Possession

by Celia Fremlin

  “But surely—” I began, trying to marshall some telling phrases which should also be reasonably polite. “But surely,—as early as this…. We were hoping that Mervyn …” and at just this moment Mervyn himself came out into the hall. He knew at once who I was talking to: he almost snatched the receiver from my hand.

  “Hullo, Mother,” he said, sharply; and at once a flood of self-pitying verbiage began pouring down the phone: I couldn’t hear the words from where I stood, but the tone was unmistakeable. To my relief, Mervyn’s demeanour was far from that of the stereotype of a Mother’s Boy. He argued back, quite sharply, though without being downright rude; and it was only when Sarah came out into the hall and urged compliance that he finally gave in.

  “O.K., O.K.,” he said irritably. “I’ll be there in half an hour. Yes. I said Yes! Forty minutes at the most.”

  He slammed down the receiver, and turned quite angrily to Sarah.

  “Damn!” he said. “Damn! I’ve given in again. I wish you’d….” But before he could finish the reprimand, Sarah’s arm was round his neck, strands of pale hair were all about him, and she was whispering something smilingly into his ear. Reluctantly, and as if fighting against it, he at last began to smile too.

  “Silly baby,” he murmured, patting her cheek. “You and Mother between you—what can a man do?” And then, suddenly purposeful: “Listen: Why don’t you come back with me? Come and meet my mother—we’ve got to face it sometime. Why not now?”

  “Oh! But would it be all right? I mean, I’d love to, but it’ll be so sudden for her!” Sarah looked eager, but doubtful.

  “Of course it’s all right. And I mean it to be sudden—that’s the best way, it won’t give her time to work herself up about it. And I’ll tell you what—” he turned to me: “Why don’t you come too, Mrs Erskine? Mother can’t mind meeting you, and it’ll soften the—” “I mean,” he hastily corrected himself “I mean it’ll give her moral support, having the other mother in the case right there with her. It’ll make her feel she’s got a companion in misery—”

  “Well, she hasn’t!” I interrupted tartly. “I’m certainly not miserable! On the contrary, I’m absolutely delighted! But anyway, Mervyn, if you are planning to take Sarah to meet your mother tonight, it surely ought to be just the two of you? For this first time, I mean. You can’t possibly have a third person tagging along on such an occasion.”

  “But that’s the whole point. We don’t want it to seem an ‘occasion’. We want Mother to get to know Sarah gradually—painlessly—just as a friend—before we tell her we’re going to be married. If I take both of you along, it’ll all seem much more—casual. Don’t you see?”

  Well, the long and the short of it was that I allowed myself to be persuaded. I was, of course, dying to see this odd, anxiety-ridden woman who dared to ride so rough-shod over all the cherished permissive principles of our age. Sheer curiosity was my main motive, and I have to admit it. And after all, it was his mother. If he didn’t think she would be put out by having two strangers thus thrust on her without warning, then who was I to object?

  Swiftly, I set about re-designing the evening, as a housewife must, to fill the gap left by my absence. Food, occupation, companionship must be made to surge in. I told Ralph what was in the refrigerator; assured him that Janice would be back any minute from her drama group and would cook it for him; and assured him also that no, of course she wouldn’t be in one of her moods, why should she?

  He had the sense not to try and answer this; indeed, he took the whole thing like a lamb, I must say, and I escaped gratefully. Actually, like most men, Ralph is always so relieved to discover that he isn’t the one who has been invited somewhere, that he is prepared to take almost anything in his stride. Even the face of a seventeen-year-old daughter who finds on returning home that something is expected of her.

  CHAPTER VI

  I DONT KNOW what I had expected Mrs Redmayne to be like. A drab little thing, I think; a mess of cardigans and straggly hair, with a skirt a little too long. I suppose I had assumed that a woman who clung so desperately to her son for company must be one incapable of making other relationships; a person so unattractive, or boring, or both, that no one but her own son would bother about her.

  Little she certainly was: barely five feet in height, I would guess; but beyond that every single detail of her, from her silver-blonde girlishly fluffy hair to her expensive silver sandals, was diametrically opposite to the picture I had built up in my mind. Her black sleeveless velvet dress was low-cut and clinging—mutton on as small a scale as she can often dress as lamb and get away with it. Sheerest nylons encased her slender legs, and crystal pendent earrings quivered like drops of water as she stood on tiptoe to embrace her tall son—tall, at least, he seemed as he bent down towards her upturned face. Her reception of Sarah and myself surprised me almost as much as her appearance. I had expected her at least to be guarded towards us; justifiably taken aback by our sudden arrival; and certainly suspicious of our friendship with her son. Instead of this, she received us with little cries of delight, kissed us on the cheek, and set herself to fussing over our comfort as if we were honoured and expected guests; running back and forth with cushions, drinks, and anxious enquiries as to whether we weren’t absolutely frozen?

  Were we expected guests, I began to wonder? Certainly her costume suggested that she was about to give some sort of party. Could this be the reason that Mervyn had decided to invite us tonight? So that we could mingle with the other guests without rousing his mother’s suspicions? This would explain, too, why she had been so anxious for him to arrive home punctually; naturally one would want the host to be there when the guests began to arrive. My feelings towards her began to soften. She was quite a nice little thing really; I had been allowing prejudice to run away with me. Certainly she was chattering away with Sarah now in the friendliest manner possible; not at all the grudging, jealous mother-in-law figure of my imagination.

  I sat back, sipped the sweet sherry she had pressed on me, and surveyed the room. It was beautifully if rather fussily furnished; flowers and silvery ornaments stood about on highly polished little tables with spindly legs; the white-painted walls were dotted with gay little landscapes and hunting scenes; small fluffy white rugs were scattered about at random, like so many kittens, on the silver-grey wall-to-wall carpet. Under the soft pink-shaded lights everything was neat, and shining, and ready, waiting for the party to begin.

  But the party didn’t begin. Only when we had been there nearly an hour, and conversation was beginning to flag, did I realise that nothing was going to happen. We were after all the only guests, and Mrs Redmayne was waiting for us to go. Her effusive welcome, just like the expectant perfection of the room, had all been a prelude to nothing.

  What was it all in aid of, then? And why the glamorous outfit—the silver sandals, the earrings? With a tiny shock of sick dismay it occurred to me that perhaps she always dressed up in this sort of way to welcome her son home in the evening; as if his return marked a gala time in the day for her—perhaps for both of them? I dropped my eyes, and could not look at the smooth little white shoulders, the neat, well-preserved little figure cunningly indicated by that neckline…. My mind sheered away from the Freudian implications of my thoughts, and I turned to Sarah and suggested that perhaps we ought to go?

  As if I had pressed a button marked “Hostess”, Mrs Redmayne sprang at once into life.

  “No, no!” she cried, shrill with sudden hospitality: of course we must not go yet; we must stay: we must take pot luck: we must sample her cooking. “Though I’m afraid you’ll think I’m quite a madcap of a cook,” she said, with a coy little giggle. “I just throw anything together, don’t I, Mervyn? But we don’t believe in standing on ceremony. Mervyn’s friends are in and out all the time, aren’t they, dear; all the boys and girls; and we all have a jolly time together. If there are too many for the chairs, why, we sit on cushions, don’t we, Mervyn? We sprawl on the floor. We have such
a jolly time.”

  Her tinkling laugh went on just a little too long in the silence of the tidy, shining room. I looked at the pale, spotless carpet and the white rugs, and I tried to imagine young people in jeans lounging on that floor, leaning against one another, laughing, drinking red wine and winding spaghetti round their forks. The picture stuck, as it were, half-way, like a lump of meat too big to swallow.

  “Suck jolly times!” she repeated; and I became aware of Mervyn frowning impatiently.

  “Well—go on, then, Mother,” he said. “Bring on the food if you want to. But do you think it could be quick this time, rather than jolly?” He glanced at his watch. “It’s after nine already.”

  “Oh, we don’t want to worry about the time, dear,” she protested; and then, addressing a gay little giggle to Sarah and me, she went on: “What’s time, anyway, when you’re having fun? That’s what I always say to Mervyn’s friends: ‘My dears,’ I say ‘We’ll eat at midnight if that’s what you’d like! Who wants to be slave to a clock …?’”

  “Oh, Mother, please!” The suppressed impatience in her son’s voice sent her scuttling into the kitchen, where a subdued clattering and clinking began, broken only by refusals of mine or Sarah’s offers of help; and, later, by occasional remarks popped round the door to the effect that she couldn’t imagine what we’d think of the dish she was concocting; she had these mad little impulses sometimes, didn’t she, Mervyn, dear. Anyway, it was all going to be madly informal, she didn’t believe in formality among friends, what did we think?

  In the end it was scrambled eggs, on neat little squares of toast, served—I suppose in the interests of informality—on cold plates. Far from lounging on the floor to eat it, we sat up at one of the spindly little tables, carefully laid with a lace cloth and mats—and I observed, from the minor commotion about where to place the table, and how to fit the four chairs round it, that meals for even as many as four must be quite a rarity in this pretty room. Still, it seemed ungracious to be thinking on these lines; the scrambled eggs weren’t bad, and, considering the suddenness of our descent, it was nice of her to feed us at all, and to exert herself so much to entertain us.

  Actually, I wished she would exert herself less. The gay prattle grew tired every now and then, as though there wasn’t quite enough of it to fill the silence, and she was having to eke it out, spreading it thinly and carefully over the evening like a thrifty housewife with the butter. Yet she did not seem to welcome interruptions; it was as if she was terrified of silence, yet couldn’t trust us to say the right things if she left us too many spaces to fill.

  The meal finished, she once again refused offers of help. With strong little white hands, sparkling with rings, she whisked the plates and cutlery onto a tray and darted out into the kitchen, leaving the three of us alone.

  Sarah and Mervyn were sitting on the sofa now, very close together, but carefully avoiding any hint of a caress. Their hands were folded neatly in their laps, like a pair of primary school children on their best behaviour, and their eyes looked straight ahead. To give them a chance to relax, I wandered off to the far end of the room and stood with my back to them, idly examining the bookshelves.

  It is said that you can tell a person’s character from their books, but I wonder if it is true? To begin with, whose character is it that you are telling, in an ordinary, average household, where books have been accumulated over several decades by several different people? And when, in addition, most of them have arrived as unsolicited presents, or have been dumped by friends who are going to collect them next month and then immediately break up their marriage and disappear, one to Australia and the other to the arms of a painter on a houseboat whose only shelf-space is occupied by saucepans, and jam jars full of old bills and rubber bands.

  Well, as I say, I don’t know; but if one did give any credence to this kind of fortune-telling, one would have to conclude that Mrs Redmayne, or Mervyn, or both of them, were very childish in their tastes; for the first volumes that met my eyes were a complete set of Andrew Lang fairy tales. The next were the Wonder Books, 1920 vintage: relics, presumably, of her childhood rather than his. And indeed one could almost imagine the self-obsessed, impractical little creature curled up in a big chair and enjoying such literature even now. I shrugged, and turned back towards the room. By now, I was glad to see, the young couple looked much more at ease; they were talking in low voices, heads together, and Mervyn’s arm was thrown across Sarah’s shoulders. He did not bother to remove it when his mother returned from the kitchen; and for a moment, knowing what I did of the delicacy of his situation, I was surprised at this. But almost immediately I realised that he was purposely allowing her to see them thus; he had come to a decision. They had come to it jointly, no doubt, in the course of that low-toned conversation.

  “Mother,” he said, tightening his grip on Sarah’s shoulder as he spoke. “Mother, Sarah and I have some wonderful news for you. We’re going to be married. Early in the New Year.”

  Was it clever—or was it the height of tactlessness—to present the news thus blandly, as a matter for unqualified rejoicing? He knew—and she must know that he knew—that what he was delivering was a shattering blow. It was cruel of him to deliver it thus under the eyes of a stranger—for such I must certainly still be counted. Or was it, perhaps, the kindest way? By thus forcing her to control her behaviour, perhaps the feelings behind it might be rendered less painful? After all, he must know his mother best.

  I looked away. It seemed unkind—almost indecent—to watch her face at such a moment; and so all I can tell you of her immediate reactions is that first there was absolute silence for long enough to rasp the nerves; and then a sharp meaningless little cry, like a small animal in its death throes.

  I did look up then. I thought she must have fainted. But no; she was standing straight and firm, drawn up to her full tiny height, looking straight at her son.

  But what a look! How shall I describe it? I have seen fear in a woman’s eyes before; and grief, and anger, and all the agonies of unrequited love. But never, I think, have I seen naked, shameless fury quite like hers. A slow and terrible colour was spreading beneath the rouge on her cheeks; her voice was squeaky and entirely strange.

  “You can’t, Mervyn!” she articulated at last. “You can’t! You can’t do this to me again!”

  “There, there, Mother!” Mervyn’s efforts to console her were clumsy and self-conscious. He patted her shoulder awkwardly; he looked quite scared. But now here was Sarah coming to his rescue. Nothing scared or uncertain about her: she flung her arms round Mrs Redmayne’s neck and hugged her.

  “Please don’t be unhappy,” she urged, kissing those cheeks with their angry flush still blazing. “I won’t take Mervyn away from you, I promise. It’s just that you’ll have two of us to take care of you now, instead of one.”

  Whether these naive protestations were really consoling to Mrs Redmayne, or whether, now that the first shock was over, she was determined not to expose herself further, I do not know. I only know that the rage began to fade from her face; she regained control of her voice and manner. She pushed Sarah from her, but gently, and even smiled a strained little smile.

  “There there, dear,” she said, almost absently. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt me…. I’m sure you meant well, I’m not blaming you at all.” She looked around the room vaguely, like someone just wakened from sleep and trying to reassure herself that this, and not her vanished dream, is the reality. “That’s all right, dear,” she continued, patting Sarah vaguely, with a sort of empty goodwill. “I’m sure everything will work out happily, one way or another. We don’t want to be in too much of a hurry, that’s all. We don’t want to rush into anything that we might regret, do we? And you’re under age, aren’t you, dear? You’re only nineteen. You can’t marry while you’re under age….”

  This childish and implausible misstatement angered me; it couldn’t be genuine. Such ignorance simply did not tally with the sureness an
d the intensity of her first, spontaneous fury.

  “Sarah can marry, with our consent—mine and her father’s” I pointed out crisply. “And we give it willingly. There will be no problem there at all!”

  Our eyes met: we weighed each other up, Mrs Redmayne and I, like two generals on the eve of battle. On my side were young love, common sense, and popular psychology; on hers I could see nothing but the dank and cloying weapon of emotional blackmail. I thought that there could be only one outcome; I imagined then, you see, that popular psychology was always bound to win. I did not know, then, how strange would be the terrain over which we would be fighting; how I would soon be stumbling, blind and mapless, into a lurid, unimaginable landscape within which she would be dreadfully, horribly at home.

  As I say, at that moment I felt smugly confident of the outcome. So it was odd—and a trifle disconcerting—that it should be my eyes which first slid away from the encounter. But she was magnanimous—or something—and did not pursue this mini-victory.

  “Good. Oh, well. We’ll have to think about it, won’t we?” Her voice was conciliatory; but her eyes, a bright, baby blue, were darting this way and that, as if looking for some way of escape.

  Once again Sarah became the good daughter-in-law. She talked reassuringly to the older woman of how often they would all see each other; of how she and Mervyn might get a flat in this very building….

  “Yes, dear. That would be very nice. But I’m afraid it wouldn’t be very practical. You see, Mervyn and I are moving to Bristol in the spring. Didn’t he tell you? You see, the firm he works for….”

  “Sarah and I are moving to Bristol,” Mervyn interposed tight-lipped; and there was an awful little silence. It was Sarah who broke it, with a further flood of consoling suggestions. They would all move to Bristol … they would get two adjoining flats there … they would get a little house and all live in it together, all three of them…. She handed out these ill-considered gobbets of comfort like a mother handing chocolates to a fractious child, and, it seemed to me, with equally questionable wisdom. I couldn’t say anything of course, but it did seem to me that Mervyn needed—even wanted—a girl who would give him strength to break away from his mother, not one who would join him in his subjection to her. However kind and idealistic were Sarah’s intentions, I felt that she was doing a disservice to the man she loved—and perhaps even to his mother, too, who would surely, in the long run, be a happier woman if she could free herself from this emotional dependence on her son and build a life of her own? She was still young enough to do so: attractive and well-preserved, and with lots of vitality. I glanced at Mervyn to see how he was taking it; and to my surprise he was fondly smiling at Sarah, like a proud parent on Prize-Giving day. He appeared entirely to approve of her thoughtless, warm-hearted bartering away of their joint independence and the privacy and comfort of their future life. Or was he less approving of it than simply not listening to it? You could never tell with lovers. That greedy, fatuous, complacent look that he was fixing on her might just mean that he was watching the lift of her chin as she talked, noticing the quiver of movement of her smooth hair, like long grass on an almost windless day. Man-like, he probably hadn’t taken in a word that she was saying, but was just sitting there, enjoying her loveliness and the fact that she seemed to be getting on well with his mother….