Friends and Lovers

by Helen Macinnes

  He stopped speaking, and stared down at the tablecloth. The lines at the side of his mouth had deepened. He looked tired and white. George Fenton-Stevens had said tonight that David was working like forty devils. But she knew now that she couldn’t blame that thin, drawn look on his face altogether on work. And if he were overworking it was because he was driven by thoughts of her, by this desperate feeling of having to start a career and make some money. I am to blame in every way, she thought unhappily. How unfair it was, how cruel to fall in love when you were young like this. Yet everyone praised young love: poets wrote about it, artists painted it, people talked about it and romanced over it and idealised it. In theory, that was. In practice they discouraged it and condemned it—a man must not marry until he could afford it; a man couldn’t afford marriage until he had put in years of training for a career, and these years of training were being made longer and longer; any other solution except marriage was wrong: even marriage itself could be wrong. Too young, they said disapprovingly. And then, five minutes later: Ah—young love, how wonderful!

  Their silence lasted even after Giuseppe had brought the soup. Penny forced herself to eat. And then she looked up at David, found he was watching her. “Oh, darling,” she said, and choked with emotion.

  “Please, Penny.” David’s look turned to one of alarm. “Please, darling. I’m sorry. I have no right to make you miserable like this.”

  “I’m not miserable,” Penny said. “At least, I am only miserable for you. It is so unfair.”

  “Don’t be miserable for me,” David said, with a very good imitation of a broad smile. “Have I been complaining? I’m the luckiest man in London at this moment. I was only trying to make some excuses for myself. I didn’t behave so very well last Sunday, not according to the etiquette books at all... Penny, don’t! I’ve heard that minestrone doesn’t improve with being watered down.”

  Penny smiled in spite of herself, and used David’s tactfully offered handkerchief to wipe her tears. “I do love you, David,” she said, avoiding his eyes.

  “I know you do. That is why I said I’m the luckiest man.” He watched her, anxiously blaming himself for ever having brought up this subject again tonight. And he must teach himself to be more restrained in his letters. Love, he thought bitterly, was pure hell.

  “It would be easier for you,” Penny said, in a stilled voice, “if you didn’t concentrate so hard on me, if you went out with other women. But I should hate that. I’m completely illogical, you see.”

  “No one ever was logical in love. The last thing I want to do is to worry you, Penny, and yet it seems as if I do. We are in love, Penny, and we cannot stifle our feelings. If we did we’d lose something of what we could have. We might lose much. You have only to look at many middle-aged couples and see that they have lost something in their power to love: some are just resigned and quietly unhappy, others keep trying to find the answer with other men and women. It seems such a waste somehow. You see, darling, when I talked so wildly last Sunday it wasn’t just of today that I was thinking. I was instinctively reaching towards tomorrow and all the other tomorrows after that. You’ve got to believe me, Penny.” He looked at her anxiously.

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

  Giuseppe materialised from the other world. He sadly cleared the unfinished plates away, shrugged his shoulders, and produced an encouraging smile with the casserole of chicken. He set the salad before them with the vinegar and oil bottles, adjusted the pepper and salt and the mixing bowl, poured the wine into their glasses, and stood back for a moment to survey the effect. Too serious, he thought, as he left them. Young people shouldn’t be too serious. What had young people to worry about?

  “Let’s not start blaming ourselves, Penny,” David said. “It isn’t our fault that we are faced with more problems than we bargained for. We’ve been led to believe all our lives, and the propaganda still goes on, that love is quite a simple formula: all two people have to do is to fall in love, be faithful, wait peacefully for marriage, and the rest is a matter of living happily ever after. But it doesn’t work out like that. The trouble is that young men aren’t quite built that way.” He repressed a smile at his unconscious choice of words. That’s the truest thing you’ve said tonight, he told himself wryly. He said, “Moralists—and I think the first of them must have been an old man with a young wife—can say, ‘You shouldn’t do this: you ought to do that.’ But if they are talking to young men in love they might as well tell a typhoid germ not to start a fever. I’m not unique, Penny; you mustn’t think that.” He smiled openly now, as he remembered the variety of complications in the sex-life of all young men he knew. “I am not a case for the medical text-books. There are millions of young men of my age going through the same mental contortions at this moment.” And physical, too, he thought grimly. “If they have money, love is made an easier problem: they can get married right away. If they live in a less complicated cultural group, they can marry too; their families rally round, and they either build themselves a one-room house on their father’s small farm or they can share the family house and perhaps the family work. Or they may belong to a group which doesn’t worry about marrying at all: they think that getting into bed with a girl is as natural as eating breakfast in the morning. They would probably not understand one word I’ve said: they would think that men like me are either mad or fools. Are we?”

  “No,” Penny said. “You aren’t mad or fools. You just have a lot more to overcome. And it doesn’t seem fair.”

  Giuseppe appeared once more. He said nothing this time, but he removed the cover of the earthenware dish to remind them.

  Penny smiled, and David’s annoyance over the interruption vanished. In a way the interruption had been good, for Penny’s voice was less despairing as she said, “I am not worth all this trouble, David. How much simpler it would have been for you to fall in love with someone like Lillian Marston.”

  “And if you were like her, in how many months would you be leaving me? No, thank you: not for me.”

  Penny gave a real smile this time. “Darling, just be patient with me. Just let me argue all this out for myself in my own way. It isn’t that I don’t want to—to have you and to be yours. It isn’t that. You said I didn’t want you enough.” She paused, remembering how that had hurt. “David,” she said, with desperate sincerity, “it isn’t that. I want to be with you all the time. I want you to make love to me. So it can’t be that I don’t want you enough. It is just that a girl—oh, I don’t know, but she is so influenced by her family and surroundings and everything. Men are so much more free in their decisions, you know. They are independent. If men and women were judged by equal standards, then it would be different. We could be courageous too. But for generations and generations we’ve been dependent and obedient, and that has put a kind of deep fear into us. Isn’t that it, David?”

  “If you weren’t afraid of hurting your family you would do what you felt was right for yourself? Would you?” He tried to make his voice sound casual.

  “Yes,” Penny admitted very slowly. “Yes,” she said honestly.

  David relaxed. It was the family. A man could deal with the barriers which a family had raised. Frigidity could never be dealt with. He said, “I have even thought of giving up Oxford, of looking for a job, any job, anywhere. Now.”

  Penny shook her head. “Later, if things did not go well for you, I’d always blame myself. As I got older and uglier I’d think I had forced you into a very bad bargain. I’d blame myself for having ruined your life.”

  David began to laugh. “Men don’t ruin so easily,” he said. “Not if their wives keep them happy. Besides, we aren’t all the geniuses which we like to think we are, we know that.”

  Giuseppe, looking for the fifth time towards the table at the window, was delighted to see them happy again. The young man was laughing, and the girl was smiling in the way she used to smile. They were even beginning to taste the food. That was a good sign, a very good sign. If
they could eat food that was half cold and not notice it, then they must be still in love. The young man was drinking his wine now. Good, very good. She wasn’t going to leave him after all. These English were very strange indeed: imagine choosing a restaurant to persuade your mistress to keep on living with you. Imagine, even, persuading with words! Still, the young man had succeeded. At this moment her eyes were filled with sunshine like the waters before Napoli. Giuseppe smiled too, as he hurried downstairs, summoned by a piercing scream from the cash-desk.

  “This,” David said, as he looked at his glass of wine, “reminds me that I came here to celebrate a decision. You still haven’t found out why I am here in London tonight to see you.”

  Penny studied his face... “It is good news, anyway,” she said. “What is it, David? It is good, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” He was trying to be noncommittal. The attempt failed. “I have been deciding about this future job of mine.”

  Penny stared blankly. “I thought it was all decided. You were going to sit the Foreign Office examinations after you finished with Oxford.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said briefly. “I had the offer of two possible jobs this week. Isn’t it extraordinary how you can think and worry about a job, and then suddenly two arrive almost at the same time? All or nothing, it seems, in this world. I wanted to hear what you thought about them, Penny. That is why I came chasing up here today. Tomorrow I have to lunch with one of the men who is offering me a job.”

  “David, why did you change your mind?”

  David didn’t answer that. “The first job,” he said, “is one with an oil company. Abroad, of course, in some peculiar place with the temperature around one hundred and ten degrees. But they do offer a princely salary. One thousand a year, flat, to start with. It goes on to incredible heights, if they like you.”

  “A thousand pounds?” Penny said incredulously. “David, that’s terrific. But, darling, what do you know about oil?”

  “Nothing,” David said cheerfully. “The oil firm is picking out two or three young men from the Universities for certain jobs. That’s all. What do you think of it?”

  “A thousand pounds is an awful lot of money,” Penny said slowly. “Are you sure they really were in earnest?”

  David repressed a smile. “Quite,” he said.

  “And what is the other job?”

  “It is with Edward Fairbairn.”

  “The economist? The man who is interested in political things?”

  “Yes.” This time David smiled. “He has just bought the old Economic Outlook, and he is going to turn it into a weekly magazine dealing with politics here and abroad. He is especially interested in employment and unemployment. He’s against the dole, for instance. Says that it is only patting on a soothing ointment to a dangerous cancer: what we need is some intelligent surgery that will get to its root. That’s the idea, vaguely, on which he is going to make a fairly large-sized report. He has offered me the chance to join his staff. I’d be working mostly on material for his report on seasonal unemployment, although I’d have a permanent job on his paper. That would give the steady salary. Three hundred pounds a year. Reviewing and articles on the side would probably bring in another fifty pounds—perhaps even a hundred. How does it sound?”

  “And after the report was finished?”

  “I should then concentrate on political articles and reporting, perhaps with a chance to travel. There is also a definite rise in salary if I am any good. If not I get chucked out on my ear. Fair enough.”

  “But David, I don’t quite understand.” Penny was really perplexed. “In the Foreign Office you’d get almost three hundred pounds a year to start with. And you never get chucked out there. Not unless you get all tangled up in some scandal with a woman or something like that. So why give up the F.O. idea and think of Fairbairn?”

  “There is quite a difference in salary actually,” David said. “It costs twice or even three times as much to live as a diplomat as it does to live as a journalist. A journalist can spend just as much or as little as it suits him on clothes or entertaining. But a diplomat has a semi-public kind of life: he has ‘obligations.’ It is hard on him, harder than most people think: either he must have some small income of his own or he must wait for years before he can get married.”

  “So that’s why you gave up the idea of trying for the F.O. We should have to wait for years...” She frowned, pushed aside her plate, fingered the stem of the coarse wineglass. Then she said quickly, “Darling, I could look after you wonderfully on almost three hundred pounds a year. On two hundred pounds, if necessary. Honestly, David, I am not so extravagant. We could manage. All we want is a very small place—two rooms even. I can learn to cook. And this year I’ve discovered how to save money on clothes. We could live simply. We don’t need much if we have each other. We could manage.”

  “There would be something rather hothouse about us if we couldn’t manage on almost three hundred a year,” David agreed. “But not attached to something like the F. O., I’m afraid. There’s a scale of living attached to jobs like that which is really crippling unless you have enough money. It wouldn’t be good for you or for me, Penny—not as the individuals we want to be. Particularly when neither of us believes that money is the proof of a man’s worth. It is useful to make life easier, that’s all. But it doesn’t mean you are superior to the chap who has less money. This price value on a man is becoming more and more a kind of snobbery, just as silly as the older ones about family trees and land ownership. It is all perfectly ludicrous. And you don’t have to indulge in vulgar ostentation to be a money snob: there is a particularly insidious kind of money snob, all very quiet, restrained, with fixed ideas of ‘what is done’ and ‘what isn’t done’! That is what we should have to battle against, darling: and I just won’t waste my energy on that.”

  “You mean that ‘what is done’ and ‘what isn’t done’ costs money?”

  “Yes. Even on the quietest level. You can make little witticisms about the new-rich who buy diamonds and cars and yards of paintings, and pride yourself on being ‘poor’ in good taste. But that somehow always turns out to mean that you wear correct clothes which certainly don’t cost thirty shillings off the peg. And you like concerts and theatres, which never means you have gallery seats. And you are a member of a club, which isn’t the Y.M.C.A. reading-room, either. And the funny thing is that if one hasn’t the money to live on that ‘simple’ scale, the quiet snobs who do live on it are inclined to think your tastes are all wrong, just as they think that those who spend more money than they do are vulgar in another way. They talk, with a whimsical smile, of being poor these days. Poor... God, they don’t even understand their own English language. Give them a taste of really being poor, keeping a wife and children on thirty bob a week, living four to a room: dirt, squalor, disease around you; no holidays, no escape. Give them that, Penny, and watch them yell. I bet they wouldn’t be so quiet about it either as the millions who are really poor.” He paused, and then smiled and said, “Sorry, Penny. Didn’t mean to get on to my soap-box. I was just trying to show you that if we tried to live within our income our tastes would be considered wrong. They would need, in order to be considered right, a little help from some quiet gilt-edged bonds.”

  “But surely if people are doing the same kind of jobs they can’t be all snobs about money? Surely some of them realise it is only a matter of luck that they inherited or married money? That is nothing to be proud of.”

  “Not all of them are snobs,” David agreed. And then he said, with a wide grin, “But it would be difficult for them to imagine that an evening at the theatre on their standards can represent our food and laundry bills for the week. That’s really my point, Penny. I don’t think that it is good for anyone to have to face that disguised competition. Human beings don’t wear very well when they have to pretend to live on a scale which would use up three times the money they are actually paid.”

  “Then careers suc
h as that become a kind of closed shop,” Penny said angrily. “A very select trade union indeed. If you can’t meet our economic standards stay out. Which only means, doesn’t it, that the country loses in the long run? Yet you would think that a country would encourage its young men with brains to marry and have children. It is setting a kind of limit, isn’t it, on the brain-power we could develop?”

  “We aren’t the only country that limits its choice. They all do, whether it is by money or religion or politics. And you must remember that any diplomat would only raise an eyebrow, perhaps not even that, and think, ‘limiting the country’s choice? Nonsense. The best man wins, that’s all.’ And he’d straighten his tie, look bored with such childish ideas, and he wouldn’t even bother to listen to any argument about disguised quotas. He got into his job by competitive examination, and so his conscience is clear.”

  “How nice for him,” Penny said. Then, more gently, “I suppose the truth is that a man can face money worries by himself. With a wife—well, there are other wives? Isn’t that it, David? But what if that wouldn’t worry me? What if I’d take them all on, and say ‘I don’t give a herring’s leg whether you have a maid or two or three, or a fur coat, a Paris hat, an Alix dress’? Really, David... ”

  “It would be much more like having stewed sausages three nights in a row to make up for one evening of decent food and wine for a dinner-party. No, thank you, darling. I’m damned if I’ll play that game. Now let’s forget it. I’ve buried the F.O. idea. What do you want to be? The wife of an oil magnate or of a journalist?”

  Penny smiled. As long as he is you it doesn’t matter what my husband is, she thought. And then she became very serious. “What did your father say, David? And your tutor? Weren’t they disappointed?” They will blame me, she told herself unhappily.