by Mary Wesley
Stepping onto the court, Rose felt Nicholas’s enmity linked with Emily’s malice; she mistrusted them. She felt the spring in the wooden floor communicate itself to her legs. She swung her father’s racquet, returned Nicholas’s serve, enjoyed the whizz of the ball, the impact on the strings of the racquet, the feel of the sinews in her wrist reacting. ‘I’ll take you both on,’ she shouted on a rise of spirit.
‘Ho! Listen to her! All right, little Rose, we take you at your word. Shall you serve first?’ Nicholas patronised.
‘No, you.’ Rose stood ready near the back line.
‘No quarter,’ said Nicholas.
‘No quarter,’ answered Rose.
Emily danced from one foot to the other near the net, looking mockingly at Rose.
Nicholas served, putting all his strength into it.
Rose returned the serve, flukily driving the ball hard and low. The strings of her father’s racquet parted with a twang. The ball, driven across the net with the combination of Rose’s strength and the weight of the racquet, thumped into Emily, hitting her hard between her breasts. Emily yelped. ‘My breast bone!’
‘Sorry!’ cried Rose. ‘Oh, look what I’ve done to Father’s racquet. Oh, bother, I’ll go and see whether I can borrow another from somebody.’ She ran lightly from the court, making her escape. Behind her, Emily groaned and Nicholas sympathised. I must get away, thought Rose, running across the garden and into the house. She doubled along a corridor and opened a door at random, shutting it quickly behind her. She was in Mr Malone’s library. There was a log fire burning in the fireplace, the smell of hyacinths dotted about the room in large bowls, no sound except the faint ticking of a bracket clock on the mantelshelf and the rustle of ash as a log settled in the grate.
Rose put the broken racquet down on a table, leaned forward on her hands and let furious tears fall onto the polished wood. She stood thus for several minutes, drawing her breath in long shuddering gasps, loathing Nicholas and Emily.
Presently she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and straightened up.
A yard from her nose across the table were a pair of men’s feet, bare, high-arched, long-toed. The heels rested on a copy of the Field.
Rose said, ‘Oh, my God,’ and froze.
The feet disappeared as the legs they belonged to were lowered. A young man stood up, holding the book he had been reading against his chest.
Rose stared. He was not much older than she. Tall, thin, dressed in clothes she had only seen worn by French workmen, baggy cotton trousers in faded blue, a baggy jacket to match over a dark flannel shirt, collarless, fastened at the neck with a bone stud. He had thick, almost black hair worn rather longer than most people, a thin eager face, longish nose, wide mouth and black, intelligent eyes.
They stood staring at each other across the intervening table. On the mantelshelf the clock ticked on while their eyes meeting measured, assessed, questioned.
Then he smiled. ‘I must put on my socks. Je m’appelle Mylo, et vous?’
‘Rose,’ said Rose.
‘Lovely,’ said Mylo, sitting down on the sofa which had hidden him from Rose. ‘I have a bloody great hole in the toe of my sock.’
‘Oh,’ said Rose.
‘Why don’t you sit down,’ said Mylo. ‘You could mop your tears with this.’ He reached across the table to a blotter and eased out a sheet of blotting paper. ‘Comme ça,’ he said, blotting the tears which marked the table. ‘Salt isn’t good for furniture or cheeks. Salt dries and becomes uncomfortable.’ He handed Rose the blotting paper. ‘Try it.’
Rose took the sheet of blotting paper and dabbed her face. ‘Thanks.’
‘Excellent, and now the socks. Just look at that for a hole.’ He wiggled his toe through the hole.
‘Are you French or English?’ Rose moved round the table, nearer the fire.
‘Both,’ said Mylo. ‘French mother, English father. And you?’
‘English.’
‘Come for the tennis?’
‘M-m-m.’
‘Bust your racquet on purpose?’ I had a razor blade with me just in case, but it broke anyway. It’s my father’s. I was annoyed with somebody.’
‘You will have to go back …’
‘M-m-m.’
‘But not just yet. Come and sit here.’ He patted the sofa.
Rose sat in a corner of the sofa and drew up her legs. ‘Are you going to play?’
‘Lord, no. No fear. Not me. I am only the tutor.’
‘The what?’
‘Tutor. I am here to babble French at George to help the final hoist into the Foreign Office. I am paid for my pains on condition that I don’t let a word of English pass my lips. That colour suits you.’
‘Oh? Thanks.’
‘And you don’t really belong in that galère. Not for you the marriage market, not for you the auction.’
Rose looked at him in silent question.
‘You know that’s what it is, don’t pretend. I bet your mother or your father pressed you to come to this party.’
‘They did,’ Rose admitted, ‘I suppose.’
‘An opportunity to meet …’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Rose impatiently. ‘Shut up.’
Mylo manoeuvred the sock so that his toe was no longer exposed, put on its mate. ‘It happens in the best societies,’ he said, ‘a marriage of convenience is a marriage that is often convenient for all, parents, children, everybody. In France where I’ve lived, it’s out in the open, everybody knows. It’s decent. In this country it’s wrapped up, disguised, cocooned in things like winter tennis parties. I wonder why you were invited.’
‘I’m a stop-gap,’ said Rose, ‘some girl has flu.’
Mylo laughed. ‘That explains it.’ He began fumbling around to find his shoes. One shoe, after the malicious manner of inanimate objects, had hidden itself under the sofa. Rose observed the back of Mylo’s neck while he reached for it. His hair grew down in a point. ‘Got it!’ He sat up and laced the shoe.
Watching his long fingers lace the shoes, Rose felt inexplicably consoled, then a swift spasm of pleasure. Mylo sat back, straightened his legs stretching them towards the fire, turned towards Rose and observed her.
Rose sitting with her legs tucked under her let her eyes travel from Mylo’s feet, now decently shod, past his waist where the too wide trousers were belted in by a leather belt, up over the heavy cotton jacket, going slower now, to his eyes.
‘There now,’ said Mylo, his lips twitching into a smile. ‘We could marry?’ he suggested.
‘What?’
‘What is your attitude to marriage?’
‘Trepidation.’
‘Both intelligent and beautiful. What do you say, though? Yes or no?’
No one had ever supposed her intelligent; the suggestion coupled with beauty made her laugh. Mylo laughed too. ‘My French side is practical. I have no money, we shall have to wait, but there is nothing to prevent us loving meanwhile, is there?’
‘Are you making fun of me?’
‘No, I am not. There is nothing funny about love. My father told me. He also told me that it can be extremely painful.’
‘Ah.’ She had not considered pain in relation to love. ‘Oh.’
‘I think, before they miss you, you had better go back to the tennis. Then, after a decent interval, come back. You can tell me about yourself and I will tell you about me. Go on, Rose, go.’ (I need a moment to think.)
‘Must I?’ (This is a lunatic conversation.)
‘I fear so.’ (What am I letting myself in for?)
‘All right.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll go.’ (Perhaps he’s not quite right in the head?)
‘But come back.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course.’ She knew she would.
As she turned to go Mylo said, ‘This person who annoyed you just now …’
‘Two people. Nicholas and Emily Thornby.’
‘Are you afraid of them?’
‘Of course not.’
‘What do they do to you?’ He did not believe her.
Rose was irresolute. Why expose her frailty, why clarify the Thornbys to this stranger? ‘I’ve known them all my life,’ she said defensively. ‘Their father was our rector; we were expected to be friends.’
‘Give me one example that explains why you are afraid of them.’
‘I am not,’ Rose denied hotly.
‘Come off it.’
‘All right. Years ago … it was a joke. We were all about six or seven, I was at a convent day school, they were at a progressive school down the road.’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t see why I should tell you, it’s all forgotten years ago,’ she back-pedalled.
‘You seem to remember.’
‘It’s pretty silly.’
‘Go on …’
‘They boasted that my nuns were dull and that at their school they learned lots of jokes and funny stories which they brought home to tell their parents and they all laughed at the stories together.’
‘That sounds all right.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’ve never talked about this since it happened. I don’t know why I’m telling you now.’
‘Do get on with it.’ (She looks distressed.)
‘Well. They told me their best, actually I paid them sixpence for it, they said if your nuns laugh you’ll get your sixpence back, I said, Of course my nuns would laugh, they often laughed, they were on the jolly side, those nuns. I thought that I’d try it on my parents first and if they laughed, the nuns would be sure to, my father and mother never laugh much, you see. So I paid my sixpence and Nicholas and Emily told me their story.’
A flash of suspicion. ‘Did you understand this story?’
‘Of course not, but I couldn’t say so, could I?’
‘Tell it me, if you remember it.’
‘I remember some of it.’
(I bet she remembers all of it.) ‘Go on, then.’
‘It was about a man and a girl in a punt. They get in the way of a barge and the bargee shouts, “Seeing as how you’ve a cunt in your punt, I won’t say what I was going to say but what I will say is …” I really have forgotten the rest …’
(Liar.) ‘But you told your parents, you remembered it long enough for that.’
‘Yes. They had some people in for drinks.’
‘And?’
‘My father whipped me, and my mother kept me in my room for two days.’
‘So the nuns never heard it?’
‘No.’
‘The nuns might have been kinder.’
‘They might not have known the words either.’ (It’s a funny thing that my mother did.)
‘And you were still expected to play with these charmers?’
‘Of course. My parents thought I’d heard the story from a rude Catholic child; they complained to Reverend Mother and took me away; there was a hell of a shemozzle.’
‘And you never let on?’
‘I couldn’t let Nicholas and Emily crow.’
‘What charming innocent children.’
‘Perhaps they did not cry at their baptisms,’ said Rose.
‘Perhaps you will get your revenge one day.’
‘Perhaps I shall,’ said Rose, grinning. ‘It would be worth my sixpence.’
‘I love you.’
‘Pulling my leg.’
‘No.’
Rose turned again to go. It was too early to tell him that she still did not know the meaning of the offending words; she had not been able to locate them in a dictionary. She had risked her naïvety far enough.
Mylo watched her move towards the door; by the door she looked back. It struck them both that they had not touched, their hands had not even met when he gave her the blotting paper.
‘Later?’ she said, looking across the space between them.
Mylo nodded.
‘And the dangers?’ she asked, as though she had previous experience of love, of life.
‘We brave them together,’ he waved her on her way with his book, ‘all of them, Emily and Nicholas, the lot.’
Rose laughed.
‘Tell them, out there at the auction, that you have a reserve on you,’ said Mylo.
‘Then I shall not mind the dangers,’ she said. Then, ‘Is the reserve a large one?’
‘Limitless.’
12
MYLO TRIED TO SWITCH his mind back to his book but it was no use; he laid it down. I will make George read it aloud, he thought, pounce on his terrible accent. While he reads, I can dream. He stood up and paced the room; he felt threatened. A hitherto independent future had become in one instant fused, interlaced with that of the girl in the rose-coloured dress who had burst into the room, disrupting his solitude.
As he paced Mylo remembered his father philosophising on love, on its aspects tragic, comic, pleasurable, painful. A lecture on love as they sat at a café table under plane trees in Provence, his father drinking pastis, his mother stitching to mend a rent in his shirt, his best, which he hoped to wear at the fête that evening. Now and again she stopped stitching to bite a thread and smile quizzically at her husband lecturing their son of ten years on the pitfalls and delights of love, urging him to enjoy but to take it lightly. He must have been a little drunk, thought Mylo, remembering the clouded pastis in the glass, the dappled sunlight slanting across his father’s face, lighting his mother’s eyes. ‘Beware,’ his father proclaimed, ‘love can alter your whole life, make you change direction, trap you.’
‘C’est juste,’ said the café owner, pouring his father another drink.
‘Your father, of course, never changes direction,’ Mylo’s mother said, mocking her husband whose chief characteristic was volatility.
‘There you go, mock me, sweep the ground from under my feet,’ Mylo’s father had caught his wife’s eye, smiling at her with complicity over the rim of his glass, ‘as usual.’
Mylo’s mother blushed, returning his father’s glance. The café proprietor flapped his napkin remarking, ‘C’est un beau discours,’ and went back inside the café chuckling. Watching his parents Mylo had realised with shock that his parents were in love. He was amazed. Amused by his stunned expression, his mother had said gravely, ‘Listen to your father, Mylo, he warns you of this terrible danger which you must avoid at all costs.’
‘It is only right that he should be made aware of the risks,’ protested his father, ‘when he meets …’
‘This girl like me?’ She had let the hands which held the sewing fall into her lap. ‘Remember that, Mylo, when the trap closes, gare à toi, take note of your papa’s warning.’
‘But it will be too late,’ cried Mylo’s father dolefully. ‘Il sera foutu,’ and his parents had laughed, watching his puzzled face.
The wonderful thing about them, thought Mylo as he paced Mr Malone’s library, had been that their love for each other had buoyed him up, included him, carried him with them. (A stupid unnecessary accident had killed them both, leaving him to face the future by himself at sixteen. There had been enough money to finish his education at the lycée, but none for university. He learned to consider the years spent with his parents in France, England, Germany, Italy, and briefly South Africa, travelling with his father, a peripatetic freelance journalist, as important experience, the University of Life—that humdrum cliché. Bilingual in French and English, he could get by in three other languages.) He had seen his mother insulted as a Jew in Germany, watched the fascists in Italy perform their deadly pantomime, accompanied his father to illicit political meetings in Spain, to incipient Marxist get-togethers in the black parts of Cape Town, grown up to think of himself as English, ‘Even though,’ as his mother would say, unable properly to pronounce her ‘th’s’, ‘they are slow sometimes, they are your people. Je te donne ton pays.’
She was an anglophile, his father complained, who longed to live permanently in the filthy English climate rather than that of her na
tive France.
Mylo stopped pacing to stare out at the Malones’ garden, neat clipped hedges, raked gravel, orderly flower beds. What would have happened to my mother, he wondered, in the war that is coming? How would things have gone for her as a Jewess in France? Jews are not going to have a very nice time. There is the possibility that unless there is a miracle the villages of England and France will have notices at the crossroads prohibiting Jews, as there are in Germany. And my father, thought Mylo, who wrote exposing the false tricks and hypocrisies of governments, how would he have fared? Could he, would he, have adapted? Most unlikely, thought Mylo, smiling in recollection of how his father had been if not exactly evicted, asked none too politely to leave South Africa. As he looked out at the frosty garden Mylo hummed the song he had helped his father record, a song sung at those secret meetings:
Tom blows hot,
Tom blows cold,
Ev’ry time poor Tom gets so-old,
Therefore, brothers, black and white,
Workers of the World unite!
He wished as he sang the words softly that there was a way of indicating to his parents that the hitherto academic experience of which they had laughingly warned him had hit him. ‘Bang, smack, wallop,’ he said out loud.
‘What?’ asked Rose, coming into the library.
‘What a long time you’ve been,’ he cried.
‘I had to play two interminable sets, every time I thought I had nearly lost, my partner won a rally.’
