Change Here For Babylon

by Nina Bawden

  The pub was hot and crowded; it was a wet night and there was a smell of steaming mackintoshes. I sat in a corner, on a polished oak bench against the wall, and drank one brandy after another. It was a spit and sawdust pub; most of the customers were regulars and drank beer. They played darts and laughed at each other’s jokes and I felt a pariah. After the fifth brandy the sweat began to break in cold waves over my body. The pain had come back behind my ribs and I remembered that I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and that Rogers had said that it was important to eat small and regular meals.

  I left my corner and went out through the swing doors, into the street. The air was cold and damp and made me feel sick-drunk. I walked down the road until I came to a telephone box. I went inside and rang Emily.

  Her voice was breathless and she coughed at the other end of the line. She said that she had gone to bed, but she would get dressed and come to meet me. She put the telephone down at once, without any endearments, and I walked to the café where we usually met.

  It was small and not very clean, down a back street in the poorer part of the town and we had never met anyone there whom we knew. Emily’s friends would not know of its existence and the food was worse than college food, so that even the poorest of my pupils would be unlikely to go there.

  I sat at our usual table in the corner. The café was empty and the waitress yawned on a hard chair by the cash desk. The place had no licence but they were allowed to bring in drinks from the nearest pub. I asked the girl to fetch me two brandies; she put the money in her apron pocket and went off with a disgruntled air, pulling her stockings straight before she went out of the door. She had fat legs, the same thick width from the ankle to the knee and she was wearing nylon stockings with black hearts embroidered up the seam.

  I lit a cigarette and waited for Emily. As always, on these occasions, I was afraid. Afraid that she might have been prevented from coming, that she would have an accident on the way, that she no longer loved me. The cloth on the table was covered with cigarette ash that crawled in the draught from the window; I tried to wipe it away with my handkerchief, but the ash made dusty grey streaks on the cotton cloth.

  The girl came back with the brandies. I ordered two mixed grills because the menu was always exactly the same, and we had discovered that the grill was more edible than the shepherd’s pie, the roast beef or the steak and kidney pudding.

  When Emily came she was wearing a cherry-coloured coat and her face was bright with happiness so that the days suddenly slipped away, and it was as it had been in the beginning when nothing had mattered except that we loved each other and were able to be together for an hour. She kissed me and we sat at the table, drinking our brandy. The waitress stood by the serving-hatch, an arm’s length away, and examined the scarlet lacquer on her bitten nails with complete indifference. She had been at the café ever since we first discovered it and we were sure that she would not recognise us if she met us in the street. She had a way of looking through us as if we were insubstantial creatures, unrealities in a world where the realities were her fingernails and her bleached hair and the pile of knitting patterns that she kept beneath the serving-table.

  The lift rattled up from the kitchen and she waited beside it with an air of infinite boredom. When it came to a halt she lifted the sliding door and took out our mixed grills. She brought the plates to our table, her eyes lighting glassily on the cracked wall behind our heads, and went back to her seat beside the cash desk. She took a pair of nail scissors from her pocket and began to cut her nails, the pink tip of her tongue protruding between her lips. She had a pretty, painted face and the back of her neck was disarmingly young.

  Emily said: “Tom, are you well?” She looked worried, and I wondered whether I looked as ill as I felt. My mouth was dry from the brandy and my head was aching. The shoddiness of the café was suddenly sharply apparent; I was appalled that I should have to bring Emily here because there was nowhere else that we could safely meet.

  I told her that I had been drinking and that I had seen Geoffrey.

  She frowned. “I thought he was out to dinner. Where did you find him?”

  “At the Fleur De Lys. I was looking for him.”

  I looked at the waitress’s bent, busy head and then I told her why I had wanted to find Geoffrey. She listened silently, staring at her plate and playing with her lamb chop. When I had finished, she said: “Tom, I don’t want to stay here any longer. Are you very hungry?”

  The colour had gone from her face and the bright lipstick looked startlingly artificial against her skin’s pallor.

  “No. I’m not hungry now,” I said.

  I paid the waitress and thanked her for her trouble. She gave me a surprised look and a vacant smile. I helped Emily into her coat: her shoulders felt bony under her dress and I wondered if she had lost weight. We walked down the narrow stairs and into the street.

  The rain had stopped and it was cool and pleasant. The people were coming out of the cinemas in a noisy, ambling crowd, their faces corpse-like under the sodium lights. I wished I had noticed the time and remembered that the local Odeon had advertised an excellent classic for this week.

  I hoped that we would get across the pavement and into the darkness of the unfenced public park on the other side of the road before we met anyone we knew. Emily saw Williams before I did and pinched my arm sharply as we hesitated on the kerb. I turned, seeing the amiable, moon face and the smile of welcome that faltered into surprise as he noticed Emily. He was the senior tutor in law; we were tolerably friendly and he and his wife had always appeared to be exceptionally fond of Nora. They were a great deal older than we were, happily married and kind; I think they would have assumed that other people were as fortunate as they. I tried to smile back casually as if it were the most natural thing in the world that I should be out with another man’s wife. He looked reassured, he turned and spoke to his wife and together they made their way through the crowd towards us. I took Emily’s arm and steered her hastily across the road, leaving him gaping foolishly on the pavement. There had been so many other, similar encounters; I knew that when I met him next I should feel it was necessary to explain and justify, walking delicately between the twin fears of saying too much and saying too little.

  In the park, the grass was long and wet against our ankles. We walked down to the river and stood looking at its liquid movement and the reflected stars. It was a light, gusty night; the pale sky was full of racing clouds, edged with silver.

  Emily said: “Do you really think he killed David?”

  Her voice was tired and casual. Her face was turned away from me.

  I lit a cigarette and the spent match made a bright arc and hissed in the water.

  “How should I know? Maybe it’s as he says—that I’m so terrified of blaming myself that I have to find a scapegoat. He had no real reason for wanting him to die.”

  She said: “People kill each other, don’t they, for quite unimportant reasons. Unimportant, that is, to other people.”

  The wind blew her hair in pale strands against her cheek. The moonlight made her skin the colour of ivory and when she turned to look at me her eyes were dark, pitted hollows in her face.

  She said, with wonder: “Does he seem to you like a murderer?”

  She was standing very still, her face uplifted, waiting for me to answer her.

  I said: “Does anyone?”

  She said, slowly and softly: “But, Tom, it would have been such a dangerous thing to do.”

  “But you see, he wouldn’t have thought it dangerous. He is so sure that nothing can touch him. You told me yourself that he was never afraid.”

  She said: “I am afraid, Tom.”

  My head was swimming with the brandy and my pulse was fast. I said gently: “Why did you go to see David? Was it because Geoffrey asked you to?”

  “Oh, yes. But I went for myself, too. There was something I didn’t want Geoffrey to know. Only David could have told him.”

  She st
opped and came close to me so that I could feel her shivering through the cloth of her coat. She was breathing fast and her voice was high and shaky.

  She said: “It was about Martin. No one except David knew. I wanted to tell you—the other night I nearly did tell you. I thought, afterwards, that I didn’t tell you because I was afraid you would laugh at me, but it wasn’t that at all. It was just the thing that I’ve always stopped at .…”

  I said: “Go on.” And she told me, in short and breathless sentences as if it were something she had hidden from herself for so long that she found it difficult to put into words.

  When she had left Martin on the lawn she had been quite sure that Geoffrey was there, in the study. He had not answered her when she called out to him and the sun had been shining on the window so that she could not see very clearly into the room, but the memory of him, seen dimly through the sun’s reflection on the glass, had remained with her. He had looked up from his desk, she said, and raised his hand in farewell. Afterwards, when he said that he had not been there and did not know that she was leaving the child, she had doubted the truth of her recollection, but during the weeks that she had been ill, it had constantly troubled her. And in the end she had told David about it.

  She said: “I didn’t want to believe it was true. I think, when I told David about it, it had seemed more like a bad dream that wouldn’t leave me than something that had really happened. But then he began to question me and I was afraid it might be true.”

  I said incredulously: “Did you believe that Geoffrey could watch his own child drown?”

  She said: “I didn’t know what to believe. I had hoped that David would laugh at me.”

  “But you said that Geoffrey loved the child.”

  “In the beginning I thought he did. Most people would have done. But to Geoffrey he was a kind of shame. Do you see? Oh, he would never have done him any deliberate harm, but this might have seemed to him to be different. And I think I had always been afraid of the way he felt about Martin, which was why I blamed myself so much. I should never have left him with Geoffrey.”

  I said: “It sounds a delightful sort of marriage. If you really believed he had allowed the child to die, why did you stay with him?”

  She said: “I don’t know whether I believed it or not. At times it would seem impossible, so impossible that I thought I must be going mad. I thought it was only because I felt guilty and wanted to blame someone. Oh, Tom, don’t you see?”

  She caught at my shoulders and shook me as if she could compel my understanding. I put my arms round her; it seemed to be the only thing to do. I couldn’t help her and because the thing had for her only the reality of a nightmare, of something seen through half-closed eyes, I think it would have been difficult for anyone to help her. The reality was, not whether Geoffrey had been guilty of his son’s death; but that she had lived with the fear of it for so many years. And the fear had become, not that he had actually done the thing, but that he would find out her own, unadmitted treachery.

  I no longer doubted that she was afraid of him; whether Martin’s death was a cause or a symptom of her fear was unimportant. I thought, afterwards, that she had always been afraid of him; he was so alien to her that fear was engendered by bewilderment. She would never have understood Geoffrey or the delicately perverse machinery that made him tick. And she would always, instinctively, be afraid of the unknown.

  She said: “These last few days I have been sure that David had already told Geoffrey—accused him, rather.”

  She began to cough, an uncontrolled, animal sound that seemed to tear her apart. Her body quivered between each bout of coughing.

  I said: “What are you going to do?”

  She shook her head and clung to me. Her voice was strained and husky. She said: “Tom, if you love me, take me away from him.”

  We found a hotel on the outskirts of the town, in the industrial

  industrict. The passages above the ground floor were lit dimly by

  naked, blue bulbs and the bedroom was papered with fawn roses on a geometrical trellis of bottle-green. The place smelt of cabbage and mildew and the window opened only with difficulty.

  It was a big hotel, near the railway junction to the north, and they made us register separately on identical slips of white paper. It was an embarrassment we had been unprepared for, but they did not seem to be particularly suspicious when we whispered together, only bored.

  We had gone to the Hunters’house before we looked for the hotel and Emily had packed a suitcase while I wrote a note to Nora. I had intended, I think, to tell her the truth; in the end I had been unable to do so and had said only that I was going away for a while and that it might be better for us both. I sent my love to Sandy.

  When we got to our room Emily was shivering with cold, and coughing. Her eyes were bright and glazed and her forehead was damp. I made her get into bed and rubbed her hands and feet. I bought half a bottle of brandy from the porter and sat on the hard, high bed beside her. We drank out of thick, glass tooth-mugs and after a little while the shivering stopped and she coughed less frequently. She talked a great deal, wandering a little with fever, and hung on to my hand as if she would never let me go. She seemed completely happy; to have intruded my own private doubts and fears would have been an unnecessary cruelty.

  I asked her, once, if she thought we were doing the right thing. She wrinkled her forehead at me and said: “There isn’t any right or wrong, I think. Not now. You can’t bring absolutes into it, can you?”

  For a short time she carried me with her. She had a direct and simple belief in the rightness of happiness and love in a manner that has come to be outmoded so that she had faith of a kind where most people have an emptiness in the heart. She was able to talk about happiness as if it were not a dirty word.

  But when she was restlessly asleep and I lay awake beside her, watching the lights move on the high cracked ceiling and listening to the trains shunting in the yard, I knew it was inevitable that I should fail her.

  We heard his voice outside in the corridor, talking to the chambermaid. He was speaking loudly as if he thought her deaf; she mumbled something in answer and then came the swift sound of his feet and his knock on the door.

  We had had breakfast and were almost ready to leave. In another ten minutes he would have found us gone. Emily was still coughing and she had eaten very little, drinking several cups of black coffee because she said her throat was hurting her. She had laddered her stocking and was changing into another pair; her bare feet on the worn rug looked rosy and cold. When he knocked on the door she was standing with the stocking in her hand; she looked at me and stiffened into stillness. Her face was naked with surprise.

  I went to the door and opened it. Geoffrey came in, the bright beads of rain still clinging to his hair. His raincoat was wet in dark patches on the shoulders. He was breathing lightly, and quickly like a man in a hurry. His face was bony and exhausted, his eyes had no expression in them at all.

  He said: “I’ve come to take you home. It’s raining. I’ve brought your mackintosh.” And he handed it to her.

  She took it and put it on the bed.

  He said: “You’d better finish dressing. Do you want me to wait outside?”

  His voice was as weary as his face. A vein twitched in the hollow shadow beneath his eye. He behaved as if I were not in the room.

  She said: “I’m leaving you. I’m going away with Tom.”

  He said: “Are you sure of that?”

  The muscles of her face had contracted and become rigid.

  She said: “I’m sorry, Geoffrey.”

  His voice was suddenly and surprisingly venomous.

  “You say that you’re sorry when you tread on a man’s feet in the Tube. Not when you ruin his life.”

  I was startled, not by the anger because that was expected, but by the apparent unhappiness behind it. It was more than hurt pride or indignation; it was evidence that, after his fashion, he loved her. I h
ad not believed him capable of love; now, looking at Emily’s white, shocked face, I knew that she had not believed it either. And it had taken the ground from beneath her feet.

  He said: “Have I treated you so badly all these years? Have I been such a bad husband to you?”

  I wondered for a moment whether it was deliberate pathos, assumed for a purpose, and then it seemed unfair and self-excusing to think like that and I was ashamed.

  She said nothing. Her eyes did not leave his face. Then she shook her head slowly and looked at me, sad-eyed, waiting for me to help her.

  I tried. I said: “I’m going to take her away.”

  He looked me up and down, and then he smiled.

  He said: “Well, Tom, I suppose I must wish you joy. Are you going to marry her?”

  I said: “I hope she will marry me.”

  He nodded, his eyes considering me. I tried to stand still and not shift under their light, grey gaze. Then he sat down on the bed, fumbled in his raincoat pocket and began to light his pipe, his skin reddened by the match’s intermittent flare. He cupped his beautiful hands carefully round the bowl and the flame like a man who is used to lighting a pipe out of doors.

  Emily turned her back on us both and began to roll on her stocking.

  He said casually: “What about Nora, Tom? Does she know what you are doing?”

  I said: “No, I haven’t told her.”

  A train rattled and banged its way across the viaduct. The cheap, glass ash tray danced on the bedside table.

  He said, contemptuously joking: “Would you like me to do it for you, Tom? She’ll have to know. And you aren’t very good at picking up your own broken pieces, are you?”

  I said: “I’ll tell her when she has to know.”

  He grinned over his pipe. “How long can you avoid decision. Tom? Shall I start divorce proceedings against Emily?”