Noisy! She found herself ducking and going head first into a Greek song that swirled over her in the hot upper air. There was the sound of the open steaming kitchen, the open grill behind the distant counter, and, on either side of the narrow, pretty room, pairs of customers, most of them young. The youngest girls, bunch up in their jerseys and anoraks, were smiling and soundlessly talking.
‘How comic,’ she said. ‘What is the song? Do you understand?’
‘Not a word,’ he said. ‘It’s probably about love, death, and goats.’
The young proprietor came up to him and said, ‘Mr Southey,’ and then murmured quietly, ‘Any news?’
George shook his head. The proprietor raised his deploring hands.
In the middle of their meal George said, seriously, ‘We’ve had a lot of bother in Munich. The Germans are very stubborn. We’re doing a book on the Rubens in the old Pinakotek. The British publishers hate the translation. There’s an idea – why don’t you do it? Drop Kenya. You talk German. Come with me. You’ll flabbergast them. Three or four days – call it five. There you are – a job. I’m serious. I’ll see to it that my brother pays you decently. All expenses paid, of course – actually, it’ll only take a couple of days. You can go to the Alps, see your old friends – the Greins and so on.’
‘George, you are very kind. I’m very sorry, I could not possibly go there. I hate the place.’
‘But you were there for two years. It’s a fine city. You taught at the university.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I was at the university, but I taught at a school there. I was never so unhappy in my life. I never want to see the place again. I’m superstitious.’
The four men who were talking loudly near the counter suddenly shouted with laughter and two of them punched each other and went on laughing. She frowned at the noise. She felt it was splitting her in two and that part of herself was being dragged back into the past, and that George was not the person she could possibly tell about it.
‘I see,’ he said.
The two neutral words began to exasperate her because they were neutral. That ‘I see’ had turned him into a stranger. She ought to have turned him down flat. She had gone too far. And then her feeling changed. She thought of him making those calls to the hospital and to his son every day: he had not hidden his misery. The noise, the songs howling out their imaginary passions, all the more forceful for being meaningless, undermined her reserve.
‘As I expect you know,’ she said, ‘I nearly married a German.’
She waited for him to say ‘Yes, I know.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’
‘I thought perhaps you did,’ she said.
‘If I had I wouldn’t have mentioned it.’
‘Dr Grein,’ she said.
‘Waffen – Sorry – Grein! You mean the man who gave that lecture when I drove you and your sister home? Well, there I go, flat on my face again.’
‘It was over then. He came with his wife. I was in love with him before he married, but it went wrong. There is no reason why I shouldn’t tell you this, except you said your first wife was a German and a Catholic. Dr Grein’s a Catholic’
‘You mean he wouldn’t divorce his wife?’ he said. ‘You can if you know the ropes.’
The ropes!
‘I was very young. People broke it up: his family, my sister.’
‘Religion is a curse,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen too much of it. What it does to people.’
‘That is simply not true,’ she said sharply in her correcting way. ‘My sister is a deeply religious woman. She objected because Heinrich’s family were peasants. I’d written to my father and told him this. She read the letter to him. She sent me a telegram saying my father was very ill. I went home at once. He was going blind. I used to read to him. It went on for a month. I always seem to be reading to blind people! My father kept saying, “Where’s this man? I want to have a look at him.” But Heinrich didn’t come. His father and mother were sweet, simple people. They were nice to me, but when I was away they warned him against me. All the little hill farms there look like children’s toys, all the villages, too, so clean and bright, the fields so green climbing up to pinewoods, and after that the rock and the snow, the air so pure. It turned my head, I suppose.’
‘There’s nothing toylike about peasants,’ he said. ‘They’re not children.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I never want to see the place again. Thank you for asking me, if you really meant it.’
‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘My brother can settle it. Really, there’s no need for anyone to go. The firm can do the job just as well in London.’
‘That’s much better, George,’ she said. ‘With all this worry about your wife it would be madness to go back to Munich. If I were in your position I would be thinking all the time, “Suppose she wakes up, suppose she dies.” You’ve got back today, but every day you were away must have been awful.’
He said, looking like stone, ‘I’m “away” here in London. I’ve been “away” for almost two years. I’m nowhere.’
‘You’re not really away, George. You take your love for your wife and your son with you everywhere.’
He sat back from the table as if to make himself distant and said, quietly, under the noise of the place, ‘I didn’t come to see you about the proofs. I came to see you. You are very beautiful. I want you.’
She could not stop the freezing lines of horror forming on her face – not at what he had said but horror of herself. She sat back looking nervously at the people in the restaurant, and in confusion she said, ‘I’m not beautiful. I didn’t think . . . I never thought . . . George, you must see – but thank you, George, please don’t go on with this. I don’t go in for that sort of thing. Even if I felt – You must see, I would not do that to your wife. Don’t be angry. Any woman likes to hear it. I admire you, George, but I don’t like messes. I couldn’t – Oh damn, don’t look so hurt, George. I envy your wife. She is a very lucky woman to be loved as you love her. I’m not a prude. I don’t mean you are wrong. I mean that it would be wrong for me.’
‘I see,’ he said in his flat, maddening way and simply stared.
She said, looking down at her empty coffee cup with suppressed anger, ‘It’s natural. You want a woman.’ And she looked up at him.
‘You,’ he said. ‘I always have.’
‘I don’t like bedroom affairs,’ she said, and suddenly burned with jealousy of George’s wife, indeed of all the women in the restaurant. She could hear her sister saying, ‘What is the matter with you? Why do you keep falling for impossible men?’
‘Can we go?’ she said.
He called for the bill. There was another loud shout of laughter from the men at the table in the corner of the bar and one of them reached for another bottle of wine.
The proprietor himself brought the bill, and after George paid it they got up and the proprietor followed them to the door. He said to George, ‘I hope you have good news.’ And to her, ‘Thank you, my lady, and be careful of the step.’
They were out in the rainy drizzle and got into the car. He said, ‘I’ve spoiled the evening. I’m sorry.’
Whatever was in her head, her body hated him to say that.
‘You have a right to ask me. Everyone has a right.’
‘Like the man who rang you at your flat?’ he said.
‘That was just an old friend,’ she said sharply. Damn again: he had noticed that.
They drove back through the two parks, empty jungles, under the artificial pink city sky. They did not speak. It was awful that the talker did not speak. When he stopped outside her house she said, ‘Thank you for dinner, George. You must get some sleep.’
‘Sleep?’ he said. ‘I’ve the feeling that I’ve been standing up all night for years.’
Then he pointed. ‘The usual London cat on your doorstep,’ he said. ‘Not yours?’
She got out and said ‘Shoo’ to the ca
t and then, ‘You do promise to tell me, please, if there is good news. I’ll pray for it.’
‘Pray?’ he said.
She watched the tail-light of his car getting smaller and smaller as he drove away down the street. It seemed to her that, like him, she had been standing up all night. He had not even said he loved her, thank heavens. Since Grein’s time she had not loved any of her one or two lovers. She shivered at the appalling simplicity of George’s situation.
The next day she was glad to go to read to the old lady.
‘Something has happened to you,’ the old lady said. ‘I can tell by your voice. You have good news.’
The lines of the old lady’s face lit up with conspiratorial pleasure. Paula was surprised at hearing herself say she had been offered an interpreting job in Munich but only for a few days.
The old lady said ‘Munich!’ and talked of the time she and her husband and a friend called Tregarron had been there before the war. The old lady scowled at a memory as she went on and then suddenly stopped. There was something like a harsh call to arms in the confused ruined corridors of the old lady’s mind. She said sharply, ‘That was where your silly sister had that stupid affair with some Nazi professor when she was at the University. Grein or something. Laborious fellow – common. You and your father had to go there and get her out of it.’
‘Dr Grein was not a Nazi,’ said Paula loudly. ‘My sister did not have an affair with him. Who told you that? Professor Grein is a very distinguished, happily married man. You must be thinking of someone else. My sister would never do anything like that.’
The old lady was frightened. She offered Paula a piece of marzipan.
‘Now, when are you going to Kenya?’ Paula asked to distract her.
‘Who told you I was going to Kenya?’ asked the old lady.
‘You did,’ Paula said. ‘You said you had a friend down there.’
A tear ran down the old lady’s face. ‘I have no friends,’ she said. ‘All my friends are dead. You are my only friend.’
I ought to have gone to see George’s poor wife in hospital and stop wasting my time with old friends of my sister, Paula said to herself when she got back to her flat. Why didn’t anyone at the Institute tell me that this had happened to the girl? It’s the least I can do for that man. Such a pretty girl. She had always felt protective of those ‘children’, as she called the typists at the Institute. Perhaps the sight of someone she had known in the past would have the curing effect of shock.
Two days later, she put down her work and with mission in her eyes she took the train from London to the Sussex town. She felt exalted watching the green country wheel wider and wider as the train cut through it. But when the train gave out its electric howl as it rushed into the peremptory tunnel under the Downs and emerged at the station of the town, she suddenly thought, How awful of me. I ought to have asked George. What an intrusion. How awful if I met him in the street.
The town was bunched on a steep hill of confusing little streets. Halfway up the hill, the traffic was heavy as buses and trucks rumbled past to the coast. She remembered George telling her that the place was famous for its murder trials at the county court and its religious riots. One year, the Pope had been burned in effigy on Guy Fawkes Day, and George had made her laugh with the tale of a woman from the marshes who was known to stick pins into a doll on the window of her cottage and to shout ‘Curse his name! Curse his name!’ as she did it.
At last she got to the long red brick hospital and its car park. She gave the name of the patient she wanted to see to the clerk at the entrance and found herself in the waiting room sitting with a dozen other visitors, all silent, all staring at the door as they had done at the sight of her. We look like a coven of witches, she thought. She had imagined that she would have been taken immediately to the Sister and certainly the doctor. She sat there thinking of what she would say when she would be taken to see the patient. Someone said, ‘The doctor’s doing the wards,’ and half an hour passed before her name was called. When she was led to the ward she asked, foolishly, ‘May I speak to her?’
‘Of course. The others do. She won’t answer.’
‘We used to work in the same office. She was my secretary,’ said Paula humbly to the down-to-earth sister who joined them for a moment as they stood looking at the now grey-haired woman lying unmoving, her eyes open. There was a sudden crash of oxygen cylinders that were being unloaded from a truck in the yard outside. The eyes did not move.
Suddenly it occurred to Paula to speak in a peremptory office voice: ‘Ethel!’ she said. ‘The moment Mr Southey gets here, tell him that I have a message from your son Harry. Please bring him to my room at once.’
There was no movement of the eyes.
The Sister said, ‘Mr Southey has been this morning. If he’s away he always telephones.’
Once more there was the crash of the oxygen cylinders.
‘Mr Southey’s brother and his wife always call.’
As Paula left the hospital she saw new people in the waiting room. They seemed to be trying to read her face as she hurried to the door. She glanced at the marshes stretching to the foot of the Downs as she hurried back to the station. She wondered where George lived in the town. She went up to the end of the platform to be away from the other passengers waiting for the next train. It was market day in the town and she could hear the calves lowing in their pens. Then, sparkling with electric flashes, the plain yellow-faced London train came in. Not until it had taken her out through that dramatic short tunnel that seemed to her to pass under the hospital did she feel free and unwatched. Under the spell of the racing train, as the countryside circled and the bridges seemed to shout at her, and branch lines swerved away into places unknown to her, and the living sky seemed to ride with her, did she think, Why did I do that presumptuous, untruthful thing?’
At last the train slowed down and rumbled over the Thames and squealed as it slowly turned into the terminus, and, released, she got up from her seat and joined the crowd that rushed to the barrier and, once past it, scattered with intent in their eyes. She threw away her usual prudence about money and took a taxi to her house. There she stood in her sitting-room, among her things, and looked at the assuring, demure white houses opposite, and then went up to her bedroom and changed her clothes and washed her hands and did her face and went down to her desk and telephoned to George and waited impatiently while a secretary went to look for him. At last he answered. Trouble with a machine,’ he said.
‘I hope you don’t mind, George. I went down to the hospital this morning to see Ethel. I hope you don’t think I was intrusive.’
‘So the nurse said,’ he said. His voice was dull. ‘It was kind of you.’
‘Not kind. It was terrible. George, I’ve just got back home.’ And then, in a quieter voice, ‘I think I have good news for you.’
‘You’ve got a job?’
‘No, no, George,’ she said impatiently. ‘You remember – what you were saying? When are you coming to London? We could talk. Not on the phone, not today. My sister is coming. Tomorrow, George. I can’t tell you now.’
Soon the Hoover was howling in the flat. Her sister did not come.
On the Saturday evening, up the stairs he came, into the room. She sat on one of the small armchairs and he on the sofa, staring at her. In the small room the literal distance between them seemed to him to be enormous and to her puzzling. She had planned that he would be sitting on the chair and she would prop herself on the sofa; they were wrongly placed.
‘George,’ she said. ‘I will.’
He stared at her and she said, ‘I’m shy. Why don’t you kiss me, George?’
He jumped up and went to her and was astonished that she turned her head this way and that to keep him away, so that they almost wrestled.
‘We shall be on the floor,’ she said with a laugh so harsh that he let her go.
‘Not here,’ she said, clutching his hand. ‘Upstairs.’
She lau
ghed as she pulled him up the stairs and then looked at him with a gloating defiant stare as she pulled off her clothes and he followed her to the bed.
‘Printer!’ she laughed. ‘You are a snake. What are you doing here?’
Then, ‘How thin you are.’
Then, ‘How strong,’ and she groaned, ‘Go on, go on – you’re killing me.’ And then softly, ‘Oh, darling,’ and her eyes flooded with tears of pleasure. ‘No more,’ she said.
They lay in silence for a long time.
‘When did you first think of me?’ she asked.
‘When I first saw you,’ he said.
‘That was years ago,’ she said.
‘When did you?’ he said.
‘I don’t know – when you asked me.’
‘Not before that?’ he said.
‘I think when you told me about ringing your son – I don’t know,’ she laughed. ‘When you grew a beard, Mr Vandyke.’
And that was not the end of it. In the morning he was still asleep, with his mouth open. She smiled at that and kissed him on the forehead, but he did not move. She gathered her clothes together and went to the bathroom. The sound of running water did not disturb him. After a while he called. There was no answer. He slept again. And then there she was in the room, astonishingly wearing a hat and a light coat and carrying a handbag.
‘Where are you going?’ he said.
‘Nowhere. I’ve just come back from church. Get up.’
‘Church!’ he said, astonished. ‘To confession?’ he mocked.
‘Of course not,’ she said sharply. ‘I always go. I told you my father was a clergyman. I went to pray for your wife,’ she said gravely. ‘Have you rung the hospital?’
‘Yes, I did when I woke up,’ he said bluntly. ‘Nothing.’
She wanted to rush at him and to kiss him, and not till they were eating breakfast at a little table in the living room did he say, ‘It was lovely,’ and she put her hand out to him and he kissed it.
‘When are you going to ring your son?’ she asked.
‘Not on Sunday mornings. They’re at church. I go riding. I’ll get him at teatime.’
A Careless Widow and Other Stories Page 11
