It was Yvette’s exasperated contention that Marianne did nothing to help herself. As an adolescent she had been unusually silent, had had to be bullied by her mother to go to the numerous parties to which she had been invited. She had made friends easily, but they were of a confiding female sort, and her attraction for these friends was that she received, absorbed their information and never criticized or opposed it. There was in fact something impressive, unchanging, even hieratic about her silent serious listening face, behind which wisdom might or might not be seated, that inspired confidences of a more restless kind. Marianne was thus not uninformed about the activities of her contemporaries, although she saw no reason to emulate such activities. Worldliness, or an appearance of worldliness – the immaculate coiffure, the silk shirts, the long red nails – sat easily on her essential simplicity, prompting speculation as to how much she really knew.
She was thus to be found quite early on in her life among her female friends, listening impassively to their confidences, and impressing them with an assumption of all-knowingness to which she added with unimportant but quite significant details: an examination of the flawless nails, perhaps, as if her concerns were, like theirs, to do with the general commerce of appearance, comparisons of which took up a good deal of their time. When she was away from these friends she lapsed into an inactivity which was in fact more native to her than the furious expectations that they might be presumed to share. She read hugely, Dickens and Wilkie Collins and her beloved Trollope, and at one point her parents assumed that she might take this up as some kind of career, might, like Toto, read English at the university, although her father was opposed to the idea of her leaving home. In her dreaming mind there were details of weddings and love affairs, great events for which there was no parallel in her everyday life except through the information imparted by her friends. She was, like her mother, ignorant of her own desires, ignorant even of possessing any. By virtue of this, and of other similar traits, she was the darling of her father, although to her mother she was something of an irritant. True, she was attractive and polite and manageable, as any daughter of Yvette’s was destined to be, but she was fatally deficient in animation, or so her mother thought. She was often to be found, perfectly dressed, with a volume in her hand, displacing no more room than a shadow does, sitting quietly in her mother’s drawing-room; looking up, her lipstick chewed off with the intensity of her attention, she was frequently unable to notice what was being said to her. ‘Marianne!’ her mother would sharply insist, but ‘Leave her, leave her,’ Hartmann would protest, passing his hand lovingly over her thick dark hair. He liked to have her sit near him, rather as if she were a cat, and gradually her intense peacefulness, or inwardness, would slow his actions and his breathing, until, with a long sigh, he would let his hand fall to the arm of his chair and be able to readjust to his domestic life, always slightly clamorous with his wife’s multiple observations.
Marianne also liked to visit Christine, who loved her dearly, seeing in her the temperate child whom she would so much have preferred to her turbulent son. Christine had no fears for Marianne, whom she saw married equably to a substantial man after a suitably long engagement. For the absence of passion which was Marianne’s most marked characteristic seemed, to Christine, to promise a happy life, a life appropriate for a woman of Marianne’s upbringing. In this prospect Christine forgot her own disappointments: it was to her as if she were starting out again with all the advantages of which she had been deprived. Marianne’s stable home, the doting affection of her father, would seem to incline her towards a similar establishment, a similar protection in the future. She saw no danger there, no ambushes along the way, and often she found herself having to reassure Yvette, whom she saw as over-anxious in her desire to see the girl settled. To Yvette, the only success for a woman was an early marriage. But to Christine the prolongation of the girlhood of which she herself had known only a poor and corrupted version seemed devoutly to be wished. As Hartmann reassured Fibich, she used nearly the same words to reassure Yvette.
‘Leave her alone,’ she would say. ‘Let her find her feet. She moves at a different pace from you. Girls marry later now. And of course she’ll marry, have no fears on that score. You must give her time to make her own choice. You simply mustn’t force her or you’ll ruin everything.’
Thus she became Marianne’s ally and a source of comfort to Yvette, and felt quite proud that she had achieved a measure of influence over them both. It was the only influence she had, since she so signally failed to have any over her son, and Fibich rarely looked to her these days for guidance, using her, much as he had used the analyst, as a repository for his worried musings or accounts of his dreams.
However, Marianne could not stay at home doing nothing, although Hartmann secretly hoped that she might be allowed to. Carefully dressed in primrose yellow cashmere and grey flannel, she entered London University to read English and to become assimilated, as they thought, into her own age group. But she found her own age group attired in combat gear and engaged in protest against the teaching body. When she refused to join in or to listen to the heated propaganda that was being dispensed all around her she was regarded as something of a class enemy and left severely alone. After a few months she was so unhappy that she asked her father if she might leave. After all, she had no desire for a career: she was out of phase even in that. And when she described the grim corridors and the dingy classrooms, the endless clamorous staircases and the penitential refectories, it was as if she had been consigned to Kafka’s Castle, so bewildered and distressed did she become. She made no friends there, and that, to her mother, signalled the failure of the whole enterprise. To Yvette, undergraduates were attractive high-born young men in sports cars, rather like Toto, in fact. If they were merely indiscriminate young people in jeans she saw no prospect for her daughter in their midst. It was a relief for them all when Marianne brought home her books, her unsullied ring binders, and her Parker 51 pen, and installed them once again at the desk in her room. ‘I didn’t like it,’ she would say, wrinkling her white forehead, without exactly specifying what it was she did not like. ‘I wasn’t happy there.’
After a short interval of peace her mother became restless again. Remembering her own success in the business world, Yvette decided that Marianne must have a job, although she was without any qualifications or even the slightest incentive. It was Christine who came up with the idea of voluntary work with a charitable organization whose main activity consisted of raising money, in the form of balls, concerts and book fairs, for neurological units in children’s hospitals. This seemed to them all far more to the point. Once again attired in cashmere and flannel, Marianne went off in the bus to the top of Park Lane, where, in a formerly elegant house, she was put to work transcribing addresses from one list to another. This kept her perfectly happy. She concealed from her mother the fact that her fellow workers were young women like herself, and the only men the board of directors who met once a month and for whom she was allowed to fill the silver water jugs in the austere room in which they held their deliberations. For these occasions she exchanged the cashmere and flannel for lighter yet at the same time more formal garments in silk and fine wool. Seeing her daughter depart the flat in a blue silk shirt, a longish black skirt, and a raw silk jacket in black and white, Yvette took heart and thought that Marianne would surely bring back a hostage in the form of a husband. For such an outfit a large sapphire and diamond ring would be perfect, the inevitable accessory.
Marianne liked going to work. She liked queuing for the bus every morning; she liked the feeling of being one of a crowd. She liked the girls she met, usually the same ones; she liked to see them brave and decked out in their morning armour. She liked to see them drawn ineluctably to the adventures in the thick paperback books they brought out from their capacious bags. She felt at one with them, although she brought no book for the short journey herself: she had discovered the delights of watching. She was less interested i
n men, their newspapers draped over metal briefcases; on the whole the bus, which briefly had the atmosphere of an informal study centre, delighted her. Above all she liked the obedience of being part of a group. Her journey home, at four-thirty in the afternoon, brought her into contact with a different set of people, a curious population of old ladies, usually in groups of four, innocent as schoolgirls in their sensible shoes and tight mackintoshes, untidy grey curls escaping from hats in the form of jelly moulds. Like schoolgirls they seemed convulsed with merriment, seeking and finding protection in their own kind, returned to their former selves, having dispensed with the bothersome business of husbands and children. Marianne had the impression that they were relieved of a burden, sex no more than a hilarious memory. She felt happy for them, was quite sorry to reach home and find that she was still young and had it all to go through before she could be similarly carefree herself.
She made a friend at work, a bold skinny girl called Belinda. Distinguished from others of her kind by an enormous appetite, Belinda’s cheeks usually bulged with forbidden chocolate. ‘My skin!’ she would moan, examining her chin and adding another layer of powder. ‘You’re so lucky.’ ‘Did he telephone?’ Marianne would ask seriously, paying her dues to friendship before putting her handbag down beside one of the two adjacent desks that they shared. There would be a sigh. Then, ‘I think I’ll give him a ring. In fact I think I’ll take a table for the ball at the Dorchester and ask a whole lot of people. Then he’ll have to come. You’ll come, won’t you? I’ll get someone for you. You ought to mix more.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Marianne would start to say, anxious not to hurt Belinda’s feelings. But, ‘I’ll just give him a ring to sound him out. If he says no, I’ll go ahead anyway. Just send the ticket. That way he’ll have to come. To hell with him. Who does he think he is, anyway?’
She would be gone for half an hour. On return her cheeks would be flushed with triumph, the triumph of the will. Seconds later the drawer of her desk would open, and seconds after that small shreds of silver paper would be consigned to the waste-paper basket. As Belinda’s mind was always and entirely on her own affairs Marianne found her a restful and congenial companion. They worked cheerfully together and were much liked by the woman who was supposed to supervise what little they did, a glossy woman of forty-five whose hands and wrists seemed weighted down by the evidence of various engagements and marriages. Engagements, if not marriages, were always in the air.
On one splendid occasion Marianne and Belinda were co-opted to help at a fund-raising book fair, where, seated behind a table, they packed up the books signed by a bemused writer of historical memoirs. Belinda, her streaked hair flapping wildly round her face, engaged everyone in animated conversation. It was one of their more successful events: the hall was crowded, the attendance gratifying. Marianne felt the stirrings of a mild spirit of recklessness as the money changed hands. Hartmann, strolling over with an air of studied unconcern, enquired, ‘Are you girls all right? Not overdoing it?’ He then went back to Yvette, who was sitting tensely behind a cup of coffee at a small table, as if attending her daugher’s début.
‘Stop fussing,’ he said. ‘She’s perfectly all right. Leave her alone.’
Five minutes later Fibich followed him.
‘Do you want anything, children? A cup of tea, perhaps?’
‘They’re sweet, your family,’ said Belinda, who had greeted him effusively and sold him a book. ‘Old-fashioned, really.’ They drank their cups of tea, which had appeared with two biscuits in each saucer. Fibich was good at that sort of detail.
Hartmann, who was immensely proud of his daughter, whom he thought beautiful and accomplished beyond all others, nevertheless registered the fact that she was unsophisticated, even untaught, in sexual matters. She will be like her mother, he thought, and the thought did not entirely displease him, for what is inconvenient in a wife may be treasured in a daughter. He longed to keep her for himself, yet he recognized, from Yvette’s restlessness, her urgings and promptings, that a partner must be found for Marianne, who seemed to have no desire to find one for herself. Nor, despite her elegant appearance and unspoilt air, did she attract anyone on her own account. When, at Yvette’s insistence, she would be obliged to accept one of Belinda’s table-filling invitations, she would not be happy. She would sit gravely, putting in the hours, swallowing tiny yawns, her eyes watering slightly with tiredness, while Belinda danced frenziedly, her dress coming apart, her high heels skidding over the polished floor. Watching her friend limp back to the safe haven where her spilling handbag and other effects were kept in custody, Marianne would wonder how soon she could go home. She found these occasions exhausting, failed to see why her presence was necessary. She considered her duty as a chaperone fulfilled after half an hour, but was too fond of Belinda to refuse her company. And she was aware that her shy replies had failed to retain at her side the young man whom Belinda had asked to accompany her. She became quite good at pretending to enjoy herself, although she was not good enough to deceive her partners. These partners, essentially good-natured, were nevertheless unwilling to repeat the exercise.
She became twenty-four, twenty-five, and still there was no sign of marriage, or even, at the worst possible reckoning, of an affair. Belinda, twirling a ruby ring on her finger, had just become engaged for the second time and was even now thinking she might break it off, having someone else in mind. Marianne became aware that she was out of favour, not only with her mother, but with her friend as well. ‘You are slow,’ Belinda would say lightly, drunk with her own success. She did not mean to be unkind. Tactlessness came naturally to her. But the atmosphere at home was deteriorating. ‘Do something,’ said Yvette grimly to Hartmann, and, ‘Ask Belinda to dinner,’ she said, more reasonably, to Marianne, aware that she must now tread carefully if she were not to drive her daughter into ever more silent opposition.
In a spirit of the utmost resignation Hartmann invited Goodman and Myers from the office. The table was excellently appointed, the salmon coulibiac effectively praised, Goodman in particular exhausting himself in superlatives. Roger Myers, a thick pale tall man with sandy hair, said little enough but was found to be the more acceptable of the two. He was thirty-eight, old by Marianne’s standards, just right according to Yvette’s. Marianne schooled herself into acceptance of another invitation to another ball, simply in order to please her mother; Myers’s invitation, when it came (and out of sheer politeness it had to come), was to a football match. He played on Sundays, with an obscure college side, in a distant park. Marianne, standing on the sidelines, found it quite restful simply to stand there and watch, without the need to be sociable. She also found herself interested, once she had got over her surprise, by Roger’s enormous knees. When he joined her at the end of the game, showered, dressed, and reassuringly taciturn, she was quite glad to see him. They stood for a moment exchanging banalities, their breath puffing little clouds into the cold air. Then he took her home. The occasion had brought colour to her pale cheeks, which Yvette took as a good sign. When Myers, standing politely in the drawing-room with a glass of sherry, named the date of the next fixture, Yvette said quickly that she was sure that Marianne would enjoy it: she looked so much better for the fresh air. It was arranged that Myers should call for her in a fortnight’s time.
Myers also played squash but rightly thought this too bold, too virile a game for Marianne to witness. He was correct in this: indeed he displayed a certain caution that partially allayed Hartmann’s misgivings. Hartmann, who had known him for the eight years he had been with the firm, had hitherto thought him an excellent accountant if a dull stick. Now he began to appreciate his prudence, his deliberate slowness, his very uninflammability. If a daughter is to marry her father does not necessarily appreciate signs of ardour, haste, desperate intent in the man who is to be her husband. Seated side by side at the parental table, Marianne and Myers, or Roger, as they now had to call him, were relaxed, even torpid, in each other’s comp
any. And there were advantages, Hartmann saw, in having a son-in-law within daily reach. His future, of course, would be assured. Hartmann tried to tell himself that he was gaining a son, and failed. One night, uncharacteristically, he awoke from a dream in which some great fiesta was taking place, with fireworks bursting in a starry sky, and everyone in Spanish costume. It should be like that, he thought instinctively, and quashed the thought. He was exceptionally good at ordering subversive thoughts out of his mind. He had had a lifetime of practice.
At the age of twenty-seven Marianne became engaged to Roger Myers, and Hartmann trained himself to think of life without her. Immediately he began making enquiries in the building as to when a flat might become available. For as brief an interval as he could command he would lose his daughter to far-off Richmond. ‘Absurdly out of the way,’ he said to Myers, who had lived there for most of his life. ‘We will find you something nearer. It will be my wedding present to you.’ Myers thanked him courteously. There was, however, no question of Myers addressing him as anything other than Mr Hartmann. This pained him, but he saw the correctness, the entirely general correctness, of Myers’s attitude. He had no fear for Marianne’s future. That was something. In the final analysis it was everything, he supposed. Thus he reasoned with himself, interminably, particularly when alive to the pain of his daughter’s disappearance from his home.
Yvette allowed herself a moment of triumphant relaxation before rushing into preparations for the wedding. Marianne’s large sapphire and diamond ring (for Roger had thought to ask Yvette’s advice on this matter) was greatly admired by Christine and Fibich. Fibich, in fact, was overjoyed, for Myers met all his criteria of gentlemanliness, having never been observed to act rashly, impetuously, or in a markedly juvenile manner. Christine gave a small party for the young people, as she chose to call them, feeling very out of it herself, and Toto was induced to be present. Toto’s attitude was one of hilarity: he had never been exactly comfortable with Marianne, who, he knew, was not receptive to his particular brand of charm. On more than one occasion she had shrunk from his exuberance, as a cat shrinks from hissing rain. As the date of the wedding drew nearer he found himself unwillingly included in the proceedings, unwillingly but with a certain fascination: he had, after all, nothing better to do, and it was all good material. When, two nights before the wedding day, Yvette urged him to take a suddenly tearful Marianne out to dinner, he felt a not altogether unwelcome leap of curiosity. He was impatient, on edge, longing to break up the saccharine Victorian atmosphere in which Yvette and Christine moved so solemnly, conscious of the significance of their activities. He took her to the Savoy, Fibich having given him a cheque for this purpose.
Latecomers Page 10
