by Jane Rule
“You’re sitting on your bed.”
“I’ll just stay tonight. I’ll find myself a room tomorrow. I really could look this afternoon—”
“Stop it, little dog. Stay for a week. Stay as long as you need to. There’s no problem.”
“No problem,” you repeated, rubbing your forehead.
“No, so take off your coat while I get coffee. How was the festival?”
“It rained,” you said. “It was all right. It was good. Just nobody there. I mean I didn’t meet anybody until John turned up, and I didn’t meet him until three days before I left.”
“And who’s he?”
“A director. He had a play on up there. He came back to London yesterday and said he’d phone here around noon. He’s going to help me move my stuff.”
Between getting coffee and moving suitcases out of the way, I heard a few more details.
“He’s sort of old—well, bald, and he knows simply everybody.”
“Everybody?”
“Gielgud and that whole crowd.”
I stalled a moment in the kitchen so that I wouldn’t have to comment on that remark.
“Oh, I’ve had a letter from Monk,” you called. “She’s coming over. She’ll be here in three or four weeks.”
That returned me to the sitting room at once. “How on earth…?”
“I even wonder if she didn’t plan it that way from the first,” you said, half grinning. “Her father is sending her to England to get her away from Robin.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“John says he can help her get into RADA. She’s going to be awfully late, but I think that’s what she wants to do. Oh, that coffee really tastes like home.” You drank it and then looked around you for the first time. “You’re so settled here, Kate. It’s really… your own place, isn’t it?”
“Doris did it for me.”
“I’ll have to find something less…” You didn’t finish your sentence.
“You’ll need some place to work,” I said. “It may not be easy to find.”
“John has some leads,” you said without much confidence. “You cook and everything like that, don’t you?”
“A little,” I said. “I’ve got a woman to clean and iron.”
“I mustn’t do that. Mother’s given me a household book. How to get clay off the carpet and tomato stains off the pillow cases, I hope. It’s my do-it-yourself year.”
“Maybe you and Monk—”
“No,” you said. “You’re not going to hold my hand, and I’m not going to hold hers. Everybody has to be independent.”
The phone rang: a careful English voice asking for you.
“Ask him to lunch if you like,” I said.
You always had an odd, alert expression when you were listening on the phone, as if the message coming through were in code. Whenever I telephoned you, I tried not to imagine your face, mouth a little open, eyelids blinking rapidly. If I did, I had to control the temptation to speak in riddles and numbers. “Come to lunch” or “I have an extra ticket for the theater” never seemed worthy of your concentration. John had probably not known you long enough to notice and was suffering from nothing more than your pauses and apologies.
“Maybe that wasn’t a good idea,” you said, as you hung up. “Maybe we’re too much trouble. Maybe you won’t like him.”
“I’ll like him,” I said.
But I didn’t. He was a tall, pale man with a sharp face and thinning blond hair, so mannered in his politeness that I was as suspicious of him as you usually were of “grown-up” men, as you called them. He was not a flatterer, however; instead he fed you names of important people he knew, another each time your attention wandered, which it did occasionally from tiredness and uncertainty. He treated you rather as if you were a parking meter with the time always running out. I was a problem he hadn’t the attention to calculate. With perverse sympathy, I watched him making that basic mistake.
The first three days of what turned out to be a ten-day visit, you slept a good deal of the day, woke in time to stir through your suitcases for something to put on, drink a cup of coffee, and rush off to meet John. You got home long after I’d gone to bed, though not always after I’d gone to sleep. I would lie, listening to you stumbling about over your scattered luggage, coughing, finally settling to the heavy sleep I’d find you in the next morning. I would pick up a still damp velvet raincoat and shoes, hang up a dress, pitch underwear into the bathroom hamper to make a path for myself into the kitchen. After you’d complained about the char’s stacking your luggage so that you couldn’t find anything, I didn’t bother with that. I don’t like untidiness, but I felt indulgent at first. It was a small flat, too small for two people. Some confusion was inevitable, and I expected each day that you’d look for and finally find a place of your own.
On the fourth day, I woke you when I came in from shopping, tripping over a record player you had apparently bought the day before.
“Sorry,” I said, “but this is getting to be an obstacle course.”
“I’m in the way,” you said mournfully “I knew I would be.”
“You’re not,” I said. “Your clutter is. Why don’t we put just one or two of these things in the hall closet?”
“I’ll move out today,” you said, sitting up in bed with an effort.
“Is that easier than putting your record player away?”
“That’s for you,” you said. “I’ve got some Deller records, too. I wanted to play them for you last night, but then it got late with John…”
“Oh, E., you’re not supposed to buy me things like that.”
“I’m not supposed to do anything for you, with you, or about you.”
“Okay, I’m delighted. And I wouldn’t even mind seeing you for an hour or two every other day or so.”
“He wants me to sleep with him,” you said.
“And?”
“He says that I’m still a virgin at twenty-two out of some kind of pride or weird masculinity. I shouldn’t wear my father’s wristwatch.”
“So he’s a psychologist as well?”
“He’s honest. That’s what I like about him. And he does understand people, all kinds of people.”
“Why don’t you have some coffee and wake up?” I suggested.
I moved with deliberate slowness in the kitchen, putting the groceries away while I waited for the coffee. I wanted to ask if you’d gone for your ration book, but I knew you hadn’t. I knew you hadn’t been looking for a room, either. I spoke firmly to myself about not being a nag. In the other room I heard Deller’s voice singing “Fine Knacks for Ladies.”
“Though all my wares be trash, the heart is true, the heart is true…”
“John says most women don’t like Deller’s voice. Those who do—”
“I know,” I said, “Have some sort of weird masculinity. Forgive me, but John sounds a little like a Penguin Classic.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I don’t know him. I can think of more appealing arguments for getting you into bed, but perhaps this one will be more effective.”
“He’s not trying to argue me into anything, Kate. He’s just trying to point out why I’m reluctant.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t want to be a professional virgin.”
“Well, who’s paying you to be one?”
“Nobody,” you said meekly “Maybe I just want someone to want something of me… anything.” The phone rang. “Damn! That will be John. I’m supposed to be meeting him for lunch.”
It was another three days before we had as long a conversation again. During that time I had a silly argument with Doris; the char threatened to quit; and I was out one night later than you were.
“Wait a minute, Esther,” I began this next conversation.
“I’m late,” you said.
“For what?”
“John, he’s—”
“Taking you to look for a flat? Or to get your ration book?”<
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“Actually, no,” you said. “These friends of his out of London have asked us down for the day, and—”
“Have you looked for a flat at all?”
“I’m going to tomorrow. I was going to today, but this came up.”
“No,” I said. “Call John and tell him you’re not going.”
“But I have to, Kate.”
“No, you don’t. You have to get your ration book and you have to look for a place to live. The time’s up.”
“But I don’t know how… without him.”
“I’ll take you,” I said.
“You don’t want to. You told me. You told me I had to be independent.”
“And this is independence, using my living room like a hotel room, me like a personal maid, and trailing around after John, picking up all the names he drops until he lets you into bed, Daddy’s wristwatch and all?”
“I’ll call him,” you said.
I went into my bedroom and shut the door. I could hear your voice uncertainly explaining in the other room. Then you knocked on the door.
“You’re the only person I really care about in the world,” you said quietly. “I’m not going to do all the apologizing you hate. I’m going to clean up the living room. Then I want you to tell me how to get to the ration board. I want to go by myself. I’ll bring the book back here for you. Then I’ll look for a place. May I stay tonight?”
“Oh, little dog,” I said. “Let me apologize for once, just for the novelty of the thing.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. You never do. You only get angry when I can’t hear any other way. Now I’m going to clean up.”
I am not good, I wanted to shout after you. I am jealous and hurt and frightened. But those aren’t things to shout at a child. They are not even things children shout at each other. I had already shouted what I could. Now I had to bear your being contrite.
John, for all his offers, was not available for flat hunting, and I was not allowed to go until after you’d made your decision. Even then, you were reluctant to have me see the place.
“I like it all right, but it’s sort of awful.”
Off Sloane Square, at a good address, Lady Alice’s house was as worn and unable to keep up with its neighbors as her face, which unpaid bills and alcohol and forgetful friends had weathered into an odd combination of bloat and gauntness. In strained Mayfair she shouted instructions at you as we followed her up four flights of stairs. She rented out the two main floors to a doctor and his wife, kept the third floor for herself, offering you the attic which, aside from a box room and rather primitive bath to be shared with her, was one large room, low-ceilinged with two small dormer windows. Down the center of it, like a path, lay a decaying hall runner. The only other floor covering was an enormous bear rug, more hide than fur, mounted awkwardly by the side of a small bed, a child’s bed probably, painted white. The few other pieces of furniture were enormous, a carved dining-room sideboard and dinner table with two matching chairs, the master chairs, and a wardrobe with two full-length mirrors. On the chimney wall, there was an old gas fire with a cooking ring that crooked out from one side.
“It’s bigger than any room I’ve ever had,” you said, “and she’s even given me dishes and pans and things like that.”
“You won’t need many pans,” I said.
“I’d never be able to learn to cook more than one thing at a time, anyway. Isn’t it a great table? I can have my desk at this end, work at the other end and eat in the middle.”
“Has she told you the name of the bear?”
“Pooh,” you said, and even you cringed.
“It’s a terrible place, E.,” I said, laughing. “I can’t imagine anyone but you living in it.”
“My own,” you said, looking around curiously.
Frank’s notion (shared by other people) that you were purposely rebelling against your mother didn’t really explain your choice. The way you lived in any setting was not as conscious as that. You were, in fact, so little separated from your childhood that Lady Alice’s sad snobbery and exiled dining-room furniture probably reminded you of home and gave you some comfort. You had always spent more time in maids’ quarters than in your own, and this room might have been the attic of your mother’s town house where you and your brother played on rainy days, a place where you had learned to order people’s trunks and old rockers and bedsprings into your own design. Far from being rebellious, you had looked for and found just the kind of playroom you were accustomed to. The only difference, admittedly a happy one, was that you never had to go downstairs to eat, say hello to guests or good night to your mother. You could even sleep among the inventions of your day.
“But she’ll be so cold,” Doris protested when I described the place to her. “And she won’t eat properly. Isn’t her mother giving her enough money?”
“She’s bought herself a complete, very expensive mountaineering outfit and two cases of baked beans,” I said. “And she has a record player just like the one she gave me, so she must have some money.”
“Is she just slightly feeble-minded?”
“It’s her tree house, Doris. I expect one day I’ll find her with a blanket draped over the chairs, sitting under it on the floor reading something wicked out of Godey’s Lady’s Book.”
“That goes back to my generation’s older generation—and farther.”
“Esther’s old-fashioned.”
“Will she be all right?”
“I imagine so. She can have dinner with me a couple of times a week. Slade’s practically around the corner from me.”
“I meant to pass on a compliment from Frank the other night. He wanted to know where on earth you’d learned to cook.”
“That certainly doesn’t sound a compliment.”
“But it is. He was really quite nervous about having dinner with you before we came. I saw him putting stomach pills into his pill box. “You really are a very good cook, Kate, and I can’t think where you learned.”
“I’ve always been fed well, and I can read.”
“I suppose, if anybody had ever let me—or if it had ever occurred to me to go out on my own the way all you kids seem to—I would have been more like Esther—made a kind of mud pie party out of the whole thing. So the question is, where did you get the confidence you have about ordinary living?”
“It doesn’t seem important enough to me to be bad at it.”
“Is there anything important like that?”
Loving, I might have said, but I probably didn’t really know that much at the time.
“I have a project for you,” I said. “I want you to ask me and a young man named Andrew Belshaw to dinner next week.”
“Fine. Who is he?”
“I met him in Spain and saw something of him in California last spring. He’s Canadian—Alberta oil, here for a Ph.D. at Cambridge. I think Frank would like him, and I’m sure you would.”
“And you do?”
“Yes,” I said.
I did not meet Andrew’s boat train. He telephoned after he had checked in at the Cumberland and asked me to meet him there for a drink. I caught a bus along Oxford Street and sat down, by mistake, next to a woman with pale red hair and a neatly trimmed red beard and mustache. No one looked at either one of us which, under the circumstances, was unnerving because it left me isolated with what seemed after a time to be my own fantasy When I got up to get off at Marble Arch, she followed me down the sidewalk and right into the hotel lobby. I saw Andrew standing by the counter at the theater ticket agency. As I hesitated, she did, too, just at my elbow. Andrew looked up, saw us and hesitated. I ran to him.
“For a minute there, I thought you’d brought a friend,” he said.
“She’s real then?” I asked, turning quickly to look back.
“It must be some sort of circus,” he said. “There. She’s going over to join that company of dwarfs.”
“Get me a drink,” I said, “before they get out the feathers and ask me
to join.”
“Not a chance,” Andrew said smiling. “This cowboy saw you first.”
We didn’t stay at the Cumberland. Andrew wanted to go to Chelsea to a pub, then on to a little restaurant he had discovered several years before. We took a bus, then walked along the Embankment in a warm, late afternoon, Andrew liking the ground under his feet after five days aboard ship.
“Isn’t it marvelous?” he said, taking my arm. “You aren’t at work yet, and I have a week before I have to be at Cambridge. I want to really do London. I’ve only been here a day or two at a time since the war.”
“Were you here in the war?”
“Down in Sussex mostly, then into Holland, but I got into London quite a bit, and I always thought I’d come back here after the war to see what it was really like. It’s still a sad, war city, though, isn’t it?”
We were looking at a great crater in the earth that has since been turned into a garden. In 1952 the tidying and high-fence building were still going on.
“Was it as bad as you thought, getting away from home?” I asked, perhaps because the sadness in his face seemed abstracted; he wasn’t really looking at what he saw.
“Yes. I had a badly symbolic thirtieth birthday just before I left.”
“You’re thirty? It never occurred to me that you were that old.”
“Oh, don’t you begin at it, too!”
“It’s just that you don’t look… or seem…”
“My father’s words exactly. A case of retarded development. Here I am, thirty years old with nothing to my credit but a B.A. in philosophy, some Boy Scout badges for an occupation war, and some business experience as my father’s ashtray emptier and my mother’s barman at charity luncheons. He’s quite right, of course. I’m not trained to do anything, and he doesn’t dare imagine what my experience would recommend me for. I’m not even married.”
“Then he shouldn’t object to your getting a Ph.D. That will train you—”
“But not for the job I’ll have to do. I told the old bastard he’d live forever and never turn over anything to anybody. And that’s true, but it’s not the way he sees it. ‘Poor old England,’ he said, ‘now the remittance men are going the other way’.”
