All the Way Home and All the Night Through

by Ted Lewis

  Jerry came in.

  “Now then, cocky,” he said. He sat down. “Got the keys?”

  I gave them to him.

  “Ta. Cup of tea, Molly. Anyhow, was it worth it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she a virgin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still, you had to get it over sometime. All stops out, next time, eh?”

  “Yeah. Should be okay.”

  Jerry got up, got his tea, sat down again.

  “Jerry, there is one thing. What I said earlier. Nobody must know. Right?”

  “Victor, don’t worry. You can take if from me.” He grinned in his confidence-trickster conspiratorial way. “Don’t worry.”

  A Sunday morning in May and we walked along the northern bank of the river, out in the country. It was a sunless morning and still. The time was ten thirty. The colours of the river bank were cool and pastel. The sky was motionless and the river slipped by almost unnoticed. We were comparatively close to the sea, and I felt if I had been able to see it, that it would have been motionless and quiet, too.

  We were walking along the bank itself. It was raised six or seven feet above the muddy shore. Behind us was the fresh red and white paint of Halton lighthouse. In front of us was nothing but the sky and a woman walking two black poodles approximately ten yards in front of us. The woman was Gillian Lewis and she was forty-one years old and attractive. The poodles were called Jasper and George. Gillian was an old friend of Mrs Walker’s. She was single, she ran an antique business in town, she wore decorated glasses, she smoked through a long black holder. I liked her. She owned a cottage out at Halton and sometimes Janet and I would stay weekends there. This was one of those week-ends.

  Gillian stopped walking. We wandered up to her.

  “I think that we should turn back now,” she said. “I’d like to get the casserole on. By the time we’ve done that and glanced at the papers, it’ll be time to have a drink.”

  These Sundays followed a pleasantly set pattern. Early breakfasts, long walks, a couple of drinks among the dart players in the village pub, Sunday lunch, falling asleep among the papers to a background of Basie or Beethoven, a late evening meal together with gins and liqueurs and wines and back to town in Gillian’s Hillman.

  We strolled back to the cottage and Gillian put the casserole in the oven and we went in the pub. The landlord and his daughters knew Gillian well and they welcomed us in a big way. I bought the first drinks and one of the landlord’s daughters served us. Gillian started a conversation with one of the locals and Janet and I were left to ourselves.

  We were sitting on a couple of high stools next to the bar. I was holding Janet’s hand which rested in her lap. Her feet were perched on one of the stool’s horizontal struts. She looked delightful. Her being radiated what she felt for me. Her expressions told me everything. She didn’t have to affect a particular expression to illustrate this. It seemed to radiate from her permanently. I smiled at her because looking at her made me want to smile all the time.

  “I look at you,” I said, “and you seem to grow more lovely as I look. And each minute that you do, the more I love you.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that. Each time you do, I love you more, and each time I think I’m reaching a breaking point, a point where I can’t contain everything I feel for you anymore, that point has been reached where it seems physically impossible. And yet it is possible. Anything’s possible. I don’t know. Nothing’s impossible, yet you’re impossible. Impossible to believe in because you’re you and in love with me.”

  “And you’re impossible. Impossible Janet Walker sitting here on a bar stool in Halton with me on a Sunday morning.”

  “I love you, Vic. I really, really love you.”

  “It’s unbearable when you say that. I can hardly take it. It makes me feel so wholly—wholly glad.”

  “I want to tell you all the time. Except I’m afraid you might become tired of me saying it.”

  I smiled at her.

  “I’d never grow tired of that, or of you, or of the two of us being together.”

  The more I knew her, the more she surprised me. The most surprising thing was, of course, that she loved me, and each new thing I discovered induced that strange process of where you mentally gasp with pleasure and surprise at the confrontation of a sparkling facet.

  Her intelligence revealed itself to me slowly at first. There had been no doubt that she had this intelligence but it was doubly valuable accompanied as it was by her generous sensitivity, all too often dispensable to the intelligence of others. She liked things; she was no more innocent in thought or innocent of the world than others, but her aura became her in such a way that I could never consider her thinking badly or acting wrongly. Rather, thinking honestly and acting genuinely.

  She knew my failings intimately and smiled rather than derided. I think she knew that many of my attitudes at the beginning had been poses in the process of my courtship. But it didn’t appear to worry her. She would hint at my early attitudes in the disguise of a joke, just to let me know. She had freely admitted to having deliberately made herself aloof at first, on the advice of her mother, after having told her how interested she was in this strange boy she had had a few words with at college who wandered about alternately scowling and looking bored. She told me that she had been irritable with herself and with me—from the time it had become obvious to herself that I was going to ask her out to the time that I actually did because the lengthy period in between seemed to her unending. She would get quite annoyed with me after yet another occasion had passed without my having asked, and she would return to her mother and complain that the methods she had suggested might not have been the best methods after all. Her mother had stood firm and not only that, she had advocated the continuation of the device into the early stages of our courtship.

  Mrs Walker seemed to me to have a super-intelligence. The kind of intelligence that could come in on the end of a conversation, whatever the content or tone, and make what had gone before seem banal or unfunny, whichever the case might be. She could make you feel small with a charming smile. And yet, in spite of this, she had warmth. There were times when Janet would be in some other place, when Mrs Walker would talk to me frankly about herself and her life. There would never be any sense of an experienced and worldly wise adult talking to a boy of twenty. She respected my intelligence and in some subtle way we seemed to conspire in the knowledge that we were both more experienced than Janet. Every time that Janet entered the room after these sessions, I would feel a pleasant worldly largesse for a time until the sheer love my looking at her inspired made it disappear like puddles under the sun of a Disney cartoon.

  And to look on her quiet loneliness made me painfully aware of my own inadequacies, of how, it seemed, the whole business balanced precariously on a thin wire waiting for my inadequacies to tilt it downward.

  Though these inadequacies didn’t seem to affect her. Rather, she didn’t seem to notice them. I would look into her eyes and see myself and a love equal in every part to my own reflected back at me. This was the best part of all: it was implicit that each other’s love was equally intense and not just intense but ultimately intense, so that we shared the wonder of two people loving to the limits of their capacities, each capacity being as full and as strong as that of the other.

  Above all was the constant desire to be with each other all the time. Never at any time could I have wished to be anywhere but with her. The day wasn’t long enough. Each good-bye became a moment to treasure all the way home and all the night through. Each meeting meant the rebirth of each other, a resurgence that made being only feel complete from the exact moment of seeing each other, touching each other, speaking to each other. To look on each other for the first time after a parting was almost too poignant for one nervous system to deal with. The world’s lif
e expectancy didn’t seem long enough to enable us to work out the vein of our feelings.

  Janet liked the same people as I did, the same music, the same films, the same streets, the same fields, the same days, the same skies, the same laughter, the same books, the same cups of tea, the same pictures, the same nights. Her quiet, composed face would transform into brightness however unfunny my passing remarks would be. She seemed to want me to go on being the way I was for the duration of my life. And I wanted her to go on being the way she was, too.

  “He’s a rum lad is our Victor,” said my grandmother. Janet smiled at her. A soft warm breeze drifted in through the open French windows and stirred a copy of the Radio Times which rested on my grandmother’s broad lap, pinned securely by her knotty, rheumy hands. I shifted my slippered feet an inch or so further up the side of the marble fireplace.

  “I am that,” I said.

  My grandmother laughed and nodded at Janet.

  “Aye, he’s a rum lad. I expect you’ll know that though, Janet.”

  “Oh, yes. No need to tell me that.”

  My grandmother laughed again.

  “Whose side are you on anyway?” I asked my grandmother. “If you’re not careful, I’ll cut your ration down to seven bottles a day.”

  “I wouldn’t take any notice of him if I were you, Mrs Jackson. He only does it when he feels no one’s taking any notice of him.”

  “Aye, you’ve got him weighed up, Janet. She has that, our Victor. Do you know?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do. I don’t stand much of a chance round these parts, what with the pair of you. No respect.”

  It was an April tea-time. Janet and my grandmother and I were sitting watching “Juke Box Jury”. The Saturday evening outside was soft and still and an occasional late bird glided across the blue sky. I had been imitating the personalities just for something to do, and that was what had prompted my grandmother’s remarks. My mother came in, wheeling the tea trolley.

  “Here we are. I expect you’re ready for something to eat.”

  Janet got up from her chair and began helping my mother with the tea things.

  I smiled to myself at the pleasure my mother felt at Janet’s spontaneous action.

  Later in the evening, Janet and I walked slowly down the garden and through into the orchard. The moon was on its ascent and the deep blue of night faded into the remainder of the day. The trees didn’t stir in that placid comfortable warmth peculiar to April. The faint hum of the rest of the landscape outside the orchard could only just be heard. A chicken complained shrilly for a second, out of sight behind a tall hedge.

  We didn’t have to say anything. The evening expressed it all and for a time we stood and appreciated the fact that we were together.

  William, the cat, emerged from the tall grass some yards away and sauntered nonchalantly toward us.

  “Hello, William,” said Janet, half-kneeling. “Hello, fat old puss.”

  I laughed. Cats always make me laugh.

  I knelt down beside Janet. I put my arm across her shoulders.

  “I can’t remember the time when I didn’t know you,” I said.

  “Can’t you?”

  “I’ll never feel like this again.”

  “Do you think there will be an “again” for you?”

  “No. There never will be. It’ll always be you.”

  It was one of the nights when Janet was to go home straight after college. Summer was round the corner and the streets dryly and warmly anticipated the heat that was to come.

  As usual I took her to her bus stop opposite the college and we waited for her bus to arrive. We stood close to each other, not saying much, watching people go in and out of college. At one point, Jerry sauntered down the steps. Janet squeezed my hand.

  I looked into her face.

  “You—you don’t discuss me with people at college, do you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, the things—well, the times at Jerry’s flat. You don’t tell them, do you? I hear how the others talk and—”

  “Well, of course, Jerry knows.”

  “Do you think he tells anyone?”

  “No. I asked him not to.”

  “Then you don’t say anything yourself.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  Janet had become quite friendly with Karen. At least they always came down to break or lunch together before Janet left Karen to join me. It disturbed me slightly. I wondered if Karen had ever heard about the night the boys had had the scene in the dormobile. I didn’t want Janet to know anything about it. One break-time I mentioned it.

  “I see you and Karen seem to be getting on quite well nowadays. Surprises me a bit, considering that she felt I gave her up for you.”

  “Does it? I suppose we do see more of each other now that she’s switched on to my course. We’re not friends exactly but we do talk quite a bit. She’s quite nice really.”

  “You think so?”

  “Why, don’t you?”

  “I think she’s a silly bitch.”

  “You make it sound like an accusation. I think she’s a bit silly, too, but she’s really quite sweet underneath.”

  “It’s not just that. I get the feeling that if she was given the chance she might do something to spoil what we have.”

  “That’s ridiculous. She may be silly, but she’s certainly not malicious. Why should she want to spoil anything for us in any case? She’s mad on Dick Castle.”

  “She’s the kind that’s always mad on someone,” I said.

  “What is suddenly so wrong with that? Besides, she’s been going out with Dick since Christmas.”

  “And mucking him about behind his back, too. When Dick’s not at the Steam Packet, she’s always disappearing with some Arab.”

  “I don’t really see how it affects us.”

  “I don’t know--- girls like that--- I’ve found they’re never satisfied unless they’ve converted other, happier people to their own way of carrying on.”

  “Don’t be silly. You think she would try and do that to me? It wouldn’t matter if she did. It wouldn’t affect me in the slightest. It’s not very flattering of you to think it would. It seems as if you think my emotions are just superficial and weak enough to change under the slightest pressure.”

  “I’m sorry, Janet. It’s just that you mean so much to me that even the most innocent things seem dangerous.”

  “How do you think I feel not being allowed to come to the Steam Packet? How do I know that you never go with anyone else? I’d never know, would I?”

  “Janet, you know I’d never go with anyone else. You know it.”

  “I think I do. But you see, I have much more to contend with than your worries about Karen.”

  “I suppose so. I was being stupid.”

  June.

  Nine months since I’d first taken Janet to the fair. Now we knew each other properly and we felt more love with the realization that the knowledge enhanced our romantic feelings rather than disposed of them.

  The weather was perfect. Day drifted after glorious day as the term began drawing to a close. The Ministry of Education examinations were over and the people concerned, myself among them, could only wait until sometime after the end of term when we would receive an envelope through the post containing a compliments slip from the principal and a small piece of paper saying “Pass” or “Fail”.

  So college began running down. People took more time off than usual and members of the staff bothered about it less than usual. The sun appeared daily from morning to late evening. I began to realize that I would soon no longer be at college.

  Now summer had really arrived; to celebrate its coming and to utilize its clear still evenings, one of the local jazz clubs hired a ferry a
nd organized a river boat shuffle. A couple of name bands from London were engaged together with three local groups, ours included. Janet’s mother was allowing her to come along, too, so I was looking forward to the whole business.

  On the Saturday afternoon before the dance set sail, I was invited to the Walker’s for tea. We had our meal on the sun terrace which opened onto the garden. When we had finished eating, we just sat round and enjoyed the sun. After a while the phone rang. Janet left the porch to answer it.

  “You have a wonderful day for your dance, Victor,” said Mrs Walker.

  “Yes. It’s just the job.”

  “Janet’s quite excited at the prospect of this evening cruise.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is a bit unusual.”

  “Not too unusual, I hope,” she smiled.

  “Oh no. No rough seas.”

  “I hope not. I’m relying on you.”

  “Yes. I know you can.”

  “Good. Then I’ve nothing to worry about.”

  Janet came back from the telephone. She was grinning.

  “My God,” she said.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “It’s my admirer,” she said.

  “Not Martin,” said her mother.

  “Yes, Martin,” she said.

  “Who’s Martin?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t he ever stop trying?” said Mrs Walker.

  “Who’s Martin?”

  “I may as well tell you,” said Janet. “I suppose it’s a bit pathetic but it’s funny, really. You remember the dance? The one where you first saw me when you were playing in the band? Well, this boy Martin, Martin Farr, he took me to the dance. That was the only time I ever went out with him. Anyway, since then he has telephoned me almost every evening asking me to go out with him. The point is he’s such a drip. Really. His voice alone is enough: ‘Hello, this is Martin here.’ He really is wet. Isn’t he, Mummy?”