The Town in Bloom

by Dodie Smith

  I burst out laughing. ‘Lilian, you’re crazy. He never had the remotest intention of marrying me.’

  ‘But he would have had it, later. Eve Lester thinks so, too. You can ask her tonight, if you like. Did I tell you she’s coming to dinner?’

  ‘No, you didn’t and I’m delighted to hear it. But I shan’t ask her anything so idiotic. Oh, I know Rex has always been fond of me, but as a wife – well, he’d never even have considered me. I was too small, not pretty enough, and utterly unimportant. We didn’t use the phrase “status symbol” then, but the idea operated all right. And I didn’t measure up.’

  ‘You’re unjust to him,’ said Lilian. ‘The real trouble was that he thought of you as a child, even though you spent that night with him.’ She had learnt the truth about that soon after she married; trust Rex to be indiscreet.

  I could see she now had an idée fixée about his feeling for me so I just said, ‘Anyway, why blame yourself? You didn’t chase Rex. He chased you.’

  ‘But he never meant to marry me. I forced him to.’ She had left the window but still not come to anchor. Now she perched on the arm of a chair and looked at me intently. ‘Did you never guess? I wrote his wife an anonymous letter. That’s why she had him followed.’

  My main concern was not to show I was shocked. I found the very words ‘anonymous letter’ automatically shocking, like the word ‘blackmail’. But I managed to say, ‘Well, that wasn’t a very ghastly crime. She was bound to find out eventually and she wanted to divorce him. No, I never guessed. Does Rex know?’

  ‘I told him ages ago. It was really that which – well, made him clear out of this room for good. We were having one of our rows. He was telling me for the umpteenth time that I had no initiative and no courage – comparing me adversely with you, as a matter of fact; you were always tops with him for courageous initiative. Well, sending that letter was the bravest thing I ever did and I thought it rated a few good marks for courage – and for loving him enough to do it. So I upped and told him. My God, that was a world record error of judgement.’

  So that had been the cause of the rift between them. I said lamely, ‘People are so prejudiced about anonymous letters. Sometimes the circumstances justify them.’

  ‘I doubt if you really believe that,’ said Lilian. ‘And the ironic thing is that I got the idea through you, that night on the roof, when you told me his wife wanted a divorce. Do you remember?’

  I did. And there was still a shadowy pain in remembering. But the pain – if it was poignant enough to deserve the word – was due to a sense of vanished youth, not to remembrance of youthful misery. I said: ‘Lilian, it’s forty years ago. None of it matters any more.’

  ‘It does to me,’ she said sombrely. ‘Sometimes, for me, time telescopes. Then is as real as now. There’s lots about it in books I’ve read. You suggested some of them.’

  The whole room was littered with books; the one small bookcase had long ago overflowed. There were books on the great religions, the panacea religions, panacea books which left religion out (the ‘think hard and you’ll get it’ type), books on mysticism (they were the ones I had suggested; it was the only form of religion that had ever interested me), on metaphysics, astronomy … I had often wondered what they all added up to in Lilian’s mind.

  I said, ‘I doubt if it’s wise to let the past loose in the present. And obviously it can’t do any practical good. Even if one annihilates time metaphysically, one can’t change what’s happened.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Lilian sharply. ‘I’m not at all sure one can’t change what’s happened. If you get your thinking absolutely right it can work both backwards and forwards.’

  ‘Well, lovely, lovely. Let your old pal in on the trick.’

  She smiled affectionately, then became intense. ‘No, no. I’m dead serious …’

  As far as I could follow, she believed that if one could recollect the past completely – could, as it were, re-possess it – and then re-think it, regretting one’s mistakes so intensely that one somehow got absolution for them, then they would cease to exist and wouldn’t, in fact, have happened. She wasn’t sure how this would affect one’s present life; perhaps it would merely reconcile one to it; perhaps the real improvement would come only when one lived one’s life again – or reincarnated; she favoured both ideas. But if time did not exist, ‘then’ would be ‘now’ and one would be living a different life while living the present one …

  Much of it might be nonsense but she had certainly stretched her mind in some interesting directions. Still, I couldn’t see how it could help her. She obviously thought it could for she finished by saying, ‘That’s why I so wanted to meet Zelle. You see, I can’t get absolution about her, from myself, unless I get it from her first.’

  ‘Surely you can’t mean absolution for letting Adrian Crossway know the life she’d been living? No one could blame you for that.’

  ‘I blame myself,’ said Lilian sternly. ‘I told Rex partly to gain face, I’m sure I did. She might have kept it from Adrian for ever. Perhaps I sinned against him too. He’s remained a desiccated celibate.’

  ‘Hardly desiccated. He always strikes me as unctuous – not that I’ve met him for years.’

  ‘Well, I don’t worry too much about him,’ said Lilian, with the flicker of a grin, ‘seeing that he’s ended up as a bishop. But I’ve always worried about Zelle. And lately I’ve felt I shall never let myself off unless I can tell her I’m sorry. You see, it’s the letting oneself off that counts – if, as I believe, one somehow governs everything that happens to one. If I could feel less guilty, I’d stop punishing myself.’

  Should I weaken and tell her where Zelle could be found? No, I was still sure I mustn’t – yet. Instead, I asked her if she had forgiven herself about the anonymous letter. ‘You should, darling. Even if you did wrong – which I’m not saying – you’ve more than atoned, these last years, by being so good to Rex.’

  She shook her head. ‘A few years’ patience isn’t all that important. But the fact that my life’s such hell now does atone a bit. It would be easier if I didn’t care for him; then I could be matter of fact, like a nurse. As it is, he so often hurts me as well as infuriates me. But what I want to know now is, do you absolve me – about the anonymous letter? By writing it I wiped out your chance with Rex.’

  I was silent a few seconds, not in doubt about my feelings but wondering how I could describe them forcibly enough. At last I said: ‘I can only tell you from the bottom of my heart that I’m grateful. The thought of being married to Rex fills me with horror. Honestly, I think I’d rather die.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re thinking of him as he is now. Can’t you see he wouldn’t be like that if he’d married you?’

  I felt momentarily impatient. ‘But I’ve told you, he wouldn’t have married me. And anyway, you over-estimate what I felt for him; it didn’t survive my affair with Brice. And you’re just being egoistical, blaming yourself for everything. Why not blame Zelle for taking you to the party where you met Rex, or me for telling you Mrs Crossway wanted a divorce? Things just happen. Nobody’s to blame.’ But even as I spoke I blamed myself for telling her about Mrs Crossway. Never before had I realised how that long ago indiscretion had affected both Rex’s and Lilian’s lives, let alone my own.

  ‘There are different kinds of happenings,’ said Lilian, her eyes fanatical. ‘Some are fated, some we force to happen. I’m a forcer – or I was, during that little period of our lives. How strange it was, the way the four of us were linked! I once thought it might be due to astrology, but none of us were born in the same year, let alone the same month.’

  ‘Oh, God, Lilian – not astrology!’

  She giggled endearingly. ‘I know – I’m a bloody fool. Perhaps all my ideas are nonsense. But sometimes, when I’ve been alone here for hours, I’ve seemed to glimpse a way to make sense of everything, if only one could will it with all one’s mind.’

  I said: ‘The trouble with you is that y
ou’re a woman of enormous energy that’s never found its right outlet. It’s my belief you’re a hussy manquée.’

  ‘A what?’ She looked interested.

  ‘You remember hussies – in novels and films. Girls who were bad but likeable; they always wiped the floor with the innocent heroines. You started off in fine style by bagging Rex, and you should have gone on like that, taking lovers and probably leaving him for a millionaire. Instead of which you had to adore him and develop a conscience. Well, no doubt it’ll get you into heaven.’

  ‘I don’t want heaven. I just want this life the way it ought to have been.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ I felt we needed a new topic. ‘Got any new clothes to show me?’

  She said she hadn’t bought any for ages. ‘I make myself take care of my hair and skin but bothering about clothes doesn’t go with the books I’ve been reading. Not that I’ve got anywhere, really.’

  I guessed she was in need of a new interest. Art, music, literature, languages, flower arrangements, even tap dancing … I had lost count of the subjects she had studied, not one of which had remained important to her.

  ‘Don’t give up yet,’ I said, having no new idea to offer.

  She went to draw the curtains and put the lights on, saying she found twilight depressing. To me, the sea-green walls in the dim, concealed lighting were more depressing than the twilight. Passing her dressing-table she picked up something from the midst of scent bottles and cosmetics. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘Looks like a piece of rubble.’

  ‘So it is, but very special rubble. I got it when they were demolishing the Club. I happened to pass one evening, just after they began – on the gentlemen’s cloakroom, actually; never did I expect to see inside that. Most of the building was still intact, with the front door locked. I looked through the letter box. Then I stood back and tried to decide where our “village” was.’

  ‘On the second floor.’

  ‘I thought so. I spotted your window. The glass was broken. It was the queerest feeling, standing there in the dusk. Though I daresay it would have meant even more to you, as you were there so much longer than I was.’ I had usually stayed there, when in London, until well on in the ’thirties, when the Club gave up those premises.

  I had hundreds of Club memories and could recall the names, faces and even the voices of well over fifty Club members. But no memories were as vivid as those of my first summer and, among Club members, only Lilian and Molly had become my lasting friends. There was indeed something inexplicable about the linking of our lives.

  Lilian, gazing at her piece of rubble, added: ‘Do you believe objects can have a sort of power in them? I once slept with this under my pillow, hoping it would make me dream of the old days.’

  ‘Must have been uncomfortable. And I do think you were asking a lot of a bit of rubble from the gents’.’

  ‘Well, it was the only bit I could get.’ She put it back on her dressing-table, where it looked absurdly out of place, and began asking me about myself. As always, she showed more under standing of my way of life than most people did. Before long, the maid came up and said Miss Lester had arrived.

  Lilian looked at her watch, then at me. ‘You have a chat with Eve while I urge Rex back into circulation.’

  Eve Lester still lived in her Covent Garden maisonette. She had retired when Rex did, but he remained her only real interest in life, though she had acquired some others in the hope of their interesting him and would bring him news of her doings much as one offers toys to an invalid child – or, as she once remarked after an offering had been spurned, like a faithful dog dropping a dead rat at his master’s feet. She came to see him almost every day and was often urged by Lilian to live with them. But it was Eve’s theory that she would lose her value for Rex if she was always on hand. In my opinion, Eve was the only woman he had consistently cared for.

  I found her standing by the drawing-room fire. Only two years younger than Rex, she was now grey-haired and very thin but she still retained both her elusive, faded beauty and her air of casual elegance. The casualness, as always, was due to the way she wore her clothes, the elegance to her extreme good taste – though she ignored present fashions. She reminded me of the grande dame actresses I had seen in my childhood; perhaps, as the heyday of her youth had been before the First World War, she had then decided how an elegant old lady should look. Tonight she was in a long, clinging grey chiffon dress which made me feel I looked like an elderly beatnik. I told her so.

  She said she was probably overdressed – ‘But Rex likes this kind of thing. You look sweet, really; very funny, of course, but you always did and we always loved it. Though nowadays it’s you who are fashionable – just like a teenager.’

  ‘Oh, dear! I do try to resist teenager clothes, but they so often fit me well and I must admit I adore them. My secret vice is that I sometimes wear black woollen tights. Our vicar found me in them and said I looked like an imp.’

  She laughed and then began talking about Rex. How had he seemed to me? Had I been able to interest him in any topic? Oughtn’t I to see him more often as I was one of the few people he liked to see? I tried to answer tactfully and refrained from pointing out that my life did not revolve round him, as hers and Lilian’s did. But she must have known what was in my mind for she finally said, ‘You never really cared for him, did you? Well, I suppose that was a good thing – for you.’

  Rex and Lilian came in, saving me from having to answer.

  Dinner went off fairly well. At first Rex treated me as the guest of honour. But only when he could chaff me or talk about his earliest memories of me did he seem to enjoy himself; when I mentioned any present-day matter – concerning me or the world in general – he showed little interest. At last he turned to Eve and they bickered cheerfully for the rest of the meal. There was no irritation behind his bickering when Eve was his partner. Only with Lilian did he ever bicker with real ill temper – and mercifully, that didn’t happen at dinner.

  I ate the excellent food and thought of the dozens, even hundreds, of meals I had eaten in that room – and doubted if I had ever been in it without remembering my first sight of it, on Black Saturday, when I had talked to Mrs Crossway (dead long ago, and I wondered if she had much enjoyed her post-Rex life; she had never married again). The eighteenth-century furniture was just as it had been then; merely forty years more valuable.

  Soon after dinner I said I must go. Rex did not try to stop me but he smiled very sweetly and said, ‘Dear child, always running away from us, aren’t you?’ I hoped he would soon forget my present self in favour of his ‘little companion of the small hours’. Lilian had telephoned for a taxi. She saw me into it and begged me to come again soon – ‘And write or ring up – anything.’ I promised to be in touch with her very shortly. As the taxi drove off I looked out of the back window and watched Madam Lily de Luxe return to her house, where now only her untidy bedroom seemed to her like home. I felt a pang at leaving her – but only great relief at leaving Rex.

  2

  When I got to the Crossway the empty foyer had that air of being both deserted and expectant which I always feel in theatre foyers when a performance is taking place. The man in the box-office (I knew none of the theatre staff now) did not raise his head as I went towards the stairs. I paused at the back of the dress circle, listening to a roar of laughter from the house. Then I went on up to the offices. The one Eve and I had used was in darkness; Brice seldom kept his secretaries in the evening. He himself used the Throne Room.

  He rose to welcome me, from behind the large desk which had replaced the long table, then settled me in the chair opposite him. He sat with his back to the wall of portraits where, ousting the mediocre painting, Rex as Charles Surface had joined his father and grandfather. No one, now, looking from Brice to Sir Roy, could have doubted that they were father and son.

  Once, in his thin youth, I had seen Brice as a Manchester Terrier. If he still resembled any dog it was
a far fiercer, weightier one, a Dobermann Pinscher. How right Rex had been in describing him as formidable, nowadays! But had he not always been formidable? Certainly his career had been one long series of battles – which he had almost always won; and his greatest victory had been in getting a lease of the Crossway when Rex retired.

  He had fought then not with Rex, whose lease had expired, but with ‘the bricks and mortar boys’, in this case the ground landlords, who saw no reason why a rickety old theatre should not be replaced by a gorgeous cinema or an office block, especially as the rickety old theatre had not paid during the last years of Rex’s tenancy. But Brice, having – against all odds – got hold of it, had made it pay. He had kept it alive by a series of raucous farces which had often seemed to me a fate worse than death – often, but not always; the play now running was a black farce about teenagers which fully deserved its great success.

  At first we talked in the curiously casual way one so often does with one’s oldest friends on meeting them after some consider able time. How were we? Was the show still doing well? How had I found Rex? (Long ago, persuaded by me, Rex had spoken to Brice of their relationship, happily accepting it.) And while we chatted, I noted that Brice, though he still looked a brown-skinned, black-haired man, was a little pale and beginning to go grey at last; and that if not yet heavy, he was no longer slim. Also a silent film of memories passed before my mind’s eye, of scenes we had played together here in the Crossway offices, in various dingy professional lodgings, and one rather grand flat when he had launched his first successful West End play. Rows and reconciliations, partings and comings together again – over what must have been nearly twenty years – had been followed by twenty years of friendship. Perhaps its closeness had sometimes been due to the distance between us; still, I was fonder of him than of anyone in the world. And it was pleasant to feel sure I always would be fond of him; and that I knew him through and through and nothing he could do, whether good or bad, would ever astonish me.