The Town in Bloom

by Dodie Smith

  Lilian answered at once. It was pleasant to hear her excitement when I said I had found Zelle.

  ‘But you sly, sly Mouse! Why did you keep it to yourself all day?’

  ‘Because she might have been unwilling to meet us. If I’d told you where she was you’d have hounded her down.’

  ‘I would indeed. Ask her to lunch tomorrow.’

  I called Zelle, who accepted the invitation. Lilian asked to speak to her, then changed her mind. ‘No, I’ll wait till tomorrow. Tell her to come at one. Oh, you kind clever Mouse! I was so miserable, sitting here in this dreary bedroom.’

  I had a sudden inspiration. ‘Lilian, why don’t you turn it into a kind of one-room flat? Line the walls with bookcases. Have a divan with a decent bedside light – instead of that eye of God or whatever it is that looks down on you now. If that room’s the place you feel at home in, do make it a home.’

  There was a long silence. Then, in the voice of a woman whose eyes are visionary, she said, ‘I might have a tiny refrigerator in the bathroom. And an electric kettle – and a toaster. Oh, what a good idea….’

  While she rattled on, I found myself looking at a framed photograph which hung on the wall beside Zelle’s bed. It had presumably been cut from a magazine; printed under the photograph were the words: ‘Summer in East Anglia’. I instantly recognised the church and the vicarage. By mentally turning the corner of the road that ran past them I could see – say, on the edge of the oak frame – the haystack behind which I had sat cogitating with my eighteen-year-old soul. A couple of inches further, along the nondescript wallpaper, would be the lodge gates of the Crossways’ house and beyond them, Rex’s barn workroom. I had a sudden memory of his face, that long ago night, youthful in the blankness of sleep; and today, youthful in the blankness of age….

  Then Lilian was demanding my views on fitted cupboards. Should they be in the bathroom, with glass doors? I suggested she should discuss this with Zelle, while my gaze rested on Zelle’s small stained wood wardrobe, a truly villainous bit of furniture – though I was to find, when Zelle showed me what she would wear for lunch with Lilian, that it contained a genuine Chanel model.

  ‘My dog lady gave it to me. It’s five years old but Chanel never dates, does she? It’s nice that she’s as fashionable now as when we were girls.’

  I also found it nice that Zelle owned a more expensive dress than had ever come my way – except for that never to be forgotten robe de style in which ‘little oddity’ had so much annoyed Rex’s leading lady.

  Already it would be two a.m. before I got home. I said I must go. ‘I’ve a long drive ahead of me.’

  ‘What, all by yourself? And I can’t imagine you driving. You’re too little.’

  ‘Well, it’s a little car.’

  We promised to keep in touch, I quite looked forward to this. She still seemed to me completely changed – a stranger, in fact; but by now she was a stranger I liked. Just before I left I asked if she thought I had changed much. She said, ‘No, you’re fantastically the same.’

  ‘Fantastically’, I thought, was probably the right word.

  I walked until I could get a taxi; the day had been ruinous in taxi fares. (But later I found a five pound note had been put in my bag. I might have known Lilian would more than foot my expenses.)

  Getting into my car in St John’s Wood I had a sense of home-coming, like a snail getting back into its shell. There wasn’t much traffic as late as this and even before I was out of the suburbs I was able to think with most of my mind.

  The lunch party today and the first lunch party … Zelle as she had been, Zelle as the crone in the park, Zelle in her drab basement flat … Molly wearing the hat of russet leaves so like her once russet hair … Lilian, that hussy manquée, in her avid girlhood, Lilian now, amidst the clutter of her bedroom, saying that if time did not exist, ‘now’ could be ‘then’, Lilian holding the bit of rubble from the gents’ as if it was a holy relic (so unlike the relic Zelle had now acquired) … and Eve, still an elegant Edwardian … and my Manchester Terrier become a Dobermann Pinscher …

  And my poor Rex – Why did I hate thinking about him, both as he was and as he had been? No doubt I felt guilty at having so little patience with him, but I was now conscious of a deeper sense of guilt towards myself. Why? And why had I tonight said to Brice that it might have been by the grace of God if—

  Suddenly I was back on that windy day when I had known I ought not to leave the Crossway, known I was crossing my fate. I had not thought about it for years – indeed, the intensity of the moment had barely outlasted the moment. I had swiftly come to see that I could not have let myself join Eve in – what was Brice’s phrase? – ‘The nucleus of a small harem, patiently waiting for a night’. And even if Lilian was right in thinking Rex would have married me, I had stopped longing for that from the moment I had Brice as a lover. Me, anyone’s patient little wife, no, thank you! And Lilian had only said Rex would have married me if he hadn’t married her, which he had. And anyway, it was all nonsense.

  And yet … I was now well into the country, the roads deserted under the moon, never a light in the scattered cottages and farms. The steady movement of the car had a hypnotic rhythm, not a rhythm that made me sleepy but one which at last drove conscious thought from my mind, creating a vacuum which was suddenly flooded with illumination. I knew why it might have been by the grace of God if I had stayed at the Crossway.

  Brice had told me I was a schoolgirl with a crush on a matinée idol. He had been wrong. The schoolgirl in me had found Rex disillusioning. What I had come to feel for him was the first fully mature emotion of my lifetime; the first and possibly the last. Certainly I had never felt so intensely about Brice or any other man. It had been genuine love, the kind of love that needs to be lived out fully, however great the cost in suffering. I had side-stepped the suffering, skipped an infinitely important phase of development.

  Was there in me a frozen immaturity? Bits and pieces were all I could look back on, bits of love, bits of talent for acting, writing, even music. (I had been taught music as a child, and very well taught, but for years I had only played by ear – how like me.) And now the boot of the car housed a collection of oil paints! A nonsense was all my life would ever add up to, the nonsense life of a nonsense woman. Eve’s life of devotion amounted to something far more worth while than my ragbag of experience.

  She had once said I suffered from an excess of individualism and I had always thought of this as a compliment. But if the individualism remained that of a precocious child, what then?

  Did I really believe all this or was I merely trying on humility to see how it felt? Basically, I was still arrogant – were not all individualists, by definition, arrogant? Why be individual? Why not be matey and merge? Incidentally, I suddenly saw why I had never got anywhere with my mysticism, that merger to end mergers. During my two years in the country I had set aside regular periods for contemplation – and always ended by contemplating the interesting job I would tackle the minute I allowed myself to stop sitting still. Even now, my soul searchings were yielding place to plans for tomorrow. At least there was one compensation for immaturity: I could always count on enormous resilience. And, come to think of it, could I not be proud of achieving so much, rather than ashamed of achieving so little? With my background, I might so easily have settled for a life of amateur theatricals, tennis, tea parties and a very dull marriage – if I ever managed to get even a dull husband; the status symbol principle had operated in the provinces quite as much as in London and conventional men seldom chose odd little wives.

  Anyway, retrospection would get me nowhere – I was as bad as Lilian, searching for explanations of the inexplicable. Turn away from the past, think of those oil paints! There had been elderly people who had developed a real talent for painting. And was not the book I was finishing better than anything I had written before? Oh, if only I were younger in years! I hoped I believed in reincarnation. I hoped I had hundreds of lives ahea
d of me. Never would I opt for nirvana.

  But even in this life there was still time. ‘The last act crowns the play.’ I had not quoted that to myself for many years. At eighteen I had equated the last act with marriage to Rex. What, at fifty-eight, did I equate it with? The sum total of life, no doubt, which must surely be the poet’s meaning. The catch about that was that, to me, no sum total would make death acceptable. Death is too much to ask of the living.

  I was only two miles from home now, driving through the sleeping village. I thought kindly of my friends there. But none of them spoke my language as the London friends of my youth did (except the young nuclear disarmer – and I did not quite speak his). Perhaps I would just visit Brice. It would be amusing to help Lilian with her room. And I ought to see more of Rex; it was outrageous that I should feel impatient with him. And I must keep in touch with Zelle – and was I not losing touch with Molly? Besides, there was so much in London to see, so much to study. I wanted to know more about the young … strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life. Fundamentally, so many of them were more serious than I and my friends had been. Youth was now conscious of the deplorable state of the world. In the ’twenties, only our private worlds had existed for us.

  Now my headlights were shining along my white fence. That was to be my first oil painting, with the lane on top of the fence, and the green field on top of the lane … and the cycling child and the cows – I could easily make those up. No, I wouldn’t go to London just yet. Granny Moses must have her head.

  Exciting to be here alone, in the small hours, under a brilliant moon … No other house in sight – that was what had first attracted me to the cottage. I was always a little proud because I never felt either lonely or scared. But I often felt astonished – astonished that I should be allowed to live here alone, to drive my own car, and sit up all night if I wanted to. Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age – and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence – still did not quite feel grown up?

  Also available

  It Ends with Revelations

  The New Moon with the Old

  Copyright

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

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  This edition published by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2012

  Copyright © Dodie Smith 1965

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978–1–78033–525–4