When he walked out of the teashop, his dream ended, he was shivering in spite of the sunshine. He stood on the edge of the pavement, wondering what held him there. Unformulated thought, as painful as a thorn in his mind, groped for the memory of having dared.
He shut his eyes tightly and stepped off the kerb. Eyes closed, he walked out across the road. The din in his ears became deafening. Shadows flitted terrifyingly against his eyelids. He heard snatches of shouting, angry and startled. He resisted the impulse to open his eyes. He was in a vast, lucent darkness, daring. He wanted to grope in front of him but he kept his hands at his sides. Engines roared close by like wild beasts. Exhaust fumes fanned his face in hot, animal breaths. He was stumbling through a jungle in the dark, the quarry of everything that prowled. He had never realised before that it took twenty years to cross a road. Out of his fear the old feeling began to blossom, icy and glorious, the joy of daring. He stumbled on the far kerb and opened his eyes. He was on the pavement once more, safe; sweating and breathing hard.
Someone stepped forward and spoke to him. The face was familiar. He tried to focus. His reason returned, and he realised what he had done. Fear clutched him, in retrospect. His legs were weak and he trembled more violently than before. He recognized the face. He was dumbfounded at its appearance, and doubly ashamed.
Rose said, “I’ve been watching you for the last few minutes. You’d better come home with me.”
He could not speak.
She said, “I was in the bus queue. I saw you come out of Lyons. Can you walk? It’s not far.”
He was still shuddering, white-faced and speechless.
She asked, “Are you ill, Jack?”
He pressed his clenched fist against his stomach as if covering a bullet-hole. His eyes wandered, and he moved his lips, trying to speak. “Oh Gawd,” he moaned at last, “them Epsom salts!”
Part Four
Chapter One
Until he was comfortably established in an armchair in her flat, Rose did not trouble Jack with questions. Crushed within himself by shame and confusion, he had scarcely dared to look at her. Now he sat, legs crossed, leaning over the side of the chair with a glass of brandy in his hand, watching her sheepishly as she paced up and down the room.
“Another drink?” Her own glass was already empty.
He shook his head and managed to say, “No, thank you.”
“Feeling better?” She did not trouble to look at him as she moved about, restless and severe, with her arms clasped across her chest, frowning down at her shoes as if unsure of what she wanted from this encounter.
“I’m all right.”
She swung suddenly to face him. “Jack, what on earth were you up to, in the street, there?”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at the rug.
“Dunno. Come over a bit funny I suppose.”
She studied him with concern. “Has it happened before?”
He shook his head. The action was absent-minded, for he was comparing her with her mother. She had the same fullness of cheek as Kate, and the same pastel colouring; but she was taller; her hair was darker, with a blue-black gleam, and less luxuriant; her eyes were as wide and clear as Kate’s, but lit with points of intentness which robbed them of Kate’s expression of wondering frankness; her face, not composed and placid like her mother’s, was marked with a keenness that added to its vitality but detracted from its beauty.
“What was it? You had your eyes shut, didn’t you? Did you know what you were doing? Or was it some sort of a faint?” He did not answer. She said, “Here, let me fill your glass again.”
They drank. When she walked, it was with Joyce that he compared her. Joyce walked with the short, rapid, toetapping step of a Cockney girl. Rose, even indoors, walked erectly and with her head back, with a long stride from, the hip, firm yet light. Her movements were lithe and impatient. She wandered again to the other end of the room, as if she were not really interested in him. She pottered over some books, and when she spoke again it was to change the subject. She asked about the Wakerells, his job, the preparations for his marriage. His reticence had created a constraint between them. Her voice was over-bright, his was dull and careful.
He was not stirred by her nearness. It had been the same in his youth. Most of his outbursts of hope and anguish had been in her absence. As soon as she had appeared, his emotions had taken flight to hide like animals in their caves. He tried to force his numbed mind to provide him with something to say. “Suppose you’re doin’ all right, eh?”
“Me? I’m—” she paused, as if making a calculation, and with an ardent little intake of breath went on, “oh, I’m happy.” After the drinks her manner had softened. Her eyes were brighter, and a faint flush had crept into the misty pallor of her cheeks. She sank on to her knees on a settee near him, and leaned over the armrest towards him, her hands clasped. “Aren’t you?”
Some strange emotion wrenched at him, and in a moment of miraculous relief he realised that his inarticulacy had vanished. He blurted the word, “I —”. All his troubles were crowding into his mouth, waiting to pour out. But she was not interested in hearing an answer to her question. She spoke again, and his confidence evaporated in a long, loud breath.
“I used to be a mad little idiot, didn’t I?” She was alive now with the joy of talking about herself. Her eyes shone with remembrance; he could not see in them any hint that he was visible to her; he felt baulked and, for the first time in this encounter, angry. “I was always, I was always looking for something, and I never had the faintest idea what it was. My mother used to tell me that it was a man. She had all that — she also had all that —” Rose pressed her hand against her breast — “all that life hurting inside her, and she never knew of anything except a man that a woman could give it to.”
Jack, still smarting at her withdrawal of offered comfort, and at the contempt for him which, as in the old days, he had felt in her self-absorption, was hardly listening. He was too busy trying to grasp his own thoughts and prepare them for speech before they again deserted him. Those fragments of her talk which penetrated him only mystified him.
“And now that I know what I was looking for,” she said, “I feel sad sometimes because she’s gone, and I can’t tell her all about it.”
Jack looked up at her, his face heavy with bitterness. “What? About this?”
“This?” She acknowledged his presence with a startled blink. When she looked at him steadfastly again the dreamy ardour in her eyes had been replaced by a mournful and understanding scrutiny. “Oh!” She uttered a laugh that was nothing more than a broken exhalation.
“Nice little love nest, eh?”
“I hadn’t exactly thought of it that way.” She spoke with a humiliating, low-toned tenderness as if showing patience to a child. “If I had, I might have furnished it a bit differently.”
The flat, in fact, was not what he had expected. It consisted of one living room, with a bathroom and a kitchenette. There was a divan against one wall of the living room, warm but plain curtains on the windows, a couple of woolly rugs on the polished floor, a small settee, on which Rose sprawled, at an angle near the fireplace, and a comfortable but ill-matched assortment of chairs and small tables. A large and well-filled bookcase stood against the opposite wall. On the mantelpiece were a doll, a plain alarm clock with a lot of papers stuffed behind it, two little wooden peasant figures painted in bright colours, and a photograph of Mick Monaghan. Wherever he looked in the room there were littered magazines and unemptied ashtrays.
“You’re a cheeky customer you are, and no mistake.”
“Well.” Her laughter subsided in a sigh. “So your mind’s made up? You’ve heard all about me? The good neighbours of Lamb Street have told you the worst. Weren’t you surprised?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He said miserably, “I never could understand you, Rosie.”
“Didn’t you want to find out more?”
“N
o.”
“Why not?”
His look, for a moment, was imploring. He mumbled. “None o’ my bloody business.”
“Didn’t you want to come and see me? Didn’t you ever think of —” her compressed little smile was not for him — “pleading with me to mend my ways?”
His voice was a cry of protest, but the words that he uttered were, “Do what you like for all I bloody care.”
“And now that we’re face to face, haven’t you anything to say? Isn’t there anything more you want to know? Here I am, Rosie Hogarth, the girl you grew up with. And you were so fond of me, you thought so much of me, you had so much confidence in me, that it’s quite clear to you, without a shadow of doubt, that I’m a prostitute.”
He cried, “Well, ain’t you?”
She opened her mouth to reply, then smiled again. “You tell me first.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I have a certain curiosity about the way your mind works. And a little pride, too.”
“Pride?”
“Yes. I like the people I like to think well of me. About the others, to be frank, I don’t give a damn.”
“Well?”
“I want to find out whether you’re one of the people I like.”
Jack felt bewildered. He looked desperately about him and said tormentedly, “You can’t half talk.”
The telephone bell rang. Rose picked up the receiver. “Oh, hallo. Peter?... Of course I recognized the voice. I’m famous for it... Mmm?... Well, it’s useful... For me, yes... All right, dear, the usual place. One o’clock, for lunch... No, come back here, otherwise someone is sure to see us... Mmm?... They always do. Take it from me. I’ve had plenty of experience. Where are you speaking from?... Oh, Peter, I told you not to ’phone from there... All right, I believe you, never again, there’s no need to be so fervent. Oh, and Peter —” she looked across the room at Jack, her eyes alight with mischief — “I’m sure you can manage more than a fiver this week... Mmm?... Well, I always do put things brutally, don’t I? I hope you won’t feel too sulky if I tell you that others are managing more... Yes, I know these are hard times, darling. That’s why I’m asking for more... Well, don’t let it worry you. Just see what you can do... Bye-bye. Bless you.”
She smiled at Jack, who was sitting with his head bowed. “That sounded bad, didn’t it?”
He rose to his feet, and made inconclusive little movements, looking everywhere but at her, with a slacklipped, despairing expression.
She said, “You’re hovering. That’s the want-to-getaway-look, isn’t it?”
“I better be going.” His voice was gruff.
“So you don’t want an answer to your question.”
“Answer?” A spasm of grief distorted his face, and his voice cracked absurdly as he pointed to the telephone and said, “What about that?”
“I’m not going to explain that,” she said evenly. “Your question called for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. You can have one or the other, no more. You’re the one who’s on trial, Jack, not me.”
“Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re barmy.” He hesitated, and exclaimed, “Words! You’re like the rest of ’em. Talk, talk. Think they can stuff a chap up with anything.”
They stood on opposite sides of the room, in silence.
Rose said, “Oh, well.”
“Oh, well.”
“So that’s that.”
“Looks like it.”
There was another silence. “You’re sure you’re feeling all right?”
“Oh, fine. Lucky I bumped into you.”
“Yes. If you’re not well, or something, you ought to see a doctor.”
“Nah. Nothing wrong with me. “Well, I —” he gaped at the door.
“Another drink for the road?”
“No thanks.”
She opened the door. “It’s been nice, Jack.”
He mumbled, “Ah,” and edged past her, “S’long.”
“Bye-bye.”
She began to close the door, saying after him, “Come again sometime.”
He called back, from the head of the staircase, “OK.” To himself he said, with great bitterness, as he went downstairs, “Some hopes!”
As if she shared his disillusionment she shut the door, and the sound came to him loudly enough to seem final.
Chapter Two
“Well,” Jack said as he walked away from Rose’s flat, “that’s that!” As was his habit, he actually spoke the words softly to himself. “Glad I’ve got that one out of my system.” For a few days it seemed as if his words were true.
He went about in a strange mood of emptiness. Life had become tasteless, without pleasure and without that other poignant flavouring, unhappiness. All emotion had become as remote from him as the words and actions of the people around him, who all seemed to be separated from him by a window of invisible glass.
It was this lethargic indifference which prevented him from actively noticing a remarkable change which had taken place in Joyce’s behaviour. After she had repulsed him on the night of their country excursion, he had expected that her attitude to him would become tinged with suspicion, disapproval and fear. On the contrary, she had all at once begun to manifest a clinging, quivering ardour that baffled him. She prolonged their kisses, pressed her body against his at every opportunity, cast long, glistening looks of entreaty at him, and when walking with him she clutched his arm desperately to her side with both hands instead of strolling comfortably arm-in-arm. She put extra blankets on his bed when he did not need them, and plagued him with her solicitousness at meals, offering him extra helpings and titbits from her plate with such eager persistence that he could not help muttering protests. Usually these had no effect on her. Like a mother, she would sweep them aside with loving, scornful laughter and continue undeterred. Once or twice, however, when she had stung him into making some savage comment, he was bewildered by the gleam of tears in her eyes, by her hot, pleading handclasps, or by the muffled incoherence of her speech.
Even if he had noticed the transformation in her, he would not have been able to interpret it. For one thing, she knew nothing of his meeting with Rose, so that this sudden emotional siege could not have been inspired by fear of a rival. For another, he now believed her to be unshakeably respectably, in other words, incurably frigid; a belief which ought, according to his standards, have delighted him but which instead increased his misgivings. If he had been asked for an explanation of her passionate attentions, he would have mumbled that she was trying to fob him off with ‘baby stuff,’ to keep him contented until their wedding day by feeding him with tit-bits of affection.
Nevertheless she persisted with her wooing, and succeeded — it was inevitable that his starved senses should be aroused by her kittenish provocations — in melting his numbed emotions into life; not to love, however, but to distaste. He regained his awareness of the surrounding world like a man aroused from sleep; he remained dazed and vulnerable. Her attentions, when he noticed them, only irritated him. A mysterious impatience, like a spring being wound up inside him, made him feel more tense every day. He found some relief in furious outbursts of energy at work, but longed ceaselessly for a form of easement from which he only restrained himself with the greatest of difficulty — a mighty explosion of unmotivated bad temper.
These new impulses threatened disaster to his plans, and he tried to suppress them. He once again begged Joyce to hasten their wedding, but she pointed out, with maddening coyness, that they could not be married in less than two months. There was the dressmaker, there were the decorators — he cut short her explanations and fled, feeling more than ever frustrated.
To make matters worse, she had become so used to his presence in the house that she no longer took care always to look her best in front of him. With a pitiful confidence she shuffled about in slippers and dressing-gown, her hair disarrayed and her skin blotchy, as if he were already her husband. It was this mistake of hers which finally nullified any effe
ct her wooing might have had.
Rosie Hogarth Page 20
