“Oh! —” Flushed and tense, she seemed to be blazing inwardly. “What did he send you for?”
“To clear things up. He thought it best not to come himself. Perhaps he was right.”
“Oh, he was right!” Rose refilled her glass.
“You’re drinking a lot, dear.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not on the bottle. It steadies me. It muddles other people’s behaviour, it helps me control mine.”
“He won’t give you any more trouble, dear. All he wants is to settle down in peace with his Joycie. He says, let bygones be bygones.”
“Thanks very much!” Rose’s movements, in girlhood, had been like those of a bird in a cage, at once violent, delicate and unpredictable. At twenty-seven, she usually carried herself like a woman who was aware of her bodily resources and knew how to use them; sometimes languid and negligent, with the lazy grace of an animal; sometimes, moving about a room or walking in the street, stepping with long quick strides, straight to an objective. Occasionally Nancy had seen her display strange, contradictory touches of nervousness, fidgeting with the edge of a curtain, toying with the pages of a book. Now she was walking up and down, arms folded, looking down at her feet without ever facing Nancy’s gaze, and adjusting her step to the pattern of the carpet. “Here’s your tea,” she said, as if glad of the diversion.
“Well, he means it, dear, and I think he’s quite right. Whatever’s happened, it would be a sin for you and him to be enemies.”
“He’s not my enemy,” Rose said vehemently, “I’m particular who I have for my enemies. And it’s a little too late to kiss and make up.”
“Why, dear? Surely it can’t mean much to you to let me tell him everything’s all right.”
“Listen, Nancy. He humiliated me. It’s all very well for him to toddle off back to his girl, and live happily ever after, and make grand, generous, careless gestures of peace towards me. You should have seen him when he was here. Did he tell you? He offered me everything. Everything!” She was play-acting derisively. “All his money. Everything he had. If I’d only be good to him. Well, he’s had what he wanted, and now — well, I’ve taken him at his word, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, he’ll find out.”
“Rose, you’re not going to do something spiteful to that boy.”
“I’m not going to do anything; and I’m never spiteful. I’ve just — well, he’ll know soon enough. And when he does, tell him, then’s the time to declare his peaceful intentions.” She laughed. “If he wants to send me any goodwill messages then, I shall receive them with pleasure and return them with interest. And now, if you don’t object, I’ll have another drink. Oh, men,” she exclaimed, “I wish we could do without them. I swore I’d never let one of them get the better of me again! And now, of all of them, it has to be this worm, this stupid ignorant lout, that does it, and without knowing it! Oh, it maddens me! It makes me sick with myself!”
She finished her brandy, stared down into the glass with compressed lips, and laughed. “Do you know what a man once told me? He said, when I’d had a couple of drinks, I was flashing and glacial and maddeningly attractive. Luckily he never saw me when I’d had half-a-dozen. I always give them the slip before then.” Her voice was higher in pitch and more liquid than usual, and she spoke with an unnatural clarity. Her eyes smiled secretively as she looked everywhere about the room except at Nancy. The flush over her cheekbones had deepened and the liquor seemed to have generated within her a ferment of excitement. “I don’t like to babble. Not to men. I’d rather let them do it. I did enough of it when I was a girl, letting everyone see what a fool I was. Still, I can talk to you, Nancy, let off steam. Heart to heart, as they say in the women’s weeklies. What angers me most of all is that that silly stupid lout, and others, it seems, should imagine that I had a weakness for men. Men, Nancy! I didn’t look at a boy when I was a kid. I used to dash about with my brothers, and with Jack. But it never occurred to me to look at any others, and I never missed them. I think that even then I valued myself too much to throw myself away on someone else. Do you know, when I joined the Army — how old was I? Oh, nearly twenty — I was startled, I swear, Nancy, I was startled out of my wits when the men started running after me. I felt as if I’d been jerked out of a daydream. And what a collection they were! Clumsy great pudding-faced louts staring after me, sooty scrawny little boilermen making passes at me in the cookhouse, skinny long Romeos with greasy hair lolloping after me in the streets. Wherever I went I was leered at, whispered at, pawed at — oh, I loathed them, but for the first time in my life I couldn’t help becoming conscious of them. It dawned on me for the first time that there really were two sexes in the world, and even if the men I saw didn’t excite me, I must admit the idea did. And then I began to feel silly just going about with girls, although I was really quite happy with them. Even among my girl friends I began to feel at a disadvantage. I suppose I’d already learned, even if only through holding men off, that I could do what I liked with them, and it annoyed me when other girls, the silliest little sluts, were condescending towards me because they had men and I hadn’t. And all of a sudden I wanted to be married. I was crazy with curiosity. I wanted a man as a sort of badge that I was grown up. And, poor me, who should come along and catch me in that state but Keith? Oh, what a ninny he was! And I married him! God!” She leaned over and refilled Nancy’s teacup. “Well, after all, he was the first of his kind I’d ever met. Slim, good-looking in that weak intellectual way, smooth fair hair, and that pleasant, relaxed way of talking I’d never heard before. And he was educated. That excited me. He was nice to me, and I felt flattered. He didn’t hound me or humiliate me with his attentions, and he made me feel very important. I used to purr with pride when he sat on a cushion at my feet. And then there was all that poetry he was always on about. That was new to me, and I got terribly excited about it. And he was full of politics, like Chris only much more extreme, and that, oh, that seemed to be what I’d been waiting for. It made the world ten times as big, and twenty times as exciting. Revolution! My chance to be Joan of Arc! — You know! I suppose I thought that it was from him that all the excitement came, instead of from these things he happened to bring my way. Anyway, God forgive me, I married him.”
She stopped to light a cigarette and to wait for comment. Nancy, listening gravely, hands in lap, was not disposed to speak. Rose left her chair and adopted a proud pose by the mantelpiece. She glanced in the mirror and gave her own image a glowing, lingering smile of recognition. When she spoke again her eyes were rapt and admiring, those of a listener. “I was just about to ask you, Nance, what on earth you saw in marriage. Then I realised, I have no right to talk about marriage, really. Oh, we had two years of it, but we were in different units, we lived our own lives, and we only saw each other weekends and for a week every three months. And yet, if we’d lived together, that wouldn’t have saved our marriage. It would have broken it all the sooner. I’m sure of that. I liked it at first. I liked it, and I was disappointed, both at once. I enjoyed love, and having someone’s company like that, and that madcap way for the first few weeks you make fools of yourselves all over the place, day and night, and you only laugh all the more if people see you. I liked walking into public places with him, and feeling, ‘I’m the real thing now, a married woman.’ I liked going back to camp, and being pestered with questions by the girls, and just smiling to myself and refusing to answer them. And yet it was a let-down. When you’ve imagined that love was going to be a sort of white-hot blaze, like the sun or something, the real thing is liable to be unimpressive. And” — she laughed, and took another quick peep at the mirror — “for all my disdain beforehand, whenever I had a taste of it, I wanted to go on for ever. He didn’t, poor thing. So there it was. Not at all bad, at first, but nothing more. He was very childish. He liked to be petted. He was vain. He enjoyed little sulks and being mooed over to make him better. He told me all his troubles, from the cradle up, as if my funct
ion on earth was to be a sort of human cure for all his complexes and whatnot. He didn’t know it, but for all his weakness and shyness he was horribly conceited. All he cared for was the sound of his own voice. I can’t stand that. Can you?”
Nancy smiled at the floor.
“Yet at first,” Rose swept on, “I even enjoyed mothering him. You know, I like to feel strong, and sort of in charge, and I did with him. And it did me good in other ways. I bloomed, as they say in books. Everyone told me how well I looked. When I was back in camp, away from him, I felt more capable than I ever had before. I was tremendously confident in a new way. There was nothing and there was nobody that could make me nervous. I was more popular and I knew it. I could brush men aside like flies. I was bubbling, bubbling with energy, all the time, as if I always had just those first couple of drinks thrilling away inside me. I got promoted, and I got more and more satisfaction out of my work. Now here’s the funny thing. I suppose it was marriage had done that. Yet each time I went on leave and met him, I had less and less patience with him. It was on my own that I enjoyed being a married woman, not with him. It was through him that I learned my own capabilities, but learning them made me despise him. I began to lead an inner life of my own again. I had thoughts without revealing them to him, I plunged into activities in which he had no part, I troubled less and less to coddle him, and the more contempt I came to feel for him the less I tried to hide it. I suppose he couldn’t help noticing — there were so many times when I was short with him, when I didn’t trouble to answer his questions, when I was sarcastic — and he started to get horribly querulous and exacting, like a child. Oh, I couldn’t stand that! The more he tried to make me pity him by acting that way, the more I regretted having married him. Then he tried to start quarrels. Only it didn’t work because I wouldn’t quarrel back. I’d just stare at him, as if I was wondering, then I’d look him up and down, from head to toe, letting him know I saw right through him, then I’d lose interest and turn away without a word, while he raved and cried and pleaded and I don’t know what else.
“I remember, after one of these scenes, it — oh, it must have been well on in nineteen forty-four. I went back to camp, and I dumped my kit, and I went for a walk round the guns. I was in a heavy ack-ack battery by that time. And it came to me that night, I don’t suppose I’d ever completely admitted it up till then, that I was sick and tired of this dreary marriage. You know, I was standing there, right under a three-seven gun, the crew were huddled around dozing, the whole site was flooded with moonlight, and suddenly I had one of those moments of seeing we all have from time to time. I can still remember the black shape of the gun, and the crew squatting around, not moving, their heads bowed — it was like a war memorial. Then I looked up at the sky. It had never seemed so immense, and so mysterious, and so full of moonlight. And I thought, ‘There are millions of people asleep all around us, in our care. And if anything comes crawling across the sky to harm them, I’ — she laid her hand on her breast — ‘can reach up into the sky to protect them, I can find a target that’s no bigger than a pin’s head in all that space, I can guide a shell to hit it. Here am I, courageous and intelligent, and I don’t need him or anyone else.’ Well, I soon had my chance to get shot of him. He started going with another woman. Of course, I found out. I think he meant me to. I think he wanted to show me that he was a male, you know, to be competed for, and won back. I suppose he expected me to be surprised, and upset, and jealous. And then, poor wretch, I suppose he wanted from the other girl what he couldn’t get from me, to be mothered when he felt little and adored when he felt big. Anyway, if I’d cared for him I wouldn’t have broken with him over a thing like that, but I despised the pair of them. I felt that it was beneath my dignity to compete with such a woman for such a man. She was welcome to him. I seized the chance, and flabbergasted him by suing for divorce. He came and pleaded, he said it was me he loved, that I must forgive him, that these slips weren’t important, that I mustn’t take it to heart — as if I had! I couldn’t have cared less! — but I just stared at him without saying a word, and walked away when he’d finished. And I got the divorce.
“Well, after that I said, ‘Now for some peace and quiet. I shan’t play the fool again in a hurry.’ Do you know how long I kept away from them? Three months, that’s all. A girl like me, who looks down on all the men she’s met, do you know what she dreams of? Not of doing without them, she of all people can’t do that. And certainly not of some vague, goody-goody equal partnership and all that rot. No, she dreams that somewhere there’s a man so much bigger than her that she can gladly grovel at his feet. And I thought I’d found him. He was everything a silly girl could dream of, bomber pilot, big, handsome, every woman who saw him crazy about him, and me mad with pride because he’d picked on me. I felt as if he’d crowned me Queen. He used to take me out in his car, seventy miles an hour was about the usual speed. I used to love sitting there with the wind battering at my face, fancying that death was flashing past us at every bend of those twisty country lanes, watching him at the wheel calm and almost sleepy with confidence. He was extravagant with money in a reckless, unselfconscious way. He absolutely overwhelmed me with attentions, flowers, wonderful things he’d say in a strong, caressing kind of voice I’d never heard before, yet all so beautifully careless. If men only knew how loathsome they are when they’re deferential! Not him, though, he always left such a wonderful impression that he didn’t give a damn. Making love — oh, I can still hardly bear to talk about it! I hadn’t known there was as much violence in the universe as I discovered inside myself, or as much humility. And in that, he was always my master, he was always so effortlessly in control of me. But most of all what attracted me was this tremendous indifference I spoke about just now, to what everyone, me included, thought of his actions. I worshipped him. With him I was meek, obedient, loving. I hung on his arm, I gloried in the little things he did for me in front of other people, I went to him like a tamed animal. I never made any demands on him. I never spoke about marriage. At that time I don’t think I ever had a single thought about the future, or about the past either, for that matter. When I first heard of other women that he went with, I had a bit of a cry, then I laughed, and I even ended up by feeling rather proud of him. I was quite willing to allow them to him. You see, I was unshakeably sure that I ranked above them. It was, well, self-obvious that between them and him it couldn’t possibly be like it was between me and him. Oh, I tried it on with him! I tried to be haughty with him, and I quarrelled — which made as little impression on him as my husband’s tantrums had made on me — and I walked out on him every so often. But I always went back. I gloried in being humbled. I’d curl up to him like a kitten, with a wonderful feeling, not of forgiveness, that didn’t come into it, but that I was being forgiven.
“This happened several times, but the strange thing was that it wasn’t one of these quarrels that ended it. In fact, we’d just been reconciled. We’d laughed together, and he’d told me — oh, he could be very amusing! — what a bitch the other girl was, and all about her antics in bed. He went into a lot of detail, and I laughed like mad. And when we parted, we made a date for the next week in London. I came up to town and he didn’t keep it. I wandered about, I had a few drinks, I got horribly wretched, I had a sudden idea that he’d been killed and rushed to ’phone his squadron, but they said, no, he’d gone up to town. I had some more drinks and promised myself a tremendous row with him. Then I thought of what a wonderful reconciliation we’d have. Oh, I was in a terrible state! I decided the best thing was to go home and cool off, but I couldn’t. I started going the rounds of all the places he’d taken me to. I didn’t care what sort of an exhibition I made of myself. And I walked into one — some stupid club — and there he was sitting at a table with this other girl. For a moment I thought I was going to rush up to them. Then she laughed. And it was exactly the same way I’d laughed when he was telling me about her. After that I couldn’t face him. I was convinced that
he was telling her jokes about me. I felt like killing myself. I drank a lot more. Then I flopped into a taxi and told the man to take me to Lamb Street. I wanted to go to mum and put my head in her lap and cry my eyes out. It’s funny, while the taxi was taking me there, I knew, underneath all my rage and misery, that I’d go back to him. Yes, I’d have gone back to him, Nance. I couldn’t have kept away. But when the taxi turned into Lamb Street, there were a lot of people talking on the pavements, and there were policemen, and where there should have been houses on our side of the street there was only the sky, and jagged bits of wall sticking up, and it was all roped off and — it was that night, Nancy. Our mum was dead. I sat down on the kerb and I had hysterics. Me, Nancy, of all people! I sat there and I screamed that God had punished me. And then Mick came along, and picked me up, and took me back to The Lamb, and put me to bed, and I lay there for a week, pretty well out of my mind.” She stubbed her cigarette. “And I never went back to that man.”
Rose sat still when she had finished, in an intent attitude, as if still affected by a play she had been watching. “Well,” she said, “Don’t sit there looking as if you’re sorry for me.”
“I’m not. I think I envy you.”
“Oh, Nancy, don’t be silly. You’re the one to be envied.”
“I’d sooner be you than me.” Nancy sat up straight. “Oh, listen to me. I am stupid. I’ve got nothing to grumble about,” she said with determination. She looked vaguely at Rose for a few moments, then she said, “Rosie dear, look, I’d like to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“About you. And about our mum.”
“Why?”
“Oh, there you go, hard as nails again. I thought you’d talked all your bitterness away.”
Rose’s face contracted in a stubborn pout. “No!”
“Rosie, please! Why bear malice?”
“Because I’m me.”
Rosie Hogarth Page 27
