An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  ‘We’ll pretend it’s our own little home,’ said Leslie. ‘“Just tea for two, and two for tea”,’ he sang softly, as he put his key in the lock.

  But he was wrong, for as we stepped into the fusty little passage we heard his fierce mother roar out, ‘Whaur hae ye been, ye silly swine?’

  Leslie stopped and shivered. ‘To Richmond, of course, Mater,’ he cried in a light, rippling voice. ‘I told you. Where we always go.’

  She came stamping out at us, square and red, her eyes flashing. She had just had a permanent wave, and her black hair looked like a woollen hat. ‘Is that ye, Chrristine? If ye’ve come for tea, ye’re too late the noo. As for ye, Leslie, I asked ye to go and get Feyther’s harrp from the shop, and hae ye done it?’

  Leslie’s father was a harpist in a cinema orchestra and expected to be out of work soon, since the first talking pictures had just been shown in London. He was a shadowy little man, with Murillo eyes and reddish hair that lay back in sticky quills, like the feathers of a sparrow.

  ‘His new harrp! That he bought wi’ his ain insurance money!’

  She turned to me. ‘Come on in, then, since ye’re here. Why dinna ye tell this silly swine to heed what his mither tells him?’

  ‘I was going to get his harp,’ Leslie cried; ‘that’s why I brought Christine back early. I meant to get it.’

  His mother had by now herded us into the parlour, where there was just about enough room for three persons and the furniture. ‘I should think ye were, kenning that he’s got his puir foot in plaster! Gallivanting, that’s all ye care aboot. But then,’ she added, in a nasty tone of maternal pity, ‘ye’re only a silly bairn still, though ye talk big to the lassies.’

  ‘Oh, Ma!’ Leslie shouted and rushed upstairs to his bedroom, where he slammed the door. He had done this once before since I had known him, on another occasion of his mother’s tormenting, and I knew he was going to have a cry.

  My head was aching badly now. I should have liked to go home there and then, but felt my duty was to Leslie, to comfort him as best I could; my heart was far more wrung than if I had still been in love with him, when I should merely have been enraged. Anyhow, his mother did not mean me to leave. She had, after all, a pot of tea that was still hot; and she liked me, as she seemed to like all young women, on the grounds that because they were all too good for Leslie they must therefore all be creatures of special quality. She fetched me a cup and sat down to talk to me. Her talk turned entirely on Leslie’s shortcomings; her resentment went back to his babyhood, when, apparently, he had invariably been sick after his bottles. Her accent had become far less Scottish, so much so that I began to wonder whether she had really spent her youth North of the Border. Leslie showed no signs of reappearing, so after half an hour or so of her displeasing reminiscences I made it plain to his mother that I was expected at home.

  I had barely gone five yards along the street when I saw Leslie coming from the opposite direction. He was pushing a big gilded harp that was mounted on a wheeled platform, rather like the pedestal of a toy dog. His head was high, and he was whistling with piercing nonchalance. As I came nearer I observed that his face was a little swollen; but the smile with which he greeted me was bland. He stopped, giving a backward jerk to the harp, which had run along a little way on its own.

  ‘I do hope Mater hasn’t been wearing you out! She’s absurd today, isn’t she?’ He glanced at the harp. ‘I thought I’d pop along and get this for the Pater, just to save fuss.’

  Two little boys on the other side of the street pointed and giggled. Leslie flushed. ‘One would look quite ridiculous with this thing if one cared one way or another.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said.

  ‘Dignity is something one has or hasn’t. If you have it you don’t mind what you do. “The morality of masters and the morality of slaves.” Nietzsche.’

  ‘Leslie,’ I said, ‘your mother sounds so much more Scotch when she’s angry. Was she born in Scotland?’

  ‘By sheer chance, no,’ he replied, lifting his eyebrows and looking seriously down upon me. ‘She was born in Bungay. But her ancestry goes back and back. Back to the Stuarts,’ he added in a hush.

  ‘Give us a tune, mister!’ one of the little boys sang out.

  Leslie flushed again. ‘Well, I’d better roll the damned thing in or Mater will be batey. She never forgets the days when we had servants, you know.’

  I walked back with him to his gate.

  He wedged the harp with a stone, so that it could not roll. ‘A sad day for us, little one. One memory the fewer.’

  ‘There’s always next week,’ I said, and felt a pang of despair, as I had intended that there should be no more next weeks with Leslie.

  ‘Kiss me.’

  ‘Not in the street. If your mother—’

  ‘The Mater has a soft heart underneath. She’s romantic, really, when you get to know her.’

  ‘Silly swine!’ said his mother from the doorway. ‘D’ye want the wurrld to see ye, standing there like a great gaby? Bring that thing inside!’

  ‘Coming,’ said Leslie. She retreated. He looked at me, his pale-blue eyes begging me not to despise him. I put my arms around his neck and kissed him heartily, paying no attention to the renewed jeers of the little boys or to the harp that had lurched away from the stone and was stuck in the privets.

  Leslie held me for a moment, encircled. ‘Yes,’ he said weightily, ‘you love your man. You are that kind of woman.’

  His mother began to hammer on the window-pane, and I went home.

  Chapter Three

  Iris Allbright was one of those ‘best friends’ sought by plain girls in some inexplicable spurt of masochism, feared by them, hated by them and as inexplicably cherished. She was abnormally pretty; she never went through the stage of childish or adolescent lumpishness, but was always delightful in shape and calmly aware of her own destiny. She was vain and rapacious. Having all the admiration, she could not bear for a jot of it to be diverted, however momentarily, elsewhere. We sealed our friendship in our first term together at school. It was to be our last together also, for I stayed on, preparing myself for a career of business or, if I proved unexpectedly brilliant, schoolteaching; and Iris went off to a school for theatrical children at Dulwich, where desultory lessons were given in the morning and the pupils sang, declaimed, mimed, or pirouetted in tutus for the rest of the day.

  Like others of her temperament, she passionately desired affection of all kinds. She needed little children to crow at her, dogs to lick her hands. From the age of twelve she had little love-affairs with boys, still in short trousers, from the grammar school; if there were no boys about she would divert her flirtatious glances to me, press her sweet-smelling, honeysuckle cheek against mine and beg me to assure her that I would never abandon her for another best friend. As we grew older, as we went walking together on the Common in the soft Sunday afternoons to meet our lads of the moment, my thraldom to her, and my desire to be rid of her for ever, seemed to increase in exact ratio one to the other. My most pleasurable secret fantasy was to imagine myself at her graveside, weeping bitterly because one so gentle and lovely should have died so young.

  She spoiled everything for me. If a youth showed the slightest interest in me she exerted every ounce of her charm to draw him to herself. We used to go out with pairs of lads who were also ‘best friends’, one conspicuously more attractive than the other. Iris at once took the handsomer for herself, assuring me that the other was supremely fitted for me, because he was clever and so was I, and that she could foresee a lifetime of intellectual harmony ahead of us. If this clever boy accepted his role as plain best friend (male) destined for plain best friend (female) and even began to show some admiration for me, Iris would not rest until she had got him away from me, at the same time keeping a firm hold upon her original choice. If there were two apples
and two to share them, she considered it a fair distribution for her to have both.

  And yet, in a way, I loved her. By flirting with me occasionally in lieu of anybody better she forced me into a kind of masculine, protective rôle. It was unnatural to me and I tried to resist it; I wished to be feminine as she; yet sometimes I felt I was beginning to walk with a sailor’s roll.

  Her femininity was absolute as that of pink roses in a basket tied with pink ribbons. She could wear dresses with flounces and floral patterns, saxe-blue ribbons fluttering from picture hats. Once I bought a bright-green hat of dashing cut, the sort I imagined Iris could not wear, and in it attended a rendezvous with our partners of the day.

  ‘Oh, isn’t that the most gorgeous tata!’ Iris exclaimed in her popular baby talk. ‘And it suits you marvellously. Doesn’t it suit her, Roger? Peter thinks you look Ooh, so bootiful!’

  The boys grinned noncommittally.

  ‘Do let me try it, Christie, please—please—please! Just for once!’

  Snatching it off my head, she went to the looking-glass and arranged it very carefully on her own. She pouted at her reflection. ‘No, it’s not for me! It’s Christine’s ownest hat. I look a hag. I look like a horse.’

  ‘You look marvellous,’ said Roger throatily, and of course she did. His throat contracted. Iris gave him a gentle flip on his nose.

  ‘You know I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Peter knows I look like a horse! Don’t I, Petey?’

  ‘You look all right,’ he muttered, as throatily as Roger.

  ‘There! Petey knows. He knows a haggy old horse when he sees one. Christie shall have her property back again.’

  And, taking off the hat, she rammed it back on my head, slightly sideways. I adjusted it, my fingers trembling. I believed it made me hideous. She had spoiled it for me and I never wore it again.

  Yet . . . yet . . . As I say, in a fashion I loved her. She had secrets with me that she whispered in my ear, tantalising the boys by glances from her steel-bright, fanshaped eyes. When she had a cold she liked me to sit at her bedside, stroking her hand or her brow. And she used often to say, ‘There’s nobody like you, Christie; nobody but you understands me. And you’re the very first person in my heart.’

  But when I fell in love for a little with the oafish Peter she abandoned Roger at once in order that I should no longer enjoy what could never be the prerogative of a plain ‘best friend’. She made me bitterly unhappy, and when in a dream I stood again at her graveside I gave a harsh laugh and said, ‘Ashes to Ashes.’

  Leslie was the only lad she was unable to charm. From the first moment he had eyes only for me. Iris tried all her devices—the teasing ones, such as tweaking his tie out and asking him for a tiny snip of it as a present; the sultry ones, such as turning her back on him and sighing on a long ripple; the malingering ones, such as pretending to turn her ankle and asking him to rub it for her. He remained impervious; perhaps, I sometimes thought, in the hard hours of my disillusionment, because he was touched. I could not believe any perfectly sane person could prefer me to Iris.

  Nevertheless, the dogged calf-love of Leslie was the supreme turning point of my youth, and it broke my enslavement to my beautiful friend. Now that I was loved, I began to look more comely. I was relaxed by confidence; I started to buy, without any feeling of making myself ridiculous, softer and paler dresses. I walked more naturally. I danced better. I began to make fewer and fewer appointments with Iris; and perhaps she did not much mind, for her own young men, reassured by the fact that somebody, even poor Leslie, could regard me with unswerving devotion, gradually came to pay me small attentions that Iris found it imprudent for them to spare.

  On the evening that I left Leslie to the harp I returned to find Iris on my doorstep. I had not seen her for a month or so; she greeted me with one of her moist open kisses dropped upon my cheekbone. ‘You horrible old stranger, you! You might have been dead for all I knew. I thought I’d come and rout you out.’

  Dressed in a blue that was softened almost to violet by the light of the falling sun, she looked so charming that passers-by slowed their pace to stare at her. Sensitive to their admiration, she extended her arm to me at full length, jingling half a dozen blue and pink glass bangles, fashionable at the time. ‘Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle! Do you like them or do I look like a Christmas tree? Darling, I’ve been knocking and banging for hours, and not a sound from anyone.’

  I guessed that my father and my Aunt Emilie must have gone to the cinema together. She was not really my aunt, but his second wife: the designation was simply one she thought suitable for my use.

  ‘I expect they’re both out.’

  ‘Oh, goody!’ said Iris. ‘I know Aunt E. heartily disapproves of me. She thinks I’m one of those fast actresses.’

  In reality, Aunt Emilie did not think of her at all; she thought of no one but my father, for whom she had a humble, stupefied, worshipping love. She had been my mother’s friend, a confirmed spinster as she supposed; and to be sought in marriage even by a man who simply needed her in order that his comforts should be uninterrupted and myself taken off his hands seemed to her a miracle and would always seem so. For his part he was mildly fond of her and of me, kind to us both, taking without giving, but taking so gracefully that his thanks seemed largesse in itself. He was a retired civil servant augmenting his pension now by letting the two top floors of the large Victorian house on the extreme edge of the Common, in the borough of Clapham and not of Battersea by the width of a street. When my grandfather bought the house in 1886 the neighbourhood had been much favoured by professional men in some way or other connected with the theatre. At that time the south side of Battersea Rise had consisted of open fields, a few hawthorns, and sheep safely grazing. He had bought his own house chiefly for the view, but within ten years the view had been obliterated by a sudden seepage of lower middle-class houses and shops, and within another ten the seepage had streamed down through stratas of villa and potential slum to the very edges of the river. My grandfather, for twenty years first violin in the orchestra at His Majesty’s Theatre, never quite lost heart, and to the end he kept our household as lavish and Bohemian in tone as it was in the days of his prosperity, simply observing to my father during his last and fatal illness, ‘When I am gone you can take lodgers in the upper part. But be sure I’m dead first.’

  Although my father, Aunt Emilie and I had to live on the ground floor and semi-basement, the house itself had a touch of old splendours—a faded Morris wallpaper still evocative of peacocks and the gold of Danäe; the drawing-room chandelier with three lustres missing, which had been used in one of Tree’s productions; a late-Regency mahogany sideboard, massive and simple, adorned only by a wreath of carved laurels; and the black and tarnished Japanese kakemonos, souvenir of a visit to San Francisco, that concealed a bad patch of cracked plastering in the upper hall.

  To my friends it all seemed imposing and a little irritating. It makes no one popular to trail the least wisp of bygone glory while being hard up; modest as my life now was, I found a certain compulsion to depreciate the little I had.

  ‘Come into the barracks, anyway,’ I said to Iris, ‘and we’ll make ourselves some tea or something.’ I took her in by the door of the semi-basement, grumbling all the while about the house being far too big for comfort.

  ‘But, darling, you can breathe!’ Iris protested. ‘When I got back home after the theatre I felt I was in a little fur-lined box.’ She had just fulfilled her first engagement as a chorus girl in a musical comedy at the Winter Gardens.

  She grew mysterious. Why did I think she had come right over from Winchester Gardens to call on a grump like me? What had I done to deserve the treat that she might, if I behaved myself, offer me? I certainly didn’t deserve nice, loyal friends who were always fussing themselves to please me.

  The long and s
hort of it was that she wanted me to go to a dance at Hammersmith with herself, her new young man, and her young man’s oldest and dearest friend. ‘Victor says Keith is absolutely charming, and he was absolutely crazy that I should find him a really gorgeous partner. So I thought of you.’

  ‘The blind date’, the acceptance of an invitation from a partner unknown, was a new amusement that had just come to England from America. I had never tried it myself, and was not eager to do so. (I was conservative in many things.) But Iris was insistent, and at the first sign of opposition from me she began to wheedle in her old, maddening and undermining fashion. ‘Victor has wonderful taste in other men, and if he says Keith’s all right you can take it that he is. And you’ll ruin my poor little pleasure if you say no.’

  I think I might, all the same, have said no had not Iris added, ‘I’m sure your Leslie can spare you for one night.’

  I remembered, then, that I was to be free of Leslie, free for myself, to choose or to refrain from choosing, free from fret and pity and the need for concealment of a mood. This seemed to me so delightful, this new freedom upon the threshold of any adventure or none at all, that I suddenly saw Iris’s plan as a delightful one, which for myself would be a secret celebration. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘When is it?’

  ‘There!’ she exclaimed. ‘I knew you’d come through. I knew you’d never let me down and make me miserable.’ Satisfied, she began to discuss what we should both wear, and I kept to myself the belief that my father might be persuaded to buy me a new dress. I could buy nothing yet for myself because, though I had left school, I was still at a secretarial training college. She picked up one of my aunt’s fashion papers (which my aunt read fervently, though with no intention of acting upon the advice given) and began to study some drawings of evening dresses, but was diverted by the picture of a somewhat overweight baby with eyes like dark and constant stars, who was staring up into the tender face of a photographer’s model unlikely to be his mother.