‘That’s what I want!’ Iris said explosively. ‘Nobody knows how I feel inside. I don’t want to be on the stage. I want to get married and have a dear little baby just like that, all to my own. I’d like to have four or five babies—yes, I would, and don’t look so cynical!’
It was many years before her own life proved the truth of what she had said. Though confident of her own beauty, she was miserably lacking in confidence where her talent was concerned, miserably badgered by her ambitious mother to a goal she felt she had no hope of attaining. (‘One day, Iris, I shall see my daughter’s name in lights.’) For all her scalp-hunting, which alienated her women-friends more and more as time went on, she was sexually cold; her deepest instincts were maternal ones, and she was afraid that she would never be able to satisfy them. (‘You don’t want to marry too young if you want to keep your figure. There’s plenty of time for all that.’) When Iris stopped in the street to moon over a baby in a perambulator she did so with all the grace and public prettiness of an actress posing for her picture; yet she was genuinely moved, as by nothing else on earth.
Not realising all this, however, I made no comment upon her stated ambitions, but asked her more about the dance. It was, she said, the annual dance given by Victor’s sports club; it was to be held on Saturday week; we would find our own way to Hammersmith tube station, and the boys would pick us up in a taxi.
‘Oh dear!’ I protested. ‘I hate those things where you carry your shoes in a bag. It looks awful.’
‘Well,’ said Iris reasonably (in some ways she was more reasonable than I and, though I did not guess it, less ambitious), ‘I suppose we’ll have to wait a bit before we really get the men with cars.’
‘You do, sometimes.’
‘Oh, stage-door johnnies, in Mother’s antiquated phrase. But then, they’re not often serious.’
‘Is Victor?’
‘For the moment,’ said Iris, with a curious convulsion of her cheeks that she called ‘dimpling’ and was the least effective of her facial devices, ‘for the moment. He’s got such lovely brown eyes, and sometimes I melt . . . I don’t believe you melt, Christie.’ I thought bitterly that I melted more often than she knew, but had come to conceal these moments lest she be tempted to remove the object of my melting.
‘I shouldn’t tell Leslie about this jaunt,’ she said. She added, with one of her meaningless adjectives, ‘He’ll only be oofy.’
Chapter Four
It is the little meannesses of our lives that plague us most. For one thing, we can bear to take them out and look at them. Few of us are strong enough, or silly enough, not to suppress the memory of our major crimes against ourselves or our fellows. The small meanness, the small chicanery, looks fairly harmless, coiled up at the bottom of the Pandora’s box which is our past; it is only when, lured by this apparent guilelessness, we take it out into the light that it sinks its fang in us, and we bleed, and we are poisoned.
It torments me now to remember how I got rid of Leslie.
My original intention, sprung to mind at Iris’s last remark, had been mean enough. I had intended to ignore her advice, tell him about this dance and my interesting unknown partner, take advantage of the quarrel he would certainly provoke and dismiss him for ever. What I actually did was worse.
Mabel, of whom Leslie had spoken on the river-bank in such ominous terms, was not, as one might have thought, a Messalina or Thaïs. She was a rather stunted little girl with beautiful vacant green eyes, who had walked the Common with Leslie that previous summer. She was a typist in a local candle-factory, five years older than he and something of a favourite with his mother. For the latter had a soft spot for people who were frightened of her, and Mabel was so frightened that she never spoke to her except to admire her wildly and at random in a scarcely audible whisper. She was an excellent dancer, as Leslie was too; and they had twice won the Yale Blues competition at the Rosebud Hall in Brixton.
Mabel’s claim to exciting wickedness in Leslie’s imagination was the fact that at eighteen she had married a works foreman of forty-five, had discovered that her marriage was bigamous and had run away from him. Leslie used to refer to her in an awed whisper as a divorcée, thinking I had not heard the true story; and he suggested that she had once consoled herself by taking a series of lovers. This, however, his mother had pooh-pooh’d. ‘The puir girl, she’s as straight as a die. Once bitten, twice shy. An’ she’s no Venus de Milo, at that.’
Leslie’s romance with Mabel had ended, as I well knew, shortly before his romance with me had begun; and I also knew that despite his pride in having had for his sweetheart a woman so much older than he (‘a woman of experience,’ he had said darkly, with the astigmatic look) he had lost all trace of interest in her. The only times he seemed to see her now were at the rare dancing competitions at the Rosebud Hall, at which she still partnered him; there was one due on the Monday week that followed Iris’s visit to my house.
I spent the next Saturday with Leslie. Luckily it was raining, so we only went to the pictures. I made myself behave affectionately as ever, though now he seemed to me a stranger standing behind a wall of glass, someone I did not recognise and who had nothing to do with me at all.
On the Monday I went with him to the dance. We were well chaperoned at these little dances, for his mother always accompanied us, each time in some new and spectacular dress she had made for the occasion. She was a professional dress-maker, and an adept in salvaging just so much from her customers’ materials as would make a blouse or a trimming for herself. Though Leslie would admit it only grudgingly, she was a superb natural dancer, and, if he had bothered himself to teach her the new steps, would have out-danced any young girl in the room. As it was, she had to content herself with the one-step and an ‘old-time’ waltz for which she was always sought by the M.C., a glossy, stout, smiling, bad-tempered little man called Wilkinshaw. It was Mabel who, generously, used to upbraid Leslie for not encouraging his mother’s talent, and reproach him for glaring at her when she insisted on taking part in the Paul Jones. ‘I know my own business,’ Leslie would say grandly (but not within his mother’s range of hearing), ‘and it’s not becoming for a woman of her natural dignity.’
The Rosebud Hall was built out on some waste ground behind a row of villas. The entrance, surprisingly enough, was actually through one of these houses, and the cloakroom was a converted scullery. House and hall were owned by Mr. Wilkinshaw, who had made quite a commercial success of his dances for years: he provided nothing but a three-piece band, and received a percentage from the café several doors down the street, where the boys and girls went in the interval for light refreshments.
The hall was graceless and gloomy, and the few paper-chains did little to mitigate the effect; but the floor was superbly sprung, and more than one young couple hoping for a professional career in ballroom dancing had done their first serious practising on it. When I had first been in love with Leslie that love had given the hall an Arabian Nights charm of its own, turning to gold dust the perfectly prosaic dust that lay on the window-ledges and the rungs of the chairs; now, in disenchantment, I saw it differently: saw, with a curious crystal prescience, that from this world, the world of Leslie, Mabel and Mr. Wilkinshaw, I must move onwards and far away. I had already deserted it in spirit as I should desert it in time; the knowledge made me both arrogant and ashamed.
Mabel, sitting at my side, looked from me to Leslie’s mother and back again with her breathless, humble gaze. This was the interval before the competition began, and Leslie had retired to change, rather pompously, into some shoes he had bought for this event alone. ‘You both look so smart tonight! I wish I had your dress-sense.’
‘A lass like yersel’ shouldna wear hrred,’ said Leslie’s mother, ‘any colour but hrred. Ye’re too peaky.’
‘Leslie said I was peaky.’
‘Fine worrds from him, the silly fule!
And me always on tae him aboot apeerients.’
He came gliding back to us across the floor, self-conscious cynosure of eyes. He was a champion, and he knew it.
‘Not nervous, Mabel? Shall we go in and win?’
‘I’d feel better if we really practised,’ she said, looking down at her short, broad, nimble feet. ‘The others do. I felt shaky last night.’
‘You were smooth enough then,’ Leslie replied. ‘Just rely on me now, and remember, keep smooth—smooth.’
Mr. Wilkinshaw came into the centre of the floor, held up his hand to a roll of drums. The competition was announced. Leslie bowed to Mabel, who stood up with the electric nervousness of a new recruit, but who, the moment she was in his arms, took on the mask of a bland, blank professionalism.
While they danced, while they were proclaimed the winners, while they were clapped, cheered, presented with a certificate by Mr. Wilkinshaw’s wife, years ago a British Amateur Champion, I evolved my shabby plan for escape.
It was understood, after these dances, that Leslie should see me home. We started off towards our tram, pursued by objurgations from his mother that he should not be late, that he should put on his clean socks next morning, and that he should not expect her to call him a dozen times to his breakfast. I suggested to him that we should walk the last part of the way. I had been speaking little and had already made him uneasy.
We walked across the Common. A light drizzle was falling, and the sparse lamps along the path were only the cores of larger, iridescent moons made of mist and gaslight. I said lightly, ‘So you’ve been seeing Mabel again.’
‘Seeing Mabel? Of course I have! I saw her tonight.’
‘And last night.’
He paused, then said, ‘I only looked in on her for a practice.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘What chance did I have? I’ve hardly seen you alone—’
‘We’ve been dancing together.’
‘And, anyway, it didn’t strike me as being of the slightest importance. Mabel is nothing more to me than a partner.’
I told him not to lie to me; that I knew he had returned to her; that his concealment of the Sunday practice had proved it; and that I never cared to compete with anyone. He might have Mabel. For us, things were at an end.
‘Silly little girl,’ said Leslie on a deep, terrified note of tenderness. He stopped and tried to embrace me.
I pulled free of him and walked on. I recognised my own deceit and was ashamed of it. But subduing this shame was a strange pride at having fought my conscience and conquered it. The need to be free was like some violent physical pressure inside of myself; I felt the constriction from my heart to my throat. I could hardly breathe for it. I went on talking, more wildly as I went on. I could not bear lying, bear suppression. I hated dishonesty. I had seen that they were in love with each other, and for all I cared they could go on being so.
‘You’re mad, you’re mad!’ cried Leslie. He stopped me forcibly this time, holding me beneath a lamp. I saw the drizzle glistening like sugar on his hair, his forehead, on the ridge of his long nose. His eyes were open and lost, the rainy lashes sticking out from the lids like chevaux de frise. Then he said fatally, ‘I can hardly help it if she’s in love with me. That’s not my fault.’
This evidence of a conceit that could override even the instinct to be silent in moments of danger (Mabel was not in the least in love with him, as well I knew) downed the last spurt of my conscience and sent it into a coma from which it was not to awaken for some years to be. I told him there was no need to discuss the matter further. We had come to the end—I had realised that for a long time, and so had he.
Nothing can be crueller than very young men and women when they fall out of love, nothing crueller nor more unimaginative. Much later in my life, when I lost a lover, I was to remember how Leslie had lost me, and to be moved painfully by pity for him and disgust for myself.
But this bursting desire for freedom gave me authority. I told him he must go away now, that I should make my way home alone.
‘But you can’t, not across the Common, not at this time of night! There are all sorts of bad types lying in wait.’
‘I’ll risk them,’ I said and broke into a trot.
The drizzle changed suddenly into torrential rain. Instead of following the path, I cut into an open field, black as pitch, and ran straight on, guiding myself by the blur of lamps along West Side. Leslie lost sight of me. I heard his voice calling, panicked and desolate. ‘Christie! Don’t be so silly! Come back! What your father would have to say—’ It passed into a trail of sound, a faint horizontal across the vertical bars of the rain, a sound far off, already being sucked down into the years; and then there was nothing at all but the hiss and patter of the night, the chattering of the trees under the punishing spouts of the sky.
The wet grass soaked into my stockings, the edge of my skirt; the soles of my shoes made a suck and a flap as I ran. The coolness was strange and delicious, and so was the dark. I was free at last, light as air. I might have been running barefoot in the surf of some marvellous sea, along the edge of a land where nobody knew me and I knew nobody. For those few moments in the long field, no one knew where I was, no one in the world. I was to have that sensation of absolute freedom many times more in my life. Once, (I remember) after a period of stress and misery, I was walking in Gray’s Inn Road, where some mere accident had taken me, and I had thought, No one can get at me. No one can write me a letter, telephone me, even guess at where I am. Here, in this London street, not two miles from my home, I might be in the deserts of Asia for all they know. And with that thought the bonds of the world had fallen from me and I had known a lightness and joy that was like rising from some crippling illness to discover that limbs would obey the will, were mastered, and were whole.
Yet it was, I think, something more than the exaltation of freedom which took me so strongly that wild wet night, in my eighteenth year. It was the knowledge that I had found the power to reject; that I need not simply take, in gratitude, what I was given. Later in my life I was to need a love so violently that I could fight for it with that strength which can throw pride overboard without a qualm; as if it were puerile and degraded; and could find courage in the memory that I had made my own choices in the past, and that therefore, if this love refused to come my way, I might find some sort of peace in accepting the rough justice of heaven. But that is another story, and not one I care to remember. As I say, it is the small things that plague us most, simply because we have the sense to keep the greater ones under lock and key.
Chapter Five
I was born two years before the First World War, at the end of my grandfather’s days of prosperity. My earliest memories are connected with shortness of money. For instance, there was a big doll displayed at Evans Auction Rooms on which I had set my heart, and my mother promised that she would go and bid for it. She returned from the sale sad-eyed and empty-handed. ‘But I was glad I didn’t get it, darling, because I felt that doll had an evil face.’ She looked pathetically into my eyes, as if begging me to be convinced. And then there was the great debate as to whether or not we should have the house wired for electricity, which ended in the curious compromise of wiring the first two floors and leaving the upper two to gas. ‘A pound a point, remember; a pound a point,’ said my father, stamping this phrase on my memory with a dark magic it has never lost.
When my grandfather died we found that he had left nothing but the house; and so the stream of lodgers (tenants, we called them) began: Mr. Cosgrave, who was removed hurriedly by night in an ambulance within a week of his arrival, on the suspicion that he had sleeping sickness; Mr. and Mrs. Leake, who were run to earth by the genuine Mrs. Leake and assaulted by her in our own hall; Mr. Smith and his sister, who left us, fortunately, a month before they were prosecuted for the dissemination of pornography through t
he mails; young Mr. Hope, who drank; and old Mrs. Thomson, whom we all disliked and whom I scared into giving notice by writing ‘The Sinn Feiners are coming!’ on the lavatory wall. (My mother assured her that there were no Sinn Feiners in Clapham and that this was a childish trick of mine, but Mrs. Thomson insisted on leaving that same day, muttering as she tottered away with her suitcase, ‘No child of nine could have spelled it, no child could have spelled it.’)
That was the kind of traffic likely to occur in those days, if you let rooms furnished. It was far too easy for people to rush in and rush out; and though we always took references, these had usually been written by the lodger’s close relations, if not by the lodger himself.
I loved my mother, a sad, fretful, affectionate woman who had enormous dreams for me. She spoke of them seldom, but looked them all the time. I was bowed by the weight of her hope. It was she who ran the house, my father and the lodgers; all the cares were hers. When she was brought down by pleurisy, which turned to double pneumonia, she looked at me in anguished surprise. ‘But I can’t die! No one else is fit to manage.’
I was fourteen then, and when she was gone I believed I could never be happy again.
She was right in believing that no one else was fit to manage. I was too young and my father too disinterested. He looked rapidly around for a wife who would manage everything, and rapidly married Emilie, who had been a tower of strength, as my father put it, right through my mother’s illness and afterwards. ‘Or perhaps one ought to say,’ he remarked, giving his strange, half-hitched smile, ‘a cottage of strength. Your Aunt Emilie is too small to remind one of towers.’
In his fashion he was very fond of me; but he had never been an ambitious man, and was not particularly ambitious on my behalf. It had been my mother’s desire that eighty pounds of her insurance money should go to training me at a really good secretarial college, where I should meet the right kind of girl and perhaps go straight into a really high-class post. If she had to see me as a secretary at all (and she saw me mostly as a great pianist, actress, singer, writer), then it was as something she called a ‘Social Secretary’, one who sent and accepted invitations for a duchess, and did the flowers. My father, though he thought the idea silly, did not flout her wishes. He put the eighty pounds down straight away and gave me another twenty to spend on appropriate secretarial clothes—in those days an unimaginable sum.
An Impossible Marriage Page 3
