‘I should leave her alone,’ said Caroline.
Next day Emilie seemed to be herself again, as ordinary, as dull, as unexcitable as ever.
Three days later I received a note from Ned Skelton, telling me he thought I might enjoy a run into the country next Sunday. He did not ask me if I would come; he simply said he would call for me with the car at half-past two.
My thoughts flew first not to him but to what I should wear. I was anaesthetised from all other emotion by the thought of clothes. I was getting shabby again; I had saved very little as yet. Should I spend it all on a new coat or on a new hat and bag? Black would go with anything, and I had an excuse now to wear black. (My grey office coat had been considered sufficient mourning by Emilie, who had not forgotten a jocose remark by my father to the effect that if she got herself up for him like a crow he would haunt her. She herself, much against her will, since she would have felt better in weeds, was wearing a brown jumper in order to mollify his ghost.) Clothes. Caroline had a fur; she might lend it to me.
I took this letter to Emilie, who read it without apparent interest; but she said, ‘Yes, do go, dear. You’re young. You shouldn’t be too much in this house of death.’
‘We can’t think about it like that always!’ I protested, my blood chilling a little.
‘No, dear. Of course not. It was silly of me. Poor Horace was always so cheerful, wasn’t he? But it would be good for you to go.’
Chapter Fourteen
Sunday was a day of snow. It lay in a crusting of black and silver beads along the privets in the front garden, clung in lichen patches to the rooftops, and was stacked, hard as steel, in the gutters. The sky looked white and hard; there was sun behind it, but it would remain invisible, would not break through.
When the dinner-plates were cleared away I went upstairs to dress. I had Caroline’s fur. I had a new black hat. I felt calm, mature, until I saw, from the top window, the little sports car, bright as a ladybird, slide to a stop. Then I was lost, frightened. My heart began to hurry; I knew I was unbecomingly flushed, that I would not be able to greet him as if he did not matter at all.
I saw him climb out, walk slowly, with his air of delicate, birdlike balance, up the front steps. He was wearing a camelhair coat and a brown felt hat. The bell rang. Let him wait! I ordered myself. But even as this firm, convincing instruction shot out I was running down into the hall. On the landing I halted, for Emilie was before me, letting him in. She said something in her little dull voice. I heard him answer her easily, his voice smiling. He looked up and saw me. ‘Hullo! I don’t think I’m early. Anyway, you’re ready for me.’
It was hard to meet his eyes. When I did so I saw a kindly shine beneath the heavy lids, something reassuring and a little comical, as if he were including me in a secret.
‘Your aunt and I have met already.’
‘Where?’ I was still unnerved enough to be obtuse. He looked so old, so much older than any of my friends; his flattery in seeking me out seemed almost too great for me to accept. I felt humble, and angry because I was humble. I wanted to quarrel.
‘Just this minute, of course.’ He asked her if she would entrust me to his driving, meaning not only to that.
‘Don’t keep her out late,’ Emilie muttered, thinking of her responsibility towards me.
‘I won’t. It’ll be freezing later on, anyhow. I’ll deposit her at seven sharp. Come on, Christine,’ he said, and took my arm, bearing me defenceless out into his unknown world.
As he helped me into the car I could not help hoping that one of my friends would see me and tell Iris. Iris’s young men were all so young; it surprised me that she, an actress, should still go running about with men little more than schoolboys.
He told me he was taking me Hindhead way. ‘Do you know it?’
I shook my head.
He drove silently for a while, and I tried to study, without him seeing me, his bird-like profile, alert, attractive, discontented.
‘I don’t suppose you know anything much.’
An alarming phrase, a seducer’s phrase, I thought, and I panicked. It suddenly occurred to me that he would want to kiss me, and that he might try to do so in a fashion not accepted by my friends, even by Dicky Flint, who was thought to be fast. ‘It is only done in France,’ Leslie had once told me in the shocked and sunken voice he used when mentioning sexual matters. ‘No nice man would ever do such a thing. Any decent girl would slap his face.’ And then, sunken deeper yet, ‘It is a sort of symbol.’
So I had thought of this as a kind of ravishing, had thought of it with horror and a kind of guilty yearning; for my youth was becoming uneasy, fretting in me like a covering of buds just below the surface of my skin.
‘How old are you, Christine?’
‘Eighteen,’ I said. I should be that age in two days’ time.
‘I am fourteen years your senior, my girl. Does that alarm you?’
‘Oh no,’ I replied. ‘That’s not old.’
‘Not to me. But I could just, allowing for precocity, have been your father.’
I wished he would not talk about precocity, paternity, my youth, his maturity. I felt he was already invading me: that he had plans for me. The fright persisted; yet I was enjoying myself. I wished Iris could see his car, his camelhair coat. He seemed to be richer than most of the young men I was likely to meet. He might take me to places like the Monseigneur—I was glad I had now some slight experience of them. I wondered about his life, felt a thrust of jealousy, sharp, pure and explicit, at the thought of the girls he must have known and kissed (how?); I did not want him to kiss me. I am strong, I said inwardly; I can look after myself.
We were free of London now, and here the snow was vast and cleanly over the land, the horizon barely distinguishable from the sky except where it was marked by the deep blueness of distant woods. All white and blue; I had never seen such ink-blue distances.
He was telling me something of himself. His father was an estate agent. He, Ned, had never liked the idea of going into the family business, so he had become a regular soldier and had served for a while in India. Then (‘It was bloody poor luck,’ he said, making me wonder whether, even though he was a man and not a boy, it was altogether respectful for him to swear so easily in my presence) they had found a spot on his lung and invalided him out.
‘The spot went eventually; I’m all right now, so don’t imagine I’m headed for a poetic end.’ He looked at me and stopped the car. We were on the Hog’s Back, the white world below us and the heavy silence of the snow all about. The sky had darkened a little to a luminous grey with a tinge of russet.
‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ He put his hand on my knee, looked at it in a kind of surprise as though he had expected to find it somewhere else, withdrew it, and offered me a cigarette. He went on with his story. He had still refused to go into the business—anything but that. He had gone to Liverpool with his army pension, with some faint idea of getting on a ship, but all he had done was to get into debt. ‘I used to back horses and now I don’t. I’ve learned my lesson. My father saw his chance at once; he said he’d pay my debts if I stopped my nonsense and came into the business. Which I did. And now I’m respectable. A little sordid, don’t you think?’
‘It’s not sordid now,’ I said cautiously, after a second’s thought.
He laughed. And then he put his arm round me, turning me so that he could look, not so much at my face, but over and into it. I was rigid with fear, desire and love; but mostly fear. The snow was falling again, spinning in little flakes no more than shadows all over the land, throwing a faint and fading lacework over the bonnet of the car. I could not bear that he should kiss me, for I knew I had no strength with which to follow Leslie’s sage advice.
He let me go, started the engine, and turned the car in the road. ‘Got to be careful, it’s like glass underfoot
. We’d better hurry or we’ll get no tea.’
We had tea at an hotel in Hindhead, a Sunday outing tea of brown and white bread and butter, egg sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, iced cakes, Dundee cake, maids-of-honour and madeleines. Most of the other people in the lounge were men and girls who had also come in their cars; the girls were smarter, a few years older, than I. I felt proud again, and the firelight reassured me.
He spoke to me gently, asking me about myself; his face was kind, and it was easier to talk to him now that he did not so openly admire me with his eyes.
‘And what were you doing with poor old Butterworth?’
I did not understand.
‘Victor Coburn’s friend. The crippled chap.’
I explained what had happened, and felt a little disgusted with myself for doing so. I should not have betrayed Keith like that, simply in order to show Ned that this was not the only sort of partner I could find. I should have pretended that he was an old friend, that I had gone to the dance with him simply because I liked him. And yet, wouldn’t Ned know by now that Keith was not an old friend? My self-disgust was eased a little.
‘You did your duty gallantly. I guessed it was a duty. Otherwise I shouldn’t have appeared in your existence again. Would that have been a pity?’
‘Of course,’ I replied brightly and rather too loudly. Several people glanced at me. I added, quietening myself, ‘This is very nice.’
‘Very nice,’ he repeated. His eyes flashed, blue and teasing. ‘Well, we shall have to be moving, or your good aunt will take me for a middle-aged seducer.’
This was so nearly what I myself took him for that I blushed. I looked away quickly, hoping he would not have noticed.
‘Which, of course,’ he added, ‘is very much your own idea. Well, I’m not. You can set your heart at rest.’
‘I didn’t think anything of the sort!’
‘Yes, you did, my dear. I always know.’
I was miserable. I felt, beneath all this teasing, the knotting of a cord. He knew I was too inexperienced, too much at sea, to tease him in return, as an older girl would have done. We sat for a few minutes in silence. Then he called the waitress, paid the bill, and drew me to my feet. We set off home.
It was quite dark now, a windless, moonless night. In the swing of the headlamps, the snow was dirty gold. Inside the car it was beautifully warm and small.
‘I like being with you,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t you feel we should get on well?’ He did not take his gaze from the road. His hands upon the wheel were small and silvery, lightly-boned, beautiful. ‘Don’t think absurd things about me. That’s for aunties. Not for you.’
‘I don’t.’
I felt I was approaching the joy, the shame, the ravishment. Unwillingly in love, I closed my eyes and felt the prickling of tears.
‘Did you wonder why I took so long getting in touch with you again?’
I asked him, with some spirit, why I should have wondered; I had not expected to see him after that night.
‘But I told you I should be seeing you. I don’t prattle for the sake of prattling.’ He gave me a brief glance, half-smiling, half surly. I had never before seen this kind of authority in a man, and I was both angered and moved by it. I found the courage for obstinacy and silence.
‘My dear girl, my dear girl,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a lot to learn. No—I meant to find you out. But I had something to get out of the way.’
I did not question him; he continued as if I had.
‘A girl. Something that’s been going on for years.’
‘I see.’
‘We weren’t engaged. It was just understood by all the bystanders. It’s over now.’
‘Poor girl!’ I exclaimed involuntarily on a flash of understanding.
He stirred. ‘Oh, I think she knew all right.’
‘Knew what?’
‘That something had happened.’
‘What had happened?’ I cried out.
‘You, of course.’ His cigarette was out, and he paused to relight it. ‘I had to tell Wanda. It was only decent.’
‘There was nothing to tell her!’
‘So far as I was concerned there was everything. And I wasn’t going to look you up again before she had the position clear.’
Even then I sensed his cruelty to this girl, the driving force of his own desires, his own impetuosities; I sensed and resented the assumption that I was there for his taking. I should have liked to leave him there and then, to make my way somehow or other home through the cold and sheltering screens of the dark, to go free. Yet I was so proud that a man so much older than I should have done this thing for me that I could not resist the steady rising of an exaltation which was like happiness. It burst the banks suddenly, flooding out conscience, drowning fear.
‘How did you know I was free?’ I demanded, but now I myself was teasing, and he knew it; knew that, even because I had found it within my power to tease him, his own power had tightened over me. For it could hold the woman as it could not hold the child.
‘You’re too young not to be. At least, you’ve been too young up to now.’
We were in the outskirts of London. Its jewelled pincers closed upon us.
‘I think we shall get on very nicely,’ said Ned, ‘extremely so.’
I took the moment into my full experience, knowing instinctively that it would be one of those I should be able to recall in sensory and pictorial detail as long as I lived: the beam of other headlights swinging over our faces; the feel of the leather seat to the hot palm of my hand; the smell of the engine; of the fur around my shoulders in which Caroline’s familiar Paris Soir still lingered; of his soft, light coat and of his own flesh; the height of my heart in my throat.
We came at last to my door.
Now, I thought, now. I steeled myself, but I am not sure to what—whether it was to accept his kiss (how cheap he would think me if I did!) or to reject it (how young, how silly he would think me if I did not!). He left the engine running, the only sound upon the stillness of the frozen common; we sat within the giant purr, neither of us speaking. I wanted, without reason, to ask him to help me—to tell him that I was, indeed, young. I was for a second not ashamed of my youth.
He took my hand and fondled it. In the light from the dashboard his face was younger, was tender, not at all alarming.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said; ‘I have enjoyed it.’
I waited. The fretting in the buds, close-packed as the microscopic flowers within a paperweight, grew almost beyond bearing—a wonder and a pain. Involuntarily I moved my fingers within his own, and as if this movement had broken a spell he let my hand go, opened the car door and in a second had me out and on to the road. He went up the steps with me and stood there while I found my key.
‘Tell your aunt you’re safe and sound, and right on the dot of seven. I’ll write to you again.’
Then he was gone; the door stood open; she called to me from below, ‘Is that you, dear? Did you have a good time? Supper’s ready.’
PART TWO
Chapter One
Many years afterwards I suddenly saw quite clearly that in those first days Ned had loved me much more than I had loved him. I was simply in love with the idea of him; had his approach to me been more immediate, less cautious, I might have realised this. But a genuine and unselfish fear for me, a doubt of our future together, made him hold off. It was not for three weeks after that drive in the snow that he took me out again; and then it was wrong with us—we had nothing to say. I was scared of boring him because I could not face the suspicion that I was a little bored myself. Another week went by, with nothing more than a brief note about nothing in particular. And another week. So my desire was fed by injured pride, and a second, more urgent, more real love imposed itself upon the romantic dream
.
I could not guess that he loved me, but was afraid to claim me in fact as he had already done by the bravado of words. My youngness frightened him. He was slipping away from me and back, as a boat moored in a river slips downstream and then, as if involuntarily, in its own good time, slips back, brought by the compulsion of the current and the rope. For he could neither want me nor want to be free of me.
Meanwhile, living in a sensual fantasy, I moved through the office life, the life of home, of Emilie, of my friends. To my friends I had already dropped a hint or two of Ned, less for the sake of boasting than from the starved impulse to speak his name out loud.
When Emilie observed ‘You don’t see much of that Mr. Skelton, do you, dear? ’ it was less of a pain to me than a pleasure, for by mentioning him she assured me that he was real, that he existed for others besides myself.
Iris, however, suspected that I had won a triumph, and she began to pester me for details. She had just dismissed Victor, after a trumped-up quarrel, because her mother had not rested from assuring her, almost every waking hour, that there were far better fish in the sea. She had dismissed him, and now, though conscious of having acted wisely in a worldly sense, she was really wretched.
I had been to supper at her house, and we were sitting afterwards in the glumly lit drawing-room, the two of us and her mother.
Mrs. Allbright was a tiny, smart, faded woman with a curious, sensitive-looking nose, which seemed rather than her eyes to look, rather than her lips to enquire. Her husband had died in the last year of the war, when Iris was two.
He had been a handsome, weak, mother-seeking man; Mrs. Allbright had mothered him with a kind of angry strenuousness. He had been her whole life. Now that he was dead she had nothing to do but mother, with equal strenuousness though less affection, her pretty and fanciful little girl.
Iris, blithe enough, buoyant enough by herself, seemed in her mother’s company weighed down by a ballast of too much ambition, too much hope. And she maddened Mrs. Allbright by her unresponsiveness.
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