‘My daughter, Christine, is a great trial to me.’ This was spoken as if Iris were not in the same room with us, rocking one foot over the other and flicking at a fashion magazine. ‘She gets this cabaret chance: a special song with two other girls, and a verse to herself. Does she leap at the opportunity? Will she try to perfect herself? Will she practise? No. She just moons about the house dusting and doing the beds, as if she were a charwoman.’
Iris seemed not to listen to this oblique bullying. She put a record on the gramophone, a sentimental song made popular by the latest talking film, and hummed the words to herself.
‘Do you know, Christine,’ Mrs. Allbright continued remorselessly, ‘who goes to the Cafe Elysee? The Prince of Wales. Now suppose Iris caught his eye. What wouldn’t a word from him do for her? I say to her, “If you won’t practise for your mother, practise for the Prince.” But she’s stubborn as a mule.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Iris cried out, shouting above the wheedling song. ‘Anyone would think he was going to marry me!’
Her mother flushed up with temper and a kind of obscure triumph. ‘Stranger things than that have happened!’ The needle ground in the groove, Just you, just you, just you, just you.
Iris raced to the gramophone, turned it off and banged down the lid. There you are, Christie! That’s what I have to put up with!’
‘They say,’ said Mrs. Allbright, ‘that he has an eye for a pretty girl. Any man who has an eye for a girl may be drawn in further than he thinks. In a democracy anything may happen.’
Stop it, stop it, stop it!’ Iris put her fingers in her ears.
Her mother sighed. ‘Oh, well. You see how I’m treated by my own girl. I wish she had your brains. Looks aren’t everything.’
‘If you’re suggesting,’ Iris shouted, still with stoppered ears but by no means deaf to her mother, whose lips she had probably learned to read, ‘that Christie hasn’t got looks, she’ll go straight home and I won’t have a single friend left. You’ve already taken Victor away from me.’
‘Of course Christine’s quite nice-looking. But God gave you exceptional looks, and no heart, and no brains. And I don’t want to hear any more about Victor. He was common.’
Iris put her hands down and relaxed into moodiness again; but it was a new kind of moodiness, with tears threatening.
‘Where’s that nice Ronald Dean? ‘Mrs. Allbright demanded.
This was the young man Iris had mischievously taken from Caroline, and had handed back with lavish generosity too late for the quarrel to be mended. Caroline was married now. She had been bright about it, brave and defiant. She had known that it would be disastrous.
‘Don’t bring that up again,’ Iris said, ‘or I’ll be having trouble with Christie as well as you.’
‘Iris can’t help it if men come round her like honey-pots,’ Mrs. Allbright said to me in a tone of rebuke. She felt her simile was somehow inexact. ‘As around a honey-pot,’ she corrected herself. ‘And Christine has her own interests these days, I believe.’
Her manner had changed. She was on her daughter’s side now, hot on the scent. She smoothed her abundant grey hair, dressed with such elaboration of waves and whorls that it made her head seem too weighty for her body to endure. Leaning back on the sofa in a pose a little like Madame Récamier’s, she pointed her intelligent nose.
‘A little bird tells me there is an exciting young man in the offing.’
‘Christie’s an oyster,’ said Iris; ‘she’s a clam. She doesn’t trust her old friends, and if you badger her she’ll just be oofy.’
‘There’s nothing exciting,’ I replied.
‘A little bird tells me he’s not one of these callow boys,’ said Mrs. Allbright.
Iris was the little bird.
‘He’s thirty-two.’
‘My dear, my dear, I hope you know what you’re doing! It’s a wise little head on young shoulders, as we all know, but men of that age don’t always have the right intentions.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said, but rejoicing to speak of him. ‘I only know Ned casually.’
‘He’s that perfect charmer we met at the dance, Mother, the one Christie took poor little Keith to.’
‘And very nice of her. I like a girl who can make sacrifices.’ Mrs. Allbright leaned across to pat the air approvingly, for she could not reach quite far enough to pat me. Her animus against Iris returned. ‘I know girls who won’t make sacrifices even for their own mothers.’
Iris was, however, too interested in her own thoughts to be distracted into anger. She came from her own chair to mine and wreathed her arm around me, a pretty arm, smooth and faintly freckled, like the shell of a brown egg. ‘Christie! I want you to bring him here one night. I want to make sure he’s really good enough for you. Please do!’
I replied that I did not know him well enough to take him visiting. ‘Besides,’ I added just so that she could hear and not her mother, ‘I haven’t forgotten Caroline.’
Iris twitched her nose. It was shorter than her mother’s, and more delicately made, but sometimes it had the same air of living on its own and holding its own opinions. ‘Horrid!’ she murmured back. She added aloud, ‘Well, get to know him better. I’ll be thrilled to see him! Everyone will be!’
‘I wonder,’ Mrs. Allbright said dreamily, ‘who of all our circle—you young ones, I mean—will be engaged first? Iris, I expect. She has more opportunities.’
‘Perhaps Christine will marry Neddy!’ Iris cried, on a babyish note. She had a habit of giving intimate nicknames to people she hardly knew or had never even met.
I told her not to be silly.
‘Christine has her own way to make. She has to look after her aunt. I’m sure her father didn’t spend all that money on her training just for her to go and marry any Tom, Dick or Harry.’
I heard this, but said nothing. I had fallen into a delightful dream of marriage. In a dark room full of the smell of flowers, with a foreign sea beyond, I held out my arms to him in terror and in longing. My thoughts seized hold of one detail of the picture and perversely clung to it. I was trying to decide upon the right nightgown.
Mrs. Allbright retired shortly afterwards. ‘I’m feeling sleepy, and you girls like to have your secrets to yourself.’ She had a parting shot at the door. ‘See if you can’t make my lazy daughter practise!’
When she had gone I said to Iris, ‘I’m not risking anybody with you, not after the business with Caroline.’
Her eyes filled and were grey as rain. She laid her hand against my cheek. ‘Darling! I swear I couldn’t help it. I tried to put him off, I swear it. And I did send him back, after all. I do think you’re cruel!’
On any other night she would have developed this theme, out of secret pride in her own power to charm and waylay, but something else was worrying her.
‘You are cruel, Christie,’ she added, but she gave it a conclusive air, as if not meaning that we should discuss the topic further. ‘Darling, I want to ask you a question.’
‘What is it?’
‘Only between us. Because we’re old friends. I couldn’t say it to anyone else. Christie, do you feel you’d want to—you know, let a man do that?’
It was the circumlocution of our day, elusive, nounless. As I have said before, we had no easy word like ‘lovemaking’ to help us.
‘If you were married, of course,’ she added with a prim look. ‘We’re not tarts.’ She took my hand and held it.
I could not answer while she was so close to me; speaking of love, she was the caricature of a lover. I got up and went over to the window. It was a wet night, and the lamps dropped their weighted ribbons into the black seas of the street. A car went by, casting up a splash and spatter as it turned the corner. I said, ‘Yes, I should want to. It’s ordinary to want to.’
‘I don’t!
’
I turned to look at her. She might have been crying for hours rather than for a few seconds. She looked pale, swollen, almost plain. ‘I’ve got to tell you. I’d loathe it. The thought of it makes me ill. I’ll have to bear it when I get married because I want babies, but that’s all! I’ve got to marry, anyway, because I shan’t make good on the damned stage, and then I’ll have to get away from Mother. But I shall hate it. I don’t know how you can!’
It was easy to come to her now and let her cling to me.
‘But Iris,’ I said after a minute or so, ‘you kiss them, don’t you? Doesn’t that ever make you feel——’
‘No! I don’t feel anything, ever. Except being pleased they like me. I’ve got to have that. It keeps me going.’
‘Is that the only reason you took Ronnie from Caroline?’
But at this she composed herself. Her features tightened. She gave me the smile she gave to the men, veiled, half a secret offered to them, the other half kept to herself. ‘How ridiculous you are! It wasn’t my fault at all. He ran after me from the moment he met me. If you want to blame anyone, blame Caroline. She didn’t do a thing to help herself. She just sat there and watched.’
It was getting late. I got up and went to fetch my coat. She did not go with me to the bedroom, but I found her waiting by the hall door. She gave me one of her planted, fresh kisses in the middle of my cheek.
‘One thing,’ I said, ‘if Ned ever does begin to like me I’ll see you don’t meet him. As a compliment to you.’
This was meant, indeed, partly as a compliment, but mostly as a joke, that we might end the evening easily. To my surprise she did not take it as such.
‘You are strong, Christie! How I envy you!’
Then she said something which seemed to come, not from herself, but from a creature lodged inside her. It had the sound of that prophecy which is only slightly emphasised because it is so sure, and I was to remember it all my life.
‘And the people who fall in love with you will jolly well see to it that you go on being strong. You’ll never be able to cry on any man’s chest. You won’t be allowed to.’
It struck me as nonsense, then—a kind of malignant but quite meaningless retort to my remark about Ned. Attracted as I was by his ruthlessness, his force, his lack of any by-your-leave, I could not imagine what she was talking about. Perhaps she could not, either, for she looked suddenly bewildered. Her smile broke out again, sweet, flirtatious, affectionate. ‘It’s been a comfort to talk. Don’t mind me. I’m often silly.’
Chapter Two
It was spring. My friends and I were mourning the death of D. H. Lawrence. Few of us had read much of his work, besides Sons and Lovers, and we grieved for him partly because he had suffered for impropriety’s sake. (In those days the standard of impropriety had not yet reached so high a level that a writer would be hard put to it to find enthusiastic persecutors. This was our difficult dawn; this was the first putting-forth of our noses to sniff the air of sexual freedom.) Yet we grieved also because, though we did not fully understand him, though we were frightened of him—sensing perhaps the touch of chill at the core of his savage and sensuous being—we felt that he was one of us. If he had not been, he could not so surely, so remorselessly, have set his thumb upon the sore places of our hearts. Aldous Huxley, we felt, had been for us. He flattered our intellects; somehow he kept his own dazzling cleverness just within our range so that, if we used our brains as he meant us to, we could always pride ourselves on seeing the joke. But Lawrence made us face what was in the dark of ourselves, whether we liked it or not; he showed us the way out of our youth, and showed us that it was hard.
Ned, to whom I spoke of him on one of our rare, becalmed, frustrating afternoons, shook his head at me. ‘There’s nothing in the fellow. I got hold of a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and, believe me, anyone could do that if they put in all the dirty words.’
The chill that came off Lawrence seemed nothing beside the chill that sometimes came off Ned. I felt it the most keenly when I first found the courage to show him clippings of my few published poems. He read them through, half smiling, then handed them back in silence. I put them in my bag. It was an hour later before he referred to them; meanwhile, we had been talking together in the uneasy, profitless banter which it seemed neither of us could escape. He said, ‘I haven’t got the true artist in my soul, Chris. You’ll have to attend to that side of things.’
We went out together once a week, either for a drive or to the cinema. He had kissed me for the first time, an ordinary goodnight kiss, not the kiss I had dreaded and longed for. I was in love with him—but not all the time. There were days when I woke to believe myself free of him. The world had mysteriously shifted into new proportions, as if some great, benign hand had jolted it during the night. On these days I told myself that it would be easy not to see him so often, and eventually not to see him at all. But then, if he did not write to me or telephone me at the office (which he usually did at ten to nine, before Mr. Baynard came in) I would be sick with desire for him, tormented by fantasies in which, without thought for myself, I would put into his hands all that I was, begging him to destroy me and rebuild me to his liking.
Also I was thinking, in a manner precariously balanced between the romantic and the practical, what it might be like if I married him.
We should not lightly condemn the snobberies of middle-class youth. For a girl like myself, born into the stratum that is for some odd reason left undesignated (not lower-middle, certainly not upper-middle, but somewhere as nearly as possible equidistant), there was not much to look forward to. A few years of business life, which might only euphemistically be referred to as a career; and then, perhaps, a modest marriage into familiar circles, familiar standards; the birth of children, and the same not unamiable, but quite unpromising, cycle all over again. I did not think seriously of a career for myself. A few poems, not really in the latest fashion, seemed little enough to found it upon: and though I professed to find T. S. Eliot freakish and pretentious, I had more than a suspicion that the day of Rupert Brooke, in whose manner I wrote, was done.
I shared, with several other girls whom I knew, the unspoken and rather despairing conviction that the only progress we could possibly hope to make would be a social one, although, being bookish, we would genuinely have preferred it to be professional. Already the suburban dance-halls seemed things of the past; the proper thing to do was to drink cocktails in the bars of Mayfair, thus romantically identifying oneself, even if only for an evening once a fortnight, with the debutante and the prostitute. (I do not think Caroline could have faced her marriage at all had not her husband felt a strong orientation towards Dover Street.) Ned took me sometimes to the Running Horse; even on one occasion to Hatchett’s. And his address was W.1.
He lived in Maddox Street, in a flat above a wholesale dress-house. He had not yet asked me to his home; I had seen it only from the outside, craning my neck upwards on a misty afternoon, hoping no one would see me and wonder what I was doing there. This was one of the days when the ache of longing had become intolerable. Almost without forethought I had found myself, during the office lunch-hour, moving in the general direction of Bond Street, not knowing why, and knowing perfectly well.
W.1. It had a magical sound in those days for the young living far beyond in the greater numerals: S.W.11, N.W.12, S.E.14. Perhaps it still has. It meant an excitement, a dangling of jewels in the dusk, music and wine. It meant having enough money not to get up on the cold, sour mornings and catch the crowded bus. It meant a kind of adventurous security.
I was sensible enough not to suppose Ned was rich or that he lived in grandeur; but I did know that he had been to a minor public school on the south coast, that he had a club, and that W.1, though he was not likely to admit it, would have as much importance in his imagination as in mine.
During that first time of dou
bt I was often pulled back from the instinct to leave him by the fantasy of myself stylish and safe in W.1. I can set this down without being much ashamed, for the silliness of youth has for me now the older sense of the word—which is simplicity or innocence. There is something cold and minatory about boys and girls who never pass through what we call a silly stage. I am more ashamed to recall that my visions of a smart life were derived less from my sober and conscientious reading (from Henry James or from Swann’s Way) than from my less publicly avowed reading of Michael Arlen.
But I had another reason, apart from the impatience of youth and the fear of the future, for thinking I might marry.
Chapter Three
Emilie had changed. She had been one of those mild, contented women with no apparent inner life, but now a deep one seemed to have taken possession of her. At first she had been dulled with grief, anaesthetised by it. In the past few weeks she had grown melancholic, only too aware of misery, only too prone to release it in sudden, soundless weeping. Several times I had come back from work to find no supper prepared for me and Emilie seated in the drawing-room window staring out over the Common, making no attempt to wipe the tears that fell down a face which had once the bright rosiness of a ripe apple, and had now the rosy-brownness of an apple rotten at the core. She no longer seemed content to let me go in and out as I pleased. She wanted to know my whereabouts, to know what time I should be in again. She needed me at last. She hated to be alone in the house.
At first she only hinted at this; soon she made it quite open, often devising strange little treats to keep me in.
‘Do you know what I thought we’d do tonight? There’s a very good programme on the wireless, so I thought, why not have our supper in the drawing-room, on a tray?’
Or again: ‘Today I remembered a game your father showed me—it’s such fun. I thought I might teach it you this evening so we could often play together.’
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