An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Her behaviour was pathetic and, in its way, comic; I had never known her remember so many hypothetical centenaries. Her uncle would have been a hundred and four on the third of next month, and his wife a hundred and five. Once she bought a bottle of medicated burgundy to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Golden Wedding her parents had not succeeded in reaching. These thoughts did not seem, as before, to add sadness to her wonder; they induced in her now a kind of hilarity, a flushed, soft-footed good humour. They made her sing under her breath ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’.

  Caroline, who had looked in one night, happened to find Emilie in one of these moods. She said to me later, when we were alone, ‘She’s a little odd these days, isn’t she, Chris?’

  I said I hoped it would pass. ‘But if it doesn’t I shall have to get married or something. It’s a dreadful house to come home to.’

  She laughed. She was tall and fair, with the heavy eyes and thick affectionate mouth of the portrait of a girl by Roger van der Weyden, which is in the National Gallery. ‘I’d swap my spouse for your aunt any day. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I burst out. I had not dared ask it before, out of respect for her courageous pretences.

  ‘Oh, I promised in a fit of nonsense—and then I couldn’t get out of it. You’d be surprised how one can’t. The first of us all to marry, and just look at me!’

  ‘It will turn out all right. It must.’

  ‘I tell myself so.’ She sighed and rose, shutting herself off from me again. She had always been an oddly abstracted girl, receiving the confidences people felt impelled to give her, yet offering little in return. ‘But you stay put. I mean it,’ she added, as she put on her hat, pushing it carefully back from her protruberant and rather childish brow. ‘The bed part is all right. It’s when you get up again that you have your doubts.’

  I was looking, not at her but at her face in the mirror, the face which should have been naked only to her own eyes. She had been the most phlegmatic, the most easygoing, the least vulnerable of us all; and at nineteen she had to find her way alone out of a silly tragedy that need never have happened. At this moment she dreaded going home.

  ‘It would be too much trouble,’ she said, ‘to avoid Iris, because she seems to rear her beautiful head all over the place. But one day I shall lie quietly down on the rug and sink my teeth in her calf.’

  I went up, when she had gone, to say goodnight to Emilie. I found her lying fully dressed on the bed in the full glare of the light.

  ‘I thought you’d be asleep by now,’ I said.

  ‘I hardly sleep at all. And I wasn’t sleepy.’

  ‘Why did you go up so early?’

  ‘I knew you wanted to be alone with your friend. You don’t need me now. Nobody does.’ She stared open-eyed into the burning lace of the gas-mantle, like an eagle staring at the sun or (I thought, with horrible literary appositeness) like Regulus lidless on the Carthaginian shore. ‘You don’t want me,’ said Emilie with a kind of revolted scorn.

  After scenes of this kind it was a relief to go to the office.

  Chapter Four

  The day began propitiously. I was reading, in a flush of excitement and discovery, a new American novel brought to me by Take Plato. (This was a friend of Dicky Flint’s, a handsome, black-avised youth of passionate intellectual ambitions, whose hair grew bison-like upon his forehead, and whose nickname had arisen from his habit, at one time, of appearing to begin every sentence with these two words.)

  ‘This is wonderful, Christine! You’ve got to read it! It’s greater than Tolstoi; it’s greater than Katherine Mansfield!’ His admirations were eclectic.

  ‘I’ve been hearing about nothing but his wretched book for a month solid,’ Dicky had said, giving his long shy grin. ‘We’ll be having to change his name if this goes on. We’ll have to call him Crying Wolfe, only it sounds like a Red Indian.’

  The book was Look Homeward Angel, and the copy, sent to Take Plato by a friend in Illinois, was the first American edition. I was intoxicated by it. I could not put it down even to eat my supper, despite Emilie’s disapproval of reading at mealtimes. I took it to the bathroom and read it while I lay soaking, pausing now and then, as the bath grew too cool for comfort, to add some more hot water. I even read it on the top of the bus, though the jolting print made me feel sick.

  It was a book for us, for our age, for our time; a book for youth, for the silly, the loving, the yearning, with their intimations of immortality, their hot hearts and hot heads. It was formless, as we were. Like us, it was filled with vaulting ambitions, noble aspirations; with the frustration of beholding the world beautiful and entire, in the knowledge that we should never be able to communicate this entirety, should be lucky if we could stammer out even an impoverished hint of it.

  I was intoxicated by it—and in this delightful drunkenness arrived at the office to find a note from Ned, summoning me to lunch with him that day at the Trocadero; to find Mr. Baynard cheerful and musical because he had been chosen to play the most interesting of the young men in Hay Fever, which his local dramatic society was to produce that summer; to find Mr. Fawcett beaming with joy because he had been able to announce the engagement of his least satisfactory son to a widow who would be able to keep him in the comfort to which he had been accustomed.

  ‘Spring is in the air,’ said Miss Rosoman. ‘What a lovely day!’

  And indeed it was one of those spring days which, even in London, are of a colour between blue and green; a sparkling, pretty day to bring the women out in flowery dresses.

  ‘Seems a pity to have to work,’ said Miss Cleek timidly, as if afraid we might think this an audacious sentiment on her part. ‘Though, of course, one has to,’ she added quickly.

  Miss Rosoman stretched her arms over her head; her full breasts rose and hardened. ‘I’d like to be out with my boy today, on the river at Sonning, or something like that.’ I was too happy to flinch snobbishly at the phrase ‘my boy’, which was one neither I nor my friends would ever have used.

  ‘ “ Thou the stream

  and I the willow,

  Thou the idol

  I the clay,”’

  Mr. Baynard sang in his frail, throaty voice. Knowing the song, I joined in with the ‘seconds’, waiting for his ‘Thou the–’ before cutting in with my descending ‘Thou the stream’.

  In the waiting-room Hatton was humming ‘Exercise’, to the droning accompaniment of the vacuum-cleaner, and the sun poured through the office windows, laying its quiet golden rectangles across the shining floors. Nothing could have begun more propitiously. My thoughts balancing between Thomas Wolfe and Ned, I worked that morning with the beautiful precision typists are often able to achieve in a state of trance. I took letters from Mr. Fawcett without hearing a word he dictated, so that when I came to transcribe them they appeared quite unfamiliar and interesting. At twelve o’clock (my normal lunch hour) I went exultantly to meet Ned.

  He had never taken me out to lunch before, chiefly because my time was so short; this seemed a special occasion. The restaurant, to me, was a smart one. I was glad to be wearing my new grey costume and hat.

  ‘Nice,’ he said appreciatively, looking me up and down. He took me out of the daylight into the warm and lamplit grill-room. The smell of roasting meat and poultry made me hungry. It was pleasant to feel, at the same time, hungry, beautiful and in love.

  As usual, he began to draw me out about my life, my habits, my tastes, my likes and dislikes, about my few childish love-affairs; about my friends, Iris, Caroline, Dicky, Leslie and Take Plato. The way I talked amused him; his eyes were sparkling and steady, full of affection and irony; but behind them was something else, something new and purposeful.

  ‘Not a bad record for a small girl,’ he commented, having edged me into telling him the names of four boys over wh
om I had respectively wept between my twelfth and my sixteenth year. ‘I shan’t put up with any more of it, you know. Dicky goes, Leslie goes, Plato goes.’

  ‘There was only Leslie, and he’s already gone.’ I could not help laughing. We were comfortable together; I was flattered by what I supposed to be his pretence of jealousy, and time went quickly.

  ‘I must be going,’ I told him; ‘there’s such a fuss if I’m even two minutes late.’

  I hoped he would call the waiter, but he did not. Let them wait for once. I’ve a piece of news for you, such as it is. I’m going into the house-selling business on my own.’ He told me he had long hated working for his father —‘It’s as bad as one of your relations teaching you at school’—and felt he would do better working for himself. His mother and father had agreed to lend him some capital, in addition to what he had already managed to save. ‘I shall start pretty modestly and then build up. I know the ropes. And I shall have something to fight for.’

  Had he said ‘work’ instead of ‘fight’ I should merely have assumed that he meant his own independence; his choice of the word told me that he meant something more, and I felt a stab of panic and excitement. He took my hand and kissed it, then stared straight at me. The rest of the room was blotted out by a haze of dark gold and darker rose. It was very hot. The babble of voices seemed far away. ‘We’ll be talking about this again.’

  I was taken with the shyness that is a part of early love, one of its dreads and delights. My own voice sounded forced as I told him how glad I was for his sake, how much I hoped for his success. I added that I really would have to go; that if he didn’t mind I would leave him to pay the bill while I rushed back to the office.

  He held my hand firmly. ‘But I do mind. You’ll go when I go.’

  I was shot through with so intense a pleasure that it seemed to me shameful. I could not meet his eyes. But however much his air of authority pleased me, I was forced to resist it. I suffered from a sort of pathological punctuality, either inherited from or patterned upon my father. Wherever I was going, I allowed for at least half an hour more than was necessary to get there. Not to arrive on time for an ordinary friendly meeting distressed me enough, but the idea of being late for the office (I had had no martinis this time to protect me against Mr. Baynard, for Ned never drank before the evening) was a torment.

  ‘I must go. I’ve got to. I shall get into such trouble!’

  ‘Sit down, Chris, and don’t fidget. How long have we known each other? Not counting the dance—since we went to Hindhead?’

  ‘Five months.’

  ‘All that time I’ve been trying to make up my mind about us.’

  ‘Ned, you must get the bill!’

  ‘All right.’

  He called to the waiter, who said, ‘Half a minute, sir.’

  ‘I’ve sown my wild oats. You haven’t begun to think about yours,’ he went on.

  ‘Girls,’ I said faintly, ‘don’t really sow them.’

  ‘Some girls do. I’ve known girls who have.’

  I hated them all.

  ‘Not girls like me.’

  ‘Not so young, anyhow.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of being young,’ I insisted, to put the girls he had known into their proper places (as a crowd of unworthy demireps); ‘it’s a matter of principle.’

  He smiled. ‘Have it your own way. Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to be accused of baby-snatching.’

  The term seemed to me vulgar; for a moment I felt the chill of it. ‘So far as I know there’s no reason why you should be,’ I replied, I fancied with dignity.

  ‘Don’t you? I really think you should.’

  The crisis I had awaited so long, with such trepidation and desire, was plainly imminent: and now my only thought was for my lateness; the only figure in the forefront of my mind Mr. Baynard.

  ‘Ned, is that waiter never coming?’

  He did not budge. ‘He’s taking his time.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall, a little white face set in a curly-rayed sun. I had thought it a beautiful clock; now I hated it. He added, with a touch of unmistakable malice, ‘And, what’s more, that clock’s ten minutes slow.’

  I was aghast. ‘Oh, it isn’t! It can’t be!’

  He compared it with his watch. ‘Twelve minutes slow, to be exact. Oh dear, you are in trouble, aren’t you? ’

  I was almost crying. I have to go, I tell you! You don’t know what it’s like for me.’

  Neurotic,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘A distressing sight in one so young.’

  I got up. Before he could stop me I left the room, raced up the stairs and ran as hard as I could go towards my fate. He caught up with me quite easily just as I had reached the corner of Jermyn Street.

  Don’t get in such a state, Chris. It’s exaggerated. I’ll come and put things right with old What’s-his-name.’ He held my arm firmly, forcing me to slow down.

  ‘You mustn’t! ’ —though as yet I could not believe he meant it. ‘It would make it much worse!’

  He said: ‘I’ll come with you.’

  I grew desperate. He was being cruel, and I knew it. Later, the memory of it might excite me, might seem to me delicious proof of his strength and manhood, but at the moment it was merely frightening. I kept begging him not to; my voice grew louder and louder.

  ‘You don’t want to cause a public sensation,’ he said. ‘They’ll be having us up for obstruction.’

  On the office steps I made one last appeal.

  ‘Nonsense. It was my fault, anyway, and I’m going to see you don’t suffer for it.’

  ‘But I’ll suffer worse!’

  ‘The more you argue, the later it’s getting,’ he replied sturdily; and as if that were not enough, the pathetic fallacy came into operation, for quite suddenly the bright day dimmed, as if a shovelful of dust had been cast across the sky, and a few great drops began to fall.

  Even in the lift he held my arm, was still holding it when we went into the office, to find Mr. Baynard awaiting me, rigid as Nelson on his column and in very much the same attitude.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Exactly half an hour over time, Miss Jackson!’ he shot at me in the staccato intonation he must have been rehearsing inwardly since one minute past one, simply altering the time named in accordance with the realities of the situation. He was too enraged even to notice Ned; or he may have thought (not perceiving the policeman grip) that he was a client who had happened to follow me in. Mr. Baynard never minded offering a rebuke in public.

  Miss Rosoman, in pity for me, bent her head and typed furiously. Miss Cleek, who had just put her head round the door of the cloakroom, withdrew it. She would hide until the storm was over.

  ‘This is the second time in six months!’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very impressive, if he but knew it,’ Ned muttered in my ear.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Baynard,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get the bill—,’

  ‘You should leave time for getting bills! I’m not going to be flouted like this by the Junior. I won’t have it. I will have my authority respected.’ His lip quivered. Rage always brought him close to tears. He turned to Ned. ‘Yes, sir? What can we do for you? ’

  ‘I’m with Miss Jackson. It was entirely my fault that she was late.’

  Betrayed into using to a friend of the Junior’s a tone he would normally only have used to a client A or B, Mr. Baynard’s fury knew no bounds.

  ‘Miss Jackson’s no right to bring her friends in here! And she’s no right to go out to lunch with friends if she can’t get back in time! This is a business office! I won’t have it!’

  Ned let go of me. He took a perching step to the counter and leaned upon it, looking up at Mr. Baynard with deceptive mildness. ‘The trouble is,’ h
e said, “that you are rude. I don’t like that.’

  ‘Who are you? What are you? Who do you think you’re talking to?’

  It struck me suddenly as a little pitiable, for Mr. Baynard was scared. He was afraid of being made ridiculous in front of the girls.

  Ned was in no hurry to reply. Miss Rosoman had slowed her typing to a beginner’s pace because she did not want to miss anything. The cloakroom door, open half an inch, indicated the interest of Miss Cleek.

  Ned said, ‘I am going to marry Miss Jackson. We decided it at lunch, which I thought might have been a good enough excuse to satisfy any reasonable person if you’d given me a chance to offer it. My name is Skelton.’

  Mr. Baynard saw the way of escape and took it. ‘Oh, I see! Well, that makes some sort of difference. I suppose I must congratulate you, Miss Jackson. But it mustn’t happen again.’

  ‘I should be annoyed if it did,’ Ned murmured, with an appearance of courteous jocularity. He put a hand upon my shoulder.

  I felt myself at the core of a tenacious dream, unable to think, to speak, having no strength to force myself awake. It must be a joke: Ned could not make me marry him by this means. Yet I felt proud. Though the dream was terrifying, I could not be certain that I was not enjoying it. I do not know what I should have done or said if I had not been saved by the percipience of Miss Rosoman, who told me afterwards what had come to her in a flash: that this was the first I had heard of my own engagement.

  She came to the counter, leaned across it and kissed me, having to heave both her feet off the ground in order to perform the feat. ‘Christine, I’m so glad! Why didn’t you tell us? Oh, Mr. Baynard, isn’t it exciting?’

  Baffled, he agreed that it was very exciting. Miss Cleek, flushed, appeared in the passage and sidled her way towards her little desk.

  ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ Ned told me. I’ll call round about eight.’ He kissed my cheek, nodded to Mr. Baynard, gave Miss Rosoman his open and charming smile, and went away.

  ‘We can’t let pleasure interfere with business,’ Mr. Baynard said, ‘even great events. You’d better hurry up and get your things off.’