An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  When I came back to my seat he had taken hold of himself, and so, to a degree, had I. He put me at once on to the most disagreeable task he could find, which was to copy some faintly soiled index cards on to some new ones. And when Miss Rosoman came to ask me all the exciting details, he told her sharply that I could not be expected to get on with my work if people constantly interrupted me.

  ‘You’re out of luck,’ she murmured to me, on the way back to her desk. They rang up this morning and said they weren’t doing his play after all. Probably stopped the whole thing so they shouldn’t have to see him act.’

  Certainly he was filled with some sadness from a source independent of my bad behaviour. During tea I heard him singing ‘Thou the Stream’ again under his breath, but this time in a minor key. I felt very sorry for him. I, too, had once enjoyed acting, and had been broken-hearted when the part of Hippolyta was taken away from me and given to a rather fat girl called Freda.

  That I could find time that afternoon to be sorry for Mr. Baynard is indicative of my state of bewilderment. I could scarcely believe what had happened to me and to what I had been publicly committed. My twitching thoughts were sharpened only by a flow of visual images, slotting their way like the lighted carriages of a railway train through a far-off landscape by night; of myself in W.1, strolling between meals in a black dress fluent and slim as a liquorice braid; of the wedding-night in the mysterious room above the sea (the phrase came to me, Le Collier des Perles); of a day of knowledge, flat in the unromantic light, and two people ordinarily dressed, making conversation at a deal table in a prison with no doors at all and no clocks upon the walls. To feel sorry for Mr. Baynard was simply one way of relief.

  I dreaded seeing Ned that night, and at the same time felt the hours would never pass. I did not know what I should say to him. I put my trust in God (I actually prayed; I asked him to send me some healing inspiration) and in the spur of the moment.

  But the day, being one of those overheated days in which curious forces work with a kind of involuntary frenzy, brought me into further trouble—this time of a ridiculous nature.

  It was my duty at five o’clock sharp to collect the remainder of the petty cash, together with the day’s accounting, put it in a cylinder and send it back to the bank through the pneumatic tube. So far as I knew at the time I did as I had always done. In retrospect I rolled up notes and debit slip, slid them into place, and fastened the cylinder-cap, which was of metal with a coating of dingy felt.

  Mr. Baynard and Miss Rosoman had gone home; Miss Cleek had taken the letters to the post; Hatton had not yet come back from delivering his messages. Mr. Fawcett was writing personal letters in his room, and I was just putting on my hat, when the inter-office telephone, between ourselves and the bank downstairs, began to ring. ‘I say,’ said Mr. Harvey, the cashier, ‘we haven’t had your dough. What’s happened to it?’

  I had sent it down, I told him, as usual.

  ‘Half a tick, then; someone else may have got it. I’ll go and see.’ After a pause he returned. ‘We’ve got the cylinder and we’ve got the lid. But no money.’

  I was invaded by alternating tides of heat and cold. ‘It must be there.’

  ‘It’s not. You can’t have screwed the cap on, that’s what.’

  ‘But I did!’

  ‘My dear girl, you can’t’ve.’

  So I went to tell the story to Mr. Fawcett, who, with that look of consternation commonly associated with people who have observed psychic phenomena, eyes protruding, hair (it seemed to me) vertical upon his scalp, darted out without a word. I heard him ringing repeatedly for the lift.

  When he returned, he was not wearing his normal air of friendly abstraction. ‘Do you know what you’ve done? There are three hundred pounds whirling around in the motor, being torn into little pieces!’

  Unable to defend myself, I put my head upon my arms and cried. I had had a terrifying vision of Paolo and Francesca in the eternal whirlwind. Three hundred pounds! It was a sum I had seen in one piece often enough, that I had counted out in fives and tens. Only now did it assume for me its appalling reality.

  I could have done nothing wiser than to put myself at Mr. Fawcett’s mercy.

  He stood above me. I could just see, through my fingers, his huge, hanging, helpless hands.

  ‘All right, all right, it can be fixed. They’ll have the numbers downstairs. But don’t do it again, and for heaven’s sake stop crying! Do stop. The world hasn’t come to an end.’

  So he tried to comfort me, speaking in tones more personal than he had ever used; more personal probably than he had ever supposed he could use to a subordinate without distaste. He scolded and consoled by turns, treated me by turns as a child and as an adult who should be ashamed of herself. Finally, unable to arouse me from my nervous frenzies, he said loudly, ‘Look here, it really doesn’t matter a damn! Besides, you’re upset enough, anyway. Mr. Baynard told me you’d just got engaged. That’s enough to upset anyone. You oughtn’t to be crying, you ought to be happy. Oh, please stop it, Miss Jackson! Go home and have a drink, if you do drink, and enjoy your dinner and think no more about it.’

  He was a good man, but cowardly. He said quickly, ‘I’m going off now. You get along, too. Hatton will lock up.’ With a whisk about of his body that disturbed the surrounding air, a sigh of relief at having decided to struggle with me no longer, he was off and away.

  I raised my head to discover, with some surprise, that my eyes were dry, though at what point I had stopped crying I could not guess. The office was quiet. The rain had ceased, but great glutted drops still sagged from the balustrade on to the veranda outside. I considered, with a kind of detached, intellectual interest, the bank notes eddying in the machine below, which I could conceive only in Wellsian terms as a sort of Martian dynamo. It was a fatal thing to do, for suddenly, without my volition, two of them turned into Ned and myself, spinning in permanent giddiness and supernatural, irrelievable nausea, in the whirlwind created by Dante out of his divine spitefulness—the whirlwind in which the modern mind can never believe (since it has made God into a tolerant fellow, a sort of senior clubman) nor the prophetic soul of the lover ever cease, in its secrecy, to fear.

  Chapter Six

  When he came that night I believed I was ready for him. I should tell him lightly that a joke was all very well, but that I should look foolish when I had to break the pretended engagement next week. I should rebuke him smilingly for giving me so much trouble, and when he had begged my pardon we would both have a good laugh over the dilemma of Mr. Baynard, the effectiveness of Miss Rosoman, the embarrassment of Miss Cleek. I should tell him about the notes in the machine.

  He came springing up the steps, two at a time, smiling all over his face. Reassured, I went to open the door.

  Then he kissed me as he had not done before. I could not bear to raise my head—I was lost.

  ‘What a way for it to happen,’ he said, in a voice not like his own. ‘I love you, Chris. Now you tell me.’

  I told him. It was a moment of drenching terror and joy. Neither of us seemed able to move.

  Then Emilie came along the hall, and when she saw us cried out as if she had seen murder done. Ned let me go. Advancing upon her (she stood with her weight upon the balls of her feet so that the trembling ran through her, one hand upon the newel-post, the other thrust half-out), he kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Aunt Emilie, Chris and I are going to get married.’

  ‘But you can’t,’ she said after a pause. Her gaze flitted between us. She put Ned away from her. ‘Christine is too young.’

  ‘My mother was married at seventeen,’ he replied, which was not true, but is a thing commonly said upon occasions such as these, when it is necessary to stopper criticism.

  ‘It was different in those days,’ Emilie answered with a curious dreaminess. Her eyes were not dreamy. The pupils
were like specks of quartz.

  ‘I know you’re surprised.’ He did not seem to regard this as an understatement. ‘But you must have guessed what I felt about her.’

  ‘She’s too young for you.’

  ‘She’s a bright girl for her age, Aunt Emilie. And I shall train her in the way she should go.’

  She moved past us into the drawing-room. We followed her. She was standing precisely under Tree’s chandelier, as in a place of judgment; but she was overcome by feebleness. ‘I can’t spare Christine. I’ve no one else.’ It did not occur to her then, or at any later time, that she could exercise the right to forbid my marriage till I was of age.

  ‘You can come and live with us, then,’ Ned said loudly, with an overriding force.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Well, you could wish us happiness.’

  ‘It won’t be soon?’ She raised her eyes to him confidingly, as if she felt he were more of her generation than mine. Her colour had faded; beneath the permanent patches of withered rose she was pale.

  ‘Not too soon. I’ve got my own way to make first. I’m setting up for myself. Come on, Aunt Emilie, say something nice!’

  ‘I congratulate you,’ she said. She touched his arm. ‘I congratulate you,’ she said to me. I kissed her. I was full of guilt. I felt as though I had submitted her to some outrageous indignity.

  Ned had come prepared. From the pocket of his mackintosh he brought a half-bottle of whisky. ‘We shall all drink to ourselves. To me and Chris and Aunt Emilie.’ He sent me off for glasses and water.

  Aunt Emilie would drink water only.

  She asked us what our plans were, what Ned’s mother thought, again insisted that the wedding should not be soon. She had accepted it, and she was desolate. He was gentle and reassuring to her throughout this dismal celebration, but he could not stand too much of it.

  ‘And now I want Chris to myself for a bit, which you’ll admit is reasonable. I’m going to run her out to Richmond, and I promise not to be late. I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he said to me, ‘so get your coat on’, and went upstairs to the bathroom.

  ‘It’s a shock,’ said Emilie. ‘It’s such a shock.’

  ‘It was to me, rather, but we shall both get used to it.’

  ‘Yes. Are you sure about it? Are you happy? I wish your father was alive!’

  ‘I’m terribly happy,’ I replied, and it was true. I was at the peak of a happiness so intense that it sent the whole room out of focus. Her pinched face was the only clear thing upon the romantic haze.

  Then she said in a loud, terrified voice, as if driven by conscience to something hateful, ‘If you don’t know about the Act, I couldn’t tell you. You’ll have to find someone else. I suppose you’ll have to know now—’ and ran from the room.

  Ned came back. ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But she was in such a state!’

  ‘She thought I mightn’t know the facts of life,’ I said reluctantly. ‘It was all she could think about, with me getting married. She feels responsible.’

  He began to laugh.

  ‘No,’ I said, don’t.’

  We went that evening for the first time to an hotel in Richmond, built upon a spur of the river. We were to go there regularly during the following year. Sitting in the cocktail bar, dimly lit for lovers, we looked out across the starless water, arrowed by ghostly swans.

  Ned held my hand tightly, almost hurting me. ‘You mean so much, Chris. I never thought I could feel like this. You don’t know how happy I am.’

  In the ballroom they were playing a popular tune of the day, gentle, sexual, invading.

  I am always a little sorry for the man or woman sensitive to music, whose lover is deaf to it. A tune which, for me, contained and still contains the essence of ourselves together, because I had heard it in his company at some moment of heightened sadness or felicity, would mean nothing to Ned, for he could not tell it from another. To have it haunting my own past and to know it could have no place in his was, for me, a barrier between us. These mnemonic tunes need have no appropriateness to the moment in which they are first heard or apprehended; there is a trivial, facetious song, with a commonplace melody, which moves me violently even on the heights of the present, since it resurrects for me a moment twenty years in its grave; it makes me look down, and I am afraid of falling.

  ‘What are they playing?’ I asked Ned.

  ‘Don’t ask me. The only tune I know is God Save the King, because everybody stands up.’

  Later, we walked on Richmond Green. The air smelled of grass and dew and of the river. ‘“Unforgettable, unforgotten,” ’ Ned murmured, tightening his arm around my shoulders. ‘You see, I can be literary, too, if I want to be. I’m not altogether a Philistine.’ The lamplight shone upon the Georgian houses beautiful in their plainness and integrity, softening red brick to the rose of Emilie’s cheeks. ‘That’s where I’d like to live one day. But we’ll have to go slow at first.’

  I had not contemplated going slow: I had seen my marriage in terms of stateliness and space and ease. But I was troubled only for a minute, for youth is ready to adapt itself to any new idea, and within a second I had established us both in a small but elegant little flat, three rooms and bath. It was a delightful idea, more delightful than the original one. Here I would work for Ned, showing him my love by my care for his well-being, the skilfulness of my domestic economy.

  ‘I shall like it anywhere with you,’ I said.

  He swung me round. Few people were about; for him there might have been no one at all but ourselves. He said, again in the voice unlike his own, that disturbed and excited me, ‘Will you? Do you feel like that? You’ve got to love me, Chris, as much as I love you, because otherwise I shan’t be able to bear it.’ He put his hand upon my breast. ‘You’ll find out.’

  I said at last, excited by an emotion I had never known before, an emotion which seemed to demand a gift for the lover, and a great one, ‘You’re older than I am. If you don’t want to wait . . . it would only be for you. I couldn’t say it, except to you.’

  He let me go. Before he spoke, I felt the frost that came from him. ‘You’re not a trollop. Don’t be so silly. And don’t ever say a thing like that again.’

  None of this would have happened had I not been too young for him, and other things were to happen for the same reason; but as yet I did not understand it. I humbled myself; I assured him of my innocence. He said he did not doubt it, but that I must learn not to say things which might arouse doubtfulness in people who did not know me. I told him I would do whatever he said, that I would learn from him, that I would trust my life to him. When he thought I was sufficiently conscious of my error he took me and kissed me until I was breathless with joy and on the edge of hysterical tears; but inside of me a small, cold critic sat aloof.

  Chapter Seven

  Next Sunday he took me to meet his family. He Iived with his parents. He had a widowed sister ten years older than he, whom he seemed not to like very much.

  I was shy enough of this visit to ask for advance information. What were they all like? What did they look like? Would they be pleased with me? How did they wish to be treated? I could not be sufficiently prepared. When Ned told me his sister despised make-up but his mother didn’t mind it, I begged him earnestly to tell me which of them I should try to satisfy, urged him at least to anticipate his father’s casting-vote. ‘It wouldn’t matter a two-penny damn to me what any of them thought,’ he said. ‘And, anyhow, I like you as you are. You don’t want to dress yourself up. Or down.’

  Nevertheless, I spent over an hour upon myself that day, growing more and more nervous as I tried first one dress and then another, made-up my face, scrubbed it clean again, and attempted to do it differently. My hair would not go right. It sprang
out at angles foreign to it, it was lustreless, it hung lankly out of curl. I felt I had not only a young look but a humble one. I was almost in despair, and so frightened by this time that birds seemed to be fluttering around in my stomach. Emilie did not help me by sitting mute on the bed, staring with mournful eyes at a patch of wall about a foot beyond my head. She was now in a state of melancholic resignation. It made her follow me from room to room, watching me as though she expected me to vanish suddenly into air, and making no comment except occasionally to remark, ‘I don’t suppose he meant it about letting me live with you. It was just for something to say.’

  It was ridiculous but noble-hearted of Sinbad the Sailor to stop and worry because the Old Man of the Sea might be getting pins and needles. Emilie should have maddened me, but she did not. Somehow I felt her misery as if it had been my own, was endowed with such a degree of empathy that I could sometimes wish she had the power to persuade me not to marry after all, but to support her dismal loneliness for as long as she lived. Even when she was not with me, she hung around my mind like an importuning ghost; but I dared not console her openly for fear of making her worse. I doubt nowadays whether she was really suffering so much as I supposed; her misery was probably more of a passive than an active state, something necessary to her, something she would have been lost and naked without. I think perhaps we often suffer unnecessary torments of spirit by imputing to others griefs as intense as our own. If we did not, we should, of course, be happier—but then, we should be less than we are. For we cannot dispossess other people from our conscience simply because they are self-regarding, or even wicked. They may suffer in the same way as the most selfless, the most generous of heart; so long as we are unable to assess the degree of their pain, we must assume it as heavy as we ourselves can imagine, and treat it accordingly.

  ‘I expect you’ll be late, dear,’ said Emilie, ‘but don’t be later than you can help.’ She added, presenting me with a picture of woe, ‘Have a good time.’