I was so anxious to appear gay and at ease when I arrived at Maddox Street that I succeeded in fixing upon my mouth a tight and aching simper. I knew it did not become me; I did not know how to get rid of it. My lips had a stretched feeling, as though they were chapped.
‘Relax, relax,’ Ned said to me, as he stopped the car.
‘I am relaxed,’ I answered in a strange, high voice, but the simper fell away, leaving behind it a small, uncontrollable twitching.
We climbed up a steep, uncarpeted stairway past several floors of offices. A little light filtered through the landing windows, an olivine and dusty light, unhelpful, discouraging. ‘Let me get my breath.’
‘What bad shape you must be in! ‘Ned exclaimed. ‘You’re snorting like a grampus. Why, I played rugger up to last year. I was about the best fly-half the club ever had.’
We came to the top floor. Before he opened it, he kissed me. ‘I’m as proud as Punch.’
After the commercial dreariness of the approach, the flat seemed to approximate itself to my dreams of smartness. I was aware of light paint, gilded looking-glasses, damask hangings Sketch; the very tall, very lean woman who came to meet me was, to my eyes, a creature from the or Tatler. I thought she must be his sister, since she looked so young.
But her voice was not young, and a vision of Leslie’s mother flicked up into my mind before I could formulate any reason why it should.
‘Well, Christine, thank God my son’s found someone to take him off our hands.’ She touched my cheek formally with her lips. ‘I’m very pleased. Come along in.’
In the harsh north light of the drawing-room I saw that, despite her slenderness, her stiff bearing, she was an old woman. She must have been sixty—which was old to me then, but is not so old now. She had Ned’s lofty, avian look and heavy eyes; her hair, which she wore in the eton crop of the 1920s, was still ivory-fair. She turned me about, studying me thoughtfully. ‘She’s a pretty girl, Ned. Has she the slightest idea what she’s in for?’ She added to me, ‘My dear, he’s always been a rolling-stone. This is his last chance to settle down, so mind he takes it, because he’ll get no further help either from me or his father.’
Ned shrugged, and grinned at her with all the privileged influence of a favourite child; I wondered if he could, in fact, be her favourite. Yet she seemed no fonder of her daughter, a stout, sardonic-looking woman carelessly dressed, to whom she now introduced me. ‘This is Elinor. She’ll be more like an aunt than a sister, won’t she? Nelly, do take that horrible dog from under my feet! He’ll be the death of me one of these days.’
Elinor said how-do-you-do to me briefly, gave me a snapshot glance and picked up from the carpet an old, clotted-looking Skye terrier. ‘I’ll put him in the hall, poor little devil. Nobody wants you, do they?’ she demanded of it. ‘Only your rotten old mistress.’
Mrs. Skelton asked me to sit down. Taking the chair opposite, she knotted upon her knees her rather large, arthritic hands, barnacled with rings, and gazed at me steadily. ‘He’s twice your age.’
‘Come, come,’ said Ned, ‘four years short of that. Don’t scare the child.’
She gave him the cold, experienced look I had so often seen Leslie’s mother give her son; Mrs. Allbright give Iris. Ignoring him, she said to me, ‘It’s on your head. I hope you’ll be happy. But you see he sticks to his work.’
We were joined then by her husband, who seemed to have been making his delayed entry for the sake of the effect and, I thought, justified it. He was short, grey, pug-nosed; he had an air of extraordinary cleanliness, as though he had just come from a Turkish bath. He was pink as a rose and walked springily.
‘So this is Ned’s surprise!’ he exclaimed, clasping his hands within an inch of my face, bending his knees so that his eyes were level with mine. I did not know what to do. I knew I should always rise in respect for women much older than I. But for men? I hesitated, then made an upward movement, awkward, tentative. Mr. Skelton put me back again. ‘No, no, don’t disturb yourself. So this is the little girl! I suppose you came in your perambulator,’ he added, with a wink.
‘Don’t clown, Harold,’ his wife said to him; ‘people don’t like it.’
Sighing, he rose up like a jack-in-a-box; his knees creaked. ‘Well, well, well.’
Elinor came in. ‘I’m getting tea. Is that all right, or is it too early?’
‘Any time.’ Mrs. Skelton lit a cigarette. ‘When are you and Ned going to get married, Christine?’
I told her it had not yet been decided.
‘I should do it as soon as possible if I were you. No point in hanging about. Besides, it’s quite time Ned put his house in order.’
‘We’ll have to get a house first,’ he said.
‘My rude son has a maddening habit of picking up my words,’ she observed to me. ‘Perhaps you can break him of it. I must say it will be a relief to me to think someone else has charge of him.’
She was so far from my idea of the conventional mother-in-law whose instinct would be to hate and hamper me that I could not resist an impulse of warmth and gratitude; I told myself that her constant belittling of Ned must be a family joke.
Elinor brought in the tea and served it. To my surprise I found that Mrs. Skelton preferred to mix herself gin and French vermouth. The meal was rather a silent one, for Elinor addressed herself in murmurs only to the dog, who had followed her back again. Ned and his father discussed the state of the stock market, and Mrs. Skelton gazed absorbedly, with no appearance of feeling that she should say anything at all, into her glass. I had time to look about me more carefully and to perceive that my first idea of sumptuousness had been a deluded one. The furniture, the carpets, the curtains, these had been expensive enough originally; but over them all lay that shabbiness which comes not so much from shortness of money as from the housekeeper’s utter lack of interest. A gas-fire spluttered and popped. The day grew darker. No one turned on a light.
At last Ned said he was taking me away again; he wanted to run out to Richmond.
‘What fun, in the pouring wet,’ Elinor observed.
‘We’ll be seeing a great deal of you, Christine,’ said Mrs. Skelton, pouring a few drops of extra gin into her cocktail. ‘You’re “family” now. You and I must have a serious talk together one of these days. And you’d better try to think what you’re going to call me.’
‘Well, I call you Harriet,’ said Ned, who looked oddly reduced in his own home, ‘so I suppose Chris had better.’
Mrs. Skelton shrugged. ‘As you please. It’s up to you. I don’t care what anyone calls me.’
Her husband had gone away. I was to learn that all his social appearances were hearty but extremely brief. He had not enough heartiness to last him long, and when he had exhausted it he relapsed into a smiling, far-away silence. He was rather like someone who has about a dozen phrases of excellent French and no more; who uses them at once to Frenchmen, amazing them, firing their admiration, and then takes his leave quickly before they can be disillusioned.
It was Elinor who went with me to the door. Ned had already gone down to the car to try to discover the cause of some fault or other he had detected in the engine. I had learned this afternoon that it was not his car but his father’s, who let him have the use of it.
‘Dullish lot, aren’t we?’ said Elinor, but she looked at me with kindness. I’m the oddest man out, because I can’t stick London and live in Tudor squalor in Herts. Neddy’s all right really; he’s lucky to get you. But keep your claws on him, if you’ve grown them yet.’
She was very ugly, I thought, and she knew it. In her view any attempt at self-improvement would be useless; so she made no such attempt. Her thick glasses had old-fashioned frames, quite round, very heavy. She wore grips in her hair, and did not conceal them. Yet she had a sweet mouth, and I supposed it was for this that her husband had marrie
d her.
‘I’ll do my best, Mrs. . . ’ I hesitated.
‘Ormerod, if it matters. But you’d better call me Nelly, as the others do. They do it out of malice. Go on, your beau’s waiting for you. See he keeps his temper, by the way. When he was a baby he used to lie and chew his fists with rage. He’s better now, of course.’
It had been a discouraging afternoon in one way, since it had effectively laid my romantic fancies; in another way it was consoling. I had been approved. I had been liked. In fact, I had been liked a little too much for my taste; it seemed to me unnatural that Ned’s family should instantly range itself on my side, as if against him. The critic within me had something to say; but I would not listen. Not at that time.
Chapter Eight
A formal engagement brings its obligations. Ned must meet my friends. I arranged an evening, inviting only the few nearest to me: Dicky, Caroline, Take Plato. I did not invite Iris—I was taking no chances.
I was apprehensive from the first. It was not that I worried as to what my friends would think of Ned—they could hardly, I felt, fail to be impressed. But what would he think of them? They seemed to me suddenly so young, the fun we had together so childish, that I loved them as never before while, in my mind, I hotly defended them against his imagined criticism.
‘We had better have some sherry as well as tea,’ suggested Emilie, who seemed as edgy as I. ‘Ned will be used to it.’
‘But one can’t,’ I said, with superiority, ‘drink sherry after dinner.’
‘Dinner?’ she repeated vaguely. For her (as for me, hitherto) this was a meal taken at midday. ‘Oh, I see. Should we buy some beer? ’ Teetotal herself, her militancy had faded somewhat since her doctor had made her break the pledge in favour of a small whisky at bedtime. Besides, she was in awe of Ned and of what she imagined to be his world. I think she sometimes regretted Leslie and his singular predictability.
The evening was as difficult as I feared. My friends sat stiffly about the room, laughing in a brief, isolated fashion whenever Ned made a joke. Dicky, having brought his ukelele, took one look at my fiance and slipped away to hide it under the hallstand. Caroline, in whom my hopes had rested, since she at least was a married woman and presumably, therefore, of adult status, was a disappointment. Her usual easy, ribald ironies ceased to flow. She smoked cigarette after cigarette; she hardly spoke at all. I found myself resenting her because she appeared to have assumed the onlooker’s role that I had reserved for myself.
Only Take Plato preserved much of his usual fluency, and I could have wished that he had not. (For it was by him that Ned appeared the most amused.)
‘Nietzsche, for instance,’ he announced, pushing back his black and tufty hair, ‘influenced me for a while. But one comes to see through him. At least, I feel one does. One can’t take too much of the world upon oneself.’
‘I never could,’ Ned agreed equably. ‘Who did you find to take his place?’
‘Schopenhauer wallowed along for about a week, didn’t he, Reg?’ Dicky enquired. But he didn’t last. No. What we heard about then was Freud. Ad nauseam.’
That, at any rate, was fruity,’ Caroline murmured. It made a change.’
Take Plato cleared his throat. ‘It is hardly possible to deny that Freud has been the catalyst of our day. Don’t you think so?’ he enquired of Ned, man to man.
‘And what has the effect been? ’
‘Well . . . to know ourselves. Now we know ourselves as we never did before. And what is more,’ my friend added with a kind of nonchalant shudder, ‘the revelation is somewhat of a catharsis.’
Dicky hummed a song, squinted at the toe of his shoe.
You’re all too clever for me,’ said Caroline. What is a catharsis, or whatever it is, anyway? It sounds like an opening medicine.’
‘It is,’ Take Plato told her eagerly. ‘It’s a kind of spiritual aperient. It is a clearance of the soul.’
It had occurred to me before that he was rather silly, though I had been too fond of him to care. Now he seemed to me ridiculous to a degree, and I found myself caring a great deal.
I tried to display him in a better light. ‘Well, it was you who discovered Thomas Wolfe,’ I said to him, for Ned’s benefit.
‘The divine Carolinian!’ he exclaimed. He smiled, delighted by the opportunity I had afforded him for bringing out his newest phrase.
‘You ought to read Wolfe,’ I said diffidently to Ned. ‘He’s pretty wonderful.’
He stretched his legs. He had rejected the sherry, as I guessed he would, and (the only comforting thing that had happened so far) appeared to be enjoying the tea and also the bread pudding, which I should have countermanded, had I known Emilie meant to provide it.
He said to Take Plato, with the air of one disposed to be instructed, ‘What do you do for a bit of light reading? In the train, for instance?’
‘Actually I read verse.’
‘God help us,’ said Dicky. ‘Now, a nice limerick—’
‘The Latin poets,’ Take Plato continued eagerly, his eyes translucent. ‘What a discovery when one comes upon them at first! Can you wonder Shakespeare worshipped Ovid?’ He quoted mellifluously, in the modern Latin we all learned at school, his accent impeccable, his quantities faultless:
‘Terra tribus scopulis vastum procurrit in aequor,
Trinacris a positu nomen adepta loci.’
‘I did that in my last year,’ Ned said, somehow surprising us and casting us into consternation, only I never said “Wastoom”. One didn’t, in my time. It means something like—“The earth sticks out in three promontories into the water. The name of the place is Trinacris, which is not inappropriate.” ’
‘You haven’t got that quite right,’ Take Plato began, blushing bright red, but Ned went on, as if he had not spoken, ‘It doesn’t seem particularly thrilling to me. What do you see in it? I told Chris I hadn’t a poet’s soul.’
There was a long silence. ‘It’s the feeling,’ Take Plato said at last. ‘If you can’t sense it you can’t.’
I could tell that everyone but Ned was relieved when it was time to go home. I was most unhappy. I had wanted him to like them; he seemed to have formed no opinions one way or the other. I had wanted them to like him; obviously they were not going to. The gap of fourteen years or so yawned more unbridgeably between him and them than between him and myself. I knew the shiver of desolation which is like the coming out of mild drunkenness into sobriety. I knew that, whatever happened in the future, I had that night bade farewell to my friends.
Chapter Nine
Yet the succeeding months were happy ones, for I was caught by the buoyancy of sheer newness. I had to learn Ned like a language; and the early stages of most languages seem simple and progress fast. I saw him nearly every day, either at my home or his—but more frequently at mine, firstly because his mother, though kind to me, seemed permanently sunken in derisive gloom, and secondly because I felt blackmailed by Emilie’s unexpressed desire for my company. I never told Ned the real reason why I so often refused to go out of an evening; I knew instinctively the comment he would have made. Instead, I found all manner of excuses for staying at home—the office had tired me out, I had a headache, I had some work to finish that would keep me too late for a run out to Richmond. He accepted them all. He was content enough to sit with me, to make love to me, to draw from me small and ludicrous incidents of my childhood to which he would listen with his half-smile, now and then running a finger down my cheek. On these evenings Emilie sat with us very little: she was content simply to know that I was in the house.
Ned had now set up in business on his own. He had bought the goodwill of a house agency near South Kensington station. The gross profits, he said, should be about three thousand a year; he hoped to nett about half. To me, the thought of this half was a fabulous one; if I married Ned I s
hould greatly exceed the ambitions of my mother, who had so often said, ‘I should like Christine to marry a thousand-a-year man.’ It was a phrase of mysterious overtones, an incantation to peal like a jammed bell through my dreams of the future.
‘If everything goes as I hope,’ said Ned, ‘we’ll get married in August. I hope to God it does. It may be tricky just at first.’
I do not know when I first sensed his lack of self-confidence, realised that it was as much a part of him as the marrow of his bones. I knew, then, that it was indeed a part of him; but, being young, I believed I could change it, that I could change him. I have never forgotten the way I tried to do so, nor the result. I remember it as one of the shames of youth which project their misery into age, of which it is impossible to speak and difficult even to write.
But before that something else happened.
One night, when the weather had turned hot and starry after early rain, Ned happened to leave his mackintosh behind at my house. I was not to see him on the following day, and as usual I was fretting—I hated days without him. I came home from the office, had my supper and was going upstairs to read, when Emilie stopped me.
She had a secretive, excited look, her mouth pursed so tightly that she seemed to be making a physical effort to keep her lips shut. I had seen her looking like this before, on the very rare occasions when she had had to nerve herself to be firm with my father. She came with quick little Japanese steps along the hall, shot out her arm and presented to me a dingy-looking piece of paper.
‘I think you ought to see this.’ She drew in her breath, held it.
‘What is it?’ I did not want to look.
‘I found it on the floor under his mackintosh. It must have fallen out. It was lying face upwards, so I couldn’t help seeing.’ She had the grace to flush a little. ‘I think you ought to know.’
She went rapidly away. I heard a door bang.
An Impossible Marriage Page 13
