An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Iris was the last person I should have told of my wretchedness, if I had not happened to meet her one afternoon in Piccadilly, when she was coming from rehearsal.

  ‘Christie! We can go home on the same bus. Why have you been avoiding me, you pig? I won’t steal your Neddy. He wouldn’t want me. No one would want a hag like me.’ Her prettiness, as usual, was making people crane backwards for another look at her. ‘They’re working us to death, darling, simply to death. My feet are so tired I’m sure my toes are going to drop off.’

  We went up to the top deck. ‘Oh, Christie!’ Iris mourned loudly. ‘I did want to sit in a front seat, but they’re all taken.’

  A man rose instantly. ‘You sit here, miss; I’m getting out soon.’

  ‘But how sweet of you! Are you sure? Are you quite sure? ‘

  He told her it was a pleasure.

  ‘There,’ Iris said to me, ‘that just shows you, Christie. You can usually get a nice seat if you really want it.’

  She settled happily down and tucked her arm through mine. ‘Tell me all about yourself. You let me do all the talking, as a rule, and tell me absolutely nothing. Tell me about your Neddy. And I honestly won’t take him away, because I’ve got the most wonderful new charmer on the tapis—he’s in the show—oh, and Victor’s got a new girl, too awful, a sort of Simple Life girl, with bangles, and Grecian sandals and hammer toes. I don’t know how he can. One can’t keep one’s toes clean in sandals, honestly one can’t, not in London, but she doesn’t seem to see that, and it’s worse if you’ve got corns.’

  The sunlight, refracted from the windows of buildings and buses, flashed on her sparkling face and magnified the golden graining of her skin. I felt desolate.

  ‘All right,’ she said, with scarcely a change of note.

  ‘Tell. Tell Iris.’

  When I had done so, as barely as I could, she turned to me with her usual little bounce of interest, her self-conscious concentration upon the love-affairs of others. ‘My dear, just let him come round!’

  I told her he would not come round, because it was all my fault.

  ‘Well, you’ve said so once, haven’t you? If he won’t listen to you, that’s that. I think he’s being quite revolting. Do you adore him? I suppose you do.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘My dear,’ Iris continued with a strange, quaint, motherly look, ‘suppose for the moment he’s not coming back.’ The words wrenched my heart.

  ‘Don’t make faces. Suppose he isn’t. Don’t you even feel, right down deep, that it’s rather nice to be free again? That no one’s going to kick up horrible fusses and make your life miserable?’

  The conductor asked us for our fares.

  ‘Oh, you will be cross with me!’ she told him confidingly. ‘I’ve only got a pound note. Now you’ll be furious!’

  He grinned and said he would manage somehow, but that she would have to wait for her change.

  ‘I could have lent you fourpence,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense. It’s good for them to have to oblige the public.’

  She turned again to my affairs. ‘Listen. Isn’t it nice to be free? Free as a bird? Dicky says you said Ned didn’t like you writing poems. But you adore writing poems! Isn’t there any fun in knowing you can write reams and reams if you want to, and simply spit in his eye?’

  Strangely enough, all this was to have its effect upon me, not then, but after Iris and I had parted on the edge of the Common. It was true that I could make myself feel a touch of relief, a touch of joy in freedom. Down the hill, behind the spires, the sky was a delicate, duck-egg green, very even and pure; and just above the cross of Saint Mark’s a single cloud floated, little and rosy, serene, unparented, unfriended, beautifully free. The light was brilliant on the roadway, a Venetian light turning to copper the faces of the grammar-school boys toiling upwards on their bicycles, late after games, after detention.

  That night I slept well. Emilie had put new sheets on my bed; they were stiff as paper and smelled of lemons. I knew the peace that is a savourable pleasure in every limb, a refreshing of bone and muscle and flesh. Over the ceiling the headlamps of passing cars fanned their lime-coloured beams; I watched them until I fell asleep, experiencing that fall, slow and delightful as the fall of Alice down the rabbit-hole; I had time to put out my hand and touch the shelf of each potential dream as I floated past it.

  In the morning I awoke as serenely, to find I had scarcely stirred in the night. The sheets lay stiff and smooth over my breast. It was some time before the anaesthetic began to disperse, before the first shaft of coming pain heralded itself by an uncomprehended movement of my memory. Remember what? I knew, but I would not remember yet.

  All that day and the next something of the serenity persisted, although by now I was consciously repressing any thought of the future, fighting it as an enthralled dreamer fights against awakening. Dicky called, and we walked on the Common.

  The weather was still hot. Though it was nine o’clock, the little bare boys still darted among the gilded island leaves and flashed in and out of the water.

  ‘Aunt Emilie’s looking pleased with herself,’ Dicky said. ‘The cat who’s eaten the canary.’

  ‘We’re having the telephone put in at last,’ I told him. ‘They’re coming to do it tomorrow.’

  ‘Is that why she’s so pleased? Is she going to phone people all day?’

  I told him she was pleased because Ned and I had quarrelled.

  ‘I see.’ He looked grave. His attitude both to me and to Iris had always been gentle and brotherly. It had been a shock, two years ago, when she had showed me in great secrecy a note written by him, beginning, ‘I am not exactly a sheikh in flowing robes, but I still think you’re wonderful.’ He, at least, I had believed, did not care for her particularly; but although he had only cared, apparently, for about a fortnight, he had been like the rest of them. ‘Is it really all off?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I never much took to the fellow,’ said Dicky, putting the whole matter into the past. He picked a tiny caterpillar from his wiry fair hair, knelt down, and deposited it safely on a blade of grass. ‘He’s all right, I suppose. But not for you. Have you got your phone number?’

  I shouldn’t know it till tomorrow, I replied; and felt suddenly miserable because we should have a telephone and I should not hear Ned’s voice over the wires.

  A naked child skipped yelping out of the water, a second child in pursuit. The two of them played tig around Dicky’s legs, depositing damp and mud on his new fawn trousers. He picked the bigger boy up and held him out at arms’ length over the pond. ‘Look what you’ve done to me, you little devil!’ The child screamed with hysterical joy, struggled and fought. Dicky dropped him in, and stood by laughing while the smaller boy went to the rescue. They abused us happily and tried to splash us as we walked on.

  Dicky took my arm. ‘You’ll get over it.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘We’ll all have good times together as we used to do.’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop that, whether I marry Ned or not.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘My friends are my friends,’ I said with firmness and dignity.

  ‘He’s not exactly yearning for them to be his.’

  I told him angrily that he was simply prejudiced; that none of us were children any more and could not go on playing as if we were. ‘If you wanted to get married I should love it. I shouldn’t say I couldn’t get on with her.’

  ‘I’m not getting married.’

  ‘You will, some day.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ he said thoughtfully.‘If we both happen not to be married by the time we’re forty we’ll marry each other. We’d get on all right in middle age.’

  ‘Why in middle age?’

 
‘Not so much love and all that stuff. I say, Chris.’ He stopped on the edge of the Parade, shielding his eyes against the sun to see if the road were clear.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘If you’re miserable you can always come and tell me. At any time.’

  We crossed the Parade into a field of grass and clover. The white flowers were tipped with brown, as if the sun had scorched them, and they smelled sweet. I felt at peace with Dicky, as I always had done. We walked on in silence and tenderness.

  Chapter Twelve

  I wrote a Byronic poem about the end of love and was pleased with it, but editors were not. I felt they must be shallow men.

  A week went by. Caroline asked me to tea in her rather overdressed service flat. She never asked her friends when her husband was in, because, she said, he would not say a word to them but simply sit in a dark corner swinging his foot and squinting down at it till their resistance was broken and they went home. ‘We get on pretty well when we’re by ourselves, in a stodgy sort of way,’ she explained rather anxiously, as if not wishing me to pity her overmuch, ‘only I don’t like being by ourselves all the time. I can’t help being sociable, any more than he can help not being.’

  The disappointments of this marriage had not, strangely enough, impaired Caroline’s looks. She had never been pretty; but the compensating quality of high-floating elegance and unconcern (she had often reminded me of a flag fluttering from the mast of a ship on a clear, cool day) was becoming more and more distinctive. Also, she had more money for her clothes, more than I had ever hoped to have, even with my thousand-a-year man.

  It occurred to me to try to write a poem about Caroline, from a male point of view; most of my love-poems at that period, with the exception of the Byronic one, were from men to women. I was writing a great deal and reading a great deal. Freedom from Ned, I told myself, would give me freedom to cultivate my mind and my talents. What worried me was the suspicion that there was something false in this sudden fertility, that the work itself was not good. Still, I was not unhappy; the anaesthesia had not entirely worn off.

  ‘If you’re only writing,’ said Emilie, ‘perhaps you could lay the table.’ Both writing and reading were, to her, activities specially designed for interruption.

  I put the poem aside with apparent bad grace but inward relief; it is good to be called from work that is not going well.

  ‘And you might get out the other cloth, the one your mother embroidered. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have nice things, even when we’re by ourselves. It’s in one of the sideboard drawers.’

  While I was looking for it, I came across Look Homeward Angel and for a second wondered what it could be doing there among the napkins and knife-boxes. Then I remembered, and at the same time was invaded by a rush of memory so intense that I had to cling to the sideboard until the occupation was complete. I could see nothing but the wild dark face of my disreputable enemy, the woman he had loved before me, to whom he would surely, if I did not intervene, return.

  Hardly knowing what I did, I went to the telephone and dialled his number.

  ‘What are you doing, dear?’ Emilie called from the kitchen. ‘You haven’t time to begin a chat now, whoever it is. The eggs are done.’

  The bell rang and rang down the dark and gaseous tunnel of space and time.

  At last the operator told me there was no reply.

  I was sick with relief. I pushed the receiver back and returned to the dining-room, where I found my mother’s cloth and threw it on to the table. What a fool I had almost made of myself! I said a prayer, thanking God for saving me from the consequences of my own weakness.

  During the meal the telephone began to make an extraordinary noise, something between a growl and a crunching of gravel. I answered it; I was trembling.

  ‘You have not replaced the receiver properly. Will you please replace the receiver properly.’

  Which I did. But by now I was awakened from the ether-dream, awake to panic and pain and longing. I should have to write to him. It would be a dignified letter, like the last, but with my pain written between every line in the heart’s invisible ink. The only trouble was just how invisible I should make it. I wrote and rewrote that letter. I even took one version out to the pillar-box. But I could not post it. Afterwards I was glad I had not, for I had just reached the office next day when he telephoned me.

  His voice was slurred and cool. ‘Hullo, you. If you’ve quite stopped being silly we could run out to Richmond tonight. But only if you’re certain you have.’

  I was much too young to realise the extent of my triumph, to know that I had it in my power to do with Ned as I pleased. Indeed, I did not even recognize this telephone-call as a surrender. I was simply shaken to tears and incoherence by love and relief. ‘Darling,’ I said. ‘Oh, darling.’ I repeated, ‘Darling.’

  I presented myself to Ned that night with a smoothed and smarmed meekness, a prettification of humility that I was ashamed of; but it is a mistake to suppose that a stronger emotion cannot reduce shame to acceptable proportions, that it cannot simply be taken on board and endured as a passenger.

  He said little to me at first, kissed me briskly, told me to hurry up, as we were late already; but in a quiet and leafy road he stopped the car and made love to me in a fashion that delighted me, for I felt he was at last treating me in a way more appropriate to Wanda than to a child. It was disturbing, worrying and glorious. It made it easy for me to abase myself more thoroughly than I had intended over the matter of our separation, and he listened to me until I was done, with the satisfied smile of an emperor receiving agreeable economic and military reports from his various dominions.

  He made, however, one concession. As he started the car again he said, ‘We made a nice little profit on a sale this week, old girl. Things are looking up.’

  ‘I knew they would!’ I cried, trying to tell him with my eyes that my faith was infinite and my love entire and at his disposal. For one shaking minute it occurred to me that I might be looking like Dog Gelert—but comedy, I knew, could only be fatal that night of all nights.

  Later, as we sat in the bar over the river, he grew mysterious, saying little, returning short answers to any remarks of mine and looking at me with a concentrated interest rather reminiscent of an expert shopper contemplating a purchase. My sense of power and of unease grew together, like separate creepers that suddenly knot and become as one. In the dark of the gilded glass upon the wall were sunk stratum upon stratum of little lights, the citron candles on the walls, the glowing tips of cigarettes. I saw myself, made rosy by the velvet on which I rested and by his steady gaze upon my face.

  He said suddenly, awkward in the fashion that worried and most moved me, ‘I’ve got something for you. I knew you wanted it. I hope you like it.’

  First the table before us held nothing but ashtrays and glasses: and then there was the little red box, the focus of all light, all moments, of all my years. I could not touch it.

  Ned put his finger to it and it sprang open; and there was the ring, and before I could think about it there was the ring on my finger, the ring with rivets to his side, frightening; but worse, disappointing.

  The Dutch boy put his finger to the breach in the dam and he stemmed the sea, but the sea held him prisoner. I was caught, I was done for, I was frightened—what other word? Not terrified. Not panicked. Simply, as a child, frightened. It is frightful to be caught by your future in a corridor of youth, to feel its hands of iron across your eyes. Caught you! Did you think you could go further? There are corridors and corridors, rooms and rooms, gateways that open on to gardens orientally bright with peonies and singing-birds, but they aren’t for you. You’ve been caught right at the beginning of the game. This is your end, this is the end for you.

  ‘It was Nell’s. I had it reset. It was better than anything I could buy for you.’ His voice sh
ot up in alarm. ‘Dear! What is it? You’re not crying?’

  We must not be sorry for ourselves in the present: that is a luxury we cannot afford, and to learn this is the first of the stoical lessons. But we may fairly be sorry for ourselves in youth, for that is the same as being sorry for another person—since we are built up of a succession of selves, so that we may never know what we truly are until our life’s end; and if there is any sort of revelation then, it will come too late to be useful. None of us is one person, but many: the one may wonder at the other, and, if there is enough time between, may pity.

  Youth in love tends to seem snobbish, since the material things connote a sort of security not yet within the comprehension of the spirit. In youth we are afraid to lay our lives within the hands of another person. Into this far-off country to which he will take us it is a comfort to bear the things we know, the silken carpet, the golden bowl, the coin inscribed with the familiar face. Money we know; ‘position’ we know, or think we know. We may yearn for these things not because we are greedy but because we need comfort. It is only when we are mature that we ask nothing of love, when love is itself the far country that is also home.

  Because I was afraid to marry Ned, because I was afraid to hold him or let him go, I had clung to the things that, for me, were symbols of maturity (and, as I believed, safety —not knowing then that there is no safety in maturity nor anywhere in life, until the sexual spirit dies): the dignity of a woman marked by a ring, the dignity of a woman married, having a home of her own, and the word ‘mine’ for material possession. I supposed that these things would compensate me for the bitterest disappointment, if disappointment came. For they would give me a public face to wear about the world; and only when we are young are we so positive about the value of appearances.

  ‘Green is your colour, isn’t it?’ He was anxious. ‘You wear green a lot. It’s a real emerald.’