It was a little stone between little pearls, a fleck and two dots. I was not, as he had thought, crying, but I wanted to cry, and as he spoke I did so.
I supposed I was crying because of disappointment with my ring, but now I know I cried for more than that. I cried because the future had caught me too early in the game, because, though the game would go on, I was ‘out’—and it was unfair, a cheat, an injustice; I cried because of my first revelation that life is frequently unjust and it is no good for us to demand that it shall be otherwise.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t expect it, not tonight, and it’s been so horrible these last weeks.’
‘I was angry with you. But it’s over now.’
‘It was horrible,’ I repeated, and could not look at him.
He begged me not to cry. It was over, it would never happen again. He asked if I were happy, and when I said I was, laughed at me because I looked so woebegone. ‘Let’s go and dance.’
I shook my head. I wanted to talk the weeks of misery away. He was gentle and kind; seeing my need to talk, he coaxed me on. Had it been so very bad? I must have known in my heart, he said, that it was all right really. I told him how I had gone for a walk with Dicky and how he had comforted me.
‘But you won’t need any more walks with Dicky now,’ Ned murmured, smiling. ‘I’ll do all the comforting. Dicky’s nose will be out of joint.’
I had to smile back at him. ‘Poor Dicky!’ I remarked. ‘Yes: Dicky’s nose, and Peter’s, and Hugh’s. All of their noses.’
Peter and Hugh were adolescent boys long lost, long forgotten, that I had told him about when he had made me amuse him with the tale of my childish love-affairs.
‘And Take Plato’s. I nearly left him out. Now come and dance. It will make you feel better.’
Chapter Thirteen
We left the bar and went into a high bright room where a few people were dining and a few couples dancing. The noise of the small band was hollow in so much space. As we danced, I felt myself rising out of the morass of fears and disappointments. I began to feel excited. I loved Ned. The ring did not seem so little after all; in fact, I liked it because it was not showy. It was in good taste, even though Miss Rosoman might not recognise taste when she saw it, and Mr. Baynard’s ideas on jewellery would be so hapless that I need pay no attention to whatever he might say. But though the ring might be little, it seemed to weigh heavily upon my finger. I was almost painfully aware of it. And it seemed to me strange and alarming, the thought that I must wear it until I died.
When the music stopped, Ned walked over to the band and asked for the same tune again—‘as this is a special occasion,’ he added in his clear, rather harsh voice. He put his arm around me. The leader, glad of any incident to break the monotony of playing for hours to so small an audience, broke into a great white smile. He bowed, congratulated us both. We danced again.
‘We’ll have a drink,’ Ned said, ‘and then we might make them play it a third time.’
I told him I did not think I ought to drink much more.
‘Champagne hurts nobody,’ he informed me, ‘and that’s what we shall have.’
I felt all eyes upon us. I was both pleased and upset.
The whole evening was now curiously out of focus; everything was strange.
‘Where did Wanda live?’ I asked him suddenly, as if she were dead. I could ask him anything I liked. I was full of power.
‘Wanda? Oh, round about here, somewhere.’
‘Did you bring her here?’
‘Once, I believe. Why?’
‘I only wanted to know.’
We drank the champagne, and danced in what was to me a darkness filled with splintering lights, to a music that came from all sides, from above, from the ground. I was glad to sit down, because I was tired.
‘You wouldn’t have a photograph of Wanda, I suppose?’
It was delightful to hear myself asking this so lightly. I began to feel that I had at last arrived upon that plateau of sophistication from which such questions may be lightly asked.
Ned stared at me. I don’t carry one about with me.’
‘But have you got one?’
‘I may have, at home. I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of stuff.’
He passed the question off.
A week or so later, not forgetting what I had said (he forgot nothing), he did show me a snapshot of two girls in cotton dresses, blinking their eyes against the sun. I looked at the beautiful young woman, lean and dark, hair springing geometrically from her high and lovely brow. ‘So that’s Wanda,’ I said.
Ned said, ‘Give it here.’ He glanced at it, caught the direction of my gaze. ‘You’re looking at the wrong one; Wanda’s the fair one.’ She was the one in glasses, short, inclined to stoutness, the very last of women (in my imagination) to be described as a mistress. ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. My heart sprang with joy.
But that, as I say, happened a week later. At this moment I forgot the photograph I so much wished to see, could think of nothing but the experience of a strange happiness and a strange tiredness, intermingled. Yet I could have danced till morning.
I was suddenly sorry for Ned because his face was flushed and he seemed upset. ‘Ask for our tune again,’ I said. This time I did not mind the thought that all eyes were upon me—it was delightful. I was only sorry that somehow the room was so dark.
He took my arm, called the waiter. He said to me in a voice that seemed unnaturally clear and slow, ‘I think we ought to be going, or we shall scare Emilie stiff.’
My own voice was clear, too. I thought it sounded very pleasant and silvery. I told him I did not care how scared Emilie was, that I was tired of being treated as a child, tired of her waiting up for me and coming inevitably to sit in rooms where I was. It was easy to talk a great deal, and I was sure Ned was amused by what I was saying.
But somehow we did not go and dance, for we were in the car again, and I was a little worried because I could not for the moment remember by what stages we had got there. Ned, I noticed, was rather silent, and replied without much appearance of interest when I tried to make him see how romantic were the squares of lighted windows high in the night; how charming the road-menders’ lamps clustered together like red currants on the trestle barriers; how pretty the illuminated ‘Left Only’ signs at the round-about, where the pavements swung around the car as if we were at the hub of them. It was easy to talk; and then it was easier to be silent. When had I last spoken? I could not remember. I was sure I should bore him if I could find nothing to say, but nothing seemed possible. Then at last I did say something, without premeditation. I said, ‘Please stop. I feel dreadful.’
We had to stop again and again. I was foundering in a darkness so black and swinging that I wanted to die. Ned was somewhere. He said comforting words, but he sounded almost angry.
My own voice said in a kind of liturgy, ‘I am so ashamed, I am so ashamed.’
‘Don’t be an ass, Chris! It happens to all of us. It doesn’t matter.’
I said, ‘We’ll never get home; we’ll never, never get home.’ The cold critic within me was perfectly stable, observing me with customary detachment.
‘We’ll never get home,’ I repeated. Ned was pushing his handkerchief at me. I took it and wiped my face; I was streaming with sweat.
And then we were home; he had taken my key and was opening the lower door. For God’s sake brace up!’
I saw Emilie, very small in a pink dressing-gown, coming to me down a great funnelled corridor. She was saying that it was late, she had some cocoa for me.
Ned was saying very brightly, ‘I’m afraid Christine’s eaten something that’s upset her. It may be a touch of food poisoning.’
Emilie was asking me anxiously what I thought it could have been—lobster was often upset
ting, or crab. Had I eaten any lobster or crab?
I said bravely, ‘It may be crab’, and pushed past her to the stairs, the stairs so far away, so infinitely desirable, leading up and up into oblivion. I climbed them; I gained the upper hall.
I heard Ned’s voice: ‘I’d better not wait, perhaps. She’ll be all right, I’m sure. I’ll ring up in the morning.’ The door closed.
It was a desolate sound, a destroying sound, the last sound in the world. I could go no further. I sat down upon the cold tessellations leaning my head against the wall. Emilie was calling me. She would come and ask me about the things I had eaten. All I had to do was to keep calm (for even this rocking horror must cease some time) and insist upon crab. The light sprang up. She was crouching over me; her apple-face was an enormous size.
‘I am drunk,’ I said. ‘Aunt Emilie, it is awful! I am drunk!’
Chapter Fourteen
She never forgave him. To the end of her life she did not. As she looked down the precipice of the past, which did not make her giddy at all, for it seemed to her only a little hill, she would still say, ‘You were a young girl. He should have taken better care of you. He had no right to let you do it.’
I think this was unfair. It was only half a bottle of champagne that I shared with Ned, but after two cocktails it was too much for me. I was a very poor drinker, but I do not see how he could have known this except by observation. Where I think she might have blamed him (she did not) was for losing his head and deserting me. He should have taken the blame, I think, even if he had not deserved it.
The incident, however, had a curious consequence; for Emilie, in her anger at Ned, seemed to decide that he owed her some very practical atonement. From that day forward she began to talk openly of living with us after we were married. She did so with a prim, defiant air, staring us between the eyes as she spoke, as if defying dogs to bite. Hitherto she had not taken Ned’s offer to share a home with her at all seriously. Now the idea never seemed absent from her mind. She no longer tried to impede my marriage; she simply included herself in it.
It was now accepted by everyone that we should marry at the end of the year. Mrs. Skelton was for ever trying to urge us into making the date earlier; but Ned was against it, for no reason he seemed prepared to give, and I had an impulse to cling to my freedom for the period at first appointed. Also, I rather resented his mother’s urgings; I had believed all proper mothers hated to lose their sons, and this unnatural behaviour on her part (or so I considered it) filled me with misgivings. I did not know how the business was going, and Ned did not tell me. He seemed cheerful enough. A month ago there had been the selling of some sizeable warehouse premises in Sutton; I presumed other things had been sold, since, after all, it was for such transactions that property agents existed. As for the amount of time he spent in sport or in driving around the country, I could only imagine that the duller matters were dealt with by subordinates.
In the meantime I had all the excitement of looking for a flat, deciding what I should wear for my wedding and whom I should ask to it. We were to be married in church, but I was not to wear white. ‘It’s so damn silly in this day and age, ‘Ned said, ‘and I should feel a prize ass with a lot of bridesmaids prancing after me. It’s much better style not to fuss.’
I believed I was in cordial agreement with this. When Emilie complained, ‘But a young bride in white is so beautiful; and you’re only married once’, I grew disproportionately angry. ‘I’m not a pagan,’ I said, ‘I don’t want all sorts of primitive rites’ —which she did not understand and which saddened her.
I hated Emilie to be sad, though I knew she displayed sadness only as a kind of moral blackmail. One night, indeed, she left her bedroom door wide open, so that on my way to the bathroom I could not help seeing her at her prayers or hear her say, in a piercing mutter, ‘and make Christine a good Christian following the laws of Church.’ It was maddening. Yet her little, stubborn, pleading face never failed to touch me, and I vowed that if I were to be burdened with Emilie all my life I would do my best not only to endure that burden but to enjoy it. I think I might have persuaded Ned into letting me wear white for her sake if she had not prayed at me. It was a pity she sometimes went too far, and a pity I was too young to understand that ‘going too far’ may often be the most pitiable plea of all.
On the whole I was very happy. I had set all else, all other interests, aside for Ned. I was learning him better now, learning to know where his nature was most tough and most sensitive. I had caught the style and rhythm of his rather rough humour and could laugh at the same things as he. I realised his tendency to bully and rather enjoyed it, for I was sure I should be able to check him if ever my enjoyment grew less. I realised that a certain kind of woman was markedly attracted by him; I had seen this in the cocktail bars, at the sports meetings and dances to which he took me. This woman was usually about five years older than he, she was married, she liked a good time, she liked to talk and drink with men, she played games well, danced well and had the assurance of success. I did not realise that for Ned she had no attraction at all, that she was not in his style; and so my love for him was constantly nudged on by jealousy. I knew he loved me. I did not believe he could possibly love me as I loved him, with that kind of obsessive love that will cherish an old bus ticket if the lover has held it, or revere like a shrine the particular platform at Victoria Station from which he catches his usual train. I did not realise, in fact, that any love except my own could be in its whole nature a little idiotic. There were things I longed to say to him that I dared not say, lest he should think me absurd. And my diffidence, my unsureness, bred his own jealousy in a fashion that suddenly became alarming.
We were sitting downstairs in the dining-room one night, both of us excited to a kind of bantering passion by the thundery heat of the weather, when the telephone rang.
Now it was typical of Emilie that she had obstinately insisted on having it installed at the bottom of the lower stairs, in the darkest and draughtiest place in the house, because she was sure it was the one place where everybody would hear it. One could, of course, hear it in the kitchen and the dining-room; on the upper floors it was almost inaudible, and if it did ring when I was in bed late at night, and I did happen to hear it, I had to run down two flights of stairs in the dark before I could reach the switch in the top hall; and even so, usually had to answer the caller in the half-dark, as the switch nearest to the telephone was several yards further along the passage.
On this occasion the caller was Dicky, just back from a walking holiday in France and eager to tell me all about it. I was as eager to hear it, for I had never been out of England, and Ned had made a half-promise to take me to Paris for a week after we were married. The conversation went on for a long time, and would have continued longer had Ned not walked out of the dining-room, his hands in his pockets, and by violent shakes of the head indicated that I was to bring it to an end.
I told Dicky I could not stop longer but that I would see him soon, and I hung up the receiver.
‘Who was that?’
I told him.
‘You might tell your friends I’m here another time, and then they may not take up your entire evening.’
I said Dicky had just returned from France, and it had all been very exciting.
‘So I gathered. And I don’t want that youngster on the telephone morning, noon and night. Things are different for you now, and he’d better realise it.’
I had to laugh at this. ‘But it’s only Dicky!’
‘I don’t care if it’s Mussolini,’ Ned retorted; ‘you’ll please make things perfectly clear.’
I said nothing; I thought this was a spurt of irrational temper, prompted perhaps by the electricity in the air. This nonsense would blow over, and Ned would come to his senses. But it did not. Within an hour Dicky rang again, to ask me if I could lend him some book or other, an
d Ned began to quarrel. It was so disagreeable that I took the first occasion to ask Dicky never to telephone me on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, for it was then that Ned was usually at my house. It made trouble for me, I said.
‘Look here,’ Dicky protested, ‘I don’t think much of a fellow who carries on like that! You tell him not to be an ass. ’
‘I daren’t,’ I replied, feeling a certain emotional luxury in not daring.
Dicky gave a disgusted shrug. ‘I don’t see how any girl could stand it.’
‘It’s natural to be jealous.’
‘But not of me!’
‘That’s what I told him.’
‘I don’t know how anybody could be jealous of me,’ Dicky pondered simply. I thought how unfair it had been for him ever to be suspected of ‘fastness’. He was the least mature sexually of all my friends, I loved him the best, and could never have thought of him for myself.
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘nor do I. I can’t imagine it.’
Oh, come,’ he said, with a spurt of injured dignity, ‘perhaps that’s going too far. I’m not Quasimodo, or anything.’
‘Of course you’re not. But don’t telephone, will you? Not on those nights?’
He did not. But two days later, when I was with Ned, the bell rang again and when I answered it my blood ran cold.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you. It’s funny to hear your voice again.’
Ned had come to stand by the door, his lips folded and furious.
I tried to make the conversation anonymous as possible, and all the while my thoughts were running round in search of an escape.
I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m rather busy now. Perhaps some other time.’
By the most wretched chance my caller was the young boy Hugh, of whom I had told Ned in fun. When Hugh and I had walked on the Common, giggling, pushing at each other, clumsily pursuing our rudimentary flirtation, he had been fifteen and I a year younger. I had not seen him since. Now, having returned to London from Ireland, he had been impelled by some malign fate to look me up.
An Impossible Marriage Page 16
