An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  I was too tired to refuse his plea that we should stop quarrelling, to refuse to forgive him. I pretended to accept his story of a care that was only for me. After a while he grew lively, almost hilarious: we must drink to the baby. We should have to find a name for him. We nearly quarrelled again over the names suggested; the whole evening took upon itself a kind of anaesthetic unreality. We began to behave towards each other with a kind of sly amorousness, as if we had only recently met. The hours were very long, the hands of the clock lagged round the dial. I thought it would never be time for sleeping, to weep in the dark.

  Next day, while Ned was at work, I went to see the doctor, who confirmed my pregnancy and arranged for me to pay him monthly visits.

  I walked back across the Common from West Side in the hot morning sun. I realised that until now I had not, despite myself, really believed it could be true, and the sense of final captivity sprang upon me. Now I was trapped; from this there could be no way out. Ned and I would have to learn to live as happily as other people and content ourselves with watching our child grow up. I sat down for a while under the trees to wait till the moment of panic had passed, as I knew it must pass. The air was still. The white dust that overlay the hawthorn leaves was turned to dry and sparkling gold by the sun. The grass was dry as hay.

  A woman went by, pushing her baby in a little wooden chair. It lolled over the strap, reared up again, gazed blankly and bluely up into the roof of the sky. And this was enough. Fatalistic, beyond tears, I walked on; I had known already the edge of that joy Ned had not let me feel when I had told him my news. I had wanted a child; I still passionately wanted one, and I thought how long the months were going to seem.

  I called in upon Emilie and told the news to her. She seemed dumbfounded; it was as though she had imagined up to now that Ned and I had lived (in Caroline’s phrase) ‘as brother and sister’.

  ‘But you’re so young!’ It was her old protest. ‘Well, dear, I’m sure I don’t know what to say. I can’t really take it in.’ She took my hand and patted it steadily. ‘It’s such a shock, really. There wasn’t a hint of it, was there?’

  Her first coherent idea was that she should do some knitting for the baby. She would go out and buy wool that very day—in fact, immediately. Indeed, she was so eager to escape to the shops for this purpose that she almost pushed me out of her flat. To Emilie adjustments came slowly, and she needed solitude in which to make them.

  When I got home again it seemed unnaturally quiet and rather dark, though the sun was still blazing down. I did not know what to do with myself, was confused between a resurgence of the panic and a stronger resurgence of excitement. I tried to read, but could make sense of nothing. This, of course, would be the worst day. Tomorrow I should be steadier, more used to the idea of this enormous change that had come to me so suddenly.

  I was having a sandwich lunch on the edge of the kitchen table—I could never be bothered to cook for myself in the middle of the day—when the bell rang.

  On the step was a door-to-door salesman, with an attaché-case full of brushes, combs, hairpins, rolls of elastic.

  ‘Good morning, madam! Can I be of any use to you today? I have a very fine line of . . . ’

  His voice trailed off.

  We stared at each other.

  He gave a backward stagger, and said, from his deepest chest-notes, ‘My God! You!’

  It was Leslie. He wore the same little bowler hat, or perhaps it was another bowler of the same pattern. His face looked longer, more foxy than ever before; his great, vacant eyes protruded. ‘My God!’

  It was not an easy moment.

  ‘Well, how extraordinary,’ I said. ‘Won’t you come in?’ The whole atmosphere of life had changed for me; this intrusion of the farcical made me light-headed.

  He had recovered himself. He gave a harsh laugh. ‘Come in? Into the hall, perhaps. No further. That’s my place.’

  He strode over the threshold, dumped the case on the hall table, and stood by it, bitter and brave.

  ‘You see, I have come to this!’

  ‘Oh, it’s a job like any other,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  He ignored me. He had a wild look; he did not seem to be any less ‘touched’ with the passing of time. ‘A job, yes. All a grateful country can find for a man who has done it, perhaps, no mean service. Oh, have you a cat?’ His voice changed surprisingly into its natural tones, as he dived down under a chair. He had always been fond of animals.

  ‘It’s not ours. It comes from next door.’

  ‘I see.’ The cat eluded him and ran off through the open door. ‘Puss, puss, puss!’

  ‘What service did you do for your country?’ I asked, giving way to curiosity—not for the truth, but for what his imagination could contrive.

  I had to wait for an answer, for he had dropped his hat and had to retrieve and brush it down.

  Then he looked at me, put a finger to his lips. ‘Confidential matters. I’m not allowed to talk. Secret service, as a matter of fact,’ he added light-heartedly.

  I told him this sounded very exciting.

  ‘It was, rather,’ said Leslie, with an air of reminiscent satisfaction. ‘Yes, not—er—unexciting. And, as a matter of fact, this lowly job I am doing now is not quite all it seems—but I can’t tell you more about that.’

  I asked him if he would not come further in and have some tea.

  ‘No, little Christine,’ he replied, putting unnecessary weight into his refusal. ‘No. Your husband might object.’

  ‘He’s out,’ I said, and at once felt I had been fast.

  ‘But such slips never impressed themselves upon Leslie. ‘I heard you were married. I happened to run into Reginald during the Long Vacation last year.’

  It took me a few seconds to realise that it was Take Plato to whom he had referred in this stately manner.

  But I did not know,’ he continued, ‘where you were living. I thought it best not to enquire.’

  I asked him why he had thought it best.

  ‘Let the past bury its dead,’ said Leslie. He paused. ‘Let the past bury its dead.’

  I enquired about his mother.

  His face clouded. ‘Oh, Mater’s her old self, you know. Still the grande dame. But as I can’t tell her the truth about myself there’s a certain misunderstanding between us. My father died last year.’

  I said I was sorry. ‘A superb musician,’ Leslie said. ‘We shall not see his like again.’

  Awkwardly, I told him it was lucky he had called, because I did, in fact, need a clothes-brush.

  Do you think,’ he replied, curling his lip with something of an effort, ‘that I could behave as a huckster to you?’

  I persuaded him that business was business. ‘Oh, well,’ said Leslie, forgetting his audience, here’s a nice little line. Real hog’s bristles. You’ll see nothing like it anywhere for the money.’

  I asked him how much it was. I saw his calculating glance flash over the hall, over what he could see of the dining-room, over my dress. ‘To you, eight-and-six.’

  ‘Far too much,’ I said.

  He assured me that I would nowhere find an article as fine as this going so cheaply. He was offering me cost-price because he knew I appreciated good things when I saw them. I offered him five shillings. He said I might have it for seven-and-six. Eventually I paid him six-and-six, which was sixpence more, as I knew, than a similar brush in the window of a shop on the Rise. This transaction concluded, Leslie reverted to his chest-notes.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, as he shut the attaché-case, ‘are you happy? ‘

  I said I was.

  ‘Truly happy? ‘

  ‘Certainly,’ I replied in a loud and, I hoped, conclusive voice.

  ‘You could never deceive me. I know you too well.’ His hand was at the do
or. He seemed to ponder, his head hanging low, the bowler in place. ‘So you are happy. Yes.’ This seemed rather a foreign construction. I wondered if Leslie had by now persuaded himself that he was really a German count; he had always been fond of the U.F.A. films. ‘You are happy. But life is queer, little Christine. I want you to know that if ever you need a shoulder to cry on —mine is here, waiting for you.’ I thanked him. I was in haste for him to go lest he should see that I was not, in fact, far from tears. For a moment the past had weighed too heavily. He added, with little logic, ‘Goodbye, my dear. We may never meet again.’

  I watched him as he ran down the stairs, the suitcase jolting in his hand. Poor Leslie, the first to love me, to give me confidence in myself; Leslie living in his dream-world, free to travel where he would on his Ruritanian passport; poor Leslie, fortunate Leslie, who would know poverty, worklessness and despair, but never know himself except as he most desired himself to be.

  I closed the door and did not think of him afterwards.

  Chapter Eight

  In those days the neighbourhood bordering between Clapham and Battersea was like a village, with all the village intimacy and cross-cuttings of class. The small professional middle-classes living along North and West Sides shopped along the Rise and St. John’s Road; sometimes, for the sake of cheapness and perhaps liveliness as well, they shopped along the stalls of Northcote Road, where bargains were to be found under the naphtha flares on Saturday nights. They drank coffee at Arding & Hobbs; the young ones who were in love walked around the specimen ‘furnished rooms’ of that shop, pretending to be in a home of their own. The young ones not yet in love, perhaps, and studious, worked in the cedar-smelling quiet of the Reference Library on Lavender Hill; the General Schools Certificate was always just around the corner. And whenever one went out, one met a friend.

  On the Rise one day Mrs. Allbright came on me out of nowhere and said (not forbearing to glance at my waist), ‘You never come to see us nowadays.’

  It was a thundery day in August. I was tired. I did not want to be kept standing. I said I was sorry, but that I had been busy: a remark that sent a flicker of lubricious light—hardly a smile—across her face. ‘Iris says it’s hard to be deserted by all her best friends. You never come, any of you.’

  Her sensitive nose moved at the tip. Despite the warmth of the day she had a pinched look, a blueness about the narrow nostrils.

  I decided to be honest with her. I reminded her that only recently she herself had greeted Caroline, who had called on Iris unexpectedly one afternoon, with the announcement that her daughter would not be ‘receiving ‘till four o’clock. ‘Caroline was rather hurt,’ I said.

  ‘And why? ’ Mrs. Allbright bridled. ‘She works later hours than the rest of you. Naturally she has to get her rest during the day.’ She paused. ‘Of course, she’d be at home to you. Her oldest friend.’

  I said I would try to look in.

  ‘I expect she feels,’ said Mrs. Allbright, ‘rather hurt that her oldest friend withholds her confidence. She only heard in the most roundabout fashion that you were expecting.’

  ‘I never kept it secret. But I haven’t been going about much.’

  ‘Due about Christmas,’ Mrs. Allbright persisted. She knew everything. She added, in a burst of bitterness, ‘To think she’s still left on the shelf, with the rest of you married and settled down!’

  I wanted to go. My legs were aching and the coming thunder was like a weight on my head. But I said, ‘I thought you didn’t want her to marry early in case it spoiled her career.’

  ‘Not any Tom, Dick and Harry. But there’s a stage-door Johnny after her now, and I tell her she’s a fool to play fast and loose with him.’ She gave me an account of him, half reverent, half ironic. He was rich, not too young, a diamond merchant of Portuguese extraction, who waited for Iris to leave the theatre night after night, who smothered her in flowers and delightful, not too expensive little gifts that it would have seemed priggish to return.

  ‘Suppose,’ said Mrs. Allbright, facing the worst, ‘that her career does not turn out as we hoped?’ Her voice sharpened: it was an effort for her to express her long fear in words. ‘In that case she would have something behind her. Thousands,’ she added, in case I should not realise what this something was. ‘But of course, she’s Miss Hoity-Toity, Miss Pick-and-Choose. I say to her, “Christine didn’t pick and choose. She took what she was offered, like a sensible girl.”’

  ‘I did choose Ned,’ I told her, young enough to be ‘drawn’.

  She gave a wide peculiar smile, but made no comment.

  A common acquaintance, stepping almost upon us out of a shop, saw her and quickly crossed the street. Dicky had once said it was always possible to know when Mrs. All-bright was coming, from the preliminary going to earth of the neighbours.

  ‘Iris,’ she went on, ‘is rapidly coming to the crossroads. She has made her first film. If she succeeds—well, who knows? There may be no need for Jaime.’

  She pronounced this name so accurately and with such empressement that I had to ask her to spell it.

  ‘Only a small part,’ said Mrs. Allbright, ‘but a little “plum”. It will be released next month. She has to sing an old English ballad.’

  Now she had given me her news she was willing to let me go. But I had not moved five yards away from her when she caught up with me, her eyelids flickering, her nose pointed. ‘You come and see the girl and put some sense into her head! She’s always relied on your opinion. She worships you. You tell her a bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush.’

  But I did not call upon Iris: all that seemed dead and gone, as faded as her pierrot doll and as grimy.

  When Ned and I saw her film we realised what a short distance, in fact, her career was likely to take her. The extreme small delicacy of her features seemed insipid, with no colouring to emphasise it. Her recorded voice had a trace of the genteel that I had never noticed when talking to her; and yet, perhaps, it is only the blind who truly hear a friend’s voice, since they are unable to associate it with the smile, the charming mouselike flicker of a facial muscle, the darkening or lightening of the eyes. Her small part had obviously been made smaller in the cutting-room; her song had been cut out altogether.

  Yet it seemed to me, that night, wonderful that she should appear on the screen at all, wonderful that there should be millions of people to see her and perhaps ask her name. I found myself looking at Ned with a touch of jealousy renewed. We had been more or less content together of late, for there is a moment, not infrequent, even in the most unhappy of marriages, when everything seems well enough, when even the sharing of ordinary domestic exchanges brings something like a touch of sweetness. Sometimes a common sense of failure is enough to give the illusion of a unity of success. And in my own marriage, ill-adjusted, wrong from the beginning, these things were true also. Sometimes Ned and I were near to each other in the thought of the child.

  For all that, he seemed not so much in love with me. His endearments were more brisk, more formal. He touched me less. He expressed an interest in the baby, what its sex would be, which of us it would take after; but he looked at me without ardour.

  I was not yet very big and I thought pregnancy had not made me plain. Nevertheless, I found myself envying girls who could be pretty, that hot summer, in their ordinary dresses; and found myself wishing that even Ned would reassure me, would tell me I was still as pretty as they, as pretty as I had ever been.

  As we left the cinema we walked towards Piccadilly Circus. Coloured letters ran along the sky. A golden bottle lavishly decanted stars into a golden cup. Over the roof-tops the sky burned with the permanent rust-red sunset of London. I felt very heavy and tired, but I tried to walk lightly; I was determined not to adopt the occupational waddle of many women in my state. In fact, I cared for my looks as I had never cared for them before, even in the d
ays of gramophones and dancing and the hopeless struggle to compete with Iris on the romantic Sunday afternoons of adolescence. I wanted Ned still to admire me, not to feel I was uninteresting and a drag; for though I was no longer in love I felt a selfish need for him. Only he was left to me, and I could not bear to feel alone. Without him, I should have nobody at all.

  Chapter Nine

  Ned stopped me suddenly. ‘We’ll give ourselves a little treat,’ he said. ‘Why not? I think we deserve it.’

  He took me without warning into one of the cocktail bars that had once so delighted me, had made me feel that I, too, was a part of W.I. But tonight, though I tried not to show it, I went there reluctantly. In my anxiety for the child I would not touch alcohol at all, and among the slender women I felt shapeless, somehow disgraced. Never had my life (that handful of days, so easily expended) seemed to me less profitable. However, we sat there in the rosy gloom, our faces flatteringly reflected in the pink-tinted glass along the walls, and I drank lime-juice.

  ‘Oh, go on,’ said Ned, ‘you need something stronger to cheer you up.’

  ‘I am exceedingly cheerful,’ I said, on the edge of tears.

  I heard him mutter to himself. Then he gave a sudden, strange, bright smile. ‘I expect all girls feel like that; they all have their moods when they’re in your condition.’

  ‘I expect they do.’

  ‘When it’s over you’ll be quite all right again.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall.’

  He listened to the music coming from the restaurant upstairs. ‘There! You say I’m tone-deaf, but I bet that’s the thing we used to hear at Richmond, day in, day out.’