An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  I was back in my room. The sun shone brightly through the clear glass and filled the frosted panes with stars of fawn and gold. They brought me some tea and I drank a little.

  I thought of Ned, and was suddenly tormented by the idea that all this time, all these hours, he must have been worrying himself sick, that he still did not know it was over and that we had a son.

  I called out, as loudly as I could, since there seemed to be no one about, ‘Will somebody tell my husband?’

  A face popped up from the floor. A wardmaid looked at me, a humble little girl in a pink dress. ‘I’ll go and ask nurse, if you like.’

  Nurse appeared from nowhere. ‘Your husband knows all about it, Mrs. Skelton. I’ve been on the phone to him. He’s like a dog with two tails, and as soon as you’ve had a sleep he shall come and see you.’

  Then it was night again, or perhaps evening. I had had something to eat. I had powdered my face, combed my hair. My body felt strangely soft and flat and light. From the kitchen along the corridor came the rattle of china and cutlery, the pervasive and repulsive smell of cauliflower cheese.

  Ned came in suddenly, on tiptoe, looking scared. He was not at all like a dog with two tails, and I was surprised at the nurse’s invention.

  ‘Thank God.’ He kissed me quickly, as if he were shy. ‘Was it awful?’

  I told him it had not been too bad and that I should not dread doing it again.

  He shuddered. ‘Not on your life.’

  I said that if he would ring the bell for me I would ask them to fetch the baby.

  ‘Not for a moment.’ He held my hands tightly. ‘Oh, Chris, it was so awful. If you knew what I’d been feeling.’

  I made a commonplace, tinny little joke about men suffering at childbirth.

  ‘I was afraid you’d die. I did get Emilie up. I couldn’t be alone.’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t going to die!’ I quoted the maternal mortality rate. He damned it.

  ‘It’s very low,’ I said.

  He sat stroking my hair.

  He found nothing to say except that he was pleased the baby was a boy.

  When they brought it, still sullen in sleep, a spire of fair hair sticking up from the blanket, minuscule hands knotted beneath its chin, he barely seemed to look at it.

  ‘Very fine. Very nice. He looks like you.’ Ned could hardly wait until the nurse had taken the child away and we were alone again.

  Then he told me he loved me and that I must always love him. We had had a bad start, but now we must manage our affairs better, have better times, go for a holiday.

  Out of my first disappointment, that he seemed unable to share my love for this little, mysterious boy sleeping out his first day away from me, came an obscure pleasure that the child was my own, entirely mine. As Ned looked at me with something of Dicky’s sheepishness, half-wanting to go and half to stay, I felt a fondness for him that appeared to me deeper than the love I had lost. There was no noise now from the kitchen; only the refrigerator gave out, at intervals, its lurch and grind. In the still light, the ethereal quietness, I took comfort from him and was very glad to hold his hand.

  Chapter Eleven

  The first sleep of a child after birth, like the sleep of a traveller at the end of a long journey, is solemn, unlined and deep. During it the child lies between his unguessable past and his equally unguessable future; the blanketing of both is about him. But when, refreshed, he floats free of that dark, warm memory, until nothing is left of it except the position in which he now lies, tortoise-wrinkled hands clasped beneath his chin, his knees drawn up to those hands, his eyes regard only the future. Then, every day, he shows new evidence of his budding; perhaps only in the flash of a new colour across the eye, in a little grumble almost too faint to hear, in the sudden stretching out of fingers that must learn to touch but do not yet know where touchable things are to be located.

  I found so great a fascination in watching the manifold changes of Mark, as we called our baby, that I could watch him untiringly without thought of time. I tried to make Ned see how infinite, in fact, was the variety of each new day—but he could not. ‘I’ll like him when he’s old enough to talk and stagger around a bit. At the moment he’s just a blob.’

  It was meant to be funny; and it chilled me. I wanted him to share this new experience, this curious research; wanted him to check my findings, assure me that they were not imaginary, that not only every day but every hour this progress towards sentience continued. But he could not. After his self-imposed abstinence he longed for me again. He was impatient until the baby was bathed, fed, and put back into his basket. He wanted to be alone with me, to feel alone with me, as if we had never had a child at all. And he was eager for me to be well enough to receive him again.

  The nurse, who was staying with me for the first month after my return, infuriated him. She was a great, moustached, cleanly chatter-box, excellent at her job, and given to open condemnation of all men and their ways.

  ‘I shall be damned glad when she’s gone,’ he said to me, as we watched her from the window wheeling the baby out into the front garden. ‘My God, how pleased I’ll be to see the back of her!’

  ‘I won’t,’ I replied. I still felt weak and dreaded the moment when I must take full responsibility for the child.

  He looked at me oddly. ‘Shall I tell you why you won’t?’

  I said it must be quite obvious.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Ned. His face was flushed. ‘It wouldn’t be obvious to most people. It is to me.’

  What he said then astonished and bewildered me. However well we may think we know another person, we can never tell what bizarre resentments they may hide within them, how curious may be the whiplash of the inner tongue that speaks to them as our own inner tongue speaks to us. We do not know what may be driving them to destruction, until the inner tongue sounds suddenly through their lips, betraying them beyond forgiveness, and altering the entire shape of our belief in them. Ned told me he knew perfectly well why I would not let him make love to me again. It was, he said, because the nurse hated the thought of sex, despised it, revolted from it. In my usual hypersensitive way—hypersensitive to everyone’s feelings but his own—I would not let him come near me while she was still in the house. He knew all this, because he had seen the look in my eyes.

  ‘It’s not five weeks,’ I said. I did not know how else to defend myself against this farrago, so preposterous that it made him seem a stranger, someone to be feared.

  ‘That’s not all of it,’ said Ned, ‘and you’re perfectly well aware of it.’

  The baby began to cry.

  ‘Leave him alone. He’s only yelling to attract attention. You listen to me.’

  I walked past him into the little nursery and shut the door.

  ‘All right,’ he called out to me. I heard him go to the telephone and dial a number. He spoke briefly to somebody, but I did not hear what he said. I only heard him laugh.

  He did not refer again to what had happened between us until after our evening meal, when the nurse had gone off to do some washing for the baby. ‘If you’ve no use for me I’m not going to be tied to the house. I’m going out, and I may be late. Don’t wait up for me.’

  I did not question him; I supposed he was going drinking with Harris or another of his friends. But he did not return at all that night. I kept waking hourly to turn on the light, look at the clock. When the nurse brought the baby to me at six o’clock she said sharply, ‘All on your lonesome?’

  I told her my husband was away for the night on business.

  ‘Oh, is he? Well, we’re always better off without them. What with their ins and outs, and their bad tempers. I envy you that dear little baby, Mrs. Skelton, but not when I think what you had to go through for it.’

  ‘I had an easy time, really,’ I said, thinking she w
as referring to my confinement.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ the nurse said, with a kind of lubricious grimness, ‘I meant something else.’

  She watched me feeding the baby.

  ‘I don’t give up easy, Mrs. Skelton, but you’d better ask doctor what he thinks about the bottle. Our little Packet’s not gaining as he ought, and in my view that’s because you’re a worrier. Not that you haven’t enough to worry you.’

  The baby fell away from the breast and began to cry; the nurse and I between us had one of those curiously undignified and slightly brutal struggles to make him take it again. She seized the top of his nut-like head and appeared to screw it on to the nipple, as if she were screwing the top on to a bottle. ‘And the state you’re in tonight! What good do you think that’s doing him? You’ve got to be quiet to feed them, quiet as a cabbage. Which you’re not.’

  We all struggled on for the best part of an hour. At the end of it I was utterly exhausted and my head was aching.

  The nurse bore the baby off for a test-weighing, bore the bad news triumphantly back. ‘Two ounces, that’s all he’s had! I’m going to give him a supplementary feed, poor mite; I won’t have my Packet starve.’

  I thought, as I fell asleep, how strange it was not to care about anybody; not for Mark, not for Ned.

  But I woke to an immediate sense of wrongness. I remembered the lonely night, Ned’s disappearance, the nerve-racked struggle with the baby. My headache was still acute.

  ‘You look a wreck this morning,’ the nurse said, bringing me tea. ‘How fit will you be when I leave you at the end of next week? You want a regular nanny, that’s what you want.’

  I told her I could not afford this. ‘Maybe you can’t, but it’s what you want.’ She added abruptly, ‘You stop in bed this morning.’

  For she was kind; she had guessed that I did not know where Ned was, that I was worried about him. She tried to comfort me by such cossetting as she could achieve.

  I lay in the quiet bedroom, watching the orange sun of winter measuring out the corners. A saffron fog hung about the sky, no more than a gauze. It was a hushed, enclosing day, a day of suspended time. I tried to write a poem; it was the first time I had written anything for over a year. There were six verses, irregular in metre. They seemed good to me when I had first completed them. Half an hour later I read them and found them lame, stale, obscurely shameful. Yet I could not bear to destroy them; I put the sheet of paper away in the empty cigarette-box that stood on the bedside table, the box I had always meant, in the first days of my marriage, to keep filled for its proper purpose, but which was now a receptacle for an odd collar-stud, a hair-grip, a laundry receipt.

  The nurse was out, doing some shopping for me. I telephoned Ned at the office.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I burst out.

  There was a pause. ‘Nowhere interesting.’

  ‘You must tell me! I’ve been so worried.’

  ‘No need. I can look after myself. I told you I’d be late. I simply couldn’t get back.’

  ‘Where did you spend the night?’

  ‘Nowhere of interest.’ His voice was stubborn and level, the kind of voice that seems to be steadied by a ruler.

  I told him angrily that he had no right to leave me like that; I had been upset and frightened. How would he feel if I behaved like this to him?

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why is it different?’

  ‘I can’t talk now. We’re busy. See you at the usual time.’

  When he came in we could not talk, for the nurse was everywhere.

  At the meal he was quiet and courteous, even putting himself out to please a little.

  I could not eat.

  If you don’t do better than that, Mrs. Skelton,’ the nurse said, ‘you won’t be able to do our Packet much good. The trouble with your wife—’ she turned purposefully to Ned— ‘she’s a worrier. And people who want to be kind to her ought to see she’s got nothing to worry about. That’s what they ought to do.’

  In the bedroom afterwards I rounded on him.

  ‘You must see I’ve a right to know!’

  The nurse was lustily singing Jerusalem in the kitchen.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you,’ Ned said. You’ll have to trust me.’

  And he refused to say another word.

  In the obstinate silences, the cold politenesses, the parody of normal domestic behaviour that filled the next few days, I was torn between two emotions. Oddly enough I was stirred by some recrudescence of my early romantic feeling for Ned into faintly admiring him for his refusal to speak. Perhaps, after all, he was proving as ‘strong’ as I had hoped he would be. But a more realistic sense told me that his obstinacy was stupid and cruel: that whatever the truth of his disappearance and however unpalatable he thought I might find it, a kindly man would have taken trouble to find a comforting lie for me.

  As the weeks went on I brooded over it all less and less; sometimes I only thought of it once or twice in a day, for the baby was now in my sole care and all my love was turned towards him. Sometimes I would be taken by a rush of irrelevant jealousy—irrelevant, because it was the kind of jealousy we usually know only when we are in love, and I was out of love, living deliberately from day to day, allowing myself no hope in anything but the capacity of life to change itself utterly at any time through one of its incalculable miracles.

  Chapter Twelve

  I think I might have filed Ned’s disappearance away into the small drawer of my mind reserved for insoluble mysteries if I had not had an odd encounter with Nelly Ormerod.

  Emilie was looking after the baby for the day so that I might go shopping in the West End. Though I had little enough to shop with, the idea of the change was stimulating, and the idea of putting on my best dress.

  It was April; a sticky spring day, unnaturally warm for the time of year, a day of brief showers and hot sun. Oxford Street was full of the reek and steam of mackintoshes. I was looking at the jewellery counter of a big shop when I caught sight of Nelly. She was examining watch-straps with a troubled air, fitting one after another upon her thick wrist, shooting back the cuffs of her tweed suit each time she did so. She stood with her legs widely planted, a pale-blue, unsuitable town hat well to the back of her head. I ran and caught her by the arm.

  ‘Oh, hullo!’ She stared at me. ‘Fancy seeing you.’ She coloured. ‘How is everybody?’

  I asked her if she was in London for the day, whether she would come and have tea with me. ‘Well, I don’t know—’ she began.

  Just then a small, eton-cropped woman, little more than a girl, thin and raven-like in a tight black costume, pounced on Nelly from the opposite side. ‘Dearest, I will buy you a brooch! I insist!’ Her voice was harsh and passionate. ‘It’s so damned silly to be proud—”

  She saw me, and waited for an introduction.

  This is Miss Fisher,’ said Nelly. Joy, this is my sister-in-law.’

  Oh,’ said the girl, flashing out a long thin hand darkened by the sun, ‘I’ve heard about you.’ I had not heard about Miss Fisher. ‘Were you two going to tea? Do, if you want, and I’ll meet you later. I’ve got to have my feet done.’

  ‘No, Joy,’ said Nelly, whose colour had not subsided, ‘there’s no need for you to go dashing off like that.’

  ‘But you can’t sit there while they cut my corns, can you? Where will you be?’

  Nelly mentioned a tea-shop nearby.

  ‘I’ll be back in about an hour. So long.’ Miss Fisher disappeared in the crowds, walking with a stiff back as if she had somehow been affronted.

  ‘She lives near me,’ said Nelly. ‘I’ve known her since she was a schoolgirl.’

  As we went towards our tea she asked me the ordinary questions: How was I? How was Emilie? How was the baby? She was all righ
t. She’d got a new dog, but it was rather a sickly creature—she could not feel for it in the same way.

  Her troubled look did not leave her for a long while. She said unexpectedly, ‘Well, you look pretty, but I can’t say you look smart. Money tight? You’re not to mind me asking.’

  Indeed, I did not. I had no one now to whom I could speak in intimacy, for Caroline never wrote or telephoned, and I heard little of Dicky. I had always found Nelly’s physical bigness a comfort. I had often wondered whether I might not make a real friend of her.

  ‘Of course money’s tight,’ I said; ‘it couldn’t be otherwise.’

  ‘Tighter now the baby’s here? I think Harriet ought to help with him.’

  ‘We can manage.’

  She gave a little sigh. Her face was clear now, clear and smiling. There was a teasing look in her eyes, warming, but somehow rather disconcerting. ‘Oh dear, you proud young people! Well, we shall have to see. How is Himself? Sticking to the grindstone?’

  ‘In my opinion, he’s doing his very best,’ I told her, wondering if he really was.

  Nelly did not take this view. Ned, she told me, was doing just enough work to make it possible for his father to employ him without all the office eyebrows shooting up. ‘There’s no log-cabin-to-White-House about your husband, my dear. If only he’d put his back into it Father might be generous. But he won’t. Still, I think you’ve improved him a bit.’ She opened her mouth as if about to say something, closed it again.

  I watched her; I knew an incomprehensible touch of unease. Her eyes were still bright, still teasing; but it was as though, below the surface expression of the retina, another expression had been slotted in, like a slide into a magic lantern.

  She said, ‘Anyhow, you seem to have kept him off the women.’

  This was so startling that for a second I did not feel the implication of betrayal. ‘Women?’ I said.

  ‘Now, Chris, you must know him by now. And he’ll have told you all about his past, if I know him.’

  The hurt was beginning; I felt my heart sink. I tried to speak lightly. ‘I know about Wanda, of course.’