Aunt Emilie jumped. She had tried to remove herself spiritually from this family conclave, to shrink smaller and smaller inside her bones, to make herself so little that nobody could see her at all. She was aroused so suddenly from this dream of smallness that she had no time to think. ‘Oh, I think they’re being silly.’
‘What!’ Mrs. Skelton smiled widely. ‘You do?’
Emilie flushed into her brown-rose patches. Her answer had been a true one. She meant to stand by it. ‘They do have a hard time. I know they didn’t like Ned going back into the job you gave him. I mean, when you offered him what they didn’t like they were very upset. I don’t see why they should be upset when you offer them something they ought to like.’
Mrs. Skelton clapped her hands softly. The ravaged handsomeness of her face was striking in the late sunlight. ‘Bravo! Thank God somebody’s got some sense.’
‘It’s amends, in a way,’ Emilie said hopefully to Ned.
Mr. Skelton was roused to protest. ‘Oh, now, now! I don’t admit that. We’ve nothing to make amends for. This is just because we want the baby to have a decent chance.’
The suggestion that this plump, lovely, hungry, happy child was not getting a decent chance enraged me.
‘Thank you,’ I said, but we can’t possibly accept.’
I looked at Ned. He was silent, his hands in his pockets. He balanced upon the balls of his feet.
‘It is kind,’ I repeated.
His mother smiled faintly. ‘All right, dear, I’ve said it’s all right. In my opinion only Mrs. Jackson is showing the slightest nous, but there you are. Harold, we must be going.’ She reminded him that friends were expected at six.
As they both rose Ned said thickly, ‘Mark’s perfectly all right—Chris does marvels for him. And I don’t think we can stand any more favours.’
I wished he had not sounded so graceless. I was torn. `No, let’s not put it like that,’ I said. ‘Please, let’s not.’
‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Skelton, kissing me, we know your heart’s in the right place. We even know it’s made of flesh and not of indiarubber. I’m sorry you won’t support your aunt, but there it is.’
Walking up to Ned she gave him a sudden, affectionate buffet on his arm. Silly fool, aren’t you? Well, it’s the way you’re made. I never knew such a boy.’
He said nothing.
The Skeltons had shaken hands with Emilie and me and were just going out, when he spoke. ‘Chris and I will see you down.’
We took them across the grass to the shady tree. Mark, eyes full of secret gaiety, of jokes only he could understand, was laughing to himself. He had kicked off both socks and, like a netted bird, had got his feet caught in the broad mesh of the perambulator net.
‘He’s most like Ned, I think,’ Mrs. Skelton said judiciously.
‘There’s the boy, what a boy!’ her husband crowed, taking out his tie and waggling the end of it at the baby. ‘Say dad, then: can’t you talk yet? Say dad-dad.’
‘I think there’s a touch of Nelly about the mouth.’ Mrs. Skelton lowered herself further over the pram, frowned, nodded to herself.
I freed the baby’s feet, pulled the net away and kissed him. His cheek was firm and resilient. It smelled of powder and flowers.
‘All right,’ said Ned loudly, ‘you know we’ll take it. You know we haven’t any option. We both thank you very much.’ His face was convulsed with anger; the rising blood had stopped at a line halfway up his forehead. He might have been out all day in the sun, watching cricket. His eyes were enlarged, as if by the lens of tears. He said tightly, ‘We are very grateful.’
Chapter Two
After that Ned paid even less attention to the baby than before. He was my child and Mrs. Sketon’s. I cared for him. She paid for him. I think Ned felt that Mark no longer had anything to do with his father.
So far as I was concerned I did not much mind. There was a little more money coming into the house. I bought two new cotton dresses that gave me more pleasure than any clothes I had ever had in my life before. Looking sentimentally at the reflection in the looking-glass of myself holding Mark in my arms, I hoped people would think, A pretty mother and a pretty baby. I began to fall back upon the fantasy life of my childhood; it was pleasant to move in those sparkling marine depths, among the delicate corals of imagination, to move slowly, flowingly, against the pressure of the waters. And though I could still see Ned clearly, I saw him through a clear glassy barrier, as a goldfish sees human beings through the bowl.
Perhaps he, also, was removed from me by dreams of his own. Often, as he sat over the newspaper while I cleared the breakfast dishes, he would remark that he didn’t like the state of the world; he wouldn’t mind betting that there would be trouble again some day. He sounded gloomy, but his eyes brightened. He was thinking of war; his own desires made him far-sighted. ‘One never knows which way the world’s going to jump. I tell you, I’d never be surprised’—he beheld distances, marching men, a life he could understand—‘to find myself back in uniform again.’
But, unlike my own, his fantasies were sporadic and short-lived. I always knew when he had emerged from one of them because of the shortness of his temper; his angry, hopeless spurts of endeavour to find a new path for himself. Once or twice, unknown to his father, he tried to find work with other firms; but business was still bad, the stock markets were still low, nobody was buying much property, and nobody wanted Ned.
I realised that he had indeed been unfortunate. If he had had his wish—to soldier, to see the world, to command and to obey, to live life by numbers—he would have been a different man. His physical courage, I had learned from his mother, had always been of a high order. He was easy and good-humoured in the company of men like himself. He could have been successful. He could have been serene.
My dissociation from him, however, had grown so extreme that I was beginning to forget what his ordinary reactions were like. A year ago, had I received this letter from the editor, telling me he liked my poem but wanted to see me about it before going further, I should have concealed it from Ned and not thrust it upon him in unthinking delight.
‘Are you up to that stuff again?’ he said.
I told him that it was only a poem.
‘I can see it is. I thought you’d grown out of all that.’ I tried to impress him with the distinction of the periodical.
‘Nobody reads it.’
‘It has,’ I said professionally, ‘quite a large circulation.’
‘You don’t want to get into those circles,’ said Ned.
I asked him what was wrong with them.
He replied rather surprisingly, ‘Messy morals. A lot of half-men who don’t wash.’
I told him indignantly that the private life of this editor was beyond question, and that his magazine was run by higher-grade literary persons almost like civil servants in their personal cleanliness.
It struck me as sad, even as I spoke, that the lighter moments of our life together should arise only out of friction. When Ned was angry he lost his sense of the ridiculous; I regained my own.
‘Well, you’re not going.’
Even from him this was preposterous. I asked him not to behave like a Victorian father.
‘The Victorians washed,’ said Ned, apparently obsessed by salubricity. ‘And I don’t want you getting into queer sets I don’t know about. They’ll take your mind off your home and your children,’—he used the plural for sturdier effect—‘and you’ll find yourself involved in all sorts of muck.’ He paused. ‘Is this chap married?’
I realised that he was driven by jealousy, that jealousy was taking a fantastic shape. A year or so ago this would have excited and pleased me: now it appeared no more than idiotic.
I said, as calmly as I could, that to the best of my knowledge the editor had been marrie
d for fifteen years and had three sons.
‘All the same,’ said Ned, ‘you write and tell him you can’t get away and that he can say what he has to say on paper.’
He rose abruptly, fetched his hat, jammed it not quite straight on his head and went away.
Now if many of us know the pressures of the inner critic, many of us also recognise—though not until his task has been carried out—the activities of the secret planner. We are unhappy in the prison of our lives—we want to break out. And so, without realising what we do since it is the secret planner who thinks for us, we slowly lay our schemes for escape.
When I went to ask Emilie if she would look after Mark that afternoon (I was, of course, going to see the editor) I had to wait for ten minutes till she could talk to me, as she was having a bath. Emilie had no books—she had never seen the need for them—so I had to divert myself by reading her church magazine. And it occurred to me that she might be far happier with the church on her doorstep, instead of a bus ride away.
When she had agreed to take Mark after his midday feed I asked her whether she would not rather have a flat in Clapham Old Town. ‘Wouldn’t it be far more convenient to you?’
The idea appealed to her at once; but she could not see that it would be practical. ‘I shouldn’t be nearly so much help to you, dear.’
She was not often a help to me in any case, but I did not, of course, say so. I told her I could always bring Mark to her if I wanted some free time, and that it would be less troublesome for me to do this than for her to cross the Common twice on Sundays and once or twice in the week.
‘But I’d never find another place,’ said Emilie, and I don’t know that I could face moving.’
‘I’ll look out for something,’ I told her, ‘and help you all I can.’
She looked in timid bewilderment about her flat, as if she were being forced to leave it within the hour.
The editor was hardly worth my gesture of defiance.
He was a young-old, aunt-like, eagle-featured man, who treated me rather as though he had forgotten sending for me and could not remember why he had done such a thing. He was courteous and prim; even Ned could scarcely have been jealous of him. It seemed that he did not like my poem well enough to print it (I swallowed disappointment like a draught of aloes) but that he thought I might be worth encouraging. He wondered—this appeared the final insult—whether I had thought of writing prose? If I should have anything else to send him (they were somewhat over-stocked with poetry just at the moment) he would be interested to read it. He rose and bowed me out, curving his height over me as if he were a lean-to shed.
I should have confessed my disobedience to Ned had the result of it not been humiliating. I should have gloried in defiance had I been able to add that the editor was printing my poem next month and that he had not seen gifts comparable with mine since he first discovered Ezra Pound. But to tell Ned I had defied him and had then received a gracious dismissal was too much. I said nothing at all. Ned assumed that I obeyed his orders, and for several days afterwards he went about with a strange, fattened look of satisfaction, treating me with uncommon tenderness.
At the end of May Dicky telephoned me. It was months since I had heard from him. He had been for a walking tour in Germany, he said, and was longing to tell me about it. What a country! There was going to be trouble. Already he had seen a sign in a park: ‘Dogs and Jews not admitted.’ It had made him think of poor old Take Plato —one had never thought of him as being a Jew, had one? How revolting people could be. But he thought Hindenburg would come down pretty smartly on the Brownshirt mob when the time came.
I asked him to come round to the flat. Ned was at his club, playing squash; he rarely went there nowadays, as he could not afford to buy people drinks. ‘I’ll be alone,’ I said, ‘so we can have a good talk.’
It was one of those evenings of mysterious promise, hot and still, a faint blue mist overlying the green mist of the common. The lamps along the Parade, the watered gold of orange juice, were just visible through the trees. I opened the windows wide, and the scent of may and petrol fumes were borne into the room.
Dicky came in with his old, sly slouch and gave me a kiss. He had never done this before. It did not mean that he had fallen in love with me; it meant that he was growing-up, that he was adopting the easier social customs of a generation a little older than our own.
‘This is cosy,’ he said, settling himself in one of the chairs I had set before the window. ‘That takes me back to old times.’ He waved his hand towards the big field, from which came faintly the sound of music. A cluster of glowing cigarette-ends were like fireflies in the dusk. Some boys and girls, like the boys and girls we had been, had brought out a portable gramophone.
‘The Rachmaninoff,’ Dicky observed, ‘his own recording.’
He turned to me and began to talk about his holidays. He was excited, but genuinely perturbed. I noticed, as his voice ran on, that in speaking of what he had seen he did not use his old schoolboy slang.
‘I don’t like it, Chris. I really don’t. There’s something there as ugly as the devil.’
I stretched out my hand to switch on the table-lamp, but he stopped me. Don’t. It’s nice as it is.’
The boys and girls were singing, their voices scooping as wistfully in space as the voices of others who had sung the songs of the last war.
‘That’s a new number,’ Dicky said attentively, slipping into the jargon of his trade. ‘It must have come out while I was away. What is it?’
I said I did not know. I did not listen to the wireless. Ned did not care for it.
‘You shouldn’t have married that fellow,’ Dicky said abruptly.
‘If I hadn’t I shouldn’t have had Mark.’
I could just see his face pallid in the beam of a street lamp.
‘You’d have had a baby you’d have liked as much. You wouldn’t have known any better.’
‘I can never believe that,’ I told him.
‘Are you getting on more or less all right?’
Even to Dicky I said, ‘Quite all right.’
‘Shouldn’t have married him. Sh!’ He held up a hand to check my reply. ‘I can just hear a word or two—something about apples and trees . . . quite a good number. I’ll have to mug up all my backwork when I get back to the office. Mind you,’ he went on without a pause, I don’t suppose we’d have got on any better. We’ve known each other too long. We should have liked the same things, though.’
He took my hand for a moment and held it. ‘You’ll be all right. Good luck.’
We were more intimate than we had ever been; I knew he had to conquer his shyness in order to speak to me like this, to touch me, and I was moved by the kindness that was so deep in his nature. We sat together in a quiet that was like the quiet of love. The common was black now, but over the rim of the farthest trees the sky was a pure and lovely green. The evening star trembled and spurted its silver as though somebody had twitched a wire. Still, from the dark field the voices rose in mournful and delectable song.
The outer door slammed. I switched on the light. ‘There’s Ned,’ I said; ‘earlier than I thought he’d be. I suppose I’ll have to make fresh coffee.’
He came in, stared at Dicky. ‘You, is it?’ He said to me, ‘What on earth were you sitting in the dark for? The light wasn’t on when I came by.’
‘The sunset was so nice,’ I replied, ‘we wanted to watch it.’
‘Hullo, Ned. Nice to see you.’ Dicky had risen and was standing slightly on one foot. He was not feeling guilty—there was nothing to feel guilty about—but in Ned’s presence he always tended to parody his own boyishness.
‘Dicky’s just back from Germany,’ I said. He’s got an awful lot that will interest you.’ I began trying to interest Ned.
Dicky said fatally, ‘Oh, and we
’ve been yarning about old times.’
Ned looked at him silently. I wondered for a moment if he had been drinking too much—but he had not.
‘I suppose I’d better slope along,’ said Dicky. He whistled softly under his breath, moved his foot in a limited tap dance.
‘Yes, I think you had.’ Ned’s voice was very clear. ‘It’s late.’
I could not bear to be so humiliated. Nonsense, I said; it was not half-past ten. I would make more coffee, and Dicky would talk about Germany.
‘No, look,’ Dicky murmured, I really shall have to wallow along. Got to be up early to work.’
‘If you come again you might make a point of coming while I’m here,’ Ned said.
I told him sharply not to be silly.
‘I won’t have you coming when I’m not here,’ Ned repeated. ‘I damned well don’t like it.’
‘Look here, Ned,’ said Dicky, ‘you’ve really got the wrong end of the stick. I’m not like that. I’m not a Don Juan.’ (He might have been seventeen; I was reminded, with a touch of the irrational jealousy we may feel for people we do not love ourselves, when they show love for others, of that schoolboy’s letter to Iris: I’m not a sheikh in flowing robes.’) Between Ned, and Dicky and myself, the years rose like bars of iron. ‘You ask Chris. She’ll tell you.’
‘I don’t need to ask my wife. I am telling you to come when I’m in and not when I’m out.’
‘I asked him here,’ I said.
Dicky was quiet. We both watched him. I saw a change in him, that made me feel I had never known him before.
For a moment I was as scared of him as I was of Ned. We do not know people. We cannot know people. We are always wrong.
He said to Ned, in a light, unfamiliar voice, ‘You’re behaving like a lout.’
Ned flushed. He had expected attack, but not of this order; its very touch of schoolboyishness put him at a loss. And his reply was oddly like a schoolboy’s.
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