‘It’s you who’s the lout. You get out of here and don’t come back.’
Dicky turned to me. He seemed easier now, in control of himself. ‘I’m sorry about this, Chris. It’s beastly for you. It’s a pity I’m the cause of it.’
I said meaninglessly, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
‘You get out of here,’ Ned said. He put a hand on Dicky’s arm.
Dicky stepped back. ‘If you like to come out with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll damned well fight you. You can’t hit a chap in his own house, or so I’m told, and you can’t hit him in yours, so there’s nothing but the Common.’ He sounded rather as if he were a little drunk; his words were slurred.
Ned smiled. He touched my shoulder, as if to make us associates. ‘Aren’t we a bit old for that sort of tomfoolery?’
‘I’m not,’ said Dicky.
They looked at each other in a sparring silence that was curiously like one of the silences of friendship.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Ned.
I said, ‘No, you won’t. If you knew how stupid you both looked!’ And indeed I was angry enough to include Dicky in my disgust.
‘Now, Chris,’ said Ned, you mind your own business.’
I told Dicky to go. He looked at Ned, then back at me. Ned stood silently. A big brown moth, flown in from the Common, dashed itself against the light.
Dicky shrugged his shoulders, gave me his old, sidelong smile; it was the bumpkin smile, disguising, derisory. ‘If you say so. We’ll see each other some time, I hope.’ Switching out his hand he caught the moth, listened to it for a second as it whirred within his palm, and put it out of the window. ‘Poor fellow! Well, I’ll slope along.’
When he had gone we both listened until the sound of his feet had died away along the road.
‘Lout,’ said Ned uneasily. He looked in the coffee-pot, swishing it around.
I said, ‘You won’t let me write; you won’t let me meet new people; you’ve driven all my friends away.’
‘Oh, he’ll be back, worse luck.’
No, I said, he would not. No one would come back.
Then I told him I was unhappy. We had failed, I said, a long time ago; he must know that.
‘I don’t admit it.’
Even at that moment domestic responsibility seemed important. Taking the pot from his hand, I said I was quite prepared to make some more coffee. All he had got there was a lot of grounds.
‘Damn the coffee,’ said Ned.
He looked thoughtful, but no more so than if he had been puzzling out the best way to get from A to B on a map. It was hard to talk to him.
I told him I wanted to be free, that I had come to the end of life with him. He must divorce me (I knew a touch of grown-up pride as I said the word) and we would both try to part without pretending a misery neither of us could really feel.
‘Oh, don’t be more silly than you can help,’ he said, still in the same restrained and moody tone.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I said, ‘want to take Mark right away from you. We could share him.’
It was curious how unreal all this seemed, even to me; and yet I knew that it was in fact a reality, that I had come to the end of pretence, of the dreary fantasy that I could live a life of sober and hopeless endurance.
‘What should I divorce you for?’ Ned asked me in a light, almost cheerful voice. ‘Adultery? Who shall I cite? Not Dicky. I’m prepared to admit that.’
I told him we must talk about this seriously. He must realise that I was in earnest.
‘You can’t, of course, divorce me,’ Ned went on. ‘I’ve done nothing and I don’t propose to. And you couldn’t expect me to perjure myself. I’m an honest man.’ He paused. ‘So you see, I’m afraid all that’s washed out.’
I said, ‘I mean this. I can’t live with you any longer. You’d be happier without me, too.’
He caught my arm. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. I shouldn’t.’ He looked at me. His eyes were thick with anger and distress. He blinked them rapidly, as if he were finding it hard to see. ‘Stop this,’ he said, ‘and don’t let’s have any more acting.’
Chapter Three
The secret planner began to work hard for me, quite in the dark at first—I did not realise fully, until later, what had made me find Emilie another home a mile away and help her immediately to move into it—and then a little more openly. I told myself that my reason for making tentative enquiries about a return to office work was that I needed something to break the monotonous tension of my life with Ned. After all, Mark could be cared for during the day; if I were earning a salary again I could afford to pay for help. Ned would be angry with me, I knew, but I did not think he would try seriously to stop me. He was prepared to please me in any way but the one I longed for. He was making love to me with a kind of feverish deliberation, almost as if he were going to the wars and we had only a little time left. He was taking me out and about. Once or twice he had bought me some flowers.
My first enquiries were tentative indeed—no more than a casual glance at the clerical employments column in the paper; a letter sent in answer to an advertisement for a girl more qualified than I—a letter to which I did not expect or really wish to receive an answer. It was too early for conclusions.
I fancied Ned had hinted to Maddox Street that there was some kind of trouble between us, because I saw none of my relations-in-law. The days dragged on into July; and as I look back at them now I am surprised to remember my own temperate, almost cheerful, spirits. It was, of course, the cheerfulness of determination. I had made up my mind. Nothing might appear to be happening, but under the quietness was a steady undertow.
I telephoned Caroline. Did she feel like seeing people again? How was she? I had missed her.
‘Darling, I will come around soon,’ she replied, ‘really I will. I’ll make the effort. At the moment I never seem to get anywhere. How’s Ned?’
I told her briefly that we had failed. She did not seem surprised.
‘And what’s going to happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, but something will.’
‘Aren’t you in love with the poor old thing, not at all?’ she enquired, in something like a parody of her old, flippant manner.
‘No,’ I said, and felt sorry for Ned and for me. ‘I hate being out of love,’ I added.
‘Oh, I don’t mind that,’ said Caroline. ‘I told you I was Pro—you know what I mean; but I was never romantic. Not like you. It’s simply that I’m at such a loose end.’
She meant that she was lonely: but it was a loneliness against which she seemed unable to act. She asked me if I had looked at the morning paper: Iris had had her first child, born in Buenos Aires. ‘I bet it’s in a frightfully unhealthy basket,’ Caroline added, ‘all air excluded by muslin and blue bows. She will probably have photographs taken of it sticking out of a boot, like one of those soppy kittens.’
She promised she would come and see me soon, she did not know when. As I hung up the receiver I felt that she, like all my friends, had gone forever.
One morning when I had gone to the West End to shop—this was my weekly entertainment, my comfort, my illusion of release—I found myself walking without premeditation down Waterloo Place. Something told me not to think at all, to let my feet carry me where they wished, to deal with a situation when I actually came face to face with it.
I got into the lift, conscious that my face was hot and flushed, that my heart was beating. Outside the door I paused, and read the gilded letters as though I had never seen them before.
It was half-past twelve. Mr. Baynard should be at lunch, Mr. Fawcett indoors with Miss Rosoman.
The familiar smell caught me, the smell of sandalwood, Jeyes fluid and carbon paper. It penetrated the joining of the doors, sifted through the keyhole. I went in.<
br />
Nobody was there. The sunlight sparkled in its familiar way upon the bevel of the looking-glass, threw its golden squares over the parquet and across the three clean blotting-pads upon the counter, pink and white and green. There was a cover upon Miss Rosoman’s machine, a sheet of paper in the typewriter that had been mine. I was reminded of Ambrose Bierce’s story of the deserted city and was about to make my escape, when Mr. Baynard came out of the inner office.
He stopped short. ‘Well, well! What a surprise! Well, Miss Jackson—Mrs. Skelton, I should say—we’d given up all hope of a visit from you. Come through, come through.’
He swung the gate for me and I stepped through into my old pasture behind the counter. Drawing up a chair for me beside his desk, he explained that he was holding the fort, that he was head cook and bottle washer. Mr. Fawcett was away on a business trip to America and had taken Miss Rosoman with him— ‘and very nice for her, too! I told her she was a lucky young woman.’ Fortunately it had been a very slack summer, otherwise he, Mr. Baynard, would have been overwhelmed. Hatton had left. They had a new man, from the Corps of Commissionaires. Miss Cleek had left, too—her father was sick, she had to nurse him. There was a new Junior, Miss Fenwick, a very bright little soul. (He sounded as if he liked her better than he had liked me.) At the moment she was out to lunch.
How was I? This was like old times. He believed I had a youngster—his tardy congratulations. Well, well, much water had flowed under the bridges.
He had always looked older than his years; now—he could not have been more than thirty-seven—he seemed dry and shrivelled as a nut. His fair hair had thinned away from the crown of his head, which protruded from the rest of his skull like the top of a cottage loaf. I saw that he had been reading The Thirty Nine Steps. I remembered him reading the same book three years ago, and found myself wondering whether this was a second reading or whether it had indeed taken him all that time to reach the two hundredth page.
‘I had hoped to see Mr. Fawcett,’ I said.
‘He’ll be sorry to have missed you; you must call on us again. Is there any little service I can render? You must make use of us as if you were a real client these days, you know.’
I saw that marriage had immeasurably improved my status in the eyes of Mr. Baynard. He chattered on about his wife, his children; told me how he had understudied Wilkins in the local society’s production of Merrie England. ‘I nearly sang it one night, too. The fellow got a heavy cold and said he wouldn’t be able to sing—but, bless you, of course he did. They’d rather make a mess of things than give another fellow a chance. Jealousy, jealousy—you find it everywhere.’
He brooded on his disappointment. “The lobster and the stickleback . . .” he hummed under his breath. He looked at the clock. ‘I’m sorry you won’t meet Miss Fenwick. She’s got to go straight from her lunch to the Passport Office. Yes, she’s a good girl, but, like all good girls, she’s getting married. The moment you’ve broken them in, off they go. That’s the way of it.’
The secret planner forced me into the open. I heard myself say, ‘I am thinking of going back to work myself. Would there be any chance for me here?’
The moment I had said it I was overcome with shame that I should have made such an appeal to my old enemy. I tried to sit gracefully, nonchalantly on my chair, to look out of the window as though my remark had been quite an idle one, the response of no consequence.
To my surprise Mr. Baynard said in the shocked voice of one familiar with hierarchical matters, ‘But, Mrs. Skelton, you couldn’t come back as a Junior! Not now you’re a married woman!’
I said I supposed so, though I hardly saw why not.
‘Surely you could find something better! After all, I imagine you only want something to pass the time. I don’t really approve of women going out to work, but sometimes my wife says to me, “ You don’t know how dull it is, Percy, to be stuck in Streatham all day! I often wish I had a job.’”
I guessed by the shadowing of his face that this was no uncommon complaint of Mrs. Baynard’s, supposed that theirs was the kind of marriage which had endured desirelessly but without question, that there was little pain in it and little joy, but only a great deal of tedium that seemed to them both like contentment. And it was to this that I refused to come.
I felt the courageous adrenalin forcing itself through me before I had realised what use I was to make of it. I was hotter than ever, the room more still.
‘I don’t want something to pass the time,’ I said. ‘I want something I can live on. I haven’t been lucky with my marriage.’
He stared at me and flushed. I must have seemed to him a visitor from that half-world where marriages were spinelessly accepted as failures, where people ran off with each other’s husbands and wives, and where the wages of their sin was usually—and unjustly—a very good time.
‘Oh dear!’ he said in a hushed cathedral voice. ‘Oh dear! I’m sorry to hear that. That’s sad news. I’m very sorry indeed.’
A noisy, iridescent blue bottle was blundering up and down the window-pane, trying to get out. Mr. Baynard rose. He took his empty tea-cup from the desk, poured the dregs into the saucer and clapped the cup over the fly. ‘Give me an envelope, will you, Mrs. Skelton?’ he asked me. I gave it him. He slipped the envelope under the cup, removed the insect gently in its prison, clambered on his chair and released it through one of the upper frames. He climbed down. ‘Poor things! I hate it when they get trapped, but I can’t bear to touch them.’
Reseating himself, he stared at me again. ‘Well, well, this is sad. I won’t ask questions. But are you quite serious about wanting work?’
I told him I was in deadly earnest, and that I should be grateful if they would consider me for my old job.
‘But look here,’ Mr. Baynard said, a picture of embarrassment and worry, ‘if you came back here as the Junior it would be hard for me to treat you differently, which indeed as a married woman . . . Why don’t you go and work somewhere quite new?’ he asked me hopefully.
I told him, better the devil I knew than the devil I didn’t. This pleased him. A smile more natural, more relaxed than I had ever seen on the face of Mr. Baynard, brightened his eyes and mouth. He liked to be called a devil.
‘It might be awkward.’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘This is so sudden,’ he murmured, turning his head this way and that as if I had proposed marriage. He got up. If I were likely to come under his command again, then it became his right to terminate interviews. He was getting into practice. ‘I’m afraid I must get back to my work. If you’re still serious—and mind you, I hope this only an impulse on your part—I suggest you write to Mr. Fawcett. He’ll be back at the beginning of August. It’s far better for him to deal with these things.’ He did not open the door of the counter for me. I passed through it, once more stood on the other side, temporarily restored to my married status. For a moment he looked desolate, as if something other than my affairs had troubled him; and this look made me say, ‘I expect you think badly of me. But I promise you, it can’t be helped. I have got to be free.’
‘If some of us had said that earlier—’ His voice was strained; he hesitated. ‘Well, I suppose the whole foundation of family life would be undermined. One doesn’t expect life to be a bed of roses, Mrs. Skelton. One has to put up with things.’ He added, sadly and grandly, ‘I often think happiness is an illusion.’
I said, ‘No, it’s not. We must have known happiness at some time or other, or we wouldn’t spend so much time struggling for more. You can’t fight for what you don’t know. So it must be real.’
‘You young people want everything your own way,’ he said.
I was standing by the back wall, just by the door. The girl who came in, a small, plump, raffish-looking girl, saw Mr. Baynard but did not at first see me.
‘I’ll have to
go back later, Percy. There’s a queue a mile long at the Passport Office. Had a good lunch?’
It was not only the use of the Christian name which made me understand, startling enough though it was from a Junior to Mr. Baynard; it was the easiness, the ironic domestic intimacy of the voice.
He coloured. He said loudly, ‘Miss Fenwick, I want you to meet your predecessor.’
She saw me; she betrayed no embarrassment. She held out her hand with a comradely flourish, jokingly suggested that she must be a poor substitute for such a paragon as myself, from all she had heard. And all the while he looked at her in hunger and in hopelessness.
As I went away, I knew that for whomever I might work it must never again be for Mr. Baynard. I knew too much about him now, had discovered this small, sorrowful romance that had come to him too late, that he would never attempt to pursue. Ugly, fussy, unattractive, he had somehow managed to engage the passing affection of this spirited-looking girl. It was one of the ludicrous miracles of love that are repeated again and again in life, every time causing the same smile, the same incredulity. We shall never know what people ‘see in each other’; it is stupid to enquire. At a time when he had come to think romance impossible, a thing only for hot-headed boys and girls, this attraction had come to him; and, ruinously, had brought him hope. For without hope he could have lived comfortably enough in his nice little house, with his capable wife, his two growing girls, his amateur-dramatic societies. Now that the crutch of hopelessness had been taken from him he was fearful and lost. He would never be the same again.
A year ago Mr. Baynard’s private grief would have diverted me from my own affairs: now, however, I pursued them remorselessly. I went up Regent street and called upon a rival of Mr. Fawcett’s with whom we had occasionally done a little business. I saw the manager, who had always been inclined to treat me with flirtatious indulgence; and without beating around the bush I asked him if he were likely to need another typist. He was a sardonic man, permitting himself to be surprised by nothing. He said that I might have called at the right time; his girl (an elderly woman, well-known to me) was retiring at the end of August. He might give me a trial—a month’s probation: what about that?
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