‘Reductio ad coitum, chum. The jolly old R.A.C.’
He went to the basement, to the lavatory, on his own. Perhaps initials reminded him of the jolly old F.F.I. His guilt then and always, in spite of any medical reassurances, or advances in chemotherapy, took a physical form. By lunch-time he was perfectly convinced he had a bad go of the pox. He had to stop himself from telling everybody in the restaurant that he had. Weeping tomorrow, he assured himself, with a belch, and frying tonight. When he went up to the bar again he noticed in one of those awful, unmistakable flashes that the young men he had been talking to, no longer thought of him as a funny chap. They exchanged a glance which, in the years to come, he was to know very well. They were not so rude as to go off to their table without returning hospitality, but they seemed to move an extra inch away, and they were now in a hurry. They thought they were avoiding encouraging a friend who was clearly a potential drunk. They were actually avoiding failure, like the plague.
Pink told them, affably, to carry on and eat, and he pretended to be waiting for Mary, whom he knew to be in London. He mentioned her by name. Another gin persuaded him to go along Princes Street and buy a pair of pearl ear-rings. He would present them to Macdonald on his return to the farmhouse. Drink up, Pink old man, he said to himself, looking glassily round the small high room, with the old, marble oyster bar, and the stained-glass windows above. Going through the swing doors, when nobody could hear him he bawled out loud, ‘I am afraid. Yippee!’
At home, only a few days later, he got a letter from Mary with her friend Jennifer’s address in big capitals written across the top, with a childish joke beside it about next of kin. The letter itself was very short.
Dear Pink,
It was terribly nice seeing you and it did help. Thank you for the Rock which was a comfort when packing and unpacking at Jennifer’s. Please note new address.
Am happier: often think of you.
Luv from,
Martita Hunt.
Luv to Daddy too. Tell him she’s perfectly O. K.
It wasn’t her usual style to drop the first person singular and it was Pink’s habit, not hers, to sign with a different name.
Very suddenly, Pink tore the letter into small pieces, then he went up to the woods by the gun-field and dropped the pieces in a clearing, where, as children, Mary and he had once buried a dead cock robin.
Mary now trod a well-worn path.
The atmosphere in the new flat was unrestful, even jumpy. Jennifer was one of those girls who do better in war-time. She was thin and quite smart, but with a strong dash of Edinburgh that showed in the shoes and accessories which were bought to last. She had celebrated her twenty-third birthday with an abortion, the father of the child being her husband, and the experience had marked her more obviously than she imagined. She had a rather brittle, gay manner and she walked always as if she were being pulled along by two huge dogs on a leash. She insisted that life was short, and though she always said of her husband, ‘Darling he was really very sweet to me,’ she had also found another phrase to obliterate the memory of a very unhappy two years, unhappy particularly for her, as she had behaved badly, and he had behaved well. She said:
‘The milk of human kindness just wasn’t strong enough for Scott-Dempster.’
Together, they lived an unreal life made up of realities; of house-keeping, rent, washing things in the basin, of seeing cinemas and offering drinks to young men with cars. Before she brought anybody who did not know Mary to meet her, Jennifer would explain quickly that she had just finished a grande affaire with David Dow, and if the guest did not recognise David’s name she would follow it with Mary’s maiden name, saying, ‘You know – the scapegoat man – before the war. The baronet.’ Mary, in her way, had name enough. That mattered to Jennifer.
And it was with Jennifer, some months later, that Mary went to a party in St John’s Wood. She only went because Jennifer could not stand the thought of going there, to a nameless party, on her own. It was held in a house that needed repairing and redecorating and a garden that was little more than a weedy rubbish dump. The party was thrown away, rather than given, by an acquaintance of Jennifer’s husband, who wrote copy in an advertising agency. He too was something of a name-man, but amongst fifty, hard (gin-cup) drinking guests, there were only three with names. The first was an I.T.V. interviewer, an authority on all subjects, the second a young barrister who had defended a homicidal lunatic and the third a lady from Berlin who made the unlikely claim that she had slept with Brecht. To this group Jennifer was immediately led and Mary landed on the floor next to a man who worked for a serious film magazine, and sang Burl Ives songs like Burl Ives. The party needs no description except to say that it went on and on, until it was enlivened by the arrival of a jazz band who were on their way back from playing in Wisbech. Amidst the noise that followed, the bellow of the songs, the blast of the latest disc and the splash of the unrepeatable anecdotes, Mary watched herself reflected in the huge uncurtained, uncleaned window. Her hair seemed more brown than red. And it was while she was doing this that a very stupid young man said, not with malice, but because it was a smart line, ‘Honey, take care. You’ve got that un-lived-in look.’ So she drank more seriously.
At half past three in the morning she was standing, for some reason which she could not remember, by a half-opened door to a bedroom, two floors up. She was with an extremely good-looking subaltern who was perhaps less out of water than he liked to suggest. He was considerably the smartest figure there, and there seemed to be no explanation for his attendance. It is doubtful whether he would have found himself with Mary, had he not heard her maiden name. The party was neither elegant enough nor slummy enough for a subaltern of the Brigade. The truth, which in the correct military fashion, he refrained from volunteering, was that he had been to school with the copywriter. They had shared a study together at Haileybury and their rejection of the solid middle-class background, although equally violent in both cases, had taken totally different forms. As he stood in the doorway, staring blandly at Mary who did not meet his eye, the last few people on the landing decided to return downstairs. One of the jazz men wished them luck and with a friend shoved them roughly into the dark bedroom and slammed the door. The subaltern was old enough not to withdraw, but young enough, when he was putting on his felt braces again, to make the mistake of assuming that it all meant as little to Mary as to himself. He suggested within a couple of minutes of completion that they go and find a drink. It was dark in the room but there was light enough for him to see her cover her forehead with her wrist. Like an old and inept husband he said, cheerfully:
‘Come on, old ducks.’
She said, ‘Please go away,’ and that was that.
The job in publishing was as dull as Mary had been led to suppose it would be, so she could not complain. All the other girls she met outside the office were very envious of her and nothing she could say would persuade them that a large publishing office was duller than a merchant bank. Publishers themselves spend their lives telling girls like Mary this, and she had been further warned that having no shorthand would exclude her from the few more rewarding jobs in the office. So while her friends envied her she hammered away on a typewriter, filed things and kept a little notebook in which all permission payments were entered. Permissions, in and out; that is to say permission granted to other publishers to quote extracts from copyright works and vice versa, took most of her time, but even in this field she was not given full responsibility. By long usage, and with about half a dozen general exceptions, publishers ask the same copyright fee of two guineas a thousand words, but this calculation was not entrusted to a girl. Instead she took all the letters to a conscientious young man who marked each one with the appropriate fee.
What she thought about during all those hours, she could not herself explain. Even her imagination seemed to suffer. For the last hour each day, however, her thoughts were always the same. They were focused on her wristwatch and just
as she had done at school, at the end of lessons, she would dash for her coat and escape before the rush. Hating the buses and the tube trains at half past five, she very often walked most of the way home, which was nearly two and a half miles. As she did so, with long steps, her eyes straight in front of her, only very occasionally straying to a shop window which she passed, nobody turned to look at her. Her coat was not very clean, her hair, now certainly more brown than red, was pulled back to a pony tail that was too young for her; her shoes were practical, with low heels. London had swallowed her.
Moreover with the loss of her imagination, facts began to take their toll. Losing part of her own personality she assumed some of the fears and habits of the girls around her, although their lives and natures were quite different from her own. She worried about money. She began to think about age for the first time, and not because her appetite had been whetted by the subaltern at the party, but because the last taboo had been broken, she started going out with other young men. Men know. She met their eye honestly and brightly. She saw several of David’s friends. Her name was passed from one to another as worth looking up. She even went out with a married man from her office, in his car.
The extraordinary thing was that the numbness, the feeling of living only in a dream, was not broken when she suspected that she was pregnant. On the contrary, the feeling grew stronger. She was hardly responsible for her own actions.
Then, suddenly, life became real again. It took on a direct urgency which within a few hours threw the time she had spent in the copyright department into correct proportion. She knew then that what was little more than a long-drawn-out restless night’s sleep must come to a sharp end. She was sitting half-way through one of the letters biting her nails and thinking that the formula was only one away from ‘Grant we beseech thee, O Lord, permission to use two thousand five hundred words—’ when she was called next door, to a room full of women, to answer a private telephone call on the outside line. As such calls were not encouraged she was already blushing when she lifted the receiver.
Jenny’s ‘Dah-ling’ rang through the room. All the other women in it seemed to have reached a pause in their work. One rubbed out a word she had just typed, another sorted out some papers.
Mary said, ‘What is it?’
‘Something awful, darling.’
This could have meant that the gas had been switched off, or that Jennifer’s current boy friend was quoted by the evening papers as out last night with Penelope Somebody-else. She knew, by Pink’s telegraph, that is to say, not by some undiscovered sense, but by some undiscovered ac-curacy of the ear, that the news was dramatic and affected only her. Just as physical pain can be tolerated by the mind leaping a split-second ahead of the blow, she was balanced ready when it came.
Jennifer went on: ‘D’you want this over the thing or shall I meet you for lunch?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Pink rang. He said I’d better tell you.’
‘Daddy.’
‘Yes. Look, he said he could cope and you must do what you want. Darling I’m so sorry.’
‘I’ll ring you back,’ Mary said. She replaced the receiver softly and looked up at the four faces round her. All the women had assumed tragic expressions but they could not quite hide their delight that the morning’s routine had been exploded.
She went without hesitation to a call-box to ring David, who sounded perfectly delighted to hear her.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘Daddy’s dead.’
‘Lunch,’ he replied.
‘Yes, please.’
When she returned, the manager’s permission for leave of absence had been granted. The conscientious young man stood by his desk like a very superior travel agent.
‘He would like you to ring tomorrow or the next day telling him when you expect to return. I imagine you will be travelling north. I have looked up the trains for you.’
‘That’s very kind, Eric,’ she said. ‘But I think I’ll go by plane.’
He blushed at the mention of his Christian name and when he shook her very firmly by the hand he could think of nothing better to say than ‘Good luck.’
Other secretaries, hanging about the stairs of the ladies’ cloakroom, resembled guests at the end of a wedding reception. They wished her good luck with their smiles and a few on more intimate terms said, ‘It’s more the shock than anything.’ She nodded, and she could not say, ‘To tell the truth I haven’t given him a thought so please don’t push me into a false position.’ She was horrified by her own tears as she left the place and took a taxi to Bianchi’s, where she went upstairs. David, for once, was not late.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘We’ll eat a great deal of pasta and send you north drunk.’
‘I think that’s a good idea.’
‘Shall we pitch into the wine or have a strong one first?’
‘Just wine.’
‘You’re an excellent girl. I’ve always said so.’ He looked at her carefully and said without smiling:
‘It’s a shame we can’t live together. No, it is.’
Soon after they got the carafe of wine, he said, ‘Money,’ and she nodded.
‘I really don’t see why I should underwrite you when you’ve got a husband and family quite wealthy enough to do so.’
‘I do see why,’ she replied.
‘Air fare?’
‘Yes. And three weeks for the flat.’
‘You can borrow that from your firm. They’ll advance it. Old established firms are famous for it. That’s why they can pay their employees less than everybody else does.’
She said, ‘I’m not coming back.’
‘You’re going back to Stephen?’
‘I’m going back home, anyway. Whether he has me back or not.’
‘Oh dear,’ David said. ‘I suppose that means twenty-five pounds.’
‘You can easily afford it.’
‘I know. I’m afraid I can. If you’re very nice and cheerful all through lunch we’ll go to a bank and get it in new notes.’
‘Before three o’clock,’ she said.
‘You look fiercer,’ he replied.
‘Do I?’
‘It’s not unattractive, but I confess it frightens me a little. I believe you’ve become a tremendous career woman,’ he said kindly. ‘I’m told this at every corner. You must advise me on my publisher’s contract. I must have an account of modern publishing methods.’
She said, ‘Are you writing a book?’
‘What’s called a series of articles. I’ve done a great deal of work since we’ve parted.’
He noticed that she smiled a good deal less.
She said, ‘Central Nervous System? Communication and Cats?’ and he pushed the points of his fork into the table-cloth.
‘Not exactly,’ he said, and it was a confession. To slip into ‘allied fields’ is perhaps more suspect than not to work at all. He began to explain himself at length. He was writing the articles for an American journal called Moral Philosophy. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘they will also be published in the serious German newspapers and the popular Dutch Press.’
‘What about?’
‘The obligatory scene.’
She ate patiently as he expanded on the subject. He seemed to be glad to talk about it. Apart from the milkman (with whom he argued on the most intricate subjects) she thought he might have found few people with whom he could discuss the project. His fellow scientists and his intellectual friends would only have given him a wry look if he had admitted to working in a field so far away from neuro-physiology in which he had done all his important work. She seemed to be listening carefully as she smoked and finished her coffee.
He said, ‘Can you imagine the playwright’s chagrin, if he watched the curtain rise on the first night only to find that one of his principal characters had decided to skip the whole thing? But in real life, nothing could be more natural. That’s the difference between life and drama, surely.’
That he might be tal
king sense was irrelevant. Mary watched him carefully and thought there is a change here, or else, up to now I have been blind. Even if it is correct, this is talk, only talk. It affects nothing.
David continued with enthusiasm. He talked as if he were dictating the paper to her.
‘In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the obligatory scene is never played. The people concerned so dislike the idea of a heavy emotional struggle that they walk off in different directions, one perhaps, rather faster than the other. They leave their problem, whatever it may be, in mid-air. In a year or two, or even a month or two, because it has been succeeded by so many others, equally acute, the situation disintegrates. The traces of it, by a tacit agreement between the parties, both of whom are now convinced that they are older and wiser, are felt, but socially ignored.’
Finishing her wine, she wondered if he were flirting with her: if this were a new beginning. But it was clearly nothing of the sort. He was not tasting the food, or noting the surroundings; not even very interested in her. He seemed to have escaped into words. She suddenly felt anxious for him, wondering what his friends and colleagues would make of him and say of him, if he continued to stick his head so firmly in the sand.
She said, ‘If you believe this, what are you going to do about it?’
He looked mystified.
‘Write it.’
‘But in your own life?’
‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘I suppose logically, one should stop skipping things. This would be courageous, but I shouldn’t think very rewarding. It would be a trial to one’s friends and extremely distressing for one’s elderly relations. One would be rather like those explosives which do the silly thing: they try and blast the wall where it resists them most. One would spend one’s whole time bouncing from one ghastly scene to the next, in search of the obligatory.’
Household Ghosts Page 32
