‘Oh yes? She another upper class lady is she?’
‘Very upper class. Her father is an earl.’
‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘bet she’s a nightmare.’
‘Actually,’ said LM, ‘she’s not. She’s extremely clever. And a very good, loyal friend. And she has done wonders for my brother, who used to lack self-confidence. I like her. She works at Lyttons with us. She’s an editor.’
‘She is? Unusual place it must be, employing women in positions like that.’
‘We believe in employing women,’ said LM, ‘it’s perfectly simple. Provided they’re up to the job of course.’
‘Yes, well, lots of women believe in being employed, too. Doesn’t make it easy for them to get the jobs though, does it? Except in service of course. Helps having friends in high places I suppose.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ said LM briskly. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a builder,’ he said. ‘A roofer. Not bad work in the summer. Horrible in the winter. And a lot of the time, you get laid off, especially if the weather’s really bad. I’ve been out of work for weeks now. Nice new job starting next month though. Row of houses near Camden Town.’
‘So – what do you live on?’ she said, genuinely interested, ‘when you’re out of work?’
‘Well, I’ve saved a bit. Get a bit off the dole if I’m lucky. They’re not exactly forthcoming with it though. Then there’s the rent from my tenants. Capitalist really, I am. Just like you.’
‘Have you got a family?’ she said, ignoring this.
‘No,’ he said briefly.
‘You’ve never married?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Well—’
‘Look,’ he said, suddenly defensive, ‘I’m not asking you a lot of personal questions, am I?’
‘No. I’m sorry. Have another whisky.’ It seemed important to win him back over.
‘Yes I will. Thanks.’ He drank it in silence, looked at her awkwardly.
‘I was married,’ he said suddenly, ‘but she – well – she died.’
‘I’m sorry. So sorry.’
‘Yes. Bit difficult.’
‘Did you love her – very much?’ she said. She surprised herself: that she could ask him something so direct, so intimate.
‘Very much. Yes, I did. She died having a baby. And the little one went with her. Bad business.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. She felt tears in her eyes. She blinked hard, took a large sip of whisky. He looked at her surprised.
‘You mean it, don’t you?’
‘Of course I mean it. It’s such a sad story. It – well it shocked me.’ He turned away, pulled a rather ragged, grubby handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘sympathy gets to me. Can’t help it.’
‘When – when did she – did it happen?’
‘Beginning of the year,’ he said briefly.
She was shocked; that he had faced such grief so recently. She put out her hand, put it on his arm.
‘That is so sad.’
‘Yes, well. She was – she was everything to me. She was lovely. Gentle and good. And so brave. God, she was brave. I still can’t believe it. Bloody doctors.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, it started coming too early. Only eight months she was. They said she’d be all right, didn’t need any special care. That she was young and all that. Turned out the – the afterbirth, it came first. So the baby died. And then she – well she died. Loss of blood. Nothing they could do, they said. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?’
He sat there, his head bowed, looking at her hand, on his arm. Then he looked up and his dark eyes were full of tears. He managed a shaky smile.
‘This is daft. I only wanted to see you home. Not tell you my life history. But you’re nice to talk to. Helps a bit, when you can talk. Now I’d better be off. That woman of yours will think I’m up to no good.’
At the front door he turned, smiled at her.
‘Thanks. Thanks for everything. It’s been really—’ he hesitated –
‘really enjoyable. And I still don’t think you look your age. Nothing like.’
‘Thank you.’
There was a silence. Then, ‘Well I didn’t attack you did I?’ he said cheerfully, ‘And I won’t be back to do your house either.’
‘What?’
‘I bet that’s what you thought,’ he said, ‘when I first offered to walk you home.’
Anger shot through LM: anger threaded with guilt.
‘How dare you say that?’ she said. ‘How dare you make such an assumption about me?’
‘I dare,’ he said, ‘because it’s quite likely to be true.’
‘Oh is it really? I offer you hospitality, kindness, and you reward me with a hide-bound, class-entrenched attitude like that.’
‘Oh, come along, Miss Lytton. You’re giving yourself away. Of course you’ve been very nice to me. Very kind, done your duty, like the good socialist I’m sure you are. But listen to you, you’re still spelling all that out.’
‘Please leave,’ she said, her voice shaking, ‘at once.’
‘All right,’ he said grinning, slightly awkwardly now, ‘No need to get upset. I’m only—’
‘There is every need,’ she said, ‘and I am upset. Very, very upset.’ Fresh rage and a pang of fierce loneliness hit her together; the tears rose again in her eyes. She turned away.
‘You’re crying.’
‘I’m not crying. And please go.’
‘You are crying,’ he said again, and put out his finger and wiped away the one tear that had escaped on to her cheek. ‘What an emotional creature you are.’
‘I am not emotional.’
‘Yes you are,’ he said, ‘very.’
‘I am simply,’ she said, struggling for dignity, ‘simply very angry. And insulted. That you should regard this evening as a bit of – of social work on my part. I’d like you to leave.’
‘All right. All right, I’m going.’
Mrs Bill appeared. ‘You all right, Miss Lytton?’ she said, her voice loaded with meaning.
‘Yes, Mrs Bill I’m quite all right,’ said LM firmly. ‘My guest is just leaving.’
‘Yes I am,’ he said. He opened the door, went out into the porch, turned, smiled at her differently, quite gently. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you, very sorry. But you must admit—’
‘Admit what?’
‘Well, that it was what you thought,’ he said, ‘at the beginning. I know it was. I could see it in your face. That’s what makes this so ridiculous. Why don’t you just say so?’
And LM, confused with emotion, unable to keep up the lie, said, her mouth twitching at the corners, ‘Yes, all right. I admit it. I did. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘And that’s why you were so angry? Because I guessed? And that made you feel bad?’
‘Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know.’
‘So much for socialism,’ he said and his expression was an extraordinary blend of contempt and amusement. ‘I knew it was too good to be true.’
LM took a deep breath. ‘Why don’t you come back in,’ she said, ‘and have another whisky?’
Half an hour later, she had locked the drawing-room door, and removed most of her clothes.
Jago Ford was not her first lover. She was a woman of extraordinary passion. She had lost her virginity at the age of seventeen to her father’s best friend. Precocious and self-confident, strongly attracted by him and eager to discover for herself the delights of an activity she had managed to glean only a very little information about, she set out to seduce him. It had not been difficult; he was not only charming, good-looking and rather vain, he had recently been widowed, and he found her enthusiastic advances irresistible. It had not lasted long, but long enough for LM to discover a considerable appetite for sex; at nineteen she had another affair with a young man at university. She was far more in love with him than he with her; as
tonished at her willingness to sleep with him, he had continued the relationship until they both graduated. There were only four women in her year; and she was infinitely more attractive than the other three. She was broken-hearted when he left her to become engaged to a rich, vapid debutante; desperately hurt that having shared much brilliant conversation and even more brilliant lovemaking and for quite a long period of time, he regarded her nonetheless as unsuitable to be a barrister’s wife. That, above all, had shaped her attitude to men of her class and age; she was terminally suspicious of them, would have no more of them. She had no desire to be married herself, hated the idea of having children; she wanted companionship, good conversation, and above all physical fulfilment. It was hard for a woman to find.
There had been a few unsatisfactory relationships through her twenties; two of them with unhappily married men, who found in her not only the companionship and physical release they needed, but also complete discretion. Each time however, she was left hurt and freshly lonely, her sense of self-respect diminished.
In Jago Ford, she found absolute happiness. He was interesting, challenging, he liked and admired her; and he was a superb lover. As was she.
‘You really know what to do, don’t you?’ he said, as they lay exhausted and smiling in one another’s arms, the first wonderful, tumultous, noisy, astonishing time.
‘I should hope so,’ she said, half indignant, ‘what did you think I was, some kind of Victorian virgin?’
‘Now don’t get aerated,’ he said, kissing her tenderly, ‘I didn’t mean that quite. I meant you know it’s about taking as well as giving. You need it don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said LM sighing, half rueful, half amused, ‘yes, I really do.’ She found it hard that first time, not to think of his wife, of the gentle, kind Annie he had loved so much, and had so recently lost. It inhibited her, worried her; she felt she was robbing Annie of Jago as she took him into her hungry body, stealing memories, breaking trust.
But, ‘don’t,’ he whispered to her as she held back, confused by those thoughts, recognising them for himself, in himself even, ‘she’s not here, she’s gone. She’d want me to be happy. And you won’t be the same.’
She wasn’t the same: he told her that, too. Close enough now to talk about her, LM learned that Annie had been awed, even shocked at times by sex; raised by a strict mother, taught to keep herself safe, told she would find marriage something to be endured, she had nonetheless managed more than that. But her role had always been passive, anxious, seeking mostly to please; and Jago, recognising that, had held back too, afraid of hurting her, asking too often, giving too little pleasure. In time they had come to enjoy each other; but it was a careful, watchful enjoyment, and by then the baby which was to part them for ever had been conceived, and from the beginning Annie had been unwell.
‘I loved her altogether,’ he said simply to LM, ‘but being with you doesn’t hurt her. Nor remembering her. You don’t have to worry about her. You just worry about me,’ he grinned suddenly, ‘and do what you can for me.’
She seemed to be able to do a lot.
Jago’s father had been a clerk in an insurance office and had been eager to see his only son educated. Jago had won a scholarship to a boarding school and had done very well there; there was even talk of teacher training college. But then his father died; Jago at fourteen was clearly old enough to earn a living and help to keep his five younger siblings. The easiest option was manual work; he had become apprenticed to one of the legion of builders covering London with houses. He had done well, and by the age of sixteen was earning half the family income; he had set aside, without too much bitterness, his dreams of a different kind of life. What he could not set aside, however, was the sense of injustice that had brought it about; that the widow of a man who had worked and died, as his father had, in the service of a large company, should have been left with almost nothing to live on. He was troubled, too, by another injustice: that the men who owned the companies drew from them large amounts of money on which they paid virtually no income tax, lived in great luxury in big houses, ate and dressed superbly well, and enjoyed the best of everything, while the men who made the money for them and worked a great deal harder, lived very often close to poverty.
He had been brought up by his father, a timid man, to accept such things, as an unalterable fact of life; but as he grew older, he became first puzzled and then angry, joined the trades union movement and the new Labour Party, and resolved to change the world. He even made speeches at a few political meetings and might have made a concerted effort to enter political life at least at a local level, had he not met Annie and fallen in love. Responsibility and the prospect of fatherhood had blunted such difficult ambitions; like his father before him, he needed his job and his salary; there was little room left for idealism. Grief and loneliness had reawakened it to a degree, but had taken away any real stomach he had for fighting; when LM met him, socialism was once again an interesting notion rather than a crusade.
‘The buggers’ll win whatever you do,’ he said to her more than once,
‘might as well grab what you can and make the most of it.’
Although he was clever, he had a certain resistance to further self-improvement. He said life was too short, that learning was for childhood, adulthood for living. He read the newspapers, followed politics and the progress of socialism, but that apart, pursued a rather self-indulgent intellectual road.
‘So don’t you try getting me to watch Shakespeare and read Dickens,’ he said to LM, ‘because there’s other things I’d rather do. I need cheering up after a long day in the cold, not preaching.’
LM said Dickens had never preached, and indeed held views on society which she was sure Jago would sympathise with, but he said all he could remember was some nonsense about a little chap being sent to the workhouse and working as a pickpocket before being reunited happily with his high-born family.
‘That wouldn’t ever happen, Meg—’ he called her Meg, said it was his own name for her, that LM didn’t sound like the sort of woman she was. ‘It would never happen, not in real life and you know it as well as I do.’
He had a certain passion for geography, dreaming of other places, other peoples and LM gave him, for their first Christmas together, a subscription to the National Geographic magazine, which he devoured, bombarding her with information about remote tribes in Africa, Eskimos, the Chinese and their astonishing early civilisation. He dreamed of travelling one day, if only to Europe; she promised him that they would do it together. She had travelled a little with her father, to Rome, Florence and Paris; she said it was indeed a most wonderful experience.
The more she knew of him, the better she liked him; even his considerable tactlessness was the result of an impeccable honesty which echoed her own. The only difference was that she had learned to stay silent, not to speak her mind.
He never said he loved her; but he told her he enjoyed being with her more than he had ever enjoyed anything. ‘Except being with Annie of course.’
‘Of course,’ said LM, struggling not to feel hurt, and then he said that being with Annie was different, and she was not to mind.
‘She was very young for a start,’ he said, ‘it was me telling her things, not the other way round.’
She could have talked to him forever; enjoyed their agreements, which were many, as much as their disagreements. On Sundays, they would go for long long walks, sometimes just over the Heath; sometimes they would take an omnibus out to the country, to the Hog’s Back in Surrey, to Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire and talk endlessly, about politics, class, the countryside – in which he was surprisingly interested – about travel and religion. He was a passionate atheist, she was a modestly committed Anglican and liked to go to church.
‘Although how you can look God in the face after what we’ve just been doing without His blessing, I don’t know,’ Jago said, the first time she left him on Sunday morning.
She told him she thoug
ht God had meant people to enjoy sex, and wouldn’t care if they were married or not. ‘And besides, I love the words. They’re very beautiful. You should come with me.’
‘Not me,’ he said, reaching out to stroke her dark hair. ‘If I did find God it’d be in a forest or on a mountain top, not in some grim church.’
LM said that was what all non-church goers said and that most churches were far from grim: ‘Wait till you see Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Or St Peter’s in Rome. Then you’ll change your mind.’
Jago said he was quite happy to wait and turned over to go back to sleep.
They had been together now for three years; happy, odd years. They gave each other great contentment, saw one another at least three times a week, spent most Sundays together, shared one another’s hopes, fears and pleasures, agreed that they were as happy as two people could be, and yet they told no one officially of their relationship. Jago feared ridicule from other people on the subject, and LM feared humiliation.
They occasionally discussed meeting one another’s families, wondered whether it would make their lives together easier or more difficult, and always finally decided against it.
‘They’d just be watching us, wondering how we got on and what might happen in the end,’ Jago said. ‘And not just yours, mine as well. Mine more so, I should say. So let’s just keep ourselves to ourselves. It’s worked pretty well so far. Might spoil it if we changed anything.’
It wasn’t quite as difficult as one might suppose, this near-secrecy; their individual lives were perfectly self-sufficient. They both worked hard, long hours, albeit in rather different ways, and then LM’s life had always been entirely absorbed by Lyttons, work, and to a lesser degree, her politics; they were hardly likely to find friends in common.
LM was quite sure it would not last, and if people saw her abandoned, left to her loneliness and singleness again, it would hurt twice as much. She was aware that Oliver and Celia suspected there was someone in her life, but they both respected her reticence: Oliver out of delicacy, Celia from a sense of sisterhood. Celia was an extraordinary woman friend; unquestioning, undemanding, untroubled by secrets. Her philosophy was based on the simple assumption that if LM – or indeed anyone – wanted to tell her something, then they would; if she did not, then Celia had no desire whatsoever to know it. LM was quite sure that if she had asked Celia to buy a white dress for her, recommend a priest and suggest some music suitable for a wedding (or, for that matter, to lend her a baby’s cradle and a perambulator) she would do so without asking a single question.
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