Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘Come on in, it’ll be cooler inside.’

  She hopped up into the back of the van and cleared a space on a small sofa covered in a sheeny chintz patterned with blowsy pink roses.

  ‘No it isn’t, it’s hotter,’ she corrected herself and as she spoke tugged the beige dress over her head and, it seemed in almost the same motion, began to kiss me.

  ‘I came for the lecturer,’ she laughed, ‘and his projector,’ and laughed again. ‘Did you know I was voted the wittiest girl in my class in Tulane? Isn’t this a neat sofa? Mom had it resprung last fall,’ and then she began to cry but told me not to worry, she always cried afterwards just like Lucretius said, but if she was happy, she cried before too.

  ‘Lucretius?’

  ‘Post coitum omne animal triste, you must know that. Especially triste when your father’s pretty near murdered your mother. Don’t mind if I try a little s-and-m on you, it’s the best way to get it out of the system.’ And she dug her fingers into my back and ground herself against me, which I said, truthfully, was lovely and not s-or-m at all, because her nails were short and her body was so deliciously cool.

  ‘I am cool,’ she said, lazily falling away from me so that the honeybrown curve of her hip was outlined against the intricate marquetry of a small desk which looked French.

  ‘The bonheur-du-jour,’ she said, ‘such a pretty name for a crummy little desk, but I like it because it was Mom’s. Don’t worry, I’m not going to cry again, when I’m really happy, I only cry before.’

  All the same, neither of us spoke for a while. It was as though we had agreed to listen to the creaking of the sofa under us.

  ‘It’s the blonde you’re in love with, isn’t it?’

  ‘The blonde?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb, Dad’s blonde, everyone’s blonde, what’s her name, the one who’s so shocked about Dad selling the stuff to make bombs with. That clear enough for you?’

  ‘How do you know all that if you don’t know her name?’

  ‘Because that creepy Englishman told me – not you, the other creepy Englishman. Don’t try to weasel out of it. Are you or aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, in a way, I suppose.’

  ‘In a way,’ she mimicked. ‘That’s the kind of phony complicated stuff that sort of person always dumps on you. Nothing like a straight screw involved. She has to be all mysterious and subtle.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true at all. She’s really rather straightforward, very down-to-earth in fact.’

  ‘Yeah, but she ties men up in knots, just because her hair looks like a bunch of hay. If her follicles had a different juice in them, you wouldn’t think twice about her.’

  ‘Well, why do you go on about her when you haven’t even met her, have you?’

  ‘Because she causes a helluva lot of trouble, that’s why, because she was the one who was responsible for screwing up my mother’s life and I expect she’ll screw up your life too if you don’t look after yourself.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You can’t blame anyone but Dodo.’

  ‘I’ve got a whole load of blame to attach to dear old Dodo, but there’s plenty left over.’

  She was smiling now, though lying on her back with her legs hooked over the arm of the sofa and her arms drawing me back to her.

  It was that moment of sinking back on to her that I remember best, her face with that open look which was beyond being beautiful or not beautiful but simply said here she was and this was not a time for fussing over miseries and betrayals but for just going ahead. And a bit later I couldn’t help thinking about all my old hesitations and fumblings and wondering how I could have been so perplexed because it was all really quite simple when you came at it from the right angle. That was the beauty of it in fact and you only spoilt it by wondering whether you were doing the right thing. Some kind of breeze found its way in through the slats in the sliding door of the U-haul, cooling our damp bodies, and I could hear the corn-tassels outside shifting in the breeze. It came to me with a little after-tremor that I wasn’t really a complicated sort of person at all.

  When I think of America, it is Dodona in the U-haul who comes up most often. There are other memories too – the lights going on across the well in the apartment block on hot summer nights and the men in vests leaning out to catch the breeze from the air conditioners, the smell of doughnuts and coffee from Horn & Hardart’s on 34th Street, the rattle of the yellow cabs on the Triboro Bridge – but for me Dodona was really the spirit of America. She had one front tooth larger than the other, and a little mole at one corner of her mouth and her father’s beryl eyes, and she was large with long strong arms and legs and she was wholly lovable, which makes it all the odder that we only saw each other a few more times when she came to New York, but she didn’t stay more than a couple of days and when I wrote to her in New Orleans (she had gone back to Tulane), she wrote only a jolly letter back with no hint of intimacy, as though she feared the letter might be censored. So she was open and fearless in the obvious physical way, I suppose, but distrustful in the other, which was probably the right thing to be in dealing with me but seemed to rule out something in life which was worth having and she didn’t pretend it wasn’t. So perhaps in that too she was the spirit of America with its enormous longings and its wonderful going on regardless of them.

  I wondered what she had done with the bonheur-du-jour.

  St Col’s

  ‘YOU’LL BE GLAD to be getting back,’ the Consul said.

  ‘Not particularly,’ I said, suddenly candid because I didn’t expect to see him again.

  ‘No, I never am,’ he said, reflectively, ‘it’s only setting out that seems worthwhile.’ Perhaps he was just as candid because he didn’t expect to see me again either.

  I was strangely numb and drained for the first few weeks back in London, as though I had completed some heroic mission. Time seemed to rumble past like buses that won’t stop in the rain, so it is hard to estimate at all precisely when I received a curious call from Helen’s mother – a month, perhaps even two. Helen herself I hadn’t seen, didn’t want to see snuggled up with Bobs in married bliss or married anything – well, I would need to be feeling a good deal more confident than I was to go looking for such an experience. But Mrs Hardress sounded anguished and I had liked her and so I went.

  For the third time – was it only the third time, the journey seemed so familiar – the little green train hissed and zinged its way along the river. Coming close at each bend it offered the same quick glimpse of the wallowing silver water and the oarsmen moving over the surface with that leggy water-beetle’s motion. Then we ducked back again behind the red-brick Dutch-style houses past scruffy back gardens with broken-down loungers and unkempt apple trees, clunking to a halt in the little station with its frilly cream roofs just downstream of the island, which still had the dank chill of winter on it with the first leaf-tips only just beginning to uncurl and the reed-spears hardly showing above the mud of the slack tide.

  Hadn’t Helen told me her mother was going to sell, had already sold perhaps? Yes, yes, that was what everyone had told her to do, but she thought what was the hurry, she had the rest of her life in which to move and anyway the market had come down 30 per cent after the oil went up. Besides, it was a small house, it was only because they were all so small that they had fitted in to it. She was thinking about selling the field telephones, though, when the market picked up. A man had come from Christie’s and said America was full of strange men collecting these things.

  ‘Well, he was strange too, my husband,’ she laughed, ‘there’s no denying that. Perhaps we all are, though it’s awful when someone tells you we’re all mad here, as though it was something to boast about, don’t you think?’

  She was not at all as I remembered her. I don’t mean that I wouldn’t have recognised her, but her soft, anxious manner had gone. She spoke in a drier, harder way, looked handsome in the way her daughter looked handsome when you were looking at her as a person not as
someone you might fall in love with. It was difficult to imagine that Helen used to call her Clutchpaws. Perhaps all her nervous mannerisms had simply been reflections of her husband’s own nervous intensity. Perhaps widowhood was the making of her. As though she could read my thoughts, she quickly said that a day didn’t go by when she didn’t miss him, quite violently sometimes, but she did have to admit that life was less of a strain without him.

  ‘But that only leaves me more time to worry about Helen. Naturally you always worry about an only daughter, but she was always so self-sufficient.’

  ‘But now she isn’t?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she is.’

  ‘Were you worried about her being on the picket line? That was almost the last time I saw her, before I went to America.’

  ‘Oh that. No, not at all. We’re Lancashire. My father was a colliery overseer, Martin’s father went down the pit before the WEA rescued him and he became a teacher. No, I like her standing up for the miners. You should have loyalties, even if that Scargill is a nasty piece of work. Anyway, with all the policemen there, you’re probably safer on a picket line than crossing the road.’

  This robust reaction took me aback. Would she have said half of it if her husband had been around?

  ‘No it wasn’t the strike, though it must have been funny seeing you there, being on the other side. Like, I don’t know, Romeo and Juliet – except not quite.’

  She added the last phrase, laughing a slightly merciless laugh.

  ‘Truth is,’ she went on, ‘she could join the Trots for all I cared. But the drinking, that is a worry.’

  ‘The drinking?’

  Mrs Hardress suddenly looked at me with a severe disbelieving stare.

  ‘You must have noticed. I mean, she probably doesn’t drink as much as you men, but it’s too much for her, much too much. She’s bleary a lot of the time – bleary, that’s what we used to call it in our family. And she starts too early in the day. When she’s here, she goes to that pub behind the station as soon as it opens which you wouldn’t go to in your right mind at any time except to get drunk.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say which wouldn’t make me seem even more crass.

  ‘How long,’ I said hesitantly, ‘do you think she’s been like this?’

  ‘You really haven’t noticed, have you? She was bad before she went away, but since she came back she’s much worse. Another way you can tell, I don’t mean to sound snobby, but she hasn’t got any discrimination. She’ll go out with any man who’ll buy her a drink. That d’Amico person – remember him? – she brought him here once when they were both pickled and he was all smarmy but you could see he was no good from a mile off. Of course, these East End villains know how to charm a girl. A bit of rough, isn’t that what they call it, but it always ends in tears. Then there’s that other one, Robert something or other. Little squirt if you ask me. She wouldn’t have taken up with him if she was seeing straight. You can see he did all that Support the Miners stuff just because it was the trendy thing to do. Doesn’t know any more about politics than he knows about nuclear physics. You must know him, father’s a vicar.’

  ‘Oh yes, Bobs.’

  ‘He’s a complete waste of space, that little man.’

  She was standing up now, for no particular reason I could see, except to ease her rage. And for the first time her little fists began to clench and unclench in the way her daughter mocked. ‘It’s not good enough. She’s got such a good brain, she could do equations when she was seven, I mean, she’s not a genius but it’s a really useful sort of brain, it’s a shame to let it go to waste skivvying in that travel agency of his.’

  ‘You mean the place Bobs works in?’

  ‘It belongs to him now. He came into some money, from an aunt, I think, and bought the man out. Isn’t that a peculiar phrase, “came into some money”, as though you were just walking along and came upon a sixpence lying on the pavement. I suppose that’s what it’s like for some people. But could you speak to her, she’ll listen to you, well, she won’t listen to me, and perhaps someone her own age –’

  Her voice trailed away in the way I remembered it when her husband was alive, as though she herself knew her hopes of my being able to help were futile. To come out to Minnow Island in the first place had amounted to acceptance of whatever it was she wanted of me, so there was nothing else to do but mumble that of course I would go and see Helen which I had been meaning to do anyway. This was only half-true. Even the thought of her had become a little daunting. I had never really known what she wanted out of life and not having seen her for so long thought she would be more mysterious still. I couldn’t understand why Mrs Hardress spoke of Bobs as of an unsatisfactory, perhaps discarded, boyfriend. They had been engaged years ago, before I went to America. By now they must have been married for ages, or if not married surely the bust-up would have been too bitter for them to go on working side by side. It was odd, I admit, that I didn’t ask Mrs Hardress what the situation was but then she was odd too, as she had said herself, odd and a little frightening. Anyway I was in no hurry to have my fears confirmed, and it was nice to be able to play a little longer with the thought that Helen might still be – but that was not a sentence I dared complete, even in my head.

  The little shop had been repainted, cream and blue, and there was a fresh sign, Moonman Travel, with a smirky blue-and-cream man-in-the-moon in the middle of the window. I couldn’t see Bobs through the window, because he was now in the inner office previously occupied by the large man with hair en brosse. Bobs himself seemed larger and rose from his chair to greet me in a fair simulation of that boss’s greeting which says you’re lucky really to get in to see me but I make a point of being accessible. The office had been painted up inside, but it had a peculiar smell, not paint.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘well, what do you think of it?’

  ‘Very smart,’ I said limply, not saying that it looked like it did before, only repainted.

  ‘The relaunch has had quite an impact, especially the specialising in Eastern Europe. We’ve got some great contacts with the Czechs and the Hungarians. Zoltan’s an absolute winner.’

  He waved back through the glass window in the door to his old desk where a skinny young man with a yellow face was talking on the phone. Gherkins, that was the smell, authentic certainly, perhaps good for business.

  ‘Helen’s out this morning with a client. I’m meeting her for spag bol at the old Salerno. It would be great if you came along.’

  Why couldn’t he just say lunch? There was something irritating about his habit of specifying the dish that he was going to have – let’s grab a vindaloo at the Shalimar was another favourite line – as if these restaurants didn’t have huge menus, though to be fair half of the items at the Shalimar were usually off.

  The Salerno was crowded. Bobs stared across the room, his gaze suddenly troubled by the possibility of her not being there, and I was stabbed by envy. Another stab when I saw her at a table squashed in the corner half-buried by the coats bosoming out from the coat-stand. She was reading, her face in profile, a pair of horn-rims perched unconvincingly on her nose as on a film star pretending to be a librarian in a romantic comedy, but her face pale and intent, not like a film star’s. Her golden hair was longer than I had remembered, reaching to the collar of her grey-blue shirt but a little tangled as though it needed cutting. She seemed unmoved by the people around her fishing for their coats or the new arrivals groping for a hook. Even as it occurred to me how much I still loved her, it also occurred to me that it was ridiculous to love someone for their yellow hair.

  Coming out of a warm embrace which sent my spirits soaring, I spotted that the book she was reading was called Principles of Social Work.

  ‘No, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Don’t believe what?’

  ‘You’re not reading it for pleasure?’

  ‘Of course not. So I’m going to be a social worker. What’s wrong with that?’


  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you always imagined I was underneath?’

  ‘I thought you were a scientist.’

  ‘As I’ve told you a million times, I was never nearly good enough to be a pure scientist. And as for the applied bit, it’s a pile of shit.’

  ‘I expect you’re right.’

  She looked at me with some irritation.

  ‘So you saw Dodo in America.’

  ‘Yes, I did. How do you know?’

  ‘Wake up. Because you sent me a postcard telling me.’

  ‘Oh yes, I did.’

  ‘And he told you all about the beryllium.’

  ‘I didn’t put that on the postcard.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. You’re so pathetically easy to read. People who are secretive just have no idea how much their faces are giving away. What a dirty trick that was, I knew he was a prick but I didn’t know how big a prick till then. Bobs, will you order me another orange juice and a saltimbocca?’

  She spoke to him distantly, mechanically, not unkindly, as to a servant who might be a little slow in the uptake. Bobs ordered a carafe of house wine for us two and then seemed to make quite a business of the orange juice order, as though it was a drink which demanded careful preparation and some particular ingredient which might be hard to get hold of. Perhaps it had been a struggle to persuade her to go for the soft drink, though his approach seemed as always likely to have the perverse effect, of provoking her to cancel it and demand a double scotch instead. But she didn’t seem to notice and started talking about her new career.

  ‘You’d love to watch me going into college with the rest of them, it would confirm all your worst prejudices, anoraks and pimples as far as the eye can see. You’d like to see all social workers strangled at birth, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t, that’s your prejudice imagining that I –’

  But I could scarcely complete the sentence because my eye was arrested, manacled if you like, to the fourth finger of her left hand which carried a glittering chunky ring.