4
The kitchen was clean enough, Pam thought, but not really clean. Wanting a rest from two hours of reading, she went up the ladder with a damp rag soaked in detergent, and rubbed a circle of cleanliness the size of a large coin that might be taken for a dab of fresh plaster whose whiteness had not yet merged. Then she rubbed until the paint under the grease became as large as the memorial plaque sent by the King and his grateful people to John’s parents.
An attempt at proper cleanliness would mean enlarging the pristine area to take up the whole room. She looked from the ladder and saw dust everywhere. Closer to the ceiling there were cobwebs and spiders’ nests. The floor had been swept but not washed. It was tidy but not clean, calling for days of work.
Everything clean was not quite clean. Lace curtains wanted washing, and the water would darken when they were dipped. Folded tea towels needed a visit to the laundrette, and cutlery could do with a rinse and a polish. Heavier curtains in the living-room should go to the cleaners. The pelmets and woodwork ought to be washed down. Everywhere called for dusting, sweeping and scrubbing.
Was life worth throwing away on such labour every week, month, year? You took one breath only in order to draw another, and laboured from birth till no more breath would come. Everything you did in life was useless, except that it kept death at bay and allowed you to live with as much ease as could be managed. Cleanliness was comfort if you had been brought up that way – though it’s no business of mine who cleans the flat, she thought, coming down the ladder and putting buckets and rags away. He’ll have to get someone else for the job.
She read again for half an hour, then peeled potatoes and put them into boiling water, laid lamb chops under the grill, and cleaned lettuce. While he carried, searched, sorted, pondered and evaluated the long undisturbed hoard she walked in and out of the dining-room, setting the table and putting down a first course. The immersion in a different life pattern, as well as the long time since breakfast, made her stomach turn with hunger like a swimmer coming up for air. The corkscrew was difficult to pull. ‘I took a bottle of Mersault from the fridge.’
He opened it.
‘You look as if you’ve just done the nightshift in a soot factory,’ she said.
He washed, then sat diagonally from her. With rolled-up sleeves, and a shirt open at the neck, it seemed as if he had lived in the flat all his bachelor days. Even his subdued and worried state emphasized the fact. ‘You must have had an interesting hour or two.’
He paused in his eating. ‘I’ll tell you about it.’
‘Take your time.’
‘I still don’t know who I am, but I’m getting a rough idea as to who I might have been, and that’s a beginning.’
She put more of the fish on his plate. ‘Have you found anything startling?’
‘Not yet. I’m not even born.’
‘Keep trying,’ she said. ‘Knowledge is sacred.’
His eyes were troubled. ‘This sort is.’
She was glad he had changed his mind about it, though he was further away than she liked. She served hot food, then set cakes and cheeses close so as not to get up till after the meal. ‘You can make the coffee.’
He poured more wine. ‘I’ll wash up, too.’
‘No. Get on with your sorting.’ If she wasn’t useful she wouldn’t be here. The day out had turned into something else. London seemed a thousand miles off. Her past had vanished. No alteration of surroundings had ever lifted her so much out of herself. Even to wonder what was missing from her consciousness did not put her back in touch. The man whose flat she was in was a stranger, as she no doubt was a stranger to him, so they were at ease with each other. At least she hoped she was. She felt almost married, but without the tangled obsessions that came from having slept in the same bed. She liked being here because she could leave whenever she wanted to.
He told her what he had found, describing how each piece of information was laid aside until something turned up from a box to confirm or complement it. He assembled truths and situations into sequences, like doing a jigsaw puzzle or putting a pack of cards in order during a game of patience. He did not go rigidly from A to B, and hurriedly to Z as if afraid to lose his way should he not finish the story quickly, or as if he couldn’t be bothered to make the tale good for her since it only concerned him, or good for himself since it couldn’t concern anyone else; but he went on calmly with his circumlocutionary report, taking a fact here, a lead there, describing a book, or a photograph, and quoting from a letter or journal, or an unlabelled sheet of paper on which someone had scribbled thoughts seemingly unrelated or information presumably unsought, and circling the loose pieces until a more or less whole picture formed, the assembling of a mosaic rather than an ordinary account which would have been finished too quickly and thereby diminished in the telling for him, and been less absorbing in the hearing of it for her.
‘I have to be careful not to allow the stuff to explain more about myself than it deserves,’ he said, having spoken in his precise way to the end of the meal. ‘I’m still me, after all, and my fifty years of unknowing haven’t been exactly meaningless.’
He was fighting his definitions to the last. She wanted to pity him because, though he might not know it, his face reflected a painful ordeal. He would never admit it, she felt sure, yet she did not envy him the ability to hold it in check, or his fate that had decided he must.
They went into the kitchen, and when the noise of the coffee grinder stopped, he said: ‘The same things happen to everyone. It’s only when you find out about such events that they seem more fascinating than they should. I read somewhere that everyone’s more like their grandparents than their parents, and now I’m not sure whether to believe it. You just have to live with what you know, I suppose, or let all revelations slip into the bloodstream, and then more or less forget them.’
She was no longer sleepy. ‘You’re only half-way through the story.’
Unopened boxes lay over the living-room floor like the jellyfish surrounding the ship off Sabang on that tropical morning when he had almost fainted and dropped overboard. Would they sting if he stepped on them? There was no option but to descend. The box nearest his chair released a smell of stale lavender, a vanishing sweetness that he recognized but could not fix in his memory.
There was the usual jumble of liner and railway tickets, whist-drive score cards, sweepstake certificates, death notices, address books, pocket diaries and dance programmes. He filled plastic bags for the dustbin men, not being a detective on the lookout for information who needed evidence to condemn or acquit. The past now seemed relevant enough to tie himself firmly to it. He had been an orphan, but it hadn’t mattered. Aunt Clara had told sufficient for him to think it unimportant to know more. If he had persisted, he was given to understand he would lose even her. She would tell him not to come back. ‘That’s all I know,’ she had snapped at him, ‘so ask me nothing else.’
‘Damn it,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll scratch among the rubbish till my fingernails bleed.’
5
‘What memories I shall be left with when all this is over!’ Clara wrote in her large script. It was open, and naïve, and the rounded generosity of individual letters stared at him like faces that pleaded to be believed. But he shook off all impressions, imagining that to attempt to read the character of writing in this way would argue even more naïvety in him.
‘I knew the cruise would not end well as soon as I saw the name of the ship. But to think I didn’t really know what was going on. How could I have been so BLOODY stupid? Yet even so I couldn’t have stopped it. Nobody could. We were together every minute. No one came into our cabin. When she was there, I was with her. But of course I couldn’t have been. At night she was on her own. Mother blamed me. Father blamed Emma. Emma blamed herself. And we all blamed THE MAN. But Emma was twenty-eight, and in control of her own decisions. Or was she? Whoever is? She saw him for the first time on the third day out, when we’d recovered fr
om our mal de mer, and there was nothing anybody could do from that moment on. But why didn’t she make him take care? Elementary precautions had always been rule number one, the first thought before enjoyment, such as it was or could ever be.’
Emma’s carefree ways did not prevent her from understanding the world well enough to try and snap its bonds, but she did more damage to herself than break free of the values which she looked on with contempt. But she was in love with Alec, a sort of scullion or undercook who should not have been within a mile of the first-class part of the ship, but who was the kind of beetle it was impossible to prevent encroaching.
Clara saw them standing on the lifeboat deck one night after dinner, and almost pulled her from the rail. ‘We must have coffee, dear.’
He looked at Clara. ‘She’ll be all right with me.’
‘Perhaps so. But she’s coming into the saloon now.’
He was even cheeky about it. ‘I was showing her the stars. There’s a few around tonight.’
‘I dare say there are.’
‘What a fuss you’re making,’ Emma said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. I’m not a young girl.’
‘I know, dear, but it’s father’s birthday tomorrow, and we have to write that telegram between us so that we can send it off.’
‘Goodbye, miss.’ The man walked away.
Emma said to Clara in the saloon: ‘Don’t do that again, do you hear? I talk to whoever I like. He’s a pleasant person, and we were just talking.’
‘With his arm around you?’
Emma’s fits of temper never lasted long. ‘It’s your dirty mind. His arm was nowhere near me.’
‘I’m not blind.’
‘I wish you were. But if you come up to me like that again and make me look such a fool I’ll jump overboard.’
‘You wouldn’t!’
‘I bloody well would.’
Clara laughed. ‘What fun!’
‘You think so?’
‘The ship would stop, and we’d throw you lifebelts. A jolly bosun would haul you aboard, and take you to the captain’s cabin.’
Everyone wondered why they were laughing.
‘I’d be clapped in irons,’ Emma screamed, ‘for the rest of the voyage.’
‘First-class irons, though,’ Clara shrieked. ‘Or maybe they’d put you in charge of that Chief Dragon Stewardess in the white overall, and the Lord knows what she’d do with you!’
‘Oh, shudder-shudder,’ Emma moaned. ‘I’d much rather have my little cock-o’-the-walk cook.’
‘Stop it. You must promise never to see him again, not someone like him. There are lots of men on board who don’t seem to be attached, so why do you have to get mixed up with a bad egg like that?’
‘Oh shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let’s forget it. It’s absolutely nothing, you know.’
Clara thought that the fuss had indeed got out of hand. ‘If it’s so unimportant why can’t you say you’ll never see him again?’
‘Well, I can say it, but I may bump into him walking around the deck.’
‘He shouldn’t be where we can see him,’ Clara said. ‘I’ll complain to the captain.’
Emma turned pale. ‘He’ll lose his job.’
‘He’ll be clapped in irons. Or be made to walk the plank,’ Clara went on, ‘from the top of the funnel.’
Emma wanted no more of her humour. ‘Don’t do any such thing.’
‘Promise, then?’
Clara waited. Emma nodded. ‘But if I don’t see him again, I’ll never forgive you. It’s rotten of you to make all this fuss, just because you’re having your period.’
A tall thin middle-aged man with a row of medal ribbons on his lapel passed their table. He turned his face away quickly, and walked out of the door to get some fresh air.
‘You’re awful!’ Clara said.
Emma became despondent. ‘He must have heard such things before, and if he hasn’t, what a poor fish!’
When two people want to be together, nothing can be done to stop them meeting. ‘We fell in love,’ Emma said, on telling Clara that she was pregnant. Emma couldn’t be guarded every minute of the day and night. At the cinema one evening Emma complained, before the main film began, that the place was stuffy and made her feel sick because the ship was rocking. She would go to her cabin and rest.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Clara offered.
She pressed her sister’s hand and moved along the row. ‘No, don’t. I’ll be all right. I just want to lie down.’
‘And you haven’t seen him since leaving the ship?’
‘No.’
Clara snorted. ‘And you call that love?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re talking like a mill girl who’s been reading Red Letter magazine.’
‘I don’t care. It was marvellous.’
Clara had seen him standing on the quayside helping to unload while they were waiting to go ashore at Southampton. He was a pallid ginger-haired man of medium height, though too far away for her to see much else. He probably had a wife and children, the squalid little runt. On every voyage he had fun with someone or other. How dare he wave at us?
‘You must have an …’ Clara daren’t say the word.
‘It’s too late,’ Emma told her. ‘I never would, anyway. I want it to be like this. Life was getting too empty for me.’
‘I can’t think what it will do to father and mother. It will kill them.’
‘Do you know,’ Emma said, ‘I don’t care. Well, I do, but it’s my life, and my baby – not theirs. I have to choose my own way out, and nobody else’s. I can’t be doing what other people want from me all the time.’
‘Father and mother aren’t other people.’
‘But they will be if they turn against me for a thing like this.’ Emma peered closer and saw her sister’s tears, wondering why Clara seemed to think that she had committed an act of treachery against her personally. Such sister-love must come to an end sooner or later. Let it go. She couldn’t bear Clara’s overweening concern, nor her parents’, which was really their concern for themselves and not for her. Yet it was the only love they had, and would never diminish.
‘We love you more than we love ourselves,’ Clara told her.
‘Please leave me alone.’
‘Of course, it won’t kill them. Silly of me to say that. Times have changed. You can always have it adopted, or something.’
Emma spoke firmly. ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’
‘Is everything I say wrong?’ Clara was alarmed at the fact that it might well be.
‘I’ve made up my mind to go to Cambridge.’ Emma sat wearily on the bed. ‘I can live there with friends till I get a flat or house of my own. Mother and father needn’t know what’s happened till the baby is born. I refuse to let anybody ruin my life.’
Clara was beginning to wonder whether their lives hadn’t been smashed before they were born, but knew she must stay with her sister in the hope that she could at least prevent her destroying another one – or two. ‘Just tell me what I can do to help.’
‘Stay with me,’ Emma said. ‘If I sleep alone tonight I shall never wake up.’
6
The taxi-cab to Liverpool Street was laden with trunks and cases. Emma took three pound notes from her purse to pay the train fares, and got thirteen-and-fourpence change. Their luggage went before them on a porter’s barrow. Emma read Strand Magazine as the train steamed lustily out of London. She seemed, while rain washed down the windows, as if she had nothing in the whole wide world to worry about.
In the booking hall at Cambridge she confessed that she knew no one there, and couldn’t think why she had suggested coming except that they had been at Newnham. For all she cared, they could just as well turn round and go back home. She didn’t want to, however, because nobody could go back, no matter where that magical locality might be. She didn’t wish to run anywhere else, either, so supposed she ought to kill herself, and certainly
would if she weren’t pregnant, and if she were on her own.
Her face was so dry, eyes so laden with self-reproach that Clara thought even tears would be a blessing. A fit, like a thunderstorm, would clear the air, at least for a while. She felt there was a barrier in Emma’s perceptions that held back notions of self-preservation. Such mending thoughts were not sufficiently plain to her. It was torment. Clara found irresponsibility the worst of sins. Emma’s apprehensions were merely somewhat distant, though being faintly sensed by her did not mean that she was mistaken as to their presence. The fact that she perceived them at all increased her trouble – and Clara did not know whether Emma would rather that they had not been there. As it was, they only sent enough indication of menace to confuse her decisions.
Their sisterly connection was firm – always had been – almost as if they were twins. Clara was appalled at the situation, but knew she must make an effort. Rain teemed outside. It would be better to do anything rather than nothing, so she telephoned the University Arms, asking for their best double room and bath for herself and her sister.
She swung jauntily out of the telephone box. ‘Come on, my love, cheer up. I’ve got us a big cosy bolt-hole looking over Parkers Piece. We’ll have a long soak in the tub, then go down for a ten-bob dinner.’ She called: ‘Hey, porter, get us a taxi.’ Turning again to Emma: ‘We’ll leave our trunks in the left-luggage, then talk about what we’re going to do when we get to our den. Or we won’t, if we don’t feel like it. We’ll do just as we like!’
They had their cases, and then tea, sent to the room. Emma sat on the bed. ‘I’m not unhappy. Don’t think that. I just don’t care. It’s wonderful. I’ve always wanted not to care, and to have something to care about that I won’t care about, and now I don’t!’
Clara passed the plate of cucumber sandwiches, glad to see her eat. She could hardly do anything else. ‘But I care for you. I sometimes think I’ve never cared about anyone else.’ It was true that she hadn’t, but Emma seemed to be in some strange land of her own, so it was no use pushing the point. She looked older than she need have, with shadows under the eyes, and even powder and rouge couldn’t hide the fact that her skin had gone past its first bloom without either of them noticing. Her eyes were large and feverish, as if straining to see more than would ever be possible.
Her Victory Page 30
