by Rosie Thomas
Miles howled at her. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Don’t look. Sheep’s eyes, drowning sheep. What do you want, damn you?’
‘I’m sorry …’
‘Sorry? What do you know about sorrow, bloody –’ he thumped himself in the chest, and staggered again ‘– stupid bitch.’
Clio faced him. She was angry now too, with the quick childish anger that sprang up in their quarrels. She said coldly, ‘I thought you might want something. Ringing my doorbell. It’s the middle of the night. If you don’t want anything except to insult me you can go away again. Sleep it off somewhere else. You are disgusting.’
He swung at her. His hand clipped the side of her face and she recoiled, shocked rather than hurt, almost spitting her fury at him. Then her arm came up and she struck back at him with her sober strength, the flat of her hand against his bruised jaw.
For a second he hung in front of her, his face changing, contracting with pain. Then he seemed to shrink, growing physically smaller as if she had punctured him. His arms wrapped around his chest and he sank down to his knees. He looked up at her, reflecting her own posture when she knelt to bathe his broken mouth. The whites of his eyes were yellow and bleary with hurt.
‘Miles …’
There was a rug in front of the gas fire. He lay down on it, drawing his knees up to his chest. With a sound like tearing cloth he began to cry. His face was a child’s, in the grip of a nightmare.
‘Don’t, Miles …’
Clio lay down beside him. She curled her body against his back, trying to warm him with her own warmth. His sobbing shook her.
‘What has happened? You must tell me. Miles, I’m here. It’s Clio, I love you. Just tell me what’s happened.’ The words became a murmur of comfort while she held him, waiting for the storm to be over. ‘I’m here. It’s all right. Don’t cry any more.’
At last he lay quietly. She made him turn to her and she smoothed his hair and held his face between her hands.
‘Your hands, so cool,’ he said. The weeping fit seemed to have sobered him, a faint glow of colour was creeping back into his face. They lay looking into each other’s eyes.
At last Clio said gently, ‘What happened? You must tell me, you know. Whatever it was.’ She made herself ready for the worst. For violence, murder even.
‘Fight in a pub.’
‘Why?’
‘I was drunk. Still am. Sorry. Drunk because I was angry.’
She soothed him, with little movements of her hands, with her soft voice. He felt the viciousness subsiding.
‘Didn’t mean to hit you. Say … what I said. Sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Why were you angry?’
‘Oh, Christ. Because I gave the first draft of my book to Tony Hardy.’
Clio knew how important that was. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said it was no good. “I can’t offer you any encouragement, Miles, I wish I could”, were his actual words.’ Miles’s face contorted, and his grazed fists clenched. ‘The smug little bastard. I could have … I wanted to kill him. With my hands. I could have done it, while he was sitting there smirking at me. But I didn’t, did I? I left him to it and I went to the Swiss, and there was a crowd of people in there. Then an argument about something or other, can’t even remember what it was, now. Hit someone, and then someone hit me back.’
He tried to smile at her and then winced, reaching up to touch his face. ‘Sorry about everything. You are the only good thing I could think of.’
Clio’s whole body relaxed, as if a wire had been cut. She could have shouted out her relief. He hadn’t run away from anything, there was no dreadful scene of violence outside in the dark. Only rejection, temporary rejection. She wanted to laugh and hold him tighter, but the laugh would have been too wild with the release of tension. She said calmly, ‘That was very short-sighted of Tony. But you are stronger than that, Miles, aren’t you? You know the importance of what you are doing. There are other publishers, other publishing houses, dozens of them. What does one opinion matter? It’s a small setback, that’s all.’
She felt strong now, all her fears gone. She knew what had to be done. Miles was vulnerable, and she could defend him. ‘Listen, you can finish the book. Complete it, and then we’ll show them. Think of all the people who admire your work. Max, Leonard, Peter and Cyril, Nina … Everyone knows you will write the great novel. Remember the success of After Image. Tony Hardy and Randle & Cates are not the sole arbiters of what is good and valuable …’
Anger flared up in Miles again. ‘Tony Hardy’s a liar, a charlatan. That list at Randles is the last refuge for … the written-out and washed-up. I wouldn’t publish my laundry lists with them, I wouldn’t pick him up if he was begging in the gutter …’
Clio let him rage. The depth of his bitterness startled her but she waited, holding him close to her.
At last, exhaustion overcame him. He shrank into passivity, and turned his face against her breast. Clio was weary too, but the old circuit of anxiety and longing had been broken. Miles had turned to her when he needed her, and in the security of knowing that she felt capable enough to make the decisions for both of them. Miles must be left in peace to work, that was all that mattered.
‘Your book will be published,’ she whispered. ‘It will have the acclaim it deserves.’ She had not read a word of it, but she felt fiercely protective and proud of it.
Miles nodded obediently. ‘Yes. Clio, I …’
She put her fingers over his mouth. ‘That’s enough. Come to bed now.’
She stood up and helped him to his feet. He almost fell, and she had to catch him and support him.
‘Still drunk,’ he mumbled. ‘Bad pig behaviour.’
Clio’s bedroom was lit by small shaded lamps. There was a crochetwork bedspread and framed family photographs, and a jumble of feminine paraphernalia on the dressing table. Miles looked around him in momentary bewilderment and then gave a wild hoot of laughter.
‘Beddy-byes, is it?’
Tenderly, patiently, Clio undressed him. He was unsteady but quite compliant. She folded his stained clothes and laid them on her Regency chair. His skin was very white and smooth, and his penis hung like a limp candle against a bush of reddish hair. She folded back the covers for him, and he lay down. When he was safely under the blankets his face sagged, and she thought that he would cry again.
‘Everything is all right now,’ she told him.
Clio undressed herself, folding her own clothes and placing them on the chair opposite Miles’s. Then she slipped into bed beside him, stretching her body alongside his. When she looked into his face she couldn’t fathom his expression but he lifted his hand, as if his arm were stiff, and laid it on her breast. She waited, expectantly, but there was no sign of his arousal.
Clio had read the textbooks and the medical notes. Very gently she reached out and began to stroke him.
His face changed. The disconcerting laughter welled up in him again. ‘Turn over,’ he ordered her. ‘With your back to me.’
His hand descended to her buttocks. He cupped them, and then parted them. At once, she felt him harden. A moment later he was inside her.
It was the briefest love-making, but they had achieved it.
When it was over Miles slid away, rolling over to lie on his back with his eyes closed now. Clio saw that there were tears under his eyelids. She felt unformed with love and tenderness. She whispered to him, ‘Miles? Don’t worry any more. I’ll look after you, if you will let me. I have this place, a little money of my own. You can move in here with me, it’s quiet here. You can work in peace, you needn’t think about anything else, no other work until your novel is written. I’ll always be here, if you want me to be.’
His eyes opened, focusing on hers. ‘Will you?’
‘Yes. Always.’
Miles’s fists clenched, then loosened again. He had the sense of a line being thrown to him, out of a heavy sea. ‘I … wish … you … would be.’
&nbs
p; Clio said, ‘We will get married as soon as we can, and then we’ll belong to each other for ever.’
He repeated with a kind of wondering docility, ‘For ever.’
He lay still, then, listening to the last ebb of traffic in the street and the creaks and sighs of an unfamiliar room. His breathing grew more even, rising and falling against Clio’s, opposite and then in harmony. She clicked a switch and the room went dark, and she settled herself against him. He felt the scented weight of her.
‘Piglet,’ Miles said.
Eleven
‘Your father and I would have liked to give you a party at home,’ Eleanor sighed, not for the first time. ‘A real party for all our friends, like in the old days.’
Clio watched her fussing around the bedroom, in which all traces of Miles’s occupancy had been carefully hidden. Her mother was already dressed for the evening. The old-fashioned and favourite dress she had chosen was cut to show off her bosom and hide her thickened waist, and the dark red shot silk flattered her colouring. Eleanor made no concession to the modern fashion for women to look as much like boys as possible. Her long, thick hair was still piled on top of her head and her heavy figure was tightly corseted. She looked handsome but distinctly of another era, like some ornate mahogany sideboard placed four-square in a mirrored Deco salon.
The thought stirred a protective tenderness in Clio. She knew how much Eleanor wanted to be maternally involved in her first daughter’s marriage preparations, and the sighing and fussing were only expressions of her frustration because Clio could find nothing for her to do.
The wedding itself was to be small and quiet, in St Pancras registry office, with a lunch in the Eiffel Tower afterwards. Ruth and Jake were giving the party this evening, and in her capable way Ruth had refused all offers of help. Clio understood that tonight her mother would like to be arranging her hair and making last-minute needle-and-thread adjustments to some frivolous frock for her, but she could not offer her even that much. Her hair was cut in a short bob, because Miles liked it that way, and could be brushed into waves in ten seconds, and her simple blue dress was already ironed and waiting on its hanger on the back of the wardrobe door. And she was afraid that Eleanor’s fiddling would at any minute expose some evidence of Miles that she could not explain away.
‘Why don’t you go into the other room and ask Pappy to pour you a drink, to calm you down before we go to Jake’s?’
Her mother turned on her, the magnificently prominent bosom heaving. ‘I am calm. Why should I not be? I was only saying I wish you had let us give a party for you at home. You only marry once, Clio. There are so many people in Oxford, in your own world, who have known you since you were tiny …’
Piano teachers, Clio thought, and French mistresses, and one-time undergraduates who were slowly metamorphosing into portly dons. She felt no particular nostalgia for the rotation of the academic year in the Woodstock Road.
‘This is our world, mine and Miles’s,’ she said, as gently as she could. ‘And everyone in the world I care most about will be at Jake and Ruth’s this evening, except for Julius.’
Julius was in Berlin. Clio said hastily before Eleanor could begin to bewail his long absence, ‘This is what Miles and I both wanted. And it’s not as if I’m the only daughter. Tabby and Alice will probably both demand huge weddings in the same year and Pappy will be driven to the verge of bankruptcy to provide them with orange blossom and white tulle, and you will both be thanking your stars that I chose St Pancras and a tailored costume from Selfridges.’
Eleanor sighed yet again. ‘Tabby is more interested in teaching her Sunday-school classes than in meeting a suitable young man. I have tried to encourage her since she came out, believe me, but she’s not like Phoebe. I suppose Phoebe might be accused of over-enthusiasm in the other direction, but then I suppose most of the young behave like that nowadays. And Alice … who can possibly predict what Alice will want when the time comes?’
Alice was stubborn and moody, given to unpredictable enthusiasms and sometimes seemingly at the mercy of her own unfocused intelligence, but when she wanted to be she could also be funny and charming and affectionate. She was her father’s delight, as she had been ever since babyhood.
While they were talking Clio had put on the blue dress and fastened it without more than a glance in the wardrobe mirror. Now she went to Eleanor and put her hands on her shoulders. She bent slightly and kissed her mother on the forehead, where two vertical lines showed between her eyebrows.
‘Everything will be all right,’ she promised her.
She guided Eleanor out of the bedroom with relief. If any rumpled male vest or stray cut-throat razor should happen to present itself in one of the other rooms, she could dismiss it as left behind by Julius.
Nathaniel was sitting beside the gas fire, reading the current issue of Fathom and smoking his pipe. He had lit and relit it with matches from a box belonging to Miles, absently picked up from the table beside him. As soon as Eleanor and Clio came in he laid the quarterly aside, with a touch of regret, and stood up.
‘How beautiful you both look. I shall be able to claim the two belles of the ball as my own.’
‘It isn’t a ball, Pappy. What can you be expecting, in Jake and Ruth’s little house? It’s a small party, for family and a few friends. Nothing formal or elaborate.’
Eleanor rustled to his side. ‘Do you see what I mean? No music or dancing. No flowers, not even a corsage for her dress, and the plainest dress for a bride-to-be, as if she wants to disappear into the wallpaper instead of shining as it is her right to do. And it’s not as if it were a question of money although she keeps talking about how poor she and Miles will be, because I have told her we could quite well afford …’
Nathaniel put his hand on her arm. ‘Eleanor, this is Clio’s wedding, and she must have it as she wants. If she wanted massed bands and twenty attendants, she would have said as much. If she prefers beer and a chicken sandwich in Islington, then she has my blessing also.’ His eyes were crinkling over the grey and black wool of his beard.
‘I don’t think it will be quite as grim even as you paint it,’ Clio told him before she kissed him. Although in her heart she felt a shiver of doubt as to whether the party was such a festive idea as it had seemed, a month ago, when Miles had agreed to set a day for their wedding. She saw her mother and father glance at each other, and then the loving determination of their smiles.
There was an extravagant bottle of champagne keeping cool on the sill outside the kitchen window. Clio had intended to bring it in with a flourish and drink a toast to Eleanor and Nathaniel and to her own future, but the moment suddenly seemed too brittle with their separate anxieties. The champagne had better stay where it was while they attended soberly to whatever the evening required of them.
Perhaps Eleanor was right after all, she thought sadly. Perhaps there should be music and flowers, and a dress that would swirl in the scented air as she danced with her lover.
But Clio only said, ‘If we are all ready, perhaps we should drive over to Islington now in case Ruth does need any help at the last minute?’
Her little car was parked in the nearby mews. As Nathaniel squeezed into the back seat and Eleanor settled alongside her, Clio was thinking that the Austin was becoming a luxury that she and Miles could no longer properly afford. Since Miles had stopped doing hack work in order to concentrate on his book, they had had to make a series of economies so as to be able to exist on Clio’s money alone. She had a small income from her Holborough grandparents, as well as what she earned at Fathom, enough for one person to live modestly on but hardly enough for two. She had made the necessary sacrifices joyfully, for Miles’s sake, and for the great novel.
But her car gave her a sense of independence, and she still loved the mechanical business of driving it. Perhaps they could manage as they were for a few more months, she decided. Until Miles’s book was completed. Or perhaps she should look for another part-time job, one that would pay,
instead of giving her time voluntarily to the Mothers’ Clinic. She would have to talk it over with Jake and Ruth. She had hardly seen them, except at the Clinic, since Miles had moved in, whereas the three of them had once been almost inseparable.
The weight of her anxieties seemed to depress the bones of her skull, but when she tried to single them out and confront them they shifted and slid, leaving only the sickly reminder of their pressure. I am getting married, she told herself. We shall be poor for a time, but this is what we have chosen.
The car bumped gently over the cobbles in the mews, and then turned out into Gower Street.
Ruth was in the kitchen with an apron tied over her best dress. She pulled out a drawer and gathered a handful of silver forks, then laid them in a rattling sheaf on the tray to be carried upstairs. She could hear Tabby with Dorcas in the dining room overhead. Perhaps between them they would be able to make a half-decent job of laying the buffet. Dorcas was willing enough but she was only the daily cleaner and couldn’t be expected to have much idea about waiting at table, and Jake’s sister was a good-natured girl who couldn’t keep an idea in her head for five minutes at a time. Ruth assumed that she would have to go up in the end and redo everything, but before then there was still the best cutlery to be sorted and the cream to be piped on to the sherry trifles.
She wiped her fingers on her apron and turned to the table where the dishes were waiting. They were heavy; Jake would have to carry them upstairs.
Where was Jake? He was late back from surgery, and he had promised faithfully that he would be home in time to help her.
Tabby put her head round the door at the top of the narrow stairs that led down to the kitchen and shouted, ‘Do you want us to use the big white tablecloth?’
Ruth winced. Tabitha had been staying in the house for two days and she still hadn’t understood that once the children were in bed the house must be kept quiet until they were properly asleep. Now Lucas would probably be out of bed and running up and down the stairs, and Rachel would start calling for another drink.
