by Zoe Morrison
‘You didn’t want to leave?’ I said.
And he said, ‘I didn’t feel the need.’
I thought of my figure walking down the street, disappearing, and thought: because he already had. He told me about an old aunt in Surrey whom he disliked intensely; she sounded like his mother, now dead. He said that when his parents died he’d felt nothing, that the funerals were tiresome, a burden to attend, and that his older brother hadn’t even bothered. And when he told me all this I knew there must be more along these lines, and that what he was not saying was worse.
I remember that he did not look at me much, but rather stared straight ahead, or at his ale; he didn’t ask me any questions. He reached across the table, took my hand.
After this he took me to a shop and bought me clothing; it was the most new clothing I’d ever owned. I walked out wearing a new dress, a new coat, a new hat, new stockings, a new pair of shoes, an entirely new outfit, and with more of everything in the parcels he and I were carrying. As we were walking back up the High Street two colleagues of his stopped us, separately, and greeted us, and both times he introduced me as Miss Alice Murray, and their faces remained expressionless while their eyes travelled all over me.
He walked me to the station that day for the first time in a while, saw me onto the train with all the bags, settled me into a seat. I remember my body being jostled about by the movement of the train, rattled along. I closed my eyes. Somehow I got myself and those parcels back to the room in Shepherd’s Bush.
Walking in London in the dark, I wanted to go further afield, out of the city, to the hills, the plains, which must have existed out there somewhere. But I was too scared, I kept looping around the same familiar streets. I felt numb. Sounds were not what they were before; they were muffled like echoes. My hands were always cold; flesh was cold. Smells did not exist either, not really, although one night I was sure I smelt the river, and it was a bad smell, awful, there was something rotting in it, and I saw it before me, a mass of brownish water coming at me, over my head, and I could not breathe. And this pain, this terrible pain that I had not yet glimpsed or caught the shape of, was everywhere but not upon me. It was as if I were holding it out in front of me with two bowed arms, and walking, walking in these loopy circles.
Papers arrived from Australia. I showed them to Edward, who said he would show them to his lawyer. After eating in the tavern we went to the college – he had to collect a book – and I waited for him again on the brocade seat and fell asleep, and this time when I woke in the bed it was morning. He was sitting very upright in a chair at the foot of the bed making notes in a periodical, and when I saw him I began to cry, for where was I? He came over, sat next to me and he said, ‘There, there. It will all be all right,’ patting my leg through the bed cover.
He was not looking at my face, and the words sounded wooden, and I knew he did not think they were true either, and that they never would be, and I was relieved by that because at least someone else had an understanding of this darkness, this terrible truth – that everything was not fine, and this did not have to be explained, apologised for, excused or denied.
When he proposed again it was very different from the first time. We were in the teashop and I had just said I should probably set off for the station. His voice was business-like, but he leant towards me and took both my hands, and I remember feeling his shaking. I accepted without flourish. Good, he said, and he leant right back in his seat as if he could relax for just a moment.
I didn’t hear from him after that for several days. I thought he must have changed his mind. So I got on the train to Oxford one morning and went up to his room in the college.
‘Hello,’ I said at the door. He looked very surprised, and not at all pleased. ‘Can I come in?’
He stood up, running a hand through his hair. ‘Yes, do,’ he said eventually.
I looked around the room: papers in neat piles on his desk, pens lined up, the chair pushed in.
‘Working hard?’ I said.
‘Always working hard.’
‘What are you working on?’
He didn’t answer that. I went to him, reached up, put my arms around his neck.
‘Keen for some distraction?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ his smile perfunctory. ‘Then I’ll need to get back to it, unfortunately. You oughtn’t to have come all this way. You’ve wasted the money of a ticket.’
Oh, don’t be so ridiculous! I wanted to cry out. We’re about to be married!
The world had changed around me. I had experienced a great loss, everyone else had gone, and I was scared; I needed someone to hold onto. That is what I thought.
30.
London, October, 1950
‘Hamish Residence,’ Hetty said.
‘It’s me. Alice.’
‘Oh my god. How are you?’
‘Oh, well, I’m —’
‘A friend,’ she called out, her voice muffled, her hand over the receiver. ‘A friend,’ louder. ‘I’ll just be a minute. No, stay there. No, please stay seated, I’ll be half a minute.’ And then she was back. ‘Sorry.’
‘How are you?’
‘Terrible. I’m counting the days.’
‘Oh, Hetty. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry. What about you? How are you?’
And when I hesitated, then said, ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘Where are you living?’
I told her about the room Fiona had found me. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without it.’
‘You would have worked out something.’
‘I’m not sure … I’ve been —’
‘It’s a difficult time.’
‘Hetty, I’m marrying Edward.’
Silence at the other end of the line, and then a bang and a scream, but there was something wrong with the way it sounded, with its timbre, as if there were something quite different beneath it. ‘Damn! Just a second —’ a loud clatter of the receiver, footsteps walking quickly, then exclamations. After a long time footsteps came back to the phone. ‘I’m sorry, Alice.’
‘Everything all right?’
‘She fell. She’s a damned idiot. I told her not to get up. She did it deliberately, she does this sort of thing. Because I was talking to you. She’s barking mad. And now we’ll all be dancing around her, around the clock, and I’ll be up again all night. What about Australia?’
‘What? Oh. Well …’ and I looked outside the phone box to the streetscape of London, the dry brown leaves whisked about by the wind, everyone with their hands in their pockets, heads down. ‘I can’t go back, Hetty. It’s not just that there’s nowhere to live now, nothing to live on, it’s …’
‘That they’re gone.’
‘Yes.’
‘But surely there must be —’
‘Look, this is what I’ve decided.’
‘Really?’
I started to cry.
‘What about London?’ she said. ‘Keep the room.’
‘She’s coming back.’
‘Share it with her.’
‘I’m sure she’d love that.’
‘Get another room.’
And eat what? I wanted to say. And keep warm – how? And even if I ate the walls and dressed myself in the curtains, how to be a concert pianist then? How? Sneak around the Royal College pretending I had never left? Leap up on stage during a concert?
These people, I thought, these people with their families and their means, however meagre, and their futures like smooth, cleared roads laid out in front of them, these people who know nothing of what it is to have nothing.
‘I have no money. I mean none, Hetty. There’s nothing.’
‘Really nothing?’
‘Really.’
‘Christ.’
‘Quite.’
Silence.
‘Are you practising?’ I asked her.
‘A bit. I used to put the mute on and do it while she listened to her wireless programs, but that didn’t last long. Then I knitted
her some earmuffs and I slip them on her when she’s sleeping, which is quite a lot, and get going in the attic. You should see these things I made her, all fluffy, multi-coloured. And when I’m doing all this I sometimes think: who is the madwoman here, exactly?’
‘Funny.’
‘And you?’
‘They let me use a room at the college. I’ve been playing a lot.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. You’re brilliant, Alice. Maybe you could …’
‘What?’
‘Maybe teach?’
‘Teach?’
‘At a school?’
‘Like a boarding school? I’d rather shoot myself.’
‘I know.’
‘I want to perform. I want to be a concert pianist.’
‘I know. You have to. We all knew that; we all know that.’
Another pause.
‘Alice, is he still … odd?’
‘What do you mean?’
Silence.
‘He’s been very good to me,’ I said. ‘He buys me tea and distracts me with walks and galleries, even though he’s very busy with teaching and so on … especially when I wasn’t very … I mean …’
‘Oh, Alice.’
We’re in love; I didn’t say it. We’ve grown close; I didn’t say that either.
‘I think I’d like a family of my own one day,’ I said quietly, and that was true. Perhaps I had started to have an inkling of how significant love was, giving it as much as getting it. That there was something beyond ourselves, as individuals, that really mattered. But the instinct was also immediate. I didn’t want to feel like this anymore, so alone and with no home, so frightened; I couldn’t feel like this anymore.
‘When’s the wedding?’ Hetty said, a new hardness in her tone. ‘I’ll see if I can get there for it.’
‘You don’t have to. It wasn’t why I was calling,’ although it half was, and then the phone started beeping and I had to put more money in, and the coins clunked down, got swallowed up, the pile in front of me diminishing, but she couldn’t see this, of course.
‘It’s very hard to get away from this asylum,’ she was saying. ‘I mean, I leave her for literally one minute and she’s done something ridiculous, fallen on her bloody head, or something. Speaking of which, I should go; you can probably hear that noise, that’s her version of moaning, if you can believe it, variations on a theme of —’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe for just a day or two I could get my sister to … Listen, what’s the date of the wedding?’
She did make it in the end. She arrived in London in a great rush the day before, excited to be there, and the joy of seeing her, Hetty, at the station in her old hat, her brown coat, her way of talking: look at you, she kept saying, look at you with your posh clothes and your new ’do, because by then I’d had my hair waved. She gave me a lace nightdress with little ribbons in bows on the shoulders.
31.
Oxford, October, 1950
The wedding was at the registry office on a Friday. Hetty was a witness, and one of Edward’s colleagues, a man with a moustache, I don’t remember his name. The four of us had lunch afterwards in the dining room of the Randolph Hotel, trout scattered with almonds floating in a pale lemon sauce; it tasted of nothing. When we finished we stood outside on the pavement talking.
There was a chilly wind that day that snapped our skirts around our legs, threw back jackets. I was holding onto my hat, telling Hetty I would take her to the station; I didn’t want her to go, wanted to keep her close, and when the taxi came I was about to get in beside her but Edward held my arm and said, No, we need to get back, and he picked up my bags and we went to the house in North Oxford.
It was furnished by then, of course. There were fancy hooks inside the door for coats and hats, a phone table in the hall with a built-in chair. He put my suitcase down inside the door.
‘Why don’t you wait in there,’ he said, pointing to the front room, and he walked past me into another room. It was what he used to say when we went to his rooms in the college. What was he up to? The Steinway was still in the front room, but now there was a chaise longue, armchairs, some pictures on the walls – a still-life, a farm with a plough. Everything looked antique, although genuine or reproduction I wasn’t sure. I stood at the window then sat on the edge of the chaise longue.
I had mostly spoken to Hetty during lunch, he had spoken to his colleague; in the taxi we hadn’t talked at all. He was probably tired. I was tired.
‘Why don’t you make some tea,’ he said, coming in. ‘The woman stocked the kitchen.’
The woman?
‘Housekeeper,’ he said. ‘I dismissed her yesterday,’ and then he left again.
I went down to the kitchen, which smelt like bleach, as if it had been swabbed, and I found what I needed, made the tea, sat at the kitchen table watching the steam coil out of the spout. The kitchen was very cold; it was always cold in that room.
I went up the hall and poked my head around the doorframe. It was a big room, his study, with floor to ceiling bookshelves in dark wood, the volumes lined up row upon row. The huge desk, also dark wood, faced the door. There was a window behind it, Edward’s head and torso a dark shape in front of it.
‘Tea’s made.’
Papers in front of him; he was working.
‘Why don’t you unpack,’ he said in a cool voice, not looking up. ‘You’ll find a chest of drawers in the bedroom. Then we can have some supper. She left some food in the pantry.’
I walked quietly up the stairs with my suitcase. The chest of drawers was small and I needed to hang things, but the wardrobe was full of his clothes (immaculately laundered, facing all the same way). I arranged my things in the drawers; I would sort out the wardrobe situation later. I changed into a warm skirt and jumper, some thick stockings. I looked around. There was the big double bed, made with tightly pulled linen.
I went back downstairs, found half a loaf of brown bread, some milk, eggs. We ate in the kitchen, and while we were eating it was as if he were concentrating hard on something else, something in his head, perhaps, or a sound outside on the street.
‘You must be very busy,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘How many weeks of term are left?’
‘A few. But it’s always busy.’
I was starting to wonder if I had done something wrong. I took our empty plates to the sink, washed them, put them on the rack, as if this were all normal, as if I had done it all before, as if the sink were already as familiar as my own hand, and when he was about to get up I turned around and said, ‘Is something wrong, Edward?’
‘No.’
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘You’re very quiet.’
And then he looked at me and he said, ‘Nothing is wrong. We are married. This is a relationship, and relationships, you will soon find, work best when certain arrangements are understood. Like all relationships this involves an exchange. You will need to adapt to the fact that I work most of the time. At the moment I am doing more work than usual in order to make up for the time you wanted me to spend with you at the start of term and over the summer. Married life is completely different to courting, an entirely different relationship. As a wife you will, of course, be occupied very soon with your own tasks.’ He took a last swig of tea, put the cup down on the table, and went back into his study. ‘Why don’t you play something on that piano?’ he called from inside the room.
His summary had left me breathless. I looked out at the dark garden and thought, I am going to laugh, I really am, and where is Hetty or George or Mary or Hilary to laugh with me? At the same time, I was feeling some horrible thing shift around inside me. I felt it had a shape or, rather, that it had taken the shape of the inside of my body. It distracted me, that shape, that mass of darkness, it weighed me down, it made me slow and quiet, it made me want to lie down and go to sleep. It stopped me from running after hi
m, hammering on the door and saying, How ridiculous. Take that back. You sit down and discuss this with me or I’m leaving at once. I did none of that. Instead I thought this speech was not unlike one of his speeches about the buildings and sights he had shown me in Oxford. It was something that could be looked at, but could be walked away from.
That night I got into bed wearing the nightdress Hetty had given me. He came up the stairs, went into the bathroom, emerged wearing pyjamas and turned out the light. Then he took off his pyjamas and got into bed. He started kissing me, but it was different from those times in the park – he was rushed, and rougher, and then he stopped kissing me, got on top of me and started pushing the nightdress up. The heaviness of him was very surprising, I remember it like yesterday. I reached up, put my palm on his cheek, tried to kiss him again, but he ignored that, got the nightdress up all the way and pushed himself into me, and kept pushing hard. When he finished he rolled off, lay there panting, then got out of bed.
I heard water running in the bathroom. I stayed very still. Then I sat up and turned on the bedside light. He came back in, stepped into his pyjama pants and buttoned up the shirt, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me. He got under the covers and said goodnight. I turned off the light and lay in the dark, looking at the slit of light at the bottom of the window, which the curtain did not cover entirely.
All the concern he had expressed about me, the way he had looked after me, complimented and encouraged me; not to mention the words spoken that morning. It was as if all that were a mask, a chimera, and this disregard, this contempt, was what lay beneath. Or else it had been an aberration, an anomaly so awful it was best forgotten.
