‘Mm-hm.’ He did not pay much attention. In America, shooting was called hunting, and that was that.
An elderly manageress in creased black silk, with a tilt to her hennaed head that hinted at better days, came to ask them if they were taking lunch, because it was quite ready. She meant that if the kitchen staff did not get off on time they would give notice, but the American ordered another drink and they stayed in the bar for quite a time before they went into the diningroom.
It was a dignified, high-ceilinged room with panelled walls and french windows leading to the rose garden. The small restaurant table and wooden chairs looked as out of place as village children at the annual party in the baronial hall.
There were only a few people lunching, because the season had scarcely begun. One of the couples had two small boys, evidently on a day out from a local boarding-school. They were very little boys, with button noses and slicked-back hair and dangling legs that would have looked more at home in shorts than in their long school uniform trousers. Their parents were too old for them. The father looked bored and the mother ate carefully, having trouble with her teeth and the rhubarb pie.
An elderly couple were obviously residents, for they had sauce jars and a packet of crispbread and a bottle of medicine and a half-empty bottle of Empire wine on their table. The two other people in the room were young and meekly self-conscious. They spoke in whispers, not watching each other eat, and trying not to look as if they enjoyed the food. They might be honeymooners, adventuring into more expensive places than they were used to, but secretly regretting that they had not stuck to the teashops where they had done their courting.
Christine did not know whether the American would enjoy watching and commenting on people in restaurants, so she said nothing, while he studied the menu.
‘The chicken sounds the safest,’ he said, with the experience of one who has spent two weeks in England. ‘How would that suit you, Miss Cope?’
‘Please don’t call me that. It reminds me of the shop.’
‘All right, Christine,’ he said. ‘Soup then, and the chicken? And we could try their apple pie.’
The waitress was setting tables for dinner at the other end of the room. He finally caught her eye; and when she had taken the order, Christine asked: ‘What shall I call you then? Vinson is a sort of difficult name. I couldn’t call you that.’
‘It’s a family name,’ he said a little stiffly. ‘I’m proud to bear it.’
It was another of these rather difficult moments when one of them unintentionally offended the other by having a different point of view. An American did not see anything odd in being called Vinson. Their minds went away from each other, but he brought them together again by saying: ‘Some of my friends call me Vin. I wish you’d call me that.’
‘Sounds like a bath cleaner,’ she said and laughed. ‘I like it,’ she added quickly before her laugh could push his friendliness away again. ‘Well, here’s to you, Vin.’ She raised the glass of water which he had asked the waitress to pour.
‘Here’s to us,’ he said, and she dropped her eyes in sudden dismay before the brown-and-amber gaze of his. Don’t try and tie me down, her thoughts fluttered. Don’t let’s start all that. We’ll never be anything to each other, and I can’t be bothered to play the game of pretending that we might.
When she looked up his eyes had moved away, and after that he was friendly and quite casual towards her. They had coffee in the sunny drawing-room and looked at magazines, and Christine tried to explain the jokes in Punch to him. The manageress, who roamed uneasily through the house like a family ghost, came in and told them a long story about when she had been to America with her husband, now, alas, passed away with the full glory of a military funeral.
They escaped from her and went out to the putting course. Vinson started by letting Christine win the first two holes, but when he saw that she was quite skilful he competed seriously against her and was pleased when he won.
They stopped for tea on the way home. The evening was warm and smelled of summer. Cresting a hill, they saw London lying before them in a clear sea of sunset, remote as a mirage.
When they reached streets and people again, Vinson said: ‘You’ll come and have dinner with me, won’t you, Christine?’
‘I can’t very well. I’m not dressed for it.’ She was wearing a tweed suit with a yellow sweater, which would not be suitable for the kind of place he might want to go.
An Englishman would have said: ‘What does it matter?’ scarcely noticing what she wore, and leaving her to bear any embarrassment that might arise; but the American, trained to take women seriously, said: ‘I see your difficulty. We’ll go to the club then. I can get you a steak there, a real steak like you can’t get anywhere else.’
It sounded better than going home to family cold supper and the remains of the day’s washing-up to be done, and Geoffrey disgruntled because he had not had his game of chess and Aunt Josephine did not make his bed tightly enough.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘but don’t think I’m accepting only from greed. I seem to have done nothing but eat all day.’
‘It’s been a good day, hasn’t it?’ He turned to look at her with his black eyebrows raised.
She said: ‘Oh yes, lovely,’ and he seemed relieved, and said: ‘I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I wanted you to.’
It was too early to eat, so Vinson suggested that they should go up to his hotel room, where he had a bottle of whisky. If Christine said no, it would have looked as if she feared he had designs on her, so she went up to his room with him, hoping that he had not.
He was very proper. He poured out whisky and showed her his colour photographs and made it seem so unlike a bedroom that she did not have to avoid looking at the bed, but could even sit on it and take off her shoes.
They talked for a while. They were friendly together. Vinson suddenly said: ‘You’re very kind to me. Why are you so kind?’
‘Why? Because I like you, I suppose.’
‘Do you? I certainly hope you do.’ He was standing in the middle of the room, poised on the balls of his feet, and she thought then that if she had given the smallest sign he would have come over to the bed. She got up, pulling down her skirt and wanting to hitch her suspenders.
‘Well, I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘What about that steak?’
He took his eyes off her and went quietly to get her coat.
The steak was enormous. It was so big and garnished with so many fried potatoes and onions that it had to be on an oval dish instead of a plate. When it was set in front of Christine she thought it was for the two of them and began to cut it in half, but another oval dish the same size was set in front of Vinson, who attacked it without surprise. Christine was left with half the steak on her plate, and she said that she wished she could put it in a paper bag and take it home for the dogs. Vinson laughed, to make sure that this was only meant to be a joke.
The roads were empty when he took her home, and he drove fast, enjoying the car and not speaking much. When they stopped outside the badly hung gate of ‘Roselawn’ and he said he would not come in, she thought, as she turned to him to say good-bye: Oh dear, now he will try to kiss me, and I don’t want him to. I shan’t know whether he is only doing it because he thinks he ought, and I’ve got indigestion.
He did not try to kiss her. He got out of the car, came round the back and opened the door for her. He shook hands and accepted her thanks politely. She was glad that he had not kissed her, but when he had gone she felt a little deflated. As she went into the house she realized that he had not contemplated kissing her, had not wanted to kiss her, and the sunny day fell away behind her in discouragement as she went to the kitchen to find the bicarbonate of soda, tiptoeing past the drawing-room, so that Aunt Josephine should not call out: ‘Come and tell us about your day!’
On Tuesday afternoon Vinson came into the shop and said that since he was just passing by he had come to see if she would care to meet him for a drink af
ter work. Christine had to refuse, because Geoffrey was to be allowed his first outing tonight, and she was to take him. He would not be driven in Mr Cope’s car, so she would have to hurry home and get his own car from the garage.
When she told him this, Vinson did not register disappointment. He dropped the invitation quickly, as if he had never made it.
They talked for a while rather stiltedly, as if they hardly knew each other, and Christine found it hard to believe that she had spent a day in the country with him and had sat on his bed chatting and drinking whisky. He asked dutifully after her family, and was carefully solicitous about Geoffrey’s health, although he had never met him.
The book department was busy, and she did not want to stand talking to him. He was in uniform, and the eyes of her assistants were on him, Christine excused herself, and he went away without smiling, briskly, as if he were bent on going to find someone else to have a drink with him.
After that he did not telephone, and he did not come back to the shop. Alice said: ‘What happened to that handsome sailor of yours, Miss Cope? We don’t seem to see so much of him these days.’
She rattled on. Alice was always talking. You could not stop her. When she could not talk to the other assistants she talked to the customers, and they did not always like it.
‘You given him the chuck, Miss Cope?’ she went on. ‘I’ll have him, if you don’t want him.’
‘He’s gone away,’ said Christine.
‘Oh dear, what a pity. I thought it was so nice for you.’ She looked down on Christine from her height of nineteen years and a different boy friend for every day of the week.
Margaret was back at work now, pale and disappointingly reluctant to discuss the baby. Christine always told her everything, but she found herself not telling her about Vinson Gaegler, in case Margaret should ask what had become of him.
Christine often wondered what had become of him. She wondered for two weeks, and then decided that he had gone back to America.
Geoffrey went home at last, wearing a broad piece of sticking plaster rakishly over one eye.
‘Chaps in the office will think I’ve been in a fight,’ he said, not displeased that he should be thought the young devil he was not.
He was delighted to go home, which was natural enough, if a little ungrateful. His good-byes were brief. He had never learned how to say thank you properly, but the next day roses arrived for Christine and an azalea plant for Aunt Josephine, without a card, but from the most stylish flower shop in London, which would obviously be Geoffrey’s choice.
‘Well now, you see,’ said Aunt Josephine, fussing delightedly over the plant and trying it in half a dozen places in the kitchen to see where it would be happiest, ‘perhaps you have maligned poor Geoffrey after all. This is really very pleasant of him.’
‘It was you who was always maligning him, and saying you would rather nurse a wardful of old men with bladder trouble,’ Christine said. ‘Why don’t you put that plant in the drawing-room where everyone can see it?’
‘It’s my plant and I want to see it, and I’m more often in the kitchen than anywhere else, with the drudging life I lead.’
‘Look here, Aunt Jo, you know I’d help you more if only you’d let me, but you always think no one can do anything right except you.’
‘Nor they can,’ said Aunt Josephine, pushing a questing cat away from the azalea. ‘You never clean your saucepans.’
‘Oh, I do! It’s you who always leaves the sink piled up with pots and pans until finally you’ve nothing left to cook with.’
‘I won’t argue with you,’ said her aunt. ‘Answer the bell, there’s a good girl. That will be Rhona, I expect. Did I forget to tell you? She telephoned this afternoon to say she was coming to see you.’
Rhona had been Christine’s crony at school. Unlike most of her other school friends, who had disappeared soon after into the limbo of marriage to dull men and chit-chat about the price of baby foods, Rhona had remained close when they were first grown up and even after her marriage to an ambitious and rather common man, whom Christine and Rhona used to laugh at when they were single girls together.
Christine did not laugh at him now, because he was Rhona’s husband, but Rhona still laughed at him, mainly for that reason.
When they had talked to Aunt Josephine for a while, they went upstairs to ruffle through Christine’s wardrobe to see whether there was anything that would do for Rhona. They were about the same size, which comforted Christine, for Rhona did not look too fat, and was much admired.
They had been wearing each other’s clothes for years, and before Rhona was married they often shared boy friends as well, and had to be careful that they did not both wear the same dress with the same man. Not that it would have mattered, because Christine’s clothes looked different and smarter on Rhona than they did on her, and she could not wear Rhona’s jaunty dresses with the same élan.
Rhona pulled out a paisley silk dress that Christine had no intention of letting her have, and squirmed before the mirror, trying to see her back view in it.
‘You don’t want this,’ she stated.
‘I do. You’re not having it.’
‘I look better in this thing than you ever did.’
‘I like it, and I’ve only had it about a month –’
‘You’d look far nicer in that green of mine with all the buttons. I’ll swop it for this. Dan says the green is the wrong colour for my skin, and he does know about clothes, if nothing else.’
‘How is he?’ asked Christine. ‘Look, you can have this red blouse if you like. I’m sick of it.’
‘Thanks.’ Rhona had her head in the wardrobe again. ‘Dan? Oh, he’s much about the same. That’s his trouble. He’s got nothing left to surprise me with any more. Even when he’s being mean I know just what he’s going to say.’
She turned round, holding a white organdie evening dress against her. ‘Look, here’s this old thing. I always try it on and it’s always too big. Must be for you too. Lord, we must have been fat sows in those days, and we thought we were such sirens. Why don’t you give it to Aunt Jo for her nuns? They would make it into nightdresses for fallen women or something. I always loved it on you, though. You wore it at Oxford the year before the war. I wore that red-and-yellow topless number, and that dreadful spotty friend of Carl’s said I looked like a tulip. It seems centuries ago. My God.’ She sat down on the bed with the white dress crumpled on her lap. ‘What’s happened to us, Chris? I feel dreadfully old.’
‘We did have fun,’ said Christine, remembering. ‘We were silly, but I wish it had lasted longer.’
‘Was it us, was it us,’ mourned Rhona, ‘you and I, who drove up to Oxford in that dear little red car of mine, cutting such a dash, with a gramophone in the back playing “Goody Goody”? Now that you can have radios in cars it isn’t fun any more. Was it us who danced all night and didn’t go to bed for days on end and drifted about on the river and cruised from party to party and thought those awful callow young men were so exciting? Have you still got that picture taken after breakfast at the Magdalen dance? No, don’t bring it out. I don’t think I could bear to look at it. You keep it because of Jerry, I suppose. There you are. That was really romantic. You and Jerry. Things like that don’t happen when you get older.’
‘I sometimes wonder,’ Christine said slowly, standing with her back to the dressing-table and looking at her friend, whose bright face had become harder and bolder through the years of marriage to an unsubtle, successful man, ‘whether we were really so happy then as we think we were, looking back on it now. I don’t think I’d like to go back to being eighteen. I was awfully shy, and I used to care too much what people thought. It’s probably better being thirty-four. I don’t mind about parties now. If I don’t like them, I go home; but in those days, if you didn’t like a party, you thought there was something wrong with you, not the party.’
‘Well, I wasn’t shy,’ said Rhona, smiling. ‘Better if I had been, perhaps.
I’d never have ended up at Bow Street with that awful Italian. Remember how we worked to keep it from Father? I’d love to go back to being eighteen again, though, mind you, I’d handle things a bit differently.’
She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. ‘And I sometimes wonder where it’s all gone to, all the things I thought life was going to be for me. Of course it’s different for you.’ She turned her head to look critically at Christine. ‘You didn’t get married. I wish you would, though,’ she said illogically, and then switching back, closing her eyes: ‘Oh, you know, Chris, I do really envy you, having a room to yourself. You can read all night if you want to, without someone keeping waking up and looking at his watch and cursing. Dan’s so big to have around. I don’t know. And he won’t stick to his dressing-room, and you know what? I just hate the smell of men’s shoes.’
‘I’m sure you’d hate far worse being a spinster,’ Christine said lightly. ‘Come on, try on that awful hat if you want to, and let’s go down and feed the dogs.’
‘Yes, I suppose I would hate it,’ said Rhona with a sigh, swinging her legs off the bed and feeling for her shoes. ‘Poor Chris. It must be dreadful for you really. I wish you’d get married and have lots of children and I’d be their godmother. Isn’t there anyone you could possibly …?’
They reviewed the list of Christine’s men friends, which was not extensive and not very satisfactory.
‘You know,’ said Rhona, ‘I often wish you’d married that Maurice. He wouldn’t have given you any trouble. Except that it would have been sort of uncomfortable if he went about being so embarrassed all the time. Haven’t you got anyone new on the tapis?’ she asked, making a disgruntled face at her reflection under the benighted black hat which Christine had bought hastily for a funeral and never worn since. ‘What about that American Aunt Jo was talking about?’
Aunt Josephine was always talking about Vinson Gaegler. He had made a great hit with her. Whenever she put any of the food he had brought on the table, she would say: ‘By courtesy of the U.S. Navy’, and Mr Cope would say: ‘I don’t know that I like being treated like a distressed person’, and attack the ham or the American bacon with gusto.
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