No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Well, what about him?’ repeated Rhona, throwing down the hat and stopping to rifle Christine’s sweater drawer. ‘Does he give you nylons? How did you meet him? Can I have this yellow cardigan? What’s he like? Tell me all.’

  Christine told her. It was often easier to tell things to Rhona than to less frivolous people. ‘He was quite nice really,’ she ended. ‘His mother lives in Kaloomis, Kansas. But he was evidently only ships that pass in the night. I ‘ve written him off.’

  ‘Oh, but you mustn’t!’ cried Rhona, who never wrote off the possibilities of a man until he was dead. ‘Look here, I’ve got two tickets I don’t want for the Royal Command film show. Ask him to that.’

  ‘He’s probably gone back to America.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rhona patiently.’ Ring up the hotel and find out.’

  ‘But I don’t think I could ask him, Ro. He’d think I was chasing him, and I’m not. He’s not so fascinating.’

  ‘He’s an American, and that’s something different from the stuffy old Empire builders you and I plug on with,’ said Rhona, speaking as if she were still as unattached as Christine.’ Let’s be thankful for that.’

  ‘Well, but I couldn’t –’

  ‘Of course you could. Most natural thing in the world. You’ll be just kindly offering to show him the sights of London. He’s bound to come if he thinks he’s going to get a look at royalty. You know what Americans are. I’ll send you the tickets, and don’t you dare take Aunt Jo. Don’t tell her, or she’ll want to go, because it’s a Stewart Granger film.’

  When her aunt and father were safely in the drawing-room, Christine went to the telephone, which had been first installed in the draughty hall years ago and had never been moved to a more convenient place.

  Nervously she half hoped to hear the hotel operator tell her that Commander Gaegler had left, but while she was waiting for her to say that, Vinson came on the line, using his clipped telephone voice.

  When she told him who she was, he sounded friendly. ‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Good to hear your voice after all this time’, although it was his fault that he had not heard it before. He accepted the invitation with pleasure, noted the time and place to meet her, and rang off without further conversation.

  As the film show was too early for Christine to have time to go home and change, she took her paisley silk dress to the shop and changed into it and did her face in the cloakroom after work. Some of the other girls were also getting ready to go out, changing into clean blouses, or adding scarves or jewellery to brighten up their black work dresses.

  Alice, with her tongue in the corner of her mouth, was sitting in her petticoat, tacking a large square of lace collar on to her dress, which a woman’s magazine had told her was ‘a cute trick for busy girls to turn day into night with that little black dress’.

  ‘Going on the loose, Miss Cope?’ she asked. ‘That’s ever such a pretty dress; though, of course, I always say prints are trying. Excuse me, dear.’ She leaned forward. ‘You’ve got a blotch of powder on one side of your nose.’

  Christine took out her puff again and fluffed it off. The light in the cloakroom mirror was too dim to do your face properly, and she did not think she looked very nice this evening. She had washed her hair last night and changed the side of the parting, in the innocent hope that this might make Vinson find her more attractive than before, and it kept trying to flop back to the other side.

  She told him to meet her in the bar of a hotel near the shop, and he was there waiting for her with two martinis and more potato crisps and salted nuts than anyone else on the little round table before him.

  He jumped up and fussed over settling her coat on the back of the chair. As they sat down, Christine wondered why she had worried about not hearing from him for more than two weeks. He had not enough substance for a man, and his face, in spite of heavy black eyebrows, was inconsequent, with its short, incurious nose and small chin. His eyes were unusual, however: dark when he looked away, but seeming light when he looked at you, staring, as he often did.

  He stared at her now as they drank their cocktails, and made a flattering comment on her dress. Christine thought that was just his polite American habit, and brushed it aside.

  ‘Why don’t English women know how to take compliments?’ he said. ‘If you tell an American girl you like her dress, she’ll say: “Thank you”, and look pleased, but an English woman just mumbles: “Oh, this old rag? It isn’t really.”’ His attempt at an English accent was so funny that Christine laughed, and he laughed too and spoke some more English, and they began to have a good time together.

  They waited in the crowded foyer of the cinema to see the royal family arrive. Christine was excited to see a few English film-stars, the women making the most of small bosoms in strapless dresses, and the men smaller than heroes should be, with bad complexions. She pointed them out to the American, but he had not heard of them. He was intent on trying to stay near the door, so that he could get a good view of royalty.

  Several other people were intent on the same thing; and when the uniformed ushers and the thin officious men in tail-coats began to push them back to clear a lane through the centre, the scented, well-dressed crowd jostled and battled almost as violently as the street crowd outside battled behind the arms of the amiable policemen.

  A cheer began to murmur down the street, swelled to a growing roar, and became a clamour of distinguishable shouts and cries as the royal car slid up to the end of the red carpet. Peering over the furred shoulders of the woman in front of them, who smelled of exotic boudoirs, Christine and Vinson saw the Queen cross the pavement and step into the foyer in a lilac-coloured crinoline, with a pleased smile for the photographers.

  After her, into the sucked-in murmur of: ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ stepped Princess Margaret in white with a white fur, looking as if she felt as attractive as she looked.

  ‘The Princess!’ breathed Vinson Gaegler, visibly moved. ‘My, she’s a honey. I wish I had my camera.’

  Christine was glad he had not, although flash-bulbs were popping all round.

  ‘Is that the King?’ he asked, as a tall man with a white carnation in his tail-coat followed the Princess and her mother into the cinema.

  ‘Of course not, silly.’ Christine shushed him, because he had spoken loudly, and people looked at him. ‘That’s just someone who’s with them, same as that other girl in black. She’s a lady-in-waiting.’

  ‘Well, who are they?’ he persisted, wanting to miss nothing of the show. He was surprised that she did not know the names of all the British aristocracy in the royal entourage. The Queen and Princess stayed a few minutes, shaking hands with the line of film personages who were waiting to be introduced, and he stood on tiptoe and stared intently, with his throat working.

  ‘Gosh,’ he said, sinking back on his heels with a sigh as the royal party disappeared. ‘That’s a thing I shan’t forget. Those two lovely women, and all the dignity and homage. It’s the finest thing your country has to show a foreigner.’

  ‘I’m glad you like the royal family,’ Christine said, as they moved slowly with the crowd to find their seats. ‘Some people pretend they think it’s silly to make such a fuss of them, although they probably read everything about them avidly in secret.’

  ‘I like it fine,’ he said. ‘For your country, of course. It wouldn’t do for ours.’

  When they were in their seats, waiting for the lights to dim, Christine said: ‘Why wouldn’t a monarchy do for the States? Americans always get so excited about the King and Queen. Why wouldn’t they like to have a pair of their own?’

  ‘Americans,’ he said seriously, ‘swear allegiance to the flag, not to any one person. We admire your royal family as emblems of the old world, but they would have no part in ours. When people talk about a closer tie between the two countries – absorbing Britain right into the United States – they forget that there’s one major reason why it could never work. We wouldn’t accept your monarchy, and yo
u wouldn’t relinquish it.’

  Christine could think of several other reasons why England could not be absorbed into the United States, but a roll of drums brought everyone to their feet as the orchestra laid down the first challenging notes, and the Queen came smiling to the front of the royal box to accept the swelling anthem of God Save the King.

  When the film was over and the royal party had left, they had to wait in the foyer while the police settled a minor riot outside, in which a male film-star lost his tie and coat buttons to the shrieking crowd. There would be pictures of it in the papers tomorrow, and Christine would be able to talk about it at work and say she had been there.

  At last they managed to push their way out on to the disorderly pavement, where a host of women who should have had something better to do were still milling about in and out of the gutter, exchanging badinage with the policemen.

  Coming out of the cinema, Christine hoped they would think she was somebody, but all the film-stars had gone now, and the crowd was not interested in the people coming out. They were just interested in being a crowd, which would not be moved on before it felt like it.

  Vinson took Christine to dinner in an underground restaurant with a dance floor. He had not booked a table, and they were stowed away at a tiny table in a corner, where they did not get good service, but Vinson thought the waiters were just being English, and did not seem to mind.

  He danced well, holding her lightly, and his steps were easy to follow. It was the year of scarcity of good new tunes, and the band, like bands at Broadcasting House and all over the country, were playing old tunes from the thirties. When they played ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’ he sang it softly in her ear as if he meant it, but when the music stopped and they stood apart, he looked round the room at the other dancers and seemed to have forgotten her.

  When they were dancing after dinner he laid the side of his head against her cheek, and the short hair above his ears felt bristly, and his skin smelled nice, but it did not mean anything. It was just his way of dancing.

  When it was time to go and he had paid the bill, with a large enough tip, Christine was glad to see, because foreigners sometimes did not work it out right in a strange currency, he put both hands on the table and said, staring at her: ‘Did you like the flowers I sent?’

  ‘Flowers? You sent -? Did you? I’m afraid–’

  ‘Roses,’ he said, ‘to go with your cheeks. And a plant for your aunt.’ The rhyme sounded funny, like ants in your pants.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Christine, ‘were those from you? We thought they were from Geoffrey.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, why not?’

  ‘There was no card with them.’

  ‘No,’ he said, getting up. ‘I thought perhaps you’d guess.’

  He was silent on the drive home, and Christine thought that she had hurt him, but it was his own fault. How could she guess? And suppose she had thought they were from him … How awful if she had thanked him, and they were not.

  When he stopped the car outside her gate he switched off the engine, got out and opened the door for her. He took her hand, and they stood for a moment by the car, looking at each other without speaking.

  ‘Christine,’ he said, ‘I’m going to pay you a compliment. I’m not going to kiss you. I like you too much, and respect you for what you are.’

  This was not as flattering as he meant it to be. Christine said: ‘Oh’, and turned towards the gate, and he squeezed her fingers and said: ‘Good night, Christ’, accenting the last syllable of her name in the way he did.

  After that he took her out quite often. They went to the theatre, and he took her to dinner at the Air Force club again, and one Saturday she took him out to Luton Hoo, where he insisted on looking at nearly every one of the hundreds of treasures, which exhausted her.

  He had boundless energy. He was never tired, and when they were out together he was always looking at his watch to see if they could fit in one more thing than they had planned. When they went sightseeing in London it was not enough for him to see just the Tower and Westminster Abbey, which to Christine was a day’s work, but he insisted on stopping off at St Paul’s, and then dragging her up the hundreds of steps of the Monument in Billingsgate. He went up in front of her, swinging his neat little bottom up the spiral stone steps and flattening himself politely against the grubby walls, where despairing climbers had scrawled their names, when he met anyone coming down. When Christine reached the top he was already studying the map on the parapet and trying to identify every church spire.

  She leaned against the parapet, looking out over the sooty view with a singing head and watery legs.

  ‘Come and look at the map,’ he said, staring out into space like a captain on the bridge, his clipped hair unruffled by the wind. ‘It makes it much more interesting.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m out of breath. I’m too fat for such a climb.’

  ‘You’re not fat,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘I like your shape. And when you climb up all those steps it makes your cheeks glow. Your complexion is beautiful. I like that too.’

  ‘Do you?’ She looked at him, wishing he would look at her.

  ‘Oh sure. It’s odd, there’s a domed church over there I can’t seem to identify.’ He dismissed the subject he had started, as he often did if you took him up on a personal note.

  Although he would seldom talk intimately, she was seeing him often enough to learn quite a lot about him. He talked to her about his early life in Kaloomis, Kansas, and about how fine it had been at Annapolis, where he was a Star Man, and he told her about his career in the Navy, of which he was proud. He was always saying: ‘Look, I’m a professional naval officer’, to qualify an opinion about the American Navy, or the war, or the navy of any other country.

  He knew that the American Navy was the finest in the world. Christine knew that the British Navy was the finest in the world, but she did not argue about it. She was learning to avoid Anglo-American arguments, which were frustrating and got you nowhere. He was American. She was English. Nothing could alter that, and so, if you wanted to be friends, you had to accept the differences of opinion caused by an accident of birth.

  With this growing realization that they must always be different in so many ways, she did not worry so much about who was right and who was wrong. He used his knife and fork in one way, she in another. He pronounced certain words differently, and said things like ‘hospitalization’, but who was she to criticize? He might just as well have criticized her for saying ‘going to hospital’. As she began to like him increasingly and to feel a friendliness in his company, she began to be just slightly shaken in her ingrained belief that because whatever you did or said was English it must be right.

  He came to lunch at ‘Roselawn’ one Sunday, bringing another parcel of food and chocolate, and got into an argument with Roger about Marshall Aid, which made the meal boring for everyone else. They were both opinionated, but Roger, being a Cope, took the argument in his stride, while Vinson took it seriously and wanted to go on with it after Roger had tired of the subject and everyone was talking about something else.

  Roger had said: ‘You Yanks think you’re the only people who know how to live, but really you’re the only country in the world which hasn’t begun to know what life’s about.’ Christine knew that Vinson was hurt by this, but she could not rouse herself to his defence. The Copes always banded together against outsiders, and it took more than her courage to champion the wrong side, because the family would have said to themselves: ‘Here, here, what’s all this? She is interested in this chap.’

  None of the family except Aunt Josephine seemed to like Vinson very much, but Christine went on asking him home, because she knew he liked it. He was envious of her family life. He wanted to be part of it. He liked her best when she was at home, moving about with trays, or sitting quietly with some sewing in the drawing-room, while the men talked. Although he came from the New World, he was old-fashioned in many ways, and he li
ked to think that she was old-fashioned too.

  He gave courteous attention to her father, whom he admired as a literary figure. There were so many overpublicized new authors in the States that every American at this time was thinking he would like to write a book; and to get something published, even if it was only a translation of someone else’s work, was to Vinson a marvellous thing. He tried very hard with Christine’s father, but even when he talked to him about his work, Mr Cope was still suspicious of him as a foreigner and would not react properly.

  Vinson also tried very hard with the dogs and cats, which were such a centre of interest and conversation in the house. Christine’s dog would go to anyone, but the cats were wary of him and would not go to him to be petted. This was the only thing that caused any doubt to Aunt Josephine. She set great store by the opinions of her cats.

  Christine continued to see Vinson Gaegler quite often, and it was not long before the family were referring to him as ‘Christine’s boy friend’, and making insinuating remarks which they thought were funny. If she had told them that he had never kissed her they would not have believed it.

  There came quite suddenly a very warm day, when spring was summer before its time. All day, moving about the book department, Christine had seen the sun flooding the pavement beyond the glass doors, and had looked with jealousy at the women who came in from outside, caught unawares by the sudden heat, wearing last summer’s dresses.

  Mr Parker, shut in his stuffy little office, did not know whether it was Christmas or Easter, but all his assistants were restless, and longed to get out for their lunch-hour.

  Christine had told Vinson that on the next sunny day she would walk up to Grosvenor Square and sit with him on the bench where they had first met. She was in the cloakroom getting ready to go out when Margaret Drew came down and found her by the grubby washbasins.