‘I changed my lunch-time,’ Margaret said. ‘Old Burman wanted me to go with her to that awful teashop that smells of fish, and I just couldn’t bear it. Let’s buy sandwiches and go and sit in the Park. I never see anything of you these days. You never come to supper any more. You’re always out with that little American with the funny name.’
Margaret knew about Vinson Gaegler by now. Everyone in the book department knew about him, because he sometimes came to fetch Christine at the shop, where he was known as ‘Miss Cope’s American’, as established as he was at home as ‘Christine’s boy friend’.
Because Margaret had said: ‘You’re always going out with that little American with the funny name’, Christine could not tell her that she was planning to meet Vinson now, so she put him out of her mind and went up the stone steps into the sunshine with Margaret.
They bought twice as many sandwiches as they needed, because ever since the war, sandwiches had one side that was just plain bread, so you had to throw away the dry bread side and put two spread sides together to make them edible. They walked down Piccadilly to Green Park and found two empty chairs among the crowd of lunch-time workers who had come to open out like crocuses to the sun.
Margaret ate her sandwiches quickly and wished they had brought more.
‘It must be wonderful to be able to eat as much as you want without worrying about getting fat, because you know you’re going to get fat soon, anyway,’ Christine said. ‘What’s it feel like, having a baby?’
‘Queer,’ Margaret said. ‘You get breathless if you talk too much. And it’s not so much fun being able to eat a lot, because there are so many things you can’t face. Laurie always wants to have salami and liver sausage, and I can hardly sit at the table with it.’
‘Why don’t you tell him? He wouldn’t eat it. He’s always so sweet and considerate.’
‘I don’t want to make any more fuss than I have to. It’s bad enough for him as it is.’
‘Bad? I should think it was marvellous for him having a baby after all this time.’
‘That’s the trouble. By this time we’ve got organized into being able to manage fairly comfortably, just the three of us, and keep Bobby at the school the Drews have always gone to, and not have to give up that silly old big house, which Laurie adores. But now there’ll be all this expense with the baby. Laurie insists on me having a private room. He says no wife of his is going into a public ward, though it’s silly when I’ve been paying five shillings a week all this time to let the Government have my baby for me.’
‘I’d like a public ward,’ said Christine, ‘except for the communal bed-pans. I’d like to lie on my side and discuss symptoms with the woman in the next bed.’
‘So would I, but you know what Laurie is. And then there’ll be all the clothes to get. I gave away all Bobby’s things years ago. And after this one is born I shan’t be able to work, because of looking after it, and I just don’t see how we’re going to manage. I tell you what it is, Chris. We just can’t afford to have a baby.’
‘Oh, Maggie, don’t. No one says that.’
‘Well, I don’t, but Laurie does. He sat looking at me the other night, at the spot where I can’t do up the button on that yellow housecoat any more, and he said, with a face as long as a boot: “We can’t really afford to have this baby.”’
‘He said that to you? Oh, poor Maggie –’
‘Well, why shouldn’t he?’ Margaret shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s true.’
‘But one just doesn’t say those things to a wife.’
‘My dear Chris, when you’ve been married fourteen years you say the truth to each other. After all that time you’re like one person, so if it doesn’t hurt you, you don’t think it will hurt the other.’
Christine was shocked, not only at Laurie’s remark, but by Margaret’s cool acceptance of the dreadful thing he had said. How little one knew about one’s married friends – the happily married ones who did not quarrel in public and seemed to have made a natural circumstance of the fusing of two lives. One knew nothing really about their marriage, because it was only significant when they were alone together. That was when the important things happened.
Walking back to the shop, Christine thought about the mythical, romantic marriage that she sometimes imagined for herself, and tried to picture it reaching the stage when you were so used to each other that one could say a hurtful thing without the other minding. But, like the magazine stories, her imagined marriage never got much farther than the wedding day and the picture of herself in a frilly apron waiting for his key in the lock in her bright little kitchen. It did not embrace the realities of familiarity. The dream would lose its charm if it did.
At a quarter past five Vinson came into the shop with his cap set perfectly straight on his head and his eyes narrowed to a gleam under his black brows.
Christine was busy with a customer. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him waiting impatiently, pretending to look at books. When she was free he came quickly up to her and caught her arm above the elbow, pinching a nerve against the bone.
‘Why didn’t you come to Grosvenor Square at noon?’ he asked, his voice strangely uneven and rough.
‘I’m sorry,’ Christine said. ‘I went out with Margaret. I hope you didn’t wait too long.’
‘I waited an hour for you, that’s all, and didn’t get any lunch,’ he said, sticking out his lower lip.
‘That’s a shame.’ He was cross, so she spoke lightly, trying to make him not cross by pretending not to notice it. ‘But we hadn’t exactly made a definite date, had we?’
‘You said you would meet me there if it was sunny,’ he said. ‘Well, it was sunny today, and you didn’t come.’
Christine apologized again, but he would not be appeased, and because he continued to be cross she ceased to feel sorry. She drew him behind the bay of the classics section, where no one could see them.
‘Look here,’ she said, ‘you’re being silly to make such a fuss. If I couldn’t come, I couldn’t, that’s all. Don’t behave as if you owned me.’
‘When I make a date with a girl I expect her to keep it. You said you’d be there and you weren’t, and that’s no way to act.’
‘Don’t lecture me.’
‘I will, goddamn it, if you need it.’
They had quite a quarrel there behind the rows of collected editions. They had never had a real quarrel before, and Christine did not like it. Vinson was petty and petulant, and Christine thought that if he was going to be like this it was not worth while having anything to do with him.
‘You just didn’t take time out to think whether I’d be waiting for you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean a thing to you. You wouldn’t care if I went back to America tomorrow.’
‘Probably not,’ she retorted. ‘Why? Would you?’ Her voice was rising with his, and then he suddenly spoke softly and pulled them both down to normal, as a telegraph pole seems to pull down the rising wires as you pass them in a train.
‘Yes, I would,’ he said very sweetly, and he smiled at her and her own easy smile spread quickly, because he had made it all right.
‘I really am sorry, Vin,’ she said, touching his arm. ‘Margaret gets a bit low these days. You know, she’s going to have a baby, and so I thought–’
‘Don’t start on explanations,’ he said. “Forget it. You should never try to hold post-mortems after a quarrel’s been stopped. Don’t you know that? Let it drop, and forget the excuses.’
She liked him when he told her how to behave. She liked to think that he was wise and knew more about life than she did, so she readily became complaisant, and when he said: ‘I’ve only got an hour, because we’ve got a late conference coming up, so go and ask if you can get away now,’ she went obediently to seek Mr Parker’s permission, and hurried out to meet Vinson at the Jermyn Street door.
They drove up to Regent’s Park and walked a little way over the grass. A bushy hedge made an angle of retreat from the open space w
here people were walking home across the Park, and he took her hand and made her sit down there, and then he kissed her.
When he had been kissing her for a little while, and putting his hands on her body, Christine realized that she had been wanting him to kiss her for a long time.
‘Why didn’t you do this before?’ she asked, pulling away from him and lying back on the grass, which was fresh and new and not yet soured by the treadings of a hundred picnics.
He turned, resting on the flat of his hand, and looked at her. He had lipstick on his mouth, but it looked all right. ‘Did you want me to, Christine?’
‘No,’ she lied, ‘I never thought about it.’
‘Well, I did. But I didn’t think you’d care for it too much. I didn’t know – I don’t know – whether anyone else had more right than I to kiss you.’
‘No.’
‘I thought maybe your cousin – you’d been going to parties with him, and there was that day you wouldn’t come out with me because of him, and you thought he’d sent the flowers.’
‘Geoffrey?’ Christine laughed and sat up. ‘Oh, Vin, if you could see him! Fancy thinking that. Men are funny.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They are funny like this. They like to do this.’
He was extremely nice to kiss, and, oddly, it felt familiar and right, as if he had been making love to her for months. Time stopped, and there were only two of them in the world. It seemed like that to her, but he suddenly raised his head and looked at his watch and stood up, brushing grass off his uniform. A naval officer is never late for a conference. Even love comes second to the United States Navy.
‘Stick around in town,’ he said,’ and meet me later and we’ll drive out to the country and find somewhere nice to eat.’
‘I will,’ she said, sitting on the grass and dreamily tidying her hair, ‘if you’ll kiss me again afterwards.’
‘Why, Christine, I thought you were so proper,’ he said, looking pleased.
‘I am really. You’d be surprised.’
‘We shall see.’ He pulled her to her feet, and Christine thought: I could stop this now, or let it go on; but she did not have any will to decide, and it did not seem to matter.
She put her arms round him. ‘Don’t go for a moment,’ she said, but he did not move close to her. Looking back on this, long afterwards, she saw that this was the first of all the many times she had said to him: ‘Don’t go’, and he had put the Navy first, until soon she began to hate it.
Things were changed after that. Christine went out with Vinson nearly every night. He let her have the car, and she would drive herself home after she had been with him, come to work in the car in the mornings and then fetch him at the naval headquarters after she came out of the shop.
She thought that when he had gone back to America she would never again drive down North Audley Street, past the red-brick corner building where the transient American sailors, loosely hung together, waited with white seabags, and the neat naval wives came out of the commissary store with huge brown-paper bags, without remembering Vinson. Whether she would remember him with or without regret, she did not know. She could not tell how this affair would end, and she was content to live in its present, without troubling about its future.
One night, when they were out dancing and had had quite a lot to drink, Vinson said: ‘I love you.’ Christine did not let herself say: ‘I love you too’, having learned long ago the folly of letting alcohol say that for you when you were not sure you meant it; but when he breathed deeply and said: ‘Come back to the hotel with me’, she hung her head and said that she would.
The night porter looked at her shrewdly, but she did not mind. He did not know her. Vinson lived at the hotel, and the censure, if any, would be on him.
When they were in the room together he kissed her violently -he was stronger than he looked – and then he sat her on the bed and sat down quietly beside her and took her hand.
‘Christine,’ he said, ‘forgive me. I’m a little plastered right now, but I know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t have asked you to come here. My wife doesn’t go to hotel bedrooms with me.’
Christine stood up, with a chill on her heart. ‘I didn’t know you were married,’ she said, with her back to him, trying to sound casual.
‘I’m not. I’m asking you to marry me.’
She did not know what to say. She hesitated, still with her back to him, and before she could answer he got up and went over to the wash-basin, where he began to mix drinks for them.
In the silence, Christine looked at herself in the mirror on the wall and wondered why anyone should want to marry her. There came into her mind all the proposals she had imagined from a dream husband, but none of them had been like this. In her dreams she had always known what to say, and had said it well, because the man gave her the right cues; but what could you say to a man who was bending over the basin trying to make the water run cold enough to mix with whisky, and who, when he turned round, wore an impersonal face, as if he had already regretted or forgotten that he had asked you to marry him?
‘Drink this,’ he said, handing her the glass she did not want. ‘You’ll feel better.’
‘I feel fine, thank you,’ she said, and then she saw his eyes, and they were not impersonal at all, but staring at her with a naked appeal not to be hurt.
‘Oh, Vin,’ she said. ‘I -’ And because it seemed so unkind not to say yes at once, she hedged with the excuse of: ‘I don’t know that I could live in America. I’ve never been there, and I–’
‘Christine,’ he said. ‘Look at me. I’m not asking you to marry America. I’m asking you to marry me.’
Christine was silent. It was better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing, and her thoughts would not collect themselves. She was excited. If he had put his glass down then and taken her in his arms and kissed her, she would probably have said yes, but he did not move towards her. He took a long swallow of his drink, walked to the window, turned and said judicially: ‘I’m not asking you to give me an answer right now. I can understand you may want to give the matter some thought.’
Why, oh why, she thought, standing in the middle of the green carpet with the untasted whisky in her hand, why be so sensible and level-headed about this? This is an emotional matter, and it should be settled emotionally. This is all wrong.
‘I think I’d better go, Vin,’ she said unhappily.
If he had protested she would have stayed, but he said: ‘All right, my dear. If you want to go away and think about it, I’ll be happy for you to do that.’
Christine did not want to think. She wanted to be swayed irretrievably one way or the other. She wanted to accept him with joy and passion, or reject him with sorrow and a few tears, but he was already picking up her coat. When she had put it on, she said, wanting some contact with the man who had asked her to marry him and then withdrawn into himself: ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?’
‘No,’ he said, looking noble. ‘I don’t want to influence you in any way. I want you to be free to make the right decision. This is real, Christine. You haven’t got to make a mistake.’
But it isn’t real, she thought. It doesn’t seem to be happening at all. In the little lobby of the suite, he held open the door for her, and when she looked seriously into his eyes he smiled.
Oh, you fool, you fool, she thought. How can you ask me to marry you when you don’t know how to treat me? If you would only take me back into the room and kiss me, and make me love you, of course I would say yes. You fool. She hated him suddenly, because he had spoiled it for both of them.
‘Good night, darling,’ he said gently. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
Well, wait on, she thought furiously, as she went down the endless hotel corridor, her whole body aching for the embraces he had not given her.
Driving home in the lovely American car, which answered your touch like a thoroughbred horse, she thought, as she outstripped two other cars at the traffic lights: If I told Rhon
a that Vinson had asked me to marry him, she would probably say: ‘My dear, of course you must, if it means driving about for the rest of your life in cars like this.’
Christine laughed aloud, with the moving air through the open window lifting her hair, and felt suddenly happier. Perhaps life was not such a grim business after all. Perhaps Rhona’s way of picking a husband was the right one. She had professed to marry her husband for no better reason than that he kept a motor-launch on the Thames.
Christine parked the car, closed all the windows and locked all the doors and went into the house, savouring experimentally the important feeling of being engaged. It would be fun telling all the people who had been saying for so long that she ought to get married. It would be exciting to take Vinson round and introduce him as My Fiancé. He was not the best-looking man she had ever seen, but there was nothing wrong with his appearance. It would be exciting to go to American parties with him and be introduced as his fiancée. It would be something new to give up work and buy a lot of clothes and have a wedding day, with herself as the central figure.
But when she was in her room she did what she had been afraid she would do ever since Vinson had said: ‘I’m asking you to marry me.’ She knelt to the bottom drawer of her desk and took out the photograph taken after the Magdalen College dance, and allowed herself to think of Jerry.
Jerry had been drunk the first time she saw him, drunk on beer at a party in someone’s rooms at Oxford. Christine was twenty, too plump, and unsure of herself, overshadowed, as she was by most of her girl friends, by the casual Jennifer, with whom she was staying at the manor house a few miles out of Oxford.
Oxford was Jennifer’s happy hunting ground. From the age of seventeen she had been running through a succession of undergraduates at every college, and scarcely a party was given without her. She was Rhona’s friend first, and then Christine, who was Rhona’s inseparable, began to be asked for weekends too, and to be taken to parties at Oxford and left to sink or swim.
Rhona and Jennifer swam with the crowd of sloppily dressed young men and precocious girls, but Christine sometimes sank, because she could not keep up with the slick conversation. She was sinking at this party where she first set eyes on Jerry. She could not drink a lot of beer. Her throat rebelled against swallowing it, but no one else’s did, and girls were sitting on laps, and someone was playing the piano in the middle of a roaring crowd who thought they were singing.
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