A thickset boy with brown hair falling into his eyes sang a descant in a pure tenor, waved his mug of beer and sat down in a heap on the floor.
‘Who is that?’ Christine asked the man sitting next to her on the sagging sofa. She had been trying to think of something to say to him for some time.
‘Oh, that,’ he said, ‘That’s one of the Canadians. He’s in the ice-hockey team. That’s about all they’re good for. Toughs all of them.’ He was an intellectual young man, with earnest glasses and a mobile Adam’s apple. He got up and left her and Christine sat alone, wondering where Rhona was. Jennifer was among the group round the piano, but Rhona had disappeared with a long young man with a head like a snake.
Christine could not remember how that party had ended. Dinner somewhere, she supposed, and then driving home too fast, with Rhona and Jennifer busily disparaging the young men who had kissed them.
The next night they went to another party. Almost as soon as they arrived, the drunken Canadian, quite sober now, with his hair slicked back and a slightly tidier suit, came up to her and said: ‘You were at Porgy’s party last night. You were sitting on the sofa. You had a yellow dress. I noticed you.’
‘You were drunk,’ Christine said, her tongue loosened by the happiness of someone having noticed her and remembered.
‘Sure,’ he smiled, ‘but not too drunk to think you looked pretty swell. Come on, I’ll get you a drink and let’s talk.’
That was the beginning of it. That was the beginning of Oxford with Jerry, and being in love, and writing to each other every day, and going to all his ice-hockey matches in London and sitting at the edge of the rink, wishing she could tell the people sitting by her that the burly, padded figure who was always being turned off the ice for fouling was hers, and would take her out alone somewhere afterwards, while the rest of the team went on to beat up the town.
Jennifer was all for love, although she did not believe in it for herself, and Christine was asked to stay more often. Jerry had a dreadful little car with flapping celluloid windows, and he would come out and spend whole Sundays at Jennifer’s house, and unless they were wanted for tennis or billiards, no one minded what they did.
That was when they used to go into the hay barn, and Jerry said: ‘Forgive me, darling.’ It was not until long after that, after the Commemoration Ball, where Christine had worn the white organdie dress and people had thrown bread at them at supper, that Jerry came down to Cornwall, where she was staying with Roger and Sylvia; and in the little inn bedroom with the Old Testament pictures and the uneven floor, he did not say: ‘Forgive me, darling’, because they both knew there was nothing to forgive.
That was the end of August. When war broke out Jerry went back to Canada to enlist, and Christine’s loss was lightened by the thought that when the war was over she could go out to Canada and marry him. He wrote to her often from the training camp, and at first he talked about how they would marry, but after a while he did not mention it, and then gradually he wrote less and less, until he did not write at all, and Christine did not know whether he had gone abroad or whether he was alive or dead.
After a while Christine’s hurt grew less. She went into a London hospital as a probationer nurse, and soon had neither the time nor the energy to remember too often that she had a broken heart. When the other nurses wrote letters to army post offices, and showed pictures of what they called their fellows, Christine would show them the photograph of Jerry taken in a canoe on the Cherwell, which got lost when the bomb blew in all the windows of the nurses’ home one night, and they were not allowed to go back to their rooms until the debris had been cleared.
His letter came when she was having her day off. She had come home the night before, dog tired, because she was on the Theatre, and it had been Mr Trellick’s tonsil day, and she had gone to bed intending to sleep late. But the habit of the six-o’clock alarm was not to be broken by one night’s freedom from it a week. She woke at exactly six o’clock, turned over to look at Nurse Jones sleeping beside her in the black iron bed, discovered that she was alone in her own room at home, and felt wide awake, as she never did at this hour in hospital. She lay for a while enjoying the thought o ‘the others crawling out of bed and fixing caps and aprons with sleep-numbed fingers, and then she went downstairs in her nightdress and bare feet to find something to eat.
As she stepped down into the hall she heard the scrunch of feet on the gravel path, and then the letter-box flapped inwards and three letters fell on to the doormat. One was for her, from Jerry. He would be on leave in London in two weeks’ time, and he insisted, without thought that she might be working, that she should keep the four days free for him.
She had not seen him for three years, and it was two years since he had written to her, but as she stood in the hall reading the letter over and over, with her bare feet turning to ice in the draught under the front door, all her pushed-away emotions came flooding back, and she was in love with Jerry as radiantly as she had been in the far-away summer at Oxford.
She had only had one week’s holiday this year. She had another week due to her. At nine o’clock the next morning she put on a clean apron, checked her stockings for ladders, and waited with the line of criminals and petitioners outside the door of Matron’s office.
‘What do you want to see the old girl for?’ asked Nurse Broderick, who stood next to her.
‘Holiday. My boy friend’s coming home on leave,’ said Christine, wanting to tell all the world.
‘Lucky cow. I’m going in to get slayed for being late in again last night. That lousy new night porter saw me climbing in the eye clinic window and reported me. Damn conchie. Look, you’d better go in before me, because the old girl will be in no mood to give anyone a holiday after she’s dealt with me.’
She changed places with Christine, but the Matron was already in a bad temper when Christine went meekly in and stood before the desk with her hands behind her back and her toes pointing straight forward.
‘Ah, Nurse Cope,’ said the Matron, louring at her from under her pinnacle of cap. ‘Thermometers again, I suppose.’
‘No, Matron, I haven’t broken one for weeks. I just wanted to ask you -I have a week’s holiday due. Could I possibly have it the week after next?’ She did not say why. If the gossip about Matron’s sex-frustrations was true, that would be fatal.
‘It’s odd you should ask that, Nurse,’ said the Matron, brightening up, ‘because the answer is no.’
Odder still, thought Christine, if the answer had been yes.
‘You’re going on night duty next week, on the gynaecological ward, so, you see, your holiday will have to wait a bit.’
She smiled. She only smiled when she had said something nasty to you. The gynae ward, of all places! On most of the other wards you got a little peace while the patients slept, but women who had had female operations kept you running about all night.
After a week of night duty among the gynae women, Christine was almost too tired to worry about Jerry. She was crawling into bed one morning after a night when she had an emergency Caesarean, a disastrous haemorrhage and five women to prepare for operations, when the maid pounded on her door and shouted: ‘Telephone, Nurse Cope!’
Hell, thought Christine, flapping down the night nurses’ corridor in her dressing-gown and slippers; but it was Jerry. He was in London. His voice sounded just the same, and her heart went out in love to him.
She could not bring herself to tell him yet that she had not been able to get her holiday. She explained that night nurses were not allowed to go out before five, but she would meet him then at a hotel near the hospital. He began to grumble about her being a nurse, but she rang off hastily and went along the corridor to Nurse Fletcher’s room. Nurse Fletcher was in bed, reading yesterday’s papers.
‘Fletcher,’ said Christine, ‘you’ve got three nights off tomorrow, haven’t you?’
‘Praise the Lord,’ said Nurse Fletcher, without looking up.
‘Be a
love and let me have them. Night Sister won’t mind, and you can have my nights off at the end of the month. It’s terribly important to me. Please do.’
‘Why should I?’ asked Nurse Fletcher with narrowed eyes. She was a mean character.
‘If you do, I’ll give you my electric fire. Give, not lend. The one you can boil a kettle on as well.’ Electric fires were treasures in the chill cells of the nurses’ home. They were not allowed, but you could hide them in a suitcase under the bed when you were out of the room. Christine had burned the bottom out of a suitcase when she had to put the fire in it red hot one evening when the Assistant Matron made a surprise raid.
Nurse Fletcher was tempted. ‘You can have the kettle as well,’ Christine said, and, grudgingly, she fell.
Jerry was waiting in the lounge, looking handsomer than anyone who had ever come to that stuffy Victorian hotel. His uniform was not smart – none of his clothes ever had been – but his eyes were bluer than Christine remembered, and his face was brown and firm. He looked ten years older instead of three.
He tried to sulk when Christine told him that she had to go back to the hospital in an hour, but when she said that after tonight she would be free for three days he looked at her with love and said that he would take a room at the most expensive hotel he could find, and they would have a honeymoon.
She did not ask him why he had not written to her for two years, and she made up her mind that she would not mention it unless he did, so as not to spoil any of their time together. She could not have a drink with him, because the gynaecological women might smell her breath. They ordered tea, but they hardly touched it. They sat in the lounge among the old ladies and provincial business men, and held hands until it was time for Christine to go back to the hospital.
He was waiting for her outside the nurses’ home at ten o’clock the next morning. Christine had ploughed through another gruelling night, and was so tired that, as she forced her weary limbs to go through the motions of dressing and packing her case, she had almost hoped that he would not come, so that she could just roll into her bed and sleep.
But he was there, and he was very bright and gay, and although he knew she had been up all night, he expected her to be bright and gay too. The sun was shining and he wanted to walk, so she tagged along with him, stumbling over kerbstones, but trying to match her spirits to his, in case he thought she was not happy about their honeymoon.
They went to the hotel to leave her bag, and when Jerry left her to go down to the hall for cigarettes Christine stopped in the middle of unpacking her case, lay down on the bed and went to sleep.
When she woke it was dusk outside the hotel windows. She was alone, and she was quite sure that Jerry had gone away in disgust, and she would never see him again. She cried for a while, and then decided that she would sleep a little longer and then get up and pack her things and go out of the hotel, inquiring at the desk: ‘Has my husband paid the bill?’
She could not go to sleep again, because she was still crying. She was crying when Jerry came into the room and lay down on the bed beside her, but then everything was all right, and everything about their time together was as wonderful as it had ever been at Oxford, or in the fishing inn in Cornwall.
It was soon after that that the bomb fell near the nurses’ home and Christine’s photograph of Jerry in the canoe was lost, so she never had any picture of him except the tousled one of him standing behind her with his hands on her bare shoulders after the Magdalen ball.
Much later, after she had written to his mother in Canada, and his mother had written back to say that Jerry had been killed, she wrote again to ask for a picture of him, but Jerry’s mother had never sent her one.
Christine rolled up the photograph again and put it back in the drawer. It was no use looking at it, and asking Jerry whether he would mind if she married Vinson. The dead did not mind if you committed sacrilege on their memory by pretending to love someone else. They just shrugged their shoulders and left it to you to decide. The dead would not help you. All they would do was make it more difficult for you by not letting you forget them.
At three o’clock in the morning, when she was sure she would not sleep, Christine went into Aunt Josephine’s room. The night-light was by the bed, because Aunt Josephine, who was afraid of no man, had been afraid of the dark all her life. The night-light flickered in a pool of wax, and by its wayward light Christine could see her aunt’s head tied up in a net, the mouth open and the nose pointing vastly to the ceiling.
At the foot of the bed the old fox-terrier slept like a heap of corrupted flesh, his brown-and-white patches bleached into his off-white senility, his fat haunch twitching to dreams of a Nimrod youth. When he twitched, one of Aunt Josephine’s legs twitched too, as if she were dreaming with him.
The opening and closing of the door had not woken her. Christine stood by the bed with her hands clasped, and said desperately: ‘Aunt Jo. Please wake up, Aunt Jo.’
Aunt Josephine’s thick eyelids quivered, her mouth closed, champing on the empty gums, and then suddenly she sat up gaping, her eyes wild. ‘What – what? What’s the matter? Is it a fire?’
‘It’s all right.’ Christine put her hand quickly on the big rough hand that trembled on the bedclothes. ‘It’s all right, Aunt Jo. It’s only me. I’m terribly sorry to wake you, but I just had to.’
Fully awake, Aunt Josephine became her solid self. She switched on the bedside light and sat up, blinking and yawning hugely. ‘What’s the matter, child? You look like the wrath of God.’
‘I feel like it. Aunt Jo, I’m awfully sorry. I know you hate to be woken up, but I just had to talk to you.’
‘Well, just let me get my grinders in,’ said Aunt Josephine, never averse to a chat at any hour of the day or night. ‘I can’t talk properly without them.’ She fumbled at the toothglass, where her large yellow teeth nestled in cloudy water, thrust them in, worked her jaws for a moment, and sat upright, staring at Christine with bright eyes.
Christine sat down on the bed and passed a hand over the bloated side of the fox-terrier, which growled in its sleep. ‘I’m in a terrible worry, Aunt Jo,’ she said. ‘I can’t sleep, and I can’t get things straight, and I felt I should go mad before morning if I didn’t discuss it with you.’
‘Fire away,’ said Aunt Josephine, hitching the eiderdown up to the neck of her woollen nightdress. ‘What’s your worry? I may not know the answer, but I’ll force advice on you just the same.’
‘I want you to. I want someone to tell me what to do, instead of having to decide for myself. He wouldn’t help me decide –’
‘He? That young Gaegler, I suppose.’
‘He’s not so young. He’s thirty-eight.’
‘That’s all right for you. I suppose he’s asked you to marry him?’
Christine nodded, fiddling with the bedclothes and not looking at her.
‘I knew he would. He asked me what I thought about it some time ago, and I said: “Go ahead and ask her. It’s no affair of mine.”’
Christine was disappointed that Vinson had spoken to Aunt Josephine before he risked asking her. It seemed Victorian, and rather cowardly.
‘What did you think I’d say?’
‘I hoped you’d say yes. Chrissie, he’s nice. There are a lot worse men than him in the world, and a lot worse people than Americans.’
‘Yes; but, Aunt Jo, you don’t marry someone because they’re nice.’ Suddenly, she was bored with the whole thing. It was too much bother. She wished she had not come into Aunt Josephine’s room and made Vinson’s proposal important by talking about it. She wished she were just the estimable Miss Cope again, calmly asleep until seven-thirty, when she would get up to go to the shop with nothing on her mind except the day’s work.
‘I don’t love him,’ she said irritably.
‘Oh – love,’ said her aunt. ‘When you’re as old as I am and have seen as many people passionately in love one year, and suing for divorce the next, you’ll learn t
o get cynical about that word.’
‘Don’t,’ said Christine. ‘I did love Jerry. I still can’t think of him without loving him.’
‘Jerry is dead,’ said Aunt Josephine harshly. ‘You’re morbid. I never should have read Great Expectations to you at an impressionable age.’
Christine felt that she was going to cry. No one could understand about her and Jerry, no one had ever had anything like that since the world began.
‘I dare say you think you’ll never love anyone like you loved poor Jerry,’ said Aunt Josephine. She reached for a packet of Lucky Strikes, shook out a cigarette and lit it, coughing alarmingly. Since Vinson had kept her supplied with American cigarettes she had taken to smoking in a big and choking way. ‘And you’re right. You never will. He’d never have married you, though.’ She knew the whole story of Jerry, and had formed her own opinion. ‘But most people marry without being in love like that. Look at your mother. She seemed quite happy, poor thing.’
Christine could not think of marriage as applied to her mother, that unreal figure of fading memory, who was so often ill, and seldom much more to her children than the smell of washed wool bedjackets, and injunctions from nurses and maids not to make so much noise on the landing. She had never questioned whether her mother and father loved each other. It was impossible to think of her father in a relationship with any woman, and one just did not think about what one’s parents must have done before one could be born.
‘If you’d never known Jerry,’ Aunt Josephine went on, ‘you’d be able to think you loved that Gaegler enough to marry him.’
‘I don’t know whether I love him at all.’
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