No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  ‘You must, or you wouldn’t even contemplate marrying him. You’d come to me and say: “Ha, ha! That Gaegler asked me to marry him. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call him That Gaegler.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind if you didn’t like him.’

  ‘We do get on pretty well,’ Christine said doubtfully. ‘But I don’t know. It would mean living in America, and I –’

  ‘My dear baby, the man comes first, not the place. That just goes with the man.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Then he’s a man with more sense than I credited him with. Oh, I know you think you couldn’t leave dear old England -wave the flag, and all these jolly red buses and everything – but you’d get on all right in America. They tell me it isn’t all like the films.’

  ‘Would you mind if I went?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Aunt Josephine shortly. ‘I should mind like hell, if you want to know. So would your Pa, I suppose, though he might not be able to say so in so many words.’

  ‘Well, then, how could I –’

  ‘Look here, Chrissie,’ said her aunt sternly. ‘You’re thirtyfour. You don’t want to be a spinster all your life, do you? It’s all right now, because people want you, but think about when you’re fifty. Who wants a single woman then? She’s just a nuisance, who everybody tries unsuccessfully to find a widower for. You love children. Well, it’s all right now being Aunt Christine, who’s more fun than Mummy, but later on other people’s children won’t want you. Clement and Jeanette will have to be told: “You must go and see Aunt Christine”, or “You really must write to the old girl. She doesn’t have much to live for.”’

  ‘But, Aunt Jo,’ said Christine in distress, ‘you shouldn’t say that. Everybody wants you.’

  ‘Like hell they do,’ said her aunt cheerfully, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the first one. ‘I’m useful, because I run your Pa’s house, but I’m a bit of a nuisance, you must admit, and people say: “There’s that crazy old woman with all her dogs and cats.”’

  ‘They don’t!’ said Christine, remembering the times when she had heard people like Geoffrey say something like that.

  ‘Don’t worry. I like them to. I like to be that crazy old Aunt Josephine. If I can’t be desirable I can at least be renowned as an Old Character. I have my niche.’

  Yes, she had her niche. She had her letters to the family abroad, and her cats and dogs, and her charities, and her pilgrimages to cemeteries. Christine gave a little shiver, seeing herself in thirty years’ time as that crazy old Aunt Christine.

  ‘You’re cold,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘Marry that Gaegler and have a nice warm double bed. It’ll do you a power of good.’

  ‘But then, about Daddy,’ Christine said, imagining what Vinson would look like in pyjamas. ‘I’ve been at home so long, and Roger isn’t really any use to him except to carve the joint on Sundays. Ought I to leave him and go so far away?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about him. I’ll look after him, same as I always have. He won’t mind too much. I know he doesn’t like that Gaegler much, but then he won’t have to see him often if you’re in America.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ Christine said. ‘Everyone is so stuffy and insular. Just because Vin doesn’t like beer and went to a school that they’ve never heard of, no one likes him except you and me. What will Roger and Sylvia say if I tell them I’m going to marry him? They’ll be crabby.’

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ said Aunt Josephine, ‘I’ll settle them. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Aunt Jo,’ said Christine, bending to kiss her, ‘you’re marvellous. Do you know, I believe I really might get married.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ said Aunt Josephine briskly. ‘And now go down and get us something to eat for the Lord’s sake. I’ll never go to sleep again, and I’m starving. Let’s have the wedding here, shall we? What excitements. I shall wear a feathered toque and a blue satin dress with a dipping hem and a bow on the hip. I see it all.’

  Much later, when Christine came out of Aunt Josephine’s room with the empty plates and cups, they had made so many plans that she felt as if she had been engaged for months and was almost as good as married.

  It was exciting. It was important. She was someone with a definite status, someone at last to whom something really noteworthy had happened. Then it occurred to her, with some surprise, that it had not happened yet. She knew that she was going to marry Vinson, but he did not. He had probably lain awake all night in a torment, chewing his nails, She knew that he bit his nails, because she had seen them.

  It would be unkind to keep him a moment longer in suspense. It was only six-thirty, but Christine went down to the hall and dialled the number of his hotel. They had to buzz his room for a long time before there was a click and a grunting ‘Hello.’ He always said Hello, instead of Hullo, as English people did.

  ‘Vin,’ said Christine eagerly. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Oh, hi there,’ he said without enthusiasm. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter. Everything’s all right. I will marry you, Vin.’ There was no answer. ‘I mean – if you still want me to?’

  ‘What’s that? If I want you to? Oh, sure, sure. Don’t be ridiculous, Christine. I’m a bit dopey, that’s all. Haven’t had my eight hours yet. You’re calling pretty early.’

  ‘Well,’ said Christine drearily. ‘I thought you’d be anxious to know.’

  ‘Oh, sure, honey. It’s marvellous. Look, you go back to bed now, and I’ll call you later, hm?’

  She had a feeling that he was asleep again almost before he put down the receiver. He was more interested in getting his sleep than in knowing whether Christine would marry him. She almost rang him back to say: ‘I’ve changed my mind’, but if she woke him again he might not listen properly, and her anger would fall flat.

  At breakfast she disappointed Aunt Josephine by refusing to carry on with the plans they had started the night before. She would not talk about Vinson. Her pride would not let her tell how he had hurt her.

  When Aunt Josephine, putting her coffee on the table with a joyful gesture that spilled some of it into the saucer, said: ‘Well now, baby, here’s a happy day for you! Aren’t you glad your crazy old aunt persuaded you to do the right thing? You see, I do have some sense after all’, Christine stirred the coffee and muttered: ‘Perhaps not as much as you think you have.’ And she bit her aunt’s head off when she asked if she might tell her brother about his daughter’s engagement before Christine got home.

  ‘Don’t interfere, Aunt Jo,’ Christine said, as she went to the car. ‘You’re always interfering.’

  Doubting and worrying, she tried to give her mind to work that morning. She snubbed Alice and snapped at Helen, and avoided Miss Burman, who followed her about trying to tell her about her mother’s birthday party, with eight big candles and two little ones. With a rush of business that came in the middle of the day, Christine was glad to have to take her mind off Vinson and occupy herself with the customers.

  She had to go up to the accounting department about a mail order, and when she came back Margaret said: ‘Your boy friend rang up, but I told him not to hang on, because I knew you’d be hours with those muddlers upstairs. He wants you to ring him back as soon as you can.’

  Well, I won’t, thought Christine angrily. Let him just see, that’s all. Let him just see.

  But let him see what, she was not quite sure. She did not know whether she would marry him or not. Aunt Josephine had made her think she would, but it ought to have been Vinson, not Aunt Josephine, who had persuaded her. She did not know what she could say to him.

  Mr Parker called her into his office to hear a publisher’s representative talk about an epoch-making new book. She glanced through the book and did not think much of it. All this firm’s books were epoch-making. The representative was a bouncing young man, who was always saying: ‘In confidence, I’ll stake
my reputation on this one’, and was quite unabashed when Goldwyn’s did not do well with it.

  The telephone rang and Christine answered it, holding it well away from her ear, because the receiver was dusty. It was nobody’s job to dust Mr Parker’s office, and since Mr Parker did not want it done, because he was afraid that things would be moved and he would not be able to find them, no one was going to make it their job.

  It was Vinson. Christine could not say: ‘I’ve changed my mind. I can’t marry you’, with Mr Parker and the bouncing young man listening. She was non-committal, and so was Vinson, because he was not alone in his office either. She thought that the least he could do would be to go out and make the call from a telephone box when talking to the girl who a few hours earlier had said she would marry him. They had a sterile conversation. Vinson wanted to see her, but she said that she must go home first, and he could ring her up there and they would make plans for the evening. She wanted to talk to Aunt Josephine and get assurance before she saw him.

  When she rang off Mr Parker, who had been waiting, tapping a pencil, said mildly: ‘I don’t know that you ought to make your private calls here, Miss Cope’, and the publisher’s representative said archly: ‘Ah well, we all know Miss Cope is a young lady much in demand. I’m sure there are many people, Mr Parker, who would like to get her away from you.’

  If he imagined he was going to increase Goldwyn’s order by that, Christine thought, he had another think coming. When he had gone she persuaded Mr Parker to reduce the order for the epoch-making book from a hundred copies to seventy-five.

  Five-thirty came slowly. When at last it was time to go, Christine hurried out of the shop, and fretted and fumed at the traffic which kept the Buick crawling nearly all the way to Barnes Common. She wanted to talk to Aunt Josephine. Aunt Josephine would make her feel that whatever she decided to do was right. Aunt Josephine would help her, as she had helped her, erratically but lovingly, ever since she had taken over the job of mother, and been more to Christine than her own mother had ever been.

  She stopped outside her home, thinking that if she gave up Vinson she would have to give the car up too and go to work by bus and underground again, and hurried up the path and through the front door, calling: ‘Aunt Jo! Aunt Jo! where are you?’

  Aunt Josephine usually came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dirty tea-towel when Christine came home and called her. Today, no one came out of the kitchen, but Mr Cope came out of the drawing-room with bent knees, a newspaper dangling from his hand.

  ‘Chrissie,’ he said, ‘thank goodness you’ve come home.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she began, but she stopped, seeing his face. The smudges under his eyes were darker than usual, and his mouth was slack.

  ‘It’s your aunt,’ he said in a dead voice. ‘She’s had a stroke,’ he added abruptly, concerned less with breaking the news gently than with unloading his own troubled thoughts as quickly as possible.

  Aunt Josephine, robust Aunt Josephine, who everyone thought was as strong as a horse and could do her work day after day and never be spared, had fallen down while she was carrying a tray of books to the back door to pack up for hospital. She had clutched at the dresser and broken some plates as she fell. The pieces of china and the books she was carrying still lay scattered on the kitchen floor, where the cats were mewing for their dinner.

  Mr Cope did not want to go to the hospital with Christine. He did not like hospitals. Aunt Josephine was still unconscious, and he had seen her unconscious on the kitchen floor, had watched her there for a long time until the ambulance came. He did not want to see that any more. But Christine made him go with her. Aunt Josephine might come round, and she would want them. As they went out of the house the telephone rang. It was probably Vinson, but she did not go back to answer it. He was like a dream that did not matter any more.

  Driving to the hospital in the Buick, which he did not like, because the seats sloped farther back than in his own car and made him feel uncomfortable, Mr Cope kept saying: ‘I heard the crash, you see. I was working, but I came out at once, and there she was, lying on the floor with her mouth open. I was working, but I came out at once,’ he kept saying, as if to justify himself that, whatever had happened, it was not his fault.

  Christine hardly heard him. She drove automatically, knowing the way well, for she had often driven Aunt Josephine down these roads with books and bundles of clothing for the hospital. All she could think of was that she had been unkind to Aunt Josephine this morning. When Aunt Jo was so eager about the engagement, Christine had said: ‘Don’t interfere. You’re always interfering’, and Aunt Josephine’s big face had looked like a gun dog disappointed of a walk.

  She could not forget that long-chopped, fallen face. If Aunt Jo died, was that how she was doomed always to remember her?

  ‘I was working,’ Mr Cope said, ‘but when I heard the crash in the kitchen I came out at once. I did what I could,’ and Christine kept seeing Aunt Josephine’s hurt, triangular eyes, and remembering that she had banged out of the house without saying good-bye to her.

  Aunt Josephine had had a stroke. They were driving to her bedside, but Mr Cope and Christine were thinking less of her than of themselves; he trying to justify his own part in the affair, she struggling with the bogy of regret. She thought with shame of the fickleness of human sympathy. You could only be really sorry for someone if what had happened to them did not make you sorrier still for yourself.

  When they went round the screens in the ward where Aunt Josephine lay, Christine forgot everything except the log-like figure, whose toes reached to the end of the high iron bed. They had taken the pillows away, and Aunt Josephine was lying flat on the mattress with one side of her face slipped backwards, and drunken snores coming from the twisted cavern of her mouth.

  Mr Cope looked at her dutifully and then looked away, pretending to examine the dish with the tongue forceps and spatula that stood by the bed. Christine gazed and gazed, trying to see beyond this strange and horrifying façade and find Aunt Josephine. She must be there, her spirit unchanged by the blow that had befallen her body, needing help, asking for help perhaps, from the limbo where she was confined; needing help and not getting it.

  Christine had nursed many unconscious people. Like the other nurses, she had learned to look on them as no more than bodies, needing routine care and watchfulness, making a lot of work, almost perverse, it sometimes seemed, when their beds needed changing just when you were most busy. Relations had come and gone, had wept, or looked in silence, and stroked the stubbornly still head that did not know or care if it was touched by a mother’s hand or a nurse’s.

  There was a boy who had been unconscious for three weeks before he died. The doctors had said he would never regain consciousness, but his mother had come every day and held his hand and talked to him, and Christine had marvelled that she could without effort see beyond the wall of coma to her son, and treat him as if he knew she were there, and could respond.

  ‘He does know me,’ she told Christine, smiling quite cheerfully. ‘I know he knows I’m here.’ But when Christine had asked the Ward Sister: ‘Could he?’ Sister had said: ‘Of course not. Use your sense, Nurse – and you must tell his mother she’ll have to go now, before the surgeons’ rounds.’

  Standing by Aunt Josephine’s bed, Christine knew that the Ward Sister had been wrong, and that she herself had been wrong when she treated unconscious patients as impersonally as if they were already dead. Aunt Josephine gave no sign, but Christine felt that she knew she was not alone.

  Her father muttered: ‘We’d better go. You heard what the nurse said. They don’t think she’ll come round. We can’t do anything here. We’d better go.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to,’ Christine said. ‘I want to stay with her.’ But the Staff Nurse came round the screens, drawing a turnip watch from under the starched bosom of her apron, and said: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go now. I have to close the ward.’

  They
took the screens away from Aunt Josephine, so that the Night Nurse could see her when she sat at the desk in the middle of the ward. The patients in the other beds peered over at Aunt Josephine, and peered at Christine and her father as they went away down the polished length of floor, their heels making too much noise.

  Alone together, each needing comfort from the other and not getting it, Christine and her father were almost like strangers. Their intimacy of thirty-four years was not deep enough to absorb this crisis. Before, when anything had happened it was always Aunt Josephine to whom they turned. She was the apex of the triangle, they the two points at its base, now left looking at each other across the space that divided them.

  There was a lot to do. Christine prepared supper for her father and tried to eat with him, and then she cleared up the books and broken china in the kitchen and fed the dogs and cats, who wandered about uneasily all evening and would not settle anywhere.

  She rang up her brother. Roger was out, and Sylvia dealt with the news with studied calm, thinking that she was being of great practical help. ‘Now, you’re not to worry,’ she said. ‘You should take a Veganin and try and get a good night’s sleep. I don’t want you to worry.’

  ‘Sylvia says we’re not to worry,’ Christine told her father caustically. Aunt Josephine would have laughed at that, but Mr Cope nodded and said vaguely: ‘Kind girl. She’s a good, kind girl. When Christine said: ‘They’re coming up tomorrow, I’m afraid. I couldn’t stop them’, he said: ‘That’s right. The family should be together at a time like this.’

  Christine did not want them to come. They had never been particularly nice to Aunt Josephine. Roger had tormented her and disobeyed her consistently when he was a boy, and since he married he and his wife had looked on her chiefly as a useful solution to the problem of his father, who might otherwise have had to live with them.

  When Vinson rang up and Christine told him what had happened, he said he would come down to her at once, but she did not want him either. People always wanted to rally round you, even though they could do nothing except talk round and round what had happened, and you did not want the bother of them. Certainly she did not want Vinson. He was outside her trouble, and she still could not think what she was going to say to him. Only Aunt Josephine could help her with that.