No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  There remained only Aunt Josephine’s decrepit fox-terrier. Christine had been looking after it as well as she could, even letting it sleep on her bed, although it did not like her.

  ‘Have to be put down, of course,’ Roger said robustly. ‘Put it out of its misery as it should have been long ago.’

  ‘But Aunt Jo loved it,’ Christine said. ‘It seems so mean to her to let it die.’ But no one would have it, and there was nothing for Christine to do but to take it away to be destroyed. When the vet carried its soggy old body away, with one leg dangling down under his arm, it looked at Christine with eyes of deep distress.

  When her father said good-bye to her at Waterloo she looked out of the window as the train pulled out, and saw in his eyes the same look that the fox-terrier had when it was carried away to die.

  She had let everybody down by going away. No one was pleased that she was going to be married. No one was happy for her, and she could not feel happy for herself. A bride going to her lover should have gone with shining eyes and an eager heart, but Christine sat miserably in the train to Southampton and would not look out of the window. When people exclaimed about the buttercups, she would not look at the fields. She did not want to leave England.

  ‘Look,’ said the man next to her, leaning over. ‘There’s our bateau. Quite sizeable, isn’t she?’

  Christine turned her head, and there was the black-and-white hull of the liner rising, it seemed, right out of the flat fields, as the train slid past it and into the customs shed.

  Chapter Three

  When she was on the boat Christine began to feel better. She had only been to sea before on a Channel steamer, huddled under coats on the windy deck because people were being sick below, and this was a completely new world to her. This lazy, luxurious liner life of eating and sleeping and making friends with people you would never see again was really the start of the tremendous adventure to which she had committed herself when she said that she would marry Vinson, and the excitement of it revived her flagging courage.

  She began to feel like a different person, which was what she wanted. She could not see the old Christine as a suitable wife for Vinson. The old Christine was an unambitious small-time person; attaching too much importance to a trifling job in a book department, slow to make new friends, happy with people who expected no more from her than cheerfulness, content with her own company and slightly ill at ease with sophisticates, and altogether unfitted to the challenge of being an American wife.

  She did not think that Vinson knew what she was really like, but with his help she could learn perhaps to be all the things he would want her to be, just as she was learning to act the part of a first-class passenger on one of the world’s biggest liners.

  She had not wanted to travel first class, but Vinson said that a commander’s wife did not travel any other way, and so she had drawn out her savings to obey him. At first she had to keep reminding herself that she had paid a fantastic amount for her ticket and was entitled to the attention and service she was given. Being waited on did not come naturally to her. She made mistakes, like folding her table napkin and making her own bed, which brought her a gentle reprimand from her stewardess: ‘There’s no need for that, madam. It’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid you didn’t make it quite right.’

  She wore her new clothes and never went out of her cabin without doing her hair and face as carefully as if she were going to a party, but she thought that people must guess that underneath there was only Christine Cope, and think her an impostor from the Tourist decks. Before long, however, her diffidence was eased away by the insidious luxury of a transatlantic crossing. She was accepted at her ticket value. She began to make friends and to be asked to meet people for cocktails in the bar. Gradually she felt herself learning to be this new person, this first-class passenger who was being borne across a well-behaved ocean to marry a commander in the United States Navy. She began to enjoy herself.

  As the slow days went by and the unseen miles slipped past she thought less and less of what she had left behind and more about what was in front of her. The cable from Roger and Sylvia saluting her departure was less real than the cable from Vinson saluting her approach. She had a picture of him on her dressing-table. Her stewardess dusted it reverently every morning and took a pleasing interest in hearing about Miss Cope’s young man, although no doubt it was only one of her duties to make the passengers feel that they mattered to her.

  Other stewardesses were called in to view Vinson, and to see the dress and hat which Christine had bought to be married in. The photograph was much admired, and the bath stewardess said that Vinson looked like Tyrone Power. That must be the eyebrows. He was in uniform, wearing his professional naval officer look, with the mouth set and the eyes slightly narrowed. Christine said Hello to the photograph every time she came into her cabin, and wondered if Vinson did the same with her picture she had given him.

  It was hard to imagine what he might be doing in that unknown map-shaped country to which the liner was faithfully ploughing through the days and nights. If it had not been for the photograph, she would have found it difficult to remember what he looked like. When she lay in bed at night she could not see his face, although she knew what his voice sounded like when he said Christine. She knew so little about him; but whoever knew enough about the man they married? If Jerry had come back from the war and married her, she would not have known enough about him, except that she loved him.

  She did not know whether she loved Vinson. Looking at herself in the mirror and thinking of the pictures she had seen of gorgeous American girls, she did not see why he should love her. He must think he did. Surely a man would not embark on the risky enterprise of asking a girl to marry him unless he felt he could not live without her.

  A man could live without a woman. Why should he saddle himself with a wife just for the sake of being married? A woman might do that, because there was not enough in life for a woman who did not marry. Towards the end of her journey Christine dared to ask herself whether that was what she was doing.

  She looked at Vinson’s picture and wished violently that he were there to kiss her. She remembered the night in his hotel room when she would have stayed there with him if he had let her. Surely it was all right. She wanted to marry Vinson, with the emphasis on Vinson and not on marry.

  She liked him better than any man she knew. He loved her and was good to her; and when he made love to her, she had for him a feeling that must surely grow into a real love as soon as they could be together all the time.

  She began to get excited about seeing him. People on the boat conspired in her excitement. She sat at a table in the dining-saloon with two American couples and a desiccated English widower who was being lent to the Atomic Energy Commission. They were thrilled when she told them that she was going to be married the day after the boat docked. One of the American women said it was darling, and the other said it was the most romantic thing she had heard of since the lovely Princess was betrothed to Phillup. The American men folded their hands over their little paunches and said it was a fine thing for the cause of greater understanding between anti-Communist nations. That was not why Christine was marrying Vinson, but she felt proud.

  The English scientist did not say much, but he joined with the others in calling her The Bride, and they all teased her gently and made her feel important. On the last night there was champagne and the dinner was in her honour. Everyone kept toasting her and wishing her luck, and the Americans told her what a wonderful life she was going to have, and what a clever thing she was doing in marrying an American.

  She sat in the place of honour in her new white evening dress and felt happier about marrying Vinson than at any time since that Saturday evening in the kitchen at ‘Roselawn’ when he had said: ‘Because I’m going to marry you’, and she had not denied it. She was a girl who was going to be married, a girl who was loved enough to be sent for across three thousand miles of Atlantic, and she felt that this was
what she must have been waiting for all her life.

  She did not sleep much that night. She woke early and went on deck to see that the shore buildings of New Jersey were already sliding by. She did not know what she had expected America to look like. It looked big, and there seemed to be a lot of factories and oil tanks on it.

  She had planned to write home about her first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline, but she stayed so long in her cabin packing and doing her face and changing her mind about which suit to wear for Vinson that she missed it all.

  When she went up to the promenade deck all she could see was the end of a great black shed. A rope mat hung on the corner of the concrete jetty that surrounded it, and the idea was evidently to lean the side of the liner against the mat and swivel it round into the dock. It took a long time. Nothing happened for half an hour, and Christine hung out of a window in company with other passengers who had already said good-bye to each other at breakfast and now had to fill in the anticlimax by saying it all over again.

  ‘You’re excited, I guess,’ said one of the Americans, who was wearing a wide-banded hat of some consequence and an overcoat that looked as if it had been cut for a pregnant woman. ‘This is some day for you. Your boy friend be here to meet you?’

  ‘He said he would. Perhaps we’ll see him in a minute.’ Christine leaned out of the window as a few people appeared at the open end of the shed, looking up at the liner and waving. Surely one of them would be Vinson. The pit of her stomach was hollow with suspense. It had been easy enough to look forward to seeing him during the trip, when he could not appear. Now that the moment she had been waiting for had come, she did not not know how it would be. What would he look like? What should she say to him? Excitement and apprehension panicked her into a sudden wish that the liner would back away from the dock and never cast her up on New York.

  A sailor with a white cap and a square collar was standing among the people on the end of the jetty holding a bunch of flowers. ‘Is that your young man?’ the American asked. ‘I thought you said he was a commander.’

  Christine laughed, but she was disappointed that Vinson was not there. If a sailor could wangle his way out to the jetty, why couldn’t a commander? She did not know the American Navy then.

  He was not there waiting with the group of people at the end of the gangway when the liner finally swung round the corner and inched up to her berth. Passengers on board were waving and calling out:’ Hi, there!’ to their friends and relations on the dock, who were wearing thinner clothes than the people who had waved the liner good-bye from England. Christine leaned out of the window and stared and searched, examining quite unlikely men, in case she was wrong and Vinson did not look like she expected.

  Shipboard acquaintances kept coming up and asking to have him pointed out to them. She felt ashamed that he was not there. Perhaps they would think that she had invented the story of a fiancé to give herself glamour. Or, what kind of a fiancé was it, they might think, who was not standing tiptoe on the dock to greet his bride?

  She felt let down and deserted. He had not come to meet her. Perhaps he was not even going to marry her. She would be stranded alone and penniless in New York, like those G.I. brides you heard about after the war, sailing out to marry men who were either in prison or already married.

  In the huge, bewildering customs shed she at last found her luggage and sat on it, waiting for someone to come and help her. When an official came up he was coloured. Christine had never spoken to a coloured man, except once when a drunken negro had tried to snatch her bag in Tottenham Court Road, and she was afraid.

  Everyone round her was talking American. She could not see any of the English people who had been on the boat. When she told the customs officer what she had to declare, her voice sounded silly to her and she was afraid he would not understand what she said. He asked her to open all her bags, but he made only a show of looking into them. He kept glancing away from her abstractedly, as if he did not care whether she came into America or not.

  He wanted her to open her hatbox, which had nothing in it but her wedding hat. ‘Must I?’ she said. She did not want his great black hand fumbling about among the veil and delicate flowers.

  ‘Look, lady,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, but you picked a bad day. It’s a check-up. I’m not inspecting you. They’re inspecting me.’ He nodded towards a pillar, where a blue-jawed man in uniform with a huge shining badge stood watching him as sternly as the recording angel.

  The coloured man smiled, showing the pink inside of his mouth, and Christine felt better. As he helped her to shut her bags, she told him that she did not know what to do because she could not find Vinson.

  ‘You’ll be O.K., ma’am,’ he said. ‘The party will be waiting down there behind the ba’ier.’

  Christine looked, and saw the crowd pressing and peering and waving beyond the wooden barrier at the end of the customs hall. Abandoning her luggage, she hurried over and stood irresolute, searching among the faces. She heard Vinson calling: ‘Christine!’ before she could see where he was.

  Suddenly he was there, right at the front of the crowd. He looked smaller than she remembered, and he wore an unfamiliar suit, a bluish sharkskin with a long double-breasted jacket which made his legs look too short; but his face was just the same and she wondered how she had ever forgotten it, and when he kissed her awkwardly across the barrier his skin smelled just as she remembered. She was safe.

  She came out to him through the gate and he kissed her again and gave her a corsage of roses, which she tried unsuccessfully in her fumbling excitement to pin on to her suit. He would send a porter for her luggage. He had taken over, and everything was all right.

  ‘Oh, Vin,’ she said, taking his arm as they went down to the street in the lift, ‘I was so worried when I couldn’t see you. I thought you hadn’t come to meet me.’

  ‘Not come to meet you? Not come to meet my girl? What do you think I am, darling? You’ve got an American to look after you now.’

  ‘Well, but,’ said Christine, ignoring the slight on Englishmen, ‘there were people waiting on the dock. There was even an ordinary sailor, and I thought you’d sure to be there.’

  ‘You have to wangle a pass,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe in pulling rank to get these privileges. Wait here, honey, while I get the automobile.’

  He left her on the kerb at the edge of the cobbled space where taxis and cars were coming and going. Coloured porters with square red caps were calling and pushing each other about like children, and policemen were stamping in the puddles, waving their arms and shouting at cars in what seemed to be a permanent state of fury. Not the hysterical, hopping fury of Paris policemen, but a resigned and bitter resentment against everything in sight, as if anyone outside the Force must be regarded as a potential criminal, from whom nothing could be expected but trouble.

  The rain fell soft and straight like anywhere else in the world. A bridge-like structure of girders, carrying a road or a railway, rose just ahead, so that Christine could see nothing of New York. It might have been Southampton or Liverpool or Calais or any dockside, and yet, even without the gaily-coloured taxis which were bigger than most English cars, the coloured porters and the policemen looking as if they were extras in a gangster film, you would have known you were in New York. The very air smelled urgently of America. Christine, sensing it for the first time, recognized it with an answering urgent excitement. She was here. It was true. She was in America.

  Vinson’s car was a black sedan, not as dashing as the Buick he had driven in England, but still impressive by Christine’s standards. He said it was only an old jalopy and they were going to get a new one soon, but it had gears on the steering wheel and a radio and all sorts of post-war gadgets, and Christine wondered what Vinson must have thought of her father and his 1939 Vauxhall of which he was so proud.

  They drove away from the docks among traffic that terrified Christine. Huge lorries as big as railway engines, in which
you could not see the dwarfed driver high above, bore down on them, or raced alongside, threatening to crush the car with their shining chromium sides. She tried not to show Vinson that she was frightened. Once in England, when she had flinched and gasped at a near-accident, he had said: ‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those women who panic in cars’, so she was determined not to be.

  She did not want him to be disappointed in her in anything. She wanted to be what he would have been expecting while he waited for her to come to him across the Atlantic. He would have been looking forward to showing her America, and expecting her to be impressed, and so she made enthusiastic comments about everything she saw, from the dresses of women on the streets to the advertising balloon which rode in the sky, although she was still too bewildered by the noise and size of everything to take in America properly.

  They swept into the Holland tunnel with a change of noise and an increase of speed. It was an endless yellow tube, with cars and deafening lorries all racing along in the same direction, and policemen immured like nuns in little glass boxes at intervals along the tiled walls.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ Vinson asked, as proudly as if he had bored the tunnel under the Hudson River himself.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ Christine gasped, raising her voice above the increased noise of the car. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘I thought not.’ He patted her hand. ‘I thought this would thrill you. There’s so many things to show you, and I want you so much to like it all. I want you to like America.’

  ‘Oh, I do, Vin,’ said Christine, gazing with relief at the pinpoint of light ahead, which showed that the monstrous tube must come to an end at last. ‘I think it’s wonderful.’