‘Cut it out, Art,’ Vin said. ‘Look, Christine, you go and ask Mrs Hamer if you can get her another glass of champagne. I want her to enjoy herself.’
‘She hasn’t finished the one she’s got,’ Christine said. ‘I don’t think she wants to enjoy herself.’
‘Now, honey,’ Vinson moved away, and Art laughed and said: ‘My wife feels just like you do. I can never get her to do the right thing. It’s been the ruin of my career. I want you two girls to get to know each other. You’ll get on fine. Where is Nancy? I never can find her at parties.’
‘I’ve been talking to her. She’s the one with the black fringe, isn’t she? She’s sweet.’
‘Fringe? Oh, you mean bangs. Yes, she’s swell. The best. They broke the mould after they made her.’
Christine hoped that Vinson would talk about her like that to other people. She liked Art Lee, although he looked odd, with his long, big-jointed bones and his cropped red hair and his knobby face that looked crudely drawn, like a character in a comic strip.
‘You’re a nice girl,’ Art said. ‘I like you.’ America was strange and bewildering, but strangers were always giving you confidence by saying they liked you.
‘I’m glad you married Vin,’ Art said.’ He’s a swell guy. We’ve been buddies for a long time. He and I were classmates at Annapolis, you know.’
A lot of the officers at the reception had told her that. It seemed to be a passport, like Englishmen being at the same public school together.
After the Admiral and his wife had left, and with them a very senior captain, who was Vinson’s divisional chief and caused him some unease, the party began to loosen up a little. The women got together in corners and gossiped, and Vinson and his friends got together in other corners and laid their arms across each other’s shoulders and raised their voices. If it had been a film, Christine thought they would have sung ‘Sweet Adeline’.
She was followed about the room by the mad Aunt Felice, whose only peculiarity, apart from wrinkled khaki cotton stockings and one drooping eye, seemed to be that she felt it her duty to try and tell Christine derogatory things about Vinson’s mother. As Aunt Felice had the kind of stammer that gets hung up for a word for seconds at a time, her recital was costive. She was constantly interrupted by another guest claiming Christine, but she persevered, following Christine about, gaping for words, and even pursuing her into the ladies’ room to finish the story of ‘that Christmas when poor little Vinson was only five’.
Edna had quarrelled with Milt because he had had too much champagne. She rescued Christine from Aunt Felice and told her that it was time for her and Vinson to leave.
‘I thought so,’ Christine said, ‘but I can’t get Vin to go. He’s having such a good time.’
‘Men,’ said Edna. ‘They’re all the same when they get together. Look at Milt.’ There was nothing wrong with Milt, who was sitting quietly on a sofa, but Edna was irritated with him today and he could do nothing right. He had been stupid about parking the car, and she did not like the way he had kissed Christine after the wedding ceremony.
‘You tell Vinson if you don’t go soon the hotel will make you pay more. They’re waiting to get the room ready for a cocktail party,’ Edna said.
Christine went over to Vinson and said: ‘I think we ought to go now, darling.’
‘Sure, honey. I’ll be with you in a moment. Jim’s just finishing one of his stories.’
‘Well, I’m going to get ready and have my bags brought down. If you don’t come soon I’ll go without you,’ Christine said, and one of Vinson’s friends made a joke about her being his commanding officer.
Christine went upstairs, feeling rather out of it. If Vinson were going to turn out to be one of those men who were always ganging around with the Boys, she might just as well have married an Englishman who always wanted to get into a corner with his friends and talk about golf.
Vinson came into the room while she was powdering her nose. He put his arms round her waist and laid his head against hers, looking at their faces together in the mirror.
‘Have a good time at your wedding?’ he asked.
‘It was lovely. I enjoyed it. Did you?’
‘You bet. I’m so glad the Admiral and his wife came. It was just all it needed.’
‘Vin, I don’t think Aunt Felice is so mad,’ Christine said, changing the subject, because she could not share his enthusiasm for the Hamers. ‘She’s just annoying. She kept trying to tell me things about your mother. Did she really turn your father out of the house one Christmas and refuse to even let him come back for his razor?’
‘I don’t remember it. Aunt Felice wanted him for herself at one time. That’s why she talked that way.’
‘Well, she didn’t give any trouble. I think everyone enjoyed themselves, don’t you? I like your friends, darling. Was I all right? They were very nice to me.’
‘I thought Art was being a bit too nice to you,’ Vinson said, moving away and flicking at the shoulders of his uniform. ‘What were you talking about all that time?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Vin, don’t be silly. You can’t be jealous of your wife at her own wedding.’
‘This town is full of wolves. You’ve got to watch out.’
‘Not Art. Darling, he’s your friend. You can’t talk about him like that. It’s ridiculous. I hope you’re not going to be jealous of every man I talk to.’
‘I’ve had too much champagne,’ he complained.
‘I know, darling. Come on, let’s go down now and get away on our own, and then you’ll feel fine.’
It was exciting running out through the hotel with the people in the lounge staring and standing up to see them, and having confetti thrown over them by the wedding guests as they got into their car. They had not driven more than a block away before a tremendous blowing of horns behind them announced that some of Vinson’s friends were following them through the traffic, and when Christine looked out of the back window she saw a shoe bumping along on a string behind the car.
All up Connecticut Avenue they were pursued by the noise and the shoe, and people on the pavements stared and waved, and a traffic policeman grinned and saluted and did not seem to mind the noise.
Christine enjoyed it. ‘I feel like a queen,’ she said, taking off her hat and shaking out confetti.
‘It’s tough,’ said Vinson, ‘but it’s just one of those things that happen at weddings. I’ll get down a side-street and try and shake them off.’
‘Oh, but I like it.’ Christine laughed excitedly. ‘I want everybody to know I’m coming and that I’m Mrs Vinson Gaegler.’ It still sounded an odd name to her, but she was getting used to saying it.
When he had left his hooting friends behind he stopped the car and got out to untie the shoe. While she waited Christine heard another weirder noise swelling towards them.
‘Oh, quick, darling,’ she leaned out of the window. ‘Hurry up. Someone else is after us.’
‘Silly,’ he said, getting into the car. ‘That’s not for us. That’s only an ambulance or a fire truck.’
‘Only!’ she said, as the noise grew to a hideous wail of sound and passed by them unseen on a parallel street. ‘It’s the most awful noise I’ve ever heard. Worse than the sirens in the Blitz. Why do they have to do it?’
‘Gets the traffic out of the way. You hear it all the time.’
‘I’ve heard it on the films, when the cops are chasing gangsters, but I didn’t know it happened in real life.’ Things were always happening in America that made you feel you were in a film.
Before they got to the country hotel where they were to spend Vinson’s few days’ leave, he stopped at a filling station and had the confetti brushed out of the car, and went into the men’s room to brush off his uniform.
‘Oh, why?’ said Christine. ‘I like our confetti. I don’t care if people at the hotel do know we’re honeymooners. They’re bound to, anyway. I’m sure we look like it.’
But Vinson did not want to
look like it. While they were at the hotel he behaved most circumspectly to her in public. When they were alone together he was not circumspect. He was everything that she could wish for in a lover, and she came back from her honeymoon far more in love with him than before.
Chapter Four
It was hard to say when Vinson ceased to be a lover and became a husband. The transition was so gradual that Christine did not notice it happening until one night, when she could not sleep, she kissed Vinson awake and turned him over to her, and he was annoyed that she had woken him.
It was the most hurtful thing that had ever happened to her in her life. When she had stopped crying enough to be able to talk, she said: ‘You wouldn’t have been like that on our honeymoon.’
‘Look, honey,’ he said, ‘I love you like crazy, but I’m a man with a job of work to do, and I need my sleep. Marriage isn’t all honeymoon, you know.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said into the pillow. ‘I was silly to think it could be.’
After that she did not make the first advances to him again. He still came to her often as a lover, especially at week-ends when he did not have to get up early, but it was not the same. Hers became the more passive and submissive role, depending on his love rather than hers for its stimulation, just as in ordinary things she was learning to be as dependent and compliant as he wanted her to be.
He was a demanding, sometimes a didactic husband. Having gone her own way all her life, Christine found at first a certain pleasure in playing the part of obedience. It was nice to belong to somebody, and a relief to have the burden of initiative taken from you. Vinson discussed things with her, but it was always he who made the decisions. When they both wanted different things she gave in and let him have his own way. She knew that she was encouraging him to be selfish, but he was selfish by nature, anyhow. She could not change that, and so the smoothest course was to allow it. He did not like it if she pitted her will against his, and so, to keep him happy, she crushed her family tendency to opinionated argument and tried to be the kind of wife he wanted.
She was a good wife. She took a lot of trouble with the apartment, she tried not to be extravagant, and she was always there looking nice when Vinson came home at night.
It was fun to have her own little home to do as she liked in. Housework, with her bright modern kitchen and all her gadgets, was a very different matter from the hopeless drudgery of trying to keep ‘Roselawn’ from degenerating into a shambles. At first she was very busy, but after a while, when she had done everything she could think of to soften the apartment out of the bachelor habits it had acquired when Vinson lived there alone, she found that marriage had not given her enough to do. There were days when she was bored, bored, bored, and longed for her busy working day at Goldwyn’s and for the friends she had left behind in England.
Christine liked most of the women she met, and she had made friends with Art Lee’s wife, but Nancy, like most of the naval wives, had children and was busy in the daytime, so Christine did not have anyone to go out with unless she was with Vinson.
She missed Timmy painfully. It was terrible not to be able to have a dog. She came home from a pet shop with a kitten one day, but Vinson said that cats were not allowed in the apartments either, and she had to take it back. She changed it for some goldfish, and they swam moodily round in a coiled glass tube fixed to the kitchen wall, poor company when she was lonely.
Her apartment was on the fourth floor of the building, which had stone stairs and a cold painted iron banister and a row of little letterboxes by the entrance, because postmen did not climb stairs in America. You had to go down and unlock your box with a key. Sometimes Christine lost the key for a few days at a time, and Vinson would be cross, although the letters that came for him were mostly bills. There were a terrible lot of bills. Things like rent and the telephone had to be paid every month, and the month’s bill was almost as high as it would be for a quarter in England. Everything in Washington was fabulously expensive, especially when you made the mistake of translating it into terms of English money.
All the apartments had ultramarine painted doors with brass knockers and nippled rubber mats outside. As you climbed the stairs you could hear what was going on behind every door. A baby crying, a saucepan lid falling, a radio commentator declaiming about a political scandal or an airplane disaster. The news never seemed to be about anything else. Christine’s door was like all the others, except that when you pressed the bell dulcet chimes sounded on the other side of it. That worried Christine, but Vinson seemed quite happy about it.
Inside the door was a little square hall with the bedroom and bath on one side and the sitting-room on the other. The wall between the sitting-room and the kitchen did not go to the end of the room, and the space where the kitchen merged into the sitting-room was used for dining, which was handy in some ways but awkward in others, for guests sitting at the table could see what kind of chaos your kitchen was in.
The nicest thing about the apartment was the screened porch which led off the sitting-room. It had a tiled floor and cushioned window seats, and potted plants grew there with an ease which would have delighted Aunt Josephine.
The apartments were in great red-brick blocks set up the side of a hill, with a sandy playground in the middle, which screamed all day long with the children who were too young to go to school. At the side of the apartment buildings ran a new road where the residents fought for a place to park their cars at night, and opposite was an expanse of raw earth, where the ground had been cleared for new houses.
Christine’s windows faced this clay desert on one side and the playground and the back of another apartment block on the other. There was nothing beautiful to look at, and nothing beautiful to listen to. The playground resounded with children’s shrieks, and the occasional scream from a window flung up by an exasperated mother. The apartment walls were thin, and all day and most of the night babies cried and radios clamoured and men and women argued, or gave parties, or knocked on things with hammers.
It was not a very nice place to live. Christine longed for a house, but Vinson said they could not afford it yet, and this was quite a good address for a naval officer to live at. Why, there was even a captain living two floors below them. That made it all right.
The Navy had to be at work by eight o’clock, which seemed to Christine unnecessary. Other wives told her that their husbands were seldom in the office on time, since they did not have to report in until eight-thirty, but Vinson was never late. He left the apartment punctually at seven-thirty, and it seemed a very long day until he came home. Other husbands left their offices at four-thirty, but Vinson often stayed late to finish some work, and she might not see him until after seven. Sometimes he brought work home, or read naval manuals for long hours after supper. He was very conscientious. One day he brought home a dictaphone and put it by his bed in case he had an idea in the night about his work. Christine was sometimes tempted to say rude things into it, but she refrained. She was a good wife, and she would help him to be made a captain, if that was what he wanted.
Christine got up when Vinson did and gave him his breakfast and kissed him good-bye by the front door. She determined that she would kiss him good-bye until the end of their days together. When you did not kiss your husband good-bye in the morning and hullo in the evening it was the end of a proper marriage. It happened to a lot of people, but how exactly did it come about? Did the kisses become cooler and more perfunctory until gradually they faded away to nothing? Or was there one terrible day when you had quarrelled and you did not kiss him good-bye, and the quarrel was still with you in the evening, and he just unlocked the door and flung down his cap and you did not get up to greet him, and that set the pattern for all the days to come, long after the quarrel was over?
Sometimes, after Vinson left in the morning, Christine went back to bed with the paper, which was about twenty times the size of the one she used to read in London. She could never find her way about the Was
hington newspapers, which were riddled with stories of political corruption, the names of victims of air disasters and road accidents, and society news about gay little parties given by women with German-Jewish names.
When she had had her bath and set her hair, which she could not pin up at night now that she was married, she cleaned up the kitchen and washed the supper dishes from the night before. Vinson would never let her do the dishes at night, although she always itched to get out to the kitchen after supper. He wanted her to sit with him, although he usually worked or read the paper or listened to the radio and did not talk to her very much. It sometimes seemed as if they had exhausted nearly everything they had to say to each other at supper.
In England, before they were married, there had always been so much to talk about. Vinson had been interested in what she had to tell him about her day at the shop, and there was so much to discover about each other’s past lives. But now that they had told nearly everything about themselves that they intended to tell, what was left? Sometimes there seemed to be a great vacuum between them, a no-man’s-land across which they could not reach each other. Christine would look up from her book or her sewing to where Vinson sat dangling a house shoe from his toe, and realize in a moment of panic that she was married to him and that he was a stranger.
She wondered what other married couples talked about when they were alone. Gossip, probably, about people they both knew, but Vinson did not care for gossip. He had definite ideas about people. He either liked them and they could do no wrong, or he did not like them and he could not hear any good about them. That was that, and he was not interested in the fascinating details of their lives.
Marriage was supposed to bring you close, but sometimes, as you got to know a person better, it drove you farther apart. When you did not know someone very well, irritating habits and small disagreements were passed over in the excitement of discovering the things you did have in common. But when you were sealed within the walls of marriage for ever, small inadequacies, even tiny differences of mood, could grow out of proportion and push you both as far back into yourselves as if you had a real quarrel.
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