No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Fine, fine,’ said Aubrey. ‘You do that. I’ll be following you myself as soon as I’m through with all this.’

  But how could he ever be through? He had a young Chinese boy at his desk now. People were gradually being taken off the top of the line, but more people were coming in all the time, all races, all shapes, all accents. Christine was now half-way up the line. If she could hold out, they must finally get to her and she could get the extension to her visa and go home and Vinson would not know that she had ever been an undesirable alien without a permit.

  The door burst open and a round, rosy woman with her hair curled like a poodle and odd bits of colourful clothing hung about her pranced in with an exuberance that disturbed the turgid waters of the office like a flung stone.

  ‘Hi there!’ she greeted Aubrey and Miss Hattie.

  Miss Hattie beamed and Aubrey answered: ‘How’s it coming, Mrs D.?’ and took new life from her vitality. They were pleased to see her. She was evidently the life and soul of the party, the office Merry Andrew, who was everybody’s friend. She threw a jolly glance round the room, put a lot of parcels and a loaf of bread down on the desk which said: INFORMATION, and began, chuckling, to read a note that somebody had left there for her. Perhaps it was Mr Pierrepont. Perhaps he was secretly in love with Mrs D., but dared not Speak, so he had written her a love-letter and escaped to lunch before she came back.

  Christine looked at her watch. It was long after her usual lunch-time. Her doctor had told her to eat at regular hours. Perhaps she felt faint because she was hungry. Conscious of the gaze of the other people waiting in the line, she got up and went over to Mrs D.’s desk.

  ‘I’ve been waiting such a long time,’ she said diffidently. ‘Do you think I might get attended to soon? I really am in rather a hurry.’

  It was an innocent enough remark, but Mrs D.’s eyebrows shot up as if at an indecency.

  ‘Just a moment, please,’ she said. ‘I’ve only just come in. I’ll see to you directly if you’ll just have a seat.’

  ‘I’ve been just having a seat for nearly two hours,’ Christine said. ‘I was only asking. After all, your desk does say Information.’

  Mrs D. did not think this was funny. She went to a cupboard at the back of the room and hung up her hat and jacket and began to rearrange her curls in the misted mirror on the wall. Aubrey finished with the Chinese boy and ambled over to inspect the trophies of her shopping expedition. Miss Hattie, drawn by the lure of parcels, left her Austrian confidante and went over to have a look too. They made a cosy little scene, examining and exclaiming, while the line of aliens waited listlessly against the wall like the debilitated inmates of a concentration camp waiting to go to the ovens.

  When Mrs D., revived with fresh powder and lipstick, went back to her desk, Christine went to her again to ask what the chances were of getting a visa before the winter set in.

  ‘All will be attended to in their turn,’ Mrs D. said cheerfully. ‘We can’t see everyone at once, you know. We’re very busy.’ She made the motions of fluffing up some papers on her desk, but after Christine had sat down she did nothing at all except twist her hair round her fingers, hum little tunes, and throw coquettish remarks across the room to Aubrey.

  The door opened and shut, opened and shut. People came and went. White people, yellow people, coloured people. One by one, at deadly intervals, the people in the line were seen by Miss Hattie or Aubrey, or sent about their business because they had the wrong forms. Christine was moving gradually towards the top. The atmosphere in the office was stifling. The heat was unbearable. The woman next to her in the tight scarf had begun to pick at her nails, and the man on the other side was seized with a fit of yawning which sent garlic out on the air every time he opened his mouth. Christine began to yawn too. Her eyes glazed over. She could not focus properly. Her head swam, and she had that terrible heavy feeling as if all the blood in her body was pooling together in the pit of her stomach.

  She managed to get up, and walked uncertainly over to Mrs D.’s desk. ‘Do you think I might have a glass of water?’ she asked. Her ears could hardly catch the sound of her own voice.

  ‘There is a water cooler in the corridor.’

  ‘I wonder – could you get it for me? I feel so queer–’

  Mrs D. gave her a penetrating glance which seemed to see right through Christine to the baby within, shrugged her shoulders, got to her feet as if it were a great effort and went to the door, sweeping a look from Christine to Aubrey and back again which seemed to say: ‘Whatever next? Whatever will they ask of us next?’

  Christine leaned against the desk. She could not get back to her chair. She looked at Aubrey, and as she looked the top of his bald head seemed to lift slightly and float from side to side. The walls of the room swayed and reeled. A mist like a rushing wind swept across her eyes. She thought she cried out, but the roaring in her ears drowned all sense or sound.

  When she came to she was lying on the floor surrounded by feet and bending bodies and shrill foreign cries of alarm. It was the most stirring thing that had ever happened in that office. Everybody was giving useless advice. Aubrey was wringing his hands and Miss Hattie was letting out little peeps of dismay, but Mrs D. came back with a paper cup of iced water and set the whole scene to rights.

  She pushed back the crowd, helped Christine to her feet and lugged her into Elwood’s cubicle. Her blouse smelled hot and unpleasing and her arms were fat and squashy, but she was a solid help and Christine clung to her until she was lowered into a chair with a torn leather seat in the corner of Elwood’s little den. Like a policeman, Mrs D. stopped the rabble from coming in after her and got them back in order to their places against the wall. Christine leaned back and closed her eyes. She had never felt so weak in her life.

  ‘What shall we do with her?’ she heard Aubrey whisper.

  ‘We must get someone to take her away,’ said Mrs D. as if Christine were a corpse or a barrel of garbage.

  ‘Can we telephone someone for you?’ Her voice was suddenly close. Christine opened her eyes. Mrs D. was bending over her. ‘My husband …’ She forced herself to think of Vinson’s office number. Aubrey, chivalrous to the last and anxious to play some active role in the drama, took over the arduous job of telephoning Vinson. Christine heard him at his desk giving the most hair-raising account of what had happened to her: ‘Your wife has been taken ill…. I think you should come at once….’

  Poor Vin. He would be in a terrible state, would drive much too fast, perhaps have an accident and never get there. Christine closed her eyes so that she could not see the people who sat by the wall staring curiously in at her, and resigned herself to the fancy that Vinson would not come.

  She drifted away almost into a faint again. It seemed an eternity, or only a moment of time, until Vinson arrived. As Christine expected, he was highly perturbed. When he had fussed over her for a moment he went out of the cubicle and began to outrage the dignity of the Immigration Office by throwing questions and orders about as if he were on a quarterdeck. Christine was glad that he was in uniform. People did not pay so much attention to him when he was in ordinary clothes. Aubrey was inclined to be huffy with him, but Mrs D. was subdued and Miss Hattie all of a twitter and the line of concentration camp inmates frankly impressed. Christine felt secure and blissfully dependent. Vinson was going to take her home. She had someone to look after her now.

  She persuaded Vinson that she was not dying and did not need an ambulance. Mrs D. found her handbag and patted her on the shoulder, with a nod that said: ‘We women know what trouble is’, and Vinson helped her to her feet and supported her to the door. As they went out she heard Aubrey say: ‘And now perhaps I’ll get a chance to go to lunch.’

  Christine felt much better, but Vinson insisted on almost carrying her along the corridor, so that she could hardly keep her feet on the ground. The people going in and out of the offices stared. The lift man stared. The loungers in the doorway stared, but at last they were in
the car and going home. When Christine started to tell Vinson what had happened, he said: ‘Don’t try to talk now. Just rest’, and would not let her say anything.

  When they reached home he took her upstairs and undressed her and put her to bed. He sat down on the bed and stroked her hair.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the visa?’ he asked very kindly. ‘I ought to be shot for being so selfish about the car this morning. I’d have gone there with you if I’d known. Why didn’t you tell me, darling?’

  ‘Well –’ Christine looked down and fingered the sheet. ‘I’d forgotten to look at the visa when you asked me, and when I did it had expired ages ago, and I was afraid you’d be cross about it.’

  He looked distressed. His black brows came together and his flecked, unblinking eyes stared at her with concern. ‘Am I such an ogre? I thought you always told me everything. You know you promised you would.’

  That was true. She had promised, the day after they were married, when they were talking very solemnly. She thought of all the things she had not told him since then. Times when she had wanted him to make love to her, and had been too shy or too proud to say so. Times when she had been bored. Days and nights when America was too big, and she had been homesick for England. Moments when she thought of Jerry, and felt guilty for trying to compare two different kind of love.

  How could one tell a husband those things? They would not help a marriage.

  ‘You do tell me everything, don’t you?’ Vinson persisted, his face close to hers. ‘You must, you know.’

  ‘Of course I do.’ She looked away. ‘I was just silly about the visa. I’m sorry, Vin.’

  ‘Are you afraid of me?’

  ‘No.’

  He kissed her. He was sweet and tender and she felt very close to him. It was worth fainting in the Immigration Office to bring them together in one of these brief idylls when she felt that marriage to him was all she wanted in the world.

  She would have to faint again some day.

  Chapter Six

  She did not faint again. August was beginning to cool into September, and with the gradual lifting of the sticky Washington heat Christine felt very well. She was well enough to receive with equanimity the news that Vinson’s mother had decided that she was able to face the trip to Washington, and was coming to stay with them for two weeks.

  Christine took the news better than Vinson did. When he began to read his mother’s letter, he said: ‘Oh my God’, although he hastily amended it to: ‘Well, isn’t that fine? Mother’s coming east to see us.’

  He seemed uneasy, but Christine was rather pleased. She was naturally curious to see her mother-in-law, and eager to make friends with her if possible. Vinson did not often speak about her, and when he did it was with no very great enthusiasm. Brought up in a family who loved and accepted each other in spite of irritations and disputes, Christine could not understand anyone not wanting to see his mother.

  Vinson did not actually say that he did not want to see her. He was too conventionally well-mannered for that. Even to Christine he did not always say what was in his mind when it was something that had no right to be there. It was obviously with an effort, however, that he said at intervals: ‘It will be nice when Mother comes. I’m sure you and she will get on.’ Sometimes, when they were planning something for the near future, he said: ‘Oh, but of course that will be when Mother’s here’, and had to brighten his tone deliberately in the middle of the sentence which he had started with inadvertent gloom.

  When Christine saw Mrs Gaegler senior she understood Vinson’s unease a little better. Mrs Gaegler had said that she would arrive on a Sunday morning, but instead she arrived early on the Saturday evening when Christine and Vinson were changing to go to a cocktail party at Admiral and Mrs Hamer’s. That was only the first of many inconvenient things she did. The next was that she brought with her a horrid little dog called Honeychile. It was a chihuahua, a tiny creature like a spider, with spindling legs, eyes like gooseberries, a rat tail, a skull too narrow to house a brain and a shrieking yap that rent the nerves. It was Mrs Gaegler’s pride and joy, the solace of her life since her husband and children had abandoned her to live alone in Kaloomis, Kansas.

  That was the way she put it. ‘I’ve been abandoned by my family,’ she would say, with the false half-laugh of self-pity. She classed her children’s defection with her husband’s, although he had gone off with a girl from a drugstore, while all they had done was to go into the Army or the Navy or get married.

  The obscene little dog ran into the house before her and nipped Christine on the ankle as soon as it saw her. Vinson raised a foot at it, and it nipped at him too and fell into a paroxysm of frustrated yapping because its futile teeth could not get through his trousers.

  ‘Poor little Honeychile!’ People with unpleasing dogs always come in just in time to catch you if you raise a hand or foot to them. ‘Vinson, I’m surprised at you!’ Mrs Gaegler cried, before she had even said hullo to her son. She bent down and picked up the dog, which went on yapping in her arms as a background to her talk. Looking back afterwards on her visit, it seemed to Christine that all her mother-in-law’s conversation had been to the accompaniment of Honeychile’s shrill yapping.

  There was plenty of it - both the yapping and the conversation. Mrs Gaegler talked all the time as if it were a bodily necessity, like breathing. She could not sit silent in a room for longer than she would have been able to hold her breath without choking. Words rattled from her in a jarring Middle West twang from the moment she woke in the morning to the moment when she had taken her sleeping-tablets and retired for the night with the threat that she would not sleep; and the words were mostly about herself.

  She was one of those very ordinary people who consider themselves unique. As a nonpareil, Mrs Gaegler was of vast interest to herself, if to no one else, and the ills and discomforts of her person were her religion. She began to complain the moment she arrived, standing in the hall in her spike heels and extraordinary little pagoda hat, with the dog barking, and Christine in her dressing-gown, and Vinson in his shirt-sleeves with his tie hanging round his open collar.

  Mrs Gaegler was an undersized, short-legged woman, who would have been fat if she had not been held in and pushed up at all the salient points. She wore her clothes well and went in for conspicuous accessories like an outsize handbag in the shape of a fishing creel, and a necklace made of small glass balls in each of which was suspended an imitation goldfish. The gold bracelet flopping at her wrist spelled out the letters I L-O-V-E Y-O-U. If Vinson’s father had given it to her, it was hard to believe that she would still wear it after he had transferred his love to the girl from the drugstore. Perhaps she had bought it for herself.

  In her youth she must often have been called ‘Babyface’, and she was trying to perpetuate the attribute into middle-age. Her round face was made up very pink and white, the bow of her lips was painted on outside the natural edge, her eyebrows repeated the round line of her china eyes, and her blue-grey hair was brushed back in a fluff of little curls. Christine had to admit that she did not really look sixty, although there were times when she was complaining when she could look a disgruntled eighty.

  Almost before she had greeted Christine and flicked her round eye up and down to sum up her daughter-in-law, she began to tell them about the trip: how tired she was, and how terrible the hotels had been, and how a thousand miles was much too far to drive – as if it were Washington’s fault for being so far away from Kansas.

  ‘Matt drives too fast, you know,’ she grumbled. ‘He always has. I kept telling him and telling him to watch his speed, and finally he side-swiped a truck back there in Zanesville, Ohio, and put a scratch on the car, which just about makes me mad, because I’ve always been so careful about the paintwork on that automobile.’

  Matt was her other son, Vinson’s younger brother, who was a captain in the Army. He was on leave now and had driven his mother to Washington, where he was going to stay with
an old college friend while she visited Vinson and Christine.

  He came in with his mother’s bags, smiling broadly. His face looked as if he were more at home with a grin on it than anything else. He was taller than Vinson and more burly, with a wider, larger-featured face. Although they were both dark, they did not look at all alike. They greeted each other with a handshake and a slap across the shoulders, but you would not have thought that they were brothers who had not met for over a year. Christine sensed a certain restraint between them; not quite an animosity, but a certain caution on Vinson’s part, as if he were in the habit of expecting his brother to get above himself, and a half-mocking watchfulness from Matthew, as if he had never quite made up his mind whether Vinson was a joke or not.

  When Vinson introduced him to Christine, Matthew looked at her contemplatively for a moment with a spreading smile, then put down the suitcases, took a deliberate stride and a firm hold on her arms and kissed her, a little too near the mouth. Christine glanced at Vinson and saw that he did not like it.

  Matthew grinned. ‘All right, all right, Mother,’ he said, for Mrs Gaegler was hopping about among her many bags like a schoolteacher trying to count a picnic party. ‘I brought everything in. Yes, your cosmetic bag’s there. You don’t have to fuss, toots.’

  ‘It appears we’ve come a day too early, Matt,’ she said, opening her eyes very wide, while Vinson and Christine murmured that it did not matter at all. ‘Vinson and this lovely girl – isn’t-she just a darling person? I knew she would be – are just off to a party, so of course there’s nothing for us but to put on our party dresses and go along with them.’

  ‘That would be wonderful, Mother,’ Vinson said awkwardly, ‘but I don’t know whether the Admiral –’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ his mother said. ‘I’m not afraid of admirals. I can get along with anyone,’ she told Christine, ‘because I’m so interested in people. I’ve studied psychology, you see, so I know what makes everyone tick.’ Christine smiled and tried to receive this information well. She was determined to like her motherin-law, and to be liked.