When she got Timmy out of the clutches of the authorities and had coped with customs and red caps, marvelling at her assured Americanized self who was so different from the bewildered English self arriving in New York last time, Christine took a taxi to Pennsylvania station and travelled the long train ride to Washington.
When the taxi-driver who brought her out to Arlington had carried in her bags for her and driven away, Christine turned on the heating plant in the cellar and began to go all round the house taking the dust-sheets off the furniture. There was no point in doing that straight away, but she felt that she had to occupy herself with something to try and take away the dead disappointed feeling of her homecoming.
The little house was cold, and at the same time stuffy with disuse. It was very quiet. Still wearing her coat, Christine sat down on the stairs and thought about Tommie. He had fallen in love with her. He had loved her so much that he did not care whether she was married, nor whether she was honest enough to say if she loved him. She had been romantic and exciting to him. Now she was just any tired woman in her own home, taking off dust-sheets and waiting for the radiators to warm up, and she was not exciting to anybody, least of all to herself.
The bell rang. Mrs Meenehan was celebrating Christine’s home-coming by a ceremonious visit to the front door instead of one of her everyday appearances at the kitchen window.
‘I’ve got all your mail here,’ she said, when she had got over the first exclamations of welcome. ‘I got the mailman to give everything to me.’
‘Oh, you needn’t have –’
‘It was no bother, Catherine honey. I knew you’d want me to be in charge while you were away, and there’s not a day passed but I’ve been round the house checking up. You ask Daddy.’
Christine took the letters, wondering how many of them Mrs Meenehan had steamed open and stuck down again.
‘No, I won’t come inside,’ Mrs Meenehan said, making Christine feel that she should have asked her in. ‘I’m just dying to hear about your trip and how you found poor old England, but you look plenty tired right now. We’ll have a good long gabfest tomorrow. And where’s the Commander? I didn’t see him get out of the taxi with you.’
‘He’s staying in Panama a bit longer,’ Christine said. ‘I expect there’s a letter from him here about it. Oh yes, here it is. Excuse me. I must read it straight away.’ She began to shut the door imperceptibly, so that Mrs Meenehan, who was standing on the sill, might be pushed gently outside without knowing it.
Timmy was on the lawn barking at the strangeness of everything. ‘I brought my dog back with me,’ Christine said, when Mrs Meenehan was safely outside and the door was shut, too far for her to step in again and start talking about the dog.
‘Oh yes, I know,’ said Mrs Meenehan. ‘I saw him. We’ve already made friends.’ You never could tell her anything new.
The telephone rang while Christine was reading Vinson’s letter. ‘Hullo?’ She answered it abstractedly, still reading. ‘Oh … Tommie. Tommie, you promised you wouldn’t ring up. Vin isn’t here yet as a matter of fact, but if he had been –’
‘Well, he isn’t, so why worry? When’s he coming back?’
‘I’m just reading his letter. Let’s see…. About two weeks, he says.’
‘I see.’ The silence on the wire between them was just as if they had looked at each other.
Every day Christine told herself that she would not see Tommie any more, and every day she told him that, but it made no more difference than it had on the ship. She knew that she must be careful in Washington, where the slightest hint of scandal would fly round the Navy wives like a torch set to oilsoaked stubble, but Tommie’s rashness was infectious, and time and again she found herself doing the things that she knew were dangerous.
She knew that she should not visit the house where he was living alone, but she could not stop herself going there. He gave her a key, and she was waiting for him every evening when he came back from the college. It was late when she drove herself home. As she turned in at her driveway she would see the light go off in the bedroom where Mrs Meenehan had been staying awake to hear what time the car came back.
One night Christine did not go home at all, and after that she stayed every night with Tommie. It did not seem to matter any more. Nothing mattered, except the diminishing time that was left to them.
Tommie had taken over the house vacated by the American Professor who had taken his place at Nottingham. The house was in Georgetown, the old part of Washington through which Vinson had driven Christine when she first arrived, and wished that he could live at such a good address.
Christine thought what a waste it was that Vinson could never know that she had been living in Georgetown. Under other circumstances he would have been so impressed.
There was nothing impressive, however, about the tiny redbrick house whose flat roof was scraped eerily by the fingers of trees on a windy night. It was the thinnest house Christine had ever seen. It stood alone, looking like a slice cut out of a terrace, with a junk yard on one side and a short alley of consciously ‘cute’ little houses converted from slave quarters on the other. Because it stood on a slight slope it seemed to tilt a little, teetering in its thinness, as if it would one day fall across the entrance of the alley and imprison the embassy girls and colonels’ widows who lived in the cute little houses.
Inside the thin house the hall was narrow, the living-room was too narrow to hold a sofa, the kitchen was so narrow that you could reach the stove, the table, the shelves, the sink without moving your feet, and the bedroom upstairs was not much bigger than the bathroom. French windows only wide enough for one person to walk through at a time led from the living-room to the neglected garden, which was littered with odds and ends thrown over by the negroes in the junk yard. The back of the house looked even narrower than the front, because there was a playground across the street instead of buildings, and so the house stood out insecurely against the winter sky, like those emaciated villas that stand about bleakly on the Belgian coast.
It was a queer, inconvenient house with doors that opened the wrong way and some windows that would not open at all, very different from Christine’s neat, scientifically designed home in Arlington. Cramped and awkward and old, the Georgetown house was romantic. At night, when the cars had stopped going by, it was so quiet that you might have been in the country, except when the sirens of ambulances or fire-engines rushed through the narrow streets with their wail of calamity.
The little red house seemed to have been made for a secret love. You could not imagine anyone quite ordinary living there, running the vacuum cleaner every morning, spraying moth powder in the cupboards, reckoning up accounts, entertaining dull guests, or stepping sedately out of the white front door and down the three brick steps to go to a dull party. Christine felt that there must have been lovers there who had left their enchantment imprisoned between the narrow walls, just as she and Tommie would leave some of theirs when they had gone.
When they had gone….
Christine tried not to think about what would happen to her when her foolish romance was over. She would be on the downhill slope of thirty-five, her last clutch at youth irretrievably loosed on the day when Vinson came back and woke her from her dream to travel the ‘long and straight and dusty’ road with him. When the future came to trouble her she shut her mind to it, as a sleeper disturbed from a beautiful dream pulls the sheets over his head and shuts his eyes tightly to fight his way back into sleep again before the dream can escape.
Being in Washington with Tommie was like seeing America all over again, in quite a new way. When Vinson had first introduced her to his country he had been so anxious that she should like it, so watchful of her reactions that it had sometimes been a strain to summon enough enthusiasm and to say the right things to please him. But Tommie brought enough enthusiasm for them both, and it was easy to discover in his happy company just how many things she enjoyed about America.
Unlike s
ome of the British who go to America with their backs up and spend their time telling people how much better things are done in England, Tommie had come over with an expectant heart, and he plunged into the life of America looking for enjoyment like an eager dog going after a stick.
With him, Christine went to all the places where she had never been with Vinson. Vinson had taken her sightseeing in the Capitol and the Monument and the memorials and museums and art galleries. He had taken her to Mount Vernon and to the home of Robert E. Lee. He had taken her to the Army and Navy Club among the old generals’ and admirals’ widows, and to reputable restaurants where you knew what kind of food you would get.
Tommie took her to dark Italian restaurants where the proprietor came and sat talking politics through a toothpick at your table, and you never knew what was in the minestrone. He took her to underground bars where all the men kept their hats on – including once the barman – and to a fish restaurant on the waterfront where you sat at a long table and joked with strangers over the fried shrimps, and out to a ‘Hot Shoppe’ where you could sit in your car while a Philippino waiter skipped out to you through the rain with a tray of food.
Christine had been wanting to go to one of these drive-in restaurants ever since she came to America, but Vinson liked to get his knees under a table when he ate. He never let her play jukeboxes, but Tommie wanted to play the jukebox wherever he found one. They would sit for hours in a waffle shop or a hamburger joint or a soda fountain putting nickels in the slot and being in love, while the over-amplified music and the chatter of teenagers lapped them round with the unsubtle noises of America.
Tommie said that some of the boys at the college snickered at him because he was English, so he began conscientiously to pepper his speech with what he thought were native expressions. He had a very English voice, unstressed, with the consonants casually slurred, so that words like ‘gee’ and ‘sure’ and ‘you’re telling me’ sounded very odd when he brought them carefully out. It made him happy, however, to think that he was talking American, and Americans themselves, always quick to be flattered by imitation, did not laugh when he said to them: ‘Look here – er – bud. I surely would be happy to have you have me introduce you to Mrs Gaegler.’
He said that at a cocktail party given by one of the college professors, to which he took Christine. She knew that she should not risk going with him, but she and Tommie were at that stage where caution has no meaning and the egotism of love sees love itself as a talisman against mishap. They had so little time left together. If Tommie must go to the party she could not let him go alone.
He stayed by her side all the time instead of going away and talking to the other men he knew, as Vinson would have done. They behaved very circumspectly, but Christine wondered if people could tell they were in love by looking at them. Once when Tommie touched her bare arm she thought that if she had been someone else watching them she would have known at once.
Tommie practised his American. When they were introduced to other guests, Christine said: ‘How do you do?’, which she had not given up even after nine months in America, but Tommie said: ‘Glad to know you’, or ‘I certainly am happy to meet you’, and repeated people’s names, just like an old hand.
However, when a surly-looking man arrived not quite sober from another cocktail party and Tommie brought out his: ‘Happy to meet you’, the man stuck out his jaw as if he were spoiling for a fight, and said: ‘Why should you be? You’ve never seen me before, and you’re never going to see me again. I’m leaving this goddamn town in two hours for Chicago. Why should you be happy to meet me?’
‘Well, I don’t know – dash it, my dear chap,’ stammered Tommie, surprised into being very English. ‘Bit of a setback,’ he said, as the man stumbled away to the bar. ‘I’ll have to rewrite my lines. Perhaps I – Gosh, darling, look. There’s a man wearing my regimental tie. Let’s go and talk to him and be English for a bit.’
‘Tommie, it doesn’t mean that he –’ Christine tried to detain him, but he was already half-way across the room, his limp more pronounced, as it always was when he had had a few drinks.
‘I see you were in my lot,’ Tommie said, holding out his hand.
‘How?’ said the man in the regimental tie. ‘How’s that again, sir?’
‘Your tie.’
The man’s baffled face broke into a beam. ‘Smooth, isn’t it? My wife bought it for me. The first one she’s bought I’ve been able to wear. Glad you like it.’
‘It’s a pattern I’ve grown fond of,’ Tommie said, leaning forward to examine the little label on the end of the tie, which said: ‘King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Genuine copy.’
Tommie wanted to see Christine’s home at Arlington. He said that he must be able to imagine her there after she had gone back. He added also that he wanted to know where to find her.
‘Oh, Tommie, don’t,’ she said. ‘Even if you’re joking. You know you promised that you wouldn’t try to see me after Vin gets back. I won’t go on with it. I can’t. You must leave me alone – please, darling, or I shan’t be able to get along. And something terrible might happen. Vin might shoot you, or shoot me, or anything. You don’t know what he’s like.’
‘Tell me,’ Tommie said. ‘Tell me more about the man Gaegler.’ He was always wanting to hear about Vinson. His curiosity about Christine’s husband was unnatural and almost morbid. Christine did not want to tell him anything. What she was doing to Vinson was bad enough without the added disloyalty of discussing him with her lover. Sometimes, when she felt a sudden panic about Vinson’s homecoming, she wanted desperately to tell Tommie everything, and to say to him with tears that he was all the things that Vinson was not; but she would not let herself.
‘Tell me more about how jealous he is,’ Tommie persisted. ‘Tell me about the time you went out with his brother.’
‘No. I wish I’d never said anything about that. I didn’t mean to. You’re so unfair, Tommie. You must make things worse this way. I won’t criticize Vin to you. I won’t, however much your male vanity wants me to. He’s my husband and I –’
‘The loyal wife,’ Tommie said, grinning. ‘A charming picture.’
‘That’s unfair too, but I suppose I deserve it. Please, Tommie, you must help me. I’ve got to get back to Vinson in three days. Don’t make it more difficult than it is already.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? I may have plans of my own.’
‘You promised! You promised me you’d stay away. Tommie, you must. It’s the only thing to do.’
‘That’s right,’ he said with his baffling look, at the same time innocent and bold. ‘I promised, didn’t I?’
‘I don’t trust you,’ Christine said in a small voice.
‘Why not?’ He opened his eyes very wide. ‘I’ve promised. So let me come and see your house, my darling. If you’re going back to get that dress for tonight, I’ll come with you. I must know everything about you, don’t you understand? How you’ve got your kitchen arranged, what your dressing-table is like, how the light will strike your face when you open the door in the morning to let Timmy out.’
Christine got up. ‘Let’s go now then,’ she said. She had known all along that she would take him. She had never been able to refuse him anything he wanted, and they only had three more days together.
It was Sunday. With any luck, the Meenehans would be in their rumpus room with the central heating and the television and Daddy’s cigar all going full blast. Christine stopped the car at the bottom of the lawn. If she did not take it into the driveway, perhaps Mrs Meenehan would not hear them arrive.
While she was in her bedroom getting her dress and Tommie was roaming round the house with a small smile on his face, Timmy, who had not lived in the house long enough to trust it, began to bark his misgivings on the lawn. Christine leaned out of the window and tried to shout at him in a whisper. He waved his plumed tail and went on barking.
‘Darling!’ Tommie called up the stairs. ‘There’s a woman wit
h a face like a sweet potato pounding on the kitchen window. What do I do?’
‘Nothing. I’ll come down. And don’t call me darling, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I heard the doggie bark,’ Mrs Meenehan said, when Christine opened the back door, ‘so I came right over to bring you back for some coffee and cake. I have a very dear friend with me I want to have you know.’
‘I haven’t got very long,’ Christine said. ‘I just came home to get a dress and then I have to go straight back to the friends I’m staying with.’
‘You come right along with me now.’ If Mrs Meenehan issued an invitation, there was no getting out of it.
‘I have someone with me, though,’ Christine said, for Tommie was visible in the hall, inspecting Vinson’s ship prints. ‘My cousin – a cousin of mine from England. He happened to come to Washington for a few days on business. Wasn’t that lucky?’ She wondered if her voice sounded as wild and unnatural as it felt.
‘Bring him along. Hi there, Mr –’
‘Burns,’ said Tommie, coming into the kitchen.
‘So you’re Catherine’s cousin. My, my. Well, I’m sure the Commander will be pleased to hear she had someone to look after her while he’s away. These Navy men. Always here and there. I know what it is. When Daddy and I had command of the Walrus he was never home for but a few days at a time.’
The Meenehans’ rumpus room was in semi-darkness, with a variety show on the screen, Mr Meenehan in slippers and a lumber jacket, and Mrs Meenehan’s friend, very fat, wedged into an upright canvas chair, head on to the television set.
‘I certainly am happy to meet you,’ she told Christine. ‘Tessie here has told me so many antidotes about you.’ She was also happy to meet Tommie, and he said that he was happy to meet her, and asked her where she came from, which he had already discovered was a thing Americans greatly liked to be asked.
‘Tuscarawas County, Ohio,’ Mrs Grady said with a proud gleam in her protruding eyes. Christine and Tommie murmured unconvincingly – it was always hard to think of a suitable response when someone had told you their home town – and sat down in front of the television set, which was the only place where there were chairs.
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