Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

by Diana Athill

  They were embarrassed for the rest of the night. They found friends to be with and talked and danced with other people. Unwilling to admit the ball ruined they did the trad- itional thing and danced until breakfast-time, but when that came they were too tired to speak. Slowly he walked her home in the unkind light, gently he kissed her under a red may tree, and they said goodbye.

  ‘Till next term,’ she said. ‘Darling, till next term . . .’

  So the twelve-week separation began and she thought of little else, day after day, night after night, but the decision.

  She had made it at once, of course, even before they parted, but she did not tell him so in her letters. She imagined him in suspense and it excited her. And although she had made the decision, she had to grow accustomed to it.

  Only one thing about it did not worry her, and that was what would happen when at last she was there, in Stephen’s bed. She had been dismayed by the physical realities of lovemaking when she had first learnt of them, at the age of eleven, but the dismay had soon worn off and since then she had seen every step nearer them as something valuable achieved. She was convinced that it could only be a matter of rapture. It was, in her imagination, the warmth, taste, dizziness of their longest kisses carried on and on to an ill-defined but complete fulfilment. That was all right.

  The things which worried her were the new relationship of deceit she would be entering with her parents and the world, the completeness of her own committal (though that inspired awe rather than anxiety), the possibility of preg- nancy, so alarming that it had to be thought of in one short word, the ‘risk’, and the practical details. The first three could not be contemplated closely because they were too big: they simply created an atmosphere of menace in which, over and over again, she pondered the fourth – how it was to be done.

  Now that she was going to be in her love’s bed she could see more clearly than ever how inexperienced he was. She could see him standing in front of a hotel receptionist, holding a pen, hesitating before writing ‘Mr and Mrs . . .’ His nervousness would be as horrible as her own. To manage it in his rooms, at the mercy of the fat landlord, would be impossible. How did one know which hotels did not mind? She could borrow Nora’s suitcase because Nora’s surname, like Stephen’s, began with M, but she could not be sure that she would not blush, or that he would not, and if the recep- tionist said, ‘Excuse me, but are you really married?’ or even looked it and said there were no rooms free. . . . People were doing it every day in hotels all over the world, it was not a serious difficulty, it could not be. Yet she worried about it all the time when she was not worrying about the chemist.

  Nora’s friend Helen, who lived in Eastbourne, had been to a doctor. There must have been many other doctors in Eastbourne besides her family’s, whereas Jane only had Dr Sims and to ask him for such a thing was unthinkable. She had discovered the name of something but she was not certain how to pronounce it, so that when she asked for it the chemist might not hear and then she would have to say it again, louder. Charing Cross Road was the place to go, because there they put them in the windows and on the counters even, you could point – but on her way back at the end of the vacation she would only just have time enough to make her connection and Charing Cross Road was in the wrong direction.

  For twelve weeks these anxieties had buzzed like mos- quitoes, teasing at the decision, giving her the circles under her eyes and spoiling her appetite. The more formidable they became, the more certain she was that she would do it in spite of them. The decision was harder than she had expected, involved more than the general principle of the thing which, though frightening, was simple. She was suffering for it, and the more she suffered the greater became her exaltation. When the new term began she would go to Stephen (who would still be unsure of her), would go straight through the door into his arms – and at this point she would turn over in bed and hug her pillow, hearing the thump of her heart against the mattress.

  So although she talked idly to Nora as they lay together in a punt while golden leaves floated by on the oil-smooth water, the fever inside her was quite out of harmony with the October afternoon.

  The next morning she did no work and ate no food. She drank black coffee and walked round the town, sometimes making a violent gesture, banging down a cup or stopping abruptly in the street at a sudden realisation of the slowness of time, at the relentless fact that the minutes and hours ahead of her could not be jumped or telescoped, that she could not run to Stephen through time as she could run through space. She wanted to do everything fast, fast; but instead forced herself to do it slowly. When the time came she changed slowly, brushed her hair slowly, went slowly out to begin the last of the ritual walks to the square, for surely in the future they would be different. ‘My love,’ she said to herself as she walked along. ‘My love, my love, my love.’ A white puppy was sitting in front of the junk shop. It came towards her, wriggling its whole body in an effort to wag its tail, and she bent down to greet it. She picked it up and kissed it between its ears. ‘Oh puppy,’ she said aloud. ‘Puppy my love, my dear dear love.’

  While she waited for the landlord to open the door she decided that she would, after all, make their greeting today the same as it had always been. She would follow the ritual in every way, so that outwardly the afternoon would be exactly the same as its forerunners, until the moment when the tea-tray was removed. She had suddenly gone beyond any thought of details. She had not been to a chemist, the land- lord would be in the house – but then he never did come upstairs after fetching the tray and they could lock the door. She could not wait another day for her love.

  Stephen was sunburnt. He took her hands and said, ‘It’s good to see you,’ and she thought his voice shook a little. They had much more to talk about than usual because the vacation lay behind them, full of his travels to be described, and Jane was delighted with herself for the liveliness and naturalness of her interest. He had two new records to play for her, several things to show and a present for her, an Austrian scarf with roses on it. Under their talk the tension screwed tighter and tighter, and she knew that he felt it as well as she did. Her exaltation grew.

  When the tray was removed she had reached a state which felt like calm. The evening had grown deep blue out- side the window and somewhere down by the river a bugler was practising a call: long, slow, immensely sad. For the rest of my life, she thought, whenever I hear a bugle in the distance, I shall be here. She got up and went directly to the sofa with no excuse. Stephen, as directly, came to join her.

  He spoke first.

  ‘Jane,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen. I don’t think I’ve thought of anything but us for the whole three months.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said softly.

  ‘I’ve thought and I’ve thought, and it’s frightfully difficult . . . I don’t know how to put it, but what I think is . . .’

  She had gone cold already. ‘Stephen!’ she said sharply.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jane, if we do anything silly now – well, we’ve both got a lot of work to do, and anyway I hadn’t realised how awfully difficult it would be, hotels and things, and then there’s the risk. I honestly think we ought not to be silly. Jane?’

  ‘Do you mean that we shouldn’t sleep together?’ She felt astonishment, very dimly at the back of her mind, that her voice should be so steady.

  ‘What I mean is that I think perhaps we shouldn’t see each other like this any more, because look what a state we get in.’

  ‘Not see each other at all?’ Her voice was not so good this time and the breath she drew sounded almost like a sob.

  ‘Oh, we can see each other, there’s no need to be theatrical about it. But less. Not alone so much.’

  It’s not like being hit on the head, she thought. It’s like being in the middle of a great black cloud. She stood up. She was a
lmost unconscious, and knew that while it lasted she must get away. She heard herself saying very precisely: ‘I hope you don’t mind but I think I must go home now.’

  ‘Jane!’ he said. ‘Don’t be miserable, please understand.’

  ‘Let’s leave it for now,’ she said in the same voice. ‘I’m not at all miserable.’

  ‘I’ll see you home,’ he said. She felt a flicker of hope but it was instantly worse than none because she knew it to be in herself, not in the situation. She had no strength to tell him she would rather go alone.

  In absolute silence they went down the stairs, through the square and past the baker’s, the fishmonger’s and the junk shop. At the corner where the street joined the main road she realised that she would not stay numb much longer. ‘Don’t come any further,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to.’

  ‘Well, if you’re all right. Look, I’ll telephone soon. I’ll telephone before the end of the week.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  Crossing the road she looked neither to right nor left. She held onto herself for a minute or two once she was over it, staring straight ahead and walking fast, as though marching, and then she remembered his voice saying ‘hotels and things’ and she began to sob. She still walked steadily, but the sobs grew louder and more uncontrollable and when she was in the quiet road leading to her college she began to run. She ran the whole length of the road, through the porter’s lodge, along the corridor to her room. It had no key. She grabbed her sponge-bag and dressing-gown and ran again, to the bathroom. She filled the bath, her sobs bursting louder under cover of the rushing taps, climbed into it and there she sat, weeping as she had not wept since she was a small child with her mouth square, her eyes screwed shut and tears streaming down and dripping from her chin into the bath water.

  Anything silly, she remembered. Work to do. ‘Oh God!’ she cried aloud among her sobs. In jagged thrusts out of the physical discomfort of her weeping came shame for him, shame for herself, incredulous anguish at what life was going to be. It couldn’t be like that. But it was already. And she had forgotten that crying was like being ill.

  She bent her head forward and the tears splashed more directly into the bath water. Opening her eyes a little (already they hardly would) she noticed this and it held her attention for a moment. My tears are mingling with my bath water, she thought, and from some tiny sound spot in all the bruis- ing she watched them do it and was amused. I am amused by my tears, she thought. I’ll get over this one day. I’m only nineteen so I’ll probably get over it quite soon, and I’ll love someone else.

  It was as though she had been wrenched in two. Her present self was sobbing in the bath, in the middle of what must surely be destruction; the other, future self was watching. It ought to be a comfort that the watcher was there, capable of one day feeling detached about this, even of thinking it funny – but as that occurred to her Jane crushed her sponge to her mouth to prevent the sobs rising to a scream. ‘Oh no!’ she begged. ‘Promise that won’t ever happen. Whatever it may seem to you then, you must remember that now it is like this, that it couldn’t possibly be more terrible. Please, please promise that you will never laugh.’

  THE RETURN

  ‘Is bombs from mountain. Not good,’ said the man Christos, scraggy at the table over his plate of beans in oil, and wiped his fist across his mouth. ‘Bombs,’ he said, his ancient- mariner’s eye censorious on the two Englishwomen. They sat at the only other table outside the bar or, speaking more accurately, the shack standing as though built of driftwood on the edge of the sea. The women looked in wonder at the bombs, which – or who – were two youths in marigold-printed shirts hanging loose outside their trousers.

  These youths were walking slowly past a second time, having come from among olive trees as though with no purpose some five minutes earlier. Across the sea were the mountains of Albania under a rusty haze, so fierce and bare that who could say what violence lurked beyond them. Assassins lived there, it was common knowledge; let a storm blow you to the wrong side of the straits and out of that bony land assassins would spring as though from dragon’s teeth to shoot you dead if you so much as sneezed. So were these bombs assassins come across, or Communists or anarchists?

  ‘Scram!’ shouted Christos, officious, and the youths kicked pebbles and went away to sulk. Then he put down his knife and leant across the table to confide: ‘I not bomb, I gentleman.’

  At that the situation suddenly became smaller, the Englishwomen, Jan and Sarah, beginning to understand. Twice, they knew, Christos had been to America, and that was why he was a man of property, owning two boats. Bombs = bums. It was a let-down.

  ‘I take you in my boat?’ said Christos. ‘When you have eaten.’

  His boat lay on the water a few yards out, resting on its shadow which might have been carved from a gigantic emerald, while all about the unshadowed water was at this moment aquamarine, great nets of golden ripples for ever sinking through it to lie on the sand beneath. To glide in a boat, leave the bay and land on new beaches only guessed at from sweaty climbs to a nearby headland: this, thought Jan and Sarah, was what they longed for most.

  Other boats had been offered and declined. Declined because their owners, in spite of courtesy, had seemed too much moved by a rare chance: these two strange women wandering alone, carrying no burdens, sitting in public with bare arms, idle, foreign, smiling and – surely? – no better than they should be. But the women, either fastidious or not yet much saddened by the years or their circumstances, wanted from fishermen no more than friendly talk and some small knowledge of another kind of life. How pleasant they found the first meetings, and how tedious the subsequent disengagements from which it was sometimes hard to salvage friendliness.

  And here was Christos gulping his beans – gulping because how could he chew with only three teeth, two gold, one black? – who must be too old and too ugly to hope for love. This it was, more than his claim to be a gentleman, that decided Jan and Sarah to accept his offer. And besides, he had visited America. Many women he must have seen, on summer days, walking unguarded in bright colours, with bare arms and necks yet still respectable.

  They went and ate, returning to the bay in the drugged hour when which was vibration of the sun and which the creaking of cicadas was hard to tell. There, pulled almost to the beach, was Christos’s boat and in it Christos and a crew of one. ‘Spiro,’ Christos said, ‘my niece.’ Spiro shook hands and dumbly smiled, he knew no word of English, handsome in blue trousers and a white shirt open on a fine chest of hair.

  Rocking a little, the boat received them, the outboard motor was started with much ado, Christos shouting orders and Spiro splashing knee-deep in his smart trousers. Then out they moved on to waters deeper but no less still and the two Englishwomen began to dream. ‘Boat – barca,’ said Christos. ‘Sea – thalassa.’ Oh, thalassa! At that word the women fell silent, sinking each into her dream of the place they were in, letting her hand trail in the water and seeing it blue even in the palm of a hand.

  An hour later, here was a beach to which Christos would put in ‘for swim,’ he said. A narrow crescent of white sand cut out of a cliff so tall and smooth that a lizard could not have found a ledge to climb. This great rock wall on one hand and on the other the open sea deep under its blue- black surface; at either end groups of rocks lying where once they had tumbled. To these rocks they went to put on bathing- dresses, the men to one end, the women to the other.

  ‘Our feet,’ said Jan in a low voice, ‘might be the first that have ever trodden this sand.’

  ‘It is not likely,’ said Sarah, ‘but that is what it feels like.’

  Where cliff met water it was bare as elephant hide and blacker, but the water sucking down six inches showed it mossed with yellow-green and lower still, an arm’s length under water, it became a feathery garden vanishing down, down, down into another world. Peering downwards, t
he women floated and swam along this meeting of land and sea, so still and so enticing but troubling because of the thunder of that meeting which lay below the calm. Christos and Spiro, sailor-like, dabbled in the narrow shallows at the beach’s edge or searched for shells among the rocks.

  They came dripping out of the water together and in a row they sat to dry. ‘Good?’ asked Christos, and the women answered, ‘Very good.’ Then Christos turned to Spiro and spoke in Greek, giving orders, and the young man rose, went over to the boat where it lay at the end of a long rope looped round a stone, splashed out to it and came back carrying a picnic. This, wrapped in sacking, was a loaf of bread, a piece of goat’s-milk cheese and a bottle – a large bottle – of ouzo with four glasses. Oh, are we guests? thought the women, surprised because the manner in which Christos spoke his few words of American had led them to suppose that he, unlike his neighbours, would be hiring, not giving, his boat. Now the situation was a little less simple – but pleasanter, they thought. Because was not the islanders’ hospitality renowned, was not the size of the bottle customary? And there were Christos’s two gold teeth, now fixed in a crust, guarantees of decorum. So they held out their glasses with a good grace and emptied them with pleasure.

  Then Christos, swallowing the last of his crust, turned to Sarah, the younger of the women, and spoke these words:

  ‘You kiss me. She kiss Spiro.’

  In the long pause the boat could be heard knocking gently against a rock emerging from the water beside it.

  Having hesitated, the women laughed. They rose to their feet laughing and said: ‘Come, Christos, it is time to go. We must get dressed.’

  Christos answered: ‘You no kiss, we no go.’

  ‘Christos!’ said Sarah, remembering his boast. ‘You gentleman!’

  ‘No, no,’ said Christos and he grinned, a distressing sight. ‘I not gentleman now, I bomb.’