‘Well—poor you! But on the other hand, I suppose it makes you what you are: so real,’ he said.
The time passed: a week, ten days. After the first two or three, you felt no more hunger, the ceaseless rueful jokes about starvation were a game, really: with no temptation in the way of available food, you felt no desire for it. Jenina and William had long ago been promoted to salads in the dining-room: Elizabeth on her lemon and hot water had lost nearly a stone. You took things very slow—that was the secret of it all: the whole tempo of the place was relaxed and lethargic, no one bothered you, you never dressed up, there was nothing to get excited about. The visits to the Grazing Grounds were nowadays only pleasant interludes of chat. William took her into a near by town, now and again, for shopping (consisting largely of purchases of cosmetics, had he but known it: she had far outgrown Jenina’s store) and she bought a new suit to fit her new figure and they went to the flicks and to the local repertory theatre and had hysterics of muffled laughter in the back row. He now and again relented and included Jenina in their expeditions but the subject of The Nectarine was taboo. ‘On our last evening here,’ he had finally conceded, ‘I’ll hear you say your piece. Now shut up about it. I just don’t want to know.’
Jenina meanwhile was divided between blind absorption in her study of the play, and heart-rent and heartrending telephonings from poor Mr. Teddy Bear. ‘Oh, Mr. Bear, darling, of course I love you… Yes, well, nobody can say they’ll love anybody for ever, darling, can they? I mean how can one know…?’ And she would remember far too late that she had promised to ring him and there would be pleadings and arguments, ending in tears; and one night after an hour of muffled sobbing, she confessed it all. ‘I’m so scared, Mrs. Mop, I don’t know what to do. I did love him, well, I mean, I love him still, but I don’t seem to want to be in love, not that kind of love…’
‘That makes three of us,’ said Elizabeth; but her heart bled for poor, unhappy Mr. Teddy Bear, who alone knew that kind of love and must suffer for it.
‘And I don’t want to hurt him, it seems so awful, he seems so much bigger and better and—and grander than me, it seems so—well, wrong—that he should be hurt by a silly little girl like me, that he should be able to! But… Well, I know you don’t think I’m a very good actress and perhaps I’m not yet but I do feel somewhere inside me a sort of—well, a sort of storm of wanting to be, of believing that I can be. And I think the real truth is that I don’t want to—well, risk giving all that up for something that just anyone can have, like being in love.’
‘You are like the girl with the nectarine,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Who didn’t want to give her heart away.’
It had been arranged that they should go up to his big room in the front of the house, where there would be lots of space for Jenina to ‘do her piece’. ‘Though why I ever let myself in for it,’ said William, as they finished the grand dinner in the dining-room which would break them in for the advent of real food next day, ‘I do not know. All I want to do is talk to you.’
‘Our last evening,’ said Elizabeth.
He took her arm. ‘Well, that’s what I want to talk about. Come on—down to the copse. We’ve got an hour or more; let her sweat a bit.’
Oh—the long, elegant legs, leaping over that forbidden fence! She thought that the memory of them would cause her, as long as she should live, a little pang, a small, piercing sweetness. And now, in her new, svelte lightness, she could well have hopped after him: but she let him help her through, let him keep her hand in his as they walked together down to their secret place. But once there he dropped it, sat a little away from her perched on the log, staring down at his toes. He said at last: ‘Do you remember, Mrs. Mop, that you once told me—“one man only…”?’
‘It still stands,’ she said. ‘It will always: poor me!’
‘You’re utterly sure of that? You see,’ he said, ‘it’s so absolutely necessary that I shouldn’t—shouldn’t let myself fall in love.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You told me.’
‘So, if you and I… I mean, if at least one of us wasn’t utterly firm, utterly sure—’
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘I adore you. The things you do, the things you say, the way you look sometimes—they make my heart stand still. I think it always will, when I think of you. But I don’t love you. Is that what you want me to say?’
‘If only I could be sure,’ he said, ‘that that’s the way I’d feel about you.’
She said, but without cruelty: ‘In other words—is this an invitation to become one of your “amusements”?’
He lifted up her hand and kissed it, laid his cheek against it, kept it in his own. ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t let it be more. But then if you didn’t love me—in that sort of way I mean—would that matter? You’re sad and alone. I’m sad and—not alone. Understanding one another as we do—couldn’t there be some happiness at least for us here?—much more happiness than in one of my “amusements” I promise you. But just not too much.’
To be wanted! To be back again in circulation, to be attractive, self-confident again, to be desired as friend and lover by such a man as this: the very apotheosis of the desirable male. He insisted: ‘You see—you’re the answer to my every prayer. I’ve got my work, yes, and that satisfies me in all those kinds of ways, I love it, it absorbs me. But one must have something else. These joyless “amusements”! What I want is someone whom I could love if only I dared to, if only I wasn’t afraid of not being able to go on with—with my other life: but who would keep me safe from love. A one-man-only girl like my darling Mrs. Mini-Mop, who couldn’t give me that kind of love, and wouldn’t let me give it to her. Don’t you see that for both of us…?’
She didn’t know. She didn’t know… His need for her was great; and so might be her need for him. A woman alone, bringing up her children as best she could—the future stretched very bleakly ahead of her. Marry again, when the divorce came through? With her re-born charms, she knew that this might well be a possibility; she hadn’t taken long, she could not but recognise, to win over this experienced, this highly selective gentleman. But—how marry without love? And if not marriage, then whom else would she find to take her on her own terms? She said at last: ‘I’ll think it over. I’ll think about it all night.’ And she took a resolution. ‘You were going to drive me back to London tomorrow. If it’s “yes”, I’ll be ready in the hall at eleven. If not, I just won’t appear at all: we’ll end it right here and I’ll find my own way home.’ But at sight of his bleak face, so much loved, she thought within herself: Whatever it may or may not mean to me—if it means so much to him, how could I let him down?
Jenina was waiting for them, sick with nervous impatience. ‘Be kind to her,’ Elizabeth implored, going up with William to the room where the poor child had set her anxious little stage. ‘Let her down gently.’ For in her heart she knew that the thing was going to be no good; immature, inexperienced, Jenina had walked through their endless rehearsals and never once touched that secret heart of the girl with the nectarine. She sat down in the big armchair, an audience of one. ‘Don’t be scared, Jenina. He’ll be kind.’
She had drawn the curtains and arranged the lights as well as she could, had scrambled together some sort of a ‘costume’, and given her hair-do a slightly Edwardian upsweep, as the part demanded. ‘If I make my entrance from here…? And would you stand over there, Mr. Lawrence? I was taking it from my first entrance, with the nectarine…’ And she clutched the pot of cleansing cream close, as though it had been a penny bun coveted by another hungry child. Elizabeth remembered William’s teasing voice: ‘Aaoh, the nectarine’s steel waarm, steel waarm from the sun…’
The telephone rang.
He went over to it. ‘They’ve traced you to my lair, Jenina. It’s for you.’
‘Oh, God!’ she said, near to tears. She took the receiver from him. ‘Teddy Bear? Oh, Teddy Bear, Mr. Bear, I told you not to ring again… Oh, please,
darling, it’s no good, I did try to tell you…’ Sobs choked her. ‘No please don’t, please don’t: I’ll be all right, Mrs. Mop will let me go home with her.’ And at last in despair: ‘Well, all right, but it’ll be no good: I did try to tell you… All right. At eleven. I’ll be ready.’ She put down the receiver and turned away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to William and went back to her position and stood there silently holding the pot of cold cream, biting on her lip to prevent herself from weeping.
Elizabeth got up and went over to her. ‘Jenina—you can’t help it; don’t break your heart about it.’ With a soft tissue she wiped away the tears, caught up a comb and tidied up the disordered hair. ‘I can’t go on,’ sobbed Jenina, ‘looking like this.’
‘Of course you’ll go on,’ said William. ‘What do you think she looked like…’ And he flung an excited glance at Elizabeth. ‘This is the way to play it! This is the way to play it, after all! Not all that serenity and calm: the girl was in agony.’
‘Yes—it’s true,’ said Elizabeth. She caught at the shaking hands, fastened them about the little pot, forced them back against the beating heart. ‘You are the girl, Jenina—the original girl. You are the girl who didn’t want to give away her heart…’
And Jenina moved forward: blindly—very young, very scared, still sick with her own remorse and pain, lifting a tear-stained face. ‘The nectarine’s still warm, still warm from the sun…’ She held it out to him: but guardedly, treasuring it.
William Lawrence stood transfixed, staring down at her. He said at last, and the sudden intensity of his anger filled Elizabeth with a shock of terror, a flash of lightning in that prosaic room. ‘You’ve taken it from the garden!’
‘Yes,’ she said, trembling. ‘The walled garden. It was perishing there.’
‘It was mine. I planted the seed, I cultivated the tree: it wasn’t yours to take.’ And he shot out a hand for it. ‘Give it to me!’
He might literally have struck her, so cringingly did she start back from the outflung hand. ‘No, I won’t. If I give it to you, you’ll only eat it, you’ll gobble it up, you’ll destroy it; and it’s so beautiful…’
‘You silly little fool, don’t you know that that’s what it’s for? In your hands it will only decay, only putrefy…’
From outside, voices reached them: walking up and down in the fading evening, departing guests lived over again the rigours of the past weeks; the words grapefruit, cardboard, the inevitable colonic irrigation floated up to them, through the muffling curtains. Within, Elizabeth sat dazed, reality suspended, and saw not an every-day, rather silly, self-centred little girl clutching a cold cream pot and thinking back hard to RADA and the lessons there—but a sick, recoiling young creature of tragedy foredoomed, caging-in her woman’s heart against the realities that might bruise or break it, but would have kept it at least from the final petrification of un-generosity, un-use. And at the end of the scene, they all three were silent. William said at last, forcing his voice to lightness: ‘Well, well, Madame Mop!—why didn’t you tell me that the young Sarah had been born again in our midst?’
‘I don’t think I knew it myself,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And neither did she.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Jenina. ‘But… I told you that there was a sort of storm inside me of knowing that I could be a real actress, of wanting to be. The storm’s outside me now. I think it may be terrible, always living with it. But it’ll be me.’
‘You’ve given away your heart after all,’ said Elizabeth, ‘to the actress within you.’
William Lawrence was miles away already, on the practical side. ‘We’ll see Frenshoen tomorrow. I’ll get an appointment, he must see you before he talks to Lydia Garden: I know he wanted her.’ He forced down his excitement, looked her over critically. ‘You’ll have to get your hair done; you can tear it to pieces a little, but it must have the right foundation. Something just suggesting the Edwardian, but not too obvious, for God’s sake, Frenshoen mustn’t be distracted by anything but just the raw acting. And what to wear?’ He thought it over. ‘I’d better come with you, we’ll go up to town first thing, be ready at nine.’ And at last he remembered, you could see the guilty moment, the swift switch of attention lest he should have hurt or offended. ‘Mrs. Mini-Mop? You won’t mind if we start early?’
‘Not a bit,’ said Elizabeth buoyantly. Only, she added, and was not quite able to keep all the irony out of her voice, had not somebody better stay behind and explain to Mr. Teddy Bear?
So she stayed. Jenina, in the end, left a note in the hall to be handed over ‘if a gentleman calls for me’. There was a window looking over the drive. Elizabeth would watch from there and if he seemed likely to welcome explanation and comfort, would go out and offer such as she might. And after that—she would, as she had said to William, find her own way home, alone. And the longing and the loneliness closed in about her once again. A rich little dinner with William now and then, no doubt, a couple of stalls for the first night of The Nectarine. But for the rest… One man only in the world for me…
She watched him drive up, the famous Mr. Bear, climb out of the car—tense, defensive, impelled forward only by the old, mindless hope of the lover unloved; watched, petrified, the slow, dazed retreat, head bent over the note. And she was out, running through the hall, out through the front door, across to where he stood by the big white Mercedes, sick-faced, desolate. ‘Oh, Edward, darling!—how could I have known it was you? Darling, I’m so sorry, don’t be so sad, she doesn’t mean to hurt you, she does love you in her own way…’ And as he looked up, confounded, ‘Yes, it’s me, but never mind that, that’s just a coincidence. I stayed behind to tell you that you mustn’t break your heart about it; she asked me to stay, I mean that does show, doesn’t it—?’
‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t believe—’
‘Well, I can’t either, but of course it’s obvious now: she always called everyone by nicknames: I wasn’t using my own name here, anyway…’
He stood staring down at her and she saw with love and pity how old he looked, how thin and haggard he had grown in these past months: poor Mr. Teddy Bear indeed, poor foolish, infatuated, heart-sick, humbled Mr. Bear. ‘But what are you here for? And good heavens,’ he added, eyeing her with increasing astonishment, ‘you look simply wonderful! What have you been doing to yourself?’
What had she been doing? Grooming herself to hand him over with decent dignity to—Jenina. And Jenina didn’t want him after all. ‘Oh, this,’ she said, glancing down at the trim waist, the narrow skirt and elegant slim legs, putting up a hand to smooth the polished cone of her hair. ‘Just tarting myself up to try and wangle a lift home from some obliging gent.’
She could not bear to see him so anxiously, so diffidently considering it. ‘Would you still accept it,’ he said at last, ‘if the obliging gent was me?’
She went round to her own old place in the car; and, sitting there beside him, fished in her new beauty case and produced a little white pot of cold cream and put it into his somewhat astonished hand. ‘It’s a present for you. I know it’s rather a funny one—’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’ve always had a secret longing for a half-finished pot of cold cream.’
‘Yes, well you can laugh; but it’s all very symbolical.’ And two idiotic tears welled up and tippled over, ploughing little furrows, in the beautiful new make-up. ‘If you did but know it—that’s a nectarine,’ she said.
A Bit of Bovver
IF THERE COULD BE anything pathetic about me, Ellen Harmon would say to herself, it’s the way I just can’t help always looking out for things to buy, that might please Cathy… But she felt herself to be hardly a figure of pathos: a well-to-do widow, putting on weight, obsessionally drooling over an only, and therefore, no doubt too well-belovèd child. She went back in her mind and crossed out ‘obsessionally’. Cathy and her crowd talked exclusively in psychiatric terms, mostly misused.
The things
never did please Cathy. ‘Oh, thank you, Mama,’ she would say—she was more civil now that she had gone off to live with William and his grotty little gang in their pad at Notting Hill Gate; so everything has its compensations, after all—‘It’s very kind of you, only I’m afraid…’ And she would give that pitying, scornful little shrug. ‘But it’s the skirt you showed me in the magazine,’ Ellen would protest, ‘the identical one. I’ve sweated half over London to get it.’ ‘O.K., so I’ve changed my mind,’ Cathy would say; and she would repeat with her own brand of strangely sincere and yet unreal apology: ‘I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings.’
You’d think that wounds often enough re-opened would somehow create their own resistance, would build up scar-tissue, become at last impervious to pain. But they didn’t: each time, they broke and bled afresh, the incessant, the innumerable woundings of Cathy’s indifference, beating against one’s own unconquerable need to love and give. Why she should add to them this idiotic extra, this silly thing about the rejected presents, Ellen’s friends couldn’t understand. ‘Just skip it, darling, let her buy her own things, leave the girl alone.’ But alas!—with Cathy you couldn’t win. Just as you had steeled your heart against her, along she came with that terrible weapon of her vulnerability. Crouching on her bed in the old, discarded nursery at home, her flower beauty hidden beneath grubby, worn old slacks and great hairy, woolly black jersey, face dirty, lovely hair uncombed—living out her fantasies of freshness and beauty, turning over and over the pages of the endless magazines she bought—seeing herself groomed, made up, glamorous, holding her own with the girls in the photographs, dressed in all the latest gear…‘William says he’s sick of seeing me in these awful old trousers. If I don’t change, he’ll leave me, I know he will.’ And, eager and wistful, she would discuss with her mother how far her money would go. ‘Well, you get the dress, darling, and I’ll give you the shoes for a present.’ ‘Oh, Mum, you wouldn’t?’ Cathy would cry rapturous with gratitude, seeing all her problems solved; and she would burst into plans for a shopping expedition which they both too well knew would never materialise. For, brought to reality, all the dreams would die. To go together would result inevitably in weariness, exasperation something very much like mutual hate; if she took the money and went off alone, she returned, drooping and humbled, having bought all the wrong things, throwing them away immediately, refusing even to try them on. So—one kept an eye out, ‘picked up’ and casually offered what one thought might just possibly, possibly meet her insatiable, unpredictable needs. Nothing ever succeeded; but Cathy was Cathy’s own enemy—one could not join forces against her. Your heart recoiled, your face grew stiff, awaiting the chill rejection; but you must just plod on.
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