‘Yes I do. I’ve read this carefully, twice. I agree it’s a dramatic situation, if true – but do you notice there isn’t a shred of hard evidence for it, not in these reports anyway? There’s all this circumstantial stuff about the whole family having been ‘‘in therapy’’, and ‘‘counselling sessions’’ and ‘‘tension’’ and so forth, but the social worker and Melvyn seem to be basing their entire case on the fact that no one in the family will actually admit anything. It’s the well-known Freudian trap: if you admit it then it’s true, and if you don’t then that in itself proves you’re ‘‘repressing’’ it. Great.’
‘It does say here that the girl seems upset and preoccupied with the subject, and … Where is it? Yes, here – ‘‘precociously aware of sexuality’’.’
‘‘‘Precociously aware’’ – yes, I bet she is, with Baines showing her dolls and working her up and encouraging her to make up dirty stories! It’s a great mistake to think that when a kid is upset what you hear is the truth: on the contrary, it may be a lurid pack of lies. Surely I don’t need to tell you that?’
‘No. But –’
‘And if you read these reports again you’ll see there’s no real evidence at all for the idea that the father’s been interfering with her or the elder sister – just this brief note from a GP saying, in effect, that he can’t be sure, that there are no gross physical signs and no evidence of rape as such.’
‘It does say the bigger girl isn’t a virgin.’
‘So? She’s fourteen, and from a crummy background. Nothing unusual there. Certainly nothing to implicate the father. Could be anybody …’ Suddenly the realization of how profoundly I had distrusted Melvyn all these years came over me in a wave that was almost an exhilaration.
‘I’m not going to lend myself to his power-grabbing fantasies,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to sign these papers.’
‘But Tom, suppose it is true? Surely you can’t take that risk? Surely, to be on the safe side – ?’
‘What safe side? What’s safe about removing a child from her home and branding her father as a danger to society and her mother as a pervert and inadequate? You’re talking like a fool Ann –’ I know I should never speak to her like that, I do know, it is cruel and pointless, but I was now launched, and swept on:
‘That’s just the sort of herd-reaction that Melvyn Baines counts on provoking. Him and his empire-building and his harem of admiring unmarried female social workers! Shall I tell you what that man’s particular talent is for? Not, for God’s sake, for understanding the complexity of people’s lives but for picking up just a bit quicker than anyone else what the next fashionable subject is going to be: Marriage Guidance – Non-Accidental Injury – God, he tried to conduct an absolute witch-hunt on that in a primary school a few years ago, I’ve just remembered … Counselling – Family Therapy – now Child Sexual Abuse – what’s the next flavour-of-the-month eh? Watch Baines and you’ll find out. Well, I’m not one of his fan club, and I’m not going to join this particular bandwagon. I won’t play ‘‘Dr Baines is so perceptive’’. I won’t sign a Place of Safety order for these girls.’
Ann’s mouth was set in a thin, miserable line. Her small chin trembled.
‘I think you may be making a terrible mistake,’ she said.
‘So be it. I’ll carry the guilt then, won’t I? I’d sooner be wrong by my own judgement than wrong by following the judgement of someone I don’t trust.’
‘What will you say to the police?’
‘I’ll tell them I haven’t been given adequate evidence. And I’ll spell out to them what I mean.’
Ann said, bravely for her: ‘Well I just hope they find another magistrate to sign their order.’
This made me deeply angry, but I just said coldly: ‘I expect they will.’
And I expect they did.
The next day, Sunday, I wrote Melvyn a long letter, expressing in temperate, impersonal terms the doubts I had conveyed to Ann with such wildness. I laboured over it all the morning, feeling increasingly paranoid about Melvyn but also increasingly unhappy with myself. Ann went about the house with a wretched, drawn look and hardly spoke. Clearly, I had gone much too far.
To my letter, I received an acknowledgement, but not at that point anything more. It seemed that Melvyn was in no hurry to enter into debate with me. Probably that was wise of him.
Neither Ann nor I had recovered fully from my outburst when I went to Edinburgh. I was going to visit my only surviving relation, my mother’s sister, and also an old friend and his new wife. Neither my own dark mood nor Ann’s hurt, withdrawn one made this a propitious time for me to travel, but the visits had long been arranged: anyway, I went.
I have known Humphrey for almost as long as I have known Lewis. In fact Humphrey was one of the Oxford friends with whom I had spent an inopportune holiday in the Lake District in the middle of my first summer with Simone. I remember eventually confiding in him, in oblique terms, why I was so restive and absent-minded. ‘I feel I’ve had to leave her just at the wrong time,’ I said glumly. Humphrey listened, full of sympathy and interest, asked tactful questions – and yet, in spite of the relief of speaking of Simone, saying her name, I began to feel more tense and frustrated rather than less, for it was borne in on me that Humphrey did not entirely understand what I was saying. He enquired at one point (‘with apologies, Tom, for even raising such a personal thing’) whether I had asked Simone to marry me. When I must have gaped at him, and insisted that our relationship was nowhere near that point, he went on to suggest, with great delicacy, that perhaps I should make the offer without delay. ‘– To reassure her, Tom. Don’t you think it might be what she very much needs, after – after what you have told me? It seems to me she must desperately want to trust you. And since you had to leave her like that yourself right after … You should have brought her here, Tom, we would all have understood. Laura would have understood, I would have had a quiet word with her … But perhaps you felt the relationship is too private to expose in that way?’
‘Yes,’ I said after a pause. ‘Yes, I expect I did think that.’ I did not know what else to say, for Humphrey’s apparent mental image of Simone now pining away in France, fearing herself seduced and abandoned, seemed so far from the reality of her and me that I could not think how to disabuse him of it. I even wondered wildly if he could possibly be right and if I, certainly less thoughtful and sensitive to others than he was, had failed, in the traditional male way, to understand Simone? But even in my present over-anxious state I knew that Simone had other strengths, other preoccupations, than those Humphrey ascribed to her: that, indeed, was one of the things that was worrying me – that very likely her mind was not now on me at all, but on things at which I could not guess.
‘Anyway,’ I said flatly, ‘she was going off herself. To relatives in the south-west.’
‘Poor love, I see,’ said Humphrey.
‘Humphrey, you know …’ I felt ungrateful, unworthy of his sensibility. Had he been a different sort of person, one who would have greeted my confidence with conspiratorial male levity, I should no doubt have been annoyed. But, as it was, I felt indignant on Simone’s behalf to see her cast in the rôle of the insipid and lachrymose Nice Girl of the period, British model. I had met enough of those at Oxford; the memory of several of them now made me feel uncomfortable and vaguely sad – partly because I almost never did remember them. ‘Simone isn’t like that. She isn’t – well, like Laura,’ I ended tactlessly.
Laura was Humphrey’s fiancée, whom he had met in his first year at Oxford: soon they were due to marry. In fact Laura was not insipid, being rather beautiful, very musical and formidably hard-working; but she came from much the same slightly grand background that Humphrey did. Though I liked her I could not quite imagine singling her out, as Humphrey had done, as the person with whom I wished to spend the rest of my life.
To my surprise, I realized that Humphrey was blushing: ‘Well of course Laura is different,’ he said firml
y. ‘I mean, she and I don’t …’
‘You don’t – ? Oh. Oh, I see.’ It was my turn to be concerned and taken aback. Our spartan holiday in Youth Hostels accompanied by several others had allowed little opportunity for private relations, but I had assumed that in more convenient times and places … In short, it had simply not occurred to me that Humphrey and Laura were not already lovers.
‘Actually, Tom – I don’t see why I shouldn’t be frank with you, I’m not ashamed of it, God knows – I haven’t ever, personally … I mean, Laura has been my first serious relationship, as I have hers. And we’ve decided to wait till we’re married. We both prefer it that way.’
All that, of course, was a lifetime ago. Strange as it may seem, Humphrey and I were genuinely close friends: he was far too diplomatic and uncensorious a person to allow any hint of disapproval to escape him regarding Simone and myself, and I was careful not to let him see that I did not, in fact, find his and Laura’s self-controlled idealism admirable.
Through the years we kept track of each other’s diverging careers, exchanged holiday visits. When Marigold was born Laura endeared herself to Simone (who had been wary of her for some reason) by sending us a tiny dress that she had hand-smocked herself. Other carefully chosen gifts followed at birthdays and Christmases and I believe it was Laura, on reflection, who was the first person to notice that Marigold had perfect pitch. She encouraged her to sing and, later, to learn the guitar. Humphrey himself was delightful with children, his face lighting up over a game, a puzzle, a bedtime story, and was enthusiastically beloved by Marigold in return. We had imagined him and Laura conscientiously planning and then producing a family of talented, well-behaved children of their own, but as the years succeeded one another it was Lewis Greenfield who settled down after all and fathered these while Humphrey and Laura’s life seemed to remain in tasteful, studiously occupied suspension. (Laura, on marriage, had given up her job at a music-publishers, to take on the busy non-occupation of Public School master’s wife and presently house-master’s.)
Eventually, trying in my elephantine way to emulate Humphrey’s own real concern for his friends, I ‘wondered’ tactlessly to Humphrey, while we were on one of our long walks, whether he and Laura were ‘seeing anyone’ about their childlessness? It was then I learnt, in Humphrey’s unspectacular, almost diffident phrases, what he and Laura had known for some time: Laura had multiple sclerosis. That was why she had made excuses not to come on any walks recently, that was the real reason she had abandoned the violin which she had played in a string quartet – and that was why she and Humphrey would never, now, have a child. ‘Of course, as soon as her MS was diagnosed,’ said Humphrey, ‘we decided a child was just not on. It’s terribly sad – Laura minds awfully, though she doesn’t show it; she’s terribly brave about the whole thing. But it just wouldn’t be fair on the child.’
I nodded, I think, adopting his own restrained manner, but privately I disagreed with him. Perhaps (although I had at that time quite forgotten Evan and Joyce) I had been alerted to something too facile in not-fair-on-the-child arguments. I thought it rather a pity, in the circumstances, that Humphrey and Laura hadn’t had a child already before her disease had declared itself. I said this to Simone, who agreed vehemently with me.
‘There’s worse things than a sick mother – many worse. It isn’t as if Humphrey and Laura haven’t got plenty of money for nannies. And living in a boarding school like that, they’re surrounded by people who would lend a hand … Anyway, Laura may go on still for years and years, mayn’t she? Why, by the time she dies the child might be as big as I was when Maman died. And it wouldn’t have been ‘‘fairer’’ on me not to have me. There’s such a thing as being too good and careful.’
Laura did live on for many years, though she had to take to a wheelchair and then to many other devices, as her strength and capabilities declined. For some time she and Humphrey continued to come on motoring holidays in France (Humphrey’s old-fashioned phrase), spending time with us at the mill; but in her last few years the primitive bathroom arrangements at the mill, and then the difficulties of travel for her anyway, made these visits a thing of the past. Instead, she would go determinedly to a health farm, sending Humphrey to us in France on what she insisted now was a necessary holiday for him from her. She also encouraged him to take with him her nephew, Jeffrey, son of a less monied home, a less idyllic marriage, a clever, awkward boy, unhappy at boarding school, in whom she and Humphrey took a concerned interest. Jeffrey, it was felt, would be company for his uncle on the journey and company for Marigold, who was more or less the same age, when at the mill. In fact this well-intentioned plan worked out better than such plans often do: Jeffrey and Marigold, after initial mutual suspicion, found sufficient interests in common and, as they progressed through their teens even seemed to become quite fond of each other.
By this time Simone herself was dead, going, like her mother, from health to death in barely a year, suddenly contesting and outstripping Laura whose own eventual demise had been in laborious rehearsal for so long. Laura lived on another two years – if ‘living’ it was, immobile, incontinent, deprived in the end even of speech. It goes without saying that through her whole illness Humphrey looked after her with the utmost devotion, and mourned her desperately when at last death released her. I am tempted to put quotation marks round this last sentence, so much does it sound as if it were lifted from an obituary notice, but it is merely a statement of truth: this was the sort of man Humphrey was. Many people would have said he had long been a widower already, in most respects, but Humphrey did not see it like that. Two widowers together, and a little self-conscious in this joint identity, we roamed the cliff above the downstream gorges of the Creuse one hot afternoon, while the idle teenagers lay sprawled on sunlit rocks far below us, and Humphrey said to me suddenly at the end of a conversation about something quite other:
‘You know, Tom, there isn’t one hour when I don’t think of her. Not one. People don’t realize that … But of course you do, I know. I expect it’s the same for you?’
It wasn’t quite, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him so. I used to think then that, much as I grieved for Simone and would have given a great deal for her life to go on – for her sake as much as my own – I probably was not as capable of such intense and exclusive love as Humphrey was. Later, when other things had happened, I became less sure of this. But that was what I thought, at the time.
Humphrey had inherited a flat in Edinburgh; he and Laura had used to let it to university people, and stayed in it themselves during the Festival until Laura became too handicapped for that. Later, I think, the boy Jeffrey lived in it while he was a student there: his edgy intelligence had developed into a taste for computer studies. Now he had moved on to a research post elsewhere, and his Uncle Humphrey had temporarily repossessed the flat.
There had been a temporary feeling about a number of Humphrey’s arrangements in the years since Laura had died: he had left one school for another, then returned to the former but no longer as a house-master. When I had remarried myself I had not, for a combination of reasons I expect, liked to make my invitation to him to come and stay with Ann and myself in London too pressing; at any rate he did not come. But he had recently married again himself: someone who had come to his school as an assistant matron, he told me. He had also changed posts again, and was now teaching for the first time at an independent day-school – in Edinburgh. His letter to me, suggesting a meeting, was affectionate and eager. I thought it was time I went to see him.
I had, in any case, another reason for visiting Edinburgh. My mother’s sister had married a Scot she had met in the war. He had died, but Auntie Madge (as I still found myself calling her, in an absurd throwback to my schooldays) lived on, old and fat and cheerful, in a house in Morningside.
On the way up in the train I tried to console myself for everything with the thought of how pleased both Auntie and Humphrey would be to see me. I was, I suppose, in
the reduced state of needing consciously to count my blessings; at such a time old friendships, old alliances, can seem the only refuge. Even as I reflected on this, I recalled the fatuous way Auntie, more consciously Scottish for years than the genuine article, loved to go on about the ‘Auld Alliance’ between Scotland and France and used to ask Simone daftly unanswerable questions about this supposed relationship. But there are worse things – ah, many worse – than being bored by an elderly relative, and in my present mood I felt grateful towards Auntie Madge for still existing, and looked forward to her welcome.
She seemed delighted to see me, and was merely a little reproachful that I had not ‘after all’ brought Ann with me, though there had at no stage been any question that I should.
‘It’s term-time, Auntie! Ann sends her – her very best to you, of course.’ (I have never managed to get my tongue round the word ‘love’ in patently inappropriate circumstances, and sometimes have difficulty in appropriate ones too.) ‘– But she couldn’t possibly have got away. Even at half-term she was up to her eyes in paperwork. She takes on so much. She’s a deputy-head now, you know.’
I always find it vaguely comforting talking about Ann: she sounds so suitable.
‘So clever …’ said my aunt with radiant vagueness. ‘I always feel quite silly beside people like that,’ she added comfortably.
‘But Auntie, you know Ann isn’t a bit intimidating. You met her –’ But my aunt wasn’t listening. She was of course, at one level, quite right: she did seem silly beside people whose energies were more focused, and indeed had always been regarded as ‘a silly woman’ (almost, as it were, an official sample of the type) by my own consciously more austere and well-organized parents. But it was, I think, her chosen rôle. In fact she had the liveliness, adaptability and taste for new experience that rarely goes with real stupidity, but she dated from an era when a semblance of muddle-headedness was supposed to be ‘more feminine’. Unlike her elder sister, my mother, she had turned her back on all education at fourteen. In my youth she worked in a hat shop, the pre-war epitome of the determinedly frivolous, and then, in the war, was said by my father to have ‘gadded about’ in one of the women’s services. Even when she subsequently retired into the respectability of a belated marriage, and took to Edinburgh and being Scottish, a vague aura of luxury and levity still surrounded her name in my parents’ household. They were fond enough of her, but thought she ought to have ‘something proper to do’, albeit of a charitable and voluntary nature. The fact that, in her improper idleness, she always seemed busy, even breathlessly so, did not please them either. It was rather remarkable how Aunt Madge, though clad in the matronly Caledonian uniform of quilting, fur and tweed, and given to orgies of baking what she now called ‘pastries’, managed nevertheless to live with a hint of un-British flamboyance within Edinburgh’s damp, sooty confines. She somehow managed to treat that deeply provincial city as if it were an oriental bazaar: from the mildest foray to Princes Street – and her forays were frequent – she would return, flushed and elated, bearing with her some ‘bargain’, some long-sought knick-knack, some newly discovered heartfelt want now cunningly supplied. A top-dressing of Scots ‘canniness’ thinly veiled a ravening consumerism; no January or July sales time could pass without Auntie ‘replenishing’ her already bursting wardrobes, her full linen cupboards, her more-thanfully-fitted kitchen.
Give Them All My Love Page 14
