The Solitary Child

by Nina Bawden

  After I had rested and bathed, I went to wake Maggie. Sitting before the open window, she was milky pale, a blonde swathe of hair hung limply against her narrow face. Wrapped in a flannel dressing-gown, thin wrists dangling from her out-grown sleeves, she looked tired and very young. She had a headache and her eyes were sore. I said I would send a message and we would spend the evening in the hotel but she protested, saying she only wanted to sleep and it would be silly, wouldn’t it, for me to stay with her and spoil my evening?

  It was so sensibly said, so limpidly and simply logical, that I felt the faint, inner stirring of dismay to be irrational and absurd. My few objections were dispatched quickly in her cool, young voice. She was quite happy alone, not in any way ill and not afraid. She did not want to eat; she would take an aspirin and go almost immediately to bed. I remember that before I left she lifted her face like a child to be kissed, said good night and smiled at me.

  We were to meet at the Périgordine. He had insisted that this was to be his party and I had thought that the restaurant was probably too expensive for him but I was afraid he would be insulted if I suggested anywhere cheaper. In social matters his assurance was eggshell thin; he would see a slight where none was intended, riding on a sad tide of doubt he would become truculent and easily angry. I was a little late and he was waiting for me outside the restaurant, looking anxiously in the wrong direction, though when we met he said, to prove that he had not been worried, that he had not expected me so soon.

  He was wearing a new suit and he had shaved himself so closely that his face looked scoured and sore. He walked bouncily like all short men. He said he had booked a table by the window but when we reached the first floor they were all occupied. He argued aggressively with the head waiter until an extra table was brought from another part of the restaurant and a place found for it near the window.

  At first it seemed that the evening was not to be a success. Our flow of small talk was not adequate to the occasion. We smiled at each other, nervously and rather too readily, to prove that we were enjoying ourselves. We discussed the food, solemnly and without hunger, eating oysters and chicken cooked in champagne. As the meal progressed, it became easier to talk, we were the same age and shared the same idiom and interests, we felt at home together.

  At a long table in the middle of the room there was a party of English people, a deputation from some provincial town. They had finished their dinner and were drinking brandy; the Lord Mayor’s midland accent boomed audibly. Occasionally he tried, in limping French, to talk to his host.

  Ross leaned across the table with an impish expression.

  “See the Lady Mayoress? She’s hating it. All she wants is a nice cup of tea and to sit in front of a fire with her legs spread out and her skirts pulled up above her knees. Her plate is hurting her. She thinks the food is horrible.”

  I laughed and cautiously turned to look at her pink, unhappy face.

  He said quietly, “Why didn’t you bring your husband with you?”

  I was startled into the truth. “I wanted to come alone.”

  “Oh, I see.” Awkwardly, he prodded with his fork at a chicken leg. Then he looked at me. “And he wouldn’t push himself where he wasn’t wanted, would he? He’s not that kind of man.”

  “How do you know what kind of man he is?”

  “From what people have said about him. From what I’ve read.” He glanced at me cautiously to see if I was annoyed. “I’d say he was out of his century. The sort of man to whom personal loyalties count for more than anything else. He would abase himself if he thought the people for whom he was responsible needed him to do so. A talented man, but his talents will always be too widespread to be of any use to him. He’s never had to put them to any sort of use and so, though he’ll probably do most things fairly well, he will never do any one thing superlatively well.” He buttered a biscuit and continued with an earnest, academic air. “It’s a failing of his class. Nothing must be done, ever, for personal gain, so very often nothing is done at all. No commercial incentive.”

  Before I was married I had often taken part in this kind of conversation, discussing my closest friends in just such a vague and general fashion. I was quite happy to talk about James to this comparative stranger. I did not see it as disloyal.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “No. I wasn’t jeering. It’s a way of living that sometimes turns out the best people. But it also turns out the people who go under most easily. They have an acute sense of personal honour but no sense of preservation. Your husband would never fight for himself, he wouldn’t think it worth while. It’s a kind of awful humility.” His pale eyes gleamed behind his spectacles. “Now you, you’re altogether different. You’d fight for what you wanted, to your last breath. That’s why you’ll be good for him.” He paused and went on in an interested voice, “You are going to stay with him, aren’t you?”

  I examined the problem distantly. It had nothing to do with me.

  “I don’t see that, in a case like this, one has any alternative. If you take something on, you have to see it through.”

  “Isn’t that stupidly heroic? And a little childish? Doing the right thing because you like to think of yourself as the kind of person who does the right thing?”

  The conversation seemed suddenly unreal and overwhelmingly silly. I said, “Of course I’m going to stay with him. I love him.”

  His face burned. I thought: that’s against the rules, isn’t it? You can say what you like, poke and pry, delve endlessly into motive and character, but you must never, never, bring any real emotion into the argument. That’s cheating, hitting below the belt.

  He said shyly, “I’m sorry. We won’t talk about it.”

  “I want to. I haven’t had anyone else to talk to. But I can’t talk about it as if it wasn’t something that was happening to me but to a person in a book.”

  “All right.” He asked diffidently, “Are you very frightened?”

  I played with a piece of bread. “I suppose so. When I got married I was sure he wasn’t guilty, it was quite impossible.”

  He said uncomfortably, “And I made you think otherwise? I destroyed all that cosy trust?”

  “You make me sound very foolish. It wasn’t just you. There are other people.… They made me wonder. You brought it out into the open, that’s all.…”

  He said with sudden, angry pity, “Why don’t you hate me? How can you bear to talk to me?”

  “I wanted to listen to you. I didn’t have to. I could have slammed the door in your face.”

  “So much for my irresistible charm.”

  “Oh, there was that, too. You were very glib. But it was mostly that I wanted the truth. I couldn’t have closed the door on that.”

  “I couldn’t tell you the truth. I didn’t know it. I don’t know it now.” Then he said gently, “There might have been someone else. Mrs. Evans saw a car in the lane.…”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “No.” He stretched his hand across the table and patted mine, withdrawing it hastily as if the brief contact might have offended me.

  I said miserably, “I’m not only afraid of him. There have been other things.…” I told him about the anonymous letters, my fall on the stairs.

  He said, “Oh, God,” and stared at his plate. Then he went on, irrelevantly, it seemed, “I’ve wondered, you know, why he didn’t simply divorce his wife. After all, if he was unhappy with her, no longer in love, wasn’t it the obvious thing to do?”

  “He might think it was wrong.”

  “Do you think so? From what Bettina has said I would have thought it more in character if he’d taken up a good Old Testament attitude and cast her out.…” He looked at me doubtfully. “It probably isn’t an important point. Forget it. You know, if you really want the truth, you could always ask him. He wouldn’t lie, I think, not to save his soul.”

  “I know.” The restaurant was hot and glarin
g. I said. “I’d like to go.”

  As we left, the waiter ran after us with an ash-tray.

  “We thought you would like to have this—for your home.” He beamed paternally upon us both.

  William’s ears were scarlet. Clumsily, he thanked the waiter and stumbled against me as we went out of the door.

  He said, pointlessly to the sky, “He thought we were married.”

  I was sorry for him. “Yes. You keep it. My husband wouldn’t understand.”

  He smiled at the plaintive joke. “Would he be jealous? How interesting. No one has ever been jealous of me. I’d like to keep it if I may.”

  His voice was light and cautious. We walked across the bridge, the width of the pavement between us. Along the banks of the river the chestnuts stirred in the breeze; the lamplight fell in a swaying, trellised pattern on the road.

  He was polite. “Are you sure you want to walk? You aren’t too tired?”

  The wind was cool and full of scents, below us the water sucked against stone. We passed a pair of lovers embracing on a bench and eyed each other shyly, conscious of our neutral state.

  After a little he began to talk naturally. He asked me about the farm, how big it was, whether we kept a milking herd.

  Then, casually, he spoke about the other people there.

  “Ann, the sister. Is she a nice person?”

  “A dear. Spinsterish and shy. She lives with a friend who’s a hypochondriac and needs a lot of nursing. Ann writes articles for a gardening weekly and takes it very seriously. She’s great friends with the vicar.”

  He said, oddly, “Is she shrewd? Could you trust her?”

  “Up to a point. She’s kind and wants to be friendly, but there’s a gap.” I wondered whether to tell him that she believed James killed his wife and decided against it. “The gap isn’t only age—it’s something in her, I think. She’s so anxious not to get in any way involved, you can only go so far with her.”

  “She wants to keep her hands clean? It’s a pity.”

  “A pity? Why?”

  He sounded vague. “No reason, really. But one likes to think there is someone.…”

  I struggled against dismay. “I’m not alone. James is not an ogre. And Maggie is fond of me, I think, and there are the Evanses and their daughter.…”

  “And you lie awake at night and wonder if they would hear you if you called?”

  I said angrily, “You are trying to frighten me deliberately.”

  His glasses shone like round, transparent moons.

  He said earnestly, “I wouldn’t want to frighten you. Not for the world. Only sometimes fear is a necessary defence.”

  “And you’re concerned for me?” I asked incredulously.

  Shyly, he said in a low voice, “I think you are a nice person. The nicest I’ve ever met, anyway, and of course I am concerned.”

  He left me outside my hotel. He gave me a soft, rubbery kiss on the side of my mouth and asked if he could write to me. I said yes, I would like him to, and after he had gone I wondered if James would mind.

  The stair lights in the hotel were controlled by a time switch: you pressed the button on one floor and the light stayed on until you reached the next unless you were infirm or slow, in which case you were plunged in darkness before you reached your door. So by the time I had unlocked my room, the landing was dark. I dropped my bag and gloves on the bed and groped for the handle of Maggie’s door.

  There is no mistaking the smell of Gaullois. It is pungent and lingers like the smell of a cheap cigar. It came out to meet me like the scent from a fox’s hole.

  Everything, in the moonlit room, was bright and clear. The bed, and the shadows beyond the bed, Maggie’s hair spread fanwise on the pillow, white flesh against the man’s sun-darkened shoulders, the high window beyond.

  She did not hear or see me; safe in thinking me out for the evening, putting her trust in the shoddy lock that had slipped when I pushed the door, she was making love.

  Chapter Eleven

  Safe in my room, I bolted the door as against a demon. Embarrassment became a major emotion and possessed me utterly; crawling on the bed, I writhed and bit the pillow, stuffing my fingers in my ears to shut out the outrageous terror that they might, in spite of their preoccupation, have seen me, the appalling fear that I could, through the thin wall, hear their cries of love. Remembering a hot, windless summer’s day when I had surprised a pair of lovers in the bracken, I shook with the same, childish panic and sudden, insane hatred. On that occasion I had run, weeping, across the common. I had hidden in some bushes by a pond, clutching at the sour earth, terrified of going home. Now there was nowhere to run to, no place to hide. I felt ashamed and dirty, a monster guilty of some unspeakable crime. I drove my knuckles hard against my eye-balls until they flamed scarlet and orange, as if sufficient pain could wipe out the image of that private and unbeautiful act.

  As always, in moments of disastrous importance, I longed only for a miracle—to have been, say, at that irretrievable moment, both deaf and blind. Faced with an unalterable event, the railing and despair is always against yourself. If I had come back later, he would have gone. If I had assumed her to be asleep and gone straight to bed, I might never have known. The first desire is always to save your own skin and to this end the primitive belief functions: that through ignorance you can remain innocent of evil. I covered my eyes and ears and lay, quivering and sobbing, on the bed.

  Slowly, the first, delirious anguish spent itself. Courses of action presented themselves one by one like headlines thrown on a lighted screen. I could confront them. Open the door and switch on the light. I could order Maggie to put on a dressing-gown and come to my room while the man dressed and left the hotel.

  And Maggie? What would she say and do? I saw her narrow face before me, the lovely, pale remoteness shattered and splintered for ever into something quite different: the cheap and nasty front of a deceiving little whore. The impossibility of blundering in upon them communicated itself to me so thoroughly that the sweat broke out all over my body. There was nothing that I could do. I must ignore it, behave as if it had never happened. In the morning we would go home. The simplicity commended itself; it was not cowardly, but wise. Almost calm, now, I sat up and reached for a cigarette.

  The room was silent. Shadows edged round the long shaft of moonlight.

  I struck a match and the rasp and flare shrieked my presence in the stillness. A new and obvious fear presented itself. Suppose she became pregnant? Nothing, then, could be forgotten or ignored. And of course I intended to ignore it—my relationship with her, my ability to protect her demanded it. James must not know. No kind of moral implication presented itself; she was a child and not to be blamed. If at any point I suspected a deficiency in my own judgment, I blamed it on James, on his harsh assessment of other people’s actions. To him, behaviour was right or wrong; in this case it would be useless to plead youth or ignorance or passion. He would see, coldly and clearly, only the bad streak in her inheritance. Maggie was taking after her mother, he would be finished with her.

  And so I sat and smoked and worked out how to lie to him.

  I said, “We’re going home. There’s a plane at ten o’clock. We’ll have to hurry.”

  I had already packed and telephoned the airport; putting off going into Maggie’s room until the last moment, I had entered it with a kind of prurient delicacy, averting my eyes from the bed.

  She had dressed and was sitting in front of the window where I had left her the night before. She was wearing her blue linen dress and her hair was tied back with a blue ribbon. Seeing her thin arms in the sleeveless frock, the tired stain under the eyes, love caught at my throat.

  She said, “I thought we were staying till Saturday.”

  Her voice was unconcerned and innocent.

  I told her shortly, “I’ve changed my mind.”

  She looked at me and then she slowly frowned as if something in my face surprised her.

  “Are
you angry with me?” she asked anxiously.

  “Angry with you? No. Is there any reason why I should be?”

  For a moment there was a troubled question in her eyes. It filled me with a crazy hope, soaring upwards in a widening spiral of love. She was going to tell me, my darling girl, trust herself to me utterly.

  Then she smiled, her beautiful, blank smile. “Of course there isn’t.” She thought. “Though I forgot to clean my teeth.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I felt sad and chilled, responsibility dragged at my stomach like a weary weight. “I’ll help you pack. Where are your things?”

  “In that cupboard.”

  She got up lazily and opened the door. A pile of soiled underclothes tumbled out on to the floor. A dress, once worn, lay crumpled among her shoes. The shelf was littered with bits of biscuit, sticky toffee papers.

  “Really, you might take better care,” I grumbled, picking up the clothes, flinging them on to the bed. “All your clean things muddled up with the dirty ones … you’re quite old enough to look after them better.…”

  She did not answer. When I turned round she was standing in front of the basin brushing her teeth. Her neck, bared by the falling hair, looked frail and humble. There was a wavy, dark line just above the collar of her dress.

  “While you’re about it, you might wash properly. You get scruffier every day.”

  She giggled softly and bent her head. I rubbed at the tidemark with a damp flannel, pretending to be rough.

  Her voice was muffled in her hair. “You do like me, don’t you, Harriet?”

  It was a joke between us. “Not so much as I would if you smelt of soap.”

  “What do I smell of ordinarily?”