Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  When he’d finished and she was as neat as she could make herself, considering the grass stains on her silk frock, he held out his hand to help her to her feet, but she shook her head, staying where she was, sitting back on her heels on the rug, hands folded on her lap.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said a little huskily. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you all day. I must say it, now. Before we go back to the hotel.’

  He grinned, and at once set the hamper down on its end and sat on it, folding his arms. His happiness hung round him, an almost palpable thing. His eyes were bright, his cheeks were still flushed and he looked more like a boy than a man of thirty-five.

  ‘Yes’m,’ he said, his eyes crinkling with the laughter in him. ‘Immediately, ma’am. Tell me you love me. Tell me we’re going to be the happiest married people who ever —’

  ‘No,’ she said urgently. Although she hadn’t meant it that way, it came out as a sharp little bark and slowly he unfolded his arms and set his hands on his lap.

  ‘What is it?’ he said after a moment, and she bent her head to look down at her own hands on her knees. Away across the river the sun was setting in a pool of crimson. Streaks of eggshell blue and the most tender of pale greens were streaked across the sky making it more like the lid of a chocolate box than a real sky, and she turned her head to stare at that; anything rather than look at his face.

  ‘I — what you were saying before, Max. About ambition. How important it always was to you — do you still feel like that?’

  The puzzlement was clear in his voice. ‘I — darling, what is this all about? Yes, I suppose it is. I mean, I care like the devil about working hard and doing my best, and I promise you I’ll always look after you, that I’ll give you the best home I can, and all your needs and more besides and —’

  ‘No!’ She knew she sounded almost angry now and didn’t care. ‘Damn it, I’m not asking you to — to give me a statement of your possessions or your earning capacity! I’m not talking about money — that’s not important. I mean, it is in that it shows you’ve achieved your ambition, but it’s not the most important part of it.’

  ‘No, I know it isn’t.’ He sounded guarded now. ‘I know that.’

  ‘It’s the doing — it’s being you and making people know it’s you, and getting it right and making them listen.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said gently, and then came across and crouched in front of her and set one finger beneath her chin, trying to make her look at him. But she pulled her head away irritably and after a moment he got to his feet again.

  ‘This is bad, whatever it is, isn’t it, Lexie?’ His voice was clipped with anxiety. ‘I’m sorry — I should have known better — but it just seemed so right. We were here and the sun and grass and the smell of the air and the water singing down there, and we’re to be married so soon. I didn’t feel it was wrong, and I didn’t realize it would upset you so much —’

  ‘Oh, of course it hasn’t! It’s not about making love that I’m worried!’ she said, and now she did look at him. ‘My darling, that was wonderful! It just had to happen. It was wonderful and I’m glad I did — but it’s about getting married — it’s about that, you see, that I have to talk to you.’

  He was so still and so silent that she said sharply, ‘Max?’ and he stood there with his back to the paint-splashed western sky, silhouetted against the exhausted orange disc of the sun that was slowly disappearing behind a stand of distant elms.

  ‘What about getting married?’

  She scrambled to her feet and stood there with her hands clenched behind her back, looking at him and squinting a little against the light.

  ‘I want to, I truly do. You must know that. But —’

  ‘How can there be any buts? We’re getting married in two weeks’ time, Lexie! If we weren’t do you think I’d have — that I could have — what do you think I am, Lexie? I love you — I never thought I could love anyone as much as I love you. I didn’t think it was possible. Don’t tell me now you don’t believe that? How can you doubt me now?’

  ‘I’m not doubting you. It’s me.’ She shook her head, took a deep breath and tried again. ‘Max, I saw Mr Welch a few days ago. I’ve been trying to think of a way of telling you ever since, and then when you phoned this morning I thought — today — today — I’ll tell him today —’

  ‘Welch?’ He sounded amazed, as though she had suddenly spoken in a new language that he didn’t comprehend. ‘What on earth are you —’

  ‘Cochran wants me for his New York show,’ she said baldly. ‘I thought at first he was like all the others, only wanting me because of all that horrible publicity, but of course it isn’t like that, not for New York. They won’t have seen any of the fuss — so they really do want me as a performer. It’s a marvellous chance, Max. Six months in New York and then he said — he promised, I can have it in the contract, he didn’t just say it — then I can have a lead part in the next London Pavilion show. It’s what I’ve been wanting all my life, Max. It’s the chance I’ve always prayed for. I know I promised you I’d forget all about the business, that I’d give it all up and just be married to you, but then it was easy to promise. I’d lost my act at the Café. The only offers I was getting were for the wrong reasons. It was easy to promise. Now it’s different. He wants me — me — and what he’s offering is — well, you can see, Max! Featured billing on Broadway, and then a West End lead. It’s too wonderful to be true — I can’t say no.’

  ‘Six months?’ he said after a stunned little silence. ‘Six months? You’re saying that —’

  ‘I’m just asking you to postpone the wedding till I come back. Or, if you like, we can be married before I go and then — but I didn’t think you’d want to do that. I thought you’d rather wait and then when I’m back and in the new show at the Pavilion, it’ll all be so easy.’

  ‘You knew this when you — when we —’ He gestured at the grass with an oddly shy little movement. She set her head on one side, puzzled, and he said, ‘You were going to say this to me and yet you didn’t stop me from —’

  ‘But my darling, why not? How could it make any difference? We’re us, we’re still ourselves. I still love you — why not?’

  ‘How much can you love me to talk of going away for six months? Never seeing each other for half a year — only letters —’

  ‘It’ll hurt like the devil. I shall miss you dreadfully,’ she said at once. ‘Don’t think I don’t know it. But you have to pay for what you want. Don’t you? You did. You spent all those years working and studying and never went anywhere and never had any fun and you thought it was worth it.’

  ‘I didn’t know you then,’ he said, and his voice sounded heavy in the dim light. The colour had disappeared from the sky now, leaving it a rich cobalt. The trees and the grass and the river were rapidly draining their colour away too, becoming a soft monochrome, and she could feel the dampness of the dew all around her. ‘If I had, I — I don’t know what I’d have done. I would have dropped everything for you.’

  ‘Then you’d have been wrong!’ she said vigorously. ‘You must know that! Work and plans to do what you want to do — you can’t just drop them because of — I mean, it’s marvellous that you love me and I love you. I want us to be happy, but it’s not enough —’

  ‘Not enough?’ he said, and even though his voice was its usual quiet self there was a sort of wail in it and she put one hand out towards him.

  ‘Oh, darling, I didn’t mean it to sound like that, truly I didn’t. I just want —’

  ‘Being married to me won’t be enough to fill your life. That’s what you want to say.’

  ‘Would it be enough for you to be married to me? Only married to me? If I said to you, drop your work, close the office, give up all you’ve struggled for, leave it all behind and come with me? Suppose I said that, said I could earn enough for both of us — and he’s offering marvellous money, I have to tell you — if I said that, would you regard that as reasonable?’<
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  ‘Don’t be absurd, Lexie!’ For the first time he sounded irritable. ‘You can’t ask a man to —’

  ‘But you can expect it of me? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘You promised. You told me, when we first talked of marriage, you promised me to give up the theatre, to be my wife. I want us to have children, Lexie, to be as other families are —’

  ‘I want children too! One day, I suppose. Not yet, but one day — but even then, I can still go on working. If I take care of my figure and work hard I can go on dancing. There were girls in the Chariot revue who’d had babies — I could as well. Why not? I wouldn’t want children yet anyway — so I could go to New York, get this marvellous start and then when I get back and do another show or two —’

  ‘And then another and another,’ he said. ‘And then, one day, we’d both be too old. And perhaps too strange to each other to care any more. You’d be so busy about your dancing —’

  ‘And what about your work?’ she said. ‘Your work’s important to you. You’ve spent years getting to where you are — don’t you think it’ll come between us sometimes?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t let it.’

  ‘You couldn’t stop it.’

  There was a silence between them and then he said, ‘You’re saying that you need your work more than you need me?’

  ‘Not more, Max.’ She said it as gently as she could. ‘Not more. But I need it perhaps as much. I don’t know. All I do know is that if I have to miss this chance —’

  ‘What? That you won’t be happy?’

  ‘I don’t know. I truly don’t know. But I think that I’d be angry and hurt and maybe bitter, and one day I might even resent you for taking away something I wanted. And I don’t ever want that to happen to us. I want us to be right and — and natural together. As we were when we made love here.’

  ‘And if we hadn’t been getting married in two weeks’ time, it would never have happened,’ he cried. ‘Can’t you see that? I am what I am, Lexie! I believe in the — the right way of doing things, the real values, the real standards. To be married, that’s the right way —’

  ‘Real values? What’s so valuable about what you’re trying to do to me? What’s so real about telling someone you love them in one sentence and then in the next that because you love them you won’t let them do the one thing they most want to do? What’s real or valuable about that? It’s like you’re trying to own me, not love me! I want to dance, Max. I have to! I want to marry you, too, but I have to dance! And if I can’t, then —’

  The words hovered unspoken in the air between them and she contemplated them, aghast. She loved him. She loved him more than she would have thought it possible to love anyone, and here she was throwing him away, telling him she didn’t want him, trying to tell him — what? That the long hours of stretching her muscles way beyond the limits of their trained endurance, that the interminable days of aching legs and screaming calves, smelly dusty backstages, exhaustion and terror as the curtain rose and the great mindless leviathan of an audience was revealed, waiting to eat her up and spit her out, was better than what he had to offer? Was that what she was trying to say? She stood there in the twilight with her head up and looked at him and shook her head, wanting to call the words back, and yet relieved and glad that she had spoken them, for it was out now, and he had to decide.

  ‘If you can’t?’ he said it quietly. ‘If you can’t you’ll do what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘I really don’t know. That’s the problem we’ve got, Max. What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know either.’ He stood very still, his face too shadowed to see clearly, so that it was some time before she realized that he was crying.

  Long after she had gone to bed in her half packed-up flat at Mulberry Walk she lay and stared at the ceiling, unable to think clearly. The journey back to town had been misery. She had sat curled up, as far away from him in the passenger seat as she could get, while he drove in grim silence, both hands set tightly on the steering wheel and his face fixed in a hard mask. She had wanted to talk, wanted to tell him it was all right, she’d changed her mind, she didn’t want to dance any more after all, it had all been a ridiculous fuss over nothing, she hadn’t meant a bit of it — but the words had dried in her mouth and refused to be spoken. Because she did want to.

  In spite of his misery, in spite of the pain of seeing tears running down his cheeks and having to pretend she hadn’t noticed — for she knew how bitterly ashamed he would be if he had thought she had been aware — it was what she wanted and there was no point in saying otherwise. The thought of New York hovered over her mind like a mist; no other concern was so near to her, not even the wedding that had been planned. All she felt now about Bessie and her excitement was irritable boredom; she loved Max, of course she did, but she didn’t want a wedding, certainly not now. In a few months’ time it would all be different. After New York, after the chance of a lifetime —

  He had left her at the flat and spoke then for the first time since leaving Maidenhead.

  ‘Tomorrow, Lexie. It’s all more than I can cope with at present, I have to admit. This afternoon — and then — I can’t cope. Tomorrow I’ll call you and we’ll sort this out — one way or another, I know we can. Just remember I love you and want what’s best for you. Promise me you’ll remember that, and that this afternoon was — that making love with you was all I knew it would be. I love you so much, Lexie.’ He’d kissed the top of her head, no more, but with such rough passion that it left her shaking as he turned and ran back to the car and took it screeching away down the quiet street towards the King’s Road.

  And now here she lay in bed in her flat, with all her possessions in packing cases around her, even her clothes mostly packed ready to be taken over to Max’s flat. It had been agreed that she would leave Mulberry Walk on Friday, the day after tomorrow, that she would move into an hotel and live there for the last week of her single life. Her furniture and bric-à-brac was to be put into store until they should decide which to keep and which to get rid of. It was all planned down to the last detail, and now she lay and tried to see herself following that plan. She tried to see herself walking out of a hotel in the quiet Mayfair street, and into the car that would carry her to the synagogue in St Petersburg Place in Bayswater where they were to be married. Then she tried to see herself at Alex Lazar’s tea shop, dancing with Max, her own husband, at her own wedding.

  But she couldn’t. All she could see was herself with her luggage on a porter’s truck being carried before her up the gangplank of a liner, and herself in a stateroom as the ship pulled away from the shore, and then herself in New York, walking along the Broadway that she knew so well from the Hollywood films she had seen, flickering over the dim screens of the cinema in the King’s Road. She lay in bed and saw her feet dancing on a Broadway stage, her name in flashing light bulbs above a Broadway theatre front, her face in American magazines and newspapers, being hailed this time not as an unwitting participant in a sleazy court case, but as a star, a real star, a dancer everyone knew and loved.

  By five in the morning she knew what she had to do, and how she was to do it. There was an inevitability about it that couldn’t be avoided. Then at last she slept, safe in the knowledge that her alarm clock would wake her at seven. There was a great deal to do, and not much time in which to do it.

  26

  The rain had been coming down relentlessly for over an hour, making gutters run like rivers and the sidewalks an obstacle course of pools where potholes had formed between the broken stones. Lexie stood under the awning of the coffee shop, trying to hold her umbrella so that it protected her legs as well as her body, and wondered bleakly whether they had special clouds of their own in New York. She would never have believed it possible that such sheets of water could be hurled down so violently for so long.

  At last amid the squealing traffic she saw a squat chequered cab without a passe
nger. She ran forward, waving furiously, but again she was too late. This time it was a man who pushed her roughly aside, not caring that he drenched her as he rushed past to grab the door and get in. Lexie stood there wanting to cry with frustration and loneliness and — although she wouldn’t have admitted the possibility a month or so ago — sheer homesickness. No one in London, she told herself with furious misery, would treat a woman so; in London it rained, but never as cruelly as this. Horrible city, horrible — and then, as she went splashing back to the sidewalk, had to grimace at herself. Because it wasn’t a horrible city. It was the most dramatic and electric place she had ever been in, and ever since she had arrived six weeks ago she had been in a fever of excitement.

  She had needed New York’s drama, needed it badly after the five days at sea, because it had distracted her. The journey had given her too much time to think, too much time to be frightened about what she was doing, above all too much time to think about Max and to a lesser extent about Bessie. She had sat on the glassed-in deck aft of the great saloon, her legs wrapped in a thick tartan rug and a cup of beef tea beside her, struggling with the letters to them.

  Bessie’s, first, because that had been the easier, but still hellishly difficult. To explain to her why she had gone without even telephoning, let alone going to see her to explain properly — it just wasn’t possible to get all she needed to say into the words that came into her mind. All she could manage was a bleak little statement of fact. That she loved Max dearly. That she didn’t want to hurt him, but that she knew she had to take this opportunity Cochran had given her. That if she had stayed and talked to either of them, she knew she’d be dissuaded, and that in the long run that would just lead to more problems. She had to do what she was doing and that was that. And please, would Bessie cancel her appointment with Alex Lazar’s niece Hannah, who had been making her wedding dress, and tell her she was sorry and some time she’d come back to Mary Bee Couturière and she would try again. That it wasn’t a for-always thing, not a cancellation, but a postponement. That was all. Just a postponement. And she sent her love to Bessie and would write again as soon as she could.