She was afraid of going batty.
She was afraid of anything happening to Marie.
But despite all these fears, despite the fact that people everywhere were being cut down in their prime or even before they reached their prime and that to die prematurely in old age was just as much of an obscenity, despite all this she did have to admit that war in some ways suited her. It was utterly selfish but there it was. She enjoyed the comradeship. She enjoyed the grumbles. She enjoyed knowing that a fresh egg would never again taste so good. The awareness and the urgency.
She enjoyed, amidst all the bungling and hysterics and overstretched nerves, the expression of people’s resilience and courage.
“Marie, do you know what I saw today? There’s a whopping big crater in the Edgware Road. It’s the second time they’ve had a hit in the same place. And somebody’s planted a Union Jack right in the middle of it. Well, it really brought the tears to my eyes. I felt like jumping down from the ambulance and standing there and saluting it. I jolly well wish I had!”
“Then you’d better go back tomorrow. And Jimmy and I will come with you.”
“But did you know there are now lots of small flags flying from broken windows all over London?”
Marie shook her head.
“Well, we ourselves have just been blooded.” Daisy stared speculatively at the stout piece of cardboard contributed by their grocer. “I’ve a pretty good mind to buy one tomorrow and hang it out of this window.”
“Buy two and hang them out of both windows!”
But the next day was Sunday and so the purchase had to be postponed. The three of them went to church. An elderly vicar preached about the necessity to forgive and the sin of passing judgment. He spoke about motes and beams. It was a brave but not a popular sermon and there were mutterings both while it was on and afterwards, too, while people stood talking in the sunshine. Daisy threw in her own few mutterings yet kept them brief. Partly because of Marie; more because of Jimmy.
On the Monday Jimmy helped her to fasten their own paper flags from the windows.
His father still hadn’t been found.
“Marie.” Daisy was drinking some Bovril and eating a sandwich before she went on duty. “What if they don’t find him?” she asked, slowly. “What if he’s been killed? I’ve been wondering, you know, whether possibly in that case…whether we ourselves…?”
“You, perhaps, Daisy. They’d never let me. Remember, I do happen to be in my seventy-fourth year.”
Daisy didn’t say much more about it then but all that night it stayed in her mind—as it had been in her mind, indeed, all of that day and a lot of the previous one as well. Before she finally went to the station she looked in on him. He was asleep. One cheek was resting against the small teddy bear which she’d bought at the same time as the Union Jacks and he was smiling, very gently. A hank of reddish-brown hair had fallen across his forehead and she brushed it back with her fingertips: she had witnessed that scene a score of times at the pictures. She stooped and kissed his freckled nose. He turned over and sighed and murmured, “Mummy…” He was still fully asleep. Marie was in the other room. “Yes, darling,” whispered Daisy. “Mummy’s here.” She had never said ‘darling’ to anyone; and yet it came quite naturally. With the back of her fingers she massaged the large red patch on his cheek. She knew it didn’t require this but half hoped her touch was going to wake him. She decided she also had time to fetch him an apple, to place beside his pillow for the morning. She imagined the three of them in ten years’ time: Jimmy then sixteen, tall and broad-shouldered and doing well at school, despite the glint of pure mischief which remained in his green-flecked eyes; she and his Gran feeling so proud of him as they watched him go up to the rostrum to collect his prize: that far-off, peaceful, peacetime speech day. She imagined him running on the sands (he was younger again now) and the two of them side-by-side on their knees building a castle with a swirling brown moat. “Rudolf Rassendyll swimming across to rescue the Prisoner of Zenda!”—she flicked two fingers through the sandy water. She imagined them in the Chamber of Horrors, at Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends. She pictured them eating their sandwiches together outside the Tower of London and getting lost in the maze at Hampton Court. Later, of course, there’d be a time when Marie was no longer with them, and my, how they were going to miss her! But after a while they’d still adventure off all over the place—Marie would have wanted that—and Jimmy would look down on her from his vast height and call her the midget and appoint himself her protector. What fun it was going to be. She loved him very much already; had done so, she thought, right from the moment she’d set eyes on him.
Only some of this, in fact, passed through her mind while she actually stood at his bedside, a nucleus which she gradually added to during the course of that night, like a gaily coloured patchwork quilt, to be spread out warmly beneath the grim realities of the wounds that had to be bound up and the various forms of suffering that had to be allayed. Somehow, she knew, she would arrange it—yes, somehow she would—whatever they might say about the need or the desirability of a father’s influence in the raising of a child. She saw already that she would probably have to contend with a lot of interfering old biddies. Well, she would! My goodness but they’d be sorry in the end that they had ever drawn their swords out of their scabbards.
It came as a real shock to realize suddenly that she was almost hoping for the death of an unknown man, and for the absence too of any caring family. (But she herself would be so much better than any caring family. Yes! She could tell the world a thing or two about family.) She tried, after this, to push such dreams out of her mind.
But with only partial success.
It was as well, however, that at least she made the effort, for the following day the news came through, just before she left the station—and while she’d been getting ready actually to run the short way home—that Jimmy’s father had at long last been discovered; and was every bit as anxious for a speedy reunion with his son as even Jimmy himself could be for a reunion with his father.
Part Four
27
A few days later Daisy sent a ‘thank you’ for her weekend: a travelling chess set and a lace-edged handkerchief. Inside the set was a further small card—“From one outsider to another. All FRILs must stick together!” Andrew was mystified but didn’t mention it to Marsha. Instead, one evening before leaving work, he telephoned for enlightenment.
“I rang to thank you, Daisy, for the present.”
“Marsha thanked me for it yesterday.”
“What on earth are FRILs?”
“Florence-Ridden-In-Laws.”
“I should have realized.”
“I’m thinking of setting up a society. Would you like to join?” She offered the inducements of a free blowpipe—a set of darts dipped in poison—and a club tie. “Grand introductory offer. Can never be repeated.”
“Why not?”
“Yes, you’re right, of course. Why not? Wax effigies and pins. Unlimited supply.”
“Poor Florence. One almost begins to feel sorry for her. She hasn’t got a hope.”
“Yes, I know, dear,” she agreed. “Hopeless.”
“Membership is going to be a bit small?”
“Select.”
“Just you, me, and Erica?”
“Oh, good heavens no, not Erica! She was long ago made over. She’s become one of them, now. Insufferable.”
“And where is Marsha going to fit in? What about Henry?”
“We reclaimed them.” She added, with the air of someone determined to be absolutely impartial, “Well, up to a point, I mean.”
“What are the aims of this society? Is there an annual dinner?”
For the time being, though, she dispensed with the aims and dealt only with the dinner.
“Oh, yes, there has to be. Every couple of months, I’d say.”
“I feel I could be interested.”
And about a week after that—without
any accompanying note—a FRILs membership card arrived at his office. It had been beautifully executed in black ink and for the first three seconds or so, as he drew it out of its envelope, he felt puzzled. He thought it was a wedding invitation.
By the second post of the morning there turned up something to go with it; a piece of literature equally well-produced. Statement of Further Aims. It was all extremely juvenile of course but at odd moments throughout the day Andrew took time off to jot down additional goals—as well as a suggestion here and there concerning management policy or a club motto or even a password. And it was often noticed that he was wearing an abstracted expression and that for much of the time he appeared to be staring rather vacantly through the window.
When he telephoned her at the end of the afternoon, to share the fruits of his preoccupation, he asked the logical follow-up question.
“Oh, by the way, when does that first annual dinner come up? I’ve got a note in my diary it’s on Tuesday of next week. To be held at your place. Can that be right?”
A moment elapsed before she answered.
“As regards the date—yes. Wrong location, though.”
“Oh. I thought according to the rules of the society it had to be somewhere private.”
“On the contrary,” she replied. “The only ruling is, we have to go in disguise. I myself shall wear a beard and eyepatch.”
He felt uncertain but said eventually, “Well, just so long as you don’t expect me to wear a frock.” His tone had grown slightly fractious.
“I warn you I’d lose interest if you did. But I’ll bring one along and then it’s up to you whether or not you’ll want to wear it.”
The following Tuesday it was Marsha whom he telephoned.
This was the first time he’d ever done so for such a reason. As he sat at his desk and steeled himself to pick up the receiver he was surprised to discover how nervous he felt.
Why nervous? It wasn’t as if Marsha were going to be awkward. She knew nothing about his work and in fact never wanted to. Oh, at the beginning maybe she’d shown a certain curiosity but her enquiries had been childish and she had seldom remembered what he’d said. On three occasions in the first week following their honeymoon she had asked precisely the same question—and each time with a look of such lively attention and anticipation—dear God, it had infuriated him! So he had soon stopped making any effort to tell her what he actually did…no matter how enormously abridged or simplified.
Of course, what she did want to know, always, was whom he’d lunched with, what he’d eaten, what his companions had eaten and what they’d spoken about. She seemed almost passionately interested in the social lives of everyone he worked with: their state of health, their wives’ and children’s states of health, their leisure activities, their servant problems, their grocery bills: just as she must have assumed—to begin with—that he would be passionately interested in every small exchange of her own boring little day. She told him of her telephone conversations, of her encounters at the shops or on her way to the shops, of the afternoons spent with her mother or with Erica, of her lunchtime visits to the cinema…when the admission prices were cheaper and she went with her little packet of sandwiches and, frequently, one or other of her equally garrulous friends.
And soon, God help him, there’d be all the baby talk as well!
For even though she must have realized by now that he wasn’t passionately interested, still it rolled out each evening, the full saga of her unmomentous day, as though this had indeed been history in the making and no detail of it should be left unrecorded. The end to the saga would only see the start to the inquisition; if he was still sitting there, which as often as not he wasn’t. “Did you have a long wait for your bus this morning? Who did you sit next to—anybody interesting—no glamorous stranger who tried to move her thigh a little too close to yours? And that reminds me. At the butter counter in Cullen’s I saw the handsomest man I’ve seen for ages. Or it might have been the bacon counter. But then I went and stood next to him by the biscuits. Was Walter Jennings late again today?”
He had told her once—once—that Walter Jennings had been nearly an hour late that morning and had got into trouble with the Colonel. Otherwise, for all she knew, this man might never have been late in his entire life—a paragon of punctuality. (Actually, he wasn’t.) But perhaps once a week, almost without fail, and with a mischievous elbow-nudging twinkle in her eye she would ask him: “Was Walter Jennings late again today?” He always thought that, maybe, the very next time she asked he would really shout at her, but somehow, no matter how his stomach tightened, even in advance, in sheer anticipation, that moment hadn’t yet arrived. Instinctively he knew it would be killing something in her if it did. Perhaps in himself too.
But for all her questions, or, rather, for all his answers, she apparently couldn’t get it into her little head that the people in his office were just as monosyllabic as he wished to make them seem; that this applied equally to anybody whom he met upon the floor of the Exchange; and that his place of work was almost in its entirety a bastion of dignity and of male reserve. No fit subject for tattle. In short he would have hoped that Ignorance might produce Awe. The fact that it didn’t was disappointing.
Yet this was no reason for him to feel nervous as he sat at his desk waiting to ask the woman on the switchboard to get him his own number.
28
But he suddenly wondered if he ought to do it from a call box. Yet he hadn’t spoken to Daisy from a call box. It would be stupid if he was going to let himself get paranoid.
“Marsha?”
“Yes. Who did you think it was? Mae West?”
“No, I didn’t think it was Mae West. I thought that just conceivably it could have been Mary.”
“Oh, you fibber! You know she hardly ever answers the phone and that even when she does she sounds like Mr Baldwin. Oh, Lord, I do so hope she didn’t hear me! You don’t suppose she did? But you always say ‘Marsha?’ in that way. Always.”
“Nonsense! How often do I ring?”
“Come up and see me sometime.”
“What?”
“Oh and by the way? Who’s speaking please? I’m sure I should have asked.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Crosspatch! I wasn’t really laughing at you! Or only the littlest, littlest bit.”
“I can’t see why you should be laughing at me at all.”
“Sorry! I’ve got a perfectly straight face now. Promise. Not a dimple anywhere in sight.”
“Right. Now the reason I’ve rung you—”
“Darling, what causes dimples? Why do some people have them and others not?”
“Marsha,” he said, with a sigh. “I have no idea what causes dimples.”
There was a pause.
“It isn’t a riddle. I suddenly wondered, that’s all. Don’t you ever think about these things? I find them fascinating. This morning I saw a man with a cleft chin. It was oddly attractive, somehow.”
“I’m certain it was.” The same tone as before: exaggerated patience.
“Andrew, has it ever occurred to you it’s only men who have cleft chins? I wonder why that is. Or do you suppose I could have got it wrong? But I’ve never seen a woman who has one.”
“I’ve got to confess, Marsha, that I haven’t recently reflected on the problem. Not with complete and utter single-mindedness.”
“It must make it difficult to shave.”
“Perhaps.” Was there ever a greater preventative to—what?—a husband’s dining with another woman—than a wife who just wouldn’t give him the opportunity to say he wouldn’t be dining with her?
Was there ever a greater inducement?
“Why are you phoning from a call box?”
“What?”
“Why aren’t you phoning from the office?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s lunchtime. I was out. I saw this box. Does it matter?”
“No, of course not. It makes life more
exciting. When I heard button A being pressed I even had time to think for one thrilling moment it might be somebody tall, dark and handsome, his heart aflame with love. That gorgeous man I told you about whom I nearly held hands with over the biscuit tins. It’s just as well I didn’t. The biscuits would have crumbled. The glass lids would have shattered. Cullen’s would have sent you a simply hair-raising bill.”
“Why me; not him?” Even to his own ears his voice sounded aggrieved. Almost as though the event she described had been factual.
Or was it possible that she had indeed stood next to this man and talked to him? Could that be a rare conversation she hadn’t actually passed on? Heaven knew, she was perfectly capable of talking to anyone.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Life is so unfair! You poor darling. And I even poked fun at you just now when you were being so very sweet and impulsive. Aren’t I a beast?”
“Impulsive?”
“Yes. You saw a phone box and you thought of me. Who feels the need of any tall dark stranger? Not I—quoth the raven!”
“You never mentioned his being dark.”
What an imbecilic thing to say! And why would he remember anyway? It wasn’t as if she had recounted it last night. This whole conversation was absurd.
“I thought you didn’t like dark men,” he said. “You always led me on to believe that. The fairer the better.”
“Yes, of course, darling.”
“What does that mean? ‘Yes, of course, darling.’ That you were saying it just because you had to?”
“No, no, I only meant it must be the exception, the one that proves the rule. There’s really no comparison. I much prefer blond men.”
When I Was Otherwise Page 15
