She had toothache, she said, really awful toothache.
‘Better go to the dentist, hadn’t you?’
She’d made an appointment, but in the end she hadn’t gone.
‘Why on earth not?’
She hadn’t been able to face it.
‘Better ring him up and tell him you’re sorry you’re late but you’re on your way.’
That was last Monday.
‘Do you mean you’ve had toothache for’ – he calculated – ‘over a week?’
She’d kept hoping it would go away. A fresh burst of tears. ‘I know I’m an awful coward, but I just can’t bring myself to go. I sort of know I must – and I can’t!’ She tried to blow her nose on a sopping handkerchief, and winced. She touched the bad side of her face and gave a little moan.
He asked her where her dentist was and she said Oxford.
‘I’ll take you,’ he said. ‘I’ll borrow a car and take you.’
And that was what he did. Ordinarily he would have found it embarrassing and difficult to ask anyone for the use of their car – petrol was short and he had no allowance himself as Jessica had their car, but now he found himself powerfully resolute: the wretched girl had to be got to the dentist and he was organizing it. He rang the deputy head of his department and said that one of the secretaries had been taken ill and he was taking her to a doctor, went and collected the keys and returned to collect her. She was still sitting at her desk.
‘Got your pass?’
She nodded. ‘In my bag.’ She was shivering. In the car, she said, ‘It’s awfully kind of you.’ Then a moment later: ‘You won’t leave me there, will you? You’ll stay with me?’
‘Of course I will.’
‘It’s really most awfully kind of you.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Veronica. Veronica Watson.’
The dentist was off the Headington Road in North Oxford. They had to wait for some time, as the disapproving receptionist said that Mr McFarlane had a patient with him, and another patient at two thirty and before that he would be having his lunch hour. At this point, Veronica asked if she might go to the lavatory, and in her absence he managed to soften up the receptionist with an assurance that secretly amazed him.
The indirect result of this was that when the time came he was allowed by the dentist to accompany Veronica into the surgery and subsequently to sit holding her hand while the offending tooth was extracted. ‘You have a whopping great abscess. You should have come last week, you know. Then we might have been able to save the tooth.’ When he had finished, and was washing his hands, he remarked, ‘You’re a lucky young woman to have your father come with you.’
He saw her about to deny this and put his finger on his lips: together they both looked towards Mr McFarlane, his back was turned and he was drying his hands on a towel.
In the street, she said, ‘I’m sorry he thought that. I hope you didn’t mind.’
‘Not at all. After all, I’m old enough to be your father.’
‘You’re not in the least like him, though.’
‘Feel better?’
‘Golly, yes! It’s a bit sore, but it’s stopped throbbing.’
He drove her home. She couldn’t possibly go back to work, he said, she should take a couple of aspirin and go to bed, and she said, all right, she would.
Her room turned out to be in the same building as his.
‘I’m so awfully grateful to you,’ she said as she got out of the car. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘My dear, it was nothing.’
‘Oh, but it was!’ She had turned back to him, her small velvety eyes glowing. ‘It feels as though you’ve saved my life!’
Driving back to Woodstock he felt happier than he had for weeks – for months, really. He was not simply a brain; he was somebody who, faced with a sudden emergency, could deal with it, could do the right good turn to somebody else with verve and assurance. Remembering those glowing eyes in her pear-shaped face, he glowed: it had not been that she was pretty, that his help had come out of some second-rate reason like being attracted to her, it had been pure kindness. The poor little thing had needed someone to take charge and he had done so. Her father, indeed!
Two days later he found a parcel on his desk. It was a box of Meltis New Berry Fruits with a card attached. ‘I didn’t know how to thank you for your kindness, but hope you will like these. Yours ever, Veronica.’
Really! There was something touching about the present and the card that had a little blue bird sitting on a twig in the right-hand top corner. She had large, rounded, rather childish writing. He opened the box, selected a green berry and ate it: gooseberry – it was actually rather good. He decided to go and thank her.
That had been the beginning of their friendship, which on her part, with a rapidity that slightly unnerved him, became a great deal more. In short, she fell madly in love with him, and he was touched, and quite soon more than touched. She was so young: it was flattering to be adored by someone so young – and really not bad-looking. Her face, when it subsided, proved to be rather round with rosy cheeks. She had dark curly hair that she wore short with a wavy fringe, and a small, full mouth that seemed always a little pursed. Her eyes were her best feature; their habitual expression was one of anxiety, but when she was with him they melted to adoration. She was like a small dark velvet pansy, a little spaniel, he told her when they reached the delightful stage of discussing themselves.
To begin with, he thought of her almost as a daughter: she gave him a kind of affectionate trust, looked up to him in the way that he had always hoped Angela would grow up to do. But when it dawned on him that she was actually in love with him, of course he told her that he was married – he wasn’t a cheap little cad like some he could mention. ‘I thought you must be,’ was all that she said, but he sensed that it was a shock to her all the same. He thought then that he should have told her before, but it hadn’t come up somehow. It changed things, whether for the better or not he really couldn’t say. It added a dimension to her attitude towards him: she was no longer assuaging his sense of failure as a father, she was beginning to affect how he felt as a husband, as a man. It was immensely comforting to be regarded as a romantic figure: it shifted Jessica to the middle distance of his consciousness and his miserable jealousy receded, leaving him with more distaste than despair. He told Veronica how fond of her he was, how much he enjoyed her company (they were now spending practically every evening together, going for walks by the canal, spending hours in various pub gardens, drinking cocoa in her room). At work there was the delicious game of pretending hardly to know one another, of being formal, using a code to arrange their meetings. His ulcer troubled him far less, and in the end not at all. She had a birthday, her twenty-first, and he gave her a Jacqmar scarf, yellow with red hammers and sickles printed all over it – Russian motifs were fashionable – and a silver bracelet with ‘Veronica’ engraved upon it. She had been thrilled; only sad that she had to go home to her parents for the celebration. She asked him to come too, but he declined. She had returned with the car, a bright red MG that her parents had given her. This had been wonderful: he managed to wangle petrol, and it meant that they could get further away from Oxford or Woodstock to places where they would be safe from meeting anyone they knew.
He had taken the opportunity while she was with her family to go to London, and there, because for once he had not given notice of his visit, he had come face to face with Clutterworth. He was apparently simply having tea with Jessica, but he suspected that a good deal had gone on before that. He was shocked by how dreadful this made him feel: he had found himself almost unable to speak, to utter more than a few words to the effect that he had simply come back to collect some important papers he’d left before. He had stumped upstairs, gone into the room in which he slept and noisily opened and shut drawers there. Her room was at the end of the landing. The door was open, the bed immaculate. Obviously tea came first. He went down the
stairs and out of the house and left them to it. He walked to the tube and took the first train that came in for Piccadilly, went to a news theatre and sat in it for two repeats of its programme. Then he went to the nearest restaurant he could find and ordered a meal: food made him feel sick, but he drank a bottle of wine and a glass of Spanish brandy. By the time he got to Paddington to catch the last train he felt feverish and drunk. Back at his digs there was a message: ‘Your wife rang. Please would you ring her.’ Would he hell! He went to bed and woke a couple of hours later with his mouth like a sandpit, stomach cramps and a pounding head. For the rest of the night, as he tramped back and forth from bedroom to lavatory, and after an abortive search for aspirin, he lay with fragments of dialogue repeating: ‘Do you think he suspected anything?’ ‘Oh, good heavens, no! He hasn’t the faintest idea!’ ‘Are you sure? Sure he won’t come back?’ ‘Honestly, dear Raymond, he isn’t very bright about that kind of thing.’ And then weary smiles or sniggering laughter at his lack of brightness …
Veronica returned in the evening of the following day, was waiting at the bus stop in her car when he got back from work. ‘It’s mine,’ she said, ‘my twenty-first birthday present. Isn’t it marvellous? I’m going to take you for a drive now – we could go to the Three Pigeons and have a drink there. Oh, I’m so glad to be back though – What’s the matter?’ By now he was in the car. ‘You look awful!’
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of town.’
But when they had reached a secluded piece of lane, and she had turned to him again and asked with real anxiety what was the matter, and he started to try to tell her, he couldn’t – he simply broke down. All his anger and hatred, of himself as well as of them, and his despair came uncontrollably out. He put his hands over his face and sobbed and couldn’t say anything at all.
She was so sweet! So gentle and concerned, so much on his side. For he did tell her – the whole thing in the end: it was such an enormous relief to tell someone who cared about him, who seemed as utterly shocked as he. ‘How simply awful for you! How could anyone do that to you?’ were two of the things she said.
‘I’m sorry to burden you with all this,’ he said later, but he wasn’t sorry at all, just incredibly relieved to have got it off his chest, and to relax in the balmy atmosphere of her concern and devotion. For this was when he recognized that she really did love him. ‘Poor darling! I do love you so much. I’d do anything to make you happier. I think you’re the most marvellous person I’ve ever met in my life.’
‘Do you? Do you really?’
‘Of course I do. Oh, darling, no wonder you’re shattered. Anyone as brave and sensitive as you would be.’
Brave, sensitive. Nobody had ever called him either of these things. But he had been brave – years ago, in France, in the trenches, when that mad major had spent six weeks trying to get him killed. He’d done every single sortie that that dotty shell shocked bugger had commanded him to do and he’d survived. And he was sensitive, really; it was just that none of his family seemed to notice the fact. But she did. This very young girl had the perception to see him as he was. He put his arms round her. ‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without you.’
It had been a turning point in their relationship, although he hadn’t realized it at the time. When, after leaving several messages at his digs, Jessica finally reached him at the office, he found it easy to say that he had had a train to catch and he thought he’d explained that.
That autumn had been a kind of halcyon renaissance for him. His times with her were entirely pleasant, angst-free; he basked in her reflected excitement at being in love. She wasn’t beautiful like Jessica, or desirable in remotely the same way, but he liked her: she was sweet and attractive, always good-natured and eager to please him – this last an experience that was quite new to him. With Jessica, he had been the supplicant, suing for her admiration and respect; with Veronica it was the other way round. Remembering what it was like to be the most vulnerable, he was very careful with her; he was determined to be both responsible and kind. This entailed not actually going to bed with her. To begin with, he had not found this very difficult: he kissed and petted her and enjoyed it, and throughout the autumn he had thought that this state of affairs suited her as well as him. But when she came to him one day with the tale of someone breaking into her room – at night, when she was about to go to bed – and admitted that this was not the first time she had been so harassed, he decided to take action and found them digs out of Keble, where most of the staff lived, a flat on the other side of Oxford. She had been thrilled. The flat, the upper floor of a small terrace house, consisted of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small sitting room with a kitchenette tacked on to it. It was furnished with bare and drab essentials. Money had to be put into meters for the gas fires and hot water; the beds were the sort to be found in boarding schools, narrow, made of iron and wire and horsehair, with blankets that had a rigid feltiness that did not promise warmth. The carpets were dirty and worn and most of the chairs were of the kind that made it unwise to sit on them without thought.
Veronica seemed unaware of any of these disadvantages. ‘I’ll be able to cook meals for us!’ she had exclaimed when she saw the Baby Belling and the small cracked sink. ‘Oh, I do think it’s wonderful of you to have found somewhere so cosy!’
That first evening they had unpacked, and eaten a picnic meal of Scotch eggs and beetroot salad, procured from a pub that they frequented, which they ate in the sitting room before the gas fire. He occupied the battered armchair, she sat on the floor beside him and they were both slightly intoxicated by the sense of adventure and whisky, and he with the feeling that he had rescued her, and she was prattling on about how she had never dreamed that he would find such a solution to her problems so quickly …
She had fallen suddenly silent.
After a moment, he put his hand on her dark, curly hair. ‘And?’
‘Nothing – really.’
‘Now, now,’ he said, gently reproving. ‘You don’t have secrets from me. You were just about to say something – I know you.’ He put his hand round the side of her head and tilted her face towards him.
‘What I was thinking,’ she said, as though this had in no way entailed her saying it, ‘was that now we are really alone.’ Her eyes were fixed upon his, and she began to blush. ‘I mean, now it would be perfectly all right for you to sleep with me. Nobody would know.’
Somewhere, at the back of his consciousness, a warning bell sounded: commitment, total responsibility, divorce, another family, losing Jessica entirely …
‘Now, my pet, it’s time we had a serious talk.’
It was serious indeed. He told her that as he was married – never mind the circumstances – he could not possibly take advantage of her, it would be unkind, utterly wrong, since she was so much younger than he, with her whole life before her (he was beginning to believe himself, gathering strength and argument). His wife would never divorce him, he said, and therefore he could not dream of them becoming lovers when there could be no future to it. It was not (her eyes were full of tears now) that he didn’t love her – she must understand that (she nodded, and the tears trickled down her face); there were some things that people such as himself did not do. However much they wanted to, he added, however hard it was for him …
She knelt upright and flung her arms round him. ‘Oh, Raymond, darling! I didn’t mean to make it harder for you! You’re so good – and sincere. One of the reasons I love you is that I admire your character so much. It’s not just a question of sex with you, like it is with so many men. You’re different, I know you are.’
While he was mopping up her face with his handkerchief, she said, ‘I’m lucky to have you at all!’
They must both be strong, he said. He felt an immense relief.
But there was no doubt that a darker note had been introduced that, in one way or another, changed everything. Not completely, of course, and by
no means all the time; it was more as though territory had been laid round their hitherto innocent playground that was a kind of no man’s land. They still met for lunch most days and – it was winter by then – went to the cinema and to pubs and occasionally out to dinner in between the quiet domestic evenings when she cooked stodgy meals and they played bezique or Racing Demon, or he listened to the radio, or wrote letters, while she did the ironing and mended her stockings. But now when he kissed and touched her small pointed breasts that were, he knew from more carefree times, of an engaging whiteness, she would become unnaturally still, and if he went on, would start to tremble and further persistence resulted in tears. Then she would apologize, protest her love and say how much she respected his self-control. There was now some of that to respect, since once he had decided that he must not have her he found her more desirable. In a way, he was grateful for this: it was somehow better than having to employ gestures and language simply to protect her pride. Nonetheless, a kind of theatrical streak had crept into their behaviour with one another, a scene of dialogue between them about what they wanted if only things were different, and what they could have as they were not, that became worn and to him irritatingly familiar with its frequent use. It was irritating, because she never seemed to tire of it; could hardly allow more than a day or two without reverting to the hopeless anguish of their situation. He discovered two ways to stall these scenes. One was to make love to her by talking rather than touching, and if, as on one or two occasions, this simply inflamed her into taking the initiative – flinging herself into his arms, taking his head in her hands and pressing her fresh red pouting mouth upon his – he could become, in his turn, agonized and beg her to refrain before it all became too much for him.
When he returned from one of his visits to London – requested by Jessica – with the news that Nora was to be married, she had seemed quite sulky and uninterested. ‘Oh, that was all she wanted you for,’ was one of the things that she said. She did not ask anything about the engagement and altogether behaved in an uncharacteristic manner, refusing to meet his eye and disappearing into the kitchen where she made rather a lot of noise with pots and pans. He supposed she was getting her period, she sometimes had a bad time of it, but by the time he had changed out of his suit into the corduroys and thick polo-necked sweater that helped to keep him warm – the gas fire was too small for the room with its ingenious draughts – she returned from the kitchen and apologized. ‘I thought, you see, that she might have asked you to come up for something quite different.’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 160
