Under the Skin

by Nina Bawden

  Back in the sitting-room, Reggie was standing before the fire looking rather like Charles Laughton as Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street, and listening to Jay with a curious expression on his face.

  Jay was saying, ‘I had no idea that doctors were so wretchedly paid in England. It came as a great shock to me.’

  Except for his bulging eyelids that remained white, like two lumps of cold mutton fat, Reggie’s face had gone an artificial-looking pink colour.

  ‘The professions are in an abominable state,’ he said in a strangled voice. ‘It’s a sign of the times, part of the post-war picture. Everyone wants something for nothing – free medicine, free drugs, free education, free housing.… They look on the Government as a kind of nanny. So what happens? Taxation goes up and up. Even in business, we suffer appallingly. Initiative is strangled, progress held back.…’

  Not surprisingly, Jay looked slightly bemused at this irrelevant outburst. ‘I had not realized … it must be so distressing for you personally. Medicine is the noblest profession, high above all others. It is my one great hope that my son should be a doctor.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Reggie said inadequately.

  ‘To have had to give it up, to be unable to help people as you would wish, must be a great sadness to you,’ Jay said. Sympathy shone in his dark eyes like twin stars of gentleness. ‘It must seem such a terrible waste of your great gifts,’ he said.

  Reggie did not answer. He opened and closed his mouth like some great, stranded fish. From the sofa, came an hysterical little snort. Veronica was huddled up, her hand in front of her mouth, her cheeks scarlet with amusement. For that moment she looked like the child she was, but the moment passed. As soon as she realized I was watching her she sat up straight, pulled in her waist, thrust out her pugnacious, beautiful breasts and hitched her short skirt an inch shorter. The reaction was automatic, though. Her attention was not on me, but on Jay. She was gazing at him, her sweet, plummy mouth slack and smiling.

  I wondered if anything in the world could convince her that Jay had not intended to take a rise out of her father. I was sure that if I told her he had spoken simply and sincerely she would only laugh with wild embarrassment. It made me feel suddenly sad.

  ‘I think lunch is probably ready,’ I said.

  During lunch, I talked to Reggie about cars. This was the equivalent of giving a baby a dummy coated with honey; after a few minutes his wrathful, baffled eye ceased rolling in Jay’s direction and I resigned myself to a didactic, male monologue on the virtues of the Trim’s new Bentley. (It had no vices; no car of Reggie’s ever had.) I nodded seriously, asked the right questions and listened with the rest of my mind to Julia’s conversation with Jay about Kenya. It was barbed on her part, but merrily so: two sherries had put her in an amiable skittish mood.

  Giles and Philip had come to some understanding during their enforced exile in the garden and giggled mysteriously throughout the meal. As soon as they had swallowed their ice-cream, Giles said loudly, ‘Philip wants to go down to the park. He wants to go on the swings.’

  Jay said, ‘I have promised him. We do not have parks with swings at home.’ He turned politely to Shirley. ‘May I take your son for a small expedition there?’

  ‘Of course. Go and wash, Giles dear.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Giles said. ‘Phil doesn’t have to wash. His dirt doesn’t show.’

  ‘Ice-cream does,’ Louise said.

  Both children broke into screams of laughter and fell off their chairs. They raced out of the room and could be heard scuffling amicably on the stairs.

  Jay said, ‘It is splendid for Philip to meet an English boy before he goes off to school. I expect Giles will give him some good advice on how to behave himself.’

  ‘Just advice,’ Veronica said darkly. ‘Not good advice.’ She had been eating like a horse; now she sat back with an air of satisfied and happy gluttony. Beneath suggestively lowered lids she looked at Jay in a melting, amorous way. ‘Can I come to the park too?’

  ‘It would be a pleasure,’ Jay said cheerfully.

  I intercepted the look Reggie and Shirley shot each other and braced myself for their refusal. But they were on their best behaviour today. Shirley – who never willingly walked anywhere – merely murmured that she would quite like to go to. She glanced at the grey, autumnal twilight lurking outside the window. It was a lovely day, she said, without enthusiasm.

  Although it was my own opinion that Veronica should not be allowed out in public unveiled and without a bodyguard, I was immediately angry. Subconsciously, I suppose, I had been waiting for something like this. They would not have objected to her taking a pleasant little afternoon walk with a white man, would they? Did they expect Jay to fall upon her among the swings and roundabouts?

  ‘I think I’ll go too,’ I said, glaring at Shirley. ‘I could do with some air.’

  ‘No,’ Louise said involuntarily. She sent me a look of mute appeal; I must not leave her, alone with Julia and Reggie.

  ‘Maybe I’d better stay and help with the washing up,’ I said.

  Once the door had closed, the storm broke.

  ‘You must be mad,’ Reggie said. ‘The fellow’s an impudent cadger. I can tell his sort a mile off – out for all he can get without even the decency to be polite about it.’

  Julia patted her hyacinth hair and placed a cigarette in a filter designed to abstract ninety per cent of the tars. She inhaled with gusto. ‘There’s no virtue in overstating your case, Reggie dear. He seemed a perfectly pleasant young man, very grateful for all Louise and Tom are doing for him.’

  ‘I can see he has charm,’ Reggie said. ‘For women, anyway. But I tell you he’s unreliable and impudent. Impudent,’ he repeated heavily and looked at me. ‘No one’s going to make a monkey out of me.’

  ‘He wasn’t trying to make a monkey out of you,’ I said. ‘He was simply sympathizing.’

  Julia said quickly, ‘Now – I want to be fair. If he was rude to you, Reggie, I’m sure it was unintentional and you must remember he has not had your opportunities. You mustn’t expect too much from simple people. My worry is that Tom and Louise may have bitten off more than they can chew. I know these people better than you, Tom. Give them an inch and they’ll take an ell. I don’t suppose you knew the child was coming, did you?’

  Taken by surprise, Louise shook her head. ‘No. I mean, he told us just as soon as he got here. I don’t mind at all, he’s a dear little boy. And he’s going to boarding-school tomorrow.’

  ‘I know that’s the idea, but how long it will last I wouldn’t like to say.’ She paused, one eyebrow raised. ‘But it just goes to show, doesn’t it? I’m sure he won’t be your first unexpected visitor, not by a long chalk. Africans have more relations than any other nation in the world – and I daresay all his relations aren’t as clean and nicely behaved as he is. Or seems to be at the moment. I could tell you a few tales if I wanted to!’

  She stubbed out her cigarette, replaced the holder in her gold-clasped crocodile bag and addressed me. ‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate your motives, Tom. You’re a very generous, liberal-minded man.’ Her wise-serpent smile showed that this was not a compliment. ‘I know you want to be kind to this African and Louise wants to please you, but you must be fair to her. After all, the extra work will come onto her, won’t it? And you know how easily she knocks herself up.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ Louise said.

  ‘Louise is as strong as a horse,’ I said.

  Julia raised her eyebrows to make it clear that she thought me both unsympathetic and untruthful. As if I hadn’t taken the point, she said reproachfully, ‘Now, Tom, you know she’s not strong.’

  All right, I thought, I may be unsympathetic but you’re a domineering pig of an old woman who would like nothing better than to keep her daughter paralytic on a sofa. Very early in our acquaintance – actually, the second time I brought Louise home from a cinema – Julia had told me she was ‘not strong’. There was some slight foundation for thi
s as there was for most of Julia’s arguments: as a child, Louise had had a ‘heart murmur’. This had been discovered shortly after Augustus had gone off with Georgiana and Julia had made more of it than was medically necessary – at first, it seemed, to tempt the straying Augustus back to the hearth and later to clamp her daughter closer to her. She had removed Louise from her school and treated her thereafter like a Victorian girl in a decline; she refused to let her play games and made her rest every afternoon. When we were first married, Louise was nervous of running for a bus or walking fast uphill. I took her to a specialist and she was a little relieved, a little ashamed, to find that although she was anaemic, the heart murmur was unimportant. But Julia’s cosseting had had its effect. Louise could remember occasions when her mother had clung to her, weeping. ‘You must take care, my darling, you mustn’t die and leave Mummy.’ She spoke of this lightly but sometimes when she was with her mother you could see the fear in her eyes; she moved more slowly, she actually looked frailer. She was looking pale now.

  I said, ‘Louise is as tough as you are. Maybe that’s an overstatement but she’s certainly as tough as I am.’

  Julia said pleasantly, ‘I know you think I’m fussy, Tom. But you must make allowances for a mother’s anxiety. It’s natural that a healthy young man should be impatient of sickness – delicate women are boring. But I have the feeling that Louise is too aware of this. I’ve often noticed that she tries to hide it from you when she’s tired or not well. She’s a good, brave girl, but it’s your job to notice. Louise needs looking after, all women do.’

  She gave a little, sad, half-sigh and fluttered her sticky, pointed eyelashes, reminding us all of the long years she had fought on gallantly alone. Few women could have been better equipped for this lonely struggle, as Augustus, a sensitive, conscientious man, must have known.

  I said rudely, ‘Oh, come off it, Julia. This is a lot of crapulous nonsense, and you know it.’

  Her eyes brightened. ‘Do you think I don’t understand my own daughter?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, both of you.’ Louise was standing with her back pressed against the wall as if facing a firing squad. She was white as a lily. ‘You go on as if I wasn’t here,’ she said bitterly and slammed out through the door.

  We heard the sound of pans being hurled violently into the stainless steel sink.

  Julia gave me a sparkling, triumphant look – now see what you’ve done – and sailed out after her. The kitchen door closed.

  ‘Well,’ Reggie sighed, eyeing the mess on the table with distaste. The idea that we might help to clear up lunch was quite foreign to him. He had given up asking us why we did not have an au pair girl to live in since Louise had told him we liked to have the house to ourselves so we could hold sexual orgies in private. (The real reason, that we couldn’t afford much help because we supported my mother, he did not believe or, rather, did not comprehend: in Reggie’s world no old woman would have allowed herself to be left so foolishly unprovided for.)

  ‘We might as well make ourselves comfortable,’ he said.

  We went into the sitting-room. Reggie settled his pendulous behind into the most comfortable chair, took a bottle from his waistcoat pocket and meditatively sucked a digestion tablet while I made up the fire. He opened his cigar case.

  ‘Mother is a bit obsessional about Lou.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mind you, I’m not saying she hasn’t reason to be worried. Even if there’s nothing wrong with her organically, she’s not exactly a toughie. Though it’s not her health that worries me.’ His lips opened wetly to receive the cigar. He puffed in silence, his eyes on the fire. Finally, he said, ‘Of course it’s none of her business, none of mine, either. But I must say I don’t think you’re altogether wise, old man. This chap may be all right – though to be honest, I wouldn’t fancy him in my house – but how can you tell, eh?’

  He shot this penetrating question at me, a gleam in his pale, boiled eyes. I shrugged my shoulders. He lowered his voice, ‘After all, Lou is going to be on her own with him quite a bit, isn’t she? I mean, you work extra hours at the lab and so on and then she’s left alone in the house when you go to visit your mother.’

  ‘That’s only once a week,’ I said.

  I went to Whitstable on Wednesdays, for the night. I went alone because since her condition had deteriorated my mother had taken a dislike, not to Louise particularly, but to all strangers. And Louise was a stranger because she recognized nobody except Miss Foley, the elderly, bird-like maiden who lived next door and came in daily to care for her, and even she was often mistaken for Harriet, my mother’s dead, elder sister, just as she confused me with Bertie – either her brother who died in the same year as Harriet or an equally loved and well-remembered Uncle Bertie who used to take her to the circus every Christmas, a big, cheerful man who kept a chemist’s shop and brought her cough candy and long, twisted sticks of barley sugar. The small bungalow with its leaning, ramshackle veranda and cosy sitting-room that used to be so full of kindly, Daily Express-reading middle-aged ladies warming their plump knees before the fire, was now peopled only with the dead. Her husband was not among them. He, her love, for whose sake she had stayed widowed though she had had ‘opportunities’ – I remember one, a boyish, elderly schoolmaster who came at week-ends to cut her privet hedge and mow her pocket handkerchief of a lawn before I was considered man enough – no longer existed for her. It was the long-dead, the dead of her childhood who were her familiars: Bertie, old and young Bertie, old Mrs Perkins who kept the sweet-shop and her son, young Mr Perkins who played the organ in church while young Bertie, her brother of twelve, blew the bellows for him. She talked to them and they answered her. They seemed gentle, happy ghosts; certainly I had never seen her frightened or upset by them.

  Only the living frightened her; she hid from the doctor and the man who came to read the gas-meter. The last time, some years ago now, that I had taken Louise with me, she had thrown a brass inkstand at her. Though Louise was startled she had not cried out, but my mother had given a gasping wail like a child who knows she has done wrong and rushed into the bathroom. She would not come out until Miss Foley, speaking through the keyhole in the guise of Harriet, had assured her we had gone.

  ‘How is your mother? Has she been violent again?’ Reggie asked.

  I shook my head. ‘She’s quite well.’

  ‘But Louise never goes with you now, to see her?’

  ‘No.’

  There had been no point in it. And although Louise hated being alone in the house, she had never grumbled or shown she was hurt, as she must have been, since she loved my mother. Or had loved her, anyway; you can’t love someone who is no longer there.

  ‘Hmm.’ Reggie examined the grey stalk at the end of his cigar with close attention. ‘It doesn’t seem a terribly satisfactory arrangement,’ he said.

  ‘Why not? Jay will be company for Louise,’ I said breezily. I knew what Reggie was thinking and hoped he would allow me to ignore it.

  But, of course, he didn’t, he never would. He cleared his throat and said, ‘I know it’s awkward to talk about this sort of thing but – well – it’s best to come out in the open, don’t you think? All Africans have a pretty strong sexual drive. Something to do with the climate. And you can’t expect their moral standards to be the same as ours.’ He gave me a sly and daring look, so taken up with this thought that he allowed the ash from his cigar to fall onto his protruding belly. One white hand rested, trembling a little, on his plump knee; his black socks sagged round ankles that were astonishingly delicate and white. I had the feeling Reggie had given me before – this was not the first time I had had a glimpse into this teeming area of his mind – that I was the only sane man in a world of lustful, grovelling voyeurs, that nasty, prurient world inhabited by judges, Sunday newspapers and men like Reggie, in which whenever a man and a woman were alone together the Devil made a third.

  I said, irritated because my voice was shaking, ‘Are you suggestin
g that Jay is likely to rape Louise? Or do you think she would be ready and willing to nip into bed with him?’

  He looked shocked, I was glad to see, and said with helpless anger – helpless, because what else could he have meant, after all? ‘Really, Tom.…’ For a moment his dislike of me, as basic and usually as politely hidden as mine of him, showed in an exasperated tightening of his full mouth. Grunting, he heaved himself more upright in his chair and brushed the cigar ash from his waistcoat.

  He said evenly, ‘I wasn’t suggesting either thing. It just crossed my mind that if he didn’t behave himself it might be rather unpleasant for my sister. That’s all.’

  He said ‘my sister’in the same way that Julia sometimes said ‘my daughter’ – as if to impress on me that consanguinity gave them a naturally greater interest in Louise’s well-being than I could ever have. I don’t know why it should annoy me, but then life is full of secret, minor annoyances that a reasonable man should be ashamed to confess to.

  I said childishly, ‘And for my wife too, I suppose. Though I can’t imagine that the situation is likely to arise.’ I dwelt on it for a minute. What did he envisage? Jay advancing on Louise with a leer while she stood cooking at the stove? I laughed and said, ‘You’ve met Jay, surely you can see he’s a perfectly civilized young man. This is just silly prejudice, why not admit it?’

  ‘If I’m prejudiced, so are you,’ Reggie said. He gave a deep, satisfied chuckle, as if he had probed my Achilles heel. ‘You’re besotted with him because he’s black.’

  I am sure he knew perfectly well that this was just about the biggest insult he could offer me.