“Lucien, I warn you. If you don’t let me past—”
“Let him past!” says Oliver, coming up behind.
But, even so, I don’t quite make it. I hear Lucien in the background saying peevishly, “Oh, surely you can take a joke, Ollie dear…” I throw up over the floor instead of into the bowl. I hang over the lavatory, sweating, dripping, retching; feeling I may be very close to death.
A moment later Oliver arrives. “Come on, my love, the place for you is bed. Is that the end, d’you think? Or not quite yet?” He hands me a wad of tissues.
“I’m sorry about this,” I say, eventually. I’m beginning to feel a degree better.
“Not your fault. If that fool hadn’t…” He adds grimly, “Well, now I’ll send ’em all packing. They were starting to get on my nerves, anyway.”
“I’m not sure what you heard but I promise you I didn’t—”
“I know that, idiot. In any case you wouldn’t have to tell me, but I saw you leave the room looking pale, then I came out after you … I’m so relieved I did.”
I allow him to cosset me: to plump the pillows and to bring hot water bottles. “Please tell James I’m sorry for the mess.”
“Don’t worry about James. Knowing how you feel about him I’ve seen to it myself. Now try to get some sleep. I love you, my angel.”
He adds, “I’ll be in soon.” The door closes. I am comfortable now and warm; the shivering’s stopped, I taste only mouthwash. I imagine I’ll have a hangover in the morning, yet for the moment I feel pampered and tranquil and secure. It’s a nice feeling. No jealousy. Not even much regret. Just a sense of wellbeing.
But shouldn’t there be at least a smattering of regret? After all, not the most auspicious start to a New Year. Brought in on a wave of vomit.
As if to show, however, that this doesn’t bode ill for 1959 … not a trace of a hangover! I actually wake up feeling hungry. I eat a good breakfast. Oliver says it’s incredible, and what it is to be young! Life begins at nineteen, I tell him—because we’re not going to have any taboo phrases in this household! He frowns; looks petulant; then wants to know why—for me—life didn’t begin at eighteen.
And later in the day, also, Oliver gets a note from poor Miss Stanton: it has been truly the loveliest of evenings—utterly perfect in every way. And how absolutely super John is!
So even this appears to be all right. I no longer need to have her on my conscience.
Not that I’ve ever fallen too great a victim to my conscience. My name is not Raskolnikov. Thank heaven.
15
Two months afterwards, on an evening in March, I returned late and found him sitting in partial darkness, having nothing but firelight to illuminate the room. My immediate fear was of another attack of the blues. This proved unfounded.
“How was ‘South Pacific’, my darling? No”—he hastily held up his hand—“you needn’t tell me! How was your driving lesson, instead?”
I kissed him on the temple, put my arms around his shoulders and laid my cheek against his. “Fine.”
“No collywobbles yet?” He pressed the back of my hand.
“About the test? Gracious, no, there’s more than a week until the twenty-third. Besides, it’s going to be a walkover.”
“Yes, I think it probably is—thanks to that excellent extra tuition you’ve been receiving most evenings.”
“Not to mention having to regurgitate the Highway Code at practically every meal.”
“Talking of which … have you eaten tonight? If not there’s chicken in the fridge. And Mrs Danvers has already gone to bed.”
“I’ll get something in a minute.” I poured myself a drink and flopped down into the armchair opposite his. “Old stick-in-the-mud! What have you been up to?”
“Mainly listening to the wireless. ‘Scrapbook for 1940’. And then sitting here thinking about it.”
“So that explains the Daylight Saving … You know something, Oliver? You’ve never spoken much about the war.”
“Perhaps it’s not a period one normally wants to dwell on.”
“Okay but—now—what would you say was your worst experience?” I uttered an exclamation. “Grief! Is this me or is it Wilfred Pickles? ‘Give ’im the money, Mabel!’”
He replied without hesitation, and put my levity to shame.
“My worst experience? Listening to a man’s screams as he burned to death in the cockpit of his Spitfire—the radio still on, of course … He was someone whom I knew quite well.”
I didn’t say anything. What could one say?
But it occurred to me—apart from the sheer horror of it—there might have been the hint of something else in his tone; something a bit too deliberately casual about the utterance of that last sentence?
“Yet when you were flying bombers,” he said, “can you really home in on the death of a single man as being your worst experience?”
He picked up his glass of whisky.
“However, that was the night I lost my faith in God.”
There followed a further pause. “I didn’t even realize…,” I began, tonelessly. But it seemed irrelevant. I stared into the fire. “What was his name?”
At first it seemed he hadn’t heard. “Sorry,” he answered, slowly. “Edmund Marshall. Why?”
“No reason. Just interested.”
“Oddly enough, in appearance, he wasn’t dissimilar to you. And he also wanted to write. I often wonder whether he’d have been successful—achieved a lasting reputation.”
“Do you think he might have?”
That wasn’t the question I had wanted to ask.
I had wanted to ask, Did you love him? But I hadn’t the temerity of Mrs Cambourne. And, anyway, I wasn’t sure I wished to hear the answer.
Then Oliver shook off his reverie. He yawned and stretched and said, “Forgive me, it’s not the past which ought to be concerning us. No; it’s the … potentially … much brighter future.” And he lifted his glass and pointed it in my direction. “May yours now be the lasting reputation!”
“Yours, too. Here’s to lasting reputations!”
“And here’s to the brighter future! Let lasting reputations take their own chance on salvation!”
We drank to it and then I went into the kitchen and raided the refrigerator—on both our accounts—and everything was fine again.
16
“I’d give anything,” he said—he was standing in front of the wardrobe pulling at the ends of his bow tie—“to be stopping in quietly by the fire with our books, listening to a few records, and then getting a reasonably early night.” He sighed. “But I suppose it’s altogether too much to ask: the avoidance of punishment twice!”
“We stopped in quietly last night,” I pointed out, with severity. I could have added: Are you growing old? “And one gets an excellent meal at the Savoy. Besides, the floor show’s fairly entertaining.”
He groaned. “Do we really have to stay for that?”
“After all, they’re your relations!”
“Very distant. I hadn’t met them until the day you did.”
“That doesn’t alter a thing.”
“And it’s certainly not me that Elizabeth fancies!”
I grinned. “So is that the reason we’re being asked?”
He came across to help me with my own bow tie. “Nothing,” he said, “would surprise me, my sweet shepsel—nothing!” He gave my cheek a fawningly sadistic pinch.
“And in that case,” he added, releasing my troubled flesh, though now administering a small hard pat, “we know exactly where to lay the blame.”
“What does shepsel mean? And why this whole Jewish-momma act?”
“It means little sheep.”
“Oh, does it? Well, thank you.”
“Am I mistaken then? Is it only the clothing you wear?”
And standing back a little to admire my tie, he expressed his satisfaction, and finished by giving me a quick kiss on that same maltreated cheek.
“C
ome on,” he said. “Enough of all this nonsense. We’d better hurry to our doom.”
But, of course, he found the evening much less of a penance than he’d expected; and—for me—having Oliver there to take his share in the conversation made it even pleasanter than before. “You could write a book on all your travels!” I said to Mrs Sheldon.
And as I’d half intended, Oliver explained to her why this should have occurred to me.
“Goodness!” she said. “We didn’t know you wrote.”
“Have you had anything published, John?” asked her husband.
“Not yet. But I live in hopes. I’ve very nearly finished my first novel.”
He nodded, appreciatively. “And now I understand why you want to run a chain of bookstores—to promote your own novels! Good thinking, I call that. But if you’ll take a little well-meant advice from someone who’s been around, young man, you won’t let the sideline get too much in the way of the main goal. Are bookstores a really paying proposition in this country?”—he turned to Oliver rather than to me.
It was the first time I had seen Oliver even mildly at a loss.
But it was Elizabeth who answered.
“Daddy, that wasn’t exactly what I said. You asked what John’s ambitions were and I told you I thought he might like to own a large and important bookstore, or maybe even a couple.” She smiled at me without any trace of embarrassment. “Or did I misunderstand the whole thing? I sometimes do, you know.”
Oh, the wide-eyed innocence of it!
I said, “Well, whilst working in Wigmore Street I may have had some rather humble notion of that kind—which possibly I did allude to in November. But since then I’ve started to think big. I’ve actually given up that job in the bookshop.”
“Well, I have to confess it to you, John, I did wonder what sort of a future there could ever be in books…”
“Oh, a tremendous future, Mr Sheldon. There can’t be any doubt. But I agree with you: not on the retail side, more on the creative.”
“The creative…?” he repeated. “You mean—?”
“Think Edna Ferber,” I said, “William Irish, John O’Hara, James M Cain—the number of their novels which have been filmed. Look at Daphne Du Maurier. Practically all of hers have! I could cite you positively dozens of wealthy writers.”
Mr Sheldon seemed still more puzzled. “You mean you gave up your job just to write a novel?”
I answered lightly: “Oh, don’t say ‘just’.”
“But what are you living on? If that isn’t too indiscreet a question.”
Oliver laughed. “Oh, didn’t you know, sir? There are no such things as indiscreet questions. Only indiscreet answers.”
“‘An Ideal Husband’,” supplied Elizabeth. “Lord Goring.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Oliver.
“I wonder which is more ill-bred,” asked Elizabeth. “Your sounding surprised or my remarking on it?”
“Oh, your remarking on it—definitely. My lapse was involuntary. I hadn’t realized Wilde was so well-known in America.” I knew he was lying.
She said, “But that hardly improves matters. By implying he is so well-known in America, you’re detracting from my own little triumph, surely?”
“Yes, you’re right,” said Oliver again. “I’m behaving very badly. You’ll have to forgive me.”
I felt pleased. Elizabeth had never shown this side of her to Oliver. They were practically flirting.
Nor had they finished yet.
“No, I was the one behaving badly. I got what I deserved. I’m afraid I’m a hopeless show-off.”
Oliver said: “I wonder what the third defect will be.”
“Hey,” I butted in. “Shame on you! I’ll have to call you out, if you can’t justify that remark.”
“Oh, these things, you know, always happen in threes.”
But I also protested at this. “What was the first?”
“Hasn’t it already been let fall—and from the lady’s own lips—that she sometimes misunderstands things?”
But, for the lady’s father, such badinage had lasted long enough. He hadn’t been diverted. “What are you living on?”
“I’ve almost forgotten,” I answered, cheerfully. “Oh, yes—my savings. And meals at the Savoy.”
Mona Sheldon gave her husband’s arm a pat. “That’s what they call dedication, sweetheart.” To me she added, “I’m afraid Theo isn’t artistic.”
Mr Sheldon appealed to Oliver. “Is this book of his any good?”
“First-rate,” replied Oliver … who hadn’t read so much as a single line.
Yet—in my own view astonishingly—Theodore Sheldon didn’t appear impressed. “All the same,” he said, “to give up your job (even though, I agree, it mayn’t have been such great shakes to begin with) without first making sure of another one … Not even to be looking for another one…”
“Actually, sir,” said Oliver, “I think it’s incredibly brave. Shows an enviable singleness of purpose! And if you can’t do that sort of thing while you’re young—well, when can you, for heaven’s sake?”
“How old are you, John?”
“Fifty-nine,” I said.
“And wearing very well, too,” applauded Mrs Sheldon. “Honestly, Theo, you’ve no right to go round asking people how old they are.”
“At twenty-five one isn’t sensitive about one’s age. I hope.”
“The thing is,” drawled Oliver, now at his most languid, “so often one meets these unimaginative types who tend to stick people in boxes—boxes labelled twenties, fifties, eighties—and, when they’ve done that, think they have them pegged. Like me, you’ll say it’s immature, but I assure you there are those sufficiently blinkered.”
Thanks partly to this—partly to Mrs Sheldon—the subject was dropped.
Between the main course and the dessert Elizabeth and I danced.
“It’s nice to get you on your own,” she said.
“I was about to say the same.”
“Thank you, Johnny, for your letters. They were neat.”
“Neat?”
She nodded.
“Elizabeth, call them models of epistolary elegance—call them edifying, rib-tickling, satirical, crazy. Call them shocking, call them barbaric. But neat? Can’t you do a little better than that?”
“Oh, neat incorporates all those things—and several more besides! It’s not really an assessment of your handwriting.”
“Ah, well, then I understand. Oh, and by the way, I received your letters, too. Entertaining little notes.”
She had written to me three times, the second and third time being more about her life back home than about her current travels. I had written twice. Possibly my original letter had been responsible for the autobiography in her next two. After talking for a couple of paragraphs about ‘Where Two Roads Meet’ and some of the films and plays I’d seen, I had gone on to describe the time I’d spent in Folkestone immediately prior to Christmas (although allowing that weekend and Christmas conveniently to merge), painting a vivid picture—hopefully a vivid picture—of my mother and aunt and their circumstances, to which she had responded with great sympathy.
We danced for a while in silence.
Then she inquired if I might let her read my novel.
“Yes, of course. I was going to ask you, anyway. My hero’s an American; I’m sure his speech will need some vetting.”
Then I said:
“A chain of bookstores, indeed!”
“Oh dear. I was hoping you’d forgotten.”
“Hmm.”
“You see, I wanted Daddy to think well of you.”
“And you could only accomplish that by gross deception!”
“I guess you may now have seen why.”
Later on, after I’d had a courtesy waltz with Mrs Sheldon, we danced again. Elizabeth said casually, “I’ve two tickets for a show tomorrow night. I wondered if maybe you were free and would like to come.”
“I’d
love to.”
“It’s ‘Auntie Mame’, with Bea Lillie and Florence Desmond.”
“Better and better.”
After a moment’s pause: “Johnny? How old are you?”
She, I remembered, was twenty. “I’m twenty-one.”
“Is that all? I’d have said twenty-three or twenty-four.” She paused. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to choose the restaurant we could eat at afterwards—somewhere nice, no matter how expensive—but I want you to understand the whole evening’s going to be on me … including any drinks before the play begins. Yes, no objections, please! Right now you don’t have a job.”
“You, neither.”
“But I’m on vacation. One’s entitled to be extravagant on vacation.”
“There are those who might claim I’m on vacation!” Naturally, I didn’t name any names.
“Okay, then.” I thought for a moment she was going to give in. (Poor Oliver!) “But there’s something you don’t know as yet. My grandfather—my adoptive grandfather—left me a twenty-five percent share of the company. In trust. For when I come of age. Beat that.”
“You’re just so vulgar,” I said.
“Aren’t I?”
“But in the circumstances … all right, then, I pass!”
“And what did I tell you?” said Oliver, an hour or two later—we were on our way home in the taxi. “That girl’s after you.”
“I think perhaps she is. And she’s loaded. It could turn a young boy’s head.”
“Is this young boy’s head in danger of getting turned?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think I was right about that third failing of hers.”
“Which is?”
“Tenacity. She’s tenacious, like her dad.”
“Failing?” I queried. “Or virtue?”
“Oh, in this case, make no mistake about it … failing! She’s a lot softer and more intelligent than he is—I’ll give you that—and in fact I do like Elizabeth; you mustn’t get me wrong.”
“But?”
My hand was resting between us on the leather seat; he laid his own upon it. “But,” he said, “you’d better spell it out to her loud and clear. That if this goes on, she’ll wind up at the bottom of the river, with a knife between the shoulder blades. I don’t suppose she’d care for that.”
The Man on the Bridge Page 11
