“Her,” she said. “Patience. She was two months old.”
“And not precisely living up to her name, by the look of things.”
“No, she was irrepressible. I remember once—” Her voice had taken on a spontaneity I hadn’t heard in it since March.
“Once?”
“No, nothing. It wasn’t of the least importance. Please turn the page.”
“Did she live on to a ripe old age? Patience.”
“I expect she did. I really don’t remember. It was a long time ago, Mr Wilmot.”
I turned the page.
In the top right-hand corner of the next I read: ‘First grownup dance. Partnered by Oswald. May 1909.’ And this time she was standing next to a very erect and dignified young man in evening clothes. “Was that your husband?”
“Good gracious, no. It was almost ten years before I married. Oswald was a cousin. I thought him rather dashing.”
“Your dress is very pretty.”
“A seamstress in the village made it. Her name was Mrs Jarvis; we called her Jarvie. A kindly woman, who always took such pains.”
I wondered what had happened to that dress which once must have mattered so much; and—by extension—to all dresses which once must have mattered so much.
“I’ve sometimes wondered that, as well,” she admitted.
And against all hope it gradually began to feel companionable again, as it had felt companionable two Boxing Days ago. The past exerted its spell. Mrs Cambourne pointed out members of her family—mostly dead—and I gazed at each photograph carefully, noting the backgrounds, drawing her out with questions to which I genuinely wanted to know the answers. My sincerity must have communicated itself.
In some ways it was a bit like sitting in a theatre before the curtain went up. Listening to the overture. But the overture was enjoyable in its own right, besides being valuable, and it also enhanced one’s appetite for the play.
She spoke briefly about her mother…“whom nowadays I resemble.” She mentioned that Oliver had been very close to his grandmother, who hadn’t died until he was eighteen.
“And this was my husband,” she said. “On our engagement day.”
The caption was of one word. ‘Landed!’ I’d have expected there to be other pictures leading up to it.
“And Oliver was very like him,” I remarked at last, after staring at the album for a long time.
“Only in looks. Not in character.”
There followed pictures of the wedding. It had obviously been a huge occasion, with long lines of expensive cars and crowds of wealthy-looking guests and a marquee on the lawn—“Here?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, here,” she answered. “You see, my husband rather took over the wedding—my parents had wanted something smaller, altogether more modest. It was the final summer of the war but Henry had only recently acquired Merriot Park and it seemed he wanted to show both me and the house off together. It was a very grand affair. Someone happened to say it was worthy of Ziegfeld and Henry took that as a great compliment.”
She sighed.
“I’m afraid my husband was in no way an admirable character. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a malingerer and a profiteer. And his friends were mostly of the same ilk. But I was dazzled and my head was turned … I haven’t even the excuse of youth. I wasn’t particularly young—especially not by the standards of that time. And I’m sure my parents were worried I’d be left unwed. During that period, of course, so many women were…”
She stared at the photographs.
“It was a miserable mistake—and one I very soon regretted. Apart from Oliver, that is … and apart from Merriot Park.” I glanced back, on the preceding page, at those two syllables of humorous self-congratulation and of faith in a secure future. ‘Landed!’
There then followed a few honeymoon snaps: the newlyweds sitting on camels in the desert, riding ponies along the chasm leading into Petra, Sarah Cambourne leaning elegantly against a rock tomb.
But the next picture was something altogether new.
Now she was wearing a knee-length dress, and a long string of beads, and holding in her arms a baby: ‘Oliver at three weeks’. The overture was over.
Yet it wasn’t until the child was nearly ten that I could really start to believe this was the person who had so completely changed my life.
And now our progress grew even more leisurely. I heard how Oliver had excelled in theatricals at the day school he’d attended until the age of twelve but how on one occasion, not having properly learned his lines, he’d adlibbed his way through most of the performance; how after the curtain calls he’d been so overcome with remorse that unknown to both his parents he had given away all his favourite toys—one to each member of the cast—in a desperate bid to atone for such flamboyance.
“When his father found out, he was livid,” exclaimed Mrs Cambourne, raising her hands and giving a soft, relishing chuckle. “Good gracious, how the feathers flew! Just bread and water for a whole day! Or that’s how it would have been! Practically Dickensian.”
“Did Oliver cry?”
“No. He seldom cried.”
There were other stories of how he had made his father angry: once by removing worms from the path of a public park in case they should be trodden on; once by insisting on picking up shattered glass in the roadway.
I mentioned how my own father had reacted to my throwing my pyjamas into the apple tree beneath my bedroom window.
Now we had reached the thirties. Sarah Cambourne, although she must have been over forty by this time, still looked carefree and frivolous in a series of gay little hats perched saucily over one eye. Oliver on the other hand—at fifteen—was looking surprisingly serious: pale-faced and introspective. But there was a snapshot of him gazing at his mother (“One of my favourites,” she said)—and she was gazing back at him—in which his tender, slightly mocking smile made him look so handsome, so unexpectedly familiar, that my head swam and I thought that I might faint. For a short time my sense of loss returned to fever pitch. But slowly such intensity subsided—and I could take note again of photographs of various tutors and associated activities: ‘The Tempest in the Garden’, ‘Summerhouse Maths’, ‘Botanists on the Hog’s Back’, ‘Looking Affectedly Academic in the Library’. That adverb had been added, and underlined, above the usual sign to indicate a word left out, in Oliver’s own hand.
Afterwards came snapshots of Oxford—mainly records of the days on which his mother had visited. Sometimes he stood chatting in a group of undergraduates and I wished I could have listened to their chat. It was impossible not to speculate a little, looking closely at all those faces, on whether any of them had ever been something more than a friend. There was a picture of Oliver standing alone on a bridge over the Isis which—along with that other, earlier one—I would particularly have liked to have.
There were no photographs of graduation.
But then I realized why. He would only have been twenty—just turned twenty—when war had been declared.
Also, it occurred to me, ‘A Yank at Oxford’ had been made during the period Oliver was at Oxford. I wondered now if he’d seen any of the filming—whether he could even have taken part in it, as an extra. Surely, at least some of the time, Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor (those two who’d been in ‘Waterloo Bridge’) would have been working there on location … which might well have caused a certain degree of excitement. But I didn’t even know if he had seen the finished product. It was only a little thing. Yet again—for a minute—I felt desolate. There was so much I’d never thought to ask him.
The album was coming to an end.
If only there could have been a second album—equally thick!
Again, it was like being in the theatre or, more particularly perhaps, the cinema: illuminated clock above the exit—merely ten minutes remaining and, oh, how you wanted them to crawl!
The second to last page showed Oliver in uniform.
He still looked youthfu
l but—now—more consistently recognizable. There was a picture of him with two small evacuee children, the little girl sitting on his shoulders, her brother with his arm around his waist and gazing up at him in adoration. There was another picture of the children, this time on their own, and then two of Oliver with Mrs Cambourne, both mother and son striking absurd poses in front of the house—‘My Hero!’ read one of them. It was an odd thought that I’d been only nine days old when those attitudes were being struck, on the Christmas Eve of 1939.
The final page was blank except for, in the top left-hand corner, a snapshot of Edmund Marshall.
By then I’d given up all hope he was going to be included.
The caption, of course, supplied the name. The photograph showed a tall and fair-haired man with an attractive face.
I affected ignorance.
“Who was this?”
“A friend of Oliver’s,” said Mrs Cambourne. “It was he who took those pictures there.” Having momentarily turned back the page, she indicated the four preceding photos.
I was frightened she might regard his role with the camera as sufficient clue to his identity. But she added, after a moment, “Really, I suppose, he wasn’t dissimilar to you.”
I didn’t know if she meant only a physical resemblance. Oliver had spoken of one. I couldn’t really see it, apart from the dark blond hair.
“He was very charming. He seemed kind. I liked him. But afterwards I learned…”
I didn’t hurry her.
“He was the first of them,” she said. “Just as you … you were the last. When I realized what was happening, I hated him; reacted to him far more strongly than—well, this goes without saying, I hope—than I would have reacted to him now.”
“When did you realize?”
“Oh, practically at once. It was sometime in the week which followed Christmas.”
And it had changed her, I knew. An end to frothy hats and silly poses; an end to springtime in November and skylarks which sang when I saw you. You put your shoulders back from then on and faced the world with wariness. Or aggresssion. Or defiance. You zealously protected the one person who had provided you with your real reason for living … and in the process you became hard.
“Yet you stuck his picture in the album,” I observed.
“It was a happy Christmas,” she answered. “Perhaps the last really happy Christmas until…”
“Until?”
I asked it hopefully; and she responded to my hope.
“Yes,” she said. “Until the Christmas before last.”
But then she shuddered.
“Though as for this one gone by…!”
“Please don’t,” I said.
But then I went on swiftly, before I could receive any tart rejoinder to do with just deserts or easy sentiment.
“How long had Oliver known him?”
“A month? Possibly two. He was stationed at the aerodrome Oliver got posted to. Bomber Command. He had some leave—no family to spend it with—Oliver invited him down here. It was the end of everything.”
Or maybe a beginning.
For some.
“A short time later he was dead.” I was glad she said that with a perceptible note of bitterness.
Edmund Marshall burned to death in his Spitfire, screaming, the radio still on.
Dear God. Dear God.
And what were you doing, God, all the while he screamed? Pressing your hands to your ears?
Or turning up the volume?
I know that you were smiling.
“It was he,” she said, “who gave Oliver that St Christopher. I don’t mean he bought it for him—it was his own. He gave it to Oliver the night before he died. I’m not sure why. If one were superstitious one might even say…” But then she shook her head. “Do you wear it now?” She must have known the answer.
“Always,” I said.
Edmund Marshall—Oliver—then me.
I drew it out but didn’t take it off. She touched it for a second.
“Do you want it back?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Perhaps I should never have made you part with it.”
“It would simply have sat there in my jewellery case—just as it was doing the last time that you came.”
I was relieved to note she didn’t give a shudder.
“Anyway,” she repeated, “after he died, things were never the same. Something in Oliver died with him. Until he met you, that is. And then that something returned to life.”
I heard the tick of the carriage clock on her mantel.
“And you’ve no idea,” she said, “how very much I hoped…!”
At which point her voice broke. But an instant later it was back under control.
“Yet it’s been pleasant sitting here like this; I can’t deny it. In other circumstances I think we could have been fond of one another, you and I. Quite fond,” she added, sadly. It was a virtual repetition of what she’d said before.
I asked timidly: “What will happen to this album when…?”
“When I die?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, the photographs of Oliver?”
“Not only them. Those of you. And even that one of Edmund Marshall. He was important in your lives. And—as you said—he had no family.”
“My dear Mr Wilmot,” she replied. “What usually happens to old photographs when you’ve had the misfortune to outlive your children and you have neither grandchildren nor anybody else to call your own?”
“But have you no nephews? Nieces?” She had pointed out an older brother in the first few pages. Also an older sister.
“Yes, a few—although they neither come to visit, nor invite me to their homes. In justice, however, I do have to say they live a long way off, and always send me Christmas cards, inscribed with flowery messages.”
She added: “And, of course, it’s highly probable that they’ll now grow a little more attentive—once it’s sunk in, I mean, that Merriot Park is mine. Well, no doubt that’s already sunk in but they don’t like to seem too hasty.”
It sounded bleak; so bleak. Perhaps I hadn’t wholly realized—not until I heard her say that—quite how much I had damaged her life. Possibly ruined it even more than I had ruined my own.
Which was maybe the hardest thing I should ever have to admit.
“So I repeat,” she said. “What usually does become of old photographs which nobody wants? At best, they get shoved into the corner of some attic.”
Was that at best? It was difficult to say. I’d often seen discarded photographs in junk shops, along with the cracked china and the tinny cutlery. Young men in army uniform; wedding day pictures; poses like ‘First grownup dance. Partnered by Oswald. May 1909.’ Even when I was a child it had always struck me as pathetic. Fascinated, I had once asked my father, “Haven’t they any mummies, then, to love them?”
“I don’t suppose you’d consider,” I said, slowly, “leaving this album to me? I promise you I’d value it.”
She answered tersely. “Oh, at this stage I can’t be thinking about anything like that!”
And shortly afterwards I drove away. Before I went she gave me tea—relations had manifestly improved. But on this occasion I looked about me with a melancholy I hadn’t experienced the last time. Or not so fully. The reason was laughable. This had been Oliver’s home; he had been born here. “One of these days,” I’d said to Elizabeth, “possibly we could buy it.” But I doubted now that such a thing would ever happen and I felt a heaviness in my heart which owned a deep mistrust of the future.
36
By nightfall my melancholy had turned into another crippling depression. I spent the whole of the next day in bed. I returned to work on Tuesday feeling only slightly less apathetic—and this was a state which lasted, allowing for minor gradations of light and shade, all through the next ten weeks. I did everything I had to; I even smiled at times, and laughed; I went to the pictures; but just a hair’s breadth beneath the
surface lay only emptiness and self-pity.
During a rare bout of activity halfway through February I wrote to Elizabeth saying I must have a clear-cut decision. Apart from a Christmas card, I had heard from her only once since November—and that, most non-committally. She now answered that she had made up her mind to stay on in America and that I should therefore start divorce proceedings. She hoped we should ‘always remain dear friends’. I thought I’d been prepared for this: had believed that I didn’t much care. But her letter was still a shock. Its finality made me recall qualities I hadn’t really thought about since her departure. It was always the same. Apparently I only began to value things as I was losing them.
My awareness of this made me write and nearly post a mawkish sort of screed begging her to reconsider. Yet in its place I eventually dashed off a deliberately short note saying, “As you like. But is that really your final word? It seems we had a lot going for us, and still could have. I was never in love with you—of course you know that—but we were always fond of one another. I believe we could work something out: contentment if not happiness. And I promise you—in regard to mentioning Oliver—I’d do my very best to be careful. Think about it. Johnny.” Which appeared a truthful statement of the facts … and left me in precisely the same position. Though not for long. Her answer came speedily. “I have thought, Johnny, believe me I have. And it honestly seems better for both of us that I should stick by my decision. There’s a man here who is anxious to marry me. By your standards, a not very exciting person, but he will make me a good and thoroughly dependable husband and I believe I shall be able to make him a good wife. He clearly worships me—it’s a nice feeling! He’s a widower with a young child, a little girl who’s perfectly sweet and now refers to me as Lizzykins! Also my parents do approve—I must admit that counts…” And she reminded me about the instructions contained in her previous letter for sending on the few things she still wanted.
The Man on the Bridge Page 23
