At Freddie's

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘You remember that, Hannah. Did you think that I ought to have said more than I did about my feelings?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You resented that, perhaps.’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘I was afraid you might not have done.’

  They had to pause for a moment while a customer from another table came to borrow their bowl of sugar. The slight sense of loss and resentment which this caused, in spite of Carroll’s courteous ‘Certainly’, drew them together a little, and yet they could hardly be thought of as antagonists.

  ‘But even if I said no more than that, did you truly believe that it was all the same to me one way or the other?’

  ‘What else could I think, when you put the map and those other bits of paper back in that case of yours straight away?’

  ‘They represented all the prospects I had at the time. I’m not likely to improve on them.’

  ‘But you put them straight back and never blinked an eyelid.’

  ‘I might have done, perhaps, if I’d been acting,’ he said. ‘I suppose then I should have been taught how to do it.’

  Hannah felt the irritation of anybody who tells a lie for friendship’s sake at being forced into the position in the first place. Of course she knew, and had very well known at the time, what it had been like for him to be turned down. And if in the long years to come, because he wasn’t much over thirty, he was going to feel as much as this and be as little able to manage as he was now, what help would there be for him? From the desolation of such clarity, let us pray to be delivered.

  ‘It’s more than that, Pierce. I’d just as soon tell you about it now. I don’t know why I’m making such a business about it anyway. It’s just that I’m becoming fond of someone else. No that’s not true either. I have become fond of someone else.’

  ‘You mean this actor you met recently, this man Lewis?’

  ‘Yes, do you remember him?’

  ‘Certainly I do. You introduced him to me outside the Nonesuch Theatre. Later I had an opportunity to see his performance on the opening night. Although I’m no judge of acting he seemed to me excellent. Is he a Roman Catholic?’

  ‘Pierce, I’ve got no idea.’

  ‘If he is, it will be a relief to your family.’

  There it was again, how could you ever explain anything to him when he had all these ideas, they were as old-fashioned as Dick’s hatband.

  ‘I daresay my family won’t ever meet him, they’re not fond of the theatre as you know. It isn’t a question of marrying him. He just comes round to my place or sometimes we go out after the show to have a drink or a plateful of ravioli or something.’

  She felt this description as particularly false. Carroll tried to enter into its spirit.

  ‘Ravioli now, am I right in thinking those are the ones in the shape of small pillows?’

  In spite of herself she was looking into the mirror behind him. It was made of pink glass. She saw the reflexion of the back of his head and shoulders, where defeat first shows absolutely.

  ‘He hasn’t asked me to marry him, Pierce, and if he did I wouldn’t.’

  She intended this as some kind of consolation, but he only replied, ‘You’ll be giving up your job, I take it?’

  ‘Why ever would I?’ she cried, glad of the chance to be annoyed. ‘I don’t want him to support me.’

  ‘Fortunately I’m not called upon to understand this man. But you mustn’t worry that it might be awkward for us, I mean for you, to go on meeting every weekday, as we are at present. For me it would be a good deal more than awkward, and for that reason I shall be resigning my job, in any case.’

  Hannah was appalled. ‘But Pierce, where will you go?’

  Where would he ever find another post? All his oddity and incompetence in his profession were laid bare without her ever having intended it. But Carroll was not offended.

  ‘I’m not sure that I’m within my rights in giving in my notice so late in the term. But then, employment at the Temple School is hardly a matter of rights.’

  She began to say that Freddie and the Bluebell wouldn’t know what to do without him, but the falsehood choked her, and she repeated with feeling, but without tact.

  ‘Please stay, Pierce, please don’t go.’

  ‘Are you mad, Hannah?’ he asked.

  She was silenced. And why did she want him to stay anyway, to be hurt and hurt again, and have to talk about it in a place like Lyons.

  It was nearly a quarter to seven and now they were being menaced by the table-wipers, who suggested taking their cups away with the terribly appropriate words are you finished? But both of them were skilled in the art of keeping a statutory amount of cold tea in their cups, which maintained the right to occupancy of the table.

  Hannah, however, began to draw on a pair of knitted woollen gloves, with which the nuns still kept her in plentiful supply. She had one of them on, one off, when he took her hands between his, the only permitted lover’s gesture in Lyons; she could feel the naked pressure on her left hand only.

  ‘Hannah, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ve noticed that over here in London a great deal of thanking and apologising goes on – in my opinion, far in excess of its object. Even you are beginning to surprise me a little in this respect Hannah. Surely we were neither of us like that before we came over here. People say “I’m sorry, but could you tell me the way to the Underground”, what are they sorry for in God’s name, and they’ll thank you for nothing at all, they’ll come through the revolving door, let’s say in one of these large shops, those glass doors I mean, and come out the other side saying thankyou, thankyou very much – thankyou to a piece of glass, I ask you. I’m not condemning it, it’s a nervous habit. But I prefer myself not to thank anyone without a reason.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re thanking me for now, Pierce, honest I don’t. After all …’

  ‘May I explain?’

  The table-wiper hovered, but deeply intent on each other as they were, both of them noticed at once and picked up their teaspoons so that they could not be dispossessed. For this purpose, Carroll reluctantly had to let go her two hands.

  ‘I believe just now you were thinking of saying that after all there were tens of thousands of girls like you both at home and over here, and that before I knew where I was I’d find another one who would suit me better. I think you might have been going to say that because it’s the kind of thing women say in these tea-places, or indeed, to judge from my sisters, at any time. You would have meant to spare my feelings, I expect, and I should have given the only possible answer, and then I should have added that it was really an impertinence for me to have planned what I did or dreamed what I did because if you should ever want to marry you must have the choice of any and every fellow with two eyes in his head.’

  Hannah repeated that she was not getting married, but without hope of his paying any attention.

  ‘You want me to come to the point. Well, when you introduced me to this man Lewis, indeed, earlier than that, when you began to talk about him incessantly, I became jealous. I spoke to you once about jealousy as being my besetting sin, but I may be mistaken about that, because the sensation was quite new to me. Seasickness is the same, you get no preparation for it. I would compare jealousy to a violent attack of seasickness with no hope of the crossing ever coming to an end. It didn’t come to an end when I passed the night with you in your flat. It didn’t come to an end when I confronted you with those pieces of paper you were talking of just now, and realised what a ludicrous miscalculation I had made.

  ‘But since that time I’ve given thought to the matter, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I’ve thought about very little else, and I don’t exactly know when it was that I came to see the whole situation rather differently. May I go back to what I said a few moments ago, that it’s obvious you must have the choice of any man you may chance to meet, provided he’s sane and has two eyes in his head. You remember my saying
that?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, that’s the point, that’s why my whole view has changed, and dearest Hannah, that’s why I want to thank you. You don’t want me and you never did and never will. But you’ve taken somebody who’s not at all young – I could give him quite a few years, I think – not very successful, or at all events he’s still not playing the principal parts after all this time, not in good condition, not very much to say for himself, and above all, Hannah, nothing much to look at. It’s a wonderful consolation to me that you didn’t want a smart fellow, or a good-looking one that would do you credit in company. You asked me what I had to thank you for, and now I think I’ve made you see it. Even if you didn’t turn to me, and I’m well aware that was too much to hope for, at least you turned to someone who resembled myself.’

  Hannah had never let herself realise until this moment how near she was to loving Boney Lewis. The shock of indignation at hearing him described as an ageing failure, a poor thing like poor Pierce, beat up in her so warmly from the depths that she felt half blind. And then it was poor Pierce himself sitting opposite her and saying it. That was a test of human kindness harder than she had ever expected to face. Compassion had almost disappeared, she was left with nothing but duty, the duty not to tell him what she thought of him. Carroll, however, unaware, pursued his comparison as though nothing else mattered but to make it completely accurate.

  ‘I can only hope that he also resembles me, in so far as that’s possible, in his love for you, Hannah. I expect he can’t imagine living without you, am I right?’

  ‘I’m afraid they’re closing now, Pierce. They’ll be wanting to take our cups away.’

  He overlooked her cowardice.

  ‘I’m sure I must be right there.’

  She helped him to retrieve his case and they threaded their way out, to part in the cold street. At the corner she gave him a hug and kiss, as one does to a cousin, or to the inconsolable. Perhaps the whole thing would turn out in the end to have been a help to him and next time he wouldn’t make such a mess of it. But unfortunately, as she knew, real life is not susceptible to rehearsals.

  ‘You must keep your spirits up,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, Hannah, you can’t accuse me of that.’

  Gleaming, empressé, and elaborately polite, Blatt appeared as Freddie’s escort with a proper recognition of the strange occasion. He arrived on the dot. Either the politeness, or a sudden failure of nerve and dread of the coming confrontation, led him to offer Miss Blewett a lift, if she was going their way, in the taxi.

  Well, the taxi would mean a few hundred yards off her journey, and she would get a closer view of the impressive pair between whom, against all the odds, she had now begun to dream of a Something. She locked and bolted the back door. Before doing so she remembered to look out into the yard, but could see nothing beyond some dark masses piled up, and the snow falling.

  At the Ristorante Impruneta, it was not any failure in himself that Blatt detected. Indeed he didn’t allow for failure, having braced himself to challenge Freddie at last on every outstanding point between them. Apart from anything else, Stewart, so he’d been told, was due back from Zurich, and he wasn’t going to face Stewart empty-handed, with nothing settled. It wasn’t the outing itself, unwieldy though that might be, that told against him, nor the anxiety of the arrival and the business of extracting her from these musty old ceremonial robes she’d seen fit to put on. This in fact was undertaken by a waiter, Freddie not appearing much less in sheer volume when her gown was taken away and hung up. No, it was none of these things that undermined, before the evening could properly be said to have started, the authority of Blatt as host. It was the entirely incalculable fact that the proprietor, his rarely-seen wife, his head waiter and all the subsidiaries and minor employees of the Impruneta came from one insignificant village south of Florence, Ognissanti a Fontesecca, and that Freddie, again for no given reason, was able to speak to them, not merely in Italian, but in the dialect of their unpicturesque hillside. In consequence, hearing the thickened consonants of their terreno, the staff emerged from behind the curtains and archways and gathered, before he had even thought about giving his order, round Blatt’s table. They stood there, without apology, to hear the words of the elderly Signora. And when she had enthralled them long enough, Freddie dismissed them with a flash of her spectacles.

  The Impruneta was convivial, cosy and expensive, not really a place where people went – particularly on a Friday evening – to see and be seen, but it was not discreet either, and from the beginning to the end of dinner none of the other diners did much except look at Freddie or make half-hearted attempts not to do so. The atmosphere of her office, half throne-room, half lair, was transposed, apparently without difficulty, to these new surroundings. But here she occupied an entire corner, commanding her territory, a hugely moulting royal raven sprinkled with gems, while her large gestures caused a myriad lights to flash on the Lady Macbeth costume. In the earliest horror films, where the sea tended to give up its dead and mummy cases opened wide to show their inmates, there would have been a place for such a dress. Soon, also, the warmth of the Impruneta drew out of the ancient frock the odour of mothballs, and of time and disuse itself.

  Blatt knew that all experience is an investment. He hadn’t forgotten what a fool he had been made to look on the subject of Mission Street and the old East End, and he restrained himself now from asking Freddie at what point in her life she had learned the dialect of a Tuscan village. The trick was to recover the advantage he’d lost already.

  ‘You ought to go out like this more often, Miss Wentworth,’ he said.

  ‘A very unwise suggestion.’

  Blatt understood her. An evening out, for Freddie, could only be the celebration of a coming disturbance, or even a change. But that was all to the good.

  In the voice of the gladiator about to enter the arena he ordered a dinner for two. From eating and drinking, he knew, not much persuasive effect could be hoped. They didn’t interest her enough. Long before her final consent had been gained he had tried to find out about her preferences from Miss Blewett, who couldn’t get much farther than Ovaltine. ‘A glass of wine sometimes, of course. We have one for the Old Vic anniversary, and we had real cocktails, with cherries in them, when the Master came, but you won’t find her indulging.’ Freddie was not indulging now, and nor was he. They had come out to enjoy themselves, yes, but as contestants, not as revellers. Their confrontation, at one end of the room, was a kind of public performance in itself. Only when the coffee came did the audience look away. Well off, or they wouldn’t have come to the Impruneta, they were keenly sensitive to the change of intonation between two diners which announces the discussion of money. The grand comedy, though still dramatic, had become a business meeting. Freddie turned now, in all her majestic slyness, completely towards Blatt.

  ‘Tell them to take away this coffee, dear.’

  Who gives the orders here, Blatt fretted to himself. How would she like it if I left her to pay the bill? ‘Don’t you care for coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘It makes me sleepy.’

  She folded her massive arms, trailing the long black fringes of her sleeves among the débris.

  ‘There are going to be great changes at the Temple.’

  His heart leaped. ‘Am I the first to get notice?’

  ‘Change, but not difference. As long as I stay there, the place will be identical. It’s only what I have decided to do that will change.’

  ‘I don’t get you. That’s what I’ve been putting to you for the last two months, and I think you spoke to me about a brother of yours that said the same or something like it. Do you mean you’ve come to agree with me?’

  If only she could have given him a word of approval. It wouldn’t have cost her anything. It wouldn’t cost her a penny simply to say that she agreed with him for once. He would have liked to prise it out of her with a cold chisel.

  ‘You’re giving up,’ he
said as calmly as he could. ‘You’re finding the work too much for you, is that what it is?’

  ‘On the contrary, I am getting rather too much for the work.’

  ‘But you’re making a change. You said that. Do you mean that you admit you’ve been wrong?’

  ‘I mean that I’m right now.’

  I can remember you wallowing on the floor, Blatt thought, why did I ever pick you up? Why am I bound hand and foot to this monster, this old cow in fancy dress, so the only thing that gets me going is to know whether she’ll take me into association and whether she’ll let me waste my money on her or not? Why can’t anyone in this place take their eyes off her? And what should I have been if I’d never met her? What is the nature of slavery?

  ‘When I say I’m right now,’ Freddie went on, ‘you ought to guard yourself against thinking of me as a self-centred old woman. I don’t rely entirely on what suits me at the moment. There’s the Word, dear. I’m fortunate, you know, that it comes so often just when I need it.’

  He was suffused with fury. Now he was going to have this Word stuck on him, and after all what was it but the old Variety routine the comics used to do down at Brady’s Club, several of them did it, Max Miller used to do it, there was this young chap, getting married and he didn’t know what was what, see, lady, and as they were in the hotel going upstairs to bed there was this notice on the wall, see, lady – and he read the words, see, lady – ‘It was something that someone said to me not very long ago, dear, but who it was has quite gone from me. Still, a benefit is more important than its source. Who was it who wrote that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It sounds like a member of the Liberal party.’

  ‘The Word that came to me was, It’s a great mistake to live with past victories. It’s been with me before, that particular Word, but it’s even more helpful now. You see, it has confirmed that when I put an end to that passing idea of a National Stage School, I was also bringing to an end what might be called the first period of Freddie’s.’