The Backward Shadow

by Lynne Reid Banks

  After a while, she looked up hopefully. ‘But it’s too late!’ she said. ‘Shops are all shut!’

  ‘I’ve got everything.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything,’ I repeated firmly.

  She dropped her head resoundingly on the floor with another loud groan. ‘But it’s absurd!’ she croaked. ‘Two grown women! I suppose you’ll make me hang up my stocking while you dress up as Father Christmas!’

  ‘Henry will be Father Christmas.’

  She looked up sharply. ‘Henry? Why Henry?’

  ‘Because I’ve invited him to come down and spend tonight here on the way to his parents’.’

  ‘But what did you do that for?’

  ‘Because I like him, and we need a man around.’

  ‘To fill our stockings.’

  ‘And drag in the yule-log, and fix the star on top of the tree, and be the baritone voice when we sing carols after dinner.’

  She stared at me, then burst out laughing, rolling on her back and kicking her shapely legs in the air. ‘I can just see Henry! Wow! Has he been told the programme? Old Po-Face! A natural-born Scrooge, if ever I saw one.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘When’s he coming?’

  ‘Any time now.’

  She lay on her side and watched while I began to arrange Christmas cards round the room, and pin up the holly which I had culled in the garden that morning. ‘Where’s the mistletoe?’ she asked sardonically.

  ‘Here,’ I said, holding it up.

  ‘God! You really have thought of everything!’ There was a pause, and then she said, ‘Except one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you kindly invited Henry, for me, presumably. What about one for you?’

  ‘You mean Toby? He’s upstairs asleep.’

  She leapt to her feet in a moment, her eyes alight. ‘The Blackbird’s here?’ she cried. ‘Oh really, you are a bitch! Letting me lie here spouting nonsense when all the time … How long has he been here?’

  ‘Only since you left for the North, obviously.’

  ‘But that was yesterday.’ She looked at me, eyes popping, mouth ajar. ‘Jane! It was yesterday’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘You mean, he was here—last night? All night?’

  ‘Yes. Do take that look off your face.’

  ‘Jane. Jane. You know I never pry, never hint, never ask, never interfere. You know that, don’t you? Did he sleep with you?’

  ‘Is that any of your business?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t, you idiot. But if you don’t tell me, I shall go out of my mind.’

  ‘Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.’

  She spun on her heels and dropped straight backwards onto the sofa, where she lay sprawled with a look of utter bliss on her face and her eyes closed. ‘Thank Christ for that!’ she murmured with what sounded like genuine reverence.

  ‘That is to say,’ I went on carefully, ‘he shared my bed. You know how imprecise English is.’

  She opened her eyes and fixed them on me as one who hears something incredible and unspeakable. ‘What,’ she said, ‘exactly, are you saying? That you went to bed together—’

  ‘And talked for an hour or so—’

  ‘And then went to sleep?’

  ‘That’s right. What about helping me in with the tree? It’s outside the back door.’

  ‘Bugger the tree. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Do you really have to know?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a student of human behaviour, with a particular interest in explanations for the inexplicable.’

  ‘There’s nothing inexplicable about this.’

  She stood up and paced about. ‘Jane. I thought we were alike. I only have women friends who are reasonable facsimiles of myself. If I were in your shoes, and were—incredibly—lucky enough to have a man friend whom I loved and who loved me, and if I had a baby to raise, and if the said friend was no longer penniless, and if he was, by some miracle, as generously-minded as you told me Toby was—is—hell’s teeth! You get the message. If such a situation existed in my totally barren sex-life and said friend turned up one twenty-third of December when I happened to be alone in the house, and …’ She turned to face me, hands spread out. ‘Why? Just tell me why!’

  ‘It’s perfectly simple. I’ve got the curse.’

  She closed her eyes tightly, grasped the sides of her head, and let out a sound that can only be represented by the comic-book stand-by ‘AAAAUGHHH !’ She held the pose, head thrown back, elbows in the air, for some moments, and then walked quite normally to the table and poured herself a drink. ‘Never mind,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘There’s always Christmas Night.’

  ‘He’ll have gone back to town by then.’

  Dottie looked as if she honestly wanted to cry. ‘Oh my God, Jane.’

  ‘Would you tell me something? Why are you so anxious to re-open my affair with Toby?’

  ‘Because,’ she answered, promptly and without any self-pity, ‘one of us at least has got to marry and be happy. And since you’ve got David, it had better be you.’

  ‘Why not you too? Or you instead?’

  She didn’t answer for a minute, but stood quite still, looking down at her drink. She looked very pretty in the firelight, not at all thirtyish. ‘Look,’ she said at last, and now there was no exaggeration and no playing games. ‘I’m a very down-to-earth girl, as you know. I mean, I don’t normally get “pre-monitions” or any nonsense like that. But I can’t help believing a bit in fate. I think you can come to turning-points in your life, when you do the right thing—or at least, the thing that will make you happiest in the end—or you do something else, and after that you get swept along in the wrong direction and you can never turn back. Maybe you find other things, you can make the best of it, and that’s what I mean to do, that’s why I’m simply plunging up to the neck in this shop business, because I think—I’m pretty sure in fact—that I’m destined, or doomed if you like, to be a career woman and never to marry. I took a boss-shot at a turning about two years ago, and I think that was it—my chance to marry, I mean. I thought I didn’t love him quite enough, or something like that, anyway I backed off and backed off until he got fed up and married someone else. I don’t mean I’m now pining for him or even that I think of him very much, but I do have the feeling that—however many affairs I may have (and I haven’t sworn off affairs really, even if I wish I could sometimes), none of them will ever lead to anything.’

  ‘Well I’ll tell you now what I think. I think everyone who is capable of love at all, has one—at least—really big thing in their lives. Early or late, it comes. And although I don’t know who this chap was that you say now you should have married, I don’t believe he was your big thing, or you’d have felt more at the time and you’d be feeling more now than just a sort of luke-warm academic regret.’

  She was watching me with the most intense interest, possibly, that I had ever seen, even on her always acutely receptive face. ‘You really think that? That I’ve still got my big thing—up ahead of me? Even though I’m thirty?’

  ‘Thirty! Thirty’s nothing. Thirty’s a beginning.’

  She was quite silent for a long time, still looking at me. In the flickering firelight I read all sorts of things into her expression; I thought I saw depths of pain there that one would never guess at from her flip behaviour and her cavalier manner. ‘I wish you were the Delphic Oracle,’ she said at last. ‘But even if you’re not, I’ll try to believe you. You can’t imagine how badly I want to.’ She gave a shaky little laugh. ‘You haven’t a clue about me, actually, I mean about what a fool I’ve made of myself from time to time in the course of The Search. Well, you met Alan. Mad, horrible fellow. But I considered him. I seriously considered him. Even after I’d seen him like that, I still didn’t wholly dismiss him, because whenever I’ve started going to bed with a man I always feel I have to justify it by at least trying to make it—work. You know—permanently. Tha
t’s my whole trouble. I don’t seem capable of living for the moment. It’s as if the future threw back a shadow—a great black shadow of years of loneliness, and it terrifies me so much that I keep lighting little futile lights to try to drive the shadow away.’

  ‘You won’t have to live alone, Dottie. There are always husbands for women like you.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘Attractive. Clever. With something to offer.’

  She heaved a monstrous sigh. ‘It seems to me those are just the ones who have to do without, because, in the final analysis, they can. And men basically want women who can’t live without them.’

  A cold shiver passed over me. ‘That’s not true!’ I said, much louder than I’d intended. ‘Men—the best kind of men—don’t want empty-headed clingers! They want independent women, women with lives of their own, women who don’t need them all the time! Don’t they?’

  ‘Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it,’ said Dottie.

  We stopped talking then because Henry arrived, and after that we were busy and pretty happy the whole evening, forcing him to do all the things I’d planned and plying him with unaccustomed quantities of whisky to get him into the Christmas spirit—which I must say proved unexpectedly easy. Toby played along with his usual enthusiasm, lightly tinged with irony, and every now and then he caught my eye and said, ‘Do you remember last year—dyeing the pop-corn? And Doris’s pot? And John helping? And the party?’ And we would laugh gaily or ruefully, whichever was called for. We even thought of trying to get hold of John, but we couldn’t think how to do it, and the sudden thought of John alone somewhere, also perhaps remembering the silly friendly intimate threesome that was Christmas of last year, plunged me into temporary depression. But John wasn’t really at the bottom of it. The real trouble was that the whole evening, through the turkey dinner and the crackers and the carols and everything, I kept on thinking, My God, What if she’s right? And what if Whistler is the needing kind? And doesn’t mind admitting it?

  A surprising sidelight on the evening was how well Toby and Henry got on together. Two more disparate personalities could scarcely be imagined; yet they took to one another almost at sight. I don’t think Henry had ever said anything consciously funny in my hearing since I’d met him, but quite suddenly there he was, festooning the tree with Toby, handing him things with deft twists of the wrist and saying in a dead-level voice, ‘Scalpel—forceps—sponge—icicle …’ and later on doing a very undergraduate but, with the mood we were all in, extremely funny imitation of a monkey as he clambered up the ladder and appeared about to start swinging from the upper branches, the star between his teeth. When we’d all had a bit to drink he began telling jokes. I’m always a bit nervous of men who don’t usually tell jokes, and who suddenly begin to when they’re tight; the jokes which then emerge are often more revealing of their libido than amusing. But Henry turned out to be such a good raconteur in his cups that even Toby, who prided himself in this field, was impressed. Henry even knew one Jewish joke that Toby had never heard, and Toby is the man that writes the Jewish jokes.

  The sleeping arrangements that night were mildly complicated. Having only one spare room, there had to be some doubling up somewhere, but it soon sorted itself out—Dottie shared my bed and Toby had the spare room while Henry dossed down on the sofa. He said he was used to it (whether he meant my particular sofa or sofas in general, I wasn’t sure) and in any case was so well-fed and soporific with drink that he didn’t mind where he slept. It really had been a very good evening—even Dottie had enjoyed herself and entered, although somewhat laconically, into the spirit of it all in the end. She was a bit aloof at first, but Henry absolutely teased her until she relented, and at one point when we were clearing the dishes away and bumping into each other, singing carols and behaving just like children, he suddenly took her arm and said, ‘That up there’s mistletoe unless I’m mistaken, and I want a kiss from someone tonight. I think it better be you.’ With that he kissed her very firmly on the cheek before she could gather her wits to elude him. She went abruptly red in the face and so did he and she made some most gauche and un-Dottie-like remark about that being a funny way to do business; he said, ‘Well, I’ll apologise if I ought to,’ and she said, ‘Oh never mind! It wasn’t that sort of kiss.’ To which he replied, ‘No, that’s true, regrettably.’ Dottie gave a sudden shrill, London laugh, which I recognised with an instinctive flash of something very like matchmaking acuity as a defence against unexpected emotion, or at the very least, physical reaction; but Henry didn’t know this, and let go of her arm as if it had suddenly become too hot. However, this was only a brief interlude in a multi-faceted evening, and might have passed completely unremarked if I hadn’t had good reason to remember it later.

  When we were all in bed, I was tired enough to want to drop off at once; but Dottie was terribly restless and kept tossing and turning in the narrow bed, waking me up with every movement, until at last, getting exasperated, I asked her if anything was the matter.

  ‘Is there no decent way I could change places with Toby?’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh, Dottie, really! I’m far too tired anyway. Go to sleep.’

  … I woke somewhere near dawn. Something had wakened me. Had it been nothing but Dottie getting out of bed and leaving the room? Anyway she was gone. But somehow I didn’t feel it was that. I still felt half-doped with sleepiness and I had to force myself to lie awake for a few minutes, wondering hazily if I could have heard David cry. I felt I should go and have a look at him, but I was so heavy-limbed and thick-headed I didn’t want to move; the whole cottage was quiet now; I had leapt out of bed so many scores of times, my heart in my mouth because I thought I had heard a whimper or, at the beginning, that perhaps he was suffocating in his blanket or something, and I was compelled to go and check that he was all right. He always had been … I rolled over and plummetted back into the depths of sleep, scarcely even asking myself where Dottie could have gone …

  When I next woke up, Dottie, looking radically different, was bending over me.

  ‘Jane, you must wake up. David’s ill.’

  I literally fell out of bed onto all fours; when I stood up, my head spun and Dottie had to steady me.

  ‘Look, don’t panic. It may be nothing much … he’s been sick in the night …’

  I didn’t wait for the rest, but ran into his little room. It stank of vomit and the deeper, more frightening smell of baby’s diarrhoea. He and his bed were clean, but the soiled sheets were bundled into a corner. He wasn’t crying, just lying there looking awful; he actually looked as if he’d lost weight off his face in the night. His eyes were big and he gazed up at me; when I touched him, he was damp and hot.

  ‘Thank you for—cleaning up—have you taken his temperature?’

  ‘I didn’t know how to, but Henry did. It’s 101.’ My blood congealed, but just then Henry came in, neatly dressed and shaved, and said calmly, ‘It sounds a lot, but it’s nothing much for a baby with salmonella. Don’t be unduly alarmed. Just give him lots to drink. The main thing is not to let him get dehydrated.’

  I simply stared at him.

  Dottie gave a little strained laugh. Even in my state of near-panic (David had never in his life been really ill) I registered that laugh—it was so different to her laugh the night before. ‘Isn’t he amazing,’ she said. ‘Just like a doctor. You should have seen how he took over.’

  ‘How do you know it’s—what you said?’ I asked thinly at last.

  ‘It’s going the rounds just now. Amanda’s just had it—my step-mother’s. She nearly went out of her mind—my step-mother, I mean, not the baby of course. But it was all over in two or three days. Antibiotics. You need to call a doctor and get him started on them right away.’

  Dottie turned to me, horrified. ‘Oh, but you mustn’t give him that stuff! It’ll poison his system—set up immunities—then if he ever really needed them—’

  ‘Don’t be so daft. He really needs them now. He’s been c
rapping and spewing half the night. Go on, Jane, you give him more to drink while I go for your sawbones—what’s his address?’

  It was so long since I’d needed a doctor that I couldn’t remember, but fortunately I’d had the sense to write it down in an address-book in my desk. There was a few moments of stifled terror as I scrabbled for it but it turned up mercifully quickly and in a very few moments Henry’s car was bucketting down the road. It was raining, and I remembered, as I held David up to drink and it all came spouting out again in an evil-smelling fountain, that it was Christmas morning. My mind was quite dark with guilt and despair. To think of him, losing liquid like that for God knows how many hours of the night, while I slept like a fat pig in its sty, oblivious … I was sure he felt lighter … patiently I coaxed more sugar-water into him. Dottie had disappeared, taking the soiled clothes, and reappeared quite quickly with cups of tea.

  ‘Where’s Toby?’ I remembered to ask.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose he’s still asleep.’

  I thought, How could he! But that was ridiculous.

  ‘Did you hear him being sick? Was that why you got up so early?’ I was prepared to be horrifyingly angry with her if she had failed to waken me; but my fog of wretchedness was pierced by her sudden look of confusion as she said, ‘No … I got up because I was restless and I wanted to wander about.’ I let it go, though later I wondered: where does one wander to, on a pouring wet night, in a five-roomed cottage of which every one except the kitchen contains somebody asleep?