My own all but passionate devotion for Henry, kindled abruptly during David’s illness, did not survive it, though it left a very warm residue; his relationship with me was certainly a very pleasant one for us both, easy, friendly and affectionate. I liked him, in fact, more and more as I came to understand his strangely withdrawn temperament better and to perceive the sterling qualities of reliability, kindliness and dry humour that lay hidden. What I never could understand was why the façade was so necessary to him, why the wit and warmth had to be winkled out of him or observed in flashes when it slipped out unawares.
And meanwhile, what of Toby?
I heard nothing from him, did nothing about him—except feel a good deal. The predominant feeling was of bewilderment. I didn’t know what had happened, but something had: something serious, moreover, and possibly (though I was too afraid of the thought of this to countenance it) even permanent. He was no longer the constant warm, secure presence bolstering up my life; he came and went, as it were, in my thoughts, and I could no longer get any real sense of security from summoning him to my mind and talking to him there. It was as if he had gone away from me and came back only intermittently, and uncertainly at that. The two-way current of love which had been flowing circuitously between us for over a year, seemed now somehow to have been damaged.
It wasn’t of course until this happened that I fully realised how heavily I’d been depending on him all the time I’d been living alone. I was forced to the conclusion at last that I had not, in essence, been living alone at all until now. Now I was. Dottie hardly counted. True, she was company of a sort; but our separate, private preoccupations, so sedulously kept secret from each other, prevented any real sense of intimacy. I missed her; I missed Toby—that is, I missed what I had had with both of them. Now I really and truly felt alone for the first time since loving Toby, and it was paralysing in its power to frighten and demoralise me.
Late one cold mid-February afternoon, before opening time, I popped next door from Mrs. Stephens’ to our shop to see how things were going. I used to go in about once a week, and could usually perceive a decided advance. To tell the truth, I personally had been so little connected with the shop that the whole project still had an aura of unreality for me; my weekly visits there were partly therapeutic, to remind myself that very soon life would change again and I would find myself transmogrified into a shopkeeper.
The premises were nearly ready; a drastic change had been wrought since the first time we’d gone in there. Many of the features Dottie had envisaged had come to pass: the removal of the counter, the scraped and polished floorboards, the refurbished fireplace, the clean paint and some rather startling but decidedly effective wallpaper. Strip-lighting had been installed, and did not look at all out of place. Henry’s practicality had triumphed with regard to the beams, damp-course and various other matters; he had also insisted upon a mild form of central heating. Before a single saleable item was installed, the shop was already radically different from any other interior in the village, especially on a dark, frozen winter’s afternoon: warm where others were chilly and damp; white-bright where others were gloomy; discreetly exuding an atmosphere of London where the rest huddled in unrepentant musty parochialism.
Dottie was there, a vivid electric-blue spark jumping from point to point. She had begun to dress very smartly again lately—to match the shop, she said, or perhaps it was to match the brittle, businesswoman character she was developing. When she saw me she darted over, and took me through to the back to see the strip-pine tressel-counters which had just arrived.
‘The workers will be out in three days,’ she said, rubbing her hands. ‘That’s nearly a week inside their original estimate. Have you the faintest idea of how miraculous that is these days? Of course it’s all my doing. I’ve been a thorn in their sides, a remorseless goad. No threats, nothing so crude—just my constant, infuriating presence, lightly, gaily, charmingly telling them how it could be done quicker and better, fore-stalling their inefficiencies, subtly refusing them tea except as a reward—and, of course, dishing out discreet but generous bonuses for extra-quick work. They hate me. Never mind—it’s done, and one week from this very day we open as a going enterprise.’
‘A week!’ I was taken aback. It wasn’t that I liked either of my present jobs very much, and as David grew older it was proving a very difficult and taxing routine; but change scares me; I can never foresee myself fitting into a new situation, and to leave an old one, however uncongenial, is always a wrench. ‘I’d better give my notice in, then—I suppose.’
‘Good Lord, yes! Haven’t you done that yet? I wish you were free now! All the goods are going to start arriving tomorrow, Henry’s bringing some and I’ve hired a van for the farther-afield stuff, and what would be grand is if you could get a day off and help me sort it all out and arrange it.’ This appealed to me strongly, and I promised to try to get off at least for some hours on the following Saturday morning. Then on Sunday we could work together all day until I had to go into the Swan for the evening.
‘Do you have to work out your notice? Couldn’t you just quit?’
‘Not really. Alf and Mrs. Stephens have been so nice.’
‘Rubbish! You’ve earned it.’
‘I’ve earned my wages. Not necessarily all the extras, putting up with David and so on.’
‘“Putting up with David”, as you call it, is a privilege.’
I said nothing to this. The fact was, if she had but noticed, David was no longer quite the angel-baby he had been to begin with. At eight months old he was rapidly developing a will and a personality very often at odds with what I required of him in the way of co-operative sleeping, eating and travelling. He had now come to the conclusion that what I wanted him to do was not always what he wanted; and when this happened he knew how to express his opposition unmistakably, both vocally and physically. I hadn’t liked to draw Dottie’s attention to the fact that he now employed such techniques as biting, kicking and hair-pulling to obtain his own way. His screaming she must have noticed, but chose to ignore. She was so busy lately, and so seldom at home at his bedtime, that this was not impossible for her.
Sometimes, when I was tired after a long difficult day and he refused to go quietly to sleep at bedtime, I was startled and alarmed to find myself getting unwontedly quite furious with him. I’d never really understood how a mother could possibly have even a faintly violent impulse towards her baby, but after he had been screaming for an hour and I had found it impossible to discover what he wanted, other than to be picked up and allowed to continue playing as if night had not come, I was ready to bang my head against a wall—or even his, if it would just stop the noise. As soon as he finally fell asleep all my love for him came rushing back at once, mingled with an agonising remorse for ever having entertained thoughts of savagery; but it did occur to me to change my dogmatic views on the subject of nannies. How lovely it would have been, when I was really at my wits’ end, to be able to hand him over to some capable woman the very touch of whose experienced hands would instantly soothe him and bring him to order! Or, better and much more wholesome, to a father … Babies, I had heard, often sense the superior strength and nervelessness of masculinity and respond to it. But David just had to make do with me, and very often these days I was too tired and miserable to be the quiet, patient, stable mother he needed.
‘I don’t quite know how we’re going to arrange it,’ I said now tentatively. ‘I mean, when the shop’s running. Where will David—’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. There’ll be no need for more than one of us to serve in the shop at once. We’ll organise a rota, one day off, one on. Except that on my days off, I’ll have to be scouting round the countryside for talent … Oh well! It’ll work out all right, you’ll see.’
‘And Henry?’
‘Henry hardly fancies himself as what he calls a “counter-jumper” type. He’ll stay in the background, organising, keeping me on an even keel, and incidentall
y of course paying the bills.’
‘What did he do before?’
‘Before what?’
‘I mean, how did he earn all the money to pay our bills with?’
‘He was in his father’s business, I gather,’ she said, going vague, as she did whenever Henry came up in conversation.
‘Which was?’
‘Oh, something in London. When he retired, his father I mean, he sold up and gave Henry his share, and this is how he’s chosen to use it.’
‘Odd, somehow.’
‘I don’t see why. Have you seen these high box-shelves? They’re for the toys and the fabrics. Did I tell you I’ve found a marvellous woman to make things like traycloths and tea-cosies—and lovely weird-looking toy animals with the scraps.’
‘It’s odd,’ I persisted, ‘because one would have expected a man of Henry’s practicality to invest his capital in a longer-term prospect—something safer, that would give him an occupation a little more … I don’t know, solid, permanent, regular-sounding than ours.’
‘He knows what he wants, no doubt.’
‘After all, he can’t be more than forty—’
‘He’s thirty-nine.’
‘Thirty-nine, then. Is he planning to spend the rest of his life living in that egg-box, as you called it, doing a little organising, a little fetching and carrying, a little advice-giving? It seems very undemanding for a man like him.’
Dottie said quietly, ‘Jane, hasn’t it struck you I don’t specially want to discuss Henry’s affairs?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ashamed, for of course it had.
‘Where’s David?’
‘Asleep in the car.’
‘He’ll freeze. Come on, let’s lock up. I’ll take him home and put him to bed for you. He’s too big to be larking about with that nubile Eleanor any more.’
Chapter 12
IT was actually another fortnight before the grand opening. Dottie realised it would take at least that to have everything ready, and also to lay on the opening itself, which involved inviting ‘the right people’ down from London. I would have thought of none of that, of course; I in my ignorance imagined one simply opened the doors of one’s shop one day and hoped people passing would come in to buy. But Dottie knew all the wrinkles. She not only sent very grand-looking invitations to literally scores of people, in and out of the trade, but spent the better part of the final week up in town, renewing contacts as she called it. I couldn’t resist asking if it were not distasteful to her, having to spend time with the corrupt, over-sophisticated city-society that she despised; she refused to be drawn, however, and simply said, ‘I’ve no principles against using them and their glamour and their money. It’s all they’re fit for, after all—commercial exploitation.’
During the week she was away, I was so shockingly lonely—having given up both my bread-and-butter jobs, I was at home alone all the time—that before two days had passed, I had no alternative but to ring Henry up and beg him to come for a meal. He was very busy—Dottie having left him plenty to do in and around the shop—but he kindly came in for lunch one morning on his way to pick up some stuff from a nearby blacksmith’s. As usual, his quiet presence restored my sense of proportion. I told him about going to America. I hadn’t mentioned this to anybody for months and it had somehow lost some of its tangibility for me—I felt I had to talk about it again to re-solidify it before it turned into a chimera and wafted away.
Henry watched me steadily as I outlined my plan, and then, after chewing his way through three mouthfuls, asked: ‘But what’ll happen about the shop?’
‘I always told Dottie I could only come in on it very temporarily.’
‘But if you go, she’ll be left to run the place all by herself.’
‘What do you mean? She’ll have you.’
Henry drank some beer and said slowly, ‘Well, but not indefinitely.’
Taken aback, I said, ‘Why not? I thought—’
‘Well, you know, I never really thought of this as being—forever.’
This put a very new complexion on things, and I thought about this new prospective hole in Dottie’s business, not to mention personal, future for a while and then asked, ‘Does Dottie know about this?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve told her.’
‘But surely you wouldn’t pull out in less than—a few years, I mean if it’s a success?’
‘I don’t know exactly when I shall pull out.’
‘Will you take your money out as well?’
Henry grinned and said, ‘No, only myself.’
‘Even so … it means so much to her. If we both walked out on her—’
‘Well, you might change your mind. In any case, there’s no reason to talk as if she’d be left entirely alone in the world. She could find a partner—’
‘You were the one who was startled when I said a few minutes ago that I was leaving in the autumn. Why not admit you were counting on me staying, just as I was counting on you?’
He got up from the table and took his beer to the window. His four-square figure looked remarkably solid and masculine, standing there in outline, and in one of those disquieting flashes of disloyalty which I had lately experienced about Toby I compared Toby’s fragile-looking slender body to this stocky silhouette, and felt such a pang of sadness as I did so that I looked away and clenched my teeth. Such moments were quite involuntary, yet I paid for them as if I had willed them. What did they mean? Was I falling out of love with Toby? Had he, wherever he was, fallen out of love with me? I got some abstruse comfort from the unendurable sense of loss this very idea gave me.
‘Look,’ said Henry. ‘Dorothy’s not a baby, though I know she behaves a bit like it sometimes. There’s no real need for either of us to fret about her. She’s taken care of herself through some tough times before this, I imagine, and she can do it again if she has to. It’s just … just that I wouldn’t want to be the one who brought it on her.’ He turned back into the room and sat down by the fire, getting out his pipe. ‘Anyway, she’s been warned—both of us have warned her. There’s not much more we can do, since she decided to go ahead anyway.’
‘And what about the shop itself? Do you think it’ll succeed?’
This time he didn’t answer for a very long time. At last he finished fiddling with the pipe, put it in his mouth and raised himself a little in the chair to get out his matches. His eyes met mine and were rather grim. ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t think it stands a dog’s chance.’
I was shattered. And so surprised I didn’t know how to react. I simply stared at him.
‘I’m telling you this,’ he said, ‘because you’ve asked me, and because I think one of you—you, it’ll have to be, since she couldn’t face it and it wouldn’t be fair to make her face it, right from the start—ought to know that—well, it’s a lovely idea, it ought to go, but it won’t. It can’t. Not here—not now. Maybe if she’d agree to rely more on factory goods … but that’d be to take away the whole point of it for her. The way she’s set on doing it … well, these days there aren’t the sources and there isn’t the market for them. Why does she think thatched roofs and hand-carved rocking-horses and patchwork quilts are practically obsolete? Because people don’t want ’em any more, that’s why; they prefer tiles and pedal-cars and candlewick. You can’t revitalise a taste for old things, however beautiful, when it’s been overtaken by a taste for new stuff, however hideous. Oh, here and there, perhaps. But not enough. The hand-made stuff takes too long, it costs too much, there isn’t enough of it. And even if there were, there wouldn’t be enough people who’d want it.’ He mumbled the last of this through his pipe-stem and then settled back, blowing out a long thin stream of aromatic smoke. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid as a scheme it’s doomed to failure.’
Utterly bewildered, I could hardly think what to ask first, but settled for the obvious. ‘Then why on earth are you letting her go ahead with it?’
‘Because she wants to so bad
ly. Because it’s damned well worthwhile. Because, at certain times and in certain ways, I’m a ruddy fool.’
He’d said it was preferable to tell me the truth than Dottie; but in fact I found it almost as hard to face. I was sure he was right; I’d suspected it from the start, and besides, when Henry said something, one instinctively believed it. And I felt a bitter disappointment. But I felt even more worried about Dottie, because now I understood very well Henry’s understated anxiety about how she would manage alone. It’s one thing to leave someone with the problems of running a successful enterprise on her hands; but to leave her to face a failure and to pick up the pieces by herself—that’s something different.
‘If you’re right,’ I said, ‘and I still hope to God you’re not, then one or other of us must stay until—well, until the crash. Hell, how appalling to be talking like this before the thing even starts! I do wonder if you shouldn’t have stopped her before she’d got in so deep.’
‘I wonder too, believe me.’
‘You were sure, right from scratch?’
‘Look, I’m not omniscient. How can I be sure? I hope I’m wrong.’
‘And if you’re right, you’ll lose all your money,’ I remembered suddenly.
‘Well … lose it … no. Losing means wasting, getting nothing back. I won’t have it any more, that’s true. But it will have gone on something, and somebody, that matters.’
I let the ‘somebody’ pass, though I got a secret warm pleasure from it. ‘Why is a man like you so keen on something like this—a piece of anachronistic feminine quixotry that most sensible, practical men would just dismiss as pure folly?’
He threw back his head suddenly and roared with laughter. It was a rare and marvellous thing to hear Henry really losing himself in laughter. ‘Anachronistic feminine quixotry!’ he shouted. ‘Oh, that’s great, that is! Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed! That’s exactly what most sensible practical men would call it.’ He leaned over and patted my arm, his eyes full of appreciation and humour. ‘Jane … you’re very good for me.’
The Backward Shadow Page 13
