The Backward Shadow

by Lynne Reid Banks

  It was so like him not to dissemble, like an ordinary man caught between two women. He said quietly, ‘Did Dottie tell you?’ I nodded. Here my eyes must have flickered uncontrollably over his shoulder because he said, ‘She’s not here now. She’s never here in the mornings.’ Which told me only the crudest part of what I had come to learn, and I found no relief in it, only a deepening fear because he spoke of it so openly. I knew it must be important and that her living with him or not hardly mattered.

  We went in. It was a high room with sloping ceiling—walls cut into by a floor-length studio-window facing the street—a vast window, uncurtained and cold grey on this winter morning. It lit the room, every corner of it, with a lucid, bleak light. The furnishing was sparse and simple, a big bed in an alcove, a lot of bookshelves on either side of a blocked-in fireplace, some chairs and a sofa, a huge scrubbed kitchen table in the middle of the room littered with papers and with Minnie, Toby’s beloved typewriter, reposing in their midst with a white tongue of foolscap sticking out of her roller. The floor was boards. The whole effect would have been very stark had it not been for a number of unmistakably feminine touches which I observed with a—well, you couldn’t properly call it a pang of jealousy since that suggests a pain which comes and goes quickly, whereas this started like a stab when I saw the Come-to-Greece posters and just went on and on. The posters themselves couldn’t have been more juvenile, I mean stuck to the wall like that with Sellotape—nobody does that any more except abroad-struck students. I tried to despise it, but it had been done out of love by a seventeen-year-old girl, who probably had been to Greece, for a thirty-year-old man who certainly hadn’t ever been able to afford it. It seemed as if she were not merely trying to brighten the barren walls of his room but giving him a glimpse of the world, a goal as it were, or perhaps simply trying, in a touching, childish way, to share something with him. Confused by the inability I felt to hate her, I forced myself to take in the other items in the room which were obviously her doing—nearly all had that glowing out-of-placeness which things bought abroad bring to English surroundings: the only rug in the room, a sort of long-haired tapestry ablaze in hot reds and pinks and tangerines which looked Spanish; a Delft coffee percolator, still on the table full of cold morning coffee; a row of unmatched mugs of varying shapes and colours which had the appearance of a collection fed by many trips; a cylindrical lamp-shade of glass beads strung between brass rims which had a look of the Middle-East. The sway-backed sofa was draped in a large bedspread-length of African batik in very masculine colours, and there was a pair of carved wooden tribal masks on the wall and a leather pouffe in blood-and-earth tones, evidently from the same part of the world. She’s been around, this girl, I thought grimly, and remembered she was the only daughter of one of the most successful literary agents in London. Young; rich; travelled; full of generosity and love … And her need not hidden, not even disguised, for who gives such gifts except as frank tokens of a desire to be loved in return? I knew she had beaten me and that I deserved to be beaten, for she was a wise woman no matter what her age, and I was a blind and bloody fool.

  I sat down on the batik and from somewhere came the strength—just enough—to appear composed while Toby chatted to John and John chatted back. Toby didn’t look at me and I felt it as a deliberate kindness on his part, which hurt me worse than anything. He’s expecting me to be feeling just exactly how I am feeling, I thought, he knows me so well, and he isn’t looking at me because he doesn’t want me to see that he knows, or perhaps he is too embarrassed … but the idea of me embarrassing Toby with my emotions was too unbearable and I stared at the jungle masks and fought to be still and controlled and above all not to cry. This whole situation was somehow, still, despite all the evidence, all the mental preparation, unthinkable—Toby and somebody else. But he’s mine! He’s mine! I kept thinking despairingly. I don’t believe any more passionate feelings had ever passed through me than I experienced as I sat on that sofa and stared blindly at those masks, hearing Toby’s voice talking cheerfully and normally and knowing he loved somebody else.

  This went on for a long time during which I don’t think I spoke a word, and at last when it seemed I couldn’t bear the ordinariness of the men’s conversation another moment, John stood up and said, ‘It’s nearly lunch-time. You got what to cook, Toby?’

  ‘A few tins—’

  ‘Not for us! This is a big day, us three together again. I go out and buy something and cook.’

  At this I jerked myself to life and said, ‘John, Toby may not want—’ thinking Whistler might be coming, but Toby quickly interrupted and said, ‘Oh but I do. I can’t think of anything nicer. Here, we’ll all contribute. Got any money, Jane?’ I said no, and John said that was good, women shouldn’t pay when there were men around, and he gave me such an ambivalent wink that I nearly smiled. He accepted a pound note from Toby and found a shopping-basket in the kitchen, which was down three steps. (The basket was also from Whistler.) ‘But it’s Sunday,’ I protested weakly, frightened now that the moment was nearly on me, wanting John and me to just quietly leave together and not have to see Toby again ever. ‘There’s a Jewish delicatessen on the main road,’ said Toby. ‘You can pick up anything you want there, and get a bottle of wine at the off-licence on the corner.’ ‘Yes!’ crowed John. ‘That cheap red stuff we used to drink at Doris’s!’ Too quickly, Toby said, ‘No, not that.’ He laughed awkwardly. ‘We can do better than that now. Get a bottle of something reasonable.’ ‘I like the cheap stuff best,’ said John regretfully.

  Then he was gone, and Toby and I were alone.

  He came at once and sat beside me on the sofa and we looked at each other. ‘We’ve got about half-an-hour before he comes back,’ he said. ‘Do you want to talk now, or shall we put it off?’

  ‘Better get it over,’ I said, frightened and hopeless but absolutely determined not to do or say anything that would embarrass him. If it was as bad as I feared, at least I could behave well over it—it was the last thing I could give him.

  ‘What—what did you come here to ask me?’

  One cannot be anything but direct with this sort of a beginning. Anyway, there was no room for prevaricating or pretending.

  ‘If you love her. If it’s serious. If you’ve stopped loving me.’

  He stared at me for a moment and said curiously: ‘Then you recognise the possibility that I might be able to answer, quite truthfully, yes, yes, and no?’

  ‘Is that your answer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That you love us both?’

  ‘Can you accept that as a premise?’

  I looked away from his steady eyes and stared at the ceiling. The accursed tears were coming and I couldn’t stop them. But I tried. I did try. I said, ‘If you tell me it’s true, of course I believe it. But I don’t know—how to behave about it.’ When I moved my head the damn things at once spilled down my face and I stood up though it was too late because of course he’d seen. I stood at the window with my back to him and the dreary winter roofs blurred and fused and I hung onto the strings of my anorak like a drowner and there was a long—an interminable silence. Then Toby came up behind me and touched me very gently on the elbows and said, ‘We’re wasting our talking-time. Come on back. It doesn’t matter if you cry.’ He brought me back to the sofa. I held myself as stiff as a rock so as not to throw myself into his arms; my throat ached so much I could hardly talk and I had to blow my nose which I felt to be an indignity. That in itself was something new and terrible. Once Toby and I could have done anything before each other; there was no need to think in terms of the impression we were making. Now all that was gone, and I literally didn’t know how to behave. How could a man love two women at once? I believed it without in the least understanding it. Sleep with, yes; but love?

  ‘Ask me; I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

  ‘But wouldn’t that be like—betraying her?’

  ‘I don’t really expect that kind of question
,’ he said gently.

  ‘Does she know about me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What does she know?’

  ‘That you exist, and that you were—and in a way still are—the most important person in my life. She’s very much aware of you as a rival, although she doesn’t understand quite what she’s fighting since she never sees you and she knows I don’t either, lately. All these things that of course you’ve noticed—’ he indicated the decor with his eyes—‘are her weapons against you, as well as her bids for me.’

  ‘Do you give her presents?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes. She’s so generous she’s made me generous too.’

  ‘Why did you and I never give each other presents?’

  ‘You gave me that typing-paper for Christmas. It was me that didn’t give you anything.’

  ‘But you never got that! You went away before I could give it to you!’

  ‘John told me, ages afterwards.’

  ‘But in general—we never gave each other—’

  ‘Jane, don’t talk such nonsense. You know exactly what we gave each other.’ There was a long silence and then he said, ‘You and I were always too poor for things like that. Whistler’s rich, she’s not happy unless she’s spending money. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, presents or no presents. It only matters if it shows that you’re mean if you don’t give, or conniving if you do. Neither applies here. Whistler can’t help giving; very often I wish she wouldn’t, but it would be cruel to try to stop her.’

  ‘Does she want to marry you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s told you that?’

  ‘Yes. She’s even proposed to me. She says she’ll come and live here with me if I don’t want to get married.’ He said it without a trace of conceit.

  ‘And—don’t you?’

  He hesitated and then said, ‘It’s difficult. You see, for so long I didn’t think about it much because I just took it for granted that if and when I married, it would be to you.’

  ‘But you never asked me!’ I blurted out, despite my resolves trying to make it his fault that everything was lost and spoilt and wasted, because I couldn’t possibly bear it if it were really all mine.

  ‘Asked you?’ he said blankly. ‘I must have done! You knew I was willing any time you were. Yes, come to think of it, I asked you very recently. In the pub.’

  I remember it only too clearly, my last chance. I had already known about the threat of Whistler; instinct had warned me it was a dangerous one. Why had I ignored it? Utterly impossible now to know—unless of course John was right, and I was afraid to marry Toby.

  No more questions came into my head for a while; I just sat silently trying to come to grips with it, but I seemed to be quite empty of thoughts. It was like that electric-shock therapy which, they say, seems at first to have knocked a hole in your brain that has to fill up again slowly. At last another question did seep into the raw empty space.

  ‘All this—did it start after—because of—the way I behaved the day David was ill?’

  Toby stood up and went to the table for a cigarette. ‘Jane,’ he said at last, ‘if you’re trying to find out what went wrong, or whose fault it was, I think you’re wasting time. Things like this—love-relationships—need a certain minimum of proximity to keep them going. We’ve seen each other exactly three times, very briefly, in the past eight months. I’m not prepared to say whose fault that is—I’m obviously more mobile than you at the moment, and I should have come to visit you much oftener, but I’ve been trying so hard to work concentratedly … at first because I wanted to prove something to you, then because I had to prove it to myself … then because I found it was the only way I could be happy. But I thought of you all the time, not so much consciously although I mentally “talked” to you a lot, but subconsciously you were always somewhere close by, the way you really used to be when you lived over my head in Fulham and I knew I only had to climb a few stairs to reach you.’ I was crying openly now, and he was holding my hand, but he was holding it the way you hold an ill person’s hand, to comfort them. ‘But then I suppose little by little it began to—get weaker, somehow, because it wasn’t fed by anything solid. And Whistler appeared. I met her at a party of Billie’s. She was only a child, I thought at first; I remember wondering why Billie let her come to one of her swish parties in dirty jeans and with her hair looking as if she’d hacked it off with a razor. She was only 16 then. But she just latched onto me somehow. Kids that age nowadays are either terribly sophisticated and devious, little trained coquettes, or they’re like Whistler—utterly open, straightforward, honest—none of those words really describes her. She told me she loved me three days after we met. Of course I didn’t take her seriously . . But Billie soon realised … Billie’s terribly worried … Do you know something? I think if I had to weigh it up, it’s much more because of Billie than for any other reason that I’ve so far kept Whistler out of my bed.’

  John came back then, and I went into the bathroom to wash my face while Toby took him through into the kitchen and showed him where things were. John was absolutely lit up with happiness, and had obviously forgotten what I’d said to him as we arrived. I glanced at him as he was passing through the main room, clutching two huge paper sacks under his arms, and he gave me a great uncomplicated grin which somehow plunged me into even deeper loneliness.

  The conversation had been broken off at such a vital point that it was not hard to resume it. While I was in the bathroom I had thought of the only other thing I really wanted to know, but before I could formulate a question Toby began again:

  ‘You mentioned the day David was ill. I won’t deny that did something to me. The helplessness I felt … You needed something from me, I even knew roughly what it was, but I couldn’t give it to you because … Well, look—and I don’t know if this’ll make any sense. When David was born and I came to see you in hospital I had a look at him, but it didn’t mean much. Even though he was yours. I was a bit shattered about that. I thought maybe seeing him, knowing he’d come out of you, knowing what you went through to get him and all that—it might make a difference; but there it was, he was just a rather ugly little scrap of human being and I couldn’t feel anything special for him. The feeling of failing you somehow started then, because I knew that if we did marry, I would have to feel like a father to David. And I didn’t … Later I felt better about it, because I found out that real fathers often don’t feel anything much for their children at first; it’s something that grows as you share in bringing them up. And that’s what I haven’t had. Do you see? David’s not mine. Not in any way. I’ve missed nearly a year of his life, a very important year when we should have been getting to know him together. So when he was so ill that day I couldn’t feel what you wanted me to feel. I could only have felt it if we’d been together, the three of us, ever since he was born.’

  ‘And if we had been—oh but Toby, it’s not fair! You mean we should have got married right after the baby was born. But you weren’t anything near ready to marry me then.’

  ‘Nonsense, I’d have married you like a shot if you’d just insisted a little.’

  ‘Insisted a little! In other words, bullied you into it!’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’

  ‘But who wants to have to push a man into marrying her?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. But from what I can see, hardly any man gets married without a bit of pushing. Especially in those circumstances.’

  I stared at him. ‘You mean, when the woman has an illegitimate baby?’

  He flushed. ‘Not that exactly. But when the man isn’t very sure of himself.’

  ‘I wanted you to be very sure of yourself and—everything else, before you married me.’

  ‘Well … one way to increase my self-confidence might have been to show me you needed me then.’ I sat in stunned silence. ‘Did you?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Christ almighty!’ I said under my breath. ‘I’ve needed you every hour of ev
ery day for the past year. Did you really have to be told that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

  ‘And your writing,’ I said, beginning now to feel something else, strangely like anger. ‘It never crossed your mind I was refraining from—pushing—in order that you should be free of domestic concerns and able to find your feet as a writer?’

  ‘Of course I realised that, and I was very grateful.’

  ‘Grateful? Were you really? But that didn’t interfere with your beginning to love me less?’

  ‘On the contrary, it made me love you more—to begin with. But damn it all, I’m only—’

  ‘Human—’

  ‘Yes. I was grateful, I appreciated you for not making demands, but as the months went by, I wanted—well, gratitude and even the realisation that you’d been right in a way, I mean that I couldn’t have worked as well as I did on the novel if I’d been distracted by a family, it didn’t stop me from getting very lonely.’

  ‘You were lonely,’ I said. ‘You were lonely. Well I’m sorry. What I should have done of course was to dump David onto a neighbour every three days and drive up here to sleep with you. That would have met the situation I should think—no ties, no restrictions, just frequent bouts of loving, undemanding sex.’

  Now it was he who stared. ‘You’re talking rubbish. You must know me well enough to know that wasn’t even remotely what I wanted.’

  ‘I’m just beginning to wonder if you know what the hell it is you do want!’

  ‘Men do manage to combine a domestic life with writing …’

  ‘Yes,’ I said from the depths of utter fury and despair. ‘Men do.’