It was horrible to be interrupted by maternal duty at such a moment. My instinctive desire to get to David had me shoving Andy off with such ruthless haste that he came to with a shout of almost animal protest.
I was fumbling with my clothes—we hadn’t undressed properly—and groping for my shoes in pitch darkness, the fire having long since gone out. Eventually, with David’s calls changing to screams of ‘Mum-mee! Mum-meee!’ I was obliged to turn on the light, which half-blinded us and brought us back to the outside, other-than-us world with the rudest sort of jar.
‘Hell’s teeth! What’s going on?’ muttered Andy. ‘Is the house on fire?’
‘No, nothing, it’s all right. It’s just David.’ I found my shoes and struggled into them, a strange guilty panic making my fingers numb and shaky.
‘Is it something serious?’
‘Yes. No. It’s something not unusual. Look, just go back to sleep if you can. I’ll be down—’ I wanted to say ‘soon’ but I knew it might not be soon. ‘I’ll be down,’ I repeated with a final inflection. My eyes were still dazzled and it was hard to see him, sitting there on the sofa, rumpled and dismayed, the dignity of love and sleep destroyed at a stroke. I felt sorry for him and for myself, and for us, the us that we had recently entered into and which David—symbolically?—had ruptured.
I ran upstairs, quickly but unsteadily. My body felt strange, not yet entirely or exclusively my possession again. The inevitable stickiness reminded me with crude vehemence of what had happened, like a hard finger poking me in the chest—‘Now you’ve done it. Now you’re for it.’ I burst into David’s room and flung myself down beside him.
‘David, darling, it’s all right, stop now, Mummy’s here. Don’t cry, love, shhh, don’t cry.’
He clung to me.
‘Mummy! I had a bad dream!’
‘What was it? Tell me.’
‘I dreamt you went away and after you’d promised! Aunty Jo came and told me, like a joke, that you’d gone. She said Jesus had taken you to his country.’
I felt an irrelevant giggle coming. Jesus wants me for an Israeli sunbeam . . .
‘Well, love, if that’s all . . . You see, I’m still here, and Jesus doesn’t seem to be bothering with me much. Now, suppose you settle down and go to sleep—’
‘No! I want you to stay with me!’
I stifled a sigh. I wanted to be a woman tonight; being forced to be a mother was doubly burdensome. I felt a hardness, a brutality creeping over me, a permanent, lurking element in my nature which sometimes, at moments of weakness, overpowers me and leads me to be cruel. On such occasions I hear myself saying, ‘Oh don’t be such a baby! Now I’ve had enough of this.’ But the proximity of love met the creeping tide of ice and melted it. I gathered him in my arms. ‘I’ll stay a little while. Give me a kiss.’
He kissed my lips with a child’s unself-conscious, but not entirely sexless, passion. ‘I love you, Mummy,’ he said. And then added, in a totally different, rather querulous voice, ‘You do smell funny.’
I blushed to my finger tips. Fortunately the room was dark.
‘That’s not a very nice thing to say.’
‘Well, but you do.’ I could actually hear him sniffing me like a dog, and I stiffened and drew away. ‘Phew, it’s awful,’ he said.
I was so embarrassed my lips went cold. ‘Well in that case, I’ll go,’ I said.
He clutched me.
‘No, no, it’s okay, I didn’t mean to be rude! Sit with me till I fall asleep.’
I got a chair and sat at a little distance from the bed.
‘Sing to me.’
‘What shall I sing?’ At least he was himself; there was no unreachable, shouting little animal in the room, as on some nights, kicking and threshing when I tried to hold him. He was not frightening like this, merely normally troublesome.
‘Sing about “The water is wide”.’
‘“The water is wide, I can not get o’er, and neither have I wings to fly . . .”’ When I got down to “But when love is old, it groweth cold, and fades away like the morning dew” I was, as always with this song, caught up in its strange, disjointed mood of melancholy. David had dropped off, I was free to go down to Andy, but instead I sat there for a few minutes, quietly holding his hand, trying to think and succeeding merely in feeling—body-feelings at that, not brain-feelings. A sensation of simultaneous lightness and heaviness, pleasure and discomfort. The smell David had noticed was all about me, pungent and animal and rawly exciting, making me think of clods of rich earth and the red blood of childbirth, the aroma of meat roasted outdoors, of sweat and of milk on a baby’s breath. I felt part of life again. I stood up, to feel my own body better, all the length and weight of it standing on my legs.
I knew suddenly that this time, I regretted nothing. I had no shame or alarm about it. I had wanted Andy, I had needed his body, desired him in a word, and all at once it seemed no error (‘sin’ was the word that came, from my convent-tainted childhood, but I shunned it) to allow the fulfilment of desire to be a stepping-stone to a complete love. Why must the mental and spiritual aspects precede the physical? And it was, as I might have known it would be had I been a little more wordly and wise, its own justification. It had clarified my tangled emotions as only bringing to the boil can clarify certain food-stuffs. Now it was not necessary even to ask myself, ‘Do I love him?’ Our relationship was a challenging and creative one, not just without the answer, but without the question.
Chapter 8
I WOKE up early the next morning, with a conviction that everything had changed.
To begin with, I was not tired at all. I felt rested in a way that as a rule, not even the longest sleep rests me. Andy had been beside me when I had gone to sleep the night before, but I didn’t have to reach over to know he had gone. I hadn’t even had to make a discreet remark as we cuddled down together at three a.m. or whatever, about the necessity of his removing himself before David could possibly catch him in my bed in the morning. I just trusted him to wake up and go, and he had gone, so quietly that I had not even stirred in my blissful, altered slumbers.
I piled up the pillows behind me and sat up in bed. The window was wide open on a pellucid May morning. I took a deep breath and my head began to spin as if I were inhaling some intoxicating gas, but of an unknown variety, of which you could die joyfully with the earth’s wildest and most magical scents passing into your head with the beneficent anaesthesia. It was strange. Life had radically altered for me in the night; this morning the whole texture of my emotions and my senses had changed, I felt happy and relaxed and every aspect of every substance around me seemed to have sprung a new dimension. Yet I was thinking of death, a death-through-pleasure that carried no overtones of fear or darkness . . . Again I breathed, feasting my eyes on the bluish hills; at the line of tall soldierly poplars erect against the sky, my eyes stopped, and I suddenly threw my head back and laughed. ‘Everything reminds me of sex . . .’
And now I understood one of the major elements in my euphoric state. It was not merely the aftermath of love. It was the unexpected absence of guilt. The events of the night before were all edged with bright colours. When had the rainbow of sensual delights so outlined my actions before, obliterating the sub-conscious grey and khaki bogies of my conditioning? Only once before . . .
I hadn’t wanted to find Toby back in his niche this morning. Yet there he was. And now the complications must begin. Because clearly no single action, except suicide, can eradicate and unravel all the twists and knots of one’s past life. The hole blasted in memory fills up again, like a child’s well dug beside the sea.
I sighed, tasting the May-morning nectar on the back of my tongue, but now it was not bliss unalloyed. Yet what had happened last night I didn’t even begin to regret. That it would happen again was all that I cared to hope for. The poplar-tree and what it symbolised were arrows pointing straight towards a solution for me and David. I gave myself over to dreams for a few minutes while the t
hrushes and blackbirds sang loud enough to drown any thought less ephemeral than blatant fantasy.
‘Mummy . . .’
It was a very tentative opening, compared to the usual boisterous entrance. I turned into reality, and saw him, a small pyjama’d figure, drooping in the doorway.
‘What, darling? Don’t you feel well?’
‘Are you going to Israel?’
‘No. You asked me not to, and I said I wouldn’t.’
I expected a lightening change to joy and triumph, the rush and feet-first leap onto my stomach. But still he stood there, watching me from under his eyelashes.
‘But you wanted to.’
‘Yes, well . . . We can’t always do what we want.’
‘But it was important?’ he persisted.
‘David, what is this now? You got your own way, and I’m not complaining. Let’s leave it at that.’
‘I just thought . . . if you really wanted to go . . .’
‘You mean, you’ve changed your mind?’
He dropped his eyes and dug his bare big toe into the varnished floorboard.
‘No, but . . .’
Conscience? Newly-awakened social-sense? He was a good child and thoughtful of me as often as any child is, but this volte-face, if really caused by an ability to put himself in my place, represented something quite new, and, surely?—premature. I couldn’t avoid suspicions of an ulterior motive somewhere.
‘David, come here.’
He straightened from the door-jamb and shuffled over to the bed. I hauled him, a dead weight, up beside me. His body certainly didn’t have the feel of one in which the spiritual yeast of a heroic unselfishness is at work.
‘What’s at the bottom of this? Let’s have it.’
‘Nothing. I was just thinking. If you really had to go, I shouldn’t stop you.’
‘Has somebody been talking to you?’ I couldn’t imagine who; it just smelled all wrong, somehow.
‘No, Mummy!’ A certain irritation in his tone was now evident. My suspicions were becoming too obvious for him to miss.
I lifted his head and peered into his bottle-brown eyes; my own were narrowed. He met them for about two seconds, and then pulled his head away.
‘Let me get this straight. You’re now telling me that you wouldn’t after all mind too badly if I went to Israel for two weeks? Without you?’
He nodded.
‘H’m,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll have to think it out again.’
David smiled faintly, still without looking at me.
I got out of bed and dressed. David sat playing with the cord of his pyjamas, occasionally glancing at me out of the corners of his eyes. I tried to appear calm, but my mind was in a ferment. I’d put the idea of Israel, if not Toby, firmly behind me; since last night this had seemed the proper location for it. But now the idea of clearing the whole affair up, of laying the ghost once and for all, seemed acutely desirable, and, suddenly, possible.
We ate breakfast in unwonted silence. We kept eyeing each other. I tried to make conversation.
‘Have you any plans for today?’
‘No . . .’
‘I mean, are you going to Amm’s or is she coming here?’
‘Amm didn’t say anything yesterday. I think she was cross.’
‘Oh? Why?’
‘Because I won a rosette, and she didn’t,’ he said, with but a trace of what I would call normal human relish.
‘Well, nevertheless, you’ll have to get together somewhere. It’s my shop-day.’
David said nothing, and picked at his toast. The phone rang. We both jumped, me the highest because I knew it was Andy. Was there an element of guilt in the jump? But as I hurried to answer it. I decided that my asking myself that question that was not a symptom of my former condition, but merely an afterpain.
‘Hallo?’
‘How are you feeling about last night?’ he asked without preamble.
‘Glorious.’
‘Are you sure? No remorseful anguishings?’
‘Not one,’ I replied.
‘Thank God for that!’ he exclaimed, in evidently genuine relief. ‘So we’re on, then?’
‘“On”?’
‘Yes. I mean, are we on, for a clandestine affair with a view to marriage?’
I couldn’t help laughing.
‘No, don’t answer, I’m feeling very flip this morning. Light-headed. Not my usual sober self at all. I want to save the latter part of my proposition for a more suitable moment. In any case, prior to that we have matters to discuss.’
‘What matters?’
‘The past and its possible effect on the future.’
‘Oh.’
This brought about a very accountable silence.
‘In that connection,’ Andy went on, ‘I have a perhaps rather surprising suggestion to make. Is this a good moment?’
‘Not really. What about lunch?’
‘I’m in London.’
‘Oh! I didn’t realise.’
‘I left you at five a.m., not knowing when the postman made his rounds and might find my car in his way, and arrived at my office, considerably startling the cleaners, at half-past six. I may add I haven’t done a stroke of work since. All I’ve done is drink coffee and indulge in euphoric brooding, if that’s not a contradiction in terms . . . May I make my suggestion, because I want you to be thinking about it.’
I glanced uneasily over my shoulder at David, who, from the set of his head which I could just see through the open kitchen door, was listening. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Where exactly is this chap of yours that was?’
‘You mean—’ I gathered my wits. I could suddenly see Andy and Toby pointing at each other like rockets on a collision course. I desperately wanted to keep them separated—the moral and mental confusion that would result from those two vital elements of my life overlapping didn’t bear contemplation.
Andy seemed to read my mind, even at 60 miles’ distance along a telephone wire. ‘It’s all right, I don’t want to meet him. I want you to.’
I swallowed. ‘But why? Wouldn’t that be—’
‘Risky? Possibly. But I’m a very superstitious bloke. I believe in ghosts. I was haunted by one for years. A very benign and loving ghost, but a ghost nevertheless. You laid her, bless you both, and now I have to help you lay yours.’
My own thoughts, echoed . . . Andy, Andy! I said his name aloud, twice, as it had come into my mind.
‘What is it?’
‘You are not only superstitious, you’re psychic.’
‘So Liz used to say . . .’
‘Mummy—’
David had come up behind me.
‘What, David?’
‘Who are you talking to?’ A bit whiney.
‘Uncle Andy.’
‘Well, do hurry and finish, it’s boring.’
‘Go out and play in the garden. I’m just coming.’
‘Oh . . .’ He turned rebelliously and shuffled off. My conscience smote me, albeit only a slap on the wrist.
‘I must go . . . what was the suggestion?’
‘You haven’t answered my question yet. Where is he?’
‘In Israel, of all places.’
‘Oh, crumbs! Of all places, indeed! Why not Vietnam? Or the Yemen? Somewhere quiet and peaceful?’
‘Why? Don’t tell me you were going to suggest I go there?’
‘I was. Now I’ll have to think about it some more.’
‘And I have to go.’
‘I’ll ring you at lunchtime. Get some sandwiches and put them by the phone. We’ll have lunch together.’
‘All right.’
‘Goodbye then, darling,’ he said, for the first time.
‘Goodbye.’
‘Jane!’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you been wondering all morning how you lived without it all these years?’
‘Yes.’
‘When can we do it again?’
‘Next time you come.’
/>
‘That’ll be tonight, then.’
‘Another five-o’clock up?’
‘I’ll take the train and nap on the way.’
‘So how will you get away from here at the crack of dawn, with no car?’
‘Leave it at the station. I’ll be there at 8 tonight. Be thinking.’
‘Even though it’s Israel?’
He hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘All right. I’ll think.’
He hung up. I leant against the wall, still listening to the dead echoes along the line.
One way and another, I was late for work, and Georgie was already bustling around folding post-weekend dustsheets.
‘Nice weekend, Miss?’ she asked me cheerfully.
‘Lovely, thank you.’
‘How was the gymkhana?’
‘Splendid. David won a yellow rosette.’
‘Fantastic!’
‘What about you?’
‘I went away with my boyfriend.’
‘Oh?’
‘On a walking trip,’ she elaborated. ‘Shropshire.’
‘Nice?’
‘Oh, it was okay, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I’m getting a bit cheesed with him, though. All this walking . . . Do you know what he gave me for my birthday? Boots. Oh, not like these! Hideous brown walking boots with cleat-things like a footballer. I was so disappointed I nearly choked! And he collects rocks. It’s a bit much. Yesterday we were trudging along a narrow path, you had to watch your feet all the time, and he was leading, and every few minutes I’d run into his behind. He kept bending over suddenly to pick up a rock. I mean, it was so jerky, banging into him all the time. And when his knapsack got full, he expected me to fill mine up with his ruddy rocks, too! I drew the line at that, I was having enough trouble dragging myself along by then, and he got narked and muttered about poor sports. I think I’ll drop him,’ she finished cheerfully.
‘Good men are hard to find,’ I remarked sententiously. I wasn’t really listening.
‘What’s good about him?’
‘Well, I don’t know, what is?’
She paused for a moment between the fabrics and the ceramics, her weight on one barely-adolescent hip, musing. ‘He’s quite good in bed,’ she said judiciously. ‘But then that’s the least you can expect, isn’t it, from an athlete.’
Two Is Lonely Page 12
