Two Is Lonely

by Lynne Reid Banks

  ‘Toby, honestly—’

  ‘No, don’t try to make me feel better about it. Billie, of all people, has tried, but only I really know. I lived through it, I watched it happen . . . Anyway, the divorce. It wasn’t the way I’d expected at all. It was as if the prisoner didn’t want to be freed. She clung to the bars and had to be dragged out screaming . . .’

  She seems, I thought grimly, to have done a fair amount of screaming, one way and another. I was having to fight against an ignoble desire to kick Whistler squarely in the pants.

  ‘The whole thing was a mistake, we’d both suffered a great deal, and it was clear to both of us that we had to get divorced. I mean, she did agree to it wholeheartedly, I think it was even her suggestion in the first place, but when it came to it I suppose she was frightened. Lousy husband though I’d been, it was still better than loneliness. And one thing I had been, to do myself justice, was fairly good with the kids, and she was terrified of being left on her own with them. That was why she agreed to let me have Rachel, even to bring her here. She always loved Carrie best, because Carrie didn’t torture her getting born.’

  The ignobility took another leap forward. Silly babyish little bitch, I thought fiercely. I did try to make myself feel as sorry for her as Toby clearly thought I should, but I couldn’t. After all, she was no longer a child-bride exactly, she should have been able to come to terms with some of it. Of course it’s sheer nonsense to say you forget about the pangs of childbirth as soon as they’ve come to a successful end. I still clearly recall how much it hurt having David, but for God’s sake you don’t blame the baby unless you’re a howling neurotic.

  ‘So the divorce, instead of relieving me a little, made me feel worse than ever. She was making reconciliation noises right up until the last moment in court, and I was very tempted; I mean, what can you do when the person you love is holding onto you and crying and pleading with you not to leave her, even when you know perfectly well . . .’ He groped in his pocket for cigarettes. He was trembling. ‘We’ll miss breakfast if we don’t go in,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Anyhow, to cut a long story short, I held out because I was so sure it would damage her more in the long run to go on living with me. But that scene in the court was harrowing. I couldn’t think about you without a sense of panic; it seemed as if everything I touched emotionally, I harmed, and I wasn’t going to harm you. But I thought about you, Jane. I thought about you. Did you feel me thinking about you?’

  I nodded. His eyes as he looked at me were stark.

  ‘I’ve always been thinking about you,’ he said.

  And I of you, my own love, I thought. And why don’t I say it now, and put the despair out of your eyes? What is holding me back? Andy is nowhere; here we are, Jane and Toby, looking into each other’s minds and memories, feeling the weight of the old love laid on us again, and yet I can’t bring words of commitment to my lips . . . Perhaps it’s the feeling of a crushing burden, a millstone instead of a blessing, hopeless sadness instead of joy. What is it, what’s wrong? It’s not what has happened in the intervening years, I’m not afraid any more to tell you I’ve had other men, for they whirl away into oblivion when I look at you like this; it’s the years themselves somehow, the length of time. Our lives have formed an ellipse around that space, and now they are touching again it feels as if the shape of our separation were driving a wedge between us forever.

  And yet I love you, have loved you and will always love you. And you will always love me. I bought my independence, and you your marriage, with an open-ended mortgage upon each other’s happiness, which neither one of us will ever quite pay off.

  We had breakfast in the big, noisy, bustling dining-hall; we didn’t talk much because there were two other people sitting at table with us, one of whom had a lot to say to Toby in Hebrew. John, we were told, had had breakfast hours ago and gone off somewhere.

  ‘Looking for some more noise, I expect,’ I said.

  ‘More than in here?’

  ‘How do you manage about that side of it?’

  ‘“My dear, the noise, the people?” Oh, it’s not so bad. I quite like noise and people, provided I can shut them out when I want to.’

  ‘And can you? Do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I noticed several people carried transistors. At eight o’clock (I was astonished it was still only that—the heat must have woken me unwontedly early) a complete hush fell on the room; even the people pushing the serving trolleys stopped wherever they were near a radio and listened as a woman’s voice read the news. Through the windows, too, you could see little groups bent over something in their midst. The tension in the air was tangible, and nobody moved for five minutes. Then it was over; as if released from a spell, everything went back to normal.

  ‘What gives?’ I asked.

  ‘My Hebrew isn’t good enough to understand much,’ said Toby. ‘Just about enough to know you shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘No, seriously—what’s happening?’

  ‘Seriously—I think you ought to go home. Later you may not be able to.’

  My heart jumped. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Ordinary passenger services are usually disrupted by a war.’

  ‘But there’s no war yet.’

  ‘There will be.’

  ‘Is that sure?’

  He shrugged. ‘What’s sure? Everyone says so. When two dogs stand growling nose to nose with their hackles up and a bone between them, the chances are they’re going to fight.’

  ‘You sound very blasé about it.’

  ‘You know me better than to believe that. I’m scared witless.’

  ‘Can’t you leave?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve enough on my conscience without adding cowardice.’

  ‘But Rachel.’

  ‘That reminds me, you haven’t seen her awake. Come on, let’s go and visit her. It’s Saturday, so I don’t have to work, and we can take her home.’

  We found Rachel playing in her children’s-house playroom. She was wearing an unironed sleeveless shirt scooped out on her brown neck, and crumpled blue shorts. Her feet were bare, and her brown hair, very glossy, was caught up in a pony-tail. Her skin was dark brown, her eyes dark blue; as she saw Toby and a smile broke up the smooth lines of her face, one saw that her mouth was in that peculiarly touching stage of vulnerable toothlessness. It marred her looks and made me want to grab her and thrust her behind me, save her from the kicks in those budding teeth she would inevitably receive from life in due course.

  Toby hugged her, and she him. Then she said, ‘How’s the war, Daddy?’

  The hug, the name, the sight of her, the sound of her voice, all provided me with one of those classic kicks in the teeth I had just wanted to protect her from. I winced visibly. Luckily no-one was looking.

  ‘Not here yet. Have you had a shelter-drill this morning?’

  ‘Yes, right away when we woke up. It’s fun down there, but it gets hot when we’re all in.’

  Toby turned her round to face me, holding her bird-boned shoulders.

  ‘This is Jane. Jane, my daughter, Rachel.’

  We looked at each other and I smiled. You little beauty, I thought. What would you have looked like if you’d been half mine? I put out my hand and she put her left one into it.

  ‘I hurt my hand for shaking with,’ she said.

  ‘How?’

  She showed me a bandage.

  ‘Playing with the patish.’

  ‘The hammer,’ Toby explained. ‘Hebrew is beginning to overtake English.’

  ‘Do you want to see what I made?’

  She went to a sort of carpentry bench and brought back some bits of wood nailed together into a very creditable boat.

  ‘That’s lovely.’

  ‘It’s the boat we came to Israel on,’ she said. ‘Have you any children?’

  I looked at Toby over her head. ‘A little boy. He’s eight.’

  ‘I’m seven. Nearly.’

  ‘Are you?’

&n
bsp; ‘Are you our visitor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we show her the swimming-pool, Daddy?’

  ‘Of course.’ He was smiling straight into my eyes, signalling to me: isn’t she perfect? The strained look was all gone; his hands on her shoulders were still and sure.

  I went back to my room to change, and there I found John, sitting on the grass outside under the jacaranda tree tuning his guitar. He looked up at me and grinned one-sidedly.

  ‘How’s it feel to be back again with Toby?’ he asked without preamble.

  ‘I still love him. But it’s not simple.’

  ‘Was it ever?’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  He lowered his head. ‘A bit more like before. Better, I mean. Toby . . . seein’ Toby helped. I still love him too, and that is simple. It heals you when you’re with a person you love.’

  ‘It didn’t help you to be with me.’

  ‘Ah Janie, but you a woman.’

  I was silenced by the sudden sadness in his voice. Out of respect for it, and a sense of my own incapacity in this situation, I sat down beside him and we didn’t say anything for about five minutes. Only his guitar spoke, a-harmonious, melancholy notes and chords and sometimes weird thin ghostly shrieks as he ran his hard thumb straight up the wires to the keys at the top.

  ‘I decided something,’ John said at last. ‘I going to find myself a man. Someone who’s like me. If you a freak, you need another freak. I’m tired of tryin’ to act like anybody. I’m different. I can’t help it. I tried to, but I can’t. I’m goin’ to find me a person to love.’

  ‘That makes two of us,’ I said. ‘Do you want to come swimming?’

  The pool, scooped out of the top of a hillock, was like a huge square-cut aquamarine surrounded by a mass of brilliant shrubs that must, from the air, look like a setting of gem-stones. From the air . . . I stared up uneasily into the mysteriously unlimited sky. Accustomed as I was to a vision-impeding lid of clouds, this blue infinity called for the deepest focus my eyes were capable of. Lying back like this, staring upward, one hand cupping the side of my head to hold out the spears of sunlight, I could get lost in that topless blue; it seemed to suck me upwards into itself . . . And strangely, there was a sense of safety in that emptiness, for if there were a bomber, there would be nothing to hide it. But of course this was nonsense. Even as I thought it, a pair of black delta-winged shapes darted from nowhere and tore straight across the sky, followed by an ear-splitting noise between a scream and a roar, as if someone were tearing the very fabric of heaven savagely in half. I glanced round, wincing at the pain in my ears, but no-one else seemed to have noticed. Only Toby looked down at me, saw my grimace and said. ‘That’s our umbrella. It functions twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘Pretty noisy umbrella,’ I commented.

  ‘Better than getting rained on. You’ve still got a glorious figure.’

  ‘Me?’ I said, genuinely surprised. If a flat belly and reasonable bust constitute a glorious figure, then I’ve got one; but I’ve also got thick legs and duck’s disease.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a bathing suit before.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t think? Of course you haven’t, how could you?’ I had been either pregnant or winter-bound (not to mention nursing) every time we had been together.

  ‘Can you swim?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Can you?’

  He looked ashamed. ‘No.’

  ‘Lots of men can’t.’

  ‘I’ve never met any. Certainly there’s not a male here over the age of four who can’t.’

  ‘Would you like me to teach you?’

  He was looking at me. ‘I want to learn, but . . . no, I’d be embarrassed. There are too many people here.’

  ‘Can’t we come up sometime when there’s no-one here?’

  ‘I might borrow the key from the gardener. Look at my daughter.’

  I lifted myself on my elbows. The pool was alive with people. You never saw a scene less easy to reconcile with a country on the brink of a desperate war. I searched for any sign of it, for it seemed incredible to me . . . I knew from old newsreels I’d seen on TV that the British had gone on enjoying themselves in an apparently normal and carefree fashion right up to September 3rd, 1939, but this spectacle of holiday abandon in front of me didn’t seem real, somehow. There were transistors, unobtrusively set amid the rumpled bright towels and picnic baskets; the jets ripping overhead from time to time; and, if you looked closely, you noticed a scarcity of young men. But nothing, nothing at all in the atmosphere betrayed the least tension or alarm.

  Toby was pointing. I saw Rachel now, in a blue bathing-suit, the straps tied together on her back with a wet hair-ribbon to keep them from slipping off her thin shoulders, poised on the diving-board. Her hair was plastered to her head; she had a seal-look, sleek and dark and so confident that her dive was careless and she side-slipped into the water. I expected her to rise up again with a silver fish in her mouth.

  ‘I love to watch her swimming,’ said Toby. ‘It’s miraculous to me, a child of mine swimming like that, so effortlessly . . . yet she’s different here—rougher—she was always so delicate and feminine at home, like a doll . . .’

  ‘Toby . . .’

  ‘H’m?’ He was still watching her, and had forgotten me for the moment.

  ‘Let me take her back for you.’

  His eyes returned to me slowly. ‘Take her back? To Whistler?’

  ‘Or Billie.’

  ‘Darling, Billie’s no good with the kids. She’s the most ungrandmotherly Jewish grandmother I’ve ever known. She hasn’t the time nor the temperament.’

  ‘Well, to Whistler then.’

  He didn’t answer at once. His eyes had returned to the black head streaking through the green water. ‘I wish she wouldn’t yell like that, I always think she’s drowning or something. She was such a little mouse in London . . . I think Whistler’s got enough on her plate with Carrie. She . . .’ He hesitated. ‘She was sometimes unkind to Rachel. She favours Carrie, as I told you. When she’s got them both together, Rachel gets the scrawny end of the chicken a bit.’

  ‘Just while—I mean, until the trouble here blows over.’

  ‘That may not be for a very long time.’

  ‘Surely you don’t mean it’ll be a long war?’

  ‘No, I think it’ll be over very quickly—one way or the other.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘I meant, there’ll always be trouble here, of varying magnitudes. Another thing is that if I send Rachel away now, when none of the others are sending their kids out, I shall be putting myself on a different footing from them.’

  ‘Toby,’ I said with the same impatience—almost irritability irritability—I had felt before when he was beating his breast over the Whistler mess, ‘I don’t understand you. Are you really saying those considerations count for more than her safety?’

  Toby lay back on his towel and put his forearm over his eyes. He was silent for a long time; the shouts from the pool seemed to eddy round his silence while I waited for it to end.

  ‘Would you take her?’ he asked at last.

  I couldn’t speak for surprise—shock. I had never dreamed of this.

  ‘You can’t possibly be serious.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What would her mother feel? What would Billie?’

  ‘I can’t answer for Billie, but I should imagine Whistler would be greatly relieved. Naturally she’s worried; at the same time, she’s frightened by the thought that she might have to have Rachel with her, accept sole responsibility for the two of them. I can’t impose that on her. It would be terrible for Rachel. She . . .’ He glanced at me darkly from under his arm and then hid his eyes again. ‘The plain truth is, she doesn’t like her mother very much. As for Billie, her pride might be hurt, but she must realise she can’t really undertake it. After all, she works full time, she’d have to get someone in to look after her. And y
ou—well, you’re all geared up to look after children. Couldn’t she muck in with David for the time being? She’s absolutely no trouble as long as she’s happy.’

  I could hardly believe my ears.

  ‘And what makes you think she would be—away from you?’

  ‘Do you see this suggestion in the light of a diabolical liberty?’

  ‘Yes—frankly.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it is. But it’s you that keeps pressing me to get her out. And I just can’t think of any other solution.’

  ‘When did you think of this one?’

  ‘Last night, as a matter of fact—when I was sitting beside your bed.’

  I sat still, trying to think, but the jets going overhead howled down thought.

  John, glossy as a sea-lion, rose and waved from the water. I waved back.

  ‘I’m going in,’ I said shortly to Toby.

  As I stood up, he caught my wrist.

  ‘If you really don’t want to, never mind. I’m prepared to keep her here and take a chance. It’s up to you.’

  Hell’s bloody bells, I thought as I pulled free of him and ran down to the pool. Why does it always have to be up to me?

  Toby came knocking on my door in the heat of the day.

  ‘I’ve got the key—you promised me a swimming lesson. Come on.’

  I didn’t want to. My mind and body craved sleep; I was worn out mentally from all the thinking and feeling involved in this situation. At lunch-time I had walked down the hill from the pool hand-in-hand with Rachel, watching her hair jump into curls again as it dried. Her hand had felt different from David’s, strong in its grip but still feminine and a little unsure. Once she had left my side to run into a small enclosure we passed, to investigate some ducklings. Returning, she had not taken the initiative, but let her shoulder rub as if incidentally against my arm, waiting to see if I would take her hand again. When I did, she glanced up at me, and although her eyes were so entirely different from Toby’s, I saw him in her face for a second, a little shy, a little sly, sure and unsure at once, child and woman together, as Toby was child and man.

  I had felt suddenly endangered by her, and had made an excuse to break the contact between us. She had instantly run on ahead, seeming not to care, but I sensed a hyper-sensitivity in her which did care quite exaggeratedly about everything touching on people’s feelings for her. If it were true that she and her mother . . . But I refused to let my mind stray in that direction, for fear pity might take me in its unbalancing grip.