Chapter Four

It was hard to say when Vinson ceased to be a lover and became a husband. The transition was so gradual that Christine did not notice it happening until one night, when she could not sleep, she kissed Vinson awake and turned him over to her, and he was annoyed that she had woken him.

It was the most hurtful thing that had ever happened to her in her life. When she had stopped crying enough to be able to talk, she said: ‘You wouldn’t have been like that on our honeymoon.’

‘Look, honey,’ he said, ‘I love you like crazy, but I’m a man with a job of work to do, and I need my sleep. Marriage isn’t all honeymoon, you know.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said into the pillow. ‘I was silly to think it could be.’

After that she did not make the first advances to him again. He still came to her often as a lover, especially at week-ends when he did not have to get up early, but it was not the same. Hers became the more passive and submissive role, depending on his love rather than hers for its stimulation, just as in ordinary things she was learning to be as dependent and compliant as he wanted her to be.

He was a demanding, sometimes a didactic husband. Having gone her own way all her life, Christine found at first a certain pleasure in playing the part of obedience. It was nice to belong to somebody, and a relief to have the burden of initiative taken from you. Vinson discussed things with her, but it was always he who made the decisions. When they both wanted different things she gave in and let him have his own way. She knew that she was encouraging him to be selfish, but he was selfish by nature, anyhow. She could not change that, and so the smoothest course was to allow it. He did not like it if she pitted her will against his, and so, to keep him happy, she crushed her family tendency to opinionated argument and tried to be the kind of wife he wanted.

She was a good wife. She took a lot of trouble with the apartment, she tried not to be extravagant, and she was always there looking nice when Vinson came home at night.

It was fun to have her own little home to do as she liked in. Housework, with her bright modern kitchen and all her gadgets, was a very different matter from the hopeless drudgery of trying to keep ‘Roselawn’ from degenerating into a shambles. At first she was very busy, but after a while, when she had done everything she could think of to soften the apartment out of the bachelor habits it had acquired when Vinson lived there alone, she found that marriage had not given her enough to do. There were days when she was bored, bored, bored, and longed for her busy working day at Goldwyn’s and for the friends she had left behind in England.

Christine liked most of the women she met, and she had made friends with Art Lee’s wife, but Nancy, like most of the naval wives, had children and was busy in the daytime, so Christine did not have anyone to go out with unless she was with Vinson.

She missed Timmy painfully. It was terrible not to be able to have a dog. She came home from a pet shop with a kitten one day, but Vinson said that cats were not allowed in the apartments either, and she had to take it back. She changed it for some goldfish, and they swam moodily round in a coiled glass tube fixed to the kitchen wall, poor company when she was lonely.

Her apartment was on the fourth floor of the building, which had stone stairs and a cold painted iron banister and a row of little letterboxes by the entrance, because postmen did not climb stairs in America. You had to go down and unlock your box with a key. Sometimes Christine lost the key for a few days at a time, and Vinson would be cross, although the letters that came for him were mostly bills. There were a terrible lot of bills. Things like rent and the telephone had to be paid every month, and the month’s bill was almost as high as it would be for a quarter in England. Everything in Washington was fabulously expensive, especially when you made the mistake of translating it into terms of English money.

All the apartments had ultramarine painted doors with brass knockers and nippled rubber mats outside. As you climbed the stairs you could hear what was going on behind every door. A baby crying, a saucepan lid falling, a radio commentator declaiming about a political scandal or an airplane disaster. The news never seemed to be about anything else. Christine’s door was like all the others, except that when you pressed the bell dulcet chimes sounded on the other side of it. That worried Christine, but Vinson seemed quite happy about it.

Inside the door was a little square hall with the bedroom and bath on one side and the sitting-room on the other. The wall between the sitting-room and the kitchen did not go to the end of the room, and the space where the kitchen merged into the sitting-room was used for dining, which was handy in some ways but awkward in others, for guests sitting at the table could see what kind of chaos your kitchen was in.

The nicest thing about the apartment was the screened porch which led off the sitting-room. It had a tiled floor and cushioned window seats, and potted plants grew there with an ease which would have delighted Aunt Josephine.

The apartments were in great red-brick blocks set up the side of a hill, with a sandy playground in the middle, which screamed all day long with the children who were too young to go to school. At the side of the apartment buildings ran a new road where the residents fought for a place to park their cars at night, and opposite was an expanse of raw earth, where the ground had been cleared for new houses.

Christine’s windows faced this clay desert on one side and the playground and the back of another apartment block on the other. There was nothing beautiful to look at, and nothing beautiful to listen to. The playground resounded with children’s shrieks, and the occasional scream from a window flung up by an exasperated mother. The apartment walls were thin, and all day and most of the night babies cried and radios clamoured and men and women argued, or gave parties, or knocked on things with hammers.

It was not a very nice place to live. Christine longed for a house, but Vinson said they could not afford it yet, and this was quite a good address for a naval officer to live at. Why, there was even a captain living two floors below them. That made it all right.

The Navy had to be at work by eight o’clock, which seemed to Christine unnecessary. Other wives told her that their husbands were seldom in the office on time, since they did not have to report in until eight-thirty, but Vinson was never late. He left the apartment punctually at seven-thirty, and it seemed a very long day until he came home. Other husbands left their offices at four-thirty, but Vinson often stayed late to finish some work, and she might not see him until after seven. Sometimes he brought work home, or read naval manuals for long hours after supper. He was very conscientious. One day he brought home a dictaphone and put it by his bed in case he had an idea in the night about his work. Christine was sometimes tempted to say rude things into it, but she refrained. She was a good wife, and she would help him to be made a captain, if that was what he wanted.

Christine got up when Vinson did and gave him his breakfast and kissed him good-bye by the front door. She determined that she would kiss him good-bye until the end of their days together. When you did not kiss your husband good-bye in the morning and hullo in the evening it was the end of a proper marriage. It happened to a lot of people, but how exactly did it come about? Did the kisses become cooler and more perfunctory until gradually they faded away to nothing? Or was there one terrible day when you had quarrelled and you did not kiss him good-bye, and the quarrel was still with you in the evening, and he just unlocked the door and flung down his cap and you did not get up to greet him, and that set the pattern for all the days to come, long after the quarrel was over?

Sometimes, after Vinson left in the morning, Christine went back to bed with the paper, which was about twenty times the size of the one she used to read in London. She could never find her way about the Washington newspapers, which were riddled with stories of political corruption, the names of victims of air disasters and road accidents, and society news about gay little parties given by women with German-Jewish names.

When she had had her bath and set her hair, which she could not pin up at night now that she was married, she cleaned up the kitchen and washed the supper dishes from the night before. Vinson would never let her do the dishes at night, although she always itched to get out to the kitchen after supper. He wanted her to sit with him, although he usually worked or read the paper or listened to the radio and did not talk to her very much. It sometimes seemed as if they had exhausted nearly everything they had to say to each other at supper.

In England, before they were married, there had always been so much to talk about. Vinson had been interested in what she had to tell him about her day at the shop, and there was so much to discover about each other’s past lives. But now that they had told nearly everything about themselves that they intended to tell, what was left? Sometimes there seemed to be a great vacuum between them, a no-man’s-land across which they could not reach each other. Christine would look up from her book or her sewing to where Vinson sat dangling a house shoe from his toe, and realize in a moment of panic that she was married to him and that he was a stranger.

She wondered what other married couples talked about when they were alone. Gossip, probably, about people they both knew, but Vinson did not care for gossip. He had definite ideas about people. He either liked them and they could do no wrong, or he did not like them and he could not hear any good about them. That was that, and he was not interested in the fascinating details of their lives.

Marriage was supposed to bring you close, but sometimes, as you got to know a person better, it drove you farther apart. When you did not know someone very well, irritating habits and small disagreements were passed over in the excitement of discovering the things you did have in common. But when you were sealed within the walls of marriage for ever, small inadequacies, even tiny differences of mood, could grow out of proportion and push you both as far back into yourselves as if you had a real quarrel.

When Vinson came home feeling masculine and wanting to love her, everything was all right between them. At such times they were happy together, and in these first months of their marriage there were enough of these times to make up for the moments when Christine struggled against disappointment like a fly caught in a cobweb.

She was happy. Of course she was happy. She had wanted to be married, and now she was. It would come out all right. Marriage was not as easy as it looked at first sight, and if there seemed to be anything wrong it must be her fault. She would be more loving and more tolerant and everything would be all right. Everything was all right. Think what some people’s marriages were like! She and Vinson were lucky.

These things she told herself as she cleaned her apartment and listened to the morning quiz programmes on the radio.

There had been nothing like them on B.B.C., except perhaps Wilfred Pickles, but ‘Have a Go’ was only a very mild version of these programmes where people from the studio audience were made to tell the microphone the most intimate things about themselves, before they tried to answer the general knowledge questions that could bring them fabulous sums of money, or a precision-built plastic rocking-chair or a television set with a tone ‘as mellow as an old Stradivarius violin’.

Whether they won or lost, of course they were given samples of whatever product was sponsoring the programme. When some colourful bearded character from the backwoods was hauled up to the microphone to tell his simple story to the amazed children of progress, Christine wondered how he felt about lugging home to his rustic retreat six giant-size boxes of Foamo, the new miracle sudsmaker that cuts dishwashing time in half, yet is mildest of all to your hands. The sponsors were usually paying his bill at a hotel in Chicago or Hollywood or wherever the programme came from, so he probably gave the Foamo to the chambermaid and went happily home to dip his tin plates in a cold mountain stream, with a hundred dollars in his pocket for knowing who was the manager of the Boston Red Sox baseball team in 1932.

There was one programme which shamelessly exploited people’s misfortunes and tragedies to provide entertainment for the vast morning audience of housewives all over America. You were supposed to write in to the studio that your child was going blind, or your wife crippled from polio or your home burned to the ground with all your savings tied up in an old sock inside it. The worse you could make it sound the better, for whoever had had the most ghastly things happen to them was asked to come along to try and win money for an operation on their child, or a wheelchair for their wife, or a down payment on a new home, so that these wonderful, wonderful people could make a new start in Little Rock, Arkansas.

It was no doubt a charitable idea, besides being a good advertisement for soap, but Christine sometimes found it quite embarrassing to listen to the tales of woe told by these ‘wonderful people’. Anyone who came to the microphone was automatically a wonderful person. Everyone was buddies and bursting with the milk of human kindness, but the plight of the wonderful people, telling their stories of crippling and ruin and sudden death for the sport of listeners, was reminiscent of the freak at a circus, exploiting his misfortunes for cash. Once a woman who had lost a husband in the last war and two sons in Korea broke down and had to be led away, and a man whose wife had died having their fifth baby sobbed right into the microphone and got the biggest applause of all.

It was all very embarrassing. Worse still when the unfortunates could not answer the question and had to trail back to Kokomo, Indiana, or Gallipolis, Ohio, with the fare wasted and the glittering prize unwon. If you could be very pathetic, however, a listener might call up the studio and offer to give you a piano or a half share in a garage or your fare to the sanatorium where your wife languished. That was very, very wonderful, and all the announcers got madly excited and handed out bars of soap all round. Christine often thought that if the benefactors had money to spare for plausible unknowns it might have been better to help their family or friends nearer home.

Better perhaps, but not so spectacular, for if charity began at home the listening millions would not hear about it, and be softened up for soap buying.

Whatever Christine felt about the programme, she always had to listen to it while she pushed her vacuum cleaner or watered her plants, much as one is impelled to stop and watch a street accident. When it was over she switched off the radio, made sure that she had her keys in her bag, for she had locked herself out more than once and had to take a taxi to Vinson’s office, and went out to do her shopping.

It was a quarter of an hour’s walk to the shops. Down a hill, under a railway bridge where there was often a puddle of muddy water which cars splashed on to your stockings as they sped unheeding by, and up a winding hill on the other side, past house after little suburban house with awnings on the windows and cutely planted evergreens and sometimes a light by the gate made like a miniature street lamp.

One of the houses had a lamp held aloft by a plaster statue of a dwarf dressed as a jockey. He was fastened to the gatepost by a stout chain and padlock, although Christine did not think he was in any danger of being stolen.

Some of the houses had the owners’ names painted on little white boards and stuck into the front lawn like Keep-off-the-Grass notices. It was always the people with the oddest names who had them planted there in bravado, as if to show that they were not ashamed of them.

The shopping centre, when she reached it, was all that she could wish for. There was a Woolworth’s, and a hardware store that sold every kind of nail the world had ever made, a florist where she bought her plants, a drugstore with a soda fountain where she treated herself to banana splits, until Vinson told her she was getting fatter, and finally the supermarket, which she did not think she would ever cease to enjoy, however long she lived in America.

The supermarket has become one of the natural phenomena of American life. It would be a small and backward village indeed that did not have one. Children are brought up to it and never know the friendly tea and biscuit smell of a corner grocery. No one stops any more to think how wonderful it is, but to anyone fresh from post-war England the supermarket is a marvel, a cornucopia of the world’s riches.

The first time Christine ventured into her local supermarket she thought she was in heaven. She took her little wire basket on wheels and pushed it round, gaping at the thousands of tins on the shelves, at the vegetables freshly washed and wrapped in cellophane, the deep-freeze locker where you could get whole meals all ready to be thawed out and eaten, and the butcher’s glass-fronted refrigerator, which was a jewel case of pork chops, lamb chops, legs of veal, breasts of chicken and crimson rounds of the kind of steaks Christine had long since forgotten.

In England, when you see something unusual on the grocer’s shelves, you buy it even if you do not need it at the moment, because it may never appear again. It took Christine a little time to drop this habit. She kept seeing things that she had craved for years, and she bought so much that she could hardly carry it home, and then had no room for all the tins in her small kitchen.

Soon, however, she managed to get into her head that she could buy anything she wanted at a moment’s notice and up to nine o’clock on Saturdays, and so she curbed her enthusiasm. She had to because she was spending too much. The prices were terrifying. When you got to the cash register at the end of the store where the incredibly quick man, who had his name pinned to his overall in a little celluloid card case, reckoned up the contents of your basket, the final sum which sprang up on the till was always more than you expected. Vinson gave her money every Monday, and she did not like having to ask him for more before the end of the week. He always gave it to her without saying anything, but she did not think he liked it.

She grew canny. She compared prices and saved a cent here and there like any Service wife. She learned not to ask for a ‘joint’ of meat. She had tried that and the butcher thought she meant pig’s knuckles. She learned what a chuck roast was, and ‘fryers’ and ‘picnics’, although she never did discover what standing ribs might be. She learned to call a tin a can and Vienna sausages Wienies, and she tried to make herself say tomatoes with an American A. She was learning the ropes.

The suburb where Christine and Vinson lived was in Maryland. It was a long journey from there to the centre of Washington. No buses ran past the apartments, so she had to walk fifteen minutes to the shopping centre and take a bus from there to the District line, where you had to change, because the state transport systems would not run into each other’s territory. You got on to what Christine had quickly learned to call a streetcar, after she had asked a man painting white lines on the road where the trams stopped, and he had straightened up and stared at her as if she ought to be in St Elizabeth’s asylum.

You had to put fifteen cents into the slot just inside the streetcar door. Christine was always careful to have a nickel and a dime ready, because, although most of the drivers were pleasant, some of them were crotchety and she was nervous of asking them for change. She thought that if she had to be a tram driver and a conductor at the same time, she would be crotchety too and have the ulcers they were popularly supposed to possess.

It was a forty-minute ride to the centre of the town where the cinemas and the best shops were. You stopped and started and stopped and started and jerked, and the bell clanged like a locomotive in a switchyard, and the streetcar’s radio played dance music and told you to buy a reconditioned sewing-machine for no money down and a long, long time to pay on the magic credit system. It also told you where you could borrow money on the easiest, friendliest terms in town. It exhorted you, it begged you to borrow money. It encouraged you to spend more than you earned and then pay off your debts by getting into debt to a loan company. It told you to forget that you had been brought up to think there was anything shameful in borrowing money. There was nothing wrong with it. All the best people did it. It was one of the most delightful business transactions you could make, and jolly Jim Jedwin was there at the Anacostia office to help you, and friendly Art Farmer would welcome you at the Friendship Heights branch. Just plain old country folks all of them, eager to give you the old-fashioned greeting of a simple, homey firm.

And so it went on. The music played. The usurer’s front man rollicked on about loans, and the streetcar jerked and stopped and started and clanged, and finally Christine got off at Fifteenth Street and dived for the pavement among the phalanx of cars that she never believed would stop for her.

She sometimes spent an afternoon walking about looking at the dresses and hats and shoes in the shop windows, but she did not often risk going inside. Vinson was particular about her appearance. He was always saying: ‘You must get the right kind of dress’ for this or that party, or: ‘You can’t go to the Henderson’s without a hat’, but if she spent too much his face tightened up when he went through her cheque stubs at the end of the month.

He was a great one for saving, and Christine was glad, although she had never learned how to save herself. To her, money was money, to be enjoyed when you had it and wished for when you did not; but Vinson had been saving for a long time, and soon perhaps they would be able to get out of the apartment and have a house with a garden - and children?

When they talked about having children, Vinson always stuck to his original opinion that they should wait a year or two ‘until we see how things are’. He was always thinking that there was going to be another war at any moment. It was depressing, Christine wanted to have a child soon. It would give more point to her life, and make her days less lonely.

‘I’m nearly thirty-five,’ she said. ‘I oughtn’t to wait too long. Soon I’ll be too old. I’m dreadfully old now.’

‘Women are in their physical prime at thirty-five,’ he said. He had read that in a magazine.

Sometimes, when she went down-town, she went to the cinema to while away the long afternoon. Once she went into a big book store with the idea of perhaps getting into conversation with the assistants and talking the language of her old life at Goldwyn’s, but they were offhand and they did not seem to know anything about the books they sold, and so she did not try to talk to them.

Going home was a nightmare if you timed it wrong and tried to get on a streetcar when all the workers were pouring out of the shops and offices. You had to wait on a narrow wooden platform in the middle of the street with cars swishing close to your legs and sometimes the rain coming down on your head. Car after car was full, and when the driver did consent to cram in a few more bodies there was no queuing system, and it was every man for himself if you wanted to get home at all. Christine always had to stand up all the way to the District line. The only man who ever got up and gave her a seat was a coloured man. When she told Vinson this he would not believe it. He did not like negroes. He said they were the ruin of Washington and someone ought to stop the evil that Roosevelt had wrought in letting them encroach all over the town like termites.

Christine did not agree with him. She liked to see so many coloured people about. It made her feel that she was in an exotic country. She was fascinated by their high voices and by the loose, bent-kneed walk of the men, the garish clothes of the women and the way they sat about on broken chairs outside their rickety homes in the evening sun, with the hair of the sticklegged little girls pulled into tight plaits that sprung from odd places all over their heads.

She had a friend called Maxwell, who did odd jobs around the apartments. He was very black indeed and he wore a bellying cinnamon-coloured cap and had one thumb missing and a silver plate in his head from the war. She asked him to clean the outside of her windows, and Vinson came home too early and found Maxwell having coffee and cake in the kitchen and telling Christine the sins of his first wife.

Vinson was cross. ‘You must learn that you can’t encourage them,’ he said. ‘Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. I know these Shines. The next thing will be he’ll be asking you for money. You’ll see.’

‘Oh no,’ Christine said. ‘Not Maxwell. He’s terribly honest. He even told me when I gave him too much for the time he’d worked.’

‘Softening you up,’ Vinson said, ‘for future benefits.’

‘Oh no, darling. You mustn’t be unfair. You’re absolutely wrong,’ Christine said, but it was not two weeks before Maxwell rang the door chimes to say that if he did not have three dollars to pay off arrears of rent he would be turned out of his house.

Christine gave him the three dollars. She did not tell Vinson, partly because it would be unfair to Maxwell, and partly because she did not want to admit she was wrong. After that Maxwell occasionally touched her for half a dollar to take his wife to the movies, but he carried her shopping for her when she met him in the street, and he unstuck windows that would not open, and told her about his method for picking up girls when he was in the Navy – ‘You is on the street with a long black cigar, and you gits her eye in yo’ eye and you keep it there’ – and he was altogether quite a pleasure to her.

The ordeal of getting to town and back in the streetcar determined Christine to learn to drive Vinson’s car and get her permit as soon as possible.

He was loath to teach her. ‘It’s dangerous,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing like your London traffic. I’m so afraid you’ll get into trouble and get yourself hurt, darling.’

Christine liked him to be concerned about her, but it did not deflect her. ‘I drove all right in England. You let me drive the Buick, and you said I was the only woman you’d ever not been scared to drive with. But of course that was when you were courting me.’

‘Could be,’ he said, ‘though you didn’t drive so badly, for a woman. But you’ll find it so hard to learn to drive on the right.’

‘You learned to drive on the left in England pretty quick. I can do it if you can. Take me out tonight and let me try and I’ll bet you I could go and take my test tomorrow.’

‘Oh no, honey!’ He did not want to think she was too efficient. ‘Besides, .there are all sorts of highway regulations you’ll have to learn. You can’t treat the Washington cops like you treated your London bobbies.’

‘I’ll learn. I will be careful. Oh, please do take me out tonight. We could find a side-road, if there are such things in this part of the world.’

He said that she should have a learner’s permit. He said that there was hardly any petrol in the car. He said that he had meant to work. Finally, when he saw how much she wanted it, he agreed to take her. Although he was selfish, his honest desire was to make her happy, although his ideas of what should make her happy were not always the same as hers. When he bought her presents, for instance, he consulted his own taste rather than hers. He bought her great purple orchids, and she did not tell him that she liked the little butterfly ones better. He thought she ought to like heavy and ornate jewellery, and he never discovered that she preferred small and delicate things.

Christine got on quite well with the car among the intricacies of boulevarding, and three-way traffic lights and one-way streets, although Vinson made her nervous by being nervous himself and shouting: ‘For God’s sake, watch it!’ when she was doing no wrong. She was not sure whether he was afraid for her or the car.

Resigned to the fact that she was bent on driving and not being for ever the helpless little wife in the passenger seat, he got her a book which told her all the traffic rules. When she had driven with him a few more times she prevailed on him to take her up to get her permit, although he did not think she would pass the test. His possessive love for her did not embrace too great a faith in her capabilities. The estimable Miss Cope was a ghost of the past.

In the great white Municipal Building she was sent into the examination room, while he had to wait on a bench outside. He bade her farewell with glum tenderness. It was rather like going to the dentist.

It was a long room like a schoolroom, with some fifty desks at which people sat with their legs twined round the chairs, hunched forward and sucking their pens as if they were struggling with a Matriculation paper. At the teacher’s desk sat a middle-aged policeman with grey hair and benevolent spectacles.

Christine found an empty desk and sat down to look at the question paper lying on it, taken back all at once to the moment of panic at the start of school examinations, when all you had studied fled from you, and you hardly dared to look at the question paper for fear that the fiends had tricked you after all and were asking that impossible one about: ‘Compare the Medieval Guilds with modern Trade Unions. What was the main difference? Describe the influence of Christianity on both these movements.’

The driver’s permit test, however, was more like an elementary intelligence test for backward children. There were three alternative answers to each question. They were written out, and all you had to do was to put an X in the space opposite the one you thought was right, so that, provided you could read, it did not matter whether you could write or not.

Some of the people round Christine did not look as if they could read or write. They sat at the desks hopelessly, as if they had come to the end of their powers and could go no farther. One man looked as if he had been there several days. His face was unshaven and his hair was on end from the amount of times he had pushed his pen through it. The floor round him was littered with cigarette butts. From time to time he fetched up great sighs, like a man in travail.

One or two bright boys were finishing their tests and taking them up to the policeman at the teacher’s desk, looking as smug as the loathsome candidates at school examinations who keep going up for more writing paper, when everyone else is struggling to think of enough to fill the paper they have been given.

Christine determined to get full marks. The questions were mostly very simple, even if you had not read the book of traffic rules. One of them was: ‘If a streetcar stops in front of you, would you (a) Stop and wait for the people to descend? (b) Blow your horn to hurry them up? (c) Drive on and make them get out of your way?’

Another was: ‘If an automobile comes up to pass you on your left, would you (a) Increase your speed? (b) Pull over to your right to give him room? (c) Swerve left and crowd him out?’

The desks were close together, and Christine saw the man next to her ponder a long time over this question, and finally put his X in the space marked (a). She wondered if he would get his permit. He looked as if he might want to be a truck driver, and would need it.

When she had finished she took her paper up to the policeman, who glanced through it briefly, made some cryptic calculations and came up with the score of ninety-five. She did not think she had made any mistakes, but perhaps you were never given full marks, in case it looked like cheating.

The policeman covered each of her eyes in turn and made her read some letters on a chart and tell him the colours of a set of red, amber and green lights. As they were placed in the familiar order of traffic lights, you could have got it right, anyway, even if you had been colour blind. Then he told her that she had a pretty English accent, lady, asked her if she was in the diplomatic service and passed her on to a window where she waited in a line for a rattled woman with hair escaping all over a grey cardigan to take her papers.

She sat with Vinson and waited half an hour for her name to be spelled out over the loudspeaker. The rattled woman could not trust herself to pronounce any name more complicated than Smith. Then she had to go to other windows and wait for other half-hours until she was finally given a fistful of papers and sent to take her driving test. There seemed to be more red tape and forms than in Socialist England.

Vinson was inordinately proud of her for having got ninety-five out of a hundred. It was nice that he was pleased, but not very flattering that he had expected her to say that she would have mown down crowds at a streetcar stop, or pushed cars off the road if they tried to pass her.

Waiting in the big car park where the driving tests were held they watched a red-faced man in a very old Ford trying to park the car between two white posts, while policemen and examiners looked cynically on.

‘Jesus,’ said Vinson. ‘Those markers are awfully close. You’ll never make it, honey.’

‘Of course I will. Just because I scraped a fender the other day by bad luck. You’ve never got over that scratch. Don’t belittle me, Vin. You make me nervous.’

‘Don’t be. Just take it easy. Don’t lose your head. Make a fresh try if you ball it up first time. Don’t be nervous.’

‘I’m not, but you’re making me. Please, Vin, don’t watch while I’m doing it.’

He promised not to look, but she felt that he was standing behind her watching when her turn came. It took her three tries to get the car parked properly, but at least she did not knock the poles down and run over a policeman’s toe, as the man in the Ford had done.

An examiner wearing a pair of blue jeans and an old leather flying jacket climbed wearily into the car with her and said, without looking at her: ‘Go ahead, lady. I’ll tell you where.’

Christine had been driving for fifteen years, but with his jaundiced presence on the seat beside her and his turgid eye looking through the windscreen at the course she took she felt as if she had hardly been in a car before. It felt odd to be driving so primly and carefully, making exaggerated hand signals and letting every pedestrian in Washington pass in front of her.

With no alteration of his countenance the examiner shifted his gum to the other cheek and began to try tricks on her. He told her to turn left when there was a sign saying NO LEFT TURN. He told her to turn right when the street on the right said DO NOT ENTER. He said: ‘Go on. Go ahead’, when a green light changed to amber. Vinson had warned her that the examiner might play games like this, so she was careful, and he shifted his gum back to the other side, foiled.

They drove round the city blocks for about ten minutes. Christine dared not talk to him, in case it was against the rules, as if you were trying to curry favour, and he did not offer any conversation except the statement that she was British and must be in the diplomatic corps.

When they had finished the tour he got out of the car without saying anything, wrote something on his papers, gave them to her and went away without a word.

Vinson came up with an anxious face. ‘I’ve passed!’ she told him, and kissed him in front of everybody, which he did not like when he was in uniform.

Now that she could drive she often took the car into Washington to go shopping or do a little gentle sightseeing, but she soon found that the difficulty of finding somewhere to park was almost as much nuisance as the dreary ride in the streetcar. Parking lots and garages were expensive, but every space on the street seemed to be taken by people who dashed into town at nine o’clock and stayed there all day. When you did see a space it was always on the wrong side of the road, and by the time you had described a complicated geometrical figure round the block to get to it someone else’s big fat car was always there.

The only empty spaces were the ones that said NO PARKING. Christine sometimes risked them, until one day she came back to the car to find a police ticket stuck under the windscreen wiper.

It was Vinson’s boast that he had never had a parking ticket in Washington. When Christine got hers he was almost as upset as if it were a prison sentence.

‘I knew you shouldn’t be driving here,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d get into trouble.’

‘It isn’t trouble. Everyone gets tickets. Nancy Lee gets one every week. She told me.’

‘What Art’s wife does and what my wife does are two very different things,’ Vinson said. He had never liked Nancy since she had taken Art away from him when they were sharing an apartment in Bethesda five years ago.

He wanted to go to the police station with Christine. He said he might be able to do some talking, but Christine thought she would rather do it herself. There was no talking to be done, however. She walked in and put her ticket on the high counter, an officer in shirtsleeves with his heavy badge sagging the front of his shirt said: ‘Three dollars’, she paid up, another officer stopped filing his nails to write her name and address in a ledger, and that was that. No muss, no fuss, as the corn-remover advertisements said.

When she wanted to use the car she had to take Vinson to work in the morning and fetch him at night. She had already driven with him on the maze of roads that surrounds that mammoth temple of Mars, the Pentagon, and she had got over her first alarmed surprise at the thousands of cars going from every direction along the roads that loop over and under each other like a fantastic model railway.

She had not known what it was like at eight o’clock in the morning, however, when half the military might of America was converging on its desks to fight for freedom and democracy. The first time she took Vinson to work at the Arlington Annexe, just above the Pentagon, she could hardly believe there were so many cars in the world, let alone merely going to work for the U.S. Government.

From the jammed Key Bridge onwards you could hardly see the road for cars. They drove in a solid mass, and when they left Rosslyn and came out on to the rolling green open space that exists solely for the purpose of containing the criss-crossing loops and swirls of roads that are necessary to get people to and from the Pentagon there were cars everywhere as far as the eye could see. Cars rushing, cars crawling, cars going in every direction like ants with an unknown purpose, and cars drawn up in their thousands in cindered car parks, as if the biggest football match in creation was going on.

She did not think she would ever find her way home. When she left Vinson at the Annexe he told her to go back the way they had come, but all the roads looked the same to her. She missed a vital turn and found herself going round and round the Pentagon with no hope of ever finding the way out. You could not stop anywhere on the road, so she drove into a car park, took a deep breath and surveyed the landscape, trying to figure out a way back to the Key Bridge. But in this traffic system the road you should take probably did not run in the direction you wanted to go. It was liable to swoop upwards in a clover leaf to get you across a bridge over another road. She ventured out again and thought she was more successful. She had the river and the bridge in sight, but the road took a sudden turn and plunge and she was back again at the Pentagon, going round in circles.

When she was a child she had been lost in the Hampton Court Maze. She remembered how she had run round and round, crying because she was lost to the world for ever. Crying and screaming had brought her mother then, but it would do nothing for her now. She went back into her car park, wondering if she would have to stay there all day until it was time to fetch Vinson.

An Army officer drove up in a green Chevrolet and told her peevishly that she was in his parking space. His eyes looked bruised and bloodshot as if he had a hangover, but he told her how to get back to the bridge, and this time she managed it. It had taken forty minutes to drive out to the Annexe with Vinson. It took her an hour and a half to get home.

She was so unnerved that she did not take herself for the drive she had planned, but parked the car with the aid of Maxwell, who was cutting grass, and went back to bed and slept for the rest of the morning.

She allowed herself plenty of time to go back and fetch Vinson. He had said to her once: ‘My wife must never be late. Nothing looks worse than a man waiting around for a woman.’

‘Except a woman waiting for a man.’

‘You know you’ve never had to wait for me.’ It was true. He was never late. Christine had always been late for everything all her life, but with Vinson she made great efforts to be on time. By luck she found the right road to the Annexe at the first attempt and was there much too early. She backed the car into Vinson’s numbered parking space and listened to the radio until it was nearly half past four and she could begin watching the doors for her husband.

At exactly four-thirty the high glass doors opened. A woman came out, then two coloured men, a naval officer, three girls, and then suddenly a whole horde of people, who poured down the steps in a solid stream and made for the gate in the wire fence. They were also coming out of another door farther along the building, and that stream joined the stream from the main doors, until there was a floodtide of hurrying people, some white, some black; girls, men, naval officers, cripples, hunchbacks, even a neatly clad dwarf or two. No rush hour that Christine had ever seen was anything like it. It was all humanity, jammed into one building and all gushing out at the same moment as if someone had opened a sluice-gate.

She did not see Vinson at first. There were so many naval officers dressed like him, and so many with his slight build and springy walk. She had already waved to two strange men, and was wondering whether to wave to another who looked like Vinson from a distance, when his head suddenly came in at the car window, with his white teeth shining and his flecked brown eyes eager to see her.

Driving home with him seemed so easy that she wondered how she had ever missed the way that morning. She soon learned her way to the Annexe and back, but she always had to keep her mind on the road. If she let it wander while she was driving she was apt to find herself carried away on a curving branch road that might lead her back to Washington, or out to Alexandria, or descending again on the Pentagon to drive round and round that hopeless merry-go-round designed by someone far cleverer than the driver of any car.

When she did not have the car she waited in the apartment for Vinson to come home. She always changed her dress and did her face, tidied away her ironing-board or her sewing, because, although it pleased him to see her busy at domestic tasks, he liked her to be unemployed when he came home, and ready to open the front door as soon as she heard his whistle on the stair. He had a special whistle for her, two rising notes, such as one might use to call a dog. He trained her to answer this promptly, and he got her so attuned to it that even when he whistled very softly she could hear it, as a dog will answer to a high-frequency whistle that the human ear cannot detect.

Sometimes, when they were sitting with people, he would whistle very softly from across the room and Christine would raise her head and look at him, although the person to whom she was talking had not heard. Vinson liked to show off this trick in public. It made him feel like Svengali.

Christine had to be ready in the evenings in case he came home punctually, but more often he stayed on to finish some work when the other people in his office had gone, and Christine waited, and worried whether the supper would spoil, and wondered whether, if she had a drink and cleaned her teeth afterwards, he would notice. He did not like her to drink alone. He liked her to wait until he came home and made his special brand of martini, which took a lot of trouble and pouring back and forth from different jugs, but tasted no different to her from any other.

She always looked forward to seeing him. Her days were often long and lonely, and she saved up small items of news for him during the day and planned how she would tell them to him. But sometimes, after he had kissed her and pressed her hard against the brass buttons of his tunic, when she started to tell him something she had been saving up, he made the wrong kind of answer, or interrupted her, and it fell flat. That often happens when you plan a story to tell someone, because while you are planning it you write all the dialogue yourself – theirs as well as yours – and then, of course, they don’t know their part.

Often Christine looked forward eagerly to chattering round Vinson in the kitchen while he went through his methodical motions of mixing martinis, and often she was disappointed because he did not think the same things funny, or was not as interested as he should have been in what the man at the drugstore had said.

Sometimes when he told her a piece of news from his day, she heard herself making the wrong comment on it, and was immediately sorry, because he, too, might have been planning while he was driving home how he would tell it to her, and now she had disappointed him, and she knew how it felt.

In the afternoons, while she waited for it to be time for Vinson to come home, she listened to the radio programmes that she had learned to call soap operas. These were a series of domestic dramas, each lasting a quarter of an hour, during which time a set of characters with easily distinguishable voices went through a chain of emotional crises. They were supposed to represent ordinary families - ‘people just like people you all know’ – but if any ordinary family had experienced so many ups and downs as these radio characters suffered from day to day they would all be in a psychiatric ward before long. The B.B.C. programme ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’ was a direct descendant of these soap operas, but while Mrs Dale and her tedious suburban family led a fairly eventful life they never experienced anything like the intrigue, murder and illicit passion in which their American counterparts indulged.

Some of the soap operas had been going on for years, but the characters in them never seemed to get any older or wiser. They were suspended in time, like the eternal Bob Cherry and Billy Bunter in the English boys’ weeklies, who had been in the Remove at Greyfriars as long as Christine could remember. They had a faithful listening audience, who had followed their fortunes from the beginning and perhaps knew more about the radio characters than they did about their own husbands. At the same time, however, the script writer had to cater for the listener who might be hearing the programme for the first time and would not know who was who. A character, therefore, would have to refer, even with intimates, to ‘my wife Ethel’, or ‘the landlady, Mrs Gooch’, or ‘Paula Revere, the leading lady in my current Broadway show’, which struck a stilted note in an otherwise free-and-easy dialogue.

Since more and more soap operas had hit the air to sell detergents and deodorants and headache pills, it was the fashion in America to condemn them for the nonsense they were, but Christine suspected that more people listened to them than would admit it. She herself, being new on their onslaught, was fascinated, and followed the fortunes of the various sets of characters with deep interest. Sometimes she tried to tell Vinson about them, but he did not want to hear, and if the programme was going on when he came home he would switch it off, so that Christine would have to wait until the next day to know whether Joanne had finally agreed to marry Anthony (with the H pronounced) or whether Leslie (pronounced Lesslie) had freed himself from the ropes in time to go after the burglar who had stolen the secret formula for the wonder drug.

There was a programme about a poor young widow with two children, who played out ‘the eternal conflict between a mother’s duty and a woman’s heart’. The children were never heard from – perhaps because child actors would be in school at the time the programme was relayed – and the young widow sometimes went off for days at a time to follow some twist of the plot, without thought of her Mother’s Duty, but such details did not matter in the larger drama of the soap operas. The children had probably played an important part at the beginning of the series – heaven knows how long ago – and after the script writer got tired of them no one thought of changing the announcement record about the Mother’s Duty and the Woman’s Heart. The public would not have wanted it changed, anyway. It was the kind of public that likes to know where it is.

There was a sinister cripple in this programme, who talked in a snarl and never threw a decent word to anybody. All the characters had to be like that – all bad, or all good, or always funny. They never said anything out of character, in case listeners should think someone else was talking.

The machinations involved to prove that the widow’s boy friend was not married to the cripple’s sister had been going on now for several months, and looked like going on for ever, with a fresh twist of tragedy or hope whenever the plot slackened. Of course you knew it would come out right in the end, because the widow was a Good character, who said things like: ‘Whatever terrible things have happened to us, I think we shall all be better people for it.’ She was also apt to tell her friends that she was looking for stars in the crown of heaven. It was very affecting.

To point up the drama in these programmes an organ was used for the incidental music. This was cheaper than having an orchestra, as its suspenseful chords could be used to make any speech momentous.

A character would say:’ We have come to a crossroads in our lives -’ Boom! from the organ. ‘There is something I have to tell you’ – careening arpeggios – ‘I’ve met someone else.’ Boom, boom, boom! with all the stops pulled out.

A love scene could be accompanied by a tremulant rendering of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, the vox humana could help Mom when she made another of her sacrifices to keep the home together, and the carillon dinged out at any mention of religion, for God was cast quite frequently for a minor role in the soap operas.

Each programme was sponsored by some product, and began and ended with a commercial announcement. The words of the commercial were on a record and were always the same, so that you got to know them so well that you did not hear them any more, which is one of the reasons why people are able to bear with sponsored radio. Some of the advertisements were set to music. Christine heard them so often that they printed themselves on her brain. When she was doing housework she sometimes found herself singing: ‘Veeto – says No, no – to Underarm O!’ or, to the tune of Ach, du lieber Augustine: ‘Mrs Filbert’s margerine, margerine m argerine. Mrs Filbert’s mar gerine – buy some today!’, or ‘Brush your teeth with Colgate’s – Colgate’s dental cream. It cleans your breath – what a toothpaste! – while it cleans your teeth!’

Such was Christine’s life during these first months in Washington. When she stopped to think about herself she was surprised to find how quickly she had settled down. She had thought that life in America would be very strange for a long time. Although she was still frequently surprised by things she saw or heard, the new routine of her life was becoming so familiar that the old rhythm of her days in England was already like a far-off song, only half remembered.

She was less bored and lonely when she began to make friends with her neighbours in the apartments. The woman who lived opposite was a large and amiable hausfrau with short stiff blonde hair and a husband who could not sit down without grunting. They were called Mr and Mrs Pitman R. Preedy and they seemed to spend most of their time eating. Christine met the wife staggering up the stairs with brown-paper bags full of food, and often when the husband came home from work, he too carried a paper bag with a salami or a bottle of cream sticking out of the top.

Mrs Preedy was for ever making cakes, and sometimes she baked an extra one for Christine. In the course of a conversation across the hall from front door to front door, which was how they usually talked, for Mrs Preedy always said she had no time to step into Christine’s apartment, and she never asked Christine into hers, Christine had told her that she never made cakes. Mrs Preedy did not know that this was because Vinson did not like them. She thought it was because Christine did not know how to make them, and so about once a week Christine would answer the door bell to find a large iced cake sitting on her doormat, and Mrs Preedy retreating to the shelter of her own front door, stretching her orange-tinted lips in delight at her good-neighbourliness.

She was very sorry for Christine, because she had come from England. She thought that everyone in England was starving. The thought of the meat ration moved her almost to tears – and the toilet paper! A friend of hers had been to England, and the stories she had told her about that! She treated Christine as if she were an African native, newly come from some benighted jungle village. Once when she met Christine in the supermarket, buying quite ordinary things like milk and eggs and butter, Mrs Preedy had said: ‘I think it’s wonderful how you know what to buy. Do they have milk in England?’

Christine never knew what to do with Mrs Preedy’s cakes. Sometimes she ate a piece for her lunch, but Vinson, who had liked her figure in England, had begun to notice that she was too plump in comparison with American girls, and she was trying hard to reduce although she did not think it would suit her. She usually gave the cakes to Maxwell, and once, when she and Mrs Preedy went out together to go shopping, Maxwell was sitting on the grass at the side of the apartments with the plate at his side and a large piece of cake half-way to his dusty pink mouth.

Christine did not know whether Mrs Preedy had seen, but the cakes continued to arrive outside her front door, although less frequently, as if Mrs Preedy might be having a struggle to make her good-neighbourliness overlook the incident.

Vinson did not like Mrs Preedy, although she called him Commodore and always asked politely after the Navy when they met on the stairs. He said that the Preedys were not the type of people you expected to find living opposite you, and the apartments must be going down in tone. One Saturday morning when he was at home he had heard Christine and Mrs Preedy calling loudly to each other across the hall about Mr Preedy’s gastroenteritis, and he had called Christine inside and asked her if she was trying to disgrace him.

When he said things like that to her he used a voice that reminded Christine of her headmistress at school and her matron in the hospital, and it made her laugh. Then Vinson was a little sad, and told her that it was only because he loved her and was proud of her that he wanted her so much to measure up to the right standards.

‘What standards?’ Christine asked, still laughing at his pursed-up mouth and serious, unblinking stare. ‘The standards of a commander’s wife, I suppose you’ll say.’

‘If you like.’

‘Well, don’t you ever be made an admiral, Vin. I’d never live up to it.’

‘I sincerely hope that I shall some day. It’s the crown of every professional naval officer’s career. And you’ll make a fine admiral’s wife. I know it.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Christine, making a rude face. ‘I’ll wear pompous hats and be a wet blanket at junior officers’ parties and stand in a corner looking down my nose at all the bootlicking women whose husbands want promotion.’

‘Now, honey,’ said Vinson uneasily, for he did not like her to talk that way about the sacred Mrs Hamer.

‘It will be bad enough when you’re a captain. I don’t seem able to behave like a commander’s wife, but it will be worse trying to be a captain’s wife. I hope I don’t get like that woman downstairs.’

‘Now, honey,’ Vinson said. ‘Captain and Mrs Decker are very fine people, and she’s been very friendly towards you.’

‘I don’t like her. She’s got a face like a crab and she’s always telling me stories about people I’ve never heard of, and what good families they come from, and the other day she drove me to the shops when it was raining, and because I wanted to go to Woolworth’s – only for just a moment – she wouldn’t wait for me and I had to walk back.’

‘I’d still be happier to see you making friends with her instead of some of the wives you run around here with.’

‘What’s wrong with them? I love old Mrs Minter. She knows how to make tea the English way. And Nora Beckley is a dear although I know she looks a bit odd. But you needn’t have been so offhand to her that time she was here when you came home. Her husband’s got cancer.’

‘Well, don’t look at me as if it was my fault. I’m certainly sorry for her, but I do want you to make the right kind of friends, darling.’

‘What’s wrong with Lianne then? She’s the nicest person I’ve met since I came to America. Life around the flats – sorry, apartments – has been much more fun for me since I’ve known her. I suppose you don’t like me being so friendly with her because her husband’s only a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve.’

Vinson did not answer. If an accusation was true he did not deny it or try to defend himself. He just ignored it, so that you never knew whether you had scored a point off him or not.

Christine had met Lianne Morgan one day when she was in the basement laundry putting her washing into the machine. A very tall slim girl with a wide mouth and a lot of flopping brown hair had come down with a basket full of dirty clothes and an even dirtier small boy in a cowboy hat covering her from behind with a couple of pistols.

‘Hi,’ said the girl to Christine at once. ‘I’ve seen you before. You’re the English girl who’s married to the good-looking Commander, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Christine. ‘How did you know?’

‘Oh, I know most things that go on around these tenements. We’ve been here since way back. You’d be surprised at some of the things I could tell you. Dick – that’s my husband – says I’m too nosy, but I can’t help it. We live in the block across the playground from you, but our laundry’s full of yacketyyacketing women this morning, so I came over here. Let me dump these things – and come up and have some coffee, won’t you? Quiet, child,’ she said to the little boy, who was killing washing machines – bang, bang – right and left. ‘He’s home from school because he said he was sick, but I found out afterwards that he’d held the thermometer under the hot faucet. Pretty cute at his age, don’t you think? I’ve got a little girl who’s older, but she isn’t half as smart.’

Christine knelt down to the little boy, who had a round bright face under the dirt, and reminded her of her nephew Clement. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked. The boy looked at his mother.

‘He’s called Perrin, poor little brute, because it’s one of Dick’s family names and his father insisted on it. I call him Peter, but Dick has to call him Perrin, in case we’ll forget when the old man comes.’

‘Well, he doesn’t call me that too much,’ said the little boy, mitigating the case against his father. ‘Mostly he calls me that evil child.’

Christine went up to Lianne’s apartment, and found it the same shape inside as her own, but looking quite different because of the state it was in. Christine’s apartment was very tidy. She had plenty of time to keep it so, although it went against her nature. She had been brought up by Aunt Josephine on the theory that there was no sense in putting things away only to have to get them out again. Her father had been allowed to keep his study in a mess of books and papers, and the drawing-room at ‘Roselawn’ had always been littered with mending, newspapers and dog pills ready to hand. If you brought down glue to mend something, or nail varnish to do your nails in front of the fire, the bottles might stand around for days, and people would look at them as they passed and say: ‘I must put that away some time.’

But Vinson did not like that kind of thing. If yesterday’s newspaper was still lying about when he came home, he would take it out to the kitchen before he sat down. He was a very tidy man. He always put his clothes away and his shoes neatly in line, so Christine had to do the same. If she left underclothes lying about he was quite capable of putting them away himself, and she did not like him to do that, in case he saw that there was still a pin on her knickers where a button should have been.

The Morgans’ apartment, however, was in chaos. ‘Forgive it,’ Lianne said, waving a hand round the living-room as they came in. ‘It isn’t always like this.’ Christine suspected that it usually was. A child’s night-clothes were thrown half on and half off the sofa, books had been pulled out of the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and one male shoe stood on the table. In the porch was a battered model railway track, which ran in and out under the chairs, some broken toys, children’s books thrown down open with the pages crumpled, a litter of scrawled drawing-paper and some dirty glasses and ashtrays. Two wooden handles hung from coiled wires on the wall.

‘That’s Dick’s muscle builder,’ said Lianne pulling on them with a backward swing of her long body. ‘He has to do something now that he’s back in the Navy in command of a large steel desk. But he will do it out here with no clothes on. He swears he can’t be seen through the screens, but of course he can. I’ve been outside to look. The Captain’s wife who lives below you has bought herself a pair of fieldglasses.

‘We had a party last night,’ she said, to explain the state of the kitchen. Christine liked it. It was the first untidy kitchen she had seen in America.

‘Some people over here wouldn’t dream of letting you into their homes unless they’d spent all day cleaning them up,’ she said.

‘I know it,’ said Lianne.’ Maybe I should be like that. I don’t know. Are you that way?’

‘Not by nature,’ Christine said. ‘But I try, because my husband thinks that I -'She stopped, realizing that what she was going to say might sound critical of Vinson. Lianne gave her a quick look and then turned to the cupboard to see if she could find two clean cups.

After that visit Christine often went over to Lianne’s apartment, or Lianne came to hers after the children had gone to school. Sometimes they went out together in the afternoon, and once, when they had been to an affecting film, they had both cried so much that when they came out they had to go and have a drink. Lianne had told the children to go to a neighbour’s apartment when they came back from school, so they did not hurry home. They had three cocktails and giggled all the way back on the streetcar, and when Christine got home she found Vinson there before her for the first time since their marriage.

He was not pleased. He did not come to the door to greet her. He sat in his chair swinging one foot, and waited for her to come to him.

She kissed him and was ready to apologize, but he pulled back his head and said in his matron voice: ‘Where have you been?’

‘Out with Lianne. We went to a movie. It was –’

‘You could at least have left a note for me.’

‘I would have, but I didn’t know I’d be so late, or that you’d get back so early.’

‘Why shouldn’t I, when I wanted to hurry back and see my wife?’

‘Please don’t make me feel bad about it, darling. You know I’ve never not been there when you come home. I thought you’d understand, just this once. Give me a kiss and tell me you love me.’

He stiffened. ‘You’ve been drinking, Christine.’

‘Well, we had to have a drink, because the movie upset us so much. What’s wrong with that? You talk as if I was a nun or something.’

‘You go off drinking down-town with your trashy friends while I sit here and worry about whether anything’s happened to you.’

‘You make it sound so terrible. I’m sure you weren’t worried. You just say that because you’re cross that I was late. I’m sure Dick isn’t cross with Lianne, although he’s bound to have been home before she was. He doesn’t work so late as you, being only a lieutenant.’

‘That boy will never get anywhere,’ Vinson muttered. ‘He’s irresponsible.’

Christine had by now got so far out of her role as humble and obedient wife that she could not get back into it.

‘Well, I like Lianne and Dick,’ she said, incensed now and unable to stop herself provoking him, ‘even if you don’t. You have your friends – and I don’t like all of them. I can’t bear that fat Willie who drops peanuts down the cracks of my sofa – so why shouldn’t I have mine? You’re jealous, that’s what it is. You’re jealous of my being friendly with Lianne because I can talk to her intimately. Why shouldn’t I have someone to talk to? I gave up friends like Margaret and Rhona in England to come out here to you, and I don’t see why I –’

‘Christine,’ he said, looking at her out of his odd, tortoiseshell cat eyes, ‘are you trying to quarrel with me? You’re wasting your breath if so, because you know I won’t quarrel with you.’

‘I wish you would.’ She felt her face flushing. ‘I wish you would quarrel sometimes, instead of being so smug.’

Even this did not rouse him. He shook his head and smiled. ‘I’m not going to spoil my marriage that way.’

‘Well, you’d better look out,’ Christine said, almost shouting, ‘or you’ll find you are spoiling it!’

She ran away because she was crying. She ran into the bedroom and lay on the bed and cried and felt sorry for herself. When she had got her breath back and was lying there pouting and trying to squeeze out another tear she realized that she was having to make an effort to go on feeling sorry for herself. She was in the wrong. She had come home late. She had tried to quarrel. She violently wished unsaid those things that she had worked herself up to say because she thought it would do Vinson good to hear them.

If he would come in now – and perhaps he would, for surely he would not like to think of his wife crying in here alone – she would throw her arms round his neck and kiss him and tell him how sorry she was. He would forgive her, and she would be just a silly and emotional woman, and make him feel strong and sensible.

She sat up and reached over to the dressing-table to powder her face, so that she should not be looking unattractively tearblotched when he came in. Then she lay back on the bed and waited for him, with one knee slightly raised, because her legs looked better that way.

He did not come into the bedroom. She waited for quite a long time. What would happen if she lay there until bedtime and he came in and undressed and let the sun go down on his wrath? That would make tomorrow as terrible as this evening. The only thing to do was to get up and go meekly into the kitchen to prepare his supper, just like ordinary evenings, to show him that it was all over and she was a good wife again.

It took quite a lot of doing, but she managed it. There was nothing else to do.

Late one afternoon, a few weeks later, Lianne rushed over to Christine and said that she had to go out to a cocktail party with Dick, and her baby-sitter had not shown up, and could Christine possibly go and look after the children for an hour or two.

Christine looked at the clock. ‘I’d love to,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see how I can. Vin will be home soon, and you know he hates it if I’m not here.’ She had told Lianne what had happened after they had been to the cinema. Lianne had been interested, but incredulous. Her life had never encompassed a man like Vinson. Dick was casual and accommodating, and she had always done what she liked with her former boy friends.

‘Please, honey,’ Lianne said, pulling up her strapless brassière. She was wearing the low-cut black cocktail dress in which she never felt comfortable. ‘Be a pal and help me out. Everyone else who’d do it is busy. You’re my last chance.’

‘You know I would if I could. I’d love to put Peter and Betsy to bed. I could finish that story I started reading to them the other day. But – it seems sort of mean to Vinson.’

‘Oh, phooey,’ said Lianne, hitching at her girdle. ‘You’re much too good a wife. You spoil that man like nobody’s business. You’re always falling in with what he wants to do. Let him fall in with you for a change. Do him good. I tell you, honey, you don’t know how to bring up a husband. Take a tip from an old married woman. You’re laying up trouble for yourself.’

That was an American wife talking. Vinson said that was why he had not married one. Christine was an English wife. Vinson said that was why he had married her.

But Lianne was her friend. She would do anything for Christine, except understand her attitude towards her husband. Christine could not let her down, and perhaps, after all, Vinson would be proud of her for being kind and helpful. She would get him to come over to Lianne’s apartment, and when he saw how good she was with the children perhaps it might encourage him about having their own baby.

Lianne took off her gay little hat, put it on again the other way round, gave Christine her front-door key and rushed off, leaving her gloves and bag on Christine’s bed. Christine left a note for Vinson explaining and telling him to come over to the Morgans’ apartment and went across to Peter and Betsy, whom she found sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator, eating cake.

She had a wonderful time with them. They were volatile children, but affectionate, and apt to counter any serious order with: ‘I like you!’ and a football tackle round the knees. Christine gave them their bath and cooked eggs for them, because they said they always had fried eggs, although she knew they didn’t. Then she chased them into bed and read to them, and all the time she was thinking how domesticated and maternal she would look when Vinson came in.

He did not come. When Lianne and Dick returned, a little tight, and Christine went back to her apartment, Vinson’s cap was in the hall and his uniform neatly on a hanger in the bedroom, but he had changed his clothes and gone out again.

He came back about ten-thirty and said that he had had supper. He would not say where he had been. He had obviously not been drinking. Christine would almost have preferred him to have gone out and got drunk. If he was as cross as that it would have been more natural. He was quite polite to her, but distant, and they went to sleep without kissing.

The next morning Christine was affectionate and quite gay, to try and make everything all right between them. If he wanted to apologize for having shrugged off on his own last night she would make it easy for him to apologize now, but Vinson had never in his life apologized when he considered that he was in the right.

To clear the air Christine would readily have said that she was sorry for going baby-sitting, but when she began: ‘Vin, about last night. I -’ he said: ‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter’, which was worse than if he had been cross with her, because she thought that he was still cross inside.

She was miserable all day. She did not tell Lianne about it, because Lianne would have taken her side and said: ‘Phooey’; and although that would have been comforting, it would not help her to make things right with Vinson. All day she planned how she would say to him that evening, after he had had a drink:’ Please, Vin, if you’re cross with me, say so. Let’s have it out, and I’ll say I’m sorry, and then we can love each other again and forget it.’

She rehearsed how she would say it, but when the time came, and Vinson was on his second martini, sitting on the porch with his jacket off and his tie pulled loose, Christine could not find the courage to say it. He was unapproachable. He was behaving as if nothing had happened and it was an evening like any other, and Christine took refuge in the compromise of letting well alone. They spent quite an amicable evening, but he was a stranger. She did not know what he was thinking.

That was one of the nights when she wanted him to make love to her. If he would do that, would confirm the inalienable physical tie that was between them, she knew that everything would be all right and they would be close again, but he kissed her good night and turned away from her, and either went to sleep or pretended to.

Christine lay awake for a long time. She looked at his gently moving shoulders and the bristly back of his head dug stubbornly into the pillow. You fool, she thought, and she remembered how she had thought: You fool, as she walked down the corridor that night at the Mount Royal, when everything would have been all right if he had only had sense enough to make love to her.

In the days that followed, Vinson entered into one of his periods of being particularly sweet and loving to her, and it charmed Christine into the conclusion that whatever had happened must have been her fault. She determined once more to start all over again and be the kind of wife he wanted her to be. Happiness was that way. If his ideals sometimes clashed with hers, she could not change him by opposing them, and so she might as well make them both happy by accepting them.

For days at a time, when he was loving her like this, Christine was happier than she had ever been in England. It made everything worth while. She saw the French film, ‘La Ronde’, and was impressed by the remark with which a husband checks his importunate wife: ‘Dans le mariage, il y a des périodes qui sont calmes et puis des périodes qui sont – hm – moins calmes.’ Christine thought that was true. She was growing to believe that marriage went in cycles, with short seasons of coolness and warmth alternating rapidly, and that it would be as foolish to think that marriage could be all warmth as to think that the year could be all summer. At these times when she was happy marriage seemed such a simple affair, and she felt she could already write a book on the subject.

Lianne and Dick gave a cocktail party. Vinson did not want to go, partly because he did not like the Morgans, and partly because he thought that there would be a lot of junior officers there. Christine said jokingly that if he did not go she would go without him. He half believed she might, and so he consented, with a kind of noblesse oblige air, to accompany her.

He would not go so far as to come home early from work, however. They arrived late and the party was in full cry, with the children in nightgowns running about like dogs among people’s legs, and three men already on the floor playing with the electric trains.

Vinson found to his surprise that there were two commanders and a captain present. His spirits rose as Dick’s powerful cocktails went down. Christine stood close to him while they had their first drinks, because he complained that he always lost track of her at parties, although it was he who usually wandered away to a male group and left her among the women.

‘That’s right, darling,’ she said, watching the frown slide off Vinson’s face. ‘You’ll feel fine when you’ve had a couple of drinks.’

He did. He felt much too fine. He got drunk at the party, and Christine was ashamed, although one or two other people were also drunk, and nobody minded. Lianne did not mind. Vinson had always been a little stiff with her before. She was glad to see him loosening up, and encouraged him to do his imitation of Danny Kaye, to which nobody listened, so it did not matter that it was not very good.

Dick did not mind either. ‘A little tight myself,’ he told Christine when she said good-bye.

Christine did mind. She had seen Vinson drink too much before, but she had never seen him drunk. It was all right to see other people like that. They were funny sometimes, but when you knew your own husband’s face so well it was not funny to see it unco-ordinated and blurred at the edges.

She managed to get him home, although he wanted to stay at the party, and he was extremely rude to her on the stairs going up to their apartment. She was afraid that someone would come out of a front door and see him stumbling up the stone steps dragging at her arm, but when she tried to hurry him he called her a goddamn fleabag. When she told him the next day that he had said this he did not believe it, and was shocked at her for inventing it.

When they got inside their apartment he stopped being rude to her and became amorous. Christine let him pull her towards him, but when he kissed her she found that being kissed by a drunk husband is like being kissed by a stranger, and she backed away. ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said, ‘and get you something to eat. Then you’ll be all right.’

‘I’m fine.’ He lurched towards her. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Christine went into the kitchen. She heard him trip over the edge of a rug as he went into the bedroom, then a crash that must be him kicking her dressing-table stool out of the way. Then silence.

When she went into the bedroom Vinson was asleep, snoring on his back, with his clothes scattered on the floor. She picked them up and put them away. It was the first time she had ever had to do this for him.

In books, when husbands got drunk, wives sometimes spent the night on the sofa in dignified reproach, but sofas in books were longer than Christine’s, and she would feel silly and prudish in the morning when he woke up sober and wanted to know what she was doing there.

She undressed quietly and got into bed, well over on her side and keeping an apprehensive eye on him. He did not wake up.

In the morning Vinson was awake before her and came out of the bathroom clear-eyed and jaunty. She opened her eyes to see him sitting on the bed grinning at her.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked.

She expected him to say: ‘Lousy’, as he often did in the mornings, but he said: ‘Fine. Just fine. How do you feel?’

‘All right. Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Well, I thought you had quite a load on last night, honey.’

‘I!’ She sat up affronted. ‘It was you. You were drunk as an owl. Don’t you remember?’

He shook his head. ‘Can’t have been. You’re making it up.’ He laughed at her.

‘Oh, Vin –’ She took his hand. ‘Please don’t do it again. It was horrible. I hated it.’

He laughed again.’ Get up and make some coffee,’ he said and went out of the room.

Christine and Vinson were going to have a party too. Not a noisy, disorganized party like the Morgans’, but a small buffet supper with everything just so. They had been to many such parties at the homes of other naval officers, and the evenings had all been much the same.

Drinks first – either old-fashioneds or martinis or highballs. The children, if any, sat in dressing-gowns before the television set watching Kukla, Fran and Ollie or a cartoon programme, and everyone said how cute they were, and the children either showed off or stared coldly at the guests.

When the children had been sent to bed, still showing off or staring coldly as they went up the stairs, the hostess brought out the supper, trying not to look too proud of the dishes she had spent all day straining to make better than the dishes of other hostesses. The food and the plates and cutlery were laid out on the table and everyone helped themselves and took the plate back to a chair and ate off their laps or on small occasional tables, like a vicarage tea-party.

Since Christine was the most newly married, she was always asked to serve herself first, which was a pity, for you did not like to take too much, and then you saw other people piling their plates and wished you had too.

The food was nearly always the same – fried chicken or a pot roast with vegetables, which the hostess spent so long carefully spooning out of the casserole and arranging on the best dish that it was half cold by the time you got to it. Vinson wanted to play safe and have fried chicken or pot roast, but Christine privately determined to have lobster salad. She did not tell Vinson in case he might worry beforehand about the consequences of so daring a departure from naval etiquette.

He discussed the invitations with her, but he had already made up his mind about the guests. He wanted Art and Nancy Lee, because he and Christine had been to supper (fried chicken) at the Lees’ house, and Vinson was meticulous about paying off invitations in kind. If someone asked him to supper he did not think it was enough to pay them back in cocktails, and if they asked him to a cocktail party he did not see why he should ask them to supper.

Christine did not see that it mattered, when someone was a good enough friend to be your best man. With her friends in England it had never mattered who invited whom, or to what, so long as you saw each other, but she liked Art and Nancy, so she let him put them on the list. He always made the lists in their household. Christine could never find any paper, but Vinson always carried a little notepad in his pocket, so he was the one who wrote things down. He had small, very neat handwriting, and he liked to make lists of things. He even wanted to make her shopping list before the party, but she would not let him, in case he queried the lobster.

A new captain had recently come to Vinson’s division. Vinson had made Christine waste a Sunday afternoon calling on the Captain and his wife in a prissy little bungalow that smelled of new chair covers. They were very dull people, and Captain Fleischman seemed to have watered down the whisky, but now they must be asked to supper. Christine protested mildly, but Vinson admitted that he had already mentioned the invitation to Captain Fleischman, which was cheating, so down they had to go on the list.

She protested, too, about Commander and Mrs Elgin, whom she had only seen half drunk at a big naval cocktail party at the Army and Navy Country Club. Vinson overruled this objection by reminding her that most of the officers had been half drunk by the end of that party, because they had paid for their tickets beforehand and were determined to drink their money’s-worth. Vinson had done the same, and Christine had spent most of the evening sitting on a sofa talking to some woman who kept trying to make her join a bridge club. It was very hot, and the woman fanned herself all the time with a paper napkin and said: ‘I feel it so particularly, coming from my air-conditioned place.’

She also said that she despised Washington (Christine was discovering that it was the modish thing to affect dislike of the nation’s capital) and she kept saying: ‘It isn’t the heat, you see, so much as the humidity’, a remark which Christine had already heard many times in Washington and would hear many times more. Americans talked about the weather even more than English people, and weather bulletins were given every halfhour on the radio to appease this passion for meteorology.

She was very tired of the woman with the paper handkerchief by the time Vinson came back rather unsteadily to find her. She was annoyed at being left for so long, and Vinson did not help by accusing her of being picked up by a man in a floral bow tie sitting on her other side, although the bow tie had been brooding over straight whisky and had not spoken a word to her.

So Commander and Mrs Elgin went on the list, and Christine hoped they would arrive sober. When people are drunk the first time you meet them, you are inclined to think of them as permanent dipsomaniacs; just as when a man has a cold sore on his lip when you are first introduced, you visualize him always with that blemish.

Now they must think of two other people to make up the party. Christine wished they could have some civilians, so that there could be a few other subjects discussed than how old Chuck would like his new post at Norfolk, Virginia, and why the Admiral was getting rid of this aide; but Vinson knew hardly anyone in Washington outside the Navy, and Christine had no friends of her own.

‘Let’s ask Dick and Lianne,’ she suggested. ‘They’ll liven it up a bit.’

‘Oh no, honey. That wouldn’t be suitable.’ ‘Why not? What’s the point of giving a party if it can’t be lively?’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean that young Morgan is too junior. You can’t ask a reserve lieutenant with senior officers like this.’ He tapped the list.

‘Of course you can! Why, Dick had loads of captains and commanders at his party. Don’t be –’

Before she could say: ‘Don’t be such a snob’, which she did not really want to say any more than he wanted to hear, he said: ‘What have you done with that book I gave you on naval social customs?’

‘I gave it to Lianne. She wanted something funny to read when that poisoned finger was getting her down.’

‘A pity. It would help you to understand these things.’

‘If I did all the things it told you to I might as well be dead. It says you must always wear a hat and gloves when you go visiting, and that you must never sit down at a party when the Admiral’s wife is standing up. Old Ma Hamer never sits down -I don’t think she can bend in the middle – so why have any chairs at all when she’s around? That book – do you know what it says? I learned this bit by heart. It says: “Do not engage in long clinches on the dock when a peck on the cheek would do. There is a certain dignity attached to the wearing of uniform, and nothing looks sillier than two people trying to show how much in love they are.”’

‘I know who we’ll ask,’ said Vinson, changing the subject, because he thought the book was right. ‘We’ll have Captain and Mrs Decker from downstairs. I’d like to get to know them better.’

‘I wouldn’t. I don’t like them. She looks as if her corsets pinched, and he just opens his mouth and words pour out of it whether you want to hear them or not. It would be much more fun to have Lianne and Dick.’

‘We’ve been into that.’ Vinson wrote down the names of the Captain and his wife who lived in the apartment below. ‘There, that makes a nice little party.’

Christine thought it sounded like a deadly little party.

It was. Nancy Lee could not come because one of her children was ill, and Art had a cold and might as well not have come either, for his cold depressed him and he hardly spoke all the evening.

Captain Fleischman from the chintzy bungalow was even duller than he had been at home. The drunken Commander turned out to be even less attractive sober than he was drunk, Captain Decker from downstairs was as prolix as Christine had feared he would be, and their three wives sat in a row on the sofa and made no effort, as much as to say: ‘All right. You asked us, and here we are. Now entertain us.’

Even the drinks did not get the party going. Vinson was an attentive host, but he was too stiff and formal with people he did not know well, especially when they were senior to him. Captain Fleischman, who was the head of his department, almost paralysed him with etiquette, although the Captain was an owl-eyed nervous little man, who you would not have thought could paralyse a rabbit.

Christine made a great effort to talk to the women. Captain Fleischman’s wife did not want to talk. She wore a dress that looked as if it had been made up of pieces left over from loose covers at the bungalow and was quite content to sit and watch the proceedings, like an old lady at a village concert. When pressed into conversation, she would say: ‘Oh, surely’, or: ‘I guess that’s so’, which was amiable enough, but not inducive to sparkling dialogue.

The Commander’s wife was too smartly dressed, as if she had expected a large party. She put a wet glass down on a polished table and some cigarette ash on the carpet, and sent raised eyebrow messages of boredom to her husband. Mrs Decker from downstairs thought as little of Christine as Christine did of her, and showed it. Her flat crustacean face was all downward curving lines as her shoe-button eyes travelled round the room, taking a disparaging inventory of the curtains and furniture.

It did not help much when Mrs Preedy skipped across the hall to borrow a jelly mould. Vinson answered the door; but although he tried to block the opening, Mrs Preedy was larger than he, and everyone could see that she had her hair in curlers and an orange chiffon scarf tied in a flowing bow round her goitrous throat.

‘That extraordinary woman,’ murmured Mrs Decker. ‘What a neighbour to have! But I suppose you have made friends with her.’

‘Of course,’ said Christine defiantly, while Vinson frowned at her and Mrs Decker told the company with an acid laugh: ‘It’s so charming the way British people will make friends with anyone.’

When Christine went into the kitchen to add the finishing touches to the supper none of the women came out to help her. Art Lee came out and found her furiously banging plates and knives and forks on to a tray.

‘Can I help?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter, Christine? You look all burned up.’

‘I am. Those damn women just sit there like the three witches and none of them offers to help.’

‘I’ll bet you hate their guts. Why do you and Vin invite such crummy people to a party?’

‘Vin wanted them. He wouldn’t let me have my friends because Dick’s only a reserve lieutenant. I wonder he even invited you. You haven’t been a commander long enough to mix with such exalted rank.’

‘Vin’s an ambitious boy,’ said Art dryly. ‘He will go far, without a doubt.’

‘I hate the Navy,’ Christine said. She did not mind what she said to Art. She could say things to him that she would not say to Vinson.

‘So do I,’ said Art. ‘Let me help you. Gee, I wish I didn’t feel so lousy. I feel the way those goldfish look.’ He stuck out a pallid tongue at the fish, then leaned against the wall and nursed his drink and his cold and forgot about helping.

Vinson came round the partition into the kitchen to get more ice, and asked Christine why she was not in the living-room entertaining her guests.

‘Well, my goodness,’ she said, exasperated. ‘I’ve got to feed them, I suppose, since I presume they only came here to get a free meal. I can’t be out there and in here getting things ready at the same time.’ She straightened up to look at him, passing the back of her hand across her hot forehead. He was still wearing the polite face he was using in the drawing-room. He made her feel cross.

‘You should have gotten things better organized before. You shouldn’t have to spend so long in the kitchen.’

‘Well, for God’s sake!’ she exploded. ‘As if it wasn’t bad enough having to spend all day preparing food for these morons without you coming in here and criticizing me.’ Art did not feel strong enough to stand a quarrel. He slipped his long body diplomatically past them and went out of the kitchen.

‘I have to criticize you,’ Vinson said, ‘when you neglect your guests and spend hours out here fooling around with Art. You might at least consider what your guests will think, even if you don’t mind how I feel about that.’

‘Oh, if you’re going to be jealous of Art –’ Christine shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the salad bowls.

Vinson grabbed her arm and twisted hep round to stand close to him. His face was not polite any more. It was dark and almost frightening, like that evening at ‘Roselawn’ when she had stood stirring the dogs’ meat on the stove and told him that she could not marry him after all. ‘Of course I’m jealous,’ he said roughly. ‘I’m jealous of every man who speaks to you. Don’t you know that, you little fool?’

When he spoke to her like that and kissed her so fiercely, she did not mind him being jealous, even of poor Art. Her passion leaped up to meet his, and for a moment the kitchen was the only place in the world, and the stupid people in the living-room could starve or go home for all Christine cared, but Vinson controlled himself almost immediately, wiped a hand across his lips, picked up the bowl of ice and went back among the company, with his face already polite again.

He would not serve drinks with the supper. Christine had wanted him to, but he said it was not the thing to do. Christine did not like the American habit of drinking solidly before the food and drinking only iced water or coffee with it. You either drank too much before the meal or not enough to carry you through it. Her guests had not drunk too much. They had drunk too little. Vinson had not been stingy with the drinks, but they were the kind of people who did not expect to be entertaining, so did not bother about drinking enough to make them so.

The evening came to an end at last. When the last guest had gone Christine fell back on the sofa and wanted to cry. A dull party at someone else’s house can make you laugh when it is over, but a dull party in your own house can only make you weep.

Vinson came back from seeing the Deckers downstairs to their apartment. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’ll tell me what you said to Captain Decker that made him say to me: “Your wife is certainly outspoken. How does she get on over here?’”

Christine had been afraid he was going to ask that. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘He’s such a know-all. I was trying to be polite and talk to him, but he was being so pompous and laying down the law about everything. He’s got that disgusting wart on his nose too. It wiggles when he talks. You can’t help looking at it.’

‘Go on,’ said Vinson, folding his arms.

‘Well, he was being so silly. You know what he said? He said that England was undefendable, and in the next war it would only be an advanced target, so the only thing to do would be to evacuate all the people over here and let Russia waste her ammunition blowing England to bits. So I said: “That shows you don’t know much about England. Most people would rather die there than be made to come over here.”’

‘Christine! That wasn’t very polite.’

‘Well, it’s true, anyway. And it goes for me too. He needn’t have been so huffy. I hope his wart turns to cancer,’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s going a bit blue. It looks as if it might.’

‘What do you mean, that goes for you too?’ Vinson asked.

‘If England was being bombed I wouldn’t want to be sitting safely over here, rolling bandages for the Red Cross, with great care not to break my nails, and being hostess at clubs for officers who were spending the war in the Pentagon. An English friend of mine got stuck over here in the last war, and she nearly died of envy because she hadn’t been through the Blitz.’

‘Don’t be so childish,’ Vinson said. ‘What good could you do? You’d only be a nuisance. Of course your place would be here. You’re an American wife now, and by that time you’ll probably be an American citizen.’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Christine, and began to collect dirty glasses and ashtrays.

She thought afterwards that if she had made her rude remark to a lieutenant instead of a captain, Vinson would not have minded, but she was glad she had not thought of telling him that at the time. It was bad enough even to find yourself thinking of remarks with which you might score off your husband.

They gave other parties, and went to many more naval parties themselves, and she was careful never to be rude to a captain. She was trying to be a good wife, and if that included sharing Vinson’s unwholesome respect for rank – well, she would have to learn that.

But you could not enjoy parties if you had to think all the time about what rank people were, and could not enjoy talking to them as if they were just ordinary people. She discovered that not all admirals and their wives were like the Hamers, and not all captains and their wives were like the Deckers. Some of them were worse, but many of them were revealed, to Christine’s surprise, to be quite human.

Going home after one party where she had spent a pleasant ten minutes talking to a slight, grey-haired man in a baggy suit, who looked more like a skilled carpenter than anything else, Vinson said in awe: ‘Admiral Briggs talked to you for a long time, didn’t he? I think that was wonderful of him.’

‘Why shouldn’t he? I’m not a leper.’

‘But darling, he’s a three-star admiral. And he talked to you for ten minutes.’

‘Perhaps you’ll be made a captain tomorrow,’ Christine said pertly.

There were too many naval cocktail parties. You could not remember one from another, because they were all exactly the same. You met mostly the same people, and got to know the women’s repertoire of dresses and hats as well as your own. If it was a high-grade party, with admirals present, the men kept their coats on, but if it was a lower-grade party, with no one higher than a captain, the men took their coats off if it was hot, and you got to know whose husband had a paunch and whose husband had retained his figure in spite of the Washington desk-sitting.

The drinks were always the same: martinis, or bourbon or scotch whisky with so much ice in the glass that it bumped against the end of your nose and you could hardly drink it. The food was always the same too. As well as the usual elaborate canapés, prepared with diabolical care by a hostess determined to outdo other naval wives, there was always a large cold ham at one end of the table and a large cold turkey at the other, from which you were supposed to cut slices and make a sandwich, which was a difficult thing to do when you had a glass in one hand and were trying to talk politely to an admiral’s wife.

At the first party where she saw ham and turkey Christine was greatly impressed at such lavishness, although the hostess herself seemed to be more proud of the fact that she had provided English mustard. ‘You make it by mixing the powder with water,’ she boasted, which, to people accustomed to buying their mustard ready mixed in jars or tubes, seemed to be the most exciting and progressive thing.

As she went to other parties and saw other turkeys and hams, invitingly sliced, but almost untasted by the guests who had come to drink, rather than eat, Christine was no longer impressed, but rather depressed by the waste of food and money. She was more depressed still when they gave a cocktail party themselves and Vinson insisted that they must have a turkey at one end of the table and a ham at the other. However, she had been obstructive about the fried chicken and the pot roast, so she let him have his way, and they were eating turkey and ham every day for a week afterwards until Christine finally gave the remainder to Maxwell. However, they had conformed to the quaint old naval custom. They had not lost caste.

Another quaint old naval custom was the paying of social calls, which Vinson swore was a necessity, but which seemed to Christine an archaic irrelevance. She had protested at first, and said that in England all that nonsense had gone out with Queen Victoria, hoping that the American respect for the English social code would deter him, but to no avail. In the United States Navy one paid calls, and so she had to waste many a week-end afternoon putting on hat and gloves to go and visit someone she did not want to see, and she had to try and look pleased when she was fetched away from washing underclothes in the bathroom to open the door to somebody who had come to call on her in gloves and a hat.

They had not yet called on Admiral and Mrs Hamer. Having seen them at her wedding Christine dreaded this, and kept making excuses not to go, until it was too late and the Hamers had gone away. Their default had preyed on Vinson, and now that the Hamers were back in Washington it was now preying more strongly, and Christine knew that they would have to get it over some time.

All calls made her nervous. The conversation was apt to be strained, because the people you had disturbed at their gardening or woken from their Sunday afternoon sleep wanted to see you as little as you wanted to see them. With the Admiral and his wife it would be even worse. The Admiral would grunt at them and blink his eyes, which were set in folds of rusty skin, like a tortoise, and Mrs Hamer would pass her eye up and down Christine, give her a mental percentage of acceptability and then sit back and expect homage.

She said all this to Vinson, but he was adamant. They must call on Admiral Hamer.

‘All right, dear. Some day soon.’ Christine was suddenly acquiescent, because she had thought of a good idea. For several days she kept telephoning the Hamers’ number. If anyone answered she put down the receiver without saying anything until on a Sunday afternoon she telephoned and there was no answer.

She ran out to the porch, where Vinson was playing solitaire with his shirt off. His chest always attracted her. It was not broad, but it stood out well like a box above his flat stomach.

‘Let’s go and call on the Hamers now,’ she urged him. ‘I’ve finished what I was doing, and if we go now straightway we’ll be back in time for you to hear that “Stop the Music” programme.’

He was pleased that she had suggested it herself. They drove out to the Hamer’s house, which had fake beams and a fake antique porch lantern and a self-conscious white fence round the tiny garden. No one answered their ring at the coy set of sleigh bells which hung outside the door, so they pushed their cards through the letter-box – and they had made their call. It was as easy as that.

It was a wonderful idea. Christine wished she had thought of it before. Some day she would write a book on naval etiquette to rival the one Vinson had given her, and earn the undying gratitude of naval wives for telling them her invention for painless call-paying.

She had not escaped as easily as she thought, however. Two days later the Admiral’s wife telephoned to thank Christine for having left cards and to say how sorry she was that she and the Admiral – she always called him The Admiral – had not been at home. She did not sound as if she meant it, but no doubt she meant well.

No doubt she meant well, too, when she went on to say that she would expect to see Christine at the next luncheon given by the Officers’ Wives’ Club. It was not an invitation. It was an order.

‘I shan’t go,’ Christine told Vinson. She had heard about these lunches from Nancy Lee.

‘You must go,’ he said. ‘When the Admiral’s wife herself invites you –’

‘She didn’t invite me to go. She told me to go,’ Christine muttered.

‘When Mrs Hamer herself invites you,’ he continued, ‘it’s obvious that you must go. You may even enjoy yourself,’ he added without much hope. ‘I’ll give you some money and you can buy a new dress for it. You will go, won’t you, honey?’ he said, suddenly nervous and almost boyish, like a child trying to persuade his mother to go to the school Speech Day.

‘Yes, dear,’ Christine said. She had taken to saying ‘Yes, dear’ lately. When she said it she felt that she sounded like a thousand middle-aged wives, but it made Vinson happy, and so she said it.

When she went into the lounge of the club where the luncheon was held, all she could see was women. Women everywhere, holding thick little glasses, and all talking. Women in white hats, women in black cartwheel hats, women in little pink hats with flowers on them. No women without hats, except Christine. She patted down her hair nervously and approached the table by the door, where three women in red, baby-blue and natural straw hats respectively sat with some notebooks and cardboard boxes and one of those little black tin money-boxes so beloved of treasurers of women’s clubs.

The treasurer in the red hat took a five-dollar note from Christine and scrabbled delicately in the box for change with long mulberry-coloured nails which did not match her hat. The woman in the baby-blue hat ticked Christine’s name off on a list and smiled at her with expert charm. No doubt she had risen to the exalted position of being allowed to sit behind the table and tick off lists on the strength of that smile. The woman in the natural straw hat, who looked like a carthorse dressed up for the summer, except that her ears did not stick out through holes in the top, searched in the cardboard boxes and gave Christine a place number and a little red card with her name on it and a safety-pin at the back. Christine pinned the card to her bosom as directed, feeling like a man who took your money in the supermarket.

The woman in the baby-blue hat, all charm, told her to go to the receiving line. Christine approached timidly and recognized Mrs Hamer in tubular brown silk, flanked by three or four other notable ladies, one of whom was Mrs Fleischman, still wearing the dress made of bits left over from the loose covers at the bungalow. She was the only one of the outriders who seemed pleased to see Christine. The others smiled, but distractedly, looking beyond her at the people coming up behind. Mrs Hamer did not smile. Her face was not made that way. She was very tall, with long pointed feet encased in patent-leather shoes which looked like the halves of over-ripe bananas. She towered over you, austere and all-powerful. It was like shaking hands with the Statue of Liberty.

Christine managed to say: ‘Thank you so much for having invited me to come’, although the invitation had meant that she had to fork out a dollar seventy-five for her lunch. Mrs Hamer murmured some regal blessing, and it was only after she had passed thankfully out of the receiving line that Christine realized that Mrs Hamer had no idea who she was.

About three hundred women were milling round the big lounge like hens in a barnyard. They were all drinking something out of the thick little glasses, but Christine could not see where they got it. With relief, she saw the black fringe and scarlet-lipped vivacity of Nancy Lee, and she edged through the crowd to her. Nancy pushed through the women who were clustered around the bar table like flies round a sore, and came back with something in a little glass for her. It was sherry, very sweet and oily and warm. Nancy and the two cheerful girls with her were wearing white name cards on their bosoms. Christine looked down at her own.

‘Why is it red?’ she asked. ‘I feel like a pariah.’

‘You’re worse than that.’ One of the cheerful girls laughed. ‘You’re a new girl. It’s your first time here isn’t it? You wait. After lunch you’ll be made to stand up so that all the girls can look at you.’

‘Oh no,’ Christine said. ‘I can’t. I’m the only one here without a hat.’

‘We’ve all been through it,’ the other girl said. ‘It’s murder. You feel everyone’s giving you the hee-haw; and if you’re fairly newly married, all these hags take a good look to see if you’re pregnant.’

‘I’m going home.’ Christine put down her glass.

‘No, you’re not.’ Nancy grabbed her arm. ‘Everyone’s going into lunch. Come on, let’s get in quick and I’ll juggle the numbers round so we can sit together.’

Several other people seemed to have done that, or else they had come with friends and been given consecutive numbers at the door. Nearly everyone was sitting next to someone they knew, which makes the lunch less of a bore, but defeated its object of bringing the girls together, because the girls just talk to their friends, and most ignored the strangers around them.

The woman next to Christine had a slim taut back with a zip fastener all the way down. That was all Christine saw of her, for she remained turned away throughout the lunch and talked to her friend on the other side about all the things she was going to cite against her husband for divorce.

The lunch was as unsuitable to the warm day as the sherry had been. It was some kind of meat served in lumps, with too little gravy and a mound of undercooked vegetables. The coloured waiters were the only men in the room, and it seemed to unhinge them. They were very slow, and they argued together a lot in corners, and by the time they reached Christine’s end of the table with the ice-cream it was only a cupful of white liquid.

‘A dollar seventy-five for this,’ Nancy said. ‘Plus paying a baby-sitter. I don’t know why we do it.’

‘Vin made me come,’ Christine said. ‘Does Art make you come too?’

‘He doesn’t, but he is in the Navy, for his sins, and I feel that the least I can do is to keep in with the top brass.’ She nodded towards the top table, where Mrs Hamer sat in the middle of a dozen rarefied women, who had had their ice-cream first, while it was still ice as well as cream.

‘Everyone talks as if the wives of senior officers did the promoting,’ Christine said. ‘I can’t see how they run a Navy that way.’

‘It isn’t exactly that, but it works the other way. If you get in wrong with one of those babies up there she’ll see to it that she talks enough about you to make them think twice before they recommend your husband for promotion.’

‘Well, but–’

‘Hush. Something is going to occur.’ Nancy sat back and closed her eyes, as the secretary of the club, a well-fed, florid woman who had given a sweaty handshake in the receiving line, rose to her feet and banged on the table with the back of a spoon.

It was just like all other meetings of women’s clubs that Christine had ever attended. The minutes were read in a flat reciting voice, and no one listened to them. There was the usual to-do about who should propose that the minutes be signed and who should second the proposal. At first no one would get up, and then suddenly three women jumped up together and began: ‘I wish to propose –’ and then looked at each other in some confusion, apologizing and saying: ‘No, no, not me’, like guests at a tennis party when there is only one court for ten people.

Our sympathy was extended to an absent mother who was in hospital in Hawaii, regrets were expressed at the loss of our valued subscriptions secretary, Mrs Jowitt, whose husband was being ordered away, congratulations were offered to two ladies who had produced little future naval officers, and our sincere thanks went out to all those ladies who so wonderfully gave their services to make the wonderful Arthritis Ball such a wonderful success. Here followed a tedious list of who had helped with the tickets, the flowers, the decorations, who had lent this and that coffee urn, and who – this was a nasty one – who had promised beforehand to help and been ‘regretfully prevented’.

Other people besides Nancy had their eyes closed by this time. Christine herself was lulled into forgetting the ordeal that the red card on her bosom presaged, when the secretary sat down to about as much applause as a tap dripping, and Mrs Hamer rose majestically to her feet, with her large hands spread flat on the table and her gaze raking the roomful of tables as if the rose on the front of her hat was a searchlight. Christine sat up. This was it.

‘Before we hear from our social secretary’ – ah, that would be it – ‘I take pleasure in introducing to you Miss …’ – she glanced down at the table – ‘Miss Mavis Harbright, who comes to us through the good offices of our member Mrs Westing’ – a cold nod down the table – ‘to give us a little talk on how to acquire the art of charm and social poise.’

‘This ought to be good.’ Nancy sat up. It was, but Christine, her ordeal only postponed, was still too nervous to enjoy fully the spectacle of an overweight and overhatted woman with a fistful of rings on her pudgy fingers telling the members of the club, who were mostly young and elegant, how they could be new women if only they would do as she did.

It was soon apparent that the good offices of our member Mrs Westing meant that the overhatted woman was a friend of Mrs Westing and had prevailed on her to get her into this galère, so that she could advertise the deportment school of which she was proud to be the principal.

Mavis Harbright worked hard. You had to give her that. She sat, she rose, she shook hands with imaginary guests, she stood at an imaginary cocktail party with the weight balanced just so to enable one to swivel round and chat lightly to all comers. She paced up and down the room with her gloves on her head. One of the naval wives called out: ‘Try that with a glass of water’, but luckily, a bamboo screen by the kitchen door fell over at that moment, so no one heard her.

Miss Harbright then stood in the best position for health and beauty, telling the ladies to be sure to tilt the pelvis and lock the thighs when so doing, which brought a giggle from one of the coloured waiters, who was listening agape. Mrs Hamer’s eye was still daring the screen not to fall down again. She shifted it slightly to the left and the waiter was withered out of the room like a piece of charred newspaper. Miss Harbright demonstrated how to get in and out of a car without loss of grace or poise, and one of the girls near Christine remarked audibly that if she did it like that she would knock off that darned mushroom hat. This brought the death-ray eye of Mrs Hamer round from the kitchen door and trained it down the table to where sat the irreverent girl, whose husband now perhaps would never get that half-stripe.

Christine’s heart sank when the exponent of poise and charm sat down at last, feeling for the chair with the calves of her legs, as demonstrated, and Mrs Hamer rose once more to call upon the social secretary. It was the lady in the carthorse hat. She glanced round the room, wet her lips like a torturer, and announced that she was going to read out the names of the new girls, who would each rise as her name was called and remain standing until told to sit down, so that all the other girls could feast their eyes.

‘Mrs Adamson!’ A short fluffy girl stood up, trying to look unconcerned. She did not know how furiously she was blushing. ‘Mrs Adamson’s husband is at Main Navy, and she comes to us from El Paso, Texas.’ Everyone stared, and Mrs Adamson dropped her eyes and grew red as a beetroot, as if there were something shameful both about her husband and El Paso, Texas.

‘Mrs Dooley!’ Oh, heavens, they were doing it in alphabetical order. It might be Christine next. ‘Mrs. Dooley!’ The social secretary looked round with her mouth open. No Mrs Dooley. Poor little Mrs Adamson stood there bravely alone, like the little boy in ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’

‘Mrs Dooley! Come along now, please!’ Someone pinched a vague, untidy girl, and she squeaked and jumped up, laughing and apologizing and quite at ease.

Everyone laughed with her. She was evidently the buffoon, who always did things wrong. It was all right for her. People knew her and liked her and laughed with her. But what if they laughed at poor Mrs Gae …

‘Mrs Gaegler!’ It sounded as silly as Christine had feared it would. Nancy dug her in the ribs, and she stood up, dropping her napkin and wishing that she had held on to her handbag, to give her something to do with her hands.

‘Mrs Gaegler’s husband is at the Arlington Annexe. Mrs Gaegler comes to us from London, England, and’ – the social secretary’s voice dropped ghoulishly – ‘she’s a bride!’

What could one do? Where could one look? Christine put her hands behind her back, realizing too late that this made her chest stick out too far, and fixed her eyes on a ventilator high up in the wall, while female stares stabbed her like darts from all over the room, and she imagined that she could hear whisperings from three hundred female tongues about this phenomenon who was a bride, and who came from London, England, and who had not got a hat. Were they asking each other if she was pregnant?

In utter ignominy, she stood straight and stiff while other names were called and other luckless girls stood up, but Christine felt all the time that every gaze was still riveted on this spectacle who came from London, England, and who had no hat and was either pregnant or too fat.

When Vinson came home that night and asked her how she had enjoyed the lunch, Christine flung her arms round his neck and burst into tears against the hard shoulder board of his jacket.

‘Here, here, what’s this?’ He led her into the living-room. ‘What’s happened? What’s all this about?’

‘Oh, Vin, it was terrible. It was awful. They made me stand up, and everybody stared at me. I’ve never felt such a fool.’ She cried so much that she slipped off the sofa and sat on the floor with her wet face jammed against his khaki trouser leg.

He was very kind to her. He tried to comfort her, but she could not make him see how awful it had been. ‘They wanted to have people get to know you, darling. You mustn’t be so self-conscious.’

‘No, no!’ she wailed. ‘They just want to make a fool of you. They all stared and whispered, and I was the only one without a hat, and all those awful women – millions of them – nothing but women – and if you’re newly married they stare at you to see if you’re pregnant.’

‘Well, honey, you don’t have to worry about that.’

‘But I am, Vin, I am!’

She did not know why she had not told him before. She had only known definitely for two days. She was going to tell him, but, hugging her delight to herself, she was half afraid to share it with him, in case he was not pleased.

He was very pleased. He was delighted. He forgot that he had said they could not afford to have a baby yet. They were very happy together, she kneeling on the floor with her arms round his waist; but when she remembered about the lunch and began to moan to him again about it, he patted her and said: ‘I’m sure there was really nothing wrong. You just feel upset and hysterical because of your condition. I’m sure they were all very kind. They’re a lovely group of women.’

‘Maybe.’ Christine stood up. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ She did not think he was, but he did not want any more tears, and she did not think she could ever explain it to him.