It was a rough crossing. The ship rolled sickeningly, unceasingly as it ploughed through the heaving waters, away from the country of Christine’s unhappiness; but her unhappiness went with her. She had not left it behind. She could not escape it just by getting on a ship and travelling the slow Atlantic miles to England.
The blanket of depression that had settled on her after she lost her baby was said by the doctors to be a perfectly natural phenomenon.
‘Purely a pathological symptom,’ they told her. ‘Naturally a woman feels sad to lose her baby, but the particular depression she experiences after a miscarriage is a normal physical manifestation - like the after-effects of jaundice, or grippe.’
It annoyed her when they said grippe instead of influenza. Everything annoyed her when she was recuperating, even the Americanisms to which she was accustomed. The doctors annoyed her, the nurses with their red nails and impertinent caps annoyed her, the poor eclamptic woman who shared her room infuriated her. Vinson annoyed her, her house, when she returned to it, annoyed her, but most of all she was annoyed by everyone’s insistence that the depression which weighed on her night and day was only an ordinary physical symptom.
What if it was? That did not make it any easier to bear. ‘You’ll shake it off,’ they told her, ‘as you grow stronger’; but she grew stronger and she did not shake it off. She began to think that it would be with her for the rest of her life, this hopelessness, this weary spirit.
Vinson’s depression was almost as great as her own, but no one could tell him that it was only a pathological symptom. Their common misfortune should have brought them together, and for a moment at the beginning it did, when Vinson was first allowed to see her in the hospital while she was having the second tranfusion, and told her that it did not matter, that nothing mattered as long as she was all right. But when she was no longer in danger, and they both began to think about the loss of their hopes and plans, they each withdrew into an egotistical despondency from which neither could put out a hand in mutual comfort.
When Vinson was ordered to Panama for a few weeks, he suggested that Christine should go to England while he was away ‘to try and get over it’. She willingly agreed. It was the one thing she wanted to do. Her family, her friends, the country she knew and loved - all the familiar things that had made her happy before would surely break the thread of her depression and make her happy again.
She had expected to feel more cheerful as soon as she got on the boat, but she did not. She was too tired by the journey to New York and the tedium of the formalities of embarkation, and by the strain of saying good-bye to Vinson, who at the last minute had let his face slip and looked suddenly lost and almost afraid. When she was tired the sorrows came crowding in unopposed. (‘Physical, purely physical,’ the smooth doctor had said. ‘When you are stronger, your unhappy thoughts will leave you.’)
It began to be rough on the first day out. Christine took to her bed, because there seemed no point in struggling about when you could not keep your feet and struggling down to the dining saloon when you did not want to eat. She lay in her bunk and dozed and woke and dozed and woke to the creak of the panelling and the hiss of the sea and the crashing of crockery in the stewards’ pantry, and with her still was the depression she had thought she could leave behind in the little house in Arlington.
She never wanted to go back to that house, although, of course, she would have to, because Vinson would be in Washington for some time after he came back from Panama. They had both been so unhappy in that house. Could they ever start again there and build some hope into their marriage? They had been happy there when she was expecting the baby, she with her sewing machine and her nest-making domesticity, he with his carpentry and his painting and his home-made nursery in the basement.
After she came back from the hospital he never went into the basement unless he had to fetch something. He did not want to do anything about the house at all, could not be bothered to put a new washer on a dripping tap or repair a loose shelf in a cupboard. He behaved as if the purpose of his home life had been taken from him and nothing was worth while.
In the evenings he was at a loose end. He did not want to read. He did not want to listen to the radio. He went back to his naval technical manuals and his notebooks. He got out the dictaphone again and put it by the bed, and sometimes at night Christine would wake from a heavy dream and hear him dictating incomprehensible things into it. The Navy was the only thing that could console him. If he could not look forward to his baby he would fix his eyes on getting his promotion to captain. He stayed later and later at the office, and when he did come home it was often difficult to find things to talk about now that they did not have plans about the baby to discuss.
The doctors had assured Christine that she could have another child later on, but she did not believe them. She felt in her heart that she was finished as a normal happy woman. She had had her chance and lost it. She had lost weight during her illness and it did not suit her face. She would not be pretty and fresh-skinned any more, and people would not say to Vinson: ‘Your charming wife.’ She would be just a wife, growing middle-aged in a meaningless marriage, and she often thought of what Stevenson wrote: ’Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.’
Long and straight and dusty… that was how she saw her future. She was morbid. She knew it, but she could not shake it off, could not laugh herself out of it, because there seemed to be nothing to laugh at.
Her conviction that she would not have another baby was partly due to Vinson. She had not told him or anyone else about pushing the car, and because he knew no reason why she should have had a miscarriage he got it into his head that she was incapable of carrying a baby to its birth. They never talked about the baby which was lost, but if Christine ventured to say: ‘Perhaps we’ll have another one’, Vinson looked gloomy and said: ‘I doubt it’, and Christine was ready to believe him.
He had been so solicitous and indulgent of her when she was pregnant that it was hard to bear the difference now that she had failed him and no longer deserved coddling. Sometimes she asked for things which he might have granted before, but now he raised objections.
She was so lonely all day. ‘I wish we could have a dog,’ she said one evening. ‘I’d feel better if I had a dog.’
‘It would be a nuisance,’ he said. ‘Look what a pest that little beast of Mother’s was.’
‘Poor Honeychile. You shouldn’t speak of her like that,’ Christine said, for while she was in the hospital Vinson had left a window open when he went to work and Honeychile had jumped out and run yapping at the wheels of a car, which had killed her. Mrs Gaegler, coming out of the hospital the next day, had flown back to Kansas in a fury and would probably never forgive Vinson.
‘I didn’t mean a dog like that, anyway,’ Christine went on. ‘I meant a proper dog. Like my Timmy. He was a great joy to me.’
‘You were a spinster then,’ he reminded her. ‘Sublimating your frustrations.’
‘I wasn’t! It’s natural to love a dog. I noticed you pretended to like the dogs all right when you were after me. You put on quite a good act, I must say - you and your tins of ham and your candy bars.’ They often spoke to each other like this nowadays. They never had another violent quarrel like the one which stormed up after Christine had been out with Matthew, but they did not mind saying caustic things to each other.
‘There were far too many animals in that house you lived in,’ Vinson said. ‘If I let you have a dog, next thing this house will be just the same. You’ve got the goldfish, and they’re bad enough. They stink to high heaven.’
‘You always used to change their water,’ Christine said sadly. ‘Now you don’t bother.’
Neither of them seemed to bother about anything very much these days. Some evenings Christine did not bother to come out of the kitchen to kiss him when he came home. He did not seem to notice. At the beginning of their marriage they had always been so conscious of each other’s presence, but now Christine sometimes thought that he did not know if she was in the room with him or not. He did not give her his special whistle any more for the pleasure of seeing her look up to a sound no one else could hear.
One morning, when she woke very tired, he said: ‘Don’t bother to get up. I’ll get my own breakfast’, and she let him. After he had gone she remembered that she had once thought that when you did not kiss your husband good-bye and hullo, and did not get up to give him his breakfast, it was the beginning of the end. She was only thirty-five. This could not happen to her marriage. After that she always got up when he did and was always punctilious about kissing him in the morning and evening, and he did not seem to notice the difference between a kiss that you wanted to give and a kiss that was a duty.
Ever since they came to the house Mrs Meenehan had been pressing them to get a television set. ‘I can’t think how you can live without one,’ she said. ‘I’d just die without mine.’ It did not occur to her that she had lived quite happily for many years before television was invented. She was an addict, a fanatic. The routine of her life was geared to the programmes. She could not iron or sew or write letters or read the newspapers unless the television was turned on. She and Daddy took most of their meals at an uncomfortable plastic-topped table in front of the set in the rumpus room, and all their visitors were forced willy-nilly to sit down in semi-darkness and watch the lighted screen.
Christine’s experience of television in England had already prejudiced her against it as a time waster and an intruder of homes, and living next door to the Meenehans had done nothing to change her mind. If having a television set meant letting it rule your life, she did not want one.
She was quite happy with the radio. She still listened to the soap operas in the afternoon, although the first novelty of them had long worn off. They were old friends now, coming up as regularly as the milk on the doorstep and the newspaper hurled from the road by a small boy with a hand-cart. The noble young widow, who undoubtedly would get no older or plainer if the programme went on for twenty years, was still trying to resolve the eternal conflict between a mother’s duty and a woman’s heart. The homey smalltown barber was still giving out a lot of advice which nobody wanted to take. The man who announced the programme about the sage, cosy Mom who was the hub of the household was still saying: ‘Imperious man, look in your heart and dwell on this: Without the woman in my house, what would I be?’
It was all just the same. It went on day after day for the comfort of hardworked housewives all over the United States. It was a harmless vice, a drug to stop women thinking too much about their lot.
Vinson, although he had once remarked wistfully that theirs was the only house in the road without a television aerial, had not wanted a set either, perhaps because it would cost too much, perhaps because anything that Mrs Meenehan recommended he automatically rejected.
On Christine’s birthday he unaccountably bought her a television set, a mammoth thing of varnished wood with almost as many knobs as a cinema organ. The installation men brought it one afternoon while Vinson was at work, hooked it up, fixed up the aerial and went away, leaving Christine moving the set about the room on its castors, trying to find a place where it would not be in the way.
When Vinson came home she did not know what to say. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said. ‘It’s much too big a present.’
‘Well,’ he mumbled, embarrassed, ‘I thought it would be nice for you. Your life is kind of dull now.’
‘Oh no it isn’t, Vin.’ They never admitted that anything was wrong.
‘Yes it is. I know it is!’ he burst out, and suddenly he held her very tightly. ‘Darling, darling, what’s wrong with us? I want us to be happy.’
Now was the time. They could have been close now and drawn some help from each other to get over this bad time together, but Christine, cursing herself as she heard her voice say it, answered: ‘Nothing’s wrong. We’re perfectly happy’, and the chance was lost.
Although Vinson had bought the set for her, he was the one who looked at it most. When she discovered that there were other programmes besides the ones the Meenehans liked, Christine began to overcome her prejudice, but she did not want to have the set playing all the time, night after night like an unwelcome lodger.
Vinson, however, took to it like a duck to water. As soon as he had taken off his uniform cap and jacket at night, he would turn on the television and squat in front of it, fiddling with the knobs and making the pictures jitter or chase each other up the screen like slowly wound film. The set would be on while they had their cocktails, and after Christine had wrenched him away to eat his dinner Vinson would go back and spend the rest of the evening in front of the screen, his naval manuals forgotten.
Christine was glad that he bad found something to keep him happy, but she hoped that he would get over his enthusiasm when the novelty wore off. Some of the television programmes were very good, with all the top talent that beer or soap or floor wax could buy, but some of the programmes were very bad, and the lengthy commercials that were forced on you in the middle did not make them any better.
All the oldest films in the world seemed to have been gathered together in the studios for the entertainment of an unprotesting public. On the television screen Jackie Coogan was still a small child, and Bebe Daniels was a mere slip of a girl with a sideways ogle and hair pulled low on the forehead. Waists were low and hats were cloche and the worn-out soundtracks grated like an early phonograph. Cowboy films of all vintages filled the screen in the early evening, for the children of America had long since given up going out to play when they could be crouched indoors watching the pintos gallop and the guns snap from the hip and the good cowboy get the sweet young girl from the bad cattle rustler.
The television commercials were far longer than the ones on the radio, and far more irksome, because you could see the eulogizers as well as hear them. On the screen, husbands in tweed jackets came home from work as cleanly shaved as when they had set out in the morning, were greeted with a glass of beer by arch little women in frilly house dresses, and downed the foaming nectar with genteel smacking of lips and knowing winks at the camera. White-capped butchers lectured you about cuts of meat, aproned grocers held up cans of peas and packets of margarine, blonde studio models who looked as if they had never been in a kitchen in their lives took cakes and biscuits out of the oven wearing a delighted air of astonishment, as well they might, seeing that someone else had made them.
When the product advertised was toothpaste or deodorant or headache pills, someone inevitably came on the screen wearing the Cossack-necked white coat peculiar to American medicine, and terrorized you about what would befall you if you did not use the sponsor’s product. Cigarettes were also advertised by men dressed up as doctors or pharmacists. The tobacco business seemed to have outgrown the selling point of which cigarette would give you most pleasure. Now it was only which one would do you the least harm. One firm went so far as to claim that their cigarette must be the best, because if you pulled a strip of paper off the side the tobacco would not fall out, which was all right if that was what you wanted cigarettes for.
Christine soon got to know all the television commercial slogans by heart, just as she had learned the ones on the radio, but she did not sing the irritating catchy tunes as she cleaned about the house or worked with her sewing-machine. Nowadays she hardly ever bothered to use the machine on which she had made so many baby clothes. In the evenings Vinson always had the television on, and she would usually sit beside him and watch the wrestling or the quiz programmes or the musical farragos, to save herself having to think of anything else to do.
On the evening before she left for England they were watching a television play, just as if it were an ordinary evening and they were not parting tomorrow. At a dramatic moment the picture went off, the voices stopped, and the announcement of a breakdown appeared on the screen.
Nothing happened for quite a long time. ‘Let’s try the radio,’ Vinson said. ‘We haven’t had that on for quite a time. Turn it on, there’s a good girl.’
‘Turn it on yourself,’ Christine said, ‘if you want it.’ She was still a little cross with him for what he had said at supper. They had been talking about her trip to England and Vinson had started to grumble, not about her leaving him – that would have been all right – but about the expense of the fare.
‘It was you who suggested I should go,’ she had said. ‘It’s a bit late to think of the expense now.’
‘I have to think of these things,’ he said. ‘It’s a good thing someone in this family does.’
‘You talk as if I was madly extravagant. I seem to be wasting my efforts trying to be so careful in the shops. Oh Lord, how I wish I had some money of my own! I tell you what, Vin; when I get back I shall have my permanent visa, and I really am going to get a job then.’
‘I told you,’ he said, putting down his fork, ‘a commander’s wife doesn’t go out to work. And soon I hope you’ll be a captain’s wife. That will make it even more impossible.’
‘I don’t want to be a captain’s wife,’ she said sulkily. ‘I think it will be hell.’
‘Christine,’ he said, calmly finishing his food, ‘you talk like a child. Compared to American women of your age you’re really very immature.’
How could he talk to her like that when she was going away tomorrow? The thought that perhaps he did not mind rankled with her all evening. She would not get up and turn on the radio for him.
When he turned it on it was the ‘Stop the Music’ programme, on which they played or sang a tune and rang people up anywhere in the United States to ask them what it was. If you could name the tune, you won a first prize and were given a chance to guess the ‘Mystery Melody’, and if you got that right yours was the earth and everything that’s in it. The compère was announcing the prizes: ‘Sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier that leaves your clothesline for the birds, an unbreakable, washable plastic rocking-chair, a super-magnificent broilomatic, boilomatic, bakeomatic kitchen range with a left-off – excuse me, friends – ha, ha! – lift-off oven door, a holiday for two in Nassau….’ The list went staggeringly on.
How wonderful to be someone who won a prize like that! Even if you had to pay income tax on it all you would still have a lot to play with. People were telephoned in Alaska, in Montana, in Big Spring, Texas – all sorts of out-of-the-way places – but never in Washington, D.C. It was never you. It was always someone else.
The telephone rang, and Christine went to it. It would be Lianne, calling to say good-bye.
‘Is that the residence of Commander Vinson Gaegler, U.S. Navy?’ said a professional operator’s voice, refining a Brooklyn accent. ‘Is Mrs Gaegler home? May I speak with her, please? Oh, hullo, Mrs Gaegler. This is your “Stop the Music” operator in New York calling.’
‘Vinson!’ Christine hissed. ‘It’s us!’
‘Hallo, hallo! Are you still on the line? Your name has been picked to be a contestant tonight in the “Stop the Music” radio programme. Do you care to participate?’
Did she care! Christine stammered into the telephone. She could hardly hold the receiver.
Non-committally, as if she were used – which, of course, she was – to offering someone the chance of winning sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier, a plastic rockingchair, a stove with a lift-off oven door, a holiday for two in Nassau, the operator explained the rules of the contest, asked Christine if she was listening to the programme, and told her to continue to listen to the telephone.
‘If you hang up or leave the phone,’ she said in her ritual voice, ‘you cannot be telephoned again.’
Christine glued one ear to the telephone and the other to the radio. Vinson was leaning forward watching the radio as if it were the television. His face was flushed with excitement, and Christine’s was on fire. Sixteen hundred dollars in cash! Now he need not grumble about her fare to England. They were finishing with another competitor – Mr Duane P. Bamburger of Boise, Idaho, who had failed to guess an obvious tune and would only get a few cartons of cigarettes.
Christine pitied Mr Bamburger fleetingly, but hated him for getting a tune she would have known. The one she got might be – ‘Vin, listen!’ They had started another tune. What was it? It sounded familiar. A girl sang the words, humming when she came to the title line ‘Da da da da da.’ It was a relic from the past. Christine remembered doing homework to it when she was at school. What was it? Something like I’ll never leave you … I won’t forget you … You’ll always find me….
What was it? What was it? Oh, don’t ask me, don’t ask me this one, she prayed silently. If you should ask me…? I’ll always want you…? I never–’
‘Stop the MUSIC!’ bellowed the compère. A telephone bell was ringing through the song. ‘Hallo … hallo …!’ she heard him say through the loudspeaker, and then there was a click in her other ear and his voice was coming through the telephone.
‘Is that Mrs Gaegler of Arlington, Virginia? Hallo there, Mrs Gaegler! How’s everything in Arlington, Virginia? Pretty swell?’ he roistered, although Christine had not been able to find the voice to answer. ‘Well, that’s fine. Just fine.’ She could hear his voice coming out of the radio a fraction of a second before it came out of the telephone. ‘Now, Mrs Gaegler, we want to give you a chance to win this wonderful jackpot of prizes. Can you name that tune we’ve just played?’
‘I – er –I – er – could you play a bit of it again?’
‘Sure thing.’ The girl sang a phrase or two.
’I’ll never leave you,’ Christine blurted out. She was sure. The prize was hers. Sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier –
‘I’m awfully sorry, Mrs Gaegler. No. I’m afraid you haven’t hit the jackpot this time.’
Christine rang off while he was promising her cartons of cigarettes. On the radio she could still hear him talking to her with undiminished bonhomie. She switched it off, very near tears.
‘Oh, Vin–’ She turned to him for sympathy, but his voice was angry.
‘You idiot,’ he said, ‘losing a chance like that. Why didn’t you get it? I thought you knew all the tunes. You’ve got all day to listen to that damn radio.’
‘I didn’t know it,’ she said miserably.
‘Well, you ought to have.’ He stuck out his lower lip.
‘Did you?’
He turned away from her as the television suddenly came on again with a burst of sound, just in time for the commercial.
He had no right to be so cross, but he was, and so was she -cross with herself as well as him. The glittering haul that had been dangled before her had been too tempting. It was not fair to tantalize people like that. They were doing it all the time. It was the modern American tragedy.
She and Vinson were still a little cross with each other when they drove to New York the next day. Christine had to keep reminding herself that she was leaving him for several weeks, that she loved him, that he was her husband, that she would undoubtedly miss him as soon as he was not there.
And then on the dockside, as she turned at the foot of the gangway and saw his face left behind among the crowd, and it had the look on it that he had not meant her to see, she did not have to remind herself of these things. She wanted to run back and say she would not go, that she would come with him to Coco Solo, Panama; but her legs took her on up the gangway, and when she went to the rail to lean over and wave, his face was back to normal again.
All these things she thought of as she lay in her bunk and braced her tired body against the rolling of the ship. At night she took sleeping pills to make sure that she would not lie awake and go on thinking, but when she slept she dreamed of Jerry. She had not dreamed of him for months, but on the ship she dreamed of him every night. On the last morning she woke believing that he was still alive. When reality seeped back to her she lay for a while quite still, thinking that she might recapture the dream if she did not move. Then she realized that she was able to lie still, that she was not being shifted from side to side of the bunk. The sea was calm, the boat sailed evenly on, and outside her porthole the early-morning sun glittered on the sea and on an unpretentious coastline of low cliffs and little white houses. She had come home to England.
Roger met her at Waterloo wearing his hairy winter overcoat that made him look like a bison. Sylvia had not come up from Farnborough because it was her ironing day. She also had Mr Cope still in bed recovering from an attack of bronchitis.
‘To tell you the truth,’ Roger said, as he drove his sedate black family car heavy-handedly along the Portsmouth road, ‘the old chap really has been pretty bad this time. Syl didn’t tell you just how bad in her letter, because we didn’t want to worry you. It was just after you… you know.’
‘After I lost the baby, you mean.’
Roger cleared his throat. Although his jokes were often coarse, he was never free about mentioning the realities of such things. ‘Bad business,’ he said gruffly. ‘Damn bad luck. Awfully sorry and all that.’
‘Thanks, Rodge.’ Christine felt miles away from him. She was glad to see him. He was uncomplicated and solid and just the same; but if she had thought that by coming back to England she could slip immediately into the familiar pattern of life, she was wrong. She felt out of place, a stranger in the car which was so small and upright and so very different from the one she was used to in America. Although she had been away from England less than a year, driving on the left was just as strange and frightening as driving on the right had been at first.
‘I tell you, my old woman and I were quite upset when we got your cable. We were in the garden at the time, putting in some bulbs for next year, and when Syl came back from the phone and told me, I must say it was quite a shock.’ Roger remembered with some pride how he and Sylvia had stood among the garden tools and bags of bulbs and been upset.
‘Oh, look,’ Christine said. ‘There’s that lovely old pub with the thatch and pink walls. I’d forgotten about it.’
‘You talk as if you’d been away for years.’
‘I feel as if I had. I’d almost forgotten there were such things as thatched roofs and real beams. And hedges,’ she said, as they left the village and the country opened quietly out into its jigsaw pattern of little fields climbing towards the low hills. ‘You never see a cut-and-laid hedge in America. Oh, Rodge, how I do love England!’
He grunted. He never responded very well to any outburst of emotion. He picked up his train of thought. ‘If only you’d been over here. We didn’t like to think of you in one of those Yank hospitals. They tell me all the nurses are blacks.’
Christine laughed. ‘Only some of them. As a matter of fact, the coloured nurse I had on night duty was better than any of the others.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t like one of them to lay her great black hands on me, I know that,’ Roger said, with a shudder that ill-befitted the son of an empire-building race.
‘Most of the hospitals there are much better than anything we’ve got over here,’ Christine said.
‘Oh, naturally, my dear old soul, naturally. It’s your country now, after all, so I’m sure everything over there is bigger and better than anything poor gone-to-seed old England has got.’
Christine looked at him in surprise. It occurred to her that he and Sylvia had decided that she would come back quite changed, praising everything American and belittling everything English.
She was right. Sylvia had a defence mechanism all prepared to take the wind out of any high-flown sails Christine might try to set. She had squandered the whole week’s meat ration, had bought vegetables and fruit out of season to make a brave show for the homecoming, but she dispelled Christine’s appreciation by saying with a sniff that was part sinus trouble, part sarcasm: ‘Of course this won’t be anything to you. I dare say you can have this sort of thing every day.’
‘We can’t,’ Christine said, ‘because we can’t afford it’, but they did not believe her. She was the American, the visitor from the land of boastful plenty.
She had come back to refresh herself with the familiarity of her own family and country. She wanted everything to be as it had always been. She wanted to slip back without effort into the family group, but Roger and Sylvia held off a little warily, as if they suspected that she had only come back to patronize.
Even the children treated her differently. They were at the age when a year can make a startling change in appearance and behaviour. They were not her babies any more. She could no longer wash their faces and hands for them, or retie the bow that always slipped off Jeanette’s forelock. Jeanette was growing her hair now, and wore it scraped back unbecomingly into a slide at the neck which never came undone. She was going to a new school, and had picked up all the high-school mannerisms. She talked very fast. She giggled a lot and hitched up her stockings. She made prissy mouths when anyone said something she thought was ‘feeble’. She had taken up tennis and did not want Christine to bowl cricket balls to her on the lawn any more. She and Clement did not want to play any of the games that Christine used to play with them. They did not hang around her and treat her as if she was more fun than their parents. She had gone away from them. She had deserted them, and now they held aloof from her a little as if they did not entirely trust her any more.
She had brought chocolate for them, and American sweaters, and pistols and half a dozen boxes of chewing gum. They stayed with her until everything had come out of her suitcase, and then they went away to mull over their booty, abandoning her when she had no more to give, shamefully embodying the anti-New Dealer’s imaginary picture of Britain’s reaction to dollar aid.
Sylvia and Roger were more gracious about the presents Christine had brought for them, although Sylvia doubted whether the nylons would fit her now that her feet had swollen from so much running up and downstairs after poor Copey.
Christine heard a lot about how difficult it had been to Manage when her father was ill. The maid had been on holiday, and the daughter of My Mrs Hatchett, the morning woman, had elected to give birth to twins at the most inconvenient time, so that Sylvia had had to Manage on her own, with the erratic help of My Mrs Hatchett’s other daughter, who was a little weak in the head and could not be trusted with the children.
You would not have thought that Christine had been away for nearly a year to marriage in a fascinating, unknown country. Sylvia and Roger did not want to hear her news; they wanted to tell her theirs. Christine could have told them things that would make their eyes stand out of their heads, but they were too busy telling her about the crockery broken by My Mrs Hatchett’s unmarried daughter, the confinement of the other daughter (rumoured to be also unmarried), the ups and downs of the meat and cheese ration, the improvement of the lawn and the disappointment of the prize gladioli, the contest between Roger and the garage over the price of reboring, and Roger’s triumph in the local golf championships, in which he had defeated the famous Henry Slater – ‘My good sister, you must remember Slater. You’ve met him here. Chap with the handlebar moustache. Real Pilot-Officer Prune type. Hell of a chap.’
Only her father was genuinely pleased and absorbed in Christine’s homecoming. Only her father wanted to hear all that she could tell him about America, and insisted on being assured that she was really happy in her new life.
Since his illness Mr Cope had become less irritable and argumentative. He was much older and more feeble; and although they had been apart for so long, Christine felt a more sympathetic intimacy between them than there had ever been when they lived together at ‘Roselawn’.
Mr Cope had grown a short grey beard during his illness, and had not bothered to shave it off when he got better. His hair had become whiter, the smudges round his eyes darker, his mouth more vague and his skin more loose and crinkled as the flesh had thinned away from his sick bones.
Christine got a shock when she saw him, propped up among snowy linen (Sylvia changed all her sheets twice a week and was for ever complaining about laundry bills), his glasses far down his nose, his hands idle on the counterpane, his eyes riveted on the door as if he had turned them there at the first sounds of her arrival.
Christine’s first thought was: How could I have gone away? How could I have gone away and left him? Although she knew that if she had stayed he would not have loved and needed her as much as he did because she had gone away. Mr Cope had always been inclined to pin his faith on something that was not there, to think that everything would be all right if only … to sigh for the things he had not instead of accepting the things he had.
Christine spent most of her time at Roger’s house up in her father’s bedroom talking to him. She told him everything about her marriage and her life in America – everything except the most important thing. She did not tell him that she could not shake off the depression that the loss of her baby had stabbed into her, nor that she and Vinson had reached the point when they both tacitly welcomed the opportunity to be apart for a while.
The alsatian lay on the floor between them with his strong head on his black-nailed paws, lifting a yellow eye from one to the other. He had lost the bounce and ferocity with which he had scattered rugs and terrorized postmen at ‘Roselawn’. He did not like Farnborough. The rabbit scents of the sandy countryside meant less to him than the more urban trail of smells that other dogs had left for him on Barnes Common. Since his master had been ill nobody would take him out, because he pulled like a plough horse on the leash and there were too many cars on the shiny black roads to take him out without one. When he went into the garden there was always somebody to shout him off the flower-beds. The children were afraid of him, and he of them. He could not tell these things, but he showed them in his dull coat and lazy eye and his listless, almost sheepish manner. He and Mr Cope had both become older and milder, and it made Christine feel closer and more affectionate towards them both.
When she asked her father how he liked living at Farnborough, he surprisingly, with his new gentleness, did not complain, although from a few unthinking remarks he let fall it was obvious that there were many things that did not please him.
Roger and Sylvia, on the other hand, made no secret of the things that did not please them about having Mr Cope living there. Frankly, he and his dog were a nuisance to them, but since there was no alternative to the present arrangement there seemed to be no point in dwelling on its inconveniences. They did dwell on them, however, but in a martyred way, rejecting any alleviating suggestions, such as getting a nurse the next time Mr Cope was ill, as the doctor said he might be if the winter was a severe one. When Christine said tentatively: ‘Perhaps I could have him out to stay with me for a while’, Roger said: ‘God no, that would kill the old man.’
Having a sister who lived in America had in no way mitigated his prejudice against that country. He lost no opportunity to jibe, and Christine found herself defending her adopted country with as much heat as she defended England if any American slighted it.
Roger said that she had acquired an American accent, although she knew she had not. His new joke was to use what he thought was American slang, his idea of the transatlantic vernacular being culled from the earlier works of P. G. Wodehouse. He would say ‘Hot dog!’ or ‘Twenty-three skidoo! – as you say in America’, undeterred by Christine’s assurances that they did not. He laughed when she said radio instead of wireless, and nearly killed himself when he saw her use her knife and fork in the American way she had learned from Vinson.
He still talked about Vinson as if he were an improbable joke. He insisted on calling him Gaegler, and the children, taking their tone from him, referred to their uncle as Gaegler too.
When Roger asked Christine: ‘Where is the great Gaegler now?’ and she said ‘Coco Solo, Panama’, he bellowed with laughter, and the children chanted: ‘Coca-Cola! Coca-Cola!’ wild with glee.
‘Shut up, Champ and Boots,’ Roger said. ‘Stow it, troops. But I must say, Chrissie, it is a hell of a funny name. No one but the Yanks would have a naval station at a place with a name like that.’
After she had been at Farnborough for several days Christine went up to London to stay with Rhona. Rhona had a new house in Hampstead, which was very grand, with a curving staircase and a manservant to open the door; but Rhona herself was quite unchanged and just as glad to see Christine as Christine was to see her.
‘I’ve sent Dan up to Gleneagles for a few days’ golf,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d have a better time without him. Darling, I am glad to see you. And you’ve got so thin! You look marvellous. I’d know that was an American dress anywhere. I like your hair too. Come upstairs and let’s start talking. We’ve got masses to say.’
They fell back at once, as they always could, into the intimacy of their early youth. They talked for hours together. They went shopping, they went to the theatre, Rhona gave a cocktail party for people Christine knew, and everyone said how wonderful Christine looked, and admired her new figure, which was gratifying, but made Christine think she must have been fatter than she realized before.
Geoffrey came to the cocktail party. He had a white scar across his left eyebrow where the hair would never grow again. It gave him a slightly quizzical air, which made his face look less negative than before. Christine was more glad to see him than she expected. When she had lived in England she had not cared whether she saw Geoffrey or not. He was too familiar, and he was always there for parties if you needed an extra man; but now she was glad to see him just because he was so familiar.
Her life in America had been a succession of new impressions, overstimulating and tiring. Over there the unexpected was always happening. In England you knew what to expect, and could relax. She realized that although she had promised herself before her marriage that she would teach Vinson the English way of relaxing and letting things slide if they could not be helped, he had taught her instead the American way of getting tense and worried over things that did not merit the importance you gave to them.
It was good to talk to Geoffrey in the familiar disrespectful language they had always used. He came to the party straight from the office in striped trousers and a stiff white collar over a blue shirt, and left a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella and a folded copy of The Economist in the hall. That was good too. It reminded you that, however far away you went to change and strange emotions, you could always come back and find England just the same.
Rhona was just the same too, although she was full of all the new things that had happened to her. Christine enjoyed her stay in the pretentious comfortable house where a maid ran your bath and ironed your nightdress every day. It was a welcome change from Sylvia’s house at Farnborough, where fires were never lit until the evening and Sylvia was perpetually worrying about whether the meat had gone off or the maid had taken umbrage.
Christine missed Vinson often. He had become a part of life that one could not shut out by going three thousand miles away, but at the same time she was glad that she was staying at Rhoda’s without him. Vinson would not have enjoyed the luxury. He was unnecessarily impressed by things like manservants and expensive china, but although he had only met Rhona once he had formed one of his censorious opinions about her. If they had been staying in the same house he would have pretended to be more prudish than he was and Rhona would have pretended to be more indecorous than she was, and Christine would have had a difficult time between them. Vinson would have been jealous of her friendship with Rhona, and Rhona would have been incredulous at her wifely submission to Vinson. It was better to be there alone. They would never have been able to talk like this if Vinson were there.
Gossiping all day and half the night with Rhona, she realized how much she missed an intimate friend in America. Lianne and Nancy Lee had been companionable, but you could not make a real confidante in such a short time. You needed to grow up together as she and Rhona had done.
Rhona was in love again. She had been in love twice since the Hungarian film director, but this time it was the real thing. She never went very far with any of her affairs, and she did not sincerely contemplate doing anything but spend the rest of her life with the complaisant Dan, but Dan annoyed her very much at times, and so she found other men to divert her.
‘It keeps you going,’ she said. ‘Being in love is a wonderful thing to keep you going.’
‘Yes, but doesn’t Dan-?’
‘Oh, he never knows. He’s always dashing about on some scheme to make five thousand pounds. He’s quite happy as long as I’m happy, and you know, I’m much nicer to him when I’ve got someone else on the stocks, so I reckon that makes up for it.’
Rhona’s ups and downs with the Hungarian and his successors took a lot of telling, but unlike Sylvia and Roger, she was just as eager to hear Christine’s news as to tell her own. Christine talked and talked and found that she was beginning to talk herself out of her depression. The things that she had brooded over alone because she could not tell them to anyone – especially not to Vinson – seemed much less when they were voiced and discussed with Rhona’s carefree philosophy. She told Rhona everything, and if Rhona did not understand some of the finer points she at least knew how to minimize their significance.
‘You worry too much,’ she said, ‘just like you always did. You’re taking this marriage business much too seriously.’
‘But, Ro, one must, if one’s to make it work.’
‘Oh, I know- but, all the same, you mustn’t mind things so much. Gosh, if I brooded every time I had a row with Dan I’d be broody all the time. Take a little look at some other man, why don’t you? I know you say Vin’s so jealous, but why not give him something to be jealous about? It would do him a power of good, and you too. A bit of outside attention would set you up no end.’
‘Oh, Ro, you know I never would. I don’t want to, anyway. That’s one of the best things about being married. You don’t have to go around any more looking at every frightful man to see if he’d possibly do.’
‘You could look just a little bit.’
‘You know I couldn’t.’
‘I know. You’re hopeless.’ They laughed together. Rhona was absurd. She never gave any advice worth taking, and yet the few days of talking and laughing with her did Christine far more good than any solemn discussion with someone who would take her problems seriously.
Her depression began to lift. She prayed that it would not come back again when she got home to Arlington. She wished that she were not going back to the little house where she and Vinson had been unhappy. It would have been better to go somewhere new and start again. She did not ask herself whether she wanted to go back to America. She was going back. That was all.
After she left Rhona she went to visit the book department at Goldwyn’s. She had often thought about going back there as a married woman who had escaped. She had planned how it would be. They would all be pleased to see her, would stare at her new clothes, would tell her spicy bits of gossip that had happened in the store while she had been away, would say: ‘Things are not the same as they were when you were here, Miss Cope -Mrs Gaegler, I mean.’
She went there on a busy afternoon, and at first she could not see anyone she knew. They all seemed to be customers. No, there was Miss Burman, just the same as ever, with the same brown dress and the same wisp of grey hair that fell into her eye as she frowned over someone’s bill.
Miss Burman was pleased to see Christine. ‘Well, look who’s here!’ she cried, throwing her wall-eye about at no one in particular. ‘My stars, you are a sight for sore eyes, Miss Cope -excuse me – Mrs Gaegler. That takes some getting used to. And how’s that handsome sailor boy of yours? That’s right, that’s right. Quite the yankee-doodle, aren’t you? Mother? Oh, she’s wonderful, thank you, dear. We had visitors to tea last week, and it tired her a little, but otherwise she’s – Oh yes, certainly, madam. Excuse me.’ She blushed, and hurried away to her waiting customer.
Christine stood looking round her and feeling like a customer. The woman with the cut-away nostrils who had taken her place as head of the department sailed up on pointed feet and gave her a brief handshake and said that Oh yes, she liked the department very much, although of course she had done a lot of reorganizing since Christine had left.
She went away and Christine stood for a moment vaguely, wondering if she had ever belonged here. Miss Burman had given her a nice welcome. She was just the same, but there was no Mr Parker, no Helen, no Alice, no Margaret, and the cookery books were where the collected editions of poets used to be. She wished she had not come.
When she went to see Margaret she found her engrossed in her baby, and much happier than she had been before. She and Laurie were short of money certainly, as they had expected to be, but it did not seem to matter as they had expected it would. They were still managing to keep the ugly old house going. It was no more or less shabby than before. Laurie looked no more like a patient scarecrow in his clothes than he always had and Margaret looked just as neat and clean as ever.
Christine had almost dreaded going to Margaret’s home, partly because she did not want to see anyone else with a baby, and partly because she was afraid that Timmy would not recognize her. She had thought about him so often, and it would be such a snub if he had forgotten her completely.
He knew her at once. He was in the garden, and he heard her step on the pavement and rushed barking to the gate, flailing his tail and giving yelps of joy as Christine fumbled at the latch of the gate in her excitement to get in to him. Then she was in the garden, and Timmy was all over her – his tongue, his paws, his panting excitement – and she had to grasp his fur and hold him still so that she could wipe her silly tears off on his neck.
Timmy never left Christine’s side all the time she was in Margaret’s house. ‘He’s afraid you’ll go away again without him,’ Margaret said. ‘Anyone would think we’d been cruel to him.’
‘Oh, Maggie, I know you’ve been wonderful –’
‘But he’s your dog,’ Laurie said in his slow, pondering way. ‘You can never take that away from them.’
‘Why don’t you take him back with you this time?’ Margaret said. ‘You could take him on the boat, and I believe they don’t have quarantine in America. They give them injections instead.’
‘If only I could …’ Christine thought of how the day before she left she had asked Vinson whether she could bring Timmy back with her. She asked it diffidently, almost timidly. She had thought about asking it for a long time, but dreaded hearing what he would answer.
‘I thought we’d settled all that,’ he said. ‘Do I have to say no to you all over again? What’s the point of bringing the animal over here when we may be gone from Washington soon? If they send me to the naval shipyard at Brooklyn we’ll probably be in an apartment.’
‘Oh, Vin, are they going to send you to Brooklyn? I don’t think I’ll like that. Nancy Lee says it’s horrible. Must we go there?’
‘My dear Christine,’ he said in his professional naval officer voice, ‘the United States Navy assigns its officers where it needs them, not where their wives happen to want to go.’
When the time came for Christine to leave England she did not know whether she was glad or sorry. She wanted to see Vinson, but she did not like leaving her father, who had leaned on her during these weeks she had spent with him as he never had before. He looked so old and heavy-eyed, and she knew he was not happy at Farnborough. He had not been able to work for some time. Sylvia had packed away his dictionaries and manuscript paper and carefully sharpened pencils, and when he was not hunched in bed he pottered purposelessly about the place like a ghost that has lost its way and come to the wrong house to haunt. Christine had promised him that he should come to her in America when he was stronger, but although he said vaguely: ‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that’, she did not think he would ever get there. She wondered if she would ever see him alive again.
It was not easy to leave England. Even a raw drizzly Sunday, with the undersized girls and pimply youths waiting in the rain for the cinemas to open, and the seedy coughing men waiting in doorways for the pubs to open, was a thing to be clung to because no Sunday was like it anywhere else in the world.
At the same time she found she was looking forward to getting back to America. She had accepted it as her home now, and there were many things about it that she had missed. Cold all the time she was in England, she had missed the sensuous pleasure of opening a front door and stepping out of an icy wind into a warm bath of air. She missed her impeccable whitetiled bathroom and the shower which made it so easy to wash your hair. She missed the supermarket, and the man making bacon-and-egg sandwiches at the lunch counter in the drugstore; the friendly familiarity of strangers on trains and buses, and the unrepressed chit-chat of salesgirls and young men who came to mend the refrigerator and told you their life’s ambitions. She missed the cars, the sweeping roads, the evening light on the white buildings of Washington, and Lincoln looking pensively into his watery mirror, with the golden reflection of the floodlit Monument coming across to meet him at night.
She looked forward to getting back to Vinson. Without him she often felt alone, as she never had when she was single. His letters said that he missed her, and she knew that he weighed his letters carefully and never said in them what was not true. When they met, everything would be all right again perhaps. She would work to make it so. She wanted to get back to America to start again to make her marriage happy, yet she was half afraid lest she should fail and things should not be any better.
And there would be Timmy to explain – Timmy, who was in a box in the guard’s van of the train which took her to Southampton. The last time she had travelled this way she had been crying and too unhappy to look out of the window. On this journey she looked out all the time, her eyes trying to hold the fleeting fields and hedges and naked elms, the garden plots dug neatly for the winter, a boy’s bicycle flung down with the wheels spinning, drably dressed people glimpsed on a shopping street as the train rushed over a bridge, because she did not know whether she would see England again.
She was glad that she would have the boat trip before she met Vinson. It would give her time to get her thoughts straight. A nuisance about this friend of Laurie’s who would be on the boat.
‘He’s going to America to teach English,’ Margaret had said. ‘We’ve told him to look you up. Do be nice to him. He’s rather a dear.’
Christine visualized a wispy professor with hair like candy floss being rather a dear in a soft-voiced unworldly way. She hoped he would not want to settle down next to her in a deckchair and tap his fingertips together and talk about Coleridge.
In the customs shed a woman porter handled her luggage. She was broad and strong and shiny like the women who had gone out to help the rescue men in the Blitz, and when Christine paid her she tipped her broken-peaked cap jauntily and said: ‘Ta, ducks.’
A crowd of boys and girls from some youth movement were travelling with rucksacks and thick clumsy clothes. Christine looked down from the ship and saw them gathered round a flustered woman who was handing out tea and buns from a trolley.
American voices were all around Christine on the boat in the turmoil of embarking. It was the last of England. When would she see another dowdy flustered woman dispensing tea and Chelsea buns, and when would someone call her Ducks again?