Christine did not see Margaret’s friend on the ship at first. She did not look for him, for she preferred to be alone, and the middle-aged New England couple who sat at her table with their opinionated teenage daughter were boring enough without having to be bored by an English professor as well.
On the second day out Christine was sitting in her deck-chair trying to read, but lifting her eyes more often to the sun-specked sea that dipped beyond the rail and to the procession of earnest walkers who paced their mile round the deck with their coats buttoned round their throats.
One of the milers, a middle-aged man with a thick woollen scarf and sparse hair that lifted in the sea breeze, looked curiously at Christine every time he went by her chair. Presently he stopped after he had passed her and went to stand at the rail near by. He glanced back at her once and then looked quickly away when he saw that she was watching him.
This must be Laurie’s friend. Soon he would summon the courage to come and speak to her, and she would have to be polite. She sighed and closed her book. She would not be polite to him for long, because it was nearly time to take Timmy out of the kennel for his morning exercise.
‘Excuse me,’ a voice said behind her. ‘You are Mrs Gaegler, aren’t you?’
Christine turned and saw a man with light-brown untidy hair, a strong English nose and an expectant smile. He wore a turtlenecked sweater under a thick tweed jacket, and flannel trousers that needed pressing.
‘The deck steward told me who you were,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind. It’s probably a bore, but I’m a friend of Laurie and Margaret Drew.’
‘Oh yes,’ Christine said, surprised. ‘You’re Mr Burns.’
He nodded. ‘It’s funny?’ he asked, for her full cheekbones were lifting into a wide smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But - you see that man over there by the rail? Well, I’ve been thinking that he was Laurie’s friend, and expecting him to come and speak to me. I thought you’d look - well, more like a college professor.’
‘I am one, I’m afraid.’ He stood and looked at her with his hands in his pockets, resting one leg. Although he had a rather ingenuous face, he had a bold sort of look, as if he did not care what people thought of him. ‘I’ve been teaching English literature at Nottingham University,’ he said, ‘and now I’m going over for a year at a college in Washington under some exchange deal. They offered me the chance, and I thought it couldn’t be any worse than Nottingham.’
‘Oh, you’ll like Washington,’ Christine said. ‘I like it better than any town - except London, of course.’
‘You live there?’
‘Yes. I’m married to an American naval officer.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Margaret told me.’ He studied her face carefully for a moment, as if he was trying to memorize it. Perhaps he was, for on a crowded boat one often meets someone one day and fails to recognize them the next.
Christine looked at her watch. ‘I’ll have to go now,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a dog in the kennels and they only let you take them out at certain times.’ She unwrapped her steamer rug and stood up. The middle-aged man by the rail moved away and started once more on his mileage, arms swinging, the slit of his overcoat flapping.
‘Could I come with you?’ Laurie’s friend said. ‘I’d like to see the dog.’
Timmy liked everyone, so of course it was not remarkable that he liked Mr Burns, but he did put on a particularly gleeful show for him, and Laurie’s friend knew how to talk to dogs.
In the afternoon the ship ran into a small storm. Christine had eaten too much at lunch out of boredom, for the couple from New England were arguing with their fat daughter, who was winning hands down as she always did, because she had the loudest and the rudest voice. When the ship began to move out of its throbbing rhythm Christine was afraid she was going to feel sea-sick and retired to her cabin.
She slept. When she woke and blinked round the cabin, as one always has to on a ship to remember where one is, she saw a note lying just inside the door. She saw the clock as she got out of bed. She had missed her time for taking Timmy out. She would have to try and get round the steward downstairs, who was one of those difficult public servants who said: ‘I’d like to, madam. You know I’d like to help you, but if I let you break the regulations everyone else will be wanting to do the same.’
The note said: ’Have taken dog out for you. Tommie Burns.’
Christine was not able to thank him before dinner. She walked round the deck once or twice, and looking through the smoking-room window, she saw him sitting with three other men drinking whisky in a haze of cigarette smoke. Why should she feel this curious stab of irritation? He was entitled to drink whisky with three men in the smoking-room. She realized that she had been half expecting him to ask her to go to the bar for a cocktail. If she had been single he probably would have, but she was married now and could not go into bars with anyone but Vinson.
She never had the courage to go into a bar alone, so she went into the main lounge and asked the steward to bring her a martini. She had two, so that she could go down to dinner as late as possible when her table mates would be half-way through their meal.
Mr and Mrs Warren, however, were too polite to get up and go before Christine had finished her dinner. Their daughter went, because she had a date with a dreamy boy, but the parents sat on, smoking all over Christine’s food and telling her where their ancestors had come from and how long their family had been in Madison, Connecticut.
After dinner Christine sat in an armchair in a corner of the lounge and watched the couples dancing and was bored. If Vinson were here they would be dancing and having drinks together between dances, and looking like any of the youngish unremarkable couples who were scattered about the lounge among the fat and elderly and a few very young people like the Warrens’ daughter, who was dancing with the dreamy boy with her bottom stuck out.
Christine sat and thought about how, if she were single, she would be sitting here trying not to look as if she wanted to dance, and yet hoping that someone would come up and ask her. She had told Rhona that one of the best things about being married was that you did not have to look about for men any more, but although that was a relief it did take away some of the excitement of life, particularly on a journey like this. Shipboard life was a great setting for romance. Christine had never had a romance on a ship. Now she never would.
Before you were married a journey like this would be an exciting adventure, just as every party was an adventure, because you never knew whom you might meet. But when you had met the person you were looking for and had married him, then you were out of the running for excitement. One part of your life was finished. There could be no more adventures, and men did not look at you in the same speculative way.
While she was thinking this and looking round the lounge at the people dancing on the floor and drinking at little tables, the corner of her eye was watching the door for Tommie Burns to come in. She knew that the corner of her eye had no business to be doing that. If he should come in and talk to her – what was there in that? Margaret had probably told him to be nice to her, just as she had told Christine to be nice to him.
When he did not come into the lounge all evening, she was disappointed. She remembered being disappointed like that on holidays long ago when she had sat in hotel lounges, wasting an evening in case a young man on whom she had fixed her eye should come in.
She saw the Warrens open the door leading from the library, so she got up and went out the opposite door. As she crossed the space outside the purser’s office to go downstairs Tommie Burns came out of the bar. He was wearing a blue suit and a white shirt and his hair was slicked down, showing the square shape of his head, wide at the corners of the forehead.
‘I thought you were never coming out,’ he said. ‘I want to buy you a drink.’
‘Why didn’t you come into the lounge then?’
‘I was afraid you’d expect me to dance with you, and I don’t -not properly, that is. Do you want a drink now?’
‘Well, I–’
‘That’s all right. I don’t either. Let’s go out on deck. I believe there must be a moon. Feverish young women and their escorts have been going out there and not coming back.’
‘Not here,’ he said when they were on the enclosed promenade deck. ‘Let’s go up top.’ Christine walked with him along the deck to the ladder and saw for the first time that he limped slightly. She had not noticed it when they were walking Timmy this morning.
On the boat deck they leaned on the rail between two lifeboats and talked – not about themselves, not about anything in particular. It was just talk. It was cold, but Christine held herself from shivering in case he should take his coat off and put it round her. It was bad enough to be up here with him without that. Heavens, if Vinson had been on the boat and had found her here in such a setting, with the moon scudding in and out of the clouds and the phosphorescence tracking on the cleaved water far below, he –
‘I think I should be going to bed,’ she said.
‘Thinking you should go and wanting to go are two different things,’ Tommie said. ‘What are you afraid of, Christine?’
‘Nothing. Why should I be?’ She laughed, but it sounded affected.
‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?’
‘No –’ She tried to push him away, but he was strong: taller than Vinson and much stronger.
She held herself stiffly, her lips resisting his kiss.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. He had a shocking air of innocence, as if he were surprised at you for thinking wrong into something he thought right.
‘Well, you know,’ she said crossly. ‘I’m married.’
‘So I’ve heard.’ He smiled gently. He was so unscrupulous that it was almost funny.
‘I ought to slap your face and run screaming for the captain,’ Christine said, trying not to answer his smile.
‘He’d probably enjoy that. He’s youngish and quite personable.’ Tommie moved in close to her again, standing so that she was pinned between him and the ship’s rail. Below her the sea ran hissing past, back to England.
‘Oh, you’re quite impossible,’ Christine said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be just a nice respectable friend of Laurie’s. My goodness, if he knew what you were like, he –’
‘No, he wouldn’t. I dare say even old Laurie behaved like this when he fell in love with Margaret. It’s just that things are speeded up on a ship. If you are going to fall in love with someone you do it quicker, don’t you? … Don’t you, Christine?’
‘I don’t know,’ she murmured feebly. ‘I don’t know… .’ She felt as if she had fallen over backwards and was drowning without a struggle in the phosphorescent sea.
Christine had expected to wake next morning in an agony of remorse, but she did not. She woke to a tingle of expectancy, wondering for a moment what was going to happen that made it such a lovely day. She remembered waking to just this feeling years ago in one of the chintzy spare rooms at Jennifer’s house the night after she met Jerry.
She turned her eyes to the dressing-table, where Vinson’s photograph regarded her as sternly as if it knew what had happened on the boat deck last night. No good telling it not to worry, that this was nothing to do with her and Vinson. The photograph had every right to worry. She was desperately worried herself.
She rang for her breakfast – she was never too worried to eat -and took a long time over having her bath and dressing, to put off the moment when she was going to find Tommie and get things straight between them. It was eleven o’clock by the time she came out of her cabin, so she decided to go and take Timmy out first, to delay the meeting a little longer.
Tommie was at the kennels, talking to Timmy through the bars. ‘I knew you’d be coming down,’ he said, ‘so I thought I’d wait for you here.’
‘You shouldn’t be waiting for me at all,’ Christine said in the voice which she had made up her mind to use. ‘In any case, I’m only going to see you for long enough to say –’ The steward came to unlock the kennel, so she had to stop saying it.
When they had quietened down Timmy’s first excitement at being free Christine clipped the leash on his collar and they walked briskly up and down the small triangle of deck allotted for the exercise of dogs. Christine began to say what she had planned, but Timmy kept pulling her from one side to the other, and it was difficult to be coherent.
‘You keep telling me you’re married,’ Tommie said. ‘I know you are, and it’s too bad, but talking about it won’t make you any less married.’
‘You don’t understand! I’m happily married, that’s the point.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Tommie looked at her, his eyes remembering last night.
Trying not to remember, Christine assumed a lecturing voice. ‘You ought to be safely married too, at your age,’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you married, anyway?’ It was a rash question, because you never knew what tragedies or disappointments lay in a man’s past, and she got the answer she deserved.
‘I’ve never felt like asking anyone to marry a cripple,’ he said. ‘I was engaged before the war, but when the Japs locked me up she was told I might be dead, and she married someone else. Just as well, really.’
‘Your – your legs?’ Christine asked, remembering the scarcely perceptible limp.
‘Only got one of’em.’
Timmy pulled her away at that moment, and when she came back to Tommie they did not talk any more about his having lost a leg. They did not talk about her being married either. Christine did not want to be unkind. She felt sorry for him, and let him take her hand.
When they had put Timmy back in the kennel again and were walking along a white corridor between closed cabin doors, Tommie took her elbow, looked quickly up and down, and kissed her. Christine could not deceive herself then that she was only feeling sorry for him, only wanting to be kind. It was nothing like that.
‘We never see anything of you now, Mrs Gaegler,’ Mr Warren said, sopping bread in his gravy. ‘Where do you get to? Maimie and I were looking for you last night to make up a fourth at bridge, and this morning I tried to find you to introduce you to some very lovely people from Maine I’ve just met up with. But you never seem to be around.’
‘Oh, I know where she is,’ said his daughter in an offensive singsong. ‘She’s always around with that English fellow. Haven’t you seen him, Pop? He’s dreamy. Looks kinda like Spencer Tracy in his palmier days.’
‘No, indeed,’ said her father, blinking with pleasure at the idea of a new person to bore. ‘I don’t believe I have met up with him. I should be very happy to know your friend, Mrs Gaegler. Whyn’t you bring him along to the bar for a cocktail tonight?’
‘Thank you,’ said Christine uncomfortably, ‘but I don’t know if he–’
‘Oh, they won’t want to waste their time with you, Pop,’ said the daughter rudely. ‘They’ve got better things to do, don’t you know that?’ She leered at Christine with her small gingerlashed eyes.
‘Excuse me,’ said Christine, getting up. ‘I think I’ll have my coffee upstairs.’ After she had left them she wished that she had not. It had been bad enough not knowing what to say to Mr Warren to avoid being coupled with Tommie as two people who accepted invitations together, but it was worse that she had shown annoyance at the daughter’s crass teasing.
Now the whole family would begin to talk about her. Perhaps they would tell other people, and the other people would talk. How had she ever been foolish enough to get herself into such a situation? She went to find Tommie to tell him that they must not see each other any more.
‘Short of one of us jumping into the sea,’ Tommie said affably, ‘I don’t see how we can help it.’ He was practising deck quoits by himself on the windy sports deck, balancing himself adroitly with his artificial leg when the ship rolled. His sleeves were turned up and the muscle of his forearm made a beautiful strong shape under the golden brown hairs. Christine took her eyes away from it.
They had two and a half more days together on the ship, and Christine spent quite a lot of time telling Tommie that they must not go on like this, but it made no difference to the behaviour of either of them. It was terrible and it was wonderful, but at New York Vinson would meet her and she would never see Tommie again. She had made him promise not to try and see her in Washington. She did not trust him at all, but she believed that he would stick to that.
At New York there was a cable waiting for Christine. It said: ’Homecoming delayed. Letter explanation at house. Love Vinson.’
Just ‘Love’, that was all. Nothing about how pleased he was that she was back in America and how sorry not to see her at once; but Vinson was never any good at conveying loving messages in letters, let alone in cables.
Christine looked for Tommie on the boat and in the customs shed. They could have travelled to Washington together, could have had a few more hours together, but perhaps it was just as well that she could not find him. What was the use of a few more hours? They had said all that there was to be said last night.
When she got Timmy out of the clutches of the authorities and had coped with customs and red caps, marvelling at her assured Americanized self who was so different from the bewildered English self arriving in New York last time, Christine took a taxi to Pennsylvania station and travelled the long train ride to Washington.
When the taxi-driver who brought her out to Arlington had carried in her bags for her and driven away, Christine turned on the heating plant in the cellar and began to go all round the house taking the dust-sheets off the furniture. There was no point in doing that straight away, but she felt that she had to occupy herself with something to try and take away the dead disappointed feeling of her homecoming.
The little house was cold, and at the same time stuffy with disuse. It was very quiet. Still wearing her coat, Christine sat down on the stairs and thought about Tommie. He had fallen in love with her. He had loved her so much that he did not care whether she was married, nor whether she was honest enough to say if she loved him. She had been romantic and exciting to him. Now she was just any tired woman in her own home, taking off dust-sheets and waiting for the radiators to warm up, and she was not exciting to anybody, least of all to herself.
The bell rang. Mrs Meenehan was celebrating Christine’s home-coming by a ceremonious visit to the front door instead of one of her everyday appearances at the kitchen window.
‘I’ve got all your mail here,’ she said, when she had got over the first exclamations of welcome. ‘I got the mailman to give everything to me.’
‘Oh, you needn’t have –’
‘It was no bother, Catherine honey. I knew you’d want me to be in charge while you were away, and there’s not a day passed but I’ve been round the house checking up. You ask Daddy.’
Christine took the letters, wondering how many of them Mrs Meenehan had steamed open and stuck down again.
‘No, I won’t come inside,’ Mrs Meenehan said, making Christine feel that she should have asked her in. ‘I’m just dying to hear about your trip and how you found poor old England, but you look plenty tired right now. We’ll have a good long gabfest tomorrow. And where’s the Commander? I didn’t see him get out of the taxi with you.’
‘He’s staying in Panama a bit longer,’ Christine said. ‘I expect there’s a letter from him here about it. Oh yes, here it is. Excuse me. I must read it straight away.’ She began to shut the door imperceptibly, so that Mrs Meenehan, who was standing on the sill, might be pushed gently outside without knowing it.
Timmy was on the lawn barking at the strangeness of everything. ‘I brought my dog back with me,’ Christine said, when Mrs Meenehan was safely outside and the door was shut, too far for her to step in again and start talking about the dog.
‘Oh yes, I know,’ said Mrs Meenehan. ‘I saw him. We’ve already made friends.’ You never could tell her anything new.
The telephone rang while Christine was reading Vinson’s letter. ‘Hullo?’ She answered it abstractedly, still reading. ‘Oh … Tommie. Tommie, you promised you wouldn’t ring up. Vin isn’t here yet as a matter of fact, but if he had been –’
‘Well, he isn’t, so why worry? When’s he coming back?’
‘I’m just reading his letter. Let’s see…. About two weeks, he says.’
‘I see.’ The silence on the wire between them was just as if they had looked at each other.
Every day Christine told herself that she would not see Tommie any more, and every day she told him that, but it made no more difference than it had on the ship. She knew that she must be careful in Washington, where the slightest hint of scandal would fly round the Navy wives like a torch set to oilsoaked stubble, but Tommie’s rashness was infectious, and time and again she found herself doing the things that she knew were dangerous.
She knew that she should not visit the house where he was living alone, but she could not stop herself going there. He gave her a key, and she was waiting for him every evening when he came back from the college. It was late when she drove herself home. As she turned in at her driveway she would see the light go off in the bedroom where Mrs Meenehan had been staying awake to hear what time the car came back.
One night Christine did not go home at all, and after that she stayed every night with Tommie. It did not seem to matter any more. Nothing mattered, except the diminishing time that was left to them.
Tommie had taken over the house vacated by the American Professor who had taken his place at Nottingham. The house was in Georgetown, the old part of Washington through which Vinson had driven Christine when she first arrived, and wished that he could live at such a good address.
Christine thought what a waste it was that Vinson could never know that she had been living in Georgetown. Under other circumstances he would have been so impressed.
There was nothing impressive, however, about the tiny redbrick house whose flat roof was scraped eerily by the fingers of trees on a windy night. It was the thinnest house Christine had ever seen. It stood alone, looking like a slice cut out of a terrace, with a junk yard on one side and a short alley of consciously ‘cute’ little houses converted from slave quarters on the other. Because it stood on a slight slope it seemed to tilt a little, teetering in its thinness, as if it would one day fall across the entrance of the alley and imprison the embassy girls and colonels’ widows who lived in the cute little houses.
Inside the thin house the hall was narrow, the living-room was too narrow to hold a sofa, the kitchen was so narrow that you could reach the stove, the table, the shelves, the sink without moving your feet, and the bedroom upstairs was not much bigger than the bathroom. French windows only wide enough for one person to walk through at a time led from the living-room to the neglected garden, which was littered with odds and ends thrown over by the negroes in the junk yard. The back of the house looked even narrower than the front, because there was a playground across the street instead of buildings, and so the house stood out insecurely against the winter sky, like those emaciated villas that stand about bleakly on the Belgian coast.
It was a queer, inconvenient house with doors that opened the wrong way and some windows that would not open at all, very different from Christine’s neat, scientifically designed home in Arlington. Cramped and awkward and old, the Georgetown house was romantic. At night, when the cars had stopped going by, it was so quiet that you might have been in the country, except when the sirens of ambulances or fire-engines rushed through the narrow streets with their wail of calamity.
The little red house seemed to have been made for a secret love. You could not imagine anyone quite ordinary living there, running the vacuum cleaner every morning, spraying moth powder in the cupboards, reckoning up accounts, entertaining dull guests, or stepping sedately out of the white front door and down the three brick steps to go to a dull party. Christine felt that there must have been lovers there who had left their enchantment imprisoned between the narrow walls, just as she and Tommie would leave some of theirs when they had gone.
When they had gone….
Christine tried not to think about what would happen to her when her foolish romance was over. She would be on the downhill slope of thirty-five, her last clutch at youth irretrievably loosed on the day when Vinson came back and woke her from her dream to travel the ‘long and straight and dusty’ road with him. When the future came to trouble her she shut her mind to it, as a sleeper disturbed from a beautiful dream pulls the sheets over his head and shuts his eyes tightly to fight his way back into sleep again before the dream can escape.
Being in Washington with Tommie was like seeing America all over again, in quite a new way. When Vinson had first introduced her to his country he had been so anxious that she should like it, so watchful of her reactions that it had sometimes been a strain to summon enough enthusiasm and to say the right things to please him. But Tommie brought enough enthusiasm for them both, and it was easy to discover in his happy company just how many things she enjoyed about America.
Unlike some of the British who go to America with their backs up and spend their time telling people how much better things are done in England, Tommie had come over with an expectant heart, and he plunged into the life of America looking for enjoyment like an eager dog going after a stick.
With him, Christine went to all the places where she had never been with Vinson. Vinson had taken her sightseeing in the Capitol and the Monument and the memorials and museums and art galleries. He had taken her to Mount Vernon and to the home of Robert E. Lee. He had taken her to the Army and Navy Club among the old generals’ and admirals’ widows, and to reputable restaurants where you knew what kind of food you would get.
Tommie took her to dark Italian restaurants where the proprietor came and sat talking politics through a toothpick at your table, and you never knew what was in the minestrone. He took her to underground bars where all the men kept their hats on – including once the barman – and to a fish restaurant on the waterfront where you sat at a long table and joked with strangers over the fried shrimps, and out to a ‘Hot Shoppe’ where you could sit in your car while a Philippino waiter skipped out to you through the rain with a tray of food.
Christine had been wanting to go to one of these drive-in restaurants ever since she came to America, but Vinson liked to get his knees under a table when he ate. He never let her play jukeboxes, but Tommie wanted to play the jukebox wherever he found one. They would sit for hours in a waffle shop or a hamburger joint or a soda fountain putting nickels in the slot and being in love, while the over-amplified music and the chatter of teenagers lapped them round with the unsubtle noises of America.
Tommie said that some of the boys at the college snickered at him because he was English, so he began conscientiously to pepper his speech with what he thought were native expressions. He had a very English voice, unstressed, with the consonants casually slurred, so that words like ‘gee’ and ‘sure’ and ‘you’re telling me’ sounded very odd when he brought them carefully out. It made him happy, however, to think that he was talking American, and Americans themselves, always quick to be flattered by imitation, did not laugh when he said to them: ‘Look here – er – bud. I surely would be happy to have you have me introduce you to Mrs Gaegler.’
He said that at a cocktail party given by one of the college professors, to which he took Christine. She knew that she should not risk going with him, but she and Tommie were at that stage where caution has no meaning and the egotism of love sees love itself as a talisman against mishap. They had so little time left together. If Tommie must go to the party she could not let him go alone.
He stayed by her side all the time instead of going away and talking to the other men he knew, as Vinson would have done. They behaved very circumspectly, but Christine wondered if people could tell they were in love by looking at them. Once when Tommie touched her bare arm she thought that if she had been someone else watching them she would have known at once.
Tommie practised his American. When they were introduced to other guests, Christine said: ‘How do you do?’, which she had not given up even after nine months in America, but Tommie said: ‘Glad to know you’, or ‘I certainly am happy to meet you’, and repeated people’s names, just like an old hand.
However, when a surly-looking man arrived not quite sober from another cocktail party and Tommie brought out his: ‘Happy to meet you’, the man stuck out his jaw as if he were spoiling for a fight, and said: ‘Why should you be? You’ve never seen me before, and you’re never going to see me again. I’m leaving this goddamn town in two hours for Chicago. Why should you be happy to meet me?’
‘Well, I don’t know – dash it, my dear chap,’ stammered Tommie, surprised into being very English. ‘Bit of a setback,’ he said, as the man stumbled away to the bar. ‘I’ll have to rewrite my lines. Perhaps I – Gosh, darling, look. There’s a man wearing my regimental tie. Let’s go and talk to him and be English for a bit.’
‘Tommie, it doesn’t mean that he –’ Christine tried to detain him, but he was already half-way across the room, his limp more pronounced, as it always was when he had had a few drinks.
‘I see you were in my lot,’ Tommie said, holding out his hand.
‘How?’ said the man in the regimental tie. ‘How’s that again, sir?’
‘Your tie.’
The man’s baffled face broke into a beam. ‘Smooth, isn’t it? My wife bought it for me. The first one she’s bought I’ve been able to wear. Glad you like it.’
‘It’s a pattern I’ve grown fond of,’ Tommie said, leaning forward to examine the little label on the end of the tie, which said: ‘King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Genuine copy.’
Tommie wanted to see Christine’s home at Arlington. He said that he must be able to imagine her there after she had gone back. He added also that he wanted to know where to find her.
‘Oh, Tommie, don’t,’ she said. ‘Even if you’re joking. You know you promised that you wouldn’t try to see me after Vin gets back. I won’t go on with it. I can’t. You must leave me alone – please, darling, or I shan’t be able to get along. And something terrible might happen. Vin might shoot you, or shoot me, or anything. You don’t know what he’s like.’
‘Tell me,’ Tommie said. ‘Tell me more about the man Gaegler.’ He was always wanting to hear about Vinson. His curiosity about Christine’s husband was unnatural and almost morbid. Christine did not want to tell him anything. What she was doing to Vinson was bad enough without the added disloyalty of discussing him with her lover. Sometimes, when she felt a sudden panic about Vinson’s homecoming, she wanted desperately to tell Tommie everything, and to say to him with tears that he was all the things that Vinson was not; but she would not let herself.
‘Tell me more about how jealous he is,’ Tommie persisted. ‘Tell me about the time you went out with his brother.’
‘No. I wish I’d never said anything about that. I didn’t mean to. You’re so unfair, Tommie. You must make things worse this way. I won’t criticize Vin to you. I won’t, however much your male vanity wants me to. He’s my husband and I –’
‘The loyal wife,’ Tommie said, grinning. ‘A charming picture.’
‘That’s unfair too, but I suppose I deserve it. Please, Tommie, you must help me. I’ve got to get back to Vinson in three days. Don’t make it more difficult than it is already.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? I may have plans of my own.’
‘You promised! You promised me you’d stay away. Tommie, you must. It’s the only thing to do.’
‘That’s right,’ he said with his baffling look, at the same time innocent and bold. ‘I promised, didn’t I?’
‘I don’t trust you,’ Christine said in a small voice.
‘Why not?’ He opened his eyes very wide. ‘I’ve promised. So let me come and see your house, my darling. If you’re going back to get that dress for tonight, I’ll come with you. I must know everything about you, don’t you understand? How you’ve got your kitchen arranged, what your dressing-table is like, how the light will strike your face when you open the door in the morning to let Timmy out.’
Christine got up. ‘Let’s go now then,’ she said. She had known all along that she would take him. She had never been able to refuse him anything he wanted, and they only had three more days together.
It was Sunday. With any luck, the Meenehans would be in their rumpus room with the central heating and the television and Daddy’s cigar all going full blast. Christine stopped the car at the bottom of the lawn. If she did not take it into the driveway, perhaps Mrs Meenehan would not hear them arrive.
While she was in her bedroom getting her dress and Tommie was roaming round the house with a small smile on his face, Timmy, who had not lived in the house long enough to trust it, began to bark his misgivings on the lawn. Christine leaned out of the window and tried to shout at him in a whisper. He waved his plumed tail and went on barking.
‘Darling!’ Tommie called up the stairs. ‘There’s a woman with a face like a sweet potato pounding on the kitchen window. What do I do?’
‘Nothing. I’ll come down. And don’t call me darling, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I heard the doggie bark,’ Mrs Meenehan said, when Christine opened the back door, ‘so I came right over to bring you back for some coffee and cake. I have a very dear friend with me I want to have you know.’
‘I haven’t got very long,’ Christine said. ‘I just came home to get a dress and then I have to go straight back to the friends I’m staying with.’
‘You come right along with me now.’ If Mrs Meenehan issued an invitation, there was no getting out of it.
‘I have someone with me, though,’ Christine said, for Tommie was visible in the hall, inspecting Vinson’s ship prints. ‘My cousin – a cousin of mine from England. He happened to come to Washington for a few days on business. Wasn’t that lucky?’ She wondered if her voice sounded as wild and unnatural as it felt.
‘Bring him along. Hi there, Mr –’
‘Burns,’ said Tommie, coming into the kitchen.
‘So you’re Catherine’s cousin. My, my. Well, I’m sure the Commander will be pleased to hear she had someone to look after her while he’s away. These Navy men. Always here and there. I know what it is. When Daddy and I had command of the Walrus he was never home for but a few days at a time.’
The Meenehans’ rumpus room was in semi-darkness, with a variety show on the screen, Mr Meenehan in slippers and a lumber jacket, and Mrs Meenehan’s friend, very fat, wedged into an upright canvas chair, head on to the television set.
‘I certainly am happy to meet you,’ she told Christine. ‘Tessie here has told me so many antidotes about you.’ She was also happy to meet Tommie, and he said that he was happy to meet her, and asked her where she came from, which he had already discovered was a thing Americans greatly liked to be asked.
‘Tuscarawas County, Ohio,’ Mrs Grady said with a proud gleam in her protruding eyes. Christine and Tommie murmured unconvincingly – it was always hard to think of a suitable response when someone had told you their home town – and sat down in front of the television set, which was the only place where there were chairs.
Mrs Meenehan climbed up the basement stairs with her slip showing to get coffee and cake, although they said that they had only just had lunch. Mr Meenehan made a little conversation, with half his attention on the television show, and Mrs Grady told them some items about Tuscarawas County, Ohio, with music and song and eulogies about toothpaste sounding through her talk of schools and county jails. No one thought of turning the television down to make talk easier. The Meenehans preferred just to raise their voices.
Mrs Meenehan’s coffee was bitter and her cake like a loofah that has been left to dry out on the edge of the bath. Christine and Tommie ate and drank bravely, trying not to look at each other. With the return of his wife from the kitchen Mr Meenehan made no further attempt at conversation. It was Sunday, and he wanted to watch the television, so he went on watching it, chuckling sometimes to himself and slapping his thin knees.
When she had exhausted Tuscarawas County Mrs Grady did not have any more to say either. She preferred to sit and stare, storing impressions away behind her glaucaemic eyes to retail to the folks back home. Mrs Meenehan, however, was never at a loss for talk. Every time Christine was getting up to say they must go Mrs Meenehan started on a new topic and she had to sit down again. Tommie was very polite and patient, but he kept telegraphing looks to Christine which showed that he was thinking as she was, that they had so little time together, and must they waste it like this?
Mrs Meenehan was telling him about the trip she and Daddy had taken in Europe after he retired. ‘We rented a car over there,’ she said, when she had finished making it quite clear that Daddy had retired as a lieutenant commander, ‘the funniest little French automobile. You never saw anything like it.’
‘Tell about where you went,’ Mrs Grady said, nodding her fleshy head. ‘They’ll admire to hear that.’
‘Well, we went just about everywhere, you know. We covered France in five days. Don’t you think that was something? Then we went over the Alps to Italy. Quite a climb, though of course nothing to our Rockies. We were quite impressed with Italy. We hadn’t been too impressed with France, with all those children going about in black aprons, but when we got into Italy, and the people had some colour to their clothes – why, you might have been in the United States!’
‘That must have set you up no end,’ Tommie said seriously.
Mrs Grady, who had been looking speculatively at him for some time, shifted her weight in the chair and said: ‘You’re foreign, ain’t you? May I ask where you come from?’
‘England.’
‘Oh, fancy. And how long have you been over here?’
‘Let’s see – about a week.’
‘I suppose,’ said Mrs Grady, ‘you studied our language before you came over here. I think it’s wonderful that you are able to speak it so well.’
Christine stared at the television set. She dared not look at Tommie. They both stood up and made some excuse to go. When they had had their laugh out, doubled up and gasping behind Mr Meenehan’s toolshed, Christine realized that she had not laughed like that since she was married.
When they got into the house they began to laugh again, laughing and kissing each other in the hall. When Christine went to her bedroom to get the dress she had come for, Tommie followed her upstairs.
‘Plees,’ he said. ‘I do not spick the language so well – but I know how to say it in French.’ He said it.
‘Oh no, Tommie.’ Christine backed quickly away from the bed. ‘Not here. Please not here. Don’t you see, that’s the last, most awful thing we –’
He was much stronger. Even with his handicap it was never any use trying to struggle against Tommie. She was lost. This was the worst sin of all, and one that could never be forgotten. How could she ever again lie with Vinson on this bed and not remember Tommie? Was that what Tommie wanted?
‘What do people say at a time like this?’ It was their last evening together. ‘There must be something that people say that makes it easier to bear, or at least makes them able to realize that it really is good-bye. I can’t realize it.’
‘No, darling,’ Tommie said, ‘because it isn’t good-bye. All right, I know. Don’t say it. Don’t say: “You promised.” I know I did. I promised, and I am coming with you to New York tomorrow to try and persuade that chap to take over my place at the college here and let me have his. I haven’t said just how I’ll try, but I’ve said I’ll try. Well now, look. If he says yes, I’ll be in New York; you’ll be in Washington, two hundred and fifty miles apart. Do you honestly think that’s going to keep you and me away from each other? How can anything do that? It would be like trying to keep the two cut ends of a worm apart. And suppose the chap says no, then I’ll have to stay in Washington. How do you think we can avoid seeing each other?’
‘We could. We wouldn’t know the same people. We’d move in different circles.’
‘Move in different circles!’ He laughed, throwing his head back. ‘What an expression. My God, you are a Navy wife. I suppose the man Gaegler talks about “moving in the right circles”.’
‘Don’t be horrid, Tommie.’
‘Never will discuss him, will you? But I gather from things you’ve let slip that he’s a snob. Snobbish and selfish and conventional and jealous – and probably a bore. My God, Christine darling, you got yourself into a hell of a mess that day you sat on a bench in Grosvenor Square.’
‘No I didn’t. Vin isn’t like you think. My marriage isn’t any worse than most people’s. It would have been all right if I hadn’t met you.’
‘How can a marriage be all right unless it’s perfect?’
‘You don’t understand. You get fond of a person. You – you get used to them. If they have faults – or perhaps not faults, but things that just aren’t right for you – well, you do mind when you first discover them, but after a bit you get used to them and it doesn’t matter.’
‘It must matter. It must get worse and worse.’
‘No. You don’t understand. It isn’t like that. You don’t understand about marriage.’
‘I understand about your marriage,’ Tommie said. ‘It’s all washed up.’
‘It isn’t! Be quiet, Tommie.’
‘Christine darling, don’t snap my head off every time I mention divorce.’
‘Why not? I’ve told you Vin would never divorce me. He’s a Catholic.’
‘But would you get a divorce if you could?’
‘What’s the use of asking me that? I can’t.’
‘But would you?’ Tommie took hold of her shoulders painfully and made her look at him.
‘I couldn’t. Oh – one can’t. You get married, and you have to go on with it. Let me go. You’re hurting me.’
She turned away and went to look out of the glass door at the dark bare garden. Above the rooftops the sky was orange in the city’s glow, and two shafts of beacon light stood straight up from the airport across the river.
‘It’s like what Stevenson wrote about marriage,’ she said. ‘There can be no by-path meadows. “The road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave”.’
‘A dismal picture,’ Tommie said. ‘But, anyway, Stevenson didn’t mean it. He’d only been married about a year when he wrote it, and he was madly in love with his wife. She was full of sex and mystery, they say. Listen, darling.’ He came and stood behind her. ‘If it was you and me it wouldn’t be long and straight and dusty.’ He rested his chin on her shoulder and they looked out at the city night together. ‘I know I told you on the ship that I’d never ask a girl to marry me because of my tin leg, but that was just making an excuse. Trying to be noble, or something. If I’d met you it wouldn’t have mattered. Would you have married me if you’d met me before Vinson?’
Christine did not want to say yes. She was afraid to say it. But when he turned her round and saw her face he did not need an answer.
Christine was driving along the U.S. 1 highway to New York, where she was going to greet her husband and say good-bye to her lover. It should have been a very poignant drive, but Christine felt dead and without emotion, driving automatically, unable to think about the future towards which she was heading, the end of a dream. Tommie did not talk very much. He behaved as if this were a drive like any other. He played with the radio, trying all the different stations, sang a little out of tune, and seemed quite happy.
He should not have been like that. Christine glanced at his guileless face and was suspicious. Did it mean that to him this drive was not the end of the journey, that he was not going to try very hard to persuade the other English professor to change places with him, or that even if he did, he was not going to let two hundred and fifty miles keep him away from Christine?
Christine was afraid. She did not trust Tommie not to write to her, although she had told him that Vinson was quite capable of opening her letters if his suspicions were aroused. She did not trust him not to ring her up. He might even turn up at Arlington with a charming smile and an innocent alibi that would not deceive Vinson for a moment. It would be terrible, unthinkable. Christine was afraid of what Tommie might do to the lives of all three of them, yet at the same time she could not help cherishing at the back of her mind the thought that he would still be in America and that she might see him again after all.
When Jerry had not written to her for two years, the thought that he was somewhere in the world and that she might see him again had been something to cling to. After he was killed she realized how much store she had set by that hope. She and Tommie were parting, for ever, she thought, but he was not dead. He would still be there, just in case …
One side of her was glad of that; the other feared it. She looked again at Tommie, grinning at the mournful crooning of an amateur on the radio. He should have been a pathetic person, a person you could feel sorry for because he had lost a leg and lost a girl who would not wait the war out for him and lost his chance of the Army career he had always wanted, but he was not pathetic. You could not be sorry for him. You could only fall in love with him and be a little sorry for yourself and afraid of his power to complicate the future.
Timmy, who did not like riding in the back of the car, jumped over to the front seat and turned Christine’s thoughts to the problems of the more immediate future. She had not written to Vinson that she was bringing the dog over. If he was going to be angry about it, there was no point in letting him foster his anger beforehand. She had not meant to bring Timmy to New York. Vinson would be pleased to see her at the pier, and she was not going to spoil that at least, but when she had shut Timmy in the house he had begun to jump up at the window and knock down plants as soon as he heard the car start up, so she had to go back and bring him with her.
She would not take him on to the dock. That would be too much. Vinson might look for her from the ship and see Timmy and start to get angry before she had a chance to explain. She would leave him in the car and try to find some way of breaking it to Vinson while he was being happy to see her and glad to be home. But however happy he was to see her, whatever words she found to tell him about Timmy, Vinson was sure to be angry. She had disobeyed him flatly, as she had seldom done before. Vinson had told her not to bring the dog from England, and she had brought him. There was going to be trouble.
There was going to be trouble too if she did not get to New York on time. Vinson hated her to be late. He was never late himself. He was always ready much too early and he could not understand that circumstances could ever make anyone else late. He would certainly not understand these circumstances, because she could not tell them to him. She was late because when she had finished getting her home ready for Vinson’s arrival and had gone to the little red house to fetch Tommie he had not been ready and he would not hurry.
If she was late in New York and Vinson had to wait for her he would be angry already before she told him about the dog. She must not be late.
‘You’re driving awfully fast,’ Tommie said. ‘Do you always go at this speed with this much traffic about?’
‘We’re late,’ Christine said. ‘It’s all right. I’m a better driver than any man ever gives me credit for. I wish this horrible great truck would let me pass. It’s been holding us up for miles.’
‘You’re thinking about the man Gaegler,’ Tommie said. ‘Hurrying to meet him. Oh well.’
‘If I obeyed my instincts I’d be crawling,’ Christine looked at him. He was smiling. She would never forget what he looked like. She said: ‘You are the most attractive man I ever met.’
He leaned across to see her face in the driving mirror. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘you’re beautiful.’
‘You are, and you know when you’re most beautiful? It’s when I tell you you are.’
If she had not turned her eyes to look at him in the mirror she might have seen a split second sooner the car racing towards her in the middle of the road as she pulled out to pass the big truck…. If she had not swerved to the right away from the other car it might have avoided her…. If she had speeded up to get past in time…. What was the use of these thoughts chasing round in her brain after the truck had crumpled the side of her car like tinfoil, and she stood unhurt by the side of the road, while the clustering aftermath of an accident gathered round her? Someone had kept Timmy alive for half an hour, but there was nothing anyone could do for Tommie.