SEVERAL weeks passed. I saw little enough of Dottie, and nothing of Henry, except once he drove down to go into a huddle with Dottie over the estimates. He left again without even waiting for a meal, but Dottie was far too excited to notice. It was clear, without anything specific being said, that he had decided to include himself in.
I was kept busy following my complex schedule; sometimes I felt as if David and I were moving parts in some kind of involved puzzle—one of those how-to-get-from-A-to-Z-by-the-longest-possible-route things. I settled into the routine as well as I could, and found it just worked, though the transition from the frowsty back bedroom at the Stephenses to the ever-colder air in the Davieses’ back garden gave David the first cold of his life. This made for worse complications, since Alf was appalled at the idea that Eleanor might catch this cold and die. So for several days David, muffled up to the eyebrows, had to travel round the countryside in the back seat of Dottie’s car. We arranged a sort of baby-trap of fish-netting over the top of the carry-cot so that he couldn’t roll out, but in any case he slept most of the time; when Dottie stopped somewhere for food, usually frugally at a country café or pub, she would get the bottle out of the thermos and feed him on her knee, stuffing a few spoonfuls of mashed vegetables or rice pudding into his mouth from her own dish for good measure. I’m sure that David’s cast-iron stomach and willingness to eat absolutely anything dates from those days when he had to fit willy-nilly into his godmother’s business life.
In the evenings we would both stagger home in a state of near-exhaustion, and usually Dottie would prepare a scratch meal while I crawled into a bath with David and got him off to bed. Really, if he had been a difficult baby in any way I simply don’t know how we’d have managed, but he was quite angelic and didn’t seem to mind what sort of hours he kept or how many of them were spent in different localities or bumping about in strange cars.
Then Dottie and I would sit down together by the fire (which in those rushed weeks I often treacherously wished was a simple electric one which didn’t need raking out, laying and lighting) with our suppers on our knees and the radio, with luck, playing soft, soothing music, and I would listen to her day’s doings. (There was little enough to relate to her of mine, in which the dramatic highlight was likely to be something like Mufferpaws having misbehaved under Mr. Stephens’ chair, leading to a horrible misunderstanding, or Eleanor cutting a tooth.)
I had to hand it to Dottie. She really was getting down to cases. I was amazed by how many sources of talent she had run to earth in how short a time. One person interested in some form of handicraft seemed to lead to another. At first, whenever she enquired for people who could make things, she was directed to Old Mrs. Crabbe who knitted lovely little jumpers, or Miss Dogsbody who was famous for her upside-down cake at bring-and-buys. Far from turning up her nose at these suggestions, she always meticulously followed them up; sitting in Mrs. Crabbe’s parlour watching her hands flash nimbly over half-finished weeny garments, her quick eye would be roving the walls and corners; and there, sure enough, she might see a rather ghastly, but beautifully executed, embroidered picture or firescreen or cushion-cover. This she would admire, and be told that this was just something Mrs. Crabbe’s married daughter did ‘to fill her hands’ while she watched the telly in the evenings. So then Dottie would repair to the home of Mrs. Crabbe’s married daughter, and ask whether she would be prepared to alter her style a little—relinquish the nasturtiums and hollyhocks and crinoline ladies, and embroider according to a design which Dottie would supply. When Mrs. Crabbe’s daughter learned that there would be money in this which could be made in her spare time, she agreed readily. So then Dottie would make a note in her little ABC notebook under E for Embroidery, and come home and tell me: ‘Now what I’ve got to look out for is an artist who can design small modern tapestries. They’re all the rage now, in London—I saw a marvellous wall decoration a few weeks ago in a friend’s flat which turned out to be a piece of embroidery based on a small Sutherland.’
‘Sew-your-own-Coventry-Cathedral,’ I suggested.
‘Don’t mock,’ she said severely. ‘It’ll sell.’
She said the same of pictures made of scraps of material and nylon stockings, which a middle-aged maiden lady in the district whose talents had so far been limited to making patchwork tea-cosies had rather doubtfully agreed she would try her hand at; and dolls made of polished straw or corn-cobs and dried leaves, ‘in the tradition of the American craftsmen’, as Dottie loftily put it; and children’s basket-chairs with hoods, which the old basket-maker she had tracked down had told her he’d almost forgotten how to make because there was no demand for them.
But all these were small fry. Pictures, and dolls would not fill the shop, or our pockets. She had to lay on ‘the hard stuff’ as she called it. So she asked round and consulted local suppliers and telephone directories and all sorts of other ingenious sources, and made a list of all the professional carpenters, potters, weavers, blacksmiths and glass-blowers she could find out about. Actually there were no glass-blowers, which was a heavy blow to her; the nearest glass foundry was in the Midlands, and she gloomily supposed they would be working full-blast mass-producing objects of singular monotony and hideousness, like the vases which flourished in the Davieses’ apartment, all without a flaw or a sign of having been touched by a warm, skilful human hand (or rather, blown into by a warm human mouth). However, doggedly determined, she set off one morning in the car to drive North and see if she couldn’t find some smallish factory with a few craftsmen left who might blow her some nice thick lopsided bubbly objects with silken textured sides and ‘that marvellous rough blob at the bottom where they’ve been broken off the pipe’, which she could display and sell as works of the glass-blowers’ art. I watched her go with a sense of affection and pride, but also a feeling of despair; she cared so desperately—not just about the shop, but about this whole concept she’d developed, this hatred of mass-production, the almost sensuous desire to propagate the work of skilled hands. I knew she was struggling against the tide, and I felt certain that, well as she had done in a small way so far, today she was doomed to disappointment. Lost in the grimy stews of the industrial Midlands, she might see and realise what she was actually up against; they might laugh at her; she might, probably would, come back that night worn out and with a destructive inkling—which I had had from the outset—that, however enthusiastically we might start out, however noble our aims or hard our efforts, by the very nature of our times, our enterprise was doomed.
Sure enough, she arrived back at eleven p.m., desperately stiff and weary, and with nothing concrete to show for it except one slender hope. I’d kept supper for her, and as she sat by the fire, almost too tired to eat it, sipping a much-needed whisky and relating her story with her head back and her eyes closed, she told me that, in the course of as dismal and depressing a day as I had foreseen for her, she had met one man with broken veins in his cheeks and lips like a trumpeter who said he had once worked for a private foundry on the outskirts of Birmingham where what he called ‘glass artists’ used to come in on Saturday afternoons before the fires had cooled, and ‘blow all manner of queer things, animals and that sometimes, but other times they just blowed lumps’. This sounded exactly what Dottie wanted, but of course it was too late by then to go all the way across to Brum, so she planned to go up there in a day or two, and see if she could find the place, if it still existed. ‘Probably doesn’t,’ she said in a flat, weary voice. ‘It’s probably a supermarket or a “proper” factory by now. That’s what that ex-craftsman called the soulless junk-producing monolith where he works now—a proper factory.’
She filled the next few days with visits closer at hand, though often she would drive fifty miles to talk to a craftsman she’d heard of in a distant village; sometimes she would spend hours just trying to find their workshops or cottages; some of the villages were even so small they were not to be found on any map, and these, she said, were where one frequently turned up the best people; it was as if the less contact they had with the world, the less likely the world was to have laid its corruptive finger on them and taken away their skills. One day she drove all the way to the Cotswolds to unearth an old man whose carving she’d seen in a junk-shop in Esher. This time she came back elated. ‘Gloucestershire’s the place!’ she exclaimed happily, tucking into a vast meal at 10 p.m. (Her appetite fluctuated according to the sort of people she’d met during the day.) ‘I tell you, the further away from the big city centres they are, the better they work, and the nicer they are, too. Simple, unspoiled, gentle, kind, marvellous, marvellous people. We’re ruining ourselves, Jane, that’s what we’re doing, we poor city idiots, clogging our bodies with poisons and cramming our souls and hands with ugliness. That old man today made me feel ashamed of myself, ashamed of my slick silly clothes, ashamed of the way I talk and the way I think and with practically everything about the way I live except the fact that some drive in me had led me to be sitting there with him, drinking cider and handling his beautiful work. You know? His tools alone, the clutter of old, worn, practical, creative tools on his work bench, was something you could paint or photograph from a hundred angles and have a picture worth hanging on your wall every time. And the quiet there—the utter peace! Every single thing in his cottage was old and well-worn and lovely to touch—mellow, smooth, integrated. I could have stayed there forever. Well,’ catching my eye, ‘of course that’s not true, but the fact that I couldn’t, means there’s something wrong with me. That old man had something that—’ She put a big chunk of stewed lamb into her mouth and chewed it blissfully. ‘Food,’ she said, ‘is wonderful when you’ve earned it. Oh, I should have been a farmer’s boy-oy-oy … have we any beer? No, don’t laugh at me. Or, yes, you may if you like. I don’t care. The old man has agreed to make tables for us. Not just ordinary tables. Irregular nests, each one a slightly different shape; and little kidney-shaped ones for children, with the chairs to match. In oak and pine and rosewood. He does the finish himself—satin. No varnish. Wait till you see what he gave me—a wonderful knife-box, with a lid that fits exactly like a glove. Just to open and close it gives one a sensual thrill. He carves a little thistle on all his work, it’s his trade-mark, like Grinling Gibbons’ mouse.’
She set off for Birmingham at the crack of dawn next day, before I was even awake, and despite the fact that she’d had only about five hours’ sleep. I couldn’t help worrying about her driving up the M1 like that, in case she got sleepy, but she’d gone by the time I thought of warning her to take a thermos of coffee. I went off to work as usual, and was in the middle of serving a little boy with a box of liquorice allsorts when the post-office door opened and in walked Toby.
‘Three tuppence-ha’penny stamps and a Mars Bar,’ he said without batting an eye.
I served him with a straight face and a heart nearly bursting with joy, while Mrs. Stephens looked at him curiously from behind the jars. He was subtly changed once again. His clothes were better—gone the threadbare corduroy jacket and the jeans-like trousers, and in their place a nice pair of off-the-peg flannels and a very nice polo-neck sweater. My eyes slid carelessly past this to his hair, which happily he had not allowed to grow to a fashionable length, and then snapped back again sharply. The sweater definitely had a hand-knitted look.
‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, much to Mrs. Stephens’ surprise.
‘Ah-ha! Lost none of our acuity, I notice,’ he remarked, unpeeling the Mars Bar and taking a bite out of it. ‘Want a bit?’
‘No thanks, I want to know where you got that sweater.’
‘Well, as you obviously spotted, it was knitted for me.’
‘Who by?’
‘We literate authors say, by whom? What are you doing in here?’
‘What are you? And don’t change the subject.’
‘If you mean, how did I know where to look for you, Billie told me. She’s a great admirer of yours—and mine, by the way. I’ve got lots to tell you. When do you get off?’
‘From here, at opening time. Then I move across to the local.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You are a busy girl,’ he said in a disturbed tone. He lowered his voice. ‘Is all this really necessary?’
‘And how.’
‘Where’s the baby?’
I gestured over my shoulder. Several customers were waiting. Toby took the hint. I’ll wait for you in the Swan,’ he said, and edged to the door. There he stopped and, while I was trying to listen to the next customer’s order, distracted me by a series of gestures indicating that the maker of the sweater was a luscious, shapely siren. With a last erotic roll of his eyes he went out, but stood for some time peering through the window making faces at me. He sloped off at last, leaving me to cope with my feelings and a crowd of customers and Mrs. Stephens’ curiosity.
‘Friend of yours, dear?’ she asked as soon as there was the smallest opportunity.
‘Yes, a very old friend.’
‘He doesn’t look very well-fed,’ she remarked.
‘He’s a writer.’ I knew that, to Mrs. Stephens, that would be self-explanatory.
‘Ah! I see,’ she said wisely.
At 11.30 I carted the cot, which seemed to grow heavier every day, across the road. Christmas was hard upon us, and the pub was thickly festooned with aged paper-chains and fretted bells and balls, with a daily-increasing number of cards tacked to the edge of the awning above the bar. Toby jumped up as I came back in, lugging the cot, and helped me to set it on one of the benches. He stood for some time then, staring down at David, who stared back up at him.
‘He’s huge,’ he said at last in a rather subdued voice.
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes … it’s just that …’
‘What?’
‘I’m missing so much of him.’
I glanced at him quickly. If he meant this as it sounded, it was perhaps the nicest thing that had been said to me for some time.
He seemed to pull his eyes away from the baby and said to me, ‘Have you time for a quick one before you start serving them?’
The pub was almost empty still, so I ducked under the bar and got us both a drink. As I passed him his, Toby leaned across the bar and kissed me quickly. ‘You,’ he said gently.
‘Yes, me,’ I said with too much briskness because I instantly wanted to be in bed with him. ‘Now what about this sweater?’
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Watch closely.’ He reached into the neck of the sweater and slowly drew out a girlie magazine with the head and naked bosom of a gorgeous blonde on its cover. By the time he’d completely withdrawn it it concealed his own face and looked as if the girl were emerging from the polo neck.
‘Brilliant,’ I said sourly. ‘She can’t even knit for herself, apparently. Come on, who was it?’
‘Well, she’s very young—seventeen as a matter of fact. The most delectable age. She’s trim and slim and small and red-headed and she wears skirts up to here and bells round her ankles …’
‘Stop making it up.’
‘But it’s true! Every word. As a matter of fact, she’s Billie Lee’s daughter.’
This rang so true that suddenly I was really jealous. I knew—I hoped—I had no cause to be, but I was. How dared she knit him a sweater? What could be more intimate, more of a declaration? The fact of my own incapacity in this field made things worse.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Whistler.’
‘Her real name is Melinda or something frightful, but she’s always called Whistler. And don’t ask what that makes Billie. She’s rather had that joke.’
‘And she’s keen on you—obviously.’
‘Why obviously?’
‘Well I mean to say! It’s a cable-stitch.’
He looked blank for a minute, then burst out laughing. ‘Well, as it happens she is a bit struck. They get these crushes at that age. I go round to Billie’s quite a bit—she’s not just an agent to me, she’s much more a friend and believe me, she’s been quite wonderful through many a tight spot in the last year. I don’t think I’d ever have finished the first novel if she hadn’t been around to push me.’
‘I’m sure. Now about Whistler, of all the bloody silly names.’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘I am like it. Didn’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘Well you’ve never given me cause before.’
‘Sad, but true. I can’t even say “that’s all you know”.’
‘Are you struck?’
‘Madly. She’s young, tender, dewy-eyed …’
‘Shut up.’
‘Darling!’
‘Sorry. Just tell me the facts.’
He looked into my eyes and then down into his drink. ‘Facts. You know I’m a man of fiction. But she’s very pretty—that’s a fact.’
I left him to serve a customer. My eyes were burning. I felt angry and miserable. I was more angry with myself than with him, because what was it all about, what was I living alone for, and not making demands on him, and trying to make myself believe in leaving each other free, if the second I thought the unthinkable—that he might, just might, in my absence look at another woman—my possessiveness came back with such force that the words ‘He’s mine, he’s mine, he’s mine,’ were beating through my brain like the very tides of my blood, and I wanted to tear the sweater off his back and throw it into the pretty face of its loving maker? I wanted to hang a label round his neck saying ‘Taken’ and chain him to my bedpost and never let him out of my sight again. And from these primitive feelings I knew that I had no more cured myself of wanting to own him than if I had just grabbed him and held onto him right at the beginning.
When I went back to him, it was as if, by silent mutual agreement, we had decided to drop the subject. He had meant it as a sort of teasing game and I couldn’t take it like that so we dropped it. He told me things were going well; he’d sold a short story to the Saturday Evening Post, which was at one time the absolute height of his ambition, and he’d started on another novel. He said Billie had persuaded him to leave the Holland Park basement and move to a more habitable abode, so he’d got a big studio-room for himself in a house in Earl’s Court—‘Lovely area, such variety! Food, shops, newspapers, nationalities—you name it, we’ve got it. All the vices and virtues catered for—the world and the city in microcosm. The house I live in is a micro-microcosm.’
‘Like the house in Fulham.’
‘God, no! Thank heaven, it’s a good step up from that. The room’s big and gaunt and practically empty, but it’s very much what I wanted. Now I’m sort of into the way of working properly, I mean so many hours every day, I don’t feel I have to keep my surroundings quite so austere. You remember how I wouldn’t let myself have a radio or pictures or even books except for what I needed for reference and a few of the classics? It was necessary then, or I’d have sat about all day letting myself fall into any distraction that offered itself. You know I’m naturally bone bloody idle. But one can get into a saving routine, a habit of work, and then you’re like a cured alcoholic, you’re afraid to backslide, you remember the horror of not working and you’re afraid to let a day drift by … I’ve done a tremendous bulk of work in the last nine months or so, and some of it’s beginning to sell, and now Billie makes me keep it up by ringing me every few days to ask how many pages I’ve written. But it’s not so essential any more—I can do it for myself. So I’m free to let myself have some of the amenities I’ve never had but always wanted.’
‘Here, Jane! Don’t you work for us any more, girl?’
I rushed through into the Public to help Alf with an apologetic air, but kept nipping back whenever I could to the end of the bar in the Saloon to hear the next instalment. Between midday and 2.30 I caught up on all his news. I heard about the few things he’d carefully bought for himself in markets and antique shops (‘Well, junk shops really, I can’t run to antique-shop prices, even the Earl’s Court Road ones.’) I heard the book was coming out in January, that the next was half-finished. I heard some very funny stories about other people living in the house. And I heard about John.
‘You know, I often wonder what will become of John. After all, what’s the future for a chap like him? He’ll never marry, never have a proper home; he’s so gentle and innocent he’ll never really get on in the world of night-club bands and so on. And I do care about the old black bastard, I mean I’ll never forget how he mothered the pair of us when we were all imprisoned together in that grim house. And how we hurt him by falling in love! I think he was half in love with both of us. In the end he completely got over any jealousy and only wanted us to marry and be happy. I never knew a queer could be so natural in his outlook towards marriage and children. He hasn’t a clue, you know, that there’s anything wrong with him, I don’t suppose he’s ever heard of queerdom or would be anything but horrified if anyone told him he wasn’t normal. I hope to Christ nobody ever does! I try to see him as often as I can. He always asks wistfully about you and the baby; he can’t understand why we’re not together.’ He took hold of my forefinger and pushed at the nail with his thumb and muttered, ‘When I talk to John and sort of soak up some of his simplicity about love and babies, I can’t understand why myself.’ He looked up at me with that utter candour that came over him whenever he wasn’t fooling around. ‘Would you like to? I mean, shall we?’
I stared at him. I should say no, because I could see that he was functioning under John’s influence and that he, by himself, was not sure. I myself was not entirely sure—of him. Would he really be able to love the baby and forget it wasn’t his? Would he be able to work with a wife and child in the house? Would he be able to keep us, or endure not being able to keep us, and my having to help? I should say no … but what if he never asked again?
In the space of those few seconds, other urgent considerations rushed through my mind. I had never, till now, thought for one moment of the possibility of his meeting someone else. But now I thought I’d been a fool. Toby was hardly suited to a monastic existence, however he might be disciplining himself; he was a very normal, hot-blooded man, and as he wasn’t getting it from me, where was he to get it? He couldn’t go on not getting it forever. Sooner or later he’d form a relationship, probably meaning it to be one of those transient oh-be-joyful things that goes up like a rocket and leaves nothing but a gratifying smell of spent sulphur in the air afterwards; but knowing Toby, it might very well not stay like that, because he wasn’t that kind; if he liked the girl well enough to make love to her in the first place, he probably liked her enough to get really involved later on. And if he got really involved with any other woman I would want to kill the pair of them, but that wouldn’t help much, since it would be entirely my own responsibility. Especially now that he’d actually asked me in so many words.
‘Toby,’ I began carefully.
‘Last orders, please!’
We looked at each other and laughed as the rush to the counter began. ‘The finality of that!’ said Toby. ‘Nothing on earth should sound that final.’