THINGS went back to being the way they’d been before. Well, not quite, but it was a pretty good surface imitation. David got better; he had lost three pounds and Dottie said his new slimness became him, but I worked on him night and day to put it back, filling him with cereals laced with butter and cocoa, chocolate biscuits and any other fattening things I could think of. I understood for the first time Alf Davies’s behaviour towards Eleanor—now every slightest sound sent me rocketting to David’s side, and I realised how fantastically carefree and almost unreal my motherhood had been until now—how can you be a mother if you’ve never had a moment’s worry or fear?
Dottie’s preoccupation with the shop continued as before, in fact she intensified her activities to a point where I began to wonder anxiously whether she wasn’t seriously overdoing it. She drove about the countryside like a maniac, seeing people, ordering samples, drawing up contracts; on other days she would spend every daylight hour in the shop itself, supervising and even helping with the redecorations. She would usually arrive home at night too tired to eat. It looked to me like a deliberate campaign to keep herself too busy to think. She never spoke about whatever it was that had happened. There were other areas of silence, too. For instance, she had completely stopped her occasional outbursts of sexy-joke-sessions about men. Men as men were never mentioned. If she missed them in her life she never hinted at it any more.
Henry had to be around more and more frequently, and quite soon he found himself a little flat in a new block on the outskirts of the village, an excrescence on the landscape which Dottie had frequently deplored; it was, by village standards, a miniature skyscraper, built by the local council to give housing mainly to ‘immigrants’ (to the locality, not the country) who were employed at a new little factory nearby—a concession by the village to the needs of the century, to whit industry to bring in money and restrain some of its own young people from the otherwise inevitable drift to the bigger towns. Henry invited us to his flat as soon as he’d settled in. He wasn’t over-excited about it, but seemed to think it quite adequate. Dottie, however, as I could plainly see, was aesthetically outraged.
She hid her feelings from Henry, and pretended to admire, though temperately, his arrangement of the highly nondescript and utilitarian furniture (which came with the flat) and the view from the fourth-floor windows over the as yet unsullied countryside. He gave us a rather touching self-cooked meal of omelettes and tinned soup, and we sat around afterwards discussing the shop; but I could see Dottie was hard put to it to hold her peace and behave as if nothing were wrong. As soon as we were on our way home, out it burst.
‘How could he live in a place like that!—an egg-box. Those stone stairs and landings! And the front doors, all the same colour! You can hear the people in the next flat breathing! How doesn’t he want to scream?’
‘But it suits him fine. It’s convenient, modern—’
‘He’s got no right to be suited by it! Nobody has,’ she added lamely, trying to make it a matter of general principle. But something very personal in her anger with Henry made me murmur, my curiosity awakened:
‘What sort of place do you think he ought to have?’
She didn’t fall into that one, though. She merely said shortly, ‘Something very different from that.’ I sighed silently, balked. I had thought she might unwarily describe the sort of characterful dwelling which only she could devise for him, and then I would have known for sure she was in love with him, instead of only suspecting it.
His feelings about her were even harder to determine. The little signs and symptoms I had observed at the beginning—his bemused expression, the way his eyes would fix themselves to some part of her and have to be wrenched away, the sudden spasms of nervousness and inclination to escape—all these were now absent. When they were together, a more practical, mundane, down-to-earth business relationship could not have been imagined. They seldom even laughed in each other’s company, although their now entirely mutual enthusiasm for the project should surely have generated the kind of excitement which, in their ‘shop’ talks, would inevitably have led to laughter. It was left to me to listen to, and appreciate, Dottie’s witty stories about her often bizarre encounters, setbacks and small triumphs; if Henry got to hear about them, it was from me. Sometimes I’d repeat, as well as I could, some anecdote of Dottie’s in front of her, presaged with the words: ‘Did you tell Henry about …?’ Sometimes even my pale re-telling could make Henry’s quiet, withdrawn, rather square features burst into one of his delightful smiles; then he would say, ‘No, she didn’t tell me.’ Dottie would remark crisply on these occasions, ‘It was only a silly fringe-thing, not important enough to waste your time with.’
Looking for signs of love, I could find only indeterminate negative ones. Why should two people who were really indifferent to each other, go to such pains to display their indifference? Why should Henry so seldom come to my place any more for friendly evenings, why were all meetings so strictly business? And why, one evening when he did come and when a 40-mile-an-hour gale, blowing mixed snow and rain parallel to the ground, suddenly developed, which should have made sleeping on our sofa the natural thing to do, did he refuse all my blandishments and insist upon climbing into his car and struggling back to the other side of the village to his own place? Dottie’s behaviour on that occasion was very odd. She said nothing, but when I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking I had heard a noise from David’s room, and went in to him, I found her sitting there in a chair by his cot. She had fallen asleep, and when the passage light fell on her face she started awake with a look of guilty dismay, as if she’d been caught out in an act of complete self-revelation. I could not just pass over this because my first thought was that some untoward indication from David must have brought her in; but when challenged, she simply said, ‘You know I love this little boy very much and there are moments when I like to be with him, even if he is fast asleep.’ It was a very simple—perhaps over-simple—matter to sub this down to ‘Tonight I needed to be near to someone I loved.’ But there was no way of being sure about anything, except that if they did care for each other, things were not progressing in any kind of positive direction. This in itself was a contra-indication, because it implied some impediment, and although I actively wracked my brains I couldn’t imagine what this could possibly be.
I am not by nature as interested in other people’s affairs as the foregoing would indicate. I, too, was looking for a kind of sublimation … I infinitely preferred to occupy my mind with Dottie’s problems in this field than be forced to face up to, analyse and deal with my own.
My own all but passionate devotion for Henry, kindled abruptly during David’s illness, did not survive it, though it left a very warm residue; his relationship with me was certainly a very pleasant one for us both, easy, friendly and affectionate. I liked him, in fact, more and more as I came to understand his strangely withdrawn temperament better and to perceive the sterling qualities of reliability, kindliness and dry humour that lay hidden. What I never could understand was why the façade was so necessary to him, why the wit and warmth had to be winkled out of him or observed in flashes when it slipped out unawares.
And meanwhile, what of Toby?
I heard nothing from him, did nothing about him—except feel a good deal. The predominant feeling was of bewilderment. I didn’t know what had happened, but something had: something serious, moreover, and possibly (though I was too afraid of the thought of this to countenance it) even permanent. He was no longer the constant warm, secure presence bolstering up my life; he came and went, as it were, in my thoughts, and I could no longer get any real sense of security from summoning him to my mind and talking to him there. It was as if he had gone away from me and came back only intermittently, and uncertainly at that. The two-way current of love which had been flowing circuitously between us for over a year, seemed now somehow to have been damaged.
It wasn’t of course until this happened that I fully realised how heavily I’d been depending on him all the time I’d been living alone. I was forced to the conclusion at last that I had not, in essence, been living alone at all until now. Now I was. Dottie hardly counted. True, she was company of a sort; but our separate, private preoccupations, so sedulously kept secret from each other, prevented any real sense of intimacy. I missed her; I missed Toby—that is, I missed what I had had with both of them. Now I really and truly felt alone for the first time since loving Toby, and it was paralysing in its power to frighten and demoralise me.
Late one cold mid-February afternoon, before opening time, I popped next door from Mrs. Stephens’ to our shop to see how things were going. I used to go in about once a week, and could usually perceive a decided advance. To tell the truth, I personally had been so little connected with the shop that the whole project still had an aura of unreality for me; my weekly visits there were partly therapeutic, to remind myself that very soon life would change again and I would find myself transmogrified into a shopkeeper.
The premises were nearly ready; a drastic change had been wrought since the first time we’d gone in there. Many of the features Dottie had envisaged had come to pass: the removal of the counter, the scraped and polished floorboards, the refurbished fireplace, the clean paint and some rather startling but decidedly effective wallpaper. Strip-lighting had been installed, and did not look at all out of place. Henry’s practicality had triumphed with regard to the beams, damp-course and various other matters; he had also insisted upon a mild form of central heating. Before a single saleable item was installed, the shop was already radically different from any other interior in the village, especially on a dark, frozen winter’s afternoon: warm where others were chilly and damp; white-bright where others were gloomy; discreetly exuding an atmosphere of London where the rest huddled in unrepentant musty parochialism.
Dottie was there, a vivid electric-blue spark jumping from point to point. She had begun to dress very smartly again lately—to match the shop, she said, or perhaps it was to match the brittle, businesswoman character she was developing. When she saw me she darted over, and took me through to the back to see the strip-pine tressel-counters which had just arrived.
‘The workers will be out in three days,’ she said, rubbing her hands. ‘That’s nearly a week inside their original estimate. Have you the faintest idea of how miraculous that is these days? Of course it’s all my doing. I’ve been a thorn in their sides, a remorseless goad. No threats, nothing so crude—just my constant, infuriating presence, lightly, gaily, charmingly telling them how it could be done quicker and better, fore-stalling their inefficiencies, subtly refusing them tea except as a reward—and, of course, dishing out discreet but generous bonuses for extra-quick work. They hate me. Never mind—it’s done, and one week from this very day we open as a going enterprise.’
‘A week!’ I was taken aback. It wasn’t that I liked either of my present jobs very much, and as David grew older it was proving a very difficult and taxing routine; but change scares me; I can never foresee myself fitting into a new situation, and to leave an old one, however uncongenial, is always a wrench. ‘I’d better give my notice in, then—I suppose.’
‘Good Lord, yes! Haven’t you done that yet? I wish you were free now! All the goods are going to start arriving tomorrow, Henry’s bringing some and I’ve hired a van for the farther-afield stuff, and what would be grand is if you could get a day off and help me sort it all out and arrange it.’ This appealed to me strongly, and I promised to try to get off at least for some hours on the following Saturday morning. Then on Sunday we could work together all day until I had to go into the Swan for the evening.
‘Do you have to work out your notice? Couldn’t you just quit?’
‘Not really. Alf and Mrs. Stephens have been so nice.’
‘Rubbish! You’ve earned it.’
‘I’ve earned my wages. Not necessarily all the extras, putting up with David and so on.’
‘“Putting up with David”, as you call it, is a privilege.’
I said nothing to this. The fact was, if she had but noticed, David was no longer quite the angel-baby he had been to begin with. At eight months old he was rapidly developing a will and a personality very often at odds with what I required of him in the way of co-operative sleeping, eating and travelling. He had now come to the conclusion that what I wanted him to do was not always what he wanted; and when this happened he knew how to express his opposition unmistakably, both vocally and physically. I hadn’t liked to draw Dottie’s attention to the fact that he now employed such techniques as biting, kicking and hair-pulling to obtain his own way. His screaming she must have noticed, but chose to ignore. She was so busy lately, and so seldom at home at his bedtime, that this was not impossible for her.
Sometimes, when I was tired after a long difficult day and he refused to go quietly to sleep at bedtime, I was startled and alarmed to find myself getting unwontedly quite furious with him. I’d never really understood how a mother could possibly have even a faintly violent impulse towards her baby, but after he had been screaming for an hour and I had found it impossible to discover what he wanted, other than to be picked up and allowed to continue playing as if night had not come, I was ready to bang my head against a wall—or even his, if it would just stop the noise. As soon as he finally fell asleep all my love for him came rushing back at once, mingled with an agonising remorse for ever having entertained thoughts of savagery; but it did occur to me to change my dogmatic views on the subject of nannies. How lovely it would have been, when I was really at my wits’ end, to be able to hand him over to some capable woman the very touch of whose experienced hands would instantly soothe him and bring him to order! Or, better and much more wholesome, to a father … Babies, I had heard, often sense the superior strength and nervelessness of masculinity and respond to it. But David just had to make do with me, and very often these days I was too tired and miserable to be the quiet, patient, stable mother he needed.
‘I don’t quite know how we’re going to arrange it,’ I said now tentatively. ‘I mean, when the shop’s running. Where will David—’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. There’ll be no need for more than one of us to serve in the shop at once. We’ll organise a rota, one day off, one on. Except that on my days off, I’ll have to be scouting round the countryside for talent … Oh well! It’ll work out all right, you’ll see.’
‘And Henry?’
‘Henry hardly fancies himself as what he calls a “counter-jumper” type. He’ll stay in the background, organising, keeping me on an even keel, and incidentally of course paying the bills.’
‘What did he do before?’
‘Before what?’
‘I mean, how did he earn all the money to pay our bills with?’
‘He was in his father’s business, I gather,’ she said, going vague, as she did whenever Henry came up in conversation.
‘Which was?’
‘Oh, something in London. When he retired, his father I mean, he sold up and gave Henry his share, and this is how he’s chosen to use it.’
‘Odd, somehow.’
‘I don’t see why. Have you seen these high box-shelves? They’re for the toys and the fabrics. Did I tell you I’ve found a marvellous woman to make things like traycloths and tea-cosies—and lovely weird-looking toy animals with the scraps.’
‘It’s odd,’ I persisted, ‘because one would have expected a man of Henry’s practicality to invest his capital in a longer-term prospect—something safer, that would give him an occupation a little more … I don’t know, solid, permanent, regular-sounding than ours.’
‘He knows what he wants, no doubt.’
‘After all, he can’t be more than forty—’
‘He’s thirty-nine.’
‘Thirty-nine, then. Is he planning to spend the rest of his life living in that egg-box, as you called it, doing a little organising, a little fetching and carrying, a little advice-giving? It seems very undemanding for a man like him.’
Dottie said quietly, ‘Jane, hasn’t it struck you I don’t specially want to discuss Henry’s affairs?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ashamed, for of course it had.
‘Where’s David?’
‘Asleep in the car.’
‘He’ll freeze. Come on, let’s lock up. I’ll take him home and put him to bed for you. He’s too big to be larking about with that nubile Eleanor any more.’