WHEN you’ve loved somebody for a long time, and then it stops, it’s akin to an amputation in that you go on feeling the cut-off part long after it’s been taken away. All sorts of nervous and emotional impulses set out to travel to their accustomed stations, and when they come up against the new, raw barrier, they’re carried through it by their own impetus, and only then, finding themselves shooting through empty space, do they dwindle and die away. In the same way, when somebody dies—I noticed this a lot with Addy—you keep projecting your thoughts towards them as if they were still alive.
And so it was with Toby.
My love-impulses kept going out towards where he has been; I kept leaning against the relationship which for so long had supported me like a plaster-cast, and falling flat on my face because it wasn’t there any longer to hold me up. As a result, after a few days I already felt bewildered and exhausted; by the end of a fortnight I was as emotionally battered as I would have been physically if I had fallen over and over again down a flight of stone steps which it was somehow beyond my power to avoid.
Because the pain of this was so awful, I began to hate him, and there’s nothing, of course, more damaging and hurtful to the psyche than that—searching grimly for things to despise and revile in a person you once loved. You may destroy the beloved image but at the same time you destroy part of the basis of your self-respect, plus a whole vital chunk out of your past. Because, if he is hateful now, what aberration once caused you to waste so much love on him?
While I was actively at work on this project of demolition, I kept remembering something he had once said to me in bed: ‘We have to do this well, this, and everything that goes with it; and we have to go on doing it well. And if by any unforeseeable chance we ever want to stop, we must do that well, too. Because if a love-affair doesn’t stay sweet in your mind forever, it just wasn’t worth it.’ And, perhaps on another occasion, but linked to the same philosophical idea: ‘If the ending is messy, one doesn’t remember anything good about any of it.’
Perhaps it was the intrinsic rightness of this that angered me now; but out of my developing sophistry came the pretence that it angered me because it was false and worse than false. Because (I reasoned) there is no such thing as a ‘good’ ending. There is only one way to make it ‘stay sweet’ and that is to continue it until one of you dies, and even that inevitable conclusion will probably spoil the mental picture through its shocking finality and sorrow. I felt this new cynicism seeping through me like sewage: nothing lasts, nothing is worth-while, the cost of every emotional indulgence is too outrageously high; but in any case nobody deserves anything better or more permanent. Certainly not Toby, and certainly not me with my ego-centricity and destructive outbursts of anger. (It would take me a long time to forgive myself for the contemptuous ‘So what?’ when Toby told me Whistler was Jewish. But it was many, many months before I was prepared to acknowledge that.)
Toby became anathema, my whipping-boy. When I felt angry with anything or anybody—when the baby cried too long or the vacuum cleaner backfired or I dropped a hot casserole full of stew; when Dottie went off ‘talent-hunting’ for three days, leaving me in the shop on my own, with only the sketchiest idea of how to cope with any but the most straight-forward sales and Mrs. G. at home breathing ’flu germs all over David and actually letting him fall off the sofa and bang his head; when the local women came sniffing round the shop with no commercial intentions other than the satisfaction of their curiosity, and made their telling exits with remarks like ‘All a bit grand for me, dear; but then I suppose you’ve been used to very different ways all round in London, haven’t you?’ When any of these things happened, I gathered my rage into a little hard ball and hurled it at an Aunt Sally figure in my mind which had Toby’s head on it. He ceased, in one sense, to be a living person, even in memory, and became a receiver, a receptacle, for all my aggressions, all my misery, all my loneliness. He got the blame for absolutely everything.
I’m quite certain, looking back, that I have never seemed so utterly detestable to myself as I was at that time. The more I made myself hate Toby, the more it rebounded, though I tried my utmost to make myself feel like a poor victim. And as I whittled away at the foundations of my life, feeble and shored-up as they were already, of course I became less and less able to cope with even the simplest daily disciplines. Everything, but everything, became too much trouble—getting up in the morning, getting myself to bed at night, and everything in between. I just seemed to shuffle through the days, begrudging every effort, seizing on every chance to fly off the handle, to sulk, to cry in secret, to take it out on people. Only with David was I able to maintain some kind of balance, but even he got shouted at and untenderly picked up or dumped down, quite often. And of course, poor Dottie got the worst of it, because she was handiest. And she was definitely not in the mood for it just then, which, looking back on it with what I know now, is what makes me most ashamed of it.
Approximately five minutes after I had arrived back from London that Sunday afternoon, having borrowed money from John for petrol, and driven all the way in a state of blind, stiff-jawed, unreasoning rage and despair—Dottie realised that something awful, and terminal, had happened. I remember that when I stamped and slammed into the cottage, she and Henry were sitting on the floor drinking tea from mugs and rejoicing, in their nice way, over the fact that David had just arrived at a sitting position by himself. ‘Amanda couldn’t do that till she was ten months,’ Henry commented, presumably solely to gratify me. I hardly heard him; I sat on the sofa staring at David, sitting there crowing, without seeing him properly, just hearing Toby’s words about marrying Whistler going on and on in my brain like one of those sleep-teaching machines. Dottie offered me tea and added, ‘You’re not going to credit this, but I’ve actually baked a cake. You have to eat it with a tea-spoon but it tastes rather marvellous.’ ‘No thanks,’ I said shortly, and got up, took David in my arms and went out of the room. It must have looked ridiculously like a melodramatic exit, but was in fact uncalculated. I had suddenly realised that even David being able to sit up alone at under 8 months didn’t give me the smallest kick; I had just had the shattering experience of sitting there looking at him after a whole day’s absence and not feeling anything, no lifting of the heart, nothing, and the veil of protective rage lifted for a few seconds to show the great yawning fearful black emptiness that lay on the other side. No Toby. No more Toby … I went upstairs with David and sat on my bed with him in my arms and just rocked to and fro gripping him tightly and keeping the veil drawn. Just that, no tears, no feelings; rock, rock, rock, and stare at the cornflower pattern on the wall … I was trying to hypnotise myself, I think, and then Dottie walked in and the spell of relative painlessness was broken.
‘What’s the matter, love, what’s happened?’
‘Nothing. Go away. Leave me alone.’
It had happened before, only with the positions reversed. In a few minutes I, like Dottie on Christmas night, would be sobbing myself empty; I longed for the release of it, but David was lying there on my knee gazing up at me unwinkingly and I looked at him and for the very first time I thought, ‘He’s got no father. I’ve got an illegitimate baby.’ Before I could check myself I said wonderingly, ‘He’s a bastard.’ ‘Who is?’ asked Dottie, and I answered, still in a sort of daze of suddenly awakened shame, ‘He is—David.’
The really remarkable thing was that Dottie understood—just from that. It amazed me more later than at the time. She sat down on the bed beside me and said, after a long silence, ‘You’ll find another father for him—better and stronger.’ I turned on her, not appreciating her perspicacity and kindness and wisdom, ‘I don’t want anyone else! I only want Toby!’ That was about the last honest, unperverted word or thought I produced about him for months. It sprang straight out of naked pain, which is one of the main sources of untampered-with truth; when you begin stifling the pain, you twist and muffle the truth at the same time.
I don’t know how to describe the weeks that followed. I would undoubtedly be even more ashamed of my behaviour, if it were not for the odd conviction that I was, as they say, ‘not myself’. It is like remembering another person’s experience, or something one once read about and felt, deeply perhaps but vicariously. In other words I think I was a little mad.
One lesson I learnt stands out clearly, however. Work, that supposed panacea, the great Taker-of-Your-Mind-Off, proved just about as totally useless and in fact irrelevant as those ‘Easy Childbirth’ theories are in the face of the real thing. The work was there, and I had to do it—housework, baby-work, and the new and—one might have expected—energy- and mind-absorbing work in the shop. In fact I seldom stopped working; but the queer thing is that the only times I was at all at peace were when I did stop. The shop did a lot of business during those first weeks after the opening; customers actually did come all the way from London as well as from surrounding districts, and when it was my turn to be on duty I was kept on my feet a large percentage of the time. But while my body was active, so was my brain, seething in its poison; and the times I look back on now with some recognition of myself are those when there was a break and I was able to go into the back of the shop, where the storeroom was, and a tiny kitchenette arrangement, and sit there motionless among the packing-cases staring out of the glass panel in the back door at the minute yard, where a tree grew out of crumbling paving-stones beside a blackened incinerator surrounded by an old board fence. That view, uninspiring as it was during the bleak winds of March and April, has imprinted itself on my memory so that at any time I can cast myself back there and feel the wooden rungs of the chair pressing into my back and see the leafless branches of that struggling tree tossing to and fo against the sky. It was as if the violence of the tree’s agitation took over the frenzy of my brain for a little while; contemplating it, yet hardly aware of it, I would feel myself growing calmer, the bitterness simmering down like boiling milk lifted for a moment off the heat. I remember I used to sigh, deeply and repeatedly, as if the madness had been using up too much oxygen, and feel gradually much better. Then I would be startled by the ping of the door in the front being opened; automatically I would jump up and hurry through, and at the same time my brain would jump to attention too and go back to its beastly work.
Dottie didn’t ever ask me again what exactly had transpired in London—I suppose she guessed. But Henry, of course, had no way of doing that, and he was fond of me, so that seeing me getting thinner very rapidly (something I only manage to do when I’m desperately unhappy) and more and more silent, he naturally became concerned, and one day when we were alone in the shop together, he suddenly said, ‘Suppose you tell me what’s happened to you.’
I said, ‘Why should I?’ which was in keeping with my general rudeness at the time, but Henry was hard to offend, and replied, ‘First, because I’m very curious to know what can possibly have changed you so radically. Second, because you never know, I might be able to help.’
Two months had already gone by since that fatal Sunday, and perhaps I was ready to talk, because I said, after only a short hesitation, ‘Do you remember Toby?’
Henry said he did, with some pleasure.
I began to prevaricate to the effect that it was all very hard to explain, but then his honesty temporarily revived mine and I realised it was not hard at all, merely wretchedly painful, so I said, ‘For a year I thought he was going to marry me, and now I’ve found out he’s going to marry somebody else.’ Put baldly like that it seemed extremely simple; I marvelled at the twisted complexity of my reactions to it.
Henry now asked the obvious question. ‘Is he David’s father?’
‘Didn’t Dottie tell you?—No.’
‘Dorothy and I don’t discuss your business. Then where is he?’
‘David’s father? I have no idea. Possibly in Paris.’
‘What sort of chap is he?—I hope you don’t mind all these questions.’
‘Not specially.’ Actually since the subject of this unexpected enquiry had shifted away from Toby, I didn’t mind at all. I really don’t think I would have minded any questions from Henry; it pleased me obscurely to find him showing such a sensible, human interest in somebody else’s concerns. I would have expected him to have found such manifestations of curiosity rather beneath him. (It was not for ages afterwards that I found out from Dottie that of course she’d told him the whole story long ago, and that he was presumably only asking me about Terry to change the obsessive focus of my thoughts for a little while.)
I told him briefly about my affair with Terry, and our mutual antipathy after it. Henry listened with his usual patience and then said, ‘And out of that, all that stupidity and futility, you got that nice child that you love so much. Zero plus zero equals any amount you like to name. It’s all very strange.’
‘So you think Terry and I are zeroes?’
‘No, no, that’s not what I meant.’ He looked up at me and smiled through his pipe-smoke. ‘You’re a fair bit of a chump at times, like now for instance, but you’re not a zero. Oh dear no.’ And he picked up my hand and held it for a moment so hard that it hurt, then put it down unselfconsciously as someone came into the shop.
A little oasis in the wilderness. After it, the dark mood of misery and brooding and tumult closed in round me again; but I remembered that warm squeeze and his funny, old-fashioned way of saying ‘You’re not a zero, oh dear no!’ Even while I was helplessly behaving like one, I remembered sometimes that Henry didn’t think I was; and it helped. A little.
But it was Dottie who dragged me out of it in the end. I hadn’t been noticing Dottie very much recently, or asking myself how things were with her; it was all part of my current malaise of introversion, because in fact had anyone asked me I would have said that Dottie mattered to me more than anybody still remaining in my life, except David of course. But one couldn’t have guessed it from my behaviour towards her. For weeks we hardly exchanged a friendly inessential word; she tried—God knows she tried—to bring me out of it with her usual flow of entertaining anecdotes, but that was just at first; no one can go on telling stories to someone who patently is not listening, let alone reacting. So then she withdrew into a sort of brisk, waiting silence, at first patient, later impatient, gradually becoming irritated and at last furious. She had good reason for this; my help and support in the shop were so essential to her that my virtual disappearance into my own private purgatory struck at the roots of all her plans, not only the business ones but also, as I was to discover, her plans for her survival through the crisis in her own life, which depended entirely on the shop and its success.
The crunch came when I had been in charge at the shop all one day while Dottie went to Birmingham. The reason for this trip was both unexpected and highly exciting to her; she had had a letter from Ron, the glass-worker with whom she had left her address all those months ago. It was neatly written on a small sheet of lined paper, and said in a very businesslike way that if she cared to come along, he might be able to show her something to her advantage. It was actually her turn for shop-duty the following day, and I had been looking forward to the sort of quiet day at home with David which was the only kind I found tolerable any more—a morning getting the housework out of the way, and an afternoon spent sitting in front of the fire watching the flames, just as I watched the tree behind the shop, letting all the vicious inner knots untie themselves. So when Dottie, showing an unusual degree of animation, announced her imminent departure and begged me to take over for the day, I sank into a deep slough of gloom and grudge and scarcely brought a civil word out of my mouth all evening. Whereas I felt she could just as easily have waited till the following day, when I was due to be at the shop anyway, she clearly felt it impossible to wait even 24 hours longer to find out what Ron had to tell her, and expected me to understand this. We both indicated our points of view in a terse conversation which ended with Dottie saying, with unaccustomed edge: ‘Look, like it or lump it this shop is our livelihood. You think it’s enough just to put in a few hours selling every second day. Well, that’s okay for shop assistants; it’s not enough for the management.’
‘Fine. Well, you be the management and give your whole life to it. I’m prepared just to be the shop-girl. After all, you haven’t got a baby to look after.’
‘No, that’s right, I haven’t,’ Dottie retorted. ‘I haven’t got one to raise, either, or I might have the grace to be damned grateful for someone who’d do all the work of setting up a business of which I was getting equal shares while doing about a fifth of the labour.’
There was no possible reply to this, so I merely shrugged coldly and went on washing the dishes. How I hate remembering it now!—although she wasn’t being entirely fair either; true, she did far more than half the work to do with the shop, but the house was my job and here she scarcely contributed anything except very occasionally a meal or a bit of washing up. Mrs. Griffiths was nearly always called in on the days when Dottie was supposed to be at home, and when Dottie had nowhere to travel to and actually did stay in the cottage with David, she did the bare minimum necessary to keep him clean and fed, and then let the housework go to hell while she did her accounts, wrote letters, drafted advertisements, or had Henry over for a conference. Often I’d get home tired at six in the evening to find the fire out and supper not even begun. I’d learnt to pick up a large packet of fish-and-chips or a frozen pork-pie on these occasions so I wouldn’t have to set to from scratch.
Anyway, this pointed exchange led to a chill evening, during which we sat locked in our private silences and I, at least, spared a thought for the past and asked myself (but desultorily) whether there was any hope of ever reverting to the status quo ante. But at the time this seemed as hopeless as trying to rebuild a house from which the foundations have been blasted away.
So the next day Dottie set off early by road for Birmingham and Ron, while I left David (as usual in shrieks of outrage at my departure, which always started the days at the shop off on the wrong foot) and drove into the village. It was the beginning of May, but there were few signs of spring, apart from new leaves and some flowers in the garden which persist in coming to birth no matter how inclement the weather. Just before climbing into the car I obeyed an impulse to throw a gardening fork into the back. I thought if the day were not too hectic I might find the energy to fulfil a promise made long ago to Mrs. Stephens, to dig the little plot behind their shop, which was next door to ours. Since the day was spoilt anyway, and since I had a slightly guilty conscience about Dottie which I wanted to expiate with sweat, I thought I might get around to it, though it seemed doubtful considering my present aversion to hard work.
The day was so gloomy and blustery, with gusts of periodic rain, that the shop was very quiet. It was also ominously cold; something had gone wrong with the central heating. I phoned Henry to tell him and he said apologetically that he was awfully sorry, he had a stinking cold that day and was cossetting himself indoors, but that I was not to call in a professional to look at it—‘No point in shelling out, it’s probably something I can deal with easily.’ He advised me to light an oil-stove for myself and stick it out for the day. This hardly commended itself to me; to begin with the oil-stove stank abominably and to go on with it heated an area approximately one-fifth of what was needed. Everything outside that area, which included my little corner of the store-room, was left to freeze, and me in it.
At about 3 p.m., when there still hadn’t been a single customer, I got so fed up and miserable that I pulled on my coat and went out through the back door, leaving it open so that I could hear the bell. I climbed easily over the dividing fence with my fork and at once began thrusting it brutally into the clotted earth of the tiny flower-beds surrounding a patch of grass the size of a night-club dance-floor. After a short while, Mrs. Stephens’ permanently startled face appeared at a back window between the dingy crocheted curtains, and then she came running out, tutting and jumping flat-footed in her carpet-slippers through the puddles, to exclaim over my hardiness, offer thanks for my help and cups of nice hot tea. I refused without stopping work, and remembered only as she was withdrawing, backwards due to admiration entirely misplaced, to make a perfunctory inquiry after Mr. Stephens’ health.
‘Oh …’ said Mrs. Stephens vaguely. ‘Not what it might be, dear. The poor lamb is not what he was, I’m afraid.’ She had spoken very softly, her voice barely carrying to me on a gust of wind, but even so she glanced nervously over her shoulder as if expecting to see his old ear glued to the window to hear whatever disloyalty might be spoken of him.
As I worked under the dark grey, sullen skies, shoved about and rumpled by the wind and slapped across the face by occasional spats of rain, I fell into a dismal pattern—digging fast and feverishly in an effort to escape my mood and my thoughts, while the thoughts raced faster and more vividly in an effort to keep up. Thoughts about Toby … I still have them. But they’re infinitely different now, thank God. Then, my mind seemed like a festering sore, an all-absorbing pain, drawing all my attention in towards itself, like the skin round a wound. I seemed to see nothing, even the good clean earth I was digging, and I certainly heard nothing other than the endless, exhausting conversations going on in my imagination.
Suddenly Henry was looking at me over the fence.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, with nothing in his voice but incredulous curiosity.
I dropped the fork and stood still, panting and worn out as if I’d been running.
‘Are you all right? You look strange.’
‘I’m all right …What time is it?’
‘It’s five o’clock. I’ve been phoning and phoning … Didn’t you hear the bell?’
‘No.’
‘How long have you been out here?’
‘I don’t know … since about three, I think.’
‘Since three!’ He didn’t look angry, just amazed. ‘But what about Billings?’
‘Who?’
‘Billings. The health-restaurant man. Didn’t Dorothy tell you?’
It came back to me with a tingling sense of shock. Of course she’d told me. She’d particularly told me about Billings. He was a man after her own heart, though his field was quite different; he was what Henry called a muck-and-mystery man, a farmer with an obsession with natural methods of crop- and stock-raising who had now decided to go into—or rather, put his son into—the restaurant business, as a subsidiary enterprise to his own farm. The farm would supply the restaurant with free-range chickens and eggs, unsprayed fruit, vegetables grown in farmyard manure, and wholewheat bread, among many other things such as honey made by bees who had never soiled their feet by settling on a chemically-treated flower. Dottie had been full of Billings for the past week, the more so since he was the biggest potential customer we had yet had. He had visited the shop, listened to Dottie expound her principles, and liked them, finding them very akin to his own, as indeed she found his; and he had virtually promised to return and order all the furniture needed by the restaurant from us—small pine refectory tables, heart-backed chairs, darkly glazed ceramic bowls for barley soup, wooden plates for meadow-raised beef steaks, baskets for the chickens, rush mats for the floors, and possibly a great many secondary items such as cruets, table-napkins, and purely decorative items. I remembered now, with a flush of guilt, that a lesser reason why Dottie had hurried off to Birmingham was because she needed to find a source of ordinary glassware—jugs and glasses for the fresh vegetable juices. And I remembered too that there had been a strong possibility that Billings would call by between 3 and 4 this afternoon, and that I had been specially told to be ready for him and to welcome him with every encouraging courtesy.
Henry was gazing at me with a sort of wonderment, his head cocked to one side, a slight frown between his eyes. He was waiting for me to speak, but what could I possibly say? I stammered something about having promised Mrs. Stephens, no customers all day, forgot about Billings, was sure I could have heard the bell … Henry’s face didn’t change.
‘I’m only asking myself,’ he said slowly, ‘what Dorothy’s going to say.’
My blood quite literally ran cold—I turned clammy all over. Was it conceivable that I was afraid—afraid of Dottie? Of course I was hopelessly, disgracefully in the wrong, but still—that didn’t explain goose-flesh.
‘Maybe he didn’t come,’ I said with sudden hope.
‘But he did.’ He handed me a note. I took my gloves off—my hands were shaking. The note, written on a page torn from a pocket pad, simply said, ‘Called at 3.30 as arranged. Could have walked off with all your stock. J. S. Billings.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said faintly.
For the first time in ten weeks, something other than Toby occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of all else. I was appalled by the prospect of Dottie’s return, and of having to confess. A totally new kind of duologue now took up all my creative slack. My end of it sounded unimaginably thin. ‘I must have been mad,’ I kept thinking to myself, wringing my hands. It didn’t occur to me then that I had been more or less mad for ten weeks.
She arrived back sometime after eight, absolutely glowing with triumph as I hadn’t seen her glow since the mysterious events of Christmas Eve. She flung her coat off and rushed into the kitchen, where in an agony of guilty anticipation I was trying to get some supper. She stood in the doorway and flung her arms wide. ‘Ron!’ she cried. ‘Ah, Ron of the licentious ogle, of the sneering lip, of the cretinous demeanour! Ron of the once-sober-and-industrious and now degenerate Lower Orders! Ron, my creation, my angel, my craftsman! I love you!’ She disappeared with a flourish, returning a few seconds later with a large box which she set down on the kitchen table. With a conjuror’s gesture she removed the lid and reverently lifted to the light a little green glass horse. It was very roughly made, the sort of thing a child might form out of taffy, teasing limbs and ears, a ruffle of mane, a switch of tail, out of it before it grew cold and hard. But there was something very attractive about it.
‘Infantile,’ said Dottie, but lovingly. ‘Too literary, too explicit. But a start. A start in the right, unblueprinted, original, creative direction.’
She produced several other little animals of the same sort. They didn’t look professional enough to offer for sale, but they had something, and Dottie said Ron was so excited about them himself that it surely wouldn’t be long before he ‘developed’ the technique to a point where they would be good enough.
‘It started with lumps,’ Dottie explained, pouring herself a huge beaker of cold milk, her eyes burning with an almost fanatical enthusiasm. ‘I showed him something when I was there before—a picture in a crafts magazine—he said it was nothing but a lump. Only afterwards he started to think about it, and he said it haunted him. So he began to pick up lumps of glass, left-overs, throw-outs, around the factory, and kind of look at them. He kept one on his mantelpiece at home for weeks, he said, and he kept staring at it, and handling it, until his wife got furious and slung it out. He was so angry at losing it, he realised that you could get fond of a lump. “It gave me all kinds of funny ideas,” he said. “And not that kind, either.” Oh, he’s marvellous, is Ron! I adore his awful smutty way of talking! So then he started making lumps in his spare time. Just letting blobs of hot glass fall as it would. Then he began blowing bubbles into it. Then shaping it. Of course he dared not let any of his mates know what he was doing—they’d have thought he’d gone bonkers. Then one day a lump turned into something like an animal, and that was how he got started on this line.’ She made the horse gallop across the table-top. ‘You know what I told him? I told him to go back to just plain lumps, and not try to make them look like anything except the kind of lump his wife threw away—the kind you can get fond of.’ She dipped into the box again and produced a lump, which she weighed in her hand. It really was rather a beautiful lump—like a piece of crystallised ocean. One immediately wanted to hold it. I reached for it instinctively and Dottie, grinning, held it away.
‘Ah ha! I knew it! It draws the hand. It even draws the face.’ She smoothed the cool thing with her cheek. ‘He was so shy about showing me this. When I raved, he thought I was having him on. I love him. I mean it. I feel I’ve started something up in him, like Pygmalion.’
‘Is that whole great box full of Ron’s lumps?’ I asked.
‘No, no. The bottom’s packed with the samples of the nicest coarse-glass tumblers and jugs I could find for my dearly beloved Mr. Billings.’ My heart sank into the region of my knees. ‘Did he call? Did he make a firm order?’ I said nothing, and he asked again, ‘Did he come?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well? Tell!’
‘I wasn’t—there.’
‘What? What do you mean? Where were you?’
‘I was out at the back, digging the Stephens’ garden.’
There was no question of her face not changing. It froze for a second and then went white. I knew I was for it and I shrank. I thought cravenly, I can’t face a row with Dottie, not now! I began gibbering out excuses but she cut me short.
‘Dear kind loving Jesus,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve bitched it. Trust you.’ She had a glass in her hand, a nice square tumbler with a solid glass bottom with a bubble in it and very thick sides. For a moment I thought she was going to throw it straight at my head, and then I thought, no, she’ll smash it on the floor. I could see the impulse tremble through her arm and be checked when it was almost overflowing into her fingers. But then she put the glass carefully back into the box and packed Ron’s things on top among the wood-shavings and newspaper. She closed the box down, keeping her head bent. I stood still, waiting. But she merely picked the box up and carried it out of the kitchen. I heard her put it down on the hall table and go upstairs. I’d never seen her even half as angry; I felt physically sick from watching it and knowing I’d caused it.
She stayed in her room all evening with the door shut, and I put David to bed in a wholly unaccustomed silence. He tried to induce me to play his usual games but I couldn’t. He went to bed whimpering resentfully and I sat by him, still silent, until he fell asleep. Then I wept with shame.
When that was finished, I went to Dottie’s door and knocked.
‘What do you want?’ she asked after a moment.
‘To come in.’
‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Better wait till I’ve had a night’s sleep.’
‘It’s tempting, but I’d rather get it over.’
There was no answer, so I turned the handle and went in. She was not undressed, but was sitting by the window. When she turned, I could see she’d been crying too. Her face was quite drawn.
I sat opposite her on the windowseat. ‘Say it,’ I said. ‘Please. We’ll both feel better.’
She gazed at me for a long moment, and then sighed from her depths and turned back to the window, leaning her chin heavily on her hand. ‘What’s the use,’ she said in a tired voice. ‘I could give you hell, but it wouldn’t change anything. Not a thing.’
‘Dottie, nothing like it will ever happen again, I promise.’
‘It’s not only that. You don’t know. You don’t know.’
‘What don’t I know?’
She didn’t answer for a moment, and then said wearily, ‘Oh, it’s—it’s a whole lot of things. I mean, even if you turned overnight into a model partner, conscientious and single-minded, it wouldn’t change the fact that you basically don’t give a damn about the whole project, that you don’t believe it stands a chance. You never have really. At first I thought I had enough enthusiasm for us both, or at least that self-interest would drive you into some semblance of caring, but I see now things don’t work out like that. You’re not—with me at all. I sometimes wonder if even Henry really is, or if in his heart of hearts he isn’t smiling pityingly at my cavortings and waiting around to pick up the pieces …’ She dropped her face into her hand for a second, then straightened it quickly, throwing a bit of hair out of her eyes and keeping her fingers over her mouth so that her voice was muffled. ‘I didn’t realise,’ she went on, ‘what a damned lonely business a business could be.’
It’s terribly easy to fall prey to the conviction that your own loneliness is the worst in the world. Except occasionally, Dottie always seemed so strong and resilient, so self-sufficient, it was hard to believe that her loneliness went as deep and hurt just as much as mine or anybody’s. Feeling sorry for Dottie always seemed like an affront; that saved one the trouble; one could always tell oneself she didn’t need sympathy, and go straight back to pitying oneself. But now I looked at her averted face and realised some part of her misery, and how akin it was to mine, and felt a shame much more poignant than the one I had felt about my default over Billings.
‘Listen,’ I said at last. ‘First, let’s get Billings out of the way. All’s not lost. I’ll go myself and see him and explain—crawl if necessary. So long as he knows it wasn’t your fault, I’m sure he’ll come round.’ She didn’t move a muscle and I knew for sure then that she’d left Billings a long way behind in her thoughts, that she was now struggling away alone in some dark secret place, far from the shop and from me. She seemed to have curled into herself and the knuckles over her mouth were white as if her hand were holding back some pressure that was trying to burst out of her. ‘Dottie,’ I said, actually managing to forget myself completely for a moment and beginning to shake a little from the tension of pity and anxiety.
She looked slowly up at me over her hand. Her eyes were desolate, and glassy with tears. ‘It’s all right,’ she said indistinctly. ‘I’m not angry any more about this afternoon. I know how you’ve been feeling. I know how terribly you miss Toby. I’m so sorry for you. Forgive me if I haven’t seemed very sympathetic. I had such dreams …’ She broke off and stared at me. Then in an altered voice she said, ‘But it’s not so bad for you. You had Toby. He’s still somewhere, your mark will always be on him, no other woman can ever wipe you out of his mind whatever happens. And you had him, you had him for a whole year, just when you needed him most. I don’t know why I should be feeling sorry for you. Maybe at bottom I’m just wildly jealous of you.’
‘To be remembered by a man, or to remember him, is hardly what one wants, or what anyone has to envy.’
‘I envy you that year. No one can do you out of that.’
‘Someone has.’
‘But you had it. You’ve had something.’
‘But it’s spoilt, it’s gone. If you’ve never had it, at least there’s no—aching empty gap where it used to be.’
‘There’s an aching empty gap where it ought to go. And the growing conviction that that place, in your body and in your life, is going to stay empty until it, and you, shrivel up.’
‘I’d change places with you this minute.’
‘No you wouldn’t. Don’t say that.’
‘I wish I’d never seen Toby, never loved him.’
‘Blasphemy,’ she said. Her hand came away from her mouth and she reached for a cigarette.
‘All I can feel is the pain. I can’t remember any tiny part of it without bitterness.’
‘Then you’re a fool. You’ve got to learn to live with it. What if your affair with Toby is all the love you’re ever due for in your life? Are you going to soil it and spoil it just because it didn’t last?’
I suddenly knew what she had meant, long ago, by the backward shadow, the shadow of the lonely future flung back on the present and filling it with fear. Dottie had been living in that shadow, and now I must live in it too. All the little specific pains and terrors were swept away in a great wave of horror. To be alone always!—through youth, middle-age, dotage … no one to share with, no one to keep you warm, no hand to hold, no other half of your organism to fill you and fulfil you … Then I remembered David. He was an added cause for fear in a way, the unsharable responsibility, the unsharable joy. But although not the right one, he was someone, to love, to be loved by, the need and the needy … (Why had I been ashamed of my need for Toby, why had I tried to fight it, what had I thought I could bring to him which would satisfy him more? And yet, how dangerous to bring that exclusive need to one’s child, one’s son …) On a tempered impulse of relief I said to Dottie, ‘You’re right. You’re right to envy me. I’ve got David.’
‘Be careful of that feeling.’
‘I know what you mean—but still.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes.’ She smoked for a while and stared at the blank window-panes and after a while she said, ‘And I’ve got the shop.’ She looked at me and gave a little rueful laugh, to which I responded. ‘It’s all very well to laugh,’ she said. ‘But at least it’s safer to pin one’s hopes and dreams on a shop. Not safer for me, but safer for the shop. It can’t turn queer because its mother dotes on it too much.’ We both laughed again at this, but thinly, whistling in the dark. ‘One has to have something,’ she said, ‘if only to take up one’s slack. Cold baths and runs over the moors and lime-juice and deck-scrubbing. Not just the sexual slack, of course. The shop’s really not much good for that! Energy, time, thoughts—enthusiasm. That most of all. It’s the caring. One needs a cause. That’s why I was so angry. Because I need someone to share my cause with me, and you don’t share it. And neither does Henry. You’ve both got causes of your own.’
‘What’s Henry’s?’
‘Henry’s cause?’ Her eyes came round to mine very slowly through the film of smoke. She was half-smiling, a grim, grim smile that stopped my breath for a minute. ‘Shall I tell you? I promised him not to.’
‘Then you’d better not.’
‘But I want to. Then you’ll understand. You’ll understand why you mustn’t say, even impulsively, that you’d change places with me or anyone.’
I said nothing.
‘Henry’s cause,’ said Dottie, ‘is dying well.’
I didn’t understand a word of what she had said. ‘Dying well? What do you mean by that?’
‘Henry is dying,’ she said very quietly. ‘And he wants to do it well.’