THERE’S no particular need, five years after the event, to go into the details of Henry’s death. Something known and inevitable, however tragic, can’t be very moving to read about, or even interesting. It happened, in any case, very soon after the visit to London which resulted in our landing a contract with Heal’s. It comforted me quite ludicrously at the time to feel that I had managed this coup in time to give Henry the knowledge that the shop was back on the upgrade—I remember him saying to me, on one of my last visits, ‘Knowing you and Dorothy have that Heal’s thing has given me a hell of a kick. It’s going to make all the difference to her …’ Neither of us was with him when he died; it was Joanna who held his hand and listened to his voice fade out right in the middle of a sentence about Dottie. It was typical of him that he died with his brain, and his heart, still working.
But if his death was somehow unterrible, the funeral cancelled that. I can’t recall it even now without horror. His body going sliding through those silent little doors to the bleat of organ music—one expected to see the brilliant white-hot glitter of the furnace between the discreet little curtains. It’s hideous, so euphemistic … In India at least you see the flames; it’s all out in the open air and everybody wails and you smell the fire and don’t pretend it isn’t really happening.
Ted arrived late; we found out from Joanna later that he’d been sitting outside in the hire-car, unable to pull himself together enough to show his face in the chapel. But then at last he came in, near the end, his face mournful and somehow simian above the impeccable morning dress with its grey waistcoat and shiny top hat. And spats. … Dottie’s and my mutual wretchedness that day was so acute that it needed only those spats to send us both into suppressed hysterics.
Dottie actually had to leave the chapel, and I followed her when I’d managed to get hold of myself; I found her in the graveyard outside standing erect, her whole body heaving with sobs, the tears washing down her face from red, anguished eyes. When she saw me coming she turned away from me with a moan. ‘We laughed!’ she got out at last in a whisper of awe and shame. ‘He’s dead, and we laughed! We’re ill, we’re damned, we’d laugh at anything!’
In vain I told her to let herself off, that it was perfectly natural, I even ventured to say that Henry would have been the first to understand and even join in … Stupid of me, for she froze like a rock at the words and said coldly, ‘Don’t talk about him like that as if he were alive. He’s dead and finished.’
I left her alone for a while, after that, but when I saw that she was not able to forgive herself I tackled her again. It was two weeks or so later, and she was much calmer, but it was an icy, lifeless sort of calm, and she answered with no hint of emotion, ‘It’s strange, but any time I’ve allowed myself to feel superior to anybody, about anything, it’s always been proved to me later that I am no better, or am even worse than they are. I used to despise my acquaintances in London because nothing was serious to them, nothing shocked them, nothing really mattered to them, and the sign of this was—they laughed, they laughed at everything, they made jokes about everything—God, the bomb, the First World War, Belsen, cruelty to children, cancer. They say it’s the English saving grace, but I think it’s our current vice. I loathe it. And yet at Henry’s funeral, with him being burnt, I laughed. I laughed at nothing, at something not at all funny: his Cockney father who had dressed in the best he could hire or buy for the occasion. I didn’t look at his face, because his tears would have shattered me; I looked at his feet—and I laughed. And so I’m just like those others. No better than those repulsive cynics and shallow gigglers. I degraded my goodbye to Henry to that level, because I just hadn’t the depth to cope with so much sorrow. That’s what’s hard to face.’
There followed an awful period, still blacked-out in memory, when Dottie and I had to struggle along somehow with the shop, which chose that moment to start doing such good business that we couldn’t abandon it as we both wanted to, and just go into retreat. But Dottie suddenly took against it. It must have been because her passion for it had prevented her being with Henry, looking after him, during the last weeks of his life, and I suppose she began to feel about it as a man might feel about a tawdry, ravishing mistress who has kept him from his sick wife’s bedside until it’s too late. Anyway, she began to hate the place, and to curse it instead of cherishing it as she had before. First the little necessary extra bits of effort were dropped, then gradually she began positively to neglect the essential work. If we hadn’t had the Heal’s contract by that time, I really think the whole thing would just have folded; but that side of it had somehow become my baby, and I managed, despite a few initial blunders, and with Dottie’s increasingly desultory but nonetheless vital help and advice, to keep this up and make a go of it.
I think it was the saving of me; quite incredible how the gods of fortune will help you sometimes when you most need it. I clearly remember one extraordinary coincidence, which was that the day of Toby’s wedding to Whistler—a huge splashy affair in some big synagogue near Marble Arch, all so dreadfully un-him that I immediately felt an air of doom over the marriage—was the day the ‘Us and Them’ boutique opened on Heal’s first floor, so I simply didn’t have time to feel anything about the wedding. And that night, which I had thought would be a major private hell (deep down somewhere in my subconscious, Toby was still mine in the most primitive physical way) I slept like the dead and my imagination with me. By the next morning the worst was over, though even the best of that little lot was not very funny, and the pain—dull, but constant—went on literally for months.
About now Dottie grew downright impossible; she withdrew; she grew surly, sulky, bad-mannered, bad-tempered. She was not drinking, but she behaved as if she were. She did as little work as possible, and that with very bad grace. Her contacts with suppliers fell off, and I found myself having to make furtive journeys round the countryside renewing them and often having to smooth out rudenesses or bad impressions Dottie had left, either by unanswered letters, unpaid bills, or hasty visits made in a bad mood.
As to her relations with me, they were all right at first—I never took her to task about her failure to pull her weight in the shop, I felt it was only fair after all the months when I hadn’t, and anyway I understood only too well what was the matter with her. But suddenly one horrible evening she turned on me over supper. There was no warning; we were just sitting there eating in what I had fondly supposed was a mutually sympathetic silence, when she abruptly looked at me and said icily, ‘I must ask you to stop apologising for me.’ I was completely taken aback; I really didn’t know what she meant. Though I happened to have spent most of the previous week doing just that, I had no idea that she knew it. There followed an awful sort of one-sided row, with me being very pacific and she getting angrier and wilder until I realised that my lack of appropriate reaction was only making her worse. Then I let myself start shouting too. It was as calculated as that, to begin with; but fatal of course, because as soon as I let go of the tight rein I had had myself on, I found out that I really had been resenting her behaviour, although I had thought I was being so damned Christian and noble about understanding it. To excuse myself a little for losing my temper as I very shortly did with her, I have to say I was functioning under some considerable strain myself; Henry had been dead barely six weeks, Toby married less than three; and I was feeling the full brunt of running a business and raising a baby for the first time virtually without any support or help from anyone.
The end of it was almost unbearably ugly. Suddenly I saw that it wasn’t just a row, she was actively hating me. I stopped shouting and asked what was really the matter? Whereupon she started shaking all over and her face went foreign; I can’t think of another word to describe it; I hardly recognised even her type for that moment. And then she screamed something mercifully incoherent into my face, and after that … Well, after that she began to hit her head against the wall and smack her own face over and over again and I was so horrified and shocked that it was several minutes before I could do anything about it. I’ll never forget the feeling of her wrist when I caught hold of it, it was completely rigid and as strong as iron, she just kept slapping and slapping herself viciously, and I remember shouting at her, ‘Slap me! Slap me!’ and frantically trying to redirect her hand. I can’t bear to think about it, even now. She collapsed in the end, teeth chattering, face all shades of grey, eyes rolling, sweat standing out all over her … I put coats over her and called a doctor, but by the time he came she’d recovered a bit and I’d managed to get her upstairs to bed. He gave her a sedative and told me it looked like the onset of a nervous breakdown, which is what it was of course; I should have seen she was heading for one but I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown really was until then.
Later that night—I was sitting beside her bed, frightened to leave her alone although she was fast asleep—she suddenly came wide awake for a few minutes and stared straight at me through the half-darkness and said, ‘Did you sleep with him?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Swear it.’ ‘I do swear it.’ ‘How can I be sure? How can I ever be sure? I know you wanted him. If he refused me and took you—’ She broke off with a sort of sudden crack like a branch breaking, and instantly closed her eyes and fell asleep again.
So that was it, and I hadn’t properly understood after all, until that moment.
She was laid up for a long time and I tried to look after her and run the shop. I couldn’t, naturally enough, so I compromised by getting a nurse in, and also engaging an assistant for the shop, a wretched brainless little girl who was the best I could get for what I could afford to pay. She distinguished herself the first week by breaking a supposedly unbreakable casserole, losing two important customers through sheer incompetence and—as I discovered much later—laying the foundations for a profitable sideline, pinching half-crowns from the petty cash.
The nurse was little more successful; she was efficient but chilly, and Dottie just lay there and didn’t even look at her. I began to have terrible fears about the actual extent of her breakdown, remembering that moment when I had not recognised her eyes or her face. She was certainly mad at that second. Sometimes when she withdrew and couldn’t be roused, I really feared for her reason. At that time I remembered nothing but good of her, her sweetness, her inexhaustible energy, her irrepressible wit and good cheer and—I knew it all the time—her genuine love for me which had lasted over years of rough going for one or other of us. I would sit in the evenings and do my accounts on the end of her bed, while she sat propped against her pillows and smoked and seemed either a little nearer or a little further away, according to some inner syndrome which I never fully understood or could predict. She never linked Henry’s and my names again. Once I was working and she suddenly leaned right forward in bed and put her hand over mine as I was writing figures; I looked up and she was gazing at me with an extraordinary expression of tenderness and regret … I jumped up at once and went to hug her. I thought in that moment everything was better, but I found it wasn’t that simple. That impulse, that look, the gesture even, had been, as it were, sent through some kind of barrier, the barrier of her illness, and when I tried to get close to her, physically and mentally, the gate clanged almost in my face and she pushed me away, her eyes tightly shut as if something had escaped from them while she wasn’t on her guard.
That whole time—the time following Henry’s death, Toby’s marriage and Dottie’s breakdown—was a time of seasoning and trial for me. That I have never worked so hard, or felt so deeply, or travelled as far in an inward fashion, hardly needs saying. And all the time, except when I visited London on business, 1 was living in the same tucked-away little backwater. Addy’s cottage was my home and my retreat, though it had lost its feeling of safety since Dottie had lodged herself and her strangeness like a cuckoo’s egg within it. I realise now that, although I never acknowledged it at the time, I was more than a little afraid of her then. It was almost a superstitious fear, as if I half-expected her to metamorphose again into a wild-eyed stranger; yet I never cared for her so much, nor so strongly sensed in her a desperate dependence on me. Sometimes this would show itself as simply and directly as it would have done with a child; she would look at me as I brought her a meal or helped her to dress (she was physically very weak at first) and say ‘Thank you, Jane,’ over and over again, very softly and politely. At other times she would suddenly get panicky for no special reason and say ‘Don’t leave me, will you?’ in the sort of voice she might have used if she’d been hanging over a cliff. Even as she began to get better, and some of her old independence and spirit returned, she would still have moments of humble and embarrassing gratitude to me, speaking as if I’d saved her life. She never, at any time, then or since, referred to the scene in the kitchen. I’ve always hoped she doesn’t remember it.
During her illness, I really think David was of more active, therapeutic help to her than either I or the doctor or any other single factor. At first I tried to keep him out of the room, for fear of disturbing her, but one day he wandered in by himself and when I went looking for him I found she’d pulled him up on the bed with her. He was lying with her, stomach to stomach, and they were pulling faces at each other, and he was laughing and saying ‘More! More!’ When I lifted him off, he reached for her and said her name, I think for the first time. Later when I came back to her alone, I heard her from outside the door repeating, with his inflection, ‘Do-tie. Do-tie.’ When I came in, I found she was crying. It was the first time since the funeral—months. The doctor had said, ‘Where are her tears? That’s what she needs, she needs to cry, healthy tears, you understand.’ And here they were, gently washing those hard, dry, wild eyes as she said her own name over and over again. After that I let him go in and play with her as often as he wanted to. She cried often, just cried for no special reason when he was with her or after he’d gone, and the doctor when I told him said ‘Good.’ And it was.
It was a long time before she asked about the shop, but she often talked about Addy’s four hundred pounds. It was odd about that. I’d given it up—sacrificed it, as I then thought—for the shop, and relinquished my cherished dreams of a trip to New York. But it had all been, as it were, an empty gesture. When Dottie asked for the money, and I gave it to her, neither of us had stopped to realise that Henry, with his inveterate providence and good sense, had long before taken the precaution of covering the premises with every known kind of insurance. The four hundred was used up in immediate costs, for Dottie got cracking the very next day at putting the shop back in order and we had very little in the kitty by then; but when the Insurance people paid up, which they did quite quickly, Henry insisted that I should take it back. It was very ironic, because there was still time for me to go to New York for Addy’s book, if I hurried; but by then Henry was already ill, Dottie working desperately, and just in case I had been in any sort of doubt or temptation (which I really wasn’t) David developed something-or-other, I’ve forgotten what, and couldn’t possibly have either come with me or been left behind. So there the £400 still was, sitting in my bank, and when I thought of it it was as if Addy’s ghost was waiting for me to do something with it. I’d told Dottie long ago about Addy’s ghost, and she had readily appreciated the non-serious, emotional side of it. The truly metaphysical side, the moments when I almost believed in Addy as a tangible presence, had merely embarrassed her, so I never mentioned it again. Now in her sleep or in moments of drowsiness when her ‘dope’ as she called it was beginning to function, she would ramble on about ‘Addy’s four hundred’ and ask me repeatedly what I was going to do with it, sometimes sounding as if it were a matter of urgent personal importance to herself that I should make a decision. Sometimes she would make little anxious jokes: ‘Addy’s waiting, isn’t she? She’s waiting for you to decide. You mustn’t disappoint her.’ And once she startled me by saying quite seriously, ‘She hates money being left to rot.’ At last I said that I thought I’d better sink it in the shop after all—it had been very hard, during the ups and downs of my first months of serious involvement in the business, not to use it. But to my surprise, Dottie was quite vehement.
‘No!’ she said. ‘Not the shop. The shop mustn’t drink everything up. Addy likes the idea of New York.’ She smiled. ‘She said she always wanted to go there, didn’t she?’
‘Not to me.’
She looked at me oddly for a moment, and said, ‘I thought you told me—’ After a while she turned away her face, and reached for a cigarette. ‘I’m sure it should be New York,’ she said.
‘But I don’t even want to go to New York now.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. The shop—’
‘The shop, the shop! Can’t you think of anything but the shop?’
‘You couldn’t, for ages.’
She didn’t reply. ‘Sublimation,’ she said at last. ‘Is it that for you too, I wonder, poor Jane?’
I hadn’t told her a word about Toby; I hadn’t mentioned him for many weeks. Yet at that moment I felt she knew that he was—‘lost and gone forever’, almost as much as Henry was for her.
Addy’s book came out, finally, in the autumn of that year, and it got a very few, very wonderful notices in some obscure highbrow magazines. The New York Times Book Review gave it a glancing notice, the key-word in which was ‘esoteric’, which, Billie wrote to me, was the kiss of death to any hope of popular success. ‘Not that I ever expected it from those epic-minded morons,’ she concluded furiously. But Dottie, who had just read the book for the first time, simply said, ‘Oh, never mind. It’s far too good for me, and for most people. Popular successes are for craftsmen. Addy’s not even an artist. I think perhaps she’s a sort of genius, or a saint.’ She kept the book beside her and read bits of it again and again. I did too. The book itself was beautiful, a wonderfully simple cover in pale shiny sea-green and gold. I was sure Addy would have been pleased.
And so the winter set in again, and Mrs. Griffiths, whose attendance had been spasmodic during the nicer weather, became steady again, an infinite help with the house-cleaning and fire-making and even cooking, which I had no time for any more. I had perforce to leave her alone with Dottie a good deal and I took her aside and urged her most strongly not to say anything that might upset or distress Dottie in any way—no gloomy stories or chalk-pit workers. ‘Oh my dear, I know the poor thing’s not well in her head,’ she replied. ‘Of course I won’t upset her. I only hope no one else’ll mention Mr. Stephens to her.’ Mr. Stephens had been taken to hospital and was in a geriatric ward. It was not this bare fact so much that Mrs. Griffiths kindly wanted to protect Dottie from; it was the truly awful stories that Mrs. Stephens was telling around the village about the way ‘they’ treated him there. She was afraid to complain too much, or have rows with the nurses, because the old man had whispered to her that they ‘took it out’ on the patients if their families complained. I saw Mrs. Stephens myself very often—she was still living in the back of the burnt-out post office; she was dreadfully unhappy, and would have had Mr. Stephens back again whatever the risk, but the doctors wouldn’t allow it. ‘The only times I can be peaceful within myself,’ she once told me, ‘is when I can make myself believe that he’s wandering when he tells me these horrible things. They can’t be true, oh, they can’t, nobody could be so cruel! But then how could he imagine anything like that? Sometimes I think it’s all a judgement on me for what I said to him, the night of the fire.’ And her fingers would begin to snap for Muffer to come to her side and be stroked, while the tears ran down her cheeks—‘I’m sorry, dear, I’m sorry, I’m sure I shouldn’t cry, you’ve got your own worries and troubles, I know …’ Seeing her did me good in the dreadful way of putting my own petty despairs into perspective, for what she was going through literally seemed to me the worst thing in the world.
During the winter there was not so much trade in the shop, but more in London, and I had to travel up and down a good deal. The Galloping Maggot had finally gone home, so I used Dottie’s car. I didn’t have to serve in the boutique, just take the stuff up, arrange it, and have discussions with the sales staff and so on. I managed to conceal most of my total ignorance for the first little while, living, as it were, on the quality of the merchandise and Dottie’s hints, which I threw out in a casual way to impress them all with my apparent business acumen and originality. After a while I began to gain a little experience of my own. I never developed, and never will develop, anything approaching Dottie’s flair; but a workaday ability to keep my head above water in the commercial millrace was quite an achievement for someone like me. And what was more important in a way, I began to enjoy it. The moment that that happened, everything became a little easier, even the erstwhile intolerable aches left over from Henry and Toby.
I nearly always tried to see John whenever I was in town, and several times we had a meal together. He was doing neither specially well nor badly; his life just seemed to jog on. He had managed to get a room to himself, mainly because his two unsavoury room-mates had gone their several ways and he had to come to an arrangement with his landlord to pay a bit extra to keep other tenants out. He had rearranged the room, which was now an enlarged version of his ‘box’ in Doris’s house—all the walls were covered with a dense, vibrant montage of posters, bits of fabric, newspaper cuttings, pin-ups black and white, male and female—a sort of glorious indiscriminate paper love-in. I added several items to this collection, including some of our carrier bags and some tea-towels which were now one of our lines, plus remnants whenever I had them to spare, though I had most of them made into patchwork cushion-covers or toys. His furniture was mostly either wicker, or metal, except the bed-head, which was a vast baroque thing he had picked up in a junk-yard, all carved with broken birds and fruit and bells and painted a bright, shiny mixture of colours—it was very psychedelic, at a time when that word hadn’t been thought of. In fact the whole room was a sort of ‘happening’; one had to narrow one’s eyes and one’s sensibilities whenever one entered, or be dazzled and almost intoxicated with all that chaos of colour. John himself began to dress in a very far-out way, in what I then thought of as Caribbean clothes—bright yellow slacks, pink or orange shirts, even coloured canvas shoes. The effect was starling, but, once one’s eyes had accustomed themselves, funny and pleasing.
John’s and my relationship never changed, never varied, and hasn’t until this day. I look upon it now as the one steady, reliable thing in my life. (Other than David; and I can’t, I dare not, really count him. More and more I’m convinced that it is fatal, almost wicked, to depend on one’s children; it’s bad enough that they depend on you.) I’m ashamed now to remember that at first I was embarrassed to have John come down to the cottage. He looked pretty outrageous even in London, before it began to swing; imagine how he looked to an ultra-conservative country village. It was Dottie who finally insisted that I invite him, and furthermore go up to town and fetch him. She needed to see him, she said, when I had described him and his abode to her. So I brought him, and in the event of course it was not embarrassing at all; true, every eye in the high-street turned as we walked or drove along it. I was less susceptible to public opinion than I had thought, and not merely didn’t care, but rather revelled in it; and John simply didn’t notice. Dottie, when we arrived, was downstairs—very unusual for her, she spent most of the time in bed, or at least in her room; but she was dressed and lying on the sofa. The effort this must have cost her surprised me (all this for John?). She actually stood up when we came in, and shook hands with him and led him to a chair, and then I noticed she had prepared a drink for him and everything, it was really quite astonishing—I mean, she’d only seen him about twice before in her life, and here she was, receiving him according to the first of her proverbial guest-categories (‘There are three kinds of guests, honoured, tolerated, and bloody nuisances’). They sat down together like old friends and began at once to talk about Dottie’s state of health, a subject I had strictly forbidden him to touch on, but she started it.
‘I’ve been ill,’ she said without preamble.
‘Not hard to see that,’ he said. ‘What the matter with you?’
‘Didn’t Jane tell you?’
‘She tell me you had a nervous breakdown.’ I sucked in my breath. To my knowledge, the words had never been spoken in Dottie’s presence till then. ‘But I dunno what is it,’ he added.
‘It’s like—if all the strings on your guitar went pop at once.’
‘Ah. No music after—uh?’
She shook her head. ‘Only jangling and banging.’
‘Sort of like being crazy?’
‘Very like it.’
‘My Mama went crazy,’ said John matter-of-factly.
‘Did they put her away?’ I stiffened in my corner, because I thought I heard a thin, panicky note in Dottie’s voice, but it may have been just the contrast with John, who had spoken entirely casually.
‘No, and you know why? Because we never told anyone. We just kep her with us. She wasn’t mad, you see, she was just crazy. Didn’t want to hurt nobody. Wanted to be different people. So we let her be whoever she wanted, and we kinda—loved her, and after a bit … she came back. And nobody ever knew.’
‘How long was she like that?’
He shrugged. Time never meant a thing to John. ‘Dunno. A year—two years maybe. Yeh, it must’ve been two years, with the time it took her to come back. That took a long time, till she was really Mama.’
‘It’s funny,’ said Dottie. ‘Even when I was at my worst—’ she glanced at me, and away again, ‘I never wanted to be anyone but me.’
‘You got a different kind then, I guess,’ said John placidly. His brilliant shirt stood out fantastically against the worn, darkened floral linen of Addy’s old armchair, like a bird of paradise in an old apple tree. He settled his back more comfortably, took a big swig of his drink, and grinned at Dottie. ‘Me, I kinda like crazy people. Now, you take Doris. She wasn’t at all crazy. But Mavis was a little, with all those things she had in her room, and the cat and all that. And as much as she was crazy, I liked her. And Toby. That cat was real crazy—wasn’t he, Janie? In them days when we was all together? That was a crazy time, and I was never so happy like them.’ He shook his head, fondly and reminiscently.
‘I wish I’d been with you in that house,’ Dottie said suddenly.
‘Yeh man, that was a time all right!’ He smiled tenderly at me, and then jumped up. ‘Hey though! Where is he—that baby you had in you belly, where’s that crazy baby shared all them good times with us?’
When he saw David, he carried on as if he’d never seen anything like him in the whole of his life. He danced, he shouted, he capered and sang; he lay down on the floor and rolled about, just as he used to roll on my rug in the L-shaped room. David fell in love with him—all of him, his woolly head, his black shining face, his expanse of teeth, his pink palms, his Caribbean clothes. We couldn’t drag them apart. John had to carry David to bed at last, and I didn’t even get a goodnight. I left them alone in David’s room, John singing and playing the bongo drums on David’s tummy, to his utterable enchantment.
I went down to Dottie, who was lying on the sofa smoking and looking quietly at nothing as she often did. But she turned to me the moment I came in, and smiled one of her old, vivid smiles.
‘What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person,’ she said. Her voice, for the first time, sounded completely normal.
So Dottie got better. As John said, it took a long time till she was really Dottie. I helped, David helped, John helped, time helped—and in the end, she began to help herself, and at last one evening she came into the kitchen, put on an apron briskly and said, ‘I’m making supper tonight, you must be whacked.’ I was; I’d been in town in the morning, and in the shop all afternoon. But still I was doubtful, and she saw it, and said, ‘Look at me, and don’t worry any more. I’m cured.’
‘Still. Take it easy.’
‘I don’t want to. When I was well, I never took it easy. If I take it easy now, I won’t feel I’m well. And I’ve got to feel I’m well. One can’t be a nervous wreck forever.’ We looked at each other, she with an odd shyness which I had never seen in her before, and I searchingly, trying to see if this long-dreamt-of recovery was real or only a phase of the illness. And then suddenly we were hugging each other in the rather embarrassed, awkward way of women. ‘All right then,’ I said. ‘The steak’s in the fridge.’
‘Have we any champagne?’
‘No, sorry. I didn’t have notice you were going to be cured today.’
‘In that case, I’ll stay crazy until opening time tomorrow.’ We both laughed; I felt a surge of wild relief. At last, at last she was better! And hot on the heels of that unselfish thought, came the selfish one—at last I’m not entirely alone!
During that meal, which was a celebration even without the champagne, we talked as we had never talked before about the shop. I say never before, because in the early days it was all one sided, Dottie had all the enthusiasm, all the ideas; I was simply a sounding-board. Then, when in recent months I had desperately wanted to talk to her, she hadn’t been there properly. Now at last some of her interest revived, we could begin to exchange true—and literal—shop-talk. I had so much to tell her; once I started, I couldn’t stop. I put her to sleep eventually, poor girl. And after she’d gone to bed, and I was still lying awake, feeling terribly excited and stimulated, I had a wonderful vision of what was ahead for us—the first really cheerful, hopeful thoughts I had entertained for longer than I could clearly remember. Dottie and I would be real partners now; I had served my apprenticeship and could work with her on an even footing. The business now mattered to me as much as to her, and I knew almost as much about it. There seemed no reason at all why we shouldn’t make a real success of it between us. And as for our mutual personal problem—to wit, men—in that elevated moment of anticipated happiness, there was no room for doubts. My old conviction returned to me full force—once one achieves self-reliance, once one has overcome the need for men, that’s when they come, usually in droves. I laughed into my pillow, fell asleep and dreamed of David, grown tall and handsome, making love to me … horrors! But I woke the next morning laughing because it was so obvious and Freudian, and I felt so happy suddenly, I felt that I, too, had been cured …
This lovely feeling went on for several days—a week. I shared everything with Dottie, every titbit, every tiny incident to do with the shop, all the stored-up bits of gossip about the various suppliers’ personal lives—I never seemed to stop talking, and Dottie listened, as I had once listened … Our roles were completely and exactly reversed. Dottie was now the stay-at-home partner, cooking the meals, looking after the baby, taking phone-calls (we had a phone in the cottage now) and occasionally going to see people, though she said she didn’t feel very good at that yet and I didn’t encourage it. And I was the active one, rushing hither and yon all day and bringing my work home with me at night. I was only waiting for the day when she would volunteer to come with me to the shop, I could hardly wait to show her all I had done there, and for the delight of seeing her properly back in harness. I felt certain that as soon as she stepped inside the doors, her old passionate involvement would grip her again and she would instandy begin to flash round the place in her old way, upbraiding me for missing possibilities, re-arranging everything, asking all the questions that she still hadn’t, somehow, asked … Only when she did all this, would I be convinced that ‘Mama had come back’.
After about a fortnight, I could stand it no longer.
‘Today you’re coming with me to the shop,’ I said one morning over the usual hasty breakfast.
She stopped eating and looked at her plate for a moment, and I felt a physical qualm of uneasiness amounting to fear; not mine, but hers. Then she looked up with a quick smile and said, ‘All right. It’s time, isn’t it?’
She was perfectly silent during the drive. I thought, she’s worried about the changes, about what I’ll have done to it. I rattled on, ‘Look, love, don’t be afraid to tell me where I’ve gone wrong. I’ve learnt a lot, but I’ll never have your touch. You’ll probably have to set the whole display to rights. I won’t mind—honestly.’ She didn’t respond, and somehow my heart sank.
When we got to the shop, I didn’t open up at once; we stood in front of the window, gazing in at the window-dressing, or rather she gazed at it and I gazed at her, trying to gauge her reaction. Her face was bleak; nothing came alive in it, neither satisfaction nor annoyance, and no excitement either, not a flicker. ‘What do you think?’ I asked at last, with forced cheerfulness. ‘Not bad for a beginner? But you must re-do it.’ She turned away from the window abruptly. ‘Let’s go in, it’s cold out here,’ she said, with a little shiver.
I unlocked the door and there was a whole silly shambles about who should go in first. I felt my nerves getting more and more on edge. Finally I walked in past her, and she followed slowly, looking round. ‘Just wander round, get the feel of it again,’ I urged her. She moved round indeed, but with a timid air, and when she touched things it was tentatively, without a trace of her old authority, rather like the sort of customer who has to buy a present for someone and hasn’t a clue what to get. After a bit she turned to me and said, with a little sharpness, ‘Please don’t stand there looking at me. It makes me nervous.’ I at once went into the back and busied myself there; I unpacked some new stuff, and when I had it dusted—and, incidentally, had made some coffee—I called her in.
‘Dottie! Come through and see something.’
When she began to walk through, I realised suddenly that I hadn’t heard a sound from her, not a footstep, since I left her; it was rather uncanny, as if she hadn’t moved at all. Her face looked a bit white as she came in, and she didn’t look at me directly. ‘Look!’ I said.
She approached the table slowly and picked up one of the pieces. It was the latest of Ron’s things, now rapidly developing into one of our most exciting lines. ‘I didn’t tell you because I wanted to surprise you,’ I said. ‘But Ron’s stuff is among the most successful at Heal’s—they’re crazy about him. He’s quit his job in the factory and gone into this full-time—spent his savings in his own little foundry. I went up to see him not long ago. I so agree with you about him. He told me his wife nearly ran away from him when he left his steady job, but she’s dead proud of him now he’s doing so well—he’s selling stuff privately too, and beginning to get overseas orders.’ Dottie still said nothing, but stood turning the smooth glass round and round in her hands. ‘You did that,’ I said quietly. ‘You brought him out and made him an artist. You’ve done that to quite a lot of people. Aren’t you pleased with yourself? Don’t you feel satisfied?’
Suddenly I saw that she was crying. ‘My God, what’s the matter?’ I asked in dismay.
‘I don’t—feel—anything,’ she managed to say, with great difficulty. ‘That’s all. Even about this—even this. Nothing, Jane. Just—sad, sad, sad.’ She put the glass piece down and turned away, holding her face in her hands. I went to her and held her. ‘It’s gone,’ she sobbed. ‘That lovely excitement, that purpose and direction—I remember it, but now it’s all left me. I’ve gone cold on it. I’ve even lost that! Oh God, I’m so lonely!’
I forget now which of us made the suggestion. Perhaps neither of us had to actually say it. It was hanging in the air between us for a long time, anyway, before it was mentioned. And then, suddenly, we were talking about it, and Dottie was showing animation for the first time in many long, weary, empty winter weeks.
‘But it’s your money,’ she kept saying. ‘Addy left it to you. How could I take it?’ And yet, she spoke without conviction, for the sake of form, and I knew even then that she would take it; it was as if she had received some sanction which I knew nothing about. Because when I finally said, ‘I’m sure this is what Addy would want,’ she fell silent and looked at me gratefully, as if she had been waiting for me to understand something.
I was much more concerned about how she would manage over there on her own. Once I wouldn’t have thought twice about it; I might rather have worried about how New York would stand up to her impact. Now she was undeniably changed; she was weaker, less sure of herself.
‘What will you do over there?’
‘I can’t tell you yet. But something will present itself.’ There was a graininess in her voice that reassured me a little. It was important that she felt a strong urge to go; it was the lack of strong urges in her life that had been, for these past weeks, the principle cause of her underlying fear and inability to come to grips with anything.
I watched her preparations to leave with a heart of solid lead. Glad though I had to be that she had found something she really wanted to do, I could not help crying inwardly after the hopes I had had for her partnership, companionship and help; nor could I completely withstand the terror of being left all on my own to run the business without her. I didn’t in the least see how I could; I would have to find someone else; but at the moment, the mere thought of doing that was as untenable as the thought of re-marriage is to a widow at the funeral.
And ironically, it was only now that I suddenly saw Dottie doing all the things I had hoped for as far as the shop was concerned. Gradually roused from her lethargy by the notion, and then the definite prospect, of going to New York, she began one day to reorganise everything; she rearranged the displays from top to bottom, saying as she moved about in her old decisive way, ‘Do forgive me, Jane; it’s not that yours aren’t wonderful; but they’re yours, and if I’m ever going to get work in New York I have to be able to show people something that’s mine’ What she was doing, then, was setting things up for professional photographs; and when these were taken, she put her hands on her hips and said, ‘There! Now let’s put it all back the way it was.’ ‘No! Are you crazy?’ I asked. ‘It’s ten times better like this.’ ‘Look, Jane,’ she said quietly. ‘“Us and Them” is yours now. It’s all yours. You can do it, I know you can. Only you must do it in your own way, not by copying me.’ And she forced me to let her put it all back. And that was the last time she ever set foot in the shop.
She left a week later. She went by boat, the cheapest way possible, in order to save money to live on when she got there. She travelled on an immigrant’s visa so that she could get work. That was the only reason, she said. ‘Good lord, can you see me turning into an American?’ I couldn’t, but if I had been there with her these five years, I would have been able to watch the process; in two more months she is taking out citizenship papers.
To be brief, then: in American parlance, she made it, and made it good. One might have expected it to be tough at first; but she never looked back. The first week, she got a job in the best shop in town, as a salesgirl in the department which sold English porcelain—it was her accent, she said, which got her the job; but it was her acumen and flair which kept it for her and got her promoted to head of the department inside of a year. Her salary was fabulous by our standards, but the cost of living was enough to devour it all—or would have been; but something happened which meant that most of her income went straight into savings.
I still have the letter she wrote me when it started—it arrived about eight months after she left England.
‘I’ve met someone,’ she wrote, ‘whom it seems a good idea for me to live with. We’ve been sleeping together on and off for quite a while now, and he’s keen that we should set up house together on—well, I was going to say on a permanent basis, but nothing’s ever that, especially not in New York. Why not marry him, did I hear you ask? Well, it’s odd about that. First of all, it’s decidedly odd that such an apparently nice bit of Adam’s-flesh is not married already (he was, of course; every man in America who isn’t a raving queer or a monster—and plenty who are—have been married sometime). So one can’t avoid suspecting a few unpleasant revelations sooner or later. And it’s even odder that he should, as a matter of fact, actually have asked me. But the oddest thing of all, I suppose, is that I’ve refused for the paradoxical reason that I seem to be too old-fashioned in my outlook to get married to a man who tried to persuade me to it by remarking, “What are you worrying about? If it doesn’t work out, we can easily get divorced.” No, don’t be put off him by that, or I’ll be sorry I mentioned it. He’s very sweet, very male (I think, though one’s becoming desperately wary—the heartier they look, the softer can often be the marshmallow centre of their Mom-complexes) and very, very attractive. And there’s another thing. Living alone for a woman in this city is just sheer hell, if only because of the others who are doing it. They are the unhappiest, sickest sisterhood in the whole world … And then there are the wolves that prey on them—on us. Oh yes, yes, there are wolves in England, too. The difference is that over there, they at least have the grace to pretend that you’d be doing them a favour. Here, they make it thoroughly clear that they regard it as the other way round. I’ve never had this feeling of needing to—well, in the old novels they used to call it “placing oneself under a man’s protection”. In order to achieve this nowadays you have to place yourself under him as well, which in the present instance, I must admit, is not the worst part of the bargain. And who knows? One day I might lose my conviction of the impermanence of relationships, and he might lose faith in the all-curing cheap panacea of divorce … Till then, we will each have someone to come home to. My God, aren’t I picking up American! Soon you’ll hear me drawling (or drooling) about Mrs. Wagner’s pies and those that pray together stay together.’
My first reaction to this letter was, that it was a vindication of Henry and his rigorous refusal to make love to Dottie. I had thought until then that he had been wrong; especially when I saw, after his death, that Dottie could hardly have been more deeply involved either way than she was, nor could her reaction to his death have been more violent. Yet the relative speed of her recovery—well under a year—proved to me, knowing her as well as I did, that Henry had been right after all.
Bill turned out to be more than a passing refuge. Their relationship developed as these things ought to, slowly and steadily, and now I’m convinced from her more recent letters that they will get married one of these days; ‘I can’t go on all my life being satisfied with godmotherhood-by-remote-control.’
As for her professional life, it is blooming. About two years ago she and Bill, who is a designer and graphic artist, pooled their joint financial resources and ‘leaked’, as she put it, ‘drop by drop into the interior decorating business.’ First a poorish friend’s old house; then a richer friend’s new house; then the flat of someone who wasn’t a friend but had seen one of the other interiors they’d done. Then it snowballed; they had to take on an office, an assistant; in no time at all, Dottie was flying round as of old, making her proverbial ‘contacts’ over an ever-growing area which, when I last heard, stretched from Buffalo to Martha’s Vineyard. ‘It’s a somewhat larger beat than Surrey,’ she remarked dryly. ‘At this rate I’ll soon need my own aeroplane.’ It would never surprise me to hear she’d got one.
And a few months ago, she mailed me a cheque for the exact equivalent of four hundred pounds …
As for myself, I’ve managed. More than that it would be difficult to claim. David is six, and sturdy, and sweet, and sound as a bell—so far. The shop is a going concern; it is still partly thanks to Dottie, whose long arm appears from time to time in the form of imported handicrafts from places like Nantucket—all a little weird; wall-hangings made of string, table-tops of concrete with the bottoms of bottles embedded in it, or strange musical toys called ‘whimmy-diddles’ which make marvellous conversation-pieces but which nobody can play. They add an exotic note to the displays, but they sell better in London, where people’s tastes are more eccentric and less practical. Another way Dottie still participates is by sending me rich and glamorous transatlantic customers. Many’s the travellers cheque that has dropped into the till from some bejewelled hand, into which, earlier, Dottie had pressed one of our flamboyant cards, with which I keep her well-supplied. ‘I forget where we picked this up, but whoever gave it to us was most insistent that we should pay you a visit …’ And Jo and I exchange knowing smiles.
Ah yes—Jo. Well, Jo is my partner. After Ted died, which he did about a year and a half after Henry, Jo, who had always kept in touch, but sporadically, because of Ted’s long illness, simply arrived one day with her station-wagon loaded with stuff and Amanda bound into the front seat with a safety belt. Jo looked older, and richer, and at the same time, softer. ‘Ted’s dead,’ she said shortly, and turned her eyes away. ‘No, don’t say anything. Lots of people thought I married him for this moment … He’s dead, and Amanda and I are on our tod and we can’t stick it, either of us. We miss him so bloody much, it’s unbelievable … Can we stay with you for a bit? Amanda can muck in with David, I’ve brought her a bed, and I’m prepared to sleep on the floor.’
Real desperation had broken up all her smooth, well-groomed, self-contained lines. I wasn’t such a stranger to her feelings and situation that I could fail to make her welcome. Amanda ‘mucked in’ admirably; she’s a bit older than David, but at 3 that really didn’t count for much, and she was just what he needed. The very day after they arrived, we began to make plans. The kids would go off to the local play-school; I’d been meaning to send David, but he hadn’t seemed keen. However, Amanda had been going for half a year, and soon convinced him that life without a play-school was unthinkable. Jo came down to the shop, moved her hands and eyes lovingly all over everything, and then said, ‘Why don’t I be your assistant?’ I stared at her. It seemed too good to be true! This chic, effectual creature, so alive, so attractive, was the next-best thing to Dottie that I could conceive of. ‘If you have any doubts about meaning that,’ I said cautiously, ‘you’d better take it back, before I chain you up.’
Within a few months, it was all fixed and working like a charm. She was too wise to settle down in the cottage, although it was perfectly pleasant and workable while it lasted, and we were both so damned lonely at the time that I was tempted to implore her to stay on. But she bought a house not far away; we did it up between us and she and Amanda moved into it. We saw each other daily, and the kids became—and have remained—great friends. They are currently engaged to be married, and are planning a wedding trip to Africa in David’s toy helicopter to bring back animals, including two mature alligators (‘to eat people with’) and a boa-constrictor.
After a year, when I saw that she was serious and not merely seeking a temporary palliative, I asked Jo to go into partnership. Since then money has more or less ceased to be a worry, as far as the shop is concerned, and we’ve been able to expand. When Mr. Stephens died, Mrs. Stephens went into an old people’s home, and the shattered remains of the post office came on the market. Jo went out one morning and bought it—just like that. She actually came home at lunchtime with a bag of groceries, from which she took various things, saying as she did so, ‘Here’s the peanut butter, and the jam, and the sponge, and the bacon, oh, and I’ve bought the post office too.’ I jibbered a bit at first, I didn’t see how we could handle anything as big as the shop would now be; but it was a variation on Parkinson’s Law; as soon as we’d moved into it we started wondering where the hell we’d squeezed everything in before. Of course it all took time; the whole front had to be rebuilt and combined with our building. It was another year before the new frontage was ready, with a fanlight door in the middle, the ‘Us’ on the left, the ‘Them’ on the right, and the ‘and’ curving round the top of the fanlight. I took endless colour slides of it to send to Dottie, and she wrote back saying, ‘I can’t say much except smarm. The fact is, I’m nearly sick with something that feels very like jealousy. But good luck to you both … Don’t forget I started it.’
One of the ambiguous beauties of half-combining my family with Jo’s is that both are fatherless. In many ways, of course, at least one man about the place could be a boon to us both, and we have often discussed the desirability of one of us marrying someone whom both of us could exploit, not sexually of course, but as a general injector of masculinity into the children’s surroundings. But no such person has appeared, though Jo has had several near-misses and even I have had a few offers—three to be exact—one David hated, and one Jo hated, and the third the others quite took to, but I couldn’t stand him, so that was that.
But in actual fact, it has helped with David—the fact of Amanda not having a father either. It definitely postponed the dreaded hour when he asked the inevitable question, to an age where it was somewhat easier to give him an explanation which held water with him and was not too far removed from the truth. It came up at last when he was going on four, and had seriously begun visiting round among the other children at his kindergarten. It came out quite straight, just the way I’d spent four years imagining it, and I had my answer ready:
‘Why haven’t I got a daddy?’
‘You have one.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He lives a long way away.’
‘Why? Why isn’t he with us?’
‘Because he and Mummy aren’t married.’
He didn’t understand this, but accepted it for a while, though he asked the same series of questions several more times later. Then came:
‘What does my daddy look like?’
I had a picture of Terry when we were in a play together, long ago, and I showed him that. Terry looked very nice in it, tall and thin and handsome in his ‘gorgeous juve’ make-up; the weak mouth and hands didn’t show. David spent a long time looking at it; my heart bled, but I stood it because I knew it was just, and in any case only the very beginning.
‘Is he good?’ he asked then.
‘Yes, I think so.’
Later: ‘Will I see him ever?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Far away.’
‘Why does he never come?’
‘He’s very busy. Maybe he’ll come one day.’ What would he think if he knew I had put Terry off coming, right at the start—that Terry didn’t even know our address? He might think that was the worst part of what I had done. Terry couldn’t reach us even if he wanted to.
It was when David had asked, in that same plaintive voice, ‘Why does he never come?’ for about the sixth time, that I began to realise, belatedly, that Terry would have to come. I wouldn’t have believed that all the pathetic little questions in the world could have brought me to think such a thing, but one cannot conceive in advance of what it does to one’s personal inclinations and resolutions to have one’s child ask that kind of question in that kind of voice.
‘Amm’s daddy’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is my daddy dead?’
‘No, I think he’s in Paris.’
‘Paris is far away, isn’t it?’
‘Pretty far.’
‘In the distance?’
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s not as far as being dead?’
‘No.’
‘Will Amm see her daddy one day?’
‘No, darling.’
‘But I will, won’t I?’
‘Maybe. I can’t promise.’
I knew nothing about Terry’s life. It was five years since I had heard anything of him. I put off any decision about contacting him for the very reasonable reason that I didn’t know how to. But in the end, the questions, gentle, repetitive, persistent, grew too much for me. I rang up his old office, to ask—just to enquire. I didn’t give a name. He’d left that firm, and moved to another. I put off ringing them for another couple of weeks, and then I had to try again.
‘Does Terence Boyden work there?’
‘One moment please.’
A click, a pause: then, incredibly, shockingly, Terry’s voice:
‘Hallo?’
It was too easy. Too sudden. I nearly hung up. I sat like a fool for moments with him saying ‘Hallo? Hallo?’ Then I said:
‘Hallo, Terry. It’s Jane.’
It was now his turn to retreat into shaken silence.
‘I’ve been—half expecting you to call. How is he?’
‘Very well. He wants to see you.’
‘I’ll come. Don’t worry. You can’t imagine …’
‘It’s all right, there’s no raging hurry—’
‘Isn’t there? I’ll be down tomorrow evening.’
‘The week-end’s time enough.’
‘Don’t you want me to come?’
I had to be honest. ‘It’s David who wants it, not me.’
He was hurt, I could tell; the little-boyishness was still there, unattractive in a grown man, yet affecting.
‘Well … I’ll come whenever you tell me.’
‘Come Saturday. That’ll give me time to prepare him.’ And myself, I thought.
He suddenly said, ‘By the way, I’m married.’
‘Oh?’ It was no sort of shock or surprise, at first I couldn’t see how it could matter. ‘Well, so long as you don’t bring her. That would be a bit too much to explain.’
‘To her, too,’ he said, with a little unexpected dryness in his voice.
‘Doesn’t she know?’
‘No, she damn well doesn’t.’
This was an appalling complication.
‘Listen, Terry. Maybe you’d better not. David can get along without seeing you. You’re liable to get into very hot water if you don’t watch out.’
‘Oh, rubbish. One afternoon—’
‘If that’s all it’s going to be, much better not to come at all.’
‘Were you thinking I was going to come regularly?’
I paused to think. ‘I’m not sure … perhaps. The where’s-daddy-why-doesn’t-he ever-come bit wore me down at last past the point of coherent thought. But I honestly think it would be stupid for you just to appear once and vanish into the haze again forever.’
‘But I want to see him! He’s mine!’
A bright, shiny, noisy alarm bell started clanging insistently in my brain.
‘Haven’t you any children of your own?’
‘What does that mean, of my own? David’s my own, isn’t he?’
It was on the tip of my tongue to retort, ‘No he bloody well is not!’ but that might have confused him. ‘I meant—with your wife.’
‘No. She can’t have any.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Do you know, I had to go through all those hideously humiliating tests because she wouldn’t credit otherwise that it wasn’t my fault? And all the time I was aching to tell her I had a son, but I couldn’t, of course.’
‘Why of course? It was all long before you met her, presumably.’
There was a pause, and then he said shortly, ‘It wouldn’t have mattered with her, if it had all been before she was born.’ Whereupon, needless to say, I realised he didn’t love her and that this marriage, like his first, had been a mistake; I realised, too, that there might be another reason why he had been waiting, half-dreading, half-hoping, but always dreaming that I might contact him—and fill up empty spaces in his life.
Fatal. Fatal. No.
‘Terry. I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I—’ I half-choked on the pompous lie—’I don’t want to endanger your marriage.’
‘Don’t you worry about that.’
‘Well, I do worry about it. And I don’t want to get mixed up in anything. I—I don’t want David to get mixed up either, any more than he has to be. It’s better for him to—lack a father, than to have one who—flits.’ I felt his hurt like a living wave humming along the wires, but I had to be ruthless. ‘I’m sorry, love.’
He sensed I was about to hang up, without giving him my address, and he suddenly shouted ‘Jane! Jane!’ down the phone at me like a drowner. ‘It’s not fair! I always wanted to be his father, but you never gave me a chance—’ I knew that if I gave him even a minute longer, a minute in which to plead, I would weaken, if only because once, long, long ago, long before David was conceived, I loved him. So I put down the phone.
That’s all, about Terry. Except that I live in dread of the day when he’ll inevitably walk into Heal’s and see me there, or deliberately run me to earth. I am as sure as it’s possible to be, that he’ll turn up one day. Now I stop to reason it out, nothing except a happy marriage and a family could have completely insured me against him. His marriage, I meant; but I suppose if I were safely immured behind the barrier of wedlock, I would feel much less vulnerable.
I wish and wish that I had never phoned him, never brought David and me back into the forefront of his mind. The danger to David is considerable. And yet … one day when he’s older, he may seek Terry out. But in the meantime … I don’t know. I just don’t know. The more I watch him, the more I gain confidence as a mother, the more I realise that I am, at my very best, exactly half of what he needs. Sometimes I watch him playing with Amanda; he is quieter and gentler than she is, shares more easily, hits back less readily; and I feel proud of him; but then I wonder whether that is normal for a boy, whether he oughtn’t to be more aggressive, noisier … He is very affectionate; he comes to me and climbs on my knee or straight up my legs into my arms for a kiss, and I hold him tight and cuddle him, and then suddenly I put him down. Because I’m not sure, even about that. And surely my very uncertainty, my underlying doubts, whether they’re psychologically justified or not, about my ordinary instincts towards him as his mother—surely they must in themselves affect him? One should be confident all the time that one is doing the right thing, and I would be, if only the masculine element was there as a counterbalance.
Whenever a man comes along, any man, even the new postman, who is youngish and tall, David runs to him—he used to throw his arms round every man he saw, when he was about three, until he saw it embarrassed them; now he just stands and stares, as if they exuded some aura he needed to be in. Twice I have seriously contemplated making a dead set for men-friends just in order to secure a father for David. Each time I was lucky; they did something or other that put me off them so entirely that I ceased to be able to contemplate living with them, even for David’s sake—I might do it for him, even so, if only I thought I was capable of hiding my own irritation or unhappiness. But in any case it’s no easy matter to find a man who is willing to father another man’s son. If only John were …! Oh well. If only he were normal, and more mature, and better educated, and had other work—and were white … Just the same, he’s the nearest thing to a father-figure in David’s life, and David’s heedlessness of his colour or any other thing about him has led me to reassess my own ideas. These biasses are obviously not born in us; David recognises him instinctively for what he is, a thoroughly good man. Oh, rarity! Good (as Dottie said) from side to side, right through the middle.
That’s nearly all. How inconclusive it all seems! Stories shouldn’t end in the middle, but the middle is where I am—the middle of my life (I’m thirty-four). Let me finish off with a word about Toby. So few marriages really work these days that it needn’t surprise anyone to hear of two failed ones inside a couple of pages. This time it’s sadder because of their children. Whistler got pregnant, according to Billie’s sardonic account, the minute Toby hung his trousers over the bedrail. It was a girl and they called her Rachel, and then two years later they had another girl called Carissa, which I believe is the name of a shrub in Hebrew. Billie relayed this information dryly, but with ill-concealed anxiety. Toby and Whistler, it seemed, were getting caught up in Zionism. ‘It’s all my fault, I had to go and force her to join the Youth Movement … I thought it might do as a framework, instead of a religion … idiot that I was. But how could I guess it would take hold of her like this? Most kids grow out of it, like Scouts and Guides … Christ! What shall I do if they want emigrate to Israel? Surely he won’t be such a damn fool—what do you think, Jane?’ She always talks as if I know him better than anyone, even though I haven’t seen him for all these years. I said I had no idea, he’d certainly never mentioned Israel to me, in fact at that time he’d hardly seemed to think about being a Jew in any way. ‘Oh, how he’s changed;’ Billie said—with what seemed to me an ironic note of disapproval. ‘He’s Jewish to his backbone these days. Do you know, I believe they light candles on Eve of Sabbath? Not when I come, of course; they don’t want to shock me with all that rubbish; but for the children.’ I was surprised she thought it rubbish; after all, the big synagogue wedding … And she wouldn’t have wanted Melissa to marry a non-Jew, would she? She wagged her head from side to side in an unconsciously typical movement. ‘Oh well of course … that’s the point where all us Jews get pretty Jewish, I suppose. But there’s no need to carry it to extremes!’
And then she began to report quarrels, and once Whistler came running home with an infant daughter under each arm and stayed for a week. Toby, who was in the middle of a novel at the time, failed to come and demand their return, so in the end she went back by herself.
Since then they have been muddling along somehow, but Billie, who’s at her wits’ end about the situation, has recently begun saying that as it’s sure to end in the divorce courts anyway, then the sooner the better, ‘before Melissa conceives again during one of their innumerable reconciliations’. She admitted to me once—she’d taken me out to dinner and accidentally got a bit tight, most unusual for her—that it’s mostly Whistler’s fault. ‘Madness to get married at that age! I was wrong, I should have encouraged them to have an affair and find out by living together that she was far, far too young and selfish and volatile to be a good wife yet. She could have been, would have been—but later, later. What a tragedy, Jane! That’s what it seems to me. A tragedy.’
And Toby? Well, she says he’s a wonderful father, but not such a wonderful husband. The writing obsesses him more and more. His first was good, but nothing special in the way of a popular success. The second was better, but somehow didn’t get the right reviews. Then came the third, born, I could see, of his disappointment in his marriage; and did I, in that one, discover parts of myself—broken up, dispersed, reassembled as all-but-recognisable fragments of two different characters, but there? He even quoted me a couple of times. The funny, disturbing, wickedly demoralising thing was, that both the women that had bits of me in them were very important in the life of the hero, and the hero was Toby all right, my Toby, overlaid and disguised and changed, but nonetheless the Toby I knew and remembered … And that book was a best-seller.
I don’t love him any more. I don’t hope and dream that one day he will come to me. He is not, any longer, the father I would want for David—a man with his affections divided: how could he love my child as much as his own? But when I read that third novel I felt a clutching at the heart, that what-would-have-happened-if? feeling that is perhaps the saddest thing in the world. Toby wasn’t ready for marriage either, five years ago. No doubt it wouldn’t have worked any better with me … He writes so maturely now; that flippant joyous put-ting-of-the-finger on things has jelled into wisdom and insight, even into himself. (How that book must have hurt Whistler if she understood it! She has failed him worse than I did.)
I do yearn for him a little, still … Zionism and all … Of course I’d be no use to him there. Oh, rubbish, what am I talking about him for? I only meant to tell what had happened to him, and here I’ve dropped back five, no, six years … It’s Billie’s fault, really. She said straight out the other day that he should have married me and not Melissa. And then, damn her eyes, she had to add: ‘I think he thinks so, too.’ I sat there in her office, struck dumb, not knowing what to say or think. I remember thinking, if she doesn’t go on and tell me what she meant, I’ll never know another moment’s quiet—but I could not, for my own sake I dared not, ask the question that would have brought out the elaboration. She was sitting there like a bright-eyed, rather wicked bird, the tip of her long little-fingernail between her teeth, her eyes fixed on me, waiting … and I didn’t ask, and she didn’t go on, so now I’ll never know what he said to her, if anything … Or if it was just one of her bits of feminine naughtiness, dropped like a stone into a pool to stir up the water-beetles and watch the ripples she’s caused.
I see I’ve got nowhere as a person. I haven’t changed (does anyone, ever?) and I haven’t even grown up in the sense that I most wanted to, of becoming strong and independent. What play or book was it, in which one spinster says wistfully to another: ‘Tell me—when did you give up hope?’ Jo and I use this as a catch-line every time a man leaves our lives—somehow in a perverted way it cheers us up, if only because each of us has said it about the same number of times to the other. I would like to give up hope, I’m sure all my relationships would be quite different if I could; just settle for being one, instead of this haunting feeling of being half of some double animal, the absent other half of which one keeps feeling for at one’s side. And how often is Dottie’s backward shadow upon me! More now than ever, seeing that it is over David too.
Was I wrong to have him? I’ve even asked myself that. Life is tough and getting tougher, I mean harder to succeed in without the negative virtue of impenetrable toughness, and I see no signs of this in David … which is probably my fault.
In one of his last letters before his quiet, unobtrusive death, Father remarked: ‘Don’t make the error of bringing David up to be too sensitive and gentle. Let him stamp on caterpillars and play with toy tommy-guns and bash other children and kill little furry things with a catapult. Ah, don’t look so horrified, my darling. He’s a male, and that’s our world; he must train for it, or he will shrivel up inside himself and die at the things he’ll have to see and do later if he wants to survive.’
Darling Father. He knew what he was talking about. He once told me that when he was in the trenches in the First War, he felt sick every time one of his pals killed a rat, although he loathed the things. The other, greater horrors, the human deaths, he could never talk about … His vulnerability punished him all his life.
But I swear I don’t know how to blunt that quality in David which I love so much. The trouble is, I simply can’t want to … Whenever I read that letter of Father’s, I can only think desperately to myself: ‘He was right about so much. But about this, he’s got to be wrong.’