How had it come about that Joanna Parsons, that English rose, had married Carl May, this upstart from a kennel? Why, because she fell in love with him, of course, and he with her, and her father was too busy and her mother too complacent to interfere with the course of true love. Nor were Carl’s natural parents in any position to object to the match, being dead, and his foster parents were only too happy at this sudden uxorious turn of events: proof that the trouble they had taken with the boy, and the love and money they had expended upon him, were to be rewarded as they had hoped. He had joined the ranks of the achieving middle classes.
Little Joanna – for this is the way fate often works; sealing in our memories what is yet to come – had, when she was a child, read about the strange case of Carl May in a daily newspaper. The image of the abused and abandoned boy stayed in her mind, waiting, as it were, to pounce. The one to whom she, who had so much, could give so much!
How was it possible, thought little Joanna at the age of ten, weeping (unusually for her) into her porridge and cream, served by a maid, the plate so prettily laid on the white linen cloth, how was it possible that a world that contained so much excellence, pleasure and refinement should be the same world in which a boy could be kept in a kennel, beaten and abused, all but starved to death, have to teach himself to read from scraps of newspaper; a boy whose mother would then kill herself and whose stepfather be battered to death in prison at the hands of a vengeful mob? What, all this, and porridge and cream and dab your mouth as well? What a strange and upsetting world it was turning out to be!
‘That child should not be allowed to read the newspapers,’ her father said, observing her tears. The Parsons lived in Harley Street, above the shop: that is to say his consulting rooms. It was Dr Parsons’ joke. Joanna’s father was a physician: his speciality ear, nose and throat; two windows from the soul’s prison on to the outside world, one organ of communication. The doctor’s function was to keep all three bright, clean and properly receptive. Dr Parsons smoked a good deal, and coughed quite often, and presently was to die of lung cancer, but never made the connection between cigarette smoke and his ill health.
‘The newspapers should print only what is happy and good,’ said her mother, ‘not upset people the way they do.’
Dr Parsons had disappointed a family of generals and majors to go into medicine. He was a man of moderate height with regular features, fair hair and bright blue eyes – the latter a recessive gene. He came from the North East – he was of Scandinavian stock.
Mrs Parsons, daughter of a West Country solicitor, had pleased her family by marrying a man a notch or so above her in the social scale, three inches taller, four years her senior, and well able to support her. She was slightly built and reckoned beautiful, with high cheekbones, wide green eyes, and the red hair sometimes inherited from two black-haired parents. She was of mixed Norman and Celtic stock. The strands of the different races met in their child, Joanna: she was beautiful, strong, healthy and bright, as if to encourage just such a blending.
‘Do stop that child snivelling,’ said Dr Parsons. ‘Take away that newspaper.’ The maid did so.
Mrs Parsons dabbed Joanna’s eyes tenderly while rebuking her crossly. ‘You have no business crying,’ she said. ‘Remember there are others far worse off than you!’
It is the custom of intelligent and competent men to marry women less intelligent and less competent than themselves. So mothers often have daughters brighter than they, and fathers have sons more stupid. It does not make for happiness. Nature looks after the race, not the individual.
Joanna stopped crying the better to puzzle it all out. But she did not forget Carl May. She saved him up, as it were, till later: stored him in her mind. One day she would make it all up to him. In the meantime she learned her letters and presently Latin and Greek, at an all-girls’ school, and amazingly nobody stopped her, for the more a girl knows the more trouble she has finding a husband who knows more. But then prudence prevailed and she went on not to university but to a finishing school in Switzerland, where, in the interests of a future marriage, she was taught the mastery of flower arrangements, the organizing of dinner parties, the proper control of drunks (speak firmly but politely), servants (likewise), and the finer points of deportment. She ‘came out’ gracefully, being presented at Court, in the traditional way, when the ceremony was revived at the end of the war, and at her very first dance just so happened to meet Carl May, a pale, intense, not very tall but good-looking young man who worked at the Medical Research Council in Hampstead. He had not been on Active Service: his was a reserved occupation.
Carl May was famous already as the young man who’d started life in a kennel. Joanna Parsons’ heart went out to him at once: she saw him as the solution to a puzzle which had worried her all her life. His body went out to her, in trust and confidence; and though his head regretted she was not of the titled, moneyed classes, he thought he could put up with that. He needed a wife to look after him and he needed one now. He did not need children, but he did not tell her that, not at once.
‘I love him so much, Mummy,’ said Joanna. ‘I do so want to marry him. I want to make the past up to him. I want to make him happy.’
‘If you love him you should marry him,’ said Mummy. ‘After all, I loved your father.’ It was 1949, the nation was three years into socialism, everything was upside down. The young man had fought through heavy odds to end up well educated and well spoken: what were a few years in a kennel? They would make him appreciate her daughter the more. It was time the girl was out of the house: she made her mother feel faded, dusty and stupid. Mrs Parsons wanted Dr Parsons to herself again.
‘I want to marry him, Daddy,’ said Joanna, waiting for opposition. But none, to her disappointment, came.
‘Why not?’ was all her father said. He’d rather she’d married a doctor and perpetuated a race of physicians; he’d rather the young man had faced up to Hitler directly, but those few hard early years should at least help keep the young man’s feet on the ground, and besides, Dr Parsons was busy. Men had brought back odd diseases from the African deserts and the jungles of the Far East; ears heard wrongly, noses smelt falsely and words came strangely from tortured throats. And it was time the girl was out of the house. The vivid presence of the daughter made him discontented with the mother.
Only Joanna’s Aunt Anne was against the match: she said, ‘the child who’s beaten grows up to beat,’ but she was years ahead of her time and regarded as an hysteric. What a hopeless doctrine it would be, if true! That we never recovered from our past! What price progress then? For what applied to individuals applied to nations, and societies too. So much the world was beginning to see.
Now Joanna was sixty, and disgraced: she had failed, in the end, to make the past up to her husband, failed to make him happy. And Carl was sixty-three. Age wears out the resolution of youth: or look at it another way – the past seeps through into the present, as the garish colour of underlying old wallpaper, left unstripped for one reason or another, but usually financial, will eventually show through to the pale expensive layer on top and spoil everything.