Chloe’s baby miscarries at five months. Chloe cries and so does Oliver. Something is lost, they both feel it. They have been attacked by outside forces, and something has been taken from them. Yet what pleasure it is to weep together, to be each so identified with the other that loss for one is loss for both, and comfort likewise?
Chloe and Oliver are married in Bristol Register Office in superstitious haste, before worse befalls. It is too late, of course, for the baby, and for Chloe’s degree, but not for each other. It also means that Oliver can get a married student’s grant, double what he is getting already, and that he and Chloe can live in moderate comfort, while he studies, and she cooks and warms his bed, and, both agree, has the best of the bargain.
Good days. Unmarried students flock to their attic door, to see what marriage is like.
Chloe does not write to tell Gwyneth that she is getting married, only that she has lost the baby. Why not? Perhaps she feels Gwyneth has so little happiness of her own she might be tempted to steal her daughter’s by disapproving of the match, or crying, or worse, smiling her small brave smile throughout the ceremony, and raising her eyebrows at the frivolity of this secular occasion; or perhaps it was that Chloe, somehow, hoped to save her mother from the pain of the memory of her own marriage, and widowhood, and the realization that now her life was over, and Chloe’s begun.
Either way, whether prompted by nervousness or kindness, Chloe, most unkindly, does not write.
Oliver, likewise, keeps the marriage secret from his family. Why? Well, his sisters were married at about the time of Chloe’s miscarriage, in a spectacular double ceremony of joy and lamentation mixed, which costs Oliver’s father all his savings in food, ritual, flowers and orchestra, and which Oliver fails to attend, by virtue of tearing an achilles tendon as he boards the train on his way to the wedding. The pain is acute, his paralysis total – how he writhes and groans on the platform; Chloe, seeing him off (not asked herself, of course) is faint with shock and pity – his sisters (he presumes, for they never write) offended, and his father (he assumes) hurt to the quick by the nebbish nature of his atheistical if academic son. Does Oliver wish to compound the hurt (as people will when they discover they have hurt, and never meant to) by keeping his own marriage secret – or was the marriage itself the intended hurt? For in Rudore family mythology, shiksas are for laying, not for marrying, and who more shiksa than Chloe, that Christian girl of now scandalous repute?
If you had asked Oliver at the time, he would have looked blank and said ‘It is nothing to do with my family whom I marry, or how, or when, or why.’
And he would have said whom, not who, because that was in his nature too.
When Oliver has his degree – and to his dismay he gets a Third Class Honours degree and not the First he has predicted for himself – he and Chloe move to London. They live in a bed-sitting room in Battersea, beneath the towers of the Power Station, which sends out a cloud of black smoke to cloak the air above them. For this was in the days before London became the clean and almost sparkling place it is now, and fogs and smogs harassed the life and lung of its inhabitants.
Chloe, without any academic qualifications to speak of after fifteen years continuous study, feels herself lucky to get a job as a counter assistant in the British Home Stores selling twin-sets – those short-sleeved round-necked jumpers each partnered by a long-sleeved cardigan in the same (and usually pastel) shade. Sometimes she is moved to the jewelry section, where the strings of mock pearls, which complete the effect of the twin-sets, are sold. She enjoys her work – folding, smoothing, measuring, handling – her every movement neat, precise, feminine and controlled. Her capacity for dedication is immense. She is very soon offered promotion to assistant manager, but declines. To accept would mean an extra half-hour’s work a day, and arriving home later than Oliver. She feels she ought to be back before her husband, to have the room warmed and the tea ready. The fogs and smogs make him cough.
It is to Chloe such an astonishing and unlikely pleasure thus to have the legal and permanent enjoyment of a man that she becomes almost religious, for fear of God’s revenge. She will call in at the Catholic Church on her way home to light candles and placate Him.
And still she does not tell Gwyneth she is married. She writes, but does not visit.
Oliver works variously as a supply teacher, as assistant floor manager for BBC radio and as Welsh Rarebit maker at Lyons and so on, but his views are (according to his employers) arrogant and impossible, and he is fired from positions whence no-one has been fired before – a matter for some pride to both Chloe and him.
What an original person Oliver is – so brave, honest and full of integrity. Ah, she loves him! Oliver hates the rich, the powerful, the smug, the beautiful, and the successful. Oliver equates virtue with failure, and integrity with poverty. Oliver sleeps badly; he wakes shrieking from nightmares; he suffers atrociously from migraines, indigestion, bronchitis, hangovers and depression. Well, she knew all that.
Chloe shares Oliver’s distresses gladly. She lives through his depressions, soothes his migraines, appreciates his writings, nurses his indigestion, endures his rages – knowing them to be with himself and not with her, however loud he shouts and however many plates he throws, and however many tears she, in the end, is forced to shed. And knowing that, come nightfall, and the wearing thin of his anger, he will look surprised, and clasp her to him, loving her as much as he loves himself – and what more than this can any woman ask of any man? These too, it seems, are happy times. And the light from this happiness casts a glow both before and after in both their lives.
This was the fore-vision, no doubt, which comforted the child Chloe as she lay fearful in her hard bed: and gave the young Oliver the will to plant and replant his garden, though the soot fell, and the dogs and the cats shat, and his sisters planted their great erasing feet amongst his tender seedlings. And this is the happiness which neither Oliver nor Chloe can now forget, as they circle each other, in and out of the events of their lives; the children, her friends, Patrick Bates; for how many more confusions, it turns out, have already been planted in her young life than in his, on that first night they met, which were later to flower, and proliferate and grow rank.
One day, of course, they are obliged to go to visit Gwyneth. She looks up from the tankards behind the bar of the Rose and Crown at the two young people facing her, and for a moment, almost wilfully, does not recognize her daughter.
Chloe Mother.
Gwyneth (Presently) Oh, it’s you, Chloe.
Chloe Mother, I have something to tell you.
Gwyneth You’re married, I know. Marjorie came down to see me and told me.
Female friends. Ah, female friends.
Chloe (Indignant) Then why didn’t you write to me—
Gwyneth just stares at her.
Chloe (Panicky) Mother, don’t be like this.
Gwyneth looks older, and tireder, and sadder. Chloe looks as lovely as she ever will. The abortive pregnancy has left her trembling on an uncertain brink somewhere between the girl and the woman: she has the best of both worlds. Gwyneth goes off to clear the tables.
Oliver It’s my fault, Mrs Evans.
Gwyneth (When she returns) You look just like her father, you know that, don’t you. I hope your lungs are good, that’s all. Keep the sheets well aired, Chloe.
It is forgiveness, acceptance, and reconciliation. She and Chloe, who lived so close and who so seldom touch each other, actually embrace, and cry a few tears. Mrs Leacock allows her to give the young couple a free supper in the Nookery, and even to sit with them while they eat it. Well, Sunday evenings are slack.
Chloe assumes that the next step is for Oliver to introduce her to his family. She says as much to him as they lie awake one night in their Battersea room. Oliver is racked with coughs. The fog closes in upon the windows, seeping through cracks, and the un-lined cotton curtains do nothing to keep it out. Oliver is earning fifteen pounds a week, which is wealth beyond dreaming, but will spend not a penny more than he can help. He works for the Rank Film Organization, where he started at eight pounds a week, and in spite of his noisy hatred of the commercial film industry, and his public castigation of it daily in the canteen as the whore of Cinema, and his drunken afternoons, he is not fired. Rather, his employers, seeing this behaviour as the sign of talent, insist on promoting him. He is given one film to write, then another. He has a gift for it. B-features, seedy thrillers; Oliver is totally involved as he writes them, giving them an internal validity no-one else quite manages – and totally horrified at himself when he has finished.
Chloe Don’t you think we should go and see your family?
Oliver I haven’t got a family. I only have a father. My sisters have passed into their husband’s care, thank God, and I hope they’re equal to it. The uncles and aunts are on their way to Bishops Avenue via Golders Green and Stamford Hill. (This being the route British Jewry takes from East End poverty to North London prosperity.) I have less of a family than you do, Chloe.
Chloe It’s not a competition, Oliver.
This is not the sort of thing she should say, or usually does. But having offered Oliver his in-laws, she feels the least he can do is offer her the same. Or is he ashamed of her? Married life, to Chloe, is beginning to seem more complicated than she had at first supposed. Unless, of course, she can continue for ever to subjugate her own interests in the way she so far has. Oliver turns his back on her and tries to go to sleep. She will not let him.
Chloe And Oliver, please darling, it’s ridiculous living the way we do now you’re earning so much money. All my wages go on the rent, which is two pounds two shillings, and food, which is three pounds however hard I try, and your fares, which are six shillings every week, and that leaves me with three shillings a week for everything else.
Oliver It was your idea to save.
Chloe Yes, but not all your salary.
Oliver Are you saying I’m mean?
Chloe Of course I’m not, darling. We’re not quarrelling, are we? We never quarrel. It’s just I darn and I darn but my knickers are in rags, and your socks must be dreadfully uncomfortable and the sheets have been sides to middle twice – can’t you feel it – and the egg slicer has worn so thin it bends when you pick up an egg and it falls off. I lost two last week that way and it’s such a waste. We bought it at a jumble sale anyway. If I could just have three shillings I could get lining material for the curtains and then you’d sleep better. If it’s not the fog coming through, it’s the lamplight from the street. You never used to be like this, Oliver.
Oliver For God’s sake, Chloe, stop nagging. I’ve got to get up at eight tomorrow in order to get half way across London so I can prostitute my soul from nine-thirty to five-thirty in order to keep you. If I wasn’t married I wouldn’t dream of doing it, I can tell you.
Chloe is tearful, and silenced, for a while.
Chloe (Presently) And you’re always so tired when you come home, and if you stop work at five-thirty why are you never back ʼtil eight, and you’re bad-tempered and I’m fed up and miserable and I wish I’d never married you.
Oliver It’s mutual.
Chloe is horrified. She weeps such pitiful tears that Oliver is alarmed and comforts her, and they don’t get to sleep until four in the morning, and the next day Oliver has a temperature and has to stay at home.
So Chloe curbs her tongue and her needs, and goes on polishing, patching, darning, smiling and mashing turnips at twopence a pound, until one Friday evening Oliver comes home with a bottle of whisky and drinks it in surly silence, out of his tooth-mug, staring into the gas fire with its four broken radiants.
Chloe knows betters by now than to ask him what the matter is. She goes to bed, in her British Home Stores nightie, reduced ten per cent for staff, and tries to sleep.
At two o’clock Oliver rouses her, and she dresses, and they walk to Chelsea and from there take a taxi (madness!) to an address off Hackney Road. Chloe is being taken at last to meet old Mr Rudore.
‘But it’s the middle of the night,’ says Chloe.
‘He never sleeps a wink,’ says Oliver, ‘or that’s what he’s been telling me all my life. So night or day, what’s the difference?’
Mr Rudore, poor shuffling old soul, is roused from deep slumber as he lies in his brass bed beneath his feather quilt in the back bedroom of his two-up, two-down house. Alley cats yowl and prowl about his dustbins.
Mr Rudore, though sleepy, does not seem disconcerted by the hour of his prodigal’s return; rather there is a look of pleased animation in his glittery old eye, and gratification at the renewal of a temporarily lost source of entertainment and mirth.
He makes Chloe tea and toast, and shows her photographs of family holidays, taking particular pleasure in a Bournemouth snap of Oliver, naked on a beach, at the age of five, with bucket, spade and starfish.
Oliver I’m sorry we came so late.
Oliver’s Father So it’s the middle of the night. So she’s a lovely girl. So you should want to let your father know.
Oliver We’ve been married three months.
Oliver’s Father So that’s well and truly married.
Oliver She’s a goy. A shiksa.
Oliver’s Father So long as she stops her husband drinking.
It seems that Oliver’s father can hardly contain his mirth.
Oliver I’m sorry I missed the girls’ wedding.
Oliver’s Father Weren’t you there? I could have sworn I saw you there, my boy.
Oliver No. I hurt my ankle. I’ve never been in such pain in all my life. I sent a telegram.
Oliver’s Father The telegrams there were! By the hundred! Their poor mother, that she shouldn’t live to see it.
Oliver can’t win. Mr Rudore settles Chloe down and hour after hour, through that long night, details to her an account of his still raging litigation with Maison Furs, the establishment which sold his wife a fur coat when they could see she was dying. Chloe struggles with sleep. She has to be at work the next morning, unlike Oliver or Oliver’s father. Oliver fidgets.
Oliver (Interrupting) Father, about money. How are you managing?
Oliver’s Father Quiet, boy. The next week, Chloe, the very next week, they had the nerve to send this bill, here it is – now where is it? If I’ve lost it that’s got me finished – ah, here it is. See the date? The 25th. And those initials scratched out. They changed typists, that’s a sign of guilty conscience, if ever I saw one—
Oliver Father, I can let you have two pounds a week, if that will help. I’m doing quite well in the film industry.
Oliver’s Father Quiet, boy! If you ask my opinion, Chloe, that typist couldn’t bring her sweet fingers to type anything so grasping and heartless—
Oliver Three pounds a week, father.
There is silence.
Oliver But you are not to use it for lawyer’s fees. And you are not to sue Dr Richman for negligence. He did everything he could for mother; if anything killed her it was overwork, and you know it.
He does not say he lays his mother’s death at his father’s door, but of course he does. It was his father’s meanness and stubbornness, he is convinced, which made his mother’s life a misery and so he often tells Chloe. Oliver’s father weighs £150 a year in Oliver’s hand against a possible £1,500 in Dr Richman’s bush, and plumps for Oliver.
He even seems prepared to take Oliver a little more seriously, and as the dawn breaks and Oliver and Chloe take their leave he actually says—
Oliver’s Father You have broken this poor old man’s heart, my boy. Marrying out!
And he screws an aye-aye-aye wail out of some almost forgotten racial memory.
Oliver, satisfied, prods Chloe awake again and they walk all the way home through the beauties of the dawn. Chloe gets blisters on her feet. She is wearing her slippers and the soles have worn through. She is very tired at work the next day.
Oliver’s meanness slips off him, as if someone had removed a strait jacket. His whole spirit seems to stretch and grow. Next time he is asked to write a film he holds out for payment on freelance terms, and gets it. He uses the money to put down a deposit on a house in Fulham, and they move into it. As if in gratitude, Chloe becomes pregnant again: stays in bed most of her pregnancy, and is delivered safely of Inigo, Oliver’s son.