In February, Grandmother Fairley had a stroke and went to stay with Aunt May in Notting Hill. Aunt May was quiet and gentle and loving, but all that Grandmother Fairley thought about was that Judith had not had her to stay. ‘Oh, my son, my son, what have I done that he should treat me so?’ she would ask, although he came to see her regularly.
Louise became angry about this. ‘What’s so special about a son? Why doesn’t she care about her daughters?’
‘Her mind is wandering,’ Judith said.
‘Her mind’s as sharp as a tack. The moment you go out of the room she stops all that moaning and sighing; I’ve watched her in the mirror in the hall. She’s a wicked old woman! You’d better not let me go to see her, because I shall tell her so.’
Louise was at odds with life. Many of her contemporaries were enjoying being in the sixth form, because they were treated by the staff as though they were adults. But Louise, not regarding the staff as adults, did not find that the more informal atmosphere compensated for having to work harder than she had ever worked before.
‘You should be grateful for your opportunities,’ her mother told her.
‘I bet that’s the kind of thing they used to say in the eighteenth century when they arranged a good marriage for their daughter! And things are no better now. In those days a woman had to get married; now she has to be educated. Either way, someone else decides what’s good for her.’
‘Is it Guy that is making you feel like this?’
‘There you go again! There are just two possibilities: go to university and make a career for yourself; or get married.’
‘If you don’t want a career and you don’t want to get married, what do you want?’
‘I’m only seventeen. I don’t have to have the whole of my life mapped out as though it had already happened, do I?’
‘That’s how life is, Louise. If we don’t grasp our opportunities, they don’t come again.’
‘Is that why you married Daddy?’
‘Don’t be impertinent.’ Judith was almost as edgy as her daughter.
‘You asked me about Guy.’
Judith found the question difficult to answer. She had known that Stanley was the one who would change her life. Now, when she returned to Falmouth, she saw that the lively boys she had grown up with had allowed their small businesses to drain their resources; they were spent forces, and their wives had the look of women whose husbands were no longer interested in them. She was proud of Stanley’s intellectual alertness, and prouder still of his undiminished sexual energy. ‘I thought we would suit each other very well,’ she said in answer to Louise.
‘But were you in love with him?’
‘Oh, how you do go on about being “in love”! That sort of feeling doesn’t last.’
‘Doesn’t last, you say! At the rate I’m going, I’ll never have had it. Do you realize I’ve never been allowed to go to a dance?’
‘Is that what this is leading up to? A dance?’
‘Not exactly.’ There was a pause while Louise marshalled her forces. ‘St Bartholomew’s Dramatic Society is doing Dear Brutus in the autumn, and they want me to play Margaret, the dream child. Why shouldn’t I? Daddy can’t find much wrong with Dear Brutus, can he?’
‘You’ll have to slim down before the autumn if you’re to play a dream child.’
‘Does that mean you’ll ask him?’
‘We’ll see. There’s sometime between now and the autumn. In the meantime, perhaps we can persuade Daddy to take us to the theatre.’
After this conversation, Judith found herself re-examining her own adolescence, arousing old yearnings which gave rise to new discontents. It was in this uneasy mood that she tackled Stanley later that week when they were sitting together after the children had gone to bed. She was aware of a certain pleasure in the prospect of combating his objections; a desire, in fact, to pick a quarrel.
She watched him reading the Methodist Recorder, innocently savouring the attack which he would make on one of the articles. She sat quietly for a few minutes, allowing her resentment to simmer. He moved and re-settled himself in his chair, like a log shifting comfortably in the fire. She said, ‘Do you think the children would enjoy this Richard of Bordeaux the critics are so enthusiastic about?’
‘Richard of Bordeaux?’ Stanley lowered his paper and stared at her. His time alone with Judith was precious. So was his peace. He imagined it was understood between them that they sat in silence while he read the paper and she pursued her womanly chores: the silence of a companionship too deep for words was how he liked to think of it.
‘It’s on in the West End,’ she continued to promote this extraordinarily irrelevant conversation. ‘John Gielgud is in it and . . .’
‘Yes, I have read about it,’ he said testily. ‘A highly romantic piece of special pleading for a thoroughly bad king.’ His disapproval of the man was growing by the minute.
‘You did agree to Louise seeing Richard II.’
‘That was Shakespeare, and it was in her school syllabus.’
‘When she goes to university, she will see things which aren’t in her syllabus.’
He could scarcely believe that she intended to squander these precious moments talking about the school syllabus. He said, ‘There will be a certain freedom, undoubtedly, and one that I would want her to experience. What she makes of it will be up to her. She will not have had bad examples set in her own home.’ In case his briskness had not sufficiently emphasized that the conversation was concluded, he returned to his study of the Methodist Recorder.
Judith said sharply, ‘Example is one thing, a refusal to allow her to begin to find her own way is another.’
‘Her own way?’ He was outraged both by the sentiment and the continued interruption of his reading. ‘What is all this talk about finding her own way?’
‘You found your own way, didn’t you?’
She was looking quite flushed and angry, some woman’s disturbance, he supposed. He said mildly, without – he prided himself – a hint of rebuke, ‘That’s different.’
‘In what way is it different?’ Her manner was almost belligerent. ‘Because you are a man? How do you think of me, then? As a parcel handed over by my father to you at the altar?’
Sighing, he folded the paper and prepared to listen, though with an air of exaggerated meekness. ‘If I ever thought that, I’ve spent the remainder of my days learning otherwise.’
‘Louise will have to find her own way and you will have to be tolerant about it.’
‘Tolerant!’ This was too much. ‘I don’t think you could find anyone more tolerant than I am. But if what we are talking about is not tolerance but indifference, that is another matter. I am not prepared to walk through the streets of South Acton and come away tolerant about unemployment.’ He was resorting to his usual practice of changing the subject so that he should be seen to be standing on firm ground. ‘Nor am I prepared to tolerate the endless delays of this bungling government in its slum clearance programme; the degradation of human beings is a matter on which I shall ever be intolerant . . .’
‘Can’t you forget what is happening to the nation and think about what is happening in your own home just this once?’
‘How can you say such a thing, Judith? I am simply arguing that . . .’
‘I am suggesting an outing to the theatre, and you have to respond by talking about slum clearance programmes! We take them to the cinema; is the theatre so different?’
He picked up the poker and inserted the point in a log, twisting it round and round as he pondered this. Beneath his irascible exterior he was a vulnerable, rather shy man and the mechanics of theatre-going bothered him. He was most at ease in his house, his school and his chapel.
‘A good deal more licence is allowed in the theatre,’ he said, giving a particularly vicious twist to the poker.
‘It doesn’t sound as if the morals in this play are any worse, than in the Ralph Lynn/Tom Walls farces we take the children to see.’
‘These are live people,’ he protested.
‘What has that got to do with it?’
He was embarrassed at the prospect of seeing live people on stage behaving in an emotional and undisciplined manner. It was not so much that he disapproved of emotion, as that his own emotions were too easily aroused. The log broke apart and he contemplated it unhappily.
Judith said, ‘I should like to see Richard of Bordeaux. It would make a change.’
He stared at her in astonishment. ‘A change? But you do so much, my darling.’
‘What? What do I do? Name me one thing, apart from housework.’
Her daily life being rather a mystery to him, he could only say, ‘Well, there’s the Women’s Bright Hour . . .’
‘The Women’s Bright Hour!’ Her face was reddened by firelight and her eyes flashed with scorn. ‘Thank you, Stanley. Is that really how you think of me? Those boring women!’
‘Good women in their way.’
‘Boring in every other way.’
Stanley laid the poker down carefully in the hearth. ‘If the thing’s so popular we probably won’t be able to book tickets.’
‘You don’t have to book for the pit.’
‘I am not going to be seen queuing outside a theatre, you can put that out of your mind!’
‘Louise and I will queue while you take Alice and Claire for a walk.’
It had been a tactical mistake to allow himself to get into an argument about the method of obtaining tickets.
They went to see Richard of Bordeaux one Saturday afternoon. Once he had dealt with the business of handing over the tickets, buying programmes and refusing tea in the interval, Stanley Fairley set himself to examine his fellow theatregoers. They did not, in his opinion, amount to much. Certainly, there were no women present who bore comparison with his wife and daughters. He settled more comfortably in his seat and examined the programme for errors.
Claire found the presence of real people on stage threatening, and her father advised her not to look when they became angry or emotionally distressed (there was rather a lot of emotional distress). Louise was enchanted by the theatre itself, the people around her, the safety curtain, the slow fading of the lights, the way in which the actors made their exits and their entrances, their gestures and their manner of wearing their costumes. Beside her, Alice sat so still she seemed scarcely to breathe; by the time it was over she was in love with John Gielgud – a love which was to last long after the hold of the silver screen had been broken.
Judith was not interested in the play, but she was very moved by the occasion. She felt, as she sat in the first row of the pit, surrounded by her family, that she had accomplished rather more than a visit to the theatre. They had taken a step forward, and life would not be the same again.
When they came out of the theatre, there were a lot of policemen about. The Blackshirts had been on the march. Fortunately, they did not discover this until the next day, and so they could discuss the play over supper.