Dear Mr Johns, Dixon wrote, gripping his pencil like a breadknife. This is just to let you no that I no what you are up to with yuong Marleen Richards, yuong Marleen is a desent girl and has got no tim for your sort, I no your sort. She is a desent girl and I wo’nt have you filing her head with a lot of art and music, she is to good for that, and I am going to mary her which is more than your sort ever do. So just you keep of her, Mr Johns this will be your olny warning. This is just a freindly letter and I am not threatenning you, but you just do as I say else me and some of my palls from the Works will be up your way and we sha’nt be coming along just to say How do you can bet. So just you wach out and lay of yuong Marleen if you no whats good for you. yours fathfully, Joe Higgins.
He read it through, thinking how admirably consistent were the style and orthography. Both derived, in large part, from the essays of some of his less proficient pupils. He could hardly hope, even so, to deceive Johns for long, especially since Johns had almost certainly got no further with Marlene Richards, a typist in his office, than staring palely at her across it. But the letter would at any rate give him a turn and his dig-mates a few moments’ amusement when it was opened, according to his habit, at the breakfast-table and read over cornflakes. Dixon wrote To:—Mr Johns and the address of the digs on a cheap envelope not specially bought for the purpose, sealed the letter up in it, and then, griming his finger on the floor, drew a heavy smudge across the flap. Finally he stuck a stamp on, slobbering on it for further verisimilitude. He’d post the letter on his way down to the pub for a lunch-time drink, but before that he must write up some of his notes for the Merrie England lecture. Before that in turn he must review his financial position, see if he could somehow restore it from complete impossibility to its usual level of merely imminent disaster, and before that again he must meditate, just for a couple of minutes, on the incredible finale to the Summer Ball the previous evening and on Christine.
He found himself unable to think coherently about, hardly able even to remember, what they’d said to each other at the Welches’, nor could he now evoke what it had been like kissing her more clearly than that he’d enjoyed it. He was already so excited about Tuesday afternoon that he had to get up and walk about his bedroom. The great thing was to convince himself utterly that she wouldn’t turn up, then whatever happened would be something extra. The trouble was that he could imagine exactly how she’d look coming across the hotel lounge towards him. Then he found he could visualize her face quite clearly, and looked inattentively out over the back garden of the lodging-house, which lay in thick, beating sunshine. He realized that when it wasn’t set in that rather chilly life-mask, her face sometimes touched upon other sorts of face by a kind of physiognomical allusion. Some of the other sorts of face were very remote from her own. There was the permanent grin of an acrobat, or partner in an apache-dance routine; the sun-dazzle of some Honourable trollop photographed motor-boating on the Riviera; the sulky mindless glare theoretically detectable on the face of a pin-up; the frown of a plethoric and not very nice little girl. At any rate they were all female faces. He coughed loudly on recalling that Margaret had more than once reminded him facially of a man with an unintelligible accent and Service glasses whom he’d known by sight in the R.A.F. and had never seen doing anything except sweeping out the N.A.A.F.I. and wiping his nose on his sleeve.
To drive this thought away he opened the cupboard that contained his smoking engines and accessories—monuments, some of them costly, to economy. As long as he could remember he’d never been able to smoke as much as he wanted to. This armoury of devices had been assembled as each fresh way of seeming to smoke as much as he wanted to had come to his notice: the desiccated packet of cheap cigarette-tobacco, the cherry-wood pipe, the red packet of cigarette-papers, the packet of pipe-cleaners, the leather cigarette-machine, the quadripartite pipe-tool, the crumbling packet of cheap pipe-tobacco, the packet of cotton-wool filter-tips (new process), the nickel cigarette-machine, the clay pipe, the briar pipe, the blue packet of cigarette-papers, the packet of herbal smoking-mixture (guaranteed free from nicotine or other harmful substances. Why?), the rusting tin of expensive pipe-tobacco, the packet of chalk pipe-filters. Dixon took a cigarette from the packet in his pocket and lit it.
On the floor of the cupboard were the empty beer-flagons which represented his only sure method of saving money. There were nine of these, but two of them belonged to an impossibly distant pub; he’d bought them to drink in the bus on the way back from the Toynbee Society dinner in February. He’d hoped, by their aid, to efface the memory of a traumatically embarrassing speech Margaret had made at the dinner, but, sitting next to him throughout the journey back, she’d vetoed his project on disciplinary grounds (there’d been a lot of students in the bus, most of them drinking beer from flagons). He shivered at this memory, tried to drive it away by totting up the exchange value of the other seven bottles. Two and eight altogether; much less than he’d counted on. He decided not to review his financial position, and was just getting out his Merrie England notes when there was a knock at his door and Margaret came in. She was wearing the green Paisley frock and the quasi-velvet shoes.
‘Hallo, Margaret,’ he said with a heartiness which originated, he realized, in a guilty conscience. But why had he got a guilty conscience? Leaving her with Gore-Urquhart at the Ball had been ‘tactful’, hadn’t it?
She looked at him with her air of not being quite sure who he was which had more than once entirely, and unaided, discomposed him. ‘Oh, hallo,’ she said.
‘How are you?’ he asked, keeping up the gimcrack friendliness. ‘Have a seat.’ He pushed forward the immense crippled armchair, of Pall Mall smoking-room size and design, that took up almost half the space left unoccupied by the bed. ‘Cigarette?’ He took out his packet to show that this was a sincere offer.
Still looking at him, she shook her head slowly, like a doctor indicating that there is no hope. Her face had a yellowish tinge, and her nostrils seemed pinched. She remained standing and not saying anything.
‘Well, how are things?’ Dixon said, tugging a smile on to his mouth.
She shook her head again, a little more slowly, and sat down on the arm of the chair, which creaked sharply. Dixon threw his pyjamas on to his bed and sat down on a cane-bottomed chair with his back to the window. ‘Do you hate me, James?’ she said.
Dixon wanted to rush at her and tip her backwards in the chair, to make a deafening rude noise in her face, to push a bead up her nose. ‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
It took her a quarter of an hour to make clear how she meant. She talked fast and fluently, moving about a lot on the chair-arm, her legs kicking straight as if hammered on the knee, her head jerking to restore invisible strands of hair, her thumbs bending and straightening. Why had he deserted her at the Ball like that? or rather, since she and he and everyone else knew why, what did he think he was up to? or rather, again, how could he do this to her? In exchange for such information on these and allied problems as he could give, she offered the news that all three Welches were ‘out for his blood’ and that Christine had referred slightingly to him at breakfast that morning. No mention of Gore-Urquhart was made, beyond a parenthetical attack on Dixon’s ‘rudeness’ in leaving the dance without saying good-night to him. Dixon knew from experience that to counter-attack Margaret was invariably mistaken, but he was too angry to bother about that. When he was sure that she was going to say no more about Gore-Urquhart, he said, his heart pounding a little: ‘I don’t see why you’re kicking up all this fuss. You looked as if you were doing all right for yourself when I left.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘You were all over that Gore-Itchbag character, hadn’t got time to say a single word to me, had you? If you didn’t do yourself any good it wasn’t for want of trying. I’ve never seen such an exhibition in my life . . .’ His voice tailed off; he couldn’t synthesize enough of the required righteous indignation.
She stared at him wide-eyed. ‘But you can’t mean . . . ?’
‘Oh yes I bloody well can; of course I can mean.’
‘James . . . you don’t know . . . what you’re talking about,’ she said, slowly and painfully, like a foreigner reading out of a phrase-book. ‘Really, I’m so surprised; I just . . . don’t know what to say.’ She began to tremble. ‘I talk to a man, just for a few minutes, that’s all it was . . . and now you start accusing me of making up to him. That’s what you mean. Isn’t that what you mean?’ Her voice quavered grotesquely.
‘That’s what I mean all right,’ Dixon said, trying to squeeze anger into his tone. ‘It’s no use denying it.’ He could only manage to sound a little nettled and out of sorts.
‘Do you really think I was trying to make up to him?’
‘Well, it looked very much like it, you must admit.’
Going so close to Dixon that he flinched, she began looking out of the window. He couldn’t see her face without craning his neck, so he took her seat on the arm of the Pall Mall armchair. She stayed there so long without moving that he began to hope she’d forgotten all about him; in a few moments he might be able to slip silently out to the pub. Then she began to speak, sounding quite calm. ‘I’m afraid there’s an awful lot you don’t understand, James. I used to think you understood me, but now . . . You see, when you say a thing like that, I don’t mind it being, er, offensive and all that, because I know you feel bad about this, at least I hope you do, for my own sake, and so I don’t mind you . . . trying to lash out at me. What makes me feel so, so unhappy, is the awful gulf it shows that there is between us. It makes me say to myself, Oh, it’s no good, he just doesn’t know me at all, never has done, either. You see that, don’t you?’
Dixon didn’t make a face; he was afraid she might see it reflected in the window-pane. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I don’t want to go into it all, James, it’s such a small, petty, trivial thing, but I suppose I’d better a little.’ She sighed. ‘Can’t you distinguish between . . . ? No, obviously you can’t. I’ll just tell you this, just this one thing, and see whether that’ll satisfy you.’ She turned and faced him, then said less calmly than before: ‘After you’d gone last night, I didn’t spend a single moment with Gore-Urquhart. He was with Carol Goldsmith. I spent the whole of the rest of the time with Bertrand, thank you very much.’ Her voice went up. ‘And you can guess what sort of a . . .’
‘Well, hard luck,’ Dixon broke in before he should have time to relent. A grandiose disgust for the whole proceedings had filled him; not merely for this one hand, but for the whole game of poker, of non-strip poker, that he and Margaret were playing. Biting his lips, he vowed to himself that this time he’d take whatever she might have to deal out. He remembered Carol’s phrase about not throwing Margaret any lifebelts. Well, he’d thrown his last one. He would not waste any more time trying to conciliate her, more because he knew it was a waste of time than because his powers of conciliation were at an end, though they were pretty well at an end as well. ‘Look here, Margaret,’ he said. ‘I’ve no desire to hurt your feelings unnecessarily, as you know perfectly well, whatever you may say. But for your own sake, as well as mine, you must get some things straight. I know you’ve had a very hard time recently, and you know I know that as well. But it won’t do you any good to go on thinking what you evidently do think about me and how we stand. It’ll only make things worse. What I want to say is, you must stop depending on me emotionally like this. I agree I was probably in the wrong over the dance business, but right or wrong won’t make any difference to this. I’ll stick up for you and I’ll chat to you and I’ll sympathize, but I’ve had enough of being forced into a false position. Get it into your head that I’ve quite lost whatever interest I may have had in you as a woman, as someone to make love to, or go to bed with—no, you can have your turn in a minute. This time you’re going to hear me out. As I said, the sex business is all finished, if it ever got started. I’m not blaming anyone; I just want to tell you you must count me out as far as anything like that’s concerned. That’s how things are. And I can’t say I’m sorry because you can’t say you’re sorry for what you can’t do anything about, and I can’t do anything about this and neither can you. That’s all.’
‘You don’t think she’d have you, do you? A shabby little provincial bore like you,’ Margaret burst out as soon as he’d stopped speaking. ‘Or has she had you already? Perhaps she just wanted a . . .’
‘Don’t be fantastic, Margaret. Come off the stage for a moment, do.’
There was a pause; then she came waveringly forward, put her hands on his shoulders, and seemed to collapse, or be dragging him, on to the bed. Unregarded, her spectacles fell off. She was making a curious noise, a steady, repeated, low-pitched moan that sounded as if it came from the pit of her stomach, as if she’d been sick over and over again and still wanted to be sick. Dixon half-helped, half-lifted her on to the bed. Now and then she gave a quiet, almost skittish little scream. Her face was pushed hard against his chest. Dixon didn’t know whether she was fainting, or having a fit of hysterics, or simply breaking down and crying. Whatever it was he didn’t know how to deal with it. When she felt that she was sitting on the bed next to him she threw herself forward so that her face was on his thigh. In a moment he felt moisture creeping through to his skin. He tried to lift her, but she was immovably heavy; her shoulders were shaking more rapidly than seemed to him normal even in a condition of this kind. Then she raised herself, tense but still trembling, and began a series of high-pitched, inward screams which alternated with the deep moans. Both were quite loud. Her hair was in her eyes, her lips were drawn back, and her teeth chattered. Her face was wet, with saliva as well as tears. At last, as he began speaking her name, she threw herself violently backwards and sideways on to the bed. While she lay there with her arms spread out, writhing, she screamed half a dozen times, very loudly, then went on more quietly, moaning with every outward breath. Dixon seized her wrists and shouted: ‘Margaret. Margaret.’ She looked at him with dilated eyes and began struggling, trying to free herself from him. Two lots of footsteps were now approaching outside, one ascending the stairs, the other descending. The door opened and Bill Atkinson came in, followed by Miss Cutler. Dixon looked up at them.
‘Hysterics, eh?’ Atkinson said, and slapped Margaret several times on the face, very hard, Dixon thought. He pushed Dixon out of the way and sat down on the bed, gripping Margaret by the shoulders and shaking her vigorously. ‘There’s some whisky up in my cupboard. Go and get it.’
Dixon ran out and up the stairs. The only thought that presented itself to him at all clearly was one of mild surprise that the fictional or cinematic treatment of hysterics should be based so firmly on what was evidently the right treatment. He found the whisky; his hand was shaking so much that he nearly dropped the bottle. He uncorked it and took a quick swig, trying not to cough. Down in his room again, he found everything much quieter. Miss Cutler, who’d been watching Atkinson and Margaret, gave Dixon a glance, not of suspicion or reproach, but of reassurance; she said nothing. As he felt at the moment, this made him want to cry. Atkinson looked up without taking the bottle. ‘Get a glass or a cup.’ He got a cup from the cupboard, poured some of the whisky into it, and gave it to Atkinson. Miss Cutler, as much in awe of him as ever, stood at Dixon’s side and watched Margaret being given some whisky.
Atkinson heaved her up into a half-sitting position. Her moans had stopped and she was trembling less violently. Her face was red from Atkinson’s blows. When he put the cup to her mouth it rattled once or twice on her teeth and her breathing was audible. With eerie predictability she choked and coughed, swallowed some, coughed again, swallowed some more. Quite soon she stopped trembling altogether and began to look round at them. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said faintly.
‘That’s all right, girlie,’ Atkinson said. ‘Like a fag?’
‘Yes please.’
‘Forward, Jim.’
Miss Cutler smiled at them all, mouthed something, and went quietly out. Dixon lit cigarettes for the three of them and Margaret sat up on the edge of the bed; Atkinson still kept his arm round her. ‘Were you the one that slapped my face?’ she asked him.
‘That’s right, girlie. It did you a power of good. How do you feel now?’
‘A lot better, thanks. A bit hazy, but otherwise all right.’
‘Good. Don’t you try to move around for a bit. Here, put your feet up and have a rest.’
‘There’s really no need . . .’
He pulled her feet up on to the bed and took off her shoes, then stood looking down at her. ‘You stay there for ten minutes at least. I’ll leave you to the care of brother Jim now. Have some more whisky when you’ve finished that, but don’t let Jim get at it. I promised his mother not to let him drink himself to death.’ He turned his Tartar’s face on Dixon. ‘All right, old man?’
‘Yes thanks, Bill. It’s been very good of you.’
‘All right, girlie?’
‘Thank you so much, Mr Atkinson; you’ve been wonderful. I just can’t thank you enough.’
‘That’s all right, girlie.’ He nodded to them and went out.
‘I’m sorry about all that, James,’ she said as soon as the door was shut.
‘It was my fault.’
‘No, you always say that. This time I’m not going to let you. I just couldn’t take what you said, that’s all. I thought to myself, I can’t bear it, I must stop him, and then I simply lost control of myself. Nothing more to it than that. And it was all so silly and childish, because you were absolutely right, saying what you did. Much better to clear the air like that. I just behaved like a perfect idiot.’
‘There’s no point in reproaching yourself. You couldn’t help it.’
‘No, but I ought to have been able to. Do sit down, James; you’re getting on my nerves, prowling around like that.’
Dixon pulled the cane-bottomed chair to beside the bed. When he was settled and looking at Margaret, he was reminded of how he’d sat at her side, just like this, when he visited her in hospital after her suicide attempt. But she’d looked different then, thinner and weaker, with her hair drawn back to the nape of her neck; and, in a way, less distressing than she looked now. The sight of her smudged lipstick, her damp nose, her disordered, stiff hair filled him with a profound and tranquil depression. ‘I’d better come back to the Welches’ with you,’ he said.
‘My dear, I wouldn’t hear of it. You’d better keep clear of that place as long as you can.’
‘I don’t care about any of that. And in any case I needn’t come in. I’ll just come back on the bus with you.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous, James. It’s absolutely unnecessary. I’m perfectly all right now. At least I will be when I’ve had another go at nice Mr Atkinson’s whisky. Would you be an angel and pour me some?’
While he complied, Dixon thought with relief that he needn’t go back on the bus with her. By now he could always tell what Margaret wanted, whatever she might say, and it was clear that this refusal of services was genuine. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel concern for her; he felt a lot, so much that the load was intolerable–intolerable, too, was the way in which to feel concern had now come, for him, to confuse itself utterly with the feeling of guilt. He gave her the cup, not looking at her; he said nothing, not for the familiar reason of not being able to say what he wanted to say, but because he could think of nothing to say.
‘I’ll just drink this and finish my cigarette, and then I’ll be off. There’s a bus at twenty to; it’ll get me in nicely. Would you get me an ashtray, James?’
He brought her a copper one which bore the representation, in high-relief, of a small antique warship and the caption ‘H.M. Torpedo-Boat Destroyer Ribble’. She dropped ash on to it, then sat up on the edge of the bed and, taking cosmetics from her handbag, began making up her face. Looking into her compact-mirror, she said conversationally: ‘It’s strange that it should end like this, isn’t it? In such a very undignified fashion.’ When he still said nothing, she went on, moving her mouth about now and then to put lipstick on it: ‘But then it hasn’t been very dignified all the way through, has it? It’s just been me flying off the handle in one way and another, and you rather reluctantly trying to get me to grow up. No, that’s not fair to you.’ She worked lipstick over her mouth, then peered into the mirror again. ‘You did all a man could do, and more than most would, believe me. You’ve got nothing to reproach yourself with. Really, I don’t know how you stuck it. I’m afraid none of it’s been much fun for you. Just as well you decided to call it quits.’ She snapped the compact shut and put it into her handbag.
‘You know I’m fond of you, Margaret,’ Dixon said. ‘It’s just that it wouldn’t work, that’s all.’
‘I know, James. Don’t you worry about anything. I shall be all right.’
‘You must always come to me if anything goes wrong. That I can do anything about.’
She smiled slightly at his reservation. ‘Of course I will,’ she said as if she were soothing him.
He raised his head and looked at her. Under the powder, her cheeks were still slightly mottled where the redness was fading, but with her glasses back on the slight puffiness round her eyes was scarcely noticeable. That she’d only recently finished being hysterical seemed incredible to him, as did the thought that he could ever have said to her anything important enough to make her hysterical. As he watched her, she put out her cigarette on
H.M.S. Ribble and stood up, brushing the ash from her dress. ‘That just about takes care of everything, I think,’ she said lightly. ‘Well, good-bye, James.’
Dixon smiled uncertainly. What a pity it was, he thought, that she wasn’t better-looking, that she didn’t read the articles in the three-halfpenny Press that told you which colour lipstick went with which natural colouring. With twenty per cent more of what she lacked in these ways, she’d never have run into any of her appalling difficulties: the vices and morbidities bred of loneliness would have remained safely dormant until old age. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked her.
‘Stop worrying about me; I’m perfectly all right. Now I must be off, or I shall miss my bus, and that’ll make me late for lunch, and you know what Mrs Neddy is about meal-times. Well, I dare say we shall run into each other before very long. Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye, Margaret. See you soon.’
She went out without replying.
Dixon put his own cigarette out, jabbing at Ribble’s bridge in a feeble rage he couldn’t find any source for. He tried to tell himself that when he’d got over his own feelings of shock, he’d begin to be glad at having told Margaret what he’d been wanting to tell her for so long, but it wasn’t convincing. He thought of his appointment with Christine the next day but one, and regarded it entirely without pleasure. Some part of what had happened in the last half-hour had spoilt all that, though he didn’t know which part. Somewhere his path to Christine was blocked; it was all going to go wrong in some way he couldn’t foresee. It wasn’t that Margaret herself would take a hand in the matter and upset things by somehow alerting Bertrand and the senior Welches; it wasn’t that he might be forced to withdraw his recent declarations to Margaret. It was something less unlikely than the first, harder to fight than the second, and much vaguer than either. It was just that everything seemed to be spoilt.
He began abstractedly brushing his hair in front of his small unframed mirror. He refused to think directly about Margaret’s fit of hysterics. Soon enough, he knew, it would take its place with those three or four memories which could make him actually twist about in his chair or bed with remorse, fear, or embarrassment. It would probably supplant the present top-of-the-list item, the time he’d been pushed out in front of the curtain after a school concert to make the audience sing the National Anthem. He could hear his own voice now, saying in those flat tones, heavy with insincerity: ‘And now . . . I want you all . . . to join with me, if you will . . . in singing . . .’ And then he’d led offin a key that must have been exactly half an octave above or below the proper one. Switching every few notes, like everybody else, from one octave to the other, half a beat in front of or behind everybody else, he’d gone through the whole thing. Cheers, applause, and laughter had followed him when he ducked his burning face back through the curtains. He looked at his face now in the mirror: it looked back at him, humourless and self-pitying.
He picked up Atkinson’s whisky-bottle and went to the door, intending to suggest a couple of pints of beer at the pub round the corner; then he turned back and picked up the letter to Johns. There seemed no point in not posting it.