To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One
Date: 2013-02-28 12:23:44+00:00
Keywords: Mental Illness; General; Contemporary; Classics; Romance; Holiday; Literary; Fiction; 20th Century; Short Stories; British Literature; Literature; Urban & Street Lit; Family; Literary Fiction; Short S
Description: From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a collection of some of her finest short stories. For more than four decades, Doris Lessing’s work has observed the passion and confusion of human relations, holding a mirror up to our selves in her unflinching dissection of the everyday. From the magnificent ‘To Room Nineteen’, a study of a dry, controlled middle-class marriage ‘grounded in intelligence’, to the shocking ‘A Woman on the Roof’, where a workman becomes obsessed with a pretty sunbather, this superb collection of stories written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s, bea
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Rights: Copyright © Doris Lessing 1953, 1954, 1957, 1963, 1969,

To Room Nineteen

Collected Stones Volume One

DORIS LESSING

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

‘The Other Woman’ was first published in Lilliput; ‘Through the Tunnel’ in John Bull; ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘The Day Stalin Died’, ‘Wine’, ‘He’, ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ and ‘The Witness’ in The Habit of Loving; and ‘One off the Short List’, ‘A Woman on a Roof’, ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’, ‘A Man and Two Women’, ‘A Room’, ‘England versus England’, ‘Two Potters’, ‘Between Men’ and ‘To Room Nineteen’ appeared in A Man and Two Women. ‘Twenty Years’ was first published in 1994 in the Daily Telegraph.

These stories have appeared previously in paperback in the following editions: ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Through the Tunnel’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘The Day Stalin Died’, ‘Wine’, ‘He’, ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ and ‘The Witness’ in The Habit of Loving; ‘The Other Woman’ in Five. The rest of the stories appear in A Man and Two Women.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Bibliographical Note

Preface

The Habit of Loving

The Woman

Through the Tunnel

Pleasure

The Day Stalin Died

Wine

He

The Other Woman

The Eye of God in Paradise

One off the Short List

A Woman on a Roof

How I Finally Lost my Heart

A Man and Two Women

A Room

England versus England

Two Potters

Between Men

The Witness

Twenty Years

To Room Nineteen

About the Author

Also by the Author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the publisher

PREFACE

All these stories have lived energetic and independent lives since I wrote them, since they have been much reprinted, in English and in other languages. None has been more anthologized than ‘Through the Tunnel’, mostly for children. I often get letters from children about it, and adolescents too, for it seems that fearful swim under the rock beneath the sea expresses their situation, or is like an initiation process. It was written because I watched a nine-year-old boy, in the South of France, longing to be accepted by a group of big boys, French, but they rejected him, and then he set challenges for himself, to become worthy of them. But, curiously, when the group turned up again some days later, the English boy had proved to his own satisfaction that he did not need them. I did not set out to write the tale for children, but this raises the whole question of writing stories especially for children. Another story, or short novel, which children like, is The Fifth Child. Italian adolescents, chosen from schools all over Italy, gave it a prize over other books from different parts of the world. Who would have thought that grim tale would appeal to children?

‘The Habit of Loving’ made a brilliant one hour television film, with Eric Portman. It was written because I - then fortyish - fell in love with a handsome youth, while an eminent and elderly actor was in love with me. The reversals of sex and situation from life to fiction would make an interesting exercise for those who enjoy that kind of psychological detective work.

‘One off the Short List’ earned approval from women, and, interestingly, from men too. I associate it with the Sixties, when it was written, for more and more that decade seems to me a comedy of sexual manners and mores. No one knew how to behave; there were no rules at all. Was this for the first time, ever? I was angry when I wrote the story, but now memories of that time make me laugh. Barbara Coles says to the seducer Graham, But you don’t even find me attractive - defining a good deal more than her own situation, for most of the sexual dance was to do with power games, one-upmanship, domination, and nothing to do with attraction, let alone love, sweet love.

‘To Room Nineteen’ is another story much translated. Recently in Hong Kong’s Chinese University the professor who was teaching it wanted me to explain to his students - and, clearly, to him - the point of the story, which to him was that a woman needed privacy so much that she died for it. This need for privacy, said he, is foreign to their culture. (But perhaps not for long: a woman in Beijing recently wrote an applauded novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.) The famous culture gap, in this discussion, proved unbridgeable. I myself have never understood this story. I do not believe for a moment that Susan Rawlings knew what it was she wanted. She was driven, but by what? She was in love with death, that is certain, but why, when she had everything any reasonable person could want. A couple of German students in Berlin asked why these intelligent and socially responsible people did not go to a marriage counsellor. The storyteller’s riposte, that then there would be no story struck me, as well as them, as frivolous. Yes, they were raising literary questions rather more fundamental than they seemed to know. But the story comes out of some hidden place not only in me, but in many women of our time, otherwise it would not have proved so popular with them. My association is with Hardy’s heroine, Sue Bridehead, who said that there would come a time when people would choose not to live, or with Olive Schreiner’s heroine who said, ‘I’m so tired of it, and tired of the future before it comes.’ A kind of moral exhaustion. I believe we do not understand the reasons for these tides of feeling as well as we think we do. And sometimes I wonder if our clever methods of birth control have not struck deep into both men’s and women’s belief in themselves - into regions much deeper and more primitive than are amenable to sweet reason.

‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ is saturated in the atmosphere of the sad and frightened time after World War Two, in Europe. I was in Germany, and I did see and experience people and places that went into the story. I visited a mental hospital, like the one I describe - and one ward in it later went up to make a scene in The Fifth Child. But that it is set in Germany is not the point at all. It is about the under-soul of Europe, the dark side where wars and killings and perversions are bred.

‘England versus England’ is often printed in magazines and collections outside this country. Other people look at us, and see what I saw when I wrote it: the depredations of our class system. I was in a mining village near Doncaster for a week, in a miner’s family, and I saw a good deal of what is described.

‘Between Men’ made a very funny half-hour television film. Television companies took more risks then than they do now.

‘A Woman on a Roof’ is liked by young people. It would make a half-hour film, and it nearly did.

‘The Day Stalin Died’ is appreciated by old Reds everywhere. When I wrote it, so I was told, the Communist Party high-ups laughed, but in public had to disapprove of it. It was the tone that was wrong: it does not do to treat serious matters lightly.

‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’ is one of my favourite stories, but not necessarily other people’s.

‘Two Potters’ has never been one of my best-liked tales, but authors have to resign themselves to having unloved favourites. Another tale - this time a novel, also had as a basis or theme a serial dream - The Summer Before the Dark - and both have for me the attraction and curiosity due to the hidden sides of ourselves. The continuing dreams of the vast dusty plain, the fragile and mortal mud houses and the old potter, went on for a decade or so, and were as interesting to me as an old and much-loved tale. Or visits to a country one has known well and left.

‘A Room’ has the same quality - for me - of a world as real as our daytime world, where time slips and slides, and people we have never met are as familiar as old friends.

‘Wine’, a very short story, is a distilling of a four-year-long love affair.

‘He’ has sometimes annoyed feminists, but I think it tells the truth about many women’s feeling for men.

Doris Lessing, 1994

The Habit of Loving

In 1947 George wrote again to Myra, saying that now the war was well over she should come home again and marry him. She wrote back from Australia, where she had gone with her two children in 1943 because there were relations there, saying she felt they had drifted apart; she was no longer sure she wanted to marry George. He did not allow himself to collapse. He cabled her the air fare and asked her to come over and see him. She came, for two weeks, being unable to leave the children for longer. She said she liked Australia; she liked the climate; she did not like the English climate any longer; she thought England was, very probably, played out; and she had become used to missing London. Also, presumably, to missing George Talbot.

For George this was a very painful fortnight. He believed it was painful for Myra, too. They had met in 1938, had lived together for five years, and had exchanged for four years the letters of lovers separated by fate. Myra was certainly the love of his life. He had believed he was of hers until now. Myra, an attractive woman made beautiful by the suns and beaches of Australia, waved goodbye at the airport, and her eyes were filled with tears.

George’s eyes, as he drove away from the airport, were dry. If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye. George dismissed the taxi early and walked through St James’s Park. Then it seemed too small for him, and he went to Green Park. Then he walked into Hyde Park and through to Kensington Gardens. When the dark came and they closed the great gates of the park he took a taxi home. He lived in a block of flats near Marble Arch. For five years Myra had lived with him there, and it was here he had expected to live with her again. Now he moved into a new flat near Covent Garden. Soon after that he wrote Myra a very painful letter. It occurred to him that he had often received such letters, but had never written one before. It occurred to him that he had entirely underestimated the amount of suffering he must have caused in his life. But Myra wrote him a sensible letter back, and George Talbot told himself that now he must finally stop thinking about Myra.

Therefore, he became rather less of a dilettante in his work than he had been recently, and he agreed to produce a new play written by a friend of his. George Talbot was a man of the theatre. He had not acted in it for many years now; but he wrote articles, he sometimes produced a play, he made speeches on important occasions and was known by everyone. When he went into a restaurant people tried to catch his eye, and he often did not know who they were. During the four years since Myra had left, he had had a number of affairs with young women round and about the theatre, for he had been lonely. He had written quite frankly to Myra about these affairs, but she had never mentioned them in her letters. Now he was very busy for some months and was seldom at home; he earned quite a lot of money, and he had a few affairs with women who were pleased to be seen in public with him. He thought about Myra a great deal, but he did not write to her again, nor she to him, although they had agreed they would always be great friends.

One evening in the foyer of a theatre he saw an old friend of his he had always admired, and he told the young woman he was with that that man had been the most irresistible man of his generation – no woman had been able to resist him. The young woman stared briefly across the foyer and said, ‘Not really?’

When George Talbot got home that night he was alone, and he looked at himself with honesty in the mirror. He was sixty, but he did not look it. Whatever had attracted women to him in the past had never been his looks, and he was not much changed: a stoutish man, holding himself erect, grey-haired, carefully brushed, well dressed. He had not paid much attention to his face since those days many years ago when he had been an actor; but now he had an uncharacteristic fit of vanity and remembered that Myra had admired his mouth, while his wife had loved his eyes. He took to taking glances at himself in foyers and restaurants where there were mirrors, and he saw himself as unchanged. He was becoming conscious, though, of a discrepancy between that suave exterior and what he felt. Beneath his ribs his heart had become swollen and soft and painful, a monstrous area of sympathy playing enemy to what he had been. When people made jokes he was often unable to laugh; and his manner of talking, which was light and allusive and dry, must have changed, because more than once old friends asked him if he were depressed, and they no longer smiled appreciatively as he told his stories. He gathered he was not being good company. He understood he might be ill, and he went to the doctor. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with his heart, he had thirty years of life in him yet – luckily, he added respectfully, for the British theatre.

George came to understand that the word ‘heartache’ meant that a person could carry a heart that ached around with him day and night for, in his case, months. Nearly a year now. He would wake in the night, because of the pressure of pain in his chest; in the morning he woke under a weight of grief. There seemed to be no end to it; and this thought jolted him into two actions. First, he wrote to Myra, a tender, carefully phrased letter, recalling the years of their love. To this he got, in due course, a tender and careful reply. Then he went to see his wife. With her he was, and had been for many years, good friends. They saw each other often, but not so often now the children were grown-up; perhaps once or twice a year, and they never quarrelled.

His wife had married again after they divorced, and now she was a widow. Her second husband had been a member of Parliament, and she worked for the Labour Party, and she was on a Hospital Advisory Committee and on the Board of Directors of a progressive school. She was fifty, but did not look it. On this afternoon she was wearing a slim grey suit and grey shoes, and her grey hair had a wave of white across the front which made her look distinguished. She was animated, and very happy to see George; and she talked about some deadhead on her hospital committee who did not see eye to eye with the progressive minority about some reform or other. They had always had their politics in common, a position somewhere left of centre in the Labour Party. She had sympathized with his being a pacifist in the First World War – he had been for a time in prison because of it; he had sympathized with her militant feminism. Both had helped the strikers in 1926. In the thirties, after they were divorced, she had helped with money when he went on tour with a company acting Shakespeare to people on the dole, or hunger-marching.

Myra had not been at all interested in politics, only in her children. And in George, of course.

George asked his first wife to marry him again, and she was so startled that she let the sugar tongs drop and crack a saucer. She asked what had happened to Myra, and George said: ‘Well, dear, I think Myra forgot about me during those years in Australia. At any rate, she doesn’t want me now.’ When he heard his voice saying this it sounded pathetic, and he was frightened, for he could not remember ever having to appeal to a woman. Except to Myra.

His wife examined him and said briskly: ‘You’re lonely, George. Well, we’re none of us getting any younger.’

‘You don’t think you’d be less lonely if you had me around?’

She got up from her chair in order that she could attend to something with her back to him, and she said that she intended to marry again quite soon. She was marrying a man considerably younger than herself, a doctor who was in the progressive minority at her hospital. From her voice George understood that she was both proud and ashamed of this marriage, and that was why she was hiding her face from him. He congratulated her and asked her if there wasn’t perhaps a chance for him yet? ‘After all, dear, we were happy together, weren’t we? I’ve never really understood why that marriage ever broke up. It was you who wanted to break it up.’

‘I don’t see any point in raking over that old business,’ she said, with finality, and returned to her seat opposite him. He envied her very much, looking young with her pink and scarcely lined face under that brave lock of deliberately whitened hair.

‘But dear, I wish you’d tell me. It doesn’t do any harm now, does it? And I always wondered … I’ve often thought about it and wondered.’ He could hear the pathetic note in his voice again, but he did not know how to alter it.

‘You wondered,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t occupied with Myra.’

‘But I didn’t know Myra when we got divorced.’

‘You knew Phillipa and Georgina and Janet and lord knows who else.’

‘But I didn’t care about them.’

She sat with her competent hands in her lap and on her face was a look he remembered seeing when she told him she would divorce him. It was bitter and full of hurt. ‘You didn’t care about me either,’ she said.

‘But we were happy. Well, I was happy …’ he trailed off, being pathetic against all his knowledge of women. For, as he sat there, his old rake’s heart was telling him that if only he could find them, there must be the right words, the right tone. But whatever he said came out in this hopeless, old dog’s voice, and he knew that this voice could never defeat the gallant and crusading young doctor. ‘And I did care about you. Sometimes I think you were the only woman in my life.’

At this she laughed. ‘Oh, George, don’t get maudlin now, please.’

‘Well, dear, there was Myra. But when you threw me over there was bound to be Myra, wasn’t there? There were two women, you and then Myra. And I’ve never understood why you broke it all up when we seemed to be so happy.’

‘You didn’t care for me,’ she said again. ‘If you had, you would never have come home from Phillipa, Georgina, Janet et al and said calmly, just as if it didn’t matter to me in the least, that you had been with them in Brighton or wherever it was.’

‘But if I had cared about them I would never have told you.’

She was regarding him incredulously, and her face was flushed. With what? Anger? George did not know.

‘I remember being so proud,’ he said pathetically, ‘that we had solved this business of marriage and all that sort of thing. We had such a good marriage that it didn’t matter, the little flirtations. And I always thought one should be able to tell the truth. I always told you the truth, didn’t I?’

‘Very romantic of you, dear George,’ she said dryly; and soon he got up, kissed her fondly on the cheek, and went away.

He walked for a long time through the parks, hands behind his erect back, and he could feel his heart swollen and painful in his side. When the gates shut, he walked through the lighted streets he had lived in for fifty years of his life, and he was remembering Myra and Molly, as if they were one woman, merging into each other, a shape of warm easy intimacy, a shape of happiness walking beside him. He went into a little restaurant he knew well, and there was a girl sitting there who knew him because she had heard him lecture once on the state of the British theatre. He tried hard to see Myra and Molly in her face, but he failed; and he paid for her coffee and his own and went home by himself. But his flat was unbearably empty, and he left it and walked down by the Embankment for a couple of hours to tire himself, and there must have been a colder wind blowing than he knew, for next day he woke with a pain in his chest which he could not mistake for heartache.

He had flu and a bad cough, and he stayed in bed by himself and did not ring up the doctor until the fourth day, when he was getting lightheaded. The doctor said it must be the hospital at once.

But he would not go to the hospital. So the doctor said he must have day and night nurses. This he submitted to until the cheerful friendliness of the nurses saddened him beyond bearing, and he asked the doctor to ring up his wife, who would find someone to look after him and would be sympathetic. He was hoping that Molly would come herself to nurse him, but when she arrived he did not mention it, for she was busy with preparations for her new marriage. She promised to find him someone who would not wear a uniform and make jokes. They naturally had many friends in common; and she rang up an old flame of his in the theatre who said she knew of a girl who was looking for a secretary’s job to tide her over a patch of not working, but who didn’t really mind what she did for a few weeks.

So Bobby Tippett sent away the nurses and made up a bed for herself in his study. On the first day she sat by George’s bed sewing. She wore a full dark skirt and a demure printed blouse with short frills at the wrist, and George watched her sewing and already felt much better. She was a small, thin, dark girl, probably Jewish, with sad black eyes. She had a way of letting her sewing lie loose in her lap, her hands limp over it; and her eyes fixed themselves, and a bloom of dark introspection came over them. She sat very still at these moments like a small china figure of a girl sewing. When she was nursing George, or letting in his many visitors, she put on a manner of cool and even languid charm; it was the extreme good manners of heartlessness, and at first George was chilled: but then he saw through the pose; for whatever world Bobby Tippett had been born into he did not think it was the English class to which these manners belonged. She replied with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to questions about herself; he gathered that her parents were dead, but there was a married sister she saw sometimes; and for the rest she had lived around and about London, mostly by herself, for ten or more years. When he asked her if she had not been lonely, so much by herself, she drawled, ‘Why, not at all, I don’t mind being alone.’ But he saw her as a small, brave child, a waif against London, and was moved.

He did not want to be the big man of the theatre; he was afraid of evoking the impersonal admiration he was only too accustomed to; but soon he was asking her questions about her career, hoping that this might be the point of her enthusiasm. But she spoke lightly of small parts, odd jobs, scene painting and understudying, in a jolly good-little-trouper’s voice; and he could not see that he had come any closer to her at all. So at last he did what he had tried to avoid, and sitting up against his pillows like a judge or an impresario, he said: ‘Do something for me, dear. Let me see you.’ She went next door like an obedient child, and came back in tight black trousers, but still in her demure little blouse, and stood on the carpet before him, and went into a little song-and-dance act. It wasn’t bad. He had seen a hundred worse. But he was very moved; he saw her now above all as the little urchin, the gamin, boy-girl and helpless. And utterly touching. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘this is half of an act. I always have someone else.’

There was a big mirror that nearly filled the end wall of the large, dark room. George saw himself in it, an elderly man sitting propped up on pillows watching the small doll-like figure standing before him on the carpet. He saw her turn her head towards her reflection in the darkened mirror, study it, and then she began to dance with her own reflection, dance against it, as it were. There were two small, light figures dancing in George’s room; there was something uncanny in it. She began singing, a little broken song in stage cockney, and George felt that she was expecting the other figure in the mirror to sing with her; she was singing at the mirror as if she expected an answer.

‘That’s very good, dear,’ he broke in quickly, for he was upset, though he did not know why. ‘Very good indeed.’ He was relieved when she broke off and came away from the mirror, so that the uncanny shadow of her went away.

‘Would you like me to speak to someone for you, dear? It might help. You know how things are in the theatre,’ he suggested apologetically.

‘I don’t maind if I dew,’ she said in the stage cockney of her act; and for a moment her face flashed into a mocking, reckless, gaminlike charm. ‘Perhaps I’d better change back into my skirt?’ she suggested. ‘More natural-like for a nurse, ain’t it?’

But he said he liked her in her tight black trousers, and now she always wore them, and her neat little shirts; and she moved about the flat as a charming feminine boy, chattering to him about the plays she had had small parts in and about the big actors and producers she had spoken to, who were, of course, George’s friends or, at least, equals. George sat up against his pillows and listened and watched, and his heart ached. He remained in bed longer than there was need, because he did not want her to go. When he transferred himself to a big chair, he said: ‘You mustn’t think you’re bound to stay here, dear, if there’s somewhere else you’d rather go.’ To which she replied, with a wide flash of her black eyes, ‘But I’m resting, darling, resting. I’ve nothing better to do with myself.’ And then: ‘Oh aren’t I awful, the things wot I sy?’

‘But you do like being here? You don’t mind being here with me, dear?’ he insisted.

There was the briefest pause. She said: ‘Yes, oddly enough I do like it.’ The ‘oddly enough’ was accompanied by a quick, half-laughing, almost flirtatious glance; and for the first time in many months the pressure of loneliness eased around George’s heart.

Now it was a happiness to him because when the distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the theatre or of letters came to see him, Bobby became a cool, silky little hostess; and the instant they had gone she relapsed into urchin charm. It was proof of their intimacy. Sometimes he took her out to dinner or to the theatre. When she dressed up she wore bold, fashionable clothes and moved with the insolence of a mannequin; and George moved beside her, smiling fondly, waiting for the moment when the black, reckless, freebooting eyes would flash up out of the languid stare of the woman presenting herself for admiration, exchanging with him amusement at the world; promising him that soon, when they got back to the apartment, by themselves, she would again become the dear little girl or the gallant, charming waif.

Sometimes, sitting in the dim room at night, he would let his hand close over the thin point of her shoulder; sometimes, when they said good night, he bent to kiss her, and she lowered her head, so that his lips encountered her demure, willing forehead.

George told himself that she was unawakened. It was a phrase that had been the prelude to a dozen warm discoveries in the past. He told himself that she knew nothing of what she might be. She had been married, it seemed – she dropped this information once, in the course of an anecdote about the theatre; but George had known women in plenty who after years of marriage had been unawakened. George asked her to marry him; and she lifted her small sleek head with an animal’s startled turn and said: ‘Why do you want to marry me?’

‘Because I like being with you, dear. I love being with you.’

‘Well, I like being with you.’ It had a questioning sound. She was questioning herself? ‘Strainge,’ she said in cockney, laughing. ‘Strainge but trew.’

The wedding was to be a small one, but there was a lot about it in the papers. Recently several men of George’s generation had married young women. One of them had fathered a son at the age of seventy. George was flattered by the newspapers, and told Bobby a good deal about his life that had not come up before. He remarked for instance that he thought his generation had been altogether more successful about this business of love and sex than the modern generation. He said, ‘Take my son, for instance. At his age I had had a lot of affairs and knew about women; but there he is, nearly thirty, and when he stayed here once with a girl he was thinking of marrying I know for a fact they shared the same bed for a week and nothing ever happened. She told me so. Very odd it all seems to me. But it didn’t seem odd to her. And now he lives with another young man and listens to that long-playing record thing of his, and he’s engaged to a girl he takes out twice a week, like a schoolboy. And there’s my daughter, she came to me a year after she was married, and she was in an awful mess, really awful … it seems to me your generation are very frightened of it all. I don’t know why.’

‘Why my generation?’ she asked, turning her head with that quick listening movement. ‘It’s not my generation.’

‘But you’re nothing but a child,’ he said fondly.

He could not decipher what lay behind the black, full stare of her sad eyes as she looked at him now; she was sitting cross-legged in her black glossy trousers before the fire, like a small doll. But a spring of alarm had been touched in him and he didn’t say any more.

‘At thirty-five, I’m the youngest child alive,’ she sang, with a swift sardonic glance at him over her shoulder. But it sounded gay.

He did not talk to her again about the achievements of his generation.

After the wedding he took her to a village in Normandy where he had been once, many years ago, with a girl called Eve. He did not tell her he had been there before.

It was spring, and the cherry trees were in flower. The first evening he walked with her in the last sunlight under the white-flowering branches, his arm around her thin waist, and it seemed to him that he was about to walk back through the gates of a lost happiness.

They had a large comfortable room with windows which overlooked the cherry trees and there was a double bed. Madame Cruchot, the farmer’s wife, showed them the room with shrewd, non-commenting eyes, said she was always happy to shelter honeymoon couples, and wished them a good night.

George made love to Bobby, and she shut her eyes, and he found she was not at all awkward. When they had finished, he gathered her in his arms, and it was then that he returned simply, with an incredulous awed easing of the heart, to a happiness which – and now it seemed to him fantastically ungrateful that he could have done – he had taken for granted for so many years of his life. It was not possible, he thought, holding her compliant body in his arms, that he could have been by himself, alone, for so long. It had been intolerable. He held her silent breathing body, and he stroked her back and thighs, and his hands remembered the emotions of nearly fifty years of loving. He could feel the memoried emotions of his life flooding through his body, and his heart swelled with a joy it seemed to him he had never known, for it was a compound of a dozen loves.

He was about to take final possession of his memories when she turned sharply away, sat up, and said: ‘I want a fag. How about yew?’

‘Why, yes, dear, if you want.’

They smoked. The cigarettes finished, she lay down on her back, arms folded across her chest, and said, ‘I’m sleepy.’ She closed her eyes. When he was sure she was asleep, he lifted himself on his elbow and watched her. The light still burned, and the curve of her cheek was full and soft, like a child’s. He touched it with the side of his palm, and she shrank away in her sleep, but clenched up, like a fist; and her hand, which was white and unformed, like a child’s hand, was clenched in a fist on the pillow before her face.

George tried to gather her in his arms, and she turned away from him to the extreme edge of the bed. She was deeply asleep, and her sleep was unsharable. George could not endure it. He got out of bed and stood by the window in the cold spring night air, and saw the white cherry trees standing under the white moon, and thought of the cold girl asleep in her bed. He was there in the chill moonlight until the dawn came; in the morning he had a very bad cough and could not get up. Bobby was charming, devoted, and gay. ‘Just like old times, me nursing you,’ she commented, with a deliberate roll of her black eyes. She asked Madame Cruchot for another bed, which she placed in the corner of the room, and George thought it was quite reasonable she should not want to catch his cold; for he did not allow himself to remember the times in his past when quite serious illness had been no obstacle to the sharing of the dark; he decided to forget the sensualities of tiredness, or of fever, or of the extremes of sleeplessness. He was even beginning to feel ashamed.

For a fortnight the Frenchwoman brought up magnificent meals, twice a day, and George and Bobby drank a great deal of red wine and of calvados and made jokes with Madame Cruchot about getting ill on honeymoons. They returned from Normandy rather earlier than had been arranged. It would be better for George, Bobby said, at home, where his friends could drop in to see him. Besides, it was sad to be shut indoors in springtime, and they were both eating too much.

On the first night back in the flat, George waited to see if she would go into the study to sleep, but she came to bed in her pyjamas, and for the second time, he held her in his arms for the space of the act, and then she smoked, sitting up in bed and looking rather tired and small and, George thought, terribly young and pathetic. He did not sleep that night. He did not dare move out of bed for fear of disturbing her, and he was afraid to drop off to sleep for fear his limbs remembered the habits of a lifetime and searched for hers. In the morning she woke smiling, and he put his arms around her, but she kissed him with small gentle kisses and jumped out of bed.

That day she said she must go and see her sister. She saw her sister often during the next weeks and kept suggesting that George should have his friends around more than he did. George asked why didn’t the sister come to see her here, in the flat? So one afternoon she came to tea. George had seen her briefly at the wedding and disliked her, but now for the first time he had a spell of revulsion against the marriage itself. The sister was awful – a commonplace, middle-aged female from some suburb. She had a sharp, dark face that poked itself inquisitively into the corners of the flat, pricing the furniture, and a thin acquisitive nose bent to one side. She sat, on her best behaviour, for two hours over the teacups, in a mannish navy blue suit, a severe black hat, her brogued feet set firmly side by side before her; and her thin nose seemed to be carrying on a silent, satirical conversation with her sister about George. Bobby was being cool and well mannered, as it were deliberately tired of life, as she always was when guests were there, but George was sure this was simply on his account. When the sister had gone, George was rather querulous about her; but Bobby said, laughing, that of course she had known George wouldn’t like Rosa; she was rather ghastly; but then who had suggested inviting her? So Rosa came no more, and Bobby went to meet her for a visit to the pictures, or for shopping. Meanwhile, George sat alone and thought uneasily about Bobby, or visited his old friends. A few months after they returned from Normandy, someone suggested to George that perhaps he was ill. This made George think about it, and he realized he was not far from being ill. It was because he could not sleep. Night after night he lay beside Bobby, after her cheerfully affectionate submission to him; and he saw the soft curve of her cheek on the pillow, the long dark lashes lying close and flat. Never in his life had anything moved him so deeply as that childish cheek, the shadow of those lashes. A small crease in one cheek seemed to him the signature of emotion; and the lock of black glossy hair falling across her forehead filled his throat with tears. His nights were long vigils of locked tenderness.

Then one night she woke and saw him watching her.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, startled. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘I’m only watching you, dear,’ he said hopelessly.

She lay curled up beside him, her fist beside her on the pillow, between him and her. ‘Why aren’t you happy?’ she asked suddenly; and as George laughed with a sudden bitter irony, she sat up, arms around her knees, prepared to consider this problem practically.

‘This isn’t marriage; this isn’t love,’ he announced. He sat up beside her. He did not know that he had ever used that tone to her before. A portly man, his elderly face flushed with sorrow, he had forgotten her for the moment, and he was speaking across her from his past, resurrected in her, to his past. He was dignified with responsible experience and the warmth of a lifetime’s responses. His eyes were heavy, satirical, and condemning. She rolled herself up against him and said with a small sad smile, ‘Then show me, George.’

‘Show you?’ he said, almost stammering. ‘Show you?’ But he held her, the obedient child, his cheek against hers, until she slept; then a too close pressure of his shoulder on hers caused her to shrink and recoil from him away to the edge of the bed.

In the morning she looked at him oddly, with an odd sad little respect, and said, ‘You know what, George. You’ve just got into the habit of loving.’

‘What do you mean, dear?’

She rolled out of bed and stood beside it, a waif in her white pyjamas, her black hair ruffled. She slid her eyes at him and smiled. ‘You just want something in your arms, that’s all. What do you do when you’re alone? Wrap yourself around a pillow?’

He said nothing; he was cut to the heart.

‘My husband was the same,’ she remarked gaily. ‘Funny thing is, he didn’t care anything about me.’ She stood considering him, smiling mockingly. ‘Strange, ain’t it?’ she commented and went off to the bathroom. That was the second time she had mentioned her husband.

The phrase, the habit of loving, made a revolution in George. It was true, he thought. He was shocked out of himself, out of the instinctive response to the movement of skin against his, the pressure of a breast. It seemed to him that he was seeing Bobby quite newly. He had not really known her before. The delightful little girl had vanished, and he saw a young woman toughened and wary because of defeats and failures he had never stopped to think of. He saw that the sadness that lay behind the black eyes was not at all impersonal; he saw the first sheen of grey lying on her smooth hair; he saw that the full curve of her cheek was the beginning of the softening into middle age. He was appalled at his egotism. Now, he thought, he would really know her, and she would begin to love him in response to it.

Suddenly, George discovered in himself a boy whose existence he had totally forgotten. He had been returned to his adolescence. The accidental touch of her hand delighted him; the swing of her skirt could make him shut his eyes with happiness. He looked at her through the jealous eyes of a boy and began questioning her about her past, feeling that he was slowly taking possession of her. He waited for a hint of emotion in the drop of her voice, or a confession in the wrinkling of the skin by the full, dark, comradely eyes. At night, a boy again, reverence shut him into ineptitude. The body of George’s sensuality had been killed stone dead. A month ago he had been a man vigorous with the skilled harbouring of memory; the long use of his body. Now he lay awake beside this woman, longing – not for the past, for that past had dropped away from him, but dreaming of the future. And when he questioned her, like a jealous boy, and she evaded him, he could see it only as the locked virginity of the girl who would wake in answer to the worshipping boy he had become.

But still she slept in a citadel, one fist before her face.

Then one night she woke again, roused by some movement of his. ‘What’s the matter now, George?’ she asked, exasperated.

In the silence that followed, the resurrected boy in George died painfully.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’ He turned away from her, defeated.

It was he who moved out of the big bed into the narrow bed in the study. She said with a sharp, sad smile, ‘Fed up with me, George? Well, I can’t help it, you know. I didn’t ever like sleeping beside someone very much.’

George, who had dropped out of his work lately, undertook to produce another play, and was very busy again; and he became drama critic for one of the big papers and was in the swim and at all the first nights. Sometimes Bobby was with him, in her startling, smart clothes, being amused with him at the whole business of being fashionable. Sometimes she stayed at home. She had the capacity for being by herself for hours, apparently doing nothing. George would come home from some crowd of people, some party, and find her sitting cross-legged before the fire in her tight trousers, chin in hand, gone off by herself into some place where he was now afraid to try and follow. He could not bear it again, putting himself in a position where he might hear the cold, sharp words that showed she had never had an inkling of what he felt, because it was not in her nature to feel it. He would come in late, and she would make them both some tea; and they would sit hand in hand before the fire, his flesh and memories quiet. Dead, he thought. But his heart ached. He had become so used to the heavy load of loneliness in his chest that when, briefly, talking to an old friend, he became the George Talbot who had never known Bobby, and his heart lightened and his oppression went, he would look about him, startled, as if he had lost something. He felt almost lightheaded without the pain of loneliness.

He asked Bobby if she weren’t bored, with so little to do, month after month after month, while he was so busy. She said no, she was quite happy doing nothing. She wouldn’t like to take up her old work again?

‘I wasn’t ever much good, was I?’ she said.

‘If you’d enjoy it, dear, I could speak to someone for you.’

She frowned at the fire but said nothing. Later he suggested it again, and she sparked up with a grin and: ‘Well, I don’t maind if I dew …’

So he spoke to an old friend, and Bobby returned to the theatre, to a small act in a little intimate revue. She had found somebody, she said, to be the other half of her act. George was very busy with a production of Romeo and Juliet, and did not have time to see her at rehearsal, but he was there on the night The Offbeat Revue opened. He was rather late and stood at the back of the gimcrack little theatre, packed tight with fragile little chairs. Everything was so small that the well-dressed audience looked too big, like over-size people crammed in a box. The tiny stage was left bare, with a few black and white posters stuck here and there, and there was one piano. The pianist was good, a young man with black hair falling limp over his face, playing as if he were bored with the whole thing. But he played very well. George, the man of the theatre, listened to the first number, so as to catch the mood, and thought, Oh Lord, not again. It was one of the songs from the First World War, and he could not stand the flood of easy emotion it aroused. He refused to feel. Then he realized that the emotion was, in any case, blocked; the piano was mocking the song; ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’ was being played like a five-finger exercise; and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and ‘Tipperary’ followed in the same style, as if the piano were bored. People were beginning to chuckle, they had caught the mood. A young blond man with a moustache and wearing the uniform of 1914 came in and sang fragments of the songs, like a corpse singing; and then George understood he was supposed to be one of the dead of that war singing. George felt all his responses blocked, first because he could not allow himself to feel any emotion from that time at all – it was too painful; and then because of the five-finger-exercise style, which contradicted everything, all pain or protest, leaving nothing, an emptiness. The show went on; through the twenties, with bits of popular songs from that time, a number about the General Strike, which reduced the whole thing to the scale of marionettes without passion, and then on to the thirties. George saw it was a sort of potted history, as it were – Noel Coward’s falsely heroic view of his time parodied. But it wasn’t even that. There was no emotion, nothing. George did not know what he was supposed to feel. He looked curiously at the faces of the people around him and saw that the older people looked puzzled, affronted, as if the show were an insult to them. But the younger people were in the mood of the thing. But what mood? It was the parody of a parody. When the Second World War was evoked by ‘Run Rabbit Run’ played like Lobengrin, while the soldiers in the uniforms of the time mocked their own understated heroism from the other side of death, then George could not stand it. He did not look at the stage at all. He was waiting for Bobby to come on, so he could say that he had seen her. Meanwhile he smoked and watched the face of a very young man near him; it was a pale, heavy, flaccid face, but it was responding, it seemed from a habit of rancour, to everything that went on on the stage. Suddenly, the young face lit into sarcastic delight, and George looked at the stage. On it were two urchins, identical it seemed, in tight black glossy trousers, tight crisp white shirts. Both had short black hair, neat little feet placed side by side. They were standing together, hands crossed loosely before them at the waist, waiting for the music to start. The man at the piano, who had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, began playing something very sentimental. He broke off and looked with sardonic inquiry at the urchins. They had not moved. They shrugged and rolled their eyes at him. He played a marching song, very loud and pompous. The urchins twitched a little and stayed still. Then the piano broke fast and sudden into a rage of jazz. The two puppets on the stage began a furious movement, their limbs clashing with each other and with the music, until they fell into poses of helpless despair while the music grew louder and more desperate. They tried again, whirling themelves into a frenzied attempt to keep up with the music. Then, two waifs, they turned their two small white sad faces at each other, and, with a formal nod, each took a phrase of music from the fast flood of sound that had already swept by them, held it, and began to sing. Bobby sang her bad stage-cockney phrases, meaningless, jumbled up, flat, hopeless; the other urchin sang drawling languid phrases from the upperclass jargon of the moment. They looked at each other, offering the phrases as it were, to see if they would be accepted. Meanwhile, the hard, cruel, hurtful music went on. Again the two went limp and helpless, unwanted, unaccepted. George, outraged and hurt, asked himself again: What am I feeling? What am I supposed to be feeling? For that insane nihilistic music demanded some opposition, some statement of affirmation, but the two urchins, half-boy, half-girl, as alike as twins (George had to watch Bobby carefully so as not to confuse her with ‘the other half of her act’) were not even trying to resist the music. Then, after a long, sad immobility, they changed roles. Bobby took the languid jaw-writhing part of a limp young man, and the other waif sang false-cockney phrases in a cruel copy of a woman’s voice. It was the parody of a parody of a parody. George stood tense, waiting for a resolution. His nature demanded that now, and quickly, for the limp sadness of the turn was unbearable, the two false urchins should flash out in some sort of rebellion. But there was nothing. The jazz went on like hammers; the whole room shook – stage, walls, ceiling – and it seemed the people in the room jigged lightly and helplessly. The two children on the stage twisted their limbs into the wilful mockery of a stage convention, and finally stood side by side, hands hanging limp, heads lowered meekly, twitching a little while the music rose into a final crashing discord and the lights went out. George could not applaud. He saw the damp-faced young man next to him was clapping wildly, while his lank hair fell all over his face. George saw that the older people were all, like himself, bewildered and insulted.

When the show was over, George went backstage to fetch Bobby. She was with ‘the other half of the act’, a rather good-looking boy of about twenty, who was being deferential to the impressive husband of Bobby. George said to her: ‘You were very good, dear, very good indeed.’ She looked smilingly at him, half-mocking, but he did not know what it was she was mocking now. And she had been good. But he never wanted to see it again.

The revue was a success and ran for some months before it was moved to a bigger theatre. George finished his production of Romeo and Juliet which, so the critics said, was the best London had seen for many years, and refused other offers of work. He did not need the money for the time being, and besides, he had not seen very much of Bobby lately.

But of course now she was working. She was at rehearsals several times a week, and away from the flat every evening. But George never went to her theatre. He did not want to see the sad, unresisting children twitching to the cruel music.

It seemed Bobby was happy. The various little parts she had played with him – the urchin, the cool hostess, the dear child – had all been absorbed into the hard-working female who cooked him his meals, looked after him, and went out to her theatre giving him a friendly kiss on the cheek. Their relationship was most pleasant and amiable. George lived beside this good friend, his wife Bobby, who was doing him so much credit in every way, and ached permanently with loneliness.

One day he was walking down the Charing Cross Road, looking into the windows of bookshops, when he saw Bobby strolling up the other side with Jackie, the other half of her act. She looked as he had never seen her: her dark face was alive with animation, and Jackie was looking into her face and laughing. George thought the boy very handsome. He had a warm gloss of youth on his hair and in his eyes; he had the lithe, quick look of a young animal.

He was not jealous at all. When Bobby came in at night, gay and vivacious, he knew he owed this to Jackie and did not mind. He was even grateful to him. The warmth Bobby had for ‘the other half of the act’ overflowed towards him; and for some months Myra and his wife were present in his mind, he saw and felt them, two loving presences, young women who loved George, brought into being by the feeling between Jackie and Bobby. Whatever that feeling was.

The Offbeat Revue ran for nearly a year, and then it was coming off, and Bobby and Jackie were working out another act. George did not know what it was. He thought Bobby needed a rest, but he did not like to say so. She had been tired recently, and when she came in at night there was strain beneath her gaiety. Once, at night, he woke to see her beside his bed. ‘Hold me for a little, George,’ she asked. He opened his arms and she came into them. He lay holding her, quite still. He had opened his arms to the sad waif, but it was an unhappy woman lying in his arms. He could feel the movement of her lashes on his shoulder, and the wetness of tears.

He had not lain beside her for a long time, years it seemed. She did not come to him again.

‘You don’t think you’re working too hard, dear?’ he asked once, looking at her strained face; but she said briskly, ‘No, I’ve got to have something to do, can’t stand doing nothing.’

One night it was raining hard, and Bobby had been feeling sick that day, and she did not come home at her usual time. George became worried and took a taxi to the theatre and asked the doorman if she was still there. It seemed she had left some time before. ‘She didn’t look too well to me, sir,’ volunteered the doorman, and George sat for a time in the taxi, trying not to worry. Then he gave the driver Jackie’s address; he meant to ask him if he knew where Bobby was. He sat limp in the back of the taxi, feeling the heaviness of his limbs, thinking of Bobby ill.

The place was in a mews, and he left the taxi and walked over rough cobbles to a door which had been the door of stables. He rang, and a young man he didn’t know let him in, saying yes, Jackie Dickson was in. George climbed narrow, steep, wooden stairs slowly, feeling the weight of his body, while his heart pounded. He stood at the top of the stairs to get his breath, in a dark which smelled of canvas and oil and turpentine. There was a streak of light under a door; he went towards it, knocked, heard no answer, and opened it. The scene was a high, bare, studio sort of place, badly lighted, full of pictures, frames, junk of various kinds. Jackie, the dark, glistening youth, was seated cross-legged before the fire, grinning as he lifted his face to say something to Bobby, who sat in a chair, looking down at him. She was wearing a formal dark dress and jewellery, and her arms and neck were bare and white. She looked beautiful, George thought, glancing once, briefly, at her face, and then away; for he could see on it an emotion he did not want to recognize. The scene held for a moment before they realized he was there and turned their heads with the same lithe movement of disturbed animals, to see him standing there in the doorway. Both faces froze. Bobby looked quickly at the young man, and it was in some kind of fear. Jackie looked sulky and angry.

‘I’ve come to look for you, dear,’ said George to his wife. ‘It was raining and the doorman said you seemed ill.’

‘It’s very sweet of you,’ she said and rose from the chair, giving her hand formally to Jackie, who nodded with bad grace at George.

The taxi stood in the dark, gleaming rain, and George and Bobby got into it and sat side by side, while it splashed off into the street.

‘Was that the wrong thing to do, dear?’ asked George, when she said nothing.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I really did think you might be ill.’

She laughed. ‘Perhaps I am.’

‘What’s the matter, my darling? What is it? He was angry, wasn’t he? Because I came?’

‘He thinks you’re jealous,’ she said shortly.

‘Well, perhaps I am rather,’ said George.

She did not speak.

‘I’m sorry, dear, I really am. I didn’t mean to spoil anything for you.’

‘Well, that’s certainly that,’ she remarked, and she sounded impersonally angry.

‘Why? But why should it be?’

‘He doesn’t like – having things asked of him,’ she said, and he remained silent while they drove home.

Up in the warmed, comfortable old flat, she stood before the fire, while he brought her a drink. She smoked fast and angrily, looking into the fire.

‘Please forgive me, dear,’ he said at last. ‘What is it? Do you love him? Do you want to leave me? If you do, of course you must. Young people should be together.’

She turned and stared at him, a black strange stare he knew well.

‘George,’ she said, ‘I’m nearly forty.’

‘But darling, you’re a child still. At least, to me.’

‘And he,’ she went on, ‘will be twenty-two next month. I’m old enough to be his mother.’ She laughed, painfully. ‘Very painful, maternal love … or so it seems … but then how should I know?’ She held out her bare arm and looked at it. Then, with the fingers of one hand she creased down the skin of that bare arm towards the wrist, so that the ageing skin lay in creases and folds. Then, setting down her glass, her cigarette held between tight, amused, angry lips, she wriggled her shoulders out of her dress, so that it slipped to her waist, and she looked down at her two small, limp, unused breasts. ‘Very painful, dear George,’ she said, and shrugged her dress up quickly, becoming again the formal woman dressed for the world. ‘He does not love me. He does not love me at all. Why should he?’ She began singing:

He does not love me
With a love that is trew …

Then she said in stage cockney, ‘Repeat; I could ‘ave bin ‘is muvver, see?’ And with the old rolling derisive black flash of her eyes she smiled at George.

George was thinking only that this girl, his darling, was suffering now what he had suffered, and he could not stand it. She had been going through this for how long now? But she had been working with that boy for nearly two years. She had been living beside him, George, and he had had no idea at all of her unhappiness. He went over to her, put his arms around her, and she stood with her head on his shoulder and wept. For the first time, George thought, they were together. They sat by the fire a long time that night, drinking, smoking and her head was on his knee and he stroked it, and thought that now, at last, she had been admitted into the world of emotion and they would learn to be really together. He could feel his strength stirring along his limbs for her. He was still a man, after all.

Next day she said she would not go on with the new show. She would tell Jackie he must get another partner. And besides, the new act wasn’t really any good. ‘I’ve had one little act all my life,’ she said, laughing. ‘And sometimes it’s fitted in, and sometimes it hasn’t.’

‘What was the new act? What’s it about?’ he asked her.

She did not look at him. ‘Oh, nothing very much. It was Jackie’s idea, really …’ Then she laughed. ‘It’s quite good really, I suppose …’

‘But what is it?’

‘Well, you see …’ Again he had the impression she did not want to look at him. ‘It’s a pair of lovers. We make fun … it’s hard to explain, without doing it.’

‘You make fun of love?’ he asked.

‘Well, you know, all the attitudes … the things people say. It’s a man and a woman – with music of course. All the music you’d expect, played offbeat. We wear the same costume as for the other act. And then we go through all the motions … It’s rather funny, really …’ she trailed off, breathless, seeing George’s face. ‘Well,’ she said, suddenly very savage, ‘if it isn’t all bloody funny, what is it?’ She turned away to take a cigarette.

‘Perhaps you’d like to go on with it after all?’ he asked ironically.

‘No. I can’t. I really can’t stand it. I can’t stand it any longer, George,’ she said, and from her voice he understood she had nothing to learn from him of pain.

He suggested they both needed a holiday, so they went to Italy. They travelled from place to place, never stopping anywhere longer than a day, for George knew she was running away from any place around which emotion could gather. At night he made love to her, but she closed her eyes and thought of the other half of the act; and George knew it and did not care. But what he was feeling was too powerful for his old body; he could feel a lifetime’s emotions beating through his limbs, making his brain throb.

Again they curtailed their holiday, to return to the comfortable old flat in London.

On the first morning after their return, she said: ‘George, you know you’re getting too old for this sort of thing – it’s not good for you; you look ghastly.’

‘But, darling, why? What else am I still alive for?’

‘People’ll say I’m killing you,’ she said, with a sharp, half angry, half amused, black glance.

‘But, my darling, believe me …’

He could see them both in the mirror; he, an old pursy man, head lowered in sullen obstinacy; she … but he could not read her face.

‘And perhaps I’m getting too old?’ she remarked suddenly.

For a few days she was gay, mocking, then suddenly tender. She was provocative, teasing him with her eyes; then she would deliberately yawn and say, ‘I’m going to sleep. Good night, George.’

‘Well, of course, my darling, if you’re tired.’

One morning she announced she was going to have a birthday party; it would be her fortieth birthday soon. The way she said it made George feel uneasy.

On the morning of her birthday she came into his study where he had been sleeping, carrying his breakfast tray. He raised himself on his elbow and gazed at her, appalled. For a moment he had imagined it must be another woman. She had put on a severe navy blue suit, cut like a man’s; heavy black-laced shoes; and she had taken the wisps of black hair back off her face and pinned them into a sort of clumsy knot. She was suddenly a middle-aged woman.

‘But, my darling,’ he said, ‘my darling, what have you done to yourself?’

‘I’m forty,’ she said. ‘Time to grow up.’

‘But, my darling, I do so love you in your clothes. I do so love you being beautiful in your lovely clothes.’

She laughed, and left the breakfast tray beside his bed, and went clumping out on her heavy shoes.

That morning she stood in the kitchen beside a very large cake, on which she was carefully placing forty small pink candles. But it seemed only the sister had been asked to the party, for that afternoon the three of them sat around the cake and looked at one another. George looked at Rosa, the sister, in her ugly straight, thick suit, and at his darling Bobby, all her grace and charm submerged into heavy tweed, her hair dragged back, without make-up. They were two middle-aged women, talking about food and buying.

George said nothing. His whole body throbbed with loss.

The dreadful Rosa was looking with her sharp eyes around the expensive flat, and then at George and then at her sister.

‘You’ve let yourself go, haven’t you, Bobby?’ she commented at last. She sounded pleased about it.

Bobby glanced defiantly at George. ‘I haven’t got time for all this nonsense any more,’ she said. ‘I simply haven’t got time. We’re all getting on now, aren’t we?’

George saw the two women looking at him. He thought they had the same black, hard, inquisitive stare over sharp-bladed noses. He could not speak. His tongue was thick. The blood was beating through his body. His heart seemed to be swelling and filling his whole body, an enormous soft growth of pain. He could not hear for the tolling of the blood through his ears. The blood was beating up into his eyes, but he shut them so as not to see the two women.

The Woman

The two elderly gentlemen emerged on to the hotel terrace at the same moment. They stopped, and checked movements that suggested they wished to retreat. Their first involuntary glances had been startled, even troubled. Now they allowed their eyes to exchange a long, formal glare of hate, before turning deliberately away from each other.

They surveyed the terrace. A problem! Only one of the tables still remained in sunlight. They stiffly marched towards it, pulled out chairs, seated themselves. At once they opened newspapers and lifted them up like screens.

A pretty waitress came sauntering across to take the orders. The two newspapers remained stationary. Around the edge of one Herr Scholtz ordered warmed wine; from the shelter of the other Captain Forster from England demanded tea – with milk.

When she returned with these fluids, neatly disposed on similar metal trays, both walls of print slightly lowered themselves. Captain Forster, with an aggressive flicker of uneasy blue eyes turned towards his opponent, suggested that it was a fine evening. Herr Scholtz remarked with warm freemasonry that it was a shame such a pretty girl should not be free to enjoy herself on such an evening. Herr Scholtz appeared to consider that he had triumphed, for his look towards the Englishman was boastful. To both remarks, however, Rosa responded with an amiable but equally perfunctory smile. She strolled away to the balustrade where she leaned indolently, her back to them.

Stirring sugar into tea, sipping wine, was difficult with those stiff papers in the way. First Herr Scholtz, then the Captain, folded his and placed it on the table. Avoiding each other’s eyes, they looked away towards the mountains, which, however, were partly blocked by Rosa.

She wore a white blouse, low on the shoulders; a black skirt, with a tiny white apron; smart red shoes. It was at her shoulders that the gentlemen gazed. They coughed, tapped on the table with their fingers, narrowed their eyes in sentimental appreciation at the mountains, looked at Rosa again. From time to time their eyes almost met but quickly slid away. Since they could not fight, civilization demanded they should speak. Yes, conversation appeared imminent.

A week earlier they had arrived on the same morning and were given rooms opposite each other at the end of a long corridor. The season was nearly over, the hotel half empty. Rosa therefore had plenty of time to devote to Herr Scholtz, who demanded it: he wanted bigger towels, different pillows, a glass of water. But soon the bell pealed from the other side of the corridor, and she excused herself and hastened over to Captain Forster who was also dissatisfied with the existing arrangements for his comfort. Before she had finished with him, Herr Scholtz’s bell rang again. Between the two of them Rosa was kept busy until the midday meal, and not once did she suggest by her manner that she had any other desire in this world than to readjust Captain Forster’s reading light or bring Herr Scholtz cigarettes and newspapers.

That afternoon Captain Forster happened to open his door; and he found he had a clear view into the room opposite, where Rosa stood at the window smiling, in what seemed to him charming surrender, at Herr Scholtz, who was reaching out a hand towards her elbow. The hand dropped. Herr Scholtz scowled, walked across, indignantly closed his door as if it were the Captain’s fault it had been left open … Almost at once the Captain’s painful jealousy was erased, for Rosa emerged from that door, smiling with perfect indifference, and wished him good day.

That night, very late, quick footsteps sounded on the floor of the corridor. The two doors gently opened at the same moment; and Rosa, midway between them, smiled placidly at first Herr Scholtz, then the Captain, who gave each other contemptuous looks after she had passed. They both slammed their doors.

Next day Herr Scholtz asked her if she would care to come with him up the funicular on her afternoon off, but unfortunately she was engaged. The day after Captain Forster made the same suggestion.

Finally, there was a repetition of that earlier incident. Rosa was passing along the corridor late at night on her way to her own bed, when those two doors cautiously opened and the two urgent faces appeared. This time she stopped, smiled politely, wished them a very good night. Then she yawned. It was a slight gesture, but perfectly timed. Both gentlemen solaced themselves with the thought that it must have been earned by his rival; for Herr Scholtz considered the Captain ridiculously gauche, while the Captain thought Herr Scholtz’s attitude towards Rosa disgustingly self-assured and complacent. They were therefore able to retire to their beds with philosophy.

Since then Herr Scholtz had been observed in conversation with a well-preserved widow of fifty who unfortunately was obliged to retire to her own room every evening at nine o’clock for reasons of health and was, therefore, unable to go dancing with him, as he longed to do. Captain Forster took his tea every afternoon in a café where there was a charming waitress who might have been Rosa’s sister.

The two gentlemen looked through each other in the dining room, and each crossed the street if he saw the other approaching. There was a look about them which suggested that they might be thinking Switzerland – at any rate, so late in the season – was not all that it had been.

Gallant, however, they both continued to be; and they might continually be observed observing the social scene of flirtations and failures and successes with the calm authority of those well qualified by long familiarity with it to assess and make judgments. Men of weight, they were; men of substance; men who expected deference.

And yet … here they were seated on opposite sides of that table in the last sunlight, the mountains rising above them, all mottled white and brown and green with melting spring, the warm sun folding delicious but uncertain arms around them – and surely they were entitled to feel aggrieved? Captain Forster – a lean, tall, military man, carefully suntanned, spruced, brushed – was handsome still, no doubt of it. And Herr Scholtz – large, rotund, genial, with infinite resources of experience – was certainly worth more than the teatime confidences of a widow of fifty?

Unjust to be sixty on such a spring evening; particularly hard with Rosa not ten paces away, shrugging her shoulders in a low-cut embroidered blouse.

And almost as if she were taking a pleasure in cruelty, she suddenly stopped humming and leaned forward over the balustrade. With what animation did she wave and call down the street, while a very handsome young man below waved and called back. Rosa watched him stride away, and then she sighed and turned, smiling dreamily.

There sat Herr Scholtz and Captain Forster gazing at her with hungry resentful appreciation.

Rosa narrowed her blue eyes with anger and her mouth went thin and cold, in disastrous contrast with her tenderness of a moment before. She shot bitter looks from one gentleman to the other, and then she yawned again. This time it was a large, contemptuous, prolonged yawn; and she tapped the back of her hand against her mouth for emphasis and let out her breath in a long descending note, which, however, was cut off short as if to say that she really had no time to waste even on this small demonstration. She then swung past them in a crackle of starched print, her heels tapping. She went inside.

The terrace was empty. Gay painted tables, striped chairs, flowery sun umbrellas – all were in cold shadow, save for the small corner where the gentlemen sat. At the same moment, from the same impulse, they rose and pushed the table forward into the last well of golden sunlight. And now they looked at each other straight and frankly laughed.

‘Will you have a drink?’ inquired Herr Scholtz in English, and his jolly smile was tightened by a consciously regretful stoicism. After a moment’s uncertainty, during which Captain Forster appeared to be thinking that the stoicism was too early an admission of defeat, he said, ‘Yes – yes. Thanks, I will.’

Herr Scholtz raised his voice sharply, and Rosa appeared from indoors, ready to be partly defensive. But now Herr Scholtz was no longer a suppliant. Master to servant, a man who habitually employed labour, he ordered wine without looking at her once. And Captain Forster was the picture of a silky gentleman.

When she reappeared with the wine they were so deep in good fellowship they might have been saying aloud how foolish it was to allow the sound companionship of men to be spoiled, even for a week, on account of the silly charm of women. They were roaring with laughter at some joke. Or rather, Herr Scholtz was roaring, a good stomach laugh from depths of lusty enjoyment. Captain Forster’s laugh was slightly nervous, emitted from the back of his throat, and suggested that Herr Scholtz’s warm Bavarian geniality was all very well, but that there were always reservations in any relationship.

It soon transpired that during the war – the First War, be it understood – they had been enemies on the same sector of the front at the same time. Herr Scholtz had been wounded in his arm. He bared it now, holding it forward under the Captain’s nose to show the long white scar. Who knew but that it was the Captain who had dealt that blow – indirectly, of course – thirty-five years before? Nor was this all. During the Second World War Captain Forster had very nearly been sent to North Africa, where he would certainly have had the pleasure of fighting Herr, then Oberst-leutnant, Scholtz. As it happened, the fortunes of war had sent him to India instead. While these happy coincidences were being established, it was with the greatest amity on both sides; and if the Captain’s laugh tended to follow Herr Scholtz’s just a moment late, it could easily be accounted for by those unavoidable differences of temperament. Before half an hour was out, Rosa was dispatched for a second flask of the deep crimson wine.

When she returned with it, she placed the glasses so, the flasks so, and was about to turn away when she glanced at the Captain and was arrested. The look on his face certainly invited comment. Herr Scholtz was just remarking, with that familiar smiling geniality, how much he regretted that the ‘accidents of history’ – a phrase that caused the Captain’s face to tighten very slightly – had made it necessary for them to be enemies in the past. In the future, he hoped, they would fight side by side, comrades in arms against the only possible foe for either … But now Herr Scholtz stopped, glanced swiftly at the Captain, and after the briefest possible pause, and without a change of tone, went on to say that as for himself he was a man of peace, a man of creation: he caused innumerable tubes of toothpaste to reach the bathrooms of his country, and he demanded nothing more of life than to be allowed to continue to do so. Besides, had he not dropped his war title, the Oberst-leutnant, in proof of his fundamentally civilian character?

Here, as Rosa still remained before them, contemplating them with a look that can only be described as ambiguous, Herr Scholtz blandly inquired what she wanted. But Rosa wanted nothing. Having inquired if that was all she could do for the gentlemen, she passed to the end of the terrace and leaned against the balustrade there, looking down into the street where the handsome young man might pass.

Now there was a pause. The eyes of both men were drawn painfully towards her. Equally painful was the effort to withdraw them. Then, as if reminded that any personal differences were far more dangerous than the national ones, they plunged determinedly into gallant reminiscences. How pleasant, said that hearty masculine laughter – how pleasant to sit here in snug happy little Switzerland, comfortable in easy friendship, and after such fighting, such obviously meaningless hostilities! Citizens of the world they were, no less, human beings enjoying civilized friendship on equal terms. And each time Herr Scholtz or the Captain succumbed to that fatal attraction and glanced towards the end of the terrace, he as quickly withdrew his eyes and, as it were, set his teeth to offer another gauge of friendship across the table.

But fate did not intend this harmony to continue.

Cruelly, the knife was turned again. The young man appeared at the bottom on the street and, smiling, waved towards Rosa, Rosa leaned forward, arms on the balustrade, the picture of bashful coquetry, rocking one heel up and down behind her and shaking her hair forward to conceal the frankness of her response.

There she stood, even after he had gone, humming lightly to herself, looking after him. The crisp white napkin over her arm shone in the sunlight; her bright white apron shone; her mass of rough fair curls glowed. She stood there in the last sunlight and looked away into her own thoughts, singing softly as if she were quite alone.

Certainly she had completely forgotten the existence of Herr Scholtz and Captain Forster.

The Captain and the ex-Oberst-leutnant had apparently come to the end of their sharable memories. One cleared his throat; the other, Herr Scholtz, tapped his signet ring irritatingly on the table.

The Captain shivered. ‘It’s getting cold,’ he said, for now they were in the blue evening shadow. He made a movement, as if ready to rise.

‘Yes,’ said Herr Scholtz. But he did not move. For a while he tapped his ring on the table, and the Captain set his teeth against the noise. Herr Scholtz was smiling. It was a smile that announced a new trend in the drama. Obviously. And obviously the Captain disapproved of it in advance. A blatant fellow, he was thinking, altogether too noisy and vulgar. He glanced impatiently towards the inside room, which would be warm and quiet.

Herr Scholtz remarked, ‘I always enjoy coming to this place. I always come here.’

‘Indeed?’ asked the Captain, taking his cue in spite of himself. He wondered why Herr Scholtz was suddenly speaking German. Herr Scholtz spoke excellent English, learned while he was interned in England during the latter part of the Second World War. Captain Forster had already complimented him on it. His German was not nearly so fluent, no.

But Herr Scholtz, for reasons of his own, was speaking his own language, and rather too loudly, one might have thought. Captain Forster looked at him, wondering, and was attentive.

‘It is particularly pleasant for me to come to this resort,’ remarked Herr Scholtz in that loud voice, as if to an inner listener, who was rather deaf, ‘because of the happy memories I have of it.’

‘Really?’ inquired Captain Forster, listening with nervous attention. Herr Scholtz, however, was speaking very slowly, as if out of consideration for him.

‘Yes,’ said Herr Scholtz. ‘Of course during the war it was out of bounds for both of us, but now …’

The Captain suddenly interrupted: ‘Actually I’m very fond of it myself. I come here every year it is possible.’

Herr Scholtz inclined his head, admitting that Captain Forster’s equal right to it was incontestable, and continued, ‘I associate with it the most charming of my memories – perhaps you would care to …’

‘But certainly,’ agreed Captain Forster hastily. He glanced involuntarily towards Rosa – Herr Scholtz was speaking with his eyes on Rosa’s back. Rosa was no longer humming. Captain Forster took in the situation and immediately coloured. He glanced protestingly towards Herr Scholtz. But it was too late.

‘I was eighteen,’ said Herr Scholtz very loudly. ‘Eighteen.’ He paused, and for a moment it was possible to resurrect, in the light of his rueful reminiscent smile, the delightful, ingenuous bouncing youth he had certainly been at eighteen. ‘My parents allowed me, for the first time, to go alone for a vacation. It was against my mother’s wishes; but my father on the other hand …’

Here Captain Forster necessarily smiled, in acknowledgment of that international phenomenon, the sweet jealousy of mothers.

‘And here I was, for a ten days’ vacation, all by myself – imagine it!’

Captain Forster obligingly imagined it, but almost at once interrupted: ‘Odd, but I had the same experience. Only I was twenty-five.’

Herr Scholtz exclaimed: ‘Twenty-five!’ He cut himself short, covered his surprise, and shrugged as if to say: Well, one must make allowances. He at once continued to Rosa’s listening back. ‘I was in this very hotel. Winter. A winter vacation. There was a woman …’ He paused, smiling, ‘How can I describe her?’

But the Captain, it seemed, was not prepared to assist. He was frowning uncomfortably towards Rosa. His expression said quite clearly: Really, must you?

Herr Scholtz appeared not to notice it. ‘I was, even in those days, not backward – you understand?’ The Captain made a movement of his shoulders which suggested that to be forward at eighteen was not a matter for congratulation, whereas at twenty-five …

‘She was beautiful – beautiful,’ continued Herr Scholtz with enthusiasm. ‘And she was obviously rich, a woman of the world; and her clothes …’

‘Quite,’ said the Captain.

‘She was alone. She told me she was here for her health. Her husband unfortunately could not get away, for reasons of business. And I, too, was alone.’

‘Quite,’ said the Captain.

‘Even at that age I was not too surprised at the turn of events. A woman of thirty … a husband so much older than herself … and she was beautiful … and intelligent … Ah, but she was magnificent!’ He almost shouted this, and drained his glass reminiscently towards Rosa’s back. ‘Ah …’ he breathed gustily. ‘And now I must tell you. All that was good enough, but now there is even better. Listen. A week passed. And what a week! I loved her as I never loved anyone …’

‘Quite,’ said the Captain, fidgeting.

But Herr Scholtz swept on. ‘And then one morning I wake, and I am alone.’ Herr Scholtz shrugged and groaned.

The Captain observed that Herr Scholtz was being carried away by the spirit of his own enjoyment. This tale was by now only half for the benefit of Rosa. That rich dramatic groan – Herr Scholtz might as well be in the theatre, thought the Captain uncomfortably.

‘But there was a letter, and when I read it …’

‘A letter?’ interrupted the Captain suddenly.

‘Yes, a letter. She thanked me so that the tears came into my eyes. I wept.’

One could have sworn that the sentimental German eyes swam with tears, and Captain Forster looked away. With eyes averted he asked nervously, ‘What was in the letter?’

‘She said how much she hated her husband. She had married him against her will – to please her parents. In those days, this thing happened. And she had sworn a vow to herself never to have his child. But she wanted a child …

‘What?’ exclaimed the Captain. He was leaning forward over the table now, intent on every syllable.

This emotion seemed unwelcome to Herr Scholtz, who said blandly, ‘Yes, that was how it was. That was my good fortune, my friend.’

‘When was that?’ inquired the Captain hungrily.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘When was it? What year?’

‘What year? Does it matter? She told me she had arranged this little holiday on grounds of her bad health, so that she might come by herself to find the man she wanted as the father of her child. She had chosen me. I was her choice. And now she thanked me and was returning to her husband.’ Herr Scholtz stopped, in triumph, and looked at Rosa. Rosa did not move. She could not possibly have failed to hear every word. Then he looked at the Captain. But the Captain’s face was scarlet, and very agitated.

‘What was her name?’ barked the Captain.

‘Her name?’ Herr Scholtz paused. ‘Well, she would clearly have used a false name?’ he inquired. As the Captain did not respond, he said firmly: ‘That is surely obvious, my friend. And I did not know her address.’ Herr Scholtz took a slow sip of his wine, then another. He regarded the Captain for a moment thoughtfully, as if wondering whether he could be trusted to behave according to the rules, and then continued: ‘I ran to the hotel manager – no, there was no information. The lady had left unexpectedly, early that morning. No address. I was frantic. You can imagine. I wanted to rush after her, find her, kill her husband, marry her!’ Herr Scholtz laughed in amused, regretful indulgence at the follies of youth.

‘You must remember the year,’ urged the Captain.

‘But my friend …’ began Herr Scholtz after a pause, very annoyed. ‘What can it matter, after all?’

Captain Forster glanced stiffly at Rosa and spoke in English, ‘As it happened, the same thing happened to me.’

‘Here?’ inquired Herr Scholtz politely.

‘Here.’

‘In this valley?’

‘In this hotel.’

‘Well,’ shrugged Herr Scholtz, raising his voice even more, ‘well, women – women you know. At eighteen, of course – and perhaps even at twenty-five –’ Here he nodded indulgently towards his opponent – ‘Even at twenty-five perhaps one takes such things as miracles that happen only to oneself. But at our age …?’

He paused, as if hoping against hope that the Captain might recover his composure.

But the Captain was speechless.

‘I tell you, my friend,’ continued Herr Scholtz, good-humouredly relishing the tale, ‘I tell you, I was crazy; I thought I would go mad. I wanted to shoot myself; I rushed around the streets of every city I happened to be in, looking into every face. I looked at photographs in the papers – actresses, society women; I used to follow a woman I had glimpsed in the street, thinking that perhaps this was she at last. But no,’ said Herr Scholtz dramatically, bringing down his hand on the table, so that his ring clicked again, ‘no, never, never was I successful!’

‘What did she look like?’ asked the Captain agitatedly in English, his anxious eyes searching the by now very irritated eyes of Herr Scholtz.

Herr Scholtz moved his chair back slightly, looked towards Rosa, and said loudly in German: ‘Well, she was beautiful, as I have told you.’ He paused, for thought. ‘And she was an aristocrat.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the Captain impatiently.

‘She was tall, very slim, with a beautiful body – beautiful! She had that black hair, you know, black, black! And black eyes, and beautiful teeth.’ He added loudly and spitefully towards Rosa: ‘She was not the country bumpkin type, not at all. One has some taste.’

With extreme discomfort the Captain glanced towards the plump village Rosa. He said, pointedly using English even at this late stage, ‘Mine was fair. Tall and fair. A lovely girl. Lovely!’ he insisted with a glare. ‘Might have been an English girl.’

‘Which was entirely to her credit,’ suggested Herr Scholtz, with a smile.

‘That was in 1913,’ said the Captain insistently, and then: ‘You say she had black hair?’

‘Certainly, black hair. On that occasion – but that was not the last time it happened to me.’ He laughed. ‘I had three children by my wife, a fine woman – she is now dead, unfortunately.’ Again, there was no doubt tears filled his eyes. At the sight, the Captain’s indignation soared. But Herr Scholtz had recovered and was speaking: ‘But I ask myself, how many children in addition to the three? Sometimes I look at a young man in the streets who has a certain resemblance, and I ask myself: Perhaps he is my son? Yes, yes, my friend, this is a question that every man must ask himself, sometimes, is it not?’ He put back his head and laughed wholeheartedly, though with an undertone of rich regret.

The Captain did not speak for a moment. Then he said in English, ‘It’s all very well, but it did happen to me – it did.’ He sounded like a defiant schoolboy, and Herr Scholtz shrugged.

‘It happened to me, here. In this hotel.’

Herr Scholtz controlled his irritation, glanced at Rosa, and, for the first time since the beginning of this regrettable incident, he lowered his voice to a reasonable tone and spoke English. ‘Well,’ he said, in frank irony, smiling gently, with a quiet shrug, ‘well, perhaps if we are honest we must say that this is a thing that has happened to every man? Or rather, if it did not exist, it was necessary to invent it?’

And now – said his look towards the Captain – and now, for heaven’s sake! For the sake of decency, masculine solidarity, for the sake of our dignity in the eyes of that girl over there, who has so wounded us both – pull yourself together, my friend, and consider what you are saying!

But the Captain was oblivious in memories. ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘No. Speak for yourself. It did happen. Here.’ He paused, and then brought out, with difficulty, ‘I never married.’

Herr Scholtz shrugged, at last, and was silent. Then he called out, ‘Fräulein, Fräulein – may I pay?’ It was time to put an end to it.

Rosa did not immediately turn around. She patted her hair at the back. She straightened her apron. She took her napkin from one forearm and arranged it prettily on the other. Then she turned and came, smiling, towards them. It could at once be seen that she intended her smile to be noticed.

‘You wish to pay?’ she asked Herr Scholtz. She spoke calmly and deliberately in English, and the Captain started and looked extremely uncomfortable. But Herr Scholtz immediately adjusted himself and said in English, ‘Yes, I am paying.’

She took the note he held out and counted out the change from the small satchel under her apron. Having laid the last necessary coin on the table, she stood squarely in front of them, smiling down equally at both, her hands folded in front of her. At last, when they had had the full benefit of her amused, maternal smile, she suggested in English: ‘Perhaps the lady changed the colour of her hair to suit what you both like best?’ Then she laughed. She put back her head and laughed a full, wholehearted laugh.

Herr Scholtz, accepting the defeat with equanimity, smiled a rueful, appreciative smile.

The Captain sat stiffly in his chair, regarding them both with hot hostility, clinging tight to his own, authentic, memories.

But Rosa laughed at him, until with a final swish of her dress she clicked past them both and away off the terrace.

Through the Tunnel

Going to the shore on the first morning of the holiday, the young English boy stopped at a turning of the path and looked down at a wild and rocky bay, and then over to the crowded beach he knew so well from other years. His mother walked on in front of him, carrying a bright striped bag in one hand. Her other arm, swinging loose, was very white in the sun. The boy watched that white, naked arm, and turned his eyes, which had a frown behind them, towards the bay and back again to his mother. When she felt he was not with her, she swung around. ‘Oh, there you are, Jerry!’ she said. She looked impatient, then smiled. ‘Why, darling, would you rather not come with me? Would you rather –’ She frowned, conscientiously worrying over what amusements he might secretly be longing for, which she had been too busy or too careless to imagine. He was very familiar with that anxious, apologetic smile. Contrition sent him running after her. And yet, as he ran, he looked back over his shoulder at the wild bay; and all morning, as he played on the safe beach, he was thinking of it.

Next morning, when it was time for the routine of swimming and sunbathing, his mother said, ‘Are you tired of the usual beach, Jerry? Would you like to go somewhere else?’

‘Oh, no!’ he said quickly, smiling at her out of that unfailing impulse of contrition – a sort of chivalry. Yet, walking down the path with her, he blurted out, ‘I’d like to go and have a look at those rocks down there.’

She gave the idea her attention. It was a wild-looking place, and there was no one there; but she said, ‘Of course, Jerry. When you’ve had enough, come to the big beach. Or just go straight back to the villa, if you like.’ She walked away, that bare arm, now slightly reddened from yesterday’s sun, swinging. And he almost ran after her again, feeling it unbearable that she should go by herself, but he did not.

She was thinking, Of course he’s old enough to be safe without me. Have I been keeping him too close? He mustn’t feel he ought to be with me. I must be careful.

He was an only child, eleven years old. She was a widow. She was determined to be neither possessive nor lacking in devotion. She went worrying off to her beach.

As for Jerry, once he saw that his mother had gained her beach, he began the steep descent to the bay. From where he was, high up among red-brown rocks, it was a scoop of moving bluish green fringed with white. As he went lower, he saw that it spread among small promontories and inlets of rough, sharp rock, and the crisping, lapping surface showed stains of purple and darker blue. Finally, as he ran sliding and scraping down the last few yards, he saw an edge of white surf and the shallow, luminous movement of water over white sand, and, beyond that, a solid heavy blue.

He ran straight into the water and began swimming. He was a good swimmer. He went out fast over the gleaming sand, over a middle region where rocks lay like discoloured monsters under the surface and then he was in the real sea – a warm sea where irregular cold currents from the deep water shocked his limbs.

When he was so far out that he could look back not only on the little bay but past the promontory that was between it and the big beach, he floated on the buoyant surface and looked for his mother. There she was, a speck of yellow under an umbrella that looked like a slice of orange peel. He swam back to shore, relieved at being sure she was there, but all at once very lonely.

On the edge of a small cape that marked the side of the bay away from the promontory was a loose scatter of rocks. Above them, some boys were stripping off their clothes. They came running, naked, down to the rocks. The English boy swam towards them, but kept his distance at a stone’s throw. They were of that coast; all of them were burned smooth dark brown and speaking a language he did not understand. To be with them, of them, was a craving that filled his whole body. He swam a little closer; they turned and watched him with narrowed, alert dark eyes. Then one smiled and waved. It was enough. In a minute, he had swum in and was on the rocks beside them, smiling with a desperate, nervous supplication. They shouted cheerful greetings at him; and then, as he preserved his nervous, uncomprehending smile, they understood that he was a foreigner strayed from his own beach, and they proceeded to forget him. But he was happy. He was with them.

They began diving again and again from a high point into a well of blue sea between rough, pointed rocks. After they had dived and come up, they swam around, hauled themselves up, and waited their turn to dive again. They were big boys – men, to Jerry. He dived, and they watched him; and when he swam around to take his place, they made way for him. He felt he was accepted and he dived again, carefully, proud of himself.

Soon the biggest of the boys poised himself, shot down into the water, and did not come up. The others stood about, watching. Jerry, after waiting for the sleek brown head to appear, let out a yell of warning; they looked at him idly and turned their eyes back towards the water. After a long time, the boy came up on the other side of a big dark rock, letting the air out of his lungs in a sputtering gasp and a shout of triumph. Immediately the rest of them dived in. One moment, the morning seemed full of chattering boys; the next, the air and the surface of the water were empty. But through the heavy blue, dark shapes could be seen moving and groping.

Jerry dived, shot past the school of underwater swimmers, saw a black wall of rock looming at him, touched it, and bobbed up at once to the surface, where the wall was a low barrier he could see across. There was no one visible; under him, in the water, the dim shapes of the swimmers had disappeared. Then one, and then another of the boys came up on the far side of the barrier of rock, and he understood that they had swum through some gap or hole in it. He plunged down again. He could see nothing through the stinging salt water but the blank rock. When he came up the boys were all on the diving rock, preparing to attempt the feat again. And now, in a panic of failure, he yelled up, in English, ‘Look at me! Look!’ and he began splashing and kicking in the water like a foolish dog.

They looked down gravely, frowning. He knew the frown. At moments of failure, when he clowned to claim his mother’s attention, it was with just this grave, embarrassed inspection that she rewarded him. Through his hot shame, feeling the pleading grin on his face like a scar that he could never remove, he looked up at the group of big brown boys on the rock and shouted, ‘Bonjour! Merci! Au revoir! Monsieur, monsieur!’ while he hooked his fingers round his ears and waggled them.

Water surged into his mouth; he choked, sank, came up. The rock, lately weighted with boys, seemed to rear up out of the water as their weight was removed. They were flying down past him now, into the water; the air was full of falling bodies. Then the rock was empty in the hot sunlight. He counted one, two, three …

At fifty, he was terrified. They must all be drowning beneath him, in the watery caves of the rock. At a hundred, he stared around him at the empty hillside, wondering if he should yell for help. He counted faster, faster, to hurry them up, to bring them to the surface quickly, to drown them quickly – anything rather than the terror of counting on and on into the blue emptiness of the morning. And then, at a hundred and sixty, the water beyond the rock was full of boys blowing like brown whales. They swam back to the shore without a look at him.

He climbed back to the diving rock and sat down, feeling the hot roughness of it under his thighs. The boys were gathering up their bits of clothing and running off along the shore to another promontory. They were leaving to get away from him. He cried openly, fists in his eyes. There was no one to see him, and he cried himself out.

It seemed to him that a long time had passed, and he swam out to where he could see his mother. Yes, she was still there, a yellow spot under an orange umbrella. He swam back to the big rock, climbed up, and dived into the blue pool among the fanged and angry boulders. Down he went, until he touched the wall of rock again. But the salt was so painful in his eyes that he could not see.

He came to the surface, swam to shore and went back to the villa to wait for his mother. Soon she walked slowly up the path, swinging her striped bag, the flushed, naked arm dangling beside her. ‘I want some swimming goggles,’ he panted, defiant and beseeching.

She gave him a patient, inquisitive look as she said casually, ‘Well, of course, darling.’

But now, now, now! He must have them this minute, and no other time. He nagged and pestered until she went with him to a shop. As soon as she had bought the goggles, he grabbed them from her hand as if she were going to claim them for herself, and was off, running down the steep path to the bay.

Jerry swam out to the big barrier rock, adjusted the goggles, and dived. The impact of the water broke the rubber-enclosed vacuum, and the goggles came loose. He understood that he must swim down to the base of the rock from the surface of the water. He fixed the goggles tight and firm, filled his lungs, and floated, face down, on the water. Now, he could see. It was as if he had eyes of a different kind – fish eyes that showed everything clear and delicate and wavering in the bright water.

Under him, six or seven feet down, was a floor of perfectly clean, shining white sand, rippled firm and hard by the tides. Two greyish shapes steered there, like long, rounded pieces of wood or slate. They were fish. He saw them nose towards each other, poise motionless, make a dart forward, swerve off, and come around again. It was like a water dance. A few inches above them the water sparkled as if sequins were dropping through it. Fish again – myriads of minute fish, the length of his fingernail, were drifting through the water, and in moment he could feel the innumerable tiny touches of them against his limbs. It was like swimming in flaked silver. The great rock the big boys had swum through rose sheer out of the white sand – black, tufted lightly with greenish weed. He could see no gap in it. He swam down to its base.

Again and again he rose, took a big chestful of air, and went down again. Again and again he groped over the surface of the rock, feeling it, almost hugging it in the desperate need to find the entrance. And then, once, while he was clinging to the black wall, his knees came up and he shot his feet out forward and they met no obstacle. He had found the hole.

He gained the surface, clambered about the stones that littered the barrier rock until he found a big one, and, with this in his arms, let himself down over the side of the rock. He dropped, with the weight, straight to the sandy floor. Clinging tight to the anchor of stone, he lay on his side and looked in under the dark shelf at the place where his feet had gone. He could see the hole. It was an irregular, dark gap but he could not see deep into it. He let go of his anchor, clung with his hands to the edges of the hole, and tried to push himself in.

He got his head in, found his shoulders jammed, moved them in sideways, and was inside as far as his waist. He could see nothing ahead. Something soft and clammy touched his mouth; he saw a dark frond moving against the greyish rock, and panic filled him. He thought of octupuses, of clinging weed. He pushed himself out backwards and caught a glimpse, as he retreated, of a harmless tentacle of seaweed drifting in the mouth of the tunnel. But it was enough. He reached the sunlight, swam to shore, and lay on the diving rock. He looked down into the blue well of water. He knew he must find his way through that cave, or hole, or tunnel, and out the other side.

First, he thought, he must learn to control his breathing. He let himself down into the water with another big stone in his arms, so that he could lie effortlessly on the bottom of the sea. He counted. One, two, three. He counted steadily. He could hear the movement of blood in his chest. Fifty-one, fifty-two … His chest was hurting. He let go of the rock and went up into the air. He saw the sun was low. He rushed to the villa and found his mother at her supper. She said only, ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’

All night the boy dreamed of the water-filled cave in the rock, and as soon as breakfast was over he went to the bay.

That night, his nose bled badly. For hours he had been underwater, learning to hold his breath, and now he felt weak and dizzy. His mother said, ‘I shouldn’t overdo things, darling, if I were you.’

That day and the next, Jerry exercised his lungs as if everything, the whole of his life, all that he would become, depended upon it. Again his nose bled at night, and his mother insisted on his coming with her the next day. It was a torment to him to waste a day of his careful self-training, but he stayed with her on that other beach, which now seemed a place for small children, a place where his mother might lie safe in the sun. It was not his beach.

He did not ask for permission, on the following day, to go to his beach. He went, before his mother could consider the complicated rights and wrongs of the matter. A day’s rest, he discovered, had improved his count by ten. The big boys had made the passage while he counted a hundred and sixty. He had been counting fast, in his fright. Probably now, if he tried, he could get through that long tunnel, but he was not going to try yet. A curious, most unchildlike persistence, a controlled impatience, made him wait. In the meantime, he lay under water on the white sand, littered now by stones he had brought down from the upper air, and studied the entrance to the tunnel. He knew every jut and corner of it, as far as it was possible to see. It was as if he already felt its sharpness about his shoulders.

He sat by the clock in the villa, when his mother was not near, and checked his time. He was incredulous and then proud to find he could hold his breath without strain for two minutes. The words, ‘two minutes’, authorized by the clock, brought close the adventure that was so necessary to him.

In another four days, his mother said casually one morning, they must go home. On the day before they left, he would do it. He would do it if it killed him, he said defiantly to himself. But two days before they were to leave – a day of triumph when he increased his count by fifteen – his nose bled so badly that he turned dizzy and had to lie limply over the big rock like a bit of seaweed, watching the thick red blood flow on to the rock and trickle slowly down to the sea. He was frightened. Supposing he turned dizzy in the tunnel? Supposing he died there, trapped? Supposing – his head went around, in the hot sun, and he almost gave up. He thought he would return to the house and lie down, and next summer, perhaps, when he had another year’s growth in him – then he would go through the hole.

But even after he had made the decision, or thought he had, he found himself sitting up on the rock and looking down into the water; and he knew that now, this moment, when his nose had only just stopped bleeding, when his head was still sore and throbbing – this was the moment when he would try. If he did not do it now, he never would. He was trembling with fear that he would not go; and he was trembling with horror at that long, long tunnel under the rock, under the sea. Even in the open sunlight, the barrier rock seemed very wide and very heavy; tons of rock pressed down on where he would go. If he died there, he would lie until one day – perhaps not before next year – those big boys would swim into it and find it blocked.

He put on his goggles, fitted them tight, tested the vacuum. His hands were shaking. Then he chose the biggest stone he could carry and slipped over the edge of the rock until half of him was in the cool, enclosing water and half in the hot sun. He looked up once at the empty sky, filled his lungs once, twice, and then sank fast to the bottom with the stone. He let it go and began to count. He took the edges of the hole in his hands and drew himself into it, wriggling his shoulders in sideways as he remembered he must, kicking himself along with his feet.

Soon he was clear inside. He was in a small rock-bound hole filled with yellowish-grey water. The water was pushing him up against the roof. The roof was sharp and pained his back. He pulled himself along with his hands – fast, fast – and used his legs as levers. His head knocked against something; a sharp pain dizzied him. Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two … He was without light, and the water seemed to press upon him with the weight of rock. Seventy-one, seventy-two … There was no strain on his lungs. He felt like an inflated balloon, his lungs were so light and easy, but his head was pulsing.

He was being continually pressed against the sharp roof, which felt slimy as well as sharp. Again he thought of octupuses, and wondered if the tunnel might be filled with weed that could tangle him. He gave himself a panicky, convulsive kick forward, ducked his head, and swam. His feet and hands moved freely, as if in open water. The hole must have widened out. He thought he must be swimming fast, and he was frightened of banging his head if the tunnel narrowed.

A hundred, a hundred and one … The water paled. Victory filled him. His lungs were beginning to hurt. A few more strokes and he would be out. He was counting wildly; he said a hundred and fifteen, and then, a long time later, a hundred and fifteen again. The water was a clear jewel-green all around him. Then he saw, above his head, a crack running up through the rock. Sunlight was falling through it, showing the clean, dark rock of the tunnel, a single mussel shell, and darkness ahead.

He was at the end of what he could do. He looked up at the crack as if it were filled with air and not water, as if he could put his mouth to it and draw air. A hundred and fifteen, he heard himself say inside his head – but he had said that long ago. He must go on into the blackness ahead, or he would drown. His head was swelling, his lungs cracking. A hundred and fifteen, a hundred and fifteen pounded through his head, and he feebly clutched at rocks in the dark, pulling himself forward, leaving the brief space of sunlit water behind. He felt he was dying. He was no longer quite conscious. He struggled on in the darkness between lapses into unconsciousness. An immense, swelling pain filled his head, and then the darkness cracked with an explosion of green light. His hands, groping forward, met nothing; and his feet, kicking back, propelled him out into the open sea.

He drifted to the surface, his face turned up to the air. He was gasping like a fish. He felt he would sink now and drown; he could not swim the few feet back to the rock. Then he was clutching it and pulling himself up on to it. He lay face down, gasping. He could see nothing but a red-veined, clotted dark. His eyes must have burst, he thought; they were full of blood. He tore off his goggles and a gout of blood went into the sea. His nose was bleeding, and the blood had filled the goggles.

He scooped up handfuls of water from the cool, salty sea, to splash on his face, and did not know whether it was blood or salt water he tasted. After a time, his heart quietened, his eyes cleared, and he sat up. He could see the local boys diving and playing half a mile away. He did not want them. He wanted nothing but to get back home and lie down.

In a short while, Jerry swam to the shore and climbed slowly up the path to the villa. He flung himself on his bed and slept, waking at the sound of feet on the path outside. His mother was coming back. He rushed to the bathroom, thinking she must not see his face with bloodstains, or tearstains, on it. He came out of the bathroom and met her as she walked into the villa, smiling, her eyes lighting up.

‘Have a nice morning?’ she asked, laying her hand on his warm brown shoulder a moment.

‘Oh yes, thank you,’ he said.

‘You look a bit pale.’ And then, sharp and anxious, ‘How did you bang your head?’

‘Oh, just banged it,’ he told her.

She looked at him closely. He was strained; his eyes were glazed-looking. She was worried. And then she said to herself, Oh, don’t fuss! Nothing can happen. He can swim like a fish.

They sat down to lunch together.

‘Mummy,’ he said, ‘I can stay under water for two minutes – three minutes, at least.’ It came bursting out of him.

‘Can you, darling?’ she said. ‘Well, I shouldn’t overdo it. I don’t think you ought to swim any more today.’

She was ready for a battle of wills, but he gave in at once. It was no longer of the least importance to go to the bay.

Pleasure

There were two great feasts, or turning points, in Mary Rogers’s year. She began preparing for the second as soon as the Christmas decorations were down. This year, she was leafing through a fashion magazine when her husband said, ‘Dreaming of the sun, old girl?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, rather injured. ‘After all, it’s been four years.’

‘I really don’t see how we can afford it.’

On her face he saw a look that he recognized.

Her friend Mrs Baxter, the manager’s wife, also saw the magazine, and said, ‘You’ll be off to the south of France again, this year, I suppose, now that your daughter won’t be needing you.’ She added those words which in themselves were justification for everything: ‘We’ll stay faithful to Brighton, I expect.’

And Mary Rogers said, as she always did: ‘I can’t imagine why anyone takes a holiday in Britain when the same money’d take them to the Continent.’

For four years she had gone with her daughter and the grandchildren to Cornwall. It sounded a sacrifice on the altar of the family, the way she put it to her friends. But this year the daughter was going to the other grandmother in Scotland, and everyone knew it. Everyone. That is, Mrs Baxter, Mrs Justin-Smith, and Mrs Jones.

Mary Rogers bought gay cottons and spread them over the living room. Outside, a particularly grim February held the little Midlands town in a steady shiver. Rain swept the windowpanes. Tommy Rogers saw the cottons and said not a word. But a week later she was fitting a white linen sunsuit before the mirror when he said, ‘I say, old girl, that shows quite a bit of leg, you know …’

At that moment it was acknowledged that they should go. Also, that the four years had made a difference in various ways. Mary Rogers secretly examined her thighs and shoulders before the glass, and thought they might very well be exposed. But the clothes she made were of the sensible but smart variety. She sewed at them steadily through the evenings of March, April, May, June. She was a good needlewoman. Also, for a few happy months before she married, she had studied fashion designing in London. That had been a different world. In speaking of it now, to the women of her circle – Mrs Baxter, Mrs Justin-Smith, and Mrs Jones – her voice conveyed the degree of difference. And Mrs Baxter would say, kindly as always, ‘Ah well, we none of us know what’s in store for us when we’re young.’

They were about to leave towards the end of July. A week before, Tommy Rogers produced a piece of paper on which were set out certain figures. They were much lower figures than ever before. ‘Oh, we’ll manage,’ said Mary vaguely. Her mind was already moving among scenes of blue sea, blue sky.

‘Perhaps we’d better book at the Plaza.’

‘Oh, surely no need. They know us there.’

The evening before they left there was a bridge party in the Baxters’ house for the jaunting couple. Tommy Rogers was seen to give his wife an uneasy glance as she said, ‘With air travel as cheap as it is now, I really can’t understand why …’

For they had booked by train, of course, as usual.

They successfully negotiated the Channel, a night in a Paris hotel, and the catching of the correct train.

In a few hours they would see the little village on the sea where they had first come twenty-five years ago on their honeymoon. They had chosen it because Mary Hill had met, in those artistic circles which she had enjoyed for, alas, so short a time, a certain well-known stage decorator who had a villa there. During that month of honeymoon, they had spent a happy afternoon at the villa.

As the train approached, she was looking to see the villa, alone on its hill above the sea. But the hill was now thick with little white villas, green-shuttered, red-roofed in the warm southern green.

‘The place seems to have grown quite a bit,’ said Tommy. The station had grown, too. There was a long platform now, and a proper station building. And gazing down towards the sea, they saw a cluster of shops and casinos and cafés. Even four years before, there had been only a single shop, a restaurant, and a couple of hotels.

‘Well,’ said Mary bitterly, ‘if the place is full of tourists now, it won’t be the same at all.’

But the sun was shining, the sea tossed and sparkled, and the palm trees stood along the white beach. They carried their suitcases down the slope of the road to the Plaza, feeling at home.

Outside the Plaza, they looked at each other. What had been a modest building was now an imposing one, surrounded by gay awnings and striped umbrellas. ‘Old Jacques is spreading himself,’ said Tommy, and they walked up the neat gravel path to the foyer, looking for Jacques who had welcomed them so often.

At the office, Mary inquired in her stiff, correct French for Monsieur Jacques. The clerk smiled and regretted that Monsieur Jacques had left them three years before. ‘He knew us well,’ said Mary, her voice coming aggrieved and shrill. ‘He always had room for us here.’

But certainly there was a room for Madame. Most certainly. At once attendants came hurrying for the suitcases.

‘Hold your horses a minute,’ said Tommy. ‘Wait. Ask what it costs now.’

Mary inquired, casually enough, what the rates now were. She received the information with a lengthening of her heavy jaw, and rapidly transmitted it to Tommy. He glanced, embarrassed, at the clerk, who, recognizing a situation, turned tactfully to a ledger and prepared to occupy himself so that the elderly English couple could confer.

They did, in rapid, angry undertones.

‘We can’t, Mary. It’s no good. We’d have to go back at the end of a week.’

‘But we’ve always stayed here …’

At last she turned towards the clerk, who was immediately attentive, and said with a stiff smile: ‘I’m afraid the currency regulations make things difficult for us.’ She had spoken in English, such was her upset; and it was in English that he replied pleasantly, ‘I understand perfectly, Madame. Perhaps you would care to try the Belle Vue across the street. There are many English people there.’

The Rogerses left, carrying their two suitcases ignominiously down the neat gravelled path, among the gay tables where people already sat at dinner. The sun had gone down. Opposite, the Belle Vue was a glow of lights. Tommy Rogers was not surprised when Mary walked past it without a look. For years, staying at the Plaza, they had felt superior to the Belle Vue. Also, had that clerk not said it was full of English people?

Since this was France, and the season, the Agency was of course open. An attractive mademoiselle deplored that they had not booked rooms earlier.

‘We’ve been here every year for twenty-five years,’ said Mary, pardonably overlooking the last four, and another stretch of five when the child had been small. ‘We’ve never had to book before.’

Alas, alas, suggested the mademoiselle with her shoulders and her pretty eyes, what a pity that St Nichole had become so popular, so attractive. There was no fact she regretted more. She suggested the Belle Vue.

The Rogerses walked the hundred yards back to the Belle Vue, feeling they were making a final concession to fate, only to find it fully booked up. Returning to the Agency, they were informed that there was, happily, one room vacant in a villa on the hillside. They were escorted to it. And now it was the turn of the pretty mademoiselle to occupy herself, not with a ledger but in examining the view of brilliant stars and the riding lights of ships across the bay, while the Rogerses conferred. Their voices were now not only angry, but high with exasperation. For this room – an extremely small one, at the bottom of a big villa, stone-floored, uncarpeted; with a single large bed of the sort Mary always thought of as French; a wardrobe that was no wardrobe, since it had been filled with shelves; a sink and a small gas stove – they were asked to pay a sum which filled them with disbelief. If they desired hot water, as the English so often do, they would have to heat it in a saucepan on the stove.

But, as the mademoiselle pointed out, turning from her appreciative examination of the exotic night scene, it would be such an advantage to do one’s own cooking.

‘I suggest we go back to the Plaza. Better one week of comfort than three of this,’ said Mary. They returned to the Plaza to find that the room had been taken, and none were available.

It was now nearly ten in the evening, and the infinitely obliging mademoiselle returned them to the little room in the villa, for which they agreed to pay more than they had done four years before for comfort, good food, and hot water in the Plaza. Also, they had to pay a deposit of over ten pounds in case they might escape in the night with the bed, wardrobe, or the tin spoons, or in case they refused to pay the bills for electricity, gas, and water.

The Rogerses went to bed immediately, worn out with travelling and disappointment.

In the morning Mary announced that she had no intention of cooking on a holiday, and they took petit-déjeuner at a café, paid the equivalent of twelve shillings for two small cups of coffee and two rolls, and changed their minds. They would have to cook in the room.

Preserving their good humour with an effort, they bought cold food for lunch, left it in the room, and prepared themselves for enjoyment. For the sea was blue, blue and sparkling. And the sunshine was hot and golden. And after all, this was the south of France, the prettiest place in Europe, as they had always agreed. And in England now, said the Daily Telegraph, it was pouring rain.

On the beach they had another bad moment. Umbrellas stretched six deep, edge to edge, for half a mile along the silvery beach. Bodies lay stretched out, baking in the sun, hundreds to the acre, a perfect bed of heated brown flesh.

‘They’ve ruined the place, ruined it,’ cried Mary, as she surveyed the untidy scene. But she stepped heavily down into the sand and unbuttoned her dress. She was revealed to be wearing a heavy black bathing suit; and she did not miss the relieved glance her husband gave her. She felt it to be unfair. There he stood, a tall, very thin, fair man, quite presentable in an absurd bathing slip that consisted of six inches of material held on by a string round his hips. And there she was, a heavy firm woman, with clear white flesh – but middle-aged, and in a black bathing suit.

She looked about. Two feet away was a mess of tangled brown limbs belonging to half a dozen boys and girls, the girls wearing nothing but coloured cotton brassiéres and panties. She saw Tommy looking at them, too. Then she noticed, eighteen inches to the other side, a vast, grey-haired lady, bulging weary pallid flesh out of a white cotton playsuit. Mary gave her a look of happy superiority and lay down flat on the sand, congratulating herself.

All the morning the English couple lay there, turning over and over on the sand like a pair of grilling herrings, for they felt their skins to be a shame and a disgrace. When they returned to their room for lunch, it was to find that swarms of small black ants had infested their cold meats. They were unable to mind very much, as it became evident they had overdone the sunbathing. Both were bright scarlet, and their eyes ached. They lay down in the cool of the darkened room, feeling foolish to be such amateurs – they, who should have known better! They kept to their beds that afternoon, and the next day … several days passed. Sometimes, when hunger overcame them, Mary winced down to the village to buy cold food – impossible to keep supplies in the room because of the ants. After eating, she hastily washed up in the sink where they also washed. Twice a day, Tommy went reluctantly outside, while she washed herself inch by inch in water heated in the saucepan. Then she went outside while he did the same. After these indispensable measures of hygiene, they retired to the much-too-narrow bed, shrinking away from any chance of contact with each other.

At last the discomfort of the room, as much as their healing flesh, drove them forth again, more cautiously clothed, to the beach. Skin was ripping off them both in long shreds. At the end of a week, however, they had become brown and shining, able to take their places without shame among the other brown and glistening bodies that littered the beach like so many stranded fish.

Day after day the Rogerses descended the steep path to the beach, after having eaten a hearty English breakfast of ham and eggs, and stayed there all morning. All morning they lay, and then all afternoon, but at a good distance from a colony of English, which kept itself to itself some hundreds of yards away.

They watched the children screaming and laughing in the unvarying blue waves. They watched the groups of French adolescents flirt and roll each other over on the sand in a way that Mary, at least, thought appallingly free. Thank heavens her daughter had married young and was safely out of harm’s way! Nothing could have persuaded Mary Rogers of the extreme respectability of these youngsters. She suspected them all of shocking and complicated vices. Incredible that, in so few years, they would be sorted by some powerful and comforting social process into these decent, well-fed French couples, each so anxiously absorbed in the welfare of one, or perhaps two small children.

They watched also, with admiration, the more hardened swimmers cleave out through the small waves into the sea beyond the breakwater with their masks, their airtubes, their frog’s feet.

They were content.

This is what they had come for. This is what all these hundreds of thousands of people along the coast had come for – to lie on the sand and receive the sun on their heating bodies; to receive, too, in small doses, the hot blue water which dried so stickily on them. The sea was very salty and warm-smelling – smelling of a little more than salt and weed, for beyond the breakwater the town’s sewers spilled into the sea, washing back into the inner bay rich deposits which dried on the perfumed oiled bodies of the happy bathers.

This is what they had come for.

Yet, there was no doubt that in the Plaza things had been quite different. There, one rose late; lingered over coffee and rolls; descended, or did not descend, to the beach for a couple of hours’ sun worship; returned to a lengthy lunch; slept, bathed again, enjoyed an even more lengthy dinner. That, too, was called a seaside vacation. Now, the beach was really the only place to go. From nine until one, from two until seven, the Rogerses were on it. It was a seaside holiday with a vengeance.

About the tenth day, they realized that half of their time had gone; and Tommy showed his restlessness, his feeling that there should be more to it than this, by diving into one of the new and so terribly expensive shops and emerging with a mask, frog’s feet, and airtube. With an apology to Mary for leaving her, he plunged out into the bay, looking like – or so she rather tartly remarked – a spaceman in a children’s comic. He did not return for some hours.

‘This is better than anything, old girl, you should try it,’ he said, wading out of the sea with an absorbed excited look. That afternoon she spent on the beach alone, straining her eyes to make out which of the bobbing periscopes in the water was his.

Thus engaged, she heard herself addressed in English: ‘I always say I am an undersea widow, too.’ She turned to see a slight girl, clearly English, with pretty fair curls, a neat blue bathing suit, pretty blue eyes, good legs stretched out in the warm sand. An English girl. But her voice was, so Mary decided, passable, in spite of a rather irritating giggle. She relented and, though it was her principle that one did not go to France to consort with the English, said: ‘Is your husband out there?’

‘Oh, I never see him between meals,’ said the girl cheerfully and lay back on the sand.

Mary thought that this girl was very similar to herself at that age – only, of course, she had known how to make the best of herself. They talked, in voices drugged by sea and sun, until first Tommy Rogers, and then the girl’s husband, rose out of the sea. The young man was carrying a large fish speared through the back by a sort of trident. The excitement of this led the four of them to share a square yard of sand for a few minutes, making cautious overtures.

The next day, Tommy Rogers insisted that his wife should don mask and flippers and try the new sport. She was taken out into the bay, like a ship under escort, by the two men and young Betty Clarke. Mary Rogers did not like the suffocating feeling of the mask pressing against her nose. The speed the frog feet lent her made her nervous, for she was not a strong swimmer. But she was not going to appear a coward with that young girl sporting along so easily just in front.

Out in the bay a small island, a mere cluster of warm, red-brown rock, rose from a surf of frisking white. Around the island, a couple of feet below the surface, submerged rocks lay; and all over them floated the new race of frog-people, face down, tridents poised, observing the fish that darted there. As Mary looked back through her goggles to the shore, it seemed very far, and rather commonplace, with the striped umbrellas, the lolling browned bodies, the paddling children. That was the other sea. This was something different indeed. Here were the adventurers and explorers of the sea, who disdained the safe beaches.

Mary lay loose on the surface of the water and looked down. Enormous, this undersea world, with great valleys and boulders, all wavering green in the sun-dappled water. On a dazzling patch of white sand – twenty feet down, it seemed – sprouted green grass as fresh and bright as if it grew on the shore in sunlight. By reaching down her hand she could almost touch it. Farther away, long fronds of weed rocked and swayed, a forest of them. Mary floated over them, feeling with repugnance how they reached up to her knees and shoulders with their soft, dragging touch. Underneath her, now, a floor of rock, covered with thick growth. Pale grey-green shapes, swelling like balloons, or waving like streamers; delicate whitey-brown flowers and stars, bubbled silver with air; soft swelling udders or bladders of fine white film, all rocking and drifting in the slow undersea movement. Mary was fascinated – a new world, this was. But also repelled. In her ears there was nothing but a splash and crash of surf, and, through it, voices that sounded a long way off. The rocks were now very close below. Suddenly, immediately below her, a thin brown arm reached down, groped in a dark gulf of rock, and pulled out a writhing tangle of grey-dappled flesh. Mary floundered up, slipping painfully on the rocks. She had drifted unknowingly close to the islet; and on the rocks above her stood a group of half-naked bronzed boys, yelling and screaming with excitement as they killed the octopus they had caught by smashing it repeatedly against a great boulder. They would eat it – so Mary heard – for supper. No, it was too much. She was in a panic. The loathsome thing must have been six inches below her – she might have touched it! She climbed on to a rock and looked for Tommy, who was lying on a rock fifty feet off, pointing down at something under it, while Francis Clarke dived for it, and then again. She saw him emerge with a small striped fish, while Tommy and Betty Clarke yelled their excitement.

But she looked at the octopus, which was now lying draped over a rock like a limp, fringed, grey rag; she called her husband, handed over the goggles, the flippers and the tube, and swam slowly back to shore.

There she stayed. Nothing would tempt her out again.

That day Tommy bought an underwater fish gun. Mary found herself thinking, first, that it was all very well to spend over five pounds on this bizarre equipment; and then, that they weren’t going to have much fun at Christmas if they went on like this.

A couple of days passed. Mary was alone all day. Betty Clarke, apparently, was only a beach widow when it suited her, for she much preferred the red-rock island to staying with Mary. Nevertheless, she did sometimes spend half an hour making conversation, and then, with a flurry of apology, darted off through the blue waves to rejoin the men.

Quite soon, Mary was able to say casually to Tommy, ‘Only three days to go.’

‘If only I’d tried this equipment earlier,’ he said. ‘Next year I’ll know better.’

But for some reason the thought of next year did not enchant Mary. ‘I don’t think we ought to come here again,’ she said. ‘It’s quite spoiled now it’s so fashionable.’

‘Oh, well – anywhere, provided there’s rocks and fish.’

On that next day, the two men and Betty Clarke were on the rock island from seven in the morning until lunchtime, to which meal they grudgingly allowed ten minutes, because it was dangerous to swim on a full stomach. Then they departed again until the darkness fell across the sea. All this time Mary Rogers lay on her towel on the beach, turning over and over in the sun. She was now a warm red-gold all over. She imagined how Mrs Baxter would say: ‘You’ve got yourself a fine tan!’ And then, inevitably, ‘You won’t keep it long here, will you?’ Mary found herself unaccountably close to tears. What did Tommy see in these people? she asked herself. As for that young man, Francis – she had never heard him make any remark that was not connected with the weights, the varieties, or the vagaries of fish!

That night, Tommy said he had asked the young couple to dinner at the Plaza.

‘A bit rash, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, well, let’s have a proper meal, for once. Only another two days.’

Mary let that ‘proper meal’ pass. But she said, ‘I shouldn’t have thought they were the sort of people to make friends of.’

A cloud of irritation dulled his face. ‘What’s the matter with them?’

‘In England, I don’t think …’

‘Oh, come off it, Mary!’

In the big garden of the Plaza, where four years ago they had eaten three times a day by right, they found themselves around a small table just over the sea. There was an orchestra and more waiters than guests, or so it seemed. Betty Clarke, seen for the first time out of a bathing suit, was revealed to be a remarkably pretty girl. Her thin brown shoulders emerged from a full white frock, which Mary Rogers conceded to be not bad at all and her wide blue eyes were bright in her brown face. Again Mary thought: If I were twenty – well, twenty-five years younger, they’d take us for sisters.

As for Tommy, he looked as young as the young couple – it simply wasn’t fair, thought Mary. She sat and listened while they talked of judging distances underwater and the advantages of various types of equipment.

They tried to draw her in but there she sat, silent and dignified. Francis Clarke, she had decided, looked stiff and commonplace in his suit, not at all the handsome young sea god of the beaches. As for the girl, her giggle was irritating Mary.

They began to feel uncomfortable. Betty mentioned London, and the three conscientiously talked about London, while Mary said yes and no.

The young couple lived in Clapham, apparently; and they went into town for a show once a month.

‘There’s ever such a nice show running now,’ said Betty. ‘The one at the Princess.’

‘We never get to a show these days,’ said Tommy. ‘It’s five hours by train. Anyway, it’s not in my line.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Mary.

‘Oh, I know you work in a matinée when you can.’

At the irritation in the look she gave him, the Clarkes involuntarily exchanged a glance; and Betty said tactfully, ‘I like going to the theatre; it gives you something to talk about.’

Mary remained silent.

‘My wife,’ said Tommy, ‘knows a lot about the theatre. She used to be in a theatre set – all that sort of thing.’

‘Oh, how interesting!’ said Betty eagerly.

Mary struggled with temptation, then fell. ‘The man who did the décor for the show at the Princess used to have a villa here. We visited him quite a bit.’

Tommy gave his wife an alarmed and warning look, and said, ‘I wish to God they wouldn’t use so much garlic.’

‘It’s not much use coming to France,’ said Mary, ‘if you’re going to be insular about food.’

‘You never cook French at home,’ said Tommy suddenly. ‘Why not, if you like it so much?’

‘How can I? If I do, you say you don’t like your food messed up.’

‘I don’t like garlic either,’ said Betty, with the air of one confessing a crime. ‘I must say I’m pleased to be back home where you can get a bit of good plain food.’

Tommy now looked in anxious appeal at his wife, but she inquired, ‘Why don’t you go to Brighton or somewhere like that?’

‘Give me Brighton any time,’ said Francis Clarke. ‘Or Cornwall. You can get damned good fishing off Cornwall. But Betty drags me here. France is overrated, that’s what I say.’

‘It would really seem to be better if you stayed at home.’

But he was not going to be snubbed by Mary Rogers. ‘As for the French,’ he said aggressively, ‘they think of nothing but their stomachs. If they’re not eating, they’re talking about it. If they spent half the time they spend on eating on something worthwhile, they could make something of themselves, that’s what I say.’

‘Such as – catching fish?’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that? Or … for instance …’ Here he gave the matter his earnest consideration. ‘Well, there’s that government of theirs for instance. They could do something about that.’

Betty, who was by now flushed under her tan, rolled her eyes, and let out a high, confused laugh. ‘Oh well, you’ve got to consider what people say. France is so much the rage.’

A silence. It was to be hoped the awkward moment was over. But no; for Francis Clarke seemed to think matters needed clarifying. He said, with a sort of rallying gallantry towards his wife, ‘She’s got a bee in her bonnet about getting on.’

‘Well,’ cried Betty, ‘it makes a good impression, you must admit that. And when Mr Beaker – Mr Beaker is his boss,’ she explained to Mary, ‘when you said to Mr Beaker at the whist drive you were going to the south of France, he was impressed, you can say what you like.’

Tommy offered his wife an entirely disloyal, sarcastic grin.

‘A woman should think of her husband’s career,’ said Betty. ‘It’s true, isn’t? And I know I’ve helped Francie a lot. I’m sure he wouldn’t have got that raise if it weren’t for making a good impression. Besides you meet such nice people. Last year, we made friends well, acquaintance, if you like – with some people who live at Ealing. We wouldn’t have, otherwise. He’s in the films.’

‘He’s a cameraman,’ said Francis, being accurate.

‘Well, that’s films, isn’t it? And they asked us to a party. And who do you think was there?’

‘Mr Beaker?’ inquired Mary finely.

‘How did you guess? Well, they could see, couldn’t they? And I wouldn’t be surprised if Francis couldn’t be buyer, now they know he’s used to foreigners. He should learn French, I tell him.’

‘Can’t speak a word,’ said Francis. ‘Can’t stand it anyway – gabble, gabble, gabble.’

‘Oh, but Mrs Rogers speaks it so beautifully,’ cried Betty.

‘She’s cracked,’ said Francis, good-humouredly, nodding to indicate his wife. ‘She spends half the year making clothes for three weeks’ holiday at the sea. Then the other half making Christmas presents out of bits and pieces. That’s all she ever does.’

‘Oh, but it’s so nice to give people presents with that individual touch,’ said Betty.

‘If you want to waste your time I’m not stopping you,’ said Francis. ‘I’m not stopping you. It’s your funeral.’

‘They’re not grateful for what we do for them,’ said Betty, wrestling with tears, trying to claim the older woman as an ally. ‘If I didn’t work hard, we couldn’t afford the friends we got …’

But Mary Rogers had risen from her place. ‘I think I’m ready for bed,’ she said. ‘Good night, Mrs Clarke. Good night, Mr Clarke.’ Without looking at her husband, she walked away.

Tommy Rogers hastily got up, paid the bill, bade the young couple an embarrassed good night, and hurried after his wife. He caught her up at the turning of the steep road up to the villa. The stars were brilliant overhead; the palms waved seductively in the soft breeze. ‘I say,’ he said angrily, ‘that wasn’t very nice of you.’

‘I haven’t any patience with that sort of thing,’ said Mary. Her voice was high and full of tears. He looked at her in astonishment and held his peace.

But next day he went off fishing. For Mary, the holiday was over. She was packing and did not go to the beach.

That evening he said, ‘They’ve asked us back for dinner.’

‘You go. I’m tired.’

‘I shall go,’ he said defiantly, and went. He did not return until very late.

They had to catch the train early next morning. At the little station, they stood with their suitcases in a crowd of people who regretted the holiday was over. But Mary was regretting nothing. As soon as the train came, she got in and left Tommy shaking hands with crowds of English people whom, apparently, he had met the night before. At the last minute, the young Clarkes came running up in bathing suits to say goodbye. She nodded stiffly out of the train window and went on arranging the baggage. Then the train started and her husband came in.

The compartment was full and there was an excuse not to talk. The silence persisted, however. Soon Tommy was watching her anxiously and making remarks about the weather, which worsened steadily as they went north.

In Paris there were five hours to fill in.

They were walking beside the river, by the open-air market, when she stopped before a stall selling earthenware.

‘That big bowl,’ she exclaimed, her voice newly alive, ‘that big red one, there – it would be just right for the Christmas tree.’

‘So it would. Go ahead and buy it, old girl,’ he agreed at once, with infinite relief.

The Day Stalin Died

That day began badly for me with a letter from my aunt in Bournemouth. She reminded me that I had promised to take my cousin Jessie to be photographed at four that afternoon. So I had; and had forgotten all about it. Having arranged to meet Bill at four, I had to telephone him to put it off. Bill was a film writer from the United States who, having had some trouble with an un-American Activities Committee, was blacklisted, could no longer earn his living, and was trying to get a permit to live in Britain. He was looking for someone to be a secretary to him. His wife had always been his secretary but he was divorcing her after twenty years of marriage on the grounds that they had nothing in common. I planned to introduce him to Beatrice.

Beatrice was an old friend from South Africa whose passport had expired. Having been named as a communist, she knew that once she went back she would not get out again, and she wanted to stay another six months in Britain. But she had no money. She needed a job. I imagined that Bill and Beatrice might have a good deal in common but later it turned out that they disapproved of each other. Beatrice said that Bill was corrupt, because he wrote sexy comedies for TV under another name and acted in bad films. She did not think his justification, namely, that a guy has to eat, had anything in its favour. Bill, for his part, had never been able to stand political women. But I was not to know about the incompatibility of my two dear friends and I spent an hour following Bill through one switchboard after another, until at last I got him in some studio where he was rehearsing for a film about Lady Hamilton. He said it was quite all right, because he had forgotten about the appointment in any case. Beatrice did not have a telephone, so I sent her a telegram.

That left the afternoon free for Cousin Jessie. I was just settling down to work when comrade Jean rang up to say she wanted to see me during lunch hour. Jean was for many years my self-appointed guide or mentor towards a correct political viewpoint. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say she was one of several self-appointed guides. It was Jean who, the day after I had my first volume of short stories published, took the morning off work to come and see me, in order to explain that one of the stories, I forget which, gave an incorrect analysis of the class struggle. I remember thinking at the time that there was a good deal in what she said.

When she arrived that day at lunchtime, she had her sandwiches with her in a paper bag, but she accepted some coffee, and said she hoped I didn’t mind her disturbing me, but she had been very upset by something she had been told I had said.

It appeared that a week before, at a meeting, I had remarked that there seemed to be evidence for supposing that a certain amount of dirty work must be going on in the Soviet Union. I would be the first to admit that this remark savoured of flippancy.

Jean was a small brisk woman with glasses, the daughter of a Bishop, whose devotion to the working class was proved by thirty years of work in the Party. Her manner towards me was always patient and kindly. ‘Comrade,’ she said, ‘intellectuals like yourself are under greater pressure from the forces of capitalist corruption than any other type of Party cadre. It is not your fault. But you must be on your guard.’

I said I thought I had been on my guard; but nevertheless I could not help feeling that there were times when the capitalist press, no doubt inadvertently, spoke the truth.

Jean tidily finished the sandwich she had begun, adjusted her spectacles, and gave me a short lecture about the necessity for unremitting vigilance on the part of the working class. She then said she must go, because she had to be at her office at two. She said that the only way an intellectual with my background could hope to attain to a correct working-class viewpoint was to work harder in the Party; to mix continually with the working class; and in this way my writing would gradually become a real weapon in the class struggle. She said, further, that she would send me the verbatim record of the Trials in the thirties, and if I read this, I would find my present vacillating attitude towards Soviet justice much improved. I said I had read the verbatim records a long time ago; and I always did think they sounded unconvincing. She said that I wasn’t to worry; a really sound working-class attitude would develop with time.

With this she left me. I remember that, for one reason and another, I was rather depressed.

I was just settling down to work again when the telephone rang. It was Cousin Jessie, to say she could not come to my flat as arranged, because she was buying a dress to be photographed in. Could I meet her outside the dress shop in twenty minutes? I therefore abandoned work for the afternoon and took a taxi.

On the way the taxi man and I discussed the cost of living, the conduct of the government, and discovered we had everything in common. Then he began telling me about his only daughter, aged eighteen, who wanted to marry his best friend, aged forty-five. He did not hold with this; had said so; and thereby lost daughter and friend at one blow. What made it worse was that he had just read an article on psychology in the woman’s magazine his wife took, from which he had suddenly gathered that his daughter was father-fixated. ‘I felt real bad when I read that,’ he said. ‘It’s a terrible thing to come on suddenlike, a thing like that.’ He drew up smartly outside the dress shop and I got out.

‘I don’t see why you should take it to heart,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we weren’t all father-fixated.’

‘That’s not the way to talk,’ he said, holding out his hand for the fare. He was a small, bitter-looking man, with a head like a lemon or like a peanut, and his small blue eyes were brooding and bitter. ‘My old woman’s been saying to me for years that I favoured our Hazel too much. What gets me is, she might have been in the right of it.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘look at it this way. It’s better to love a child too much than too little.’

‘Love?’ he said. ‘Love, is it? Precious little love or anything else these days if you ask me, and Hazel left home three months ago with my mate George and not so much as a postcard to say where or how.’

‘Life’s pretty difficult for everyone,’ I said, ‘what with one thing and another.’

‘You can say that,’ he said.

This conversation might have gone on for some time, but I saw my cousin Jessie standing on the pavement watching us. I said goodbye to the taxi man and turned, with some apprehension, to face her.

‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘I saw you arguing with him. It’s the only thing to do. They’re getting so damned insolent these days. My principle is, tip them sixpence regardless of the distance, and if they argue, let them have it. Only yesterday I had one shouting at my back all down the street because I gave him sixpence. But we’ve got to stand up to them.’

My cousin Jessie is a tall girl, broad-shouldered, aged about twenty-five. But she looks eighteen. She has light brown hair which she wears falling loose around her face, which is round and young and sharp-chinned. Her wide, light blue eyes are virginal and fierce. She is altogether like the daughter of a Viking, particularly when battling with bus conductors, taxi men, and porters. She and my Aunt Emma carry on permanent guerrilla warfare with the lower orders; an entertainment I begrudge neither of them, because their lives are dreary in the extreme. Besides, I believe their antagonists enjoy it. I remember once, after a set-to between Cousin Jessie and a taxi driver, when she had marched smartly off, shoulders swinging, he chuckled appreciatively and said: ‘That’s a real old-fashioned type, that one. They don’t make them like that these days.’

‘Have you bought your dress?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got it on,’ she said.

Cousin Jessie always wears the same outfit: a well-cut suit, a round-necked jersey, and a string of pearls. She looks very nice in it.

‘Then we might as well go and get it over,’ I said.

‘Mummy is coming, too,’ she said. She looked at me aggressively.

‘Oh well,’ I said.

‘But I told her I would not have her with me while I was buying my things. I told her to come and pick me up here. I will not have her choosing my clothes for me.’

‘Quite right,’ I said.

My Aunt Emma was coming towards us from the tearoom at the corner, where she had been biding her time. She is a very large woman, and she wears navy blue and pearls and white gloves like a policeman on traffic duty. She has a big, heavy-jowled, sorrowful face; and her bulldog eyes are nearly always fixed in disappointment on her daughter.

‘There!’ she said as she saw Jessie’s suit. ‘You might just as well have had me with you.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Jessie quickly.

‘I went in to Renée’s this morning and told them you were coming, and I asked them to show you that suit. And you’ve bought it. You see, I do know your tastes as I know my own.’

Jessie lifted her sharp battling chin at her mother, who dropped her eyes in modest triumph and began poking at the pavement with the point of her umbrella.

‘I think we’d better get started,’ I said.

Aunt Emma and Cousin Jessie, sending off currents of angry electricity into the air all around them, fell in beside me, and we proceeded up the street.

‘We can get a bus at the top,’ I said.

‘Yes, I think that would be better,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘I don’t think I could face the insolence of another taxi driver today.’

‘No,’ said Jessie, ‘I couldn’t either.’

We went to the top of the bus, which was empty, and sat side by side along the two seats at the very front.

‘I hope this man of yours is going to do Jessie justice,’ said Aunt Emma.

‘I hope so too,’ I said. Aunt Emma believes that every writer lives in a whirl of photographers, press conferences, and publishers’ parties. She thought I was the right person to choose a photographer. I wrote to say I wasn’t. She wrote back to say it was the least I could do. ‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest anyway,’ said Jessie, who always speaks in short, breathless, battling sentences, as from an unassuageably painful inner integrity that she doesn’t expect anyone else to understand.

It seems that at the boarding house where Aunt Emma and Jessie live, there is an old inhabitant who has a brother who is a TV producer. Jessie had been acting in Quiet Wedding with the local Reps. Aunt Emma thought that if there was a nice photograph of Jessie, she could show it to the TV producer when he came to tea with his brother at the boarding house, which he was expected to do any weekend now; and if Jessie proved to be photogenic, the TV producer would whisk her off to London to be a TV star.

What Jessie thought of this campaign I did not know. I never did know what she thought of her mother’s plans for her future. She might conform or she might not; but it was always with the same fierce and breathless integrity of indifference.

‘If you’re going to take that attitude, dear,’ said Aunt Emma, ‘I really don’t think it’s fair to the photographer.

‘Oh, Mummy!’ said Jessie.

‘There’s the conductor,’ said Aunt Emma, smiling bitterly. ‘I’m not paying a penny more than I did last time. The fare from Knightsbridge to Little Duchess Street is threepence.’

‘The fares have gone up,’ I said.

‘Not a penny more,’ said Aunt Emma.

But it was not the conductor. It was two middle-aged people, who steadied each other at the top of the stairs and then sat down, not side by side, but one in front of the other. I thought this was odd, particularly as the woman leaned forward over the man’s shoulder and said in a loud parrot voice: ‘Yes, and if you turn my goldfish out of doors once more, I’ll tell the landlady to turn you out. I’ve warned you before.’

The man, in appearance like a damp, grey, squashed felt hat, looked in front of him and nodded with the jogging of the bus.

She said, ‘And there’s fungus on my fish. You needn’t think I don’t know where it came from.’

Suddenly he remarked in a high insistent voice, ‘There are all those little fishes in the depths of the sea, all those little fishes. We explode all these bombs at them, and we’re not going to be forgiven for that, are we, we’re not going to be forgiven for blowing up the poor little fishes.’

She said, in an amiable voice, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and she left her seat behind him and sat in the same seat with him.

I had known that the afternoon was bound to get out of control at some point but this conversation upset me. I wa relieved when Aunt Emma restored normality by saying: ‘There. There never used to be people like that. It’s the Labour Government.’

‘Oh, Mummy,’ said Jessie, ‘I’m not in the mood for politics this afternoon.’

We had arrived at the place we wanted, and we got down off the bus. Aunt Emma gave the bus conductor ninepence for the three of us, which he took without comment. ‘And they’re inefficient as well,’ she said.

It was drizzling and rather cold. We proceeded up the street, our heads together under Aunt Emma’s umbrella.

Then I saw a newsboard with the item: Stalin is Dying. I stopped and the umbrella went jerking up the pavement without me. The newspaperman was an old acquaintance. I said to him, ‘What’s this, another of your sales boosters?’ He said: ‘The old boy’s had it, if you ask me. Well, the way he’s lived – the way I look at it, he’s had it coming to him. Must have the constitution of a bulldozer.’ He folded up a paper and gave it to me. ‘The way I look at it is that it doesn’t do anyone any good to live that sort of life. Sedentary. Reading reports and sitting at meetings. That’s why I like this job – there’s plenty of fresh air.’

A dozen paces away Aunt Emma and Jessie were standing facing me, huddled together under the wet umbrella. ‘What’s the matter, dear?’ shouted Aunt Emma. ‘Can’t you see, she’s buying a newspaper,’ said Jessie crossly.

The newspaperman said, ‘It’s going to make quite a change, with him gone. Not that I hold much with the goings-on out there. But they aren’t ued to democracy much, are they? What I mean is, if people aren’t used to something, they don’t miss it.’

I ran through the drizzle to the umbrella. ‘Stalin’s dying,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’ said Aunt Emma suspiciously.

‘It says so in the newspaper.’

‘They said he was sick this morning, but I expect it’s just propaganda. I won’t believe it till I see it.’

‘Oh don’t be silly, Mummy. How can you see it?’ said Jessie.

We went on up the street. Aunt Emma said: ‘What do you think, would it have been better if Jessie had bought a nice pretty afternoon dress?’

‘Oh, Mummy,’ said Jessie, ‘can’t you see she’s upset? It’s the same for her as it would be for us if Churchill was dead.’

‘Oh, my dear!’ said Aunt Emma, shocked, stopping dead. An umbrella spoke scraped across Jessie’s scalp, and she squeaked. ‘Do put that umbrella down now. Can’t you see it’s stopped raining?’ she said, irritably, rubbing her head.

Aunt Emma pushed and bundled at the umbrella until it collapsed, and Jessie took it and rolled it up. Aunt Emma, flushed and frowning, looked dubiously at me. ‘Would you like a nice cup of tea?’ she said.

‘Jessie’s going to be late,’ I said. The photographer’s door was just ahead.

‘I do hope this man’s going to get Jessie’s expression,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘There’s never been one yet that got her look.’

Jessie went crossly ahead of us up some rather plushy stairs in a hallway with mauve and gold striped wallpaper. At the top there was a burst of Stravinsky as Jessie masterfully opened a door and strode in. We followed her into what seemed to be a drawing room, all white and grey and gold. The Rites of Spring tinkled a baby chandelier overhead; and there was no point in speaking until our host, a charming young man in a black velvet jacket, switched off the machine, which he did with an apologetic smile.

‘I do hope this is the right place,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘I have brought my daughter to be photographed.’

‘Of course it’s the right place,’ said the young man. ‘How delightful of you to come!’ He took my Aunt Emma’s white-gloved hands in his own and seemed to press her down on to a large sofa; a pressure to which she responded with a confused blush. Then he looked at me. I sat down quickly on another divan, a long way from Aunt Emma. He looked professionally at Jessie, smiling. She was standing on the carpet, hands linked behind her back, like an admiral on the job, frowning at him.

‘You don’t look at all relaxed,’ he said to her gently. ‘It’s really no use at all, you know, unless you are really relaxed all over.’

‘I’m perfectly relaxed,’ said Jessie. ‘It’s my cousin here who isn’t relaxed.’

I said, ‘I don’t see that it matters whether I’m relaxed or not, because it’s not me who is going to be photographed.’ A book fell off the divan beside me on the floor. It was Prancing Nigger by Ronald Firbank. Our host dived for it, anxiously.

‘Do you read our Ron?’ he asked.

‘From time to time,’ I said.

‘Personally I never read anything else,’ he said. ‘As far as I am concerned he said the last word. When I’ve read him all through, I begin again at the beginning and read him through again. I don’t see that there’s any point in anyone ever writing another word after Firbank.’

This remark discouraged me, and I did not feel inclined to say anything.

‘I think we could all do with a nice cup of tea,’ he said. ‘While I’m making it, would you like the gramophone on again?’

‘I can’t stand modern music,’ said Jessie.

‘We can’t all have the same tastes,’ he said. He was on his way to a door at the back, when it opened and another young man came in with a tea tray. He was as light and lithe as the first, with the same friendly ease of manner. He was wearing black jeans and a purple sweater, and his hair looked like two irregular glossy black wings on his head.

‘Ah, bless you, dear!’ said our host to him. Then to us: ‘Let me introduce my friend and assistant, Jackie Smith. My name you know. Now if we all have a nice cup of tea, I feel that our vibrations might become just a little more harmonious.’

All this time Jessie was standing-at-ease on the carpet. He handed her a cup of tea. She nodded towards me, saying, ‘Give it to her.’ He took it back and gave it to me. ‘What’s the matter, dear?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

‘I am perfectly well,’ I said, reading the newspaper.

‘Stalin is dying,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘Or so they would like us to believe.’

‘Stalin?’ said our host.

‘That man in Russia,’ said Aunt Emma.

‘Oh, you mean old Uncle Joe. Bless him.’

Aunt Emma started. Jessie looked gruffly incredulous.

Jackie Smith came and sat down beside me and read the newspaper over my shoulder. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well, well.’ Then he giggled and said: ‘Nine doctors. If there were fifty doctors I still wouldn’t feel very safe, would you?’

‘No, not really,’ I said.

‘Silly old nuisance,’ said Jackie Smith. ‘Should have bumped him off years ago. Obviously outlived his usefulness at the end of the war, wouldn’t you think?’

‘It seems rather hard to say,’ I said.

Our host, a teacup in one hand, raised the other in a peremptory gesture. ‘I don’t like to hear that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘I really don’t. God knows, if there’s one thing I make a point of never knowing a thing about, it’s politics, but during the war Uncle Joe and Roosevelt were absolutely my pin-up boys. But absolutely!’

Here Cousin Jessie, who had neither sat down nor taken a cup of tea, took a stride forward and said angrily: ‘Look, do you think we could get this damned business over with?’ Her virginal pink cheeks shone with emotion, and her eyes were brightly unhappy.

‘But, my dear!’ said our host, putting down his cup. ‘But of course. If you feel like that, of course.’

He looked at his assistant, Jackie, who reluctantly laid down the newspaper and pulled the cords of a curtain, revealing an alcove full of cameras and equipment. Then they both thoughtfully examined Jessie. ‘Perhaps it would help,’ said our host, ‘if you could give me an idea what you want it for? Publicity? Dust jackets? Or just for your lucky friends?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ said Cousin Jessie.

Aunt Emma stood up sand said: ‘I would like you to catch her expression. It’s just a little look of hers …’

Jessie clenched her fists at her.

‘Aunt Emma,’ I said, ‘don’t you think it would be a good idea if you and I went out for a little?’

‘But my dear …’

But our host had put his arm around her and was easing her to the door. ‘There’s a duck,’ he was saying. ‘You do want me to make a good job of it, don’t you? And I never could really do my best, even with the most sympathetic lookers-on.’

Again Aunt Emma went limp, blushing. I took his place at her side and led her to the door. As we shut it, I heard Jackie Smith saying: ‘Music, do you think?’ And Jessie: ‘I loathe music.’ And Jackie again: ‘We do rather find music helps, you know …’

The door shut and Aunt Emma and I stood at the landing window, looking into the street.

‘Has that young man done you?’ she asked.

‘He was recommended to me,’ I said.

Music started up from the room behind us. Aunt Emma’s foot tapped on the floor. ‘Gilbert and Sullivan,’ she said. ‘Well, she can’t say she loathes that. But I suppose she would, just to be difficult.’

I lit a cigarette. The Pirates of Penzance abruptly stopped.

‘Tell me, dear,’ said Aunt Emma, suddenly rougish, ‘about all the exciting things you are doing.’

Aunt Emma always says this; and always I try hard to think of portions of my life suitable for presentation to Aunt Emma. ‘What have you been doing today, for instance?’ I considered Bill; I considered Beatrice; I considered comrade Jean.

‘I had lunch,’ I said, ‘with the daughter of a Bishop.’

‘Did you, dear?’ she said doubtfully.

Music again: Cole Porter. ‘That doesn’t sound right to me,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘It’s modern, isn’t it?’ The music stopped. The door opened. Cousin Jessie stood there, shining with determination. ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, but I’m not in the mood.’

‘But we won’t be coming up to London again for another four months.’

Our host and his assistant appeared behind Cousin Jessie. Both were smiling rather bravely. ‘Perhaps we had better all forget about it,’ said Jackie Smith.

Our host said, ‘Yes, we’ll try again later, when everyone is really themselves.’

Jessie turned to the two young men and thrust out her hand at them. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, with her fierce virgin sincerity. ‘I am really terribly sorry.’

Aunt Emma went forward, pushed aside Jessie, and shook their hands. ‘I must thank you both,’ she said, ‘for the tea.’

Jackie Smith waved my newspaper over the three heads. ‘You’ve forgotten this,’ he said.

‘Never mind, you can keep it,’ I said.

‘Oh, bless you, now I can read all the gory details.’ The door shut on their friendly smiles.

‘Well,’ said Aunt Emma, ‘I’ve never been more ashamed.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Jessie fiercely. ‘I really couldn’t care less.’

We descended into the street. We shook each other’s hands. We kissed each other’s cheeks. We thanked each other. Aunt Emma and Cousin Jessie waved at a taxi. I got on a bus.

When I got home, the telephone was ringing. It was Beatrice. She said she had got my telegram, but she wanted to see me in any case. ‘Did you know Stalin was dying?’ I said.

‘Yes, of course. Look, it’s absolutely essential to discuss this business on the Copper Belt.’

‘Why is it?’

‘If we don’t tell people the truth about it, who is going to?’

‘Oh, well, I suppose so,’ I said.

She said she would be over in an hour. I set out my typewriter and began to work. The telephone rang. It was comrade Jean. ‘Have you heard the news?’ she said. She was crying.

Comrade Jean had left her husband when he became a member of the Labour Party at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, and ever since then had been living in bed-sitting rooms on bread, butter and tea, with a portrait of Stalin over her bed.

‘Yes, I have,’ I said.

‘It’s awful,’ she said sobbing. ‘Terrible. They’ve murdered him.’

‘Who has? How do you know?’ I said.

‘He’s been murdered by capitalist agents,’ she said. ‘It’s perfectly obvious.’

‘He was seventy-three,’ I said.

‘People don’t die just like that,’ she said.

‘They do at seventy-three,’ I said.

‘We will have to pledge ourselves to be worthy of him,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose we will.’

Wine

A man and woman walked towards the boulevard from a little hotel in a side street.

The trees were still leafless, black, cold; but the fine twigs were swelling towards spring, so that looking upward it was with an expectation of the first glimmering greenness. Yet everything was calm, and the sky was a calm, classic blue.

The couple drifted slowly along. Effort, after days of laziness, seemed impossible; and almost at once they turned into a café and sank down, as if exhausted, in the glass-walled space that was thrust forward into the street.

The place was empty. People were seeking the midday meal in the restaurants. Not all: that morning crowds had been demonstrating, a procession had just passed, and its straggling end could still be seen. The sounds of violence, shouted slogans and singing, no longer absorbed the din of Paris traffic; but it was these sounds that had roused the couple from sleep.

A waiter leaned at the door, looking after the crowds, and he reluctantly took an order for coffee.

The man yawned; the woman caught the infection; and they laughed with an affectation of guilt and exchanged glances before their eyes, without regret, parted. When the coffee came, it remained untouched. Neither spoke. After some time the woman yawned again; and this time the man turned and looked at her critically, and she looked back. Desire asleep, they looked. This remained: that while everything which drove them slept, they accepted from each other a sad irony; they could look at each other without illusion, steady-eyed.

And then, inevitably, the sadness deepened in her till she consciously resisted it; and into him came the flicker of cruelty.

‘Your nose needs powdering,’ he said.

‘You need a whipping boy.’

But always he refused to feel sad. She shrugged, and, leaving him to it, turned to look out. So did he. At the far end of the boulevard there was a faint agitation, like stirred ants, and she heard him mutter, ‘Yes, and it still goes on …’

Mocking, she said, ‘Nothing changes, everything always the same …’

But he had flushed. ‘I remember,’ he began, in a different voice. He stopped, and she did not press him, for he was gazing at the distant demonstrators with a bitterly nostalgic face.

Outside drifted the lovers, the married couples, the students, the old people. There the stark trees; there the blue, quiet sky. In a month the trees would be vivid green; the sun would pour down heat; the people would be brown, laughing, bare-limbed. No, no, she said to herself, at this vision of activity. Better the static sadness. And, all at once, unhappiness welled up in her, catching her throat, and she was back fifteen years in another country. She stood in blazing tropical moonlight, stretching her arms to a landscape that offered her nothing but silence and then she was running down a path where small stones glinted sharp underfoot, till at last she fell spent in a swathe of glistening grass. Fifteen years.

It was at this moment that the man turned abruptly and called the waiter and ordered wine.

‘What,’ she said humorously, ‘already?’

‘Why not?’

For the moment she loved him completely and maternally, till she suppressed the counterfeit and watched him wait, fidgeting, for the wine, pour it, and then set the two glasses before them beside the still-brimming coffee cups. But she was again remembering that night, envying the girl ecstatic with moonlight, who ran crazily through the trees in an unsharable desire for – but that was the point.

‘What are you thinking of?’ he asked, still a little cruel.

‘Ohhh,’ she protested humorously.

‘That’s the trouble, that’s the trouble.’ He lifted his glass, glanced at her, and set it down. ‘Don’t you want a drink?’

‘Not yet.’

He left his glass untouched and began to smoke.

These moments demanded some kind of gesture – something slight, even casual, but still an acknowledgement of the separateness of these two people in each of them; the one seen, perhaps, as a soft-staring never-closing eye, observing, always observing, with a tired compassion; the other, a shape of violence that struggled on in the cycle of desire and rest, creation and achievement.

He gave it her. Again their eyes met in the grave irony, before he turned away, flicking his fingers irritably against the table; and she turned also, to note the black branches where the sap was tingling.

‘I remember,’ he began; and again she said, in protest, ‘Ohhh!’

He checked himself. ‘Darling,’ he said dryly, ‘you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.’ They laughed.

‘It must have been this street. Perhaps this café – only they change so. When I went back yesterday to see the place where I came every summer, it was a pâtisserie, and the woman had forgotten me. There was a whole crowd of us – we used to go around together – and I met a girl here, I think, for the first time. There were recognized places for contacts; people coming from Vienna or Prague, or wherever it was, knew the places – it couldn’t be this café, unless they’ve smartened it up. We didn’t have the money for all this leather and chromium.’

‘Well, go on.’

‘I keep remembering her, for some reason. Haven’t thought of her for years. She was about sixteen, I suppose. Very pretty – no, you’re quite wrong. We used to study together. She used to bring her books to my room. I liked her, but I had my own girl, only she was studying something else, I forget what.’ He paused again, and again his face was twisted with nostalgia, and involuntarily she glanced over her shoulder down the street. The procession had completely disappeared, not even the sound of singing and shouting remained.

‘I remember her because …’ And, after a preoccupied silence: ‘Perhaps it is always the fate of the virgin who comes and offers herself, naked, to be refused.’

‘What!’ she exclaimed, startled. Also, anger stirred in her. She noted it, and sighed. ‘Go on.’

‘I never made love to her. We studied together all that summer. Then, one weekend, we all went off in a bunch. None of us had any money, of course, and we used to stand on the pavements and beg lifts, and meet up again in some village. I was with my own girl, but that night we were helping the farmer get his fruit, in payment for using his barn to sleep in, and I found this girl Marie was beside me. It was moonlight, a lovely night, and we were all singing and making love. I kissed her, but that was all. That night she came to me. I was sleeping up in the loft with another lad. He was asleep. I sent her back down to the others. They were all together down in the hay. I told her she was too young. But she was no younger than my own girl.’ He stopped; and after all these years his face was rueful and puzzled. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I sent her back.’ Then he laughed. ‘Not that it matters, I suppose.’

‘Shameless hussy,’ she said. The anger was strong now. ‘You had kissed her, hadn’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘But we were all playing the fool. It was a glorious night – gathering apples, the farmer shouting and swearing at us because we were making love more than working, and singing and drinking wine. Besides, it was that time: the youth movement. We regarded faithfulness and jealousy and all that sort of thing as remnants of bourgeois morality.’ He laughed again, rather painfully. ‘I kissed her. There she was, beside me, and she knew my girl was with me that weekend.’

‘You kissed her,’ she said accusingly.

He fingered the stem of his wineglass, looking over at her and grinning. ‘Yes, darling,’ he almost crooned at her. ‘I kissed her.’

She snapped over into anger. ‘There’s a girl all ready for love. You make use of her for working. Then you kiss her. You know quite well …’

‘What do I know quite well?’

‘It was a cruel thing to do.’

‘I was a kid myself …’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She noted, with discomfort, that she was almost crying. ‘Working with her! Working with a girl of sixteen, all summer!’

‘But we all studied very seriously. She was a doctor afterwards, in Vienna. She managed to get out when the Nazis came in, but …’

She said impatiently, ‘Then you kissed her, on that night. Imagine her, waiting till the others were asleep, then she climbed up the ladder to the loft, terrified the other man might wake up, then she stood watching you sleep, and she slowly took off her dress and …’

‘Oh, I wasn’t asleep. I pretended to be. She came up dressed. Shorts and sweater – our girls didn’t wear dresses and lipstick – more bourgeois morality. I watched her strip. The loft was full of moonlight. She put her hand over my mouth and came down beside me.’ Again, his face was filled with rueful amazement. ‘God knows, I can’t understand it myself. She was a beautiful creature. I don’t know why I remember it. It’s been coming into my mind the last few days.’ After a pause, slowly twirling the wineglass: ‘I’ve been a failure in many things, but not with …’ He quickly lifted her hand, kissed it, and said sincerely: ‘I don’t know why I remember it now, when …’ Their eyes met, and they sighed.

She said slowly, her hand lying in his: ‘And so you turned her away.’

He laughed. ‘Next morning she wouldn’t speak to me. She started a love affair with my best friend – the man who’d been beside me that night in the loft, as a matter of fact. She hated my guts, and I suppose she was right.’

‘Think of her. Think of her at that moment. She picked up her clothes, hardly daring to look at you …’

‘As a matter of fact, she was furious. She called me all the names she could think of; I had to keep telling her to shut up, she’d wake the whole crowd.’

‘She climbed down the ladder and dressed again, in the dark. Then she went out of the barn, unable to go back to the others. She went into the orchard. It was still brilliant moonlight. Everything was silent and deserted, and she remembered how you’d all been singing and laughing and making love. She went to the tree where you’d kissed her. The moon was shining on the apples. She’ll never forget it, never, never!’

He looked at her curiously. The tears were pouring down her face.

‘It’s terrible,’ she said. ‘Terrible. Nothing could ever make up to her for that. Nothing, as long as she lived. Just when everything was most perfect, all her life, she’d suddenly remember that night, standing alone, not a soul anywhere, miles of damned empty moonlight …’

He looked at her shrewdly. Then, with a sort of humorous, deprecating grimace, he bent over and kissed her and said: ‘Darling, it’s not my fault; it just isn’t my fault.’

‘No,’ she said.

He put the wineglass into her hands; and she lifted it up, looked at the small crimson globule of warming liquid, and drank with him.

He

‘Goodness! You gave me a start, Mary …’

Mary Brooke was quietly knitting beside the stove. ‘Thought I’d drop in,’ she said.

Annie Blake pulled off her hat and flopped a net of bread and vegetables on the table; at the same time her eyes were anxiously inspecting her kitchen: there was an unwashed dish in the sink, a cloth over a chair. ‘Everything’s in such a mess,’ she said irritably.

Mary Brooke, eyes fixed on her knitting, said, ‘Eh, sit down. It’s clean as can be.’

After a hesitation Annie flopped herself into the chair and shut her eyes. ‘Those stairs …’ she panted. Then: ‘Like a cuppa tea, Mary?’

Mary quickly pushed her knitting away and said, ‘You sit still. I’ll do it.’ She heaved up her large, tired body, filled a kettle from the tap, and set it on the flame. Then, following her friend’s anxious glance, she hung the dish cloth where it belonged and shut the door. The kitchen was so clean and neat it could have gone on exhibition. She sat down, reached for her knitting, and knitted without looking at it, contemplating the wall across the room. ‘He was carrying on like anything last night,’ she observed.

Annie’s drooping lids flew open, her light body straightened. ‘Yes?’ she murmured casually. Her face was tense.

‘What can you expect with that type? She doesn’t get the beds made before dinnertime. There’s dirt everywhere. He was giving it to her proper. Dirty slut, he called her.’

‘She won’t do for him what I did, that’s certain,’ said Annie bitterly.

‘Shouting and banging until early morning – we all heard it.’ She counted purl, plain, purl, and added: ‘Don’t last long, do it? Six months he’s been with her now?’

‘He never lifted his hand to me, that’s certain,’ said Annie victoriously. ‘Never. I’ve got my pride, if others haven’t.’

‘That’s right, love. Two purl. One plain.’

‘Nasty temper he’s got. I’d be up summer and winter at four, cleaning those offices till ten, then cleaning for Mrs Lynd till dinnertime. Then if he got home and found his dinner not ready, he’d start to shout and carry on – well, I’d say, if you can’t wait five minutes, get home and cook it yourself, I’d say. I bring in as much as you do, don’t I? But he never lifted a finger. Bone lazy. Men are all the same.’

Mary gave her friend a swift, searching glance, then murmured, ‘Eh, you can’t tell me …’

‘I’d have the kids and the cleaning and the cooking, and working all day – sometimes when he was unemployed I’d bring in all the money … and he wouldn’t even put the kettle on for me. Women’s work, he said.’

‘Two purl, plain.’ But Mary’s kindly face seemed to suggest that she was waiting to say something else. ‘We all know what it is,’ she agreed at last, patiently.

Annie rose lightly, pulled the shrieking kettle off the flame, and reached for the teapot. Seen from the back, she looked twenty, slim and erect. When she turned with the steaming pot, she caught a glimpse of herself; she set down the pot and went to the mirror. She stood touching her face anxiously. ‘Look at me!’ She pushed a long, sagging curl into position, then shrugged. ‘Well, who’s to care what I look like anyway?’

She began setting out the cups. She had a thin face, sharpened by worry, and small sharp blue eyes. As she sat down, she nervously felt her hair. ‘I must get the curlers on to my hair,’ she muttered.

‘Heard from the boys?’

Annie’s hand fell and clenched itself on the table. ‘Not a word from Charlie for months. They don’t think … he’ll turn up one fine day and expect his place laid, if I know my Charlie. Tommy’s after a job in Manchester, Mrs Thomas said. But I had a nice letter from Dick …’ Her face softened; her eyes were soft and reminiscent. ‘He wrote about his father. Should he come down and speak to the old so and so for me, he said. I wrote back and said that was no way to speak of his father. He should respect him, I said, no matter what he’s done. It’s not his place to criticize his father, I said.’

‘You’re lucky in your boys, Annie.’

‘They’re good workers, no one can say they aren’t. And they’ve never done anything they shouldn’t. They don’t take after their dad, that’s certain.’

At this, Mary’s eyes showed a certain tired irony. ‘Eh, Annie – but we all do things we shouldn’t.’ This gaining no response from the bitter Annie, she added cautiously, ‘I saw him this morning in the street.’

Annie’s cup clattered down into the saucer. ‘Was he alone?’

‘No. But he took me aside – he said I could give you a message if I was passing this way – he might be dropping in this evening instead of tomorrow with your money, he said. Thursday she goes to her mother’s – I suppose he thinks while the cat’s away …’

Annie had risen, in a panic. She made herself sit down again and stirred her tea. The spoon tinkled in the cup with the quivering of her hand. ‘He’s regular with the money, anyway,’ she said heavily. ‘I didn’t have to take him into court. He offered. And I suppose he needn’t, now the boys are out keeping themselves.’

‘He still feels for you, Annie …’ Mary was leaning forward, speaking in a direct appeal. ‘He does, really.’

‘He never felt for anyone but himself,’ snapped Annie. ‘Never.’

Mary let a sigh escape her. ‘Oh, well …’ she murmured. ‘Well, I’ll be getting along to do the supper.’ She stuffed her knitting into her carryall and said consolingly: ‘You’re lucky. No one to get after you if you feel like sitting a bit. No one to worry about but yourself …’

‘Oh, don’t think I’m wasting any tears over him. I’m taking it easy for the first time in my life. You slave your life out for your man and your kids. Then off they go, with not so much as a thank you. Now I can please myself.’

‘I wouldn’t mind being in your place,’ said Mary loyally. At the door she remarked, apparently at random, ‘Your floor’s so clean you could eat off it.’

The moment Mary was gone, Annie rushed into her apron and began sweeping. She got down on her knees to polish the floor, and then took off her dress and washed herself at the sink. She combed her dragging wisps of pale hair and did each one up neatly with a pin till her face was surrounded by a ring of little sausages. She put back her dress and sat down at the table. Not a moment too soon. The door opened, and Rob Blake stood there.

He was a thin, rather stooping man, with an air of apology. He said politely, ‘You busy, Annie?’

‘Sit down,’ she commanded sharply. He stooped loosely in the doorway for a moment, then came forward, minding his feet. Even so she winced as she saw the dusty marks on the gleaming linoleum. ‘Take it easy,’ he said with friendly sarcasm. ‘You can put up with my dust once a week, can’t you?’

She smiled stiffly, her blue eyes fastened anxiously on him, while he pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Well, Annie?’

To this conciliatory opening she did not respond. After a moment she remarked, ‘I heard from Dick. He’s thinking of getting married.’

‘Getting married, now? That puts us on the shelf, don’t it?’

‘You’re not on any shelf that I can see,’ she snapped.

‘Now – Annie …’ he deprecated, with an appealing smile. She showed no signs of softening. Seeing her implacable face, his smile faded, and he took an envelope from his pocket and pushed it over.

‘Thanks,’ she said, hardly glancing at it. Then that terrible bitterness came crowding up, and he heard the words: ‘If you can spare it from her.’

He let that one pass; he looked steadily at his wife, as if seeking a way past that armour of anger. He watched her, passing the tip of his tongue nervously over his lips.

‘Some women know how to keep themselves free from kids and responsibilities. They just do this and that, and take up with anyone they please. None of the dirty work for them.’

He gave a sigh, and was on the point of getting up, when she demanded, ‘Like a cuppa tea?’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’ He let himself sink back again.

While she worked at the stove, her back to him, he was looking around the kitchen; his face had a look of tired, disappointed irony. An ageing man, but with a dogged set to his shoulders. Trying to find the right words, he remarked, ‘Not so much work for you now, Annie.’

But she did not answer. She returned with the two cups and put the sugar into his for him. This wifely gesture encouraged him. ‘Annie,’ he began, ‘Annie – can’t we talk this over …’ He was stirring the tea clumsily, not looking at it, leaning forward. The cup knocked over. ‘Oh, look what you’ve done,’ she cried out. ‘Just look at the mess.’ She snatched up a cloth and wiped the table.

‘It’s only a drop of tea, Annie,’ he protested at last, shrinking a little aside from her furious energy.

‘Only a drop of tea – I can polish and clean half the day, and then in a minute the place is like a pig sty.’

His face darkened with remembered irritation.

‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ she went on accusingly, ‘she lets the beds lie until dinner, and the place isn’t cleaned from one week to the next.’

‘At least she cares more for me than she does for a clean floor,’ he shouted. Now they looked at each other with hatred.

At this delicate moment there came a shout: ‘Rob. Rob!’

She laughed angrily. ‘She’s got you where she wants you – waits and spies on you and now she comes after you.’

‘Rob! You there, Rob?’ It was a loud, confident, female voice.

‘She sounds just what she is, a proper …’

‘Shut up,’ he interrupted. He was breathing heavily. ‘You keep that tongue of yours quiet, now.’

Her eyes were full of tears, but the blue shone through, bright and vengeful. ‘“Rob, Rob” – and off you trot like a little dog.’

He got up from the table heavily, as a loud knock came at the door.

Annie’s mouth quivered at the insult of it. And his first instinct was to stand by her – she could see that. He looked apologetically at her, then went to the door, opened it an inch, and said in a low, furious voice: ‘Don’t you do that now. Do you hear me!’ He shut the door, leaned against it, facing Annie. ‘Annie,’ he said again, in an awkward appeal. ‘Annie …’

But she sat at her table, hands folded in a trembling knot before her, her face tight and closed against him.

‘Oh, all right!’ he said at last despairingly, angry. ‘You’ve always got to be in the right about everything, haven’t you? That’s all that matters to you – if you’re in the right. Bloody plaster saint, you are.’ He went out quickly.

She sat quite still, listening until it was quiet. Then she drew a deep breath and put her two fists to her cheeks, as if trying to keep them still. She was sitting thus when Mary Brooke came in. ‘You let him go?’ she said incredulously.

‘And good riddance, too.’

Mary shrugged. Then she suggested bravely, ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on him, Annie – give him a chance.’

‘I’d see him dead first,’ said Annie through shaking lips. Then: ‘I’m forty-five, and I might as well be on the dust heap.’ And then, after a pause, in a remote, cold voice: ‘We’ve been together twenty-five years. Three kids. And then he goes off with that … with that …’

‘You’re well rid of him, and that’s a fact,’ agreed Mary swiftly.

‘Yes. I am, and I know it …’ Annie was swaying from side to side in her chair. Her face was stony, but the tears were trickling steadily down, following a path worn from nose to chin. They rolled off and splashed on to her white collar.

‘Annie,’ implored her friend. ‘Annie …’

Annie’s face quivered, and Mary was across the room and had her in her arms. ‘That’s right, love, that’s right, that’s right, love,’ she crooned.

‘I don’t know what gets into me,’ wept Annie, her voice coming muffled from Mary’s large shoulder. ‘I can’t keep my wicked tongue still. He’s fed up and sick of that – cow, and I drive him away. I can’t help it. I don’t know what gets into me.’

‘There now, love, there now, love.’ The big, fat, comfortable woman was rocking the frail Annie like a baby. ‘Take it easy, love. He’ll be back, you’ll see.’

‘You think he will?’ asked Annie, lifting her face up to see if her friend was lying to comfort her.

‘Would you like me to go and see if I can fetch him back for you now?’

In spite of her longing, Annie hesitated. ‘Do you think it’ll be all right?’ she said doubtfully.

‘I’ll go and slip in a word when she’s not around.’

‘Will you do that, Mary?’

Mary got up, patting her crumpled dress. ‘You wait here, love,’ she said imploringly. She went to the door and said as she went out: ‘Take it easy, now, Annie. Give him a chance.’

‘I go running after him to ask him back?’ Annie’s pride spoke out of her wail.

‘Do you want him back or don’t you?’ demanded Mary, patient to the last, although there was a hint of exasperation now. Annie did not say anything, so Mary went running out.

Annie sat still, watching the door tensely. But vague, rebellious, angry thoughts were running through her head: If I want to keep him, I can’t ever say what I think, I can’t ever say what’s true – I’m nothing to him but a convenience, but if I say so he’ll just up and off …

But that was not the whole truth; she remembered the affection in his face, and for a moment the bitterness died. Then she remembered her long hard life, the endless work, work, work – she remembered, all at once, as if she were feeling it now, her aching back when the children were small; she could see him lying on the bed reading the newspaper when she could hardly drag herself … It’s all very well, she cried out to herself, it’s not right, it just isn’t right … A terrible feeling of injustice was gripping her; and it was just this feeling she must push down, keep under, if she wanted him. For she knew finally – and this was stronger than anything else – that without him there would be no meaning in her life at all.

The Other Woman

Rose’s mother was killed one morning crossing the street to do her shopping. Rose was fetched from work, and a young policeman, awkward with sympathy, asked questions and finally said: ‘You ought to tell your Dad, miss, he ought to know.’ It had struck him as strange that she had not suggested it, but behaved as if the responsibility for everything must of course be hers. He thought Rose was too composed to be natural. Her mouth was set and there was a strained look in her eyes. He insisted; Rose sent a message to her father; but when he came she put him straight into bed with a cup of tea. Mr Johnson was a plump, fair little man, with wisps of light hair lying over a rosy scalp, and blue, candid, trustful eyes. Then she came back to the kitchen and her manner told the policeman that she expected him to leave. From the door he said diffidently: ‘Well, I’m sorry, miss, I’m really sorry. A terrible thing – you can’t rightly blame the lorry-driver, and your mum – it wasn’t her fault, either.’ Rose turned her white, shaken face, her cold and glittering eyes towards him and said tartly: ‘Being sorry doesn’t mend broken bones.’ That last phrase seemed to take her by surprise, for she winced, her face worked in a rush of tears, and then she clenched her jaw again. ‘Them lorries,’ she said heavily, ‘them machines, they ought to be stopped, that’s what I think.’ This irrational remark encouraged the policeman: it was nearer to the tears, the emotion that he thought would be good for her. He remarked encouragingly: ‘I daresay, miss, but we couldn’t do without them, could we now?’ Rose’s face did not change. She said politely: ‘Yes?’ It was sceptical and dismissing; that monosyllable said finally: ‘You keep your opinions, I’ll keep mine.’ It examined and dismissed the whole machine age. The young policeman, still lingering over his duty, suggested: ‘Isn’t there anybody to come and sit with you? You don’t look too good, miss, and that’s a fact.’

‘There isn’t anybody,’ said Rose briefly, and added: ‘I’m all right.’ She sounded irritated, and so he left. She sat down at the table and was shocked at herself for what she had said. She thought: I ought to tell George … But she did not move. She stared vaguely around the kitchen, her mind dimly churning around several ideas. One was that her father had taken it hard, she would have her hands full with him. Another, that policemen, officials – they were all nosy parkers, knowing what was best for everybody. She found herself staring at a certain picture on the wall, and thinking: ‘Now I can take that picture down. Now she’s gone I can do what I like.’ She felt a little guilty, but almost at once she briskly rose and took the picture down. It was of a battleship in a stormy sea, and she hated it. She put it away in a cupboard. Then the white empty square on the wall troubled her, and she replaced it by a calendar with yellow roses on it. Then she made herself a cup of tea and began cooking her father’s supper, thinking: I’ll wake him up and make him eat, do him good to have a bite of something hot.

At supper her father asked: ‘Where’s George?’ Her face closed against him in irritation and she said: ‘I don’t know.’ He was surprised and shocked, and he protested: ‘But Rosie, you ought to tell him, it’s only right.’ Now, it was against this knowledge that she had been arming herself all day; but she knew that sooner or later she must tell George, and when she had finished the washing-up she took a sheet of writing-paper from the drawer of the dresser and sat down to write. She was as surprised as her father was: Why didn’t she want to tell George? Her father said, with the characteristic gentle protest: ‘But, Rosie, why don’t you give him a ring at the factory? They’d give him the message.’ Rosie made as if she had not heard. She finished the letter, found some coppers in her bag for a stamp and went out to post it. Afterwards she found herself thinking of George’s arrival with the reluctance that deserved the name of fear. She could not understand herself, and soon went to bed in order to lose herself in sleep. She dreamed of the lorry that had killed her mother; she dreamed, too, of an enormous black machine, relentlessly moving its great arms back and forth, back and forth, in a way that was menacing to Rose.

George found the letter when he returned from work the following evening. His first thought was: ‘Why couldn’t she have got killed next week, after we were married, instead of now?’ He was shocked at the cruel and selfish idea. But he and Rose had been going together now for three years, and he could not help feeling that it was cruel of fate to cloud their wedding with this terrible, senseless death. He had not liked Rose’s mother: he thought her a fussy and domineering woman; but to be killed like that, all of a sudden, in her vigorous fifties – He thought suddenly: ‘Poor little Rosie, she’ll be upset bad, and there’s her Dad, he’s just like a big baby; I’d better get to her quick.’ He was putting the letter in his pocket when it struck him: ‘Why did she write? Why didn’t she telephone to the works?’ He looked at the letter and saw that Mrs Johnson had been killed as long ago as yesterday morning. At first he was too astonished to be angry; then he was extraordinarily angry. ‘What!’ he muttered, ‘why the hell – what’s she doing?’ He was a member of the family, wasn’t he? – or as good as. And she wrote him stiff little letters, beginning Dear George, and ending, Rose – no love, not even a sincerely. But underneath the anger he was deeply dismayed. He was remembering that there had been a listlessness, an apathy about her recently that could almost be taken as indifference. For instance, when he took her to see the two rooms that would be their home, she had made all kinds of objections instead of being as delighted as he was. ‘Look at all those stairs,’ she had said, ‘it’s so high up,’ and so on. You might almost think she wasn’t keen on marrying him – but this idea was insupportable, and he abandoned it quickly. He remembered that at the beginning, three years ago, she had pleaded for them to marry at once; she didn’t mind taking a chance, she had said; lots of people got married on less money than they had. But he was a cautious man and he talked her into waiting for some kind of security. That’s where he made his mistake, he decided now; he should have taken her at her word and married her straight off, and then … He hastened across London to comfort Rose; and all the time his thoughts of her were uneasy and aggrieved; and he felt as anxious as a lost child.

When he entered the kitchen it was with no clear idea of what to expect; but he was surprised to find her seated at her usual place at the table, her hands folded idly before her, pale, heavy-lidded, but quite composed. The kitchen was spotless and there was a smell of soapsuds and clean warmth. Evidently the place had just been given a good scrub.

Rose turned heavy eyes on him and said: ‘It was good of you to come over, George.’

He had been going to give her a comforting kiss, but this took him by surprise. His feelings of outrage deepened. ‘Hey,’ he said, accusingly, ‘what’s all this, Rosie, why didn’t you let me know?’

She looked upset, but said, evasively: ‘It was all over so quick, and they took her away – there didn’t seem no point in getting you disturbed too.’

George pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. He had thought that there was nothing new to learn about Rose, after three years. But now he was giving her troubled and apprehensive glances; she seemed a stranger. In appearance she was small and dark, rather too thin. She had a sharp, pale face, with an irregular prettiness about it. She usually wore a dark skirt and a white blouse. She would sit up at night to wash and iron the blouse so that it would always be fresh. This freshness, the neatness, was her strongest characteristic. ‘You look as if you could be pulled through a hedge backwards and come out with every hair in order,’ he used to tease her. To which she might reply: ‘Don’t make me laugh. How could I?’ She would be quite serious; and at such moments he might sigh, humorously, admitting that she had no sense of humour. But really he liked her seriousness, her calm practicality: he relied on it. Now he said, rather helplessly: ‘Don’t take on, Rosie, everything’s all right.’

‘I’m not taking on,’ she replied unnecessarily, looking quietly at him, or rather, through him, with an air of patient waiting. He was now more apprehensive than angry. ‘How’s your Dad?’ he asked.

‘I’ve put him to bed with a nice cup of tea.’

‘How’s he taking it?’

She seemed to shrug. ‘Well, he’s upset, but he’s getting over it now.’

And now, for the life of him, he could think of nothing to say. The clock’s ticking seemed very loud, and he shifted his feet noisily. After a long silence he said aggressively: ‘This won’t make any difference to us, it’ll be all right next week, Rosie?’

He knew that it wasn’t all right when, after a further pause, she turned her eyes towards him with a full, dark, vague stare: ‘Oh, well, I don’t know …’

‘What do you mean?’ he challenged quickly, leaning across at her, forcibly, so that she might be made to respond: ‘What do you mean, Rosie, let us have it now.’

‘Well – there’s Dad,’ she replied, with that maddening vagueness.

‘You mean we shan’t get married?’ he shouted angrily. ‘Three years, Rosie …’ As her silence persisted: ‘Your Dad can live with us. Or – he might be getting married again – or something.’

Suddenly she laughed, and he winced; her moments of rough humour always disconcerted him. At the same time they pained him because they seemed brutal. ‘You mean to say,’ she said, clumsily jeering, ‘you mean you hope he gets married again, even if no one else’d ever think of it.’ But her eyes were filled with tears. They were lonely and self-sufficing tears. He slowly fell back into his chair, letting his hands drop loosely. He simply could not understand it. He could not understand her. It flashed into his mind that she intended not to marry him at all, but this was too monstrous a thought, and he comforted himself: ‘She’ll be all right by tomorrow, it’s the shock, that’s all. She liked her ma, really, even though they scrapped like two cats.’ He was just going to say: ‘Well, if I can’t do anything I’ll be getting along; I’ll come and see you tomorrow,’ when she asked him carefully, as if it were an immense effort for her to force her attention on to him: ‘Would you like a cuppa tea?’

‘Rose!’ he shouted miserably.

‘What?’ She sounded unhappy but stubborn; and she was unreachable, shut off from him behind a barrier of – what? He did not know. ‘Oh, go to hell then,’ he muttered, and got up and stamped out of the kitchen. At the door he gave her an appealing glance, but she was not looking at him. He slammed the door hard. Afterwards he thought guiltily: She’s upset, and then I treat her bad.

But Rose did not think of him when he had gone. She remained where she was, for some time, looking vaguely at the calendar with the yellow roses. Then she got up, washed her hands, hung her apron on the hook behind the door, as usual, and went to bed. ‘That’s over,’ she said to herself, meaning George. She began to cry. She knew she would not marry him – rather, could not marry him. She did not know why this was impossible or why she was crying: she could not understand her own behaviour. Up till so few hours before she had been going to marry George, live with him in the little flat: everything was settled. Yet, from the moment she had heard the shocked voices saying outside in the street: Mrs Johnson’s dead, she’s been killed – from that moment, or so it seemed now, it had become impossible to marry George. One day he had meant everything to her, he represented her future, and the next, he meant nothing. The knowledge was shocking to her; above all she prided herself on being a sensible person; the greatest praise she could offer was: ‘You’ve got sense,’ or ‘I like people to behave proper, no messing about.’ And what she felt was not sensible, therefore, she could not think too closely about it. She cried for a long time, stifling her sobs so that her father could not hear them where he lay through the wall. Then she lay awake and stared at the square of light that showed chimney-pots and the dissolving yellowish clouds of a rainy London dawn, scolding herself scornfully: What’s the good of crying? while she mopped up the tears that rose steadily under her lids and soaked down her cheeks to the already damp pillow.

Next morning when her father asked over breakfast cups: ‘Rosie, what are you going to do about George?’ she replied calmly, ‘It’s all right, he came last night and I told him.’

‘You told him what?’ He spoke cautiously. His round, fresh face looked troubled, the clear, rather childlike blue eyes were not altogether approving. His workmates knew him as a jaunty, humorous man with a warm, quick laugh and ingrained opinions about life and politics. In his home he was easy and uncritical. He had been married for twenty-five years to a woman who had outwardly let him do as he pleased while taking all the responsibility on herself. He knew this. He used to say of his wife: ‘Once she’s got an idea into her head you might as well whistle at a wall!’ And now he was looking at his daughter as he had at the mother. He did not know what she had planned, but he knew nothing he said would make any difference.

‘Everything’s all right, Dad,’ Rose said quietly.

I daresay, he thought; but what’s it all about? He asked: ‘You don’t have to get ideas into your head about not getting married. I’m easy.’ Without looking at him she filled his cup with the strong, brown, sweet tea he loved, and said again: ‘It’s all right.’ He persisted: ‘You don’t want to make any mistakes now, Rosie, you’re upset, and you want to give yourself time to have a good think about things.’

To this there was no reply at all. He sighed and took his newspaper to the fire. It was Sunday. Rosie was cooking the dinner when George came in. Jem, the father, turned his back on the couple, having nodded at George, thus indicating that as far as he was concerned they were alone. He was thinking: George’s a good bloke, she’s a fool if she gives him up.

‘Well, Rosie?’ said George, challengingly, the misery of the sleepless night bursting out of him.

‘Well what?’ temporized Rose, wiping dishes. She kept her head lowered and her face was pale and set hard. Confronted thus, with George’s unhappiness, her decision did not seem so secure. She wanted to cry. She could not afford to cry now, in front of him. She went to the window so that her back might be turned to him. It was a deep basement, and she looked up at the rubbish-can and railings showing dirty black against the damp, grey houses opposite. This had been her view of the world since she could remember. She heard George saying, uncertainly: ‘You marry me on Wednesday, the way we fixed it, and your Dad’ll be all right, he can stay here or live with us, just as you like.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rose after a pause.

‘But why, Rosie, why?’

Silence. ‘Don’t know,’ she muttered. She sounded obstinate but unhappy. Grasping this moment of weakness in her, he laid his hand on her shoulder and appealed. ‘Rosie girl, you’re upset, that’s all it is.’ But she tensed her shoulder against him and then, since his hand remained there, jerked herself away and said angrily: ‘I’m sorry. It’s no good. I keep telling you.’

‘Three years,’ he said slowly, looking at her in amazed anger. ‘Three years! And now you throw me over.’

She did not reply at once. She could see the monstrousness of what she was doing and could not help herself. She had loved him then. Now he exasperated her. ‘I’m not throwing you over,’ she said defensively.

‘So you’re not!’ he shouted in derision, his face clenched in pain and rage. ‘What are you doing then?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly.

He stared at her, suddenly swore under his breath and went to the door: ‘I’m not coming back,’ he said, ‘you’re just playing the fool with me, Rosie. You shouldn’t’ve treated me like this. No one’d stand for it, and I’m not going to.’ There was no sound from Rose, and so he went out.

Jem slowly let down the paper and remarked: ‘You want to think what you’re doing, Rosie.’

She did not reply. The tears were pouring down her face, but she wiped them impatiently away and bent to the oven. Later that day Jem watched her secretly over the top of the paper. There was a towel-rail beside the dresser. She was unscrewing it and moving it to a different position. She rolled the dresser itself into the opposite corner and then shifted various ornaments on the mantelpiece. Jem remembered that over each of these things she had bickered with her mother: the women could not agree about where the dresser would stand best, or the height of the towel-rail. So now Rose was having her own way, thought Jem, amazed at the sight of his daughter’s quiet but determined face. The moment her mother was dead she moved everything to suit herself … Later she made tea and sat down opposite him, in her mother’s chair. Women, thought Jem, half humorous, half shocked at the persistence of the thing. And she was throwing over a nice, decent chap just because of – what? At last he shrugged and accepted it; he knew she would have her way. Also, at the bottom of his heart, he was pleased. He would never have put any pressure on her to give up marriage, but he was glad that he did not have to move, that he could stay in his old ways without disturbance. She’s still young, he comforted himself; there’s plenty of time for her to marry.

A month later they heard George had married someone else. Rose had a pang of regret, but it was the kind of regret one feels for something inevitable, that could not have been otherwise. When they met in the street, she said, ‘Hullo, George,’ and he gave her a curt, stiff nod. She even felt a little hurt because he would not let bygones be; that he felt he had to store resentment. If she could greet him nicely, as a friend, then it was unkind of him to treat her coldly … She glanced with covert interest at the girl who was his wife, and waited for a greeting; but the girl averted her face and stared coldly away. She knew about Rose; she knew she had got George on the rebound.

This was in 1938. The rumours and the fear of war were still more an undercurrent in people’s minds than a part of their thinking. Vaguely, Rose and her father expected that everything would continue as they were. About four months after the mother’s death, Jem said one day: ‘Why don’t you give up your work now. We can manage without what you earn, if we’re careful.’

‘Yes?’ said Rose, in the sceptical way which already told him his pleading was wasted. ‘You’ve got too much,’ he persisted. ‘Cleaning and cooking, and then out all day at work.’

‘Men,’ she said simply, with a good-natured but dismissing sniff.

‘There’s no sense in it,’ he protested, knowing he was wasting his breath. His wife had insisted on working until Rose was sixteen and could take her place. ‘Women should be independent,’ she had said. And now Rose was saying: ‘I like to be independent.’

Jem said: ‘Women. They say all women want is a man to keep them, but you and your mother, you go on as if I’m trying to do you out of something when I say you mustn’t work.’

‘Women here and women there,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t know about women. All I know is what I think.’

Jem was that old type of Labour man who has been brought up in the trade union movement. He went to meetings once or twice a week, and sometimes his friends came in for a cup of tea and an argument. For years he had been saying to his wife: ‘If they paid you proper, it’d be different. You work ten hours a day, and it’s all for the bosses.’ Now he used the argument on Rose, and she said: ‘Oh, politics, I’m not interested.’ Her father said: ‘You’re as stubborn as a mule, like your mother.’

‘Then I am,’ said Rose, good-humouredly. She would have said she had not ‘got on’ with her mother; she had had to fight to become independent of that efficient and possessive woman. But in this she agreed with her: it had been instilled into her ever since she could remember, that women must look after themselves. Like her mother, who was indulgent about the trade union meetings, as if they were a childish amusement that men should be allowed: and she voted Labour to please him, as her mother had done. And every time her father pleaded with her to give up her job at the bakery she inexorably replied: ‘Who knows what might happen? It’s silly not to be careful.’ And so she continued to get up early in order to clean the basement kitchen and the two little rooms over it that was their home; then she made the breakfast, and went out to shop. Then she went to the bakery, and at six o’clock came back to cook supper for her father. At weekends she had a grand clean-up of the whole place, and cooked puddings and cakes. They were in bed most nights by nine. They never went out. They listened to the radio while they ate, and they read the newspapers. It was a hard life, but Rose did not think of it as hard. If she had ever used words like happiness she would have said she was happy. Sometimes she thought wistfully, not of George, but of the baby his wife was going to have. Perhaps, after all, she had made a terrible mistake? Then she squashed the thought and comforted herself: There’s plenty of time, there’s no hurry, I couldn’t leave Dad now.

When the war started she accepted it fatalistically, while her father was deeply upset. His vision of the future had been the old socialist one: everything would slowly get better and better; and one day the working man would get into power by the automatic persuasion of common sense, and then – but his picture of that time was not so clear. Vaguely he thought of a house with a little garden and a holiday by the sea once a year. The family had never been able to afford a proper holiday. But the war cut right across this vision.

‘Well, what did you expect?’ asked Rose satirically.

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded aggressively. ‘If Labour’d been in, it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

‘You’re just like your mother,’ he complained again. ‘You haven’t got any logic.’

‘Well, you’ve been going to meetings for years and years, and you make resolutions, and you talk, but there’s a war just the same.’ She felt as if this ended the argument. She felt, though she could never have put it into words, that there was a deep basic insecurity, that life itself was an enemy to be placated and humoured, liable at any moment to confront her, or people like her, with death or destitution. The only sensible thing to do was to gather together every penny that came along and keep it safe. When her mother had been alive, she paid thirty shillings of the two pounds a week she earned towards the housekeeping. Now that thirty shillings went straight into the post office. When the newspapers and the wireless blared war and horror at her, she thought of that money, and it comforted her. It didn’t amount to much, but if something happened … What that something might be, she did not clearly know. But life was terrible, there was no justice – had not her own mother been killed by a silly lorry crossing the street she had crossed every day of her life for twenty-five years … that just proved it. And now there was a war, and all sorts of people were going to be hurt, all for nothing – that proved it too, if it needed any proof. Life was frightening and dangerous – therefore, put money into the post office; hold on to your job, work, and – put money into the post office.

Her father sat over the wireless set, bought newspapers, argued with his cronies, trying to make sense of the complicated, cynical movements of power politics, while the family pattern of life dissolved into the slogans and noise of war, and the streets filled with uniforms and rumours. ‘It’s all Hitler,’ he would say aggressively to Rose.

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

‘Well, he started it, didn’t he?’

‘I’m not interested who started it. All I know is, ordinary people don’t want war. And there’s war all the time. They make me sick if you want to know – and you men make me sick, too. If you were young enough, you’d be off like the rest of them,’ she said accusingly.

‘But, Rosie,’ he said, really shocked. ‘Hitler’s got to be stopped, hasn’t he?’

‘Hitler,’ she said scornfully. ‘Hitler and Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt – they all make me sick, if you want to know. And that goes for your Attlee too.’

‘Women haven’t got any logic,’ he said, in despair.

So they came not to discuss the war at all, they merely suffered it. Slowly, Rose came to use the same words and slogans as everyone else; and like everyone else, with the deep, sad knowledge that it was all talk, and what was really happening in the world was something vast and terrible, beyond her comprehension; and perhaps it was wonderful, too, if she only knew – but she could never hope to understand. Better get on with the job, live as best she could, try not to be afraid and – put money in the post office.

Soon she switched to a job in a munitions factory. She felt she ought to do something for the war, and also, she was paid much better than in the bakery. She did fire-watching, too. Often she was up till three or four and then woke at six to clean and cook. Her father continued as a bricklayer and did fire-watching three or four nights a week. They were both permanently tired and sad. The war went on, month after month, year after year, food was short, it was hard to keep warm, the searchlights wheeled over the dark wilderness of London, the bombs fell screaming, and the black-out was like a weight on their minds and spirits. They listened to the news, read the newspapers, with the same look of bewildered but patient courage; and it seemed as if the war was a long, black, noisome tunnel from which they would never emerge.

In the third year Jem fell off a ladder one cold, foggy morning and injured his back. ‘It’s all right, Rose,’ he said. ‘I can get back to work all right.’

‘You’re not working,’ she said flatly. ‘You’re sixty-seven. That’s enough now, you’ve been working since you was fourteen.’

‘There won’t be enough coming in every week.’

‘Won’t there?’ she said triumphantly. ‘You used to go on at me for working. Aren’t you glad now? With your bit of pension and what I get, I can still put some away every week if I try. Funny thing,’ she said reflectively, not without grim humour: ‘It was two pounds a week when there was peace, and I was supposed to be grateful for it. Comes a war and they pay you like you was a queen. I’m getting seven pounds a week now, one way and another. So you take things easy, and if I find you getting back to work, with your back as it is, and your rheumatism, you’ll catch it from me, I’m telling you.’

‘It’s not right for me to sit at home, with the war and all,’ he said uneasily.

‘Well, did you make the war? No! You have some sense now.’

Now things were not so hard for Rose because when Jem could get out of bed he cleaned the rooms for her and there was a cup of tea waiting when she came in at night. But there was an emptiness in her and she could not pretend to herself there was not. One day she saw George’s wife in the street with a little girl of about four, and stopped her. The girl was hostile, but Rose said hurriedly: ‘I wanted to know, how’s George?’ Rather unwillingly came the reply: ‘He’s all right, so far, he’s in North Africa.’ She held the child to her as she spoke, as if for comfort, and the tears came into Rose’s eyes. The two women stood hesitating on the pavement, then Rose said appealingly: ‘It must be hard for you.’ ‘Well it’ll be over some day – when they’ve stopped playing soldiers,’ was the grim reply; and at this Rose smiled in sympathy and the women suddenly felt friendly towards each other. ‘Come over some time if you like,’ said George’s wife, slowly; and Rose said quickly: ‘I’d like to ever so much.’

So Rose got into the habit of going over once a week to the rooms that had originally been got ready for herself. She went because of the little girl, Jill. She was secretly asking herself now: Did I make a mistake then? Should I have married George? – But even as she asked the question she knew it was futile: she could have behaved in no other way; it was one of those irrational emotional things that seem so slight and meaningless, but are so powerful. And yet, time was passing, she was nearly thirty, and when she looked in the mirror she was afraid. She was very thin now, nothing but a white-faced shrimp of a girl, with lank, tired, stringy black hair. Her sombre dark eyes peered anxiously back at her over hollowed and bony cheeks. ‘It’s because I work so hard,’ she comforted herself. ‘No sleep, that’s what it is, and the bad food, and those chemicals in the factory … it’ll be better after the war.’ It was a question of endurance; somehow she had to get through the war, and then everything would be all right. Soon she looked forward all week to the Sunday night when she went over to George’s wife, with a little present for Jill. When she lay awake at nights she thought not of George, nor of the men she met at the factory who might have become interested in her, but of children. ‘What with the war and all the men getting killed,’ she sometimes worried, ‘perhaps it’s too late. There won’t be any men left by the time they’ve finished killing them all off.’ But if her father could have managed for himself before, he could not now; he was really dependent on her. So she always pushed away her fears and longings with the thought: ‘When the war’s over we can eat and sleep again, and then I’ll look better, and then perhaps …’

Not long before the war ended Rose came home late one night, dragging her feet tiredly along the dark pavement, thinking that she had forgotten to buy anything for supper. She turned into her street, was troubled by a feeling that something was wrong, looked down towards the house where she lived, and stopped dead. There were heaps of smoking rubble showing against the reddish glare of fire. At first she thought: ‘I must have come to the wrong street in the black-out.’ Then she understood and began to run towards her home, clutching her handbag tightly, holding the scarf under her chin. At the edge of the street was a deep crater. She nearly fell into it, but righted herself and walked on stumblingly among bomb refuse and tangling wires. Where her gate had been she stopped. A group of people were standing there. ‘Where’s my father?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Where is he?’ A young man came forward and said, ‘Take it easy, miss.’ He laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘You live here? I think your Dad was an unlucky one.’ The words brought no conviction to her and she stared at him, frowning. ‘What have you done with him?’ she asked, accusingly. ‘They took him away, miss.’ She stood passively, then she heavily lifted her head and looked around her. In this part of the street all the houses were gone. She pushed her way through the people and stood looking down at the steps to the basement door. The door was hanging loose from the frame, but the glass of the window was whole. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, half-aloud. She took a key from her handbag and slowly descended the steps over a litter of bricks. ‘Miss, miss,’ called the young man, ‘you can’t go down there.’ She made no reply, but fitted the key into the door and tried to turn it. It would not turn, so she pushed the door, it swung in on its one remaining hinge, and she went inside. The place looked as it always did, save that the ornaments on the mantelpiece had been knocked to the floor. It was half-lit from the light of burning houses over the street. She was slowly picking up the ornaments and putting them back when a hand was laid on her arm. ‘Miss,’ said a compassionate voice, ‘you can’t stay down here.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she retorted, with a flash of stubbornness.

She looked upwards. There was a crack across the ceiling and dust was still settling through the air. But a kettle was boiling on the stove. ‘It’s all right,’ she announced. ‘Look, the gas is still working. If the gas is all right then things isn’t too bad, that stands to reason, doesn’t it now?’

‘You’ve got the whole weight of the house lying on that ceiling,’ said the man dubiously.

‘The house has always stood over the ceiling hasn’t it,’ she said, with a tired humour that surprised him. He could not see what was funny, but she was grinning heavily at the joke. ‘So nothing’s changed,’ she said, airily. But there was a look on her face that worried him, and she was trembling in a hard, locked way, as if her muscles were held rigid against the weakness of her flesh. Sudden spasmodic shudders ran through her, and then she shut her jaw hard to stop them. ‘It’s not safe,’ he protested again, and she obediently gazed around her to see. The kettle and the pans stood as they had ever since she could remember; the cloth on the table was one her mother had embroidered, and through the cracked window she would see the black, solid shape of the dustcan, though beyond it there were no silhouettes of grey houses, only grey sky spurting red flame. ‘I think it’s all right,’ she said, stolidly. And she did. She felt safe. This was her home. She lifted the kettle and began making tea. ‘Have a cup?’ she inquired, politely. He did not know what to do. She took her cup to the table, blew off the thick dust and began stirring in sugar. Her trembling made the spoon tinkle against the cup.

‘I’ll be back,’ he announced suddenly, and went out, meaning to fetch someone who would know how to talk to her. But now there was no one outside. They had all gone over to the burning houses; and after a little indecision he thought: I’ll come back later, she’s all right for the moment. He helped with the others over at the houses until very late, and he was on his way home when he remembered: That kid, what’s she doing? Almost, he went straight home. He had not had his clothes off for nights, he was black and grimy, but he made the effort and returned to the basement under the heap of rubble. There was a faint glow beneath the ruin and, peering low, he saw two candles on the table, while a small figure sat sewing beside them. Well I’ll be … he thought, and went in. She was darning socks. He went beside her and said: ‘I’ve come to see if you’re all right.’ Rose worked on her sock and replied calmly: ‘Yes, of course I’m all right, but thanks for dropping in.’ Her eyes were enormous, with a wild look, and her mouth was trembling like that of an old woman. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, at a loss. ‘What do you think?’ she said tartly. Then she looked wonderingly at the sock which was stretched across her palm and shuddered. ‘Your Dad’s sock?’ he said carefully; and she gave him an angry glance and began to cry. That’s better, he thought, and went forward and made her lean against him while he said aloud: ‘Take it easy, take it easy, miss.’ But she did not cry for long. Almost at once she pushed him away and said: ‘Well, there’s no need to let the socks go to waste. They’ll do for someone.’

‘That’s right, miss.’ He stood hesitantly beside her and, after a moment, she lifted her head and looked at him. For the first time she saw him. He was a slight man, of middle height, who seemed young because of the open, candid face, though his hair was greying. His pleasant grey eyes rested compassionately on her and his smile was warm. ‘Perhaps you’d like them,’ she suggested. ‘And there’s his clothes, too – he didn’t have anything very special, but he always looked after his things.’ She began to cry again, this time more quietly, with small, shuddering sobs. He sat gently beside her, patting her hand as it lay on the table, repeating. ‘Take it easy, miss, take it easy, it’s all right.’ The sound of his voice soothed her and soon she came to an end, dried her eyes and said in a matter-of-fact voice: ‘There, I’m just silly, what’s the use of crying?’ She got up, adjusted the candles so that they would not gutter over the cloth, and said: ‘Well, we might as well have a cup of tea.’ She brought him one, and they sat drinking in silence. He was watching her curiously; there was something about her that tugged at his imagination. She was such an indomitable little figure sitting there staring out of sad, tired eyes, under the ruins of her home, like a kind of waif. She was not pretty, he decided, looking at the small, thin face, at the tired locks of black hair lying tidily beside it. He felt tender towards her; also he was troubled by her. Like everyone who lived through the big cities during the war, he knew a great deal about nervous strain; about shock; he could not have put words around what he knew, but he felt there was still something very wrong with Rose; outwardly, however, she seemed sensible, and so he suggested: ‘You’d better get yourself some sleep. It’ll be morning soon.’

‘I’ve got to be getting to work. I’m working an early shift.’

He said: ‘If you feel like it,’ thinking it might be better for her to work. And so he left her, and went back home to get some sleep.

That next evening he came by expecting to find her gone, and saw her sitting at the table, in the yellow glow from the candles, her hands lying idly before her, staring at the wall. Everything was very tidy, and the dust had been removed. But the crack in the ceiling had perceptibly widened. ‘Hasn’t anyone been to see you?’ he asked carefully. She replied evasively: ‘Oh, some old nosy parkers came and said I mustn’t stay.’ ‘What did you tell them?’ She hesitated and then said: ‘I said I wasn’t staying here, I was with some friends.’ He scratched his head, smiling ruefully: he could imagine the scene. ‘Those old nosy parkers,’ she went on resentfully, ‘interfering, telling people what to do.’

‘You know, miss, I think they were right, you ought to move out.’

‘I’m staying here,’ she announced defiantly, with unmistakable fear. ‘Nothing’s getting me out. Not all the king’s horses.’

‘I don’t expect they could spare the king’s horses,’ he said, trying to make her laugh; but she replied seriously, after considering it: ‘Well, even if they could.’ He smiled tenderly at her literal-mindedness, and suggested on an impulse: ‘Come to the pictures with me, doesn’t do any good to sit and mope.’

‘I’d like to, but it’s Sunday, see?’

‘What’s the matter with a Sunday?’

‘Every Sunday I go and see a friend of mine who has a little girl …’ she began to explain; and then she stopped, and went pale. She scrambled to her feet and said: ‘Oh oh, I never thought …’

‘What’s wrong, what’s up?’

‘Perhaps that bomb got them too, they were along this street – oh dear, oh dear, I never came to think – I’m wicked, that’s what I am …’ She had taken up her bag and was frantically wrapping her scarf around her head.

‘Here, miss, don’t go rushing off – I can find out for you, perhaps I know – what was her name?’

She told him. He hesitated for a moment and then said: ‘You’re having bad luck, and that’s a fact. She was killed the same time.’

‘She?’ asked Rose, quickly.

‘The mother was killed, the kid’s all right, it was playing in another room.’

Rose slowly sat down, thinking deeply, her hand still holding the scarf together at her chin. Then she said: ‘I’ll adopt her, that’s what I’ll do.’

He was surprised that she showed no sort of emotion at the death of the woman, her friend. ‘Hasn’t the kid got a dad?’ he asked. ‘He’s in North Africa,’ she said. ‘Well, he’ll come back after the war, he might not want you to adopt the kid.’ But she was silent, and her face was hard with determination. ‘Why this kid in particular?’ he asked. ‘You’ll have kids of your own one day.’

She said evasively: ‘She’s a nice kid, you should see her.’ He left it. He could see that there was something here too deep for him to grasp. Again he suggested: ‘Come to the pictures and take your mind off things.’ Obediently she rose and placed herself at his disposal, as it were. Walking along the streets she turned this way and that at the touch of his hand, but in spirit she was not with him. He knew that she sat through the film without seeing it. ‘She’s in a bad way,’ he said helplessly to himself. ‘It’s time she snapped out of it.’

But Rose was thinking only of Jill. Her whole being was now concentrated on the thought of the little girl. Tomorrow she would find out where she was. Some nosy parkers would have got hold of her – that was certain; they were always bossing other people. She would take Jill away from them and look after her – they could stay in the basement until the house got rebuilt … Rose was awake all night, dreaming of Jill; and next day she did not go to work. She went in search of the child. She found her grandmother had taken her. She had never thought of the grandmother, and the discovery was such a shock that she came back to the basement not knowing how she walked or what she did. The fact that she could not have the child seemed more terrible than anything else; it was as if she had been deprived maliciously of something she had a right to; something had been taken away from her – that was how she felt.

Jimmie came that night. He was asking himself why he kept returning, what it would come to; and yet he could not keep away. The image of Rose, the silent, frightened little girl – which was how he saw her – stayed with him all day. When he entered the basement she was sitting as usual by the candles, staring before her. He saw with dismay that she had made no effort to clean the place, and that her hair was untidy. This last fact seemed worse than anything.

He sat beside her, as usual, and tried to think of some way to make her ‘snap out of it’. At last he remarked: ‘You ought to be making some plans to move, Rose.’ At this, she irritably shrugged her shoulders. She wished he would stop pestering her with this sort of reminder. At the same time she was glad to have him there. She would have liked him to stay beside her silently; his warm friendliness wrapped her about like a blanket, but she could never relax into it because there was a part of her mind alert against him for fear of what he might say.

She was afraid, really, that he might talk of her father. Not once had she allowed herself to think of it – her father’s death, as it must have been. She said to herself the words: My father’s dead, just as she had once said to herself: My mother’s dead. Never had she allowed those words to form into images of death. If they had been ordinary deaths, deaths one could understand, it would have been different. People dying of illness or age, in bed; and then the neighbours coming, and then the funeral – that was understandable, that would have been different. But not the senselessness of a black bomb falling out of the sky, dropped by a nice young man in an aeroplane, not the silly business of a lorry running someone over – no, she could not bear to think of it. Underneath the surface of living was a black gulf, full of senseless horror. All day, at the factory (where she helped to make other bombs) or in the basement at night, she made the usual movements, said the expected things, but never allowed herself to think of death. She said: My father’s been killed, in a flat, ordinary voice, without letting pictures of death arise into her mind.

And now here was Jimmie, who had come into her life just when she needed his warmth and support most; and even this was two-faced, because it was the same Jimmie who made these remarks, forcing her to think … she would not think, she refused to respond. Jimmie noticed that whenever he made a remark connected in any way with the future, or even with the war, a blank, nervous look came on to her face and she turned away her eyes. He did not know what to do. For that evening he left it, and came back next day. This was the sixth day after the bomb, and he saw that the crack in the ceiling was bulging heavily downwards from the weight on top of it, and when a car passed, bits of plaster flaked down in a soft white rain. It was really dangerous. He had to do something. And still she sat there, her hands lying loosely in front of her, staring at the wall. He decided to be cruel. His heart was hammering with fright at what he was going to do; but he announced in a loud and cheerful voice: ‘Rose, your father’s dead, he’s not going to come back.’

She turned her eyes vaguely towards him; it seemed as if she had not heard at all. But he had to go on now. ‘Your Dad’s had it,’ he said brightly. ‘He’s copped it. He’s dead as a doornail, and it’s no use staying here.’

‘How do you know?’ she asked faintly. ‘Sometimes there are mistakes. Sometimes people come back, don’t they?’

This was much worse than he had thought. ‘He won’t come back, I saw him myself.’

‘No,’ she protested, sharply drawing breath.

‘Oh, yes I did. He was lying on the pavement, smashed to smithereens.’ He was waiting for her face to change. So far, it was obstinate, but her eyes were fixed on him like a scared rabbit’s. ‘Nothing left,’ he announced, jauntily, ‘his legs were gone – nothing there at all, and he didn’t have a head left either …’

And now Rose got to her feet with a sudden angry movement, and her eyes were small and black. ‘You …’ she began. Her lips shook. Jimmie remained seated. He was trying to look casual, even jaunty. He was forcing himself to smile. Underneath he was very frightened. Supposing this was the wrong thing? Supposing she went clean off her rocker … supposing … He passed his tongue quickly over his lips and glanced at her to see how she was. She was still staring at him. But now she seemed to hate him. He wanted to laugh from fright. But he stood up and, with an appearance of deliberate brutality, said: ‘Yes, Rosie girl, that’s how it is, your Dad’s nothing but a bleeding corpse – that’s good, bleeding!’ And now, he thought, I’ve done it properly! ‘You –’ began Rose again, her face contracted with hatred. ‘You –’ And such a stream of foul language came from her mouth that it took him by surprise. He had expected her to cry, to break down. She shouted and raved at him, lifting her fists to batter at his chest. Gently holding her off he said silently to himself, giving himself courage: ‘Ho, ho, Rosie my girl, what language, naughty, naughty!’ Out loud he said, with uneasy jocularity: ‘Hey take it easy, it’s not my fault now …’ He was surprised at her strength. The quiet, composed, neat little Rose was changed into a screaming hag, who scratched and kicked and clawed. ‘Get out of here you –’ and she picked up a candlestick and threw it at him. Holding his arm across his face, he retreated backwards to the door, gave it a kick with his heel, and went out. There he stood, waiting, with a half-rueful, half-worried smile on his face, listening. He was rubbing the scratches on his face with his handkerchief. At first there was silence, then loud sobbing. He straightened himself slowly. I might have hurt her bad, talking like that, he thought; perhaps she’ll never get over it. But he felt reassured; instinctively he knew he had done the right thing. He listened to the persistent crying for a while, and then wondered: Yes, but what do I do now? Should I go back again now, or wait a little? And more persistent than these worries was another: And what then? If I go back now, I’ll let myself in for something and no mistake. He slowly retreated from Rose’s door, down the damaged street, to a pub at the corner, which had not been hit. Must have a drink and a bit of a think … Inside the pub he leaned quietly by the counter, glass in hand, his grey eyes dark with worry. He heard someone say: ‘Well handsome, and what’s been biting you?’ He looked up, smiling, and saw Pearl. He had known her for some time – nothing serious; they exchanged greetings and bits of talk over the counter when he dropped in. He liked Pearl, but now he wanted to be left alone. She lingered and said again: ‘How’s your wife?’ He frowned quickly, and did not reply. She made a grimace as if to say: Well, if you don’t want to be sociable I’m not going to force you! But she remained where she was, looking at him closely. He was thinking: I shouldn’t have started it, I shouldn’t have taken her on. No business of mine what happened to her … And then, unconsciously straightening himself, with a small, desperate smile that was also triumphant: ‘You’re in trouble again, my lad, you’re in for it now!’ Pearl remarked in an offhand way: ‘You’d better get your face fixed up – been in a fight?’ He lifted his hand to his face and it came away covered with blood. ‘Yes,’ he said, grinning, ‘with a spitfire.’ She laughed, and he laughed with her. The words presented Rose to him in a new way. Proper little spitfire, he said to himself, caressing his cheek. Who would have thought Rose had all that fire in her? Then he set down the glass, straightened his tie, wiped his cheek with his handkerchief, nodded to Pearl with his debonair smile, and went out. Now he did not hesitate. He went straight back to the basement.

Rose was washing clothes in the sink. Her face was swollen and damp with crying, but she had combed her hair. When she saw him she went red, trying to meet his eyes, but could not. He went straight over to her and put his arms around her. ‘Here, Rosie, don’t get worked up now.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, with prim nervousness, trying to smile. Her eyes appealed to him. ‘I don’t know what came over me, I don’t really.’

‘It’s all right, I’m telling you.’

But now she was crying from shame. ‘I never use them words. Never. I didn’t know I knew them. I’m not like that. And now you’ll think …’ He gathered her to him and felt her shoulders shaking. ‘Now don’t you waste any more time thinking about it. You were upset – well, I wanted you to be upset, I did it on purpose, don’t you see, Rosie? You couldn’t go on like that, pretending to yourself.’ He kissed the part of her cheek that was not hidden in his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, I’m ever so sorry,’ she wept, but she sounded much better.

He held her tight and made soothing noises. At the same time he had the feeling of a man sliding over the edge of a dangerous mountain. But he could not stop himself now. It was much too late. She said, in a small voice: ‘You were quite right, I know you were. But it was just that I couldn’t bear to think. I didn’t have anybody but Dad. It’s been him and me together for ever so long. I haven’t got anybody at all …’ The thought came into her mind and vanished: Only George’s little girl. She belongs to me by rights.

Jimmie said indignantly: ‘Your Dad – I’m not saying anything against him, but it wasn’t right to keep you here looking after him. You should have got out and found yourself a nice husband and had kids.’ He did not understand why, though only for a moment, her body hardened and rejected him. Then she relaxed and said submissively: ‘You mustn’t say anything against my Dad.’

‘No,’ he agreed, mildly. ‘I won’t.’ She seemed to be waiting. ‘I haven’t got anything now,’ she said, and lifted her face to him. ‘You’ve got me,’ he said at last, and he was grinning a little from sheer nervousness. Her face softened, her eyes searched his, and she still waited. There was a silence, while he struggled with common sense. It was far too long a silence, and she was already reproachful when he said: ‘You come with me, Rosie, I’ll look after you.’

And now she collapsed against him again and wept: ‘You do love me, don’t you, you do love me?’ He held her and said: ‘Yes, of course, I love you.’ Well that was true enough. He did. He didn’t know why, there wasn’t any sense in it, she wasn’t even pretty, but he loved her. Later she said: ‘I’ll get my things together and come to where you live.’

He temporized, with an anxious glance at the ominous ceiling: ‘You stay here for a bit. I’ll get things fixed first.’

‘Why can’t I come now?’ She looked in a horrified, caged way around the basement as if she couldn’t wait to get out of it – she who had clung so obstinately to its shelter.

‘You just trust me now, Rosie. You pack your things, like a good girl. I’ll come back and fetch you later.’ She clutched his shoulders and looked into his face and pleaded: ‘Don’t leave me here long – that ceiling – it might fall.’ It was as if she had only just noticed it. He comforted her, put her persuasively away from him, and repeated he would be back in half an hour. He left her sorting out her belongings in worried haste, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

And now what was he going to do? He had no idea. Flats – they weren’t hard to find, with so many people evacuated; yes, but here it was after eleven at night, and he couldn’t even lay hands on the first week’s rent. Besides, he had to give his wife some money tomorrow. He walked slowly through the damaged street, in the thick dark, his hands in his pockets, thinking: Now you’re in a fix, Jimmie boy, you’re properly in a fix.

About an hour later his feet took him back. Rose was seated at the table, and on it were two cardboard boxes and a small suitcase – her clothes. Her hands were folded together in front of her.

‘It’s all right?’ she inquired, already on her feet.

‘Well, Rosie, it’s like this –’ he sat down and tried for the right words. ‘I should’ve told you. I haven’t got a place really.’

‘You’ve got no place to sleep?’ she inquired incredulously. He avoided her eyes and muttered: ‘Well, there’s complications.’ He caught a glimpse of her face and saw there – pity! It made him want to swear. Hell, this was a mess, and what was he to do? But the sorrowful warmth of her face touched him and, hardly knowing what he was doing, he let her put her arms around him, while he said: ‘I was bombed out last week.’

‘And you were looking after me, and you had no place yourself?’ she accused him, tenderly. ‘We’ll be all right. We’ll find a place in the morning.’

‘That’s right, we’ll have our own place and – can we get married soon?’ she inquired shyly, going pink.

At this, he laid his face against hers, so that she could not look at him, and said: ‘Let’s get a place first, and we can fix everything afterwards.’

She was thinking. ‘Haven’t you got no money?’ she inquired, diffidently at last. ‘Yes, but not the cash. I’ll have it later.’ He was telling himself again: You’re properly in the soup, Jimmie, in – the – soup!

‘I’ve got two hundred pounds in the post office,’ she offered, smiling with shy pride, as she fondled his hair. ‘And there’s the furniture from here – it’s not hurt by the bomb a bit. We can furnish nicely.’

‘I’ll give you back the money later,’ he said desperately.

‘When you’ve got it. Besides, my money is yours now,’ she said, smiling tenderly at him. ‘Ours.’ She tasted the word delicately, inviting him to share her pleasure in it.

Jimmie was essentially a man who knew people, got around, had irons in the fire and strings to pull; and by next afternoon he had found a flat. Two rooms and a kitchen, a cupboard for the coal, hot and cold water, and a share of the bathroom downstairs. Cheap, too. It was the top of an old house, and he was pleased that one could see trees from Battersea Park over the tops of the buildings opposite. Rose’ll like it, he thought. He was happy now. All last night he had lain on the floor beside her in the ruinous basement, under the bulging ceiling, consumed by dubious thoughts; now these had vanished, and he was optimistic. But when Rose came up the stairs with her packages she went straight to the window and seemed to shrink back. ‘Don’t you like it, Rosie?’ ‘Yes, I like it, but …’ Soon she laughed and said, apologetically: ‘I’ve always lived underneath – I mean, I’m not used to being so high up.’ He kissed her and teased her and she laughed too. But several times he noticed that she looked unhappily down from the window and quickly came away, with a swift, uncertain glance around at the empty rooms. All her life she had lived underground, with buses and cars rumbling past above eye-level, the weight of the big old house heavy over her, like the promise of protection. Now she was high above streets and houses, and she felt unsafe. Don’t be silly, she told herself. You’ll get used to it. And she gave herself to the pleasure of arranging furniture, putting things away. She took a hundred pounds of her money out of the post office and bought – but what she bought was chiefly for him. A chest for his clothes: she teased him because he had so many; a small wireless set; and finally a desk for him to work on, for he had said he was studying for an engineering degree of some kind. He asked her why she bought nothing for herself, and she said, defensively, that she had plenty. She had arranged the new flat to look like her old home. The table stood the same way, the calendar with yellow roses hung on the wall, and she worked happily beside her stove, making the same movements she had used for years; for the cupboard, the drying-line and the draining-board had been fixed exactly as they had been ‘at home’. Unconsciously, she still used that phrase. ‘Here,’ he protested, ‘isn’t this home now?’ She said seriously: ‘Yes, but I can’t get used to it.’ ‘Then you’d better get used to it,’ he complained, and then kissed her to make amends for his resentment. When this had happened several times he let out: ‘Anyway, the basement’s fallen in, I passed today, and it’s filled with bricks and stuff.’ He had intended not to tell her. She shrank away from him and went quite white. ‘Well, you knew it wasn’t going to stay for long,’ he said. She was badly shaken. She could not bear to think of her old home gone; she could imagine it, the great beams slanting into it, filled with dirty water – she imagined it and shut out the vision for ever. She was quiet and listless all that day, until he grew angry with her. He was quite often angry. He would protest when she bought things for him. ‘Don’t you like it?’ she would inquire, looking puzzled. ‘Yes, I like it fine, but …’ And later she was hurt because he seemed reluctant to use the chest, or the desk.

There were other points where they did not understand each other. About four weeks after they moved in she said: ‘You aren’t much of a one for home, are you?’ He said, in genuine astonishment: ‘What do you mean? I’m stuck here like …’ He stopped, and put a cigarette in his mouth to take the place of speech. From his point of view he had turned over a new leaf; he was a man who hated to be bound, to spend every evening the same way; and now he came to Rose most evenings straight from work, ate supper with her, paid her sincere compliments on her cooking, and then – well, there was every reason why he should come, he would be a fool not to! He was consumed by secret pride in her. Fancy Rose, a girl like her, living with her old man all these years, like a girl shut into a convent, or not much better – you’d think there was something wrong with a girl who got to be thirty before having a man in her bed! But there was nothing wrong with Rose. And at work he’d think of their nights and laugh with deep satisfaction. She was all right, Rose was. And then, slowly, a doubt began to eat into the pride. It wasn’t natural that she’d been alone all those years. Besides, she was a good-looker. He laughed when he remembered that he had thought her quite ugly at first. Now that she was happy, and in a place of her own, and warmed through with love, she was really pretty. Her face had softened, she had a delicate colour in her thin cheeks, and her eyes were deep and welcoming. It was like coming home to a little cat, all purring and pliable. And when he took her to the pictures he walked proudly by her, conscious of the other men’s glances at her. And yet he was the first man who had had the sense to see what she could be? – hmm, not likely, it didn’t make sense.

He talked to Rose, and suddenly the little cat showed its sharp and unpleasant claws. ‘What is it you want to know?’ she demanded coldly, after several clumsy remarks from him. ‘Well, Rosie – it’s that bloke George, you said you were going to marry him when you were a kid still?’

‘What of it?’ she said, giving him a cool glance.

‘You were together for a long time?’

‘Three years,’ she said flatly.

‘Three years!’ he exclaimed. He had not thought of anything so serious. ‘Three years is a long time.’

She looked at him with a pleading reproach that he entirely failed to understand. As far as she was concerned the delight Jimmie had given her completely cancelled out anything she had known before. George was less than a memory. When she told herself that Jimmie was the first man she had loved, it was true, because that was how she felt. The fact that he could now question it, doubting himself, weakened the delight, made her unsure not only of him but of herself. How could he destroy their happiness like this! And into the reproach came contempt. She looked at him with heavy, critical eyes; and Jimmie felt quite wild with bewilderment and dismay – she could look at him like that! – then that proved she had been lying when she said he was the first – if she had said so … ‘But, Rosie,’ he blustered, ‘it stands to reason. Engaged three years, and you tell me …’

‘I’ve never told you anything,’ she pointed out, and got up from the table and began stacking the dishes ready for washing.

‘Well, I’ve a right to know, haven’t I?’ he cried out, unhappily.

But this was very much a mistake. ‘Right?’ she inquired in a prim, disdainful voice. She was no longer Rose, she was something much older. She seemed to be hearing her mother speaking. ‘Who’s talking about rights?’ She dropped the dishes neatly into the hot, soapy water and said: ‘Men! I’ve never asked you what you did before me. And I’m not interested either, if you want to know. And what I did, if I did anything, doesn’t interest you neither.’ Here she turned on the tap so that the splashing sounds made another barrier. Her ears filled with the sound of water, she thought: Men, they always spoil everything. She had forgotten George, he didn’t exist. And now Jimmie brought him to life and made her think of him. Now she was forced to wonder: Did I love him as much then? Was it the same as this? And if her happiness with George had been as great as now it was with Jimmie, then that very fact seemed to diminish love itself and make it pathetic and uncertain. It was as if Jimmie were doing it on purpose to upset her. That, at any rate, was how she felt.

But across the din of the running water Jimmie shouted: ‘So I’m not interested, is that it?’

‘No, you’d better not be interested,’ she announced, and looked stonily before her, while her hands worked among the hot, slippery plates. ‘So that’s how it is?’ he shouted again, furiously.

To which she did not reply. He remained leaning at the table, calling Rose names under his breath, but at the same time conscious of bewilderment. He felt that all his possessive masculinity was being outraged and flouted; there was, however, no doubt that she felt as badly treated as he did. As she did not relent he went to her and put his arms around her. It was necessary for him to destroy this aloof and wounded-looking female and restore the loving, cosy woman. He began to tease: ‘Spitfire, little cat, that’s what you are.’ He pulled her hair and held her arms to her sides so that she could not dry the plates. She remained unresponsive. Then he saw that the tears where running down her immobile and stubborn cheeks, and in a flush of triumph picked her up and carried her over to the bed. It was all quite easy, after all.

But maybe not so easy, because late that night, in a studiously indifferent voice, Rose inquired from the darkness at his side: ‘When are we going to get married?’ He stiffened. He had forgotten – or almost – about this. Hell, wasn’t she satisfied? Didn’t he spend all his evenings here? He might just as well be married, seeing what she expected of him. ‘Don’t you trust me, Rosie?’ he inquired at last. ‘Yes, I trust you,’ she said, rather doubtfully, and waited. ‘There’s reasons why I can’t marry you just now.’ She remained silent, but her silence was like a question hanging in the dark between them. He did not reply, but turned and kissed her. ‘I love you, Rosie, you know that, don’t you?’ Yes, she knew that; but about a week later he left her one morning saying: ‘I can’t come tonight, Rosie. I’ve got to put in some work on this exam.’ He saw her glance at the desk she had bought him and which he had never used. ‘I’ll be along tomorrow as usual,’ he said quickly, wanting to escape from the troubled, searching eyes.

She asked suddenly: ‘Your wife getting anxious about you?’

He caught his breath and stared at her: ‘Who told you?’ She laughed derisively. ‘Well, who told you?’

‘No one told me,’ she said, with contempt.

‘Then I must have been talking in my sleep,’ he muttered, anxiously.

She laughed loudly: ‘“Someone told me.” “Talking in your sleep” – you must think I’m stupid.’ And with a familiar, maddening gesture, she turned away and picked up a dishcloth.

‘Leave the dishes alone, they’re clean anyway,’ he shouted.

‘Don’t shout at me like that.’

‘Rose,’ he appealed after a moment, ‘I was going to tell you, I just couldn’t tell you – I tried to, often.’

‘Yes?’ she said, laconically. That yes of hers always exasperated him. It was like a statement of rock-bottom disbelief, a basic indifference to himself and the world of men. It was as if she said: ‘There’s only one person I can rely on – myself.

‘Rosie, she won’t divorce me, she won’t give me my freedom.’ These dramatic words were supplied straight to his tongue by the memory of a film he had seen the week before. He felt ashamed of himself. But her face had changed. ‘You should have told me,’ she said; and once again he was disconcerted because of the pity in her voice. She had instinctively turned to him with a protective movement. Her arms went around him and he let his head sink on her shoulder with that old feeling that he was being swept away, that he had no control over the things he did and said. Hell, he thought, even while he warmed to her tenderness: to hell with it. I never meant to get me and Rosie into this fix. In the meantime she held him comfortingly, bending her face to his hair, but there was a rigidity in her pose that told him she was still waiting. At last she said: ‘I want to have kids. I’m not getting any younger.’ He tightened his arms around her waist while he thought: I never thought of that. For he had two children of his own. Then he thought: She’s right. She should have kids. Remember how she got worked up over that other kid in the blitz? Women need to have kids. He thought of her with his child, and pride stirred in him. He realized he would be pleased if she got pregnant, and felt even more at sea. Rose said: ‘Ask her again, Jimmie. Make her divorce you. I know women get spiteful and that about divorces, but if you talk to her nice –’ He miserably promised that he would. ‘You’ll ask her tonight?’ she insisted. ‘Well …’ the fact was, that he had not intended to go home tonight. He wanted to have an evening to himself – go to the pub, see some of his pals, even work for an hour or so. ‘Weren’t you going home tonight?’ she asked, incredulously, seeing his face. ‘No, I meant it, I want to do some work. I’ve got to get this exam, Rosie. I know I can take it if I work a little. And then I’m qualified. Just now I’m not one thing and I’m not the other.’ She accepted this with a sigh, then pleaded: ‘Go home tomorrow then and ask her.’

‘But tomorrow I want to come and see you, Rosie, don’t you want me?’ She sighed again, not knowing that she did, and smiled: ‘You’re nothing but a baby, Jimmie.’ He began coaxing: ‘Come on, be nice, Rosie, give me a kiss.’ He felt it was urgently necessary for him to have her warm and relaxed and loving again before he could leave her with a quiet mind. And so she was – but not entirely. There was a thoughtful line across her forehead and her mouth was grave and sad. Oh, to hell with it, he thought, as he went off. To hell with them all.

The next evening he went to Rose anxiously. He had drunk himself gay and debonair in the pub, he had flirted a little with Pearl, talked sarcastically about women and marriage, and finally gone home to sleep. He had breakfast with his family, avoided his wife’s sardonic eye, and went off to work with a bad hangover. At the factory, as always, he became absorbed in what he was doing. It was a small factory which made precision instruments. He was highly skilled, but in status an ordinary workman. He knew, had known for a long time, that with a little effort he could easily take an examination which would lift him into the middle classes as far as money was concerned. It was the money he cared about, not the social aspect of it. For years his wife had been nagging at him to better himself, and he had answered impatiently because, for her, what mattered was to outdo their neighbours. This he despised. But she was right for the wrong reasons. It was a question of devoting a year of evenings to study. What was a year of one’s life? Nothing. And he had always found examinations easy. That day, at the factory, he had decided to tell Rose that she would not see as much of him in future. He swore angrily to himself that she must understand a man had a duty to himself. He was only forty, after all … And yet, even while he spoke firmly to himself and to the imaginary Rose, he saw a mental picture of the desk she had bought him that stood unused in the living room of the flat. ‘Well, who’s stopping you from working?’ she would inquire, puzzled. Genuinely puzzled, too. But he could not work in that flat, he knew that; although in the two months before he had met Rose he was working quite steadily in his evenings. That day he was cursing the fate that had linked him with Rose; and by evening he was hurrying to her as if some terrible thing might happen if he were not there by supper-time. He was expecting her to be cold and distant, but she fell into his arms as if he had been away for weeks. ‘I missed you,’ she said, clinging to him. ‘I was so lonely without you.’

‘It was only one night,’ he said, jauntily, already reassured.

‘You were gone two nights last week,’ she said, mournfully. At once he felt irritated. ‘I didn’t know you counted them up.’ he said, trying to smile. She seemed ashamed that she had said it. ‘I just get lonely,’ she said, kissing him guiltily. ‘After all …’

‘After all what?’ His voice was aggressive.

‘It’s different for you,’ she defended herself. ‘You’ve got – other things.’ Here she evaded his look. ‘But I go to work, and then I come home and wait for you. There’s nothing but you to look forward to.’ She spoke hastily, as if afraid to annoy him, and then she put her arms around his neck and kissed him coaxingly and said: ‘I’ve cooked you something you like – can you smell it?’ And she was the warm and affectionate woman he wanted her to be. Later he said: ‘Listen, Rosie girl, I’ve got to tell you something. That exam – I must start working for it.’ She said, gaily, at once: ‘But I told you already, you can work here at the desk and I’ll sew while you work, and it’ll be lovely.’ The idea seemed to delight her, but his heart chilled at it. It seemed to him quite insulting to their romantic love that she should not mind his working, that she should suggest prosaic sewing – just like a wife. He spent the next few evenings with her, newly in love, absorbed in her. And he felt hurt when she suggested hurriedly – for she was afraid of a rebuff – ‘If you want to work tonight, I don’t mind, Jimmie.’ He said laughing: ‘Oh, to hell with work, you’re the only work I want.’ She was flattered, but the thoughtful line was marked deep across her forehead. About a fortnight after his wife was first mentioned she delicately inquired: ‘Have you asked her about the divorce?’

He turned away, saying evasively, ‘She wouldn’t listen just now.’ He was not looking at her, but he could feel her heavy, questioning look on him. His irritation was so strong that he had to make an effort to control it. Also he was guilty, and that guilt he could understand even less than the irritation. He all at once became very gay, so that his mood infected her, and they were giggling and laughing like two children. ‘You’re just conventional, that’s what you are,’ he said, pulling her hair. ‘Conventional?’ she tasted the big word doubtfully. ‘Women always want to get married. What do you want to get married for? Aren’t we happy? Don’t we love each other? Getting married would just spoil it.’ But theoretical statements like this always confused Rose. She would consider each of them separately, with a troubled face, rather respectful of the intellectual minds that had formulated them. And while she considered them, the current of her emotions ran steadily and deep, unconnected with words. From the gulf of love in which she was sunk she murmured, fondly: ‘Oh, you – you just talk and talk.’ ‘Men are polygamous,’ he said gaily, ‘it’s a fact, scientists say so.’ ‘What are women then?’ she asked, keeping her end up. ‘They aren’t polygamous.’ She considered this seriously, as was her way, and said doubtfully: ‘Yes?’ ‘Hell,’ he expostulated, half seriously, half laughing, ‘you’re telling me you’re polygamous?’ But Rose moved uneasily, with a laugh, away from him. To connect a word like polygamous, reeking as it did of the ‘nosy parkers’ who were, she felt, her chief enemy in life, with herself, was too much to ask of her. Silence. ‘You’re thinking of George,’ he suddenly shouted, jealously. ‘I wasn’t doing any such thing,’ she said, indignantly. Her genuine indignation upset him. He always hated it when she was serious. As far as he was concerned, he had just been teasing her – he thought.

Once she said: ‘Why do you always look cross when I say what I think about something?’ Now that surprised him – didn’t she always say what she thought? ‘I don’t get cross, Rosie, but why do you take everything so serious?’ To this she remained silent, in the darkness. He could see the small, thoughtful face turned away from him, lit by the bleak light from the window. The thoughtfulness seemed to him like a reproach. He liked her childish and responsive. ‘Don’t I make you happy, Rose?’ He sounded miserable. ‘Happy?’ she said, testing the word. Then she unexpectedly laughed and said: ‘You talk so funny sometimes you make me laugh.’ ‘I don’t see what’s funny, you’ve no sense of humour, that’s what’s wrong with you.’ But instead of responding to his teasing voice, she thought it over and said seriously: ‘Well I laugh at things, don’t I? I must be laughing at something then. My Dad used to say I hadn’t any sense of humour. I used to say to him: “How do you know what I laugh at isn’t as funny as what you laugh at?”’ He said, wryly, after a moment, ‘When you laugh, it’s like you’re not laughing at all, it’s something nasty.’ ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘I ask you if you’re happy and you laugh – what’s funny about being happy?’ Now he was really resentful. Again she meditated about it, instead of responding – as he had hoped – with a laugh or some reassurance that he made her perfectly happy. ‘Well, it stands to reason,’ she concluded, ‘people who talk about happy or unhappy, and then the long words – and the things you say, women are like this, and men are like that, and polygamous and all the rest – well …’ ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Well, it just seems funny to me,’ she said lamely. For she could have found no words at all for what she felt, that deep knowledge of the dangerousness and the sadness of life. Bombs fell on old men, lorries killed people, and the war went on and on, and the nights when he did not come to her she would sit by herself, crying for hours, not knowing why she was crying, looking down from the high window at the darkened, ravaged streets – a city dark with the shadow of war.

In the early days of their love Jimmie had loved best the hours of tender, aimless, frivolous talk. But now she was, it seemed, always grave. And she questioned him endlessly about his life, about his childhood. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he would inquire, unwilling to answer. And then she was hurt. ‘If you love someone, you want to know about them, it stands to reason.’ So he would give simple replies to her questions, the facts, not the spirit, which she wanted. ‘Was your Mum good to you?’ she would ask, anxiously. ‘Did she cook nice?’ She wanted him to talk about the things he had felt; but he would reply, shortly: ‘Yes,’ or ‘Not bad.’

‘Why don’t you want to tell me?’ she would ask, puzzled.

He repeated that he didn’t mind telling her; but all the same he hated it. It seemed to him that no sooner had one of those long, companionable silences fallen, in which he could drift off into a pleasant dream, than the questions began. ‘Why didn’t you join up in the war?’ she asked once. ‘They wouldn’t have me, that’s why.’ ‘You’re lucky,’ she said, fiercely. ‘Lucky nothing, I tried over and over. I wanted to join.’

And then, to her obstinate silence, he said: ‘You’re queer. You’ve got all sorts of ideas. You talk like a pacifist; it’s not right when there’s a war on.’

‘Pacifist!’ she cried, angrily. ‘Why do you use all these silly words? I’m not anything.’

‘You ought to be careful, Rosie, if you go saying things like that when people can hear you, they’ll think you’re against the war, you’ll get into trouble.’

‘Well, I am against the war, I never said I wasn’t.’

‘But Rosie –’

‘Oh, shut up. You make me sick. You all make me sick. Everybody just talks and talks, and those fat old so-and-so’s talking away in Parliament, they just talk so they can’t hear themselves think. Nobody knows anything and they pretend they do. Leave me alone, I don’t want to listen.’ He was silent. To this Rose he had nothing to say. She was a stranger to him. Also, he was shocked: he was a talker who liked picking up phrases from books and newspapers and using them in a verbal game. But she, who could not use words, who was so deeply inarticulate, had her own ideas and stuck to them. Because he used words so glibly she tried to become a citizen of his country – out of love for him and because she felt herself lacking. She would sit by the window with the newspapers and read earnestly, line by line, having first overcome her instinctive shrinking from the language of violence and hatred that filled them. But the war news, the slogans, just made her exhausted and anxious. She turned to the more personal. ‘War takes toll of marriage,’ she would read. ‘War disrupts homes.’ Then she dropped the paper and sat looking before her, her brow puzzled. That headline was about her, Rose. And again, she would read the divorces; some judge would pronounce: ‘This unscrupulous woman broke up a happy marriage and …’ Again the paper dropped while Rose frowned and thought. That meant herself. She was one of those bad women. She was The Other Woman. She might even be that ugly thing, A Co-Respondent … But she didn’t feel like that. It didn’t make sense. So she stopped reading the newspapers, she simply gave up trying to understand.

She felt she was not on an intellectual level with Jimmie, so instinctively she fell back on her feminine weapons – much to his relief. She was all at once very gay, and he fell easily into the mood. Neither of them mentioned his wife for a time. It was their happiest time. After love, lying in the dark, they talked aimlessly, watching the sky change through moods of cloud and rain and tinted light, watching the searchlights. They took no notice of raids or danger. The war was nearly over, and they spoke as if it had already ended. ‘If we was killed now, I shouldn’t mind,’ she said, seriously, one night when the bombs were bad. He said: ‘We’re not going to get killed, they can’t kill us.’ It sounded a simple statement of fact: their love and happiness was proof enough against anything. But she said again, earnestly: ‘Even if we was killed, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t see how anything afterwards could be as good as this now.’

‘Ah, Rosie, don’t be so serious always.’

It was not long before they quarrelled again – because she was so serious. She was asking questions again about his past. She was trying to find out why the army wouldn’t have him. He would never tell her. And then he said, impatiently, one night: ‘Well, if you must know, I’ve got ulcers … ah, for God’s sake, Rosie, don’t fuss, I can’t stand being fussed.’ For she had given a little cry and was holding him tight. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I haven’t been cooking the proper things for you.’

‘Rose, for crying out aloud, don’t go on.’

‘But if you’ve got ulcers you must be fed right, it stands to reason.’ And next evening when she served him some milk pudding, saying anxiously: ‘This won’t hurt your stomach,’ he flared up and said, ‘I told you, Rosie, I won’t have you coddling me.’ Her face was loving and stubborn and she said: ‘But you’ve got no sense …’

‘For the last time, I’m not going to put up with it.’

She turned away, her mouth trembling, and he went to her and said desperately: ‘Now don’t you take on, Rosie, you mean it nicely, but I don’t like it, that’s why I didn’t tell you before. Get it?’ She responded to him, listlessly, and he found himself thinking, angrily: ‘I’ve got two wives, not one …’ They were both dismayed and unhappy because their happiness was so precarious it could vanish overnight just because of a little thing like ulcers and milk pudding.

A few days later he ate in heavy silence through the supper she had provided, and then sarcasm broke out of him: ‘Well, Rosie, you’ve decided to humour me, that’s what it is.’ The meal had consisted of steamed fish, baked bread and very weak tea, which he hated. She looked uncomfortable, but said obstinately: ‘I went to a friend of mine who’s a chemist at the corner, and he told me what it was right for you to eat.’ Involuntarily he got up, his face dark with fury. He hesitated, then he went out, slamming the door.

He stood moodily in the pub, drinking. Pearl came across and said: ‘What’s eating you tonight?’ Her tone was light, but her eyes were sympathetic. The sympathy irritated him. He ground out: ‘Women!’ slammed down his glass and turned to go. ‘Doesn’t cost you anything to be polite,’ she said tartly, and he replied: ‘Doesn’t cost you anything to leave me alone.’ Outside he hesitated a moment, feeling guilty. Pearl had been a friend for so long, and she had a soft spot for him – also, she knew about his wife, and about Rose, and made no comment, seemed not to condemn. She was a nice girl, Pearl was – he went back and said, hastily: ‘Sorry, Pearl, didn’t mean it.’ Without waiting for a reply he left again, and this time set off for home.

The woman he called his wife looked up from her sewing and asked briefly: ‘What do you want now?’

‘Nothing.’ He sat down, picked up a paper and pretended to read, conscious of her glances. They were not hostile. They had gone a long way beyond that, and the fact that she seemed scarcely interested in him was a relief after Rose’s persistent, warm curiosity – like loving white fingers strangling him, he thought involuntarily. ‘Want something to eat?’ she inquired at last.

‘What have you got?’ he inquired cautiously, thinking of the tasteless steamed fish and baked bread he had just been offered.

‘Help yourself,’ she returned, and he went to the cupboard on the landing, filled a plate with bread and mustard pickles and cheese, and came back to the room where she was. She glanced at his plate, but made no comment. After a while he asked sarcastically: ‘Aren’t you going to tell me I shouldn’t eat pickles?’

‘Couldn’t care less,’ she returned equably. ‘If you want to kill yourself, it’s your funeral.’ At this he laughed loudly, and she joined him. Later, she asked: ‘Staying here the night?’

‘If you don’t mind.’ At this she gave a snort of derisive laughter, got up and said: ‘Well, I’m off to bed. You can’t have the sofa because the kids have got a friend and he’s got it. You’ll have to put a blanket and a cushion on the floor.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, indifferently. ‘How are the kids?’ he inquired, as an afterthought.

‘Fine – if you’re interested.’

‘I asked, didn’t I?’ he replied, without heat. All this conversation had been conducted quietly, indifferently, and the undercurrent was almost amiable. An outsider would have said they hardly knew each other. When she had gone he took a blanket from a drawer, wrapped it round his legs, and settled himself in a chair. He had meant to think about himself and Rose, but instead he dropped off at once. He left the house early, before anyone was awake. All day at the factory he thought: About Rose, what must I do about Rose? After work he went instinctively to the pub. Pearl stood quietly behind the counter, showing him by her manner that she was not holding last night’s bad humour against him. He meant to have one drink and go, but he had three. He liked Pearl’s cheerful humour. She told him that her young man was playing about with another girl, and added, as if it hardly concerned her: ‘There’s plenty of fish in the sea after all.’

‘That’s right,’ he said, non-committally.

‘Well, we all have our troubles,’ she said, with a half-humorous sigh.

‘Yes – for what they’re worth.’ At this he felt a pang of guilt because he had been thinking of Rose. Pearl was giving him a keen look. Then she said: ‘I didn’t say he hadn’t been worth it. But now that other girl’s getting all the benefit …’ Here she laughed grimly.

He liked this cheerful philosophy, and could not prevent himself saying: ‘He’s got no sense, turning you up.’ He looked with appreciation at her crown of bright yellow curls, at her shapely body. Her eyes brightened, and he said good night quickly, and left. He mustn’t get mixed up with Pearl now, he was thinking.

It was after eight. Usually he was with Rose by seven. He lagged down the street, thinking of what he would say to her, and entered the flat with a blank mind. For some reason he was very tired. Rose had eaten by herself, cleared the table, and now sat beside it, frowning over a newspaper. ‘What are you reading?’ he asked, for something to break the ice. Looking over her shoulder he saw that she had marked a column headed: ‘Surplus Women Present Problem to Churches.’ He was surprised.

‘That’s what I am, a surplus woman,’ she said, and gave that sudden, unexpected laugh.

‘What’s funny?’ he asked, uncomfortably.

‘I’ve a right to laugh if I want,’ she retorted. ‘Better than crying, anyhow.’

‘Oh, Rose,’ he said, helplessly, ‘oh, Rose stop it now …’ She burst into tears and clung to him. But this was not the end, and he knew it. Later that night she said: ‘I want to tell you something …’ and he thought: Now I’m for it – whatever it is.

‘You were home last night, weren’t you.’

‘Yes,’ he said, alertly.

A pause, and then she asked: ‘What did she say?’

‘About what?’ It was a fact that he did not immediately understand her. ‘Jimmie,’ she said incredulously, under her breath and he said: ‘Rosie, it’s no good, I told you that before.’

She did not immediately reply, but when she did her voice was very bitter: ‘Well, I see how it is now.’

‘You don’t see at all,’ he said sarcastically.

‘Well, then, tell me?’ He was silent. Her silence was like a persistent question. Again he felt as if the warm, soft fingers were wrapping around him. He felt suffocated. ‘There’s nothing to explain, I just can’t help it.’ A pause, and then she said in the flat, laconic way he hated: ‘Yes?’ That was all. For the time being, at least. A week later she said, calmly: ‘I went to see Jill’s Granny today.’

His heart faltered and he thought: Now what? ‘Well?’ he inquired.

‘George was killed last month. In Italy.’

He felt triumph, then he said guiltily: ‘I’m sorry.’ She waved this away and said: ‘I told her Granny that I want to adopt Jill.’

‘But Rosie …’ Then he saw her face and quailed.

‘I want kids,’ she said fiercely. He dropped his gaze.

‘Her Granny won’t want to give her up.’

‘I’m not so sure. At first she said no, then she thought it over a bit. She’s getting old now – eighty next year. She thinks perhaps Jill’d be better with me.’

‘You want to have the kid here?’ he asked, incredulously.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘You’re working all day.’ She was silent, he looked at her – and slowly coloured.

‘Listen a minute,’ she began, persuasively – not unpleasantly at all, though every word wounded Jimmie. ‘I furnished this place. It was my furniture and my money. And I’ve got a hundred still in the post office in case of accidents – I’ll need it; now the war’s over we won’t be earning so much money, if I know anything. So far, I’ve not been …’ But here her instinctive delicacy overcame her, and she could not go on. She wanted to say that she paid for the food, paid for everything. Lately, even the rent. One week he had said, apologetically, that he hadn’t the cash, and that if she could do it this once – but now it was a regular thing.

‘You want me to give you the money so you can stay here with the kid?’ he inquired, cautiously. She was blushing with embarrassment. ‘No, no,’ she said, quickly. ‘Listen. If you can just pay the rent – that would be enough. I could get a part-time job, just the mornings. Jill goes to school now, and I’d manage somehow.’

He digested this silently. He was thinking, incredulously: She wants to have a kid here, a kid’s always in the way – that means she can’t love me any more. He said, slowly: ‘Well, Rosie, if that’s what you want, then go ahead.’

Her face cleared into vivid happiness and she came running to him in the old way and kissed him and said: ‘Oh, Jimmie; oh, Jimmie …’ He held her and thought, bitterly, that all this joy was not because of him, all she cared about was the kid – women! But at the back of his mind were two other thoughts: First, that he did not know how he would find the money to pay the rent unless he passed that examination soon, and the other was that the authorities would never let Rose have Jill.

Next evening Rose was despondent. ‘Did you see the officials?’ he asked at last.

‘Yes.’ She would not look at him. She was staring helpless down from the window.

‘Wasn’t it any good?’

‘They said I must prove myself a fit and proper person. So I said that I was. I told them I’d known Jill since she was born. I said I knew her mother and father.’

‘That’s true enough,’ he could not help interjecting, jealously. She gave him a cold look and said: ‘Don’t start that now. I told them her Granny was too old, and I could easily look after Jill.’

‘Well then?’

She was silent, then, wringing her hands unconsciously, she cried out: ‘They wasn’t nice, they wasn’t nice to me at all. There were two of them, a woman and a man. They said: How could I support Jill? I said I could get money. They said I must show them papers and things …’ She was silently crying now, but she did not come to him. She stayed at the window, her back turned, shutting him out of her sorrow. ‘They asked me, how could a working girl look after a child, and I said I’d do it easy, and they said, did I have a husband …’ Here she leaned her head against the wall and sobbed bitterly. After a time he said: ‘Well, Rosie, it looks as if I’m not good for you. Perhaps you’d better give me up and get yourself a proper husband.’ At this she jerked her head up, looked incredulously at him and cried: ‘Jimmie! How could I give you up …’ He went to her, thinking, in relief: ‘She loves me better after all.’ He meant: better than the child.

It seemed that Rose had accepted her defeat. For some days she talked sorrowfully about ‘those nosy parkers’ at the Council. She was even humorous, though in the way that made him uneasy. ‘I’ll go to them,’ she said, smiling grimly, ‘I’ll go and I’ll say: I can’t help being a surplus woman. Don’t blame me, blame the war, it’s not my fault that they keep killing all the men off in their silly wars …’

And then his jealousy grew unbearable and he said: ‘You love Jill better than me.’ She laughed in amazement, and said, ‘Don’t be a baby, Jimmie.’ ‘Well, you must. Look how you go on and on about that kid. It’s all you think about.’

‘There isn’t no sense in you being jealous of Jill.’

‘Jealous,’ he said, roughly. ‘Who says I’m jealous?’

‘Well, if you’re not, what are you then?’

‘Oh, go to hell, go to hell,’ he muttered to himself, as he put his arms around her. Aloud he said: ‘Come on, Rosie girl, come on, stop being like this, be like you used to be, can’t you?’

‘I’m not any different,’ she said patiently, submitting to his caresses with a sigh.

‘So you’re not any different,’ he said, exasperatedly. Then, controlling himself with difficulty he coaxed: ‘Rosie, Rosie, don’t you love me a little …’

For the truth was he was becoming obsessed with the difference in Rose. He thought of her continuously as she had been. It was like dreaming of another woman, she was so changed now. At work, busy with some job that needed all his attention, he would start as if stung, and mutter: ‘Rose – oh, to hell with her!’ He was remembering, with anguish, how she had run across the room to welcome him, how responsive she had been, how affectionate. He thought of her patient kindliness now, and wanted to swear. After work he would go straight to the flat, reaching it even before she did. The lights would be out, the rooms cold, like a reminder of how Rose had changed. She would come in, tired, laden with string-bags, to find him seated at the table staring at her, his eyes black with jealousy. ‘This place is as cold as a street-corner,’ he would say, angrily. She looked at him, sighed, then said, reasonably: ‘But Jimmie, look, here’s where I keep the sixpences for the gas – why don’t you light the fire?’ Then he would go to her, holding down her arms as he kissed her, and she would say: ‘Just leave me a minute, Jimmie. I must get the potatoes on or there’ll be no supper.’

‘Can’t the potatoes wait a minute?’

‘Let me get my arms free, Jimmie.’ He held them, so she would carefully reach them out from under the pressure of his grip, and put the string-bags on the table. Then she would turn to kiss him. He noticed that she would be glancing worriedly at the curtains, which had not been drawn, or at the rubbish-pail, which had not been emptied. ‘You can’t even kiss me until you’ve done all the housework,’ he cried, sullenly. ‘All right then, you tip me the wink when you’ve got a moment to spare and you don’t mind being kissed.’

To this she replied, listlessly but patiently: ‘Jimmie, I come straight home from work and there’s nothing ready, and before you didn’t come so early.’

‘So now you’re complaining because I come straight here. Before, you complained because I dropped in for a drink somewhere first.’

‘I never complained.’

‘You sulked, even if you didn’t complain.’

‘Well, Jimmie,’ she said, after a sorrowful pause, as she peeled the potatoes. ‘If I went to drink with a boy-friend you wouldn’t like it either.’

‘That means Pearl, I suppose. Anyway, it’s quite different.’

‘Why is it different?’ she asked, reasonably. ‘I don’t like to go to pubs by myself, but if I did I don’t see why not, I don’t see why men should do one thing and women another.’

These sudden lapses into feminism always baffled him. They seemed so inconsistent with her character. He left that point and said: ‘You’re jealous of Pearl, that’s what it is.’

He wanted her, of course, to laugh, or even quarrel a little, so the thing could be healed by kisses, but she considered it, thoughtfully, and said: ‘You can’t help being jealous if you love someone.’

‘Pearl!’ he snorted. ‘I’ve known her for years. Besides, who told you?’

‘You always think that nobody ever notices things,’ she said, sadly. ‘You’re always so surprised.’

‘Well, how did you know?’

‘People always tell you things.’

‘And you believe people.’

A pause, Then: ‘Oh, Jimmie, I don’t want to quarrel all the time, there isn’t any sense in it.’ This sad helplessness satisfied him, and he was able to take her warmly in his arms. ‘I don’t mean to quarrel either,’ he murmured.

But they quarrelled continuously. Every conversation was bound to end, it seemed, either in Pearl or in George. Or their tenderness would lapse into tired silence, and he would see her staring quietly away from him, thinking. ‘What are you getting so serious about now, Rosie?’ ‘I was thinking about Jill. Her Granny’s too old. Jill’s shut up in that kitchen all day – just think, those old nosy parkers say I’m not a fit and proper person for Jill, but at least I’d take her for walks on Sunday …’

‘You want Jill because of George,’ he would grind out, gripping her so tight she had to ease her arms free. ‘Oh, stop it, Jimmie, stop it.’

‘Well, it’s true.’

‘If you want to think it, I can’t stop you.’ Then the silence of complete estrangement.

After some weeks of this he went back to the pub one evening. ‘Hullo, stranger,’ said Pearl. Her eyes shone welcomingly over at him.

‘I’ve been busy, one way or another,’ he said.

‘I bet,’ she said, satirically, challenging him with her look.

He could not resist it. ‘Women,’ he said, ‘women.’ And he took a long drain from his glass.

‘Don’t you talk that way to me,’ she said, with a short laugh. ‘My boy-friend’s just got himself married. Didn’t so much as send me an invite to the wedding.’

‘He doesn’t know what’s good for him.’

Her wide, blue eyes swung around and rested obliquely on him before she lowered them to the glasses she was rinsing. ‘Perhaps there are others who don’t neither.’

He hesitated and said: ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ Caution held him back. Yet they had been flirting cheerfully for so long, out of sheer good-nature. The new hesitation was dangerous in itself, and gave depth to their casual exchanges. He thought to himself: Careful, Jimmie, boy, you’re off again if you’re not careful. He decided he should go to another pub. Yet he came back, every evening, for he looked forward to the moment when he stood in the doorway, and then she saw him, and her eyes warmed to him as she said lightly: ‘Hullo, handsome, what trouble have you been getting yourself into today?’ He got into the way of staying for an hour or more, instead of the usual half hour. He leaned quietly against the counter, his coat collar turned up around his face, while his grey eyes rested appreciatively on Pearl. Sometimes she grew self-conscious and said: ‘Your eyes need a rest,’ and he replied, coolly: ‘If you don’t want people to look at you, better buy yourself another jumper.’ He would think, with a sense of disloyalty: Why doesn’t Rosie buy herself one like that? But Rose always wore her plain, dark skirts and her neat blouses, pinned at the throat with a brooch.

Afterwards he climbed the stairs to the flat thinking, anxiously: Perhaps today she’ll be like she used to be? He would expectantly open the door, thinking: Perhaps she’ll smile when she sees me and come running over …

But she would be at the stove, or seated at the table waiting, and she gave him that tired, patient smile before beginning to dish up the supper. His disappointment dragged down his spirits, but he forced himself to say: ‘Sorry, I’m late, Rosie.’ He braced himself for a reproach, but it never came, though her eyes searched him anxiously, then lowered as if afraid he might see a reproach in them.

‘That’s all right,’ she replied, carefully, setting the dishes down and pulling out the chair for him.

Always, he could not help looking to see if she was still ‘fussing’ about the food. But she was taking trouble to hide the precautions she took to feed him sensibly. Sometimes he would probe sarcastically: ‘I suppose your friend the chemist said that peas were good for ulcers – how about a bit of fried onions, Rosie?’

‘I’ll make you some tomorrow,’ she would reply. And she averted her eyes, as if she were wincing, when he pulled the pickle bottle towards him and heaped mustard pickle over his fish. ‘You only live once,’ he remarked, jocularly.

‘That’s right.’ And then, in a prepared voice: ‘It’s your stomach, after all.’

‘That’s what I always said.’ To himself he said: Might be my bloody wife. For his wife had come to say at last: ‘It’s your stomach, if you want to die ten years too soon …’

If he had attacks of terrible pain in the night, after a plateful of fried onions, or chips thick with tomato sauce, he would lie rigid beside her, concealing it, just as he had with his wife. Women fussing! Fussing women!

He asked himself continually why he did not break it off. A dozen times he had said to himself: That’s enough now, it’s no good, she doesn’t love me, anyway. Yet by evening he was back at the pub, flirting tentatively with Pearl, until the time came when he could delay no longer. And back he went, as if dragged, to Rose. He could not understand it. He was behaving badly – and he could not help himself; he should be studying for his exam – and he couldn’t bring himself to study; it would be so easy to make Rose happy – and he couldn’t take the decisive step; he should decide not to return to Pearl in the evenings, and he could not keep away. What was it all about? Why did people just go on doing things, as if there were dragged along against their will, even against what they enjoyed?

One Saturday evening Rose said: ‘Tomorrow I won’t be here.’

He clutched at her hand and demanded: ‘Why not? Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to take Jill out all day and then have supper with her Granny.’

Breathing quickly, his lips set hard, he brought out: ‘No time for me any more, eh?’

‘Oh, Jimmie, have some sense.’

Next morning he lay in bed and watched her dress to go out. She was smiling, her face soft with pleasure. She kissed him consolingly before she left, and said: ‘It’s only on Sundays, Jimmie.’

So it’s going to be every Sunday, he thought miserably.

In the evening he went to the pub. It was Pearl’s evening off. He had thought of asking her along to the pictures, but he didn’t know where she lived. He went to his home. The children were in bed and his wife had gone to see a neighbour. He felt as if everyone had let him down. At last he went back to the flat and waited for Rose. When she came he sat quietly, an angry little smile on his face, while she chatted animatedly about Jill. In bed he turned his back on her and lay gazing at the greyish light at the window. It couldn’t go on, he thought; what was the point of it? Yet he was back next evening as usual.

Next Sunday she asked him to go with her to see Jill.

‘What the hell!’ he exclaimed, indignantly.

She was hurt. ‘Why not, Jimmie? She’s so sweet. She’s such a good girl. She’s got long golden ringlets.’

‘I suppose George had long yellow ringlets, too,’ he said, sardonically.

She looked at him blankly, shrugged, and said no more. When she had gone he went to Pearl’s house – for he had asked for the address – and took her to the pictures. They were careful and polite with each other. She watched him secretly: his face was tight with worry; he was thinking of Rose with that damned brat – she was happy with Jill, when she couldn’t even raise a smile for him! When he said good night, Pearl drawled out: ‘Do you even know what the film was called?’

He laughed uncomfortably and said: ‘Sorry, Pearl, got things on my mind.’

‘Thanks for the information.’ But she was not antagonistic; she sounded sympathetic. He was grateful for her understanding. He hastily kissed her cheek and said: ‘You’re a nice kid, Pearl.’ She flushed and quickly put her arms around his neck and kissed him again. Afterwards he thought uneasily: If I just lifted my little finger I could have her.

At home Rose was cautious with him and did not mention Jill until he did. She was afraid of him. He saw it, and it made him half-wild with frustration. Anyone’d think that he was cruel to her! ‘For crying out aloud, Rose,’ he pleaded, ‘what’s the matter with you, why can’t you be nice to me?’

To which she sighed and asked in a dry, tired voice: ‘I suppose Pearl is nice to you.’

‘Hell, Rosie, I have to do something when you’re away.’

‘I asked you to come with me, didn’t I?’

They were on the verge of some crisis, and both knew it, and for several days they were treating each other almost like strangers, for fear of an explosion. They hardly dare let their eyes meet.

On the following Saturday evening Rose inquired: ‘Made a date with Pearl for tomorrow?’

He was going to deny it, but she went on implacably: ‘Things can’t go on like this, Jimmie.’ He was silent, and then she asked suddenly: ‘Jimmie, did you ever really ask your wife to divorce you?’

He exploded: ‘Hell, Rosie, are you going back to that now?’

‘I suppose you are thinking it’s not my affair and I’m interfering,’ she said, and laughed with that unexpected, grim humour of hers.

Rose went off to Jill in the morning without another word to him. As for him, he went to Pearl. The girl was gentle with him: ‘If you don’t feel like the pictures, you don’t have to take me,’ she said, sympathetically. So they went to a café and he said, abruptly: ‘You know, Pearl, it’s no good getting to like me, women think I’m poison when they get to know better.’ He was grinning savagely and his hands were clenched. She reached out, took one of them and said: ‘It’s for me to say what I want, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he said at random, putting his arm around her, feeling that he had, by this remark, absolved himself of all responsibility for Pearl. He was thinking of Rose. She’d be back home by now. Well, it’d do her good not to find him there. She just took him for granted, and it was a fact. But after a restless five minutes he said: ‘I better be getting along.’ When he left her, Pearl said: ‘I love you, Jimmie, don’t forget that. I’d do anything for you, anything …’ She ran into the house, and he saw she was crying. She loves me, at any rate, he thought, thinking angrily of Rose. Slowly he climbed the long, dark stairs. He was very tired again. I must get some sleep, he mused, dimly, this can’t go on, it wears a man out, I’ll go straight to bed and sleep.

But he opened the door on bright light; she was already in, seated at the table. She was still in ber best clothes: a neat grey suit, white blouse, brooch; and her hair looked as if she had just combed it. Her face was what held him: she looked tight-lipped, determined, even triumphant. What’s up? he thought.

‘Don’t go to bed straight away,’ she said – for he was throwing off his shoes and coat. ‘There’s something we’ve got to do.’

‘It’d better be pretty important,’ he said. ‘I’m dead on my feet.’

‘For once you’d better stay on your feet.’ This brutal note was new and astonishing from Rose.

‘What’s going on?’

‘You’ll see in a minute.’

He almost ignored her and went to bed; but at last he compromised by pushing the pillows against the wall and leaning on them. ‘Wake me up when the mystery’s ripe,’ he said, and dropped off at once.

Rose remained at the table in a stiff attitude, watching the door and listening. The day before she had made a decision. Or rather, a decision had been made for her. It had come into her head: Why not write and ask? She’ll know … At first the idea had shocked her. It was a terrible thing to do, contrary to what she felt to be the right way to behave. And yet from the moment it entered her head, the idea gathered strength until she could think of nothing else. At last she sat down and wrote:

Dear Mrs Pearson, I am writing to you on a matter which is personal to us both, and I hope it gives no offence, because I am not writing in that spirit. I am Rose Johnson, and your husband has been courting me for two years since before the war stopped. He says you live separate and you won’t divorce him. I want things to be straight and proper now, and I’ve been thinking perhaps if we have a little talk, things will be straight. If this meets with your approval, Jimmie will be home tomorrow night, ten or so, and we could all three have a talk. Believing me, I mean no trouble or offence.

This letter she had carried herself to the house and dropped through the letter-slot. Afterwards, she could not go away. She walked guiltily up the street, and then down, her eyes fixed on the windows. That was where she lived. Her heart was so heavy with jealous love it was as if her very feet were weighted. That was where Jimmie had lived with her. That was where his children lived. She hoped to get a glimpse of them, and looked searchingly at some children playing in the street, trying to find his eyes, his features in their faces. There was a little boy she thought might be his son and she found herself smiling at the child, her eyes filled with tears. Then, finally, she walked past the house and thought: If only it’d come to an end, I can’t bear it no longer, I can’t bear it …

There were footsteps, Rose half-rose to open the door, but they went past. Later, when she had given up hope, there were steps again, and they stopped at the door. Now the moment had come. Rose was faint with anxiety and could hardly cross the floor. She thought: I mustn’t wake Jimmie, he’s so tired. She opened the door with an instinctive gesture of warning towards the sleeping man. Mrs Pearson glanced at him, smiled in a tight-lipped fashion, and came in, making her heels click loudly. Rose had created for herself many pictures of this envied woman, Jimmie’s wife. She had imagined her, for some reason, fair, frail, pretty – rather like Pearl, whom she had seen in the street once. But she was not like that at all. She was a big, square woman, heavy on her feet. Her face was square and good-humoured, her brown eyes calm and direct. Her dark, greying hair was tightly waved, too close around her head for the big features. ‘Well,’ she said in a normal voice, with a good-humoured nod at Rose, ‘the prisoner’s sleeping before the execution.’

‘Oh, no,’ breathed Rose, in dismay: ‘It’s not like that at all.’

Mrs Pearson looked curiously at her, shrugged, and laid her bag on the table. ‘Thanks for the letter,’ she said. ‘It’s about time you found out.’

‘Found out what?’ asked Rose quickly.

Jimmie stirred, looked blankly over at the women and then scrambled quickly to his feet. ‘What the hell?’ he asked, involuntarily. And then, very angry: ‘What are you poking your nose in for?’

‘She asked me to come,’ said his wife, quietly. She sat down. ‘Come and sit down, Jimmie, and let’s talk it over.’

He looked quite baffled. Then he, too, shrugged, lit a cigarette and came to the table. ‘OK, get it over,’ he said jauntily. He glanced incredulously at Rose. She could do this to him, he thought, hurt to the very bone – and she says she loves me … He was set hard against Rose, hard against his wife … Well, let them do as they liked.

‘Now listen, Jimmie,’ said his wife, reasonably, as to a child, ‘it seems you’ve been telling this poor child a lot of lies.’ He sat tight and said nothing. She waited, then went on, looking at Rose: ‘This is the truth. We’ve been married ten years. We’ve got two kids. We were happy at first – well, nothing unusual in that. Then he got fed up. Nothing unusual in that either. In any case, he’s not a man who can settle to anything. I used to be unhappy, and then I got used to it. I thought: Well, we can’t change our natures. Jimmie doesn’t mean any harm, he just drifts into everything. Then the war started, and you know how things were. I was working night-shifts, and he too, and there was a girl at his factory, and they got together.’ She paused, looking at Jimmie like a presiding judge, but he said nothing. He smoked, looking down at the table with a small angry smile. ‘I got fed up and said we’d better separate. Then he came running back and said it wouldn’t happen again, he didn’t really want a divorce.’ Jimmie stirred, opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again. ‘You were going to say?’ inquired his wife, pleasantly. ‘Nothing. Go on, enjoy yourself.’

‘Isn’t it true?’

He shrugged, she waited and then went on: ‘So everything was all right for a month or so. And then he started up with the girl again …’

‘Pearl?’ Rose suddenly asked.

He snorted derisively: ‘Pearl, that’s all she can think of.’

‘Who’s Pearl?’ asked Mrs Pearson, alertly. ‘She’s a new one on me.’

‘Never mind,’ said Rose. ‘Go on.’

‘But this time I’d had enough. I said either me or her.’ Addressing Rose, excluding Jimmie, she said: ‘If there’s one thing he can’t do, it’s make up his mind to anything.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Rose, involuntarily. Then she flushed and looked guiltily at Jimmie.

‘Go one, enjoy yourselves,’ he said, sarcastically.

‘We haven’t been enjoying ourselves, you have.’

‘That’s what you think.’

‘Oh, have it your own way. You always do. But now I’m talking to Rose. When I said either her or me, he got into a proper state. The root of the matter was, he wanted both of us. Men are naturally bigamists, he said.’

‘Yes,’ said Rose again, quickly.

‘Oh, for crying out aloud, can’t you two ever take a joke. It was a joke. What did you think? I wanted to be married to two women at once. One’s enough.’

‘You have been married to two women at once,’ said his wife, tartly. ‘Whether you liked it or not. Or as good as.’ The two women were looking at each other, smiling grimly. Jimmie glanced at them, got up and went to the window. ‘Let me know when you’ve finished,’ he said.

Rose made an impulsive movement towards him. ‘Oh sit down, the trouble with you is you’re too soft with him. I was too.’

From the window Jimmie said: ‘Soft as concrete.’ To Rose he made a gesture indicating his wife: ‘Just take a good look at her and see how soft she is.’ Rose looked, flushed, and said: ‘Jimmie, I didn’t mean anything nasty for you.’

‘You didn’t?’ That was contemptuous.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Pearson, loudly, interrupting this exchange: ‘At last I got the pip and divorced him.’

Rose drew in her breath. Her eyes were frantic. ‘You’re divorced?’ She stared at Jimmie, waiting for him to deny it, but he kept his back turned. ‘Jimmie, it isn’t true, is it?’

Mrs Pearson said, with rough kindliness, ‘Now don’t get upset, Rose. It’s time you knew what’s what. We got divorced three years ago. I got the kids, and he’s supposed to pay me two pounds a week for them. But if the other girl thought he was going to marry her she made a mistake. He was courting me for three years and then I had to put my foot down. He said he couldn’t live without me, but at the registry he looked like a man being executed.’

Jimmie said, in cold fury: ‘If you want to know the truth, she wouldn’t marry me, she married someone else.’

‘I daresay. She learned some sense, I expect. You never told her you were married, and she got shocked into her senses when she found out.’

‘Go on,’ said Rose, ‘I want to hear the end of it.’

‘There wasn’t any end, that’s the point. After the divorce Jimmie was popping in and out as if he belonged in the house. “Here,” I used to say, “I thought we were divorced.” But if he was short of a place to sleep, or he wanted somewhere to read, or his ulcers was bad, he’d drop in for a meal or the use of the sofa. And he still does,’ she concluded.

Rose was crying now. ‘Why did you lie to me, Jimmie,’ she implored, gazing at his impervious back. ‘Why? You didn’t have to lie to me.’

He said miserably: ‘What was the use, Rosie? I have to pay two pounds a week to her. I couldn’t do that and give you a proper home too.’

Rose gave a helpless sort of gesture and sat silently, while the tears ran steadily down. Mrs Pearson watched her, not unkindly. ‘What’s the use of crying?’ she inquired. ‘He’s no good to you. And you say he’s got another woman already! Who’s this Pearl?’

Rose said: ‘He takes her to the pictures and she wants to marry him.’

‘How the hell do you know?’ he asked, turning around and facing them at last.

Rose glanced pleadingly at him and said softly: ‘But Jimmie, everybody knows.’

‘I suppose you’ve been down talking to Pearl,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Women!’

‘Of course I didn’t.’ She was shocked. ‘I wouldn’t do no such thing. But everyone knows about it.’

‘Who’s everyone this time?’

‘Well, there’s my friend at the shop at the corner, who keeps my bit extra for me when there’s biscuits or something going. He told me Pearl was crazy for you, and he said people said you were going to marry her.’

‘Jesus,’ he said simply, sitting on the bed. ‘Women.’

‘Just like him,’ commented Mrs Pearson dryly. ‘He always thinks he’s the invisible man. He can just carry on in broad daylight and no one’ll notice what he’s doing. He’s always surprised when they do. He was going out with that other girl for months, and the whole factory knew it, but when I mentioned it he thought I’d had a private detective on to him.’

‘Well,’ said Rose, helplessly, at last. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t.’

She said again, with that rough warmth: ‘Now don’t you mind too much, Rosie. You’re well out of it, believe me.’

Rose’s lips trembled again. Mrs Pearson got up, sat by her and patted her shoulders. ‘There now.’ she said, as Rose collapsed. ‘Now don’t take on. There, there.’ she soothed, while over Rose’s head she gave her husband a deadly look. Jimmie was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking, looking badly shaken. What he was thinking was: That Rose could do this to me – how could she do it to me?

‘I haven’t got nothing,’ wailed Rose. ‘I haven’t got anything or anybody anywhere.’

Mrs Pearson went on patting. Her face was thoughtful. She made soothing noises, and then she asked suddenly, out of the blue: ‘Listen, Rose, how’d you like to come and live with me?’

Rose stopped crying from the shock, lifted her face and said: ‘What did you say?’

‘I expect you’re surpised.’ Mrs Pearson looked surprised at herself. ‘I just thought of it – I’m starting a cake shop next month. I saved a bit during the war. I was looking for someone to help me with it. You could live in my place if you like. It’s only got three rooms and a kitchen, but we’d manage.’

‘The house isn’t yours?’

Mrs Pearson laughed: ‘I suppose my lord told you he owned the whole house? Not on your life. I’ve got the basement.’

‘The basement,’ said Rose, intently.

‘Well, it’s warm and dry and in one piece, more than can be said for most basements.’

‘It’s safer, too,’ said Rose, slowly.

‘Safer?’

‘If there’s bombing or something.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Pearson, rather puzzled at this. Rose was gazing eagerly into her face. ‘You’ve got the kids,’ said Rose, slowly.

‘They’re no trouble, really. They’re at school.’

‘I didn’t mean that – could I have a kid – no listen, I’d be wanting to adopt a kid if I came to you. If I lived with you I’d be a fit and proper person and those nosy parkers would let me have her.’

‘You want to adopt a kid?’ said Mrs Pearson, rather put out. She glanced at Jimmie, who said: ‘You say things about me – but look at her. She was engaged to a man, and he was killed and all she thinks about is his kid.’

‘Jimmie …’ began Rose, in protest. But Mrs Pearson asked: ‘Hasn’t the kid got a mother?’

‘The blitz,’ said Rose, simply.

After a pause Mrs Pearson said thoughtfully: ‘I suppose there’s no reason why not.’

Rose’s face was illuminated. ‘Mrs Pearson,’ she prayed, ‘Mrs Pearson – If I could have Jill, if only I could have Jill …’

Mrs Pearson said dryly: ‘I can’t see me cluttering myself up with kids if I didn’t have to. You wouldn’t catch me marrying and getting kids if I had my chance over again, but it takes all sorts to make a world.’

‘Then it’d be all right?’

Mrs Pearson hesitated: ‘Yes, why not?’

Jimmie gave a short laugh. ‘Women,’ he said. ‘Women.’

‘You can talk,’ said his wife.

Rose looked shyly at him. ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.

‘He’s going to marry Pearl, I don’t think,’ commented his wife.

Rose said slowly: ‘You ought to marry Pearl, you know, Jimmie. You did really ought to marry her. It’s not right. You shouldn’t make her unhappy, like me.’

Jimmie stood before them, hands in pockets, trying to look nonchalant. He was slowly nodding his head as if his worst suspicions were being confirmed. ‘So now you’ve decided to marry me off,’ he said, savagely.

‘Well, Jimmie,’ said Rose, ‘she loves you, everyone knows that, and you’ve been taking her out and giving her ideas – and – and – you could have this flat now, I don’t want it. You better have it, anyway, you can’t get flats now the war’s finished. And you and Pearl could live here.’ She sounded as if she were pleading for herself.

‘For crying out aloud,’ said Jimmie, astonished, gazing at her.

Mrs Pearson was looking shrewdly at him. ‘You know, Jimmie, it’s not a bad idea, Rose is quite right.’

‘What-a-at? You too?’

‘It’s about time you stopped messing around. You messed around with Rose here, and I told you time and time again, you should either marry her or not, I said.’

‘You knew about me?’ said Rose, dazedly.

‘Well, no harm in that,’ said Mrs Pearson, impatiently. ‘Be your age, Rose. Of course, I knew. When he came home I used to say to him: You do right by that poor girl. You can’t expect her to go hanging about, missing her chances, just to give you an easy life and somewhere to play nicely at nights.’

‘I told Rose,’ he said, abruptly. ‘I told her often enough I wasn’t good enough for her, I said.’

‘I bet you did,’ said his wife, shortly. ‘Didn’t I, Rose?’ he asked her.

Rose was silent. Then she shrugged. ‘I just don’t understand,’ she said at last. And then, after a pause: ‘I suppose you’re just made that way.’ And then, after a longer pause: ‘But you ought to marry Pearl now.’

‘Just to please you, I suppose!’ He turned challengingly to his wife: ‘And you, too, I suppose. You want to see me safely tied up to someone, don’t you?’

‘No one’s going to marry me, stuck with two kids,’ said his wife. ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t be tied too, if we’re going to look at it that way.’

‘And you can’t see why I shouldn’t marry Pearl when I’ve got to pay you two pounds a week?’

Mrs Pearson said on an impulse: ‘If you marry Pearl, I’ll let you off the two pounds. I’m going to make a good thing out of my cake shop, I expect, and I won’t need your bit.’

‘And if I don’t marry her, then I must go on paying you the two pounds?’

‘Fair enough,’ she said, calmly.

‘Blackmail,’ he said, bitterly. ‘Blackmail, that’s what it is.’

‘Call it what you like.’ She got up and lifted her handbag from the table. ‘Well, Rose,’ she said. ‘All this has been sudden, spur of the moment sort of thing. Perhaps you’d like to think about it. I’m not one for rushing into things myself, in the usual way. I wouldn’t like you to come and then be sorry after.’

Rose had unconsciously risen and was standing by her. ‘I’ll come with you now, if it’s all right. I’ll get my things tomorrow. I wouldn’t want to stay here tonight.’ She glanced at Jimmie, then averted her face.

‘She’s afraid of staying here with me,’ said Jimmie with bitter triumph.

‘Quite right. I know you.’ She mimicked his voice: ‘Don’t go back on me, Rose, don’t you trust me?’

Rose winced and muttered: ‘Don’t do that.’

‘Oh, I know him, I know him. And you’d have to put chains on him and drag him to the registry. It’s not that he doesn’t want to marry you. I expect he does, when all’s said. But it just kills him to make up his mind.’

‘Staying with me, Rosie?’ asked Jimmie, suddenly – the gambler playing his last card. He watched her with bright eyes, waiting, almost sure of his power to make her stay.

Rose looked unhappily from him to Mrs Pearson.

Mrs Pearson watched her with a half-smile; that smile seemed to say: I’m not implicated, settle it for yourself, it makes no difference to me. But aloud she said: ‘You’re a fool if you stay, Rosie.’

‘Let her decide,’ said Jimmie, quietly. He was thinking: If she cares anything she’ll stay with me, she’ll stand by me. Rose gazed pitifully at him and wavered. It flashed across her mind: He’s just trying to prove something to his wife, he doesn’t really want me at all. But she could not take her eyes away. There he sat, upright but easy, his hair ruffled lightly on his forehead, his handsome grey eyes watching her. She thought, wildly: Why does he just sit there waiting? If he loved me he’d come across and put his arms around me and ask me nicely to stay with him, and I would – if he’d only do that …

But he remained quiet, challenging her to move; and slowly the tension shifted and Rose drooped away from him with a sigh. She turned to Mrs Pearson. He couldn’t really love her or he wouldn’t have just sat there – that’s what she felt.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, heavily.

‘That’s a sensible girl, Rose.’

Rose followed the older woman with dragging feet.

‘You won’t regret it,’ said Mrs Pearson. ‘Men – they’re more trouble than they’re worth, when all is said. Women have to look after themselves these days, because if they don’t, no one will.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Rose, reluctantly. She stood hesitating at the door, looking hopefully at Jimmie. Even now – she thought – even now, if he said one word she’d run back to him and stay with him.

But he remained motionless, with that bitter little smile about his mouth.

‘Come on, Rose,’ said Mrs Pearson. ‘Come, if you’re coming. We’ll miss the Underground.’

And Rose followed her. She was thinking: ‘I’ll have Jill, that’s something. And by the time she grows up perhaps there won’t be wars and bombs and things, and people won’t act silly any more.’

The Eye of God in Paradise

O— in the Bavarian Alps is a charming little village. It is no more charming, however, than ten thousand others; although it is known to an astonishing number of people, some of whom have actually been there, while others have savoured its attractions in imagination only. Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty who – or so one hopes – must be embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them. This history of O— is fascinating; for this is true of every village. Its location has every advantage, not least that of being so near to the frontier that when finally located on the map it seems to the exbuberant holiday-making fancy that one might toss a stone from it into Austria. This is, of course, not the case, since a high wall of mountains forms a natural barrier to any such adventure, besides making it essential that all supplies for O— and the ten or a dozen villages in the valley above it must come from Germany. This wall of mountains is in fact the reason why O— is German, and has always been German; although its inhabitants, or so it would seem from the songs and stories they offer the summer and winter visitors on every possible occasion, take comfort from the belief that Austria is at least their spiritual home. And so those holiday-makers who travel there in the hope of finding the attractions of two countries combined are not so far wrong. And there are those who go there because of the name, which is a homely, simple, gentle name, with none of the associations of, let us say, Berchtesgaden, a place in which one may also take one’s ease, if one feels so inclined. O— has never been famous; never has the spotlight of history touched it. It has not been one of those places that no one ever heard of until woken into painful memory, like Seoul, or Bikini, or, for that matter, this same Berchtesgaden, although that is quite close enough for discomfort.

Two holiday-makers who had chosen O— out of the several hundred winter resorts that clamoured for their patronage were standing in one of the upper streets on the evening of their arrival there. The charming little wooden houses weighted with snow, the delightful little streets so narrow and yet so dignified as to make the great glittering cars seem pretentious and out of place, the older inhabitants in their long dark woollen skirts and heavy clogs, even a sleigh drawn by ribboned horses and full of holiday-makers – all this was attractive, and undeniably what they had come for; particularly as slopes suitable for skiing stretched away on every side. Yet there was no denying that something weighed on them; they were uneasy. And what this thing was does not need to be guessed at, since they had not ceased to express it, and very volubly, since their arrival.

This was a pleasure resort; it existed solely for its visitors. In winter, heavy with snow, and ringing with the shouts of swooping skiers; in summer, garlanded with flowers and filled with the sounds of cowbells – it was all the same: summer and winter dress were nothing but masks concealing the fact that this village had no existence apart from its flux of visitors, which it fed and supplied by means of the single rickety little train that came up from the lowlands of Bavaria, and which in turn it drained of money spent freely on wooden shoes, carved and painted wooden bottles, ironwork, embroidered aprons, ski trousers and sweaters, and those slender curved skis themselves that enabled a thousand earth-plodders to wing over the slopes all through the snow months.

The fact is that for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one’s friends. Everyone knows it, everyone feels it; and this is the insoluble contradiction of tourism; and perhaps the whole edifice will collapse at that moment when there is not one little town, not one village in the whole of Europe that has not been, as the term is, exploited. No longer will it be possible to drive one’s car away into the mountains in search of that unspoiled village, that Old-World inn by the stream; for when one arrives most certainly a professional host will hasten out, offering professional hospitality. What then? Will everyone stay at home?

But what of poor, war-denuded Europe whose inhabitants continue to live, a little sullenly perhaps, under the summer and winter eyes of their visitors, eyes that presumably are searching for some quality, some good, that they do not possess themselves, since otherwise why have they travelled so far from themselves in order to examine the lives of other people?

These were the sort of reflections – which it must be confessed, could scarcely be more banal – that were being exchanged by our two travellers.

There they stood, outside a little wayside booth, or open shop, that sold, not carved bottles or leather aprons, but real vegetables and butter and cheese. These goods were being bought by a group of American wives who were stationed here with their husbands as part of the army of occupation. Or rather, their husbands were part of the machinery which saw to it that American soldiers stationed all over the American zone of occupation could have pleasant holidays in the more attractive parts of Europe.

Between small, green-painted houses, the snow was pitted and rutted in the narrow street, glazed with the newly frozen heat of tramping feet. In places it was stained yellow and mounded with dark horse droppings, and there was a strong smell of urine mingling with the fresh tang of winter cabbage, giving rise to further reflections about the superiority of automobiles over horses – and even, perhaps, of wide streets over narrow ones, for at every moment the two travellers had to step down off the small pavement into the strong-smelling snow to allow happy groups of skiers to pass by; had to stand back again to make room for the cars that were trying to force a passage up to the big hotels where the American soldiers were holidaying with their wives or girls.

There were so many of the great powerful cars, rocking fast and dangerously up over the slippery snow, that it was hard to preserve the illusion of an unspoiled mountain village. And so the two lifted their eyes to the surrounding forests and peaks. The sun had slipped behind the mountains, but had left their snowfields tinted pink and gold, sentinelled by pine groves which, now that the light had gone from them, loomed black and rather sinister, inevitably suggesting wolves, witches, and other creatures from a vanished time – a suggestion, however, tinged with bathos, since it was obvious that wolves or witches would have got short shrift from the mighty creators of those powerful machines. The tinted glitter of the smooth slopes and the black stillness of the woods did their best to set the village in a timelessness not disturbed by the gear and machinery of the travelling cages that lifted clear over intervening valleys to the ledge of a mountain where there was yet another hotel and the amenities of civilization. And perhaps it was a relief, despite all the intrusions of the machinery of domesticity and comfort, to rest one’s eyes on those forests, those mountains, whose savagery seemed so innocent. The year was 1951; and, while the inhabitants of the village seemed almost feverishly concerned to present a scene of carefree charm, despite all their efforts the fact which must immediately strike everyone was that most of the people in the streets wore the uniform of the war which was six years past, and that the language most often overheard was American. But it was not possible to stand there, continually being edged this way and that on and off the pavement, with one’s eyes fixed determinedly on natural beauty, particularly as the light was going fast and now the houses, shops, and hotels were taking their nocturnal shape and spilling the white pallor of electricity from every door and window, promising warmth, promising certain pleasure. The mountains had massed themselves, black against a luminous sky. Life had left them and was concentrating down in the village. Everywhere came groups of skiers hastening home for the night, and everywhere among them those men and women who proclaimed themselves immediately and at first glance as American. Why? Our two stood there, looking into first one face and then the next, trying to define what it was that set them apart. A good-looking lot, these new policemen of Europe. And well-fed, well-dressed … They were distinguished above all, perhaps, by their assurance! Or was this noisy cheerfulness nothing more than the expression of an inner guilt because the task of policing and preserving order earned such attractive holidays? In which case, it was rather to their credit than not.

But when the four army wives had finished their bargaining at the vegetable and dairy stall and went up the steep street, walking heavily because of their crammed baskets, they so dominated the scene in their well-cut trousers and their bright jackets that the women selling produce and the locals who had been waiting patiently for the four to conclude their shopping seemed almost unimportant, almost like willing extras in a crowd-scene from a film called perhaps Love in the Alps, or They Met in the Snow.

And six years had been enough to still in the hearts of these Germans – for Germans they were, although Austria was no more than a giant’s stone-throw away – all the bitterness of defeat? They were quite happy to provide a homely and picturesque background for whatever nationalities might choose to visit them, even if most were American and many British – as our two conscientiously added, trying not to dissociate themselves from their responsibilities, even though they felt very strongly that the representatives of their country were much too naturally modest and tactful to appropriate a scene simply by the fact that they were in it.

It was hard to believe; and the knowledge of the secret angers, or at the very best, an ironical patience, that must be burning in the breasts of their hosts, the good people of the village of O—, deepened an uneasiness which was almost (and this was certainly irrational) a guilt which should surely have no place in the emotions of a well-deserved holiday.

Guilt about what? It was absurd.

Yet, from the moment they had arrived on the frontier – the word still came naturally to them both – and had seen the signs in German; had heard the language spoken all around them; had passed through towns whose names were associated with the savage hate and terror of headlines a decade old – from that moment had begun in both the complicated uneasiness of which they were so ashamed. Neither had admitted it to the other; both were regretting they had come. Why – they were both thinking – why submit ourselves when we are on holiday and won’t be able to afford another one for goodness knows how long, to something that must be unpleasant? Why not say simply and be done with it that, for us, Germany is poisoned? We never want to set foot in it again or hear the language spoken or see a sign in German. We simply do not want to think about it; and if we are unjust and lacking in humanity and reason and good sense then – why not? One cannot be expected to be reasonable about everything.

Yet here they were.

The man remarked, after a long silence: ‘Last time I was here there was nothing of that.’

Down the other side of the street, pressed close to the wall to avoid a big car that was going by, came a group of five girls in local peasant costume. All day these girls had been serving behind the counters, or in the restaurants, wearing clothes such as girls anywhere in Europe might wear. Now their individual faces had dwindled behind great white starched headdresses. Their bodies were nothing more than supports for the long-sleeved, long-skirted, extinguishing black dresses. The whole costume had something reminiscent of the prim fantasy of the habits of certain orders of nuns. They were plodding resignedly enough – since after all they were being well paid for doing this – down over the snow towards one of the big hotels where they would regale the tourists with folk songs before slipping home to change into their own clothes in time to spend an hour or so with their young men.

‘Well, never mind, I suppose one does like to see it?’ The woman slipped her arm through his.

‘Oh, I suppose so, why not?’

They began to walk down the street, leaning on each other because of the slipperiness of the rutted snow.

It hung in the balance whether one or other of them might have said something like: Suppose we all stopped coming? Suppose there were no tourists at all; perhaps they would simply cease to exist? Like actors who devote so much of themselves to acting they have no emotions over their own lives but continue to exist in whatever part they are playing …

But neither of them spoke. They turned into the main street of the village, where there were several large hotels and restaurants.

Very easily one of them might have remarked to the other, with a kind of grumbling good humour: It’s all very well, all these things we’re saying about tourists, but we are tourists ourselves.

Come, come, the other would have replied. Clearly we are tourists on a much higher level than most!

Then they would have both laughed.

But at the same moment they stopped dead, looking at some queer hopping figure that was coming along the pavement over the badly lighted snow. For a moment it was impossible to make out what this great black jumping object could be that was coming fast towards them along the ground. Then they saw it was a man whose legs had been amputated and who was hopping over the snow like a frog, his body swinging and jerking between his heavy arms like the body of some kind of insect.

The two saw the eyes of this man stare up at them as he went hopping past.

At the station that day, when they arrived, two men hacked and amputated by war almost out of humanity, one without arms, his legs cut off at the knee, one whose face was a great scarred eyeless hollow, were begging from the alighting holiday-makers.

‘For God’s sake,’ said the man suddenly, as if this were nothing but a continuation of what they had been saying, ‘for God’s sake, let’s get out of here.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed instantly. They looked at each other, smiling, acknowledging in that smile all that they had not said that day.

‘Let’s go back. Let’s find somewhere in France.’

‘We shouldn’t have come.’

They watched the cripple lever himself up over a deep doorstep, dragging his body up behind his arms, using the stump of his body as a support while he reached up with long arms to ring the bell.

‘What about the money?’ she asked.

‘We’ll go home when it runs out.’

‘Good, we’ll go back tomorrow.’

Instantly they felt gay; they were leaving tomorrow.

They walked along the street, looking at the menus outside the hotels. He said, ‘Let’s go in here. It’s expensive, but it’s the last night.’

It was a big, brown, solid-looking hotel called the Lion’s Head; and on the old-fashioned gilded signboard was a great golden lion snarling down at them.

Inside was a foyer, lined with dark, shining wood; there were dark, straight-backed wooden settles around the walls and heavy arrangements of flowers in massive brass tubs. Glass doors opened into the restaurant proper. This was a long room lined with the same gleaming dark wood, and in each corner stood even larger brass tubs crammed with flowers. The table-cloths were heavy white damask; a profusion of cutlery and glass gleamed and glittered. It was a scene of solid middle-class comfort. A waiter showed them to an empty table at one side. The menu was placed between them. They exchanged a grimace, for the place was far too expensive for them, particularly as now they were committed to spending so much of their money on fares away and out of Germany into France – a country where they would feel no compulsion at all to make disparaging and ironical remarks about tourists or tourism.

They ordered their dinner and, while they waited, sat examining the other diners. The Americans were not here. Their hotels were the big, new, modern ones at the top of the village. The clientele here was solidly German. Again the two British tourists were conscious of a secret, half-ashamed unease. They looked from one face to another, thinking: Six years ago, what were you doing? And you – and you? We were mortal enemies then; now we sit in the same room, eating together. You were the defeated.

The last was addressed as a reminder to themselves, for no people could have looked less defeated than these. A more solid, sound, well-dressed, comfortable crowd could not be imagined; and they were eating with the easy satisfaction of those who cannot imagine ever being short of a meal. Yet six years ago …

The waiter brought two plates of soup, very big plates, mono-grammed with the sign of the Lion’s Head, so full that they asked him to take them away and divide one portion between the two of them. For they had observed that a single portion (served on large metal dishes) of any dish here was enough for two English stomachs. Not that they were not more than willing to do as well as these people around them – the defeated whose capacity seemed truly incredible. But one day in this country of hearty eaters had not enlarged their stomachs to German capacity; and now that they were leaving not later than tomorrow, it was too late.

They consumed their half-portions of very strong meat soup, full of vegetables; and pointed out to each other that, even so, their plates held twice as much as they would in England; and continued to dart curious, half-guilty glances at their fellow diners.

Six years ago these people were living amid ruins, in cellars, behind any scrap of masonry that remained standing. They were half-starved, and their clothes were rags. An entire generation of young men were dead. Six years. A remarkable nation, surely.

The jugged hare came and was eaten with appreciation.

They had ordered pastries with cream; but alas, before they could eat them, they had to restore themselves with strong cups of coffee.

Back in France, they told themselves and each other, they would find themselves at home, at table as well as spiritually. By this time tomorrow, they would be in France. And now, with the last meal over and the bill to pay, came the moment of general reckoning, soon over, and in fact accomplished hastily on the back of an envelope.

To take a train, third-class, back to the nearest suitable spot in the French Alps would use up half of their available currency; and it would be a choice of staying out their full three weeks and eating one meal a day – and that a very slender meal – or staying a week and then going home.

They did not look at each other as they reached this final depressing conclusion. They were thinking, of course, that they were mad to leave at all. If to come to Germany was the result of some sort of spiritual quixotry, a symptom of moral philanthropy suitable only for liberal idealists whom – they were convinced – they both despised, then to leave again was simply weak-minded. In fact, their present low-spiritedness was probably due to being over-tired, for they had spent two successive nights sitting upon hard wooden train seats, sleeping fitfully on each other’s shoulders.

They would have to stay. And now that they reached this conclusion, depression settled on them both; and they looked at the rich Germans who surrounded them with a gloomy hatred which, in their better moments, they would have utterly repudiated.

Just then the waiter came forward, followed by an energetically striding young man apparently fresh from a day’s skiing, for his face was flaming scarlet under untidy shags of sandy hair. They did not want him at their table, but the restaurant was now quite full. The waiter left their bill on the tablecloth; and they occupied themselves in finding the right change, under the interested inspection of the young sportsman, who, it seemed, was longing to advise them about money and tips. Resenting his interest, they set themselves to be patient. But the waiter did not return for some time, so busy was he at the surrounding tables; and they watched a party of new arrivals who were settling down at a nearby table that had been reserved for them. There came first a handsome woman in her early middle age, unfastening a shaggy, strong-looking fur coat of the kind worn for winter sports or bad weather outdoors. She flung this open on her chair, making a kind of nest, in which she placed herself, wrapping it closely around her legs. She was wearing a black wool dress, full-skirted and embroidered in bright colours, a dress which flirted with the idea of peasant naïvety. Having arranged herself, she raised her face to greet the rest of her family with a smile that seemed to mock and chide them for taking so long to follow after her. It was a handsome face: she was a fine-looking woman, with her fair curling hair, and a skin bronzed deep with the sun and oil of many weeks of winter sport. Next came a young lad, obviously her son, a very tall, good-looking, attractive youth, who began teasing her because of her hurry to begin eating. He flashed his white strong teeth at her, and his young blue eyes, until she playfully took his arm and shook him. He protested. Then both, with looks of mock concern because this was a public place, desisted, lowered their voices, and sat laughing while the daughter, a delightfully pretty girl of fifteen or so, and the father, a heavy, good-humoured gentleman, took the two empty chairs. The family party was complete. The waiter was attentive for their order, which was for four tall glasses of beer, which they insisted on having that moment, before they could order or even think of food. The waiter hurried off to fetch the beer, while they settled down to study the menus. And one could be sure that there would be no half-portions for this family, either for financial reasons or because they suffered from limitations of appetite.

Watching this family, it came home to the couple from Britain that what they were resenting was very likely their sheer capacity for physical enjoyment. Since, like all British people of their type, they spent a great deal of emotional energy on complaining about the inability of their countrymen to experience joy and well-being, they told themselves that what they felt was both churlish and inconsistent. The woman said to the man in a conciliating, apologetic, almost resigned voice, ‘They really are extraordinarily good-looking.’

To this he responded with a small ironical grimace: and he returned his attention to the family.

Mother, father, and son were laughing over some joke, while the girl turned a very long tapering glass of beer between thumb and forefinger of a thin, tanned hand so that the frost beads glittered and spun. She was staring out of the family group, momentarily lost to it, a fair, dreaming tendril of a girl with an irregular wedge of a little face. Her eyes wandered over the people at the tables, encountered those of our couple, and lingered in open, bland curiosity. It was a gaze of frank unselfconsciousness, almost innocence; the gaze of a protected child who knew she might commit no folly on her own individual account, since the family stood between her and the results of folly. Yet, just then, she chose to be out of the family group; or at least, she gazed out of it as one looks through an open door. Her pale, pretty eyes absorbed what she wanted of the British couple, and, at their leisure, moved on to the other diners; and all the time her fingers moved slowly up and down the slim cold walls of her beer glass. The woman, finding in this girl a poetic quality totally lacking from the stolid burghers who filled this room, indicated her to the man by saying: ‘She’s charming.’ Again he grimaced, as if to say: Every young girl is poetic. And: She’ll be her mother in ten years.

Which was true. Already the family had become aware of the infidelity of this, their youngest member; already the handsome mother was leaning over her daughter, rallying her for her dreamy inattention, claiming her by little half-caressing, peremptory exclamations. The solid, kindly father laid his brown and capable hand on the girl’s white-wool-covered forearm and bent towards her with solicitude, as if she were sick. The boy put a large forkful of meat into his mouth and ate it ruminantly, watching his sister with an irreverent grin. Then he said in a low tone some word that was clearly an old trumpet for disagreement between them, for she swung her chin towards him petulantly with a half-reproachful and half-resentful epithet. The brother went on grinning, protective but derisive; the father and mother smiled tenderly at each other because of the brother-and-sister sparring.

No, clearly, this young girl had no chance of escaping from the warm prison of her family; and in a few years she would be a capable, handsome, sensual woman, married to some manufacturer carefully chosen for her by her father. That is, she would be unless another war or economic cataclysm intervened and plunged all her people into the edge-of-disater hunger-bitten condition from which they had just emerged. Though they did not look as if they had …

Returned full circle to the point of their complicated and irrational dislike, the man and woman raised ironical eyes at each other, and the man said briefly: ‘Blond beasts.’

These two were of another family of mankind from most of the people in the restaurant.

The man was Scotch, small-built, nervous, energetic, with close-springing black hair, white freckled skin, quick, deep blue eyes. He tended to be sarcastic about the English, among whom, of course, he had spent most of his life. He was busy, hard-working, essentially pragmatic, practical, and humane. Yet above and beyond all these admirably useful qualities was something else, expressed in his characteristic little grimace of ironical bitterness, as if he were saying: Well, yes, and then?

As for her, she was small, dark, and watchful, Jewish in appearance and arguably by inheritance, since there had been a Jewish great-grandmother who had escaped from pogrom-loving Poland in the last century and married an Englishman. More potent than the great-grandmother was the fact that her fiancé, a medical student and a refugee from Austria, had been killed in the early days of the war flying over this same country in which they now sat and took their holiday. Mary Parrish was one of those people who had become conscious of their claims to being Jewish only when Hitler drew their attention to the possibility they might have some.

She now sat and contemplated the handsome German family and thought: Ten years ago … She was seeing them as executioners.

As for the man, who had taken his name, Hamish, from a string of possible names, some of them English, because of another kind of national pride, he had served in his capacity as a doctor on one of the commissions that, after the war, had tried to rescue the debris of humanity the war had left all over Europe.

It was no accident that he had served on this commission. Early in 1939 he had married a German girl, or rather, a Jewish girl, studying in Britain. In July of that year she had made a brave and foolhardy attempt to rescue some of her family who had so far escaped the concentration camps, and had never been heard of since. She had simply vanished. For all Hamish knew, she was still alive somewhere. She might very well be in this village of O—. Ever since yesterday morning when they entered Germany, Mary had been watching Hamish’s anxious, angry, impatient eyes moving, preoccupied, from the face of one woman to another; old women, young women, women on buses, trains, platforms; women glimpsed at the end of a street; a woman at a window. And she could feel him thinking: Well, and if I did see her, I wouldn’t recognize her.

And his eyes would move back to hers; she smiled; and he gave his small, bitter, ironical grimace.

They were both doctors, both hard-working and conscientious, both very tired because, after all, while living in Britain has many compensations, it is hard work, this business of maintaining a decent level of life with enough leisure for the pursuits that make life worth-while, or at least to cultivated people, which they both were, and determined to remain. They were above all, perhaps, tired people.

They were tired and they needed to rest. This was their holiday. And here they sat, knowing full well that they were pouring away energies into utterly useless, irrelevant and, above all, unfair emotions.

The word ‘unfair’ was one they both used without irony.

She said, ‘I think one week in France would be better than three here. Let’s go. I really do think we should.’

He said, ‘Let’s go into one of the smaller villages higher up the valley. They are probably just ordinary mountain villages, not tarted-up like this place.’

‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ she agreed with relief.

Here they both became alert to the fact that the young man who had sat down at their table was watching them, at the same time as he heartily chewed a large mouthful of food, and looked for an inlet into their conversation. He was an unpleasant person. Tall, with an uncoordinated, bony look, his blue eyes met the possibilities of their reaction to him with a steady glare of watchful suspicion out of an ugly face whose skin had a peculiar harsh red texture. The eyes of our couple had been, unknown to them, returning again and again to this remarkable scarlet face, and at the back of their minds they had been thinking professionally: A fool to overheat himself in this strong reflected light up here.

Now, at the same moment, the two doctors realized that the surface of his face was a skin-graft; that the whole highly-coloured, shiny, patchy surface, while an extraordinarily skilful reconstruction of a face, was nothing but a mask, and what the face had been before must be guessed at. They saw, too, that he was not a young man, but, like themselves, in early middle age. Instantly pity fought with their instinctive dislike of him; and they reminded themselves that the aggressive glare of the blue eyes was the expression of the pitiful necessity of a wounded creature to defend itself.

He said in stiff but good English, or rather, American: ‘I must beg your pardon for interrupting your conversation, and beg leave to introduce myself – Dr Schröder. I wish to place myself at your service. I know this valley well, and can recommend hotels in the other villages.’

He was looking at Hamish, as he had from the time he began speaking; though he gave a small, minimal bow when Mary Parrish introduced herself and instantly returned his attention to the man.

Both the British couple felt discomfort; but it was hard to say whether this was because of the man’s claim on their pity; because of their professional interest in him, which they must disguise; or because of the impolite insistence of his manner.

‘That is very kind of you,’ said Hamish; and Mary murmured that it was very kind. They wondered whether he had heard Hamish’s ‘blond beasts’. They wondered what other indiscretions they might have committed.

‘As it happens,’ said Dr Schröder, ‘I have a very good buddy who runs a guest house at the top of the valley. I was up there this morning, and she has a dandy room to let.’

Once again they indicated that it was very kind of him.

‘If it is not too early for you, I shall be taking the 9.30 autobus up the valley tomorrow for a day’s skiing, and I shall be happy to assist you.’

And now it was necessary to take a stand one way or the other. Mary and Hamish glanced at each other inquiringly; and immediately Dr Schröder said, with a perceptible increase of tension in his manner, ‘As you know, at this time in the season, it is hard to find accommodation.’ He paused, seemed to assure himself of their status by a swift inspection of their clothes and general style, and added: ‘Unless you can afford one of the big hotels – but they are not of the cheapest.’

‘Actually,’ said Mary, trying to make of what he must have heard her say before a simple question of caprice: ‘Actually we were wondering whether we might not go back to France? We are both very fond of France.’

But Dr Schröder was not prepared to take this from them. ‘If it is a queston of skiing, then the weather report announced today that the snow is not as good in the French Alps as it is with us. And, of course, France is much more expensive.’

They agreed that this was so; and he continued to say that if they took the empty room at his buddy’s guest house it would cost them much less than it would at a German pension, let alone a French pension. He examined their clothes again and remarked, ‘Of course, it must be hard for you to have such unfortunate restrictions with your travel allowance. Yes, it must be annoying. For people of a good salary and position it must be annoying.’

For both these two the restrictions of the travel allowance merely confirmed a fact; they could not have afforded more than the allowance in any case. They realized that Dr Schröder was quite unable to decide whether they were rich and eccentric English people who notoriously prefer old clothes to new clothes, or whether they were rich people deliberately trying to appear poor, or whether they were poor. In the first two cases they would perhaps be eager to do some trade in currency with him? Was that what he wanted?

It seemed it was; for he immediately said that he would be very happy to lend them a modest sum of dough, in return for which he would be glad if they would do the same for him when he visited London, which he intended to do very soon. He fastened the steady glare of his eyes on their faces, or rather, on Hamish’s face, and said: ‘Of course, I am prepared to offer every guarantee.’ And he proceeded to do so. He was a doctor attached to a certain hospital in the town of S—, and his salary was regular. If they wished to make independent inquiries they were welcome to do so.

And now Hamish intervened to make it clear that they could not afford to spend on this vacation one penny more than the travel allowance. For a long moment Dr Schröder did not believe him. Then he examined their clothes again and openly nodded.

Now, perhaps, the man would go away?

Not at all. He proceeded to deliver a harangue on the subject of his admiration for Britain. His love for the entire British nation, their customs, their good taste, their sportsmanship, their love of fair play, their history, and their art were the ruling passions of his life. He went on like this for some minutes, while the British couple wondered if they ought to confess that their trade was the same as his. But, if they did, presumably it would let them in for even closer intimacy. And by a hundred of the minute signs which suffice for communication between people who know each other well, they had said that they disliked this man intensely and wished only that he would go away.

But now Dr Schröder inquired outright what profession his new friend Mr Anderson pursued; and when he heard that they were both doctors, and attached to hospitals whose names he knew, his expression changed. But subtly. It was not surprise, but rather the look of a prosecutor who has been cross-examining witnesses and at last got what he wants.

And the British couple were beginning to understand what it was Dr Schröder wanted of them. He was talking with a stiff, brooding passion of resentment about his position and prospects as a doctor in Germany. For professional people, he said, Germany was an unkind country. For the business people – yes. For the artisans – yes. The workers were all millionaires these days, yes sir! Better far to be a plumber or an electrician than a doctor. The ruling dream of his life was to make his way to Britain, and there become an honoured – and, be it understood – a well-paid member of his profession.

Here Doctors Anderson and Parrish pointed out that foreign doctors were not permitted to practise in Britain. They might lecture; they might study; but they might not practise. Not unless, added Dr Parrish, possibly reacting to the fact that not once had this man done more than offer her the barest minimum of politeness until he had recognized that she, as well as Hamish, was a doctor and therefore possibly of use to him – not unless they were refugees, and even then they must take the British examinations.

Dr Schröder did not react to the word ‘refugee’.

He returned to a close cross-examination about their salaries and prospects, dealing first with Mary’s, and then, in more detail, with Hamish. At last, in response to their warning that for him to become a doctor in Britain would be much more difficult than he seemed to think, he replied that in this world everything was a question of pulling strings. In short, he intended they should pull strings for him. It was the most fortunate occurrence of his life that he had happened to meet them that evening, the happiest and the best-timed …

At this, the eyes of the British couple met on a certain suspicion. Ten minutes later in the talk it emerged that he knew the lady who ran the house where they had taken a room, and therefore he probably had heard from her that she had a British doctor as a lodger. Very likely he had arranged with the waiter to be put at their table. For he must know the people of the village well: he had been coming for his winter holidays to O— since he was a small child – Dr Schröder held out his hand below table level to show how small. Yes, all those years of winters O— had known Dr Schröder, save for the years of war, when he was away serving his country.

There was a small stir in the restaurant. The family were rising, gathering their wraps, and departing. The lady first, her shaggy brown coat slung over her handsome shoulders, her rosy lower lip caught by her white teeth as she searched for belongings she might have forgotten. Then she extended her smile, so white against the clear brown skin, and waited for her son to take her by the shoulder and propel her, while she laughed protesting, to the door. There, when it opened, she shivered playfully, although it was only the door to the vestibule. Behind her came the pretty, rather languid girl; then the stout authoritative father, shepherding his family away and out to the snow-cold air. The family vanished, leaving their table a mess of empty glasses, plates, broken bread, cheeses, fruit, wine. The waiter cleared the table with a look as if he found it a privilege.

The British couple also rose and said to Dr Schröder that they would think over his suggestion and perhaps let him know in the morning. His thin-skinned shiny face tilted up at them, and levelled into an affronted mask as he stood up and said, ‘But I understood all arrangements were made.’

And how had they got themselves into this position, where they could not exercise simple freedom of choice without upsetting this extremely dislikeable person? But they knew how. It was because he was a wounded man, a cripple; because they knew that his fixed aggression was part of his laudable determination not to let that shockingly raw face drive him into self-pity and isolation. They were doctors, and they were reacting above all to the personality of a cripple. When they said that they were tired and intended to go to bed early, and he replied instantly, insulted, that he would be happy to accompany them to a certain very pleasant place of entertainment, they knew that they could bring themselves to do no more than say they could not afford it.

They knew he would immediately offer to be their host. He did, and they politely refused as they would refuse an ordinary acquaintance, and were answered by the man who could tolerate no refusal, because if he once accepted a refusal, he would be admitting to himself that his face put him outside simple human intercourse.

Dr Schröder, who had spent all the winter holidays of his life in this valley, naturally knew the proprietor of the hotel where he proposed to take them; and he guaranteed them a pleasant and relaxing evening while he fixed on them a glare of suspicious hate.

They walked together under the snow-weighted eaves of the houses, over snow rutted by the hundred enormous American cars which had rocked over it that day, to the end of the street where there was a hotel whose exterior they had already inspected earlier that day and rejected on the grounds that anything inside it must necessarily be too expensive for them. Immediately outside, on the seared snow, sat the man without legs they had seen earlier. Or rather he stood, his head level with their hips, looking as if he were buried to hip-level in the snow, holding out a cloth cap to them. His eyes had the same bold, watchful glare as those of Dr Schröder.

Dr Schröder said, ‘It’s a disgrace that these people should be allowed to behave like this. It makes a bad impression on our visitors.’ And he led the British couple past the cripple with a look of angry irritation.

Inside was a long room sheltered by glass on two sides from the snow which could be seen spinning down through the areas of yellow light conquered from the black mass of the darkness by the room and its warmth and its noise and its people. It was extraordinarily pleasant to enter this big room, so busy with pleasure, and to see the snow made visible only during its passage through the beams from the big windows, as if the wildness of the mountain valley had been admitted just so far as would give the delight of contrast to the guests who could see savagery as a backdrop of pretty, spinning white flakes.

There was a small band, consisting of piano, clarinet and drum playing the kind of jazz that makes a pleasant throb, like a blood-beat, behind conversation.

The family had moved themselves from the table in the restaurant to a table here and sat as before in a close group. The British couple found an empty table near them, which Dr Schröder approved; and when the waiter came knew they had been right – the drinks were very expensive and this was not a place where one might lightly sip one drink for a whole evening while richer people drank seriously. One was expected to drink; people were drinking, although a small beer cost nearly ten shillings. They saw, too, that Dr Schröder’s boast that he had special privileges here because he was a friend of the proprietor was untrue. His passport here, as everywhere else, was his raw, shiny face. When the proprietor glanced towards him during his hospitable passage among the tables, he did so with a nod and a smile, but it was a smile that had the over-kindness of controlled hostility. And his eyes lingered briefly on the British couple who, after this inspection, were forced to feel that everyone else in this place was German. The Americans were in their own rich hotels; the impoverished British in the cheap guest houses; this place was for wealthy Germans. And the British couple wondered at the insistence of Dr Schröder in bringing them here. Was it possible that he really believed he had a special place in the heart of the proprietor? Yes, it was; he kept smiling and nodding after the turned back of the fat host, as if to say: You see, he knows me; then smiling at them, proud of his achievement. For which he was prepared to pay heavily in actual money. He counted out the price of the drinks with the waiter with a painful care for the small change of currency that they understood very well. What recompense could they possibly give this man; what was he wanting so badly? Was it really only that he wanted to live and work in Britain?

Again Dr Schröder began to talk, and again of his admiration for their country, leaning across the table, looking into their faces, as if this was a message of incalculable importance to them both.

He was interrupted by the clarinet player who stood up, took a note from the regular ground-throb of the music, and began to develop a theme of his own from it. Couples went on to a small area of shiny floor not occupied by tables, and which was invaded at every moment by the hurrying waiters with their trays of drinks. They were dancing, these people, for the pleasure not of movement, but of contact. A dozen or a score of men and women, seemingly held upright by the pressure of the seated guests around them, idled together, loosely linked, smiling, sceptical, good-natured with the practice of pleasure.

Immediately the dancing was broken up because the group of folk singers had come in at the big glass entrance door, in their demure conventual dress, and now stood by the band waiting.

The woman at the next table gave a large cheerful shrug and said, ‘This is the fifth time. This is my fifth home-evening.’ People turned to smile at the words heimat-abend, indulgent with the handsome woman and her look of spoiled enjoyment. Already one of the folk singers was moving among the tables to collect their fee, which was high; and already the rich papa was thrusting towards the girl a heap of money, disdaining the change with a shake of his head – change, however, which she did not seem in any urgency to give him. When she reached the table where our couple sat with Dr Schröder, Hamish paid, and not with good grace. After all, the prices were high enough here without having to pay more for folk songs which one did not necessarily want to listen to at all.

When the girl had made her rounds and collected her money, she rejoined the group, which formed itself together near the band and sang, one after another, songs of the valley, in which yodelling figured often and loudly, earning loud applause.

It was clear that Dr Schröder, who listened to the group with a look of almost yearning nostalgia, did not feel its intrusion as an irritant at all. Folk songs, his expression said, were something he could listen to all night. He clapped often and glanced at his guests, urging them to share his sentimental enjoyment.

At last the group left; the clarinet summoned the dancers to the tiny floor; and Dr Schröder resumed his hymn of love for Britain. Tragic, he said, having stated and restated the theme of praise – tragic that these two countries had ever had to fight at all. Tragic that natural friends should have been divided by the machinations of interested and sinister groups. The British couple’s eyes met ironically over the unspoken phrase, international Jewry, and even with the consciousness of being pedantic, if not unfair. But Dr Schröder did not believe in the unstated. He said that international Jewry had divided the two natural masters of Europe, Germany and Britain; and it was his passionate belief that in the future these two countries should work together for the good of Europe and thus, obviously, of the whole world. Dr Schröder had had good friends, friends who were almost brothers, killed on the front; where British and German troops had been manoeuvred into hostility; and he grieved over them even now as one does for sacrificed victims.

Dr Schröder paused, fixed them with the glare of his eyes, and said: ‘I wish to tell you that I, too, was wounded; perhaps you have not noticed. I was wounded on the Russian front. My life was despaired of. But I was saved by the skill of our doctors. My entire face is a witness to the magnificent skill of our German doctors.’

The British couple hastened to express their surprise and congratulations. Oddly enough, they felt a lessened obligation towards compassion because of Dr Schröder’s grotesque and touching belief that his face was nearly normal enough to be unnoticed. He said that the surface of his face had burned off when a tank beside him had exploded into pieces, showering him with oil. He had fought for three years with the glorious armies of his country all over the Ukraine. He spoke like a survivor from the Grande Armée to fellow admirers of ‘The Other’, inviting and expecting interested congratulation. ‘Those Russians,’ he said, ‘are savages. Barbarians. No one would believe the atrocities they committed. Unless you had seen it with your own eyes you would not believe the brutality the Russians are capable of.’

The British couple, now depressed into silence, and even past the point where they could allow their eyes to meet in ironical support of each other, sat watching the languidly revolving dancers.

Dr Schröder said insistently, ‘Do you know that those Russians would shoot at our soldiers as they walked through the streets of a village? An ordinary Russian peasant, if he got the chance, would slaughter one of our soldiers? And even the women – I can tell you cases of Russian women murdering our soldiers after pretending to be buddies with them.’

Mary and Hamish kept their peace and wondered how Dr Schröder had described to himself the mass executions, the hangings, the atrocities of the German army in Russia. They did not wonder for long, for he said, ‘We were forced to defend ourselves. Yes, I can tell you that we had to defend ourselves against the savagery of those people. The Russians are monsters.’

Mary Parrish roused herself to say, ‘Not such monsters, perhaps, as the Jews?’ And she tried to catch and hold the fanatic eyes of their host with her own. He said, ‘Ah, yes, we had many enemies.’ His eyes, moving fast from Hamish’s face to Mary’s, paused and wavered. It occurred to him perhaps that they were not entirely in accordance with him. For a second his ugly, blistered mouth twisted in what might have been doubt. He said politely, ‘Of course, our Führer went too far in his zeal against our enemies. But he understood the needs of our country.’

‘It is the fate of great men,’ said Hamish, in the quick sarcastic voice that was the nearest he ever got to expressed anger, ‘to be misunderstood by the small-minded.’

Dr Schröder was now unmistakably in doubt. He was silent, examining their faces with his eyes, into which all the expression of his scarred face was concentrated, while they suffered the inner diminishment and confusion that happens when the assumptions on which one bases one’s life are attacked. They were thinking dubiously that this was the voice of madness. They were thinking that they knew no one in Britain who would describe it as anything else. They were thinking that they were both essentially, selfconsciously, of that element in their nation dedicated to not being insular, to not falling into the errors of complacency; and they were, at this moment, feeling something of the despair that people like them had felt ten, fifteen years ago, watching the tides of madness rise while the reasonable and the decent averted their eyes. At the same time they were feeling an extraordinary but undeniable reluctance to face the fact that Dr Schröder might represent any more than himself. No, they were assuring themselves, this unfortunate man is simply a cripple, scarred mentally as well as physically, a bit of salvage from the last war.

At this moment the music again stopped, and there was an irregular clapping all over the room; clearly there was to be a turn that the people there knew and expected.

Standing beside the piano was a small, smiling man who nodded greetings to the guests. He was dark, quick-eyed, with an agreeable face that the British couple instinctively described as ‘civilized’. He nodded to the pianist, who began to improvise an accompaniment to his act; he was half-singing, half-talking the verse of a song or ballad about a certain general whose name the British couple did not recognize. The accompaniment was a steady, military-sounding thump-thump against which the right hand wove fragments of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ and the ‘Horst Wessel Song’. The refrain was: ‘And now he sits in Bonn’.

The next verse was about an admiral, also now sitting in Bonn.

The British couple understood that the song consisted of the histories of a dozen loyal German militarists who had been over-zealous in their devotion to their Führer; had been sentenced by the Allied courts of justice to various terms of imprisonment, or to death; ‘and now they sat in Bonn.’

All that was fair enough. It sounded like a satire on Allied policy in Germany which – so both these conscientious people knew and deplored – tended to be over-generous to the ex-murderers of the Nazi regime. What could be more heartening than to find their own view expressed there, in this comfortable resort of the German rich? And what more surprising?

They looked at Dr Schröder and saw his eyes gleaming with pleasure. They looked back at the urbane, ironical little singer, who was performing with the assurance of one who knows himself to be perfectly at one with his audience, and understood that this was the type of ballad adroitly evolved to meet the needs of an occupied people forced to express themselves under the noses of a conqueror. True that the American army was not here, in this room, this evening; but even if they had been, what possible exception could they have taken to the words of this song?

It was a long ballad, and when it was ended there was very little applause. Singer and audience exchanged with each other smiles of discreet understanding, and the little man bowed this way and that. He then straightened himself, looked at the British couple, and bowed to them. It was as if the room caught its breath. Only when they looked at Dr Schröder’s face, which showed all the malicious delight of a child who had thumbed his nose behind teacher’s back, did they understand what a demonstration of angry defiance that bow had been. And they understood, with a sinking of the heart, the depths of furious revengeful humiliation which made such a very slight gesture so extremely satisfying to these rich burgesses, who merely glanced discreetly, smiling slightly, at these conquerors in their midst – conquerors who were so much shabbier than they were, so much more worn and tired – and turned away, exchanging glances of satisfaction, to their batteries of gleaming glasses filled with wine and with beer.

And now Mary and Hamish felt that this demonstration, which presumably Dr Schröder had shared in, perhaps even invited, released them from any obligation to him; and they looked at him with open dislike, indicating that they wished to leave.

Besides, the waiter stood beside them, showing an open insolence that was being observed and admired by the handsome matron and her husband and her son; the girl was, as usual, dreaming some dream of her own and not looking at anyone in particular. The waiter bent over them, put his hands on their still half-filled glasses, and asked what they would have.

Hamish and Mary promptly drank what remained of their beer and rose. Dr Schröder rose with them. His whole knobbly, ugly body showed agitation and concern. Surely they weren’t going? Surely, when the evening was just beginning, and very soon they would have the privilege of hearing again the talented singer who had just retired, but only for a short interval. Did they realize that he was a famous artist from M—, a man who nightly sang to crammed audiences, who was engaged by the management of this hotel, alas, only for two short weeks of the winter season?

This was either the most accomplished insolence or another manifestation of Dr Schröder’s craziness. For a moment the British couple wondered if they had made a mistake and had misunderstood the singer’s meaning. But one glance around the faces of the people at the near tables was enough: each face expressed a discreetly hidden smile of satisfaction at the rout of the enemy – routed by the singer, and by the waiter, their willing servant who was nevertheless at this moment exchanging democratic grins of pleasure with the handsome matron.

Dr Schröder was mad, and that was all there was to it. He both delighted in the little demonstration of hostility and, in some involved way of his own, wanted them to delight in it – probably out of brotherly love for him. And now he was quite genuinely agitated and hurt because they were going.

The British couple went out, past the smiling band, past the conscious waiter, while Dr Schröder followed. They went down the iced steps of the hotel and stopped by the legless man who was still rooted in the snow like a plant, where Hamish gave him all the change he had, which amounted to the price of another round of drinks had they stayed in the big warm room.

Dr Schröder watched this and said at once, with indignant reproach, ‘You should not do this. It is not expected. Such people should be locked away.’ All his suspicion had returned; they must, obviously, be rich, and they had been lying to him.

Mary and Hamish went without speaking down the snow-soft street, through a faint fall of white snow; and Dr Schröder came striding behind them, breathing heavily. When they reached the door of the little house where they had a room, he ran around them and stood facing them, saying hurriedly, ‘And so I shall see you tomorrow at the autobus, nine-thirty.’

‘We will get in touch with you,’ said Hamish politely, which, since they did not know his address, and had not asked for it, was as good as dismissing him.

Dr Schröder leaned towards them, examining their faces with his gleaming, suspicious eyes. He said, ‘I will attend you in the morning,’ and left them.

They let themselves in and ascended the shallow wooden stairs to their room in silence. The room was low and comfortable, gleaming with well-polished wood. There were an old-fashioned rose-patterned jug and basin on the washstand and an enormous bed laden with thick eiderdowns. A great, shining, blue-tiled stove filled half a wall. Their landlady had left a note pinned to one of the fat pillows, demanding politely that they should leave, in their turn, a note for her outside their door, saying at what hour they wished to receive their breakfast tray. She was the widow of the pastor. She now lived by letting this room to the summer and winter visitors. She knew this couple were not married because she had had, by regulation, to take down particulars from their passports. She had said nothing of any disapproval she might have felt. The gods of the tourist trade must not be offended by any personal prejudice she might hold; and she must have prejudices, surely, as the widow of a man of God, even against a couple so obviously respectable as this one?

Mary said, ‘I wish she’d turn us out in a fit of moral indignation. I wish someone would have a fit of moral indignation about something, instead of everything simmering and festering in the background.’

To which he replied, with the calm of a practical man, ‘We will get up extremely early and leave this valley before our friend Dr Fascist can see us. I don’t think I could bear to exchange even one more word with him.’ He wrote a short note to the widow of the pastor, demanding breakfast for seven o’clock; left it outside the door; and, thus well organized, invited Mary to come to bed and stop worrying.

They got into bed and lay side by side. This was not a night when their arms could hold any comfort for each other. This was a night when they were not a couple, they were two people. Their dead were in the room with them – if Lise, his wife, could be called dead. For how were they to know? War above all breeds a knowledge of the fantastic, and neither of them heard one of the extraordinary and impossible stories of escape, coincidence and survival without thinking: Perhaps Lise is alive somewhere after all. And the possible aliveness of Hamish’s dead wife had kept alive the image of the very young medical student who, being a medical student, had no right to risk himself in the air at all; but who had in fact taken wing out of his furious misery and anger because of the Nazis and had crashed in flames a year later. These two, the pretty and vivacious Lise and the gallant and crusading airman, stood by the enormous, eiderdown-weighted bed and said softly: You must include us, you must include us.

And so it was a long time before Mary and Hamish slept.

Both awoke again in the night, aware of the snow-sheen on the windowpanes, listening to the soft noises of the big porcelain stove which sounded as if there were a contented animal breathing beside them in the room. Now they thought that they were leaving this valley because, out of some weakness of character apparently inherent in both of them, they had put themselves in a position where, if they took a room higher up the valley, it would have to be a room chosen for them by Dr Schröder, since they could not bring themselves to be finally rude to him because of that scarred face of his.

No, they preferred to conclude that Dr Schröder summed up in his personality and being everything they hated in this country, Germany, the great catalyst and mirror of Europe: summed it up and presented it to them direct and unambiguously, in such a way that they must reject or accept it.

Yet how could they do either? For to meet Dr Schröder at all made it inevitable that these two serious and conscience-driven people must lie awake and think: One nation is not very different from another … (For if one did not take one’s stand on this proposition where did one end?) And therefore it followed that they must think: What in Britain corresponds to Dr Schröder? What unpleasant forces are this moment simmering in the sewers of our national soul that might explode suddenly into shapes like Dr Schröder? Well then? And what deplorable depths of complacency there must be in us both that we should feel so superior to Dr Schröder – that we should wish only that he might be pushed out of sight somewhere, like a corpse in a house full of living people; or masked like a bad smell; or exorcized like an evil spirit?

Were they or were they not on holiday? They were; and therefore exempt by definition from lying awake and thinking about the last war; lying awake and worrying about the possible next war; lying awake and wondering what perverse masochism had brought them here at all.

At the dead and silent hour of four, when not a light glimmered anywhere in the village, they were both awake, lying side by side in the great feather-padded bed, discussing Dr Schröder in depth. They analysed him politically, psychologically, and medically – particularly medically – and at such length that when the maid came in with their early breakfast they were extremely reluctant to wake up. But they forced themselves to wake, to eat and to dress, and then went downstairs where their landlady was drinking coffee in her kitchen. They put their problem to her. Yesterday they had agreed to stay with her for a week. Today they wanted to leave. Since it was the height of the season presumably she would let her room today? If not, of course they would be delighted to pay what they were morally bound to do.

Frau Stohr dismissed the subject of payment as irrelevant. At this time of the year her bell rang a dozen times a day with inquiries for rooms by people who had arrived at the station and hoped, usually over-optimistically, to find empty rooms in the village. Frau Stohr was upset that her two guests wished to leave. They were not comfortable? They were badly served?

They hastened to assure her that the place was everything they wanted. At the moment they felt it was. Frau Stohr was the most pleasant sight in an early morning after a night of conscience-searching. She was a thin and elderly lady, her white hair drawn back into a tight knot which was stuck through with stiff utilitarian pins almost the size of knitting needles. Her face was severe, but tranquil and kindly. She wore a long, full, black woollen skirt, presumably a practical descendant of the great woollen skirts of the local peasant costume. She wore a long-sleeved striped woollen blouse fastened high at the throat with a gold brooch.

They found it very hard to say that they wanted to leave the valley the day after arriving in it. The rectitude of this admirable old lady made it difficult. So they said they had decided to take a room farther up the valley where the snow slopes organized for skiing would be closer to the villages. For, above all, they did not want to hurt Frau Stohr’s national feelings; they intended to slip quietly down to the station and take the first train away from the place, away and out of Germany into France.

Frau Stohr instantly agreed. She had always thought it more suitable for the serious skiers to find homes farther up the valley. But there were people who came to the winter sports not for the sport, but for the atmosphere of the sport. As for herself she never tired of seeing the young people at their tricks on the snow. Of course, when she had been a girl, it was not a question of tricks at all; skis were simply a means of getting from one place to another quickly … but now, of course, all that had changed, and someone like herself who had been almost born on skis, like all the children of the valley, would find it embarrassing to stand on skis again with nothing to show in the way of jumps and turns. Of course, at her age she seldom left the house, and so she did not have to expose her deficiencies. But her two guests, being serious skiers, must be feeling frustrated, knowing that all the long runs, and the big ski lifts were at the head of the valley. Luckily she knew of a lady in the last village of the valley who had a free room and would be just the person to look after them.

Here she mentioned the name of the lady recommended by Dr Schröder the night before, and it was extraordinary how this name, yesterday associated with every kind of unpleasantness, became attractive and reassuring, simply because it came from the lips of Frau Stohr.

Mary and Hamish exchanged looks and came to a decision without speaking. In the sober light of early morning, all the very sound arguments against leaving the valley returned to them. And after all, Dr Schröder was staying in O— itself, and not in the village thirty miles up the valley. At worst he might come and visit them.

Frau Stohr offered to telephone Frau Länge, who was a good woman and an unfortunate one. Her husband had been killed in the last war. Here Frau Stohr smiled at them with the gentle tolerance of the civilized who take it for granted that war between nations need not destroy their common humanity and understanding. Yes, yes, as long as men were so stupid there would be wars and, afterwards, widows like poor Frau Länge, who had lost not only her husband but her two sons, and now lived alone with her daughter, taking in lodgers.

Frau Stohr and the British couple, united on the decent common ground of the international humanitarian conscience, smiled at each other, thinking compassionately of Frau Länge. Then Frau Stohr went to the telephone and engaged the room on behalf of her two guests, for whom she was prepared to vouch personally. Then they settled the bill, thanked each other, and separated – Mary and Hamish with their cases in their hands and their skis over their shoulders towards the bus stop, and Frau Stohr to her knitting and her cup of coffee in her big heated kitchen.

It was a clear morning, the sun sparkling pinkly over the slopes of snow where the pine trees stood up, stiff and dark. The first bus of the day was just leaving, and they found places in it. They sat behind two small pigtailed blonde girls who saw nobody else in the bus, but held each other’s hands and sang one folk song after another in small, clear voices. Everyone in the bus turned to smile with affectionate indulgence at them. The bus climbed slowly up and up, along the side of the snow-filled valleys; and as the skiing villages came into sight, one after another, the bus stopped, shedding some passengers and taking on others, but always full; up and up while the two small girls sang, holding hands, looking earnestly into each other’s faces, so as to be sure they were keeping time, and never once repeating a song.

The British couple thought it unlikely that they could find, in their own country, two small girls who could sing, without repeating themselves, for two solid hours of a bus journey, even if their British stiff-lippedness would allow them to open their mouths in public in the first place. These two singing children comforted Mary and Hamish quite remarkably. This was the real Germany – rather old-fashioned, a bit sentimental, war, simple, kindly. Dr Schröder and what he stood for was an unlucky and not very important phenomenon. Everything they had felt yesterday was the result of being overtired. Now they examined the pleasant villages through which they passed with anticipation, hoping that the one they were committed to would be equally as full of modest wooden chalets and apparently inexpensive restaurants.

It was. As the very head of the valley where the mountain barrier beyond which lay Innsbruck rose tall and impregnable, there was a small village, as charming as all the others. Here, somewhere, was the house of Frau Länge. They made inquiries at a hotel and were directed. A path ran off from the village uphill among the pine woods to a small house about a mile away. The isolation of this house appealed naturally to the instincts of the British couple, who trudged towards it over cushions of glittering snow, feeling grateful to Frau Stohr. The path was narrow, and they had constantly to stand aside while skiers in bright clothes whizzed past them, laughing and waving. The proficiency of the sun-bronzed gods and goddesses of the snowfields discouraged Mary and Hamish, and perhaps half the attraction of that isolated house was that they could make their tame flights over the snow in comparative privacy.

The house was square, small, wooden; built on a low mound of snow in a space surrounded by pine woods. Frau Länge was waiting for them at her front door, smiling. For some reason they had imagined her in the image of Frau Stohr; but she was a good twenty years younger, a robust, straw-headed, red-cheeked woman wearing a tight scarlet sweater and a tight bright blue skirt. Behind her was a girl, obviously her daughter, a healthy, brown, flaxen-haired girl. Both women occupied themselves with a frank and intensive examination of their new guests for the space of time it took them to cross the snow to the house. The room they were given was at the front of the house, looking away from the village up into a side valley. It was a room like the one they had occupied for the one night at Frau Stohr’s; low, large, gleaming with waxed wood, and warmed by an enormous tiled stove. Frau Länge took their passports to write down their particulars, and when she returned them it was with a change of manner which made Mary Parrish and Hamish Anderson know they had been accepted into a freemasonry with their hostess. She said, while her franky vulgar blue eyes continued a minute examination of them and their belongings, that her dear aunt, Frau Stohr, who was not really her aunt, just a second cousin, called Aunt out of respect for her age and position as widow of the pastor, had spoken for them; that she had every confidence in any person recommended from that quarter. And she had heard, too, from dear Dr Schröder, who was an old friend, a friend of many years, ah – what a brave man. Did they notice his face. Yes, truly? Did they know that for two years he had lain in hospital while a new face was moulded for him and covered with skin taken from his thighs? Poor man. Yes, it was the barbarity of those Russians that was responsible for Dr Schröder’s face. Here she gave an exaggerated sigh and a shrug and left them.

They reminded themselves that they had hardly slept for three nights of their precious holiday, and this doubtless accounted for their present lack of enthusiasm for the idea of putting on skis. They went to sleep and slept the day through; that evening they were served a heavy meal in the living room by Frau Länge herself, who stood chatting to them until they asked her to sit down. Which she did, and proceeded to cross-examine them about the affairs of the British royal family. It was impossible to exaggerate the degree of enthusiasm aroused in Frau Länge by the royal family. She followed every move made by any member of it through a dozen illustrated papers. She knew what they all ate, how they liked things cooked, and how served. She knew the type of corset favoured by the Queen, the names of the doctors attending her, the methods of upbringing planned for the royal children, the favourite colours of the two royal Elizabeths and the royal Margaret.

The British couple, who were by temperament republicans and who would have described themselves as such had the word not, at that time, been rather vieux jeu, acquired an impressive amount of information about ‘their’ royal family, and felt inadequate, for they were unable to answer any of her questions.

To escape from Frau Länge they went back to their room. They discovered that this house was not at all isolated as it had seemed during the day when the pine trees had concealed from them buildings farther up the little side valley. Lights sparkled in the trees, and it seemed that there were at least two large hotels less than half a mile away. Music streamed towards them across the dark snow.

In the morning they found there were two American hotels; that is, hotels specifically for the recreation of American troops. Frau Länge used the word American with a mixture of admiration and hatred. And she took it for granted that they, who were after all partners with the Americans (and the Russians of course) in this business of policing the defeated country, should share this emotion with her. It was because they shared with her, Frau Länge, the quality of not being rich.

‘Ah,’ she said, with a false and hearty shrug of her shoulders, a false humility in her voice, ‘it is a terrible thing, the way they come here and behave as if they owned our country.’ And she stood at the window, while the British couple ate their breakfast, watching the American soldiers and their wives and their girl friends swooping past down the slopes; and on her face was a bitter envy, an admiring spite, as if she were thinking. Yes? Then wait and see!

Later that day they saw the daughter standing displayed on her doorstep in well-cut ski trousers and sweaters, like a girl in a poster, looking at the American soldiers. And they heard her call out, every time a single man went past: ‘Yank-ee. Yank-ee.’ The soldier would look up and wave, and she waved back shouting: ‘I love you, Buddy.’ At last one came over; and the two went off on skis, down to the village.

Frau Länge, who had seen them watching, said, ‘Ach, these young girls, I was one myself.’ She waited until they smiled their tolerant complicity – and waited in such a way they felt they could do no less, seeing that their passports proved they had no right to different standards; and said, ‘Yes, when one is young one is foolish. I remember how I fell in love with every man I saw. Ach, yes, it was so. I was living in Munich when I was a girl. Yes, youth has no discrimination. I was in love with our Führer, yes, it is true. And before that in love with a Communist leader who lived in our street. And now I tell my Lili it is lucky that she falls in love with the American army, because she is in love with democracy.’ Frau Länge giggled and sighed.

At all the heavy meals she served them – sausage and sauerkraut and potatoes; sauerkraut, potatoes, and beef stew – she stood by them, talking, or sat modestly at the other end of the polished wood table, one plump forearm resting before her, one hand stroking and arranging her bright yellow hair, and talked and talked. She told them the history of her life while they ate. Her mother died of hunger in the First World War. Her father was a carpenter. Her elder brother was a political; he was a Social Democrat, and so she had been a Social Democrat, too. And then he had been a Communist and so she voted for the Communists, God forgive her. And then there came the Fiihrer and her brother told her he was a good man, and so she became a Nazi. Of course, she was very young and foolish in those days. She told them, giggling, how she had stood in those vast crowds while the Führer spoke, shrieking with enthusiasm. ‘For my brother was in the uniform, yes, and he was so good-looking, you would never believe it!’

The British couple remembered listening on the radio to the sound of those fanatic crowds roaring and yelling approval to the dedicated, hysterical, drum-beating voice; they watched Frau Länge and imagined her a young girl, sweating and scarlet-faced, yelling with the thousands, arm in arm with her girl friend, who was of course in love with the uniformed brother. Then, afterwards cooling her sore throat with beer in a café, she would perhaps have giggled with the girl friend at the memory of her intoxication. Or perhaps she had not giggled. At any rate, she had married and come here to the mountains and had three children.

And now her man was dead, killed on the front near Stalingrad. And one son had been killed in North Africa, and another at Avranches. And when her Lili leaned out of the window giggling and waving at a passing American soldier she giggled and said, with a glance at the British couple, ‘Lucky for us we aren’t in the Russian zone, because if so Lili would have loved a Russki.’ And Lili giggled and leaned farther out of the window and waved and called, ‘Buddy, I love you.’

Frau Länge, conscious perhaps that the continued politeness of her British guests need not necessarily mean agreement, would sometimes straighten her shoulders into prim self-righteousness, look in front of her with lowered and self-conscious eyelids, and say with a murmuring shocked rectitude: ‘Yes, Lili, say what you like, but we are lucky this time to have English people as guests. They are people like ourselves who have suffered from this terrible war. And they will go back home and tell their friends what we suffer because our country is divided. For it is clear they are shocked. They did not know of the humiliations we have to undergo.’

At this Mary Parrish and Hamish Anderson would say nothing at all, but politely passed each other the salt or the dumplings and shortly afterwards excused themselves and went to their room. They were sleeping a good deal, for, after all, they were people kept permanently short of sleep. And they ate heartily if not well. They skied a little and lay often in the sun, acquiring a layer of brown that they would lose within a week of returning to London. They were feeling rested. They were in a lethargy of physical contentment. They listened to Frau Länge, accepted her scolding because of their total ignorance of the manners and habits of the royal families of Europe, watched the daughter go off with this US soldier or that; and when Dr Schröder arrived one afternoon to take coffee with Frau Länge, they were happy to join the party. Frau Länge had explained to them that it was the dream of Dr Schröder’s life to reach the United States. Unfortunately, every attempt he had made to do this had failed. It was, perhaps, easy for them to arrange a visa for Dr Schröder from London? No? It was difficult there, too? Ach, if she were a young woman she too would go to the United States; that was the country of the future, was it not? She did not blame Dr Schröder that he wished so much to go there. And if she were in a position to assist him, they must believe her that she would, for friends should always help each other.

They had decided that it was Frau Länge’s plan to marry Lili to the doctor. But it seemed Lili did not share this idea, for although she knew he was coming, she did not appear that evening. And perhaps Frau Länge was not altogether sorry, for while the word flirtation could hardly be used of a relationship like this one, it was extremely amiable. Frau Länge sighed a great deal, her silly blue eyes fastened on the terrible shining mask of her friend’s face, saying, ‘Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott, mein Gott!’ while Dr Schröder accepted the tribute like a film star, bored with flattery, making polite gestures of repudiation with one hand, using the other to eat with. He stayed the night, ostensibly on the old sofa in the kitchen.

In the morning he woke Mary and Hamish at seven to say that unfortunately he was leaving the valley because he was due to take up his duties at the hospital, that he was delighted to have been of service to them, that he hoped they would arrange their return journey so as to pass through the city where his hospital was, and asked for their assurances that they would.

The departure of Dr Schröder brought it home to them that their own holiday would end in a week and that they were bored, or on the point of becoming bored. They had much better rouse themselves, leave the snow mountains, and go down to one of the cities below, take a cheap room, and make an effort to meet some ordinary people. By this they meant neither the rich industrialists who frequented this valley, nor people like Frau Stohr, who were manifestly something left over from an older and more peaceful time; nor like Frau Länge and her daughter Lili; nor like Dr Schröder. Saying goodbye to Frau Länge was almost painless for, as she said instantly, a day never passed without at least one person knocking on her door and asking for a room because, as everyone in the village knew, she gave good value for money. This was true; Frau Länge was a natural landlady; she had given them far more than had been contracted for in the way of odd cups of coffee and above all in hours of fraternal conversation. But at last she accepted their plea that they wanted to spend a week in their professional guise, seeing hospitals and making contact with their fellow-doctors. ‘In that case,’ she said at once, ‘it is lucky that you know Dr Schröder, for there could be no better person to show you everything that you need to see.’ They said that they would look up Dr Schröder the moment they arrived, if they should happen to pass through his town, and with this the goodbyes were made.

They made the journey by bus down the long winding valley to the mother village, O—, caught the little rickety train, spent another uncomfortable night sitting up side by side on the hard wooden benches, and at last reached the city of Z—, where they found a small room in a cheap hotel. And now they were pledged to contact ordinary people and widen their view of present-day Germany. They took short walks through the streets of the city surrounded by ordinary people, looked into their faces, as tourists do, made up stories about them, and got into brief conversations from which they made large generalizations. And, like every earnest tourist, they indulged in fantasies of how they would stop some pleasant-faced person in the street and say: We are ordinary people, completely representative of the people of our country. You are obviously an ordinary person, representative of yours. Please divulge and unfold yourself to us, and we will do the same.

Whereupon this pleasant-faced person would let out an exclamation of delight, strike his forehead with his fist and say: But my friends! There is nothing I would like better. With which he would take them to his house, flat, or room; and a deathless friendship would begin, strong enough to outlast any international misunderstandings, accidents, incidents, wars, or other phenomena totally undesired by the ordinary people on both sides.

They did not contact Dr Schröder, since they had taken good care not to choose the town he was working in. But from time to time they thought how pleasant it would have been if Dr Schröder had not been such an utterly disgusting person; if he had been a hardworking, devoted, idealistic doctor like themselves, who could initiate them into the medical life of Germany, or at least, of one city, without politics entering their intercourse at all.

Thinking wistfully along these lines led them into a course of action foreign to their naturally diffident selves. It so happened that about a year before, Dr Anderson had got a letter from a certain Dr Kroll who was attached to a hospital just outside the city of Z— congratulating him on a paper he had published recently and enclosing a paper on his own which dealt with a closely related line of research. Hamish remembered reading Dr Kroll’s paper and diagnosing it as typical of the work put out by elderly and established doctors who are no longer capable of ploughing original furrows in the field of medicine but, because they do not wish to seem as if they have lost all interest in original research, from time to time put out a small and harmless paper which amounts to an urbane comment on the work of other people. In short, Dr Anderson had despised the paper sent to him by his colleague in Germany and had done no more than write him a brief letter of thanks. Now he remembered the incident and told Mary Parrish about it, and both wondered if they might telephone Dr Kroll and introduce themselves. When they decided that they should, it was with a definite feeling that they were confessing a defeat. Now they were going to be professional people, nothing more. The ‘ordinary people’ had totally eluded them. Conversations with three workmen (on buses), two housewives (in cafés), a businessman (on a train), two waitresses and two maids (at the hotel) had left them dissatisfied. None of these people had come out with the final, pithy, conclusive statement about modern Germany that they so badly needed. In fact none of them had said more than what their counterparts in Britain would have done. The nearest to a political comment any of them had made was the complaint by one of the maids that she did not earn enough money and would very likely go to England where, she understood, wages were much higher.

No, contact with that real, old-fashioned, healthy Germany, as symbolized by the two little girls singing on the bus, had failed them. But certainly it must be there. Something which was a combination of the rather weary irony of the refugees both had known, the bitter affirmation of the songs of Bertolt Brecht, the fighting passion of a Dimitrov (though of course Dimitrov was not a German); the innocence of the little girls, the crashing chords of Beethoven’s Fifth. These qualities were fused in their minds into the image of a tired, sceptical, sardonic, but tough, personage, a sort of civilized philosopher prepared at any moment to pick up a rifle and fight for the good and the right and the true. But they had not met anyone remotely like this. As for the two weeks up in the valley, they had simply wiped them out. After all, was it likely that a valley given up wholly to the pursuit of pleasure, and all the year round at that, could be representative of anything but itself?

They would simply accept the fact that they had failed, and ring up Dr Kroll, and spend the remaining days of their holiday acquiring information about medicine. They rang up Dr Kroll who, rather to their surprise, remembered the interesting correspondence he had had with Dr Anderson and invited them to spend the next morning with him. He sounded not at all like the busy head of a hospital, but more like a host. Having made this arrangement, Doctors Parrish and Anderson were on the point of going out to find some cheap restaurant – for their reserve of money was now very small indeed – when Dr Schröder was announced to them. He had travelled that afternoon all the way from S— especially to greet them, having heard from his buddy Frau Länge that they were here. In other words, he must have telephoned or wired Frau Länge, who knew their address since she was forwarding letters for them; his need for them was so great that he had also travelled all the way from S—, an expensive business, as he did not hesitate to point out.

The British couple, once again faced with the scarred face and bitter eyes of Dr Schröder, once again felt a mixture of loathing and compassion and limply made excuses because they had chosen to stop in this town and not in S—. They said they could not possibly afford to spend the evening, as he wanted to do, in one of the expensive restaurants; refused to go as his guests since he had already spent so much money on coming to meet them; and compromised on an agreement to drink beer with him. This they did in various beer cellars where the cohorts of the Führer used to gather in the old days. Dr Schröder told them this in a way that could be taken either as if he were pointing out a tourist attraction, or as if he were offering them the opportunity to mourn a lost glory with him. His manner towards them now fluctuated between hostility and a self-abasing politeness. They, for their part, maintained their own politeness, drank their beer, occasionally caught each other’s eye, and suffered through an evening which, had it not been for Dr Schröder, might have been a very pleasant one. From time to time he brought the conversation around to the possibilities of his working in Britain; and they repeated their warnings, until at last, although he had not mentioned the United States, they explained that getting visas to live in that part of the world would be no easier in Britain than it was here. Dr Schröder was not at all discomposed when they showed that they were aware of his real objective. Not at all; he behaved as if he had told them from the start that the United States was his ideal country. Just as if he had never sung songs of praise to Britain, he now disparaged Britain as part of Europe, which was dead and finished, a parasite on the healthy body of America. Quite obviously all people of foresight would make their way to America – he assumed that they, too, had seen this obvious truth, and had possibly already made their plans? Of course he did not blame anyone for looking after himself first, that was a rule of nature; but friends should help each other. And who knew but that once they were all in America Dr Schröder might be in a position to help Doctors Anderson and Parrish? The wheel of chance might very well bring such a thing to pass. Yes, it was always advisable in this world to plan well ahead. As for himself, he was not ashamed to admit that it was his first principle; that was why he was sitting this evening in the city of Z—, at their service. That was why he had arranged a day’s leave from his own hospital – not the easiest thing to do, this, since he had just returned from a fortnight’s holiday – in order to be their guide around the hospitals of Z—.

Mary and Hamish, after a long stunned silence, said that his kindness to them was overwhelming. But unfortunately they had arranged to spend tomorrow with Dr Kroll of such-and-such a hospital.

The eyes of Dr Schröder showed a sudden violent animation. The shiny stretched mask of his face deepened its scarlet and, after a wild angry flickering of blue light at the name Kroll, the eyes settled into a steady, almost anguished glare of inquiry.

It appeared that at last they had hit upon, quite by chance, the way to silence Dr Schröder.

‘Dr Kroll,’ he said, with the sigh of a man who, after long searching, finds the key. ‘Dr Kroll. I see. Yes.’

At last he had placed them. It seemed that Dr Kroll’s status was so high, and therefore, presumably, their status also, that he could not possibly aspire to any equality with them. Perfectly understandable that they did not need to emigrate to America, being the close friends of Dr Kroll. His manner became bitter, brooding, and respectful, and at the most suggested that they might have said, nearly three weeks ago on that first evening in O—, that they were intimates of Dr Kroll, thereby saving him all this anguish and trouble and expense.

Dr Kroll, it emerged, was a man loaded with honours and prestige, at the very height of his profession. Of course, it was unfortunate that such a man should be afflicted in the way he was …

And how was Dr Kroll afflicted?

Why, didn’t they know? Surely, they must! Dr Kroll was for six months in every year a voluntary patient in his own hospital – yes, that was something to admire, was it not? – that a man of such brilliance should, at a certain point in every year, hand over his keys to his subordinates and submit to seeing a door locked upon himself, just as, for the other six months, he locked doors on other people. It was very sad, yes. But of course they must know all this quite well, since they had the privilege of Dr Kroll’s friendship.

Mary and Hamish did not like to admit that they had not known it was a mental hospital that Dr Kroll administered. If they did, they would lose the advantage of their immunity from Dr Schröder who had, obviously, already relinquished them entirely to a higher sphere. Meanwhile, since his evening was already wasted, and there was time to fill in, he was prepared to talk.

By the time the evening had drawn to a close in a beer cellar where one drank surrounded by great wooden barrels from which the beer was drawn off direct into giant-sized mugs – the apotheosis of all beer cellars – they had formed an image of Dr Kroll as a very old, Lear-like man, proud and bitter in the dignified acceptance of his affliction; and although neither of them had any direct interest in the problems of the mentally sick, since Mary Parrish specialized in small children and Hamish Anderson in geriatrics, they were sympathetically looking forward to meeting this courageous old man.

The evening ended without any unpleasantness because of the invisible presence of Dr Kroll. Dr Schröder returned them to the door of their hotel, shook their hands, and wished them a happy conclusion to their holiday. The violent disharmony of his personality had been swallowed entirely by the self-abasing humility into which he had retreated, with which he was consoling himself. He said that he would look them up when he came to London, but it was merely conventional. He wished them a pleasant reunion with Dr Kroll and strode off through the black, cold, blowing night towards the railway station, springing on his long lean legs like a black-mantled grasshopper – a hooded, bitter, energetic shape whirled about by flurries of fine white snow that glittered in the streetlights like blown salt or sand.

Next morning it was still snowing. The British couple left their hotel early to find the right bus stop, which was at the other end of the city in a poor suburb. The snow fell listlessly from a low grey sky, and fine shreds of dingy snow lay sparse on the dark earth. The bombs of the recent war had laid the streets here flat for miles around. The streets were etched in broken outlines, and the newly laid railway lines ran clean and shining through them. The station had been bombed, and there was a wooden shed doing temporary duty until another could be built. A dark-wrapped, dogged crowd stood bunched around the bus stop. Nearby a mass of workmen were busy on a new building that rose fine and clean and white out of the miles of damaged houses. They looked like black and energetic insects at work against the stark white of the walls. The British couple stood hunching their cold shoulders and shifting their cold feet with the German crowd, and watched the builders. They thought that it was the bombs of their country which had created this havoc; thought of the havoc created in their country by the bombs of the people they now stood shoulder to shoulder with, and sank back slowly into a mood of listless depression. The bus was a long time coming. It seemed to grow colder. From time to time people drifted past to the station shed or added themselves to the end of the bus queues, or a woman went past with a shopping basket. Behind the ruined buildings rose the shapes and outlines of the city that had been destroyed and the outlines of the city that would be rebuilt. It was as if they stood solid among the ruins and ghosts of dead cities and cities not yet born. And Hamish’s eyes were at work again on the faces of the people about them, fixed on the face of an old shawled woman who was passing; and it seemed as if the crowd, like the streets, became transparent and fluid, for beside them, behind them, among them stood the dead. The dead of two wars peopled the ruined square and jostled the living, a silent snowbound multitude.

The silence locked the air. There was a low, deep thudding that seemed to come from under the earth. It was from a machine at work on the building site. The machine, low in the dirty snow, lifted black grappling arms like a wrestler or like someone in prayer; and the sound of its labouring travelled like a sensation of movement through the cold earth, as if the soil were hoarsely breathing. And the workmen swarmed and worked around the machine and over the steep sides of the new building. They were like children playing with bricks. Half an hour before a giant of a man in black jackboots had strode past their block building and carelessly kicked it down. Now the children were building it again, under the legs of a striding race of great black-booted giants. At any moment another pair of trampling black legs might come straddling over the building and down it would go, down into ruin, to the accompaniment of crashing thunder and bolts of lightning. All over the soil of patient Europe, soil soaked again and again by blood, soil broken again and again by angry metal, the small figures were at work, building their bright new houses among the shells and the ruins of war; and in their eyes was the shadow from the great marching jackbooted feet, and beside each of them, beside every one of them, their dead, the invisible, swarming, memoried dead.

The crowd continued to wait. The machine kept up its hoarse breathing. From time to time a shabby bus came up, a few people climbed in, the bus went off, and more people came dark-clothed through the thinly falling snow to join the crowd, which was very similar to a British crowd in its stolid disciplined quality of patience.

At last a bus with the number they had been told to look for drew up, and they got into it with a few other people. The bus was half empty. Almost at once it left the city behind. Dr Kroll’s hospital, like so many of the similar hospitals in Britain, was built well outside the city boundaries so that the lives of healthy people might not be disturbed by thoughts of those who had to retreat behind the shelter of high walls. The way was straight on a good narrow road, recently rebuilt, over flat black plains streaked and spotted with snow. The quiet, windless air was full of fine particles of snow that fell so slowly it seemed that the sky was falling, as if the slow weight of the snow dragged the grey covering over the black flat plains down to the earth. They travelled forward in a world without colour.

Dr Kroll’s hospital made itself visible a long way off over the plain. It consisted of a dozen or more dark, straight buildings set at regular angles to each other, like the arrangement of the sheds in the concentration camps of the war. Indeed, at a distance, the resemblance to the mechanical order of a concentration camp was very great; but as the bus drew nearer the buildings grew and spread into their real size and surrounded themselves with a regular pattern of lawns and shrubs.

The bus set them down outside a heavy iron gate; and at the entrance of the main building, which was high and square, they were welcomed by a doctor whose enthusiasm was expressly delegated from Dr Kroll, who was impatiently waiting for them upstairs. They went up several staircases and along many corridors, and though that whatever bleak impression this place might give from the outside, great care had been given to banishing bleakness from within. The walls were all covered by bright pictures, which there was no time to examine now, as they hurried after their busy guide; flowers stood on high pedestals at every turning of the corridor, and the walls and ceiling and woodwork were painted in clean white and blue. They were thinking sympathetically of the storm-driven Lear whom they were so soon to meet, as they passed through these human and pleasant corridors; they were even thinking that perhaps it was an advantage to have as director of a mental hospital a man who knew what it was like to spend time inside it as a victim. But their guide remarked, ‘This is, of course, the administrative block and the doctors’ quarters. Dr Kroll will be happy to show you the hospital itself later.’

With this he shook them by the hand, nodded a goodbye and went, leaving them outside the half-open door of what looked like a middle-class living room.

A hearty voice called out that they must come in; and they went into a suite of two rooms, half-divided by sheets of sliding glass, brightly lighted, pleasantly furnished, and with nothing in it reminiscent of an office but a single small desk in the farther of the two rooms. Behind the desk sat a handsome man of late middle age who was rising to greet them. It occurred to them, much too late, that this must be Dr Kroll; and so their greetings, because they were shocked, were much less enthusiastic than his. His greetings were in any case much more like a host’s than a colleague’s. He was apparently delighted to see them and pressed them to sit down while he ordered them some coffee. This he did by going to the house telephone on the desk in the room beyond the pane of glass; and the two looked at each other, exchanging surprise, and then, finally, pleasure.

Dr Kroll was, to begin with, extremely distinguished, and they remembered something Dr Schröder had said the night before, to the effect that he came from an old and respected family; that he was, in short, an aristocrat. They had to accept the word when looking at Dr Kroll himself, even though they could not conceivably take it from Dr Schröder. Dr Kroll was rather tall and managed to combine heaviness and leanness in a remarkable way, for while he was a man of whom one instinctively wondered how much he must weigh when he stood on a scale, he was not fat, or even plump. But he was heavy; and his face, which had strong and prominent bones, carried a weight of large-pored flesh. Yet one would have said, because of the prominent dome of pale forehead and because of the large, commanding nose, and because of the deep dark lively eyes, that it was a lean face. And his movements were not those of a heavy man; he had quick impatient gestures and his large, handsome hands were in constant movement. He returned, smiling, from giving orders about the coffee, sat down in an easy chair opposite the two British doctors, and proceeded to entertain them in the most urbane and pleasant way in the world.

He spoke admirable English, he knew a good deal about Britain, and he now discussed the present state of affairs in Britain with assurance.

His admiration for Britain was immense. And this time the British couple were flattered. This was something very different from hearing praise from that appalling Dr Schröder. Until the coffee came, and while they were drinking it, and for half an hour afterwards, they discussed Britain and its institutions. The British couple listened to a view of Britain that they disagreed with profoundly, but without irritation, since it was natural that a man like this should hold conservative ideas. Dr Kroll believed that a limited monarchy was the best guarantee against disorder and was, in fact, the reason for the well-known British tolerance, which was a quality he admired more than any other. Speaking as a German, and therefore peculiarly equipped to discuss the dangers of anarchy, he would say that the best thing the Allied Armies could have done would have been to impose upon Germany a royal family, created, if necessary, from the shreds and fragments of the unfortunately dwindling royal families of Europe. Further, he believed that this should have been done at the end of the First World War, at the Treaty of Versailles. When Britain, usually so perspicacious in matters of this kind, had left Germany without a royal safeguard, they had made the worst mistake of their history. For a royal family would have imposed good conduct and respect for institutions and made an upstart like Hitler impossible.

At this point the eyes of the British pair met again, though briefly. There was no doubt that to hear Hitler described as an upstart revived some of the sensations they felt when listening to Dr Schröder or Frau Länge. A few seconds later they heard him being referred to as a mongrel upstart, an unease definitely set in, beneath the well-being induced by the good coffee and their liking for their host.

Dr Kroll developed his theme for some time, darting his lively and intelligent glances at them, offering them more coffee, offering them cigarettes, and demanded from them an account of how the Health Service worked in Britain. He took it for granted that neither would approve of a scheme which gave people something for nothing, and he commiserated with them for their subjection to state tyranny. They ventured to point out to him certain advantages they felt it had; and at last he nodded and admitted that a country as stable and well-ordered as their own might very well be able to afford extravagant experiments that would wreck other countries – his own, for instance. But he did feel disturbed when he saw their country, which he regarded as the bulwark of decency against socialism in Europe, giving in to the mob.

Here they suggested that they did not want to take up more of his time than was necessary; he must be very busy. For surely the director of such a large hospital could not possibly afford to devote so much time to every foreign doctor who wished to see over it? Or could it be his devotion to Britain that made him so ready to devote his time to them?

At any rate, he seemed disappointed at being reminded of what they had come for. He even sighed and sat silent a little, so that Dr Anderson, out of politeness, mentioned the paper he had received from him so that they might, if Dr Kroll wished it, discuss the subject of their research. But Dr Kroll merely sighed again, and said that these days he had very little time for original work; such was the penalty one must pay for accepting the burdens of administration. He rose, all his animation gone, and invited them to step into the other room beyond the glass panel where he would collect his keys. So the three of them went into the inner drawing room, which was an office because of the desk and the telephone; and there Mary Parrish’s attention was drawn to a picture on the wall above the desk. At a distance of six or eight feet it was a gay fresh picture of a cornfield painted from root-vision, or field-mouse view. The sheaves of corn rose startlingly up, bright and strong, mingled with cornflowers and red poppies, as if one were crouching in the very centre of a field. But as one walked towards the picture it vanished, it became a confusion of bright paint. It was finger-painted. The surface of the canvas was as rough as a ploughed field. Mary Parrish walked up to it, into the bright paint, took a few steps back, and back again; and, behold, the picture recreated itself, the cornfield strong and innocent, with something of the sensual innocence of Renoir’s pictures. She was so absorbed, that she started when Dr Kroll dropped a heavy hand on her shoulder and demanded, Was she fond of painting? Instantly both she and Hamish assured him that they were enthusiastically fond of pictures.

Dr Kroll dropped back on the surface of his very neat desk – so neat one could not help wondering how much it was used – the very large black bunch of keys he had removed from it; and he stood in front of the cornfield picture, his hands on Mary’s shoulder.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is what I am really interested in. Yes, yes; this, you must agree, is more interesting than medicine.’

They agreed, since they had just understood that this was the artist in person. Dr Kroll proceeded to take out from a large cupboard set into the wall a thick stack of pictures, all finger-painted, all with the rough staring surface of thick paint, all of which created themselves at ten paces into highly organized and original pictures.

Soon both rooms were full of pictures that leaned against chairs, tables, walls and along the sliding glass panels. Dr Kroll, his fine hands knotted together in anxiety because of their possible reception of his work, followed them around as they gazed at one picture after another. It became evident that the pictures separated themselves into two categories. There were those, like the cornfield, done in bright clear colours, very fresh and lyrical. Then there were those which, close up, showed grim rutted surfaces of dirty black, grey, white, a sullen green and – recurring again and again – a characteristic sullen shade of red – a dark, lightless, rusty red like old blood. These pictures were all extraordinary and macabre, of graveyards and skulls and corpses, of war scenes and bombed buildings and screaming women and houses on fire with people falling from burning windows like ants into flames. It was quite extraordinary how, in the space of a few seconds, these two conventional and pretty rooms had been transformed by these pictures into an exhibition of ghoulishness, particularly as the scenes of the pictures were continually vanishing altogether into areas of thick paint that had been smeared, rubbed, piled, worked all over the canvas an inch or so thick by the handsome fingers of Dr Kroll. Standing at six feet from one picture, the proper distance to view the work of Dr Kroll, the picture they had been examining five moments before, and which they had now moved away from, lost its meaning and disintegrated into a surface of jumbled and crusted colour. They were continually stepping forward or stepping back from chaos into moments of brief, clear, startling illumination. And they could not help wondering if Dr Kroll was gifted with a peculiar vision of his own, a vision perhaps of his fingertips, which enabled him to see his work as he stood up against it, rubbing and plastering the thick paint on to the canvas; they even imagined him as a monster with arms six feet long, standing back from his canvas as he worked on it like a clambering spider. The quality of these pictures was such that, as they examined them, they could not help picturing the artist as a monster, a maniac, or kind of gifted insect. Yet, turning to look at Dr Kroll, there he stood, a handsome man who was the very essence of everything that was conservative, correct, and urbane.

Mary, at least, was feeling a little giddy. She sought out the battling blue eyes of her partner, Hamish, and understood that he felt the same. For this was an exact repetition of their encounter with Dr Schröder with his scarred face that demanded compassion. In saying what they thought of his work to Dr Kroll, they must remember that they were speaking to a man who gallantly and bravely volunteered to hand the keys of sanity over to a subordinate and retired into madness for six months of the year, when, presumably, he painted these horrible pictures, whose very surfaces looked like the oozing, shredding substance of decomposing flesh.

Meanwhile, there he stood beside them, searching their faces anxiously.

They said, in response to his appeal, that this was obviously a real and strong talent. They said that his work was striking and original. They said they were deeply impressed.

He stood silent, not quite smiling, but with a quizzical look behind the fine eyes. He was judging them. He knew what they were feeling and was condemning them, in the same way as the initiated make allowances for the innocent.

Dr Anderson remarked that it must be admitted that the pictures were rather strong? Not to everybody’s taste, perhaps? Perhaps rather savage?

Dr Kroll, smiling urbanely, replied that life tended sometimes to be savage. Yes, that was his experience. He deepened his smile and indicated the cornfield on the wall behind his desk and said that he could see Dr Anderson preferred pictures like that one?

Dr Anderson took his stand, and very stubbornly, on the fact that he preferred that picture to any of the others he had seen.

Mary Parrish moved to stand beside Dr Anderson and joined him in asserting that to her mind this picture was entirely superior to all the others; she preferred the few bright pictures, all of which seemed to her to be loaded with a quality of sheer joy, a sensuous joy, to the others which seemed to her – if he didn’t mind her saying so – simply horrible.

Dr Kroll turned his ironical, dark gaze from one face to the other and remarked: ‘So.’ And again, accepting their bad taste: ‘So.’

He remarked, ‘I am subject to fits of depression. When I am depressed, naturally enough, I paint these pictures.’ He indicated the lightless pictures of his madness. ‘And when I am happy again, and when I have time – for, as I have said, I am extremely busy – I paint pictures such as these …’ His gesture towards the cornfield was impatient, almost contemptuous. It was clear that he had hung the joyous cornfield on the wall of his reception room because he expected all his guests or visiting colleagues to have the bad taste to prefer it.

‘So,’ he said again, smiling dryly.

At which, Mary Parrish – since he was conveying a feeling of total isolation – said quickly, ‘But we are very interested. We would love to see some more, if you have time.’

It seemed that he needed very much to hear her say this. For the ironical condemnation left his face and was succeeded by the pathetic anxiety of the amateur artist to be loved for his work. He said that he had had two exhibitions of his paintings, that he had been misunderstood by the critics, who had praised the paintings he did not care for, so that he would never again expose himself publicly to the stupidity of critics. He was dependent for sympathy on the understanding minority, some of them chance visitors to his hospital; some of them even – if they did not mind his saying so – inmates of it. He would, for two such delightful guests as his visitors from England, be happy to show more of his work.

With this he invited them to step into a passage behind his office. Its walls were covered from floor to ceiling with pictures. Also the walls of the passage beyond it.

It was terrifying to think of the energy this man must have when he was ‘depressed’. Corridor after corridor opened up, the walls all covered with canvases loaded with thick, crusted paint. Some of the corridors were narrow, and it was impossible to stand far enough back for the pictures to compose themselves. But it seemed that Dr Kroll was able to see what his hands had done even when he was close against the canvas. He would lean into a big area of thick, dry paint from which emerged fragmentarily a jerky branch that looked like a bombed tree, or a bit of cracked bone, or a tormented mouth, and say: ‘I call this picture “Love”.’ Or Victory, or Death; for he liked this kind of title. ‘See? See that house there? See how I’ve put the church?’ And the two guests gazed blankly at the smears of paint and wondered if perhaps this canvas represented the apotheosis of his madness and had no form in it at all. But if they stepped back against the opposite wall as far as they could, and leaned their heads back to gain an extra inch of distance, they could see that there was a house or a church. The house was also a skull; and the dead grey walls of the church oozed rusty blood, or spilled a gout of blood over the sills of its windows, or its door ejected blood like a person’s mouth coughing blood.

Depression again weighed on the pair who, following after the dignified back of Dr Kroll as he led them into yet another picture-filled corridor, instinctively reached for each other’s hands, reached for the warm contact of healthy flesh.

Soon their host led them back into the office, where he offered them more coffee. They refused politely but asked to see his hospital. Dr Kroll carelessly agreed. It was not, his manner suggested, that he did not take his hospital seriously, but that he would much rather, now he had been given the privilege of a visit from these rarely sympathetic people, share with them his much higher interests: his love for their country, his art. But he would nevertheless escort them around the hospital.

Again he took up the great bundle of black keys and went before them down the corridor they had first entered by. Now they saw that the pictures they had noticed then were all by him; these were the pictures he despised and hung for public view. But as they passed through a back door into a courtyard he paused, held up his keys, smiling, and indicated a small picture by the door. The picture was of the keys. From a scramble of whitey-grey paint came out, very black and hard and shining, a great jangling bunch of keys that also looked like bells, and, from certain angles, like staring eyes. Dr Kroll shared a smile with them as if to say: An interesting subject?

The three doctors went across a courtyard into the first block, which consisted of two parallel very long wards, each filled with small, tidy, white beds that had a chair and a locker beside them. On the beds sat, or leaned, or lay, the patients. Apart from the fact that they tended to be listless and staring, there was nothing to distinguish this ward from the ward of any public hospital. Dr Kroll exchanged brisk greetings with certain of his patients; discouraged an old man who grasped his arm as he passed and said that he had a momentous piece of news to tell him which he had heard that moment over his private wireless station, and which affected the whole course of history; and passed on smiling through this building into the next. There was nothing new here. This block, like the last, had achieved the ultimate in reducing several hundred human beings into complete identity with each other. Dr Kroll said, almost impatiently, that if you had seen one of these wards you had seen them all, and took off at a tangent across a courtyard to another of these regular blocklike buildings which was full of women. It occurred to the British pair that the two buildings on the other side of the court had men in them only; and they asked Dr Kroll if he kept the men in the line of buildings on one side of the court, and the women on the other – for there was a high wire fence down the court, with a door in it that he opened and locked behind him. ‘Why, that is so,’ said Dr Kroll indifferently.

‘Do the men and the women meet – in the evenings, perhaps?’

‘Meet? No.’

‘Not at social evenings? At dances perhaps? At some meals during the week?’

Here Dr Kroll turned and gave his guests a tolerant smile. ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘sex is a force destructive enough even when kept locked up. Do you suggest that we should mix the sexes in a place like this, where it is hard enough to keep people quiet and unexcited?’

Dr Anderson remarked that in progressive mental hospitals in Britain it was a policy to allow men and women to mix together as much as was possible. For what crime were these poor people being punished, he inquired hotly, that they were treated as if they had taken perpetual vows of celibacy?

Dr Parrish noted that the word ‘progressive’ fell very flat in this atmosphere. Such was the power of Dr Kroll’s conservative personality that it sounded almost eccentric.

‘So?’ commented Dr Kroll. ‘So the administrators of your English hospitals are prepared to give themselves so much unnecessary trouble?’

‘Do the men and women never meet?’ insisted Dr Parrish.

Dr Kroll said tolerantly that at night they behaved like naughty schoolchildren and passed each other notes through the wire.

The British couple fell back on their invincible politeness and felt their depression inside them like a fog. It was still snowing lightly through the heavy grey air.

Having seen three buildings all full of women of all ages, lying and sitting about in the listlessness of complete idleness, they agreed with Dr Kroll it was enough; they were prepared to end their tour of inspection. He said that they must return with him for another cup of coffee, but first he had to make a short visit, and perhaps they would be kind enough to accompany him. He led the way to another building set rather apart from the others, whose main door he opened with an enormous key from his bunch of keys. As soon as they were inside it became evident that this was the children’s building. Dr Kroll was striding down the main passage, calling aloud for some attendant who appeared to take instructions.

Meanwhile, Mary Parrish, doctor who specialized in small children, finding herself at the open door of a ward looked in, and invited Dr Anderson to do the same. It was a very large room, very clean, very fresh, with barred windows. It was full of cots and small beds. In the centre of the room a five-year-old child stood upright against the bars of a cot. His arms were confined by a straitjacket, and because he could not prevent himself from falling, he was tied upright against the bars with a cord. He was glaring around the room, glaring and grinding his teeth. Never had Mary seen such a desperate, wild, suffering little creature as this one. Immediately opposite the child sat a very large towheaded woman, dressed in heavy striped grey material, like a prison dress, knitting as comfortably as if she were in her kitchen.

Mary was speechless with horror at the sight. She could feel Hamish stiff and angry beside her.

Dr Kroll came back down the passage, saw them, and said amiably: ‘You are interested? So? Of course, Dr Parrish, you said children are your field. Come in, come in.’ He led the way into the room, and the fat woman stood up respectfully as he entered. He glanced at the straitjacketed child and moved past it to the opposite wall, where there was a line of small beds, placed head to foot. He pulled back the coverings one after another, showing a dozen children aged between a year and six years – armless children, limbless children, children with enormous mis-shapen heads, children with tiny heads and monstrous bodies. He pulled the coverings off, one after another, replacing them as soon as Mary Parrish and Hamish Anderson had seen what he was showing them, and remarked: ‘Modern drugs are a terrible thing. Now these horrors are kept alive. Before, they died of pneumonia.’

Hamish said, ‘The theory is, I believe, that medical science advances so fast that we should keep even the most apparently hopeless people alive in case we find something that can save them?’

Dr Kroll gave them the ironical smile they had seen before, and said, ‘Yes, yes, yes. That is the theory. But for my part …’

Mary Parrish was watching the imprisoned little boy, who glared from a flushed wild face, straining his small limbs inside the thick stuff of the strait jacket. She said, ‘In Britain strait jackets are hardly ever used. Certainly not for children.’

‘So?’ commented Dr Kroll. ‘So? But sometimes it is for the patient’s own good.’

He advanced towards the boy and stood before the bars of the cot, looking at him. The child glared back like a wild animal into the eyes of the big doctor. ‘This one bites if you go too near him,’ commented Dr Kroll; and with a nod of his head invited them to follow him out.

‘Yes, yes,’ he remarked, unlocking the big door and locking it behind them, ‘there are things we cannot say in public, but we may agree in private that there are many people in this hospital who would be no worse for a quick and painless death.’

Again he asked that they should excuse him, and he strode off to have a word with another doctor who was crossing the court in his white coat, with another big bunch of black keys in his hand.

Hamish said, ‘This man told us that he has directed this hospital for thirty years.’

‘Yes, I believe he did.’

‘So he was here under Hitler.’

‘The mongrel upstart, yes.’

‘And he would not have kept his job unless he had agreed to sterilize Jews, serious mental defectives, and communists. Did you remember?’

‘No, I’d forgotten.’

‘So had I.’

They were silent a moment, thinking of how much they had liked, how much they still liked, Dr Kroll.

‘Any Jew or mental defective or communist unlucky enough to fall into Dr Kroll’s hands would have been forcibly sterilized. And the very ill would have been killed outright.’

‘Not necessarily,’ she objected feebly. ‘After all, perhaps he refused. Perhaps he was strong enough to refuse.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘After all, even under the worst governments there are always people in high places who use their influence to protect weak people.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And he might have been one.’

‘We should keep an open mind?’ he inquired, quick and sarcastic. They stood very close together under the cold snow in a corner of the grey courtyard. Twenty paces away, beyond walls and locked doors, a small boy, naked save for a straitjacket and tied to bars like an animal, was grinding his teeth and glaring at the fat knitting wardress.

Mary Parrish said miserably, ‘We don’t know, after all. We shouldn’t condemn anyone without knowing. For all we know he might have saved the lives of hundreds of people.’

At this point Dr Kroll came back, swinging his keys.

Hamish inquired blandly, ‘It would interest us very much to know if Hitler’s regime made any difference to you professionally?’

Dr Kroll considered this question as he strolled along beside them. ‘Life was easy for no one during that time,’ he said.

‘But as regards medical policy?’

Dr Kroll gave this question his serious thought, and said, ‘No, they did not interfere very much. Of course, on certain questions, the gentlemen of the Nazi regime had sensible ideas.’

‘Such as? For instance?’

‘Oh, questions of hygiene? Yes, one could call them questions of social hygiene.’ He had led them to the door of the main building, and now he said: ‘You will, I hope, join me in a cup of coffee before you leave? Unless I can persuade you to stay and have a meal with us?’

‘I think we should catch our bus back to town,’ said Hamish, speaking firmly for both of them. Dr Kroll consulted his watch. ‘Your bus will not be passing for another twenty minutes.’ They accompanied him back through the picture-hung corridors to his office.

‘And I would like so much to give you a memento of your visit,’ he said, smiling at them both. ‘Yes, I would like that. No, wait for one minute, I want to show you something.’

He went to the wall cupboard and took out a flat object wrapped in a piece of red silk. He unwrapped the silk and brought forth another picture. He set this picture against the side of the desk and invited them to stand back and look at it. They did so, already prepared to admire it, for it was a product of one of the times when he was not depressed. It was a very large picture, done in clear blues and greens, the picture of a forest – an imaginary forest with clear streams running through it, a forest where impossibly brilliant birds flew, and full of plants and trees created in Dr Kroll’s mind. It was beautiful, full of joy and tranquillity and light. But in the centre of the sky glared a large black eye. It was an eye remote from the rest of the picture; and obviously what had happened was that Dr Kroll had painted his fantasy forest, and then afterwards, looking at it during some fit of misery, had painted in that black, condemnatory, judging eye.

Mary Parrish stared back at the eye and said, ‘It’s lovely; it’s a picture of paradise.’ She felt uncomfortable at using the word paradise in the presence of Hamish, who by temperament was critical of words like these.

But Dr Kroll smiled with pleasure, and laid his heavy hand on her shoulder, and said: ‘You understand. Yes, you understand. That picture is called The Eye of God in Paradise. You like it?’

‘Very much,’ she said, afraid that he was about to present that picture to her. For how could they possibly transport such a big picture all the way back to Britain and what would she do with it when she got there? For it would be dishonest to paint out the black, wrathful eye: one respected, naturally, an artist’s conception even if one disagreed with it. And she could not endure to live with that eye, no matter how much she liked the rest of the picture.

But it seemed that Dr Kroll had no intention of parting with the picture itself, which he wrapped up again in its red silk and hid in the cupboard. He took from a drawer a photograph of the picture and offered it to her, saying, ‘If you really like my picture – and I can see that you do, for you have a real feeling, a real understanding – then kindly take this as a souvenir of a happy occasion.’

She thanked him, and both she and Hamish looked with polite gratitude at the photograph. Of course it gave no idea at all of the original. The subtle blues and greens had gone, were not hinted at; and even the softly-waving grasses, trees, plants, foliage, were obliterated. Nothing remained but a reproduction of crude crusts of paint, smeared thick by the fingers of Dr Kroll, from which emerged the hint of a branch, the suggestion of a flower. Nothing remained except the black, glaring eye, the eye of a wrathful and punishing God. It was the photograph of a roughly-scrawled eye, as a child might have drawn it – as, so Mary could not help thinking, that unfortunate straitjacketed little boy might have drawn the eye of God, or of Dr Kroll, had he been allowed to get his arms free and use them.

The thought of that little boy hurt her; it was still hurting Hamish who stood politely beside her. She knew that the moment they could leave this place and get on to the open road where the bus passed would be the happiest of her life.

They thanked Dr Kroll profoundly for his kindness, insisted they were afraid they might miss their bus, said goodbye, and promised letters and an exchange of medical papers of interest to them all – promised, in short, eternal friendship.

Then they left the big building and Dr Kroll and emerged into the cold February air. Soon the bus came and picked them up, and they travelled back over the flat black plain to the city terminus.

The terminus was exactly as it had been four or five hours before. Under the low grey sky the black chilled earth, the ruins of streets, the already softening shapes of bomb craters, the big new shining white building covered with the energetic shapes of workers. The bus queue still waited patiently, huddled into dark, thick clothes, while a thin bitter snow drifted down, down, hardly moving, as if the sky itself were slowly falling.

Mary Parrish took out the photograph and held it in her chilly gloved hand.

The black angry eye glared up at them.

‘Tear it up,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Why not? What’s the use of keeping the beastly thing?’

‘It wouldn’t be fair,’ she said seriously, returning it to her handbag.

‘Oh, fair,’ he said bitterly, with an impatient shrug.

They moved off side by side to the bus stop where they would catch a bus back to their hotel. Their feet crunched sharply on the hard earth. The stillness, save for the small shouts of the men at work on the half-finished building, save for the breathing noise of the machine, was absolute. And this queue of people waited like the other across the square, waited eternally, huddled up, silent, patient, under the snow; listening to the silence, under which seemed to throb from the depths of the earth the memory of the sound of marching feet, or heavy, black-booted, marching feet.

One off the Short List

When he had first seen Barbara Coles, some years before, he only noticed her because someone said: ‘That’s Johnson’s new girl.’ He certainly had not used of her the private erotic formula: Yes, that one. He even wondered what Johnson saw in her. ‘She won’t last long,’ he remembered thinking, as he watched Johnson, a handsome man, but rather flushed with drink, flirting with some unknown girl while Barbara stood by a wall looking on. He thought she had a sullen expression.

She was a pale girl, not slim, for her frame was generous, but her figure could pass as good. Her straight yellow hair was parted on one side in a way that struck him as gauche. He did not notice what she wore. But her eyes were all right, he remembered: large, and solidly green, square-looking because of some trick of the flesh at their corners. Emerald-like eyes in the face of a schoolgirl, or young schoolmistress who was watching her lover flirt and would later sulk about it.

Her name sometimes cropped up in the papers. She was a stage decorator, a designer, something on those lines.

Then a Sunday newspaper had a competition for stage design and she won it. Barbara Coles was one of the ‘names’ in the theatre, and her photograph was seen about. It was always serious. He remembered having thought her sullen.

One night he saw her across the room at a party. She was talking with a well-known actor. Her yellow hair was still done on one side, but now it looked sophisticated. She wore an emerald ring on her right hand that seemed deliberately to invite comparison with her eyes. He walked over and said: ‘We have met before, Graham Spence.’ He noted, with discomfort, that he sounded abrupt. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember, but how do you do?’ she said, smiling. And continued her conversation.

He hung around a bit, but soon she went off with a group of people she was inviting to her home for a drink. She did not invite Graham. There was about her an assurance, a carelessness, that he recognized as the signature of success. It was then, watching her laugh as she went off with her friends, that he used the formula: ‘Yes, that one.’ And he went home to his wife with enjoyable expectation, as if his date with Barbara Coles were already arranged.

His marriage was twenty years old. At first it had been stormy, painful, tragic – full of partings, betrayals and sweet reconciliations. It had taken him at least a decade to realize that there was nothing remarkable about this marriage that he had lived through with such surprise of the mind and the senses. On the contrary, the marriages of most of the people he knew, whether they were first, second or third attempts, were just the same. His had run true to form even to the serious love affair with the young girl for whose sake he had almost divorced his wife – yet at the last moment had changed his mind, letting the girl down so that he must have her for always (not unpleasurably) on his conscience. It was with humiliation that he had understood that this drama was not at all the unique thing he had imagined. It was nothing more than the experience of everyone in his circle. And presumably in everybody’s else’s circle too?

Anyway, round about the tenth year of his marriage he had seen a good many things clearly, a certain kind of emotional adventure went from his life, and the marriage itself changed.

His wife had married a poor youth with a great future as a writer. Sacrifices had been made, chiefly by her, for that future. He was neither unaware of them, nor ungrateful; in fact he felt permanently guilty about it. He at last published a decently successful book, then a second which now, thank God, no one remembered. He had drifted into radio, television, book reviewing.

He understood he was not going to make it; that he had become – not a hack, no one could call him that – but a member of that army of people who live by their wits on the fringes of the arts. The moment of realization was when he was in a pub one lunchtime near the BBC where he often dropped in to meet others like himself: he understood that was why he went there – they were like him. Just as that melodramatic marriage had turned out to be like everyone else’s – except that it had been shared with one woman instead of with two or three – so it had turned out that his unique talent, his struggles as a writer had led him here, to this pub and the half dozen pubs like it, where all the men in sight had the same history. They all had their novel, their play, their book of poems, a moment of fame, to their credit. Yet here they were, running television programmes about which they were cynical (to each other or to their wives) or writing reviews about other people’s books. Yes, that’s what he had become, an impresario of other people’s talent. These two moments of clarity, about his marriage and about his talent, had roughly coincided; and (perhaps not by chance) had coincided with his wife’s decision to leave him for a man younger than himself who had a future, she said, as a playwright. Well, he had talked her out of it. For her part she had to understand he was not going to be the T. S. Eliot or Graham Greene of our time – but after all, how many were? She must finally understand this, for he could no longer bear her awful bitterness. For his part he must stop coming home drunk at five in the morning, and starting a new romantic affair every six months which he took so seriously that he made her miserable because of her implied deficiencies. In short he was to be a good husband. (He had always been a dutiful father.) And she a good wife. And so it was: the marriage became stable, as they say.

The formula: Yes, that one no longer implied a necessarily sexual relationship. In its more mature form, it was far from being something he was ashamed of. On the contrary, it expressed a humorous respect for what he was, for his real talents and flair, which had turned out to be not artistic after all, but to do with emotional life, hard-earned experience. It expressed an ironical dignity, a proving to himself not only: I can be honest about myself, but also: I have earned the best in that field whenever I want it.

He watched the field for the women who were well known in the arts, or in politics; he looked out for photographs, listened for bits of gossip. He made a point of going to see them act, or dance, or orate. He built up a not unshrewd picture of them. He would either quietly pull strings to meet her or – more often, for there was a gambler’s pleasure in waiting – bide his time until he met her in the natural course of events, which was bound to happen sooner or later. He would be seen out with her a few times in public, which was in order, since his work meant he had to entertain well-known people, male and female. His wife always knew, he told her. He might have a brief affair with this woman, but more often than not it was the appearance of an affair. Not that he didn’t get pleasure from other people envying him – he would make a point, for instance, of taking this woman into the pubs where his male colleagues went. It was that his real pleasure came whe he saw her surprise at how well she was understood by him. He enjoyed the atmosphere he was able to set up between an intelligent woman and himself: a humorous complicity which had in it much that was unspoken, and which almost made sex irrelevant.

On to the list of women with whom he planned to have this relationship went Barbara Coles. There was no hurry. Next week, next month, next year, they would meet at a party. The world of well-known people in London is a small one. Bit and little fishes, they drift around, nose each other, flirt their fins, wriggle off again. When he bumped into Barbara Coles, it would be time to decide whether or not to sleep with her.

Meanwhile he listened. But he didn’t discover much. She had a husband and children, but the husband seemed to be in the background. The children were charming and well brought up, like everyone else’s children. She had affairs, they said; but while several men he met sounded familiar with her, it was hard to determine whether they had slept with her, because none directly boasted of her. She was spoken of in terms of her friends, her work, her house, a party she had given, a job she had found someone. She was liked, she was respected, and Graham Spence’s self-esteem was flattered because he had chosen her. He looked forward to saying in just the same tone: ‘Barbara Coles asked me what I thought about the set and I told her quite frankly …’

Then by chance he met a young man who did boast about Barbara Coles; he claimed to have had the great love affair with her, and recently at that; and he spoke of it as something generally known. Graham realized how much he had already become involved with her in his imagination because of how perturbed he was now, on account of the character of this youth, Jack Kennaway. He had recently become successful as a magazine editor – one of those young men who, not as rare as one might suppose in the big cities, are successful from sheer impertinence, effrontery. Without much talent or taste, yet he had the charm of his effrontery. ‘Yes, I’m going to succeed, because I’ve decided to; yes, I may be stupid, but not so stupid that I don’t know my deficiencies. Yes, I’m going to be successful because you people with integrity, etc., etc., simply don’t believe in the possibility of people like me. You are too cowardly to stop me. Yes, I’ve taken your measure and I’m going to succeed because I’ve got the courage, not only to be unscrupulous, but to be quite frank about it. And besides, you admire me, you must, or otherwise you’d stop me …’ Well, that was young Jack Kennaway, and he shocked Graham. He was a tall, languishing young man, handsome in a dark melting way, and, it was quite clear, he was either asexual or homosexual. And this youth boasted of the favours of Barbara Coles; boasted, indeed, of her love. Either she was a raving neurotic with a taste for neurotics; or Jack Kennaway was a most accomplished liar; or she slept with anyone. Graham was intrigued. He took Jack Kennaway out to dinner in order to hear him talk about Barbara Coles. There was no doubt the two were pretty close – all those dinners, theatres, weekends in the country – Graham Spence felt he had put his finger on the secret pulse of Barbara Coles; and it was intolerable that he must wait to meet her; he decided to arrange it.

It became unnecessary. She was in the news again, with a run of luck. She had done a successful historical play, and immediately afterwards a modern play, and then a hit musical. In all three, the sets were remarked on. Graham saw some interviews in newspapers and on television. These all centred around the theme of her being able to deal easily with so many different styles of theatre; but the real point was, of course, that she was a woman, which naturally added piquancy to the thing. And now Graham Spence was asked to do a half-hour radio interview with her. He planned the questions he would ask her with care, drawing on what people had said of her, but above all on his instinct and experience with women. The interview was to be at nine-thirty at night; he was to pick her up at six from the theatre where she was currently at work, so that there would be time, as the letter from the BBC had put it, ‘for you and Miss Coles to get to know each other’.

At six he was at the stage door, but a message from Miss Coles said she was not quite ready, could he wait a little. He hung about, then went to the pub opposite for a quick one, but still no Miss Coles. So he made his way backstage, directed by voices, hammering, laughter. It was badly lit, and the group of people at work did not see him. The director, James Poynter, had his arm around Barbara’s shoulders. He was newly well-known, a carelessly good-looking young man reputed to be intelligent. Barbara Coles wore a dark blue overall, and her flat hair fell over her face so that she kept pushing it back with the hand that had the emerald on it. These two stood close, side by side. Three young men, stagehands, were on the other side of a trestle, which had sketches and drawings on it. They were studying some sketches. Barbara said, in a voice warm with energy: ‘Well, so I thought if we did this – do you see, James? What do you think, Steven?’ ‘Well, love,’ said the young man she called Steven, ‘I see your idea, but I wonder if …’ ‘I think you’re right, Babs,’ said the director. ‘Look,’ said Barbara, holding one of the sketches towards Steven, ‘look, let me show you.’ They all leaned forward, the five of them, absorbed in the business.

Suddenly Graham couldn’t stand it. He understood he was shaken to his depths. He went off stage, and stood with his back against a wall in the dingy passage that led to the dressing rooms. His eyes were filled with tears. He was seeing what a long way he had come from the crude, uncompromising, admirable young egomaniac he had been when he was twenty. That group of people there – working, joking, arguing, yes, that’s what he hadn’t known for years. What bound them was the democracy of respect for each other’s work, a confidence in themselves and in each other. They looked like people banded together against a world which they – no, not despised, but which they measured, understood, would fight to the death, out of respect for what they stood for, for that it stood for. It was a long time since he felt part of that balance. And he understood that he had seen Barbara Coles when she was most herself, at ease with a group of people she worked with. It was then, with the tears drying on his eyelids, which felt old and ironic, that he decided he would sleep with Barbara Coles. It was a necessity for him. He went back through the door on to the stage, burning with this single determination.

The five were still together. Barbara had a length of blue gleaming stuff which she was draping over the shoulder of Steven, the stagehand. He was showing it off, and the others watched. ‘What do you think, James?’ she asked the director. ‘We’ve got that sort of dirty green, and I thought …’ ‘Well,’ said James, not sure at all, ‘well, Babs, well …’

Now Graham went forward so that he stood beside Barbara, and said: ‘I’m Graham Spence, we’ve met before.’ For the second time she smiled socially and said: ‘Oh I’m sorry, I don’t remember.’ Graham nodded at James, whom he had known, or at least had met off and on, for years. But it was obvious James didn’t remember him either.

‘From the BBC,’ said Graham to Barbara, again sounding abrupt, against his will. ‘Oh I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I forgot all about it. I’ve got to be interviewed,’ she said to the group. ‘Mr Spence is a journalist.’ Graham allowed himself a small smile ironical of the word journalist, but she was not looking at him. She was going on with her work. ‘We should decide tonight,’ she said. ‘Steven’s right.’ ‘Yes, I am right,’ said the stagehand. ‘She’s right, James, we need that blue with that sludge-green everywhere.’ ‘James,’ said Barbara, ‘James, what’s wrong with it? You haven’t said.’ She moved forward to James, passing Graham. Remembering him again, she became contrite. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘we can none of us agree. Well, look’ – she turned to Graham – ‘you advise us, we’ve got so involved, with it that …’ At which James laughed, and so did the stagehands. ‘No, Babs,’ said James, ‘of course Mr Spence can’t advise. He’s just this moment come in. We’ve got to decide. Well, I’ll give you till tomorrow morning. Time to go home, it must be six by now.’

‘It’s nearly seven,’ said Graham, taking command.

‘It isn’t!’ said Barbara, dramatic. ‘My God, how terrible, how appalling, how could I have done such a thing …’ She was laughing at herself. ‘Well, you’ll have to forgive me, Mr Spence, because you haven’t got any alternative.’

They began laughing again: this was clearly a group joke. And now Graham took his chance. He said firmly, as if he were her director, in fact copying James Poynter’s manner with her: ‘No, Miss Coles, I won’t forgive you, I’ve been kicking my heels for nearly an hour.’ She grimaced, then laughed and accepted it. James said: ‘There, Babs, that’s how you ought to be treated. We spoil you.’ He kissed her on the cheek, she kissed him on both his, the stagehands moved off. ‘Have a good evening, Babs,’ said James, going, and nodding to Graham. Who stood concealing his pleasure with difficulty. He knew, because he had had the courage to be firm, indeed, peremptory, with Barbara, that he had saved himself hours of manoeuvring. Several drinks, a dinner – perhaps two or three evenings of drinks and dinners – had been saved because he was now on this footing with Barbara Coles, a man who could say: ‘No, I won’t forgive you, you’ve kept me waiting.’

She said: ‘I’ve just got to …’ and went ahead of him. In the passage she hung her overall on a peg. She was thinking, it seemed, of something else, but seeing him watching her, she smiled at him, companionably: he realized with triumph it was the sort of smile she would offer one of the stagehands, or even James. She said again: ‘Just one second …’ and went to the stage-door office. She and the stage doorman conferred. There was some problem. Graham said, taking another chance: ‘What’s the trouble, can I help?’ – as if he could help, as if he expected to be able to. ‘Well …’ she said, frowning. Then, to the man: ‘No, it’ll be all right. Good night.’ She came to Graham. ‘We’ve got ourselves into a bit of a fuss because half the set’s in Liverpool and half’s here and – but it will sort itself out.’ She stood, at ease, chatting to him, one colleague to another. All this was admirable, he felt; but there would be a bad moment when they emerged from the special atmosphere of the theatre into the street. He took another decision, grasped her arm firmly, and said: ‘We’re going to have a drink before we do anything at all, it’s a terrible evening out.’ Her arm felt resistant, but remained within his. It was raining outside, luckily. He directed her, authoritative: ‘No, not that pub, there’s a nicer one around the corner.’ ‘Oh, but I like this pub,’ said Barbara, ‘we always use it.’

‘Of course, you do,’ he said to himself. But in that pub there would be the stagehands, and probably James, and he’d lose contact with her. He’d become a journalist again. He took her firmly out of danger around two corners, into a pub he picked at random. A quick look around – no, they weren’t there. At least, if there were people from the theatre, she showed no sign. She asked for a beer. He ordered her a double Scotch, which she accepted. Then, having won a dozen preliminary rounds already, he took time to think. Something was bothering him – what? Yes, it was what he had observed backstage, Barbara and James Poynter. Was she having an affair with him? Because if so, it would all be much more difficult. He made himself see the two of them together, and thought with a jealousy surprisingly strong: Yes, that’s it. Meantime he sat looking at her, seeing himself look at her, a man gazing in calm appreciation at a woman: waiting for her to feel it and respond. She was examining the pub. Her white woollen suit was belted, and had a not unprovocative suggestion of being a uniform. Her flat yellow hair, hastily pushed back after work, was untidy. Her clear white skin, without any colour, made her look tired. Not very exciting, at the moment, thought Graham but maintaining his appreciative pose for when she would turn and see it. He knew what she would see: he was relying not only on the ‘warm kindly’ beam of his gaze, for this was merely a reinforcement of the impression he knew he made. He had black hair, a little greyed. His clothes were loose and bulky – masculine. His eyes were humorous and appreciative. He was not, never had been, concerned to lessen the impression of being settled, dependable: the husband and father. On the contrary, he knew women found it reassuring.

When she at last turned she said, almost apologetic: ‘Would you mind if we sat down? I’ve been lugging great things around all day.’ She had spotted two empty chairs in a corner. So had he, but rejected them, because there were other people at the table. ‘But my dear, of course!’ They took the chairs, and then Barbara said: ‘If you’ll excuse me a moment.’ She had remembered she needed makeup. He watched her go off, annoyed with himself. She was tired; and he could have understood, protected, sheltered. He realized that in the other pub, with the people she had worked with all day, she would not have thought: ‘I must make myself up, I must be on show.’ That was for outsiders. She had not, until now, considered Graham an outsider, because of his taking his chance to seem one of the working group in the theatre; but now he had thrown this opportunity away. She returned armoured. Her hair was sleek, no longer defenceless. And she had made up her eyes. Her eyebrows were untouched, pale gold streaks above the brilliant green eyes whose lashes were blackened. Rather good, he thought, the contrast. Yes, but the moment had gone when he could say: Do you know you had a smudge on your cheek? Or – my dear girl! – pushing her hair back with the edge of a brotherly hand. In fact, unless he was careful, he’d be back at starting point.

He remarked: ‘That emerald is very cunning’ – smiling into her eyes.

She smiled politely, and said: ‘It’s not cunning, it’s an accident, it was my grandmother’s.’ She flirted her hand lightly by her face, though, smiling. But that was something she had done before, to a compliment she had had before, and often. It was all social, she had become social entirely. She remarked: ‘Didn’t you say it was half-past nine we had to record?’

‘My dear Barbara, we’ve got two hours. We’ll have another drink or two, then I’ll ask you a couple of questions, then we’ll drop down to the studio and get it over, and then we’ll have a comfortable supper.’

‘I’d rather eat now, if you don’t mind. I had no lunch, and I’m really hungry.’

‘But my dear, of course.’ He was angry. Just as he had been surprised by his real jealousy over James, so now he was thrown off balance by his anger: he had been counting on the long quiet dinner afterwards to establish intimacy. ‘Finish your drink and I’ll take you to Nott’s.’ Nott’s was expensive. He glanced at her assessingly as he mentioned it. She said: ‘I wonder if you know Butler’s? It’s good and it’s rather close.’ Butler’s was good, and it was cheap, and he gave her a good mark for liking it. But Nott’s it was going to be. ‘My dear, we’ll get into a taxi and be at Nott’s in a moment, don’t worry.’

She obediently got to her feet: the way she did it made him undersand how badly he had slipped. She was saying to herself: Very well, he’s like that, then all right, I’ll do what he wants and get it over with …

Swallowing his own drink he followed her, and took her arm in the pub doorway. It was polite within his. Outside it drizzled. No taxi. He was having bad luck now. They walked in silence to the end of the street. There Barbara glanced into a side street where a sign said: BUTLER’S. Not to remind him of it, on the contrary, she concealed the glance. And here she was, entirely at his disposal, they might never have shared the comradely moment in the theatre.

They walked half a mile to Nott’s. No taxis. She made conversation: this was, he saw, to cover any embarrassment he might feel because of a half-mile walk through rain when she was tired. She was talking about some theory to do with the theatre, with designs for theatre building. He heard himself saying, and repeatedly: Yes, yes, yes. He thought about Nott’s. There he took the headwaiter aside, gave him a pound, and instructions. They were put in a corner. Large Scotches appeared. The menus were spread. ‘And now, my dear,’ he said, ‘I apologize for dragging you here, but I hope you’ll think it’s worth it.’

‘Oh, it’s charming, I’ve always liked it. It’s just that …’ She stopped herself saying: it’s such a long way. She smiled at him, raising her glass, and said: ‘It’s one of my very favourite places, and I’m glad you dragged me here.’ Her voice was flat with tiredness. All this was appalling; he knew it; and he sat thinking how to retrieve his position. Meanwhile she fingered the menu. The headwaiter took the order, but Graham made a gesture which said: Wait a moment. He wanted the Scotch to take effect before she ate. But she saw his silent order; and, without annoyance or reproach, leaned forward to say, sounding patient: ‘Graham, please, I’ve got to eat, you don’t want me drunk when you interview me, do you?’

‘They are bringing it as fast as they can,’ he said, making it sound as if she were greedy. He looked neither at the headwaiter nor at Barbara. He noted in himself, as he slipped farther and farther away from contact with her, a cold determination growing in him; one apart from, apparently, any conscious act of will, that come what may, if it took all night, he’d be in her bed before morning. And now, seeing the small pale face, with the enormous green eyes, it was for the first time that he imagined her in his arms. Although he had said: Yes, that one, weeks ago, it was only now that he imagined her as a sensual experience. Now he did, so strongly that he could only glance at her, and then away towards the waiters who were bringing food.

‘Thank the Lord,’ said Barbara, and all at once her voice was gay and intimate. ‘Thank heavens. Thank every power that is …’ She was making fun of her own exaggeration; and, as he saw, because she wanted to put him at his ease after his boorishness over delaying the food. (She hadn’t been taken in, he saw, humiliated, disliking her.) ‘Thank all the gods of Nott’s,’ she went on, ‘because if I hadn’t eaten inside five minutes I’d have died, I tell you.’ With which she picked up her knife and fork and began on her steak. He poured wine, smiling with her, thinking that this moment of closeness he would not throw away. He watched her frank hunger as she ate, and thought: Sensual – it’s strange I hadn’t wondered whether she would be or not.

‘Now,’ she said, sitting back, having taken the edge off her hunger: ‘Let’s get to work.’

He said: ‘I’ve thought it over very carefully – how to present you. The first thing seems to me, we must get away from that old chestnut: Miss Coles, how extraordinary for a woman to be so versatile in her work … I hope you agree?’ This was his trump card. He had noted, when he had seen her on television, her polite smile when this note was struck. (The smile he had seen so often tonight.) This smile said: All right, if you have to be stupid, what can I do?

Now she laughed and said: ‘What a relief. I was afraid you were going to do the same thing.’

‘Good, now you eat and I’ll talk.’

In his carefully prepared monologue he spoke of the different styles of theatre she had shown herself mistress of, but not directly: he was flattering her on the breadth of her experience; the complexity of her character, as shown in her work. She ate, steadily, her face showing nothing. At last she asked: ‘And how did you plan to introduce this?’

He had meant to spring that on her as a surprise, something like: Miss Coles, a surprisingly young woman for what she has accomplished (she was thirty? thirty-two?) and a very attractive one … ‘Perhaps I can give you an idea of what she’s like if I say she could be taken for the film star Marie Carletta …’ The Carletta was a strong earthy blonde, known to be intellectual. He now saw he could not possibly say this: he could imagine her cool look if he did. She said: ‘Do you mind if we get away from all that – my manifold talents, et cetera …’ He felt himself stiffen with annoyance; particularly because this was not an accusation, he saw she did not think him worth one. She had assessed him: This is the kind of man who uses this kind of flattery and therefore … It made him angrier that she did not even trouble to say: Why did you do exactly what you promised you wouldn’t? She was being invincibly polite, trying to conceal her patience with his stupidity.

‘After all,’ she was saying, ‘it is a stage designer’s job to design what comes up. Would anyone take, let’s say Johnnie Cranmore’ (another stage designer) ‘on to the air or television and say: How very versatile you are because you did that musical about Java last month and a modern play about Irish labourers this?’

He battened down his anger. ‘My dear Barbara, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that what I said would sound just like the mixture as before. So what shall we talk about?’

‘What I was saying as we walked to the restaurant: can we get away from the personal stuff?’

Now he almost panicked. Then, thank God, he laughed from nervousness, for she laughed and said: ‘You didn’t hear one word I said.’

‘No, I didn’t. I was frightened you were going to be furious because I made you walk so far when you were tired.’

They laughed together, back to where they had been in the theatre. He leaned over, took her hand, kissed it. He said: ‘Tell me again.’ He thought: Damn, now she’s going to be earnest and intellectual.

But he understood he had been stupid. He had forgotten himself at twenty – or, for that matter, at thirty; forgotten one could live inside an idea, a set of ideas, with enthusiasm. For in talking about her ideas (also the ideas of the people she worked with) for a new theatre, a new style of theatre, she was as she had been with her colleagues over the sketches or the blue material. She was easy, informal, almost chattering. This was how, he remembered, one talked about ideas that were a breath of life. The ideas, he thought, were intelligent enough; and he would agree with them, with her, if he believed it mattered a damn one way or another, if any of these enthusiasms mattered a damn. But at least he now had the key, he knew what to do. At the end of no more than half an hour, they were again two professionals, talking about ideas they shared, for he remembered caring about all this himself once. When? How many years ago was it that he had been able to care?

At last he said: ‘My dear Barbara, do you realize the impossible position you’re putting me in? Margaret Ruyen who runs this programme is determined to do you personally, the poor woman hasn’t got a serious thought in her head.’

Barbara frowned. He put his hand on hers, teasing her for the frown: ‘No, wait, trust me, we’ll circumvent her.’ She smiled. In fact Margaret Ruyen had left it all to him, had said nothing about Miss Coles.

‘They aren’t very bright – the brass,’ he said. ‘Well, never mind: we’ll work out what we want, do it, and it’ll be a fait accompli.’

‘Thank you, what a relief. How lucky I was to be given you to interview me.’ She was relaxed now, because of the whisky, the food, the wine, above all because of this new complicity against Margaret Ruyen. It would all be easy. They worked out five or six questions, over coffee, and took a taxi through rain to the studios. He noted that the cold necessity to have her, to make her, to beat her down, had left him. He was even seeing himself, as the evening ended, kissing her on the cheek and going home to his wife. This comradeship was extraordinarily pleasant. It was balm to the wound he had not known he carried until that evening, when he had had to accept the justice of the word journalist. He felt he could talk for ever about the state of the theatre, its finances, the stupidity of the government, the philistinism of …

At the studios he was careful to make a joke so that they walked in on the laugh. He was careful that the interview began at once, without conversation with Margaret Ruyen; and that from the moment the green light went on, his voice lost its easy familiarity. He made sure that not one personal note was struck during the interview. Afterwards, Margaret Ruyen, who was pleased, came forward to say so; but he took her aside to say that Miss Coles was tired and needed to be taken home at once; for he knew this must look to Barbara as if he were squaring a producer who had been expecting a different interview. He led Barbara off, her hand held tight in his against his side. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve done it, and I don’t think she knows what hit her.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘it really was pleasant to talk about something sensible for once.’

He kissed her lightly on the mouth. She returned it, smiling. By now he felt sure that the mood need not slip again, he could hold it.

‘There are two things we can do,’ he said. ‘You can come to my club and have a drink. Or I can drive you home and you can give me a drink. I have to go past you.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Wimbledon.’ He lived, in fact, at Highgate; but she lived in Fulham. He was taking another chance, but by the time she found out, they would be in a position to laugh over his ruse.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘You can drop me home then. I have to get up early.’ He made no comment. In the taxi he took her hand; it was heavy in his, and he asked: ‘Does James slave-drive you?’

‘I didn’t realize you knew him – no, he doesn’t.’

‘Well I don’t know him intimately. What’s he like to work with?’

‘Wonderful,’ she said at once. ‘There’s no one I enjoy working with more.’

Jealousy spurted in him. He could not help himself: ‘Are you having an affair with him?’

She looked: what’s it to do with you? but said: ‘No, I’m not.’

‘He’s very attractive,’ he said, with a chuckle of worldly complicity. She said nothing, and he insisted: ‘If I were a woman I’d have an affair with James.’

It seemed she might very well say nothing. But she remarked: ‘He’s married.’

His spirits rose in a swoop. It was the first stupid remark she had made. It was a remark of such staggering stupidity that … he let out a humouring snort of laughter, put his arm around her, kissed her, said: ‘My dear little Babs.’

She said: ‘Why Babs?’

‘Is that the prerogative of James? And of the stagehands?’ he could not prevent himself adding.

‘I’m only called that at work.’ She was stiff inside his arm.

‘My dear Barbara, then …’ He waited for her to enlighten and explain, but she said nothing. Soon she moved out of his arm, on the pretext of lighting a cigarette. He lit it for her. He noted that his determination to lay her, and at all costs, had come back. They were outside her house. He said quickly: ‘And now, Barbara, you can make me a cup of coffee and give me a brandy.’ She hesitated; but he was out of the taxi, paying, opening the door for her. The house had no lights on, he noted. He said: ‘We’ll be very quiet so as not to wake the children.’

She turned her head slowly to look at him. She said, flat, replying to his real question: ‘My husband is away. As for the children, they are visiting friends tonight.’ She now went ahead of him to the door of the house. It was a small house, in a terrace of small and not very pretty houses. Inside a little, bright, intimate hall, she said: ‘I’ll go and make some coffee. Then, my friend, you must go home because I’m very tired.’

The my friend struck him deep, because he had become vulnerable during their comradeship. He said, gabbling: ‘You’re annoyed with me – oh, please don’t, I’m sorry.’

She smiled, from a cool distance. He saw, in the small light from the ceiling, her extraordinary eyes. ‘Green’ eyes are hazel, are brown with green flecks, are even blue. Eyes are chequered, flawed, changing. Hers, were solid green, but really, he had never seen anything like them before. They were like very deep water. They were like – well, emeralds; or the absolute clarity of green in the depths of a tree in summer. And now, as she smiled almost perpendicularly up at him, he saw a darkness come over them. Darkness swallowed the clear green. She said: ‘I’m not in the least annoyed.’ It was as if she had yawned with boredom. ‘And now I’ll get the things … in there.’ She nodded at a white door and left him. He went into a long, very tidy white room, that had a narrow bed in one corner, a table covered with drawings, sketches, pencils. Tacked to the walls with drawing pins were swatches of coloured stuffs. Two small chairs stood near a low round table: an area of comfort in the working room. He was thinking: I wouldn’t like it if my wife had a room like this. I wonder what Barbara’s husband …? He had not thought of her till now in relation to her husband, or to her children. Hard to imagine her with a frying pan in her hand, or for that matter, cosy in the double bed.

A noise outside: he hastily arranged himself, leaning with one arm on the mantelpiece. She came in with a small tray that had cups, glasses, brandy, coffeepot. She looked abstracted. Graham was on the whole flattered by this: it probably meant she was at ease in his presence. He realized he was a little tight and rather tired. Of course, she was tired too, that was why she was vague. He remembered that earlier that evening he had lost a chance by not using her tiredness. Well now, if he were intelligent … She was about to pour coffee. He firmly took the coffeepot out of her hand, and nodded at a chair. Smiling, she obeyed him: ‘That’s better,’ he said. He poured coffee, poured brandy, and pulled the table towards her. She watched him. Then he took her hand, kissed it, patted it, laid it down gently. Yes, he thought, I did that well.

Now, a problem. He wanted to be closer to her, but she was fitted into a damned silly little chair that had arms. If he were to sit by her on the floor …? But no, for him, the big bulky reassuring man, there could be no casual gestures, no informal postures. Suppose I scoop her out of the chair on to the bed? He drank his coffee as he plotted. Yes, he’d carry her to the bed, but not yet.

‘Graham,’ she said, setting down her cup. She was, he saw with annoyance, looking tolerant. ‘Graham, in about half an hour I want to be in bed and asleep.’

As she said this, she offered him a smile of amusement at this situation – man and woman manoeuvring, the great comic situation. And with part of himself he could have shared it. Almost, he smiled with her, laughed. (Not till days later he exclaimed to himself: Lord, what a mistake I made, not to share the joke with her then: that was where I went seriously wrong.) But he could not smile. His face was frozen, with a stiff pride. Not because she had been watching him plot; the amusement she now offered him took the sting out of that; but because of his revived determination that he was going to have his own way, he was going to have her. He was not going home. But he felt that he held a bunch of keys, and did not know which one to choose.

He lifted the second small chair opposite to Barbara, moving aside the coffee table for this purpose. He sat in this chair, leaned forward, took her two hands, and said: ‘My dear, don’t make me go home yet, don’t, I beg you.’ The trouble was, nothing had happened all evening that could be felt to lead up to these words and his tone – simple, dignified, human being pleading with human being for surcease. He saw himself leaning forward, his big hands swallowing her small ones; he saw his face, warm with the appeal. And he realized he had meant the words he used. They were nothing more than what he felt. He wanted to stay with her because she wanted him to, because he was her colleague, a fellow worker in the arts. He needed this desperately. But she was examining him, curious rather than surprised, and from a critical distance. He heard himself saying: ‘If James were here, I wonder what you’d do? His voice was aggrieved; he saw the sudden dark descend over her eyes, and she said: ‘Graham, would you like some more coffee before you go?’

He said: ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for years. I know a good many people who know you.’

She leaned forward, poured herself a little more brandy, sat back, holding the glass between her two palms on her chest. An odd gesture: Graham felt that this vessel she was cherishing between her hands was herself. A patient, long-suffering gesture. He thought of various men who had mentioned her. He thought of Jack Kennaway, wavered, panicked, said: ‘For instance, Jack Kennaway.’

And now, at the name, an emotion lit her eyes – what was it? He went on, deliberately testing this emotion, adding to it: ‘I had dinner with him last week – oh, quite by chance! – and he was talking about you.’

‘Was he?’

He remembered he had thought her sullen, all those years ago. Now she seemed defensive, and she frowned. He said: ‘In fact he spent most of the evening talking about you.’

She said in short, breathless sentences, which he realized were due to anger: ‘I can very well imagine what he says. But surely you can’t think I enjoy being reminded that …’ She broke off, resenting him, he saw, because he forced her down on to a level she despised. But it was not his level either: it was all her fault, all hers! He couldn’t remember not being in control of a situation with a woman for years. Again he felt like a man teetering on a tightrope. He said, trying to make good use of Jack Kennaway, even at this late hour: ‘Of course, he’s a charming boy, but not a man at all.’

She looked at him, silent, guarding her brandy glass against her breasts.

‘Unless appearances are totally deceptive, of course.’ He could not resist probing, even though he knew it was fatal.

She said nothing.

‘Do you know you are supposed to have had the great affair with Jack Kennaway?’ he exclaimed, making this an amused expostulation against the fools who could believe it.

‘So I am told.’ She set down her glass. ‘And now,’ she said, standing up, dismissing him. He lost his head, took a step forward, grabbed her in his arms, and groaned: ‘Barbara!’

She turned her face this way and that under his kisses. He snatched a diagnostic look at her expression – it was still patient. He placed his lips against her neck, groaned ‘Barbara’ again, and waited. She would have to do something. Fight free, respond, something. She did nothing at all. At last she said: ‘For the Lord’s sake, Graham!’ She sounded amused: he was again being offered amusement. But if he shared it with her, it would be the end of this chance to have her. He clamped his mouth over hers, silencing her. She did not fight him off so much as blow him off. Her mouth treated his attacking mouth as a woman blows and laughs in water, puffing off waves or spray with a laugh, turning aside her head. It was a gesture half annoyance, half humour. He continued to kiss her while she moved her head and face about under the kisses as if they were small attacking waves.

And so began what, when he looked back on it afterwards, was the most embarrassing experience of his life. Even at the time he hated her for his ineptitude. For he held her there for what must have been nearly half an hour. She was much shorter than he, he had to bend, and his neck ached. He held her rigid, his thighs on either side of hers, her arms clamped to her side in a bear’s hug. She was unable to move, except for her head. When his mouth ground hers open and his tongue moved and writhed inside it, she still remained passive. And he could not stop himself. While with his intelligence he watched this ridiculous scene, he was determined to go on, because sooner or later her body must soften in wanting his. And he could not stop because he could not face the horror of the moment when he set her free and she looked at him. And he hated her more, every moment. Catching glimpses of her great green eyes, open and dismal beneath his, he knew he had never disliked anything more than those ‘jewelled’ eyes. They were repulsive to him. It occurred to him at last that even if by now she wanted him, he wouldn’t know it, because she was not able to move at all. He cautiously loosened his hold so that she had an inch or so leeway. She remained quite passive. As if, he thought derisively, she had read or been told that the way to incite men maddened by lust was to fight them. He found he was thinking: Stupid cow, so you imagine I find you attractive, do you? You’ve got the conceit to think that!

The sheer, raving insanity of this thought hit him, opened his arms, his thighs, and lifted his tongue out of her mouth. She stepped back, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and stood dazed with incredulity. The embarrassment that lay in wait for him nearly engulfed him, but he let anger postpone it. She said positively apologetic, even, at this moment, humorous: ‘You’re crazy, Graham. What’s the matter, are you drunk? You don’t seem drunk. You don’t even find me attractive.’

The blood of hatred went to his head and he gripped her again. Now she had got her face firmly twisted away so that he could not reach her mouth, and she repeated steadily as he kissed the parts of her cheeks and neck that were available to him: ‘Graham, let me go, do let me go, Graham.’ She went on saying this; he went on squeezing, grinding, kissing and licking. It might go on all night: it was a sheer contest of wills, nothing else. He thought: It’s only a really masculine woman who wouldn’t have given in by now out of sheer decency of the flesh! One thing he knew, however: that she would be in that bed, in his arms, and very soon. He let her go, but said: ‘I’m going to sleep with you tonight, you know that, don’t you?’

She leaned with hand on the mantelpiece to steady herself. Her face was colourless, since he had licked all the make-up off. She seemed quite different: small and defenceless with her large mouth pale now, her smudged green eyes fringed with gold. And now, for the first time, he felt what it might have been supposed (certainly by her) he felt hours ago. Seeing the small damp flesh of her face, he felt kinship, intimacy with her, he felt intimacy of the flesh, the affection and good humour of sensuality. He felt she was flesh of his flesh, his sister in the flesh. He felt desire for her, instead of the will to have her; and because of this, was ashamed of the farce he had been playing. Now he desired simply to take her into bed in the affection of his senses.

She said: ‘What on earth am I supposed to do? Telephone for the police, or what?’ He was hurt that she still addressed the man who had ground her into sulky apathy; she was not addressing him at all.

She said: ‘Or scream for the neighbours, is that what you want?’

The gold-fringed eyes were almost black, because of the depth of the shadow of boredom over them. She was bored and weary to the point of falling to the floor, he could see that.

He said: ‘I’m going to sleep with you.’

‘But how can you possibly want to?’ – a reasonable, a civilized demand addressed to a man who (he could see) she believed would respond to it. She said: ‘You know I don’t want to, and I know you don’t really give a damn one way or the other.’

He was stung back into being the boor because she had not the intelligence to see that the boor no longer existed; because she could not see that this was a man who wanted her in a way which she must respond to.

There she stood, supporting herself with one hand, looking small and white and exhausted, and utterly incredulous. She was going to turn and walk off out of simple incredulity, he could see that. ‘Do you think I don’t mean it?’ he demanded, grinding this out between his teeth. She made a movement – she was on the point of going away. His hand shot out on its own volition and grasped her wrist. She frowned. His other hand grasped her other wrist. His body hove up against hers to start the pressure of a new embrace. Before it could, she said: ‘Oh Lord, no, I’m not going through all that again. Right, then.’

‘What do you mean – right, then?’ he demanded.

She said: ‘You’re going to sleep with me. OK. Anything rather than go through that again. Shall we get it over with?’

He grinned, saying in silence: ‘No darling, oh no you don’t, I don’t care what words you use, I’m going to have you now and that’s all there is to it.’

She shrugged. The contempt, the weariness of it, had no effect on him, because he was now again hating her so much that wanting her was like needing to kill something or someone.

She took her clothes off, as if she was going to bed by herself: her jacket, skirt, petticoat. She stood in white bra and panties, a rather solid girl, brown-skinned still from the summer. He felt a flash of affection for the brown girl with her loose yellow hair as she stood naked. She got into bed and lay there, while the green eyes looked at him in civilized appeal: Are you really going through with this? Do you have to? Yes, his eyes said back: I do have to. She shifted her gaze aside, to the wall, saying silently: Well, if you want to take me without any desire at all on my part, then go ahead, if you’re not ashamed. He was not ashamed, because he was maintaining the flame of hate for her which he knew quite well was all that stood between him and shame. He took off his clothes, and got into bed beside her. As he did so, knowing he was putting himself in the position of raping a woman who was making it elaborately clear he bored her, his flesh subsided completely, sad, and full of reproach because a few moments ago it was reaching out for his sister whom he could have made happy. He lay on his side by her, secretly at work on himself, while he supported himself across her body on his elbow, using the free hand to manipulate her breasts. He saw that she gritted her teeth against his touch. At least she could not know after all this fuss he was not potent.

In order to incite himself, he clasped her again. She felt his smallness, writhed free of him, sat up and said: ‘Lie down.’

While she had been lying there, she had been thinking: The only way to get this over with is to make him big again, otherwise I’ve got to put up with him all night. His hatred of her was giving him a clairvoyance: he knew very well what went on through her mind. She had switched on, with the determination to get it over with, a sensual good humour, a patience. He lay down. She squatted beside him, the light from the ceiling blooming on her brown shoulders, her flat hair falling over her face. But she would not look at his face. Like a bored, skilled wife, she was; or like a prostitute. She administered to him, she was setting herself to please him. Yes, he thought, she’s sensual, or she could be. Meanwhile she was succeeding in defeating the reluctance of his flesh, which was the tender token of a possible desire for her, by using a cold skill that was the result of her contempt for him. Just as he decided: Right, it’s enough, now I shall have her properly, she made him come. It was not a trick, to hurry or cheat him, what defeated him was her transparent thought: Yes, that’s what he’s worth.

Then, having succeeded, and waited for a moment or two, she stood up, naked, the fringes of gold at her loins and in her armpits speaking to him a language quite different from that of her green, bored eyes. She looked at him and thought, showing it plainly: What sort of man is it who …? He watched the slight movement of her shoulders: a just-checked shrug. She went out of the room: then the sound of running water. Soon she came back in a white dressing gown, carrying a yellow towel. She handed him the towel, looking away in politeness as he used it. ‘Are you going home now?’ she inquired hopefully, at this point.

‘No, I’m not.’ He believed that now he would have to start fighting her again, but she lay down beside him, not touching him (he could feel the distaste of her flesh for his) and he thought: Very well, my dear, but there’s a lot of the night left yet. He said aloud: ‘I’m going to have you properly tonight.’ She said nothing, lay silent, yawned. Then she remarked consolingly, and he could have laughed outright from sheer surprise: ‘Those were hardly conducive circumstances for making love.’ She was consoling him. He hated her for it. A proper little slut: I forced her into bed, she doesn’t want me, but she still has to make me feel good, like a prostitute. But even while he hated her, he responded in kind, from the habit of sexual generosity. ‘It’s because of my admiration of you, because … after all, I was holding in my arms one of the thousand women.’

A pause. ‘The thousand?’ she inquired, carefully.

‘The thousand especial women.’

‘In Britain or in the world? You choose them for their brains, their beauty – what?’

‘Whatever it is that makes them outstanding,’ he said, offering her a compliment.

‘Well,’ she remarked at last, inciting him to be amused again: ‘I hope that at least there’s a short list you can say I am on, for politeness’ sake.’

He did not reply for he understood he was sleepy. He was still telling himself that he must stay awake when he was slowly waking and it was morning. It was about eight. Barbara was not there. He thought: My God! What on earth shall I tell my wife? Where was Barbara? He remembered the ridiculous scenes of last night and nearly succumbed to shame. Then he thought, reviving anger: If she didn’t sleep beside me here I’ll never forgive her … He sat up, quietly, determined to go through the house until he found her and, having found her, to possess her, when the door opened and she came in. She was fully dressed in a green suit, her hair done, her eyes made up. She carried a tray of coffee, which she set down beside the bed. He was conscious of his big loose hairy body, half uncovered. He said to himself that he was not going to lie in bed, naked, while she was dressed. He said: ‘Have you got a gown of some kind?’ She handed him, without speaking, a towel, and said: ‘The bathroom’s second on the left.’ She went out. He followed, the towel around him. Everything in this house was gay, intimate – not at all like her efficient working room. He wanted to find out where she had slept, and opened the first door. It was the kitchen, and she was in it, putting a brown earthenware dish into the oven. ‘The next door,’ said Barbara. He went hastily past the second door, and opened (he hoped quietly) the third. It was a cupboard full of linen. ‘This door,’ said Barbara, behind him.

‘So all right then, where did you sleep?’

‘What’s it to do with you? Upstairs, in my own bed. Now, if you have everything, I’ll say goodbye, I want to get to the theatre.’

‘I’ll take you,’ he said at once.

He saw again the movement of her eyes, the dark swallowing the light in deadly boredom. ‘I’ll take you,’ he insisted.

‘I’d prefer to go by myself,’ she remarked. Then she smiled: ‘However, you’ll take me. Then you’ll make a point of coming right in, so that James and everyone can see – that’s what you want to take me for, isn’t it?’

He hated her, finally, and quite simply, for her intelligence; that not once had he got away with anything, that she had been watching, since they had met yesterday, every movement of his campaign for her. However, some fate or inner urge over which he had no control made him say sentimentally: ‘My dear, you must see that I’d like at least to take you to your work.’

‘Not at all, have it on me,’ she said, giving him the lie direct. She went past him to the room he had slept in. ‘I shall be leaving in ten minutes,’ she said.

He took a shower fast. When he returned, the workroom was already tidied, the bed made, all signs of the night gone. Also, there were no signs of the coffee she brought in for him. He did not like to ask for it, for fear of an outright refusal. Besides, she was ready, her coat on, her handbag under her arm. He went, without a word, to the front door, and she came after him, silent.

He could see that every fibre of her body signalled a simple message: Oh God, for the moment when I can be rid of this boor! She was nothing but a slut, he thought.

A taxi came. In it she sat as far away from him as she could. He thought of what he should say to his wife.

Outside the theatre she remarked: ‘You could drop me here, if you liked.’ It was not a plea, she was too proud for that. ‘I’ll take you in,’ he said, and saw her thinking: Very well, I’ll go through with it to shame him. He was determined to take her in and hand her over to her colleagues, he was afraid she would give him the slip. But far from playing it down, she seemed determined to play it his way. At the stage door, she said to the doorman: ‘This is Mr Spence, Tom – do you remember, Mr Spence from last night?’ ‘Good morning, Babs,’ said the man, examining Graham, politely, as he had been ordered to do.

Barbara went to the door to the stage, opened it, held it open for him. He went in first, then held it open for her. Together they walked into the cavernous, littered, badly lit place and she called out: ‘James, James!’ A man’s voice called out from the front of the house: ‘Here, Babs, why are you so late?’

The auditorium opened before them, darkish, silent, save for an early-morning busyness of charwomen. A vacuum cleaner roared, smally, somewhere close. A couple of stagehands stood looking up at a drop which had a design of blue and green spirals. James stood with his back to the auditorium, smoking. ‘You’re late, Babs,’ he said again. He saw Graham behind her, and nodded. Barbara and James kissed. Barbara said, giving allowance to every syllable. ‘You remember Mr Spence from last night?’ James nodded: How do you do? Barbara stood beside him, and they looked together up at the blue-and-green backdrop. Then Barbara looked again at Graham, asking silently: All right now, isn’t that enough? He could see her eyes, sullen with boredom.

He said, ‘Bye, Babs. Bye, James. I’ll ring you, Babs.’ No response, she ignored him. He walked off slowly, listening for what might be said. For instance: ‘Babs, for God’s sake, what are you doing with him?’ Or she might say: ‘Are you wondering about Graham Spence? Let me explain.’

Graham passed the stagehands who, he could have sworn, didn’t recognize him. Then at last he heard James’s voice to Barbara: ‘It’s no good, Babs, I know you’re enamoured of that particular shade of blue, but do have another look at it, there’s a good girl …’ Graham left the stage, went past the office where the stage doorman sat reading a newspaper. He looked up, nodded, went back to his paper. Graham went to find a taxi, thinking: I’d better think up something convincing, then I’ll telephone my wife.

Luckily he had an excuse not to be at home that day, for this evening he had to interview a young man (for television) about his new novel.

A Woman on a Roof

It was during the week of hot sun, that June.

Three men were at work on the roof, where the leads got so hot they had the idea of throwing water on to cool them. But the water steamed, then sizzled; and they made jokes about getting an egg from some woman in the flats under them, to poach it for their dinner. By two it was not possible to touch the guttering they were replacing, and they speculated about what workmen did in regularly hot countries. Perhaps they should borrow kitchen gloves with the egg? They were all a bit dizzy, not used to the heat; and they shed their coats and stood side by side squeezing themselves into a foot-wide patch of shade against a chimney, careful to keep their feet in the thick socks and boots out of the sun. There was a fine view across several acres of roofs. Not far off a man sat in a deck chair reading the newspapers. Then they saw her, between chimneys, about fifty yards away. She lay face down on a brown blanket. They could see the top part of her: black hair, a flushed solid back, arms spread out.

‘She’s stark naked,’ said Stanley, sounding annoyed.

Harry, the oldest, a man of about forty-five, said: ‘Looks like it.’

Young Tom, seventeen, said nothing, but he was excited and grinning.

Stanley said: ‘Someone’ll report her if she doesn’t watch out.’

‘She thinks no one can see,’ said Tom, craning his head all ways to see more.

At this point the woman, still lying prone, brought her two hands up behind her shoulders with the ends of a scarf in them, tied it behind her back, and sat up. She wore a red scarf tied around her breasts and brief red bikini pants. This being the first day of the sun she was white, flushing red. She sat smoking, and did not look up when Stanley let out a wolf whistle. Harry said: ‘Small things amuse small minds,’ leading the way back to their part of the roof, but it was scorching. Harry said: ‘Wait, I’m going to rig up some shade,’ and disappeared down the skylight into the building. Now that he’d gone, Stanley and Tom went to the farthest point they could to peer at the woman. She had moved, and all they could see were two pink legs stretched on the blanket. They whistled and shouted but the legs did not move. Harry came back with a blanket and shouted: ‘Come on, then.’ He sounded irritated with them. They clambered back to him and he said to Stanley: ‘What about your missus?’ Stanley was newly married, about three months. Stanley said, jeering: ‘What about my missus?’ – preserving his independence. Tom said nothing, but his mind was full of the nearly naked woman. Harry slung the blanket, which he had borrowed from a friendly woman downstairs, from the stem of a television aerial to a row of chimney pots. This shade fell across the piece of gutter they had to replace. But the shade kept moving, they had to adjust the blanket, and not much progress was made. At last some of the heat left the roof, and they worked fast, making up for lost time. First Stanley, then Tom, made a trip to the end of the roof to see the woman. ‘She’s on her back,’ Stanley said, adding a jest which made Tom snicker, and the older man smile tolerantly. Tom’s report was that she hadn’t moved, but it was a lie. He wanted to keep what he had seen to himself: he had caught her in the act of rolling down the little red pants over her hips, till they were no more than a small triangle. She was on her back, fully visible, glistening with oil.

Next morning, as soon as they came up, they went to look. She was already there, face down, arms spread out, naked except for the little red pants. She had turned brown in the night. Yesterday she was a scarlet and white woman, today she was a brown woman. Stanley let out a whistle. She lifted her head, startled, as if she’d been asleep, and looked straight over at them. The sun was in her eyes, she blinked and stared, then she dropped her head again. At this gesture of indifference, they all three, Stanley, Tom and old Harry, let out whistles and yells. Harry was doing it in parody of the younger men, making fun of them, but he was also angry. They were all angry because of her utter indifference to the three men watching her.

‘Bitch,’ said Stanley.

‘She should ask us over,’ said Tom, snickering.

Harry recovered himself and reminded Stanley: ‘If she’s married, her old man wouldn’t like it.’

‘Christ,’ said Stanley virtuously, ‘if my wife lay about like that, for everyone to see, I’d soon stop her.’

Harry said, smiling: ‘How do you know, perhaps she’s sunning herself at this very moment?’

‘Not a chance, not on our roof.’ The safety of his wife put Stanley into a good humour, and they went to work. But today it was hotter than yesterday; and several times one or the other suggested they should tell Matthew, the foreman, and ask to leave the roof until the heat wave was over. But they didn’t. There was work to be done in the basement of the big block of flats, but up there they felt free, on a different level from ordinary humanity shut in the streets or the buildings. A lot more people came out on to the roofs that day, for an hour at midday. Some married couples sat side by side in deck chairs, the women’s legs stockingless and scarlet, the men in vests with reddening shoulders.

The woman stayed on her blanket, turning herself over and over. She ignored them, no matter what they did. When Harry went off to fetch more screws, Stanley said: ‘Come on.’ Her roof belonged to a different system of roofs, separated from theirs at one point by about twenty feet. It meant a scrambling climb from one level to another, edging along parapets, clinging to chimneys, while their big boots slipped and slithered, but at last they stood on a small square projecting roof looking straight down at her, close. She sat smoking, reading a book. Tom thought she looked like a poster, or a magazine cover, with the blue sky behind her and her legs stretched out. Behind her a great crane at work on a new building in Oxford Street swung its black arm across the roofs in a great arc. Tom imagined himself at work on the crane, adjusting the arm to swing over and pick her up and swing her back across the sky to drop near him.

They whistled. She looked up at them, cool and remote, and went on reading. Again, they were furious. Or rather, Stanley was. His sun-heated face was screwed into rage as he whistled again and again, trying to make her look up. Young Tom stopped whistling. He stood beside Stanley, excited, grinning; but he felt as if he were saying to the woman: ‘Don’t associate me with him,’ for his grin was apologetic. Last night he had thought of the unknown woman before he slept, and she had been tender with him. This tenderness he was remembering as he shifted his feet by the jeering, whistling Stanley, and watched the indifferent, healthy brown woman a few feet off, with the gap that plunged to the street between them. Tom thought it was romantic, it was like being high on two hilltops. But there was a shout from Harry, and they clambered back. Stanley’s face was hard, really angry. The boy kept looking at him and wondered why he hated the woman so much, for by now he loved her.

They played their little games with the blanket, trying to trap shade to work under; but again it was not until nearly four that they could work seriously, and they were exhausted, all three of them. They were grumbling about the weather, by now. Stanley was in a thoroughly bad humour. When they made their routine trip to see the woman before they packed up for the day, she was apparently asleep, face down, her back all naked save for the scarlet triangle on her buttocks. ‘I’ve got a good mind to report her to the police,’ said Stanley, and Harry said: ‘What’s eating you? What harm’s she doing?’

‘I tell you, if she was my wife!’

‘But she isn’t, is she?’ Tom knew that Harry, like himself, was uneasy at Stanley’s reaction. He was normally a sharp young man, quick at his work, making a lot of jokes, good company.

‘Perhaps it will be cooler tomorrow,’ said Harry.

But it wasn’t, it was hotter, if anything, and the weather forecast said the good weather would last. As soon as they were on the roof, Harry went over to see if the woman was there, and Tom knew it was to prevent Stanley going, to put off his bad humour. Harry had grown-up children, a boy the same age as Tom, and the youth trusted and looked up to him.

Harry came back and said: ‘She’s not there.’

‘I bet her old man has put his foot down,’ said Stanley, and Harry and Tom caught each other’s eyes and smiled behind the young married man’s back.

Harry suggested they should get permission to work in the basement, and they did, that day. But before packing up Stanley said: ‘Let’s have a breath of fresh air.’ Again Harry and Tom smiled at each other as they followed Stanley up to the roof, Tom in the devout conviction that he was there to protect the woman from Stanley. It was about five-thirty, and a calm, full sunlight lay over the roofs. The great crane still swung its black arm from Oxford Street to above their heads. She was not there. Then there was a flutter of white from behind a parapet, and she stood up, in a belted, white dressing gown. She had been there all day, probably, but on a different patch of roof, to hide from them. Stanley did not whistle, he said nothing, but watched the woman bend to collect papers, books, cigarettes, then fold the blanket over her arm. Tom was thinking: If they weren’t here, I’d go over and say … what? But he knew from his nightly dreams of her that she was kind and friendly. Perhaps she would ask him down to her flat? Perhaps … He stood watching her disappear down the skylight. As she went, Stanley let out a shrill derisive yell; she started, and it seemed as if she nearly fell. She clutched to save herself, they could hear things falling. She looked straight at them, angry. Harry said, facetiously: ‘Better be careful on those slippery ladders, love.’ Tom knew he said it to save her from Stanley, but she could not know it. She vanished, frowning. Tom was full of secret delight, because he knew her anger was for the others, not for him.

‘Roll on some rain,’ said Stanley, bitter, looking at the blue evening sky.

Next day was cloudless, and they decided to finish the work in the basement. They felt excluded, shut in the grey cement basement fitting pipes, from the holiday atmosphere of London in a heat wave. At lunchtime they came up for some air, but while the married couples, and the men in shirt-sleeves or vests, were there, she was not there, either on her usual patch of roof or where she had been yesterday. They all, even Harry, clambered about, between chimney pots, over parapets, the hot leads stinging their fingers. There was not a sign of her. They took off their shirts and vests and exposed their chests, feeling their feet sweaty and hot. They did not mention the woman. But Tom felt alone again. Last night she had asked him into her flat; it was big and had fitted white carpets and a bed with a padded white leather head top. She wore a black filmy négligé and her kindness to Tom thickened his throat as he remembered it. He felt she had betrayed him by not being there.

And again after work they climbed up, but still there was nothing to be seen of her. Stanley kept repeating that if it was as hot as this tomorrow he wasn’t going to work and that’s all there was to it. But they were all there next day. By ten the temperature was in the middle seventies, and it was eighty long before noon. Harry went to the foreman to say it was impossible to work on the leads in that heat; but the foreman said there was nothing else he could put them on, and they’d have to. At midday they stood, silent, watching the skylight on her roof open, and then she slowly emerged in her white gown, holding a bundle of blanket. She looked at them, gravely, then went to the part of the roof where she was hidden from them. Tom was pleased. He felt she was more his when the other men couldn’t see her. They had taken off their shirts and vests, but now they put them back again, for they felt the sun bruising their flesh. ‘She must have the hide of a rhino,’ said Stanley, tugging at guttering and swearing. They stopped work, and sat in the shade, moving around behind chimney stacks. A woman came to water a yellow window box just opposite them. She was middle-aged, wearing a flowered summer dress. Stanley said to her: ‘We need a drink more than them.’ She smiled and said: ‘Better drop down to the pub quick, it’ll be closing in a minute.’ They exchanged pleasantries, and she left them with a smile and a wave.

‘Not like Lady Godiva,’ said Stanley. ‘She can give us a bit of a chat and a smile.’

‘You didn’t whistle at her,’ said Tom, reproving.

‘Listen to him,’ said Stanley, ‘you didn’t whistle, then?’

But the boy felt as if he hadn’t whistled, as if only Harry and Stanley had. He was making plans, when it was time to knock off work, to get left behind and somehow make his way over to the woman. The weather report said the hot spell was due to break, so he had to move quickly. But there was no chance of being left. The other two decided to knock off work at four, because they were exhausted. As they went down, Tom quickly climbed a parapet and hoisted himself higher by pulling his weight up a chimney. He caught a glimpse of her lying on her back, her knees up, eyes closed, a brown woman lolling in the sun. He slipped and clattered down, as Stanley looked for information: ‘She’s gone down,’ he said. He felt as if he had protected her from Stanley, and that she must be grateful to him. He could feel the bond between the woman and himself.

Next day, they stood around on the landing below the roof, reluctant to climb up into the heat. The woman who had lent Harry the blanket came out and offered them a cup of tea. They accepted gratefully, and sat around Mrs Pritchett’s kitchen an hour or so, chatting. She was married to an airline pilot. A smart blonde, of about thirty, she had an eye for the handsome sharp-faced Stanley; and the two teased each other while Harry sat in a corner, watching, indulgent, though his expression reminded Stanley that he was married. And young Tom felt envious of Stanley’s ease in badinage; felt, too, that Stanley’s getting off with Mrs Pritchett left his romance with the woman on the roof safe and intact.

‘I thought they said the heat wave’d break,’ said Stanley, sullen, as the time approached when they really would have to climb up into the sunlight.

‘You don’t like it, then?’ asked Mrs Pritchett.

‘All right for some,’ said Stanley. ‘Nothing to do but lie about as if it was a beach up there. Do you ever go up?’

‘Went up once,’ said Mrs Pritchett. ‘But it’s a dirty place up there, and it’s too hot.’

‘Quite right too,’ said Stanley.

Then they went up, leaving the cool neat little flat and the friendly Mrs Pritchett.

As soon as they were up they saw her. The three men looked at her, resentful at her ease in this punishing sun. Then Harry said, because of the expression on Stanley’s face: ‘Come on, we’ve got to pretend to work, at least.’

They had to wrench another length of guttering that ran beside a parapet out of its bed, so that they could replace it. Stanley took it in his two hands, tugged, swore, stood up. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, and sat down under a chimney. He lit a cigarette. ‘Fuck them,’ he said. ‘What do they think we are, lizards? I’ve got blisters all over my hands.’ Then he jumped up and climbed over the roofs and stood with his back to them. He put his fingers either side of his mouth and let out a shrill whistle. Tom and Harry squatted, not looking at each other, watching him. They could just see the woman’s head, the beginnings of her brown shoulders. Stanley whistled again. Then he began stamping with his feet, and whistled and yelled and screamed at the woman, his face getting scarlet. He seemed quite mad, as he stamped and whistled, while the woman did not move, she did not move a muscle.

‘Barmy,’ said Tom.

‘Yes,’ said Harry, disapproving.

Suddenly the older man came to a decision. It was, Tom knew, to save some sort of scandal or real trouble over the woman. Harry stood up and began packing tools into a length of oily cloth. ‘Stanley,’ he said, commanding. At first Stanley took no notice, but Harry said: ‘Stanley, we’re packing it in, I’ll tell Matthew.’

Stanley came back, cheeks mottled, eyes glaring.

‘Can’t go on like this,’ said Harry. ‘It’ll break in a day or so. I’m going to tell Matthew we’ve got sunstroke, and if he doesn’t like it, it’s too bad.’ Even Harry sounded aggrieved, Tom noted. The small, competent man, the family man with his grey hair, who was never at a loss, sounded really off balance. ‘Come on,’ he said, angry. He fitted himself into the open square in the roof, and went down, watching his feet on the ladder. Then Stanley went, with not a glance at the woman. Then Tom who, his throat beating with excitement, silently promised her in a backward glance: Wait for me, wait, I’m coming.

On the pavement Stanley said: ‘I’m going home.’ He looked white now, so perhaps he really did have sunstroke. Harry went off to find the foreman who was at work on the plumbing of some flats down the street. Tom slipped back, not into the building they had been working on, but the building on whose roof the woman lay. He went straight up, no one stopping him. The skylight stood open, with an iron ladder leading up. He emerged on to the roof a couple of yards from her. She sat up, pushing back her black hair with both hands. The scarf across her breasts bound them tight, and brown flesh bulged around it. Her legs were brown and smooth. She stared at him in silence. The boy stood grinning, foolish, claiming the tenderness he expected from her.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I … I came to … make your acquaintance,’ he stammered, grinning, pleading with her.

They looked at each other, the slight, scarlet-faced excited boy, and the serious, nearly naked woman. Then, without a word, she lay down on her brown blanket, ignoring him.

‘You like the sun, do you?’ he inquired of her glistening back.

Not a word. He felt panic, thinking of how she had held him in her arms, stroked his hair, brought him where he sat, lordly, in her bed, a glass of some exhilarating liquor he had never tasted in life. He felt that if he knelt down, stroked her shoulders, her hair, she would turn and clasp him in her arms.

He said: ‘The sun’s all right for you, isn’t it?’

She raised her head, set her chin on two small fists. ‘Go away,’ she said. He did not move. ‘Listen,’ she said, in a slow reasonable voice, where anger was kept in check, though with difficulty; looking at him, her face weary with anger: ‘If you get a kick out of seeing women in bikinis, why don’t you take a sixpenny bus ride to the Lido? You’d see dozens of them, without all this mountaineering.’

She hadn’t understood him. He felt her unfairness pale him. He stammered: ‘But I like you, I’ve been watching you and …’

‘Thanks,’ she said, and dropped her face again, turned away from him.

She lay there. He stood there. She said nothing. She had simply shut him out. He stood, saying nothing at all, for some minutes. He thought: She’ll have to say something if I stay. But the minutes went past, with no sign of them in her, except in the tension of her back, her thighs, her arms – the tension of waiting for him to go.

He looked up at the sky, where the sun seemed to spin in heat; and over the roofs where he and his mates had been earlier. He could see the heat quavering where they had worked. ‘And they expect us to work in these conditions!’ he thought, filled with righteous indignation. The woman hadn’t moved. A bit of hot wind blew her black hair softly, it shone, and was iridescent. He remembered how he had stroked it last night.

Resentment of her at last moved him off and away down the ladder, through the building, into the street. He got drunk then, in hatred of her.

Next day when he woke the sky was grey. He looked at the wet grey and thought, vicious: ‘Well, that’s fixed you, hasn’t it now? That’s fixed you good and proper.’

The three men were at work early on the cool leads, surrounded by damp drizzling roofs where no one came to sun themselves, black roofs, slimy with rain. Because it was cool now, they would finish the job that day, if they hurried.

How I Finally Lost my Heart

It would be easy to say that I picked up a knife, slit open my side, took my heart out, and threw it away; but unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as that. Not that I, like everyone else, had not often wanted to do it. No, it happened differently, and not as I expected.

It was just after I had had a lunch and a tea with two different men. My lunch partner I had lived with for (more or less) four and seven-twelfths years. When he left me for new pastures, I spent two years, or was it three, half dead, and my heart was a stone, impossible to carry about, considering all the other things weighing on one. Then I slowly, and with difficulty, got free, because my heart cherished a thousand adhesions to my first love – though from another point of view he could be legitimately described as either my second real love (my father being the first) or my third (my brother intervening).

As the folk song has it:

I have loved but three men in my life,
My father, my brother, and the man that took my life.

But if one were going to look at the thing from outside, without insight, he could be seen as (perhaps, I forget) the thirteenth, but to do that means disregarding the inner emotional truth. For we all know that those affairs or entanglements one has between serious loves, though they may number dozens and stretch over years, don’t really count.

This way of looking at things creates a number of unhappy people, for it is well known that what doesn’t really count for me might very well count for you. But there is no way of getting over this difficulty, for a serious love is the most important business in life, or nearly so. At any rate, most of us are engaged in looking for it. Even when we are in fact being very serious indeed with one person we still have an eighth of an eye cocked in case some stranger unexpectedly encountered might turn out to be even more serious. We are all entirely in agreement that we are in the right to taste, test, sip and sample a thousand people on our way to the real one. It is not too much to say that in our circles tasting and sampling is probably the second most important activity, the first being earning money. Or to put it another way, ‘If you are serious about this thing, you go on laying everybody that offers until something clicks and you’re all set to go.’

I have disgressed from an earlier point: that I regarded this man I had lunch with (we will call him A) as my first love; and still do despite the Freudians, who insist on seeing my father as A and possibly my brother as B, making my (real) first love C. And despite, also, those who might ask: What about your two husbands and all those affairs?

What about them? I did not really love them, the way I loved A.

I had lunch with him. Then, quite by chance, I had tea with B. When I say B, here, I mean my second serious love, not my brother, or the little boys I was in love with between the ages of five and fifteen, if we are going to take fifteen (arbitrarily) as the point of no return … which last phrase is in itself a pretty brave defiance of the secular arbiters.

In between A and B (my count) there were a good many affairs, or samples, but they didn’t score. B and I clicked, we went off like a bomb, though not quite as simply as A and I had clicked, because my heart was bruised, sullen, and suspicious because of A’s throwing me over. Also there were all those ligaments and adhesions binding me to A still to be loosened, one by one. However, for a time B and I got on like a house on fire, and then we came to grief. My heart was again a ton weight in my side.

If this were a stone in my side, a stone,
I could pluck it out and be free …

Having lunch with A, then tea with B, two men who between them had consumed a decade of my precious years (I am not counting the test or trial affairs in between) and, it is fair to say, had balanced all the delight (plenty and intense) with misery (oh Lord, Lord) – moving from one to the other, in the course of an afternoon, conversing amiably about this and that, with meanwhile my heart giving no more than slight reminiscent tugs, the fish of memory at the end of a long slack line …

To sum up, it was salutary.

Particularly as that evening I was expecting to meet C, or someone who might very well turn out to be C – though I don’t want to give too much emphasis to C, the truth is I can hardly remember what he looked like, but one can’t be expected to remember the unimportant ones one has sipped or tasted in between. But after all, he might have turned out to be C, we might have clicked, and I was in that state of mind (in which we all so often are) of thinking: He might turn out to be the one. (I use a women’s magazine phrase deliberately here, instead of saying, as I might: Perhaps it will be serious.)

So there I was (I want to get the details and atmosphere right) standing at a window looking into a street (Great Portland Street, as a matter of fact) and thinking that while I would not dream of regretting my affairs, or experiences, with A and B (it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all), my anticipation of the heart because of spending an evening with a possible C had a certain unreality, because there was no doubt that both A and B had caused me unbelievable pain. Why, therefore, was I looking forward to C? I should rather be running away as fast as I could.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was looking at the whole phenomenon quite inaccurately. My (or perhaps I am permitted to say our?) way of looking at it is that one must search for an A, or a B, or a C or a D with a certain combination of desirable or sympathetic qualities so that one may click, or spontaneously combust: or to put it differently, one needs a person who, like a saucer of water, allows one to float off on him/her, like a transfer. But this wasn’t so at all. Actually one carries with one a sort of burning spear stuck in one’s side, that one waits for someone else to pull out; it is something painful, like a sore or a wound, that one cannot wait to share with someone else.

I saw myself quite plainly in a moment of truth: I was standing at a window (on the third floor) with A and B (to mention only the mountain peaks of my emotional experience) behind me, a rather attractive woman, if I may say so, with a mellowness that I would be the first to admit is the sad harbinger of age, but is attractive by definition, because it is a testament to the amount of sampling and sipping (I nearly wrote simpling and sapping) I have done in my time … there I stood, brushed, dressed, re-lipped, kohl-eyed, all waiting for an evening with a possible C. And at another window overlooking (I think I am right in saying) Margaret Street, stood C, brushed, washed, shaved, smiling: an attractive man (I think), and he was thinking: Perhaps she will turn out to be D (or A or 3 or ? or %, or whatever symbol he used). We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our hearts in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other’s face like snowballs, or cricket balls (How’s that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: ‘Take my wound.’ Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all, one simply expects to get rid of one’s own.

I decided I must go to the telephone and say C! – You know that joke about the joke-makers who don’t trouble to tell each other jokes, but simply say Joke 1, or Joke 2, and everyone roars with laughter, or snickers, or giggles appropriately … Actually one could reverse the game by guessing whether it was Joke C(b) or Joke A(d) according to what sort of laughter a person made to match the silent thought … Well, C (I imagined myself saying), the analogy is for our instruction: Let’s take the whole thing as read or said. Let’s not lick each other’s sores; let’s keep our hearts to ourselves. Because just consider it, C, how utterly absurd – here we stand at our respective windows with our palpitating hearts in our hands …

At this moment, dear reader, I was forced simply to put down the telephone with an apology. For I felt the fingers of my left hand push outwards around something rather large, light, and slippery – hard to describe this sensation, really. My hand is not large, and my heart was in a state of inflation after having had lunch with A, tea with B, and then looking forward to C … Anyway, my fingers were stretching out rather desperately to encompass an unknown, largish, lightish object, and I said: Excuse me a minute, to C, looked down, and there was my heart, in my hand.

I had to end the conversation there.

For one thing, to find that one has achieved something so often longed for, so easily, is upsetting. It’s not as if I had been trying. To get something one wants simply by accident – no, there’s no pleasure in it, no feeling of achievement. So to find myself heart-whole, or, more accurately, heart-less, or at any rate, rid of the damned thing, and at such an awkward moment, in the middle of an imaginary telephone call with a man who might possibly turn out to be C, well, it was irritating rather than not.

For another thing, a heart raw and bleeding and fresh from one’s side, is not the prettiest sight. I’m not going into that at all. I was appalled, and indeed embarrassed that that was what had been loving and beating away all those years, because if I’d had any idea at all – well, enough of that.

My problem was how to get rid of it.

Simple, you’ll say, drop it into the waste bucket.

Well, let me tell you, that’s what I tried to do. I took a good look at this object, nearly died with embarrassment, and walked over to the rubbish can, where I tried to let it roll off my fingers. It wouldn’t. It was stuck. There was my heart, a large red pulsing bleeding repulsive object, stuck to my fingers. What was I going to do? I sat down, lit a cigarette (with one hand, holding the matchbox between my knees), held my hand with the heart stuck on it over the side of the chair so that it could drip into a bucket, and considered.

If this were a stone in my hand, a stone,
I could throw it over a tree …

When I had finished the cigarette, I carefully unwrapped some tin foil, of the kind used to wrap food in when cooking, and I fitted a sort of cover around my heart. This was absolutely and urgently necessary. First, it was smarting badly. After all, it had spent some forty years protected by flesh and ribs and the air was too much for it. Secondly, I couldn’t have any Tom, Dick and Harry walking in and looking at it. Thirdly, I could not look at it for too long myself, it filled me with shame. The tin foil was effective, and indeed rather striking. It is quite pliable and now it seemed as if there were a stylized heart balanced on my palm, like a globe, in glittering, silvery substance. I almost felt I needed a sceptre in the other hand to balance it … But the thing was, there is no other word for it, in bad taste. I then wrapped a scarf around hand and tin-foiled heart, and felt safer. Now it was a question of pretending to have hurt my hand until I could think of a way of getting rid of my heart altogether, short of amputating my hand.

Meanwhile I telephoned (really, not in imagination) C, who now would never be C. I could feel my heart, which was stuck so close to my fingers that I could feel every beat or tremor, give a gulp of resigned grief at the idea of this beautiful experience now never to be. I told him some idiotic lie about having flu. Well, he was all stiff and indignant, but concealing it urbanely, as I would have done, making a joke but allowing a tiny barb of sarcasm to rankle in the last well-chosen phrase. Then I sat down again to think out my whole situation.

There I sat.

What was I going to do?

There I sat.

I am going to have to skip about four days here, vital enough in all conscience, because I simply cannot go heartbeat by heartbeat through my memories. A pity, since I suppose this is what this story is about; but in brief: I drew the curtains, I took the telephone off the hook, I turned on the lights, I took the scarf off the glittering shape, then the tin foil, then I examined the heart. There were two-fifths of a century’s experience to work through, and before I had even got through the first night, I was in a state hard to describe …

Or if I could pull the nerves from my skin
A quick red net to drag through a sea for fish …

By the end of the fourth day I was worn out. By no act of will, or intention, or desire, could I move that heart by a fraction – on the contrary, it was not only stuck to my fingers, like a sucked boiled sweet, but was actually growing to the flesh of my fingers and my palm.

I wrapped it up again in tin foil and scarf, and turned out the lights and pulled up the blinds and opened the curtains. It was about ten in the morning, an ordinary London day, neither hot nor cold not clear nor clouded nor wet nor fine. And while the street is interesting, it is not exactly beautiful, so I wasn’t looking at it so much as waiting for something to catch my attention while thinking of something else.

Suddenly I heard a tap-tap-tapping that got louder, sharp and clear, and I knew before I saw her that this was the sound of high heels on a pavement though it might just as well have been a hammer against stone. She walked fast opposite my window and her heels hit the pavement so hard that all the noises of the street seemed absorbed into that single tap-tap-clang-clang. As she reached the corner at Great Portland Street two London pigeons swooped diagonally from the sky very fast, as if they were bullets aimed to kill her; and then as they saw her they swooped up and off at an angle. Meanwhile she had turned the corner. All this has taken time to write down, but the thing happening took a couple of seconds: the woman’s body hitting the pavement bang-bang through her heels then sharply turning the corner in a right angle; and the pigeons making another acute angle across hers and intersecting it in a fast sweep of displaced air. Nothing to all that, of course, nothing – she had gone off down the street, her heels tip-tapping, and the pigeons landed on my windowsill and began cooing. All gone, all vanished, the marvellous exact co-ordination of sound and movement, but it had happened, it had made me happy and exhilarated, I had no problems in this world, and I realized that the heart stuck to my fingers was quite loose. I couldn’t get it off altogether, though I was tugging at it under the scarf and the tin foil, but almost.

I understood that sitting and analysing each movement of my pulse or beat of my heart through forty years was a mistake. I was on the wrong track altogether: this was the way to attach my red, bitter, delighted heart to my flesh for ever and ever …

Ha! So you think I’m done! You think …
Watch, I’ll roll my heart in a mesh of rage
And bounce it like a handball off
Walls, faces, railings, umbrellas and pigeons’ backs …

No, all that was no good at all, it just made things worse. What I must do is to take myself by surprise, as it were, the way I was taken by surprise over the woman and the pigeons and the sharp sounds of heels and silk wings.

I put on my coat, held my lumpy scarfed arm across my chest, so that if anyone said: What have you done with your hand? I could say: I’ve banged my finger in the door. Then I walked down into the street.

It wasn’t easy to go among so many people, when I was worried that they were thinking: What has that woman done to her hand? because that made it hard to forget myself. And all the time it tingled and throbbed against my fingers, reminding me.

Now I was out I didn’t know what to do. Should I go and have lunch with someone? Or wander in the park? Or buy myself a dress? I decided to go to the Round Pond, and walk around it by myself. I was tired after four days and nights without sleep. I went down into the Underground at Oxford Circus. Midday. Crowds of people. I felt self-conscious, but of course need not have worried. I swear you could walk naked down the street in London and no one would even turn round.

So I went down the escalator and looked at the faces coming up past me on the other side, as I always do; and wondered, as I always do, how strange it is that those people and I should meet by chance in such a way, and how odd that we would never see each other again, or, if we did, we wouldn’t know it. And I went on to the crowded platform and looked at the faces as I always do, and got into the train, which was very full, and found a seat. It wasn’t as bad as at rush hour, but all the seats were filled. I leaned back and closed my eyes, deciding to sleep a little, being so tired. I was just beginning to doze off, when I heard a woman’s voice muttering, or rather, declaiming:

‘A gold cigarette case, well, that’s a nice thing, isn’t it, I must say, a gold case, yes …’

There was something about this voice which made me open my eyes: on the other side of the compartment, about eight persons away, sat a youngish woman, wearing a cheap green cloth coat, gloveless hands, flat brown shoes, and lisle stockings. She must be rather poor – a woman dressed like this is a rare sight, these days. But it was her posture that struck me. She was sitting half twisted in her seat, so that her head was turned over her left shoulder, and she was looking straight at the stomach of an elderly man next to me. But it was clear she was not seeing it: her young staring eyes were sightless, she was looking inwards.

She was so clearly alone, in the crowded compartment, that it was not as embarrassing as it might have been. I looked around, and people were smiling, or exchanging glances, or winking, or ignoring her, according to their natures, but she was oblivious of us all.

She suddenly aroused herself, turned so that she sat straight in her seat, and directed her voice and her gaze to the opposite seat:

‘Well so that’s what you think, you think that, you think that do you, well, you think I’m just going to wait at home for you, but you gave her a gold case and …’

And with a clockwork movement of her whole thin person, she turned her narrow pale-haired head sideways over her left shoulder, and resumed her stiff empty stare at the man’s stomach. He was grinning uncomfortably. I leaned forward to look along the line of people in the row of seats I sat in, and the man opposite her, a young man, had exactly the same look of discomfort which he was determined to keep amused. So we all looked at her, the young, thin, pale woman in her private drama of misery, who was so completely unconscious of us that she spoke and thought out aloud. And again, without particular warning or reason, in between stops, so it wasn’t that she was disturbed from her dream by the train stopping at Bond Street, and then jumping forward again, she twisted her body frontways, and addressed the seat opposite her (the young man had got off, and a smart grey-curled matron had got in):

‘Well I know about it now, don’t I, and if you come in all smiling and pleased well then I know, don’t I, you don’t have to tell me, I know, and I’ve said to her, I’ve said, I know he gave you a gold cigarette case …’

At which point, with the same clockwork inpulse, she stopped, or was checked, or simply ran out, and turned herself half around to stare at the stomach – the same stomach, for the middle-aged man was still there. But we stopped at Marble Arch and he got out, giving the compartment, rather than the people in it, a tolerant half-smile which said: I am sure I can trust you to realize that this unfortunate woman is stark staring mad …

His seat remained empty. No people got in at Marble Arch, and the two people standing waiting for seats did not want to sit by her to receive her stare.

We all sat, looking gently in front of us, pretending to ourselves and to each other that we didn’t know the poor woman was mad and that in fact we ought to be doing something about it. I even wondered what I should say: Madam, you’re mad – shall I escort you to your home? Or: Poor thing, don’t go on like that, it doesn’t do any good, you know – just leave him, that’ll bring him to his senses …

And behold, after the interval that was regulated by her inner mechanism had elapsed, she turned back and said to the smart matron who received this statement of accusation with perfect self-command:

‘Yes, I know! Oh yes! And what about my shoes, what about them, a golden cigarette case is what she got, the filthy bitch, a golden case …’

Stop. Twist. Stare. At the empty seat by her.

Extraordinary. Because it was a frozen misery, how shall I put it? A passionless passion – we were seeing unhappiness embodied, we were looking at the essence of some private tragedy – rather, Tragedy. There was no emotion in it. She was like an actress doing Accusation, or Betrayed Love, or Infidelity, when she has only just learned her lines and is not bothering to do more than get them right.

And whether she sat in her half-twisted position, her unblinking eyes staring at the greenish, furry, ugly, covering of the train seat, or sat straight, directing her accusation to the smart woman opposite, there was a frightening immobility about her – yes, that was why she frightened us. For it was clear that she might very well (if the inner machine ran down) stay silent, for ever, in either twisted or straight position, or at any point between them – yes, we could all imagine her, frozen perpetually in some arbitrary pose. It was as if we watched the shell of some woman going through certain predetermined motions.

For she was simply not there. What was there, who she was, it was impossible to tell, though it was easy to imagine her thin, gentle little face breaking into a smile in total forgetfulness of what she was enacting now. She did not know she was in a train between Marble Arch and Queensway, nor that she was publicly accusing her husband or lover, nor that we were looking at her.

And we, looking at her, felt an embarrassment and shame that was not on her account at all …

Suddenly I felt, under the scarf and the tin foil, a lightening of my fingers, as my heart rolled loose.

I hastily took it off my palm, in case it decided to adhere there again, and I removed the scarf, leaving balanced on my knees a perfect stylized heart, like a silver heart on a Valentine card, though of course it was three-dimensional. This heart was not so much harmless, no that isn’t the word, as artistic, but in very bad taste, as I said. I could see that the people in the train, now looking at me and the heart, and not at the poor mad-woman, were pleased with it.

I got up, took the four or so paces to where she was, and laid the tin-foiled heart down on the seat so that it received her stare.

For a moment she did not react, then with a groan or a mutter of relieved and entirely theatrical grief, she leaned forward, picked up the glittering heart, and clutched it in her arms, hugging it and rocking it back and forth, even laying her cheek against it, while staring over its top at her husband as if to say: Look what I’ve got, I don’t care about you and your cigarette case, I’ve got a silver heart.

I got up, since we were at Notting Hill Gate, and, followed by the pleased congratulatory nods and smiles of the people left behind, I went out on the platform, up the escalators, into the street, and along to the park.

No heart. No heart at all. What bliss. What freedom …

Hear that sound? That’s laughter, yes.
That’s me laughing, yes, that’s me.

A Man and Two Women

Stella’s friends the Bradfords had taken a cheap cottage in Essex for the summer, and she was going down to visit them. She wanted to see them, but there was no doubt there was something of a letdown (and for them too) in the English cottage. Last summer Stella had been wandering with her husband around Italy; had seen the English couple at a café table, and found them sympathetic. They all liked each other, and the four went about for some weeks, sharing meals, hotels, trips. Back in London the friendship had not, as might have been expected, fallen off. Then Stella’s husband departed abroad, as he often did, and Stella saw Jack and Dorothy by herself. There were a great many people she might have seen, but it was the Bradfords she saw most often, two or three times a week, at their flat or hers. They were at ease with each other. Why were they? Well, for one thing they were all artists – in different ways. Stella designed wallpapers and materials; she had a name for it.

The Bradfords were real artists. He painted, she drew. They had lived mostly out of England in cheap places around the Mediterranean. Both from the North of England, they had met at art school, married at twenty, had taken flight from England, then returned to it, needing it, then off again: and so on, for years, in the rhythm of so many of their kind, needing, hating, loving England. There had been seasons of real poverty, while they lived on pasta or bread or rice, and wine and fruit and sunshine, in Majorca, southern Spain, Italy, North Africa.

A French critic had seen Jack’s work, and suddenly he was successful. His show in Paris, then one in London, made money; and now he charged in the hundreds where a year or so ago he charged ten or twenty guineas. This had deepened his contempt for the values of the markets. For a while Stella thought that this was the bond between the Bradfords and herself. They were so very much, as she was, of the new generation of artists (and poets and playwrights and novelists) who had one thing in common, a cool derision about the racket. They were so very unlike (they felt) the older generation with their Societies and their Lunches and their salons and their cliques: their atmosphere of connivance with the snobberies of success. Stella, too, had been successful by a fluke. Not that she did not consider herself talented; it was that others as talented were unfêted, and unbought. When she was with the Bradfords and other fellow spirits, they would talk about the racket, using each other as yardsticks or fellow consciences about how much to give in, what to give, how to use without being used, how to enjoy without becoming dependent on enjoyment.

Of course Dorothy Bradford was not able to talk in quite the same way, since she had not yet been ‘discovered’; she had not ‘broken through’. A few people with discrimination bought her unusual delicate drawings, which had a strength that was hard to understand unless one knew Dorothy herself. But she was not at all, as Jack was, a great success. There was a strain here, in the marriage, nothing much; it was kept in check by their scorn for their arbitrary rewards of ‘the racket’. But it was there, nevertheless.

Stella’s husband had said: ‘Well, I can understand that, it’s like me and you – you’re creative, whatever that may mean, I’m just a bloody TV journalist.’ There was no bitterness in this. He was a good journalist, and besides he sometimes got the chance to make a good small film. All the same, there was that between him and Stella, just as there was between Jack and his wife.

After a time Stella saw something else in her kinship with the couple. It was that the Bradfords had a close bond, bred of having spent so many years together in foreign places, dependent on each other because of their poverty. It had been a real love marriage, one could see it by looking at them. It was now. And Stella’s marriage was a real marriage. She understood she enjoyed being with the Bradfords because the two couples were equal in this. Both marriages were those of strong, passionate, talented individuals; they shared a battling quality that strengthened them, not weakened them.

The reason why it had taken Stella so long to understand this was that the Bradfords had made her think about her own marriage, which she was beginning to take for granted, sometimes even found exhausting. She had understood, through them, how lucky she was in her husband; how lucky they all were. No marital miseries; nothing of (what they saw so often in friends) one partner in a marriage victim to the other, resenting the other; no claiming of outsiders as sympathizers or allies in an unequal battle.

There had been a plan for these four people to go off again to Italy or Spain, but then Stella’s husband departed, and Dorothy got pregnant. So there was the cottage in Essex instead, a bad second choice, but better, they all felt, to deal with a new baby on home ground, at least for the first year. Stella, telephoned by Jack (on Dorothy’s particular insistence, he said), offered and received commiserations on its being only Essex and not Majorca or Italy. She also received sympathy because her husband had been expected back this weekend, but had wired to say he wouldn’t be back for another month, probably – there was trouble in Venezuela. Stella wasn’t really forlorn; she didn’t mind living alone, since she was always supported by knowing her man would be back. Besides, if she herself were offered the chance of a month’s ‘trouble’ in Venezuela, she wouldn’t hesitate, so it wasn’t fair … fairness characterized their relationship. All the same, it was nice that she could drop down (or up) to the Bradfords, people with whom she could always be herself, neither more or less.

She left London at midday by train, armed with food unobtainable in Essex: salamis, cheeses, spices, wine. The sun shone, but it wasn’t particularly warm. She hoped there would be heating in the cottage, July or not.

The train was empty. The little station seemed stranded in a green nowhere. She got out, cumbered by bags full of food. A porter and a stationmaster examined, then came to succour her. She was a tallish, fair woman, rather ample; her soft hair, drawn back, escaped in tendrils, and she had great helpless-looking blue eyes. She wore a dress made in one of the materials she had designed. Enormous green leaves laid hands all over her body, and fluttered about her knees. She stood smiling, accustomed to men running to wait on her, enjoying them enjoying her. She walked with them to the barrier where Jack waited, appreciating the scene. He was a smallish man, compact, dark. He wore a blue-green summer shirt, and smoked a pipe and smiled, watching. The two men delivered her into the hands of the third, and departed, whistling, to their duties.

Jack and Stella kissed, then pressed their cheeks together.

‘Food,’ he said, ‘food’, relieving her of the parcels.

‘What’s it like here, shopping?’

‘Vegetables all right, I suppose.’

Jack was still Northern in this: he seemed brusque, to strangers; he wasn’t shy, he simply hadn’t been brought up to enjoy words. Now he put his arm briefly around Stella’s waist, and said: ‘Marvellous, Stell, marvellous.’ They walked on, pleased with each other. Stella had with Jack, her husband had with Dorothy, these moments, when they said to each other wordlessly: If I were not married to my husband, if you were not married to your wife, how delightful it would be to be married to you. These moments were not the least of the pleasures of this four-sided friendship.

‘Are you liking it down here?’

‘It’s what we bargained for.’

There was more than his usual shortness in this, and she glanced at him to find him frowning. They were walking to the car, parked under a tree.

‘How’s the baby?’

‘Little bleeder never sleeps, he’s wearing us out, but he’s fine.’

The baby was six weeks old. Having the baby was a definite achievement: getting it safely conceived and born had taken a couple of years. Dorothy, like most independent women, had had divided thoughts about a baby. Besides, she was over thirty and complained she was set in her ways. All this – the difficulties, Dorothy’s hesitations – had added up to an atmosphere which Dorothy herself described as ‘like wondering if some damned horse is going to cake the fence’. Dorothy would talk, while she was pregnant, in a soft staccato voice: ‘Perhaps I don’t really want a baby at all? Perhaps I’m not fitted to be a mother? Perhaps … and if so … and how …?’

She said: ‘Until recently Jack and I were always with people who took it for granted that getting pregnant was a disaster, and now suddenly all the people we know have young children and babysitters and … perhaps … if …’

Jack said: ‘You’ll feel better when it’s born.’

Once Stella had heard him say, after one of Dorothy’s long troubled dialogues with herself: ‘Now that’s enough, that’s enough, Dorothy.’ He had silenced her, taking the responsibility.

They reached the car, got in. It was a second-hand job recently bought. ‘They’ (being the press, the enemy generally) ‘wait for us’ (being artists or writers who have made money) ‘to buy flashy cars.’ They had discussed it, decided that not to buy an expensive car if they felt like it would be allowing themselves to be bullied; but bought a second-hand one after all. Jack wasn’t going to give them so much satisfaction, apparently.

‘Actually we could have walked,’ he said, as they shot down a narrow lane, ‘but with these groceries, it’s just as well.’

‘If the baby’s giving you a tough time, there can’t be much time for cooking.’ Dorothy was a wonderful cook. But now again there was something in the air as he said: ‘Food’s definitely not too good just now. You can cook supper, Stell, we could do with a good feed.’

Now Dorothy hated anyone in her kitchen, except, for certain specified jobs, her husband; and this was surprising.

‘The truth is, Dorothy’s worn out,’ he went on, and now Stella understood he was warning her.

‘Well, it is tiring,’ said Stella soothingly.

‘You were like that?’

Like that was saying a good deal more than just worn out, or tired, and Stella understood that Jack was really uneasy. She said, plaintively humorous: ‘You two always expect me to remember things that happened a hundred years ago. Let me think …’

She had been married when she was eighteen, got pregnant at once. Her husband had left her. Soon she had married Philip, who also had a small child from a former marriage. These two children, her daughter, seventeen, his son, twenty, had grown up together.

She remembered herself at nineteen, alone, with a small baby. ‘Well, I was alone,’ she said. ‘That makes a difference. I remember I was exhausted. Yes, I was definitely irritable and unreasonable.’

‘Yes,’ said Jack, with a brief reluctant look at her.

‘All right, don’t worry,’ she said, replying aloud as she often did to things that Jack had not said aloud.

‘Good,’ he said.

Stella thought of how she had seen Dorothy, in the hospital room, with the new baby. She had sat up in bed, in a pretty bed jacket, the baby beside her in a basket. He was restless. Jack stood between basket and bed, one large hand on his son’s stomach. ‘Now, you just shut up, little bleeder,’ he had said, as he grumbled. Then he had picked him up, as if he’d been doing it always, held him against his shoulder, and, as Dorothy held her arms out, had put the baby into them. ‘Want your mother then? Don’t blame you.’

That scene, the ease of it, the way the two parents were together, had, for Stella, made nonsense of all the months of Dorothy’s self-questioning. As for Dorothy, she had said, parodying the expected words but meaning them: ‘He’s the most beautiful baby ever born. I can’t imagine why I didn’t have him before.’

‘There’s the cottage,’ said Jack. Ahead of them was a small labourer’s cottage, among full green trees, surrounded by green grass. It was painted white, had four sparkling windows. Next to it a long shed or structure that turned out to be a greenhouse.

‘The man grew tomatoes,’ said Jack. ‘Fine studio now.’

The car came to rest under another tree.

‘Can I just drop in to the studio?’

‘Help yourself.’ Stella walked into the long, glass-roofed shed. In London Jack and Dorothy shared a studio. They had shared huts, sheds, any suitable building, all around the Mediterranean. They always worked side by side. Dorothy’s end was tidy, exquisite. Jack’s lumbered with great canvases, and he worked in a clutter. Now Stella looked to see if this friendly arrangement continued, but as Jack came in behind her he said: ‘Dorothy’s not set herself up yet. I miss her, I can tell you.’

The greenhouse was still partly one: trestles with plants stood along the ends. It was lush and warm.

‘As hot as hell when the sun’s really going, it makes up. And Dorothy brings Paul in sometimes, so he can get used to a decent climate young.’

Dorothy came in, at the far end, without the baby. She had recovered her figure. She was a small dark woman, with neat, delicate limbs. Her face was white, with scarlet rather irregular lips, and black glossy brows, a little crooked. So while she was not pretty, she was lively and dramatic-looking. She and Stella had their moments together, when they got pleasure from contrasting their differences, one woman so big and soft and blonde, the other so dark and vivacious.

Dorothy came forward through shafts of sunlight, stopped, and said: ‘Stella, I’m glad you’ve come.’ Then forward again, to a few steps off, where she stood looking at them. ‘You two look good together,’ she said, frowning. There was something heavy and overemphasized about both statements, and Stella said: ‘I was wondering what Jack had been up to.’

‘Very good, I think,’ said Dorothy, coming to look at the new canvas on the easel. It was of sunlit rocks, brown and smooth with blue sky, blue water, and people swimming in spangles of light. When Jack was in the South, he painted pictures that his wife described as ‘dirt and grime and misery’ – which was how they both described their joint childhood background. When he was in England he painted scenes like these.

‘Like it? It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Dorothy.

‘Very much,’ said Stella. She always took pleasure from the contrast between Jack’s ourward self – the small, self-contained little man who could have vanished in a moment into a crowd of factory workers in, perhaps, Manchester, and the sensuous bright pictures like these.

‘And you?’ asked Stella.

‘Having a baby’s killed everything creative in me – quite different from being pregnant,’ said Dorothy, but not complaining of it. She had worked like a demon while she was pregnant.

‘Have a heart,’ said Jack, ‘he’s only just got himself born.’

‘Well, I don’t care,’ said Dorothy. ‘That’s the funny thing, I don’t care.’ She said this flat, indifferent. She seemed to be looking at them both again from a small troubled distance. ‘You two look good together,’ she said, and again there was the small jar.

‘Well, how about some tea?’ said Jack, and Dorothy said at once: ‘I made it when I heard the car. I thought better inside, it’s not really hot in the sun.’ She led the way out of the greenhouse, her white linen dress dissolving in lozenges of yellow light from the glass panes above, so that Stella was reminded of the white limbs of Jack’s swimmers disintegrating under sunlight in his new picture. The work of these two people was always reminding one of each other, or each other’s work, and in all kinds of ways: they were so much married, so close.

The time it took to cross the space of rough grass to the door of the little house was enough to show Dorothy was right: it was really chilly in the sun. Inside two electric heaters made up for it. There had been two little rooms downstairs, but they had been knocked into one fine low-ceilinged room, stone-floored, whitewashed. A tea table, covered with a purple checked cloth, stood waiting near a window where flowering bushes and trees showed through clean panes. Charming. They adjusted the heaters and arranged themselves so they could admire the English countryside through glass. Stella looked for the baby; Dorothy said: ‘In the pram at the back.’ Then she asked: ‘Did yours cry a lot?’

Stella laughed and said again: ‘I’ll try to remember.’

‘We expect you to guide and direct, with all your experience,’ said Jack.

‘As far as I can remember, she was a little demon for about three months, for no reason I could see, then suddenly she became civilized.’

‘Roll on the three months,’ said Jack.

‘Six weeks to go,’ said Dorothy, handling teacups in a languid indifferent manner Stella found new in her.

‘Finding it tough going?’

‘I’ve never felt better in my life,’ said Dorothy at once, as if being accused.

‘You look fine.’

She looked a bit tired, nothing much; Stella couldn’t see what reason there was for Jack to warn her. Unless he meant the languor, a look of self-absorption? Her vivacity, a friendly aggressiveness that was the expression of her lively intelligence, was dimmed. She sat leaning back in a deep airchair, letting Jack manage things, smiling vaguely.

‘I’ll bring him in in a minute,’ she remarked, listening to the silence from the sunlit garden at the back.

‘Leave him,’ said Jack. ‘He’s quiet seldom enough. Relax, woman, and have a cigarette.’

He lit a cigarette for her, and she took it in the same vague way, and sat breathing out smoke, her eyes half closed.

‘Have you heard from Philip?’ she asked, not from politeness, but with sudden insistence.

‘Of course she has, she got a wire,’ said Jack.

‘I want to know how she feels,’ said Dorothy. ‘How do you feel, Stell?’ She was listening for the baby all the time.

‘Feel about what?’

‘About his not coming back.’

‘But he is coming back, it’s only a month,’ said Stella, and heard, with surprise, that her voice sounded edgy.

‘You see?’ said Dorothy to Jack, meaning the words, not the edge on them.

At this evidence that she and Philip had been discussed, Stella felt, first, pleasure: because it was pleasurable to be understood by two such good friends; then she felt discomfort, remembering Jack’s warning.

‘See what?’ she asked Dorothy, smiling.

‘That’s enough now,’ said Jack to his wife in a flash of stubborn anger, which continued the conversation that had taken place.

Dorothy took direction from her husband, and kept quiet a moment, then seemed impelled to continue: ‘I’ve been thinking it must be nice, having your husband go off, then come back. Do you realize Jack and I haven’t been separated since we married? That’s over ten years. Don’t you think there’s something awful in two grown people stuck together all the time like Siamese twins?’ This ended in a wail of genuine appeal to Stella.

‘No, I think it’s marvellous.’

‘But you don’t mind being alone so much?’

‘It’s not so much, it’s two or three months in a year. Well of course I mind. But I enjoy being alone, really. But I’d enjoy it too if we were together all the time. I envy you two.’ Stella was surprised to find her eyes wet with self-pity because she had to be without her husband another month.

‘And what does he think?’ demanded Dorothy. ‘What does Philip think?’

Stella said: ‘Well, I think he likes getting away from time to time – yes. He likes intimacy, he enjoys it, but it doesn’t come as easily to him as it does to me.’ She had never said this before because she had never thought about it. She was annoyed with herself that she had had to wait for Dorothy to prompt her. Yet she knew that getting annoyed was what she must not do, with the state Dorothy was in, whatever it was. She glanced at Jack for guidance, but he was determinedly busy on his pipe.

‘Well, I’m like Philip,’ announced Dorothy. ‘Yes, I’d love it if Jack went off sometimes. I think I’m being stifled being shut up with Jack day and night, year in year out.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jack, short but good-humoured.

‘No, but I mean it. There’s something humiliating about two adult people never for one second out of each other’s sight.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘when Paul’s a bit bigger, you buzz off for a month or so and you’ll appreciate me when you get back.’

‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate you, it’s not that at all,’ said Dorothy, insistent, almost strident, apparently fevered with restlessness. Her languor had quite gone, and her limbs jerked and moved. And now the baby, as if he had been prompted by his father’s mentioning him, let out a cry. Jack got up, forestalling his wife, saying: ‘I’ll get him.’

Dorothy sat, listening for her husband’s movements with the baby, until he came back, which he did, supporting the infant sprawled against his shoulder with a competent hand. He sat down, let his son slide on to his chest, and said: ‘There now, you shut up an leave us in peace a bit longer.’ The baby was looking up into his face with the astonished expression of a newly born, and Dorothy sat smiling at both of them. Stella understood that her restlessness, her repeated curtailed movements, meant that she longed – more, needed – to have the child in her arms, have its body against hers. And Jack seemed to feel this, because Stella could have sworn it was not a conscious decision that made him rise and slide the infant into his wife’s arms. Her flesh, her needs, had spoken direct to him without words, and he had risen at once to give her what she wanted. This silent instinctive conversation between husband and wife made Stella miss her own husband violently, and with resentment against fate that kept them apart so often. She ached for Philip.

Meanwhile Dorothy, now the baby was sprawled softly against her chest, the small feet in her hand, seemed to have lapsed into good humour. And Stella, watching, remembered something she really had forgotten: the close, fierce physical tie between herself and her daughter when she had been a tiny baby. She saw this bond in the way Dorothy stroked the small head that trembled on its neck as the baby looked up into his mother’s face. Why, she remembered it was like being in love, having a new baby. All kinds of forgotten or unused instincts woke in Stella. She lit a cigarette, took herself in hand; set herself to enjoy the other woman’s love affair with her baby instead of envying her.

The sun, dropping into the trees, struck the windowpanes; and there was a dazzle and a flashing of yellow and white light into the room, particularly over Dorothy in her white dress and the baby. Again Stella was reminded of Jack’s picture of the white-limbed swimmers in sun-dissolving water. Dorothy shielded the baby’s eyes with her hand and remarked dreamily: ‘This is better than any man, isn’t it, Stell? Isn’t it better than any man?’

‘Well – no,’ said Stella laughing. ‘No, not for long.’

‘If you say so, you should know … but I can’t imagine ever … tell me, Stell, does your Philip have affairs when he’s away?’

‘For God’s sake!’ said Jack, angry. But he checked himself.

‘Yes, I am sure he does.’

‘Do you mind?’ asked Dorothy, loving the baby’s feet with her enclosing palm.

And now Stella was forced to remember, to think about having minded, minding, coming to terms, and the ways in which she now did not mind.

‘I don’t think about it,’ she said.

‘Well, I don’t think I’d mind,’ said Dorothy.

‘Thanks for letting me know,’ said Jack, short despite himself. Then he made himself laugh.

‘And you, do you have affairs while Philip’s away?’

‘Sometimes. Not really.’

‘Do you know, Jack was unfaithful to me this week,’ remarked Dorothy, smiling at the baby.

‘That’s enough,’ said Jack, really angry.

‘No, it isn’t enough, it isn’t. Because what’s awful is, I don’t care.’

‘Well why should you care, in the circumstances?’ Jack turned to Stella. ‘There’s a silly bitch Lady Edith lives across that field. She got all excited, real live artists living down her lane. Well Dorothy was lucky, she had an excuse in the baby, but I had to go to her silly party. Booze flowing in rivers, and the most incredible people – you know. If you read about them in a novel you’d never believe … but I can’t remember much after about twelve.’

‘Do you know what happened?’ said Dorothy. ‘I was feeding the baby, it was terribly early. Jack sat straight up in bed and said: “Jesus, Dorothy, I’ve just remembered, I screwed that silly bitch Lady Edith on her brocade sofa.”’

Stella laughed. Jack let out a snort of laughter. Dorothy laughed, an unscrupulous chuckle of appreciation. Then she said seriously: ‘But that’s the point, Stella – the thing is, I don’t care a tuppenny damn.’

‘But why should you?’ asked Stella.

‘But it’s the first time he ever has, and surely I should have minded?’

‘Don’t you be too sure of that,’ said Jack, energetically puffing his pipe. ‘Don’t be too sure.’ But it was only for form’s sake, and Dorothy knew it, and said: ‘Surely I should have cared, Stell?’

‘No. You’d have cared if you and Jack weren’t so marvellous together. Just as I’d care if Philip and I weren’t …’ Tears came running down her face. She let them. These were her good friends; and besides, instinct told her tears weren’t a bad thing, with Dorothy in this mood. She said sniffing: ‘When Philip gets home, we always have a flaming bloody row in the first day or two, about something unimportant, but what it’s really about, and we know it, is that I’m jealous of any affair he’s had and vice versa. Then we go to bed and makeup.’ She wept, bitterly, thinking of this happiness, postponed for a month, to be succeeded by the delightful battle of their day to day living.

‘Oh Stella,’ said Jack. ‘Stell …’ He got up, fished out a handkerchief, dabbed her eyes for her. ‘There, love, he’ll be back soon.’

‘Yes, I know. It’s just that you two are so good together and whenever I’m with you I miss Philip.’

‘Well, I suppose we’re good together?’ said Dorothy, sounding surprised. Jack, bending over Stella with his back to his wife, made a warning grimace, then stood up and turned, commanding the situation. ‘It’s nearly six. You’d better feed Paul. Stella’s going to cook supper.’

‘Is she? How nice,’ said Dorothy. ‘There’s everything in the kitchen, Stella. How lovely to be looked after.’

‘I’ll show you our mansion,’ said Jack.

Upstairs were two small white rooms. One was the bedroom, with their things and the baby’s in it. The other was an overflow room, jammed with stuff. Jack picked up a large leather folder off the spare bed and said: ‘Look at these, Stell.’ He stood at the window, back to her, his thumb at work in his pipe bowl, looking into the garden. Stella sat on the bed, opened the folder and at once exclaimed: ‘When did she do these?’

‘The last three months she was pregnant. Never seen anything like it, she just turned them out one after the other.’

There were a couple of hundred pencil drawings, all of two bodies in every kind of balance, tension relationship. The two bodies were Jack’s and Dorothy’s, mostly unclothed, but not all. The drawings startled, not only because they marked a real jump forward in Dorothy’s achievement, but because of their bold sensuousness. They were a kind of chant, or exaltation about their marriage. The instinctive closeness, the harmony of Jack and Dorothy, visible in every movement they made towards or away from each other, visible even when they were not together, was celebrated here with a frank, calm triumph.

‘Some of them are pretty strong,’ said Jack, the Northern working-class boy reviving in him for a moment’s puritanism.

But Stella laughed, because the prudishness masked pride: some of the drawings were indecent.

In the last few of the series the woman’s body was swollen in pregnancy. They showed her trust in her husband, whose body, commanding hers, stood or lay in positions of strength and confidence.

In the very last Dorothy stood turned away from her husband, her two hands supporting her big belly, and Jack’s hands were protective on her shoulders.

‘They are marvellous,’ said Stella.

‘They are, aren’t they.’

Stella looked, laughing, and with love, towards Jack; for she saw that his showing her the drawings was not only pride in his wife’s talent; but that he was using this way of telling Stella not to take Dorothy’s mood too seriously. And to cheer himself up. She said, impulsively: ‘Well that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

‘What? Oh yes, I see what you mean, yes, I think it’s all right.’

‘Do you know what?’ said Stella, lowering her voice. ‘I think Dorothy’s guilty because she feels unfaithful to you.’

‘What?’

‘No, I mean, with the baby, and that’s what it’s all about.’

He turned to face her, troubled, then slowly smiling. There was the same rich unscrupulous quality of appreciation in that smile as there had been in Dorothy’s laugh over her husband and Lady Edith. ‘You think so?’ They laughed together, irrepressibly and loudly.

‘What’s the joke?’ shouted Dorothy.

‘I’m laughing because your drawings are so good,’ shouted Stella.

‘Yes, they are, aren’t they?’ But Dorothy’s voice changed to flat incredulity: ‘The trouble is, I can’t imagine how I ever did them, I can’t imagine ever being able to do it again.’

‘Downstairs,’ said Jack to Stella, and they went down to find Dorothy nursing the baby. He nursed with his whole being, all of him in movement. He was wrestling with the breast, thumping Dorothy’s plump pretty breast with his fists. Jack stood looking down at the two of them, grinning. Dorothy reminded Stella of a cat, half closing her yellow eyes to stare over her kittens at work on her side, while she stretched out a paw where claws sheathed and unsheathed themselves, making a small rip-rip-rip on the carpet she lay on.

‘You’re a savage creature,’ said Stella, laughing.

Dorothy raised her small vivid face and smiled. ‘Yes, I am,’ she said, and looked at the two of them calm, and from a distance, over the head of her energetic baby.

Stella cooked supper in a stone kitchen, with a heater brought by Jack to make it tolerable. She used the good food she had brought with her, taking trouble. It took some time, then the three ate slowly over a big wooden table. The baby was not asleep. He grumbled for some minutes on a cushion on the floor, then his father held him briefly, before passing him over, as he had done earlier, in response to his mother’s need to have him close.

‘I’m supposed to let him cry,’ remarked Dorothy. ‘But why should he? If he were an Arab or an African baby he’d be plastered to my back.’

‘And very nice too,’ said Jack. ‘I think they come out too soon into the light of day, they should just stay inside for about eighteen months, much better all round.’

‘Have a heart,’ said Dorothy and Stella together, and they all laughed; but Dorothy added, quite serious: ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking so too.’

This good nature lasted through the long meal. The light went cool and thin outside; and inside they let the summer dusk deepen, without lamps.

‘I’ve got to go quite soon,’ said Stella, with regret.

‘Oh, no, you’ve got to stay!’ said Dorothy, strident. It was sudden, the return of the woman who made Jack and Dorothy tense themselves to take strain.

‘We all thought Philip was coming. The children will be back tomorrow night, they’ve been on holiday.’

‘Then stay till tomorrow, I want you,’ said Dorothy, petulant.

‘But I can’t,’ said Stella.

‘I never thought I’d want another woman around, cooking in my kitchen, looking after me, but I do,’ said Dorothy, apparently about to cry.

‘Well, love, you’ll have to put up with me,’ said Jack.

‘Would you mind, Stell?’

‘Mind what?’ asked Stella, cautious.

‘Do you find Jack attractive?’

‘Very.’

‘Well, I know you do. Jack, do you find Stella attractive?’

‘Try me,’ said Jack, grinning; but at the same time signalling warnings to Stella.

‘Well, then!’ said Dorothy.

‘A ménage à trois?’ asked Stella, laughing. ‘And how about my Philip? Where does he fit in?’

‘Well, if it comes to that, I wouldn’t mind Philip myself,’ said Dorothy, knitting her sharp black brows and frowning.

‘I don’t blame you,’ said Stella, thinking of her handsome husband.

‘Just for a month, till he comes back,’ said Dorothy. ‘I tell you what, we’ll abandon this silly cottage, we must have been mad to stick ourselves away in England in the first place. The three of us’ll just pack up and go off to Spain or Italy with the baby.’

‘And what else?’ inquired Jack, good-natured at all costs, using his pipe as a safety valve.

‘Yes, I’ve decided I approve of polygamy,’ announced Dorothy. She had opened her dress and the baby was nursing again, quietly this time, relaxed against her. She stroked his head, softly, softly, while her voice rose and insisted at the other two people: ‘I never understood it before, but I do now. I’ll be the senior wife, and you two can look after me.’

‘Any other plans?’ inquired Jack, angry now. ‘You just drop in from time to time to watch Stella and me have a go, is that it? Or are you going to tell us when we can go off and do it, give us your gracious permission?’

‘Oh I don’t care what you do, that’s the point,’ said Dorothy, sighing, sounding forlorn, however.

Jack and Stella, careful not to look at each other, sat waiting.

‘I read something in the newspaper yesterday, it struck me,’ said Dorothy, conversational. ‘A man and two women living together – here, in England. They are both his wives, they consider themselves his wives. The senior wife has a baby, and the younger wife sleeps with him – well, that’s what it looked like, reading between the lines.’

‘You’d better stop reading between the lines,’ said Jack. ‘It’s not doing you any good.’

‘No, I’d like it,’ insisted Dorothy. ‘I think our marriages are silly. Africans and people like that, they know better, they’ve got some sense.’

‘I can just see you if I did make love to Stella,’ said Jack.

‘Yes!’ said Stella, with a short laugh which, against her will, was resentful.

‘But I wouldn’t mind,’ said Dorothy, and burst into tears.

‘Now, Dorothy, that’s enough,’ said Jack. He got up, took the baby, whose sucking was mechanical now, and said: ‘Now listen, you’re going right upstairs and you’re going to sleep. This little stinker’s full as a tick, he’ll be asleep for hours, that’s my bet.’

‘I don’t feel sleepy,’ said Dorothy, sobbing.

‘I’ll give you a sleeping pill, then.’

Then started a search for sleeping pills. None to be found.

‘That’s just like us,’ wailed Dorothy, ‘we don’t even have a sleeping pill in the place … Stella, I wish you’d stay, I really do. Why can’t you?’

‘Stella’s going in just a minute, I’m taking her to the station,’ said Jack. He poured some Scotch into a glass, handed it to his wife and said: ‘Now drink that, love, and let’s have an end to it. I’m getting fed-up.’ He sounded fed-up.

Dorothy obediently drank the Scotch, got unsteadily from her chair and went slowly upstairs. ‘Don’t let him cry,’ she demanded, as she disappeared.

‘Oh you silly bitch,’ he shouted after her. ‘When have I let him cry? Here, you hold on a minute,’ he said to Stella, handing her the baby. He ran upstairs.

Stella held the baby. This was almost for the first time, since she sensed how much another woman’s holding her child made Dorothy’s fierce new possessiveness uneasy. She looked down at the small, sleepy, red face and said softly: ‘Well, you’re causing a lot of trouble, aren’t you?’

Jack shouted from upstairs: ‘Come-up a minute, Stell.’ She went up, with the baby. Dorothy was tucked up in bed, drowsy from the Scotch, the bedside light turned away from her. She looked at the baby, but Jack took it from Stella.

‘Jack says I’m a silly bitch,’ said Dorothy, apologetic, to Stella.

‘Well, never mind, you’ll feel different soon.’

‘I suppose so, if you say so. All right. I am going to sleep,’ said Dorothy, in a stubborn, sad little voice. She turned over, away from them. In the last flare of her hysteria she said: ‘Why don’t you two walk to the station together? It’s a lovely night.’

‘We’re going to,’ said Jack, ‘don’t worry.’

She let out a weak giggle, but did not turn. Jack carefully deposited the now sleeping baby in the bed, about a foot from Dorothy. Who suddenly wriggled over until her small, defiant white back was in contrast with the blanketed bundle that was her son.

Jack raised his eyebrows at Stella: but Stella was looking at mother and baby, the nerves of her memory filling her with sweet warmth. What right had this woman, who was in possession of such delight, to torment her husband, to torment her friend, as she had been doing – what right had she to rely on their decency as she did?

Surprised by these thoughts, she walked away downstairs, and stood at the door into the garden, her eyes shut, holding herself rigid against tears.

She felt a warmth on her bare arm – Jack’s hand. She opened her eyes to see him bending towards her, concerned.

‘It’d serve Dorothy right if I did drag you off into the bushes …’

‘Wouldn’t have to drag me,’ he said; and while the words had the measure of facetiousness the situation demanded, she felt his seriousness envelop them both in danger.

The warmth of his hand slid across her back, and she turned towards him under its pressure. They stood together, cheeks touching, scents of skin and hair mixing with the smells of warmed grass and leaves.

She thought: What is going to happen now will blow Dorothy and Jack and that baby sky-high; it’s the end of my marriage; I’m going to blow everything to bits. There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it.

She saw Dorothy, Jack, the baby, her husband, the two half-grown children, all dispersed, all spinning downwards through the sky like bits of debris after an explosion.

Jack’s mouth was moving along her cheek towards her mouth, dissolving her whole self in delight. She saw, against closed lids, the bundled baby upstairs, and pulled back from the situation, exclaiming energetically: ‘Damn Dorothy, damn her, damn her, I’d like to kill her …’

And he, exploding into reaction, said in a low furious rage: ‘Damn you both! I’d like to wring both your bloody necks …’

Their faces were at a foot’s distance from each other, their eyes staring hostility. She thought that if she had not had the vision of the helpless baby they would now be in each other’s arms – generating tenderness and desire like a couple of dynamos, she said to herself, trembling with dry anger.

‘I’m going to miss my train if I don’t go,’ she said.

‘I’ll get your coat,’ he said, and went in, leaving her defenceless against the emptiness of the garden.

When he came out, he slid the coat around her without touching her, and said: ‘Come on, I’ll take you by car.’ He walked away in front of her to the car, and she followed meekly over rough lawn. It really was a lovely night.

A Room

When I first came into this flat of four small boxlike rooms, the bedroom was painted pale pink, except for the fireplace wall, which had a fanciful pink and blue paper. The woodwork was a dark purple, almost black. This paint is sold by a big decorating shop in the West End and is called Bilberry.

Two girls had the flat before me. Very little money, obviously, because the carpeting was going into holes and the walls were decorated with travel posters. The woman upstairs told me they often had parties that lasted all night. ‘But I liked to hear them, I enjoy the sounds of life.’ She was reproachful. I don’t have parties often enough for her. The girls left no forwarding address, following the tradition for this flat. Over the years it has often happened that the bell rings and people ask for ‘Angus Ferguson – I thought he lived here?’ And the Maitlands? And Mrs Dowland? And the young Caitsbys? All these people, and probably many others, have lived in this flat, and departed leaving nothing behind. I know nothing about them, nor does anyone else in the building, though some of them have lived here for years.

I found the pink too assertive, and after several mistakes settled on. white walls, leaving the plum-colour, or Bilberry, woodwork. First I had grey curtains, then blue ones. My bed is under the window. There is a desk, which I had meant to write on, but it is always too cluttered with papers. So I write in the living room or on the kitchen table. But I spend a lot of time in the bedroom. Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing. It is my room; it is where I feel I live, though the shape is bad and there are things about it that can never be anything but ugly. For instance, the fireplace was of iron – a bulging, knobbed, ornamented black. The girls had left it as it was, using a small gas heater in the opening. Its heavy ugliness kept drawing my eyes towards it; and I painted a panel from the ceiling downwards in the dark plum colour, so that the fireplace and the small thick shelf over it would be absorbed. On either side of the panel since I could not have the whole wall in plum, which at night looks black, were left two panels of the absurd wallpaper, which has bright people like birds in pink and blue cages. The fireplace seemed less obtrusive, but my fire is a gas fire, a square solid shape of bronze, brought from an earlier flat where it did not look too bad. But it does not fit here at all. So the whole wall doesn’t work, it fails to come off.

Another wall, the one beside my bed, is also deformed. Over the bed swells a grainy irregular lump two or more feet across. Someone – Angus Ferguson? The Maitlands? Mrs Dowland? – attempted to replace falling plaster and made a hash of it. No professional plasterer could have got away with such a protuberance.

On the whole, this wall gives me pleasure: it reminds me of the irregular whitewashed walls of another house I lived in once. Probably I chose to paint this room white because I wanted to have the whitewashed lumpy walls of that early house repeated here in London?

The ceiling is a ceiling: flat, white, plain. It has a plaster border which is too heavy for the room and looks as if it might fall off easily. The whole building has a look of solid ugliness, but it was built cheap and is not solid at all. For instance, walls, tapped, sound hollow; the plaster, when exposed, at once starts to trickle as if the walls were of loose sand held together by wallpaper. I can hear anything that goes on over my head, where the old woman who likes to hear a bit of life lives with her husband. She is Swedish, gives Swedish lessons. She dresses prettily, and looks a dear respectable old thing. Yet she is quite mad. Her door has four heavy, specially fitted locks inside, as well as bolts and bars. If I knock she opens the door on a chain four inches long and peers through to make sure that I (or they) will not attack her. Inside is a vision of neatness and order. She spends all day cleaning and arranging. When she can’t find anything more to do in her flat she posts notices on the stairs saying: ‘Any person who drops rubbish on these stairs will be reported to the Authorities!’ Then she visits every flat in turn (there are eight identical flats one above the other) and says confidingly: ‘Of course the notice isn’t meant for you.’

Her husband works for an export firm and is away a good deal. When she expects him back, she dresses as carefully as a bride and goes off to meet him, blushing. On the nights he comes back from his trips the bed creaks over my head, and I hear them giggling.

They are an orderly couple, bed at eleven every night, up every morning at nine. As for myself, my life has no outward order and I like having them up there. Sometimes, when I’ve worked late, I hear them getting up and I think through my sleep or half sleep: Good, the day’s started, has it? And I drift back to a semiconsciousness blended with their footsteps and the rattling of cups.

Sometimes, when I sleep in the afternoons, which I do because afternoon sleep is more interesting than night sleep, she takes a nap too. I think of her and of myself lying horizontally above each other, as if we were on two shelves.

When I lie down after lunch there is nothing unplanned about it. First I must feel the inner disturbance or alertness that is due to overstimulation, or being a little sick or very tired. Then I darken the room, shut all the doors so the telephone won’t wake me (though its distant ringing can be a welcome dream-progenitor) and I get into bed carefully, preserving the mood. It is these sleeps which help me with my work, telling me what to write or where I’ve gone wrong. And they save me from the fever of restlessness that comes from seeing too many people. I always drift off to sleep in the afternoons with the interest due to a long journey into the unknown, and the sleep is thin and extraordinary and takes me into regions hard to describe in a waking state.

But one afternoon there was no strange journey, nor was there useful information about my work. The sleep was so different from usual that for some time I thought I was awake.

I had been lying in the semidark, the curtains, of varying shades of dark blue, making a purply-moving shade. Outside it was a busy afternoon. I could hear sounds from the market underneath, and there was angry shouting, a quarrel of some kind, a man’s voice and a woman’s. I was looking at the fireplace and thinking how ugly it was, wondering what sort of person had deliberately chosen such a hideous shape of black iron. Though of course I had painted it over. Yes, whether I could afford it or not, I must get rid of the square bronze gas fire and find a prettier one. I saw the bronze shape had gone; there was a small black iron grate and a small fire in it, smoking. The smoke was coming into the room, and my eyes were sore.

The room was different; I felt chilled and estranged from myself as I looked. The walls had a paper whose general effect was a dingy brown, but looking closely at it I saw a small pattern of brownish-yellow leaves and brown stems. There were stains on it. The ceiling was yellowish and shiny from the smoke. There were some shreds of pinky-brown curtains at the windows with a rear in one so that the bottom edge hung down.

I was no longer lying on the bed, but sitting by the fire across the room, looking at the bed and at the window. Outside a shrill quarrel went on, the voices rising up from the street. I felt cold, I was shivering, and my eyes watered. In the little grate sat three small lumps of shiny coal, smoking dismally. Under me was a cushion or a folded coat, something like that. The room seemed much larger. Yes, it was a largish room. A chest of brown-varnished wood stood by the bed which was low, a good foot lower than mine. There was a red army blanket stretched across the bed’s foot. The recesses on either side of the fireplace had shallow wooden shelves down them, holding folded clothes, old magazines, crockery, a brown teapot. These things conveyed an atmosphere of thin poverty.

I was alone in the room, though someone was next door. I could hear sounds that made me unhappy, apprehensive. From upstairs a laugh, hostile to me. Was the old Swedish lady laughing? With whom? Had her husband come back suddenly?

I was desolate with loneliness that felt it would never be assuaged, no one would ever come to comfort me. I sat and looked at the bed which had the cheap red blanket on it that suggested illness, and sniffed because the smoke was tearing at the back of my throat. I was a child, I knew that. And that there was a war, something to do with war, war had something to do with this dream or memory – whose? I came back to my own room, lying on my bed, with silence upstairs and next door. I was alone in the flat, watching my soft dark blue curtains softly moving. I was filled with misery.

I left my pretty bedroom and made myself tea; then returned to draw the curtains and let the light in. I switched on the gas heater which came up hot and red, driving the memory of cold away; and I looked behind its bronze efficiency into a grate that had not had coals in it, I knew, for years.

I have tried to dream myself back into that other room which is under this room, or beside it, or in it, or existing in someone’s memory. Which war was it? Whose was the chilly poverty? And I would like to know more about the frightened little child. He (or she) must have been very small for the room to look so big. So far I have failed. Perhaps it was the quarrel outside in the street that … that what? And why?

England versus England

‘I think I’ll be off,’ said Charlie. ‘My things are packed.’ He had made sure of getting his holdall ready so that his mother wouldn’t. ‘But it’s early,’ she protested. Yet she was already knocking red hands together to rid them of water while she turned to say goodbye: she knew her son was leaving early to avoid the father. But the back door now opened and Mr Thornton came in. Charlie and his father were alike: tall, overthin, big-boned. The old miner stooped, his hair had gone into grey wisps, and his hollow cheeks were coal-pitted. The young man was still fresh, with jaunty fair hair and alert eyes. But there were scoops of strain under his eyes.

‘You’re alone,’ said Charlie involuntarily, pleased, ready to sit down again. The old man was not alone. Three men came into view behind him in the light that fell into the yard from the door, and Charlie said quietly: ‘I’m off, Dad, it’s goodbye till Christmas.’ They all came crowding into the little kitchen, bringing with them the spirit of facetiousness that seemed to Charlie his personal spiteful enemy, like a poltergeist always standing in wait somewhere behind his right shoulder. ‘So you’re back to the dreaming spires,’ said one man, nodding goodbye. ‘Off to t’palaces of learning,’ said another. Both were smiling. There was no hostility in it, or even envy, but it shut Charlie out of his family, away from his people. The third man, adding his tribute to this, the most brilliant son of the village, said: ‘You’ll be coming back to a right Christmas with us, then, or will you be frolicking with t’lords and t’earls you’re the equal of now?’

‘He’ll be home for Christmas,’ said the mother sharply. She turned her back on them, and dropped potatoes one by one from a paper bag into a bowl.

‘For a day or so, any road,’ said Charlie, in obedience to the prompting spirit. ‘That’s time enough to spend with t’hewers of wood and t’drawers of water.’ The third man nodded, as if to say: That’s right! and put back his head to let out a relieved bellow. The father and the other two men guffawed with him. Young Lennie pushed and shoved Charlie encouragingly and Charlie jostled back, while the mother nodded and smiled because of the saving horseplay. All the same, he had not been home for nearly a year, and when they stopped laughing and stood waiting for him to go, their grave eyes said they were remembering this fact.

‘Sorry I’ve not had more time with you, son,’ said Mr Thornton, ‘but you know how ‘tis.’

The old miner had been union secretary, was now chairman, and had spent his working life as miners’ representative in a dozen capacities. When he walked through the village, men at a back door, or a woman in an apron, called: ‘Just a minute, Bill,’ and came after him. Every evening Mr Thornton sat in the kitchen, or in the parlour when the television was claimed by the children, giving advice about pensions, claims, work rules, allowances; filling in forms; listening to tales of trouble. Ever since Charlie could remember, Mr Thornton had been less his father than the father of the village. Now the three miners went into the parlour, and Mr Thornton laid his hand on his son’s shoulder, and said: ‘It’s been good seeing you,’ nodded, and followed them. As he shut the door he said to his wife: ‘Make us a cup of tea, will you, lass?’

‘There’s time for a cup, Charlie,’ said the mother, meaning there was no need for him to rush off now, when it was unlikely any more neighbours would come in. Charlie did not hear. He was watching her slosh dirty potatoes about under the running tap while with her free hand she reached for the kettle. He went to fetch his raincoat and his holdall listening to the nagging inner voice which he hated, but which he felt as his only protection against the spiteful enemy outside: ‘I can’t stand it when my father apologizes to me – he was apologizing to me for not seeing more of me. If he wasn’t as he is, better than anyone else in the village, and our home the only house with real books in it. I wouldn’t be at Oxford, I wouldn’t have done well at school, so it cuts both ways.’ The words, cut both ways, echoed uncannily in his inner ear, and he felt queasy, as if the earth he stood on was shaking. His eyes cleared on the sight of his mother, standing in front of him, her shrewd, non-judging gaze on his face. ‘Eh, lad,’ she said, ‘you don’t look any too good to me.’ ‘I’m all right,’ he said hastily, and kissed her, adding: ‘Say my piece to the girls when they come in.’ He went out, with Lennie behind him.

The two youths walked in silence past fifty crammed lively brightly lit kitchens whose doors kept opening as the miners came in from the pit for their tea. They walked in silence along the front of fifty more houses. The fronts were all dark. The life of the village, even now, was in the kitchens where great fires roared all day on the cheap coal. The village had been built in the thirties by the company, now nationalized. There were two thousand houses, exactly alike, with identical patches of carefully tended front garden, and busy back yards. Nearly every house had a television aerial. From every chimney poured black smoke.

At the bus stop Charlie turned to look back at the village, now a low hollow of black, streaked and spattered with sullen wet lights. He tried to isolate the gleam from his own home, while he thought how he loved his home and how he hated the village. Everything about it offended him, yet as soon as he stepped inside his kitchen he was received into warmth. That morning he had stood on the front step and looked out on lines of grey stucco houses on either side of grey tarmac; on grey ugly lamp-posts and greyish hedges, and beyond to the grey minetip and the neat black diagram of the minehead.

He had looked, listening while the painful inner voice lectured: ‘There nothing in sight, not one object or building anywhere, that is beautiful. Everything is so ugly and mean and graceless that it should be bulldozed into the earth and out of the memory of man.’ There was not even a cinema. There was a post office, and attached to it a library that had romances and war stories. There were two miners’ clubs for drinking. And there was television. These were the amenities for two thousand families.

When Mr Thornton stood on his front step and looked forth he smiled with pride and called his children to say: ‘You’ve never seen what a miners’ town can be like. You couldn’t even imagine the conditions. Slums, that’s what they used to be. Well, we’ve put an end to all that … Yes, off you go to Doncaster, I suppose, dancing and the pictures – that’s all you can think about. And you take it all for granted. Now, in our time …’

And so when Charlie visited his home he was careful that none of his bitter criticisms reached words, for above all, he could not bear to hurt his father.

A group of young miners came along for the bus. They wore smartly shouldered suits, their caps set at angles, and scarves flung back over their shoulders. They greeted Lennie, looked to see who the stranger was, and when Lennie said: ‘This is my brother,’ they nodded and turned quickly to board the bus. They went upstairs, and Lennie and Charlie went to the front downstairs. Lennie looked like them, with a strong cloth cap and a jaunty scarf. He was short, stocky, strong – ‘built for t’pit,’ Mr Thornton said. But Lennie was in a foundry in Doncaster. No pit for him, he said. He had heard his father coughing through all the nights of his childhood, and the pit wasn’t for him. But he had never said this to his father.

Lennie was twenty. He earned seventeen pounds a week, and wanted to marry a girl he had been courting for three years now. But he could not marry until the big brother was through college. The father was still on the coal face, when by rights of age he should have been on the surface, because he earned four pounds a week more on the face. The sister in the office had wanted to be a schoolteacher, but at the moment of decision all the extra money of the family had been needed for Charlie. It cost them two hundred pounds a year for his extras at Oxford. The only members of the family not making sacrifices for Charlie were the schoolgirl and the mother.

It was half an hour on the bus, and Charlie’s muscles were set hard in readiness for what Lennie might say, which must be resisted. Yet he had come home thinking: Well, at least I can talk it out with Lennie, I can be honest with him.

Now Lennie said facetiously, but with an anxious loving inspection of his brother’s face: ‘And what for do we owe the pleasure of your company, Charlie boy? You could have knocked us all down with a feather when you said you were coming this weekend.’

Charlie said angrily: ‘I got fed up with t’earls and t’dukes.’

‘Eh,’ said Lennie quickly, ‘but you didn’t need to mind them, they didn’t mean to rile you.’

‘I know they didn’t.’

‘Mum’s right,’ said Lennie, with another anxious but carefully brief glance, ‘you’re not looking too good. What’s up?’

‘What if I don’t pass t’examinations,’ said Charlie in a rush.

‘Eh, but what is this, then? You were always first in school. You were the best of everyone. Why shouldn’t you pass, then?’

‘Sometimes I think I won’t,’ said Charlie lamely, but glad he had let the moment pass.

Lennie examined him again, this time frankly, and gave a movement like a shrug. But it was a hunching of the shoulders against a possible defeat. He sat hunched, his big hands on his knees. On his face was a small critical grin. Not critical of Charlie, not at all, but of life.

His heart beating painfully with guilt, Charlie said: ‘It’s not as bad as that, I’ll pass.’ The inner enemy remarked softly: I’ll pass, then I’ll get a nice pansy job in a publisher’s office with the other wet-nosed little boys, or I’ll be a sort of clerk. Or I’ll be a teacher – I’ve no talent for teaching, but what’s that matter? Or I’ll be on the management side of industry, pushing people like Lennie around. And the joke is, Lennie’s earning more than I shall for years.’ The enemy behind his right shoulder began satirically tolling a bell and intoned: ‘Charlie Thornton, in his third year at Oxford, was found dead in a gas-filled bed-sitting room this morning. He had been overworking. Death from natural causes.’ The enemy added a loud rude raspberry and fell silent. But he was waiting: Charlie could feel him there waiting.

Lennie said: ‘Seen a doctor, Charlie boy?’

‘Yes. He said I should take it easy a bit. That’s why I came home.’

‘No point killing yourself working.’

‘No, it’s not serious, he just said I must take it easy.’

Lennie’s face remained grave. Charlie knew that when he got home he would say to the mother: ‘I think Charlie’s got summat on his mind.’ And his mother would say (while she stood shaking chips of potato into boiling fat): ‘I expect sometimes he wonders is the grind worth it. And he sees you earning, when he isn’t.’ She would say, after a silence during which they exchanged careful looks: ‘It must be hard for him, coming here, everything different, then off he goes, everything different again.’

‘Shouldn’t worry, Mum.’

‘I’m not worrying. Charlie’s all right.’

The inner voice inquired anxiously: ‘If she’s on the spot about the rest, I suppose she’s right about the last bit too – I suppose I am all right?’

But the enemy behind his right shoulder said: ‘A man’s best friend is his mother, she never lets a thing pass.’

Last year he had brought Jenny down for a weekend, to satisfy the family’s friendly curiosity about the posh people he knew these days. Jenny was a poor clergyman’s daughter, bookish, a bit of a prig, but a nice girl. She had easily navigated the complicated currents of the weekend, while the family waited for her to put on ‘side’. Afterwards Mrs Thornton had said, putting her finger on the sore spot: ‘That’s a right nice girl. She’s a proper mother to you, and that’s a fact.’ The last was not a criticism of the girl, but of Charlie. Now Charlie looked with envy at Lennie’s responsible profile and said to himself: Yes, he’s a man. He has been for years, since he left school. Me, I’m a proper baby, and I’ve got two years over him.

For above everything else, Charlie was made to feel, every time he came home, that these people, his people, were serious; while he and the people with whom he would now spend his life (if he passed the examination) were not serious. He did not believe this. The inner didactic voice made short work of any such idea. The outer enemy could, and did, parody it in a hundred ways. His family did not believe it, they were proud of him. Yet Charlie felt it in everything they said and did. They protected him. They sheltered him. And above all, they still paid for him. At his age, his father had been working in the pit for eight years.

Lennie would be married next year. He already talked of a family. He, Charlie (if he passed the examination), would be running around licking people’s arses to get a job, Bachelor of Arts, Oxford, and a drug on the market.

They had reached Doncaster. It was raining. Soon they would pass where Doreen, Lennie’s girl, worked. ‘You’d better get off here,’ Charlie said. ‘You’ll have all that drag back through the wet.’ ‘No, s’all right, I’ll come with you to the station.’

There were another five minutes to go. ‘I don’t think it’s right, the way you get at Mum,’ Lennie said, at last coming to the point.

‘But I haven’t said a bloody word,’ said Charlie, switching without having intended it into his other voice, the middle-class voice which he was careful never to use with his family except in joke. Lennie gave him a glance of surprise and reproach and said: ‘All the same. She feels it.’

‘But it’s bloody ridiculous.’ Charlie’s voice was rising. ‘She stands in that kitchen all day, pandering to our every whim, when she’s not doing housework or making a hundred trips a day with that bloody coal …’ In the Christmas holidays, when Charlie had visited home last, he had fixed up a bucket on the frame of an old pram to ease his mother’s work. This morning he had seen the contrivance collapsed and full of rainwater in the back yard. After breakfast Lennie and Charlie had sat at the table in their shirtsleeves watching their mother. The door was open into the back yard. Mrs Thornton carried a shovel whose blade was nine inches by ten, and was walking back and forth from the coalhole in the yard, through the kitchen, into the parlour. On each inward journey, a small clump of coal balanced on the shovel. Charlie counted that his mother walked from the coalhole to the kitchen fire and the parlour fire thirty-six times. She walked steadily, the shovel in front, held like a spear in both hands, and her face frowned with purpose. Charlie had dropped his head on to his arms and laughed soundlessly until he felt Lennie’s warning gaze and stopped the heave of his shoulders. After a moment he had sat up, straight-faced. Lennie said: ‘Why do you get at Mum, then?’ Charlie said: ‘But I haven’t said owt.’ ‘No, but she’s getting riled. You always show what you think, Charlie boy.’ As Charlie did not respond to his appeal – for far more than present charity – Lennie went on: ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ ‘Old! She’s not fifty!’

Now Charlie said, continuing the early conversation: ‘She goes on as if she were an old woman. She wears herself out with nothing – she could get through all the work she has in a couple of hours if she organized herself. Or if just for once she told us where to get off.’

‘What’d she do with herself then?’

‘Do? Well, she could do something for herself. Read. Or see friends. Or something.’

‘She feels it. Last time you went off she cried.’

‘She what?’ Charlie’s guilt almost overpowered him, but the inner didactic voice switched on in time and he spoke through it: ‘What right have we to treat her like a bloody servant? Betty likes her food this way and that way, and Dad won’t eat this and that, and she stands there and humours the lot of us – like a servant.’

‘And who was it last night said he wouldn’t have fat on his meat and changed it for hers?’ said Lennie smiling, but full of reproach.

‘Oh, I’m just as bad as the rest of you,’ said Charlie, sounding false. ‘It makes me wild to see it,’ he said, sounding sincere. Didactically he said: ‘All the women in the village – they take it for granted. If someone organized them so that they had half a day to themselves sometimes, they’d think they were being insulted – they can’t stop working. Just look at Mum, then. She comes into Doncaster to wrap sweets two or three times a week – well, she actually loses money on it, by the time she’s paid bus fares. I said to her, “You’re actually losing money on it,” and she said: “I like to get out and see a bit of life.” A bit of life! Wrapping sweets in a bloody factory. Why can’t she just come into town of an evening and have a bit of fun without feeling she has to pay for it by wrapping sweets, sweated bloody labour? And she actually loses on it. It doesn’t make sense. They’re human beings, aren’t they? Not just …’

‘Not just what?’ asked Lennie angrily. He had listened to Charlie’s tirade, his mouth setting harder, his eyes narrowing. ‘Here’s the station,’ he said in relief. They waited for the young miners to clatter down and off before going forward themselves. ‘I’ll come with you to your stop,’ said Charlie; and they crossed the dark shiny, grimy street to the opposite stop for the bus which would take Lennie back to Doreen.

‘It’s no good thinking we’re going to change, Charlie boy.’

‘Who said change?’ said Charlie excitedly; but the bus had come, and Lennie was already swinging on to the back. ‘If you’re in trouble just write and say,’ said Lennie, and the bell pinged and his face vanished as the lit bus was absorbed by the light-streaked drizzling darkness.

There was half an hour before the London train. Charlie stood with the rain on his shoulders, his hands in his pockets, wondering whether to go after his brother and explain – what? He bolted across the street to the pub near the station. It was run by an Irishman who knew him and Lennie. The place was still empty, being just after opening time.

‘It’s you then,’ said Mike, drawing him a pint of bitter without asking. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ said Charlie, swinging himself up on to a stool.

‘And what’s in the great world of learning?’

‘Oh Jesus, no!’ said Charlie. The Irishman blinked, and Charlie said quickly: ‘What have you gone and tarted this place up for?’

The pub had been panelled in dark wood. It was ugly and comforting. Now it had half a dozen bright wallpapers and areas of shining paint, and Charlie’s stomach moved again, light filled his eyes, and he set his elbows hard down for support, and put his chin on his two fists.

‘The youngsters like it,’ said the Irishman. ‘But we’ve left the bar next door as it was for the old ones.’

‘You should have a sign up: Age This Way,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d have known where to go.’ He carefully lifted his head off his fists, narrowing his eyes to exclude the battling colours of the wallpapers, the shine of the paint.

‘You look bad,’ said the Irishman. He was a small, round, alcoholically cheerful man who, like Charlie, had two voices. For the enemy – that is, all the English whom he did not regard as a friend, which meant people who were not regulars – he put on an exaggerated brogue which was bound, if he persisted, to lead to the political arguments he delighted in. For friends like Charlie he didn’t trouble himself. He now said: ‘All work and no play.’

‘That’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘I went to the doctor. He gave me a tonic and said I am fundamentally sound in wind and limb. “You are sound in wind and limb,” he said,’ said Charlie, parodying an upper-class English voice for the Irishman’s pleasure.

Mike winked, acknowledging the jest, while his professionally humorous face remained serious. ‘You can’t burn the candle at both ends,’ he said in earnest warning.

Charlie laughed out. ‘That’s what the doctor said. You can’t burn the candle at both ends, he said.’

This time, when the stool he sat on, and the floor beneath the stool, moved away from him, and the glittering ceiling dipped and swung, his eyes went dark and stayed dark. He shut them and gripped the counter tight. With his eyes still shut he said facetiously: ‘It’s the clash of cultures, that’s what it is. It makes me light-headed.’ He opened his eyes and saw from the Irishman’s face that he had not said these words aloud.

He said aloud: ‘Actually the doctor was right, he meant well. But Mike, I’m not going to make it, I’m going to fail.’

‘Well, it won’t be the end of the world.’

‘Jesus. That’s what I like about you, Mike, you take a broad view of life.’

‘I’ll be back,’ said Mike, going to serve a customer.

A week ago Charlie had gone to the doctor with a cyclostyled leaflet in his hand. It was called ‘A Report Into the Increased Incidence of Breakdown Among Undergraduates’. He had underlined the words:

Young men from working-class and lower-middle-class families on scholarships are particularly vulnerable. For them, the gaining of a degree is obviously crucial. In addition they are under the continuous strain of adapting themselves to middle-class mores that are foreign to them. They are victims of a clash of standards, a clash of cultures, divided loyalties.

The doctor, a young man of about thirty, provided by the college authorities as a sort of father figure to advise on work problems, personal problems and (as the satirical alter ego took pleasure in pointing out) on clash-of-culture problems, glanced once at the pamphlet and handed it back. He had written it. As, of course, Charlie had known. ‘When are your examinations?’ he asked. Getting to the root of the matter, just like Mum, remarked the malevolent voice from behind Charlie’s shoulder.

‘I’ve got five months, doctor, and I can’t work and I can’t sleep.’

‘For how long?’

‘It’s been coming on gradually.’ Ever since I was born, said the enemy.

‘I can give you sedatives and sleeping pills, of course, but that’s not going to touch what’s really wrong.’

Which is, all this unnatural mixing of the classes. Doesn’t do, you know. People should know their place and stick to it. ‘I’d like some sleep pills, all the same.’

‘Have you got a girl?’

‘Two.’

The doctor paid out an allowance of man-of-the-world sympathy, then shut off his smile and said: ‘Perhaps you’d be better with one?’

Which, my mum figure, or my lovely bit of sex? ‘Perhaps I would, at that.’

‘I could arrange for you to have some talks with a psychiatrist – well, not if you don’t want,’ he said hastily, for the alter ego had exploded through Charlie’s lips in a horselaugh and: ‘What can the trick cyclist tell me I don’t know?’ He roared with laughter, flinging his legs up; and an ashtray went circling around the room on its rim. Charlie laughed, watched the ashtray, and thought: There, I knew all the time it was a poltergeist sitting there behind my shoulder. I swear I never touched that damned ashtray.

The doctor waited until it circled near him, stopped it with his foot, picked it up, laid it back on the desk. ‘It’s no point your going to him if you feel like that.’

All avenues explored, all roads charted.

‘Well now, let’s see, have you been to see your family recently?’

‘Last Christmas. No doctor, it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I can’t work there.’ You try working in an atmosphere of trade union meetings and the telly and the pictures in Doncaster. You try it, doc. And besides all my energies go into not upsetting them. Because I do upset them. My dear doc, when we scholarship boys jump our class, it’s not me who suffer, it’s our families. We are an expense, doc. And besides – write a thesis, I’d like to read it … Call it: Long-term effects on working-class or lower-middle-class family of a scholarship child whose existence is a perpetual reminder that they are nothing but ignorant non-cultured clods. How’s that for a thesis, doc? Why, I do believe I could write it myself.

‘If I were you, I’d go home for a few days. Don’t try to work at all. Go to the pictures. Sleep and eat and let them fuss over you. Get this prescription made up and come and see me when you get back.’

‘Thanks, doc, I will.’ You mean well.

The Irishman came back to find Charlie spinning a penny, so intent on this game that he did not see him. First he spun it with his right hand, anticlockwise, then with his left, clockwise. The right hand represented his jeering alter ego. The left hand was the didactic and rational voice. The left hand was able to keep the coin in a glittering spin for much longer than the right.

‘You ambidextrous?’

‘Yes, always was.’

The Irishman watched the boy’s frowning, teeth-clenched concentration for a while, then removed the untouched beer and poured him a double whisky. ‘You drink that and get on the train and sleep.’

‘Thanks, Mike. Thanks.’

‘That was a nice girl you had with you last time.’

‘I’ve quarrelled with her. Or rather, she’s given me the boot. And quite right too.’

After the visit to the doctor Charlie had gone straight to Jenny. He had guyed the interview while she sat, gravely listening. Then he had given her his favourite lecture on the crass and unalterable insensibility of anybody anywhere born middle-class. No one but Jenny ever heard this lecture. She said at last: ‘You should go and see a psychiatrist. No, don’t you see, it’s not fair.’

‘Who to, me?’

‘No, me. What’s the use of shouting at me all the time? You should be saying these things to him.’

‘What?’

‘Well, surely you can see that. You spend all your time lecturing me. You make use of me, Charles.’ (She always called him Charles.)

What she was really saying was: ‘You should be making love to me, not lecturing me.’ Charlie did not really like making love to Jenny. He forced himself when her increasingly tart and accusing manner reminded him that he ought to. He had another girl, whom he disliked, a tall crisp middle-class girl called Sally. She called him, mocking: Charlie boy. When he had slammed out of Jenny’s room, he had gone to Sally and fought his way into her bed. Every act of sex with Sally was a slow, cold subjugation of her by him. That night he had said, when she lay at last, submissive, beneath him: ‘Horny-handed son of toil wins by his unquenched virility beautiful daughter of the moneyed classes. And doesn’t she love it.’

‘Oh yes I do, Charlie boy.’

‘I’m nothing but a bloody sex symbol.’

‘Well,’ she murmured, already self-possessed, freeing herself, ‘that’s all I am to you.’ She added defiantly, showing that she did care, and that it was Charlie’s fault: ‘And I couldn’t care less.’

‘Dear Sally, what I like about you is your beautiful honesty.’

‘Is that what you like about me? I thought it was the thrill of beating me down.’

Charlie said to the Irishman: ‘I’ve quarrelled with everyone I know in the last weeks.’

‘Quarrelled with your family too?’

‘No,’ he said, appalled, while the room again swung around him. ‘Good Lord no,’ he said in a different tone – grateful. He added savagely: ‘How could I? I can never say anything to them I really think.’ He looked at Mike to see if he had actually said these words aloud. He had, because now Mike said: ‘So you know how I feel. I’ve lived thirty years in this mucking country, and if you arrogant sods knew what I’m thinking half the time …’

‘Liar. You say whatever you think, from Cromwell to the Black and Tans and Casement. You never let up. But it’s not hurting yourself to say it.’

‘Yourself, is it?’

‘Yes. But it’s all insane. Do you realize how insane it all is, Mike? There’s my father. Pillar of the working class. Labour Party, trade union, the lot. But I’ve been watching my tongue not to say I spent last term campaigning about – he takes it for granted even now that the British should push the wogs around.’

‘You’re a great nation,’ said the Irishman. ‘But it’s not your personal fault, so drink up and have another.’

Charlie drank his first Scotch, and drew the second glass towards him. ‘Don’t you see what I mean?’ he said, his voice rising excitedly. ‘Don’t you see that it’s all insane? There’s my mother, her sister is ill and it looks as if she’ll die. There are two kids, and my mother’ll take them both. They’re nippers, three and four, it’s like starting a family all over again. She thinks nothing of it. If someone’s in trouble, she’s the mug, every time. But there she sits and says: “Those juvenile offenders ought to be flogged until they are senseless.” She read it in the papers and so she says it. She said it to me and I kept my mouth shut. And they’re all alike.’

‘Yes, but you’re not going to change it, Charlie, so drink up.’

A man standing a few feet down the bar had a paper sticking out of his pocket. Mike said to him: ‘Mind if I borrow your paper for the winners, sir?’

‘Help yourself.’

Mike turned the paper over to the back page. ‘I had five quid on today,’ he said. ‘Lost it. Lovely bit of horseflesh, but I lost it.’

‘Wait,’ said Charlie excitedly, straightening the paper so he could see the front page. WARDROBE MURDERER GETS SECOND CHANCE it said. ‘See that?’ said Charlie. ‘The Home Secretary says he can have another chance, they can review the case, he says.’

The Irishman read, cold-faced. ‘So he does,’ he said.

‘Well, I mean to say, there’s some decency left, then. I mean if the case can be reviewed it shows they do care about something at least.’

‘I don’t see it your way at all. It’s England versus England, that’s all. Fair play all round, but they’ll hang the poor sod on the day appointed as usual.’ He turned the newspaper and studied the race news.

Charlie waited for his eyes to clear, held himself steady with one hand flat on the counter, and drank his second double. He pushed over a pound note, remembering it had to last three days, and that now he had quarrelled with Jenny there was no place for him to stay in London.

‘No, it’s on me,’ said Mike. ‘I asked you. It’s been a pleasure seeing you, Charlie. And don’t take the sins of the world on your personal shoulders, lad, because that doesn’t do anyone any good, does it, now?’

‘See you at Christmas, Mike, and thanks.’

He walked carefully out into the rain. There was no solitude to be had on the train that night, so he chose a compartment with one person in it, and settled himself in a corner before looking to see who it was he had with him. It was a girl. He saw then that she was pretty, and then that she was upper-class. Another Sally, he thought, sensing danger, seeing the cool, self-sufficient little face. Hey, there, Charlie, he said to himself, keep yourself in order, or you’ve had it. He carefully located himself: he, Charlie, was now a warm, whisky-comforted belly, already a little sick. Close above it, like a silent loudspeaker, was the source of the hectoring voice. Behind his shoulder waited his grinning familiar. He must keep them all apart. He tested the didactic voice: It’s not her fault, poor bitch, victim of the class system, she can’t help she sees everyone under her like dirt … But the alcohol was working strongly and meanwhile his familiar was calculating: She’s had a good look, but can’t make me out. My clothes are right, my haircut’s on the line, but there’s something that makes her wonder. She’s waiting for me to speak, then she’ll make up her mind. Well, first I’ll get her, and then I’ll speak.

He caught her eyes and signalled an invitation, but it was an aggressive invitation, to make it as hard for her as he could. After a bit, she smiled at him. Then he roughened his speech to the point of unintelligibility and said: ‘’Appen you’d like t’window up? What wi’ t’rain and t’wind and all.’

‘What?’ she said sharply, her face lengthening into such a comical frankness of shock that he laughed out, and afterwards inquired impeccably: ‘Actually it is rather cold, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you like to have the window up?’ She picked up a magazine and shut him out, while he watched, grinning, the blood creep up from under her neat collar to her hairline.

The door slid back; two people came in. They were a man and his wife, both small, crumpled in face and flesh, and dressed in their best for London. There was a fuss and a heaving of suitcases and murmured apologies because of the two superior young people. Then the woman, having settled herself in a corner, looked steadily at Charlie, while he thought: Deep calls to deep, she knows who I am all right, she’s not foxed by the trimmings. He was right, because soon she said familiarly: ‘Would you put the window up for me, lad? It’s a rare cold night and no mistake.’

Charlie put up the window, not looking at the girl, who was hiding behind the magazine. Now the woman smiled, and the man smiled too, because of her ease with the youth.

‘You comfortable like that, father?’ she asked.

‘Fair enough,’ said the husband on the stoical note of the confirmed grumbler.

‘Put your feet up beside me, any road.’

‘But I’m all right, lass,’ he said bravely. Then, making a favour of it, he loosened his laces, eased his feet inside too-new shoes, and set them on the seat beside his wife.

She, for her part, was removing her hat. It was of shapeless grey felt, with a pink rose at the front. Charlie’s mother owned just such a badge of respectability, renewed every year or so at the sales. Hers was always bluish felt, with a bit of ribbon or coarse net, and she would rather be seen dead than without it in public.

The woman sat fingering her hair, which was thin and greying. For some reason, the sight of her clean pinkish scalp shining through the grey wisps made Charlie wild with anger. He was taken by surprise, and again summoned himself to himself, making the didactic voice lecture: ‘The working woman of these islands enjoys a position in the family superior to that of the middle-class woman, etc., etc., etc.’ This was an article he had read recently, and he continued to recite from it, until he realized the voice had become an open sneer, and was saying: ‘Not only is she the emotional bulwark of the family, but she is frequently the breadwinner as well, such as wrapping sweets at night, sweated labour for pleasure, anything to get out of the happy home for a few hours.’

The fusion of the two voices, the nagging inside voice, and the jeer from the dangerous force outside, terrified Charlie, and he told himself hastily: ‘You’re drunk, that’s all, now keep your mouth shut, for God’s sake.’

The woman was asking him: ‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes, I’m all right,’ he said carefully.

‘Going all the way to London?’

‘Yes, I’m going all the way to London.’

‘It’s a long drag.’

‘Yes, it’s a long drag.’

At this echoing dialogue, the girl lowered her magazine to give him a sharp contemptuous look, up and down. Her face was now smoothly pink, and her small pink mouth was judging.

‘You have a mouth like a rosebud,’ said Charlie, listening horrified to these words emerging from him.

The girl jerked up the magazine. The man looked sharply at Charlie, to see if he had heard aright, and then at his wife, for guidance. The wife looked doubtfully at Charlie, who offered her a slow desperate wink. She accepted it, and nodded at her husband: boys will be boys. They both glanced warily at the shining face of the magazine.

‘We’re on our way to London too,’ said the woman.

‘So you’re on your way to London.’

Stop it, he told himself. He felt a foolish slack grin on his face, and his tongue was thickening in his mouth. He shut his eyes, trying to summon Charlie to his aid, but his stomach was rolling, warm and sick. He lit a cigarette for support, watching his hands at work. ‘Lily-handed son of learning wants a manicure badly,’ commented a soft voice in his ear; and he saw the cigarette poised in a parody of a cad’s gesture between displayed nicotined fingers. Charlie, smoking with poise, sat preserving a polite, sarcastic smile.

He was in the grip of terror. He was afraid he might slide off the seat. He could no longer help himself.

‘London’s a big place, for strangers,’ said the woman.

‘But it makes a nice change,’ said Charlie, trying hard.

The woman, delighted that a real conversation was at last under way, settled her shabby old head against a leather bulge, and said: ‘Yes, it does make a nice change.’ The shine on the leather confused Charlie’s eyes; he glanced over at the magazine, but its glitter, too, seemed to invade his pupils. He looked at the dirty floor, and said: ‘It’s good for people to get a change now and then.’

‘Yes, that’s what I tell my husband, don’t I, father? It’s good for us to get away, now and then. We have a married daughter in Streatham.’

‘It’s a great thing, family ties.’

‘Yes, but it’s a drag,’ said the man. ‘Say what you like, but it is. After all, I mean, when all is said and done.’ He paused, his head on one side, with a debating look, waiting for Charlie to take it up.

Charlie said: ‘There’s no denying it, say what you like, I mean, there’s no doubt about that.’ And he looked interestedly at the man for his reply.

The woman said: ‘Yes, but the way I look at it, you’ve got to get out of yourself sometimes, look at it that way.’

‘It’s all very well,’ said the husband, on a satisfied but grumbling note, ‘but if you’re going to do that, well, for a start-off, it’s an expense.’

‘If you don’t throw a good penny after a bad one,’ said Charlie judiciously, ‘I mean, what’s the point?’

‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the woman excitedly, her old face animated. ‘That’s what I say to father, what’s the point if you don’t sometimes let yourself go?’

‘I mean, life’s bad enough as it is,’ said Charlie, watching the magazine slowly lower itself. It was laid precisely on the seat. The girl now sat, two small brown-gloved hands in a ginger-tweeded lap, staring him out. Her blue eyes glinted into his, and he looked quickly away.

‘Well, I can see that right enough,’ said the man, ‘but there again, you’ve got to know where to stop.’

‘That’s right,’ said Charlie, ‘you’re dead right.’

‘I know it’s all right for some,’ said the man, ‘I know that, but if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to consider. That’s what I think.’

‘But father, you know you enjoy it, once you’re there and Joyce has settled you in your own corner with your own chair and your cup to yourself.’

‘Ah,’ said the man, nodding heavily, ‘but it’s not as easy as that, now, is it? Well, I mean, that stands to reason.’

‘Ah,’ said Charlie, shaking his head, feeling it roll heavily in the socket of his neck, ‘but if you’re going to consider at all, then what’s the point? I mean, what I think is, for a start-off, there’s no doubt about it.’

The woman hesitated, started to say something, but let her small bright eyes falter away. She was beginning to colour.

Charlie went on compulsively, his head turning like a clockwork man’s: ‘It’s what you’re used to, that’s what I say, well I mean. Well, and there’s another thing, when all is said and done, and after all, if you’re going to take one thing with another …’

‘Stop it,’ said the girl, in a sharp high voice.

‘It’s a question of principle,’ said Charlie, but his head had stopped rolling and his eyes had focused.

‘If you don’t stop I’m going to call the guard and have you put in another compartment,’ said the girl. To the old people she said in a righteous scandalized voice: ‘Can’t you see he’s laughing at you? Can’t you see?’ She lifted the magazine again.

The old people looked suspiciously at Charlie, dubiously at each other. The woman’s face was very pink and her eyes bright and hot.

‘I think I’m going to get forty winks,’ said the man, with general hostility. He settled his feet, put his head back, and closed his eyes.

Charlie said: ‘Excuse me,’ and scrambled his way to the corridor over the legs of the man, then the legs of the woman, muttering: ‘Excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry.’

He stood in the corridor, his back jolting slightly against the shifting wood of the compartment’s sides. His eyes were shut, his tears running. Words, no longer articulate, muttered and jumbled somewhere inside him, a stream of frightened protesting phrases.

Wood slid against wood close to his ear, and he heard the softness of clothed flesh on wood.

‘If it’s that bloody little bint I’ll kill her,’ said a voice, small and quiet, from his diaphragm.

He opened his murderous eyes on the woman. She looked concerned.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, stiff and sullen, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’

‘It’s all right,’ she said, and laid her two red hands on his crossed quivering forearms. She took his two wrists, and laid his arms gently down by his sides. ‘Don’t take on,’ she said, ‘it’s all right, it’s all right, son.’

The tense rejection of his flesh caused her to take a step back from him. But there she stood her ground and said: ‘Now look, son, there’s no point taking on like that, well, is there? I mean to say, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s no other way of looking at it.’

She waited, facing him, troubled but sure of herself.

After a while Charlie said: ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’

She nodded and smiled, and went back into the compartment. After a moment, Charlie followed her.

Two Potters

I have only known one potter in this country, Mary Tawnish, and she lives out of London in a village where her husband is a schoolteacher. She seldom comes to town, and I seldom leave it, so we write.

The making of pots is not a thing I often think of, so when I dreamed about the old potter it was natural to think of Mary. But it was difficult to tell her: there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don’t, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other. Mary Tawnish says, when others relate their dreams: ‘I’ve never had a dream in my life.’ And adds, to soften or placate: ‘At least, I don’t remember. They say it’s a question of remembering?’

I would have guessed her to be a person who would dream a good deal, I don’t know why.

A tall woman, and rather large, she has bright brown clustering hair, and brown eyes that give the impression of light, though not from their surface: it is not a ‘bright’ or ‘brilliant’ glance. She looks at you, smiling or not, but always calm, and there is an impression of light, which seems caught in the structure of colour in the iris, so sometimes her eyes look yellow, set off by smooth brown eyebrows.

A large, slow-moving woman, with large white slow hands. And a silent one – she is a listener.

Her life has been a series of dramas: a childhood on the move with erratic parents, a bad first marriage, a child that died, lovers, but none lasting; then a second marriage to William Tawnish who teaches physics and biology. He is a quick, biting, bitter little man with whom she has three half-grown children.

More than once I have told her story, without comment, in order to observe the silent judgment: Another misfit, another unhappy soul, only to see the judger confounded on meeting her, for there was never a woman less fitted by nature for discord or miseries. Or so it would seem. So it seems she feels herself, for she disapproves of other people’s collisions with themselves, just as if her own life had nothing to do with her.

The first dream about the potter was simple and short. Once upon a time … there was a village or a settlement, not in England, that was certain, for the scene was of a baked red-dust bareness. Low rectangular structures, of simple baked mud, also reddish-brown, were set evenly on the baked soil, yet because some were roofless and others in the process of crumbling, and others half built, there was nothing finished or formed about this place. And for leagues and leagues, in all directions, the great plain, of reddish earth, and in the middle of the plain, the settlement that looked as if it were hastily moulded by a great hand out of wet clay, allowed to dry, and left there. It seemed uninhabited, but in an empty space among the huts, all by himself, working away on a primitive potter’s wheel turned by foot, was an old man. He wore a garment of coarse sacking over yellowish and dusty limbs. One bare foot was set in the dust near me, the cracked toes spread and curled. He had a bit of yellow straw stuck in close grizzling hair.

When I woke from this dream I was rested and excited, in spite of the great dried-up plain and the empty settlement one precarious stage from the dust. In the end I sat down and wrote to Mary Tawnish, although I could hear her flat comment very clearly: Well, that’s interesting. Our letters are usually of the kind known as ‘keeping in touch’. First I inquired about her children, and about William, and then I told the dream: ‘For some reason I thought of you. I did know a man who made pots in Africa. The farmer he worked for discovered he had a talent for potmaking (it seemed his tribe were potters by tradition) because when they made bricks for the farm, this man, Elija, slipped little dishes and bowls into the kiln to bake with the bricks. The farmer used to pay him a couple of shillings a week extra, and sold the dishes to a dealer in the city. He made simple things, not like yours. He had no wheel, of course. He didn’t use colour. His things were a darkish yellow, because of the kind of soil on that farm. A bit monotonous after a bit. And they broke easily. If you come up to London give me a ring …’

She didn’t come, but soon I had a letter with a postscript: What an interesting dream, thanks so much for telling me.

I dreamed about the old potter again. There was the great, flat, dust-beaten reddish plain, ringed by very distant blue-hazed mountains, so far away they were like mirages, or clouds, or low-lying smoke. There was the settlement. And there the old potter, sitting on one of his upturned pots, one foot set firmly in the dust, and the other moving the wheel; one palm shaping the clay, the other shedding water which glittered in the low sullen glare in flashes of moving light on its way to the turning wet clay. He was extremely old, his eyes faded and of the same deceiving blue as the mountains. All around him, drying in rows on a thin scattering of yellow straw, were pots of different sizes. They were all round. The huts were rectangular, the pots round. I looked at these two different manifestations of the earth, separated by shape; and then through a gap in the huts to the plain. No one in sight. It seemed no one lived there. Yet there sat the old man, with the hundreds of pots and dishes drying in rows on the straw, dipping his hand into an enormous jar of water and scattering drops that smelled sweet as they hit the dust and pitted it.

Again I thought of Mary. But they had nothing in common, that poor old potter who had no one to buy his work, and Mary who sold her strange coloured bowls and jugs to the big shops in London. I wondered what the old potter would think of Mary’s work – particularly what he’d think of a square flat dish I’d bought from her, coloured a greenish-yellow. The square had, as it were, slipped out of whack, and the surface is rough, with finger marks left showing. I serve cheese on it. The old man’s jars were for millet. I knew that, or for soured milk.

I wrote and told Mary the second dream, thinking: Well, if it bores or irritates her, it’s too bad. This time she rang me up. She wanted me to go down to one of the shops which had been slow in making a new order. Weren’t her things selling? she wanted to know. She added she was getting a fellow feeling for the old potter, he didn’t have any customers either, from the size of his stock. But it turned out that the shop had sold all Mary’s things, and had simply forgotten to order more.

I waited, with patient excitement, for the next instalment, or unfolding, of the dream.

The settlement was now populated, indeed, teeming, and it was much bigger. The low flat rooms of dull earth had spread over an area of some miles. They were not separated now, but linked. I walked through a system of these rooms. They were roughly the same size, but set at all angles to each other so that, standing in one, it might have one, two, three doors, leading to a corresponding number of mud rooms. I walked for something like half a mile through low dark rooms without once needing to cross a roofless space, and when I emerged in the daylight, there was the potter, and beyond him a marketplace. But a poor one. From out of his great jars, women, wearing the same sort of yellowish sacking as he, sold grain and milk to dusty, smallish, rather listless people. The potter worked on, under heavy sunlight, with his rows and rows of clay vessels drying on the glinting yellow straw. A very small boy crouched by him, watching very movement he made. I saw how the water shaken from the old fingers on the whirling pot flew past it and spattered the small intent poverty-shaped face with its narrowed watching eyes. But the face received the water unflinching, probably unnoticed.

Beyond the settlement stretched the plain. Beyond that, the thin, illusory mountains. Over the red flat plain drifted small shadows: they were from great birds wheeling and banking and turning.

I wrote to Mary and she wrote back that she was glad the old man had some customers at last, she had been worried about him. As for her, she thought it was time he used some colour, all that red dust was depressing. She said she could see the settlement was short of water, since I hadn’t mentioned a well, let alone a river, only the potter’s great brimming jar which reflected the blue sky, the sun, the great birds. Wasn’t a diet of milk and millet bad for people? Here she broke off to say she supposed I couldn’t help all this, it was my nature, and ‘Apropos, isn’t it time your poor village had a storyteller at least? How bored the poor things must be!’

I wrote back to say I was not responsible for this settlement, and whereas if I had my way, it would be set in groves of fruit trees and surrounded by whitening corn fields, with a river full of splashing brown children, I couldn’t help it, that’s how things were in this place, wherever it was.

One day in a shop I saw a shelf of her work and noticed that some of them were of smooth, dully shining brown, like polished skin – jars, and flat round plates. Our village potter would have known these, nothing to surprise him here. All the same, there was a difference between Mary’s consciously simple vessels, and the simplicity of the old potter. I looked at them and thought: Well, my dear, that’s not going to get you very far … But I would have found it hard to say exactly what I meant, and in fact I bought a plate and a jar, and they gave me great pleasure, thinking of Mary and the old potter linked in them, between my hands.

Quite a long time passed. When I dreamed again all the plain was populated. The mountains had come closer in, reaching up tall and blue into the blue sky, circumscribing the plain. The settlements, looked at from the height of the mountaintops, seemed like patches of slightly raised surface on the plain. I understood their nature and substance: a slight raising of the dust here and there, like the frail patterning of raindrops hitting dry dust, pitting it, then the sun coming out swiftly to dry the dust. The resulting tiny fragile patterned crust of dried dust – that gives, as near as I can, the feeling the settlements gave me, viewed from the mountains. Except that the raised dried crusts were patterned in rectangles. I could see the tiny patternings all over the plain. I let myself down from the mountains, through the great birds that wheeled and floated, and descended to the settlement I knew. There sat the potter, the clay curving under his left hand as he flicked water over it from his right. It was all going on as usual – I was reassured by his being there, creating his pots. Nothing much had changed, though so much time had passed. The low flat monotonous dwellings were the same, though they had crumbled to dust and raised themselves from it a hundred times since I had been here last. No green yet, no river. A scum-covered creek had goats grazing beside it, and the millet grew in straggly patches, flattened and brown from drought. In the marketplace were pinkish fruits, lying in heaps by the soft piles of millet, on woven straw mats. I didn’t know the fruit: it was small, about plum-size, smooth-skinned, and I felt it had a sharp pulpy taste. Pinky-yellow skins lay scattered in the dust. A man passed me, with a low slinking movement of the hips, holding his sacklike garment in position at his side with the pressure of an elbow, staring in front of him over the pink fruit which he pressed against sharp yellow teeth.

I wrote and told Mary the plain was more populated, but that things hadn’t improved much, except for the fruit. But it was astringent, I wouldn’t care for it myself.

She wrote back to say she was glad she slept so soundly, she would find such dreams depressing.

I said there was nothing depressing about it. I entered the dream with pleasure, as if listening to a storyteller say: Once upon a time …

But the next was discouraging, I woke depressed. I stood by the old potter in the marketplace, and for once his hands were still, the wheel at rest. His eyes followed the movements of the people buying and selling, and his mouth was bitter. Beside him, his vessels stood in rows on the warm glinting straw. From time to time a woman came picking her way along the rows, bending to narrow her eyes at the pots. Then she chose one, dropped a coin in the potter’s hand, and bore it off over her shoulder.

I was inside the potter’s mind and I knew what he was thinking. He said: ‘Just once, Lord, just once, just once!’ He put his hand down into a patch of hot shade under the wheel and lifted on his palm a small clay rabbit which he held out to the ground. He sat motionless, looking at the sky, then at the rabbit praying: ‘Please, Lord, just once.’ But nothing happened.

I wrote to Mary that the old man was tired with long centuries of making pots whose life was so short: the litter of broken pots under the settlement had raised its level twenty feet by now, and every pot had come off his wheel. He wanted God to breathe life into his clay rabbit. He had hoped to see it lift up its long red-veined ears, to feel its furry feet on his palm, and watch it hop down and off among the great earthenware pots, sniffing at them and twitching its ears – a live thing among the forms of clay.

Mary said the old man was getting above himself. She said further: ‘Why a rabbit? I simply don’t see a rabbit. What use would a rabbit be? Do you realize that apart from goats (you say they have milk), and those vultures overhead, they have no animals at all? Wouldn’t a cow be better than a rabbit?’

I wrote: ‘I can’t do anything about that place when I’m dreaming it, but when I’m awake, why not? Right then, the rabbit hopped off the old man’s hand into the dust. It sat twitching its nose and throbbing all over, the way rabbits do. Then it sprang slowly off and began nibbling at the straw, while the old man wept with happiness. Now what have you to say? If I say there was a rabbit, a rabbit there was. Besides, that poor old man deserves one, after so long. God could have done so much, it wouldn’t have cost Him anything.’

I had no reply to that letter, and I stopped dreaming about the settlement. I knew it was because of my effrontery in creating that rabbit, inserting myself into the story. Very well, then … I wrote to Mary: ‘I’ve been thinking: suppose it had been you who’d dreamed about the potter – all right, all right, just suppose it. Now. Next morning you sat at the breakfast table, your William at one end, and the children between eating cornflakes and drinking milk. You were rather silent. (Of course you usually are.) You looked at your husband and you thought: What on earth would he say if I told him what I’m going to do? You said nothing, presiding at the table; then you sent the children off to school, and your husband to his classes. Then you were alone and when you’d washed the dishes and put them away, you went secretly into the stone-floored room where your wheel and the kiln are, and you took some clay and you made a small rabbit and you set it on a high shelf behind some finished vases to dry. You didn’t want anyone to see that rabbit. One day, a week later, when it was dry, you waited until your family was out of the house, then you put your rabbit on your palm, and you went into a field, and you knelt down and held the rabbit out to the grass, and you waited. You didn’t pray, because you don’t believe in God, but you wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if that rabbit’s nose had started to twitch and its long soft ears stood up …’

Mary wrote: ‘There aren’t any rabbits any more, had you forgotten myxomatosis? Actually I did make some small rabbits recently, for the children, in blue and green glaze, because it occurred to me the two youngest haven’t seen a rabbit out of a picture book. Still, they’re coming back in some parts, I hear. The farmers will be angry.’

I wrote: ‘Yes, I had forgotten. Well then … sometimes at evening, when you walk in the fields, you think: How nice to see a rabbit lift his paws and look at us. You remember the rotting little corpses of a few years back. You think: I’ll try again. Meantime, you’re nervous of what William will say, he’s such a rationalist. Well of course, so are we, but he wouldn’t even play a little. I may be wrong, but I think you’re afraid of William catching you out, and you are careful not to be caught. One sunny morning you take it out on to the field and … all right, all right then, it doesn’t hop away. You can’t decide whether to lay your clay rabbit down among the warm grasses (it’s a sunny day) and let it crumble back into the earth, or whether to bake it in your kiln. You haven’t baked it, it’s even rather damp still: the old potter’s rabbit was wet, just before he held it out into the sun he sprinkled water on it, I saw him.

‘Later you decide to tell your husband. Out of curiosity? The children are in the garden, you can hear their voices, and William sits opposite you reading the newspaper. You have a crazy impulse to say: I’m going to take my rabbit into the field tonight and pray for God to breathe life into it, a field without rabbits is empty. Instead you say: “William, I had a dream last night …” First he frowns, a quick frown, then he turns those small quick sandy-lashed intelligent eyes on you, taking it all in. To your surprise, instead of saying: “I don’t remember your ever dreaming,” he says: “Mary, I didn’t know you disapproved of the farmers killing off their rabbits.” You say: “I didn’t disapprove. I’d have done the same, I suppose.” The fact that he’s not reacted with sarcasm or impatience, as he might very well, makes you feel guilty when you lift the clay rabbit down, take it out to a field and set it in a hedge, its nose pointing out towards some fresh grass. That night William says, casual: “You’ll be glad to hear the rabbits are back. Basil Smith shot one in his field – the first for eight years, he says. Well, I’m glad myself, I’ve missed the little beggars.” You are delighted. You slip secretly into a cold misty moonlight and you run to the hedge and of course the rabbit is gone. You stand, clutching your thick green stole around you, because it’s cold, shivering, but delighted, delighted! Though you know quite well one of your children, or someone else’s child, has slipped along this hedge, seen the rabbit, and taken it off to play with.’

Mary wrote: ‘Oh all right, if you say so, so it is. But I must tell you, if you are interested in facts, that the only thing that has happened is that Dennis (the middle one) put his blue rabbit out in a hedge for a joke near the Smith’s gate, and Basil Smith shot it to smithereens one dusk thinking it was real. He used to lose a small fortune every year to rabbits, he didn’t think it was a funny joke at all. Anyway, why don’t you come down for a weekend?’

The Tawnishes live in an old farmhouse on the edge of the village. There is a great garden, with fruit trees, roses – everything. The big house and the three boys mean a lot of work, but Mary spends all the time she can in the shed that used to be a dairy where she pots. I arrived to find them in the kitchen, having lunch. Mary nodded to me to sit down. William was in conflict with the middle boy, Dennis, who was, as the other two boys kept saying, ‘showing off’. Or rather, he was in that torment of writhing self-consciousness that afflicts small boys sometimes, rolling his eyes while he stuttered and wriggled, his whole sandy freckled person scarlet and miserable.

‘Well I did I did I did I did I did …’ He paused for breath, his eyes popping, and his older brother chanted: ‘No you didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t.’

‘Yes I did I did I did I did …’

And the father said, brisk but irritated: ‘Now then, Dennis, use your loaf, you couldn’t have, because it is obvious you have not.’

‘But I did I did I did I did …’

‘Well, then, you had better go out of the room until you come to your senses and are fit company for rational people,’ said his father, triumphantly in the right.

The child choked on his battling breath, and ran howling out into the garden. Where, after a minute, the older boy followed, ostensibly to control him.

‘He did what?’ I asked.

‘Who knows?’ said Mary. There she sat, at the head of the table, bright-eyed and smiling, serving apple pie and custard, a dark changeling in the middle of her gingery, freckled family.

Her husband said, brisk: ‘What do you mean, who knows? You know quite well.’

‘It’s his battle with Basil Smith,’ said Mary to me. ‘Ever since Basil Smith shot at his blue rabbit and broke it, there’s been evil feeling on both sides. Dennis claims that he set fire to the Smith farmhouse last night.’

‘What?’

Mary pointed through a low window, where the Smith’s house showed, two fields away, like a picture in a frame.

William said: ‘He’s hysterical and he’s got to stop it.’

‘Well,’ said Mary, ‘if Basil shot my blue rabbit I’d want to burn his house down too. It seems quite reasonable to me.’

William let out an exclamation of rage; checked himself because of my presence, shot fiery glances all round, and went out, taking the youngest boy with him.

‘Well,’ said Mary. ‘Well …’ She smiled. ‘Come into the pottery, I’ve got something to show you.’ She went ahead along a stone passage, a tall, lazy-moving woman, her bright brown hair catching the light. As we passed an open window, there was a fearful row of shrieks, yells, blows; and we saw the three boys rolling and tussling in the grass, while William danced futilely around them shouting: ‘Stop it, stop it at once.’ Their mother proceeded, apparently uninterested, into the potting room.

This held the potting apparatus, and a great many jars, plates, and jugs of all colours and kinds ranged on shelves. She lifted down a creature from a high shelf, and set it before me. Then she left it with me, while she bent to attend to the kiln.

It was yellowish-brown, a sort of rabbit or hare, but with ears like neither – narrower, sharp, short, like the pointed unfolding shoots of a plant. It had a muzzle more like a dog’s than a rabbit’s; it looked as if it did not eat grass – perhaps insects and beetles? Yellowish eyes were set on the front of its head. Its hind legs were less powerful than a rabbit’s, or hare’s; and I saw its talents were for concealment, not for escaping enemies in great pistoning leaps. It rested on short, stubby hind legs, with front paws held up in a queer, twisted, almost affected posture, head turned to one side, and ears furled around each other. It looked as if it had been wound up like a spring, and had half unwound. It looked like a strangely shaped rock, or like the harsh twisted plants that sometimes grow on rocks.

Mary came back and stood by me, her head slightly on one side, with her characteristic small patient smile that nevertheless held a sweet concealed exasperation.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there it is.’

I hesitated, because it was not the creature I had seen on the old potter’s palm.

‘What was an English rabbit doing there at all?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t say it was an English rabbit.’

But of course, she was right: this animal was far more in keeping with the dried mud houses, the dusty plain, than the pretty furry rabbit I had dreamed.

I smiled at Mary, because she was humouring me, as she humoured her husband and her children. For some reason I thought of her first husband and her lovers, two of whom I had known. At moments of painful crisis, or a parting, had she stood thus – a calm, pretty woman, smiling her sweetly satirical smile, as if to say: ‘Well, make a fuss if you like, it’s got nothing at all to do with me’? If so, I’m surprised that one of them didn’t murder her.

‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘thanks. Can I take this thing, whatever it is?’

‘Of course. I made it for you. You must admit, it may not be pretty, but it’s more likely to be true.’

I accepted this, as I had to; and I said: ‘Well, thanks for coming down to our level long enough to play games with us.’

At which there was a flash of yellow light from her luminous eyes, while her face remained grave, as if amusement, or acknowledgment of the truth, could only be focused in her thus, through a change of light in her irises.

A few minutes later, the three boys and the father came round this part of the house in a whirlwind of quarrelling energy. The aggrieved Dennis was in tears, and the father almost beside himself. Mary, who until now had remained apart from it all, gave an exclamation, slipped on a coat, and said: ‘I can’t stand this. I’m going to talk to Basil Smith.’

She went out, and I watched her cross the fields to the other house.

Meanwhile Dennis, scarlet and suffering, came into the pottery in search of his mother. He whirled about, looking for her, then grabbed my creature, said: ‘Is that for me?’ snatched it posessively to him when I said: ‘No, it’s for me,’ set it down when I told him to, and stood breathing like a furnace, his freckles like tea leaves against his skin.

‘Your mother’s gone to see Mr Smith,’ I said.

‘He shot my rabbit,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t a real rabbit.’

‘But he thought it was a real rabbit.’

‘Yes, but you knew he would think so, and that he’d shoot at it.’

‘He killed it!’

‘You wanted him to!’

At which he let out a scream and danced up and down like a mad boy, shouting: ‘I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t …’

His father, entering on this scene, grabbed him by his flailing arms, fought the child into a position of tensed stillness, and held him there, saying, in a frenzy of incredulous common sense: ‘I’ve never-in-my-life-heard-such-lunacy!’

Now Mary came in, accompanied by Mr Smith, a large, fair, youngish man, with a sweet open face, which was uncomfortable now, because of what he had agreed to do.

‘Let that child go,’ said Mary to her husband. Dennis dropped to the floor, rolled over, and lay face down, heaving with sobs.

‘Call the others!’

Resignation itself, William went to the window, and shouted: ‘Harry, John, Harry, John, come here at once, your mother wants you.’ He then stood, with folded arms, a defeated philosopher, grinning angrily while the two other children came in and stood waiting by the door.

‘Now,’ said Mary. ‘Get up, Dennis.’

Dennis got up, his face battered with suffering, and looked with hope towards his mother.

Mary looked at Basil Smith.

Who said, careful to get the words right: ‘I am very sorry that I killed your rabbit.’

The father let out a sharp outraged breath, but kept quiet at a glance from his wife.

The chest of Dennis swelled and sank – in one moment there would be a storm of tears.

‘Dennis,’ said Mary, ‘say after me: Mr Smith, I’m very sorry I set fire to your house.’

Dennis said in a rush, to get it out in time: ‘Mr Smith I’m very sorry I set fire to your … to your … to your …’ He sniffed and heaved, and Mary said firmly: ‘House, Dennis.’

‘House,’ said Dennis, in a wail. He then rushed at his mother, buried his head in her waist, and stood howling and wrestling, while she laid large hands on his ginger head and smiled over it at Mr Basil Smith.

‘Dear God,’ said her husband, letting his folded arms drop dramatically, now the ridiculous play was over. ‘Come and have a drink, Basil.’

The men went off. The two other children stood silent and abashed, because of the force of Dennis’s emotion, for which they clearly felt partly responsible. Then they slipped out to play. The house was tranquil again, save for Dennis’s quietening sobs. Soon Mary took the boy up to his room to sleep it off. I stayed in the great, stone-floored pottery, looking at my stranged twisted animal, and the blues and greens of Mary’s work all around the walls.

Supper was early and soon over. The boys were silent, Dennis too limp to eat. Bed was prescribed for everyone. William kept looking at his wife, his mouth set under his ginger moustache, and he could positively be heard thinking: Filling them full of this nonsense while I try to bring them up reasonable human beings! But she avoided his eyes, and sat calm and remote, serving mashed potatoes and brown stew. It was only when we had finished the washing up that she smiled at him – her sweet, amused smile. It was clear they needed to be alone. I said I wanted an early night and left them: he had gone to touch her before I was out of the room.

Next day, a warm summer Sunday, everyone was relaxed, the old house peaceful. I left that evening, with my clay creature, and Mary said smiling, humouring me: ‘Let me know how things go on with your place, wherever it is.’ But I had her beautiful animal in my suitcase, so I did not mind being humoured.

That night, at home, I went into the marketplace, and up to the older potter who stilled his wheel when he saw me coming. The small boy lifted his frowning attentive eyes from the potter’s hand and smiled at me. I held out Mary’s creature. The old man took it, screwed up his eyes to examine it, nodded. He held it in his left hand, scattered water on it with his right, held his palm down towards the littered dust, and the creature jumped off it and away, with quick, jerky movements, not stopping until it was through the huts, clear of the settlement, and against a small outcrop of jagged brown rocks where it raised its front paws and froze in the posture Mary had created for it. Overhead an eagle or a hawk floated by, looked down, but failed to see Mary’s creature, and floated on, up and away into the great blue spaces over the flat dry plain to the mountains. I heard the wheel creak; the old man was back at work. The small boy crouched, watching, and the water flung by the potter’s right hand sprayed the bowl he was making and the child’s face, in a beautiful curving spray of glittering light.

Between Men

The chair facing the door was covered in coffee-brown satin. Maureen Jeffries wore dark brown silk tights and a white ruffled shirt. She would look a delectable morsel in the great winged chair. No sooner was she arranged in it, however, than she got out again (with a pathetic smile of which she was certainly unconscious) and sat less dramatically in the corner of a yellow settee. Here she remained some minutes, thinking that after all, her letter of invitation had said, jocularly (she was aware the phrase had an arch quality she did not altogether like): ‘Come and meet the new me!’

What was new was her hairstyle, that she was a stone lighter in weight, that she had been dowered afresh by nature (a word she was fond of) with delicacy of complexion. There was no doubt all this would be better displayed in the big brown chair: she made the change back again.

The second time she removed herself to the yellow settee was out of decency, a genuine calculation of kindness. To ask Peggy Bayley to visit her at all was brave of her, she had needed to swallow pride. But Peggy would not be able to compete with the ruffled lace shirt and all that it set off, and while this would be so precisely because of her advantages … that she was married, comfortably, to Professor Bayley (whose mistress she, Maureen, had been for four years) – nevertheless there was no need to rub in her, Maureen’s, renewed and indeed incredible attractiveness, even though it had been announced by the words: the new me.

Besides, her attractiveness was all that she, Maureen, had to face the world with again, and why not display it to the wife of Professor Bayley, who had not married herself, but had married Peggy instead? Though (she whispered it to herself, fierce and bitter) if she had tricked Tom Bayley into it, put pressure on him, as Peggy had, no doubt she would be Mrs Bayley … She would go back to the brown chair.

But if she had tricked Tom into it, then it would have served her right, as it certainly served Peggy right, if from the start of this marriage Tom Bayley had insisted on a second, bachelor flat into which she, Maureen, was never allowed to go, just as Peggy was not. She, Maureen, would have refused marriage on such terms, she must give herself credit for that; in fact, her insistence on fidelity from Tom, a natural philanderer, was doubtless the reason for his leaving her for Peggy. So on the whole she did not really envy Peggy, who had achieved marriage when she was already nearly forty with the eminent and attractive professor at the price of knowing from the start she would not be the only woman in his life; and knowing, moreover, she had achieved marriage by the oldest trick in the world …

At this point Maureen left the brown chair for the third time, found the yellow settee obvious, and sat on the floor, in the grip of self-disgust. She was viewing the deterioration of her character, even while she was unable to stop the flow of her bitter thoughts about Peggy. Viewing herself clear-sightedly had, in fact, been as much her occupation for the last six months of semi-retreat as losing a stone and regaining her beauty.

Which she had: she was thirty-nine and she had never been more attractive. The tomboy who had left home in Iowa for the freedoms of New York had been lovely, as every fairly endowed young girl is lovely, but what she was now was the product of twenty years of work on herself. And other people’s work too … She was a small, round, white-skinned, big-brown-eyed, black-haired beauty, but her sympathy, her softness, her magnetism were the creation of the loves of a dozen intelligent men. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year-old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl’s genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

It had been six months ago when her most recent – and, she had hoped, her final – lover, Jack Boles, had left her, and left her in pieces, that it had occurred to her that twenty – indeed, only ten – years ago she had discarded lovers, she had been the one to say, as Jack had said – embarrassed and guilty, but not more than he could easily come to terms with – ‘I’m sorry, forgive me, I’m off.’ And, and this was the point, she had never calculated the consequences to herself, had taken money from no man, save what she considered she had earned, had remained herself always. (In her time with Jack she had expressed opinions not her own to please him: he was a man who disliked women disagreeing with him.) Above all, she had never given a moment’s thought to what people might say. But when Jack threw her over, after an affair which was publicized through the newspapers for months (‘Famous film director shares flat in Cannes with the painter Maureen Jeffries’) she had thought first of all: I’ll be a laughing stock. She had told everyone, with reason, that he would marry her. Then she thought: But he stayed with me less than a year, no one has got tired of me before so quickly. Then: the woman he has thrown me over for is not a patch on me, and she can’t even cook. Then back again to the beginning: People must be laughing at me.

Self-contempt poisoned her, particularly as she was unable to let Jack go, but pursued him with telephone calls, letters, reproaches, reminders that he had promised marriage. She spoke of what she had given him, did everything in fact that she despised most in women. Above all, she had not left this flat whose rent he had recently paid for five years. What it amounted to was, he was buying her off with the lease of this flat.

And instead of walking right out of it with her clothes (she was surely entitled to those?) she was still here, making herself beautiful and fighting down terror.

At eighteen, leaving her father’s house (he was a post-office clerk), she had had her sex and her courage. Not beauty. For like many other professional beauties, women who spend their lives with men, she was not beautiful at all. What she had was a focused sex, her whole being aware and sharpened by sex, that made her seem beautiful. Now, twenty years later, after being the mistress of eleven men, all of them eminent or at least potentially eminent, she had her sex, and her courage. But – since she had never put her own talent, painting, first; but always the career of whichever man she was living with, and out of an instinct of generosity which was probably the best thing in her – she now could not earn a living. At least, not in the style she had been used to.

Since she had left home she had devoted her talents, her warmth, her imagination to an art teacher (her first lover), two actors (then unknown, now world-famous), a choreographer; a writer; another writer; then, crossing the Atlantic to Europe, a film director (Italy), an actor (France), a writer (London), Professor Tom Bayley (London), Jack Boles, film director (London). Who could say how much of her offered self, her continually poured-forth devotion to their work, was responsible for their success? (As she demanded of herself fiercely, weeping, in the dark hours.)

She now had left her sympathy, her charm, her talents for dress and decor, a minor talent for painting (which did not mean she was not a discriminating critic of other people’s work), the fact she was a perfect cook, and her abilities in bed, which she knew were outstanding.

And the moment she stepped out of this flat, she would step out, also, of the world of international money and prestige. To what? Her father, now living in a rooming house in Chicago? No, her only hope was to find another man as eminent and lustrous as the others; for she could no longer afford the unknown geniuses, the potential artists. This is what she was waiting for, and why she remained in the luxurious flat, which must serve as a base; and why she despised herself so painfully; and why she had invited Peggy Bayley to visit her. One: she needed to bolster herself up by seeing this woman, whose career (as the mistress of well-known men) had been similar to hers, and who was now well married. Second: she was going to ask her help. She had gone carefully through the list of her ex-lovers, written to three, and drawn three friendly but unhelpful letters. She had remained, officially, a ‘friend’ of Tom Bayley; but she knew better than to offend his wife by approaching him except with her approval. She would ask Peggy to ask Tom to use his influence to get her a job of the kind that would enable her to meet the right sort of man.

When the doorbell rang, and she had answered it, she went hastily to the big brown chair, this time out of bravado, even honesty. She was appealing to the wife of a man whose very publicized mistress she had been; and she did not wish to soften the difficulties of it by looking less attractive than she could; even though Peggy would enter with nothing left of her own beauty; for three years of marriage with Professor Bayley had turned her into a sensible, good-looking woman, the sleek feline quality gone that had led her from Cape Town to Europe as a minor actress, which career she had given up, quite rightly, for the one she was born for.

But Peggy Bayley entered, as it were, four years back: if Maureen was small, delicate, luscious, then Peggy’s mode was to be a siren: Maureen jerked herself up, saw Peggy push pale hair off a brown cheek with a white ringed hand and slide her a green-eyed mocking smile. She involuntarily exclaimed: ‘Tom’s ditched you!’

Peggy laughed – her voice, like Maureen’s, was the husky voice of the sex-woman – and said: ‘How did you guess!’ At which she turned, her hips angled in a mannequin’s pose, letting her gold hair fall over her face, showing off a straight green linen dress that owed everything to a newly provocative body. Not a trace left of the sensible healthy housewife of the last three years: she, like Maureen, was once again focused behind her sexuality, poised on it, vibrating with it.

She said: ‘We both of us look very much the better for being ditched!’

Now, with every consciousness of how she looked, she appropriated the yellow settee in a coil of femininity, and said: ‘Give me a drink and don’t look so surprised. After all, I suppose I could have seen it coming?’ This was a query addressed to – a fellow conspirator? No. Victim? No. Fellow artisan – yes. Maureen realized that the only-just-under-the-surface hostility that had characterized their meetings when Peggy was with Tom Bayley had vanished entirely. But she was not altogether happy yet about this flow of comradeship. Frowning, she got out of the brown satin chair, a cigarette clumsy between her lips. She remembered that the frown and the dangling cigarette belonged to the condition of a woman sure of a man; her instincts were, then, to lie to Peggy, and precisely because she did not like to admit, even now, long after the fact, just how badly she was alone? She poured large brandies, and asked: ‘Who did he leave you for?’

Peggy said: ‘I left him,’ and kept her green eyes steady on Maureen’s face to make her accept it, despite the incredulity she saw there.

‘No, really, it’s true – of course there were women all the time, that’s why he insisted on the hidey-hole in Chelsea …’ Maureen definitely smiled now, to remind her of how often she had not acknowledged the reason for the hidey-hole. It had been ‘Bill’s study, where he can get away from dreary domesticity’. Peggy accepted the reminder with a small honest smile that nevertheless had impatience. ‘Well of course I told lies and played little games, don’t we all?’ – that’s what the smile said; and Maureen’s dislike of herself made her say aloud, so as to put an end to her silent rancorous criticism of Peggy: ‘Well, all right then. But you did force him to marry you.’ She had taken three large gulps of brandy. Whereas she had drunk far too much in the months after Jack had left her, during the last weeks her diet had forbidden her alcohol, and she was out of practice. She felt herself already getting tight, and she said: ‘If I’m going to get tight, then you’ve got to too.’

‘I was drunk every day and night for two months,’ said Peggy, again with the level green look. ‘But you can’t drink if you want to keep pretty.’

Maureen went back to the brown chair, looked at Peggy through coiling blue smoke, and said: ‘I was drunk all the time for – it was ages. It was disgusting. I couldn’t stop.’

Peggy said: ‘Well all right, we’ve finished with that. But the point was, not the other women – we discussed his character thoroughly when we married and …’ Here she stopped to acknowledge Maureen’s rather sour smile, and said: ‘It’s part of our role, isn’t it, to thoroughly discuss their characters?’ At this, both women’s eyes filled with tears, which both blinked away. Another barrier had gone down.

Peggy said: ‘I came here to show myself off, because of your boasting little letter – I’ve been watching you patronize me since I married Tom, being dull and ordinary – I wanted you to see the new me! … God knows why one loses one’s sex when one’s settled with a man.’

They both giggled suddenly, rolling over, Peggy on her yellow linen, Maureen on her glossy brown. Then at the same moment, they had to fight back the tears.

‘No,’ said Maureen, sitting up, ‘I’m not going to cry, oh no! I’ve stopped crying, there’s not the slightest point.’

‘Then let’s have some more to drink,’ and Peggy handed over her glass.

They were both tight, already; since both were in any case on the edge of themselves with fasting.

Maureen half filled both glasses with brandy, and asked: ‘Did you really leave him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’ve got better reason to like yourself than I have. I fought, and I made scenes, and when I think of it now …’ She took a brandy gulp, looked around the expensive room, and said: ‘And I’m still living on him now and that’s what’s so horrible.’

‘Well, don’t cry, dear,’ said Peggy. The brandy was slurring her, making her indolent. The dear made Maureen shrink. It was the meaningless word of the theatre and film people, which was all right, even enjoyable, with the theatre and film people, but it was only one step from …

‘Don’t,’ said Maureen, sharp. Peggy widened her long green eyes in a ‘charming’ way, then let them narrow into the honesty of her real nature, and laughed.

‘I see your point,’ she said. ‘Well, we’d better face it, hadn’t we? We’re not so far off, are we?’

‘Yes,’ said Maureen. ‘I’ve been thinking it out. If we had married them, that marriage certificate, you know, well then, we’d have felt quite all right to take money, in return for everything, everything, everything!’ She put her face down and sobbed.

‘Shut up,’ said Peggy. But it sounded because of her tightness like ‘Shhrrrp.’

‘No,’ said Maureen, sitting up and sniffing. ‘It’s true. I’ve never taken money – I mean I’ve never taken anything more than housekeeping money and presents of clothes – have you?’ Peggy was not looking at her, so she went on: ‘All right, but I’ll take a guess that Tom Bayley’s the first man you’ve taken a settlement from, or alimony – isn’t that so? And that’s because you were married to him.’

‘I suppose so. I told myself I wouldn’t but I have.’

‘And you don’t really feel bad about it, just because of that marriage certificate?’

Peggy turned her glass round and round between long soft fingers and at length nodded: I suppose so.

‘Yes. Of course. And all the fun we’ve both made about that marriage certificate in our time. But the point is, taking money when you’re married doesn’t make you feel like a tart. With all the men I’ve been with, I’ve always had to argue with myself, I’ve said, Well, how much would he have to pay for what I do for him – the cooking and the housekeeping and the interior decoration and the advice? A fortune! So there’s no need for me to feel badly about living in his flat and taking clothes. But I did feel bad, always. But if Jack had married me, living in this bloody flat of his wouldn’t make me feel like a bloody tart.’ She burst into savage angry tears, stopped herself, breathed deeply, and sat silent, breathing deep. Then she got up, refilled her glass and Peggy’s, and sat down. The two women sat in silence, until at last Maureen said: ‘Why did you leave him?’

‘When he married me we both thought I was pregnant … no, it’s true. I know what you and everyone else said, but it was true. I had no periods for three months, and then I was very ill, they said it was a miscarriage.’

‘He wants children?’

‘Didn’t he with you?’

‘No.’

‘Then he’s changed. He wants them badly.’

‘Jack wouldn’t hear of children, wouldn’t hear of them, but that little bitch he’s ditched me for … I hear you’re great friends with them?’ She meant Jack and the girl for whom she was thrown over.

Peggy said: ‘Jack is a great friend of Tom’s.’ This was very dry, and Maureen said: ‘Yes. Yes! All Jack’s friends – I cooked for them, I entertained them, but do you know not one of them has ever rung me up since he left me? They were his friends, not mine.’

‘Exactly. Since I left Tom I haven’t seen either Jack or his new girl. They visit Tom.’

‘I suppose one of Tom’s girls got pregnant?’

‘Yes. He came to me and told me. I knew what I was supposed to do, and I did it. I said: Right, you can have your divorce.’

‘Then you’ve got your self-respect, at least.’

Peggy turned her glass round, looking into it; it slopped over on to the yellow linen. Both women watched the orange stain spread, without moving, in an aesthetic interest.

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Peggy. ‘Because I said: “You can have your divorce, but you’ve got to give me so much money, or else I’ll sue you for infidelity – I’ve got the evidence a thousand times over.”’

‘How much?’

Peggy coloured, took a gulp of brandy and said: ‘I’m going to get forty pounds a month alimony. It’s a lot for him – he’s a professor, not a film director.’

‘He can’t afford it?’

‘No. He told me he must give up his hidey-hole. I said: “Too bad.”’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Twenty-seven. An art student. She’s pretty and sweet and dumb.’

‘But she’s pregnant.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve never had a baby?’

‘No. But I’ve had several abortions and miscarriages.’

The two women looked frankly at each other, their faces bitter.

‘Yes,’ said Maureen. ‘I’ve had five abortions and one of them was by one of those old women. I don’t even use anything, and I don’t get pregnant … How did you like Jack’s new girl?’

‘I liked her,’ said Peggy, apologetically.

‘She’s an intellectual,’ said Maureen: it sounded like ‘inteleshual’.

‘Yes.’

‘Ever so bright and well-informed.’ Maureen battled a while with her better self, won the battle, and said: ‘But why? She’s attractive, but she’s such a schoolgirl, she’s a nice bright clever little schoolgirl with nice bright little clothes.’

Peggy said: ‘Stop it. Stop it at once.’

‘Yes,’ said Maureen. But she added, out of her agonized depths: ‘And she can’t even cook!’

And now Peggy laughed, flinging herself back and spilling more brandy from her drunken hand. After a while, Maureen laughed too.

Peggy said: ‘I was thinking, how many times have wives and mistresses said about us: Peggy’s such a bore, Maureen’s so obvious.’

‘I can hear them: of course they’re very pretty, and of course they can dress well, and they’re marvellous cooks, and I suppose they’re good in bed, but what have they got?’

‘Stop it,’ said Peggy.

Both women were now drunk. It was getting late. The room was full of shadow, its white walls fading into blue heights; the glossy chairs, tables, rugs, sending out deep gleams of light.

‘Shall I turn on the light?’

‘Not yet.’ Peggy now got up herself to refill her glass. She said: ‘I hope she has the sense not to throw up her job.’

‘Who, Jack’s red-headed bitch?’

‘Who else? Tom’s girl is all right, she’s actually pregnant.’

‘You’re right. But I bet she does, I bet Jack’s trying to make her give it up.’

‘I know he is. Just before I left Tom – before he threw me over – your Jack and she were over to dinner. Jack was getting at her for her column, he was sniping at her all evening – he said it was a left-wing society hostess’s view of politics. A left-wing bird’s-eye view, he said.’

‘He hated me painting,’ said Maureen. ‘Every time I said I wanted a morning to paint, he made gibes about Sunday painters. I’d serve him his breakfast, and go up to the studio – well, it’s the spare room really. First he’d shout up funny cracks, then he’d come up and say he was hungry. He’d start being hungry at eleven in the morning. Then if I didn’t come down and cook, he’d make love. Then we’d talk about his work. We’d talk about his bloody films all day and half the night …’ Maureen’s voice broke into a wail: ‘It’s all so unfair, so unfair, so unfair … they were all like that. I’m not saying I’d have been a great painter, but I might have been something. Something of my own … Not one of those men did anything but make fun, or patronize me … all of them, in one way or another. And of course, one always gives in, because one cares more for …’

Peggy who had been half asleep, drooping over her settee, sat up and said: ‘Stop it, Maureen. What’s the good of it?’

‘But it’s true. I’ve spent twenty years of my life, eighteen hours a day, bolstering up some man’s ambition. Well, isn’t it true?’

‘It’s true, but stop it. We chose it.’

‘Yes. And if that silly red-haired bitch gives up her job, she’ll get what she deserves.’

‘She’ll be where we are.’

‘But Jack says he’s going to marry her.’

‘Tom married me.’

‘He was intrigued by that clever little red-headed mind of hers. All those bright remarks about politics. But now he’s doing everything he can to stop her column. Not that it would be any loss to the nation, but she’d better watch out, oh yes, she had …’ Maureen weaved her brandy glass back and forth in front of hypnotized eyes.

‘Which is the other reason I came to see you.’

‘You didn’t come to see the new me?’

‘It’s the same thing.’

‘Well?’

‘How much money have you got?’

‘Nothing.’

‘How long is the lease for this flat?’ Maureen held up the fingers of one hand. ‘Five years? Then sell the lease.’

‘Oh I couldn’t.’

‘Oh yes you could. It would bring you in about two thousand, I reckon. We could take a flat somewhere less expensive.’

‘We could?’

‘And I’ve got forty pounds a month. Well, then.’

‘Well then what?’ Maureen was lying practically flat in the big chair, her white lace shirt ruffled up around her breasts, so that a slim brown waist and diaphragm showed above the tight brown trousers. She held her brandy glass in front of her eyes and moved it back and forth, watching the amber liquid slopping in the glass. From time to time the brandy fell on her brown stomach flesh and she giggled.

Peggy said: ‘If we don’t do something, I’ve got to go back to my parents in Oudtshoorn – they’re ostrich farmers. I was the bright girl that escaped. Well, I’ll never make an actress. So I’ll be back living out my life among the sugar-bushes and the ostriches. And where will you be?’

‘Ditto, ditto.’ Maureen now wriggled her soft brown head sideways and let brandy drip into her open mouth.

‘We’re going to open a dress shop. If there’s one thing we both really understand, it’s how to dress.’

‘Good idea.’

‘What city would you fancy?’

‘I fancy Paris.’

‘We couldn’t compete in Paris.’

‘No, can’t compete in … how about Rome? I’ve got three ex-lovers in Rome.’

‘They’re not much good when it comes to trouble.’

‘No good at all.’

‘Better stay in London.’

‘Better stay in London. Like another drink?’

‘Yes. Yesssh.’

‘I’ll get-get-itit.’

‘Next time, we mustn’t go to bed without the marriage shertificate.’

‘A likely shtory.’

‘But it’s against my prinshiples, bargaining.’

‘Oh I know, I know.’

‘Yesh.’

‘Perhaps we’d better be leshbians, what do you think?’

Peggy got up, with difficulty, came to Maureen, and put her hand on Maureen’s bare diaphragm. ‘Doesh that do anything for you?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘I fanshy men myself,’ said Peggy, returning to her settee, where she sat with a bump, spilling liquor.

‘Me too and a fat lot of good it duz ush.’

‘Next time, we don’t give up our jobs, we stick with the dress shop.’

‘Yessh …’

A pause. Then Peggy sat up, and focused. She was pervaded by an immense earnestness. ‘Listen, she said. ‘No, damn it, lishen, that’s what I mean to shay all the time, I really mean it.’

‘I do too.’

‘No. No giving it up the firsht time a m-m-man appearsh. Damn it, I’m drunk, but I mean it … No, Maureen, I’m not going to shtart a dresh shop unless that’s undershtood from the shtart. We musht we musht agree to that, work firsht, or elshe, or else you know where we’re going to end up.’ Peggy brought out the last in a rush, and lay back, satisfied.

Maureen now sat up, earnest, trying to control her tongue: ‘But … what … we are both good at, itsh, it’s bolshtering up some damned genus, genius.’

‘Not any more. Oh no. You’ve got to promish me, Maureen, promish me, or elshe …’

‘All right, I promish.’

‘Good.’

‘Have another drink?’

‘Lovely brandy, lovely lovely lovely blandy.’

‘Lovely brandy …’

The Witness

In the mornings, when Mr Brooke had hung his hat carefully on the nail over his desk, and arranged his pipe and tobacco at his elbow, he used to turn to the others and say hopefully: ‘You should have just seen Twister today. He brought my newspaper from the doorstep without dropping it once.’ Then he looked at the polite, hostile faces, laughed a short, spluttering, nervous laugh, and bent his head to his papers.

Miss Jenkins, the private secretary, kept a peke called Darling, and she had only to mention him for everyone to listen and laugh. As for Richards, he was engaged, and they pulled his leg about it. Every time he went purple and writhed delightedly under his desk. The accountant, Miss Ives, a tart old maid who lived some proud, defiant life of her own, had a garden. When she talked about trees the office grew silent with respect. She won prizes at flower shows. There was no getting past her.

At eight, as they settled down for the day, at eleven when cups of tea came round slopped into saucers, at three in the afternoon when they ate cream cakes, they all had something.

Mr Brooke had brought his terrier Twister simply so that he could make them notice him sometimes. First it was a canary, but he decided at last canaries couldn’t be interesting. Although Miss Jenkins’ peke did nothing but eat, she could talk about it every day and get an audience, but then she was a very attractive girl. She wouldn’t have been the boss’s private secretary if she wasn’t. Mr Brooke’s dog did everything. He taught it at night, in his room, to beg and balance and wait for sugar. He used to rub its ears gratefully, thinking: ‘It will make them sit up when I tell them he can keep perfectly still for ten minutes by the watch the office gave me when I had worked for them twenty years.’ He used to say things like that to himself long after he had given up trying to attract their notice.

And, after all, he had not been alone, had not added up figures from eight to four for thirty years, without making something of his own he could live from. He decided to keep the canary, because it took no room and he had come to enjoy its noise. He kept the dog, too, because it was company, of a kind. The real reason why he got rid of neither was because they annoyed his landlady, with whom he bickered continually. After office he used to walk home thinking that after supper he would make the dog bark so that she would come in and make a scene. These scenes usually ended in her crying; and then he could say: ‘I am alone in the world too, my dear.’ Sometimes she made him a cup of tea before going to bed, saying bitterly: ‘If you won’t look after yourself I suppose someone must. But don’t let that damned dog spill it all over the floor.’

After she had gone to bed, and there was no chance of meeting her in the passage, he cut out pictures from magazines, sent off postal orders to addresses he was careful to keep hidden from her inquisitive eyes, and was not in the least ashamed of himself. He was proud of it; it was a gesture of defiance, like getting drunk every Friday. He chose Fridays because on Saturday mornings, when he was really not fit for work, he could annoy Miss Ives by saying: ‘I went on the loose last night.’ Then he got through the hours somehow. A man was entitled to something, and he did not care for gardens.

The rest of the week he used to sit quietly at his desk, watching them talk together as if he were simply not there, and wish that Miss Jenkins’ dog would get ill, and she would ask him for advice; or that Miss Ives would say: ‘Do help me with my ledger; I have never seen anyone who could calculate as fast as you’; or that Richards would quarrel with his girl and confide in him. He imagined himself saying: ‘Women! Of course! You can’t tell me anything.’

Other times he stood looking out of the window, listening to the talk behind him, pretending not to, pretending he was indifferent. Two storeys down in the street life rushed past. Always, he felt, he had been looking out of windows. He dreamed, often, that two of the cars down below would crash into each other, and that he was the only witness. Police would come stamping up the stairs with notebooks, the typists would ask avidly ‘What actually happened, Mr Brooke?’, the boss would slap him on the shoulder and say: ‘How lucky you saw it. I don’t know what I would do without you.’ He imagined himself in Court, giving evidence. ‘Yes, your Worship, I always look out of the window at that time every day. I make a habit of it. I saw everything …’

But there never was an accident, the police only came once, and that was to talk to Miss Jenkins when her peke got lost, and he hardly saw Mr Jones except to nod to. It was Miss Ives who was his real boss.

He used to peep through the door of the typists’ room, where six girls worked, when the boss went through each morning, and go sick with envious admiration.

Mr Jones was a large, red-faced man with hair grown white over the ears; and after lunch every day he smelled of beer. Nevertheless, the girls would do anything for him. He would say breezily: ‘Well, and how’s life today?’ Sometimes he put his arm round the prettiest and said: ‘You’re too cute to keep long. You’ll be getting married …’ He said it as if he were handing out medals, something one had to do, part of his job. It’s only to make them work harder, thought Mr Brooke bitterly, surreptitiously shutting the door, and listening to how the typewriters started clattering furiously the moment Mr Jones left. Then he used to go to the washroom and look at his own face in the glass. He had no white hair himself: he was quite a good-looking man, he thought. But if he put his arm round a girl’s shoulder he would get his face slapped, he knew that.

It was the year he was fifty-five, retiring age, that Marnie de Kok came into the office as a junior, straight from school. Mr Brooke did not want to leave off working. He couldn’t live on what he had saved; and in any case the office was all he had. For some weeks he looked crumpled up with apprehension, but Mr Jones said nothing, and after a while he took heart again. He did not want to think about it, and besides, with Marnie there everything was changed. After one morning there was a different feeling in the office.

She was a girl of eighteen from some little dorp miles away, the youngest of ten children. She had a small plump, fresh face that always had a look of delighted expectation, a shrill, expressive voice, and was as slim and as quick as a fish. She darted about the place, talking to the staff as if it had never entered her head that anyone in the world could not be pleased to waste his time on her account. She shattered the sacred silence of the main office with her gossip about her family, sat on the desks and swung her legs, put vases of flowers among the telephones. And even Miss Ives took off her glasses and watched her. They all watched her, and particularly Mr Jones who made plenty of excuses to leave his desk, with the indulgent, amused, faintly ironic smile with which one looks at children, remembering what all that fearlessness and charm is going to come to. As for Mr Brooke he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. For a while he was afraid to speak, for Marnie, like the others, seemed not to know he was there, and when he did, she looked at him with startled distaste, a look he was used to, though it in no way corresponded with what he felt about himself. She might be my daughter, he said to himself defensively; and he used to ask her whom she ate lunch with, what picture she has seen the night before, as a jealous lover can’t resist talking about his mistress, feeling that even to speak about what she has been doing robs it of its danger, makes the extraordinary and wonderful life she leads apart from him, in some way his. But Marnie answered shortly, or not at all, wrinkling up her nose.

Even that he found attractive. What was so charming about her was her directness, the simplicity of her responses. She knew nothing of the secret sycophancy of the office which made the typists speak of Mr Jones in one voice and Miss Ives in another. She treated everyone as if she had known them always. She was as confiding as a child, read her letters out loud, jumped with joy when parcels came from home, and wept when someone suggested gently that there were better ways of doing her work.

For she was catastrophically inefficient. She was supposed to learn filing; but in actual fact she made the tea, slipped over to the teashop across the road ten times a day for cream cakes, and gave people advice about their colds or how to make their dresses.

The other typists, who were after all her natural enemies, were taken by surprise and treated her with the tenderest indulgence. It was because it occurred to no one that she could last out the first month. But Miss Ives made out her second pay-cheque, which was very generous, with a grim face, and snubbed her until she cried.

It was Miss Ives, who was afraid of nothing, who at last walked into Mr Jones’ office and said that the child was impossible and must leave at once. As it was the files would take months to get straight. No one could find anything.

She came back to her desk looking grimmer than ever, her lips twitching.

She said angrily, ‘I’ve kept myself for twenty-seven years this March. I’ve never had anything. How many women have the qualifications I have? I should have had a pretty face.’ And then she burst into tears. It was mild hysterics. Mr Brooke was the first to fuss around with water and handkerchiefs. No one had ever seen Miss Ives cry.

And what about? All Mr Jones had said was that Marnie was the daughter of an old school friend and he had promised to look after her. If she was no good at filing, then she must be given odd jobs.

‘Is this an office or a charitable institution?’ demanded Miss Ives. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, never.’ And then she turned to Mr Brooke, who was leaning ineffectually over her, and said: ‘There are other people who should go too. I suppose he was a friend of your father? Getting drunk and making a pig of yourself. Pictures of girls in your desk, and putting grease on your hair in the washrooms …’

Mr Brooke went white, tried to find words, looked helplessly round for support to Miss Jenkins and Richards. They did not meet his eyes. He felt as if they were dealing him invisible blows on the face; but after a few moments Miss Ives put away her handkerchief, picked up her pen with a gesture of endurance, and went back to her ledger. No one looked at Mr Brooke.

He made himself forget it. She was hysterical, he said. Women would say anything. He knew from what men had told him there were times you should take no notice of them. An old maid, too, he said spitefully, wishing he could say it aloud, forgetting that she, too, had made of her weakness a strength, and that she could not be hurt long by him, any more than he could by her.

But that was not the only case of hysteria. It seemed extraordinary that for years these people had worked together, making the same jokes, asking after each other’s health, borrowing each other’s things, and then everything went wrong from one day to the next.

For instance one of the typists wept with rage all of one morning because Mr Jones sent back a letter to be retyped. Such a thing had never been known. Such was his manner, as a rule, that a reprimand was almost as warming as praise.

As for Marnie herself, she was like a small child who does not know why it has been slapped. She wandered about the office miserably, sniffing a little, until by chance Mr Jones saw her and asked what was wrong. She began to cry, and he took her into his room. The door was shut for over an hour while clients waited. When she came out, subdued but cheerful, the typists cold-shouldered her. Then she rushed in to Miss Ives and asked if she could move her desk in to the main office, because the other girls were ‘nasty to her’. Very naturally Miss Ives was unsympathetic, and she cried again, with her head among the papers on Mr Brooke’s desk. It happened to be the nearest.

It was lunch time. Everyone left but Marnie and Mr Brooke. The repugnance she felt for this elderly man with the greasy faded hair, the creased white hands, the intimate unpleasant eyes, melted in the violence of her misery. She allowed him to stroke her hair. She cried on his shoulder as she had cried on Mr Jones’ shoulder that morning.

‘No one likes me,’ she sobbed.

‘Of course everyone likes you.’

‘Only Mr Jones likes me.’

‘But Mr Jones is the boss …’ stammered Mr Brooke, appalled at her incredible ingenuousness. His heart ached for her. He caressed the damp bundle huddled over his desk gently, paternally, wanting only to console her. ‘If you could just remember this is an office, Marnie.’

‘I don’t want to work in an office. I want to go home. I want my mother. I want Mr Jones to send me home. He says I can’t. He says he will look after me …’

When they heard steps on the stairs Mr Brooke guiltily slipped back to his corner, and Marnie stood up, sullen and defiant, to face Miss Ives, who ignored her. Marnie dragged her feet across the floor to the typists’ room.

‘I suppose you have been encouraging her,’ said Miss Ives. ‘She needs a good spanking. I’ll give it to her myself soon.’

‘She’s homesick,’ he said.

‘What about her step-father in there?’ snapped Miss Ives, jerking her head at Mr Jones’ door.

‘He’s sorry for her,’ said Mr Brooke, defending his own new feeling of protectiveness for the girl.

‘Some people have no eyes in their heads,’ she said unpleasantly. ‘Taking her to the pictures. Taking her to dinner every night. I suppose that is being sorry for her too?’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Mr Brooke hotly. But he was sick with dismay and anger. He wanted to hit Miss Ives, wanted to run into Mr Jones’ room and hit him, wanted to do something desperate. But he sat himself down at his desk and began adding figures. He was behindhand as usual. ‘Slow but sure, that’s what I am,’ he said to himself, as always, when he saw how the work piled up and he never was level with it. But that afternoon Miss Ives returned him three sheets of calculations and said, ‘Try to be more accurate, Mr Brooke, if you please.’

At four, when Mr Jones came through the front office on his way home, Marnie was waiting to catch his eye. He stopped, smiling; then realized the entire staff were watching, and went on, reddening.

Marnie’s lips quivered again.

‘More rain coming,’ said Miss Ives acidly.

‘Can I take you to your bus-stop?’ asked Mr Brooke, defying Miss Ives. There was laughter from the open door of the typists’ room. Mr Brooke had heard that kind of laugh too often, after he had left a room, to care about it now. Marnie tossed her head at Miss Ives. ‘I should be pleased,’ she said daintily.

They walked down the stairs, she racing in front, he trying to keep up. She seemed to dance down the street; the sun was shining; it dazzled in her bright hair. Mr Brooke was panting, smiling, trying to find breath to talk. He knew that above their heads Miss Ives and the others leant over the sill watching them with scornful disgusted faces. He did not care; but when he saw Mr Jones come out of a shop, as if he had been waiting for Marnie, he stopped guiltily and said, ‘Good night, Sir.’

Mr Jones nodded, not looking at him. To Marnie he said, smiling gently, ‘Feeling happier? Don’t worry, you won’t be in an office for long. Some lucky man will marry you soon.’ It was the sort of thing he said to his typists. But not as he said it now.

Marnie laughed, ran up to him, kissed his cheek.

‘Well!’ said Mr Jones, looking fatuously pleased. He glared over Marnie’s head at Mr Brooke, who hurried off down the street as if he had been given an order, without looking around. Soon he heard Marnie pattering up behind him.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he spoke reproachfully.

Her face was happy, guileless. ‘He’s like my dad,’ she said.

At the bus-stop Mr Brooke suddenly could not bear to see her go. He caught her arm and said, ‘Come to my place and see my dog Twister. You would like him.’

She said, ‘You know, I didn’t like you at first. I do now.’

‘My dog can fetch the newspaper in the morning,’ he said. ‘He never tears it.’

‘I like dogs,’ she said confidingly, as if it were the most surprising news in the world.

When they reached his room he was so proud, so flustered, that he could only look at her and smile. He unlocked it with shaking hands and dropped the key when he saw the landlady peering through her window. Marnie picked it up, and went before him into his room as if taking possession of it.

‘What a nice room,’ she said. ‘But it’s too small. If you moved your bed …’

She darted over to the divan he slept on and pushed it across a corner. Then she patted cushions, moved a chair, and turned to him. ‘That’s much better,’ she said. ‘I’m good at this sort of thing. I’m a home girl. That’s what my mum says. She didn’t want me to come to an office. Dad and Mr Jones fixed it up.’

‘Your mother is quite right,’ said Mr Brooke devotedly.

It was then she paused to look about her, and it was then her face changed and Mr Brooke slowly went cold. He saw the room with her eyes, and saw himself, too, as she would see him henceforth.

It was a small room, with patterned wall-paper, all roses and ribbons. The canary hung in the window, the dog’s basket was under the bed. There was nothing else of Mr Brooke in the room that had been inhabited by so many people before him. Except the pictures, which covered most of the wall-paper.

Marnie moved forward slowly, with a queer hunching of her shoulders, as if a draught blew on them, and Mr Brooke went after her, unconsciously holding out his hands behind her back in appeal.

‘I must buy some pictures,’ he said, trying to sound casual.

There were film stars, bathing beauties, half-nude women all over his walls, dozens of them.

He knew, instinctively, that he should ask for her pity, as she had asked for his. He said, ‘I can’t afford to buy pictures.’

But when she turned towards him at last, he knew his expression must be wrong, for she searched his face, and looked as if she had trodden on something unpleasant.

‘I had forgotten about them,’ he cried, truthfully and desperately. Then: ‘I’m not like that, Marnie, not really.’

Her hand swung out and stung his cheek. ‘You dirty old man,’ she said. ‘You dirty, dirty old man.’

She ran out of his room, and as she went the landlady came in.

‘Baby-snatching?’ she said. ‘You can’t have women here, I told you.’

‘She’s my daughter,’ said Mr Brooke.

The door slammed. He sat on his bed and looked at the walls, and felt, for just a few moments, old and mean and small. Then he recovered himself and said aloud: ‘Well, and what do you expect, making me live alone?’ He was addressing, not only Marnie and the landlady, but all the women he had seen in the street, or on the screen, or eating at the next table.

‘You wouldn’t have stayed, anyway,’ he muttered at last. He began tearing the pictures off the walls. Then he slowly put them back again. He even cut out a new one from a paper called Parisian Fancies which he had sent for because of an advertisement, and hung it immediately over his bed. ‘That will give you something to think about,’ he said to the landlady, whom he could hear stomping about in the next room. Then he went out and got very drunk indeed.

Next morning the landlady saw the picture while he was in his bath, and told him he must go or she would fetch the police. ‘Indecent exposure, that’s what it is,’ she said.

‘Do you think I care?’ said Mr Brooke.

He was still a little drunk when he reached the office. He walked in aggressively, and at once Miss Ives sniffed and stared at him. She got up immediately and went in to Mr Jones’ room. Mr Jones came out with her and said, ‘If you do this again, Brooke, you must go. There’s a limit to everything.’

Through the open door, Mr Brooke could see Marnie swinging herself round and round in Mr Jones’ big chair, eating sweets.

Towards the middle of the morning Miss Jenkins started to cry and said, ‘Either she goes or I do.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Miss Ives. She nodded her head up and down significantly. ‘It won’t last. Something will happen, one way or the other. Things can’t go on like this.’ Miss Jenkins went home, saying she had a headache. Richards went in to Mr Jones’ office for something and came out, too angry to speak. The typewriters were silent next door. No one did any work except Miss Ives. It seemed everyone was waiting.

At lunchtime they all left early. Mr Brooke stayed in the office. His head ached, his limbs were stiff, and he couldn’t face the two flights of stairs. He ate sandwiches, and then went to sleep with his head on his desk. When he woke he was still alone. He could not think clearly, and wondered for a moment where he was. Then he saw flies gathering over the crumbs on his papers, and got up stiffly to fetch a duster. The door into the typists’ room was closed. He opened it a few inches and peered cautiously through. He thought for a moment he was still asleep, for there were Marnie and Mr Jones. His face was buried in her hair, and he was saying, ‘Please Marnie, please, please, please …’ as if he were drunk.

Mr Brooke stared, his eyes focusing with difficulty. Then Marnie gave a little scream and Mr Jones jumped up and came across. ‘Spying!’ he said angrily.

Mr Brooke had lost his breath. His mouth fell open, his hands spread out helplessly. Finally, he said to Marnie, ‘Why didn’t you slap his face?’

She ran across the room shouting, ‘You dirty old man, you dirty old man!’

‘He’s older than I am.’

‘You shut up, Brooke,’ said Mr Jones.

‘He has grown-up children. He has grandchildren, Marnie.’

Mr Jones lifted his fist; but at that moment Marnie said triumphantly, ‘I’m going to marry him. I’m going to get married. So there!’ Mr Jones dropped his arm, and his angry red face became slowly complacent, grateful, adoring.

Mr Brooke saw that she had said that for the first time; that if he had not entered perhaps she would never have said it.

He looked at Mr Jones, and out of his knowledge of himself hated him, but with a small feeling of envious admiration. The confused thought in his mind was: ‘If he had pictures he would be careful to keep them hidden.’

After a while, he said half-pityingly, half-spitefully to Marnie, ‘You are a silly little girl. You’ll be sorry.’ Then he turned and groped his way out, holding on to the walls.

Later in the afternoon Miss Ives brought him a cheque. He was dismissed with a bonus of ten pounds. Ten pounds for thirty years’ work! He was too numbed to notice it.

‘Did you know she was marrying him?’ he asked Miss Ives, wanting to see her made angry.

But she sounded pleased. ‘He told us just now.’

‘He’s older than I am …

‘Serves her right,’ snapped Miss Ives. ‘Little fool like that. It’s all she’s good for. Getting married. That’s all these girls think of. She’ll learn what men are.’

And then she handed him his hat, and began gently pushing him to the door. ‘You’d better go,’ she said, but not unkindly. ‘He doesn’t want to see you again. He said so. And you look after yourself. You can’t go drinking like that, at your age.’

Then she shut the door behind him. When he saw he was quite alone in the passage he began to laugh. He laughed hysterically for some time. Then he went slowly and carefully down the stairs, holding his hat in one hand and his fountain pen in the other. He began to walk down the street, but at the corner he came back, and waited at the foot of the stairs. He wanted to say goodbye to the people he had worked with so long. He could imagine them saying in the typists’ room: ‘What! old Brooke has gone, has he? I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to see him before he left.’

Twenty Years

A large room – no, more of a small hall … decorated with too much plaster pressed into shapes reminiscent of moulded puddings touched with gold … far too many people standing upright, each holding a glass while fitting ‘bite-sized’ canapés into their mouths and making conversation … what is this? A cocktail party, and no one here had not said earlier, Oh God, I’ll have to drop in for at least half an hour. Now they glanced about over their interlocutors’ heads, to see who else was there who should be spoken to or at least noticed. They tried not to look at their watches for they were off to restaurants or – much too late – to homes in suburbs or even other towns. An office party, and it was to celebrate half a century’s existence of a firm, an occasion important enough to merit this illustrious hotel.

There were a couple of chairs in a corner and in these people sank for a few moments to rest their feet and gather their forces.

One woman had settled there for rather longer, perhaps fifteen minutes, and she was staring in at the crowd. Not easy to keep one person in view, heads kept intervening, shoulders; and sometimes for a whole minute or two the person she seemed to be concentrating on was hidden from her. But she sat on, sure of her intention.

She was different from most of them there, not only because she was older. She was fifty? A young sixty? She wore – well, she was elegant enough, and fresh, for she had not spent all day working in an office.

The man she intermittently kept in view was middle-aged, handsome in a well-worn way, and was probably something in a design department. His clothes insisted on individuality – dark green jacket, a black silk polo neck.

The crowd was thinning a bit, people slipping away, hoping to be unnoticed. Now she could see him and she looked steadily at him, and with a frown. Had he noticed her? He had glanced at her once, twice, but went on talking to the man in front of him, and again looked past him, in her direction. His thoughtful look was not unlike hers, but it had in it something of affront or even grievance. He turned himself about deliberately so he stood four-square to her, and their eyes met, and while they looked long at each other neither tried to conceal it. She remained where she was, not frowning now, but not smiling either. After a few moments when he might easily – it seemed – simply walk away, he took some large strides through a by now sparse crowd and stood over her.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘this is certainly not where I’d expect to see you.’

‘I don’t see why not?’

Again, he might easily have taken off, but he sat down in the other chair. A waitress was circulating with wine, garnet and yellow, and she took a white wine, he a red.

‘Twenty years?’ she enquired finely, but with something like a grimace.

‘I suppose it can’t be far off twenty years.’

The way they were looking at each other now denied the twenty years.

Yet they were wary, he more than her. On guard. Noting this she smiled. Deliberately.

‘What are you expecting? Surely not that I am going to throw my wine in your face?’ And she laughed.

‘You throw …’ He was genuinely astonished. And accusing.

‘I’ve often enough wanted to – well, something of the kind. Much worse, if you must know … like killing you, for instance.’

But now, as if for the benefit of an imaginary spectator, he demonstrated male reaction to female irrationality, with a dropped jaw, raised brows, an, as it were, detached quizzicality.

‘You kill me,’ he merely let drop, with a cold smile.

‘Well, it did wear off, but there’s quite a residue of … I don’t think time does soften all that much, not really.’

And now his face lost its deliberate theatricality. He was serious. He examined her. Then he drank half his wine, shook his head in a way that might have meant, sour wine this! – put the glass back on a passing tray.

‘Anyone would think,’ said he, ‘that there was something you have to forgive me.’

At this it was her turn to direct at him a derisive laugh that matched his earlier theatricality.

There was something here that didn’t fit, and both could see it, and were prepared to show they could see it.

‘I waited for you all day,’ he said at last, deliberate. ‘I was sitting in the garden of that bloody hotel all day. And then I came back after dinner and stayed till midnight. Waiting. It was raining.’

She shifted her legs about, seemed to reject what he said, might have got up and walked away, on an impulse that definitely was as much from the past as from present discordance. She sighed … ‘And I waited for you. I didn’t go away at all. I stayed until midnight. Then I took a room in the hotel and woke up at five in the morning. I waited. In the garden, where we said. It was not raining.’

He laughed, short and angry.

She laughed: the same.

‘You haven’t changed,’ said she, irritable.

‘You are suggesting I didn’t wait all day and half the night for you?’

‘As it happens yes, that is what I am suggesting.’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ he exploded, and she smiled, lips compressed, in a way he recognized, for in a crescendo of anger he said, ‘You certainly haven’t changed. You never gave me credit for anything.’

‘Just as well then that we didn’t manage to make the same place, the same time.’

And now their eyes blazed up with regret, and a far from dead emotion.

‘Oh no,’ she began, and gathered herself to get up and go. He put out a hand to hold her. She subsided, looking at the large but fine hand that gripped her bare forearm. She shut her eyes, holding her breath.

‘My God,’ he said, softly.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Then his hand fell lingeringly off her arm, and both sighed.

‘I heard you were married,’ she remarked.

‘And of course you were.’

‘Why of course?’

He let that pass. ‘We have both been married,’ he summed up, lips tight and amused – life’s like that.

‘I am married.’

‘I suppose I am, really,’ he confessed.

‘How like you,’ she accused, with bitterness.

‘Oh no, not like that, you’re wrong, as it happens it is she who … but never mind.’

‘No, never mind,’ she said.

‘Children?’

‘Two,’ she said. ‘The girl is sixteen. The boy – fifteen.’

‘Grown up,’ he said. ‘And I have three. Three girls. A houseful of women.’

‘Just your style,’ she said, but quite amiably. She laughed. Not unamiably.

‘So what did happen that day?’ he enquired, achieving an amused detachment.

‘That far off day.’

‘Not so far off, evidently,’ he said, and again their eyes blazed up at each other.

By now they were almost alone in the room, and the last guests, looking back, noticed these two, locked in their intensity. One woman actually laughed and shrugged, worldly and envious, indicating the couple to her companion. A man. He grimaced.

‘I waited for you,’ he insisted.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Why should you doubt it?’

She thought seriously about this. Then, ‘I doubt it because – I waited so long. And because – well, it seemed all of a pattern with …’

‘Really? It really did? And what had I ever done to make you think … I adored you,’ he accused her. Fierce. Intimate, his face near hers.

‘You knew that.’

‘Then why …?’

‘I was there,’ he said.

She shut her eyes. She sat, eyes closed, and there were tears on her lashes.

He groaned, seeing them.

She opened her eyes. ‘Then it was the wrong day. We got the day wrong.’

‘Certainly not the wrong hotel,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘I can’t go past that hotel now without feeling sick.’

‘No. In fact I don’t go near it.’

‘The Green Swan?’

‘The Green Swan.’

‘Then why didn’t you telephone me?’ he asked.

‘Because – it was the last straw,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’

‘But I did. I rang twice. Then I thought, to hell with her.’

‘You did ring me?’ she said derisively, but with what seemed like hope that it was true.

‘Yes, I did.’

She snarled prettily. ‘Well, water under bridges.’ She got up and now he didn’t stop her. Perhaps she had expected him to. He watched her stand there hesitating. He looked at her bare brown forearm, as if he still had it in his grasp. Then he stood up.

‘I don’t think I feel that,’ he said. A proposition.

She shook her head slightly, teeth gripping her lower lip. She walked towards the exit: walked clumsily – blind.

He followed just behind her. ‘Darling,’ he said, in a low voice.

She shook her head and walked on, fast.

‘You bloody fool,’ he heard her say, softly, wildly, accusing. ‘You poor bloody fool.’

And he said, ‘You mean, you don’t believe I was there? Ah, poor darling, poor darling.’

But she had gone. He was now the last guest in the room, ignored by the waitresses who were tidying up. But they were all aware of him, and he realized they knew something had happened, had been watching them. We must have been putting on quite a show, she and I, he thought.

Quickly he walked out of the big room, through corridors, and then out of a side door of the hotel into a street that was dark, lights blurred because of rain. He stood on the pavement, his back to the hotel. There was no one in the street. Then a young woman came through the rain towards him, under a black umbrella, which hid her face. As he had done then, all those years ago, he stared: Is it she? Has she come at last? But she went on past him, and he turned his attention to the end of the street where she had come from. He stared as he had done then, through grey shrouds of rain. No one came, no one. And he went on standing there in the shabby street, while bitterness filled his throat and it seemed to him the twenty years still to be lived through were empty years, and because she had not come that day her absence had shadowed his life, forbidding him all love, all joy. He could not face what he still had to live through, and it was her fault …

Then, suddenly, he thought, I bet she isn’t standing somewhere in the rain grieving for me. She hasn’t given me a thought. When did she ever care a damn about me – not really … here I am standing here like a dolt thinking about her and she …

A clean and cold bitterness jolted him like electricity, and he walked briskly away to his own life full of the energy of decision.

To Room Nineteen

This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlingses’ marriage was grounded in intelligence.

They were older when they married than most of their married friends: in their well-seasoned late twenties. Both had had a number of affairs, sweet rather than bitter; and when they fell in love – for they did fall in love – had known each other for some time. They joked that they had saved each other ‘for the real thing’. That they had waited so long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible discrimination. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt) probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid, self-doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.

Not only they, but others, felt they were well matched: their friends’ delight was an additional proof of their happiness. They had played the same roles, male and female, in this group or set, if such a wide, loosely connected, constantly changing constellation of people could be called a set. They had both become, by virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others came for advice. They could be, and were, relied on. It was one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably because of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course! How right! How was it we never thought of it before!

And so they married amid general rejoicing, and because of their foresight and their sense for what was probable, nothing was a surprise to them.

Both had well-paid jobs. Matthew was a sub-editor on a large London newspaper, and Susan worked in an advertising firm. He was not the stuff of which editors or publicized journalists are made, but he was much more than ‘a sub-editor’, being one of the essential background people who in fact steady, inspire and make possible the people in the limelight. He was content with this position. Susan had a talent for commercial drawing. She was humorous about the advertisements she was responsible for, but she did not feel strongly about them one way or the other.

Both, before they married, had had pleasant flats, but they felt it unwise to base a marriage on either flat, because it might seem like a submission of personality on the part of the one whose flat it was not. They moved into a new flat in South Kensington on the clear understanding that when their marriage had settled down (a process they knew would not take long, and was in fact more a humorous concession to popular wisdom than what was due to themselves) they would buy a house and start a family.

And this is what happened. They lived in their charming flat for two years, giving parties and going to them, being a popular young married couple, and then Susan became pregnant, she gave up her job, and they bought a house in Richmond. It was typical of this couple that they had a son first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter. Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose. But people did feel these two had chosen; this balanced and sensible family was no more than what was due to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right.

And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in Richmond and were happy. They had everything they had wanted and had planned for.

And yet …

Well, even this was expected, that there must be a certain flatness …

Yes, yes, of course, it was natural they sometimes felt like this. Like what?

Their life seemed to be like a snake biting its tail. Matthew’s job for the sake of Susan, children, house, and garden – which caravanserai needed a well-paid job to maintain it. And Susan’s practical intelligence for the sake of Matthew, the children, the house and the garden – which unit would have collapsed in a week without her.

But there was no point about which either could say: ‘For the sake of this is all the rest.’ Children? But children can’t be a centre of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can’t be a wellspring to live from. Or they shouldn’t be. Susan and Matthew knew that well enough.

Matthew’s job? Ridiculous. It was an interesting job, but scarcely a reason for living. Matthew took pride in doing it well; but he could hardly be expected to be proud of the newspaper: the newspaper he read, his newspaper, was not the one he worked for.

Their love for each other? Well, that was nearest it. If this wasn’t a centre, what was? Yes, it was around this point, their love, that the whole extraordinary structure revolved. For extraordinary it certainly was. Both Susan and Matthew had moments of thinking so, of looking in secret disbelief at this thing they had created: marriage, four children, big house, garden, charwomen, friends, cars … and this thing, this entity, all of it had come into existence, been blown into being out of nowhere, because Susan loved Matthew and Matthew loved Susan. Extraordinary. So that was the central point, the wellspring.

And if one felt that it simply was not strong enough, important enough, to support it all, well whose fault was that? Certainly neither Susan’s nor Matthew’s. It was in the nature of things. And they sensibly blamed neither themselves nor each other.

On the contrary, they used their intelligence to preserve what they had created from a painful and explosive world: they looked around them, and took lessons. All around them, marriages collapsing, or breaking, or rubbing along (even worse, they felt). They must not make the same mistakes, they must not.

They had avoided the pitfall so many of their friends had fallen into – of buying a house in the country for the sake of the children; so that the husband became a weekend husband, a weekend father, and the wife always careful not to ask what went on in the town flat which they called (in joke) a bachelor flat. No, Matthew was a full-time husband, a full-time father, and at nights, in the big married bed in the big married bedroom (which had an attractive view of the river) they lay beside each other talking and he told her about his day, and what he had done, and whom he had met; and she told him about her day (not as interesting, but that was not her fault) for both knew of the hidden resentments and deprivations of the woman who has lived her own life – and above all, has earned her own living – and is now dependent on a husband for outside interests and money.

Nor did Susan make the mistake of taking a job for the sake of her independence, which she might very well have done, since her old firm, missing her qualities of humour, balance, and sense, invited her often to go back. Children needed their mother to a certain age, that both parents knew and agreed on; and when these four healthy wisely brought-up children were of the right age, Susan would work again, because she knew, and so did he, what happened to women of fifty at the height of their energy and ability, with grown-up children who no longer needed their full devotion.

So here was this couple, testing their marriage, looking after it, treating it like a small boat full of helpless people in a very stormy sea. Well, of course, so it was … The storms of the world were bad, but not too close – which is not to say they were selfishly felt: Susan and Matthew were both well-informed and responsible people. And the inner storms and quicksands were understood and charted. So everything was all right. Everything was in order. Yes, things were under control.

So what did it matter if they felt dry, flat? People like themselves, fed on a hundred books (psychological, anthropological, sociological) could scarcely be unprepared for the dry, controlled wistfulness which is the distinguishing mark of the intelligent marriage. Two people, endowed with education, with discrimination, with judgment, linked together voluntarily from their will to be happy together and to be of use to others – one sees them everywhere, one knows them, one even is that thing oneself: sadness because so much is after all so little. These two, unsurprised, turned towards each other with even more courtesy and gentle love: this was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other. In fact, even to say so, to think in such a way, was banal, they were ashamed to do it.

It was banal, too, when one night Matthew came home late and confessed he had been to a party, taken a girl home and slept with her. Susan forgave him, of course. Except that forgiveness is hardly the word. Understanding, yes. But if you understand something, you don’t forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don’t understand. Nor had he confessed – what sort of word is that?

The whole thing was not important. After all, years ago they had joked: Of course I’m not going to be faithful to you, no one can be faithful to one other person for a whole lifetime. (And there was the word faithful – stupid, all these words, stupid, belonging to a savage old world.) But the incident left both of them irritable. Strange, but they were both bad-tempered, annoyed. There was something unassimilable about it.

Making love splendidly after he had come home that night, both had felt that the idea that Myra Jenkins, a pretty girl met at a party, could be even relevant was ridiculous. They had loved each other for over a decade, would love each other for years more. Who, then, was Myra Jenkins?

Except, thought Susan, unaccountably bad-tempered, she was (is?) the first. In ten years. So either the ten years’ fidelity was not important, or she isn’t. (No, no, there is something wrong with this way of thinking, there must be.) But if she isn’t important, presumably it wasn’t important either when Matthew and I first went to bed with each other that afternoon whose delight even now (like a very long shadow at sundown) lays a long, wand-like finger over us. (Why did I say sundown?) Well, if what we felt that afternoon was not important, nothing is important, because if it hadn’t been for what we felt, we wouldn’t be Mr and Mrs Rawlings with four children, etc., etc. The whole thing is absurd – for him to have come home and told me was absurd. For him not to have told me was absurd. For me to care, or for that matter not to care, is absurd … and who is Myra Jenkins? Why, no one at all.

There was only one thing to do, and of course these sensible people did it: they put the thing behind them, and consciously, knowing what they were doing, moved forward into a different phase of their marriage, giving thanks for past good fortune as they did so.

For it was inevitable that the handsome, blond, attractive, manly man, Matthew Rawlings, should be at times tempted (oh, what a word!) by the attractive girls at parties she could not attend because of the four children; and that sometimes he would succumb (a word even more repulsive, if possible) and that she, a good-looking woman in the big well-tended garden at Richmond, would sometimes be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness. Except that bitterness was not in order, it was out of court. Did the casual girls touch the marriage? They did not. Rather it was they who knew defeat because of the handsome Matthew Rawlings’s marriage body and soul to Susan Rawlings.

In that case why did Susan feel (though luckily not for longer than a few seconds at a time) as if life had become a desert, and that nothing mattered, and that her children were not her own?

Meanwhile her intelligence continued to assert that all was well. What if her Matthew did have an occasional sweet afternoon, the odd affair? For she knew quite well, except in her moments of aridity, that they were very happy, that the affairs were not important.

Perhaps that was the trouble? It was in the nature of things that the adventures and delights could no longer be hers, because of the four children and the big house that needed so much attention. But perhaps she was secretly wishing, and even knowing that she did, that the wildness and the beauty could be his. But he was married to her. She was married to him. They were married inextricably. And therefore the gods could not strike him with the real magic, not really. Well, was it Susan’s fault that after he came home from an adventure he looked harassed rather than fulfilled? (In fact, that was how she knew he had been unfaithful, because of his sullen air, and his glances at her, similar to hers at him: What is it that I share with this person that shields all delight from me?) But none of it by anybody’s fault. (But what did they feel ought to be somebody’s fault?) Nobody’s fault, nothing to be at fault, no one to blame, no one to offer or to take it … and nothing wrong, either, except that Matthew never was really struck, as he wanted to be, by joy; and that Susan was more often threatened by emptiness. (It was usually in the garden that she was invaded by this feeling: she was coming to avoid the garden, unless the children or Matthew were with her.) There was no need to use the dramatic words, unfaithful, forgive, and the rest: intelligence forbade them. Intelligence barred, too, quarrelling, sulking, anger, silences of withdrawal, accusations and tears. Above all, intelligence forbids tears.

A high price has to be paid for the happy marriage with the four healthy children in the large white gardened house.

And they were paying it, willingly, knowing what they were doing. When they lay side by side or breast to breast in the big civilized bedroom overlooking the wild sullied river, they laughed, often, for no particular reason; but they knew it was really because of these two small people, Susan and Matthew, supporting such an edifice on their intelligent love. The laugh comforted them; it saved them both, though from what, they did not know.

They were now both fortyish. The older children, boy and girl, were ten and eight, at school. The twins, six, were still at home. Susan did not have nurses or girls to help her: childhood is short; and she did not regret the hard work. Often enough she was bored, since small children can be boring; she was often very tired; but she regretted nothing. In another decade, she would turn herself back into being a woman with a life of her own.

Soon the twins would go to school, and they would be away from home from nine until four. These hours, so Susan saw it, would be the preparation for her own slow emancipation away from the role of hub-of-the-family into woman-with-her-own-life. She was already planning for the hours of freedom when all the children would be ‘off her hands’. That was the phrase used by Matthew and by Susan and by their friends, for the moment when the youngest child went off to school. ‘They’ll be off your hands, darling Susan, and you’ll have time to yourself.’ So said Matthew, the intelligent husband, who had often enough commended and consoled Susan, standing by her in spirit during the years when her soul was not her own, as she said, but her children’s.

What it amounted to was that Susan saw herself as she had been at twenty-eight, unmarried; and then again somewhere about fifty, blossoming from the root of what she had been twenty years before. As if the essential Susan were in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage. Matthew said something like this to Susan one night: and she agreed that it was true – she did feel something like that. What, then, was this essential Susan? She did not know. Put like that it sounded ridiculous, and she did not really feel it. Anyway, they had a long discussion about the whole thing before going off to sleep in each other’s arms.

So the twins were off to their school, two bright affectionate children who had no problems about it, since their older brother and sister had trodden this path so successfully before them. And now Susan was going to be alone in the big house, every day of the school term, except for the daily woman who came in to clean.

It was now, for the first time in this marriage, that something happened which neither of them had foreseen.

This is what happened. She returned, at nine-thirty, from taking the twins to the school by car, looking forward to seven blissful hours of freedom. On the first morning she was simply restless, worrying about the twins ‘naturally enough’ since this was their first day away at school. She was hardly able to contain herself until they came back. Which they did happily, excited by the world of school, looking forward to the next day. And the next day Susan took them, dropped them, came back, and found herself reluctant to enter her big and beautiful home because it was as if something was waiting for her there that she did not wish to confront. Sensibly, however, she parked the car in the garage, entered the house, spoke to Mrs Parkes the daily woman about her duties, and went up to her bedroom. She was possessed by a fever which drove her out again, downstairs, into the kitchen, where Mrs Parkes was making cake and did not need her, and into the garden. There she sat on a bench, and tried to calm herself, looking at trees, at a brown glimpse of the river. But she was filled with tension, like a panic: as if an enemy was in the garden with her. She spoke to herself severely, thus: All this is quite natural. First, I spent twelve years of my adult life working, living my own life. Then I married, and from the moment I became pregnant for the first time I signed myself over, so to speak, to other people. To the children. Not for one moment in twelve years have I been alone, had time to myself. So now I have to learn to be myself again. That’s all.

And she went indoors to help Mrs Parkes cook and clean, and found some sewing to do for the children. She kept herself occupied every day. At the end of the first term she understood she felt two contrary emotions. First: secret astonishment and dismay that during those weeks when the house was empty of children she had in fact been more occupied (had been careful to keep herself occupied) than ever she had been when the children were around her needing her continual attention. Second: that now she knew the house would be full of them, and for five weeks, she resented the fact she would never be alone. She was already looking back at those hours of sewing, cooking (but by herself), as at a lost freedom which would not be hers for five long weeks. And the two months of term which would succeed the five weeks stretched alluringly open to her – freedom. But what freedom – when in fact she had been so careful not to be free of small duties during the last weeks? She looked at herself, Susan Rawlings, sitting in a big chair by the window in the bedroom, sewing shirts or dresses, which she might just as well have bought. She saw herself making cakes for hours at a time in the big family kitchen: yet usually she bought cakes. What she saw was a woman alone, that was true, but she had not felt alone. For instance, Mrs Parkes was always somewhere in the house. And she did not like being in the garden at all, because of the closeness there of the enemy – irritation, restlessness, emptiness, whatever it was, which keeping her hands occupied made less dangerous for some reason.

Susan did not tell Matthew of these thoughts. They were not sensible. She did not recognize herself in them. What should she say to her dear friend and husband Matthew? ‘When I go into the garden, that is, if the children are not there, I feel as if there is an enemy there waiting to invade me.’ ‘What enemy, Susan darling?’ ‘Well I don’t know, really …’ ‘Perhaps you should see a doctor?’

No, clearly this conversation should not take place. The holidays began and Susan welcomed them. Four children, lively, energetic, intelligent, demanding: she was never, not for a moment of her day, alone. If she was in a room, they would be in the next room, or waiting for her to do something for them; or it would be time for lunch or tea, or to take one of them to the dentist. Something to do: five weeks of it, thank goodness.

On the fourth day of these so welcome holidays, she found she was storming with anger at the twins, two shrinking beautiful children who (and this is what checked her) stood hand in hand looking at her with sheer dismayed disbelief. This was their calm mother, shouting at them. And what for? They had come to her with some game, some bit of nonsense. They looked at each other, moved closer for support, and went off hand in hand, leaving Susan holding on to the windowsill of the living room, breathing deep, feeling sick. She went to lie down, telling the older children she had a headache. She heard the boy Harry telling the little ones: ‘It’s all right, Mother’s got a headache.’ She heard that It’s all right with pain.

That night she said to her husband: ‘Today I shouted at the twins, quite unfairly.’ She sounded miserable, and he said gently: ‘Well, what of it?’

‘It’s more of an adjustment than I thought, their going to school.’

‘But Susie, Susie darling …’ For she was crouched weeping on the bed. He comforted her: ‘Susan, what is all this about? You shouted at them? What of it? If you shouted at them fifty times a day it wouldn’t be more than the little devils deserve.’ But she wouldn’t laugh. She wept. Soon he comforted her with his body. She became calm. Calm, she wondered what was wrong with her, and why she should mind so much that she might, just once, have behaved unjustly with the children. What did it matter? They had forgotten it all long ago: Mother had a headache and everything was all right.

It was a long time later that Susan understood that that night, when she had wept and Matthew had driven the misery out of her with his big solid body, was the last time, ever in their married life, that they had been – to use their mutual language – with each other. And even that was a lie, because she had not told him of her real fears at all.

The five weeks passed, and Susan was in control of herself, and good and kind, and she looked forward to the end of the holidays with a mixture of fear and longing. She did not know what to expect. She took the twins off to school (the elder children took themselves to school) and she returned to the house determined to face the enemy wherever he was, in the house, or the garden or – where?

She was again restless, she was possessed by restlessness. She cooked and sewed and worked as before, day after day, while Mrs Parkes remonstrated: ‘Mrs Rawlings, what’s the need for it? I can do that, it’s what you pay me for.’

And it was so irrational that she checked herself. She would put the car into the garage, go up to her bedroom, and sit, hands in her lap, forcing herself to be quiet. She listened to Mrs Parkes moving around the house. She looked out into the garden and saw the branches shake the trees. She sat defeating the enemy, restlessness. Emptiness. She ought to be thinking about her life, about herself. But she did not. Or perhaps she could not. As soon as she forced her mind to think about Susan (for what else did she want to be alone for?) it skipped off to thoughts of butter or school clothes. Or it thought of Mrs Parkes. She realized that she sat listening for the movements of the cleaning woman, following her every turn, bend, thought. She followed her in her mind from kitchen to bathroom, from table to oven, and it was as if the duster, the cleaning cloth, the saucepan, were in her own hand. She would hear herself saying: No, not like that, don’t put that there … Yet she did not give a damn what Mrs Parkes did, or if she did it at all. Yet she could not prevent herself from being conscious of her, every minute. Yes, this was what was wrong with her: she needed, when she was alone, to be really alone, with no one near. She could not endure the knowledge that in ten minutes or in half an hour Mrs Parkes would call up the stairs: ‘Mrs Rawlings, there’s no silver polish. Madam, we’re out of flour.’

So she left the house and went to sit in the garden where she was screened from the house by trees. She waited for the demon to appear and claim her, but he did not.

She was keeping him off, because she had not, after all, come to an end of arranging herself.

She was planning how to be somewhere where Mrs Parkes would not come after her with a cup of tea, or a demand to be allowed to telephone (always irritating since Susan did not care who she telephoned or how often), or just a nice talk about something. Yes, she needed a place, or a state of affairs, where it would be necessary to keep reminding herself: In ten minutes I must telephone Matthew about … and at half past three I must leave early for the children because the car needs cleaning. And at ten o’clock tomorrow I must remember … She was possessed with resentment that the seven hours of freedom in every day (during weekdays in the school term) were not free, that never, not for one second, ever, was she free from the pressure of time, from having to remember this or that. She could never forget herself; never really let herself go into forgetfulness.

Resentment. It was poisoning her. (She looked at this emotion and thought it was absurd. Yet she felt it.) She was a prisoner. (She looked at this thought too, and it was no good telling herself it was a ridiculous one.) She must tell Matthew – but what? She was filled with emotions that were utterly ridiculous, that she despised, yet that nevertheless she was feeling so strongly she could not shake them off.

The school holidays came round, and this time they were for nearly two months, and she behaved with a conscious controlled decency that nearly drove her crazy. She would lock herself in the bathroom, and sit on the edge of the bath, breathing deep, trying to let go into some kind of calm. Or she went up into the spare room, usually empty, where no one would expect her to be. She heard the children calling ‘Mother, Mother’, and kept silent, feeling guilty. Or she went to the very end of the garden, by herself, and looked at the slow-moving brown river; she looked at the river and closed her eyes and breathed slow and deep, taking it into her being, into her veins.

Then she returned to the family, wife and mother, smiling and responsible, feeling as if the pressure of these people – four lively children and her husband – were a painful pressure on the surface of her skin, a hand pressing on her brain. She did not once break down into irritation during these holidays, but it was like living out a prison sentence, and when the children went back to school, she sat on a white stone seat near the flowing river, and she thought: It is not even a year since the twins went to school, since they were off my hands (What on earth did I think I meant when I used that stupid phrase?) and yet I’m a different person. I’m simply not myself. I don’t understand it.

Yet she had to understand it. For she knew that this structure – big white house, on which the mortgage still cost four hundred a year, a husband, so good and kind and insightful, four children, all doing so nicely, and the garden where she sat, and Mrs Parkes the cleaning woman – all this depended on her, and yet she could not understand why, or even what it was she contributed to it.

She said to Matthew in their bedroom: ‘I think there must be something wrong with me.’

And he said: ‘Surely not, Susan? You look marvellous – you’re as lovely as ever.’

She looked at the handsome blond man, with his clear, intelligent blue-eyed face, and thought: Why is it I can’t tell him? Why not? And she said: ‘I need to be alone more than I am.’

At which he swung his slow blue gaze at her, and she saw what she had been dreading: Incredulity. Disbelief. And fear. An incredulous blue stare from a stranger who was her husband, as close to her as her own breath.

He said: ‘But the children are at school and off your hands.’

She said to herself: I’ve got to force myself to say: Yes, but do you realize that I never feel free? There’s never a moment I can say to myself: There’s nothing I have to remind myself about, nothing I have to do in half an hour, or an hour, or two hours.

But she said: ‘I don’t feel well.’

He said: ‘Perhaps you need a holiday.’

She said, appalled: ‘But not without you, surely?’ For she could not imagine herself going off without him. Yet that was what he meant. Seeing her face, he laughed, and opened his arms, and she went into them, thinking: Yes, yes, but why can’t I say it? And what is it I have to say?

She tried to tell him, about never being free. And he listened and said: ‘But Susan, what sort of freedom can you possibly want – short of being dead! Am I ever free? I go to the office, and I have to be there at ten – all right, half past ten, sometimes. And I have to do this or that, don’t I? Then I’ve got to come home at a certain time – I don’t mean it, you know I don’t – but if I’m not going to be back home at six I telephone you. When can I ever say to myself: I have nothing to be responsible for in the next six hours?’

Susan, hearing this, was remorseful. Because it was true. The good marriage, the house, the children, depended just as much on his voluntary bondage as it did on hers. But why did he not feel bound? Why didn’t he chafe and become restless? No, there was something really wrong with her and this proved it.

And the word bondage – why had she used it? She had never felt marriage, or the children, as bondage. Neither had he, or surely they wouldn’t be together lying in each other’s arms content after twelve years of marriage.

No, her state (whatever it was) was irrelevant, nothing to do with her real good life with her family. She had to accept the fact that, after all, she was an irrational person and to live with it. Some people had to live with crippled arms, or stammers, or being deaf. She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own.

Nevertheless, as a result of this conversation with her husband, there was a new regime next holidays.

The spare room at the top of the house now had a cardboard sign saying: PRIVATE! DO NOT DISTURB! on it. (This sign had been drawn in coloured chalks by the children, after a discussion between the parents in which it was decided that was psychologically the right thing.) The family and Mrs Parkes knew this was ‘Mother’s Room’ and that she was entitled to her privacy. Many serious conversations took place between Matthew and the children about not taking Mother for granted. Susan overheard the first, between father and Harry, the older boy, and was surprised at her irritation over it. Surely she could have a room somewhere in that big house and retire into it without such a fuss being made? Without it being so solemnly discussed? Why couldn’t she simply have announced: ‘I’m going to fit out the little top room for myself, and when I’m in it I’m not to be disturbed for anything short of fire’? Just that, and finished; instead of long earnest discussions. When she heard Harry and Matthew explaining it to the twins with Mrs Parkes coming in – ‘Yes, well, a family sometimes gets on top of a woman’ – she had to go right away to the bottom of the garden until the devils of exasperation had finished their dance in her blood.

But now there was a room, and she could go there when she liked, she used it seldom: she felt even more caged there than in her bedroom. One day she had gone up there after a lunch for ten children she had cooked and served because Mrs Parkes was not there, and had sat alone for a while looking into the garden. She saw the children stream out from the kitchen and stand looking up at the window where she sat behind the curtains. They were all – her children and their friends – discussing Mother’s Room. A few minutes later, the chase of children in some game came pounding up the stairs, but ended as abruptly as if they had fallen over a ravine, so sudden was the silence. They had remembered she was there, and had gone silent in a great gale of ‘Hush! Shhhhhh! Quiet, you’ll disturb her …’ And they went tiptoeing downstairs like criminal conspirators. When she came down to make tea for them, they all apologized. The twins put their arms around her, from front and back, making a human cage of loving limbs, and promised it would never occur again. ‘We forgot, Mummy, we forgot all about it!’

What it amounted to was that Mother’s Room, and her need for privacy, had become a valuable lesson in respect for other people’s rights. Quite soon Susan was going up to the room only because it was a lesson it was a pity to drop. Then she took sewing up there, and the children and Mrs Parkes came in and out: it had become another family room.

She sighed, and smiled, and resigned herself – she made jokes at her own expense with Matthew over the room. That is, she did from the self she liked, she respected. But at the same time, something inside her howled with impatience, with rage … And she was frightened. One day she found herself kneeling by her bed and praying: ‘Dear God, keep it away from me, keep him away from me.’ She meant the devil, for she now thought of it, not caring if she were irrational, as some sort of demon. She imagined him, or it, as a youngish man, or perhaps a middle-aged man pretending to be young. Or a man young-looking from immaturity? At any rate, she saw the young-looking face which, when she drew closer, had dry lines about mouth and eyes. He was thinnish, meagre in build. And he had a reddish complexion, and ginger hair. That was he – a gingery, energetic man, and he wore a reddish hairy jacket, unpleasant to the touch.

Well, one day she saw him. She was standing at the bottom of the garden, watching the river ebb past, when she raised her eyes and saw this person, or being, sitting on the white stone bench. He was looking at her, and grinning. In his hand was a long crooked stick, which he had picked off the ground, or broken off the tree above him. He was absent-mindedly, out of an absent-minded or freakist impulse of spite, using the stick to stir around in the coils of a blindworm or a grass snake (or some kind of snake-like creature: it was whitish and unhealthy to look at, unpleasant). The snake was twisting about, flinging its coils from side to side in a kind of dance of protest against the teasing prodding stick.

Susan looked at him thinking: Who is the stranger? What is he doing in our garden? Then she recognized the man around whom her terrors had crystallized. As she did so, he vanished. She made herself walk over to the bench. A shadow from a branch lay across thin emerald grass, moving jerkily over its roughness, and she could see why she had taken it for a snake, lashing and twisting. She went back to the house thinking: Right, then, so I’ve seen him with my own eyes, so I’m not crazy after all – there is a danger because I’ve seen him. He is lurking in the garden and sometimes even in the house, and he wants to get into me and to take me over.

She dreamed of having a room or a place, anywhere, where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was.

Once, near Victoria, she found herself outside a news agent that had Rooms to Let advertised. She decided to rent a room, telling no one. Sometimes she could take the train in from Richmond and sit alone in it for an hour or two. Yet how could she? A room would cost three or four pounds a week, and she earned no money, and how could she explain to Matthew that she needed such a sum? What for? It did not occur to her that she was taking it for granted she wasn’t going to tell him about the room.

Well, it was out of the question, having a room; yet she knew she must.

One day, when a school term was well established, and none of the children had measles or other ailments, and everything seemed in order, she did the shopping early, explained to Mrs Parkes she was meeting an old school friend, took the train to Victoria, searched until she found a small quiet hotel, and asked for a room for the day. They did not let rooms by the day, the manageress said, looking doubtful, since Susan so obviously was not the kind of woman who needed a room for unrespectable reasons. Susan made a long explanation about not being well, being unable to shop without frequent rests for lying down. At last she was allowed to rent the room provided she paid a full night’s price for it. She was taken up by the manageress and a maid, both concerned over the state of her health … which must be pretty bad if, living at Richmond (she had signed her name and address in the register), she needed a shelter at Victoria.

The room was ordinary and anonymous, and was just what Susan needed. She put a shilling in the gas fire, and sat, eyes shut, in a dingy armchair with her back to a dingy window. She was alone. She was alone. She was alone. She could feel pressures lifting off her. First the sounds of traffic came very loud; then they seemed to vanish; she might even have slept a little. A knock on the door; it was Miss Townsend the manageress, bringing her a cup of tea with her own hands, so concerned was she over Susan’s long silence and possible illness.

Miss Townsend was a lonely woman of fifty, running this hotel with all the rectitude expected of her, and she sensed in Susan the possibility of understanding companionship. She stayed to talk. Susan found herself in the middle of a fantastic story about her illness, which got more and more improbable as she tried to make it tally with the large house at Richmond, well-off husband, and four children. Suppose she said instead: Miss Townsend, I’m here in your hotel because I need to be alone for a few hours, above all alone and with no one knowing where I am. She said it mentally, and saw, mentally, the look that would inevitably come on Miss Townsend’s elderly maiden’s face. ‘Miss Townsend, my four children and my husband are driving me insane, do you understand that? Yes, I can see from the gleam of hysteria in your eyes that comes from loneliness controlled but only just contained that I’ve got everything in the world you’ve ever longed for. Well, Miss Townsend, I don’t want any of it. You can have it, Miss Townsend. I wish I was absolutely alone in the world, like you. Miss Townsend, I’m besieged by seven devils, Miss Townsend, Miss Townsend, let me stay here in your hotel where the devil can’t get me …’ Instead of saying all this, she described her anaemia, agreed to try Miss Townsend’s remedy for it, which was raw liver, minced, between wholemeal bread, and said yes, perhaps it would be better if she stayed at home and let a friend do shopping for her. She paid her bill and left the hotel, defeated.

At home Mrs Parkes said she didn’t really like it, no, not really, when Mrs Rawlings was away from nine in the morning until five. The teacher had telephoned from school to say Joan’s teeth were paining her, and she hadn’t known what to say; and what was she to make for the children’s tea, Mrs Rawlings hadn’t said.

All this was nonsense, of course. Mrs Parkes’s complaint was that Susan had withdrawn herself spiritually, leaving the burden of the big house on her.

Susan looked back at her day of ‘freedom’ which had resulted in her becoming a friend to the lonely Miss Townsend, and in Mrs Parkes’s remonstrances. Yet she remembered the short blissful hour of being alone, really alone. She was determined to arrange her life, no matter what it cost, so that she could have that solitude more often. An absolute solitude, where no one knew her or cared about her.

But how? She thought of saying to her old employer: I want you to back me up in a story with Matthew that I am doing part-time work for you. The truth is that … but she would have to tell him a lie too, and which lie? She could not say: I want to sit by myself three or four times a week in a rented room. And besides, he knew Matthew, and she could not really ask him to tell lies on her behalf, apart from his being bound to think it meant a lover.

Suppose she really took a part-time job, which she could get through fast and efficiently, leaving time for herself. What job? Addressing envelopes? Canvassing?

And there was Mrs Parkes, working widow, who knew exactly what she was prepared to give to the house, who knew by instinct when her mistress withdrew in spirit from her responsibilities. Mrs Parkes was one of the servers of this world, but she needed someone to serve. She had to have Mrs Rawlings, her madam, at the top of the house or in the garden, so that she could come and get support from her: ‘Yes, the bread’s not what it was when I was a girl … Yes, Harry’s got a wonderful appetite, I wonder where he puts it all … Yes, it’s lucky the twins are so much of a size, they can wear each other’s shoes, that’s a saving in these hard times … Yes, the cherry jam from Switzerland is not a patch on the jam from Poland, and three times the price …’ And so on. That sort of talk Mrs Parkes must have, every day, or she would leave, not knowing herself why she left.

Susan Rawlings, thinking these thoughts, found that she was prowling through the great thicketed garden like a wild cat: she was walking up the stairs, down the stairs, through the rooms, into the garden, along the brown running river, back, up through the house, down again … It was a wonder Mrs Parkes did not think it strange. But on the contrary, Mrs Rawlings could do what she liked, she could stand on her head if she wanted, provided she was here. Susan Rawlings prowled and muttered through her house, hating Mrs Parkes, hating poor Miss Townsend, dreaming of her hour of solitude in the dingy respectability of Miss Townsend’s hotel edroom, and she knew quite well she was mad. Yes, she was mad.

She said to Matthew that she must have a holiday. Matthew agreed with her. This was not as things had been once – how they had talked in each other’s arms in the marriage bed. He had, she knew, diagnosed her finally as unreasonable. She had become someone outside himself that he had to manage. They were living side by side in this house like two tolerably friendly strangers.

Having told Mrs Parkes, or rather, asked for her permission, she went off on a walking holiday in Wales. She chose the remotest place she knew of. Every morning the children telephoned her before they went off to school, to encourage and support her, just as they had over Mother’s Room. Every evening she telephoned them, spoke to each child in turn, and then to Matthew. Mrs Parkes, given permission to telephone for insructions or advice, did so every day at lunchtime. When, as happened three times, Mrs Rawlings was out on the mountainside, Mrs Parkes asked that she should ring back at such and such a time, for she would not be happy in what she was doing without Mrs Rawlings’s blessing.

Susan prowled over wild country with the telephone wire holding her to her duty like a leash. The next time she must telephone, or wait to be telephoned, nailed her to her cross. The mountains themselves seemed trammelled by her unfreedom. Everywhere on the mountains, where she met no one at all, from breakfast time to dusk, except sheep, or a shepherd, she came face to face with her own craziness which might attack her in the broadest valleys, so that they seemed too small; or on a mountain-top from which she could see a hundred other mountains and valleys, so that they seemed too low, too small, with the sky pressing down too close. She would stand gazing at a hillside brilliant with ferns and bracken, jewelled with running water, and see nothing but her devil, who lifted inhuman eyes at her from where he leaned negligently on a rock, switching at his ugly yellow boots with a leafy twig.

She returned to her home and family, with the Welsh emptiness at the back of her mind like a promise of freedom.

She told her husband she wanted to have an au pair girl.

They were in their bedroom, it was late at night, the children slept. He sat, shirted and slippered, in a chair by the window, looking out. She sat brushing her hair and watching him in the mirror. A time-hallowed scene in the connubial bedroom. He said nothing, while she heard the arguments coming into his mind, only to be rejected because every one was reasonable.

‘It seems strange to get one now, after all, the children are in school most of the day. Surely the time for you to have help was when you were stuck with them day and night. Why don’t you ask Mrs Parkes to cook for you? She’s even offered to – I can understand if you are tired of cooking for six people. But you know that an au pair girl means all kinds of problems, it’s not like having an ordinary char in during the day …’

Finally he said carefully: ‘Are you thinking of going back to work?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, not really.’ She made herself sound vague, rather stupid. She went on brushing her black hair and peering at herself so as to be oblivious of the short uneasy glances her Matthew kept giving her. ‘Do you think we can’t afford it?’ she went on vaguely, not at all the old efficient Susan who knew exactly what they could afford.

‘It’s not that,’ he said, looking out of the window at dark trees, so as not to look at her. Meanwhile she examined a round, candid, pleasant face with clear dark brows and clear grey eyes. A sensible face. She brushed thick healthy black hair and thought: Yet that’s the reflection of a madwoman. How very strange! Much more to the point if what looked back at me was the gingery green-eyed demon with his dry meagre smile … Why wasn’t Matthew agreeing? After all, what else could he do? She was breaking her part of the bargain and there was no way of forcing her to keep it: that her spirit, her soul, should live in this house, so that the people in it could grow like plants in water, and Mrs Parkes remain content in their service. In return for this, he would be a good loving husband, and responsible towards the children. Well, nothing like this had been true of either of them for a long time. He did his duty, perfunctorily; she did not even pretend to do hers. And he had become like other husbands, with his real life in his work and the people he met there, and very likely a serious affair. All this was her fault.

At last he drew heavy curtains, blotting out the trees, and turned to force her attention: ‘Susan, are you really sure we need a girl?’ But she would not meet his appeal at all. She was running the brush over her hair again and again, lifting fine black clouds in a small hiss of electricity. She was peering in and smiling as if she were amused at the clinging hissing hair that followed the brush.

‘Yes, I think it would be a good idea on the whole,’ she said, with the cunning of a madwoman evading the real point.

In the mirror she could see Matthew lying on his back, his hands behind his head, staring upwards, his face sad and hard. She felt her heart (the old heart of Susan Rawlings) soften and call out to him. But she set it to be indifferent.

He said: ‘Susan, the children?’ It was an appeal that almost reached her. He opened his arms, lifting them from where they had lain by his sides, palms up, empty. She had only to run across and fling herself into them, on to his hard, warm chest, and melt into herself, into Susan. But she could not. She would not see his lifted arms. She said vaguely: ‘Well, surely it’ll be even better for them? We’ll get a French or a German girl and they’ll learn the language.’

In the dark she lay beside him, feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away. She disliked very much the woman who lay here, cold and indifferent beside a suffering man, but she could not change her.

Next morning she set about getting a girl, and very soon came Sophie Traub from Hamburg, a girl of twenty, laughing, healthy, blue-eyed, intending to learn English. Indeed, she already spoke a good deal. In return for a room – ‘Mother’s Room’ – and her food, she undertook to do some light cooking, and to be with the children when Mrs Rawlings asked. She was an intelligent girl and understood perfectly what was needed. Susan said: ‘I go off sometimes, for the morning or for the day – well, sometimes the children run home from school, or they ring up, or a teacher rings up. I should be here, really. And there’s the daily woman …’ And Sophie laughed her deep fruity Fräulein’s laugh, showed her fine white teeth and her dimples, and said: ‘You want some person to play mistress of the house sometimes, not so?’

‘Yes, that is just so,’ said Susan, a bit dry, despite herself, thinking in secret fear how easy it was, how much nearer to the end she was than she thought. Healthy Fräulein Traub’s instant understanding of their position proved this to be true.

The au pair girl, because of her own common sense, or (as Susan said to herself with her new inward shudder) because she had been chosen so well by Susan, was a success with everyone, the children liking her, Mrs Parkes forgetting almost at once that she was German, and Matthew finding her ‘nice to have around the house’. For he was now taking things as they came, from the surface of life, withdrawn both as a husband and a father from the household.

One day Susan saw how Sophie and Mrs Parkes were talking and laughing in the kitchen, and she announced that she would be away until teatime. She knew exactly where to go and what she must look for. She took the District Line to South Kensington, changed to the Circle, got off at Paddington, and walked around looking at the smaller hotels until she was satisfied with one which had FRED’S HOTEL painted on windowpanes that needed cleaning. The façade was a faded shiny yellow, like unhealthy skin. A door at the end of the passage said she must knock; she did, and Fred appeared. He was not at all attractive, not in any way, being fattish, and rundown, and wearing a tasteless striped suit. He had small sharp eyes in a white creased face, and was quite prepared to let Mrs Jones (she chose the farcical name deliberately, staring him out) have a room three days a week from ten until six. Provided of course that she paid in advance each time she came? Susan produced fifteen shillings (no price had been set by him) and held it out, still fixing him with a bold unblinking challenge she had not known until then she could use at will. Looking at her still, he took up a ten-shilling note from her palm between thumb and forefinger, fingered it; then shuffled up two half-crowns, held out his own palm with these bits of money displayed thereon, and let his gaze lower broodingly at them. They were standing in the passage, a red-shaded light above, bare boards beneath, and a strong smell of floor polish rising about them. He shot his gaze up at her over the still-extended palm, and smiled as if to say: What do you take me for? ‘I shan’t,’ said Susan, ‘be using this room for the purposes of making money.’ He still waited. She added another five shillings, at which he nodded and said: ‘You pay, and I ask no questions.’ ‘Good,’ said Susan. He now went past her to the stairs, and there waited a moment: the light from the street door being in her eyes, she lost sight of him momentarily. Then she saw a sober-suited, white-faced, white-balding little man trotting up the stairs like a waiter, and she went after him. They proceeded in utter silence up the stairs of this house where no questions were asked – Fred’s Hotel, which could afford the freedom for its visitors that poor Miss Townsend’s hotel could not. The room was hideous. It had a single window, with thin green brocade curtains, a three-quarter bed that had a cheap green satin bedspread on it, a fireplace with a gas fire and a shilling meter by it, a chest of drawers, and a green wicker armchair.

‘Thank you,’ said Susan, knowing that Fred (if this was Fred, and not George, or Herbert or Charlie) was looking at her, not so much with curiosity, an emotion he would not own to, for professional reasons, but with a philosophical sense of what was appropriate. Having taken her money and shown her up and agreed to everything, he was clearly disapproving of her for coming here. She did not belong here at all, so his look said. (But she knew, already, how very much she did belong: the room had been waiting for her to join it.) ‘Would you have me called at five o’clock, please?’ and he nodded and went downstairs.

It was twelve in the morning. She was free. She sat in the armchair, she simply sat, she closed her eyes and sat and let herself be alone. She was alone and no one knew where she was. When a knock came on the door she was annoyed, and prepared to show it: but it was Fred himself, it was five o’clock and he was calling her as ordered. He flicked his sharp little eyes over the room – bed, first. It was undisturbed. She might never have been in the room at all. She thanked him, said she would be returning the day after tomorrow, and left. She was back home in time to cook supper, to put the children to bed, to cook a second supper for her husband and herself later. And to welcome Sophie back from the pictures where she had gone with a friend. All these things she did cheerfully, willingly. But she was thinking all the time of the hotel room, she was longing for it with her whole being.

Three times a week. She arrived promptly at ten, looked Fred in the eyes, gave him twenty shillings, followed him up the stairs, went into the room, and shut the door on him with gentle firmness. For Fred, disapproving of her being here at all, was quite ready to let friendship, or at least companionship, follow his disapproval, if only she would let him. But he was content to go off on her dismissing nod with the twenty shillings in his hand.

She sat in the armchair and shut her eyes.

What did she do in the room? Why, nothing at all. From the chair, when it had rested her, she went to the window, stretching her arms, smiling, treasuring her anonymity, to look out. She was no longer Susan Rawlings, mother of four, wife of Matthew, employer of Mrs Parkes and of Sophie Traub, with these and those relations with friends, schoolteachers, tradesmen. She no longer was mistress of the big white house and garden, owning clothes suitable for this and that activity or occasion. She was Mrs Jones, and she was alone, and she had no past and no future. Here I am, she thought, after all these years of being married and having children and playing those roles of responsibility – and I’m just the same. Yet there have been times I thought that nothing existed of me except the roles that went with being Mrs Matthew Rawlings. Yes, here I am, and if I never saw any of my family again, here I would still be … how very strange that is! And she leaned on the sill, and looked into the street, loving the men and women who passed, because she did not know them. She looked at the downtrodden buildings over the street, and at the sky, wet and dingy, or sometimes blue, and she felt she had never seen buildings or sky before. And then she went back to the chair, empty, her mind a blank. Sometimes she talked aloud, saying nothing – an exclamation, meaningless, followed by a comment about the floral pattern on the thin rug, or a stain on the green satin coverlet. For the most part, she wool-gathered – what word is there for it? – brooded, wandered, simply went dark, feeling emptiness run deliciously through her veins, like the movement of her blood.

This room had become more her own than the house she lived in. One morning she found Fred taking her a flight higher than usual. She stopped, refusing to go up, and demanded her usual room, Number 19. ‘Well, you’ll have to wait half an hour then,’ he said. Willingly she descended to the dark disinfectant-smelling hall, and sat waiting until the two, man and woman, came down the stairs, giving her swift indifferent glances before they hurried out into the street, separating at the door. She went up to the room, her room, which they had just vacated. It was no less hers, though the windows were set wide open, and a maid was straightening the bed as she came in.

After these days of solitude, it was both easy to play her part as mother and wife, and difficult – because it was so easy: she felt an impostor. She felt as if her shell moved here, with her family, answering to Mummy, Mother, Susan, Mrs Rawlings. She was surprised no one saw through her, that she wasn’t turned out of doors, as a fake. On the contrary, it seemed the children loved her more; Matthew and she ‘got on’ pleasantly, and Mrs Parkes was happy in her work under (for the most part, it must be confessed) Sophie Traub. At night she lay beside her husband, and they made love again, apparently just as they used to, when they were really married. But she, Susan, or the being who answered so readily and improbably to the name of Susan, was not there: she was in Fred’s Hotel, in Paddington, waiting for the easing hours of solitude to begin.

Soon she made a new arrangement with Fred and with Sophie. It was for five days a week. As for the money, five pounds, she simply asked Matthew for it. She saw that she was not even frightened he might ask what for: he would give it to her, she knew that, and yet it was terrifying it could be so, for this close couple, these partners, had once known the destination of every shilling they must spend. He agreed to give her five pounds a week. She asked for just so much, not a penny more. He sounded indifferent about it. It was as if he were paying her, she thought: paying her off – yes, that was it. Terror came back for a moment, when she understood this, but she stilled it: things had gone too far for that. Now, every week, on Sunday nights, he gave her five pounds, turning away from her before their eyes could meet on the transaction. As for Sophie Traub, she was to be somewhere in or near the house until six at night, after which she was free. She was not to cook, or to clean, she was simply to be there. So she gardened or sewed, and asked friends in, being a person who was bound to have a lot of friends. If the children were sick, she nursed them. If teachers telephoned, she answered them sensibly. For the five daytimes in the school week, she was altogether the mistress of the house.

One night in the bedroom, Matthew asked: ‘Susan, I don’t want to interfere – don’t think that, please – but are you sure you are well?’

She was brushing her hair at the mirror. She made two more strokes on either side of her head, before she replied: ‘Yes, dear, I am sure I am well.’

He was again lying on his back, his big blond head on his hands, his elbows angled up and part-concealing his face. He said: ‘Then Susan, I have to ask you this question, though you must understand, I’m not putting any sort of pressure on you.’ (Susan heard the word pressure with dismay, because this was inevitable, of course she could not go on like this.) ‘Are things going to go on like this?’

‘Well,’ she said, going vague and bright and idiotic again, so as to escape: ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’

He was jerking his elbows up and down, in annoyance or in pain, and, looking at him, she saw he had got thin, even gaunt; and restless angry movements were not what she remembered of him. He said: ‘Do you want a divorce, is that it?’

At this, Susan only with the greatest difficulty stopped herself from laughing: she could hear the bright bubbling laughter she would have emitted, had she let herself. He could only mean one thing: she had a lover, and that was why she spent her days in London, as lost to him as if she had vanished to another continent.

Then the small panic set in again: she understood that he hoped she did have a lover, he was begging her to say so, because otherwise it would be too terrifying.

She thought this out, as she brushed her hair, watching the fine black stuff fly up to make its little clouds of electricity, hiss, hiss, hiss. Behind her head, across the room, was a blue wall. She realized she was absorbed in watching the black hair making shapes against the blue. She should be answering him. ‘Do you want a divorce, Matthew?’

He said: ‘That surely isn’t the point, is it?’

‘You brought it up, I didn’t,’ she said, brightly, suppressing meaningless tinkling laughter.

Next day she asked Fred: ‘Have inquiries been made for me?’

He hesitated, and she said: ‘I’ve been coming here a year now. I’ve made no trouble, and you’ve been paid every day. I have a right to be told.’

‘As a matter of fact, Mrs Jones, a man did come asking.’

‘A man from a detective agency?’

‘Well, he could have been, couldn’t he?’

‘I was asking you … well, what did you tell him?’

‘I told him a Mrs Jones came every weekday from ten until five or six and stayed in Number 19 by herself.’

‘Describing me?’

‘Well, Mrs Jones, I had no alternative. Put yourself in my place.’

‘By rights I should deduct what that man gave you for the information.’

He raised shocked eyes: she was not the sort of person to make jokes like this! Then he chose to laugh: a pinkish wet slit appeared across his white crinkled face: his eyes positively begged her to laugh, otherwise he might lose some money. She remained grave, looking at him.

He stopped laughing and said: ‘You want to go up now?’ – returning to the familiarity, the comradeship, of the country where no questions are asked, on which (and he knew it) she depended completely.

She went up to sit in her wicker chair. But it was not the same. Her husband had searched her out. (The world had searched her out.) The pressures were on her. She was here with his connivance. He might walk in at any moment, here, into Room 19. She imagined the report from the detective agency: ‘A woman calling herself Mrs Jones, fitting the description of your wife (etc., etc., etc.) stays alone all day in Room No. 19. She insists on this room, waits for it if it is engaged. As far as the proprietor knows, she receives no visitors there, male or female.’ A report something on these lines, Matthew must have received.

Well of course he was right: things couldn’t go on like this. He had put an end to it all simply by sending the detective after her.

She tried to shrink herself back into the shelter of the room, a snail pecked out of its shell and trying to squirm back. But the peace of the room had gone. She was trying consciously to revive it, trying to let go into the dark creative trance (or whatever it was) that she had found there. It was no use, yet she craved for it, she was as ill as a suddenly deprived addict.

Several times she returned to the room, to look for herself there, but instead she found the unnamed spirit of restlessness, a prickling fevered hunger for movement, an irritable self-consciousness that made her brain feel as if it had coloured lights going on and off inside it. Instead of the soft dark that had been the room’s air, were now waiting for her demons that made her dash blindly about, muttering words of hate; she was impelling herself from point to point like a moth dashing itself against a windowpane, sliding to the bottom, fluttering off on broken wings, then crashing into the invisible barrier again. And again and again. Soon she was exhausted, and she told Fred that for a while she would not be needing the room, she was going on holiday. Home she went, to the big white house by the river. The middle of a weekday, and she felt guilty at returning to her own home when not expected. She stood unseen, looking in at the kitchen window. Mrs Parkes, wearing a discarded floral overall of Susan’s, was stooping to slide something into the oven. Sophie, arms folded, was leaning her back against a cupboard and laughing at some joke made by a girl not seen before by Susan – a dark foreign girl, Sophie’s visitor. In an armchair Molly, one of the twins, lay curled, sucking her thumb and watching the grownups. She must have some sickness, to be kept from school. The child’s listless face, the dark circles under her eyes, hurt Susan: Molly was looking at the three grownups working and talking in exactly the same way Susan looked at the four through the kitchen window: she was remote, shut off from them.

But then, just as Susan imagined herself going in, picking up the little girl, and sitting in an armchair with her, stroking her probably heated forehead, Sophie did just that: she had been standing on one leg, the other knee flexed, its foot set against the wall. Now she let her foot in its ribbon-tied red shoe slide down the wall, stood solid on two feet, clapping her hands before and behind her, and sang a couple of lines in German, so that the child lifted her heavy eyes at her and began to smile. Then she walked, or rather skipped, over to the child, swung her up, and let her fall into her lap at the same moment she sat herself. She said: ‘Hopla! Hopla! Molly …’ and began stroking the dark untidy young head that Molly laid on her shoulder for comfort.

Well … Susan blinked the tears of farewell out of her eyes, and went quietly up the house to her bedroom. There she sat looking at the river through the trees. She felt at peace, but in a way that was new to her. She had no desire to move, to talk, to do anything at all. The devils that had haunted the house, the garden, were not there; but she knew it was because her soul was in Room 19 in Fred’s Hotel; she was not really here at all. It was a sensation that should have been frightening: to sit at her own bedroom window, listening to Sophie’s rich young voice sing German nursery songs to her child, listening to Mrs Parkes clatter and move below, and to know that all this had nothing to do with her: she was already out of it.

Later, she made herself go down and say she was home: it was unfair to be here unannounced. She took lunch with Mrs Parkes, Sophie, Sophie’s Italian friend Maria, and her daughter Molly, and felt like a visitor.

A few days later, at bedtime, Matthew said: ‘Here’s your five pounds,’ and pushed them over to her. Yet he must have known she had not been leaving the house at all.

She shook her head, gave it back to him, and said, in explanation, not in accusation: ‘As soon as you knew where I was, there was no point.’

He nodded, not looking at her. He was turned away from her: thinking, she knew, how best to handle this wife who terrified him.

He said: ‘I wasn’t trying to … it’s just that I was worried.’

‘Yes I know.’

‘I must confess that I was beginning to wonder …’

‘You thought I had a lover?’

‘Yes, I am afraid I did.’

She knew that he wished she had. She sat wondering how to say: ‘For a year now I’ve been spending all my days in a very sordid hotel room. It’s the place where I’m happy. In fact, without it I don’t exist.’ She heard herself saying this, and understood how terrified he was that she might. So instead she said: ‘Well, perhaps you’re not far wrong.’

Probably Matthew would think the hotel proprietor lied: he would want to think so.

‘Well,’ he said, and she could hear his voice spring up, so to speak, with relief: ‘In that case I must confess I’ve got a bit of an affair on myself.’

She said, detached and interested: ‘Really? Who is she?’ and saw Matthew’s startled look because of this reaction.

‘It’s Phil. Phil Hunt.’

She had known Phil Hunt well in the old unmarried days. She was thinking: No, she won’t do, she’s too neurotic and difficult. She’s never been happy yet. Sophie’s much better. Well Matthew will see that himself, as sensible as he is.

This line of thought went on in silence, while she said aloud: ‘It’s no point telling you about mine, because you don’t know him.’

Quick, quick, invent, she thought. Remember how you invented all that nonsense for Miss Townsend.

She began slowly, careful not to contradict herself: ‘His name is Michael’ – (Michael What?) - ‘Michael Plant.’ (What a silly name!) ‘He’s rather like you – in looks, I mean.’ And indeed, she could imagine herself being touched by no one but Matthew himself. ‘He’s a publisher.’ (Really? Why?) ‘He’s got a wife already and two children.’

She brought out this fantasy, proud of herself.

Matthew said: ‘Are you two thinking of marrying?’

She said, before she could stop herself: ‘Good God, no!’

She realized, if Matthew wanted to marry Phil Hunt, that this was too emphatic, but apparently it was all right, for his voice sounded relieved as he said: ‘It is a bit impossible to imagine oneself married to anyone else, isn’t it?’ With which he pulled her to him, so that her head lay on his shoulder. She turned her face into the dark of his flesh, and listened to the blood pounding through her ears saying: I am alone, I am alone, I am alone.

In the morning Susan lay in bed while he dressed.

He had been thinking things out in the night, because now he said: ‘Susan, why don’t we make a foursome?’

Of course, she said to herself, of course he would be bound to say that. If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let’s make a foursome!

‘Why not?’ she said.

‘We could all meet for lunch. I mean, it’s ridiculous, you sneaking off to filthy hotels, and me staying late at the office, and all the lies everyone has to tell.’

What on earth did I say his name was? – she panicked, then said: ‘I think it’s a good idea, but Michael is away at the moment. When he comes back though – and I’m sure you two would like each other.’

‘He’s away, is he? So that’s why you’ve been …’ Her husband put his hand to the knot of his tie in a gesture of male coquetry she would not before have associated with him; and he bent to kiss her cheek with the expression that goes with the words: Oh you naughty little puss! And she felt its answering look, naughty and coy, come on to her face.

Inside she was dissolving in horror at them both, at how far they had both sunk from honesty of emotion.

So now she was saddled with a lover, and he had a mistress! How ordinary, how reassuring, how jolly! And now they would make a foursome of it, and go about to theatres and restaurants. After all, the Rawlingses could well afford that sort of thing, and presumably the publisher Michael Plant could afford to do himself and his mistress quite well. No, there was nothing to stop the four of them developing the most intricate relationship of civilized tolerance, all enveloped in a charming afterglow of autumnal passion. Perhaps they would all go off on holidays together? She had known people who did. Or perhaps Matthew would draw the line there? Why should he, though, if he was capable of talking about ‘foursomes’ at all?

She lay in the empty bedroom, listening to the car drive off with Matthew in it, off to work. Then she heard the children clattering off to school to the accompaniment of Sophie’s cheerfully ringing voice. She slid down into the hollow of the bed, for shelter against her own irrelevance. And she stretched out her hand to the hollow where her husband’s body had lain, but found no comfort there: he was not her husband. She curled herself up in a small tight ball under the clothes: she could stay here all day, all week, indeed, all her life.

But in a few days she must produce Michael Plant, and – but how? She must presumably find some agreeable man prepared to impersonate a publisher called Michael Plant. And in return for which she would – what? Well, for one thing they would make love. The idea made her want to cry with sheer exhaustion. Oh no, she had finished with all that – the proof of it was that the words ‘make love’, or even imagining it, trying hard to revive no more than the pleasures of sensuality, let alone affection, or love, made her want to run away and hide from the sheer effort of the thing … Good Lord, why make love at all? Why make love with anyone? Or if you are going to make love, what does it matter who with? Why shouldn’t she simply walk into the street, pick up a man and have a roaring sexual affair with him? Why not? Or even with Fred? What difference did it make?

But she had let herself in for it – an interminable stretch of time with a lover, called Michael, as part of a gallant civilized foursome. Well, she could not, and would not.

She got up, dressed, went down to find Mrs Parkes, and asked her for the loan of a pound, since Matthew, she said, had forgotten to leave her money. She exchanged with Mrs Parkes variations on the theme that husbands are all the same, they don’t think, and without saying a word to Sophie, whose voice could be heard upstairs from the telephone, walked to the underground, travelled to South Kensington, changed to the Inner Circle, got out at Paddington, and walked to Fred’s Hotel. There she told Fred that she wasn’t going on holiday after all, she needed the room. She would have to wait an hour, Fred said. She went to a busy tearoom-cum-restaurant around the corner, and sat watching the people flow in and out the door that kept swinging open and shut, watched them mingle and merge and separate, felt her being flow into them, into their movement. When the hour was up she left a half crown for her pot of tea, and left the place without looking back at it, just as she had left her house, the big, beautiful white house, without another look, but silently dedicating it to Sophie. She returned to Fred, received the key of No. 19, now free, and ascended the grimy stairs slowly, letting floor after floor fall away below her, keeping her eyes lifted, so that floor after floor descended jerkily to her level of vision, and fell away out of sight.

No. 19 was the same. She saw everything with an acute, narrow, checking glance: the cheap shine of the satin spread, which had been replaced carelessly after the two bodies had finished their convulsions under it; a trace of powder on the glass that topped the chest of drawers; an intense green shade in a fold of the curtain. She stood at the window, looking down, watching people pass and pass and pass until her mind went dark from the constant movement. Then she sat in the wicker chair, letting herself go slack. But she had to be careful, because she did not want, today, to be surprised by Fred’s knock at five o’clock.

The demons were not here. They had gone forever, because she was buying her freedom from them. She was slipping already into the dark fructifying dream that seemed to caress her inwardly, like the movement of her blood … but she had to think about Matthew first. Should she write a letter for the coroner? But what should she say? She would like to leave him with the look on his face she had seen this morning – banal, admittedly, but at least confidently healthy. Well, that was impossible, one did not look like that with a wife dead from suicide. But how to leave him believing she was dying because of a man – because of the fascinating publisher Michael Plant? Oh, how ridiculous! How absurd! How humiliating! But she decided not to trouble about it, simply not to think about the living. If he wanted to believe she had a lover, he would believe it. And he did want to believe it. Even when he had found out that there was no publisher in London called Michael Plant, he would think: Oh poor Susan, she was afraid to give me his real name.

And what did it matter whether he married Phil Hunt or Sophie? Though it ought to be Sophie who was already the mother of those children … and what hypocrisy to sit here worrying about the children, when she was going to leave them because she had not got the energy to stay.

She had about four hours. She spent them delightfully, darkly, sweetly, letting herself slide gently, gently, to the edge of the river. Then, with hardly a break in her consciousness, she got up, pushed the thin rug against the door, made sure the windows were tight shut, put two shillings in the meter, and turned on the gas. For the first time since she had been in the room she lay on the hard bed that smelled stale, that smelled of sweat and sex.

She lay on her back on the green satin cover, but her legs were chilly. She got up, found a blanket folded into the bottom of the chest of drawers, and carefully covered her legs with it. She was quite content lying there, listening to the faint soft hiss of the gas that poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drifted off into the dark river.

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award, and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. She lives in north London.

Also by the Author

NOVELS

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

The Summer Before the Dark

Memoirs of a Survivor

Diary of a Good Neighbour

If the Old Could…;

The Good Terrorist

The Fifth Child

Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

Love, Again

Mara and Dann

Ben in the World

‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

The Sirian Experiments

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence

Martha Quest

A Proper Marriage

A Ripple from the Storm

Landlocked

The Four-Gated City

POETRY

Fourteen Poems

SHORT STORIES

Five

The Habit of Loving

A Man and Two Women

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

Winter in July

The Black Madonna

This Was the Old Chiefs Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)

The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)

To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

London Observed

DRAMA

Each His Own Wilderness

Play with a Tiger

The Singing Door

NON-FICTION

In Pursuit of the English

Particularly Cats

Rufus the Survivor

Going Home

A Small Personal Voice

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

The Wind Blows Away Our Words

African Laughter

Under My Skin

Walking in the Shade

Read on

Have You Read?

A selection of other books by Doris Lessing

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

The Grass is Singing: Chapter 1

MURDER MYSTERY

By Special Correspondent

Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered.

It is thought he was in search of valuables.

The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.

And then they turned the page to something else.

But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.

To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would have never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.

Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.

And then it was that someone used the phrase ‘poor whites’. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. ‘Poor whites’ were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.

Though the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.

Thus the district handled the Turners, in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves ignored. They apparently did not recognize the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.

The more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary the case becomes. Not the murder itself; but the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.

For instance, they must have wondered who that ‘Special Correspondent’ was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder. One could say that he practically controlled the handling of the case, even taking precedence over the Sergeant himself. And people felt that to be quite right and proper. Whom should it concern, if not the white farmers, that a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned? It was their livelihood, their wives and families, their way of living, at stake.

But to the outsider it is strange that Slatter should have been allowed to take charge of the affair, to arrange that everything should pass over without more than a ripple of comment.

For there could have been no planning: there simply wasn’t time. Why, for instance, when Dick Turner’s farm boys came to him with the news, did he sit down to write a note to the Sergeant at the police camp? He did not use the telephone.

Everyone who has lived in the country knows what a branch telephone is like. You lift the receiver after you have turned the handle the required number of times, and then, click, click, click, you can hear the receivers coming off all over the district, and soft noises like breathing, a whisper, a subdued cough.

Slatter lived five miles from the Turners. The farm boys came to him first, when they discovered the body. And though it was an urgent matter, he ignored the telephone, but sent a personal letter by a native bearer on a bicycle to Denham at the police camp, twelve miles away. The Sergeant sent out half a dozen native policemen at once, to the Turners’ farm, to see what they could find. He drove first to see Slatter, because the way that letter was worded roused his curiosity. That was why he arrived late on the scene of the murder. The native policemen did not have to search far for the murderer. After walking through the house, looking briefly at the body, and dispersing down the front of the little hill the house stood on, they saw Moses himself rise out of a tangled ant-heap in front of them. He walked up to them and said (or words to this effect): ‘Here I am.’ They snapped the handcuffs on him, and went back to the house to wait for the police cars to come. There they saw Dick Turner come out of the bush by the house with two whining dogs at his heels. He was off his head, talking crazily to himself, wandering in and out of the bush with his hands full of leaves and earth. They let him be, while keeping an eye on him, for he was a white man, though mad, and black men, even when policemen, do not lay hands on white flesh.

People did ask, cursorily, why the murderer had given himself up. There was not much chance of escape. But he did have a sporting chance. He could have run to the hills and hidden for a while. Or he could have slipped over the border to Portuguese territory. Then the District Native Commissioner, at a sundowner party, said that it was perfectly understandable. If one knew anything about the history of the country, or had read any of the memoirs or letters of the old missionaries and explorers, one would have come across accounts of the society Lobengula ruled. The laws were strict: everyone knew what they could or could not do. If someone did an unforgivable thing, like touching one of the King’s women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment, which was likely to be impalement over an ant-heap on a stake, or something equally unpleasant. ‘I have done wrong, and I know it,’ he might say, ‘therefore let me be punished.’ Well, it was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are ‘fine’ (Yet the fashion is changing: it is permissible to glorify the old ways sometimes, providing one says how depraved the natives have become since.)

So that aspect of the affair was dropped, yet it is not the least interesting, for Moses might not have been a Matabele at all. He was in Mashonaland; though of course natives do wander all over Africa. He might have come from anywhere: Portuguese territory, Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa. And it is a long time since the days of the great king Lobengula. But then native commissioners tend to think in terms of the past.

Well, having sent the letter to the police camp, Charlie Slatter went to the Turners’ place, driving at a great speed over the bad farm roads in his fat American car.

Who was Charlie Slatter? It was he who, from the beginning of the tragedy to its end, personified Society for the Turners. He touches the story at half a dozen points; without him things would not have happened quite as they did, though sooner or later, in one way or another, the Turners were bound to come to grief.

Slatter had been a grocer’s assistant in London. He was fond of telling his children that if it had not been for his energy and enterprise they would be running round the slums in rags. He was still a proper cockney, even after twenty years in Africa. He came with one idea: to make money. He made it. He made plenty. He was a crude, brutal, ruthless, yet kindhearted man, in his own way, and according to his own impulses, who could not help making money. He farmed as if he were turning the handle of a machine which would produce pound notes at the other end. He was hard with his wife, making her bear unnecessary hardships at the beginning; he was hard with his children, until he made money, when they got everything they wanted; and above all he was hard with his farm labourers. They, the geese that laid the golden eggs, were still in that state where they did not know there were other ways of living besides producing gold for other people. They know better now, or are beginning to. But Slatter believed in farming with the sjambok. It hung over his front door, like a motto on a wall: ‘You shall not mind killing if it is necessary.’ He had once killed a native in a fit of temper. He was fined thirty pounds. Since then he had kept his temper. But sjamboks are all very well for the Slatters; not so good for people less sure of themselves. It was he who had told Dick Turner, long ago, when Dick first started farming, that one should buy a sjambok before a plough or a harrow, and that sjambok did not do the Turners any good, as we shall see.

Slatter was a shortish, broad, powerful man, with heavy shoulders and thick arms. His face was broad and bristled; shrewd, watchful, and a little cunning. He had a crop of fair hair that made him look like a convict; but he did not care for appearances. His small blue eyes were hardly visible, because of the way he screwed them up, after years and years of South African sunshine.

Bent over the steering wheel, almost hugging it in his determination to get to the Turners quickly, his eyes were little blue chinks in a set face. He was wondering why Marston, the assistant, who was after all his employee, had not come to him about the murder, or at least sent a note. Where was he? The hut he lived in was only a couple of hundred yards from the house itself. Perhaps he had got cold feet and run away? Anything was possible, thought Charlie, from this particular type of young Englishman. He had a rooted contempt for soft-faced, soft-voiced Englishmen, combined with a fascination for their manner and breeding. His own sons, now grown up, were gentlemen. He had spent plenty of money to make them so; but he despised them for it. At the same time he was proud of them. This conflict showed itself in his attitude towards Marston: half hard and indifferent, half subtly deferential. At the moment he felt nothing but irritation.

Half-way he felt the car rock, and swearing, pulled it up. It was a puncture: no, two punctures. The red mud of the road held fragments of broken glass. His irritation expressed itself in the half-conscious thought, ‘Just like Turner to have glass on his roads!’ But Turner was now necessarily an object of passionate, protective pity, and the irritation was focused on Marston, the assistant who, Slatter felt, should somehow have prevented this murder. What was he being paid for? What had he been engaged for? But Slatter was a fair man in his own way, and where his own race was concerned. He restrained himself, and got down to mending one puncture and changing a tyre, working in the heavy red slush of the roads. This took him three-quarters of an hour, and by the time he was finished, and had picked the pieces of green glass from the mud and thrown them into the bush, the sweat was soaking his face and hair.

When he reached the house at last, he saw, as he approached through the bush, six glittering bicycles leaning against the walls. And in front of the house, under the trees, stood six native policemen, and among them the native Moses, his hands linked in front of him. The sun glinted on the handcuffs, on the bicycles, on the masses of heavy wet leaves. It was a wet, sultry morning. The sky was a tumult of discoloured clouds: it looked full of billowing dirty washing. Puddles on the pale soil held a sheen of sky.

Charlie walked up to the policemen, who saluted him. They were in fezes, and their rather fancy-dress uniform. This last thought did not occur to Charlie, who liked his natives either one way or the other: properly dressed according to their station, or in loincloths. He could not bear the half-civilized native. The policemen, picked for their physique, were a fine body of men, but they were put in the shade by Moses, who was a great powerful man, black as polished linoleum, and dressed in a singlet and shorts, which were damp and muddy. Charlie stood directly in front of the murderer and looked into his face. The man stared back, expressionless, indifferent. His own face was curious: it showed a kind of triumph, a guarded vindictiveness, and fear. Why fear? Of Moses, who was as good as hanged already? But he was uneasy, troubled. Then he seemed to shake himself into self-command, and turned and saw Dick Turner, standing a few paces away, covered with mud.

‘Turner!’ he said, peremptorily. He stopped, looking into the man’s face. Dick appeared not to know him. Charlie took him by the arm and drew him towards his own car. He did not know he was incurably mad then; otherwise he might have been even more angry than he was. Having put Dick into the back seat of his car, he went into the house. In the front room stood Marston, his hands in his pockets, in a pose that seemed negligently calm. But his face was pale and strained.

‘Where were you?’ asked Charlie at once, accusingly.

‘Normally Mr Turner wakes me,’ said the youth calmly. ‘This morning I slept late. When I came into the house I found Mrs Turner on the verandah. Then the policemen came. I was expecting you.’ But he was afraid: it was the fear of death that sounded in his voice, not the fear that was controlling Charlie’s actions: he had not been long enough in the country to understand Charlie’s special fear.

Charlie grunted: he never spoke unless necessary. He looked long and curiously at Marston, as if trying to make out why it was the farm natives had not called a man who lay asleep a few yards off, but had instinctively sent for himself. But it was not with dislike or contempt he looked at Marston now; it was more the look a man gives a prospective partner who has yet to prove himself.

He turned and went into the bedroom. Mary Turner was a stiff shape under a soiled white sheet. At one end of the sheet protruded a mass of pale strawish hair, and at the other a crinkled yellow foot. Now a curious thing happened. The hate and contempt that one would have expected to show on his face when he looked at the murderer, twisted his features now, as he stared at Mary. His brows knotted, and for a few seconds his lips curled back over his teeth in a vicious grimace. He had his back to Marston, who would have been astonished to see him. Then, with a hard, angry movement, Charlie turned and left the room, driving the young man before him.

Marston said: ‘She was lying on the verandah. I lifted her on to the bed.’ He shuddered at the memory of the touch of the cold body. ‘I thought she shouldn’t be left lying there.’ He hesitated and added, the muscles of his face contracting whitely: ‘The dogs were licking at her.’

Charlie nodded, with a keen glance at him. He seemed indifferent as to where she might be lying. At the same time he approved the self-control of the assistant who had performed the unpleasant task.

‘There was blood everywhere. I cleaned it up…I thought afterwards I should have left it for the police.’

‘It makes no odds,’ said Charlie absently. He sat down on one of the rough wood chairs in the front room, and remained in thought, whistling softly through his front teeth. Marston stood by the window, looking for the arrival of the police car. From time to time Charlie looked round the room alertly, flicking his tongue over his lips. Then he lapsed back into his soft whistling. It got on the young man’s nerves.

At last, cautiously, almost warningly, Charlie said: ‘What do you know of this?’

Marston noted the emphasized you, and wondered what Slatter knew. He was well in control of himself, but as taut as wire. He said: ‘I don’t know. Nothing really. It is all so difficult .’ He hesitated, looking appealing at Charlie.

That look of almost soft appeal irritated Charlie, coming from a man, but it pleased him too: he was pleased the youth deferred to him. He knew the type so well. So many of them came from England to learn farming. They were usually ex-public school, very English, but extremely adaptable. From Charlie’s point of view, the adaptability redeemed them. It was strange to see how quickly they accustomed themselves. At first they were diffident, though proud and withdrawn; cautiously learning the new ways, with a fine sensitiveness, an alert self-consciousness.

When old settlers say, ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying, in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out: we don’t want you.’ Most of these young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard, of course, becoming as bad oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as ‘bad’. And anyway, what had one’s ideas amounted to? Abstract ideas about decency and goodwill, that was all: merely abstract ideas. When it came to the point, one never had contact with natives, except in the master-servant relationship. One never knew them in their own lives, as human beings. A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sundrenched country they had come to; they had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburnt limbs and toughened bodies.

If Tony Marston had been even a few more months in the country it would have been easy. That was Charlie’s feeling. That was why he looked at the young man with a speculative frowning look, not condemning him, only wary and on the alert.

He said: ‘What do you mean, it is all so difficult?’

Tony Marston appeared uncomfortable, as if he did not know his own mind. And for that matter he did not: the weeks in the Turners’ household with its atmosphere of tragedy had not helped him to get his mind clear. The two standards – the one he had brought with him and the one he was adopting – conflicted still. And there was a roughness, a warning note, in Charlie’s voice, that left him wondering. What was he being warned against? He was intelligent enough to know he was being warned. In this he was unlike Charlie, who was acting by instinct and did not know his voice was a threat. It was all so unusual. Where were the police? What right had Charlie, who was a neighbour, to be fetched before himself, who was practically a member of the household? Why was Charlie quietly taking command?

His ideas of right were upset. He was confused, but he had his own ideas about the murder, which could not be stated straight out, like that, in black and white. When he came to think of it, the murder was logical enough; looking back over the last few days he could see that something like this was bound to happen, he could almost say he had been expecting it, some kind of violence or ugliness. Anger, violence, death, seemed natural to this vast, harsh country…he had done a lot of thinking since he had strolled casually into the house that morning, wondering why everyone was so late, to find Mary Turner lying murdered on the verandah, and the police boys outside, guarding the houseboy; and Dick Turner muttering and stumbling through the puddles, mad, but apparently harmless. Things he had not understood, he understood now, and he was ready to talk about them. But he was in the dark as to Charlie’s attitude. There was something here he could not get hold of.

‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘When I first arrived I didn’t know much about the country.’

Charlie said, with a good-humoured but brutal irony, ‘Thanks for the information.’ And then, ‘Have you any idea why this nigger murdered Mrs Turner?’

‘Well, I have a sort of idea, yes.’

‘We had better leave it to the Sergeant, when he comes then.’

It was a snub; he had been shut up. Tony held his tongue, angry but bewildered.

When the Sergeant came, he went over to look at the murderer, glanced at Dick through the window of Slatter’s car, and then came into the house.

‘I went to your place, Slatter,’ he said, nodding at Tony, giving him a keen look. Then he went into the bedroom. And his reactions were as Charlie’s had been: vindictiveness towards the murderer, emotional pity for Dick, and for Mary, a bitter contemptuous anger: Sergeant Denham had been in the country for a number of years. This time Tony saw the expression on the face, and it gave him a shock. The faces of the two men as they stood over the body, gazing down at it, made him feel uneasy, even afraid. He himself felt a little disgust, but not much; it was mainly pity that agitated him, knowing what he knew. It was the disgust that he would feel for any social irregularity, no more than the distaste that comes from failure of the imagination. This profound instinctive horror and fear astonished him.

The three of them went silently into the living-room.

Charlie Slatter and Sergeant Denham stood side by side like two judges, as if they had purposely taken up this attitude. Opposite them was Tony. He stood his ground, but he felt an absurd guiltiness taking hold of him, simply because of their pose, standing like that, looking at him with subtle reserved faces that he could not read.

‘Bad business,’ said Sergeant Denham briefly.

No one answered. He snapped open a notebook, adjusted elastic over a page, and poised a pencil.

‘A few questions, if you don’t mind,’ he said. Tony nodded.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘About three weeks.’

‘Living in this house?’

‘No, in a hut down the path.’

‘You were going to run this place while they were away?’

‘Yes, for six months.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I intended to go on a tobacco farm.’

‘When did you know about this business?’

‘They didn’t call me. I woke and found Mrs Turner.’

Tony’s voice showed he was now on the defensive. He felt wounded, even insulted that he had not been called: above all, that these two men seemed to think it right and natural that he should be bypassed in this fashion, as if his newness to the country unfitted him for any kind of responsibility. And he resented the way he was being questioned. They had no right to do it. He was beginning to simmer with rage, although he knew quite well that they themselves were quite unconscious of the patronage implicit in their manner, and that it would be better for him to try and understand the real meaning of this scene, rather than to stand on his dignity.

‘You had your meals with the Turners?’

‘Yes.’

‘Apart from that, were you ever here – socially, so to speak?’

‘No, hardly at all. I have been busy learning the job.’

‘Get on well with Turner?’

‘Yes, I think so. I mean, he was not easy to know. He was absorbed in his work. And he was obviously very unhappy at leaving the place.’

‘Yes, poor devil, he had a hard time of it.’ The voice was suddenly tender almost maudlin, with pity, although the Sergeant snapped out the words, and then shut his mouth tight, as if to present a brave face to the world. Tony was disconcerted: the unexpectedness of these men’s responses was taking him right out of his depth. He was feeling nothing that they were feeling: he was an outsider in this tragedy, although both the Sergeant and Charlie Slatter seemed to feel personally implicated, for they had unconsciously assumed poses of weary dignity, appearing bowed down with unutterable burdens, because of poor Dick Turner and his sufferings.

Yet it was Charlie who had literally turned Dick off his farm; and in previous interviews, at which Tony had been present, he had shown none of this sentimental pity.

There was a long pause. The Sergeant shut his notebook. But he had not yet finished. He was regarding Tony cautiously, wondering how to frame the next question. Or that was how it appeared to Tony, who could see that here was the moment that was the crux of the whole affair. Charlie’s face: wary, a little cunning, a little afraid, proclaimed it.

‘See anything out of the ordinary while you were here?’ asked the Sergeant, apparently casual.

‘Yes, I did,’ blurted Tony, suddenly determined not to be bullied. For he knew he was being bullied, though he was cut off from them both by a gulf in experience and belief. They looked up at him, frowning; glanced at each other swiftly – then away, as if afraid to acknowledge conspiracy.

‘What did you see? I hope you realize the – unpleasantness – of this case?’ The last question was a grudging appeal.

‘Any murder is surely unpleasant,’ remarked Tony drily.

‘When you have been in the country long enough, you will understand that we don’t like niggers murdering white women.’

The phrase, ‘When you have been in the country’, stuck in Tony’s gullet. He had heard it too often, and it had come to jar on him. At the same time it made him feel angry. Also callow. He would have liked to blurt out the truth in one overwhelming, incontrovertible statement; but the truth was not like that. It never was. The fact he knew, or guessed, about Mary, the fact these two men were conspiring to ignore, could be stated easily enough. But the important thing, the thing that really mattered, so it seemed to him, was to understand the background, the circumstances, the characters of Dick and Mary, the pattern of their lives. And it was not so easy to do. He had arrived at the truth circuitously: circuitously it would have to be explained. And his chief emotion, which was an impersonal pity for Mary and Dick and the native, a pity that was also rage against circumstances, made it difficult for him to know where to begin.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I know from the beginning, only it will take some time, I am afraid…’

‘You mean you know why Mrs Turner was murdered?’ The question was a quick, shrewd parry.

‘No, not just like that. Only I can form a theory.’ The choice of words was most unfortunate.

‘We don’t want theories. We want facts. And in any case, you should remember Dick Turner. This is all most unpleasant for him. You should remember him, poor devil.’

Here it was again: the utterly illogical appeal, which to these two men was clearly not illogical at all. The whole thing was preposterous! Tony began to lose his temper.

‘Do you or do you not want to hear what I have to say?’ he asked, irritably.

‘Go ahead. Only remember, I don’t want to hear your fancies. I want to hear facts. Have you ever seen anything definite which would throw light on this murder? For instance, have you seen this boy attempting to get at her jewellery, or something like that? Anything that is definite. Not something in the air.’

Tony laughed. The two men looked at him sharply.

‘You know as well as I do this case is not something that can be explained straight off like that. You know that. It’s not something that can be said in black and white, straight off.’

It was pure deadlock; no one spoke. As if Sergeant Denham had not heard those last words, a heavy frown on his face, he said at last: ‘For instance, how did Mrs Turner treat this boy? Did she treat her boys well?’

The angry Tony, fumbling for a foothold in this welter of emotion and half-understood loyalties, clutched at this for a beginning.

‘Yes, she treated him badly, I thought. Though on the other hand…’

‘Nagged at him, eh? Oh well, women are pretty bad that way, in this country, very often. Aren’t they, Slatter?’ The voice was easy, intimate, informal. ‘My old woman drives me mad – it’s something about this country. They have no idea how to deal with niggers.’

‘Needs a man to deal with niggers,’ said Charlie. ‘Niggers don’t understand women giving them orders. They keep their own women in their right place.’ He laughed. The Sergeant laughed. They turned towards each other, even including Tony, in an unmistakable relief. The tension had broken; the danger was over: once again, he had been bypassed, and the interview, it seemed, was over. He could hardly believe it.

‘But look here,’ he said. Then he stopped. Both men turned to look at him, a steady, grave, irritated look on their faces. And the warning was unmistakable! It was the warning that might have been given to a greenhorn who was going to let himself down by saying too much. This realization was too much for Tony. He gave in; he washed his hands of it. He watched the other two in utter astonishment: they were together in mood and emotion, standing there in perfect understanding; the understanding was unrealized by themselves, the sympathy unacknowledged; their concerted handling of this affair had been instinctive: they were completely unaware of there being anything extraordinary, even anything illegal. And was there anything illegal, after all? This was a casual talk, on the face of it, nothing formal about it now that the notebook was shut – and it had been shut ever since they had reached the crisis of the scene.

Charlie said, turning towards the sergeant, ‘Better get her out of here. It is too hot to wait.’

‘Yes,’ said the policeman, moving to give orders accordingly.

And that brutally matter-of-fact remark, Tony realized afterwards, was the only time poor Mary Turner was referred to directly. But why should she be? – except that this was really a friendly talk between the farmer who had been her next neighbour, the policeman who had been in her house on his rounds as a guest, and the assistant who had lived there for some weeks. It wasn’t a formal occasion, this: Tony clung to the thought. There was a court case to come yet, which would be properly conducted.

‘The case will be a matter of form, of course,’ said the Sergeant, as if thinking aloud, with a look at Tony. He was standing by the police car, watching the native policemen lift the body of Mary Turner, which was wrapped in a blanket, into the back seat. She was stiff; a rigid outstretched arm knocked horribly against the narrow door; it was difficult to get her in. At last it was done and the door shut. And then there was another problem: they could not put Moses the murderer into the same car with her; one could not put a black man close to a white woman, even though she were dead, and murdered by him. And there was only Charlie’s car, and mad Dick Turner was in that, sitting staring in the back. There seemed to be a feeling that Moses, having committed a murder, deserved to be taken by car; but there was no help for it, he would have to walk, guarded by the policemen, wheeling their bicycles, to the camp.

All these arrangements completed, there was a pause.

They stood there beside the cars, in the moment of parting, looking at the red-brick house with its shimmering hot roof, and the thick encroaching bush, and the group of black men moving off under the trees on their long walk. Moses was quite impassive, allowing himself to be directed without any movement of his own. His face was blank. He seemed to be staring straight into the sun. Was he thinking he would not see it much longer? Impossible to say. Regret? Not a sign of it. Fear? It did not seem so. The three men looked at the murderer, thinking their own thoughts, speculative, frowning, but not as if he were important now. No, he was unimportant: he was the constant, the black man who will thieve, rape, murder, if given half a chance. Even for Tony he no longer mattered; and his knowledge of the native mind was too small to give him any basis for conjecture.

‘And what about him?’ asked Charlie, jerking his thumb at Dick Turner. He meant: where does he come in, as far as the court case is concerned?

‘He looks to me as if he won’t be good for much,’ said the Sergeant, who after all had plenty of experience of death, crime and madness.

No, for them the important thing was Mary Turner, who had let the side down; but even she, since she was dead, was no longer a problem. The one fact that remained still to be dealt with was the necessity for preserving appearances. Sergeant Denham understood that: it was part of his job, though it would not appear in regulations, was rather implicit in the spirit of the country, the spirit in which he was soaked. Charlie Slatter understood it, none better. Still side by side, as if one impulse, one regret, one fear, moved them both, they stood together in that last moment before they left the place, giving their final silent warning to Tony, looking at him gravely.

And he was beginning to understand. He knew now, at least, that what had been fought out in the room they had just left was nothing to do with the murder as such. The murder, in itself, was nothing. The struggle that had been decided in a few brief words – or rather, in the silences between the words – had had nothing to do with the surface meaning of the scene. He would understand it all a good deal better in a few months, when he had ‘become used to the country’. And then he would do his best to forget the knowledge, for to live with the colour bar in all its nuances and implications means closing one’s mind to many things, if one intends to remain an accepted member of society. But, in the interval, there would be a few brief moments when he would see the thing clearly, and understand that it was ‘white civilization’ fighting to defend itself that had been implicit in the attitude of Charlie Slatter and the Sergeant, ‘white civilization’ which will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or for evil, with a black person. For once it admits that, it crashes, and nothing can save it. So, above all, it cannot afford failures, such as the Turners’ failure.

For the sake of those few lucid moments, and his half-confused knowledge, it can be said that Tony was the person present who had the greatest responsibility that day. For it would never have occurred to either Slatter or the Sergeant that they might be wrong: they were upheld, as in all their dealings with the black-white relationship, by a feeling of almost martyred responsibility. Yet Tony, too, wanted to be accepted by this new country. He would have to adapt himself, and if he did not conform, would be rejected: the issue was clear to him, he had heard the phrase ‘getting used to our ideas’ too often to have any illusions on the point. And, if he had acted according to his by now muddled ideas of right and wrong, his feeling that a monstrous injustice was being done, what difference would it make to the only participant in the tragedy who was neither dead or mad? For Moses would be hanged in any case; he had committed a murder, that fact remained. Did he intend to go on fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle? And if so, which principle? If he had stepped forward then, as he nearly did, when Sergeant Denham climbed finally into the car, and had said: ‘Look here, I am just not going to shut up about this,’ what would have been gained? It is certain that the Sergeant would not have understood him. His face would have contracted, his brow gone dark with irritation, and, taking his foot off the clutch, he would have said, ‘Shut up about what? Who has asked you to shut up?’ And then, if Tony had stammered out something about responsiblity, he would have looked significantly at Charlie and shrugged. Tony might have continued, ignoring the shrug and its implication of his wrongmindedness: ‘If you must blame somebody, then blame Mrs Turner. You can’t have it both ways. Either the white people are responsible for their behaviour, or they are not. It takes two to make a murder – a murder of this kind. Though, one can’t really blame her either. She can’t help being what she is. I’ve lived here, I tell you, which neither of you has done, and the whole thing is so difficult it is impossible to say who is to blame.’ And then the Sergeant would have said, ‘You can say what you think right in court.’ That is what he would have said, just as if the issue had not been decided – though ostensibly it had never been mentioned – less than ten minutes before. ‘It’s not a question of blame,’ the Sergeant might have said. ‘Has anyone said anything about blame? But you can’t get away from the fact that this nigger has murdered her, can you?’

So Tony said nothing and the police car went off through the trees. Charlie Slatter followed in his car with Dick Turner. Tony was left in the empty clearing, with an empty house.

He went inside, slowly, obsessed with the one clear image that remained to him after the events of the morning, and which seemed to him the key to the whole thing: the look on the Sergeant’s and Slatter’s faces when they looked down at the body; that almost hysterical look of hate and fear.

He sat down, his hand to his head, which ached badly; then got up again and fetched from a dusty shelf in the kitchen a medicine bottle marked ‘Brandy’. He drank it off. He felt shaky in the knees and in the thighs. He was weak, too, with repugnance against this ugly little house which seemed to hold within its walls, even in its very brick and cement, the fears and horror of the murder. He felt suddenly as if he could not bear to stay in it, not for another moment.

He looked up at the bare crackling tin of the roof, that was warped with the sun, at the faded gimcrack furniture, at the dusty brick floors covered with ragged animal skins, and wondered how those two, Mary and Dick Turner, could have borne to live in such a place, year in and year out, for so long. Why, even the little thatched hut where he lived at the back was better than this! Why did they go on without even so much as putting in ceilings? It was enough to drive anyone mad, the heat in this place.

And then, feeling a little muddle-headed (the heat made the brandy take effect at once), he wondered how all this had begun, where the tragedy had started. For he clung obstinately to the belief, in spite of Slatter and the Sergeant, that the causes of the murder must be looked for a long way back, and that it was they which were important. What sort of woman had Mary Turner been, before she came to this farm and had been driven slowly off balance by heat and loneliness and poverty? And Dick Turner himself – what had he been? And the native – but here his thoughts were stopped by lack of knowledge. He could not even begin to imagine the mind of a native.

Passing his hand over his forehead, he tried desperately, and for the last time, to achieve some sort of a vision that would lift the murder above the confusions and complexities of the morning, and make of it, perhaps, a symbol, or a warning. But he failed. It was too hot. He was still exasperated by the attitude of the two men. His head was reeling. It must be over a hundred in this room, he thought angrily, getting up from his chair, and finding that his legs were unsteady. And he had drunk, at the most, two tablespoons of brandy! This damned country, he thought, convulsed with anger. Why should this happen to me, getting involved with a damned twisted affair like this, when I have only just come: and I really can’t be expected to act as judge and jury and compassionate God into the bargain!

He stumbled on to the verandah, where the murder had been committed the night before. There was a ruddy smear on the brick, and a puddle of rainwater was tinged pink. The same big shabby dogs were licking at the edges of the water, and cringed away when Tony shouted at them. He leaned against the wall and stared over the soaked greens and browns of the veld to the kopjes, which were sharp and blue after the rain; it had poured half the night. He realized, as the sound grew loud in his ears, that cicadas were shrilling all about him. He had been too absorbed to hear them. It was a steady, insistent screaming from every bush and tree. It wore on his nerves. ‘I am getting out of this place,’ he said suddenly. ‘I am getting out of it altogether. I am going to the other end of the country. I wash my hands of the thing. Let the Slatters and the Denhams do as they like. What has it got to do with me?’

That morning, he packed his things and walked over to the Slatters’ to tell Charlie he would not stay. Charlie seemed indifferent, even relieved; he had been thinking there was no need of a manager now that Dick would not come back.

After that the Turners’ farm was run as an overflow for Charlie’s cattle. They grazed all over it, even up to the hill where the house stood. It was left empty: it soon fell down.

Tony went back into town, where he hung round the bars and hotels for a while, waiting to hear of some job that would suit him. But his early carefree adaptability was gone. He had grown difficult to please. He visited several farms, but each time went away: farming had lost its glitter for him. At the trial, which was as Sergeant Denham had said it would be, a mere formality, he said what was expected of him. It was suggested that the native had murdered Mary Turner while drunk, in search of money and jewellery.

When the trial was over, Tony loafed about aimlessly until his money was finished. The murder, those few weeks with the Turners, had affected him more than he knew. But his money being gone, he had to do something in order to eat. He met a man from Northern Rhodesia, who told him about the copper mines and the wonderfully high salaries. They sounded fantastic to Tony. He took the next train to the copper belt, intending to save some money and start some business on his own account. But the salaries, once there, did not seem so good as they had from a distance. The cost of living was high, and then, everyone drank so much…Soon he left underground work and was a kind of manager. So, in the end, he sat in an office and did paperwork, which was what he had come to Africa to avoid. But it wasn’t so bad really. One should take things as they came. Life isn’t as one expects it to be – and so on; these were the things he said to himself when depressed, and was measuring himself against his early ambitions.

For the people in ‘the district’, who knew all about him by hearsay, he was the young man from England who hadn’t the guts to stand more than a few weeks of farming. No guts, they said. He should have stuck it out.

The Golden Notebook

[The four notebooks were identical, about eighteen inches square, with shiny covers, like the texture of a cheap watered silk. But the colours distinguished them—black, red, yellow and blue. When the covers were laid back, exposing the four first pages, it seemed that order had not immediately imposed itself. In each, the first page or two showed broken scribblings and half-sentences. Then a title appeared, as if Anna had, almost automatically, divided herself into four, and then, from the nature of what she had written, named these divisions. And this is what had happened. The first book, the black notebook, began with doodlings, scattered musical symbols, treble signs that shifted into the £ sign and back again; then a complicated design of interlocking circles, then words:]

black

dark, it is so dark

it is dark

there is a kind of darkness here

[And then, in a changed startled writing:]

Every time I sit down to write, and let my mind go easy, the words, It is so dark, or something to do with darkness. Terror. The terror of this city. Fear of being alone. Only one thing stops me from jumping up and screaming or running to the telephone to ring somebody, it is to deliberately think myself back into that hot light…white light, the light, closed eyes, the red light hot on the eyeballs. The rough pulsing heat of a granite boulder. My palm flat on it, moving over the lichens. The grain of the lichens. Tiny, like minute animals’ ears, a warm rough silk on my palm, dragging insistently at the pores of my skin. And hot. The smell of the sun on hot rock. Dry and hot, and the silk of dust on my cheek, smelling of sun, the sun. Letters from the agent about the novel. Every time one of them arrives I want to laugh—the laughter of disgust. Bad laughter, the laughter of helplessness, a self-punishment. Unreal letters, when I think of a slope of hot pored granite, my cheeks against hot rock, the red light on my eyelids. Lunch with the agent. Unreal—the novel is more and more a sort of creature with its own life. Frontiers of War now has nothing to do with me, it is a property of other people. Agent said it should be a film. Said no. She was patient—her job to be.

[A date was scribbled here—1951.]

(1952) Had lunch with film man. Discussed cast for Frontiers. So incredible wanted to laugh. I said no. Found myself being persuaded into it. Got up quickly and cut it short, even caught myself seeing the words Frontiers of War up outside a cinema. Though of course he wanted to call it Forbidden Love.

(1953) Spent all morning trying to remember myself back into sitting under the trees in the vlei near Mashopi. Failed.

[Here appeared the title or heading of the notebook:]

THE DARK

[The pages were divided down the middle by a neat black line, and the subdivisions headed:]

Source               Money

[Under the left word were fragments of sentences, scenes remembered, letters from friends in Central Africa gummed to the page. On the other side, a record of transactions to do with Frontiers of War, money received from translations, etc., accounts of business interviews and so on.

After a few pages the entries on the left ceased. For three years the black notebook had in it nothing but business and practical entries which appeared to have absorbed the memories of physical Africa. The entries on the left began again opposite a typed manifesto-like sheet gummed to the page, which was a synopsis of Frontiers of War, now changed to Forbidden Love, written by Anna with her tongue in her cheek, and approved by the synopsis desk in her agent’s office:]

Dashing young Peter Carey, his brilliant scholastic career at Oxford broken by World War II, is posted to Central Africa with the sky-blue-uniformed youth of the RAF to be trained as a pilot. Idealistic and inflammable, young Peter is shocked by the go-getting, colour-ridden small-town society he finds, falls in with the local group of high-living lefts, who exploit his naive young radicalism. During the week they clamour about the injustices meted out to the blacks; week-ends they live it up in a lush out-of-town hotel run by John-Bull-type landlord Boothby and his comely wife, whose pretty teen-age daughter falls in love with Peter. He encourages her, with all the thoughtlessness of youth; while Mrs Boothby, neglected by her hard-drinking money-loving husband conceives a powerful but secret passion for the good-looking youth. Peter, disgusted by the leftists’ week-end orgies, secretly makes contact with the local African agitators, whose leader is the cook at the hotel. He falls in love with the cook’s young wife, neglected by her politics-mad husband, but this love defies the taboos and mores of the white settler society. Mistress Boothby surprises them in a romantic rendezvous; and in her jealous rage informs the authorities of the local RAF camp, who promise her Peter will be posted away from the Colony. She tells her daughter, unaware of her unconscious motive, which is to humiliate the untouched young girl whom Peter has preferred to herself and who becomes ill because of the insult to her white-girl’s pride and announces she will leave home in a scene where the mother, frantic, screams: ‘You couldn’t even attract him. He preferred the dirty black girl to you.’ The cook, informed by Mrs Boothby of his young wife’s treachery, throws her off, telling her to return to her family. But the girl, proudly defiant, goes instead to the nearest town, to take the easy way out as a woman of the streets. Heart-broken Peter, all his illusions in shreds, spends his last night in the Colony drunk, and by chance encounters his dark love in some shabby shebeen. They spend their last night together in each other’s arms, in the only place where white and black may meet, in the brothel by the sullied waters of the town’s river. Their innocent and pure love, broken by the harsh inhuman laws of this country and by the jealousies of the corrupt, will know no future. They talk pathetically of meeting in England when the war is over, but both know this to be a brave lie. In the morning Peter says good-bye to the group of local ‘progressives’, his contempt for them clear in his grave young eyes. Meanwhile his dark young love is lurking at the other end of the platform in a group of her own people. As the train steams out, she waves; he does not see her; his eyes already reflect thought of the death that awaits him—Ace Pilot that he is!—and she returns to the streets of the dark town, on the arm of another man, laughing brazenly to hide her sad humiliation.

[Opposite this was written:]

The man at the synopsis desk was pleased by this; began discussing how to make the story ‘less upsetting’ to the money-bags—for instance, the heroine should not be a faithless wife, which would make her unsympathetic, but the daughter of the cook. I said I had written it in parody whereupon, after a moment’s annoyance, he laughed. I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, good-natured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for instance, Comrade X, on the murder of three British communists in Stalin’s prisons, looked exactly like this when he said: Well, but we’ve never made enough allowance for human nature) and he said: ‘Well, Miss Wulf, you’re learning that when you’re eating with the devil the spoon has got to be not only a long one, but made of asbestos—it’s a perfectly good synopsis and written in their terms.’ When I persisted, he kept his temper and enquired, oh very tolerantly, smiling indefatigably, whether I didn’t agree that in spite of all the deficiencies of the industry, good films got made. ‘And even films with a good progressive message, Miss Wulf?’ He was delighted at finding a phrase guaranteed to pull me in, and showed it; his look was both self-congratulatory and full of cynical cruelty. I came home, conscious of a feeling of disgust so much more powerful than usual, that I sat down and made myself read the novel for the first time since it was published. As if it had been written by someone else. If I had been asked to review it in 1951, when it came out, this is what I should have said:

‘A first novel which shows a genuine minor talent. The novelty of its setting: a station in the Rhodesian veld whose atmosphere of rootless money-driving white settlers against a background of sullen dispossessed Africans; the novelty of its story, a love affair between a young Englishman thrown into the Colony because of the war and a half-primitive black woman, obscures the fact that this is an unoriginal theme, scantily developed. The simplicity of Anna Wulf’s style is her strength; but it is too soon to say whether this is the conscious simplicity of artistic control, or the often deceptive sharpness of form which is sometimes arbitrarily achieved by allowing the shape of a novel to be dictated by a strong emotion.’

But from 1954 on:

‘The spate of novels with an African setting continues. Frontiers of War is competently told, with a considerable vigour of insight into the more melodramatic sexual relationships. But there is surely very little new to be said about the black-white conflict. The area of colour-bar hatreds and cruelties has become the best documented in our fiction. The most interesting question raised by this new report from the racial frontiers is: why, when the oppressions and tensions of white-settled Africa have existed more or less in their present form for decades, is it only in the late forties and fifties that they exploded into artistic form? If we knew the answer we would understand more of the relations between society and the talent it creates, between art and the tensions that feed it. Anna Wulf’s novel has been sprung by little more than a warm-hearted indignation against injustice: good, but no longer enough…’

During that period of three months when I wrote reviews, reading ten or more books a week, I made a discovery: that the interest with which I read these books had nothing to do with what I feel when I read—let’s say—Thomas Mann, the last of the writers in the old sense, who used the novel for philosophical statements about life. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated. Those fishermen in Scotland were a different species from the coalminers I stayed with in Yorkshire; and both come from a different world than the housing estate outside London.

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty ‘subjects’ I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist. I suffer torments of dissatisfaction and incompletion because of my inability to enter those areas of life my way of living, education, sex, politics, class bar me from. It is the malady of some of the best people of this time; some can stand the pressure of it; others crack under it; it is a new sensibility, a half-unconscious attempt towards a new imaginative comprehension. But it is fatal to art. I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can. When I said that to Mother Sugar she replied with the small nod of satisfaction people use for these resounding truths, that the artist writes out of an incapacity to live. I remember the nausea I felt when she said it; I feel the reluctance of disgust now when I write it: it is because this business about art and the artist has become so debased, the property of every sloppy-minded amateur that any person with a real connection with the arts wants to run a hundred miles at the sight of the small satisfied nod, the complacent smile. And besides, when a truth has been explored so thoroughly—this one has been the subject matter of art for this century, when it has become such a monster of a cliché, one begins to wonder, is it so finally true? And one begins to think of the phrases ‘incapacity to live’, ‘the artist’, etc., letting them echo and thin in one’s mind, fighting the sense of disgust and the staleness, as I tried to fight it that day sitting before Mother Sugar. But extraordinary how this old stuff issued so fresh and magisterial from the lips of psycho-analysis. Mother Sugar, who is nothing if not a cultivated woman, a European soaked in art, uttered commonplaces in her capacity as witch-doctor she would have been ashamed of if she were with friends and not in the consulting room. One level for life, another for the couch. I couldn’t stand it; that is, ultimately, what I couldn’t stand. Because it means one level of morality for life, and another for the sick. I know very well from what level in my self that novel, Frontiers of War, came from. I knew when I wrote it. I hated it then and I hate it now. Because that area in myself had become so powerful it threatened to swallow everything else, I went off to the witch-doctor, my soul in my hands. Yet the healer herself, when the word Art cropped up, smiled complacently; that sacred animal the artist justifies everything, everything he does is justified. The complacent smile, the tolerant nod, is not even confined to the cultivated healers, or the professors; it’s the property of the money-changers, the little jackals of the press, the enemy. When a film mogul wants to buy an artist—and the real reason why he seeks out the original talent and the spark of creativity is because he wants to destroy it, unconsciously that’s what he wants, to justify himself by destroying the real thing—he calls the victim an artist. You are an artist, of course…and the victim more often than not, smirks, and swallows his disgust.

The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word ‘artist’ used by the enemy.

I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this—why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game—that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company; yet I know that what made the film company so excited about the possibilities of that novel as a film was precisely what made it successful as a novel. The novel is ‘about’ a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn’t true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can’t read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. And I know that in order to write another, to write those fifty reports on society which I have the material to write, I would have to deliberately whip up in myself that same emotion. And it would be that emotion which would make those fifty books novels and not reportage.

When I think back to that time, those week-ends spent at the Mashopi hotel, with that group of people, I have to first switch something off in me; now, writing about it, I have to switch it off, or ‘a story’ would begin to emerge, a novel, and not the truth. It is like remembering a particularly intense love affair, or a sexual obsession. And it is extraordinary how, as the nostalgia deepens, the excitement, ‘stories’ begin to form, to breed like cells under a microscope. And yet it is so powerful, that nostalgia, that I can only write this a few sentences at a time. Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And the people who read Frontiers of War will have had fed in them this emotion, even though they were not conscious of it. That is why I am ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime.

The Good Terrorist: Chapter 1

The house was set back from the noisy main road in what seemed to be a rubbish tip. A large house. Solid. Black tiles stood at angles along the gutter, and into a gap near the base of a fat chimney a bird flew, trailing a piece of grass several times its length.

‘I should think, 1910,’ said Alice, ‘look how thick the walls are.’ This could be seen through the broken window just above them on the first floor. She got no response, but nevertheless shrugged off her backpack, letting it tumble on to a living rug of young nettles that was trying to digest rusting tins and plastic cups. She took a step back to get a better view of the roof. This brought Jasper into vision. His face, as she had expected it would be, was critical and meant to be noticed. For her part she did not have to be told that she was wearing her look, described by him as silly. ‘Stop it,’ he ordered. His hand shot out, and her wrist was encircled by hard bone. It hurt. She faced him, undefiant but confident, and said, ‘I wonder if they will accept us?’ And, as she had known he would, he said, ‘It is a question of whether we will accept them.’

She had withstood the test on her, that bony pain, and he let her wrist go and went on to the door. It was a front door, solid and sure of itself, in a little side street full of suburban gardens and similar comfortable houses. They did not have slates missing and broken windows.

“Why, why, why?’ asked Alice angrily, addressing the question, probably, to the universe itself, her heart full of pain because of the capacious, beautiful and unloved house. She dragged her backpack by its strap after her and joined him.

‘Profit, of course,’ he said, and pressed the bell, which did not ring. He gave the door a sharp push and they went into a large shadowy hall where stairs went strongly up, turned at a wide landing, and rose out of sight. The scene was illuminated by a hurricane lamp that stood on the floor in a corner. From a side room came the sound of soft drumming. Jasper pushed open this door too. The windows were covered by blankets, leaving not a chink of light. A black youth looked up from his family of drums, his cheeks and teeth shining in candlelight. ‘Hi,’ he said, all his fingers and both feet at work, so that it seemed he was dancing as he sat, or was perhaps on some kind of exercise machine.

This smiling jolly black boy who looked like an advertisement for an attractive holiday in the Caribbean struck Alice’s organ of credibility falsely, and she tucked away a little memo to herself not to forget a first impression of anxiety or even sorrow, which was the real message her nerves were getting from him. She found herself actually on the verge of saying, ‘It’s all right, it’s OK, don’t worry!’ But meanwhile Jasper was demanding, ‘Where’s Bert?’

The black youth shrugged, nonchalantly, still smiling, and did not for one moment stop his energetic attack on his instruments. Jasper’s tight grip on her upper arm took her out of the room into the hall, where Alice said, ‘This place smells.’

‘Well,’ said Jasper, in the clumsily placating way she knew was meant as love, ‘I suppose you’ll put a stop to that.’

At once, feeling her advantage, she said, ‘Don’t forget you’ve been living soft for four years. You’re not going to find it easy after that.’

‘Don’t call me soft,’ he said, and kicked her on the ankle. Not hard, but enough.

This time she went ahead of him and opened a door she felt must be to the kitchen. Light fell on desolation. Worse, danger: she was looking at electric cables ripped out of the wall and dangling, raw-ended. The cooker was pulled out and lying on the floor. The broken windows had admitted rain water which lay in puddles everywhere. There was a dead bird on the floor. It stank. Alice began to cry. It was from pure rage. ‘The bastards,’ she cursed. ‘The filthy stinking fascist bastards.’

They already knew that the Council, to prevent squatters, had sent in the workmen to make the place uninhabitable. ‘They didn’t even make those wires safe. They didn’t even…’ Suddenly alive with energy, she whirled about opening doors. Two lavatories on this floor, the bowls filled with cement.

She cursed steadily, the tears streaming. ‘The filthy shitty swine, the shitty fucking fascist swine…’ She was full of the energy of hate. Incredulous with it, for she had never been able to believe, in some corner of her, that anybody, particularly not a member of the working class, could obey an order to destroy a house. In that corner of her brain that was perpetually incredulous began the monologue that Jasper never heard for he would not have authorized it: But they are people, people did this. To stop other people from living. I don’t believe it. Who can they be? What can they be like? I’ve never met anyone who could. Why, it must be people like Len and Bob and Bill, friends. They did it. They came in and filled the lavatory bowls with cement and ripped out all the cables and blocked up the gas.

Jasper stood and watched her. He was pleased. This fury of energy had banished her look, which he hated, when she seemed, all of her, to be swollen and glistening, as if not merely her face but her whole body filled with tears which oozed from every pore.

Without referring to him she ran up the stairs and he followed slowly, listening to how she banged on doors, and then, hearing nothing, flung them open. On the first-floor landing they stood looking into order, not chaos. Here every room had sleeping-bags, one or two, or three. Candles or hurricane lamps. Even chairs with little tables beside them. Books. Newspapers. But no one was in.

The smell on this floor was strong. It came from upstairs. More slowly they went up generously wide stairs, and confronted a stench which made Jasper briefly retch. Alice’s face was stern and proud. She flung open a door on to a scene of plastic buckets, topped with shit. But this room had been deemed sufficiently filled, and the one next to it had been started. Ten or so red, yellow and orange buckets stood in a group, waiting.

There were other rooms on this floor, but none was used. None could be used, the smell was so strong.

They went down the stairs, silent, watching their feet, for there was rubbish everywhere, and the light came dimly through dirty windows.

‘We are not here,’ said he, anticipating her, ‘to make ourselves comfortable. We aren’t here for that.’

She said, ‘I don’t understand anyone choosing to live like this. Not when it’s so easy.’

Now she sounded listless, flat, all the incandescence of fury gone.

He was about to start a speech about her bourgeois inclinations, as she could see; but the front door opened, and against the sunlight was outlined a military-looking figure.

‘Bert!’ he shouted, and jumped down the stairs three at a time. ‘Bert. It’s Jasper…’

Alice thought maternally, hearing that glad voice ring out, it’s because of his shitty father; but it was part of her private stream, since of course Jasper did not allow her the right to such ideas.

‘Jasper,’ acknowleged Bert, and then peered through the gloom up at her.

‘Alice – I told you,’ said Jasper.

‘Comrade Alice,’ said Bert. His voice was curt, stern and pure, insisting on standards, and Jasper’s voice fell into step. ‘We have just come,’ he said. ‘There was no one to report to.’

‘We spoke to him, in there,’ remarked Alice, arriving beside them, indicating the room from where came the soft drumming.

‘Oh, Jim,’ dismissed Bert. He strode to a door they had not opened, kicked it open, since it had lost it knob, and went in without looking to see if they followed.

This room was as near to normal as any they had seen. With the door shut, you could believe this was a sitting-room in an ordinary house, although everything – chairs, a sofa, the carpet – was dingy. The smell was almost shut out, but to Alice it seemed that an invisible film of stench clung to everything, and she would feel it slippery on her fingers if she touched.

Bert stood upright, slightly bent forward, arms at ease, looking at her. But he did not see her, she knew that. He was a dark thin young man, probably twenty-eight or thirty. His face was full of black shining hairs, and his dark eyes and a red mouth and white teeth gleamed from among them. He wore new stiff dark-blue jeans and a close-fitting dark-blue jacket, buttoned up and tidy. Jasper wore light-blue linen trousers and a striped T-shirt like a sailor’s; but Alice knew he would soon be in clothes like Bert’s, which were in fact his normal gear. He had had a brief escapade into frivolity due to some influence or other.

Alice knew that the two men would now talk, without concerning themselves with her, and set herself to guard her interests, while she looked out of the bow-window into the garden, where rubbish of all kinds reached to the sills. Sparrows were at work on the piles, scratching and digging. A blackbird sat on a milk carton and looked straight at her. Beyond the birds, she saw a thin cat crouched under a hydrangea in young green leaf and slim coronets of pink and blue that would be flowers. The cat was watching her too, with bright starved eyes.

Bert reached into a cupboard and took out a thermos flask the size of a bucket; and three mugs.

‘Oh, you do have electricity then?’ she asked.

‘No. A comrade in the next street fills it for me every morning,’ he said.

Alice, watching the scene with half her attention, saw how Jasper eyed the flask, and the pouring of the coffee. She knew he was hungry. Because of the row with her mother, and then slamming out of the house, he had not breakfasted. And he had not had time to drink the coffee she had taken up to him. She thought, ‘But that’s Bert’s supply for the day,’ and indicated she wanted only half a cup. Which she was given, exactly as specified.

Jasper drank down his cup at once, and sat looking at the thermos, wanting more. Bert did not notice.

‘The situation has changed,’ Bert began, as if this were a continuation of some meeting. ‘My analysis was incorrect, as it happened. I underestimated the political maturity of the cadres. When I put the question to the vote, half decided against, and they left here at once.’

Jasper said, ‘Then they would have proved unreliable. Good riddance.’

‘Precisely.’

‘What was the question?’ inquired Alice. She used her ‘meeting voice’, for she had learned that this was necessary to hold her own. To her, it sounded false and cold, and she was always embarrassed by it; because of the effort it needed, she sounded indifferent, even absentminded. Yet her eyes were steadily and even severely observing the scene in front of her: Bert, looking at her, or rather, at what she had said; Jasper, looking at the thermos. Suddenly he was unable to stop himself, and he reached for the jug. Bert said, ‘Sorry,’ and pushed it towards him.

‘You know what the question was,’ said Jasper, sour. ‘I told you. We are going to join the IRA.’

‘You mean,’ said Alice, ‘you voted on whether to join the IRA?’ She sounded breathless: Bert took it as fear, and he said, with loud, cold contempt, ‘Shit-scared. They ran like little rabbits.’

Alice persisted, ‘How was it put to the vote?’

Bert said, after a pause, ‘That this group should make approaches to the IRA leadership, offering our services as an England-based entity.’

Alice digested this, looking strained because of the effort it cost her to believe it, and said, ‘But Jasper told me that this house was Communist Centre Union?’

‘Correct. This is a CCU squat.’

‘But has the leadership of the CCU decided to offer the services of the whole CCU to the IRA? I don’t understand,’ she said fiercely, not at all in her ‘political’ voice, and Bert said, curt and offhand because, as she could see, he was uncomfortable, ‘No.’

‘Then how can a branch of the CCU offer it services?’

Here she observed that Jasper was seeking to engage Bert’s eyes in ‘Take no notice of her’ looks, and she forestalled him. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

Bert admitted, ‘You are correct, in a way. The point was discussed. It was agreed that while approaches could not be made as a group of the CCU, it would be permissible for a group of CCU members to make the approach, as associated individuals.’

‘But…’ Alice lost interest. They are at it again, she was thinking. Fudging it. She returned her attention to the rubbish pile a yard beyond the dirty glass. The blackbird had gone. The poor cat was sniffing around the edges of the heap, where flies were crawling.

She said, ‘What do you do for food here?’

‘Take-away.’

‘This rubbish is a health hazard. There must be rats.’

‘That’s what the police said.’

‘Have they been?’

‘They were here last night.’

‘Oh, I see, that’s why the others left.’

‘No,’ said Bert. ‘They left because they got the shits. About the IRA.’

‘What did the police say?’

‘They gave us four days to leave.’

‘Why don’t we go to the Council?’ said Alice, in an irritated wail; and as Jasper said, ‘Oh, there she goes again,’ the door opened and a young woman came in. She had short shiny black hair that had been expertly cut, black quick eyes, red lips, a clear white skin. She was glossy and hard, like a fresh cherry. She looked carefully at Bert, at Jasper, and at Alice, and Alice knew she was being seen.

‘I’m Pat,’ she said. ‘Bert told me about you two.’ And then, ‘You are brother and sister?’

At once Jasper snapped, ‘No, we are not!’

But Alice liked it when people made the mistake, and she said, ‘People often take us as brother and sister.’

Pat again examined them. Jasper fidgeted under the look, and turned away, hands in his jacket pockets, as if trying to seem indifferent to an attack.

They were both fair, with reddish gleams in hair that wanted to go into little curls and wisps. Jasper’s was cut very short; Alice’s was short and chunky and serviceable. She cut it herself. They both had pinkish freckled skin. Jasper’s little blue eyes were in round white shallows, and this gave him an angelic, candid air. He was very thin, and wore skin-tight clothes. Alice was stocky, and she had a pudgy, formless look to her. Sometimes a girl of twelve, even thirteen, before she is lit by pubescence, is as she will be in middle age. A group of women are standing on a platform in the Underground. Middle-aged women, with carrier bags, gossiping. Very short women, surely? No, they are girls, of twelve or so. Forty years of being women will boil through them, and leave them as they are now, heavy and cautious, and anxious to please. Alice could seem like a fattish clumsy girl or, sometimes, about fifty, but never looked her age, which was thirty-six. Now it was a girl who returned Pat’s look with friendly curiosity from small blue-grey eyes set under sandy lashes.

‘Well,’ said Pat, strolling to the window to stand by Alice, ‘have you heard that this happy little community is for the chop?’

She looked much older than Alice, was ten years younger. She offered Alice a cigarette, which was refused, and smoked hers needfully, greedily.

‘Yes, and I said, why not negotiate with the Council?’

‘I heard you. But they prefer their romantic squalor.’

‘Romantic,’ said Alice, disgusted.

‘It does go against the grain, negotiating with the Establishment,’ said Bert.

‘Do you mean that this commune is breaking up?’ said Jasper suddenly, sounding so like a small boy that Alice glanced quickly to see whether it had been noticed. It had: by Pat, who stood, holding her cigarette to her lips between two fingers and distancing them, then bringing them back, so that she could puff and exhale, puff and exhale. Looking at Jasper. Diagnosis.

Alice said quickly, her heart full of a familiar soft ache, on Jasper’s account, ‘It doesn’t go against my grain. I’ve done it often.’

‘Oh you have, have you?’ said Pat. ‘So have I. Where?’

‘In Birmingham. A group of seven of us went to the Council over a scheduled house. We paid gas and electricity and water, and we stayed there thirteen months.’

‘Good for you.’

‘And in Halifax, I was in a negotiated squat for six months. And when I was in digs in Manchester, that was when I was at the university, there was a house full of students, nearly twenty of us. It started off as a squat, the Council came to terms, and it ended up as a student house.’

During this the two men listened, proceedings suspended. Jaspar had again filled his mug. Bert indicated to Pat that the thermos was empty, and she shook her head, listening to Alice.

‘Why don’t we go to the Council?’ said Alice direct to Pat.

‘I would. But I’m leaving anyway.’ Alice saw Bert’s body stiffen, and he sat angry and silent.

Pat said to Bert, ‘I told you last night, I was leaving.’

Alice had understood that this was more than political. She saw that a personal relationship was breaking up because of some political thing! Every instinct repudiated this. She thought, involuntarily, What nonsense, letting politics upset a personal relationship! This was not really her belief: she would not have stood by it if challenged. But similar thoughts often did pass through her mind.

Pat said, to Bert’s half-averted face, ‘What the fuck did you expect? At an ordinary meeting like that – two of them from outside, we didn’t know anything about them. We don’t know anything about the couple who came last week. Jim was in the room and he isn’t even CCU. Suddenly putting forward that resolution.’

‘It wasn’t sudden.’

‘When we discussed it before we decided to make individual approaches. To discuss it with individuals, carefully.’

Her voice was full of contempt. She was looking at – presumably – her lover as though he was fit for the dustbin.

‘You’ve changed your mind, at any rate,’ said Bert, his red lips shining angrily from his thickets of beard. ‘You agreed that to support the IRA was the logical position for this stage.’

‘It is the only correct attitude, Ireland is the fulcrum of the imperialist attack,’ said Jasper.

‘I haven’t changed my mind,’ said Pat. ‘But if I am going to work with the IRA or anyone else, then I’m going to know who I am working with.’

‘You don’t know us,’ said Alice, with a pang of painful realization; she and Jasper were part of the reason for this couple’s break-up.

‘No hard feelings,’ said Pat. ‘Nothing personal. But yes. The first I heard of you was when Bert said he had met Jasper at the CND rally Saturday. And I gather Bert hadn’t even met you.’

‘No,’ said Alice.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not the way to do things.’

‘I see your point,’ said Alice.

A silence. The two young women stood at the window, in an aromatic cloud from Pat’s cigarette. The two men were in chairs, in the centre of the room. The rain-like pattering of the drum came from Jim beyond the hall.

Alice said, ‘How many people are left here now?’

Pat did not answer and at last Bert said, ‘With you two, seven.’ He added, ‘I don’t know about you, Pat.’

‘Yes, you do,’ said Pat, sharp and cold. But they were looking at each other now, and Alice thought: No, it won’t be easy for them to split up. She said, ‘Well, if it’s seven, then four of us are here now. Five if Pat…Where are the other two? I want to get an agreement that I go to the Council.’

‘The lavatories full of cement. The electricity cables torn out. Pipes probably rotten,’ said Bert on a fine rising derisive note.

‘It’s not difficult to put it right,’ said Alice. ‘We did it in Birmingham. The Council smashed the place to a ruin. They pulled the lavatories completely out there. All the pipes. Filled the bath with cement. Piled rubbish in all the rooms. We got it clean.’

‘Who is going to pay for it?’ That was Bert.

‘We are.’

‘Out of what?’

‘Oh, belt up,’ said Pat, ‘it costs us more in take-away and running around cadging baths and showers than it would to pay electricity and gas.’

‘It’s a point,’ said Bert.

‘And it would keep Old Bill off our backs,’ said Alice.

Silence. She knew that some people – and she suspected Bert, though not Pat, of this – would be sorry to hear it. They enjoyed encounters with the police.

Bert said unexpectedly, ‘Well, if we are going to build up our organization we aren’t going to need attention from Old Bill.’

‘Exactly,’ said Pat. ‘As I’ve been saying.’

Silence again. Alice saw it was up to her. She said, ‘One problem. In this borough they need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas. Who is in work?’

‘Three of the comrades who left last night were.’

‘Comrades!’ said Bert. ‘Opportunistic shits.’

‘They are very good honest communists,’ said Pat. ‘They happen not to want to work with the IRA.’

Bert began to heave with silent theatrical laughter, and Jasper joined him.

‘So we are all on Social Security,’ said Alice.

‘So no point in going to the Council,’ said Bert.

Alice hesitated and said painfully, ‘I could ask my mother…’

At this Jasper exploded in raucous laughter and jeers, his face scarlet. ‘Her mother, bourgeois pigs…’

‘Shut up,’ said Alice. ‘We were living with my mother for four years,’ she explained in a fine breathless, balanced voice, which seemed to her unkindly cold and hostile. ‘Four years. Bourgeois or not.’

‘Take the rich middle class for what you can get,’ said Jasper. ‘Get everything out of them you can. That’s my line.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Alice. ‘I agree. But she did keep us for four years.’ Then, capitulating, ‘Well, why shouldn’t she? She is my mother.’ This last was said in a trembling painful little voice.

‘Right,’ said Pat, examining her curiously. ‘Well, no point in asking mine. Haven’t seen her for years.’

‘Well then,’ said Bert, suddenly getting up from the chair and standing in front of Pat, a challenge, his black eyes full on her. ‘So you’re not leaving after all?’

‘We’ve got to discuss it, Bert,’ she said, hurriedly, and walked over to him, and looked up into his face. He put his arm around her and they went out.

Alice surveyed the room. Skilfully. A family sitting-room, it had been. Comfortable. The paint was not too bad, the chairs and a sofa probably stood where they had then. There was a fireplace, not even plastered over.

‘Are you going to ask your mother? I mean, to be a guarantor?’ Jasper sounded forlorn. ‘And who’s going to pay for getting it all straight?’

‘I’ll ask the others if they’ll contribute.’

‘And if they won’t?’ he said, knowingly, sharing expertise with her, a friendly moment.

‘Some won’t, we know that,’ she said, ‘but we’ll manage. We always do, don’t we?’

But this was too direct an appeal to intimacy. At once he backed away into criticism. ‘And who’s going to do all the work?’

As he had been saying now for fourteen, fifteen years.

In the house in Manchester she shared with four other students she had been housemother, doing the cooking and shopping, housekeeping. She loved it. She got an adequate degree, but did not even try for a job. She was still in the house when the next batch of students arrived, and she stayed to look after them. That was how Jasper found her, coming in one evening for supper. He was not a student, had graduated poorly, had failed to find a job after half-hearted efforts. He stayed on in the house, not formally living there, but as Alice’s ‘guest’. After all, it was only because of Alice’s efforts that the place had become a student house: it had been a squat. And Jasper did not leave. She knew he had become dependent on her. But then and since he had complained she was nothing but a servant, wasting her life on other people. As they moved from squat to squat, commune to commune, this pattern remained: she looked after him and he complained that other people exploited her.

At her mother’s he had said the same. ‘She’s just exploiting you,’ he said. ‘Cooking and shopping. Why do you do it?’

‘We’ve got four days,’ said Alice. ‘I’m going to get moving.’ She did not look at him, but walked steadily past him, and into the hall. She carried her backpack into the room where Jim was drumming and said, ‘Keep an eye on this for me, comrade.’ He nodded. She said, ‘If I get permission from the Council for us to live here, will you share expenses?’

His hands fell from the drums. His friendly round face fell into lines of woe and he said, ‘They say I can’t stay here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh shit, man, I’m not into politics. I just want to live.’ Now he said, incredulously, ‘I was here first. Before any of you. This was my place. I found it. I said to everyone, Yes, come in, come in, man, this is Liberty Hall.’

‘That’s not fair,’ said Alice, at once.

‘I’ve been here eight months, eight months, Old Bill never knew, no one knew. I’ve been keeping my nose clean and minding my own business, and suddenly…’ He was weeping. Bright tears bounced off his black cheeks and splashed on the big drum. He wiped them off with the side of his palm.

‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘you just stay put and I’ll get it on the agenda.’

She was thinking as she left the house: All those buckets of shit up there, I suppose Jim filled them, nearly all. She thought: If I don’t pee I’ll…She could not have brought herself to go up and use one of those buckets. She walked to the Underground, took a train to a station with proper lavatories, used them, washed her face and brushed her hair, then went on to her mother’s stop, where she stood in line for a telephone booth.

Three hours after she left home screaming abuse at her mother, she dialled her number.

Her mother’s voice. Flat. At the sound of it affection filled Alice, and she thought, I’ll ask if she wants me to do some shopping for her on the way.

‘Hello, Mum, this is Alice.’

Silence.

‘It’s Alice.’

A pause. ‘What do you want?’ The flat voice, toneless.

Alice, all warm need to overcome obstacles on behalf of everyone, said, ‘Mum, I want to talk to you. You see, there’s this house. I could get the Council to let us stay on a controlled squat basis, you know, like Manchester? But we need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas.’

She heard a mutter, inaudible, then, ‘I don’t believe it!’

‘Mum. Look, it’s only your signature we want. We would pay it.’

A silence, a sigh, or a gasp, then the line went dead.

Alice, now radiant with a clear hot anger, dialled again. She stood listening to the steady buzz-buzz, imagining the kitchen where it was ringing, the great warm kitchen, the tall windows, sparkling (she had cleaned them last week, with such pleasure), and the long table where, she was sure, her mother was sitting now, listening to the telephone ring. After about three minutes, her mother did lift the receiver and said, ‘Alice, I know it is no use my saying this. But I shall say it. Again. I have to leave here. Do you understand? Your father won’t pay the bills any longer. I can’t afford to live here. I’ll have trouble paying my own bills. Do you understand, Alice?’

‘But you have all those rich friends.’ Another silence. Alice then, in a full, maternal, kindly, lecturing voice, began, ‘Mum, why aren’t you like us? We share what we have. We help each other out when we’re in trouble. Don’t you see that your world is finished? The day of the rich selfish bourgeoisie is over. You are doomed…’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Alice’s mother, and Alice warmed into the purest affection again, for the familiar comforting note of irony was back in her mother’s voice, the awful deadness and emptiness gone. ‘But you have at some point to understand that your father is not prepared any longer to share his ill-gotten gains with Jasper and all his friends.’

‘Well, at least he is prepared to see they are ill-gotten,’ said Alice earnestly.

A sigh. ‘Go away, Alice,’ said Alice’s mother. ‘Just go away. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear from you. Try to understand that you can’t say the things to people you said to me this morning and then just turn up, as if nothing had happened, with a bright smile, for another hand-out.’

The line went dead.

Alice stood, in a dazzle of shock. Her head was full of dizzying shadow and light. Someone behind her in the queue said, ‘If you’ve finished…’, pushed in front of her, and began to dial.

Alice drifted off on to the pavement and wandered aimlessly around the perimeter of that area, now fenced off with high, corrugated iron, where so recently there had been a market, full of people buying and selling. She had had a pitch there herself last summer, and first she sold cakes and biscuits and sweets, and then hot soup, and sandwiches. Proper food, all wholemeal flour and brown sugar, and vegetables grown without insecticides. She cooked all this in her mother’s kitchen. Then the Council closed the place down. To build another of their shitty great enormous buildings, their dead bloody white elephants that wouldn’t be wanted by anyone but the people who made a profit out of building them. Corruption. Corruption everywhere. Alice, weeping out loud, blubbering, went stumbling about outside the enormous iron fence, like a fence around a concentration camp, thinking that last summer…

A whistle shrieked. Some factory or other…one o’clock. She hadn’t done anything yet…Standing on the long shallow steps that led to the Public Library, she wiped her face, and made her eyes look out instead of in. It was a nice day. The sun was shining. The sky was full of racing white clouds, and the blue seemed to dazzle and promise.

She went back to the telephones in the Underground and rang her father’s office on the private number.

He answered at once.

‘This is Alice.’

‘The answer is no.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’

‘Say it.’

‘I want you to guarantee our expenses, electricity and gas, for a squat.’

‘No.’

She hung up, the burning anger back. Its energy took her to the pavement, and walked her up the avenue to a large building which was set back a bit, with steps. She raced up them and pressed a bell, holding it down until a woman’s voice, not the one she expected, said, ‘¿Sí?’

‘Oh, fucking Christ, the maid,’ said Alice, aloud. And, ‘Where’s Theresa?’

‘She at work.’

‘Let me in. Let me come in.’

Alice pushed open the door on the buzzer, almost fell into the hall, and thumped up four flights of heavily carpeted stairs to a door, where a short dumpy dark woman stood, looking out for her.

‘Just let me in,’ said Alice, fiercely pushing her aside, and the Spanish woman said nothing, but stood looking at her, trying to find the right words to say.

Alice went into the sitting-room where she had so often been with her friend Theresa, her friend ever since she, Alice, had been born, kind and lovely Theresa. A large calm ordered room, with great windows, and beyond them gardens…She stood panting. I’ll tear down those pictures, she was thinking, I’ll sell them, I’ll take those little netsukes, what are they worth? I’ll smash the place up…

She tore to the telephone, and rang the office. But Theresa was in conference.

‘Get her,’ she commanded. ‘Get her at once. It is an emergency. Tell her it’s Alice.’

She had no doubt that Theresa would come, and she did.

‘What is it, Alice, what’s wrong, what is the matter?’

‘I want you to guarantee expenses. For a squat. No, no, you won’t have to pay anything, ever, just your signature.’

‘Alice, I’m in the middle of a conference.’

‘I don’t care about your shitty conference. I want you to guarantee our electricity and gas.’

‘You and Jasper?’

‘Yes. And others.’

‘I’m sorry, my dear. No.’

‘What’s the matter with Jasper? Why are you like this? Why? He’s just as good as you are.’

Theresa said, calm and humorous, as always, ‘No, Alice, he is not as good as I am. Far from it. Anyway, that’s it. No, but I’ll give you fifty pounds if you come round.’

‘I am around. I am in your flat. But I don’t want your shitty fifty pounds.’

‘Well, then, I’m sorry, my dear.’

‘You spend fifty pounds on a dress. On a meal.’

‘You shared the meal, didn’t you? This is silly. I’m sorry, I’m busy. All the buyers are here from everywhere.’

‘It’s not silly. When have you seen me spend fifty pounds on a meal? If my mother wants to spend fifty pounds on food for all her shitty rich friends, and I cook it, that doesn’t mean…’

‘Listen, Alice, if you want to come round and have a talk tonight, you are welcome. But it will have to be late, because I will be working until eleven, at least.’

‘You…you…are a lot of rich shits,’ said Alice, suddenly listless.

She put down the receiver, and was about to leave when she remembered, and went to the bathroom, where she emptied herself, again carefully washed her face, and brushed her hair. She was hungry. She went to the kitchen and cut herself a lavish sandwich. Lisa followed her and stood at the door to watch, her hands folded around the handle of a feather duster, as if in prayer. A dark patient tired face. She supported her family in Valencia, so said Theresa. She stood watching Alice eating her salami and her pâté on thick bread. Then watched while Alice peered into every corner of the refrigerator, and brought out some leftover spiced rice, which she ate with a spoon, standing up.

Then she said, ‘Ciao,’ and heard as she left, ‘Buenos días, señorita.’ There was something in that voice, a criticism, that again lit the anger, and she ran down all the stairs again and out on to the pavement.

It was after two.

Her thoughts whirled about. Jasper, why did they hate him so? It was because they were afraid of him. Afraid of his truth…She realized that she had walked herself to a bus-stop, and the bus would take her to the Council. She got on, suddenly cold, concentrated, and careful.

She was rehearsing in her mind her previous successful negotiations. A great deal would depend, she knew, on whom she saw…luck…Well, she had been lucky before. And besides, what she was suggesting was reasonable, in the best interests of everybody, the ratepayers, the public.

In the great room filled with desks and people and telephones, she sat opposite a girl, younger than she, and knew at once that she was lucky. On Mary Williams’s left breast was a ‘Save the Whales!’ button, and the sprightly shape of the animal made Alice feel soft and protective. Mary Williams was a good person, like herself, like Jasper, like all their friends. She cared.

Alice gave the address of her house confidently, stated her case and waited until the official turned to press a button or two, and the information arrived, to be set on the desk between them.

‘Scheduled for demolition,’ said Mary Williams, and sat smiling, nothing more to be said.

This Alice had not expected. She could not speak. It was grief that filled her, transmuting, but slowly, to rage. The face that Mary Williams saw swelled and shone, and caused her to say uncomfortably, even stammering, ‘Why, why, what is the matter?’

‘It can’t be demolished, it can’t,’ stated Alice, in a toneless empty voice. Then, rage exploding, ‘It’s a marvellous house, perfect! How can you demolish it? It’s a bloody scandal.’

‘Yes, I know that sometimes…’ said Mary Williams swiftly. She sighed. Her glance at Alice was a plea not to make a scene. Alice saw it, saw that scenes not infrequently occurred at this desk.

She said, ‘There must be a mistake. Surely they aren’t entitled to destroy a house like this…Have you seen it? It’s a good house. A good place…’

‘I think they mean to put up flats.’

‘Naturally! What else?’

The two young women laughed, their eyes meeting.

‘Wait,’ said Mary Williams, and went off to confer, in her hand the sheet containing the vital statistics of the house. She stood by the desk of a man at the end of the room, and came back to say, ‘There have been a lot of complaints about the state of the houses. The police, for one.’

‘Yes, it’s a disgusting mess,’ agreed Alice. ‘But it’ll be cleared up in no time.’

Here Mary nodded, Proceed! and sat doodling, while Alice talked.

And talked. About the house. Its size, its solidity, its situation. Said that, apart from a few slates, it was structurally sound. Said it needed very little to make it liveable. She talked about the Birmingham squat and the agreed tenancy there; about Manchester, where a slum scheduled for demolition had been reprieved, and became an officially recognized student residence.

‘I’m not saying it couldn’t happen,’ said Mary.

She sat thinking, her biro at work on a structure of cells, like a honeycomb. Yes, Alice knew, Mary was all right, she was on their side. Although Mary was not her style, with her dark little skirt and crisp little blouse, with her bra outlining the modest breast where the whale cavorted, tail in the sky, black on blue sea. All the same, Mary’s soft masses of dark hair that went into curls on her forehead, and her plump white hands, made Alice feel warm and secure. She knew that if Mary had anything to with it, things would go well.

‘Wait a minute,’ Mary said; and again went to confer with her colleague. This man now gave Alice a long inspection, and Alice sat confidently, to be looked at. She knew how she seemed: the pretty daughter of her mother, short curly fair hair nicely brushed, pink and white face lightly freckled, open blue-grey gaze. A middle-class girl with her assurance, her knowledge of the ropes, sat properly in the chair, and if she wore a heavy blue military jacket, under it was a flowered pink and white blouse.

Mary Williams came back and said, ‘The houses are coming up for a decision on Wednesday.’

‘The police gave us four days to clear out.’

‘Well, I don’t see what we can do.’

‘All we need is a statement, in writing, that the case is being considered, to show the police, that’s all.’

Mary Williams did not say anything. From her posture, and her eyes – that did not look at Alice – it was suddenly clear that she was after all, very young, and probably afraid for her job.

There was some sort of conflict there, Alice could see: this was more than just an official who sometimes did not like the work she had to do. Something personal was boiling away in Mary Williams, giving her a stubborn, angry little look. And this again brought her to her feet and took her for the third time to the official whose job it was to say yes and no.

‘You do realize,’ said Mary Williams, talking for her colleague, ‘that this letter would say only that the house is on the agenda for Wednesday?’

Alice said, inspired, ‘Why don’t you come and see it? You and –?’

‘Bob Hood. He’s all right. But he’s the one who…’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Alice. ‘But why don’t you both come and see the house?’

‘The houses, yes – I think Bob did see them, but it was some time ago – yes, perhaps we should.’

Mary was writing the words which would – Alice was sure – save the house. For as long as it was needed by Alice and the others. Save it permanently, why not? The piece of paper was slid into an envelope bearing the name of the Council, and Alice took it.

‘Have you got a telephone in the house?’

‘It was ripped out.’ It was on the tip of Alice’s tongue to describe the state of the house: cement in the lavatories, loose electric cables, the lot; but instinct said no. Although she knew that this girl, Mary, would be as furious, as sick, as anyone could be, that such deliberate damage could be done to a place, the damage had been done by officialdom, and Mary was an official. Nothing should be done to arouse that implacable beast, the bureaucrat.

‘When should I ring you?’ she asked.

‘Thursday.’

That was the day the police said they would be thrown out.

‘Will you be here on Thursday?’

‘If not, Bob over there will take the call.’

But Alice knew that with Bob things would not go so well.

‘It’s routine,’ said Mary Williams. ‘Either they will pull the houses down at once, or they will postpone it. They have already postponed several times.’ Here she offered Alice the smile of their complicity, and added, ‘Good luck.’

‘Thanks. See you.’

Alice left. It was only five o’clock. In one day she had done it. In eight hours.

Love, Again: Chapter 1

Easy to think this was a junkroom, silent and airless in a warm dusk, but then a shadow moved, someone emerged from it to pull back curtains and throw open windows. It was a woman, who now stepped quickly to a door and went out, leaving it open. The room thus revealed was certainly over-full. Along one wall were all the evidences of technical evolution – a fax machine, a copy machine, a word processor, telephones – but as for the rest, the place could easily be some kind of theatrical storeroom, with a gold bust of some Roman female, much larger than life, masks, a crimson velvet curtain, posters, and piles of sheet music, or rather photocopies that had faithfully reproduced yellowing and crumbling originals.

On the wall over the word processor was a large reproduction of Cézanne’s Mardi Gras, also the worse for wear: it had been torn across and put together with sellotape.

The woman next door was energetically attending to something: objects were being moved about. Then she reappeared and stood looking in at the room.

Not a young woman, as it had been easy to imagine from the vigour of her movements when still half seen in the shadows. A woman of a certain age, as the French put it, or even a bit older, and not dressed to present herself, but wearing old trousers and shirt.

This woman was alert, full of energy, yet she did not seem pleased with what she looked at. However, she shook all that off and went to her processor, sat down, put out a hand to switch on a tape. At once the room was filled with the voice of the Countess Dié, from eight centuries ago (or a voice able to persuade the listener she was the Countess), singing her timeless plaints:

I must sing, whether I will or not:

I feel so much pain over him whose friend I hold myself,

For I love him more than anything that is…

The modern woman, sitting with her hands ready to attack the keys, was conscious she felt superior to this long-ago sister, not to say condemning. She did not like this in herself. Was she getting intolerant?

Yesterday Mary had rung from the theatre to say that Patrick was in emotional disarray because he had fallen in love again, and she had responded with a sharp comment.

‘Now, come on, Sarah,’ Mary had rebuked her.

Then Sarah had agreed, and laughed at herself.

Feeling disquiet, however. There seems to be a rule that what you condemn will turn up sooner or later, to be lived through. Forced to eat your vomit – yes, Sarah knew this well enough. Somewhere in her past she had made a note: Beware of condemning other people, or watch out for yourself.

The Countess Dié was too disturbing, and Sarah switched the plaint off.

Silence. She sat breathing it in. She was altogether too much affected by this old troubadour and trouvère music. She had been listening to little else for days, to set the tone of what she had to write. Not only the Countess, but Bernard de Ventadorn, Pierre Vidal, Giraut de Bornelh, and other old singers, had put her into a state of…she was restless, and she was feverish. When had music affected her like this before? She did not think it had. Wait, though. Once she had listened to jazz, particularly the blues, it seemed day and night, for months. But that was when her husband died, and the music had fed her melancholy. But she did not remember…yes, first she had been grief-ridden, and then she had chosen music to fit her state. But this was a different matter altogether.

Her task this evening was not a difficult one. The programme notes were too stiff in tone: this was because, writing them, she had been afraid of being over-charmed by the subject. And she was being charmed by the sensuous voice of the Countess – or the young woman Alicia de la Haye.

She did not have to do the programme notes now. In fact she had made a rule for herself not to work in the evenings at home: a rule she had not been keeping recently. To spell it out, she had not been keeping her own prescriptions for balance and good mental health.

She sat listening to silence. A sparrow chirped.

She thought, I’ll look up that Provençal poem by Pound; that’s hardly work after all.

The desk was stacked with reference books, files of cuttings, and on one side of it bookshelves rose to the ceiling. A book lay open on one side of the word processor.

Growing old gracefully…the way has been signposted. One might say the instructions are in an invisible script which becomes slowly legible as life exposes it. Then the appropriate words only have to be spoken. On the whole the old don’t do badly. Pride is a great thing, and the necessary stances and stoicisms are made easy because the young do not know – it is hidden from them – that the flesh withers around an unchanged core. The old share with each other ironies appropriate to ghosts at a feast, seen by each other but not by the guests whose antics and posturings they watch, smiling, remembering.

To this set of placid sentences full of self-respect most people getting old would subscribe, feeling well presented and even defended by them.

Yes, I’ll go along with that, thought Sarah. Sarah Durham. A good sensible name for a sensible woman.

The book where she had found these sentences had been on a trestle in a street market, the memoirs of a society woman once known for her beauty, written in old age and published when she was nearly a hundred, twenty years ago. A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up. Once, she would never have even opened a book by an old person: nothing to do with her, she would have felt. But what could be odder than the way that books which chime with one’s condition or stage in life insinuate themselves into one’s hand?

She pushed away that book, thought Pound’s verses could wait, and decided to enjoy an evening when nothing at all would be expected of her. An evening in April, and it was still light. This room was calm, usually calming, and like the other three rooms in this flat held thirty years of memories. Rooms a long time lived in can be like littered sea shores; hard to know where this or that bit of debris has come from.

She knew exactly where the bits of theatrical junk had originated: which play, or what actor. But on the window sill was a bowl of coloured pebbles she had picked up outside a village in Provence where she had gone walking with her two children, then aged twelve and thirteen. What was the name of that village? She had been several times to that region, and she had always picked up stones to take home. Strings of beads in all shades of red were pinned in a fan shape on a board that filled a good part of a wall. Why had she kept the thing? Piles of books on the theatre climbed the walls: she had not opened some of them for years. And there was the poster of Mardi Gras. He had been eye to eye with her for decades, that arrogantly sexy youth in the red and black diamond pattern costume with his touch-me-not look. He was like her own son – well, yes, that had been a long time ago, and George was now an almost middle-aged scientist. These days, when she did look at it (after all, one doesn’t much look at what is on one’s walls), her eyes went to the uncertain youth with his dark thoughtful eyes in the ill-fitting Pierrot dress. Her daughter, aged fifteen, had demanded a Pierrot costume, and she, Cathie’s mother, had known it was a statement. I am like him. I need a disguise. I wish I were not unsure but like the Harlequin, who knows how beautiful he is. There was nothing unsure about Cathie these days, a successful matron, with children, a job, a satisfactory husband.

Sarah knew she saw the picture as portraits of her own children. Why did she keep it there? Parents often secretly cherish photographs of their offspring that have nothing to do with their present ages, and these are not always appealingly helpless infants.

She should get rid of all this rubbish…and now, suddenly, she sat up straight in her chair and then stood and began a prowl around the room. This was not the first time she had had the thought. Years ago, she had looked around this room, full of things that had come to rest there for some reason or another and thought, I must get rid of it all.

The poster was there because her daughter Cathie had brought it home. It had nothing to do with her, Sarah. What could she say was hers? The books, the reference books: her working necessities. And the rest of her home? An extended prowl then, repeated now, took her past dishes of shells collected by the children decades ago, a cupboard that still had their old clothes in it, postcards, stuck on a cork board, from people on holiday. Her clothes? Could she say that these were here because she had chosen them? Well, yes, but fashion had dictated them.

On that evening years ago, she had come to the unsettling conclusion that very little in these four large rooms was here because of some considered choice of hers. A choice from that part of her she thought of as herself. No, and she had decided to go through the rooms and throw everything out…well, almost everything: here was something that would stay if everything else found itself bagged up for the dustbins. It was a real photograph, which took itself seriously. A pleasant man, a bit worried perhaps, or tired? – a net of fine lines around frank and comradely blue eyes, and with grey in his fair hair (whose soft silkiness she could feel in her fingers), which was probably the first sign of a heart attack that was to strike him down so young, at forty. He sat with his arms around two children, boy and girl, aged eight and nine. The three of them were smiling at Sarah. The photograph was in a silver frame, art deco, not Sarah’s taste, but it had been given to her by her husband who had had it from his mother. Should she throw out the frame because she had never liked it?

Why hadn’t she made a clean sweep? It was because she had been too busy. Some new play, probably. She had always worked so hard.

Sarah came to a stop in front of a mirror. She looked at a handsome apparently middle-aged woman with a trim body. Her hair, always in tight smooth bands for convenience – she could not be bothered with hairdressers – was described as fair on her passport, but it was more a dull yellow, like neglected brass. Surely by now she ought to have at least the odd grey hair? But that shade often does not go grey or white, at least not until real old age. Young, its possessors yearn for lively colour and might dye it, and when older gratefully leave it alone and are accused of dyeing it. She did not often look in the mirror: she was not anxious about her looks. Why should she be? She was often thought twenty years younger than her real age. In another mirror, through the open door to her bedroom, she seemed even less her age. She could see the reflection by twisting herself about. Her back was erect and full of vitality. Her osteopath, when treating her for back trouble (it did seem to be making itself felt these days), enquired if she had been a dancer. The two mirrors were there because decades ago her husband had said, ‘Sarah, these rooms are too dark. Can’t we get some light into them?’ The walls were painted bright white, but they had dimmed, and the curtains had been white, were now dark cream. When the sun shone in, the room filled with light, shadow, and moving reflections, a place of suggestion and possibilities. Without sun, the mirrors showed furniture that stood about in a still light like water. A pearly light. Restful. She liked these rooms, could not think of anything worse than having to leave them. They could be criticized for being shabby. Her brother said they were, but she thought his house smart and awful. Nothing had been changed here for years. The rooms gently dimmed into acceptance: of her being so busy always, and of her being, at heart, not much interested, and of the way the years accumulated, leaving deposits, books and photographs, postcards and things from the theatre.

All this junk should go out…Here on the wall of her bedroom was a group of photographs. Some were of her grandmother and grandfather in India, posed and formal, doing their duty, but she had added one cut out of a magazine, of a girl dressed in the fashions of the year Sarah Anstruther went out to marry her fiancé, doing well in the Indian Civil Service. This girl was not Sarah Durham’s grandmother, but all the photographs Sarah had of this woman she had never met were of a young matron competently facing the world, and the shy, frightened unknown was – Sarah Durham was pretty sure – rather more to the point. A girl of eighteen, travelling to a country she knew nothing about, where she would marry a young man she hardly knew, to become a memsahib…common, in those days, but what courage.

Sarah Durham’s life had held no such dramatic choices. In a potted biography, of the kind seen on book jackets or theatre notes, it would look like this:

Sarah Durham was born in 1924 in Colchester. Two children. Her brother studied medicine. She went to a couple of reputable girls’ schools. At university she studied French and Italian, and then spent a year at the University of Montpellier doing music, living with an aunt who had married a Frenchman. During the war she was a chauffeur for the Free French in London. In 1946 she married Alan Durham, and there were two children. He died, leaving her a widow in her mid-thirties. She had lived in London, with the children.

A calm and reasonable woman…true that Alan’s death had thrown her into unhappiness for a time, but it wore off. That was how she put it now, knowing she was choosing not to remember the misery of that time. Hypocrite memory…kind memory that allowed her to claim a tranquil life.

She went back to her workroom and read the exemplary passage in the book again, the one beginning, ‘Growing old gracefully…’ It ended a chapter, and the next one began, ‘What I liked best about my trip to India was the early mornings, before the heat got bad and we had to stay inside. When I decided not to marry Rupert after all I am sure now it was the heat rather than him I was refusing. I was not in love with him, but I did not know that then. I had not learned what being in love was.’

For the third time she read ‘Growing old gracefully…’ to the end of the chapter. Yes, that would do. She found herself at sixty-five telling younger friends that there was nothing to getting old, quite pleasurable really, for if this or that good took itself off, then all kinds of pleasures unsuspected by the young presented themselves, and one often found oneself wondering what the next surprise would be. She said this sort of thing in good faith, and while observing the emotional tumults of those even a decade younger than herself even indulged private shudders at the thought of going through all that again – a formula which included love. As for being in love, it had occurred to her it was twenty years since she had been in love, she who had once fallen in love easily and – she had to admit it – even eagerly. She could not believe she would be in love again. She said this too with complacency, forgetting the hard law that says you must suffer what you despise.

She was not going to sit down and work…it occurred to her that one reason for this exaggerated no to another evening spent doing what she did all day was her – well, yes, the word had to be – fear of that music. Those plaints from long ago were a drug. Had jazz really taken her over as the Countess Dié and Bernard, Pierre and Giraut, had done? And what about the woman who was, these days, her occupation – Julie Vairon, whose music stood in yellowing stacks on a table? No, she distrusted music. She was in good company after all; many of the great and the wise had thought music a dubious friend. She had always listened in the spirit of: You’re not going to take me over, don’t you think it!

No: no work, and no music. She was restless enough to…climb a mountain, to walk twenty miles. Sarah found she was tidying this room, which certainly needed it. She might as well vacuum the floor…why not all four rooms? The kitchen. The bathroom. By twelve her flat was a paragon. You would think this woman took pride in her housewifely skills. Instead she had a cleaner in once a week, and that was it.

Surely she wasn’t nervous of meeting – as she had to do tomorrow – Stephen Ellington-Smith, known jokingly in the company as Our Angel. She could not remember being nervous ever before about this kind of encounter. After all, it was her job to meet and soothe patrons, benefactors, and angels, she did it all the time.

Sarah’s memories divided her life into two eras, or different landscapes, one sunny and unproblematical, and then all effort and difficulty. (Yet the war with its anxieties was somehow accommodated in the first sunlit stretch. How could that be? And all those family money difficulties? Nonsense, mere trifles, compared to what followed.) Her husband’s death, that was when this Sarah Durham had begun, poor and desperate. Her parents did not have much money. There had been no insurance. She could not really afford to stay in this flat but decided she would, preserving continuity for the already traumatized children. She earned her living and theirs by all kinds of badly paid freelance work for newspapers and magazines, publishers and the theatre, one theatre in particular, The Green Bird, then not more than a group putting on plays with small casts where they could, sometimes in pubs. In the seventies there were many brave small companies, chancing their luck. A certain Italian play which she had translated for them, and which they thought they had the rights to, became unavailable, and to fill the gap she adapted from a novel some sketches of contemporary life. These were a success, and she found herself one of the people running the theatre: first there was the fact that she was there all day, casting and then directing; then a regular salary. A regular theatre too. She was one of the four who decided to risk a long lease. These three were her closest friends, for surely the people you spend all day and most evenings with must be that. For ten years they had precariously survived, and then five years ago a play transferred to the West End, did well, and seemed likely to run forever. The Green Bird was now established as one of the best of the fringe theatres, and critics came to their first nights. From being an almost amateur, badly-paid hanger-on to the edges of real theatre, she was now known in the theatre world as the influential manager of The Green Bird and, sometimes, as the director of a play. The fact is, the four all did everything, and had from the beginning. Their success had brought them concomitant envy, and they were known – inevitably – as The Gang of Four. These changes had taken years, and at no point had she made claims for herself. She sometimes privately marvelled that hard work and – of course – good luck had added up to so much: it will be seen that she was not a self-admiring woman, nor even an ambitious one.

Who were these colleagues with whom she had shared so much? Mary Ford had been a pretty wisp of a thing with vast hazy blue eyes and a tremulous stubborn little face, but the years had made of the waif a solid calm competent woman of about forty, whose main job in the theatre was publicity and promotion. Roy Strether, another paradigm of competence, was formally stage manager. He was a solid, apparently slow man, who never allowed himself excitement, no matter what the crisis. He joked of himself that he looked like a footballer gone to seed. He was large, untidy, even clumsy. They remembered him as young, a sixties drop-out, who had earned his living as so many future successes did, painting houses. The fourth member of the permanent staff was Patrick Steele. They would joke, in front of him or not, that it was as well they three were so boringly stolid and reliable, for he was volatile, shrill, and moody; a slight, bird-like boy (he remained a boy while the years changed them) with soft black hair like plumage and black excitable eyes. He was homosexual and, these days, pretty scared. He would not go and be tested, saying that if he was HIV positive he did not want to know, but meanwhile he was being responsible and no danger to anyone. He often wept, for his emotional life gave him frequent cause for tears. He was brilliant, a magician: he could create moonlight, a lake, a mountain, with light and silver paper and shadows. Other theatres tried to lure him away but failed, for these four shared a belief that their talents together were larger than they could ever be apart. Patrick was as versatile as them all. He had written a libretto for a musical that had been so near a success they jested that next time he would soar off away into fame and be forever lost to them.

These were their public personas, their ‘images’ – how people from outside saw them, perhaps while they sat in their daily get-together for discussion, in a small office they might liken to a cockpit or an engine room. It was the usual mix of elegant technology, each machine already obsolete almost before it was installed, and old chairs and tables they felt disinclined to get rid of.

Four people, energized by their competence and success. Behind each there was that hinterland called personal life, which here was very far from being separated from working hours.

Mary was unmarried – without a man – because she had to look after her mother, who had multiple sclerosis and was pretty helpless. When she had been unable to organize other help, sometimes an old woman with shaking hands sat in a wheelchair in an aisle and watched the rehearsals.

Roy Strether was married, with a child. The marriage was unsuccessful. Sometimes the little boy would be inserted into a seat near his father’s at a rehearsal and was commended by everybody for behaving well. Tired or demanding attention, he might sit on the old woman’s lap, she delighted that at least she had some limited usefulness.

Sarah’s responsibilities were self-imposed. For ten years now her vital energies – emotional – had been engaged, not by her own children and grandchildren, established successfully in other continents (India and America) but by her brother’s youngest girl, Joyce. Hal and Anne had three daughters, the older two ordinary and just like everybody else’s children. Joyce had been a problem since birth. Why? Who knows? She was a screaming baby, a grizzling toddler, a disagreeable child. Sent to school, she at once fell ill and had to come home. She simply could not manage school and other children. Her parents both being doctors, her condition never lacked diagnoses. Her records were voluminous and in several hospitals. A psychiatrist recommended that she be allowed to stay at home. Sarah was appealed to, and Joyce spent her days with her, in the room that had been the children’s room. In those days Sarah often worked at home, and when she did go out for appointments Joyce stayed happily by herself. What did she do? Nothing at all. She made herself cups of tea, watched television, and sometimes rang telephone numbers at random until someone was willing to talk to her, when she would chat away sometimes for an hour or two hours. The telephone bills were enormous, and Hal and Anne did not offer to pay for them.

Joyce became anorexic and was again in hospital. She was ‘stabilized’ and despatched back to Sarah, who protested it was not fair, she could not deal any longer with Joyce. Hal had said in his kindly judicious way that it must be nice for Sarah to have Joyce around when her own children were so far away. But when the unsure and suffering Pierrot, now the efficient mother of two children in California, or the arrogantly beautiful boy, now a marine biologist with two sons, came bringing grandchildren to visit their grandmother, Joyce went home and there was no argument about it. As Joyce became fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, things went from bad to very bad. Suicide attempts, crises, cries for help. It was Sarah who took her to hospital and talked with the doctors, who had been briefed, of course, by the parents. It was always Aunt Sarah who was summoned. Back home, Joyce went to bed. Sarah fought with her and often succumbed to the low painful state threatening those who take on the psychic burden of those – as we put it – who cannot cope with ordinary life. There were times when she felt that she too would take to her bed and stay there, but her colleagues sustained her. And then all at once everything changed. One of the people, a girl, who chatted with Joyce on the telephone suggested they should meet. Sarah rang her brother, saying she had not seen Joyce for days, and now it was for him, for Joyce’s parents, to make decisions. When Hal said he was afraid Joyce looked on her – Sarah – as her effective parent (‘You are her effective parent, Sarah, surely you must know that’), Sarah said she was sorry, she had done her bit. Of course that was not the end of it. She worried quite dreadfully about Joyce: it had always been a waste of time worrying about Joyce. As the result of a television programme about people living rough, she went to the police, who suggested a certain café in King’s Cross. Joyce’s name was known to these addicts, pushers, and prostitutes. Sarah again rang her brother, who said, ‘She’s old enough now to take responsibility for herself,’ and then added with cheerful spite, in his way that said since he took pleasure in malice then his interlocutor must too, ‘We’ve been meaning to tell you. You should do something about yourself. You could do with a lick of paint.’

Postponing the lick, she went to the psychiatrist most often consulted about Joyce, where she heard that Joyce’s flight into the great world could be seen as a step into maturity. An interesting notion, that a loony girl’s development might be better furthered by joining drug users, pushers, and prostitutes than by taking refuge in her family. But there was nothing she, Sarah, could do. She would at last lead her own life. No, she did not expect to feel immediately better without the interminable drag and drudge of Joyce. Then she did take herself in hand, at last. She examined herself in the dim mirrors, switching on all the lights. Not bad, she supposed. She looked a handsome middle-aged matron. A hairdresser had improved her hair-do: a small smooth head went well with clothes more expensive than anything she had bought for years. At the theatre, her colleagues commended her. They also allowed her to know she had let herself be put upon and she should stand up for herself.

Besides, they all needed undivided energies. They were all working on a production more ambitious than anything they had done. Only a year ago, Julie Vairon had been on a list of possibilities, and now it was a big co-production, with American, French, and English money. They knew they would have to engage more people, expand, but they put off doing this. They confessed there was something disturbing about Julie Vairon’s irresistible sweep, and Mary Ford wondered aloud if they would have taken on Julie if they had known what an upheaval would result, but Patrick said it was not Julie Vairon but Julie Vairon who was the trouble; and he spoke with the whimsical self-satisfaction which is, because of a secret identification, felt as flattering.

In the eighties of the last century, in Martinique, a beautiful girl – a quadroon, like Napoleon’s Josephine – fascinated a young French officer. This is where Julie Vairon, the play – or, as it was later billed, An Entertainment – began. She was the daughter of a mulatto woman who had been the mistress of a white plantation owner’s son. When he inherited the plantation he married suitably, a poor but aristocratic girl from France, but remained Sylvie Vairon’s protector, while gossip claimed he was much more. He agreed the girl should be educated, at least to the level of the daughters of the neighbouring rich family, also landowners. Perhaps his conscience troubled him, but it was said, too, that he had enlightened ideas and these were expressed only here, in Julie’s education. She had music lessons and drawing lessons and read quantities of books recommended by tutors who fitted in her lessons between the more formal lessons they gave the rich girls in their big house five miles away. The tutors were fiery young men who regretted they had not been born in time for the Revolution, or at least to fight in Napoleon’s armies, just as in our time young men or women mourn because they were not in Paris in ’68. ‘But ’68 was a failure,’ a practical elder may protest, only to be demolished by passionately scornful eyes. ‘What of it! Think how exciting it must have been!’

One of the young ladies, more enterprising than her sisters, decided to satisfy her curiosity about the mysterious Julie and contrived to visit her secretly in the house in the forest where Julie lived with her mother. She boasted about her exploit, which was evidence of her brave indifference to convention, and added to the already noisy rumours. The visit was invaluable to Julie, for she had had nothing to measure herself against. She learned from it that she was more intelligent than these respectable girls – her visitor was supposed to be the cleverest of them – but learned too how socially disadvantaged she herself was, for she was educated above her prospects and even her possibilities. Also, she knew why the tutors were all so ready to teach her. They might all be in love with her, but they could also talk to her.

Of herself at that time she wrote less than ten years later, Inside that pretty little head what an olla podrida of incompatible ideas. But I envy that girl her innocence. She had read the Encyclopedists, was devoted to Voltaire, while Rousseau, so appealing to anyone dependent on natural justice, had to hold sway. She could debate (and did, endlessly, with her tutors) about the acts and speeches of every personage on the great stage of the Revolution as if she had lived through it. She knew as much about the heroes of the American War of Independence. She adored Tom Paine, worshipped Benjamin Franklin, was convinced she and Jefferson were made for each other. She knew that had she been old enough she would have got on a ship to America to nurse the victims of the Civil War. But in fact she was living on her father’s banana estate, the illegitimate part-black (she was a light brown colour, like a southern French or Italian) daughter of a black lady whose house in the sultry forest was where successive waves of young officers, all bored out of their minds in this beautiful but dull island, went for entertainment, dancing, drinking, food, and the delightful singing of beautiful Julie. A very young officer, Paul Imbert, fell in love with her. He adored her, but did he adore her enough to marry her or even take her with him to France? Probably not, if she had not refused to see difficulties and insisted they should run away together. His parents were respectable people living not far from Marseilles, his father a magistrate. They refused to receive Julie. Paul found for her a little stone house in hilly and romantic country, and there he visited his love daily for a year, riding through aromatic pines, poplars, and olive trees. Then his parents pulled strings, the army forgave his young man’s lapse, and he was sent on duty to French IndoChina. And now Julie was alone in the woods, with no means of support. The magistrate sent her money. He had glimpsed the girl walking with his son in the hills. He envied Paul. This was not why he sent money. Paul had confessed with all suitable remorse that Julie was pregnant. For a time she had believed she was. With only a few francs between her and starvation, she returned the money to Paul’s father, saying that it was true she had been pregnant, but nature had quickly come to her aid – to the aid of all of them. Thus she made a claim on him, on his feelings of responsibility. She thanked him for his interest and asked him to help her get employment in the middle-class homes of the small town near to her, Belles Rivières. She could draw well, and she painted in water colours – unfortunately oils were too expensive for her. She played the piano. She could sing. ‘I believe that in these accomplishments I shall prove in no way inferior to the tutors currently employed in this district.’ She was asking for far more than the generous sum of money he had offered. By now everyone knew of the pretty but dubious girl who had tried to ensnare the son of one of their most respected families and lived all by herself like a savage in the woods. Her lover’s father thought for a long time. Probably he would not have responded had he not caught that glimpse of her with Paul. He went to see her and found an accomplished, witty, and delightful young woman, with the most charming manners in the world. In short, he fell in love with her, as everyone did. He could not bring himself to refuse her, said he would speak to selected families on her behalf, but kept himself in face by asking for an undertaking that she would never contact any member of his family again. She replied with a quick and impatient scorn he had to see was genuine: ‘I had assumed, monsieur, that you would have already understood that.’

For four years she taught the daughters of a doctor, two lawyers, three chemists, and a prosperous shopkeeper. All of them begged her to move into the little town, ‘where you will be more comfortable.’ Meaning that they were uncomfortable because this girl, no matter how well-bred and clever, was living by herself a good three miles from Belles Rivières. She refused, delightfully but firmly, telling them about the great forests of Martinique, the flowers and the butterflies and the brilliant birds, where she had wandered, absolutely by herself. She could not be happy living in streets, she said, though the truth was she dreamed of the streets of Paris and how she could reach them without worsening her already bad position. If she was going to try her chances in the big city it should be now, while she was still young and pretty, but she still dreamed of Paul. That she had been bound to lose him she had very soon learned, and knew that if he came back from the army she could not have him. Living, as she insisted on doing, free but alone told everyone she was waiting for him, and everyone – father, mother, sisters, would be writing to tell him so. Far from enticing him to her, this would put him off, as all her instincts, and the worldly wisdom imparted by her mother, told her. But she could not leave the place. Freedom! Liberty! she often cried to herself, roaming about her forests.

What did she look like at this time? How did she see her prospects? How did she strike the good people whose daughters she taught? How did they strike her? We know. We know it all. She drew self-portraits all her life, not because she had no other model, but because she was engaged in discovering her real, her hidden nature: we have a phrase for this search. She kept journals from the time she reached France. And there was her music, that would have told us everything even without her journals. The picture that emerges is not merely of an intelligent and attractive woman, but one who disturbed and challenged even when she did not intend to, who all her life fed malicious tongues, who always had men in love with her though she did not expect them to be or try to attract them. When she was accepted as tutor into these good houses, she behaved like a paragon of propriety, but she knew it would take only a small mistake to have the doors shut on her. She walked on a knife-edge, for above all, she had charm, that double-edged gift, arousing more expectations than it can ever fulfil. She certainly disappointed the young ladies she taught, who called her best friend and championed her to doubtful mothers and fathers, yet secretly hoped for more than her prudent advice: ‘Do you really want to be like me?’ she might sweetly enquire, when some over-protected daughter asked her aid in some minor rebellion. ‘Do what your parents say, and when you are married you can do as you like.’ She had learned this from Stendhal’s letters to his sister.

In her journals she wrote she would rather be herself, ‘an outcast’, than any one of these privileged girls.

When she was twenty-five she took a big step up the social ladder. She taught the two daughters of a Comte Rostand. The Rostands were the leading family in the area. They lived in a large and ancient château and sent a carriage for her twice a week. That was when she gave lessons in the dark hours as well as in the light, for before the carriage she had insisted that since she had to walk miles back and forth from her little house, she would teach in the town only in the day. This caused sarcastic comments. Everyone knew she wandered about all by herself at night in her forests. Yet she was too delicate to walk back in the dark from the town? And how about dancing by herself among the rocks, banging a tambourine, or something that looked like one – a primitive looking thing, probably from that primitive country she came from. Dancing naked – some claimed to have seen her.

Did she? There is no mention of it in her journals – though when she began to keep a record, there were only notes and jottings, and only later did it develop into a running commentary on her life. There is, however, a drawing of a woman dancing in a setting of trees and rocks. A full moon. Naked. This drawing is so unlike anything else she did of herself it shocks. Interesting to watch when some fan of Julie’s was handed a pile of her drawings. The face froze, there was an indrawn breath and – then – a laugh. The laugh was from shock. But how often is shock no more than a moment of half-expected revelation? A door opens (perhaps literally) onto a scene that is beautiful, or ugly, something ferocious or shocking – at any rate, the other side of the well-lit and ordered world we know: there it is, the truth. But why was there never mention of dancing in her journals? Perhaps it only happened once, and she got some kind of a scare. A pretty risky thing, to dance like that. She knew people spied on her. The gendarmes certainly did, but if one of them took a look through her uncurtained and unshuttered window – she hated feeling shut in, she said – he would see the proper young woman of the drawing rooms standing before her easel or playing her harp or writing at a small table under an oil lamp that showed the open book, her neatly ringed hand with the pen, her face, her bands of black hair, her bust smooth in a dress that went high to her throat, where there was a small white collar.

The gendarmes would also report that there were many books. If they took a good look when she was out, down in the town, they would not now be able to report anything consistently seditious or troubling. For while she still loved Revolutions as a matter of principle – she would not have been able to think of herself as a serious person if she did not – her shelves now provided a more balanced diet. Montaigne sat by Madame Roland, Madame de Sévigné with Énile. Clarissa – that novel whose influence on European literature had been and still was so strong – was in a pile with Rousseau’s Confessions, while Victor Hugo and Maupassant, Balzac and Zola, saw no reason why they should not share space with Voltaire. Beside her bed – small and narrow, with a single pillow – was evidence that she was taking possession of the part of France she found herself in, because she was reading whatever she could find of regional literature, had fallen in love with the old Provençal poets, and they and the newest Provençal poet, Mistral, were by the little blue enamel candlestick with its modest white candle on her night table.

A learned young woman, even a bluestocking, so the talk went, side by side with the other, more appetizing rumours, and when the château sent the carriage for Julie – it had to wait a good mile from her house, and even then there was only a cart road – this meant that the Rostands did not know about her nocturnal activities, or perhaps they did not care, were at the very least respecting her insistence on being considered, at least for form’s sake, as one of them.

The youngest son, Rémy, soon fell fatally in love with her. If Paul had been the essence of the romantic hero, dark, handsome, impetuous, full of temperament, then Rémy was the mature love, sober, patient, observant, with that small dry humour women love as a sign of seriousness, of experience.

When she began to love him it was against her good sense, and then she abandoned caution, just as she had in Martinique with Paul, and loved him absolutely. The carriage no longer waited for her where the cart track ended, for she ceased to give lessons at the château, but he visited her in her forest house and sometimes stayed with her for days at a time. The family knew he would get over it, and waited. He begged them to allow him to marry her. She dreamed of marrying him, while common sense told her to stop. All this went on for months – three years in fact – of bliss, of anguish, or despair, heights and depths of all kinds. She continued to give lessons in the town, while he begged her to rely on him. The citizens were able to ignore the hideous rumours, because their aristocratic family were being so cool, and because the pair was so discreet. They were never seen together. Besides, the young woman was such an excellent teacher. And above all her fees were so moderate.

This time Julie did get pregnant, and the lovers were happy and dreamed of the life they would have with their child. The baby was born, was a healthy child, but died of a minor ailment, the way children did so easily then. The two were ill with grief, but soon learned that the rumours in the town were more than ugly – they were dangerous. Criticism of Julie, so long repressed because of her confidence, and her skills, and because she always seemed to have powerful protectors, now expressed itself in the gossip that she had killed the child. It was known where and how. Half a mile from her house, a river ran fast downhill over rocks into a deep cold pool. The child’s death ended the family’s patience. Rémy was told to remove himself into the army. He was twenty-three. Julie was then twenty-eight. The two parted in an agony of grief, hardly able to move, as if they had been slowed by a deadly cold, an invisible ice. They told each other they would never get over it, and somewhere or other, they did not.

She had not been able to teach in the town since her pregnancy showed. With what she had saved, and what Rémy could give her when he left, she had enough to live on for a year. While she was slowly putting herself together again, and her journals tell us how painful a process this was, she repeated former behaviour. In a letter beginning, ‘There is no more helpless and unfortunate being than a young woman without a family, without a protector…,’ she asked Count Rostand to get her work as a copier of music. This he did. He knew she was more than adequately equipped for anything in this line. The family was a musical one. Musicians both well known and amateur played in their salons on feast days, and Julie’s own music had been played at these evenings, and sometimes by herself. It was a strange music – but then, she did come from an exotic island. The family knew she was a real musician, wrote serious music.

For years she lived quietly by herself, earning her living in a variety of ways. She copied music and even, on request, composed pieces for special occasions. She sang at the more respectable public feasts or festivals, always careful to refuse an invitation that might lower her status as a respectable woman. She drew and painted, in pastels and water colours, the picturesque scenes she lived among, and made studies of birds and animals. These pictures were sold from a printer’s shop in the town. She was never well off, but she was not poor either. Several times her journals recorded timely gifts of money from the Rostands, presumably at Rémy’s request.

She was alone? Yes, always. She was not able to forget Rémy, and he did not forget her. Occasionally they wrote long letters. Three years after he was banished into the army in French Equatorial Africa, he came on leave, and visited her, but they were both so affected they decided never to meet again. He was already engaged to marry a girl from a suitable family.

This romantic story, the reader has probably long ago decided, is hardly unusual. Beautiful young women without family support, and disadvantaged – in this case doubly, being both illegitimate and coloured – have this kind of history. In the rich parts of the world. In the poor countries of the Third World most particularly. Even in the Second World (but where is that?), poor and pretty girls match dreams to expectations, but with their hearts, not their heads.

Julie’s head was far from weaker than her heart. As her journals show. And her self-portraits. And, not least, her music. While her unfortunately not unusual story unfolded itself, her mind remained – bad luck for her – above it all, as if Jane Austen were rewriting Jane Eyre, or Stendhal a novel by George Sand. An uncomfortable business, reading her journals, because one has to feel that it is bad enough she had to suffer all that pain and loneliness, without having to endure her own severe view of herself. She might have adored her lover Paul, and more than adored Rémy, but she often described these passions as if a busy physician were making notes about calamitous illnesses. Not that she dismissed these calamities as worthless or meaningless: on the contrary, she gave them all the weight and meaning they did have in her life.

Five years after the loss of her lover Rémy, she was asked in marriage by a man of fifty, Philippe Angers, the master of the printing works where she sold her pictures. He was well-off, a widower with grown-up children. She liked him. She wrote that talking with him was the best thing in her life, after her music. He visited her in her own house, openly, his horse and sometimes his carriage left standing under the pines and turkey oaks where the cart track ended. She walked with him in a public garden at Belles Rivières. They spent the day together at a fête in Nice. This was his way of telling the world that he approved of Julie and her way of life, and proposed to take her on regardless of public opinion. But by now people were pleased that this vagabond and disturber of minds should be made harmless at last.

She was writing, I like him so much, and everything about this proposition is sensible. Why then does it lack conviction? She mused that the word conviction was an interesting one in this context. Paul had been convincing, and Rémy most certainly was. What did she mean by it, though?

For a long sober year Julie and the master printer planned their marriage. His children met her and presumably approved. One of them was a farmer, Robert. She describes how Robert joined the printer and herself for a meal. I could love that one, she remarks. And he certainly could love me. When we looked at each other we knew it. That would have conviction, all right! But it doesn’t matter. He lives with his wife and his four children near Béziers. We shall probably never see each other.

Remarks about her future husband continue, and they are calm, sensible, one could say respectful. There is, however, an entry describing a day in her married life. I shall wake up in that comfortable bed beside him, when the maid comes in to do the fire. Just as his wife did. Then I will kiss him and I will get up to make the coffee, since he likes my coffee. Then I shall kiss him when he goes downstairs to the shop. Then I shall give the girl orders. At last I will go to the room he says I can have for myself and I shall paint. Oils if I like. I will be able to afford anything I like in that line. He usually doesn’t come to the midday meal, so I shall ignore it and walk in the gardens and make conversation with the citizens, who are longing to forgive me. Then I shall play the piano a little, or my flute. He has not heard the music I am writing these days. I don’t think he would like it. Dear Philippe, he is so warmhearted. He had tears in his eyes when the dog was sick. He will come in for supper and we will eat soup. He likes my soup, he likes how I cook. Then we will talk about his day. It is interesting, the work he does. Then we will talk about the newspapers. We shall often disagree. He certainly does not admire Napoleon! He goes to bed early. That will be the hardest, to be shut up in a house all night.

Not once is there a suggestion of a financial calculation. Yet she was quite alone in the world. Her mother had been killed in the Mount Pelée earthquake, having gone to visit a sister living at St Pierre, which was destroyed. It is not recorded whether Julie ever asked her father for help.

A week before the mayor, who was an old friend of Philippe’s, was to marry them at the town hall, she drowned herself in the pool where gossips said she had killed her baby. They did not believe she had killed herself. Why should she, now that all her problems were solved? Nor had she slipped and fallen, which was what the police decided. Absurd! – when she had been jumping around those woods for years, like a goat. No, she was murdered, and probably by a disappointed lover no one knew about. Living all by herself miles from any decent people, she had been asking for something of the sort.

There were suitable condolences for the citizen who had lost his love, for no one could doubt he adored her, but people said he was well out of it. The gendarmes collected up her papers, her sketches, her pictures, a good deal of sheet music, and for lack of a better idea put it all into a big packing case that went to stand in the cellar of the provincial museum. Then, in the 1970s, Rémy’s descendants found some of her music among their papers, were pleased with it, remembered there was a packing case in the museum, found more music there, and got it played at a local summer festival. That is where the Englishman Stephen Ellington-Smith heard it. As music lovers will know, Julie Vairon quickly became recognized as a composer unique in her time, an original, and people are already using the word great.

But she was not only a musician. The artistic world admires her. ‘A small but secure niche…’ is how she is currently evaluated. Some people think she will be remembered for her journals. Excerpts appeared in both France and England, and were at once praised: very much to the taste of this time. Three volumes of her journals were published in France, and one volume (the three abridged) in Britain, where no one disagreed with the French claim that she deserves to stand on the same shelf as Madame de Sévigné. But some people have too many talents for their own good. Perhaps better if she had been an artist with that modest sensitive unpretentious talent so becoming in women. Which brings us to the feminists for whom she is a contentious sister. For some she is the archetypal female victim, while others identify with her independence. And as a musician, so one critic complained, ‘the trouble is one doesn’t know how to categorize her.’ All very well to say now how modern she is, but her music was not of her time. She came from the West Indies, people remind each other, where there is all that loud and disturbing music and it was ‘in her blood’. No one forgets that ‘blood’, an asset now, if not then. No wonder her rhythms are not of Europe. But then, they aren’t African either. To add to the problem, her music had two distinct phases. The first kind is not hard to understand, though where it could have come from certainly is: nearest to it is the trouvère and troubadour music of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. But that music was not available in Julie’s time, as it is now, in recordings of arrangements made using the instruments of then and re-created from difficult-to-decipher manuscripts. There are ways of bringing that old music back to life. One tradition of Arab music has changed little in all those centuries from what was taken to Spain, whence it came to southern France and inspired the singers and musicians who wandered from castle to castle, court to court, with instruments that were the ancestors of the ones we know. Yet when music has to be inferred, recreated, ‘heard’, the interpretation of an individual has to be at least in part an original inspiration. The words of the Countess Dié are as she sang them, but exactly how did she sing them? Did Julie see old manuscripts somewhere? We all know the most unlikely things do happen. Where? Did the Rostand family have ancient manuscripts in their possession? The trouble with this interesting theory – which postulates that this ancestor-loving, music-loving clan were so careless with a treasure from the past that they did not recognize its influences on Julie – is that Julie wrote that kind of music before knowing the family, for her songs of that time were fed by her grief over losing Paul. One may speculate harmlessly that among those solid middle-class families whose daughters she taught was one with an ancient chest full of…it is possible. Very well, then, how did this kind of singing come into her mind, living in her hilly solitude? What was she hearing, listening to? It was certain there were the sounds of running and splashing water, the noise of cicadas and crickets, owls and nightjars, and the high thin scream of a hawk on its rocky heights, and the winds of that region, which whine drily through hills where the troubadours went, making their singular music. There are those who say fancifully that she was visited by their essences during those long evenings alone, composing her songs. A music lover actually played them at a concert of trouvère and troubadour music, and everyone marvelled, for she could have been one of them. So that was her ‘first phase’, hard to explain but easy to listen to. Her ‘second phase’ was different, though there was a short period when the two kinds of music were in an uneasy alliance. Oil and water. Nothing African about the new phase. Long flowing rhythms go on, and very occasionally a primitive theme appears, if by that is meant sounds that remind one of dancing, of physical movement. But then it becomes only one of several themes weaving in and out, rather as the voices in late medieval music make patterns where no one voice is more important than another. Impersonal. Perhaps it is that which disturbs. The music of her ‘troubadour’ period complains right enough, but formally, within the limits of a form (like the fado or, for that matter, like the blues) which always sets bounds to the plaint of a little individual calling out for compassion, for surcease – for love. Her late music, cool and crystalline, could have been written by an angel, as a French critic said, but another riposted, No, by a devil.

It is hard, listening to her late music, to match it with what she said of herself in her journal, and with her self-portraits. Just before she threw herself into the pool, because that sensible marriage ‘lacked conviction’, she drew in pastels a wreath of portraits of herself, a satirical echo of those garlands of little cherubs or angels to be found on greeting cards. The sequence begins at top left with a pretty, wispy baby who is staring with intelligent black eyes straight back at the viewer – at, it must be remembered, Julie, as she worked. Next, the delightful little girl, her white muslin dress, the pink ribbons, vigorous black curls, and a smile that both seduces and mocks the viewer. Then an adolescent girl, and she is the only one who does not look directly back out of the picture. She is half turned away, with a proud poised profile, like an eaglet. Nothing comfortable about this girl, and one is glad to be spared her eyes, bound to demand strong reactions and sympathies. At the bottom, a spray of conventionalized leaves to match a bow of white ribbon at the top. At bottom right, opposite the eaglet, a young woman, seen as the apogee of this life, its achievement: she is not unlike Goya’s Duchess of Alba, but prettier, with black curls, a fresh vigorous figure, and black bold amused eyes, forcing you to stare back into them. On the opposing side to the adolescent girl, in her way matching or commenting on her, is a coolly smiling woman in her early thirties, handsome and composed, nothing remarkable about her except for the thoughtful gaze, which holds you until: Very well, then, what is it you want to say? There is a black line drawn between this portrait and the next two: two stages of her life she chose not to live. A plump middle-aged woman sits with folded hands, eyes lowered. All the energy of the picture is in a yellow scarf over her grey hair: she could be any woman of fifty-five. The old woman is only an old woman. There is no individuality there, as if Julie could not imagine herself old or did not care enough to think herself into being old. And having drawn that emphatic black line, she had walked out of her house through the trees and stood – for how long? – on the edge of the river, and then jumped into a pool full of sharp rocks.

This was just before the First World War, which so rapidly and drastically changed the lives of women. Supposing she had not jumped, decided to live?

Before jumping she put her pictures, her music, her journals, into tidy heaps. She did not seem to have destroyed anything, probably thought: Take it or leave it. She did write a helpful note for the police, telling them where to look for her body.

Oblivion, for three-quarters of the century. Then the summer recital in Belles Rivières where her music was played for the first time. Shortly after that, her work was included in an exhibition of women artists in Paris, which came successfully to London. A television documentary was made. A romantic biography was written by someone who had either not read the journals or decided to take no notice of them.

This was where Sarah Durham had entered the story. She read the English version of the journals, thought it unsatisfactory, sent to Paris for the French edition, and found herself captivated by Julie to the extent that she was actually making a draft of a play before discussing it with the other three. They were as intrigued as she was. Afterwards no one could remember who had suggested using Julie’s music; this kind of creative talk among people who work together is very much more than the sum of its parts. They could not stop talking about Julie. She had taken over The Green Bird. Sarah did another draft, with music. This was shown to potential backers, and at once Julie Vairon began to escalate. Then another play arrived, written by Stephen Ellington-Smith, who had done so much to ‘discover’ and then ‘promote’ Julie Vairon: ‘Julie’s Angel’.

They all read this new play, which was romantic, not to say sentimental, and no one would have given it another thought had Patrick not demanded a special meeting. Present were Sarah, Mary Ford, Roy Strether, Patrick Steele – the Founding Four. And, too, Sonia Rogers, an energetic redhead who was being ‘tried out’. They were still saying that she was being tried out when it was evident she was a fixture, because no one wanted to admit an era was over. Why Sonia? Why none of the other hopefuls who worked in and around the theatre, sometimes without payment or for very little? Well, it was because she was there. She was everywhere, in fact. ‘Turn the stone and there you find her,’ jested Patrick. She had come in as a ‘temp’ and had at once become indispensable. Simple. She was at this meeting because she had come into the office for something and was invited to stay. She perched on the top of a filing cabinet as if ready to fly away at one cross word.

Patrick opened fire with ‘What’s the matter with Stephen Whatsit’s play? It just needs a bit of tightening, that’s all.’

Mary sang, ‘ “She was poor but she was honest, victim of a rich man’s whim”.’

Roy said, ‘Two rich men, to be accurate.’

Sarah said, ‘Patrick, these days you simply can’t have a play with a woman as a victim – and that’s all.’

Patrick said, sounding, as he did so often, trapped, betrayed, isolated, ‘Why not? That’s what she was. Like poor Judy. Like poor Marilyn.’

‘I agree with Sarah,’ said Sonia. ‘We couldn’t have a play about Judy. We couldn’t do Marilyn – not just victims and nothing else. It’s not on.’

There was a considerable pause, of the kind when invisible currents and balances shift. Sonia had spoken with authority. She had said We. She wasn’t thinking of herself as temporary, on trial. Right, the Founding Four were thinking. And now that’s it. We have to accept it.

They all knew what each of the others was thinking. How could they not? They did not need even to exchange glances, or grimaces. They were feeling, were being made to feel, faded, shabby – past it. There sat this Sonia, as bright and glossy as a lion cub, and they were seeing themselves through her eyes.

‘I agree absolutely,’ said Mary, finally, assuming responsibility for the moment. And her smile at Sonia was such that the young woman showed her pleasure with a short triumphant laugh, tossing her fiery head. ‘They wouldn’t do an opera about Madame Butterfly now.’ Mary went on.

‘Everyone goes to see Madame Butterfly,’ said Patrick.

‘Everyone?’ said Sonia, making a point they were meant to see was a political one.

‘How about Miss Saigon?’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve read the script.’

‘What’s it about?’ asked Sonia.

‘The same plot as Madame Butterfly,’ said Patrick. ‘You talk your way out of that one, Sarah Durham.’

‘It’s a musical,’ said Sarah. ‘Not our audience.’

‘Disgraceful,’ said Sonia. ‘Are you sure, Patrick?’

‘Absolutely.’

Patrick pressed his attack. ‘Then how about the Zimbabwe play? I don’t remember anyone saying it should be a musical.’

The Zimbabwe play, by black feminists, was about a village girl who longed to live in town, just like everyone else in Zimbabwe, but there is unemployment. Her aunt in Harare says no, her house is already over-full. This precipitates a moral storm in the village, because the aunt’s refusal is a break with the old ways, when the more fortunate members of a family had to keep any poor relation who asked. But the aunt says, I have already got twenty people in my house, with my children and my parents and I’m feeding everyone. She is a nurse. The village girl catches the eye of a local rich man, the owner of a lorry service. She gets pregnant. She kills the child. Everyone knows, but she is not prosecuted. She becomes an amateur prostitute. She never thinks of herself as one: ‘This time the man will love me and marry me.’ Another baby is left on the doorstep of the Catholic mission. She gets AIDS. She dies.

‘I saw it,’ said Sonia. ‘It was good.’

‘But that was all right, because she was black?’ said Patrick, and laughed aloud at the political minefield he had invited them into.

‘Let’s not start,’ said Mary. ‘We’ll be here all night.’

‘Right,’ said Patrick, having made his point.

‘It’s too late anyway,’ said Roy, summing up, as he generally did. Calm, large, unflappable, one of the world’s natural arbiters. ‘We’ve already agreed on Sarah’s play.’

‘But,’ Sonia directed them, ‘I do think we should at least remember that it is the story of girls all over the world. As we sit here. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.’

‘But it’s too late,’ said Roy.

Mary remarked. ‘I don’t think the French are in on it because they like the idea of a good cry. They don’t see it as a weepy. When I talked to Jean-Pierre on the phone yesterday about the publicity, he said Julie was born out of her time.’

‘Well, of course,’ said Sarah.

‘Jean-Pierre says they see her as an intellectual, in their tradition of female bluestockings.’

‘In other words,’ said Roy, ending the meeting by standing up, ‘we shouldn’t be having this conversation at all.’

‘What about the American sponsors?’ demanded Patrick. ‘What have they agreed to? I bet not a French bluestocking.’

‘They bought the package,’ said Sarah.

‘I can tell you this,’ said Patrick. ‘If you did Stephen Whatsit’s play there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.’

As Mary and Roy went banging off down the wooden stairs, they sang, ‘“She Was Poor but She Was Honest”,’ and Patrick actually had tears in his eyes. ‘For goodness sake!’ said Sarah, and put her arms around him. As people did so often: There there! He complained they patronized him, and they said, But you need it, with your wounded heart always on view. All this had been going on for years. But things had changed…Sonia wasn’t going to spoil him. Now, at the foot of the stairs, she looked critically at Patrick who – always ornamental, and even bizarre – was today like a beetle, in a shiny green jacket, his black hair in spikes. But Sonia, in the height of fashion, wore black full Dutch-boy trousers, a camouflage T-shirt from army surplus and over it a black lace bolero from some flea market, desert boots, a jet Victorian choker necklace, many rings and earrings. Her hair, in a variation of a 1920s shingle, was in a tight point at the back, and in front in deeply curving lobes, like a spaniel’s ears. But her hair was seldom the same for more than a day or two. Her get-up did not please Patrick. He had already been heard shrilly criticizing her for lack of chic. ‘Being a freak isn’t smart, love,’ he had said. To which she had replied, ‘And who’s talking?’

Sarah did not go to bed on the night before she was due to meet Stephen Ellington-Smith. For one thing, she had not finished cleaning until three in the morning. Then she decided to do the programme notes after all. Then she reread Julie’s journals, preparing herself for what she believed would be a fight with Julie’s Angel.

‘Look,’ she imagined herself saying, ‘Julie never saw herself as a victim. She saw herself as having choice. Until 1902 and her mother’s death, she could have gone home to Martinique. Her mother actually wrote saying she was welcome any time. There’s even a rather silly letter from her half-brother, who took over the estate when the father died, making jokes about their relationship; it was insulting in a sort of schoolboy way. He said the father had told him to “look after” Julie. But she didn’t reply. She wondered whether she should be a prostitute – don’t forget this was the time of les grandes horizontales. But she said she had no taste for luxury, and that did seem to be essential for a highclass tart. She was offered a job as a chanteuse in a nightclub in Marseilles, but she said it would be too emotionally demanding, she would have no time for her music and her painting. Anyway, she hated provincial towns. She did actually have the chance of going to Paris in a touring company as a singer. But this was nothing like her dreams of Paris. She said in her journal, If Rémy asked me to go to Paris and live with him there…we could live quietly, we could have real friends…The underline there says everything, I think. She goes on. Of course it is out of the question, though I saw him with his wife at the fête. It is clear they do not love each other. She was invited to go as governess in a lawyer’s household in Avignon: he was a widower. Several men wanted to set her up in Nice or Marseilles as a mistress. These offers were merely recorded, as she might have written, It was hot today, or, It was cold.

‘We could easily present Julie in terms of what she refused. And what did she actually choose? A little stone house in the forest. “The cow-byre”, as the citizens contemptuously called it. She chose to live alone, paint and draw and compose her music and, every night of her life, write a commentary on it.

‘Yes, I agree it is not easy to make of this a riveting drama. Not easy even if we keep the form you have chosen. Act One: Paul. Act Two: Rémy. Act Three: Philippe. Yes, you could argue that she did write, I don’t think I could bear to move away from my little house where everything speaks to me of love. As George Sand might have written. But don’t forget she went on, I live here exactly as my mother did in her house. The difference is that she has been kept all her life. By one man – my father. She always loved him and never had choice. She could not leave his estate because if she did she could have earned her living only as a brothel-keeper (like her mother and her grandmother, or so she hinted). Or as an ordinary prostitute, or perhaps as a housekeeper. What were her accomplishments? She could cook. She could dress. She knew about plants and herbs. Presumably she knew about love but we never discussed love, that is, the making of it, because she destined me to be a young lady and she didn’t want to raise thoughts in my mind about her, about what she is really like (and that is in itself so touching it could almost break my heart, because how else could I have defined myself, what I am, if not by understanding her?). But I am very much afraid, if we sat alone and talked like women, I would hear her say, I live here in this house because everything in it and near it reminds me of love. And included in this love would be memories of shadows of great trees on her walls, and in the mirror of her sitting room and on the ceilings of her bedroom, and the damp, the everlasting humidity, and the heavy smell of flowers and of wet vegetation, and a smell something like the wet fur of animals that filled the house when it rained. But the fact is, my mother could not have left her house and her life even if she wanted to, but I can leave here at any time.

‘Where in all this do we see the victim?’

It was not that she was afraid of any financial consequences of refusing his play, because he had written, ‘I am sure it goes without saying that my support for the play will not be in any way affected if you all decide my little attempt is not good enough.’

He was already at a table in a restaurant she was relieved to find was not one of the currently fashionable ones. A large, rather dark, old-fashioned room, and quiet. He was at first glance a country gentleman. As she advanced towards him she reflected that it was surely remarkable that when she returned to the office and answered Mary Ford’s query, ‘What’s he like?’ with ‘He’s a country gentleman, old style’ – then Mary would at once know what she meant. Her parents, or Mary Ford’s, her grandparents or Mary’s, would not at once be able to ‘place’ many people in today’s Britain, but they would know Stephen Ellington-Smith at a glance. He was a man of about fifty, large but not fat. He was big-framed and, authoritatively but casually, seemed to take up a lot of space. His face was blond and open: green-eyed, sandy-lashed; and his hair, once fair, was greying. His clothes were as you’d expect: but Sarah found herself automatically making notes for the next time they needed to fit out such a character in a play. Their essence, she decided, was that they would be unnoticeable if he was stalking a deer. His mildly checked brownish-yellow jacket was like a zebra’s coat in that it was designed to merge.

He watched her come towards him, rose, pulled out a chair. His inspection, she knew, was acute, but not defensive. She felt he liked her, but then, people on the whole tended to.

‘There you are,’ said he. ‘I must say you are a relief. I don’t know quite what I expected, though.’ Then, before they had even settled themselves, he said, ‘I really do have to make it clear that I’m not going to mind if you people have decided against my play. I’m not a playwright. It was a labour of love.’

He was saying this as one does to clear the ground before another – the real problem is faced. And she was thinking of a conversation in the office. Mary had remarked, ‘All the same, it’s a funny business. He’s been involved with Julie Vairon for a good ten years one way or another. What’s in it for him?’ Quite so. Why should this man, ‘A regular amateur of the arts, old style, you know’ – so he had been described by the Arts Council official who had suggested approaching him as a patron – have been involved with that problematical Frenchwoman for a decade or more? The reason was almost certainly the irrational and quirky thing that is so often the real force behind people and events, and often not mentioned, or even noticed. This was what Mary Ford had been hinting at. More than hinting. She had said, ‘If we’re going to have problems with him, let’s have them out in the open right from the beginning.’ ‘What sort of problems do you expect?’ Sarah had asked, for she respected Mary’s intuition. ‘I don’t know.’ Then she sang, to the tune of ‘Who Is Sylvia’, ‘Who is Julie, what is she…’

They began by talking practicalities. There was the difficulty that began Julie Vairon’s career. The play was to have gone on in London at The Green Bird, one of three planned for the summer season. By chance, Jean-Pierre le Brun, an official from Belles Rivières, heard from the Rostand family, which had been very co-operative, that a play was imminent, and he flew to London to protest. How was it that Belles Rivières had not been consulted? The truth was, the Founding Four had not thought of it, but that was because they had not seen the piece as ambitious enough to involve the French. Besides, Belles Rivières did not have a theatre. And, as well, Julie Vairon was in English. Jean-Pierre had accepted that the English had been quicker to see the possibilities of Julie, and no one wanted to deny them that honour. There was no question of taking Julie Vairon away from The Green Bird. That was hardly possible, at this stage. But he was genuinely and bitterly hurt that Belles Rivières had been excluded. What was to be done? Very well, the English version could be used for a run in France. Yes, unfortunately it had to be admitted that if tourists were attracted, then they would be more likely to speak English than French. And besides, so many of the English themselves were settled in the area…he shrugged, leaving them to decide what he thought of this state of affairs.

So it was decided. And what about the money? For The Green Bird could not finance the French run. No problem, cried Jean-Pierre; the town would provide the site, using Julie’s own little house in the woods – or what was left of it. But Belles Rivières did not have the resources to pay for the whole company for a run of two weeks. It was at this point that an American patron came in, to add his support. How had he heard of this, after all, pretty dicey proposition? Someone in the Arts Council had recommended it and this was because of Stephen’s reputation.

At this point, mutual support and helpfulness was being expressed mostly in photographs back and forth, London to Belles Rivières, London to California, Belles Rivières to California. It turned out that there was already a Musée Julie Vairon in Belles Rivières. Her house was visited by pilgrims.

Stephen was disturbed. ‘I wonder what she’d think of so many people in her forest. Her house.’

‘Didn’t we tell you we were going to use her house for the French run? Didn’t you see the promotional material?’

‘I suppose I hadn’t really taken it in.’ He seemed to be debating whether to trust her. ‘I even felt bad about writing that play – invading her privacy, you know.’ Then, as she found herself unable to reply to this, for it was a new note, and unexpected, he added abruptly, thrusting out his chin small-boy style, ‘You have understood, I am sure, that I am hopelessly in love with Julie?’ Then gave a helpless, painful grimace, flung himself back in his chair, pushed away his plate, and looked at her, awaiting a verdict.

She attempted a quizzical look, but his gesture was impatient. ‘Yes, I am besotted with her. I have been since I first heard her music at that festival. In Belles Rivières, you know. She’s the woman for me. I knew that at once.’

He was trying to sound whimsical but was failing.

‘I see,’ she said.

‘I hope you do. Because that’s the whole point.’

‘You aren’t expecting me to say anything boring, like, She’s been dead for over eighty years?’

‘You can say it if you like.’

The silence that followed had to accommodate a good deal. It was not that his passion was ‘crazy’ – that portmanteau word, but that he was sitting there four-square and formidable, determined that she should not find it so. He waited, apparently at his ease because he had made his ultimatum, and he even glanced about at this familiar scene of other eaters, waiters, and so on, but she knew that here, at this very point, was what he was demanding in return for his very sizeable investment. She had to accept him, his need.

After a time she heard herself remark, ‘You don’t like her journals very much, do you?’

At this he let out a breath. It would have been a sigh if he had not been measuring it, checking it, even, for too much self-revelation. He shifted his legs abruptly. He looked away, as if he might very well get up and escape and then made himself face her again. She liked him very much then. She liked him more and more. It was because she felt at ease with him, absolutely able to say anything.

‘You’ve put your finger on…no, I don’t. No, when I read her journals I feel – shut out. She slams a door in my face. It’s not what I…’

‘What you are in love with?’

‘I don’t think I’d like that cold intelligence of hers directed at me.’

‘But when one is in love one’s intelligence does go on, doesn’t it? Commenting on –’

‘On what?’ he cut in. ‘No, if she’d been happy she’d never have written all that. All that was just…self-defence.’

At this she had to laugh, because of the enormity of his dismissal of – as far as she was concerned – the most interesting aspect of Julie.

‘Oh all right, laugh,’ he said grumpily, but with a smile. She could see he did not mind her laughing. Perhaps he even liked it. There was something about him of a spreading, a relaxation, as if he had held a breath for too long and was at last able to let it go. ‘But you don’t understand, Sarah – I may call you Sarah? Those journals are such an accusation.’

‘But not of you.’

‘I wonder. Yes, I do, often. What would I have done? Perhaps she would have written of me as she did about Rémy. I represented to him everything he had ever dreamed about when he hoped to be larger than his family, but in the end he was not more than the sum of his family.’

‘And is that what she represents to you? An escape from your background?’

‘Oh no,’ he said at once. ‘To me she represents – well, everything.’

She could feel her whole self rejecting this mad exaggeration. Her body, even her face, was composing itself into critical lines, without any directing intention from her intelligence. She lowered her eyes. But he was watching her – yes, she already knew that close, intelligent look – and he knew what she was feeling, for he said, ‘Please don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said cautiously, ‘I have decided to forget it.’

‘Why?’ he enquired, not intending flattery. ‘You are a good-looking woman.’

‘I am a good-looking woman still,’ said she. ‘I am still a good-looking woman. Quite so. That’s it. I haven’t been in love for twenty years. Recently I’ve been thinking about that – twenty years.’ As she spoke she was amazed that she was saying to this stranger (but she knew he was not that) things she had never said to dear and good friends, her family – that is what they were – at the theatre. She put on the humour and maternal style that seemed more and more her style: ‘And what was it all about, I wonder now, all that…absurdity?’

‘Absurdity?’ And he let out that grunt of laughter that means isolation in the face of wilful misunderstanding.

‘All that anguish and lying awake at night,’ she insisted, forcing herself to remember that indeed she had done all that. (It occurred to her she had not even acknowledged, for years, that she had done all that.) ‘Thank God it can never happen to me again. I tell you, getting old has its compensations.’ Here she stopped. It was because of his acute examination of her. She felt at once that her voice had rung false. She was blushing – she felt hot, at any rate. He was, there was no doubt, a handsome man, or had been. He was a pretty good proposition even now. Twenty years ago perhaps…and here she smiled ironically at him, for she knew her hot cheeks were making confessions. She went on, however, actually thinking that if he could be so brave, then so could she. ‘What I think now is, I was in love too often.’

‘I’m not talking about the little inflammations.’

Again she had to laugh. ‘Well, perhaps you are right.’ Right about what? – and she could see he was finding the phrase, as she did the moment it was out, a bromide, dishonest. ‘But why do we assume it always means the same thing to everyone – being in love? Perhaps “little inflammations” is accurate enough, for a lot of people. Sometimes when I see someone in love I think that a good screw would settle it.’ Here she took from him, as she had expected to, a surprised and even hard look at the ugly term, which she had used deliberately. Women who are ‘getting on’ often have to do this. One minute (so it feels) they are using the language of our time (ugly, crude, honest), and in the next, they have become, or feel they soon will if they don’t do something about it, ‘little old ladies’, because the younger generation have begun to censor their speech, as if to children. But, she thought, critical of herself, there is no need to take up stances with this man.

He said, after a long pause, while he examined her, ‘You’ve simply decided to forget, that’s all it is.’

She conceded, ‘Very well, then, I have. Perhaps I don’t want to remember. If a man had ever been everything to me – that’s what you said, everything…but I did have a very good marriage. But everything…let’s talk about your play, Stephen.’ And she deliberately (dishonestly) let this look as if she didn’t want to talk about her dead husband.

‘All right,’ he agreed, after a pause. ‘But it’s not important. I don’t really mind about it. Scrap it.’

‘Wait. I’m going to keep a good bit of it. The dialogue is good.’ This was not tact. His dialogue in parts was better than hers. Now she knew why. ‘Do you realize you have made Rémy the focus of everything? The real love? What about Paul? After all, she did run away to France with him.’

‘Rémy was the love of her life. She said so herself. It’s in her journals.’

‘But she didn’t get into her stride with the journals until after Paul ditched her. Suppose we had a day-by-day record of her feelings for Paul, as we have for Rémy?’ He definitely did not like this. ‘You identify with Rémy – and it is your own background. Minor aristocracy?’

‘Well, perhaps.’

‘And you’ve hardly mentioned the son of her worthy printer. Julie and Robert took one look at each other and, quote, If you have a talent for the impossible, then at least recognize it. After that, she killed herself. It seems to me the printer’s son could easily have been as important as Rémy.’

‘It seems to me you want to make her a kind of tart, falling in love with one man after another.’

She couldn’t believe her ears. ‘How many women have you been in love with?’

Obviously he couldn’t believe his. ‘I don’t really see the point of discussing the double standard.’

They were looking at each other with dislike. There was nothing for it but to laugh.

Then he insisted, ‘I have been in love, seriously, with one woman.’

She waited for him to say ‘my wife’ – he was married – or someone else, but he meant Julie. She said, ‘It’s my turn to say that you have decided to forget. But that isn’t the point. At the risk of being boring, art is one thing and life another. You don’t seem to see the problem. In your version, her main occupation was being in love.’

‘Wasn’t being in love her main occupation?’

‘She was in love a lot of her time. It wasn’t her main occupation. But these days we cannot have a play about a woman ditched by two lovers who then commits suicide. We can’t have a romantic heroine.’

Clearly she could not avoid this conversation: she reflected it was probably the tenth time in a month.

‘I don’t see why not. Girls are going through this kind of thing all the time. They always have.’

‘Look. Couldn’t we leave it to people who write theses? It’s an aesthetic question. I am simply telling you what I know. Out of theatre experience. After all, even the Victorians made a comic song out of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”. But I think I know how to solve it.’ Her duplicity with him would be limited to not telling him she had solved it already. ‘We can leave the story exactly as you have it. But what will put the edge on it…there is something; I hope you are going to ask what.’

‘Very well,’ he said, and she could see that this was the moment when he finally gave up his play. With good grace. As one would expect from someone like him.

‘We will use what she thought about it all…’

‘Her journals!’

‘Partly. Her journals. But even more, her music. There are her songs, and a lot of her music lends itself – we can use words from the journals and fit them to the music. Her story will have a commentary – her own.’

He thought about this an uncomfortably long time. ‘It is astonishing – it is really extraordinary – the way Julie is always being taken away from me.’ Here he looked embarrassed and said, ‘All right, I know that sounds mad.’

She said, ‘Oh well, we are all mad,’ but, hearing her comfortable maternal voice, knew at once she was not going to be allowed to get away with it. Again she was finding his acute look hard to bear. ‘I do wonder what it is you are mad about,’ he remarked, with more than a flick of malice.

‘Ah, but I’ve reached those heights of common sense. You know, the evenly lit unproblematical uplands where there are no surprises.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

You could say their smiles at each other, companionable but satiric, marked a stage.

The restaurant was emptying. They had come to the end of what they had to say to each other, at least for now. Both were making the small movements that indicate a need to separate.

‘You don’t want to hear any more of my ideas for the play?’

‘No, I shall leave it to you.’

‘But your name will be on it, with mine, as co-authors.’

‘That would be more than generous.’

They left the restaurant, slowly. At this very last moment, it seemed they did not want to part. They said goodbye and walked away from each other. Only then did they remember they had been together for nearly three hours, talking like intimates, had told each other things seldom said even to intimates. This idea stopped them both, and turned them around at the same moment on the pavement of St Martin’s Lane. They stood examining each other’s faces with curiosity, just as if they had not been sitting a few feet apart, for so long, talking. Their smiles confessed surprise, pleasure, and a certain disbelief, which latter emotion – or refusal of it – was confirmed when he shrugged and she made a spreading gesture with her hands which said, Well, it’s all too much for me! At which they actually laughed, at the way they echoed, or mirrored, each other. Then they turned and walked energetically away, he to his life, she to hers.

In the office, Sarah found Mary Ford making a collage of photographs for publicity, while Sonia stood over her, hands on her hips, in fact learning, but making it look as if she was casually interested.

Sarah told Mary that Stephen Ellington-Smith was a country gentleman, old style. That he was too magnanimous to be petty about his play. That he was, in fact, a poppet. Mary said, ‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Sonia took in this exchange with her little air of detachment.

Sarah sat with her back to the two young women, pretending to work, listening…no, one young woman and a middle-aged one: she had to accept that about Mary, even if it did hurt. They had all become so used to each other…Sonia was there in that office – not strictly her territory – not only to learn but to stake a claim. She wanted to be made responsible for the next production, Hedda Gabler. ‘You people will be busy with your Julie,’ she said. There was no need for the two senior officials to confer: they knew what each other thought. And why not? They were not likely to find anyone sharper, cleverer – and more ambitious – than Sonia. ‘Why not?’ said Mary, and without turning around, Sarah said, ‘Why not?’ In this way confirming Sonia’s position, and a much larger salary. Sonia left. ‘Why not?’ said Mary again, quietly, and Sarah turned herself about and smiled confirmation of Mary’s real message, which was that there really was no doubt of it – an epoch was indeed over.

Sarah did not need a week to use Stephen’s dialogue where it fitted, but decided to pretend she had needed that time, so he would not feel his contribution was inconsiderable. But when she was actually seated there, in her room, the mess of papers she was already calling the script spread about, a week did not seem too much. For one thing, she was unhappy with the existing translation of the journals. She had made her own of some of the passages, those that would accompany the music. She had had to get permission from the Rostands. ‘After all,’ she had written, ‘it is only a question of a few pages. It is not as if I were proposing to make a new translation of all Julie’s writings.’ In fact she wished she could. She privately believed that people loving literature who chanced to read her translations would at once see how much better, more vivacious, her language was, how much closer to Julie’s self. Perhaps one day she would make a new translation, choosing different passages: she did not necessarily agree with the English translator’s choices. She understood Julie much better than…Sitting there, the word processor pushed to one side, for she was still at the stage of words scribbled on loose sheets with a Biro – yes, pretty old-fashioned, she knew – she thought, That’s something of a claim I’m making…conceited? Perhaps. But I think it’s true. This young woman hasn’t understood the first thing about Julie…I care very much that her translation is flat, no effervescence. I care too much. I am altogether too much involved in this business. Yes, of course you have to be totally submerged in what you are working on, even if a week after it’s finished you’ve forgotten it…What is it about that bloody Julie: she gets under people’s skin; she’s under mine. Look how this thing takes off, spreads itself about – she’s blowing us all apart, and we know it. I really am intoxicated – probably all these months of listening to the music. Well, I have to listen to it this week…I’m making everything too complicated: I’ve spent years and years weighted with Duty, working like a madwoman, and if I don’t watch out I’ll go sailing off into the sky like a hydrogen balloon.

She sat, hour after hour, choosing words, hearing them: seductive. Like music, particularly when choosing words that will be congruous with music. The words, which she was already hearing sung, were running in her head. This is an affliction of words’ users and makers. Words appear in your mind and dance there to rhythms you consciously know nothing about. Tags and rags of words: they can be an indication of a hidden state of mind. They can jiggle or sing for days, driving you mad. They can be like invisible film, like cling film, between you and reality. She was hardly the first person to have noted this. D. H. Lawrence, for instance: ‘She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life out of living things.’ Yes, this was an illustration of exactly what she complained of: there was the quotation, pat and patented, colonizing her mind. Well, when she had finished this task, Julie’s words, not to mention the Countess Dié’s, would linger and then sink back into that vast invisible Book of Great Quotations, leaving her in peace…she had long ago created a saving mental image, to be used at moments when her brain was so abuzz with words she seemed to prickle all over with their energy.

She imagined a shepherd boy from a long time ago – hundreds of years, for it was more restful if this scene lived in an antique air, as if it had come off a wall or the side of a vase. This young creature was illiterate, had never seen words on a page, or on a parchment. There were tales in his head, for there has never been a country or a culture without them. But when he sat on his dry hillside, under his tree, watching – what? sheep, probably – his mind was empty, and memories or thoughts came to him in the shape of pictures. Sarah did not allow this poor youth even the traditional shepherd’s pipe. Silence it had to be. Only a breeze moving through the tree he sat under. A cricket. The sheep cropping the grass. This figure had to be a boy. A girl – no. She would almost certainly be wondering whom she would be married off to. Girls were seldom allowed to be alone, but it did not matter, a girl or a boy – and silence. Sarah tried to imagine what it would be like not to have a brain set by the printed word. Not easy.

When the week was up, Sarah telephoned Stephen to say she believed the script – the libretto? how was this hybrid to be described? – was ready. No doubt that he was pleased to hear her voice, and she was disproportionately pleased that his voice warmed and lifted. Then he said, ‘But you know, you really don’t have to…’ in the way of someone not expecting much consideration. Which was surely remarkable?

‘But of course,’ said Sarah. ‘We are co-authors after all.’

‘I’m not going to complain. Tomorrow?’

And now began a time which, when she looked back on it, seemed like a country where she had gone by chance, one she had not known existed, a place of charm, a landscape like a dream landscape, with its own strong atmosphere, that speaks in a language one half knows or has forgotten. Before meeting Stephen somewhere – a restaurant, a garden, a park, she would say to herself, Oh come on, you’re imagining it. When it was time to part, she was reluctant, and made excuses to put off the moment. She knew he was doing the same. He too probably thought before meeting her or after they separated, ‘Nonsense, I’m imagining it.’ But they could not doubt that when they were together they were in a pleasantness, an case, an air different from quotidian life. A charmed place where anything could be said. And yet this was not a case of two people finding each other’s lives a reason for being intrigued. If she was not much interested in his, it was because she had not experienced anything like it: he was rich, he owned a large and historic house. When he asked about her life, she gave him the facts: she had been married young, widowed young, she had successfully brought up two children by herself. She had almost by accident – so it seemed now – become well known in the theatre. Oh yes, she had for a time been responsible for her brother’s child. He listened, thought, and remarked, ‘When people tell you about their lives – well, the plot – they don’t tell you much about themselves. Not really.’ As if he thought she was about to disagree, he went on, ‘That is, not if they are people with anything to them. What’s interesting about people is not what life hands out to them. We can’t help that, can we?’

He was making some kind of plea for himself, or an explanation, so she believed. But why did he need to? He often seemed to feel the need to apologize. What for?

Meanwhile they went on – well, yes, they were enjoying themselves.

‘I do enjoy being with you,’ he said, and not only did this have the frankness – the generosity – she expected from him, but he sounded surprised. Was enjoyment not something he expected? Well, this kind of delightfulness was not anything she was used to either. She really had had to work so hard, had been so weighed down with responsibility…but surely a man with so many advantages did not lack opportunities for…but it was the two of them, their being together, as if they both owned a key to this place whose air was happiness.

And they might shake their heads, offering each other ironic smiles because of the improbability of this affinity. Charm. Like opening a wonderfully wrapped package and finding in it a gift secretly hankered after for years but never really expected. Her life had become charmed because of this Stephen What’s-his-name, who was in love with a dead woman. Which passion they discussed a good deal, he with perfect good humour because, as he informed her, he had carried away his Julie into some fastness where she, Sarah, could not come. ‘I simply have to save her from you,’ he said. They had fallen into the habit of talking whimsically about his craziness – she could use the word because he did. ‘You’re crazy, Stephen.’ ‘Yes, I’ll freely admit it, Sarah.’ But to say someone is crazy is almost to make it all harmless. It is a joky little word.

Yet she believed he was doing himself real harm. Sometimes, when a silence had fallen between them she saw his face sombre, abstracted: yes, indeed ‘his’ Julie was in some deep place inside him where he visited her. But this was not doing him good, to judge from the dark hurt look he wore then. Sometimes, when she saw that look, she decided not to think about what it meant, for fear she too would succumb. She had learned this habit of self-protection with Joyce: there was a point when she decided not to enter imaginatively into the poor girl’s state of mind, for fear of being taken over. Surely there was something here that contradicted the outward life of this man, which was everything it should be, public-spirited, sane, generous, open for anyone to look at and judge. To joke about his ‘crush’ on Julie, choosing to avert her mind from what it might mean, saved their friendship from Julie. For Sarah – and she was ashamed of the irrationality of it – wondered more and more what witchery that woman must have had to influence people so strongly after she was dead. One might even fancifully see her as Orpheus, charming victims into dark places, by the power of her music and her words.

As for Sarah’s play – or script – Stephen said, ‘You’ve got her pretty well. I do realize I was being partial – I mean, in the play I did. And I’m glad you’ve made me see her…rounded out. It’s odd, what a block I had about reading her thoughts. But it hasn’t changed what I feel about her. You see, we were made for each other, Julie and I. Well, Sarah, your face isn’t exactly designed to hide what you think…is that because you don’t believe there can be someone made for you? I remember I thought that once. But the truth is, there can be just the one person. It’s funny, isn’t it, how few people there are who…but you can have this feeling about the most unlikely people. I remember once – I was in Kenya, on active service. Everyone’s forgotten Kenya. Too many wars, I suppose. I met this woman. She was an Indian woman. Older than I was. And it was there…we knew each other at once. You have to trust in this kind of thing. If you don’t, you are denying the best part of life. You and I have something of the kind – well, we know that. It has nothing to do with age, or sex, or colour, or anything of that sort.’

Sarah was saying to herself, about ‘this thing I have with Stephen’, that if she had had a brother – a real one, not a clown like Hal – then this is what it might have been like. Extraordinary it had not ever occurred to her that to have a brother might be a pleasant thing.

Sarah and Mary flew together to Nice. When high in the air over Europe, Sarah observed that Mary’s mouth was moving as she sat with closed eyes. No, Mary was not praying. She made a point of repeating her mantra as a public relations woman several times a day: ‘This summer dozens of festivals will compete for attention. The Julie Vairon Festival will be only one of them. I shall make sure it will be the best, the most visible, and that everyone will want to come.’

They were met at the airport by Jean-Pierre le Brun, whom they felt they already knew, after so many consultations by telephone. He was dark, good-looking, well-dressed, combining in that uniquely French way correctness, politeness, and a practised scepticism, as if at university he had taken Anarchy and Law as his main subjects, and these had merged and become subdued to a style. Meeting the Englishwomen, also officials of a kind, he managed to express an extreme of respectful politeness, with a readiness to be affronted. He was not aware that he radiated resentment as well, but in no time he had forgotten about it, for he decided he liked them. They enjoyed an amiable lunch at Les Collines Rouges, Belles Rivières’ main café-restaurant. It then being late for business in the town hall, he drove them off into the wooded hills behind the town, first speeding along a tarmacked road and then driving not much slower when it became a rough track. This was the road Julie had followed when she walked to and from Belles Rivières. ‘She walked in all weathers, la pauvre,’ said Jean-Pierre. Here two unsentimental Englishwomen smiled at the Frenchman who was being so formally sentimental, exactly as expected. And in fact he had tears in his eyes.

At the track’s end they walked up a rocky path till they stood in a wide space between trees and rocks. The soil was a vibrant red in the late afternoon sun. The green of the trees was intense. The air was full of a murmur like bees, but this was the river and the waterfall: apparently there had been heavy rain. There was not much left of the ‘cow-byre’ the citizens had complained about. To quote from Mary Ford’s publicity brochure: A little stone house, cold, uncomfortable, was where Julie Vairon lived in the south of France, from the day of her landing penniless off the ship until she died. It had been a charcoal burner’s house. ‘Well, why not?’ Mary demanded. ‘Someone must have lived there before she did.’ After Julie’s death it stood empty for many years. Then the farmer Leyvecque, whose grandsons still farm in the area, used it as a stable. A storm took off the tile roof. If the town of Belles Rivières had not rescued it, there would be left only a heap of rubble, but instead the site is now a charming theatre, where this summer…

There wasn’t much left of the house. The long back wall stood, and parts of the side wall, now capped with cement to stop them collapsing further. Behind the house red earth sloped to the trees. Umbrella pines. Oaks. Olives and chestnuts. Some of these trees had known Julie. The air was full of healthy aromatic smells. The three people walked back and forth over the site where Julie’s life would shortly be re-enacted. Well, her life as edited by the necessities of the production. The acting would be on the space on a side of the house. The musicians would be on a low stone platform – at once Sarah and Mary began explaining that this platform must be larger, and nearer the acting area, because of the importance of the music. Jean-Pierre argued for form’s sake and then said he had not understood the music would carry so much of the meaning. He gracefully gave in, as he had been going to from the start. These negotiations were going on in a mixture of French and English – the English for Mary’s benefit. She had explained over lunch that she could not learn languages, in the way the English have, as if afflicted by a defective gene as yet unknown to science. Because it was Mary who was going to have to work with Jean-Pierre on publicity, Sarah listened to what turned out to be a pretty fundamental clash of views. He said he expected an audience of about two hundred for each night of the two weeks. Mary protested that many more must be planned for. Jean-Pierre said that one could not expect large audiences for a new play, and one with only local significance. Still gracefully disagreeing, the three arrived back in the town. Jean-Pierre left them at their hotel to return to his family, and it was with regret. Mary and he were making a game out of her inability to speak French and were communicating in Franglais. Clearly he enjoyed the surprise of this large, calm, apparently stolid young woman, with her equable blue eyes, taking off into ever surrealer flights of language.

There were three hotels. Among them the whole company would be distributed. All this was arranged by Sarah next morning, before the visit to the town hall, which was a formality, since everything had been already agreed on. Then Mary went off to interview descendants of the Imberts and the Rostands, Paul’s family and Rémy’s. Jean-Pierre went with her. Both clans had announced themselves only too willing to aid the Julie Vairon Festival, which would add such lustre to the little town. She also intended to visit the Julie Vairon Museum, and the archives, and the house – still as it was – where Julie would have lived had she decided to marry Philippe the master printer. And how about Philippe’s son Robert’s family? Perhaps they would agree – but they were a good way off. All this was going to take at least three days. Sarah flew back to London by herself.

She telephoned Stephen. On hearing each other’s voices they at once entered a region of privileged complicity, like children with secrets. This new note had been struck from the moment the script was judged finished by the Founding Four. When adults do this, it often means they are over-burdened, or even threatened in some way. Well, Stephen’s Julie was certainly threatened. ‘Now Julie’s gone public…’ as he put it.

She told him what she had seen of Julie’s house. Stephen had visited it ten years earlier when bushes were growing up through the floors and dislodging stones from the walls. She told him of the three hotels, two new, all named after Julie. She described Jean-Pierre. Because of her tone, he enquired, ‘And how does he see her?’ and she was enabled to murmur, ‘La pauvre…la pauvre…’ so that Stephen was able to exclaim, ‘Sentimental bloody…’ and she laughed. In short, they behaved as they had to in this ancient business of the French and the English finding each other impossible, to the satisfaction of both. But perhaps each nation’s need always to find the same traits in the other imposes a style, and so it is all perpetuated.

And now she and anyone else from The Green Bird who was interested were invited to the house in Oxfordshire, because there would be an evening of music and dancing, a miniature festival, and Julie’s music would be sung. Sarah had been invited for the whole weekend. She did not really want to see him in his house, his other life – his real life? Their friendship was threatened, so she felt. Surely it was a tenuous thing, based on imaginings, on phantoms? She knew very well what she was afraid of: that the ‘magic’, the charm, would simply evaporate. But of course she had to go, and she even wanted to. During the week before that weekend, they met for dinner, on his suggestion. She could see that he too was uneasy. He was giving her information, facts, one after another, fielding them to her, she thought, and even said it to him, earning a smile – like an elder brother practising bowling on a sister, watching to make sure she accepted what was sent in the right way. ‘No, no,’ she parodied, ‘don’t step back, you’ll knock the stumps off! Elbow up, as you bring the bat forward.’

The house was his wife Elizabeth’s. His was the money. No, it certainly was not for mutual convenience they had married, but the house was central to their lives: they both loved it.

There were three children, boys, at boarding school. They like boarding school, he insisted, in a way that said he often had to insist. She was interested that people like him felt they had to defend the sacred institution. Boarding school suited them, said Stephen. Yes, it was a pity they hadn’t a daughter. ‘Particularly for me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if we’d had a daughter, Julie wouldn’t have got to me the way she did.’ But there would not be another child. Poor Elizabeth had more than done her bit.

They were good friends, he and Elizabeth, he said, choosing his words, but not looking into her face, rather down at his plate. Not because he was evading something, but because – she felt – there was more he might be saying, which he expected her to see for herself.

He liked to think he managed the estate productively. Elizabeth certainly ran the house well. Every summer they had festivals. ‘Half the county come to them, and we do them proud. Elizabeth had the idea first, but it was because she knows it’s the kind of thing I like. Now we both put everything we’ve got into it.’ This was said with satisfaction, even pride. They were going to expand, become something like Glyndebourne, only on a much smaller scale. And only in the summers. Sarah would see it all for herself, when she came.

Again she felt that another meaning was carried by these words: and wondered if he was aware that everything he said seemed to be signalling: Listen to this carefully.

‘I want you to see it all,’ he insisted, this time looking at her. ‘I like the idea of your being there. I’m not really the kind of man who likes his life in compartments – yes, I know there are plenty who do, but I…’ His smile had energy in it, the mild elation that seemed to expand him when he talked of his house and his life in it. ‘You mustn’t think I don’t know how extraordinarily lucky I am,’ he said, as they strolled to the tube. ‘Well, you’ll see for yourself. I don’t take anything for granted, I assure you.’

She was to take the train to Oxford on the mid-afternoon on Friday. At two the doorbell rang, and there was Joyce. Having not seen her for some time, Sarah saw her with new eyes, if only for a moment. At once her heart began to feel an only too familiar oppression. As Joyce walked in she seemed to be straying, or wandering in some private dream. She was a tall girl, now very thin. When her sisters put make-up on her she could be lovely. Her hair – and this is what struck to the heart – was marvellous, a fine light gold, and full of vitality, loose around her pasty spotty little face. ‘Make yourself some tea,’ said Sarah, but Joyce fell into a chair. She really did seem ill. Her great blue eyes were inflamed. Her characteristic smile – she had faced the world with it since she stopped being a child, was bright, scared, anxious. Yes, she was ill. Sarah took her temperature and it was 101.

‘I want to stay here,’ Joyce said. ‘I want to live here with you.’

Her dilemma was being put to Sarah in as dramatic a form as it could be. She had been afraid of something like this. All kinds of pressure, though none that could be visible, or even probable, to anyone but herself, were urging her to give in at once. But she was remembering something Stephen had said: ‘You’ve been looking after her for – how long? Did you say ten years? Why don’t her parents look after her?’ And when Sarah could not reply, ‘Well, Sarah, it looks a funny business to me.’

‘At the time it seemed quite natural.’

But his silence was because he had decided not to say what he thought. Yet usually they did say what they thought. Would he have said, ‘You’re crazy, Sarah’ and admitted her to the company of those who behave as they do because they cannot help themselves? And another time he had remarked, ‘If you hadn’t taken her in, what do you think would have happened?’ This was not the hot and indignant voice she was used to hearing from people who feel threatened, because they are thinking, If you take on such a burden, then perhaps I shall be expected to sacrifice myself too. No, he had been thinking it all out. She had never wondered what would have happened to Joyce if she had not looked after her. But would Joyce have been worse off if her aunt had left her to her parents? She couldn’t be much worse off, could she?

Now she made herself say, the effort putting severity into her voice, ‘Joyce, I’m just leaving. I’m off for the weekend. I’ll take you home and put you to bed there.’

‘But I’ve lost the door key,’ said Joyce, her eyes filling with tears.

Sarah knew the key had not been lost, but to prove that meant she would have to search Joyce’s pathetic grubby bag, which once had been a brightly striped Mexican affair.

She told herself that on this ground she would have to fight, though it was poor ground. If she did not…She telephoned the hospital where her brother was a consultant, was told it was his afternoon in Harley Street, rang Harley Street, was told he was with a patient. Sarah said to the receptionist that this was Dr Millgreen’s sister, and the call concerned his daughter, who was ill. She would hold on. She held on for a good ten minutes, while Joyce cried quietly in her chair.

At one point she said in a little voice, ‘But I want to stay here with you, Auntie.’

‘You can’t stay here with me now. You’re ill, you need treatment.’

‘But he’ll make me go to hospital. I don’t want to.’

‘No, but he’d make you stay in bed, and so would I.’

‘Why are you all so horrible to me? I want to live with you always.’

‘Joyce, none of us has heard one word from you – good God, it must be five months. I was running all over London looking for you.’

At this point the receptionist said Dr Millgreen could not come to the telephone, Mrs Durham must manage. ‘Tell my brother that his daughter is in my flat. She is ill. I shall be away until Monday.’

She was angry. That she was full of guilt goes without saying. It was no use telling herself she had no reason to feel guilt.

She said to Joyce, ‘I suppose someone will come and fetch you. If not, I should simply get into a taxi and go home.’ Here she put some money into the Mexican bag.

Joyce whimpered, ‘Oh Auntie, I don’t understand.’

Because this was a child talking, not even Joyce the unpredictable adolescent, who did manage to cope with life on some sort of level, Sarah did not reply to her. Instead she said to an adult, reminding herself that Joyce was twenty, ‘Look, Joyce, you understand perfectly well. Something or other has happened out there, but of course you’ll never tell us what…’

Joyce interrupted angrily, ‘If I did tell you, you’d take advantage of me and punish me.’

Sarah said, ‘I don’t remember my punishing you for anything, ever.’

‘But my father does. He’s always horrible.’

‘He is your father. And you have a mother; she stands up for you.’ Joyce turned away her face. She was trembling, in spasms. ‘You are a grown-up woman, Joyce. You’re not a little girl.’

At this a little girl looked vaguely in her aunt’s direction with enormous drowned eyes. A small pink mouth stood pathetically half open.

‘I’m not going to spend my life looking after you. I don’t mind if you come and stay here when I’m here. But I’m not going to wait on you. If you like I’ll take you for a holiday somewhere. You certainly look as if you could do with one. Well, we’ll talk about it, but not now. I’ve got a train to catch. I’ll ring up from Oxfordshire and find out if you’ve gone home.’

Joyce would not go home. Late that night Hal might mention to his wife, if he remembered, that the girl was ill and alone in Sarah’s flat. Rather, ‘Joyce has turned up at Sarah’s, and Sarah seems to think she’s not well.’ Anne, exhausted and irritable, would instruct the two girls, Briony and Nell, to go over to Sarah’s. They would be angry with Joyce for disappearing for so long. They would be angry with Sarah for not coping. Everyone would be angry with Sarah. As usual. It crossed Sarah’s mind now to think that was indeed a bit odd.

When Sarah got off the train, it was Elizabeth who came to introduce herself. The two women frankly inspected each other, Elizabeth in a way that made Sarah wonder exactly what Stephen had said about her, for Elizabeth had the look of someone checking to make sure information had been correct: apparently, yes, it had. Elizabeth was a smallish woman, with shiny yellow hair held by a black velvet ribbon, and this made her look both efficient and spirited. Her face was round and healthy and her cheeks were country pink. She had unequivocal bright blue eyes. Her body was firm and rounded: if one touched it, one’s finger would bounce off, thought Sarah. Everything about this woman told the world, but in a take-it-or-leave it voice, You can rely on me for anything reasonable. She seemed pleased with Sarah and was certainly thinking, Good, I don’t have to bother with her, she can look after herself. For Elizabeth – like Sarah – was one of the people who wake every morning with a mind’s eye list of items to be dealt with. Sarah had already been crossed off the list.

Now Elizabeth strode off to a station wagon, but slowed so as to adjust to Sarah’s pace. The back of the car seemed crammed with large healthy dogs. Elizabeth drove fast and well – what else? She commanded the car with every muscle of her body, as if it were a horse she could not trust not to get out of hand. Meanwhile she gave Sarah information about what they saw as they drove through the jolly countryside. At the top of a rise she stopped the car and said, ‘There it is, there’s Queen’s Gift.’ Although she had lived in the house all her life and could hardly be unused to this view, she sounded like a child trying not to be too pleased with itself, and Sarah liked her from that moment.

The house stood four-square on its slight rise, dignified but sprightly, as if a country dance had been magicked into brick, but not without suggestions (the eight barred windows at the top?) that in its long centuries there must have been plenty of drama. It was a hot still afternoon in that summer of 1989, when one perfect day followed another. The house seemed determined to soak in sunlight and store it against the English weather that was bound to set in again soon. There it sat glowing redly amid its English lawns and shrubs and judiciously disposed trees, take me or leave me, not a house one could live in without submitting to it, and, clearly, Elizabeth felt that in presenting the house she was defining herself. Now she told Sarah she had been born there. Her father had been born there. Queen’s Gift had been in her family one way or another since it had been built.

They drove slowly through appropriately impressive gates, the dogs barking and whining at being home, then through a wood of beeches and oaks, and turned a corner abruptly to approach a side view of the house, where, on a tall board that pointed the way to a beech walk, was Julie’s face – an impetuous smiling girl – styled in black and white on a poster. At once Sarah was returned to her own world, or rather the two worlds slid together. There are times when everything seems like a film set or a stage set, and the old house had become a background for Julie Vairon, incongruous though that certainly was.

Stephen emerged from tall doors at the top of a flight of stone steps that were an invitation (only conditional, for above them was a notice that said, discreetly, Cloakrooms) to the public to ascend them. Stephen seemed worried. He descended the steps, smiling at her, but on the last one he stopped, and his large hand was curving around a gently eroded stone ball that crowned a pillar, as if, because of the habits necessary to a busy man, he was assessing the condition of this sphere since it might be time for him to do something about it.

He took her suitcase, set it on the bottom step, and said he would show her around. At this Elizabeth laughed and said, ‘But poor Sarah, can’t she have a cup of tea first?’ as she relinquished their guest, her own duty done, to her husband. Sarah waited for a signal or glance that recognizes a situation, and it came: Elizabeth shone that smile on them both that says – in this case with good-humoured irony – ‘I know what is going on and I don’t mind,’ before going off on her own affairs. In fact she had so little interest in this obligatory little act that the smile had faded before she turned away. There are not many spouses, or partners, strong-minded enough to forgo that look, that smile, or laugh, for it makes a claim, and an even stronger one than jealousy or anger. Stephen glanced at Sarah to see if she had noticed, and then a small grimace signalled, A pity, and he said aloud, ‘Don’t mind. She’s got it wrong. If she had ever asked, I would have…’

‘Oh, but it’s a compliment,’ she said.

He put his hand inside her elbow. This hand both took possession of Sarah and said it was prepared to relinquish her at the smallest sign that it was taking too much for granted. Sarah, from the world of the theatre, laughed, put her arms around him, and kissed him on both cheeks, one, two. He at once went bright red. He was pleased, though.

‘Sarah, I really am so glad to see you here. Don’t ever think I’m not.’

Why should she think such a thing?

Apparently he still felt she needed essential instruction. Again he took her arm, this time with confident masculine proprietorship, which she enjoyed (she was prepared to concede) more than perhaps she ought. They walked slowly through gardens and shrubberies, and past long warm reddish brick walls where roses sent out waves of scent. Late May: the roses were early.

Stephen said he hoped that she, Sarah, and the whole company would give Elizabeth credit for all the work she had done. It was she who had persuaded artistic friends in Paris to get Julie Vairon’s pictures exhibited. It was she who had approached the television people to make a documentary. Elizabeth was a generous woman, he insisted.

They walked on grass between two hedges of beech, whose attribute is to remind you, when in full healthy green, that it will hold its own through long winters, withstanding gales, frost, anything at all nature chooses to throw at it, never losing so much as a russet leaf. A beech hedge, whether it likes it or not, makes statements of confidence. It refuses pathos.

‘She is always generous,’ he said again, and, feeling she was being prompted, she asked, ‘What does she make of – well, of you and Julie?’ But it was the wrong question, for his face said he had already answered her. Disappointment in her made him relinquish her arm, and she, disappointed in her turn, insisted, ‘She would admit that one may be jealous of a…’ She could not bring herself to say, ‘a dead woman’, for it was too brutal. Instead she said, ‘…of a ghost?’ A foolish, harmless word.

‘I don’t think she would admit to anything so irrational.’

They had strolled on a good few yards through air that was a mix of warm dry scents all making claims on her memory, when she remarked, ‘For one thing, you can’t compete with a…dead woman.’ It was not easy to use that word.

He stopped and turned to look close into her face. ‘You say that as if you knew all about jealousy.’

‘Did I? I suppose I did.’ And hearing in retrospect how she had spoken, she was discomfited. She was off balance. Meanwhile his eyes, green but – seen so close – as full of variegations as the surface of a cut olivine, green specked with black and grey, were full on her face. Trying to laugh, she said, ‘I remember saying to myself, That’s it, never again, I’ll never feel jealousy again.’ She knew her voice was full of resentment.

‘So you were generous too?’

‘If you want to make it generosity…I thought of it as self-preservation. I know one thing – funny that I haven’t thought of it for ages: but you can kill yourself with jealousy.’ She was trying to make her voice light and humorous. She failed.

‘You said to whoever it was, Bless you, my child, run off to your little amusements, what we have is so strong it can’t affect our marriage?’

‘It wasn’t my marriage. It was later than that. And I certainly never said, Run along! On the contrary, that was it – finished!’ She was surprising herself by the cold anger in her voice. ‘I could never say it couldn’t affect a marriage or anything else. It was a question of…’

‘Well?’ he demanded, and gripped her elbows in large and confident hands. The strength of those hands spoke direct to her, reminding her…His eyes, those interesting pebbles so close to her own, seemed to her now to be tinged with – was that anxiety?

Violent needs conflicted in her. One was to comfort and heal, for she always felt he emanated an appeal, a need: she had never been more aware than now that he guarded a hurt place. But it seemed her own need was stronger, for what burst out of her was: ‘Pride. It was pride.’ And she was surprised – if she could be more surprised than she had already become, seeing what was revealed of a forgotten past – at the violence in the word. What’s the matter with me? she was asking herself, while she withstood the pressure of those uncompromising eyes. ‘Of course it was pride. Do you imagine I’d keep a man who wanted someone else?’

She, Sarah – that is, the Sarah of today – had not spoken these words. Some long ago Sarah had said them. It was getting harder every second to stand there between Stephen’s hands and sustain that long close examination. She felt ashamed, and her face burned.

‘You are talking like the kind of woman you seem determined not to be – to seem to be.’

‘What kind of woman?’

‘A love woman,’ he said. ‘A woman who takes her stand on love.’

‘Well,’ said she, attempting humour again, but with no success, ‘I do seem to remember something of the kind.’ And was about to walk away from the situation, when he tightened his grip on her elbows.

‘Wait, you always run away.’

‘But it was all a long time ago…All right, then, I’ll try. Do you remember Julie’s journals – yes I know you don’t like them. When she was writing about her master printer, she said, And there will inevitably come that night when I know it is not me, Julie, he is holding in his arms, but the wife of the chemist or the farmer’s daughter who brought the eggs that afternoon. I’d rather die. And of course, she did.’ Her voice was full of defiance. ‘Immature – that’s what our Julie was. A mature woman knows that if her husband chooses to fancy the chemist’s wife or the girl who is driving the Express delivery cart, and fucks them in her stead, well, it’s just one of those things.’

‘And vice versa, I think.’ He smiled. ‘The husband knows he is holding in his arms the stable boy, because his wife is?’

‘That’s your – his affair.’

‘Well, well, well,’ he said, full of sardonic relish. He let her go. And as they walked on, while the essences of flower and leaf meandered past their faces, ‘And that marriage of yours? I really am curious. That little way of yours, all passion spent, amuse yourself, my children, while I benevolently look on.’ This was not spiteful, or even resentful: he laughed, a bark of sceptical laughter, but gave her the look of a friend.

Sarah fought to become that Sarah who was able benevolently to look on.

‘It lasted ten years. Then he died.’ Now she believed that the younger Sarah had taken herself off, back into some dark corner. ‘I don’t look back on my pursuit of love after that with much admiration for myself. I was so immature, you see. I was never prepared to settle for the sensible – you know, a widow with two young children should look for a father for her children.’

He snorted a kind of amusement. Then, ‘A real romantic. Who would have thought it? Well, actually, yes, I did, I really did.’

‘And I am walking on a lovely afternoon with a man who is besotted, may I use that word? – with a phantom.’

‘She is no phantom,’ he said gravely.

In front of them the shrubs were thinning: an open space was imminent, showing through the branches.

She heard herself sigh, and he sighed too.

‘Sarah! Do you imagine I don’t know how all this sounds? I am not so mad that…give me some credit.’ They stood on the edge of a vast lawn, glimmering a strong green in yellow light. ‘For a time I believed I was possessed. I even considered going off to be exorcised – but for that kind of thing to work, surely you have to believe in it? But I’m afraid I don’t believe that some Tom, Dick, or Harry of a priest can deal with…Someone no better than I am? Nonsense. And then I began to do a lot of reading, and I found that Julie is that side of myself that was never allowed to live. The Jungians have a word for it. My anima. What’s in a word? It seems to me all that kind of thing amounts to – well, not much more than the pleasures of definition. Why is a word like that useful when you are experiencing…? All I know is that if she walked towards me now I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.’

The great lawn, as flat as a lake, was backed by beeches, chestnuts, and oaks; and some shrubs that were all in flower, pink, white, and yellow, although well grown themselves, were made so small by the trees they seemed like flowers in a border. In the middle of the green expanse was a wooden stage, about three feet in height. There the musicians and singers would be tomorrow. A few wooden chairs idled on the grass: apparently this was an audience that liked to stroll about while it listened. Slowly the two approached the little stage, which was like a flat rock in still water. This place, this stage, this lawn, was a vast O framed by trees, green heights around flat green. Now the two were circling the stage. On the far side of it was a poster of Julie, or rather of Julie’s drawing of herself as an Arab girl, a transparent veil across the lower part of her face, her eyes black and – yes, the word haunting would do. Stephen came to a standstill. He made a small sound – a protest. ‘Elizabeth didn’t say she was using this one,’ he said. It was not the picture on the other posters. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asked. He did not reply. He was staring helplessly, as at an accident, or a catastrophe. He was pale. Sarah put her hand into his arm and moved him away. He walked stiffly, even stumbled. He turned his face to her, and Sarah almost let out that laugh which says, ‘You are doing it well, congratulations.’ Nothing that he had said, nothing she had thought about him – and she believed she had been prepared to dive deep into his wells of fantasy – had prepared her for what she saw. His face was pulled into that mask that illustrates Tragedy – the other side of Comedy; the theatrical stereotypes. She was standing still, staring at him. Her heart beat. Foreboding. Fear – yes, it was that. Yes, she had seen his face wretched; she had said to herself the sanitized sets of words we use in this time of ours, which has banished this kind of thing, has decided it is all an affair of horoscopes, or ‘ghosts’, and that if they squeak and gibber, then they are comic rather than not. She had never even begun to imagine what she was seeing now, the haunted tragic face with the dragged-down mouth that seemed as if an invisible hand held it, a mouth all suffering. She was shocked as if she had opened a door by mistake and seen something like a murder or an act of torture, or a woman in an extreme of grief, sitting rocking, clutching at her hair with both hands, then raking her nails across her breasts, where the blood runs down.

He’s ill, she thought. She thought, That’s grief. What I am looking at – that’s grief. She felt ashamed to be a witness of it and turned her face away, thinking, I’ve never, ever, felt anything like that.

Now he remembered she was there, and he turned his own face away and said, his voice rough, ‘You see, you have no idea at all, Sarah. You simply don’t understand…well, why should you? I hope you never will.’

At supper that night there were seven people. The informal meal was taken in a room that had a hatch through into the kitchen, and it had been cooked and served by a pleasant motherly sort of woman not unlike an auburn-haired blue-eyed sheepdog. This was Norah Daniels, a housekeeper, or something of that sort, and she sat at the table with Stephen and Elizabeth and Sarah and the three boys, James, about twelve, George, ten or so, and Edward, seven. These children were beautifully behaved, in a style imposed on them by their parents: a light impersonal affection, and it was joky, for there was a lot of banter of the kind Sarah remembered from her school days. It was mostly Norah who played this game. Stephen was silent. He claimed he had a headache and they must forgive him. Not ask too much of him was what he meant and what they all heard. It was evident that this was a message heard often in this family, from him, and from Elizabeth, because she was so very busy. She kept saying she was, and that was why she had not done a variety of things she had promised – ring up a friend’s mother, write a letter about a visit, buy new cricket balls. But she would do all these things tomorrow. The three boys, fair, slight, blue-eyed, angelic-looking children, watched the adults’ faces carefully for signals. This was their habit. This was their necessity. They had been taught never to ask too much. Only Norah was outside this pattern, for she smiled special smiles at each of them, helped them to food in an indulgent way, remembered personal tastes, gave Edward, the smallest one, an extra helping of pudding, kissed him warmly, with a hug, and then excused herself, her own meal finished, saying she had things to do. At once the boys asked permission to leave the table, and they slid away into a warm dusk. For a time their high clear voices could be heard from the garden. Soon music sounded from the top of the house – some pop group. Elizabeth remarked that it was time the boys were asleep, and departed, but only briefly, to make sure they were in bed.

Then Stephen and Elizabeth apologized to Sarah, saying they needed a couple of hours to discuss arrangements for tomorrow, for more people were coming than they had expected. ‘This Julie of yours is obviously a great draw,’ said Elizabeth, but it did not seem she meant anything special by it.

Sarah walked about in the dusk for a while, until the birds stopped commenting on the affairs of the day and the moon made itself brilliantly felt. She telephoned her brother’s house. Anne answered. Yes, she had sent the girls to collect Joyce, who, on arriving home, had at once disappeared again. Anne did not suggest this was Sarah’s fault, as Hal would have done. He had said they should all have a serious talk about Joyce, and suggested Monday night. Sarah agreed, but knew her voice communicated to Anne, as Anne’s did to her, that nothing would come of this.

Sarah’s room was full of moonlight and overlooked the great lawn and the trees beyond, the scene full of glamour and mystery, like a theatre set.

She lay in bed and was determined she would not think about Joyce, for she did not feel strong enough to accommodate the anxiety thoughts of joyce always brought with them, when she was already anxious enough. She had expected to be disturbed by this visit, and she was. Not in the way she had been afraid of. Whatever it was that Stephen and she shared, they shared it still. No, now she felt she had been selfish, for she could not get out of her mind the look on his face that afternoon – such grief, such pain, such a degree of suffering. It was crazy. He might be sane in nine-tenths of his life, this intelligent hard-working many-sided life of his, but in one part of it he was, quite simply, not normal. Well, what of it? It did not seem to be doing much harm, and certainly not to Elizabeth. But there was something bothering Sarah, and she couldn’t put a finger on it. She went off to sleep, glad to forget it all, and woke completely and as suddenly as if there had been a clap of thunder. The moon had left her room. She was remembering a scene at the table of Norah handing Elizabeth a glass of wine, and Elizabeth’s smile at Norah. Well, yes, that was it. And she shut her eyes and replayed the scene. Stephen was at one end of the table, Elizabeth at the other, Norah beside Elizabeth. The women’s bodies had carried on a comfortable conversation with each other, as well-married bodies often do. And Stephen? Now it seemed to Sarah that he was an outsider in his own house – no, for this house had, for all those centuries, accommodated any number of eccentricities and deviations. It was certainly not the house that excluded Stephen. Was he excluded at all? He had said he and his wife were good friends, and evidently they were. But her picture of Stephen – at least tonight, as she lay half asleep – seemed to be merging with that of Joyce, the girl, or child, who was always on the fringes of life, unaccepted by it, unacceptable. And that had to be ridiculous, for Stephen was firmly set in this life of his, born to it, could not be imagined outside it.

Sarah briskly got up, had a long bath, and watched early light come streaming through great trees. Five in the morning. She went quietly down the great central staircase, found a side door where bolts slid easily back, and went out. Two red setters came rushing around the corner of the house, silently, thank goodness, their fringed ears streaming. They put wet noses into her palm and their bodies wriggled with pleasure. She had not gone far into the woods when Stephen came through the trees. He had seen her from his bedroom window. Nothing now could seem more absurd than her earlier thoughts about Stephen. Nor could anything be more pleasant than this strolling about in the trees with cheerful dogs, listening to the raucous exchanges of the crows and the chattering of the small birds as they got their affairs together. At one point Stephen even casually mentioned Elizabeth and Norah, like this: ‘You must have noticed, I’m sure…’ He did not seem disturbed, and there was no sign of the tragic mask she had stared at yesterday. He seemed in good spirits and entertained her with a comic view of himself as a Maecenas. As a young man, he said, he had been a bit of a red, ‘but not too inappropriately extreme for my station in life,’ and had had nothing but contempt for rich patrons. ‘“We know what we are, but know not what we may be,”’ he quoted, and added – and this was the only moment that morning when there was a suggestion of something darker, ‘But the truth is, if we did know what we are, then we would know what we could be. And I wonder how many people would be able to stand that?’

Later, after breakfast, the boys made friends with her in their easy well-mannered way and took her off on a tour around the estate. She could see they had been told to do this. ‘Not Angles, but angels’ inevitably popped into her mind.

After lunch the theatre contingent arrived. Mary Ford, to take photographs of everything and to interview Elizabeth; Roy Strether, and, unexpectedly, Henry Bisley, the American chosen to direct because of the American money in the production. Besides, he seemed by far the best available. He was in Munich directing Die Fledermaus and had come for the weekend to hear this music. Henry was at first all defensive. There are men who carry with them, as some half-grown fishes are attached to yolk sacs, the shadow of their mothers, at once visible in an over-defensiveness and readiness for suspicion. It happened that on his arrival he walked into a room that had in it four women, Elizabeth, Norah, Mary Ford, and Sarah, and he was on the point of fleeing, when Sarah rescued him and took him out to the gardens. They had become acquainted during the casting session a month before. He was bound to be wary of her on two counts: first that she was co-author of this play, and then that as one of the four who ran The Green Bird, she had engaged him. Soon he was reassured. For one thing, he was not by temperament ever likely to remain in one place, physically or emotionally. A man of about thirty-five: his restlessness seemed appropriate for someone younger: he danced rather than walked, as if to stay still might make him vulnerable to attack, and black eyes darted enquiries into a place, a person, and moved on to the next thing, which was also bound to be a challenge. She talked soothingly about this and that, noting that she was employing the murmuring maternal persona identified and rejected by Stephen. She showed him the gardens. She showed him the big lawn – the theatre area. She took him to see a half-built new block of rehearsal rooms. He was subdued by the beauty of the place, and flattered by it, being absorbed, as they all were, into a munificence like a general blessing. As they went back into the house he stopped to look up at its façade and ask why those top windows were barred. She did not know. Encountering Norah, who was pushing through the hall a trolley laden with cleaning equipment, like those used in hotels, Sarah asked about the barred windows, and Norah said they were probably for the first Mrs Rochester. ‘Well, they must have had plenty of loonies here, in all that time.’

The afternoon went enjoyably past, while Mary Ford photographed them all. A buffet supper was served, in a much larger and grander room, Elizabeth and Norah supervising Alison and Shirley, two girls from the near town, whose healthy and wholesome prettiness reminded everyone that so recently there had indeed been country girls. Guests arrived, it seemed far too many, but these grounds could accommodate large numbers without seeming overpopulated. People went wandering about, stood on the lawn talking, sat on the grass. A company from London did Elizabethan dances. A local group sang songs composed by Tudor monarchs. Then came the main event, Julie’s music, with the words Sarah had put to it. This was the late music, and there were singers only, without accompaniment, for it had been agreed that her ‘troubadour music’ needed the old instruments to do it justice, and not all had yet been found. The singers stood on the little stage in a strong yellow evening light, four girls in white dresses with their hair loose, a style appropriate, they had decided, for this music that filled the great grassy space between the trees with shimmering uncomfortable patterns of sound continually repeating, but not exactly, for they changed by a note, or a tone, so that when you thought you were listening to the same sequence of notes, they had subtly changed, gone into a different mode, while the ear followed a little behind. The words were half heard, were cries, or even laments, but from another time, the future perhaps, or another place, for if these sounds mourned, it was not for any small personal cause. The music floated in the dusk, and the dark filled the trees and the moon lifted over them, and the singers too seemed to float in their pale dresses. Lights came on in the big house, but not here. The girls were chanting to a silent crowd.

Sarah stood in anxiety with her colleagues. None had heard this music sung with words. Solid and sensible Mary, solid and reliable Roy, stood on either side of Sarah, reserving judgement, and then, unable to contain themselves, exclaimed that it was marvellous, it was wonderful, and Sarah herself could hardly believe it was she who had done this – though it was not her at all, it was rather Julie Vairon. The three stood close, part of their attention charmed into passivity, listening, while the other part was energetically at work on this material, imagining it in various settings and modes. Stephen came up and said, ‘Sarah, I’m hearing something I simply didn’t expect. I had no idea…’ and he strode off into the dusk. Mary Ford summed up professionally: ‘Sarah, it’s all going to work.’ And Henry Bisley materialized in front of her, his dark eyes shining in the light from the high windows of the house, and said in a voice full of surprise and gratitude, ‘Sarah, that’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful, Sarah.’

They all had to get back to London, and Henry to Munich. Sarah went with them. She said she had to work, but the truth was she did not want to spoil by daytime ordinariness the other-worldly charm of that evening. Charm…what is it, what can account for it? One says, charm, enchantment, and nothing has been said. But this place, and this group of people who were going to work together to make Julie Vairon, were charged with some subtle fascination, like the light that fades from a dream as you wake.

That night at home, Sarah thought she could not remember another time in her life that had this quality of…whatever the word should be. She found herself smiling, as at a child or a lover, without meaning to, without knowing she was going to. But what was making her smile, or even laugh, she had no idea at all.

If you find a ghost in your arms, better not look at its face.

– Julie Vairon’s Journals, English edition, page 43

But Sarah was choosing not to remember Stephen’s tragic mask.

And now it was Monday night. It occurred to Sarah, as she waited for the doorbell, that her exhilaration could only be because she actually believed some sort of sensible solution would end this talk. You’re living in a dream world, she told herself, and hummed ‘Living in a dream world with me.’ All the same, she strolled about her rooms arranging sentences in her mind which would be persuasive enough to make Hal – well, make him what?

The bell rang. Peremptory. Hal stood there, stood dramatically, apparently waiting for a formal invitation, while Anne, with glances and smiles that managed to be both apologetic and exasperated, simply came in and stood with her back to both of them, at the window.

‘Oh, do come in, Hal,’ said Sarah, annoyed with him already. She left him standing and went to sit down. Hal did not at once enter. He was giving her living-room a good once-over: he had not been in it for some time. The room had been variously used in this family flat’s long history. It had once been her children’s bedroom, but it had been a living room now for years. She was seldom in it. She would not have invited her brother into her study or her bedroom, where he would see photographs, piles of books, all kinds of objects that would emanate the intensely personal look of continuous use, which he would find irritating, even shameless, like underclothes left lying about. As he stood there, he sent suspicious glances to a drawing of Julie pinned on the door. Anne at the window could not be saying more clearly that she did not consider herself part of this scene. She was a tall woman, thin – too thin, a rack of bones – and her pale dry hair was tied back roughly behind her head. As usual she was surrounded by a fug of tobacco smoke, which seemed the very essence of dry exhaustion. She had lit a cigarette already, but furtively: she always smoked with guilt, as if still in her hospital, knowing she was giving a bad example to her patients. At the sight of her, Sarah’s compunctious heart reminded her that Anne’s perennial exhaustion was why she, Sarah, could never bring herself to ‘put her foot down’ over Joyce. She had never not pitied her sister-in-law.

And now Hal did come in, letting it be understood by means of compressed lips and raised brows – useful perhaps for indicating to patients that their lifestyle did not meet with his approval? – that it was time his sister took her room in hand. He looked judiciously at a cheerful if faded chair opposite Sarah’s – would he allow himself to sit in it? He did.

Hal was not the elder brother, as his air of command might suggest, but three years younger than Sarah. A large comfortable man, with an affable manner; everything about him must give his patients confidence. He was a success in his professional life, and his family life wasn’t so bad either, though he had always been unfaithful to Anne. She forgave him. Rather, one deduced that she must, since she did not go in for confidences. Probably she did not care, or perhaps it was that one could not imagine him unforgiven. Now Hal was sitting on the stiff chair, his arms folded high on his chest, legs apart and braced, as if he might otherwise bounce as he sat. He looked like a great delightful baby, with his little wisps of black hair, his fat little tummy, his little chins. He had small black eyes like large raisins.

Sarah offered them drinks, tea, coffee, and so forth, and her brother’s impatient shake of the head made it clear he was pressed for time.

‘Now look here,’ he said. ‘We do realize you have always been amazingly good with Joyce.’

There are occasions, when it becomes evident they are bound to develop in a certain way, that have a quite intoxicating momentum.

‘Yes, I think I have too.’

‘Oh, really, Sarah,’ he exclaimed hotly, his wells of patience already overdrawn.

And now he began on the rhetorical statements (the counterpart of her prepared reasonings to him) rehearsed and polished on the way here. They had the theatrical ring which goes with a thoroughly false position. ‘You must see that Joyce looks on you as a mother,’ he said. ‘You have been a mother to her, we both know that.’ Here he looked at Joyce’s mother, wanting her agreement, but she was smoking furiously, her back turned. ‘It really isn’t on for you to drop her like this.’

‘But I haven’t dropped her, any more than you have.’

He registered this shaft with a hostile look and a quiver of his lips which said he felt he was unfairly treated. ‘You know very well what I am saying.’

‘What you are saying is that I should give up my job and sit here for when she does turn up, even if it is only once in six months for an evening. Because that is what it amounts to.’

‘Exactly,’ said Anne angrily.

Hal sat puffing his lips out, hugging himself with both arms: he was a threatened man; he had two women against him. ‘Why can’t you take her with you to rehearsals, that kind of thing?’

‘Why don’t you take her to your hospital and to Harley Street? Why doesn’t Anne give up her job and sit at home waiting for Joyce?’

At this Anne let out a loud theatrical titter. ‘Exactly,’ she said again, through swirls of smoke. She swatted her hand at the smoke, to show how she deplored her weakness.

‘Look, Hal,’ said Sarah, keeping her voice down. ‘You’re talking as if nothing has changed. Well, they have. Joyce is a young woman. She’s not a little girl any longer.’

‘No,’ said Anne, ‘he can’t see it. Or won’t.’

‘Oh really,’ exploded Hal, and then he collapsed. He let his arms fall, and stared, his face all disconsolate lines.

This man who had all his life been lucky and successful had met something intractable. But the point was, this had happened not this week but years ago. It was as if he had never taken the truth in. ‘It is really quite appalling,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do about it? She runs around with drop-outs and layabouts and all sorts of people.’

‘Alcoholics and drug pushers and prostitutes,’ said Anne, and at last turned herself around. Her face was flushed, and brave with the determination to have her say. ‘Hal, at some point you have to face up to it. There’s nothing we can do about Joyce. Short of chaining her down and locking her up. All we can do is to take her in when she does turn up and not lecture her. Why do you always shout at her? No wonder she comes here to Sarah.’

Some people are the moral equivalent of those who have never, ever, been ill in their lives and, when they are at last ill, might even die from the shock. Hal could not face up to it: if he admitted one defeat, what might then follow? He sat silent, breathing heavily, arms hanging, not looking at them. His little pink mouth stood slightly open – like Joyce’s, in fact. ‘It’s awful, awful,’ he sighed at last, and got up. He had inwardly shelved the problem, and that was that.

‘Yes, dear, it is awful,’ said his wife firmly. ‘It has always been awful and it will probably go on being awful.’

‘Something has to be done about it,’ he said, just as if beginning the conversation, and Sarah breathed, ‘Good God!’ while Anne said, with a tight and derisive smile, ‘You two are so funny.’

Sarah felt all the indignation due when one is in the right but being classed with someone in the wrong.

Anne explained apologetically, ‘You both seem to think that if you just come up with something, then Joyce will become normal.’ She shrugged, gave Sarah an apologetic grimace. Husband and wife went to the door, the big man drifting along beside Anne, his eyes abstracted. He had inwardly removed himself. Sarah was able to visualize furious scenes between these two, when Anne tackled Hal, and Hal simply repeated, ‘Yes, we must do something.’ For years. Meanwhile good old Sarah looked after Joyce. Nothing at all would change as a result of this talk. Well, something had. Sarah had not before seen that somewhere or other she did believe that Joyce would suddenly become normal, if only they could come up with the right recipe.

The door was shut, and she listened to their feet on the stairs, their voices raised in connubial disagreement.

Sarah sat at her desk and stared into the watery depths of the mirror. She had to do more work on the songs, fitting Julie’s words to music and even making some words up. I don’t know why it is, Julie had written, and this was when she had just agreed to marry Philippe the master printer, but every scene I am part of, when there are people in it, rejects me. If someone were to reach out a hand to me and I stretched out my hand to him, I know my hand would go into a cloud or a mist, like the spray that lies over my pool when there has been heavy rain in the hills. But suppose in spite of everything my fingers closed over warm fingers? She called the music she wrote that spring ‘Songs from a Shore of Ice’.

Sarah began, ‘If I reached my hand into cloud or river spray…’ She, Sarah, had found a hand in a cloud or mist – for Stephen had certainly been an unknown – a warm hand, kindly by habit, a strong one, but holding it, she had felt its grasp become desperate. Help me, help me, said that hand.

The rehearsals were to be in London, in a church hall, a utilitarian place that managed to be dim enough to need some lights on, in spite of the sunlight outside. Fewer than the full company arrived for the first rehearsal. The musicians and singers would come later. Henry Bisley was in New Orleans for the opening of his production of La Dame aux Camélias, set in the brothels of that town at the turn of the century. Roy Strether, Patrick Steele, and Sandy Grears, the lighting and effects man, were all busy on the final rehearsals for the opening in The Green Bird of Abélard and Héloïse, which would precede Hedda Gabler. Patrick had announced that he was glad Julie Vairon would need so little in the way of scenery. He was so disappointed: Sarah had turned his Julie into a bluestocking, he explained, and he did not think he could ever forgive her.

Julie had arrived, a strong healthy girl with the misty blue eyes that can only be Irish. She was Molly McGuire, from Boston. Philippe the master printer was Richard Service, from Reading, a quiet middle-aged man of the observing non-commenting kind: probably similar to Philippe Angers. Paul, or Bill Collins, was a handsome, in fact beautiful, young man, who at once claimed he was all cockney, and proved it by singing ‘She Was Poor but She Was Honest’ – a song which by now they had all understood would be the theme song of the rehearsals. Actually he was from a prosperous London suburb, or at least partly, for he had lived half his life in the States, because of the complicated marriages of his parents. In impeccable English, he said, ‘I’m all things to all men, that’s it, mate, that’s me, Bill, the all-purpose all-weather dancing and singing cockney actor from Brixton.’ The Noël Coward drawl that went with this vanished, as he said in an American accent, and this had the effect of changing him completely: face, smile, set of body, ‘Don’t you believe it. I’m a pretty limited sort of guy. “I won’t dance, please don’t make me, I won’t sing, please don’t make me…,’’ singing this not badly at all. ‘Limitations I do have –’ He hesitated and might have stopped there, but added, compelled to it, with a sudden cold ruthlessness, ‘But I know how to sell myself.’ Now he gave a swift look around to judge the effect of all this, saw them disconcerted, realized the reason was what he had said last, heard it as they had, and sent a nervous small boy’s smile all around. Then, with the grimace that goes with I don’t know why I do this sort of thing, he walked quickly to a chair in a corner and sat there alone. So unhappy did he look that Julie’s mother, Madame Sylvie Vairon (Sally Soames from Brixton – really from Brixton; she had been born there), went over to sit with him, apparently casually. She was a large stately beautiful black woman, who, it was already clear, was going to dominate any scene by her looks, just as Bill did.

Rémy Rostand, or Andrew Stead, was a Texan, with sandy hair, freckles, and pale blue eyes which had too many wrinkles around them for his age, probably forty. He had just come from making a film about the old gauchos, shot on the high plateaux of north-west Argentina. He walked like a horseman, stood like a film gunman, and had shortly to become Rémy, with all the diffidence and hard-to-achieve self-respect of a youngest son. Had Henry known what he was doing when he cast this bandit for the role? In the early days of every production, this unvoiced query is in the air. An unemphatically good-looking, ordinary young man, George White, was going to be Paul’s comrade-in-arms in Martinique, then Rémy’s older brother, not to mention Philippe’s assistant in the printing shop.

On the first day, Sarah and Stephen were more prominent than they had planned, because of the absence of Henry, but luckily Mary Ford had ordered a photo session, and the six actors and two authors were photographed, separately and in couples and in groups, endlessly photographed, the actors at least posing with practised good nature, obedient to the god Publicity. And Mary’s face was solemn, concentrated, for she was utterly given up to her devotions as she took the pictures. Photographers are always in search of that perfect, that paradigmatic, but just out of reach summit of revelation. The next one – yes! – that will be it…do you mind turning your head just half an inch…that’s it, but no, don’t smile…yes, this time smile…this one will be…just one more…one more…and now…yes, I think I got it that time…but I’ll just use up this roll…All over the world these pictures are stacked up in piles, in files and folders, in drawers, on shelves, on walls, the visible record of that race of transcendence-seekers, the photographers’ compulsive quest.

And while Mary sat chatting with them all, her camera was held between alert fingers, ready to swoop it up into place to catch that unique and utterly unrepeatable pose or look which would transform a summary biography – twenty lines on the programme – into irresistible truth.

During that first day a good deal was said about how wonderful a thing Julie Vairon was, how altogether unique. This was because the actors were all taking a chance, much more than is usual with that hazard the theatre. The piece was a sport: not a play, not an opera. They had not heard the music that would fit the words. All of them confessed to having been attracted to Julie Vairon, but they did not know why, for all they had been sent – all they could have been sent – was an assemblage of scenes so lightly sketched that sometimes only a phrase or a sentence indicated passionate love, or renunciation. They were reassuring themselves.

First Molly came to Sarah, who invited her to sit down between her and Stephen, to say she had been told by those who had been at Queen’s Gift how wonderful the music was, and the songs, and she simply couldn’t wait to hear it all. Stephen only allowed himself a glance at this dangerous girl and then stared off at the others, while Sarah talked for him. Molly went, and then Bill, who had been watching for an opportunity, appeared by them, murmuring congratulations on the script and the lyrics. It was a shock to hear the word lyric used to describe those bitterly sad, some said abrasive, songs of the ‘first period’, and the broken lines of the ‘second period’, when there might be no more than a phrase repeated many times, or a word chosen for its sound.

‘I seem to hear it all already,’ claimed Bill, sliding into the seat between Sarah and Stephen, but smiling at Sarah. Then, having established his right to intimacy with Sarah – she could see this was his style, or his need – he glanced at Stephen. But Stephen was not going to succumb, for there was a sharp, not to say critical, look to him, as he examined the young man. Bill quietly got up and walked away, not, however, without the quick flash of a smile at her.

Walking to the tube with Sarah, Stephen remarked, ‘Molly doesn’t look remotely like Julie.’

‘She’ll convince you when the time comes.’

‘And Andrew might as well be a cowboy.’

‘Rémy must surely have spent a lot of time on horseback?’

‘And as for that young…Julie would never fall for that pretty face.’

‘But Julie did fall for a pretty face. Paul has to be a romantic young lieutenant, and not much more, don’t you see? For the sake of dramatic contrast.’

‘Good God.’

‘Nothing she wrote indicated he was more than a good-looking boy.’

They stood together on the pavement. She was thinking that this querulous note in him was new. More, that in the first weeks of their friendship she would have thought him incapable of it. She was relieved to see that now he seemed to be fighting to preserve an obstinate self-respect, while his eyes were full of misery.

Unexpectedly he said, ‘Sarah…I’m out of my depth…’ He grimaced, then made this a smile, walked away to the Underground entrance, turned to give her a small apologetic wave – and vanished.

It was the first read-through of the first act. They were nearly all present now, but there did not seem many people scattered about in the large hall. Henry had announced that he would be putting them all into position right from the start, because how people stood, or were, in relation to each other changed their voices, their movements – everything about them. The actors exchanged those smiles – what else? – meaning that from him they expected no less. Their smiles were already affectionate, as they stood about like dancers waiting for lift-off, and for him to command them. He had arrived that morning by plane from New Orleans, but he was already almost dancing his instructions, falling for seconds at a time into the characters they were going to play. He had been an actor, surely? Yes, and a dancer too, but that was before he had become an old man, and he had worked in a circus too: and here he became a clown, staggering over his own inept feet, miraculously recovering himself, and jumping back into his own self with a clap of the hands that summoned them into their positions. He must be of Italian descent, with those dark and dramatic eyes. Often, in southern Europe, you see a man, a woman, leaning against a wall, standing behind a market stall, all loud exclamatory sound and gesticulation, in the moment before they suddenly go quiet, black eyes staring in sombre fatalism: too much sun, too much bloody history, too much bloody everything, and a bred-in expectation of more of the same. And here was Henry Bisley, from the northern United States, standing limp, switched off, his eyes sombre and abstracted, southern eyes, eyes from the Mediterranean, but even as he leaned briefly against a wall, he seemed already on his way somewhere else. And the idea of movement was emphasized by his shoes, for they would have been useful for a marathon. For that matter, all their shoes seemed designed for a hundred-yard sprint.

Stephen and Sarah sat side by side at a table which was a continuation of Henry’s – the director’s. At the table beyond that was Roy Strether, watching everything and making notes. Mary Ford was photographing at the theatre.

The read-through began with the scenes in Julie’s mother’s house in Martinique, and the evening party where the handsome lieutenant Paul, brought by his comrade Jean, was introduced to Julie.

Since the musicians were not there, it was a question of going through the scenes while the words of the songs were spoken, so that everyone would get an idea of what would happen. Roy read, in a voice as flat as the recorded telephone announcement ‘Your number has not been recognized’.

This first scene had Julie standing attractively by her harp, shoulder outlined in white muslin (in fact Molly wore jeans and a purple T-shirt), a dress bought by papa on his last visit to distant Paris, on mother Sylvie’s insistence. Julie was singing (today she only spoke) a conventional ballad from sheet music (a piece of typing paper) brought by the father from Paris with the dress. For while the reputation of this house and the two beautiful women was exactly what might be expected among the young officers who were unwillingly on service in this attractive but boring island, Julie and her mother disappointed expectations by behaving with the propriety used by the mothers and sisters of these young men, and even more so. Nor had they expected to find Parisian fashions.

It was only when the officers had gone that the women became themselves and spoke their minds, in words recorded by Julie.

To start with, beauty was not so much in the eye of this beholder, for that first evening all I thought was, That’s a pretty hero! No, it was Maman who was dissolved by Paul. I said to her, He’s too much, he’s like a present in pretty paper, and you don’t want to unwrap it because it would spoil the parcel. Maman said, ‘My God, if I were even ten years younger.’ Maman was forty then. She said, ‘I swear, if he kissed me, it would be my first time ever.’

The two women were to sing a duet, ‘If he kissed me it would be my first time ever,’ using the first-period music, like a blues.

This was hardly likely to be the first time for Julie, not with all those young officers about. Sarah passed a note to Henry that unless they were careful, this song would get the wrong kind of laughter. He tilted a page towards her to show he had already marked the danger point with an underlined Laughs!

‘But I wouldn’t mind a smile,’ he said, and smiled at her to show the kind of smile.

This cast did laugh a lot. Laughter kept breaking out during the duet, which of course was being spoken, not sung. Henry asked them to cool it, and at once they sobered, the impassioned words being exchanged without emotion, producing an effect of hopeless despair. So sudden was the change that there was a sigh, the long slowly released breath that means surprise, even shock.

‘Right,’ said Henry. ‘That’s it. We’ll have to wait for the music.’

They were already a group, a family, partly because of their real interest in this piece, partly because of the infectious energies of Henry. Already they were inside the feeling of conspiracy, faint but unmistakable, the we-against-the-world born out of the vulnerability of actors in the face of criticism so often arbitrary, or lazy, or ignorant, or spiteful – against the world outside, which was them and not we, the world which they would conquer. They already believed they would conquer. It was because of Julie Vairon’s special atmosphere.

How easily, how recklessly we join this group or that, religious, political, theatrical, intellectual – any kind of group: that most potent of witches’ brews, charged with the possibilities for harm and for good, but most often for illusion. Sarah was not exactly a stranger to the fumy atmospheres the theatre creates, but usually she was in and out of rehearsals, doing this job and that, and she had not before written a whole play, based on journals and music she had soaked herself in for months, then been in on the casting, then committed herself to what would be two months, more, of day-by-day involvement with rehearsals. She would not this time be flitting off to other productions, other rehearsals. She would be part of Julie Vairon, day and night, indefinitely.

Meanwhile minor annoyances were being absorbed into a general effervescence, which was surely pretty unusual so early in a production. Having to wait for the music was testing them all. This was not the most comfortable of rehearsal places. It was too big, and their voices echoed in it: there was no way of judging how they should be pitched and used. Even with the sun blazing down outside, the old hall was dismal, and a shaft of light striking down from a high window showed up the dust in the air, like a column of water full of algae, or like bits of mica.

‘Solid enough to climb up,’ said Henry, actually making a pantomime of climbing up, defusing possible complaints with a laugh. And they all laughed again at the unexpected effect when the column of light, moving as the earth turned, reached the actors at exactly that moment when Paul and Julie stole away from Maman’s house on a dark night, though she was not deceived, and knew they were going, while the bright column pointed at them like the finger of God.

After the read-through Sarah and Stephen were going off to lunch with Henry Bisley, for they had to know one another better, but as they stood at the exit into the outside world, Paul the handsome lieutenant, or rather Bill Collins, was there with them, though he had not been invited. They climbed the stairs together, and when they went to the little local restaurant, Bill was the fourth. In the restaurant, the rest of the cast sat at one table, but Bill was at theirs. Sarah did not take much notice of him, because of getting to know Henry. This was going to be a satisfactory director, she was thinking, and could feel Stephen thinking too. He was sharp, competent, knew the material inside out, and, as a bonus, was very funny. Anywhere near him, people laughed. Sarah was laughing, and Stephen too, though when he did, it sounded as if he was surprised at himself for doing it. Halfway through the meal, Stephen left them. Elizabeth was preparing another recital of Tudor music, but this time with dancing, modern dancing, athletic and vigorous. Apparently it ‘worked’, though one could tell he did not much care for the combination. He said to Sarah, ‘You see, it’s my part of the bargain. She would never say anything if I was not there, but if I didn’t turn up, she’d feel let down. And rightly.’ He did not want to go. She did not want him to go. She was surprised at the strength of the pang she felt. Henry was called over to the other table: Andrew Stead wanted advice. That left her and Bill. He was eating heartily – Henry had eaten a little salad; Stephen had left most of his food. She thought that this is how a very young man ate, even a schoolboy – or a young wolf. Well, he was very young. Twenty-six, and she guessed much younger than that in himself. All those winning smiles and sympathetic glances – he kept them up although, clearly, he was famished and that was his first consideration. Behind her she heard laughter at the other table, and turned her head to listen. Bill at once saw this and said, ‘I simply have to tell you, Sarah, what it means to me, getting this part – I mean, a real part. I’m afraid I’ve had to take quite a few parts that – well, we have to eat, don’t we?’

Laughter again. Mary was telling a tale which concerned Sonia, and it ended: ‘Two knives, on his seat.’ ‘Knives?’ said Richard. ‘Surgical knives,’ said Mary. The laughter was now loud, and nervous, and Richard said, ‘You can’t expect a man to laugh at that,’ and laughed. ‘All the same…serves the little creep right.’

‘Sarah,’ said Bill, leaning forward to claim her, his beautiful eyes on her eyes. ‘I do feel so at home with you. I felt that so much, at the casting session, but now…’ She smiled at him and said, ‘But I have to go.’ He was genuinely disconcerted, rejected. Like a small boy. Sarah went past the other table, smiling generally and said to Mary, who was about to return to the theatre, ‘Ring me tonight?’

Bill was already settling himself beside Mary. Sarah paid her bill and looked back. Bill sat straight up, head slightly back. He looked like an arrogantly sulky adolescent, touch me not at war with oh yes, please. Henry was reaching out with a pencil in his hand to mark a passage in Richard’s script. He was looking over it at her, eyes sombre.

That evening she sat thinking about brother Hal, because of her feelings about Stephen. There were no new thoughts in her head. Hal had been her mother’s favourite, she had always known and accepted that. Or at least she could not remember ever having not accepted it. He was the much wanted and loved boy, and she had taken second place from the moment he was born. Well, unfair preferences are hardly unusual in families. She had never liked Hal, let alone loved him. And now, for the first time, she was understanding how much she had missed in her life. Instead of something like a black hole – all right, then, a grey hole – there would have been all her life…what? A warmth, a sweetness. Instead of always having to brace herself when she had to meet Hal, she could have smiled, as she did when thinking of Stephen. She knew she did, for she had caught the smile on her face.

Late that night Mary rang. First she said her mother was in a bad patch, with a leg that was paralysed, perhaps temporarily. One had to expect this kind of thing with multiple sclerosis. She was going to have to pay someone to come in twice a day when she, Mary, was working so intensively. She did not say this was going to be financially difficult. Sarah did not say that extra money would be found. All their salaries were due to go up: the four had always accepted less than they could have claimed. But now, with Julie Vairon, there was suddenly much more money…if none of this was said, it was understood.

Then Mary told Sarah about Sonia and the knives.

From time to time, in London, some young man desiring to attract attention announces that Shakespeare had no talent. This guarantees a few weeks of indignation. (Usually it is the perpetrator who has no talent – but Bernard Shaw, who had, made this particular way of shocking the bourgeoisie permissible.) Shakespeare had been announced as having no talent quite recently, and a new ploy was needed. What better than to say, in a country with a genius for the theatre, that theatre itself is stupid and unnecessary? A certain young man who had created for himself and his cronies a style of sneering attack on nearly everything not themselves, had become editor of a well-known periodical. A schoolfriend, Roger Stent, meeting his suddenly well-known chum, asked if there was a job for him on New Talents. ‘Do you like theatre?’ ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ ‘Perfect,’ cried this editor. ‘Just what I want. I want someone who is not part of that old gang.’ (Newcomers to a literary scene always imagine cabals, gangs, and cliques.) Roger Stent went on his first visit to the theatre, the National, and in fact rather enjoyed himself. His review would have been favourable, but he put in some criticisms. The editor said he was disappointed. ‘Really my ideal theatre critic would be someone who loathed the theatre.’ ‘Let me have another try,’ said Roger Stent. His reviews became notorious for their vindictiveness – but this was the style of this new addition, the Young Turks, to the literary scene in the early eighties. He perfected a sneering, almost lazy contempt for everything he reviewed.

Abélard and Héloïse had opened, and his review began, ‘This is a turgid piece about a sex-crazed nun and her life-long pursuit of a Paris savant. Not content with being the cause of his castration, she felt no shame about boring him with wittering letters about her emotions…’

The policy of The Green Bird was to rise above unpleasant or even malicious reviews, but Sonia said, ‘Why? I’m not going to let him get away with it.’ She wrote a letter to him, with a copy to the editor, beginning, ‘You ignorant and illiterate little shit, if you ever come anywhere near The Green Bird again, you’d better watch it.’

He wrote her a graceful, almost languid letter, saying that perhaps he had been mistaken and he was ready to see the piece again and he ‘trusted there would be a ticket for him at the box office’ on such and such a night. This last bit of impertinence was very much in the style of this latent incarnation of Young Turks.

She left a message that there would be a ticket for him, as requested. When he reached his seat, he found two surgical knives lying crossed on it. They were so sharp that he cut his fingers picking them up and had to leave the theatre, bleeding profusely. Sonia supplied full details to a gossip columnist.

Sarah laughed and said she hoped this was not how Sonia was going to react to every unfavourable review.

Mary, laughing, said that Sonia had explained that bullies only understand the boot. ‘The new brutalism, that’s what she says it is. She says we lot are all living in a dream world.’

‘She said, “you lot”?’

‘Well, she did say “we” the other day.’

‘So she did. We must hope.’

At rehearsals that week she missed Stephen, but she rang him or he rang her to find out how they were going. Meanwhile she sat by Henry, or rather by his chair while he was working with the actors. If Henry did actually arrive back to sit down for a moment, he was off again after whispering a word or two, usually a joke. This was becoming their style: they jested. Yet he felt threatened. For he must: she could see herself, that watchful (that maternal) presence, making notes. And she was still at work on the lyrics, if that was the word for them, for often the actors said something, improvised, suggested changes. She was needed here: she had to reassure herself because she knew how very much she did not want to leave. Julie had her in thrall. A sweet insidious deceptiveness seemed now to be the air she breathed, and if it was a poison, she did not care.

The actors all came to sit by her, in Henry’s empty chair, or in Stephen’s, but she soon saw that Bill was there oftener than any of them. This gift of his for establishing instant intimacy – she felt she had known the young man for years. But she was not the only one being offered his charm. He seemed to be making a gift of himself to everyone. During this first week, which was devoted to the first act, the handsome lieutenant Paul had to dominate: he was in nearly every scene. And his part was so sympathetic, for he was so innocently as well as so madly in love with Julie. From the moment he first saw Julie standing by her harp, he was in a fever, not only of love, but the intoxication of the discovery of his own tenderness. The apprentice loves of young men tend to be brutal. He was truly convinced of their happiness once they reached France, and did not know it was an idyll possible only in Martinique, in this artificial and romantic setting, with its outsize butterflies, its brilliant birds, its languorous flowers and insinuating breezes. He forgot that it had been not his but Julie’s idea to run away, taking their idyll with them. The young man simply shone with the confidence of love, its triumphs, its discoveries, and this was not only during Paul’s scenes with Molly, where the two were entirely professional, making the jokes about their passion necessary to defuse those stormy love scenes. And yet, more than once, Sarah had caught him glancing at herself while he was making love to Molly, a quick hard calculating look from a world far from the simplicities of sympathy they enjoyed when he sat chatting in a chair beside her. He wanted to know if she was affected by him. Well, she was. But so was everybody else. Sally, that handsome black lady, who always wore an air of sceptical worldly wisdom and a sweet derisive worldly smile, a woman who commanded attention even when she sat knitting in a chair offstage (not one to waste time, she knitted not only for her family but for sale to a certain very expensive shop) – Sally watched Bill Collins with exactly the same fatalistic short laugh and shrug that, as Julie’s mother, she allowed herself when first observing her daughter’s passion for Paul. She and Sarah exchanged glances of female appreciation for the young man, but they were critical too, because he was so conscious of his looks and so skilled at using them. Well, good luck to him, those looks said. The other females present were the same. Mary Ford and Molly (as Molly) caught each other’s eyes and grimaced: no, he is really altogether too much.

The Fifth Child: Chapter 1

Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that this was what they had been waiting for. Someone conservative, old-fashioned, not to say obsolescent; timid, hard to please: this is what other people called them, but there was no end to the unaffectionate adjectives they earned. They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that they were ordinary and in the right of it, should not be criticized for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness, just because these were unfashionable qualities.

At this famous office party, about two hundred people crammed into a long, ornate, and solemn room, for three hundred and thirty-four days of the year a boardroom. Three associated firms, all to do with putting up buildings, were having their end-of-year party. It was noisy. The pounding rhythm of a small band shook walls and floor. Most people were dancing, packed close because of lack of space, couples bobbing up and down or revolving in one spot as if they were on invisible turntables. The women were dressed up, dramatic, bizarre, full of colour: Look at me! Look at me! Some of the men demanded as much attention. Around the walls were pressed a few non-dancers, and among these were Harriet and David, standing by themselves, holding glasses – observers. Both had reflected that the faces of the dancers, women more than men, but men, too, could just as well have been distorted in screams and grimaces of pain as in enjoyment. There was a forced hecticity to the scene…but these thoughts, like so many others, they had not expected to share with anyone else.

From across the room – if one saw her at all among so many eye-demanding people – Harriet was a pastel blur. As in an Impressionist picture, or a trick photograph, she seemed a girl merged with her surroundings. She stood near a great vase of dried grasses and leaves and her dress was something flowery. The focusing eye then saw curly dark hair, which was unfashionable…blue eyes, soft but thoughtful…lips rather too firmly closed. In fact, all her features were strong and good, and she was solidly built. A healthy young woman, but perhaps more at home in a garden?

David had been standing just where he was for an hour drinking judiciously, his serious grey-blue eyes taking their time over this person, that couple, watching how people engaged and separated, ricocheting off each other. To Harriet he did not have the look of someone solidly planted: he seemed almost to hover, balancing on the balls of his feet. A slight young man – he looked younger than he was – he had a round, candid face and soft brown hair girls longed to run their fingers through, but then that contemplative gaze of his made itself felt and they desisted. He made them feel uncomfortable. Not Harriet. She knew his look of watchful apartness mirrored her own. She judged his humorous air to be an effort. He was making similar mental comments about her: she seemed to dislike these occasions as much as he did. Both had found out who the other was. Harriet was in the sales department of a firm that designed and supplied building materials; David was an architect.

So what was it about these two that made them freaks and oddballs? It was their attitude to sex! This was the sixties! David had had one long and difficult affair with a girl he was reluctantly in love with: she was what he did not want in a girl. They joked about the attraction between opposites. She joked that he thought of reforming her: ‘I do believe you imagine you are going to put the clock back, starting with me!’ Since they had parted, unhappily enough, she had slept – so David reckoned – with everyone in Sissons Blend & Co. With the girls, too, he wouldn’t be surprised. She was here tonight, in a scarlet dress with black lace, a witty travesty of a flamenco dress. From this concoction her head startingly emerged. It was pure nineteen-twenties, for her black hair was sleeked down into a spike on her neck at the back, with two glossy black spikes over her ears, and a black lock on her forehead. She sent frantic waves and kisses to David from across the room where she circled with her partner, and he smiled matily back: no hard feelings. As for Harriet, she was a virgin. ‘A virgin now,’ her girl friends might shriek; ‘are you crazy?’ She had not thought of herself as a virgin, if this meant a physiological condition to be defended, but rather as something like a present wrapped up in layers of deliciously pretty paper, to be given, with discretion, to the right person. Her own sisters laughed at her. The girls working in the office looked studiedly humorous when she insisted, ‘I am sorry, I don’t like all this sleeping around, it’s not for me.’ She knew she was discussed as an always interesting subject, and usually unkindly. With the same chilly contempt that good women of her grandmother’s generation might have used, saying, ‘She is quite immoral you know,’ or, ‘She’s no better than she ought to be,’ or, ‘She hasn’t got a moral to her name’; then (her mother’s generation), ‘She’s man-mad,’ or, ‘She’s a nympho’ – so did the enlightened girls of now say to each other, ‘It must be something in her childhood that’s made her like this. Poor thing.’

And indeed she had sometimes felt herself unfortunate or deficient in some way, because the men with whom she went out for a meal or to the cinema would take her refusal as much as evidence of a pathological outlook as an ungenerous one. She had gone about with a girl friend, younger than the others, for a time, but then this one had become ‘like all the others’, as Harriet despairingly defined her, defining herself as a misfit. She spent many evenings alone, and went home often at weekends to her mother. Who said, ‘Well, you’re old-fashioned, that’s all. And a lot of girls would like to be, if they got the chance.’

These two eccentrics, Harriet and David, set off from their respective corners towards each other at the same moment: this was to be important to them as the famous office party became part of their story. ‘Yes, at exactly the same time…’ They had to push past people already squeezed against walls; they held their glasses high above their heads to keep them out of the way of the dancers. And so they arrived together at last, smiling – but perhaps a trifle anxiously – and he took her hand and they squeezed their way out of this room into the next, which had the buffet and was as full of noisy people, and through that into a corridor, sparsely populated with embracing couples, and then pushed open the first door whose handle yielded to them. It was an office that had a desk and hard chairs, and, as well, a sofa. Silence…well, almost. They sighed. They set down their glasses. They sat facing each other, so they might look as much as they wished, and then began to talk. They talked as if talk were what had been denied to them both, as if they were starving for talk. And they went on sitting there, close, talking, until the noise began to lessen in the rooms across the corridor, and then they went quietly out and to his flat, which was near. There they lay on his bed holding hands and talked, and sometimes kissed, and then slept. Almost at once she moved into his flat, for she had been able to afford only a room in a big communal flat. They had already decided to marry in the spring. Why wait? They were made for each other.

Harriet was the oldest of three daughters. It was not until she left home, at eighteen, that she knew how much she owed to her childhood, for many of her friends had divorced parents, led adventitious and haphazard lives, and tended to be, as it is put, disturbed. Harriet was not disturbed, and had always known what she wanted. She had done well enough at school, and went to an arts college where she became a graphic designer, which seemed an agreeable way of spending her time until she married. The question whether to be, or not to be, a career woman had never bothered her, though she was prepared to discuss it: she did not like to appear more eccentric than she had to be. Her mother was a contented woman who had everything she could reasonably want; so it appeared to her and to her daughters. Harriet’s parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.

David’s background was a quite different matter. His parents had divorced when he was seven. He joked, far too often, that he had two sets of parents: he had been one of the children with a room in two homes, and everybody considerate about psychological problems. There had been no nastiness or spite, if plenty of discomfort, even unhappiness – that is, for the children. His mother’s second husband, David’s other father, was an academic, an historian, and there was a large shabby house in Oxford. David liked this man, Frederick Burke, who was kind, if remote, like his mother, who was kind and remote. His room in this house had been his home – was, in his imagination, his real home now, though soon, with Harriet, he would create another, an extension and amplification of it. This home of his was a large bedroom at the back of the house overlooking a neglected garden; a shabby room, full of his boyhood, and rather chilly, in the English manner. His real father married one of his kind: she was a noisy, kind, competent woman, with the cynical good humour of the rich. James Lovatt was a boat builder, and when David did consent to visit, his place could easily be a bunk on a yacht, or a room (‘This is your room, David!’) in a villa in the South of France or the West Indies. But he preferred his old room in Oxford. He had grown up with a fierce private demand on his future: for his own children it would all be different. He knew what he wanted, and the kind of woman he needed. If Harriet had seen her future in the old way, that a man would hand her the keys of her kingdom, and there she would find everything her nature demanded, and this as her birthright, which she had – at first unknowingly, but then very determinedly – been travelling towards, refusing all muddles and dramas, then he saw his future as something he must aim for and protect. His wife must be like him in this: that she knew where happiness lay and how to keep it. He was thirty when he met Harriet, and he had been working in the dogged disciplined manner of an ambitious man: but what he was working for was a home.

Not possible to find the kind of house they wanted, for the life they wanted, in London. Anyway, they were not sure London was what they needed – no, it wasn’t, they would prefer a smallish town with an atmosphere of its own. Weekends were spent looking around towns within commuting distance of London, and they soon found a large Victorian house in an overgrown garden. Perfect! But for a young couple it was absurd, a three-storeyed house, with an attic, full of rooms, corridors, landings…Full of space for children, in fact.

But they meant to have a lot of children. Both, somewhat defiantly, because of the enormity of their demands on the future, announced they ‘would not mind’ a lot of children. ‘Even four, or five…’ ‘Or six,’ said David. ‘Or six!’ said Harriet, laughing to the point of tears from relief. They had laughed and rolled about the bed and kissed and were exuberant because this, the place where both had expected and even been prepared to accept rebuff or a compromise, had turned out to be no danger at all. But while Harriet could say to David, David to Harriet, ‘Six children at least,’ they could not say this to anyone else. Even with David’s quite decent salary, and Harriet’s, the mortgage of this house would be beyond them. But they would manage somehow. She would work for two years, commute with David daily to London, and then…

On the afternoon the house became theirs, they stood hand in hand in the little porch, birds singing all around them in the garden where boughs were still black and glistening with the chilly rain of early spring. They unlocked their front door, their hearts thudding with happiness, and stood in a very large room, facing capacious stairs. Some previous owner had seen a home as they did. Walls had been pulled down to make this a room that accommodated nearly all the ground floor. One half of it was a kitchen, marked off from the rest by no more than a low wall that would have books on it, the other half with plenty of space for settees, chairs, all the sprawl and comfort of a family room. They went gently, softly, hardly breathing, smiling and looking at each other and smiling even more because both had tears in their eyes – they went across the bare boards that soon would have rugs on them, and then slowly up the stairs where old-fashioned brass rods waited for a carpet. On the landing, they turned to marvel at the great room that would be the heart of their kingdom. They went on up. The first floor had one large bedroom – theirs; and opening off it a smallish room, which would be for each new baby. There were four other decent rooms on this floor. Up still generous but narrower stairs, and there were four more rooms whose windows, like the rooms below, showed trees, gardens, lawns – all the perspectives of pleasant suburbia. And above this floor was an enormous attic, just right for the children when they had got to the age for secret magical games.

They slowly descended the stairs, one flight, two, passing rooms, and rooms, which they were imagining full of children, relatives, guests, and came again into their bedroom. A large bed had been left in it. It had been specially made, that bed, for the couple they had bought the house from. To take it away, so said the agent, would have meant dismantling it, and anyway the owners of the bed were going to live abroad. There Harriet and David lay down side by side, and looked at their room. They were quiet, awed by what they were taking on. Shadows from a lilac tree, a wet sun behind it, seemed to be enticingly sketching on the expanses of the ceiling the years they would live in this house. They turned their heads towards the windows where the top of the lilac showed its vigorous buds, soon to burst into flower. Then they looked at each other. Tears ran down their cheeks. They made love, there, on their bed. Harriet almost cried out, ‘No, stop! What are we doing?’ For had they not decided to put off having children for two years? But she was overwhelmed by his purpose–yes, that was it, he was making love with a deliberate, concentrated intensity, looking into her eyes, that made her accept him, his taking possession of the future in her. She did not have contraceptives with her. (Both of course distrusted the Pill.) She was at the height of her fertility. But they made love, with this solemn deliberation. Once. Twice. Later, when the room was dark, they made love again.

‘Well,’ said Harriet, in a little voice, for she was frightened and determined not to show it, ‘Well, that’s done it, I’m sure.’

He laughed. A loud, reckless, unscrupulous laugh, quite unlike modest, humorous, judicious David. Now the room was quite dark, it looked vast, like a black cave that had no end. A branch scraped across a wall somewhere close. There was a smell of cold rainy earth and sex. David lay smiling to himself, and when he felt her look, he turned his head slightly and his smile included her. But on his terms; his eyes gleamed with thoughts she could not guess at. She felt she did not know him.…‘David,’ she said quickly, to break the spell, but his arm tightened around her, and he gripped her upper arm with a hand she had not believed could be so strong, insistent. This grip said, Be quiet.

They lay there together while ordinariness slowly came back, and then they were able to turn to each other and kiss with small reassuring daytime kisses. They got up and dressed in the cold dark: the electricity wasn’t on yet. Quietly they went down the stairs of their house where they had so thoroughly taken possession, and into their great family room, and let themselves out into the garden that was mysterious and hidden from them, not yet theirs.

‘Well?’ said Harriet humorously as they got into his car to return to London. ‘And how are we going to pay for it all if I am pregnant?’

Quite so: how were they? Harriet indeed became pregnant on that rainy evening in their bedroom. They had many bad moments, thinking of the slenderness of their resources, and of their own frailty. For at such times, when material support is not enough, it is as if we are being judged: Harriet and David seemed to themselves meagre and inadequate, with nothing to hold on to but stubborn beliefs other people had always judged as wrong-headed.

David had never taken money from his well-off father and stepmother, who had paid for his education, but that was all. (And for his sister Deborah’s education; but she had preferred her father’s way of life as he had preferred his mother’s, and so they had not often met, and the differences between brother and sister seemed to him summed up in this – that she had chosen the life of the rich.) He did not now want to ask for money. His English parents – which was how he thought of his mother and her husband – had little money, being unambitious academics.

One afternoon, these four – David and Harriet, David’s mother, Molly, with Frederick – stood in the family room by the stairs and surveyed the new kingdom. There was by now a very large table, which would easily accommodate fifteen or twenty people, at the kitchen end; there were a couple of vast sofas, and some commodious armchairs bought second-hand at a local auction. David and Harriet stood together, feeling themselves even more preposterously eccentric, and much too young, faced with these two elderly people who judged them. Molly and Frederick were large and untidy, with a great deal of grey hair, wearing comfortable clothes that complacently despised fashion. They looked like benevolent haystacks, but were not looking at each other in a way David knew well.

‘All right, then,’ he said humorously, unable to bear the strain, ‘you can say it.’ And he put his arm around Harriet, who was pale and strained because of morning sickness and because she had spent a week scrubbing floors and washing windows.

‘Are you going to run a hotel?’ enquired Frederick reasonably, determined not to make a judgement.

‘How many children are you intending to have?’ asked Molly, with the short laugh that means there is no point in protesting.

‘A lot,’ said David softly.

‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘Yes.’ She did not realize, as David did, how annoyed these two parents were. Aiming, like all their kind, at an appearance of unconformity, they were in fact the essence of convention, and disliked any manifestation of the spirit of exaggeration, of excess. This house was that.

‘Come on, we’ll give you dinner, if there is a decent hotel,’ said David’s mother.

Over that meal, other subjects were discussed until, over coffee, Molly observed, ‘You do realize that you are going to have to ask your father for help?’

David seemed to wince and suffer, but he had to face it: what mattered was the house and the life that would be lived in it. A life that – both parents knew because of his look of determined intention, which they judged full of the smugness of youth – was going to annul, absolve, cancel out all the deficiencies of their life, Molly’s and Frederick’s; and of James’s and Jessica’s life, too.

As they separated in the dark car-park of the hotel, Frederick, said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you are both rather mad. Well, wrong-headed, then.’

‘Yes,’ said Molly. ‘You haven’t really thought it out. Children…no one who hasn’t had them knows what work they make.’

Here David laughed, making a point – and an old one, which Molly recognized, and faced, with a conscious laugh. ‘You are not maternal,’ said David. ‘It’s not your nature. But Harriet is.’

‘Very well,’ said Molly, ‘it’s your life.’

She telephoned James, her first husband, who was on a yacht near the Isle of Wight. This conversation ended with ‘I think you should come and see for yourself.’

‘Very well, I will,’ said he, agreeing as much to what had not been said as to what had: his difficulty in keeping up with his wife’s unspoken languages was the main reason he had been pleased to leave her.

Soon after this conversation, David and Harriet again stood with David’s parents – the other pair – in contemplation of the house. This time they were outside it. Jessica stood in the middle of a lawn still covered with the woody debris of the winter and a windy spring, and critically surveyed the house. To her it was gloomy and detestable, like England. She was the same age as Molly and looked twenty years younger, being lean and brown and seeming to glisten with sun oil even when her skin was without it. Her hair was yellow and short and shiny and her clothes bright. She dug the heels of her jade-green shoes in the lawn and looked at her husband, James.

He had already been over the house and now he said, as David had expected. ‘It’s a good investment.’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘It’s not overpriced. I suppose that’s because it’s too big for most people. I take it the surveyor’s report was all right?’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘In that case I shall assume responsibility for the mortgage. How long is it going to take to pay off?’

‘Thirty years,’ said David.

‘I’ll be dead by then, I expect. Well, I didn’t give you much in the way of a wedding present.’

‘You’ll have to do the same by Deborah,’ said Jessica.

‘We have already done much more for Deborah than for David,’ said James. ‘Anyway, we can afford it.’

She laughed, and shrugged: it was mostly her money. This ease with money characterized their life together, which David had sampled and rejected fiercely, preferring the parsimony of the Oxford house – though he had never used that word aloud. Flashy and too easy, that was the life of the rich; but now he was going to be beholden to it.

‘And how many kids are you planning, if one may ask?’ enquired Jessica, looking like a parakeet perched on that damp lawn.

‘A lot,’ said David.

‘A lot,’ said Harriet.

‘Rather you than me, then,’ said Jessica, and with that David’s other parents left the garden, and then England, with relief.

Now entered on to this scene Dorothy, Harriet’s mother. It occurred to neither Harriet nor David to think, or say, ‘Oh God, how awful, having one’s mother around all the time,’ for if family life was what they had chosen, then it followed that Dorothy should come indefinitely to help Harriet, while insisting that she had a life of her own to which she must return. She was a widow, and this life of hers was mostly visiting her daughters. The family house was sold, and she had a small flat, not very nice, but she was not one to complain. When she had taken in the size and potential of the new house, she was more silent than usual for some days. She had not found it easy bringing up three girls. Her husband had been an industrial chemist, not badly paid, but there never had been much money. She knew the cost, in every way, of a family, even a small one.

She attempted some remarks on these lines one evening at supper. David, Harriet, Dorothy. David had just come home late: the train was delayed. Commuting was not going to be much fun, was going to be the worst of it, for everyone, but particularly of course for David, for it would take nearly two hours twice a day to get to and from work. This would be one of his contributions to the dream.

The kitchen was already near what it ought to be: the great table, with heavy wooden chairs around it –only four now, but more stood in a row along the wall, waiting for guests and still unborn people. There was a big stove, an Aga, and an old-fashioned dresser with cups and mugs on hooks. Jugs were full of flowers from the garden where summer had revealed a plenitude of roses and lilies. They were eating a traditional English pudding, made by Dorothy; outside, the autumn was establishing itself in flying leaves that sometimes hit the windowpanes with small thuds and bangs, and in the sound of a rising wind. But the curtains were drawn, warm thick flowered curtains.

‘You know,’ said Dorothy, ‘I’ve been thinking about you two.’ David put down his spoon to listen as he would never have done for his unworldly mother, or his worldly father. ‘I don’t believe you two ought to rush into everything – no, let me have my say. Harriet is only twenty-four – not twenty-five yet. You are only just thirty, David. You two go on as if you believe if you don’t grab everything, then you’ll lose it. Well, that’s the impression I get, listening to you talk.’

David and Harriet were listening: their eyes did meet, frowning, thoughtful. Dorothy, this large, wholesome, homely woman, with her decisive manner, her considered ways, was not to be ignored; they recognized what was due to her.

‘I do feel that,’ said Harriet.

‘Yes, girl, I know. You were talking yesterday of having another baby straight away. You’ll regret it, in my view.’

‘Everything could very well be taken away,’ said David, stubborn. The enormity of this, something that came from his depths, as both women knew, was not lessened by the News, which was blasting from the radio. Bad news from everywhere: nothing to what the News would soon become, but threatening enough.

‘Think about it,’ said Dorothy. ‘I wish you would. Sometimes you two scare me. I don’t really know why.’

Harriet said fiercely, ‘Perhaps we ought to have been born into another country. Do you realize that having six children, in another part of the world, it would be normal, nothing shocking about it – they aren’t made to feel criminals.’

‘It’s we who are abnormal, here in Europe,’ said David.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Dorothy, as stubborn as either of them. ‘But if you were having six – or eight, or ten – no, I know what you are thinking, Harriet, I know you, don’t I? – and if you were in another part of the world, like Egypt or India or somewhere, then half of them would die and they wouldn’t be educated, either. You want things both ways. The aristocracy –yes, they can have children like rabbits, and expect to, but they have the money for it. And poor people can have children, and half of them die, and expect to. But people like us, in the middle, we have to be careful about the children we have so we can look after them. It seems to me you haven’t thought it out…no, I’ll go and make the coffee, you two go and sit down.’

David and Harriet went through the wide gap in the wall that marked off the kitchen to the sofa in the living-room, where they sat holding hands, a slight, stubborn, rather perturbed young man, and an enormous, flushed, clumsily moving woman. Harriet was eight months pregnant, and it had not been an easy pregnancy. Nothing seriously wrong, but she had been sick a lot, slept badly from indigestion, and was disappointed with herself. They were wondering why it was that people always criticized them. Dorothy brought coffee, set it down, said, ‘I’ll do the washing-up – no, you just sit there.’ And went back to the sink.

‘But it is what I feel,’ said Harriet, distressed.

‘Yes.’

‘We should have children while we can,’ said Harriet.

Dorothy said, from the sink, ‘At the beginning of the last war, people were saying it was irresponsible to have children, but we had them, didn’t we?’ She laughed.

‘There you are, then,’ said David.

‘And we kept them,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, here I am certainly,’ said Harriet.

The first baby, Luke, was born in the big bed attended mostly by the midwife, with Dr Brett there, too. David and Dorothy held Harriet’s hands. It goes without saying that the doctor had wanted Harriet in hospital. She had been adamant; was disapproved of – by him.

It was a windy cold night, just after Christmas. The room was warm and wonderful. David wept. Dorothy wept. Harriet laughed and wept. The midwife and the doctor had a little air of festivity and triumph. They all drank champagne, and poured some on little Luke’s head. It was 1966.

Luke was an easy baby. He slept most peaceably in the little room off the big bedroom, and was contentedly breast-fed. Happiness! When David went off to catch his train to London in the mornings, Harriet was sitting up in bed feeding the baby, and drinking the tea David had brought her. When he bent to kiss her goodbye, and stroked Luke’s head, it was with a fierce possessiveness that Harriet liked and understood, for it was not herself being possessed, or the baby, but happiness. Hers and his.

That Easter was the first of the family parties. Rooms had been adequately if sketchily furnished, and they were filled with Harriet’s two sisters, Sarah and Angela, and their husbands and their children; with Dorothy, in her element; and briefly by Molly and Frederick, who allowed that they were enjoying themselves but family life on this scale was not for them.

Connoisseurs of the English scene will by now have realized that on that powerful, if nowhere registered, yardstick, the English class system, Harriet scaled rather lower than David. Within five seconds of any of the Lovatts or the Burkes meeting any of the Walkers, the fact had been noted but not commented on – verbally, at least. The Walkers were not surprised that Frederick and Molly said they would be there for only two days; not that they changed their minds when James Lovatt appeared. Like many husbands and wives forced to separate by incompatibility, Molly and James enjoyed meeting when they knew they must shortly part. In fact, they all enjoyed themselves, agreeing that the house was made for it. Around the great family table, where so many chairs could be comfortably accommodated, people sat through long pleasant meals, or found their way there between meals to drink coffee and tea, and to talk. And laugh…Listening to the laughter, the voices, the talk, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David in their bedroom, or perhaps descending from the landing, would reach for each other’s hand, and smile, and breathe happiness. No one knew, not even Dorothy – certainly not Dorothy – that Harriet was pregnant again. Luke was three months old. They had not meant for Harriet to be pregnant – not for another year. But so it was. ‘There’s something progenitive about this room, I swear it,’ said David, laughing. They felt agreeably guilty. They lay in their bed, listening to Luke make his baby noises next door, and decided not to say a word until after everyone had gone.

When Dorothy was told, she was again rather silent, and then said, ‘Well, you’ll need me, won’t you?’

They did. This pregnancy, like the other, was normal, but Harriet was uncomfortable and sick, and thought to herself that while she had not changed her mind at all about six (or eight or ten) children, she would be jolly sure there was a good interval between this one and the next.

For the rest of the year, Dorothy was pleasantly around the house, helped look after Luke and to make curtains for the rooms on the third floor.

That Christmas, Harriet was again enormous, in her eighth month, and she laughed at herself for her size and unwieldiness. The house was full. All the people who were here for Easter came again. It was acknowledged that Harriet and David had a gift for this kind of thing. A cousin of Harriet’s with three children came, too, for she had heard of the wonderful Easter party that had gone on for a week. A colleague of David’s came with his wife. This Christmas was ten days long, and one feast followed another. Luke was in his pram downstairs and everyone fussed over him, and the older children carried him around like a doll. Briefly, too, came David’s sister Deborah, a cool attractive girl who could easily have been Jessica’s daughter and not Molly’s. She was not married, though she had had what she described as near misses. In general style she was so far removed from the people in the house, all basic British – as they defined themselves relative to her – that these differences became a running joke. She had always lived the life of the rich, had found the shabby high-mindedness of her mother’s house irritating, hated people being crammed together, but conceded that she found this party interesting.

There were twelve adults and ten children. Neighbours, invited, did appear, but the sense of family togetherness was strong and excluded them. And Harriet and David exulted that they, their obstinacy, what everyone had criticized and laughed at, had succeeded in this miracle: they were able to unite all these so different people, and make them enjoy each other.

The second child, Helen, was born, like Luke, in the family bed, with all the same people there, and again champagne anointed the baby’s head, and everyone wept. Luke was evicted from the baby’s room into the next one down the corridor, and Helen took his place.

Though Harriet was tired – indeed, worn out – the Easter party took place. Dorothy was against it. ‘You are tired, girl,’ she said. ‘You are bone tired.’ Then, seeing Harriet’s face: ‘Well, all right, but you aren’t to do anything, mind.’

The two sisters and Dorothy made themselves responsible for the shopping and the cooking, the hard work.

Downstairs among all the people–for the house was again full – were the two little creatures, Helen and Luke, all wispy fair hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks. Luke was staggering about, aided by everyone, and Helen was in her pram.

That summer – it was 1968 – the house was full to the attic, nearly all family. The house was so convenient for London: people travelled up with David for the day and came back with him. There was good walking country twenty minutes’ drive away.

People came and went, said they were coming for a couple of days and stayed a week. And how was all this paid for? Well, of course everyone contributed; and, of course, not enough, but people knew David’s father was rich. Without that mortgage being paid for, none of this could have happened. Money was always tight. Economies were made: a vast hotel-size freezer bought second-hand was stocked with summer fruit and vegetables. Dorothy and Sarah and Angela bottled fruit and jam and chutneys. They baked bread and the whole house smelled of new bread. This was happiness, in the old style.

There was a cloud, though. Sarah and her husband, William, were unhappily married, and quarrelled, and made up, but she was pregnant with her fourth, and a divorce was not possible.

Christmas, just as wonderful a festival, came and went. Then Easter…sometimes they all had to wonder where everybody was fitting themselves in.

The cloud on family happiness that was Sarah and William’s discord disappeared, for it was absorbed in worse. Sarah’s new baby was Down’s syndrome, and there was no question of them separating. Dorothy remarked sometimes that it was a pity there wasn’t two of her, Sarah needed her as much, and more, than Harriet. And indeed she did take off on visits to her Sarah, who was afflicted, while Harriet was not.

Jane was born in 1970, when Helen was two. Much too fast, scolded Dorothy, what was the hurry?

Helen moved into Luke’s room, and Luke moved one room along. Jane made her contented noises in the baby’s room, and the two little children came into the big family bed and cuddled and played games, or they visited Dorothy in her bed and played there.

Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved. Often, when David and Harriet lay face to face, it seemed that doors in their breasts flew open, and what poured out was an intensity of relief, of thankfulness, that still astonished them both: patience for what seemed now such a very long time had not been easy, after all. It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves. And look, they had been right to insist on guarding that stubborn individuality of theirs, which had chosen, and so obstinately, the best – this.

Outside this fortunate place, their family, beat and battered the storms of the world. The easy good times had utterly gone. David’s firm had been struck, and he had not been given the promotion he expected; but others had lost their jobs and he was lucky. Sarah’s husband was out of work. Sarah joked dolefully that she and William attracted all the ill luck in the clan.

Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William’s unhappiness, their quarelling, had probably attracted the mongol child – yes, yes, of course she knew one shouldn’t call them mongol. But the little girl did look a bit like Genghis Khan, didn’t she? A baby Genghis Khan with her squashed little face and her slitty eyes? David disliked this trait of Harriet’s, a fatalism that seemed so at odds with the rest of her. He said he thought this was silly hysterical thinking: Harriet sulked and they had to make up.

The little town they lived in had changed in the five years they had been here. Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now commonplace. Gangs of youths hung around certain cafés and street-ends and owed respect to no one. The house next door had been burgled three times: the Lovatts’ not yet, but then there were always people about. At the end of the road there was a telephone box that had been vandalized so often the authorities had given up: it stood unusable. These days, Harriet would not dream of walking at night by herself, but once it would not have occurred to her not to go anywhere she pleased at any time of the day or night. There was an ugly edge on events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in England, not one – enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other said. The young Lovatts made themselves read the papers, and watch the News on television, though their instinct was to do neither. At least they ought to know what went on outside their fortress, their kingdom, in which three precious children were nurtured, and where so many people came to immerse themselves in safety, comfort, kindness.

The fourth baby, Paul, was born in 1973, between a Christmas and an Easter. Harriet was not very well: her pregnancies had continued uncomfortable and full of minor problems – nothing serious, but she was tired.

The Easter festivities were the best ever: that year was the best of all their years, and, looking back afterwards, it seemed that the whole year was a celebration, renewed from a spring of loving hospitality whose guardians were Harriet and David, beginning at Christmas when Harriet was so very pregnant, everyone looking after her, sharing in the work of creating magnificent meals, involved with the coming baby…knowing that Easter was coming, then the long summer, then Christmas again…

Easter went on for three weeks, all of the school holidays. The house was crammed. The three little children had their own rooms but moved in together when beds were needed. Which of course they adored. ‘Why not let them sleep together always?’ Dorothy, the others would enquire. ‘A room each for such little tiddlers!’

‘It’s important,’ said David, fierce; ‘everyone should have a room.’

The family exchanged glances as families do when stubbing toes on some snag in one of them: and Molly, who felt herself both appreciated but in some devious way criticised, too, said, ‘Everyone in the world! Everybody!’ She had intended to sound humorous.

This scene was at breakfast – or, rather, mid-morning – in the family room, breakfast continuing indefinitely. All the adults were still around the table, fifteen of them. The children played among the sofas and chairs of the sitting-room area. Molly and Frederick sat side by side, as always, preserving their air of judging everything by the perspectives of Oxford, for which, here, they often got teased, but did not seem to mind, and were humorously on the defensive. David’s father, James, had been written to again by Molly, who had said he must ‘fork out’ more money, the young couple simply were not coping with feeding Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. He had sent a generous cheque and then had come himself. He sat opposite his former wife and her husband, and as usual both kinds of people were observed examining each other and marvelling that they could ever have come together. He looked fitted out for some sporting occasion: in fact, he was off skiing shortly, like Deborah, who was here with her little air of an exotic bird that had alighted in a strange place and was kept there by curiosity – she was not going to admit to admiration. Dorothy was there, dispensing tea and coffee. Angela sat with her husband; her three children played with the others. Angela, efficient, brisk (‘a coper,’ as Dorothy said, the ‘thank God’ being unspoken), allowed it to be known that she felt the two other sisters took up all of Dorothy and left her nothing. She was like a clever, pretty little fox. Sarah, Sarah’s husband, cousins, friends – the big house had people tucked into every corner, even on the sofas down here. The attic had long ago become a dormitory stacked with mattresses and sleeping bags in which any number of children could be bedded. As they sat here in the great warm comfortable room, which had a fire burning of wood collected by everyone yesterday from the woodland they had been walking in, the rooms above resounded with voices, and with music. Some of the older children were practising a song. This was a house – and this defined it for everyone, admiring what they could not achieve themselves – where television was not often watched.

Sarah’s husband, William, was not at the table, but lounging against the dividing wall; and the little distance expressed what he felt his relation to the family was. He had left Sarah twice, and come home again. It was evident to everyone this was a process that would continue. He had got himself a job, a poor one, in the building trade: the trouble was that he was distressed by physical disability, and his new daughter, the Down’s syndrome baby, appalled him. Yet he was very much married to Sarah. They were a match: both tall, generously built, dark, like a pair of gypsies, always in colourful clothes. But the poor baby was in Sarah’s arms, covered up so as not to upset everyone, and William was looking everywhere but at his wife.

He looked instead at Harriet, who sat nursing Paul, two months old, in the big chair that was hers because it was comfortable for this function. She looked exhausted. Jane had been awake in the night with her teeth, and had wanted Mummy, not Granny.

She had not been much changed by presenting the world with four human beings. She sat there at the head of the table, the collar of her blue shirt pushed to one side to show part of a blue-veined white breast, and Paul’s energetically moving little head. Her lips were characteristically firmly set, and she was observing everything: a healthy, attractive young woman, full of life. But tired…the children came rushing from their play to demand her attention, and she was suddenly irritable, and snapped, ‘Why don’t you go and play upstairs in the attic?’ This was unlike her – again glances were exchanged among the adults, who took over the job of getting the children’s noise out of her way. In the end, it was Angela who went with them.

Harriet was distressed because she had been bad-tempered. ‘I was up all night,’ she began, and William interrupted her, taking command – expressing what they all felt, and Harriet knew it; even if she knew why it had to be William, the delinquent husband and father.

‘And now that’s got to be it, sister-in-law Harriet,’ he announced, leaning forward from his wall, hand raised, like a band-leader. ‘How old are you? No, don’t tell me, I know, and you’ve had four children in six years…’ Here he looked around to make sure they were all with him: they were, and Harriet could see it. She smiled ironically.

‘A criminal,’ she said, ‘that’s what I am.’

‘Give it a rest, Harriet. That’s all we ask of you,’ he went on, sounding more and more facetious, histrionic – as was his way.

‘The father of four children speaks,’ said Sarah, passionately cuddling her poor Amy, defying them to say aloud what they must be thinking: that she was going out of her way to support him, her unsatisfactory husband, in front of them all. He gave her a grateful look while his eyes avoided the pathetic bundle she protected.

‘Yes, but at least we spread it out over ten years,’ he said.

‘We are going to give it a rest,’ announced Harriet. She added, sounding defiant, ‘For at least three years.’

Everyone exchanged looks: she thought them condemning.

‘I told you so,’ said William. ‘These madmen are going to go on.’

‘These madmen certainly are,’ said David.

‘I told you so,’ said Dorothy. ‘When Harriet’s got an idea into her head, then you can save your breath.’

‘Just like her mother,’ said Sarah forlornly: this referred to Dorothy’s decision that Harriet needed her more than Sarah did, the defective child notwithstanding. ‘You’re much tougher than she is, Sarah,’ Dorothy had pronounced. ‘The trouble with Harriet is that her eyes have always been bigger than her stomach.’

Dorothy was near Harriet, with little Jane, listless from the bad night, dozing in her arms. She sat erect, solid; her lips were set firm, her eyes missed nothing.

‘Why not?’ said Harriet. She smiled at her mother: ‘How could I do better?’

‘They are going to have four more children,’ Dorothy said, appealing to the others.

‘Good God,’ said James, admiring but awed. ‘Well, it’s just as well I make so much money.’

David did not like this: he flushed and would not look at anyone.

‘Oh don’t be like that, David,’ said Sarah, trying not to sound bitter: she needed money, badly, but it was David, who was in a good job, who got so much extra.

‘You aren’t really going to have four more children?’ enquired Sarah, sighing – and they all knew she was saying, four more challenges to destiny. She gently put her hand over the sleeping Amy’s head, covered in a shawl, holding it safe from the world.

‘Yes, we are,’ said David.

‘Yes, we certainly are,’ said Harriet. ‘This is what everyone wants, really, but we’ve been brainwashed out of it. People want to live like this, really.’

‘Happy families,’ said Molly critically: she was standing up for a life where domesticity was kept in its place, a background to what was important.

‘We are the centre of this family,’ said David. ‘We are – Harriet and me. Not you, Mother.’

‘God forbid,’ said Molly, her large face, always highly coloured, even more flushed: she was annoyed.

‘Oh all right,’ said her son. ‘It’s never been your style.’

‘It’s certainly never been mine,’ said James, ‘and I’m not going to apologize for it.’

‘But you’ve been a marvellous father, super,’ chirruped Deborah. ‘And Jessica’s been a super mum.’

Her real mother raised her ponderous brows.

‘I don’t seem to remember your ever giving Molly much of a chance,’ said Frederick.

‘But it’s so co-o-o-ld in England,’ moaned Deborah.

James, in his bright, overbright clothes, a handsome well-preserved gent dressed for a southern summer, allowed himself the ironical snort of the oldster at youthful tactlessness, and his look at his wife and her husband apologized for Deborah. ‘And anyway,’ he insisted, ‘it isn’t my style. You’re quite wrong, Harriet. The opposite is true. People are brainwashed into believing family life is the best. But that’s the past.’

‘If you don’t like it, then why are you here?’ demanded Harriet, much too belligerently for this pleasant morning scene. Then she blushed and exclaimed, ‘No, I didn’t mean that!’

‘No, of course you don’t mean it,’ said Dorothy. ‘You’re overtired.’

‘We are here because it’s lovely,’ said a schoolgirl cousin of David’s. She had an unhappy, or at least complicated, family background, and she had taken to spending her holidays here, her parents pleased she was having a taste of real family life. Her name was Bridget.

David and Harriet were exchanging long supportive humorous looks, as they often did, and had not heard the schoolgirl, who was now sending them pathetic glances.

‘Come on, you two,’ said William, ‘tell Bridget she’s welcome.’

‘What? What’s the matter?’ demanded Harriet.

William said, ‘Bridget has to be told by you that she is welcome. Well – we all do, from time to time,’ he added, in his facetious way, and could not help sending a look at his wife.

‘Well, naturally you are welcome, Bridget,’ said David. He sent a glance to Harriet, who said at once. ‘But of course.’ She meant, That goes without saying; and the weight of a thousand marital discussions was behind it, causing Bridget to look from David to Harriet and back, and then around the whole family, saying, ‘When I get married, this is what I am going to do. I’m going to be like Harriet and David, and have a big house and a lot of children…and you’ll all be welcome.’ She was fifteen, a plain dark plump girl who they all knew would shortly blossom and become beautiful. They told her so.

‘It’s natural,’ said Dorothy tranquilly. ‘You haven’t any sort of a home really, so you value it.’

‘Something wrong with that logic,’ said Molly.

The schoolgirl looked around the table, at a loss.

‘My mother means that you can only value something if you’ve experienced it,’ said David. ‘But I am the living proof that isn’t so.’

‘If you’re saying you didn’t have a proper home,’ said Molly, ‘that’s just nonsense.’

‘You had two,’ said James.

‘I had my room,’ said David. ‘My room – that was home.’

‘Well, I suppoe we must be grateful for that concession. I was not aware you felt deprived,’ said Frederick.

‘I didn’t, ever – I had my room.’

They decided to shrug, and laugh.

‘And you haven’t even thought about the problems of educating them all,’ said Molly. ‘Not so far as we can see.’

And now here was appearing that point of difference that the life in this house so successfully smoothed over. It went without saying that David had gone to private schools.

‘Luke will start at the local school this year,’ said Harriet. ‘And Helen will start next year.’

‘Well, if that’s good enough for you,’ said Molly.

‘My three went to ordinary schools,’ said Dorothy, not letting this slide; but Molly did not accept the challenge. She remarked, ‘Well, unless James chips in to help…” thus making it clear that she and Frederick could not or would not contribute.

James said nothing. He did not even allow himself to look ironical.

‘It’s five years, six years, before we have to worry about the next stage of education for Luke and Helen,’ said Harriet, again sounding over-irritable.

Insisted Molly: ‘We put David down for his schools when he was born. And Deborah, too.’

‘Well,’ said Deborah, ‘why am I any better for my posh schools than Harriet – or anyone else?’

‘It’s a point,’ said James, who had paid for the posh schools.

‘Not much of a point,’ said Molly.

William sighed, clowning it: ‘Deprived all the rest of us are. Poor William. Poor Sarah. Poor Bridget. Poor Harriet. Tell me, Molly, if I had been to posh schools would I get a decent job now?’

‘That isn’t the point,’ said Molly.

‘She means you’d be happier unemployed or in a filthy job well educated than badly educated,’ said Sarah.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Molly. ‘Public education is awful. It’s getting worse. Harriet and David have got four children to educate. With more to come, apparently. How do you know James will be able to help you? Anything can happen in the world.’

‘Anything does, all the time,’ said William bitterly, but laughed to soften it.

Harriet moved distressfully in her chair, took Paul off her breast with a skill at concealing herself they all noted and admired, and said, ‘I don’t want to have this conversation. It’s a lovely morning…’

‘I’ll help you, of course, within limits,’ said James.

‘Oh, James…’ said Harriet, ‘thank you…thank you…Oh dear…why don’t we go up to the woods?…We could take a picnic lunch.’

The morning had slid past. It was midday. Sun struck the edges of the jolly red curtains, making them an intense orange, sending orange lozenges to glow on the table among cups, saucers, a bowl of fruit. The children had come down from the top of the house and were in the garden. The adults went to watch them from the windows. The garden continued neglected; there was never time for it. The lawn was patchily lush, and toys lay about. Birds sang in the shrubs, ignoring the children. Little Jane, set down by Dorothy, staggered out to join the others. A group of children played noisily together, but she was too young, and strayed in and out of the game, in the private world of a two-year-old. They skilfully accommodated their game to her. The week before, Easter Sunday, this garden had had painted eggs hidden everywhere in it. A wonderful day, the children bringing in magical eggs from everywhere that Harriet and Dorothy and Bridget, the schoolgirl, had sat up half the night to decorate.

Harriet and David were together at the window, the baby in her arms. He put his arm around her. They exchanged a quick look, half guilty because of the irrepressible smiles on their faces, which they felt were probably going to exasperate the others.

‘You two are incorrigible,’ said William. ‘They are hopeless,’ he said to the others. ‘Well, who’s complaining? I’m not! Why don’t we all go for that picnic?’

The house party filled five cars, children wedged in or on the adults’ laps.

Summer was the same: two months of it, and again the family came and went, and came again. The schoolgirl was there all the time, poor Bridget, clinging fast to this miracle of a family. Rather, in fact, as Harriet and David did. Both more than once – seeing the girl’s face, reverential, even awed, always on the watch as if she feared to miss some revelation of goodness or grace the moment she allowed her attention to lapse – saw themselves. Even uneasily saw themselves. It was too much…excessive…Surely they should be saying to her, ‘Look here, Bridget, don’t expect so much. Life isn’t like that!’ But life is like that, if you choose right: so why should they feel she couldn’t have what they had so plentifully?

Even before the crowd gathered before the Christmas of 1973, Harriet was pregnant again. To her utter dismay, and David’s. How could it have happened? They had been careful, particularly so because of their determination not to have any more children for a while. David tried to joke, ‘It’s this room, I swear it’s a baby-maker!’

They had put off telling Dorothy. She was not there, anyway, because Sarah had said it was unfair that Harriet got all the help. Harriet simply could not manage. One after another, three girls came to help; they had just left school and could not easily find work. They were not much good. Harriet believed she looked after them more than they her. They came or didn’t come as the mood took them, and would sit around drinking tea with their girl-friends while Harriet toiled. She was frantic, exhausted…she was peevish; she lost her temper; she burst into tears…David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning her: Paul lay whimpering in his pram, ignored. David took a fortnight’s leave from his office to come home and help. They had known how much they owed Dorothy, but now knew it better – and that when she heard Harriet was pregnant again she would be angry. Very. And she would be right.

‘It will all be easier when Christmas starts,’ wept Harriet.

‘You can’t be serious,’ said David, furious. ‘Of course they can’t come this Christmas.’

‘But it is so easy when people are here, everyone helps me.’

‘Just for once we’ll go to one of them,’ said David, but this idea did not live for more than five minutes: none of the other households could accomodate six extra people.

Harriet lay weeping on her bed. ‘But they must come, don’t put them off – oh, David, please…at least it’ll keep my mind off it.’

He sat on his side of the bed watching her, uneasy, critical, trying not to be. Actually he would be pleased not to have the house full of people for three weeks, a month: it cost so much, and they were always short of money. He had taken on extra work, and here he was at home, a nursemaid.

‘You simply have to get someone in to help, Harriet. You must try and keep one of them.’

She burst out in indignation at the criticism. ‘That’s not fair! You aren’t here stuck with them – they aren’t any good. I don’t believe any of these girls have done an hour’s work in their lives.’

‘They’ve been some help – even if it’s only the washing-up.’

Dorothy telephoned to say that both Sarah and Harriet were going to have to manage: she, Dorothy, needed a break. She was going home to her flat to please herself for a few weeks. Harriet was weeping, hardly able to speak. Dorothy could not get out of her what could possibly be wrong: she said, ‘Very well, I suppose I’ll have to come, then.’

She sat at the big table with David, Harriet, the four children there, too, and looked severely at Harriet. She had understood her daughter was pregnant again within half an hour of arriving. They could see from her set angry face that she had terrible things to say. ‘I’m your servant, I do the work of a servant in this house.’ Or, ‘You are very selfish, both of you. You are irresponsible.’ These words were in the air but were not spoken: they knew that if she allowed herself to begin she would not stop with this.

She sat at the head of the table – the position near the stove – stirring her tea, with one eye on baby Paul, who was fretful in his little chair and wanted to be cuddled. Dorothy, too, looked tired, and her grey hair was disordered: she had been going up to her room to tidy herself when she had been swallowed in embraces with Luke and Helen and Jane, who had missed her and knew that the crossness and impatience that had ruled the house would now be banished.

‘You know that everyone is expecting to come here for Christmas,’ she demanded heavily, not looking at them.

‘Oh yes, yes, yes,’ clamoured Luke and Helen, making a song and dance of it and rushing around the kitchen. ‘Oh yes, when are they coming? Is Tony coming? Is Robin coming? Is Anne coming?’

‘Sit down,’ said David, sharp and cold, and they gave him astonished, hurt looks and sat.

‘It’s crazy,’ said Dorothy. She was flushed with the hot tea and with all the things she was forcing herself not to say.

‘Of course everyone has to come,’ Harriet said, weeping – and ran out of the room.

‘It’s very important to her,’ said David apologetically.

‘And not to you?’ This was sarcastic.

‘The thing is, I don’t think Harriet is anywhere near herself,’ said David, and held his eyes on Dorothy’s, to make her face him. But she would not.

‘What does that mean, my mother isn’t near herself?’ enquired Luke, the six-year-old, ready to make a word game of it. Even, perhaps, a riddle. But he was perturbed. David put out his arm and Luke went to his father, stood close, looked up into his face.

‘It’s all right, Luke,’ said David.

‘You’ve got to get someone in to help,’ said Dorothy.

‘We have tried.’ David explained what had happened with the three amiable and indifferent girls.

‘Doesn’t surprise me. Who wants to do an honest job these days?’ said Dorothy. ‘But you have to get someone. And I can tell you I didn’t expect to end my days as your and Sarah’s skivvy.’

Here Luke and Helen gave their grandmother incredulous looks and burst into tears. After a pause, Dorothy controlled herself and began consoling them.

‘All right, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘And now I’m going to put Paul and Jane to bed. You two, Luke and Helen, can put yourselves to bed. I’ll come up and say good night. And then your gran is off to bed. I’m tired.’

The subdued children went off upstairs.

Harriet did not come down again that evening; her husband and her mother knew she was being sick. Which they were used to…but were not used to ill temper, tears, fretfulness.

When the children were in bed, David did some of the work he had brought home, made himself a sandwich, and was joined by Dorothy, who had come down to make herself tea. This time they did not exchange irritabilites: they were together in a companionable silence, like two old campaigners facing trials and difficulties.

Then David went up into the great shadowy bedroom, where lights from an upstairs window in a neighbouring house a good thirty yards away sent gleams and shadows on to the ceiling. He stood looking at the big bed where Harriet lay. Asleep? Baby Paul was lying asleep close to her, unwrapped. David cautiously leaned over, folded Paul into his cuddling blanket, took him to his room next door. He saw Harriet’s eyes shine as she followed his movements.

He got into bed and, as always, slid out his arm so that she could put her head on to it and be gathered close to him.

But she said, ‘Feel this,’ and guided his hand to her stomach.

She was nearly three months pregnant.

This new baby had not yet shown signs of independent life, but now David felt a jolt under his hand, quite a hard movement.

‘Can you be further along that you thought?’ Once more he felt the thrust, and could not believe it.

Harriet was weeping again, and he felt, knowing of course this was unfair, that she was breaking the rules of some contract between them: tears and misery had not ever been on their agenda!

She felt rejected by him. They had always loved to lie here feeling a new life, greeting it. She had waited four times for the first little flutters, easily mistaken but then certain; the sensation that was as if a fish mouthed out a bubble; the small responses to her movements, her touch, and even – she was convinced – her thoughts.

This morning, lying in the dark before the children woke, she had felt a tapping in her belly, demanding attention. Disbelieving, she had half sat up, looking down at her still flat, if soft, stomach, and felt the imperative beat, like a small drum. She had been keeping herself on the move all day, so as not to feel these demands from the new being, unlike anything she had known before.

‘You had better go and get Dr Brett to check the dates,’ said David.

Harriet said nothing, feeling it was beside the point: she did not know why she felt this.

But she did go to Dr Brett.

He said, ‘Well, perhaps I was out by a month – but if so, you have really been very careless, Harriet.’

This scolding was what she was getting from everyone, and she flashed out, ‘Anyone can make a mistake.’

He frowned as he felt the emphatic movements in her stomach, and remarked, ‘Well, there’s nothing very much wrong with that, is there?’ He looked dubious, however. He was a harassed, no longer young man, who, she had heard, had a difficult marriage. She had always felt rather superior to him. Now she felt at his mercy, and was looking up into that professionally reticent face as she lay there, under his hands, longing for him to say something else. What? An explanation.

‘You’ll have to take it easy,’ he said, turning away.

Behind his back, she muttered, ‘Take is easy yourself!’ and chided herself, You bad-tempered cow.

Everyone arriving for Christmas was told Harriet was pregnant – it was a mistake – but now they were pleased, really.…But ‘Speak for yourselves,’ said Dorothy. People had to rally around, even more than they always did. Harriet was not to cook, do housework, do anything. She must be waited upon.

Each new person looked startled on hearing this news, then made jokes. Harriet and David came into rooms full of family, talking, who fell silent knowing they were there. They had been exchanging condemnations. Dorothy’s role in keeping this household going was being given full credit. The pressure on David’s salary – not, after all, a large one – was mentioned. Jokes were made about James’s probable reception of the news. Then the teasing began. David and Harriet were commended for their fertility, and jokes were made about the influences of their bedroom. They responded to the jokes with relief. But all this jesting had an edge on it, and people were looking at the young Lovatts differently from the way they had done before. The quietly insistent patient quality that had brought them together, that had caused this house to come into being and had summoned all these unlikely people from various parts of England, and the world, too – James was coming from Bermuda, Deborah from the States, and even Jessica had promised to put in a brief appearance – this quality, whatever it was, this demand on life, which had been met in the past with respect (grudging or generous), was now showing its reverse side, in Harriet lying pale and unsociable on her bed, and then coming down determined to be one of the party but failing, and going upstairs again; in Dorothy’s grim patience, for she worked from dawn to dusk and often in the night, too; and in the children’s querulousness and demands for attention – particularly little Paul’s.

Another girl came in from the village, found by Dr Brett. She was, like the other three, pleasant, lazy, seeing nothing to be done unless her attention was directed to it, affronted by the amount of work needed by four children. She did, however, enjoy the people sitting around and talking, the sociable atmosphere, and in no time she was sharing meals and sitting around with them; she found it quite in order to be waited on by them. Everyone knew that she would find an excuse to leave when this delightful house party broke up.

Which it did, rather earlier than usual. It was not only Jessica (in her bright summer clothes that made no concession to the English winter except for a slight cardigan) who remembered people elsewhere who had been promised visits. Jessica took herself off, and Deborah with her. James followed. Frederick had to finish a book. The enraptured schoolgirl, Bridget, found Harriet lying down, her hands pressed into her stomach, tears running down her face, moaning from some pain she would not specify – and was so shocked she, too, wept and said she had always known it was too good to last, and went off back home to her mother, who had just remarried and did not really want her.

The girl who had come to help went home, and David looked for a trained nanny in London. He could not afford one, but James had said he would pay for it. Until Harriet was better, he said: uncharacteristically grumpy, he was making it clear he thought that Harriet had chosen this life and now should not expect everyone to foot the bill.

But they could not find a nanny: the nannies all wanted to go abroad with families who had a baby, or perhaps two; or to be in London. This small town, and the four children, with another coming, put them off.

Instead, Alice, a cousin of Frederick’s, a widow down on her luck, came to help Dorothy. Alice was quick, fussy, nervous, like a little grey terrier. She had three grown-up children, and grandchildren, but said she did not want to be a nuisance to them, a remark that caused Dorothy to make dry remarks, which Harriet felt like accusations. Dorothy was not pleased to have a woman of her own age sharing authority, but it could not be helped. Harriet seemed unable to do anything much.

She went back to Dr Brett, for she could not sleep or rest because of the energy of the foetus, which seemed to be trying to tear its way out of her stomach.

‘Just look at that,’ she said as her stomach heaved up, convulsed, subsided. ‘Five months.’

He made the usual tests, and said, ‘It’s large for five months, but not abnormally so.’

‘Have you ever had a case like this before?’ Harriet sounded sharp, peremptory, and the doctor gave her an annoyed look.

‘I’ve certainly seen energetic babies before,’ he said shortly, and when she demanded, ‘At five months? Like this?’ he refused to meet her – was dishonest, as she felt it. ‘I’ll give you a sedative,’ he said. For her. But she thought of it as something to quiet the baby.

Now, afraid of asking Dr Brett, she begged tranquillizers from friends, and from her sisters. She did not tell David how many she was taking, and this was the first time she had hidden anything from him. The foetus was quiet for about an hour after she dosed herself, and she was given a respite from the ceaseless battering and striving. It was so bad that she would cry out in pain. At night, David heard her moan, or whimper, but now he did not offer comfort, for it seemed that these days she did not find his arms around her any help.

‘My God,’ she said, or grunted, or groaned, and then suddenly sat up, or scrambled out of bed and went doubled up out of the room, fast, escaping from the pain.

He had stopped putting his hand on her stomach, in the old companionable way, for what he felt there was beyond what he could manage with. It was not possible that such a tiny creature could be showing such fearful strength; and yet it did. And nothing he said seemed to reach Harriet, who, he felt, was possessed, had gone right away from him, in this battle with the foetus, which he could not share.

He might wake to watch her pacing the room in the dark, hour after hour. When she at last lay down, regulating her breathing, she would start up again, with an exclamation, and, knowing he was awake, would go downstairs to the big family room where she could stride up and down, groaning, swearing, weeping, without being observed.

As the Easter holiday approached and the two older women made remarks about getting the house ready, Harriet said, ‘They can’t come. They can’t possibly come.’

‘They’ll expect it,’ said Dorothy.

‘We can manage,’ said Alice.

‘No,’ said Harriet.

Wails and protests from the children, and Harriet did not soften. This made Dorothy even more disapproving. Here she was, with Alice, two capable women, doing all the work, and the least Harriet could do…

‘You’re sure you don’t want them to come?’ asked David, who had been begged by the children to make her change her mind.

‘Oh, do what you like,’ Harriet said.

But when Easter came, Harriet was proved right: it was not a success. Her strained, abstracted face as she sat there at her table, stiffly upright, braced for the next jolt, or jab, stopped conversation, spoiled the fun, the good times. ‘What have you got in there?’ asked William, jocular but uneasy, seeing Harriet’s stomach convulse. ‘A wrestler?’

‘God only knows,’ said Harriet, and she was bitter, not joking. ‘How am I going to get through to July?’ she demanded, in a low appalled voice. ‘I can’t! I simply can’t do it!’

They all – David, too – judged that she was simply exhausted because this baby was coming too soon. She must be humoured. Alone in her ordeal – and she had to be, she knew that, and did not blame her family for not accepting what she was being slowly forced to accept – she became silent, morose, suspicious of them all and their thoughts about her. The only thing that helped was to keep moving.

If a dose of some sedative kept the enemy – so she now thought of this savage thing inside her – quiet for an hour, then she made the most of the time, and slept, grabbing sleep to her, holding it, drinking it, before she leaped out of bed as it woke with a heave and a stretch that made her feel sick. She would clean the kitchen, the living-room, the stairs, wash windows, scrub cupboards, her whole body energetically denying the pain. She insisted that her mother and Alice let her work, and when they said there was no need to scrub the kitchen again, she said, ‘For the kitchen no, for me yes.’ By breakfast time she might have already worked for three or four hours, and looked hag-ridden. She took David to the station, and the two older children to school, then parked the car somewhere and walked. She almost ran through streets she hardly saw, hour after hour, until she understood she was causing comment. Then she took to driving a short way out of the town, where she walked along the country lanes, fast, sometimes running. People in passing cars would turn, amazed, to see this hurrying driven woman, white-faced, hair flying, open-mouthed, panting, arms clenched across her front. If they stopped to offer help, she shook her head and ran on.

Time passed. It did pass, though she was held in an order of time different from those around her – and not the pregnant woman’s time either, which is slow, a calendar of the growth of the hidden being. Her time was endurance, containing pain. Phantoms and chimeras inhabited her brain. She would think, When the scientists make experiments, welding two kinds of animal together, of different sizes, then I suppose this is what the poor mother feels. She imagined pathetic botched creatures, horribly real to her, the products of a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little spaniel; a lion and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger and a goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws.

In the afternoon, she collected the children from school, and, later, David from the station. She walked around the kitchen as suppers were eaten, encouraged the children to watch television, and then went up to the third floor where she hastened up and down the corridor.

The family could hear her swift heavy steps, up there, and did not let their eyes meet.

Time passed. It did pass. The seventh month was better, and this was because of the amount of drugs she took. Appalled at the distance that had grown up between her and her husband, between her and the children, her mother, Alice, she now planned her day for one thing: that she would seem to be normal between the hours of four, when Helen and Luke ended school, until eight or nine, when they went to bed. The drugs did not seem to be affecting her much: she was willing them to leave her alone and to reach the baby, the foetus – this creature with whom she was locked in a struggle to survive. And for those hours it was quiet, or if it showed signs of coming awake, and fighting her, she took another dose.

Oh how eager everyone was to welcome her back into the family, normal, herself: they ignored, because she wanted them to, her tenseness, her tiredness.

David would put his arms around her and say, ‘Oh, Harriet, you are all right?’

Two months to go.

‘Yes, yes, I am. Really.’ And she silently addressed the being crouching in her womb: ‘Now you shut up or I’ll take another pill.’ It seemed to her that it listened and understood.

A scene in the kitchen: family supper. Harriet and David commanded the head and foot of the table. Luke and Helen sat together on one side. Alice held little Paul, who could never get enough cuddling: he got so little from his mother. Jane sat near Dorothy’s place, who was at the stove, ladle in her hand. Harriet looked at her mother, a large healthy woman in her fifties, with her bush of iron-grey curls, and her pink fresh face, and her large blue eyes ‘like lollipops’ – a family joke – and thought, I’m as strong as she is. I’ll survive. And she smiled at Alice, thin, wiry, tough, energetic, and thought again, These elderly women, look at them, they’ve survived everything.

Dorothy was filling their plates with vegetable soup. She sat down, at leisure, with her own plate. Bread was passed around, a big basket of it.

Happiness had returned and sat at the table with them – and Harriet’s hand, unseen below the level of the table-top, was held over the enemy: You be quiet.

‘A story,’ said Luke. ‘A story, Daddy.’

On days when there was school tomorrow, the children had supper early and went up to bed. But on Fridays and Saturdays they ate with the grown-ups and a story was told during the meal.

Here, enclosed in the hospitable kitchen, it was warm and steamy with the smell of soup. Outside was a blustering night. May. The curtains were not drawn. A branch stretched across the window: a spring branch, full of pristine blossom, pale in the twilight, but the air that beat on the panes had been blasted down south from some iceberg or snow-field. Harriet was spooning in soup, and broke hunks of bread into it. Her appetite was enormous, insatiable – so bad she was ashamed and raided the fridge when no one could see her. She would interrupt her nocturnal peregrinations to stuff into herself anything she could find to eat. She even had secret caches like an alcoholic’s hoards, only it was food: chocolate, bread, pies.

David began, ‘Two children, a boy and a girl, set off one day to have an adventure in the forest. They went a long way into the forest. It was hot outside, but under the trees it was cool. They saw a deer lying down, resting. Birds flitted about and sang to them.’

David stopped to eat soup. Helen and Luke sat with their eyes on his face, motionless. Jane listened, too, but differently. Four years old: she looked to see how they took in the story, and copied them, fixing her eyes on her father.

‘Do the birds sing to us?’ enquired Luke doubtfully, frowning. He had a strong, severe face; and, as always, he demanded the truth. ‘When we are in the garden and the birds sing, are they singing to us?’

‘Of course not, silly,’ said Helen. ‘It was a magic forest.’

‘Of course they sing to you,’ said Dorothy firmly.

The children, first hunger appeased, sat with their spoons in their hands, wide eyes on their father. Harriet’s heart oppressed her: it was their open trustfulness, their helplessness. The television was on: a professionally cool voice was telling about some murders in a London suburb. She lumbered over to turn it off, plodded back, served herself more soup, piled in the bread…She listened to David’s voice, tonight the storyteller’s voice, so often heard in the kitchen, hers, Dorothy’s –

‘When the children got hungry, they found a bush covered with chocolate sweets. Then they found a pool made of orange juice. They were sleepy. They lay under a bush near the friendly deer. When they woke up, they said thank you to the deer and went on.

‘Suddenly the little girl found she was alone. She and her brother had lost each other. She wanted to go home. She did not know which way to walk. She was looking for another friendly deer, or a sparrow, or any bird, to tell her where she was and show her the way out of the forest. She wandered about for a long time, and then she was thirsty again. She bent over a pool wondering if it would be orange juice, but it was water, clear pure forest water, and it tasted of plants and stones. She drank, from her hands.’ Here the two older children reached for their glasses and drank. Jane interlaced her fingers to form a cup.

‘She sat there by the pool. Soon it would be dark. She bent over the pool to see if there was a fish who could tell her the way out of the forest, but she saw something she didn’t expect. It was a girl’s face, and she was looking straight up at her. It was a face she had never seen in her whole life. This strange girl was smiling, but it was a nasty smile, not friendly, and the little girl thought this other girl was going to reach up out of the water and pull her down into it…’

A heavy, shocked, indrawn breath from Dorothy, who felt this was too frightening at bedtime.

But the children sat frozen with attention. Little Paul, grizzling on Alice’s lap, earned from Helen ‘Be quiet, shut up.’

‘Phyllis – that was the little girl’s name – had never seen such frightening eyes.’

‘Is that Phyllis in my nursery school?’ asked Jane.

‘No,’ said Luke.

‘No,’ said Helen.

David had stopped. Apparently for inspiration. He was frowning, had an abstracted look, as if he had a headache. As for Harriet, she was wanting to cry out, ‘Stop – stop it! You are talking about me – this is what you are feeling about me!’ She could not believe that David did not see it.

‘What happened then?’ asked Luke. ‘What happened exactly?’

‘Wait,’ said David. ‘Wait, my soup…’ He ate.

‘I know what happened,’ said Dorothy firmly. ‘Phyllis decided to leave that nasty pool at once. She ran fast along a path until she bumped into her brother. He was looking for her. They held each other’s hands and they ran out of the forest and they ran safely home.’

‘That was it, exactly,’ said David. He was smiling ruefully, but looked bemused.

‘And that was what really really happened, Daddy?’ demanded Luke, anxious.

‘Absolutely,’ said David.

‘Who was that girl in the pool, who was she?’ demanded Helen, looking from her father to her mother.

‘Oh just a magic girl,’ said David casually. ‘I have no idea. She just materialized.’

‘What’s materialized?’ asked Luke, saying the word with difficulty.

‘It’s bedtime,’ said Dorothy.

‘But what is materialized?’ Luke insisted.

‘We haven’t had any pudding!’ cried Jane.

‘There’s no pudding, there’s fruit,’ said Dorothy.

‘What is materialized, Daddy?’ Luke anxiously persisted.

‘It is when something that wasn’t there suddenly is there.’

‘But why, why is it?’ wailed Helen, distressed.

Dorothy said, ‘Upstairs, children.’

Helen took an apple, Luke another, and Jane lifted some bread off her mother’s plate with a quick, conscious, mischievous smile. She had not been upset by the story.

The three children went noisily up the stairs, and baby Paul looked after them, excluded, his face puckering, ready to cry.

Alice swiftly got up with him and went after the children, saying, ‘No one told me stories when I was little!’ It was hard to tell whether this was a complaint or, ‘and I’m better for it.’

Suddenly, Luke appeared on the landing. ‘Is everyone coming for the summer holidays?’

David glanced worriedly at Harriet – then away. Dorothy looked steadily at her daughter.

‘Yes,’ said Harriet weakly. ‘Of course.’

Luke called up the stairs, ‘She said, “Of course”!’

Dorothy said, ‘You will have just had this baby.’

‘It’s up to you and Alice,’ said Harriet. ‘If you feel you can’t cope, then you must say so.’

‘It seems to me that I cope,’ said Dorothy, dry.

‘Yes, I know,’ said David quickly. ‘You’re marvellous.’

‘And you don’t know what you would have done –’

‘Don’t,’ said David. And to Harriet: ‘Much better that we put things off, and have them all at Christmas.’

‘The children will be so disappointed,’ said Harriet.

This did not sound like her old insistence: it was flat and indifferent. Her husband and her mother examined her curiously–so Harriet felt their inspection of her, detached, unkind. She said grimly, ‘Well, perhaps this baby will be born early. Surely it must.’ She laughed painfully, and then suddenly she got up, exclaiming, ‘I must move, I have to!’ and began her dogged, painful hour-after-hour walk back and forth, up and down.

She went to Dr Brett at eight months and asked him to induce the baby.

He looked critically at her and said, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in it.’

‘I don’t. But this is different.’

‘Not that I can see.’

‘It’s because you don’t want to. It’s not you who is carrying this – ‘ She cut off monster, afraid of antagonizing him. ‘Look,’ she said, trying to sound calm, but her voice was angry and accusing, ‘would you say I was an unreasonable woman? Hysterical? Difficult? Just a pathetic hysterical woman?’

‘I would say that you are utterly worn out. Bone tired. You never did find being pregnant easy, did you? Have you forgotten? I’ve had you sitting here through four pregnancies, with all kinds of problems – all credit to you, you put up with everything very well.’

‘But it’s not the same thing, it is absolutely different, I don’t understand why you can’t see it. Can’t you see it?’ She thrust out her stomach, which was heaving and – as she felt it – seething as she sat there.

The doctor looked dubiously at her stomach, sighed, and wrote her a prescription for more sedatives.

No, he couldn’t see it. Rather, he wouldn’t – that was the point. Not only he, but all of them, they wouldn’t see how different this was.

And as she walked, strode, ran along the country lanes, she fantasized that she took the big kitchen knife, cut open her own stomach, lifted out the child –and when they actually set eyes on each other, after this long blind struggle, what would she see?

Soon, nearly a month early, the pains began. Once she started, labour had always gone quickly. Dorothy rang David in London, and at once took Harriet into hospital. For the first time, Harriet had insisted on a hospital, surprising everyone.

By the time she was there, there were strong wrenching pains, worse, she knew, than ever in the past. The baby seemed to be fighting its way out. She was bruised – she knew it; inside she must be one enormous black bruise…and no one would ever know.

When at last the moment came when she could be given oblivion, she cried out, ‘Thank God, thank God, it’s over at last!’ She heard a nurse saying, ‘This one’s a real little toughie, look at him.’ Then a woman’s voice was saying, ‘Mrs Lovatt, Mrs Lovatt, are you with us? Come back to us! Your husband is here, dear. You’ve a healthy boy.’

‘A real little wrestler,’ said Dr Brett. ‘He came out fighting the whole world.’

She raised herself with difficulty, because the lower half of her body was too sore to move. The baby was put into her arms. Eleven pounds of him. The others had not been more than seven pounds. He was muscular, yellowish, long. It seemed as if he were trying to stand up, pushing his feet into her side.

‘He’s a funny little chap,’ said David, and he sounded dismayed.

He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped from his eyes to his crown. His hair grew in an unusual pattern from the double crown where started a wedge or triangle that came low on the forehead, the hair lying forward in a thick yellowish stubble, while the side and back hair grew downwards. His hands were thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms. He opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother’s face. They were focused greeny-yellow eyes, like lumps of soapstone. She had been waiting to exchange looks with the creature who, she had been sure, had been trying to hurt her, but there was no recognition there. And her heart contracted with pity for him: poor little beast, his mother disliking him so much…But she heard herself say nervously, though she tried to laugh, ‘He’s like a troll, or a goblin or something.’ And she cuddled him, to make up. But he was stiff and heavy.

‘Come, Harriet,’ said Dr Brett, annoyed at her. And she thought, I’ve been through this with Dr bloody Brett four times and it’s always been marvellous, and now he’s like a schoolmaster.

She bared her breast and offered the child her nipple. The nurses, the doctor, her mother, and her husband stood watching, with the smiles that this moment imposed. But there was none of the atmosphere of festival, of achievement, no champagne; on the contrary, there was a strain in everyone, apprehension. A strong, sucking reflex, and then hard gums clamped down on her nipple, and she winced. The child looked at her and bit, hard.

‘Well,’ said Harriet, trying to laugh, removing him.

‘Try him a little more,’ said the nurse.

He was not crying. Harriet held him out, challenging the nurse with her eyes to take him. The nurse, mouth tight with disapproval, took the baby, and he was put unprotesting in his cot. He had not cried since he was born, except for a first roar of protest, or perhaps surprise.

The four children were brought in to see their new brother in the hospital ward. The two other women who shared the room with her had got out of bed and taken their babies to a day-room. Harriet had refused to get out of bed. She told the doctors and nurses she needed time for her internal bruises to heal; she said this almost defiantly, carelessly, indifferent to their critical looks.

David stood at the end of the bed, holding baby Paul.

Harriet yearned for this baby, this little child, from whom she had been separated so soon. She loved the look of him, the comical soft little face, with soft blue eyes – like bluebells, she thought–and his soft little limbs…it was as if she were sliding her hands along them, and then enclosing his feet in her palms. A real baby, a real little child…

The three older children stared down at the newcomer who was so different from them all: of a different substance, so it seemed to Harriet. Partly this was because she was still responding to the look of him with her memories of his difference in the womb, but partly it was because of his heavy, sallow lumpishness. And then there was this strange head of his, sloping back from the eyebrow ridges.

‘We are going to call him Ben,’ said Harriet.

‘Are we?’ said David.

‘Yes, it suits him.’

Luke on one side, Helen on the other, took Ben’s small hands, and said, ‘Hello, Ben.’ ‘Hello, Ben.’ But the baby did not look at them.

Jane, the four-year-old, took one of his feet in her hand, then in her two hands, but he vigorously kicked her away.

Harriet found herself thinking, I wonder what the mother would look like, the one who would welcome this – alien.

She stayed in bed a week – that is, until she felt she could manage the struggle ahead – and then went home with her new child.

That night, in the connubial bedroom, she sat up against a stack of pillows, nursing the baby. David was watching.

Ben sucked so strongly that he emptied the first breast in less than a minute. Always, when a breast was nearly empty, he ground his gums together, and so she had to snatch him away before he could begin. It looked as if she were unkindly depriving him of the breast, and she heard David’s breathing change. Ben roared with rage, fastened like a leech to the other nipple, and sucked so hard she felt that her whole breast was disappearing down his throat. This time, she left him on the nipple until he ground his gums hard together and she cried out, pulling him away.

‘He’s extraordinary,’ said David, giving her the support she needed.

‘Yes, he is, he’s absolutely not ordinary.’

‘But he’s all right, he’s just…”

‘A normal healthy fine baby,’ said Harriet, bitter, quoting the hospital.

David was silent: it was this anger, this bitterness in her that he could not handle.

She was holding Ben up in the air. He was wrestling, fighting, struggling, crying in his characteristic way, which was a roar or a bellow, while he went yellowish white with anger – not red, like a normal cross baby.

When she held him to get up the wind, he seemed to be standing in her arms, and she felt weak with fear at the thought that this strength had so recently been inside her, and she at its mercy. For months, he had been fighting to get out, just as now he fought in her grasp to become independent.

When she laid him in his cot, which she was always glad to do because her arms ached so badly, he bellowed out his rage, but soon lay quiet, not sleeping, fully alert, his eyes focused, and his whole body flexing and unflexing with a strong pushing movement of heels and head she was familiar with: it was what had made her feel she was being torn apart when he was inside her.

She went back into bed beside David. He put out his arm, so that she could lie by him, inside it, but she felt treacherous and untruthful, for he would not have liked what she was thinking.

Soon she was exhausted with feeding Ben. Not that he did not thrive: he did. He was two pounds over his birth weight when he was a month, which was when he would have been less than a week old if he had gone full term.

Her breasts were painful. Making more milk than they ever had had to do, her chest swelled into two bursting white globes long before the next feed was due. But Ben was already roaring for it, and she fed him, and he drained every drop in two or three minutes. She felt the milk being dragged in streams from her. Now he had begun something new: he had taken to interrupting the fierce sucking several times during a feed, and bringing his gums together in the hard grinding movement that made her cry out in pain. His small cold eyes seemed to her malevolent.

‘I’m going to put him on the bottle,’ she said to Dorothy, who was watching this battle with the look, it seemed to Harriet, everyone had when watching Ben. She was absolutely still and intent, fascinated, almost hypnotized, but there was repugnance there, too. And fear?

Harriet had expected her mother to protest with ‘But he’s only five weeks old!’ – but what Dorothy said was ‘Yes, you must, or you’ll be ill.’ A little later, watching Ben roar, and twist and fight, she remarked. ‘They’ll all be coming soon for the summer.’ She spoke in a way new to her, as if listening to what she said and afraid of what she might say. Harriet recognized it, for this was how she felt saying anything at all. So do people speak whose thoughts are running along secretly in channels they would rather other people did not know about.

On that same day, Dorothy came into the bedroom where Harriet fed Ben, and saw Harriet pulling the child clear of breasts that had bruises all around the nipples. She said, ‘Do it. Do it now. I’ve bought the bottles, and the milk. I’m sterilizing the bottles now.’

‘Yes, wean him,’ said David, agreeing at once. But she had fed the other four for months, and there had been hardly a bottle in the house.

The adults, Harriet and David, Dorothy and Alice, were around the big table, the children having gone up to bed, and Harriet tried Ben with the bottle. He emptied it in a moment, while his body clenched and unclenched, his knees up in his stomach, then extended like a spring. He roared at the empty bottle.

‘Give him another,’ sad Dorothy, and set about preparing one.

‘What an appetite,’ said Alice socially, trying hard, but she looked frightened.

Ben emptied the second bottle: he was supporting it with his two fists, by himself. Harriet barely needed to touch it.

‘Neanderthal baby,’ said Harriet.

‘Oh come on, poor little chap,’ said David, uneasy.

‘Oh God, David,’ said Harriet, ‘poor Harriet is more like it.’

‘All right, all right – the genes have come up with something special this time.’

‘But what, that’s the point,’ said Harriet. ‘What is he?’

The other three said nothing – or, rather, said by their silence that they would rather not face the implications of it.

‘All right,’ said Harriet, ‘let’s say he has a healthy appetite, if that makes everyone happy.’

Dorothy took the fighting creature from Harriet, who collapsed exhausted back in her chair. Dorothy’s face changed as she felt the clumsy weight of the child, the intransigence, and she shifted her position so that Ben’s pistoning legs could not reach her.

Soon Ben was taking in twice the amount of food recommended for his age, or stage: ten or more bottles a day.

He got a milk infection, and Harriet took him to Dr Brett.

‘A breast-fed baby shouldn’t get infections,’ he said.

‘He’s not breast-fed.’

‘That’s not like you, Harriet! How old is he?’

‘Two months,’ said Harriet. She opened her dress and showed her breasts, still making milk, as if they responded to Ben’s never appeased appetite. They were bruised black all around the nipples.

Dr Brett looked at the poor breasts in silence, and Harriet looked at him: his decent, concerned doctor’s face confronting a problem beyond him.

‘Naughty baby,’ he conceded, and Harriet laughed out loud in astonishment.

Dr Brett reddened, met her eyes briefly in acknowledgement of her reproach, and then looked away.

‘All I need is a prescription for diarrhoea,’ said Harriet. She added deliberately, staring at him, willing him to look at her, ‘After all, I don’t want to kill the nasty little brute.’

He sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed them slowly. He was frowning, but not in disapproval of her. He said, ‘It is not abnormal to take a dislike to a child. I see it all the time. Unfortunately.’

Harriet said nothing, but she was smiling unpleasantly, and knew it.

‘Let me have a look at him.’

Harriet took Ben out of the pram, and laid him on the table. At once he turned on to his stomach and tried to get himself on all fours. He actually succeeded for a moment before collapsing.

She looked steadily at Dr Brett, but he turned away to his desk to write a prescription.

‘There’s obviously nothing much wrong with him,’ he said, with the same baffled, offending note that Ben did bring out of people.

‘Have you ever seen a two-month baby do that?’ she insisted.

‘No. I must admit I haven’t. Well, let me know how you get on.’

The news had flown around the family that the new baby was successfully born, and everything was all right. Meaning that Harriet was. A lot of people wrote and rang, saying they were looking forward to the summer holidays. They said, ‘We are longing to see the new baby.’ They said, ‘Is little Paul still as delicious as he was?’ They arrived bringing wine and summer produce from all over the country, and all kinds of people stood bottling fruit and making jams and chutneys with Alice and Dorothy. A crowd of children played in the garden or were taken off to the woods for picnics. Little Paul, so cuddlesome and funny, was always on somebody’s lap, and his laugh was heard everywhere: this was his real nature, overshadowed by Ben and his demands.

Because the house was so full, the older children were in one room. Ben was already in a cot with high wooden slatted sides, where he spent his time pulling himself up to a sitting position, falling, rolling over, pulling himself up…This cot was put in the room where the older children were, in the hope that Ben would be made social, friendly, by his siblings. It was not a success. He ignored them, would not respond to their advances, and his crying – or, rather, bellowing –made Luke shout at him, ‘Oh shut up!’ – but then he burst into tears at his own unkindness. Helen, at the age to cherish a baby, tried to hold Ben, but he was too strong. Then all the older children in the house were put into the attic, where they could make as much noise as they wanted, and Ben went back into his own room, ‘the baby’s room’ – and from there they heard his grunts and snuffles and roars of frustration as he tried some feat of strength and fell down.

The new baby had of course been offered to everyone to hold, when they asked, but it was painful to see how their faces changed confronting this phenomenon. Ben was always quickly handed back. Harriet came into the kitchen one day and heard her sister Sarah say to a cousin, ‘That Ben gives me the creeps. He’s like a goblin or a dwarf or something. I’d rather have poor Amy any day.’

This afflicted Harriet with remorse: poor Ben, whom no one could love. She certainly could not! And David, the good father, hardly touched him. She lifted Ben from his cot, so much like a cage, and put him on the big bed, and sat with him. ‘Poor Ben, poor Ben,’ she crooned, stroking him. He clutched her shirt with both hands, pulled himself up, and stood on her thigh. The hard little feet hurt her. She tried to cuddle him, persuade him to soften against her…Soon she gave up, put him back in his pen, or cage…a roar of frustration because he had been put down, and she held out her hands to him, ‘Poor Ben, dear Ben,’ and he grasped her hands and pulled himself up and stood grunting and roaring with triumph. Four months old…He was like an angry, hostile little troll.

She did make a point of going to him every day when the other children were out of the way, and taking him to the big bed for a time of petting and play, as she had with all of them. Never, not once, did he subside into a loving moment. He resisted, he strove, he fought – and then he turned his head and closed his jaws over her thumb. Not as an ordinary baby will, in the sucking bite that relieves the pain of teething, or explores the possibilites of a mouth, tongue: she felt her bone bend, and saw his cold triumphant grin.

She heard herself say, ‘You aren’t going to do me in, I won’t let you.’

But for a while she did try hard to make him ordinary. She took him down into the big living-room where all the family were, and put him into the playpen there – until his presence affected people, and they tended to go away. Or she took him to the table in her arms, as she had done with the others – but could not hold him, he was too strong.

In spite of Ben, the summer holidays were wonderful. Again, there were two months of it. Again, David’s father, briefly descending, gave them a cheque, and they could not have managed without. ‘It is like being in the middle of some bloody great fruit pudding, this house,’ said James. ‘God knows how you do it.’

But afterwards, when Harriet thought of those holidays, what she remembered was how they all looked at Ben. There would be a long thoughtful stare, puzzled, even anxious; but then came fear, though everyone tried to conceal it. There was horror, too: which is what Harriet felt, more and more. He did not seem to mind, or even to notice. It was hard to make out what he did think of other people.

Harriet lay inside David’s arms one night before sleeping, talking over the day, as they always did, and she remarked, out of a current of thoughts about the summer, ‘Do you know what this house is good for? What people come for? It’s for a good time, that’s all.’

He was surprised. Even – she felt – shocked. ‘But what else do we do it for?’ he enquired.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, sounding helpless. Then she turned in to his embrace, and he held her while she wept. They had not yet resumed love-making. This had never happened before. Making love during pregnancy, and very soon after pregnancy – this had never been a problem. But now they were both thinking, That creature arrived when we were being as careful as we knew how – suppose another like him comes? For they both felt – secretly, they were ashamed of the thoughts they had about Ben – that he had willed himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness, which had no defences against him or anything like him. But not making love was not only a strain for them both, it was a barrier, because they had to be reminded continually of what threatened them…so they felt.

Then something bad happened. Just after all the family had gone away, as the school term began, Paul went into Ben’s room by himself. Of all the children, he was the most fascinated by Ben. Dorothy and Alice, who were together in the kitchen, Harriet having gone off to take the older ones to school, heard screams. They ran upstairs to find that Paul had put his hand in to Ben through the cot bars, and Ben had grabbed the hand and pulled Paul hard against the bars, bending the arm deliberately backwards. The two women freed Paul. They did not bother to scold Ben, who was crowing with pleasure and achievement. Paul’s arm was badly sprained.

No one felt like saying to the children, ‘Be careful of Ben.’ But there was no need after the incident with Paul’s arm. That evening the children heard what had happened, but did not look at their parents and Dorothy and Alice. They did not look at each other. They stood silent, heads bent. This told the adults that the children’s attitudes to Ben were already formed: they had discussed Ben and knew what to think about him. Luke, Helen and Jane went away upstairs silently, and it was a bad moment for the parents.

Alice said, watching them, ‘Poor little things.’

Dorothy said, ‘It’s a shame.’

Harriet felt that these two women, these two elderly, tough, seasoned survivors, were condemning her, Harriet, out of their vast experience of life. She glanced at David, and saw he felt the same. Condemnation, and criticism, and dislike: Ben seemed to cause these emotions, bring them forth out of people into the light…

The day after this incident, Alice announced that she felt she was no longer needed in this house, she would go back to her own life: she was sure Dorothy could manage. After all, Jane was going to school now. Jane would not have gone to school this year, a proper school, all day, for another year: they had sent her early. Precisely because of Ben, though no one had said it. Alice left, with no suggestion it was because of Ben. But she had told Dorothy, who had told the parents, that Ben gave her the horrors. He must be a changeling. Dorothy, always sensible, calm, matter-of-fact, had laughed at her. ‘Yes, I laughed at her,’ she reported. Then, grim, ‘But why did I?’

David and Harriet conferred, in the low, almost guilty, incredulous voices that Ben seemed to impose. This baby was not six months old yet…he was going to destroy their family life. He was already destroying it. They would have to make sure that he was in his room at mealtimes and when the children were downstairs with the adults. Family times, in short.

Now Ben was almost always in his room, like a prisoner. He outgrew his barred cot at nine months: Harriet caught him just as he was about to fall over the top. A small bed, an ordinary one, was put into his room. He walked easily, holding on to the walls, or a chair. He had never crawled, had pulled himself straight up on to his feet. There were toys all over the floor – or, rather, the fragments of them. He did not play with them: he banged them on the floor or the walls until they broke. The day he stood alone, by himself, without holding on, he roared out his triumph. All the other children had laughed, chuckled, and wanted to be loved, admired, praised, on reaching this moment of achievement. This one did not. It was a cold triumph, and he staggered about, eyes gleaming with hard pleasure, while he ignored his mother. Harriet often wondered what he saw when he looked at her: nothing in his touch or his look ever seemed to say, This is my mother.

One early morning, something took Harriet quickly out of her bed into the baby’s room, and there she saw Ben balanced on the window-sill. It was high – heaven only knew how he had got up there! The window was open. In a moment he would have fallen out of it. Harriet was thinking, What a pity I came in…and refused to be shocked at herself. Heavy bars were put in, and there Ben would stand on the sill, gripping the bars and shaking them, and surveying the outside world, letting out his thick, raucous cries. All the Christmas holidays he was kept in that room. It was extraordinary how people, asking – cautiously – ‘How is Ben?’ and hearing, ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ did not ask again. Sometimes a yell from Ben loud enough to reach downstairs silenced a conversation. Then the frown appeared on their faces that Harriet dreaded, waiting for it: she knew it masked some comment or thought that could not be voiced.

And so the house was not the same; there was a constraint and a wariness in everybody. Harriet knew that sometimes people went up to look at Ben, out of the fearful, uneasy curiosity he evoked, when she was out of the way. She knew when they had seen him, because of the way they looked at her afterwards. As if I were a criminal! she raged to herself. She spent far too much of her time quietly seething, but did not seem able to stop. Even David, she believed, condemned her. She said to him, ‘I suppose in the old times, in primitive societies, this was how they treated a woman who’d given birth to a freak. As if it was her fault. But we are supposed to be civilized!’

He said, in the patient, watchful way he now had with her, ‘You exaggerate everything.’

‘That’s a good word – for this situation! Congratulations! Exaggerate!’

‘Oh God, Harriet,’ he said differently, helplessly, ‘don’t let’s do this – if we don’t stand together, then…’

It was at Easter that the schoolgirl Bridget, who had returned to see if this miraculous kingdom of everyday life was perhaps still there, enquired, ‘What is wrong with him? Is he a mongol?’

‘Down’s syndrome,’ said Harriet. ‘No one calls it mongol now. But no, he’s not.’

‘What’s wrong with him, then?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Harriet airily. ‘As you can see for yourself.’

Bridget went away, and never came back.

The summer holidays again. It was 1975. There were fewer guests: some had written or rung to say they could not afford the train fare, or the petrol. ‘Any excuse is better than none,’ remarked Dorothy.

‘But people are hard up,’ said David.

‘They weren’t so hard up before that they couldn’t afford to come and live here for weeks at a time at your expense.’

Ben was over a year old now. He had not said one word yet, but in other ways he was more normal. Now it was difficult to keep him in his room. Children playing in the garden heard his thick, angry cries, and saw him up on the sill trying to push aside his bars.

So he came out of his little prison and joined them downstairs. He seemed to know that he ought to be like them. He would stand, head lowered, watching how everyone talked, and laughed, sitting around the big table; or sat talking in the living-room, while the children ran in and out. His eyes were on one face, then another: whomever he was looking at became conscious of that insistent gaze and stopped talking; or turned a back, or a shoulder, so as not to have to see him. He could silence a room full of people just by being there, or disperse them: they went off making excuses.

Towards the end of the holidays, someone came bringing a dog, a little terrier. Ben could not leave it alone. Wherever the dog was, Ben followed. He did not pet it, or stroke it: he stood staring. One morning when Harriet came down to start breakfast for the children, the dog was lying dead on the kitchen floor. It had had a heart attack? Suddenly sick with suspicion, she rushed up to see if Ben was in his room: he was squatting on his bed, and when she came in, he looked up and laughed, but soundlessly, in his way, which was like a baring of the teeth. He had opened his door, gone quietly past his sleeping parents, down the stairs, found the dog, killed it, and gone back up again, quietly, into his room, and shut the door…all that, by himself! She locked Ben in: if he could kill a dog, then why not a child?

When she went down again, the children were crowding around the dead dog. And then the adults came, and it was obvious what they thought.

Of course it was impossible – a small child killing a lively dog. But officially the dog’s death remained a mystery; the vet said it had been strangled. This business of the dog spoiled what was left of the holidays, and people went off home early.

Dorothy said, ‘People are going to think twice about coming again.’

Three months later, Mr McGregor, the old grey cat, was killed in the same way. He had always been afraid of Ben, and kept out of reach. But Ben must have stalked him, or found him sleeping.

At Christmas the house was half empty.

It was the worst year of Harriet’s life, and she was not able to care that people avoided them. Every day was a long nightmare. She woke in the morning unable to believe she would ever get through to the evening. Ben was always on his feet, and had to be watched every second. He slept very little. He spent most of the night standing on his window-sill, staring into the garden, and if Harriet looked in on him, he would turn and give her a long stare, alien, chilling: in the half dark of the room he really did look like a little troll or a hobgoblin crouching there. If he was locked in during the day, he screamed and bellowed so that the whole house resounded with it, and they were all afraid the police would arrive. He would suddenly, for no reason she could see, take off and run into the garden, and then out the gate and into the street. One day, she ran a mile or more after him, seeing only that stubby squat little figure going through traffic lights, ignoring cars that hooted and people who screamed warnings at him. She was weeping, panting, half crazed, desperate to get to him before something terrible happened, but she was praying, Oh, do run him over, do, yes, please…She caught up with him just before a main road, grabbed him, and held the fighting child with all her strength. He was spitting and hissing, while he jerked like a monster fish in her arms. A taxi went by; she called to it, she pushed the child in, and got in after him, holding him fast by an arm that seemed would break with his flailing about and fighting.

What could be done? Again she went to Dr Brett, who examined him and said he was physically in order.

Harriet described his behaviour and the doctor listened.

From time to time, a well-controlled incredulity appeared on his face, and he kept his eyes down, fiddling with pencils.

‘You can ask David, ask my mother,’ said Harriet.

‘He’s a hyperactive child – that’s how they are described these days, I believe,’ said old-fashioned Dr Brett. She went to him because he was old-fashioned.

At last he did look at her, not evading her.

‘What do you expect me to do, Harriet? Drug him silly? Well, I am against it.’

She was crying inwardly, Yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly what I want! But she said, ‘No, of course not.’

‘He’s physically normal for eighteen months. He’s very strong and active of course, but he’s always been that. You say he’s not talking? But that’s not unusual. Wasn’t Helen a late talker? I believe she was?’

‘Yes,’ said Harriet.

She took Ben home. Now he was locked into his room each night, and there were heavy bars on the door as well. Every second of his waking hours, he watched. Harriet watched him while her mother managed everything else.

David said, ‘What is the point of thanking you, Dorothy? It seems everything has gone a long way beyond thank-yous.’

‘Everything has gone a long way beyond. Period.’ Said Dorothy.

Harriet was thin, red-eyed, haggard. Once again she was bursting into tears over nothing at all. The children kept out of her way. Tact? Were they afraid of her? Dorothy suggested staying alone with Ben for a week in August while the family went off together somewhere.

Neither Harriet nor David would normally have wanted to go anywhere, for they loved their home. And what about the family coming for the summer?

‘I haven’t noticed any rush to book themselves in,’ said Dorothy.

They went to France, with the car. For Harriet it was all happiness: she felt she had been given back her children. She could not get enough of them, nor they of her. And Paul, her baby whom Ben had deprived her of, the wonderful three-year-old, enchanting, a charmer – was her baby again. They were a family still! Happiness…they could hardly believe, any of them, that Ben could have taken so much away from them.

When they got home, Dorothy was very tired and she had a bad bruise on her forearm and another on her cheek. She did not say what had happened. But when the children had gone to bed on the first evening, she said to Harriet and David, ‘I have to talk – no, sit down and listen.’

They sat with her at the kitchen table.

‘You two are going to have to face it. Ben has got to go into an institution.’

‘But he’s normal,’ said Harriet, grim. ‘The doctor says he is.’

‘He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are.’

‘What kind of institution would take him?’

‘There must be something,’ said Dorothy, and began to cry.

Now began a time when every night Harriet and David lay awake talking about what could be done. They were making love again, but it was not the same. ‘This must be what women felt before there was birth control,’ Harriet said. ‘Terrified. They waited for every period, and when it came it meant reprieve for a month. But they weren’t afraid of giving birth to a troll.’

While they talked, they always listened for sounds from ‘the baby’s room’ – words they never used now, for they hurt. What was Ben doing that they had not believed him capable of? Pulling those heavy steel bars aside?

‘The trouble is, you get used to hell,’ said Harriet. ‘After a day with Ben I feel as if nothing exists but him. As if nothing has ever existed. I suddenly realize I haven’t remembered the others for hours. I forgot their supper yesterday. Dorothy went to the pictures, and I came down and found Helen cooking their supper.’

‘It didn’t hurt them.’

‘She’s eight.’

Having been reminded, by the week in France, of what their family life really was, could be, Harriet was determined not to let it all go. She found she was again silently addressing Ben: ‘I’m not going to let you destroy us, you won’t destroy me…’

She was set on another real Christmas, and wrote and telephoned to everyone. She made a point of saying that Ben was ‘much better, these days.’

Sarah asked if it would be ‘all right’ to bring Amy. This meant that she had heard – everyone had – about the dog, and the cat.

‘It’ll be all right if we are careful never to leave Amy alone with Ben,’ said Harriet, and Sarah, after a long silence, said, ‘My God, Harriet, we’ve been dealt a bad hand, haven’t we?’ ‘I suppose so,’ said Harriet, but she was rejecting this submission to being a victim of fate. Sarah, yes; with her marital problems, and her mongol child – yes. But she, Harriet, in the same boat?

She said to her own children, ‘Please look after Amy. Never leave her alone with Ben.’

‘Would he hurt Amy the way he hurt Mr McGregor?’ asked Jane.

‘He killed Mr McGregor,’ Luke said fiercely. ‘He killed him.’

‘And the poor dog,’ said Helen. Both children were accusing Harriet.

‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘he might. That’s why we have to watch her all the time.’

The children, the way they did these days, were looking at each other, excluding her, in some understanding of their own. They went off, without looking at her.

The Christmas, with fewer people, was nevertheless festive and noisy, a success; but Harriet found herself longing for it to be over. It was the strain of it all, watching Ben, watching Amy – who was the centre of everything. Her head was too big, her body too squat, but she was full of love and kisses and everyone adored her. Helen, who had longed to make a pet of Ben, was now able to love Amy. Ben watched this, silent, and Harriet could not read the look in those cold yellow-green eyes. But then she never could! Sometimes it seemed to her that she spent her life trying to understand what Ben was feeling, thinking. Amy, who expected everyone to love her, would go up to Ben, chuckling, laughing, her arms out. Twice his age, but apparently half his age, this afflicted infant, who was radiant with affection, suddenly became silent; her face was woeful, and she backed away, staring at him. Just like Mr McGregor, the poor cat. Then she began to cry whenever she saw him. Ben’s eyes were never off her, this other afflicted one, adored by everyone in the house. But did he know himself afflicted? Was he, in fact? What was he?

Christmas ended, and Ben was two and a few months old. Paul was sent to a little nursery school down the road, to get him away from Ben. The naturally high-spirited and friendly child was becoming nervous and irritable. He had fits of tears or of rage, throwing himself on the floor screaming, or battering at Harriet’s knees, trying to get her attention, which never seemed to leave Ben.

Dorothy went off to visit Sarah and her family.

Harriet was alone with Ben during the day. She tried to be with him as she had with the others. She sat on the floor with building blocks and toys you could push about. She showed him colourful pictures. She sang him little rhymes. But Ben did not seem to connect with the toys, or the blocks. He sat among the litter of bright objects and might put one block on another, looking at Harriet to see if this was what he should do. He stared hard at pictures held out to him, trying to decipher their language. He would never sit on Harriet’s knees, but squatted by her, and when she said, ‘That’s a bird, Ben, look – just like that bird on that tree. And that’s a flower,’ he stared, and then turned away. Apparently it was not that he could not understand how this block fitted into that or how to make a pile of them, rather that he could not grasp the point of it all, nor of the flower, nor the bird. Perhaps he was too advanced for this sort of game? Sometimes Harriet thought he was. His response to her nursery pictures was that he went out into the garden and stalked a thrush on the lawn, crouching down and moving on a low fast run – and he nearly did catch the thrush. He tore some primroses off their stems, and stood with them in his hands, intently staring at them. Then he crushed them in his strong little fists and let them drop. He turned his head and saw Harriet looking at him: he seemed to be thinking that she wanted him to do something, but what? He stared at the spring flowers, looked up at a blackbird on a branch, and came slowly indoors again.

One day, he talked. Suddenly. He did not say, ‘Mummy,’ or ‘Daddy,’ or his own name. He said, ‘I want cake.’ Harriet did not even notice, at first, that he was talking. Then she did, and told everyone, ‘Ben’s talking. He’s using sentences.’ As their way was, the other children encouraged him: ‘That’s very good, Ben,’ ‘Clever Ben!’ But he took no notice of them. From then on he announced his needs. ‘I want that.’ ‘Give me that.’ ‘Go for a walk now.’ His voice was heavy and uncertain, each word separate, as if his brain were a lumber-house of ideas and objects, and he had to identify each one.

The children were relieved he was talking normally. ‘Hello, Ben,’ one would say. ‘Hello,’ Ben replied, carefully handing back exactly what he had been given. ‘How are you, Ben?’ Helen asked. ‘How are you?’ he replied. ‘No’ said Helen, ‘now you must say, “I’m very well, thank you,” or, “I’m fine”.’

Ben stared while he worked it out. Then he said clumsily, ‘I’m very well.’

He watched the children, particularly Luke and Helen, all the time. He studied how they moved, sat down, stood up; copied how they ate. He had understood that these two, the older ones, were more socially accomplished than Jane; and he ignored Paul altogether. When the children watched television, he squatted near them and looked from the screen to their faces, for he needed to know what reactions were appropriate. If they laughed, then, a moment later, he contributed a loud, hard, unnatural-sounding laugh. What was natural to him, it seemed, in the way of amusement was his hostile-looking teeth-bared grin, that looked hostile. When they became silent and still with attention, because of some exciting moment, then he tensed his muscles, like them, and seemed absorbed in the screen – but really he kept his eyes on them.

Altogether, he was easier. Harriet thought: Well, any ordinary child is at its most difficult for about a year after it gets to its feet. No sense of self-preservation, no sense of danger: they hurl themselves off beds and chairs, launch themselves into space, run into roads, have to be watched every second…And they are also, she added, at their most charming, delightful, heart-breakingly sweet and funny. And then they gradually become sensible and life is easier.

Life had become easier…but this was only as she saw it, as Dorothy brought home to her.

Dorothy came back to this household after what she called ‘a rest’ of some weeks, and Harriet could see her mother was preparing for a ‘real talk’ with her.

‘Now, girl, would you say that I am interfering? That I give you a lot of unwanted advice?’

They were sitting at the big table, mid-morning, with cups of coffee. Ben was where they could watch him, as always, Dorothy was trying to make what she said humorous, but Harriet felt threatened. Her mother’s honest pink cheeks were bright with embarrassment, her blue eyes anxious.

‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘You aren’t. You don’t.’

‘Well, now I’m going to have my say.’

But she had to stop: Ben began banging a stone against a metal tray. He did this with all his force. The noise was awful, but the women waited until Ben stopped: interrupted, he would have raged and hissed and spat.

‘You have five children,’ Dorothy said. ‘Not one. Do you realize that I might just as well be the mother of the others when I’m here? No, I don’t believe you do, you’ve got so taken over by…’

Ben again banged the tray with his stone, in a frenzy of exulting accomplishment. It looked as if he believed he was hammering metal, forging something: one could easily imagine him, in the mines deep under the earth, with his kind…Again they waited until he stopped the noise.

‘It’s not right,’ said Dorothy. And Harriet remembered how her mother’s ‘That’s not right!’ had regulated her childhood.

‘I’m getting on, you know,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can’t go on like this, or I’ll get ill.’

Yes, Dorothy was rather thin, even gaunt. Yes, Harriet thought, full of guilt as usual, she should have noticed.

‘And you have a husband, too,’ said Dorothy, apparently not knowing how she was turning the knife in her daughter’s heart. ‘He’s very good, you know, Harriet. I don’t know how he puts up with it.’

The Christmas after Ben became three only partly filled the house. A cousin of David’s had said, ‘I’ve been inspired by you, Harriet! After all, I’ve got a home, too. It’s not as big as yours, but it’s a nice little house.’ Several of the family went there. But others said they were coming: made a point of coming, Harriet realized. These were the near relations.

Again a pet was brought. This time it was a big dog, a cheerful boisterous mongrel, Sarah’s children’s friend, but most particularly Amy’s. Of course all the children loved him, but Paul most of all, and this made Harriet’s heart ache, for they could have no dog or cat in their home. She even thought: Well, now Ben is more sensible, perhaps…But she knew it was impossible. She watched how the big dog seemed to know that Amy, the loving little child in the big ugly body, needed gentleness: he moderated his exuberance for her. Amy would sit by the dog with her arm around his neck, and if she was clumsy with him, he lifted his muzzle and gently pushed her away a little, or gave a small warning sound that said, ‘Be careful.’ Sarah said this dog was like a nursemaid to Amy. ‘Just like Nana in Peter Pan,’ the children said. But if Ben was in the room, the dog watched him carefully and went to lie in a corner, his head on his paws, stiff with attention. One morning when people were sitting around having breakfast, Harriet for some reason turned her head and saw the dog, asleep, and Ben going silently up to him in a low crouch, hands held out in front of him…

‘Ben!’ said Harriet sharply. She saw those cold eyes turn towards her, caught a gleam of pure malice.

The dog, alerted, scrambled up, and his hair stood on end. He whined anxiously, and came into the part of the room where they all were, and lay down under the table.

Everyone had seen this, and sat silent, while Ben came to Dorothy and said, ‘I want milk.’ She poured him some, and he drank it down. Then he looked at them all staring at him. Again he seemed to be trying to understand them. He went into the garden, where they could see him, a squat little gnome, poking with a stick at the earth. The other children were upstairs somewhere.

Around the table sat Dorothy, with Amy on her lap, Sarah, Molly, Frederick, James and David. Also Angela, the successful sister, ‘the coper’, whose children were all normal.

The atmosphere made Harriet say defiantly, ‘All right, then, let’s have it.’

She thought it not without significance, as they say, that it was Frederick who said, ‘Now look here, Harriet, you’ve got to face it, he’s got to go into an institution.’

‘Then we have to find a doctor who says he’s abnormal,’ said Harriet. ‘Dr Brett certainly won’t.’

‘Get another doctor,’ said Molly. ‘These things can be arranged.’ The two large haystacky people, with their red well-fed faces, were united in determination, nothing vague about them now they had decided there was a crisis, and one that – even indirectly – threatened them. They looked like a pair of judges after a good lunch, Harriet thought, and glanced at David to see if she could share this criticism with him; but he was staring down at the table, mouth tight. He agreed with them.

Angela said, laughing, ‘Typical upper-class ruthlessness.’

No one could remember that note being struck, or at least not so sharply, at this table before. Silence, and then Angela softened it with ‘Not that I don’t agree.’

‘Of course you agree,’ said Molly. ‘Anyone sensible would have to.’

‘It’s the way you said it,’ said Angela.

‘What does it matter how it is said?’ enquired Frederick.

‘And who is going to pay for it?’ asked David. ‘I can’t. All I can do is to keep the bills paid, and that is with James’s help.’

‘Well, James is going to have to bear the brunt of this one,’ said Frederick, ‘but we’ll chip in.’ It was the first time this couple had offered any financial help. ‘Mean, like all their sort,’ the rest of the family had agreed; and now this judgement was being remembered. They would come for a stay of ten days and contribute a pair of pheasants, a couple of bottles of very good wine. Their ‘chipping in’, everyone knew, wouldn’t amount to much.

Full of division, the family sat silent.

Then James said, ‘I’ll do what I can. But things are not as good as they were. Yachts are not everyone’s priority in hard times.’

Silence again, and everyone was looking at Harriet.

‘You are funny people,’ she said, setting herself apart from them. ‘You’ve been here so often and you know –I mean, you really know what the problem is. What are we going to say to the people who run this institution?’

‘It depends on the institution,’ said Molly, and her large person seemed full of energy, conviction: as if she had swallowed Ben whole and was digesting him, thought Harriet. She said, mildly enough, though she trembled, ‘You mean, we have to find one of those places that exist in order to take on children families simply want to get rid of?’

‘Rich families,’ said Angela, with a defiant little sniff.

Molly, confronting impertinence, said firmly, ‘Yes. If there is no other kind of place. But one thing is obvious: if something isn’t done, then it’s going to be catastrophic.’

‘It is catastrophic,’ said Dorothy, firmly taking her position. ‘The other children…they’re suffering. You’re so involved with it, girl, that you don’t see it.’

‘Look,’ said David, impatient and angry because he could not stand this, fibres tangled with Harriet, with his parents, being tugged and torn. ‘Look, I agree. And some time Harriet is going to have to agree. And as far as I am concerned, that time is now. I don’t think I can stick it any longer.’ And now he did look at his wife, and it was a pleading, suffering look. Please, he was saying to Harriet. Please.

‘Very well,’ said Harriet. ‘If some place can be found that…’ And she began to cry.

Ben came in from the garden and stood watching them, in his usual position, which was apart from everyone else. He wore brown dungarees and a brown shirt, both in strong material. Everything he wore had to be thick, because he tore his clothes, destroyed them. With his yellowish stubbly low-growing hair, his stony unblinking eyes, his stoop, his feet planted apart and his knees bent, his clenched held-forward fists, he seemed more than ever like a gnome.

‘She is crying,’ he remarked, of his mother. He took a piece of bread off the table and went out.

‘All right,’ said Harriet, ‘what are you going to tell them?’

‘Leave it to us,’ said Frederick.

‘Yes,’ said Molly.

‘My God!’ said Angela, with a kind of bitter appreciation of them. ‘Sometimes when I’m with you, I understand everything about this country.’

‘Thank you,’ said Molly.

‘Thank you,’ said Frederick.

‘You aren’t being fair, girl,’ said Dorothy.

‘Fair,’ said Angela, and Harriet, and Sarah, her daughters, almost all at once.

And then everyone but Harriet laughed. In this way was Ben’s fate decided.

A few days later, Frederick rang to say that a place had been found and a car was coming for Ben. At once. Tomorrow.

Harriet was frantic: the haste of it, the – yes, ruthlessness! And the doctor who had authorized this? Or would? A doctor who had not even seen Ben? She said all this to David, and knew from his manner that a good deal had gone on behind her back. His parents had talked to him at his office. David had said something like ‘Yes, I’ll see to it’ when Molly, whom suddenly Harriet hated, had said, ‘You’ll have to be firm with Harriet.’

‘It’s either him or us,’ said David to Harriet. He added, his voice full of cold dislike for Ben, ‘He’s probably just dropped in from Mars. He’s going back to report on what he’s found down here.’ He laughed – cruelly, it seemed to Harriet, who was silently taking in the fact – which of course she had half known already – that Ben was not expected to live long in this institution, whatever it was.

‘He’s a little child,’ she said, ‘He’s our child.’

‘No, he’s not,’ said David, finally. ‘Well, he certainly isn’t mine.’

They were in the living-room. Children’s voices rose sharp and distant from the dark winter garden. On the same impulse, David and Harriet went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. The garden held dim shapes of tree and shrub, but the light from this warm room reached across the lawn to a shrub that was starkly black with winter, lit twiggy growths that showed a glitter of water, and illuminated the white trunk of a birch. Two small figures, indistinguishably unisex in their many-coloured padded jackets, trousers, woollen caps, emerged from the black under a holly thicket, and came forward. They were Helen and Luke, on some adventure. Both held sticks and were prodding them here and there into last year’s leaves.

‘Here it is!’ Helen’s voice rose in triumph, and the parents saw, emerging into the light on the end of the stick, the summer’s lost red-and-yellow plastic ball. It was dirtied and squashed, but whole. The two children began a fast stamping dance around and around, the rescued ball held aloft in triumph. Then, suddenly, for no obvious reason, they came racing up to the french doors. The parents sat down on a sofa, facing the doors, which burst inwards, and there they were, two slight, elegant little creatures, with flaring red, frost-burned cheeks and eyes full of the excitements of the dark wilderness they had been part of. They stood breathing heavily, their eyes slowly adjusting to reality, the warm, lit family room and their parents sitting there looking at them. For a moment it was the meeting of two alien forms of life: the children had been part of some old savagery, and their blood still pounded with it; but now they had to let their wild selves go away while they rejoined their family. Harriet and David shared this with them, were with them in imagination and in memory, from their own childhoods: they could see themselves clearly, two adults, sitting there, tame, domestic, even pitiable in their distance from wildness and freedom.

Seeing their parents there alone, no other children around, and above all, no Ben, Helen came to her father, Luke to his mother, and Harriet and David embraced their two adventurous little children, their children, holding them tight.

Next morning the car, which was a small black van, came for Ben. Harriet had known it was coming, because David had not gone to work. He had stayed so as to ‘handle’ her! David went upstairs, and brought down suitcases and holdalls that he had packed quietly while she was giving the children breakfast.

He flung these into the van. Then, his face set hard, so that Harriet hardly knew him, he picked Ben up from where he sat on the floor in the living-room, carried him to the van, and put him in. Then he came fast to Harriet, with the same hard set face, and put his arm around her, turned her away from the sight of the van, which was already on its way (she could hear yells and shouts coming from inside it), and took her to the sofa, where – still holding her tight – he said, over and over again, ‘We have to do it, Harriet. We have to.’ She was weeping with the shock of it, and with relief, and with gratitude to him, who was taking all the responsibility.

When the children came home, they were told Ben had gone to stay with someone.

‘With Granny?’ asked Helen, anxious.

‘No.’

Four pairs of suspicious, apprehensive eyes became suddenly full of relief. Hysterical relief. The children danced about, unable to help themselves, and then pretended it was a game they had thought up then and there.

At supper they were overbright, giggling, hysterical. But in a quiet moment Jane asked shrilly, ‘Are you going to send us away, too?’ She was a stolid, quiet little girl, Dorothy in miniature, never saying anything unnecessary. But now her large blue eyes were fixed in terror on her mother’s face.

‘No, of course we aren’t,’ said David, sounding curt.

Luke explained, ‘They are sending Ben away because he isn’t really one of us.’

In the days that followed, the family expanded like paper flowers in water. Harriet understood what a burden Ben had been, how he had oppressed them all, how much the children had suffered; knew that they had talked about it much more than the parents had wanted to know, had tried to come to terms with Ben. But now Ben was gone their eyes shone, they were full of high spirits, and they kept coming to Harriet with little gifts of a sweet or a toy, ‘This is for you, Mummy.’ Or they rushed up to kiss her, or stroke her face, or nuzzle to her like happy calves or foals. And David took days off from work to be with them all – to be with her. He was careful with her, tender. As if I were ill, she decided rebelliously. Of course she thought all the time of Ben, who was a prisoner somewhere. What kind of a prisoner? She pictured the little black van, remembered his cries of rage as he was taken away.

The days went by, and normality filled the house. Harriet heard the children talking about the Easter holidays. ‘It will be all right now that Ben isn’t here,’ said Helen.

They had always understood so much more than she had wanted to acknowledge.

While she was part of the general relief, and could hardly believe she had been able to stand such strain, and for so long, she could not banish Ben from her mind. It was not with love, or even affection, that she thought of him, and she disliked herself for not being able to find one little spark of normal feeling: it was guilt and horror that kept her awake through the nights. David knew she was awake, though she did try to hide it.

Then one morning she started up out of sleep, out of a bad dream, though she did not know what, and she said, ‘I’m going to see what they are doing to Ben.’

David opened his eyes, and lay silent, staring over his arm at the window. He had been dozing, not asleep. She knew he had feared this, and there was something about him then that said to her: Right, then that’s it, it’s enough.

‘David, I’ve got to.’

‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘I simply have to.’

Again she knew from the way he lay there, not looking at her, and did not say anything more than that one syllable, that it was bad for her, that he was making decisions as he lay there. He stayed where he was for a few minutes, and then got out of bed, and went out of the room and downstairs.

When she had got her clothes on, she rang Molly, who was at once coldly angry. ‘No, I’m not going to tell you where it is. Now you’ve done it, then leave it alone.’

But at last she did give Harriet the address.

Again Harriet was wondering why she was always treated like a criminal. Ever since Ben was born it’s been like this, she thought. Now it seemed to her the truth, that everyone had silently condemned her. I have suffered a misfortune, she told herself; I haven’t committed a crime.

Ben had been taken to a place in the North of England; it would be four or five hours’ drive – perhaps more, if she was unlucky with traffic. There was bad traffic, and she drove through grey wintry rain. It was early afternoon when she approached a large solid building of dark stone, in a valley high among moors she could hardly see for grey drifting rain. The place stood square and upright among dismal dripping evergreens, and its regular windows, three rows of them, were barred.

She entered a small entrance lobby that had a handwritten card tacked on the inner door: ‘Ring for Attendance.’ She rang, and waited, and nothing happened. Her heart was beating. She still surged with the adrenalin that had given her the impetus to come, but the long drive had subdued her, and this oppressive building was telling her nerves, if not her intelligence – for, after all, she had no facts to go on – that what she had feared was true. Yet she did not know exactly what that was. She rang again. The building was silent: she could hear the shrill of a bell a long way off in its interior. Again, nothing, and she was about to go around to the back when the door abruptly opened to show a slatternly girl wearing jerseys, cardigans, and a thick scarf. She had a pale little face under a mass of curly yellow hair that had a blue ribbon holding a queue like a sheep’s tail. She seemed tired.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

Harriet saw, understanding what this meant, that people simply did not come here.

She said, already stubborn, ‘I’m Mrs Lovatt and I’ve come to see my son.’

It was evident that these were words this institution, whatever it was, did not expect to meet.

The girl stared, gave an involuntary little shake of the head that expressed incapacity, and then said, ‘Dr MacPherson isn’t here this week.’ She was Scottish, too, and her accent was strong.

‘Someone must be deputizing for him,’ said Harriet decisively.

The girl fell back before Harriet’s manner, smiling uncertainly, and very worried. She muttered, ‘Wait here, then,’ and went inside. Harriet followed her before the big door was shut to exclude her. The girl did glance around, as if she planned to say, You must wait outside, but instead she said, ‘I’ll fetch someone,’ and went on into the dark caverns of a corridor that had small ceiling lights all along it, hardly disturbing the gloom. There was a smell of disinfectant. Absolute silence. No, after a time Harriet became aware of a high thin screaming that began, and stopped, and went on again, coming from the back of the building.

Nothing happened. Harriet went out into the vestibule, which was already darkening with the approaching night. The rain was now a cold deluge, silent and regular. The moors had disappeared.

She rang again, decisively, and returned to the corridor.

Two figures appeared, a long way off under the pinpoints of the ceiling lights, and came towards her. A young man, in a white coat that was not clean, was followed by the girl, who now had a cigarette in her mouth and was screwing up her eyes from the smoke. Both looked tired and uncertain.

He was an ordinary young man, though worn down in a general way; taken bit by bit, hands, face, eyes, he was unremarkable, but there was something desperate about him, as if he contained anger, or hopelessness.

‘You can’t be here,’ he said, in a flurried indecisive way. ‘We don’t have visiting days here.’ His voice was South London, flat and nasal.

‘But I am here,’ said Harriet. ‘I am here to see my son Ben Lovatt.’

And suddenly he took in a breath, and looked at the girl, who pursed her lips together and raised her eyebrows.

‘Listen,’ said Harriet. ‘I don’t think you understand. I’m not just going away, you know. I’ve come to see my son, and that is what I am going to do.’

He knew she meant it. He slowly nodded, as if saying, Yes, but that isn’t the point. He was looking hard at her. She was being given a warning, and from someone who was taking the responsibility for it. He might be a rather pitiable young man, and certainly an overtired and inadequately fed one, doing this job because he could not get another, but the weight of his position – the unhappy weight of it – was speaking through him, and his expression and his reddened, smoke-tired eyes were severe, authoritative, to be taken seriously.

‘When people dump their kids here, they don’t come and see them after,’ he said.

‘You see, you don’t understand at all,’ said the girl.

Harriet heard herself explode with ‘I’m sick of being told I don’t understand this and that. I’m the child’s mother. I’m Ben Lovatt’s mother. Do you understand that?’

Suddenly they were all three together in understanding, even in desperate acceptance of some kind of general fatality.

He nodded, and said, ‘Well, I’ll go and see…’

‘And I am coming, too,’ she said.

This really did alert him. ‘Oh no,’ he exclaimed, ‘You are not!’ He said something to the girl, who began running surprisingly fast down the corridor. ‘You stay here,’ he said to Harriet, and strode after the girl.

Harriet saw the girl turn right and disappear, and without thinking she opened a door at her right hand. She saw the young man’s arm raised in imprecation, or warning, while what was behind that door reached her.

She was at the end of a long ward, which had any number of cots and beds along the walls. In the cots were – monsters. While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body…then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs…a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting – a doll with chalky swollen limbs, its eyes wide and blank, like blue ponds, and its mouth open, showing a swollen little tongue. A lanky boy was skewed, one half of his body sliding from the other. A child seemed at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her. Rows of freaks, nearly all asleep, and all silent. They were literally drugged out of their minds. Well, nearly silent: there was a dreary sobbing from a cot that had its sides shielded with blankets. The high intermittent screaming, nearer now, still assaulted her nerves. A smell of excrement, stronger than the disinfectant. Then she was out of the nightmare ward and in another corridor, parallel to the one she had first seen, and identical. At its end she saw the girl, followed by the young man, come a little way towards her and then again turn right…Harriet ran fast, hearing her feet thud on the boards, and turned where they did, and was in a tiny room holding trolleys of medicines and drugs. She ran through this and was now in a long cement-floored passage that had doors with inspection grilles in them all along the wall facing her. The young man and the girl were opening one of these doors as she arrived beside them. All three were breathing heavily.

‘Shit,’ said the young man, meaning her being there.

‘Literally,’ said Harriet as the door opened on a square room whose walls were of white shiny plastic that was buttoned here and there and looked like fake expensive leather upholstery. On the floor, on a green foam-rubber mattress, lay Ben. He was unconscious. He was naked, inside a strait-jacket. His pale yellow tongue protruded from his mouth. His flesh was dead white, greenish. Everything – walls, the floor, and Ben – was smeared with excrement. A pool of dark yellow urine oozed from the pallet which was soaked.

‘I told you not to come!’ shouted the young man. He took Ben’s shoulders and the girl Ben’s feet. From the way they touched the child, Harriet saw they were not brutal; that was not the point at all. They lifted Ben thus – for in this way they had to touch very little of him – out of this room, along the corridor a little way, and through another door. She followed, and stood watching. This was a room that had sinks all along one wall, an immense bath, and a sloping cement shelf with plugs all along it. They put Ben on this shelf, unwound the strait-jacket, and, having adjusted the temperature of the water, began washing him down with a hose that was attached to one of the taps. Harriet leaned against the wall, watching. She was shocked to the point where she felt nothing at all. Ben did not move. He lay like a drowned fish on the slab, was turned over several times by the girl, when the young man interrupted the hosing process for the purpose, and was finally carried by them both to another slab, where they dried him and then took a clean strait-jacket from a pile and put it on him.

‘Why?’ demanded Harriet, fierce. They did not answer.

They took the child, trussed, unconscious, his tongue lolling, out of the room, down the corridor, and into another room that had a cement shelf like a bed in it. They put Ben on it, and then both stood up and sighed: ‘Phew.’

‘Well, there he is,’ said the young man. He stood for a moment, eyes closed, recovering from the ordeal, and then lit a cigarette. The girl put out her hand for one; he gave it to her. They stood smoking, looking at Harriet in an exhausted, defeated way.

She did not know what to say. Her heart was hurting as it would for one of her own, real children, for Ben looked more ordinary than she had ever seen him, with those hard cold alien eyes of his closed. Pathetic: she had never seen him as pathetic before.

‘I think I’ll take him home,’ she said.

‘It’s up to you,’ said the young man shortly.

The girl was looking curiously at Harriet, as if she were part of the phenomenon that was Ben, of the same nature. She asked, ‘What are you going to do with him?’ She added, and Harriet recognized fear in her voice, ‘He’s so strong – I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘None of us have seen anything like it,’ said the young man.

‘Where are his clothes?’

Now he laughed, scornful, and said, ‘You’re going to put his clothes on and take him home, just like that?’

‘Why not? He was wearing clothes when he came.’

The two attendants – nurses, orderlies, whatever they were – exchanged looks. Then both took a drag on their cigarettes.

He said, ‘I don’t think you understand, Mrs Lovatt. How far have you got to go, for a start?’

‘Four or five hours’ driving.’

He laughed again, at the impossibility of it – of her, Harriet – and said, ‘He’s going to come round on the journey, and then what?’

‘Well, he’ll see me,’ she said, and saw from their faces that she was being stupid. ‘All right, then, what do you advise?’

‘Wrap him in a couple of blankets, over the strait-jacket,’ said the girl.

‘And then drive like hell,’ he said.

The three now stood in silence, looking at each other, a long, sober look.

‘You try doing this job,’ said the girl suddenly, full of rage against fate. ‘You just try it. Well, I’m leaving at the end of this month.’

‘And so am I, no one sticks it longer than a few weeks,’ said the man.

‘All right,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m not going to complain, or anything.’

‘You’ll have to sign a form. We have to be covered,’ he said.

But they could not easily find the form. At last, after a lot of rummaging about in a filing cabinet, they produced a slip of paper, mimeographed years ago, that said Harriet acquitted the institution of all responsibility.

Now she picked Ben up, touching him for the first time. He was deadly cold. He lay heavy in her arms, and she understood the words ‘a dead weight’.

She went out into the corridor, saying, ‘I’m not going through that ward again.’

‘Who could blame you?’ said the young man, wearily sarcastic. He had got hold of a load of blankets, and they wrapped Ben in two, carried him out to the car, laid him on the back seat, and piled more blankets over him. Only his face showed.

She stood with the two young people by the car. They could hardly see each other. Apart from the car lights, and the lights of the building, it was dark. Water squelched under foot. The young man took out of his overall pocket, a plastic package containing a syringe, a couple of needles, and some ampules.

‘You had better take these,’ he said.

Harriet hesitated, and the girl said, ‘Mrs Lovatt, I don’t think you realize – ’

She nodded, took the package, got in.

‘You can give him up to four shots a day, no more,’ said the young man.

As she was about to let the clutch pedal out, she asked, ‘Tell me, how long do you think he would have lasted?’

Their faces were white patches in the gloom, but she could see that he shook his head, turning away. The girl’s voice came: ‘None of them last long. But this one…he’s very strong. He’s the strongest any of us have seen.’

‘Which means he would have lasted longer?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, that’s not it at all. Because he’s so strong, he fights all the time, and so he has to have bigger shots. It kills them.’

‘All right,’ said Harriet. ‘Well, thank you both.’

They stood watching as she drove off, but almost at once vanished into the wet dark. As she rounded the drive, she saw them standing in the dimly lit porch, close together, as if reluctant to go in.

She drove as fast as she could through the wintry rain, avoiding the main roads, keeping an eye on the heap of blankets behind her. About half-way home she saw the blankets heave and convulse, and Ben woke with a bellow of rage, and thrashed about, landing on the floor of the car, where he began to scream, not like the thin high automatic screaming she had heard at the institution but screams of fear that vibrated through her. She stuck it out for half an hour, feeling the thuds that Ben made vibrate through the car. She was looking for a lay-by that had no other car in it, and when she found one, she stopped, let the engine run, and took out the syringe. She knew how to use it, from some illness of the other children. She broke open the capsule, which had no brand name on it, and filled the syringe. Then she leaned over the back of the seat. Ben, naked except for the strait-jacket, and blue with cold, was heaving and struggling and bellowing. His eyes looked up at her in a glare of hate. He didn’t recognize her, she thought. She did not dare unwind the jacket. She was afraid of injecting him anywhere near his neck. At last she managed to grab, and hold, an ankle, jabbed the needle into the lower part of his calf, and waited until he went limp: it took a few moments. What was this stuff?

Again she put him on the back seat under the blankets, and now she drove on the main roads home. She got there at about eight. The children would be sitting around the kitchen table. And David would be with them: he would not have gone to work.

With Ben a mound of blankets in her arms, his face covered, she went into the living-room, and looked over the low wall to where they all sat around the big table. Luke. Helen. Jane. Little Paul. And David, his face set and angry. And very tired.

She remarked, ‘They were killing him,’ and saw that David would not forgive her for saying this in front of the children. All showed fear.

She went straight up the stairs to the big bedroom, and through it to ‘the baby’s room’, and put Ben on the bed. He was waking up. And then it began, the fighting, the heaving, the screaming. Again he was on the floor, rolling around on it; and again he flexed and bent and thrashed, and his eyes were pure hate.

She could not take off the strait-jacket.

She went down into the kitchen, and got milk and biscuits while her family sat and watched her in total silence.

Ben’s screams and struggling were shaking the house.

‘The police will be here,’ said David.

‘Keep them quiet,’ she commanded, and went up with the food.

When Ben saw what she held, he became silent and still, and his eyes were avid. She lifted him like a mummy, put the cup of milk to his lips, and he almost drowned as he gulped: he was starving. She fed him bits of biscuit, keeping her fingers clear of his teeth. When what she had brought was finished, he began roaring and flailing again. She gave him another jab.

The children were in front on the television, but were not watching it. Jane and Paul were crying. David sat at the table with his head in his hands. She said softly, for him to hear, ‘All right, I am a criminal. But they were murdering him.’

He did not move. She had her back to him. She did not want to see his face.

She said, ‘He would have been dead in a few months. Weeks, probably.’ A silence. At last she turned. She could hardly bear to look at him. He looked ill, but that was not it…

She said, ‘I couldn’t stand it.’

He said deliberately, ‘I thought that was the idea.’

She cried out, ‘Yes, but you didn’t see it, you didn’t see –!’

‘I was careful not to see,’ he said. ‘What did you suppose was going to happen? That they were going to turn him into some well-adjusted member of society and then everything would be lovely?’ He was jeering at her, but it was because his throat was stiff with tears.

Now they looked at each other, long, hard, seeing everything about each other. She thought, All right, he was right, and I was wrong. But it’s done.

She said aloud, ‘All right, but it’s done.’

‘That’s the mot juste, I think.’

She sat down beside the children on the sofa. Now she saw they all had tear-stained faces. She could not touch them to comfort them, because it was she who made them cry.

When she at last said ‘Bed,’ they all got up at once and went, without looking at her.

She took supplies of suitable food for Ben up to the big bedroom. David had moved his things to another room.

When Ben woke towards morning and began his roaring, she fed him, and drugged him.

She gave the children breakfast as always, and tried to be normal. They tried, too. No one mentioned Ben.

When David came down, she said, ‘Please take them to school.’

Then the house had only her and Ben in it. When he woke, she fed him but did not drug him. He roared and struggled, but, she thought, much less.

In a lull, when he seemed worn out, she said, ‘Ben, you are at home, not in that place.’ He was listening.

‘When you stop making all that noise, I’ll take you out of that thing they put you in.’

It was too soon, he began struggling again. Through his screams she heard voices, and went to the banisters. David had not gone to his office, had stayed home to help her. Two young policewomen stood there, and David was talking to them. They went away.

What had they been told? She did not ask.

Towards the time the children were due home, she said to Ben, ‘I want you to be quiet now, Ben. The other children will be here and you’ll frighten them screaming like that.’

He became quiet: it was exhaustion.

He was on the floor, which was by now streaked with excrement. She carried him to the bathroom, took off the jacket, put him in the bath and washed him, and saw that he was shuddering with terror: he had not always been unconscious when they washed him in that place. She took him back to the bed, and said, ‘If you start all that again, then I’m going to have to put that thing back on you.”

He ground his teeth at her, his eyes blazing. But he was afraid, too. She was going to have to control him through fear.

She cleaned his room while he lay moving his arms about, as if he had forgotten how to do it. He had been in that cloth prison, probably, ever since he had been in the institution.

Then he squatted on his bed, moving his arms and staring around his room, recognizing it, and her, at last.

He said, ‘Open the door.’

She said, ‘No, not until I am sure you will behave well.’

He was about to start again, but she shouted at him, ‘Ben, I mean it! You shout and scream and I’ll tie you up.’

He controlled himself. She handed him sandwiches, which he crammed into his mouth, choking.

He had unlearned all the basic social skills that it had been so hard to teach him.

She talked quietly while he ate. ‘And now listen to me, Ben. You have to listen. You behave well and everything will be all right. You must eat properly. You must use the pot or got to the lavatory. And you mustn’t scream and fight.’ She was not sure he heard her. She repeated it. She went on repeating it.

That evening she stayed with Ben, and she did not see the other children at all. David went up to the other room away from her. How she felt at this time was that she was shielding them from Ben while she re-educated him for family life. But how they felt it, she knew, was that she had turned her back on them all and chosen to go off into alien country, with Ben.

That night she locked the door on him, and bolted it, left him undrugged and hoped he would sleep. He did, but woke, screaming in fear. She went in to him, and found him backed against the wall at the end of the bed, an arm up over his face, unable to hear her, while she talked, and talked, using reasonable persuasive words against this storm of terror. At last he became quiet and she gave him food. He could not get enough food: he had really been starving. They had had to keep him drugged, and, when drugged, he could not eat.

Fed, he again backed himself against the wall, squatted on the bed, and looked at the door where his jailers would enter: he had not really understood he was at home.

Copyright

Fourth Estate

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HarperCollinsPublishers Limited

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A Flamingo Modern Classic 2002

Previously published in paperback by

Triad Grafton 1979 and Flamingo 1994

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1978

‘Twenty Years’ first published in 1994 in the Daily Telegraph

Copyright © Doris Lessing 1953, 1954, 1957, 1963, 1969,

1971, 1972, 1994

This edition copyright © Doris Lessing 2002

Preface copyright © Doris Lessing 1994

Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

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EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007322275

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