Brief Lives (22 page)

‘I’ll go now,’ I said to Julia, not expecting her to protest.

She turned to me, her eyelids raised.

‘Did you say you had brought some food?’ she asked.

‘A lovely rice salad,’ said Maureen.

‘I see. Not a dish I normally like. Never mind, it won’t hurt me for once. You might just put some on a plate and bring it in.’

I BECAME NERVOUS
now in the evenings, particularly when rain threatened, as it did frequently after the hectically bright days of late April. Standing at my window I would nervously count the hours that remained before I could go to bed. There was nothing to stop me, of course, but I felt unwillingly expectant from about five o’clock onwards, as if someone were due to look in and ask me how I had spent my day, or perhaps in the hopes that such a person would arise. I knew no one like that; I was generally judged old enough to look after myself, but not yet old enough to require care or at least a cheerful enquiry from time to time. Eventually I would become an object of pity, if I were lucky enough not to become an object of derision, one of those mad old women in broken shoes who mutter to themselves in public places. Whenever I thought of women like this I would take a deep breath and pull in my stomach. Even standing at the window became an improving exercise, and any uncertainty I felt almost benign. But
it was an anxious time, and nothing seemed to allay my uneasiness. As the light faded, and it took longer to do so in the lengthening spring days, I would scan the street for signs of life, watch the hairdresser over the way locking up for the night, hear the home-going traffic in the distance, and reflect with sadness that the children would all be gathered safely in, watching television, and that none would pass my window, waving, as they sometimes did.

I no longer liked the flat, which had always seemed to me appropriate rather than endearing. I disliked the orange street lamp outside the window and the dark lake of grey carpet; I disliked the brilliantly lit bathroom, and the bedroom from which the sun was always absent. The liver-coloured exterior, the clammy tiled entrance hall now filled me with dread as I returned with my shopping, but this may have been because I always returned too early for my liking, having mentally seen the children off to school. The whole blank morning stretched before me, and yet the mornings were not as bad as the unforgiving evenings, when I longed for the sound of a friendly step turning in towards my doorway. Oddly enough it was not Charlie that I missed, but rather the person for whom Charlie had always been a substitute, whoever he was. Charlie had been, and had remained, too clandestine for comfort: his fine smile had concealed a certain brutality, so that the agreeable and no doubt authentic face that he presented to the outside world, to his colleagues, his associates, his clients, and of course his wife, would be revealed to me as false, for I would see the grinning face of desire, the face that would be easily relinquished and left behind, as he resumed the easy lineaments of his superior and public self. I did not want this back. I was tired of, even disgusted with, my role in this matter, for it was only with my collusion that certain pretexts could be
acted upon, and although I knew that desire had been authoritative, even if the relationship had been rudimentary, I renounced it all in the name of a virtue which would in any event soon be imposed on me by age and which I now embraced with the fervour of a convert.

The irony of the situation was that it had been quite foreign to my nature. I was not born to be a mistress; I doubted if I was even born to be a wife. In my own mind I existed as a hopeful adolescent in a tight-waisted cotton frock, practising my scales, or as a young girl, singing all those touching old songs with dedication but without sorrow. Maybe, like Julia, I should never have left my mother. I am aware that no woman of any sense thinks like this today, but, perhaps because of recent experiences, because of the disappointment I was bound to register with my life, I had to confess to feelings of longing for earlier days, days of confidence and high expectation before the realities of life closed in. From those early days I had retained my disastrous simple-mindedness, which guaranteed that I should do the wrong thing, know the wrong people, enter into associations through sheer ignorance, and be forever haunted by the outcome. Women of sixty—nearly sixty-one—are supposed to be experienced, prudent, tough, yet I felt as wistful as I had always done since I had left girlhood. It was this wistfulness that would descend on me in the early evenings, when I stood at the window, my hands idle, and listened for that imagined friendly step. When the street lamp came on, later and later now, it was my signal to turn away in despair, like Mariana in the moated grange. ‘ “He cometh not,” she said.’ Yet there was a measure of relief in the knowledge that no concealment would be necessary. I need never draw my curtains now.

So peculiarly distressing were these evenings that when
Paul and Caroline Langdon invited me to one of their dinner parties in Gertrude Street I accepted without hesitation. They were a pleasant couple, with whom I had remained on distant but friendly terms. They had been generous with invitations, but had taken my refusal to be reclusion after Owen’s death or a general reluctance to visit my old home again. Caroline was a good woman, punctilious with Christmas cards containing family news and signed by all the children, although we were no relation to each other and had so very little in common. I sometimes saw her in the local greengrocer’s, a tall thin woman with an interesting melancholy face, which was quite misleading for she was habitually cheerful. She would be dressed in a ruffle-necked blouse, a long bright skirt and a suede waistcoat: work-worn hands, adorned with two splendid diamond rings, would grasp the six carrier bags containing provisions for the evening’s dinner, for she liked to entertain at home, and managed it all quite effortlessly, as well as teaching deaf children, running a house in the Dordogne, and skiing with her husband every February.

She was obviously just back from the annual trip to Villars when I met her, for her face and hands were brown and her hair long and lank. The usual amalgamation of shopping bags was grouped around her ankles as her large and bony hands selected oranges and cradled chilly nests of grapes. ‘Please do not touch’, said a notice, but Caroline was tolerated as a particularly splendid type of local womanhood. ‘Hello, Fay,’ she said, flashing her tired smile. ‘Keeping well?’ ‘I’m fine, dear, thank you,’ I replied. ‘And you? Paul and the children?’ ‘Yes, we’re okay, much better now that the two big ones are away at college. Only William at home now. You must come round and see us, Fay. I’ll give you a ring,’ she shouted as she negotiated the door with all her
plastic bags. She wore large flat shoes on her stockingless brown feet. I was glad to see her, as I was always glad to see anyone who accepted me at face value in those days, although she made me feel prim and elderly in my blue tweed coat, with the pink scarf at the neck. Even the thought of her busy life gave me pleasure, as I turned with a sigh to buy the pint of milk and the lettuce and half-pound of tomatoes that constituted my own meagre shopping.

I rarely cooked for myself these days, which was a pity, for I had always enjoyed it. The preparation of food seemed to me to be of worth only if one could provide it for others, which I did, in a sense, but not in any sense of which I could approve. Vinnie picked malevolently at what was on her plate, managing to spoil the food without actually consuming much of it, while Julia deplored whatever I took round to her, although I noticed that it all disappeared. Maybe Maureen ate it. It hardly mattered; its function, for me, was automatically lessened by the mere fact that only an irritable conscience had spurred me into what had originally been a gesture and now seemed to have become an obligation. And so when, contrary to all expectations, Caroline did telephone and invite me to dinner, I astonished her by accepting. To be treated as a guest, and to be out of the flat for the entire evening, suddenly seemed the most desirable thing in the world. I had a long black silk skirt which I had hardly worn, and a white silk blouse with a high neck and full sleeves. I had my hair done, and felt as excited as a girl at the prospect of being treated like a real person, by kind young people who had no reason to denigrate or to distrust me. I believe, in fact, that they remained eternally grateful to me for letting them have the house, into which they all fitted comfortably, as though they had been designed for it, or it for them. When I looked back on my own uneasy days
there I could only congratulate myself on having done at least one thing right.

But I felt nervous just the same, my social muscles all unused. Also unused were my reactions to the pleasantries of men met on such occasions, for I did not doubt that Caroline, who was correct to her very fingertips, would have invited someone suitable as my partner. I felt the lack of such a partner very forcibly as I made my way, in my narrow shoes, through the blue evening to Gertrude Street. I felt something of my original unhappiness—which I now recognized as such—as I approached the house and felt the peculiar quietness of the landlocked street descend on me. Men in pinstriped trousers were locking their cars for the night and going in to the dinner parties that their wives had no doubt arranged, for this was the sort of urban landscape in which dinner parties were a twice-weekly affair. No children played in the street. Basement kitchens were brightly lit; television sets banished to nurseries or master bedrooms. The house looked to me as uncomfortable as it had always done, but now at least it was convincingly populated. I had been wrong for it, inadequate, seeking to fill the house with my own girlhood dreams, whereas what was demanded of me was an altogether adult appreciation of my duties and a perception of the demeanour that a man like my husband would have chosen for his wife. I had given dinner parties but I had not enjoyed them, had thought Owen’s guests either too dull or wholly unsuitable. I had always hoped for much more than those occasions seemed to deliver.

As I stepped inside the house I noticed with a pang, but a pang of deliverance, that the old harsh colours were still in place. ‘Not that we like them,’ Caroline had said. ‘But those papers will last for ever. She had them specially made,
you know, Hermione, I mean. Hideous, but wonderful quality. At least we’ve obliterated all the decoration in our bathroom, all that fake Rex Whistler stuff. You don’t mind, do you Fay?’ ‘My dear,’ I had told her. ‘The house is yours. I said goodbye to it when Owen died. Do whatever you please.’ I had left the furniture there as well, and I think that they were happy with it. As I made my way into the drawing-room I greeted various chairs and tables as if we were old friends at a memorial service.

To my surprise the man who rose from his chair and held out his hand was the doctor who had treated me for whatever had been wrong with me a few months earlier. ‘Do you know Alan Carter, Fay?’ asked Caroline. ‘Only professionally,’ I said, giving him my hand. ‘And are you better?’ he asked, peering into my face with what seemed a worried look. I had noticed that he appeared excessively worried for a doctor, as if he himself, unlike most doctors, were subject to the ills of the flesh. This reassured me. I thought the ideal doctor should be a bit of a hypochondriac, ready to test his own remedies, or, better still, having already tested them.

‘Really better?’ he asked, taking my hand in both of his.

‘But you mustn’t ask me that,’ I said. ‘Or rather I mustn’t tell you. If I want to tell you how I am I should make an appointment.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. I can hardly sit down to a meal these days without someone telling me about their back. Headaches are commonplace. “I suppose it’s a virus,” they say. I’ve even had bunions: would I recommend the operation? I was eating smoked salmon at the time, I remember. It tends to ruin one’s dinner.’

‘You must be very susceptible. I thought doctors were made of iron. One thinks of riotous medical students.’

‘Youth, you know. Not that I ever rioted. And I was ill
an awful lot as a child. After that one becomes more wary of it.’

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘dealing with illness must be something of a trial for you.’

‘It’s got better, actually. Illnesses can be treated, you know. I think I can just about manage it now. I remember you,’ he went on. ‘You were Fay Dodworth, weren’t you?’

I blushed with pleasure. ‘How did you know?’

‘Oh, you haven’t changed all that much. I used to listen to you when I was in the army, doing my National Service. We all did. It was a lovely voice, but why were the songs so sad?’

‘I didn’t know how sad they were at the time. I was young, you see; nothing had happened to me then. It’s strange how the words come back to me now.’

‘Fay, do you know the Finlays?’ Caroline asked. ‘Alison and Richard? And Louisa and Anthony Cope? Fay Langdon, our cousin by marriage.’

I thought that was nice of her, as it was nice of her to keep the party small and manageable. I exchanged a few remarks with the Copes and the Finlays, and I was glad that I had taken a certain amount of trouble with my appearance, as the wives were resplendently dressed, with pearl chokers and tiny diamond earrings, but my attention was monopolized by Dr Carter, who now had me by the arm, as if he were shepherding me to a safer place. ‘I really am most tremendously hungry,’ he said in a confidential tone of voice. ‘I do hope the pleasantries will not be unduly extended. I like to eat early and then go home and play the piano. It’s the only chance I get.’