Brief Lives (4 page)

It was four o’clock in the afternoon and she was drinking gin. She looked as if she had taken up residence in her dark blue button-backed chair for the evening, although I was to learn that she was rarely in, but, rather like my father, went out to play cards—in her case bridge—in one or other of the Swan Court flats, which seemed an ideal haven for widowers and divorcees of a gin-drinking and bridge-playing kind. Their games could, and did, go on uninterrupted by any domestic obligations, for there was a restaurant on the ground floor, and I believe one could even have food sent up, as if one were in an hotel. This suited Vinnie, who was incompetent on many levels. Her daily routine was to get up at about ten-thirty, smoke the first cigarette of the day, take a bath and dress, and then apply the heavy make-up, without which she looked like a seamed and battered twelve-year-old. She would eat lunch in the restaurant, take a short walk to buy gin and cigarettes, and then settle down in her sitting-room with a drink to await the daily visit of her son, whom she worshipped and indulged, as did every woman with whom he came into contact. After he had gone she would make a few telephone calls, heave herself from her chair, apply a new layer of powder, and take the lift to another flat for an evening of bridge.

This seemed to satisfy her perfectly. Her life, though restricted, had the merit of being self-contained, and apart from her painful love for her son she had no passions that could not be satisfied. If there were no food in the flat she did not eat. If she were extremely hungry, as I suppose she must have been from time to time, she simply turned up at the door of one of her bridge-playing friends—deeply enthusiastic
elderly men, women as distracted as she was herself—and plaintively demanded a cup of coffee. When I got to know her better I realized that she could eat for two days at a time. She was an opportunistic feeder, putting away amazing quantities of whatever happened to be around and then lapsing vaguely into her gin and cigarette routine until another meal happened to come her way. After I married Owen I got into the habit of taking food round to her flat, but she regarded this as insulting and left it in the fridge in the kitchen, to go bad. She preferred to drop into our house, poke around in the kitchen, and demolish two very large slices of apple tart if it happened to be on the table, swinging her tiny legs all the while and making up her face immediately afterwards. The adjusting of her curls under the spotted veil signified the end of the day’s ingestion of nourishment and the beginning of the evening’s entertainment.

At that first meeting she manifested a friendliness which facilitated conversation but did not entirely warm the atmosphere. She was not a disarming woman, although she was an accessible one; she gave the impression that she knew all about men, having discussed them at length with any number of women, but the tight mouth and the lonely eyes told another story. I later learned that she came from a family of runaway husbands: her own father had defaulted, before her husband, Henry Langdon, got himself mixed up with another woman, was forced to abandon his legal practice, and moved to southern Spain, where he still lived with his mistress, being neither sadder nor wiser for the experience. Mr Langdon was only mentioned swingeingly and with disgust, although Vinnie lived quite comfortably on the alimony he paid her, and had insisted that he abandon all claims to the marital home in Gertrude Street, where Owen
now lived, Vinnie having thankfully decamped to Swan Court and the eternal bridge game that was to be her only occupation. All this I learned much later. What impressed me straight away was the hunger with which she looked at her son, so much so that she paid me little attention, thinking, perhaps rightly, that I was one of many and would soon be discarded. Since she was clever enough to realize that Owen might be irritated and embarrassed by the intensity of her love she disguised it with a number of flirtatious routines. When she left the room she would pause in the doorway, kick one leg back behind her, and, with a radiant smile, say, ‘Don’t let them start without me. I’m just going to change.’ Five minutes later the lavatory would flush and she would be back, rubbing cream into her hands and twisting her rings back the right way.

I was intimidated by her at that first meeting, for I did not see how she could be anyone’s mother. She was unlike any mother I had known, my own mother being shy and self-effacing, and Mrs Savage, Millie’s mother, who came down from Manchester from time to time, being a charming highly coloured woman, with her daughter’s lovely smile, who would give us tips on how to make ourselves attractive to men, how to brighten our hair, where to wear scent, and so on. All of this we knew, of course, but we thought it generous of her to try to enter our world in this way. Moreover, Mrs Savage had a certain claim on our attention, for she made no secret of the fact that she was still deeply in love with Millie’s father, and several times we sent her home with new lipstick, or eye shadow that we had decided was the wrong colour, or, once, a pair of high-heeled sandals that I had bought and found uncomfortable. Mrs Savage had the good manners of the good-hearted. ‘Kind wishes to Mother,’ she said to me, after her first visit to the
flat, and later, never failed to send her her love, although they had only met once. ‘I’ll ring Isabel when I get home and tell her you’re all right,’ she would say, for by that time my mother would hardly leave her house. This was the centre of my unhappiness, but I tried to hide it, for I realized that it made the young men who took me out impatient. I would see her at the weekends and sometimes in the week as well, although my heart grew heavy as I reached the house. ‘Belle’, I called her now, as my father had done, but she looked at me as if I had committed a solecism, and turned away.

Through all the restrictions and the worry that my mother’s condition imposed on me my love for her grew, as, I think, did hers for me. This love was not a pleasure to either of us; it was, if anything, a burden. My mother felt it harnessed her to this world, which she tried so hard to ignore and which she was ready to leave, while to me it was the magnet that drew me unwillingly home, back to that narrow house and my mother’s almost noiseless footfall, and the cup of tea that she silently put before me, as if appeasing a stranger in some primitive ritual. She had grown thin and frail; when I took her in my arms I could feel her heart beating under her cardigan. I took to staying with her until she had got into bed, and then sitting with her while she drank the hot milk and honey that I brought her. She would relax and smile at me then, briefly reverting to the mother I had always known, and I would lay my cheek on her hand in relief and gratitude. ‘You go, dear,’ she would say, with something of a return to her old manner. ‘Mind you take a taxi, now.’ Five minutes later, looking for a taxi in the dark and empty street, I would be harassed and burdened once again.

Therefore I did not think I need take Vinnie seriously,
for she conformed to no idea of motherhood that I had ever entertained. Evidently she felt the same about me: I was not the sort of girl to wrest her son away from her, although a more enlightened mother might have noticed that he was in urgent need of being rescued. Handsome, spoilt, and apparently well-off, he had been one of the youngest Battle of Britain pilots, and the experience had made him so avid for excitement, yet at the same time so devoid of any motivation of his own, that he had had trouble settling down, had taken a long holiday from work after the war, and, only at the insistence of his father’s brother, had finished his interrupted law studies and eventually joined the firm in Hanover Square. Had I been more experienced I should have seen in him the makings of a rather brutal success; the word tycoon was not yet common in those days but now that I have survived him I realize that that was what he would have become had he lived into late middle age. There was a cynicism there that I could never understand. His mother, with her anxious eyes and fashionable legs, her gin and her dazzling dusty mirrors, understood it far too well. All I knew, at our first meeting, was that the hot sun brought out the smell of her scent,
Arpege
, with something older and more hidden underneath, and drove prisms of light from the mirrors into my eyes, giving me a migraine headache, the first one I had ever had. The idea that she might become my mother-in-law did not occur to me for a single second. While as far as Vinnie was concerned I was so far removed from what she considered to be suitable that I was dismissed out of hand.

And yet, with all this unsuitability being demonstrated, there was anxiety in the air. Both Vinnie and I knew that Owen’s emotions were in a tangled state and that he was both susceptible and on his guard, likely, in fact, to make
a reckless judgment and a wrong decision, or, worse, no decision at all, and become old, sitting with his mother in her little flat, drinking gin, for want of anything better to do. For Owen had been married, briefly, before, to the beautiful Hermione, who had left him for an American colonel with whom she had been having an affair about which Owen had known nothing. She had walked out of the house in Gertrude Street, on which she had lavished so much of Owen’s money (or rather Owen’s father’s money) and was currently in Orlando, Florida, still with the colonel, who was now something substantial in marinas. Hermione Langdon, as she was then, possessed suitability in abundance: she was striking, ‘amusing’, and had advanced ideas on interior decoration. When I first visited Owen’s house I had felt my eyes watering: she had done out the rooms in dark harsh colours, indigo, sage green, and the brooding red of claret. There was a large chandelier in each of the two rooms on the first floor, which opened out into each other. Everything was spotless, excessive, and chilly. Owen’s bed, which seemed to me twice the normal size, had a white satin coverlet with sculptured edges to match the white satin padded and buttoned bedhead. I did not see how any woman other than Hermione could sleep in such a bed; maybe that had been her intention. In any event, when I saw that bed I realized that Owen was not—could not be—for me.

Vinnie, after offering me gin, when I was badly in need of a cup of tea and an aspirin, asked me what I did. I told her that I sang, to which she replied, ‘Oh, how clever of you. All you girls do something these days. I never did. I was married practically from the cradle.’ Then she realized that she had uttered the word ‘married’, looked frightened, and changed the subject.

She feared that Owen would marry me, or the next girl he brought home, or the one after that. But I knew that he had no such intention, and, although I was hopelessly in love with him, I was almost reconciled to being forgotten once he had got tired of me. We had met at a party, to which I had not wanted to go. Millie dragged me there, and I felt tired and bad-tempered. Neither of us knew our host—a journalist—well, and we were intimidated by his flat, which seemed full of noisy, excitable and superior people. My first sight of Owen was prophetic: he was talking to a girl who had her back to the wall; he had one hand extended behind her, so that she was imprisoned by his arm beside her head. I registered a sort of antagonism at the same time as I caught my breath, for I had never seen such a beautiful man. He was tall and exceptionally graceful; his hair was longer than average, and he had a restless fatigued expression, which I later came to identify as boredom. So strong was my reaction, which was almost one of fear, that I turned to leave, for this was a contest I had no desire to enter. I knew that I was too placid, too simple for such a man, and that even if I won his attention I should not be able to hold it. ‘Oh, don’t go,’ he said, releasing the girl inside his arm. ‘We haven’t met yet.’

He later told me that he fell in love with me then, and although I believed him I never felt confident that he loved me as a man should love a woman he intends to marry. But perhaps it was exactly intention rather than volition on his part that brought us together. He was bored with his mother’s anxiety, bored with finding different girls to sleep with, bored with his life, bored with the restless existential boredom that plagued him when things were not going well. I represented an easy way out of both his boredom and his entanglements. I was straightforward, transparent, unlikely
to present him with problems or complications, was traditional enough to lavish care on his home, horrible though I thought it, and a good enough daughter to my own mother to spare some thought for his. Yet all this he did not know until later. My own feeling is that he had no desire to marry me on that first evening, although he always gallantly emphasized that this was the case. I was a pretty girl then, and he had probably marked me down as one of his future conquests. It was only after we had met a few more times, and he was impressed by the obvious quality of my devotion, that marriage came into the equation.

Whatever I had in the way of character or attainments never counted as much with Owen as the pleasure I could give him in the way of dressing well, looking good, and providing an agreeable atmosphere for his guests. That was my attraction for him: I was nice to look at and my eyes were empty of calculation. But although I knew, on that first occasion, that my dress was becoming, and although I felt the colour rising to my cheeks as he stared at me, what I felt was uncertainty, an uncertainty which was to accompany me throughout my married life. For a question mark hung over my status. There was nothing grand about me, as there had been about Hermione, and it was clear—to everyone—that of the two of us I was likely to love the more. Owen’s boredom meant that he had a limited attention span: he always needed new people to break what he experienced as the monotony of the old. Whereas, to me, falling in love was a lifelong commitment, and the prospect of marriage a solemn undertaking. And I think that at that stage in my life I too was feeling a little restless; I considered that I was no longer a novice either in age or in experience. I had gone as far as I was likely to go in my career, for here too new faces and new voices were called for and were constantly
being discovered, and the novelty was beginning to wear off. I realize now that I was tired, simply tired. The flat in Foubert’s Place struck me as too small, and much as I loved Millie, I did not really think that women were meant to live eternally together, like schoolgirls in a dormitory. I wanted to be looked after; I wanted babies. This all sounds very commonplace, and I dare say it is. Looking back I see that all women are programmed in this way and are hardly aware of it. I was aware of it only because I never intended to be anything but married. Therefore becoming Owen’s lover as I did was a particularly dark and hazardous enterprise for me, making the idea of marriage one of overpowering importance, although in cooler moments I could see that the whole thing was inappropriate.