Jill (15 page)

“Chris, is it?”

John nodded, terrified lest Christopher should notice the bow he had on and jump to the right conclusions, for he had sensed last night that such a thing might arouse Christopher’s sudden violence. But he need not have worried, for as soon as the door
opened an outraged coo greeted Christopher, as Elizabeth accused him of neglecting her by being out when she called. Christopher stood grinning and stamping, shaking the wet off his brown pork-pie hat and taking off his raincoat with a stiff, rustling sound. They started a wrangle about this, which John listened to with amusement.

“And when I
do
come, through the
pouring
rain,” said Elizabeth, posturing tragically, “you, you
beast
, AREN’T IN.”

“I was buying cakes,” said Christopher unconcernedly, opening the door of the cupboard, “for you to stuff.”

“With my money,” put in John jovially. Then he realized he had been very rude, and blushed scarlet. Elizabeth looked at him for a second, and dropped her eyes. After a moment Christopher made another remark, and began laying the table for two with John’s cups and plates, which John rightly took as a signal for him to go. He shuffled and blew his nose, replacing his handkerchief in his breast pocket, where he noticed Christopher sometimes kept his, and took down his overcoat from behind the door. Elizabeth had returned to the subject of Christopher’s unjustified neglect.

“I’ve been working, working
all day
, except for coffee and lunch—— All right, I bet that’s more than
you
can say.” Christopher made a loud baa-ing noise. “I’m literally exhausted. If you only knew what a monster my tutor can be.…”

“Oh, come off it.” A plate in one hand, he stood grinning at her and suddenly made a playful snatch at her hair. “You spend all your time doing yourself up——”

“Behave!” she cried, swaying back with a little yelp of amusement. They hesitated, smiling at each other.

“I must be going now,” muttered John, not looking at them and buttoning his coat. “I—er—late.…” He did not know why that little cub-like squabble had affected him as strongly as it had, but it had taken his imagination, and it seemed obvious now that he should not have tried to kiss Elizabeth, whereas a moment before he had been furious with himself. He was content to leave them together. When he looked at them both, he felt like a waiter in an expensive restaurant. Their friendliness to him was like the tips they would give a waiter.

“Good-bye, then.”

“Good-bye.”

“Goodbye, John.”

He went out, filled with a curious sad contentment, as if he had suddenly been changed to another person, and banged the door clumsily so that it did not catch. As he turned back to shut it, he heard Elizabeth say:

“You’ve trained him well.”

Christopher laughed and said “Yes.”

“Quite a little gent. And is this still his china? You are a horror.”

“That’s his butter.”

He heard Elizabeth explode with laughter.

“Well, of all the——! It’s too bad. He
must
be a feeble sort of worm.”

“Mother said he looked stuffed.”

“Stuffed! That’s
just
the word!”

But I mustn’t stop and listen, thought John mechanically, because he’ll be coming out to fill my kettle, and he’d be embarrassed. Also he dare not hear any more.

The rain had made the air very chill and all the outer flagstones of the cloisters were wet. The grass was drenched and the stone carvings and gargoyles soaked through. A few of the windows round the quadrangle were lighted.

His face, as he walked to the Lodge, was white, and he felt as if he had been knocked about by a boxer who had known exactly where to hit him in order to hurt him the most.

There was a letter come for him by the afternoon post from his sister Edith, the teacher in Manchester. He picked it up and walked out into the street, starting to open it.

Twenty paces down the road he realized he had not yet begun to read it, and tried to give it his attention. Shelter practice with the children, evacuation, scraps of local news. Old Mr. Reading was in the Infirmary. “I expect you are thoroughly settled down by now,” she had written, “and are feeling a terrific ‘swell’.”

Once they had shown him that he was despicable, he instantly saw himself as fifty times more despicable than they thought
him. The past three weeks, that hitherto had been dispersed and vague, sprang suddenly into focus for what they were—an extended, conceited daydream, that had made him irritatingly absurd.

He walked on, the letter in his hand. The College nurse passed him wondering if perhaps he had just received some bad news. He did not see her. The traffic and people in the streets receded as he walked; a column of soldiers whistling a music-hall song marched by on the other side of the road without paying any attention to him; a van was unloading bacon into a grocer’s and he had to wait while a huge half-split pig wrapped in sacking was carried in.

He crumpled the letter back into its envelope without reading the last page and pushed it into his pocket.

Oh, yes, of course I use his crocks. He daren’t stop me.

Chris, you are awful!

That’s his butter you’re eating. Spread it on thick.

Oh, Chris!

Mother thought he was a scared stuffed little rabbit.

He must be a pretty miserable specimen.

He sincerely remembered the conversation like this. The original was lost and fresh versions of the different lines kept coming up and overlaying each other. He repeated them carefully in his head. The rain blew in his face. For the moment he was knocked all to pieces, the pieces being different emotions, shame, self-disgust, rage and so on; he had not grasped the situation sufficiently to be able to take up an attitude towards it. All he knew was that his sensibilities were scorched, rather as if he had walked too close to an open furnace door.

It was all so bewildering. Inexplicable incidents came back to his mind, one after the other: Christopher calling him “John”, Mrs. Warner including him in her easy smiling, Elizabeth retying his bow-tie. As he thought of the bow-tie and saw himself reflected in a shop window, he was carried off in a gust of anger, then bewilderment ebbed back again. What had they really meant by these things, then? But if he picked up each relationship and turned it round critically, he could see that the reverse side was always scorn and derision. He wondered that he
could have been so dense as never to have noticed it before. The incident of Christopher and the pound returned constantly to his mind like an ominous, banging gong.

The clocks of the town struck four times: he had been walking about for twenty minutes, the afternoon was coming to its close and still the rain swept up and down the streets. His hair was soaking wet and he was aware that his shoe leaked once more. Busy shoppers pushed their umbrellas here and there about the pavements and a newspaper seller sheltered in the doorway of a bank collected pennies swiftly. A chalked placard told of the news from Albania. He looked around him in a dazed way, wondering where to have tea and noticed the Green Leaf only a few doors down the road. He was there before he remembered its importance, but with an obstinate expression he pushed open the door and went in. His first phase of sheer puzzlement had gone. What possessed him now was a shuddering rage at himself and at all the rest of them; he plunged into the steaming interior filled with the hysterical determination of a man who in sheer fury probes an agonizing wound. The café was two-thirds full and the seat they had occupied was taken, but he managed to sit in the next alcove and wearily pushed aside the used crockery that littered the table.

A waitress came and took his order. She was not the same one as on Saturday. He ordered exactly the same tea as they had had then.

He looked along the alcoves, each with its light, and loneliness began to displace his rage. Loneliness made any emotion he suffered impotent. No feeling he had could possibly affect anyone else.

The tea came and he started eating without pleasure. He was surprised how exactly the taste of each item coincided with how he remembered them from Saturday. The tomato sandwiches were wet and the thin transparent bread-and-butter showed the red tomato lurking within. He stirred his tea and drank.

What was he to do, now that he knew what they thought of him? How should he change his attitude towards them? How ought he to treat them?

His trains of thought kept snapping off and having to be restarted. He lifted the best cake from the stand and cut it in half. Then he remembered that this habit of cutting food he had picked up from Christopher: at home he had always bitten it.

How should he face Christopher now? And at this thought the last remnants of his illusion collapsed like the last wall of a demolished house. After all, then, he was on his own; he had failed, utterly and ignominiously failed to weave himself into the lives of these people. As he had feared, the door had swung open again and he was alone again, doubly alone. The days would be scrappy, bits and pieces of action. No objects, no continuity.

And still he could not understand why it had all happened, why he had been so obtuse, or they had been so deceitful, what had intervened between them to refract his vision of them all. It was surely not his fault. He lit the fourth of his cigarettes and smoked it slowly. The room filled and emptied again, leaving him sitting small and white-faced at his table. At last the waitress came and scribbled a bill for him, tucking it folded under his plate, whence he extracted it and glanced at the total: three and a penny. He pulled his change out of his pocket and stared in terror at it: one and sevenpence halfpenny. He had no other money. The woman came back, expecting to be paid.

“I—er—I’m sorry—I’ve come without—I’ve only got one and sevenpence,” he blurted, horrified: he spread it out in his hand. In his bewilderment he would not have been surprised had she called the police. “I’ve come out with no—I’m awfully sorry.…”

She looked at him suspiciously.

“Are you a student?”

“Oh, yes—yes——”

He gave his College.

“Just write your name and address on the back of the bill, then: you can pay us tomorrow.” She stared at him. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes—once——”

He wrote “John Kemp” with trembling hands on the bill,
remembering irrelevantly that the meals had not been identical because he had forgotten to ask for China tea.

“And the address.” Glancing at his shabby clothes, she added:

“Be more careful next time.”

He hated having to go back to the College. But night was falling, the bells were chiming six o’clock, workmen cycled along the wet streets with their dim lamps. From farther off came the shouts of urchins who were throwing sticks and stones up at a horse-chestnut tree and along the street windows would be filled with light, then carefully darkened. As he stepped through the gate he sighed: it was humiliating to have to return like a circling boomerang to the place and the person he most wanted to avoid. But he was powerless to make a tragedy of the affair. As he walked slowly across the first quadrangle he could not help noticing the instant peace of the air inside the College, and, his fingers touching his sister’s letter, he withdrew it and fitted it properly into its envelope. After all, it seemed, things had been momentarily frozen still with horror were moving forward again.

But he had not expected the rage that flared up at him when he entered their room, where Christopher lay sprawled on the sofa turning the pages of a magazine. For a moment he was blind with anger: the words he had overheard shone in his mind in lacerating detail; for a moment he really thought as soon as he could control his voice he would quarrel with Christopher and get him to change rooms. Then he took off his overcoat and hung it up. Elizabeth had gone and the servant had cleared away the tea-things.

“Been anywhere?” Christopher had forgotten that John had not left the room of his own free will.

John could hardly speak.

“No.”

He came round the sofa to the hearth, looking down at Christopher. His big legs were thrust out at ease and though he was not smoking the grate was littered with cigarette-ends. He turned a page in the silence. The electric light was burning. John lodged his sister’s letter on the mantelpiece.

“That for me?” asked Christopher idly.

John looked at him intently. “No,” he said, “it’s from my sister.” He cleared his throat.

“Sister?” Christopher folded up the magazine and threw it on to the table. “I didn’t know you had one. Is she older than you?”

John saw Christopher’s teeth as he yawned. “No,” he answered quickly. “Jill’s only fifteen.”

“Sisters are rather a pest.” Christopher put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “I’ve got two myself. But they’re older than I am. At home, is she?”

“No, she’s away at school.”

Something in John’s tone made Christopher glance at him: to his surprise, John was looking at him too. They regarded each other blankly. John picked up a half-written sheet of notes he had been making that afternoon and folded it exactly in half. Then he tore it across the fold.

“Fortunately I don’t see much of mine,” said Christopher, “though a curious thing happened last summer. Do you know London at all?”

“No.”

“Well, it was in the bar of rather a decent hotel in Regent Street one night. I was there with Pat and Elizabeth one night. I think the blitz was on, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it: anyway, we’d all had a good bit to drink. Then I happened to notice a girl who was standing near with a couple of Polish officers, and she seemed to be staring at me. I thought it was a bit rum, you know, and I thought perhaps I was imagining it, but, no, she looked exactly as if she was going to come across and speak. I thought it was some super-subtle kind of pick-up, you know.” John tore the halves into quarters. “Still, she didn’t say anything and I forgot about her. Then, just as we were going out, she suddenly came up to me with a sort of half-smile and said ‘It
is
Christopher, isn’t it?’ And it was my sister Constance. I hadn’t seen her for—oh, at least two years.” He ended in an oddly embarrassed way.