No More Meadows (14 page)

Vinson also tried very hard with the dogs and cats, which were such a centre of interest and conversation in the house. Christine's dog would go to anyone, but the cats were wary of him and would not go to him to be petted. This was the only thing that caused any doubt to Aunt Josephine. She set great store by the opinions of her cats.

Christine continued to see Vinson Gaegler quite often, and it was not long before the family were referring to him as ‘Christine's boy friend', and making insinuating remarks which they thought were funny. If she had told them that he had never kissed her they would not have believed it.

There came quite suddenly a very warm day, when spring was summer before its time. All day, moving about the book department, Christine had seen the sun flooding the pavement beyond the glass doors, and had looked with jealousy at the women who came in from outside, caught unawares by the sudden heat, wearing last summer's dresses.

Mr Parker, shut in his stuffy little office, did not know whether it was Christmas or Easter, but all his assistants were restless, and longed to get out for their lunch-hour.

Christine had told Vinson that on the next sunny day she would walk up to Grosvenor Square and sit with him on the bench where they had first met. She was in the cloakroom getting ready to go out when Margaret Drew came down and found her by the grubby washbasins.

‘I changed my lunch-time,' Margaret said. ‘Old Burman wanted me to go with her to that awful teashop that smells of fish, and I just couldn't bear it. Let's buy sandwiches and go and sit in the Park. I never see anything of you these days. You never come to supper any more. You're always out with that little American with the funny name.'

Margaret knew about Vinson Gaegler by now. Everyone in the book department knew about him, because he sometimes came to fetch Christine at the shop, where he was known as ‘Miss Cope's American', as established as he was at home as ‘Christine's boy friend'.

Because Margaret had said: ‘You're always going out with that little American with the funny name', Christine could not tell her that she was planning to meet Vinson now, so she put him out of her mind and went up the stone steps into the sunshine with Margaret.

They bought twice as many sandwiches as they needed, because ever since the war, sandwiches had one side that was just plain bread, so you had to throw away the dry bread side and put two spread sides together to make them edible. They walked down Piccadilly to Green Park and found two empty chairs among the crowd of lunch-time workers who had come to open out like crocuses to the sun.

Margaret ate her sandwiches quickly and wished they had brought more.

‘It must be wonderful to be able to eat as much as you want without worrying about getting fat, because you know you're going to get fat soon, anyway,' Christine said. ‘What's it feel like, having a baby?'

‘Queer,' Margaret said. ‘You get breathless if you talk too much. And it's not so much fun being able to eat a lot, because there are so many things you can't face. Laurie always wants to have salami and liver sausage, and I can hardly sit at the table with it.'

‘Why don't you tell him? He wouldn't eat it. He's always so sweet and considerate.'

‘I don't want to make any more fuss than I have to. It's bad enough for him as it is.'

‘Bad? I should think it was marvellous for him having a baby after all this time.'

‘That's the trouble. By this time we've got organized into being able to manage fairly comfortably, just the three of us, and keep Bobby at the school the Drews have always gone to, and not have to give up that silly old big house, which Laurie adores. But now there'll be all this expense with the baby. Laurie insists on me having a private room. He says no wife of his is going into a public ward, though it's silly when I've been paying five shillings a week all this time to let the Government have my baby for me.'

‘I'd like a public ward,' said Christine, ‘except for the communal
bed-pans. I'd like to lie on my side and discuss symptoms with the woman in the next bed.'

‘So would I, but you know what Laurie is. And then there'll be all the clothes to get. I gave away all Bobby's things years ago. And after this one is born I shan't be able to work, because of looking after it, and I just don't see how we're going to manage. I tell you what it is, Chris. We just can't afford to have a baby.'

‘Oh, Maggie, don't. No one says that.'

‘Well, I don't, but Laurie does. He sat looking at me the other night, at the spot where I can't do up the button on that yellow housecoat any more, and he said, with a face as long as a boot: “We can't really afford to have this baby.”'

‘He said that to you? Oh, poor Maggie –'

‘Well, why shouldn't he?' Margaret shrugged her shoulders. ‘It's true.'

‘But one just doesn't say those things to a wife.'

‘My dear Chris, when you've been married fourteen years you say the truth to each other. After all that time you're like one person, so if it doesn't hurt you, you don't think it will hurt the other.'

Christine was shocked, not only at Laurie's remark, but by Margaret's cool acceptance of the dreadful thing he had said. How little one knew about one's married friends – the happily married ones who did not quarrel in public and seemed to have made a natural circumstance of the fusing of two lives. One knew nothing really about their marriage, because it was only significant when they were alone together. That was when the important things happened.

Walking back to the shop, Christine thought about the mythical, romantic marriage that she sometimes imagined for herself, and tried to picture it reaching the stage when you were so used to each other that one could say a hurtful thing without the other minding. But, like the magazine stories, her imagined marriage never got much farther than the wedding day and the picture of herself in a frilly apron waiting for his key in the lock in her bright little kitchen. It did not embrace the realities of familiarity. The dream would lose its charm if it did.

At a quarter past five Vinson came into the shop with his cap set perfectly straight on his head and his eyes narrowed to a gleam under his black brows.

Christine was busy with a customer. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him waiting impatiently, pretending to look at books. When she was free he came quickly up to her and caught her arm above the elbow, pinching a nerve against the bone.

‘Why didn't you come to Grosvenor Square at noon?' he asked, his voice strangely uneven and rough.

‘I'm sorry,' Christine said. ‘I went out with Margaret. I hope you didn't wait too long.'

‘I waited an hour for you, that's all, and didn't get any lunch,' he said, sticking out his lower lip.

‘That's a shame.' He was cross, so she spoke lightly, trying to make him not cross by pretending not to notice it. ‘But we hadn't exactly made a definite date, had we?'

‘You said you would meet me there if it was sunny,' he said. ‘Well, it was sunny today, and you didn't come.'

Christine apologized again, but he would not be appeased, and because he continued to be cross she ceased to feel sorry. She drew him behind the bay of the classics section, where no one could see them.

‘Look here,' she said, ‘you're being silly to make such a fuss. If I couldn't come, I couldn't, that's all. Don't behave as if you owned me.'

‘When I make a date with a girl I expect her to keep it. You said you'd be there and you weren't, and that's no way to act.'

‘Don't lecture me.'

‘I will, goddamn it, if you need it.'

They had quite a quarrel there behind the rows of collected editions. They had never had a real quarrel before, and Christine did not like it. Vinson was petty and petulant, and Christine thought that if he was going to be like this it was not worth while having anything to do with him.

‘You just didn't take time out to think whether I'd be waiting for you,' he said. ‘It doesn't mean a thing to you. You wouldn't care if I went back to America tomorrow.'

‘Probably not,' she retorted. ‘Why? Would you?' Her voice
was rising with his, and then he suddenly spoke softly and pulled them both down to normal, as a telegraph pole seems to pull down the rising wires as you pass them in a train.

‘Yes, I would,' he said very sweetly, and he smiled at her and her own easy smile spread quickly, because he had made it all right.

‘I really am sorry, Vin,' she said, touching his arm. ‘Margaret gets a bit low these days. You know, she's going to have a baby, and so I thought–'

‘Don't start on explanations,' he said. “Forget it. You should never try to hold post-mortems after a quarrel's been stopped. Don't you know that? Let it drop, and forget the excuses.'

She liked him when he told her how to behave. She liked to think that he was wise and knew more about life than she did, so she readily became complaisant, and when he said: ‘I've only got an hour, because we've got a late conference coming up, so go and ask if you can get away now,' she went obediently to seek Mr Parker's permission, and hurried out to meet Vinson at the Jermyn Street door.

They drove up to Regent's Park and walked a little way over the grass. A bushy hedge made an angle of retreat from the open space where people were walking home across the Park, and he took her hand and made her sit down there, and then he kissed her.

When he had been kissing her for a little while, and putting his hands on her body, Christine realized that she had been wanting him to kiss her for a long time.

‘Why didn't you do this before?' she asked, pulling away from him and lying back on the grass, which was fresh and new and not yet soured by the treadings of a hundred picnics.

He turned, resting on the flat of his hand, and looked at her. He had lipstick on his mouth, but it looked all right. ‘Did you want me to, Christine?'

‘No,' she lied, ‘I never thought about it.'

‘Well, I did. But I didn't think you'd care for it too much. I didn't know – I don't know – whether anyone else had more right than I to kiss you.'

‘No.'

‘I thought maybe your cousin – you'd been going to parties
with him, and there was that day you wouldn't come out with me because of him, and you thought he'd sent the flowers.'

‘Geoffrey?' Christine laughed and sat up. ‘Oh, Vin, if you could
see
him! Fancy thinking that. Men are funny.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘They are funny like this. They like to do this.'

He was extremely nice to kiss, and, oddly, it felt familiar and right, as if he had been making love to her for months. Time stopped, and there were only two of them in the world. It seemed like that to her, but he suddenly raised his head and looked at his watch and stood up, brushing grass off his uniform. A naval officer is never late for a conference. Even love comes second to the United States Navy.

‘Stick around in town,' he said,' and meet me later and we'll drive out to the country and find somewhere nice to eat.'

‘I will,' she said, sitting on the grass and dreamily tidying her hair, ‘if you'll kiss me again afterwards.'

‘Why, Christine, I thought you were so proper,' he said, looking pleased.

‘I am really. You'd be surprised.'

‘We shall see.' He pulled her to her feet, and Christine thought: I could stop this now, or let it go on; but she did not have any will to decide, and it did not seem to matter.

She put her arms round him. ‘Don't go for a moment,' she said, but he did not move close to her. Looking back on this, long afterwards, she saw that this was the first of all the many times she had said to him: ‘Don't go', and he had put the Navy first, until soon she began to hate it.

Things were changed after that. Christine went out with Vinson nearly every night. He let her have the car, and she would drive herself home after she had been with him, come to work in the car in the mornings and then fetch him at the naval headquarters after she came out of the shop.

She thought that when he had gone back to America she would never again drive down North Audley Street, past the red-brick corner building where the transient American sailors, loosely hung together, waited with white seabags, and the neat naval wives came out of the commissary store with huge brown-paper bags, without remembering Vinson. Whether she would
remember him with or without regret, she did not know. She could not tell how this affair would end, and she was content to live in its present, without troubling about its future.

One night, when they were out dancing and had had quite a lot to drink, Vinson said: ‘I love you.' Christine did not let herself say: ‘I love you too', having learned long ago the folly of letting alcohol say that for you when you were not sure you meant it; but when he breathed deeply and said: ‘Come back to the hotel with me', she hung her head and said that she would.

The night porter looked at her shrewdly, but she did not mind. He did not know her. Vinson lived at the hotel, and the censure, if any, would be on him.

When they were in the room together he kissed her violently -he was stronger than he looked – and then he sat her on the bed and sat down quietly beside her and took her hand.

‘Christine,' he said, ‘forgive me. I'm a little plastered right now, but I know what I'm doing. I shouldn't have asked you to come here. My wife doesn't go to hotel bedrooms with me.'

Christine stood up, with a chill on her heart. ‘I didn't know you were married,' she said, with her back to him, trying to sound casual.

‘I'm not. I'm asking you to marry me.'

She did not know what to say. She hesitated, still with her back to him, and before she could answer he got up and went over to the wash-basin, where he began to mix drinks for them.