No More Meadows (22 page)

His face was set, as it always was when he was driving. His neck went straight up from his spine, and his heavy eyebrows met in a cleft of frown. Now and again he turned to smile at her, but when he turned back to the road his smile disappeared at once. He took his driving very seriously. In England that had seemed to her unnecessary. Over here, where it seemed that you had an even chance of being killed at any moment she thought that probably he was right.

‘Vin,' she said, ‘I'll never learn to drive over here.'

‘Yes you will. My wife can do anything. Besides, you'll have to, if you want to go anywhere in the daytime. The buses aren't too good out at the suburb where we live.'

‘I'll never do it. I'll just have to sit at home and wait for you.'

‘That's a nice picture. When I'm working I'll like to think of you sitting at home.'

‘What shall I be doing?' She could not visualize her married life at all.

‘Well, you'll be busy around the apartment, and then there's the radio, and there'll be plenty of women neighbours for you to make friends with. There are about five hundred apartments in this development. That will be nice for you.'

‘Yes, I expect so.' She would be like the women in magazine advertisements, having coffee in her trim kitchen with Mary Lou from next door, who had dropped in to exchange cake recipes.

Concentrating on the car, Vinson did not talk to her very much. He pointed things out for her to admire, but they were going so fast that the things had usually gone by before she could see them. She was excited when she saw her first motel, which was called ‘Paradise', and had neon signs and a row of little huts like a Butlin's holiday camp, but by the time they had passed motel after motel, each bearing some unsuitable name like ‘Ye Olde Manor House', ‘Tumbleweed Haven', she began to get blasé and was not surprised by them any more.

The traveller to America expects to be surprised, and for the first hour or so he is. But the most surprising thing about the whole country is the short time in which it ceases to surprise you. The first miles of the road are full of marvels, but too soon you become sated. You cannot be amazed any more. You find yourself sitting back and accepting without question the recurring beads of hot-dog stands, Bar-B-Qs, chromium diners shaped like railway carriages and churches topped by neon crucifixes that are strung along the necklace of the eastern seaboard roads.

By the time they stopped for lunch Christine was beginning to feel as if she had been in America all her life. She was hardly shaken by the size of the roadside restaurant, which had a long snack counter, where people mused over towering sundaes, dozens of plastic-topped tables in booths and a menu better than any West End hotel.

Vinson ordered for her, because Christine did not know what to choose. He was a little offhand and arbitrary with the waitress, who wore a lace handkerchief ruffled on her bosom like a flower. He had been like that sometimes with waiters in England, where it had not got him anywhere. It occurred to Christine that all the American principles of democracy and the pursuit of happiness were not as strong as the principle that in a land of producers the customer is king.

A mammoth red jukebox stood near the restaurant door, and you could put a nickel in a slot on the wall by your table and press a button for the record you wanted. Christine asked
Vinson for a nickel. She wanted to press the button marked ‘Stardust', but he would not let her.

‘Why not? You're meant to. People must like the music, or they wouldn't have that thing there.' As if in answer, the machine leaped into amplified life with a sobbing rendition of ‘You darling'.

‘There you see, Vin. Someone else has put a nickel in, and now I'll have to wait for mine. If they can do it, why can't I?'

‘It was those high-school kids over there. That's all right for them. Look, Christine, this is a good place for us to come and eat, but you and I don't play the jukebox.'

‘I can't see why not.' If he were going to put all kinds of taboos and snobberies on her in America, she might as well have stayed in England, where at least she knew what the snobberies were, without having to learn them.

It was a long drive to Washington. In England, such a mileage would have been a tremendous undertaking, with maps and tuning of the car and advice from the A. A., but over here, where the big cities were farther apart and you could average almost twice the speed on the one-way roads, it was a mere afternoon's work.

Christine was asleep with her head on Vinson's shoulder before they got to Baltimore. He had woken her up when they were crossing the bridge over the Delaware River, and she had marvelled dutifully at its span and slept again.

She woke again when they were crawling with the traffic through endless narrow streets, where you could guess what the occupants of the houses were like by the state of their front steps. Rows and rows of thin red terrace houses, some of them with imitation landscapes painted on drawn blinds. Rows and rows of front doors, painted, peeling, or varnished like a coffin, with imitation graining. Set after set of four steps up from the street; some shining white, some dirtied beyond the trouble of an occasional hearthstone; some made of rickety old wood, others replaced by funereal marble; some steps tumbling with negro babies, some a forum for a gang of small boys with pistols and eclipsing cowboy hats; one with a girl in a lavender dress waiting for a boy, or for something to happen; one with an
old crone knitting; some with a dead potted plant waiting for the trash collector; some with a young couple to whom the steps were something more than the hundreds of others like them in the row.

‘What town is this?'

‘Baltimore. Hell of a place to drive in.'

Christine raised her head, afraid that it was in his way.

‘Don't take your head away. I like it there. Christine,' Vinson said, as he stopped the car at red traffic lights, ‘I'm so glad you've come. I've longed for this.'

‘So have I. Oh, Vin, are we really going to be married tomorrow? I can't believe it. Everyone on the boat thought it was awfully romantic to be married as soon as I arrive. And it is, isn't it?'

Her voice was dreamy, but his was practical as he answered: ‘It's the best thing. You'd have had to stay in a hotel otherwise, and that would be a waste of money.'

‘Wouldn't you have let me stay with you at the flat – apartment, I mean – even if we couldn't be married tomorrow?' Christine asked sleepily, as the lights changed to green.

‘In Washington? I work there, don't forget.'

‘I wouldn't have minded.'

‘The Navy would –'

‘Oh, the Navy –' Christine went to sleep again.

It was dusk when they came into Washington down a broad avenue that shone with tramlines, coloured electric signs and the lights of an endless stream of cars. Christine's first impression of the city was that there must be some sort of gala tonight. Nearly every house had its porch lamp turned on, the square glass canopies outside the cinemas were a dazzle of jewel-massed lights beating on the pavement like an insufferable sun, and strings of glaring white electric bulbs outlined the open spaces where used cars were drawn up for sale.

‘No,' Vinson said. ‘It's just an ordinary evening. I guess it's always like this, but of course this is your first sight of an American city by night. What price Piccadilly Circus now? This is a bit brighter than the dear old Dilly, isn't it?' He sometimes used expressions which he thought were English slang.

‘All those second-hand cars.' Christine could not get over
them. ‘Why, in England it's almost as difficult to get a secondhand car as a new one. And all these look so shiny and new. Who buys them? And why do they leave them out in the open like that? Don't they get stolen? Perhaps they leave the lights on all night. But that would be awfully expensive. Do they have a man to watch them?'

Vinson did not know. He was not interested in the problems of used-car dealers. They had passed two mammoth churches and were going down a hill now between huge blocks of flats with plate-glass entrance doors and flowering shrubs and evergreens artistically planted, and he was pointing them out as being swank apartment houses.

‘But this is the best address of all,' he said, as the hill steepened and they were among shops again. ‘This is Georgetown,' he said reverently. ‘Each side of this avenue. Gee, I wish we could live here.'

‘Well, why don't we?'

‘We couldn't get near it on my pay. It's mostly diplomats and politicians who live in Georgetown.'

‘Well, who wants to live among them?' she said, but he would not be consoled.

‘The best address in Washington,' he said regretfully. ‘I'd sure like to have it on my notepaper.'

Christine was about to say that she did not see that it mattered, but fortunately, before they could start another of those small dissensions that crept upon them sometimes out of their different points of view, Vinson turned down a side-street and said: ‘I'm going to take you past the church where we're going to be married tomorrow. That's why I brought you this way, though it's not the quickest route to the hotel.' He was always much exercised about knowing the shortest way from place to place.

‘Is it the church where you always go to Mass?'

‘No, but it's a smart place to be married. All the best people come here.'

Christine thought that they should have been married in Vinson's parish church, but she was discovering that the secret of keeping a man happy was not to tell him the things he did not want to hear, so she said nothing.

It was a dignified white church with pillars. Christine was pleased with it, and thought she might look quite well being photographed on the porch after the ceremony, with Vinson in all his gold braid.

‘Of course we can't be married actually in the church,' he said. ‘It will have to be in the rectory.'

‘Why?' Her visions of walking down the aisle in her new dress faded.

‘Because it's a mixed wedding. They don't allow non-Catholics to be married in church in this diocese.'

‘Well, I think that's pretty stuffy. Aren't I good enough for them?'

‘Look, honey' – Vinson moved the car on as a driver behind them sounded his horn an unnecessary number of times – ‘we haven't had a religious argument yet. Don't let's start one now. You don't mind my being a Catholic. You said so.'

‘At least you go to church, which is more than most men I know do.'

‘You see what I mean about Georgetown?' he said, as they drove down a street of pretty little houses which were no two alike; some white, some coloured, some soft red brick snug with creepers, and some with painted shutters.

‘Some of these houses are a hundred and fifty years old,' he said, with the same awe he had given to Westminster Abbey.

The houses were charming, and there were trees everywhere, in the streets and in the gardens of the houses. Some of them were lit theatrically by street lamps where insects clustered, and she was reminded of the gilded leaves of London plane trees on a summer night. When she leaned out of the window she smelled the familiar summer city smell, which at the same time endears you and makes you long for the country.

‘I think I like Washington,' she said.

There were trees everywhere all over the city. Trees and broad avenues, and then they were driving between the great white State Department buildings, with their clean lines and bold carving.

Christine was genuinely amazed at America now. She did not have to assume admiration to please Vinson. People had told her that Washington was the most beautiful city in America,
but although she had lived all her life in London she did not like towns, and she had not believed that any city could be beautiful.

But this was different. She had not expected the Washington Monument to be glowing with light and to rise up serenely from a sea of grass, and although she had seen pictures of what the Capitol dome looked like she had not expected its floodlit, majestic beauty. It soared above the hill like a heavenly body, as if dissociating itself from the machinations and intrigues that went on below.

Vinson drove her around the buildings on Capitol Hill. ‘Now, doesn't this make you proud to be an American?' he asked her, sitting very straight behind the wheel, as if someone had waved the Stars and Stripes at him.

Christine pulled her head in through the window. ‘I'm not an American.'

‘You will be after tomorrow, darling, whatever your passport says. All this will be yours,' Vinson said, waving his hand at the imposing steps of the Senate. ‘The government belongs to the people here, you know, not the people to the government.'

‘It's beautiful,' Christine said. ‘It's sort of depressing, though, to think of all the rubbish that must have been talked here by men with string ties and mouths full of teeth since this building was put up.'

He did not laugh. Perhaps she should not have said this. He could joke about American institutions when he was with his own countrymen, but with her, who was a foreigner, he took his country seriously. She could understand that, because that was how she felt about England. Perhaps after tomorrow, if he thought that marrying him made her an American, she could make jokes about the government.

The hotel was a towering place, with most of the ground-floor walls made of plate glass, so that the people in the lounge and the cocktail bar were like goldfish in a bowl. If Christine had been a down-and-out, she would have come and flattened her nose against the glass to make the hotel guests feel embarrassed.

Vinson's mother, who sounded like something of a hypochondriac, had felt unable to make the trip from Kansas for the wedding, but his sister and her husband had come from Wilmington
to keep the family flag flying. Vinson had assured Christine that they were easy people to get on with, but she dreaded meeting them. What would they think of her? The sister would be sure to be smart. Even with her new clothes, Christine did not think she would ever be smart in the way Americans were. What would they think of Vinson marrying an English girl? Would they say, as she had heard one Wave say to another at a cocktail party Vinson had taken her to in England: ‘Isn't an American girl good enough for him?'