To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One Read online

  ‘You didn’t care for me,’ she said again. ‘If you had, you would never have come home from Phillipa, Georgina, Janet et al and said calmly, just as if it didn’t matter to me in the least, that you had been with them in Brighton or wherever it was.’

  ‘But if I had cared about them I would never have told you.’

  She was regarding him incredulously, and her face was flushed. With what? Anger? George did not know.

  ‘I remember being so proud,’ he said pathetically, ‘that we had solved this business of marriage and all that sort of thing. We had such a good marriage that it didn’t matter, the little flirtations. And I always thought one should be able to tell the truth. I always told you the truth, didn’t I?’

  ‘Very romantic of you, dear George,’ she said dryly; and soon he got up, kissed her fondly on the cheek, and went away.

  He walked for a long time through the parks, hands behind his erect back, and he could feel his heart swollen and painful in his side. When the gates shut, he walked through the lighted streets he had lived in for fifty years of his life, and he was remembering Myra and Molly, as if they were one woman, merging into each other, a shape of warm easy intimacy, a shape of happiness walking beside him. He went into a little restaurant he knew well, and there was a girl sitting there who knew him because she had heard him lecture once on the state of the British theatre. He tried hard to see Myra and Molly in her face, but he failed; and he paid for her coffee and his own and went home by himself. But his flat was unbearably empty, and he left it and walked down by the Embankment for a couple of hours to tire himself, and there must have been a colder wind blowing than he knew, for next day he woke with a pain in his chest which he could not mistake for heartache.

  He had flu and a bad cough, and he stayed in bed by himself and did not ring up the doctor until the fourth day, when he was getting lightheaded. The doctor said it must be the hospital at once.

  But he would not go to the hospital. So the doctor said he must have day and night nurses. This he submitted to until the cheerful friendliness of the nurses saddened him beyond bearing, and he asked the doctor to ring up his wife, who would find someone to look after him and would be sympathetic. He was hoping that Molly would come herself to nurse him, but when she arrived he did not mention it, for she was busy with preparations for her new marriage. She promised to find him someone who would not wear a uniform and make jokes. They naturally had many friends in common; and she rang up an old flame of his in the theatre who said she knew of a girl who was looking for a secretary’s job to tide her over a patch of not working, but who didn’t really mind what she did for a few weeks.

  So Bobby Tippett sent away the nurses and made up a bed for herself in his study. On the first day she sat by George’s bed sewing. She wore a full dark skirt and a demure printed blouse with short frills at the wrist, and George watched her sewing and already felt much better. She was a small, thin, dark girl, probably Jewish, with sad black eyes. She had a way of letting her sewing lie loose in her lap, her hands limp over it; and her eyes fixed themselves, and a bloom of dark introspection came over them. She sat very still at these moments like a small china figure of a girl sewing. When she was nursing George, or letting in his many visitors, she put on a manner of cool and even languid charm; it was the extreme good manners of heartlessness, and at first George was chilled: but then he saw through the pose; for whatever world Bobby Tippett had been born into he did not think it was the English class to which these manners belonged. She replied with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to questions about herself; he gathered that her parents were dead, but there was a married sister she saw sometimes; and for the rest she had lived around and about London, mostly by herself, for ten or more years. When he asked her if she had not been lonely, so much by herself, she drawled, ‘Why, not at all, I don’t mind being alone.’ But he saw her as a small, brave child, a waif against London, and was moved.

  He did not want to be the big man of the theatre; he was afraid of evoking the impersonal admiration he was only too accustomed to; but soon he was asking her questions about her career, hoping that this might be the point of her enthusiasm. But she spoke lightly of small parts, odd jobs, scene painting and understudying, in a jolly good-little-trouper’s voice; and he could not see that he had come any closer to her at all. So at last he did what he had tried to avoid, and sitting up against his pillows like a judge or an impresario, he said: ‘Do something for me, dear. Let me see you.’ She went next door like an obedient child, and came back in tight black trousers, but still in her demure little blouse, and stood on the carpet before him, and went into a little song-and-dance act. It wasn’t bad. He had seen a hundred worse. But he was very moved; he saw her now above all as the little urchin, the gamin, boy-girl and helpless. And utterly touching. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘this is half of an act. I always have someone else.’

  There was a big mirror that nearly filled the end wall of the large, dark room. George saw himself in it, an elderly man sitting propped up on pillows watching the small doll-like figure standing before him on the carpet. He saw her turn her head towards her reflection in the darkened mirror, study it, and then she began to dance with her own reflection, dance against it, as it were. There were two small, light figures dancing in George’s room; there was something uncanny in it. She began singing, a little broken song in stage cockney, and George felt that she was expecting the other figure in the mirror to sing with her; she was singing at the mirror as if she expected an answer.

  ‘That’s very good, dear,’ he broke in quickly, for he was upset, though he did not know why. ‘Very good indeed.’ He was relieved when she broke off and came away from the mirror, so that the uncanny shadow of her went away.

  ‘Would you like me to speak to someone for you, dear? It might help. You know how things are in the theatre,’ he suggested apologetically.

  ‘I don’t maind if I dew,’ she said in the stage cockney of her act; and for a moment her face flashed into a mocking, reckless, gaminlike charm. ‘Perhaps I’d better change back into my skirt?’ she suggested. ‘More natural-like for a nurse, ain’t it?’

  But he said he liked her in her tight black trousers, and now she always wore them, and her neat little shirts; and she moved about the flat as a charming feminine boy, chattering to him about the plays she had had small parts in and about the big actors and producers she had spoken to, who were, of course, George’s friends or, at least, equals. George sat up against his pillows and listened and watched, and his heart ached. He remained in bed longer than there was need, because he did not want her to go. When he transferred himself to a big chair, he said: ‘You mustn’t think you’re bound to stay here, dear, if there’s somewhere else you’d rather go.’ To which she replied, with a wide flash of her black eyes, ‘But I’m resting, darling, resting. I’ve nothing better to do with myself.’ And then: ‘Oh aren’t I awful, the things wot I sy?’

  ‘But you do like being here? You don’t mind being here with me, dear?’ he insisted.

  There was the briefest pause. She said: ‘Yes, oddly enough I do like it.’ The ‘oddly enough’ was accompanied by a quick, half-laughing, almost flirtatious glance; and for the first time in many months the pressure of loneliness eased around George’s heart.

  Now it was a happiness to him because when the distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the theatre or of letters came to see him, Bobby became a cool, silky little hostess; and the instant they had gone she relapsed into urchin charm. It was proof of their intimacy. Sometimes he took her out to dinner or to the theatre. When she dressed up she wore bold, fashionable clothes and moved with the insolence of a mannequin; and George moved beside her, smiling fondly, waiting for the moment when the black, reckless, freebooting eyes would flash up out of the languid stare of the woman presenting herself for admiration, exchanging with him amusement at the world; promising him that soon, when they got back to the apartment, by themselves, she would again become the dear little gi
rl or the gallant, charming waif.

  Sometimes, sitting in the dim room at night, he would let his hand close over the thin point of her shoulder; sometimes, when they said good night, he bent to kiss her, and she lowered her head, so that his lips encountered her demure, willing forehead.

  George told himself that she was unawakened. It was a phrase that had been the prelude to a dozen warm discoveries in the past. He told himself that she knew nothing of what she might be. She had been married, it seemed – she dropped this information once, in the course of an anecdote about the theatre; but George had known women in plenty who after years of marriage had been unawakened. George asked her to marry him; and she lifted her small sleek head with an animal’s startled turn and said: ‘Why do you want to marry me?’

  ‘Because I like being with you, dear. I love being with you.’

  ‘Well, I like being with you.’ It had a questioning sound. She was questioning herself? ‘Strainge,’ she said in cockney, laughing. ‘Strainge but trew.’

  The wedding was to be a small one, but there was a lot about it in the papers. Recently several men of George’s generation had married young women. One of them had fathered a son at the age of seventy. George was flattered by the newspapers, and told Bobby a good deal about his life that had not come up before. He remarked for instance that he thought his generation had been altogether more successful about this business of love and sex than the modern generation. He said, ‘Take my son, for instance. At his age I had had a lot of affairs and knew about women; but there he is, nearly thirty, and when he stayed here once with a girl he was thinking of marrying I know for a fact they shared the same bed for a week and nothing ever happened. She told me so. Very odd it all seems to me. But it didn’t seem odd to her. And now he lives with another young man and listens to that long-playing record thing of his, and he’s engaged to a girl he takes out twice a week, like a schoolboy. And there’s my daughter, she came to me a year after she was married, and she was in an awful mess, really awful … it seems to me your generation are very frightened of it all. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Why my generation?’ she asked, turning her head with that quick listening movement. ‘It’s not my generation.’

  ‘But you’re nothing but a child,’ he said fondly.

  He could not decipher what lay behind the black, full stare of her sad eyes as she looked at him now; she was sitting cross-legged in her black glossy trousers before the fire, like a small doll. But a spring of alarm had been touched in him and he didn’t say any more.

  ‘At thirty-five, I’m the youngest child alive,’ she sang, with a swift sardonic glance at him over her shoulder. But it sounded gay.

  He did not talk to her again about the achievements of his generation.

  After the wedding he took her to a village in Normandy where he had been once, many years ago, with a girl called Eve. He did not tell her he had been there before.

  It was spring, and the cherry trees were in flower. The first evening he walked with her in the last sunlight under the white-flowering branches, his arm around her thin waist, and it seemed to him that he was about to walk back through the gates of a lost happiness.

  They had a large comfortable room with windows which overlooked the cherry trees and there was a double bed. Madame Cruchot, the farmer’s wife, showed them the room with shrewd, non-commenting eyes, said she was always happy to shelter honeymoon couples, and wished them a good night.

  George made love to Bobby, and she shut her eyes, and he found she was not at all awkward. When they had finished, he gathered her in his arms, and it was then that he returned simply, with an incredulous awed easing of the heart, to a happiness which – and now it seemed to him fantastically ungrateful that he could have done – he had taken for granted for so many years of his life. It was not possible, he thought, holding her compliant body in his arms, that he could have been by himself, alone, for so long. It had been intolerable. He held her silent breathing body, and he stroked her back and thighs, and his hands remembered the emotions of nearly fifty years of loving. He could feel the memoried emotions of his life flooding through his body, and his heart swelled with a joy it seemed to him he had never known, for it was a compound of a dozen loves.

  He was about to take final possession of his memories when she turned sharply away, sat up, and said: ‘I want a fag. How about yew?’

  ‘Why, yes, dear, if you want.’

  They smoked. The cigarettes finished, she lay down on her back, arms folded across her chest, and said, ‘I’m sleepy.’ She closed her eyes. When he was sure she was asleep, he lifted himself on his elbow and watched her. The light still burned, and the curve of her cheek was full and soft, like a child’s. He touched it with the side of his palm, and she shrank away in her sleep, but clenched up, like a fist; and her hand, which was white and unformed, like a child’s hand, was clenched in a fist on the pillow before her face.

  George tried to gather her in his arms, and she turned away from him to the extreme edge of the bed. She was deeply asleep, and her sleep was unsharable. George could not endure it. He got out of bed and stood by the window in the cold spring night air, and saw the white cherry trees standing under the white moon, and thought of the cold girl asleep in her bed. He was there in the chill moonlight until the dawn came; in the morning he had a very bad cough and could not get up. Bobby was charming, devoted, and gay. ‘Just like old times, me nursing you,’ she commented, with a deliberate roll of her black eyes. She asked Madame Cruchot for another bed, which she placed in the corner of the room, and George thought it was quite reasonable she should not want to catch his cold; for he did not allow himself to remember the times in his past when quite serious illness had been no obstacle to the sharing of the dark; he decided to forget the sensualities of tiredness, or of fever, or of the extremes of sleeplessness. He was even beginning to feel ashamed.

  For a fortnight the Frenchwoman brought up magnificent meals, twice a day, and George and Bobby drank a great deal of red wine and of calvados and made jokes with Madame Cruchot about getting ill on honeymoons. They returned from Normandy rather earlier than had been arranged. It would be better for George, Bobby said, at home, where his friends could drop in to see him. Besides, it was sad to be shut indoors in springtime, and they were both eating too much.

  On the first night back in the flat, George waited to see if she would go into the study to sleep, but she came to bed in her pyjamas, and for the second time, he held her in his arms for the space of the act, and then she smoked, sitting up in bed and looking rather tired and small and, George thought, terribly young and pathetic. He did not sleep that night. He did not dare move out of bed for fear of disturbing her, and he was afraid to drop off to sleep for fear his limbs remembered the habits of a lifetime and searched for hers. In the morning she woke smiling, and he put his arms around her, but she kissed him with small gentle kisses and jumped out of bed.

  That day she said she must go and see her sister. She saw her sister often during the next weeks and kept suggesting that George should have his friends around more than he did. George asked why didn’t the sister come to see her here, in the flat? So one afternoon she came to tea. George had seen her briefly at the wedding and disliked her, but now for the first time he had a spell of revulsion against the marriage itself. The sister was awful – a commonplace, middle-aged female from some suburb. She had a sharp, dark face that poked itself inquisitively into the corners of the flat, pricing the furniture, and a thin acquisitive nose bent to one side. She sat, on her best behaviour, for two hours over the teacups, in a mannish navy blue suit, a severe black hat, her brogued feet set firmly side by side before her; and her thin nose seemed to be carrying on a silent, satirical conversation with her sister about George. Bobby was being cool and well mannered, as it were deliberately tired of life, as she always was when guests were there, but George was sure this was simply on his account. When the sister had gone, George was rather querulous about her; but
Bobby said, laughing, that of course she had known George wouldn’t like Rosa; she was rather ghastly; but then who had suggested inviting her? So Rosa came no more, and Bobby went to meet her for a visit to the pictures, or for shopping. Meanwhile, George sat alone and thought uneasily about Bobby, or visited his old friends. A few months after they returned from Normandy, someone suggested to George that perhaps he was ill. This made George think about it, and he realized he was not far from being ill. It was because he could not sleep. Night after night he lay beside Bobby, after her cheerfully affectionate submission to him; and he saw the soft curve of her cheek on the pillow, the long dark lashes lying close and flat. Never in his life had anything moved him so deeply as that childish cheek, the shadow of those lashes. A small crease in one cheek seemed to him the signature of emotion; and the lock of black glossy hair falling across her forehead filled his throat with tears. His nights were long vigils of locked tenderness.

  Then one night she woke and saw him watching her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, startled. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘I’m only watching you, dear,’ he said hopelessly.

  She lay curled up beside him, her fist beside her on the pillow, between him and her. ‘Why aren’t you happy?’ she asked suddenly; and as George laughed with a sudden bitter irony, she sat up, arms around her knees, prepared to consider this problem practically.

  ‘This isn’t marriage; this isn’t love,’ he announced. He sat up beside her. He did not know that he had ever used that tone to her before. A portly man, his elderly face flushed with sorrow, he had forgotten her for the moment, and he was speaking across her from his past, resurrected in her, to his past. He was dignified with responsible experience and the warmth of a lifetime’s responses. His eyes were heavy, satirical, and condemning. She rolled herself up against him and said with a small sad smile, ‘Then show me, George.’