Complete Short Stories (VMC) (108 page)

Frederick sat bolt upright, too, with his arms folded across his chest, as if he were on trial. Jessie tried to give him a look of contempt, to direct waves of animosity towards him, but he gazed blandly ahead. She thought: ‘Whatever we may say about Nicky, he did marry poor Gwen. She was lucky about that, and doesn’t have to go to work any more.’

Gwen, watching the other family, passed the baby along to Jessie, who held it self-consciously. When the ceremony was over, she carried it from the church, anxious to be out in the air again, and believing that the others were following her. Frederick caught up with her in the porch. ‘A little child has brought us together,’ he said, smiling at the distance.

Vexed, she walked ahead of him into the sunshine. The warmth of the afternoon wafted towards them. The street glittered and shimmered and some yellow wallflowers in the churchyard agonised the eye.

He followed her down the path.

‘What a pleasant surprise!’ she said, not able to leave things as they were. ‘Who’d have thought, when I woke up this morning,
this
would happen?’

‘Do you still drink as much?’ he asked in a polite voice.

Nicky came running out of the church and down the path towards them.

‘Will you please tell me your name?’ he asked Jessie. ‘We are to write down the godparents.’ He had always known Jessie too well to have considered her surname. Jessie was nervous of being committed in any way, and believed that the less she put her name to things the better.

‘Gutteridge,’ she said reluctantly. The feeling of being on alien ground, which she had cast off on leaving the church, returned.

‘Please will you spell this for me?’

Sullenly, she spelt it.

Nicky ran back to the church, his lips moving busily.

A taxi was waiting at the gates and Frederick opened the door and curtly signalled Jessie to get in.

‘I ordered this,’ he said, and sat down beside her. All of his movements, the way he crossed one leg over the other, and flicked a speck of dust off
his knee, demonstrated his contempt for her, and his own ease and relaxation.

I wonder what I did wrong, she thought. He liked me at first and I thought he enjoyed the quarrelling.

She had wondered for weeks, but reached no conclusion, afraid that because she was middle-aged men would always slip through her fingers.

‘Oh, go on, say something, or I shall scream,’ she said, shaking with exasperation.

‘What am I to say?’ he asked courteously.

‘Shut up!’

She stroked the baby’s cheek with the tip of her finger, feeling ridiculous sitting there beside Frederick with the baby in her arms.

Gwen and Nicky came down the path.

‘I ordered the taxi,’ Frederick said again, opening the door for them. They climbed in and sat on the little tip-up seats, and Gwen, her hands loose in her lap, glanced across at the baby.

‘Like me to have him?’ she asked.

‘No, he’s all right.’

She looked useless and idle now, as if she were nothing when the baby was taken from her.

‘They couldn’t make anything of your name,’ Nicky told Jessie. ‘Tomorrow I must go back with it written down.’

‘I should forget it,’ Jessie said.

When the taxi stopped, Frederick got out first. ‘I’ll see to this,’ he told them. ‘This is on me.’

He always knew how to behave, Jessie thought. She could not help but admire him. The first time he had come into the bar, she had noticed his manner. When he had paid for his drink, he had taken a great handful of silver from his pocket and slapped it down on the bar for her to sort out what he owed. When his friends came in – Nicky perhaps, and Gwen – he would let them order their drinks and then he would push the money across to Jessie. ‘I’m taking care of that,’ he would say.

Awkwardly, Jessie stepped out of the car, holding the baby, who with blue eyes now wide open placidly surveyed the sky, and turned its fist hungrily against its mouth.

Gwen and Nicky lived in two rooms above a butcher’s shop. When Nicky unlocked the street door, there was a cool smell of meat and scrubbed wood. Against the window hung sheaves of clean wrapping-paper on hooks. Pots of ferns stood in the shadows, and shining knives and cleavers. Jessie held her breath, fastidiously, and followed Gwen up the narrow stairs.

The rooms were sparsely furnished and the men, throwing off their
raincoats, sank down as if exhausted in the only two chairs. In the bedroom, Jessie laid the baby in his cradle, which was a large wooden box from the greengrocer’s. There was none of the equipment – the lined baskets and the powder puffs and enamel bowls – that Jessie had so envied her married sister. A waste of a baby, she decided.

‘He’s wet his frock,’ she told Gwen. ‘I’ll change it, if you like.’ She felt rather condescending and capable with the baby now, quite used to him.

‘It’s the only one he’s got,’ Gwen said. ‘He just stays in his nightgown other days.’

In the morning, Jessie thought that she would go to the draper’s and buy a heap of baby linen.

‘I’m glad it’s over,’ Gwen said, as she combed her hair. ‘Nicky was all for it. He was christened himself, you see.’

When she heard her husband calling, she dropped the comb at once and ran into the other room where the men lolled in their chairs, their arms trailing over the sides as if they were drifting in a punt on the river.

They are a heartless pair, Jessie thought.

‘A pity if either of you over-taxed yourself. You want to take things quiet at your age,’ she said. The other three could see the reason why she had never married, and, a second or two later, she saw it herself, looking at Gwen complying for all she was worth handing them cups of tea, perching on the arm of her husband’s chair in a grateful way.

‘Where am I supposed to sit?’ she asked.

Frederick folded his arms across his chest, as he had in church, and shut his eyes. She sat on the arm of his chair.

‘Such beautiful manners,’ she murmured. ‘Very lucky, Gwen, us having these two polite gents.’

‘
You
haven’t got
me
,’ Frederick said.

‘Gwen, get the bottle of port out of the cupboard,’ Nicky said. ‘We should drink the baby’s health.’

‘Port on top of tea!’ Jessie thought. She glanced at Frederick, as if to share with him her surprise at this idea, but his eyes seemed to her transparent, without any
look
in them. His manner was transparent, too; but nothing was behind it to be revealed. He was quite negative; just
not hers
.

‘To Nicholas!’ Nicky said. They stood and raised their glasses, and tears rushed to Jessie’s eyes. She always cried easily – when ‘God Save the King’ was played, or when she saw a bride. Gwen looked tearful, too, but from fatigue. While the others were drinking, she fetched the baby and sat down, opening her blouse to feed him. Once, Jessie saw her brush her lashes with her fingers. The baby fed steadily, then less steadily, then nodded; full, blissful, his eyelids at half-mast and a line of eye showing beneath.

‘He’s too tired to shut his eyes even,’ Jessie said.

‘A very tiring day,’ Frederick said.

‘He’s just good,’ Gwen said, and she buttoned her blouse and dried her eyes finally.

Nicky said: ‘What about filling our glasses?’

She hurried to do so, the baby asleep over her shoulder.

‘I must go,’ Frederick said, when he had emptied his glass.

‘Yes,’ said Jessie, standing up, too. She hoped, still, that she would not be obliged to spend the evening on her own. To walk along quarrelling with Frederick would be better.

Frederick took a pound note, smoothed it flat and put it behind the clock. ‘Buy the baby something,’ he said to Gwen.

Nicky saw them downstairs and through the shop. He locked the door behind them, and they were left standing in the hot deserted streets.

‘Never anyone much about on Sundays,’ Jessie said conversationally.

He was silent.

‘Going to thunder, I think,’ she went on, looking at the lowering, cloudless sky, and drawing her furs round her, trying to provoke him into some response, she said: ‘It’s my birthday tomorrow.’

He smiled and tightened the belt of his raincoat, buckling it neatly.

‘That is no concern of mine,’ he said, and walked briskly away, whistling through his teeth. One after another, enormous spots of rain began to fall upon the pavement.

They were the first in. The landlord followed them into the little side bar with two pints of stout-and-mild on a tin tray, then rattled with a poker at the fire which had been quenched with a welter of coal. It was an empty gesture, a mere pass made in the direction of hospitality. When he had gone: ‘Well!’ she said, turning from a picture of Lord Kitchener, tears in her eyes.

‘You haven’t been in here since I went,’ he said.

‘How did you know?’

‘Because you walked up to that picture as if you were saying: “Ah, Lord Kitchener, my old friend!” If you were here every night you wouldn’t have done that.’ He handed her a glass of beer and went to the window. The cobbles outside, between pub and church, were full of shadows, the sun struck only the gilt weathervane on the steeple. Now the quarter was marked with rounded leaden notes. Thrushes sang from gravestones and umbrella trees.

‘The violet hour. Who said that? Sappho?’

‘Sappho. I like the sound of Sappho. The last time I was in here …’

‘The day before war. A Saturday. They were all here – the man in the bowler hat and his wife …’

‘The one in the corner with the paste sandwiches, reading …’

‘One moment!’ She flicked her fingers. ‘
Extinct Civilisations
! That was it. Over there,’ she pointed, ‘two girls drinking.
Good
girls! There hadn’t started to be tarts about then. Not here, I mean.’

‘Are there now?’

She laughed. ‘And
you
said: “We’ll always remember this because it is a Date. It is something children will have to learn for history.”’

‘Poor little sods.’

‘“When I am eighty,” you said, “I shall tell people I remember that day. I sat drinking at the Fleece with Sarah Fletcher …”’

‘So I shall tell my children that.’

‘And they will be madly bored, and you will say, “That stout old woman who lives now, I believe, at Tunbridge Wells.”’

‘No. I shall say, “I was drinking with Sarah Fletcher, a beautiful lady and my very dear friend.”’

‘No one has talked like that to me for four years.’

She sat down at the table and he came and sat down beside her. They slipped into the old habit of drinking together, elbow against elbow, their beer going down level as it used.

‘How’ve you been for …?’ he tapped the glass.

‘I haven’t much …’

‘Nor me. How does it go down?’

‘It seems no different, though I suppose it is.’

‘How is your son?’ he asked politely.

‘His milk teeth are coming out. Funny and touching when he grins. I love it in him. Not in other children, though.’

‘And your daughter?’

‘You speak very stiffly.’ She laughed.

‘Say “silly sod” as you used.’

‘No. I’ve stopped saying that.’

As he tapped the table with a half-crown, he was thinking how grimy his hand looked, and curled the nails into his palm, against the coin.

‘I hated all the maleness, chaps undressing together, being hearty,’ he said suddenly. ‘I always felt thin and blue. Good luck!’ He lifted his filled glass. ‘But the worst thing was Christmas dinners. All sitting there being pleased and cheery with our nice dinners and the officers being decent, but each one of us his own private self. “Poor men and soldiers unable to rejoice.” Perhaps not, though. Perhaps all enjoying themselves like hell. God, this is boring. Before I came tonight, I thought I wouldn’t tell any soldier stories. You see, you don’t like me to talk like it.’

She wiped a little moustache of froth from her mouth. ‘I want you to tell me some time, but it separates me from you, and just now it is hard enough to get back again.’

‘I thought we were doing fine.’

‘I thought so too.’

‘And then there always
were
things to separate us. Your posh friends and your political notions. These endureth for ever, but being a soldier soon stops.’

‘I can think of the fighting and your being hungry and the hospital all right, but I can’t hear about the Christmas dinner. I can’t think about that.’

‘I enjoyed it like mad really. Look, now the fire’s going to burn for us.’

The coals shuddered and collapsed and a few flames, pale like irises, grew up between them.

‘Do you still cry as much as you used?’

‘No.’ At once, the tears rushed up into her eyes.

The landlord came in now, and placed a log on top of the flames, which
wavered and sank down. It was a damp green log, with ivy still clinging to its bark.

‘Tell me more, then, about being a soldier.’

‘No, it’s just madly boring and stupid, living miles below the subsistence level, and the chaps being so coarse, much worse even than the way posh girls like you are coarse. And when they’re not being coarse, they’re bloody touching and have S.W.A.K. on the backs of their letters and make you feel ashamed. It’s only all being together. Then office jobs – copy lists of numbers on to ration cards, so boring you make mistakes … do a pile and then say, “Oh, God! October has only thirty days,” correct them all, smudges and blots and then, “Oh damn! it’s November has thirty.” And being in a sort of dirty post-office place, dust, broken nibs, ink bottles empty, falling over and full of fluff. And stuffy. You’re not listening. Let’s have some more beer. Darling, what are you looking at?’

‘I was watching the ivy on that log turning bronze.’

‘I hate ivy. Christ! The trouble is, I’ve no more money.’

She felt in her coat pockets. It was a thick white coat with a fine bloom of dirt upon it.

‘Angel! I do like taking money from a nice girl.’

‘Ivy. My mother’s favourite. She used to like to spend two or three hours fixing it all up in a jar against a white wall.’

‘Your mother did do the hell of a lot of high-class things, but don’t go on about
her
. You’ll only cry.’