Love in Our Time (2 page)

“And when you've got the grate out,” he continued, “I should have a look behind the surround. They make 'em of anything these days.”

Alice rose and put some more coal on the fire. Then she sat down on the floor at Mr. Biddle's feet. She had never been particularly fond of him while she had been living at home—it was her mother that she had been closer to; but now that she was married she was convinced all the time that Mr. Biddle must be breaking his heart because of her absence. She wanted to do everything in her power to make him happy.

Mr. Biddle moved up so that she could lean against his knee and began to stroke her head. His pink, church-wardenly hand passed caressingly over the dark waves of her hair. Gerald looked at it in silence. For some reason he resented that hand: he resented it quite as much as if it had been any other man's hand. At last he couldn't stand it any longer.

“Mind if I excuse myself?” he asked. “Got an important letter to write.”

Alice opened her mouth to object but Mr. Biddle stopped her.

“You make yourself at home,” he said to Gerald. “I'm all right here with Allus.”

He gave her a little nudge with his knee as he said it, and his hand began to stroke her hair again.

As soon as he had left them Gerald lit another cigarette and went upstairs to the room he called his study. Admittedly, the study was not properly furnished yet—he and Alice had agreed to leave it till later. But it had a rug and a couple of chairs and a desk. The desk had come from the same shop which had supplied the walnut suite in the bedroom. It was a very handsome piece. The only thing against it was the drawers. He had already dragged one of the picturesque, antique-looking handles clean out of the wood trying to get at something that was inside.

But this time he simply wanted to write. The veneered and panelled lid came down easily enough, and he took his place at it with a pleasant feeling of inner enlargement. Here he was, his own master, sitting at his own desk in his own study in his own house preparing to write an important and private letter.

But the letter itself was not so easy. He had destroyed six sheets of notepaper and smoked two more cigarettes right through before he was satisfied with it. Then, when he had finally approved the draft, he took out a sheet of the special notepaper, with Two Gables, Boleyn Avenue, N.2, printed in fanciful, frustrated capitals across the top of it, and began to make a fair copy.

He wrote slowly and carefully, with his tongue pressed into his cheek.

The phrasing when he had finished was clear, succinct and to the point:

ADVERTISER, PUBLIC SCHOOL TYPE, it ran, DESIRES CHANGE. EXCELLENT APPEARANCE. WELL SPOKEN. OWN CAR. HIGHEST REFS. BRIMFUL OF INITIATIVE AND IDEAS. PROSPECTS ESSENTIAL. WRITE BOX …

He read it over twice and saw nothing to alter. Then he stamped the envelope, enclosed the postal order he had brought in readiness and went out straight away to post it. He almost tiptoed down so as not to disturb the happy and indulgent Mr. Biddle. He didn't want him asking any silly questions as to where he was going for the moment; the whole matter of the advertisement was private even from Alice. There was no point in making her worried by thinking that he didn't like his job. He had never even told her how shabbily the I.P.P. had treated him—how after he had represented Imperial Picture Papers in the West End for five difficult years they had split up the territory and given all his best customers to a little sinister North-countryman who carried a fountain pen in his outside breast pocket and wore his trousers hitched up right over his ankles. It was the North-countryman who now called on the car firms and the big dress shops and the distillers, while he, Gerald Sneyd, was left to round up the shoe shops and hatters and smaller fry for their advertisements. No! he wasn't going to talk, he was going to do something. He was living for that remote, splendid moment when he would be able to walk into Mr. Hubbard's room without knocking and say politely, but nonchalantly: “I've come to offer my resignation. Another firm has offered me
all
the West End.”

But it was Sunday evening now and very peaceful. International Picture Papers seemed a long way off, and Boleyn Avenue and Collet Gardens the kind of Paradise that men attained by spending the rest of their earthly lives in E.C.4 or W.C.1. All feeling of ferment had gone out of the air. There was simply an atmosphere of aimlessness and abeyance. Except for those who worshipped or went to the pictures there was nothing whatever to be done until to-morrow morning. There was, in short, the regular seventh day feeling of life having run out three or four hours before it was time to go to bed.

When he got back to Two Gables, Mr. Biddle was just leaving. He was standing on the doorstep in his unfashionable blue overcoat, and his cloth cap. It was a Sunday indulgence of his, that cap. He never wore it at any other time; and each week as he took it off its peg, he felt a happier and easier man. Soon, when he had retired—it was a cottage in Dorset that he promised himself—he looked forward to being able to wear it every day. In its way, it was his symbol of contentment, that cap. When he was wearing it, and his pipe was full of the dark treacly mixture which he always smoked, he would mooch along, a walking mass of satisfaction. Even the dog, from long association, had grown more than a little like him. It sauntered in his wake with just a suggestion of cap and pipe about it, too.

When Mr. Biddle saw Gerald he gave him a cheerful nod.

“Allus wanted to knock me up a few sandwiches,” he explained, “but I've told her they were expecting me.”

At the word “they” he nodded expressively in the direction of St. Stephen's Church at the corner: there was something comfortably intimate and familiar about
the gesture as though he and the saint were the two pillars of the place. Then he kissed Alice, patted Gerald on the back and set off. There was just comfortable time. He would go back home, and leave the dog, and exchange his cloth cap for a bowler, and walk round to St. Stephen's in time to show people to their seats. He liked Sunday evenings; they seemed to have been made for men on the wrong side of fifty.

At the corner he turned and looked back. Alice and Gerald were still there. They made a pleasant sight in the doorway of their home: Gerald had got his hand on Alice's shoulder. Mr. Biddle waved affectionately and raised his cap; all the same he could not help wishing it had been anyone but Gerald.…

As soon as Mr. Biddle had gone, Gerald felt easier. The house seemed somehow warmer and more intimate without him; it was their house again. When they got back into the drawing-room, he put his arms round Alice and kissed her. They had been married only three months and were still very much in love. It was what he wanted, to be able to shut the front door and for them to be left alone together. Alice willingly put her lips to his and closed her eyes. It was the antidote to everything, this kind of love. Fear, and discontent and anxiety were all defeated by it.

“I love you, Alice,” he said.

“I love you, Gerald.”

Sunday evening was nearly over. They lay in bed beside each other on the patent spring mattress that had gone with the suite and watched the headlamps of passing cars make patterns on the ceiling. Gerald's arm was round Alice. She had been crying.

“I wish it didn't have to be like that,” she said at last, “It spoils everything.”

“I'm sorry,” he replied bitterly. “I'm sorry you feel like that.”

“But it hasn't got to be always, has it?” she asked. “Say that you don't want it to be that way always.”

“O.K.,” he said; he wanted to drop the conversation altogether.

“But it's only because we haven't enough money, isn't it?” she persisted. “It isn't that you don't ever want to have one.”

“That's all it is,” he answered. “It's just because we can't afford it.”

He drew his arm away and sat up on his elbow: it seemed a poor sort of ending to their love.

In the darkness beside him he could feel that Alice was still crying. She was quite silent about it, just lying there, sobbing. He put his arm round her again and tried to reason with her.

“It isn't that I don't love you,” he said. “You know that. It's simply that if we had a baby now it'd be the end of everything. We'd have to sell the car and cut down on holidays and God knows what else. It wouldn't give us a chance.”

“Other people do it,” she said.

“Other people don't have our expenses.”

“I'd rather have a baby than a car.”

“You try it and see,” he said.

She moved out of his arms and turned her back on him.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “Don't let's talk about it. I don't want your baby.”

He could feel that she was really crying this time.

He lay for a moment without moving and then got up. He remembered now that he hadn't seen to the windows. Downstairs in the drawing-room he paused and looked out into the garden. It was a pale moonlight night and everyone else on the estate seemed to be asleep; there wasn't even a light in any of the windows. Half an hour ago Alice and he had been lovers, and now they were just two people who didn't want the same thing and happened to sleep together. It was a queer business this being in love. It had been difficult in Eden. And ever since then every damn thing had conspired to make it more difficult still.

It was Gerald's idea that they should have a party. The idea came to him quite suddenly next morning. It struck him all at once that perhaps Alice was too much cut off from life. It must be very different, he realised, being shut away in Boleyn Avenue from being in the City. When he had first met her, Alice had been a typist in Faith Bros., the outfitters. There had always been plenty going on there. Simply being in an office like that with the phone ringing all day and letters flowing in with every post, gave a person the feeling of being right up to the ears in life.

She didn't see anybody now from the time he left in the mornings until he got back at night. Once or twice, to make something to do, she had, he knew, taken herself to the pictures in the afternoon. But it had been no fun sitting there in the ornate gloom of the local Arcadian with a staring wilderness of two thousand empty seats all round her; it had been as unsatisfactory as buying a box of chocolates and eating them all herself. The more he thought about it the more he realised that her present life wasn't right for a girl. It was like being compulsorily retired at twenty-two.

He wished now that he and Alice had made things up before he left. If it had been eight thirty-five or even eight-forty he could have gone back and said he was sorry; they could have kissed and forgiven and he
wouldn't have had her on his conscience all day. But at eight forty-five there was nothing for it but to take his place by the kerb alongside the other Tudor citizens who were waiting for the tram.

They were amazing, those tramcars. They came swaying and grinding down the road, in an endless series, all identically painted and all identically packed. They were solid with people by the time they got to Finchley, jammed with barbarians from the outer North. The passengers themselves all had the fixed, permanent look of people who had been sleeping, sitting up all night in the depot waiting for the morning rush to begin.

At the third attempt he got on: there was no standing back and waiting for ladies to get on first. It was every man for himself and the ladies knew it. With their short umbrellas and their little, sharp attaché-cases they fought for their rights, and got them. When the tram moved off again it was usually the men who had been left behind.

By the time he had got to town he had worked out all the details of the party. He would get all the old bunch together. It would be like one of the old jolly mornings at The Spaniards, except that all the drinks would be on him. That was a point to consider, of course. Some of the bunch were able to put it away like anything. He would have to order at least a couple of dozen bottles of lager beer and hang back himself till he saw how things were going. And there was food to be considered: they would have to be given something. It was not until he had pondered for a moment that he saw that sausages were the only solution. There had been a paragraph in the paper only the other night about a peer's daughter who gave beer-and-sausage parties in a
mews in Belgravia; and if a peer's daughter could get away with it, he reckoned that he and Alice could do the same.

Of course, there were other expenses. There were cigarettes, for instance: they would need a hundred at least—it would look very bad running out of cigarettes half-way through. Quite clearly the whole thing wouldn't be cheap by any means, but if it made Alice happy again it would have been worth it.

He was still thinking about the party when he reached the office. The imposing marble and chromium staircase of Imperial Picture Papers was so familiar that he passed up almost without noticing it; the staircase was built to impress visitors, not the staff. His department lay at the end of a long corridor, like a tunnel. All the marble and chromium had given out by the time the architect had got as far as that. It was where the work was done and it was as plain as a barracks.

He heard Mr. Hubbard's voice before he was even in the room. The shrill tenor squeal reached him through the thin glass partition.

“Where's Sneyd?” Mr. Hubbard was asking irritably. “Tell him I'm waiting for him.”

Boleyn Avenue and Alice, and Saturday-afternoon-till-Sunday-night all flickered for an instant, and then vanished. Only Monday morning remained. He was a family man in his own right no longer; Mr. Hubbard had raised his voice, and he was just a name, an impersonal, replaceable name, on the salary list of the I.P.P.

He shot his hat and coat into a corner of the room and straightened his tie. Then he went through and knocked on Mr. Hubbard's door.