A Closed Eye (10 page)

‘I believe that Helen is extremely well; at least, I have no
reason to suspect otherwise. When last heard of she was living with a woman friend near Newbury. Why do you ask? She can be of no interest to you, particularly now.’

‘I sometimes think I don’t make you happy enough,’ confessed Harriet.

But he knew she was thinking of her own condition, and said gently, ‘I am perfectly happy, you know. We’re both a little overwrought at the moment—you must allow for that. Now, what about some raspberries?’ He put a hand on hers. ‘It will be all right, you know. You’re not frightened, are you?’

She smiled at him, grateful as always for his kindness. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not frightened.’

They walked back, on a mellow evening not appreciably cooler than the preceding afternoon. The radiant autumn had lasted well into October; the sun at midday was nearly as warm as August. The baby will be born in the winter, she thought, and felt a little cold herself. ‘You should have worn a coat,’ said Freddie. ‘That jacket is too light.’

‘But it was so warm this afternoon …’

‘And now it is unsettled. The fine spell may be over.’

How shall I stand the winter, she thought, and at that moment her baby moved imperiously inside her.

‘Freddie,’ she said. ‘I’m really very well. Take no notice of my moods. I’m fine, not even tired any more. Would you like to ask anyone to dinner? It’d be no trouble; I’m more or less straight. I haven’t paid you nearly enough attention recently. You’ve been wonderful,’ she said, in all sincerity. It did not occur to her at that moment that any other kind of happiness existed.

Freddie’s predictions were correct. The following day dawned dull and grey; cobwebs on the rose-bushes in their garden were spangled with opaque misty drops.

‘Not much point in going out today,’ said Freddie, departing for the office. ‘What will you do?’

‘Nothing much. Finish my book, I think.’ But
Little Dorrit
was beginning to horrify her, as well as move her to frequent tears. The tenderness, the pity of the girl! And to end up with that wreck of a husband! An impossible woman, she thought, with a slight but definite sorrow. But good, as I always wanted to be good, believing that if one wished it so one could become perfect. Dickens himself wanted it to be true. Maybe it is merely a matter of doing one’s best, all the time. The thought cheered her. I shall behave as if I were a better person, she decided, and that way I might turn out a credit to Freddie. But I must be cheerful! Cheerfulness is what is needed now, and humility. Let nothing you dismay, she thought, walking round the garden, and feeling drops of water on her skirt. In the distance she heard the telephone.

‘Mrs Dodd,’ said Dawn, as she came into the house. ‘Left a number for you to ring her back.’

The number was Tessa’s old number in Cadogan Square. But the caller had been her mother. Had something terrible happened? Why had Tessa not telephoned herself? Are we, awful thought, estranged? Or, worse than all other thoughts, has she seen through my indifference when Jack’s name is mentioned? There was a dangerous conversation once … But there was never any intention on my part … She could not have thought … She blushed, took a deep breath, and picked up the telephone. ‘Mrs Dodd?’ she said. ‘This is Harriet Lytton.’

‘Harriet! So good of you to ring back so promptly! Such exciting news! Tessa’s had a little girl, prematurely, but quite all right. They just got back from Paris in time.
Wasn’t
it lucky?’

Harriet had forgotten the amount of emphasis and punctuation in Tessa’s mother’s conversational style. A noble and commanding woman, she had always thought her; her voice matched her unusual height and distant kindness. All kinds of
public duties could be assumed from the very fashion in which she entered a room.

‘A girl!’ she said, sitting down. ‘How wonderful. Was Jack with her?’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Dodd, with immense enthusiasm. She did not like Jack, but would have considered it disloyal to admit it. ‘Well, I must get on and let everybody else know. Nice to have made contact again, Harriet. You’re keeping well, I hope?’

‘Thank you, yes. I’ll go and see Tessa this afternoon, shall I?’

‘Oh … how kind. But you won’t stay long, will you? She’s very tired still. And Jack’s there, anyway. Now, you take care of
your
self. Goodbye, my dear.’

Excitement, long dormant, brought her to life. ‘Dawn,’ she called. ‘I’m going out. Could you leave me a sandwich for later? I don’t know what time I’ll be back.’

She half ran down the King’s Road in her eagerness, then pulled herself together, reflected that she should have brought an umbrella, smoothed her hair, buttoned her white coat, and walked on sedately. Both she and Tessa were booked into the same private hospital, under the same consultant. She floated up the stairs, disdaining the lift: she knew the rooms, the efficient corridors. Knocking on Tessa’s door, she tried to compose her radiant face, which was what Jack Peckham saw, before once again her hand flew up to her jaw.

‘Mrs Lytton,’ he said gravely. ‘Have some champagne.’

‘Hattie! How did you get here?’ Tessa was sitting up in bed, her hair washed, a white cotton nightgown slipping from her shoulders. She looked, Harriet thought, almost dishevelled, alert, quizzical, as if she had not bargained on the interruption.

‘Your mother telephoned. I’m so happy for you, darling. Where’s the baby?’

‘Downstairs, in an incubator. Oh, she’s fine, quite small,
but that’s to be expected. Elizabeth, we’re calling her. Elizabeth Charlotte.’

‘Elizabeth after my mother,’ said Jack, handing her a glass of champagne.

Harriet sat down, feeling suddenly tired. Jack’s presence inhibited her from asking the questions she longed to have answered. She drank her champagne, told Tessa how well she looked, and, aware of Jack standing with his back to the door, his arms folded, said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, shall I? Oh, I didn’t even bring flowers! I think I must be more excited than you are.’ When is Jack going back? She wanted to ask. When can we have a proper talk?

‘Well, actually … I don’t want too many visitors while Jack’s still in London. Of course, it’s always good to see you. Dear Hattie. Have some more champagne.’

‘No, I must be going,’ said Harriet, smoothing her fine dark hair back again; her hand, she noticed, was very slightly trembling. ‘Well … let me know when you’ll be coming home. Is there anything you want? Anything I can do?’

‘Nothing. Now I
am
a bit tired. Good to see you, Hattie. Thank you for coming.’ She sank down in the bed, apparently torpid, her eye watchful. Jack opened the door with exaggerated courtesy. ‘Good of you to come,’ he said. She detected a faint irony in his elaborately good manners. As the door wheezed slowly behind her, she could just make out, ‘She can be a bit dense, sometimes.’

She walked slowly home, through what was now a steady drizzle. Dawn had left her watercress sandwiches. Ignoring these, she made some coffee, then sat by the window, looking out on to the silent square. It’s just that one feels a little lonely from time to time, she thought. So stupid. And it will be hours before Freddie gets home. Always I turn back to him, she thought, and almost managed not to think, and usually after disappointments.

O
N
F
REDDIE’S FACE
, unseasonal merriment. ‘A girl!’ she heard him say before she drifted off. When she woke again, the sight of her furiously sleeping baby led to instant possession of herself. There was a certain hilarity in the room; she was thought to have done well. ‘A very easy delivery,’ said Mr Cambridge, looking in. Her father and mother were joking with Freddie; Freddie was joking with the nurse. What larks, thought Harriet, amused. Now they will all take the credit. Nothing could upset her now; she had belatedly come of age. ‘Imogen’, she announced to the room. ‘She is going to be called Imogen.’ Surprised, they acquiesced; what a pretty name, they said. ‘Imogen Claire,’ she added later, after drinking a cup of tea. But when they had all gone away, at last, she bent over the little crib and whispered, ‘Immy. My Immy.’

There never was such a child, she thought, both then and later. Her beauty was astonishing, even more astonishing in that it proceeded from two such ordinary people: such perfection of feature, such silkiness of hair seemed to them miraculous. In comparison poor little Elizabeth Peckham looked like a waif, spindly, blotchy, her pale blue eyes faintly crossed. ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Harriet generously. ‘She’ll grow out of that.’ Her own child gave no trouble, so little that they marvelled at her. There was no thought of disciplining her:
she was too unexpected, too undeserved. Although the child slept through the nights her parents did not, alert for possible calls, for possible dangers. Dawn thought them crazy. Freddie, permanently tired, found himself smiling throughout the day.

Harriet, with magnificent impartiality, allowed others to admire the child. Her own father was restored to euphoria; her mother was pleased but impatient, anxious to dissociate herself from so ageing an event. Nevertheless, exquisite clothes continued to arrive by post. The baby was immaculate, changed several times a day. It seemed a pity not to spoil her, to gratify her. There was never any thought that she might be denied whatever it was she wanted. And they were rewarded, they were quite sure of that. Imogen never cried. On the contrary, she laughed. When Harriet wheeled her out in her pram she laughed at the women who were drawn to her. Sitting up, and able to use her hands more purposefully, she grabbed what was available to her on supermarket shelves. ‘Imogen! Put that back!’ Harriet would say. Imogen laughed. Others might see defiance in that small face. Harriet saw the life force.

There was no more boredom, no more loneliness. Unsuspected energies constantly renewed themselves; self-pity was a thing of the past. And sometimes there were two children to look after, for Tessa took advantage of the garden in Wellington Square to leave poor Lizzie Peckham for the afternoon, or for the day, or occasionally for the night. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she would say. ‘Only it’s Dad’s retirement party.’ Wish it were mine, thought Freddie, who was now rather more tired than he had bargained for. Dawn was not best pleased, although it was really no trouble to cook two fillets of plaice instead of one, to put two sets of clothes into the washing machine. ‘That kid’s not properly fed,’ she might remark to Harriet. ‘She doesn’t know how to eat.’ ‘I think her
mother still gives her baby food,’ Harriet would say. ‘That’s why she has no appetite. The food is unfamiliar to her. Come on, Lizzie, another little mouthful.’ Imogen would look on amazed, then would start to eat the strawberries put on a plate for Lizzie. ‘Immy!’ she would protest. ‘Those are
Lizzie’s
strawberries. You’ve had yours.’ Imogen laughed.

Curiously, the two children did not get on. Lizzie was a nervous child, pale, and sometimes, when she could raise the energy, fierce. She would sit in a corner of the room, nursing the toy she had brought with her, visibly anxious that it might be taken away from her, longing for her mother to come and end her ordeal. For that mother she had a love and a hunger that were not entirely reciprocated. Tessa viewed her daughter with a certain perceptible disappointment. Where was Jack’s beauty, where were her own high colour, her sense of what was due to her? She grew bored with the tasks required of her, decided that she must go back to work, left Lizzie at Wellington Square for a whole day while she had her hair done, and, while she was about it, treated herself to a manicure and a pedicure, and—why not?—something new to wear. For Jack might come home, unannounced, at any moment, though he showed no signs of doing so. ‘Somewhere in Israel,’ she replied to Harriet’s question, sitting in Harriet’s drawing-room, accepting a glass of sherry from Freddie, while Lizzie plucked fretfully at her short and unmaternal skirt. ‘But he’ll be back as soon as he can manage it.’ ‘He won’t, you know,’ Freddie remarked to Harriet, when they were preparing for bed that evening. ‘She really is a tiresome woman. And why can’t that child go to its grandparents?’ ‘You weren’t listening,’ said Harriet. ‘They’ve sold Cadogan Square and moved to the mews. Now that he’s retired they plan to spend most of the year at their place in France. Tessa will be entirely alone.’ ‘Why don’t you think Jack will come back?’ she asked, a little later. ‘Why should he?’ Freddie
retorted. ‘He’s not my idea of a married man.’ He resented Jack’s freedom on behalf of married men like himself. ‘He’s never spent any time at home, if you can call it home. And neither of them seems particularly interested in the girl.’ For Lizzie was ‘the girl’ to him. He could not, perhaps would not, take to her. She was inferior in every respect to his own child, who was quite enough, sometimes too much for him. Lizzie Peckham was an annoyance, a distraction, with her woeful face and her grubby track suit. She did not seem to care for him, or indeed for anyone except her mother. She sat out her periods in Wellington Square as if they were a long exile. Harriet was sorry for her, but Immy came first.

Imposing Lizzie on Freddie meant imposing Tessa as well, for Lizzie had to be collected at the end of a long and tiring day, when the child’s face was already wan with fatigue. And Tessa was not easily dispatched; Freddie fumed. It seemed to Harriet that her friend was endangered by various antagonisms; Dawn too rather disliked her, thought her a bad mother, and to Harriet’s amazement remarked that she thought Tessa frivolous. ‘Frivolous?’ echoed Harriet. ‘But in fact her life is rather hard. She never knows when her husband is coming home.’ (Or indeed whether he is coming home at all, she said to herself.) ‘And her parents are leaving London, going to live abroad—she will hardly ever see them. And Lizzie does rather cling to her. I think perhaps she’s a little unsettled,’ she said moderately. ‘She was talking about going back to work.’ ‘Lizzie might as well be a weekly boarder here,’ said Dawn, who liked the child. ‘And she’s not happy. Anyone can see she’s unhappy here. Women like that shouldn’t have children,’ she added virtuously, as the young sometimes will.