A Little Death (21 page)

‘Don’t be disgusting.’

Jimmy hated anything like that, especially if I said it, but I didn’t care, I was so fed up with the whole thing. It was always that, or the garden, or making radios with the chauffeur, or
something.
That was the thing about Teddy: he understood how to enjoy himself; Jimmy never did.

That was the great difference between them. Jimmy lived for his work and, whatever he was doing, he had to understand it down to the last detail. Like those wretched machines he was always buying for the servants
and then bothering over them in the kitchen. It was almost an obsession with him, to understand how a machine worked. Teddy didn’t want details. If he saw a good thing he’d put his money into it and the money would do the work while he amused himself. He never talked about business things to me, of course, because I wouldn’t have understood, but I know he did well out of them. He liked music and dancing and car racing—he loved that. He used to take me to Brooklands sometimes. I’d love to go there just once more, but they’ve closed it down. They used to keep the cars in stables as if they were horses and there was a place they always called the paddock, full of cars waiting to race. Teddy used to get
so
excited…

Even if Ada hadn’t told him, Jimmy must have known that he couldn’t be the child’s father because we no longer had sexual relations. I know Ada thought I’d done something to cause the miscarriage—women have such nasty minds, particularly lower-class women—but nothing so vile would have occurred to Teddy. Or Jimmy, for that matter. And I didn’t try to abort the baby. I wouldn’t have known how. I’ve always thought it aborted itself because I didn’t deserve to have a child, not that I wanted one. The whole business sounds revoltingly medieval and I can’t imagine why anybody does it.

My relationship with Teddy—the physical relationship, I mean—only lasted until the miscarriage. He thought he’d hurt me, you see, that it was his fault, and that frightened him terribly. ‘We needn’t, need we? Not again?’

I said, ‘No, we don’t have to.’

‘But we can still have a lot of fun together, can’t we?’

He thought that was what I wanted, you see, what I needed to stop me feeling blue about the baby. Because
even though I hadn’t wanted it, losing it like that did leave me feeling rather peculiar. And Teddy tried to make fun—
I
tried, too, to be gay and not to care about anything, I tried very hard, but there was a change between us and we couldn’t seem to get back to our old ways. We’d go off and dance and do things, but it wasn’t the same. It was as if Teddy was frightened to be alone with me. He’d always collected people, wherever he went, with his champagne and cigars, he wanted people to enjoy themselves. He’d invite complete strangers to Hope House. Women I’d never seen before in my life were always draping themselves over me and saying, ‘Darling, it was so sweet of you to invite me.’ One couldn’t very well say, ‘I didn’t.’ The men were the kind who pay absurd compliments. There was one fellow who told me that he was my slave. He said, ‘You can order me to do whatever you like and I’ll do it. You have only to say the word.’ Well, this got very tedious because he was constantly following me around, waiting for these orders, and I could never think of anything for him to do except bring me cocktails. He must have got awfully bored because he started throwing himself at my feet and trying to kiss my shoes, and it all got rather sordid and embarrassing. Teddy had to ask his chauffeur to frog-march him out of the house in the end. I can’t remember what his name was, if I ever knew it. I didn’t know any of their names and I don’t suppose half of them knew mine. But it was as if Teddy and I were wearing a sign saying ‘Don’t leave us alone’.

I suppose… the sorts of things we did, that was the time as much as anything. Everyone was a bit mad then. Driving around London in the middle of the night having treasure hunts, that sort of thing. Nothing seemed to matter very much… I didn’t especially
want
to do the things I was doing—certainly I didn’t
like the people, I thought they were a great lot of phonies, all talking at the tops of their voices about nothing at all—but one had to do something. I remember one party at Hope House, walking through a great throng of these people in the garden, all strangers, all drunk and I was drunk too, they swung themselves round at me with their teeth showing like horses on a merry-go-round that come towards you and past you, towards you and past you, round and round again and again, and never stop for you to climb on board…

But I needed them to be there. Teddy and I would go to one of the nightclubs and bring them back, hordes of them, roaring up the drive shrieking and sounding their horns, the girls running up and down the paths in short dresses, tipsy and laughing. They just wanted to enjoy themselves, they didn’t care how. I wanted not to be alone and there they were.

I suppose I had hoped that Teddy would look after me, somehow, but he couldn’t. I wanted him to protect me from Jimmy and from myself. The emptiness I felt inside, knowing I’d failed with Jimmy, that I couldn’t talk to him or anyone… but how could Teddy protect me from that? He couldn’t, of course he couldn’t, and everything was wrong and I didn’t know what to do. I’d even driven Edmund away. One could hardly blame him—what was it the soldier said, in that famous cartoon? ‘If you know of a better ’ole, go to it.’

But people will always believe what they see and Ada’s no different from the rest, whatever she may think. She thought I’d been pregnant with Teddy’s child and that was what she told Jimmy. When Jimmy asked me, I agreed that Teddy was the child’s father and of course that was what Teddy thought, too. It was better that way. And, as things turned out, I couldn’t have chosen a sweeter, kinder person.

Once you were wounded they handed you round like a parcel, in and out of trains and hospital wards with doctors and nurses and all the rest of it, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t much care what happened to me, to tell the truth. I couldn’t think of one single, solitary reason why I should still be alive, when Roland and thousands of other men were dead. What had I done that I should be allowed to live? It didn’t make any sort of sense to me then and it doesn’t now. Being a parcel was bearable because one didn’t have to do or say anything, but when one had to come back among the people one knew, the effort one had to make just to be like one’s self, the old, peacetime self, was quite remarkable.

I know this business took men in different ways. I knew that Roland would have just shrugged it off, that’s the thing, and I tried to live up to that. Remembering Roland would help me to get along, but I felt—I say ‘I felt’ as if it’s in the past, but it’s part of that old whitewash on the wall, the old lie that one is a decent human being, because it’s the same old wall underneath the paint and I still experience this overwhelming feeling of guilt that I should be alive and Roland dead. Even with Ada, I knew her brother had been killed and I imagined that she must look at me and think, Why did
he
deserve to come back and not my brother? I couldn’t bear to look at her. But one lived in a normal house and
the servants expected you to tell them you wanted things, to give orders—and I felt as if I had been struck dumb. It was like the dinners with my father when I was a child: the churning in the gut, the cork in the throat, the not being able to swallow… It’s strange to think of it now, but for quite a time I couldn’t bear to see Louisa at all. It became so bad that I even asked Georgie to tell her she shouldn’t visit. And when Georgie told me that Louisa was marrying Davy I almost felt glad of it because I knew I didn’t deserve her. Nowadays, her visits are the one thing I look forward to. I mark time between them and when she’s here I try to hide my pleasure from Georgie, although I suppose she must see it.

It took quite a time for the wound in my chest to heal, because the bullet had left rather a mess, but when it had begun to clear up a bit, the doctor suggested exercise. At first I went for walks outside, but then I became afraid of what I would see. It was the faces, men’s faces. I kept thinking I could see Roland. A man might be the same height, have the same colour hair or just the uniform and, if the light was poor, or he was some distance away… a few times I even called out and once a man turned and said, ‘Your pal’s dead, isn’t he?’

I said, ‘Yes.’ He told me he’d done the same himself.

I gave up on walks and plodded round the garden instead, but I still couldn’t get rid of the feeling in my stomach, as if my guts were twisting themselves into knots. Georgie said, ‘It’s a good job you’re not a horse.’ Because they’d shoot a horse with twisted guts, you see, they’d have to. If I’d had any sense I might have shot myself.

Perhaps it was all that which led me to do… to what happened, I don’t know. You see, I had to spend a
lot of time in bed because of the wound and I used to get very bored, so Georgie would come to my room and play cards. Georgie always cheats at cards and my being ill made no difference at all—she’d cheat a child of six if she thought she could get away with it. I can tell by her eyes when she’s doing it, but the bridge players never noticed, except for one man, and I think Georgie knew he’d got his eye on her because he was hardly ever invited. But Georgie never asks anyone for bridge nowadays—not that there’s many to come, they’ve all moved away or died. No one visits now except Louisa.

None of this is what I was trying to say… but how does one speak of what Georgie and I did? What is one supposed to
say?
Talking about it makes it seem so unpleasant, sordid, and it wasn’t that. You think of these slums where they all pile into the same bed and the girl has a child and they don’t know if it’s the brother’s, or the father’s, or whose it is. Everyone’s heard of that sort of thing, but it was nothing like that. At the time I didn’t think—well, what we were doing didn’t involve anyone else. Although it did, of course, in the end. Like throwing a stone into a still pond and watching the ripples spread out. But it didn’t seem so dreadful, in fact, at first it was marvellously innocent, like being children again, and I felt so safe… I don’t suppose that makes much sense, but it’s true. One can’t explain without making excuses, though, and there are no excuses for what we did.

Who began it, started it? I suppose one has to say it was one or the other, but really it wasn’t either of us. It wasn’t as if—well, of course there had been a few girls in France, but that was here today, gone tomorrow, you never thought about it afterwards and I don’t suppose they did, either. It must have happened first in the evening, because I remember that I was in bed and Georgie
came into the room wearing a lovely pair of silk pyjamas. ‘Make some room,’ she said. ‘I’m cold,’ and she got into bed next to me. We’d often done that as children, at least when we were on our own, so there was nothing particularly strange about it. We were alone in the house—well, the servants were there, of course, but what I mean is that Jimmy wasn’t. Georgie got into bed beside me and we got on with our game of cards. Then I noticed her trying to get a look at my hand and she saw me watching her, so she said, ‘Oh, you’ve been cheating,’ because Georgie always puts the blame on the other fellow when she’s been caught out at cards.

Well, normally I didn’t say anything when she cheated, but this time I said, ‘You can stop that, because I know you’ve been cheating,’ and then we had a little tussle over the cards, because she wanted to get hold of mine and I wouldn’t let her. Or that’s how it started out: ‘Let go, those are mine.’

‘No, you let go, you oaf,’ and she started giggling like a schoolgirl.

At first it felt the same as when we were children, the absence of any of what I suppose you’d call physical feeling, but then there came a moment where Georgie was lying across my lap, holding me round the waist; I had my cards hidden behind my back and she was trying to snatch them. She was making little lunges to try and reach the cards: ‘I’m-going-to-make-you-give-them-to-me-Edmund,’ like that. I looked down at the top of her head and then there was the sensation of how warm her body was, and suddenly I found myself—I found that I was—aroused—by her—by what she was doing— and I suppose she must have discovered it too, because she stopped moving and straightened up. Her arm stayed round my waist, but she became quite still. She could have turned her head and looked at me quite
easily where she was, but she didn’t, her face was turned away from me, and I have an idea her eyes were shut. She said ‘Edmund’. Not a question, not an accusation, more like a sigh: ‘Edmund.’ So then I shut my eyes as well and I felt her touch my cheek. I didn’t want her to take her hand off my face. In fact, I think I may have moved it back when she tried to take it away. She said, ‘I love you, Edmund. Don’t worry, no one will ever know.’ I can’t remember what I said in answer. Perhaps I didn’t say anything. I don’t know.

When I watched her take the pyjamas off, because she had no coyness or false modesty or anything of that sort, I realised that I had never seen a woman entirely naked before. Statues and pictures, yes, but not a real woman. With the girls in France, there was always a chemise, or some sort of garment, and it had never occurred to me that anyone
would
take all their clothes off. I could tell by the way Georgie was looking at me that she didn’t unclothe herself like that for Jimmy and I suppose I felt a sort of pride about that. She was kneeling up on the bed, with her knees slightly apart and, although the bedclothes bunched up around her legs, I could see that the hair between them was curled like mine and of course it was the same colour, black. It looked so dark against her skin, which was pale and smooth, and lovely to touch, and it fitted so well. That may sound strange, but the girls in France—perhaps it was because of the difficult times with the war and shortage of food and so forth—sometimes they seemed to have too much skin for what was inside, and it was often quite dark and coarse, even rough. But Georgie’s skin was soft and it fitted her like a perfect kid glove.

I wanted to tell her she was beautiful, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t talk or even swallow, because she was staring at me. Nobody had ever looked at me like that. I
wanted to look at her body but I could only look at her eyes. I couldn’t stop looking at them. It was like a contest to see who would look away first. Georgie moved her face nearer and nearer to mine and leaned over so that our noses were touching, like she used to when we were children. ‘How many eyes?’ she said. ‘How many eyes have I got?’