Banishing Verona (12 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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Outside, dusk was falling and streetlights were sparse, but Charles led the way confidently from one square to the next until we reached an imposing set of stairs. At the top he pushed open a huge door. In the vast gloom I gradually distinguished the trains lined up at the platforms, like slumbering behemoths. Charles had brought me to the Gare de Lyon. On the far side a single engine let out a sonorous whistle; a burst of steam floated up to the vaulted ceiling. He led us over to the engine and called up, asking permission to climb aboard. I can still remember stepping into that cabin. For years I had been living with mud and cold, smells I couldn't or wouldn't identify. Suddenly I was warm and dry and the air smelled of nothing more sinister than the stoker's coffee and engine oil. My French was still absurdly bad but Charles was fluent. As a boy, he'd spent holidays in Brittany. While he pelted the men with questions, the driver kindly gave me his seat. I rested my hands on the wheel, pretending to drive.
The next thing I knew, someone was tugging my sleeve.
Monsieur, monsieur. Il faut partir.
Still half asleep, I stood on the platform watching the engine pull out of the station. Even in my dazed state I could feel Charles beside me, observing every detail of the train's departure. These iron maidens were the love of his life. On the steps of the station, looking out into the misty streets, he rocked back on his heels and said, “What are you going to do when you get home?”
“I'm going to Cambridge to study mathematics.” I had a piercing vision of a future in which I would sit in lectures, carry a clean handkerchief, wear a gown at dinner. My biggest fear would be missing the curfew.
Charles didn't seem to hear my answer. “You know what I think we should do? Take over my pater's railway.”
“I have forty-one pounds in my bank account,” I said, exaggerating only slightly.
But Charles, it turned out, had a little more, or his father did, and he absolutely meant that offhand remark uttered at dusk on the steps of the Gare de Lyon. I won't go into the financial details, but after we'd graduated from university we ended up owning a hundred and fifty miles of track and half a dozen stations. We survived the general strike, the stock market crash, and the Second World War, and lost everything when railways were nationalised by the Labour Government, for which we both voted, in 1945.
 
 
Seven years after I came down from Cambridge, I married a fair-haired Welshwoman called Irene Talbott. Mutual friends introduced us at a matinee of
The Importance of Being Earnest.
At dinner afterward she did a very passable imitation of Lady Bracknell, and later, when the bill came, she attempted to pay her share. Her parents were both dead, she told me; she lived in lodgings and worked in a dress shop. I was intrigued by her wit and her independence. Eight months after the matinee, I proposed, and four months after that we got married. For reasons that made perfect sense at the time, I did not take her to meet my parents until the eve of the wedding, when we caught the train to Kendal. A taxi dropped us off at the vicarage shortly before dinner. I hadn't been home since Christmas, and the roses by the door were in bloom.
“What a lovely spot,” said Irene.
Inside was roast duck and trifle and my mother in top form. She stood at the head of the table, pretending to teach Sunday school. “Now, children, who can tell me why the servant with the single talent was punished? That's right, Tabitha. Darned if I know.”
Over the port she sang the music hall song that, before she met my father, she had planned to use at auditions. “I gave up everything for him,” she said, producing a handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes. “I never could resist a man in a dog collar.”
“Nor I a woman of the stage,” said my father. The three of us laughed beneath Irene's watchful gaze.
We retired shortly afterward with remarks about the big day ahead, but upstairs in my old room I felt too restless for sleep. I sat by the window, having a last cigarette, and thought about the afternoon Tiger and I had climbed the hill curiously known as the High Street. We were almost at the summit when he beckoned me over. A few yards away, balanced on a ledge, was an untidy bundle of sticks containing three good-sized chicks. As we crouched behind a rock watching them, a whirring came from overhead. A peregrine falcon was hovering so close that its wing-beats lifted our hair. We froze, not knowing if the chicks were progeny or prey. The answer came a second later when the bird swooped down and bent to feed them.
As we crept away, I saw that Tiger's cheeks were wet with tears. I knew better than to ask the cause. He led us up the final pitch, an almost sheer rock face, at breakneck speed. I had noticed before that, when he forgot my limitations, Tiger climbed as if he weren't subject to gravity.
Left to my own devices, I would probably have begun next to think about JS. All my ghosts were out that night, crying stop, wait, don't do it. But just as I was finishing my cigarette there was a knock at my door. I went to open it, expecting Irene. “Edmund,” said my mother, slipping past me, “I have to talk to you.” She had not used my baptismal name in over a decade.
Standing there in her white nightdress, her hands clasped before her, she made her speech. “You think Irene's like me, all jokes and silliness. The thing is, Jig, I'm not really like that. I knew that marrying me would ruin Henry's career and that we'd have to scramble to make ends meet. There hasn't been an hour since I walked down the aisle when making him happy and
running a pleasant household hasn't been my main preoccupation. But Irene is different. Underneath the giggling, she's shell-shocked. There's some bad history there: maybe a dead fiancé or two. She'll be fine for a while. Then she'll go to pieces, mark my words.”
Her earlier joking gone, she was utterly serious. As for me, I would have given almost anything not to be getting married. But such is the contrariness of human nature that, as soon as my mother began to speak, I knew I couldn't back out. “Mother,” I whispered—we were both aware of Irene in the next room—“I don't have a clue what you're talking about. You've barely met Irene. Of course you make her nervous. There's no way I'm going to jilt her at the altar, just because you have a bee in your bonnet.”
I turned back to the window. I could argue with my mother until the cows came home, but I could not contradict her. A couple of months ago I had begun to notice how reticent Irene was about her past. I'd been talking about the Christmas before I met her, when I'd gone skiing with Charles and his wife. “What did you do?” I asked.
“Oh, I can't remember,” she said. “Did you get us a reservation at Cox's?”
We must, during our courtship, have had hundreds of similar exchanges, but for some reason this one irked me. “It's only a year and a half ago,” I said. “Surely you know what you were doing.”
“Well, I don't,” she said, “but I could guess. I went to a service at St. Paul's and had dinner with my landlady. She made the goose and I was in charge of the vegetables: Brussels sprouts with chestnuts and braised parsnips. Afterwards we played canasta. Will that do?” She turned to smile at me. “Oh, Jig. Truly, everything from the time before I met you is a blur. I worked, I slept, I tried to get by.”
We were walking through St. James's Park—it was nearly dusk but the pelicans were still drifting around on the lake—and
I reached for her arm and said how lovely she looked. But later that week when I ran into the friends who had introduced us, I asked, casually I hope, how they knew Irene and learned that they had met her only a few weeks before the matinee; Irene had deftly managed to suggest a long friendship. I had been so charmed by her gaiety, and moved by the loss of her parents, that I hadn't stopped to ask certain questions. Still, my doubts might have dissipated—Irene was excellent company—if in the course of procuring the marriage license, I hadn't discovered she was twenty-nine, six years older than I'd thought.
Now, while my mother made one last attempt, I lit a second cigarette and struggled not to tell her everything. “Please, Jig,” she said. “I'll pretend to be ill tomorrow, to save face. If you still feel the same about her in a year, I promise I'll dance my shoes off at your wedding.”
She was looking at me beseechingly, and just for a moment I thought of Albert, the man who had shot himself. Then she did something inexpressibly touching. In her haste to talk to me she had not stopped even to remove her hairpiece which, although the artifice grew yearly more obvious, she still insisted on wearing. People wouldn't know me without my falsie, she said, when my father or I suggested she leave it off. Now she raised her arms and began, one by one, to take out the pins that secured it. Sometimes, as a boy, she had let me do this for her.
But I was a successful businessman. I kept my doubts to myself and sent my mother away, carrying her switch of false hair. Next morning she was a model of good humour as she carried up a breakfast tray to Irene and acted as her lady's maid. Irene had bought the dress from her shop and altered it herself. Henry performed the ceremony. The church was packed with parishioners and old friends, mostly mine.
We went to Paris for our honeymoon. I took Irene to the Gare de Lyon and we tried to find the café where Charles and I had met. For a while we wandered from square to square while I said maybe that's it, or I think it was on a corner. At last we simply
chose one. Over a glass of Calvados, Irene made me repeat the whole story. We came back to London and settled into a modest house she had found in Clapham. For almost two years our lives ran smoothly. Business was flourishing. We went to plays and dinners with friends and entertained in turn; there were holidays in Europe, riding and walking on the Downs. But soon after our son was born, in 1931, something happened; Irene became subject to bouts of melancholy. Or perhaps she no longer cared to conceal them. A nursemaid took care of Dennis, and Irene moved into the spare room. Increasingly, I stayed late at the office and dined alone.
The war cheered her up, perhaps in part because it allowed her to have a job again. To my surprise she refused to leave London or to let Dennis leave. He would go to school, per usual, and hide under his desk when the bombs fell. The Germans must be beaten and it was up to every man, woman, and child to do their part, whether it was piloting a Spitfire or saying multiplication tables. She herself drove a supply lorry and went for long walks around the city, heedless of the raids.
On March 12, 1941, the two of us, as seldom happened on a weekday, were both at home. I spent the morning in my study and emerged for a lunch of braised kidneys, boiled potatoes, carrots. We talked about whether to try to get a plumber to fix the leaky tap in the bathroom and what we should give Charles for his birthday. Afterward, Irene went out to the kitchen to make tea. The housekeeper had given notice in 1939 and it would have been unpatriotic, if not impossible, to replace her. I was reading the newspaper when her cry came.
“Oh, Jig, Jig, come quickly. Something dreadful has happened. I've taken poison.”
I called the doctor, I stuck my finger down her throat, I made her drink glass after glass of water and walk back and forth. Why, I kept asking. Why take poison? Why take it now?
She didn't answer. Within an hour she was insensible. The doctor came and said there was nothing to be done. When Dennis
arrived home from school, I told him, perhaps unwisely, what was happening and sent him to his room. She died shortly before midnight, making a noise like a door creaking on its hinges.
I don't know how my mother guessed, but Irene had lost not one but two fiancés. The first, the great love, I learned when I searched her desk, was named Dennis; he and I had fought on the same stretch of the front for a few months. Fiance number two, a less well-documented figure, had worked in catering before he died of polio in 1923. If I could have spoken with complete frankness, I would have claimed that I no longer cared about Irene, that I stayed with her out of loyalty and propriety, but as I sat at her desk, with its neat pigeonholes spilling their secrets, I felt as if my world had once again turned upside down. All the little attentions she had paid me during our courtship, the ardor with which she gave herself to me on our wedding night, even her deceits—which I had interpreted as signs of affection—were, I now realised, evidence of experience and desperation.
The worst was yet to come. I had urged my parents not to attend the funeral; the journey took almost a day and I was not sure that, in their presence, I could maintain my composure. Charles and other old friends kept me company. By unspoken agreement we all just wandered off after the ceremony; there was no pretence of a drink or a meal. I was standing at the gate of the cemetery when an elderly couple, painstakingly smart, whom I had assumed were connected with the shop where Irene used to work, approached. “How do you do,” said the man; he had an English accent. “We're Mr. and Mrs. Talbott.”
“How do you do,” I said.
“We're Mr. and Mrs. Talbott,” he repeated. “Irene's parents.”
I made a terrible fool of myself but I managed to stop just short of telling these pleasant upright people that they were dead. “I thought you were Welsh,” I said stupidly. It was the only safe comment that came to mind.

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