Brief Lives (18 page)

‘No, don’t come,’ I said to Charlie on the telephone. ‘I’ll be fine in a couple of days. And I don’t want you to catch it.’

One pays too dearly for love. It seemed to me then that I could have managed without, although now I think differently. Now I know that one must accept everything in order to prepare some kind of harvest. Maybe that is why one is drawn so blindly into what is patently unwise. At that bleak moment I envisaged life free of the fate I had devised for myself, and myself free to come and go as I pleased. For although the day was dark I knew that spring was coming, when I would recover my former lightness. I would tell him, I thought, and suddenly my mind was made up. When I was recovered, and could trust myself not to be tearful, I would tell him that it had to end, that he must not come any more. Then I should be free of them both, for Julia inevitably came into this equation. I could refuse obligations that
I had accepted out of pity or guilt or terror. For I was frightened of her, always had been. Although I did not like her any more than she liked me, she was always in my thoughts, in a way that I hoped, I trusted, I was not in hers. She was impervious to me; what I did was of no interest to her. That was the mark of her ascendancy. That was how I had managed to keep my secret for so long.

With Charlie it was different. Charlie was so schooled in discretion that nothing untoward would ever escape him, and thus he persuaded himself that his loyalty was intact. Maybe it was. With Julia he espoused a mode of being that was the one perhaps best suited to his nature. Soft-footed, smiling, attentive, it was natural for him to care for her. ‘You are the woman of my life,’ he had written to her. ‘There will be no other.’ I saw now that this was true, that what happened when he was away from her troubled neither of them. So solipsistic was Julia that it would not occur to her to wonder what he did when he was not with her. When he handed her her drink in the drawing-room in Onslow Square he would be as he had always been: the essential, the eternal lover and husband. I had often wondered at the unthinking way in which she issued her orders, and the unthinking way in which he obeyed them. He would never leave her. He had never left her. I was marginal. I had always known this and had not resented it, perhaps had not examined it, as I did now. What did he feel? Probably what I felt, pleasure and regret.

Fortunately I had never told him of my feelings and the shadow they sometimes cast. To do that, I knew, would make him sigh, but would bring out something defensive in his nature. The citadel of his arrangements was not to be breached. That much had always been clear, but was now becoming clearer. As for me, I had reached the limit of my
ability to dissemble. Perhaps I had somehow thought that the dissimulation was also temporary, as temporary as my attendance on Julia. Perhaps I had never wished for either. This, however, was now irrelevant. Now that the end of the affair had apparently been reached, and so swiftly, almost easily, I was willing to concede that he had almost loved me, but that what he had felt had been a fraction out of true, something that he could manage only by withholding it, keeping it out of my reach, lest I should take it into my head to lay hands on it and do damage. I wiped my eyes, got up and made a cup of tea. I would end it as pleasantly as I could, so that we both had a decent remembrance of each other. And when it was done (here I trembled) I would telephone Harry and ask him to get me some more work, or I would push a tea trolley round the hospital, or join the WVS. There must be several things a woman can do other than think of love and marriage. The young, of course, know this, or they seem to nowadays. My generation was less realistic. It seems to me now that my own youth was passed in a dream, and that I only came to see the world as it was when it was already too late.

I was about to do something prestigious, something I had never done before, and I felt a very slight return of energy. Professional pride had never meant anything to me: it was as natural for me to sing as it was to breathe. It had never occurred to me to think of singing as an heroic enterprise, whereas breaking off a love affair seemed to demand of me a certain prowess. It called for style, and I doubted that I should be equal to the occasion. It was my lack of style that had made me fear Julia. Still she came into my mind, had in fact never left it. We could never be friends; the idea was abusive, perverse. Acquaintances perhaps, whose acquaintanceship was dwindling. I should in effect be taking my
leave of Julia, as well as of Charlie. It was strange how they now appeared to me to be indivisible, as if I could not know one without partaking of the other. That had been the position and I had ignored it, and had paid the price of ignoring it. If I had been discreet, uncomplaining, it was out of shame as well as a sense of what was fitting. And I was not really qualified for the task. It seems to me now that a mistress is a kind of prodigy, that this particular calling is not within the reach of all. The young can manage it, but such is their innocence that they do not even use the word, which is lurid, old-fashioned, with connotations of little black dresses and scarlet nails and evil ways. The young can manage anything, and perhaps they should: it is their prerogative. But a woman like myself, conventional, a widow, which somehow makes it worse, has no business to be engaging in these matters. Yet to say goodbye to someone—anyone—is such a terrible thing that it should not be undertaken lightly. One shrinks from such finality, and if one does not there is something wrong. Nature gives the warning here. But then Nature has also provided an unwelcome commentary: tiredness, a wrinkled skin. These are harsh verdicts on what is unsuitable, inappropriate. My weakness was to wish for consolation, when, properly speaking, there could be none.

I was not quite prepared to act on my great decision, and so I did something that I had thought of doing for a long time: I telephoned Millie and asked if I could come down for a day or two. She was delighted, and her pleasure moved me, made me think of simple days to come, or at least of simple days in the past when I seemed to have achieved the wholeness I now desired. It perturbed me slightly that I was not able to let Charlie know that I should be away; I had never done this before, and had always been
there to speak to him, to greet him, to serve him his coffee. I thought of the telephone ringing in the empty flat and felt a disappointment that I should not be there. For some reason it reminded me of the telephone ringing in Gertrude Street and my not being there to pick it up, my preferring to be absent in the sunny streets. There was no lightheartedness in my present projected absence, no sense of escape, as there had been that last time. There was no summer to beckon me away from my duties, for now I had no duties to abandon. I had difficult work to do, preparations to make for a new life, one for which I suddenly had little taste.

I felt weak and incapable of getting to Paddington, so I ordered a car to take me down to Millie’s, or at least to Moreton-in-Marsh, where she would meet me. From the back seat of the car London frightened me as it never did when I was on foot; I seemed to enter a world of traffic from which there was no exit and all I saw was ugliness, thundering lorries, overpasses, meek houses, seedy private hotels, factories apparently sited in vacant lots, and everywhere noise, confusion, urgency. England seemed to have turned into one huge road system while I had been living my sleeping life. Reading passed me in a flash, then Oxford, and then the sounds diminished and we were in the open country. Charlbury, Kingham, Moreton. I told the driver to drop me outside the station, where Millie was to collect me. I had an hour in hand. On weakish legs I wandered down the handsome high street, found a café and went in. I sat at a table in the window and drank excellent hot coffee. I wondered what it would be like to live in such a place. There could be no life more circumscribed than the one I had devised for myself, and it might be better for me to have a change, or rather make one. Shops here sold the same products, the same newspapers. And the place was
handsome. Pale buildings faced each other across a carriage road; there was a porticoed hotel, and a couple of estate agents, and a particularly fine bank building. There were souvenir shops for the visitors, and discreet pubs with an air of reserve about them. There was nothing to stop me living here, near to Millie, but already I felt the ache of the town dweller displaced into an atmosphere which will never become familiar. I should never become a native of this place, never accept it as my own or myself as part of it. Yet it was beautiful. As I walked back to the station I noticed a lightness in the air, a powdery hazy quality and a colour somewhere between grey and blond, a trembling of leaves waiting to emerge, a watery lightness to the clouds, a white brilliance held in check. Spring, so much more noticeable than in London, where only the cut flowers changed and where one made special detours to view flowering trees. Spring was also unsatisfactory in London, pale mornings leading to long pale days in which nothing seemed to happen, and bird-song sounding forlorn in the long late twilight. In the country spring seemed sturdier, more an affair of men and cultivation than of women and girls, and their vapours. Distractedly I scanned the pleasant street, and at last I glimpsed Millie, waving. I waved back and ran towards her, as fast as my newly fledged condition would allow.

She had aged too. The skin of her face was shiny and seamed and her hair was now pepper and salt and tied back carelessly with a velvet ribbon. She had worn it like that when she was a girl, when we were both girls, and were slim-waisted in the pretty cotton frocks of the day. Now she wore an olive green waterproof jacket and a tweed skirt, thickish stockings and flat shoes. Her legs, which had been magnificent, were still beautiful, as were her hands, white,
straight, without loose flesh. The full body, sloping down into those beautiful legs, had been Millie’s greatest attraction, and even now that the body bent a little forward at the waist I could see her as she had been when she was a girl. We had never quarrelled, had never shocked or disturbed each other with unwonted confessions or unwise accusations. Some instinct had kept us true friends. We had preserved each other’s modesty. That was how we came to greet each other with such a rush of feeling; we knew that there were no spoiled memories behind us. Each saw in the other, perfectly preserved, a picture of her own girlhood, and with it all the Edenic simplicity of a life which can never be prolonged or duplicated. Growing up means growing away, and everyone is eager to begin the work. It is only halfway that one begins to look back, and by then it is already too late.

Her house was small and dark and smelt of apples stored for the winter. The windows of her long low sitting-room looked out on to the single street of a small village. I was glad to see that she still had her piano. We bumped out through the kitchen with my overnight bag and into a garden bounded on one side by a miniature wing, just one room on top of another, which was where she housed her guests. ‘We’ve had both children staying here,
and
their families,’ she boasted, but it looked too small for me, used as I was to the flat where I could roam all night on bare feet if sleep deserted me. I sat down on my bed and gazed at the white sky out of the window. It was colder here and silent, yet I was not unduly dismayed. Rather I was bemused, in abeyance. How much so I saw when I looked in the silvery mirror of the little dressing-table. A pale wary face looked back at me, with a drained lifeless appearance, the expression watchful, stunned, as if at the receipt of bad news.

Over tea Millie asked me all about myself, but what I longed to tell her I could not, out of a sort of respect, both for her and for myself. But when she said, ‘You must miss Owen,’ I started, and said hurriedly that I did not, that it had been a mistake in so many ways, not to marry him, but to imagine that he could be happy with a woman like myself. ‘I am so dull,’ I said to her with a smile.

‘Dull?’ she said indignantly. ‘I never heard such nonsense. Why, you could marry again tomorrow if you wanted to.’

‘Why no,’ I said, bending down to fondle a little white cat. ‘No, I shall never marry again.’

‘Fay. I hate to think of you on your own. You were so gifted, so happy. Do you ever sing these days?’

‘Never.’ I smiled.

‘Well, you’re going to sing now,’ she said, going over to the piano, which was open.

‘I couldn’t possibly,’ I said, feeling a forbidden ache in my throat.

‘I’ll start.’ She played a few bars, hummed a few notes, then began to sing, and stopped. ‘You see?’ she said. Her voice had become thinner, whispery, like an old record. ‘I’ve lost it. All over. Fortunately I’m so happy in other ways that it doesn’t matter. I can still carry a tune, but I haven’t the breath. And do you know, Donald still boasts about me, as if I were in my heyday. “My wife’s the musician,” he says, when anyone asks him to play—and he’s a good pianist, you know. And his wife can’t sing a note these days. But I’m sure you can, Fay. Won’t you try? For me?’

So I sang. I sang ‘Only Make-Believe’, and ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’, and ‘I’ll Be Loving You Always’, and, of course, ‘Arcady’. Sometimes my voice broke on a high note but I sang on, for those songs said better than I could the
emptiness and longing of my life. Singing reminded me, weakened my resolve. Why end what was there, why cancel it? What right had I to think it the correct course of action? Those songs were somehow too much for me. When I was young they did not move me so much: I sang them unaffectedly then, unshadowed by knowledge. Now, even the words seemed unbearable. But I sang on as if I were
giving
my final performance, as if all that mattered was to get through the programme, and then to say goodbye. My breathing was still good, and I sounded quite well, even to myself, although by now there were tears in my eyes.

Millie closed the piano with a bang. ‘You can still do it,’ she said, but she eyed me sadly, aware that something was wrong and that I would not tell her. ‘If you would only come down here more often,’ she said, walking me through to the kitchen with an arm round my waist. ‘I could introduce you to so many nice men. You’d never be lonely. And who knows? You might fall in love again. It’s never too late.’