Brief Lives (21 page)

Trying to repair the ruin of my life I forced myself to look outward. There were, to say the least, those less fortunate than myself. Although I was sure that Charlie had made a careful will, had left life insurance policies, I doubted Julia’s ability to deal with any of this. The task would fall to Maureen, for Julia would immediately declare herself incapable?—had already done so—and poor Pearl Chesney would ultimately be released to her little flat in Surrey, Kingston, I think it was, although she was no longer enthusiastic at the prospect. Julia’s prostration gave her a chance to assume her former ascendancy: she looked altogether more purposeful, more gainfully employed, wiping easy tears from her tawny
cheeks, bustling in with glasses of water, offering a highly elaborate négligé and laying it reverently at the foot of the bed, even rearranging pillows. It seemed odd to me that with all this attention being paid no one had managed to remove the filmed cup and saucer and the plate with its traces of marmalade which was now being used as an ashtray. A degree of uncertainty was one of the tenets of their housekeeping: not knowing where to start or how to finish, so that one intention was always colliding with another. I was there one afternoon when they had discussed the making of a cup of tea, although none had been produced. ‘Hardly worth it now,’ Julia had said. ‘Might as well have a drink. Oh, you don’t drink, do you? Well, if you had come earlier we could have had it together. I rather look forward to a cup of tea. Never mind, another time.’ ‘It’s no trouble,’ Maureen had said, appearing in the doorway with a tea towel in her hand. ‘I can easily make a cup if Fay wants one.’ ‘No, come and sit down, Maureen. You’ve done quite enough,’ said Julia. ‘It’s too late, anyway.’ There would follow the usual lament on demise of staff, an affirmation that her day was done, and a condemnation of the changing world. All of this was quite predictable. Food seemed a particularly uncertain commodity, owing to the extreme incompetence that prevailed. Frequently discussion about a meal, or reminiscences of meals in the past, would be called in as partial substitutes for the meal itself. ‘I’m not really hungry,’ Julia would say. ‘Is there anything left over?’ For she was a fearless eater of ancient cooked meats, congealed sardines, cold rice pudding, cheese with a greenish bloom on it, none of which affected her in the slightest. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s waste,’ she would say. She had the digestion of an adolescent at boarding school, whereas
the mere sight of such food made me feel ill. ‘There’s a lot of nonsense talked about cooking,’ said Julia. ‘Not that I can taste it anyway.’

The greater part of this incompetence, this helplessness, was due to the character of Maureen, that mysterious and apparently ageless devotee who, twenty years earlier, had come to interview Julia for the local paper and had stayed ever since. She had not grown weary in her devotion: if anything she had grown more devout, but in a general sense. From being once exclusively concentrated on Julia, her goodwill now reached out to embrace the universe; she was tireless in the service of the church, though what she actually did remained obscure, possibly because no one could bear to ask her. She seemed to clock in to St Luke’s twice a day, once for worship, and later for a rather excited discussion of parish business, which included the magazine and what she referred to as ‘the rotas’. To my mind putting Maureen in charge of anything was asking for trouble, but in the way of certain Christians she regarded her muddle-headedness as God-given, laughed forbearingly over a hopeless mass of papers which someone else would have to sort out, and further burnished the ready and rather mad smile which she bestowed on the world at large.

‘Now look here!’ said Julia. ‘This love affair you’re having with God.’ In so saying she adopted the pose of a forthright downright no-nonsense Englishwoman: I think she even leaned forward and grasped her knees with her hands. ‘It’s all very well, darling, but where’s it getting you? As you know, I’ve always been religious myself.’ (This may have been true, although one was inclined not to believe it.) ‘But I’ve always looked for God outside the church. In nature,’ she said, her hands describing a poetic curve. ‘Whereas you closet yourself inside that awful building,
with those awful people, and life passes you by. It’s not as if you were a girl any more.’ Maureen must have been about forty-five, having been a fledgling reporter on her first arrival. ‘If only you’d let Bobby do something about your hair you’d at least be more presentable. Not that there’s any chance of your meeting anyone, the way you carry on. I suppose it’s all quite harmless. But remember, Maureen, God is outside as well as inside. The sun,’ she said vaguely. ‘Trees. Look up,’ she added more vigorously. ‘Look about you. That’s what I’ve always done. And I don’t think anyone would say I was a bad woman,’ she said, with a fine smile. ‘At least, nobody ever has.’ Certainly not in your hearing, I thought. No one would dare.

My heart ached for Maureen, whom I did not, could not, like. In the full flush of middle age she looked like a girl, unadorned, clumsy, touching, and irritating. An overall impression of paleness was highlighted by her eager smile and her habit of pushing her glasses up her nose. She had fine teeth and indeterminate features, surmounted by too much badly permed hair: hair met glasses and was occasionally trapped behind them. She wore track suits in baby colours of pink and blue, and white socks and sneakers. The body thus hidden appeared to be healthy and undemanding, for she was essentially virginal. She was like one of those very early martyrs who cheerfully embraced their doom in the Colosseum without ever tasting the alternative. Julia was Maureen’s doom, and her smiles grew ever more radiant, her laughter ever more hearty as Julia became more unreasonable. The suspicion grew in me that she regarded Julia as her cross and personally offered her up to the Almighty every time she suffered a rebuke or broke crockery on her behalf. It also occurred to me that Julia would not care to be annexed in this way, but had no idea that this was the
case, being totally unconcerned with and certainly uninterested in Maureen’s feelings. Some justification is needed for certain actions in this vale of tears: Maureen had perfected a euphoria that kept her immune from Julia’s hints and excused the curious calling of parasitism that had come her way.

My uneasiness with Maureen stemmed from my suspicion that she was highly excitable, and that if she did not look for God in nature it was because her relationship with nature was on the sneaky side and occasionally overpowered her with headaches and deep blushes, leaving her paler, more mirthful, and more devout than ever. Julia’s advice to her was cruel, but unintentionally so. Maureen was in fact tormented by nature, or rather by Nature, her instincts always on the alert. She should have married young and had a baby every year for four years. As it was, her fecundity had lost its original character, and now manifested itself as hysteria. Maureen’s laughter, these days, was almost continuous, as she dropped and broke things, or alternatively praised and cosseted Julia. Julia thought her a fool, but had, I think, no real understanding of Maureen’s tragedy, forced as she was to make do with this simulacrum of a life, when she possessed the makings of an earth mother. I had watched, pitying and slightly perturbed, as she exclaimed with pleasure over some titbit of food that I had brought, how pleasurably the teeth had closed and the mouthful tipped down the yielding throat. The key to Maureen was the voracity of her appetite and the mincing ways with which she sought to disguise it.

She had never cared for me, although so all-embracing was her love of humanity that I doubt whether she realized this. The normal and perhaps more limited passions were subsumed into her gigantic and indiscriminate goodwill. I
wondered if she was still capable of knowing whether she liked or disliked any one person: she accepted everyone as a matter of principle. Although this is undoubtedly an admirable trait it depressed and inhibited me, since it made the truth unavailable; one could never judge Maureen’s mood or even her character, since her defensive laughter seemed to put her beyond criticism. Yet once or twice I noticed her eyes on me, and when I returned her glance she immediately made her face a blank, as if in embarrassment. I could not tell whether the cause of the embarrassment was myself or her own thoughts. She gave the appearance of being sexually null, since she devoted no thought to her hair and clothes, but my impression was that she went to great pains to curb unused energies, and that once alone in her room she performed all sorts of spiritual exercises before embracing the loneliness of the night to come. I hated to see her living the life she had devised for herself, yet she was a blameless woman, eager, and no doubt generous. Her good qualities were immediately compromised by the fact that although willing she was almost always unhelpful. This moral clumsiness was a trait as ineradicable as tone deafness or colour blindness.

I wondered how Julia could bear to rely on her ministrations, until I reflected that Julia’s days were long and trivial, so that being subjected to excited discussions as to the advisability of making a cup of tea struck her now as entirely normal, and may even have responded to something genuinely unschooled in Julia’s make-up. A mixture of the convent and the dressing-room, the atmosphere in Onslow Square seemed to be redolent of the company of women. If they had been men, Maureen would have been Julia’s fag. But what had always constrained me was to see them so happy with their own female company. Pearl Chesney, I
think, had felt the same constraint, and so was not a true member of the little clan. I, of course, was a renegade; I should have been one in any case. What I loved and prized was the steadiness of a man’s affection, his indulgence, his company. I had known this in childhood, and even during my brief career, when the boys in the band had looked after me as if I were their little sister. In adult life, unfortunately, this affection had been fitful, limited, doled out in unpredictable instalments. Even so it struck me as the greater prize, greater by far than the intimacy of women. This may be an indication of my lesser nature. To Julia, primarily to Julia, though I think to Maureen as well, female company was a rule of life, and one deserted it only through stupidity. Julia often cited her first husband, Hodge, as an example of this desertion. ‘I should never have left Mummy,’ she would say, with what seemed to me brazen innocence. Lovers did not impair her fidelity to her own kind in the same degree. Indeed mother and daughter seemed to look on the taking of a lover as licensed naughtiness. ‘I’m afraid I was rather naughty,’ Julia would say, of her various lovers. ‘But he
was
very good-looking.’

This sort of talk had gone on in Charlie’s presence, although her gallant days were over by the time Charlie met and married her. My impression was that she did not miss them, those lovers of hers, but regarded them much as she might have regarded the various performances she had given, in a detached and semi-professional sense. I have no doubt that she would have revealed all to a biographer, had one been forthcoming. For the essence of Julia was an untroubled conscience, a conscience so limpid that wrongdoing, detectable in others, was always excusable in herself. This conferred on her a certain girlishness, which, combined with the authority bestowed by great beauty, made
her enigmatic and irresistible to men. But I wondered how companionable it might be on a daily basis. To my mind too much caprice obscures affection. To Charlie, I could see, she was still a prize. He respected her, feared her, certainly loved her, and perhaps hardly noticed his reduced role as supporter and protector. She accepted his tributes, valued him for the quality of the life he had enabled her to live, may have loved him, but looked to him mainly to love her. She did this without presumption, as if she found it natural that people should love her. As far as she knew, they always had.

We had thus both known a certain indulgence, Julia from her theatrical eminence, I from my singing days. The difference was that I longed for it to last, registered and mourned its absence, whereas Julia assumed that the source and supply would never dry up. While I, all longing, all loving, had made of a meagre portion my entire diet, Julia was able to remain indifferent to circumstance in the knowledge that she would be eternally protected. I even regarded her indifference to food as proof of the fact that she was always confident of being eventually fed, that she could go through the day on one of her revolting snacks and a couple of glasses of whisky, secure in the knowledge that when Charlie came home he would cook her an omelette and generally look after her.

She believed in the rights of women, she told us, but what she really believed in was the right of women to behave capriciously. There was a distinctly masculine side to her, in her refusal to entertain weak hopes and fears, her judicial appraisal of her gifts and attributes, her professional competence and objectivity, her hardy egotism. She was an unreliable mixture of the calculating and the obtuse. In comparison, I felt stupid, clumsy, vulnerable, and now tired
to death. Yet I saw in dwindling perspective the nature of Charlie’s feeling for me. I had thought of him as an opportunist, and maybe I had been right. I had come to welcome every sight of him, and he undoubtedly took pleasure in the extent of my welcome. Was there more? Did it occur to him, ever, to regret his role of complaisant husband? This I should never know, for I had never asked him. Nor did it much matter now. For it seemed to me regrettable, and always had. Only Julia’s monstrous vanity had provided a partial justification, had obscured my part in the affair. I viewed her with a cold eye: nothing would alter that. I resented the pity I felt for her as she lay in that bed, smoking cigarette after cigarette. That very slightly haggard expression gave me pause. Yet when I saw how little of Charlie was left in that flat, how easily his trace had been effaced, how total was Julia’s presence, my heart hardened again. Dead, he was as discreet as he had been in life. There was no trace of him in my flat either. The Victorian cup and saucer I had put away, never to be used again. I had nothing by which to remember him. It was perhaps fitting that I should now take my leave, since no ties bound me to this place, where I had failed to entertain or be understood.