Casting Off (19 page)

And then, out of the blue, something happened that began to make a difference.

One morning he received a memo so badly typed that it was almost without sense. It was not for the first time that week, and he blew up, went in search of the perpetrator to bawl him or her out.

It was a girl. She sat in the semi-basement, in what must once have been a scullery, which now looked like a cell with its heavily barred windows and stone floor. She was hunched over her typewriter and she was crying. She looked up as he stormed into the room, but anything he was about to say left his mind at the sight of her. Her face was blotched and shiny with crying, and one side of it was swollen like someone with mumps. She looked revolting.

‘What on earth is the matter with you?’

She had toothache, she said, really awful toothache.

‘Better go to the dentist, hadn’t you?’

She’d made an appointment, but in the end she hadn’t gone.

‘Why on earth not?’

She hadn’t been able to face it.

‘Better ring him up and tell him you’re sorry you’re late but you’re on your way.’

That was last Monday.

‘Do you mean you’ve had toothache for’ – he calculated – ‘over a
week
?’

She’d kept hoping it would go away. A fresh burst of tears. ‘I know I’m an awful coward, but I just can’t bring myself to go. I sort of know I must – and I can’t!’ She tried to blow her nose on a sopping handkerchief, and winced. She touched the bad side of her face and gave a little moan.

He asked her where her dentist was and she said Oxford.

‘I’ll take you,’ he said. ‘I’ll borrow a car and take you.’

And that was what he did. Ordinarily he would have found it embarrassing and difficult to ask anyone for the use of their car – petrol was short and he had no allowance himself as Jessica had their car, but now he found himself powerfully resolute: the wretched girl had to be got to the dentist and he was organizing it. He rang the deputy head of his department and said that one of the secretaries had been taken ill and he was taking her to a doctor, went and collected the keys and returned to collect her. She was still sitting at her desk.

‘Got your pass?’

She nodded. ‘In my bag.’ She was shivering. In the car, she said, ‘It’s awfully kind of you.’ Then a moment later: ‘You won’t leave me there, will you? You’ll stay with me?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘It’s really most awfully kind of you.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Veronica. Veronica Watson.’

The dentist was off the Headington Road in North Oxford. They had to wait for some time, as the disapproving receptionist said that Mr McFarlane had a patient with him, and another patient at two thirty and before that he would be having his lunch hour. At this point, Veronica asked if she might go to the lavatory, and in her absence he managed to soften up the receptionist with an assurance that secretly amazed him.

The indirect result of this was that when the time came he was allowed by the dentist to accompany Veronica into the surgery and subsequently to sit holding her hand while the offending tooth was extracted. ‘You have a whopping great abscess. You should have come last week, you know. Then we might have been able to save the tooth.’ When he had finished, and was washing his hands, he remarked, ‘You’re a lucky young woman to have your father come with you.’

He saw her about to deny this and put his finger on his lips: together they both looked towards Mr McFarlane, his back was turned and he was drying his hands on a towel.

In the street, she said, ‘I’m sorry he thought that. I hope you didn’t mind.’

‘Not at all. After all, I’m old enough to be your father.’

‘You’re not in the least like him, though.’

‘Feel better?’

‘Golly, yes! It’s a bit sore, but it’s stopped throbbing.’

He drove her home. She couldn’t possibly go back to work, he said, she should take a couple of aspirin and go to bed, and she said, all right, she would.

Her room turned out to be in the same building as his.

‘I’m so awfully grateful to you,’ she said as she got out of the car. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘My dear, it was nothing.’

‘Oh, but it was!’ She had turned back to him, her small velvety eyes glowing. ‘It feels as though you’ve saved my life!’

Driving back to Woodstock he felt happier than he had for weeks – for months, really. He was
not
simply a brain; he was somebody who, faced with a sudden emergency, could deal with it, could do the right good turn to somebody else with verve and assurance. Remembering those glowing eyes in her pear-shaped face,
he
glowed: it had not been that she was
pretty
, that his help had come out of some second-rate reason like being
attracted
to her, it had been pure kindness. The poor little thing had needed someone to take charge and he had done so. Her father, indeed!

Two days later he found a parcel on his desk. It was a box of Meltis New Berry Fruits with a card attached. ‘I didn’t know how to thank you for your kindness, but hope you will like these. Yours ever, Veronica.’

Really! There was something touching about the present and the card that had a little blue bird sitting on a twig in the right-hand top corner. She had large, rounded, rather childish writing. He opened the box, selected a green berry and ate it: gooseberry – it was actually rather good. He decided to go and thank her.

That had been the beginning of their friendship, which on her part, with a rapidity that slightly unnerved him, became a great deal more. In short, she fell madly in love with him, and he was touched, and quite soon more than touched. She was so
young
: it was flattering to be adored by someone so young – and really not bad-looking. Her face, when it subsided, proved to be rather round with rosy cheeks. She had dark curly hair that she wore short with a wavy fringe, and a small, full mouth that seemed always a little pursed. Her eyes were her best feature; their habitual expression was one of anxiety, but when she was with him they melted to adoration. She was like a small dark velvet pansy, a little spaniel, he told her when they reached the delightful stage of discussing themselves.

To begin with, he thought of her almost as a daughter: she gave him a kind of affectionate trust, looked up to him in the way that he had always hoped Angela would grow up to do. But when it dawned on him that she was actually in love with him, of course he told her that he was married –
he
wasn’t a cheap little cad like some he could mention. ‘I thought you must be,’ was all that she said, but he sensed that it was a shock to her all the same. He thought then that he should have told her before, but it hadn’t come up somehow. It changed things, whether for the better or not he really couldn’t say. It added a dimension to her attitude towards him: she was no longer assuaging his sense of failure as a father, she was beginning to affect how he felt as a husband, as a man. It was immensely comforting to be regarded as a romantic figure: it shifted Jessica to the middle distance of his consciousness and his miserable jealousy receded, leaving him with more distaste than despair. He told Veronica how fond of her he was, how much he enjoyed her company (they were now spending practically every evening together, going for walks by the canal, spending hours in various pub gardens, drinking cocoa in her room). At work there was the delicious game of pretending hardly to know one another, of being formal, using a code to arrange their meetings. His ulcer troubled him far less, and in the end not at all. She had a birthday, her twenty-first, and he gave her a Jacqmar scarf, yellow with red hammers and sickles printed all over it – Russian motifs were fashionable – and a silver bracelet with ‘Veronica’ engraved upon it. She had been thrilled; only sad that she had to go home to her parents for the celebration. She asked him to come too, but he declined. She had returned with the car, a bright red MG that her parents had given her. This had been wonderful: he managed to wangle petrol, and it meant that they could get further away from Oxford or Woodstock to places where they would be safe from meeting anyone they knew.

He had taken the opportunity while she was with her family to go to London, and there, because for once he had not given notice of his visit, he had come face to face with Clutterworth. He was apparently simply having tea with Jessica, but he suspected that a good deal had gone on before that. He was shocked by how dreadful this made him feel: he had found himself almost unable to speak, to utter more than a few words to the effect that he had simply come back to collect some important papers he’d left before. He had stumped upstairs, gone into the room in which he slept and noisily opened and shut drawers there. Her room was at the end of the landing. The door was open, the bed immaculate. Obviously tea came
first
. He went down the stairs and out of the house and left them to it. He walked to the tube and took the first train that came in for Piccadilly, went to a news theatre and sat in it for two repeats of its programme. Then he went to the nearest restaurant he could find and ordered a meal: food made him feel sick, but he drank a bottle of wine and a glass of Spanish brandy. By the time he got to Paddington to catch the last train he felt feverish and drunk. Back at his digs there was a message: ‘Your wife rang. Please would you ring her.’ Would he hell! He went to bed and woke a couple of hours later with his mouth like a sandpit, stomach cramps and a pounding head. For the rest of the night, as he tramped back and forth from bedroom to lavatory, and after an abortive search for aspirin, he lay with fragments of dialogue repeating: ‘Do you think he suspected anything?’ ‘Oh, good heavens, no! He hasn’t the faintest idea!’ ‘Are you
sure
? Sure he won’t come back?’ ‘Honestly, dear Raymond, he isn’t very bright about that kind of thing.’ And then weary smiles or sniggering laughter at his lack of brightness . . .

Veronica returned in the evening of the following day, was waiting at the bus stop in her car when he got back from work. ‘It’s mine,’ she said, ‘my twenty-first birthday present. Isn’t it marvellous? I’m going to take you for a drive
now
– we could go to the Three Pigeons and have a drink there. Oh, I’m so glad to be back though – What’s the matter?’ By now he was in the car. ‘You look
awful
!’

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of town.’

But when they had reached a secluded piece of lane, and she had turned to him again and asked with real anxiety what
was
the matter, and he started to try to tell her, he couldn’t – he simply broke down. All his anger and hatred, of himself as well as of them, and his despair came uncontrollably out. He put his hands over his face and sobbed and couldn’t say anything at all.

She was so sweet! So gentle and concerned, so much on his side. For he
did
tell her – the whole thing in the end: it was such an enormous relief to tell someone who cared about him, who seemed as utterly shocked as he. ‘How simply awful for you! How could anyone do that to
you
?’ were two of the things she said.

‘I’m sorry to burden you with all this,’ he said later, but he wasn’t sorry at all, just incredibly relieved to have got it off his chest, and to relax in the balmy atmosphere of her concern and devotion. For this was when he recognized that she really did love him. ‘Poor darling! I do love you so much. I’d do anything to make you happier. I think you’re the most marvellous person I’ve ever met in my life.’

‘Do you? Do you really?’

‘Of course I do. Oh, darling, no wonder you’re shattered. Anyone as brave and sensitive as you would be.’

Brave, sensitive. Nobody had ever called him either of these things. But he
had
been brave – years ago, in France, in the trenches, when that mad major had spent six weeks trying to get him killed. He’d done every single sortie that that dotty shell-shocked bugger had commanded him to do and he’d survived. And he was sensitive, really; it was just that none of his family seemed to notice the fact. But
she
did. This very young girl had the perception to see him as he was. He put his arms round her. ‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without you.’

It had been a turning point in their relationship, although he hadn’t realized it at the time. When, after leaving several messages at his digs, Jessica finally reached him at the office, he found it easy to say that he had had a train to catch and he thought he’d explained that.

That autumn had been a kind of halcyon renaissance for him. His times with her were entirely pleasant, angst-free; he basked in her reflected excitement at being in love. She wasn’t beautiful like Jessica, or desirable in remotely the same way, but he liked her: she was sweet and attractive, always good-natured and eager to please him – this last an experience that was quite new to him. With Jessica, he had been the supplicant, suing for her admiration and respect; with Veronica it was the other way round. Remembering what it was like to be the most vulnerable, he was very careful with her; he was determined to be both responsible and kind. This entailed not actually going to bed with her. To begin with, he had not found this very difficult: he kissed and petted her and enjoyed it, and throughout the autumn he had thought that this state of affairs suited her as well as him. But when she came to him one day with the tale of someone breaking into her room – at night, when she was about to go to bed – and admitted that this was not the first time she had been so harassed, he decided to take action and found them digs out of Keble, where most of the staff lived, a flat on the other side of Oxford. She had been thrilled. The flat, the upper floor of a small terrace house, consisted of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small sitting room with a kitchenette tacked on to it. It was furnished with bare and drab essentials. Money had to be put into meters for the gas fires and hot water; the beds were the sort to be found in boarding schools, narrow, made of iron and wire and horsehair, with blankets that had a rigid feltiness that did not promise warmth. The carpets were dirty and worn and most of the chairs were of the kind that made it unwise to sit on them without thought.