Female Friends (17 page)

Christie stops off at Soho on the way home and spends an hour with a tart. How else will he survive?

She loves him. She means to marry him. How else will she survive?

‘I can’t,’ Grace says to him, weeping, wriggling out of his arms on some deserted shore. It is night. The moon shines. The whole world waits. ‘I can’t. I’m not that kind of girl. If I say no, I know you’ll leave me, and then I’ll die, but no, no, no. Oh Christie, if you knew how I loved you!’

What a risk she takes. He nearly leaves her, she doesn’t know how nearly. Grace disturbs first his nights and then his days, and Christie has enterprises to keep going, and an office, and a staff and a million to be made.

Grace wins the unofficial Slade Prize, not for the most accomplished student, but for the Most Desirable Girl of the Year. Christie stays. He likes success. Grace’s eyes are incredible: her skin through the very effort of virtue has the pallor of debauchery. When she walks, sometimes, her knees knock together as if she was a young colt and could hardly control them. It’s as if, Christie thinks, you only had to push her and she’d fall down and wait, knees obligingly apart.

But she doesn’t, and she won’t. Grace wins.

‘Grace, will you marry me?’

What a catch, everyone says! This thirty-year-old, tall South African with his land-owning father, his background of parched veldt and black servants, and his riches; and his naïveties about the English social scene, born out of
Cavalcade
and
Mrs Miniver
and
Brief Encounter
and
The Way Ahead
, making a fortune in pre-stressed concrete, lording it over the new light-weight aggregates. You can build high on London clay, these days, as never before. London can become New York. Christie’s first to realize it. The safety factors are uncertain. No-one knows quite what they are. Christie tells them, if they ask.

Christie arranges the wedding, the way he arranges anything. He must forego his ambition of a wedding quite like the one in
Father of the Bride
, for the Bride’s Mother is dead, and the Bride’s Father disaffected in Bournemouth, but Christie does what he can.

The wedding is held in a church in the Sussex village where Christie’s English aunt lives. The reception is in a marquee set up in the garden. The sun shines, bells ring, flowers bloom, the virgin bride, beautiful and translucent in white, comes down the aisle. The groom stands beside her; the union is blessed. Was ever there a more charming couple? Cucumber sandwiches, strawberries, champagne. A thunderstorm. Laughter, tears, off to Cornwall and the honeymoon in the Bentley with the old shoes tied behind.

Those little fishermen’s cottages, those deserted rocky shores. You could make love on a beach, in those days, and there wouldn’t be a soul for miles. (It isn’t like that now. The Life Guard would have you up for indecency in five minutes.) Christie is sated: so is Grace, languid as can be. Tactfully but persistently he inquires about her already ruptured hymen. These things are important.

Horse-riding, she says.

And so it might be, after all.

Then back to St John’s Wood and life as a young matron. There’s no reason that anyone can see, in those innocent days, for Grace and Christie not to live happily ever after.

Grace even conceives, on her wedding night.

What judgement, what skill, what luck. Playing Grandmother’s footsteps with fate. Wanting just enough, never too much.

Good days!

Grace gives birth to a boy in March. Piers. Two years later, Petra is born. They are rather delicate, fragile, whiney children, as if all the strength of preceding generations has gone into the parents and left none over for these afterthoughts. Grace loves them, intemperately.

And Marjorie! Marjorie goes to Grace’s wedding. (Patrick is not invited.) She is happy for her friend, and her complexion is clear and spotless. She wears a New Look dress with soft unpadded shoulders, tight waist, and full skirt—and needn’t have bothered because at the reception, sheltering from the thunderstorm under an oak-tree, she meets Ben, who does not care in the least what she looks like but likes to listen to what she says.

Within three weeks she has left Frognal and is living in a tiny flat in West Kilburn with Ben. Ben is an architectural student and has been asked to the wedding because his father is a business contact of Christie’s. Ben, himself, has many doubts about Christie’s business methods, let alone his constructional ones, but keeps them to himself. Ben’s family is Zionist. Marjorie wonders whether, having a Jewish father herself, and feeling sympathy with that much suffering race, she should not become a Jew herself? But Ben, who takes his Judaism in a political rather than a religious sense, feels it to be unnecessary. As for marriage, there is lots of time for that. They have a sure sense of a long future together. Besides, if they married, she would lose her grant, finally obtained from a reluctant local authority after many solicitors’ letters and injunctions from Helen in Mexico.

Chloe is asked to Grace’s wedding, but cannot attend. She has other matters to occupy her mind.

C
HLOE OFFERS TO COOK
the children’s supper, but Françoise, now quite cheered up, will not hear of it. The most she will allow is that Chloe can help. She bustles about in Chloe’s kitchen as if it were her own. Chloe feels ill at ease: as if she were the stranger, not Françoise.

Some people, thinks Chloe, can make themselves at home anywhere. Françoise clatters and sings amongst another woman’s pots and pans and thinks nothing of it. It has taken Chloe all of ten years to regard this house as her own. It is as if, having had no proper home as a child, only a room shared with a mother, she has no right to achieve one now. Her adult life is plagued with the notion that she has no real entitlement to anything, to have only what she can snatch when no-one’s looking.

And Oliver, of course, stretching out his control to cover the choice of colour of the spare-room wallpaper, the books in the shelves, the newspapers through the letterbox, the food in the cupboard, the greenfly in the garden, the money in her pocket, does not make matters easier. She knows it. All the same, she thinks, it takes two, as always. One to stretch out greedy hands, the other to decline to push them away; out of fear, or idleness, or stupidity or force of habit. All Chloe has to do is go into a Garden Shop, buy a chemical insecticide, put that into the syringe instead of soap and water—and there you are, no greenfly.

But will she? No.

When Chloe first meets Oliver, she is sitting primly on a cushion. She is shy, and not at ease with the others. That is, she looks down her fine patrician nose and appears superior. Chloe does not have a boyfriend, and is naturally anxious that this should be put down to her discriminating nature rather than her lack of capacity to attract. She is raw enough as it is with the humiliation of being pitied, as she is, for having no proper home, no proper family, no proper clothes; not even, she suspects, proper breasts. (The slight ladylike mounds which she soaps, rinses and dries so carefully each morning, seem to her to be sadly inadequate. Not that she has any means of actual comparison, of course—other girls, like her mother, dress and undress, wash and dry themselves, either in privacy or behind towels.) And though she weighs a stone more than she used to—she lives in a students’ hostel and has grown plump from too many potatoes and too much misery—the extra weight seems to lie around her hips. Perhaps she is going to turn out pear-shaped, like Marjorie? It is her fear. And now as she sits on her cushion and looks down her nose, her cotton skirt nips her tightly round her waist. It is pretty pink check fabric, which once curtained the Ladies Cloakroom at the Rose and Crown, until faded beyond hope by the afternoon sun.

Oliver, coming late to the party, only there because he could not sleep, disliking his host and by implication his guests, mistakenly believes that Chloe, sitting on her cushion, looking clean and shockable and the kind of girl most likely to annoy him, is in the company of the President of the Dramatic Society, who sits at Chloe’s feet and lays his head upon them for no other reason than that he has a headache and wishes to die. When he finally pulls himself together enough to go and look for another drink, Oliver takes his place. He strokes Chloe’s ankle. Chloe looks down upon his head, black, curly, silky and riotous. Does she have a premonition, then, how familiar this particular head of hair is to become to her? How she is to watch it, over countless breakfast tables, flourish, fade and thin? Perhaps. Why else does she stay, and listen, and respond, and not obey her impulse simply to get up and walk away, or at the very least move her ankle out of his reach and her future too?

Oliver
What makes you think you’re so superior?

Chloe is speechless.

Oliver
Too good to talk to me, you see.

How black his eyes are: how furious his mouth. He has rolled up his shirt-sleeves. His arms are hairy and sinewy. He moves up and sits next to her on the cushion. She edges over, but still their bodies touch. He smiles.

Oliver
Why are you girls so mean with yourselves?

Chloe has the habit of instant guilt. If anyone says ‘it’s raining’, Chloe replies ‘I’m sorry’.

Chloe (Now)
I’m sorry.

Oliver
It’s not your fault. It’s the way you were brought up. What pretty hands you have. They haven’t done much washing-up, I don’t suppose. My mother died from taking in washing. She had cancer of the liver. Bleach fumes are carcinogenic, you know.

Chloe, horrified, doesn’t know. Oliver moves closer. They are the only pair upright in the room. Someone has blown out all but two candles. His eyes gleam in the darkness. She loses all impulse to move away.

Oliver
Mind you, she was only a member of the working classes. You know, those comic characters you meet in novels. One thing’s for certain, this lot on the floor will never overthrow the established order of things. Too busy worrying about their sex lives. Will she, won’t she, can he, can’t he, and if she won’t he can, and she will he can’t. Who’s going to bother with Marx when they’re still stuck at Havelock Ellis. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Chloe
No.

Oliver
I’d better stop talking then. Tell me about yourself.

Chloe
There’s nothing to tell.

He believes her.

Oliver
What cold hands you have. And you’re so stiff. Why don’t you relax? Shall I take you home?

Mesmerized, Chloe lets him take her back to his attic flat. He makes tea and serves it in tin mugs. It is too late for her to get back into the hostel—she has a late pass but it expires at 1 a.m., when the doors are locked shut, but Chloe does not care, nor wish to burden him with her predicament. She will have to climb back in over the wall, like anyone else.

Oliver tells her about his mother’s death, his father’s villainy, his lost garden, his two school friends, killed by blast. He curses the government, the war, his race, his religion—he wants nothing of any of it. He cries! Chloe has never seen a man cry before. She didn’t know they did. Tears come into her own eyes.

‘I wish I could cry for you,’ she says, and means it. She throws away her happiness in handfuls, this girl.

Oliver is not in the habit of crying. He feels both ashamed and gratified at so doing. What is she doing to him, this quiet, unsmiling girl? Entering into his grief, accepting it—not attempting to deny it, as do most he meets. In these days he is the last person to believe—as he will later—that the past should remain dead and buried. But then later he has Chloe to bear the burden for him. After all, he earns the money. The least Chloe can do is cope with his temperament.

But now he trembles as he undresses her and leads her to the bed. She needs no arguments, it seems, or promises. He does not want to make her angry, he does not want to hurt her. He wants to keep her.

Oliver Rudore and Chloe Evans. Love at first sight!

For Chloe does not doubt she loves him. She could spend the rest of her life in his bed, so much does it hurt when she’s out of it. Chloe, always so fearful of projecting a future for herself lest some inexorable force, roused from slumber by her daring, picks her up and sets her down again amongst the pots and pans of the Rose and Crown, can now raise her eyes from her text books, and see a vision of a future self, aligned to Oliver Rudore.

Chloe becomes very thin very quickly. She misses meals at the hostel because she is busy cooking Oliver’s, concocting marvels on his gas ring. She is short of sleep, since she seldom gets over the hostel wall and into bed before four in the morning, and Sociology tutorials start at nine. (Oliver has no classes before eleven.) In the evenings, when they are not making love, she learns typing from a Teach-Yourself book, the better to type Oliver’s essays.

Chloe writes to her mother, not mentioning Oliver at all, but asking whether Gwyneth can provide her with a typewriter. She, who never makes demands! Gwyneth instantly and dutifully supplies one; giving up her Thursday afternoons for three whole months to do so. Mrs Leacock kindly remarking that yes, the Rose and Crown could do with a new machine, and so perhaps Gwyneth would care to buy the old one from her, at a very reasonable price, considering the scarcity of metal, including thirty-year-old Olympias.

As for Oliver, he becomes quite genial. He even acquires some friends, lured partly by the change in him and partly by Chloe’s cooking. It is pleasant to see the pair of them together, holding hands whenever they can, thighs touching under the table, not so much lascivious as companionable, and replete.

Oliver’s sisters come to visit him, on leave from the telephone exchange. They do everything together: the two-headed, four-breasted monster of his childhood. Look at them now, swaying together into his room, bearing seed-cake and coffee beans, blonde hair curled high in identical curls, wearing the same thin white blouses, with the same buttons bursting apart under the thrust of their ripe breasts. They share the same swooping, raucous laugh, the same mocking geniality: both show off engagement rings, one diamond, one emerald. Chloe likes them. She does not understand Oliver’s horror of these bouncing girls. He whispers to her what he never thought to tell anyone—the bath times, when they, the big-girls, bathed him, the baby, and raised his little winkie high, and let it fall, and laughed in the most good-natured way, but laughed. She shakes her head in horror for him.