It Ends with Revelations (13 page)

She said dazedly, ‘But I thought they liked Miles.’

‘They do. They admire him as an actor and as a man. I tell you, they don’t
disapprove
of homosexuality. But they don’t feel a homosexual should have first claim on a woman they want their father to have. I know it’s preposterous, ludicrous, even. But it’s also good sense.’

‘But how could they know that you felt anything at all about me – let alone what I felt about you?’

‘They’re very deeply attached to me, and they became attached to you with astonishing swiftness. And I suspect that, to the eyes of love, love shows. I knew about you, as well as about myself, almost from the beginning.’

She was becoming more and more dazed. ‘But you couldn’t have known about me, any more than they could. I didn’t know about myself – not until today, when I was alone here. Those children made the whole thing up and put the idea into your head.’

‘It was in my head from the first day I met you. Oh, I
don’t say I fell in love at sight but I did feel very much attracted. And if you’ll look back honestly you’ll find that you … well, at least felt
something
. I’ve a great many faults but I’m not particularly conceited and I tell you I knew. There was … something in your eyes.’

Already a retrospective self-knowledge was rushing at her. ‘Oh, my God, was there something Miles could have seen? Was that why you thought he’d let me come alone today?’

‘I don’t know that he saw a thing, as regards you. But my own feelings were so strong that I should have thought anyone could see them. And I can’t imagine Miles behaving like a dog in a manger. Does he usually?’

‘There’s been no question of it. I’ve never –’ She broke off, shaking her head hopelessly. ‘Oh, you’ve got it all wrong.’

‘Are you telling me you’ve never had any lovers?’

‘Not since I married. There were some before.’

‘Then is Miles bi-sexual?’

‘No. He’s completely homosexual. Though he would, if I’d wished it …’ She shook her head. ‘That doesn’t mean that I don’t love him. It’s just that it’s not that kind of love.’

‘Then all these years there’s been
no one
?’

She smiled. ‘Perhaps I’m what Kit says she is, frigid. Though I wasn’t in my unregenerate youth.’

He, too, smiled. ‘That’s surely a matter that’s easily decided.’

He came round the table, pulled her to her feet and took
her in his arms. Her response to his kiss was so
overwhelming
that she had to cling to him for support.

‘Oh, dear,’ she said weakly. ‘I do apologize.’

He laughed. ‘Apologies were never less called for. All the same, as we’ve rather a lot to discuss, we’d better leave it at that for the moment. Well, almost at that.’ He kissed her again, less lingeringly, then settled her back in her chair. ‘Drink some chocolate. Have a piece of cake.’

‘Let them eat cake,’ she said balefully. ‘Oh, Geoffrey, need we talk – now?’

He placed the cake knife on the kitchen table. ‘Look, there’s the drawn sword between us. Obviously one needs protection from frigid women. My dear love, of course we must talk. When will you tell Miles? Or rather, when will you have it out with him? I’m sure he knows already.’

She said thoughtfully, ‘I think you’re wrong about that. Even if he knows about you, he couldn’t know about me – when I didn’t know myself.’

‘All right. Let’s say it was all wishful thinking on the part of me and my children. It doesn’t matter now.’

‘But of course it does. If Miles doesn’t know yet, why should he ever, if we’re discreet? I can’t bear the thought of his knowing.’

‘My dear Jill, one can’t divorce a man without his knowing.’

She sprang up so suddenly that her chair overturned. ‘You must be mad. I couldn’t conceivably divorce him.’

‘Then let him divorce you. Though I should have thought, when it’s not a real marriage –’

‘Marriage isn’t only sleeping together. I’ve had years and years of loving kindness from Miles.’

‘And God bless him for that. But surely –’ He came round to pick up her chair. ‘Well, don’t back away from me. I’m not going to rape you.’

‘I don’t mind your raping me. I’m all for it, in fact. But I’m not leaving Miles. I
couldn’t
, Geoffrey. Oh, dear, I quite see that you want a wife –’

‘I don’t want
a
wife, I want you. Did you really think I’d settle for an affair? Remember, my children are in on this.’

She was shaken by sudden fury. ‘Blast your children. The nerve of it – you and them. The great Thornton
take-over
bid! Well, it isn’t going to work. Oh, God!’

He had taken her in his arms again.

‘It’s not fair,’ she said at last. ‘You know I’m in love with you and you’re just taking advantage of me.’

‘Oh, no, I’m not. Now or ever.’

‘You mean you’re going to hold out for marriage? How bloody priggish. Darling, please, even apart from Miles, I’m not suitable for you. I don’t belong to your world. And I wouldn’t begin to know how to be a politician’s wife. I haven’t even any political opinions.’

‘Then you can try mine on for size. Jill, none of that matters.’

She said earnestly, ‘But you know it does, when it comes to marriage. Why can’t we just be lovers? The children needn’t know. And probably Miles needn’t, though if he did there’d be no trouble. I even think he’d be glad for me.’ 

‘I daresay. But I’m not sleeping with you by courtesy of a queer.’

‘There we have it,’ she said with bitterness. ‘That’s how you really feel about him. Oh, you pretend to be tolerant and enlightened but it
is
pretence. You really despise him.’

‘I don’t, and I’m deeply sorry I said that, though it’s not really a derogatory term. I’ve heard many homosexuals use it about themselves.’

‘It’s all right for queers to call each other queer, just as it’s all right for Negroes to call each other niggers. Anyhow, the
way
you said it was insulting.’

‘Was it? Yes, it probably was. Listen, we’d better get this clear. I like and admire Miles. And my tolerance – even the word’s an impertinence; let’s say my enlightenment – anyway, it
is
genuine. But I can’t quite control my
resentment
that a completely homosexual man should have married a normal and obviously highly-sexed woman. No doubt it’s a convenience to have a wife –’

She interrupted him. ‘It’s got nothing to do with that. He married me for
my
sake, not for his. You don’t understand all he’s done for me, all we’ve meant to each other all these years. You don’t understand anything.’

‘Then make me,’ said Thornton.

9

Snow on a Warm August Afternoon

But could she? Could she even bring herself to try?

He said persuasively, ‘Come on, now. And remember I want to know all about you, as well as about your relationship with Miles. It’s an extraordinary feeling to be so much in love with a woman I know so little about. I’m like those people who say they know nothing about painting but know what they like – only I want to find out
why
I like.’

‘Perhaps you’ll just find out that you like me less,’ – and remembering her past self she thought this very possible. Well, that might be no bad thing; not that she wanted him to stop being attracted by her, merely to stop wanting to marry her. Anyway, she’d try to be completely honest. ‘I’d better begin with my despised girlhood,’ – despised, certainly, by her and if anyone had
not
despised it, that fact hadn’t come to her notice.

‘Go back further. What were you like as a child?’

‘Horrible, I should think, and generally miserable. Oh, perhaps not really miserable, just deadly bored and uncomfortable and so often cold. My father was a stage manager, usually on tour; in those days – I mean when I was really small – there were still a good many touring companies. My mother and I trailed round with him. I’ve heard old pros describe theatrical lodgings as cosy but they never struck me that way. And there were the dreary Sunday train calls.’

What she called her camp-following days had ended when she had to go to school – ‘You can’t think how nasty cheap boarding schools can be.’ And even the cheapest cost more than her parents could well afford so that twice, when her father had stage-managed West End shows, she’d been brought home (always theatrical digs) and sent to the nearest day school – ‘Then off they’d go on tour again, and once to Australia, and I’d go back to boarding school – a different one, the one I’d left not being keen on such an impermanent boarder. I doubt if I’m much better educated than gipsy children.’

She had left school for good at sixteen, to work as her father’s assistant and also keep house for him, as her mother had died. ‘I probably didn’t miss her as much as I thought I did. Perhaps I just thought I was entitled to feel forlorn and motherless. And from seeing too little of my father, I then saw too much. He was quite a kind man but
short-tempered
, also he was an old-fashioned stage manager and thought it necessary to bully people and use foul language. The comic thing was that he could switch the foul language
off whenever he was with my mother and me. But once I was in the theatre, working for him, he didn’t think it necessary to. I found it humiliating when he swore at stage hands in front of me – and sometimes at me in front of them. I suppose it made me feel a bit extra inferior. Silly, really, as when my father swore it meant no more than when a dog barks. And he trained me well; by the time I was eighteen I was a good A.S.M. in spite of loathing the job. Oh, God, do you really want to hear all this stuff?’

‘Every word. Go on and don’t skip anything.’

She spoke of various jobs, with and without her father. When she was twenty he had gone to Australia again. He could have taken her as his assistant but she’d just landed a fairly good job and preferred to stick to it. ‘I never saw him again. He stayed out there, married a woman who owned a small hotel, and died four years later.’ She paused, conscious of a disinclination to talk about her life after her father left England. But she must, of course, because it was the mess she had made of things then that had led up to her marriage, or more specifically, to her gratitude for it, and it was the gratitude she had to make clear.

‘What happened after you were left on your own?’ Thornton gently prodded.

‘Nothing pleasant, and no wonder. You can’t imagine how ghastly I was at twenty: gawky, badly dressed, with the most awful hair. Either it was lanky and greasy, or frizzed up by a cheap permanent wave. I’m not at all sure I was even clean – no, really; I always seemed to be in the kind of rooms where you felt dirtier after getting out of the
bath than before you got into it. Oh, no doubt I managed badly about my looks and clothes, but an A.S.M. gets no time for private life, especially on tour. By then there weren’t so many regular tours, but I had a genius for getting into pre-London try-outs that went on for weeks and then didn’t get to London. But my real trouble –’

She broke off, unwilling to describe that real trouble to a man to whom she wanted to remain attractive. But this was all part of the credit Miles deserved and she was going to do the job thoroughly. ‘Let’s face it,’ she said at last. ‘I was sex-mad and sex-starved. It’s a repulsive combination – and anyway, my whole life was in the theatre where there are always plenty of attractive girls around. I was
twenty-two
before anyone obliged by seducing me. He was fifty and the occasion couldn’t have been less glamorous. Can I skip it?’

‘No,’ said Thornton. ‘Back in the witness box, my love.’

‘I’d almost forgotten you’re a barrister as well as an M.P. – doubly out of my world. Well, onward with True Confession….’

She had taken a job with a repertory company which, at Christmas, had put on
The Importance of Being Earnest
– ‘Funny I was thinking of it just a little while back, when I was eating all your cucumber sandwiches. Well, they’d engaged a West End actor to play John Worthing. He was much too old, of course, but he wore his clothes well and still looked handsome in his make-up. We were staying at the same horrid little hotel, so we got together a bit – anyway, we did on Christmas Day when we were at a loose
end because there was no performance, I mean in the theatre.’ She broke off to laugh. ‘Oh, dear, no girl could have had a more putting-off introduction to sex. He hadn’t known I was a virgin and he
hated
it, both morally and physically one might say. I’m not sure I wasn’t still a virgin when it was all over. For the rest of the Christmas season we barely spoke, and then when he left the company he tried to be gallant and said, “Thank you, dear girl, for a memory I shall treasure.” And believe it or not, that was quite a comfort to me. I pretended to myself that I’d been in love with him and he with me and it was simply his conscience that had come between us. Perhaps I’ve always been able to let one half of my mind fool the other half. But in the end, I see what I’ve been up to.’

She had looked away while describing what she had come to think of as a ludicrous episode. Now she offered a rueful grin, and was worried by the gravity of his expression. She instantly wondered if he had found the story in bad taste – as she now instantly did. Even while telling it – and before – she had disliked the tone of her voice and the words she was choosing. It was as if the girl she had been was taking over from her present self. But perhaps her present self was only a veneer; if so, he’d better know it. She looked away again, quickly, and pressed on.

‘Well, after that, I was out of work for some time, and then in some plays that never came to London. There was no one I could even pretend to be in love with and life was just a monotony of hard work and discomfort. I remember sitting in that Spa Street café where we first met
thinking that if I could be peacefully dead by just wishing it, I probably
would
wish it – well, it was raining and I was extra full of self-pity because I’d been hankering for clothes in the Spa Street shops. And there was worse ahead of me because I was then with yet another play that folded on tour, after which I was out of work for months. But eventually I landed another job – and in London; the best job I ever had, as a matter of fact, only – I’d better warn you that what’s coming isn’t pretty, but it’s important if you want to know why I married Miles.’

She had fallen in love with the stage manager she worked with and she still considered him worth falling in love with. ‘He was superb at his job – great authority and without shouting and swearing. And he was as good with the company as he was with his staff. Some stage managers bully the staff and toady to the company – that is, the important members of it. But he was just universally both kind and firm. He was the first man – the only man – to teach me that our job was to keep the company happy. And we were always
partners
in the job, not just the boss and his run-about. Naturally, I adored him, and I’m sure he was fond of me, perhaps even a little in love, though I always knew he really loved his wife. Anyway, we had an affair, a real affair, it lasted a whole year.’

She broke off, and sat staring at the stopped kitchen clock, wondering how best to convey what that year had meant to her, which was all the more difficult because it now meant so little; indeed, she couldn’t remember when last she had thought about it. And yet … Perhaps talking
about the past stirred a flicker in the embers. After a moment, Thornton said, ‘Does the memory still distress you? Have a rest. There’s another thermos of chocolate. And how about some more cake?’

‘I’ve already had two pieces. Still … it’s such very good cake. You’ll be thinking I’m a compulsive eater.’

‘You well might be. Women who sublimate their sexual life to the extent you must have been doing are liable to compensate with food.’

‘Oh, God, are they? I don’t
think
I do, though there
was
a time when – I don’t
need
this cake.’

He looked at her amusedly. ‘It wouldn’t worry me even if you were a glutton – which you couldn’t be, with your figure. Eat your cake. And then tell me about your nice stage manager. Were you happy at last?’

Had she been, even for so much as a day out of the whole of that year? ‘Well, I was happier – or rather, I was fully alive at last; sometimes I was more acutely unhappy than I’d ever been, because I knew he didn’t love me. And he was apt to make that painfully clear. It’s surprising how unkind fundamentally kind men can be when they feel guilty – as he did, towards his wife. And then it was all so
difficult
. He had to be at home every night and on Sundays. Of course we had the theatre to make love in but what with eight performances a week and understudy rehearsals we didn’t have too much time. And cleaners are always liable to barge into dressing rooms – which, anyway, aren’t the cosiest of love nests. Once or twice we went wandering round the dust-sheeted theatre, looking for somewhere
private. There was a top box … Oh, dear!’ She broke off and took a drink of chocolate.

‘Sounds an exciting setting,’ said Thornton,
encouragingly
.

‘It didn’t excite me, just terrified me. But I was almost always terrified – of being discovered, of his getting tired of me, of not giving satisfaction.’

‘Hardly conducive to fun.’

‘Fun? That’s something I quite gave up hoping for. I didn’t mind too much. I concentrated on love. And it was love all right, on my side. Well, eventually his wife came to the theatre one afternoon unexpectedly, got as far as his office door and heard enough. She didn’t come in – at least I was spared that. She just went home, and had it out with him that night. I guessed he was quite glad to be forced to give me up, and the play was due to come off so it was all very convenient. He got work with a company that was going to Australia – I think my telling him about my father put that idea into his head. And off he went with his forgiving wife.’

‘Leaving you flat.’

‘Not as flat as you make it sound. He fixed a job for me, in a play that was going on tour for a month with a London theatre already booked. Miles was the leading man. He’d just blossomed into being a star, not as big a one as he is now but, in a way, more exciting because he was a newer one. And, goodness me, was he handsome! And not just boringly handsome; he’s never been that. There’s always been something off-beat about his good looks which saves
them from being conventional. Lovelorn though I was, I was sure that, well, if I hadn’t been lovelorn I should have fallen for him. I felt distinctly swindled when I learned that he was a homosexual.’

‘You knew that from the outset?’

‘Yes, indeed. Jack – my stage manager – told me. He’d stage-managed a show Miles was in and liked him very much. Jack also told me that Miles lived with a boy – well, a man; he was thirty, only a couple of years younger than Miles – and they were completely devoted to each other. They’d been together nearly ten years. Alan – Miles’s love – was a small-part actor, not very good and he didn’t get a lot of work, but he was a dear. He came to several rehearsals. Miles introduced him to me and he was particularly pleasant to me, as Miles always was – though Miles was more than pleasant, he went out of his way to be kind to me, as he always does if he sees anyone is unhappy. And in my case it didn’t take much seeing. Night after night, as soon as I got into bed, I’d start thinking of the past year and then I’d put in a couple of hours crying. Naturally I looked like hell in the morning – no one ever looked more hideous than I do after crying. Really, I wonder that I held that job down; but my work was all right. Don’t look so worried. None of this harrows me now.’

‘It does me,’ said Thornton. ‘Have some more chocolate.’