No More Meadows (20 page)

‘Look here,' he said. ‘We don't know anything about this fellow. He's obviously a first-class chap – don't get me wrong -but aren't you rather rushing into this without knowing anything about his background? We don't know who his people are, and so on. I mean, you've only seen him over here as a naval officer, and you never can tell about Americans, anyway. They all sound the same to me.'

‘You mean you think he's common.' Christine stabbed at a brussels sprout with her fork. Sylvia was the sort of housekeeper who aggravated the horrors of having to have brussels sprouts in season by having them out of season as well, when there were other vegetables to choose from. ‘Don't be a snob, Rodge. Vin isn't common, though it wouldn't matter if he was. Our family's not such great shakes. What about Uncle Willie and the pawnshop? Anyway, nobody's common in America. The word doesn't exist.' She had gathered that from Vinson's mystification when she had used the word to him in describing someone.

‘Must be what's wrong with that country then,' said Roger complacently, slathering mustard on his meat. ‘But honestly, Chris, you're going to find it awfully different over there. I wonder if you'll like it? I know I wouldn't.'

‘I'll love it,' said Christine. ‘You're so beastly insular. I think it's exciting to be starting out all over again in a new country that has the future of the world in its hands.'

She was quoting Vinson, and Roger said: ‘God help the world, if that's the case.'

‘Of course you'll be living in the land of plenty. It will be very different from what we have to manage with over here,' said Sylvia gently but accusingly.

‘I'll send you food parcels,' said Christine, determined not to be confounded by them. ‘And chocolate for the children, and I'll send you nylons.'

‘I'd have to pay duty on them.' Sylvia quickly found fault. ‘But you mustn't worry about us. You'll have your own life to lead over there, and we'll manage all right, no doubt, though I must say I wouldn't have expected you to spring this on us just now, so soon after Aunt Jo –'

‘She liked him!' cried Christine violently. ‘She liked Vinson, and she wanted me to marry him.'

‘Oh, so you discussed it with her?' Sylvia raised her thin gingery eyebrows. ‘I must say I think it's a little funny that we never heard anything about it.' Funny was another of her favourite words.

‘Why should I tell you when I knew you'd be like this? Aunt Jo was the only one who cared whether I was happy or not. She wanted me to marry Vin. She said so, and I don't care what you or anyone thinks -' She paused blindly at the unappetising food on her plate, and Sylvia said in very English French:
'Pas devant la bonne',
as the maid trod heavily back into the room with a plate of blancmange.

The children had been lunching with a neighbour. When they came back Christine told them her news. She thought that they would be pleased and excited, as children were by any new turn of events, whatever its implications. Even death was something new to marvel at; but instead of being excited about Christine they looked at her in dismay and said: ‘What about us? You're going away to America and we shan't ever see you again. What will happen to us?'

Jeanette clung to Christine and began to cry, and they both put on a ridiculous act, crying:' What shall we do without you;
oh, whatever shall we do?' as if they had a cruel mother and father, and she were their only hope in the world.

It was almost as if their parents had put them up to behaving like this. Everyone was conspiring to make Christine feel bad about following her perfectly natural desire to be married and have a life of her own.

When she left, Roger made his final shot. ‘Well, we shan't be calling you the estimable Miss Cope much longer,' he said amiably enough, as they went down the path between the neat box hedges, which were one of the reasons why Sylvia did not want to have Mr Cope's dog,' but I don't see how you can face the thought of being called Mrs Gaegler. That's no kind of a name. My sister, Mrs Gaegler.' He shook his head and snickered. ‘I can't see myself saying that with a straight face.'

It was not much better at the shop. Christine's outside friends were pleased when she told them. Rhona was ecstatic, and began making plans to come to America and stay with her, and Margaret and Laurie were unselfishly delighted, although they would miss her. But in the busy book department, where the estimable Miss Cope was so much needed, the congratulations were shadowed by the unspoken reproach that she was letting them down by going away so suddenly before anyone could be trained to take her place.

‘Of course I'm glad for you, my dear,' Mr Parker said, ‘but if only you could have stayed just a little while longer and helped me to organize the department under a new head saleswoman. I don't know who they'll send me. The personnel is so poor these days. Mrs Drew could have taken over, but I doubt she'll come back now. She seems to have deserted us too.'

‘She's going to have a baby. Surely she's allowed to do that.'

‘I know, my dear, I know. I'm not complaining, but to lose the two of you … Miss Burman will never amount to much, poor old soul, Alice is being moved next month, and Helen -well, she's a worthy enough girl, but she hasn't your experience. Oh dear, Miss Cope, I just don't see how I'm going to manage without you. You've been indispensable to me, but your young man must come first, I suppose.'

He managed a brave smile, which flickered out of his face
almost at once. Christine agreed with him. She did not see how he was going to manage without her. She knew that she had held him together in his uncertain sway over the book department. Even if he got efficient new helpers, they would not cover up for him and look after him as she had done.

She worked like a beaver in her last few days at the shop, to try to make amends for her desertion. She brought the stock list up to date and checked the order book and rearranged untidy sections, but Mr Parker, in his distress at losing her, was already becoming more futile than he had ever been, and she dreaded to think what muddles he would get into when she was gone.

Now that she knew she was leaving the shop she wanted it to happen quickly, but at half past five on her last day she did not want to go. She remembered only the nice things about working at Goldwyn's, and none of the things she had grumbled about.

Mr Parker, Miss Burman, Alice and Helen, and even the new assistant, who had a fluting voice and cut-away nostrils, had clubbed together to buy her a silver ashtray with her new initials on it: C.M.G. They gave it to her with some embarrassment after the shop closed. Christine wanted to cry. Miss Burman did cry, and Mr Parker shook her hand feebly and shuffled away in his black musician's hat to the door which the commissionaire was holding for him. It was very distressing.

Just before she left England Margaret told Christine that she had had Miss Burman to tea, and Miss Burman had told her, with many indrawn breaths, that Mr Parker had resigned his post. ‘Though given the sack,' Miss Burman said, ‘would be more my way of putting it.'

Then there were the animals. Mr Cope's dog was going to Farnborough, under Roger's half-joking threat that he would shoot it if it gave any trouble. Christine had wanted to take her dog Timmy to America with her, but Vinson said that they would be living in an apartment, and dogs were not allowed. Even if they moved away from Washington, he said, they would not want to be trammelled with a dog when they did not know where they might be sent.

When he wrote that to her, Christine almost wrote back to say
she would not come to America. Vinson had pretended to like dogs when he first came to ‘Roselawn', but now that he was safely engaged to her she saw that he did not. If only they could have talked it over, he might have reassured her, but three thousand miles was too far to make contact over things like this. Christine's letters were warm and impulsive, the sort of letters she would like to get; but Vinson's letters to her were carefully composed and a little stilted, and did not reveal his feelings. Even his love messages sounded as if they came out of a book. Christine thought that she would mind leaving Timmy more than anyone in England. Margaret was going to take him for her, and two days before her boat sailed she took him over to the Drews' house. It would have been terrible if he had been sad and pleaded her with his eyes not to go, but it was even more terrible that he settled down quite happily, ate a large meal and was too busy with a bone in the garden to notice when she went away.

The goldfish were given to Sylvia's children. She struck at having the love-birds, and they were given to a pet shop, whose owner would not pay anything for them, because he said they were too old.

The oldest cat had to be destroyed because Christine could not find anyone who would take it. Two of the others had run away after Aunt Josephine died, and the remaining cat was given as a parting present to Miss Burman, who might not have been so delighted with it if she had realized it was expecting kittens.

There remained only Aunt Josephine's decrepit fox-terrier. Christine had been looking after it as well as she could, even letting it sleep on her bed, although it did not like her.

‘Have to be put down, of course,' Roger said robustly. ‘Put it out of its misery as it should have been long ago.'

‘But Aunt Jo loved it,' Christine said. ‘It seems so mean to her to let it die.' But no one would have it, and there was nothing for Christine to do but to take it away to be destroyed. When the vet carried its soggy old body away, with one leg dangling down under his arm, it looked at Christine with eyes of deep distress.

When her father said good-bye to her at Waterloo she looked
out of the window as the train pulled out, and saw in his eyes the same look that the fox-terrier had when it was carried away to die.

She had let everybody down by going away. No one was pleased that she was going to be married. No one was happy for her, and she could not feel happy for herself. A bride going to her lover should have gone with shining eyes and an eager heart, but Christine sat miserably in the train to Southampton and would not look out of the window. When people exclaimed about the buttercups, she would not look at the fields. She did not want to leave England.

‘Look,' said the man next to her, leaning over. ‘There's our
bateau.
Quite sizeable, isn't she?'

Christine turned her head, and there was the black-and-white hull of the liner rising, it seemed, right out of the flat fields, as the train slid past it and into the customs shed.

When she was on the boat Christine began to feel better. She had only been to sea before on a Channel steamer, huddled under coats on the windy deck because people were being sick below, and this was a completely new world to her. This lazy, luxurious liner life of eating and sleeping and making friends with people you would never see again was really the start of the tremendous adventure to which she had committed herself when she said that she would marry Vinson, and the excitement of it revived her flagging courage.

She began to feel like a different person, which was what she wanted. She could not see the old Christine as a suitable wife for Vinson. The old Christine was an unambitious small-time person; attaching too much importance to a trifling job in a book department, slow to make new friends, happy with people who expected no more from her than cheerfulness, content with her own company and slightly ill at ease with sophisticates, and altogether unfitted to the challenge of being an American wife.

She did not think that Vinson knew what she was really like, but with his help she could learn perhaps to be all the things he would want her to be, just as she was learning to act the part of a first-class passenger on one of the world's biggest liners.

She had not wanted to travel first class, but Vinson said that a commander's wife did not travel any other way, and so she had drawn out her savings to obey him. At first she had to keep reminding herself that she had paid a fantastic amount for her ticket and was entitled to the attention and service she was given. Being waited on did not come naturally to her. She made mistakes, like folding her table napkin and making her own bed, which brought her a gentle reprimand from her stewardess: ‘There's no need for that, madam. It's very kind of you, but I'm afraid you didn't make it quite right.'

She wore her new clothes and never went out of her cabin without doing her hair and face as carefully as if she were going to a party, but she thought that people must guess that underneath
there was only Christine Cope, and think her an impostor from the Tourist decks. Before long, however, her diffidence was eased away by the insidious luxury of a transatlantic crossing. She was accepted at her ticket value. She began to make friends and to be asked to meet people for cocktails in the bar. Gradually she felt herself learning to be this new person, this first-class passenger who was being borne across a well-behaved ocean to marry a commander in the United States Navy. She began to enjoy herself.

As the slow days went by and the unseen miles slipped past she thought less and less of what she had left behind and more about what was in front of her. The cable from Roger and Sylvia saluting her departure was less real than the cable from Vinson saluting her approach. She had a picture of him on her dressing-table. Her stewardess dusted it reverently every morning and took a pleasing interest in hearing about Miss Cope's young man, although no doubt it was only one of her duties to make the passengers feel that they mattered to her.

Other stewardesses were called in to view Vinson, and to see the dress and hat which Christine had bought to be married in. The photograph was much admired, and the bath stewardess said that Vinson looked like Tyrone Power. That must be the eyebrows. He was in uniform, wearing his professional naval officer look, with the mouth set and the eyes slightly narrowed. Christine said Hello to the photograph every time she came into her cabin, and wondered if Vinson did the same with her picture she had given him.