Stories (29 page)

She asked suddenly: “Your wife getting anxious about you?”

He caught his breath and stared at her: “Who told you?” She laughed derisively. “Well, who told you?”

“No one told me,” she said, with contempt.

“Then I must have been talking in my sleep,” he muttered, anxiously.

She laughed loudly: “‘Someone told me.’ Talking in your sleep’—you must think I’m stupid.” And with a familiar, maddening gesture, she turned away and picked up a dishcloth.

“Leave the dishes alone; they’re clean, anyway,” he shouted.

“Don’t shout at me like that.”

“Rose,” he appealed after a moment, “I was going to tell you, I just couldn’t tell you—I tried to, often.”

“Yes?” she said laconically. That “yes” of hers always exasperated him. It was like a statement of rock-bottom disbelief, a basic indifference to himself and the world of men. It was as if she said: There’s only one person I can rely on—myself.

“Rosie, she won’t divorce me, she won’t give me my freedom.” These dramatic words were supplied straight to his tongue by the memory of a film he had seen the week before. He felt ashamed of himself. But her face had changed. “You should have told me,” she said; and once again he was disconcerted because of the pity in her voice. She had instinctively turned to him with a protective movement. Her arms went around him and he let his head sink on her shoulder with that old feeling that he was being swept away, that he had no control over the things he did and said. Hell, he thought, even while he warmed to her tenderness: to hell with it. I never meant to get me and Rosie into this fix. In the meantime she held him comfortingly, bending her face to his hair, but there was a rigidity in her pose that told him she was still waiting. At last she said: “I want to have kids. I’m not getting any younger.” He tightened his arms around her waist while he thought: I never thought of that. For he had two children of his own. Then he thought: She’s right. She should have kids. Remember how she got worked up over that other kid in the blitz? Women need to have kids. He thought of her with his child, and pride stirred in him. He realised he would be pleased if she got pregnant, and felt even more at sea. Rose said: “Ask her again, Jimmie. Make her divorce you. I know women get spiteful and that about divorces, but if you talk to her nice—” He miserably promised that he would. “You’ll ask her tonight?” she insisted. “Well …” The fact was, that he had not intended to go home tonight. He wanted to have an evening to himself—go to the pub, see some of his pals, even work for an hour or so. “Weren’t you going home tonight?” she asked, incredulously, seeing his face. “No, I meant it. I want to do some work. I’ve got to get this exam, Rosie. I know I can take it if I work a little. And then I’m qualified. Just now I’m not one thing and I’m not the other.” She accepted this with a sigh, then pleaded: “Go home tomorrow then and ask her.”

“But tomorrow I want to come and see you, Rosie, don’t you want me?” She sighed again, not knowing that she did, and smiled: “You’re nothing but a baby, Jimmie.” He began coaxing: “Come on, be nice, Rosie, give me a kiss.” He felt it was urgently necessary for him to have her warm and relaxed and loving again before he could leave her with a quiet mind. And so she was—but not entirely. There was a thoughtful line across her forehead and her mouth was grave and sad. Oh, to hell with it, he thought, as he went off. To hell with them all.

The next evening he went to Rose anxiously. He had drunk himself gay and debonair in the pub, he had flirted a little with Pearl, talked sarcastically about women and marriage, and finally gone home to sleep. He had breakfast with his family, avoided his wife’s sardonic eye, and went off to work with a bad hangover. At the factory, as always, he became absorbed in what he was doing. It was a small factory which made precision instruments. He was highly skilled, but in status an ordinary workman. He knew, had known for a long time, that with little effort he could easily take an examination which would lift him into the middleclasses as far as money was concerned. It was the money he cared about, not the social aspect of it. For years his wife had been nagging at him to better himself, and he answered impatiently because, for her, what mattered was to outdo their neighbours. This he despised. But she was right for the wrong reasons. It was a question of devoting a year of evenings to study. What was a year of one’s life? Nothing. And he had always found examinations easy. That day, at the factory, he had decided to tell Rose that she would not see as much of him in future. He swore angrily to himself that she must understand a man had a duty to himself. He was only forty, after all…. And yet, even while he spoke firmly to himself and to the imaginary Rose, he saw a mental picture of the desk she had bought him that stood unused in the livingroom of the flat. “Well, who’s stopping you from working?” she would enquire, puzzled. Genuinely puzzled, too. But he could not work in that flat, he knew that; although in the two months before he had met Rose he was working quite steadily in his evenings. That day he was cursing the fate that had linked him with Rose; and by evening he was hurrying to her as if some terrible thing might happen if he were not there by supper time. He was expecting her to be cold and
distant, but she fell into his arms as if he had been away for weeks. “I missed you,” she said, clinging to him. “I was so lonely without you.”

“It was only one night,” he said, jauntily, already reassured.

“You were gone two nights last week,” she said, mournfully. At once he felt irritated. “I didn’t know you counted them up,” he said, trying to smile. She seemed ashamed that she had said it. “I just get lonely,” she said, kissing him guiltily. “After all …”

“After all what?” His voice was aggressive.

“It’s different for you,” she defended herself. “You’ve got—other things.” Here she evaded his look. “But I go to work, and then I come home and wait for you. There’s nothing but you to look forward to.” She spoke hastily, as if afraid to annoy him, and then she put her arms around his neck and kissed him coaxingly and said: “I’ve cooked you something you like—can you smell it?” And she was the warm and affectionate woman he wanted her to be. Later he said: “Listen, Rosie girl, I’ve got to tell you something. That exam—I must start working for it.” She said, gaily, at once: “But I told you already, you can work here at the desk and I’ll sew while you work, and it’ll be lovely.” The idea seemed to delight her, but his heart chilled at it. It seemed to him quite insulting to their romantic love that she should not mind his working, that she should suggest prosaic sewing—just like a wife. He spent the next few evenings with her, newly in love, absorbed in her. And he felt hurt when she suggested hurriedly—for she was afraid of a rebuff—“If you want to work tonight, I don’t mind, Jimmie.” He said laughing: “Oh, to hell with work, you’re the only work I want.” She was flattered, but the thoughtful line was marked deep across her forehead. About a fortnight after his wife was first mentioned, she delicately enquired: “Have you asked her about the divorce?”

He turned away, saying evasively, “She wouldn’t listen just now.” He was not looking at her, but he could feel her heavy, questioning look on him. His irritation was so strong that he had to make an effort to control it. Also he was guilty, and that guilt he could understand even less than the irritation. He all at once became very gay, so that his mood infected her, and they were giggling and laughing like two children. “You’re just conventional, that’s what you are,” he said, pulling her hair. “Conventional?” she tasted the big word doubtfully. “Women always
want to get married. What do you want to get married for? Aren’t we happy? Don’t we love each other? Getting married would just spoil it.” But theoretical statements like these always confused Rose. She would consider each of them separately, with a troubled face, rather respectful of the intellectual minds that had formulated them. And while she considered them, the current of her emotions ran steadily and deep, unconnected with words. From the gulf of love in which she was sunk she murmured, fondly: “Oh, you—you just talk and talk.” “Men are polygamous,” he said gaily, “it’s a fact, scientists say so.” “What are women then?” she asked, keeping her end up. “They aren’t polygamous.” She considered this seriously, as was her way, and said doubtfully: “Yes?” “Hell,” he expostulated, half-seriously, half-laughing, “you’re telling me you’re polygamous?” But Rose moved uneasily, with a laugh, away from him. To connect a word like “polygamous,” reeking as it did of the “nosey-parkers” who were, she felt, her chief enemy in life, with herself, was too much to ask of her. Silence. “You’re thinking of George,” he suddenly shouted, jealously. “I wasn’t doing any such thing,” she said, indignantly. Her genuine indignation upset him. He always hated it when she was serious. As far as he was concerned, he had just been teasing her—he thought.

Once she said: “Why do you always look cross when I say what I think about something?” Now, that surprised him—didn’t she always say what she thought? “I don’t get cross, Rosie, but why do you take everything so serious?” To this she remained silent, in the darkness. He could see the small, thoughtful face turned away from him, lit by the bleak light from the window. The thoughtfulness seemed to him like a reproach. He liked her childish and responsive. “Don’t I make you happy, Rose?” He sounded miserable. “Happy?” she said, testing the word. Then she unexpectedly laughed and said: “You talk so funny sometimes you make me laugh.” “I don’t see what’s funny, you’ve no sense of humour, that’s what’s wrong with you.” But instead of responding to his teasing voice, she thought it over and said seriously: “Well, I laugh at things, don’t I? I must be laughing at something then. My dad used to say I hadn’t any sense of humour. I used to say to him, ‘How do you know what I laugh at isn’t as funny as what you laugh at?’” He said, wryly, after a moment, “When you laugh, it’s like you’re not laughing at all, it’s something nasty.” “I don’t know what
you mean.” “I ask you if you’re happy and you laugh—what’s funny about being happy?” Now he was really resentful. Again she meditated about it, instead of responding—as he had hoped—with a laugh or some reassurance that he made her perfectly happy. “Well, it stands to reason,” she concluded, “people who talk about happy or unhappy, and then the long words—and the things you say, women are like this, and men are like that, and polygamous and all the rest—well …” “Well?” he demanded. “Well, it just seems funny to me,” she said lamely. For she could have found no words at all for what she felt, that deep knowledge of the dangerousness and the sadness of life. Bombs fell on old men, lorries killed people, and the war went on and on, and the nights when he did not come to her she would sit by herself, crying for hours, not knowing why she was crying, looking down from the high window at the darkened, ravaged streets—a city dark with the shadow of war.

In the early days of their love Jimmie had loved best the hours of tender, aimless, frivolous talk. But now she was, it seemed, always grave. And she questioned him endlessly about his life, about his childhood. “Why do you want to know?” he would enquire, unwilling to answer. And then she was hurt. “If you love someone, you want to know about them, it stands to reason.” So he would give simple replies to her questions, the facts, not the spirit, which she wanted. “Was your mum good to you?” she would ask, anxiously. “Did she cook nice?” She wanted him to talk about the things he had felt; but he would reply, shortly: “Yes” or “Not bad.”

“Why don’t you want to tell me?” she would ask, puzzled.

He repeated that he didn’t mind telling her; but all the same he hated it. It seemed to him that no sooner had one of those long companionable silences fallen, in which he could drift off into a pleasant dream, than the questions began. “Why didn’t you join up in the war?” she asked once. “They wouldn’t have me, that’s why.” “You’re lucky,” she said fiercely. “Lucky nothing, I tried over and over. I wanted to join.”

And then, to her obstinate silence he said: “You’re queer. You’ve got all sorts of ideas. You talk like a pacifist; it’s not right when there’s a war on.”

“Pacifist!” she cried angrily. “Why do you use all these silly words? I’m not anything.”

“You ought to be careful, Rosie, if you go saying things like
that where people can hear you, they’ll think you’re against the war, you’ll get into trouble.”

“Well, I am against the war, I never said I wasn’t.”

“But Rosie—”

“Oh shut up. You make me sick. You all make me sick. Everybody just talks and talks, and those fat old so-and-so’s talking away in Parliament, they just talk so they can’t hear themselves think. Nobody knows anything and they pretend they do. Leave me alone, I don’t want to listen.” He was silent. To this Rose he had nothing to say. She was a stranger to him. Also, he was shocked: he was a talker who liked picking up phrases from books and newspapers and using them in a verbal game. But she, who could not use words, who was so deeply inarticulate, had her own ideas and stuck to them. Because he used words so glibly, she tried to become a citizen of his country—out of love for him and because she felt herself lacking. She would sit by the window with the newspapers and read earnestly, line by line, having first overcome her instinctive shrinking from the language of violence and hatred that filled them. But the war news, the slogans, just made her exhausted and anxious. She turned to the more personal. WAR TAKES TOLL OF MARRIAGE, she would read, WAR DISRUPTS HOMES. Then she dropped the paper and sat looking before her, her brow puzzled. That headline was about her, Rose. And again, she would read the divorces; some judge would pronounce: “This unscrupulous woman broke up a happy marriage and …” Again the paper dropped while Rose frowned and thought. That meant herself. She was one of those bad women. She was The Other Woman. She might even be that ugly thing, A Co-Respondent…. But she didn’t feel like that. It didn’t make sense. So she stopped reading the newspapers; she simply gave up trying to understand.

She felt she was not on an intellectual level with Jimmie, so instinctively she fell back on her feminine weapons—much to his relief. She was all at once very gay, and he fell easily into the mood. Neither of them mentioned his wife for a time. It was their happiest time. After love, lying in the dark, they talked aimlessly, watching the sky change through moods of cloud and rain and tinted light, watching the searchlights. They took no notice of raids or danger. The war was nearly over, and they spoke as if it had already ended. “If we was killed now, I
shouldn’t mind,” she said, seriously, one night when the bombs were bad. He said: “We’re not going to get killed, they can’t kill us.” It sounded a simple statement of fact: their love and happiness was proof enough against anything. But she said again, earnestly: “Even if we was killed, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t see how anything afterwards could be as good as this, now.”