The Backward Shadow (32 page)

Being in London was painful, somehow. I'd planned to do a lot of things while I was up, including going to Father's house to make sure his tenants were looking after the place properly, as he'd asked me to do before leaving for Spain; and perhaps going to visit John. But the conversation about Toby had disturbed me too much to let me do anything more which brought memories into sharper focus. I did
go
to John's place, mainly because I felt so vulnerable myself that I could wince from imagining how hurt he would be if he knew I'd come up to town without going to see him. Not that he would have found out, but still … I was relieved to find he was out. By day, that house, which had once been my refuge, seemed unrelievedly squalid and it smelt of human uneasiness. The same children who had shouted after me that morning were playing on the steps again. They weren't thin or anything but none of their clothes seemed to fit, they were grubby and their eyes were distrustful as they looked up at me. I have never hated my times as Dottie did, and as Billie seemed to; but the look in those black children's faces was the look of them-and-us which gave me a feeling compounded of guilty conscience, resentment and even fear. I left a note behind the broken door of John's letter-box in the hall and got away quickly.

I was actually at the station when I thought of Heal's. It came to me quite suddenly and I stood stock still in front of W. H. Smith's and thought about it. There was nothing on earth I wanted more at that moment than to do something that would help Dottie and give her a lift. The blunders I'd made in the past vis-à-vis the shop still weighed heavily on my conscience and I wanted desperately, too, to please Henry—though the last time I had been over to see him he had looked so ill
and seemed so listless that I had fleeting, stifled doubts whether even a fillip for the shop would have power to rouse him to anything like his old enthusiasm. However, as I considered it I remembered that I had all the cuttings and several brochures with me. The cuttings I had wanted to show Billie (but had forgotten), the brochures were advertisements and a handout that I had in the bottom of my shopping-basket after a visit to the printers. I took stock of my personal appearance, which usually left almost everything to be desired, though Dottie insisted I dress smartly when I was serving in the shop; but today I had outfitted myself carefully for my interview with Billie; one always armours oneself for encounters containing the potential of emotional uncertainty. I looked all right

I left the station, knowing I was missing the only train for two hours, and got a bus to Tottenham Court Road. Once in Heal's exquisite entrance hall, surrounded by sights of sweet perfection and the odours of seasoned wood and dressed cloth, I was assailed with misgivings. Business people don't just arrive for important interviews without an appointment, surely? Besides, looking about at that great store it seemed hard to imagine they would be impressed by anything we had to offer. But words of Dottie's came back to me: ‘Some of our stuff is as good as anything anywhere.' I looked around again, and saw that it was so—I had nothing to be ashamed of. I found my way to the business manager's office and requested an interview.

THERE'S
no particular need, five years after the event, to go into the details of Henry's death. Something known and inevitable, however tragic, can't be very moving to read about, or even interesting. It happened, in any case, very soon after the visit to London which resulted in our landing a contract with Heal's. It comforted me quite ludicrously at the time to feel that I had managed this coup in time to give Henry the knowledge that the shop was back on the upgrade—I remember him saying to me, on one of my last visits, ‘Knowing you and Dorothy have that Heal's thing has given me a hell of a kick. It's going to make all the difference to her …' Neither of us was with him when he died; it was Joanna who held his hand and listened to his voice fade out right in the middle of a sentence about Dottie. It was typical of him that he died with his brain, and his heart, still working.

But if his death was somehow unterrible, the funeral cancelled that. I can't recall it even now without horror. His body going sliding through those silent little doors to the bleat of organ music—one expected to see the brilliant white-hot glitter of the furnace between the discreet little curtains. It's hideous, so euphemistic … In India at least you see the flames; it's all out in the open air and everybody wails and you smell the fire and don't pretend it isn't really happening.

Ted arrived late; we found out from Joanna later that he'd been sitting outside in the hire-car, unable to pull himself together enough to show his face in the chapel. But then at last he came in, near the end, his face mournful and somehow simian above the impeccable morning dress with its grey waistcoat and shiny top hat. And
spats
. … Dottie's and my mutual wretchedness that day was so acute that it needed only those spats to send us both into suppressed hysterics.

Dottie actually had to leave the chapel, and I followed her when I'd managed to get hold of myself; I found her in the
graveyard outside standing erect, her whole body heaving with sobs, the tears washing down her face from red, anguished eyes. When she saw me coming she turned away from me with a moan. ‘We laughed!' she got out at last in a whisper of awe and shame. ‘He's dead, and we laughed! We're ill, we're damned, we'd laugh at anything!'

In vain I told her to let herself off, that it was perfectly natural, I even ventured to say that Henry would have been the first to understand and even join in … Stupid of me, for she froze like a rock at the words and said coldly, ‘Don't talk about him like that as if he were alive. He's dead and finished.'

I left her alone for a while, after that, but when I saw that she was not able to forgive herself I tackled her again. It was two weeks or so later, and she was much calmer, but it was an icy, lifeless sort of calm, and she answered with no hint of emotion, ‘It's strange, but any time I've allowed myself to feel superior to anybody, about anything, it's always been proved to me later that I am no better, or am even worse than they are. I used to despise my acquaintances in London because nothing was serious to them, nothing shocked them, nothing really mattered to them, and the sign of this was—they laughed, they laughed at everything, they made jokes about everything—God, the bomb, the First World War, Belsen, cruelty to children, cancer. They say it's the English saving grace, but I think it's our current vice. I loathe it. And yet at Henry's funeral, with him being burnt, I laughed. I laughed at nothing, at something not at all funny: his Cockney father who had dressed in the best he could hire or buy for the occasion. I didn't look at his face, because his tears would have shattered me; I looked at his feet—and I laughed. And so I'm just like those others. No better than those repulsive cynics and shallow gigglers. I degraded my goodbye to Henry to that level, because I just hadn't the
depth
to cope with so much sorrow. That's what's hard to face.'

There followed an awful period, still blacked-out in memory, when Dottie and I had to struggle along somehow with the
shop, which chose that moment to start doing such good business that we couldn't abandon it as we both wanted to, and just go into retreat. But Dottie suddenly took against it. It must have been because her passion for it had prevented her being with Henry, looking after him, during the last weeks of his life, and I suppose she began to feel about it as a man might feel about a tawdry, ravishing mistress who has kept him from his sick wife's bedside until it's too late. Anyway, she began to hate the place, and to curse it instead of cherishing it as she had before. First the little necessary extra bits of effort were dropped, then gradually she began positively to neglect the essential work. If we hadn't had the Heal's contract by that time, I really think the whole thing would just have folded; but that side of it had somehow become my baby, and I managed, despite a few initial blunders, and with Dottie's increasingly desultory but nonetheless vital help and advice, to keep this up and make a go of it.

I think it was the saving of me; quite incredible how the gods of fortune will help you sometimes when you most need it. I clearly remember one extraordinary coincidence, which was that the day of Toby's wedding to Whistler—a huge splashy affair in some big synagogue near Marble Arch, all so dreadfully un-him that I immediately felt an air of doom over the marriage—was the day the ‘Us and Them' boutique opened on Heal's first floor, so I simply didn't have time to feel anything about the wedding. And that night, which I had thought would be a major private hell (deep down somewhere in my subconscious, Toby was still mine in the most primitive physical way) I slept like the dead and my imagination with me. By the next morning the worst was over, though even the best of that little lot was not very funny, and the pain—dull, but constant—went on literally for months.

About now Dottie grew downright impossible; she withdrew; she grew surly, sulky, bad-mannered, bad-tempered. She was not drinking, but she behaved as if she were. She did as little work as possible, and that with very bad grace. Her contacts
with suppliers fell off, and I found myself having to make furtive journeys round the countryside renewing them and often having to smooth out rudenesses or bad impressions Dottie had left, either by unanswered letters, unpaid bills, or hasty visits made in a bad mood.

As to her relations with me, they were all right at first—I never took her to task about her failure to pull her weight in the shop, I felt it was only fair after all the months when
I
hadn't, and anyway I understood only too well what was the matter with her. But suddenly one horrible evening she turned on me over supper. There was no warning; we were just sitting there eating in what I had fondly supposed was a mutually sympathetic silence, when she abruptly looked at me and said icily, ‘I must ask you to stop apologising for me.' I was completely taken aback; I really didn't know what she meant. Though I happened to have spent most of the previous week doing just that, I had no idea that she knew it. There followed an awful sort of one-sided row, with me being very pacific and she getting angrier and wilder until I realised that my lack of appropriate reaction was only making her worse. Then I let myself start shouting too. It was as calculated as that, to begin with; but fatal of course, because as soon as I let go of the tight rein I had had myself on, I found out that I really had been resenting her behaviour, although I had thought I was being so damned Christian and noble about understanding it. To excuse myself a little for losing my temper as I very shortly did with her, I have to say I was functioning under some considerable strain myself; Henry had been dead barely six weeks, Toby married less than three; and I was feeling the full brunt of running a business and raising a baby for the first time virtually without any support or help from anyone.

The end of it was almost unbearably ugly. Suddenly I saw that it wasn't just a row, she was actively hating me. I stopped shouting and asked what was really the matter? Whereupon she started shaking all over and her face went foreign; I can't think of another word to describe it; I hardly recognised even
her
type
for that moment. And then she screamed something mercifully incoherent into my face, and after that … Well, after that she began to hit her head against the wall and smack her own face over and over again and I was so horrified and shocked that it was several minutes before I could do anything about it. I'll never forget the feeling of her wrist when I caught hold of it, it was completely rigid and as strong as iron, she just kept slapping and slapping herself viciously, and I remember shouting at her, ‘Slap
me
! Slap
me
!' and frantically trying to redirect her hand. I can't bear to think about it, even now. She collapsed in the end, teeth chattering, face all shades of grey, eyes rolling, sweat standing out all over her … I put coats over her and called a doctor, but by the time he came she'd recovered a bit and I'd managed to get her upstairs to bed. He gave her a sedative and told me it looked like the onset of a nervous breakdown, which is what it was of course; I should have seen she was heading for one but I didn't know what a nervous breakdown really was until then.

Later that night—I was sitting beside her bed, frightened to leave her alone although she was fast asleep—she suddenly came wide awake for a few minutes and stared straight at me through the half-darkness and said, ‘Did you sleep with him?' ‘No,' I said. ‘Swear it.' ‘I do swear it.' ‘How can I be sure? How can I ever be sure? I know you wanted him. If he refused me and took you—' She broke off with a sort of sudden crack like a branch breaking, and instantly closed her eyes and fell asleep again.

So that was it, and I hadn't properly understood after all, until that moment.

She was laid up for a long time and I tried to look after her and run the shop. I couldn't, naturally enough, so I compromised by getting a nurse in, and also engaging an assistant for the shop, a wretched brainless little girl who was the best I could get for what I could afford to pay. She distinguished herself the first week by breaking a supposedly unbreakable casserole, losing two important customers through sheer incompetence and—as I discovered much later—laying the foundations
for a profitable sideline, pinching half-crowns from the petty cash.

The nurse was little more successful; she was efficient but chilly, and Dottie just lay there and didn't even look at her. I began to have terrible fears about the actual extent of her breakdown, remembering that moment when I had not recognised her eyes or her face. She was certainly mad at that second. Sometimes when she withdrew and couldn't be roused, I really feared for her reason. At that time I remembered nothing but good of her, her sweetness, her inexhaustible energy, her irrepressible wit and good cheer and—I knew it all the time—her genuine love for me which had lasted over years of rough going for one or other of us. I would sit in the evenings and do my accounts on the end of her bed, while she sat propped against her pillows and smoked and seemed either a little nearer or a little further away, according to some inner syndrome which I never fully understood or could predict. She never linked Henry's and my names again. Once I was working and she suddenly leaned right forward in bed and put her hand over mine as I was writing figures; I looked up and she was gazing at me with an extraordinary expression of tenderness and regret … I jumped up at once and went to hug her. I thought in that moment everything was better, but I found it wasn't that simple. That impulse, that look, the gesture even, had been, as it were, sent through some kind of barrier, the barrier of her illness, and when I tried to get close to her, physically and mentally, the gate clanged almost in my face and she pushed me away, her eyes tightly shut as if something had escaped from them while she wasn't on her guard.