Wish Her Safe at Home (25 page)

“I should consider myself extraordinarily privileged. I should take a small step backwards and gaze in admiration.”

“You wouldn’t feel embarrassed?”

“No, not at all. Any more than you would if it had been
me
skipping through the house in my birthday suit. Or even if it had been the two of us doing it together.”

Well, I have to confess, this cast a fresh complexion on matters. (And by the bye I wasn’t sure that
maidenhood
was any longer one hundred percent correct!) But just as I was in the throes of vacillating still further—even about to cave in altogether—Roger stood up.

“Oh, you’re not going?” I exclaimed.

But I felt a measure of relief along with disappointment. He gently pulled away his hand.

“No fear!” he smiled. “I haven’t had my sherry.”

Now,
this
was certainly Roger the Bold—leaping down from the yardarm with a vengeance, and a cutlass in his mouth!

“It’s just that it’s quite close in here. May I take my jumper off?”

“Of course you may.” I was preoccupied. “I’ll fetch the sherry; I
hope
there’s still some left! And while I’m gone I’ll perhaps have a quick word with Horatio? You see, it could be that up to now he hasn’t fully grasped the...
”

“Situation” I was going to say but Roger was unbuttoning his shirt.

And when he’d removed it he said, “Rachel. Is that really all you want? Merely the shirt?”

There was a pause. Keeping to the truth isn’t
always
quite so easy as one might suppose. “Oh, dear heaven! My goodness! I’m not altogether sure.” My mouth and lips felt dry.

“But it
is
warm. Wouldn’t you like me to take anything else off?”

I dispensed with words. I nodded. In fact I found this easier.

He unzipped his jeans.

I didn’t know if I had nodded quite enough.

And soon his jeans had been discarded.

He then pulled off his socks. Finally—and with an air distinctly roguish—he began to push down his underpants.

But he took it completely at his ease: no rush: merely an inch or so at a time; possibly less. Roger the Tantalizer! (I was again reminded of the William books; and simultaneously of Paul—but what unsuitable moments to remember him!) And then he walked towards me.
He
came to
me
.

He held me to him; we could scarcely have got closer and how I could smell the heady mix of his deodorant and cologne! (Oh dear!
Had
I remembered to wash?)

And how I could feel his enormous winky pressed hard against my wedding dress.

Rachel Anne,

Rachel Anne,

Who’ll never be without a man...
!

That was the chant the other children used to sing in the playground. Not just the girls either; the boys would join in as well, with equal affection, perhaps with even greater affection, since no matter how much the girls liked me there was always, naturally, just the slightest dash of jealousy colouring their admiration. Indeed, as Eunice once put it—Eunice my best friend and eventually, though only very briefly, my successor as Head Girl: “It’s a good thing that no one can help loving you, Rachel, because otherwise we’d all be sticking pins in your effigy! We girls would. Do you realize that none of us ever gets a look-in if you’re around? It’s always
you
whose books the boys want to carry—always
you
they want to kiss and take to the pictures. Life simply isn’t fair!”

Possibly because I
did
realize this I was always extra nice to everyone, in an effort—I felt it was almost an obligation—to atone. I always shared out my sweets at school (and my mother’s, God bless her) for these of course were the postwar years, when sweets were still on ration. I lent my clothes and I helped people with their homework and I willingly wrote their lines for them; I
would
have sat their detentions if this had somehow been manageable. I tried to have a cheerful word for everyone and never a spiteful thought about a soul. When they made me a prefect I was renowned as the most lenient prefect in the school—yet I never received any cheek or had any problems over discipline. “Oh, what it is to be both beautiful
and
kind! And to excel at sports as well as classwork! No wonder all the younger girls have massive crushes on you!”

It was one of the teachers who said that. Another on some later occasion put it slightly differently. “And to cap it all, Rachel Anne, I do believe you’re a saint, on temporary loan to us from heaven! And what’s more,” she added, “it must be pretty
glum
up there while you’re away!”

Yes, more than anything else there were three things I felt especially proud of: first, that everyone automatically thought I must be earmarked for heaven; second, that they all appeared to consider me such
fun
; and third that I was always such a triumph in the school play. (One mildly aggravating note, however: although I repeatedly tried to emphasize in my curtain speech that the production was the result of months of hard work on the part of everyone involved—a team effort of the most inspirational order—no audience would ever quite allow me to get away with that!) I particularly, of course, remember the last play that we did. It was called
The Mask of Virtue
and Laurence Olivier happened to be out front. I say “happened”; but even if I had believed in such things as coincidence or luck I would have known his presence wasn’t merely fortuitous. Tipped off on some mysterious grapevine he was there as talent scout, unassuming yet glamorous, silent, courteous, intent.

And, my word,
was
he glamorous! My mother and he came round to my “dressing room” immediately after the show. He congratulated me but not fulsomely—with caution almost—and spoke to me unsmilingly about details of my performance. “Darling,” said my mother, for a moment laying her hand lovingly upon my shoulder, “we’re going to leave you to get changed. Make yourself look even more beautiful than ever. Mr. Olivier is taking us out to supper!”

“Larry,” corrected the young man. “Larry to my friends.”

He took us to the Savoy Grill. I hardly knew what I ate. He was the most attractive man in the room—in the whole of the West End—in the whole of the known world. As my mother declared later, “The eyes of everyone in that Grill never looked anywhere else; I don’t suppose they’d ever seen another couple like yourselves!” He was in his middle-to-late twenties; about eight years older than I was.

In the taxi to the High Street he wrote down our number. “May I ring you in the morning?”

But then he laughed. “No—dash it—I can’t wait until the morning! My mind’s made up! In a few weeks we’re taking a production of
Hamlet
to Denmark. To Elsinore itself! Rachel? Will you play Ophelia?”

We sat up, my mother and I, till nearly three, chatting in the kitchen in our nightgowns, over our cups of hot chocolate.

“Darling, I’m so very proud of you!
What
an evening!
What
a triumph! If only Daddy could have been there!”

“Oh, Mummy, he
was
—in spirit!” Indeed, he nearly had been—in person! He nearly hadn’t died whilst saving another soldier’s life.

But his earthly presence would have caused complications. And besides...
it was good to think of him waiting for me up in heaven—and being able in the meantime to lean out over the side and keep a fatherly eye on my progress.

“I feel I want to cry,” said my mother. “I don’t mean just because of Daddy but because I can now see this is going to be the last night of your childhood; you’ll be leaving me before either of us knows it. It’s only right and proper that you should—you have your own exciting life to lead—but, even so, I can’t pretend...
”

She smiled satirically at her own silliness and took a sip of chocolate.

“Mummy, I shall never leave you. You know that. I mean, not in the furthest reaches of my heart and soul.”

“Yes, I do know that, my dearest.” She patted my hand. “And it makes me feel quite guilty and ashamed.”

“What!”

“Yes. Frequently I feel I haven’t been as good to you as I’d have liked.”

I protested, loudly and indignantly. “You’ve been a perfect mother!”

“Shhh! Shhh! You’ll wake the neighbours!”

“Then you mustn’t talk such nonsense!”

“Bless you for saying that, my love.”

“I mean it!”

“Yet all the same—bear with me—I still want to beg your forgiveness for any little ways in which I
may
have failed you. No, please—this is important—don’t say there’s nothing to—”

“Then I forgive you
everything
with all my heart,” I interrupted, with a laugh. “And you must do the same for me! Extend to me your forgiveness for every little way in which
I
may have failed
you—
and for every little way in which I ever shall.”

“Oh, there’s—”

“Come on. Fair’s fair!”

“Very well. My forgiveness is absolute!”

“And mine, too. What a ridiculous conversation! Especially as I now believe that, even when we think we have something to forgive others for, we’re really only blaming them for the faults which lie in ourselves.”

I took a thoughtful sip.

“For instance...
just about the last thing in this world I can imagine! But supposing you ever became possessive? Domineering? Would I afterwards be justified in claiming you had ruined my life? (“O misery me, she stole from me my birthright, my inheritance, my due!”) No, certainly not! For I could always have
broken away
, couldn’t I? And if I wasn’t up to doing that, then the fault was in me—yes?—not in you.”

“Oh, in that case you might say next that even if I dropped a little arsenic in your bedtime drink the fault would lie entirely in yourself!”

“Yes!”

“And the other way about.
Much
more likely, if I’m to turn into this creature you describe!”

“Yes!”

We roared with laughter. “Oh, poor Mrs. Fowler,” I gasped. “Poor Mr. Richards! Poor Neville and Joan!”

“And what’s more,” she said, “the fault
would
be in me! And I forgive you unconditionally!”

We grew more serious for a moment. “Besides,” I said, “there’s always a pattern. There would always be a purpose. God would be leading us forever on. To eventual sunlight and eternal growth. No matter what; through whatever form of hell. I firmly believe that.”

We stood up and put the saucepan and the cups in water, and the biscuit tin away. We hugged each other. “I know what
I
believe,” said my mother. “That you, darling, deserve to win through to success and happiness and glory as nobody else I know!”

“Correction: as
everybody
else you know. Life is a vale of tears, life is a battleground and who are we to judge the merits or demerits of a single travelling soul?” I had my two hands to my breast as I declaimed this and we both declared I wore the mantle of my Aunt Alicia!

* * *

In bed, despite the lateness of the hour and the silence of the pub across the way, I lay awake for a long time—though strangely not thinking so much about the future as about the past. This was indeed the last night of my childhood and it isn’t everyone who can point to it so accurately—yes, even as it’s passing! I loved my little room. I regretted to think of it now slipping away from me. My bed was at the very heart of it: my craft, my sanctuary, my dreamland: the place where I’d been tickled, pampered, healed—most comforted, most demonstrably loved—the place where I’d hung up my Christmas stocking. Home.

Home was the spot it was always so good to get back to, even from the best of holidays. (Even from the holiday I’d spent in Paris that year when I’d turned seventeen!) I loved our fortnights by the sea—especially, perhaps, when my father had been there to bury me in sand, build me castles, make me kites; give me piggybacks, teach me how to swim. Yet even after he was gone we still managed to have lots of fun, my mum and I. We would stroll out to fetch the papers before breakfast, filling our lungs with fresh sea air, and have an early cup of tea at a café on the front, watching the seagulls wheel gracefully above the prom. We would listen to the band and sometimes request particular pieces of music. (One year—this was all postwar of course—my mother rather fancied the bandleader; we laughed a lot about that. I requested
The Dream of Olwyn
.) We would go to the fol-de-rolles at the end of the pier. We would have a late-night mug of Ovaltine at Fortes and we would sit up companionably in our twin beds, reading our novels and each eating a Crunchie bar—like Eunice and
her
mother sometimes used to do on holiday. (Arabella’s, too, had once had a thing for a bandleader; but
he
, it appeared, had never responded in the smallest way!) Oh, it was all such fun. Yet just the same it always felt so good to return. “Back to our little grey home in the west,” I remember saying on one occasion, “or anyway to our little grey home in Paradise Street.” Not that it was really grey, just a bit smoke-begrimed, and it wasn’t really in Paradise Street either: only
my
room and the bathroom overlooked that. But the very fact I had said it (or
sung
it!)—didn’t that show how this mean little thoroughfare somehow meant more to me than the far more respectable High Street? After all, Paradise Street was the road in which Paul had lived, along with his rabbit; it was the road which led to the recreation garden, where my friend the street orderly resided—and where I had once read
John Halifax Gentleman
in the space of a single day. It was the road which led to the Classic cinema in Baker Street.

Home...
I thought of how we used to sit together listening to the wireless, my mother possibly doing some darning, myself—since it was generally only show tunes or the like—getting on with my homework. (But naturally, if we were listening to
Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh
or
Educating Archie
or a play, then homework would take second place.) On Sunday nights we used to eat hot toast with dripping and switch on
Grand Hotel
. Most often this was after we’d just got back from the first performance at the pictures.

Home...
Saturday afternoons in summer by the lake in Regent’s Park, our having walked up a lazily drowsing High Street, carrying our books and our deckchairs and our frozen lollies...
Visits to my Great-Aunt Alicia (the rift between my father and his aunt seeming so unimportant now that my father was dead...
“and especially,” whispered my mother, wickedly irrepressible, as we stood waiting for the bus in Baker Street—our being for the first time en route to Neville Court—“now that
we
are poor!”): always a Lyons cake avowedly baked that very morning by Bridget, despite its coronet of bright yellow or orange icing, unarguably professional and a good inch thick; despite also the sponge or scones or rock cakes , undeniably authentic. Always a plateful of delicious biscuits—these, it was conceded,
could
have come from the grocer’s—and a scolding for my mother if she drew attention to the number I was eating. Always a song from
Bitter Sweet
. Luxury. Insulation. Permanence.

Songs around the piano at the pub. (The first time we went in, my mother was prepared to lie about my age but this had proved unnecessary.) She once, after a great deal of persuasion, sang a solo: “Other People’s Babies.” She scored such a hit with it. I felt so proud. It seemed she had an unexpected gift for blending comedy with pathos: you almost thought as you listened that here was a real nanny, old now, unwanted and living mainly on memories but still rich and happy with the warmth of them. That song became my mother’s speciality. (It sometimes saddened me to think about the wealth of untapped talent in the world.) I too had a speciality, although it never achieved quite the same level of success—which I was glad of. (I must admit that I deliberately held back.) Something by Cole Porter.

Experiment—

Make that your motto day and night;

Experiment—

And you will someday reach the light...