A Misalliance (8 page)

This was Mrs Beamish’s domain, for it was clear that at night she occupied the sofa with the flame-coloured cushions, lying across its considerable expanse in a long flimsy dressed-up garment and watching for passers-by through the barred windows with their careless and random accumulations of orange curtain. Where Elinor slept was not immediately apparent. Though imperfect, the room might have been designed to receive visitors: whether reclining on her
chaise-longue
or her sofa, Mrs Beamish would have the air of expecting messengers, tributes. She was both queenly and
accessible, and someone, somewhere, in the background had had resources, for the cups, though marked by hairline cracks, were of fine china and had been riveted, their deep curving saucers of a nineteenth-century pattern. On a wavering trolley, the teapot was a flattened silver oval, of modern Danish design, as were the teaspoons. The remains of a chocolate cake lay on a creased bag on a glass cake dish such as might have come from Woolworth’s before the war. The milk was in a bottle.

Mrs Beamish’s perfect appearance – orange haired, her eyelids half closed over slanting eyes, her small brown foot emerging from the intricate tube of lavender grey cotton that was her dress – belied the hasty assemblage of the room and made it seem a temporary background to which she was very properly indifferent. It was clear that she had assumed her maternal role in the same temporary spirit, for there was no evidence of a child’s games or pastimes, although the room was untidy enough to accommodate both. But Mrs Beamish’s mythological status would give her a careless attitude towards children; nymphs are not known for their maternal feelings, although they lend themselves, for brief periods, to the business of nurture. The absent husband, who must certainly, Blanche thought, be in prison, had clearly not married this girl out of a desire to provide a second mother for his child, although he may vaguely have wished that it might be so; he had married her for her long slender body and her discontented brooding face, her disabused eyelids. Yet whatever her disappointments, she had an air of passing lightly through life, of passing on, and leaving little trace. She could be, Blanche thought, and probably was, formidable.

‘Have you lived here long?’ Blanche enquired, her cooling transparent tea revealing a previous stain in the cup.

‘About a year. The lease was up on our old place and we had to find something quickly before my husband went
abroad. We’d never have considered this place otherwise. Nowhere for Nellie to play and horribly damp. But a friend of ours, a painter, was going to the States for a year and he let us have it for nothing. So we couldn’t refuse.’

Yes, thought Blanche, admitting the plausibility of this story. It would be a painter. It is always painters who live in such squalor, considering their thoughts to be on a higher plane. On Art, in fact. But art is about aristocracy and subversion, a deeper subversion than this. And out of the corner of her eye she saw the archaic smile again, and felt it hang in the air for a moment, before it disappeared.

‘And your husband,’ she said, with some trepidation. ‘Will he be away for long? I expect he misses the little girl.’

‘Oh, Paul,’ replied the girl, with a disgusted laugh. ‘He works for an American, a beast, I hate him. He’s horribly rich and he has houses all over the place; and he’s frightfully difficult and impatient and that’s why he needs Paul. He uses him like a bloody factotum, if you’ll pardon my French. That’s where they are now, France. I don’t know where, exactly. Buying another house, I daresay.’

‘But if he’s American, why can’t he do this for himself?’ asked Blanche, bewildered by the idea of a primitive millionaire with an exquisite sophisticate in his entourage, like an eighteenth-century dancing master, employed to teach deportment.

‘Because he’s some sort of weirdo who’s struck it rich and needs my husband’s knowhow and languages. Paul’s clever; he could live anywhere. We lived abroad when we were first married; we met this American in Paris and he hired Paul straight away. Then Paul insisted that I come home and look after the baby, although as far as I could see she was much better off with his mother. I need never have come into it, as far as she’s concerned. Funny little thing,’ she added indifferently.

‘It all sounds very unusual,’ said Blanche, her curiosity
magnificently compensated. ‘I hope this American pays your husband well. You both deserve a better place than this.’

‘Who, Demuth? Don’t make me laugh. He made Paul sign a contract – I was dead against it – so that if he stays with him he gets a huge lump sum at the end of the year, paid into various accounts. In the meantime, he lives as family. Very well, too. Very addicted to high living is my Paul.’

‘But in the meantime,’ said Blanche thoughtfully, ‘you have to live like this? Of course, it’s only temporary,’ she added, seeing a slight hauteur enter the girl’s expression. ‘But, as you say, there’s nowhere for Elinor to play.’

‘Yes, it’s crappy. But, like I said, it’s free, and by the end of the year we should be well off. Which is just as well because just now,’ she laughed, ‘it’s a little difficult. Neither of us has ever been poor, you see. All our stuff had to go into store. So I keep having to buy new. Nellie needs clothes all the time, of course. Fortunately I was able to bring some of my own from Paris, and Paul is supposed to be sending the rest. But as you say, or maybe you didn’t, maybe I’m just going by the expression on your face, it’s lousy here. I’m not leaving my red fox coat to moulder away down here, thank you very much. I’m letting Mrs Demuth store it for me in her wardrobe, free of charge. And a few other things.’ She laughed.

‘How perfectly fascinating,’ said Blanche.

‘You thought Paul was in jug, didn’t you?’ said the girl shrewdly. ‘Most people do. Well, he isn’t.’ She lit a cigarette and stared out of the window. ‘Raining again,’ she added.

‘If I can help you with Elinor,’ murmured Blanche tentatively, not wishing to give offence.

‘Well, thanks. I’ll remember. Mrs Hubert Vernon. What does your husband do?’

‘Whatever he does is nothing to do with me any more,’ said Blanche with an unhappy laugh. ‘We’re divorced. I
have a little money of my own.’ And then wished that she had not said that. But why not? she thought. I have been cautious for far too long. And I did want to know. And now I do. And must probably be prepared to pay for my entertainment. The thought did not please her but she managed to suppress it for the time being.

Moving between her inner and outer worlds as she did – as she supposed most people did – Blanche was forced to the conclusion that her previous life had been deficient in every way. Timidly trying to confront reality, she had misjudged the density of reality itself. Waiting, always waiting, for something to happen, she was constantly surprised when it did. And when confronted with the reality of other lives, she felt herself to be unprepared, and therefore all the more desirous of understanding that reality. That she, a respectable middle-aged woman, who, as recently as that very morning, had enacted the age-old role of respectable middle-aged women in succouring her ailing sister-in-law with wings of chicken, should now, in a state of suppressed excitement, be sitting in this artist’s bower, with its smell of musty damp and its circling flies, would have seemed to her incomprehensible if it had been put to her in bald terms or told to her of somebody else. She saw suddenly and precisely something that had previously only appeared to her in a vague and nebulous light: a great chasm dividing the whole of womanhood. On the one side, Barbara with her bridge evenings and her gouty husband, Mrs Duff with her girlish respectability, and her own awkward self, and on the other Mousie and her kind and Sally Beamish, movers and shakers, careless and lawless, dressed in temporary and impractical garments, and in their train men who would subvert their families, abandon their wives and children, for their unsettling companionship. On the one side the evangelical situation – and Miss Elphinstone too came into it at this point – and on the other the pagan world. For ‘good’ women,
Blanche thought, men would present their ‘better’ selves, saving their primitive and half-conscious energies for the others. And she herself, she further thought, had made the mistake of trying to fashion herself for the better half, assuming the uncomplaining and compliant posture of the Biblical wife when all the time the answer was to be found in the scornful and anarchic posture of the ideal mistress.

That Sally Beamish was to be found among the latter she did not doubt. For was it not Blanche who now offered to put Elinor to bed, while Sally, brooding on her day’s mysterious adventures, lit another cigarette and remained staring out of the dirty window? ‘Oh, she’s not tired yet,’ said Sally, with a vague look at Elinor, who had read her book silently and immovably throughout tea. ‘The point is, what are we going to eat tonight? I didn’t have time to do any shopping.’ Well, you can work that one out for yourself, thought Blanche, with a return to her old asperity, although she had automatically put the cups on the trolley and wheeled it through to the kitchen, moved less by good manners than by an evil desire to know the worst.

The kitchen was indeed all that she had expected, and possibly more. Under a weak hanging light two more flies were circling over an old gate-legged table, its polish long gone, its surface grey and scarred with bleached rings. A smeared window looked out on to a small area of mossy flagstones and blackened brick, in the corner of which the falling rain gurgled through a choked pipe. The draining-board of a stone sink held a washed pile of mugs, plates, and cheap knives and forks. Since there appeared to be no cupboards, most of the kitchen’s contents were piled on the table: half a loaf of bread, standing in its own field of crumbs on a bread-board, an open packet of Earl Grey tea, two jars of spaghetti sauce, two green apples, a bottle of milk, a carton of orange juice, a very expensive Le Creuset casserole, an equally expensive flowered enamel saucepan, something
in a brown paper bag, some kitchen foil, and a brown earthenware teapot with a chipped spout. Removing the lid, Blanche found this to be full of cold tea and could not refrain from tipping it out and rinsing the pot. Having done this, she was led naturally into removing the washing-up from the draining-board, but on second thoughts rinsed it through again and left it, neatly stacked, where she had found it. The bread she covered with the foil, disturbing one of the flies as she did so. The cake went back into its bag. She started guiltily, as if surprised in a luckless form of trespass, as Sally Beamish and her child materialized behind her.

‘She’s tired, all of a sudden,’ said Sally, as Elinor, inscrutable, sat high in Sally’s arms with an arm round her neck. ‘She wants to go to bed.’

‘Did she say so?’ asked Blanche eagerly.

‘Oh, no, she never says anything. But we understand each other, don’t we, Nellie?’

She smiled in genuine friendship at the child, whose arm tightened about her neck. For a second their heads bent together and touched. So this is how it looks, thought Blanche: parity. The parity of pagan innocence. To hide the look of longing which she was sure was printed on her face, she turned away, but, as she did so, said, ‘Shall I give you a hand with her?’

I am like Miss Elphinstone, she thought, Christian behaviour masking brute hunger, the same hand stretching out of its own accord to stroke the child’s cheek. But Elinor turned away, her mood having changed: now she was at one with her laughing mother and that mother not displeased, Blanche noted, to see the child’s gesture of repudiation.

Heavy hearted, she followed them into the small dark room that housed Elinor’s bed and her chest of drawers, on which sat a huge snowy teddy bear, a present, Blanche judged, from Paris. In the grubby gloom a nightlight was lit and placed by the bed; Sally’s face was illuminated most
beautifully as she bent over the flame, her expression calm and wise. She seemed in no way surprised by the way her day had turned out, or at Blanche’s continued presence. In this both mother and child were alike.

They left the child, clasping an older dirtier bear and already half asleep, and went back into the living-room. Blanche felt a sudden longing for her own austere blue and grey drawing-room, a warm bath, her first glass of wine. She would wait for Bertie, although he almost certainly would not come; she even felt longing for those empty evenings of preparation and single-mindedness. Her mind was frayed, unsettled by the day’s events, filled to a discordant extent with speculation. And the memory of the child’s hand in hers now struck her as dangerous, something not to be cherished or brooded upon, something to be treated lightly; in fact she must treat the whole incident as lightly as Sally did herself. Involuntarily she moved to the door, intent now on her departure, her return to the life that awaited her at home.

‘So if you could just tide us over,’ she heard Sally say.

‘Of course.’ Her assent was without importance. She had no business here. She handed over five ten-pound notes and smiled vaguely at the girl’s cheerful but unsurprised response.

‘I’m sure Nellie would love to come and see you again,’ said Sally. ‘She seems to have had a lovely time. And she loves her book.’

But Blanche was now preoccupied and rather wished the girl would turn away and busy herself with her own affairs. The telephone rang. Sally made no move to answer it.

‘Your telephone,’ said Blanche, opening the door.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Sally, following her. ‘They can always ring back.’

The man in the restaurant, thought Blanche. The one who gave her lunch. The one she was so eager to join. And she smiled, and turned, then found herself in the area, the
silent rain seeping through the moisture laden air and falling warm on her face.

Looking back from the end of the street she saw Sally, her strange corolla of a dress flattened to her body by the damp, standing at the top of the steps. She watched, as Sally looked down the road, away from her. Then she turned, and, seeing Blanche, lifted her arm in a heraldic wave. Blanche waved back. They stood there, at some distance from each other, in the rain, waving.