A Start in Life (8 page)

Molly smiled sadly.

‘I'm not as young as I was. I'm older than you, remember, Helen. I've got just enough to keep me until I pop off, and then that's it. Remember what we used to say? No regrets.'

‘No regrets,' echoed Helen. She was more shaken than she would admit. Her friend was a living embodiment of all that awaited her. Helen knew that was ageing badly, that she had lost too much weight, that her teeth ached, that her circulation was bad. Sometimes she kept her make-up on all night in order not to give herself a shock the following morning. It was only by resting most of the day, by eating soft foods that did not demand too much effort, by never risking the challenges of the street, of the bus, that she kept as well as she did. It suited her looks to never quite get dressed, to trail, to chatter, to heighten the colour of her eye sockets and her cheeks, and above all to sleep. She had brought her pills with her to Hove, of course. But she felt brittle, exposed, chilled by the invigorating wind off the sea. Her wedding ring slipped about on her finger. She could think of nothing to do. She remembered that she was older than George. She was almost frightened. And her face wore that lost and petulant air that Ruth remembered from her childhood and which seemed to turn the mother into the child and the child into the mother.

George, too, was far from happy. He left the two women together and walked into Brighton: at least he could keep himself in shape. On the walk back he did the shopping. He longed, with a fierceness that surprised him, to sit down at a decent table and have someone serve his food. He longed to eat a meal without knowing in advance what it was. He longed, if not for Sally, then for life in Sally's flat. Sometimes he caught himself longing for his mother. Ruth would have recognized his expression too: rueful, withdrawn, the lips pursed. A stranger, suddenly.

The sun came out and they made a slight effort. George hired a car and they drove along the coast. They had lunch in restaurants and tea in hotels. Then George realized how much money they were spending and announced that they should take more advantage of the open air. They had come for the sea bathing, after all.

‘You hate it,' said Helen. ‘You always have.'

‘I'm quite happy,' replied George, ‘sitting here in the chalet.' While he sat there he let his anger mount and felt it was doing him a power of good. Anger would liberate him from servility, would make him lose his scruples. Anger, he almost believed, would enable him to have his own way.

Following in Molly's crunching wake over the beach, Helen tried not to look at the blade-like thinness of her own legs. Her narrow feet, now unused to walking, turned at the ankle and she wondered how she would ever get back. As she hobbled thankfully over the rim of sand into the sea the shock of the water nearly took her breath away. The waves were boisterous and her knees gave way. Water slopped over her mouth; her hair, so carefully set for the holiday, straggled in wet strands on her neck. Without her looks she felt her personality deteriorate. Molly, splashing cheerfully and trying to ignore the pain in her shoulder, shouted, ‘You'll feel the benefit later.'

As he helped to dry her, rubbing her bluish white feet while Molly shook herself like a dog and plugged in the kettle, George knew that he no longer loved his wife. He felt – and this he had always felt, although he did not know the reason – extremely sorry for her. As a natural corollary, he felt extremely sorry for himself. He was still vigorous; he did not think of himself as an ageing man. His looks had not changed noticeably since his mother died. He still eyed himself appreciatively in the glass every morning. He had, he felt, a future. With Mrs Jacobs. He would tell Helen that he was going to buy a share in the bookshop and spend his time there. The others would have to make their own arrangements. Ruth, if necessary, could stay at home. All this flashed through his mind with a rapidity that amazed him. When the moment of revelation passed – really, this holiday was doing them no good at all – he knew that he could not carry out all his plans, put all his projects into effect. But some … Why not some?

Helen, with frozen hands, jammed on her peaked cap. They were all, for various reasons, subdued. Then Molly, against every principle she held dear, reached into her canvas hold-all and produced a bottle of gin.

Helen turned to her, with her beautiful smile restored.

‘Molly, my darling, you are an angel. Always were. Never jealous or ratty. Not even when I had that little affair with Eric.'

Molly had not known about this. She had trusted her late husband implicitly. But she was a sensible woman; she saw in Helen's face the end of many love affairs. We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care. Life had not been too harsh. The sea would still be there at the end. She was nearly ready.

But Helen, she saw, would be taken unawares.

Ruth, trying to put her notes into some kind of order, realized that the days were getting shorter. She could no longer walk in the evenings. Leaves were being raked and burnt in back gardens; from midday to three in the afternoon the sun still blazed and clothes felt too heavy. Then the brightness went out of the air; the light, with infinite slowness, receded into a greyish mist; the smoke rose from the gardens and drifted round the trees. As dusk came down, late roses startled with the intensity of their colour.

Ruth, in her bedroom, struggled with
Modeste Mignon
, in which all the vices turn out to be virtues. Mrs Cutler, at the kitchen table, studied her horoscope in the evening paper. The flat was clean, the store cupboard provisioned. In Ruth's wardrobe hung a new blue dress in which she planned to take Paris by storm, for had not Balzac laid that obligation upon her? Her ticket was booked, Humphrey and Rhoda Wilcox alerted. She was in two minds about going. Oakwood Court was now so peaceful that she felt she might work here quite as well as in the Wilcoxes' maid's room. The quality of life had improved quite a bit. Mrs Cutler was now watching cookery programmes on afternoon television, but as she never wrote down the recipes there was little chance of her ever reproducing them. She regarded them as pure entertainment, in the same way as she sat through programmes about woodland predators or crime on the
streets of New York.

‘The kitchens they must have,' she marvelled. ‘And fancy eating all those courses at one meal.'

They had both benefited greatly from the holiday in Hove.

It was therefore with something like dismay that they became aware that the surge of the lift and the noise of its doors slamming meant that George and Helen were home.

Their eyes met over the kitchen table. Neither moved. Cautiously, Mrs Cutler diminished the volume of her transistor radio. In the hall voices were raised, lights switched on, and a stumbling struggle, in which cases were dropped or even dragged, dominated the whine of bullets from the detective play to which they were listening.

‘Never again,' they could hear Helen groaning, ‘never again.'

Reaching out a hand, Mrs Cutler turned off the radio and they both, resignedly, got to their feet.

‘It was ghastly,' said Helen the following morning from her bed, although she seemed quite cheerful. ‘Sitting in that dog kennel all day with the monsoon blowing and Molly's cooking sticking permanently in one's teeth. Why are vegetarians so unreasonable?'

George and Ruth and Mrs Cutler had reassembled in the bedroom, which had resumed its air of disorder and permanence. Suitcases had been opened but not unpacked. An open bottle of nail varnish, its brush already stiff, added a strong smell to the already stale air. Helen wore her denim cap, her nightdress, and a cardigan, and was lighting one cigarette from the stub of another. George lined up the pair of shoes from which Helen had thankfully removed her feet the previous evening. After a moment's hesitation he threw them under the bed. Ruth observed him as he picked minute pieces of fluff
from the sleeve of his jacket. He seemed quieter than usual.

Ruth thought that something in her parents had changed but could not identify the change. Physically, they were both very much present. They seemed to be occupying more space than usual. Perhaps she had got used to the relative silence of Mrs Cutler. Perhaps being in the open air had made them seem so voluble, so oppressive.

‘Now that you're home,' said Ruth, ‘you mustn't slip into bad habits again. You're much too lazy, Mother. You should get out more.'

Helen turned her head very slowly.

‘Get out?' she questioned. ‘I don't even feel like getting up.'

That was it; that was the change. Helen meant it. They all knew that she meant it. Something would have to be done. But Ruth remembered her mother's face as she had seen it the previous evening, frightened and old under the unbecoming slant of the peaked cap. George had seen it too. Mrs Cutler had seen it and was determined to do something about it.

Mrs Cutler had liked being mistress of the flat: she didn't count Ruth. She remembered a time when she had been mistress of her own small house in Battersea, when Douglas would take her to the pub on a Friday evening, when she had a captive audience of her own. The only stratagem she knew took shape in her mind. She was not keen on it but it would have to do.

‘I've been thinking,' she said, unconsciously fingering her left hand. ‘I might like to get married again. Can't give up without trying, can you?'

George was stunned. Helen, on the contrary, seemed very sympathetic. She foresaw entertainment for the weeks ahead. And she need not even get up for it.

‘There are marriage bureaux, of course,' said Helen. ‘I believed there's one next to Barker's. Why don't you
sign on or fill in the form or whatever you have to do, and then you can ask them back here, whoever they are. If anyone turns up,' she added kindly. ‘As you know, I'm a pretty good judge of character. And men are such liars; they certainly won't tell you the truth. But they won't get much past me.' She seemed cheered by the prospect. ‘With my experience,' she said.

Mrs Cutler, who had already decided to take her project seriously but to meet any aspirants at the Mexicana coffee bar next door to the launderette, agreed to let Helen help her with the application.

‘Say you're of independent means,' advised Helen, now filled with enthusiasm. ‘That always gets them. And, after all, you are, aren't you?'

Ruth slipped out of the room as her father was leaving.

‘Is she all right?' she asked. ‘She looks different, somehow. Thinner, more highly coloured.'

‘Of course she's all right,' replied George. They were whispering. He was annoyed. Nobody worried how
he
was. He was becoming restive.

‘I don't like the idea of your going away, Ruth. Don't like it at all. Especially if Maggie's going to leave.'

Ruth looked at him in astonishment.

‘But who on earth would want to marry Mrs Cutler?' she asked. ‘She doesn't mean it. This is the only home she's ever likely to have.'

George shook his head.

‘Think about it, Ruth. You have a duty to her, you know.' Then he left, in a hurry to get to Peter Jones, to oversee his purchases and perhaps buy himself a towelling bathrobe.

This was the first Ruth had heard of her duty, which she had always imagined was confined to the characters of Balzac. She had a duty to them, certainly, and the British Council, no less, had recognized it. Her father could not really imagine that she would be of any use here?

In the days that followed, it became quite clear that he did.

On the first Tuesday in October, in an atmosphere of suppressed disappointment and anxiety, Ruth waited for the taxi to take her to Victoria Station. Her mother was in bed (‘You don't mind, do you, darling heart? My precious girl? I am just a
little
bit tired'). Her father, who was gravely displeased with her, had gone to Mount Street to prove it. Ruth was suddenly bereft. As her taxi drew up and she prepared to say goodbye to Oakwood Court, she glanced up at the window of the dining room. There she saw Mrs Cutler, watchful and pinched once again, her chestnut lights faded, her lipstick incarnadine. Behind her stretched a day already full of instant coffee.

Mrs Cutler raised her thumb. Ruth could not make out the words she was mouthing. Her throat ached, her eyes burned with loneliness. She waved. Mrs Cutler threw open the window.

‘Keep in touch,' she shouted, thinly, so as not to attract the attention of the neighbours. Ruth could barely hear her. ‘Make the most of it,' yelled Mrs Cutler, getting into the spirit of the thing. ‘Go on, Ruth don't hang about.' She raised her thumb again. ‘Never say die!' And she slammed down the window.

Ruth woke up, sat up, and eased herself into another day in the rue des Marronniers. She reached for her notebook and wrote down her dream, having read in a magazine that this was therapeutic. The dream, as usual, had been disagreeable. She had been waiting in a freezing cold bed-sitting room, painted white, for her examination results. She knew, with a deep and ancient inner conviction, that all the other rooms in the house were heated, and all the other occupants were in receipt of good news. Before she could be moved to begin her usual mild protest against this state of affairs, she was translated to Brussels, where an enormous hunger overcame her. She was so busy bolting down coffee and rolls that she could not spare the time to entertain her companion, a person of indeterminate sex with grey hair. She awoke, bewildered, in the knowledge that she had been left alone at the café table while her companion set off with purposeful gestures to cross a small wood or garden thickly carpeted with fallen leaves. This dream had been in colour. Rather like a film.

In contrast to her dream, the sepia light that strained to get through the barred window of her room on the sixth floor in the rue des Marronniers reduced her life to monochrome. She still could not believe that anyone had consigned her to this place when she had committed no crime. Although Rhoda and Humphrey Wilcox had been severe and owlish enough to inspire a certain discomfort,
she had liked their bright chintzy flat and had looked forward to leading a quiet life there. Rhoda had given her a cup of tea and a very small biscuit, had steered her towards the eighty-year-old Humphrey who was sitting, tortoise-like, in his armchair, and had left her to do something in the kitchen. Ruth had been aware that this was the equivalent of one of those country house weekends at which you are assessed for your suitability to occupy a minor but significant post in the Civil Service. Ignoring Humphrey's hand, which strayed towards her knee and rested there, ignoring his insistence on speaking French – he wrote his biographies under the pseudonym of Maurice de Grandville – she listened for twenty minutes to his disquisition on the life of the Duchesse de Berry, and would have listened longer had they both not become aware of Rhoda, returned from the kitchen, and standing with folded arms by the door. Humphrey removed his hand, which was pale and humid, like that of a poulterer.

‘Humphrey has quite taken to you,' said Rhoda. ‘I think it will be all right to let you have the room, although Humphrey sometimes meditates up there. You do know about maids' rooms, don't you?'

Ruth shook her head. ‘I only know they're usually on the top floor.'

‘At one time all the servants in the building had the top floor to themselves. No servants now, of course, but there is a staircase outside the kitchen door which they all used when they started work in the mornings. So much more civilized than having them living in.'

She led Ruth, with her suitcase and her typewriter, out through the kitchen door, up the staircase, and along an endless prison corridor which appeared to have small cells opening off it at regular intervals. She fitted a large iron key into an obdurate door, forced it open, and went over to push back the shutters of the window. This made no appreciable difference to the quality of light in the
room, which was furnished with a double bed, a small papier mâché table, and a sink with a jaunty little screen round it. One cold tap.

‘You're extremely lucky to find the room empty,' said Rhoda, peering at Ruth narrowly as if she were indeed a servant, were up to no good, and might possibly be pregnant. She was a queenly and reproving woman who made Ruth feel apologetic. Although, she said to herself, the boot is really on the other foot; I'm paying good money for this.

‘My nephew usually has the room when he comes over on business,' Rhoda went on. ‘But Humphrey doesn't care for him much.'

She straightened a dim glass oval on the wall. Ruth's eyes followed her.

‘I see you are admiring my needlework pictures,' said Rhoda. Ruth, who could hardly see anything, searched her heart for words of admiration and could find none. ‘The last of my mother's pieces,' said Rhoda. ‘From my home in Ringwood.'

There was a slight pause.

‘Mrs Wilcox,' murmured Ruth. ‘Are there any arrangements for having a bath?'

Rhoda looked pensive, as if she had not reckoned on such a request.

‘The only bathroom is downstairs in the flat. I suppose you could come down at six o'clock for a quarter of an hour and have a bath. But do not, I beg you, disturb Humphrey.'

Ruth walked towards the window and tried to move it.

‘Does it open?' she asked Rhoda.

‘I don't think so.' Rhoda's voice was remote. ‘But you will be very comfortable here. I have made up the bed myself. There is an electric kettle. You have your own lavatory next door but as it is not much used Humphrey has taken to keeping some of his wine in there. Marianne
will clean your room once a week: I will tell you what to pay her. And you can have your bath at six o'clock in the evenings.'

‘One thing,' she added, with a minatory outstretched arm. ‘We are both writers. We need peace and quiet downstairs. I hope you will not introduce any …' She searched for the right word. ‘Distractions,' she brought out finally. Ruth knew what she meant.

She sank down on the bed in panic, not daring to move until the sound of Rhoda's heels had disappeared down the iron staircase. Then, as quietly as if she were being overheard, she crept along the corridor, down the staircase, through the kitchen and into the reassuring safety of the street.

Here all was pleasure and purpose. The sun, once more, blazed; thin dresses were still being worn, tables outside cafés were thronged, everyone was in an exceptional humour. ‘
L'étonnant été d'octobre
', announced
France-Soir
on its front page, and showed a photograph of an elderly couple sunning themselves on a bench in the Tuileries. Ruth walked. Under chestnut trees now the colour of her hair, she walked all day, trying to decide whether she were better or worse off than she had been at home. On the whole, worse, she thought. As dusk fell, she wandered slowly back up the rue de Passy, admiring the shops, the bright-eyed, quick-tempered people, the beautiful children. She was now very tired and realized that she might sleep, even in that terrible room. She bought some milk and some coffee and turned into the rue des Marronniers.

That had been three weeks ago. Since then, she had got used to shutting up her books in the Bibliothèque Nationale at five sharp, so that she could clock in in time for her bath, had even got used to Humphrey observing her through a crack in the bathroom door. The evenings were long, that was the only thing. The mazy pleasures of Paris distracted her in the daytime, and besides, there
was so much to do, so much work, so much French to be spoken, meals to be eaten in the
brasserie
round the corner, books to be bought. In the evenings, though, she did not always feel like reading. Bursts of foggy music from the cinema next door signalled the beginning and end of the performances; high heels tapping along the corridor announced the return home of her neighbours, whom she had never met. She felt too humble to buy a radio.

One endless Sunday she went to the Louvre. She made the classic promenade down the Champs Elysées, through the Tuileries to the Square Court, where children were wheeling about on their bicycles, and because she was reluctant to leave the still warm air, over the Pont des Arts and up the rue Bonaparte to the Luxembourg. There she sat, becalmed, going only to a café in the Place Saint-Sulpice for a sandwich some time after half past one. Dahlias blazed in the flower beds of the Luxembourg Gardens; when the gardeners removed them winter would have begun in earnest. The long straight paths were now thick with fallen leaves for it had been a very dry summer. An ancient invalid sun came out briefly to warm her iron chair but was soon vanquished by the haze obscuring the grey-blue sky. The easy days were over.

She wandered back to the Louvre, although the light was no longer good. She was indifferent to most of what she saw until she came to the Flemish primitives, with their immaculate pain and sorrow, their thoughtful grieving little heads, their chilly pallid Christs deposed, as it were, into the unhelpful climate of northern Europe. She paid a duty visit to the early-nineteenth-century galleries and was bemused, as always, by the sheer size of everything: giant figures enmeshed with one another, toiling towards rescue after shipwreck, towards liberty after oppression, towards Paris after Moscow; never would they find peace or be reconciled to their proper dimensions. At a country funeral stretching down a considerable expanse of one wall, a woman wiped her eyes
with a handkerchief the size of a small tablecloth. A noble Roman, turning his back on his dead sons, twisted enormous and imperfect feet to demonstrate his anguish. In front of what she considered to be a vaguely improper allegory of Endymion being embraced by a moonbeam, she saw two youngish people convulsed with laughter. The laughter seemed to her not French; it contained the agonized excesses and repressions of English school life. She moved closer to the couple, a man and a girl. The man, though young, had white hair; the girl was dark and very pretty. They appeared to be very much in love. Their exuberance was too much for the Louvre to contain and attracted reproving looks from the attendant. As the gallery emptied and the light became bluish and obscure, Ruth and the couple found their way out and down the main staircase. She was not surprised to hear them speaking English and wished that she could signal to them that she was English herself. But she was by this time too immured in her own silence to make a sign to anyone.

They were waiting at the bus stop and had evidently wandered, as she had, back up the rue Bonaparte. She heard them discussing where to eat that evening and a great pain filled her, that she should never be able to make such plans. The impossibility of her present life was apparent to her as it had never been before. She was a prisoner in her cell, and in addition to her physical restraints she had imprisoned herself in a routine as destructive of liberty and impulse as if it had been imposed on her by a police state. Every morning she caught the same bus to the Bibliothèque Nationale. Every lunchtime she ate a sandwich in the same café. Every evening she presented herself for her bath and returned, chilly, to her room where, she was beginning to realize, problems of increased loneliness awaited her. She studied the couple closely, as if they were an unknown species. They were, in fact, an unknown species. They were happy.

In her blue dress, in which she had not taken Paris by storm, and her wool coat, Ruth felt shabby and obedient. The girl wore trousers and a pullover, the man a well-cut suit of tweed. A great desire for change came over Ruth and a great uncertainty as to how this might be brought about. For she knew, obscurely, that she had capacities as yet untried but that they might be for ever walled up unless her circumstances changed. Love, she supposed, might do it, but there was no one with whom she might fall in love. Nobody even looked at her, except Humphrey. She shuddered at the thought. At that moment the bus arrived, and in her abstracted move to board it she hit the young man's elbow with her shoulder bag.

‘So sorry,' she said automatically.

He smiled. ‘We thought you were English. French people take the Louvre far more seriously. Especially on a Sunday.'

They sat down facing each other. She was, in fact, unmistakably English in her heavy coat, with her heavy bag, and her heavy hair obscuring the shape of her head. Since the dinner with Richard she had ceased to pay much attention to her appearance.

‘We were admiring your hair,' said the girl. ‘You don't often see that colour here.'

Ruth always deprecated her hair, which seemed to her too flashy for her personality, marking her out when she found it more restful to be obscure.

‘I ought to have it cut,' she replied. ‘But I don't quite know where to go.'

‘There's a good place next door to our flat,' said the girl. ‘Rue Marboeuf. Where are you getting off?'

‘At the Alma.' Ruth was quite dazed by the suddenness with which this exchange had been effected. She was also trying to take in the news that these two English people had a flat. In Paris.

‘That's our stop,' the girl said. ‘Why don't we have a coffee, then I can show you.'

They were called Hugh and Jill Dixon. They held each other's hands and told her about themselves. They had been married three months. Hugh was a dealer in Old Master drawings; Jill worked in a travel agency. They had each, separately, lived in Paris for some years and had met at a party. They were – and here Ruth felt a disappointment mixed with a dawning excitement – thinking of going back to London.

‘If you ever want to get rid of the flat,' she murmured, ‘I'd be delighted …'

The girl grimaced. ‘There are dozens of people after it. And it's not much to look at. But you know what it's like trying to find a place here.'