Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (18 page)

“The grass on the other side,” Amy would remind him.

“Here is proper drawing paper.” She found a half-used sketching-block and gave it to Dora.

“I hope I won’t waste it.”

“I’m sure you won’t. You are beginning to make lovely pictures. Your grandfather would be proud of you.”

“Is this a drawing-room? Would you call this a drawing-room? My second-best friend has a drawing-room; but they have a piano in
theirs.”

“No, this is a studio, where work is… where work was done.”

“May I look inside drawers?”

Knowing that it was a favourite pastime, Amy consented. In one there was a collection of the bones of birds, skulls and frail rib-cages. “Yuk!” said Dora, pushing that drawer in hastily, and then cautiously opening another.

“So that’s where my meat dish went,” Amy said to
herself. It was on a table by the easel, covered with squiggles and messes of dried paint.

“What is this?” Dora asked, taking out a medal on a ribbon.

“It’s an Order that Grandpa got from the Queen.” Amy remembered that day at Buckingham Palace, Majesty leaning forward to put the ribbon over Nick’s brush of hair, and dandruff, disturbed in a cloud, settling on the shoulders of his dark suit. Majesty smiling, taking one pace back, and no wonder.

“Bloody archaic nonsense,” Nick had grumbled afterwards, eating spaghetti in Bertorelli’s.

“An order?” said Dora. “It looks more like a medal to me.” She was filled with awe. “I didn’t know he had one.”

“Yes, it’s a medal.”

Dora’s acquisitiveness now broke all bounds. “May I have it when you die, to keep it in the family?” she asked. She did not want Amy’s death, but she knew that such matters had to be established and made certain of. “I should so much treasure it,” she said, rather cunningly. She imagined herself wearing it to parties, and saying it came from the Queen.

“Yes, my dear, of course you may.”

“But no one will know I am to have it. I haven’t anything of Grandpa’s. Except, of course, this lovely drawing-paper,” she added tactfully.

“Then take it now,” said Amy, “and make sure of it.”

“Take it
now?”

“Why not? I don’t want it. Your Grandfather didn’t want it. It was James – your father — who persuaded
him into it He might be glad for it to belong to you now – Daddy, I mean.”

“Better find something for Isobel,” Dora said, with sudden practicality, “or there will be hell to pay. Some little thing. She’s too young to appreciate things. Anything pleases her”, she added, so untruthfully, because she felt suddenly endangered about inheriting the silver dolls’ tea-set.

“I have a coral necklace….”

“That would do beautifully,” said Dora, who could foresee that Isobel was no longer to outshine her at parties. “I think coral would be very suitable. Well, now I’d better get on with my drawing.” She took the sketching-block, and hung the medal round her neck, and then looked with tight lips at her grandfather’s last attempted effort, more than puzzled that the Queen should have thought him O.K. as a painter.

She was contented all day. They had a little shopping to do – as with Auntie Dot – and then she threw crusts for ducks. She did her drawing, and all day long she wore her medal.

I’m a very boring person, Amy thought, so therefore, having to live with it all the time, I get very bored myself. And time hangs heavily. But not so bad when Dora’s here. Children seem not to mind people being boring. I think they may even fear the other thing.

There were longer gaps between Amy’s letters to Martha, than Martha’s to her. Sometimes, Martha did not wait for the gap to be closed, and wrote another.
She was unhappy. The envelopes were crammed with sadness. She found that she could not finish her novel about London while sitting, as she had to, at the top of a tall apartment block in New Ludlow, looking down at the tops of trees far below. She feared for what she had written, as much as she feared what she must write. She went nowhere; saw no one. She was not asked to lecture on English literature, or on anything else. It was the wrong time of year for lectures. And she had constant headaches, but could not afford the special medical treatment she thought she needed. Simon was, on the whole, both kind and considerate; but his work came first. He would return from it, glowing with tactless enthusiasm, and only slowly, as the evening wore on, did he sink into a suitable state of commiseration. Martha, seeing no one else, read and read (and no wonder her head ached so much, Amy thought), and she wrote in great detail about her reading, having nothing else to discuss. New Ludlow had no art gallery, no old buildings, nothing beautiful or interesting. So write she did. But only letters, and her notes on her reading. It was constantly on Amy’s mind that she owed a reply.

So, as soon as Dora had been taken home on Sunday evening, she sat down, with Martha’s last letter before her, and began to compose her piece. She was sorry this; she was sorry that – sorry about the headaches and the ugly town, and the loneliness. Yes, she had read Ada Leverson, but a long time ago, and couldn’t remember much, except that she had seemed rather cool and up-to-date. (Martha had written a whole page about
Love at Second Sight.)
She was
sorry to hear that the wind blew so cruelly across the campus, and clouted Martha’s block of flats until it seemed to sway; but, for that matter, there was quite a stiffish breeze here along the Thames, and the air was full of blossom loosened before its time. She wrote of Dora’s visit and Ernie’s state of health (Martha, she thought, was becoming as bad); but she left out, after reflection, the outing to the stately home with Gareth, for that would only cause trouble, and bring forth more self-pity, there being, obviously, no stately home in New Ludlow.

It was not a very long letter, though well spread out, but it took a long time to write. When she had done, she sealed it and stamped it – so expensive – and laid it on the hall table for posting, and then could feel a great sense of accomplishment for the rest of the evening.

But before she could take it to the post next morning, another letter had arrived from Martha. She had found that she could stand no more — of New Ludlow, the apartment, or — now — of Simon. She could not get a job, and, as he gave her no money, she had none, apart from a meagre house-keeping allowance, the spending of which he was inclined to supervise. He had begun to criticise her cooking, especially if he thought she had been extravagant, and then the dish had turned out badly. Some ham done in a madeira sauce had been the last straw – too much salt. He had taken the slices of hot ham and washed them under the faucet; and that same night had expected to make love to her. Married tiffs, Amy had thought scornfully. She and Nick had had plenty of them, and
survived. But she had to brace herself at the next paragraph. Would Amy please, then, from the money Martha had left with her, post to her a single, tourist-class air ticket to London? And put the remainder of the money to Martha’s account in her old bank in Hampstead? She did not yet know where she would go when she arrived in England, for she knew that immediately on leaving Mrs. Francis she was to have been replaced by someone else; but, unless Amy cared to meet her plane at Heathrow, she would write to her, or telephone, as soon as she could give her new address.

“She is coming back,” Amy said to James, and she handed him the letter to read, which would have angered Martha very much, if she had known. “With a greater load of troubles than ever.”

“Well, she did help you through bad ones of your own.” He was forever reminding her of this, so she ignored him.

“Have you sent the ticket yet?”

“I haven’t got it yet.” (Although this was some days later.) “That’s why I rang up to ask you to look in. I thought you might be an angel and do it for me.”

“Well, of course. I’ll do it first thing in the morning. Let me make a note of the dates she suggests.”

“I suppose it is right to encourage her,” Amy said piously.

“It’s her own money, and she’s a grown woman, and sounds desperate to me. So you’ll go to the airport to meet her?”

“How can I, dear? It would mean taking a taxi all that way, and you know how expensive that would be. After my little talking-to, I’ve been trying to cut down. Besides, I shouldn’t have an idea where to take her
to.
”

“You would have to bring her back here, for the time being. I think that’s what she expects anyway.”

“Once here, she’d never go away again.”

“You could quite firmly give a specified time.”

“It wouldn’t be any use with Martha.”

“Well, whatever you decide to do, don’t for heaven’s sake punish her because you owe her gratitude. It’s a natural temptation to fall into, I’m afraid.”

At first, that night, she had confused dreams about planes, of missing them, of being held up at airports, of being lost. In a later part of the night, she dreamed about Gareth. They were walking through a golden field – buttercups below, laburnum and broom about and above. She had once been in a place like that with Nick when they were in the Auvergne, years ago; but Nick did not come into the dream. Her companion was not at first clear to her – just a man who walked along beside her, whose shadow fell over the buttercups with hers, both slanting away in a sun which was beginning to set. At the outset of the dream, it was the scene itself which was important – the bliss of it, but even more bliss when the stranger put an arm along her shoulders; later, his hands on her breasts, until, very soon, they were in the buttercups, loving. Words were not spoken, as far as she could bashfully
remember on waking. What she knew though, for certain, was that it had been Gareth. She felt humiliation, disbelief, and astonishment; a vague shame in Nick’s direction, too. I can’t help what I dream, she kept telling herself. But if Gareth should call in that evening, she felt she could not face him. The dream had been so vivid, that now — made fanciful by the last of the darkness – she felt he also must be aware of it.

Although there was not yet a glimmer of light from between her uncurtained windows, and none of the neighbourhood birds had begun to sing, she would not allow herself to go to sleep again, lest goodness knew what might happen in her dreams.

Amy did not go to the airport to meet Martha, preferring, as she said (and even said that Martha herself would prefer), to give her time to settle in somewhere first.

She waited, but with no great impatience, to hear from her at her new address, complacently imagining her in some, but different, bed-sitter in the Hampstead area, writing her novel, booking up her lecture engagements for the beginning of the season, whenever that might be. She would be interested to learn of the details of the departure from New Ludlow, and wondered if Martha had told Simon that she was leaving, or had crept out, with just a few possessions, one day when he was at work.

She had managed to push her dream about Gareth into the background of her mind. What was one’s subconscious for, if one had to be conscious of what it contained? She could find no other use for it. She had faced Gareth again, though wearing a new dress and feeling a different person because of it. At first, she experienced a little surprise that he should behave so calmly, as if nothing had happened between them; but so it was.

There had since been another expedition, this time as far as the Cotswolds. There had also been a slight argument. He would never let her pay for anything. “After all your whisky I’ve drunk in these last years?” he had said – although he had so often brought a
bottle of his own and handed it over to Ernie. How unlike Simon he was, Amy decided. And probably general practitioners got less income in England than industrial chemists in America, she thought, knowing nothing about either.

She did not hear from Martha. This was, at first, a reprieve. She would be sorting out London North. But quite a few days went by.

“You lost your chance at the airport,” James told her on one of his evening visits. He was telling her things all the time nowadays, as if true roles were reversed, and he had become her parent, and much more censorious than the ones she had really had.

“She knows where to find me,” Amy said defensively.

“And she also knows that you don’t want her here. You’ve made that clear to her by avoiding that meeting.”

“We’ve been through that already, over and over.”

What with the money question and the problem of Martha, she and James were not getting on well these days. There had also been an upset about her having given Nick’s Order to Dora. This, it appeared, had seemed to James to show a callous lack of respect. “She wanted to wear it to the
Zoo,”
he had complained. “And I really can’t see why you find anything so awfully funny in that.”

So, after a time, Amy began to wish that a letter would come, or that Martha would telephone. She had transferred the rest of the money to the bank in Martha’s name as she had been asked to do, so that she was assured that she had something to live on for
a time. But for how long? She tried not to blame herself, to feel the remorse that James seemed to feel suitable to her; but she had to admit that with every day that passed her guilt grew deeper.

When the front door-bell rang, she would start with dismay and run upstairs to gather her wits about her and rehearse her excuses. She would linger up there, until Ernie had answered the door and she could lean over the landing banisters and find out who the visitor was. It did not happen very often; for, really, she knew very few people who might just drop in.