Brief Lives (23 page)

‘I rarely come out myself in the evenings these days,’ I said. ‘This is quite an adventure for me.’

‘Never fear,’ he said. ‘Stand your ground. You may be
required to protect me, for unfortunately Mrs Cope is a patient of mine and rather a regular visitor to the surgery. A complicated condition, but far from serious. I won’t tell you about it, if you don’t mind.’

‘Please don’t,’ I said.

‘No, my worry is that she may give me the latest news of it. She believes in keeping me in the picture. So awkward, particularly when I am hungry. That’s why I accept these invitations with misgivings.’

‘Do you live alone?’ I asked, slightly rattled by his apparently compulsive desire to tell the truth.

‘Completely. A woman comes in every day, but she doesn’t cook. That is why I have to go out to dinner. What you mean is, am I married? I was. My wife divorced me, on the grounds of her adultery and my incompetence.’

‘I see,’ I said, as thoughtfully as I could.

‘One daughter,’ he went on. ‘Rather a nice woman. Ah, I think we are about to go in.’ He grasped my arm, as if to shield himself from Louisa Cope, who now bore down on him. ‘Alan,’ she said flirtatiously. ‘Those new pills you gave me are hopeless. Quite hopeless. What on earth are they supposed to do? Well, whatever it is they’re not doing it.’

‘You seem quite well to me, Louisa,’ he said, his eyes furtive.

‘Hopeless, quite hopeless,’ she went on, but she said it with an amorous look on her face, as if she had other plans for him. It occurred to me that to some women he might appear attractive.

‘Perhaps you could look in tomorrow morning before surgery,’ she went on, as we moved to the dining-room.

‘I’m afraid I shall be running round Battersea Park,’ he said, regretfully but firmly. ‘I always do, you know.’

I stole a look at him as his head bent reverently over his
mozzarella salad. His looks were cadaverous, more suited to a funeral director than to a doctor, I thought, though that might be explained by his evident hunger. He had a long dark mournful face, punctuated by two startlingly blue eyes: hair was strenuously trained over a high and otherwise sparsely furnished head. It seemed to be agreed that no one should speak to him while he was eating. In the interval of the plates being changed he sat back as though exhausted.

‘If you are always hungry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you would like to come for a meal one evening?’

‘I should like that very much. Mind you,’ he added, ‘I shall never marry again.’

‘No,’ I replied, rather annoyed. ‘Neither shall I. Did you think I was asking you to marry me?’

‘I seem to be the target of women,’ he went on, ‘as I expect you are of men. After all, you are attractive, as I am not. Are you on your own?’

‘I am a widow,’ I said primly.

‘I look upon widows as ordinary women,’ he said. ‘I have your telephone number in my files. I will get in touch.’

After that he turned heroically to Mrs Cope who was on his other side, and I to Richard Finlay who immediately began to tell me about his latest holiday in the Seychelles. Across the table a long and involved story was going on between Paul and Anthony Cope. It seemed as if the ladies had been paid their quota of attention for the evening. Cautiously I began to relax and enjoy myself. The room still looked hideous to me but was softened by the white candles in Caroline’s Georgian candlesticks. Upstairs I knew that I should find the terrible bed, but the thought no longer disturbed me. I drank my wine and felt comfortable. Lemon mousse succeeded fillet of beef. ‘And of course the car was an absolute write-off,’ said Anthony Cope.

‘I will see you home,’ said Dr Carter. ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t come in. I try to put in my forty minutes at the piano.’

‘What do you play?’ I asked, imagining a well-tempered clavichord.

‘Oh, all the old music hall songs,’ was the reply. ‘I collect them. A hobby of mine. Do you know one called “Our Clara’s Clicked Again”?’

‘My father used to sing it,’ I said wonderingly.

‘That’s a particular favourite. A marvellous antidote to what I have to do in the daytime.’

‘Doesn’t it wake people up?’

‘Not really. At least, no one’s complained.’

They would hardly do that, I thought. A doctor is still held in high esteem, even in, perhaps undoubtedly in, our secular society. They would tolerate his eccentricity, for the privilege of having him next door, in case they needed him, although with all this running and piano playing and dining out he did not seem to be particularly available. But I remembered that when he had come to me he had looked entirely normal, rather impressive, in fact. I had not known that his anxiety was habitual. I had assumed it was something to do with my condition. I had felt anxious myself, with good reason, it now seemed. All that was now over. For the first time in ages I felt normal, as if I were starting with a clean slate. Charlie disappeared, as though he had never been.

I took my cue that evening from Dr Carter. If he could be an eccentric bachelor, I could be an eccentric widow. We might have an eccentric partnership. Or not, as the case might be. Caroline had obviously thought he might ‘do’ for me, and although this was ridiculous it was nice to be included in people’s thoughts, after my long exile. For the
first time in what seemed like years I felt as though I were among people who approved of me. It even became apparent that Caroline was offering me as a sort of attraction, for after dinner, as we sat in the drawing-room, she encouraged me to tell the others of my early days, and of life at the BBC in the stringent years after the war. None of them remembered me, of course; they were that little bit too young, even though they looked prosperous and substantial enough to be my age, yet women’s liberation and a mistaken nostalgia for the war years had made me an object of some interest. ‘I never thought of myself as a feminist,’ I said, to an enthralled Alison Finlay, ‘but I earned my own money from the age of seventeen and gave some of it to my mother. You see, it was Mother who saw to it that I had a good training, and so I really owed it all to her. My father would have approved, whatever I did. There was none of that antagonism between the sexes that there seems to be now. Even women don’t get along with each other as well as they might. But we were all friends then, quite shy and trusting by contemporary standards. I never had the slightest difficulty, although I went out into the world so young. Everyone looked after me.’

‘How
interesting
,’ said Louisa Cope. ‘But why did you give it up? It sounds delightful.’

‘I married,’ I said. ‘And I thought it right to be a full-time married woman. That’s where my age tells. No woman today would give up her career in that particular way. But I couldn’t have managed both, and I didn’t think it right to try. The thought simply didn’t occur to me.’

‘She had a lovely voice,’ said Dr Carter, from what seemed to me a remote part of the room. ‘But the songs were lugubrious.’

‘But you see we were far more sentimental in those days,
far less inhibited about feeling, although we were shy. We used those songs to do our courting with: they were about longing and loyalty, very big feelings that simple people can’t bring themselves to name. And the war made them that much more important.’

I felt flushed, confident. No one had ever asked me about my career before, not Owen, not Charlie. To be in the company of someone who had heard me sing was a deep pleasure for me. And Caroline was pleased with me too, for entertaining her guests in this novel way. I was a relic to them, almost a celebrity. It somehow pleased them, I sensed, that I was now an elderly lady and yet still presentable. Caroline kissed me warmly as I left, and said, ‘You must come again soon, Fay. You’ve been a tremendous hit.’ I said, and I meant it, ‘It was one of the nicest evenings I can remember. I’ll telephone you tomorrow, dear. Thank you so much.’

Dr Carter took my arm and strode off at an athlete’s pace. After a moment I unhooked my arm and stood still. ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked, walking back to me.

‘I’m perfectly well, but I’m wearing rather frail shoes,’ I said, ‘and I can’t keep up with you. And anyway, it’s such a pleasant evening. Why hurry? Oh, of course, your piano playing. I’m so sorry; I don’t want to hold you up. Would you like to race on ahead?’

‘I’ll see you home, of course,’ he said. ‘I dare say I need not play the piano tonight. I’m not a slave to habit.’

‘It is so nice and mild that I’m enjoying this breath of air. Indeed, I enjoyed the whole evening.’

‘Pleasant people, yes. And here we are, Drayton Gardens. I am further on, Lowndes Square. Well, I’ll be in touch. By the way, are you comfortably off?’

‘Yes,’ I said firmly.

‘That’s good, so am I. Well, good night.’

No dreams that night, not much sleep either. Louisa Cope and Alison Finlay would have been perturbed and not a little disconcerted to learn that pleasurable anticipation can persist even in a woman of my age. It did not worry me, but it did make me laugh. I felt scandalous again, seeking an age-old remedy for a wounded heart, and finding it. I had no illusions about Dr Carter’s desirability.

In truth, I thought he was impossible, but he amused me into thinking fresh thoughts. An original man is a rare and valuable thing, and as I get older I appreciate humour more than the kind of seriousness that usually attends these affairs. It now strikes me that seriousness is misplaced, that it is all a joke, a sport of the gods, that eventually wears out and fades away. Sometimes not even a memory is left. That is what I saw in the course of my sleepless dreamless night, that I had been granted one more touch of humour in my life, one last joke, before the dark. The best of it was that I had no designs on Dr Carter, none at all. I simply warmed to the idea of having him as a friend, of cooking him the odd meal, of claiming him as a person of my acquaintance, of occasionally being his partner at some kind of social function (this last was vague to me). My long loneliness disappeared in the course of that night, and when I got up to make my tea the following morning I felt as fresh as if I had slept for ten hours.

I watched the sun come up, bathed and dressed carefully. I had already decided to do something that I had been thinking about for a long time. It seemed appropriate to expend some of the energy that had been restored to me, and to cancel the last remnants of my idle life. I had passed the little headquarters of the WVS on one of my evening walks and my intention must have been fixed even then, for
I remembered where it was. It was a brilliant morning, good for a new beginning. In the WVS office, which was really the front part of a shop, the sun streamed through dusty windows on to a desk covered with papers. Beside the desk, and occupying a large area of the carpet was a huge dog covered in very long hair. A striking white-haired woman in a heather mixture suit appeared from the back room, carrying a cup of coffee. ‘Harding,’ she said. ‘Letty Harding. Can I help you?’

I explained that I wanted to do some voluntary work and she seemed delighted, although when I explained that I could not drive a car she looked a little more dubious. ‘I’m afraid that means office work,’ she said. ‘Not what you’re used to, I’m sure. How do you feel about sitting here answering the telephone?’ I said that would be fine. We arranged that I should work from one-thirty to four-thirty on four afternoons a week, sitting at that desk, in the dusty sunlight, in the shop window.

‘By the way,’ said Mrs Harding. ‘You won’t mind if I leave Doggie with you? I called him Doggie because I couldn’t think of another name. He’s very old, and he sleeps all the time, but he hates being left at home.’ I said that I should be quite happy with Doggie, who already had a dish of water and a tin plate beside him. So many new things seemed to have come into my life so suddenly that I hardly recognized myself. Perhaps it was all a mirage and I should end up like Maureen with her rotas. Either way, it seemed to me, my fate had been decided.

As it turned out, office life suited me wonderfully. There was very little to do, which may be the case even in real offices among unskilled women like myself, but one has the complacency of belonging and the excuse for dressing up and the tremendous cordiality of one’s own kind. It strikes
me that women in offices find the same sort of peace as men do in clubs. I took a book along with me, made coffee as soon as I got there, gave Doggie some fresh water, and prepared to answer queries about Meals on Wheels. Women like Mrs Harding did marvellous work, taking old people to hospital for their appointments, seeing that the housebound got properly fed, arranging for the visit of the chiropodist or even the hairdresser. I learnt there about being old, and how terrible it is. I determined to work for these people for as long as I could, until I was old myself. With a little grace I should be better prepared to deal with my own decrepitude, when it came.

I felt well, I felt buoyant, but there was no doubt that I was ageing, and quite comprehensively. I was stiff in the mornings and getting more shortsighted; my once pretty hands were now quite gnarled, and, of course, the hair was silver. I looked attractive for my age, but I looked my age: there was no danger of my being mistaken for somebody younger. I was glad that Dr Carter had seen me at my best. Behind the daytime mask the cruel body goes its way, breeding its own destruction, signalling—blatantly—its own decay. I knew all this. That was an additional reason for my gratitude to Mrs Harding, for giving me a little work to do, and a reason to think of others, and an agreeable way of passing the unforgiving time. ‘You’ve fitted in so well,’ she said. ‘We’re really very grateful. And Doggie is devoted to you. Quite devoted.’

With my afternoons taken up in this way I could no longer put in time at Onslow Square, a fact for which I felt the purest gratitude. I had never been in any doubt that Julia was an obligation, and one that I had come to shoulder with distasteful feelings of guilt and shame, but the truth now burst upon me that I need no longer bear the burden.
Naturally, I should have to sign off, as it were, go to see her to explain my new circumstances, but although I could imagine her staring at me, the eyelids fully raised, and then going into one of her pantomimes of incomprehension, the spectacles on their silken cord slowly raised and adjusted on the nose, I could also see that I should have to talk my way out of it, be bluff, reasonable, if necessary unforthcoming. She would resent it, as if I were slipping out of the theatre before the house lights went up, but really, was there not something unseemly, something masochistic in continuing to visit a woman who at best was bored by one and at worst antagonistic? It was just that I had always had what seemed to me good reasons for doing so, and not only that, because I pitied and admired the woman, difficult though she was. Antagonism was the climate of her chilly nature; she found it hard, perhaps impossible, to love, whereas I found it all too easy. For that reason I lost caste, while she consistently gained it. On no account must Dr Carter’s name be brought into this, although I felt dangerously tempted to share my delight. This was another of my lower-class attributes, this silly and unwarranted trustingness, in promises which were not promises at all, but only forms of words, or even of leavetaking. That was why Charlie had distorted my life, or, to be fair, why I had distorted my life for Charlie. I now looked back on him with impatience, uneasiness, something like despair. It is nearly always a fatal mistake to go against one’s nature, however unsatisfactory that nature proves to be. One must be authentic if one is to be anything at all.