Casting Off (24 page)

‘I was leaving some pictures to be framed. I suppose you wouldn’t invite me back for a cup of tea?’ She looked nervous. ‘Oh! I don’t think—’ ‘Oh, please do! It’s such years. I’d really like to hear what’s been happening to you.’

‘Nothing very much. Oh – all right. Yes, do come.’

Her rather flat, girlish little voice, which did not alter whatever was happening to her or whatever she said about it, came back to him. Poor little Rowena, as Mummy called her. She had wanted to marry him so badly; he supposed now that perhaps he hadn’t treated her very well. But, as Mummy had said, it wouldn’t have done. ‘A very amiable nonentity,’ Mummy had called her, but that was all six or more years ago; she must have changed.

Her house was rather impressive; large and filled with good furniture. She put him in the drawing room and went away to make tea. When she had taken off her gloves, he saw her rings – a wedding ring and one with a large sapphire and diamonds. Of course, she had married: he vaguely remembered Mummy mentioned it.

‘I married Ralph Fytton,’ she said, when she had brought the tea tray and he had asked her.

‘The scientist?’

She nodded. ‘He died last year. He got all the way through the war and then he died of pneumonia.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes, it was very sad for him.’

‘But not for you?’

‘Oh, yes, it was sad for me too. In a way. But it wasn’t working out. As a marriage, I mean. I wanted children, you see, and he didn’t.’ She poured the tea and handed him a cup.

‘How odd!’ he exclaimed.

‘I know. But he thought the world wasn’t a fit place for children any more. He knew about the bomb, you see – long before it was used, I mean. He got awfully depressed. He used to say it was time for the human race to come to an end. I couldn’t argue with him. I never could argue with him about anything, he was so terribly clever.’

‘It sounds rough on you.’ He wanted to say, ‘Why did you marry him?’ but thought better of it. Instead, he said, ‘He was a good deal older than you, wasn’t he?’

And she answered in her flat little voice, ‘Nearly thirty years.’

She was, he knew, thirty-five; only three years younger than him, and another argument that his mother had employed against his marrying her had been her age, too old, Zee had said.

‘So,’ she said, not looking at him, ‘how are you? I saw that you nearly got into Parliament. That was bad luck.’

‘Not really. I don’t think it was what I really
wanted
to do.’

‘And you have a little son! I saw that in
The Times
. How marvellous for you.’ There was a slight pause, and then she said, ‘Your mother very kindly asked me to your wedding. But it didn’t feel right to go actually.’

He remembered their last walk, after the lunch at Hatton when eventually he had told her that he thought he was going to marry Louise, and how she had said at once, ‘I know. I knew the moment I came into the room and saw her. She’s very beautiful and I could see she’s awfully clever.’ And then she had wept. He had tried to put his arms round her but she had pulled away from him to lean against a tree and continue crying. All the while she was crying she kept apologizing. ‘I’m so sorry – be all right in a minute – sorry to be like this—’ and he, embarrassed and uncomfortable, had said, ‘I never said anything about – that I would—’

‘I know,’ she had said. ‘I know you didn’t. I just – sort of hoped . . .’ Her flat, childish voice had died away at this point. He had offered her the cliché handkerchief then and she had mopped up and said she would go home now. He remembered telling her how fond of her he was, and saying what good times they had had. They had gone back to the house, and Rowena had thanked Zee for lunch, and he had taken her to her car. He had kissed her face and said how sorry he was. He had really not thought of her again. But now earlier memories of their times together flooded back: the first time she had taken off her clothes – God, what a lovely body she had! – and her always agreeable admiration, how, even in those times she was always beautifully dressed (she made her own clothes), the eager interest she took in everything he did . . .

He leaned forward and took her hands. ‘We did have fun, didn’t we?’

‘Not fun,’ she said. ‘I never thought of it as fun.’

He did not see her for some weeks after that. Then he ran into her on his way to his gallery in Bond Street. It was then that he discovered that she worked three days a week in another gallery. He took her to the Ritz for a drink where they had two Martinis each, followed by a longish lunch. She said that she had to go back to work, was already late, and on an impulse, and because Louise was in Sussex seeing her family, he asked her to have dinner with him. ‘And we might go dancing somewhere,’ he added. She had always been a good dancer, could follow him on the floor whatever he did.

That had been the beginning of it. He had told her that things were not good between him and Louise; she had been unmaliciously sympathetic – she had always been good-natured, he could never recall her speaking ill of anyone. She bore him no resentment which, as their intimacy increased, he began to see she had the right to do. He
had
treated her badly. The moment on their last walk together at Hatton when he had tried to excuse himself by saying that he had never intended to marry her now made him feel ashamed and in the end he told her so. ‘It was selfish and pompous and altogether
crass
of me,’ he said, and she had answered: ‘Oh, Mike! You always overdo that kind of thing, to make people disagree with you.’

The truth of this and the fact that she did not often say anything that surprised him by its perception made him feel – for a moment – just a little in love with her. And she
was
lovely. She had always been so with each feature perfectly in place, a broad forehead, large wide-apart eyes, which were neither grey nor blue nor green but, at different times, the palest version of those colours, a small nose and a wide mouth that drooped at the corners, like small commas, giving her expression a gravity that enhanced it and made incident in the broad sweeping planes of her face. He had explored all these things in his drawings when they had first become lovers; now he was rediscovering them with the minute changes wrought by time and her experience – both of which seemed to have added to her attraction. She had poise now and more animation, and she did not invariably agree with him.

They did not meet often: he was working very hard, and, as the daylight hours gradually increased, for longer, and most evenings he had engagements with Louise. But there were times when Louise announced that she was spending the evening with her cousins Polly and Clary or her friend Stella, whom he had never really taken to, or she wanted to go to some play that he knew he would not enjoy, and then he would ring Rowena from his studio and make a plan with her. She seemed always to be free, and when, on one of these occasions, he remarked upon this and said that surely she must have other friends, she had answered that she put them off. That was the evening when he first went to bed with her, and it was a great success. She had always been easy in bed and he was able to enjoy himself, as well as his effect upon her, with no trouble at all. She combined passivity with obvious sexual satisfaction – the perfect combination, he thought.

Afterwards they lay in her bed and had a serious (stock) conversation about the fact that he was married and did not want to rock the boat – the child and so forth – and she listened and accepted everything he said in just the right way. ‘I’m so happy,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about anything else. I’m here if you want me.’

His marriage seemed to be at an impasse. However, a gallery in New York who had shown some of his pictures before the war had written asking him whether he was interested in another show. He had discussed the matter with his mother, who thought it an excellent idea, although she had advised him to be firm about a date sufficiently far off for him to accumulate enough portraits. If this did come off, he decided to take Louise with him: a complete change of scene might also improve their marriage. It would get her away from her preoccupation with the theatre and give them a chance to be really alone together. Sebastian and Nannie could go to his mother at Hatton. It would be a kind of second honeymoon, and Louise, who had never been abroad in her life, must surely be excited at the prospect. Rowena did not come into these plans – how could she? – but the knowledge that she was there, in the background, gave him a new kind of assurance that he badly needed. The spring of ’47, he thought, would be the right time to go to America, and he wrote to this effect.

As Christopher tramped back down the cart track from the farm to his caravan he noticed with satisfaction that the wind had dropped, not completely, to that stillness that usually prefaced rain at this time of year, but to a kinder, more domestic breeze. Perhaps it would be a fine weekend – he passionately hoped so. He had had his weekly bath and supper with the Hursts, a day earlier because tomorrow Polly was coming to stay. She had never been before; indeed he had never had
anybody
to stay in the caravan with him and his excitement at the prospect was beginning to congeal into anxiety. Although it was dark, he didn’t need a torch – knew the way blindfold. But Polly would need one. He must be sure the battery was working on the old one he had – come to that he must find it, must add that to his list. Lucky he’d asked for the day off tomorrow because there was a hell of a lot to do before Polly arrived.

He had asked her on the spur of the moment at the party given for his sister Angela before she left for America. After Nora’s wedding he had decided that family parties were not for him; they only made him feel depressed and isolated, something which in his ordinary life he did not feel at all. But he was very fond of Ange, she was his sister and he felt he might never see her again. Mindful of the fiasco of the very old suit that he had tried to wear to Nora’s wedding (his mother had made him borrow something from Uncle Hugh, which hadn’t fitted either but in a different way), he had bicycled into Hastings and bought himself a dark suit and a utility shirt. Then he remembered that he’d used his tie to bind the splint on the vixen’s leg, and bought himself another: green with blue spots on it. It wasn’t silk, which meant it wouldn’t tie very well, but it didn’t matter as he didn’t expect to wear it much. Mrs Hurst had knitted him some socks for Christmas. He hadn’t enough coupons left to buy shoes, so he would have to wear the awful old ones that were far too tight, or his boots. In the end he chose his boots.
He
didn’t look at people’s feet, so he didn’t think they would be noticed. He’d have to stay in London on the night of the party, and he absolutely didn’t want to have to stay with Mum and Dad, so although he hated the telephone, he rang up Ange at her house and asked if he could stay with her because she knew how he felt about Dad. She was nice about it, and said if he didn’t mind the floor he could. ‘Anyway, there’s no room in their tiddly little house because Judy will be there,’ she had said.

So that stormy Saturday he took Oliver over to the Hursts and bicycled against a violent headwind to the station. It was bitterly cold and hail fell with little stinging blows on to his face: he was glad of his oilskin jacket.

Journeys always made him anxious; the train was all right because all he had to do was to sit in it until it finally stopped in London. But then he had to find the right bus stop for the right bus that would take him to a stop by Lyons Corner House in Tottenham Court Road, and then he had to walk on until a turning to the left, which was Percy Street where Ange lived. But it was nice when he finally got there. Ange seemed really pleased to see him and made him tea and toast. She had her hair in curlers and she was wearing her dressing gown, but the main thing was that she looked happy. This made her look so different that he realized that she must have been pretty unhappy before.

When they were sitting as near to the small electric fire as they could get and drinking the tea, he said, ‘Do you remember when I met you in the drive at Mill Farm after we all knew there wasn’t going to be the war and you were so unhappy and you couldn’t tell me about it?’

‘Yes. I could now. I thought I was in love with Rupert—’

‘
Uncle
Rupert?’

‘Yep, I thought it was the end of the world. I thought he loved me back, you see. Well – I suppose I sort of
imagined
he did. And, of course, he didn’t.’

‘Poor Ange!’

‘Don’t worry. It’s completely over. Everybody has to have a first love and I expect they mostly go wrong.’

‘Did good things happen after it?’

‘Not much. I fell in love with someone else and that was far worse.
He
was married too.’

‘Was that the person you nearly did marry?’

‘Yes – no. It was the person Mummy thought I ought to marry. For the obvious reason.’ She looked at him to see if he knew what she meant, and just as he was about to ask her why their mother thought she ought to marry someone who was married already, she said: ‘I was pregnant.’