Dolly (22 page)

I wandered out into Holbein Place. It was a beautiful day, cold and sunny, and the Christmas tree was up in the middle of Sloane Square. I had not, until that moment, considered Christmas. I supposed that I should spend it with Miss Lawlor, but reflected that Miss Lawlor would certainly be in attendance at church and almost as certainly would be visited by one of her elderly friends. Marigold, I knew, would be on duty. I did not as yet feel any panic at the thought of Christmas, or rather I did not feel any extra panic, for all the days were equally burdensome to me. But the day was so fine that it seemed idle to anticipate a day which might not be so fine, and I walked over the bridge to Prince of Wales Drive, aware that in reality I had already said goodbye to my old home, and even appreciating that the flat in Dolphin Square would, on a day like this, be bathed in winter sunlight.

My malaise, I decided, was now caused by the fact that I had no work, and I thought that to be deprived of work was a shameful thing, even more shameful than being independently wealthy. I needed work, but I also needed an education, and the thought occurred to me that I could take a degree without going to Cambridge, and that I could enrol at Birkbeck College in the following October and attend the evening lectures there. Then if I kept on working at the agency and studied in the evening I could fill my time most profitably, and in three years, or however long it took, be in
a position to do real work and thus feel exonerated. What I wanted to do was write, but then so did everyone else. I liked stories; I had the gift of fabulation, but I always imagined an audience of children, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me. I might become a teacher, I thought. This decision reassured me, and I reached the old flat without more than the usual sadness. It did not occur to me to seek any guidance as to my future. I conceived of it as one long lonely effort, and was a little frightened. My world was underpopulated: I did not see how I was to make new friends. I only knew that I did not want the future to start straight away. Therefore I decreed for myself a holiday, albeit a sad one, which I would try to fill as best I could.

After a morning spent circulating with the crowds in the National Gallery and eating a meal in the restaurant there, sharing a table with three lively young women who apparently worked in the same office and to whom I longed to speak, I reflected that this experience had not been too bad, and that I might just repeat it on the following day, when I might look more closely at the Sienese school and perhaps attend one of the lectures, but that it could not be repeated
ad infinitum
because I would eventually see it for what it was, a pretext. I was no David Copperfield: I did not gather round myself a cast of fascinating characters, nor were there benevolent elders in the background, happy to recognise my gifts and my promise. I came out of the Gallery and leaned over the balustrade, gazing with puzzled eyes at an indifferent Trafalgar Square. It was not yet three o’clock, but already the day was dying; the sun, the colour of a blood orange, was shrinking in the sky, and an expanse of whitish cloud, soon
to turn grey, and then to darken, dispensed a more palpable cold than I had noticed in the daytime. That moment of going home was for me always fraught with difficulty. Although self-sufficient by nature I hated the silent evenings, for the television had gone to Miss Lawlor and the radio was already in Dolphin Square. And perhaps I lacked resource; perhaps I simply lacked company. On the evening of which I speak I felt the onset of a deplorable weakness, which was augmented by the prospect of Christmas, as, I have since discovered, is the case with others, even those more fortunately placed than myself.

When the telephone rang I ran to it with the purest gratitude.

‘Dolly here,’ said a brisk voice. ‘I notice you don’t bother to keep in touch these days.’

‘I suppose I was waiting for you,’ I said, immediately regretting the criticism implicit in this remark.

‘What else am I doing, you funny girl?’ Funny, in Dolly’s parlance, was a synonym for selfish, dreary, stupid, and similar terms of disparagement. Since she used it all the time, of everyone, one could not challenge her on it, although her meaning was always perfectly clear. Being funny meant being relegated, as having revealed a sordid disposition. ‘Funny woman,’ she would say wonderingly, after unleashing a diatribe against one of her dearest friends. I took it that I was where I had always been, in the wrong.

‘I was thinking about Christmas,’ Dolly went on. ‘You won’t want to be alone, and I don’t either. Everyone wants me to go to them, but I don’t fancy it, not this year.’

I thought she was referring to my mother’s recent death, and said eagerly, ‘Shall I come over to you?’

‘Good heavens, I’m not staying here. Anyway I couldn’t. Annie’s gone to Ostend, to her daughter. No, I thought of a hotel. Somewhere on the coast. I thought you might like to join me. It would get you out. Of course it’s ridiculously expensive, although not for you.’ She gave her familiar little laugh.

‘I could treat us both,’ I said. I was grateful to her for thinking of me, for including me in her plans.

‘You could, of course. Well, that would be very nice of you, Jane.’

Praise from Dolly! I began to experience a family feeling that I had never, even at my most desolate, connected with Dolly.

‘Had you anywhere in mind?’

‘Bournemouth,’ she said. ‘The Grand. I went there with Mother when we first came to England. It’s where I met your uncle, as a matter of fact. I’ll book, shall I?’

‘And I’ll look up the trains.’

‘What a funny girl you are. We’ll go by car, of course. I hope you’ve got something decent to wear. One is expected to make a bit of an effort. And I dare say there will be dancing.’

‘Do we really need a car?’

‘Well I certainly do, Jane. There’s my luggage, my make-up case, my heated rollers. Good heavens, I certainly need a car. I don’t suppose you’ll take much. You can take a cab over to me—I’ll hire the car. Be here at midday on the twenty-third. We should be there in time for tea.’

My case was packed by the twenty-second. I was timidly delighted. I watched the weather, as if we should be out all day, walking by the sea, although as far as I knew Dolly never walked anywhere. In the evenings there would be dancing, she said. I would not dance, for I doubted whether I should find a partner, but I should be quite content to watch, even though it might mean seeing the equivalent of one of those television programmes my mother so enjoyed coming to life. Coming to life! I was young; I was ready for pleasure. And maybe Dolly and I could use this occasion to become on better terms with each other, for as she had once so nearly remarked, she was all I had.

On the day on which we had agreed, or rather Dolly had agreed, that we should meet, I found her standing in the hallway of her flat, in her fur coat, surrounded by various pieces of luggage. I had time to notice that the flat looked dusty: Dolly, by contrast, was heavily made-up, her face enlivened by various colours which heightened her expression of appetite but looked harsh on this grey day. She seemed morose, as if regretting the necessity for my company. Her manner was equally distant; in fact her disposition seemed sombre, even brooding, as if she desired nothing more than to be left to herself, as if she had urgent calculations to make, as if her normal vivacity, however irritating it occasionally was, had been laid aside in favour of a sudden access of cold reason.

I did not see why she should be so bleak at the outset of what purported to be a holiday, but I noted with relief that I was not the occasion for her strange humour, that I had in effect done nothing to provoke it, that my presence did not even register very strongly, and was in any case irrelevant to
Dolly’s mood. This had its origins in circumstances then unknown to me, although I was to approach an understanding of them later on.

I followed her down the stairs, noting how easily she lifted and carried her suitcase, watching her glossy fur back with its obedient muscles, reflecting that she was essentially durable. Yet there was a suspicion of age—the merest suspicion only—in the very slight hunching of the shoulders, the shortening of the neck, half submerged in, and therefore even more drastically shortened by, an expensive silk scarf. When a woman can no longer straighten her neck and throw back her head with ease she had better see that she performs neither action inadvertently. Dolly’s newly coiffed head disappeared down the stairwell in front of me; her footsteps seemed heavier, or merely more determined, as if she were undertaking a mission which might have something perilous about it, but which she was pursuing with her usual courage. For Dolly had courage, had in fact never lacked it.

‘I hope you will be able to amuse yourself, Jane,’ she said, settling herself in the back of the car, which immediately filled with the smell of her scent. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to close my eyes. I shall need all my energy for this evening.’

She handed me a brochure which showed a Jacobean-style mansion in a sunlit snowy landscape. Inside was another photograph of a log fire in a marble fireplace wreathed with holly. The first thing to register was the price charged for this three-day Christmas break, which struck me as excessive, although this apparently was what people were prepared to pay for the privilege of being taken in at a problematic
time of the year. The object seemed to be to create the atmosphere of a cruise, with the accent on food, entertainment, and dancing. There was to be a welcome champagne reception, I read, that evening, with local carol singers, followed by dinner in the French style. A full range of diversions, including cards and a quiz in the television room, would be available. On Christmas Eve, ladies were advised that the hairdressing salon would be open until five o’clock. Another champagne reception would be followed by dinner in the Italian style. There would be dancing until midnight, when hot punch and mince pies would be served. Feeling slightly sick I noted that Christmas Day would be marked by full English breakfast, morning coffee, with a visit from more carol singers, traditional Christmas lunch, followed by tea with Christmas cake. Dinner would consist of a Scandinavian smorgasbord. On Boxing Day one could take brunch in the restaurant, after which one was expected to make oneself scarce until the evening cocktail party, followed by a grand gala dinner, with dancing and cabaret. On the following day, I noticed, no food other than breakfast was provided; after yet another cocktail party one was expected to depart, while the hotel geared itself up for what was announced as a magnificent New Year’s break.

The grim professionalism of these people astounded me, for surely there could be little pleasure in any of this for the staff. Or even for the patrons, stuffed to the gills with smorgasbord and Christmas cake. But then I reflected that lonely people, widows especially, might wait all the year for the opportunity of meeting others in a festive atmosphere, and for three or four days manage to give an impression of high spirits
and fulfillment, overlooking or even forgetting the circumstances in which they lived. In this category I was forced to include Dolly, yet it worried me that she had to descend to this sort of amusement which seemed inferior to me, commercial, if not downright cynical. But people went on cruises, I thought, and sometimes made friends, and although Dolly seemed to have plenty of friends I could see that she might enjoy a holiday from her real life.

I stole a look at her from time to time. Her bluish eyelids were tightly shut, and her thin lips, painted a dark red, were clamped together in a downward line never before witnessed by me. She looked old; she looked ill. She also looked resolute, as if about to undertake a difficult enterprise. She remained asleep, or else communing with herself, for two hours, at the end of which she opened her eyes, relaxed her mouth, looked thoughtful, then enthusiastic, then joyous, in a progression so natural that I wondered how I had ever thought her old. A layer of scented powder was applied, lipstick was renewed, the social persona was refurbished and ready for action. Yet somehow I was left with that impression of determination, as if Dolly were a professional herself. Maybe this was an element of her natural behaviour, faced, as she had been, with many precarious situations.

This glimpse behind the façade of Dolly’s life made me uncomfortable. I did not like her, yet I had no wish to see her humiliated, and I sensed that she was ripe for a humiliation of one kind or another. She had lost her natural sense of festivity, which was in fact her most attractive characteristic. Her spontaneity I had always doubted, since I had become aware of the enormous amount of calculation behind it. Now
there was a watchfulness about her; I was seeing an older, more effortful Dolly. Yet when I looked at her again I was surprised by a dazzling if meaningless smile, one of the smiles by which I had first known her, and I determined to afford her as good a time as possible, since that was what she wanted. ‘Singing and dancing, Jane’, I could almost hear her say. It seemed to me something of a defeat that she had been reduced to the manufactured entertainment advertised in the brochure. As for myself, I hoped for nothing from this excursion. The only saving grace was that neither of us would be on our own.

The car approached a looming pile which bore only the faintest resemblance to the illustration in the brochure. The weather, moreover, was mild, grey, and overcast. We entered a ferociously heated lobby which seemed full of people whom Dolly surveyed with an expectant eye. From time to time a voice on a loudspeaker, prefaced by a crackle, announced that tea was now being served in the lounge. ‘Come along, Jane,’ said Dolly, in her normal brisk and emphatic voice. I followed her into a huge room smelling of cigars, where waitresses sped about with silver teapots and plates of pastries. I prepared to chaperone Dolly to the best of my ability, but her eyes were sharper than mine. ‘Why Harry,’ I heard her say, in a delighted and infinitely honeyed tone. Harry rose to his feet from a chair beside a log fire: that at least was genuine. ‘You got here all right, then,’ he said. ‘The others are over there.’ He seated himself again, as if he had fulfilled his social duty, and returned to the newspaper, in which he was checking the racing results. I followed Dolly across the room to where Phyllis, Beatrice, and the other two
were seated, with their amiable but unimpressive husbands. All uttered delighted noises of appreciation. ‘Jane, do ask Harry to join us,’ said Dolly, who was now restored to full vivacity. ‘Oh, yes, do,’ said Phyllis, or Rose, or Meriel. ‘A party’s not a party without Harry.’ ‘And order tea,’ added Dolly, whose face had lost any suggestion of age, even less of the bitter reflections which seemed to have assailed her in the car. I was self-conscious as I crossed the floor, although I felt invisible in this middle-aged company. ‘Dolly says, won’t you join them?’ I asked Harry. He gave me a hard look, not altogether well-meaning. I was slightly afraid of him. ‘Ordered tea, have you?’ he said. I recovered a little of my composure. ‘Perhaps you could do that for me,’ I told him, and rejoined the group.