Holiday (4 page)

‘Well, God bless the lad,’ said Beardy.

A voice over the public-address requested them to take their seats as the play would be resumed in four minutes’ time. They sighed.

‘I shall listen carefully in the second half,’ she said, slopping the lemon about in the dregs of her drink. ‘You’ve got me worried. I’d convinced myself this was like nothing on earth, and now you say . . .’ She really appeared to consider the point. Her shoulders seemed to screw, almost ugly, with the effort. ‘Put this glass down somewhere, Malcolm.’

As Beardy turned his back, she announced,

‘Meg Vernon.’

For a moment, he was nonplussed, as if she’d spoken in a foreign tongue.

‘Edwin Fisher.’

‘Pleased.’

Malcolm was back, on escort duty. She bowed her head, old-fashioned, and stepped beautifully away. Fisher, ashamed to stumble in immediately behind them, searched the auditorium. When he found them, Meg’s hair seemed darker, less unusual, and she pointed, laughing widely, frivolously. Outside she had seemed serious, not humourless, capable of wit, but almost unhuman. He played with the neologism, because he could handle a little word, occupy himself with it, keep his head while he fought for equilibrium from that three minutes in the foyer when he’d been summoned to a presence. Now she laughed, and bounced, and poked a finger out, and could be criticised.

He saw her a week later, by chance.

Search in the telephone directory had no result, and he’d begun to recover from the impact of the first meeting when he nearly walked past her in the crowded centre of the town.

‘Oh, hello there,’ he said, turning to touch her arm.

She narrowed her eyes, in the sunshine, slightly untidy, unready for him.

‘Edwin Fisher,’ he said.

‘Have you any more names?’ Now she sounded like a schoolgirl or a teaching miss.

‘Edwin Arthur Fisher.’

People shoved past them for home at five past five, so that the two were forced apart. He chased her fiercely, under an arcade by a double pillar.

‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ he said.

She looked at her watch, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, squinting again, and, hitching her shoulder-bag, acquiesced. In the tea-shop, dark with pannelled walls and bar-lights, they sat without speaking at a crumb-littered table. Now, make-up unrenewed, face smudged, she seemed at once more approachable and yet complex because he knew that a few minutes’ preparation could transform this breathless, dusty girl into a magnificent woman who’d fetched him over in the theatre. She was handsome, with fine eyes, a large mouth and head of dark auburn hair, purpled in shadow, fine and heavy as if cast. One finger had a blotch of ink; the second button of her blouse was lost.

He ordered tea as the waitress swatted the table-cloth.

‘Were you going anywhere?’ he asked.

‘To my flat.’

‘And then?’

‘Then.’ She blew the echo away.

‘We’ll go to the pictures,’ he said, suddenly awkwardly, unlike himself.

‘What’s on?’

‘No idea.’ She laughed, said that was silly.

‘I don’t much mind. I could do with your company.’

‘You hardly know me,’ she said.

‘I don’t know you at all.’

He began to tell her about himself, his job at the High School, his ambition to write a play. The waitress arrived; triangles of buttered bread, six assorted cakes on a cake-stand with doyley, tea, milk and sugar in metal containers. Each had a small pot of jam, one dark red, one orange. Pouring out the tea, she held the knob lid under the smirched finger, she paused, breathed in audibly, said,

‘I can’t go to the cinema with you. I’m not dressed for it.’

The mind was made up and the certainty of intonation made her look older.

‘Neither am I.’

‘I noticed.’

That held him up, almost shocked him though he could not have said whether it was because she criticised him, or because she thought clothes important. They began to talk about ‘A Doll’s House’ and he enjoyed himself explaining why he found it an important play.

‘And yet,’ he said, eager, spreading jam, ‘there’s something wrong with it.’

‘Such as?’

‘Perhaps it’s pre-Freudian. Would she have left him if matters had been right sexually between them?’

‘He enjoyed her.’

‘Is that it? I don’t know. I mean given the position of a woman in those days and their provincial view of petty-crime, she hardly seemed strong enough to make her mind up, just like that, and leave. I know she’d something about her, that she’d borrowed the money which needed some doing for a woman, I admit, and saved her husband’s life, but . . .’

‘What?’

‘To leave three children. Children she loved. For a mere piece of intellectualism.’

‘You think like her husband,’ Meg said. ‘That women are little song-birds or feather-headed spendthrifts. You do. You might think you don’t.’

‘But a young family . . .’

‘Listen,’ she answered. ‘Nobody would leave children they loved, if they acted sensibly. But thousands do. Lawrence’s Frieda. Nearly broke her heart.’

They argued desultorily so that Fisher was thwarted. He was not sure what he felt and guessed that the girl was bent on making fun of him. She’d enjoyed the play, admitted now that the dialogue wasn’t too unreal if she made allowances for the old-fashioned translation, but her main objection was that Ibsen was out to act bogeys. Scare her with his horror.

‘What do you want, then?’

‘Ordinary pieces of life.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Quarrels about the rent or the soup. Agreement about what shoes to buy. I don’t know. When people come on stage, fit as fiddles and say they’re going to die with T.B. of the spine caused by their father’s lechery, I begin to think . . .’ She broke off, smiling down at her plate.

‘That sort of thing happens.’

‘I wish it wouldn’t. Anyway, I don’t want it shoved under my nose. There’s enough unpleasantness as it is.’

‘But we get pleasure, a marvellous pleasure, don’t we, out of seeing men and women face up to, and even be defeated by fearful events?’

‘You might. I don’t.’

‘Why do you go the theatre, then?’

‘Because Malcolm asked me.’

‘Though,’ he said, ‘you knew you wouldn’t enjoy it.’

‘I’d not seen it before. You never know.’

Now it seemed important to him to convince her, to open her eyes to the poet’s art. As he talked, lectured her, hectored, she listened politely enough, even with a show of interest, but with a fixed determination not to be influenced. Her mind she’d made up, for herself. Ibsen and Shakespeare and Sophocles could tear their man, their noble women, to tatters, in the greatest language, and she’d look on as she’d watch a man fly-fishing or a bulldozer flattening a building or a horse-race on television. Such things happened, and as I’m here I might as well see what’s going on, but I’m not involved, only curious.

‘It might be your house they’re knocking down.’

‘Then I’d be furious. Or sorry, or something.’

‘But you wouldn’t feel the same for somebody else whose home’s being destroyed?’

‘Neither would you,’ she said.

‘Not so strongly, perhaps.’

He argued, and she talked. It was like trying to run a private race against a cripple. She hobbled; he sprinted. When he passed the post, she was elsewhere so that the victory meant nothing, went unobserved. An emotional cripple, that’s what this beautiful girl was. He liked the expression but kept his mouth shut. As usual he did not believe himself.

Excited he returned to Ibsen, who hadn’t made his Nora convincing. She’d suffered shock, at her husband’s self-righteous anger, but that seemed hardly enough to cause her to fly off in the middle of the night, out into a cold, man’s world to fend for herself. ‘She’d damned soon find out,’ Fisher said, finger-nail tapping the table, ‘that her husband, hide-bound as he was, priggish, domineering, babyish, wasn’t without his virtues compared with some of the men she’d have to deal with.’

Meg picked up her gloves, not quickly, said they should leave. They did not speak again until they were out in the street.

‘What’s the programme?’ he asked.

‘I’d better go to my flat.’

‘I’ve only just found you.’

‘That sounds like a bit from your friend Ibsen,’ she said cruelly. He laughed at that, because she was right. He judged this meeting to be crucial.

‘I don’t mind what we do,’ he said, ‘so long as we do it together.’

‘Commit suicide?’

‘Is that what you feel like?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I think we should go home, dress up, and go out drinking.’

‘Do you know what my father would say to that?’ she asked.

‘Uh, uh?’

‘Is that all your education has fitted you for? To get drunk?’

‘And what do you say?’

She snatched her gloves off, half in pique. Now the two of them had crossed the road in a crowd, stood in front of the Council House, motionless among people who stumbled, raced past.

‘You’ve not answered my question,’ he began. In no hurry, she wrinkled her face, as if genuinely troubled, needing his assurance. He could not offer it. On a sunny evening he needed to worship, not advise.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

‘You hardly know me.’

‘I’m proposing to remedy that.’ Immediately he regretted his flippancy. The Council House clock struck the hour with impressive noise, vibrating in the flagstones.

‘Six,’ he said. ‘Tell you what. Let’s be back here by eight.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t want to see me, then?’ he asked.

‘I don’t mind. It’s not that. Oh, I don’t know.’ She flailed about with her gloves.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Eight o’clock. Or somewhere else, if you like.’

Now she stood composed, statuesque, but he would not have been surprised if she had wheeled and stalked off. She nodded.

‘Here?’ he asked.

‘Right.’

‘Eight, then.’ He held a hand out. ‘Goodbye, Miss Vernon.’

Her eyes widened, met his, held steady, looked away. No trace of a smile answered his exaggeration of gallantry. She nodded, jerked the expressive gloves on, pointed, mumbled the number of her bus and made for it.

He watched her, a tall girl, tossing her hair, looking taller.

Against his expectation, she returned exactly on time, beautifully groomed. The square, less crowded, opened to her; men turned their heads and she walked proudly.

‘We’ll go up to the Country.’

‘I don’t drink much.’ She spoke diffidently now as if this small disclaimer implied something else, that she shouldn’t be here, that she regretted her promise.

‘Neither do I, for that matter.’

When he complimented her on her appearance, making her look at their reflection in the long shop-windows of Market Street she barely acknowledged him. It was as if, in assuming these magnificent and suitable clothes, she allowed them to speak for her. This absent-mindedness of hers worried him in the next months. However interested he might be, or intense, however he exerted himself to amuse or even rile her, she offered him a bare eigth of her attention, and brooded on other matters.

In the hotel she accepted beer; he was content to sit in a corner where he could watch her. There she seemed easier, talked about herself. She was twenty-one, in her final year at a training college, with a job already organized at a junior school in a good area of the city.

‘I know the headmistress,’ she said, ‘and my father’s solicitor to the Director of Education.’ He could not guess whether she spoke with or without irony. He decided, delighted, that she ought not to be so pale; the skin of her hands which were large and well shaped seemed almost transparent.

‘There’s something I ought to tell you,’ she had said, interrupting an anecdote of his about some clever clowning in the Upper Sixth.

‘Go on.’

‘I’m engaged to Malcolm.’

Disappointment dried, withered him. He could not be so easily immersed in her.

‘He’s a lecturer at the college.’

‘I see.’

‘I attended his lectures on psychology in the first year course. He’s very clever. And interesting.’

‘You’re lucky then.’

Very slowly she picked up her jar of ale which she’d barely sipped, held it a moment at her mouth, and then returned it to the table, clutched between both hands.

‘It’s no good,’ she announced.

‘What isn’t?’

‘Between Malcolm and me. The engagement.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked, man of the world.

‘I don’t mind.’ She pouted, shrugged, but minutely, creating no fuss. ‘He’s boring. And I think sometimes he’s silly. For a man who’s thirty-one.’

Fisher kept his eyes down, concentrating on his drink.

‘It was a great thing,’ she said, ‘when he asked me out with him. He was a lecturer. And attractive. I lived in a hostel then, and the other girls were jealous. We used to talk to each other about the things he said in his tutorials.’

‘What did he?’

‘I’ve forgotten now. Oh, well, once he gave a lecture on how much of human behaviour was instinctive. It was interesting. I’d never thought of it before, and we hadn’t done anything about it at school, even in bio lessons. He made it sound fascinating, the way he talked, though it didn’t tie up with much.’

‘Um.’

‘But he’s rather silly. And jealous. All caught up with himself. He’s everything that counts.’ She stopped. ‘I oughtn’t to talk to you about him. Daddy hadn’t anything to say in his favour.’

‘Oh.’

‘“He’s a pretentious, slimy, little shit.” That’s what he called him.’

‘And is he?’

‘I think,’ Meg said, steadily, ‘nobody’s perfect. But I’ve had enough of Malcolm. I shall tell him so.’

‘What will he do?’

‘There’s not much he can, is there?’ She did not triumph, merely stated this fact or fiction.

Fisher, delighted, a man again, had emptied his pot, urged her to do likewise, but she refused. She talked on desperately for half an hour until he became unsure whether she meant what she said, or baited him, or perhaps needed his support. At his third pint, she still wetted her lips in her half; he said, clutching himself together,