Lewis Percy (28 page)

13

His daughter: a pale, silent, delicate child, much as her mother must have been, a child with an unreasonable desire to be good. Dressed elaborately in smocks and white stockings, hair ribbons and patent leather shoes, she seemed conscious of the burden of being her grandmother’s pride and joy. For she was Mrs Harper’s child rather than Tissy’s. When Lewis rang the bell of the house in Britannia Road, and Mrs Harper – never Tissy – opened the door, the child would hide behind her, fearful of this stranger, not, Lewis thought, because he was a stranger, but because he was a man. A natural prejudice against men was in the air she breathed. She seemed to know, even at two years old, that a man might spoil her dress, ruffle her hair, insist on disturbing exercise. When Lewis eventually succeeded in coaxing her out from behind the bulk of Mrs Harper, she looked uncertain, kept a hand on her grandmother’s skirt. He hated to bribe her with toys, but could not resist bringing her a doll now and again, telling himself that when she was old enough he would furnish her with an entire library. The doll called Mildred never left her: she held it in both arms, much as Tissy had once held her, but without an expression of excitement or pleasure. Holding the doll carefully, she seemed weighed down with responsibility and maternal anxiety.

Lewis’s heart ached for her. He could see loneliness there,
sadness, fear. He tried to draw her to him: she came, reluctantly. He took her out on Sunday mornings, to the park, to feed the ducks and the geese, but she hated their noise, their squabbling and flapping, and he could see that after half an hour she was anxious to get home. She was only happy sitting in her little chair in the red drawing-room, or walking with Mrs Harper to the shops. She seemed to prefer the company of her grandmother, or, more surprisingly, of the doctor, whose deteriorating bloodshot face she allowed to nestle her own. She was well looked after, Lewis could see, although the atmosphere around her was elderly. The doctor, in particular, was now in poor health and relying more and more on the comforts Mrs Harper could provide, without, however, doing so in any way that would endanger his independence.

Lewis knew that it was bad for the child to be brought up by these defeated people, but he could see that his daughter had something innately pitiful about her. This he ascribed to some melancholy native gene emanating from himself, for he had forgotten the days when he was happy. He could not in all conscience indict Tissy, although he was surprised at the off-handedness of her mothering. Once Jessica had outgrown her status as a baby, Tissy had more or less relinquished her, and had pursued other, rather less tangible, but presumably more rewarding, interests. When he caught a fleeting glimpse of her these days he found her extremely disconcerting, almost a stranger. Compared with the assiduity she had shown in her early days as a wife, the limits of her concern were very soon reached. Lewis put this down to her recent indoctrination, which had freed her from the restrictions under which she had previously laboured. When she was not at her job with Lancelot Antiques, she was at her group, or with her new friends, Kate and Fran. He rarely saw her for more than a few minutes at a time.

When he did, however, when he happened to be at the door as she was going out, she was breezily nice to him, as she might have been to a stranger. Yet there was a distance
in the niceness which proclaimed: I have made my decision, I shall never go back on it. The other life that I lived with you was so benighted that you cannot expect me to admit it to my newly raised consciousness except to laugh at my folly. Of course, I serve as an example to the group. Remember how I couldn’t go out alone? Shackled, you see, by false expectations. And look at me now. I earn my living, I’ve got friends, I’m
involved
. And I don’t have to bother with men any more. That’s what’s so wonderful. We have a very good social life, the three of us; we go to exhibitions, see the new films, have plenty to talk about. Mother looks after Jess. It’s given her a new lease of life; she was getting so low before. Now that she’s got something to occupy her mind she’s a different person. The baby’s fine. She doesn’t miss me. And later on, when she’s older, she’ll have me as a role model. That’s extremely important for a girl. When I think how backward I used to be I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Fortunately, that’s all behind me now.

She did not, of course, say any of this. He marvelled at her but was forced to come to terms with the fact that he hardly knew her in this radiant new guise. To begin with she looked different. She had never lost the weight she had put on when the baby was born, but what had previously been flaccid was now tough, hard-packed into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. These garments were clean but not noticeably attractive. Nevertheless, they gave her an air of being ready for action, ready to get her hands dirty in the course of some honest job: dismantling a car, for example, or working a petrol pump. Her colour was high, higher than it had ever been, and she laughed frequently, revealing her rather large teeth. Her hair was the same, though, limp, and held back by a velvet band.

Lewis could now define what had originally attracted him to her in the very absence of those qualities of delicacy, hesitancy, timidity, which had been laid aside for ever. These same qualities were now vested in his little girl. He would have preferred the child to be bold, even wicked, but it
seemed as if she would have to go through the whole evolutionary process on her own, although, to judge by Tissy’s present state, this was now redundant. Every time he saw her his determination to rescue her increased. But she must grow up first: he could not uproot a child with such a pronounced leaning towards what he could only assume was introspection. She must mature and harden a little before she was ready for him, just as he must be firm and decisive if he were ever to be a reasonable father to so fragile a creature. Yet, thinking of her mother, who had turned out to be unexpectedly resourceful, he wondered if she might not eventually be just as determined. For this reason he cherished her childishness, and was not anxious for her to grow up. He would have liked, merely, to figure a little in her world, without interfering or creating conflicts in her infant mind. He brought her books, which he was sometimes allowed to read to her.

She was his whole life. When he was not with her he was thinking about her. He called round most evenings on his way home, and if he were lucky he would see her before she went to sleep. The Sunday morning excursions were not a success: there was always the little reaction of retreat when she first saw him, and she tired easily. He thought that she would never get used to him, and despaired of making her love him, but decided to be tactful, self-effacing, as he was now, without knowing it, most of the time. The idea of demanding love sickened him, particularly of one so easily frightened. Besides, love … He had been twice defeated. He no longer expected anyone to love him, although he himself had not grown cynical. In many ways he was still ready to love, was, in certain moments, abounding in love, but no longer to a painful or even a nervous extent. Everyone now seemed to him to be worthy of love, even the stranger he passed in the street. The highest good, he perceived, was to love and be loved. But somehow, unconsciously, he dealt himself out of the whole affair. He could love but not be loved. He was only one half of the equation.

So, delicately, fearfully – with a fear and a delicacy to match her own – he loved his daughter, forcing himself to be content to care for her at a distance, never bringing a note of disagreement into Mrs Harper’s house, even when he saw or heard something that pained him, always calm with the child, never letting his disappointment show when she failed to run into his arms as he held them out to her.

Because of her he was valiant. Living alone, which had initially caused him such despair, became a daily battle against inertia, lethargy, carelessness. Without knowing it he assumed the steady hopeful smile that had characterized him as a very young man as he got out of bed, had his bath, prepared his breakfast, always determined to put a good face on things, to create a discipline for himself, to maintain decent standards, so that his daughter need never be ashamed of him. For her susceptibility, he knew, was extreme, and would increase rather than diminish as she grew older and began to take the world’s measure. Still smiling, he would leave for the library, breathing the morning air conscientiously, greeting the postman, the milkman, noticing the passers-by, all of whom seemed to him worthy of love. He knew a brief, very brief, failure of energy after accomplishing this exercise and before beginning the day’s work, but a cup of coffee in the sandwich bar near the college gave him a moment’s respite from his determination to win his victory over the day, and after that he was able to resume the smile, the mask, the endeavour. The day passed smoothly and in silence. Sometimes he would look up from his desk in a panic. Supposing this were to be taken away from him! How would he exist with a whole day to fill? How did other people manage? For there must be other people like him, virtually alone in the world? But this did not bear thinking about, and with only a very little reluctance he was able to turn his attention once more to his eternal index cards, thankful that the engine of the day was now fully engaged, and that it could run on to its close without further efforts on his part.

The end of the afternoon was more difficult, as indeed
it is for most people. Melancholy overcame him for a while at the approach of six o’clock; his movements slowed down as he bent to pick up his briefcase and straightened up to say goodnight. At this point fear dictated his thoughts. These people, these other people, of whom he was so anxious to think well, were no doubt going home to wives, to children, to comfort, to reassurance, to life! And these young secretaries and their boyfriends, busy selecting a film to see, and these ladies joining their husbands in town for a visit to the theatre: how enviable they all seemed! In the early days of his solitary new life he had gone with Pen to the opera, but had had to give it up: it upset him too much. The nobility of the gestures and the sentiments filled him with despair, and when anybody died he could not bear it. He had to concede that Pen and even George Cheveley had behaved impeccably when he had broken down in the middle of
Manon
. They had thought it would appeal to him, since he loved the novel, but instead it had brought forth tears which he was unable to suppress. ‘
Adieu, notre petite table
,’ Manon had sung, and he was done for. They had taken him home like an invalid at the end of the evening, had insisted that he drink a little whisky, and had only left when he pronounced himself ready for bed.

‘Funny how that should have set him off,’ said George to Pen on the way home.

‘Oh, well, any kind of loss, you know. It doesn’t really matter who feels it. Or for whom.’

So he no longer went to the opera, but saw Pen, and occasionally George, on a Sunday afternoon, after his run in the park. He was forced to acknowledge that he had misjudged George, whose taciturn presence he now found unexpectedly soothing.

His evenings consisted, in essence, of his long walk home and his visit to his daughter. In time he managed to think the others out of the way: they were servants, handmaidens, liegemen, surrounding the child and guaranteeing her safety. The discordant personalities of Mrs Harper and
the doctor, the new-found insolence of his wife, failed to move him. Their importance was reduced to the sole function of looking after his daughter. He would find her in her nightdress and slippers, ready for bed. She always ran to the door when she heard his ring, but looked doubtful as soon as she saw him. He wondered whether she felt the same fear of everyone. Unlike most children she enjoyed going to bed. He had always done so himself, and was gratified to see evidence of this inherited trait. If she were not too sleepy he would read to her from one of the books he had brought with him. ‘When I was one, I was just begun,’ he read. ‘When I was two, I was nearly new.’ She would gaze at him with eyes as serious but as abstracted as her mother’s had been. He read on, cherishing every moment; therefore he was doubly disappointed when he called and found that she had been put to bed early and was already asleep. On these evenings he barely stopped to exchange a few words with Mrs Harper, who was no longer reluctant to talk to him, and had on more than one occasion invited him to stay and share their meal. But he never did. He would have nothing to do with a false domesticity, a pretence at normality, acceptance of the status quo. Besides, only his daughter interested him. He accepted the others as inevitable, but did not choose to remain in their company.