No More Meadows (15 page)

In the silence, Christine looked at herself in the mirror on the wall and wondered why anyone should want to marry her. There came into her mind all the proposals she had imagined from a dream husband, but none of them had been like this. In her dreams she had always known what to say, and had said it well, because the man gave her the right cues; but what could you say to a man who was bending over the basin trying to make the water run cold enough to mix with whisky, and who, when he turned round, wore an impersonal face, as if he had already regretted or forgotten that he had asked you to marry him?

‘Drink this,' he said, handing her the glass she did not want. ‘You'll feel better.'

‘I feel fine, thank you,' she said, and then she saw his eyes,
and they were not impersonal at all, but staring at her with a naked appeal not to be hurt.

‘Oh, Vin,' she said. ‘I -' And because it seemed so unkind not to say yes at once, she hedged with the excuse of: ‘I don't know that I could live in America. I've never been there, and I–'

‘Christine,' he said. ‘Look at me. I'm not asking you to marry America. I'm asking you to marry me.'

Christine was silent. It was better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing, and her thoughts would not collect themselves. She was excited. If he had put his glass down then and taken her in his arms and kissed her, she would probably have said yes, but he did not move towards her. He took a long swallow of his drink, walked to the window, turned and said judicially: ‘I'm not asking you to give me an answer right now. I can understand you may want to give the matter some thought.'

Why, oh why, she thought, standing in the middle of the green carpet with the untasted whisky in her hand, why be so sensible and level-headed about this? This is an emotional matter, and it should be settled emotionally. This is all wrong.

‘I think I'd better go, Vin,' she said unhappily.

If he had protested she would have stayed, but he said: ‘All right, my dear. If you want to go away and think about it, I'll be happy for you to do that.'

Christine did not want to think. She wanted to be swayed irretrievably one way or the other. She wanted to accept him with joy and passion, or reject him with sorrow and a few tears, but he was already picking up her coat. When she had put it on, she said, wanting some contact with the man who had asked her to marry him and then withdrawn into himself: ‘Aren't you going to kiss me good night?'

‘No,' he said, looking noble. ‘I don't want to influence you in any way. I want you to be free to make the right decision. This is real, Christine. You haven't got to make a mistake.'

But it isn't real, she thought. It doesn't seem to be happening at all. In the little lobby of the suite, he held open the door for her, and when she looked seriously into his eyes he smiled.

Oh, you fool, you fool, she thought. How can you ask me to marry you when you don't know how to treat me? If you would
only take me back into the room and kiss me, and make me love you, of course I would say yes. You fool. She hated him suddenly, because he had spoiled it for both of them.

‘Good night, darling,' he said gently. ‘I'll be waiting.'

Well, wait on, she thought furiously, as she went down the endless hotel corridor, her whole body aching for the embraces he had not given her.

Driving home in the lovely American car, which answered your touch like a thoroughbred horse, she thought, as she outstripped two other cars at the traffic lights: If I told Rhona that Vinson had asked me to marry him, she would probably say: ‘My dear, of course you must, if it means driving about for the rest of your life in cars like this.'

Christine laughed aloud, with the moving air through the open window lifting her hair, and felt suddenly happier. Perhaps life was not such a grim business after all. Perhaps Rhona's way of picking a husband was the right one. She had professed to marry her husband for no better reason than that he kept a motor-launch on the Thames.

Christine parked the car, closed all the windows and locked all the doors and went into the house, savouring experimentally the important feeling of being engaged. It would be fun telling all the people who had been saying for so long that she ought to get married. It would be exciting to take Vinson round and introduce him as My Fiancé. He was not the best-looking man she had ever seen, but there was nothing wrong with his appearance. It would be exciting to go to American parties with him and be introduced as his fiancée. It would be something new to give up work and buy a lot of clothes and have a wedding day, with herself as the central figure.

But when she was in her room she did what she had been afraid she would do ever since Vinson had said: ‘I'm asking you to marry me.' She knelt to the bottom drawer of her desk and took out the photograph taken after the Magdalen College dance, and allowed herself to think of Jerry.

Jerry had been drunk the first time she saw him, drunk on beer at a party in someone's rooms at Oxford. Christine was
twenty, too plump, and unsure of herself, overshadowed, as she was by most of her girl friends, by the casual Jennifer, with whom she was staying at the manor house a few miles out of Oxford.

Oxford was Jennifer's happy hunting ground. From the age of seventeen she had been running through a succession of undergraduates at every college, and scarcely a party was given without her. She was Rhona's friend first, and then Christine, who was Rhona's inseparable, began to be asked for weekends too, and to be taken to parties at Oxford and left to sink or swim.

Rhona and Jennifer swam with the crowd of sloppily dressed young men and precocious girls, but Christine sometimes sank, because she could not keep up with the slick conversation. She was sinking at this party where she first set eyes on Jerry. She could not drink a lot of beer. Her throat rebelled against swallowing it, but no one else's did, and girls were sitting on laps, and someone was playing the piano in the middle of a roaring crowd who thought they were singing.

A thickset boy with brown hair falling into his eyes sang a descant in a pure tenor, waved his mug of beer and sat down in a heap on the floor.

‘Who is that?' Christine asked the man sitting next to her on the sagging sofa. She had been trying to think of something to say to him for some time.

‘Oh, that,' he said, ‘That's one of the Canadians. He's in the ice-hockey team. That's about all they're good for. Toughs all of them.' He was an intellectual young man, with earnest glasses and a mobile Adam's apple. He got up and left her and Christine sat alone, wondering where Rhona was. Jennifer was among the group round the piano, but Rhona had disappeared with a long young man with a head like a snake.

Christine could not remember how that party had ended. Dinner somewhere, she supposed, and then driving home too fast, with Rhona and Jennifer busily disparaging the young men who had kissed them.

The next night they went to another party. Almost as soon as they arrived, the drunken Canadian, quite sober now, with his hair slicked back and a slightly tidier suit, came up to her and
said: ‘You were at Porgy's party last night. You were sitting on the sofa. You had a yellow dress. I noticed you.'

‘You were drunk,' Christine said, her tongue loosened by the happiness of someone having noticed her and remembered.

‘Sure,' he smiled, ‘but not too drunk to think you looked pretty swell. Come on, I'll get you a drink and let's talk.'

That was the beginning of it. That was the beginning of Oxford with Jerry, and being in love, and writing to each other every day, and going to all his ice-hockey matches in London and sitting at the edge of the rink, wishing she could tell the people sitting by her that the burly, padded figure who was always being turned off the ice for fouling was hers, and would take her out alone somewhere afterwards, while the rest of the team went on to beat up the town.

Jennifer was all for love, although she did not believe in it for herself, and Christine was asked to stay more often. Jerry had a dreadful little car with flapping celluloid windows, and he would come out and spend whole Sundays at Jennifer's house, and unless they were wanted for tennis or billiards, no one minded what they did.

That was when they used to go into the hay barn, and Jerry said: ‘Forgive me, darling.' It was not until long after that, after the Commemoration Ball, where Christine had worn the white organdie dress and people had thrown bread at them at supper, that Jerry came down to Cornwall, where she was staying with Roger and Sylvia; and in the little inn bedroom with the Old Testament pictures and the uneven floor, he did not say: ‘Forgive me, darling', because they both knew there was nothing to forgive.

That was the end of August. When war broke out Jerry went back to Canada to enlist, and Christine's loss was lightened by the thought that when the war was over she could go out to Canada and marry him. He wrote to her often from the training camp, and at first he talked about how they would marry, but after a while he did not mention it, and then gradually he wrote less and less, until he did not write at all, and Christine did not know whether he had gone abroad or whether he was alive or dead.

After a while Christine's hurt grew less. She went into a
London hospital as a probationer nurse, and soon had neither the time nor the energy to remember too often that she had a broken heart. When the other nurses wrote letters to army post offices, and showed pictures of what they called their fellows, Christine would show them the photograph of Jerry taken in a canoe on the Cherwell, which got lost when the bomb blew in all the windows of the nurses' home one night, and they were not allowed to go back to their rooms until the debris had been cleared.

His letter came when she was having her day off. She had come home the night before, dog tired, because she was on the Theatre, and it had been Mr Trellick's tonsil day, and she had gone to bed intending to sleep late. But the habit of the six-o'clock alarm was not to be broken by one night's freedom from it a week. She woke at exactly six o'clock, turned over to look at Nurse Jones sleeping beside her in the black iron bed, discovered that she was alone in her own room at home, and felt wide awake, as she never did at this hour in hospital. She lay for a while enjoying the thought o ‘the others crawling out of bed and fixing caps and aprons with sleep-numbed fingers, and then she went downstairs in her nightdress and bare feet to find something to eat.

As she stepped down into the hall she heard the scrunch of feet on the gravel path, and then the letter-box flapped inwards and three letters fell on to the doormat. One was for her, from Jerry. He would be on leave in London in two weeks' time, and he insisted, without thought that she might be working, that she should keep the four days free for him.

She had not seen him for three years, and it was two years since he had written to her, but as she stood in the hall reading the letter over and over, with her bare feet turning to ice in the draught under the front door, all her pushed-away emotions came flooding back, and she was in love with Jerry as radiantly as she had been in the far-away summer at Oxford.

She had only had one week's holiday this year. She had another week due to her. At nine o'clock the next morning she put on a clean apron, checked her stockings for ladders, and waited with the line of criminals and petitioners outside the door of Matron's office.

‘What do you want to see the old girl for?' asked Nurse Broderick, who stood next to her.

‘Holiday. My boy friend's coming home on leave,' said Christine, wanting to tell all the world.

‘Lucky cow. I'm going in to get slayed for being late in again last night. That lousy new night porter saw me climbing in the eye clinic window and reported me. Damn conchie. Look, you'd better go in before me, because the old girl will be in no mood to give anyone a holiday after she's dealt with me.'

She changed places with Christine, but the Matron was already in a bad temper when Christine went meekly in and stood before the desk with her hands behind her back and her toes pointing straight forward.

‘Ah, Nurse Cope,' said the Matron, louring at her from under her pinnacle of cap. ‘Thermometers again, I suppose.'

‘No, Matron, I haven't broken one for weeks. I just wanted to ask you -I have a week's holiday due. Could I possibly have it the week after next?' She did not say why. If the gossip about Matron's sex-frustrations was true, that would be fatal.

‘It's odd you should ask that, Nurse,' said the Matron, brightening up, ‘because the answer is no.'

Odder still, thought Christine, if the answer had been yes.

‘You're going on night duty next week, on the gynaecological ward, so, you see, your holiday will have to wait a bit.'

She smiled. She only smiled when she had said something nasty to you. The gynae ward, of all places! On most of the other wards you got a little peace while the patients slept, but women who had had female operations kept you running about all night.

After a week of night duty among the gynae women, Christine was almost too tired to worry about Jerry. She was crawling into bed one morning after a night when she had an emergency Caesarean, a disastrous haemorrhage and five women to prepare for operations, when the maid pounded on her door and shouted: ‘Telephone, Nurse Cope!'

Hell, thought Christine, flapping down the night nurses' corridor in her dressing-gown and slippers; but it was Jerry. He was in London. His voice sounded just the same, and her heart went out in love to him.

She could not bring herself to tell him yet that she had not been able to get her holiday. She explained that night nurses were not allowed to go out before five, but she would meet him then at a hotel near the hospital. He began to grumble about her being a nurse, but she rang off hastily and went along the corridor to Nurse Fletcher's room. Nurse Fletcher was in bed, reading yesterday's papers.