No More Meadows (30 page)

He did not come. When Lianne and Dick returned, a little tight, and Christine went back to her apartment, Vinson's cap was in the hall and his uniform neatly on a hanger in the bedroom, but he had changed his clothes and gone out again.

He came back about ten-thirty and said that he had had supper. He would not say where he had been. He had obviously not been drinking. Christine would almost have preferred him to have gone out and got drunk. If he was as cross as that it would have been more natural. He was quite polite to her, but distant, and they went to sleep without kissing.

The next morning Christine was affectionate and quite gay, to try and make everything all right between them. If he wanted to apologize for having shrugged off on his own last night she would make it easy for him to apologize now, but Vinson had never in his life apologized when he considered that he was in the right.

To clear the air Christine would readily have said that she was sorry for going baby-sitting, but when she began: ‘Vin, about last night. I -' he said: ‘Forget it. It doesn't matter', which was worse than if he had been cross with her, because she thought that he was still cross inside.

She was miserable all day. She did not tell Lianne about it, because Lianne would have taken her side and said: ‘Phooey'; and although that would have been comforting, it would not help her to make things right with Vinson. All day she planned how she would say to him that evening, after he had had a drink:' Please, Vin, if you're cross with me, say so. Let's have it out, and I'll say I'm sorry, and then we can love each other again and forget it.'

She rehearsed how she would say it, but when the time came, and Vinson was on his second martini, sitting on the porch with his jacket off and his tie pulled loose, Christine could not find
the courage to say it. He was unapproachable. He was behaving as if nothing had happened and it was an evening like any other, and Christine took refuge in the compromise of letting well alone. They spent quite an amicable evening, but he was a stranger. She did not know what he was thinking.

That was one of the nights when she wanted him to make love to her. If he would do that, would confirm the inalienable physical tie that was between them, she knew that everything would be all right and they would be close again, but he kissed her good night and turned away from her, and either went to sleep or pretended to.

Christine lay awake for a long time. She looked at his gently moving shoulders and the bristly back of his head dug stubbornly into the pillow. You fool, she thought, and she remembered how she had thought: You fool, as she walked down the corridor that night at the Mount Royal, when everything would have been all right if he had only had sense enough to make love to her.

In the days that followed, Vinson entered into one of his periods of being particularly sweet and loving to her, and it charmed Christine into the conclusion that whatever had happened must have been her fault. She determined once more to start all over again and be the kind of wife he wanted her to be. Happiness was that way. If his ideals sometimes clashed with hers, she could not change him by opposing them, and so she might as well make them both happy by accepting them.

For days at a time, when he was loving her like this, Christine was happier than she had ever been in England. It made everything worth while. She saw the French film, ‘La Ronde', and was impressed by the remark with which a husband checks his importunate wife:
‘Dans le mariage, il y a des périodes qui sont calmes et puis des périodes qui sont – hm – moins calmes.'
Christine thought that was true. She was growing to believe that marriage went in cycles, with short seasons of coolness and warmth alternating rapidly, and that it would be as foolish to think that marriage could be all warmth as to think that the year could be all summer. At these times when she was happy marriage seemed such a simple affair, and she felt she could already write a book on the subject.

Lianne and Dick gave a cocktail party. Vinson did not want to go, partly because he did not like the Morgans, and partly because he thought that there would be a lot of junior officers there. Christine said jokingly that if he did not go she would go without him. He half believed she might, and so he consented, with a kind of
noblesse oblige
air, to accompany her.

He would not go so far as to come home early from work, however. They arrived late and the party was in full cry, with the children in nightgowns running about like dogs among people's legs, and three men already on the floor playing with the electric trains.

Vinson found to his surprise that there were two commanders and a captain present. His spirits rose as Dick's powerful cocktails went down. Christine stood close to him while they had their first drinks, because he complained that he always lost track of her at parties, although it was he who usually wandered away to a male group and left her among the women.

‘That's right, darling,' she said, watching the frown slide off Vinson's face. ‘You'll feel fine when you've had a couple of drinks.'

He did. He felt much too fine. He got drunk at the party, and Christine was ashamed, although one or two other people were also drunk, and nobody minded. Lianne did not mind. Vinson had always been a little stiff with her before. She was glad to see him loosening up, and encouraged him to do his imitation of Danny Kaye, to which nobody listened, so it did not matter that it was not very good.

Dick did not mind either. ‘A little tight myself,' he told Christine when she said good-bye.

Christine did mind. She had seen Vinson drink too much before, but she had never seen him drunk. It was all right to see other people like that. They were funny sometimes, but when you knew your own husband's face so well it was not funny to see it unco-ordinated and blurred at the edges.

She managed to get him home, although he wanted to stay at the party, and he was extremely rude to her on the stairs going up to their apartment. She was afraid that someone would come out of a front door and see him stumbling up the stone steps dragging at her arm, but when she tried to hurry him he
called her a goddamn fleabag. When she told him the next day that he had said this he did not believe it, and was shocked at her for inventing it.

When they got inside their apartment he stopped being rude to her and became amorous. Christine let him pull her towards him, but when he kissed her she found that being kissed by a drunk husband is like being kissed by a stranger, and she backed away. ‘I'll make some coffee,' she said, ‘and get you something to eat. Then you'll be all right.'

‘I'm fine.' He lurched towards her. ‘Let's go to bed.'

Christine went into the kitchen. She heard him trip over the edge of a rug as he went into the bedroom, then a crash that must be him kicking her dressing-table stool out of the way. Then silence.

When she went into the bedroom Vinson was asleep, snoring on his back, with his clothes scattered on the floor. She picked them up and put them away. It was the first time she had ever had to do this for him.

In books, when husbands got drunk, wives sometimes spent the night on the sofa in dignified reproach, but sofas in books were longer than Christine's, and she would feel silly and prudish in the morning when he woke up sober and wanted to know what she was doing there.

She undressed quietly and got into bed, well over on her side and keeping an apprehensive eye on him. He did not wake up.

In the morning Vinson was awake before her and came out of the bathroom clear-eyed and jaunty. She opened her eyes to see him sitting on the bed grinning at her.

‘How do you feel?' she asked.

She expected him to say: ‘Lousy', as he often did in the mornings, but he said: ‘Fine. Just fine. How do
you
feel?'

‘All right. Why shouldn't I?'

‘Well, I thought you had quite a load on last night, honey.'

‘I!' She sat up affronted. ‘It was you. You were drunk as an owl. Don't you remember?'

He shook his head. ‘Can't have been. You're making it up.' He laughed at her.

‘Oh, Vin –' She took his hand. ‘Please don't do it again. It was horrible. I hated it.'

He laughed again.' Get up and make some coffee,' he said and went out of the room.

Christine and Vinson were going to have a party too. Not a noisy, disorganized party like the Morgans', but a small buffet supper with everything just so. They had been to many such parties at the homes of other naval officers, and the evenings had all been much the same.

Drinks first – either old-fashioneds or martinis or highballs. The children, if any, sat in dressing-gowns before the television set watching Kukla, Fran and Ollie or a cartoon programme, and everyone said how cute they were, and the children either showed off or stared coldly at the guests.

When the children had been sent to bed, still showing off or staring coldly as they went up the stairs, the hostess brought out the supper, trying not to look too proud of the dishes she had spent all day straining to make better than the dishes of other hostesses. The food and the plates and cutlery were laid out on the table and everyone helped themselves and took the plate back to a chair and ate off their laps or on small occasional tables, like a vicarage tea-party.

Since Christine was the most newly married, she was always asked to serve herself first, which was a pity, for you did not like to take too much, and then you saw other people piling their plates and wished you had too.

The food was nearly always the same – fried chicken or a pot roast with vegetables, which the hostess spent so long carefully spooning out of the casserole and arranging on the best dish that it was half cold by the time you got to it. Vinson wanted to play safe and have fried chicken or pot roast, but Christine privately determined to have lobster salad. She did not tell Vinson in case he might worry beforehand about the consequences of so daring a departure from naval etiquette.

He discussed the invitations with her, but he had already made up his mind about the guests. He wanted Art and Nancy Lee, because he and Christine had been to supper (fried chicken) at the Lees' house, and Vinson was meticulous about paying off invitations in kind. If someone asked him to supper he did not think it was enough to pay them back in cocktails, and if they
asked him to a cocktail party he did not see why he should ask them to supper.

Christine did not see that it mattered, when someone was a good enough friend to be your best man. With her friends in England it had never mattered who invited whom, or to what, so long as you saw each other, but she liked Art and Nancy, so she let him put them on the list. He always made the lists in their household. Christine could never find any paper, but Vinson always carried a little notepad in his pocket, so he was the one who wrote things down. He had small, very neat handwriting, and he liked to make lists of things. He even wanted to make her shopping list before the party, but she would not let him, in case he queried the lobster.

A new captain had recently come to Vinson's division. Vinson had made Christine waste a Sunday afternoon calling on the Captain and his wife in a prissy little bungalow that smelled of new chair covers. They were very dull people, and Captain Fleischman seemed to have watered down the whisky, but now they must be asked to supper. Christine protested mildly, but Vinson admitted that he had already mentioned the invitation to Captain Fleischman, which was cheating, so down they had to go on the list.

She protested, too, about Commander and Mrs Elgin, whom she had only seen half drunk at a big naval cocktail party at the Army and Navy Country Club. Vinson overruled this objection by reminding her that most of the officers had been half drunk by the end of that party, because they had paid for their tickets beforehand and were determined to drink their money's-worth. Vinson had done the same, and Christine had spent most of the evening sitting on a sofa talking to some woman who kept trying to make her join a bridge club. It was very hot, and the woman fanned herself all the time with a paper napkin and said: ‘I feel it so particularly, coming from my air-conditioned place.'

She also said that she despised Washington (Christine was discovering that it was the modish thing to affect dislike of the nation's capital) and she kept saying: ‘It isn't the heat, you see, so much as the humidity', a remark which Christine had already heard many times in Washington and would hear many times
more. Americans talked about the weather even more than English people, and weather bulletins were given every halfhour on the radio to appease this passion for meteorology.

She was very tired of the woman with the paper handkerchief by the time Vinson came back rather unsteadily to find her. She was annoyed at being left for so long, and Vinson did not help by accusing her of being picked up by a man in a floral bow tie sitting on her other side, although the bow tie had been brooding over straight whisky and had not spoken a word to her.

So Commander and Mrs Elgin went on the list, and Christine hoped they would arrive sober. When people are drunk the first time you meet them, you are inclined to think of them as permanent dipsomaniacs; just as when a man has a cold sore on his lip when you are first introduced, you visualize him always with that blemish.

Now they must think of two other people to make up the party. Christine wished they could have some civilians, so that there could be a few other subjects discussed than how old Chuck would like his new post at Norfolk, Virginia, and why the Admiral was getting rid of this aide; but Vinson knew hardly anyone in Washington outside the Navy, and Christine had no friends of her own.

‘Let's ask Dick and Lianne,' she suggested. ‘They'll liven it up a bit.'

‘Oh no, honey. That wouldn't be suitable.' ‘Why not? What's the point of giving a party if it can't be lively?'

‘I don't mean that. I mean that young Morgan is too junior. You can't ask a reserve lieutenant with senior officers like this.' He tapped the list.