Stories (60 page)

“So you’re engaged to Stanley Hunt?” said Tony.

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“Caught him—good for you!”

“He’s caught me, more like it!”

“Have it your way.”

She was red and angry. He was serious.

“Come and have a bite?” he said. She went.

It was a small restaurant, full of office workers eating on luncheon vouchers. She ate fried plaice (“No chips, please”) and he ate steak-and-kidney pudding. He joked, watched her, watched her intently, said finally: “Can’t you do better than that?” He meant, and she knew it, better in the sense she would use herself, in her heart: he meant nice. Like himself. But did that mean that Tony thought she was nice? Unlike Stanley? She did not think she was; she was moved to tears (concealed) that he did. “What’s wrong with him then?” she demanded, casual. “What’s wrong with you? You need your head examined.” He said it seriously, and they exchanged a long look. The two of them sat looking goodbye at each other: the extremely pretty girl at whom everyone in the room kept glancing and remarking on, and the goodlooking, dark, rather fat young accountant who was brusque and solemn with disappointment in her. With love for her? Very likely.

She went home silent, thinking of Tony. When she thought of him, she needed to cry. She also needed to hurt him.

But she told her parents she was engaged to Stanley, who would be an architect. They would have their own house, in (they thought) Hemel Hempstead. He owned a car. He was coming to tea on Sunday. Her mother forgot the dukes and the film producers before the announcement ended; her father
listened judiciously, then congratulated her. He had been going to a football match on Sunday, but agreed, after persuasion, that this was a good enough reason to stay home.

Her mother then began discussing, with deference to Maureen’s superior knowledge, how to manage next Sunday to best advantage. For four days she went on about it. But she was talking to herself. Her husband listened, said nothing. And Maureen listened, critically, like her father. Mrs. Watson began clamouring for a definite opinion on what sort of cake to serve on Sunday. But Maureen had no opinion. She sat, quiet, looking at her mother, a largish ageing woman, her ex-fair hair dyed yellow, her flesh guttering. She was like an excited child, and it was not attractive. Stupid, stupid, stupid—that’s all you are, thought Maureen.

As for Maureen, if anyone had made the comparison, she was “sulking” as she had before over being a model and having to be drilled out of her “voice.” She said nothing but: “It’ll be all right, Mum, don’t get so worked up.” Which was true, because Stanley knew what to expect: he knew why he had not been invited to meet her parents until properly hooked. He would have done the same in her place. He was doing the same: she was going to meet his parents the week after. What Mrs. Watson, Mr. Watson, wore on Sunday; whether sandwiches or cake were served; whether there were fresh or artificial flowers—none of it mattered. The Watsons were part of the bargain: what he was paying in return for publicly owning the most covetable woman anywhere they were likely to be; and for the right to sleep with her after the public display.

Meanwhile Maureen said not a word. She sat on her bed looking at nothing in particular. Once or twice she examined her face in the mirror, and even put cream on it. And she cut out a dress, but put it aside.

On Sunday Mrs. Watson laid tea for four, using her own judgement, since Maureen was too deeply in love (so she told everyone) to notice such trifles. At four Stanley was expected, and at three-fifty-five Maureen descended to the livingroom. She wore a faded pink dress from three summers before, her mother’s cretonne overall used for housework, and a piece of cloth tied round her hair that might very well have been a duster. At any rate, it was faded grey. She had put on a pair of her mother’s old shoes. She could not be called plain; but she
looked like her own faded elder sister, dressed for a hard day’s spring cleaning.

Her father, knowledgeable, said nothing: he lowered the paper, examined her, let out a short laugh, and lifted it again. Mrs. Watson, understanding at last that this was a real crisis, burst into tears. Stanley arrived before Mrs. Watson could stop herself crying. He nearly said to Mrs. Watson: “I didn’t know Maureen had an older sister.” Maureen sat listless at one end of the table, Mr. Watson sat grinning at the other, and Mrs. Watson sniffed and wiped her eyes between the two.

Maureen said: “Hello, Stanley, meet my father and mother.” He shook their hands and stared at her. She did not meet his eyes: rather, the surface of her blue gaze met the furious, incredulous, hurt pounce of his glares at her. Maureen poured tea, offered him sandwiches and cake, and made conversation about the weather, and the prices of food, and the dangers of giving even good customers credit in the shop. He sat there, a well set up young man, with his brushed hair, his brushed moustache, his checked brown cloth jacket, and a face flaming with anger and affront. He said nothing, but Maureen talked on, her voice trailing and cool. At five o’clock, Mrs. Watson again burst into tears, her whole body shaking, and Stanley brusquely left.

Mr. Watson said: “Well, why did you lead him on, then?” and turned on the television. Mrs. Watson went to lie down. Maureen, in her own room, took off the various items of her disguise, and returned them to her mother’s room. “Don’t cry, Mum. What are you carrying on like that for? What’s the matter?” Then she dressed extremely carefully in a new white linen suit, brown shoes, beige blouse. She did her hair and her face, and sat looking at herself. The last two hours (or week) hit her, and her stomach hurt so that she doubled up. She cried; but the tears smeared her makeup, and she stopped herself with the side of a fist against her mouth.

It now seemed to her that for the last week she had simply not been Maureen; she had been someone else. What had she done it for? Why? Then she knew it was for Tony: during all that ridiculous scene at the tea table, she had imagined Tony looking on, grinning, but understanding her.

She now wiped her face quite clear of tears, and went quietly out of the house so as not to disturb her father and mother. There was a telephone booth at the corner. She stepped, calm
and aloof, along the street, her mouth held (as it always was) in an almost smile. Bert from the grocer’s shop said: “Hey, Maureen, that’s a smasher. Who’s it for?” And she gave him the smile and the toss of the head that went with the street and said: “You, Bert, it’s all for you.” She went to the telephone booth thinking of Tony. She felt as if he already knew what had happened. She would say: “Let’s go and dance, Tony.” He would say: “Where shall I meet you?” She dialled his number, and it rang and it rang and it rang. She stood holding the receiver, waiting. About ten minutes—more. Slowly she replaced it. He had let her down. He had been telling her, in words and without, to be something, to stay something, and now he did not care; he had let her down.

Maureen quietened herself and telephoned Stanley.

All right then, if that’s how you want it, she said to Tony.

Stanley answered, and she said amiably: “Hello.”

Silence. She could hear him breathing, fast. She could see his affronted face.

“Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” She tried to make this casual, but she could hear the fear in her voice. Oh yes, she could lose him and probably had. To hide the fear, she said: “Can’t you take a joke, Stanley?” and laughed.

“A joke!”

She laughed. Not bad, it sounded all right.

“I thought you’d gone off your nut, clean off your rocker….” He was breathing in and out, a rasping noise. She was reminded of his hot breathing down her neck and her arms. Her own breath quickened, even while she thought: I don’t like him, I really don’t like him at all … and she said softly: “Oh Stan, I was having a bit of a giggle, that’s all.”

Silence. Now, this was the crucial moment.

“Oh Stan, can’t you see—I thought it was all just boring, that’s all it was.” She laughed again.

He said: “Nice for your parents, I don’t think.”

“Oh they don’t mind—they laughed after you’d left, though first they were cross.” She added hastily, afraid he might think they were laughing at him: “They’re used to me, that’s all it is.”

Another long silence. With all her willpower she insisted that he should soften. But he said nothing, merely breathed in and out, into the receiver.

“Stanley, it was only a joke, you aren’t really angry, are you,
Stanley?” The tears sounded in her voice now, and she judged it better that they should.

He said, after hesitation: “Well, Maureen, I just didn’t like it. I don’t like that kind of thing, that’s all.” She allowed herself to go on crying, and after a while he said, forgiving her in a voice that was condescending and irritated: “Well, all right, all right, there’s no point in crying, is there?”

He was annoyed with himself for giving in; she knew that, because she would have been. He had given her up, thrown her over, during the last couple of hours: he was pleased, really, that something from outside had forced him to give her up. Now he could be free for the something better that would turn up—someone who would not strike terror into him by an extraordinary performance like this afternoon’s.

“Let’s go off to the pictures, Stan….”

Even now, he hesitated. Then he said, quick and reluctant: “I’ll meet you at Leicester Square, outside the Odeon, at seven o’clock.” He put down the receiver.

Usually he came to pick her up in the car from the corner of the street.

She stood smiling, the tears running down her face. She knew she was crying because of the loss of Tony, who had let her down. She walked back to her house to make up again, thinking that she was in Stanley’s power now: there was no balance between them, the advantage was all his.

T
his is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence.

They were older when they married than most of their married friends: in their well-seasoned late twenties. Both had had a number of affairs, sweet rather than bitter; and when they fell in love—for they did fall in love—had known each other for some time. They joked that they had saved each other “for the real thing.” That they had waited so long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible discrimination. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt) probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid, self-doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.

Not only they, but others, felt they were well-matched: their friends’ delight was an additional proof of their happiness. They had played the same roles, male and female, in this group or set, if such a wide, loosely connected, constantly changing constellation of people could be called a set. They had both become, by virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others came for advice. They could be, and were, relied on. It was one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably because of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course! How right! How was it we never thought of it before!

And so they married amid general rejoicing, and because of
their foresight and their sense for what was probable, nothing was a surprise to them.

Both had well-paid jobs. Matthew was a subeditor on a large London newspaper, and Susan worked in an advertising firm. He was not the stuff of which editors or publicised journalists are made, but he was much more than “a subeditor,” being one of the essential background people who in fact steady, inspire and make possible the people in the limelight. He was content with this position. Susan had a talent for commercial drawing. She was humorous about the advertisements she was responsible for, but she did not feel strongly about them one way or the other.

Both, before they married, had had pleasant flats, but they felt it unwise to base a marriage on either flat, because it might seem like a submission of personality on the part of the one whose flat it was not. They moved into a new flat in South Kensington on the clear understanding that when their marriage had settled down (a process they knew would not take long, and was in fact more a humorous concession to popular wisdom than what was due to themselves) they would buy a house and start a family.

And this is what happened. They lived in their charming flat for two years, giving parties and going to them, being a popular young married couple, and then Susan became pregnant, she gave up her job, and they bought a house in Richmond. It was typical of this couple that they had a son first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter. Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose. But people did feel these two had chosen; this balanced and sensible family was no more than what was due to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right.

And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in Richmond and were happy. They had everything they had wanted and had planned for.