The Backward Shadow (12 page)

‘Could you have an affair with somebody else?'

The question came from Dottie, but I might have asked it of myself. The answer, based with all honesty on my experience with that grisly Alan, had to be a qualified yes, and for the first time I understood how men can have affairs and claim that it has nothing to do with their marriage. But that's not to say I would have felt right about it, or enjoyed it more than marginally, or that it wouldn't have damaged me, and me-and-Toby.

‘Could you?'

‘I don't know—perhaps. But not—but never—marry.' I felt like adding,
I am married
, but it would have sounded stupid.

‘Whatever happened,' Dottie asked suddenly, just as I was going out of the door, ‘to the black man?'

‘John? He's working in a club in London.'

‘Could you have an affair with a negro?'

‘Dottie, what on earth is all this about?—No.'

‘Why not?'

‘I'd feel strange about it. I must go.'

‘Go on, then. I'll take good care of David.' I was outside and climbing into the car when I heard the window open and Dottie shouted after me: ‘
I
could!'

‘What?'

‘Have an affair with a negro!'

‘Well, you're out of luck in these parts.'

‘I might go and hunt up John. He was a really nice fellow.'

I slammed the car door eloquently and drove away, thinking: a fat lot of good darling old John would do you or any woman. I didn't like the taste left in my mouth by the conversation, somehow. Was Dottie getting frustrated? It was something I could well sympathise with, though it didn't take me like that—sexy conversations and so on. And being
nervy. The way I coped was to lie in bed at night, or in my bath, and imagine Toby and me in all sorts of lovely pornographic situations—on rafts at sea where he had to lick my lips to keep them moist, or in steaming jungles with us both naked and slippery, or just back in the L-shaped room doing the things we actually did. I liked reading sexy books, too, and identifying myself with the protagonists. The trouble with so-called dirty books, of course, is that they usually
get
dirty—I mean, the lovely sex gets mucky and perverted instead of just being normal, the way I like it. For instance I adored
Fanny Hill
and got a lot of purely physical, sublimationary pleasure out of it, till it got to the mucky bits about whips and idiots which made me feel absolutely sick. What the hell is the matter with people that they need that sort of thing? And what was the matter with Dottie, that she needed to start talking about having affairs with negroes in that rather peculiar, lip-licking way? I loved Dottie. I really cared about her. It worried me very much when she did things or said things that were not in keeping with what I thought I knew of her.

SEVERAL
weeks passed. I saw little enough of Dottie, and nothing of Henry, except once he drove down to go into a huddle with Dottie over the estimates. He left again without even waiting for a meal, but Dottie was far too excited to notice. It was clear, without anything specific being said, that he had decided to include himself in.

I was kept busy following my complex schedule; sometimes I felt as if David and I were moving parts in some kind of involved puzzle—one of those how-to-get-from-A-to-Z-by-the-longest-possible-route things. I settled into the routine as well as I could, and found it just worked, though the transition from the frowsty back bedroom at the Stephenses to the ever-colder air in the Davieses' back garden gave David the first cold of his life. This made for worse complications, since Alf was appalled at the idea that Eleanor might catch this cold and die. So for several days David, muffled up to the eyebrows, had to travel round the countryside in the back seat of Dottie's car. We arranged a sort of baby-trap of fish-netting over the top of the carry-cot so that he couldn't roll out, but in any case he slept most of the time; when Dottie stopped somewhere for food, usually frugally at a country café or pub, she would get the bottle out of the thermos and feed him on her knee, stuffing a few spoonfuls of mashed vegetables or rice pudding into his mouth from her own dish for good measure. I'm sure that David's cast-iron stomach and willingness to eat absolutely anything dates from those days when he had to fit willy-nilly into his godmother's business life.

In the evenings we would both stagger home in a state of near-exhaustion, and usually Dottie would prepare a scratch meal while I crawled into a bath with David and got him off to bed. Really, if he had been a difficult baby in any way I simply don't know how we'd have managed, but he was quite angelic and didn't seem to mind what sort of hours he
kept or how many of them were spent in different localities or bumping about in strange cars.

Then Dottie and I would sit down together by the fire (which in those rushed weeks I often treacherously wished was a simple electric one which didn't need raking out, laying and lighting) with our suppers on our knees and the radio, with luck, playing soft, soothing music, and I would listen to her day's doings. (There was little enough to relate to her of mine, in which the dramatic highlight was likely to be something like Mufferpaws having misbehaved under Mr. Stephens' chair, leading to a horrible misunderstanding, or Eleanor cutting a tooth.)

I had to hand it to Dottie. She really was getting down to cases. I was amazed by how many sources of talent she had run to earth in how short a time. One person interested in some form of handicraft seemed to lead to another. At first, whenever she enquired for people who could make things, she was directed to Old Mrs. Crabbe who knitted lovely little jumpers, or Miss Dogsbody who was famous for her upside-down cake at bring-and-buys. Far from turning up her nose at these suggestions, she always meticulously followed them up; sitting in Mrs. Crabbe's parlour watching her hands flash nimbly over half-finished weeny garments, her quick eye would be roving the walls and corners; and there, sure enough, she might see a rather ghastly, but beautifully executed, embroidered picture or firescreen or cushion-cover. This she would admire, and be told that this was just something Mrs. Crabbe's married daughter did ‘to fill her hands' while she watched the telly in the evenings. So then Dottie would repair to the home of Mrs. Crabbe's married daughter, and ask whether she would be prepared to alter her style a little—relinquish the nasturtiums and hollyhocks and crinoline ladies, and embroider according to a design which Dottie would supply. When Mrs. Crabbe's daughter learned that there would be money in this which could be made in her spare time, she agreed readily. So then Dottie would make a note in her little ABC notebook under E for Embroidery, and come home and
tell me: ‘Now what I've got to look out for is an artist who can design small modern tapestries. They're all the rage now, in London—I saw a marvellous wall decoration a few weeks ago in a friend's flat which turned out to be a piece of embroidery based on a small Sutherland.'

‘Sew-your-own-Coventry-Cathedral,' I suggested.

‘Don't mock,' she said severely. ‘It'll sell.'

She said the same of pictures made of scraps of material and nylon stockings, which a middle-aged maiden lady in the district whose talents had so far been limited to making patchwork tea-cosies had rather doubtfully agreed she would try her hand at; and dolls made of polished straw or corn-cobs and dried leaves, ‘in the tradition of the American craftsmen', as Dottie loftily put it; and children's basket-chairs with hoods, which the old basket-maker she had tracked down had told her he'd almost forgotten how to make because there was no demand for them.

But all these were small fry. Pictures, and dolls would not fill the shop, or our pockets. She had to lay on ‘the hard stuff' as she called it. So she asked round and consulted local suppliers and telephone directories and all sorts of other ingenious sources, and made a list of all the professional carpenters, potters, weavers, blacksmiths and glass-blowers she could find out about. Actually there were no glass-blowers, which was a heavy blow to her; the nearest glass foundry was in the Midlands, and she gloomily supposed they would be working full-blast mass-producing objects of singular monotony and hideousness, like the vases which flourished in the Davieses' apartment, all without a flaw or a sign of having been touched by a warm, skilful human hand (or rather, blown into by a warm human mouth). However, doggedly determined, she set off one morning in the car to drive North and see if she couldn't find some smallish factory with a few craftsmen left who might blow her some nice thick lopsided bubbly objects with silken textured sides and ‘that marvellous rough blob at the bottom where they've been broken off the pipe', which she could display and sell as works of the glass-blowers' art. I
watched her go with a sense of affection and pride, but also a feeling of despair; she cared so desperately—not just about the shop, but about this whole concept she'd developed, this hatred of mass-production, the almost sensuous desire to propagate the work of skilled hands. I knew she was struggling against the tide, and I felt certain that, well as she had done in a small way so far, today she was doomed to disappointment. Lost in the grimy stews of the industrial Midlands, she might see and realise what she was actually up against; they might laugh at her; she might, probably would, come back that night worn out and with a destructive inkling—which I had had from the outset—that, however enthusiastically we might start out, however noble our aims or hard our efforts, by the very nature of our times, our enterprise was doomed.

Sure enough, she arrived back at eleven p.m., desperately stiff and weary, and with nothing concrete to show for it except one slender hope. I'd kept supper for her, and as she sat by the fire, almost too tired to eat it, sipping a much-needed whisky and relating her story with her head back and her eyes closed, she told me that, in the course of as dismal and depressing a day as I had foreseen for her, she had met one man with broken veins in his cheeks and lips like a trumpeter who said he had once worked for a private foundry on the outskirts of Birmingham where what he called ‘glass artists' used to come in on Saturday afternoons before the fires had cooled, and ‘blow all manner of queer things, animals and that sometimes, but other times they just blowed lumps'. This sounded exactly what Dottie wanted, but of course it was too late by then to go all the way across to Brum, so she planned to go up there in a day or two, and see if she could find the place, if it still existed. ‘Probably doesn't,' she said in a flat, weary voice. ‘It's probably a supermarket or a “proper” factory by now. That's what that ex-craftsman called the soulless junk-producing monolith where he works now—a proper factory.'

She filled the next few days with visits closer at hand, though often she would drive fifty miles to talk to a craftsman she'd heard of in a distant village; sometimes she would spend hours
just trying to find their workshops or cottages; some of the villages were even so small they were not to be found on any map, and these, she said, were where one frequently turned up the best people; it was as if the less contact they had with the world, the less likely the world was to have laid its corruptive finger on them and taken away their skills. One day she drove all the way to the Cotswolds to unearth an old man whose carving she'd seen in a junk-shop in Esher. This time she came back elated. ‘Gloucestershire's the place!' she exclaimed happily, tucking into a vast meal at 10 p.m. (Her appetite fluctuated according to the sort of people she'd met during the day.) ‘I tell you, the further away from the big city centres they are, the better they work, and the nicer they are, too. Simple, unspoiled, gentle, kind, marvellous, marvellous people. We're ruining ourselves, Jane, that's what we're doing, we poor city idiots, clogging our bodies with poisons and cramming our souls and hands with ugliness. That old man today made me feel ashamed of myself, ashamed of my slick silly clothes, ashamed of the way I talk and the way I think and with practically everything about the way I live except the fact that some drive in me had led me to be sitting there with him, drinking cider and handling his
beautiful
work. You know? His tools alone, the clutter of old, worn, practical, creative tools on his work bench, was something you could paint or photograph from a hundred angles and have a picture worth hanging on your wall every time. And the
quiet
there—the utter peace! Every single thing in his cottage was old and well-worn and lovely to touch—mellow, smooth, integrated. I could have stayed there forever. Well,' catching my eye, ‘of course that's not true, but the fact that I couldn't, means there's something wrong with
me
. That old man had something that—' She put a big chunk of stewed lamb into her mouth and chewed it blissfully. ‘Food,' she said, ‘is wonderful when you've earned it. Oh, I should have been a farmer's boy-oy-oy … have we any beer? No, don't laugh at me. Or, yes, you may if you like. I don't care. The old man has agreed to make tables for us. Not just ordinary tables. Irregular nests,
each one a slightly different shape; and little kidney-shaped ones for children, with the chairs to match. In oak and pine and rosewood. He does the finish himself—satin. No varnish. Wait till you see what he gave me—a wonderful knife-box, with a lid that fits exactly like a glove. Just to open and close it gives one a sensual thrill. He carves a little thistle on all his work, it's his trade-mark, like Grinling Gibbons' mouse.'

She set off for Birmingham at the crack of dawn next day, before I was even awake, and despite the fact that she'd had only about five hours' sleep. I couldn't help worrying about her driving up the M1 like that, in case she got sleepy, but she'd gone by the time I thought of warning her to take a thermos of coffee. I went off to work as usual, and was in the middle of serving a little boy with a box of liquorice allsorts when the post-office door opened and in walked Toby.