The Backward Shadow (13 page)

‘Three tuppence-ha'penny stamps and a Mars Bar,' he said without batting an eye.

I served him with a straight face and a heart nearly bursting with joy, while Mrs. Stephens looked at him curiously from behind the jars. He was subtly changed once again. His clothes were better—gone the threadbare corduroy jacket and the jeans-like trousers, and in their place a nice pair of off-the-peg flannels and a very nice polo-neck sweater. My eyes slid carelessly past this to his hair, which happily he had not allowed to grow to a fashionable length, and then snapped back again sharply. The sweater definitely had a hand-knitted look.

‘Where did you get that?' I asked, much to Mrs. Stephens' surprise.

‘Ah-ha! Lost none of our acuity, I notice,' he remarked, unpeeling the Mars Bar and taking a bite out of it. ‘Want a bit?'

‘No thanks, I want to know where you got that sweater.'

‘Well, as you obviously spotted, it was knitted for me.'

‘Who by?'

‘We literate authors say, by whom? What are you doing in here?'

‘What are
you
? And don't change the subject.'

‘If you mean, how did I know where to look for you, Billie told me. She's a great admirer of yours—and mine, by the way. I've got lots to tell you. When do you get off?'

‘From here, at opening time. Then I move across to the local.'

He raised his eyebrows. ‘You are a busy girl,' he said in a disturbed tone. He lowered his voice. ‘Is all this really necessary?'

‘And how.'

‘Where's the baby?'

I gestured over my shoulder. Several customers were waiting. Toby took the hint. I'll wait for you in the Swan,' he said, and edged to the door. There he stopped and, while I was trying to listen to the next customer's order, distracted me by a series of gestures indicating that the maker of the sweater was a luscious, shapely siren. With a last erotic roll of his eyes he went out, but stood for some time peering through the window making faces at me. He sloped off at last, leaving me to cope with my feelings and a crowd of customers and Mrs. Stephens' curiosity.

‘Friend of yours, dear?' she asked as soon as there was the smallest opportunity.

‘Yes, a very old friend.'

‘He doesn't look very well-fed,' she remarked.

‘He's a writer.' I knew that, to Mrs. Stephens, that would be self-explanatory.

‘Ah! I see,' she said wisely.

At 11.30 I carted the cot, which seemed to grow heavier every day, across the road. Christmas was hard upon us, and the pub was thickly festooned with aged paper-chains and fretted bells and balls, with a daily-increasing number of cards tacked to the edge of the awning above the bar. Toby jumped up as I came back in, lugging the cot, and helped me to set it on one of the benches. He stood for some time then, staring down at David, who stared back up at him.

‘He's huge,' he said at last in a rather subdued voice.

‘Well, that's good, isn't it?'

‘Oh yes … it's just that …'

‘What?'

‘I'm missing so much of him.'

I glanced at him quickly. If he meant this as it sounded, it was perhaps the nicest thing that had been said to me for some time.

He seemed to pull his eyes away from the baby and said to me, ‘Have you time for a quick one before you start serving them?'

The pub was almost empty still, so I ducked under the bar and got us both a drink. As I passed him his, Toby leaned across the bar and kissed me quickly. ‘You,' he said gently.

‘Yes, me,' I said with too much briskness because I instantly wanted to be in bed with him. ‘Now what about this sweater?'

‘Ah yes,' he said. ‘Watch closely.' He reached into the neck of the sweater and slowly drew out a girlie magazine with the head and naked bosom of a gorgeous blonde on its cover. By the time he'd completely withdrawn it it concealed his own face and looked as if the girl were emerging from the polo neck.

‘Brilliant,' I said sourly. ‘
She
can't even knit for herself, apparently. Come on, who was it?'

‘Well, she's very young—seventeen as a matter of fact. The most delectable age. She's trim and slim and small and red-headed and she wears skirts up to here and bells round her ankles …'

‘Stop making it up.'

‘But it's true! Every word. As a matter of fact, she's Billie Lee's daughter.'

This rang so true that suddenly I was really jealous. I knew—I hoped—I had no cause to be, but I was. How dared she knit him a sweater? What could be more intimate, more of a declaration? The fact of my own incapacity in this field made things worse.

‘What's her name?'

‘Whistler.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Her real name is Melinda or something frightful, but she's always called Whistler. And don't ask what that makes Billie. She's rather had that joke.'

‘And she's keen on you—obviously.'

‘Why obviously?'

‘Well I mean to say! It's a cable-stitch.'

He looked blank for a minute, then burst out laughing. ‘Well, as it happens she
is
a bit struck. They get these crushes at that age. I go round to Billie's quite a bit—she's not just an agent to me, she's much more a friend and believe me, she's been quite wonderful through many a tight spot in the last year. I don't think I'd ever have finished the first novel if she hadn't been around to push me.'

‘I'm sure. Now about Whistler, of all the bloody silly names.'

‘Don't be like that.'

‘I
am
like it. Didn't you know?'

‘No.'

‘Well you've never given me cause before.'

‘Sad, but true. I can't even say “that's all you know”.'

‘Are
you
struck?'

‘Madly. She's young, tender, dewy-eyed …'

‘Shut up.'

‘Darling!'

‘Sorry. Just tell me the facts.'

He looked into my eyes and then down into his drink. ‘
Facts
. You know I'm a man of fiction. But she's very pretty—that's a fact.'

I left him to serve a customer. My eyes were burning. I felt angry and miserable. I was more angry with myself than with him, because what was it all about, what was I living alone for, and not making demands on him, and trying to make myself believe in leaving each other free, if the second I thought the unthinkable—that he might, just might, in my absence look at another woman—my possessiveness came back with such force that the words ‘He's mine, he's mine, he's
mine,' were beating through my brain like the very tides of my blood, and I wanted to tear the sweater off his back and throw it into the pretty face of its loving maker? I wanted to hang a label round his neck saying ‘Taken' and chain him to my bedpost and never let him out of my sight again. And from these primitive feelings I knew that I had no more cured myself of wanting to own him than if I had just grabbed him and held onto him right at the beginning.

When I went back to him, it was as if, by silent mutual agreement, we had decided to drop the subject. He had meant it as a sort of teasing game and I couldn't take it like that so we dropped it. He told me things were going well; he'd sold a short story to the
Saturday Evening Post
, which was at one time the absolute height of his ambition, and he'd started on another novel. He said Billie had persuaded him to leave the Holland Park basement and move to a more habitable abode, so he'd got a big studio-room for himself in a house in Earl's Court—‘Lovely area, such variety! Food, shops, newspapers, nationalities—you name it, we've got it. All the vices and virtues catered for—the world and the city in microcosm. The house I live in is a micro-microcosm.'

‘Like the house in Fulham.'

‘God, no! Thank heaven, it's a good step up from that. The room's big and gaunt and practically empty, but it's very much what I wanted. Now I'm sort of into the way of working properly, I mean so many hours every day, I don't feel I have to keep my surroundings quite so austere. You remember how I wouldn't let myself have a radio or pictures or even books except for what I needed for reference and a few of the classics? It was necessary then, or I'd have sat about all day letting myself fall into any distraction that offered itself. You know I'm naturally bone bloody idle. But one can get into a saving routine, a habit of work, and then you're like a cured alcoholic, you're afraid to backslide, you remember the horror of not working and you're afraid to let a day drift by … I've done a tremendous bulk of work in the last nine months or so, and some of it's beginning to sell, and now
Billie makes me keep it up by ringing me every few days to ask how many pages I've written. But it's not so essential any more—I can do it for myself. So I'm free to let myself have some of the amenities I've never had but always wanted.'

‘Here, Jane! Don't you work for us any more, girl?'

I rushed through into the Public to help Alf with an apologetic air, but kept nipping back whenever I could to the end of the bar in the Saloon to hear the next instalment. Between midday and 2.30 I caught up on all his news. I heard about the few things he'd carefully bought for himself in markets and antique shops (‘Well, junk shops really, I can't run to antique-shop prices, even the Earl's Court Road ones.') I heard the book was coming out in January, that the next was half-finished. I heard some very funny stories about other people living in the house. And I heard about John.

‘You know, I often wonder what will become of John. After all, what's the future for a chap like him? He'll never marry, never have a proper home; he's so gentle and innocent he'll never really get on in the world of night-club bands and so on. And I do care about the old black bastard, I mean I'll never forget how he mothered the pair of us when we were all imprisoned together in that grim house. And how we hurt him by falling in love! I think he was half in love with both of us. In the end he completely got over any jealousy and only wanted us to marry and be happy. I never knew a queer could be so natural in his outlook towards marriage and children. He hasn't a clue, you know, that there's anything wrong with him, I don't suppose he's ever heard of queerdom or would be anything but horrified if anyone told him he wasn't normal. I hope to Christ nobody ever does! I try to see him as often as I can. He always asks wistfully about you and the baby; he can't understand why we're not together.' He took hold of my forefinger and pushed at the nail with his thumb and muttered, ‘When I talk to John and sort of soak up some of his simplicity about love and babies, I can't understand why myself.' He looked up at me with that utter candour
that came over him whenever he wasn't fooling around. ‘Would you like to? I mean, shall we?'

I stared at him. I should say no, because I could see that he was functioning under John's influence and that he, by himself, was not sure. I myself was not entirely sure—of him. Would he really be able to love the baby and forget it wasn't his? Would he be able to work with a wife and child in the house? Would he be able to keep us, or endure not being able to keep us, and my having to help? I should say no … but what if he never asked again?

In the space of those few seconds, other urgent considerations rushed through my mind. I had never, till now, thought for one moment of the possibility of his meeting someone else. But now I thought I'd been a fool. Toby was hardly suited to a monastic existence, however he might be disciplining himself; he was a very normal, hot-blooded man, and as he wasn't getting it from me, where was he to get it? He couldn't go on not getting it forever. Sooner or later he'd form a relationship, probably meaning it to be one of those transient oh-be-joyful things that goes up like a rocket and leaves nothing but a gratifying smell of spent sulphur in the air afterwards; but knowing Toby, it might very well not stay like that, because he wasn't that kind; if he liked the girl well enough to make love to her in the first place, he probably liked her enough to get really involved later on. And if he got really involved with any other woman I would want to kill the pair of them, but that wouldn't help much, since it would be entirely my own responsibility. Especially now that he'd actually asked me in so many words.

‘Toby,' I began carefully.

‘Last orders, please!'

We looked at each other and laughed as the rush to the counter began. ‘The finality of that!' said Toby. ‘Nothing on earth should sound that final.'

DOTTIE
went to Birmingham on the 23rd, and came back late on Christmas Eve—having stayed overnight at a long-distance drivers' stop-over en route for home and had several hair-raising adventures; she hadn't had much luck and was feeling disappointed and depressed. The foundry was still there, and still operating, but under new management—no more ‘glass artists', but a production line which went on day and night, turning out every sort of monstrosity that can possibly be formed of glass. At first she couldn't even find anybody there who wasn't a white-collar worker—not an overall, not a burst cheek-vein, not a blow-pipe, not even a furnace was in evidence. She sat in a clean grey cubicle and spoke to a clean grey woman who merely smiled thinly when she told her what she wanted. On her way out she went scouting round the back and found some men who looked as if they might, in the course of their work, occasionally see glass in its molten state, eating sandwiches in a patch of cold sunshine which fell miraculously through the black net of the surrounding chimneys onto a packing-case. She asked them if they'd ever heard of anybody who knew how to blow glass and they laughed and eyed her up and down in her bright trim coat and long London boots, and said how could you have a glass factory without people who knew how to blow glass? They all knew how. But, said Dottie, did any of them know how to
work
glass, to make something of their own? ‘I know how to make mistakes!' said one man. ‘Do you know how to make mistakes, miss?' They all roared. Dottie, setting her teeth, waited silently for them to stop, and then asked the same man, ‘What I mean is, could you make something out of glass that was quite different from anything else?' ‘Like what, for instance?' he asked suspiciously. She pulled out a couple of pages from her pet American magazine,
Craft Horizons
, showing some beautiful smooth irregular shapes.
The men crowded round to look. ‘What's this, then? Here, Ron, look at this! What magazine's this, then?' They examined the pictures with wonder, and read the captions. They seemed to be struck dumb. ‘But what is it?' asked one of them. ‘It's not a vase, it's not a jug—some kind of ornament, is it? But it's not symmetrical.' ‘That's the whole point—one of them. It's art. Like a statue. The man who made it is trying to say something—with glass. Not simply to make something useful.' They were silent, staring at the unfamiliar contours. ‘Could any of you do anything like it?' They shook their heads slowly. ‘Don't see the point of it, meself,' said one. ‘You'd never sell it. Who'd want a thing like that?' ‘Somebody did. Somebody paid nearly five hundred dollars for that one, for instance.' The men whistled. Then one of them said, ‘Ah. But that's Americans. They'll buy anything.'