The Backward Shadow (28 page)

‘That's fine, cheer us up,' said Henry. ‘Anyway, you certainly did your bit today.' He looked at her with suddenly narrowed eyes. ‘I hope to Christ you really liked all that stuff,' he said, ‘and didn't just buy it to—'

‘Shut up,' she said sharply. ‘I don't
ever
do stupid, meaningless, dishonest things like that, and you should know it.'

We drove home, and Henry expansively invited them in for supper, which caused me sinkings of the heart because I hadn't planned on that; but Joanna, who I imagined to be a thoroughly experienced hostess, took one quick glance at my face (which may well have paled slightly) and chipped in with a grateful but firm refusal. ‘Baby-sitter problems—you
know
,' she said cosily to me. We were standing in the lane outside the cottage gate; Ted, with lumbering courtesy, and entirely masculine tenderness, was helping her on with a very glamorous off-white trench-coat lined with dark real fur which, when done up, only showed discreetly at neck and cuffs—an overstated understatement of wealth and restraint. Through this wrist-ruff her thin expressive hand extended itself to shake mine warmly. ‘It's been gorgeous,' she said. ‘You must come to us and bring David. And if you can't or don't, I'm coming to see you again soon.' She shook Dottie's hand more reservedly, and then kissed Henry. She was so petite that she had to stand on tiptoe to do it and watching Dottie I could see that she did know that there had once been something between them (I think I would have guessed it myself from that brief moment even if I hadn't known) and that she minded. I understood it so well. She had so little of him, she begrudged any form of sharing. And Jo was the sort of woman you would always have to feel a little wary of, however married she was. And I somehow felt that, despite everything, she was very married.

Then Henry shook hands with Ted, who said grudgingly, ‘Well son, I can't pretend it hasn't surprised me a bit, to
hear how well you're making out with that posh ice-cream-and-oysters business of yours. If you really get a concession from Heal's, you're away, I suppose. Funny, I thought you'd be sure to come a cropper, trying to flog stuff like that … maybe the public taste's improving.'

‘Let's hope so—it's time it did.'

‘So long as you're giving 'em what they want, that's the way … like I always told you. No good trying to educate 'em. Find out what they want and lay it in by the gross.' He looked thoughtfully at his brogues for a minute. ‘Funny somehow, to think of my five thousand going on stuff like that.'

‘
My
five thousand, Dad.'

‘I mean, that I made.'

‘
I
mean, that
I
made.'

Ted looked at him a moment, and then laughed and gave him a sort of hug. ‘Yes, well, you've learnt something from your old Dad, anyhow. Eh?'

‘And let's hope his old Dad's learnt something from him,' put in Jo briskly. ‘Eh? Come on, Ted, we must away.'

After they'd gone we sat about the living-room and Henry suddenly got up and, after asking my permission, poured himself a large whisky and soda. He went back to his armchair and sat drinking it, looking, I thought, remarkably contented, at least until the drink was finished. Then his conscience started bothering him.

‘Maybe I shouldn't have told all those whoppers to the old man,' he said. ‘But I couldn't let him have the laugh on me.'

‘He surely wouldn't have laughed!'

‘Oh ho! Would he not! You don't know him.' He looked over at Dottie who was staring into the fire with a fixed expression. I knew she was thinking about Jo; I hoped Henry didn't. ‘But there's one thing. Moments of desperation can throw up some good ideas. That one about Heal's—we just might be able to make an honest man of me about that. It's worth looking into. Eh, Dorothy?' Dottie came to with a jolt.

‘Heal's? Yes. Yes, I thought when we said it that it would bear investigating. I'll write and make an appointment—enclose
some cuttings from the opening press.' She got up. ‘I must go to bed,' she said shortly. ‘Goodnight to you both.' She gave us a vague salute and went upstairs. She looked awfully tired.

Henry echoed my thought. ‘She looks tired,' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘Just the same, eight p.m.'s pretty early to be going to bed.'

We said no more. I realised it was the first time for ages that I'd been alone with Henry and I wished I didn't feel so uncomfortable with him, now that there was nothing to keep the conversation going. I was tired myself, and half-wished he would go; but when I thought of his austere anonymous little flat, and his aloneness once he shut the door after himself there, I felt glad he seemed to want to stay awhile. To be alone and to think about your own death coming closer … Addy had done that, deliberately. But Addy was as strong as a weathered oak, and the commoner forms of loneliness were unknown to her. Henry always appeared very self-sufficient, but there was a vulnerable place inside him that made the way he was behaving all the more admirable.

‘Do you want some supper, Henry?'

‘Thanks, I don't mind.'

‘It's only left-overs, I'm afraid.'

‘Left-overs of
that
meal would grace a prince's table,' he said, and added, ‘Thanks. For the lunch, I mean.'

‘Was it all right?'

‘Spot on.'

He smiled at me and, incredibly, I caught myself wanting to love him—to go to him that moment and kiss and caress him. The attraction of the doomed, I thought, trying to disgust myself, to shake off this extraordinary feeling. You don't really find him physically attractive, what you feel this moment is an unworthy mixture of pity and morbidity, not flattering to him really. But I went into the kitchen and stood there for a moment, quite shaken by something very much like desire, and unable to pull myself away from it by any kind of crisp rationalisations.

However, by the time I'd hashed up some supper for us it had faded almost into total quiescence, only interfering subtly with my actions. For instance, I wanted to lay a rather special sort of table in the dining-room with candles and so on but I stopped myself, of course, and instead threw a few bits of china and cutlery onto the kitchen table. I went too far the other way, and made it all too casual and sloppy, which drew a faintly caustic remark from Henry about eating
al fresco
. I mollified him by opening a bottle of his favourite lager which I always kept handy in the fridge, and we had a pleasant enough supper. During it Henry talked about his father and Joanna and how it never failed to strike him as rather unnatural that their marriage appeared so successful.

‘It's not only the age thing, it's her being so delicate and him so—well, gross.' I said he wasn't gross at all, but very spare and trim for a man of his age, but Henry said, ‘Not physically. I mean coarse, really. When you think of them in bed it's like thinking about a butterfly and a gorilla.' We munched in silence for a bit and then I said, ‘Do you think about it often?' And he said, in what seemed to be a non-sequitur, ‘I'm quite a normal chap, you know, whatever Dorothy may have told you to the contrary.'

It took me a moment to digest this, and still I had to be very cautious.

‘Dottie hasn't told me anything.'

He looked up at me over a forkful of food and a sudden piercing silence fell which seemed to make a buzzing in my ears, like a silent echo of my own lie. ‘I think she has,' he said at last.

He went on eating, but more slowly, frowning slightly, bent over his plate, putting the food into his mouth deliberately and washing every third mouthful down with a gulp of beer. I had a sense of something—it came over me, as it had earlier; the way he moved, the way he ate, calmly and deliberately. And yet … he did this every day in his flat, quite alone, with no one for company and no distractions, this and a thousand other little everyday actions … did he perform every one of
them in awareness of the shadow? Could there be such a thing as an automatic action when one
knows
how near death is? Surely he must look at his very hands performing the movements of lifting the fork, cutting the meat, and feel a coldness of anticipation come over him as he imagined them lying rubbery, icy and abandoned, at his sides, in such a little while? Didn't the food curdle in his stomach as he thought that his body was so close to corruption? ‘This sensible warm motion cease on a sudden …' Yes, that was what the ordinary simple mechanics of life were—warm, sensible, unutterably pleasant and comfortable, no,
comforting
, and to think—to be forced to think imminently of that all coming to a stop—what would it do, what new patterns of thought would it overlay upon everything one did?

I stared at him with a pity that was so deep it was almost revulsion. I, too, suddenly saw him in a new way; his death was so sure, so close, that it was almost as if he had no life even now, as if he were a monstrous doll going through the motions of life; for just as a disease is not a disease if you have the cure, so life, suddenly and horribly, did not seem to be life when its term was near and known. Fear of the unknown is part of disease; and joy of the unknown—of the unknown length of time ahead—is an integral and necessary part of life. Life without that is death begun early. And at that, I began to understand Dottie's philosophy, if one can call it that, of the backward shadow, the thief that destroys by reaching behind it, which deguts the present from the future. For loneliness, too, is like an illness; and it's not true loneliness if you know, or can even hope, that it will have an end. Missing someone who is going to come back is not loneliness. And if one
knew
, knew beyond doubt, that one's loneliness was going to last forever, if it was beyond hope of remedy, that would surely be the same kind of death-in-life which Henry was living through moment by moment …

‘How do you bear it!'

I hadn't meant to ask, or to say a word. The words burst out of me as one might be unable to prevent oneself asking a
miracle-worker how his miracles were done. For I was certain that I myself would go mad if I were living in Henry's situation, and yet, here he was, sitting in front of me, eating his dinner—there he had been, all day, entertaining his father, enjoying his little moment of triumph, worrying because he had not been entirely entitled to it … normally. Normally! ‘I'm quite a normal chap you know …' But how, how, how? And so, out of my uncontrollable admiration and bewilderment, the words came out.

He finished eating, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and sat back. ‘How do I bear it,' he repeated slowly. ‘Well, thanks for asking. I think myself it's pretty remarkable how I do bear it. Perhaps it helps that I've always been rather phlegmatic, I suppose you'd say. But it's hard, and it's hard not to show that it's hard. One sometimes longs to talk about it. Like telling war stories. If one were really grown-up, really brave, one wouldn't need to. I despise myself for wanting to, because I'm afraid that what I really want is—people's pity. I have such a lot for myself, you see, but it doesn't seem to be enough. And yet of course at the same time pity is the last thing on earth that I want. Because what I can see now in your eyes, Jane, it just—makes it more real, easier to believe. You're looking at me as if I were a corpse already! The only
really
good moments, of course, are when I stop believing it. Like today, while we were sitting at that tea-place, and the three of you were looking at me, you, Dorothy and Jo, three attractive women, and for a long moment while I was drinking my tea I forgot. I just thought how pleasant it was to be sitting like that being stared at by the three of you and that after all I must have something …' He laughed aloud. ‘Silly, isn't it! You were all staring at me thinking “Poor old Henry, he's going to croak” and I'd forgotten and thought you were all under my spell … My God!' he cried out suddenly, and I was struck by an unnamable fear that something, some long-held control, was going to break, and that then whatever tremendous force lay behind it would overwhelm me. ‘What a fool I've been! The time, the chances I've wasted! That's the
very worst thing about it. Thinking of all you've missed. Do you know that in the whole of my life I've only had three women? And one of them was a tart. And the other two didn't matter, they weren't anything, just stupid creatures I fell in with and did it with because they seemed to expect it … But nothing real, nothing
proper
! Jo wouldn't, and with Dorothy it's me that won't. My Christ that's hard work if you like,
that's
something to be proud of, not taking her, putting her first. I must stop, I must shut up! Talking will take all the good out of it. But you don't know how I want her! I never wanted anyone like that, and there she is, there she is …' He put up both hands and covered—not his eyes as I expected, but his mouth, as if to stem the flood of revelation which seemed to be frightening him as much as it was me. He bent his head low over the table till I could only see the top of it, his ‘funny hair' as Dottie used to call it, little sandy waves running across from his neat parting, unmoved by his emotion, as orderly as something machine-made … so typical of him outwardly, the order, the almost rigid calm, while at the same time—under those trim flat waves, behind that sedate waistcoat—violence, fragility, mortality. My hands reached out. He brought both his down like clamps dropping, clutching my wrists, and I could feel the deep inner trembling. He held me like that for a minute, still staring down at the table and then he said harshly, ‘You won't go to New York and leave her, will you? I want your absolute promise that you won't go.'

I didn't answer. I don't think I really registered until afterwards what he had said. I was still half inside his skin, feeling his fear and his courage battling; the very walls of him shook with the force of it. He looked up at me and repeated: ‘Jane! You've got to promise me you'll be here to look after her!' And all I did was to get up somehow and go round the table and stand as close to him as I could get. He looked at me for a moment very austerely, then a sudden expression of intense surprise came over his face as if he felt something twist inside him, something totally unexpected beginning to get a grip
on him. And abruptly he took hold of me, clenching his fists on the clothes at my waist, and put his face against me.