The Backward Shadow (33 page)

That whole time—the time following Henry's death, Toby's marriage and Dottie's breakdown—was a time of seasoning and trial for me. That I have never worked so hard, or felt so deeply, or travelled as far in an inward fashion, hardly needs saying. And all the time, except when I visited London on business, 1 was living in the same tucked-away little backwater. Addy's cottage was my home and my retreat, though it had lost its feeling of safety since Dottie had lodged herself and
her strangeness like a cuckoo's egg within it. I realise now that, although I never acknowledged it at the time, I was more than a little afraid of her then. It was almost a superstitious fear, as if I half-expected her to metamorphose again into a wild-eyed stranger; yet I never cared for her so much, nor so strongly sensed in her a desperate dependence on me. Sometimes this would show itself as simply and directly as it would have done with a child; she would look at me as I brought her a meal or helped her to dress (she was physically very weak at first) and say ‘Thank you, Jane,' over and over again, very softly and politely. At other times she would suddenly get panicky for no special reason and say ‘Don't leave me, will you?' in the sort of voice she might have used if she'd been hanging over a cliff. Even as she began to get better, and some of her old independence and spirit returned, she would still have moments of humble and embarrassing gratitude to me, speaking as if I'd saved her life. She never, at any time, then or since, referred to the scene in the kitchen. I've always hoped she doesn't remember it.

During her illness, I really think David was of more active, therapeutic help to her than either I or the doctor or any other single factor. At first I tried to keep him out of the room, for fear of disturbing her, but one day he wandered in by himself and when I went looking for him I found she'd pulled him up on the bed with her. He was lying with her, stomach to stomach, and they were pulling faces at each other, and he was laughing and saying ‘More! More!' When I lifted him off, he reached for her and said her name, I think for the first time. Later when I came back to her alone, I heard her from outside the door repeating, with his inflection, ‘Do-tie. Do-tie.' When I came in, I found she was crying. It was the first time since the funeral—months. The doctor had said, ‘Where are her tears? That's what she needs, she needs to cry, healthy tears, you understand.' And here they were, gently washing those hard, dry, wild eyes as she said her own name over and over again. After that I let him go in and play with her as often as he wanted to. She cried often, just cried for no special
reason when he was with her or after he'd gone, and the doctor when I told him said ‘Good.' And it was.

It was a long time before she asked about the shop, but she often talked about Addy's four hundred pounds. It was odd about that. I'd given it up—sacrificed it, as I then thought—for the shop, and relinquished my cherished dreams of a trip to New York. But it had all been, as it were, an empty gesture. When Dottie asked for the money, and I gave it to her, neither of us had stopped to realise that Henry, with his inveterate providence and good sense, had long before taken the precaution of covering the premises with every known kind of insurance. The four hundred was used up in immediate costs, for Dottie got cracking the very next day at putting the shop back in order and we had very little in the kitty by then; but when the Insurance people paid up, which they did quite quickly, Henry insisted that I should take it back. It was very ironic, because there was still time for me to go to New York for Addy's book, if I hurried; but by then Henry was already ill, Dottie working desperately, and just in case I had been in any sort of doubt or temptation (which I really wasn't) David developed something-or-other, I've forgotten what, and couldn't possibly have either come with me or been left behind. So there the £400 still was, sitting in my bank, and when I thought of it it was as if Addy's ghost was waiting for me to do something with it. I'd told Dottie long ago about Addy's ghost, and she had readily appreciated the non-serious, emotional side of it. The truly metaphysical side, the moments when I almost believed in Addy as a tangible presence, had merely embarrassed her, so I never mentioned it again. Now in her sleep or in moments of drowsiness when her ‘dope' as she called it was beginning to function, she would ramble on about ‘Addy's four hundred' and ask me repeatedly what I was going to do with it, sometimes sounding as if it were a matter of urgent personal importance to herself that I should make a decision. Sometimes she would make little anxious jokes: ‘Addy's waiting, isn't she? She's waiting for you to decide. You mustn't disappoint her.' And once she startled
me by saying quite seriously, ‘She hates money being left to rot.' At last I said that I thought I'd better sink it in the shop after all—it had been very hard, during the ups and downs of my first months of serious involvement in the business,
not
to use it. But to my surprise, Dottie was quite vehement.

‘No!' she said. ‘Not the shop. The shop mustn't drink everything up. Addy likes the idea of New York.' She smiled. ‘She said she always wanted to go there, didn't she?'

‘Not to me.'

She looked at me oddly for a moment, and said, ‘I thought you told me—' After a while she turned away her face, and reached for a cigarette. ‘I'm sure it should be New York,' she said.

‘But I don't even want to go to New York now.'

‘Don't you?'

‘No. The shop—'

‘The shop, the shop! Can't you think of anything but the shop?'

‘You couldn't, for ages.'

She didn't reply. ‘Sublimation,' she said at last. ‘Is it that for you too, I wonder, poor Jane?'

I hadn't told her a word about Toby; I hadn't mentioned him for many weeks. Yet at that moment I felt she knew that he was—‘lost and gone forever', almost as much as Henry was for her.

Addy's book came out, finally, in the autumn of that year, and it got a very few, very wonderful notices in some obscure highbrow magazines. The
New York Times
Book Review gave it a glancing notice, the key-word in which was ‘esoteric', which, Billie wrote to me, was the kiss of death to any hope of popular success. ‘Not that I ever expected it from those epic-minded morons,' she concluded furiously. But Dottie, who had just read the book for the first time, simply said, ‘Oh, never mind. It's far too good for me, and for most people. Popular successes are for craftsmen. Addy's not even an artist. I think perhaps she's a sort of genius, or a saint.' She kept the book beside her and read bits of it again and again. I
did too. The book itself was beautiful, a wonderfully simple cover in pale shiny sea-green and gold. I was sure Addy would have been pleased.

And so the winter set in again, and Mrs. Griffiths, whose attendance had been spasmodic during the nicer weather, became steady again, an infinite help with the house-cleaning and fire-making and even cooking, which I had no time for any more. I had perforce to leave her alone with Dottie a good deal and I took her aside and urged her most strongly not to say anything that might upset or distress Dottie in any way—no gloomy stories or chalk-pit workers. ‘Oh my dear, I know the poor thing's not well in her head,' she replied. ‘Of course I won't upset her. I only hope no one else'll mention Mr. Stephens to her.' Mr. Stephens had been taken to hospital and was in a geriatric ward. It was not this bare fact so much that Mrs. Griffiths kindly wanted to protect Dottie from; it was the truly awful stories that Mrs. Stephens was telling around the village about the way ‘they' treated him there. She was afraid to complain too much, or have rows with the nurses, because the old man had whispered to her that they ‘took it out' on the patients if their families complained. I saw Mrs. Stephens myself very often—she was still living in the back of the burnt-out post office; she was dreadfully unhappy, and would have had Mr. Stephens back again whatever the risk, but the doctors wouldn't allow it. ‘The only times I can be peaceful within myself,' she once told me, ‘is when I can make myself believe that he's wandering when he tells me these horrible things. They can't be true, oh, they can't, nobody could be so cruel! But then how could he imagine anything like that? Sometimes I think it's all a judgement on me for what I said to him, the night of the fire.' And her fingers would begin to snap for Muffer to come to her side and be stroked, while the tears ran down her cheeks—‘I'm sorry, dear, I'm sorry, I'm sure I shouldn't cry, you've got your own worries and troubles, I know …' Seeing her did me good in the dreadful way of putting my own petty despairs into perspective, for what she
was going through literally seemed to me the worst thing in the world.

During the winter there was not so much trade in the shop, but more in London, and I had to travel up and down a good deal. The Galloping Maggot had finally gone home, so I used Dottie's car. I didn't have to serve in the boutique, just take the stuff up, arrange it, and have discussions with the sales staff and so on. I managed to conceal most of my total ignorance for the first little while, living, as it were, on the quality of the merchandise and Dottie's hints, which I threw out in a casual way to impress them all with my apparent business acumen and originality. After a while I began to gain a little experience of my own. I never developed, and never will develop, anything approaching Dottie's flair; but a workaday ability to keep my head above water in the commercial millrace was quite an achievement for someone like me. And what was more important in a way, I began to enjoy it. The moment that that happened, everything became a little easier, even the erstwhile intolerable aches left over from Henry and Toby.

I nearly always tried to see John whenever I was in town, and several times we had a meal together. He was doing neither specially well nor badly; his life just seemed to jog on. He had managed to get a room to himself, mainly because his two unsavoury room-mates had gone their several ways and he had to come to an arrangement with his landlord to pay a bit extra to keep other tenants out. He had rearranged the room, which was now an enlarged version of his ‘box' in Doris's house—all the walls were covered with a dense, vibrant montage of posters, bits of fabric, newspaper cuttings, pin-ups black and white, male and female—a sort of glorious indiscriminate paper love-in. I added several items to this collection, including some of our carrier bags and some tea-towels which were now one of our lines, plus remnants whenever I had them to spare, though I had most of them made into patchwork cushion-covers or toys. His furniture was mostly either wicker, or metal, except the bed-head, which was a vast baroque thing
he had picked up in a junk-yard, all carved with broken birds and fruit and bells and painted a bright, shiny mixture of colours—it was very psychedelic, at a time when that word hadn't been thought of. In fact the whole room was a sort of ‘happening'; one had to narrow one's eyes and one's sensibilities whenever one entered, or be dazzled and almost intoxicated with all that chaos of colour. John himself began to dress in a very far-out way, in what I then thought of as Caribbean clothes—bright yellow slacks, pink or orange shirts, even coloured canvas shoes. The effect was starling, but, once one's eyes had accustomed themselves, funny and pleasing.

John's and my relationship never changed, never varied, and hasn't until this day. I look upon it now as the one steady, reliable thing in my life. (Other than David; and I can't, I dare not, really count him. More and more I'm convinced that it is fatal, almost wicked, to depend on one's children; it's bad enough that they depend on you.) I'm ashamed now to remember that at first I was embarrassed to have John come down to the cottage. He looked pretty outrageous even in London, before it began to swing; imagine how he looked to an ultra-conservative country village. It was Dottie who finally insisted that I invite him, and furthermore go up to town and fetch him. She needed to see him, she said, when I had described him and his abode to her. So I brought him, and in the event of course it was not embarrassing at all; true, every eye in the high-street turned as we walked or drove along it. I was less susceptible to public opinion than I had thought, and not merely didn't care, but rather revelled in it; and John simply didn't notice. Dottie, when we arrived, was downstairs—very unusual for her, she spent most of the time in bed, or at least in her room; but she was dressed and lying on the sofa. The effort this must have cost her surprised me (all this for John?). She actually stood up when we came in, and shook hands with him and led him to a chair, and then I noticed she had prepared a drink for him and everything, it was really quite astonishing—I mean, she'd only seen him about twice before in her life, and here she was, receiving him according
to the first of her proverbial guest-categories (‘There are three kinds of guests, honoured, tolerated, and bloody nuisances'). They sat down together like old friends and began at once to talk about Dottie's state of health, a subject I had strictly forbidden him to touch on, but she started it.

‘I've been ill,' she said without preamble.

‘Not hard to see that,' he said. ‘What the matter with you?'

‘Didn't Jane tell you?'

‘She tell me you had a nervous breakdown.' I sucked in my breath. To my knowledge, the words had never been spoken in Dottie's presence till then. ‘But I dunno what is it,' he added.

‘It's like—if all the strings on your guitar went pop at once.'

‘Ah. No music after—uh?'

She shook her head. ‘Only jangling and banging.'

‘Sort of like being crazy?'

‘Very like it.'

‘My Mama went crazy,' said John matter-of-factly.

‘Did they put her away?' I stiffened in my corner, because I thought I heard a thin, panicky note in Dottie's voice, but it may have been just the contrast with John, who had spoken entirely casually.