The Backward Shadow (6 page)

No, but something of the sort. What could I do? Surely I had some kind of flair which could be useful? Abruptly I envied Dottie, an old familiar feeling that I hadn't had for a long time. Dottie had taken herself in hand, channelled her talents, been clever enough to get herself a niche in the fashionable world where they could best be put to use, and where she could embellish them with new skills. Any fool, I suddenly thought, can have a baby. But not any fool can support it.

My early-morning pastoral elation was cooling with the bathwater. I was getting goose-flesh, and not just from being slightly chilled. The lonely feeling, the helpless sense of being too small for the battle, could lash back in a moment, like a bent branch, if one didn't watch it. I clambered out, wrapped myself in a bathrobe which had been warming in front of the
oil-stove, and dried David while the water gurgled away with a passionate resonance. The sun had gone in, and I felt rather like having a good cry all of a sudden, which wasn't wise in front of David who had recently begun to sense my moods like a dog and respond to the bad ones with sympathetic howls. So I quickly got him to bed before the mood overwhelmed us both.

It was just about time to dry my eyes and start thinking about lunch when a car drew up outside. My heart gave a little lurch of joy which told me more clearly than the unexplained crying-fit that the feathers were fitted very insecurely into my cap; almost any visitor (except the plumber) would have been welcome just then, even though the house was a mess and I was still looking like the wrath of God in a pair of pregnancy slacks and one of Addy's age-old smocks. When I saw Dottie's behind emerge from the car, followed by the rest of her lugging a large carry-all, I couldn't get outside fast enough to greet her with hugs and glad cries.

She noticed my red eyes immediately.

‘What've you been bawling about on this gorgeous morning?'

‘I've been bawling because no one was coming to lunch—as far as I then knew,' I said, taking one handle of the hold-all. ‘Good God, what have you got in here, geological specimens?'

‘Toys for my godchild.'

‘I must warn you, his tastes aren't very sophisticated. His favourite thing at the moment is a rather oily length of old bicycle-chain.'

‘And bottles.'

‘Ah! There you may find a more appreciative response.'

She was dressed for the occasion in tight trousers, tucked into very smart leather boots, topped by a hip-length jacket of tartan wool with a fringe.

‘I do wish you'd try to look a bit more dowdy when you know you're going to see me,' I couldn't help saying peevishly.

‘My dowdy days are over,' she said. ‘Only women like you, with no need for sublimations or compensations, can afford the luxury of dressing badly.'

We went indoors and she flopped down on the sofa. I threw a log on the fire, which was burning sluggishly amid yesterday's ashes, wishing I'd done a bit more housework in the morning.

‘How long are you staying?'

‘How long can you put up with me?'

I looked at her sharply, remembering quite suddenly that it was not Saturday.

‘Indefinitely, but … what about your job?'

‘What job?' she asked, with a one-sided smile.

‘H'm. I sense a crisis. Have a sherry before you begin.'

‘Forgive my ingratitude, but this is not an occasion for sherry.' She plunged a hand into the hold-all and came up with a bottle of Black and White.

‘I've got no soda,' I warned her.

‘Soda's for good days.'

We drank, Dottie eyeing me over the rim of her glass with a rueful, ironic expression.

‘Well?' I asked.

‘Well! The job has folded. Not the job only—the whole enterprise. Bust—kaput—down the drain. Pity. It was fun while it lasted.' She shrugged, a casual gesture which didn't fool me. Dottie had waited a long time for this particular opportunity, this potentially gold-plated niche within a niche—buyer for a new and wildly with-it boutique in Sloane Street.

‘What happened, exactly?'

‘The happy young couple who started it with the aid of large wedding-presents from their respective daddies decided, six months after the nuptials, that they'd “made a nonsense” as they put it. Strange how they both used the same expression, though there the similarity in their stories ended. According to him, she was frigid and neurotic; according to her, he was kinky and wanted to tie her to the bed-posts, among other exotic delights. All very sad. And strange … they looked so normal. But then, who's normal these days?'

‘I am,' I said. ‘I think.'

‘Only because you live in the country,' she said obscurely. ‘There's no “normal” any more. If normal means average, you're the kinky one, believe me.' She sighed deeply. ‘I don't even know if I'm normal any more. Is it normal to choose the chaste life when one could be getting tied to bed-posts or rolling about on grubby mattresses in discothéques every night? I've been told so often lately that I'm a freak that I'm beginning to believe it.'

‘Which is what you're doing here.'

‘The whisky is making you very acute, Janie. But then, you always were pretty perceptive, even before you opted for the life of a happy cabbage which I suddenly so envy you.' She poured another drink and stared at the fire. ‘What a really wonderful smell that is—wood burning.'

‘It's apple and pine, mixed. I agree it's wonderful.'

‘And is that actual beeswax I smell on the furniture?'

‘No,
Johnson's Glocoat
. But it's nice.'

‘Christ, I'm going to cry.'

‘No, please, don't you start! It's too much. I've been at it all morning.'

‘It's this
bloody
business of being alone,' she mumbled, her face in her hands.

‘I know. Do shut up, please, Dottie.'

‘You're lucky. You don't know how lucky you are.'

‘Yes, I do. But right now I'd give half my luck for half your ability to earn your own living.'

She looked up at me through a ruined eye make-up.

‘Is that what you were really crying about—money?'

‘Sort of. Partly.'

‘I'll lend you some.'

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but that'd be no good. It's not only the cash I want, it's the feeling that I can cope.'

‘You've coped up to now.'

‘So have you.'

She stared at me. ‘Ah. I see what you mean. No, past successes or gettings-by don't really help at crossroads, do they?' She dried her eyes and leaned her head back, staring at the
ceiling. We sat silently for a while and at last I said, ‘What about food?'

‘Not hungry, really.'

‘Bowl of soup?'

‘Oh, well …'

She fed David for me and seemed more cheerful. I was full of sympathy, and yet I couldn't quite understand why she was so basically upset. She'd been in and out of jobs before, and would surely not find it hard to get another now, though perhaps not quite so close to her heart's desire. I knew it was something deeper, a pot-hole in the long cold valley of being unmarried. It was some days before I pieced it all together from snatches of conversation here and there. It was all fairly hard to pin down or explain, but after my experiences in the L-shaped room, though hers were on a much more sophisticated level, I thought I understood.

‘It's the parties,' she said, ‘and the dates, and the things you hear at them. It's not just that most of the conversation is shallow and brittle and all the worn-out words for cocktail-talk; there's a viciousness there, a feeling of inner bankruptcy. I sat next to a young writer at a dinner party the other night—the sort of man one thinks one would like to meet, until one meets him. He's very ugly, with a beautiful, aristocratic wife who sat across the table smiling tenderly at him all the time he was telling me in a low, continuous mutter what a shallow, boring bitch she was. On my other side was a politician you often see on television, holding forth on brains-trusts—he's supposed to be one of the white hopes of the future—and he was quite seriously propounding his theory that the best way to control the population in the East was to blanket the Orient in homosexual propaganda and try to turn as many young men as possible into queers.'

‘He was joking.'

‘Was he? Nobody was laughing. Then at another recent party that I got invited to more or less by accident, given by some tycoon in the rag-trade, one of the guests got a very little bit tight and made a speech about the host, highly
laudatory in tone, from which it clearly emerged that both of them were nothing but very successful crooks. The speaker stood there cheerfully making jokes about the dirty deals they'd done together, and the whole room was rolling about with carefree laughter. What's so lousy, Jane, is that while there've always been crooks and bastards and hypocrites and all the other species of human insect, they've never felt free to get up at parties and boast about it until just recently. Nobody's shocked any more—not by anything. It's not done to be shocked. You have to accept everything, like some sort of garbage-disposal unit that opens itself up and makes happy laughing noises while every sort of rottenness and filth is tipped into it. I tell you, I'm afraid to go out with men now. They've all got something disgusting to tell you about themselves. All they want from you is that you shall listen and not be shocked, so they can go away feeling there's nothing the matter with them. Well, I tell you, I won't do it any more. When they start, I just tell them I don't want to hear. If they insist, I don't try to be unshockable—when I'm shocked, I act shocked, and then of course it's their turn to laugh. The ugly, frightened sound of that laughter is something I can't describe. Sometimes I feel they're wiping their dirty minds all over me. That's why I won't go to bed with them any more. It's like acquiescing to them as people, and I don't, not to one in fifty of them, not to one in a hundred.'

Of course this didn't all come out in one long speech, but in dribs and drabs, over a number of days. I was appalled … even the L-shaped room, and the denizens of its surroundings, for all their squalor, had not been as sordid as the picture Dottie drew for me of the smart set. The thing was, she didn't strike me as the type that would attract that sort of thing unless it were much more universal than I had imagined. She seemed to be saying it was so intrinsic that it was impossible to avoid—except by burying oneself in the country, about which she suddenly harboured rather unrealistic notions of purity and sanity and vicelessness. As a sort of balancer, I told her about the plumber, but she simply asked if he'd actually ‘tried anything'
and when I said no, she said in that case the gleam in his eye had probably been a reflection of my own slight guilt-complex and that even if he'd pinched my bottom with his size-4 pliers, it would have been merely a nymphs-and-shepherds type frolic compared to what she was talking about.

During the first few days of her visit, while she was unwinding, we didn't talk much about me, and my plan-making was held in abeyance. She grew more and more relaxed, less and less smart as the few clothes she'd brought lost their immaculate perfection, and (it seemed to me) more and more deeply entrenched and unwilling to return to London. Not that I minded. Though her conversation was frequently depressing, her company in general was a joy; for Dottie could never be gloomy for long, and even her gloom was often shot with humour and mimicry. David loved her, and she him. I began myself to dread the moment when she would inevitably have to depart to renew the battle.

One morning in the village while we were shopping, she paused to look through an empty bay-window overhung by a ‘Shop for Rent' sign.

‘What was here?' she asked.

‘All-sorts shop,' I said. ‘Very dingy, doomed to fail. After all, we have a tiny supermarket now.'

‘Don't,' said Dottie, whose current fad was shuddering at all manifestations of urban progress. She lingered on, peering through cupped hands into the dusty interior. ‘I have a fellow-feeling for failed enterprises at the moment,' she said. ‘Could we get the key and go in and look?'

‘There's nothing to see—just an empty shop. A bit sad, really.'

‘Still … I'd like to.'

She persisted, so I took her to the estate agent's and soon we were standing in the shop. It was, indeed, quite empty, except for some cornflakes cartons stuffed with paper and rubbish, a dusty counter and some broken shelves still festooned with a tatty oil-cloth frill attached to rusty thumb-tacks. The floor was bare boards, the walls papered with a
flowered pattern gone dark which reminded me irresistibly of the L-shaped room when I had first gone there.

Dottie was running her hand over one section of wall.

‘There's a beam under here,' she said. ‘Fancy covering a genuine beam with this hideous wall-paper! You're right, they deserved to fail.'

‘I didn't say that,' I murmured. ‘Look, there are beams in the ceiling, too. Quite untampered with.'

‘How can you say that! They've been whitewashed.'

‘What's wrong about that?'

She gave me a look. ‘You've got no feeling for places,' she said.

That annoyed me. It was patently untrue.

‘If there's one thing I have got, it's a feeling for places!' I said hotly. ‘You didn't see the L-shaped room before and after!'

‘I didn't see it at all, you never invited me,' she reminded me.

‘I'm very good with places,' I persisted.

‘All right, prove it. What would you do with this?'

‘Do with it? Just what any sane person would do—leave it alone.'

But even as I said the words, I felt a pang. Poor little place! It shouldn't be so dirty and ugly. The bay window was marvellous; it came almost to the ground and there was a semi-circular rostrum inside for arranging displays on. The floor was pine, and so, probably, was the fireplace, which had been painted dark green and filled in with cardboard. Stripped and waxed, they would be beautiful. The counter was an excrescence, but it could be taken out. It would be an anachronism to sell food in here anyway, it would need to be—oh, antiques or something. Lustrous copper, glowing rose-wood, fine mellow velvets and stripped oak and those silky green paperweights full of bubbly flowers …