The Dangerous Years (2 page)

“Why not come to-morrow?” she said, quietly, though she was relieved to have this mood of loneliness so happily broken. “Let us meet in Town and get some of the shopping done on your way down.”

This was agreed, and Joan rang off. Her mother knew better than to try to get more information out of her by questioning her, especially on the telephone.

The house was quieter than ever after that interlude, and the widow shut herself in for the night, alone there, in the midst of a countryside where she played so active a part with her good works, and her apparently selfless nature. A wind sprang up, flinging masses of dead leaves against the windows, where they scratched and rustled like ghosts, clamouring from the past. She went early to bed, and to her astonishment, found herself weeping as soon as her head touched the pillow. ‘Milly must be right,' she thought. ‘Something must be done. I suppose it is my time of life. Well, I hope it won't last long.' And upon that practical surmise, she fell asleep.

Next morning dawned cold and misty. Below the open and rising ground on which the cottage stood, the woods lay scarved, vague masses of dark vegetation under a milky sky. Mary felt more cheerful, however, as she bustled about, preparing for the day in London. In spite of the cold, the Austin Seven started up immediately, and Mary drove to Oxted station with time to spare.

As the train approached London, daylight faded away under an overhead fog, but the line was clear, and the train arrived on time. Mary took the Underground to King's Cross, and waited there until her daughter's train came in, half an hour late.

She saw Joan in the distance, walking towards the barrier, striding past people, her head up, a newspaper in one hand, a brief-case in the other. She saw her mother and waved the newspaper, but in a dispirited way that set Mary wondering again.

“You are tired darling,” she said, looking up at the young woman's handsome face, a feminine replica of that of the dead soldier-stockbroker.

“I
am
tired,” replied the girl firmly, “I've hardly slept for a week.”

Mary took her arm, and they left the station, to come out into the dark Town.

“Good God!” said the girl. “How very appropriate!”

“Why, Joan, whatever is the matter?”

Mary stopped and turned to her, forcing the girl to stop too. She saw the over-intensity of those normally serene features, the emphasis with which Joan stood as though stamping the pavement into submission.

“Don't ask me here, Mother. I can't talk about it now. Let's forget everything and concentrate on our shopping. There's some sense in that, perhaps. Now where do we go first?”

Mary was instantly overcome by the illusion of being the younger of the two, and she followed Joan in silence for a while, trying to control her anxiety. She studied the rebellious hair, which made a halo round the shabby toque. She observed how the broad shoulders stooped, as though shrinking from something unpleasant. She was so nervous that she could almost feel the pavement vibrating under the girl's angry tread.

“Where's your luggage?” she said.

“Oh God, I've left it in the train! Not even competent to manage
that
! Here, hold this and wait for me.” She thrust the brief-case into her mother's hand, and fled.

A quarter of an hour passed, while Mary stood outside the station, consumed by uncertainties, a forlorn figure in the gloom. Then Joan reappeared, carrying a small suitcase, which she held up triumphantly.

“It had already got to the Lost Property Office. What a fool I am. This won't do, Mother. Let's pull ourselves together, after wasting all that time.”

She was cheered by this small success, and kept this animation for the rest of the morning. Only once, during lunch in the restaurant of a crowded shop, did Mary venture to look enquiringly at Joan; but before she could speak, the girl took fright, having intercepted the glance.

“Don't look at me like that, Mother. I know what you mean, but we can't talk here. I'm not sure of myself. I don't possess your universal kindness. I'm really a
wickedly selfish creature. You know that. You know how I bully you. It's no use telling me …”

“I'm not telling you anything, Joan. Let us do as you say, and wait until we get home; if we ever do get home out of this dreadful atmosphere.”

The fog had now come down, and penetrated even into the heated shops. It hung about among the lights, cloaking each bulb with a nimbus of sulphury shadow. Shoppers began to cough, to draw their collars close about their throats and chests. The traffic slowed down, its roar diminishing to a rubbery rumble.

“We'd better make for Victoria station,” said Mary, “before the rush-hour begins.”

But Joan objected. She made the excuse that there were thousands more gifts to be bought. This was an excuse for putting off the confession, and Mary at last rebelled. They reached Victoria to discover that other people were of the same mind. The station was packed with a crowd of parcel-encumbered shoppers. Blackboards with cancellations and new directions stood on easels. Overhead, under the dome, a thick cloud of chocolate-coloured smoke hung like a sagging tent. Beyond the station, all was dark, though the hour was only three o'clock. From time to time, if there were such a factor as time, a fog signal exploded, and yet another train rumbled to a standstill. Distant lowings from down-river suggested that tugs were in difficulties in and beyond London Pool.

The two women fought their way to a barrier and a platform where a lunch-time train still waited. They found seats, and sat there, in a cold coach, with their parcels about them, the racks being already filled. “One thing, it teaches us patience,” said a passenger. Mary, sitting pressed against her daughter, felt the girl's body start, and she half-expected her to make some rude retort. She put her hand on Joan's lap, and patted the firm flesh.
There was no response. Joan was determined on being alone in the universe.

After two hours of great discomfort and cold, mother and daughter reached Oxted, and groped their way to the car in the station yard. But now it needed some persuasion, and Joan had to lift the bonnet, tickle the carburetter, and swing the handle a dozen times before the engine woke. The fog here was vegetable instead of mineral, but it was hardly less thick, and Joan had to drive in low gear all the way to the cottage. But she appeared to welcome the needed concentration, and hummed to herself as she peered ahead, hugging the verge of the road up through the back of the village, over the Common, and down to the great wood. Here, where the Weald opened, the mist thinned a little, revealing the nearer trees and bushes beside the lane. The headlights of the car struck the coloured trunks and sweeps of halfnaked fronds, making sudden flares of yellow, umber and gold, but tarnished gold. A falling leaf from time to time crossed the windscreen, screaming with light, then vanishing. Once an owl glided in front of the car, an unreal apparition that left behind it a cry that choked upon itself as though smothered by the drip, drip of the clinging mist.

“Home at last, and thank you,” said Mary, when Joan followed her into the cottage after putting the car away in the thatched stable. “I thought we were doomed.”

“I never abandoned hope,” said Joan. And so the mother and daughter kept up this pretence of cheerfulness, giving themselves another respite and taking comfort from the physical pleasure of being indoors, warm, wrapped in familiar surroundings, where every object had its intimate whisper of memory, wistful perhaps but no less endeared.

Mary kindled the fire in the open hearth, and the flames from the paraffin sprinkled over the ashes lit up the Elizabethan brickwork, the door of the bread-oven, the
gap of the salt-recess, the logs piled up and over the two seats in the chimney corners. As Mary went to draw the curtains, her cat appeared outside the casement, two eyes gleaming, and a coral-red mouth opening and shutting, the sound of the appeal cut off by the panes. She opened the window and he sprang in, his blue-grey fur bedewed, and his whiskers drooping. Shuddering as he walked, he made for the centre table, where he rubbed himself at an angle against a leg, purring and mewing together, protesting against the inclement weather and half-blaming his mistress. Joan stooped and roughly ran her hand along his coat, from head to tail, bringing it away wet and stuck with loose hairs.

The cottage was still lighted by oil-lamps, and the flat odour of them added to the rustic mood of the interior. With curtains drawn, the log fire now burning fiercely and hissing as it attacked the damp soot of the upper chimney, the two lamps casting pools of golden light and saturating the air with an almost visible texture of peacefulness, the two women forgot the outside world, and settled down before the fire, with tea and the opportunity for small-talk.

But the mother could wait no longer.

“Now, darling. What is it all about?” she asked, filling Joan's cup again.

Joan hesitated, stared fixedly at the fire, clutched the cat on her lap and made it cry out in protest. She turned to her mother, who saw her breast rising and falling, shadowed and lit by fire-glow.

“Look, Mother,” she said at last. “John and I can't go on as we have done. I can see that I made the mistake of urging him into marriage. But I begin to feel that I might just as well have snatched a boy out of the Fourth Form. I wonder somebody hasn't informed the R.S.P.C.C.”

“Don't be facetious, Joan. It sounds so bitter. I can't imagine what …”

Joan suddenly changed her mood. Turning abruptly, she spilled the cat from her lap, and jumped up, to pace before the fire, marking the tiled spaces with her large shoes.

“Well, the truth is, that our marriage is no marriage at all. We've had four years of this boyish comradeship, and I can stand it no more. It's turning me into a crank, a monomaniac.”

“My dear child …”

“I know. It sounds quite indecent. But when a man lives with you and treats you one moment like a fellow-soldier, and the next as though you were a dangerous Lilith or Delilah creeping towards him with a pair of shears to strip him of his manly strength, what are you to do, as a woman—as a woman, Mother; and that's the blunt truth?”

Her voice broke, and Mary feared that she was about to burst into a flood of weeping; but indignation took charge again, and drove her to a further pacing of the floor. The logs on the fire collapsed, sending up a flight of sparks, and Mary got up, walked round her daughter and drew the logs together. The girl ignored this interruption, and spoke again.

“This university life is all very well. I enjoy that. But when it is cut off from reality—you know what I mean? Yes, that's what it comes to. John is so concerned with his magnificent physical condition, when he's not in the laboratory, that he begins to look upon me as a menace. Nothing must come between him and his fitness for climbing. You know he's joined the Alpine Club, and goes up there to read for one night a week? That leaves me out at least for that part of his life. And for the rest—well, you see that I'm trying to tell you, Mother. I'm only human, and I can't stand it any more. I've been a fool over him. He says so himself; accuses me of spoiling my career at Newnham because of what he calls my emotionalism.
Emotionalism! It makes me want to say something beastly, something that smells of the stable and mother earth. But there it is. One can't do it. All I know is, we've got no children, and are not likely to have any.”

Mary felt herself going colder and colder as she listened. She had no warmth of experience to draw upon. For the past fourteen years all her efforts of will had been directed to quelling the fires of nature. She believed that she must be direct and candid with the distracted girl.

“I don't know what to say, Joan. I had no idea of this. You both appeared to be so happy together, with your work, and your expeditions. Didn't you meet on the mountains? Life has drifted away from, from … It is so long now since I had your father. We were happy enough; without question. All was so natural. You were born at the end of our first year. Then your brother died. That frightened us a little, but it made no difference to our relationship. You know what I mean.”

She knelt before the fire still, gazing into the past.

“But after I lost him. Yes, that was the end of things. I had to put all that behind me. I was afraid, Joan. I am afraid still, though I begin to grow old. An old woman, changing into something poor and strange. I don't recognise myself. But I want to help you. I don't believe in violence. You must not be …”

“Don't imagine I'm being headstrong, Mother. This thing has been growing for the past two years, though I've tried to hide it, dismiss it. The fact is, he's not made for marriage. I love him, and he thinks he loves me. But all this fasting, and remorse; all this self-dedication as though he were a Greek athlete or a medieval monk. The two ways of life are utterly incompatible. I've done with it all, Mother, done with it. And nothing in the world will make me carry on with it. We had it all out before he went off for his rock-climbing. I accused him finally of being abnormal, and he was terribly hurt. But it's true, it's true.
Either that or we are physically incompatible, and he does not really want me. Sometimes I've thought that he was either a child, or a man belonging to a generation older than mine. It was as though, as though he were more in love with you, Mother, than with me!”

Mary, still kneeling before the fire, looked up almost slyly at her daughter, though she spoke as one shocked.

“Joan, how can you say such things?”

“Well, sometimes it has looked like that. He worships you; he
hovers
over you—yes, hovers. Perhaps it is because you are smaller than I—and still so lovely, with that silver hair framing a face that you and I both take for granted, but must have driven men mad in the past—and could do so to-day, too, if men were still capable of that sort of thing. But I sometimes think the biology of the human male has been altered. It's turned away from … Oh, I'm talking rot, Mother. I can only speak from my own experience. And I know this. My own marriage is a failure, and I've done with men for good. That's final, and it's no use crying over it.”