The Facts of Life (4 page)

‘My Sally’s a good girl,’ she would boast to other mothers, whose daughters she called sluts and minxes behind their backs. And when a friend of hers from the factory had insinuated, over tea and gossip, that Sally was missing out on life, she countered, ‘You save yourself, girl. Don’t make the mistake I made; save yourself until you find a bloke that’s really
worth
it. If none of them comes up to scratch, think what you’ll have spared yourself!’

She changed her tune after the war. Just as she returned from her months with the munitions factory women with a brassier, more defiant air, so Sally seemed to cross some invisible boundary, transformed overnight from her mother’s good girl into her unweddable daughter.

On her posting to the hospital ship, Sally met a young officer. He also came from East Anglia – their first conversation inevitably drifted from chart-reading to homesickness. He had a fiancée in Norwich who, he confided, was pregnant and he would have to marry on his next visit home. He sought Sally out often to talk with her – earnest talk, for which she scarcely felt herself equipped, about love, marriage, the war and life back home.

The men and women on board fraternised compulsively: uprooted from their backgrounds, their tastes and class were masked by uniforms. All social niceties were swept aside by the atrocious wounds of the men brought on board and the daily possibility of being ‘accidentally’ torpedoed out of the water. Sally discovered that by voicing opinions which in Dr Pertwee’s rooms were commonplace, she swiftly gained a reputation for being left-wing, if not exactly communist, and somehow ‘fast’. The effect was giddying.

There were often parties – anything to relieve the tension – and at one such her officer friend plucked up the courage to ask her to dance. They danced through three songs in a row, went out on deck to cool down and, surprised by lust (she was, at least), went by discreet, separate routes to his cabin. His lovemaking was fast and hurt her, but he was apologetic when he realised she had been a virgin. This momentous event turned to farce when they tried to wash the blood off his sheets, then realised they had no way of getting the things dry again. They ended up stuffing them out of a porthole amid jokes about burials at sea. Sally was uncertain whether she had enjoyed the experience at all and was dogged for days afterwards by a fear of pregnancy. He found his mysterious way to quantities of black market condoms however, and she would visit his cabin at least once a week. The sex remained hasty and was never entirely without pain but, when the time came for her to be shipped back to England, she thought she was beginning to see what all the fuss was about.

Since then there had been nobody in her life, unless she counted Gordon Graeme, the hospital’s senior registrar, who seemed to regard it as a grave discourtesy not to press his unwelcome hands and innuendi on any personable female who came his way. Living with her parents precluded anything beyond heartfelt courtship or extreme subterfuge, and long hours at the hospital and the motorbike rides there and back left her too exhausted for either. Until now.

After the concert, she and Edward saw each other almost every day. She began to lie to her parents, pretending that she was spending an evening with colleagues or old friends rather than have them know how often she saw him. She found they did not talk much. Instead they
did
things. They went to plays, to concerts, of course, and to the Sadlerian and Rexbridge Museums. They took long walks, breaking the companionable silence only to talk of what they saw, not of what they felt. Sally was not sure what she was feeling just yet.

She made up for lost years by reawakening in herself a keen appetite for the cinema. They saw anything, everything, from
Tarzan
to
Henry V
. Through the university film club they saw German films, and he would translate for her in whispers the grosser phrases the subtitler had censored. The foreign films were shown in a church hall but the trashier English and American things they enjoyed from the double courtship seats at the rear of the Rexbridge Majestic. They would hold hands in the darkness, fingers restlessly interlacing. He would wrap an arm across her seat-back and explore her shoulder or the side of her neck with his fingertips until the skin grew unbearably sensitised and she had to take his hand to make him stop for a while. They exchanged chaste kisses but went no further. Each was waiting for the other to make the first move; Edward, because she was older and he was shy, Sally, because only when he made a move would she decide whether she wanted him to. One evening, though, during a piece of historical hokum called
The Reprieve
, he seemed to come to a decision.

‘I should catch my bus,’ she said, glancing at her watch. She had left her bike at home for her father to tinker with that night and the film had been a long one.

‘I’ll drive you home later,’ he replied. ‘Come back with me first.’

‘Won’t Thomas be there?’

‘Probably. But I’d like you to meet him. I should like him to meet you.’

Thomas was Edward’s former tutor.
In loco parentis
before Edward was hospitalised, he had encouraged Edward to return to Rexbridge and, when he could not persuade him to finish his degree, had offered him two rooms to rent in his house and found him an undemanding job with a bookseller. When the owner had bought and priced any books brought in, Edward had to place them on the appropriate shelves. Otherwise he spent his days sitting peaceably behind the counter, and so could combine the work easily with labouring at a score. Few customers actually wanted to buy; most of them were indigent students, hoping to sell.

Thomas’s house was an elegant early Victorian building, with railings at the front and a wrought iron gate. Sally smelled jasmine as they walked up the path. The hall floor shone with polish as did various pieces of antique furniture. A grandfather clock was striking ten as she checked her reflection in a looking glass that hung over a delicate table. For the first time with Edward she felt a pang of insecurity. Compared with all this, Dr Pertwee’s rooms seemed Bohemian. Edward was used to such elegance, born to it, for all she knew. He was in his element. There was a cultured male cough from a half-open door across the hall. She pulled her cardigan straight, knowing, as she had when she bought it, that its shade of pink was somehow wrong. Even more than at Edward’s brief encounter with her parents, she felt her age.

‘Edward,
mein Schön
?’

‘Thomas.’

Edward touched her shoulder reassuringly and led her to the open door.

Thomas was, she guessed, in his fifties. He had silvery hair swept back off a square, intelligent face. As he rose from his armchair by the fireplace, she saw that he had been sitting, cat-like, with a leg curled under him. He advanced to shake her hand, taking off his tortoise-shell reading glasses and searching her face intently, even as his smile said ‘friend’.

‘Thomas, I’ve brought Sally home to meet you. Dr Sally Banks, Professor Thomas Hickey.’

‘How do you do,’ Thomas said. ‘Do sit down.’ He waved her to the other armchair. ‘Let me offer you a glass of something, young lady. Whisky? Brandy? I’ve some rather good port open.’

‘Port would be lovely.’

‘Edward, fetch us all a glass of port.’

As Professor Hickey sat, he curled his leg up again.

‘I wish I were as supple as that,’ she said.

‘Raja yoga,’ he replied. ‘I picked it up in India years ago and now I suppose it’s made me something of a crank.’ He seemed pleased that she had noticed. ‘What has Edward been doing with his evening? Something improving, I hope?’

‘Not terribly,’ she confessed. ‘
The Reprieve
.’

‘Margaret Lockwood?’

‘No, that new girl. The blonde. Myra Tey? No. Toye. Myra Toye. Still, it was better than the last film we saw.’

‘Which was?’

‘
Humoresque
,’ said Edward, handing them their glasses. ‘Isaac Stern played the violin on the soundtrack.’

Thomas shrugged as though to ask what could be so awful in that.

‘Joan Crawford was the star,’ she explained. ‘She was a society woman married to a long-suffering violinist.’

‘Oh,’ said Thomas, in mock disapproval. ‘Inexplicable actress, really. So entirely false. And I find her hair unnerving. It puts one in mind of steel wool.’

The port was delicious. Sally sipped. Her head filled with its rich fumes and she noticed that, despite its sedate atmosphere, the room was filled with furniture and artefacts from the Far East. The prints she could see from her chair were of a distinctly pornographic nature. Sally saw Thomas watching her and smiled, nervously.

‘It’s a lovely room,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

There was a pause in which they all sipped, then Edward piped up.

‘Sally’s the doctor who looked after me at the chest hospital, Thomas.’

‘Ah.’ Thomas widened pale blue eyes. ‘So you’re the one responsible for his miraculous recovery.’

‘Well hardly,’ Sally said. ‘He was well on the mend when I first saw him. I only wish we’d got him away from that army hospital earlier, then he’d have been out and about much sooner. From what I can see, the treatment he got there was basic in the extreme; there were days when he saw no-one but orderlies.’

Thomas raised his eyebrows and shrugged, as though the reason for this neglect were tiresomely familiar to both of them – which irritated her, because it wasn’t. At least, not to her.

‘Sally very kindly tracked me down some manuscript paper,’ Edward went on.

‘I’d found him drawing in all the lines himself!’ she laughed.

Thomas shook his head and tutted. A large black cat emerged, purring, from a hiding-place beneath the sofa and sprang on to his lap. It settled as he stroked it, and stared at Sally over his knees with gooseberry eyes.

‘I was working on the quartet,’ Edward added. ‘Hardly anyone came in to the shop today and I’ve nearly finished the third movement.’

‘We all expect great things of Edward,’ Thomas told Sally. ‘Great things.’ He spoke pointedly but with the same, soft delivery. He spoke almost as though Edward were an infant prodigy, not a young man a few years her junior. It sounded like a challenge.

‘Leave,’ she told herself. ‘Leave Edward all to him and run away.’

‘Tell me more,’ she asked instead.

‘As you’ll have gathered, I couldn’t persuade him to finish his degree – and on reflection I think he made the right decision – but I think it’s vital we all save him from London. London is death to creative talent in anyone but writers. He needs tranquillity.’ There was another pause. Thomas looked down to fondle the cat’s ears. Edward caught Sally’s eye and winked. She simply stared back. For a moment he seemed utterly strange to her.

‘Do you know much about music?’ Thomas asked her.

‘I’m a doctor.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘No. I don’t know a thing.’

‘I’m sure Edward will soon change all that.’ Thomas smiled. The interview was over – he was releasing her back into plain conversation.

‘He’s doing his best,’ she said. ‘But I seem to like everything. I’m afraid I’m too undiscerning. My ear lacks taste.’

‘On the contrary, your musical palate is unjaded; far happier for when you come to hear something Edward has written.’

She grinned across at Edward.

‘What’s his music like?’ she asked.

‘Like nothing you’ll have heard in your
life
!’ Thomas said and laughed aloud. The cat, plainly used to the noise, slowly closed its eyes. ‘Tell me,’ Thomas asked, ‘I’m most curious. Didn’t Edward say your name was Banks?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So you must be Alice Pertwee’s disciple.’

‘Oh. I’d hardly say I was that. She took me in hand, though. What do you call a patron’s patronee?’

‘A project?’

‘Yes.’ Sally smiled, determined to show him she was undaunted. ‘I was her project. Do you know her, then?’

‘The Great Sexologist? To be sure. We’ve often found ourselves on the same committee. Rarely in agreement, mind you, but she’s of that generation that doesn’t hold such things against one. I know about you because she discussed your case once in a talk I heard her give on the social benefits of education to the less fortunate.’

‘Well,’ Sally looked with brief anger at her port glass then back full in Thomas’s face. ‘That puts me squarely in my place.’

‘Yes,’ he went on, with perfect equanimity, ‘I suppose it does. Have you taken young Edward to meet her yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well you must, you must. She’s an institution and you clearly have an entrée. She won’t be with us forever. I’d heard she was planning to leave Rexbridge altogether.’

‘Doesn’t she have an old house way out in the fens?’

‘Yes. An extraordinary place by all accounts, but she doesn’t seem to have lived there for years. Has she never taken you there?’

‘No,’ said Sally thoughtfully, ‘I always visit her in her rooms. But if the state of those is anything to go by, she’s probably let the house fall down.’

They sat on for a while, chatting, until it became clear that Thomas regarded himself as a chaperon – whether for Edward or Sally was unclear. At last he squinted at his watch in the lamplight, grunted, pushed the cat off his lap and said, firmly, ‘Well, young man, I think it’s time you drove this musical innocent home.’