Thursday’s Child
Thursday’s Child
Helen Forrester
Helen Forrester’s moving story of an English girl and her love affair with an Indian man.Peggy Delaney was a Lancashire girl born and bred, beginning to live again after the heartache of the war.Ajit Singh was a charming young Indian student, shortly to return to his homeland and an arranged marriage.When Peggy and Ajit fell in love, each one knew the future would not be easy. But as they began their new life, far from their homes and their families, they found that love could bring two worlds together…
HELEN FORRESTER
Thursday’s Child
DEDICATION (#u9353ad82-32b5-5795-89ca-b383befacb80)
When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut.
Gitanjali-Rabindranath Tagore
CONTENTS
COVER (#u12ab2e30-5239-56f3-ad38-dada575655ad)
TITLE PAGE (#u397dabc5-41a4-5bbd-b109-257d21a456e0)
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE (#u1dfe746c-a21f-509f-9521-703ead059c81)
CHAPTER TWO (#uc78c86ac-47d1-5f67-af95-98837d3cb416)
CHAPTER THREE (#u253dafc4-da8b-5819-83f0-8a088033fecc)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u52cbf096-daa2-5be2-8968-c4682d6c6776)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u232969f5-741d-5731-8c63-5e3545400608)
CHAPTER SIX (#u5008bad9-0d94-575a-a676-b9b232b59088)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#u81cc667b-0cba-52c0-83a4-dc861fddb6ca)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#u5ed16549-971f-594d-8c4e-f8bdca83c3e8)
CHAPTER NINE (#u4dfe991a-c0e0-52e5-aebd-8dc877161dc2)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
OTHER WORKS (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_7e993971-6f9a-5f65-a315-d70736b31b71)
‘Dawn’t be a fool,’ shouted James as he slapped me hard across the face.
I stopped shrieking and began to weep, rocking myself backwards and forwards, my hands clutching at my nightgown as if to tear it.
James, with tears running down his face, was saying: ‘Now, dawn’t take on so, luv.’
His Lancashire accent, usually carefully suppressed, was homely and comforting, and gradually my weeping lessened and I lay back on the pillow. The medicine bottles on the mantelpiece changed from red blobs to definite shapes, and James’s face, so like Barney’s, ceased to be a blurred mirage and I saw how exhausted he looked.
That last winter of the war had seemed particularly long and cold. Although in Wetherport bombing raids had ceased some time before, most of its inhabitants were worn down by overwork and poor food, and Mother was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of March I caught influenza. On the morning that James called, I was feeling better, and, with the promise that on the following day I should get up, Mother had tucked me up in bed with two hot-water bottles, and had gone out to shop. She had been gone only five minutes when the doorbell rang.
I let it ring twice, in the hope that whoever was at the door would go away, but the third ring was such a prolonged one that in desperation I got out of bed, hastily wrapped myself in a blanket and pattered along the icy upper hall and down the equally icy Victorian staircase to answer it.
On the doorstep stood James, looking as white as if he had just seen the sticky result of a direct hit on an air-raid shelter. Mist had formed little globules of moisture on his red hair and on his muffler; his face was blue with cold.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked apprehensively, and shivered in the draught from the open door.
‘Get back into bed and ah’ll tell thee,’ said James.
In spite of ten days of illness, I ran up the stairs and scrambled into bed, my heart pounding with foreboding.
‘It’s Barney,’ I muttered, my teeth chattering. ‘Something has happened to Barney.’
James limped slowly up the stairs, drawing off his gloves as he came, entered my bedroom and sat down heavily on the bedside chair.
One of my hands lay on the coverlet and he took it in his.
‘Peggie, dear, Barney was killed the day before yesterday. Mother got the news this morning.’ The words came in the precise, clear tones he used when clarifying a point of law for one of his clients.
Although the news was something I had feared daily for months, I was stupefied by it and could not for a moment grasp the implication of his words. It was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés.
Jackie had gone down in the Swallow in 1939, a month before our wedding, and it broke my heart, but I was young then – and young hearts mend – so that when Barney proposed to me four years later life once more became worth living.
I had known Barney all my life. He was big, red-headed and impetuous, and I fell in love all over again. His only sorrow seemed to be that his twin brother, James, was lame and could not, therefore, join the Army with him. This had separated them for the first time in their lives – and now they were separated for ever.
‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I had shouted in my agony, as James’s words bit into my heart and mind.
I must have had hysterics; otherwise James would never have struck me, but I remember only an enveloping, physical pain. Barney was dead, and the knowledge of it killed part of me.
I clung to James’s hand: ‘Why did he have to die?’ I sobbed. ‘Why not take a useless fool like me, not a good man like him? Why couldn’t I die instead?’
James loosed his hand and put his arm around me. He smoothed the hair away from my eyes: ‘The good God must have other work for you to do,’ he said.
James was not the kind of man to talk about God, and his words stuck in my mind, but at that time I just lay in his arms with his face close to mine, and thought only of my own misery and not of his. He and Barney were identical twins, and he must have felt as if one of his limbs had been amputated without anaesthetic – yet he never mentioned his mother’s or his own suffering.
James was still nursing me against his damp overcoat when Mother returned from shopping. She could never tell the brothers apart unless she saw James limp, and she thought it was Barney sitting beside me.
‘Barney, how nice to see you. Leave at last!’
James said, ‘I’m James,’ and Mother understood.
‘My poor darlings,’ she said. ‘Your poor mother.’
In her time, Mother had faced many crises, and she was wonderfully patient with James and me that day. It was she who remembered to telephone James’s office – James was a solicitor, as was Barney – to ask his clerk to cancel his morning appointments, and it was she who later bundled him off to work, after letting him talk to her about Barney while she prepared lunch for him.
‘Is someone with your mother?’ she asked.
‘My aunt is with her.’
‘Then when you have eaten this, go away and work. Work is a good opiate.’
When he had gone, she came and sat on my bed and talked to me. She did not talk about Barney, but about James, of his brilliant brain, his sensitiveness and the sorrow he must be feeling. She said firmly that Angela, who is my younger sister, and I must help to comfort him and his widowed mother.
I listened dully. At that moment I did not care about anybody except Barney, and every time I thought of his lying, blown to pieces, in a German field, sobs shook me and I writhed in my bed, so that the pillows grew damp and the sheets became hopelessly twisted.
When Mother realised that it was too soon to divert my thoughts to other people, she sat quietly by me until Father and Angela returned from work. Perhaps she knew what I had not realised, that James loved me more than Barney did; and maybe she hoped that when the pain had worn off, I would transfer my love of one brother to the other.
Father came in and stared down at me with pitying eyes.
‘I am sorry, child,’ he said.
He bent and kissed me: ‘Have courage, little girl.’
He went away to eat his dinner, and I heard the quiet murmur of his and Mother’s voices in the room below.
I heard also Angela’s key in the lock of the front door, and the patter of Mother’s slippers as she went to meet her in the hall. I heard Angela give a little cry of anguish; Mother must have told her the news immediately, so that she did not blunder when she came up to see me.
There was a pause and then Angela’s dragging footsteps up the stairs. Enwrapped in my own misery as I was, even I thought how tired she must be to come so slowly.
Angela came into the room. She had taken off her hat and coat, but still wore the slacks and the overall she used in her work as a ‘back-room girl’. She had studied electronics, but none of the family really knew exactly what she did in the closely guarded Government laboratory where much of her life was spent.
She shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Her face was an unearthly white and, despite the heat of the sickroom, she was shivering.
‘Pegs.’ Her voice was only a whisper.
She looked so stricken that I motioned her to come to me. I had not imagined that my elegant, sophisticated sister had so much feeling in her, and I was jolted out of my self-pity.
She came and sat down on the bed, her shoulders hunched and her hands dangling hopelessly between her trousered knees. This ugly posture was enough to tell me how deeply she had been affected by the news of Barney’s death; usually she sat very gracefully, with straight back and ordered hands.
Suddenly she flung herself across me and wept, her breath coming in harsh gasps. I said nothing, feeling too full of grief myself to speak.
‘Dinner’s ready, Angela,’ called Mother.
‘Give me a handkerchief,’ said Angela, looking up quickly, her sobs hastily stifled.
I gave her a very wet handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She tried to smile at me, as she said: ‘Woman must eat as well as weep.’
She went across to the dressing-table and powdered her nose with my puff, then came back to the bed, and in almost motherly fashion, straightened my top sheet and kissed me on the forehead. I could feel her lips trembling as they touched my skin, although she looked fairly composed as she walked to the door.
As she went out, she said: ‘I’ll come up after dinner and keep you company while you eat your supper.’
‘I can’t eat,’ I said.
‘My dear, you must. In times like this, one must keep strong – and you have a long way to go yet.’
‘I wish I was dead,’ I said.
After Angela had gone downstairs, I lay for a long time, thinking of Barney. I had always had a great affection for him, hot-tempered and ruthless as he often was; when we were younger, I had imagined that he preferred Angela to me as he had taken her out frequently, but it was to me that he proposed during the last Christmas he had spent at home. I had been so happy; it seemed as if the war could not possibly last much longer, and we planned to be married as soon as Barney was demobbed. He had survived the invasion of France safely and had enjoyed one more leave when his badly mauled regiment was brought home to be reformed. He had been tired and morose during that last leave, as if he had a premonition of what was to come, but after he was rested he became more cheerful and we spent two or three happy days together before he went back to his barracks.
I had begun to collect linen and china for the small flat we hoped to find. I wanted Barney to enjoy all the comforts I could scrounge for him in a tightly rationed country. I had bought sheets on the blackmarket, made pillowcases out of bleached flour bags, begged old curtains from Mother, and had bought from auction sales pieces of painted china and prewar silverware. Even now, on the bedside table, lay a half-finished tablecloth, which I was contriving by faggoting together tiny pieces of linen left over from the manufacture of aeroplane wings.
In a paroxysm of rage, I sat up and flung the tablecloth and the coloured embroidery silks across the room. Unfortunately, I flung the water glass as well; but the explosion it made when it crashed released the tension in me, and when Mother came running into the room, I was crying with steady, hopeless sobs.
Mother picked up the cloth and folded it carefully. It was to be a long time before I would spread it on a table, and if some, self-appointed prophet had told me where the table would be, he would not have been believed.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_9b028baf-1b7a-5495-9bbb-602a45514719)
When I was seven, my father, Thomas Delaney, came to Wetherport to work in the Income Tax Offices. In order to be near his work, he bought a Victorian house not far from the middle of the city. It had a walled back garden, in which my father managed to grow the daffodils for which he was famous locally. In spite of the heavy fall of soot and the fact that the surrounding houses had long since deteriorated into apartments or boarding houses, the family was very fond of its home and we refused to be dislodged from it, even during the heaviest bombing; and when we surveyed it on Victory Day, five weeks after Barney’s death, we were happy to find that it was in as good condition as when we first entered it.
From this house, I had gone out to school and later to the University; and now when my long day’s work was done, it was the place to which I thankfully returned each night.
About half a mile from home there was a very old part of the city, which bordered upon the docks, and it was in this area that, after taking a degree, I took up social work amongst unwanted and neglected children. A scar on my lung kept me out of the Forces during the war, and I was left undisturbed by the Ministry of Labour and National Service to continue my work. Most of the prostitutes of Wetherport lived in my district, and the place swarmed with troops and sailors of every nationality. Many of the residents were coloured – part West African Negro, part Arab and part Chinese, with a few Indians scattered amongst them. Their poverty was great and was intensified by the bombing which they bravely endured. They knew me as ‘the lady from the Welfare’ and I was classed with ‘the man from the parish’, that is, the Relieving Officer, as someone to whom the front door could be opened without hesitation. The war brought work to those who were dock labourers and seamen, and the young men were called into the Army, so that their fighting cocks tended to languish in their backyards, but games of fan-tan and crown and anchor flourished, and betting and drinking carried away much that was earned; the poverty and filth of their homes remained.
As the war progressed, illegitimate children seemed to be born faster than I could cope with them and my work was always far behind. I therefore returned to the office a week after James’s visit, still feeling shaky from the effects of the influenza.
The elderly voluntary workers, who were my staff, were horribly kind. They had seen Barney’s name in the ‘Killed in Action’ column of the Wetherport Telegram, and they handled me as if I was a delicate ornament, liable to breakage. They tiptoed in and out of my room, brought me specially made cups of tea, and murmured that I was looking better or looking worse. I felt like screaming at them to stop, to be normal, to make some vulgar joke, so that the automaton that was me could try and laugh.
One day James rang me up and asked me to join his walking club – it was surprising how far his lame leg could carry him over rough country. By the end of the summer, I had become, at his instigation, an unprotesting member of a music club and an opera society. He kept me in circulation firmly; every time I showed signs of slinking back to the family fireplace to weep he hauled me out again.
Very few of our friends came home from the war, and, in the topsy-turvy world in which we found ourselves, Angela also seemed glad of James’s company, and she frequently came with us on our outings. She was witty and she often made James laugh; he had the same throaty chuckle as Barney – and it hurt me to hear him. I love to hear merriment, but a dead man’s laugh is saddening, especially when you still love him.
Occasionally it was very like torture to have James striding along beside me, looking just as Barney always did, and then to catch his eye and see a different soul, a strange mind, peering out at me; but he was an old friend and I did not have to make a special effort to be pleasant in his company, so I clung to him, and for nearly three years saw him from time to time, either at the various clubs to which he had introduced me or at his mother’s home, which I visited occasionally. His mother welcomed my visits and, presumably, hoped that I would marry him. This solution had not occurred to me and James gave no hint that it had occurred to him; he continued to behave in his usual silently courteous manner and asked nothing except my company. He had other women friends, with some of whom I was also acquainted, but he never showed any particular preference for one of them.
I gradually picked up the fragments of my life and stuck them together again as best I could. The sickening reaction from the effort entailed by the war had, however, set in, and like many others I felt low and dispirited. I had been the only young woman left in our organisation at a time when our work was increasing; the war itself had brought many problems which were not the concern of any particular authority and I often found myself doing work far removed from the care of children. Many were the days when there was no time to eat and many the nights I spent on an old sofa in the office rather than waste time by going home. Once the Japanese war had been brought to a horrifying finish by the atom bomb, however, new social workers were recruited and my hours of work became normal. I should have been grateful for a life once more returned to a peaceful routine, but I found myself intolerably bored and very tired of solving other people’s problems.
In the autumn of 1948, however, James’s love of chocolate caused a sharp change in my life. We were attending a first night at the Royal Theatre, and I had elected to wait in the foyer, while James carried on a delicate negotiation with the girl in the sweet shop next door, for the purchase of a box of rare, handmade chocolates, for which he had not enough ration coupons. I stood idly watching the people arriving for the show. Every tram that stopped outside unloaded a fresh mass of shabby humanity; a few small private cars added their quota of patrons. Dressed in old sweaters, tweeds and raincoats, the women hatless like myself, they poured into the theatre. They certainly did not care much about outward appearances, but I knew they would form an attentive and critical audience.
I had just seen a Duchess slip quietly into the auditorium, chivvied from behind by two students who were afraid of being late, when a voice behind me gushed: ‘My deah, where have you been all these years?’
The voice was familiar, and I turned round quickly, to face a middle-aged woman who was extending a black-gloved hand to me.
‘Bessie,’ I cried, overjoyed at meeting someone I had known before the war. The last time I had seen Bessie she had been in khaki uniform – a sort of female brass hat – but there was nothing of that about her now. Her black suit and frilly, red hat made her completely feminine.
‘My deah, you are just the woman for whom I’ve been looking. Can you dance?’
‘Yes,’ I said blankly.
James came up to us, triumphantly bearing his box of chocolates, and was introduced. The foyer bell rang, and Bessie said hastily: ‘Come and see me, my deah, tomorrow evening at 42 Belfrey Street – the McShane Club. Come at seven.’ She looked about anxiously. ‘Please excuse me – I must find my party.’
She waved one plump hand vaguely in the direction of the front door and tripped across the hall, her high heels clicking merrily on the marble floor, and to my amazement, joined a party of Negroes. She greeted them gaily and vanished with them into the auditorium.
James’s eyebrows lifted, as he asked: ‘Who are they?’
‘No idea,’ I said.
‘Have a chocolate,’ said James, tearing off wrappings.
James had invited a young married couple to join us, and as soon as they arrived we went in to see the play. It was a good play about the escape of a prisoner of war from a German stalag – but my mind was on Bessie.
Bessie Forbes used to live in a flat near to us. Her husband had been a lieutenant in the Regular Army and had been at Wetherport Barracks for nearly a year before the war broke out. He had been sent to Norway and had been posted as Missing. Bessie waited for further news but none came, and, as she had no children, she enlisted in the Army Territorial Service. I knew she had done very well in the Service, but presumably she had now taken her discharge. I wondered if she had married again. And what was she doing in the company of Negroes? Negroes were an everyday part of my working life – but that was unusual. It was not reasonable to suppose that a woman of Bessie’s station in society would be well acquainted with any – the colour bar still functioned in England quite effectively in respect of Negroes.
At the end of the second interval, as the audience was surging back to its seats, I was tossed against Bessie, and she smiled at me.
‘Who are you with?’ I whispered, nearly dead with curiosity.
‘Nigerian chieftains,’ she said. ‘See you tomorrow,’ and she was swept away from me.
The mystery was beyond me, so I ate James’s chocolates and tried to concentrate on the play.
James and I walked leisurely home together. The night was clear and there was a sweet smell of rotting leaves in the park. We did not talk much on the way, knowing each other well enough not to have to make conversation. He lingered at our gate and I asked him in.
‘No, I – I won’t come in tonight,’ he said.
He made no move to depart, however, and leaned awkwardly against the gate pillar, his fingers drumming on its dirty, granite sides.
He said abruptly: ‘Peggie, will you marry me?’
My mind was on Nigerian chieftains, but the answer came without hesitation, and I surprised myself with the certainty of it.
‘No, Jamie,’ I said gently, ‘I can’t.’
James stopped drumming on the gate pillar and gripped it hard.
‘Why not, Peggie? Ah love thee.’
‘I know, dear, and I’m sorry.’ I paused, and looked at him in the light of the street lamp. ‘You are so like Barney, Jamie, that I would love you because of the likeness and not because you are you. It would not be fair to you.’
He stood there, silently biting his lower lip, just as Barney used to when puzzled.
‘Ah might’ve guessed it,’ he said at length. ‘Are you sure, Pegs?’ The light-blue eyes gleamed suddenly in the poor light and there was pain in them.
My resolve faltered; James would make a good husband, I knew. He had a depth of character which Barney had lacked. I looked up at him again. The light was playing tricks with him and it seemed as if Barney was standing there, instead of James; like a tormenting dream, I thought bitterly.
‘I can’t, Jamie. You’re the finest man I know – but I can’t marry you – I just can’t.’
‘Dawn’t fret yourself, luv. Ah do understand.’ He lifted my chin with one hand, so that the lamplight fell upon my face. His lips were curved with pity. ‘Just remember, that ah’m always around if you want me,’ he said softly. His arm dropped to his side and he turned to go. ‘Good night, Peggie, luv.’
‘Good night, Jamie – I’m truly sorry.’
He looked back at me as I stood by the gate: ‘Ah told thee – dawn’t fret,’ he called as he limped into the darkness.
I knew I had hurt badly someone who loved me very much, and as I climbed the front steps I reproached myself mercilessly for being so foolish as to see so much of him when I had no intention of marrying him.
I let myself in. Everybody was in bed, and only the tick of the grandfather clock broke the quietness. On the bottom step of the staircase lay Tomkins, our cat, and I sat down by him and scratched his ears. He stood up, stretched, and leaped up on to my shoulder, to rub himself against my neck. The house seemed so peaceful, so normal, just as it had been since I was a little girl. Only the little girl had grown and changed into a disheartened woman.
I burst into tears, and Tomkins fled up the stairs.
A door opened and Angela leaned over the banisters.
‘What’s the matter, Peg?’
‘Nothing much,’ I whispered, ‘I am all right,’ and I picked up my handbag and went slowly up the stairs.
Angela was standing in a shaft of light from her bedroom, fairylike in a nylon nightgown, her fair hair tumbling about her shoulders. She looked tired, however, as if she had not slept well for a long time.
I smiled wanly at her and she followed me into my bedroom.
‘You look tired,’ I said.
‘Me? Oh, I am blooming. I never did sleep much.’
‘Go to bed now – there’s nothing the matter with me – I’m just grizzling – it was nice of you to come, though.’ I caught her by the shoulders and kissed her impulsively. ‘You’re a darling, Angela,’ I said.
‘Am I?’ Her lips were tight across her teeth in a wry smile.
‘Of course you are. Now go to bed and don’t worry about me.’
A look of weariness crossed her face. She seemed suddenly much older.
‘Sure you’re all right? No more tears?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll go then. Nighty-night.’ And she trailed across the passage to her own room and quietly shut the door.
I switched on the electric fire, undressed in front of it and then went to the dressing-table to take the pins from my hair. Although I was shivering a little from the clammy coldness of the big room, I paused to look at the shadowy reflection in the mirror.
My hair fell thick and brown to my waist. I lacked the courage to bleach it golden as Angela did. Large hazel eyes peered anxiously between the tousled locks.
‘You are abominably average,’ I addressed myself. ‘Stock size figure and long legs included.’ I peered closer. ‘What on earth can a man see in that?’
Tomkins meowed at my feet and I bent to stroke him.
‘Tomkins,’ I said, ‘if I was half as beautiful as Angela, I would have married a king – and he would not have had to be killed,’ I added sharply.
Why, I wondered idly, as I got into bed, had Angela not married? She must meet many scientists in the course of her work – but science is not a lucrative profession, I reminded myself, and Angela is distinctively expensive-looking.
Tomkins heaved himself on to the bed and settled down in the curve of my knees.
‘Tomkins,’ I said, ‘you’d better have some kittens to keep Angela and me company when we grow old – because it doesn’t look as if either of us is destined for matrimony.’
I turned over and Tomkins meowed protestingly, as if to say that he would if he could.
‘Well, find yourself a pretty lady pussy,’ I said drowsily, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_573a4239-fb93-525a-9a77-5536ee7ad5c7)
I was still puzzling about Bessie and the Negroes as I walked swiftly through the badly-lit streets, to keep my appointment at 42 Belfrey Street. I felt a subdued excitement at the thought of seeing her again – after all, Bessie belonged to that part of my life which had been sunlit and full of hope, when the war was still a long way off in places like Poland and Norway.
I had been unable to remember what kind of a club the McShane was, but the moment I walked through its swing doors and a gust of conversation swept round me, I wondered how I could have forgotten.
Angus McShane, a native of Wetherport and a great believer in the excellence of British culture, had at his death asked that his considerable fortune be used to build a club for the purpose of propagating British ideas amongst foreign visitors to Britain.
The City Council, faced with all the difficulties inherent in ruling a port full of foreigners of every nationality, had supported the idea, and the result was a suite of pleasantly furnished rooms in the middle of the city, where foreign visitors and students could entertain their friends and also make friends with English people. Dances were held; English was taught; a canteen dispensed English food – and confirmed the opinion of its customers, that the British were the world’s worst cooks; a library held an assortment of donated books ranging from classics to the latest Ernest Hemingway and the newest magazines; and the lounge into which I walked that autumn evening seemed to contain a representative from every country in the world – and they were nearly all men.
Shyness swept over me and I hesitated, while the doors behind me made a steady plopping sound as they swung back and forth. Four men in American-cut suits stood near me. They were coffee-skinned, and I could feel their eyes looking me over. Their gaze was not insolent and they seemed to approve of me, for they sighed softly as I passed. Two Negroes sitting near bowed their heads self-consciously over a magazine as my skirt brushed the small table in front of them. They made me feel thoroughly womanly, and I enjoyed the change from being Miss Margaret Delaney, the lady from the Welfare.
A white-haired lady was sitting by one of the two fires that blazed in the room, and she was playing chess with a young Chinese. As I looked round, she cried, ‘Checkmate,’ triumphantly, and her opponent’s eyes vanished into slits as he laughed.
‘Excellent play, most excellent,’ he said.
The lady looked up and saw me and I went to her, and asked where Mrs Forbes could be found.
‘She is probably in her office on the floor above.’ The voice was quiet and cultured.
The Chinese bowed slightly: ‘Permit me to take the lady up,’ he said.
His opponent smiled graciously and said that Dr Wu would be pleased to direct me.
Dr Wu rose and bowed to me: ‘Come this way,’ he said.
He led me out of the lounge and up a flight of stairs to a series of offices.
‘This is your first visit here?’ he inquired, his eyes twinkling behind rimless spectacles and his hands making neat, small gestures to guide me along the passage.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I trust that we may have the pleasure of seeing you here again,’ he said, as he knocked at the door. He bowed again and left me, as Bessie called, ‘Come in.’
‘My deah,’ said Bessie, ‘I’m delighted to see you. Sit down and have a cigarette.’
Bessie, out of uniform, had more charm than most women. That evening she was wearing a pink cardigan that gave colour to her naturally pale complexion. Her dark hair was brushed up in a Pompadour style. As she lit my cigarette I tried to imagine her drilling on a parade ground, but failed hopelessly. The determination and discipline which had lain under her uniform was still with her, however, as I was soon to find out.
‘Bessie, what are you doing here?’
‘I’m the Entertainment Secretary – it’s my job to see that visitors here enjoy themselves.’
I nodded. That explained the Nigerian chieftains at the theatre.
‘Do you like it?’
‘Rather. I meet anybody who is anybody – and no two days are alike.’
‘What have you in mind for me to do?’
‘I’m starting a dancing class – very good teacher, but not enough partners. If you are free, I wondered if you would volunteer to come along on Thursday evenings and act as a partner. I can assure you that there are less amusing ways of spending an evening.’
‘But women are two a penny in this town, Bessie. Why pick on a rather dull person like me?’
‘Two-a-penny women are not required in this establishment,’ said Bessie. ‘Every woman crossing the threshold of this club has to be vouched for personally by a member of the staff or by some other responsible person. Each member has a pass which she must show to the commissionaire at the door.’
‘No commissionaire was there when I came in.’
‘Oh,’ said Bessie, and seized the telephone. Her conversation was brief and frigid. The commissionaire never again left his post without being relieved by his colleague. After Bessie had dealt with him, I think he would have stuck there like the guard at the gate of Pompeii, even to being engulfed by boiling lava.
Bessie turned back to me.
‘You always struck me as someone whose head was well screwed on, and I badly need helpers like that. I noticed at the theatre that you are still single. Any ideas of matrimony?’
‘No,’ I said, my throat tight.
Bessie looked at my plainly combed, long hair, my tailored suit and my far too sensible, flat-heeled shoes: ‘No, I suppose not,’ she said in a specially kind tone of voice.
I felt angry. I am not beautiful and my work demanded that I should dress very plainly, but Barney, James and Jackie had loved me, so I could not be entirely lacking in charm. Still, the dancing class promised to be a new experience, so I asked her to explain exactly what was entailed by acting as a partner.
Bessie explained about times and lessons, and I agreed to come the following evening. Then a little silence came between us.
Hesitatingly, I asked if she had ever heard what happened to Lieutenant Forbes.
She gave a fluttering sigh: ‘No,’ she said. ‘He was presumed killed.’
‘I’m sorry, Bessie.’
She sighed again and fiddled with the fountain pen on her desk: ‘It’s quite all right, deah,’ she said, ‘I was lucky to have him for as long as I did.’
I saw that it was time to go and I rose. She got up and walked with me downstairs and as far as the swing doors, which the commissionaire opened. She told him that I would be coming on the following day and that I was to be brought straight up to her. Then she shook my hand.
‘You will enjoy it here – meet some new people – have some fun,’ she said.
I murmured that the nicest thing was seeing her again – and I meant it.
When I got home, Father was sitting by the fire reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. He rose and kissed me. Our house always smells of polish and flowers, and the outside door is invariably open and welcoming; his warm greeting and the habit he has of pushing forward the most comfortable chair for you, make the shyest visitor feel that his arrival is a pleasure. He has long since lived down the fact that he is ‘in the Income Tax’, and everybody knows him as Mr Delaney who has such a lovely show of daffodils.
‘Where’s Mother?’ I asked, taking off my dark jacket and eyeing it disgustedly.
‘She’s in the kitchen, making chili con carne for your supper.’
‘How good she is,’ I said. I love hot dishes, but as no one else in the family liked them, I did not eat them often, so I kissed Father on his bald patch and wandered hopefully kitchenwards.
The house may be Victorian, but the kitchen is not. Father had the old kitchen ripped out, just before the war began, and Mother worked in an atmosphere reminiscent of the advertisements in American magazines.
Mother was really cooking chili con carne.
‘The butcher gave me some extra meat,’ she explained, ‘and I’ve had the beans for years.’
I sniffed appreciatively and sat on the primrose-coloured table, while I told her about the McShane Club. I also told her ruefully about Bessie’s tone of voice when marriage was mentioned.
Mother looked at me shrewdly from the corners of her eyes. She said: ‘The war lasted too long. Now it is finished, it is time to wear pretty clothes again. You should buy a “new look” dress.’
‘Good heavens, Mother, they are too ultra-fashionable. I’ve never seen anyone in Wetherport wearing one yet.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mother, ‘they are in the shops – I’ve seen them – and you have just the figure for one. You’ve plenty of money – you saved all through the war for –’ she stopped.
‘For my marriage,’ I finished off.
‘Yes, dear,’ said Mother sadly.
It was true. I had three hundred pounds in the bank. I sighed; but when on the following day I had finished a round of visits to foster-parents, I slipped into a dress shop and spent an hour buying a dress and coat, followed by another hour in hat and shoe shops. I wondered if I would ever have the courage to wear my purchases, but it did not take much bullying from Mother to make me put them all on, and, when I arrived at the club, Bessie was full of admiration for my appearance. She ushered me into the room in which the dancing class was being held, with the advice that many of the pupils were Muslims, who had not mixed much with women before, and that I should be careful.
Fifteen male pairs of eyes took in every detail of me. Seven female pairs of eyes smiled with relief.
‘Welcome to the battleground,’ said one young lady.
‘How do you do,’ said the teacher. ‘Will you kindly partner Mr Popolopogas. We shall just go over the basic steps of the waltz again.’
We went over them – Mr Popolopogas went over my feet as well. He was a willow of a man, topped with outsize horn-rimmed spectacles, and upon inquiry he informed me in slow, correct English that he was a Greek and was studying medicine.
I graduated from Mr Popolopogas to Mr Ramid Ali, Egyptian cotton merchant’s son, sent to Lancashire to see our methods of spinning. Then I did a quickstep with an officer in the French Air Force, who was about a foot shorter than me. Finally, the dancing teacher picked out one or two advanced pupils to teach them another step of the tango. I was asked to partner a Negro. Although many Negroes lived in the district in which I worked and I knew some of them quite well, I had never been touched by a Negro, and I was nervous – not nervous because he was as black as I was white, but because I knew the shy reserve of black people and I wanted him to feel that I liked dancing with him.
We did the exercise while he held me very stiffly and at a distance, but to dance a good tango the partners must be close and the woman must be held snugly against the man. I, therefore, stopped dancing and explained the proper stance. He immediately held me correctly and it was obvious that he knew the proper hold, but had been too afraid of me to use it. I could feel him trembling slightly against me as we moved off again to the throbbing notes of ‘Jealousy’. We were to dance the whole record through, and after a minute I realised that the man guiding me was far more expert than I was.
I concentrated on the steps and followed carefully. He did not dance with the polite diffidence of an Englishman, but with the full ardour that the South American rhythm demanded. My heart beat faster and I began to enjoy myself. Soon there was nothing in the world except the piercing wail of violins backed by the steady beat of drums, and a compelling body which gently but insistently persuaded me into figures I had never danced before. I did not even notice the slight gap between two records. A wild, sensuous happiness enveloped me. The dark cheek above me rested very close to mine. A separate me appreciated the beauty of the line from chin to ear, finely chiselled out of ebony. Sweat was pouring from him but he smelled clean and sweet, and he danced as nature intended us to dance, to the complete relaxation of mind and body.
Suddenly a burst of applause hit me. My partner let go of me and pulled out a pocket handkerchief to mop the perspiration off his face. He was laughing joyously. I was embarrassed to find that we were the only couple on the floor and had indeed danced alone through the last record, while the rest of the pupils formed an interested audience. I blushed hotly as everyone began to laugh, but it was all so good-natured that I had to laugh too.
The dancing teacher came to us and explained to my partner that he should now lead me back to my seat and say ‘thank you very much’, which he did, still laughing exuberantly.
The class then broke up, and I went with the other girls, who were all younger than me, to powder my nose. They were ordinary, middle-class girls, some of them students, with pleasant, accentless speech. They were full of little jokes about the dancing class and teased me about the tango I had danced. They told me I had danced beautifully and said they hoped to see me the following week. I felt very cheerful and I was glad that Bessie had found such nice young women for our foreign visitors to meet. From my work, I knew very well how difficult it was for strangers to know English families, more especially so if the stranger’s skin was not white.
On the bus going home, I realised guiltily that for a whole day I had not thought of Barney, and I wondered if he would mind. Then I thought of how he would have laughed at my discomfiture after the tango and I giggled behind my gloved hand. Looking out through the rain-lashed window I seemed to see him laughing with me, and I thought that perhaps he would be happy that I was feeling happier.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_57882464-19cf-59d5-966b-fcef4120cad7)
I soon became acquainted with all the staff and most of the members of the McShane. Bessie introduced me to the Director, Dr Gantry, a short, wiry man of uncertain temper and many accomplishments. He spoke seven languages well and managed to make himself understood in several more. He was almost womanly in his insistence that the club must have a homely atmosphere; it must look like a well-cared-for house, not too fashionable or too shabby; there must be flowers and it must be warm and airy. He went through the premises daily, inspecting every corner like the Chief Steward of a liner; he met diplomats when their ships docked at Wetherport, and found digs for vegetarian students; he kept up a lively correspondence with ex-members of the club, who had returned to their own countries; he encouraged every kind of Anglo-Other Country society to meet at the club, provided they steered clear of political pitfalls; he led panting young men up and down mountains in the Lake District and in and out of the best country pubs – he would say: ‘You haven’t seen England if you haven’t been in a pub’; he took great care of the women who helped him with their voluntary work in the club, and any man about whom they complained was summoned to his office and if he did not mend his ways his pass was taken from him. This last was a delicate problem, but Dr Gantry had a fair idea of when a man had made a genuine mistake or when a woman’s behaviour might be at fault. He used to say, however, that he sometimes thought he was running a marriage bureau, not a club. So many visitors were men, still young and single. They outnumbered their sisters by four to one, and as a result of the Committee’s care in the choice of ladies allowed inside the club, these men met very marriageable young women. Almost every week Dr Gantry gave his blessing to a new couple about to marry, and he always said that Britain’s best export was wives.
At the end of two months of helping with the dancing class and sometimes helping Bessie with a particularly large influx of visitors, Dr Gantry offered me a position on the staff of the club.
‘The Government has made so much use of our services that we have been able to obtain a grant from them to extend our work,’ Dr Gantry said one day, as he chatted to me in the lounge, where I was waiting for the dancing class to begin, ‘and it has long been my opinion that lady visitors to this country have many problems peculiar to women. I put this point to the Committee the other day and it was agreed that we should ask you to join our staff and look after our lady members.’
His offer was very unexpected but I was most interested and murmured that I was flattered by it.
‘Mrs Forbes tells me that much of your present work is in connection with women and children. She said also that you have a degree in Economics – is that so? and that you can speak French and German?’
‘Yes, it is so.’ My face must have shown my interest, because he went on to tell me about the salary and the working hours. The staff worked in shifts, and sometimes I would have to be on duty during week-ends and in the evening; this did not trouble me as I had often worked irregular hours; and as he went on to describe the work to be done, I felt a great desire to leave my present employment, in which I saw only the more sordid and degraded side of women, and do work of a pleasant nature.
‘I can be free in two months’ time,’ I said, my mind made up. ‘Will that be all right?’
‘Just in time for the rush of summer visitors,’ said Dr Gantry, wringing my hand, and then, before I could take breath, he shot across the room to talk to an Indian in a pink turban.
So I became part of the life of the McShane. It was for me a new and exciting life after the many years I had spent amongst the less fortunate inhabitants of the city. I helped Indian ladies with their shopping, shepherded American ladies round castles and museums, introduced wan German girls, imported as nurses, to the delights of having enough to eat, arranged tours for Gold Coast ladies whose knowledge of Shakespeare was frightening and who always wanted to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage. I led hikes into the Welsh mountains, into the Lake District and into the Peak District, arranged tours round biscuit factories, cotton mills, docks, power stations and new housing estates; and I enjoyed every minute of it.
I encouraged my often-shy bunches of ladies to talk to everyone they met, with the result that many a factory hand heard of Somaliland for the first time, and many a farmer saw India as a cluster of multicoloured saris fluttering round his cow-shed.
I rediscovered England myself, and the beauty of it was intensified for me by the many years spent working in an industrial town. When nowadays I sometimes feel a little homesick, I think of Tarn Hows in a rainstorm or the green pools of Snowdonia glittering in the sun, and my mind is diverted and the mood passes.
So the summer and autumn passed in a holocaust of work. Father was amused at what he called my Wogs, but he was pleased to see my enthusiasm, and Mother was delighted about my improved health – plenty of fresh air was putting pink into my cheeks and improving my appetite. I no longer wept. The pain that was Barney was with me still, although I tried not to disturb the wrappings with which time was insulating it.
James sometimes invited Angela and me to the theatre or to a concert, but he was careful not to be alone with me, and marriage was not mentioned by either of us again.
I never forgot the tango which I danced with the Negro, Paul Stacey, and neither did he. Whenever I attended one of the dances given at the McShane, he always danced a tango with me, and I always felt slightly drunk after it. He had a girl friend, a Polish refugee, and they clung to each other through many social difficulties. She could not tango, however, and she used to stand and watch us dance and clap her hands to the rhythm of the music. She had been in a concentration camp and her eyes were full of the horrors she had seen, and yet when she was with Paul she was completely at peace. He knew exactly how to chase the ghosts from her mind and bring quiet to her restless body, and he never deserted her except to dance the tango.
The tango undid the good which many months of quiet discipline had done. When I knew that Barney would never come back to me, physical desire had raged within me. I knew, however, that to live I must find peace of body as well as of mind, and I therefore worked long hours and concentrated painstakingly on the problems of my clients. Gradually some respite came until, consciously or unconsciously, in the space of five minutes Paul made naught of all my efforts. At first I felt humiliated and ashamed that, without encouragement, I could feel such desires – but comon sense told me that I was still young and must expect such feelings, so again I did my best to channel my energies into my work.
One day Bessie came and told me that a party of Egyptians was expected that evening. They were a rich and influential group of young men, who were touring Britain. It was Sunday and they were stranded in Wetherport until morning. Their guide, a harassed Government official, had telephoned to ask if we could entertain them for the evening, and, since a dance was held every Sunday evening, Dr Gantry had said that we could.
‘They’re Muslims,’ said Bessie in disgust. She was normally extremely tolerant, but for some reason she had taken a dislike to all followers of the Prophet, and it took her all her self-control to be pleasant to them. Like everything else about the staff, this was well known in the club. Probably she did not like them because, on their arrival in Britain, she was often the first Englishwoman – sometimes the first woman outside their family – to whom they had ever addressed themselves; and she suffered from their lack of knowledge of Western conventions.
Anyway, Bessie galvanised the canteen into baking in their honour, rounded up by telephone some girls with whom they could dance and begged me to help in the ballroom as well, although I protested laughingly that I was tired, after tramping round the cathedral with a party of American ladies.
When the Egyptians arrived, I was having a cheerful argument with Dr Wu, who believed ardently in the Chinese Communists’ cause and wished to convert me to his views, so I did not see them enter the room.
A silence stole over the lounge and I turned to see about a dozen exquisitely tailored young men surveying the room languidly, while a very indifferently tailored Englishman with a decidedly hunted look was dithering in front of them.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to Dr Wu, and went to the rescue.
The Englishman clutched my hand, said he was delighted to meet me and introduced me to his charges as Mrs Forbes. All the Egyptians immediately voiced their delight too, so it seemed pointless to explain that I was not Mrs Forbes.
I took their coats from them, found them easy chairs near the fire and asked the steward to find out what they would like to drink. The party was split evenly between whiskies and sodas and cups of tea. Since Bessie had not appeared, I asked Dr Wu, in a whisper, if he would kindly find her for me. Then I sat down amongst the new arrivals and chatted to them about their tour. Their English was a pleasure to hear, every word being clearly enunciated.
Dr Gantry arrived, followed by Bessie, so I moved away from the circle and went to speak to the group of American ladies, who had congregated in one corner. They were curious to know who the new visitors were, and when I told them that they had come to dance, the ladies promptly announced that they wanted to dance too and charged off to the cloakroom to ‘pretty up’, as they called it.
It looked as if the evening would be lively, so I sat down in a corner to rest for a few minutes. I had hardly seated myself when Dr Wu came up and silently handed me a cup of coffee – he must have seen my fatigue and gone specially to the buffet to get it. I was touched.
‘Please don’t mention it,’ he said when I thanked him, ‘it is a pleasure to me.’
I looked at Wu with new interest. Up to then he had just been another Chinese with Communist ideals, but when he expressed his pleasure he became suddenly a real person to me for the first time.
‘You are very kind, Dr Wu,’ I said, as I sipped the coffee appreciatively.
Wu smiled. ‘You are very kind to us,’ he said. ‘Madame Li has told me of your many kindnesses to her and to the other ladies in your charge.’
‘It is nothing,’ I said, the old shyness creeping over me. ‘I just do my work.’
‘You do much more than your work,’ said Wu. ‘We all know that,’ and he waved one hand as if to associate with his remarks the many faces in the background.
This was the first indication I had had that anyone other than the ladies I escorted appreciated the amount of work which I put into the club, and I was pleased. Through Wu’s polite remarks I glimpsed also how much foreigners like himself depended on the club for its friendly atmosphere.
‘I must desert you and go to the dance,’ I said, hastily finishing my coffee. ‘I have promised to help Mrs Forbes.’
Wu rose, bowed and smiled so that his eyes nearly vanished.
‘Alas,’ he said, ‘dancing is beyond me. My stupid feet fail to understand what the music tells them to do.’ His hands fluttered hopelessly.
I laughed.
‘Soon my friend will arrive and we will both come to the ballroom to watch you dance. Mr Stacey says that you dance most excellently.’
‘Mr Stacey is too kind. Do I know your friend?’
‘I think not. May I have the pleasure of introducing him to you later in the evening?’
‘I should be delighted to meet him,’ I said, and went away to dance with the Egyptians.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_64121fc2-7d48-514e-9f90-3c13b35bb2e6)
The usual mixed crowd was gyrating slowly round the ballroom floor to the strains of a waltz. The room was already overhot and the Englishman in charge of the radiogram was perspiring. The lights had been lowered for the waltz and the whole room looked dreamy and unreal. I felt very tired.
Bessie ushered in most of the Egyptians – one or two older ones had stayed with their English guide and Dr Gantry in the lounge, preferring the cosy fire and Dr Gantry’s lively conversation to dancing.
I went to Bessie. She was wearing a pink dress and her best hostess manner; and I noted that she had already enchanted a rather portly, but extremely aristocratic-looking, member of the party. She promptly pushed him on to me and we finished the waltz together.
The club had long since found that to encourage new members to dance, it was advisable in the first instance for one of the staff to ask them to dance, after which they usually had enough courage to ask someone else to dance. I therefore went to each Egyptian in turn and took him on to the floor, after which I let him loose amongst the other women present. Most of them danced very well and their conversation was polite.
The lights had again been lowered for a waltz, and I swam out with my fifth Egyptian. This one hugged me tightly to him, and we had hardly circulated once round the room before he asked me to accompany him to Manchester the following day and spend the evening with him.
I regretted that I was not free as I worked at the club. He said calmly that he would arrange it with Dr Gantry, who was a friend of his father’s. He wanted, he said soulfully, to take me to a ball and dance the whole evening with me. Retreating, I said that it was impossible and that I had no suitable clothes.
He said he would buy me all the clothes I could desire.
I was in real difficulty. Dr Gantry had expressly asked that we be careful in handling these young men, whose fathers were either high-ranking Government officials or well-to-do aristocrats. All his life this young man had probably had everything he wanted, and it would not be easy to gainsay him.
The record player seemed to be playing for an interminable time, and the Egyptian’s lips were brushing my ear as he murmured: ‘We are agreed that there are many more beautiful women in England, but you – you are the most seductive woman we have seen.’
I wanted to giggle. Miss Delaney, until lately helper of girls in distress, to be called seductive and to be so tempted! I had to get out of my predicament somehow – and get out of it gracefully. I looked round for a staff member or some English helper to whom I might have introduced my partner and thus created a diversion and made my escape; but almost everyone was dancing and the record-playing Englishman seemed to have vanished.
My partner was saying: ‘You should wear pearls in your ears – you must let me buy you some.’
I resisted a temptation to slap his face. Then over his shoulder I saw Dr Wu enter with a brown-skinned man – presumably the friend he had mentioned earlier. Dr Wu would do very nicely – but by the time we had danced round to the door where he had been standing, he had gone and there was only his friend, leaning against the doorpost and puffing at a pipe. I did not know this man and so continued to dance. The Egyptian had taken my silence for acquiescence and was breathing sweet nothings down my neck. Once more we came near to the door. I looked up and straight into the eyes of the brown-faced stranger. They were the most honest eyes imaginable, and when I looked they had such an unexpectedly gentle expression that I felt I had inadvertently peeped into his private life, and I dropped my own eyes. The music stopped and I guided the Egyptian firmly towards his friends. He was saying: ‘Please say where I shall meet you tomorrow.’
‘I am sorry I cannot come,’ I said, and turned round and fled.
Just at the door I looked back. The Egyptian was fighting his way through the swarm of dancers. Whatever should I do? ‘Come with me,’ said a voice.
I looked up. The stranger was laughing down at me. A thousand times better than twenty Egyptians, I thought. He opened the door opposite the ballroom door. The library, of course. So simple a means of escape – across the floor and down the tiny back staircase to the canteen on the floor below.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said, as we descended the staircase. ‘How did you guess?’
The stranger looked embarrassed and said shyly: ‘I was looking at your face.’ He stood uncertainly before me, pipe in one hand, the other making nervous gestures. I smiled, and he gained enough courage to say: ‘I come here every Saturday and Sunday to see you.’
I was surprised. ‘But I have never seen you before,’ I exclaimed.
‘You have to take care of all the ladies. How is it that you will see me?’
‘But – but …’ Words would not come. The evening was getting to the stage of fantasy, and I was so tired.
‘Is your work ended?’ asked the stranger, seeing my embarrassment and trying to change the subject. He drew out of his pocket an old-fashioned gold watch. ‘The time is ten o’clock.’
‘Oh, yes, Mrs Forbes asked me to stay only until 9.30.’
‘May I obtain for you a cup of tea before you go? We could – we could sit and drink tea safely in this corner, where you cannot be seen from the door by the Muslim.’
My legs were feeling unaccountably wobbly, my head ached and the canteen was quiet, except for two German girls talking with their English escorts. I sat down where he had indicated.
Mrs Barnes, the Canteen Manageress, evidently knew the stranger who liked to look at me every Saturday and Sunday, because she drew from under the counter and gave to him some cheese straws and some chocolate biscuits, which were in short supply at the time. Armed with these and some tea he came and sat down by me. My head was clearing and when I thanked him I took a good look at him. He was dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy, grey trousers; his white shirt made his skin look very dark but his features were clear cut and delicate; both in expression and outline his face reminded me of a Saint in an old Italian painting; his hands also, as they invited me to eat and drink, used the gestures portrayed in the same paintings.
‘From which country do you come?’ I asked, ‘and may I ask your name?’
‘I am from India and I am called Ajit Singh. You are Miss Margaret Delaney and you live in this city, yes?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and inquired if he was at the University.
‘I am writing my thesis – I spend much time, however, at the Berkeley Street power station – for experience.’
‘Oh,’ I said blankly, wondering what kind of experience a power station offered.
‘Instruments,’ said Ajit, as if divining my thoughts.
The tea was reviving me. My eyes twinkled with the mischief I felt, as I asked suddenly: ‘Why do you come to see me on Saturdays and Sundays?’
‘I have to work very much from Monday to Friday,’ was the calm rejoinder.
I laughed outright: ‘But I have never met you.’
‘There was no one to introduce us.’
‘That does not seem to deter the others.’
‘My father has said that in England an introduction is necessary before a gentleman speaks to a lady. Tonight I see the Egyptian frighten you – and I know Father is right.’
‘The Egyptian was introduced to me – he was not, however, acquainted with our customs. It must have been difficult for him to understand the subtle relationship between men and women in the West.’
‘It was difficult for me – but I have not frightened you, have I?’
‘No,’ I smiled.
He looked as if he was about to say something that was important to him, but changed his mind and said merely: ‘This evening my friend, Dr Wu, had promised to introduce us, but we have managed very well by ourselves, have we not?’ He flashed a little grin at me, as he took out his tobacco pouch and filled his pipe: ‘May I smoke?’ he asked.
This then was Dr Wu’s friend. Presumably they had met at the University.
‘Please do smoke,’ I said. ‘I must go – otherwise I shall miss the last bus home.’
He rose as I did, and opened the door for me.
‘Thank you again for rescuing me,’ I said, pausing by the door.
‘It is nothing,’ he said, his face inexplicably sad.
‘I hope to see you next Saturday,’ I said, desiring to clear the melancholy shadow away.
The sun shone immediately. ‘I wish that I will see you,’ he said, and I went to fetch my coat and hat.
As I hurried through the swing doors on my way out, I met Dr Wu looking harassed.
‘Are you looking for Mr Singh?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Miss Delaney, I am.’
‘You will find him in the canteen,’ I said, and ran down the stairs. As I went through the glass outer door, I turned. Wu was standing at the top of the stairs grinning down at me, as if I were the subject of some private joke.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_bda99f97-2938-5095-a931-7883b8604a86)
My term of duty on the following day did not start until two o’clock, so I missed the fun when Bessie received a telephone call. As a result of the Egyptian invasion, poor Bessie had worked until late on Sunday evening but had returned to work at her usual hour on the Monday morning, in order to act as Chairman at a meeting of an Anglo-Polish organisation. She was at the meeting when the club telephonist called her out of the room and said that someone who would not give his name wished to speak to her urgently.
She lifted the receiver and a reproachful voice immediately upbraided her. Could she not recognise love when she saw it – his heart was broken – one day was all he asked.
‘Who are you and what do you think you are talking about?’ asked an outraged Bessie.
When he gave his name she became more polite – the stony politeness reserved for Muslims.
‘I think a mistake has been made,’ she said guardedly.
‘You are the Mrs Forbes, the beautiful Mrs Forbes with whom I danced last night?’
‘Well, I am Mrs Forbes, but I did not dance with anyone last night – I was too busy.’
‘Yes, I remember – I remember – there were two Mrs Forbes – you are the lady of the blue dress?’
‘No,’ said Bessie. ‘I’m the lady of the pink dress.’ Then she thought of my blue dress. All Bessie’s latent motherly instincts came to the fore. Deliver me to this lunatic? No. She dealt summarily with the Egyptian and returned, full of apologies, to her Committee.
‘Bessie, dear, what did you say to him?’ I asked, after I explained the confusion over the initial introductions the previous evening.
Bessie looked at me sideways. ‘I told him that your reluctance to accompany him was natural, because you had an Italian husband six feet tall and expert with a knife.’
‘Bessie,’ I gasped, ‘you’re a dreadful scallywag.’
‘It was effective,’ said Bessie dryly.
During the afternoon I took two Americans round the docks, after which they were to take dinner with an English family. I left them at their hotel and walked through the crowded streets towards the club, meaning to do a couple of hours of work at my desk before taking dinner in the canteen. One way of avoiding the more crowded pavements was to take a short cut through a store which had its front and back entrances on adjoining streets, and this I did, only to collide with Mother.
‘Hello, dear,’ said Mother, clutching her parcels to her.
‘Hello, Mum. What are you doing here?’
‘Christmas shopping.’
Mother was looking worn, so I asked her to come and have some tea. We turned back into the store, and were fighting our way through the Cosmetics Department, towards the lift which would carry us up to the restaurant, when I suddenly saw a familiar face bent over an array of perfume bottles, while a bored shop assistant stood behind the counter and dealt with other customers between addressing the perfume buyer. I heard her say: ‘Passion of Paris is considered most alluring.’
‘Mr Singh,’ I said.
‘Who?’ asked Mother, peering through her eye veil.
‘Mr Singh. Come and meet him – he is quite amusing.’
Mother loves meeting new people, so we walked across to the perfume counter and I asked if I could help him, and then introduced him to Mother.
‘Please do help me,’ implored Mr Singh. ‘My friends at my digs say that dragons like scent for Christmas – they do not tell me which perfume to buy – it is most confusing.’
‘Dragons?’ I queried.
‘Landladies,’ said Mr Singh unsmilingly.
I heard Mother stifle a laugh behind her parcels, and I hastily straightened my own face and looked gravely through the collection of bottles. I was very conscious of Mr Singh standing by me. He did not look at my face, but he watched my hands as I sought for the best bargain for him. He took out a finely tooled leather pocket book and paid for the present, and then looked hesitatingly at Mother and me.
‘Will you join me to drink tea in the restaurant before continuing your shoppings?’ he asked.
Before I could open my mouth, Mother said that we would be delighted. She had never met an Indian before and was evidently excited at the prospect of examining further the specimen before her. Her neat, grey curls danced as she talked vivaciously to Mr Singh, and it was obvious that she enjoyed the tea party that followed. Mr Singh held open the doors for her and helped her with her parcels, pulled out chairs, and insisted on ordering masses of buttered toast, since the restaurant had sold out of cake. Mother was conquered by him before the meal was ended.
At the end of an hour I remembered guiltily my piled-up desk and said that I must return to work. We collected the parcels and Mr Singh paid the bill.
As we were waiting for the lift to take us down again, Mr Singh asked: ‘We are – that is – the Indian community is giving a Christmas party – I wonder – Mrs Delaney – Miss Delaney – would you like to come?’
This was a rare honour. The small Indian community tended to mix amongst themselves and rarely asked outsiders to their entertainments. In any case, no opportunity to refuse was given me. Mother accepted with alacrity for both of us.
‘We are mostly students,’ said Mr Singh. ‘It will be held in the club canteen.’
The canteen was decorated for the occasion with the Indian national flag and a picture of Gandhiji framed with flowers. It was a good party, although everything went wrong. The lights fused, the hot food, cooked by the students themselves, arrived cold, and the ice cream melted, but nobody was upset. Leisurely our hosts lit matches while the Canteen Manageress mended the fuse, somehow the Indian food tasted good, though strange to Western taste – and Mother felt like an empress.
As the eldest lady there she was specially looked after, and she was enchanted by the respect shown to her. She was soon surrounded by an assortment of men in Indian costumes; and three girls were almost tearing off their saris in an effort to show her how they were put on. As soon as their first shyness had worn off, they all talked at once, and I could hear her clear English voice rising above theirs, as she asked questions about their studies, their costumes and their homes.
Mr Singh looked after me and brought his special friends to meet me. He was very nervous and seemed fearful that I would criticise the arrangements for the party.
‘This food is not typical of India. The ladies who cooked it are not used to cooking – in India each family employs a cook.’
I assured him that the food was excellent.
‘We should have put up more decorations – the room looks bare.’
I reassured him on that point too.
Gradually he relaxed and soon he was laughing and joking with the little circle who had gathered round us. I sat quietly and listened, occasionally adding some small remark to the conversation. He was very popular amongst his own people, of that there was no doubt. Occasionally he broke into his own language and after these interludes there was always a roar of laughter.
‘Singh knows more jokes and riddles than anyone here,’ confided a small, handsome woman in an orange sari.
‘He should tell me some in English,’ I said, ‘I’m sure they must be good.’
Singh looked at me, full of contrition. ‘I forgot,’ he said.
‘Afterwards you shall tell them all over again in English,’ I teased.
He salaamed. ‘It will be my pleasure,’ he said.
I could see some of the girls present giving each other knowing looks at this promise of a private conversation; it meant nothing to me at the time, but it meant everything to them, and speculation as to Singh’s intentions ran high.
Mother asked Ajit – for Ajit he had become by the end of the party – to Christmas dinner at our house, and although I was pleased at her offering hospitality to a visitor, I wondered with some trepidation what Father would say about an Indian coming into the house.
Father did not make any special comment. He just looked very shrewdly at the man before him, the same careful look with which I am sure he scrutinises income tax returns, and then made him sit down and drink sherry, while Angela, Mother and I arranged the dinner table.
Although I had lived the whole of my life with my parents, I learned something new about Father that evening. It was apparent that he did not feel at all awkward about his foreign guest; there was none of that strained manner which is often apparent when even the most courteous man of one colour meets a man of another colour. It was as if Father had never heard of a colour bar – and I was proud of him. Strangely, too, I felt proud of Ajit. Father yarned happily about how he had fought with the Japanese in Russia and how well they had endured the cold winter, and Ajit told him how the Madrasi soldiers had successfully fought in a Kashmiri winter. Then they went on to the adaptability of mankind in general, from there to religions, and, by the time the port was served, they were old friends.
Angela sat down at the piano and played carols as we sat round the fire; and I watched the face of this stranger, who had tumbled into the middle of our family. The flickering firelight sometimes silhouetted the almost Greek profile and sometimes lit up the full face, so that its calm gentleness was fully revealed.
Father must have been looking too, as he smoked his after-dinner pipe and plied his guest with tobacco. He asked to which caste he belonged.
‘I am kshatriya – warrior caste,’ answered Ajit. ‘That is the second caste.’
‘A very gentle warrior,’ I thought.
When our guest took his leave and Father was bolting the front door for the night, he said to me as I started to mount the staircase: ‘The first young man I have met for a long time who has both brains and manners. Got any more like him at your club?’ And he grinned a little wickedly.
‘Plenty,’ I said, blowing him a kiss, ‘of all shades.’
Upstairs Angela was hanging up her frock in the big wardrobe in my room. She said, without preamble: ‘He’s rather a pet, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’
‘Ajit Singh.’
I started to pull the hairpins out of my bun. ‘Yes,’ I said almost reluctantly, ‘I suppose he is.’
On the evening of Boxing Day I was on duty at the club to make sure that the few ladies who had no private invitations had something or someone to entertain them. As I went from one easy chair to another in the lounge, I found myself looking for Ajit Singh. The room was lit with coloured lights half hidden in evergreens. A German architect had amused himself by decorating the room and the result was a soft glow with an occasional sparkle of tinsel or silver balls. It would be easy to miss someone in such dim light, and I had just decided that he had not come, when a voice from a particularly dark corner said: ‘Hello.’
I jumped, the cushion I had been shaking up still held in one hand.
‘It is Singh.’
He was sitting cross-legged in a deep settee and was smoking his pipe.
I said: ‘Good evening. How are you?’
‘Very well. Can you sit with me – today everybody is out, and I think your work is not great.’
‘I haven’t much to do.’ I sat down beside him. He continued to smoke, saying nothing and looking reflectively at me.
‘Will you come to the University Ball with me on New Year’s Eve?’ he asked.
Before I could stop myself I had answered in the affirmative, and when I saw his face soften, I was glad I had said yes. I foresaw all kinds of complications arising from that simple ‘yes’, but his pleasure was unbounded and I did not regret it. He thanked me effusively and also added thanks for the previous day’s invitation.
I said we were glad to have him and then asked him about Indian Festivals, which subject kept up the conversation until Dr Wu came in with Madame Li and the conversation became general.
Ajit Singh did not dance well, but the University Ball was fun. I knew several people present and was amused to see their eyebrows shoot up as they noted my Indian escort.
I did not care. I was enjoying being made a fuss of by a man who liked to come and look at me on Saturdays and Sundays.
We were eating ice cream when a very tall Indian, with a very short redhead on his arm, came up to us and roared: ‘Ajit, old chap, introduce me.’
‘Miss Delaney, may I introduce to you Mr Chundabhai Patel-my friend.’
My hand was enveloped in an enormous brown one. Chundabhai was the biggest ugliest Indian I had ever seen, but I could not help liking him. Six feet six inches was topped by a bullet head, blessed with small, twinkling eyes. His hair was cut to within an inch of his head, like a dog’s coat. His suit was of a quality rarely available in England at that time, and his shirt was silk.
He pulled forward his lady friend. Her name was Sheila Ferguson and she was doing chemistry under the same Professor as Chundabhai. Her freckled nose wrinkled and she tossed her red hair, as she described the Professor’s despair over the work of both of them.
When they went away to dance, I asked Ajit who Chundabhai was.
‘He is a Banya, the son of a rich chemical manufacturer. Soon he will go home to Shahpur to work with his father.’
So I heard the name of Shahpur for the first time; but it was just the name of an Indian town, a name more easily pronounceable than many. I asked where it was and whether it was a big city.
‘It is one of the richest of Indian cities. It has many industries – cotton, metalware, chemicals – but it has little water as it lies at the juncture of three deserts.’
‘Is the Government trying to improve the water supply?’
‘Certainly it is. Further north there is a river which is being dammed. From it they will obtain power for Shahpur and with the power water will be pumped from new deep wells. One day perhaps there will be a better way of bringing water to Shahpur, but Government has much work to do – it cannot do it all at once.’ He grinned at me, and added: ‘The British did not expect to harvest much tax from the district round Shahpur, so they did not care about providing water for it.’
It was the first time I had heard him criticise the British régime in India. His usual attitude was to ignore the past and speak only of the future of his country. Other Indians sometimes said that the Germans or the French would have been worse taskmasters and would have made their struggle for freedom both longer and bloodier.
‘Don’t be too hard on my fellow countrymen,’ I said.
He thought he had hurt me and to comfort me he said immediately that India had much that was good to learn from England, and that India was indebted to many fine English administrators.
Chundabhai came back to the table. Sheila followed with two English friends of Ajit and Chundabhai, and the party became hilarious.
This was the first of many occasions that Ajit and I enjoyed together, sometimes with a group from the club, sometimes just the two of us. It was a peculiar relationship. Ajit never asked anything of me – he seemed just content to be with me; and I was grateful for his peaceful presence. Part of me cried out to be loved, but I could not imagine being loved by anyone but Barney – and Barney was dead.
Very occasionally Ajit came to our house for an hour or so on Sunday evening, when I was not on duty. Mother always made him stay to supper and he basked in the comfortable, domestic atmosphere. After one of these visits, as we walked down the path to the gate, he said to me rather wistfully: ‘You have a splendid home.’
‘I think you must have a nice one too,’ I said.
‘I have,’ he said absently, ‘but I cannot hope to provide for my wife what Father provided for Mother. Middle-class people in India do not have so much money in our days.’
‘It is the same in England,’ I said. ‘If Angela or I got married, we would probably start in a two-roomed flat.’
‘Would you?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Of course.’
He shook my hand and went through the gate. I leaned over it and watched him out of sight. I was troubled because I saw myself hurting yet another man by refusing his proposal.
But I flattered myself. No proposal came.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_bfc26fe2-18bd-5220-8599-fa95cd3f435c)
A year went by, a year full of contented work for me. I began to have friends all over the world. After our visitors had gone, they often wrote to members of the staff, inviting them to spend holidays in cities as far apart as Delhi and Santiago. The feeling that I could go to almost any large town in the world and find a friend there to make me welcome, gave me a confidence that I had not enjoyed before.
I met also many English people, who took an interest in the club’s activities, and I learned how hospitable they could be, rationed and servantless as they were. I sometimes accepted an invitation to tea myself, and Mother helped me to entertain in return. By this means the number of her acquaintances was enlarged, and she found new interests to replace the slackening demands made on her by her daughters.
It was after one of these tea parties, when we were washing up, that Mother said: ‘Are we going to have a marriage in the family, darling?’
My hands froze amongst the soapsuds of the washing-up water. Had she misunderstood Ajit’s and my relationship, and if she had, how could I explain its special quality?
‘I don’t know, Mummy,’ I said guardedly.
‘I think so, dear – Angela and Jamie.’
I sighed with relief. Mother knew nothing of James’s proposal to me; all she knew was that he used to pay equal attention to both her daughters, but recently he had taken Angela out alone on one or two occasions.
‘I hope you are right, Mother,’ I said, as I shook more soap flakes into the water.
Mother looked troubled.
‘I sometimes worry about Angela,’ she said. ‘I can never get close to her as I can to you – even when she was a small child she seemed remote and independent.’
‘Don’t worry, Mother. Angela is a very capable young woman and well able to take care of herself.’
Mother sighed.
‘I expect you are right, darling – it would be so nice if she married James – he’s so dependable.’
So Mother felt the same as I did about Angela. As far as her personal affairs were concerned, she was bafflingly unapproachable – and yet we both loved her. Whenever I thought of Angela I thought of kindness. We had shared our toys, lent each other clothes for special occasions, rarely quarrelled. When we were at Grammar School we had confided in each other about our boy friends and small triumphs and disappointments; but when I preceded her to University that closeness seemed to vanish, probably just because we saw less of each other.
What did I know of Angela, the grown-up, sophisticated Angela, who, now that the war was over, was beginning to publish modest papers on her work?
She was a shadowy figure who had rejoiced with me over my engagement to Jackie; held me tightly while I got over his death and had been glad when I became engaged to Barney – or had she been glad? She had seemed surprised, almost shocked at first.
As I carefully laid the plates on the draining-board for Mother to dry, I thought again of that terrible last year of the war and of the events that led up to my engagement to Barney.
The twins had lived down the road from us since they were small boys and we had often played together. Barney, James, Angela and me, and as we grew older we had occasionally paired off – my heart missed a beat – not Barney and Peggie, and James and Angela, but Barney and Angela, with James and me left to our own devices.
I dropped a cup and smashed it.
‘My love, I hope you are not upset about James and Angela,’ said Mother, helping me to pick up the bits.
‘Oh, no, Mummy,’ I said truthfully, ‘I am very pleased.’
I put the bits of broken china into the sink basket and apologised for my clumsiness.
Barney’s actual wooing of me, apart from odd kisses at children’s parties, had been short and sweet. It had been compressed into fourteen days’ leave during which we had become engaged, and one subsequent leave. In between there had been letters every two or three days – love letters.
I had been very flattered by the sudden special attention from a man who had stood high in my affection from childhood. His hot, almost desperate passion had awakened an equal passion in me, and the idea of spending the rest of my life with him made me glow with happiness.
Mechanically I emptied the teapot as I thought back to the days before Barney had volunteered for military service – and I was afraid. A fine sweat trickled down my back and I clutched the teapot firmly in case its fate should be the same as the broken teacup. I began to remember odd times when the four of us had gone out together, when we were all students – and I saw sudden little pictures of Barney hauling Angela up Scafell, Barney and Angela picking gooseberries in our garden and quarrelling at the same time, only to fall silent when I approached, Angela kissing someone good night under the laburnum – I had thought it was James she kissed, but it could have been Barney – Angela making a point of meeting the postman on her way out to work during the war and taking her letters from him.
I tried, as I scrubbed the kitchen sink, to remember Angela’s other men friends. There were one or two vague figures escorting her during her teens, but I realised with a growing feeling of nausea that, if I excepted a fellow scientist who had written a paper with her, I knew of no man with whom she had gone out alone either during or since the war, except Gaylord, an American officer, towards the end of the war.
I tried to crush down my fears. I did not really know who were her admirers – she could have been in love with the entire British Army – and we should not have known at home.
I was afraid to pursue the subject further and yet a morbid fascination led me on from one damning consideration to another. Try and be sensible, I told myself. He is dead anyway. Maybe he did admire Angela, loving her like a sister and you like a wife-to-be. But the kiss under the laburnum tree was not a sisterly kiss, said my memory.
I dried my hands. ‘Mother, I think I will lie down for a while before going to work.’
I felt like lying down to die, like the laddie in the Scottish song.
The winter twilight had already closed in, as I lay down on my bed. Why had I never thought of this before? Probably because I had never thought of being in competition with Angela. I was nearer the age of the twin brothers, being three years older than she was – and I had always imagined that her sweethearts would be younger men. Three years’ difference in age is nothing between adults – but it is between children, and I was still carrying on the same childish attitude that I had when she was four and I was seven. She had always been my little sister – too young to really feel what I was feeling. Too young to suffer what I was suffering.
Too young to suffer what I was suffering? My heart leaped with pity for Angela. If she and Barney had been sweethearts, what must she have suffered when he was killed? I remembered her tears on the day the news came and I mentally kicked myself for being so stupid. What must she have felt when he became engaged to me? How did it come about that he proposed to me instead of her? I buried my head in the pillow as if to shut out further thought.
The light was switched on – Angela walked to the clothes cupboard, singing under her breath. She hesitated when she unexpectedly discovered that I was resting on the bed.
‘Sorry to disturb you, Pegs,’ she said. ‘I wanted a dress from the wardrobe.’
‘It is all right,’ I said, ‘I have to go to work soon.’
She took out the dress and came and sat on the bed by me. She was in her petticoat, and I looked at her coldly. She was beautiful, I thought regretfully, in comparison with my English prettiness.
‘At this minute you look just like Father,’ she said, and then broke off. She must have seen my eyes glistening with unshed tears.
‘Don’t cry, Pegs,’ she said, her voice full of sympathy.
My eyes examined her face critically. It was lined quite heavily under her powder, and there was a maturity about it that spoke of acquaintance with pain. Something had taken away her springy youthfulness.
I tried to behave like my normal self, and smiled at her.
‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘Angela, is it true about you and James?’
‘James and me?’
‘Yes, Mother was saying she thought you might be getting married.’
‘Well – er, no – he’s never asked me. We went to the Law Society Ball together – and to a popular lecture on nuclear physics, that’s all.’ She laughed. ‘Mother is romancing.’
‘Would you marry him if he asked you?’
She opened and closed the zip fastener on the back of the dress she was holding, before she answered thoughtfully: ‘I suppose I would – I’d be stupid not to – he’s a good catch.’ She looked at me mischievously. ‘Would you mind if I did?’
‘No, no, I’d be delighted.’ I did not say anything about his proposal to me. I looked at her through my lashes and imagined Barney kissing her shoulder. It hurt.
‘Angela –’ I faltered, and yet I felt if I did not know I should die. ‘Angela, will you tell me something – I won’t be angry, whatever you reply.’
She looked mystified and although she answered ‘certainly’ her voice had a defensive note.
I raised myself on my elbow until I was looking closely into her eyes.
‘Angela, were you in love with Barney?’
A flush crept over her face and neck and perspiration started on her forehead, but she answered me steadily: ‘Yes.’
I took a long breath.
‘Was he in love with you?’
‘Yes.’ She half rose, to leave me, but I restrained her by catching her wrist, and looking at her imploringly.
‘Angela, why in the name of Mercy did he become engaged to me?’
‘It was the best revenge he could think of.’
‘Revenge? On whom?’
‘On me.’ She stood up, and there was anger in her voice as she spoke: ‘Our heroic Barney was nothing but a handsome jealous cat.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, a chill creeping over me, ‘were you his mistress?’
‘We were always lovers – ever since my seventeenth birthday party.’
I shivered. That party was in 1939. I remembered it well – everybody had got a little drunk and Mother had been upset about it – but the first months of the war had upset all of us.
‘Why did you not get married?’
‘At first he was studying and had no money. When he and James took over his father’s practice, he said that before either of them married they must re-establish the firm. Then he volunteered.’ Her voice trembled. ‘When he came home on leave he expected to make love, though he never mentioned getting married. Once I asked him – but he laughed it off – said the end of the war would be time enough. A man never wants to marry his mistress,’ she finished up bitterly.
‘Well, what did you do?’
‘Gaylord came along. He was really sweet to me, so I thought I would marry a man who loved me rather than one whom I loved. After about twelve months, he told me he was going home to his wife – it was the first indication he had given me that he was married.’ She shrugged her shoulders, and continued: ‘I suppose he was no different from most men away from their homes.’
There seemed to be more to come – Angela’s lips were quivering, so I said: ‘Go on.’
‘Barney came home on leave unexpectedly and caught us one night at the gate. He glared at the pair of us as if we were scum, and marched on into the house. He never spoke to me again, except when I was amongst the family. He wanted everything without responsibility, and, when he saw that he was going to lose me to someone else, he tried to punish me – perhaps he thought when he became engaged to you I would crawl at his feet rather than see you marry him.’
‘And how soon after that did he become engaged to me?’
‘During his next leave.’
I felt sick, horribly sick. Barney making love to me to revenge himself on my sister, whose only fault it seemed to me was that she had trusted a lifelong friend too well.
Angela crouched on the bed and hid her face in her hands. I felt a great anger against Barney – such disregard of the damage he had been doing was unforgivable. I sat up and put my arms around Angela.
‘Angela,’ I said softly, ‘he’s dead. One day you will marry a more worthwhile man – perhaps James – he is a good man.’
‘Pegs,’ she wailed, clinging to me, ‘it was awful.’
Now it was my turn to comfort her. I stroked her head and thought how many times she had comforted me.
‘My love,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me? I would have boxed his ears and told him to stop acting like a child. I would have sent him back to you.’
‘I have some pride – and you were so happy.’
‘Of course.’
Dazed with misery, I sat for a while, automatically stroking the blonde head. In those minutes I realised how little I knew about men. Most of my knowledge of them had come at second-hand through the cases I had handled and through books. Jackie, my first fiancé, had been the brother of a girl friend of mine and had been at sea for months at a time. The club had been my first opportunity to meet many strangers – previously I had gone to balls and dances as one of a party. How blind I had been, not to realise what Barney was doing. How blind and how full of false pride. Hatred surged through me – hatred of a man who had humiliated me in my own sight.
The alarm clock whirred and brought my sanity back sharply. Time to go to work.
Angela and I got up together and dressed silently, Angela to keep some mysterious appointment, and I to make out a list of cultural centres in which South African schoolteachers visiting the north might be interested.
Before we went downstairs, I kissed Angela and the kiss was warmly returned. I felt humbly grateful for the comfort of the forgiveness it conveyed.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_34144b56-2a1c-516c-bfa9-a2dad7f9f020)
I worked until midnight, when the club closed. The thought of going home to bed made me feel sleepless, and, as the last bus had just left, I decided that, rather than take a taxi, I would walk home. I walked slowly through the night mist and, when at last I reached our gate, I thought irritably that I would never sleep if I went in, so I walked round the block. The policeman on the beat knew me, and said: ‘Good night, Miss.’
I returned the salutation. I came again to our gate but continued past it, walking the same route. The constable met me again and asked if I had lost anything.
Wearily, I said: ‘No, thank you. I am just taking a stroll before going to bed.’
‘It’s not too safe round here late at night, Miss.’
I agreed, and walked back to our gate with him. It appeared that I would have to go to bed, but my nerves were jangled and I felt that to scream would be a great relief.
At home I made myself some cocoa and at three o’clock I got into bed. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Barney laughing at me, until I could have shrieked at him to go away and never haunt me again.
I switched on the bedside lamp and took from the side table the studio portrait which he had given me just before leaving on his last journey back to barracks. I sat up in bed and for a long time examined the face portrayed. The lips smiled at me, but when I covered them up and looked at the eyes alone, they were cold and staring.
At five o’clock I got up. It was Sunday morning, and the church bells soon began to ring for the first service of the day. Mother heard me washing in the bathroom and called to ask if I was poorly. I said I was quite all right and was preparing to go to church. I heard her bed creak as, satisfied, she turned over to sleep again.
I had no intention of going to church, but it was the simplest explanation to save Mother getting up to see what she could do to help me. Garbed in slacks and woollen sweaters, I went out into the garden. Lighted only by the shaft of light from the front door, it was as bleak and shrivelled as my heart. I went inside, boiled some water and washed up the supper dishes for Mother, after which I laid the table for breakfast.
I had just refilled the sugar basin when, to my astonishment, the telephone bell rang. I answered it quickly, to avoid its waking the entire household.
‘I wish to speak to Miss Delaney,’ said Ajit.
‘Speaking,’ I said. ‘Hello.’
Ajit’s cool tone melted into a warm hello.
‘I am reminding you that you must be ready at ten o’clock,’ he said.
‘Oh, Lord!’ I ejaculated.
‘Is there trouble?’
‘No, no,’ I said. I had forgotten that I had promised to walk along the coast with him to a village inn which specialised in bacon and egg teas. He had taken great trouble to pick a Sunday when I would be free and when the tide would be high and at its wintry best. The thought of being bright and entertaining throughout the day was too much for me. I opened my mouth to make an excuse.
‘I hope I do not telephone too early. We Indians rise rather early.’
‘No, I was already up.’
‘Then we will meet at ten o’clock.’
It seemed unkind to disappoint him, so I said that I would be ready and would bring some sandwiches for lunch.
The happiness of his response when I said this could hardly be construed as enthusiasm for sandwiches, so I was glad I had not refused to go.
Ajit had not been at the club the night before. He was working very hard, trying to cram in as much experience and study as he could before going home. He had just finished an arduous round of visits to the factories of electrical instrument makers, and had determined to make this Sunday a holiday.
He met me at the corner of the road in which my home stood. I was early and shivering in the north wind which whined through the leafless trees. The sun peeped only intermittently through the clouds, and the deserted streets looked dismal. I turned up the collar of my leather windjammer.
Ajit was apologetic about my having to wait for him. He glanced at my face, which I knew looked drawn in spite of careful make-up.
‘Are you well?’ he asked. ‘We need not go if you do not wish it.’
I assured him, with a brisk smile, that I was quite well. He looked doubting, but the bus came and we boarded it.
The sea was a heaving mass of grey, except where far out the waves were hitting a sandbank and breaking into white spray. As we started along the top of the sea wall, only the slapping of the water against the base of it and the cries of gulls broke the silence. We walked steadily, the wind behind us, and gradually my body warmed with the exercise and the fresh air cleared my head.
In the coarse grass covering the sand at the back of the wall, I saw a rabbit peeping up at us and, laughingly, I pointed it out to Ajit.
He had been looking at me from time to time rather anxiously, but he was apparently satisfied when I laughed, because he laughed too. He told me about the squirrels that lived in the neem trees in the garden of his home in Delhi, and of the lizards that always made a home in the window curtains, no matter how frequently they were shaken out. I shivered at the idea of lizards in the house, but he said they were harmless creatures with yellow bodies and sparkling eyes, and they kept the room free from insects. He told me also about the mongoose that lived in the inner courtyard to guard it from snakes.
‘Snakes are sacred, are they not?’
‘Village people sometimes worship cobras as a manifestation of God – but it is the cow which is really sacred – she gives us milk, clarified butter and curd, and in return she must be fed and protected and on no account slaughtered.
‘It would be merciful to kill some of the cows which are sick and old,’ he added ruefully.
‘I read once that one of the Hindu Gods is a destroyer. Is that true?’
‘Yes, Shiva destroys – without thought or mercy,’ he said, bitterness in his voice.
I thought of the famines, the floods, the earthquakes, the riots of India. It was not surprising that they believed in a God who destroyed.
‘Well, who creates?’
‘Brahma creates. From the holocaust which Shiva makes, he recreates. So life is born anew and nothing is wasted.’
Nothing is wasted. From the devastation which emotions leave, does Brahma spin again the threads of life? I wondered. It was a new idea to me – a harsh idea – that destruction was a necessary preliminary to the creation of fresh life.
‘Do you believe in such Gods?’
‘No, these Gods are for simple people. I must seek the truths behind them.’ He glanced at me and saw that I was not bored, so he continued: ‘There is a part of an Indian’s life which is given to the study of religion. When his sons are grown up and he can rest from his work, he spends many hours of his day in contemplation and in the study of Sacred Books, such as the Gita and the Upanishads, and he prays for enlightenment. A few renounce their wealth and their families and become beggars, asking only for food from the householders and cotton cloth to cover their bodies.’
‘By ridding himself of worldly ties, he expects to give all his thoughts to God?’
‘The same idea exists in the Christian religion,’ he said, nodding his head in assent to my question. ‘It is, however, in one particular different. In Christianity blind faith is required. In Hinduism faith is not asked. A man must by earnest contemplation discover what he feels to be true, and in that only he must believe.’
‘It is a hard religion.’
‘On the contrary. It provides for every man. It asks only belief to the best of a man’s ability – no more.’
Mother and Father had brought up their daughters to go to church on Sundays and babble the Lord’s Prayer every night. They had also taught us the accepted rules of conduct in society. Good children, they said, did not lie or cheat. Good young women lay only with their husbands; they were not too vain; they did not gossip unkindly, and so on. I had often questioned these teachings, but it was clear that they contributed to the peace of the community, so I accepted them. But when the war came to our city with all its savagery of persistent air raids, when most of the boys with whom I had grown up were dead in an apparently futile war, my mind sought for a reason for all the suffering I saw – and found none. And subsequently had not found any.
I had dug amid rubble with nothing but a coal shovel and bare hands to free a mother and children from the cellar of their ruined home, and had prayed at the same time that God would not let the tottering walls around me fall and crush me too. They had not fallen – but I had not then believed in God. With a crushed child in one’s arms it is hard to believe in any kind of Divine Mercy. My confused mind seemed symbolic of a whole world which faced the same issues.
Rather than continue a discussion which threatened to resurrect old worries, I suggested that we have lunch, and we sought shelter from the wind in a deep hollow ringed with rough grasses. It was a pleasant place, and the sun which had strengthened as we walked warmed us as we munched the sandwiches that I had brought. Afterwards we sat and smoked in silence.
Ajit took my hand and opened it. Very lightly he traced the lines upon it with his finger.
‘Your hand is full of good,’ he said finally.
‘I suppose I am really a fortunate woman,’ I said, ‘but I do not feel so.’
He puffed at his pipe, and looked again at the hand.
‘The early life is broken, full of small illnesses and disappointments – later on it greatly improves.’
‘Does it?’ I asked hopefully, leaning closer to him to have a better look.
He caught his breath as I moved nearer, but went on: ‘Yes, there is a husband – and three children.’ He broke off and then asked: ‘Have you been married? Forgive me for asking.’
It was my turn to catch my breath. ‘Not quite,’ I said, ‘I have been engaged twice and both my fiancés were killed.’
‘Forgive me,’ he repeated. ‘I should not have asked, although it is written in your hand.’ He closed the hand but kept it in his own firm grasp. His head was bent as he stared at our clasped hands; his hair was glossy, like the back of a cat.
He looked up, straight into my eyes: ‘Why are you so unhappy today?’ he asked.
Although I was totally unprepared for such a question, I tried to evade it lightly, as I said with forced gaiety: ‘Do I look unhappy? It must be old age creeping up on me.’
‘Age – you?’ he exclaimed. ‘No, some shock has come to you – and I wondered if I could be of comfort.’ He stroked my hand absentmindedly.
At his words, my mind was flooded with the pain and humiliation of yesterday. The quivering of my lips became a general trembling, which he felt in the hand he stroked.
‘Say to me,’ he said very gently.
‘I – er – it is rather a personal matter.’
‘Naturally it is personal – that much I realise. It is good when in trouble to speak to another of one’s personal matters – it makes better.’
His voice was full of sympathy and, after a hesitating start, the whole story poured from me in short, bitter sentences, and, just as he had said, it made me feel better.
Finally I said: ‘Unknowingly I hurt Angela, who loved me enough not to let me see the jealousy she must have felt.’
During the recital he had continued to hold my hand as he sat stiffly cross-legged, but as I finished he let go of it and lay down on his back and relit his pipe. The smoke rose in cloudlets, as he thought. Then he looked at me and grinned mischievously. Feeling very self-conscious at having confided in a stranger and a man, I smiled rather tremulously back at him.
‘You are lovely when you smile,’ he said, as if he had not heard the story at all.
The incongruity of the remark struck me and I laughed a little harshly.
‘That is not a good laugh,’ he said, raising himself on his elbow, so that he was quite close to me, and taking my hand again. ‘I have some advice to give you.’
‘Yes?’
‘Let me marry you. Let me show you what life and love can really be.’
I started up as if to run away, but he would not let go of my hand.
‘Don’t go away. Hear me to the end.’
I looked down at him and was astonished at the beauty which flooded his face; it was transfigured. There was love in it such as I had previously seen only upon the face of a new mother – no lust – just a glow of affection. I knew I was seeing something rare, and I sat down again, hardly knowing what I did but fascinated by a loveliness I did not know a man’s face could show.
‘I have loved you from the first day I saw you – you must know it.’
I did know it although I had not acknowledged it to myself. I nodded.
‘We would have to fight many difficulties together, as we are of different races – yet those difficulties could also make us cling together and know each other.’ His eyes were imploring. ‘I would love you so that sadness and weariness left your face, and contentment filled your life.’
‘You do not ask me if I love you.’
‘I do not ask your love now – only the chance to win it – and the privilege of giving you happiness.’
I felt curiously humble before him, very uncertain of myself, but the desire to run away had gone. It was as if unimagined treasures had been laid before me; and it seemed to me that I had done nothing to merit such a gift.
I tried to think clearly, to imagine what living with a man who was brown would be like. My mind refused to grasp anything, however, except that a delicate, brown finger was stroking my wrist and that a man of known integrity and ability was looking at me with adoration, and had just offered me all that he had and an entirely new life.
‘Ajit – I am not worth all the sacrifice it would mean.’
‘My Rani – my Queen, you are worth everything to me.’ He slipped his arm round me and drew me closer. Suddenly I turned my face to his shoulder and wept wearily. I wept the last tears I had for Barney, who had been such a scallywag in life and was so pitiful in death. And for the first time for years I desired to make someone else happy instead of hugging my own miseries to myself.
The Chinese say that the time to court the widow is immediately after the funeral, and there had certainly been a funeral the day before, a funeral during which love had been replaced by hate and then by pity – pity for Barney, pity for Angela, pity for myself.
He let me cry until the sobs became less. Then a brown hand turned my face to his. Very carefully he pushed back the loose hairs from my face which must have been ugly from crying. He bent his head and softly caressed my cheek with his nose. A butterfly kiss went across my lips, and I lay still, too tired to protest.
Infinitely patient, he courted me as if I was a girl bride who had never seen him before and was afraid of being alone with him. He did not attempt to kiss me as Barney had kissed me. Just light kisses, softly across my mouth, until I began to desire more. His breath was sweet in my nostrils, and my arms almost of their own accord went up and round his neck.
When he felt my whole body stir uneasily, he said: ‘Marry me?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and he released me slowly. He was beaming.
‘You will be the Lakshmi of my house,’ he said, ‘the Goddess and Giver of all Good Things.’
The winter sun grew sharply stronger, as the clouds rolled away. I smiled at him very shyly although my pulses were pounding. I had just accepted a very difficult set of ties and yet I felt released from bondage. I sat back on my heels and surveyed my future husband.
Because I was for the first time imagining him as a partner, it was as if I had never seen him before. He lay and puffed his pipe contentedly and hummed under his breath, as if nothing had happened, his eyes shadowed by their dark lids and enormous lashes. A patient man, I thought. Anyone else would have followed up the advantage which my acceptance had given him. Some inner perception must have warned him to go slowly – or was it an infinitely subtle skill in the making of love?
At the thought of his really making love to me, a hot flush rose to my face and I scrambled to my feet. He got up too. He was shivering, whether with cold or desire I did not know, but I arranged his scarf for him and made him button his raincoat to the top.
‘Hot tea and bacon and eggs,’ I said as I pulled on my woollen gloves.
‘These English women,’ he said. ‘So practical – and also so impractical,’ and he swung me towards him and kissed me hard until my body slackened against his. I pulled myself away hastily.
‘Bacon and eggs,’ I said firmly, and ran up the sea wall to the top. The wind hit me as it blew straight off the sea.
‘It’s really cold,’ I said as he joined me.
‘Let us then run.’
So, laughing, we ran along the sea wall to get warm. As I raced Ajit, the wind tearing at my hair and the waves roaring at my feet, some youth came back to me, and I was filled with young hope for the future.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_0a03afb4-cdd9-5f8c-b61a-c6897c9ffeb1)
There was a log fire in the parlour of the pub where we had out tea, and as we were the only customers, we afterwards sat hand in hand on an old wooden settle and watched the sparks fly up the chimney.
The landlady who served us looked upon us with disdain, but when she heard our voices, she confided audibly to her daughter behind the bar that: ‘She isn’t a common sort,’ and she unbent enough to ask Ajit if he was a student from India. She also asked me if I was a student. I said vaguely that I was a social worker, not wishing to invite further questioning. The landlady was nonplussed by my answer and said to her daughter, as she took our dirty dishes to the sink behind the counter, that: ‘It was a right rum combination – an Indian and a social aid worker.’
Both Ajit and I giggled when we heard this remark; but it reminded Ajit of another problem.
‘What will your father say about your marriage to me?’
I was secretly worried about my parents’ reaction to the marriage, although I did not want to communicate this worry to Ajit.
‘Father likes you very much,’ I said cautiously, ‘although he will be very upset at my going to live so far away as in India.’
‘We shall see – I do not wish that he should grieve.’ He let go of my hand, picked up the poker and poked at the fire, while his fine eyebrows knitted and a frown broke the smoothness of his forehead.
‘Peggie, in one month’s time I have to return to India.’
‘So soon?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘Yes, my Queen, I have obtained a post at the new power station at Pandipura, near Shahpur – where Chundabhai lives – and I must start work in two months’ time.’
‘But, darling …’ I expostulated. I got no further, the rest of what I was about to say being smothered in a kiss. It was the first time I had used an endearment when speaking to him, and he was delighted. I had to laugh. He had picked just the right second in which to kiss me – the barmaid had bent down beneath her counter to put away a glass.
‘Darling,’ I protested, fighting my way free, ‘not in public.’ I relieved him of the poker which he had been brandishing in the air.
He immediately let go of me. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, looking very crestfallen.
I slipped my hand into his and said: ‘You are sweet – and don’t be sorry – the kiss meant a great deal to me –’ I stammered and could feel the colour mounting to my cheeks.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘It was naughty of me – in Bombay I would have been liable to a fine for such behaviour.’
‘It was a little naughty – but very nice,’ I said. ‘Now, tell me about your return home.’
He did not immediately reply to my prompting about his journey home. After a moment or two, he said slowly: ‘I have not yet told my father about my marriage to you.’
‘How could you? You have only today asked me.’
‘I have had the intention for twelve months,’ he said calmly.
I grinned. I could imagine it. Although his ideas erupted suddenly into words, it was obvious that much preparatory thought had been given to them. I was glad that he, at least, had given thought to our marriage; I was still bewildered at the change he had brought into my life and at my temerity in accepting his proposal.
‘Are you going to write to your father now?’
He did not answer the question directly, but said:
‘My father will not wish us to marry. He will wish me to have a bride of his own choice from our own caste. It is possible that he will be most angry.’
I knew that the old customs were dying out in India and I queried his remarks.
‘They are dying,’ he said, ‘but still they linger in families. I love my parents and I do not wish their anger – but I love you more and am determined to marry you.’ His face darkened as he said this and he put his arm round my waist. ‘Peggie,’ he went on, his voice full of urgency, ‘marry me now, quickly. What has been done cannot be undone.’
I had heard of the power of Indian parents, and I asked him what his father was likely to do if he defied him, as he suggested.
‘I am fortunate,’ said Ajit. ‘I have a post and do not have to depend on my family. I do not think Father will use his influence to have me dismissed – he will not wish to ruin me. We shall, therefore, be assured of our income.’ He stirred uneasily and went on, ‘It must be hard for you to understand the tight bonds of an Indian family – here you leave your parents as a matter of course, but in India it is not so. It is the unity of our families which makes life bearable in a country where there is no other protection against catastrophe except the family.’
I thought this over. Then I asked: ‘Why don’t you get a job in this country, where life is easier and a quarrel with your father would not affect you so much?’
‘Peggie, you have often told me of the difficulty of getting employment for coloured people in this city. You know the difficulties.’
I did know the difficulties. Although before the law all citizens had the same rights, when a man came before a prospective employer he had to balance his brown skin by being twice as good as the white man applying with him, even if they had been born and bred in the same district. It would be even more difficult for a foreigner. He might be lucky and obtain a post, but I writhed at the thought of the petty insults he might well have to endure from the men who served under him.
‘I do know,’ I said, my mind made up. ‘We shall go to India, and we shall hope to win your parents’ goodwill. You shall teach me carefully the customs of your caste, so that after a while people will half forget that I am English, and then perhaps your father will not be so angry and you can make peace with him.’
‘You are good,’ he said. ‘You would not have to alter completely your way of life – you need only conform in public – perhaps wear a sari.’
His face cleared, and I said: ‘You are right about being married soon. We will put up the banns immediately and we can then be married a week before you go.’
‘What are banns?’ he asked.
I explained about a registry office marriage. He was full of excitement. ‘I will go to the Registrar tomorrow,’ he said. He squeezed me hard against him, and then got up abruptly, fumbling in his pocket for money to pay our bill.
We decided to go back to town by bus, and as we waited in the darkness at the bus stop near the inn, he came close to me and held me to him, and talked quietly about our future life together.
Our children could be Christians, he said, if I wished it, but he would prefer to bring them up as Hindus as they would have to live in India. This question had already occurred to me, and I said that they should be Hindus. I knew from previous conversations with Ajit that the rules of conduct laid down for Hindus were wise, and all I asked of Ajit was that what we taught our children should be free from corruption or bigotry.
He chuckled. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, ‘and put out of your mind most missionary writings about us. You will find purity of thought in India as well as here.’
‘I shall be happy if our children are like you,’ I said.
He trembled. ‘I am not good,’ he said. ‘I … I want that we do not wait three weeks for our marriage.’
‘The time will go quickly,’ I said, unclasping myself from him, as the lights of the bus swept us.
As the bus jogged back to town, I puzzled over the best way to break the news of my engagement at home. My head was heavy from lack of sleep and I could not think very well, so I decided to leave the question until the following day.
Knowing that Ajit’s dragon did not provide supper, I insisted that he should come home for a meal.
As our shoes were dirty, we went in through the back door. My heart was pattering and I think Ajit’s must have been too, but Mother was too busy to notice any difference in us. She was just taking a pie out of the oven.
‘Come in, children,’ she said. ‘I hoped you would come soon. I have made a pie for supper. Peggie, pass me that cloth. Ajit, I am glad you have come. Perhaps you would like a wash. Hang the rucksack on the door.’ She flew round the kitchen like a plump robin.
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Helen Forrester
Helen Forrester’s moving story of an English girl and her love affair with an Indian man.Peggy Delaney was a Lancashire girl born and bred, beginning to live again after the heartache of the war.Ajit Singh was a charming young Indian student, shortly to return to his homeland and an arranged marriage.When Peggy and Ajit fell in love, each one knew the future would not be easy. But as they began their new life, far from their homes and their families, they found that love could bring two worlds together…
HELEN FORRESTER
Thursday’s Child
DEDICATION (#u9353ad82-32b5-5795-89ca-b383befacb80)
When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut.
Gitanjali-Rabindranath Tagore
CONTENTS
COVER (#u12ab2e30-5239-56f3-ad38-dada575655ad)
TITLE PAGE (#u397dabc5-41a4-5bbd-b109-257d21a456e0)
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE (#u1dfe746c-a21f-509f-9521-703ead059c81)
CHAPTER TWO (#uc78c86ac-47d1-5f67-af95-98837d3cb416)
CHAPTER THREE (#u253dafc4-da8b-5819-83f0-8a088033fecc)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u52cbf096-daa2-5be2-8968-c4682d6c6776)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u232969f5-741d-5731-8c63-5e3545400608)
CHAPTER SIX (#u5008bad9-0d94-575a-a676-b9b232b59088)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#u81cc667b-0cba-52c0-83a4-dc861fddb6ca)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#u5ed16549-971f-594d-8c4e-f8bdca83c3e8)
CHAPTER NINE (#u4dfe991a-c0e0-52e5-aebd-8dc877161dc2)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
OTHER WORKS (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_7e993971-6f9a-5f65-a315-d70736b31b71)
‘Dawn’t be a fool,’ shouted James as he slapped me hard across the face.
I stopped shrieking and began to weep, rocking myself backwards and forwards, my hands clutching at my nightgown as if to tear it.
James, with tears running down his face, was saying: ‘Now, dawn’t take on so, luv.’
His Lancashire accent, usually carefully suppressed, was homely and comforting, and gradually my weeping lessened and I lay back on the pillow. The medicine bottles on the mantelpiece changed from red blobs to definite shapes, and James’s face, so like Barney’s, ceased to be a blurred mirage and I saw how exhausted he looked.
That last winter of the war had seemed particularly long and cold. Although in Wetherport bombing raids had ceased some time before, most of its inhabitants were worn down by overwork and poor food, and Mother was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of March I caught influenza. On the morning that James called, I was feeling better, and, with the promise that on the following day I should get up, Mother had tucked me up in bed with two hot-water bottles, and had gone out to shop. She had been gone only five minutes when the doorbell rang.
I let it ring twice, in the hope that whoever was at the door would go away, but the third ring was such a prolonged one that in desperation I got out of bed, hastily wrapped myself in a blanket and pattered along the icy upper hall and down the equally icy Victorian staircase to answer it.
On the doorstep stood James, looking as white as if he had just seen the sticky result of a direct hit on an air-raid shelter. Mist had formed little globules of moisture on his red hair and on his muffler; his face was blue with cold.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked apprehensively, and shivered in the draught from the open door.
‘Get back into bed and ah’ll tell thee,’ said James.
In spite of ten days of illness, I ran up the stairs and scrambled into bed, my heart pounding with foreboding.
‘It’s Barney,’ I muttered, my teeth chattering. ‘Something has happened to Barney.’
James limped slowly up the stairs, drawing off his gloves as he came, entered my bedroom and sat down heavily on the bedside chair.
One of my hands lay on the coverlet and he took it in his.
‘Peggie, dear, Barney was killed the day before yesterday. Mother got the news this morning.’ The words came in the precise, clear tones he used when clarifying a point of law for one of his clients.
Although the news was something I had feared daily for months, I was stupefied by it and could not for a moment grasp the implication of his words. It was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés.
Jackie had gone down in the Swallow in 1939, a month before our wedding, and it broke my heart, but I was young then – and young hearts mend – so that when Barney proposed to me four years later life once more became worth living.
I had known Barney all my life. He was big, red-headed and impetuous, and I fell in love all over again. His only sorrow seemed to be that his twin brother, James, was lame and could not, therefore, join the Army with him. This had separated them for the first time in their lives – and now they were separated for ever.
‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I had shouted in my agony, as James’s words bit into my heart and mind.
I must have had hysterics; otherwise James would never have struck me, but I remember only an enveloping, physical pain. Barney was dead, and the knowledge of it killed part of me.
I clung to James’s hand: ‘Why did he have to die?’ I sobbed. ‘Why not take a useless fool like me, not a good man like him? Why couldn’t I die instead?’
James loosed his hand and put his arm around me. He smoothed the hair away from my eyes: ‘The good God must have other work for you to do,’ he said.
James was not the kind of man to talk about God, and his words stuck in my mind, but at that time I just lay in his arms with his face close to mine, and thought only of my own misery and not of his. He and Barney were identical twins, and he must have felt as if one of his limbs had been amputated without anaesthetic – yet he never mentioned his mother’s or his own suffering.
James was still nursing me against his damp overcoat when Mother returned from shopping. She could never tell the brothers apart unless she saw James limp, and she thought it was Barney sitting beside me.
‘Barney, how nice to see you. Leave at last!’
James said, ‘I’m James,’ and Mother understood.
‘My poor darlings,’ she said. ‘Your poor mother.’
In her time, Mother had faced many crises, and she was wonderfully patient with James and me that day. It was she who remembered to telephone James’s office – James was a solicitor, as was Barney – to ask his clerk to cancel his morning appointments, and it was she who later bundled him off to work, after letting him talk to her about Barney while she prepared lunch for him.
‘Is someone with your mother?’ she asked.
‘My aunt is with her.’
‘Then when you have eaten this, go away and work. Work is a good opiate.’
When he had gone, she came and sat on my bed and talked to me. She did not talk about Barney, but about James, of his brilliant brain, his sensitiveness and the sorrow he must be feeling. She said firmly that Angela, who is my younger sister, and I must help to comfort him and his widowed mother.
I listened dully. At that moment I did not care about anybody except Barney, and every time I thought of his lying, blown to pieces, in a German field, sobs shook me and I writhed in my bed, so that the pillows grew damp and the sheets became hopelessly twisted.
When Mother realised that it was too soon to divert my thoughts to other people, she sat quietly by me until Father and Angela returned from work. Perhaps she knew what I had not realised, that James loved me more than Barney did; and maybe she hoped that when the pain had worn off, I would transfer my love of one brother to the other.
Father came in and stared down at me with pitying eyes.
‘I am sorry, child,’ he said.
He bent and kissed me: ‘Have courage, little girl.’
He went away to eat his dinner, and I heard the quiet murmur of his and Mother’s voices in the room below.
I heard also Angela’s key in the lock of the front door, and the patter of Mother’s slippers as she went to meet her in the hall. I heard Angela give a little cry of anguish; Mother must have told her the news immediately, so that she did not blunder when she came up to see me.
There was a pause and then Angela’s dragging footsteps up the stairs. Enwrapped in my own misery as I was, even I thought how tired she must be to come so slowly.
Angela came into the room. She had taken off her hat and coat, but still wore the slacks and the overall she used in her work as a ‘back-room girl’. She had studied electronics, but none of the family really knew exactly what she did in the closely guarded Government laboratory where much of her life was spent.
She shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Her face was an unearthly white and, despite the heat of the sickroom, she was shivering.
‘Pegs.’ Her voice was only a whisper.
She looked so stricken that I motioned her to come to me. I had not imagined that my elegant, sophisticated sister had so much feeling in her, and I was jolted out of my self-pity.
She came and sat down on the bed, her shoulders hunched and her hands dangling hopelessly between her trousered knees. This ugly posture was enough to tell me how deeply she had been affected by the news of Barney’s death; usually she sat very gracefully, with straight back and ordered hands.
Suddenly she flung herself across me and wept, her breath coming in harsh gasps. I said nothing, feeling too full of grief myself to speak.
‘Dinner’s ready, Angela,’ called Mother.
‘Give me a handkerchief,’ said Angela, looking up quickly, her sobs hastily stifled.
I gave her a very wet handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She tried to smile at me, as she said: ‘Woman must eat as well as weep.’
She went across to the dressing-table and powdered her nose with my puff, then came back to the bed, and in almost motherly fashion, straightened my top sheet and kissed me on the forehead. I could feel her lips trembling as they touched my skin, although she looked fairly composed as she walked to the door.
As she went out, she said: ‘I’ll come up after dinner and keep you company while you eat your supper.’
‘I can’t eat,’ I said.
‘My dear, you must. In times like this, one must keep strong – and you have a long way to go yet.’
‘I wish I was dead,’ I said.
After Angela had gone downstairs, I lay for a long time, thinking of Barney. I had always had a great affection for him, hot-tempered and ruthless as he often was; when we were younger, I had imagined that he preferred Angela to me as he had taken her out frequently, but it was to me that he proposed during the last Christmas he had spent at home. I had been so happy; it seemed as if the war could not possibly last much longer, and we planned to be married as soon as Barney was demobbed. He had survived the invasion of France safely and had enjoyed one more leave when his badly mauled regiment was brought home to be reformed. He had been tired and morose during that last leave, as if he had a premonition of what was to come, but after he was rested he became more cheerful and we spent two or three happy days together before he went back to his barracks.
I had begun to collect linen and china for the small flat we hoped to find. I wanted Barney to enjoy all the comforts I could scrounge for him in a tightly rationed country. I had bought sheets on the blackmarket, made pillowcases out of bleached flour bags, begged old curtains from Mother, and had bought from auction sales pieces of painted china and prewar silverware. Even now, on the bedside table, lay a half-finished tablecloth, which I was contriving by faggoting together tiny pieces of linen left over from the manufacture of aeroplane wings.
In a paroxysm of rage, I sat up and flung the tablecloth and the coloured embroidery silks across the room. Unfortunately, I flung the water glass as well; but the explosion it made when it crashed released the tension in me, and when Mother came running into the room, I was crying with steady, hopeless sobs.
Mother picked up the cloth and folded it carefully. It was to be a long time before I would spread it on a table, and if some, self-appointed prophet had told me where the table would be, he would not have been believed.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_9b028baf-1b7a-5495-9bbb-602a45514719)
When I was seven, my father, Thomas Delaney, came to Wetherport to work in the Income Tax Offices. In order to be near his work, he bought a Victorian house not far from the middle of the city. It had a walled back garden, in which my father managed to grow the daffodils for which he was famous locally. In spite of the heavy fall of soot and the fact that the surrounding houses had long since deteriorated into apartments or boarding houses, the family was very fond of its home and we refused to be dislodged from it, even during the heaviest bombing; and when we surveyed it on Victory Day, five weeks after Barney’s death, we were happy to find that it was in as good condition as when we first entered it.
From this house, I had gone out to school and later to the University; and now when my long day’s work was done, it was the place to which I thankfully returned each night.
About half a mile from home there was a very old part of the city, which bordered upon the docks, and it was in this area that, after taking a degree, I took up social work amongst unwanted and neglected children. A scar on my lung kept me out of the Forces during the war, and I was left undisturbed by the Ministry of Labour and National Service to continue my work. Most of the prostitutes of Wetherport lived in my district, and the place swarmed with troops and sailors of every nationality. Many of the residents were coloured – part West African Negro, part Arab and part Chinese, with a few Indians scattered amongst them. Their poverty was great and was intensified by the bombing which they bravely endured. They knew me as ‘the lady from the Welfare’ and I was classed with ‘the man from the parish’, that is, the Relieving Officer, as someone to whom the front door could be opened without hesitation. The war brought work to those who were dock labourers and seamen, and the young men were called into the Army, so that their fighting cocks tended to languish in their backyards, but games of fan-tan and crown and anchor flourished, and betting and drinking carried away much that was earned; the poverty and filth of their homes remained.
As the war progressed, illegitimate children seemed to be born faster than I could cope with them and my work was always far behind. I therefore returned to the office a week after James’s visit, still feeling shaky from the effects of the influenza.
The elderly voluntary workers, who were my staff, were horribly kind. They had seen Barney’s name in the ‘Killed in Action’ column of the Wetherport Telegram, and they handled me as if I was a delicate ornament, liable to breakage. They tiptoed in and out of my room, brought me specially made cups of tea, and murmured that I was looking better or looking worse. I felt like screaming at them to stop, to be normal, to make some vulgar joke, so that the automaton that was me could try and laugh.
One day James rang me up and asked me to join his walking club – it was surprising how far his lame leg could carry him over rough country. By the end of the summer, I had become, at his instigation, an unprotesting member of a music club and an opera society. He kept me in circulation firmly; every time I showed signs of slinking back to the family fireplace to weep he hauled me out again.
Very few of our friends came home from the war, and, in the topsy-turvy world in which we found ourselves, Angela also seemed glad of James’s company, and she frequently came with us on our outings. She was witty and she often made James laugh; he had the same throaty chuckle as Barney – and it hurt me to hear him. I love to hear merriment, but a dead man’s laugh is saddening, especially when you still love him.
Occasionally it was very like torture to have James striding along beside me, looking just as Barney always did, and then to catch his eye and see a different soul, a strange mind, peering out at me; but he was an old friend and I did not have to make a special effort to be pleasant in his company, so I clung to him, and for nearly three years saw him from time to time, either at the various clubs to which he had introduced me or at his mother’s home, which I visited occasionally. His mother welcomed my visits and, presumably, hoped that I would marry him. This solution had not occurred to me and James gave no hint that it had occurred to him; he continued to behave in his usual silently courteous manner and asked nothing except my company. He had other women friends, with some of whom I was also acquainted, but he never showed any particular preference for one of them.
I gradually picked up the fragments of my life and stuck them together again as best I could. The sickening reaction from the effort entailed by the war had, however, set in, and like many others I felt low and dispirited. I had been the only young woman left in our organisation at a time when our work was increasing; the war itself had brought many problems which were not the concern of any particular authority and I often found myself doing work far removed from the care of children. Many were the days when there was no time to eat and many the nights I spent on an old sofa in the office rather than waste time by going home. Once the Japanese war had been brought to a horrifying finish by the atom bomb, however, new social workers were recruited and my hours of work became normal. I should have been grateful for a life once more returned to a peaceful routine, but I found myself intolerably bored and very tired of solving other people’s problems.
In the autumn of 1948, however, James’s love of chocolate caused a sharp change in my life. We were attending a first night at the Royal Theatre, and I had elected to wait in the foyer, while James carried on a delicate negotiation with the girl in the sweet shop next door, for the purchase of a box of rare, handmade chocolates, for which he had not enough ration coupons. I stood idly watching the people arriving for the show. Every tram that stopped outside unloaded a fresh mass of shabby humanity; a few small private cars added their quota of patrons. Dressed in old sweaters, tweeds and raincoats, the women hatless like myself, they poured into the theatre. They certainly did not care much about outward appearances, but I knew they would form an attentive and critical audience.
I had just seen a Duchess slip quietly into the auditorium, chivvied from behind by two students who were afraid of being late, when a voice behind me gushed: ‘My deah, where have you been all these years?’
The voice was familiar, and I turned round quickly, to face a middle-aged woman who was extending a black-gloved hand to me.
‘Bessie,’ I cried, overjoyed at meeting someone I had known before the war. The last time I had seen Bessie she had been in khaki uniform – a sort of female brass hat – but there was nothing of that about her now. Her black suit and frilly, red hat made her completely feminine.
‘My deah, you are just the woman for whom I’ve been looking. Can you dance?’
‘Yes,’ I said blankly.
James came up to us, triumphantly bearing his box of chocolates, and was introduced. The foyer bell rang, and Bessie said hastily: ‘Come and see me, my deah, tomorrow evening at 42 Belfrey Street – the McShane Club. Come at seven.’ She looked about anxiously. ‘Please excuse me – I must find my party.’
She waved one plump hand vaguely in the direction of the front door and tripped across the hall, her high heels clicking merrily on the marble floor, and to my amazement, joined a party of Negroes. She greeted them gaily and vanished with them into the auditorium.
James’s eyebrows lifted, as he asked: ‘Who are they?’
‘No idea,’ I said.
‘Have a chocolate,’ said James, tearing off wrappings.
James had invited a young married couple to join us, and as soon as they arrived we went in to see the play. It was a good play about the escape of a prisoner of war from a German stalag – but my mind was on Bessie.
Bessie Forbes used to live in a flat near to us. Her husband had been a lieutenant in the Regular Army and had been at Wetherport Barracks for nearly a year before the war broke out. He had been sent to Norway and had been posted as Missing. Bessie waited for further news but none came, and, as she had no children, she enlisted in the Army Territorial Service. I knew she had done very well in the Service, but presumably she had now taken her discharge. I wondered if she had married again. And what was she doing in the company of Negroes? Negroes were an everyday part of my working life – but that was unusual. It was not reasonable to suppose that a woman of Bessie’s station in society would be well acquainted with any – the colour bar still functioned in England quite effectively in respect of Negroes.
At the end of the second interval, as the audience was surging back to its seats, I was tossed against Bessie, and she smiled at me.
‘Who are you with?’ I whispered, nearly dead with curiosity.
‘Nigerian chieftains,’ she said. ‘See you tomorrow,’ and she was swept away from me.
The mystery was beyond me, so I ate James’s chocolates and tried to concentrate on the play.
James and I walked leisurely home together. The night was clear and there was a sweet smell of rotting leaves in the park. We did not talk much on the way, knowing each other well enough not to have to make conversation. He lingered at our gate and I asked him in.
‘No, I – I won’t come in tonight,’ he said.
He made no move to depart, however, and leaned awkwardly against the gate pillar, his fingers drumming on its dirty, granite sides.
He said abruptly: ‘Peggie, will you marry me?’
My mind was on Nigerian chieftains, but the answer came without hesitation, and I surprised myself with the certainty of it.
‘No, Jamie,’ I said gently, ‘I can’t.’
James stopped drumming on the gate pillar and gripped it hard.
‘Why not, Peggie? Ah love thee.’
‘I know, dear, and I’m sorry.’ I paused, and looked at him in the light of the street lamp. ‘You are so like Barney, Jamie, that I would love you because of the likeness and not because you are you. It would not be fair to you.’
He stood there, silently biting his lower lip, just as Barney used to when puzzled.
‘Ah might’ve guessed it,’ he said at length. ‘Are you sure, Pegs?’ The light-blue eyes gleamed suddenly in the poor light and there was pain in them.
My resolve faltered; James would make a good husband, I knew. He had a depth of character which Barney had lacked. I looked up at him again. The light was playing tricks with him and it seemed as if Barney was standing there, instead of James; like a tormenting dream, I thought bitterly.
‘I can’t, Jamie. You’re the finest man I know – but I can’t marry you – I just can’t.’
‘Dawn’t fret yourself, luv. Ah do understand.’ He lifted my chin with one hand, so that the lamplight fell upon my face. His lips were curved with pity. ‘Just remember, that ah’m always around if you want me,’ he said softly. His arm dropped to his side and he turned to go. ‘Good night, Peggie, luv.’
‘Good night, Jamie – I’m truly sorry.’
He looked back at me as I stood by the gate: ‘Ah told thee – dawn’t fret,’ he called as he limped into the darkness.
I knew I had hurt badly someone who loved me very much, and as I climbed the front steps I reproached myself mercilessly for being so foolish as to see so much of him when I had no intention of marrying him.
I let myself in. Everybody was in bed, and only the tick of the grandfather clock broke the quietness. On the bottom step of the staircase lay Tomkins, our cat, and I sat down by him and scratched his ears. He stood up, stretched, and leaped up on to my shoulder, to rub himself against my neck. The house seemed so peaceful, so normal, just as it had been since I was a little girl. Only the little girl had grown and changed into a disheartened woman.
I burst into tears, and Tomkins fled up the stairs.
A door opened and Angela leaned over the banisters.
‘What’s the matter, Peg?’
‘Nothing much,’ I whispered, ‘I am all right,’ and I picked up my handbag and went slowly up the stairs.
Angela was standing in a shaft of light from her bedroom, fairylike in a nylon nightgown, her fair hair tumbling about her shoulders. She looked tired, however, as if she had not slept well for a long time.
I smiled wanly at her and she followed me into my bedroom.
‘You look tired,’ I said.
‘Me? Oh, I am blooming. I never did sleep much.’
‘Go to bed now – there’s nothing the matter with me – I’m just grizzling – it was nice of you to come, though.’ I caught her by the shoulders and kissed her impulsively. ‘You’re a darling, Angela,’ I said.
‘Am I?’ Her lips were tight across her teeth in a wry smile.
‘Of course you are. Now go to bed and don’t worry about me.’
A look of weariness crossed her face. She seemed suddenly much older.
‘Sure you’re all right? No more tears?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll go then. Nighty-night.’ And she trailed across the passage to her own room and quietly shut the door.
I switched on the electric fire, undressed in front of it and then went to the dressing-table to take the pins from my hair. Although I was shivering a little from the clammy coldness of the big room, I paused to look at the shadowy reflection in the mirror.
My hair fell thick and brown to my waist. I lacked the courage to bleach it golden as Angela did. Large hazel eyes peered anxiously between the tousled locks.
‘You are abominably average,’ I addressed myself. ‘Stock size figure and long legs included.’ I peered closer. ‘What on earth can a man see in that?’
Tomkins meowed at my feet and I bent to stroke him.
‘Tomkins,’ I said, ‘if I was half as beautiful as Angela, I would have married a king – and he would not have had to be killed,’ I added sharply.
Why, I wondered idly, as I got into bed, had Angela not married? She must meet many scientists in the course of her work – but science is not a lucrative profession, I reminded myself, and Angela is distinctively expensive-looking.
Tomkins heaved himself on to the bed and settled down in the curve of my knees.
‘Tomkins,’ I said, ‘you’d better have some kittens to keep Angela and me company when we grow old – because it doesn’t look as if either of us is destined for matrimony.’
I turned over and Tomkins meowed protestingly, as if to say that he would if he could.
‘Well, find yourself a pretty lady pussy,’ I said drowsily, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_573a4239-fb93-525a-9a77-5536ee7ad5c7)
I was still puzzling about Bessie and the Negroes as I walked swiftly through the badly-lit streets, to keep my appointment at 42 Belfrey Street. I felt a subdued excitement at the thought of seeing her again – after all, Bessie belonged to that part of my life which had been sunlit and full of hope, when the war was still a long way off in places like Poland and Norway.
I had been unable to remember what kind of a club the McShane was, but the moment I walked through its swing doors and a gust of conversation swept round me, I wondered how I could have forgotten.
Angus McShane, a native of Wetherport and a great believer in the excellence of British culture, had at his death asked that his considerable fortune be used to build a club for the purpose of propagating British ideas amongst foreign visitors to Britain.
The City Council, faced with all the difficulties inherent in ruling a port full of foreigners of every nationality, had supported the idea, and the result was a suite of pleasantly furnished rooms in the middle of the city, where foreign visitors and students could entertain their friends and also make friends with English people. Dances were held; English was taught; a canteen dispensed English food – and confirmed the opinion of its customers, that the British were the world’s worst cooks; a library held an assortment of donated books ranging from classics to the latest Ernest Hemingway and the newest magazines; and the lounge into which I walked that autumn evening seemed to contain a representative from every country in the world – and they were nearly all men.
Shyness swept over me and I hesitated, while the doors behind me made a steady plopping sound as they swung back and forth. Four men in American-cut suits stood near me. They were coffee-skinned, and I could feel their eyes looking me over. Their gaze was not insolent and they seemed to approve of me, for they sighed softly as I passed. Two Negroes sitting near bowed their heads self-consciously over a magazine as my skirt brushed the small table in front of them. They made me feel thoroughly womanly, and I enjoyed the change from being Miss Margaret Delaney, the lady from the Welfare.
A white-haired lady was sitting by one of the two fires that blazed in the room, and she was playing chess with a young Chinese. As I looked round, she cried, ‘Checkmate,’ triumphantly, and her opponent’s eyes vanished into slits as he laughed.
‘Excellent play, most excellent,’ he said.
The lady looked up and saw me and I went to her, and asked where Mrs Forbes could be found.
‘She is probably in her office on the floor above.’ The voice was quiet and cultured.
The Chinese bowed slightly: ‘Permit me to take the lady up,’ he said.
His opponent smiled graciously and said that Dr Wu would be pleased to direct me.
Dr Wu rose and bowed to me: ‘Come this way,’ he said.
He led me out of the lounge and up a flight of stairs to a series of offices.
‘This is your first visit here?’ he inquired, his eyes twinkling behind rimless spectacles and his hands making neat, small gestures to guide me along the passage.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I trust that we may have the pleasure of seeing you here again,’ he said, as he knocked at the door. He bowed again and left me, as Bessie called, ‘Come in.’
‘My deah,’ said Bessie, ‘I’m delighted to see you. Sit down and have a cigarette.’
Bessie, out of uniform, had more charm than most women. That evening she was wearing a pink cardigan that gave colour to her naturally pale complexion. Her dark hair was brushed up in a Pompadour style. As she lit my cigarette I tried to imagine her drilling on a parade ground, but failed hopelessly. The determination and discipline which had lain under her uniform was still with her, however, as I was soon to find out.
‘Bessie, what are you doing here?’
‘I’m the Entertainment Secretary – it’s my job to see that visitors here enjoy themselves.’
I nodded. That explained the Nigerian chieftains at the theatre.
‘Do you like it?’
‘Rather. I meet anybody who is anybody – and no two days are alike.’
‘What have you in mind for me to do?’
‘I’m starting a dancing class – very good teacher, but not enough partners. If you are free, I wondered if you would volunteer to come along on Thursday evenings and act as a partner. I can assure you that there are less amusing ways of spending an evening.’
‘But women are two a penny in this town, Bessie. Why pick on a rather dull person like me?’
‘Two-a-penny women are not required in this establishment,’ said Bessie. ‘Every woman crossing the threshold of this club has to be vouched for personally by a member of the staff or by some other responsible person. Each member has a pass which she must show to the commissionaire at the door.’
‘No commissionaire was there when I came in.’
‘Oh,’ said Bessie, and seized the telephone. Her conversation was brief and frigid. The commissionaire never again left his post without being relieved by his colleague. After Bessie had dealt with him, I think he would have stuck there like the guard at the gate of Pompeii, even to being engulfed by boiling lava.
Bessie turned back to me.
‘You always struck me as someone whose head was well screwed on, and I badly need helpers like that. I noticed at the theatre that you are still single. Any ideas of matrimony?’
‘No,’ I said, my throat tight.
Bessie looked at my plainly combed, long hair, my tailored suit and my far too sensible, flat-heeled shoes: ‘No, I suppose not,’ she said in a specially kind tone of voice.
I felt angry. I am not beautiful and my work demanded that I should dress very plainly, but Barney, James and Jackie had loved me, so I could not be entirely lacking in charm. Still, the dancing class promised to be a new experience, so I asked her to explain exactly what was entailed by acting as a partner.
Bessie explained about times and lessons, and I agreed to come the following evening. Then a little silence came between us.
Hesitatingly, I asked if she had ever heard what happened to Lieutenant Forbes.
She gave a fluttering sigh: ‘No,’ she said. ‘He was presumed killed.’
‘I’m sorry, Bessie.’
She sighed again and fiddled with the fountain pen on her desk: ‘It’s quite all right, deah,’ she said, ‘I was lucky to have him for as long as I did.’
I saw that it was time to go and I rose. She got up and walked with me downstairs and as far as the swing doors, which the commissionaire opened. She told him that I would be coming on the following day and that I was to be brought straight up to her. Then she shook my hand.
‘You will enjoy it here – meet some new people – have some fun,’ she said.
I murmured that the nicest thing was seeing her again – and I meant it.
When I got home, Father was sitting by the fire reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. He rose and kissed me. Our house always smells of polish and flowers, and the outside door is invariably open and welcoming; his warm greeting and the habit he has of pushing forward the most comfortable chair for you, make the shyest visitor feel that his arrival is a pleasure. He has long since lived down the fact that he is ‘in the Income Tax’, and everybody knows him as Mr Delaney who has such a lovely show of daffodils.
‘Where’s Mother?’ I asked, taking off my dark jacket and eyeing it disgustedly.
‘She’s in the kitchen, making chili con carne for your supper.’
‘How good she is,’ I said. I love hot dishes, but as no one else in the family liked them, I did not eat them often, so I kissed Father on his bald patch and wandered hopefully kitchenwards.
The house may be Victorian, but the kitchen is not. Father had the old kitchen ripped out, just before the war began, and Mother worked in an atmosphere reminiscent of the advertisements in American magazines.
Mother was really cooking chili con carne.
‘The butcher gave me some extra meat,’ she explained, ‘and I’ve had the beans for years.’
I sniffed appreciatively and sat on the primrose-coloured table, while I told her about the McShane Club. I also told her ruefully about Bessie’s tone of voice when marriage was mentioned.
Mother looked at me shrewdly from the corners of her eyes. She said: ‘The war lasted too long. Now it is finished, it is time to wear pretty clothes again. You should buy a “new look” dress.’
‘Good heavens, Mother, they are too ultra-fashionable. I’ve never seen anyone in Wetherport wearing one yet.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mother, ‘they are in the shops – I’ve seen them – and you have just the figure for one. You’ve plenty of money – you saved all through the war for –’ she stopped.
‘For my marriage,’ I finished off.
‘Yes, dear,’ said Mother sadly.
It was true. I had three hundred pounds in the bank. I sighed; but when on the following day I had finished a round of visits to foster-parents, I slipped into a dress shop and spent an hour buying a dress and coat, followed by another hour in hat and shoe shops. I wondered if I would ever have the courage to wear my purchases, but it did not take much bullying from Mother to make me put them all on, and, when I arrived at the club, Bessie was full of admiration for my appearance. She ushered me into the room in which the dancing class was being held, with the advice that many of the pupils were Muslims, who had not mixed much with women before, and that I should be careful.
Fifteen male pairs of eyes took in every detail of me. Seven female pairs of eyes smiled with relief.
‘Welcome to the battleground,’ said one young lady.
‘How do you do,’ said the teacher. ‘Will you kindly partner Mr Popolopogas. We shall just go over the basic steps of the waltz again.’
We went over them – Mr Popolopogas went over my feet as well. He was a willow of a man, topped with outsize horn-rimmed spectacles, and upon inquiry he informed me in slow, correct English that he was a Greek and was studying medicine.
I graduated from Mr Popolopogas to Mr Ramid Ali, Egyptian cotton merchant’s son, sent to Lancashire to see our methods of spinning. Then I did a quickstep with an officer in the French Air Force, who was about a foot shorter than me. Finally, the dancing teacher picked out one or two advanced pupils to teach them another step of the tango. I was asked to partner a Negro. Although many Negroes lived in the district in which I worked and I knew some of them quite well, I had never been touched by a Negro, and I was nervous – not nervous because he was as black as I was white, but because I knew the shy reserve of black people and I wanted him to feel that I liked dancing with him.
We did the exercise while he held me very stiffly and at a distance, but to dance a good tango the partners must be close and the woman must be held snugly against the man. I, therefore, stopped dancing and explained the proper stance. He immediately held me correctly and it was obvious that he knew the proper hold, but had been too afraid of me to use it. I could feel him trembling slightly against me as we moved off again to the throbbing notes of ‘Jealousy’. We were to dance the whole record through, and after a minute I realised that the man guiding me was far more expert than I was.
I concentrated on the steps and followed carefully. He did not dance with the polite diffidence of an Englishman, but with the full ardour that the South American rhythm demanded. My heart beat faster and I began to enjoy myself. Soon there was nothing in the world except the piercing wail of violins backed by the steady beat of drums, and a compelling body which gently but insistently persuaded me into figures I had never danced before. I did not even notice the slight gap between two records. A wild, sensuous happiness enveloped me. The dark cheek above me rested very close to mine. A separate me appreciated the beauty of the line from chin to ear, finely chiselled out of ebony. Sweat was pouring from him but he smelled clean and sweet, and he danced as nature intended us to dance, to the complete relaxation of mind and body.
Suddenly a burst of applause hit me. My partner let go of me and pulled out a pocket handkerchief to mop the perspiration off his face. He was laughing joyously. I was embarrassed to find that we were the only couple on the floor and had indeed danced alone through the last record, while the rest of the pupils formed an interested audience. I blushed hotly as everyone began to laugh, but it was all so good-natured that I had to laugh too.
The dancing teacher came to us and explained to my partner that he should now lead me back to my seat and say ‘thank you very much’, which he did, still laughing exuberantly.
The class then broke up, and I went with the other girls, who were all younger than me, to powder my nose. They were ordinary, middle-class girls, some of them students, with pleasant, accentless speech. They were full of little jokes about the dancing class and teased me about the tango I had danced. They told me I had danced beautifully and said they hoped to see me the following week. I felt very cheerful and I was glad that Bessie had found such nice young women for our foreign visitors to meet. From my work, I knew very well how difficult it was for strangers to know English families, more especially so if the stranger’s skin was not white.
On the bus going home, I realised guiltily that for a whole day I had not thought of Barney, and I wondered if he would mind. Then I thought of how he would have laughed at my discomfiture after the tango and I giggled behind my gloved hand. Looking out through the rain-lashed window I seemed to see him laughing with me, and I thought that perhaps he would be happy that I was feeling happier.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_57882464-19cf-59d5-966b-fcef4120cad7)
I soon became acquainted with all the staff and most of the members of the McShane. Bessie introduced me to the Director, Dr Gantry, a short, wiry man of uncertain temper and many accomplishments. He spoke seven languages well and managed to make himself understood in several more. He was almost womanly in his insistence that the club must have a homely atmosphere; it must look like a well-cared-for house, not too fashionable or too shabby; there must be flowers and it must be warm and airy. He went through the premises daily, inspecting every corner like the Chief Steward of a liner; he met diplomats when their ships docked at Wetherport, and found digs for vegetarian students; he kept up a lively correspondence with ex-members of the club, who had returned to their own countries; he encouraged every kind of Anglo-Other Country society to meet at the club, provided they steered clear of political pitfalls; he led panting young men up and down mountains in the Lake District and in and out of the best country pubs – he would say: ‘You haven’t seen England if you haven’t been in a pub’; he took great care of the women who helped him with their voluntary work in the club, and any man about whom they complained was summoned to his office and if he did not mend his ways his pass was taken from him. This last was a delicate problem, but Dr Gantry had a fair idea of when a man had made a genuine mistake or when a woman’s behaviour might be at fault. He used to say, however, that he sometimes thought he was running a marriage bureau, not a club. So many visitors were men, still young and single. They outnumbered their sisters by four to one, and as a result of the Committee’s care in the choice of ladies allowed inside the club, these men met very marriageable young women. Almost every week Dr Gantry gave his blessing to a new couple about to marry, and he always said that Britain’s best export was wives.
At the end of two months of helping with the dancing class and sometimes helping Bessie with a particularly large influx of visitors, Dr Gantry offered me a position on the staff of the club.
‘The Government has made so much use of our services that we have been able to obtain a grant from them to extend our work,’ Dr Gantry said one day, as he chatted to me in the lounge, where I was waiting for the dancing class to begin, ‘and it has long been my opinion that lady visitors to this country have many problems peculiar to women. I put this point to the Committee the other day and it was agreed that we should ask you to join our staff and look after our lady members.’
His offer was very unexpected but I was most interested and murmured that I was flattered by it.
‘Mrs Forbes tells me that much of your present work is in connection with women and children. She said also that you have a degree in Economics – is that so? and that you can speak French and German?’
‘Yes, it is so.’ My face must have shown my interest, because he went on to tell me about the salary and the working hours. The staff worked in shifts, and sometimes I would have to be on duty during week-ends and in the evening; this did not trouble me as I had often worked irregular hours; and as he went on to describe the work to be done, I felt a great desire to leave my present employment, in which I saw only the more sordid and degraded side of women, and do work of a pleasant nature.
‘I can be free in two months’ time,’ I said, my mind made up. ‘Will that be all right?’
‘Just in time for the rush of summer visitors,’ said Dr Gantry, wringing my hand, and then, before I could take breath, he shot across the room to talk to an Indian in a pink turban.
So I became part of the life of the McShane. It was for me a new and exciting life after the many years I had spent amongst the less fortunate inhabitants of the city. I helped Indian ladies with their shopping, shepherded American ladies round castles and museums, introduced wan German girls, imported as nurses, to the delights of having enough to eat, arranged tours for Gold Coast ladies whose knowledge of Shakespeare was frightening and who always wanted to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage. I led hikes into the Welsh mountains, into the Lake District and into the Peak District, arranged tours round biscuit factories, cotton mills, docks, power stations and new housing estates; and I enjoyed every minute of it.
I encouraged my often-shy bunches of ladies to talk to everyone they met, with the result that many a factory hand heard of Somaliland for the first time, and many a farmer saw India as a cluster of multicoloured saris fluttering round his cow-shed.
I rediscovered England myself, and the beauty of it was intensified for me by the many years spent working in an industrial town. When nowadays I sometimes feel a little homesick, I think of Tarn Hows in a rainstorm or the green pools of Snowdonia glittering in the sun, and my mind is diverted and the mood passes.
So the summer and autumn passed in a holocaust of work. Father was amused at what he called my Wogs, but he was pleased to see my enthusiasm, and Mother was delighted about my improved health – plenty of fresh air was putting pink into my cheeks and improving my appetite. I no longer wept. The pain that was Barney was with me still, although I tried not to disturb the wrappings with which time was insulating it.
James sometimes invited Angela and me to the theatre or to a concert, but he was careful not to be alone with me, and marriage was not mentioned by either of us again.
I never forgot the tango which I danced with the Negro, Paul Stacey, and neither did he. Whenever I attended one of the dances given at the McShane, he always danced a tango with me, and I always felt slightly drunk after it. He had a girl friend, a Polish refugee, and they clung to each other through many social difficulties. She could not tango, however, and she used to stand and watch us dance and clap her hands to the rhythm of the music. She had been in a concentration camp and her eyes were full of the horrors she had seen, and yet when she was with Paul she was completely at peace. He knew exactly how to chase the ghosts from her mind and bring quiet to her restless body, and he never deserted her except to dance the tango.
The tango undid the good which many months of quiet discipline had done. When I knew that Barney would never come back to me, physical desire had raged within me. I knew, however, that to live I must find peace of body as well as of mind, and I therefore worked long hours and concentrated painstakingly on the problems of my clients. Gradually some respite came until, consciously or unconsciously, in the space of five minutes Paul made naught of all my efforts. At first I felt humiliated and ashamed that, without encouragement, I could feel such desires – but comon sense told me that I was still young and must expect such feelings, so again I did my best to channel my energies into my work.
One day Bessie came and told me that a party of Egyptians was expected that evening. They were a rich and influential group of young men, who were touring Britain. It was Sunday and they were stranded in Wetherport until morning. Their guide, a harassed Government official, had telephoned to ask if we could entertain them for the evening, and, since a dance was held every Sunday evening, Dr Gantry had said that we could.
‘They’re Muslims,’ said Bessie in disgust. She was normally extremely tolerant, but for some reason she had taken a dislike to all followers of the Prophet, and it took her all her self-control to be pleasant to them. Like everything else about the staff, this was well known in the club. Probably she did not like them because, on their arrival in Britain, she was often the first Englishwoman – sometimes the first woman outside their family – to whom they had ever addressed themselves; and she suffered from their lack of knowledge of Western conventions.
Anyway, Bessie galvanised the canteen into baking in their honour, rounded up by telephone some girls with whom they could dance and begged me to help in the ballroom as well, although I protested laughingly that I was tired, after tramping round the cathedral with a party of American ladies.
When the Egyptians arrived, I was having a cheerful argument with Dr Wu, who believed ardently in the Chinese Communists’ cause and wished to convert me to his views, so I did not see them enter the room.
A silence stole over the lounge and I turned to see about a dozen exquisitely tailored young men surveying the room languidly, while a very indifferently tailored Englishman with a decidedly hunted look was dithering in front of them.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to Dr Wu, and went to the rescue.
The Englishman clutched my hand, said he was delighted to meet me and introduced me to his charges as Mrs Forbes. All the Egyptians immediately voiced their delight too, so it seemed pointless to explain that I was not Mrs Forbes.
I took their coats from them, found them easy chairs near the fire and asked the steward to find out what they would like to drink. The party was split evenly between whiskies and sodas and cups of tea. Since Bessie had not appeared, I asked Dr Wu, in a whisper, if he would kindly find her for me. Then I sat down amongst the new arrivals and chatted to them about their tour. Their English was a pleasure to hear, every word being clearly enunciated.
Dr Gantry arrived, followed by Bessie, so I moved away from the circle and went to speak to the group of American ladies, who had congregated in one corner. They were curious to know who the new visitors were, and when I told them that they had come to dance, the ladies promptly announced that they wanted to dance too and charged off to the cloakroom to ‘pretty up’, as they called it.
It looked as if the evening would be lively, so I sat down in a corner to rest for a few minutes. I had hardly seated myself when Dr Wu came up and silently handed me a cup of coffee – he must have seen my fatigue and gone specially to the buffet to get it. I was touched.
‘Please don’t mention it,’ he said when I thanked him, ‘it is a pleasure to me.’
I looked at Wu with new interest. Up to then he had just been another Chinese with Communist ideals, but when he expressed his pleasure he became suddenly a real person to me for the first time.
‘You are very kind, Dr Wu,’ I said, as I sipped the coffee appreciatively.
Wu smiled. ‘You are very kind to us,’ he said. ‘Madame Li has told me of your many kindnesses to her and to the other ladies in your charge.’
‘It is nothing,’ I said, the old shyness creeping over me. ‘I just do my work.’
‘You do much more than your work,’ said Wu. ‘We all know that,’ and he waved one hand as if to associate with his remarks the many faces in the background.
This was the first indication I had had that anyone other than the ladies I escorted appreciated the amount of work which I put into the club, and I was pleased. Through Wu’s polite remarks I glimpsed also how much foreigners like himself depended on the club for its friendly atmosphere.
‘I must desert you and go to the dance,’ I said, hastily finishing my coffee. ‘I have promised to help Mrs Forbes.’
Wu rose, bowed and smiled so that his eyes nearly vanished.
‘Alas,’ he said, ‘dancing is beyond me. My stupid feet fail to understand what the music tells them to do.’ His hands fluttered hopelessly.
I laughed.
‘Soon my friend will arrive and we will both come to the ballroom to watch you dance. Mr Stacey says that you dance most excellently.’
‘Mr Stacey is too kind. Do I know your friend?’
‘I think not. May I have the pleasure of introducing him to you later in the evening?’
‘I should be delighted to meet him,’ I said, and went away to dance with the Egyptians.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_64121fc2-7d48-514e-9f90-3c13b35bb2e6)
The usual mixed crowd was gyrating slowly round the ballroom floor to the strains of a waltz. The room was already overhot and the Englishman in charge of the radiogram was perspiring. The lights had been lowered for the waltz and the whole room looked dreamy and unreal. I felt very tired.
Bessie ushered in most of the Egyptians – one or two older ones had stayed with their English guide and Dr Gantry in the lounge, preferring the cosy fire and Dr Gantry’s lively conversation to dancing.
I went to Bessie. She was wearing a pink dress and her best hostess manner; and I noted that she had already enchanted a rather portly, but extremely aristocratic-looking, member of the party. She promptly pushed him on to me and we finished the waltz together.
The club had long since found that to encourage new members to dance, it was advisable in the first instance for one of the staff to ask them to dance, after which they usually had enough courage to ask someone else to dance. I therefore went to each Egyptian in turn and took him on to the floor, after which I let him loose amongst the other women present. Most of them danced very well and their conversation was polite.
The lights had again been lowered for a waltz, and I swam out with my fifth Egyptian. This one hugged me tightly to him, and we had hardly circulated once round the room before he asked me to accompany him to Manchester the following day and spend the evening with him.
I regretted that I was not free as I worked at the club. He said calmly that he would arrange it with Dr Gantry, who was a friend of his father’s. He wanted, he said soulfully, to take me to a ball and dance the whole evening with me. Retreating, I said that it was impossible and that I had no suitable clothes.
He said he would buy me all the clothes I could desire.
I was in real difficulty. Dr Gantry had expressly asked that we be careful in handling these young men, whose fathers were either high-ranking Government officials or well-to-do aristocrats. All his life this young man had probably had everything he wanted, and it would not be easy to gainsay him.
The record player seemed to be playing for an interminable time, and the Egyptian’s lips were brushing my ear as he murmured: ‘We are agreed that there are many more beautiful women in England, but you – you are the most seductive woman we have seen.’
I wanted to giggle. Miss Delaney, until lately helper of girls in distress, to be called seductive and to be so tempted! I had to get out of my predicament somehow – and get out of it gracefully. I looked round for a staff member or some English helper to whom I might have introduced my partner and thus created a diversion and made my escape; but almost everyone was dancing and the record-playing Englishman seemed to have vanished.
My partner was saying: ‘You should wear pearls in your ears – you must let me buy you some.’
I resisted a temptation to slap his face. Then over his shoulder I saw Dr Wu enter with a brown-skinned man – presumably the friend he had mentioned earlier. Dr Wu would do very nicely – but by the time we had danced round to the door where he had been standing, he had gone and there was only his friend, leaning against the doorpost and puffing at a pipe. I did not know this man and so continued to dance. The Egyptian had taken my silence for acquiescence and was breathing sweet nothings down my neck. Once more we came near to the door. I looked up and straight into the eyes of the brown-faced stranger. They were the most honest eyes imaginable, and when I looked they had such an unexpectedly gentle expression that I felt I had inadvertently peeped into his private life, and I dropped my own eyes. The music stopped and I guided the Egyptian firmly towards his friends. He was saying: ‘Please say where I shall meet you tomorrow.’
‘I am sorry I cannot come,’ I said, and turned round and fled.
Just at the door I looked back. The Egyptian was fighting his way through the swarm of dancers. Whatever should I do? ‘Come with me,’ said a voice.
I looked up. The stranger was laughing down at me. A thousand times better than twenty Egyptians, I thought. He opened the door opposite the ballroom door. The library, of course. So simple a means of escape – across the floor and down the tiny back staircase to the canteen on the floor below.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said, as we descended the staircase. ‘How did you guess?’
The stranger looked embarrassed and said shyly: ‘I was looking at your face.’ He stood uncertainly before me, pipe in one hand, the other making nervous gestures. I smiled, and he gained enough courage to say: ‘I come here every Saturday and Sunday to see you.’
I was surprised. ‘But I have never seen you before,’ I exclaimed.
‘You have to take care of all the ladies. How is it that you will see me?’
‘But – but …’ Words would not come. The evening was getting to the stage of fantasy, and I was so tired.
‘Is your work ended?’ asked the stranger, seeing my embarrassment and trying to change the subject. He drew out of his pocket an old-fashioned gold watch. ‘The time is ten o’clock.’
‘Oh, yes, Mrs Forbes asked me to stay only until 9.30.’
‘May I obtain for you a cup of tea before you go? We could – we could sit and drink tea safely in this corner, where you cannot be seen from the door by the Muslim.’
My legs were feeling unaccountably wobbly, my head ached and the canteen was quiet, except for two German girls talking with their English escorts. I sat down where he had indicated.
Mrs Barnes, the Canteen Manageress, evidently knew the stranger who liked to look at me every Saturday and Sunday, because she drew from under the counter and gave to him some cheese straws and some chocolate biscuits, which were in short supply at the time. Armed with these and some tea he came and sat down by me. My head was clearing and when I thanked him I took a good look at him. He was dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy, grey trousers; his white shirt made his skin look very dark but his features were clear cut and delicate; both in expression and outline his face reminded me of a Saint in an old Italian painting; his hands also, as they invited me to eat and drink, used the gestures portrayed in the same paintings.
‘From which country do you come?’ I asked, ‘and may I ask your name?’
‘I am from India and I am called Ajit Singh. You are Miss Margaret Delaney and you live in this city, yes?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and inquired if he was at the University.
‘I am writing my thesis – I spend much time, however, at the Berkeley Street power station – for experience.’
‘Oh,’ I said blankly, wondering what kind of experience a power station offered.
‘Instruments,’ said Ajit, as if divining my thoughts.
The tea was reviving me. My eyes twinkled with the mischief I felt, as I asked suddenly: ‘Why do you come to see me on Saturdays and Sundays?’
‘I have to work very much from Monday to Friday,’ was the calm rejoinder.
I laughed outright: ‘But I have never met you.’
‘There was no one to introduce us.’
‘That does not seem to deter the others.’
‘My father has said that in England an introduction is necessary before a gentleman speaks to a lady. Tonight I see the Egyptian frighten you – and I know Father is right.’
‘The Egyptian was introduced to me – he was not, however, acquainted with our customs. It must have been difficult for him to understand the subtle relationship between men and women in the West.’
‘It was difficult for me – but I have not frightened you, have I?’
‘No,’ I smiled.
He looked as if he was about to say something that was important to him, but changed his mind and said merely: ‘This evening my friend, Dr Wu, had promised to introduce us, but we have managed very well by ourselves, have we not?’ He flashed a little grin at me, as he took out his tobacco pouch and filled his pipe: ‘May I smoke?’ he asked.
This then was Dr Wu’s friend. Presumably they had met at the University.
‘Please do smoke,’ I said. ‘I must go – otherwise I shall miss the last bus home.’
He rose as I did, and opened the door for me.
‘Thank you again for rescuing me,’ I said, pausing by the door.
‘It is nothing,’ he said, his face inexplicably sad.
‘I hope to see you next Saturday,’ I said, desiring to clear the melancholy shadow away.
The sun shone immediately. ‘I wish that I will see you,’ he said, and I went to fetch my coat and hat.
As I hurried through the swing doors on my way out, I met Dr Wu looking harassed.
‘Are you looking for Mr Singh?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Miss Delaney, I am.’
‘You will find him in the canteen,’ I said, and ran down the stairs. As I went through the glass outer door, I turned. Wu was standing at the top of the stairs grinning down at me, as if I were the subject of some private joke.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_bda99f97-2938-5095-a931-7883b8604a86)
My term of duty on the following day did not start until two o’clock, so I missed the fun when Bessie received a telephone call. As a result of the Egyptian invasion, poor Bessie had worked until late on Sunday evening but had returned to work at her usual hour on the Monday morning, in order to act as Chairman at a meeting of an Anglo-Polish organisation. She was at the meeting when the club telephonist called her out of the room and said that someone who would not give his name wished to speak to her urgently.
She lifted the receiver and a reproachful voice immediately upbraided her. Could she not recognise love when she saw it – his heart was broken – one day was all he asked.
‘Who are you and what do you think you are talking about?’ asked an outraged Bessie.
When he gave his name she became more polite – the stony politeness reserved for Muslims.
‘I think a mistake has been made,’ she said guardedly.
‘You are the Mrs Forbes, the beautiful Mrs Forbes with whom I danced last night?’
‘Well, I am Mrs Forbes, but I did not dance with anyone last night – I was too busy.’
‘Yes, I remember – I remember – there were two Mrs Forbes – you are the lady of the blue dress?’
‘No,’ said Bessie. ‘I’m the lady of the pink dress.’ Then she thought of my blue dress. All Bessie’s latent motherly instincts came to the fore. Deliver me to this lunatic? No. She dealt summarily with the Egyptian and returned, full of apologies, to her Committee.
‘Bessie, dear, what did you say to him?’ I asked, after I explained the confusion over the initial introductions the previous evening.
Bessie looked at me sideways. ‘I told him that your reluctance to accompany him was natural, because you had an Italian husband six feet tall and expert with a knife.’
‘Bessie,’ I gasped, ‘you’re a dreadful scallywag.’
‘It was effective,’ said Bessie dryly.
During the afternoon I took two Americans round the docks, after which they were to take dinner with an English family. I left them at their hotel and walked through the crowded streets towards the club, meaning to do a couple of hours of work at my desk before taking dinner in the canteen. One way of avoiding the more crowded pavements was to take a short cut through a store which had its front and back entrances on adjoining streets, and this I did, only to collide with Mother.
‘Hello, dear,’ said Mother, clutching her parcels to her.
‘Hello, Mum. What are you doing here?’
‘Christmas shopping.’
Mother was looking worn, so I asked her to come and have some tea. We turned back into the store, and were fighting our way through the Cosmetics Department, towards the lift which would carry us up to the restaurant, when I suddenly saw a familiar face bent over an array of perfume bottles, while a bored shop assistant stood behind the counter and dealt with other customers between addressing the perfume buyer. I heard her say: ‘Passion of Paris is considered most alluring.’
‘Mr Singh,’ I said.
‘Who?’ asked Mother, peering through her eye veil.
‘Mr Singh. Come and meet him – he is quite amusing.’
Mother loves meeting new people, so we walked across to the perfume counter and I asked if I could help him, and then introduced him to Mother.
‘Please do help me,’ implored Mr Singh. ‘My friends at my digs say that dragons like scent for Christmas – they do not tell me which perfume to buy – it is most confusing.’
‘Dragons?’ I queried.
‘Landladies,’ said Mr Singh unsmilingly.
I heard Mother stifle a laugh behind her parcels, and I hastily straightened my own face and looked gravely through the collection of bottles. I was very conscious of Mr Singh standing by me. He did not look at my face, but he watched my hands as I sought for the best bargain for him. He took out a finely tooled leather pocket book and paid for the present, and then looked hesitatingly at Mother and me.
‘Will you join me to drink tea in the restaurant before continuing your shoppings?’ he asked.
Before I could open my mouth, Mother said that we would be delighted. She had never met an Indian before and was evidently excited at the prospect of examining further the specimen before her. Her neat, grey curls danced as she talked vivaciously to Mr Singh, and it was obvious that she enjoyed the tea party that followed. Mr Singh held open the doors for her and helped her with her parcels, pulled out chairs, and insisted on ordering masses of buttered toast, since the restaurant had sold out of cake. Mother was conquered by him before the meal was ended.
At the end of an hour I remembered guiltily my piled-up desk and said that I must return to work. We collected the parcels and Mr Singh paid the bill.
As we were waiting for the lift to take us down again, Mr Singh asked: ‘We are – that is – the Indian community is giving a Christmas party – I wonder – Mrs Delaney – Miss Delaney – would you like to come?’
This was a rare honour. The small Indian community tended to mix amongst themselves and rarely asked outsiders to their entertainments. In any case, no opportunity to refuse was given me. Mother accepted with alacrity for both of us.
‘We are mostly students,’ said Mr Singh. ‘It will be held in the club canteen.’
The canteen was decorated for the occasion with the Indian national flag and a picture of Gandhiji framed with flowers. It was a good party, although everything went wrong. The lights fused, the hot food, cooked by the students themselves, arrived cold, and the ice cream melted, but nobody was upset. Leisurely our hosts lit matches while the Canteen Manageress mended the fuse, somehow the Indian food tasted good, though strange to Western taste – and Mother felt like an empress.
As the eldest lady there she was specially looked after, and she was enchanted by the respect shown to her. She was soon surrounded by an assortment of men in Indian costumes; and three girls were almost tearing off their saris in an effort to show her how they were put on. As soon as their first shyness had worn off, they all talked at once, and I could hear her clear English voice rising above theirs, as she asked questions about their studies, their costumes and their homes.
Mr Singh looked after me and brought his special friends to meet me. He was very nervous and seemed fearful that I would criticise the arrangements for the party.
‘This food is not typical of India. The ladies who cooked it are not used to cooking – in India each family employs a cook.’
I assured him that the food was excellent.
‘We should have put up more decorations – the room looks bare.’
I reassured him on that point too.
Gradually he relaxed and soon he was laughing and joking with the little circle who had gathered round us. I sat quietly and listened, occasionally adding some small remark to the conversation. He was very popular amongst his own people, of that there was no doubt. Occasionally he broke into his own language and after these interludes there was always a roar of laughter.
‘Singh knows more jokes and riddles than anyone here,’ confided a small, handsome woman in an orange sari.
‘He should tell me some in English,’ I said, ‘I’m sure they must be good.’
Singh looked at me, full of contrition. ‘I forgot,’ he said.
‘Afterwards you shall tell them all over again in English,’ I teased.
He salaamed. ‘It will be my pleasure,’ he said.
I could see some of the girls present giving each other knowing looks at this promise of a private conversation; it meant nothing to me at the time, but it meant everything to them, and speculation as to Singh’s intentions ran high.
Mother asked Ajit – for Ajit he had become by the end of the party – to Christmas dinner at our house, and although I was pleased at her offering hospitality to a visitor, I wondered with some trepidation what Father would say about an Indian coming into the house.
Father did not make any special comment. He just looked very shrewdly at the man before him, the same careful look with which I am sure he scrutinises income tax returns, and then made him sit down and drink sherry, while Angela, Mother and I arranged the dinner table.
Although I had lived the whole of my life with my parents, I learned something new about Father that evening. It was apparent that he did not feel at all awkward about his foreign guest; there was none of that strained manner which is often apparent when even the most courteous man of one colour meets a man of another colour. It was as if Father had never heard of a colour bar – and I was proud of him. Strangely, too, I felt proud of Ajit. Father yarned happily about how he had fought with the Japanese in Russia and how well they had endured the cold winter, and Ajit told him how the Madrasi soldiers had successfully fought in a Kashmiri winter. Then they went on to the adaptability of mankind in general, from there to religions, and, by the time the port was served, they were old friends.
Angela sat down at the piano and played carols as we sat round the fire; and I watched the face of this stranger, who had tumbled into the middle of our family. The flickering firelight sometimes silhouetted the almost Greek profile and sometimes lit up the full face, so that its calm gentleness was fully revealed.
Father must have been looking too, as he smoked his after-dinner pipe and plied his guest with tobacco. He asked to which caste he belonged.
‘I am kshatriya – warrior caste,’ answered Ajit. ‘That is the second caste.’
‘A very gentle warrior,’ I thought.
When our guest took his leave and Father was bolting the front door for the night, he said to me as I started to mount the staircase: ‘The first young man I have met for a long time who has both brains and manners. Got any more like him at your club?’ And he grinned a little wickedly.
‘Plenty,’ I said, blowing him a kiss, ‘of all shades.’
Upstairs Angela was hanging up her frock in the big wardrobe in my room. She said, without preamble: ‘He’s rather a pet, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’
‘Ajit Singh.’
I started to pull the hairpins out of my bun. ‘Yes,’ I said almost reluctantly, ‘I suppose he is.’
On the evening of Boxing Day I was on duty at the club to make sure that the few ladies who had no private invitations had something or someone to entertain them. As I went from one easy chair to another in the lounge, I found myself looking for Ajit Singh. The room was lit with coloured lights half hidden in evergreens. A German architect had amused himself by decorating the room and the result was a soft glow with an occasional sparkle of tinsel or silver balls. It would be easy to miss someone in such dim light, and I had just decided that he had not come, when a voice from a particularly dark corner said: ‘Hello.’
I jumped, the cushion I had been shaking up still held in one hand.
‘It is Singh.’
He was sitting cross-legged in a deep settee and was smoking his pipe.
I said: ‘Good evening. How are you?’
‘Very well. Can you sit with me – today everybody is out, and I think your work is not great.’
‘I haven’t much to do.’ I sat down beside him. He continued to smoke, saying nothing and looking reflectively at me.
‘Will you come to the University Ball with me on New Year’s Eve?’ he asked.
Before I could stop myself I had answered in the affirmative, and when I saw his face soften, I was glad I had said yes. I foresaw all kinds of complications arising from that simple ‘yes’, but his pleasure was unbounded and I did not regret it. He thanked me effusively and also added thanks for the previous day’s invitation.
I said we were glad to have him and then asked him about Indian Festivals, which subject kept up the conversation until Dr Wu came in with Madame Li and the conversation became general.
Ajit Singh did not dance well, but the University Ball was fun. I knew several people present and was amused to see their eyebrows shoot up as they noted my Indian escort.
I did not care. I was enjoying being made a fuss of by a man who liked to come and look at me on Saturdays and Sundays.
We were eating ice cream when a very tall Indian, with a very short redhead on his arm, came up to us and roared: ‘Ajit, old chap, introduce me.’
‘Miss Delaney, may I introduce to you Mr Chundabhai Patel-my friend.’
My hand was enveloped in an enormous brown one. Chundabhai was the biggest ugliest Indian I had ever seen, but I could not help liking him. Six feet six inches was topped by a bullet head, blessed with small, twinkling eyes. His hair was cut to within an inch of his head, like a dog’s coat. His suit was of a quality rarely available in England at that time, and his shirt was silk.
He pulled forward his lady friend. Her name was Sheila Ferguson and she was doing chemistry under the same Professor as Chundabhai. Her freckled nose wrinkled and she tossed her red hair, as she described the Professor’s despair over the work of both of them.
When they went away to dance, I asked Ajit who Chundabhai was.
‘He is a Banya, the son of a rich chemical manufacturer. Soon he will go home to Shahpur to work with his father.’
So I heard the name of Shahpur for the first time; but it was just the name of an Indian town, a name more easily pronounceable than many. I asked where it was and whether it was a big city.
‘It is one of the richest of Indian cities. It has many industries – cotton, metalware, chemicals – but it has little water as it lies at the juncture of three deserts.’
‘Is the Government trying to improve the water supply?’
‘Certainly it is. Further north there is a river which is being dammed. From it they will obtain power for Shahpur and with the power water will be pumped from new deep wells. One day perhaps there will be a better way of bringing water to Shahpur, but Government has much work to do – it cannot do it all at once.’ He grinned at me, and added: ‘The British did not expect to harvest much tax from the district round Shahpur, so they did not care about providing water for it.’
It was the first time I had heard him criticise the British régime in India. His usual attitude was to ignore the past and speak only of the future of his country. Other Indians sometimes said that the Germans or the French would have been worse taskmasters and would have made their struggle for freedom both longer and bloodier.
‘Don’t be too hard on my fellow countrymen,’ I said.
He thought he had hurt me and to comfort me he said immediately that India had much that was good to learn from England, and that India was indebted to many fine English administrators.
Chundabhai came back to the table. Sheila followed with two English friends of Ajit and Chundabhai, and the party became hilarious.
This was the first of many occasions that Ajit and I enjoyed together, sometimes with a group from the club, sometimes just the two of us. It was a peculiar relationship. Ajit never asked anything of me – he seemed just content to be with me; and I was grateful for his peaceful presence. Part of me cried out to be loved, but I could not imagine being loved by anyone but Barney – and Barney was dead.
Very occasionally Ajit came to our house for an hour or so on Sunday evening, when I was not on duty. Mother always made him stay to supper and he basked in the comfortable, domestic atmosphere. After one of these visits, as we walked down the path to the gate, he said to me rather wistfully: ‘You have a splendid home.’
‘I think you must have a nice one too,’ I said.
‘I have,’ he said absently, ‘but I cannot hope to provide for my wife what Father provided for Mother. Middle-class people in India do not have so much money in our days.’
‘It is the same in England,’ I said. ‘If Angela or I got married, we would probably start in a two-roomed flat.’
‘Would you?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Of course.’
He shook my hand and went through the gate. I leaned over it and watched him out of sight. I was troubled because I saw myself hurting yet another man by refusing his proposal.
But I flattered myself. No proposal came.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_bfc26fe2-18bd-5220-8599-fa95cd3f435c)
A year went by, a year full of contented work for me. I began to have friends all over the world. After our visitors had gone, they often wrote to members of the staff, inviting them to spend holidays in cities as far apart as Delhi and Santiago. The feeling that I could go to almost any large town in the world and find a friend there to make me welcome, gave me a confidence that I had not enjoyed before.
I met also many English people, who took an interest in the club’s activities, and I learned how hospitable they could be, rationed and servantless as they were. I sometimes accepted an invitation to tea myself, and Mother helped me to entertain in return. By this means the number of her acquaintances was enlarged, and she found new interests to replace the slackening demands made on her by her daughters.
It was after one of these tea parties, when we were washing up, that Mother said: ‘Are we going to have a marriage in the family, darling?’
My hands froze amongst the soapsuds of the washing-up water. Had she misunderstood Ajit’s and my relationship, and if she had, how could I explain its special quality?
‘I don’t know, Mummy,’ I said guardedly.
‘I think so, dear – Angela and Jamie.’
I sighed with relief. Mother knew nothing of James’s proposal to me; all she knew was that he used to pay equal attention to both her daughters, but recently he had taken Angela out alone on one or two occasions.
‘I hope you are right, Mother,’ I said, as I shook more soap flakes into the water.
Mother looked troubled.
‘I sometimes worry about Angela,’ she said. ‘I can never get close to her as I can to you – even when she was a small child she seemed remote and independent.’
‘Don’t worry, Mother. Angela is a very capable young woman and well able to take care of herself.’
Mother sighed.
‘I expect you are right, darling – it would be so nice if she married James – he’s so dependable.’
So Mother felt the same as I did about Angela. As far as her personal affairs were concerned, she was bafflingly unapproachable – and yet we both loved her. Whenever I thought of Angela I thought of kindness. We had shared our toys, lent each other clothes for special occasions, rarely quarrelled. When we were at Grammar School we had confided in each other about our boy friends and small triumphs and disappointments; but when I preceded her to University that closeness seemed to vanish, probably just because we saw less of each other.
What did I know of Angela, the grown-up, sophisticated Angela, who, now that the war was over, was beginning to publish modest papers on her work?
She was a shadowy figure who had rejoiced with me over my engagement to Jackie; held me tightly while I got over his death and had been glad when I became engaged to Barney – or had she been glad? She had seemed surprised, almost shocked at first.
As I carefully laid the plates on the draining-board for Mother to dry, I thought again of that terrible last year of the war and of the events that led up to my engagement to Barney.
The twins had lived down the road from us since they were small boys and we had often played together. Barney, James, Angela and me, and as we grew older we had occasionally paired off – my heart missed a beat – not Barney and Peggie, and James and Angela, but Barney and Angela, with James and me left to our own devices.
I dropped a cup and smashed it.
‘My love, I hope you are not upset about James and Angela,’ said Mother, helping me to pick up the bits.
‘Oh, no, Mummy,’ I said truthfully, ‘I am very pleased.’
I put the bits of broken china into the sink basket and apologised for my clumsiness.
Barney’s actual wooing of me, apart from odd kisses at children’s parties, had been short and sweet. It had been compressed into fourteen days’ leave during which we had become engaged, and one subsequent leave. In between there had been letters every two or three days – love letters.
I had been very flattered by the sudden special attention from a man who had stood high in my affection from childhood. His hot, almost desperate passion had awakened an equal passion in me, and the idea of spending the rest of my life with him made me glow with happiness.
Mechanically I emptied the teapot as I thought back to the days before Barney had volunteered for military service – and I was afraid. A fine sweat trickled down my back and I clutched the teapot firmly in case its fate should be the same as the broken teacup. I began to remember odd times when the four of us had gone out together, when we were all students – and I saw sudden little pictures of Barney hauling Angela up Scafell, Barney and Angela picking gooseberries in our garden and quarrelling at the same time, only to fall silent when I approached, Angela kissing someone good night under the laburnum – I had thought it was James she kissed, but it could have been Barney – Angela making a point of meeting the postman on her way out to work during the war and taking her letters from him.
I tried, as I scrubbed the kitchen sink, to remember Angela’s other men friends. There were one or two vague figures escorting her during her teens, but I realised with a growing feeling of nausea that, if I excepted a fellow scientist who had written a paper with her, I knew of no man with whom she had gone out alone either during or since the war, except Gaylord, an American officer, towards the end of the war.
I tried to crush down my fears. I did not really know who were her admirers – she could have been in love with the entire British Army – and we should not have known at home.
I was afraid to pursue the subject further and yet a morbid fascination led me on from one damning consideration to another. Try and be sensible, I told myself. He is dead anyway. Maybe he did admire Angela, loving her like a sister and you like a wife-to-be. But the kiss under the laburnum tree was not a sisterly kiss, said my memory.
I dried my hands. ‘Mother, I think I will lie down for a while before going to work.’
I felt like lying down to die, like the laddie in the Scottish song.
The winter twilight had already closed in, as I lay down on my bed. Why had I never thought of this before? Probably because I had never thought of being in competition with Angela. I was nearer the age of the twin brothers, being three years older than she was – and I had always imagined that her sweethearts would be younger men. Three years’ difference in age is nothing between adults – but it is between children, and I was still carrying on the same childish attitude that I had when she was four and I was seven. She had always been my little sister – too young to really feel what I was feeling. Too young to suffer what I was suffering.
Too young to suffer what I was suffering? My heart leaped with pity for Angela. If she and Barney had been sweethearts, what must she have suffered when he was killed? I remembered her tears on the day the news came and I mentally kicked myself for being so stupid. What must she have felt when he became engaged to me? How did it come about that he proposed to me instead of her? I buried my head in the pillow as if to shut out further thought.
The light was switched on – Angela walked to the clothes cupboard, singing under her breath. She hesitated when she unexpectedly discovered that I was resting on the bed.
‘Sorry to disturb you, Pegs,’ she said. ‘I wanted a dress from the wardrobe.’
‘It is all right,’ I said, ‘I have to go to work soon.’
She took out the dress and came and sat on the bed by me. She was in her petticoat, and I looked at her coldly. She was beautiful, I thought regretfully, in comparison with my English prettiness.
‘At this minute you look just like Father,’ she said, and then broke off. She must have seen my eyes glistening with unshed tears.
‘Don’t cry, Pegs,’ she said, her voice full of sympathy.
My eyes examined her face critically. It was lined quite heavily under her powder, and there was a maturity about it that spoke of acquaintance with pain. Something had taken away her springy youthfulness.
I tried to behave like my normal self, and smiled at her.
‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘Angela, is it true about you and James?’
‘James and me?’
‘Yes, Mother was saying she thought you might be getting married.’
‘Well – er, no – he’s never asked me. We went to the Law Society Ball together – and to a popular lecture on nuclear physics, that’s all.’ She laughed. ‘Mother is romancing.’
‘Would you marry him if he asked you?’
She opened and closed the zip fastener on the back of the dress she was holding, before she answered thoughtfully: ‘I suppose I would – I’d be stupid not to – he’s a good catch.’ She looked at me mischievously. ‘Would you mind if I did?’
‘No, no, I’d be delighted.’ I did not say anything about his proposal to me. I looked at her through my lashes and imagined Barney kissing her shoulder. It hurt.
‘Angela –’ I faltered, and yet I felt if I did not know I should die. ‘Angela, will you tell me something – I won’t be angry, whatever you reply.’
She looked mystified and although she answered ‘certainly’ her voice had a defensive note.
I raised myself on my elbow until I was looking closely into her eyes.
‘Angela, were you in love with Barney?’
A flush crept over her face and neck and perspiration started on her forehead, but she answered me steadily: ‘Yes.’
I took a long breath.
‘Was he in love with you?’
‘Yes.’ She half rose, to leave me, but I restrained her by catching her wrist, and looking at her imploringly.
‘Angela, why in the name of Mercy did he become engaged to me?’
‘It was the best revenge he could think of.’
‘Revenge? On whom?’
‘On me.’ She stood up, and there was anger in her voice as she spoke: ‘Our heroic Barney was nothing but a handsome jealous cat.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, a chill creeping over me, ‘were you his mistress?’
‘We were always lovers – ever since my seventeenth birthday party.’
I shivered. That party was in 1939. I remembered it well – everybody had got a little drunk and Mother had been upset about it – but the first months of the war had upset all of us.
‘Why did you not get married?’
‘At first he was studying and had no money. When he and James took over his father’s practice, he said that before either of them married they must re-establish the firm. Then he volunteered.’ Her voice trembled. ‘When he came home on leave he expected to make love, though he never mentioned getting married. Once I asked him – but he laughed it off – said the end of the war would be time enough. A man never wants to marry his mistress,’ she finished up bitterly.
‘Well, what did you do?’
‘Gaylord came along. He was really sweet to me, so I thought I would marry a man who loved me rather than one whom I loved. After about twelve months, he told me he was going home to his wife – it was the first indication he had given me that he was married.’ She shrugged her shoulders, and continued: ‘I suppose he was no different from most men away from their homes.’
There seemed to be more to come – Angela’s lips were quivering, so I said: ‘Go on.’
‘Barney came home on leave unexpectedly and caught us one night at the gate. He glared at the pair of us as if we were scum, and marched on into the house. He never spoke to me again, except when I was amongst the family. He wanted everything without responsibility, and, when he saw that he was going to lose me to someone else, he tried to punish me – perhaps he thought when he became engaged to you I would crawl at his feet rather than see you marry him.’
‘And how soon after that did he become engaged to me?’
‘During his next leave.’
I felt sick, horribly sick. Barney making love to me to revenge himself on my sister, whose only fault it seemed to me was that she had trusted a lifelong friend too well.
Angela crouched on the bed and hid her face in her hands. I felt a great anger against Barney – such disregard of the damage he had been doing was unforgivable. I sat up and put my arms around Angela.
‘Angela,’ I said softly, ‘he’s dead. One day you will marry a more worthwhile man – perhaps James – he is a good man.’
‘Pegs,’ she wailed, clinging to me, ‘it was awful.’
Now it was my turn to comfort her. I stroked her head and thought how many times she had comforted me.
‘My love,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me? I would have boxed his ears and told him to stop acting like a child. I would have sent him back to you.’
‘I have some pride – and you were so happy.’
‘Of course.’
Dazed with misery, I sat for a while, automatically stroking the blonde head. In those minutes I realised how little I knew about men. Most of my knowledge of them had come at second-hand through the cases I had handled and through books. Jackie, my first fiancé, had been the brother of a girl friend of mine and had been at sea for months at a time. The club had been my first opportunity to meet many strangers – previously I had gone to balls and dances as one of a party. How blind I had been, not to realise what Barney was doing. How blind and how full of false pride. Hatred surged through me – hatred of a man who had humiliated me in my own sight.
The alarm clock whirred and brought my sanity back sharply. Time to go to work.
Angela and I got up together and dressed silently, Angela to keep some mysterious appointment, and I to make out a list of cultural centres in which South African schoolteachers visiting the north might be interested.
Before we went downstairs, I kissed Angela and the kiss was warmly returned. I felt humbly grateful for the comfort of the forgiveness it conveyed.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_34144b56-2a1c-516c-bfa9-a2dad7f9f020)
I worked until midnight, when the club closed. The thought of going home to bed made me feel sleepless, and, as the last bus had just left, I decided that, rather than take a taxi, I would walk home. I walked slowly through the night mist and, when at last I reached our gate, I thought irritably that I would never sleep if I went in, so I walked round the block. The policeman on the beat knew me, and said: ‘Good night, Miss.’
I returned the salutation. I came again to our gate but continued past it, walking the same route. The constable met me again and asked if I had lost anything.
Wearily, I said: ‘No, thank you. I am just taking a stroll before going to bed.’
‘It’s not too safe round here late at night, Miss.’
I agreed, and walked back to our gate with him. It appeared that I would have to go to bed, but my nerves were jangled and I felt that to scream would be a great relief.
At home I made myself some cocoa and at three o’clock I got into bed. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Barney laughing at me, until I could have shrieked at him to go away and never haunt me again.
I switched on the bedside lamp and took from the side table the studio portrait which he had given me just before leaving on his last journey back to barracks. I sat up in bed and for a long time examined the face portrayed. The lips smiled at me, but when I covered them up and looked at the eyes alone, they were cold and staring.
At five o’clock I got up. It was Sunday morning, and the church bells soon began to ring for the first service of the day. Mother heard me washing in the bathroom and called to ask if I was poorly. I said I was quite all right and was preparing to go to church. I heard her bed creak as, satisfied, she turned over to sleep again.
I had no intention of going to church, but it was the simplest explanation to save Mother getting up to see what she could do to help me. Garbed in slacks and woollen sweaters, I went out into the garden. Lighted only by the shaft of light from the front door, it was as bleak and shrivelled as my heart. I went inside, boiled some water and washed up the supper dishes for Mother, after which I laid the table for breakfast.
I had just refilled the sugar basin when, to my astonishment, the telephone bell rang. I answered it quickly, to avoid its waking the entire household.
‘I wish to speak to Miss Delaney,’ said Ajit.
‘Speaking,’ I said. ‘Hello.’
Ajit’s cool tone melted into a warm hello.
‘I am reminding you that you must be ready at ten o’clock,’ he said.
‘Oh, Lord!’ I ejaculated.
‘Is there trouble?’
‘No, no,’ I said. I had forgotten that I had promised to walk along the coast with him to a village inn which specialised in bacon and egg teas. He had taken great trouble to pick a Sunday when I would be free and when the tide would be high and at its wintry best. The thought of being bright and entertaining throughout the day was too much for me. I opened my mouth to make an excuse.
‘I hope I do not telephone too early. We Indians rise rather early.’
‘No, I was already up.’
‘Then we will meet at ten o’clock.’
It seemed unkind to disappoint him, so I said that I would be ready and would bring some sandwiches for lunch.
The happiness of his response when I said this could hardly be construed as enthusiasm for sandwiches, so I was glad I had not refused to go.
Ajit had not been at the club the night before. He was working very hard, trying to cram in as much experience and study as he could before going home. He had just finished an arduous round of visits to the factories of electrical instrument makers, and had determined to make this Sunday a holiday.
He met me at the corner of the road in which my home stood. I was early and shivering in the north wind which whined through the leafless trees. The sun peeped only intermittently through the clouds, and the deserted streets looked dismal. I turned up the collar of my leather windjammer.
Ajit was apologetic about my having to wait for him. He glanced at my face, which I knew looked drawn in spite of careful make-up.
‘Are you well?’ he asked. ‘We need not go if you do not wish it.’
I assured him, with a brisk smile, that I was quite well. He looked doubting, but the bus came and we boarded it.
The sea was a heaving mass of grey, except where far out the waves were hitting a sandbank and breaking into white spray. As we started along the top of the sea wall, only the slapping of the water against the base of it and the cries of gulls broke the silence. We walked steadily, the wind behind us, and gradually my body warmed with the exercise and the fresh air cleared my head.
In the coarse grass covering the sand at the back of the wall, I saw a rabbit peeping up at us and, laughingly, I pointed it out to Ajit.
He had been looking at me from time to time rather anxiously, but he was apparently satisfied when I laughed, because he laughed too. He told me about the squirrels that lived in the neem trees in the garden of his home in Delhi, and of the lizards that always made a home in the window curtains, no matter how frequently they were shaken out. I shivered at the idea of lizards in the house, but he said they were harmless creatures with yellow bodies and sparkling eyes, and they kept the room free from insects. He told me also about the mongoose that lived in the inner courtyard to guard it from snakes.
‘Snakes are sacred, are they not?’
‘Village people sometimes worship cobras as a manifestation of God – but it is the cow which is really sacred – she gives us milk, clarified butter and curd, and in return she must be fed and protected and on no account slaughtered.
‘It would be merciful to kill some of the cows which are sick and old,’ he added ruefully.
‘I read once that one of the Hindu Gods is a destroyer. Is that true?’
‘Yes, Shiva destroys – without thought or mercy,’ he said, bitterness in his voice.
I thought of the famines, the floods, the earthquakes, the riots of India. It was not surprising that they believed in a God who destroyed.
‘Well, who creates?’
‘Brahma creates. From the holocaust which Shiva makes, he recreates. So life is born anew and nothing is wasted.’
Nothing is wasted. From the devastation which emotions leave, does Brahma spin again the threads of life? I wondered. It was a new idea to me – a harsh idea – that destruction was a necessary preliminary to the creation of fresh life.
‘Do you believe in such Gods?’
‘No, these Gods are for simple people. I must seek the truths behind them.’ He glanced at me and saw that I was not bored, so he continued: ‘There is a part of an Indian’s life which is given to the study of religion. When his sons are grown up and he can rest from his work, he spends many hours of his day in contemplation and in the study of Sacred Books, such as the Gita and the Upanishads, and he prays for enlightenment. A few renounce their wealth and their families and become beggars, asking only for food from the householders and cotton cloth to cover their bodies.’
‘By ridding himself of worldly ties, he expects to give all his thoughts to God?’
‘The same idea exists in the Christian religion,’ he said, nodding his head in assent to my question. ‘It is, however, in one particular different. In Christianity blind faith is required. In Hinduism faith is not asked. A man must by earnest contemplation discover what he feels to be true, and in that only he must believe.’
‘It is a hard religion.’
‘On the contrary. It provides for every man. It asks only belief to the best of a man’s ability – no more.’
Mother and Father had brought up their daughters to go to church on Sundays and babble the Lord’s Prayer every night. They had also taught us the accepted rules of conduct in society. Good children, they said, did not lie or cheat. Good young women lay only with their husbands; they were not too vain; they did not gossip unkindly, and so on. I had often questioned these teachings, but it was clear that they contributed to the peace of the community, so I accepted them. But when the war came to our city with all its savagery of persistent air raids, when most of the boys with whom I had grown up were dead in an apparently futile war, my mind sought for a reason for all the suffering I saw – and found none. And subsequently had not found any.
I had dug amid rubble with nothing but a coal shovel and bare hands to free a mother and children from the cellar of their ruined home, and had prayed at the same time that God would not let the tottering walls around me fall and crush me too. They had not fallen – but I had not then believed in God. With a crushed child in one’s arms it is hard to believe in any kind of Divine Mercy. My confused mind seemed symbolic of a whole world which faced the same issues.
Rather than continue a discussion which threatened to resurrect old worries, I suggested that we have lunch, and we sought shelter from the wind in a deep hollow ringed with rough grasses. It was a pleasant place, and the sun which had strengthened as we walked warmed us as we munched the sandwiches that I had brought. Afterwards we sat and smoked in silence.
Ajit took my hand and opened it. Very lightly he traced the lines upon it with his finger.
‘Your hand is full of good,’ he said finally.
‘I suppose I am really a fortunate woman,’ I said, ‘but I do not feel so.’
He puffed at his pipe, and looked again at the hand.
‘The early life is broken, full of small illnesses and disappointments – later on it greatly improves.’
‘Does it?’ I asked hopefully, leaning closer to him to have a better look.
He caught his breath as I moved nearer, but went on: ‘Yes, there is a husband – and three children.’ He broke off and then asked: ‘Have you been married? Forgive me for asking.’
It was my turn to catch my breath. ‘Not quite,’ I said, ‘I have been engaged twice and both my fiancés were killed.’
‘Forgive me,’ he repeated. ‘I should not have asked, although it is written in your hand.’ He closed the hand but kept it in his own firm grasp. His head was bent as he stared at our clasped hands; his hair was glossy, like the back of a cat.
He looked up, straight into my eyes: ‘Why are you so unhappy today?’ he asked.
Although I was totally unprepared for such a question, I tried to evade it lightly, as I said with forced gaiety: ‘Do I look unhappy? It must be old age creeping up on me.’
‘Age – you?’ he exclaimed. ‘No, some shock has come to you – and I wondered if I could be of comfort.’ He stroked my hand absentmindedly.
At his words, my mind was flooded with the pain and humiliation of yesterday. The quivering of my lips became a general trembling, which he felt in the hand he stroked.
‘Say to me,’ he said very gently.
‘I – er – it is rather a personal matter.’
‘Naturally it is personal – that much I realise. It is good when in trouble to speak to another of one’s personal matters – it makes better.’
His voice was full of sympathy and, after a hesitating start, the whole story poured from me in short, bitter sentences, and, just as he had said, it made me feel better.
Finally I said: ‘Unknowingly I hurt Angela, who loved me enough not to let me see the jealousy she must have felt.’
During the recital he had continued to hold my hand as he sat stiffly cross-legged, but as I finished he let go of it and lay down on his back and relit his pipe. The smoke rose in cloudlets, as he thought. Then he looked at me and grinned mischievously. Feeling very self-conscious at having confided in a stranger and a man, I smiled rather tremulously back at him.
‘You are lovely when you smile,’ he said, as if he had not heard the story at all.
The incongruity of the remark struck me and I laughed a little harshly.
‘That is not a good laugh,’ he said, raising himself on his elbow, so that he was quite close to me, and taking my hand again. ‘I have some advice to give you.’
‘Yes?’
‘Let me marry you. Let me show you what life and love can really be.’
I started up as if to run away, but he would not let go of my hand.
‘Don’t go away. Hear me to the end.’
I looked down at him and was astonished at the beauty which flooded his face; it was transfigured. There was love in it such as I had previously seen only upon the face of a new mother – no lust – just a glow of affection. I knew I was seeing something rare, and I sat down again, hardly knowing what I did but fascinated by a loveliness I did not know a man’s face could show.
‘I have loved you from the first day I saw you – you must know it.’
I did know it although I had not acknowledged it to myself. I nodded.
‘We would have to fight many difficulties together, as we are of different races – yet those difficulties could also make us cling together and know each other.’ His eyes were imploring. ‘I would love you so that sadness and weariness left your face, and contentment filled your life.’
‘You do not ask me if I love you.’
‘I do not ask your love now – only the chance to win it – and the privilege of giving you happiness.’
I felt curiously humble before him, very uncertain of myself, but the desire to run away had gone. It was as if unimagined treasures had been laid before me; and it seemed to me that I had done nothing to merit such a gift.
I tried to think clearly, to imagine what living with a man who was brown would be like. My mind refused to grasp anything, however, except that a delicate, brown finger was stroking my wrist and that a man of known integrity and ability was looking at me with adoration, and had just offered me all that he had and an entirely new life.
‘Ajit – I am not worth all the sacrifice it would mean.’
‘My Rani – my Queen, you are worth everything to me.’ He slipped his arm round me and drew me closer. Suddenly I turned my face to his shoulder and wept wearily. I wept the last tears I had for Barney, who had been such a scallywag in life and was so pitiful in death. And for the first time for years I desired to make someone else happy instead of hugging my own miseries to myself.
The Chinese say that the time to court the widow is immediately after the funeral, and there had certainly been a funeral the day before, a funeral during which love had been replaced by hate and then by pity – pity for Barney, pity for Angela, pity for myself.
He let me cry until the sobs became less. Then a brown hand turned my face to his. Very carefully he pushed back the loose hairs from my face which must have been ugly from crying. He bent his head and softly caressed my cheek with his nose. A butterfly kiss went across my lips, and I lay still, too tired to protest.
Infinitely patient, he courted me as if I was a girl bride who had never seen him before and was afraid of being alone with him. He did not attempt to kiss me as Barney had kissed me. Just light kisses, softly across my mouth, until I began to desire more. His breath was sweet in my nostrils, and my arms almost of their own accord went up and round his neck.
When he felt my whole body stir uneasily, he said: ‘Marry me?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and he released me slowly. He was beaming.
‘You will be the Lakshmi of my house,’ he said, ‘the Goddess and Giver of all Good Things.’
The winter sun grew sharply stronger, as the clouds rolled away. I smiled at him very shyly although my pulses were pounding. I had just accepted a very difficult set of ties and yet I felt released from bondage. I sat back on my heels and surveyed my future husband.
Because I was for the first time imagining him as a partner, it was as if I had never seen him before. He lay and puffed his pipe contentedly and hummed under his breath, as if nothing had happened, his eyes shadowed by their dark lids and enormous lashes. A patient man, I thought. Anyone else would have followed up the advantage which my acceptance had given him. Some inner perception must have warned him to go slowly – or was it an infinitely subtle skill in the making of love?
At the thought of his really making love to me, a hot flush rose to my face and I scrambled to my feet. He got up too. He was shivering, whether with cold or desire I did not know, but I arranged his scarf for him and made him button his raincoat to the top.
‘Hot tea and bacon and eggs,’ I said as I pulled on my woollen gloves.
‘These English women,’ he said. ‘So practical – and also so impractical,’ and he swung me towards him and kissed me hard until my body slackened against his. I pulled myself away hastily.
‘Bacon and eggs,’ I said firmly, and ran up the sea wall to the top. The wind hit me as it blew straight off the sea.
‘It’s really cold,’ I said as he joined me.
‘Let us then run.’
So, laughing, we ran along the sea wall to get warm. As I raced Ajit, the wind tearing at my hair and the waves roaring at my feet, some youth came back to me, and I was filled with young hope for the future.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_0a03afb4-cdd9-5f8c-b61a-c6897c9ffeb1)
There was a log fire in the parlour of the pub where we had out tea, and as we were the only customers, we afterwards sat hand in hand on an old wooden settle and watched the sparks fly up the chimney.
The landlady who served us looked upon us with disdain, but when she heard our voices, she confided audibly to her daughter behind the bar that: ‘She isn’t a common sort,’ and she unbent enough to ask Ajit if he was a student from India. She also asked me if I was a student. I said vaguely that I was a social worker, not wishing to invite further questioning. The landlady was nonplussed by my answer and said to her daughter, as she took our dirty dishes to the sink behind the counter, that: ‘It was a right rum combination – an Indian and a social aid worker.’
Both Ajit and I giggled when we heard this remark; but it reminded Ajit of another problem.
‘What will your father say about your marriage to me?’
I was secretly worried about my parents’ reaction to the marriage, although I did not want to communicate this worry to Ajit.
‘Father likes you very much,’ I said cautiously, ‘although he will be very upset at my going to live so far away as in India.’
‘We shall see – I do not wish that he should grieve.’ He let go of my hand, picked up the poker and poked at the fire, while his fine eyebrows knitted and a frown broke the smoothness of his forehead.
‘Peggie, in one month’s time I have to return to India.’
‘So soon?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘Yes, my Queen, I have obtained a post at the new power station at Pandipura, near Shahpur – where Chundabhai lives – and I must start work in two months’ time.’
‘But, darling …’ I expostulated. I got no further, the rest of what I was about to say being smothered in a kiss. It was the first time I had used an endearment when speaking to him, and he was delighted. I had to laugh. He had picked just the right second in which to kiss me – the barmaid had bent down beneath her counter to put away a glass.
‘Darling,’ I protested, fighting my way free, ‘not in public.’ I relieved him of the poker which he had been brandishing in the air.
He immediately let go of me. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, looking very crestfallen.
I slipped my hand into his and said: ‘You are sweet – and don’t be sorry – the kiss meant a great deal to me –’ I stammered and could feel the colour mounting to my cheeks.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘It was naughty of me – in Bombay I would have been liable to a fine for such behaviour.’
‘It was a little naughty – but very nice,’ I said. ‘Now, tell me about your return home.’
He did not immediately reply to my prompting about his journey home. After a moment or two, he said slowly: ‘I have not yet told my father about my marriage to you.’
‘How could you? You have only today asked me.’
‘I have had the intention for twelve months,’ he said calmly.
I grinned. I could imagine it. Although his ideas erupted suddenly into words, it was obvious that much preparatory thought had been given to them. I was glad that he, at least, had given thought to our marriage; I was still bewildered at the change he had brought into my life and at my temerity in accepting his proposal.
‘Are you going to write to your father now?’
He did not answer the question directly, but said:
‘My father will not wish us to marry. He will wish me to have a bride of his own choice from our own caste. It is possible that he will be most angry.’
I knew that the old customs were dying out in India and I queried his remarks.
‘They are dying,’ he said, ‘but still they linger in families. I love my parents and I do not wish their anger – but I love you more and am determined to marry you.’ His face darkened as he said this and he put his arm round my waist. ‘Peggie,’ he went on, his voice full of urgency, ‘marry me now, quickly. What has been done cannot be undone.’
I had heard of the power of Indian parents, and I asked him what his father was likely to do if he defied him, as he suggested.
‘I am fortunate,’ said Ajit. ‘I have a post and do not have to depend on my family. I do not think Father will use his influence to have me dismissed – he will not wish to ruin me. We shall, therefore, be assured of our income.’ He stirred uneasily and went on, ‘It must be hard for you to understand the tight bonds of an Indian family – here you leave your parents as a matter of course, but in India it is not so. It is the unity of our families which makes life bearable in a country where there is no other protection against catastrophe except the family.’
I thought this over. Then I asked: ‘Why don’t you get a job in this country, where life is easier and a quarrel with your father would not affect you so much?’
‘Peggie, you have often told me of the difficulty of getting employment for coloured people in this city. You know the difficulties.’
I did know the difficulties. Although before the law all citizens had the same rights, when a man came before a prospective employer he had to balance his brown skin by being twice as good as the white man applying with him, even if they had been born and bred in the same district. It would be even more difficult for a foreigner. He might be lucky and obtain a post, but I writhed at the thought of the petty insults he might well have to endure from the men who served under him.
‘I do know,’ I said, my mind made up. ‘We shall go to India, and we shall hope to win your parents’ goodwill. You shall teach me carefully the customs of your caste, so that after a while people will half forget that I am English, and then perhaps your father will not be so angry and you can make peace with him.’
‘You are good,’ he said. ‘You would not have to alter completely your way of life – you need only conform in public – perhaps wear a sari.’
His face cleared, and I said: ‘You are right about being married soon. We will put up the banns immediately and we can then be married a week before you go.’
‘What are banns?’ he asked.
I explained about a registry office marriage. He was full of excitement. ‘I will go to the Registrar tomorrow,’ he said. He squeezed me hard against him, and then got up abruptly, fumbling in his pocket for money to pay our bill.
We decided to go back to town by bus, and as we waited in the darkness at the bus stop near the inn, he came close to me and held me to him, and talked quietly about our future life together.
Our children could be Christians, he said, if I wished it, but he would prefer to bring them up as Hindus as they would have to live in India. This question had already occurred to me, and I said that they should be Hindus. I knew from previous conversations with Ajit that the rules of conduct laid down for Hindus were wise, and all I asked of Ajit was that what we taught our children should be free from corruption or bigotry.
He chuckled. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, ‘and put out of your mind most missionary writings about us. You will find purity of thought in India as well as here.’
‘I shall be happy if our children are like you,’ I said.
He trembled. ‘I am not good,’ he said. ‘I … I want that we do not wait three weeks for our marriage.’
‘The time will go quickly,’ I said, unclasping myself from him, as the lights of the bus swept us.
As the bus jogged back to town, I puzzled over the best way to break the news of my engagement at home. My head was heavy from lack of sleep and I could not think very well, so I decided to leave the question until the following day.
Knowing that Ajit’s dragon did not provide supper, I insisted that he should come home for a meal.
As our shoes were dirty, we went in through the back door. My heart was pattering and I think Ajit’s must have been too, but Mother was too busy to notice any difference in us. She was just taking a pie out of the oven.
‘Come in, children,’ she said. ‘I hoped you would come soon. I have made a pie for supper. Peggie, pass me that cloth. Ajit, I am glad you have come. Perhaps you would like a wash. Hang the rucksack on the door.’ She flew round the kitchen like a plump robin.
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Helen Forrester
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Стоимость: 542.17 ₽
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Helen Forrester’s moving story of an English girl and her love affair with an Indian man.Peggy Delaney was a Lancashire girl born and bred, beginning to live again after the heartache of the war.Ajit Singh was a charming young Indian student, shortly to return to his homeland and an arranged marriage.When Peggy and Ajit fell in love, each one knew the future would not be easy. But as they began their new life, far from their homes and their families, they found that love could bring two worlds together…