Change Here For Babylon Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

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  Contents

  Nina Bawden

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nina Bawden

  Change Here For Babylon

  Nina Bawden

  Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children – Carrie’s War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry – have become contemporary classics.

  She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured – but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages.

  Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter’s Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime’s contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

  Chapter One

  The execution took place on a mild day, early in February. It had been raining during the night and the pavements steamed in the moist, morning sun. It was gentle weather; the soft sky held the promise of spring and not the retribution of winter. When it was over, they posted a notice on the gates of the prison and the people jostled each other to be the first to read it. They were mostly women and they talked in hushed whispers as though they were in church. A stray dog snuffled in the dirty gutters and a little boy in wellington boots wailed on a long, persistent note and tugged at his mother’s sleeve. There was no triumphant sense of justice done, only bewildered appraisal of an uncomprehended act. It was a messy way to die.

  I waited for a little while although there was no point in waiting. Then I went home. I didn’t feel anything very much and that surprised me. It was all over. There was nothing left but the small change of living.

  The past was dead and indestructible, so I told myself. Nothing could be altered now; perhaps in the beginning it could not have been altered because what had happened was the result of our weaknesses, our blind self-estimates, our pride, our false humilities. The end, though we could not have foreseen it, had been within us. It was small comfort and dishonest philosophy and as always I went back over the whole business, splitting and splintering the shape of the past, distorting it and twisting it and looking for the truth. And, as always, I went back to the beginning.

  Nora and I had had a row before we went to the Hunters’party. It was the usual sort of row about nothing in particular and it was conducted in the usual sort of way in savage, hushed whispers because the walls of our suburban house were thin and Nora’s mother was in the next room. She had the radio on, but it was turned so low that she could not have been listening to it. She always did that, saying she did not want to wake the child, but it was really because she liked martyrdom. She also wanted to be able to hear what Nora and I said to each other so that she could persuade herself that I was a bad husband for her daughter. Not because she thought that I was a bad husband or even that Nora deserved someone better, but because she took pleasure in being a knowledgeable witness to unhappiness or failure. I knew, all the time we were angry with each other, that she was listening on the other side of the thin wall. I knew that she was sitting bolt upright in her chair with her interminable grey knitting on her lap, her fat knees spread out to the fire’s heat, the glasses nodding on her nose and her mouth as tight as a trap. The knowledge was as bad as her presence would have been.

  I think the row started because of Nora’s dress. We had been quite friendly together before she put it on, after her bath. It was an old dress and not particularly becoming to her, and she knew it. She also knew that we couldn’t afford another and therefore she wasn’t able to make an issue of it. So we had a row about whether we should order a taxi to bring us home after the party or whether we should rely on someone giving us a lift back into the town. I have forgotten which of us wanted to order a taxi but it was not, even then, important.

  We both said the same things that we always said on these occasions and the fact that the accusations were unoriginal and expected did not lessen their impact. They had sufficient truth in them to sting. Nora stood before the looking-glass, tugging at her dress. Her eyes shone with temper and her cheeks were flushed; she was normally too pale and the colour suited her. She said that life with me was intolerable, that if she had known it was going to be like this she would never have married me. It was the wail of a child worried and excited by the prospect of a party. She was almost thirty and social occasions still unnerved her.

  I remember that I sat on the bed in my dinner-jacket and laced up my shoes and felt sad and ashamed because there was no reply to so many of the things she said. To be honest, I don’t think she loved me as much as she always insisted, on these occasions, that she did; her love was just another stick to beat the dog with. Neither did she really believe that I was not still in love with her. We had had rows before when I had loved her with my whole heart and she had said much the same kind of thing with the same kind of hysterical bitterness. It had been easy to get angry with her then because I had been sure of loving her; it was impossible to get angry with her now. I began to feel the aching pain behind my eyes that was always there when we quarrelled. I got up from the bed and said that she was a silly goose and that it was stupid to quarrel, wasn’t it, and spoil the evening?

  In the end I made her laugh a little and she put lipstick on her mouth and combed her hair. We went together into Sandy’s room. He looked a nice little urchin lying there asleep with his teddy bear across his chest and his collection of toy cars beside his head. I picked a small lorry off the pillow; the sharp edge of it had bruised the soft flesh below his eye. He stirred and smiled and sucked windily at the gap in his front teeth and Nora and I smiled across his sleeping head from sentimental habit. Convention decreed that this was the end of the row, the re-union by the bedside of the child, and until the taxi came we talked together with careful friendship.

  It wasn’t our kind of party. The Hunters weren’t our kind of people and we weren’t theirs, but we were asked, every year, to their duty cocktail party. This year I had not wanted to go, but Emi
ly had said that it would look odd if we didn’t come. And it wouldn’t have been easy to explain to Nora. She didn’t have much fun, poor child, although I think that she liked going out on this occasion not so much because she enjoyed herself when she got there as because being asked to the Hunters’party was a kind of assertion of status. We were professional people; the other people who lived in our street were not and they were not asked to the party. Most of them were better off than we were but I was the only man who owned a dinner-jacket. Nora would have been shocked if I had suggested that she was a snob.

  She explained her attitude carefully.

  “It isn’t a matter of social standing, Tom. I haven’t anything in common with them.”

  So during the three years we had lived in Sanctuary Road she had been sweet and remote with our working-class neighbours, holding high the shabby and pathetic banner of her university education. She liked to be seen carrying the new non-fiction books from the public library although she seldom finished them. She liked listening to the light programme and reading the popular women’s magazines—I would find them carefully hidden under the sofa cushions—and she was ashamed of these things. Sometimes I was embarrassed for her and angry because of these small pretences. Now, thinking about them on the way to the Hunters’party, they made her seem vulnerable and sweet. I took her hand and held it and she leaned contentedly against me. I kissed her, not because I loved her, but because she was Nora who had been my wife for eight years and because, at this moment, I was glad that she was with me. She laced her fingers through mine and we sat in friendly silence like a happily married couple.

  During the last decade the local rich had deserted the town’s north suburb; the angular Victorian villas that had housed them were empty now of all but the oldest of the university fellows. The Hunters’village was fashionable and slightly phoney; their house fronted on to the main street. From the volume of noise that came from the open front door it sounded like a successful party.

  Nora began to be nervous when she joined me in the hall after taking off her coat. She was holding one shoulder awkwardly and a little higher than the other in the way she had when she was unsure of herself. Her eyes were bright and panicky. I told her that she was looking lovely and good enough to eat; she grinned weakly and said that she felt like an early Christian being thrown to the lions, but that she would be all right once she’d had a drink.

  The drawing-room smelt of gin and perfume and hothouse chrysanthemums. Clear middle-class voices cracked off the crystal of the chandeliers. We were late and sober and I badly needed a drink. There were rather too many waiters and rather too large and imposing a bar erected in front of the french windows. Emily’s parties were always ostentatious. She wasn’t showing off; it was the natural overflowing of a happily exuberant nature. She would have behaved in the same way, on a different scale, in a Glasgow slum.

  I couldn’t see her when we first went into the room, and I felt the absurd panic that I always felt when she was late for an appointment or didn’t answer the telephone when I rang. I told myself that it was silly to feel like that and I made myself talk to Nora, find her a drink and light her cigarette. She was clinging and nervously chatty; I could never leave her at parties until she had drunk enough to be unself-conscious. I think that she was afraid I would leave her; she turned her back on the room and tried to entertain me with bright, strained gaiety as if I were not her husband and responsible for her.

  I made her drink a double gin and then Geoffrey Hunter came to our rescue. He was a good host and he said all the right things. He told Nora that she looked charming and said how glad he was that we had been able to come. He was very emphatic about the gladness because we weren’t the sort of people who usually came to his parties. I would have liked to think that he sounded insincere, but he didn’t. He sounded gentle and assured and genuine, and I hated every inch of him from his flat, well-bred English face to his excellently-shod feet. He had no mannerisms, no tricks of speech. He didn’t need them. He spoke softly and he had a scholar’s face and amused, slightly prominent, blue eyes. But the confidence was there without the outward trappings; it came from some inner core of sureness that was quite unshakeable.

  We talked for a little while and then he shepherded Nora away, shining and happy, to be introduced to some people whom, he said, he was sure she would like. He made it sound flattering as if he knew she would only like exceptional people.

  Then I saw Emily and my heart lifted with delight. She was talking to a pair of middle-aged, wilting women who looked as if they might be the relicts of country vicars. One of them had a dark growth of hair that sprouted from a mole on her chin and waggled as she talked. Emily seemed to be enjoying her party. I remember that I felt jealous because she could appear so happy when I was not there. She was wearing a long, tight dress made of green silk; the colour suited her and made her skin look pearly. I stood beside her and she turned and said:

  “Tom, how nice. I’m so glad you could come.”

  Her voice was cool and social. She kept her hand on my arm while she introduced me to the grey women, and once she pinched me sharply through the stuff of my coat without any change of expression in her voice or on her face except for a quick, laughing look to see if I had winced. I hated meeting her at parties where there was no chance of our being alone together, but I think she got a certain amount of pleasure out of it as if we were children among the grown-ups, sharing a secret.

  She said: “Mr. Harrington lectures at the university,” and the two women looked admiring and said that it must be very interesting, such a pleasant job. It was clear that they thought I spent my days in a book-lined room with a decanter of port at my elbow and I longed to tell them that I lived in the sort of shabby, ill-built house that they barely knew existed. One of them was Lady Somebody-or-Other and the second one a plain Mrs., but I never sorted out which was which. They both wore the kind of shapeless dress that has a deep V-neck filled in with beige-coloured lace. We talked gardens and said how beautiful the dahlias were this year, perhaps it was a result of the wet summer? One of them had ordered her tulip bulbs from Holland. Bulbs, she said, made you realise that spring was not so very far away.

  When we had exhausted the herbaceous border we smiled at each other with tight, determined smiles until Emily excused herself and said that she must go and see about the buffet supper.

  She said, enjoying the game: “Perhaps you would be kind and help me, Tom?”

  I was the willing guest. “I’d be delighted,” I said.

  We escaped to the damask-covered tables and counted knives and forks out of a varnished box. Her bare arm and shoulder were close to mine and her hair tickled my ear. I wanted to kiss her badly, and I suppose it was the effort of not doing so that blinded me to the fact that there was something wrong. Her face was flushed, her voice excited, and she was talking a great deal in a rather silly social way that was unlike her. I think I thought she had been drinking too much and too quickly.

  Then she stopped talking and stared beyond me, over my shoulder. Her eyes frowned a little in the way they always did when she was worried or annoyed. She had lovely eyes, of an unexceptional and ordinary blue, but wide and bright and clear.

  I turned round to see who she was looking at and saw Nora’s brother David standing between two groups of people, quite alone, and watching us with sharp, attentive eyes. His stocky legs were placed wide apart, his chin thrust forward on to his big barrel of a chest. He seemed to find us amusing.

  I said: “What’s the matter? Shouldn’t he be here?”

  She didn’t seem to have heard me, and so I repeated the question. She looked at me and said in a quick, confused way:

  “Yes, of course he should. I mean, we sent an invitation to the paper. Geoffrey wants to keep in with the local press because of the election.”

  I said: “But you hoped he wouldn’t be the one to come? It’s all right. I don’t go much of a bundle on my brother-in-law myself.”
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br />   She grinned in an apologetic sort of way. “He hates Geoffrey,” she said.

  It was the one thing David and I agreed on, but I didn’t say so. I suppose that in a way our dislike had the same kind of basis—the dislike of the half-failure for the man to whom failure is unthinkable. And in David’s case it was more than that. He was a bitter Socialist and his politics were very personal affairs. He had expected to be the local Labour candidate and at the last minute he had been dropped for one of the public school brigade. We were a marginal seat and I imagined that the town’s committee had wanted a bigger gun.

  I said: “If he had his way he wouldn’t give you much of a write-up for this. He’s all against the fat man who waters the worker’s beer. But he can’t do Geoffrey any harm. He works for the wrong sort of paper.”

  She smiled, but not happily and then she bit her lip as if she were uneasy and alarmed about something, and I couldn’t understand why. David was a nasty little trick, but he wasn’t anyone to worry about. I wondered suddenly why she should be so sure that he hated Geoffrey. She might have known about the political business, but she couldn’t have known how David would take it.

  She said: “I think I’ll go and talk to him.”

  She sounded abstracted. I said: “D’you have to? I should have thought not.”

  She said vaguely: “Duty talk, Tom. You ought to circulate, anyway. It’s not very clever of us to stay together.”

  She left me and went to talk to David. They stood in a corner together; the hair curled on the nape of her neck as she bent her head towards him. She looked lovely; she was a tall, high-breasted girl with a wide Irish face, full of colour. Feature by feature she was not especially beautiful, her nose was too heavy and her mouth too full, but she had an air of almost extravagant health that made most women look drab beside her.