The Solitary Child Page 2

  Outside it was cloudy and there was no moon. There was a single, bright lamp outside the public house, and beyond that the thick darkness of the mews. I stood on the stone steps, peering into the blackness, straining for the sound of his footsteps. But there was nothing except the muted noises from the pub and the steady, wet sluicing of the rain through the dying leaves of the plane tree on to the rough cobbles below.

  For a moment I wondered whether it might not be better to leave things as they were, to go back into the pub and ring for a taxi to take me home. Clearly, he had meant his departure to be final; in a way, to follow him would be an impertinence.

  I hesitated for perhaps thirty seconds. Then I went, slipping in my thin, party shoes, down the steps and away from the circle of rain-washed light, to the end of the black alley. Just before I reached it, I remembered that there were probably two entrances to the mews and that, trying to shake me off, he might have left by the other one.

  But he was too convinced that I had been glad to see him go. He was walking rapidly, a tall and solitary figure in a Burberry, under the dripping trees of the garden in the square. His head shone wet and golden in the light from the street lamps.

  He must have heard me running after him but so complete was his belief that he was unwanted that he did not turn round. He did not stop until I had almost caught up with him and called his name.

  His face was blank with surprise. The rain ran down his face like tears.

  I said, idiotically, “I didn’t think I’d catch you.”

  He stared truculently. “You didn’t have to come after me. Why did you?”

  I had been going to apologise. Now, looking at his shut and guarded face, I knew it was what he feared.

  I stumbled out, “I didn’t want you to leave me.” He said nothing and I went on, not caring what he thought of me, only aware that he must, for so long, have steeled himself against patronage and pity, “I thought you liked being with me. And I didn’t know your address.”

  He looked unsure of himself and shy.

  “It was unforgivable of me,” he said.

  “I’ve forgiven you for walking out.”

  “I’m not just another lame duck?”

  “No,” I said violently, “oh no.” And then I wondered about our careful introduction at the party. It hadn’t been the kind of party where people were introduced to each other. And I remembered Lally saying on an occasion forgotten until now, “Harriet has such a terrible sense of justice. It amounts to a preference, always, for the underdog.”

  I felt stupid and dreadfully young. I said haltingly:

  “Just now—in the pub—I think you misunderstood me.”

  His face froze. He spoke stiffly, dismissing the matter. “This is hardly the place, is it?” He gestured at the sodden gardens and the steady rain. “You must be soaked in a thin coat and those pretty shoes.”

  His voice was unexpectedly kind and it destroyed my self-control. Silly tears stung my eyes. He handed me a handkerchief and I snivelled into it.

  He said, in a grumbling, old woman’s voice, “Too much excitement, Miss Harriet. It’s always the same after a party. Tears before night …”

  It was wildly funny. I blew my nose loudly and thoroughly and we laughed at each other, suddenly happy and at ease.

  He said, “So I can take you home after all.” Tucking his hand through my arm, he walked me along the pavement in the blowing rain. He did not speak of what had happened that night or any other night. It was as if he had found it easier to talk in the pub when we had been almost strangers; as if what had happened since we left had made us more intimate and therefore further from each other. For my part, I knew that we would meet again and so there was no need to talk of something that would keep. I had not bargained, then, for the increasing difficulty in speaking of it that came with each new meeting; it was as if the closer we became in all but this one thing the more afraid we were of mentioning it lest it should spoil our happiness. For we were happy.

  Only when I said that I would have to tell my mother was it spoken of, and then only obliquely and with a kind of shyness.

  The fire spurted a blue whip of flame and James said, “I could see your mother and tell her myself.”

  I tried not to sound relieved. “It might help. I’ll only make an idiot of myself, on my own, and she’ll think I’m being provocative and flippant.”

  “She’ll say, ‘Do you really think it clever, Harriet, to mix yourself up with a man whose name has been splashed across the headlines of the gutter press? And after all, there is no smoke without fire!’”

  I stared at him. “How do you know?”

  “Because you’ve told me. Oh, not directly. But whenever you talk about her, you become a different person. Belligerent, on guard. She’s bound to say something like that.”

  “It’s stupid, but she makes me nervous. She always has done. She used to say I had an unfortunate manner.”

  It was meant to make him laugh but somehow it didn’t.

  He said sharply, “Don’t you make your relationship with your mother unnecessarily complicated? There is nothing exceptional about it. No one is ever at ease with their parents. It’s the memory of complete authority and occasional injustice.”

  It was a rebuke. I said brightly, “It’s fashionable to be neurotic about your parents, this year.”

  I knew, before I said it, that it was not the kind of remark that amused him.

  He said, “You’re not neurotic. It’s a pernicious word. It means, so often, tactless or perverse or simply—wicked.”

  It didn’t make much sense but he said it with a kind of force that was almost anger as if it wasn’t an irrelevant remark to him. I remember that I wondered why he had said “wicked.” He wasn’t the sort of person to use strong words lightly. Then he looked at me with a swift change of mood and said, “Let’s go out to dinner. We’re still celebrating, aren’t we?”

  I found it difficult to respond at once. “Of course. Ought I to change?”

  He smiled suddenly and sweetly, and said, “You look very nice as you are.”

  It wasn’t exactly lavish praise but I was unused to compliments, and if I was disappointed it would have seemed shameful to show it.

  I made up my face and put on my coat. We walked down the narrow stairs and out into the choking fog.

  It was too early for dinner, so we went to the Green Wizard and met Lally and Barney Pettigrew. They had been divorced for something under a year; they met fairly frequently and behaved with casual intimacy as if they were still man and wife.

  Lally waved to us as we came into the pub, and Barney slouched towards us, chinking the coins in his pocket.

  “What are you drinking? Bitter and a shandy, miss. James, I’ve got something outside for you. A lovely job.”

  “The Hispano-Suiza?”

  “That’s right, old chap. It’s a beauty, want to see it?”

  They drained their tankards and disappeared through the swing doors. Lally coughed over her cigarette.

  “Let’s get in a huddle, shall we?” We found seats near the fire. She was wearing a fisherman’s sweater and navy jeans. She stretched out her pale hands to the flames.

  “I wonder why Englishmen get so sexually excited over old cars. On our honeymoon I shared Barney with a monstrous thing on four wheels that he wanted to run in the Old Crocks race. He spent all day flat on his back with a spanner. Harriet, do you really want to marry James?”

  She watched me earnestly through the ragged ends of her hair. She had a round face like a clean dairymaid; she always looked like a little girl dressing up in her big sister’s clothes.

  “Why not?”

  She made a face. “Oh, I don’t know. Only it seems odd, somehow. There you are, glowing with youth and puppy fat, standing on the brink where the brook and river meet and all that sort of thing. …”

  “Did you ask Barney to get James out of the way so you could say this? I’m not fat and I don’t want to marry
someone just out of the nest. I don’t like my own generation.”

  It was a little pompous but Lally always made me behave like that.

  “Then wait for it to grow up. Honestly, ducky, James is a dear, sweet creature, bags of integrity and all that, but he’s awfully solemn and settled. You don’t want to bury yourself on a farm and never see anyone this side of fifty again. It’s too cold comfort for words. You’ll hate it.”

  “I might not. Why should I?”

  She rumpled her hair, her eyes shone with earnestness.

  “Besides, ducky, there’s the other business.… I don’t say James hasn’t had a perfectly hideous time and rotten luck, but it does make him accident prone, if you see what I mean.”

  “I don’t at all.”

  There was a silence. “Don’t you?” She sounded doubtful. She shook back her hair and I saw that she wore the expression that she put on like a uniform whenever she was about to rush in where angels fear to tread. “Well, actually, ducky, I think he did it.”

  “Lally!” Her eyes fell, the hand that she put up to shield her face from the fire was trembling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a tiny voice. “But I thought I ought to say it.” The tears splashed on to the scratched oak table.

  “Well, you’ve done your duty, haven’t you?” I said.

  She was really upset; I fished in my pocket and gave her a handkerchief.

  “I don’t believe he did,” I said, “but anyway, it’s my funeral, isn’t it?”

  She laughed rather hysterically at that and the tears on her face had dried when James and Barney came back into the pub. They were very enthusiastic about the car and talked technicalities for about ten minutes. Then James said we were going out to dinner to celebrate and we got up to go.

  Barney grinned at me. “Has Lally been talking you into adopting a black baby? It’s the latest craze. You know she always has to be in the middle of a movement. At the moment it’s colour prejudice. She’s hoping to arrange a marriage between a charming African barrister she picked up on the Tube and a nice, English, middle-class girl. They’ll be a most unsuitable couple but that doesn’t matter. Lally will have struck a blow for the Cause.”

  He sounded bitter but I didn’t think about it very much because I was angry with Lally and wanted to get out of the pub.

  As we walked, James said, “What idiots they are.”

  “Barney and Lally? I think they are being sensible and civilised. I mean they like each other’s company even though they didn’t want to stay married to each other. Would it be better if they each pretended the other were dead?”

  “I should respect them more if they did. They’ve both broken a contract—you’d think they would dislike being continually reminded of their own irresponsibility.”

  “That’s a bit priggish, isn’t it? I don’t agree with Lally, but if she feels like that, it’s none of our business.”

  “Barney doesn’t feel like that. He’s old-fashioned, like me. He only sees Lally because he loves her. I don’t really see why he should have been forced to behave like a fool just because Lally got the idea that marriage was an out-of-date institution. Not that you can exempt him from blame. He knew they were both being wrong-headed and stupid. He should never have allowed it to happen.”

  “It’s none of our business,” I repeated absently.

  I wondered whether I should buy some jeans to wear on the farm. Perhaps people who lived in the country didn’t wear them, perhaps only girls like Lally wore them, swaggering their pert behinds down village streets, typed immediately as Londoners and odd.…

  “Isn’t it our business?” said James. His face was set and serious.

  “Surely it’s society’s business when people treat their marriage vows lightly? It’s beginning of the rot—a kind of inward decay.”

  I considered, a little alarmed at the forcefulness of his manner.

  “I don’t know, darling. Are there really more divorces now because people are less moral—or, on a more pedestrian level—because they are less conscious of their obligations? Or is it because our generation takes marriage more seriously—expects more from it, if you see what I mean—and so is less likely to put up with the second-rate or any kind of organised sham?”

  “Don’t be childish, Harriet. That’s sloppy thinking. A hypocritical glossing over what is really a defection from the moral law. I didn’t expect it from you.”

  “You mustn’t talk to me as if I were a naughty little girl. I won’t have it.”

  Outraged, I stamped my foot on the pavement. I had not intended to argue on the personal plane, indeed, I had not intended to argue at all. Inwardly, I resented the fact that he should appear to consider that his age gave him an advantage over me. The outburst had its effect. He stopped walking and kissed me, I ducked away from his kiss and his mouth bumped against my nose.”

  “Darling, forgive me.” His tone was indulgent. “I’d forgotten that it was useless to argue with a woman. They take any disagreement as a personal affront. I don’t object to Lally and Barney. In fact, I like them very much. Would you like them to be our witnesses when we get married?”

  “Oh, no.” I went on hastily, so that he should not question my refusal. “I’d rather have someone we didn’t know at all. Like the charwoman … it would be more romantic.”

  “Do you think so, love?” It made him laugh, we were happy again and kissed properly, under a street lamp.

  We went to Rules and sat, side by side on a sofa, and ate fried scampi with tartare sauce. The room was half empty because of the fog and we were very private in our corner. Because of this James was happier than he usually was in public places; we had a bottle of wine and held hands under the tablecloth.

  James had to go home, to the farm, before we were married. There were arrangements to be made; when he had come to London to combine the business of settling his mother’s estate with the pleasure of a holiday, he had not anticipated being away for so long. He had a good man, he said, but he could not be left too long without guidance; if we were to go to Switzerland for our honeymoon, arrangements would have to be made for Evans to have additional help. I had the idea that it was not really necessary for James to go, that he tended to make too great a burden of his responsibilities.

  “Have you always lived there?” I asked. In the fortnight we had known each other we had talked a great deal—I think, for James, it was the first time he had talked to anyone for a long time—but we had not spoken much of practical matters. He had not mentioned the farm and, until now, I had not asked him about it. In his silence I had been conscious of restraint.

  No, he said, he had not always lived there. His grandfather had been a wealthy wool merchant who had bought the place during an agricultural boom and put an agent in to run it. James’s father had hated the country—except as a background for gentlemanly sport and the shooting at Random End was indifferent—but when he died his widow had taken her children to live there and it was the place where James had spent his boyhood.

  “At least,” he said, “the part of it that seemed to matter. When we went there, it was like being set free, suddenly, in a world I had only dreamed about.”

  He had a rather slow way of talking, choosing his words with care so that there would sometimes be quite long gaps in the middle of his sentences while he felt for the right phrase. If it was something that really interested him he would become almost oblivious of the person he was speaking to; there was a feeling that you were no longer being addressed individually, but as part of an audience.

  Before his father’s death, they had lived in towns, in narrow, tall houses, never very long in one place. There was never anywhere to play except the dusty back gardens, smothered with soot. For James they had been long, restricted years although his life had been no different from the lives of most town children, certainly no different from my own. But James had hated the dirt and the noise; when his father died and the family moved to the farm, it had been a kin
d of deliverance.

  He said, “It had always been called Random End. Perhaps that’s why my grandfather bought it. Partly because the coincidence amused him and partly because he had always secretly ached after the life of a country gentleman and this way he got it vicariously. I know I always thought it was wonderful to have a house called after me.”

  He smiled gently at himself. “I remember the day we went there as clearly as if it were last week. We got there very late. It was a long drive from the station and it was raining and cold and dark. We were sent straight to bed—there was a fire in my bedroom and it seemed extraordinary luxury. There were trees all round the house that sounded like the sea. The noise made my sister cry but I liked it. I lay awake for a long time and watched the fire on the bedroom walls and listened to the trees.”

  When he woke in the morning the wind had died and it was bright and still. The pale, autumn sun fell through the open window on to the old walls, the heavy furniture and the dead fire. He got out of bed and padded to the window. There were high trees all round the house and rooks screamed in and out of the branches. The house was built in a wide valley between gently swelling hills. There was a long, flat hill and a knobbly one, and one shaped like a cone with purple heather growing almost to the summit. The crown of the hill was rock and the ground round the rock had been scarred white by fire. The fields stretched, tiny and domestic, half-way up the hills, and in the distance was the blue Welsh plateau. It was spacious, tumbled country; the air was soft and clear.

  His eyes were moist. He blinked at his wine glass.

  “You know, when I stood there, that first morning, I knew I had come home. It was as violent a feeling as first love.” He grinned. “And probably more lasting.”

  He was being gently sentimental in the fashion of an older generation than mine, but it did not embarrass me.

  I felt very happy. I was a little drunk. I loved him dearly, dearly.

  I said, hoarse with sentiment, “It will be heaven to live there with you.”

  He looked at me, startled, almost as if he had forgotten I was there. As if I were a stranger who had intruded on his private thoughts.