Change Here For Babylon Page 4

  I remember that as I rode back to the town I felt a primitive and raging hatred that I had never felt before. I was physically sick with it; I got off my bicycle and vomited in a ditch. I had never felt before that I wanted to kill a man.

  Nora was in the kitchen, making breakfast. The hair fell over her forehead and her cheek was smudged. She was wearing the down-at-heel slippers that she kept for working in the house and the vein that marked the back of her bare leg looked blue and swollen and sore.

  She said: “Where have you been, Tom? It’s so thoughtless …”

  I said: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be late. Can I help?”

  She went on: “Mother had a bad night and wants her breakfast in bed. And we’re late already.”

  Then she made an obvious effort, and said: “I don’t mean to be cross. I’ve got a terrible hangover.”

  I felt, suddenly, perhaps because of guilt or insecurity, that she had never seemed so dear. Because she looked plain and tired and harassed she seemed to be infinitely precious. I wanted to kiss her and promise to look after her, to reassure both of us. And I was appalled at myself and my own hypocrisy.

  I laid breakfast and helped Sandy to get ready for school. He was quarrelsome and difficult at breakfast, and Nora looked more and more miserably worried until he finally departed, slamming the door behind him.

  I helped Nora to wash up the dishes and then I bathed and shaved and changed my clothes. I had a lecture at ten o’clock but I felt a curious reluctance to leave the house. I followed Nora from room to room, not wanting to talk to her, but wanting to be with her, until in the end she said pettishly: “For heaven’s sake, Tom, you’ll be late, won’t you?”

  She put up her cheek to be kissed and her hair brushed my cheek. It was soft and smelt of bacon fat. I collected my books and lecture notes and left the house as if it were an ordinary morning.

  Chapter Three

  There was a note from Emily waiting for me when I got to my room after the lecture. It said she would be in the bar of the Woolpack before lunch and would I meet her there? She sent her love and three scrawled kisses at the bottom of the page.

  The Woolpack was the town’s main hotel. It was darkly and expensively Tudor, and the bar was always crowded and noisy so that it was, in effect, a very private place to meet.

  I had a tutorial at twelve o’clock with a slow and spotty youngster who worked heartbreakingly hard and would be lucky if he got a pass degree. I cut him short by about twenty minutes and then felt guilty about it when I saw the hurt surprise on his face.

  Emily was sitting at a table at the end of the long bar with a gin and tonic in front of her. The sun came in through the window behind her and gilded her hair. She looked lovely in a peaches and cream way as if she had slept for a long, untroubled night. The tweeds she was wearing were new and suited her. Two men standing at the bar were gaping at her with open admiration.

  I had been prepared to find her unhappy and worn; I should have remembered that she was more resilient than anyone I had ever known. I sat down opposite her and she smiled at me with love and pleasure as if there was nothing wrong at all.

  I said: “You look a honey. Like an Ovaltine advertisement. Or a Vogue model wearing the right clothes on a Scottish moor.”

  She said: “Dearest Tom, I love you.” As if that was the only thing that mattered. It would have been pleasant, because she looked so lovely and the sun was shining, to have fostered the illusion.

  I said: “Does Geoffrey know you have come to see me?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know. I think he does. He thought he would be able to scare you into not seeing me. I’m so very glad he couldn’t do that.”

  She stretched her hand across the table. Her rings cut into the fleshy part of my fingers.

  I said, uncomfortably: “It isn’t going to be easy now he knows about it. He’s not likely to accept the situation, is he?”

  “What can he do?” She sounded puzzled, not apprehensive.

  “He could make himself unpleasant, couldn’t he?” And I glanced instinctively over my shoulder as if I had expected to see him standing there.

  I saw David. He was standing with his back to us and talking to a group of undergraduates, five or six young men who laughed loudly and dutifully every now and again. I had always, when I wasn’t disliking him, been sorry for David because he needed an audience so badly. And because it was only the first year undergraduates who collected about him, scandalised and impressed by his malicious, clever tongue. After a term or so they drifted away, bored or embarrassed, and I suspected that they laughed at him behind his back. He was wearing a filthy raincoat and the bottoms of his trouser legs were impressed and muddy. I hoped he hadn’t seen us.

  Emily said: “Geoffrey never goes to pubs,” and she smiled at me in the amused and private way she had when she knew what I was thinking about without my telling her.

  Then she said: “Are you really worried, Tom? He’s not likely to do anything about it, even if he could. It’s only an open scandal that he minds about.”

  I said, and I think I was a little angry that she should be so secure and safe in her belief that Geoffrey could do nothing:

  “Do you really think it is as simple as that? That we can go on seeing each other? That I need not tell Nora if we do?”

  She said: “Was it ever simple, Tom? And is it worse to deceive Nora now that Geoffrey knows, than it was before?”

  I said: “Of course it is worse,” and felt a fool.

  Then I tried to explain, both to Emily and to myself, why this should be so, and it sounded illogical and merely silly. I said that she was right in thinking that the moral issues involved were unchanged, that Geoffrey’s knowledge had merely presented them afresh. That what I was feeling now was nothing new but only the same appalled feeling of guilt that I had felt in the beginning and grown used to through the months so that until now I had ceased to feel it either deeply or sharply.

  She grinned in the way she always grinned when I was being pompous.

  She said: “Darling, it isn’t only that. While no one knew about it we were able to persuade ourselves that it wasn’t an ordinary, shabby affair. The sort of thing you read about in the Sunday newspapers. Now Geoffrey knows about it, it isn’t so easy to feel like that. You touch the bright bubble and all you have is a watery mess.”

  She blushed brightly and looked immediately shy, as if she had not intended to say anything so dramatic and give herself away so completely. We had never pretended that our affair was justified because we loved each other; it would have sounded too much like special pleading. And I had been too wary of my own motives to say that my love for her was something different and set apart. I think, too, that I had been afraid she would think me naïve and laugh at me. I remember that I was suddenly quite astonishingly grateful because Emily appeared to feel, in a way I had not expected, that our relationship was more important than we had ever allowed ourselves to admit. We looked at each other with the embarrassment of people confronted with an emotion that had always been understated and treated, for the most part, lightly.

  I said, self-consciously: “I expect I’ve just been badly scared.”

  And then I went to buy her another drink. While I was standing at the bar, David turned and saw me. He nodded and raised his glass. He was drinking tomato juice. I waited for him to start talking to his young men before I took our drinks back to the table.

  When I sat down, Emily said: “Tom, would you rather not see me again?”

  It wasn’t the prelude to an outburst of feminine reproaches; she really wanted to know. When I said nothing, she went on anxiously:

  “You know, I would understand that it wasn’t because you didn’t love me.”

  She couldn’t have made it easier for me. I knew then that if I were to say it was what I wanted, she would have accepted it without resentment, not because she understood, but because she loved me.

  “Of course I want to see you,” I
said, and when she smiled it was like the sun coming out. I felt ashamed because of my own small and completely conscious desire to have done with the whole thing.

  She said: “Tom, you mustn’t dislike Geoffrey too much. He doesn’t mean to talk like a pompous ass. I think he honestly tries to be fair and to see our side of it. After you’d gone this morning he was upset because he said he had felt like a schoolmaster, and he was afraid you had resented him.”

  I said: “It’s Geoffrey’s great art. Decent chapmanship. Something Stephen Potter forgot about. Puts everyone else in the wrong.”

  She giggled. “I love you, Tom.”

  I said crossly: “Oh, you’re quite right. He behaved beautifully this morning. He didn’t attack me with a hatchet and he hadn’t beaten you—or had he? All I know is that the next time I want a mistress I’ll get myself the wife of a simple, hot-headed dock labourer. It would be far less humiliating to have one’s head split open, don’t you think?”

  Emily said: “Oh, for God’s sake, Tom.” Then: “I’m sorry. Poor darling. It was abominably unpleasant. I know how you felt. But it was the situation, not Geoffrey.”

  I said: “And my own over-developed sense of class inferiority.”

  She said: “Tom, don’t be silly,” in a bewildered and slightly irritated way. It was something about me that she had never understood and would never understand. I think she thought it was just a joke, in rather bad taste.

  I remembered something that had bothered me. I said: “Why did David tell Geoffrey about us? At the party you said that he hated Geoffrey. Why did you say that?”

  She looked at me with troubled eyes. There were bracken-coloured flecks in the blue colour round the pupil.

  She said: “Do you really want to know?”

  I nodded and she shifted uneasily in her seat and fiddled with the metal clasp of her handbag. She lit a cigarette nervously and then she told me about it. It was a simple and nasty little story and I wondered why she had bothered to be so elusive about it.

  When they had first moved to the town—about a year before I had known them—they had met David at a party. I gathered that it was the sort of party they would not go to now and that they had only accepted the invitation because they were strangers in the town. David had been in one of his brighter moods and they had found him amusing. He could be very witty when he chose and before you came to the end of his funny stories. For a while they had seen him fairly frequently, at least Emily said that she had seen him. She was vague about how the friendship had developed, perhaps intentionally, perhaps because it had really been unimportant to her. It was impossible to tell. She said that in the end she began to meet him accidentally in the town and that the meetings had been curiously frequent as if he had contrived them. One day she had had lunch with him, and David had asked her to go to bed with him. He had seemed very sure that she would.

  There had been a row, in the restaurant, and Emily had walked out. She had thought that was the end of it. The chance meetings stopped and the circle she and Geoffrey belonged to did not include unsuccessful journalists.

  Then she saw him again. She had been in the bar of the golf club, waiting for Geoffrey, and David had come in. He was moving unnaturally, swaying on his feet, and when he came to sit beside her, she saw that he was drunk. She would have left, but it became apparent that she couldn’t do so without provoking a scene. For a while he didn’t speak to her and then he started to talk in a savage undertone. He said that she was a high and mighty little bitch and did she really think that she was too good for him? There was a lot more and she tried not to listen, watching the door for Geoffrey. He lurched against her, imprisoning her arms by her sides and began to kiss her.

  Geoffrey came in with his golfing partner and pulled David away and knocked him down. David had fallen badly, and when he got up from the floor the blood was running from his mouth. He neither moved nor spoke; he stood like a statue and stared at Geoffrey. She had been frightened by the look on his face. But David did nothing. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his mouth. And then he left the bar.

  She said uneasily: “I know to some people it would be an unimportant incident that had been humiliating and silly. But David wouldn’t think like that, would he?”

  It sounded very slender. I said: “And one way to get his own back on Geoffrey is to run to him with tittle-tattle about his wife? It doesn’t sound very effective, does it? David doesn’t usually go in for ineffectual gestures of that kind. He’s too careful and too proud. It sounds more as if it were you he hated, my sweet. Or me.”

  She said: “I suppose so.” Her eyes avoided mine and she bit at her lip in an embarrassed, unhappy way.

  I said: “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  She looked confused. “I suppose I thought it would upset you.”

  “Did you think I would believe you had been to bed with him?”

  “You wouldn’t have believed it when I told you it wasn’t true. But afterwards, when I wasn’t there, you’d have worried about it.”

  Her voice was cool, matter-of-fact, but her eyes were hurt. I remembered my frequent, small jealousies and was suddenly ashamed, forgetting how well founded they had always seemed to be.

  I said: “Darling, I’m sorry. It’s only because I have no right to mind.”

  She smiled: “Tom, have lunch with me?”

  I said: “I wish I could. But I told Nora I’d be back.”

  She didn’t smile in the way she usually smiled when this sort of thing happened. Instead she looked weary and the air of health and well-being left her face. I was conscious of the tired, blue shadows under her eyes. At last she did smile, though not convincingly, and said:

  “I’m sorry, Tom. But perhaps it would have been a silly thing to do anyway.”

  I said helplessly: “I love you.” And then, as she stood up: “I’ll ring you.”

  It sounded inadequate and foolish: I watched her walk away from me across the bar and out through the swing doors. She moved well with a straight back and long steps. She looked tall and very beautiful.

  When I left the hotel I wondered whether to go back to college and fetch my bicycle or whether to catch a bus back to the house. It suddenly seemed to be of immense importance that I should make up my mind correctly. It was ten minutes’walk back to the college; on the other hand, although the buses stopped at the end of my road they moved very slowly through the heavy traffic in the centre of the town and were always crowded at lunchtime. I stood, immobilised with indecision, outside the swing doors and blinked at the sun which was bright after the dark bar and hurt my eyes.

  When I saw David he was parting from his group of undergraduates and, left alone on the pavement, was looking at me uncertainly. It struck me, then, that I was not in the least angry with David, nor had been at any point since the telephone call. The absurdity of this amused me and I grinned at him widely, and said:

  “Hallo, David.”

  He looked surprised and faintly relieved. He yawned in an exaggerated manner and rubbed his eyelids squeakily over his eyeballs. He was unshaven and the skin of his forehead was scaly.

  I asked him if he had recovered from the party and he muttered something about a thick head. I said that I wasn’t surprised and he bared his long teeth and said that he hadn’t expected to see me looking so fit.

  These civilities accomplished, we stood for a moment or two, drugged by the unexpectedly warm sun. I waited for him to say something about Emily because he must have seen that we were together, but instead he dived into a long, involved and obscene story about one of the town’s leading councillors. It wasn’t at all funny, and I don’t think he expected it to be because he tailed off just before he reached what might have been the point and left the councillor in midair, so to speak, on the road to Brighton with his wife’s Swiss maid.

  We started to walk together up the street towards the bus stop. We were both silent and David kept his eyes on the pavement so that all I
could see of him was his long black hair and broad, hunched shoulders.

  At last he said: “Tom, old boy, can you let me have a fiver?”

  He had asked me for money before, but never so baldly. There had always been some long-winded explanation of why he needed it and over-loud assurances about paying it back. He had usually done so promptly; he wasn’t dishonest about money.

  This time it was different. There were no explanations, no promises. The request was made casually, with an air almost of authority. He was watching me with brown, bright eyes and a small, triumphant grin. For a moment or two I didn’t understand what was happening and when I did I felt no anger, only astonishment.

  I said, without thinking: “David, are you blackmailing me?”

  He flushed darkly and screwed up his eyes at the sun. He said: “Come, come, Tom. What a way to treat your brother-in-law.” He didn’t sound very sure of himself. He began to assume anger. “Is it so unreasonable a thing to ask? You don’t have to lend me money, but you’ve done it before without insulting me. As it happens I’m in a bit of a spot at the moment, but I wouldn’t have asked you if I’d thought you’d take advantage of it. I didn’t think you’d object.”

  “Especially after last night?” I wasn’t in the mood for evasion or politeness.

  He stopped blustering and shrugged his big shoulders in mock acceptance.

  “All right. But blackmail’s a nasty word, Tom, isn’t it? What could I do? Tell Nora about the nice piece you’ve found yourself? That would put the cat among the pigeons beautifully, but, believe me, old boy, I wouldn’t do it. I just appreciate your taste.”

  He smiled with sly pleasure. “But they’re a bad pair to get mixed up with, Tom. Tarred with the same brush. Not the right sort of people for the grammar schoolboy who wants to make good. They can do you a lot of harm.”

  The slyness had gone from his voice; he sounded friendly and anxious, and almost as though he minded about me. I asked him what he meant.