“Well I don’t know,” said Molly. “Who would ever have thought? And you and I are different as chalk and cheese.”
“Perhaps not so different,” said Anna, drily; but Molly laughed in disbelief.
She was a tallish woman, and big-boned, but she appeared slight, and even boyish. This was because of how she did her hair, which was a rough, streaky gold, cut like a boy’s; and because of her clothes, for which she had a great natural talent. She took pleasure in the various guises she could use: for instance, being a hoyden in lean trousers and sweaters, and then a siren, her large green eyes made-up, her cheek-bones prominent, wearing a dress which made the most of her full breasts.
This was one of the private games she played with life, which Anna envied her; yet in moments of self-rebuke she would tell Anna she was ashamed of herself, she so much enjoyed the different roles: “It’s as if I were really different—don’t you see? I even feel a different person. And there’s something spiteful in it—that man, you know, I told you about him last week—he saw me the first time in my old slacks and my sloppy old jersey, and then I rolled into the restaurant, nothing less than a femme fatale, and he didn’t know how to have me, he couldn’t say a word all evening, and I enjoyed it. Well, Anna?”
“But you do enjoy it,” Anna would say, laughing.
But Anna was small, thin, dark, brittle, with large black always-on-guard eyes, and a fluffy haircut. She was, on the whole, satisfied with herself, but she was always the same. She envied Molly’s capacity to project her own changes of mood. Anna wore neat, delicate clothes, which tended to be either prim, or perhaps a little odd; and relied upon her delicate white hands, and her small, pointed white face to make an impression. But she was shy, unable to assert herself, and, she was convinced, easily overlooked.
When the two women went out together, Anna deliberately effaced herself and played to the dramatic Molly. When they were alone, she tended to take the lead. But this had by no means been true at the beginning of their friendship. Molly, abrupt, straightforward, tactless, had frankly domineered Anna. Slowly, and the offices of Mother Sugar had had a good deal to do with it, Anna learned to stand up for herself. Even now there were moments when she should challenge Molly when she did not. She admitted to herself she was a coward; she would always give in rather than have fights or scenes. A quarrel would lay Anna low for days, whereas Molly thrived on them. She would burst into exuberant tears, say unforgivable things, and have forgotten all about it half a day later. Meanwhile Anna would be limply recovering in her flat.
That they were both “insecure” and “unrooted,” words which dated from the era of Mother Sugar, they both freely acknowledged. But Anna had recently been learning to use these words in a different way, not as something to be apologised for, but as flags or banners for an attitude that amounted to a different philosophy. She had enjoyed fantasies of saying to Molly: We’ve had the wrong attitude to the whole thing, and it’s Mother Sugar’s fault—what is this security and balance that’s supposed to be so good? What’s wrong with living emotionally from hand-to-mouth in a world that’s changing as fast as it is?
But now, sitting with Molly talking, as they had so many hundreds of times before, Anna was saying to herself: Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel.
The room they sat in was on the first floor, overlooking a narrow side street, whose windows had flower boxes and painted shutters, and whose pavements were decorated with three basking cats, a pekinese and the milk-cart, late because it was Sunday. The milkman had white shirt-sleeves, rolled up; and his son, a boy of sixteen, was sliding the gleaming white bottles from a wire basket on to the doorsteps. When he reached under their window, the man looked up and nodded. Molly said: “Yesterday he came in for coffee. Full of triumph, he was. His son’s got a scholarship and Mr Gates wanted me to know it. I said to him, getting in before he could, ‘My son’s had all these advantages, and all that education, and look at him, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. And yours hasn’t had a penny spent on him and he’s got a scholarship.’ ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘that’s the way of it.’ Then I thought, well I’m damned if I’ll sit here, taking it, so I said: ‘Mr Gates, your son’s up into the middle-class now, with us lot, and you won’t be speaking the same language. You know that, don’t you?’ ‘It’s the way of the world,’ he says. I said, ‘It’s not the way of the world at all, it’s the way of this damned class-ridden country.’ He’s one of those bloody working class tories, Mr Gates is, and he said: ‘It’s the way of the world, Miss Jacobs, you say your son doesn’t see his way forward? That’s a sad thing.’ And off he went on his milk-round, and I went upstairs and there was Tommy sitting on his bed, just sitting. He’s probably sitting there now, if he’s in. The Gates boy, he’s all of a piece, he’s going out for what he wants. But Tommy—since I came back three days ago, that’s all he’s done, sat on his bed and thought.”
“Oh Molly, don’t worry so much. He’ll turn out all right.” They were leaning over the sill, watching Mr Gates and his son. A short, brisk, tough little man, and his son was tall, tough, and good-looking. The women watched how the boy, returning with an empty basket, swung out a filled one from the back of the milk-cart, receiving instructions from his father with a smile and a nod. There was perfect understanding there; and the two women, both of them bringing up children without men, exchanged a grimacing envious smile.
“The point is,” said Anna, “neither of us were prepared to get married simply to give our children fathers. So now we must take the consequences. If there are any. Why should there be?”
“It’s all very well for you,” said Molly, sour. “You never worry about anything, you just let things slide.”
Anna braced herself—almost did not reply, and then with an effort said: “I don’t agree, we try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule? That’s what it amounts to.”
“There you are,” said Molly, antagonistic; “but I’m not a theoretical type. You always do that—faced with something you start making up theories. I’m simply worried about Tommy.”
Now Anna could not reply: her friend’s tone was too strong. She returned to her survey of the street. Mr Gates and his boy were turning the corner out of sight, pulling the red milk-cart behind them. At the opposite end of the street was a new interest: a man pushing a handcart. “Fresh country strawberries,” he was shouting. “Picked fresh this morning, morning-picked country strawberries…”
Molly glanced at Anna, who nodded, grinning like a small girl. (She was disagreeably conscious that the little-girl smile was designed to soften Molly’s criticism of her.) “I’ll get some for Richard too,” said Molly, and ran out of the room, picking up her handbag from a chair.
Anna continued to lean over the sill, in a warm space of sunlight, watching Molly, who was already in energetic conversation with the strawberry seller. Molly was laughing and gesticulating, and the man shook his head and disagreed, while he poured the heavy red fruit on to his scales.
“Well you’ve no overhead costs,” Anna heard, “so why should we pay just what we would in the shops?”
“They don’t sell morning-fresh strawberries in the shops, miss, not like these.”
“Oh go on,” said Molly, as she disappeared with her white bowl of red fruit. “Sharks, that’s what you are!”
The strawberry man, young, yellow, lean and deprived, lifted a snarling face to the window where Molly had already inserted herself. Seeing the two women together he said, as he fumbled with his glittering scales, “Overhead costs, what do you know about it?”
“Then come up and have some coffee and tell us,” said Molly, her face vivid with challenge.
At which he lowered his face and said to the street floor: “Some people ha
ve to work, if others haven’t.”
“Oh go on,” said Molly, “don’t be such a sourpuss. Come up and eat some of your strawberries. On me.”
He didn’t know how to take her. He stood, frowning, his young face uncertain under an over-long slope of greasy fairish hair. “I’m not that sort, if you are,” he remarked, at last, off-stage, as it were.
“So much the worse for you,” said Molly, leaving the window, laughing at Anna in a way which refused to be guilty.
But Anna leaned out, confirmed her view of what had happened by a look at the man’s dogged, resentful shoulders, and said in a low voice: “You hurt his feelings.”
“Oh hell,” said Molly, shrugging. “It’s coming back to England again—everybody so shut up, taking offence, I feel like breaking out and shouting and screaming whenever I set foot on this frozen soil. I feel locked up the moment I breathe our sacred air.”
“All the same,” said Anna, “he thinks you were laughing at him.”
Another customer had slopped out of the opposite house; a woman in Sunday comfort, slacks, loose shirt, and a yellow scarf around her head. The strawberry man served her, non-committal. Before he lifted the handles to propel the cart onwards, he looked up again at the window, and seeing only Anna, her small sharp chin buried in her forearm, her black eyes fixed on him, smiling, he said with grudging good-humour: “Overhead costs, she says…” and snorted lightly with disgust. He had forgiven them.
He moved off up the street behind the mounds of softly red, sun-glistening fruit, shouting: “Morning-fresh strawberries, picked this morning!” Then his voice was absorbed into the din of traffic from the big street a couple of hundred yards down.
Anna turned and found Molly setting bowls of the fruit, loaded with cream, on the sill. “I’ve decided not to waste any on Richard,” said Molly, “he never enjoys anything anyway. More beer?”
“With strawberries, wine, obviously,” said Anna greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft sliding resistance, and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallised beside each glass on the white paint in quivering lozenges of crimson and yellow light, and the two women sat in the sunlight, sighing with pleasure and stretching their legs in the thin warmth, looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine.
But now the door-bell rang, and both instinctively gathered themselves into more tidy postures. Molly leaned out of the window again, shouted: “Mind your head!” and threw down the door-key, wrapped in an old scarf.
They watched Richard lean down to pick up the key, without even a glance upwards, though he must know that at least Molly was there. “He hates me doing that,” she said. “Isn’t it odd? After all these years? And his way of showing is simply to pretend it didn’t happen.”
Richard came into the room. He looked younger than his middle age, being well-tanned after an early summer holiday in Italy. He wore a tight yellow sports shirt, and new light trousers: every Sunday of his year, summer or winter, Richard Portmain wore clothes that claimed him for the open air. He was a member of various suitable golf and tennis clubs, but never played unless for business reasons. He had had a cottage in the country for years; but sent his family to it alone, unless it was advisable to entertain business friends for a week-end. He was by every instinct urban. He spent his week-ends dropping from one club, one pub, one bar, to the next. He was a shortish, dark, compact man, almost fleshy. His round face, attractive when he smiled, was obstinate to the point of sullenness when he was not smiling. His whole solid person—head poked out forward, eyes unblinking, had this look of dogged determination. He now impatiently handed Molly the key, that was loosely bundled inside her scarlet scarf. She took it and began trickling the soft material through her solid white fingers, remarking: “Just off for a healthy day in the country, Richard?”
Having braced himself for just such a jibe, he now stiffly smiled, and peered into the dazzle of sunlight around the white window. When he distinguished Anna, he involuntarily frowned, nodded stiffly, and sat down hastily across the room from both of them, saying: “I didn’t know you had a visitor, Molly.”
“Anna isn’t a visitor,” said Molly.
She deliberately waited until Richard had had the full benefit of the sight of them, indolently displayed in the sunshine, heads turned towards him in benevolent enquiry, and offered: “Wine, Richard? Beer? Coffee? Or a nice cup of tea perhaps?”
“If you’ve got a Scotch, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Beside you,” said Molly.
But having made what he clearly felt to be a masculine point, he didn’t move. “I came to discuss Tommy.” He glanced at Anna, who was licking up the last of her strawberries.
“But you’ve already discussed all this with Anna, so I hear, so now we can all three discuss it.”
“So Anna’s told you…”
“Nothing,” said Molly. “This is the first time we’ve had a chance to see each other.”
“So I’m interrupting your first heart to heart,” said Richard, with a genuine effort towards jovial tolerance. He sounded pompous, however, and both women looked amusedly uncomfortable, in response to it.
Richard abruptly got up.
“Going already?” enquired Molly.
“I’m going to call Tommy.” He had already filled his lungs to let out the peremptory yell they both expected, when Molly interrupted with: “Richard, don’t shout at him. He’s not a little boy any longer. Besides I don’t think he’s in.”
“Of course he’s in.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s looking out of the window upstairs. I’m surprised you don’t even know whether your son is in or not.”
“Why? I don’t keep a tab on him.”
“That’s all very well, but where has that got you?”
The two now faced each other, serious with open hostility. Replying to his: Where has that got you? Molly said: “I’m not going to argue about how he should have been brought up. Let’s wait until your three have grown up before we score points.”
“I haven’t come to discuss my three.”
“Why not? We’ve discussed them hundreds of times. And I suppose you have with Anna too.”
There was now a pause while both controlled their anger, surprised and alarmed it was already so strong. The history of these two was as follows: They had met in 1935. Molly was deeply involved with the cause of Republican Spain. Richard was also. (But, as Molly would remark, on those occasions when he spoke of this as a regrettable lapse into political exoticism on his part: Who wasn’t in those days?) The Portmains, a rich family, precipitously assuming this to be a proof of permanent communist leanings, had cut off his allowance. (As Molly put it: My dear, cut him off without a penny! Naturally Richard was delighted. They had never taken him seriously before. He instantly took out a party card on the strength of it.) Richard who had a talent for nothing but making money, as yet undiscovered, was kept by Molly for two years, while he prepared himself to be a writer. (Molly; but of course only years later: Can you imagine anything more banal? But of course Richard has to be commonplace in everything. Everyone was going to be a great writer, but everyone! Do you know the really deadly skeleton in the communist closet—the really awful truth? It’s that every one of the old party war horses—you know, people you’d imagine had never had a thought of anything but the party for years, everyone has that old manuscript or wad of poems tucked away. Everyone was going to be the Gorki or the Mayakovski of our time. Isn’t it terrifying? Isn’t it pathetic? Every one of them, failed artists. I’m sure it’s significant of something, if only one knew what.) Molly was still keeping Richard for months after she left him, out of a kind of contempt. His revulsion against left-wing politics, which was sudden, coincided with his decision that Molly was immoral, sloppy and bohemian. Luckily for her, however, he had already contract
ed a liaison with some girl which, though short, was public enough to prevent him from divorcing her and gaining custody of Tommy, which he was threatening to do. He was then readmitted into the bosom of the Portmain family, and accepted what Molly referred to, with amiable contempt, as “a job in the city.” She had no idea, even now, just how powerful a man Richard had become by that act of deciding to inherit a position. Richard then married Marion, a very young, warm, pleasant, quiet girl, daughter of a moderately distinguished family. They had three sons.
Meanwhile Molly, talented in so many directions, danced a little—but she really did not have the build for a ballerina; did a song and dance act in a revue—decided it was too frivolous; took drawing lessons, gave them up when the war started when she worked as a journalist; gave up journalism to work in one of the cultural outworks of the communist party; left for the same reason everyone of her type did—she could not stand the deadly boredom of it; became a minor actress, and had reconciled herself, after much unhappiness, to the fact that she was essentially a dilettante. Her source of self-respect was that she had not—as she put it—given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.
And her secret source of uneasiness was Tommy, over whom she had fought a years-long battle with Richard. He was particularly disapproving because she had gone away for a year, leaving the boy in her house, to care for himself.
He now said, resentful: “I’ve seen a good deal of Tommy during the last year, when you left him alone…”
She interrupted with: “I keep explaining, or trying to—I thought it all out and decided it would be good for him to be left. Why do you always talk as if he were a child? He was over nineteen, and I left him in a comfortable house, with money, and everything organised.”
“Why don’t you admit you had a whale of a good time junketting all over Europe, without Tommy to tie you?”