'Oh, why, Howard?' I said. Because I didn't much feel like visiting, it being cold and we'd just come back from the heat. Besides, it was my birthday, and if there was to be any visiting people ought really to be coming visiting me. But Howard said:
'We've been away a couple of months, and it's only right and fair that we should go and visit your relations and so on. They'll want to see us to tell us how well we're looking and to hear all about our holiday.'
'They'll only be jealous,' I said. But that was typical of Howard, really. He could be awfully considerate when he wanted to be. Then it struck me as funny that he didn't say that we ought to go and see his auntie as well, she still being in hospital, but it was rather a long way away and perhaps he'd go and see her on his own sometime. So I put my mink on and out we went and caught a bus and went to see Mum and Pop. They were a bit surprised to see us, but very glad, even though it was Saturday morning and Mum was cleaning up a bit and Pop doing a sort of repair job to the radio. They wanted to hear about everything and were very interested. They were both looking well, too, and they were pleased with the refrigerator that had been bought for them out of Howard's money. They begged us to stay for dinner, saying, at least Mum saying, that it was only a bit of beef stew but we were very welcome. Howard said:
'I'd like nothing in the world better than some of your lovely beef stew. After all the dressed-up tripe we've had on our travels it'll be a real treat.'
'Tripe, did you say?' said Pop, taking his Woodbine out of his mouth. 'You got tripe in them foreign parts, did you?'
'That was only in a manner of speaking,' said Howard. 'Muck I should really have said, because a lot of it was really just a lot of dressed up nonsense, not worth one hundredth part of what we had to pay for it.'
'Oh, Howard,' I said, 'we had some very nice chicken in that place in Chicago, just off State Street, you remember.' That seemed very funny and I almost giggled, thinking of me talking like that, about what we had to eat in Chicago and so on. Fancy us having been all over America like that.
'You didn't get to Philadelphia, then,' said my dear Pop. 'Aunt Edith's cousin settled there and was said to be doing very well in politics. It shows you, doesn't it?' It did show you, in a way, us talking about America as foreign parts and yet it's really a place where Aunt Edith's cousin (Aunt Edith was only an aunt, really, by marriage) went and settled. Not foreign at all. But my opinion is that there's no place that's foreign any more. Mars is foreign, and Saturn and the moon and so on, but no place on earth is really foreign. We proved that, in a way.
Well, we had some of Mum's lovely beef stew for dinner, and Pop had some canned beer in the fridge, and afterwards we had ice cream, a family block split up, and it was all very nice. Then Howard said, 'Now we're going to see how Myrtle and Michael are getting on.' Pop said:
'Oh, Michael won't be in, this being Saturday afternoon. He's become a big United supporter lately and they're playing at home. But Myrtle will very likely be there.'
'A lovely coat,' said Mum, stroking my mink when I put it on. 'That must have set you back a few hundred.' Poor Mum. Then Howard shook hands with Pop and kissed Mum very tenderly and said, 'God bless you both.' He could be very sweet, as I've said. And off we went to visit our Myrtle. There was a young lady called Myrtle who had an affair with a turtle. She always got very mad if you recited that to her. We had to wait a bit for a bus and it was really cold, but you don't find taxis cruising around in Bradcaster. But, waiting for a bus and getting on it, and a good few people being on it, I could show off the mink better and I saw a good number give it the old once-over.
Myrtle and Michael lived in a council flat at the top of a block of flats in Sunnyvale Road, and it was a bit pathetic really the way Myrtle and Michael had big ideas about this flat and wanted it to look like something on the television. There was the one big living-room with a sort of dining-recess, and they'd got a sort of little bar at one end, with two stools, and these had been made by a carpenter. But on the bar all they had was a few bottles of bitter lemon and some Portuguese Burgundy, so it was rather pathetic. Myrtle had had these sort of square shelves fitted to the walls, very up-to-date, and artificial flowers and creepers on them. When she came to the door she was wearing black ballerina tights and a black sweater but she looked a lot better than she'd looked that time when she'd tried to do herself in, I will say that. She was very surprised to see us, but she said, 'Come in, how very nice,' and she switched off the radiogram they had which had been playing all twanging guitars, very teenage. Howard said:
'We thought we'd come and see you, having been away for some time.'
'Yes,' said Myrtle, 'how very nice. Do sit down. Take off your coat, Jan,' she said to me, and her eyes sort of devoured my mink. When I took it off she put it to herself, cuddling her chin into it and swaying from side to side, fancying herself. 'Gorgeous, isn't it?' she said. 'Oh, you are lucky, our Jan.' That was really sincere, not catty or nasty as Myrtle so often was. But then Howard said:
'You can have it some day, Myrtle.'
'Have what?' said Myrtle. 'This coat?' She looked in sort of wonder at Howard.
'I'll leave it you in my will,' I said, grinning a bit, only joking.
'You do that,' said Howard, serious. 'You make that promise here and now that Myrtle shall have it.'
'Oh,' said Myrtle, 'I'll go before she will, never fear.'
'You nearly went that time,' said Howard. 'They say you get a new lease that way, like the newspapers perhaps reporting you dead by mistake. You'll live longer than Janet, I reckon.'
'Let's not have all this morbid talk,' said Myrtle. 'Have a drink instead. Let me see, let me see, I can offer you bitter lemon or a nice glass of red wine.' Poor Myrtle. What we should have done really was to bring them a bottle of gin or something as a present. But that's the trouble with being rich. If you're rich you sort of forget other people's needs and you sort of imagine that everybody's the same as you and can buy a bottle of gin without turning a hair. But Howard said:
'Thanks very much, Myrtle, but we're not really staying. What we wanted to say was that you and Michael should come to our house to tea tomorrow. That's right, isn't it, Janet?' I just looked at him with my mouth open, because he'd not said anything to me previously about having them to tea. Now I'd have to buy cakes and things on the way home. But I had to say:
'That's right, you're to come to tea. Then we can talk about what sort of a holiday we had. We can tell you all about Hollywood and Broadway and the Bahamas.'
'Thanks very much,' said Myrtle, genteel. 'You seem to have done a lot,' she went on, 'don't you, with just this thousand pounds? I mean, I don't see how you did it, what with this mink coat costing a fabulous amount.'
'I put some money on a horse,' said Howard, then shut his lips tight.
'I thought it must be something like that,' said Myrtle. 'You are a sly one, and no mistake.'
'And now we're going,' said Howard, getting up. No sooner had we arrived than we had to leave. Myrtle gave me back my mink, devouring it again with her eyes, and saying, 'Fabulous, oh you are lucky, our kid.'
When we got outside I scolded Howard for giving them this invitation without telling me first and now I had to go and buy ham and tongue and fancy cakes and a big walnut cake or something. 'It's not fair,' I said. 'We're only just back and today's my birthday and I haven't had time nor inclination to check over the larder and properly clean up and that sort of thing.' Howard just smiled and said, 'Never mind, never mind, sweetie.' Sometimes he made me really mad. And when I said we'd better go to Hastings Road to do a bit of shopping if we were going to have a tea-party tomorrow, Howard said:
'Get nothing special. They'll just have to have what's in the house.' And I said, really mad at him:
'Why do you do these things? Why? Why? Why?'
'Oh,' said Howard, 'Myrtle's one of the family, isn't she? She lived with us that time like one of the family, coming and going as she wanted to. She never knocks at the door, does she?
She always barges straight in.'
'Oh, you're impossible,' I said. 'I don't know why I married you sometimes.'
'Never mind, sweetie,' he said, hugging my arm under his. 'I'll make everything right, just you wait and see.'
'And where's this special present you promised me?' I said. 'That's another thing. You seem to be making this a queer sort of birthday for me altogether.'
'Any minute now, love,' said Howard, and we were just coming into Cranmer Road. 'Oh,' he said, 'I forgot to post this letter.' And he took out this envelope and then dumped fifty-odd thousand quid into the post-box at the corner, just like that. There were times when I could have hit him. Hard.
Chapter 24
We got back home and built the fire up, because it was perishing out, mink or no mink. Then Howard said, 'Sit down.' I was only too ready to sit down, almost on the fire I was so cold. He sat down himself at the other side of the fire and said, 'Right. Do you trust me in everything?'
'If you mean sending off that cheque -' I said.
'No, no, in everything,' said Howard. 'Do you?' He looked sort of hangdog at me, almost begging for affection, and I remembered Howard in the U.S.A. being very efficient with the airports and dollars and cents and so on, and I had to say, 'Of course I do.' And I did, I supposed.
'Good,' said Howard, and it was as though I'd given the right answer in a quiz or something. 'And it's really us together, the two of us against the world, the pair of us going through hell itself together? Is it that?'
'Yes, yes, of course,' I said, and I went over and sat on his knee. Howard sort of stroked me, looking at his wrist-watch. 'I love you,' I said. 'You've really been the only man in my life.' And I kissed his ear.
'You'd rather die with me than live with anybody else?' said Howard.
'Oh, yes,' I said, and then I said, 'But that's only supposing. I don't like all this talk about dying. We're going to live together. We're still young. We've a long way to go.'
'No,' said Howard, very quietly and in a sort of disgusted voice. 'We've come to the end of the line. At least I have. I don't want any more of it. This afternoon I pass out of time. And if we're to be together it follows that you pass out with me. I fixed this day when I won that money. Your birthday, to make it easy to remember. You're going to get your birthday present very soon now. The finest present anyone could have.' I felt myself growing very cold and I tried to get off Howard's knee so that I could have a better look at him, but I hardly seemed able to move. I said:
'Howard, are you feeling all right? You sure you're not sickening for flu or something?' Because this sort of depression sometimes comes with flu, though usually towards the end of it. My voice seemed to be very small when I said what I said. Howard said:
'I feel all right. Physically I'm quite fit. Look at my tongue, see.' He put his tongue out at me and it was as clean as a dog's tongue. 'And I'm mentally all right, too. My brain's very clear. I've had all this worked out for some time now. In about an hour from now we'll either be in a better world or in no world, which amounts to the same thing.'
'Oh, Howard,' I said, 'you are morbid.' Because I still couldn't take in what he was saying. But I was off his knee now and was standing on the hearth-rug looking down at him, very worried by all this.
'It's a rotten world, love,' he said. 'We gave it a chance. We fed money into it like it was a big machine and it paid out nothing. And it's collapsing all around us, decaying with rottenness. It won't last much longer if it goes on as it is going on. It'll be finished soon.'
'All right,' I said. 'It's a rotten world, you say.' And I sort of put my arms akimbo. 'I've said it before and I'll say it again, that it's not the world but the people that's in it. And you can't change it, you can't do anything about it. So you put up with it, that's what you do. And I put up with it.' All this time I was talking he sat looking up at me, hangdog, with his hands sort of limp. 'And besides,' I said, 'it's not too bad of a world when you come to look at it. It's a better world than when those men with beards were alive.'
'What men?' he said.
'Those men in the quiz, those old writers and suchlike that you won the big money on. It's better than it was then. It's more healthy, for one thing. You don't get these very narrow streets full of smells and disease that you got then. And they didn't take baths in those days. They didn't take a bath from one year's end to the next. Like Queen Elizabeth, I read about her in a woman's magazine, she hardly ever took a bath. What was the smell like, do you think, with her not taking a bath for over a year? A dirty old bitch, that's what she was.'
'You be careful what you're saying,' said Howard, and you could see he was a bit shocked. 'That's high treason, that sort of remark.'
'She's dead,' I said. 'Queen Elizabeth's dead. The First, that is. It's the Second we have now, and there's all the difference in the world between them. Like chalk and cheese, I'd say. This one is sweet and pretty and a good mother and has a lovely smile, and I shouldn't wonder if she has four baths a day, so there.' I found myself really blazing.
'Never mind,' said Howard, shaking his head in a slow weary sort of a way. 'You're off the point, really. The point is that somebody's got to protest against the world as it is, and we're the people who're going to do it.'
'Oh, nonsense,' I said. 'Leave all that protesting to the people who're paid to do it, M.P.'s and suchlike. People who write in the papers and suchlike. Although,' I said, 'there's nothing to stop you writing to the papers if you want to, protesting about things. But what do you want to protest about?'
'Everything,' said Howard, 'everything. The cheapness and the vulgarity and silliness and the brutishness and nastiness of everything and everybody. The Daily Window sums it all up, really. We went on taking it and I was made sick reading it, but it became part of our life and it's the Daily Window that's getting this money to spend on good causes, you see. It was all there in the Daily Window, people from places like Bermondsey and Stoke-on-Trent pretending to be Americans and writing as if they were Americans. I've nothing against Americans, and we've seen them at first-hand for ourselves, but I don't want to see English people turned into second-hand Americans. But it's not just that. It's this spitting in the eye of everything we used to stand for. There was this writer, you see, D. H. Lawrence, and he said that there was this terrible Old England, like an old lion that kids keep poking sticks at through the bars and the lion's roaring away and is all scabby and old.'
'He wrote about Lady Chatterley, that man,' I said, 'if it's the same one you're referring to. A book full of Sex and actually describing these two people doing it. It came out last year in the Penguins.'
'You're off the point,' yelled Howard, shutting me up. 'The point is about the English lion scabby and jeered at and dying because people throw stones at it. We're not going to see it any longer, you and I. You and I are getting out of it while the going's good.'
It was a bit too much like a TV play or film for me to take in still what Howard was driving at. And very slowly it was starting to dawn on me that Howard had perhaps gone a bit crackers, the result of his having this photographic brain so long, and now it was catching up with him, but I still couldn't take it in as though it was real, it was still something on the TV as far as I was concerned. 'All right,' I said, 'we'll go away again and stay out of England a long time if that'll make you feel any better, but like an idiot you've got rid of all our money and we couldn't very well take up jobs abroad, could we, us not knowing foreign languages?'
Howard shook me a bit then. 'You still don't understand,' he said. 'We've got to be sort of witnesses, sort of martyrs. We've got to show the Daily Window and the whole world that we're getting out of the world as a sort of protest. Our deaths will sort of show how two decent ordinary people who'd been given every chance that money can give but no other chance, no other chance at all, how two such people felt about the horrible stinking world. Death, girl, death,' he shouted, and the tip of his tongue was between his teeth and I saw that one of the front ones
was going, 'that's what I'm talking about, death, lovely death. We're going to die, girl.'
'No,' I said, 'no,' frightened properly now, trying to get away but he gripped my shoulders very tight, 'no, no.'
'Yes,' said Howard, sort of quiet but wild and savage at the same time, 'we're going to die, girl, and within the next hour, too. So you'd better reconcile yourself to that, because we don't want any final nastiness, do we? We want love and tranquillity, which we've always had together. We want calm and peace at the end as at the beginning and in the middle, too.'
'No,' I cried, still trying to get away. 'I don't want to die. Not yet I don't, not for a long time yet. Let me go, let me go, let me go.'
'You said out of your own mouth,' said Howard, 'that the two of us being together was the important thing, and you can't deny that you said it. Well, it's only right that we're together in death as we were in life, isn't it? Right, then we go together and we'd better not be too long about it, either. So we'd better get undressed here by the fire to be warm, and put on our night things and then we'll be comfortable to go to bed and die.'
I managed to pull myself away enough to bang on the wall, for I was scared out of my wits now, and I banged and banged and banged but nobody was interested, and I yelled, 'Help.' Then I remembered it was Saturday and the people next door, the Hodgkinsons, were always out on Saturday afternoon, he to the football and she and the kids to the pictures, so it was no use, and I supposed it would be much the same if I even got as far as the back-door and opened it and yelled blue murder, everybody being out at something or other.
'It's no good struggling or yelling,' said Howard in a very sad disappointed sort of way. 'You've got to go with me, the two of us have got to go together, but I did hope that you'd see my point right away and come quietly, so to speak, without any fuss or bother. So, if you love me as you say you do, please quieten down and remember I'm your husband and head of the house and what I say goes. See?'