Round about then Martha came back from visiting Nanny Butts who said that while there was nothing she would like better than to take on the three dear little babies, she felt she was really getting too old, being well over seventy now: might she suggest her niece Pauline, a very good girl. (Pauline moved into the flat in North London and became nurse to the three infants and the girl-friend of Gwen’s boy-friend, Gwen and he having separated.) Lynda was in a large room painted a shiny mustard colour that made Martha queasy, and was watching television with half a hundred patients and nurses. She was curt and listless with Martha. Martha asked if she could see her alone: Lynda came, with bad grace, to sit on her bed, with the white-sheeting curtains drawn-privacy. Lynda towards Martha was as if two totally different attitudes had been stirred together to that point where they nearly coalesced, like the ‘marble pudding’ of childhood. She alternatively snubbed her, shrank, blocked herself off, and immediately afterwards, or at the same time, seemed to yearn and beg for help and for forgiveness.
The doctor had told Martha that Lynda was hallucinating badly.
Martha reminded Lynda of their joint experiences. The Lynda who remembered them was either not there, or was frightened to admit she was there.
Lynda had had, for the space of several days, a series of visions or pictures (on the inner television set) and the dreams like stills from the visions. These showed landscapes that were all known to Lynda, like the country around Nanny Butts’s cottage, and around Margaret’s house, and from her childhood. They looked as if a kind of frozen dew had covered everything so that at first glance she had cried out that ‘England has been poisoned, it looked like a poisoned mouse lying dead in a corner’. For everything had appeared as a faintly phosphorescent or begemmed stillness. They had given her larger doses, had taken her off to a small room for a couple of days of deep sleep. But when the sleep had worn off, she began dreaming again. England was poisoned, she cried; some enemy was injecting England with a deathly glittering dew.
Young Dr Bentin had been very kind; had explained that what she was doing was to project her own loathing of herself, her self-hatred, outwards on to her country. Lynda had been very ready to accept this, God knew she loathed herself: she knew she was useless, debased, ñt for nothing.
They lessened the drugs; she had another few days of the hallucinations; this time, she kept quiet, remembering the past.
But, she had decided she wanted to stay in hospital. She had met Sandra, who (Lynda knew this very well) was dependent on Lynda, while giving the appearance of looking after her; Sandra, without Lynda, could expect nothing but a room alone somewhere: she had no money, children who had grown up and did not like her. It was a most common story.
Lynda wished to stay in the hospital, with Sandra as a friend and companion. But a new dispensation had set in: no one was encouraged to stay in hospitals if they could go out. Lynda and Sandra begged and asked and tricked, played every game they knew, to stay in, but without taking drugs. But no, Dr Bentin gave them a time limit, four weeks, to leave: he would see that the supplies of drugs were adequate. It was an absolute clash.
Lynda did not want to come back to Radlett Street. She felt as if she were beginning again on an old cycle. Over fifteen years ago she had ‘come home’ with Dorothy and prescription for drugs-different drugs, it was true. She did not believe she would ever get herself free of these that she was taking now. Besides, she did not want to ‘see things’ again. Hearing them was bad enough. Therefore, for the whole of an afternoon with Martha, she listened, while hanging her head, turning herself away, sighing in dramatic exasperation, and Martha pointed out that ‘seeing things’ did not have to be frightening … had Lynda entirely forgotten? No, Lynda had not; for she would, while sulking or grinding her teeth at Martha, suddenly reach out a dirty hand and stroke Martha’s timidly, as if to say: Take no notice, here I am; as a cat puts out a paw saying: Have you forgotten me?
And when Martha said: ‘You’ve simply gone under for a bit, that’s all, ’ she nodded quickly up and down, while her eyes filled with tears. But a moment later she shot Martha a melodramatic sideways hating look.
Lynda had come home, with Sandra, to the basement, less than six months after she had left it to learn independence.
She was now packing to move out again.
When asked how she was, she said: ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you!’ with a small trembling toss of the head. But to Martha it seemed as if Lynda had at last been defeated. She did not talk now at all of doing without the drugs: she did not say: ‘I know what I know’ and ‘You have to keep silent’ - or make any of her small gestures of self-respect. She went once a week, as Sandra did, to see Dr Bentin or an associate, and just as she and Dorothy had done, the two made a tight defensive alliance which no one could penetrate. The taking of medicines, sedatives, pep-pills and sleeping pills regulated their days and nights.
Across the landing in Mark’s bedroom, Rita was packing for him: they were off to North Africa in a few days. Martha had been listening (as she added pennies to pennies, shillings to shillings, pounds to pounds and-as this was money to do with the new Coldridge-Esse Perkins Scheme-hundreds of pounds to hundreds of pounds) while Rita sang, over and over again in a cradle-rocking croon: ‘Pack your bags and get, Ferreira, pack your bags and go.‘ But there had been silence for some time; from which Martha concluded they were making love. As Rita said, often enough: ‘Can you blame him! I mean, when you think his wife was never a true wife to him!’
Before Rita arrived Martha had dreamed-she couldn’t make head or tail of it, though it was extremely vivid-that she went into Mark’s bedroom and found Maisie naked, sitting up in bed by Mark, who was asleep. This was the Maisie of before the war, a fresh plump girl with tendrils of gold hair on a lush neck. ‘Martha, ’ said this young corn goddess, ‘your trouble is, you’ve never given Mark what he wanted.’ ‘I know that, Maisie, ’ dream-Martha had meekly replied. ‘But don’t you see, I had to hold things together-don’t you see that? ’ ‘Well, it’s lucky you’ve got me, isn’t it? ’ had said Maisie, lying on frilled pink pillows (in the most appalling taste) and extending a majestic white arm to curve around Mark. ‘Yes, thank you very much, ’ had said dream-Martha. And woke, full of the wild painful grieving that only a dream can contain, full of memories of Thomas.
At the airport, what had walked through the barriers at Customs was a tall strong dark girl with short black hair in curls. The straight dark eyes, the strong black brows, of the Maynards, gave Rita an arresting uncomfortable beauty. She was altogether too decisive in style for the taste of the ‘sixties, which was for dollies, kittens, babies, schoolgirls, kewpies, space girls, little things of one sort and another. So Paul had told her the very first evening. ‘You’d better let me take you in hand, ’ he said; to which she had replied: ‘Why? ’
And indeed, why? And what was upsetting Mrs. Maynard? If Rita’s clothes were wrong for London, then it was because they were painfully conventional, and too long, and had no fantasy. Her voice was heavily accented, but then it was bound to be. She wasn’t at all elegant in any way-but when had the Maynards ever been that? In short, Martha found herself again brooding (exactly as she had when she was a girl) about the private standards the Maynards must set themselves and which no one else could be expected to share, and which had nothing at all to do with beauty, or kindness, or charm, or intelligence, and which, for the Maynards, were the only excellence that mattered. It was not conceivably possible that the Maynards were hoping to turn Rita into a lady?
Were they criticizing her for not being one? It was only when Martha actually saw Rita that she realized how strong must be that obsession which she privately referred to as ‘The Blood of the Maynards’. For getting on for twenty-five years, what dreams had been dreamed, what hopes encouraged, what lacks and needs felt, to make of Rita someone who needed urgent improvement?
She solved Martha’s problem about how to greet a person she had not seen since bab
yhood, by putting down her suitcase and flinging her arms around Martha’s neck and kissing her. Almost she might have murmured: ‘At last, I’ve come home!’ On the drive back to the house she talked-giving news after a long separation. She walked into the house with a look of such delighted fulfilment that it was impossible to tell her so soon it was probably going to be pulled down. And indeed, when she did hear this news, it was clear that it would be Rita who would suffer most about its death.
Mark was there for her first meal at the house, but he was self-absorbed in misery at that time, for he had just heard that Lynda planned to leave him. He hardly spoke, and it did not seem that Rita had taken much account of him.
Paul came in that evening, as handsome and as poised as usual, and after she had said: ‘Why? ’ the following dialogue took place.
‘Because you won’t do as you are.’
‘Do for what? ’
‘You could be absolutely super, I mean it!’
She looked at him. On to her face slowly came a look of purest, frankest, most confiding, sexual confidence, like a page or two from a True Love Confessions Magazine. He blushed, became pettish, and said spitefully: ‘You’re quite sexy I suppose.’
‘Thank you, ’ said Rita, laughing heartily; for as she told Martha afterwards, she had not met anyone like him before.
‘Well if you won’t change your hair and get some clothes I’m not going to take you out, ’ said Paul.
Delicacy prevented her from saying that if he didn’t, experience told her there would always be those who would.
He misunderstood her smiling silence, and pressed on: ‘I’ll take you to see Madeleine tomorrow: she’ll cut your hair.’
Madeleine was London’s second-most-fashionable hairdresser, and a personal chum.
He now observed that she was embarrassed: but for him. It was not that he had not encountered before this kindly embarrassment in a girl-he often did. But in Rita it was stunningly open, like a reproach from Demeter, or a young Boadicea.
He stood before her, as it were crying out: But I’m the epitome of what every sensible girl could want!
And she stood smiling her: You’re very handsome but…
The two continued thus all evening, but in the end, rather kindly, she did agree to be taken shopping by him-no, not tomorrow because she was busy, ‘but soon, I promise’.
Francis and Jill came to meet her; and invited her to visit them. She went. She had become part of the family. Mark said: ‘She’s welcome to it, but it’s as if she were coming home.’
Yes, it was; and in her manner, all the time, whatever she said or did, or whether she chatted away to Martha or to Mark or patronized Paul, there was a secret delighted confidence, as if she wore a magic talisman which she knew could not fail her.
Martha thought at first that her manner, the warm quick ease of it, was simply Maisie’s being given-so to speak-its head, room to grow in sympathetic surroundings. For being brought up in that awful little mining town could have been no joke. And there was no doubt that her nature was all Maisie’s, if her looks were all Maynard.
But Martha was wrong. She did not understand how wrong for some time, though she even tried something she always avoided (it was like eavesdropping or reading someone’s letters!). She tried to overhear what Rita was thinking. It was difficult: she was simply not on Rita’s wavelength. And when she did manage to catch some phrases they sounded like dialogue from an old-fashioned romantic novel, all to do with ‘being found’, ‘coming into her own’, ‘her secret destiny’, and so on.
At last it all came out, very late one night over cocoa and biscuits and cigarettes, in the kitchen.
Rita had been brought up by her granny until she was ten, in the town that had begun as a mining camp and which had kept the flavour of one when it became one of the Colony’s ‘towns’ - five thousand white inhabitants every one of whom she knew by sight or by name, and a couple of thousand black inhabitants, whom she never saw at all. Everything revolved around the mine and the only entertainments were bars and the cinema. Here Rita went to school and saw her mother only occasionally. Then Maisie had made an extended visit. Presumably the good times were at last wearing thin, or she had discovered she loved her daughter. But she had stayed, and then married an engineer from the mine, and all four, granny, Rita, Maisie and the new husband, had lived in the tiny tin-roofed shanty house where the view was the mining machinery across a sandy road, and a small garden full of zinnias and canna lilies. Then the granny had died; what this had meant to Rita was clear enough from her face as she told it. The marriage was neither successful nor particularly bad. Maisie drank a lot but was good-natured if slatternly. The engineer was given to drunken bouts, but he was kind to Rita, while nagging at Maisie for being fat and so lazy. There was a large picture of Maisie on Rita’s dressing-table: she had had an eye infection, had neglected it, and now wore a pink eye-shade permanently over one eye. Also, she had had a slight stroke, and her mouth dragged slightly, giving her a peevish sour look. But Rita had not spent much time after she was eleven in the mining town; for one day the Maynards appeared and had offered to pay to send Rita to boarding-school with the nuns in the city. Maisie had made no objection. Rita then had been for eight years at the convent, had spent her holidays with her mother, and even one holiday with the Maynards. But she couldn’t stand Mrs. Maynard she said: once was enough.
She was popular and social, did well enough at school not to attract attention, read enormous quantities of love magazines, was taken out often by Mr Maynard to tea or to the pictures-and about the age of fifteen had understood the obvious fact that Mr Maynard must be her father. She had always felt (she told Martha) that her real father was not the airman McGrew. Maisie, when drunk, sighed and wept and talked of the men she remembered and for a time it sounded to Rita as if ‘a red communist from Greece’ had been her father ‘In vino Veritas-as they say, ’ said Rita; for her mother had once sworn that cross her heart and tell no lies, it wasn’t Andrew.
And when Rita had made the step into a discovery, for she had only to look into the mirror to see the truth, and had said to Maisie: ‘I’m surprised Mrs. Maynard doesn’t mind!’-all Maisie had said was: ‘Blood is thicker than water!’
And it had been left at that.
For years then, Rita had been paid for, been taken out, been given treats and clothes by Mr Maynard, her father-so she had felt it. And she would not again visit the house, out of delicacy, for she did not wish to wound Mrs. Maynard. She was fond of Mr Maynard-dear old sweet man, she said he was. It seemed she imagined the uncontrollable passion of an elderly man saying good-bye to his youth, and herself its lucky fruit. Lucky it had been: her inheritance was the Maynards, and what they stood for, or had stood for. One day a letter, or a message, or a lawyer’s announcement would arrive, a door would open, a road would become clear-and there she would be. And here she was, with her mother’s old friend Martha, and this house was her future.
She did mention Binkie once: he was a bit silly, she thought. Not at all the kind of son for the Maynards. He did not get on with them. It must be terribly hard for them. Of course, men did drink, she knew that: being brought up in a mining town had taught her everything. But there was drinking and drinking. And his wife-did you ever meet her, Martha? Well, she’s one of those civil service types, you know, and really, those two boys of hers-she, Rita, had been out with one of them once, and that was enough. But she didn’t like speaking ill of people.
So she went on. Maisie’s daughter would not like to say straight out: ‘I’m not surprised that he prefers me, the daughter of his joy, to an idiot like Binkie and Binkie’s unsatisfactory stepchildren, ’ but that she fully understood and supported his preference was clear from her happy smile as she told how he, Mr Maynard, always took her out, but never them, always remembered her birthday, and never let a Christmas go by. At which point Martha produced eight hundred pounds in five-pound notes, to be spent as she wished. Tears filled her eyes: no
t surprised tears, of course not; she was one, she knew, to whom the good things would naturally come. ‘Oh, he’s so kind, Martha, if you only knew how kind he was!’
Martha postponed the truth with the thought: Well I’m sure it doesn’t matter if I tell her later.
‘He’s always so kind to everyone. Caroline-you don’t mind my mentioning her? Well, I saw her at school sometimes, but we weren’t really friends, you know, they are civil service types really, it’s not my style. But one afternoon he took me and Caroline out together and then sometimes we saw each other like pals-sort of. He’s good to her, too. But not as much as to me. He visits their house a lot. He spends as much time there as he does at his own home. But I think for a person with a kind heart like him, a house without children must be a sad place. It often makes me sad when I think of him, the way he feels for Caroline and me. But if I say it myself, Martha, I know I’m his favourite. You can’t help feeling these things.’
To the middle-aged who have been dedicated to propositions like: The Truth Will Make You Free-and so on, come very interesting moments, such as, when confronted with Rita. It was not that Maisie’s daughter would be shocked to hear that Mr Maynard, now over seventy, still pursued his life-long liaison with Mrs. Talbot, even when she was an ancient lady confined to bed with a nurse permanently in attendance-she was a bit dotty now, people said. Or that Mr Maynard would have sentimental emotions on two counts for Caroline-Martha’s daughter, his old mistress’s daughter’s stepchild. Of course not. She’d find it all very touching. Probably it was, too; probably it was Martha who was at fault. (She remembered being made to feel like this by Maisie who would be incapable of doubting that the heart is always better than a nasty, critical, carping head.) And what did it matter that it was Binkie and not Mr Maynard who had fathered Rita who almost certainly, like the old Maynards themselves, would be bound to believe that the Blood was the thing. And besides, who else had ever found Mr Maynard sweet and kind? And besides, blood or no blood, who would want Binkie as a father if she could have Judge Maynard? Thus did the truth not so much go down with trumpets before Rita, as slink away, with something like an embarrassed smile. Martha was able to feel she ought to be shedding a tear or two for Mrs. Maynard, thus cheated so finally out of a granddaughter: but whose fault was it?