Though born and bred in Hampstead, Myra was built for the country, George said. He’d once written a poem implying that while she might be no fit subject for Baudelaire or Boucher she was all that he wanted her to be: strong, passionate, and a lover of woods and gardens. As the last wheel of the barrow was dragged up the final step, her ironic grunt would have ruffled his peace of mind if he’d been home to hear it. He’d merely stated what he wanted her to be, and being in love she’d moulded herself to that off-beat image. Well-built and tall, she had small breasts and full hips, and arms that had grown strong and tanned in adjusting herself to George’s ideal, while George himself, over their years in the house, spent more and more time in his study and less and less in the garden. She wore glasses, kept her hair short because whenever it grew long she looked too much part of the trees and landscape, a duller person than she thought she was, mistress of lawns and lettuce-plots behind the six-roomed Georgian house.
In many ways Myra wished she had become a lover of the country, for maybe then the country would have grown to love her. But neither was it intolerable, which showed how George had been mistaken in at least one of his adjectives, for if she’d any passion left she’d be out of this green horseshoe of lawns and shrubs.
The false adjective told more of George than a score of right ones. Though his character was less flawed than most, he didn’t show much of himself, which meant that more than six years had passed before she finally knew him, thereby proving the advantage of the strong silent type: marriage lasted longer, for one couldn’t possibly lose interest until all secrets had been opened.
On first meeting he was quiet, shy, and big-built, a young man with short black hair and brown eyes, pipe smoking, comfortable, twenty-nine years old, working with a survey group somewhere in Kent. On Friday night the Soho pub was crowded. Myra stood well back from the bar, able to see only the glittering wall of bottles rising in the distance. She’d spent a day in the art galleries, and now wanted to see crowds and real faces. Drawings and paintings had shown little humanity, though they had, as usual, opened various aspects of her inner self – only to close them again the minute she stepped outside. She was fascinated by other people’s visions, the colourful abstractions of singular rare beings called artists – until her perceptions were swamped by a sensation of drunkenness that didn’t take away the ability to walk straight.
Having few friends at the L S E, she loved the comforting sight of people whose purpose in life was different from her own. Street lights and coffee smells, shouts and stars – she left them on impulse and went into the pub. This well-built man was talking in loud fluent French to another drinker. She looked, unaware that in observing him it might be said she was trying to pick him up. Faces fascinated her, so that she wondered whether she shouldn’t have gone to St Martin’s instead of the L S E. On the street she’d look at a face – belonging to a man or woman, it didn’t matter as long as they were beautiful or interesting – and only realize she was staring when someone smiled and asked her to come and have a drink. She thought that, having what she considered a rather plain face, her stares would be taken as unimportant, until she realized that looking at someone might make her face softer and more appealing than before she stared.
George looked drunk, his eyes lit, but his French sounded so perfect that she thought he might be French, though anglicized to the perfection of good clothes looking shabby, a button missing from his mackintosh, shoes needing polish, and a pipe that wouldn’t light for more than two puffs. His face became rock calm when listening to the other man’s replies, and she saw what it would be like when out of a pub and sober, found it interesting because it was profound and kind, a low forehead all the more attractive in an obviously intelligent man. Talking about books, the words Proust, Huysmans, Apollinaire bounced softly above smoke and noise.
The barrow of dead leaves, held from cold wind by the weight of a fork, was hauled to a mound already smouldering. George hinted that she clear the lawns and paths so that they looked once more part of the smartest house in the village. She’d intended doing it next week, after writing her lectures for the W E A, but George, thinking her unresponsive, sulked at last night’s supper, a polite sulk which meant gruff replies to any question concerning the house. Not a word was said about the lawns, as the hours between supper and bedtime plodded on, both reading on either side of the dead television screen, and the reason for his silence came to her. She looked up at eleven o’clock and said: ‘I think I’ll get rid of the leaves tomorrow. Burn them.’
‘All right,’ he said, as if it didn’t matter whether they were cleared or not – yet the petulance drained from his voice. She imagined this to be the perfect marriage: intuitive, calm, diplomatic. If only I didn’t know all his thoughts and wishes, and he didn’t sense mine. There’s little left at this stage, though it was the same after two years, so I’ve no reason to brood on it at six. He didn’t even glance from his book, and her irritation was squashed by the fact that she’d hardly looked up from hers, either.
He’d noticed her staring at him, back in that far-off Soho pub, a young tall brunette with rounded cheeks, and glasses that hid the full glamour of her eyes unless or until you went to bed with her and she took them off. Maybe they stayed on even then. Her face was pale from too much walking, his red and flushed from striding fields with notebook and theodolite. She looked – and after six years she hadn’t stopped looking for some sort of answer in him. Perhaps one came only when you didn’t need to look. To look was to doubt, and answers were given only to those who trusted. But no, she’d gone through that phase years ago, and found it as false as any other. Permutations and subtleties were mere mechanics that explained nothing – though immersion in them was often a satisfying anodyne to stop you cutting your throat, or to enable you to do so.
Lifting another half-pint, he’d called: ‘Mazel tov!’
The phrase startled, by its appropriateness when addressed to her, but coming from him the greeting lost its authentic blade-ending, that last syllable sharpened on whetstone that chopped you down the spiritual middle to make sure the good luck entered. ‘Why not have a drink?’
‘I have one.’
‘I wasn’t going to say anything’ – he stepped closer – ‘in case I reminded you of a brother you hadn’t seen for five years.’
‘You don’t. But where do you get the “mazel tov”?’
‘I buy it at Christmas, plenty of white berries. You kiss under it.’ He kissed her: ‘Mazel tov!’
‘That’s mistletoe,’ she smiled. ‘Mazel tov’s Yiddish. I’m Jewish, so I thought you were.’
‘Don’t be literal. One of my pole-carriers uses it. He’s a Cockney.’
‘What are you?’ she said.
‘A surveyor. A bore. A technician mapping out the new age in Kentish swamps. I like being a surveyor, but don’t ask me why. People fall into two tables: they either ask me that, or they say they’ve never met a surveyor before.’
‘I’m in the second table,’ she said, then ordered another brown ale. Half an hour later she was drunk, and George said: ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Yes,’ she answered.
He had a room in Pembridge Square, and their taxi swayed between traffic along Oxford Street. The feast of talk that had possessed them in the pub lapsed before the wide curves of a traffic roundabout. Sobered, George leaned across, one hand behind her head, and his mouth pressing skilfully onto her lips. She saw other cars swinging towards them across the blue-black tarmac, giant sparks sliding into the central fire of their passion. They began from a distance, gathered speed while growing bigger as if guided by phosphorescent glowlamps overhead and coming for the big smash, upshoot of fire and metal. His kiss grew hard, and she closed her eyes to fill in the bones of it.
She felt sick, so they got out on Moscow Road, soothed by a cool wind blowing in the darkness, hovering lamps, cats at dustbins outside grocery shops, milk bottles piled in crates. He put an arm around her. ‘You
need a meal. I have food at my place. Tins, anyway. Some biscotte. Tea. You’ll feel better.’ At nineteen this was adventure, far from that Hampstead monstrosity in which her family lived, double fronted, double garaged, double cream cream in the double sized fridge, a double lounge and double everything house that meant half a life she’d rather stay out of half the night than sit and argue with her mother who thought she should have left school at seventeen and learned hairdressing. Her parents were fine: as long as they left her alone, she loved them very much.
They walked into the outstretched arms of Pembridge Square, swaying a little towards its massive houses. The night filled her with a sense of freedom, gave her a visionary light-bodied walk, in the middle of the road, alone, her satchel of books and make-up swinging loose – until the noise of an on-rushing car threw her breathless onto the pavement. George laughed, and took her arm. ‘Will you still marry me?’
The stairs were steep, wide, dimly lit. Drudging around Soho all evening had drained her energy, and she ascended slowly. Halfway up she touched his arm and answered: ‘Yes.’
I hadn’t said yes to anyone before, and I don’t know why I said yes then. Once in his room we didn’t wait to eat. He told me later how surprised he was at the speed at which I undressed. I knelt on the bed and looked at him, loving my nakedness and not really concerned about his as I took off my blouse and brassiere. It was quick, and didn’t add up to the sort of passion he wanted, but he was too excited to notice. He was drawn out too quickly by my split mixture of coldness and blinding rage, of wanting to be loved all the way by a man I had fallen in love with but who was for all that a stranger.
In a way he was still a stranger. She found that the only time he was free with speech was when using a foreign language, talking in French or Italian to some waiter or fisherman during a holiday. Myra’s shyness never approached the dimensions of spiritual deformity it sometimes attained in George. She was protected by a more intelligent face from which comment was not always expected, though in which it was always assumed to exist.
The thunderbolt of soberness hit them so hard that they couldn’t stay in the room either to eat or sleep. They walked – traversing the lit-up arc of north-west London, hardly talking, between decaying houses towards Edgware Road and Swiss Cottage, as if to escape the ghosts of that unexpected love-making. Myra had been exhilarated, though not satisfied, by the straight-rutted contact with another person, as if they had put each other to a certain use through lack of patience or knowledge. She felt fine, full of energy, feverish; yet aware of the cosmic distance that had separated their feelings, good only in that it had sharpened the carnal matching of their bodies. She had expected a softening of the spirit, a drawing closer as this hard aloofness vanished with the years, but it had stayed in that same pristine state of pure contact – moonlove and nothing else.
Like natures were no good, she thought, tipping the barrow and scooping the last leaves out with her hands, raking them into a heap. If silence and shyness ever broke they would have become different people in each other’s sight and fled apart. A lack of reserve would be fatal. Reserve is what we depended on each other for – to bolster it up in ourselves, to protect George from himself and me from myself. We each are afraid of ourselves, not each other, and won’t ever get close until our separate fears are done with. One like nature holds the other in check, the sparks of mutual domination being all that remain.
They drank coffee and ate sandwiches near Hampstead tube station, walked towards the Heath. George knew it well, a short-cut from the Ponds to West Heath Road, a slow madcap around the heights of London. They found a place in the undergrowth, hidden from all lights. Myra felt no coldness, nor blinding rage either. The orgasm went into every limb, diminishing its impact at the vital centre of herself.
Beech, plane, oak and maple, the last dead twigs and branches were gathered from around the house and brought to the top bank for burning. She smiled at thinking so far back, paused between sweeps of her rake and realized how much they had nevertheless changed since that first evening. If he hadn’t changed so much – from untidy, generous and shy, to neat, maniacal and tight – she wouldn’t be hounding the garden offal of winter for the first big conflagration of the year. At that first ‘mazel tov’ she would have consoled herself by the folk adage that still waters run deep if she hadn’t seen this as an advantage in a man. But from running deep the banks had almost joined, due to limestone and chalk deposits. His lack of speech when sober had led him to choose a wife after half an hour’s drunken talk. Through lack of experience she had accepted a husband in the same space of time. In the old days a girl was matched and married off by a broker, sold and traded like a slave, and in thinking she had done the opposite she had only done worse, because from what she knew of George she might as well have been taken to the canopy never having seen him at all. She drew herself back: that’s not quite true; we did live together a while before marrying. And when they did – a quiet splicing at St Pancras town hall when the red flag still flew – George had chosen a house in the first spasm of looking, though she had to admit that as a surveyor he had made a better job of this than in his choice of a wife.
For George, the house was a dream come true, worked and toiled for since driving along the village street in his battered sports car six years ago. Realism was on his side. He’d seen it first in November, with no blue light and sun of summer to blind him into love for it. A square, neat, two-storeyed Georgian structure, it stood in cold and drizzle, gardens empty, garage falling to pieces. The quiet sort, he was an optimist in material things, saw the garden cleared and the lawn laid, garage, woodsheds, tool huts and wash house all hammered, relatched and painted; bricks repointed, windows cleaned, the front door gleaming black with a polished brass knocker, the back gate opening to a path that, running through the yard, would lead char or tradesmen to the kitchen door.
George had set himself and others to work on it. A thousand borrowed from his mother made the down payment, the last money in her account, but with George’s cash a flat had been converted above the garage and she had lived there until she died two years ago, glad to leave the semi-detached in S.E. 98, become a member of the Women’s Institute, the Old Folks Club, and be among friends and family for the rest of her life.
Myra went to make coffee. Mrs Harrod was vacuuming upstairs, but would be down when she heard the cups rattling. After coffee a laundry list must be made, then Myra would go to the village store. Notes for her next lecture needed re-thinking, and there were letters to write, as well as minutes of the last W I meeting to type. Doing nothing was even more of a full time job than a full time job, though it was easier than when George’s mother lay in bed above the garage. It had been difficult to fulfil his dream of a perfect house, and still apply principles of family love and solidarity by emptying his mother’s slops.
Another help in their long haul up was Myra’s own money, five hundred a year from her father who wanted to stun the government out of death duty they’d scoop from his thriving shoe factory when and if he died. The indestructible old man sat in the big chair when he came to see them and grinned at the nestlike order his son-in-law had created with such hard-earned money – that he’d hoped he’d have the panache to spend like a man.
Myra’s mother hadn’t taken to George at first because his religion wasn’t the same as theirs – though neither family had much – not to mention a difference in race which her mother was too polite to mention except every day for six months when she wanted Myra to change her mind and marry one of their own sort. But Myra didn’t succumb, knew exactly what she couldn’t help doing beneath that rounded face, smile and glasses. Under it, as under a calm moon of autumn, the sea moved. She went home often at the beginning, and each time, after arguments on love and loyalty and family, came away wounded but in one piece, bringing typewriter, gramophone or books. By the time she went to the registry office, standing in the large room with George and repeating all the pointless formulae
, she felt a wild exuberant sea pressing to burst out and overwhelm her with laughter and gladness. Her face was on fire, her knees seemed about to commit the first and final act of treachery. She felt alone, a pillar of stone in the middle of a violent lake. George did not exist. No one was there but herself, and the faint influx of these tedious words that she must have been repeating: ‘I do,’ but the affirmation bashing against her shouted: ‘I survived. I survived. I’m in one piece and free.’
It was freedom only because it was different. Finding a house and fixing it up hid the fact that underneath they were two wounded people who had met one morning after an inconclusive and agonizing battle. They had come together by the planned move of a psychotic God. ‘Mazel tov.’
Coffee boiled, was poured out and blancoed by milk. Mrs Harrod, a grey-haired old woman with a lined face and cat-sly eyes, sat opposite. Her husband, working in a motorway repair gang, had been spun off his feet by a passing car five years ago, so neatly clipped that hardly a mark was visible when his mates lifted him out of hoar frost by the road and humped him to the tool hut. From this accident Mrs Harrod bought a doll-cottage, and voted Conservative instead of ignoring election days. Good fortune coming out of so much black could only be an act of God, so she went to church on Sunday and was even spoken to by other property owners of the village. But she had to live, so worked every morning for Myra. She was neither clever, neat, intelligent nor industrious, but drudged around and did the jobs that Myra could never face – though they sometimes appealed to Myra more than the gardening that had fallen to her lot. She’d thought of letting Mrs Harrod go, and paying a man to garden with what she cost, but George wouldn’t like it, because Mrs Harrod was the sort of anachronistic rural institution that appealed to him in spite of his progressive brand of politics. And Myra was also fond of her. Mrs Harrod was the only person of the village whom she felt close to. Considering all the stillbirths, deaths, accidents and animal woundings that had gone on around her, Mrs Harrod seemed to have lived her life in the red. There was no one in the parish she didn’t know about. The most obscure family in the council houses up the hill, or the remotest keeper’s cottage set at the far corner of some copse and miles from the nearest lane were as simple illuminated books set out for the autodidact. She created a village of two faces for Myra, one of the Women’s Institute singing ‘Jerusalem’ in this pleasant arcadian valley; and another of ferocious sexual Luddites liable to turn without thought and set axe or penis at the nearest body. The two blended and Myra saw it as part of her own life, though whether the village accepted her as quickly as she had accepted someone from it to do her housework was impossible to say.