Two Is Lonely

‘My name’s Felix Andrews,’ he said. ‘May I buy you both a drink?’

  Jo accepted for both of us. Odd, how often I felt the age-difference between us, not in any loss of sympathy or understanding, but in a sharp and fleeting feeling every now and then that we were basically of different generations. She had passed some subtle, fortyish borne into what I can only term middle-age, however lightly it sat upon her, while I was still—well, not exactly young, but not yet middle-aged. I wondered if it had anything to do with the change of life, which Jo was now passing through. It was something I viewed with horror and dread, though paradoxically I didn’t (yet) fear growing old. It wasn’t so much a matter of losing my youthful looks, smooth skin, and so on. I just hated the idea that I wouldn’t be able to have any more children. The opposite was true of Jo. She reckoned she’d been lucky to fit in even one child, marrying as late as she had, and Amanda seemed to satisfy such maternal instincts as she had quite amply. But she had been a beauty; she had had quite a few lovers and many admirers. I couldn’t escape the conclusion sometimes, listening to her talk about her days in the theatre, that it was the admiration more than the love which had been important to her, and that was no doubt why she had never married until at 37 she suddenly woke up and realised that what mattered now was to secure herself against the time when she would not be a beautiful but not very talented actress any longer. Happily she got love, and admiration too, from Ted, and the baby was more like a gift to him than a satisfaction of any basic need of her own nature.

  Now that her looks had begun to fade—her hair no longer bright blonde of its own volition, her delicately-boned face beginning to look a tiny bit simian with wrinkles under her ever-more-careful make-up—she couldn’t help mourning the beauty she was losing. I who had no beauty to lose, only youngness, sympathised deeply, though for the first time I could see that the lack of beauty could be an advantage.

  We sat down together at a table with our drinks, and began to exchange polite pleasantries. Jo asked all the questions to which she already knew the answers. Felix Andrews didn’t hide the fact that his work was the most important thing in his life; I liked him for that, though I kept wondering where his son came in—he didn’t mention him. He did, however, say that his wife had died four years before.

  Quite soon Alf beckoned us. The party was over. We said goodbye to Felix Andrews, shaking hands with him. I felt the unmistakable current of his maleness running into my hand, and I smelt his male smell. Later, Jo was to say, ‘I should say only about two per cent female hormones in that one.’ Jo has a basic animal quality which reacts instinctively to the male and female animal in people she meets. I thought, (though I did not say so because I knew Jo was watching me and suddenly about this I didn’t want to be watched too closely) ‘Yes, there’s a very male animal there which is looking for a mate.’ I was a little frightened by the purely physical frisson this thought gave me.

  ‘We’ll be hearing from him, I expect,’ I said casually.

  ‘You will, you mean,’ she promptly replied. She fixed her sharp bright blue eyes on me. ‘Interested?’

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ I answered as shortly as friendship allowed . . .

  Chapter 2

  ‘MUMMY!’

  I started guiltily, wondering how long I’d been standing there, my hand on the phone, brooding. I was always brooding these days. David kept having occasion to say sharply, ‘Your eyes have gone dead again.’ It hurt me to realise how much more often my withdrawn thoughts were with Toby than with Andy . . . Today, for instance, I had been awake (more or less) and functioning for two hours and until I heard his voice and got my face-lift I had not thought about Andy actively. This did not conform to previous love-patterns. As I walked out to the car I did a quick memory-recce—had I thought either of Toby? No. Somehow that made it all right. Toby and Andy were forever paired in my mind, like racing figures, or like weights on either arm of a scale; I watched them always and minutely to see who was getting ahead, cursed my folly, and continued to do it.

  The post van came bumping up the lane, and the postman handed me my letters through the window. ‘Sorry I’m late, mum,’ he said. (He knew I was not entitled to more than a ‘miss’, but he had long ago granted me the ‘madam’ as a courtesy.) ‘Mr. Broughton’s boy left the gate open and his cows were all over the place. Had to back up and tell him, and then we had to chase ’em back. Took best part of half an hour. I wouldn’t like to be that lad when his dad catches hold of him.’

  And our anachronism gave me a cheery wave and went bumping away out of sight round the hedgerow. I watched him go. Soon he would go for good. His route along this country lane had already received its doom in the form of the accursed word ‘uneconomic’.

  It was a bare ten minutes by car to Jo’s house. It was much larger than the cottage and elegance itself by comparison—Jo’s urbanism had only given way to the claims of the simple life on condition that it was not permitted to become too simple. Jo’s husband, Ted Barclay, had left her a tidy fortune, part of which she had invested in my—now our—handcrafts shop in the village, but a large part of which she had used to buy and equip this house. She had not my retrogressive prejudices against television, for instance, and possessed two, one a colour set, and her daughter Amanda—slightly David’s senior, being already five months past her eighth birthday—had all the toys and clothes that were good for her, or even, as I sometimes thought, more. My son, being somewhat of a hedonist, sometimes seemed to prefer Amm’s house to his own as a place of recreation, for which it was hard to blame him. But since the advent of the ponies last Christmas a lot of problems were solved: the indoor attractions of the respective homes had faded into a common denominator of pallidness by comparison with the main interest of their joint lives.

  There the ponies stood, already saddled and hitched by their reins to the paddock-gate, David’s little fat roan shaking the hair out of his eyes and Amanda’s undeniably more slender and handsome chestnut cropping the hedge. Their names, taken from a series of children’s books which had once been all the rage, were Bee and Ant. Amanda, immaculately got up for riding, including a hard hat and a proper vented hacking jacket, her blonde pigtail turned up and tied with a neat black velvet bow, was sitting on the gate, switching the early flies off Ant’s ears with her crop, and looking rather bad-tempered. When she saw us coming she jumped down and began opening the gate.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked peevishly as we got out and David ran to Bee to give him his lump of sugar. ‘I thought you were never coming!’ She spoke to David and not to me, seizing this opportunity to set the tone of the day with a little mild bullying; it was part of their relationship that she was the leader and the boss, but as her bossing rolled straight off him, I didn’t object. Besides, she was remarkably self-confident and dependable for her age. She had all her mother’s will-power, and a dollop of Ted’s sound practical business-sense; she knew as if by instinct what risks were too great and which were worth taking, and if by any chance she were too rash, David’s native caution (‘My child is cautious, yours is timid, hers is a coward’) prevented him from following blindly into it. They made a good team. Sometimes nowadays when they were allowed to go off riding by themselves and I got imaginative about stones rolling under hooves and low-hanging branches I would find myself thinking, ‘Oh, he’ll be all right with Amm,’ as if she were his nanny.

  They were already mounting. Amanda trotted Ant briskly up to the car and handed me a scrap of paper through the window.

  ‘Here’s the map, Aunt Jane,’ she said competently. ‘The picnic place is marked with an X like we did that other time. It’ll be a nice game for you to find it.’

  ‘Thank you dear,’ I said drily, ‘but I’m not in the game-playing vein today.’ I glanced at the map—dashingly but quite clearly delineating the main highways and byways of the district—fetched a felt pen out of my glove-compartment and set a large red X of my own in the middle of a field. ‘That is where we shall be mee
ting for lunch. One o’clock sharp. You can borrow my old watch,’ I said smartly as she opened her mouth to protest. That closed it again.

  David naturally set up a jealous caterwaul.

  ‘Why can’t I keep it, Mummy?’

  ‘Because it’s a ladies’ watch, and also because I don’t trust you to remember you’ve got it.’ The watch and map were handed over. Amanda looked doubtfully at the latter.

  ‘That takes us a long way from where I’d planned,’ she objected.

  ‘Bad luck. No show up, no eat.’ I put the old station-wagon into gear. ‘Take very good care of yourselves now, and make quite sure what’s growing in the fields before you ride across them.’

  ‘Oh, Auntie! We know every field for miles.’

  ‘Yes, and every field knows you, and so does every farmer. We don’t want any more trouble with Mr. Broughton and his baby wheat, thank you.’

  The children waved to me and jogged off down the lane, their black hats bobbing. I turned into Jo’s expansive drive and sat quite motionless for a few minutes, listening to the quiet and smelling the air and feeling the spring breeze touching my cheek and neck, staring half-awarely at the winter jasmine and crocuses in the flower-beds on either side of Jo’s white front door. Though my senses were engaged, the whole operation rested me. After a bit I heaved a deep sigh—tasting the horsey odour, too tangible for mere smelling, on the back of my tongue—and reached for my letters which I’d thrust into my coat pocket. Nothing but business, no doubt—but then suddenly I stiffened with interest. It was a letter from Dottie! With the photos, of course. I hadn’t expected it yet, it was only a few days since she’d phoned me in the very middle of the night (I’d left David’s bedside to answer the phone, thinking it must be a wrong number)—and there came Dottie’s voice semi-circling the globe: ‘To Dorothy a daughter! I’ve done it, I’ve done it I tell you! It’s here beside me. Well, say something!—My God, doesn’t it hurt like hell, though? Doesn’t it hurt, Jane? Why did you never tell me how much it hurts?’

  ‘Darling, it’s marvellous, I’m so glad—’

  ‘You’ve no business to be glad it hurt! Bill says—’ (Oceanic roarings mingled with the pips.)

  ‘What did Bill say?’

  ‘He says it couldn’t have done, he says they gave me the latest injection that paralyses you from the neck down and leaves you laughing, but I was yelling so loud I didn’t know I’d had it.’

  ‘What, the baby?’

  ‘No, the injection!’ she bawled over the increasingly bad line.

  ‘So what’s she like?’

  ‘Just a minute, I’ll look—’

  ‘A minute costs three pounds—’

  ‘We can afford it, love, we’re doing great these days. Listen, I’ve looked, and—Jane?—sorry, thought we’d been cut off—she’s beautiful! I didn’t notice before. She’s got nicer since she was born, more peaceful. She’s not mauve now.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Let’s see—about half-an-hour.’

  ‘Good God, why aren’t you sleeping?’

  ‘It’s that damned coffee they gave me afterwards instead of tea. Really, there are some things about America I’ll never get used to.’

  And now here were the first photos, the first maternal letter. I looked at them—efficient flash-snaps of her sitting up in bed, her hair longer, softer, pinned up with a few wisps escaping, not the crisp streaky short bob she’d always worn; no make-up; looking older but prettier, in a bed-jacket very like the one she’d bought me when I nearly miscarried with David. I hardly looked at the baby, which was just a baby. I looked at Dottie, her thin, vigorous arms veiled in the lacy woollen sleeves, her hands curved in that peculiarly possessive, graceful position against the shawl, her head tilted on the neck, bent at an almost unnatural angle to look down into the baby’s face with a smile at once fatuous and sublime . . . The lines of her age were marked in necklaces around the base of her throat. She was a year older than me and this was her first baby.

  I did not entirely like looking at the photos. As I stared, I found my hands and neck and arms and head imitating that position from memory. I had not forgotten the sensation. Despite all the suppressing I’d been doing for eight years, I now had to acknowledge that I had not reconciled myself to never having it again. I didn’t read the letter just then. I looked through the windscreen at the mellow umber bricks of Jo’s house with the yellow stars of jasmine picked out against them and thought, ‘I must marry. Why don’t I marry? There is something wrong with David and it comes from this, that I haven’t married, and maybe that’s because there is something wrong with me.’

  I shook myself together and looked at my new watch. It was a present. From Andy. He’d bought it for my birthday because I’d told him no watches ever kept time on me, and he said, ‘Your time is out of tune. I shall buy you watches one after another until I find one that matches your metabolism.’ Then he looked at my old watch and said, ‘Do you wear this in bed?’ and when I said yes, he said, ‘You must not wear the new one in bed. I know what happens. It’s not your electrical magnetism at all. You sleep with your head on your arm, and you dribble.’ ‘I do WHAT!’ I cried in outrage, though it burst upon me in the same instant that what he said was true. ‘We will say no more about it. Unlike some men, I have no objection to an occasional dribble. Leave your watch on your bedside table. Suffice it to say that if it goes wrong, I shall know why.’ Looking at it now, I laughed aloud, a silly, half-humiliated laugh. How could such a ridiculous conversation contrive to be, and remain in the mind, so intimate, so sensual, so titillating?

  I had two hours before I was due to meet the children. Time enough to go home and do the house, or go shopping, or to our shop to do some accounts, or again home to wash my hair, or write some letters . . . Instead of doing any of these useful and necessary things, I climbed into the back of the station-wagon, unrolled the mattress I kept there for David, spread a horsey-smelling rug over myself, and gave myself permission to sleep.

  Need it be said that I couldn’t? The three cups of coffee had done their work too well. After ten minutes I rolled over onto my back and lay, wide awake, staring at the underside of the car roof. Random thoughts—or what used to be so called until the psychiatric small-change of our era taught the least brilliant of us that no such thing as a random thought exists—trailed their coats through my weary, artificially wakeful brain. I tried an experiment. I made a wind-screen wiper—very realistic, with a slight squeak—and sent it back and forth across the screen behind my eyes until it was quite blank. Every little drop of thought that splashed against the screen, the wiper wiped away. It took some time, but in the end I got it—total blackness. Then I held that as long as I could and waited to see which ‘random’ thought was strong enough to burst open on the empty screen first.

  When I realised it was going to be Toby, I fought it; the windscreen wiper went mad, squeaking back and forth frantically, but his face remorselessly materialised, and at last, like sleep overtaking me, the effort spent itself and I let the thought take me over.

  It was nearly seven years since I’d seen Toby. After his marriage to Melissa (whose nickname, Whistler, aggravated my bitterness towards her by its overtones of cheerfulness) I took very good care to keep clear of any situation in which I might possibly meet him—or her. If the man you love is lured away from you by some unprincipled syren, I suppose it may be legitimate to share the blame with her; but when you have no-one at all to blame but yourself, it is much harder, and takes much longer, to rid yourself of the bile of bitterness and regret.

  I could have had him—or so he told me, at that last ghastly meeting. If, instead of removing myself from what I regarded as my mill-stone position around his neck, I had just stayed around, after David was born—if only (in his words) I had ‘insisted a little’ at the right time . . . But I hadn’t thought it was fair to him, especially considering that David was not his child. How ludicrously faux naive that sounded now. But at th
e time I was filled with idiotic concepts which have no place in the love-game at all if one is playing to win. I suppose the underlying truth was, I never doubted that he was basically mine, that we would be together in the end, and that I could afford the moral luxuries of fairness, consideration for his needs as a budding writer, etc., etc., since our marvellous, unassailable love would inevitably survive all manner of neglects and absences which might endanger any of the frailer varieties of human affection. Idiot that I was . . . So while I, filled with self-conscious nobility of spirit, was learning the invaluable lessons of independence in the country cottage I’d inherited from my dear dead aunt Addy, Whistler was capturing Toby with the help of extreme youth, unconcealed need, and above all, proximity.

  If I had by any chance been flattering myself that my few months of solitude in the cottage had really taken me far along the thorny road to true independence, those months following Toby’s marriage would have taught me otherwise. I fell flat on my silly face emotionally, and if Dottie, and the shop, and later Jo had not been around, I would surely just have gone quietly to pieces. I had learnt to do without a man in my life, but I had never learnt to be completely alone—I’d never had to. At the worst, there was always David: not much of a companion in infancy, it’s true, but a being, someone alive to talk to and look after whose needs had called up whatever strength I had and kept me more or less on the rails.

  And of course, I mustn’t overlook the therapeutic effect of John.

  John was a constant in my life. He was not often around, living as he did in London and being involved in the twilit mysteries of his sub-culture world of jazz, pot, and so on, which he did not attempt to share with me. In the same way my business life was a closed book to him; he disliked Jo, believing (correctly, I fear) that she bore some subterranean prejudice against his colour, and in any case nothing could have interested him less than the shop, apart from some of the more vivid objects to be seen there.