As soon as the words were out I knew I’d finished everything. But, oddly, I no longer cared. At least, not for that moment. I’d worked so hard on myself, trying to grow, trying to be independent, trying to be strong and unselfish. It had been so damned difficult, so against my grain; but I’d done it all for him. And my reward now was to be told I should have been weak and clinging and dependent. The very qualities I’d been trying to develop had lost me the thing I was working for. All desire to cry had gone. I sat there shaking with rage, watching with actual satisfaction as his face turned white, then scarlet.
‘So you don’t think I’m much of a mensch,’ he said quietly.
‘I’d never doubted it till this moment. But of all the feeble, pusillanimous—’
‘Yes,’ he interrupted. ‘Quite. Well, who knows? You may be right.’
We sat in silence, and the rage withdrew slowly, like a wave, leaving desolation. The pain of losing him began again and I bit on it hard, like a bad tooth.
‘So what are your plans now? I suppose you’ll marry Whistler.’
‘Yes, I suppose so, when she’s a little older. If she still wants to.’ There was another long pause in which we could hear John—the sole reason why I couldn’t leave the flat and run and run as fast and as far away as I could—singing and banging about in the kitchen, making us a celebration lunch. ‘There’s one thing,’ said Toby abruptly. ‘She’s Jewish.’
I snapped my head round to look at him in amazement. ‘So what?’
He didn’t look at me but at the point of his cigarette as he said, ‘I’ve had the strangest feeling recently that I’d like to marry a Jewish woman. To be—more Jewish than I’ve been. Don’t ask me to explain. It’s just a feeling.’ He added after a moment, defensively, ‘After all, I am a Jew.’
He met my eyes. His were defiant, sheepish somehow, as if he realised the underlying weakness of what he was saying. I thought, John’s wrong. I’m no spiritual Hercules, but at least I know who I am. And on that belief, plus three glasses of wine, I coasted smoothly through the celebration lunch as if on the crest of an artificial wave, and it was Toby who lay below in the trough and didn’t say a word.
Chapter 16
WHEN you’ve loved somebody for a long time, and then it stops, it’s akin to an amputation in that you go on feeling the cut-off part long after it’s been taken away. All sorts of nervous and emotional impulses set out to travel to their accustomed stations, and when they come up against the new, raw barrier, they’re carried through it by their own impetus, and only then, finding themselves shooting through empty space, do they dwindle and die away. In the same way, when somebody dies—I noticed this a lot with Addy—you keep projecting your thoughts towards them as if they were still alive.
And so it was with Toby.
My love-impulses kept going out towards where he has been; I kept leaning against the relationship which for so long had supported me like a plaster-cast, and falling flat on my face because it wasn’t there any longer to hold me up. As a result, after a few days I already felt bewildered and exhausted; by the end of a fortnight I was as emotionally battered as I would have been physically if I had fallen over and over again down a flight of stone steps which it was somehow beyond my power to avoid.
Because the pain of this was so awful, I began to hate him, and there’s nothing, of course, more damaging and hurtful to the psyche than that—searching grimly for things to despise and revile in a person you once loved. You may destroy the beloved image but at the same time you destroy part of the basis of your self-respect, plus a whole vital chunk out of your past. Because, if he is hateful now, what aberration once caused you to waste so much love on him?
While I was actively at work on this project of demolition, I kept remembering something he had once said to me in bed: ‘We have to do this well, this, and everything that goes with it; and we have to go on doing it well. And if by any unforeseeable chance we ever want to stop, we must do that well, too. Because if a love-affair doesn’t stay sweet in your mind forever, it just wasn’t worth it.’ And, perhaps on another occasion, but linked to the same philosophical idea: ‘If the ending is messy, one doesn’t remember anything good about any of it.’
Perhaps it was the intrinsic rightness of this that angered me now; but out of my developing sophistry came the pretence that it angered me because it was false and worse than false. Because (I reasoned) there is no such thing as a ‘good’ ending. There is only one way to make it ‘stay sweet’ and that is to continue it until one of you dies, and even that inevitable conclusion will probably spoil the mental picture through its shocking finality and sorrow. I felt this new cynicism seeping through me like sewage: nothing lasts, nothing is worth-while, the cost of every emotional indulgence is too outrageously high; but in any case nobody deserves anything better or more permanent. Certainly not Toby, and certainly not me with my ego-centricity and destructive outbursts of anger. (It would take me a long time to forgive myself for the contemptuous ‘So what?’ when Toby told me Whistler was Jewish. But it was many, many months before I was prepared to acknowledge that.)
Toby became anathema, my whipping-boy. When I felt angry with anything or anybody—when the baby cried too long or the vacuum cleaner backfired or I dropped a hot casserole full of stew; when Dottie went off ‘talent-hunting’ for three days, leaving me in the shop on my own, with only the sketchiest idea of how to cope with any but the most straight-forward sales and Mrs. G. at home breathing ’flu germs all over David and actually letting him fall off the sofa and bang his head; when the local women came sniffing round the shop with no commercial intentions other than the satisfaction of their curiosity, and made their telling exits with remarks like ‘All a bit grand for me, dear; but then I suppose you’ve been used to very different ways all round in London, haven’t you?’ When any of these things happened, I gathered my rage into a little hard ball and hurled it at an Aunt Sally figure in my mind which had Toby’s head on it. He ceased, in one sense, to be a living person, even in memory, and became a receiver, a receptacle, for all my aggressions, all my misery, all my loneliness. He got the blame for absolutely everything.
I’m quite certain, looking back, that I have never seemed so utterly detestable to myself as I was at that time. The more I made myself hate Toby, the more it rebounded, though I tried my utmost to make myself feel like a poor victim. And as I whittled away at the foundations of my life, feeble and shored-up as they were already, of course I became less and less able to cope with even the simplest daily disciplines. Everything, but everything, became too much trouble—getting up in the morning, getting myself to bed at night, and everything in between. I just seemed to shuffle through the days, begrudging every effort, seizing on every chance to fly off the handle, to sulk, to cry in secret, to take it out on people. Only with David was I able to maintain some kind of balance, but even he got shouted at and untenderly picked up or dumped down, quite often. And of course, poor Dottie got the worst of it, because she was handiest. And she was definitely not in the mood for it just then, which, looking back on it with what I know now, is what makes me most ashamed of it.
Approximately five minutes after I had arrived back from London that Sunday afternoon, having borrowed money from John for petrol, and driven all the way in a state of blind, stiff-jawed, unreasoning rage and despair—Dottie realised that something awful, and terminal, had happened. I remember that when I stamped and slammed into the cottage, she and Henry were sitting on the floor drinking tea from mugs and rejoicing, in their nice way, over the fact that David had just arrived at a sitting position by himself. ‘Amanda couldn’t do that till she was ten months,’ Henry commented, presumably solely to gratify me. I hardly heard him; I sat on the sofa staring at David, sitting there crowing, without seeing him properly, just hearing Toby’s words about marrying Whistler going on and on in my brain like one of those sleep-teaching machines. Dottie offered me tea and added, ‘You’re not going to credit this, but I’ve act
ually baked a cake. You have to eat it with a tea-spoon but it tastes rather marvellous.’ ‘No thanks,’ I said shortly, and got up, took David in my arms and went out of the room. It must have looked ridiculously like a melodramatic exit, but was in fact uncalculated. I had suddenly realised that even David being able to sit up alone at under 8 months didn’t give me the smallest kick; I had just had the shattering experience of sitting there looking at him after a whole day’s absence and not feeling anything, no lifting of the heart, nothing, and the veil of protective rage lifted for a few seconds to show the great yawning fearful black emptiness that lay on the other side. No Toby. No more Toby … I went upstairs with David and sat on my bed with him in my arms and just rocked to and fro gripping him tightly and keeping the veil drawn. Just that, no tears, no feelings; rock, rock, rock, and stare at the cornflower pattern on the wall … I was trying to hypnotise myself, I think, and then Dottie walked in and the spell of relative painlessness was broken.
‘What’s the matter, love, what’s happened?’
‘Nothing. Go away. Leave me alone.’
It had happened before, only with the positions reversed. In a few minutes I, like Dottie on Christmas night, would be sobbing myself empty; I longed for the release of it, but David was lying there on my knee gazing up at me unwinkingly and I looked at him and for the very first time I thought, ‘He’s got no father. I’ve got an illegitimate baby.’ Before I could check myself I said wonderingly, ‘He’s a bastard.’ ‘Who is?’ asked Dottie, and I answered, still in a sort of daze of suddenly awakened shame, ‘He is—David.’
The really remarkable thing was that Dottie understood—just from that. It amazed me more later than at the time. She sat down on the bed beside me and said, after a long silence, ‘You’ll find another father for him—better and stronger.’ I turned on her, not appreciating her perspicacity and kindness and wisdom, ‘I don’t want anyone else! I only want Toby!’ That was about the last honest, unperverted word or thought I produced about him for months. It sprang straight out of naked pain, which is one of the main sources of untampered-with truth; when you begin stifling the pain, you twist and muffle the truth at the same time.
I don’t know how to describe the weeks that followed. I would undoubtedly be even more ashamed of my behaviour, if it were not for the odd conviction that I was, as they say, ‘not myself’. It is like remembering another person’s experience, or something one once read about and felt, deeply perhaps but vicariously. In other words I think I was a little mad.
One lesson I learnt stands out clearly, however. Work, that supposed panacea, the great Taker-of-Your-Mind-Off, proved just about as totally useless and in fact irrelevant as those ‘Easy Childbirth’ theories are in the face of the real thing. The work was there, and I had to do it—housework, baby-work, and the new and—one might have expected—energy- and mind-absorbing work in the shop. In fact I seldom stopped working; but the queer thing is that the only times I was at all at peace were when I did stop. The shop did a lot of business during those first weeks after the opening; customers actually did come all the way from London as well as from surrounding districts, and when it was my turn to be on duty I was kept on my feet a large percentage of the time. But while my body was active, so was my brain, seething in its poison; and the times I look back on now with some recognition of myself are those when there was a break and I was able to go into the back of the shop, where the storeroom was, and a tiny kitchenette arrangement, and sit there motionless among the packing-cases staring out of the glass panel in the back door at the minute yard, where a tree grew out of crumbling paving-stones beside a blackened incinerator surrounded by an old board fence. That view, uninspiring as it was during the bleak winds of March and April, has imprinted itself on my memory so that at any time I can cast myself back there and feel the wooden rungs of the chair pressing into my back and see the leafless branches of that struggling tree tossing to and fo against the sky. It was as if the violence of the tree’s agitation took over the frenzy of my brain for a little while; contemplating it, yet hardly aware of it, I would feel myself growing calmer, the bitterness simmering down like boiling milk lifted for a moment off the heat. I remember I used to sigh, deeply and repeatedly, as if the madness had been using up too much oxygen, and feel gradually much better. Then I would be startled by the ping of the door in the front being opened; automatically I would jump up and hurry through, and at the same time my brain would jump to attention too and go back to its beastly work.
Dottie didn’t ever ask me again what exactly had transpired in London—I suppose she guessed. But Henry, of course, had no way of doing that, and he was fond of me, so that seeing me getting thinner very rapidly (something I only manage to do when I’m desperately unhappy) and more and more silent, he naturally became concerned, and one day when we were alone in the shop together, he suddenly said, ‘Suppose you tell me what’s happened to you.’
I said, ‘Why should I?’ which was in keeping with my general rudeness at the time, but Henry was hard to offend, and replied, ‘First, because I’m very curious to know what can possibly have changed you so radically. Second, because you never know, I might be able to help.’
Two months had already gone by since that fatal Sunday, and perhaps I was ready to talk, because I said, after only a short hesitation, ‘Do you remember Toby?’
Henry said he did, with some pleasure.
I began to prevaricate to the effect that it was all very hard to explain, but then his honesty temporarily revived mine and I realised it was not hard at all, merely wretchedly painful, so I said, ‘For a year I thought he was going to marry me, and now I’ve found out he’s going to marry somebody else.’ Put baldly like that it seemed extremely simple; I marvelled at the twisted complexity of my reactions to it.
Henry now asked the obvious question. ‘Is he David’s father?’
‘Didn’t Dottie tell you?—No.’
‘Dorothy and I don’t discuss your business. Then where is he?’
‘David’s father? I have no idea. Possibly in Paris.’
‘What sort of chap is he?—I hope you don’t mind all these questions.’
‘Not specially.’ Actually since the subject of this unexpected enquiry had shifted away from Toby, I didn’t mind at all. I really don’t think I would have minded any questions from Henry; it pleased me obscurely to find him showing such a sensible, human interest in somebody else’s concerns. I would have expected him to have found such manifestations of curiosity rather beneath him. (It was not for ages afterwards that I found out from Dottie that of course she’d told him the whole story long ago, and that he was presumably only asking me about Terry to change the obsessive focus of my thoughts for a little while.)
I told him briefly about my affair with Terry, and our mutual antipathy after it. Henry listened with his usual patience and then said, ‘And out of that, all that stupidity and futility, you got that nice child that you love so much. Zero plus zero equals any amount you like to name. It’s all very strange.’
‘So you think Terry and I are zeroes?’
‘No, no, that’s not what I meant.’ He looked up at me and smiled through his pipe-smoke. ‘You’re a fair bit of a chump at times, like now for instance, but you’re not a zero. Oh dear no.’ And he picked up my hand and held it for a moment so hard that it hurt, then put it down unselfconsciously as someone came into the shop.
A little oasis in the wilderness. After it, the dark mood of misery and brooding and tumult closed in round me again; but I remembered that warm squeeze and his funny, old-fashioned way of saying ‘You’re not a zero, oh dear no!’ Even while I was helplessly behaving like one, I remembered sometimes that Henry didn’t think I was; and it helped. A little.
But it was Dottie who dragged me out of it in the end. I hadn’t been noticing Dottie very much recently, or asking myself how things were with her; it was all part of my current malaise of introversion, because in fact had anyone asked me I would have sa
id that Dottie mattered to me more than anybody still remaining in my life, except David of course. But one couldn’t have guessed it from my behaviour towards her. For weeks we hardly exchanged a friendly inessential word; she tried—God knows she tried—to bring me out of it with her usual flow of entertaining anecdotes, but that was just at first; no one can go on telling stories to someone who patently is not listening, let alone reacting. So then she withdrew into a sort of brisk, waiting silence, at first patient, later impatient, gradually becoming irritated and at last furious. She had good reason for this; my help and support in the shop were so essential to her that my virtual disappearance into my own private purgatory struck at the roots of all her plans, not only the business ones but also, as I was to discover, her plans for her survival through the crisis in her own life, which depended entirely on the shop and its success.
The crunch came when I had been in charge at the shop all one day while Dottie went to Birmingham. The reason for this trip was both unexpected and highly exciting to her; she had had a letter from Ron, the glass-worker with whom she had left her address all those months ago. It was neatly written on a small sheet of lined paper, and said in a very businesslike way that if she cared to come along, he might be able to show her something to her advantage. It was actually her turn for shop-duty the following day, and I had been looking forward to the sort of quiet day at home with David which was the only kind I found tolerable any more—a morning getting the housework out of the way, and an afternoon spent sitting in front of the fire watching the flames, just as I watched the tree behind the shop, letting all the vicious inner knots untie themselves. So when Dottie, showing an unusual degree of animation, announced her imminent departure and begged me to take over for the day, I sank into a deep slough of gloom and grudge and scarcely brought a civil word out of my mouth all evening. Whereas I felt she could just as easily have waited till the following day, when I was due to be at the shop anyway, she clearly felt it impossible to wait even 24 hours longer to find out what Ron had to tell her, and expected me to understand this. We both indicated our points of view in a terse conversation which ended with Dottie saying, with unaccustomed edge: ‘Look, like it or lump it this shop is our livelihood. You think it’s enough just to put in a few hours selling every second day. Well, that’s okay for shop assistants; it’s not enough for the management.’