The Backward Shadow

  Will you now ask your aunt to get in touch with me direct? I don’t seem to have her address. I’m simply longing to meet her. I still think it’s one of the most fascinating pieces of writing that’s ever come into my hands.

  Yours sincerely,

  Billie Lee

  I fell off the high stool, and tottered to the living-room to seek something more stable to sink into. The truth was, I’d forgotten all about the tough, hard-bitten little red-headed literary agent to whom I had taken Addy’s manuscript months and months ago. I remembered her now, though, clearly—small, tightly corsetted, smartly dressed and coiffured, three charm-bracelets jangling on one tiny wrist and a man’s watch incongruously strapped round the other. An impression of compactness, self-assurance and determination … Where had I heard of her? Oh yes, from Toby. She must be his agent … I read the letter again, letting my eyes slide over the final paragraph. I would think and feel about that later. After my first outburst of grief when Father told me of Addy’s death, I hadn’t shed one tear for her; it seemed oddly incongruous to mourn her here, where she still seemed alive. But now I was going to have to face those realisations which are a far sadder part of death than merely missing the person—those if-only-she-could-have-been-here-for-this regrets.

  But first the letter from the American publisher. I was disappointed to see it was a carbon copy on commonplace flimsy, not as I had hoped the impressive original on high-quality airmail paper. The letter itself was very dignified and restrained, quite English in fact—a far cry from the sort of uninhibited New World enthusiasm I would have expected from an American firm. But a genuine excitement was apparent between the lines. Secure in the knowledge of being alone, I read it aloud to Addy’s shade. I read Billie Lee’s letter aloud, too. Then I put them both in my apron pocket, went out into the autumn garden, and wept.

  A lovely thing about living miles from anyone else is that you can cry out loud, luxuriously. How well I understand the Irish and other women, who wail and keen over their dead! How it helps, and how much more, instinctively, you feel you are paying tribute to your dead when you don’t bottle it up, but let it all come out with a lovely, mournful, anguished sound! I could imagine how Father, and my aunts and uncles and cousins, had blinked back their tears with stiff upper lids at the funeral (I was still in hospital from David), concealing their genuine grief behind impassive British façades. I imagined Addy, somewhat improbably dressed in her voluminous canvas gardening apron, so tough she could keep shears in its pocket, and her muddy Wellingtons, looking on with disappointment and contempt. As I bent now over the droopping dahlias, scattering them with un-English tears and making a noise that would not have shamed an Arab wake, I could hear her saying: ‘That’s more like it! I was beginning to wonder if anyone had noticed I was missing!’ Suddenly the misery of wanting her sank down another fathom inside me; my legs went weak with sorrow and I found myself sitting on the wet grass, bawling, my head between my knees …

  Suddenly I straightened up and listened. I had competition—David was bawling too. I rushed in to him; even by my haphazard standards, it was hours past his feeding time. I scooped him out of the wooden cradle so swiftly I left it rocking, and in two seconds the bawling had stopped—both lots. It was difficult to be unhappy with him in my arms, quite impossible while he sucked me. He tucked his near-side arm under mine, and I could feel his hand clutching my ribs in spasms of ecstasy as he drank.

  I dressed him more warmly than usual (a jacket as well as a nightgown) and put him down to sleep in his pram in the garden. He didn’t feel like sleeping right away, so we had a nice long stare at each other, which was good for meditation. His eyes were not going to be blue, after all—one more unlike-Terry item which I added to his mounting score of good points. His hair, practically partable already, looked rather like Kenneth Kaunda’s—it gave him a perpetually startled look, even when he was asleep. Suddenly, for no good reason, he grinned at me. It was his first recognisable smile at me, as distinct from indiscriminate face-experiments. I straightened up from my slouched position over the pram-handle. His eyes followed me, and he grinned again. I felt like a lioness whose offspring brings her his first kill.

  If only Dottie would come tonight! Perhaps he would do it again for her. Her reactions to such an achievement were bound to be entirely satisfying. Only it wasn’t Saturday, so how could it be her? Tantalising. I left David asleep, climbed into Addy’s aged Morris, and drove into the village, where I resolutely put the two red figures on my bank statement from my mind and laid in a pot roast with every trimming I could think of, including a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape.

  While I was in the pub I put through a call to Billie Lee. It was not very easy to say what I had to say, but she was so unexpectedly good about it—sympathetic in a terse how-damned-awful-I-am-sorry way—that I didn’t start crying again as I’d feared.

  ‘Well, m’dear,’ said her deep, mannish voice, ‘it all devolves on you, then.’ She paused, and then added, ‘You know, I’m not only sorry for you, losing your aunt, I’m actually jolly sorry for myself as well. I had so looked forward to meeting her … damn. What a bitch life is. Oh well, I suppose we must just do our best for her book … she’s left something of some importance behind, at least, which is more than most of us will.’

  She went on to tell me the details of the American sale. It seemed the advance royalties were something in the neighbourhood of four hundred pounds, and even while I was glorying in relief, I was wondering for the first time whether there wasn’t something rather dreadful about spending Addy’s money. I felt I should keep it for her, somehow—as if she’d be needing it.

  You poor eedjit, what d’you think I left it to you for? And mind you do something exciting with it, too, and don’t just let it dribble away.

  I put the pot roast in the oven early, and David and I spent a restless two hours waiting for the ‘Michelin Man’. Finally I couldn’t keep the poor child hanging on any longer, and reluctantly gave him his supper and put him to bed. I waited another two hours, unable to settle to anything, listening attentively for a car. The oven was turned down to almost off, the living-room fire had had four replenishments of pine-logs and I was getting decidedly sleepy myself, not to say hungry and a bit cross. Perhaps the card was someone’s idea of a joke? Finally I could stand it no longer. I slammed down my book, stamped to the elegantly-laid table and swept one lot of cutlery back in the drawer.

  Right on cue came a double knock on the door.

  I’d heard no car, and there was no question of having missed it as you could always hear them, woomphing and protesting in bottom gear over that last half-mile of pot-holes. Even a cycle could be heard swishing through the puddles, and any light at all on the road shone through the big bow window onto the whitewashed wall opposite. I felt a marked twinge of fear, remembering poor Mrs. Stubbs and her chalk-dusted assailant (‘Like a proper gole he must’ve looked, dear, face and ’ands and clothes all white—but they wasn’t white for long, oh no!’) But there was a chain on the door, and after all, I was expecting someone.

  I went to the door, put the chain on it, and opened it resolutely to its full six inches. Through the gap a hand, a small, strong, familiar hand, snaked in and made a strangler’s gesture that was straight out of a Danziger Brothers B picture. I looked at it, dumbly, for a moment, until that well-remembered voice said plaintively: ‘Well, come on! How can I do you if you don’t let me in?’

  ‘Idiot, idiot!’ I said a moment later, my face turned down against his shoulder and our arms round each other too tightly for normal breathing.

  ‘Who’s an idiot? You don’t mean to stand there and tell me you didn’t know who to expect?’

  ‘How could I?’

  He drew away and looked at me, the blackbird’s face that wasn’t like a blackbird any more wrinkling up with astonishment. ‘You mean there’s somebody else who sends stupid cryptic messages instead of just writing a sensible letter saying “I’m coming”?’ he a
sked on a bleat.

  ‘I thought Dottie?’

  ‘Dottie schmottie.’ He sniffed the pot-roast-scented air. ‘Ah, Bisto! Let’s be ’avin’ it. I’ve walked all the way from the village.’

  ‘But it’s miles!’

  ‘You’re telling me?’

  ‘You’re mad!’

  ‘You’re telling me?’

  He kissed my cheek lingeringly, and then my lips briefly, and looked at me for a moment. His wise bright eyes seemed to take in every detail, seeing my face and what lay behind it with equal ease.

  ‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ he asked, softly but with some surprise. ‘I thought your letters sounded almost too cheerful, but I see now you didn’t lie.’

  ‘I never lie.’

  ‘That’s fairly true, now I come to think of it.’

  ‘It’s not to my credit. I can’t put a brave face on anything. If I’m miserable I show it. As you know.’

  ‘I never did like these noble selfless women who never share anything important like misery,’ he said. ‘It makes a man feel left out in the cold. That’s one thing you never did with me.’ He hugged me again. With each minute that passed I was sinking back deeper and deeper into my love for him. It gave me a panicky feeling. I’d been congratulating myself during the last few months on the completeness with which I had let him go, just when I needed him most—I had felt secretly rather noble and selfless about it, actually. I hadn’t wanted to be an emotional burden to him, just when he was beginning to find his feet as a writer and as a man, so I’d waved him an apparently cheery goodbye and gone off to the country with David, leaving Toby to the rigours of his basement flat in Holland Park and his second novel. We’d written occasionally—brief, terse notes from him, ending always ‘Love, Toby,’ and from me gay, flippant letters which were intended to convey how well I was making out by myself and how free from responsibility he was. It hadn’t been too difficult, because I was happy most of the time, but whenever I got his letters or sat down to write one to him I would remember with poignant clarity those extraordinary weeks of our love in the L-shaped room in Fulham, a love which had sprung on me from behind, so to speak, and then grown and deepened as naturally as roots going into the earth until he was absolutely a fundamental part of my life. At such times I would feel the stretched-elastic tension still there between us, dragging, dragging … and the flippancy and carelessness hadn’t always gone easily onto paper.

  And now here he was, his hands absently slipping up my arms under the sleeves of my cardigan, his eyes watching every tell-tale change of expression on my face. He did not have to look up or down to meet my eyes, in fact if I leant straight forward it was not his lips I kissed, but the tip of his beaky nose. I did it now, from habit, and suddenly he caught his breath and took me in his arms and we stood there in the little tiled hall, oblivious, kissing and kissing …

  ‘I didn’t intend any of this nonsense,’ he said at last, a little gasp audible in his voice. ‘I just came to see you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And to be fed.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Not to resume intimate relations,’ he said severely, like a domestic court magistrate.

  ‘Certainly not. That’s quite understood.’

  We went into the living-room with our arms companionably round each other.

  ‘How lovely and cosy it is here!’ he exclaimed, looking round. ‘What a difference after my place! An open fire, and comfortable armchairs … Gosh, if I’d known there was all this, I’d have overcome my natural reluctance to see you and wished myself onto you ages ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ I heard myself asking.

  He grinned up at me from where he’d crouched in front of the blazing logs.

  ‘I had nothing to show you before,’ he said.

  He reached into his pocket, and brought out a small book with drab paper covers.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, although I knew.

  In the firelight his face was glowing, and all the shadows struck off it so that he looked about sixteen, or even younger, like a thin beaky little boy with tousled black hair and his wrists growing out of his jacket. He held the book up to me, his lips curled up in the tight little grin of pleasure.

  I’d often wondered about the novel he had been struggling to write when we were both living in that bug-run in Fulham. This, then, was it—the finished product of all those months of driving himself against the grain of his own self-confessed indolence, dredging up the wisdom that lay beneath his apparently frivolous nature, and sweating out a style which could not be traced to the despised articles from which he had earned a thin living. It felt strange, almost it gave me a sensual thrill, to hold the solid little blocks of pages in my hands, to riffle through them and see the black streaks flipping past, each streak a word written by Toby, accepted, acknowledged as worth-while and printed by other, unknown men who had set their favourable judgement on his talent.

  I crouched beside him suddenly, hugged his small head in the crook of my arm, and kissed him. I was moved, for a moment, almost to tears of pleasure.

  ‘Do you like the title?’

  I hadn’t looked at it, but now I did. It was Brave Coward.

  ‘Ouch! No.’

  He rose on his knees with a roar. ‘WHAT!? Why the hell not? What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s awful, that’s all. I hate those two-contradictory-word titles, like I hate those the-this-and-the-that ones they’re always using for films.’

  ‘The what and the what? What are you talking about?’

  ‘The-Young-and-the-Squalid, The-Vile-and-the-Sacred, The-Bright-and-the-Brutish.’

  ‘Never heard of them,’ he said blankly, looking at me as if I’d gone mad.

  ‘You know what I mean—titles like that.’

  ‘But Brave Coward isn’t—’

  ‘Toby. Look, what does it matter? It’s a very catchy title—’

  ‘CATCHY!’ he yelled. ‘Christ! It’s not a pop tune! Catchy! The publishers said it was absolutely brilliant.’

  ‘It probably is. I’m probably crazy.’

  ‘There’s no bloody probably about it!’

  ‘Okay, then.’

  ‘Okay!’

  There was a long, ill-tempered silence. He took the proof-copy away from me protectively and pretended to be glancing through it. I could almost see the steam rising from him.

  ‘It’s a marvellous title,’ he mumbled at last.

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  Suddenly he turned round, flung the book aside, and with a loud snarl of frustrated fury threw himself on top of me. I found myself on my back on the hearthrug, having my head bumped against the floor.

  ‘Toby! Let go! Get off my stomach, you’re curdling my milk!’

  ‘Funny place to keep it. Say uncle.’

  ‘Uncle!’

  ‘Say it’s the best title in living memory!’

  ‘“Uncle” is the best title in living memory.’

  ‘Aaargh!’

  He rose in disgust and stood over me, the book in his hand.

  ‘You’re a nice friend!’ he said. ‘I might as well throw the damn thing in the fire as show it to you. I suppose you’ll pick holes in every blasted line!’

  ‘I won’t! I—’

  ‘You won’t, because I’m not going to show it to you!’

  ‘Oh, darling—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I half-think you mean it. You are a baby still.’

  ‘Don’t try me too far! Since you knew me, let me tell you, I’ve become absolutely the most adult adult I know. I’m so mature I had to shave my beard off for fear of it turning white. Is a lioness infantile because she springs to the defence of her cubs, when some crass, callow, invidious, insidious female jackal creeps up and tries to bite their titles off? What do you know about titles, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing, Toby. Let’s forget it.’

  ‘You’re so brilliant, what would you have calle
d it?’

  ‘How can I—’

  ‘Just give me one better one. Anything.’

  ‘The Brave and the Cowardly.’

  He turned away, waving his arms wildly as if invoking God’s aid. Then he spun round, did an elaborate windup like a baseball pitcher, and flung the book straight into the fire.

  For a moment we both remained motionless, paralysed. Then, as one man, we flung ourselves forward. I grabbed the tongs, he the poker, and in a second we had raked the scorched volume out of the wood-ash. Toby sank onto the rug again, and closed his eyes. He’d actually gone pale.

  ‘Are you completely potty?’ I ventured to ask curiously.

  ‘No. I just can’t throw. I meant it to miss.’

  He sank slowly down until he was lying with his head in my lap. I stroked his silky black hair and after a while he began purring softly, as of old.

  ‘I really don’t seem to have grown up much, do I?’ he said humbly at last.

  ‘No, thank God.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When I saw you after that long gap—when Terry fetched you and you came to the L-shaped room, the day I had the baby, and when you came to the hospital afterwards—I could see you’d changed. You were so self-assured. I knew it was a good thing, and yet … I was afraid you’d got too serious, that you’d disciplined the fun out of yourself …’ I leaned down and kissed his mouth upside-down. He reached up to touch my face and said ‘Another thing I haven’t disciplined out of myself is wanting you. You do look funny the wrong way up.’

  ‘Let’s eat, eh?’

  ‘Good God, haven’t we done that yet? I’ve stopped being hungry.’

  ‘That’s temper.’

  ‘It’s not.’ He drew my head down again and kissed me in a special way he had which made my blood beat suddenly and almost painfully upward, like a steep musical crescendo. The effect behind my closed eyelids was as if a mountain had abruptly risen out of a calm sea, lifting me off the surface of things into a rarified isolation, all commonplaces sinking below me into unimportance and oblivion.