The Backward Shadow

  We were on our knees one morning, re-waxing the floor after laboriously cleaning it. I was a little ahead, applying the wax, and Henry was crawling along after me, concentratedly, steadily rubbing back and forth along the planks, working with the grain. Dottie was off somewhere ordering replacements. David was there, I remember, sitting in a corner of the bow-window, making a tower out of broken pieces of ceramics. I was so bloody tired I could scarcely keep moving, and I had to keep my eyes fixed on the floor in front of me because any time I looked up and around and saw the state everything was still in I just felt like lying down on my stomach and crying my eyes out. It’s hard to explain how I felt about it. It was almost as if the state of the shop represented the state of my own life, to whit utterly squalid with disorder and mess and confusion, and to have that condition prevailing both inwardly and in my surroundings was just too much.

  Suddenly I heard Henry stop rubbing and I turned round and saw him get up slowly and go and sit on a chair which happened to be in the middle of the room.

  ‘Henry?’

  ‘It’s all right, don’t fuss. I’ll start again in a minute. I’m entitled to take a break, after all we’re not in the bloody Union. Besides, I’m a dying man.’ I sat on the floor stupefied, not so much by what he’d said as by a sudden agonising realisation that if Toby, funny, wise, darling Toby, had been mortally ill, he, too, would have made jokes about it in just that tone. I remembered that Dottie had first started to be in love with Henry the night that I had made the startling discovery that the two men had the same sense of humour. Perhaps my loves—the one that was going to finish and the one that was stealthily beginning—began their overlap at the same moment.

  ‘Let’s both have a break—I’m just about whacked. I’ll make some coffee.’

  ‘Tea for me.’

  ‘Okay. Want some milk, David?’

  ‘Na,’ he said scathingly, which meant that he did.

  I brewed up in the kitchen at the back. My mind was a blank of weariness, but I was conscious of a deep pull towards Henry, an aching desire to go to him where he sat motionless in the middle of the ruined shop and embrace him, warm him, recover him somehow, drag him back up the steep hill … I made his tea and took it in to him, and it seemed that it was an effort for him even to raise his hand to take it.

  ‘Henry, this is ridiculous. You mustn’t go on working like this.’

  ‘Oh, what’s the odds? A bit longer, a bit shorter … one can’t opt out just for the sake of a few extra weeks or months.’

  I had no answer for this but to put my arm round him. I felt the empty eye of advance grief opening up inside me like a lens. He said, ‘No, don’t do that.’ I took my arm away, stung. ‘And don’t do that, either—don’t be hurt. Don’t be hurt! I don’t want anybody to be hurt.’

  ‘I do love you, Henry,’ I said. It was the only time.

  He sighed deeply without looking at me. ‘It makes you wonder, you know. You say you love me, Dorothy I know loves me although in a quite different way, Joanna gives me funny long looks … When I was healthy and thought I had a future, do you think any woman of the calibre of you three would have looked at me twice? Well, I don’t know, maybe they would, but they didn’t. Now it all seems such a waste, such a nuisance. I don’t want anybody to be hurt,’ he repeated harshly. He took my hand and squeezed it roughly, still without turning his head. ‘Not you, not anybody. Let my old Dad cry for me, let him do the funeral honours—that’ll be enough. Look, I’m damn sorry for what happened—you know, that night. My fault. I got taken short with a sharp attack of temps perdu. But that’s no excuse. Forget it.’

  ‘I don’t want to. It was too important to me.’

  ‘Try. Be a good girl. I can’t help wondering what would happen if they let condemned criminals loose to wander about for the last few weeks or so before they topped ’em. They’d probably be killed in the rush.’

  ‘Henry, I really can’t let you go on thinking that I—that we only love you out of some sort of morbid—’

  ‘It must have something to do with it! I mean it’s obvious. Look at me. I ask you. Just look.’ I looked, and he did something amazingly funny to his face—as if by tightening a few muscles he had subtly turned it into its own caricature. It was an exaggeration of all the features that Dottie had once said made him ‘funny-looking’. ‘I’ve got a face like the Idris lemon,’ he said plaintively. ‘You think I don’t know? I have to shave the damn thing every day!’

  There’s nothing worse than being forced to laugh in the very midst of despair, to laugh aloud at the object of one’s love and grief. I didn’t understand this until much later; I didn’t understand why the laugh I gave was so painful. I learnt it with Dottie at his funeral … but I’m jumping ahead. All my memories of that time are telescoped now; the laugh I gave then, Dottie’s laugh at the funeral—all are jumbled together under the huge black memory-shadow of his death.

  Anyway, that was all there was to my intimacy with Henry. That laugh, the sudden tears that followed it interrupted by David spilling his milk … that was its sum and its finale. Short, deep, permanent in its effects, like a stab wound. And the terrible thing is, I suppose I shall never know whether he was right—whether my knowledge that he was going to die did have anything to do with it. On the other hand, does it matter? The memory, the loss, the dull, accepted ache, are facts.

  Very soon after the brief episode in the shop—a matter of only a week or so, I think—Henry found he couldn’t go on working and took to his bed. He said he was very sorry, but he was just too tired. We should have been relieved that the anxiety of watching him doing things that were a strain and very dangerous for him had been removed; but that he had given in was frightening. It also doubled our work, for as well as cleaning and scrubbing, buying and selling (for Dottie had insisted upon ‘business as usual’ after the first couple of days) we now had to go in turns over to Henry’s flat to take care of him. But before long, Joanna appeared on the scene. ‘This situation is absurd,’ she said crisply. She brooked no argument, but simply packed Henry’s suitcase and bore him away in her car. ‘I shall be able to look after him better than you can, with the shop and everything,’ she said firmly. I saw her and Dottie exchange a long, straight look, and then Dottie nodded. That night when we crawled home from our day’s work, Dottie drank whisky until it put her to sleep. It was the only time I’ve ever seen her drunk, and then you wouldn’t have known it wasn’t just exhaustion. She sat in front of the fire, steadily drinking, and I suddenly seemed to catch her thoughts as if they were floating through the air between us: The shop comes first. Or perhaps it was just what I would have been thinking, in her place; for she could always have just given up the shop and devoted all her time to Henry, and she hadn’t, and couldn’t, and what sort of person did that make her, in her own eyes?

  She came to terms with it, as I suppose we always do with whatever is wrong with us. Every few days she would go over to see him and tell him the latest news. These visits were hell for her. Of course she didn’t say so, but the strain of them told on her. After one of them she would come back so plunged in depression that it seemed impossible to pull her out of it. But she was extraordinarily resilient. If she could bring herself to lie down on the floor and romp with David for ten minutes, or if she had work to do in the evening, even paper-work, connected with the shop, she would make a fairly quick recovery. But this resilience too, had its negative side, because it troubled her conscience that she could so quickly become lively and ‘happy’ again. Once I remember she caught herself laughing and talking baby-talk to David while he was having his bath, and she stopped suddenly and said in a subdued voice, ‘I’m rubber. I’m not flesh and blood at all. What’s the matter with me?’ And she ran away from David quickly as if he menaced her somehow.

  Sometime early in September I had a letter from Billie Lee, asking me to come up to London to see her. I assumed it was something to do with the imminent publication in America of Addy’s boo
k, about which I had heard nothing for ages, yet there was something indefinable in the tone of the letter which gave me a vague hint of what was actually coming.

  It was very inconvenient just then to take a day off, and if I had not had this strange feeling that Billie wanted to talk to me about some personal matter, which could only be concerned with Toby, I would have telephoned her instead of going up. But as it was, I got Dottie to drop me off at the station on her early way to work and took the train up to town.

  Billie received me with singular warmth, remarking what a lot of weight I had lost and asking after David and the shop with great solicitude. She gave me a tulip-glass of excellent sherry and came round to sit with me on my side of her big desk in the smart office lined with the colourful jackets of her clients’ books. When I asked, she said oh yes, that my aunt’s book was coming out the following month—there’d been a slight delay due to a printer’s strike in New York—was I still planning to go over there? No? Pity in a way, the publishers were exceptionally nice ‘guys’ and would have been glad to entertain me … I suppose she saw from my bleak expression that I didn’t want to hear more in this strain for she quickly let it drop and we sat for a while chatting rather strainedly about this and that … There was, I noticed, a large portrait-frame on her desk with its back to me, well within my reach. My hand moved several times of its own volition to turn it round and look into the face of Whistler, but I always drew it back.

  At last I decided that even this rather mannish, efficient woman could do with a little help, so I said, ‘How’s your daughter these days?’ She gave a little quick cough, as if of surprise, and set her glass down with a click on the desk. ‘Melissa?’ she asked, though I knew she had only the one. ‘Oh—she’s—fine. Very well. You knew she’s on the point of getting engaged?’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘You did know?’

  ‘I suppose I did, in a way.’

  ‘To—er …’

  ‘Toby. Yes, I know.’

  There was a pause. She tapped her beige-polished fingernails on the desk and her charm-bracelets shivered with a gentle clinking sound. Her acquiline profile was turned to me. She looked softer and less garish now that fashion had decreed a more natural look in make-up and her lips were not so violently red, though her hair still was, rather brighter if anything than before.

  ‘Look here,’ she said at last. ‘I have to—I mean, I’ve been needing to talk to somebody who knows him. I don’t know at all how you feel about all this. I know you were fond of him at one time.’ She paused, but I said nothing, so she went on. ‘He’s very talented—there is that about it. And funny, and charming. I like him a lot myself. The only thing is …’ She paused, glanced at me, and looked away again. ‘The only thing is, he strikes me as sort of—unsubstantial. I don’t know if that’s really the right word. Unsolid, somehow—lightweight. What I mean is—she’s only 17. I don’t have to agree to her marrying yet. I could make them wait.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  ‘God, I’m not sure! Perhaps because I don’t feel certain she would. She loves me and we’re close, but—she’s absolutely mad about him, she wants him, she thinks of nothing else, the—the sex thing is pulling her apart … God, Jane,’ she said suddenly, ‘you’re lucky to have a son and not a daughter! You can’t conceive how difficult it is to be a parent nowadays! The bombardment! That’s what I call it. They’re bombarded, day and night, from every side—hoardings, books, television of course, plays and films and newspapers and friends’ conversations twenty-times-of-course … there’s no escaping it … To be seventeen and lovely and a virgin is absolutely unheard-of, the pressure to do something about it is too strong for any young personality to withstand, especially when … Well, he is attractive, little and thin and all as he is, even I can see that. The question is, would I rather she got safely married to him, even though I’m not sure how reliable he would be in the long run, or have an affair with him that can be got out of?’ She sighed from her depths and lit a cigarette. ‘You see? Even I’m affected by the bombardment. I couldn’t have dreamed of such a thing ten years ago—my own daughter! But now it’s irresistible, the very air’s contaminated with this—moral looseness. Even my generation begins to latch on to the current solutions, the notion that self-control is non-existent, that passion is ipso facto irresistible, purity an encumbrance and an anachronism.’ She began to walk slowly up and down the room, her short sharp heels making little dents in the mustard coloured carpet. After a long while she looked at me, and with a wry half-smile. ‘Sorry, stranger,’ she said. ‘It’s only because you know him—so much better than I do. Tell me. Can I trust her to him?’

  The irony of all this—that I should be in a position of with-holding or giving a reference to Toby as a potential husband—struck me very forcibly. Toby’s image for me was, at that time, overlayed by my feelings for Henry, though the two have sorted themselves out since into two distinct and very different patterns. But listening to Billie talk about him forced me to bring him out of obscurity and look back at him over the gulf of undeserved hatred that I had dug to separate me from my desire for him. And now, in all honesty, I could only think what a very fortunate person Whistler was, I could only feel a sort of stifled impatience, almost anger, against Billie for not realising it, not appreciating him, my Toby …

  ‘He could have seduced her, you know. Any time he’d wanted to,’ I said.

  She stopped pacing abruptly and looked at me, her face turning a bright mottled pink, which clashed with her hair and gave her a very unpleasant appearance. Her thin nervous hands clenched and for a moment I thought she was going to be furious with me, but she was too fair in the long run to allow the truth to sting her into more than momentary anger. After a moment her colour receded and she sat down again with her cigarette twisting in and out between her fingers.

  ‘That’s true,’ she said flatly. ‘That’s perfectly true. And he hasn’t. I’m sure of that.’

  She sat for a long moment in silence, and then looked at me and smiled thinly. ‘Well, thank you. I suppose you’ve given me the only kind of recommendation that I could have accepted. Once it would have meant nothing at all, for a thirty-year-old man not to have seduced an innocent seventeen-year-old girl who loved him. Anyone who did, would have been a bastard. Now anyone who doesn’t is either an idiot, a eunuch or a saint.’ She laughed. ‘He’s certainly not the first two, so we must give him the benefit of the doubt and presume that he’s nearer to the third.’

  Being in London was painful, somehow. I’d planned to do a lot of things while I was up, including going to Father’s house to make sure his tenants were looking after the place properly, as he’d asked me to do before leaving for Spain; and perhaps going to visit John. But the conversation about Toby had disturbed me too much to let me do anything more which brought memories into sharper focus. I did go to John’s place, mainly because I felt so vulnerable myself that I could wince from imagining how hurt he would be if he knew I’d come up to town without going to see him. Not that he would have found out, but still … I was relieved to find he was out. By day, that house, which had once been my refuge, seemed unrelievedly squalid and it smelt of human uneasiness. The same children who had shouted after me that morning were playing on the steps again. They weren’t thin or anything but none of their clothes seemed to fit, they were grubby and their eyes were distrustful as they looked up at me. I have never hated my times as Dottie did, and as Billie seemed to; but the look in those black children’s faces was the look of them-and-us which gave me a feeling compounded of guilty conscience, resentment and even fear. I left a note behind the broken door of John’s letter-box in the hall and got away quickly.

  I was actually at the station when I thought of Heal’s. It came to me quite suddenly and I stood stock still in front of W. H. Smith’s and thought about it. There was nothing on earth I wanted more at that moment than to do something that would help Dottie and give her a lift. The blunders I?
??d made in the past vis-à-vis the shop still weighed heavily on my conscience and I wanted desperately, too, to please Henry—though the last time I had been over to see him he had looked so ill and seemed so listless that I had fleeting, stifled doubts whether even a fillip for the shop would have power to rouse him to anything like his old enthusiasm. However, as I considered it I remembered that I had all the cuttings and several brochures with me. The cuttings I had wanted to show Billie (but had forgotten), the brochures were advertisements and a handout that I had in the bottom of my shopping-basket after a visit to the printers. I took stock of my personal appearance, which usually left almost everything to be desired, though Dottie insisted I dress smartly when I was serving in the shop; but today I had outfitted myself carefully for my interview with Billie; one always armours oneself for encounters containing the potential of emotional uncertainty. I looked all right

  I left the station, knowing I was missing the only train for two hours, and got a bus to Tottenham Court Road. Once in Heal’s exquisite entrance hall, surrounded by sights of sweet perfection and the odours of seasoned wood and dressed cloth, I was assailed with misgivings. Business people don’t just arrive for important interviews without an appointment, surely? Besides, looking about at that great store it seemed hard to imagine they would be impressed by anything we had to offer. But words of Dottie’s came back to me: ‘Some of our stuff is as good as anything anywhere.’ I looked around again, and saw that it was so—I had nothing to be ashamed of. I found my way to the business manager’s office and requested an interview.