The Backward Shadow

  I was much more concerned about how she would manage over there on her own. Once I wouldn’t have thought twice about it; I might rather have worried about how New York would stand up to her impact. Now she was undeniably changed; she was weaker, less sure of herself.

  ‘What will you do over there?’

  ‘I can’t tell you yet. But something will present itself.’ There was a graininess in her voice that reassured me a little. It was important that she felt a strong urge to go; it was the lack of strong urges in her life that had been, for these past weeks, the principle cause of her underlying fear and inability to come to grips with anything.

  I watched her preparations to leave with a heart of solid lead. Glad though I had to be that she had found something she really wanted to do, I could not help crying inwardly after the hopes I had had for her partnership, companionship and help; nor could I completely withstand the terror of being left all on my own to run the business without her. I didn’t in the least see how I could; I would have to find someone else; but at the moment, the mere thought of doing that was as untenable as the thought of re-marriage is to a widow at the funeral.

  And ironically, it was only now that I suddenly saw Dottie doing all the things I had hoped for as far as the shop was concerned. Gradually roused from her lethargy by the notion, and then the definite prospect, of going to New York, she began one day to reorganise everything; she rearranged the displays from top to bottom, saying as she moved about in her old decisive way, ‘Do forgive me, Jane; it’s not that yours aren’t wonderful; but they’re yours, and if I’m ever going to get work in New York I have to be able to show people something that’s mine’ What she was doing, then, was setting things up for professional photographs; and when these were taken, she put her hands on her hips and said, ‘There! Now let’s put it all back the way it was.’ ‘No! Are you crazy?’ I asked. ‘It’s ten times better like this.’ ‘Look, Jane,’ she said quietly. ‘“Us and Them” is yours now. It’s all yours. You can do it, I know you can. Only you must do it in your own way, not by copying me.’ And she forced me to let her put it all back. And that was the last time she ever set foot in the shop.

  She left a week later. She went by boat, the cheapest way possible, in order to save money to live on when she got there. She travelled on an immigrant’s visa so that she could get work. That was the only reason, she said. ‘Good lord, can you see me turning into an American?’ I couldn’t, but if I had been there with her these five years, I would have been able to watch the process; in two more months she is taking out citizenship papers.

  To be brief, then: in American parlance, she made it, and made it good. One might have expected it to be tough at first; but she never looked back. The first week, she got a job in the best shop in town, as a salesgirl in the department which sold English porcelain—it was her accent, she said, which got her the job; but it was her acumen and flair which kept it for her and got her promoted to head of the department inside of a year. Her salary was fabulous by our standards, but the cost of living was enough to devour it all—or would have been; but something happened which meant that most of her income went straight into savings.

  I still have the letter she wrote me when it started—it arrived about eight months after she left England.

  ‘I’ve met someone,’ she wrote, ‘whom it seems a good idea for me to live with. We’ve been sleeping together on and off for quite a while now, and he’s keen that we should set up house together on—well, I was going to say on a permanent basis, but nothing’s ever that, especially not in New York. Why not marry him, did I hear you ask? Well, it’s odd about that. First of all, it’s decidedly odd that such an apparently nice bit of Adam’s-flesh is not married already (he was, of course; every man in America who isn’t a raving queer or a monster—and plenty who are—have been married sometime). So one can’t avoid suspecting a few unpleasant revelations sooner or later. And it’s even odder that he should, as a matter of fact, actually have asked me. But the oddest thing of all, I suppose, is that I’ve refused for the paradoxical reason that I seem to be too old-fashioned in my outlook to get married to a man who tried to persuade me to it by remarking, “What are you worrying about? If it doesn’t work out, we can easily get divorced.” No, don’t be put off him by that, or I’ll be sorry I mentioned it. He’s very sweet, very male (I think, though one’s becoming desperately wary—the heartier they look, the softer can often be the marshmallow centre of their Mom-complexes) and very, very attractive. And there’s another thing. Living alone for a woman in this city is just sheer hell, if only because of the others who are doing it. They are the unhappiest, sickest sisterhood in the whole world … And then there are the wolves that prey on them—on us. Oh yes, yes, there are wolves in England, too. The difference is that over there, they at least have the grace to pretend that you’d be doing them a favour. Here, they make it thoroughly clear that they regard it as the other way round. I’ve never had this feeling of needing to—well, in the old novels they used to call it “placing oneself under a man’s protection”. In order to achieve this nowadays you have to place yourself under him as well, which in the present instance, I must admit, is not the worst part of the bargain. And who knows? One day I might lose my conviction of the impermanence of relationships, and he might lose faith in the all-curing cheap panacea of divorce … Till then, we will each have someone to come home to. My God, aren’t I picking up American! Soon you’ll hear me drawling (or drooling) about Mrs. Wagner’s pies and those that pray together stay together.’

  My first reaction to this letter was, that it was a vindication of Henry and his rigorous refusal to make love to Dottie. I had thought until then that he had been wrong; especially when I saw, after his death, that Dottie could hardly have been more deeply involved either way than she was, nor could her reaction to his death have been more violent. Yet the relative speed of her recovery—well under a year—proved to me, knowing her as well as I did, that Henry had been right after all.

  Bill turned out to be more than a passing refuge. Their relationship developed as these things ought to, slowly and steadily, and now I’m convinced from her more recent letters that they will get married one of these days; ‘I can’t go on all my life being satisfied with godmotherhood-by-remote-control.’

  As for her professional life, it is blooming. About two years ago she and Bill, who is a designer and graphic artist, pooled their joint financial resources and ‘leaked’, as she put it, ‘drop by drop into the interior decorating business.’ First a poorish friend’s old house; then a richer friend’s new house; then the flat of someone who wasn’t a friend but had seen one of the other interiors they’d done. Then it snowballed; they had to take on an office, an assistant; in no time at all, Dottie was flying round as of old, making her proverbial ‘contacts’ over an ever-growing area which, when I last heard, stretched from Buffalo to Martha’s Vineyard. ‘It’s a somewhat larger beat than Surrey,’ she remarked dryly. ‘At this rate I’ll soon need my own aeroplane.’ It would never surprise me to hear she’d got one.

  And a few months ago, she mailed me a cheque for the exact equivalent of four hundred pounds …

  As for myself, I’ve managed. More than that it would be difficult to claim. David is six, and sturdy, and sweet, and sound as a bell—so far. The shop is a going concern; it is still partly thanks to Dottie, whose long arm appears from time to time in the form of imported handicrafts from places like Nantucket—all a little weird; wall-hangings made of string, table-tops of concrete with the bottoms of bottles embedded in it, or strange musical toys called ‘whimmy-diddles’ which make marvellous conversation-pieces but which nobody can play. They add an exotic note to the displays, but they sell better in London, where people’s tastes are more eccentric and less practical. Another way Dottie still participates is by sending me rich and glamorous transatlantic customers. Many’s the travellers cheque that has dropped into the till from some bejewelled hand, into which, earlier, Dot
tie had pressed one of our flamboyant cards, with which I keep her well-supplied. ‘I forget where we picked this up, but whoever gave it to us was most insistent that we should pay you a visit …’ And Jo and I exchange knowing smiles.

  Ah yes—Jo. Well, Jo is my partner. After Ted died, which he did about a year and a half after Henry, Jo, who had always kept in touch, but sporadically, because of Ted’s long illness, simply arrived one day with her station-wagon loaded with stuff and Amanda bound into the front seat with a safety belt. Jo looked older, and richer, and at the same time, softer. ‘Ted’s dead,’ she said shortly, and turned her eyes away. ‘No, don’t say anything. Lots of people thought I married him for this moment … He’s dead, and Amanda and I are on our tod and we can’t stick it, either of us. We miss him so bloody much, it’s unbelievable … Can we stay with you for a bit? Amanda can muck in with David, I’ve brought her a bed, and I’m prepared to sleep on the floor.’

  Real desperation had broken up all her smooth, well-groomed, self-contained lines. I wasn’t such a stranger to her feelings and situation that I could fail to make her welcome. Amanda ‘mucked in’ admirably; she’s a bit older than David, but at 3 that really didn’t count for much, and she was just what he needed. The very day after they arrived, we began to make plans. The kids would go off to the local play-school; I’d been meaning to send David, but he hadn’t seemed keen. However, Amanda had been going for half a year, and soon convinced him that life without a play-school was unthinkable. Jo came down to the shop, moved her hands and eyes lovingly all over everything, and then said, ‘Why don’t I be your assistant?’ I stared at her. It seemed too good to be true! This chic, effectual creature, so alive, so attractive, was the next-best thing to Dottie that I could conceive of. ‘If you have any doubts about meaning that,’ I said cautiously, ‘you’d better take it back, before I chain you up.’

  Within a few months, it was all fixed and working like a charm. She was too wise to settle down in the cottage, although it was perfectly pleasant and workable while it lasted, and we were both so damned lonely at the time that I was tempted to implore her to stay on. But she bought a house not far away; we did it up between us and she and Amanda moved into it. We saw each other daily, and the kids became—and have remained—great friends. They are currently engaged to be married, and are planning a wedding trip to Africa in David’s toy helicopter to bring back animals, including two mature alligators (‘to eat people with’) and a boa-constrictor.

  After a year, when I saw that she was serious and not merely seeking a temporary palliative, I asked Jo to go into partnership. Since then money has more or less ceased to be a worry, as far as the shop is concerned, and we’ve been able to expand. When Mr. Stephens died, Mrs. Stephens went into an old people’s home, and the shattered remains of the post office came on the market. Jo went out one morning and bought it—just like that. She actually came home at lunchtime with a bag of groceries, from which she took various things, saying as she did so, ‘Here’s the peanut butter, and the jam, and the sponge, and the bacon, oh, and I’ve bought the post office too.’ I jibbered a bit at first, I didn’t see how we could handle anything as big as the shop would now be; but it was a variation on Parkinson’s Law; as soon as we’d moved into it we started wondering where the hell we’d squeezed everything in before. Of course it all took time; the whole front had to be rebuilt and combined with our building. It was another year before the new frontage was ready, with a fanlight door in the middle, the ‘Us’ on the left, the ‘Them’ on the right, and the ‘and’ curving round the top of the fanlight. I took endless colour slides of it to send to Dottie, and she wrote back saying, ‘I can’t say much except smarm. The fact is, I’m nearly sick with something that feels very like jealousy. But good luck to you both … Don’t forget I started it.’

  One of the ambiguous beauties of half-combining my family with Jo’s is that both are fatherless. In many ways, of course, at least one man about the place could be a boon to us both, and we have often discussed the desirability of one of us marrying someone whom both of us could exploit, not sexually of course, but as a general injector of masculinity into the children’s surroundings. But no such person has appeared, though Jo has had several near-misses and even I have had a few offers—three to be exact—one David hated, and one Jo hated, and the third the others quite took to, but I couldn’t stand him, so that was that.

  But in actual fact, it has helped with David—the fact of Amanda not having a father either. It definitely postponed the dreaded hour when he asked the inevitable question, to an age where it was somewhat easier to give him an explanation which held water with him and was not too far removed from the truth. It came up at last when he was going on four, and had seriously begun visiting round among the other children at his kindergarten. It came out quite straight, just the way I’d spent four years imagining it, and I had my answer ready:

  ‘Why haven’t I got a daddy?’

  ‘You have one.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He lives a long way away.’

  ‘Why? Why isn’t he with us?’

  ‘Because he and Mummy aren’t married.’

  He didn’t understand this, but accepted it for a while, though he asked the same series of questions several more times later. Then came:

  ‘What does my daddy look like?’

  I had a picture of Terry when we were in a play together, long ago, and I showed him that. Terry looked very nice in it, tall and thin and handsome in his ‘gorgeous juve’ make-up; the weak mouth and hands didn’t show. David spent a long time looking at it; my heart bled, but I stood it because I knew it was just, and in any case only the very beginning.

  ‘Is he good?’ he asked then.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Later: ‘Will I see him ever?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Far away.’

  ‘Why does he never come?’

  ‘He’s very busy. Maybe he’ll come one day.’ What would he think if he knew I had put Terry off coming, right at the start—that Terry didn’t even know our address? He might think that was the worst part of what I had done. Terry couldn’t reach us even if he wanted to.

  It was when David had asked, in that same plaintive voice, ‘Why does he never come?’ for about the sixth time, that I began to realise, belatedly, that Terry would have to come. I wouldn’t have believed that all the pathetic little questions in the world could have brought me to think such a thing, but one cannot conceive in advance of what it does to one’s personal inclinations and resolutions to have one’s child ask that kind of question in that kind of voice.

  ‘Amm’s daddy’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is my daddy dead?’

  ‘No, I think he’s in Paris.’

  ‘Paris is far away, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pretty far.’

  ‘In the distance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s not as far as being dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will Amm see her daddy one day?’

  ‘No, darling.’

  ‘But I will, won’t I?’

  ‘Maybe. I can’t promise.’

  I knew nothing about Terry’s life. It was five years since I had heard anything of him. I put off any decision about contacting him for the very reasonable reason that I didn’t know how to. But in the end, the questions, gentle, repetitive, persistent, grew too much for me. I rang up his old office, to ask—just to enquire. I didn’t give a name. He’d left that firm, and moved to another. I put off ringing them for another couple of weeks, and then I had to try again.

  ‘Does Terence Boyden work there?’

  ‘One moment please.’

  A click, a pause: then, incredibly, shockingly, Terry’s voice:

  ‘Hallo?’

  It was too easy. Too sudden. I nearly hung up. I sat like a fool for moments with him saying ‘Hallo? Hallo?’
Then I said:

  ‘Hallo, Terry. It’s Jane.’

  It was now his turn to retreat into shaken silence.

  ‘I’ve been—half expecting you to call. How is he?’

  ‘Very well. He wants to see you.’

  ‘I’ll come. Don’t worry. You can’t imagine …’

  ‘It’s all right, there’s no raging hurry—’

  ‘Isn’t there? I’ll be down tomorrow evening.’

  ‘The week-end’s time enough.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to come?’

  I had to be honest. ‘It’s David who wants it, not me.’

  He was hurt, I could tell; the little-boyishness was still there, unattractive in a grown man, yet affecting.

  ‘Well … I’ll come whenever you tell me.’

  ‘Come Saturday. That’ll give me time to prepare him.’ And myself, I thought.

  He suddenly said, ‘By the way, I’m married.’

  ‘Oh?’ It was no sort of shock or surprise, at first I couldn’t see how it could matter. ‘Well, so long as you don’t bring her. That would be a bit too much to explain.’

  ‘To her, too,’ he said, with a little unexpected dryness in his voice.

  ‘Doesn’t she know?’

  ‘No, she damn well doesn’t.’

  This was an appalling complication.

  ‘Listen, Terry. Maybe you’d better not. David can get along without seeing you. You’re liable to get into very hot water if you don’t watch out.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish. One afternoon—’

  ‘If that’s all it’s going to be, much better not to come at all.’

  ‘Were you thinking I was going to come regularly?’

  I paused to think. ‘I’m not sure … perhaps. The where’s-daddy-why-doesn’t-he ever-come bit wore me down at last past the point of coherent thought. But I honestly think it would be stupid for you just to appear once and vanish into the haze again forever.’