Down in the City (22 page)

‘Hardly,' David smiled. ‘Everyone believes in the pacifist ideal—up to a point, and especially women—but no one practises it, and for very good reasons. I wonder if you do realise all that it would imply?'

‘That's a bit tough, isn't it?' Clem rebuked him mildly, looking from one to the other. ‘If he understood you at all, Marion, he would know that you are not a woman to make such a statement without knowing what you mean.'

‘Thank you, Clem. I could defend myself, but I think I won't. I doubt if David is open to persuasion.'

‘Perhaps not. But I apologise,' David said. ‘You surprised me. I respect your opinion on all kinds of things, Marion, but you haven't often come out with anything that's surprised me as much as this.'

She smiled at him as if she could believe this.

‘What do you suppose Stan Peterson was doing during the war?' Angela murmured.

Hector put his glass on the table by his side. ‘I envy you two your cellar.'

‘Cellar!' David exclaimed. ‘You know very well that it's a small cupboard—all too small. However,' he admitted, ‘it has its beauties.'

As Clem refilled the glasses Marion thought that whatever were the merits of the liquid he poured, the effect had been a blessed loosening of tension. There had been forgetfulness of guilt on David's part, regret on Hector's; Angela was more animated; Clem looked less tired, while she herself, remembering Esther, hoped with more hope that a lapse of time would end misunderstandings.

‘Angela, dear, and boys,' she said, when Clem had finished, ‘I don't want to rush you through to the dining room, but you know Mrs Ramsay. I don't know what will happen if we allow her special efforts for us to wither in front of her eyes…'

As they left the room, carrying their glasses carefully, smiling and relaxed, Esther arrived at the front door of her flat.

It seemed to her that she had been hailed by at least six people on the way upstairs, and now, in sight of peace, here was Rachel standing dumbly at the door waiting for her; standing alone in the long, quiet passageway, turning anxious eyes on her.

Hiding her instinctive withdrawal, resignedly holding herself firm, she said coolly, ‘Hello, Rachel. Were you coming to see me?' She fitted the key in the lock.

‘Yes. I'd just rung the bell when I heard you coming upstairs. I saw the garage was empty and I thought I'd come up. I…'

‘Then come in,' Esther said, holding the door open for her. ‘Stan probably won't be home for hours.'

Her tone was not uncordial, but still Rachel hesitated in the doorway. ‘I only meant to stay for a little while,' she said awkwardly, ‘but you've been out…If you're tired or anything I'll just go…'

There was a silence and Rachel's embarrassment increased; she felt enormous with embarrassment. Esther repeated quietly, ‘Come in,' and Rachel went forward, walking gingerly on the balls of her feet, as if by treading lightly and noiselessly she might give less offence.

Esther waved her through to the sitting room while she went to change her clothes. She called that there were some American magazines on the little table or somewhere in the room, and would she like to amuse herself with them for five minutes.

Obediently taking the suggestion as an order, Rachel picked up one and began to flip the pages over. Smooth glossy paper. A three-decker cake thick with chocolate icing, brightly yellow and brown, loomed three-dimensionally for a second and was overturned. All the best people wear these watches, smoke these cigarettes, wear these furs, clean their houses with these vacuum cleaners…

Faster and faster her hand turned the pages and then it stopped altogether. She had to think. It was wasted effort, time, to pretend when there was no one to deceive. She had to think. Her heart was pounding with alarm as she asked herself yet again how she was to prevent Esther from listening to Mrs Maitland. It was for this reason that she had come tonight, but now that she was here nothing seemed possible. Hopelessly she thought that Laura's silence was the only solution, and she knew that she could achieve nothing there.

Behind her, venetian blinds which had been lowered earlier in the day against the sun rocked unevenly in the wind and tapped on the window frame. Rachel jerked her head at the noise, and as she did she thought of Stan and her heart leapt. Could she warn him? Catch him before he came in? Face him? Tell him? She knew that she could not. Hearing Esther's footsteps in the hall she hastily reopened the magazine.

They both smiled formally and started a scrappy conversation while Esther cooked an egg and made some coffee. She said that she thought Pauline and Bob looked well after their holiday; she had called in to see them in the morning. Stan wanted to have a game with Bob on Saturday if he wasn't booked up. He would go down to ask him tonight sometime. There was a new dress on the bed that Rachel might like to see. Was she sure she wouldn't have anything to eat or drink? Oh. If she had finished dinner as recently as that…

Their eyes met just as often as politeness made necessary and Rachel, stricken by a thought that only her perturbation had excluded for so long, began to find even these few encounters unbearable.

What if she seemed like a kind of blackmailer, coming up without being asked—a thing she'd never done before—as if she wanted to see what was going on, sure that she wouldn't be turned out because of what she'd seen and heard that night? What if that was what Esther thought?

Common sense said in its literal voice that a single call, several weeks after the event, scarcely amounted to spying or any kind of blackmail. And where was the benefit to her? What was the payment? She wasn't a heart-eater. A heart-eater? No, but still…

When Esther asked about Luigi—How was he? How had his family settled down?—Rachel was too unnerved to feel at all outraged that he should be the subject of a perfunctory inquiry. She knew that this was the end, too. No more could be said. His name came as her dismissal. The inquiry asked, Esther's duty was done.

‘I'd better go,' she said shrilly. ‘I only meant to stay for a few minutes.'

Her persistence in staying, the futility of intentions—these, and Esther's quiet dignity—cut into the girl's conscience. To Rachel it seemed now that all the trust of the world was to be betrayed, that some kind of innocence, to which she could not aspire, was to be shattered. She felt accused of all things bad. She was ashamed for herself and Laura, for Stan and the woman, whoever she was.

She turned to go but Esther stopped her. ‘I didn't mean to be unpleasant in the car, Rachel, or to—'

‘You weren't.'

‘I think I was, but I'm sorry. I've been on edge—not feeling well—but it's no excuse. I hoped you would understand. And poor Stan…'

Rachel nodded vigorously at the floor. They walked slowly to the door.

‘Are you going to be busy on Saturday?'

‘I'm meeting Luigi at one. I'm not doing anything in the morning, though.'

‘That was what I meant, really. I wondered if you'd like to come for a swim while Stan's playing golf? Don't say yes unless you'd like to…Along to the pool.'

‘But I
would
like to,' Rachel smiled, and relinquishing all responsibility, prayed that Laura would change her mind. ‘What time should I be ready?'

Esther frowned suddenly and gave an exclamation. ‘Oh! I'd forgotten. Laura phoned today and asked me down on Saturday morning for coffee.'

Once again Rachel was conscious of the beating of her heart. ‘Phoned?' she echoed. So it's all arranged. Fixed.

‘Yes. I am sorry.' Esther smiled a little at Rachel's expression and thought how young she was.

‘Forget it!' she said with a nervous, reckless laugh. ‘Don't go! She'll only want to gossip and you don't enjoy it much, do you?'

‘I don't see how I can get out of it now. I should have remembered before I spoke. I am sorry, pet. Perhaps
next
week? What do you say? And I won't make any more appointments to gossip with Laura till we've fixed it?' She looked at Rachel kindly, her tone softening as she saw how strangely crestfallen she seemed.

On the stairs Rachel passed Stan. She hardly noticed him until he said, ‘If you weren't so gloomy you wouldn't be a bad-looking girl.'

Then, automatically, she stretched her mouth, but he had gone, racing upstairs two at a time. The door banged and he was home. Home early.

‘Est?…Est?' he shouted and she went to meet him, hearing something in his voice that made her wonder, doubt. How are we now? Where do we stand?

She stopped before she reached him. ‘Hello?' She waited to see if she had been mistaken. ‘Washing up,' she said, holding her rubber-gloved hands towards him.

‘Hello, pet,' he said, and found that he could not control his voice. They looked at each other for a long time.

Stan said, ‘It lasted too long, didn't it, Est? Didn't it, baby?' He drew her into his arms with a suppressed groan. ‘What was it all about? Do you know? It's been hell, hasn't it? Why do we do these things to ourselves?'

Why they should have come together now without words or effort when other agonisingly rehearsed scenes had only hardened the strain between them, she did not know. But even as she felt his hands and mouth, part of her mind took up his question, recoiling, almost fearful that he could ask it. Took up his question, but for half a second only, and then she closed her eyes.

That night after he left her she lay in the darkness falling in and out of sleep, consciousness ebbing, reaching a prescribed extremity and flowing back. It was late. The surrounding flats were silent; there was an occasional street scuffle, half mechanical, half human, but apart from that—nothing. A small room, a silver moon caught in a silver mirror, two figures humped in two narrow beds, each conscious that the other was awake.

Even Stan sensed, though less acutely than Esther, the current that seemed to flow between them, but both missed the universal nature of the link in a way that the Maitlands, who called themselves an ordinary couple, did not. The Maitlands knew themselves to be of unusual excellence as partners, gave themselves first place on the list of happy marriages, but allowed that there might be others, different in degree perhaps, but not in kind. Esther saw herself and Stan as unique; their union losing nothing for being dangerous and dark at times; and Stan walked his own mind, a distorted giant, and viewed his wife, his closest tie, through the same untruthful glass.

Now, he allowed his thoughts to drift to Esther with satisfaction and a powerful beating of his heart, with some regret, with humility and a few aspirations. Est was very happy now, he thought, and so was he. The situation was under control. Comfortably swaddled in well being, he moved on to the new job that occupied most of his working hours. Another dollar job. Those damned restrictions, he murmured lovingly. Oh, those restrictions. There was a definite warmth in his veins when he thought of them. The shadows of his associates on the job moved before his eyes; faces and names and voices that knew when to be discreet; fellows who could be found in any one of half a dozen pubs, who lived nowhere, with no one, and had no lives but the one he saw. That was the proper way, too. Not like the old days when they were all pals on and off duty. But still good boys, he thought. All good boys as long as you watched them.

And Vi, he thought after a while. Good old Vi. He would see her at the weekend. He was getting sleepy again, sinking, drifting, and the thought of Vi went down to sleep with him, sucked down into his mind like a broken ship to the seabed. He slept.

Esther knew at once. She turned on the pillows and looked across the room but his face was in shadow. She heard his steady breathing. She lay with one arm trailing over the edge of the low divan and her fingers, uncurling, stretched out towards him as she looked, as if to call him back to consciousness.

Circumstance had bent her head, compelled her to see what she would not. Unwilling, she had acquiesced and agreed to see as many facts as she must: facts which left her not unhopeful, which brought with them a new and adult arrangement of beliefs. They brought, too, a tightening of her obsessive passion.

I know him better than he knows himself, she thought. These bad weeks are over, and already he has forgotten them. These nights and nights that made me want to die—a blank to him. Poor Stan—lucky Stan. But who could want him to remember?

She knew that if he had gone back to look for causes he would have blamed David, told her to think of their ruined plans. The miserable series of personal disasters that had followed their meeting could be attributed only to David. It would seem natural and manly to Stan that he should have reacted as he had, drinking and raging until stomach and brain rebelled.

She had come to see Stan's personality as one so precariously balanced on his desperate need for universal admiration, that criticism, however just, from anyone he deemed superior, plunged him from normality to a state where pride was burned and thought and feeling ran molten. After long ages and a period of forgetfulness he came back, and all was as it had been before.

Half sleeping, she looked across at him again and was content. She felt that whatever either of them was, with the help of the other, all would be well.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Heavy pounding rain fell from a summer sky that had lately been a harsh bright blue; now thick clouds chugged and swirled in the low darkness. The hollow crack of rolling thunder was past, but the rain still pelted down, a solid wall of water.

Though the air inside was warm and sticky, Laura shivered suddenly in a draught and sent Anabel to fetch a cardigan for her. Visibility ended within a few feet of the window. She stared, shivered again, and clasped her arms across her bosom.

Anabel came back, dropped the soft yellow thing at her mother's feet and turned a neat somersault. She thought about repeating her success and was preparing, after natural deliberation, to stand on her head, when Laura swooped on her unexpectedly from behind and lifted her in the air. She shrieked with annoyance, but such was her delight in change that she withheld a more coherent protest until she saw what was to happen. The next minute she was downstairs, installed in the Demsters' flat with Teddy and a few of her old books. Remembering, then, that she had been badly treated, Anabel pouted resentfully at her mother and Pauline Demster.