On Green Dolphin Street (3 page)

Charlie refreshed their glasses and put his feet up on the table.

“Would you two like something to eat?” said Mary. “Those little snacks were a long time ago.”

“To tell the truth, darling,” said Charlie, “I’m not really hungry.”

“Frank? I could make an omelette and toast. There are some potatoes I could fry up, too.”

“I guess I should head back.”

“Have a bloody omelette,” said Charlie genially. “Here, listen to this.” He took off Frank Sinatra and began riffling through a line of long-playing records held in a red wire rack.

By four o’clock, they had sampled most of the collection and the bottle of Four Roses was empty. Mary showed Frank upstairs to the attic at the back of the house; he lost his footing for a moment on the uncarpeted stair. Charlie was already in bed by the time Mary got back to their room and started to undress.

“Have we got to get up early?” he said.

“Just the usual. School.”

Mary slid in beside him.

“What do you make of that chap?” said Charlie.

“Who? Frank?”

“Yes.”

“Strange,” said Mary. “Your sort of man, though.”

“Yup. Ghastly taste in music.”

That night, for no reason she could see, Mary dreamed of David Oliver. His presence in her dreams was, naturally, unpredictable, though he always took center stage as though nothing had gone wrong.

In the second summer of the war, having completed her studies, Mary was in London, living with her parents in their house in Regent’s Park. She helped them stick tape crosses on the windowpanes in the corridor that ran off the first-floor landing; though London was a dangerous place to be, beneath the German bombs, her parents felt better with their only child wrapped up safe inside their house. Mary, while she set about applying to join the WAAF, was glad to be home again, and to resume the familiar routine all three of them pretended they followed only to please the other two. Before dinner they gathered in the drawing room for drinks and did the crossword in
The Times
. Mary’s father, James Kirwan, read out the clues to give the women a chance to volunteer an answer; if none was forthcoming, he would fill it in himself with a propelling pencil. “Mary, here’s one for you: ‘One takes a hammering, sleeping rough without security.’ Twelve letters.
G
, two blanks
C
, ends
P
three blanks. If ‘Pietà’ is right, which I think it must be.”

“Glockenspiel,” said Mary. “I don’t know why.”

After dinner they would listen to the wireless, read or play cards. James often wore strangely unbecoming clothes, lumberjack shirts or tennis sweaters, after his day at the Treasury; Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, was usually in a suit she had worn to the surgery where she worked as a general practitioner. James was a solidly made man, patient and sardonic; Elizabeth suffered from weak eyesight, was sympathetic, untidy, with gray hair struggling to escape from a variety of restraints, and still had the clear skin and wide dark eyes that had made her beautiful. She also had a ferocious temper, which exploded without warning; although the subsequent
peacemaking could sometimes make the atmosphere more harmonious than before the outburst, it was a process the others both feared.

Mary had thought all children were as richly enfolded in love as she was because the child assumes the extent to which it possesses any quality is the norm, until its experience of others’ lives gives it a median against which to judge. It was not until her twenties that she started to appreciate that, even among families generally termed happy, few children had enjoyed what she could now see that she had had: a triangle of affection, in which each person was fully contented only in the presence of the other two. Sometimes when it was growing dark she watched the railings at the foot of Primrose Hill from her bedroom window until she saw her father’s hat and turned-up raincoat progressing toward the gloomy street lamp; though he denied it when she taxed him with it later, it was clear to her that his step unconsciously quickened to something near a run as he approached his house.

One day he brought back with him to tea a man called David Oliver, an economist who had been seconded to the Treasury from London University. He sat next to the fire with his teacup rattling in his lap; he was awkwardly polite toward Mrs. Kirwan, struggling to his feet each time she came back into the room, slopping tea into the saucer, and was deferential toward her husband, occasionally slipping in a vocative “sir.” He had round cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses; it was a face that seemed aching to be comic, and his manner suggested some hilarity suppressed, but he successfully maintained a solemn front, smiling only when he glanced across at Mary, who was sitting on the sofa, her stockinged feet beneath her, stroking the marmalade cat.

Mary Kirwan, at the age of twenty-one, had something of the feline about herself. She was smaller than either of her parents, lacking her father’s solid build or her mother’s height; she was small-boned, with wavy hair of a color bordering on black, cut a little above the shoulder and held off her face with combs. Her movements were still quick and girlish, while her features were those of her mother at the same age: large, dark eyes, prone to fright, in pale, clear skin. “It’s like looking at a miniature
version of myself,” Elizabeth said. “Like looking in a mirror that slightly reduces everything.” Her sense of her daughter as someone of not quite serious adult size was integral to the way she loved her.

Mary’s father often brought home people from work; he liked to think his wife and daughter would enjoy their conversation and he wanted lonely colleagues to think they were free to share in his unexpected domestic happiness. A bachelor who lived in Southwark digs, where the landlady’s offering was some version of stew and semolina at six o’clock, David Oliver was easily persuaded to stay to dinner. He drank gin and orange and accepted two refills.

“David’s a terrific brainbox,” said Mary’s father over dinner. “People are in awe of him at work.”

“I had to make myself good at work because no one took me seriously.”

“Why was that?” said Elizabeth.

“It just happened. At school, at work, wherever I’ve been, it’s always the same. The others always seemed to think I was a figure of fun.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.” David looked down into his wineglass; he seemed less nervous than before. “Maybe I’ve just got a ridiculous face.”

A week later, Mary had a postcard from David asking if she would like to go to the pictures; there was a cinema in Bloomsbury still showing
Rebecca
, he said. Concealing the fact that she had already seen it, Mary took a bus to Russell Square and sat through the film a second time. Afterward, they went to an ABC café, where they had tea and dry buns; David told her about his work and how little he liked it. He was in a reserved occupation, required to lend the weight of his economic expertise to the war effort; he had failed an army medical on the grounds that he was still debilitated by childhood polio.

“But it’s absurd,” he said, drawing a face with his finger on the steamed window of the café. “I’m as strong as an ox. I play squash twice a week. As soon as this job’s over, I’m going to reapply.”

“I think you should,” said Mary. “That’s a good drawing, by the way.”

“What?” David rubbed his hand quickly across the pane.

“Do you do proper drawings? I mean on paper, not on glass?”

“I do go to life classes, I admit. In an awful drafty place in Battersea. We draw a little man who used to be a prizefighter, or so he says. He’s very hairy.”

Mary looked at David’s face closely: his blinking eyes and plump cheeks would hardly have enthralled a Rebecca, but she felt at ease with him, flattered by his attention.

David continued to send her postcards; he seemed anxious that her parents should know that he communicated with her, that there should be nothing underhand in his approach. He invited her to watch him play squash, where he revealed an unexpectedly muscular and competitive side, whipping the small black ball from the hidden corners of the court with a powerful wrist, his plimsolls squeaking with torsion on the narrow floorboards. He took her to a pub; he took her boating on the Serpentine; he invited her back to his digs and made her toast on the gas fire in his room overlooking Trinity Church Square. At Mary’s request, he showed her his sketchbooks, including charcoal drawings of the hirsute prizefighter, and some watercolors of intense indigo and crimson.

One Sunday she arrived at David’s lodgings in her WAAF uniform, free not to return until ten. The film they had agreed on was due to start at five, and David made cocktails from gin and various tins of fruit juice he had found in his landlady’s cupboard. After lunch, Mary curled up on his sofa with a book, while he began to sketch, standing in the window where the light was best.

“Would you like me to pose for you?” said Mary, bored by the book.

David raised his eyebrows. “It’s rather cold.”

“David! I didn’t mean—”

“Of course not. I was being silly.”

She looked at his suddenly serious face, with the light coming through behind it, and she thought how much she liked him.

Flushed by the cocktails, she said, “I will if you like.”

David said nothing for a moment, then, “Are you sure?”

Mary laughed and sprang from the sofa. “You look so solemn!”

He grimaced and exhaled, as though he did not know what to do.

“You could start by lighting the gas,” said Mary.

“All right. You can undress behind that screen. There’s a dressing gown on the chair.”

As she stepped out of her skirt, Mary was aware that something more than art was happening. She had made no plans, but so great was her confidence in being loved and not betrayed that she barely hesitated, unfastening the hooks and clips of her underwear; she followed some light instinctive purpose, immune to the cautious gravity of self-questioning. Perhaps it was necessary in some way to liberate herself from the perfect triangle of her parents’ pure emotion, to coarsen the texture of her life, but she felt no awareness of this thought, only a strange levity as she wrapped David’s scratchy woolen dressing gown around her.

Then, as she went back to the sofa, she changed her mind: it was only a drawing, nothing more than that. Her posing for him showed a new degree of trust and friendship—one that he had more than earned—but when she saw the prosaic details of his artistic preparations, watched him roll back the page on the pad and clip it in place, she saw she had been wrong to think this was somehow a significant moment.

“How do you want me?”

“Are you warm enough? If so, you can take the dressing gown off.”

Apart from parents and doctors, Mary had never stood naked before anyone in her life. She had been so used to thinking of herself in the diminutive, her own body reflected back through the loving eyes of those who still viewed her as a child, that she had little sense of her breasts and the dark, filmy circles that spread from their centers; she was unaware of any effect the sight of her pale skin and its inverse, hidden folds might have on the clothed man standing opposite.

She held her hand for a moment across her chest as she sat down again, then breathed deeply and put it by her side.

“Is this all right?”

“Just turn to your left a little. That’s right.”

For twenty minutes, David stood scratching at the pad with short, irritable strokes, his eyes flashing back and forth behind the lenses of his spectacles. Mary knew that one thing a model was not supposed to do
was ask to see the picture, and she concentrated on keeping still. Her back ached from the lack of support in the broken-springed sofa, and a nerve, which had caught in the ball of her foot where she had arched it in the hope of grace, was making her leg tremble.

Eventually, David put down his pencil and came over to where she sat.

“Can I rearrange you a little?” he said.

He lifted her elbow and resettled it.

“This isn’t working at all,” he said.

“You look so worried.”

“I can’t concentrate. You know why.”

“Do I?” It was the first time Mary had seen herself through the eyes of a man; and this intelligent, worldly person seemed quite disabled, reduced to helplessness, by some power of hers alone. Seeing this, she felt an exquisite trepidation.

David moved her arm again, this time allowing his hand to touch her breast. His voice was clotted. “You’re very beautiful, you know.”

“I’m not.”

“You are, you are.” He ran his hand over her abdomen, down between her legs while his other hand stroked her forehead. “With your black gypsy hair.”

“It’s not black.”

“Almost.”

His hand ran slickly through her, then settled to a point of sensation that made her close her eyes as she felt her spine grow numb. The last coherent thought she had was that she still had not kissed him.

Later, although they had not actually made love, Mary felt ashamed of how easily she seemed to have found her way into this new experience; she felt awkward as she fumbled with the fastenings of her clothes behind the screen. By the next time she saw David, however, the natural poise of her temperament had reasserted itself: they went to the National Gallery and then for lunch in a café; she enjoyed being with him and was, in the end, disappointed that he did not seem to feel himself entitled to repeat his forward behavior. She wondered if he really valued her, or if perhaps she had accommodated him too readily. She wanted to seduce him properly
so that he would be forced to confront this new reality, whatever it turned out to be.

David needed no persuading, only an opportunity, which came the following weekend after a party given by a colleague. They took a taxi back to David’s lodgings, slipped their shoes off at the door and crept upstairs. He put a penny in the gas meter, lit the fire and then, when the blackout was up, a candle, by whose orange flame she allowed him to undress her, piece by piece, as he knelt before her on the threadbare hearth rug. As he dealt with her jacket and skirt, he was still talking about the landlady, Mrs. Carman, with her bilious temper and bags full of odd-smelling possessions; when he pulled down her satin slip, he became more serious. How solemn his face then became, Mary could not say, as, acting on some childish impulse, she had closed her eyes in the hope of becoming invisible.