The Backward Shadow (16 page)

‘Can't I do something to help?'

‘No you can't,' she said shrilly. ‘Except go back up to David and leave me alone for five minutes.'

Alarmed, hurt and disconcerted, I obeyed. I had never seen Dottie like this in all the years we'd known each other. I could hear her right through the floor-boards, sobbing her eyes out.

I sat up most of the night with David. Every time he stirred, I put a bottle to his lips, and usually he drank a little, mostly in his sleep. He wasn't sick again until he woke up in the morning. I heard Dottie coming slowly upstairs, in the middle of the night, and going quietly into the spare room. The next I heard from her was when she brought me a cup of coffee early the next morning. I had dozed off and hadn't heard her going downstairs again. She looked about as haggard and worn-out as I felt, and avoided my eyes, but she had brought two cups and sat down to drink hers with me, which seemed a good sign.

‘How was he in the night?' she asked. She sounded very subdued, as if she'd cried herself empty—I knew that feeling.

‘All right—fine really.' At that moment he opened his eyes, lifting his head and was sick right through the bars of the cot. We both jumped up and this time I had no objection to Dottie's helping. We cleaned up in silence and then sat down to finish our cold coffee. The light coming into the room was cold and grey. I saw Dottie shiver in her elegant, but now sick-stained, house-coat. I put my hand out very tentatively and touched hers. Her cup rattled in her hand as she put it down and turned to me. ‘What on earth can I say? I've got to say something and say it quickly, but I'm damned if I know what.'

Her eyes were really so exhausted and pathetic that I simply hugged her. ‘Don't say a word—you idiot—it's all right—'

‘But I'm so ashamed—'

‘Oh, nonsense, love, don't be ridiculous. Please forget it.'

‘I can't even explain. No. Don't ask me anything. I'll tell
you sometime, perhaps. I can't now. Let's—if you could just pretend—this whole ghastly Christmas—didn't happen. Help me to pretend it didn't happen!' She began to cry again, weakly and desperately, leaning against me—suave, poised, self-controlled Dottie. I marvelled, and at the same time I burned, let me be honest, with an almost intolerable curiosity. It
must
have something to do with Henry. What? But friendship demanded, not the patient willing ear, but deafness and denial of my own powerful desire to know.

THINGS
went back to being the way they'd been before. Well, not quite, but it was a pretty good surface imitation. David got better; he had lost three pounds and Dottie said his new slimness became him, but I worked on him night and day to put it back, filling him with cereals laced with butter and cocoa, chocolate biscuits and any other fattening things I could think of. I understood for the first time Alf Davies's behaviour towards Eleanor—now every slightest sound sent me rocketting to David's side, and I realised how fantastically carefree and almost unreal my motherhood had been until now—how can you be a mother if you've never had a moment's worry or fear?

Dottie's preoccupation with the shop continued as before, in fact she intensified her activities to a point where I began to wonder anxiously whether she wasn't seriously overdoing it. She drove about the countryside like a maniac, seeing people, ordering samples, drawing up contracts; on other days she would spend every daylight hour in the shop itself, supervising and even helping with the redecorations. She would usually arrive home at night too tired to eat. It looked to me like a deliberate campaign to keep herself too busy to think. She never spoke about whatever it was that had happened. There were other areas of silence, too. For instance, she had completely stopped her occasional outbursts of sexy-joke-sessions about men. Men as men were never mentioned. If she missed them in her life she never hinted at it any more.

Henry had to be around more and more frequently, and quite soon he found himself a little flat in a new block on the outskirts of the village, an excrescence on the landscape which Dottie had frequently deplored; it was, by village standards, a miniature skyscraper, built by the local council to give housing mainly to ‘immigrants' (to the locality, not the country) who were employed at a new little factory nearby—
a concession by the village to the needs of the century, to whit industry to bring in money and restrain some of its own young people from the otherwise inevitable drift to the bigger towns. Henry invited us to his flat as soon as he'd settled in. He wasn't over-excited about it, but seemed to think it quite adequate. Dottie, however, as I could plainly see, was aesthetically outraged.

She hid her feelings from Henry, and pretended to admire, though temperately, his arrangement of the highly nondescript and utilitarian furniture (which came with the flat) and the view from the fourth-floor windows over the as yet unsullied countryside. He gave us a rather touching self-cooked meal of omelettes and tinned soup, and we sat around afterwards discussing the shop; but I could see Dottie was hard put to it to hold her peace and behave as if nothing were wrong. As soon as we were on our way home, out it burst.

‘How could he live in a place like that!—an
egg
-box. Those stone stairs and landings! And the front doors, all the same colour! You can hear the people in the next flat breathing! How doesn't he want to scream?'

‘But it suits him fine. It's convenient, modern—'

‘He's got no
right
to be suited by it! Nobody has,' she added lamely, trying to make it a matter of general principle. But something very personal in her anger with Henry made me murmur, my curiosity awakened:

‘What sort of place do you think he ought to have?'

She didn't fall into that one, though. She merely said shortly, ‘Something very different from that.' I sighed silently, balked. I had thought she might unwarily describe the sort of characterful dwelling which only she could devise for him, and then I would have known for sure she was in love with him, instead of only suspecting it.

His feelings about her were even harder to determine. The little signs and symptoms I had observed at the beginning—his bemused expression, the way his eyes would fix themselves to some part of her and have to be wrenched away, the sudden spasms of nervousness and inclination to escape—all these
were now absent. When they were together, a more practical, mundane, down-to-earth business relationship could not have been imagined. They seldom even laughed in each other's company, although their now entirely mutual enthusiasm for the project should surely have generated the kind of excitement which, in their ‘shop' talks, would inevitably have led to laughter. It was left to me to listen to, and appreciate, Dottie's witty stories about her often bizarre encounters, setbacks and small triumphs; if Henry got to hear about them, it was from me. Sometimes I'd repeat, as well as I could, some anecdote of Dottie's in front of her, presaged with the words: ‘Did you tell Henry about …?' Sometimes even my pale re-telling could make Henry's quiet, withdrawn, rather square features burst into one of his delightful smiles; then he would say, ‘No, she didn't tell me.' Dottie would remark crisply on these occasions, ‘It was only a silly fringe-thing, not important enough to waste your time with.'

Looking for signs of love, I could find only indeterminate negative ones. Why should two people who were really indifferent to each other, go to such pains to display their indifference? Why should Henry so seldom come to my place any more for friendly evenings, why were all meetings so strictly business? And why, one evening when he did come and when a 40-mile-an-hour gale, blowing mixed snow and rain parallel to the ground, suddenly developed, which should have made sleeping on our sofa the natural thing to do, did he refuse all my blandishments and insist upon climbing into his car and struggling back to the other side of the village to his own place? Dottie's behaviour on that occasion was very odd. She said nothing, but when I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking I had heard a noise from David's room, and went in to him, I found her sitting there in a chair by his cot. She had fallen asleep, and when the passage light fell on her face she started awake with a look of guilty dismay, as if she'd been caught out in an act of complete self-revelation. I could not just pass over this because my first thought was that some untoward indication from David must have brought
her in; but when challenged, she simply said, ‘You know I love this little boy very much and there are moments when I like to be with him, even if he is fast asleep.' It was a very simple—perhaps over-simple—matter to sub this down to ‘Tonight I needed to be near to someone I loved.' But there was no way of being sure about anything, except that if they did care for each other, things were not progressing in any kind of positive direction. This in itself was a contra-indication, because it implied some impediment, and although I actively wracked my brains I couldn't imagine what this could possibly be.

I am not by nature as interested in other people's affairs as the foregoing would indicate. I, too, was looking for a kind of sublimation … I infinitely preferred to occupy my mind with Dottie's problems in this field than be forced to face up to, analyse and deal with my own.

My own all but passionate devotion for Henry, kindled abruptly during David's illness, did not survive it, though it left a very warm residue; his relationship with me was certainly a very pleasant one for us both, easy, friendly and affectionate. I liked him, in fact, more and more as I came to understand his strangely withdrawn temperament better and to perceive the sterling qualities of reliability, kindliness and dry humour that lay hidden. What I never could understand was why the façade was so necessary to him, why the wit and warmth had to be winkled out of him or observed in flashes when it slipped out unawares.

And meanwhile, what of Toby?

I heard nothing from him, did nothing about him—except feel a good deal. The predominant feeling was of bewilderment. I didn't know what had happened, but something had: something serious, moreover, and possibly (though I was too afraid of the thought of this to countenance it) even permanent. He was no longer the constant warm, secure presence bolstering up my life; he came and went, as it were, in my thoughts, and I could no longer get any real sense of security from summoning him to my mind and talking to him there. It was as
if he had gone away from me and came back only intermittently, and uncertainly at that. The two-way current of love which had been flowing circuitously between us for over a year, seemed now somehow to have been damaged.

It wasn't of course until this happened that I fully realised how heavily I'd been depending on him all the time I'd been living alone. I was forced to the conclusion at last that I had not, in essence, been living alone at all until now. Now I was. Dottie hardly counted. True, she was company of a sort; but our separate, private preoccupations, so sedulously kept secret from each other, prevented any real sense of intimacy. I missed her; I missed Toby—that is, I missed what I had had with both of them. Now I really and truly felt alone for the first time since loving Toby, and it was paralysing in its power to frighten and demoralise me.

Late one cold mid-February afternoon, before opening time, I popped next door from Mrs. Stephens' to our shop to see how things were going. I used to go in about once a week, and could usually perceive a decided advance. To tell the truth, I personally had been so little connected with the shop that the whole project still had an aura of unreality for me; my weekly visits there were partly therapeutic, to remind myself that very soon life would change again and I would find myself transmogrified into a shopkeeper.

The premises were nearly ready; a drastic change had been wrought since the first time we'd gone in there. Many of the features Dottie had envisaged had come to pass: the removal of the counter, the scraped and polished floorboards, the refurbished fireplace, the clean paint and some rather startling but decidedly effective wallpaper. Strip-lighting had been installed, and did not look at all out of place. Henry's practicality had triumphed with regard to the beams, damp-course and various other matters; he had also insisted upon a mild form of central heating. Before a single saleable item was installed, the shop was already radically different from any other interior in the village, especially on a dark, frozen win
ter's afternoon: warm where others were chilly and damp; white-bright where others were gloomy; discreetly exuding an atmosphere of London where the rest huddled in unrepentant musty parochialism.

Dottie was there, a vivid electric-blue spark jumping from point to point. She had begun to dress very smartly again lately—to match the shop, she said, or perhaps it was to match the brittle, businesswoman character she was developing. When she saw me she darted over, and took me through to the back to see the strip-pine tressel-counters which had just arrived.

‘The workers will be out in three days,' she said, rubbing her hands. ‘That's nearly a week inside their original estimate. Have you the faintest idea of how miraculous that is these days? Of course it's all my doing. I've been a thorn in their sides, a remorseless goad. No threats, nothing so crude—just my constant, infuriating presence, lightly, gaily, charmingly telling them how it could be done quicker and better, fore-stalling their inefficiencies, subtly refusing them tea except as a reward—and, of course, dishing out discreet but generous bonuses for extra-quick work. They
hate
me. Never mind—it's done, and one week from this very day we open as a going enterprise.'

‘A week!' I was taken aback. It wasn't that I liked either of my present jobs very much, and as David grew older it was proving a very difficult and taxing routine; but change scares me; I can never foresee myself fitting into a new situation, and to leave an old one, however uncongenial, is always a wrench. ‘I'd better give my notice in, then—I suppose.'