The Backward Shadow (24 page)

I said, ‘Why should I?' which was in keeping with my general rudeness at the time, but Henry was hard to offend, and replied, ‘First, because I'm very curious to know what can possibly have changed you so radically. Second, because you never know, I might be able to help.'

Two months had already gone by since that fatal Sunday, and perhaps I was ready to talk, because I said, after only a short hesitation, ‘Do you remember Toby?'

Henry said he did, with some pleasure.

I began to prevaricate to the effect that it was all very hard to explain, but then his honesty temporarily revived mine and I realised it was not hard at all, merely wretchedly painful, so I said, ‘For a year I thought he was going to marry me, and now I've found out he's going to marry somebody else.' Put baldly like that it seemed extremely simple; I marvelled at the twisted complexity of my reactions to it.

Henry now asked the obvious question. ‘Is he David's father?'

‘Didn't Dottie tell you?—No.'

‘Dorothy and I don't discuss your business. Then where is he?'

‘David's father? I have no idea. Possibly in Paris.'

‘What sort of chap is he?—I hope you don't mind all these questions.'

‘Not specially.' Actually since the subject of this unexpected enquiry had shifted away from Toby, I didn't mind at all. I really don't think I would have minded any questions from Henry; it pleased me obscurely to find him showing such a sensible, human interest in somebody else's concerns. I would have expected him to have found such manifestations of curiosity rather beneath him. (It was not for ages afterwards that I found out from Dottie that of course she'd told him the whole story long ago, and that he was presumably only asking me about Terry to change the obsessive focus of my thoughts for a little while.)

I told him briefly about my affair with Terry, and our mutual antipathy after it. Henry listened with his usual patience and then said, ‘And out of that, all that stupidity and futility, you got that nice child that you love so much. Zero plus zero equals any amount you like to name. It's all very strange.'

‘So you think Terry and I are zeroes?'

‘No, no, that's not what I meant.' He looked up at me and smiled through his pipe-smoke. ‘You're a fair bit of a chump at times, like now for instance, but you're not a zero. Oh dear no.' And he picked up my hand and held it for a moment so hard that it hurt, then put it down unselfconsciously as someone came into the shop.

A little oasis in the wilderness. After it, the dark mood of misery and brooding and tumult closed in round me again; but I remembered that warm squeeze and his funny, old-fashioned way of saying ‘You're not a zero, oh dear no!' Even while I was helplessly behaving like one, I remembered sometimes that Henry didn't think I was; and it helped. A little.

But it was Dottie who dragged me out of it in the end. I
hadn't been noticing Dottie very much recently, or asking myself how things were with her; it was all part of my current malaise of introversion, because in fact had anyone asked me I would have said that Dottie mattered to me more than anybody still remaining in my life, except David of course. But one couldn't have guessed it from my behaviour towards her. For weeks we hardly exchanged a friendly inessential word; she tried—God knows she tried—to bring me out of it with her usual flow of entertaining anecdotes, but that was just at first; no one can go on telling stories to someone who patently is not listening, let alone reacting. So then she withdrew into a sort of brisk, waiting silence, at first patient, later impatient, gradually becoming irritated and at last furious. She had good reason for this; my help and support in the shop were so essential to her that my virtual disappearance into my own private purgatory struck at the roots of all her plans, not only the business ones but also, as I was to discover, her plans for her survival through the crisis in her own life, which depended entirely on the shop and its success.

The crunch came when I had been in charge at the shop all one day while Dottie went to Birmingham. The reason for this trip was both unexpected and highly exciting to her; she had had a letter from Ron, the glass-worker with whom she had left her address all those months ago. It was neatly written on a small sheet of lined paper, and said in a very businesslike way that if she cared to come along, he might be able to show her something to her advantage. It was actually her turn for shop-duty the following day, and I had been looking forward to the sort of quiet day at home with David which was the only kind I found tolerable any more—a morning getting the housework out of the way, and an afternoon spent sitting in front of the fire watching the flames, just as I watched the tree behind the shop, letting all the vicious inner knots untie themselves. So when Dottie, showing an unusual degree of animation, announced her imminent departure and begged me to take over for the day, I sank into a deep slough of gloom and grudge and scarcely brought a civil word out of my
mouth all evening. Whereas I felt she could just as easily have waited till the following day, when I was due to be at the shop anyway, she clearly felt it impossible to wait even 24 hours longer to find out what Ron had to tell her, and expected me to understand this. We both indicated our points of view in a terse conversation which ended with Dottie saying, with unaccustomed edge: ‘Look, like it or lump it this shop is our livelihood. You think it's enough just to put in a few hours selling every second day. Well, that's okay for shop assistants; it's not enough for the management.'

‘Fine. Well, you be the management and give your whole life to it. I'm prepared just to be the shop-girl. After all, you haven't got a baby to look after.'

‘No, that's right, I haven't,' Dottie retorted. ‘I haven't got one to raise, either, or I might have the grace to be damned grateful for someone who'd do all the work of setting up a business of which I was getting equal shares while doing about a fifth of the labour.'

There was no possible reply to this, so I merely shrugged coldly and went on washing the dishes. How I hate remembering it now!—although she wasn't being entirely fair either; true, she did far more than half the work to do with the shop, but the house was my job and here she scarcely contributed anything except very occasionally a meal or a bit of washing up. Mrs. Griffiths was nearly always called in on the days when Dottie was supposed to be at home, and when Dottie had nowhere to travel to and actually did stay in the cottage with David, she did the bare minimum necessary to keep him clean and fed, and then let the housework go to hell while she did her accounts, wrote letters, drafted advertisements, or had Henry over for a conference. Often I'd get home tired at six in the evening to find the fire out and supper not even begun. I'd learnt to pick up a large packet of fish-and-chips or a frozen pork-pie on these occasions so I wouldn't have to set to from scratch.

Anyway, this pointed exchange led to a chill evening, during which we sat locked in our private silences and I, at least,
spared a thought for the past and asked myself (but desultorily) whether there was any hope of ever reverting to the status quo ante. But at the time this seemed as hopeless as trying to rebuild a house from which the foundations have been blasted away.

So the next day Dottie set off early by road for Birmingham and Ron, while I left David (as usual in shrieks of outrage at my departure, which always started the days at the shop off on the wrong foot) and drove into the village. It was the beginning of May, but there were few signs of spring, apart from new leaves and some flowers in the garden which persist in coming to birth no matter how inclement the weather. Just before climbing into the car I obeyed an impulse to throw a gardening fork into the back. I thought if the day were not too hectic I might find the energy to fulfil a promise made long ago to Mrs. Stephens, to dig the little plot behind their shop, which was next door to ours. Since the day was spoilt anyway, and since I had a slightly guilty conscience about Dottie which I wanted to expiate with sweat, I thought I might get around to it, though it seemed doubtful considering my present aversion to hard work.

The day was so gloomy and blustery, with gusts of periodic rain, that the shop was very quiet. It was also ominously cold; something had gone wrong with the central heating. I phoned Henry to tell him and he said apologetically that he was awfully sorry, he had a stinking cold that day and was cossetting himself indoors, but that I was not to call in a professional to look at it—‘No point in shelling out, it's probably something I can deal with easily.' He advised me to light an oil-stove for myself and stick it out for the day. This hardly commended itself to me; to begin with the oil-stove stank abominably and to go on with it heated an area approximately one-fifth of what was needed. Everything outside that area, which included my little corner of the store-room, was left to freeze, and me in it.

At about 3 p.m., when there still hadn't been a single customer, I got so fed up and miserable that I pulled on my
coat and went out through the back door, leaving it open so that I could hear the bell. I climbed easily over the dividing fence with my fork and at once began thrusting it brutally into the clotted earth of the tiny flower-beds surrounding a patch of grass the size of a night-club dance-floor. After a short while, Mrs. Stephens' permanently startled face appeared at a back window between the dingy crocheted curtains, and then she came running out, tutting and jumping flat-footed in her carpet-slippers through the puddles, to exclaim over my hardiness, offer thanks for my help and cups of nice hot tea. I refused without stopping work, and remembered only as she was withdrawing, backwards due to admiration entirely misplaced, to make a perfunctory inquiry after Mr. Stephens' health.

‘Oh …' said Mrs. Stephens vaguely. ‘Not what it might be, dear. The poor lamb is not what he was, I'm afraid.' She had spoken very softly, her voice barely carrying to me on a gust of wind, but even so she glanced nervously over her shoulder as if expecting to see his old ear glued to the window to hear whatever disloyalty might be spoken of him.

As I worked under the dark grey, sullen skies, shoved about and rumpled by the wind and slapped across the face by occasional spats of rain, I fell into a dismal pattern—digging fast and feverishly in an effort to escape my mood and my thoughts, while the thoughts raced faster and more vividly in an effort to keep up. Thoughts about Toby … I still have them. But they're infinitely different now, thank God. Then, my mind seemed like a festering sore, an all-absorbing pain, drawing all my attention in towards itself, like the skin round a wound. I seemed to see nothing, even the good clean earth I was digging, and I certainly heard nothing other than the endless, exhausting conversations going on in my imagination.

Suddenly Henry was looking at me over the fence.

‘What are you doing?' he asked, with nothing in his voice but incredulous curiosity.

I dropped the fork and stood still, panting and worn out as if I'd been running.

‘Are you all right? You look strange.'

‘I'm all right …What time is it?'

‘It's five o'clock. I've been phoning and phoning … Didn't you hear the bell?'

‘No.'

‘How long have you been out here?'

‘I don't know … since about three, I think.'

‘Since three!' He didn't look angry, just amazed. ‘But what about Billings?'

‘Who?'

‘Billings. The health-restaurant man. Didn't Dorothy tell you?'

It came back to me with a tingling sense of shock. Of course she'd told me. She'd particularly told me about Billings. He was a man after her own heart, though his field was quite different; he was what Henry called a muck-and-mystery man, a farmer with an obsession with natural methods of crop- and stock-raising who had now decided to go into—or rather, put his son into—the restaurant business, as a subsidiary enterprise to his own farm. The farm would supply the restaurant with free-range chickens and eggs, unsprayed fruit, vegetables grown in farmyard manure, and wholewheat bread, among many other things such as honey made by bees who had never soiled their feet by settling on a chemically-treated flower. Dottie had been full of Billings for the past week, the more so since he was the biggest potential customer we had yet had. He had visited the shop, listened to Dottie expound her principles, and liked them, finding them very akin to his own, as indeed she found his; and he had virtually promised to return and order all the furniture needed by the restaurant from us—small pine refectory tables, heart-backed chairs, darkly glazed ceramic bowls for barley soup, wooden plates for meadow-raised beef steaks, baskets for the chickens, rush mats for the floors, and possibly a great many secondary items such as cruets, table-napkins, and purely decorative items. I remembered now, with a flush of guilt, that a lesser reason why Dottie had hurried off to Birmingham was because she
needed to find a source of ordinary glassware—jugs and glasses for the fresh vegetable juices. And I remembered too that there had been a strong possibility that Billings would call by between 3 and 4 this afternoon, and that I had been specially told to be ready for him and to welcome him with every encouraging courtesy.

Henry was gazing at me with a sort of wonderment, his head cocked to one side, a slight frown between his eyes. He was waiting for me to speak, but what could I possibly say? I stammered something about having promised Mrs. Stephens, no customers all day, forgot about Billings, was sure I could have heard the bell … Henry's face didn't change.

‘I'm only asking myself,' he said slowly, ‘what Dorothy's going to say.'

My blood quite literally ran cold—I turned clammy all over. Was it conceivable that I was afraid—afraid of Dottie? Of course I was hopelessly, disgracefully in the wrong, but still—that didn't explain goose-flesh.