The Backward Shadow (25 page)

‘Maybe he didn't come,' I said with sudden hope.

‘But he did.' He handed me a note. I took my gloves off—my hands were shaking. The note, written on a page torn from a pocket pad, simply said, ‘Called at 3.30 as arranged. Could have walked off with all your stock. J. S. Billings.'

‘Oh my God,' I said faintly.

For the first time in ten weeks, something other than Toby occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of all else. I was appalled by the prospect of Dottie's return, and of having to confess. A totally new kind of duologue now took up all my creative slack. My end of it sounded unimaginably thin. ‘I must have been mad,' I kept thinking to myself, wringing my hands. It didn't occur to me then that I had been more or less mad for ten weeks.

She arrived back sometime after eight, absolutely glowing with triumph as I hadn't seen her glow since the mysterious events of Christmas Eve. She flung her coat off and rushed into the kitchen, where in an agony of guilty anticipation I
was trying to get some supper. She stood in the doorway and flung her arms wide. ‘Ron!' she cried. ‘Ah, Ron of the licentious ogle, of the sneering lip, of the cretinous demeanour! Ron of the once-sober-and-industrious and now degenerate Lower Orders! Ron, my creation, my angel, my
craftsman
! I love you!' She disappeared with a flourish, returning a few seconds later with a large box which she set down on the kitchen table. With a conjuror's gesture she removed the lid and reverently lifted to the light a little green glass horse. It was very roughly made, the sort of thing a child might form out of taffy, teasing limbs and ears, a ruffle of mane, a switch of tail, out of it before it grew cold and hard. But there was something very attractive about it.

‘Infantile,' said Dottie, but lovingly. ‘Too literary, too explicit. But a start. A start in the right, unblueprinted, original, creative direction.'

She produced several other little animals of the same sort. They didn't look professional enough to offer for sale, but they had something, and Dottie said Ron was so excited about them himself that it surely wouldn't be long before he ‘developed' the technique to a point where they would be good enough.

‘It started with lumps,' Dottie explained, pouring herself a huge beaker of cold milk, her eyes burning with an almost fanatical enthusiasm. ‘I showed him something when I was there before—a picture in a crafts magazine—he said it was nothing but a lump. Only afterwards he started to think about it, and he said it haunted him. So he began to pick up lumps of glass, left-overs, throw-outs, around the factory, and kind of look at them. He kept one on his mantelpiece at home for weeks, he said, and he kept staring at it, and handling it, until his wife got furious and slung it out. He was so angry at losing it, he realised that you could get fond of a lump. “It gave me all kinds of funny ideas,” he said. “And not
that
kind, either.” Oh, he's marvellous, is Ron! I adore his awful smutty way of talking! So then he started making lumps in his spare time. Just letting blobs of hot glass fall as it would. Then he
began blowing bubbles into it. Then shaping it. Of course he dared not let any of his mates know what he was doing—they'd have thought he'd gone bonkers. Then one day a lump turned into something like an animal, and that was how he got started on this line.' She made the horse gallop across the table-top. ‘You know what I told him? I told him to go back to just plain lumps, and not try to make them look like anything except the kind of lump his wife threw away—the kind you can get fond of.' She dipped into the box again and produced a lump, which she weighed in her hand. It really was rather a beautiful lump—like a piece of crystallised ocean. One immediately wanted to hold it. I reached for it instinctively and Dottie, grinning, held it away.

‘Ah ha! I knew it! It draws the hand. It even draws the face.' She smoothed the cool thing with her cheek. ‘He was so shy about showing me this. When I raved, he thought I was having him on. I love him. I mean it. I feel I've started something up in him, like Pygmalion.'

‘Is that whole great box full of Ron's lumps?' I asked.

‘No, no. The bottom's packed with the samples of the nicest coarse-glass tumblers and jugs I could find for my dearly beloved Mr. Billings.' My heart sank into the region of my knees. ‘Did he call? Did he make a firm order?' I said nothing, and he asked again, ‘Did he come?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Well? Tell!'

‘I wasn't—there.'

‘What? What do you mean? Where were you?'

‘I was out at the back, digging the Stephens' garden.'

There was no question of
her
face not changing. It froze for a second and then went white. I knew I was for it and I shrank. I thought cravenly, I can't face a row with Dottie, not now! I began gibbering out excuses but she cut me short.

‘Dear kind loving Jesus,' she said softly. ‘You've bitched it. Trust you.' She had a glass in her hand, a nice square tumbler with a solid glass bottom with a bubble in it and very thick sides. For a moment I thought she was going to throw it
straight at my head, and then I thought, no, she'll smash it on the floor. I could see the impulse tremble through her arm and be checked when it was almost overflowing into her fingers. But then she put the glass carefully back into the box and packed Ron's things on top among the wood-shavings and newspaper. She closed the box down, keeping her head bent. I stood still, waiting. But she merely picked the box up and carried it out of the kitchen. I heard her put it down on the hall table and go upstairs. I'd never seen her even half as angry; I felt physically sick from watching it and knowing I'd caused it.

She stayed in her room all evening with the door shut, and I put David to bed in a wholly unaccustomed silence. He tried to induce me to play his usual games but I couldn't. He went to bed whimpering resentfully and I sat by him, still silent, until he fell asleep. Then I wept with shame.

When that was finished, I went to Dottie's door and knocked.

‘What do you want?' she asked after a moment.

‘To come in.'

‘I wouldn't if I were you. Better wait till I've had a night's sleep.'

‘It's tempting, but I'd rather get it over.'

There was no answer, so I turned the handle and went in. She was not undressed, but was sitting by the window. When she turned, I could see she'd been crying too. Her face was quite drawn.

I sat opposite her on the windowseat. ‘Say it,' I said. ‘Please. We'll both feel better.'

She gazed at me for a long moment, and then sighed from her depths and turned back to the window, leaning her chin heavily on her hand. ‘What's the use,' she said in a tired voice. ‘I could give you hell, but it wouldn't change anything. Not a thing.'

‘Dottie, nothing like it will ever happen again, I promise.'

‘It's not only that. You don't know. You don't know.'

‘What don't I know?'

She didn't answer for a moment, and then said wearily, ‘Oh, it's—it's a whole lot of things. I mean, even if you turned overnight into a model partner, conscientious and single-minded, it wouldn't change the fact that you basically don't give a damn about the whole project, that you don't believe it stands a chance. You never have really. At first I thought I had enough enthusiasm for us both, or at least that self-interest would drive you into some semblance of caring, but I see now things don't work out like that. You're not—with me at all. I sometimes wonder if even Henry really is, or if in his heart of hearts he isn't smiling pityingly at my cavortings and waiting around to pick up the pieces …' She dropped her face into her hand for a second, then straightened it quickly, throwing a bit of hair out of her eyes and keeping her fingers over her mouth so that her voice was muffled. ‘I didn't realise,' she went on, ‘what a damned lonely business a business could be.'

It's terribly easy to fall prey to the conviction that your own loneliness is the worst in the world. Except occasionally, Dottie always seemed so strong and resilient, so self-sufficient, it was hard to believe that her loneliness went as deep and hurt just as much as mine or anybody's. Feeling sorry for Dottie always seemed like an affront; that saved one the trouble; one could always tell oneself she didn't need sympathy, and go straight back to pitying oneself. But now I looked at her averted face and realised some part of her misery, and how akin it was to mine, and felt a shame much more poignant than the one I had felt about my default over Billings.

‘Listen,' I said at last. ‘First, let's get Billings out of the way. All's not lost. I'll go myself and see him and explain—crawl if necessary. So long as he knows it wasn't your fault, I'm sure he'll come round.' She didn't move a muscle and I knew for sure then that she'd left Billings a long way behind in her thoughts, that she was now struggling away alone in some dark secret place, far from the shop and from me. She seemed to have curled into herself and the knuckles over her mouth were white as if her hand were holding back some pressure
that was trying to burst out of her. ‘Dottie,' I said, actually managing to forget myself completely for a moment and beginning to shake a little from the tension of pity and anxiety.

She looked slowly up at me over her hand. Her eyes were desolate, and glassy with tears. ‘It's all right,' she said indistinctly. ‘I'm not angry any more about this afternoon. I know how you've been feeling. I know how terribly you miss Toby. I'm so sorry for you. Forgive me if I haven't seemed very sympathetic. I had such dreams …' She broke off and stared at me. Then in an altered voice she said, ‘But it's not so bad for you. You had Toby. He's still
somewhere
, your mark will always be on him, no other woman can ever wipe you out of his mind whatever happens. And you had him, you had him for a whole year, just when you needed him most. I don't know why
I
should be feeling sorry for
you
. Maybe at bottom I'm just wildly jealous of you.'

‘To be remembered by a man, or to remember him, is hardly what one wants, or what anyone has to envy.'

‘I envy you that year. No one can do you out of that.'

‘Someone
has
.'

‘But you
had
it. You've had
something
.'

‘But it's spoilt, it's gone. If you've never had it, at least there's no—aching empty gap where it used to be.'

‘There's an aching empty gap where it ought to go. And the growing conviction that that place, in your body and in your life, is going to stay empty until it, and you, shrivel up.'

‘I'd change places with you this minute.'

‘No you wouldn't. Don't say that.'

‘I wish I'd never seen Toby, never loved him.'

‘Blasphemy,' she said. Her hand came away from her mouth and she reached for a cigarette.

‘All I can feel is the pain. I can't remember any tiny part of it without bitterness.'

‘Then you're a fool. You've got to learn to live with it. What if your affair with Toby is all the love you're ever due for in your life? Are you going to soil it and spoil it just because it didn't last?'

I suddenly knew what she had meant, long ago, by the backward shadow, the shadow of the lonely future flung back on the present and filling it with fear. Dottie had been living in that shadow, and now I must live in it too. All the little specific pains and terrors were swept away in a great wave of horror. To be alone always!—through youth, middle-age, dotage … no one to share with, no one to keep you warm, no hand to hold, no other half of your organism to fill you and fulfil you … Then I remembered David. He was an added cause for fear in a way, the unsharable responsibility, the unsharable joy. But although not the right one, he was someone, to love, to be loved by, the need and the needy … (Why had I been ashamed of my need for Toby, why had I tried to fight it, what had I thought I could bring to him which would satisfy him more? And yet, how dangerous to bring that exclusive need to one's child, one's son …) On a tempered impulse of relief I said to Dottie, ‘You're right. You're right to envy me. I've got David.'

‘Be careful of that feeling.'

‘I know what you mean—but still.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Oh, yes.' She smoked for a while and stared at the blank window-panes and after a while she said, ‘And I've got the shop.' She looked at me and gave a little rueful laugh, to which I responded. ‘It's all very well to laugh,' she said. ‘But at least it's safer to pin one's hopes and dreams on a shop. Not safer for me, but safer for the shop.
It
can't turn queer because its mother dotes on it too much.' We both laughed again at this, but thinly, whistling in the dark. ‘One has to have something,' she said, ‘if only to take up one's slack. Cold baths and runs over the moors and lime-juice and deck-scrubbing. Not just the sexual slack, of course. The shop's really not much good for that! Energy, time, thoughts—enthusiasm. That most of all. It's the caring. One needs a cause. That's why I was so angry. Because I need someone to share my cause with me, and you don't share it. And neither does Henry. You've both got causes of your own.'

‘What's Henry's?'

‘Henry's cause?' Her eyes came round to mine very slowly through the film of smoke. She was half-smiling, a grim, grim smile that stopped my breath for a minute. ‘Shall I tell you? I promised him not to.'

‘Then you'd better not.'

‘But I want to. Then you'll understand. You'll understand why you mustn't say, even impulsively, that you'd change places with me or anyone.'

I said nothing.

‘Henry's cause,' said Dottie, ‘is dying well.'

I didn't understand a word of what she had said. ‘Dying well? What do you mean by that?'