The Sleeping Beauty (10 page)

‘Two coffees,’ bawled the waitress.

‘Anything to eat?’ Laurence asked.

The girl shook her head, and in any case the waitress had gone away.

‘Where do you live?’

‘I’m staying up on the Cliff Road. I’m a children’s nurse and we brought them here to get over the whooping-cough. I’m not in quarantine, though, or anything like that. Anyhow, I had it when I was four. Did you ever have it?’

‘Whooping-cough? I couldn’t say,’ Laurence replied carelessly,
as if children’s ailments were rather beyond his scope. After a while, feeling that he had offered nothing about himself, he said: ‘I’m in the Army.’

She glanced gravely at his uniform, not smiling.

‘My name’s Laurence Godden.’

She admired this name for a moment or two. Taking the evening step by step was like going over the tracks of a daydream. She thought that she had experienced just as much as she would be able to remember in bed that night. Bliss so crowded in that she was sure her memory would contain no more. She was in some ways – emotionally, at least – a cautious, hoarding girl. Feeling herself incapable of further happiness; wanting to save, not waste, her pleasure, she refused a second cup of coffee. Instinct urged her to hurry home with her treasure and count it over in solitude.

‘What is
your
name?’ Laurence asked.

‘Betty Logan.’

‘How long will you be here, in Seething?’

‘I don’t know. They don’t tell you. Until Baby picks up, I expect.’

Laurence hoped that Baby would not pick up for months. He did not care if – he? she? – lay at death’s door indefinitely.

‘Will you come out with me again?’

‘Well, yes, I’d quite like to.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure.’

Laurence dropped sixpence on to the table as they went out. He did not slip it genteelly under his saucer, she noticed.

The streets were almost empty. An obviously betrothed couple stood looking in at the lighted window of a furniture shop at a three-piece suite labelled ‘Uncut Moquette’. Doors of pubs swinging open sharply let out wedges of light, a gusty, Saturday-night hubbub.

They crossed the open space to the sea-front and Laurence said: ‘That’s where I live,’ pointing to the row of houses by the pier.

‘Quite a little house,’ she thought.

Laurence imagined his mother alone there – unless with that Vinny – behind the drawn curtains, and he felt a curious triumph, a hardening against her, standing there with the girl beside him.

They walked on. ‘But aren’t you going home?’ she asked.

‘When I have seen
you
home.’

She settled again to her contentment. Passing the Italian Gardens, where the Public Conveniences stood at the entrance, hedged with euonymus and laurel, he pulled her close to him and kissed her. He did it a little roughly and clumsily and not as he had intended, and he hoped that she would not notice or compare the embrace unfavourably with others. In the light from a street-lamp he saw her blink; she looked jolted, as if the breath had been knocked from her.

Incredulity surmounted all other feelings in her. In first love – and to some people for ever after, too – the long-anticipated is strangest of all; the inevitable cannot be believed; the familiar daydream becomes the most unfamiliar reality. Love had seized her as unexpectedly as would sudden death.

Having seen this look on her face, he drew her head to his shoulder again, moved his cheek tenderly against her hair, kissed her eyelids. A half-drunken man stumbled towards the lavatory, unbuttoning himself, muttering stupidly. Laurence held Betty tightly to him as they walked on; as if to keep her quite safe from the ugliness in the world.

‘But it is done from kindness,’ Emily insisted.

They were walking along the esplanade and Vinny’s condemnations of Rose kept checking her as if, standing still, she
could protest the better. Though they had walked with a wide space between them, each time she stopped, he went closer to her by the sea-wall and they looked over the sands together. When she had finished her argument, they would move on until the next provocation.

‘And I do not mind,’ she added.

Her hands, which rested on the stone wall, were bare of gloves, of rings. The darkness suited her looks, he decided; deciding also that a woman would pretend to misunderstand, hearing that. It was simply that the contrast of her pallor was now more dramatic and that, having no colour by day, she lost nothing by darkness.

He said: ‘You give her more than ever she gave you – her peace, her security; you compensate her for all she lacks; you shield her from her own child.’

‘I do it gladly.’

‘And if one day you began
not
to do it gladly, you began to chafe against imprisonment …’

‘Imprisonment?’ She laughed, and looked at him scornfully.

‘… And wished for more scope and something of your own?’ he continued smoothly.

‘I should not.’

‘You
could
not.’

‘Why “could” not?’

‘You are shutting doors one after another which you will soon find are
finally
shut. Shut fast. You inside, the world outside.’

‘I shall want nothing different,’ she said impatiently.

‘We never know what we shall want from one year to another – every age a dangerous age in so many ways …’

The discussion had begun at the beginning of the esplanade. As they had come off the sands, he had suddenly invited her out to luncheon the next day, to hire a car, he suggested, and drive
into the country. She had half-a-dozen reasons for not going – her dread of being in public places; the interest which would be aroused in Mrs Tumulty and the other guests; the embarrassment of explaining to Rose; the fact that Sunday luncheon was a busy time when Philly must be kept out of mischief; her own deep disinclination for anything different. She gave one or two of the reasons, but neither the first nor the last. The idea could not appeal to her because she did not allow the possibility of acquiescing: it was dismissed at once for her, but she could not so easily dismiss it for him. He saw that the hardest job would be to make her ever consider such an invitation (once considered, surely he could persuade her by one method or another?); but her objections were ready-made and unconditional. She was so sure, that she was not offended by any of his remarks, and only faintly surprised. She denied his most personal onslaught coolly. That he was a stranger could make no difference to her, since there were only strangers in her life. In Vinny’s experience the one possible alternative to enjoying talking of oneself was to shrink from doing so. To be calmly unconcerned, as was Emily, as she appeared to him to be, was something he had not met before.

‘It was kind of you to come and explain to me about Philly,’ he had said earlier.

‘I owed you that, at least,’ she had replied.

There had been nowhere in the house for them to talk and she had fetched her coat at once when he had suggested this walk. He waited for her in the garden and, seeing her come running out of the porch with her light step, he had been filled with pleasure and anticipation; but conversation between them had turned out differently from his expectations. Her frankness and friendliness only underlined the fact that she was beyond his reach and had no need to be guarded with him.

On their way through the garden, they had passed the
drawing-room window. As they trod softly on the grass, they could see into the uncurtained room where Mrs Tumulty and Mrs Tillotson were in earnest conversation. Mrs Tumulty had dropped her knitting. She sat upright in a winged chair, her fingertips just meeting across her stomach. Mrs Tillotson leant forward, her chin on her fist, an intense expression about her mouth, as if she were talking sensibly about something emotional – such as sex or religion. Yet Vinny guessed that his mother was only telling her how to bring up children; describing how she had reared him; sat up all night through scarlet-fever; taken him to Weymouth for his holidays; fed him on wholemeal bread; been mother, father, nurse, wife, godparent, teacher, confessor, psycho-analyst to him. Mr Tillotson sat on the sofa, staring at her in wonder, his finger on a word in his book.

Vinny rather disloyally described such a monologue to Emily and heard her laughing softly beside him as they went down the steps to the sands.

‘So you never married?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said sadly.

She thought his sadness was because he had not; but it was really because he had lied to her.

‘Why do you bother about people?’ she now asked him. ‘I never do.’

‘Oh, I am too interfering, I know,’ he said. ‘But from the same standard, you are not interfering enough. In my own defence, I must say that to be curious
is
to be at least in the outgoing stream. An inquisitive man cannot help but touch life at many points, be drawn onwards, as one should be – from whatsoever motive. The danger isn’t from lack of discrimination, but from choosing nothing at all …’

‘Danger?’

‘Danger of death.’

‘I have chosen nothing,’ she echoed lightly. ‘Yet some in the same circumstances might say that they had chosen their duty.’

‘You made
no
choice,’ he insisted. ‘Your days are filled now with things chosen for you.’

‘And all that I lack was rejected for me.’ She thought of her old life, of her lover who had left her. ‘You have been very censorious.’

‘Only for my own sake. I so wanted you to come with me tomorrow that I could not accept any of the excuses you made. If you had said: “I do not care to,” it would have been my own private loss and I should never have questioned you; but your saying that you may not leave that child or do anything to displease your sister; that you meet no one, go nowhere, reveals the sort of life I can’t contemplate for anyone, you least of all.’

Coming to the end of the sea-wall, she touched the last stone as if it were a superstition of hers, then turned and began to walk homewards; but she did not answer him.

‘I hope Philly won’t try going for walks tonight,’ she said tiredly. ‘Or Rose will be losing all her visitors.’

‘Is it wise for you to keep her there?’

She looked at him sharply, and he added: ‘The responsibility … the fact that she might do herself harm.’

‘Away from me, I think she’d die anyhow.’

Across a grassy space with shrubs, the Victoria Hotel was floodlit – lamps hidden in rockeries flung up such a glare upon the façade that balconies, gables, verandahs were bone-white. Dance-music floated away from the building.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Vinny asked her.

‘Oh, no, thank you.’

She recoiled from the idea, even to taking a pace, physically, away, nearer to the sea-wall.

‘You’ll accept nothing from me – no drives in the country, luncheons, sound advice. Not even a glass of brandy.’

‘I accept the kindness which lies behind all the offers.’

‘“Kindness” implies condescension. If I were ever allowed to give you anything, the only kindness would be yours to me. The gift could only be a tribute …’

‘You are very good at this sort of conversation,’ she said.

‘… a tribute to your beauty,’ he added.

She looked away.

‘In which no other woman I have ever seen equals you.’

‘You pay so many compliments.’

‘I have paid them all my life, not realising until now how I threw away my words.’

‘Shall we go by the road or sands?’ she asked, pausing at the end of the esplanade.

He thought the sands more romantic, but regretted the choice as soon as they began to climb the cliff-steps. Although in good health always – as most inquisitive people are, since curiosity whips up the circulation and gives an appetite – he had begun of late to feel breathless when going upstairs. He became silent and tried not to breathe too loudly, but he could hear an annoying buzzing in his head, and his temples throbbed. Emily went up so lightly. Her hand scarcely touched the rail. At the top, he was desperate at the thought of saying goodnight to her with no promise of seeing her again.

‘At least you came for a walk with me,’ he said. ‘I can remember that.’

She said: ‘I had to explain,’ then quickly added: ‘It was a lovely walk.’

‘Shall we go for others?’

‘I couldn’t promise.’

They came to the back entrance of the house, the door set in the flint wall. A fir-tree sawed the air with its creaking branches.
Nettles and rank grass grew among the mossy cobblestones, dustbins, foot-scrapers, gratings. It was a dreary part of the garden where only tradesmen went.

She stood with her back to the door, but had already opened it, letting out a slit of light. He guessed that she hoped not to see Rose. Saying good-night to her sadly, he went through the shrubbery towards his bedroom. ‘I am nowhere with her,’ he told himself dejectedly. He wanted to break into her isolation, rouse her, bring her out of the briars, present her to the world. ‘But why?’ he asked himself and, glancing at the mirror, thought: ‘A fine sort of Prince to break the spell – old, out-of-breath. And why? Why?’ he wondered. ‘What do I want with her in the end?’ He sat down suddenly on the bed. ‘I want to marry her,’ he said aloud.

But he was, in fact, somewhere with her. Going into Rose’s sitting-room, seeing the dead fire, she thought that the afternoon seemed far away in some old life. She knelt and picked up the playing-cards, frowning at herself because she felt pleased and excited, as if the walk had dispelled a stale languor. She went over to the table and drawing up a chair, neatly laid out a game of Patience. She played carefully, as if a great deal depended on the result. If she could have glimpsed her own stern set look, she must have laughed.

‘Darling, I was so sorry I was out,’ Isabella called, hearing Laurence come in. ‘Did you go to the cinema?’

‘Yes.’

‘I must have got back almost as soon as you had gone out. What a pity.’

Laurence, who thought it nothing of the kind, agreed. Isabella was reading the catalogue for the Auction Sale of her furniture, and it made strange, sad reading for her.

‘How oddly they group things together!’ she said. ‘“Lot twenty, shepherd’s crook and Gladstone-bag.” Do you recall a shepherd’s crook, Laurence? And Gladstone-bag? We may be Liberals, but I didn’t know we had a Gladstone-bag.’