Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘You can’t go back to the boat in that state.’
Relief surged through me and I felt the sweat break out on my forehead. ‘Thank you. That’s very kind. But you must chuck me out whenever you want to.’
I had gained my point.
When we had loaded the car to go home, she said, ‘I think I’d like to see what driving would be like. Whether my leg works or not.’
‘Fine.’ What else could I say? But it was another little thrust towards independence. ‘If it’s painful, let me take over, won’t you?’
‘I will.’
All went well for the first few miles, but then, when we reached the corner before the turning to our lane, she suddenly exclaimed, and braked hard; and I, who had been attending to her profile
rather than to the road, looked ahead to find us skidding into the verge where there was a ditch. We stopped just before we would have gone into it. I still didn’t know what was going on. She
was getting out of the car, so I did the same. On the road behind us was a dark bundle of fur.
‘I hit it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see it in time.’ She was very distressed. She crouched down and touched its body – it was a young cat. ‘It isn’t
dead,’ she said. ‘Do you think . . .’
I got down to look at it. It was clearly dying. ‘You go back to the car,’ I said. ‘I’ll deal with it.’
‘Couldn’t we take it to a vet? Save it?’
‘No. You go back to the car. Daisy,
please.’
The wretched creature was still alive; its amber eyes wide and staring, mouth agape, lips drawn back from the little white pointed teeth. As I took hold of it, it gave one weak wail of agony. I
put one hand over its head and the other round its neck, gave one strong twist and felt the vertebrae snap. When I let go of it, its head fell back on the road with an unearthly quickness. There
was no blood. I picked it up and laid it in the cow parsley on the verge. I was used, from my poaching days, to finishing off any damaged creature, but I knew that Daisy was not.
She was huddled in the passenger seat. I got in beside her.
‘Is it dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘You drive. I’m not fit to. I killed it.’ And she burst into tears.
I turned to her, put my arms round her shoulders and pulled her towards me until her face lay against mine. A faint resistance and then she let go. I held her until the convulsions of sobbing
became less, then I tilted her head so that I could kiss her. I simply laid my mouth against hers and there was a kind of breathless pause, and then I became aware that the kiss was returned. I was
careful to take no advantage from this: if some wild creature approaches and you remain perfectly still and quiet they are more likely to come nearer. This was the light in which I had early seen
Daisy, someone whose experience had taught her distrust and fear of others, and subsequent information (from the diaries and letters) had confirmed this. So I remained still – not quite
unresponsive, but passive.
She did not kiss me for very long, and when she withdrew, I sensed that she was at a loss, uncertain, indeed extremely shy about how to be with me. I released her at once.
‘I will drive home, if you like. But it was not your fault. It could just as easily have happened to me – or to anyone. All right?’
She shot me a quick, nervous look.
‘Yes – you drive.’
She was silent all the way back, and I was content to savour the salt of her tears from her mouth. I was light-headed with the exhilaration of that first kiss – are not all first kisses
unlike any others? – and the certainty that I was on the brink of achieving all that I had schemed and dreamed about for so long.
This was right. That night, she invited me into her bed.
Oak Tree Cottage. 3 June
I am not in love – I am
not.
So what is it that is happening – in me, to me, about me? I am confused, incapable of thought ... Or if I have thoughts,
they contradict one another as fast as they come. So I resort to my old habit of trying to write myself into clarity, or acceptance or comprehension – whatever is needed. He has gone to
pump out the wretched boat, so I have some hours to myself that I need to sort things out. Already I seem to have two selves, two parallel lives, and I have no control over whether they will
merge into one, or divide more and more widely until one is outdistanced by the other.
For instance, it was not he who asked if he might spend the night with me last night, I asked
him.
The moment that I said it I felt afraid, and the other part of me jeered and
gabbled; what was the point of holding love dear, allotting it such significance, mourning its loss so greatly (as, indeed, I have done) if the slightest indication of its presence puts me to
flight? It makes me nothing but words, a craven creature devoted merely to attitudes. You would not say, ‘Life is supremely valuable to me, but I don’t think I’ll have it
now.’ That is poorly put. I suppose I mean that opportunity, like chance, is not necessarily a fine thing, but sometimes it is there. If I never trust anyone, there will be no one to
trust. I might endure that, but how could I want it?
He seems to have no conflict at all. Ever since I have known him he has shown me nothing but the most gentle kindness. Last night he was the same. When he got into bed with me I was
shaking so much that I was embarrassed by my own fear. He took me in his arms and said, ‘I’m not going to fuck you. I’m simply going to be with you.’
And that is what happened. He put the lamp on the floor so that the room was full of shadows and subdued light. I said that I had not been to bed with anyone for nearly ten years (this was
some sort of apology for shaking so much). Much later, when I was naked, I heard myself trying to excuse my body – the stripes and blue veins on my breasts from feeding Katya, and he
said that I was inside my stripes and that it was me he loved. ‘If you were marked all over, like a zebra, I should love you.’ All through the night he told me that he loved me
– kissed me and touched me with real tenderness. Some time after the dawn chorus when I discovered, waking, that I had fallen asleep, I found him propped on one elbow looking down at
me, and as I saw him, he smiled and as he began to kiss me again he covered my left breast with his hand and at once I started to tremble, but not from fear. But when I told him that I wanted
him, he stroked my face and said, ‘You’re not ready yet.’
I felt such an amazing, such a sweet sense of relief, that there was time and that I could take it and that he understood my need, that I could have wept, but he sensed that too, and
diverted me.
It was some hours later during that timeless night that I recognized and could accept his unconditional love, and then, for the first time in my life, I felt free to be nothing but myself.
Years slipped away from me until I was ageless, without shame or my lifelong anxieties that I was not giving enough, pulling my weight, doing or being what might be expected of me, all the
armour I had always used when someone was going through the motions of intimacy with what I now realized had always been a stranger. I did not feel a stranger to him, and the extent of his
strangeness to me was simply as much a pleasure as a mystery.
When it was light, he went downstairs to make tea and he sat on the side of the bed while we drank it, and we talked, exchanging small desultory facts about ourselves. I asked him how he
had come to have such a passion for reading, and he said that he supposed it was an escape. When I said it was clear that he didn’t read escapist literature, he said that escape
didn’t equate with unreality, it was simply different. ‘Often,’ he said, ‘it seems more real than my own life. And far more variable.’
Then he said, ‘We must think of a way to celebrate this day.’
‘Haven’t you got to do the boat?’
‘Oh. Have I got to? Well, supposing I spend a couple of hours and then come back and, if you will allow me to, bath and shave and
then
take you out to lunch? Will that
do?’
I agreed. I did not think that he ought to afford to take me to lunch, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I said a pub by the canal somewhere would be nice.
Now he has gone to the boat, and I have bathed and dressed and here I am in the garden with my diary.
That awful boat! I had no idea what it was like and I certainly had not realized that he did not even own it. Poor man! It is hard to imagine how someone so sensitive and intelligent could
stand such a life – the discomfort, the isolation, the squalor! I suppose that, until he gets his divorce, that wife will continue to sit in their house and he will have no money to buy
anywhere else. And yet I don’t see how he can get the work that he is clearly so good at remaining where he is. No wonder he wanted to do my garden so much, although he has earned very
little money from it. Perhaps, when I offered him more money for all that he has done for me during these past weeks, it was not nearly enough. If I had had nurses, or a housekeeper or,
indeed, anyone living in, as he has been doing, it would have cost three times as much. Perhaps I should . . .
But here she stopped; somehow, after the last night, it would be invidious to offer him more money. It would seem as though – she felt herself blushing, something that seldom happened when
she was alone. No, a man – anyone – who was poor and honourable must have pride, and not to respect that would be patronising and altogether offensive. He had never complained about his
life, and what he had told her of it, coupled with what she now knew about him, engendered a kind of admiration for him that was new to her. In spite of neglect and cruelty in childhood, and then a
series of dreadful – in the case of his Charley, tragic – events, he had somehow managed to keep his freshness of heart, almost a kind of innocence that touched her.
Whatever happens, I must not hurt him: he has surely had enough of that. I must be clear and honest, never lead him to think I care more for him than is true. But what is
that? Well, if I don’t know, I should tell him so.
But then she thought that any kind of uncertainty about degrees of involvement – or love – seemed only to make the other person infer what they wished. So she must keep her
uncertainty to herself.
What I
do
know, she thought later, as she shut up the diary, is that last night I wanted him. Pure lust, I suppose, something that I don’t think I have ever felt before in my life
(I
thought
I loved Stach; I
knew
I loved Jass) but that is what it was. And while she could acknowledge that to herself, the idea of telling him made her . . . But she
did
tell
him! She said she wanted him. And he could easily have translated that into her falling in love with him.
The trouble with you, she told herself angrily, is that, due to being sixty, you have old-fashioned schoolgirl notions about this kind of thing. You manage to be too old and too young in the
same breath. And then she remembered how she had felt in the night when he had given her time; how she seemed to become no age at all. All those sensations and memories were but a few hours old and
perhaps suited only to the privacy and nakedness of night.
At any rate, she suddenly felt extremely shy of meeting him when he came back from the boat, and took refuge in household chores, ironing her shirts in the kitchen with the back door open for it
was going to be a very hot day. She ironed to music, a Mozart piano concerto – one of the late ones – but when she reached the slow movement she stopped ironing and abandoned herself to
its slow, gentle insistence, had never noticed before how erotic this particular movement was. But perhaps it was not Mozart, it was her perception that had changed. Any minute now, she mocked, the
slow, gentle insistence of the iron on your nightdress will have much the same effect.
The telephone rang, and she went to the sitting room to answer it.
It was Anna, asking her if she wanted to do some programme.
‘Hang on, have to subdue Mozart.’
‘It’s a series. They want you to make six programmes in pairs back to back.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t hear what it was about.’
‘Oh. It’s one of those guess-who’s-written-this jobs. They want you as a team captain. You have two different people on your team for each programme and you play against the
other lot. It’s a live audience, going out at six p.m. You’d need to stay the night, I should think. But if Anthony has a friend staying with him in your flat you could always stay with
me.’
‘Can I think about it?’
‘You can. But I know that that means you don’t want to do it. Easier to say now, wouldn’t it be? They don’t pay much,’ she added. ‘I’ll say you’re
working. Which is true, isn’t it?’
‘A bit – yes.’
‘How
are
you, anyway? When shall I come and see you?’
‘Oh, soon. Let me finish the new play treatment first. Then you can read it and we can talk. You know how that gets me going.’ She could hear herself gabbling and she guessed that
Anna could hear it too.
‘Is your faithful serf still looking after you?’
‘He’s working on his boat, but he still does a good deal for me. He’s not a serf,’ she added: the notion made her feel angry.
‘Can you drive yet?’
‘I tried yesterday. But it was awful.’ And she told Anna about the cat. It was a relief to have something of this kind to tell her – something where she was not withholding
anything. But after she’d told about not actually killing the poor cat, and Henry having to finish it off, she fell silent.
‘How very upsetting. But it probably wasn’t your
fault,
Daisy, just awful bad luck. It might have happened to anyone.’
‘That’s what Henry said.’
‘It must be true, then, mustn’t it? Nearly forgot. Anthony was asking about you.’
‘What about me?’
‘How you were. How you were getting on in the country. Whether you were ever coming back. He sent his love and said that, in spite of his loathing for rural life, he would brave it one
weekend to see you.’