Marking Time (59 page)

‘For God’s sake, don’t tell her! She would tell Villy and—’

‘Of course I won’t. I’ll say it’s for a young friend of mine in the RAF,’ he said. ‘I’ll manage that – don’t you worry.’

‘It’s probably frightfully expensive—’

‘Don’t worry about that either. That’s the least I can do.’

‘You know, I’m practically certain Jamie’s yours,’ she said. ‘It seems so awful to keep having babies without their father.’

She had never actually said that about Jamie before, although he had certainly wondered. What with alcohol, emotion and fatigue she was on the brink of becoming maudlin. He kissed her and said,
‘Jamie’s wonderful because he’s yours. You know I love him. Now, we’d better both get some sleep.’

And she had gone out like a light, but the bed was narrow for the two of them, and it took him time to get off, and then he slept fitfully.

Now, in the cold light of day, and by Jove, it
was
cold, he thought, he’d better make some tea for them both, since there was nothing to have for breakfast. This entailed padding
down two flights of stairs to the kitchen and struggling to find tea and the tin of dried milk, which he had no idea how to mix, while the kettle was boiling. In the end, he took the tin up with
him, alongside a jug of water. His head was beginning to throb and his mouth felt vile partly because he’d slept in his false teeth. He cleaned them all, the living and the dead, as he called
them, and gave himself a stiff draught of Andrew’s Liver Salts before he woke her up.

The tea was rather nasty, but she said it was a great deal better than nothing.

As he dropped her off at the cottage at Wadhurst, he said, ‘I’ll ring you on Monday evening. From the office, just before I leave. About five.’

‘If you make it half past, Isla’ll be at her WI meeting.’

‘Right. God bless.’

He drove on, wondering what would be the most tactful way of tackling Jessica about an abortionist. Tact was certainly required: he was not supposed to know about Angela only, of course, Villy
had told him, on top of which, Jessica, who was pretty sharp, would not be likely to believe that he wanted one for a friend unless he was very convincing. He began to regret having suggested it,
but he’d have to go through with it now.

But he didn’t have to, because on Monday morning Diana rang him at the office to say that Angus had been killed – in an air raid on Portsmouth.

‘Poor darling. Do you feel—’

‘I don’t know what I feel,’ she said. ‘Stunned, mostly. We hadn’t been getting on, but all the same it seems a fearful waste. He so loved the Army – a
civilian death seems rather a sell.’ She sounded brittle with shock. ‘He was going to be sent overseas,’ she said. ‘He was looking forward to it. Apparently it wasn’t
even a particularly bad raid.’ He could not think of anything to say.

‘Poor Isla’s devastated,’ she said. ‘Anyway,
you
needn’t worry. I can tell her a story now and she’ll
want
to believe it.’ Then she
said, ‘I’m going to ring off now: I really can’t think of anything else to say.’

He wrote her a letter later on that day. He wasn’t used to writing them, but he felt for her. He could see how she must feel guilty, and how difficult it must be to be living with her
sister-in-law and having to pretend to feel more than she did.
And
she was pregnant, and money, which had always been tight, would now be tighter on a widow’s pension. He
couldn’t manage to say much of this in his letter, but he told her he would help in any way that he could and that he was sorry. And he sent his love and said he would keep in close touch. It
wouldn’t help her much, he knew; nothing helped guilt except absolution from whomever one had harmed, and he, of all people, knew how awful it was when you had no hope of that.

The platform of the station at Oxford Circus was, as usual, crowded. By this time of night, everybody who slept on it had commandeered their place – the same one every
night, Angela had begun to notice. The most favoured slept next to the slot machines that contained a small mirror in which, no doubt, they could comb out their hair in the morning. Many of them
slept in curlers. They spread layers of newspaper on the ground, covered it with a blanket, and a pillow, if they had one, and then lay fully clothed with another blanket on top. Over the weeks,
they must have become used to the preliminary rush of warm, dark brown air that was pushed through the tunnel in front of each train, arriving with a crescendo of sound that died away to a
high-pitched little mechanical ticking. A second’s silence; then there would be the hiss of the doors opening and a pause while the passengers got in and out of the train before a weary voice
called, ‘Mind the doors!’ whereupon with a convulsive, moaning lurch it was off again, gathering speed, its rocking racket gradually dying away as it disappeared into the tunnel. Every
three or four minutes this happened, and yet people slept through it. When she came off duty after the night shift at six thirty in the morning, there they would be, bleary-eyed, taking out their
curlers and dropping them into biscuit tins or brown-paper carrier bags, making up their faces in the slot-machine mirrors or with tiny ones from their handbags, drinking tea out of Thermos flasks,
not saying anything much to one another. The men, who were mostly old, would still be asleep since their toilet was minimal: old boys on their backs, their mouths open, snoring, their sparse
yellow-grey hair ruffled by the approach of each train.

Outside the station it was utterly dark, and very cold. Angela had always been thin, but since her abortion she had not wanted to eat much at all and had become much thinner, so she felt the
cold. She only had to cross the road to reach the Peter Robinson building, now housing the Overseas Service of the BBC. She was the most junior continuity announcer, and had been working for six
weeks now. Brian had got her the job – he was quite high up in the administration – and she knew he had pulled strings to get her in. ‘I must try and make it up to you
somehow,’ he had said, on their last private meeting. Although it seemed extraordinary to her that he could seriously equate an admittedly better job with being in love, having his baby and
being rejected. She had not
meant
to get pregnant, but when she was, she had told him at once, thinking it would turn the scales, that he would leave the wife he either never spoke of or
spasmodically disparaged, and marry her. But he had been appalled by her news and so violent about her
not
having the baby, that she said she would have it anyway – whether he
married her or not. So then he said that they might have to wait, but would get married in the end and she had been happy again – and
then
, she did not know how it happened, her
mother found out that she was pregnant, and when Angela said it didn’t matter, that he was going to marry her as soon as he got a divorce, her mother actually went and
saw
him. But
she did not know this until after their meeting. He never meant to marry you, her mother said; he has a wife and children – he would not think of leaving them; he only said what he did
because he was terribly worried about you.

They had had one meeting: she had wanted him to come to her bed-sitter in Notting Hill Gate, but he had refused – said he would meet her in Kensington Gardens by the Peter Pan statue.
‘Supposing it’s pouring with rain?’ she said (this was on the telephone). ‘It won’t be,’ he had replied.

It wasn’t. It was one of those tremulously balmy September mornings, with a pale blue sky and soft yellow sunlight that had no warmth. The trees were turning and the grass, now that they
had taken away all the small railings that had edged every path to use the iron for the war effort, looked very green and faintly crisp from an early frost. She knew she would arrive too early and
walked, as slowly as she could bear to, from Lancaster Gate station on the path nearest the Serpentine lake. In spite of everything that had happened, she could not help feeling excited and happy
at the prospect of seeing him, and during this walk she moved from being afraid – from dreading – what he might be going to say to her, to wondering what he might say, and eventually to
imagining
what he might say which, of course, miraculously became what she wanted to hear. I shall remember this day all my life, she thought, and, more dramatically, I am walking towards
my fate. Their difference in age did not matter (he had said that right at the beginning); he would drink less, she was sure, if he was happier which she was certain he would be with her. If he did
not want children, she would not have any. She would do exactly what he wanted, because she wanted to do that.

He was late, but only a few minutes. She saw him coming – along the same path that she had walked – but she forced herself to remain on the bench until he was very near, when she
could not help springing to her feet.

She wanted to fly into his arms, but he kissed her cheek, a most non-committal kiss, and suggested they sit.

From the moment that he began to speak – making it clear that the meeting was for him an ordeal – her heart, which had seemed almost in her throat, began to sink, heavily, coldly, in
her breast.

He said how difficult it was for him to say the things he had to say. He said he was entirely to blame. He said that he had been carried away – he made that sound as though this was a
faintly disgusting, contemptible thing to have been. He said that his wife had been made very unhappy by the affair – she knew, he interrupted her, because he had told her. She had been
wonderful about it all, had entirely understood how it had all come about and was prepared to forgive him for the sake of their marriage and their children. He was too old for Angela, and she was
so young, at the beginning of her life, that she was bound to find some really nice young man who would be worthy of her (there were fearful echoes here of Rupert, who now seemed so distant, so
long ago). He was not going to see her again; he had promised her mother – and then that came out. The shock and humiliation of this – of being
discussed
as though she was a
child, by his wife and her mother – was too much and anger suddenly animated the paralysed stupor with which she had listened until then. How dared he go and see her mother behind her back!
she’d said.
She
had come to see him, he replied. Pride forbade her asking him how her mother could have known about it, if not from him. Afterwards she recognised that he had lied by
not saying things: he had rung her mother up, and
then
her mother had gone to see him. He told her that he had arranged for her to have an audition for the announcing job, and when she
said she didn’t want it, he had urged her at least to try for it. ‘You need something interesting to do now,’ he had said. ‘The alternative is that you will be called up to
do God knows what.’ Then he had said how much he admired her courage and that he was taking his wife on a short holiday which he felt was badly needed. He had told her to take care of herself
– looked as though he was going to kiss her cheek again, but she turned her face away – touched her hands, a sort of apologetic pat, as she said to herself afterwards, got up from the
bench and walked quickly away without looking back. Or at least she did not think he looked back – again her pride prevented her from watching him walk away; one glance had been enough.

She felt utterly betrayed, but the devilish thing was that she still could not think of him without longing. She did not ‘respect’ him, as she put it – at times she was even
able to dislike him – but some part of her hung on to how they had been before all this had happened and longed to go back to it.

She had got the job because she had not really cared whether she did or not, had had no nerves, was calm and cool and collected. She had trailed other announcers for a week and learned the job
and then begun. It was two months now since that meeting and she got through the days and nights somehow. Everything, excepting the job, was an extraordinary and pointless effort –
travelling, feeding herself, making any small decision, talking to other people. She slept and slept – getting up in the afternoons was always hard, and on her days off she didn’t
bother sometimes to get up at all.