No More Meadows (16 page)

‘Fletcher,' said Christine, ‘you've got three nights off tomorrow, haven't you?'

‘Praise the Lord,' said Nurse Fletcher, without looking up.

‘Be a love and let me have them. Night Sister won't mind, and you can have my nights off at the end of the month. It's terribly important to me. Please do.'

‘Why should I?' asked Nurse Fletcher with narrowed eyes. She was a mean character.

‘If you do, I'll give you my electric fire. Give, not lend. The one you can boil a kettle on as well.' Electric fires were treasures in the chill cells of the nurses' home. They were not allowed, but you could hide them in a suitcase under the bed when you were out of the room. Christine had burned the bottom out of a suitcase when she had to put the fire in it red hot one evening when the Assistant Matron made a surprise raid.

Nurse Fletcher was tempted. ‘You can have the kettle as well,' Christine said, and, grudgingly, she fell.

Jerry was waiting in the lounge, looking handsomer than anyone who had ever come to that stuffy Victorian hotel. His uniform was not smart – none of his clothes ever had been – but his eyes were bluer than Christine remembered, and his face was brown and firm. He looked ten years older instead of three.

He tried to sulk when Christine told him that she had to go back to the hospital in an hour, but when she said that after tonight she would be free for three days he looked at her with love and said that he would take a room at the most expensive hotel he could find, and they would have a honeymoon.

She did not ask him why he had not written to her for two years, and she made up her mind that she would not mention it unless he did, so as not to spoil any of their time together. She could not have a drink with him, because the gynaecological women might smell her breath. They ordered tea, but they
hardly touched it. They sat in the lounge among the old ladies and provincial business men, and held hands until it was time for Christine to go back to the hospital.

He was waiting for her outside the nurses' home at ten o'clock the next morning. Christine had ploughed through another gruelling night, and was so tired that, as she forced her weary limbs to go through the motions of dressing and packing her case, she had almost hoped that he would not come, so that she could just roll into her bed and sleep.

But he was there, and he was very bright and gay, and although he knew she had been up all night, he expected her to be bright and gay too. The sun was shining and he wanted to walk, so she tagged along with him, stumbling over kerbstones, but trying to match her spirits to his, in case he thought she was not happy about their honeymoon.

They went to the hotel to leave her bag, and when Jerry left her to go down to the hall for cigarettes Christine stopped in the middle of unpacking her case, lay down on the bed and went to sleep.

When she woke it was dusk outside the hotel windows. She was alone, and she was quite sure that Jerry had gone away in disgust, and she would never see him again. She cried for a while, and then decided that she would sleep a little longer and then get up and pack her things and go out of the hotel, inquiring at the desk: ‘Has my husband paid the bill?'

She could not go to sleep again, because she was still crying. She was crying when Jerry came into the room and lay down on the bed beside her, but then everything was all right, and everything about their time together was as wonderful as it had ever been at Oxford, or in the fishing inn in Cornwall.

It was soon after that that the bomb fell near the nurses' home and Christine's photograph of Jerry in the canoe was lost, so she never had any picture of him except the tousled one of him standing behind her with his hands on her bare shoulders after the Magdalen ball.

Much later, after she had written to his mother in Canada, and his mother had written back to say that Jerry had been killed, she wrote again to ask for a picture of him, but Jerry's mother had never sent her one.

Christine rolled up the photograph again and put it back in the drawer. It was no use looking at it, and asking Jerry whether he would mind if she married Vinson. The dead did not mind if you committed sacrilege on their memory by pretending to love someone else. They just shrugged their shoulders and left it to you to decide. The dead would not help you. All they would do was make it more difficult for you by not letting you forget them.

At three o'clock in the morning, when she was sure she would not sleep, Christine went into Aunt Josephine's room. The night-light was by the bed, because Aunt Josephine, who was afraid of no man, had been afraid of the dark all her life. The night-light flickered in a pool of wax, and by its wayward light Christine could see her aunt's head tied up in a net, the mouth open and the nose pointing vastly to the ceiling.

At the foot of the bed the old fox-terrier slept like a heap of corrupted flesh, his brown-and-white patches bleached into his off-white senility, his fat haunch twitching to dreams of a Nimrod youth. When he twitched, one of Aunt Josephine's legs twitched too, as if she were dreaming with him.

The opening and closing of the door had not woken her. Christine stood by the bed with her hands clasped, and said desperately: ‘Aunt Jo. Please wake up, Aunt Jo.'

Aunt Josephine's thick eyelids quivered, her mouth closed, champing on the empty gums, and then suddenly she sat up gaping, her eyes wild. ‘What – what? What's the matter? Is it a fire?'

‘It's all right.' Christine put her hand quickly on the big rough hand that trembled on the bedclothes. ‘It's all right, Aunt Jo. It's only me. I'm terribly sorry to wake you, but I just had to.'

Fully awake, Aunt Josephine became her solid self. She switched on the bedside light and sat up, blinking and yawning hugely. ‘What's the matter, child? You look like the wrath of God.'

‘I feel like it. Aunt Jo, I'm awfully sorry. I know you hate to be woken up, but I just had to talk to you.'

‘Well, just let me get my grinders in,' said Aunt Josephine, never averse to a chat at any hour of the day or night. ‘I can't talk properly without them.' She fumbled at the toothglass,
where her large yellow teeth nestled in cloudy water, thrust them in, worked her jaws for a moment, and sat upright, staring at Christine with bright eyes.

Christine sat down on the bed and passed a hand over the bloated side of the fox-terrier, which growled in its sleep. ‘I'm in a terrible worry, Aunt Jo,' she said. ‘I can't sleep, and I can't get things straight, and I felt I should go mad before morning if I didn't discuss it with you.'

‘Fire away,' said Aunt Josephine, hitching the eiderdown up to the neck of her woollen nightdress. ‘What's your worry? I may not know the answer, but I'll force advice on you just the same.'

‘I want you to. I want someone to tell me what to do, instead of having to decide for myself. He wouldn't help me decide –'

‘He? That young Gaegler, I suppose.'

‘He's not so young. He's thirty-eight.'

‘That's all right for you. I suppose he's asked you to marry him?'

Christine nodded, fiddling with the bedclothes and not looking at her.

‘I knew he would. He asked me what I thought about it some time ago, and I said: “Go ahead and ask her. It's no affair of mine.”'

Christine was disappointed that Vinson had spoken to Aunt Josephine before he risked asking her. It seemed Victorian, and rather cowardly.

‘What did you think I'd say?'

‘I hoped you'd say yes. Chrissie, he's nice. There are a lot worse men than him in the world, and a lot worse people than Americans.'

‘Yes; but, Aunt Jo, you don't marry someone because they're
nice.'
Suddenly, she was bored with the whole thing. It was too much bother. She wished she had not come into Aunt Josephine's room and made Vinson's proposal important by talking about it. She wished she were just the estimable Miss Cope again, calmly asleep until seven-thirty, when she would get up to go to the shop with nothing on her mind except the day's work.

‘I don't love him,' she said irritably.

‘Oh – love,' said her aunt. ‘When you're as old as I am and have seen as many people passionately in love one year, and suing for divorce the next, you'll learn to get cynical about that word.'

‘Don't,' said Christine. ‘I did love Jerry. I still can't think of him without loving him.'

‘Jerry is dead,' said Aunt Josephine harshly. ‘You're morbid. I never should have read
Great Expectations
to you at an impressionable age.'

Christine felt that she was going to cry. No one could understand about her and Jerry, no one had ever had anything like that since the world began.

‘I dare say you think you'll never love anyone like you loved poor Jerry,' said Aunt Josephine. She reached for a packet of Lucky Strikes, shook out a cigarette and lit it, coughing alarmingly. Since Vinson had kept her supplied with American cigarettes she had taken to smoking in a big and choking way. ‘And you're right. You never will. He'd never have married you, though.' She knew the whole story of Jerry, and had formed her own opinion. ‘But most people marry without being in love like that. Look at your mother. She seemed quite happy, poor thing.'

Christine could not think of marriage as applied to her mother, that unreal figure of fading memory, who was so often ill, and seldom much more to her children than the smell of washed wool bedjackets, and injunctions from nurses and maids not to make so much noise on the landing. She had never questioned whether her mother and father loved each other. It was impossible to think of her father in a relationship with any woman, and one just did not think about what one's parents must have done before one could be born.

‘If you'd never known Jerry,' Aunt Josephine went on, ‘you'd be able to think you loved that Gaegler enough to marry him.'

‘I don't know whether I love him at all.'

‘You must, or you wouldn't even contemplate marrying him. You'd come to me and say: “Ha, ha! That Gaegler asked me to marry him. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”'

‘I wish you wouldn't call him That Gaegler.'

‘You wouldn't mind if you didn't like him.'

‘We do get on pretty well,' Christine said doubtfully. ‘But I don't know. It would mean living in America, and I –'

‘My dear baby, the man comes first, not the place. That just goes with the man.'

‘That's what he said.'

‘Then he's a man with more sense than I credited him with. Oh, I know you think you couldn't leave dear old England -wave the flag, and all these jolly red buses and everything – but you'd get on all right in America. They tell me it isn't
all
like the films.'

‘Would you mind if I went?'

‘That's not the point,' said Aunt Josephine shortly. ‘I should mind like hell, if you want to know. So would your Pa, I suppose, though he might not be able to say so in so many words.'

‘Well, then, how could I –'

‘Look here, Chrissie,' said her aunt sternly. ‘You're thirtyfour. You don't want to be a spinster all your life, do you? It's all right now, because people want you, but think about when you're fifty. Who wants a single woman then? She's just a nuisance, who everybody tries unsuccessfully to find a widower for. You love children. Well, it's all right now being Aunt Christine, who's more fun than Mummy, but later on other people's children won't want you. Clement and Jeanette will have to be told: “You must go and see Aunt Christine”, or “You really must write to the old girl. She doesn't have much to live for.”'

‘But, Aunt Jo,' said Christine in distress, ‘you shouldn't say that. Everybody wants
you.'

‘Like hell they do,' said her aunt cheerfully, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the first one. ‘I'm useful, because I run your Pa's house, but I'm a bit of a nuisance, you must admit, and people say: “There's that crazy old woman with all her dogs and cats.”'

‘They don't!' said Christine, remembering the times when she had heard people like Geoffrey say something like that.

‘Don't worry. I like them to. I like to be that crazy old Aunt Josephine. If I can't be desirable I can at least be renowned as an Old Character. I have my niche.'

Yes, she had her niche. She had her letters to the family abroad, and her cats and dogs, and her charities, and her pilgrimages to cemeteries. Christine gave a little shiver, seeing herself in thirty years' time as that crazy old Aunt Christine.

‘You're cold,' said Aunt Josephine. ‘Marry that Gaegler and have a nice warm double bed. It'll do you a power of good.'

‘But then, about Daddy,' Christine said, imagining what Vinson would look like in pyjamas. ‘I've been at home so long, and Roger isn't really any use to him except to carve the joint on Sundays. Ought I to leave him and go so far away?'

‘Don't you worry about him. I'll look after him, same as I always have. He won't mind too much. I know he doesn't like that Gaegler much, but then he won't have to see him often if you're in America.'

‘That's another thing,' Christine said. ‘Everyone is so stuffy and insular. Just because Vin doesn't like beer and went to a school that they've never heard of, no one likes him except you and me. What will Roger and Sylvia say if I tell them I'm going to marry him? They'll be crabby.'

‘I'll tell them,' said Aunt Josephine, ‘I'll settle them. Don't worry.'

‘Aunt Jo,' said Christine, bending to kiss her, ‘you're marvellous. Do you know, I believe I really might get married.'

‘Of course you will,' said Aunt Josephine briskly. ‘And now go down and get us something to eat for the Lord's sake. I'll never go to sleep again, and I'm starving. Let's have the wedding here, shall we? What excitements. I shall wear a feathered toque and a blue satin dress with a dipping hem and a bow on the hip. I see it all.'