Same place, he challenged her to. The tea room. What if the Zeppelins had it, she replied. Then it’s since breakfast this morning, he said. But, she began, and then she stopped. How could she say, But you’re not back in your old lodgings. Or at least you weren’t last week.
She is in her bedroom, still debating whether to change her outfit again. There’s not been much new since the war began, just a lot of taking-in, and only half of her clothes fit into the cupboards in Celeste’s surprisingly feminine spare room, which, though barely a quarter of the size of her room on Park Lane, feels four times as airy. The other half of her clothes are on the unused nursery floor upstairs and for the past hour Bea has been pattering between the two, hunting down skirts and dresses and blouses that flap at the edge of her memory. She wants to look different to the woman who ran away from him after they’d made love.
The front doorbell clangs and Bea starts. Celeste’s visitors rarely put in an appearance at such a civilised time of day. Bea can’t help but walk to the door of her room and open it just to listen.
Whoever has arrived is planting weighted footsteps across the marble floor of the hall. Now he has stopped and is speaking measuredly, as if considering each word before it is delivered in a voice strange to this house, but very familiar to Bea.
She doesn’t run downstairs. She can’t move, can barely breathe, and she is waiting for the room to spin. Somewhere outside her head she can hear steps padding up the stairs to the drawing room on the first floor. Bea sits down at her dressing table and leans on her elbows. A pot of powder falls over and she watches the grains spread on to the carpet, light as dust. That’s how I feel, she thinks.
The knock at her door still startles her. One of Celeste’s maids stands in the doorway, all crisp in her black and white, her face soft with concern. Christ, does she know, too? She’s been with Celeste long enough. Before the woman has had the chance to speak, Bea nods. As she starts to stand up from the dressing table, the maid moves towards her as if to help her, but Bea shakes her head, pulls herself upright, wrestling her feet back into her shoes, and then heads for the door.
‘Miss Beatrice?’
Bea stops. She really doesn’t want to stop, in case her legs don’t work when she starts moving again. But there is concern in the woman’s voice, and Bea pauses. What is she going to say? That he’s missing an eye, an arm, a leg?
‘You’ve a couple of hooks still open, Miss Beatrice.’
‘Oh.’ And Bea lets her do them for her and, without asking, smooth down one side of Bea’s hair and add a pin. Then Bea goes out on to the landing and down the two flights to the drawing room.
He is in uniform, and five years have aged him ten. His eyes are calmer, almost dulled, as he looks at her, but he is still John, all slim and high-cheek-boned and somehow boyish. She turns away so he can’t see whatever look it is she has on her face, which feels flushed
and freezing and watery, all at once. Her insides are knotting themselves. You can’t, thinks Bea, just shut off everything you have once felt, blow it away in a puff as if it were never there at all. The world must be filled with people whose hearts do not fully belong to one person. Blast it. How damn annoying, how annoying of him to be here, now, waking the kraken she had long put to sleep. It’s not true, is it, that if you let wounds heal well enough, the scars can never be pulled open.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘For what exactly, Mr Vinnicks?’ and she feels a little stab of pleasure as he starts at the froideur of being called by his surname. Thank her? She’s angry now – it has taken her five years to be angry. She tells herself it’s with him, for being pulled along by the hand for all those months and then so suddenly let go. But it’s not: she’s angry with herself for the fool she was for believing him, and the fool she might still be.
‘For seeing me.’
‘I could hardly pass you on the stairs as I left.’
‘Beatrice, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s too late, John.’ This was at least true until five minutes ago.
‘Bea, I made a mistake.’
‘A lot of mistakes have been made over the past few years. You shouldn’t marry people you meet on a boat.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Oh, you knew her beforehand?’ Take the anger out of your voice, Beatrice. You’re giving yourself away.
‘No, we didn’t marry.’
Bea flinches, she can’t help it, and she knows he’s seen. She should be sympathetic now but she can’t do it. She can’t lie like that, it would be too damn obvious what she really thought. So she says exactly that, what she really thinks.
‘Don’t expect my commiserations.’
He pauses, swallows, looks at the carpet and then back up again.
‘Will you—’
This time she’s not going to stand and wait for the words not to be the ones she wants to hear. Five years, a war, a quarter of the men she used to dance with dead, and holes left in the rest patched up with her own hands, and she’s still not up to being disappointed by John again. And the thought that he hurt her that much gives her a rush of desire to hurt him back.
‘Good God,’ she interrupts him, ‘you’re not going to propose now, are you?’
He doesn’t reply to this. He just looks straight at her. ‘I’ve two tickets for
Carmen
,’ he says. ‘For the day after tomorrow …’
Bea nods.
She feels sick in the taxi to Pimlico. She’s late. Of course she’s late. Not that John stayed long, not even beyond simply arranging to meet, but afterwards she’d had to go and sit down upstairs, wait for the flush to subside, and wonder what she was going to say to Mr Campbell.
What is she doing with him, with John, with Bill, with any of them? That she’s such a far cry now from war-wounded Bea who felt she barely merited a second glance should make her feel pleased, but she is simply uncertain as to how she should behave. There are no rules for all this sort of thing now, it’s not how it was.
It’s guilt that she’s bringing with her: she’s barely seen Mr Campbell, and she’s going to let him down again. Of course she couldn’t have stood him up after last time. She’d certainly never see him again then. And she doesn’t want that, even though John is back.
There’s nothing between Mr Campbell and me, she tells herself. Not after no letter for a year and just five minutes on the street. When she’d returned to the table Bill had still been sitting there, looking nowhere. An old friend, Bea said. We lost contact during the war. Yes, Bill said. Bea glanced down and saw that he had already settled up. Let’s go, he said. And they went. She sent a short note to thank him for lunch. He has not replied.
*
Pimlico is sadder than ever. The tea room more so, and Bea hesitates outside. The paint has all but vanished from the sign and there’s a board across one of the front windows. She pulls her coat tighter around her as she walks in.
He’s not there. Good God, she can’t be so late that he has come and gone already. She looks at her watch. Half past, hell. It’s started to rain, her taxi’s gone and the street is empty. She sits down at a far table and considers how angry he must still be with her to have left.
Bea is still sitting there five minutes later when a figure in the doorway catches her eye. It is Mr Campbell, mackintosh undone, the hem swinging around his knees. She gets a half-smile across the room, but no apology. I know, he says, when he reaches her table, that you have hardly been waiting. The waitress approaches, half the age and size of the one who was here before. As she puts a card on the table Bea notices, they both notice, the indentation of a wedding ring. That’s not been gone long, he says when she walks away. No, replies Bea.
He’s different to how he was in Piccadilly. The dislike has gone and in its place is a distraction; he’s tapped that cigarette on the table over a dozen times. He’s looking at her, though, with what, Bea thinks, is a look of regret – and this gives her hope. He is moving the cigarette towards his mouth when he glances at Bea and hesitates.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do.’
He passes it to her and she puts it in her mouth, holding it high and to the side. He takes out a box of matches, strikes one and leans over the table towards her and she can feel the size of him swallowing her up. Hold fast, Beatrice, she tells herself, and break this silence.
‘No lighter?’ she teases.
‘No holder?’
‘There weren’t so many in France,’ she replies.
‘Bloody mess. The whole thing, a bloody mess.’
‘Isn’t slaughter always bloody, Michael,’ she says, using his Christian name pointedly, as if to pull him to her.
‘Sadly, it is not,’ he replies, ‘always pointless.’
‘So, where has it not been pointless?’
‘When it makes men free.’
‘Still the idealist. Where will your ideals take you after all this?’ They’re sparring now, she must surely be winning him back.
‘Only as far as my circumstances allow me.’
He brings it straight up, the chasm of class between them, that his circumstances are less than Bea’s. He is saying he has neither her money nor her connections, and has to pound away at the law, while Bea can do what she likes.
Does he think, she wonders, that is why she turned him down? She wants to tell him he is wrong.
‘That is the sort of pragmatism that suffocates ideals,’ she hits back.
‘A man must do the right thing. For four years, I, and every man around me, have been searching for the right thing to do amidst a morass of wrong. It is habit-forming.’
But not happy-making, thinks Bea, for she can feel a heaviness in him as he speaks.
‘How do you know what the right thing to do is?’
‘It makes itself very clear.’
‘You sound obliged.’
‘Obligation, Miss Masters, comes in many forms.’
Thoughts of possible obligations start to race around Bea’s mind, taking various female shapes. Pale-faced women, sickly women, seductresses. She almost asks him whether he has someone in the f.w., but stops herself. Would he even know that meant the family way and, in any case, she can’t bring herself to ask. Then she wonders whether that was all his proposal to her was, an obligation to a woman to whom he had just made love? She can feel him slipping away from her. Dammit, Bea, you can’t let him go now, and, instinctively, almost unconsciously, because it is
her bad hand that leads the rest of her, it reaches forward and places itself upon his clenched fist before she can think to draw it back.
Even through her gloves his fingers are warm. Mr Campbell’s fist collapses beneath her hand. A second later, his fingers are locked through hers, and he leads her back to his old digs.
Afterwards, they lie smoking in bed as well as they can, for there isn’t the width for them side by side, and they laugh as they pull each other back up as they start to fall. In the end they cling on to each other, his thick arm around her back, turning them into a single, balancing mass.
There was no tentativeness this time on his part. There is no resemblance, she thinks, thank God, between now and last time. She blocks out of her head what may have happened in between. Not that Bea’s been, well, there’s been nobody she liked that much, not worth the bore of worrying about whether she were pregnant. However, there’ve been a few inconclusive long evenings with the Bills of this world, who would not have been, she imagines, as openly hungry.
Bea never did this with John. They didn’t even spend a long evening together; that part of their relationship was left entirely to a combination of idealised hopes and ignorance. It wasn’t supposed to be done then, certainly not before you were engaged. But few bother with ‘supposed-tos’ now.
Bea thinks about how John’s slender frame would fit beside her easily in this bed, and how she can’t imagine him holding up the pair of them with one arm, and she’s not sure she would want him to. All she wants now is for John to ask her what he failed to before – so she can turn him down. For she will, won’t she? You can’t marry two people at once.
Bea looks to her side and can’t quite say it, so she turns to blow smoke rings at the wall opposite the bed. It’s the same room, same floorboards, same greyness, even a couple of socks hanging on a rail
in the corner. But apart from these, barely a personal possession in view, just a small battered suitcase, firmly closed and, on the table in the corner, a hairbrush half hidden by the cheap paper of a couple of open letters. At last she finds the ability to speak.
‘Michael?’ Will he answer to ‘Michael’ again now.
‘Yes.’
They couldn’t stay in England, they’d have to take her remaining money and his accent somewhere it wouldn’t matter any more. They would vanish, like Edie, into a new and exciting place. America, she thinks; now John is back in London, they could go. It would be an adventure, and there they could make what they wanted of their lives – surely he would like that. And it comes,
‘Michael, I will marry you, you know.’
His arm slackens, and she begins to fall. He catches her and it feels as if he is holding her from necessity, his face is pointing away as he speaks. My God, he can’t bring himself to look at her. They’re coming again, aren’t they, those words that are the opposite of what she is expecting to hear.
‘Beatrice,’ he says, ‘I can’t marry you now.’
And Bea feels a darkness clouding her head. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, trying to push it out. Then a couple of fat teardrops fall on to the outside of her eyelids. She wipes them away with a clumsy fist of a hand, and opens her eyes.
He is leaning over her, his eyes damp with more tears. ‘I can’t,’ he says again. ‘Not now.’
Then he curves himself right over her and kisses her, so slowly and deeply that he could be taking her very soul with him.
She’s run away, gone down to Clemmie at Gowden. She doesn’t understand what can have changed so – apart from her hand. And it couldn’t be – she’s sure it isn’t that. The war, or rather the end of it, has changed him. At least, that is what Bea is forcing herself to think, that now ‘It’ is all is over, his urgency for life has faded and class is dividing them again. So much for being brought up to avoid
fortune-hunters. Michael needs what money she has more than most; it’s more than enough to put him in Parliament, but he would rather go without it than have her.