Authors: Barbara Vine
It would be the first time he had visited it. He knew more or less where it was and set off from Paddington station through a maze of dirty little streets in the direction of the Grand Union Canal and the one beautiful building to be seen, the tall and narrow Gothic church of St. Mary Magdalene, with its tapering spire, that stood almost on its bank. On this cold, dry, grey autumn day, a sharp wind whipped round street corners. A galvanised-iron dustbin stood on the rectangle of concrete that served as Bertie’s front garden, and beside it, leaning against the house wall, was a motorbike with badly worn tyres. There was no doorbell. The flap on the letterbox had welded itself to its rusty surround, so there appeared to be no way of gaining admittance. About to bang on the door with his fist, John tried the blackened brass handle first. The door opened and he stepped inside.
The house smelt unpleasant, a combination of paraffin, fried fish, and urine. The door to the front room had fallen off its
hinges and been left leaning against the wall. Every surface in the room and the passage had been painted dark brown, but so long ago that much of it had bubbled up and was peeling away to show the tinned-salmon colour underneath. It was cold. John called out Bertie’s name. Nothing happened and he called again.
A door slammed upstairs and Bertie appeared at the top of the stairs. He was naked but for a pair of cotton trousers and the braces which held them up. “Oh, it’s you. Bit early, aren’t you?”
“I think I said the afternoon.”
John took in the situation even before Bertie’s companion had emerged from the bedroom. Once, not long ago, John wouldn’t have understood, but in the intervening year or two he had lost his innocence. He had discovered Bertie
in flagrante delicto,
a term John had come across somewhere but never expected to experience himself. Yet he knew Bertie now. He knew how he lived and what he did. It was still a terrible shock.
The man who was now behind Bertie seemed to have hurriedly put on a shirt and trousers and, a good six inches taller, could clearly be seen struggling to tie his tie. Bertie came a few steps down. He said, incredibly, “I don’t suppose you’ve had your dinner. You get along to Delamere Road, there’s a café there. I’ll join you in ten minutes.”
If only he had had the sense, John thought as he walked away from the house, to have told Bertie to write if his visit
was
convenient, not if it wasn’t. But would Bertie have written at all? He didn’t care, he had no feeling for John’s feelings, he had made it plain that men such as them could have as many partners as they liked (partners in crime) and no one was to mind, no one was to be jealous. John was experiencing the sorrow of the man who knows that he passionately loves someone who is unworthy of his love. Even thinking that way made him ashamed of his arrogance in priding himself on being better than Bertie. He found the café and walked past it—he felt food would have choked him—down
to the bank of the Grand Union Canal. He had heard people refer to it as a river, not knowing the difference between this still, stagnant water and a flowing stream. This water was a greenish brown and quite opaque. A narrow boat went by, low enough to pass under the first bridge and the second and through the tunnel at Maida Hill, not far from where he had first lived in London. In the wake of the boat came a pair of Canada geese and a bobbing coot, the white flash on its head bright on this dull day. John had never before thought of putting an end to things but now it occurred to him that to fill his pockets with stones and slip into that cold, brown water would bring him a peaceful death. He turned away and walked to the station.
A train for Penzance had just gone. He was cold but a fire was in the waiting room and no one sitting on the horsehair settee that was near to it. Strangely, the warmth made him feel better. It wasn’t simply a physical improvement but a mental cheering up. Perhaps he had been too hasty, perhaps he should have stayed, got Bertie to send the tall man away, talked to his lover, explaining how unhappy Bertie’s infidelities—that was how John saw them—made him feel. In spite of the hunger which was now returning, he fell asleep with his head resting against the slippery, black fabric. At some point he was aware of a porter coming in to tend to the fire from a scuttle of coal, the man calling him sir and asking if he was all right. John thought he might be turned out onto the cold platform, but this didn’t happen. He was aware of other people coming and going, but they took no notice of him and he went back to sleep.
This time it was only a doze, broken by waking dreams, as he began once more to think what he should do. He was ignorant, apart from what he had read in English literature, of how hard it is to give up someone with whom you have an intense sexual bond. His eyes still closed, he tried to imagine life without Bertie, the emptiness, the longing that would need to find expression in
a howl of grief. He knew now, he knew what the books had never told him.
Outside, it was dark. He sat there, half lay there, wondering how hard it would be to walk to the end of the platform and, when the great train came in from the West Country, still going fast, to slip off onto the rails and lie down quietly to let it pass over him. He heard the porter come back and, instead of kneeling in front of the fireplace, sit down beside him on the settee. John opened his eyes and saw it was Bertie.
“So this is where you’ve got to. Fine dance you’ve led me, and I’m bleeding frozen.”
John wanted to do what he thought he would never do again and certainly dared not do here, throw his arms round him and kiss him the way a man and a woman were allowed to kiss. All he could do was murmur that he loved him.
“Then you’d best come back to my place like you said you would. Never mind Davy, he’s just rubbish. He don’t count. Come on now. Pull yourself together and we’ll go get ourselves a slap-up meal first.”
So John went with him, hating himself but powerless to refuse.
M
RS.
I
MBER
came back in the Rolls-Royce, bringing Charmian with her to be measured for her frock, and consented this time to be given a cup of tea. The two little girls, much the same age, got on well, rather better, Maud thought, than Hope did with Maureen Crocker, and Maud hoped a closer acquaintance might be possible. But when she suggested that Charmian might come again to play with Hope’s wooden farmyard and the metal animals or in the little wooden house John had built for her in the garden, Mrs. Imber looked almost shocked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Perhaps you didn’t know, but Charmian often isn’t quite well.”
“That woman is the worst kind of snob,” Maud said to John. “There’s nothing wrong with the child. It’s just that we’re not good enough for them. Gladys told me the Imbers are basically brewers. All their money comes from beer. Two generations back they were farm labourers.”
John was content for Hope to have her village friends. She would soon be going to school and make more. Since she had become four he was more and more conscious that while she called him Daddy, he wasn’t her father, was indeed her uncle, and “living a lie,” as he put it to himself, was increasingly upsetting to him. Since the episode of Bertie’s flagrant and apparently guiltless unfaithfulness, their encounters had always taken place in the little slum house in Paddington. No one ever cleaned it. Plainly
it was not only filthy but disintegrating, and although in receipt of money from his lover whenever John could afford it, Bertie spent nothing on his home. He seemed not to notice the smell or the slowly failing plumbing. What primitive electrical wiring there was had ceased to function, a failure Bertie attributed to the cables being chewed through by mice. But John had seen a rat when arriving there one evening, the half-tame animal sitting beside the dustbin and staring insolently at him. Bertie laughed when John told him.
He had never again visited Bury Row. The only visitor from John’s world was Elspeth Dean, the music teacher, and one of only two women on his boys’ school staff, and she came not at his invitation but at Maud’s. The illusion that John and Maud were a married couple had to be sustained and not just in the village, but whereas John knew that this must be permanent, Maud hoped that if, for instance, they moved somewhere new, they might revert to being brother and sister. She thought that if Elspeth became her friend and John saw her in their domestic setting, he might grow fond enough of her to see her as a possible wife. As for herself, ever since Rosemary’s visit—never repeated—she had wondered about Ronnie and for months half expected him to write or even visit. Though the months had stretched to years and he had never come, she still thought it a chance that they would meet and the love they had never had for each other would blossom like a long-neglected plant which, when fed and watered, might come into bloom.
John too hoped for changes, but of a different kind. To him, Elspeth, though pleasant and pretty and possessed of a lovely singing voice, was rather a nuisance in the house in the evenings, someone to talk to he had no wish to converse with, someone who seemed to be growing fonder of him when he knew and expected Maud to know that he was irrevocably “one of those” or
“queer” as he and Bertie put it. The changes he wanted and saw as happening in the future were much the same as Maud’s, that they might move away and become brother and sister again, that someone come along and marry Maud, so that she was supported otherwise than by him and leave him free to take a house somewhere to share with Bertie.
At least now Bertie seemed to look upon their relationship as permanent, John coming up to Paddington once every two or three weeks and sending him a couple of pound notes in an envelope between visits. They no longer discussed it, but John was sure that Bertie’s occasional adventures with Davy and his kind still took place and always would. He decided that he could bear it so long as he was told nothing about it and never again was to be shocked by the sight he had had on his first visit to Bertie’s house.
At home in Bury Row, Hope started school in the autumn after she was five, the little Church of England school attached to All Saints that was also attended by Georgie Tranter and Maureen Crocker. Maud took Hope, holding her hand, and fetched her home in the afternoon. She and her daughter had been so close and so much together that Hope cried disproportionately when Maud left her in the playground, but by the next day she was better and ran towards the school door to find her new friends.
Mrs. Imber had been less than delighted with the smocking on Charmian’s frock; the stitches were not quite even and the hem was not as neatly done as she’d expected. She paid Maud but told her she wanted no more work from her; Maud, easily disheartened, abandoned her ambition to become a professional dressmaker and made clothes for herself and Hope alone. She missed Hope more than she had thought she would, even looking forward to her starting school as a time when she would have “more time to myself.” With no resources but her child, no hobbies but one she felt she did less than well, not much of a reader,
she saw life stretching bleakly before her. She was like a traveller setting forth along a path he believes will lead to the city, but who rounds a bend to see a limitless desert stretching before him. To compensate, she went frequently into Ashburton to the shops and sometimes to Newton Abbot, where she took the train to Plymouth, spending more money than the family could afford on high-quality food and buying ready-made dresses, hats, and shoes. Meanwhile, Hope went down with chicken pox, which made Maud worry her face would be scarred, and then with measles. These, the inevitable result of starting school, had little ill effect on her.
John had given up expecting letters from Bertie unless he had something exceptional to tell him. Apart from a telegram there was no other means of communication. Although several people in Dartcombe had the telephone—the Imbers, someone had told him, made long-distance calls on theirs—John had no ambitions in that direction. He couldn’t afford it. He confessed to himself that he had hoped Maud might make a success of her dressmaking, become a good businesswoman, and augment their income. But, no, he told himself, he should have known better. He was appalled by her extravagance and the frivolous items she bought. Money was always short. He occasionally went to Bristol to see his parents, but now these visits had to be cancelled. He was even sending less to Bertie, something which so distressed him as to keep him awake at night. Soon, with no enclosure to put in the envelopes, he wrote less and less often. Even when he had no replies to his letters, he would have gone on writing over the years because this, though one-sided, was the only contact he had with Bertie. But it occurred to him that Bertie might find his letters annoying, and he pictured Bertie’s exasperation, but abandoning the correspondence, such as it was, was almost unbearable, as if life itself were over. Six months, a year, then two years, had passed
since John had last spent a night in Bertie’s house, more than a year since he had heard from Bertie. John’s nights were haunted by the dreams of the jealous lover; scenes of Bertie frolicking with handsome young men drifted past John’s sleeping eyes so that he often woke with a groan of misery and shame. His love remained undiminished. He thought that the worst had happened to him and he had sunk into the depths of misery.
His heart leapt—he actually felt it take a jump of joy—when one morning, just as he was leaving for school, Maud brought him a letter she had just picked up from the doormat. Bertie’s backward-sloping handwriting was now known to her almost as well as it was to John, but the difference in the emotions they felt when reading the address was evident in the pursing of her lips, wrinkling of her nose, and the way she held the envelope almost at arm’s length.
“Give it to me, please,” John said. “If you don’t care to touch it, why not leave it where it was and let me pick it up?”
She made him no answer. In future, he thought, if this letter made things better between Bertie and himself, he would invite his lover here and she must put up with it. Self-pity and resentment engulfed him. He had given up all chance of his own happiness for her, lied for her, earned for her and her child, given up a lot of comforts—such as a good bed in a good bedroom—to which he was entitled, and his reward was to be denied the company of the only person in the world who meant anything to him. He still hadn’t opened the letter, and now a dread took hold of him, a fear that Bertie was telling him what he already knew but had never put clearly into words, that all was over between them. Inside that envelope must be bad news, the confirmation of the fears John dared not face, for Bertie never wrote a simple love letter and certainly would not be telling him he was sorry not to have written before, but that everything was all right and
he longed to see him. That wasn’t Bertie’s style. The cowardly side of John suggested he might leave the letter unopened, hide it in his bedroom. The braver John gritted his teeth, stuck his thumbnail under the flap, and ripped open the envelope.