The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Page 10

  The flat was full of books and manuscripts, pieces of ivory and wood carvings that he had picked up on his travels, pictures that had caught his fancy because the artist had captured the atmosphere of a place. The furniture was well-worn, chosen for comfort rather than style. Kerren was reassured. The flat belonged to a man who was not afraid of sentiment. But she was disappointed that there were no pictures of his wife and children; she felt that they represented a barrier through which she must pass before she could know him completely. But time would smooth things out, she thought comfortably, there was plenty of time now that the war was over. As he handed her a gin and tonic she asked irrelevantly:

  ‘Why The Bull and Mouth Inn?’

  ‘Why not?’ He knew London too well to want to talk about it.

  John Hughes laughed. ‘I love the way you come out with things, Kerren!’

  The familiarity of her name on his lips startled her. She was suddenly aware that he was greatly attracted to her; he made no attempt to disguise the fact but sat gazing at her, his blue eyes bright with admiration. She felt that she was exposed to a blaze of light after a long period in twilight. She looked down into her glass, trying to escape.

  Adam, having poured whisky for himself and John Hughes, stretched out in an armchair.

  ‘Are you still insisting on going back to medical school?’ he asked.

  John Hughes said, ‘I am.’

  He did not say it at all belligerently, but Kerren noticed for the first time that he had a rather forceful face in spite of his amiability. He had a very strong jaw-line, not obstinate or ruthless, simply strong; it made one wonder about his character which was surprising because up to now he had seemed too boyish to have anything much in the way of character.

  ‘Do you think I should go to medical school?’ he asked her.

  ‘If you want to, of course you should. I think it’s important to do what one wants to do.’

  Adam said, ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I’m still deciding. I think I might like to be a journalist.’

  ‘What’s your shorthand speed?’

  He had a habit of bringing her dreams down to a mundane level. He went on reminiscently, ‘When I first thought about journalism I went to see the editor of our local rag. He told me to get my speed up to 160. I worked like fury and when I had done it I went back. He had gone and the new man was not in the least interested in me. I was beginning to lose interest myself, but it made me so furious that I really set about it. I thought how mortified he would be when I was editor of the Manchester Guardian.’

  ‘Adam!’ Kerren was enchanted. ‘Did you really think like that, too?’

  ‘You haven’t a monopoly interest in dreams.’ He had been waiting to get his own back. They laughed and eased into each other’s company. John Hughes said to her:

  ‘Adam’s right, you know. You’ll have to learn the tools of your trade.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ But it would take so much time if she had to start at the bottom; she was already twenty-four and life seemed to be slipping away. She was reluctant to commit herself to a long grind of study.

  ‘Are you going to be a great surgeon?’ she asked John Hughes.

  ‘One thing at a time! I’ve got to qualify first.’

  He knew where he was going, he was no dreamer.

  Kerren looked into her glass. For a moment or so no one spoke and it did not matter, it was very pleasant. Somewhere in the City bells sounded. Would they be the bells of Old Bailey, St Clements . . .?

  ‘Do you ever go out in the evening and wander round?’ she said to Adam.

  ‘Not now. I used to.’

  He had done so much and she was at the beginning. Would he wait for her or would she have to miss something? And was she prepared to? She wondered idly about this, the drink beginning to make her feel confident so that she imagined that everything depended on her. John Hughes said to Adam:

  ‘Have you decided about The Rags of Time?’

  Adam shook his head. He cocked an eye at Kerren. ‘What about doing a bit of reading for us?’

  ‘Reading?’

  ‘We have a book that we can’t agree about. Suppose you read it and give us the layman’s judgement?’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, feeling flattered.

  ‘A prisoner of war novel. The title comes from John Donne, “. . . Days, months, years, which are the rags of time”.’

  ‘Do you think it should be published?’

  ‘That’s neither here nor there. You mustn’t have any preconceived ideas. Are you a quick reader?’

  ‘Fairly.’

  He went to his desk and produced the manuscript. It was a hefty one, Kerren noticed.

  ‘I’ve never done this sort of thing before,’ she said, rather daunted.

  ‘So much the better. I’m not asking you for a critical judgement, we have a surfeit of those. Just tell me whether it would stay on the library shelves.’

  She took it, feeling that it represented something momentous in their relationship.

  ‘Have you read it?’ she asked John Hughes.

  He nodded. He had been watching her face and she realized that he had understood how she felt; he was not quite so callow as she had at first thought.

  It was just after half-past nine when they left Adam’s flat. John Hughes carried the manuscript for her.

  ‘Are you a publisher’s reader?’ she asked him.

  ‘Only unofficially. My father is Adam’s partner.’

  He did not offer his opinion on The Rags of Time and she did not like to ask for it. As they came into Ludgate Circus she saw the lights of The King Lud and said rather wistfully, ‘I should like to have had a drink there.’

  He took her arm and changed direction.

  ‘Then let’s do that thing.’

  He was formidably decisive.

  Chapter Ten

  Kerren seemed to have taken a decidedly literary turn. She was forever sitting with her nose buried in a manuscript that Adam Grieve had given her to read; every now and then she read bits out to Cath when they had coffee together in Kerren’s flat. Cath disapproved of all this. She felt that Kerren was not really interested in the book, she was worried in case her criticism of it failed to impress Adam. Kerren was constantly trying to find solutions in other people instead of getting down to the business of adjusting to life. Now she saw a whole world of artistic fulfilment opening up to her through Adam. One found fulfilment in oneself, other people helped, but finally you were on your own. Cath pointed this out, but Kerren thought that she was preaching and would not listen. That was another of life’s bitter lessons: other people did not want the fruits of your wisdom.

  It was unlikely, in any case, that they would have reached much agreement on the book since Cath had decided that art was an escape from life. Life was too urgent and painful to be contained within the formal framework of a work of art. Pain was important to Cath. She had never reconciled herself to her comfortable home life. As a child she had dreaded going to parties because her expensive dresses always aroused admiring comment; she was a plain child and would have preferred to be less conspicuous. When she joined the W.R.N.S. she found, in the discomfort of life on an airfield, a necessary ingredient that had hitherto been left out of her life. She took to hardship as others take to luxury. On her release, she failed to find a substitute satisfaction. She now had a job in the office of a refugee organization and she spent most of her evenings doing youth work. She got very little money, but was troubled by the fact that her home circumstances still enabled her to live more comfortably than most people. Her father had sent the front gate for scrap during the war, but peace brought no comparable patriotic gesture. When Stafford Cripps appealed for greater sacrifice, her mother switched off the radio.

  ‘Sacrifice! When his government is pouring money down the drain, he has the impudence to ask us to save more!’

  Cath had not minded her mother’s onslaught on Aneurin Bevan who did not appeal to her wit
h his flamboyant Welsh ways; but Cripps had a fine, flawless integrity which even her mother should have appreciated.

  ‘If I had his money, I could afford his integrity,’ her mother sighed.

  ‘That has nothing to do with it. The money is irrelevant.’

  Cath was not in the least worried about Stafford Cripps’s money, although she could not forgive her parents for their more modest income. There was a meanness about the very modesty. There was a meanness about peace. Everyone was concerned with trivialities. In her one clerical job she had involved herself in a major crisis by addressing a director as Mister instead of Esquire. ‘There was more panic than in flying control during an alert,’ she told Kerren. She had found the work of air mechanic exacting; every time a plane that she had serviced took off, she had sweated with anxiety in case something went wrong. She had worked from dawn till dusk in bitter weather, crawling back to the cabin, numb with cold, to wrestle with the intractable stove. The aircraft by day and the stove by night had dominated her life. There was nothing in civilian life to replace them. Even with the refugee organization she spent more time looking into complaints about the misdirection of supplies than doing anything constructive. Not that it was easy to be constructive with the refugees.

  ‘You get them a job and in a week they’ve thrown it in because they were asked to do something that they considered beneath them, or because someone said something that offended them!’ she told Kerren.

  All the courage seemed to have drained from life; it was a weary, whining world. There was, however, a staunchness in Cath, and she persisted doggedly in the work, hoping that she might in time achieve a sweetness that would see the good behind the prickly mask.

  ‘This book is about a prisoner of war camp in Japan,’ Kerren said, ‘it ought to appeal to you.’

  ‘It’s no use going over the past. It’s the mess that’s left behind that we have to deal with.’

  ‘You can’t deal with it without understanding.’

  They sat in Kerren’s room and argued night after night. Sometimes Jan joined them. He was not a great help.

  ‘No one can understand unless they have actually experienced these things.’ He was annoyed that they should even try; he guarded his territory ferociously, blocking every attempt to find a way through.

  ‘No, no!’ he would exclaim. ‘It was not like that at all. You had to live, this was all that mattered. You did not have time to philosophize. If you did not concentrate on living, you died. It was as simple as that.’

  But when they talked about the stark reality of keeping alive, he would laugh and say, ‘Bare bones of existence! How dreary you are. It was not all so stark. Man is much more resilient than you think.’

  He was annoyed if they thought that anyone had suffered more than he had; yet he rejected pity. He worked very hard at the restaurant, turning his hand to the most menial work when the Occasion demanded.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Cath asked, puzzled.

  ‘Like it? It has to be done.’

  He was not concerned with the pursuit of happiness, the business of keeping alive was still of paramount importance to him. His one outlet seemed to be Robin. He often led the conversation round to her.

  ‘When will she come again?’ he asked them once.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Kerren answered.

  ‘Perhaps I shall go to see her.’

  Cath could not understand his attachment. She had been prepared to lose him to Kerren or to Dilys, but she was mortified that he should have transferred his interest to a shallow creature like Robin. One Sunday afternoon, when time hung heavy on her hands and she was particularly restless, she went to see Dilys. It was late April, gusty winds blustering the trees in the park, sending paper skittering in the gutters. Cath felt the old, urgent longing as she padded along the street. Every so often, in the midst of her endeavours to become a very good person, she felt a tug in the other direction. The street corner was not without appeal; it seemed the one way in which the warring needs of suffering and pleasure might be reconciled.

  As she turned the corner of the block of flats the lights were coming on in windows and the people in the street were shadowy. One of the shadows materialized for a moment as he passed close by her, then faded again; but in that moment his familiarity was clearly established. She went up in the lift to Dilys’s flat, and by the time Dilys opened the door she had traced the memory. She looked at Dilys as she stood at the door and knew by her expression that Dilys had closed the door only a few minutes ago; something of the encounter still lingered in Dilys’s eyes.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that you knew Adam Grieve,’ Cath said.

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  Dilys blinked mild surprise, but if she was really taken aback it did not register on her face. Cath realized that Dilys was not in the least honest in her dealings with people; it was one of those realizations which comes not as a shock, but as something that explains and clarifies. Dilys drifted down the corridor, wraith-like in a filmy blue dress, and Cath stumped after her, substantial in camel hair. Someone had been sitting on the settee in the lounge; Cath noticed this and at the same time recalled the lover who would not listen to music lying on the floor. She felt that she had always known that Dilys was not to be trusted. Dilys silently arranged herself on the floor, leaning against the bookshelves. Cath felt that she was with a complete stranger. Her presence in the flat was something that Dilys scarcely registered; it had always been like this, people came and went and Dilys’s eyes never focused on them. Her open-handed hospitality had its roots not in generosity but in complete indifference. Cath pushed a stubborn knot of hair back from her forehead and attacked.

  ‘Was it because you knew Adam Grieve that you were so eager to meet Kerren? Was that why you asked me to introduce you to her?’ She stood in the middle of the carpet, legs planted firmly apart; she felt that she would be sacrificing her integrity were she to sit down.

  Dilys drew up her knees and clasped her hands around them. Her body looked brittle as a twig beneath the filmy dress. Cath said, ‘Well?’ Dilys looked down, examining her clasped hands; the dark hair fell on either side of her face which looked more thin and white than ever. Cath said, ‘I think you owe me an explanation.’ Dilys did not move her head, but her eyes looked anxiously round the room as though trying to assemble the bits and pieces into a coherent pattern. Cath, rather nonplussed by this performance, decided to sit down after all.

  ‘I think you’ve behaved very deceitfully,’ she said.

  At this, Dilys looked at her with every appearance of honest indignation. ‘I’m not deceitful because I choose to keep things to myself.’

  ‘You used me to get to know Kerren because you wanted to find out what there was between her and Adam Grieve.’

  Dilys laughed. It was not a provocative or derisive laugh, more the laugh that a child cannot stifle. Cath, conscious of having been rather melodramatic, said loudly:

  ‘Is Adam Grieve your lover?’

  Dilys nodded her head rapidly, glad, it seemed, to make amends by giving the right answer. ‘Yes. Yes, he is my lover.’

  Cath stared at her and Dilys passed her hands through her hair, folding it beneath her chin to form a frame for her face. She looked as though she was trying not to laugh again. Cath said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ She pondered this and then repeated slowly, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Dilys tossed her head so that the dark hair fell free again. ‘He loves me quite desperately. Oh, so desperately . . . you have no idea what it is like . . .’ Excitement touched her features with the livid brilliance of lightning and went as suddenly leaving her face bland as though nothing had stirred it. ‘He won’t speak, though . . . He’s lost so much, you see; he won’t speak. But I understand, because I’ve lost a lot, too. You’re right about Kerren. I did wonder about her at one time. But she isn’t important, she only wants what all the other little people want . . .’

  Cath said stridently, ‘And so does Adam Grieve. M
en are all pretty basic, really.’

  ‘Dear me!’ Dilys’s laugh was not that of the child this time, there was an edge to it. A rash of colour stained her face and neck making her look, in Cath’s view, singularly unattractive. ‘How dreary I find this preoccupation with the flesh.’

  The random thrust went home. Cath got up.

  ‘This is your affair,’ she gabbled, eager to get out before her tongue ran away with her. ‘I’m sorry I interfered.’

  She plunged out into the dimpsy light of early evening more shaken than angry. She did not tell Kerren about her conversation with Dilys; there had been an undercurrent of something she did not understand and did not want to think about. She could not sleep that night. How terrible life was, how frighteningly fragile, a paper-thin façade . . . and behind it. By morning, she had made up her mind how she must live. She must work, just as she had done in the services, work until she could drop so that she slept too exhausted even to dream. She would not spend any more evenings questioning life with Kerren, arguing with Jan, indulging in fantasies with Dilys. She did not want any more of that kind of exploration, she had reached her limit. In the morning she would set about finding more active work.

  Chapter Eleven

  Adam went away for Easier, so Kerren was able to keep the book longer than she had expected. ‘I shall devote the whole of Easter to it,’ she wrote to Robin.

  Robin’s devotions were less innocent. Clyde had booked a room at The Old Mill in Burford. Robin had hoped that they would be able to stay at The Lamb, but this had not been possible. The Old Mill was a Tudor building fronted by a pleasant green lawn which was on a higher level than the ground floor of the building. Clyde thought this gradual hunching into the earth an enchanting indication of age. Robin suspected damp.

  Terence had been left with Robin’s mother. This had seemed a good idea at the time, but when they were unpacking in their room she began to have doubts about this gift of time to be spent together. Clyde opened the low lattice window and the unnerving country silence added to her misgivings.