The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Read online

  Gradually she stopped crying and lay still. Only a dull anger remained. It seemed inconceivable that when she went out this evening she was worried in case Adam was Dilys’s lover; whereas now that she had discovered that nothing in this world would have made him Dilys’s lover, she herself did not want him any more. She turned her face to the wall. She had discarded Adam Grieve: it was plain that they had absolutely nothing in common.

  Chapter Twenty

  Golden rod and daisies on the altar, the bible open on the lectern, a green marker across the page, the gold-edged leaves of the book caught by the sun . . . She really must stop letting her mind wander in this way. Beside her, Cath was rigid with dedication, giving herself in a way that Kerren found obscurely irreligious, which was not at all what Cath wished to convey. What was the old man saying? ‘You may, at any moment, as you turn the corner of the street, as you open your door in the evening, quite suddenly be confronted with something for which you have to stand. You won’t get a warning. One thing we can be certain about is that life will always take us by surprise.’ He could say that again!

  Cath, of course, had found a deeper significance in the old man’s words. As they walked through the sun-scorched streets, she said, ‘He’s so right, Kerren! One must stand for something. It’s the aimlessness that is so destructive. There are so many awful things happening and all that we can worry about is food rationing.’

  Mrs. Norman talked all through lunch about the iniquities of the new bread rationing scheme. ‘Four units for a large loaf!’ There was to be an extra 2% of meat for sausages from August 11th; but what did that mean – there wasn’t any meat in sausages at the moment. Kerren supposed that if she had to live in this atmosphere she, too, might start a search for deeper significance.

  Cath said that all over Europe people were starving, there were refugees on the roads who did not know which country they were in, let alone where their homes were. She appeared to be as well up in these statistics as was her mother in the rationing statistics. It was the one thing they seemed to have in common as a family, a passion for statistics.

  Kerren wished she could get away from it all. Lately she had thought of taking a job abroad and she had visualized herself finding what she needed in the shade of a Greek temple beneath an olive tree by the shores of Galilee, in the open spaces of New Zealand. But it all came back to the old man’s words, she thought, looking at the sun filtering through the branches of the plane trees in the square; one must stand somewhere and fight. London seemed as good a place as anywhere to do this.

  It was so hot. The air was heavy with the smell of petrol fumes and dust, the smell of high summer in a town. Her dress was too tight under the arms, whenever she moved sweat broke out all over her body. Mr. and Mrs. Norman said that they would leave them alone, which meant that they wanted to have an afternoon sleep. As soon as they had gone, Cath said, ‘I’m going to join U.N.R.R.A., Kerren.’

  Her eyes looked bleak, trying to dissociate themselves from the round face with its russet cheeks and full red lips.

  ‘They wear uniform, don’t they?’ Kerren asked. ‘I couldn’t bear that again. How did we manage in this heat, Cath?’

  ‘We didn’t have time to think,’ Cath pointed out. ‘There was too much work to do.’

  Kerren shifted on the settee and her damp dress pulled across her back and thighs, impeding movement.

  ‘Work is the answer,’ Cath said. ‘Work for other people. If you don’t put something into life, you can’t expect to get anything out of it.’

  Kerren doubted whether it was as simple as that. It was no use doing good as though you were storing up credit, thinking that one day you could call in your debts. But it was too hot and sticky to argue. And anyway, U.N.R.R.A. would probably be the right answer for Cath; it would provide ample opportunity to meet men and enough misery and squalor to satisfy her conscience.

  Cath said, ‘But that’s enough about me. Tell me your news.’ She was practising putting self aside, Kerren noted. ‘When does John go to Cambridge?’

  ‘Soon, I suppose.’

  ‘You’ll be able to visit him, won’t you? Perhaps he’ll ask you to the May Ball.’

  Cath wanted very much to get Kerren settled with John before she departed for Europe.

  John had shown an equally irritating desire to get Kerren settled with Adam before he went to Cambridge. He could not be free of her while there was still a chance for him. She cluttered up his mind.

  ‘I can’t see what’s in the way of your marrying Adam,’ he had said brashly one evening as they were walking along the towpath at Kew.

  ‘Alison is in the way.’

  ‘Why should you worry about Alison? She’s dead.’

  ‘She’s not dead for Adam. And he won’t talk about her. He excludes me from that part of his life.’

  John caught at a willow branch, bending it fiercely. His expression was fierce, too.

  ‘I admire Adam Grieve as much as any man I know. He has a great reserve of courage.’ He pulled harder on the branch as though testing its courage and then let it go so that it swished up, narrowly missing Kerren’s face. ‘Why do you want to break him?’

  ‘Break him!’ she cried. ‘I would never hurt him, never, never!’

  ‘But you want to turn him into another person. You want something in him to crack so that he will . . . come to you, I suppose is the beastly phrase . . . unburden himself, lay all his troubles at your feet! But if he did that he would be destroying his way of coping with things, can’t you understand? It would humiliate him. Why can’t you let him work things out for himself?’

  ‘Of course he must work things out for himself.’ Hadn’t she decided, when her anger over the Dilys affair had abated, that she would be prepared to wait, to sacrifice her own impatient longings? Wasn’t that hard enough without being accused of selfishness?

  John said, ‘He can work things out for himself as long as he comes up with the answer you want.’

  ‘He can be himself and let me know him, surely?’

  She wanted so desperately to know about Alison and the children,’ to understand what they had meant to him. It seemed to her sometimes that Alison was being kept in limbo by Adam. She felt that she would never be completely at ease with him until Alison had been set free.

  ‘I shall be glad when John has gone to Cambridge,’ she said to Cath. ‘We get on each other’s nerves lately.’

  ‘But you will go and see him, won’t you, Kerren?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  Cath had to be satisfied with that.

  They went for a walk in the evening. The temperature had dropped slightly and a breeze rippled across the park, chilling the sweat on their heated bodies. Kerren said, ‘Oh, what ecstasy!’ And what deprivation that Adam was not at her side. She wanted to rush to the nearest telephone box and ask him to come to her. As they walked beneath the trees in the park, she felt heavy with pain and longing. Cath said:

  ‘I shall miss you.’

  Secretly, she was rather squeamish and there had been times in the W.R.N.S. when she had found the cheerful squalor of camp life hard to bear. Now she was committing herself to a squalor so different that no word had been invented to describe it. Already the thought of the concentration camps haunted her and she had begun to have nightmares. She would wake at night and rush to open the window wider. But in spite of this, it seemed as though a faint odour of putrefaction was beginning to invade her room. She was very afraid.

  ‘I haven’t told Mummy and Daddy yet,’ she said to Kerren. ‘It will upset them to think that I want to go away again so soon.’

  The grass in the park was thin and the baked earth was cracked. Dust and grit had worked their way into Kerren’s sandals. In the distance, between the trees, they could see the tall buildings of Knightsbridge shrouded in a warm, purple haze. Adam would be sitting in his room, Kerren thought, the window open, the noise of trains rattling over the bridge disturbing him every now and again, making him g
lance up. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands. Her mouth was dry. She could see it all as clearly as though she was actually there, tip-toeing across the carpet towards him, reaching out her hands to lay them on his shoulders. Oh Adam, dear, dear Adam!

  Beside her, Cath said, ‘I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to Mummy or Daddy while I was away. Do you think I ought to stay at home and look after them?’

  They had walked to the far side of the park now. It was nearly dark but still very warm.

  ‘You go, Cath,’ Kerren said. ‘It’s not for ever, after all.’

  Her feet were very painful, but she went on walking, trying to keep herself from making that telephone call to Adam. Cath said:

  ‘Shall we see whether Dilys is in?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Do you mind if I do? I haven’t seen much of her lately, and I’d like to tell her that I’m going away.’

  If she was left alone, she would telephone to Adam. Kerren said, ‘All right. I’ll come with you.’ They went up to Dilys’s flat and rang the door bell, but although they waited a long time there was no answer. Kerren looked through the letterbox. She could see the hall, empty, doors opening on more emptiness.

  It was going to be a hard winter, she thought as they walked away. Cath gone, Dilys drifting out of focus, John at Cambridge. She would see Adam from time to time, of course . . .

  At the back of all this unease was the figure of Con. His loneliness seemed to have infected her. She could not talk about him to anyone. It would be wrong to tell Robin; and, in any case, Robin would be unable to comprehend what had happened to Con. Adam had never liked Con and he would imagine that anything that Kerren said was coloured by her own feelings for the man. Cath would moralize.

  So, although it was against her nature, Kerren kept it to herself. Hitherto, she had always believed that somewhere there was someone with whom she could share all her deepest feelings. Now she had moments of doubt. She began to wonder whether she would ever achieve the unity she so desperately wanted with Adam. If she could not talk to him about Con, perhaps she would one day have to concede that he could not talk to her about Alison.

  Autumn came, smoky, with brilliant colours among the trees in the park. The evenings closed in. Her sense of insecurity had come back, increased if anything. London was not always a friendly city.

  Sometimes, walking through Notting Hill she had a little shiver of fear that was not the romantic exhilaration which she had felt at times in the war, but something that was stark and very cold. There were narrow streets and alleys, ill-lit, with dim, crumbling houses on either side. Joyless places. Youths loitered there, aimless, unpredictable, moon-white faces unformed waiting for some fleeting emotion to contort them in laughter or animal ferocity. She watched them once or twice and they scurried out of sight like things that only come out at night when they think they will not be seen. Once she saw a cat streak ahead of them. She stood for a moment at the entrance to the alleyway. She was convinced that at such moments they were torturing the cat. An unnamed, hideous violence seemed to pervade the air; she did not dare to go after them because she was afraid that she might be confronted with something which would demand action on her part. It had been easy to be brave during the war when bravery was the order of the day. The war provided a cause, too; a general acceptance of motives. She had always regarded herself as something of a rebel. But now, in this aimless, sprawling town she sometimes longed for that lost security. What could one stand for in this chaos? You could be kicked to death in that dark alley and no one would come when you called. What was it that the old man had said in church? ‘You may at any moment . . . suddenly be faced with something for which you have to stand One thing we can be certain about is that life will always take us by surprise . . .’ She did not want that kind of surprise. She stopped taking short cuts through the backstreets and walked down the busy Bayswater Road.

  Adam was civilized. Thank God for Adam. He was annoying, of course, with his uncompromising allegiance to standards in art and music, his complete dismissal of the trivial, his inability to adapt himself to the small change of day-today amusements. He was intolerant and his friends were intellectuals, some of them snobs, not all of them of any value. He did not want to discuss things; once out of his own sphere of interest he had a habit of going to sleep when other people developed their own ideas. ‘Perhaps the world is sick,’ he had said recently. ‘But I don’t want to take its pulse every day.’ He was maddening at such times. But he was civilized. Although she behaved badly to him at this period, he meant more to her than ever before.

  Chapter Twenty One

  ‘Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.

  Let us go hence together without fear;

  Keep silence now, for singing-time is over

  And over all old things and all things dear,

  She loves not you nor me as all we love her.

  Yes, though we sang as angels in her ear,

  She would not hear . . .’

  ‘Do you really like this stuff?’ Adam asked as Dilys came into the room. He had picked the book up, open at this poem, and did not like what he read.

  ‘He speaks to my subconscious,’ she answered.

  Adam, who did not doubt this, shut the book with a snap.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  It was difficult to tell with Dilys; he supposed it was conceivable that she intended to go out to dinner in slacks and a polo-necked jersey. It was one of those November evenings when the sun had gone down in a rusty blur and now there was an acrid promise of fog. Already the windows, never very clean, were smeared and black smuts were appearing on the sills. But Dilys usually ignored the weather. The last time he had taken her out it had been raining and she had worn a chiffon affair which showed all her underclothes.

  They went to a café off Victoria Station. Dilys was not a very cheerful companion. Adam watched her toying with a minute portion of plaice as though it was a sizeable and very tough steak. He realized, with some misgivings, that this was no affectation; she had lost the habit of eating. Even in the dingy, candlelit room, he could see that there was no flesh on her, only transparent skin stretched by sharp bones. How long had this been going on?

  She asked suddenly, ‘Why did Alison let the children go to America?’

  She spoke as though it was something that had happened yesterday and he found himself replying calmly, ‘She thought they would be safer there.’ He had told Alison on his last leave with her that he did not want the children to go. It all came back to him quite clearly.

  ‘But suppose we are invaded,’ she had said fretfully. ‘It’s all very well for you. You’ll be out of it all.’ Rather as though he had deserted her.

  ‘Were you angry?’ Dilys asked.

  ‘By the time I found out about it, the children . . . it was all over. It was too late to be angry.’

  He had been on his way home when she had killed herself. She had told her friends, ‘Adam will never forgive me.’ She had not given him a chance to disprove this.

  Dilys said, ‘She was their mother, yet she let them go.’

  There was no hint of condemnation, he would not have tolerated that. Perhaps she derived comfort from the situation, which seemed in some way to parallel her own abandonment. Adam said, ‘Sometimes people make hurtful decisions when they are in a panic. And you must remember that journalists are difficult people to be married to. When you most need their advice and support they are half the world away.’ Even before the war there had been trouble between himself and Alison. She had been a bad manager, unable in his absence to cope with household economy, let alone such imponderables as bank statements and investments. This was not something he was prepared to discuss, however, and he felt that he had gone as far as he could to help Dilys. But Dilys appeared to have her own form of comfort.

  ‘They’re not dead, my mother and Alison,’ she announced. ‘There is no such thing as death. It’s just an illusion of the liv
ing. We like to have things in neat little compartments. That’s why we invented time; so that past, present and future could on no account be jumbled up together.’ Her face was intensely animated now, eyes bright and a ragged flush on her cheeks. She talked fast, tripping herself every now and again with the faintest stutter. ‘But they are jumbled up. Of course they are! Alison and my mother are as alive as you and I. Only we are too insensitive to feel their presence. Too concerned with flesh and blood . . .’

  Adam said brusquely, ‘When I die I shan’t want the living to involve me in their activities. I shall take my rest and cursed be he who interferes with it!’