The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Read online

  Chapter Three

  Hunger was the one constant feature of Kerren’s early days in London. It became so familiar that she no longer recognized it for what it was: she put her tiredness down to the fact that she was unused to life in this hectic city, her desperate evening depressions she accepted as the price of a mercurial temperament, faintness she attributed to the fact that her monthly period was due, was upon her, had just passed.

  The business of buying food was in itself unpleasant. Goods had been in short supply for a long time and shop owners, no longer needing to woo customers, had grown contemptuous. The roles were reversed. Mr. Baxter no longer stood at the door of his grocery store rubbing anxious hands together and calling greetings to Mrs. Norman and her friends as they swept by. He no longer asserted that it was a pleasure to serve them when they came in just as the shop was closing and kept him running hither and thither while his evening meal spoilt in the oven. Mr. Baxter stood behind the counter, sullen and bored, while the ladies fawned over him and vied with each other for his favours. Whereas it had once been his pride to meet their most extravagant whim, it now gave him equal satisfaction to refuse their most humble request. ‘Smoked sausage? I can’t remember the last time I saw a smoked sausage!’ ‘Lean bacon? Oh, I don’t think we shall ever see lean bacon again!’

  Mrs. Norman condemned such behaviour, but Kerren noticed that she always took care to remind the grocer of her long association with him. ‘Do you ever see poor old Prodham, Mr. Baxter? I can remember Prodham coming for his Christmas box and joining the servants for the hot punch that my dear mother always prepared. How many years ago would that be?’ Mr. Baxter conceded that it would be quite some time ago.

  Kerren was not included among Mr. Baxter’s favoured customers. She was not good at ingratiating herself with people; if they did not take to her spontaneously, she could not make an effort to please them. Of all the trades people, only the greengrocer, who had an Irish aunt, was kind to her. So she usually ended the day with fruit and very little else.

  Sometimes she was tempted to draw the money that she had in the bank and spend it on expensive meals in West End restaurants where the cover charge provided a way of evading the limit of five shillings per meal. But always she resisted the temptation. Ever since she had first received it, she had put aside her widow’s pension. She felt that this money was not hers alone, that it also belonged to Peter and must not be spent on obtaining extra comfort. When she really knew what she wanted from life, she might well need money and she would spend it then and only then. In the meantime, she went hungry, and, since it was her own choice, kept quiet about it.

  The arrival of the post enlivened the gloom of the bleak winter mornings. Kerren’s parents wrote regularly, but their letters were always a disappointment. They never attempted to answer her letters in detail or to show any interest in her life in London; they wrote about Belfast people whom she had never met or had long forgotten. In addition to her parents’ letters, she had occasional letters from her old school friend, Dorothy. Most interesting of all were the letters that came from Wren friends. These were young women who had been demobilized within the last six months and were facing the same problems of adjustment in offices where people seemed to be exclusively concerned with the trivia of life. They missed the easy comradeship of service life. They missed, too, that sense of due irreverence which had carried them through many crises on the airfield. Several men wrote to Kerren; none of them lived near London but they all promised to look her up when they passed that way.

  ‘What about Adam?’ Cath asked once. ‘He lives in London, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Off and on.’ Karren had put Adam Grieve to the back of her mind; he was not forgotten, but she was not ready to think about him yet. She diverted Cath’s attention by saying, ‘Robin will be coming to London for a week-end soon. I had a letter today.’

  ‘It will be interesting to see her.’ It was no accident that Cath said ‘interesting’ rather than ‘nice’ or ‘good’. Robin Vernon, in her opinion, was a hard little bitch who had married a man that she did not love for respectability’s sake.

  ‘How is that marriage working out?’ she asked.

  ‘All right, I think.’

  Kerren had shared with Robin those days when all the world is new and there is magic around every corner: she was not going to discuss her with Cath. In fact, she doubted whether the marriage was working out. Robin recorded the details of her extensive social life, making amusing comments about ‘the Cheltenham shower’, but her wit was injected with the iron of discontent. She wrote little about the baby and she never referred to her husband. Kerren wondered whether the boy took after Robin or Con Hilliard; it would be unfortunate if he was like Con, Robin would have to put up with people saying ‘He doesn’t favour either of you, does he?’

  What a mistake it had been for Robin to marry Clyde! As she put up the blind in the mornings and peered upwards to get a glimpse of the sky, grey as a blood-drained face peering through the dark forest of chimneys, Kerren thought of Robin. Robin was the one person she had known who was good company first thing in the morning, as glittering as the frost on the window pane. What an adventure they could have made of life in London, how they would have turned this dreary basement upside down! The bathroom tap which gushed rusty water, the cistern that never filled, the sinister smell from the room above, the noise in the street when the pubs emptied, the policeman who flashed his torch down and let its beam linger over the bed . . . There was so much that could be laughed about, if only one had a companion of Robin’s steel.

  Kerren was lonely. No one in London really accepted her. The people at the library thought she was ‘a character’ and Cath’s parents thought she was a freak. Even Cath, Kerren suspected, was a little wary of her; Cath liked people to be fairly predictable. At times, Kerren was conscious of trying to subdue her personality in order to make herself more generally acceptable.

  The only possible substitute for Robin that she had yet encountered was Dilys March, one of Cath’s odd friends. Dilys made a practice of going up the down escalator, a gesture which seemed to Kerren to be deeply symbolic. One must rebel, she would tell herself as she watched the people spilling out of Shepherds Bush tube station. It was as though a child had tossed its toy box petulantly into the street, out they all tumbled, an absurd jostle of puppets moving hither and thither with no idea of what they were doing or why. To become one of these mindless creatures would be to relinquish one’s immortality. Oh yes! One must rebel. One must challenge all the conventions and not just the significant ones, one must fight against the trivial, one must go up the down escalator.

  Dilys’s sublime gift, in Kerren’s view, was her complete disregard of other people. Kerren, conscious of people trying to impose a pattern of behaviour on her, envied Dilys her unawareness of the reactions of those around her. It was as though she had managed to isolate herself from all extraneous influences. As Kerren sat in crowded restaurants listening to Dilys proclaiming in her flute-like voice, ‘The internal sanitary towel is the greatest modem invention, I can’t think why it hasn’t been recognized – probably because it only benefits women,’ Kerren thought this is how I must become. As a start, she tried to steel herself against embarrassment when Dilys insisted on discussing the most intimate details of other people’s love affairs in a rush hour tube train.

  Dilys, however, was not without discretion. She was, for example, very reticent about her own love affairs with the result that her friends had created a mythology around her sexual activities. The most that she had ever confided in Kerren was that her present lover was a civilized person and not in the least interested in enduring relationships. Kerren greatly admired the casual ease with which she imagined Dilys conducted her affairs.

  ‘You must meet Dilys,’ she wrote to Robin. ‘I know that you will appreciate her. She is genuinely horrified by this deadly routine existence that grinds people down. She said the other day, “One must laugh and dance a
nd sing in the streets. Let the people stare! Insanity is preferable to this terrible conformity!” And, do you know, I think she really meant it.’

  Dilys was like a flame in an icy world and Kerren was grateful to her. The right job had not yet turned up and life was uncomfortable and dreary. She saw Jan from time to time but he was not an easy companion and persisted in discussing the possibility of their becoming lovers, not, she now felt, because he wanted this but because it gave him an opportunity to sound wordly-wise.

  ‘It is bad for you to be living like this,’ he would begin, and would go on to talk seriously about the emotional and physical harm that she was doing herself. ‘You can enjoy nothing fully, food, wine, music, art, literature . . .’

  Kerren felt that this was probably true; she certainly got very little pleasure out of food lately, although she had a suspicion that this was more a matter of economics than of sex.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ she said.

  ‘Your husband died two years ago.’

  ‘Eighteen months.’

  He snapped his fingers at this quibble over six months. ‘If you go on like this you will become cold; no one will want you.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed because it was easier not to argue. He would never understand. She was not by nature promiscuous, but it was not this that held her back so much as the feeling that in the end it would come to nothing and that he would be the one to be hurt. If someone had to be hurt, she preferred that it should be she. She avoided Jan as much as possible.

  Her friendship with Ian on the other hand was developing without stress, if rather slowly. They went to French films together and Kerren paid for herself; she had insisted on doing this on the first occasion because they had gone at her suggestion and he seemed happy to let the arrangement continue. Sometimes when the film was over they walked through the town, the tips of their fingers touching. Jan would have thought this incredibly childish. But Kerren remembered these walks all her life; the great wide streets, the narrow alleys, the dark parks, the jazzy clamour of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, the unexpectedness of Soho Square with the tall plane trees making an oasis in the midst of the warren of restaurants and clubs. London was a very unexpected place, this was its great charm; one could never be sure what one might find round the next corner. All this gave her the sense that something was going to happen to her, something strange and marvellous was waiting somewhere just ahead in this enchanted city. When she touched the tips of Jan’s fingers an electric excitement went through her. He was a tantalizing person. She seldom saw him at week-ends and she longed for hip to invite her to his home which she was convinced would have the special quality of a place where the elusive world of childhood and the more harshly defined adult world were reconciled. But although she dropped hints, he did not respond.

  ‘What do you do with yourself at week-ends?’ she asked.

  ‘Whatever turns up. I hate planning things, don’t you?’

  ‘It depends,’ she said dispiritedly.

  Another time, she said, ‘I suppose you know a lot of people in Ealing?’

  He had lived there all his life in a house off the common. He conceded that he knew quite a few people in Ealing.

  ‘It sounds nice,’ she said.

  ‘It has its points.’ He laughed and looked away from her, sharing a secret joke with a little tuft of cloud high above Marble Arch.

  Her week-ends were lonely. She took to visiting Kew Gardens where she could at least be certain of keeping warm in the hothouses. This became a family joke with her children years later.

  On Sundays she went to church. She had gone through a period during the war when she fancied herself an agnostic, but indifference did not suit her temperament and the choice became one between atheism and some form of belief. As she found it harder not to believe than to believe, she had resumed her churchgoing. The vicar was old and his energy had dwindled with his congregation; he did not appear to be interested in the few who remained and sometimes seemed to be communicating rather querulously with himself. But Kerren had a great respect for him because he had refused to hold any civic services in the church after the dropping of the atom bomb. When she mentioned this to Cath’s parents, Mr. Norman became very angry.

  ‘Old Allenby didn’t have a son fighting in the Far East! He might have felt differently otherwise.’

  Mrs. Norman was far more concerned with Mr. Aneurin Bevan.

  ‘That we should be governed by such people!’ She looked at Cath and Kerren, their faces wooden, and her eyes grew hurt, her mouth drooped in weary reproach. ‘Doesn’t it matter to you? Doesn’t anything rouse you? We’ve got friends who live in Ebbw Vale. They say he drives down there in a limousine and just outside the town he gets out of it and makes his entry on a tram.’

  ‘Do they still have trams?’ Kerren was interested; there were no trams in this part of London. Mrs. Norman flung down the paper. ‘It’s your world now,’ she said, as though it was the globe and not the Daily Telegraph that she had surrendered.

  On such occasions she would sit and brood over the ashy fire, a tall, thin woman with an aquiline profile and sandy hair drawn into unfashionable earphones, a woman resolutely dedicated to the past. Kerren felt guilty about disliking her so much and tried hard to disguise the fact, but it was not in her nature to dissemble; whatever stirred her innermost being, were it hatred, love, delight or despair, was mirrored in her face.

  ‘Mother wasn’t always like this,’ Cath said defensively on one occasion when Kerren’s aspect had become particularly stormy. ‘She used to be great fun before the war. We had a tennis court in the garden then and she organized the most wonderful children’s parties. All my friends loved coming because she never fussed. She was too busy to fuss. She worked for lots of charities and she was always opening bazaars and speaking at meetings. She was so happy and occupied. I think she felt that she knew her place and the part she had to play, and this was awfully important to her. Now she seems to have lost the knack of living.’

  There were snapshots about the house that gave credence to Cath’s impression of her mother; but Kerren could not come to terms with a snapshot and she continued to dislike Mrs. Norman. Her conscience told her that it was wrong to accept Mrs. Norman’s hospitality. She avoided Cath for a time and concentrated on Robin’s coming visit. She had been putting money aside and had saved the considerable sum of three pounds.

  Robin came at the end of February, on a day that dawned inauspiciously with a sepia haze that promised fog. Kerren watched the yellow sky all day from the library windows, dreading that Robin’s train would be held up outside London.

  Chapter Four

  Fields divided by straggling hedgerows, a waterlogged lane and a lone brick farmhouse amid an untidy clutter of barns and outhouses. The banks rose steeply on either side and the train roared through a tunnel. Brief darkness, then a wan grey light, fields again, a waterlogged lane, another farmhouse. How unendurably monotonous the country was! Robin settled back in the comfort of the first-class compartment and closed her eyes. Her pulse was racing and she felt sick. It had been touch and go up to the last minute whether she would get away. Terence had had a temperature and she had been afraid that he might die while she was away so that she would feel guilty for the rest of her life for not loving him enough. They had all been surprised by her concern, even her mother-in-law had been momentarily touched. ‘Babies often run temperatures, my dear, and lose them as easily; they are really very resilient creatures. Terence will be all right tomorrow.’ For once, her own mother had agreed; they were glad to have her out of the way, the two grandmothers, so that they could fight over the child on their own. It would have been an awful bore for them if she had been a good mother.

  Clyde had not been quite so happy to see her go, but he had not protested; he recognized that she needed an occasional escape from the responsibilities of wife and mother. He took her to the station and just before the train left, he said gently:

&nb
sp; ‘Have a good time, my dear. And come back feeling better.’

  ‘Whatever are you talking about?’ she said sharply, taken aback by his perceptiveness. ‘I’m not ill.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Just have a good time, then.’

  She had planned to say something kind and reassuring, but when he said ‘Come back feeling better’ she suddenly realized how unhappy she had made him during the past few weeks; the hopelessness of it all came over her and as usual her good intentions were defeated. He was too good for her. The more she saw of him the more she realized what a second-rate person she was; he was the mirror in the fairy story that tells an unacceptable truth. Inescapable, too. Even now, when the train was carrying her away from him, when ahead there was the bliss of a week-end free from responsibility, he had intruded by giving her a task to fulfil. ‘Come back feeling better.’

  He didn’t ask much, it should be easy to make him happy; she hated herself for her inability to satisfy his simple need. If only he had a sense of humour! But he was an intensely serious person and she was a flippant creature; he brought her airiest remark down to earth and worried at it. Only last week they had had an argument because she had been annoyed when her brother telephoned to say that he was not well enough to have dinner with them.

  ‘He never meant to be well enough!’

  ‘You mustn’t be hurt, darling.’ Clyde was immediately anxious. ‘I’m sure he didn’t think about all the work you’ve put in.’

  ‘I am not hurt.’ She hated the suggestion that Christopher could still hurt her now that she had escaped from the family circle where Christopher was all that mattered and she was an intruder. ‘I am merely annoyed that he didn’t refuse the invitation in the first place.’