After Julius (30 page)

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do know.’

‘Well, I felt I must be mad to have thought that he loved me: to have thought that I could love him: that was one part of it. But in a way, the other part was worse. You know –
finding that someone who went about being so publicly responsible was so craven inside. I expect I was a bit mad at the time: you know, feeling sick, and feeling it’s all to no purpose, and
being frightened of the operation, but also when I was alone I kept saying “
Who
is
good
?” which sounds a terribly silly question, except that I could not answer it, past
saying “Well
you
aren’t for a start – look what you’re doing – what you’re
conniving
at.” But I couldn’t get any further than that and
that was what was so frightening. You know when you have something that seems so important you can’t think of anything else,
and
you find that you can’t
think
about it at
all?’

‘Did you want the child?’

‘That was all part of what I couldn’t think about,’ she said, after a silence. ‘I knew that
he
didn’t – that he regarded the idea of it with
panic-stricken loathing. That didn’t seem a good start for it. I knew I couldn’t have had it, and then got it adopted. I couldn’t face it much more than that. I didn’t want
to be with
him
any more, so it would have meant bringing up a child by myself with everybody knowing who the father was.

‘I couldn’t – can’t – argue ethically about any of this. I couldn’t get past wanting him to want it, or at least being calmer – more indifferent . . .
I’m not trying to justify myself. I’m just telling you. I can’t think why.’

‘I asked you: that’s why. So you went through with the abortion?’

‘Yes. I only saw him once after that. He made one more scene – a smaller one, because I clearly wasn’t up to the full-sized kind. He said I was dramatizing a perfectly ordinary
situation. I expect I was. Then he went to stay with friends in the country, because he needed a rest after all the strain I’d put him to. He wrote to me saying he thought it was better if we
didn’t meet for a time. He was right there. And that was that.’

After a long pause, she said: ‘I do wish we
had
got a cigarette.’

‘You know, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that most men aren’t like that?’

He felt her shake her head.

‘He was a bastard,’ he insisted. ‘Most men simply don’t behave quite as childishly and brutally as that. You were just damned unlucky. Whatever most men thought about
wanting a child or not, they wouldn’t be so irresponsible or obsessed with their own panic’

‘I chose him,’ she said dully: ‘that’s where this all began. I got myself involved with a man like that. What you said. That was
my
responsibility.’

‘But you couldn’t have known this about him.’

‘Anyway, hundreds of women are made pregnant by people who never even know. Just go off – leaving the woman to do what she can.’

‘It’s no good saying that. You know perfectly well that those are all people who don’t think what they are doing – don’t believe it will happen to them, and
don’t care.’

‘You don’t see the point. I don’t go to bed with people casually like that. One-night stands of somebody I meet at a party and never see again. I was looking for something much
more than that. And if you have a prolonged affair with somebody, eventually there comes a time when you
know
that in no circumstances do they want your child, and then you’re
finished. It’s a kind of primitive vanity thing, I suppose. Like a man being told that the woman had never really wanted him at all: she just liked his company, his affection, or something. I
don’t suppose he’d find it easy to go on with her sexually if he absolutely
knew
that. It isn’t that I’m simply looking for someone to have children by: it might
sound like that, but it isn’t. It’s just that what I wanted would include the possibility of children – they’d just naturally have to be there.’

‘Aren’t you still looking for it?’

‘I wouldn’t be talking about it if I were. I was going to stop seeing Dick this Sunday anyway. He was coming back from Rome to see me, and I was going to tell him then.’ Then
she said: ‘I suppose I
do
dramatize things. I think one does that when one isn’t sure whether the other person has the slightest idea what they’re like. It makes me want to
shout and underline things.’

‘I know.’

She was instantly defensive.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean about shouting when one doesn’t think people are hearing. Usually, of course, it’s just that they don’t want to hear.’

He wanted to put on the light in the car to see her face, but he didn’t.

‘Well,’ he said, as lightly as he could, ‘what are you going to do besides get rid of Mr Hammond?’

‘That’s the question. Give up playing the piano merely rather well as well, I think. Then I think I ought to get a different kind of work to do.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well –
don’t
laugh at me,’ she added, as though he already had, ‘I thought it would be a good thing if I did something for other people. I mean, I never
have. I think if I felt a bit more responsible for other people, I wouldn’t get into these morasses.’

‘What had you in mind?’

‘Oh, I know you think I couldn’t do anything. But apart from training to be useful, there are thousands of dull jobs that anybody could do.’

‘But how long do you think you could stand doing one of them for?’

‘I don’t know, till I try, do I? And anyway, it’s absurd to think that anyone who has a public conscience has it from a position of strength. If that was so, there
wouldn’t be all these jobs going, and all these thousands of people who need help. It might be better for them if everybody who helped them was all right Jack, but if three-quarters of the
helpers are doing it to help themselves where’s the harm? And how can they choose anyhow? I mean, the people who need helping.’

‘They can’t, of course. But you’ve left out one thing. All the people who are any good at this sort of work believe that where it really matters people
are
the same, and
that they
are
one of them.’

‘Of course . . .’

‘No – wait a minute. I don’t mean the democratic intellectual: they’re deeply dishonest about it all. If you push them, they start talking about intelligence, degrees of
it, and so on. They operate a secret double standard, which means that they’re judging themselves against other people all the time. To go on doing most of the work you’re talking about
you have to love everyone you’re working for, and the moment you start judging people, the love breaks down.’

‘That sounds unbelievably priggish to me.’

‘Yes? Well – you try talking about this sort of thing, meaning what you say, and avoid that little trap in your nature. I don’t say
I
love people. I’ve just spent
six years finding that out, at enormous cost to my self-esteem. What I mean is that it’s very difficult to go on slogging away unless you do care.’

‘So – what do you do?’

Well,
I’m
just going to try simply earning my living without too much self-conscious regard for my character. I don’t think I can do much on a larger scale until I’ve
got the basic conditions of my own life straight. I can’t love millions of people anyway – but as I haven’t made a success of loving even one person, that’s probably the
place to start.’

‘Oh!’ She started to laugh, unconvincingly. ‘Oh – God! Don’t you see? We’re back where we started! In two years’ time, I shall be saying to you:
“How on earth did you get yourself involved with a woman like that?”’

‘I can just see your flashing social worker’s eyes. Why don’t you start your career of self-abnegation by doing something for me? Go on – say what?’

‘All right, what?’ She said it with genuine wariness.

‘Come and be my secretary for the next two weeks. Help an over-worked GP new to the job. You can answer the telephone, and drive me all over London on calls. It might make the difference
between life and death for quite a lot of people: I’ve forgotten my way about London and my sense of direction is a bit underprivileged.’

‘What else would I have to do?’

‘Well – I don’t know. Of course, a GP doesn’t have ordinary hours, like other people. I think you’d have to live in my friends’ flat with me.’

She said nothing to this. He said:

‘I’ve fallen in love with you, you see. So I should prefer you to be there all the time.’

She said: ‘You can’t have!’

‘All right. I’m madly attracted to you. I want you. And if you came and lived with me for a couple of weeks, I might get it out of my system.’

‘Oh
that
!’ she said, and sounded like an aggressive twelve-year-old.

‘Yes! That. What’s wrong with it? “How can I know what I think till ‘I’ve said it” stuff! Got to start somewhere, haven’t we? Do you think I ought to
begin by admiring your character? Well, maybe I ought – but I haven’t. Anyway, you’ve been running down your character most convincingly ever since I met you, but you’ve
most properly remained silent on the subject of your physical charms. All doctors are very keen on bodies, you know, and some doctors prefer women’s bodies. I’m one of them. A
woman’s body seems to me a very good starting point indeed.’

‘So you think I’m the kind of person who’d go to bed with the first man who asks me?’

He drew a deep breath of mock patience: really he was thinking very hard. ‘To begin with you’ve made it quite clear that I’m far from the first man. To go on with you
didn’t seem to take to my falling in love with you. And – a few passing remarks about your character – apart from being intermittently offensive, romantic to the point where any
discrimination you may have isn’t the slightest use to you, you sometimes strike me as moronic. Finally, don’t you think my enlarging upon the reasons why I love you when we hardly know
each other and haven’t been to bed is just a weeny bit old-fashioned?’

There was a pause, and then she said, hardly audible: ‘If you think all that, how can I know that you like me?’

‘You can’t be
sure
: it has to be a bit of a risk. This is where somebody ought to say that we’re neither of us children. Do you mind if I turn on the light?’

He turned it on before she could answer, to see her, and she looked back at him, deeply uncertain, openly waiting and afraid, poised for some kind of emotional flight – an expression
which, with a sense of shock, he suddenly remembered and recognized as belonging to her.

‘You looked like that when I left after staying that night in your house at the beginning of the war! Exactly like that! You said: “Good-bye, Felix. Take care of yourself.” Do
you
remember?’

She made some minute movement of denial, frowned, and then, unaccountably, to him, she started to blush: a painful business, he knew, and only facile in literature. Oh – God; Esme, he
thought: surely that can’t ruin everything now? He turned off the light.

‘We’re going back now,’ he said: ‘and tomorrow I shall take you away – if you’ll come with me?’

He heard the faintest sound of assent and took her icy and trembling hand.

‘Are you going to kiss me?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t simply kiss you, and I don’t want us to begin like this.’ He raised her hand and kissed it. ‘You’re frozen, darling, but
you needn’t be afraid.’

He looked at her, huddled in the dark beside him, took off his scarf and arranged it, under her hair, round her neck.

‘There; now we
must
go, or all my good resolutions will fail me.’

He asked her to tell him the way, but otherwise they were silent the short journey back. He drove slowly because his mind wasn’t on it. Declarations, of any kind, he reflected, were
illuminating. They didn’t simply crystallize whatever it was you had thought you were declaring about: making them revealed a whole lot more. He had known that he
was
falling in love
with her, that he wanted her more than he had ever wanted anyone in his life. He hadn’t known that he would feel overrun by this mixture of elation, belligerent desire to protect her, awe at
the thought of living an everyday life with someone who looked as she did, amusement at how much better he understood her than she realized, anxiety that, when it came to the point, she
wouldn’t choose
him
. He glanced at her, lying back in her seat – her eyes were shut. One way and another, she had had an exhausting evening, and if she felt better about anything
at all now, she might have gone to sleep. That scene with the Hammonds, in front of her mother, would have taken it out of anybody, and then, on top of that, the effort she had put into telling him
about the abortion, not simply of truth as to facts, but care about her responses to them. She had never taken the easy way out, even to the key question of whether she had wanted the child. That
swine! For a few minutes he indulged in a hate fantasy about Mr X. He was in court; the charge was private irresponsibility: he was face to face with John Freeman (briefed with all unsavoury facts)
for half an hour under glaring television lights. He was walking up and down Oxford Street every day for a month with a sandwich board saying ‘I am a neurotic bully’ on it. He was face
to face with Felix King, the world heavyweight champion boxer. There was something wrong with his balls and he was being forcibly driven in a taxi to some unqualified quack by a friend of a friend
of a friend . . .

Steady . . . it was all in the past – all over. But at least, whatever he was like, he wasn’t as bad as that. There were other things in the past, though, which weren’t over
enough. There was Esme. Somehow, he knew she would be waiting up for them, wanting him to talk about ‘things’. The green folder, Julius, herself, him, them. It wasn’t going to be
easy, somehow, to say ‘I’ve fallen in love with your daughter.’ But at some point he was going to have to say it. Or was he? He wished they need not go back; could drive straight
to London. What was more important, Esme or Cressy? Starting right with Cressy, of course, and that involved not leaving a mess in Sussex. Perhaps she would even be pleased about it, relieved that
Cressy had found somebody who was, if nothing else, reliable and kind . . .