Back (18 page)

That very first evening, when Charley did not come, while she lay in bed as they talked downstairs, she had asked herself if he was being told something which kept him. He was and he wasn’t. To tell the truth, he had forgotten that she existed.

There was a silence this first night after she left for bed until Mr Phillips announced,

“Well here you are again then, Charley.”

“Yes,” Charley Summers replied. They were sitting opposite each other, over cups of tea.

“It seems a long time,” Mr Phillips said. Charley did not reply.

“I’ve put her in Rose’s old room,” Mr Phillips explained. Charley looked at him, but the widower’s face was bland. Then the man went on, “Who is she?”

“Works with me.”

“You London office people get all the fun and games,” Mr Phillips said. “But don’t wake Ridley, will you?”

“Doesn’t he sleep any better than his mother did, then?”

“Yes,” James replied. “She was always complaining about that, wasn’t she?”

“Well I mean,” Charley loyally objected. “It’s rotten if you can’t sleep.” He was surprised to find he could be cold once more, while speaking of her, cold.

“They get more than they realize,” Mr Phillips said.

“No way of telling.”

“There is if you’re stretched out by their side,” Mr Phillips answered cheerfully. “Many’s the time I’ve listened to her snore, when she’s told me the next day she hadn’t slept a wink all night.”

“I didn’t know,” Charley lied, delighted that he could talk easily of Rose. He couldn’t now imagine why he had got himself into such a state about her handwriting. All of a sudden, or so he thought, she was dead to him at last. She was really gone.

“The doctor seemed to think it affected her resistance at the last,” James went on. “I didn’t undeceive him. You see she’d complained of not sleeping ever since I brought her here.”

“I couldn’t drop off when I first got back. It was the quiet.”

“You weren’t having raids out there, not all the time, surely?”

“Sleeping alone,” Charley explained. “After twenty to a room.”

“What did the Army doctors say?” Mr Phillips asked.

“They’re all trick cyclists now,” Charley said. “Best not to undeceive those merchants either.” Then his mind turned to Mrs Grant. “Did the family come down when she lay dying?” he lazily enquired, free as air about Rose.

“Her old mother was too ill and couldn’t be left.”

“I see,” Charley said.

“Or so that old bastard Gerald made out, anyway. I say, my dear lad, I hope I haven’t gone over the line. In-laws and all that.” He felt, entirely without jealousy, as though Charles and he had shared Rose.

“Don’t mind me, Jim. He’s poison.”

“Right then, we know where we stand. That man’s always up to some deadly work. Poor soul, it’s really no wonder she’s as she is today, Mrs Grant, you know.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Well, that’s a real relief, Charley old boy. Because I felt a bit of a worm in front of you, letting fly like that about him.”

Charley looked at Mr Phillips. Everything had changed, yet it was no different. They had sat on so often after Rose had gone to bed, so many years back, saying much the same.

“Lot of water’s passed under the bridge,” Charley commented with a trace of disgust, as though speaking of the sewage system.

“It was terrible when it happened, poor old girl,” Mr Phillips said. “Ridley was the worst part. Must have come as a shock to you, too. One of the first letters you got from home?”

“There it is.”

“Life has a funny way of getting back at us, sometimes.” Phillips spoke as though he’d had one wife after another, each of whom had lived just three months. “But d’you mind if I ask a question? Why did you take me along a few weeks ago to meet a certain person?”

“Then you did notice a resemblance?” Charley asked, showing the embarrassment in his voice.

“Not the slightest,” Mr Phillips replied with confidence. “Was that your reason?”

“Good lord, no,” Mr Summers lied, and became voluble. “It was Mr Grant sent me in the first place. I shan’t ever know what for, some more of his fun and games I suppose. Well, we had a bit of a misunderstanding right off, she and I. I don’t understand now what she thought. But it struck me there couldn’t be any harm in taking you along. Hope you didn’t mind?”

“Of course not. Then when I turned it over in my head afterwards I wondered if you hadn’t mistaken something.”

Charley was alarmed, but he kept pretty calm. He was now ashamed of what he had felt for Rose.

“What d’you mean?” he asked.

“It’s only that there’s nothing to the shape of a face.”

“What are you getting at?” Charley wanted to know, on the defensive because that phrase had particularly made him think of her son.

“Yet when a man marries again, he chooses the same type, or so the women say. While you and Rose were old pals, knew each other long before we ever met.” There was a pause. He did not explain further. “You know, now she’s gone, you’re my link with her, old man,” Jim Phillips said.

They’d had double whiskies for the road before they left the pub. Charley began to wonder if James wasn’t a trifle sozzled. But he kept quiet.

“Look,” Mr Phillips went on, “perhaps you may consider I’m going a bit beyond it, even for between friends, but I’ve had no one I could talk to, all this long while. Anybody would think Ridley must remind me of her, but he doesn’t, and if ever you’re in my position, as I hope you never will, I dare say you’ll find the same. No, when you took me up to that flat in London, I did wonder at the time if you wanted to see whether I got it too. I mean, if she should remind me, as well as you.”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at?” Charley asked, still on the defensive.

“I’m not getting at anything, or anybody,” Mr Phillips said handsomely. “Forget it. No, I’m speaking for your own good. When she died I took it very bad, living on in the same house as I had to. I’ve given your friend her old room by the way. There wasn’t anywhere else. And I shouldn’t wonder if you didn’t feel it very hard as well, situated like you were when you heard, out there. But what I’m trying to say is, it’s you reminds me of her when I’m with you, there you are. Much more than your other lady friend, or even the boy now. There’s nothing in faces.”

“Then you did think they were like when I took you?”

“Just when I first set eyes on her I might have done, and with that contemptible remark she made after. I was a bit wild with you as a matter of fact, just for the moment. Then when I got back I read the old story I sent on.”

“Which story?” he asked, glad to get off the subject.

“Didn’t you try it? Oh, in one of those magazines my sister used to take when she kept house here, before I married, and I kept ’em up, I don’t know why.”

“I believe I did, now you come to mention this.”

“Which didn’t ring the bell, eh Charley? Well there’s no accounting.”

“I don’t see much in books,” Mr Summers said.

“No more do I,” Phillips agreed. “Marriage is a funny thing. And nothing at all to do with the tripe these screwy authors serve us up with.”

“Did Rose ever know Arthur Middlewitch?” Charley interrupted.

“Arthur who?”

“Middlewitch.”

“Never heard of him,” Mr Phillips said. “You knew her earlier than me,” he pointed out.

“It’s nothing. Just an idea,” Charley replied.

“But to carry on with what I was in the middle of,” Mr Phillips began again, “you know, before Ridley was born, Rose got it into her head we were going to have a daughter.” This gave Charley a shock because he remembered very well how, at the time, she had insisted to him that they would have a son. “They get crazes for things,” Mr Phillips was saying, “in her case it was olives, and, of course, that’s a female name, anyway she was quite settled she’d have a girl.” “You liar” Charley said to himself under his breath, although Rose was gone and he’d got rid of her, didn’t mind any more, or so he’d been thinking. “Well, she made me promise, if anything should happen to her at the birth, that I’d never let those Grants have the kid.”

“She knew about ’em, then?” Charley got out, with difficulty. What had Rose been doing to talk of a daughter, when with him she had been so full of a son?

“Of course I promised,” Mr Phillips said. “What man wouldn’t. It came easy, too, this particular promise. After all having children is what we’re here for,” he said with assurance. “All there is to life, or that’s how it strikes me. But it proves one point, she must have known something was up, at Redham, between her mother and the old man, eh? Stands out a mile she must have. Not a happy home, you know.”

“Certainly is,” Charley agreed, confused, several sentences behind once more.

“Which brings me to what I’ve been getting to,” Mr Phillips said. “Why don’t you marry and settle down?”

This was a bit of a facer.

“Why don’t you marry again, for that matter?” Charley asked, with the air of a man getting himself out of a tight spot.

“Who me?” Mr Phillips demanded. “Once bitten twice shy, old chap. No, that’s got a disobliging sound to it. What I meant was that, with Ridley, I’ve perpetuated myself, d’you get me? So you’ve nothing of the sort in mind?”

“Never,” Charley said, and made it sound final.

“Not even with our friend upstairs you brought along?”

“I told you I work with her in the office.”

“Well it’s been known before, after all? It wouldn’t be the first time. All right, you’re not.” Then he lied. “I only asked because with Rose’s room being the only other one, mine’s right next door, so I thought you might have imagined I was trying some funny business or something.”

“That’s O.K.,” Charley said. “There’s nothing in her direction for me or you, you can bet your life on that.” He was also lying, but in his case with only half a mind to it, he was so taken up with sudden doubts of Rose, doubts which almost redisposed him to love her.

“You ought to marry. A man like you should,” Mr Phillips repeated, well content.

“Why?”

“Because you’re alone, old man.”

“Aren’t you, as well?” Charley asked, still defensive.

“I’ve got Ridley.”

“Of course,” Charley muttered, but saying to himself “You old mutt, if you only knew.”

“No, it’s a duty,” Mr Phillips went on. “Because you’re moping. That’s what’s got you, moping.”

Charley stayed silent. His day to day sense of being injured by everyone, by life itself, rose up and gagged him.

“I say I hope you don’t mind my speaking like this? But I’ve noticed things. You’ve been different, old chap, since you got back.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Very likely,” Mr Phillips admitted, as though granting a favour. “Still, we have to take the world the way we find it. There’s life to live after all. You’ll overlook my saying so, I’m sure, but you’re maladjusted.”

There was a silence.

“Nowaday’s no man’s got a right to lead his own life,” James went on, speaking with a fat man’s conviction. “It’s selfish, that’s what it is, not to marry and not to have the little old comforts marriage brings. With the responsibilities.”

“I’m not fit,” Charley brought out with difficulty, and with a great look of pain. His self pity had at last got the better of him.

“My dear old chap, if you’d rather not discuss it, why of course. In any case, what say we wander upstairs and get a bit of sleep?”

But Charley did not move.

“After those prisoner of war camps,” he began, then stopped.

“Well what about ’em? Pretty rough, what?”

“I can’t,” Charley said, shifting about in his chair.

“Well,” Mr Phillips said with a change of tone, “we have chewed the old rag over, haven’t we? Will you just look at the time? It’s beddy byes now for us, I say.” As he got up to go, the younger man thought, “Why you bloody civilian.”

In his bed he had a short spell of Rose before he began to feel he was back in Germany again.

The next day, the first morning of her visit, it was James called her with a cup of tea and the usual questions about whether she had been all right, slept well, and so on. But the following day, after James had been for hours in bed with her, it was Charley who brought the cup, and who sat down on the edge, looking as usual as if he was sleep-walking.

“Well Dot,” he’d said, with no more than a glance in her direction. But of course, on account of what she had just done with the other man, she’d absolutely shrunk away from him, couldn’t help herself. It made her feel a fool even to think of it after, for he couldn’t have been up to anything, not him, poor fish. So he’d drifted out, almost at once. You could never tell if he noticed.

But the first morning they had an egg for breakfast each, which made up for a good deal.

Then, when Charley was helping to clear away, he’d come on the Phillips daily help in the scullery, Rose’s precious Mrs Gubbins. James left them alone. Later on he asked Charley what had passed.

“‘Imagine seeing you again,’ was what she said,” Charley lied, for the woman, who hardly ever spoke, had come out with, “Imagine seeing you here again.”