Casting Off (43 page)

After supper, she fetched the drawings she had made and laid them out on the table. He was far quicker than most of the clients at understanding them, and when she remarked on this, he said, ‘Well, it’s a bit like map-reading, isn’t it? And I had to get very good at that.’

‘The war?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Moved about. Got dropped into places. From time to time.’

‘You were a paratrooper?’

‘That’s it.’

She stared at him, trying to imagine having to jump out of an aeroplane into nothing. ‘I know I don’t look the part,’ he said apologetically, ‘romantic heroes and all that stuff. I look more like a frog, really, which is not much good unless you are one.’

She opened her mouth to say that he didn’t look like a frog, but he leaned over the table and put his hand over her mouth. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Everything’s been so truthful between us. I don’t want a kind lie. Imagine me on a water-lily leaf. Look!’ And he suddenly crooked his arms and sat hunched with his eyes stretched wide open. He looked so tremendously like a frog that she couldn’t help laughing. ‘I’m a wonderful swimmer, too,’ he said, ‘just haven’t got my colour quite right.’

‘I’ve never met a frog before.’

‘It’s not surprising. There aren’t a lot of us about.’

‘Do you feel OK about the drawings?’

‘I trust you absolutely.’

‘I suggest we go ahead with the building part, and then you can see what you want to spend money on. You’ll need some more furniture and curtains, and something to put on the floors. But we can do a lot of that fairly cheaply if you want – I mean, paint on the wall instead of wallpaper, and sanding the floor instead of carpet, that kind of thing. And there are places where you can buy second-hand furniture quite cheaply. That’s what I did.’

‘Did you? Well, you did it awfully well, I must say.’

She made coffee and they took it downstairs to her room. By now she had the delightful sensation of feeling that she had known him all her life, plus the certainty that there was a great deal more to know. They talked and talked: about themselves, the state of the world, about themselves again – how much he didn’t want to be a lawyer, and how she felt that her job was really a dead end, about whether anything that they ever did would in the least change the world and its dreary, warlike, power-mongering ways, about whether the arts were a politically civilizing influence, about whether people had always been the same and the only changes were technological. It was after midnight when they realized the time.

‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ he asked as she let him out.

‘It is tomorrow.’

‘Well, later today, then.’

That was the beginning, ages ago, it now seemed. They did meet that next evening: he took her out to supper, but it wasn’t a great success – he seemed quite different, nervous, abstracted and ill at ease. There was one lighter moment when, after a rather unpleasantly bossy waiter had tried to manipulate them into choosing something neither of them wanted to eat and had gone away sulking, he suddenly imitated the waiter – his looming shoulders, his patronizing expression and his accent – so accurately that she burst out laughing. He smiled, then, and was momentarily at ease, but it didn’t last. He saw her home, but when she asked whether he would like to come in, he said no, he had to go home. Then he said that he had to go down to the country to see his parents and wouldn’t be about for a few days. ‘Ring me when you get back,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he answered. If they were in a play, she thought, it was as though he had heard some dreadful piece of gossip about her that had changed his view of her. Of course it couldn’t be that. But in the days that followed, while she went to the shop, cleaned her flat, paid a visit to the Duchy and Aunt Rach, wrote to poor Wills at his school and had her father, who was clearly missing Uncle Rupe and Zoë, to supper, she wondered about him – Gerald, she called him now to herself, although they had not used each other’s names at all.

Then, the following week, she got a telephone message from the builders who were doing his flat with some query that she knew she could only sort out on the site. So she went to Ebury Street and found the expected mess of plaster dust, broken brick and floorboards up. They were altering the partition walls to make the kitchen larger and this meant moving the services. She noticed that the camp bed had been moved to the middle of the room, as the electrician had the floor up round the skirting boards. It had newspapers spread all over it, held down by some of the bricks, and the telephone, covered with dust, lay beside it.

‘Wouldn’t it be easier to dismantle the bed?’ she asked. ‘It’s only a camp bed – it would pack away.’

‘Can’t do that because the gentleman is sleeping on it,’ Mr Doncaster said. ‘Really be easier if he’d move out for a week or two, but there it is.’

‘He’s back, then?’

‘Mr Lisle? Only went away for one night. He’s back, all right. It means getting the services back on for him – barring the hot water, of course – every night. That takes time, you know.’

‘Let’s look at the problem, then,’ she said. She felt dispirited that he had been back for days and hadn’t rung her. She wondered whether he had known that she was coming this morning and had gone out to avoid her. She also wondered fleetingly why she minded.

That evening, when she had had supper and was doing her ironing, she decided that she missed Gerald because she was lonely with Clary being away. When she had finished, she found herself sitting at her small davenport with a piece of paper on which she had so far written.

GERALD

cons.

He does look rather like a frog.

He said he was going away for a ‘few days’ and he didn’t (untruthful).

He wears pretty awful clothes. (Must be dirty too, living in that mess.)

He bites his nails.

He doesn’t seem to want to do anything (have a career).

He’s very changeable. I thought he really liked me, but he can’t or he would have rung up. (He pretended to like me?)

He seems to have a horrible family.

Then she got stuck. So she started the other column.

pros.

I like talking to him.

He makes me laugh.

He has extremely considerate manners.

He hasn’t made a pass at me like most people after about two meetings.

He doesn’t show off at all. (What about? Well, he might have shown off about parachute jumping – being brave in the war and all that.)

He likes cats – and other animals.

He is very uncomplaining.

I actually like him more than most people.

He has a very nice voice.

Good ears.

Good hands except for the nails (a detail).

She stopped there and reviewed the page. He was uncomplaining about what sounded like a fairly horrible life – being the least favourite child, and being sent away all the time, and them killing his cat, and then having all of the war to fight. But was this because he was a weak character and hadn’t stood up to his parents or anyone else, or was he simply stoic about misfortune?

Clary – and Louise, ages ago – had said that she should be careful about being sorry for people: Louise had even said that she would probably marry someone simply because she was sorry for them. This used to be true of her, she thought, but she was experienced now: at least four people had made her feel sorry for them because they said they were so madly in love with her and she didn’t love them back. Well, Christopher hadn’t behaved like that, and it had made her feel sorrier for him than the others, but she still hadn’t felt she ought to agree to love or marry him. So she needn’t worry about any of that any more. She’d also been through all the misery of unrequited love with Archie: looking back on that, she could hardly understand it. Archie was, of course, a very nice man, but she was actually relieved that he hadn’t been in love with her. That afternoon when he’d come back from France because of Clary, she’d been awfully grateful that he’d come because she’d known that he would know what to do for Clary, but looking at him, she’d seen how old he was – looking older, of course, because of his sleepless night – and that he was not someone she wanted to kiss or spend the night with. She had asked Clary what that part of being in love was actually like; in fact, she’d more or less asked her three times, although she’d only put the question baldly once. ‘I’m not quite sure,’ Clary had said to the bald question. ‘I don’t feel I’ve got the hang of it yet – Noël says it’s my bourgeois upbringing – but I will tell you, Poll. I won’t be like everyone else in our family about it.’ The next time that she asked was more round-about: ‘How’s it going?’

And Clary had thought for a bit before she said, ‘I’m not absolutely sure, but I have a sort of feeling that it’s mostly for men – only people don’t tell you that.’ And the last time, just before she knew – or, rather, before Clary had told her – that she was pregnant, Clary had looked at her with a hunted expression. ‘It’s simply to do with Nature, and you know what Nature’s like . . .’ Then she said, ‘But it doesn’t really matter if you love the other person.’ Then she had said, ‘Do stop cross-examining me!’ and burst into tears. So when Archie had turned up that day, she’d been glad to see him, but she’d known that she didn’t love him enough to go through all that.

She read through the piece of paper again. At the bottom of the pros, she wrote, ‘I would quite like to see him again.’ Then, at the bottom of the cons, she wrote, ‘He doesn’t seem to bother about me much.’

The next evening she rang him up.

‘Who is it?’ He sounded extremely wary.

‘It’s me. Polly.’

‘So it is!’ He sounded pleased now.

‘I wondered if you’d like to come to lunch over the weekend.’

‘I’ve got a car. Couldn’t we go somewhere and have a walk somewhere where there’s grass and trees and I could take you out to lunch?’ He arranged to pick her up at eleven on Saturday morning.

It was easy, she thought. If you wanted to see someone, you simply asked them. Why hadn’t he asked her?

He arrived promptly, in a different but equally old tweed suit – this one had leather patches on the elbows and a blue shirt with a rather frayed collar. His car proved to be a battered old Morris Minor. ‘Where to?’ he said, when he had handed her into her seat.

‘I thought we could go to Richmond Park. Or Kew – or Hampstead Heath?’

‘You choose,’ he said.

‘Richmond Park is the most countryish.’

‘Do you know the way?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘That’s all right. I’ve got a map.’

When he’d finished with the map, he put it on her lap. ‘In case I make a mistake,’ he said, ‘but I think I can remember it. Awfully glad you rang up.’

‘You could have rung me.’

‘In a way I could. I wasn’t sure . . .’ His voice trailed off. Then he said, ‘I’m really a sort of job for you, I know that. I didn’t want to – overstep the mark.’

‘I don’t think there is a mark,’ she said. She felt entirely light-hearted.

They walked in the park for two hours. It was one of the best autumn days that month: mild, with hazy sun, pale blue sky, the trees still thick with bronzed and livid leaves and distant small herds of deer. During the walk he told her that his father was very ill and that that was why he had been away. ‘I thought he might want to see me,’ he said, ‘but he didn’t. So in fact I only stayed one night.’

‘Is your mother very upset?’

‘Can’t tell. She’s never very anything. She doesn’t talk to me much.’

‘He will get better, won’t he?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ He didn’t seem to want to talk about it. But much later, when they were having lunch, he said, ‘Actually, I’m quite worried about my mother, if my father dies. I’m not sure what she’ll do.’

A vision of his mother taking sleeping pills or drowning herself came instantly to Polly’s mind. ‘You mean, she is – will be – terribly unhappy?’

‘Not that. No, she’s always hated our house, and she’s talked for ages now about going to live on the Riviera somewhere. But I don’t think she’s got much idea about money, not that I’m all that good at it, but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing much left.’ Then he said he didn’t want to talk about that any more, and tell him more about her family. ‘They sound much more fun.’ So she did: they were back to the same kind of ease with each other that had obtained when he had come to her house, when they slipped easily from one subject to another as though they had known one another for years but had not met for some time, with the result that a great deal had piled up to talk about.