Storyboard (9 page)

It wasn’t—you couldn’t possibly call it—a convenient flat, Sophia thought, setting out her typing materials on the kitchen table. But one developed obligations to
people
simply by living. If you were the punctual professor, and people set their clocks by you, then you couldn’t be unpunctual without knowing that the clocks would all be be set wrong. If Sophia wished to move, she would have to find someone else to take the flat over from her,
otherwise
Mrs. Lumley wouldn’t even be eating bread-
and-marge
. She knew this, just as Mrs. Lumley knew that Sophia could move at any time on a week’s notice, and yet had grown to trust that Sophia would stay. Anyway, there were inconveniences in moving. It would take ages to get another telephone, and simply to be on the telephone was important, even if it didn’t often ring. Sophia began to type a letter to Deborah. Probably all this lodger business was rather a bore, and Ralph had already found somewhere else. But if he were coming to town in any case, and would like to meet Hugh, Sophia was sure it would be worth doing. After all, although she didn’t want Deborah to tell Ralph this, it would do Hugh good to have somebody else in the house; he seemed to have made a satisfactory adjustment to living alone, but one couldn’t get round the fact that solitude was a great breeder of eccentricity. Perhaps Ralph would ask for her at Reception, and she would meet him, and take him in to see Hugh. She was quite looking
forward
to meeting Ralph again.

E
ven before she married Keith, Sylvia would
sometimes
have headaches. She would be tired or under strain, and they would come. At the University College of the South West she had taken her Finals with a
headache
, and had done well enough, which showed that they weren’t really important. If one learned to bear them, they would go away; one oughtn’t to get into the habit of taking drugs. After her marriage, when she and Keith set up house in the Notting Hill flat, the
headaches
weren’t at first as frequent. There was just the one spell when Betty … Betty…. What was her name?—the pale edgy girl with the mastoid scar, who had played Sylvia up all one term, and set Three A against her. During that term Sylvia would come home limp to Keith in the evenings, her appetite gone, and would allow Keith to make her a cup of strong tea and coax her back to courage. Towards the end of term, one midday at school dinner, the habitual headache had gathered itself into an intensity of pain between the eyes, and she had flushed all over, and been sick, and everything had gone out of focus and whirled about her, and she had been sent home in a taxi. She had never suffered a migraine before. They did not know what it was, she and Keith. They had been frightened of this unknown
disorder
, and the doctor hadn’t been much help—a young
plump man who had whispered of cerebral haemorrhage to Keith in the hallway.

Still, Betty Thing had left the school (or something had happened; at any rate, she had not been there at the beginning of the next term), and things had gone well again for Sylvia, who was not really a
disciplinarian
, but enjoyed her work, and so had little trouble in that way. There had been another, less painful attack over the school play (
The
Admirable
Crichton
)
,
but
nothing
of any consequence. Except that when Stephen was five years old, and ready for nursery school, the
headaches
had begun again, and for the last year or so the migraine had returned also.

How do these things begin? You catch a cold one winter, and it doesn’t go away, but leaves you depressed and headachy for weeks until you discover that the cold has gone after all, but the depression and the headaches remain. You have—everybody has—a physical
weakness
; in your case it is that the blood vessels of your brain become easily congested. No single event sets this off. Perhaps it is just that as you grow older—as you grow less able to cope—as there are fewer people around to whom you can let off steam—or perhaps the climate is damper—perhaps you have developed an allergy to something as yet unknown (to your husband? to your own child?)…. How do things begin? How do they lead so from one to another? At first there had been Keith’s new job, and he didn’t have to stay late in the evenings at that time, and they would share a laugh
together
at the dottiness of the new world he had entered. Sylvia remembered people’s names and idiosyncrasies; perhaps there were fewer then to remember. They both agreed that if this were to be Keith’s career, they must take it seriously, without of course allowing themselves
to be sucked in by it. One couldn’t have a child in a furnished flat, so they were already looking for
somewhere
unfurnished, but on a short lease, because
obviously
they must move out of London once the child was old enough to toddle. Those days of pregnancy and the new job were almost the best time. They found a small first-floor flat in Barnes, and spent the evenings before they moved in, painting the floor, papering the living-room walls with a Regency stripe, Sylvia
standing
on a kitchen chair to hold the paper steady at the top, dressed as she was in maternity trousers and an old tweed jacket of Keith’s, with her belly already swelling nobly in front like a melon, and Keith crouched below her, fixing the paper to the wall. She took no sudden fancies during that time, was never fretful, seldom sick, and, insisting on a natural birth, accomplished it to schedule without complications.

They were so busy then, sharing in looking after Stephen. Sylvia had him all day during the week of course, and it was a bit of a drag, but one expects that; one almost welcomes it when the child is so young, so much a baby, so much still a part of one’s own body. Les and Anne, who lived in the flat above, also had a small baby; Sylvia often went shopping with Anne,
because
one mother can always look after two prams for a while, and that gave both of them mobility at
Sainsbury’s
. Then, living at Barnes they were close to Celia Parker and her husband, Danny; Celia had been a physiotherapist at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and was an old friend. Stephen was such a good baby that Keith and Sylvia didn’t need a baby-sitter if they were going out to dinner with the Parkers. They just took Stephen along with them in his pram and left him sleeping quietly in a bedroom. And, although the theatre had become
difficult
,
Keith and Sylvia could still go to the pictures if they felt like it by taking it in turns, one at the first house and one at the second. They saw “Richard III” that way when it came to the Gaumont.

Of course, Sylvia missed teaching. How could she’not? But they’d always intended to start a family some day, so there wasn’t much sense in grumbling. It felt a bit strange to be dependent on Keith now, when he had been for so long dependent on her, not that this was anything she could discuss with him, and she was bound to get over it. Keith was in Marketing then—
£
950 a year, rising by fifty or a hundred pounds every six months, and home by a quarter past six every evening. When he became an Account Executive, and the Agency began to advance him more quickly, so that he had soon reached a salary of
£
1,500, they began to look around for a mortgage and a house.

They had a little money saved, and there was the paid-up value of Keith’s insurance, and Sylvia’s father let them have a little. They wanted a house in what is called “semi-country”, with trees and fields and a good train service. It need not be big. They were not planning to have another child (how, without saying so, had they come to this decision?) and were not likely to need room for in-laws, since Keith’s parents had retired to
Bournemouth
, and Sylvia’s lived in the north. There is a belt all round London of suitable places. Purley, Esher, Watford, even Guildford—they were not so far away that friends couldn’t come over for an evening.

Friends who are not seen at least every few days cease after a while to be friends; they are not asked and do not come for an evening. When one lives in a detached house with a garage and a garden, even though that house may not be too big, one doesn’t any longer go shopping
as a natural thing with one’s neighbour. Keith worked hard, both in and out of office hours. It was not only the getting home late from the office, but the nights spent away, the evenings spent in entertaining. A small child, even one’s own child, is not an adequate
intellectual
companion for a woman with a degree in English and a Teacher’s Diploma. So Sylvia’s headaches
returned
, and she found that she grew very easily tired—it was so stupid, when she had much less to do now than when she was teaching, or when Stephen was a baby. She began to be worried that she might be anaemic, and went to see the doctor, who warned her against the sandwich-in-the-middle-of-the-day habit, and sent her away with a prescription for what turned out to be red capsules, containing iron and the B vitamins. But the capsules gave Sylvia diarrhoea, so she soon stopped
taking
them.

And she went on feeling tired. It was irritating for Keith that, on the evenings when he did get home in good time, she used often to fall asleep in her chair after dinner. “You can’t be tired. You never
do
anything,” he had once said, and she had replied, “Whose fault is that? Anyway, what do you know or care about what I do in the daytimes?” and there had been a quarrel which had brought on a headache as well as the tiredness. There wasn’t much for them to talk about during these
evenings
, because Keith had now become so much absorbed in the problems of his work at the Agency, he could no longer discuss them with her. He forgot that Sylvia did not know the details, could not follow his shorthand, needed to be reminded who was who and did what, had often not been told what (since it was so much in his own mind) he assumed she already knew, and he grew impatient. Sylvia did not like to be snapped at. She began
to say that she was not interested in advertising. “It’s nothing to do with our home,” she said.

Stephen grew. Sometimes Sylvia was frightened that she did not love him, that it was all a sham, that really she … If it were not for Stephen … If Stephen hadn’t happened…. What did she feel for him? Love was not a word she understood (she thought at these times), but irritation … hate … Once when they had been
standing
together on the pavement, she had suddenly wanted, really wanted to push him off under a car or a big red bus, to push him off and watch the traffic crush him—and she had hurried home with him, trembling,
frightened
, unable to understand herself, not wanting to understand, not wanting to know. Because love was not, as one imagined it, something continuous; it was not something to be taken for granted; if it were instinctive, that instinct was intermittent, and could give way to other instincts—the instinct to hurt, the instinct to hate. As Stephen grew bigger, he grew less helpless, less hers. He came to know that there were other people in the world, other authorities than hers. He knew that his father and mother were not, after all, simply two aspects of the same god, but that they might disagree, and that one of them was sometimes kinder to him than the other. Of course Sylvia loved him; of course she did; why else did she worry so much about him? But it wasn’t fair, the way he played up to his father. It wasn’t fair, the way Keith encouraged him. Since Keith was home so seldom—a mornings’ father, a week-ends’ father—it was, Sylvia supposed, only natural in a way that Stephen should make up to him, should bid constantly for his attention, should flirt with him, as if to say in his childish way, “Look what fun we can have together. Stay home with me, and love me, and we shall have fun always.” It was only natural,
but it was irritating for Sylvia. She herself would never dream of doing such a thing.

*

Ralph was not quite the country mouse. He’d never intended to stay in Leicestershire all his life, he would tell you, and if a fellowship at Oxford and Cambridge were impossible and he didn’t yet want to do a year in the United States, then London would be better than
Stoke-on
-Trent, Reading or even Manchester. Only he hadn’t ever needed to
live
in London before; one couldn’t count the three weeks he’d spent at the Y.M.C.A. off
Tottenham
Court Road, when, at the end of one Long
Vacation
, he’d done a little work at the British Museum. So now he would have to find somewhere to live. Some room somewhere. It wouldn’t be easy for him to hunt for
London
digs from Oxford, and he wasn’t sure how to go about it; his Oxford digs had been inherited from a colleague, and were extremely comfortable, with good cooked breakfasts and lunch on Sundays if he wanted it. One would have to come down for the day, he supposed, and spend it looking at the little cards outside
newsagents
’ shops, and ringing people up. How did one refuse if one didn’t care for the room? One would
already
be in it (the woman, no doubt, standing by the door to block a quick departure), and perhaps one should say, “May I let you know?” but what if she were to reply, “Why can’t you tell me now?” when really one had seen the room and there would be no reason why one couldn’t tell her, except cowardice. Would
The
Radical
know of somewhere? Gloomily Ralph read the small advertisements on its back pages. A Socialist Guest House in Perranporth. A lady in Hampstead who wished to make a home for coloured students. A room and food in return for help with the
children and instruction in Spanish. A large room in a Regency House overlooking the park, with a Study Circle that met on Fridays. Musical interests.
Vegetarian
interests. Cultural interests. Photographic
interests
. Theatre and Ballet. A gentleman with own car seeking another gentleman with whom to share a
holiday
in Andorra. Perhaps, Ralph thought, some local paper would tell him more about ordinary rooms at ordinary rents where he wouldn’t be expected to read proofs or do weaving in the evenings.

He wasn’t going to be paid enough for him to be able to afford a flat, even an unfurnished one, and anyway he hadn’t any furniture. He didn’t want anywhere squalid, and he didn’t want to be bothered. He didn’t want to have to move again soon; he had too many books for that. It was all so difficult. When Deborah told him that Sophia might know of somewhere, he took it as an excuse to put the problem out of his mind for a while. And when later on Deborah asked him whether he would like to visit the Agency and talk to Hugh, he was ready enough to do that much, since it was
obviously
so much less embarrassing than being shown a series of rooms by a series of women, all of whom (as he imagined them) would be either squalid or genteel or both.

Ralph looked at Hugh, and decided that he would be harmless and uninterfering. Hugh looked at Ralph, and decided that he was an ordinary young man, who would prefer books to hi-fi equipment, and would not be likely to take to popping in during the evenings. Ralph rather liked the idea of getting his own breakfast in the morning, and saw that it would now be toast and coffee. Both wished that Sophia would return; reassuring as it was to know that they would have nothing to say to each
other later, for the time being it made both of them
uncomfortable
. After a long silence, Hugh said, “I have a very old Morris Minor. Do you think we should go and look at the room?” and Ralph said, “I’m sure it’s all right if you’re sure
I’m
all right,” and there was another silence. Then Hugh said, “I’ve no doubt we shall settle down. In our different ways. I’ve never been a landlord before, so you’ll have to make allowances,” and Ralph said, “Well, I’ve often been a lodger, so at least I know the form,” and Hugh said, “You’ll have to keep me straight then. I expect Sophia told you about the dachshunds. They’re very quiet except when I come home.”