The Town in Bloom (25 page)

‘Did you never see any of the earlier ones?’

‘Were there some? No, I never saw them. Funny, I’ve kept the name Zelle – always tell people I’m called that, though I’d almost forgotten where it came from. And I’d quite forgotten Lilian’s idea of having reunion lunches – though I remembered it after I’d read the advertisement, and lots of other things too. That was a nice room I had at the Club.’

I asked if she still had her picture of the baby faun, and at first she couldn’t even remember it. Then it came back to her. ‘Now what happened to that? I probably left it behind somewhere. For years and years I was moving around; I used to do resident jobs, mother’s help and housekeeping; and I was in a factory during the war. Not long after that I got this flat and I’ve stayed put. It’s central and I like the church in the square. What’s been happening to you? I saw your name in the papers once or twice. You had a play on, didn’t you? But I haven’t seen anything about you for years.’

‘There hasn’t been anything to see.’ I found I could give her a résumé of my life as briefly as she had told me about hers. She said mine sounded exciting – ‘Anyway, you’ve had lots of change. Tell me about Molly and Lilian.’

I told her, and said how anxious Lilian was to see her. This astonished her so much that I tried to explain. She looked amused and said, ‘Fancy old Lily de Luxe with a conscience – and after all these years! Actually, I thought she did the right thing. Oh, I was bitter for a while, but it was only fair he should be warned; otherwise he might have got out on a limb over me, poor man, because he was on the way to being smitten. I suppose you’ll laugh when I tell you I really was converted.’

‘
Religiously
converted?’

‘Well, don’t look so horrified. I remember now, you didn’t believe in religion. I always did in a way, but I hated it until I met Adrian Crossway. That changed my whole life. You’d be surprised how moral I’ve been, not that I take much credit for it; that year with poor old Bill sort of put me off anything else – well, for quite a long time. Later, I did meet a few men I liked. I could have married one of them. But it’d have spoilt what I felt about Adrian Crossway. That wonderful man! Well, let’s have a drink. I think I’ve some gin.’

‘Couldn’t we have some tea – as we used to, in the old days?’

She went to get it. I had asked for it only because I wanted a few minutes alone, to think. In my handbag was a letter from Adrian Crossway to Zelle. As instructed in her farewell note I had hung on to it, awaiting the forwarding address that never came. I had brought it to all the reunion lunches, in case she turned up. And now … should I hand it over? It might well be disillusioning. If so, could it not – even after all these years – do real harm? She had built her life round something she had got from
Adrian; might not the letter damage more than just her idealised memory of him? But it was a letter intended for her and she had asked me to take care of it, if it came, and let her have it if she gave me the chance to.

Perhaps I ought to take it away and steam it open. I loathed the idea – and how could I judge if the contents would hurt her? I no longer felt I knew her. Once or twice a note in her voice had reminded me of the Zelle I remembered, but most of the time she had seemed just a thin, grey, elderly woman, very matter of fact – except about Adrian Crossway. I looked round the dull little basement room, trying to learn more about her from it. There were no books; just a pile of women’s weeklies and parish magazines. The few pictures were framed colour prints of bluebell woods and the like. What a setting for the
princesse lointaine
who had poured out money on us all! But perhaps I had never really known her. Was she not basically a poor girl from a Welsh village, used to hard work – and with religion, probably, in her bones? Her year with a rich elderly man, culminating in a few months with us, represented only an odd little quirk in the mainstream of her life.

I was still undecided what to do about the letter when she came back with the tea and made the decision for me by saying, ‘I suppose – I’ve often wondered – I suppose no letter came for me after I left the Club? I mean, from Adrian Crossway. But it’s silly to ask, really. You wouldn’t remember.’

That settled it; she must have her letter. I took it out of my bag and handed it over.

She sat staring at the envelope. ‘Such beautiful writing
… goodness, it does feel extraordinary, after all these years. It’s a George V stamp. Well, here goes.’

After a couple of minutes she looked up and said, ‘It’s a marvellous letter. I’d like you to read it.’

In my opinion it was a swine of a letter, pompous, sententious and oh, so guarded! Adrian wrote of unexpected parish work which would debar him from an immediate visit to London. Also he had decided that the work in the East End he had suggested for her would not be suitable – ‘We must think again, and forgive me if this takes a little while.’ He regretted that he could not get her accommodation in the village for the weekend of his Harvest Festival and mentioned some churches in London she might like to attend – ‘Remember, God is the same God both in town and country.’ Finally, there was a paragraph of obviously valedictory good wishes concluding with: ‘You were kind enough to say that coming to my church had meant much to you. I trust that any little help I may, by God’s grace, have given you will be of lasting value. I shall pray for you.’ And he was hers ‘with deepest sincerity, Adrian Crossway.’

I did not believe the writer of that letter was anyone’s with deepest sincerity. The exquisitely inscribed words (‘written’ was too ordinary a word for that elegant script) merely amounted to a brush-off – and of all brush-offs, deliver me from the pious brush-off. But this one, for Zelle, would become a relic. Well, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the holiness of a relic is undoubtedly in the mind of the worshipper.

I said, ‘Oh, Zelle, I’m so glad.’ It got me by. I handed the letter back and she read it again, then said how grateful
she was to me for taking care of it. After that, she put it back in its envelope and poured out tea, which we drank while talking casually about the past, sometimes saying how long ago it seemed and sometimes that it only seemed like yesterday; and both were true.

Eventually I asked if she would see Lilian. She agreed at once, saying she’d like to – ‘And perhaps Lilian can put some work in my way. I was glad when I read that Mr Crossway got knighted.’

‘After a good long wait. I think straightforward divorce passes for respectability these days. Yes, I’m sure Lilian can find you some kind of work.’ I looked at my watch. It was only a little after eleven. ‘I’d like to ring her up now.’

I expected to do so from a call box but it turned out that Zelle had a telephone; she said she needed it as she often got last-minute jobs. We went into her bedroom and she left me alone.

Lilian answered at once. It was pleasant to hear her excitement when I said I had found Zelle.

‘But you sly, sly Mouse! Why did you keep it to yourself all day?’

‘Because she might have been unwilling to meet us. If I’d told you where she was you’d have hounded her down.’

‘I would indeed. Ask her to lunch tomorrow.’

I called Zelle, who accepted the invitation. Lilian asked to speak to her, then changed her mind. ‘No, I’ll wait till tomorrow. Tell her to come at one. Oh, you kind clever Mouse! I was so miserable, sitting here in this dreary bedroom.’

I had a sudden inspiration. ‘Lilian, why don’t you turn it into a kind of one-room flat? Line the walls with bookcases. Have a divan with a decent bedside light –
instead of that eye of God or whatever it is that looks down on you now. If that room’s the place you feel at home in, do
make
it a home.’

There was a long silence. Then, in the voice of a woman whose eyes are visionary, she said, ‘I might have a tiny refrigerator in the bathroom. And an electric kettle – and a toaster. Oh,
what
a good idea….’

While she rattled on, I found myself looking at a framed photograph which hung on the wall beside Zelle’s bed. It had presumably been cut from a magazine; printed under the photograph were the words: ‘Summer in East Anglia’. I instantly recognised the church and the vicarage. By mentally turning the corner of the road that ran past them I could see – say, on the edge of the oak frame – the haystack behind which I had sat cogitating with my eighteen-year-old soul. A couple of inches further, along the nondescript wallpaper, would be the lodge gates of the Crossways’ house and beyond them, Rex’s barn workroom. I had a sudden memory of his face, that long ago night, youthful in the blankness of sleep; and today, youthful in the blankness of age….

Then Lilian was demanding my views on fitted cupboards. Should they be in the bathroom, with glass doors? I suggested she should discuss this with Zelle, while my gaze rested on Zelle’s small stained wood wardrobe, a truly villainous bit of furniture – though I was to find, when Zelle showed me what she would wear for lunch with Lilian, that it contained a genuine Chanel model.

‘My dog lady gave it to me. It’s five years old but Chanel never dates, does she? It’s nice that she’s as fashionable now as when we were girls.’

I also found it nice that Zelle owned a more expensive dress than had ever come my way – except for that never to be forgotten
robe de style
in which ‘little oddity’ had so much annoyed Rex’s leading lady.

Already it would be two a.m. before I got home. I said I must go. ‘I’ve a long drive ahead of me.’

‘What, all by yourself? And I can’t imagine you driving. You’re too little.’

‘Well, it’s a little car.’

We promised to keep in touch, I quite looked forward to this. She still seemed to me completely changed – a stranger, in fact; but by now she was a stranger I liked. Just before I left I asked if she thought
I
had changed much. She said, ‘No, you’re fantastically the same.’

‘Fantastically’, I thought, was probably the right word.

I walked until I could get a taxi; the day had been ruinous in taxi fares. (But later I found a five pound note had been put in my bag. I might have known Lilian would more than foot my expenses.)

Getting into my car in St John’s Wood I had a sense of home-coming, like a snail getting back into its shell. There wasn’t much traffic as late as this and even before I was out of the suburbs I was able to think with most of my mind.

The lunch party today and the first lunch party … Zelle as she had been, Zelle as the crone in the park, Zelle in her drab basement flat … Molly wearing the hat of russet leaves so like her once russet hair … Lilian, that hussy
manquée
, in her avid girlhood, Lilian now, amidst the clutter of her bedroom, saying that if time did not exist, ‘now’ could be ‘then’, Lilian holding the bit of rubble from the
gents’ as if it was a holy relic (so unlike the relic Zelle had now acquired) … and Eve, still an elegant Edwardian … and my Manchester Terrier become a Dobermann Pinscher …

And my poor Rex – Why did I hate thinking about him, both as he was and as he had been? No doubt I felt guilty at having so little patience with him, but I was now conscious of a deeper sense of guilt towards myself. Why? And why had I tonight said to Brice that it might have been
by
the grace of God if—

Suddenly I was back on that windy day when I had known I ought not to leave the Crossway, known I was crossing my fate. I had not thought about it for years – indeed, the intensity of the moment had barely outlasted the moment. I had swiftly come to see that I could not have let myself join Eve in – what was Brice’s phrase? – ‘The nucleus of a small harem, patiently waiting for a night’. And even if Lilian was right in thinking Rex would have married me, I had stopped longing for that from the moment I had Brice as a lover. Me, anyone’s patient little wife, no, thank you! And Lilian had only said Rex would have married me if he hadn’t married her, which he had. And anyway, it was all nonsense.

And yet … I was now well into the country, the roads deserted under the moon, never a light in the scattered cottages and farms. The steady movement of the car had a hypnotic rhythm, not a rhythm that made me sleepy but one which at last drove conscious thought from my mind, creating a vacuum which was suddenly flooded with illumination. I knew why it might have been
by
the grace of God if I had stayed at the Crossway.

Brice had told me I was a schoolgirl with a crush on a matinée idol. He had been wrong. The schoolgirl in me had found Rex disillusioning. What I had come to feel for him was the first fully mature emotion of my lifetime; the first and possibly the last. Certainly I had never felt so intensely about Brice or any other man. It had been genuine love, the kind of love that needs to be lived out fully, however great the cost in suffering. I had side-stepped the suffering, skipped an infinitely important phase of development.

Was there in me a frozen immaturity? Bits and pieces were all I could look back on, bits of love, bits of talent for acting, writing, even music. (I had been taught music as a child, and very well taught, but for years I had only played by ear – how like me.) And now the boot of the car housed a collection of oil paints! A nonsense was all my life would ever add up to, the nonsense life of a nonsense woman. Eve’s life of devotion amounted to something far more worth while than my ragbag of experience.

She had once said I suffered from an excess of individualism and I had always thought of this as a
compliment
. But if the individualism remained that of a precocious child, what then?

Did I really believe all this or was I merely trying on humility to see how it felt? Basically, I was still arrogant – were not all individualists, by definition, arrogant? Why be individual? Why not be matey and merge? Incidentally, I suddenly saw why I had never got anywhere with my mysticism, that merger to end mergers. During my two years in the country I had set aside regular periods for contemplation – and always ended by contemplating the
interesting job I would tackle the minute I allowed myself to stop sitting still. Even now, my soul searchings were yielding place to plans for tomorrow. At least there was one compensation for immaturity: I could always count on enormous resilience. And, come to think of it, could I not be proud of achieving so much, rather than ashamed of achieving so little? With my background, I might so easily have settled for a life of amateur theatricals, tennis, tea parties and a very dull marriage – if I ever managed to get even a dull husband; the status symbol principle had operated in the provinces quite as much as in London and conventional men seldom chose odd little wives.