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A car passed down the road. By the dimmed light of its headlamps, I saw the man I was fighting with.
‘Spaldine!’ I exclaimed. I let go of him and he began running. But I ran after him and called his name again. He stopped and we confronted one another, fists clenched, in the middle of the roadway.
‘Oh, my Christ! Stubbs!’ he gasped.
We went into a little pub, mopped ourselves up in the Gents’, and then sat at a table and talked over half-pints of bitter and cigarettes.
Spaldine was full of jealousy and bile. Once he started the tale of his grievances, he could not stop. And the target of his love and hatred was Sister Traven – as he called her thoughout his account.
He had first made love to Sister at Branwells about three weeks before I did. He had been entirely more precipitate than I. He had gone up to her room sometimes in the early hours of the morning and had stayed till dawn. He was crazy about her.
No coherent feelings, apart perhaps from amazement at my own pain, came to me as he talked. Although I interjected remarks, and they came from numbed lips, they were innocuous remarks that apparently rendered him quite insensible to any effect he was having on me.
‘What about Pepper? He was the prefect in your dormitory. Didn’t he ever find you were missing?’
‘I always went up to Sister Traven’s room in my pyjamas and dressing-gown. Then if I met anyone I could say I was feeling sick, see? Pepper, he used to sleep till the Five-to Bell! From Sister’s room you can hear old Scrimbleshanks going across the quad to ring the Rising Bell. That was the signal for me to leave her. She never wanted me to leave her.’
‘Nobody ever caught you getting back to dorm?’
‘You can always make excuses, can’t you, Stubbs? Been for a shit, or something.’
That he could equate that with lying with Virginia!
Forgetting his anger, Spaldine began telling me some of the stories of her earlier life which I had heard. But there were alarming little differences between his accounts and the ones I had received, the only one of which I remember was that she told Spaldine (later in their relationship, this was) that when her family was living in Tanganyika she and her sister had been pursued by hornets and had had to jump into a lake with all their clothes on to avoid the insects. It was a distorted echo from my own life, coming back to me disturbingly now.
Spaldine had soon begun to guess that Sister was taking other lovers. At one time he suspected me, but his brief conversation with me in the sickroom had deflected his suspicions; frankly, he said, he regarded me as too yellow to try any such thing. So he had kept watch elsewhere.
‘Do you mean to say you deliberately spied on her?’
‘I wasn’t going to let anyone else get up her if I could help it, was I?’
‘Weren’t you?’ Several lifetimes of hatred drifted between us, mine only mitigated by sorrow for poor innocent Virginia, who had somehow been cozened into taking this lout into her bed. As I looked at the blunt and detestable features of the lout, I recalled how this was the fellow who used to toss himself off and press his fingers against the base of his beastly prick, so as to save his beastly semen; had he told her that, I wondered?
Hating to hear every word, I nevertheless needed to hear more, as if the poison never poisoned enough. Interrupting him curtly, I went and bought two more half-pints, thinking that that put paid to pie-and-peas for the next day.
When I set his drink in front of him he lifted the glass and sipped without a word of thanks, frowning, still involved with his hateful story.
Watching Sister became his obsession, and soon he found confirmation of his suspicions.
‘Who do you reckon was getting stuck across her? I’ll tell you! Angel-Face Knowles!’
‘Knowles! No! He was just a kid!’
‘He was getting stuck across her, I tell you, slimy little bastard!’
Knowles could only have been fifteen. Knowles’s parents were extremely rich. Knowles managed to hire a car from the village; he met Sister at a prearranged spot, and they were driven away somewhere – Spaldine never managed to find out where, but he saw them drive off in the general direction of Derby. He tackled Knowles about it later.
Apparently Knowles was eager to boast of his escapade. He said they had checked into a hotel and he had been registered as Sister’s son! I had no means of knowing whether this happened, or whether it was a fantasy of Knowles’s or of Spaldine’s. Spaldine was revealing himself as a highly unbalanced character.
He had threatened to report Knowles to the Head; Knowles, a cool customer, dared him to do it. Spaldine then hit him, and Knowles promised that if another blow landed then he would go to the Head and make his report on Spaldine. Checkmate.
Knowles lived over in Cheshire, so Spaldine at least had the holidays clear, as he imagined. He could think about nothing but Sister – his family considered him mad. He decided he must cycle over to Traven House to see her.
Another revelation was coming. I saw it in his eyes. My stomach was chilled with beer and anguish. I had to excuse myself and go into the Gents’ for a pee. As I stood there, I was saying to myself, half-aloud, ‘What’s he going to say next? What’s he going to say next?’
When I got back to the table Spaldine had craftily lit a fresh cigarette, thus saving himself the necessity of offering me one. He blew smoke out across the table and said, ‘You never went to Traven House, did you?’
‘I was going, but we changed our plans.’
‘Like that was it? Give over, Stubbs. I know who changed the plans! She did – she had to! She doesn’t live at Traven House any more than I do.’
‘You’re lying, Spaldine!’
‘Look, I turned up there about twelve o’clock. Great big house all going to pot, it is! An old man answered the door, some sort of a butler, I suppose. I asked for Sister and the old boy said there was nobody of that name there, very poker-faced. Of course, I said I knew better. They’d got birds nesting under the porch affair. I kicked up a bit of a fuss. The old bloke started shouting. Eventually a chap calling himself Captain Traven turned up. He could have been sixty or seventy, I suppose. Anyhow, he sent the aged retainer away and tried to sort things out a bit. I told him why I was there, and he asked me in for a beer. He was civil enough – he’d been in the Army, he said. Walked with a limp. It was a funny house, a lot of sporting what’s-its on the walls. As I say, he gave me a beer. I needed it. And we had a chat. They’d got a kind of a billiard room there.’
‘What relation was this captain to Virginia?’
From what Spaldine said, I gathered that the captain squeezed more information out of Spaldine than Spaldine squeezed out of him. The captain sounded a shady character, the way Spaldine told it, but a few words from Spaldine could have made the Archbishop of Canterbury sound like a cheap crook.
The captain had evaded Spaldine’s question about Virginia, much as Spaldine evaded mine about her. He had talked about the failure of business interests. A hag-like woman with dyed red hair had appeared, lit a cigarette, and inspected Spaldine; she asked him if he was staying for lunch (to which the captain had sharply said ‘No’), and then drifted off without another word; Spaldine said he was willing to bet that the hag was not the captain’s wife.
‘What did he say about Virginia?’
Spaldine had led the conversation round to Virginia, and the captain told him that she was his daughter – his only daughter; after his second marriage she had become very difficult; eventually she had left under a cloud – this many moons ago, Spaldine gathered – with mutual vows that she would never return. She had tried to set the house on fire.
The repulsiveness of this story owed much to the obnoxious character of the man who was telling it, but it had certain features in its own right that exercised very little appeal on me. Even supposing Spaldine had inserted no lies of his own into the account, there was no telling how much of the story was a fabrication of the captain’s. Spaldine had said of him, by way of description, that he wore ‘a sort of military dressing-gown’; and somehow this detail alone was enough to conjure up in my eyes a whole career of unscrupulousness. I felt myself close to the dusty source of that terrible ill which I always knew had been done Virginia at some period in the past.
No such reflections detained Spaldine. He was pressing on with his tale of disenchantment.
Still on the trail of Sister – and now more savagely than ever, I gathered – he had cycled in to Nottingham and hammered on the door in Union Street. The slut (described by Spaldine as ‘a little honey in sexy pink slippers’) had opened up to him and shown him Virginia’s room upstairs. Virginia was in, and alarmed to see him. He was furious and created a big scene, during which she wept. Later she soothed him and said that even if her situation was not quite as she had represented it, it was certainly not as her father had represented it. He was a cruel man who had turned out her and her mother, so that he might live in sin with the red-haired woman. He was currently trying to disinherit her from the money due to her in her grandfather’s will.
All the time Spaldine raved on about the lies Sister had told him and the damage she had done him, I was aware how my hatred of him was growing. He referred to her as a snake-in-the-grass, using the expression several times, but he was my snake-in-the-grass; plainly, he had bullied Virginia, and had still been screwing her in Union Street, even when he had begun, by his own admission, to hate her. To think I’d met him in Nottingham, that very day, shortly after he had been seeing her, had bought him a cup of coffee, had never suspected a thing!
How I felt about Virginia was another matter. I was then unsure how I felt; an immense lake of sorrow was growing inside me, but partly it was because I regretted she had become involved with Spaldine.
However, it was clear that many of Spaldine’s charges against her were correct in essence. Virginia had deceived everyone. The wealthy upper-class background she had sketched was a myth – as I should have seen, had I had more experience, from her worn clothes and the shabby rooms in which she had to live.
‘You realize that the bitch is even now having it off with somebody else?’ Spaldine said. ‘She came down here because she couldn’t get enough round Nottingham.’
‘She’s allowed to choose, isn’t she?’
‘Don’t give me that stuff! She’s got an obligation to me – to us, let’s say, hasn’t she? To me, anyhow. Just because she was sacked from school …’
‘What? She was sacked? Are you sure? She never told me she was sacked!’
‘She never told you a bloody thing, Stubbs!’
‘She told me she wanted to join the Nursing Service.’
‘Oh did she! She told me she had to come to London to act as principal witness in some involved divorce case concerning a friend.’
‘Well, she mentioned that to me too – perhaps both are true.’
‘Look, they’re neither true, you silly clot! I reckon she got bunked!’
‘You’ve no proof.’
‘I reckon the Head found out what she was up to. Christ, man, she must have had half the Upper School across her at one time or another. Someone on the staff would have been bound to find out!’
‘You’re just guessing, and you’ve no right to say that. I don’t see you’ve got any right to watch her house, either – much less clobber anyone who comes out.’
He shambled up to the bar and bought two more half-pints of beer and a packet of Woodbines. I watched him and saw what a radically unattractive fellow he was, his fair hair standing up in spikes, his nose pudgy and dismal and his trousers filthy from our scramble. No doubt I looked as bad myself. The knuckles of my left hand were bleeding badly, and I had wrapped them in a dirty handkerchief. Two sordid young men of seventeen, Virginia’s lovers! Poor dear Virginia!
Spaldine put the beer down and lit a fag. I cadged one off him. A couple of old women were watching us covertly, attracted by Spaldine’s vehement manner, doubtless. I gave them a good hard stare, mean-mouthed, and they looked away.
‘See, something fishy’s going on round at hers,’ Spaldine said. ‘I bloody know there’s some other bloke having it off with her. She put me off meeting her tonight, you know. She doesn’t want me any more, that’s for sure!’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to resign yourself to the worst? You can’t make her’ (I gulped) ‘love you.’
‘Are you bloody daft? Look, what I thought we’d do is this. We can have a plan of action, see? With two of us it’s easy. We take it in turn to watch her place. She generally goes out in the morning. Instead of following her, we could slip in there and one search her room while the other kept look-out. Then we could find this other bloke’s name and address …’
‘No! Spaldine, try and see this from a sensible angle …’
‘No, listen, you don’t know what I was going to say!’
‘I don’t want …’
‘Listen, never mind that! I wasn’t going to say we should go and beat him up. I reckon perhaps I was wrong there. Wrong tactics! We go round and see this other bloke and just scare him off, you see!’ He delivered this looking at me hard, his eyes blazing with inspiration, – watching to see the delight dawn on my face as I took in the brilliance of his plan.
‘Balls!’ I said.
‘No, don’t you see … Look, we can act a bit tough with him to show him we can’t be mucked about. But we tell him, just tell him, all about the downright lies Sister has told us. That should scare him off.’
‘Why? Has it scared you off, Spaldine?’
He looked away from me, let his gaze travel jerkily over the bar.
‘I’ll have to do it myself, then.’ He took a meditative sip of his beer. ‘You’re about as much good as a wet fish, Stubbs,’ he said. He drained the rest of his glass, set it down on the table and wiped his lips. ‘And I don’t want to see you round by hers again,’ he said. He stood up, nodded severely, and marched out through the door.
I sat there, finishing my beer more slowly, and went out into the streets; if I hurried I could get back to my pie-and-peas shop before it closed. There would be time enough to suffer when my stomach was less empty.
In fact, my stomach began to suffer directly it was full of pie-and-peas. My entrails, all my insides, had undergone awful contortions of coldness during the episode with Spaldine. Leaving the pie-and-peas shop, I had to make for the nearest public lavatory at the double.
It was one of those subterranean London affairs, and as I sank down on the seat in my stall, the subterranean nature of my life was borne in on me. My coming to the bloody capital was meant as a great gesture of love; but so submerged was everyone in the animal hurly-burly of their lives that nobody had noticed it. Nobody. Only my stomach, as it emptied, gave indications that the gesture had ever been made.
All round me were other declarations of abortive love. Beside, the usual boastings about length and frequency of climax and pleas for assignation with eighteen-year-old R.A.F. boys, several case histories were scrawled on the door and walls. One was about a fellow luring a news-girl into his kitchen on a Sunday morning and sucking her off on the table. One began, ‘My older brother is in the Merchant Navy and when he comes home he has to share my bed with me.’
I read them with detached interest as I wiped myself. Written large by my right-hand side was a pencilled notice: ‘Why Shit Here When There Are Better Stories in the Next Cubicle?’
The story of my life, I thought.
My ‘Virginia Journal’ had travelled south with me. Sitting on my bed and laying it on my rickety little bedside table, I spent some hours writing it up, trying to make sense of what was happening.
There is some happiness now in seeing that even then I was generous to Virginia, although I believed that society imposed a sort of obligation on me to judge her harshly and to hate her for her way of life: but that was a hangover from the kind of judgements exercised by a previous generation. Naïve though my sentiments were, they ended with a sentence that now pleases me a lot: ‘I never gave Virginia a single present (more poverty than meanness), and she never gave me one, but yet she gave me more than I can say.’
That was meant to be the last word.
I decided that Virginia wanted to see me no more than she did Spaldine; so I would fade out of her life. If that was her point of view, I had sympathy with it; we were in London now, not Branwells, and she no more wanted me in her bed than I wanted young Brown in mine; circumstances had altered cases. All this was pusillanimous, perhaps; it was not unnatural to feel down-hearted in the circumstances. I had no hatred of her – any hatred was directed towards the odious Spaldine.
Feeling extremely low, I brought out my comforter and commenced to rub it, gazing at it affectionately and thinking how ably it had worked to Virginia’s and my mutual pleasure in that little nest of hers which she had never allowed me to see. It stood to attention at the thought. I began to grow enthusiastic myself. After the spasm of pleasure raked through my body I climbed into bed and went to sleep.
For the next day or two I went about pretending that a new phase in my life had begun. I cultivated a Miss Tregonin, a Cornish girl with a mass of freckles who was younger than I and also worked at the trestle table in the department. I had no intention of going home with my tail between my legs.
On Saturday came a letter from Virginia, written on her violet notepaper, saying that she was in trouble but would like to meet me at the National Gallery at noon that day. We could have lunch together.
‘… in trouble but would like to see you …’ Not ‘… in trouble and would like to meet you …’ What was the distinction there, and was it one she had intended to make? What, for God’s sake, was the trouble?
And the business about meeting her at noon. The department did not close until noon, so I could not hope to be at the National Gallery before 12.15. I pictured that frail little elusive figure among the columns; would it wait for me? Could it? What were the hidden pressures of its life that kept it moving all the while? I remembered what I knew intuitively: somehow, Virginia had been hurt.
So I slipped away from the department at 11.40, hoping nobody spotted me, and Virginia turned up at the Gallery at 12.30.
It happened that the Gallery was shut that day for what were euphemistically called ‘Alterations’. Most of the pictures were being crated up and taken into the country. Trafalgar Square was a sober sight, with sandbags everywhere, and a great water tank, and other evidence of warlike preparedness. Like almost everyone else, Virginia and I carried our gas-masks in little square boxes.
We went and ate in a humble restaurant near Charing Cross Station. There were net curtains at the window, through which a wintry sun attempted to shine. We smiled at each other, hardly knowing what to say.
She made no attempt to apologize for the dreariness of our last meeting. Was she aware how miserable I had felt then? Rather sharply, I asked what sort of trouble she was in.
‘You haven’t the experience, Horry, to know how complicated life can be,’ she began.
‘I have more experience than you may believe, Virginia. I am no longer a kid, as I told you the other night.’ Only a long while after did I realize that that declaration might not have the effect on her I intended. I was conscious then of my youth and of the fact that if she was in trouble then it was a man she needed; later I perceived that she could only achieve satisfactory relationships with boys – children, in fact, on whom her gentle, almost non-existent character could have some weight, and who might repose in her a trust she could not give herself.
She looked at me doubtfully, her head on one side. I was being judged in ways I could not know. ‘I am sorry we are having to meet one another in London. It’s all more complex than Branwells … My life just is terribly complex. You can see how I have come down in the world, through no fault of my own. I’m such a silly about money matters, among other things. Now there’s the war to make everything more difficult. I’m lucky to have such a good friend in Josie …’
I took her hand and said, ‘Virginia, darling, you also have a good friend in me. I’m not just another chap who screws you and disappears – I love you, I want to help you!’
‘You mustn’t use that ugly word, pet. You are a dear boy, but you can’t help me.’
‘How do you know? Tell me what sort of trouble you’re in! I’m down here all on my own – I’m free to help in any way I can. I came to London just to help you. Of course, I’m a bit hard up …’
The waitress arrived and we had to be quiet. We sat and looked at each other as the soup plates arrived. Then she said, ‘I’m being watched night and day at Josie’s place. It’s her cousin – the one you saw. I know he is connected with the divorce in some way. They have got a man watching me, the solicitors. I believe he has a gun in his pocket.’
‘Did he follow you here, to this restaurant?’
‘I don’t believe so. I went in and out of a few shops by different doors on my way to meet you. That’s why I was slightly late.’ So she had noticed she was late.
‘Virginia, darling, I want to tell you something. I want you to understand that I do dearly love you. It’s not just sexual attraction. I know all about the age difference between us, but it makes no difference to me – I love you just as you are. And I know more about you and your private life than you may think. It has no effect on my feelings for you.’ I said that rather hastily, for a slight flicker of expression came over her face, a tiny change, something so transient – and then she directed her gaze down at the tablecloth.
The intuitive core in me felt her alter; but of course I overruled that and went on. ‘It’s true you are being watched, Virginia, but not for the reasons you imagine. You are being watched by Christopher Spaldine and he intends you no good. He has nothing to do with anyone in the house, but he wants to get revenge on you.’
