скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Yes. Well, it’s everything.’
‘How can you sit there, insisting on the things you insist on, and say it’s everything?’
‘If that’s what you are, then be it.’
‘Just one thing or the other?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? It’s true that what I think contradicts what I feel, but …”
‘But?’
‘All right, it’s all meaningless, with my mind I know it, it’s an accident, it’s a freak, but all the same, everything gives me pleasure all the time. Why should it be a contradiction, why should it?’
‘You don’t see it as a contradiction?’
‘No.’
‘You’re living on the fat of your ancestors, the fat of their belief, that’s all.’
‘Possibly, but why should I care?’
‘A fly buzzing in the sun,’ he said. His smile was first wry and tender, then full of critical dislike. The criticism, the coldness of it, hurt her, and she felt tears rise. So today she could not stay long, because tears were not allowed, they were part of the other argument, or fight, a personal one, played out (or fought out), finished.
She was blinking her eyes dry, without touching them, so that he would not see she wanted to cry, when he said: ‘Suppose that I am the future?’
A long silence, and she thought: Possibly, possibly.
‘It seems to me that I am. Suppose the world fills more and more with people like me, then –’
‘The little flies will have to buzz louder.’
He laughed, short but genuine. She thought, I don’t care what you say, that laugh is stronger than anything. She sat in silence for the thousandth time, willing it to be stronger, feeling herself to be a centre of life, or warmth, with which she would fill this room.
He sat, smiling, but in an inert, heavy way, his limbs seeming, even from where she sat across the room, cold and confused. She went to him, squatted on her knees by his chair, lifted his hand off the black leather arm-piece, and felt it heavy with cold. It gave her hand a squeeze more polite than warm, and she gripped it firmly, willing life to move down her arm through her hand into his. Closing her eyes, she now made herself remember, with her flesh, what she had discarded (almost contemptuous) on the pavement – the pleasure from the touch of faded books, pleasure from the sight of ranked fruit and vegetables. Discoloured print, shut between limp damp cotton, small voices to be bought for sixpence or ninepence, became a pulse of muttering sound, a pulse of vitality, like the beating colours of oranges, lemons and cabbages, gold and green, a dazzle, a vibration in the eyes – she held her breath, willed, and made life move down into his hand. It lay warmer and more companionable in hers. After a while he opened his eyes and smiled at her: sadness came into the smile, then a grimness, and she kissed his cheek and went back to her place on the rough blanket. ‘Flies,’ she said.
He was not looking at her. She thought: Why do I do it? These girls who come through here for a night, or two nights, because he needs their generous naïveté, give him no less. I, or one of them, it makes no difference. ‘I’d like a drink,’ she said.
He hesitated, hating her drinking at all, but he poured her one, while she said silently (feeling adrift, without resources, and cold through every particle of herself): All right, but in the days when our two bodies together created warmth (flies, if you like, but I don’t feel it) I wouldn’t have asked for a drink. She was thinking: And suppose it is yours that is the intoxication and not mine? when he remarked: ‘Sometimes when I’ve been alone here a couple of days I wonder if I’m not tipsy on sheer …’ He laughed, in an intellectual pleasure at an order of ideas she was choosing not to see.
‘The delight of nihilism?’
‘Which of course you don’t feel, ever!’
She saw that this new aggressiveness, this thrust of power and criticism (he was now moving about the room, full of energy) was in fact her gift to him; and she said, suddenly bitter: ‘Flies don’t feel, they buzz.’
The bitterness, being the note of the exchange they could not allow themselves, made her finish her few drops of liquor, making a new warmth in her stomach where she had needed a spark of warmth.
He said: ‘For all that, it seems to me I’m nearer the truth than you are.’
The word truth did not explode into meaning: it sounded hard and self-defined, like a stone; she let it lie between them, setting against it the pulse that throbbed in the soft place by the ankle bone – her feet being stretched in front of her, so she could see them.
He said: ‘It seems to me that the disconnected like me must see more clearly than you people. Does that sound ridiculous to you? I’ve thought about it a great deal, and it seems to me you are satisfied with too little.’
She thought: I wish he would come over here, sit by me on this blanket, and put his arm around me – that’s all. That’s all and that’s all. She was very tired. Of course I’m tired – it’s all the buzzing I have to do …
Without warning, without even trying, she slipped into being him, his body, his mind. She looked at herself and thought: This little bundle of flesh, this creature who will respond and warm, lay its head on my shoulder, feel happiness – how unreal, how vulgar, and how meaningless!
She shook herself away from him, up and away from the settee. She went to the window.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Enjoying your view.’
The sky was clear, it was evening, and far below in the streets the lights had come on, making small yellow pools and gleams on pavements where the tiny movement of people seemed exciting and full of promise. Now he got himself out of his machine-like chair and came to stand by her. He did not touch her; but he would not have come at all if she had not been there. He supported himself with one big hand on the glass and looked out. She felt him take in a deep breath. She stood silent, feeling the life ebbing and coiling along the pavements and hoping he felt it. He let out his breath. She did not look at him. He took it in again. The hand trembled, then tensed, then set solid, a big, firmly made hand, with slightly freckled knuckles – its steadiness comforted her. It would be all right. Still without looking at his face, she kissed his cheek and turned away. He went back to his chair, she resumed her place on the blanket. The room was filling with dusk, the sky was greying, enormous, distant.
‘You should get curtains, at least.’
‘I should be tempted to keep them drawn all the time.’
‘Why not, then, why not?’ she insisted, feeling her eyes wet again. ‘All right, I won’t cry,’ she said reasonably.
‘Why not? If you feel like crying.’
She no longer wept. But once, and not so long ago, she had wept herself almost to pieces over him, her, their closeness which nevertheless the cold third, like a cruel king, refused to sanction. She noted that the pulse moving in her ankle had the desperate look of something fighting death; her foot in the dusk was a long way off; she felt divided, not in possession of herself. But she remained where she was, containing her fragmentation. And he held out his fist, steady, into the glimmer of grey light from the sky, watching it exactly as she looked at her own pulse, the stranger.
‘For God’s sake turn the light on,’ she said, giving in. He put out his hand, pressed down the switch, a harsh saving light filled the room.
He smiled. But he looked white again, and his forehead gleamed wet. Her heart ached for him, and for herself, who would now get up deliberately and go away from him. The ache was the hurt of exile, and she was choosing it. She sat smiling, chafing her two ankles with her hands, feeling the warmth of her breathing flesh. Their smiles met and exchanged, and now she said: ‘Right, it’s time to go.’
She kissed him again, he kissed her, and she went out, saying: ‘I’ll ring you.’
Always, when she left his door shut behind her, the black door which was exactly the same as all the others in the building except for the number, she felt in every particle of herself how loneliness hit him when she (or anybody) left.
The street she went out into was unfamiliar to her, she felt she did not know it. The hazy purple sky that encloses London at night was savage, bitter, and the impulse behind its shifting lights was a form of pain. The roughness of the pavement, which she knew to be warm, struck cold through the soles of her sandals, as if the shadows were black ice. The people passing were hostile, stupid animals from whom she wished to hide herself. But worse than this, there was a flat, black-and-white two-dimensional jagged look to things, and (it was this that made it terrifying) the scene she walked through was a projection of her own mind, there was no life in it that belonged there save what she could breathe into it. And she herself was dead and empty, a cardboard figure in a flat painted set of streets.
She thought: Why should it not all come to an end, why not? She saw again the potato face of Fred the vegetable seller whose interest in Ada’s husband’s illness was only because she was a customer at his stall; she looked at Ada whose ugly life (she was like a heave of dirty earth or some unnameable urban substance) showed in her face and movements like a visible record of thick physical living. The pathos of the adolescents did not move her, she felt disgust.
She walked on. The tall building, like a black tower, stood over her, kept pace with her. It was not possible to escape from it.
Her hand, swinging by her thigh, on its own life, suddenly lifted itself and took a leaf off a hedge. The leaf trembled: she saw it was her fingers which shook, with exhaustion. She stilled her fingers, and the leaf became a thin hard slippery object, like a coin. It was small, round, shining, a blackish-green. A faint pungent smell came to her nostrils. She understood it was the smell of the leaf which, as she lifted it to her nostrils, seemed to explode with a vivid odour into the senses of her brain so that she understood the essence of the leaf and through it the scene she stood in.
She stood fingering the leaf, while life came back. The pulses were beating again. A warmth came up through her soles. The sky’s purplish orange was for effect, for the sake of self-consciously exuberant theatricality, a gift to the people living under it. An elderly woman passed, mysterious and extraordinary in the half-light, and smiled at her. So. She was saved from deadness, she was herself again. She walked slowly on, well-being moving in her, making a silent greeting to the people passing her. Meanwhile the dark tower kept pace with her, she felt it rising somewhere just behind her right shoulder. It was immensely high, narrow, terrible, all in darkness save for a light flashing at its top where a man, held upright by the force of his will, sat alone staring at a cold sky in vertiginous movement.
She moved steadily on, on the rhythm of her own pleasantly coursing blood. With one hand, however, she secretly touched the base of the tower whose shadow would always follow her now, challenging her, until she dared to climb it. With the other hand she held fast to the leaf.
Notes for a Case History (#ulink_13f60a6c-4503-58da-ac43-f8364763ad7d)
Maureen Watson was born at 93 Nelson’s Way, N. I., in 1942. She did not remember the war, or rather, when people said ‘The War,’ she thought of Austerity: couponed curtains, traded clothes, the half-pound of butter swapped for the quarter of tea. (Maureen’s parents preferred tea to butter.) Further back, at the roots of her life, she felt a movement of fire and shadow, a leaping and a subsidence of light. She did not know whether this was a memory or a picture she had formed, perhaps from what her parents had told her of the night the bomb fell two streets from Nelson’s Way and they had all stood among piles of smoking rubble for a day and night, watching firemen hose the flames. This feeling was not only of danger, but of fatality, of being helpless before great impersonal forces; and was how she most deeply felt, saw, or thought an early childhood which the social viewer would describe perhaps like this:
Maureen Watson, conceived by chance on an unexpected granted-at-the-last-minute leave, at the height of the worst war in history, infant support of a mother only occasionally upheld (the chances of war deciding) by a husband she had met in a bomb shelter during an air raid: poor baby, born into a historical upheaval which destroyed forty million and might very well have destroyed her.
As for Maureen, her memories and the reminiscences of her parents made her dismiss the whole business as boring, and nothing to do with her.
It was at her seventh birthday party she first made this clear. She wore a mauve organdie frock with a pink sash, and her golden hair was in ringlets. One of the mothers said: ‘This is the first unrationed party dress my Shirley has had. It’s a shame, isn’t it?” And her own mother said: ‘Well of course these war children don’t know what they’ve missed.’ At which Maureen said: ‘I am not a war child.’ ‘What are you then, love?’ said her mother, fondly exchanging glances.
‘I’m Maureen,’ said Maureen.
‘And I’m Shirley,’ said Shirley, joining cause.
Shirley Banner was Maureen’s best friend. The Watsons and the Banners were better than the rest of the street. The Watsons lived in an end house, at higher weekly payments. The Banners had a sweets-paper-and-tobacco shop.
Maureen and Shirley remembered (or had they been told?) that once Nelson’s Way was a curved terrace of houses. Then the ground-floor level had broken into shops: a grocer’s, a laundry, a hardware, a baker, a dairy. It seemed as if every second family in the street ran a shop to supply certain defined needs of the other families. What other needs were there? Apparently none; for Maureen’s parents applied for permission to the Council, and the ground floor of their house became a second grocery shop, by way of broken-down walls, new shelves, a deepfreeze. Maureen remembered two small rooms, each with flowered curtains where deep shadows moved and flickered from the two small fires that burned back to back in the centre wall that divided them. These two rooms disappeared in clouds of dust from which sweet-smelling planks of wood stuck out. Strange but friendly men paid her compliments on her golden corkscrews and asked her for kisses, which they did not get. They gave her sips of sweet tea from their canteens (filled twice a day by her mother) and made her bracelets of the spiralling fringes of yellow wood. Then they disappeared. There was the new shop. Maureen’s Shop. Maureen went with her mother to the sign shop to arrange for these two words to be written in yellow paint on a blue ground.
Even without the name, Maureen would have known that the shop was connected with hopes for her future; and that her future was what her mother lived for.
She was pretty. She had always known it. Even where the shadows of fire and dark were, they had played over a pretty baby. ‘You were such a pretty baby, Maureen.’ And at the birthday parties: ‘Maureen’s growing really pretty, Mrs Watson.’ But all babies and little girls are pretty, she knew that well enough … no, it was something more. For Shirley was plump, dark – pretty. Yet their parents’ – or rather, their mothers’ – talk had made it clear from the start that Shirley was not in the same class as Maureen.
When Maureen was ten there was an episode of importance. The two mothers were in the room above Maureen’s Shop and they were brushing their little girls’ hair out. Shirley’s mother said: ‘Maureen could do really well for herself, Mrs Watson.’ And Mrs Watson nodded, but sighed deeply. The sigh annoyed Maureen, because it contradicted the absolute certainty that she felt (it had been bred into her) about her future. Also because it had to do with the boring era which she remembered, or thought she did, as a tiger-striped movement of fire. Chance: Mrs Watson’s sigh was like a prayer to the gods of Luck: it was the sigh of a small helpless thing being tossed about by big seas and gales. Maureen made a decision, there and then, that she had nothing in common with the little people who were prepared to be helpless and tossed about. For she was going to be quite different. She was already different. Not only The War but the shadows of war had long gone, except for talk in the newspapers which had nothing to do with her. The shops were full of everything. The Banners’ sweets-tobacco-paper shop had just been done up; and Maureen’s was short of nothing. Maureen and Shirley, two pretty little girls in smart mother-made dresses, were children of plenty, and knew it, because their parents kept saying (apparently they did not care how tedious they were): ‘These kids don’t lack for anything, do they? They don’t know what it can be like, do they?’ This, with the suggestion that they ought to be grateful for not lacking anything, always made the children sulky, and they went off to flirt their many-petticoated skirts where the neighbours could see them and pay them compliments.
Eleven years. Twelve years. Already Shirley had subsided into her role of pretty girl’s plainer girl friend, although of course she was not plain at all. Fair girl, dark girl, and Maureen by mysterious birthright was the ‘pretty one’, and there was no doubt in either of their minds which girl the boys would try first for a date. Yet this balance was by no means as unfair as it seemed. Maureen, parrying and jesting on street corners, at bus stops, knew she was doing battle for two, because the boys she discarded Shirley got: Shirley got far more boys than she would have done without Maureen who, for her part, needed – more, had to have – a foil. Her role demanded one.
They both left school at fifteen, Maureen to work in the shop. She was keeping her eyes open: her mother’s phrase. She wore a slim white overall, pinned her fair curls up, was neat and pretty in her movements. She smiled calmly when customers said: ‘My word, Mrs Watson, your Maureen’s turned out, hasn’t she?’
About that time there was a second moment of consciousness. Mrs Watson was finishing a new dress for Maureen, and the fitting was taking rather long. Maureen fidgeted and her mother said: ‘Well, it’s your capital, isn’t it? You’ve got to see that, love.’ And she added the deep unconscious sigh. Maureen said: ‘Well don’t go on about it, it’s not very nice, is it?’ And what she meant was, not that the idea was not very nice, but that she had gone beyond needing to be reminded about it; she was feeling the irritated embarrassment of a child when it is reminded to clean its teeth after this habit has become second nature. Mrs Watson saw and under-stood this, and sighed again; and this time it was the maternal sigh which means: Oh dear, you are growing up fast! ‘Oh Mum,’ said Maureen, ‘sometimes you just make me tired, you do really.’
Sixteen. She was managing her capital perfectly. Her assets were a slight delicate prettiness, and a dress sense that must have been a gift from God, or more probably because she had been reading the fashion magazines since practically before consciousness. Shirley had put in six months of beehive hair, pouting scarlet lips, and an air of sullen disdain; but Maureen’s sense of herself was much finer. She modelled herself on film stars, but with an understanding of how far she could go – of what was allowable to Maureen. So the experience of being Bardot, Monroe, or whoever it was, refined her: she took from it an essence, which was learning to be a vehicle for other people’s fantasies. So while Shirley had been a dozen stars, but really been them, in violent temporary transmogrifications, from which she emerged (often enough with a laugh) Shirley – plump, good-natured, and herself- Maureen remained herself through every role, but creating her appearance, like an alter ego, to meet the expression in people’s eyes.
Round about sixteen, another incident: prophetic. Mrs Watson had a cousin who worked in the dress trade, and this man, unthought-of for many years, was met at a wedding. He commented on Maureen, a vision in white gauze. Mrs Watson worked secretly on this slender material for some weeks; then wrote to him: Could Maureen be a model? He had only remote connections with the world of expensive clothes and girls, but he dropped into the shop with frankly personal aims. Maureen in a white wrapper was still pretty, very; but her remote air told this shrewd man that she would certainly not go out with him. She was saving herself; he knew the air of self-esteem very well from other exemplars. Such girls do not go out with middle-aged cousins, except as a favour or to get something. However, he told Mrs Watson that Maureen was definitely model material, but that she would have to do something about her voice. (He meant her accent of course; and so Mrs Watson understood him.) He left addresses and advice, and Mrs Watson was in a state of quivering ambition. She said so to Maureen: ‘This is your chance, girl. Take it.’ What Maureen heard was; ‘This is my chance.’
Maureen, nothing if not alert for her Big Chance, for which her whole life had prepared her, accepted her mother’s gift of a hundred pounds (she did not thank her, no thanks were due) and actually wrote to the school where she would be taught voice training.
Then she fell into sullen withdrawal, which she understood so little that a week had gone by before she said she must be sick – or something. She was rude to her mother: very rare, this. Her father chided her for it: even rarer. But he spoke in such a way that Maureen understood for the first time that this drive, this push, this family effort to gain her a glamorous future, came from her mother, her father was not implicated. For him, she was a pretty-enough girl, spoiled by a silly woman.
Maureen slowly understood she was not sick, she was growing up. For one thing: if she changed her ‘voice’ so as to be good enough to mix with new people, she would no longer be part of this street, she would no longer be Our Maureen. What would she be then? Her mother knew: she would marry a duke and be whisked off to Hollywood. Maureen examined her mother’s ideas for her and shrank with humiliation. She was above all no fool, but she had been very foolish. For one thing: when she used her eyes, with the scales of illusion off them, she saw that the million streets of London blossomed with girls as pretty as she. What, then, had fed the illusion in herself and in other people? What accounted for the special tone, the special looks that always greeted her? Why, nothing more than that she, Maureen, because of her mother’s will behind her, had carried herself from childhood as something special, apart, destined for a great future.
Meanwhile (as she clearly saw) she was in 93 Nelson’s Way, serving behind the counter of Maureen’s Shop. (She now wondered what the neighbours had thought – before they got used to it – about her mother’s fondness so terribly displayed.) She was dependent on nothing less than that a duke or a film producer would walk in to buy a quarter of tea and some sliced bread.
Maureen sulked. So her father said. So her mother complained. Maureen was – thinking? Yes. But more, a wrong had been done her, she knew it, and the sulking was more of a protective silence while she grew a scab over a wound.
She emerged demanding that the hundred pounds should be spent on sending her to secretarial school. Her parents complained that she could have learned how to be a secretary for nothing if she had stayed on at school another year. She said: ‘Yes, but you didn’t have the sense to make me, did you? What did you think – I was going to sell butter like you all my life?’ Unfair, on the face of it; but deeply fair, in view of what they had done to her. In their different ways they knew it. (Mr Watson knew in his heart, for instance, that he should never have allowed his wife to call the shop ‘Maureen’s’.) Maureen went, then, to secretarial school for a year. Shirley went with her: she had been selling cosmetics in the local branch of a big chain store. To raise the hundred pounds was difficult for Shirley’s parents: the shop had done badly, had been bought by a big firm; her father was an assistant in it. For that matter, it wasn’t all that easy for the Watsons: the hundred pounds was the result of small savings and pinchings over years.
This was the first time Maureen had thought of the word capital in connection with money, rather than her own natural assets: it was comparatively easy for the Watsons to raise money, because they had capital: the Banners had no capital. (Mrs Watson said the Banners had had bad luck.) Maureen strengthened her will; and as a result the two families behaved even more as if the girls would have different futures – or, to put it another way, that while the two sums of a hundred pounds were the same, the Watsons could be expected to earn more on theirs than the Banners.
This was reflected directly in the two girls’ discussions about boys. Shirley would say: ‘I’m more easy going than you.’
Maureen would reply: ‘I only let them go so far.’
Their first decisions on this almighty subject had taken place years before, when they were thirteen. Even then Shirley went further (‘let them go further’) than Maureen. It was put down, between them, to Shirley’s warmer temperament – charitably; for both knew it was because of Maureen’s higher value in the market.
At the secretarial school they met boys they had not met before. Previously boys had been from the street or the neighbourhood, known from birth, and for this reason not often gone out with – that would have been boring (serious, with possibilities of marriage). Or boys picked up after dances or at the pictures. But now there were new boys met day after day in the school. Shirley went out with one for weeks, thought of getting engaged, changed her mind, went out with another. Maureen went out with a dozen, chosen carefully. She knew what she was doing – and scolded Shirley for being so soft. ‘You’re just stupid, Shirl – I mean, you’ve got to get on. Why don’t you do like me?’
What Maureen did was to allow herself to be courted, until she agreed at last, as a favour, to be taken out. First, lunch – a word she began to use now. She would agree to go out to lunch two or three times with one boy, while she was taken out to supper (dinner) by another. The dinner partner, having been rewarded by a closed-mouth kiss for eight, ten, twelve nights, got angry or sulky or reproachful, according to his nature. He dropped her, and the lunch partner was promoted to dinner partner.
Maureen ate free for the year of her training. It wasn’t that she planned it like this; but when she heard other girls say they paid their way or liked to be independent, it seemed to Maureen wrong-headed. To pay for herself would be to let herself be undervalued: even the idea of it made her nervous and sulky.
At the end of the training Maureen got a job in a big architect’s office. She was a junior typist. She stuck out for a professional office because the whole point of the training was to enable her to meet a better class of people. Of course she had already learned not to use the phrase, and when her mother did snubbed her with: ‘I don’t know what you mean, better class, but it’s not much point my going into that hardware stuck upstairs in an office by myself if I can get a job where there’s some life about.’
Shirley went into a draper’s shop where there was one other typist (female) and five male assistants.
In Maureen’s place there were six architects, out most of the time, or invisible in large offices visited only by the real secretaries; a lower stratum of young men in training, designers, draughtsmen, managers, etc., and a pool of typists.
The young men were mostly of her own class. For some months she ate and was entertained at their expense; and at each week’s end there was a solemn ceremony, the high point of the week, certainly the most exciting moment in it, when she divided her wage. It was seven pounds (rising to ten in three years) and she allocated two pounds for clothes, four for the post office, and one pound for the week’s odd expenses.
At the end of a year she understood two things. That she had saved something like two hundred pounds. That there was not a young man in the office who would take her out again. They regarded her, according to their natures, with resentment or with admiration for her cool management of them. But there was nothing doing there – so they all knew.
Maureen thought this over. If she were not taken out to meals and entertainment, she must pay for herself and save no money, or she must never go out at all. If she was going to be taken out, then she must give something in return. What she gave was an open mouth, and freedom to the waist. She calculated that because of her prettiness she could give much less than other girls.
She was using her capital with even more intelligence than before. A good part of her time – all not spent in the office or being taken out – went in front of her looking glass, or with the better-class fashion magazines. She studied them with formidable concentration. By now she knew she could have gone anywhere in these islands, except for her voice. Whereas, months before, she had sulked in a sort of fright at the idea of cutting herself off from her street and the neighbours, now she softened and shaped her voice, listening to the clients and the senior architects in the office. She knew her voice had changed when Shirley said: ‘You’re talking nice, Maureen, much nicer than me.’
There was a boy in the office who teased her about it. His name was Tony Head. He was in training to be an accountant for the firm, and was very much from her own background. After having taken her out twice to lunch, he had never asked her again. She knew why: he had told her. ‘Can’t afford you, Maureen,’ he said. He earned not much more than she did. He was nineteen, ambitious, serious, and she liked him.
Then she was nineteen. Shirley was engaged to one of the assistants in her shop, and would be married next Christmas.
Maureen took forty pounds out of her savings and went on a tour to Italy. It was her first time out of England. She hated it: not Italy, but the fact that half the sixty people on the tour were girls, like herself, looking for a good time, and the other half elderly couples. In Rome, Pisa, Florence, Venice, the Italians mooned over Maureen, courted her with melting eyes, while she walked past them, distant as a starlet. They probably thought she was one. The courier, a sharp young man, took Maureen out to supper one night after he had finished his duties, and made it clear that her mouth, even if opened, and her breasts, were not enough. Maureen smiled at him sweetly through the rest of the trip. No one paid for her odd coffees, ices and drinks. On the last night of the trip, in a panic because the forty-pound investment had yielded so little, she went out with an Italian boy who spoke seven words of English. She thought him crude, and left him after an hour.
But she had learned a good deal for her forty pounds. Quietly, in her lunch hour, she went off to the National Gallery and to the Tate. There she looked, critical and respectful, at pictures, memorizing their subjects, or main colours, learning names. When invited out, she asked to be taken to ‘foreign’ films, and when she got back home wrote down the names of the director and the stars. She looked at the book page of the Express (she made her parents buy it instead of the Mirror) and sometimes bought a recommended book, if it was a best seller.
Twenty. Shirley was married and had a baby. Maureen saw little of her – both girls felt they had a new world of knowledge the other couldn’t appreciate.
Maureen was earning ten pounds a week, and saved six.
There came to the office, as an apprentice architect, Stanley Hunt, from grammar school and technical college. Tallish, well-dressed, fair, with a small moustache. They took each other’s measure, knowing they were the same kind. It was some weeks before he asked her out. She knew, by putting herself in his place, that he was looking for a wife with a little money or a house of her own, if he couldn’t get a lady. (She smiled when she heard him using this word about one of the clients.) He tried to know clients socially, to be accepted by them as they accepted the senior architects. All this Maureen watched, her cool little face saying nothing.
One day, after he had invited a Miss Plast (Chelsea, well-off, investing money in houses) to coffee, and had been turned down, he asked Maureen to join him in a sandwich lunch. Maureen thanked him delightfully, but said she already had an engagement. She went off to the National Gallery, sat on the steps, froze off wolves and pickups, and ate a sandwich by herself.
A week later, invited to lunch by Stanley, she suggested the Trattoria Siciliana which was more expensive, as she knew quite well, than he had expected. But this meal was a success. He was impressed with her, though he knew (how could he not, when his was similar?) her background.
She was careful to be engaged for two weeks. Then she agreed to go to the pictures – ‘a foreign film, if you don’t mind, I think the American films are just boring.’ She did not offer to pay, but remarked casually that she had nearly six hundred pounds in the post office. ‘I’m thinking of buying a little business, some time. A dress shop. I’ve got a cousin in the trade.’
Stanley agreed that ‘with your taste’ it would be a sure thing.
Maureen no longer went to the Palais, or similar places (though she certainly did not conceal from Stanley that she had ‘once’), but she loved to dance. Twice they went to the West End together and danced at a Club which was ‘a nice place’. They danced well together. On the second occasion she offered to pay her share, for the first time in her life. He refused, as she had known he would, but she could see he liked her for offering: more, was relieved; in the office they said she was mean, and he must have heard them. On that night, taken home lingeringly, she opened her mouth for him and let his hands go down to her thighs. She felt a sharp sexuality which made her congratulate herself that she had never, like Shirley, gone ‘half-way’ before. Well of course, girls were going to get married to just anybody if they let themselves be all worked up every time they were taken out!
But Stanley was not at all caught. He was too cool a customer, as she was. He was still looking for something better.
He would be an architect in a couple of years; he would be in a profession; he was putting down money for a house; he was good-looking, attractive to women, and with these assets he ought to do better than marry Maureen. Maureen agreed with him.
