“If I married,” she explained, and spoke as if talking to a child. “No,” she went on, “whoever took me to be his wedded wife, would have to take my cat on with me.”
“Well, why not?” he asked, wondering.
He became aware that she was watching him.
“That’s all very fine, but Panzer’s one of those things I’d have to get straight right off,” she insisted. “Her future kittens as well, oh yes. I could never leave them behind.”
He did not know what he was supposed to say. He was floundering.
“Why sure,” he said. “But you’d leave Mrs Grant?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “There’s not room for two in my digs, and houses aren’t easy to come by these days. I’d stay on where I am now. She’d be glad to welcome my husband in her home.”
“I thought she had a niece in Leicester,” he brought out.
“And so she has, Charley, but she’s not sure of her welcome there. Oh we’ve had this out. She’d be quite agreeable.”
“Well that makes it easier, certainly, with the cat and her kittens.”
She accepted this. “There you are,” she said.
They had almost come to the single village street, in which he had met Arthur Middlewitch during the August holiday, and through which he had so often strolled with Rose, after her marriage to Phillips. It was also where Ridley used to play with the Gubbins children. He did wonder for a moment whether they would run across the boy, but the little street was quite deserted. He supposed the locals were sleeping off their Christmas dinner. He was glad, because he did not want James to know that he was down. He was not going to have him getting in first with this girl, as Jim had done the last time. Then, absolutely without warning, stepping out of a surface shelter in the roadway, and not three paces from them, was Ridley, his eyes fixed on Nance. Afterwards, when Charley went over it in his mind, he thought he had never seen such pain on any face. For the boy had blushed, blushed a deep scarlet in this snow clear light. He must have thought he was seeing his mother step, in her true colours, out of his father’s microfilms. And Nance, who did not know him, passed him by.
Charley managed to turn round, without attracting her attention, in order to make the child a sign. All he could think of, and he did not know why, was to put a finger to his lips. At that, Ridley turned, and ran off fast.
Charley was so upset that he did not take in the sense of the words with which Nance then broke the silence that had fallen between them.
“We could make a go of it between us, you know, if we tried,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You wouldn’t have heard, would you dear?” she said gently. “I was making a proposal.”
He still did not trust his ears.
“I didn’t quite catch,” he lied.
She stopped in her tracks. She put her hands up to the lapels of his coat.
“I was proposing, dear,” she said.
He felt his heart beating so hard that he was afraid he would suffocate.
“You really mean it?” he asked, and for the rest of his life, for the life of him, he could not remember anything of what passed during the remainder of that afternoon. It was bliss.
So she had asked him to marry her, and had been accepted. She had made only one condition, which was that they should have a trial trip. So it was the same night, under Mr Mandrew’s roof, that he went to her room, for the first time in what was to be a happy married life.
She was lying stark naked on the bed, a lamp with a pink shade at her side. She had not drawn the blackout, and the electric light made the dark outside a marvellous deep blue. In an attempt to seem natural, he said something about showing a light.
“Come here, silly,” was what she replied.
Then he knelt by the bed, having under his eyes the great, the overwhelming sight of the woman he loved, for the first time without her clothes. And because the lamp was lit, the pink shade seemed to spill a light of roses over her in all their summer colours, her hands that lay along her legs were red, her stomach gold, her breasts the colour of cream roses, and her neck white roses for the bride. She had shut her eyes to let him have his fill, but it was too much, for he burst into tears again, he buried his face in her side just below the ribs, and bawled like a child. “Rose,” he called out, not knowing he did so, “Rose.”
“There,” Nancy said, “there,” pressed his head with her hands. His tears wetted her. The salt water ran down between her legs. And she knew what she had taken on. It was no more or less, really, than she had expected.
NOTES
1Horizon, 15 (1947), p 75.
2 Another favourable critic was Marie Scott-James in Time and Tide, 30 November 1946, p 1161, who praised the book’s “curious and arresting blend of the lyrical and the realistic” and claimed that “no other living novelist has caught the contemporary idiom so well”.
3Spectator, 29 November 1946, p 590. In the New Statesman, Reyner Heppenstall went further: “Mr. Green’s readers are entitled to sulk …. The hallucinations in Back depend upon two low-grade coincidences, a likeness between half-sisters and the fact that the name Rose occurs in the past tense of a common verb. Out of this confusion arises no unperplexing ecstasy …” (23 November 1946, p 386).
4 Henry Green, Pack My Bag, 1940, pp 66–7.
5 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980, 1985, p 194.
6Concluding, Harvill edn. (1997) p 46.
7 James Lees-Milne, Fourteen Friends, 1996, p 123.
8 Matthew Yorke, ed., Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, 1992, p 115. It seems from a letter to Evelyn Waugh (11 November 1946: Yorke Archive) that Green did not know that the book — written by a M. de Courchamps — was a fabrication.
9 Information from Alice Keene.
10 Letter to Nancy Mitford, 27 November 1946. Waugh said much the same to Green himself in a letter dated 8 November 1946 (Yorke Archive), but more diplomatically.
11 For example Rod Mengham in The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green, 1982, pp 173–4.
12 Marie Scott-James, for example (see note 2), who said of “the beautiful opening passage which is poetry rather than prose” that “One is reminded of T.S. Eliot by the abrupt transitions from the sublime to the ridiculous and their purpose is the same.”
13 Letter from Lehmann to Green dated 5 October 1944, now at Austin, Texas. Lehmann said, though, that the Hogarth Press might have been interested in a book-length translation from the Souvenirs.
14 Henry Green to John Lehmann, 6 September 1945. (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas.)
15 Henry Green to Rosamond Lehmann, 14 March 1945 (Library of King’s College, Cambridge).
16 John Lehmann to Henry Green, 19 September 1945 (Princeton University Library).
17Paris Review interview reprinted in Surviving (see note 8), p 244.
18 See note 5.
19 John Russell, Henry Green: Nine novels and an unpacked bag, 1960, p 169.
20 Evelyn Waugh to Henry Green, 8 November 1946 (Yorke Archive).