“Alison, what am I going to do tomorrow?”
“You’re going to accept.”
“Do you want me to accept?”
“Not all over again.”
We were lying on our backs, and I could see her eyes were open. Somewhere down below little leaves in front of a lamppost cast nervous shadows across our ceiling.
“If I say what I feel about you, will you…”
“I know what you feel.”
And it was there: an accusing silence.
I reached out and touched her bare stomach. She pushed my hand away, but held it. “You feel, I feel, what’s the good. It’s what we feel. What you feel is what I feel. I’m a woman.”
I was frightened; and calculated my answer.
“Would you marry me if I asked you?”
“You can’t say it like that.”
“I’d marry you tomorrow if I thought you really needed me. Or wanted me.”
“Oh Nicko, Nicko.” Rain lashed the windowpanes. She beat my hand on the bed between us. There was a long silence.
“I’ve just got to get out of this country.”
She didn’t answer; more silence, and then she spoke.
“Pete’s coming back to London next week.”
“What will he do?”
“Don’t worry. He knows.”
“How do you know he knows?”
“I wrote to him.”
“Has he answered?”
She breathed out. “No strings.”
“Do you want to go back to him?”
She turned on her elbow and made me turn my head, so that our faces were very close together.
“Ask me to marry you.”
“Will you marry me?”
“No.” She turned away.
“Why did you do that?”
“To get it over. I’m going to be an air hostess, and you’re going to Greece. You’re free.”
“And you’re free.”
“If it makes you happier—I’m free.”
The rain came in sudden great swathes across the treetops and hit the windows and the roof; like spring rain, out of season. The bedroom air seemed full of unspoken words, unformulated guilts, a vicious silence, like the moments before a bridge collapses. We lay side by side, untouching, effigies on a bed turned tomb; sickeningly afraid to say what we really thought. In the end she spoke, in a voice that tried to be normal, but sounded harsh.
“I don’t want to hurt you and the more I… want you, the more I shall. And I don’t want you to hurt me and the more you don’t want me the more you will.” She got out of bed for a moment. When she came back she said, “We’ve decided?”
“I suppose.”
We said no more. Soon, too soon, I thought, she went to sleep.
In the morning she was determinedly gay. I telephoned the Council. I went to receive Miss Spencer-Haigh’s congratulations and briefings, and took her out for a second and—I prayed—last lunch.
5
What Alison was not to know—since I hardly realized it myself—was that I had been deceiving her with another woman during the latter part of September. The woman was Greece. Even if I had failed the board I should have gone there. I never studied Greek at school, and my knowledge of modern Greece began and ended with Byron’s death at Missolonghi. Yet it needed only the seed of the idea of Greece, that morning in the British Council. It was as if someone had hit on a brilliant solution when all seemed lost. Greece—why hadn’t I thought of it before? It sounded so good: “I’m going to Greece.” I knew no one—this was long before the new Medes, the tourists, invaded—who had been there. I got hold of all the books I could find on the country. It astounded me how little I knew about it. I read and read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
It seemed almost a secondary thing, by the time I left, that I wanted to escape from England. I thought of Alison only in terms of my going to Greece. When I loved her, I thought of being there with her; when I didn’t, then I was there without her. She had no chance.
I received a cable from the School Board confirming my appointment, and then by post a contract to sign and a courteous letter in atrocious English from my new headmaster. Miss Spencer-Haigh produced the name and address in Northumberland of a man who had been at the school the year before. He hadn’t been appointed by the British Council, so she could tell me nothing about him. I wrote a letter, but that was unanswered. Ten days remained before I was due to go.
Things became very difficult with Alison. I had to give up the flat in Russell Square and we spent three frustrating days looking for somewhere for her to live. Eventually we found a large studio-room off Baker Street. The move, packing things, upset us both. I didn’t have to go until October 8th, but Alison started work on the 1st, and the need to get up early, to introduce order into our life, was too much for us. We had two dreadful rows. The first one she started, and stoked, and built up to a whitehot outpouring of contempt for men, and me in particular. I was a snob, a prig, a twopenny-halfpenny Don Juan—and so on. The next day—she had been icily mute at breakfast—when I went in the evening to meet her, she was not there. I waited an hour, then I went home. She wasn’t there, either. I telephoned: no air-hostess trainees had been kept late. I waited, getting angrier and angrier, until eleven o'clock, and then she came in. She went to the bathroom, took her coat off, put on the milk she always had before bed, and said not a word.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I’m not going to answer any questions.”
She stood over the stove in the kitchen recess. She had insisted on a cheap room. I loathed the cooking-sleeping-everything in one room; the shared bathroom; the having to hiss and whisper.
“I know where you’ve been.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You’ve been with Pete.”
“All right. I’ve been with Pete.” She gave me a furious dark look. “So?”
“You could have waited till Thursday.”
“Why should I?”
Then I lost my temper. I dragged up everything I could remember that might hurt her. She didn’t say anything, but undressed and got into bed, and lay with her face turned to the wall. She began to cry. In the silence I kept remembering, with intense relief, that I should soon be free of all this. It was not that I believed my own vicious accusations; but I still hated her for having made me make them. In the end I sat beside her and watched the tears trickle out of her swollen eyes.
“I waited hours for you.”
“I went to the cinema. I haven’t seen Pete.”
“Why lie about it?”
“Because you can’t trust me. As if I’d do that.”
“This is such a lousy way to end.”
“I could have killed myself tonight. If I’d had the courage. I’d have thrown myself under the train. I stood there and thought of doing it.”
“I’ll get you a whisky.” I came back with it and gave it to her. “I wish to God you’d live with someone. Isn’t there another air hostess who’d—”
“I’m never going to live with another woman again.”
“Are you going back to Pete?”
She gave me an angry look.
“Are you trying to tell me I shouldn’t?”
“No.”
She sank back and stared at the wall.
“I’d be back with him now… if I could stand the idea.” For the first time she gave a faint smile. The whisky was beginning to work. “It’s like those Hogarth pictures. Love a la mode. Five weeks later.”
“Are we friends again?”
“We can’t ever be friends again.”
“If it hadn’t been you, I’d have walked out this evening.”
“If it hadn’t been you I wouldn’t have come back.”
She held out her glass for more whisky. I kissed her wrist, and went and got the bottle.
“You know what I thought today?” She said it across the room.
“No.”
“If I killed myself, you’d be pleased. You’d be able to go round saying, she killed herself because of me. I think that would always keep me from suicide. Not letting some lousy slit like you get the credit.”