“I’ve never heard the name.”
“Have I got you on false pretences?” Vicky glanced sideways from the wheel, to see if I was disappointed. “Juckson-Smith — I think they call her Olive.”
Then I understood. I had not seen her for thirty years. Once there had been a sort of indeterminate affection, certainly not more, between us. She had been a member of George Passant’s group, the only one of us from a well-to-do family. Those had been idealistic days, when George ranged about the town, haranguing us with absolute hope about our “freedom”. But after I left the town, some of them worked out their freedom: Olive took a lover, and under his influence got mixed up in the scandal which — to me at least, who had to watch it — had been a signpost along our way.
She had, so far as I had heard, cut off all connections with the town. Her family was respectable, and it was not a pretty story. She had married her lover, and, some time during the war, I had been told that they had parted. Presumably she had married again. All this had happened many years before, and except to a few of us, might be submerged or forgotten.
Myself I wasn’t remembering much of it, memory didn’t work like that, as Vicky drove past the outer suburbs, into the country, past the Midland fields, every square foot manmade and yet pastoral in the level light. It was past nine, but the sun was still over the horizon. Swathes of warm air kept surging through the open window, as we passed, slowing down, tree after tree.
“You do know her then?”
“I knew her first husband better. He was rather an engaging man.”
“Why was he engaging?”
“You might have liked him.” No, I shouldn’t have said that. Jack Cotery was just the kind of seducer whom this young woman had no guard against. I hurried on: “He had a knack of reducing everything to its lowest common denominator. He often turned out to be right, though I didn’t enjoy it.”
I began to tell her an anecdote. But this was one that I didn’t mind recalling. My spirits had become higher. When I was in high spirits, and letting myself go, Vicky found it hard to decide whether I was serious or not. She drove on, her expression puzzled and even slightly mulish, as I indulged myself talking about Martineau. Martineau, when I was in my teens, had been a partner in one of the town’s solidest firms of solicitors — the same firm of which George Passant was managing clerk. He was a widower, and he kept something like a salon for us all. Then, over a period of two or three years, round the age of fifty, he became invaded by religion, or by a religious search: he started wayside preaching, and before long gave up all he had, except for what he could carry, and went off as a tramp. At my college I used to receive postcards from various workhouses.
“Did you?” said Vicky, as though it were an invention.
He joined a religious community, and soon left that to become a pavement artist on the streets of Leeds. The pictures he drew were intended to convey a spiritual message. After a while, he moved to London and operated in the King’s Road. The average daily take in Chelsea was three times the take in Leeds: I picked up some information about the economics of pavement artistry in the late thirties.
“Did you?” said Vicky once more.
The point was, I said, Jack Cotery had insisted from the start that all Martineau wanted was a woman. Jack had discovered that his wife had been an invalid, he had had no sexual life right through his forties. Jack said that if he and my Sheila went off together, that would cure them, if anything could. I thought that was too reductive, too brash by half. The trouble was, about Martineau it turned out to be right.
“What happened?” Suddenly Vicky was interested.
Very simple. At the age of sixty Martineau met, Heaven knows how, a very nice and mildly eccentric woman. They got married within three weeks and had two children in the shortest conceivable time. Martineau gave up pavement artistry (though not religion) and returned to ordinary life. Very ordinary: because he became a clerk in exactly the type of solicitors’ firm in which he had been a partner and given his share away. My last glimpse of him: he had been living in a semi-detached house in Reading, running round the garden bouncing his daughter on his back. He had exuded happiness, and had survived in robust health until nearly eighty.
“I can understand that,” said Vicky, driving past the golden fields.
“Can you?”
“I shouldn’t be so edgy if I weren’t so chaste.”
“You’re not very edgy.”
“I’m getting a bit old to sleep alone.”
“You know,” I said, “it isn’t the answer to everything.”
“It’s the answer to a good many things,” she said.
From the road, a mile or two further on, one could see a house standing a long way back upon a knoll, as sharp and isolated as in a nineteenth-century print. Yes, that was where we were going, said Vicky. It was a comely Georgian façade: once, I supposed, this had been a squire’s manor house. Not now. Not now, as we drove up the tree-verged drive, car after car parked right to the door: no poor old Leicestershire squire had ever lived like this. In fact, we didn’t enter the house at all, but went round, past the rose gardens, to the swimming pool. There, standing on the lawn close by, or sitting in deckchairs, must have been sixty or seventy people. Some were in the water: waiters were going about with trays of drinks. I met my hostess, middle-aged, well dressed. I met some of the guests, middle-aged, well dressed. I found myself trying to remember names, just as if I were in America. For an instant, looking down from the pool over the rolling countryside, I wondered how I could tell that I wasn’t in America. This might have been Pennsylvania. This was a style of life that was running round the fortunate of the world. One difference, perhaps, but that was only a matter of latitude: in Pennsylvania it wouldn’t have been bright daylight at half past nine.
I had a drink, answered amiable questions, received an invitation or two: one man claimed to have played cricket with my brother Martin. My hostess rejoined me and said: “You know Olive Juckson-Smith, don’t you?”
I said, yes, I used to. She said, do come and meet her, it’ll be a surprise.
We made our way, through the jostling party, the decibels rising, the alcohol sinking, to a knot of people at the other side of the pool. My hostess called: “Olive! I’ve got an old friend for you.”
The first thing I noticed was that Olive’s hair had gone quite white. She was my own age, so that oughtn’t to have disturbed me, though for a moment, after all those years, it did. She had been, in her youth, a handsome Nordic girl, bold-eyed and strong. Her eyes still shone light-blue, but her face was drawn: she had lost a lot of weight: though her arms were muscular, her body had become gaunt. The first moment was over, the shock had gone. But I was left with the expression that greeted me. It was one of hostility — no, more than that, something nearer detestation.
“How are you?” I asked, still expecting (it was the mild pleasure I had been imagining on the way out) to meet an old friend.
“I’m well enough.” Her answer was curt, as though she didn’t want to speak at all.
“Where are you living now?”
She brought out the name of a Northern town. She was fashionably turned out. I guessed that she and her husband were as well-off as my hosts. I didn’t know whether she had had children, and I couldn’t begin to ask. I said, trying to remain warm: “It’s a long time since we met, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” Her voice was frigid, and she hadn’t given even a simulacrum of a smile.
My hostess, who was both kindly and no fool, was becoming embarrassed. To ease things over, she said to Olive that I had done a good many things in the time between. “I’ve heard of some of the things you’ve done,” Olive said to me, her face implacable.