Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 17

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“You sit there,” said Joan Bridges, indicating the one comfortable chair in the small boarding-house bedroom.

“Can’t I help you?”

“Not in those clothes; you should just sit and be decorative; there’s nothing much to do, anyway.” Joan had escaped early from the typewriting-agency off the Strand that employed her services. Before Caroline’s arrival, she had arranged the flowers in the black pottery vase, pulled the screen round the fitted basin in the corner, spread the large yellow cloth over the card-table and set upon it the bright blue china, the Woolworth knives and forks. Now she arranged the slices of cold ham and liver-sausage on the blue dish; she cut the French bread that squeaked under the knife; she uncorked the bottle of sherry. “You can pour it out. Oh, and better lock the door in case Miss G. is prowling.” To eat upstairs was against the boarding-house rules; but with Caroline here, it was unthinkable to sit in the public dining-room eating the dull food and surrounded by other people at the small table that shivered on its uneven legs.

“Tell ...” said Joan. She opened the tin of soup and poured it into the saucepan; she knelt by the fire, stirring the soup above the gas-ring; she drank her sherry and followed the story as devotedly as though she were reading an instalment of a serial.

“Do you think I am crazy?”

“No,” said Joan, “I couldn’t imagine your giving up America anyway. What is Michael’s view?”

“I haven’t told him yet. And blow me,” said Caroline, “it’s the first time I’ve ever been frightened of telling him anything.”

“I don’t think you need be.”

There was nothing that Joan did not know about Michael Knowle; she had met him once, for a period of three minutes and she knew him better than she knew any man living. His character and customs fitted all her preconceived ideas of romantic heroes; he went in with Byron, Shelley, Sydney Carton and other forgivably immoral persons of genius. Even his looks admitted him to that gallery. He shed a lustre upon his smallest idiosyncracy, making it important that he smoked fifty cigarettes a day, that his favourite foods were curry and caviar; that he found the Richard Bennett murder-case more fascinating than the case of Crippen or Bywaters; that he suffered from insomnia; that when his mind was at peace he whistled Loch Lomond and that when he was harassed, he sang one line of a song dating from the Boer war; “Oh, why did I leave my little back-room in Bloomsburee?”

She liked him especially for never losing his temper and for worshipping cats, with a preference towards tabbies.

Joan tasted the soup, sat back on her heels and looked thoughtfully at Caroline, whose face in the firelight was pale and fated, the way that lovers could be expected to look.

“You know,” said Joan, “I don’t really see the point of telling him at all. There’s nothing he can do about it anyway. You’ve dished yourself with Rokov; Rokov isn’t a friend of his like Jay; he couldn’t put those pieces together again if he tried. You’ve split with Dennis; Michael can’t retrieve that. What is the point of worrying him? Go off to America and have a lovely time without spoiling the start.”

“And tell him—what?”

“Oh ... tell him that Rokov cancelled the appointment,” said Joan limpidly.

“Just lie ... ?”

“Just lie. For once.”

Caroline rose from the chair and began to pace; as usual, to watch her walk made Joan feel dumpy and fat. From the days of their childhood, Caroline had seemed a spectacular and unlikely companion. She had been the long-legged, queer little girl whose aunt lived in the Georgian house at the end of the High Street. She was invited to tea with Joan’s large, noisy family at the vicarage; on one of their escapes to the greenhouse she had explained with pride that she was born out of wedlock; she had been the one who went away to boarding-school while Joan attended day-school at home, involving the exchange of long, facetious letters. Joan never learned to take her affection for granted; when they grew up it seemed likely that they would drift out of each other’s orbit, particularly when Caroline went to live with her mother and Joan began her secretarial training. She saw looming, between the R.A.D.A. and the Polytechnic, a gulf that had not divided the Georgian house from the vicarage. She was prepared then for Caroline to shoot off into fame, to achieve glittering friends, and, in due course, to send her dress-circle seats for a major triumph.

“And she is still my best friend,” Joan said to herself, carrying the saucepan to the table.

It was odd, she thought, pouring the soup, to compare their two careers and to see that Caroline was a failure while she herself advanced steadily. Merritt’s Typewriting Agency chose its employees carefully; it specialised in literary work. As head-typist, Joan read and checked manuscripts signed with august names; she got a preview of popular novels, plays that ran, short stories that sold. The work satisfied her because it was a contribution to literature. She prized her telephone-contacts with the creators and found their occasional appearances in the office rewarding. She made enough money to save regularly, and here again it was odd to think that she was so often in a position to lend Caroline sums varying between five shillings and five pounds. Sometimes she waited long for the repayment, but it always came.

“Anyway,” said Joan, “eat first and decide afterwards. Everything gets out of proportion on an empty stomach, or a lack of sleep.”

“ ‘Old weariness with his rust-eaten knife’,” said Caroline, seating herself at the table.

“Yes ... Cameron-Wilson, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know who wrote it; Michael quoted it last night. Do you know every poem that has ever been written?”

“Not quite,” said Joan complacently. “But I think you’ll find that one in Magpies In Picardy; poem to An Old Boot In A Ditch; we’ll look it up afterwards.”

Caroline glanced round the cheap wooden shelves that held Joan’s library. “If I never act again, I can at least complete my reading. I could set myself a course, and include all those old numbers that one always pretends to have read: Paradise Lost and Tristram Shandy and Crime and Punishment. By God, I’m hungry; may I have some more liver-sausage?”

Joan said pensively, “You aren’t really a neurotic, because you can always eat and always sleep.”

“Well, is Michael a neurotic? He doesn’t sleep.”

“I don’t know.”

“Anybody less.... Look, if I do tell him the lie, he’s bound to find it out. That play will go into production with some daisy or other in the lead.”

“Rokov could have engaged her for the part before he saw you; then had a temptation; then developed a conscience this morning.”

“Y-yes. Possibly.”

“In any case, whatever you say to Michael, he’ll forgive you.”

She knew this because Michael was too gentle ever to be angry; too charming a person to rank among the Spoilers-of-the-Fun. He had the soft heart of all the romantic lovers; that was why his wife could put it across him. Joan’s picture of Mercedes fitted neatly into the frame occupied by the implacable wives of fiction.

She rose and put the eclairs on the two glass plates. Caroline said, “What a nice life, if there were only food in it; one could be a single-hearted gourmet.”

“You couldn’t. You were born to trouble. And I was born a pudding. And I shall marry a nice dull man, and go on having adventures inside my head and between the covers of books.”

She did not add, “And share your love-affairs at secondhand,” because this would embarrass Caroline; Caroline might, also, be perplexed by the suggestion that she was akin to the novelists and dramatists who patronised the typewriting agency where Joan made her practical, necessary contribution. Caroline would stare and say, “Blow me,” if Joan told her that she thought of her as an artist, not only in her career but in her life; that the love-affair itself seemed to Joan to rank as a work of art. It was immoral; it was altogether outside the canons of the vicarage; but it was like the best art; it was there and it obeyed its own rules.

The contribution that Joan made to it was also there; whether she served as confidante, knowing that to be in love was to be lonely, or whether she fed the situation with the varied supplies that it needed; filling the gaps in Caroline’s knowledge of poetry; borrowing manuals of surgery from the cousin who was a medical student; agreeing on a dozen occasions to the request, “May I say that I was with you?”; typing the notes for Michael’s lecture to the B.M.A. when his secretary failed him. She had helped Caroline towards a perception, if not a toleration, of Mercedes. Joan had never seen Mercedes, but she was better qualified than Caroline to understand a wife’s point of view. She had been brought up in a Christian family that belonged to the accepted social pattern; she could see why a marriage was different from a love-affair.

And she was content with her rôle, not only because she loved Caroline but because, at secondhand, she was in love with Michael, who gave her no more trouble than Byron or Shelley gave her, but who, being alive, was more fun.

“And don’t think,” she said, “that I wouldn’t change places with you any time. Most respectable women would. Going to America for a month, with a chap and a lot of new clothes——”

“And a sense of guilt,” said Caroline, “that would make my mother very happy to contemplate.”