Dreams of another day, p.14
Dreams of Another Day, page 14
Julia pushed herself up from the tree against which she had been leaning and brushed some leaves out of her hair.
‘I suppose you’re right. I’ll go and round up the young,’ she said, sounding tired. ‘It’s astonishing how energetic they can be in all this heat.’
‘You stay put,’ said Mark cheerfully. ‘I’ll get them. I’d like to stretch my legs a bit in any case.’
He strode off, leaving the others to shake crumbs off the plates and rugs and pack everything up into Julia’s hamper.
‘Thank goodness for Scotland!’ she said as she buckled its leather straps. ‘Are you going away this summer, Ming?’
‘I don’t think so. If London gets too horribly stuffy I’ll probably spend a few days down with my parents, and perhaps extend my weekly visits to Connie Wroughton. When do you go?’
‘Julia and the children are off next week,’ said David, putting out a hand to help her up off the grass. ‘I’ll follow as soon as I can. We always try to spend the whole of August in Scotland, recharging our batteries for the first two weeks and then shooting. It’s glorious up there, Ming, even if you don’t shoot. She ought to come for a bit, shouldn’t she, Julia?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ she said after an appreciable pause. ‘Do come and stay, Ming, if you’d like to. It’s wonderfully relaxing after the rush and worry of being in London. Peter and Flixe brought the children up last year and seemed to enjoy themselves.’
‘That’s awfully sweet of you,’ said Ming, who had noticed the pause and wondered about it, ‘but I really don’t think I can this year while we’re still fighting for the magazine’s very existence. I can’t help thinking that if I stop my battle to boost the circulation I’ll lose what little ground we’ve gained.’
‘Well, we’ll have to make a plan for next summer then,’ said Julia, smiling more easily. ‘You and Mark both, perhaps:’
‘Perhaps,’ said Ming, thinking that they might none of them be in a position to take any kind of holiday if the politicians really plunged them into war. ‘You are kind.’
Mark hove into sight then, with Jonathan riding in triumph on his shoulders and Amanda dancing along at his side chattering in excitement. David went to meet them.
‘And good with children, too,’ murmured Julia, smiling so that her brown eyes narrowed and gleamed.
‘I know, I know,’ said Ming, almost snapping. ‘He’s positively too good to be true. Has Flixe been trying to make you egg me on?’
‘She did mention how much she wants to see you happily established,’ admitted Julia, wishing that she had said nothing, ‘and it is hard not to think how well the pair of you get on together. But it is absolutely none of my business.’
‘No,’ said Ming frankly. ‘It isn’t really. If Flixe asks you about today, perhaps you ought just to tell her that I’m not the marrying kind.’
There was a sharpness in her voice that surprised Julia, as well as a hardness in her eyes and a determined look about her mouth.
‘I’ve made you angry,’ said Julia quickly. ‘I’m sorry about that. It’s just that we’re all so fond of you, we’d like you to be happy.’
‘Is marriage really so wonderful?’ asked Ming, remembering all her various friends’tribulations.
‘I think it’s the most important thing there is,’ said Julia at last. Her eyes were fixed on the tall figure of her husband, who had just relieved Mark of his burden. In a rush of honesty, she felt compelled to add, ‘And there are times when it’s quite hellishly difficult.’
As Julia turned to Ming and looked straight at her, Ming saw real unhappiness in her eyes and a kind of terror. Much of Ming’s anger dissolved and her need to offer comfort persuaded her to smile.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. It’s charming of you to mind about me. I just have terrible difficulty in letting myself believe in any kind of permanence.’
Julia winced noticeably, but she recognised Ming’s sincerity and knew that she was completely unaware of David’s state of mind. It was not Ming’s fault that she had come into his life at a time when he was facing disillusion and a sense of failure, or that her open admiration of him had somehow given him back his faith in himself. Julia had been trying to make herself believe that that was all there was to it, but she found it hard.
Whenever David was anywhere near Ming, his face changed from bleak depression to eager interest. Julia had to watch that, just as she had to listen to his innumerable accounts of how intelligent Ming was, how sweet and how sensitive.
The very openness of David’s delight told Julia that there was no question of a love affair in his mind, and yet she could not avoid the knowledge that he was to some extent falling in love with Ming. If she had not been so vulnerable she would have seemed less dangerous, and if she had not presented such a threat then Julia could have watched her reawakening of David’s zest for life with undiluted pleasure. That she could not was the hardest aspect of it all to bear.
‘There can never be any guarantees of permanence,’ Julia said as gently as she could, ‘but if anyone has loyalty stamped on them, I’d have thought it was your young man.’
‘Yes, I know,’ answered Ming readily. ‘He’s like David in that.’
They said no more, but stowed the rugs and baskets in their respective boats and waited in the brindled shade for the two men.
Ming said very little on the slow, hot drive back into London. Mark was not sure whether it was contentment or boredom or even a headache that kept her silent and had begun to worry by the time they reached the suburbs. As they rounded Shepherd’s Bush Green and were held up at a red traffic light, Ming turned to him.
‘Mark, it’s been such a lovely day that it seems a pity to end it so soon. Would you like to come back with me to Cheyne Walk and have some supper?’
The lights changed before he had framed his answer and it was not until they were driving down towards Kensington that he said slowly:
‘I’d love to, if you really mean it.’
She turned briefly to smile at him. The traffic miraculously cleared and Ming put her foot down, changing up to fourth.
When they got to the flat she took him into the drawing room and asked what he wanted to drink.
‘Oh, anything,’ he said, looking at her as she stood, slim and relaxed, beside the marquetry tray on which she kept a selection of bottles.
‘Really?’ she said, smiling mockingly over her shoulder.
She looked so happy, so certain of herself and him, that he believed he had managed to cross a barrier that had been keeping them apart. He moved closer and put a hand on her fair hair. The wind on their drive back into London had whipped it into tangles and he began to smooth it, stroking her head over and over again. Ming turned to face him and he put his other hand on her head.
‘I’m sorry about the tangles,’ she said with a humility that touched him almost unbearably. She seemed so trusting that he wanted to build defences all round her so that she should never be hurt again. It had always been obvious to him that someone had once hurt her badly.
‘Don’t worry about the tangles, my love,’ he said, putting both arms around her and laying his cheek against her head. ‘You look adorable when you’re untidy. When you were lying there in the grass with twigs in your hair it was almost impossible not to come and kiss you despite our formidable chaperones.’
He slid his smooth cool hands on either side of her face and turned it up towards him. She was smiling faintly, remembering the last time he had kissed her and waiting for him. Her wonderful dark blue eyes were clear and seemed to be full of love.
Mark bent his head and kissed each of them in turn, then her slightly tilted nose and finally her parted lips.
Ming moved a little closer and reached up towards him, her hands on his arms. For a moment she felt utterly at peace. His gentleness and the warmth of his affection seemed to be everything that she had ever wanted.
As he felt her responding to him, Mark’s hands moved to her neck and his thumbs stroked the smooth skin, reaching down between the lapels of her linen shirt to her breastbone. His breathing changed and quickened.
Ming drew back a little and saw in his face an urgency of need that warned her of what she was doing to him.
‘Mark, no,’ she said, suddenly realising that he had misunderstood her invitation to supper.
‘Ming?’ he said, puzzled and rather worried. ‘Did I hurt you?’
She managed to smile as she shook her head, unable to explain why she had to stop him from touching her in case she in turn had misunderstood him.
‘Then what? What’s the matter?’ His voice had been sharpened by anxiety but to her it sounded like anger.
‘I can’t …’ she began and then shook her head again. ‘I’m sorry.’
Mark dropped his hands to his sides. Ming saw his mouth twist and his eyes grow cold and she moved away to stare out of the window. With one hand clinging to the curtain, she said:
‘I’m sorry, Mark. I didn’t mean to let you do that.’
‘What do you mean by “let”?’ he asked. His voice was quiet but she could still hear anger in it and her hand tightened on the chintz.
‘You spent half the picnic looking at me as though you loved me,’ he added in a voice that sounded distant. ‘You invited me back here. When you stood in my arms just now I could feel that you wanted me.’ He stopped, took a deep breath and then went on more quietly: ‘And then you talk about letting me kiss you, as though you thought I wanted something you found hateful. But you didn’t hate it. I couldn’t have misunderstood the way you moved towards me, the sweet way you kissed me. What are you trying to do, Ming?’
At that she did turn and as he saw her face he closed his eyes.
‘Don’t look like that,’ he said in a voice of aching despair. ‘God knows, I don’t want to make you unhappy.’
‘Or I you,’ she managed to say, despite the tears that seeped from her eyes. She tried to stop them.
‘Then what the hell is going on? If I could even understand what it is that you want, I could cope better.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ she said instinctively. ‘Mark, please don’t be angry.’
‘Ming,’ he said in a voice of determined reason. ‘I’m not angry. But I am worried and … and lost. You know that I love you and I would do anything in my power to protect you from anything in the world. But I don’t understand what you are after, what it is that you want from me.’
He waited, but she found she could not answer since she herself did not know what she wanted.
‘If you want me to get out of your way, all you have to do is say so,’ he said. When she still said nothing, he added in a harder voice: ‘Well?’
‘I don’t understand it either,’ she said with difficulty. ‘All I know is that I am very fond of you and I should hate it if … if I didn’t see you sometimes.’
‘But that’s all. I see. I can’t blame you, I suppose, because it’s pretty much what you told me when I first asked you to marry me – even if you seemed to have changed your mind last week.’ He shrugged. ‘But I really don’t think that I am capable of going on like this.’
The sight of her white, unhappy face wrenched at him but he was having a fierce enough battle to keep himself in control and at that moment there was nothing he could have done for her.
‘I suppose,’ he added in a voice of such bitterness that she felt unbearably guilty, ‘that just because I’m half suffocated by desire for you, there’s no law that says you have to reciprocate. I’ll go.’
‘Mark, don’t …’ she began, but he had gone before she could finish her sentence.
Chapter Ten
Ming spent the days before she expected her next anonymous letter in dread that it would say something about Mark. Her sisters had figured in earlier letters, as had Connie and Max. Ming’s work, her character, her looks, even the black dress she had bought for the Attingers’ dance had aroused her nameless correspondent’s malice. Only Mark had never been mentioned.
When the letter came on the expected day in the usual style, it informed Ming only that she was lazy, exploitative, unfair and greedy, and that the false charm she exercised over people so destructively would lead to her humiliating downfall. Relieved, she even managed a grim smile at the irony. Mark was the only person she had actually exploited and he had never been mentioned as one of her victims.
Her excitement over the magazine and her attempts to lighten its tone and content were overtaken by her muddled feelings for Mark, and she lost most of her ability to inject fun into the articles she wrote. She continued doing what she could to expand the circulation and for most of the rest of her time simply followed Max’s orders, one of which was to monitor the Suez crisis.
As far as they could discover diplomatic negotiations were being carried on as discreetly as possible with all the countries who used the Canal regularly. The two most important were the French and the Americans.
The French, who had as much or more interest in the Canal as the British, were pressing for military action against Egypt. The Americans, richer and infinitely more powerful, were urging negotiation rather than war. Nasser had for some time been playing them off against the Russians, which had made them withdraw their offer to help finance an immense dam at Aswan just before he nationalised the Canal; but they disliked British and French imperialism, did not themselves make much use of the Canal and disapproved in principle of military intervention in the affairs of other countries.
They proposed first an eighteen-power conference on the Canal, which led to a doomed attempt by the Prime Minister of Australia to negotiate with Nasser, and then the Suez Canal Users’Association, which was to organise the operation of the Canal, collect the fees for its use and pay a proportion of the proceeds to the Egyptian Government.
Ming, reading the little information that reached the newspapers, hoped that the Americans would prevail and that some kind of negotiated settlement would be reached. But there were plenty of others who preferred the French view.
While the negotiators’ efforts continued and the international lawyers produced arguments for and against the acceptability of military intervention, Anthony Eden was preparing for it in case Nasser failed to yield to diplomatic pressure. Elite forces were withdrawn from their, policing duties in Cyprus for retraining in Malta, reservists were called up, and the Chiefs of Staff drew up plans first for a landing to the north of Alexandria, then a land assault from the south and finally a sea-borne assault on Port Said. The Treasury were working out how a war might be financed and what consequences it could have for the value of sterling.
The members of Eden’s Cabinet were divided, in increasing but secret bitterness, between those who shared his view that force must be used to destroy the Egyptian army and bring down Nasser, those who were prepared for war only if the Security Council of the United Nations sanctioned it, and the others who believed that armed intervention was not only inappropriate but also morally and legally unjustifiable.
The Cabinet disunity was not publicised but many people suspected it, and it was mirrored in the country as a whole. Half the press and its readers were furious that nothing had been done to teach Nasser a lesson and the rest were equally angry with the obvious military preparations.
Jack Hazeldene’s occasional letters to Ming were appropriately discreet, but since they came from Malta, she knew that he would be one of the first into Egypt if the government did decide on war.
Increasingly afraid of the prospect, she badly wanted to discuss what she had heard with Mark, but she knew that she had cut herself off from him. Throughout that summer she saw nothing more of him until one Sunday morning in October, when she was on her way to lunch with Gerry and Mike.
Ming had taken the lift and arrived at the door of their flat at a quarter to one, just as Mark reached the top of the stairs. He said her name and she whirled round, almost overbalancing.
She was so astonished to see him that she lost all her self-control and reached out for him with both hands.
‘Mark,’ she said, her face eager. ‘I had no idea Gerry had asked you. Are you all right?’
Evidently surprised by the warmth of her welcome, he hugged her lightly and then drew back to smile at her, but his eyes were dull. He looked so ill and so worried that she said at once:
‘Mark, please don’t be so angry. I know I deserve it, but I…’
‘I’m not angry with you, Ming. Things are awfully sticky just now in the office, that’s all.’
‘I can imagine.’
As Ming smiled at him, the happiness died out of her eyes and her mouth looked vulnerable. He longed to be able to tell her just how hard the civil servants and politicians who hated the thought of war as much as she did were working to prevent it, and how frustrated they were by the almost furtive secrecy of Eden’s supporters on the Egypt Committee. Even members of the Cabinet who had shown themselves hostile to the idea of military intervention were denied information and many senior civil servants knew that they were being kept in the dark if not actually told lies.
‘It may blow over,’ he said unconvincingly.
‘Really?’
‘No one knows what’s going to happen, but you mustn’t be afraid. Even if the worst happens, it’ll be a local affair. It won’t touch you.’
Ming shuddered.
‘It’s not that,’ she said with some difficulty, ‘so much as what might happen if it all escalates. Don’t you think the Russians might come in on Egypt’s side? If that happened it could be even worse than last time.’
‘No. I don’t think so. We’re in no position to fight another major war, the French certainly aren’t, I doubt if the Russians are, and even the Americans would find it difficult. Whatever happens it won’t be that. Besides we’ve got the bomb. No one’s going to risk it.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Ming, turning to knock on Gerry’s door.
Almost before they were inside the flat Mike insisted on taking Mark round to the local pub for a drink before lunch, leaving Ming to help Gerry cook.
