Dreams of another day, p.18
Dreams of Another Day, page 18
He sat down abruptly on the bed. His voice and the bleakness in his grey eyes forced Ming out of her shock. She walked forward and sat down beside him, not touching him.
‘I thought that you wanted to make love to me,’ she said slowly, trying to ward off the trouble that at last, too late, she could see coming. After all it seemed that her first instincts had been right. If she had not been prepared to marry him she should have kept out of his way, however much she missed him.
‘Ever since that dreadful evening when you told me you were half-suffocated with desire and then again after Gerry’s lunch. Wasn’t that what you meant?’
‘In a way,’ he said and the despair in his voice cut into her. ‘Yes, it was, but …’
‘I don’t understand,’ Ming said sadly. ‘We seem always to be at cross purposes. I’d begun to realise how unfair I’ve been all these months, letting you take me out, give me things, make me really extraordinarily happy, and yet not giving you what you seemed to want so much. Was I wrong about that too?’
Mark shook his head, but he also covered his face with his hands. After a moment he breathed deeply and took his hands away again. Looking straight ahead of him at the drawing of her father that she had hung on the pale green wall, he took a grip on his emotions and said in a voice of almost official calm:
‘I suppose it must be my fault; I must have confused you. I wanted you terribly, but in a different context, Ming. I wanted you for … life. I wanted to share with you; to make a commitment to you that would override every other in my life and to know that you had done the same.’ He turned to face her and she was horrified by the look in his face. ‘God knows, if I’d just wanted someone to sleep with, I could have …’ He broke off, making her feel despicably cheap.
‘What a mess!’ said Ming, getting up off the bed and standing with her back to him. ‘I was trying to be fair to you. Since I knew that I couldn’t say I’d marry you, I wanted at least to give you something you seemed to want and I could give.’
The hurt that she had inflicted on him was mirrored by her own. ‘I’d hate you to think that it is something I gave lightly – or that I have given anyone else.’
Mark stood up and went to find his tie. He stared at his reflection in a pier-glass and knotted the tie round his neck.
‘You did say that “it was a long time” since you had been to bed with anyone. That sounds as though …’
‘Just after the war,’ she said in a detached voice, as though she were talking about someone else, ‘I was in a rather bad state, very unsure about how to cope with things that had happened to me and things I’d done. A man I’d known for some time seemed to offer a new way. We were … I had agreed to marry him, but it was not until he had taken me to bed and made love to me that I realised that I could not, and so I ended it. That was all.’
Mark swung round. A bitter question suggested itself to him, but even as the words formed in his mind he knew that they were inappropriate. He and Ming might have misunderstood each other over their needs and feelings, but she was still the woman with whom he had fallen in love. It would be a pretty poor love, he told himself, if it could not stand a blow or two, if it could answer hurt with hurt.
‘Was this evening just a test then, a test that I failed, just as he did, whoever the poor beggar was?’ he said coldly in spite of all his good intentions.
Ming looked stricken. She tried to speak, failed and simply shook her head.
‘I’d better go.’
‘Yes,’ Ming managed to say. ‘That might be best. Oh, Mark, I’ve hurt you all over again,’ she added, feeling hot tears welling under her eyelids. ‘I never meant to do that.’
‘I suppose not,’ he answered. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Yes, I see. Mark?’
‘Yes?’
‘Please do not think too badly of me.’
He made himself smile at her, but it was not a particularly successful effort.
‘I’ll telephone you,’ he said as he left the flat.
Ming woke the next morning trying to tell herself that she had no reason to feel so miserable. She might have sacrificed Mark’s friendly company, but at the same time she had been released at last from all responsibility for his feelings. He had gone and that was that. She was free to get on with her life. She ought to have felt relieved.
It took considerable resolution to face the life for which she had freed herself and which seemed infinitely less important than the man she was certain she did not love. Eventually she got out of bed and dressed, deciding to fill her days with so much that she had no time to think about her tiresome and contradictory emotions.
Eating breakfast at the kitchen table, she planned her programme. The first thing was obviously to follow Connie’s instruction to find some incontrovertible evidence of Bertrand’s allegations. After that, Ming thought, she might concentrate on arranging to have the rest of her flat decorated and furnished.
The post brought a letter from Miss Roseheath, congratulating Ming on one of her articles about women and money, which helped to keep her mind on her work. It had so impressed her, the teacher wrote, that she wondered whether Ming would consider going to the school one Saturday and giving a lecture to the senior girls.
Apparently there were no suitable dates for it during the current term, but Miss Roseheath suggested a Saturday at the end of January. Ming wrote it into her diary and scribbled a letter of acceptance.
By the time she had decided who to approach first in her search for proof of what Bertrand had said it was well after eleven o’clock. Ming picked up the telephone to talk to the most intelligent of the secretaries she had known in the House of Commons.
‘Diana?’ she said when the call was answered. ‘Mary Alderbrook here. How are you?’
‘I’m very well. How is life when you’re released from the grindstone?’
‘Pretty good in most ways. I’m just back from Paris.’
‘Lucky old you!’
‘But there are other ways in which it’s not so good. I miss all the chums for one thing. I was wondering: would you care to have lunch one day?’
‘I’d love to,’ said Diana. Ming thought that she could hear real enthusiasm in Diana’s voice. ‘James is away today, and so I’m relatively free. Would that be too soon? It seems a pity to miss the opportunity.’
‘Today would be perfect,’ said Ming and suggested a small Italian restaurant where they had occasionally lunched in the past. They agreed to meet there at half-past twelve.
Before she changed out of her trousers, Ming went to the small boxroom beside the kitchen to see whether she might be able to convert it into a study. It was beginning to annoy her that her drawing room looked so like an office, and that the piles of paper she had accumulated were threatening to overwhelm everything else in the room. The boxroom was dull and dark, with only a small window looking out over the back of a row of undistinguished buildings. Remembering the way Natalie had decorated her flat and almost made a virtue out of its gloominess, Ming decided that she might be able to make something of the little room in a similar style.
It would be impossible ever to make it look as light as the rest of the flat, but if it were done up in a rich, dark colour it could at least be cosy. Then she thought of the pillars in the Sainte-Chapelle and wondered whether she could find anyone who made wallpapers decorated with small gold fleur-de-lis or castles on rich, dark blue or red backgrounds, and if not whether it would be feasible to paste gilded wrapping paper on to the boxroom walls.
Having telephoned four shops to describe what she wanted and ask for samples of their most suitable wallpapers, Ming went into her bedroom to change out of her trousers. As she was pulling on a girdle and unwrapping a new pair of stockings, she tried to decide how to phrase the questions she had to ask Diana.
Chapter Thirteen
Ming arrived early at the restaurant, chose a table that was separated from its nearest neighbour by a large potted palm, and settled down to wait for her friend.
Diana Frontwell was a few years younger than Ming but much taller and more fully built. Her hair was a pale, carroty red and her face strikingly pale. Her big nose had a pronounced bump and when she wore her hair piled up she looked remarkably like portraits of Elizabeth I, which had caused some amusement when she had first appeared at Westminster three years earlier. Intelligent and hard-working, she had always impressed Ming, although some of the other old hands had found her lack of deference irritating.
Watching her walk into the little restaurant, Ming recognised some of the impatience Connie had expressed in Egypt. It seemed absurd that anyone with Diana’s gifts should be working as a secretary to a dull, second-rate Tory back-bencher. If she had only been a man as interested in politics as she was, she would have been fighting her way up the ladder to a safe parliamentary seat of her own. If she had had money of her own or a rich and complaisant husband, she might have been doing it despite her sex. As it was, the nearest she was likely to get to representing a constituency would be as the wife of its Member of Parliament.
Over a plate of lasagne and a glass of red wine, Ming suppressed her instinct to urge Diana to strike out on her own and instead encouraged her to relay all the gossip of the Palace of Westminster: who had resigned and who had taken their places; which secretaries were in love with the Members for whom they worked and which Members’marriages were in trouble; what Ming’s replacement was like, and how much she resented the eulogies she kept hearing about her predecessor.
‘I rather doubt those,’ said Ming, amused at the distance she had travelled since her own resignation. ‘When I saw Roger Sillhorne in the summer, he seemed positively to loathe me. Perhaps I ought to drop in and try to make friends with her. I don’t like the thought of people hating me for something that’s not my fault.’
Diana drank a little of the sour, thin wine, pulled a face that made her look even more like Gloriana than usual, and then said:
‘I don’t suppose it could do any harm, and it might help; particularly if you wore some of your older clothes. I think the Paris glamour might put her nose out of joint even more badly than Sillhorne’s unending nostalgia for the days when you ran his office.’
Ming looked down at the plain dark suit she was wearing. It had not in fact come from Paris, but from a small shop in Knightsbridge, which Flixe had recommended. Cut with a short jacket that ballooned below the shoulders and a narrow skirt ending about four inches below the knee, the suit’s very simplicity marked it as far more expensive than the pleasant, decently cut grey-green dress and jacket that Diana was wearing.
‘I see what you mean,’ said Ming, rather embarrassed. ‘But let’s forget about me. What is Roger making of all this Suez business? I’d have thought it was right up his street.’
Diana laughed and told Ming a little about the government’s handling of the crisis and a lot about its effect on the individual Members of Parliament she knew well.
‘Veronica says Roger’s been beside himself ever since Nasser stole the Canal. He’s outraged that the United Nations is forbidding any intervention in Egypt. She says it’s even overtaken you as his chief topic of conversation, although now, of course, there’s Hungary, too.’
Ming vaguely remembered reading about trouble in Hungary, but there were no details in her mind.
‘Yes, that puzzles me,’ she said carefully. ‘I can’t quite work out from the papers what is really happening there. Do you know?’
‘No more than what I’ve read. Students have been rioting, one lot of Communists is fighting another lot, and the Russians are killing both sorts: nearly eight hundred yesterday according to one report I saw.’
‘I read that, too. Women and children and students, almost none of them armed.’ She remembered the newspaper stories she had read on the aeroplane. ‘It’s frightful, isn’t it?’
‘Awful, but what can you expect of the Russians?’ Diana looked down at her watch. ‘I’m going to have to go. I’ve got a pile of letters to type even though James is away. It was good to see you.’
‘Hasn’t it been fun? Although it’s peculiar hearing about the old place as an outsider,’ said Ming, bending down to pick up her gloves and handbag. ‘I hadn’t expected to feel so … excluded. It was so marvellous to be free of it all in the beginning that I hadn’t known how much I might miss it. We must keep in touch.’
‘That would be nice. And I’m sure you were right to go: you look so much better than in the old days – and not just better dressed. It can’t only be that you’ve inherited a fortune,’ said Diana with a friendly smile.
At that reminder of their unequal resources, Ming signalled to the waitress for a bill, which she paid. When they left the restaurant, Ming decided to walk home. It seemed mad to walk all over Paris to look at beautiful buildings and then to ignore London. Besides, she thought that if she were physically tired out, she might be able to stop her mind from turning over and over the way she ought to have handled her friendship with Mark. She set off to walk slowly back to her flat along the river.
It was a glorious day, bright and clear but cold, with a crisp, wintry tang in the air. Only a few leaves still hung on the naked trees, and Ming revelled in the smell of drying vegetation, bonfires, dust, petrol and something that seemed to belong peculiarly to London. Once she had passed the comforting, squat familiarity of the Tate Gallery there was not much to see except for the acres of dilapidated once-cream houses of Pimlico until she reached the Royal Hospital, which she knew well.
With her feet aching badly, she walked the last hundred yards to her flat and wished that she felt invigorated by the exercise. She changed her shoes for a pair of slippers and her suit and savage underclothes for the morning’s comfortable trousers and jersey and settled down at her desk.
Before she had done more than unscrew the cap of her pen the telephone rang. Ming was constitutionally incapable of leaving a telephone ringing without answering it, however much she resented the interruption, and so she picked up the receiver.
‘Ming?’ She immediately recognised Peter Suvarov’s voice even though its usual charming languor had been transmuted into hoarse urgency.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked quickly, wondering if he could be in a state about the rising in Hungary. After what Natalie had told her about his loathing of the revolution in which he had participated she would not have been surprised.
‘It’s Flixe. She started about two hours ago, but there are complications. An ambulance is on its way to take us to the hospital. There’s not much time. Could you bear to come and oversee the girls?’
‘Of course,’ said Ming, betraying none of the sudden terror that made her head swim. ‘I’ll come at once. How long have I got?’
‘It’s not that urgent. We’ve got Flixe’s midwife and Brigitte to look after them, but they’re a bit weepy and I think it would help to have an aunt.’
‘Don’t worry about them or me, Peter,’ said Ming, putting all the comfort of which she was capable into her voice. ‘Give Flixe my love, and tell me …’ Her voice trembled. ‘And tell me how it goes,’ she went on more steadily.
‘Will do. Here’s the ambulance. ’Bye.’
He cut the connection and all Ming heard was the electric buzz on the line. She put down her receiver and tried to think clearly. With no idea of how long Flixe would be in hospital or when she herself would be able to return to the flat, Ming thought that she ought to pack plenty of clothes and take some work too.
Twenty-five minutes after Peter’s call, she had fetched the car from its garage and was loading a suitcase into the boot. She had a bag full of notes and her portable typewriter. Trying not to think of all the horror stories about fatal confinements and damaged babies she had heard over the years, she drove carefully towards Kensington and found a parking space just outside Flixe’s house.
Her two daughters, six-year-old Fiona and the baby Sophie, were playing listlessly in the brightly painted attic nursery with Brigitte, their German au pair girl, while the midwife was busy making tea in the kitchen. She was much slimmer and younger than the nurse who had overseen Flixe’s first three confinements, and in her starched white uniform she looked out of place in the cosy kitchen, which was designed to look as much like a romanticised farm-house as possible.
There was a huge, scrubbed wooden table in the centre, dark red quarry tiles on the floor, and brightly polished copper saucepans in a rack above the cooker. Bunches of herbs, strings of onions, dried mushrooms and garlic hung from hooks in the ceiling. Ming had often told Flixe that she expected to see hams and sausages there too, but so far there had been nothing but vegetables.
Ming introduced herself to the nurse and sat down at the kitchen table before asking as calmly as possible what had happened to Flixe.
‘Nothing so far,’ said Nurse Jenkins with a quick smile. She warmed the kitchen tea pot, threw away the water and measured three spoonfuls of tea into the pot. ‘But the baby span round just as labour was beginning and I could not turn it back. A breech delivery is safer in hospital in any case, and I think she might have to have a caesarian section.’
‘Is that serious?’ Ming asked, feeling very ignorant. ‘It doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘No, it isn’t, but her condition might have become serious if we had kept her here. Would you like a cup of tea, Miss Alderbrook?’ she asked, pouring boiling water on to the tea leaves.
‘Thank you, yes. That would be splendid. Is there anything wrong with the child?’
‘Nothing as far as I could tell, but they’ll be able to check that, too, at St Mary’s. I’ll call the girls for their tea.’
As the nurse left the room, looking capable and reassuring, Ming wondered whether she had heard the whole truth about her sister’s condition. But there was nothing she could do except wait for a call from Peter and do her best to amuse the children.
That proved simplicity itself. After tea Ming read stories to Fiona while Brigitte helped Sophie with a simple jigsaw puzzle. The only difficult moment was when Fiona looked up at the end of one book to say:
