Dreams of another day, p.23
Dreams of Another Day, page 23
Disappointed in his search for sustenance and comfort, Nicholas let out a cry of rage. Ming looked up guiltily and across the grey stone font she caught Flixe’s eye. Her smile seemed to express such immediate understanding that Ming felt almost afraid of what she might have betrayed.
‘Dear me.’ The vicar, who had just emerged from the vestry, had a light voice that managed to be audible even through the child’s increasingly violent screaming. He was a pleasant but ordinary-looking man, and not even the ecclesiastical splendour of his gold-embroidered stole and long white surplice could lend him presence.
‘I am sorry,’ whispered Ming. ‘I can’t stop him yelling.’
The vicar smiled reassuringly and told her that he was quite used to it. He explained what she was to do at each stage of the service and told her to hold Nicholas the other way so that when she handed him over, his head would rest against the vicar’s left arm. Obediently Ming turned the baby around and was unutterably relieved when he became quieter.
The priest began his prayers as the congregation shivered and tried not to think of the cups of hot tea that awaited them at Flixe’s house. At the appointed moment Ming undertook to renounce the devil and all his works on behalf of the child in her arms and handed him to the priest.
The baby yelled again as the cold but holy water was dripped on to his forehead and he was baptised Nicholas David Alexander.
As soon as his mother rescued him from the arms of the church’s representative he stopped crying again, and along with everyone else Ming smiled at the sight of Flixe making faces at her baby, apparently quite oblivious to her surroundings or the other people who filled them.
Flixe’s house seemed a paradise of warmth, colour and scent after the monotonous grey stone and the damp chill of the church. There were large vases of informally arranged cream and flame-coloured flowers all round the big, pale drawing room, and it smelled deliciously of them and of the woodsmoke of the fire in the Adam fireplace. Flixe’s friends and relations soon lost their pinched expressions as they drank whisky or China tea, nibbled savoury sandwiches and ignored the vicar, who stood in a corner of Flixe’s elegant room looking lost and hungry.
Ming took pity on him and collected two cups of tea from a laden table by the window.
‘Would you like one?’ she asked when she reached him and was rewarded with a grateful smile.
‘I don’t know how Mrs Suvarov manages to keep this house so warm,’ he said. ‘We can never do anything with either the vicarage or the church.’
‘It is nice, isn’t it? Sometimes I think she overdoes it, but on a day like today it really comes into its own. That was a lovely service.’
After that she could not think of anything more to say and, since the vicar could not either, Ming was relieved to see David Wallington strolling casually towards her, cup in hand.
‘Hello!’ she said cheerfully. ‘We were just talking about central heating and the weather.’
‘How very English!’ said David with a cheerful smile. ‘May I remove my fellow-godparent, Mr Hackinster?’
‘Oh, my goodness! Yes, by all means. So nice to have had a chance to chat to you.’
Ming smiled at him, and let David take her to the opposite side of the big room.
‘Oughtn’t we to talk to our other fellow-godparent?’ she said. ‘It seems a bit mean …’
‘He’s busy just now,’ said David with a nod towards the fire. Ming looked and saw that the Hungarian was talking seriously to Julia Wallington. She was leaning towards him and neither of them paid any attention at all to the people who passed by.
‘So he is Amanda’s godfather and the painter of those wonderful portraits at your house,’ said Ming. ‘I thought he must be.’
‘That’s right. I’d forgotten that you didn’t know him. He was Julia’s main prop and stay here in London after the war, while I was still stuck in Italy. They’re devoted to one another.’
‘Don’t you mind?’ asked Ming curiously. There was something extraordinarily intimate about the way in which they were so absorbed in each other. David shook his head.
‘Julia and I are much too solidly rooted together to fear each other’s friendships. Tibor is part of the family. And he needs her very badly just now.’
‘Why?’ asked Ming, too surprised to conceal her curiosity. She was about to retract her rude question when David raised his eyebrows.
‘Coming as he does from Hungary, he’s not unnaturally … distressed.’ There was enough surprise in his voice to make Ming say quickly:
‘I haven’t forgotten them, David, all those young men and women who tried to stop the Russian tanks with little more than their bare hands and who died so horribly. I haven’t forgotten, but there isn’t anything I can do about it. And there’s far too much that I should be doing something about and can’t.’
‘I know you’d never forget. Ming, please don’t think I was criticising you. I … couldn’t. I’m sorry you’ve so much to worry about just now. You look tired too. You’d better sit down.’ David pointed to one of Flixe’s sofas.
Ming sank down into the yielding softness and sighed, still concerned that David should have thought her indifferent to the suffering of the Hungarians. Whenever she thought about it, she was full of useless sympathy, but it was inevitable that her distress over Jack’s death, the loss of Mark and her father’s fury should seem more immediate.
‘I hadn’t realised how wearing it would all be,’ she said, smiling gratefully up at David. ‘Being so tired makes me concentrate on all the wrong things.’
‘You need to take more care of yourself – or let other people take care of you.’
Ming thought of Mark and clamped her lips together. David watched her anxiously, thinking that she looked almost ill.
‘Would you like some more tea?’
‘That would be heaven.’ Ming smiled up at him. ‘Perhaps a sandwich too, if you’ve got enough hands.’
David nodded. He was back in a few minutes with a plate of sandwiches and biscuits and her refilled cup. Having put them on a small table he sat down beside her and stretched his arm along the sofa back. Ming ate and drank and began to recover.
‘You look better,’ said David after a while. ‘At least as much of you as I can see under that hat.’
‘It’s a very elegant hat, and quite the latest thing.’
‘Oh, I’m sure it is,’ said David quickly, ‘although the sight of your face unshadowed would rival any hat.’
‘I do feel much better,’ said Ming, rather taken aback. Max’s warning about the people who are so unsure of themselves that they try to make everyone else fall in love with them echoed in her mind.
‘Thank you, David. You’ve been very kind,’ she added formally in an attempt to counteract any subconscious flirting.
‘For feeding you or rescuing you from the vicar?’ he asked with a smile, but then he did not wait for her answer. ‘How are you generally? Apart from being tired, I mean. I don’t seem to have seen you for ages – not since that day we had tea together in the House.’
‘Oh, I’m all right.’
‘Really? You don’t look it,’ he said, studying her tired, beautiful face. ‘In fact you look as though you’ve been badly hurt. Have you been having a hard time over your article?’
Ming let her head droop, so that he could no longer see anything of her face, and closed her eyes for a moment. His sympathy was almost more than she could take.
‘It’s not so much that, as that a friend of mine was killed at Port Said,’ she said after a moment.
‘I am so sorry,’ said David quietly. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘No. It’s hard to talk about. I really don’t resent the fury of people who disagree with what I wrote,’ she said, diverting them both from the subject of Jack Hazeldene. ‘After all if one is publishing one’s opinions, one must expect people to criticise them. It isn’t fair to take up a platform and then whine about disagreement or criticism.’
‘I don’t think you’d ever whine,’ said David quietly. ‘You’re far too brave and generous for that.’
A shadow fell across the white-and-gold plate Ming was holding and she looked up to see Julia Wallington standing watching them both. She was dressed as simply as usual but with a certain understated magnificence that Ming had not noticed in her before. On the left shoulder of Julia’s short, belted crimson jacket was a superb diamond sunburst, and both her face and her hair were more elaborately arranged than usual.
‘Julia!’ said Ming in welcome as David got to his feet. ‘How lovely to see you. Come and sit down. David has just shown me how blissful it is to take the weight off one’s feet.’
Julia smiled as she recognised the unaffected pleasure in Ming’s face, and took David’s place. He fetched his wife a cup of tea and then left them alone.
‘Christenings are rather depressing, aren’t they?’ she said to Ming. ‘I disliked both of ours. I’m not quite sure why.’
‘Perhaps it’s because there are no hymns,’ suggested Ming, ‘or perhaps just because there’s such a tiny huddle of people at the back of a great, echoing grey barn of a church.’
‘Could be,’ said Julia. ‘Or it may be all those portentous announcements about sin and the devil and punishment.’
Ming was interested and considered the point.
‘I’d have thought that you’d have known all about that anyway,’ she said and, as soon as she noticed Julia’s peculiar expression, hurried to add, ‘in your job.’
Julia relaxed and nodded.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I was impressed with the latest issue of your magazine.’
‘Were you?’ Ming’s face lit up as it had not for either David’s compliments or his kindness. ‘Thank you very much. I’ve been a bit worried about it ever since I handed it over. I was so angry that I didn’t really think about the Official Secrets Act and so on.’
‘I think you’d be very unlucky to be prosecuted,’ said Julia kindly. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much. And as far as I can tell you were entirely justified.’
Chapter Seventeen
Two more letters reached Ming at the beginning of the following week and she began to feel like a boxer who has taken so many punches that his will to fight begins to go. It seemed to her that life had been much simpler when she had spent her energies merely trying to fulfil what everyone wanted of her. Then she had never had to worry about what she was doing. She had simply followed orders. It might have made her angry, but a little suppressed rage seemed a small price to pay when consequences and responsibilities could be handled by those who had ordained her actions. She felt sick whenever she remembered Connie’s lighthearted instruction to cause trouble.
Ming decided to shut down completely. She would read no more of the anonymous letters when they arrived but simply add them unopened to the boxful in her desk. She would not think about Mark or Jack Hazeldene. She would not let herself hope or dream or want anything at all. Instead she would do whatever was necessary for the magazine and try to think as little as possible about anything else.
At the first editorial meeting after the December issue of the magazine had been published both Max and Connie noticed the change in her. Ming was much quieter than she had been, purple-grey shadows lay under her eyes, and the corners of her mouth drooped. It was obvious that her recently acquired confidence had already been shaken and they thought she looked ill as well.
Connie put the change down to Ming’s distress over her father’s disapproval of her article, of which Flixe had passed on a detailed and angry account. Max assumed that Ming’s abstraction had been caused by troubles with her young man.
Both of them were right. Ming’s unhappiness over her father and Mark had grown, and damaged her in growing, but there were other things troubling her, too, of which the worst was Jack’s death. Of the rest, the most recurrent was a fear of legal action over her article. Julia’s reassurance at the christening did not seem to help much.
Ming had decided to say nothing to Connie or Max, because there was nothing either of them could do to contain the damage that might in any case not happen, but it was hard. After the meeting Max made Ming stay behind when Connie left, on the pretext that he had cooked a special lunch and did not want to waste it.
‘I’m not very good company just now,’ Ming said. ‘But if you’d rather be bored than waste your cooking, then so be it.’
Max made no comment, but he cleared the papers off his gate-legged table, took some cutlery out of a drawer in the oak cupboard, told Ming to lay the table, and went out to the kitchen to fetch lunch.
It proved to be a salmi of woodcock, cooked according to the recipe in The Gentle Art of Cookery, a book which entranced Max with its eccentric elegance. Ming ate her share with more real pleasure than she had felt for days, drank the wine he had poured and complimented him as she laid her knife and fork tidily on her empty plate.
‘I’m glad you liked it,’ said Max. ‘Now tell me, what is it? The young man?’
‘Partly,’ said Ming. ‘He told me some weeks ago that he thought we ought not to meet for a bit, and now he’s written to say that he’s been offered a job outside London that seems more interesting than the Civil Service and he’s going to accept it. He suggests that we might see each other some time next year.’
‘That sounds fine. Why haven’t you rung him at once and suggested meeting him on the first of January? I assume from your face that you haven’t.’
‘No,’ said Ming. She got up from the table and went to fetch her bag. ‘There are two reasons. One is that he once told me there was no job he could imagine that would be more important and satisfying than what he was doing in the Ministry of Defence.’
Max watched her, thinking that she looked as though she had lost weight. Her well-cut blue tweed skirt was so loose that it had swivelled round and the back pleat was six inches to the right of its proper place, and the clinging paler-blue twin-set showed off the sharpness of her shoulders and elbows.
‘What is the other reason?’ he asked when it became clear that she was not going to volunteer it. She came back to the table, but obviously found it difficult to answer.
‘Tell me something else,’ said Max with a mischievous smile. ‘Do you always dress to go with this room or is it pure chance?’
A faint smile twitched at Ming’s dry lips and she began to look more like herself. She glanced around the room at Max’s carefully orchestrated blues, creams and whites and nodded.
‘I’d never thought of it like that, but I suppose I have nearly always worn blue-and-white when I’ve come down here. It’s not that surprising, because a lot of my clothes are blue.’
‘And a good thing, too, with your eyes. Now come on, tell me what’s really worrying you.’
Instead of answering, Ming offered him the piece of paper she had taken out of her bag. Surprised, Max accepted it and unfolded it to read the few, typed lines:
Well, well, Ming, you’ve done it now, haven’t you? Where will your destructiveness end? Not content with driving the poor man mad with frustration, now you’ve got him the sack. Didn’t you think of what the Ministry of Defence would do to a civil servant known to be ‘friendly’with a journalist who criticised the government like that? I think you did. I think you were punishing him. One day you will get your just rewards and I for one will laugh and laugh and laugh.
‘Have you had many of these?’ asked Max, folding it up again
and laying it on the table. He wiped his fingers fastidiously on his white damask napkin.
‘Yes,’ said Ming. ‘One a fortnight ever since Connie and I got back from Egypt. Just recently I found a kind of satisfaction in feeling furious about them, but now that’s gone again, and I don’t think I can bear it much longer. Not if they’re going to tell me things like that.’
She put her elbows on the table and propped her head up on her hands. When she looked at Max again he saw that her darkened eyelashes were wet, but she was not actually crying and her face was under control.
‘Why haven’t you said anything before?’
Ming shrugged and tried to think up rational excuses to explain her wholly irrational conviction that she had to keep the letters to herself.
‘I did ring the police at the beginning, but they said they couldn’t do anything unless the letters contained physical threats. They never have.’
‘But still, you must have needed sympathy at least.’
Ming felt a sudden pain in her bottom lip and she realised that she was biting it. Having released it, she looked at Max, but she said nothing.
‘I’ve had my share of that sort of letter,’ he said gently. ‘I do understand.’
‘I suppose,’ said Ming slowly, ‘that I was afraid I couldn’t cope with sympathy. Sometimes it’s easier to keep things at a bearable level if you don’t have to thank people for being kind and find appropriate things to say to their reassurances. I suppose I thought if I could just put them away and not think about them that would be best since no one could do anything to stop them coming.’
‘Except the person who was writing them,’ said Max, watching her carefully. When she shivered, he went on: ‘Isn’t that really the trouble? That you were afraid to find out who it is who thinks like that about you?’
He was shocked by the thought of what she had been enduring for so long and hiding so successfully and he wanted to try to help, but when he saw her face crumple he wished that he had kept his mouth shut.
Ming turned away and walked down the long room to the fireplace. Max’s kindness – and his perspicacity – had got right under her guard. She knelt down and held out her shaking hands to the flames until she was sure of herself. The fierce heat against her skin helped. After a long time, she came back. Her face was completely controlled again.
