Dreams of another day, p.28
Dreams of Another Day, page 28
‘Daddy!’ she called, when she was near enough to do it without waking the rest of the family.
He turned and his face lit up as he saw her. Ming hurried to the edge of the ha-ha and he came across the field to help her down.
‘Morning, Ming,’ he said, raising his hat.
‘Good morning. Golly, it’s cold, isn’t it?’
‘You’re getting soft with all that London central heating,’ he said with a short, sharp laugh. Ming smiled obediently. ‘It’s jolly invigorating really.’
‘At least the frost makes everything look gorgeous,’ said Ming, pointing to the prickly hedge, whose branches seemed to be coated in sparkling white powder. ‘One forgets in London quite how beautiful winter can be.’
‘Wish you spent more time here,’ her father muttered. ‘Do your bridge a power of good, too. Gone to seed a bit, old girl, what? Not playing much these days?’
‘Hardly at all,’ she said. ‘I’m not that interested, I’m afraid, and I’ve been awfully busy this last year.’
‘Yes,’ he said so drily that she knew she had to tackle what was between them.
‘Mother says you were upset by what I wrote about Suez.’
‘A bit,’ he said shortly. ‘Seemed rather uncalled-for, and disloyal. I’d never expected that of you. Loyalty’s always been one of your strong suits; loyalty and sweetness. That wretched Wroughton woman’s been a bad influence. You’ve changed since you started seeing so much of her. Got rather hard.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Ming sadly, ‘it’s not Connie changing me; it’s me waking up to who and what I am. I’m not sweet. I’ve always agreed with everyone, because I’ve been too afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. I’ve always tried to please people, because it’s the only way I’ve known of stopping them being angry with me. But I’ve slowly discovered that it’s been killing me.’
‘Don’t exaggerate, Ming. That’s new, too. Piglet!’ he roared to one of the labradors, who was wriggling under the fence that divided the empty field from one full of sheep. ‘Damn dog. Piglet!’
The animal obeyed its master and slunk back to, his side. Something in Ming said, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.
‘Daddy,’ she said quietly, ‘it’s hard to explain when you’re so cross with me. Perhaps “killing” was too emphatic. “Stifling” might be better. But whatever the word, I was very unhappy. I’ve realised that for years and years I’ve done what was expected of me without giving any thought to what I wanted. I’ve suppressed every thought that seemed at all dangerous, and any opinion that might upset people. Then in the end I realised that if I went on trying to be what everyone else wanted of me, I’d never grow up into my own self.’
They walked on in silence through the scrubby field grass, and Ming tried again.
‘I realised that if I never did that, I’d always be miserable and probably go rather potty too. I’m sorry that you’re hurt to find out that I’m not the sweet child you always thought, but I’m thirty-two for heaven’s sake!’
‘Sweetness needn’t be childish, Ming,’ said the, general, keeping his voice level and his eyes on the; horizon. ‘Some of the best – and most successful – women have been that kind, gentle, good. It’s not to be despised even nowadays. All this modern stuff about – what do they call it? – individuality is just a new name for bad, old-fashioned selfishness. What?’
Ming felt as though the hooks were being dragged out of her and she knew that they had barbs on them. They hurt too much to be simple hooks.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘I think I’ll go back and help mother get breakfast.’
‘Ever read Dr Johnson, Ming?’
‘What?’ she said, surprised and bemused. ‘Sorry, no, hardly at all. Why?’
‘”Want of tenderness is want of parts, and is no less a proof of stupidity than depravity,”‘ he quoted unexpectedly. ‘Always seemed like good sense to me.’
‘And to me, too,’ admitted Ming when she had thought about it, ‘but tenderness can’t be used to hide behind – and I used to do that. I’ll see you at breakfast.’
The general strode off, leaving Ming to watch him in silence. She tried to look at him as a stranger might, a knowledgeable stranger, perhaps, but one who had no emotional hooks in her. She saw a man of little education and less imagination, of almost limitless physical endurance and unquestioning obedience to a code he believed was immutable. He would have died, she realised, to protect her, but would hate the thought of her acquiring the toughness that would make his protection unnecessary.
The army had been his life and he missed it badly now that he was retired. He mistrusted foreigners, he believed in the rightness of his country and, in a faintly embarrassed fashion, in the existence of God. He had been born, educated and trained to stand firm against the enemies of his country and its Empire. But he knew nothing of the talents of peace, nothing of the delicate building up of relationships between people who were not divided by a hierarchy, and nothing at all of the need to behave to the women of his family as though they were independent human beings. Ming felt very sorry for him.
‘Piglet! Roo!’ The general shouted at his dogs, who would never answer back and could be beaten when they disobeyed.
Chapter Twenty
It was a relief for Ming to be travelling down to Etchingham on the Tuesday immediately after Christmas, even though she had used all her petrol ration and was sitting in a chilly train compartment. Her physical state was as nothing compared with the pleasure of being back in her own world. Connie Wroughton met her at the station and drove her to Max’s cottage for the editorial meeting. Connie seemed to be abstracted and rather worried. Ming sat in silence until they were within the gates of Connie’s estate.
‘How’s the market garden doing in this beastly weather?’ Ming asked as they passed the manager’s cottage.
Connie turned to glance quickly at her passenger. It was almost the first time she had ever mentioned the garden.
‘Not too bad. Bill is very good at coping with things like expected frosts. All the cloches have been out for weeks. But the greenhouses had to be shut down with the fuel crisis. We’re certainly going to lose a lot of money on them this year.’
‘I’m sorry. You’ve got an unfair number of worries on your plate.’
‘I suppose one benefit of that is that one can’t get too worked up over any particular one,’ said Connie wryly. ‘Have you decided what you think we ought to do about the summons?’
‘Yes. I think we’ve got to defend, because …’ Ming was beginning just as they turned on to the gravel in front of Max’s cottage.
‘No, tell me why later,’ said Connie decisively. ‘I’m following your lead in keeping Max right away from it all. Will you come and have lunch with me after the meeting? We can talk about it then.’
‘All right. Thank you,’ said Ming, getting out of the car.
Max welcomed them with his usual pleasure and pot of good strong coffee. The three of them took their accustomed places at his gate-legged table and discussed the articles for the next month’s magazine. Max asked for several changes to Ming’s major retrospective piece on 1956.
‘Must I?’ she asked, rather depressed. ‘I thought it was so good.’
‘That’s a real danger signal,’ Max said, laughing. ‘Wasn’t it Dr Johnson who said that if you were particularly pleased with anything you had written you ought to cut it at once?’
Ming’s eyebrows twitched.
‘Probably. You are extraordinary, Max, the way you produce echoes of all the disagreeable things people have said without being the least disagreeable yourself. I’ll have a bash at it. May I come back after lunch and use your typewriter?’
Max looked from one woman to the other, realised that they must have decided to discuss the case without him, and simply nodded.
‘I do particularly like your tying up the final closure of the Boy’s Own Paper with the ending of the Imperial Dream in the blockage of the Suez Canal, but we’ve had an awful lot of Suez recently and I think you need to emphasise some of the other things that happened in 1956, not least the events in Hungary. After all we’ve joined the rest of the press in criticising the British Government for bombing Egypt, but the Russians have done far worse.’
‘Did anyone ever expect them to behave decently?’ Ming asked coldly.
‘Perhaps not, but that’s a point that should be made too. Suez may have been (what did you call it?) “our greatest national disgrace” but it is not uniquely frightful.’
‘But—’ said Ming. Before she could complete her protest, Connie intervened.
‘What did you write?’ she asked.
Max shuffled his heap of articles and picked out Ming’s. He turned to the last page.
‘“Perhaps at the end of this, the year the Boy’s Own Paper ceased to exist,”’ he read out, ‘“we can look forward to a time when our government is no longer obsessed with its imperial past. People in England have come to understand that powerful countries have no right to impose their will on the rest of the world. The arrogance that has been displayed so nakedly in both Budapest and Cairo is as out of date as the belief that the State should ordain what its adult citizens may read in the privacy of their own homes.”’
‘No, Ming,’ said Connie forthrightly. ‘We’ve annoyed enough people. I really don’t think that we ought to be so provocative. To tie up Suez with the obscenity case like that is … well, it’s unwise to put it mildly.’
‘All right,’ said Ming at once. ‘I’ll take all allusion to the case right out if you like.’
‘But …’ Max began.
‘You can talk about it all after lunch. I’d like to get on with the meeting now.’
‘You’re the boss, Connie. On to the next issue,’ said Max, pulling a sheet of paper towards him. ‘Any views?’
‘I did wonder whether we ought not to have a sequel to Ming’s women and money article last year.’
‘I’d like to do that. I got some splendidly approving letters after it. What angle, though? I doubt if I’d find many more high-earning women,’ said Ming, looking happier.
‘I was thinking more on the lines of some of those sadder letters we got just after it was published,’ said Connie. ‘Max, did we ever show them to Ming?’
‘It seemed inappropriate just then,’ he said, turning away to reach into the oak coffer behind his chair where he kept the most interesting readers’ letters. ‘Here, Ming.’ He held out a bundle attached at one corner with a long, green Treasury tag.
‘Why inappropriate?’ Ming did not take the bundle.
‘You were a bit preoccupied in October,’ he said, ‘and they’re not very happy letters.’
‘Quite angry, too,’ murmured Connie. ‘Now, apart from women and money, what else have we?’
‘I’ve been wondering whether we ought not to do something on the Morton Commission Report on Marriage and Divorce,’ said Ming.
‘Could be tricky. With the moral crusaders already arming against us, we don’t want to get our names up for being anti-marriage.’
‘It wouldn’t be anti-marriage, Connie.’ Ming was adamant about that. ‘But I’ve been talking to lots of people recently and hardly any women seem to know what their legal rights and obligations are once they marry and have children. Surely we could do a purely informative piece without being tarred as destroyers of family life … but I really do think that we ought to show some of the reality behind this myth of the happiness of housework and babies.’
‘She’s right you know. After all, showing truth behind myths and pouring a bit of light into housebound women’s lives are what the magazine is supposed to be doing,’ said Max quietly. ‘We can’t let them beat us, Connie.’
‘Beat us? Who?’ It was clear from her voice that Connie knew she was fighting a rearguard action.
‘The mythmakers, the paternalists, the chaps who ignore their own foibles, miseries and knowledge and impose the results of their fantasies and neuroses on the rest of us.’
‘Look here,’ said Ming, tackling Connie’s anxieties as best she could. ‘Why don’t we describe the findings of the Commission and as a tailpiece add something about juvenile delinquency and the problems of broken homes? That way it will be clear that we’re hardly advocating divorce, just laying out the facts.’
‘All right. Can you do that as well as the financial piece? Max, you’ll oversee to make sure it all fits?’
‘Yes, Connie,’ he said and then went on to hand out books for review and discuss the articles they ought to commission from their growing stable of freelance writers.
When they had agreed what they wanted for the cover design and which artist should be asked to submit sketches, Connie took Ming back to her Dower House for lunch.
‘Food first or talk?’ said Connie, letting them both in through the front door. ‘I haven’t prepared anything.’
‘Why not both at once?’
Connie smiled at Ming’s suggestion.
‘All right. I’ll go and load up a tray and take it into my study,’ she said. ‘There’s the remains of Sunday’s joint: would sandwiches do you?’
‘Perfectly. Let me help, please?’
They went together to the kitchen, made themselves thick sandwiches of cold lamb, redcurrant jelly, and cold potatoes that had been grown in Connie’s garden, and carried them with a jug of water to the room that Connie’s sister had always used as her private drawing room.
Ming had not been in it since Diana’s death, for Connie always entertained guests in the much bigger room on the opposite side of the hall. In the old days the smaller one had been a place of great peace and gentleness, with a rose-coloured carpet, silver-grey walls studded with French drawings of cosy domestic scenes, and delicate eighteenth-century furniture made of various golden woods.
When Connie opened the door and urged Ming to precede her, Ming was so astonished that she almost dropped the tray she was carrying. Never had there been such a transformation in any room. Where once there had been quietness, now there was drama.
After a while she realised that the silver-grey walls were the same and so were the eighteenth-century tables and bureau. The new carpet was dark green and the curtains green trellised with gold, but it was not they that had made the change. The delicate drawings of cats and washerwomen, children and sunny rooms had gone and the only picture in the room was an immense Old Master hanging on the wall opposite the fireplace.
‘I’ll stoke up the fire,’ said Connie, as Ming stood transfixed by the painting. ‘Put the tray down on that table and pull up a couple of chairs.’
‘Connie, the picture.’ Ming’s voice held awe as well as shock.
Connie turned from the fire and smiled.
‘I couldn’t think what the matter was. I’d forgotten that you wouldn’t have been in here recently. It’s marvellous, isn’t it? Max helped me buy it during the war, but I didn’t hang it until after Diana died. It didn’t seem appropriate.’
‘It’s staggering. It must be Jael and Sisera, but who on earth painted it?’
‘We’re not absolutely certain, but the theory is that it might have been Artemisia Gentileschi. No one but she produced such powerful women at the right sort of date, and she did specialise in Old Testament heroines.’
‘But how can you live with it? It’s shocking … wonderful, but quite overpowering,’ said Ming.
‘I find the rage in it helps,’ said Connie frankly. ‘Remember what this room was like when Diana was still alive?’
‘Indeed yes.’ Ming had a moment’s pang for the gentleness of the French drawings.
‘Diana accepted things; a contented resignation was more important to her than almost anything else. Well, I don’t accept things and I won’t use my energies for suppression and rationalisation. I won’t pretend and force myself to believe in pretence. If things are horrible, I’d rather know and cope with them.’
Turning her back on the painting, Ming sat down and took a bite of her sandwich.
‘And yet,’ said Ming when she had swallowed her mouthful, ‘you want to accept what Roger’s done and plead guilty, don’t you?’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Connie with a sidelong look at Ming.
‘Because if you agreed with me you’d have said so in the car before the meeting. Come on, Connie, why?’
Connie shrugged and ate some more of her sandwich, reaching out for a napkin as a piece of jelly-covered potato slid out from between the two thick pieces of bread.
‘If we fight, we will probably lose the magazine,’ she said when she could speak again. ‘Ratterley has made it clear that even if we win, we’ll have to pay our own costs. The operating profit is slender at the best of times and hardly pays the bank’s interest on their loan. We’ve lost some advertisers – and some subscribers – who disapprove of our stand over Suez. We can’t afford pride. Much as I want to smash Sillhorne’s face in a not-guilty verdict from an Old Bailey jury, I know that it would be more sensible to get the whole thing over with as quickly and cheaply as possible.’
‘That does make sense,’ said Ming. Her reluctance was very obvious to Connie.
‘But?’
‘But I can’t help thinking that we ought to fight, for all the same reasons as we published the piece in the first place. And I loathe the idea of giving way to Roger without even a protest. Besides, Gerry thinks we ought to push for the principle of the thing.’
‘Gerry would.’ There was a caustic note in Connie’s voice.
For the first time it occurred to Ming that Connie might find Gerry’s independent mind and success in her work more of a source of jealousy than Flixe’s luxurious maternity.
‘What does Flixe think?’
‘Flixe thinks we should let him get away with it and feel morally superior,’ said Ming with a shrug. ‘She’s never been as interested in principles as Gerry.’
