Begin again, p.12
Begin Again, page 12
For some reason the fact that she had been so normal, so gullible, so impressionable at school, annoyed Florence very much, even though it had, of course, contributed largely to her happiness. It annoyed her more and more as she thought about it, until, by the time the bus was jolting down Regent Street, she was longing to go back to school and be as strikingly individual as possible. It would be fun, thought Florence regretfully, to be a problem to the house-mistress, an articulate problem, who argued about everything, and accepted nothing on trust. “You don’t like me, Miss Bates, because I have individuality, which is very awkward for you. I rather sympathize but you can’t expect me to fall in with your ideas to suit your convenience.” Delightful picture! Or, when she was sent to the head mistress, as surely she would be, “No, I am afraid I can’t agree to be a conscientious prig.” Conscientious prig—Florence rolled the offensive phrase lovingly round her tongue. For a moment Florence played with the idea of rewriting her novel along those lines, of transforming the downtrodden Celia into a rebel spirit. Then she decided that her present method of portraying the evils of school life was perhaps subtler. To become more and more miserable was a deeper degradation for a child’s spirit than open rebellion.
It was really rather odd that she had taken neither course herself.
The education of the young was an absorbing subject, thought Florence, stepping off the bus into the gutter, and catching sight of a clock. She suddenly saw that instead of being rather early, as she had comfortably imagined, she was in reality distinctly late. It was much more absorbing than tapping a typewriter. Perhaps she would have done well to be a school-mistress. Almost immediately she admitted to herself that she would have loathed it. The actual teaching would have been all right. She knew she had some natural gifts in that direction and plenty of communicable enthusiasm. But the atmosphere of a school! The appalling silliness of the girls! Well, perhaps it would be all right if one were a head mistress and not in too close contact with them. Florence entertained herself with a vision of herself, aged forty, poised, charming and humourous, welcoming a new girl. “Don’t be exactly like the others, my dear. Cultivate individual tastes and don’t believe anything is important unless it seems so to you. Always test the truth of anything people tell you for yourself. Never believe your elders simply because they are your elders.” Well, perhaps it would be a funny school, but all the same she would be a very stimulating head mistress—and a very queer under-mistress, admitted Florence to herself with a sigh, turning in (ten minutes later) at the office door. Anyway these speculations had kept her mind off that horrible pile of yesterday’s work sitting waiting to be done by the side of her typewriter. She cast a look of disgust at the filing-basket and one of impatience at her machine, and, trying unsuccessfully to look and feel like the perfect secretary, went off to collect her morning’s mail.
II
Jane worked for a man, to Florence’s secret envy, and managed both him and her job with an airy competence. Because she amused him and because she never appeared harassed, Mr. Earnshaw thought her a good secretary. She was, at any rate, a very pleasant one, and it was both unjust and natural that she should succeed where Florence failed.
“It’s too hot to read half these letters and far too hot to answer them,” had been her employer’s amiable greeting that morning.
“A deck-chair in the shade and a copy of the Rainbow is about my intellectual level for today,” said Jane. She was looking very brown and pretty in a striped yellow and white frock.
“The Rainbow? Oh, yes, of course. I read that too once,” said Mr. Earnshaw reminiscently.
He dictated a few letters and gave her a pile more that required formal acknowledgment, and then retired to his room. Jane suspected that he was reading the Morning Post, but bore him no grudge for it as she tapped merrily away on her typewriter. The other girl was away on holiday. Business was fairly slack. Probably she would get away about five. Presently the telephone rang. It was Henry, tender and solicitous, and anxious to know if she were alone.
“Yes, of course I’m alone,” said Jane. “Why, what do you want?”
Henry, it appeared, wanted to tell her he loved her.
“Oh, is that all,” said Jane, gayly wounding him for the thousandth time, “I thought at least you wanted to make some dishonourable proposal.”
She doesn’t mean it, thought Henry, manfully resisting the instantaneous pang that this suggestion sent through him, she doesn’t mean to hurt me, but, oh God, I wish she wouldn’t talk like that. I don’t know about next weekend, after all, I’m a man, it will be my fault if she’s sorry afterwards. . . .
“Do you want anything special, darling?” inquired Jane casually.
“Just a moment. You’re not sorry about next week-end, are you, darling? I mean I feel rather a cad when I think—” His voice trailed solemnly away.
“I shouldn’t think then,” said Jane, glancing at the pile of letters she had to work through.
“You’re sure you’re not sorry?”
“I’m never sorry about anything,” said Jane with devastating truthfulness.
It was not very satisfactory, but at least it was reassurance of a sort, and Henry, who had lain awake most of the previous night torturing himself with uncertainty, recognized that it was all the comfort he would get.
“Where would you like to go this evening, darling?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere.”
“Isn’t there something you’d like to do?”
Irritated, alas, as always by Henry’s indecisive humility, Jane replied rather crossly that after working all day in the office in such frightful heat she thought she’d probably like to lie prostrate in the shade and be fed with ices.
“Shall I come to the flat then?” said Henry, pathetically eager to respond to any suggestion.
“All right. We’ll have a picnic on the roof,” said Jane, vaguely wishing she had suggested dinner at a restaurant and a theatre afterwards.
“Just us,” said Henry, his voice thrilling with emotion. (How could he get like that just after breakfast?)
“Well, Florence will be in, I believe, but she said she was going to spend the evening in the bath.”
“She can’t spend the whole evening there.”
“Yes, she can. We often do.” (What had it got to do with Henry anyway?) “Eating ice-cream,” added Jane as an explanatory afterthought.
“Oh, darling, it does sound frightfully bad for you.”
“No, it’s marvellous,” said Jane patiently, “you try.”
“Promise me you won’t do it too often.”
“I say, Henry. Have you got an awful lot more to say?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, it’s just that I’ve got an awful pile of work here . . .”
“I’m terribly sorry.” (It was maddening how one could always tell what the effect of any remark one made would be. If only he wouldn’t always be so penitent.)
“Good-by, my darling.” (Thank goodness he was ringing off.) “It will be marvellous this evening.”
“Good-by.”
Jane went back to her typewriter, but Henry, after replacing the receiver, stood for some moments before the telephone in a sort of trance. It was extraordinary the effect just her voice had on him. That sort of hidden chuckle in it sometimes. . . .
When she came back from lunch Jane found a copy of the Rainbow, neatly folded, lying beside her typewriter. The habit of fifteen years back immediately asserted itself. She turned at once to the last page and perused with every symptom of eager interest the coloured adventures of Peter and Pauline.
“Marzipan the Magician was my favourite,” said Mr. Earnshaw, coming in while she was still intent on the paper.
“Let’s see if he’s still here,” said Jane, reluctantly tearing her eyes from Peter and Pauline and turning over the pages in search of the versatile wizard. He was. Everything was, in fact, precisely the same from the green, red and yellow Bruin Boys on the cover (how those boys did laugh when Mrs. Bruin fell right into the bath!) to Bonnie Bluebell as irritatingly pat with her answers to riddles as ever. (Ha! Ha! laughed Bluebell, I guessed that one, didn’t I? Now, can you guess this?) Jane and Mr. Earnshaw found themselves particularly appreciating the breezy enthusiasm of the Editor’s Chat. “Well, now I must get on with my post-bag, mustn’t I? What clever boys and girls the Rainbow readers are! Here is such a good trick to try on your chums. . . . Ha! Ha! How surprised they will be when they see how simple it is after all! Mabel will receive a splendid prize for sending me this smart catch!”
“Yes, I won a prize once,” said Jane bitterly. “It was for ‘Dolly’s Birthday Cake.’ You got a potted meat jar, one of the flat china kind, and stuck matches on it to represent candles and sealing wax for icing. Very clever. And do you know what happened to the filthy prize? It got lost in the post and never arrived at all! Of all the sickening swindles!”
“Ha! Ha!” said Mr. Earnshaw gravely, “the Post-Office gets the prize for that smart catch.”
“Oh, look at this, isn’t it clever?” said Jane, forgetting her grievance as her eye fell on the Editor’s concluding paragraph. “‘Well, kiddies, before I stop don’t let me forget to remind you to ask daddy to buy you Tiger Tim’s lovely Painting Books. They are selling out very quickly, so hurry up, boys and girls, and look out for my exciting news next week.’”
“M’m,” said Mr. Earnshaw. Jane looked at him sharply. He was not really listening. He was turning another sheet round and round in his hands, scrutinizing it carefully. Apparently he was trying to find Wippity Woppety’s fine catch—six fat fish, concealed somewhere in the picture.
“I know the one you haven’t seen,” said Jane, “look—there. In between his boot and the tree. That’s the only tricky one.”
“I saw that first of all,” said Mr. Earnshaw proudly. “But look how many do you make altogether? One, two, three—”
It was past three o’clock before Jane settled down to the typewriter again. Some urgent letters came in by the afternoon post. People rang up to speak to Mr. Earnshaw, who insisted that he was out. Long and complicated messages were then taken by Jane; and Mr. Earnshaw, on receiving them, remarked annoyingly that he would have liked to have spoken to old So-and-so himself. After this he began to stand behind Jane as she telephoned, listening to her replies and trying to divine by this unsatisfactory means the relative importance of the callers. Jane, who found this the most maddening of all habits, bore everything patiently. After all, he had bought her the Rainbow. He was rather a lamb on the whole. If the work couldn’t get finished, well, it was jolly well his fault. “Yes—yes—yes—quite, I’ll tell Mr. Earnshaw,” she cooed into the mouthpiece in a soothing and noncommittal voice. There were sounds of impatience behind her. I should like to slap him, thought Jane, and said politely, “Excuse me one moment, I believe I hear Mr. Earnshaw just coming in.” She handed him the receiver with a winning smile, and successfully blackmailed him into doing his own work.
She got back to the flat later than usual and found Henry patiently waiting on the doorstep. He had a cardboard box under his arm.
“You didn’t get off punctually, did you?” said Henry. He was prepared to be sympathetic, but Jane perversely refused to have a grievance.
“My fault,” she said. “We spent half the afternoon reading the Rainbow. I’ve brought it back for you. Oh, Henry, it’s marvellous. Exactly the same as ever.”
“Never read it,” said Henry. It was rather hard that he had not been given a chance of being noble about being kept waiting.
“Oh, if you’ve never read it—”
“Are you all alone with Mr. What’s-his-Name now in the office?”
“Yes. Highly immoral, isn’t it?”
“Is he in love with you?” inquired Henry gloomily.
“Oh! Passionately! Look out, Henry, that box you’ve got is dripping.”
“I don’t see how any one could be with you all day and not fall in love with you,” said Henry, putting the offending box down on the table.
“Oh, darling! It’s run all down your trouser-leg.”
“Never mind. Oh, Jane, it is marvellous to see you again!”
“What is it in the box?” inquired Jane, postponing an imminent embrace.
“Lobster mayonnaise. I do love you.”
Florence’s key was heard in the lock and the embrace was again postponed.
“Hello, Henry.”
“Hello, Florence.”
“I thought you were going to be out,” said Florence, trying not to sound inhospitable.
“We’re going for a picnic on the roof,” said Jane. (There wasn’t enough lobster mayonnaise for three, was there?)
“Oh. Well, I’ve got an egg. God, I am hot.” Florence disappeared abruptly into the bathroom, where she could be heard divesting herself vigorously of her clothes. Jane and Henry gazed silently at the mayonnaise and felt secretly both greedy and unkind.
“I say, Florence. Do you want the bread and butter?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well, you don’t want all of it, do you?”
“There isn’t much. If I’d known you were going to be in—”
“Oh, no, you’re right, there isn’t much. I say, Henry, would you mind frightfully—that little baker at the corner stays open quite late.”
“Let’s go together, darling,” said Henry.
“Well—wouldn’t it be better if I took things up to the roof while you were out? I mean, it’s fairly late already.”
“All right,” said Henry heroically, and added compassionately, “I expect you’re tired.”
“Well, it seems silly two of us going, doesn’t it?”
Henry, who never found it silly to perform the most trivial errand in Jane’s company, departed obediently, and Jane, with much effort and sweating, carried up rugs and cushion and plates to the roof and laid them out in the shadow of a chimney-stack.
The roof was a little grimy, but the air was beginning to get cooler now and the view over miles of London roofs was exhilarating. She piled all the cushions under her fair head, stretched herself full length, and hoped ungratefully that Henry wouldn’t be too quick. Henry, however, seemed to take practically no time. He appeared round the corner of the chimney-stack with a large loaf under his arm and a beaming smile on his honest perspiring face.
“I haven’t been long, have I, darling?”
“Very quick,” said Jane, and felt suddenly touched. Touched by his devotion, by his obvious need of her, by the sight of his fingers unwrapping the loaf, by the thought that the poor pet had evidently bought the largest in the shop. She sat up and arranged the cushions and made it comfortable for him to sit beside her, leaning against the chimney-stack in great content. There were still moments like this for them. Suddenly, now and again, it would be as if they had never quarrelled; as if the Henry and Jane of three years ago, instead of retreating like ghosts into a dimming past, had slipped back, warm-blooded and alive, into their old bodies. At such times the Oxford days seemed only a short while ago, not a long way off in another world. Was it yesterday that they lay together in a punt, blinking at the patterned fronds of green above, each finding in the other the secret of utter contentment? “I didn’t know falling in love was like this.” The thrilled murmur of Henry’s voice. The sound of a punt-pole on a gritty bottom, the swish of a paddle, the warmth of the sun on their faces. “Oh, Henry, darling—darling. . . .” The shyness and wonder of their first kisses. “Just to be near you, Jane, is so marvellous. . . .” A gramophone in the distance playing a tune that no one played now. The gurgling whispering river-water.
The lobster mayonnaise lay untouched, while Jane, remembering suddenly these things, stroked Henry’s head and said, “Darling, you’re sweet to me.”
“You see, I love you so,” said Henry simply.
“I know, I know,” murmured Jane. The little short hairs on his neck were bristly to the touch. It was rather sweet the way his hair grew. “Darling Henry, I love you too. In my own way. You mustn’t mind its being my own way, darling. You do see, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Henry, wanting only to keep Jane a moment longer as she was, seizing her hand and kissing it, ridiculous tears pricking at the back of his eyes, “Yes, darling, I see.” Lying with his head in Jane’s lap he gave a long sigh. With one finger Jane gently ruffled his eyebrows. It was an old trick of hers, unbearably dear to him. He dosed his eyes. The sharp pattern of the sky and chimneypots etched itself for a second, dancing, inside his eyelids. Jane’s hand caressed his cheek, then lay on his mouth. She offered him each finger in turn, and he gently bit each one. Terribly silly, terribly sweet. Why should she suddenly choose this moment to remember these dear things? “This is just like Oxford,” said Henry softly.
“We never sat on roofs at Oxford.”
“No. But you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” said Jane, understanding. But we can’t go back, she thought sadly. That’s what Henry never understands. We must change. We must go on. Oxford was lovely, but it’s over. It’s over.
If only people could leave us alone, thought Henry vaguely and desperately, it would all be just the same as it used to be. We haven’t changed really, sometimes it’s as wonderful as ever. It’s just that things come between us. I shall never love any one else.
