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  In the interval, drinking in the bar, we met two friends of his. We talked about Nell and Quentin. They’d gone away, Richard said, to escape the formal announcement: ‘Or rather the consequences of…’

  His friends were newly married; they looked closely at me, the girl especially, and at one point she said, ‘I hear Juliet’s in London, Richard?’ But Richard merely said, quietly: ‘Oh, but that’s all off you know.’

  After the concert we had some supper. Halfway through the meal, during a lull in the conversation, I was struck by a fatigue so complete, such a lightheaded exhaustion that I could hardly hold my head up. I suppose really that for several nights I’d been short of sleep, but this frightening blanket of weariness, my limbs as heavy as my head was airy, seemed to come from nowhere.

  I left the rest of the meal untouched. ‘All right?’ asked Richard. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  Looking at him, his face creased with polite concern, I saw a stranger: the eye of fatigue sharpening the outlines. ‘Yes, really,’ I said. ‘I really did enjoy it,’

  And what, I asked inside, is going to come of all this? Seeing that moment, myself in the autumn (perhaps even sooner?) back on the same bench in the Valley Gardens.

  On the journey home I was too tired to speak. Richard said apologetically, ‘I’ve kept you out awfully late again. Two nights running.’ Tomorrow, he said, he had to see a client; he wouldn’t be clear much before nine. ‘Could I ring you Friday, or Saturday?’

  I wanted to say, ‘You don’t have to see me each evening;’ but I said instead, ‘Oh yes.’

  Back home again, conscience-stricken suddenly, I rang Elizabeth’s hotel. But she was off duty. Leaving a message, I stumbled up to bed.

  There was a smell of bacon when I woke in the morning. I came down to find my father already eating, his 1911 Coronation mug beside him full of tea.

  I said awkwardly, ‘I’d have got that for you.’

  He looked up, giving me a quick appraising glance, then said coldly, ‘If we each look after ourselves, we’ll do well enough.’ He drank some tea. ‘I write to Mrs Pickering,’ he said, ‘and you write to Mrs Pickering. It works all right.’ Then, looking over the edge of the mug he added casually, ‘Who was that took you out last night? Someone from the office?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were in –’

  That’s not an answer,’ he said, staring at me. I was easily discomfited, so rarely did we look at each other, and picking up the newspaper, I hid behind it. The dock strike had worsened, troops had been called out -

  ‘I thought maybe Jowett had taken a fancy to you? It’s a nice notion –’

  He was wearing a very bright blue shirt which, intensifying the colour of his eyes, made them more piercing. I remembered it as one that more than any other, grated on my mother. ‘Such a peculiarly loud shade, Lucy!’

  ‘But I don’t want to know – as it happens,’ he said dismissively. ‘If you’re starting to lead a normal life, I’m not stopping you. I don’t want to know.’

  Then abruptly changing the subject, he spoke of my mother. He found visiting her impossible, he said, although he’d been in for the sake of appearances. ‘You’ll have to see to all that,’ he said.

  Shaking off my depression, during the lunch hour I bought her a new bedjacket, planning to take it to her straight after work. I was pleased with it: white, elaborate with big drooping sleeves; but because it was of nylon, I worried a little, imagining that she might be disappointed: making her usual remarks about shoddy, man-made fabrics, fingering the material (behind her, more solid business stock than she’d ever care to admit) asking, ‘Is this real, Lucy?’

  But in the late afternoon, when I was taking letters from Mr Jowett, Richard telephoned. His appointment had been cancelled. Could I, would I meet him tonight? Without thinking, I said yes at once: remembering my mother immediately after.

  The arrangement had been brisk but as soon as I put the phone down, Mr Jowett who’d grumbled when he handed me the receiver, said resentfully, ‘Private calls …’ Surprising myself, victim of a bad conscience anyway because I wasn’t going to see my mother, I replied tartly: ‘That was Mr Ingleson. Ingleson and Barraclough. He’d arranged to call me.’ But I’d already begun to blush and although Mr Jowett, put out, glanced at me with grudging respect, my triumph was shortlived; eleven mistakes in the next two letters completed my routing. By six o’clock I was exhausted.

  Richard seemed tired, tense too as if preoccupied. The hotel, a different one this time, was very crowded; we stood with our drinks, the conversation creaking – I wondered whether perhaps two evenings weren’t the limit? After that I became boring.

  Making an excuse, I went out and telephoned Elizabeth, but the Horsfall home didn’t answer, and she wasn’t at the hotel. I could feel, tightening, the knot of worry about her.

  ‘This place is fearfully crowded,’ Richard said when I came back, ‘and hot too.’ Unless I was particularly hungry – what about a walk? The Valley Gardens, if I’d like that – perhaps through on to Harlow Moor?

  A child’s sock, grass-stained, grubby, lay on the stone shelf at the entrance to the Gardens; I remembered the stiff, frosted glove I’d seen that winter day with Richard, when squirrel-like I had hoarded his every word. This evening as I walked beside him, there seemed few of them to hoard. Once, he said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I’m not awfully good company tonight.’ But he offered no explanation. He was very flushed: with the heat, I thought.

  I had a feeling of doom. Then as we passed the empty bandstand and came up near the children’s pond, he said suddenly:

  ‘Look, there’s something I wanted to say. I –’ he stopped. He had gone even more red.

  ‘Yes?’

  Flustered, he said quickly, ‘Sorry, no – forget it, please,’ then a moment later, asked me some of the same questions about my mother he’d asked earlier: how was she? would she soon be out? was the nursing home all right?

  ‘And by the way, I forgot,’ he said, ‘Father Ainslie. I did mention him at home – though I’m afraid, as I’d thought, there isn’t much.’ Brightening now a little, ‘Mother’s obviously filed it all away mentally and had quite a job resurrecting anything at all The only item she came up with, was that evidently he’d never eat game. She’s no idea whether the embargo was morals or gastronomy or what – but he could smell it out under any guise; devilled, pâté, pie, soup, the lot. Although I gather when things got difficult – later 1917-ish, he ate rabbit and liked it. Anyway,’ he said hopefully, ‘perhaps it’ll turn out to be an idiosyncrasy your mother’d noticed?’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ I said awkwardly; thinking already with dread of tomorrow.

  For a while after that, we talked more easily and as we came out on to Harlow Moor – tame but evocative version of the real thing – we were joking about Mr Jowett. (How had we arrived there, from Patmore?)

  Few people were about. It was cooler up here too: the pines smelling aromatic, resinous, the evening sun showing yellow behind the dark green. We came to a bench in the clearing:

  ‘Shall we – sit down for a while?’

  I saw that he’d gone furiously red again.

  ‘Look –’ he said, urgently, almost at once after we’d sat down. ‘What I’ve been wanting to say is –’ he was frowning now. He leant forward, hands in pockets, head turned away. ‘I mean – hell, I’m making an awful mess of this. But the thing is – I’d wondered…’ He paused, swallowed.

  There was a moment’s silence; when I looked up, he was staring straight at the ground – pushing with his foot at the scattered pine-needles.

  ‘Lucy, would you – marry me?’

  Silence again. He turned and looked at me.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said; tears pricked at once.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, laughing, pulling me towards him, my head against his jacket. ‘Oh God.’

  Then he saw that I was crying. Trembling, tension releasing itself in great shivers:

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sp; ‘What is it, darling? Lucy, love – what is it?’

  It was nothing: just shock, just happiness, ‘You see, I thought –’ (What was it I had thought?) ‘I love you,’ I said, ‘terribly. I love you terribly.’

  ‘But that’s good,’ he was stroking my hair as he spoke, my mouth still against the material of his jacket, ‘God, I haven’t done this at all well. I’d meant – I wanted to say, I love you, too – very much. I should have –’

  ‘I thought – you were bored with me.’

  ‘Heavens. Oh God, I have done it badly. Darling – I hadn’t meant to do it like this at all. It’s just that I thought you might think – oh God. I didn’t know where to begin, you see. The first thing that anyone’s going to think, that you’re going to think -that it’s all on the rebound, only it isn’t. God, I am muddling this –’

  I’d sat up again now. He was still stroking my hair as he spoke; I’d stopped crying, felt calmer, was rejoicing at his fingers, sliding from my hair, pressing my forehead, cheek.

  ‘After that picnic, on the Sunday, I could only think of phoning you – but I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say – how to say it even. I just felt… Then, well the Tuesday, it went so awfully well, and the Wednesday too. And I thought,’ he stopped. ‘God,’ he said, ‘I’m getting this all wrong. Only – you see, it’s as if I’d known. It was one of those – you must think me … God, three days. Only, I thought, if I asked you now – as it were shocked you, began that way round – it would be the best – we could go on from that. Heavens, I’m putting this awfully badly –’

  Behind us in the bushes was a persistent scratching, scuffling sound. A loud voice some distance away, called: ‘Mischief, Mischief –’

  ‘It’s like being eighteen, nineteen again. This great age – and I seem no better at saying anything. Bloody inarticulate –’

  An elderly woman, stout, in tweeds, strode into the clearing. She looked hot and cross. ‘Mischief. Where’s my Mischief?’ Swinging a dog chain, she glanced over at us incuriously, then called again ‘Mischief!’, sharp, peremptory. There was some more scuffling and a tiny Yorkshire terrier came out of the bushes, silken fringe disturbed, tartan coat dusty, twigs clinging. ‘Naughty Mischief,’ she exclaimed, bending down awkwardly, clipping on the lead. ‘Wicked boy.’

  ‘A coat, in this weather,’ said Richard as, Mischief under her arm, she walked off; we laughed relievedly.

  And that scene by a freak of memory, is what remains most vividly of the evening, so that shutting my eyes, I see, I hear the absurd exchange as if it were yesterday. For the rest: I chase through a blur. What, really, did he say? He did fumble for words, he did find it difficult to say how it could all have been; it wasn’t a dream.

  But it was a dream come true, and I hadn’t – never had – made provision for that.

  Later, over cold chicken and salad, we discussed practicalities. There were enough of them.

  ‘I feel rather bad -I haven’t met your parents at all, and – and permission, and so on. You’re awfully young – I mean, I keep forgetting.’

  About his family: there would be no worry, he was sure of that. ‘It’s just the suddenness that’s going to surprise – and there’ll be frightful cracks about fast work, and rebound –’ But then, it wasn’t as if we were necessarily going to marry in such haste. Only, on the other hand, not a long engagement – What did I think?

  Unbelieving, excited, I joined in the exciting, unbelieving exchange: the ‘I thought that you thought’, ‘how silly’, ‘how wonderful’, ‘but when did you?’, ‘if only I’d known …’

  (Where was Juliet’s ghost that night? Not abroad I think).

  ‘Love first,’ he was saying, ‘love first, and – and get to know afterwards…’

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the morning, I found a note on the kitchen dresser which I must have missed the night before. In Mrs Pickering’s handwriting, it read: ‘Ring Mrs Horsfall urgent.’

  Still in a floating dream -I hadn’t for sheer happiness slept all night -I picked up the telephone. Mrs Horsfall answered at once.

  ‘Lucy? Is that you, Lucy?’ Her voice was loud, angry: ‘Lucy, there’s been things kept back. And I’ll not have it –’

  ‘What?’ I tried to ask carefully, ‘not have what?’

  Her voice boomed back down the ear piece: I could almost feel her body quivering:

  ‘Things I’d not mention on the exchange, Lucy! Something not very nice at all …’ Then, in the voice she usually kept for Elizabeth: ‘We’re going to get to the bottom of this. You’re to come round and see me this evening.’

  A bit shaken, I promised hurriedly that of course I’d do my best.

  I had only just put the receiver down when the telephone went again. Richard. Instantly, everything to do with the Horsfalls went out of my head.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right, darling? Did you sleep at all? You’re not worrying about anything? Promise? Your father – did you see him? Shall I ring him?’ Then: ‘Everyone here’s tremendously pleased. Awfully bucked. No worries there at all.’ He was arranging for me to meet his parents tomorrow evening. ‘And your mother – you’ll see your mother today?’ Twice I pinched myself; thought: this isn’t real.

  All morning in the office I was full of suppressed excitement, bubbling inside me so that I felt someone would surely guess: even my footsteps were springy, but except for Mr Jowett looking at me oddly once or twice, no one noticed anything at all.

  At twelve o’clock I set off for the nursing home carrying the bedjacket and the Memory Box, which I’d stuffed into a holdall. My mother was half-sitting, half-lying when I came in; her hair, limp-looking today, dusty, was carelessly bundled up. She was gazing aimlessly out of the window, the lines of her face heavy.

  ‘Darling,’ she said reproachfully, ‘you didn’t come yesterday!’ Her fingers tapped the sheet. ‘No one did. Not even Peter. And that letter from Gervase. It’s too bad. He wants us early this year,’ her mouth twitched. ‘But the date he suggests – it’s quite impossible.’ She sounded near to tears. ‘There’s not a hope I shall be released from this purgatory in time.’ A pin fell from her hair and she left it lying on the sheet. ‘Is that the Memory Box in there?’ she asked, dully. But when I took it out she wasn’t interested. ‘Push it into the cupboard,’ she told me.

  At that moment a nurse came in with her lunch. Pale, mutilated cabbage, a slice of corned beef, some waxy potatoes. Steam rose from the oval dish of milk pudding alongside.

  As the nurse left, ‘Tapioca,’ exclaimed my mother disgustedly, keeping up the myth that food at home was invariably delicious. ‘And in this weather, Lucy!’ She toyed with a few mouthfuls of potato.

  I took the carrier bag with the bedjacket, and passed it over:

  ‘For me?’ she asked, half-heartedly curious. She looked doubtful. Then lifting the jacket from its tissue folds, shaking it out, her face lit up:

  ‘But it’s lovely, darling!’ Trying it on at once: ‘But it’s lovely,’ she repeated, ‘so glamorous. So –’ she patted it, adjusting the ribbons, searching for words.

  Suddenly fearful that I was going to cry: ‘And that’s not all,’ I said, ‘there’s something else. I mean – something I have to tell you.’

  She looked up then, alarmed. ‘What’s happened, Lucy?’ She repeated it, urgently: ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Richard,’ I said in a squeaky voice. ‘You know – Richard.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Well, he asked me to marry him, and I said yes –’

  ‘What?’ She stared incredulously. I said it again, slowly, spelt it out. But she still went on staring: until quite suddenly, throwing open her arms, her face quite radiant, she called out:

  ‘Darling, come here, darling!’ Then hugging me, so violently that I was afraid for her, ‘Darling!’ she said, breathlessly; I could feel her heart thudding. Something faintly medicinal blended with the characteristic smell of her skin. As she
sat back again, holding my hand in hers, I noticed that her eyelids were fluttering. But then, putting her head on one side, looking very serious she said:

  ‘Lucy, you are sure about this?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Of course yes.’

  ‘I mean, darling – it isn’t just possible that you misunderstood something? Some – some action of his? I mean, he did actually ask? You’ve not been a little goose, and thought that –’ She frowned, bit her lip.

  But when, surprised, I assured her that yes, it really was true, then she burst out: ‘I knew it!’ in a triumphant voice.

  She leant forward, almost girlish, chin tucked into the palm of her hand. A stream of questions gushed from her; but she was too excited to listen to any answers. A feverish quizzing, barely coherent. ‘I knew it,’ she kept telling me. ‘I had this dream, darling –’ She waved the ribbons of the bedjacket about. ‘I shall write to Gervase, this very afternoon,’ she was exclaiming, when a nurse came in. ‘You know, it seems incredible I’ve never met Richard. I feel as if, somehow –’

  ‘But we haven’t eaten at all,’ said the nurse disapprovingly, looking at the tray.

  My mother declared joyously: ‘My daughter’s brought me the most marvellous news.’ Excitement was forming beads of sweat on her forehead. ‘She’s just got engaged!’

  ‘Isn’t that nice now?’ said the nurse. She looked at me over her glasses; then plumping up my mother’s pillows behind her, ‘And a lovely new bedjacket, too!’ she said patronizingly. ‘Aren’t we spoilt?’

  Soon after, I left; but up to the last minute my mother was pouring out excitement, plans, ideas: looking tremblingly, dangerously happy. It was only then when I was halfway down the drive, that I realized there was one question about Richard she hadn’t asked: she had never asked me whether I loved him.

  Work hadn’t started again when I got back to the office. Two of the principals were out, also Mr Jowett. Stella had brought me some egg sandwiches and I ate them while we all looked at Maureen’s Polyfotos of her new boyfriend. We were each to be allowed to choose one: she was cutting them up now with the office scissors.