To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

One day he was walking down the Charing Cross Road, looking into the windows of bookshops, when he saw Bobby strolling up the other side with Jackie, the other half of her act. She looked as he had never seen her: her dark face was alive with animation, and Jackie was looking into her face and laughing. George thought the boy very handsome. He had a warm gloss of youth on his hair and in his eyes; he had the lithe, quick look of a young animal.

He was not jealous at all. When Bobby came in at night, gay and vivacious, he knew he owed this to Jackie and did not mind. He was even grateful to him. The warmth Bobby had for ‘the other half of the act’ overflowed towards him; and for some months Myra and his wife were present in his mind, he saw and felt them, two loving presences, young women who loved George, brought into being by the feeling between Jackie and Bobby. Whatever that feeling was.

The Offbeat Revue ran for nearly a year, and then it was coming off, and Bobby and Jackie were working out another act. George did not know what it was. He thought Bobby needed a rest, but he did not like to say so. She had been tired recently, and when she came in at night there was strain beneath her gaiety. Once, at night, he woke to see her beside his bed. ‘Hold me for a little, George,’ she asked. He opened his arms and she came into them. He lay holding her, quite still. He had opened his arms to the sad waif, but it was an unhappy woman lying in his arms. He could feel the movement of her lashes on his shoulder, and the wetness of tears.

He had not lain beside her for a long time, years it seemed. She did not come to him again.

‘You don’t think you’re working too hard, dear?’ he asked once, looking at her strained face; but she said briskly, ‘No, I’ve got to have something to do, can’t stand doing nothing.’

One night it was raining hard, and Bobby had been feeling sick that day, and she did not come home at her usual time. George became worried and took a taxi to the theatre and asked the doorman if she was still there. It seemed she had left some time before. ‘She didn’t look too well to me, sir,’ volunteered the doorman, and George sat for a time in the taxi, trying not to worry. Then he gave the driver Jackie’s address; he meant to ask him if he knew where Bobby was. He sat limp in the back of the taxi, feeling the heaviness of his limbs, thinking of Bobby ill.

The place was in a mews, and he left the taxi and walked over rough cobbles to a door which had been the door of stables. He rang, and a young man he didn’t know let him in, saying yes, Jackie Dickson was in. George climbed narrow, steep, wooden stairs slowly, feeling the weight of his body, while his heart pounded. He stood at the top of the stairs to get his breath, in a dark which smelled of canvas and oil and turpentine. There was a streak of light under a door; he went towards it, knocked, heard no answer, and opened it. The scene was a high, bare, studio sort of place, badly lighted, full of pictures, frames, junk of various kinds. Jackie, the dark, glistening youth, was seated cross-legged before the fire, grinning as he lifted his face to say something to Bobby, who sat in a chair, looking down at him. She was wearing a formal dark dress and jewellery, and her arms and neck were bare and white. She looked beautiful, George thought, glancing once, briefly, at her face, and then away; for he could see on it an emotion he did not want to recognize. The scene held for a moment before they realized he was there and turned their heads with the same lithe movement of disturbed animals, to see him standing there in the doorway. Both faces froze. Bobby looked quickly at the young man, and it was in some kind of fear. Jackie looked sulky and angry.

‘I’ve come to look for you, dear,’ said George to his wife. ‘It was raining and the doorman said you seemed ill.’

‘It’s very sweet of you,’ she said and rose from the chair, giving her hand formally to Jackie, who nodded with bad grace at George.

The taxi stood in the dark, gleaming rain, and George and Bobby got into it and sat side by side, while it splashed off into the street.

‘Was that the wrong thing to do, dear?’ asked George, when she said nothing.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I really did think you might be ill.’

She laughed. ‘Perhaps I am.’

‘What’s the matter, my darling? What is it? He was angry, wasn’t he? Because I came?’

‘He thinks you’re jealous,’ she said shortly.

‘Well, perhaps I am rather,’ said George.

She did not speak.

‘I’m sorry, dear, I really am. I didn’t mean to spoil anything for you.’

‘Well, that’s certainly that,’ she remarked, and she sounded impersonally angry.

‘Why? But why should it be?’

‘He doesn’t like – having things asked of him,’ she said, and he remained silent while they drove home.

Up in the warmed, comfortable old flat, she stood before the fire, while he brought her a drink. She smoked fast and angrily, looking into the fire.

‘Please forgive me, dear,’ he said at last. ‘What is it? Do you love him? Do you want to leave me? If you do, of course you must. Young people should be together.’

She turned and stared at him, a black strange stare he knew well.

‘George,’ she said, ‘I’m nearly forty.’

‘But darling, you’re a child still. At least, to me.’

‘And he,’ she went on, ‘will be twenty-two next month. I’m old enough to be his mother.’ She laughed, painfully. ‘Very painful, maternal love … or so it seems … but then how should I know?’ She held out her bare arm and looked at it. Then, with the fingers of one hand she creased down the skin of that bare arm towards the wrist, so that the ageing skin lay in creases and folds. Then, setting down her glass, her cigarette held between tight, amused, angry lips, she wriggled her shoulders out of her dress, so that it slipped to her waist, and she looked down at her two small, limp, unused breasts. ‘Very painful, dear George,’ she said, and shrugged her dress up quickly, becoming again the formal woman dressed for the world. ‘He does not love me. He does not love me at all. Why should he?’ She began singing:

He does not love me

With a love that is trew …

Then she said in stage cockney, ‘Repeat; I could ‘ave bin ‘is muvver, see?’ And with the old rolling derisive black flash of her eyes she smiled at George.

George was thinking only that this girl, his darling, was suffering now what he had suffered, and he could not stand it. She had been going through this for how long now? But she had been working with that boy for nearly two years. She had been living beside him, George, and he had had no idea at all of her unhappiness. He went over to her, put his arms around her, and she stood with her head on his shoulder and wept. For the first time, George thought, they were together. They sat by the fire a long time that night, drinking, smoking and her head was on his knee and he stroked it, and thought that now, at last, she had been admitted into the world of emotion and they would learn to be really together. He could feel his strength stirring along his limbs for her. He was still a man, after all.

Next day she said she would not go on with the new show. She would tell Jackie he must get another partner. And besides, the new act wasn’t really any good. ‘I’ve had one little act all my life,’ she said, laughing. ‘And sometimes it’s fitted in, and sometimes it hasn’t.’

‘What was the new act? What’s it about?’ he asked her.

She did not look at him. ‘Oh, nothing very much. It was Jackie’s idea, really …’ Then she laughed. ‘It’s quite good really, I suppose …’

‘But what is it?’

‘Well, you see …’ Again he had the impression she did not want to look at him. ‘It’s a pair of lovers. We make fun … it’s hard to explain, without doing it.’

‘You make fun of love?’ he asked.

‘Well, you know, all the attitudes … the things people say. It’s a man and a woman – with music of course. All the music you’d expect, played offbeat. We wear the same costume as for the other act. And then we go through all the motions … It’s rather funny, really …’ she trailed off, breathless, seeing George’s face. ‘Well,’ she said, suddenly very savage, ‘if it isn’t all bloody funny, what is it?’ She turned away to take a cigarette.

‘Perhaps you’d like to go on with it after all?’ he asked ironically.

‘No. I can’t. I really can’t stand it. I can’t stand it any longer, George,’ she said, and from her voice he understood she had nothing to learn from him of pain.

He suggested they both needed a holiday, so they went to Italy. They travelled from place to place, never stopping anywhere longer than a day, for George knew she was running away from any place around which emotion could gather. At night he made love to her, but she closed her eyes and thought of the other half of the act; and George knew it and did not care. But what he was feeling was too powerful for his old body; he could feel a lifetime’s emotions beating through his limbs, making his brain throb.

Again they curtailed their holiday, to return to the comfortable old flat in London.

On the first morning after their return, she said: ‘George, you know you’re getting too old for this sort of thing – it’s not good for you; you look ghastly.’

‘But, darling, why? What else am I still alive for?’

‘People’ll say I’m killing you,’ she said, with a sharp, half angry, half amused, black glance.

‘But, my darling, believe me …’

He could see them both in the mirror; he, an old pursy man, head lowered in sullen obstinacy; she … but he could not read her face.

‘And perhaps I’m getting too old?’ she remarked suddenly.

For a few days she was gay, mocking, then suddenly tender. She was provocative, teasing him with her eyes; then she would deliberately yawn and say, ‘I’m going to sleep. Good night, George.’