The Parrot Cage, page 16
She went back upstairs and settled down at her desk to sort out a bundle of reports from the analysts so that she could rewrite them for Suvarov. They were more complicated even than usual, and it was not until well after eight o’clock that she finished the last one. Then she clipped them together, put them in the locked tray for one of the typists, cleared her desk and left the building.
Walking slowly across the park, she wondered whether it would be too late to persuade Anna Kingsley to go out to dine somewhere with her, or whether she ought to stay in the flat and do what she could with the tin of sardines and packet of powdered egg that were the remains of her last shopping expedition. When she reached Dover Street she rang Anna’s bell, but there was no answer. Reluctantly she turned and went down to her basement, thinking sentimentally of Andrew. However annoying he could be, at least when they had been living together she had always had company. Eating alone, she decided, was not something that human beings should have to do.
On the doormat, she found a telegram. She bent down to pick up the sinister yellow envelope, remembering the day that Flixe had opened Suvarov’s telegraphed summons for her. Trying to reason away her dread, Gerry thrust two shaking fingers under the gummed flap and ripped open the envelope.
Deeply regret to inform you Andrew Kyrle seriously wounded. Repatriation as soon as possible post-operation. Islip.
Wounded, not dead, thought Gerry. But wounded how? What kind of wound could send you home? What on earth should she do? Why couldn’t Islip, whoever he was, have told her more?
It must have been Syria, she thought a little more calmly, unless Andrew had been sent to Iraq. But wherever it had been, he could not be in too bad a way if they were able to send him home. Yet it must be serious, or they would have put him in hospital in Cairo or somewhere nearer and taken him back into the regiment when he was healed. He must be in pain and was probably afraid, too. For the first time since she had joined in the war Gerry wished that she had managed to get herself sent back to the Middle East. At least if she had been in Palestine she might have been able to help Andrew bear whatever it was that had happened, and make the journey home less awful for him. Oh, poor Andrew: the army was his life; what on earth would he find to replace it? She put her head in her hands.
Into her mind came another, more selfish, worry: how would Andrew’s repatriation affect her and the life she had built for herself? Despite her sister’s death, the miseries of the Blitz, her difficulties with the analysts at work and her frustrated love for Suvarov, she had been happier in London than at almost any time she could remember. She had discovered that she could use her brains to some effect after all and she had learned an immense amount since she had started working for Suvarov, not only about the war, its causes and its probable development, but also about herself and other people. It was true that she had missed Andrew increasingly, but now that he was on his way back to her, she began cussedly to remember the difficulties rather than the consolations of his presence.
Sitting there, with the telegram crumpled in her left hand, she tried to list for herself the things she had learned, as though to stop herself from listing all the things that she dreaded about Andrew’s return. In the end she decided that the only one that really mattered was that she had learned how to know other people. In the old days, whenever she had thought about the men or women she met it had always been in relation to herself: what would they think of her? Were they more or less intelligent than she? How could she impress them? Or depress their pretentions? Now at last she had learned to look at them as they were in their own universe, and to be interested in them and want to know more. It was as though living on her own for the first time in her life she had been able to see the world and its inhabitants for what they really were. And she had been free. Now that freedom was threatened.
Gerry was ashamed of her self-absorption at a time when Andrew must be in beastly pain in some military hospital, but she could not help it. The war had taken her away from the battle she had fought for so long to believe that she was the kind of woman her father and Andrew wanted her to be, and she could not bear the thought of going back to it.
After nearly twenty minutes of fruitless speculation and growing anxiety, Gerry tried to pull herself together and make herself eat something. She could not face the struggle to turn the powdered egg into anything edible and so she simply opened the tin of sardines and ate the lot with a teaspoon. Then she washed the spoon, threw the oily tin into the rubbish bin and had a bath.
Rather to her surprise she managed to get to sleep and, undisturbed by either bomb or ack-ack gun, achieved a solid eight-hour night. It allowed her to reach a kind of rationality. There was nothing she could do for Andrew until he returned and no amount of retrospective anxiety could lessen his wounds. Until he returned the possible difficulties of being both his wife and the independent working woman she had become were irrelevant.
She had no more news of him until the end of August, when she found a brief note in her evening post from some unknown captain informing her that Andrew had had his right foot amputated in hospital in Cairo, had been fitted with an artificial limb, and would be reaching England the following day. Deeply thankful that the injury and its cure had not been worse, she took the note into the office the following morning and asked Suvarov for time off work to go to meet her husband. Gerry was reluctant to ask for extra time, but Andrew obviously had to be met off the boat train at Victoria, and there was no one else to do it; and although there was a lot going on in the analysts’room, the actual quantity of work coming her way was not enough to make her feel that she was scrimshanking.
Waiting for Andrew at Victoria Station, she wondered how they would meet each other; what on earth she would be able to say to him; how he would greet her; whether they could somehow get back to the time before the war, before her pregnancy even, when it was still easy to believe that they loved each other. Before she had left her flat, she had examined her face in the glass with exaggerated care, half believing that her faithlessness must be visible to anyone who looked, but seeing no physical change in her face except for the marks of tiredness that all Londoners wore.
As she stood amid the grime of the crowded platforms, with dusty pigeons flashing irritatingly past her head, and anxious, tired-faced men and women brushing past her, Gerry admitted to herself for the first time exactly what her mind had meant by that word ‘faithlessness’. It was not, she acknowledged, the short, physical act itself that worried her – that could not hurt her husband unless she told him of it. No, the real betrayal was what she had felt in Suvarov’s arms as he had touched her and talked to her, shown her what ‘making love’actually meant to people who knew about it. He had taught her, without knowing what he was doing, just how clumsy, unfeeling, selfish and tyrannical her husband was in bed, and it was realising that she could never unlearn the lesson that was beginning to trouble her so much. She felt like Eve after eating the apple: never could she go back to the state of unknowing; but what she had come to know might threaten to destroy any chance she had to be happy with her husband or to make him happy.
Perhaps, she began to think just as the train appeared at the end of the long, curving grey platform, there are things we can do about it; perhaps now that I know I … But no – how could she talk to Andrew about anything like that? The rain-splattered train came rushing down the track towards her. She stood by the barrier, with both hands resting on the curved handle of her umbrella, waiting.
The train doors were flung back with a syncopated rattling crash and people started to edge down from the high steps: tired women with whining children; apparently happy, grinning servicemen with kitbags on their shoulders; a pompous, official-looking man followed by a tittupping, hurrying assistant in an ill-fitting suit. Then she saw a stick, carefully positioned below the step, a khaki-trousered leg following it. She was so sure that its owner must be Andrew that she started to walk forward, having to push her legs ahead one after the other as though she were wading through the stickiness of a bog. She reached the door just as he manoeuvred his other leg onto the platform and was turning, a little breathless, to someone behind him, who slung down his old leather grip.
‘Thanks, old boy. Damn good of you,’ he said. His voice seemed much more familiar than his face, half-hidden as it was by his formal, badged cap, and Gerry started. The movement caught his eye and he turned to face her. With an extravagant movement of his free hand, he pulled off his cap and with it dangling from his outstretched hand, he said:
‘Gerry! Darling, how wonderful!’
His face was alight, his dark, greeny-brown eyes narrowing in the intensity of his smile. In the split second before she went to embrace him, Gerry remembered for the first time since their dead baby had been taken from her how it had felt to love him. Her own face seemed to loosen its bonds and she was able to smile back at him as she went towards him.
The hugeness of the relief she felt made her hug him tightly, feeling the brass buttons of his tunic right through the thickness of her gaberdine mackintosh. She let her head rest, just for a moment, against his cold cheek, but she could not speak. After a minute or two, he said gently:
‘Gerry, I’m not very good at standing yet.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Andy,’ she said, pulling back at once. ‘Does it hurt … much?’
‘Off and on, but I’m getting used to it, and I can walk pretty well again.’
‘I am sorry; but there’s one thing to be thankful for, you won’t have to go back and face it all again. Have they found a job for you yet? I’ve waited and waited for letters.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. But all the things I wanted to tell you were secret and so I didn’t write at all. Islip said he’d telegraphed you when it happened.’
‘Yes, darling, he did,’ said Gerry soothingly, thinking that this was not the moment to tell him how little Islip had seen fit to tell her. ‘But a job?’
‘Yes. I gather it’s something in the War Office. I don’t quite know what yet, but I’m to start as soon as possible. How do we get to your flat?’
‘Taxi I think. I mean, I think it’s better waiting than fighting our way on the Underground.’
‘All right. How is it? I think you said that Kingsley woman found it for you.’
‘It’s been fine, but it may be a bit small for the two of us. I think we’ll probably have to get something bigger. But it’s most frightfully convenient because I can walk to work – and you’ll be able to get to the War Office. So much better than having to wait hours for buses that never come.’
‘Yes, tell me about this job of yours,’ he said, bending to pick up the bag at his side.
‘Oh, don’t, darling. I’ll carry that,’ she said, not averse to putting off any discussion of her work just for a while. ‘So, what exactly is it?’
‘This sounds silly, Andrew, but I can’t tell you.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m your husband; if you can’t trust me, who can you trust?’
This was worse than she had expected. Choosing her words with some care as they walked towards the barrier and Andrew handed over his travel warrant, she said quietly:
‘It isn’t that. It’s like you and the letters you wanted to write. We’re not supposed to tell anyone anything about it at all – of course it’s not that I don’t trust you. But what if someone else managed to hear what I said? That sort of thing. You know.’
‘Told your sister?’ he asked, so casually that for a moment Gerry missed the danger signs.
‘Flixe? No, of course not. She wouldn’t let me anyway. She’s got pathologically discreet since all this started.’
‘Not that it matters now, of course,’ he went on, transferring his stick to his other hand in order to hold Gerry’s elbow.
Why not? she wanted to ask, but so dreaded his reply that she said nothing about it.
‘Mother will be so pleased to know you’re back,’ she said instead. ‘All the time I was there last summer, she was always talking about you and she asks about you every time I ring up.’
‘We’ll go for a weekend as soon as I’ve got things sorted out. I missed her a lot, wanted to have a week or so down there before I started this new job; but they didn’t think there was time.’
‘I don’t suppose it’s very comfortable at the moment; she’s got three evacuees – six-year-olds, I think. The odd thing is that she seems to have got jolly fond of them. Perhaps it’s because they’re boys.’
‘I’d have thought Fanny would find slum boys particularly difficult, or are they our sort?’
‘No. From the East End, she said. But she’s never really liked girls. D’you know, I hadn’t thought until just now, but perhaps that’s why she was always so dissatisfied with Flixe and me. Just dreadfully disappointed that we were girls. Thank God, that one’s ours.’
They walked towards the cab together and he held open the door for her and waited until she was seated before trying to lever himself up off the pavement. She thought how charming and how absurd of him to follow the old conventions when it would have been so much simpler for her to stand behind him and help him in. He took her hand when he was at last sitting beside her and, leaning forward to close the sliding partition between them and the driver, said softly:
‘Gerry, it’s … Thank God I’m back. I couldn’t bear it out there without you. I don’t sleep properly when I’m not with you. And I just don’t feel happy any more when we’re apart. When you wrote to say you weren’t coming, I was nearly desperate.’ He raised her hand and kissed her wrist. The warm moistness of his lips made her remember why that old love had never been quite enough. Her instinctive withdrawal made her ashamed of herself. But he misinterpreted her movement and said as he started to kiss her neck:
‘Don’t worry, darling. Cabbies’mirrors are specially angled so that they can’t see what goes on in the back seat. Kiss me, Gerry.’
‘Andy, not here. There’s something so … so shabby about kissing in taxis.’
‘All right,’ he said, as though humouring an invalid. ‘After all, it’s not going to be very long before I can kiss any bit of you I like.’
This time, slightly better prepared, she managed not to shudder. Telling herself that any husband coming back from a war, after well over a year’s absence, would talk like that, would want to renew his marriage in the way Andrew obviously wanted, she gripped his hand and tried to look pleased.
In spite of her resolve it was almost all she could do not to sigh out her dissatisfaction forty minutes later as he lay on top of her jerking his way to his own release. Despite the violent physical joining of which she was part she felt that there was no real connection between them; he could have been with any woman – or on his own; he was completely oblivious to her as she lay quite still, her teeth clenched to prevent any of the words in her mind spilling out and hurting him.
When at last it was over and he rolled off her to relapse immediately into a kind of semi-comatose sleep, she wondered how he could do such things without a word to her, without even acknowledging that she was there. Did he not know that lovemaking was something that happened between two people, not something imposed by one for his pleasure on another? Obviously he did not.
She did not feel that she could get straight out of bed and get ready for work as she longed to do, for in that tiny flat he would be bound to wake, and so she lay beside him until he started to snore. Then she did slide out from under the blankets and, moving as quietly as she possibly could, got ready to leave for the office. Just before she went out of the door, she scribbled a note for him, saying simply: ‘Have gone to work, darling. I’ll be back at about seven and perhaps we could go out to dinner to celebrate. G.’
She hurried across the park, not even stopping on the bridge to see how the dreary grey weather of that dismal August day was affecting her view down the lake, and nearly ran up the stairs to her office. To her astonishment Suvarov was there, the first time in months that he had not been out at half-past two, and she stood in the doorway, still and blushing.
He looked up at her and she could see from the understanding in his eyes that he knew exactly what had just happened to her. Pushing down as far as she could the knowledge that Andrew would never have seen what Suvarov could so easily see, she just said:
‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ and turned to her own desk. He got up to come and stand in front of her and she hoped very much that he would not touch her. He did not, just stood there looking at her and speaking in his deep, slightly accented voice:
‘Gerry, I am several kinds of brute to have done to you what I did, but I am not the kind of dog in the manger who would do it and then criticise you for going back to your husband.’
Without thinking anything except that she was with a friend who understood everything, Gerry said:
‘“Going back” makes it all sound so very voluntary.’
‘I am sorry.’ There was a pause and then he said with a tentativeness that was new to Gerry: ‘He didn’t … hurt you?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing like that; it was all so unconscious. I might not have been there at all.’ She made a sound like a laugh, but there was no mirth in her expression. ‘God knows why I’m telling you of all people things like this.’
‘Who better, Gerry? I care for you so much, and we both know that we can’t be anything except friends. But listen, he is a young man – I don’t want to put this in a way that might hurt you, Gerry, but it is worth saying – and the techniques of it all are quite tricky to learn. You have to be taught and perhaps he has not had the luck to … to love anyone who can teach him.’
Gerry was silent for a long time, but when she spoke she surprised him.
‘That makes such sense that I don’t know why I never thought of it. Will you tell me something else, since we’re able to be honest with each other?’
