Chapter 6 An Unanswerable Predicament
Gray raindrops pattered listlessly on the kitchen window, obscuring the thin morning light.
Honor shivered and wished it weren’t too early for a drink.
She scraped a dot of margarine across some toast, then dropped the knife on the floor as Saul, coming up behind her, said good morning with a certain insistence, as if not for the first time.
“Sorry, darling.” She picked up the knife. “You made me jump. I was miles away. There’s tea in the pot.” She sat down at the table. “We don’t usually see you for breakfast.”
He sat down across from her. As ever, he had dressed carefully, in a dark-blue Viyella shirt and a wool waistcoat in a blue-and-brown check. His face was clean-shaven, and he exuded a pleasing mélange of scents: peppery aftershave, musky hair oil, toothpaste.
“Well,” said Saul, “you wished for my presence to be…” He raised his eyebrows. “Noticed more, didn’t you? Because of—”
“Because of Mr. Sullivan. I certainly did. You are thoughtful.” Yet why, she wondered, was this the first morning he’d shown his face?
The conversation in question had occurred some ten days ago, that night she went to bed with him.
She’d been drunk, uncharacteristically impulsive.
Stupid of her. This was the first time they’d been alone since then, she realized.
There was an atmosphere between them. Did he imagine they were to resume their affair?
More to the point, did he want to? Oh, stop it, she told herself.
As if everything weren’t complicated enough.
She chewed a mouthful of toast—it tasted like dust—and tried to think of something to say.
Thank goodness for Lulu the dog; she padded over to the table and gazed up at Saul, tail down and eyes full of reproach. “Don’t fall for it,” said Honor. “She knows you’re a soft touch. She’s had her breakfast. Naughty girl.”
But Saul didn’t chuckle or pick up Lulu in sympathy. Instead he frowned, sipped some tea, and said, “How are you, Honor dear? I was wondering if perhaps—” He broke off at the sound of footsteps down the passage.
“Oh,” said Robbie. “Good morning, Saul. Hello, Honor.” He seemed surprised to find them both there. “Is there tea in the pot?”
“Why don’t you make some fresh,” said Honor. “Saul, what were you going to say?”
“I beg your pardon? What was I… No, nothing important.” Saul turned his attention to Robbie, who was examining some marmalade remnants at the bottom of the jar. “Now then, how are you getting on with our new guest?”
“Our new… You mean Jimmy.”
Saul smiled. “Jimmy, yes. Are you two finding—”
“Mr. Sullivan, I mean.” Robbie, feeling his cheeks redden, turned away and tipped the used tea leaves into the sink. “As I was telling Honor yesterday, we’ve had a couple of chats. He and I. He seems like a—”
“Golly, I’m starving!” Mina, her slippered tread soundless, appeared as if from nowhere.
Wrapped in a peach satin robe, face meticulously painted, ten or eleven metal cylinders arranged on her head, she looked like a cartoon android.
Or, thought Robbie, an adolescent male’s idea of one.
“Any marmalade left?” she asked him hopefully.
“Mina,” said Honor, in a tone of weary outrage, “you didn’t sleep like that, did you?
How can you bear it?” And if I’ve told her once, she thought, I’ve told her a thousand times: Dress properly before coming downstairs.
For someone so preoccupied with ladylike etiquette, Mina had a slatternly side.
Too heavy-handed with the maquillage, too.
Honor remembered how, as a girl a year or two younger than Mina, she’d dared come down to breakfast wearing a smudge of black around her eyes, in timid imitation of Clara Bow.
“You wipe that muck off your face this instant,” her mother had said, “or you’ll feel the back of my hand. ”
“One must suffer to be beautiful,” replied Mina.
“Who said that? Was it a foreigner? Whoever it was, she wasn’t wrong.
” She tucked a few renegade strands behind her ear.
“The thing is, mornings when I’ve got an early class, it’s either sleep in my rollers or wake up at four o’clock to put them in.
” This, her shrug indicated, was an unanswerable predicament.
Robbie brandished the marmalade jar. “There’s a bit left. You can have it.” Abandoning the prospect of toast for himself, he placed the refilled teapot on its coir mat at the center of the table, then sat down next to Honor.
Mina opened the bread bin and continued: “Perhaps I ought to get a permanent wave. I’ve got the right sort of hair for it. Takes a curl well.”
Honor stared at her, in no mood for a discussion of hair maintenance. “Have you seen George this morning?” she queried.
Mina gestured to the ceiling with a breadknife.
“Still in bed. I won’t repeat what she said when I put my head around the door, if you don’t mind.
” She scooped a dollop of marmalade onto a hunk of bread and circled the spoon to spread it.
“When she got home last night, she asked me to wake her this morning. And that’s the thanks I get.
If she’s late to an engagement, it shan’t be on my account. ”
“Oh, where did she go last night?” Honor half yawned with apparent disinterest. “Anywhere special?”
“Lord only knows,” said Mina. She sat down and began cutting her bread into triangles. “All I can tell you is that—”
Saul placed a hand on Mina’s wrist. “But Robbie was telling us his impressions of Mr. Sullivan.” He smiled across the table at Robbie. “Please, do go on.”
“Was I?” Robbie used his fingertips to sweep some crumbs into a small pile. “Not much to say, really. He’s a nice enough fellow.”
“Though not a soldier, I gather,” said Saul. He and Mina exchanged a glance.
“Is it true, Honor?” asked Mina. “Was Mr. Sullivan exempted for asthma? Because my brother, he—”
“If that is what Mr. Sullivan says,” said Honor, more sharply than she’d intended, “then that is what happened. It’s none of your concern either way.”
Mina, her face the picture of wounded innocence, applied herself to her breakfast. Robbie tried to remember if he’d smoked his last cigarette yesterday. Saul felt in his pocket for his own cigarette case, and Honor said, “Darling, we’re still eating.”
“Look, I do believe it’s stopped raining,” said Saul. “I’ll go outside. Robbie, would you care to join me for a smoke in the garden?”
During the war, Honor’s late husband, Gerald, had planted fruits and vegetables in the garden, dutifully obeying the government’s “Dig for Victory” slogan.
Under the supervision of his first wife, Barbara, he’d grown patches of onions, potatoes, cabbages, strawberries, and figs.
The usurpation of the household by Honor (Barbara, elbowed into unmerry divorcée-hood, would put it less politely), someone who’d never touched soil in her life and didn’t wish to start, reduced the bounty of these harvests.
After Gerald died, grass and weeds spread until the only signs of his industry were wooden demarcation strips, mossy and swollen with rain.
Six months into Honor’s widowhood, on a bright summer’s day, she and Robbie went outside and he wondered aloud about reviving the kitchen garden.
Spuds, after all, were still in short supply.
Honor had clapped her hands. “How I should love that! As you see, we’ve been lacking a capable man about the place.
” Why Saul didn’t figure in this calculation was unclear—perhaps, as a Jew, he was too effete for manual labor.
(Robbie, who hardly knew any Jewish people, guiltily revised this opinion when told of Saul’s years in a slave labor camp.) Anyway, Robbie hadn’t actually meant to offer himself as the resident horticulturalist. As he’d soon learn, one had to be careful what one said to Honor.
She had the enviable skill of interpreting everything in a manner most convenient to herself.
Robbie was twenty-seven when he moved into his room at Honor’s.
After coming down from Cambridge and getting married, he’d lived with his wife, Pamela, on the ground floor of a decaying terraced house in some nameless purlieu of Acton and Chiswick.
Pamela’s father, the proprietor of a factory in Surbiton that made metal tubes (for what purpose?
Robbie didn’t like to ask), subsidized the rent, “just while you get on your feet.” As it turned out, to Pamela this meant “until I badger my disappointment of a husband into respectable employment.” Since she’d successfully badgered him into marriage, you couldn’t blame her for continuing with this approach.
Her own occupation, attending a secretarial college in South Kensington to learn typing and shorthand, was deadly dull.
None of her friends with husbands were expected to do anything.
Robbie’s comparative leisure, therefore, was all but intolerable.
Yet just as intolerable to Robbie was the denigration of his writing—that painstaking, near-constant effort—as leisure.
He wasn’t sitting around twiddling his thumbs, for crying out loud.
Sometimes he even helped with the housework.
If he needed a break from his typewriter, he tidied up a bit or took some dirty washing to the laundry.
Once, feeling especially energetic, he mopped the linoleum in both the sitting room and the kitchen.
Meanwhile, the novel was coming along nicely.
He’d recently published his first poem, in The New Statesman and Nation, no less.
And a chap at The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post had promised him some reviewing work.