Chapter 6 An Unanswerable Predicament #2
The final showdown occurred when Pamela proposed, in all seriousness, that Robbie take a job at “Daddy’s firm.
” Daddy was keen to show him the ropes, she said.
He’d have to start at the bottom, of course—maybe take some night classes in engineering—but within a few years he might be in management.
He could still write his novel at the lunch break, if he really wanted to.
The ensuing row crescendoed with Robbie storming off into the sunset.
He really wasn’t a storming-off sort of fellow.
On reaching the Metropolitan line station at Goldhawk Road, he realized he had nowhere to go, no friend whose sofa he might sleep on.
None of his sisters lived in London. Even if they had, they were all married to ghastly men.
Not wanting to lose his nerve, he got on a train and rode all the way to Liverpool Street, where he alighted and went into the platform bar.
A drink supplied the courage he needed to telephone his aunt Demelza, who lived above a pub in Bloomsbury.
As a self-described “free spirit,” Demelza might be sympathetic to his plight, he thought.
(“Free spirit, my eye,” said Robbie’s father. “Try as nutty as a fruitcake.”)
“Kicked you out, has she?” He heard the rasp of a match and the inhalation of a cigarette.
“That’s some backbone, isn’t it? Didn’t know she had it in her.
Well, I can put you up for a night or two.
You don’t want to go home, I take it?” She meant to his parents, and before he replied, she went on: “No, I can’t say I blame you.
You’ll have to stay out of my landlord’s way, of course. He’s fussy about nonpaying guests.”
Demelza, who was into Eastern religions and miscellaneous spiritual mumbo jumbo, answered the door in a loose straw-colored garment not unlike a medieval monk’s robe.
With her fairish hair bound in two long plaits and an aureole of frizz around her face, she seemed even battier than Robbie remembered.
He supposed that a woman deprived of both children and sex was unlikely to reach middle age without turning a bit strange.
Of course, Demelza wasn’t yet old. Only a few years his senior, he believed.
But it was different for women. Especially those who insisted upon such flagrant eccentricity.
“You’d better come in,” she sighed, as though he’d dropped by unannounced. “I’ll put the kettle on. Have you got a shilling for the meter?”
Demelza got by on a war widow’s pension, albeit one subsidized by some agreeable friendships.
She was strict about assigned days for her chaps’ visits, in this way keeping them innocent of their cooperative status in her life.
Rarely did her husband, four years dead, even feature in her thoughts.
She’d married him at nineteen, primarily because he said no one else would ever ask.
On receiving the telegram from the Air Ministry, she’d struggled to understand her emotion until she realized it was joy: exalted, triumphant joy at her sudden liberation.
His aunt’s digs weren’t very cheerful, thought Robbie.
The two low-ceilinged rooms were separated by an arch, across which she had strung up a beaded fly curtain, like at the butcher’s.
The larger room had a basin and shower, a single gas burner, and a round table covered with a pink crocheted shawl.
In the smaller, windowless room was a single divan, untidily strewn with a red candlewick bedspread, and an imitation-walnut chest of drawers.
Instead of electric lighting, there were gas jets on the wall.
Outside on the landing was the telephone, with a jam jar for tuppences and a notebook to record calls, and a lavatory, shared by whoever had taken the downstairs bedroom for the night.
“We get all sorts,” said Demelza. “Not Yanks, mind you. Geoffrey draws the line at Yanks.” She handed a cup of tea to Robbie, who looked at her quizzically.
“Too slow to join the Great War,” she said with a forgiving little head shake.
Later that night Robbie lay on a blanket on the floor, in another man’s pajamas, underneath a quilt that smelled strongly of incense and, faintly, dog (but there was no sign of a dog), listening to Demelza snoring on the other side of the curtain.
Was his life, he wondered, going to become as small, as impoverished and mean, as his aunt’s?
He contemplated going back to Pamela, even agreeing to work at the metal-tube factory.
Trollope had worked for the post office, hadn’t he?
And a writer called Philip Larkin, an Oxford graduate, had somehow managed to publish a lauded poetry collection and two novels while working as a librarian, and still in his early twenties to boot.
Robbie hadn’t read these so-called novels; he was too jealous.
They probably weren’t very good. And supposing he did go and work for his father-in-law?
Then there’d be no excuse not to have a baby.
He couldn’t explain why, but a child was not something he could countenance. Not yet.
He spent the next two days wandering around, leaving Demelza’s rooms first thing and staying out until evening.
It was mid-June and the weather was dry, albeit rarely sunny.
For long, stretched-out hours he sat on park benches, puzzling over the interplay of freely made choices and blind fate that had placed him in this quagmire.
When the mental impasse of deciding how to live oppressed him too heavily, he retreated under a tree and napped.
On waking, he bought sandwiches at a cheap student café.
He thought about telephoning Pamela, but failed to do so. He couldn’t imagine what he might say.
After a second day had passed in this desultory fashion, he was walking down Torrington Place at about seven o’clock and saw Demelza, who had a friend with her.
“Talk of the devil,” she said happily, “and he will appear. This is my chum Sadie Havers. We’ve just been to a Theosophical Society meeting.
” Demelza appeared to have dressed for the occasion, in a purple caftan and matching turban.
“Sadie, this is the out-of-luck nephew I was telling you about.”
Sadie was a tall, healthy-looking girl with a chestnut Eton crop, hatless, in a casual costume of wide-legged trousers and a filmy shirt with polka dots. She cocked her head and considered Robbie. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, I think you just might be Honor’s sort of thing.”
Demelza explained, “Sadie’s landlady needs help with a new literary venture. Apparently the pay will be rather modest, but you might negotiate some sort of live-in situation.”
They stood on the pavement outside the newspaper shop at the corner of Malet Street.
The sky was bleached white, and the air smelled of warm tar and apple blossoms. Robbie digested Demelza’s words—it sounded like a miraculous stroke of luck, which probably meant it was anything but—and Sadie said, “No promises, of course. The lady in question is a bit… well, she’s a bit peculiar.
But I’ll let you make up your own mind. If you like, you can come back with me now. ”
“By ‘peculiar,’ Sadie only means unusual,” put in Demelza quickly. “Artistic. It sounds like just the ticket to me. Sadie, you’re a lifesaver. I’ll telephone you tomorrow. Ta-ta.”
Robbie and Sadie watched her skip off, and he said, “This is most awfully kind of you. Are you sure it’s all right if I come with you this evening? Because I can easily—”
She laughed and shook her head. “You’ll be doing me a favor.
Introducing you to Honor will raise my prestige.
And to be honest, I could do with someone else nearer my own age in the house.
Someone else full stop, actually. There’s this fellow who lives in the basement—oh, he’s nice enough, but he and Honor are carrying on an affair.
I’m supposed to pretend I don’t notice. It’s awkward.
Sorry, I’m not really selling it, am I? It’s a lovely house.
And I’m sure Honor’s new venture will be very interesting to you.
She worked for the publishers Wilson-Murray, you know—it was her husband’s company, before he passed over to the other side. ”
As Robbie later learned, Sadie had been a Queen Alexandra’s nurse in Normandy and Belgium, where she’d acquired a firm belief in this “other side.” After the war, she became a private nurse to the terminally ill, living in at Tregunter Road for Gerald’s final six months.
Then she decided she’d had enough of broken and decaying bodies.
I’m only twenty-four, she thought. I need some beauty, some life.
So she applied to art school, but at Honor’s insistence stayed on in the house.
Her presence, she suspected, was a fig leaf of propriety, a diversion from Honor and her foreign chap shacking up before Gerald was cold in the ground (before he was anywhere near the ground, truth be told).
But what did Sadie care, living in that big house for free?
“I’ve rather fallen down on the job here,” said Robbie now to Saul, accepting a cigarette and gesturing toward some sorry-looking broad-bean seedlings.
“I planted those two weeks ago, but I probably ought to have covered them. It’s been so cold.
” He cupped his hand over the flame of Saul’s lighter.
“Thanks.” He blew out smoke. “I’ll try and do some tomatoes, I suppose. ”
Saul, uninterested, said, “It seems like a lot of effort. Honor’s got you doing this every year, hasn’t she? You know, you mustn’t let her take advantage of your good nature.”