An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Genres: Classics; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Satire; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

'As her work reappears, another missing jigsaw piece is replaced' Independent Described by the New York Times upon her death as 'one of Britain's best-known novelists', plunge yourself into the wry world of Pamela Hansford Johnson in this story of seduction and marriage, perfect for fans of Elizabeth Jane Howard and Barbara Pym. ****************** It's between the wars, and Christine - Christie, to her friends - is tired of London, her job in a travel agency, her friends, and the young men she's being set up with. So when, by chance, she meets the older Ned Skelton, who seems sophisticated and experienced, she quickly becomes besotted. Before Christie knows it, they are engaged. But will marriage to a man she doesn't know well truly offer this young woman an escape? Or is she walking into another prison of her own making? A classic coming-of-age story set in the 1930s, by one of Britain's best-loved and almost-forgotten novelists. 'A story so vivid it might be the memoir of a real person' Britannia and Eve ****************** Praise for Pamela Hansford Johnson: 'Witty, satirical and deftly malicious' Anthony Burgess 'A remarkable craftswoman' A.S. Byatt 'Hansford Johnson at her wittiest is Waugh mingled with Malcolm Bradbury Ruth Rendell 'A writer whose memory fully deserves to be kept alive' Jonathan Coe

Release date: October 4, 2018

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 322

Sample

Chapter 1

(Outside The Door)

 

I made up my mind that I would not see Iris Allbright again, not after so many years. I do not like looking back down the chasm of the past and seeing, in a moment of vertigo, some terror that looks like a joy, some joy crouched like a terror. It is better to keep one’s eyes on the rock-face of the present, for that is real; what is under your nose is actual, but the past is full of lies, and the only accurate memories are those we refuse to admit to our consciousness. I did not want to see Iris; we had grown out of each other twenty years ago and could have nothing more to say. It might be interesting to see if she had kept her looks, if she had worn as well as I had; but not so interesting that I was prepared to endure an afternoon of reminiscence for the possible satisfaction of a vanity.

Also, she had had only one brief moment of real importance in my life, which was now shrivelled by memory almost to silliness. I doubted whether she herself would remember it at all. I would not see her; I had made up my mind.

But it was not so easy. Iris was determined that I should visit her, now she had returned to Clapham, and to this end kept up a campaign of letters and telephone calls. Didn’t I want to talk over old times? If not, why not? She was longing to tell me all about her life in South America, all about her marriage, her children, her widowhood – didn’t I want to hear? She was longing to hear all about me. (‘How you’ve got on! Little Christie!’) I couldn’t be so busy as to be unable to spare just half an hour. Why not this Wednesday? Or Wednesday week? Or any day the following week? She was always at home.

I began to feel like the unfortunate solicitor badgered with tea invitations by Armstrong, the poisoner of Hay. Knowing that if he accepted he would be murdered with a meat-paste sandwich, in constant touch with the police who had warned him what his fate was likely to be, he was nevertheless tortured by his social sense into feeling that if Armstrong were not soon arrested he would have to go to tea, to accept the sandwich, and to die. It was a hideous position for a man naturally polite and of good feeling.

My own position was in a sense more difficult, for no one was likely to arrest Iris Allbright, and I felt the time approaching when I must either bitterly offend her or go to Clapham. In the end I went to Clapham.

I took a certain pleasure in seeing the neighbourhood again. I was born near the Common. I had memories of crossing it on cold and frosty mornings on my way to school; of walking there on blue and dusty summer evenings in the exalted, painful insulation of first, childish love-affairs. I could see the island on the pond, cone-shaped, thick with sunny trees, on which the little boys ran naked, natural and Greek after swimming, until the borough council insisted on bathing drawers. I could see the big field by North Side, the boys and girls lounging in deck-chairs, playing ukeleles as the sun fell into ash and the new moon hardened like steel in the lavender sky; the field behind the Parade, with little low hawthorn hills, where less innocent lovers lay locked by night.

I had not been there since the war.

Now, on that Sunday afternoon in October, I saw it changed, my world laid waste. There were allotments in the big field; the scrawny, shabby cabbages shrivelling on their knuckly stems; tangles of weed lying over the broken earth like travellers thirst-ridden in the desert crawling towards a water-hole. Here and there were tin huts, lop-sided, peeling in the sun; and the row of high houses stretching from Sisters Avenue to Cedars Road had the shabby sadness of women too discouraged to paint their faces or get out of their dressing-gowns. And there were letting-boards. I could not remember anything being to let in my day.

The impression I had of it all was violent, too Gothic to be true – only true, perhaps, in relation to my romantic memories; but I felt depressed, a stranger there myself, and wished again that I had not yielded to Iris’s importunities.

She was living on the second floor of a block of mansion flats, built of liver-coloured brick, and roofed in some approximation to château style. The turrets gleamed damply, like gun-metal, on the light-blue sky, and the glazed laurels flashed red and white below in the refracted light from the cars and buses. It was noisy on that corner, as I had remembered it; but far dustier – unless the dust were on the lens of my own memories. I went into the dankness of the tiled hallway, which was like the entrance to a municipal swimming baths, and in the aquarian gloom searched for her name on the Ins and Outs board, faintly hoping that by some accident I might find her proclaimed ‘Out’ and so have an excuse for going away again.

Iris Allbright. Iris de Castro she was now. She was in.

As I climbed the first flight of stairs I heard a gramophone playing in one of the flats, playing a tune of twenty years ago. I stopped, so certain only Iris could still preserve this record that I wondered for a moment if she were not living on the first floor after all. The world shifted in place and time; I stood against the wall, hearing that tune, seeing nothing but the downward breadth of my own pink dress. He was coming to me now across the slippery floor. I pretended not to know it. I heard Iris humming the words of the song in her small, light, penetrating voice. Every thread in my dress was sharp and separate, each with an individuality of its own. I noted the design of the weaving.

‘Shall we dance this?’ he said, and I looked up, and Iris was answering him. ‘No, no; I’m tired. You dance this with my friend.’ ‘I’m not dancing this one,’ I said airily; ‘I’ve laddered my stocking. I want to stop before it goes any further.’ He did not seem to hear me. Iris gave her little shrug, accompanied by the lifting of the right corner of her mouth, the sloping down of her left shoulder. She stepped into his arms and went off as if a breeze had lifted her from her feet. But this had not been her moment of importance, not this one at all.

The world shifted again with a rush of chilly air and set me down on a stair in a dark hallway, above a green-tiled well. I went on upwards and stood before her door. Through the landing window I could see a boy and girl lolling against the railings of the Common, staring at each other. A bus came along. He gave her a kiss and ran for it. She waved after him, until there was only dust to see and the resettling of the plane trees. Then she went back to the railings and sat there, despondent. She raised her hand, let it fall to her side; it was a kind of rehearsed gesture, designed to convince her of her own sadness.

I rang the bell, and at once heard steps along the hall. Between my ringing and the opening of the door lay the whole of my youth.

Chapter 2

I was out of love: it was insufferably sad. Leslie and I sat on the river’s brink, Leslie having no idea of my state of mind. He was in one of his sophisticated moods, conceited, reminiscent. ‘I couldn’t care for Mabel after that,’ he continued. ‘I pride myself on being broad-minded, but it was too much. Now it’s all merely a part of my past.’

Leslie was seventeen.

It was a freckled, fleecy day, with small clouds like strips of cotton wool running across the bright-blue sky, and the spring wind rattling the leaves. Leslie wore brown-and-white shoes, with Oxford trousers of a purplish shade, which were the fashion that year.

‘There are sides of life I hope you will never know, Christine,’ said Leslie. His handsome nose, which was rather too long, had caught the sun. His thick, matted ginger hair had caught it also, and the heated brilliantine was giving it a green appearance. ‘Little Christine,’ he added, on one of his chest notes. He put his arm round me, then withdrew it as though I had burned him. I asked him what the matter was.

‘I felt I had no right to touch you with such ideas going through my mind.’

‘What ideas?’ But I did not really want to know. My head ached. I was tired of Richmond. I longed to get on the bus and go home, let myself in quietly without disturbing my parents and go to my own room, which would be very cool and rather dark. I should have to tell him in a letter; I had not the courage to speak.

‘I heard something pretty shocking the other night. I ran into Dicky Flint.’

Leslie made a flinching gesture, probably suggested by Dicky’s name. He passed a hand over his eyes. He said in a bass whisper, ‘Do you know, there’s a brothel in Balham?’

I was six months older than he and had read more. I said I had always imagined there might be several.

Leslie leaped to his feet and clenched his hand upon his breast. He was breathing hard. He was not very tall.

‘Now what’s the matter?’

‘To hear such things – from your little lips!’

He presented his profile to the light. A little taken off the nose and added to the chin, and he would have been as fascinating as he thought he was. Even so, he was better-looking than the sweethearts of most of my friends, and I had been deeply flattered when he had first singled me out at the grammar-school dance, for in those days I was far from pretty, and self-conscious about my bust. I had let him kiss me in the gloom of the marquee, and afterwards we had danced in a dream on the square of grass lit by the headlights of the cars parked around it. We had fallen wildly in love. By the time my friends had made me fully aware that Leslie had an ominous mother and was commonly regarded as a little touched I was too deeply involved to break away, and certainly too proud to give my friends the satisfaction of seeing me do so. I believed Leslie could be reclaimed, that he could have sense knocked into his head. I comforted myself by thinking that he only seemed stupid because he was intellectual; he walked about at week-ends with a volume of Nietzsche under his arm. But our affair had now endured nearly eight months, and I knew that Leslie was irreclaimable.

‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

He looked bitter. He was busy working up a little quarrel, which he was prepared to lead into a lyric reconciliation. He said nothing. I picked daisies and began to make a chain. They looked charming in my green lap, and I was wearing green shoes to match, which was a fashion so unusual that other girls stared at me in envy. They were linen shoes, and I had painted them with oil-colours; the idea was taken from Little Women, and I was always afraid someone else would copy it.

Giving up any hope of making me speak first, Leslie dropped on to one knee at my side and laid his hand on my shoulder. He stared at me gravely, with an effect very slightly astigmatic. ‘You are so small,’ he said, using his chest notes again, ‘and so pure. I don’t want the world to touch you. I don’t want to think of you as – a Mabel.’

‘You couldn’t,’ I said; ‘my legs are the right length.’

Leslie said, ‘Pshaw’, a word he had read in a book and pronounced exactly. ‘Little one,’ he added. His lip drooped.

‘Let’s go back. Do you mind? My head aches.’

‘Lie in the long grass and I will stroke it away.’

I told him I really would like to go home, and I sucked in my cheeks a little to make myself look wan. He was very disappointed, for our recent Saturdays at Richmond had been rather chilly and wet, and this was the first fine day. ‘I wanted to take you on the river.’

This increased my determination to go home. I had once let Leslie row me before, and it was a humiliating memory. We had set out with difficulty, as he had been unable to.leave the bank till the man pushed him out with a boathook. He had then zigzagged down with the tide, catching crabs frequently, and banging into other skiffs; we had been shouted at. This had gone on for about an hour. When we turned back I realised that the wind was hard against us, and that, with Leslie’s frantic tacking, we should never get back to our base before nightfall. ‘Let me row,’ I had pleaded, but he had only bulged his eyes at me sternly and informed me that he did not treat his women like that. We had been battling for about an hour, not infrequently accompanied by shrieks of derision from other boaters, when it occurred to me to ask him if he had ever rowed before. ‘Once or twice,’ said Leslie with such little breath as he had left. He looked as if he might have a stroke.

‘Where?’

‘The pond on Clapham Common.’

When we reached the boathouse it was almost dark. The man with the boathook, who had to drag us in, was furious. Leslie was almost in tears, and I was actually so.

‘I couldn’t let you row me today,’ I told him now; ‘it would make my head a hundred times worse.’

‘Well, then,’ said Leslie, ‘come home and have tea at my place. My mater’s at Auntie’s. We’ll be by ourselves.’ He gave me a soft, suggestive look. ‘My kisses will cure you,’ he murmured in my ear. His breath smelled of jam.

It was only because I no longer loved Leslie that I assented to this compromise ending to our day. I did not want to hurt him more than I must, and he was miserable enough already. I had begun to realise for the first time that rejecting love, if not so painful as having it rejected, has a shame and an anguish of its own. ‘All right. But I won’t be able to stay long. And don’t let’s make love this evening – let’s just be nice and friendly with each other.’

‘Make love’ in those days did not mean what it appears to mean now. When boys and girls in their teens spoke of love-making they meant kissing, and little more.

‘I will cherish you,’ said Leslie with a strange, episcopal air, helping me to my feet. He picked up the daisy-chain that had dropped from my lap, looked at me meaningfully, pressed it to his lips and stowed it away in the vee of his Fair Isle pullover. He was not, I noted with some satisfaction, wearing the pair of brown-and-white shoes he had bought to go with his sporting attire, as I had condemned them and, after a long tussle of our wills, had forced him to hide away.

When we reached the row of houses in which he lived, on the outskirts of Tooting Bec Common, the light was falling into the ruddiness of a fine evening. The wind had ceased. The red bricks glowed rose red, and over the chimneys the sky was clear as water.

His house was the fourth in the row, a six-roomed villa with a green gate and a hedge of yellow privet.

‘We’ll pretend it’s our own little home,’ said Leslie. ‘ “Just tea for two, and two for tea”,’ he sang softly, as he put his key in the lock.

But he was wrong, for as we stepped into the fusty little passage we heard his fierce mother roar out, ‘Whaur hae ye been, ye silly swine?’

Leslie stopped and shivered. ‘To Richmond, of course, Mater,’ he cried in a light, rippling voice. ‘I told you. Where we always go.’

She came stamping out at us, square and red, her eyes flashing. She had just had a permanent wave, and her black hair looked like a woollen hat. ‘Is that ye, Chrristine? If ye’ve come for tea, ye’re too late the noo. As for ye, Leslie, I asked ye to go and get Feyther’s harrp from the shop, and hae ye done it?’

Leslie’s father was a harpist in a cinema orchestra and expected to be out of work soon, since the first talking pictures had just been shown in London. He was a shadowy little man, with Murillo eyes and reddish hair that lay back in sticky quills, like the feathers of a sparrow.

‘His new harrp! That he bought wi’ his ain insurance money!’

She turned to me. ‘Come on in, then, since ye’re here. Why dinna ye tell this silly swine to heed what his mither tells him?’

‘I was going to get his harp,’ Leslie cried; ‘that’s why I brought Christine back early. I meant to get it.’

His mother had by now herded us into the parlour, where there was just about enough room for three persons and the furniture. ‘I should think ye were, kenning that he’s got his puir foot in plaster! Gallivanting, that’s all ye care aboot. But then,’ she added, in a nasty tone of maternal pity, ‘ye’re only a silly bairn still, though ye talk big to the lassies.’

‘Oh, Ma!’ Leslie shouted and rushed upstairs to his bedroom, where he slammed the door. He had done this once before since I had known him, on another occasion of his mother’s tormenting, and I knew he was going to have a cry.

My head was aching badly now. I should have liked to go home there and then, but felt my duty was to Leslie, to comfort him as best I could; my heart was far more wrung than if I had still been in love with him, when I should merely have been enraged. Anyhow, his mother did not mean me to leave. She had, after all, a pot of tea that was still hot; and she liked me, as she seemed to like all young women, on the grounds that because they were all too good for Leslie they must therefore all be creatures of special quality. She fetched me a cup and sat down to talk to me. Her talk turned entirely on Leslie’s shortcomings; her resentment went back to his babyhood, when, apparently, he had invariably been sick after his bottles. Her accent had become far less Scottish, so much so that I began to wonder whether she had really spent her youth North of the Border. Leslie showed no signs of reappearing, so after half an hour or so of her displeasing reminiscences I made it plain to his mother that I was expected at home.

I had barely gone five yards along the street when I saw Leslie coming from the opposite direction. He was pushing a big gilded harp that was mounted on a wheeled platform, rather like the pedestal of a toy dog. His head was high, and he was whistling with piercing nonchalance. As I came nearer I observed that his face was a little swollen; but the smile with which he greeted me was bland. He stopped, giving a backward jerk to the harp, which had run along a little way on its own.

‘I do hope Mater hasn’t been wearing you out! She’s absurd today, isn’t she?’ He glanced at the harp. ‘I thought I’d pop along and get this for the Pater, just to save fuss.’

Two little boys on the other side of the street pointed and giggled. Leslie flushed. ‘One would look quite ridiculous with this thing if one cared one way or another.’

‘Not at all,’ I said.

‘Dignity is something one has or hasn’t. If you have it you don’t mind what you do. “The morality of masters and the morality of slaves.” Nietzsche.’

‘Leslie,’ I said, ‘your mother sounds so much more Scotch when she’s angry. Was she born in Scotland?’

‘By sheer chance, no,’ he replied, lifting his eyebrows and looking seriously down upon me. ‘She was born in Bungay. But her ancestry goes back and back. Back to the Stuarts,’ he added in a hush.

‘Give us a tune, mister!’ one of the little boys sang out.

Leslie flushed again. ‘Well, I’d better roll the damned thing in or Mater will be batey. She never forgets the days when we had servants, you know.’

I walked back with him to his gate.

He wedged the harp with a stone, so that it could not roll. ‘A sad day for us, little one. One memory the fewer.’

‘There’s always next week,’ I said, and felt a pang of despair, as I had intended that there should be no more next weeks with Leslie.

‘Kiss me.’

‘Not in the street. If your mother—’

‘The Mater has a soft heart underneath. She’s romantic, really, when you get to know her.’

‘Silly swine!’ said his mother from the doorway. ‘D’ye want the wurrld to see ye, standing there like a great gaby? Bring that thing inside!’

‘Coming,’ said Leslie. She retreated. He looked at me, his pale-blue eyes begging me not to despise him. I put my arms around his neck and kissed him heartily, paying no attention to the renewed jeers of the little boys or to the harp that had lurched away from the stone and was stuck in the privets.

Leslie held me for a moment, encircled. ‘Yes,’ he said weightily, ‘you love your man. You are that kind of woman.’

His mother began to hammer on the window-pane, and I went home.

Chapter 3

Iris Allbright was one of those ‘best friends’ sought by plain girls in some inexplicable spurt of masochism, feared by them, hated by them and as inexplicably cherished. She was abnormally pretty; she never went through the stage of childish or adolescent lumpishness, but was always delightful in shape and calmly aware of her own destiny. She was vain and rapacious. Having all the admiration, she could not bear for a jot of it to be diverted, however momentarily, elsewhere. We sealed our friendship in our first term together at school. It was to be our last together also, for I stayed on, preparing myself for a career of business or, if I proved unexpectedly brilliant, school-teaching; and Iris went off to a school for theatrical children at Dulwich, where desultory lessons were given in the morning and the pupils sang, declaimed, mimed, or pirouetted in tutus for the rest of the day.

Like others of her temperament, she passionately desired affection of all kinds. She needed little children to crow at her, dogs to lick her hands. From the age of twelve she had little love-affairs with boys, still in short trousers, from the grammar school; if there were no boys about she would divert her flirtatious glances to me, press her sweet-smelling, honeysuckle cheek against mine and beg me to assure her that I would never abandon her for another best friend. As we grew older, as we went walking together on the Common in the soft Sunday afternoons to meet our lads of the moment, my thraldom to her, and my desire to be rid of her for ever, seemed to increase in exact ratio one to the other. My most pleasurable secret fantasy was to imagine myself at her graveside, weeping bitterly because one so gentle and lovely should have died so young.

She spoiled everything for me. If a youth showed the slightest interest in me she exerted every ounce of her charm to draw him to herself. We used to go out with pairs of lads who were also ‘best friends’, one conspicuously more attractive than the other. Iris at once took the handsomer for herself, assuring me that the other was supremely fitted for me, because he was clever and so was I, and that she could foresee a lifetime of intellectual harmony ahead of us. If this clever boy accepted his rôle as plain best friend (male) destined for plain best friend (female) and even began to show some admiration for me, Iris would not rest until she had got him away from me, at the same time keeping a firm hold upon her original choice. If there were two apples and two to share them, she considered it a fair distribution for her to have both.

And yet, in a way, I loved her. By flirting with me occasionally in lieu of anybody better she forced me into a kind of masculine, protective rôle. It was unnatural to me and I tried to resist it; I wished to be feminine as she; yet sometimes I felt I was beginning to walk with a sailor’s roll.

Her femininity was absolute as that of pink roses in a basket tied with pink ribbons. She could wear dresses with flounces and floral patterns, saxe-blue ribbons fluttering from picture hats. Once I bought a bright-green hat of dashing cut, the sort I imagined Iris could not wear, and in it attended a rendezvous with our partners of the day.

‘Oh, isn’t that the most gorgeous tata!’ Iris exclaimed in her popular baby talk. ‘And it suits you marvellously. Doesn’t it suit her, Roger? Peter thinks you look Ooh, so bootiful!’

The boys grinned noncommittally.

‘Do let me try it, Christie, please – please – please! Just for once!’

Snatching it off my head, she went to the looking-glass and arranged it very carefully on her own. She pouted at her reflection. ‘No, it’s not for me! It’s Christine’s ownest hat. I look a hag. I look like a horse.’

‘You look marvellous,’ said Roger throatily, and of course she did. His throat contracted. Iris gave him a gentle flip on his nose.

‘You know I don’t.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘Peter knows I look like a horse! Don’t I, Petey?’

‘You look all right,’ he muttered, as throatily as Roger.

‘There! Petey knows. He knows a haggy old horse when he sees one. Christie shall have her property back again.’

And, taking off the hat, she rammed it back on my head, slightly sideways. I adjusted it, my fingers trembling. I believed it made me hideous. She had spoiled it for me and I never wore it again.

Yet . . . yet . . . As I say, in a fashion I loved her. She had secrets with me that she whispered in my ear, tantalising the boys by glances from her steel-bright, fanshaped eyes. When she had a cold she liked me to sit at her bedside, stroking her hand or her brow. And she used often to say, ‘There’s nobody like you, Christie; nobody but you understands me. And you’re the very first person in my heart.’

But when I fell in love for a little with the oafish Peter she abandoned Roger at once in order that I should no longer enjoy what could never be the prerogative of a plain ‘best friend’. She made me bitterly unhappy, and when in a dream I stood again at her graveside I gave a harsh laugh and said, ‘Ashes to Ashes.’

Leslie was the only lad she was unable to charm. From the first moment he had eyes only for me. Iris tried all her devices – the teasing ones, such as tweaking his tie out and asking him for a tiny snip of it as a present; the sultry ones, such as turning her back on him and sighing on a long ripple; the malingering ones, such as pretending to turn her ankle and asking him to rub it for her. He remained impervious; perhaps, I sometimes thought, in the hard hours of my disillusionment, because he was touched. I could not believe any perfectly sane person could prefer me to Iris.

Nevertheless, the dogged calf-love of Leslie was the supreme turning-point of my youth, and it broke my enslavement to my beautiful friend. Now that I was loved, I began to look more comely. I was relaxed by confidence; I started to buy, without any feeling of making myself ridiculous, softer and paler dresses. I walked more naturally. I danced better. I began to make fewer and fewer appointments with Iris; and perhaps she did not much mind, for her own young men, reassured by the fact that somebody, even poor Leslie, could regard me with unswerving devotion, gradually came to pay me small attentions that Iris found it imprudent for them to spare.

On the evening that I left Leslie to the harp I returned to find Iris on my doorstep. I had not seen her for a month or so; she greeted me with one of her moist open kisses dropped upon my cheekbone. ‘You horrible old stranger, you! You might have been dead for all I knew. I thought I’d come and rout you out.’

Dressed in a blue that was softened almost to violet by the light of the falling sun, she looked so charming that passers-by slowed their pace to stare at her. Sensitive to their admiration, she extended her arm to me at full length, jingling half a dozen blue and pink glass bangles, fashionable at the time. ‘Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle! Do you like them or do I look like a Christmas tree? Darling, I’ve been knocking and banging for hours, and not a sound from anyone.’

I guessed that my father and my Aunt Emilie must have gone to the cinema together. She was not real. . .