The Last Resort

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Genres: Black Humor; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

'A very cool and intelligent writer' TLS 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. ****************** Christine Hall, a mother in her late thirties, is on holiday on the south coast of England when she bumps into an old friend: Celia Baird, staying with her parents at the Moray hotel. Celia - eccentric, impulsive - is one of tangled group of friends who have Christine at their core. There's architect Eric Aveling (who happens to be having an affair with Celia); his wife, terminally ill Lois; and Junius Evans, Eric's business partner. When death affects a shift in the dynamics of the group, none of them expect the final outcome. Duty, guilt, secrecy, loneliness: the hidden side of marriage is uncovered as choices are thrust upon the characters. ****************** 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: 352

Sample

Chapter 1

After dinner it rained so heavily that nobody went out. The public rooms at the Moray were crowded: fires had been lit. It was abnormally cold for June.

I had nothing left to read and all the magazines had been taken by other people. I thought I would try to ‘think’, which was something Gerard could do in vacuo, sitting motionless for an hour at a time absorbed in the cinematic projections from his own head, but which I always found it hard to do for more than five minutes unless I were doing something else as well. Although I was then in my late thirties, I was well below the average age of the other visitors. I felt oppressed by elderliness and by the rain, resentful as a young girl who feels her life racing by when there are no entertainments and she has to sit still. I began listening to conversations; which was not easy, for voices at the Moray had the comfortable wash and muffle of the sea and were very seldom raised. But it is possible to throw the hearing as a ventriloquist throws the voice, and I was able to adjust my ear to a couple, a stark-looking old man and his small plump wife, a good deal younger, who were sitting on a sofa a few yards away from me, with a space between them. They might have quarrelled, or have been expecting a third party.

They looked vaguely familiar but not more than that; I did not know their voices. The man seemed to address himself angrily to a bowl of rhododendrons, as if their mauve Edwardian silkiness, their opulent, upholstered domestication, somehow annoyed him.

‘. . . I’d let them die before I turned out for them.’

She must have said, ‘Let who?’ Her gaze touched the flowers, twitched away from them. He said, ‘Wanting everything for nothing, pills for the slightest finger-ache; thank God I’m free of it.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. She leaned forward so that she could see, through the doorway into the reception hall, the girls, the porters, the desk, the switchboard, the lift. ‘What is she doing? Shall I go up?’

‘Leave her alone, she’s all right.’ He picked up the evening paper, thrust it under her nose. ‘Look at that, there’s what I mean. Some poor damned doctor hauled over the coals again.’

‘Do you want any coffee?’ She fumbled on the wall behind her, trying to find the bell.

‘Oh, leave it alone,’ he said, ‘leave it alone. It always keeps you awake.’

A woman who had been sitting next to me took off her glasses, folded her petit point with a decisive air, yawned, smiled a little above my head and went off towards the lift. She had left her own paper behind, and I was grateful. In it I found the story of a doctor upbraided by the coroner for refusing to come out at night to a farm labourer, who had then astonished and embarrassed him by dying.

When I had finished reading this and every other item (with the deep, illuminated pleasure I took to any kind of reading-matter if it were the only kind available) I saw that my angry doctor and his wife had gone, that I was the only person left in the room, and that a porter was going the rounds, discouragingly turning out every standard lamp but mine, and keeping a dulled, rapacious eye on that. I thought I would go upstairs and write to Gerard, which would be like talking to him.

It was still raining next morning, but there was a faint bloom of light upon the horizon, and over the West Pier a strip of cobalt blue just big enough, as I used to say when I was a child, to make a man’s shirt. I sat in the lounge for half an hour, waiting for the sun to come out and finishing my letter. My couple were there, still with the space between them; this space, as in Giorgione’s Storm, now seemed to me to be pregnant with action. I should not have been surprised to see it suddenly filled with Banquo. The woman lifted her arm, raised it to her head, and I knew what she was going to do next: she was going to see that her ear-rings were firmly in place, to give each screw a turn. It was so familiar a gesture that I was filled with irritation. Who were these two, and where had I seen them before? They were not speaking this morning. He sat reading the Times, she sat touching her ear-rings, her cheeks, her hair, now and then slightly changing her position, recrossing her legs, redisposing her arm along the chair as if it were some objet de vertu that must be precisely displayed.

I went out to post my letter, go to the bank, do one or two pieces of shopping. Then I walked down to the promenade and leaned over the rail to watch the scurrying sea. The light had now spread across the skin of the water, and the olive greyness was giving way to a firm and resonant blue. Sun flickered on the wet pebbles. Along the groin, acid-green with weed, a child teetered like a tightrope-walker, balancing spade and pail. It was still chilly, but there was hope of a fine afternoon, and to the left of the bay the cliffs sparkled through ectoplasmic mist as though to them summer had already come.

Suddenly the sun tore the clouds open and poured through. The pebbles sent up steam. The pink and shiny roadways steamed, and the roofs of cars. Soon there were deck-chairs on the stones, men wearing handkerchiefs knotted at the four corners, girls in bathing-suits spreadeagled on towels as if to be torn by horses. All the edge of the sea glittered with children.

I sat through the morning on a scrap of sand, enjoying the surprise of the heat. It had been a day like this when Gerard and I were married. I felt very happy. I did not feel like returning for lunch to the Moray, where they would have all the grainy, sand-coloured shades pulled down against the light. I ate at a café in the open air, went to the county ground to watch cricket (partly because Gerard had taught me to like it, but even more because he loved it himself) and returned at teatime with scorched arms and neck.

I recognised Celia Baird sitting farouche and neat between her parents. As usual, she was expensively dressed; as usual, only her hat became her. Her other clothes looked too restrained, too elderly, always a little too large. I noticed that she was wearing a good deal of jewellery, a pearl necklace and ear-rings, a pearl and diamond brooch, a large, old-fashioned ruby ring. She was looking through a smart magazine with the restless, rather angry air she had when she thought about buying things. I thought how much she had aged. She glanced up and saw me. Her eyes, which were rather small and of a very light, clear blue, met mine for a moment without recognition: then she was transformed, her face brilliant and full of expectancy. She said something to her mother, who asked her to repeat it, then quickly smiled and nodded in my direction. Celia jumped up and came across the room to me, leaving the gap for Banquo or Giorgione to fill.

‘How wonderful to see you!’ Her voice was light and rather thin, pretty, a young girl’s voice. She did not prattle, but in such a voice could have done so. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

I had met Celia just after the end of the war. She ran, or partly ran, a small secretarial agency in Knightsbridge, where I had gone in my search for a typist for Gerard and me to share. Somehow we had become quite friendly; she had been to our house once or twice. She had a false-innocent brand of wit that amused us, and she seemed solitary. We knew little about her except that she lived for the greater part of the year with her parents. Once we had seen her with them in London, at a restaurant, but we were lunching on business so did no more than wave to her then. During the past year or so we had lost sight of her.

She repeated, as though I had refused to answer her question, though in fact she had not given me time to do so, ‘No, but seriously, what are you doing here?’

I told her I was on holiday, that Gerard was in America on a business trip, that I was tired after finishing a book and that I did not much like being in our own house without him.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I hoped he was with you.’ She said this with so frank and thorough an air that I remembered how much I had liked her, and wondered again why we had drifted away from each other. I asked her if she were on holiday too.

She looked surprised. ‘I live here. It’s far less nuisance for Father and Mummy – no horrible servants glowering and hating you, no business of stoking boilers. Dull as death, of course, but what’s that? And I’m usually in London mid-week. I’ve got a room.’

She asked after my son. I told her he was away at school.

‘Oh yes, of course! I’m so sorry, I don’t remember things. I expect he’s still as handsome, like a very beautiful stork.’

She looking out of the window, peering under the blind into the bright street. For a moment she seemed to forget me. The light sparked the stones of her ring. I admired it. She turned back to me, smiling. ‘It’s Mummy’s, she thinks it’s hideous. You must come over and meet them, but not now. I enjoy being off the chain.’

I said I was wondering where I had seen them before.

‘But have you? Oh yes, in the Connaught. You were with Junius Evans.’

‘Why, do you know Junius?’ I asked her.

She said, ‘He’s the friend of a friend of ours. I waved to all of you that day, but he didn’t respond. He was feeling weighty about something. He believes it gives him great weight if he pretends not to see people. Do you like him? I’m never sure that I do. But I do when he’s actually present.’

I said I knew him only slightly; at that time he had been writing an introduction to an architectural book Gerard had commissioned.

‘It must have been dreadful,’ she said. ‘He sounds so grand but writes such bad grammar. No’ – she had this trick of beginning a comment with ‘no’, as if I had said something that needed correction – ‘it’s his partner we know so well. Eric Aveling – have you ever met him? He was the son of Mummy’s greatest friend. We’ve known him all our lives.’

Looking across at her wide-spaced parents, who seemed to be waiting in some side-pocket of time for the liberation of a stray word or the striking of the clock, I was puzzled that she spoke so collectively.

She added, ‘He may be down next week-end. I’m not sure. Will you have coffee with us after dinner? You won’t want to dine with us, it would be too trying; if I were you I’d fight shy. But if you’d come out with me tomorrow night, we could find somewhere more cheerful. Shall we? I could book a table’ – she mentioned an extremely expensive and mildly raffish new hotel in a neighbouring resort – ‘and we could dance with seemly pansies who sing the words in one’s ear. Do say you will!’

I remembered then her lavish generosity. She was well-off, had inherited money of her own, and she loved to share. Sharing brightened her, gave her warmth and confidence, though she performed this sharing with an air of almost deceitful diffidence.

I said I should love to go out with her.

‘We could dress up,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to ask Mummy, but she won’t come.’

Chapter 2

When she brought me over after dinner to introduce me to the Bairds they reacted as if I were the signal for which they had been waiting since the beginning of their lives. The old man sprang up with a crackling of bones and made a great crockery-breaking gesture of the arm towards the nearest chair. Mrs. Baird half rose, grasped my hand and swung back on it into her seat.

‘I think we must call you Christine, too. Celia’s told us about you so often that we really feel we know you.’ She touched the ear-rings to see they were in place, gave a little anticipatory gasp and sat back with an air of relaxation, as if expecting me to start making jokes. As I did not immediately speak, she began looking about her for the bell. ‘You must have some brandy, I always think it settles one. Daddy, will you call Simpson? You’re nearer than I am.’

Her husband put his finger to the buzzer and left it there. I could hear it drilling away out in the hall.

When the waiter came she said, ‘The Biscuit Dubouché, mind. Not that other stuff. How’s the cold tonight? You must tell Mrs. Simpson that the old remedies are the best – mustard and water.’

Baird gave me a phosphorescent smile. ‘Hear her prescribing? I don’t stop her. I’m a cipher. How do you like it here?’

I praised the comfort, the beds, the very old waiter concerned because he thought I did not eat enough.

‘Finnegan,’ said Celia. ‘That’s why I didn’t see you before. You must have a table in the L.’

‘You haven’t seen your friend,’ said Mrs. Baird, ‘because you’ve been shutting yourself up in your room. It’s unhealthy. And unsociable!’ She addressed me suddenly. ‘Do try to make her less unsociable, Christine – we hardly get any of her company.’

Celia said, ‘Now don’t start picking sides again, Mummy. Christine’s in my team, anyway. She wouldn’t be able to read properly down here any more than I can.’ She turned to me. ‘Finnegan’s very good at the fatherly business, he gets all the biggest tips. Acually, he’s probably a pimp.’

Mrs. Baird pursed her lips in mock disapproval, as if deprecating but admiring a forward child. ‘What will your friend think of you! She’ll think we haven’t brought you up properly. Poor old Finnegan!’

‘Carcinoma,’ said Baird. ‘He won’t be here this time next year.’ He said the word so loudly that nervous heads turned. There was a sort of rising flutter, then a subsidence, as after a scuffle of fowls. Silence fell like feathers coming to earth.

He said after a moment or so, in a manner faintly propitiating, ‘I expect he left it too late. These people always do. He may not know, of course. I know.’

The brandies came. He sniffed at the glass, pressed the bell again.

‘Simpson! This isn’t the Biscuit!’

The waiter said he had poured it himself.

‘I don’t care who poured it. It’s more like Marc.’

‘Oh, Arthur,’ said Mrs. Baird, ‘your silly old nose can’t be working properly. It’s lovely!’

‘Celia! You smell it. Taste it. Go on.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘You, Mrs. Hall!’ Unlike his wife, he did not intend to use my first name. ‘Go on, let’s have some sense out of you!’

His tone was so rude that I was embarrassed; I could not think at once of a soothing reply. Mrs. Baird and Celia, however, merely looked bored. They withdrew, as it were, to the stalls, and sat with folded hands.

‘I don’t think I’d know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about brandy. I don’t often drink it.’

The waiter filled in time by replacing ashtrays.

‘You! Simpson! Go and drink these yourself and bring us three more. The right stuff this time!’

When the waiter had gone Celia said, ‘You do love to pay for your pleasure, Father.’

I did not understand what she meant. Seeing this, she smiled at me and patted Baird’s arm. The weariness of her face was replaced by a look of strong, secreted happiness; I felt it had nothing to do with her parents nor with me. She explained, ‘It is Simpson’s Saturday treat. Father doesn’t like to say, “Buy yourself a drink”, so he complains about the brandies, orders another round and gives the first lot to Simpson. It is true.’

‘It isn’t true,’ said Baird. ‘He brought us muck. But as he doesn’t know muck, and as I don’t want him to get into trouble below stairs, I cover up for him. And don’t set up your opinions over mine!’ This last exhortation was delivered with so savage an air that I was alarmed; however, he said nothing else for a time, but sat back in his chair as though some necessary routine task had been completed.

He was tall, tremulously thin, the skin pocketed upon his bones. Scraps of indigo hair clung like cobwebs over his narrow skull; they seemed to bother him; now and again he smoothed them down with a wetted finger or pressed them back. He had curious flat brown eyes, the colour of pitch-pine, and false teeth that were too shapely and a little too luminous, slightly bluish. He looked like a ruined chapel.

Mrs. Baird would have looked merely comfortable and null but for her restless movements and for her small shrewd eyes that appeared to be faceted about the pupil. They were a curious blue, very pale, with an overwash of hazel; below them the papery skin was pouched and shiny. An expensive, heavy scent threw its gauze about her; in an empty room one could easily have found her favourite chair. Just as Celia’s clothes seemed too loose, hers seemed too tight. The ribs of her corset striped with shadow the light-blue silk of her dress; she might have had a broad, barrel-shaped skeleton.

When the matter of the brandies had been settled she began to talk to me easily, while Celia retired into a kind of smiling, daughterly silence. She told me they had lived at the Moray since 1946, when her husband had retired from medicine as a protest against the National Health Act. (It struck me that he was getting too old to practise, in any case; he must have been seventy or more.)

‘So I did,’ Baird put in. He seemed pleased to hear himself discussed, but a little on the alert; like a writer content to hear his work criticised, but ready to correct the critic on any minor textual slip.

‘I’m afraid he hates the working-class,’ his wife added surprisingly, lowering her voice slightly as if to reveal a naughty but lovable foible. ‘He doesn’t march much with the times. Of course, you don’t have to, here.’

‘The Moray is Father’s stronghold,’ Celia said. ‘If they insist on chanting the Internationale in the streets he has only to ring for Simpson and have them moved on.’

‘I suppose you think that’s funny,’ said Baird.

‘Or “Men of England wherefore plough”. The Internationale may be a little strong for the times.’

‘Don’t tease Daddy,’ said Mrs. Baird. ‘He knows more about things than you do.’ She turned to me again, told me she had read one of my books and expressed astonished admiration to hear that I wrote in longhand and did not type them. ‘You must get tired out. I don’t know how you do it.’

Celia went out to the reception desk to buy more cigarettes for herself and for me. When she had gone her mother said quickly, ‘I do hope you’re staying here for a while. It can’t be amusing for Celia to see only old people.’

I fancied it was not amusing for Mrs. Baird either.

‘Do take her out of herself. Of course, I don’t know what she does when she’s in London.’

Now the appeal of this was unmistakable: Mrs. Baird passionately wanted to know, and hoped to use me as a spy.

‘She doesn’t have to work,’ Baird said. ‘There’s no need for it. It’s all tomfoolery. She does it to be independent.’

‘Of course I do,’ said Celia, coming back. ‘Why not? It makes me more interesting, if I have a topic of conversation.’

She insisted on paying for my cigarettes. I tried to protest but she stopped me impatiently. ‘Oh, don’t be silly. You shall buy the next lot.’ She pushed away the money I had offered her as if it really were dirty, as if it were in itself offensive. Yet in the next breath she reminded her mother that she owed her seven and six.

‘What for? The coat-hangers?’

‘I got you three. I can’t have you throwing your clothes all over the floor. It’s revolting.’

‘You see how my little girl treats me?’ Mrs. Baird looked delighted. ‘That’s what we all come to, in time. You’ve got a boy, haven’t you, Christine? You wait till he’s old enough to boss you. Celia is very bossy; aren’t you, darling?’

‘I expect so.’ Celia’s answer was so distrait that I looked at her, and saw that she was filled with a kind of impatient joy. She said to me, ‘Could you bear to walk along the front? It’s quite fine out.’

I fetched my coat and we left the hotel. It was a calm evening, smelling strongly of the sea. The white electric moons, strung for miles along the coast in their diminishing rings, were blurred in a slight sea-mist.

Celia said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

Chapter 3

She did not, however, speak until we had gone a hundred yards or so, but hurried me on with a buoyant stride that was almost a skip. It was as if she still feared to be within earshot of the Moray.

Then she said, ‘I’ve got someone coming down.’

She smiled to herself, not looking at me. I thought she would continue, but instead she suddenly stopped. We were at the end of a square, in which there was a garden mound, walled and balustraded, thick with shrubs that had been fixed in a stoop of forty-five degrees by the prevailing wind. Their salty incrustations sparkled in the gilding of the street lamps; they might have been polyps in some dense and rambling forest of the sea.

‘Salicaceae,’ she said, in a new, light voice, ‘that’s what used to fascinate me when I was at school. They took us to some cliffs by motor-coach once, so we could see for ourselves. There were some bright-green pulpy plants – you squashed them and the sea came out. And there were sea-pinks.’

She walked on. Her fur cape slipped from her shoulders, and she hitched it back impatiently.

After a while she spoke of Gerard again, tenderly, as if she had known him very well. She envied me, she said, but in a nice way; a happy marriage was happy for other people. ‘I often wish I’d married; but then again, I don’t know.’

I thought I might ask her why she had not, knowing that she did indeed want to confide in me but was uncertain how to begin. She turned to me, then, with an air of eagerness, as if I had released words from her; but I guessed that she was substituting them for others more important.

She told me of a youthful love affair that had lasted some years. The man had been talented, poor and idle; he was always going to make good, to make enough money to marry on. ‘I hadn’t any of my own at that time, and certainly Father wouldn’t have helped. It was quite right of him not to help. That would have been entirely the wrong way to go about things.’ So the affair had drifted on. They had not slept together, since it had been drummed into Celia by her mother that once a man had had you he didn’t want you; he would always ‘throw it up in your face’.

She laughed; she was mocking and radiant. ‘The things we believe! But he had much the same ideas. I’ll show you his photograph, if you remind me.’ She stopped under a lamp. With Celia, to propose a thing was very often to perform it at once. She opened her bag, displaying a chaos of papers, cosmetics, combs, pens, pencils; she was so neat in her person that such untidiness seemed a wild incongruity. Raking among the tousle, she pulled out a passport photograph, cracked and dogeared. ‘Like Dorian Gray, I think, but you mustn’t be misled. It was not that at all. He was very ruttish. It was just that it could never be me, because he respected me.’ She paused. ‘How I used to cry at nights when he’d been making one of his dismal confessions! He was always confessing.’

The affair had finally petered out. Mrs. Baird had never approved of him; Celia had come to believe she was right. He had disappeared for over a year and had turned up again, married, and, she said, ‘full of effrontery, he made me a sort of godmother to his wife. She was all right; I didn’t care. But I was twenty-seven, then, and it was a bit late.’

Though she had told me this story in order to delay or to conceal another, she had been swept by it into the past. Under her happiness of the moment was the darkening of past defeat; like sand beneath the shallows, it discoloured the water while leaving the surface bright.

Shortly after the end of the affair she had inherited money from an aunt – enough, invested, to bring in five hundred a year. I gathered that Dr. Baird had been much displeased. Though he himself had ample private means and needed no more money, he felt he had been by-passed and insulted. For Celia this had meant a liberty it had never previously occurred to her to desire. She and a friend had bought up a modest secretarial agency and had made it pay. They did not take much out of the business, only enough to pay the rent of a two-room flat on the north side of Hyde Park. ‘It works very well; we have a room each, and usually stay in it. We like each other, but not to talk a lot, if you understand me. We have our own lives, and I assure you I have very little idea what she does with hers.’

It puzzled me that Celia, who was more than usually eloquent, should find such a relationship possible. I said so.

‘Am I eloquent?’ She was flattered. ‘No, but, you see, my life with the parents is one thing – I like to please them. In London I like to please myself.’

We were passing a large hotel on the sea front, turreted, pinnacled and blazing with light. The plants on the floodlit balconies showed spinach-green. Music thumped out and the shadows of dancers weaved across the blinds. ‘Isn’t it appalling?’ Celia said. ‘Let’s go in.’

It was often possible, I thought, to guess the financial position of women by the way they entered public places. Celia pushed open the doors of this sea palace as if they were in the way, as if everyone were in her way. She hitched her furs, put a proprietary hand on my arm, and drew me into the largest and brightest of the several lounges. A waiter led us to a table. She objected to it, made him find us another. With a clink of bracelets, she ordered brandy. I noted that her finger-nails were remarkably small, that the pink varnish contrasted oddly with the utilitarian brown of her hands, which she used oddly. When she drew out a note from her purse she crooked her little finger like someone over-genteel lifting a teacup. The crooked finger, I felt, was a kind of secret sign for the benefit of waiters; she was treated with great deference.

She sat for some time listening with pleasure to the music. The band was playing some nostalgic tune of the early ’thirties. I thought of Ned, to whom I had once been married, and remembered that we had danced to it.

‘Tunes of our era,’ Celia said. ‘I feel about them as Mummy feels about The Belle of New York. I think of people like us, you and me, as veterans of the Spanish War. I used to carry banners, I and my young man. The parents were incensed. Did you care?’

I said I had cared, that they had been horrible years, but at least we had been alive. We had gained more than we knew from having a Cause.

‘Oh, but do we want Causes?’ Celia asked, looking suddenly prim and rather shocked.

I said that now we could see the effect of everyone being without them.

‘That’s what Father can’t understand. For him, the revolution howls up the front night and day. He doesn’t realise that to all intents and purposes it’s been consolidated. At any rate for the time being. Eric says he intends to be the last grandee.’

It was as if a light had flashed up. I knew beyond doubt that this was the name she had wanted to speak.

‘Eric Aveling,’ she said. ‘Junius is the junior partner. Aveling, Hart and Evans.’

She spoke the name of this firm as if it were a line of poetry, beautiful and gnomic.

‘He’s coming down next week-end. Will you be here?’

She did not wait for a reply. She was released, she could now speak.

‘He’s someone I want.’

This wanting gave her a look of fulfilment. She lay back in the deep chair, relaxed with love. ‘Oh, you don’t know,’ she said, ‘how wonderful it is to talk!’

She told me how, after years of friendship, they had fallen in love, had become lovers. She still felt strange with him; whenever they met she felt an initial shyness. Her parents, of course, knew nothing; this was an affair of secrecy, snatched moments, snatched nights – there had once been a snatched week. ‘It’s so extraordinary,’ she said, ‘that it should have been me. When you think that he’s been looking at me for years. I can’t get over it. But the trouble is Lois.’

The look of rapture left her, though the graveness of love remained. Before speaking again, she put out her cigarette and lit another; offered the case to me and dropped her matches, which, as the box was badly fitted, spilled all over the carpet. The waiter ran to pick them up. She wait. . .