Therefore Choose (20 page)

“You've not turned out so badly.”

“The other day you berated me for not being desperate to marry. I haven't had such a good sight of motherhood. That's why I'm not going in for that popular form of female employment. Unsuited on account of early experience and genetic constitution.”

“Sounds as if you're suffering from a defence.”

“Sounds as if you've been reading Uncle Siggy,” she said. “It's not a defence against anything.”

“Hmm.”

“You assume everyone's the same as you, but they're not. And now you're telling me I'm a case.”

“I didn't say that at all.”

“Then why are you talking about defences? You think that really, underneath, like all women, I must want to get married and get on with a spot of procreation. I don't know how you men manage to keep thinking such things. You think I'm just longing to enter into contractual obligations that will only be to my disadvantage.”

“Everyone has aspects that are hidden from themselves,” he said.

“Listen to you.”

“D'you think you were affected by the war?” said George suddenly.

“Everyone was.”

“No, really, in yourself?”

“Not in the same way you've been. Being Irish, I was a neutral.”

“You think I've been affected, since you knew me, when we were students?”

George saw her glance at him, to see, he supposed, whether he was joking.

“You've lost your youth,” she said. “You've got a lot to get over. It'll take a while.”

“Is it so obvious? In what way?”

“You're serious.”

“I am.”

“You're preoccupied, sometimes difficult to reach. I don't remember that in you. When we were students you were quite unformed, a bit naïve, but you were open. I liked that. Now you're more formed, but there's a melancholy about you, that you've seen things, done things that were more than a body should have to see and do. There's a loss, not an emptiness perhaps, maybe the woman you told me about, Anna, from before the war.”

“I'm not open any more?”

“You're more wary. Anxiety, I suppose.”

“There is a loss,” he said. “Not a loss that just happened. Something I did.”

They were silent, together.

“I crossed the shadow line,” said George.

“Like Joseph Conrad said,” she replied. “From youth to maturity.”

“Not maturity,” he said. “Only adulthood.”

Almost without him realizing it
, the nights George spent with Bernardette became more frequent. She was affectionate, but she made no move to change the way she lived. George knew he had to make decisions. In the daytime, he would go back to his room on Judd Street, sometimes wander through Bloomsbury, Holborn, Marylebone, sometimes go to the British Museum, where he had obtained a ticket for the Reading Room.

George pushed the marmalade across the table towards Bernardette.

“I'm going to the Reading Room today,” he said. “Anything you'd like me to look up for you?”

“I've all the knowledge I need just now,” she said. “So you'll come round tomorrow evening?”

The fog was not bad when George left Bernardette's, and it was no worse when he caught the bus. But by the time they reached Mornington Crescent it was so dense you couldn't see a thing. The conductor reached out a brand from the luggage compartment, lit it, and a man in a beige trench coat walked in front of the bus, holding aloft the flaming torch so that the driver could see it. Someone in London Transport must have deemed this to be the best way for buses to proceed under these circumstances.

A few minutes later the bus stopped, and the man bearing the brand returned to the platform at the back of the bus in a fit of coughing. George offered to take his place.

“Keep eight or ten feet from the curb,” said the driver. “All I need is three or four yards from the car in front.”

At first George could see the curb to his left, but in front nothing. He walked forward, purposefully, his brand held high. Then there was nothing on his left; there must be a side road. The diesel-grumbling bus followed like a spaniel. Then the curb appeared again and — suddenly with relief, just a few yards ahead — he saw a stopped car. It was an Austin Seven, with tail lights that seemed none too bright. George stopped. He waved his brand and had a sudden memory of his father setting off in his Austin Seven. He hoped not to be crushed. The fog: how little we see.

Twenty minutes later George recognized they'd crossed the Euston Road. He waved his brand again, and the bus stopped. He walked back a few paces to the driver.

“This is where I get off,” said George. “Someone else'll have to take over.”

The driver grinned. “You'll probably want your fare back,” he said.

“If I could get my money back for everything that didn't go that well, I'd be a sight better off than I am now.”

Back in his room on Judd Street, George lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He thought about the remark he'd made to the bus driver about getting his money back. From his officer's salary, he'd saved enough money for now. What he didn't have is any idea what to do.

Love, he thought, that's the thing. What is it women have? Not sex, though that's part of it …

George had a shock of realization. He suddenly sensed his feelings for Bernardette were not very different from those he'd had for Anna. It's something they have. Or is it something they are? Being a woman. Something that makes the world … what, complete? Perhaps that's what all those stories are, of puppets that become animated.

Perhaps Bernardette was right, he thought. Perhaps I should get a job. What did Uncle Siggy say? “Love and work.”

But she's put the kibosh on love. Can't think about that. I'm not going to think about that.

So, work. All the work in getting qualified — time and effort and money — now I can't bear the idea of medicine. Repelled by it. What about the civil service?

George spent a long evening with Peter, whom he didn't see at all during the war, but whom he'd met twice since they'd been demobbed. Peter had had a fairly quiet war as an officer in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he'd risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He'd got married when he was on leave in 1944 to a girl from Henley, whom he'd known when he was growing up. They had a Georgian house in Islington and a child. He was in the Ministry of Town and Country Planning.

“How is your ministry?” said George. “Is it the kind of place one can feel good about?”

“I don't know about good,” said Peter. “It's good enough. Isn't that what one wants in life?”

“Is it somewhere I could be useful? With all the rebuilding.”

“You want me to make one or two discreet little inquiries?”

“Generally speaking,”
said Bernardette. “What do you mean by ‘generally speaking'?”

“I mean, I don't quite know where I am with you.”

George was in bed with Bernardette, and he felt moved by her in the same way as the first time: her generosity, the warm touch of her breasts against his chest.

“You could come on Mondays and Thursdays. I could make a space for you then, if that is not too coarse a way of putting it,” she said.

George didn't reply.

“Is it permanency?” she said. “Is that what you'd like, something on paper?”

“That's not it.”

“You don't like me putting it like that,” she said. “You'd like me to talk about love or something.”

“No,” he said. “I'm very touched. But I wonder whether I'm what you want. Really you want Pardou.”

“You mean you're not sure whether I'm what you want, now you've had a chance to look me over.”

“I don't know.”

“Boy all of a dither,” she said. “Finds very decent offer too much to pass up, but not enough to be enough.”

“It's not that,” he said.

“It's that Fräulein,” she said. “Even if you found her, she'd not be the same any more, and you wouldn't feel the same. You know that? She married your best friend.”

“Maybe I've changed.”

“For me, Pardou is not a ghost. When he's here, he's here. That's almost enough. I don't know why it isn't quite. Perhaps it will all emerge in my analysis. Perhaps that's where the Mondays and Thursdays come in. There'd be breakfast the next morning too, you know. You wouldn't have to leave too early.”

“An arrangement.”

“You fellas are not pragmatic enough. You're too romantic.”

“Like the Germans.”

“So that's what it was with them?”

“I went to see my friend Peter. He's in the civil service,” said George. “I think I might try that for a while.”

“If I was your mother, I'd give you a good shake. You've got perfectly good skills. You don't have to be a general practitioner, or take out gallbladders. There's a hundred things you could do. If you used your imagination, you'd be able to think of them. Go and be a doctor on a liner and bonk with all the unattached lady passengers who go on liners especially for that very purpose. Or go and do a piece of useful public health research on the Orkney Islands, now they're no longer a naval base.”

“That's what I don't seem to have, any imagination.”

“Oh God. Now here you are talking about your problems in just exactly that way we agreed you wouldn't.”

George pinched her on the bum. “You're being aggressive,” he said. “It's very improper for a psychiatrist to take advantage of a person in a vulnerable state, and it'll end up with me having to lay a complaint with the General Medical Council.”

“Well, now you're talking.”

George had not seen Bernardette
for a week. He took a note round to the hospital, to suggest that they meet at a restaurant on Charlotte Street.

“I've ordered a bottle of St. Emilion,” he said when Bernardette arrived, fifteen minutes late. “Can I pour you a drop?”

“Thank you kindly, sir. So how's the boy been since the last appointment?”

“I've been thinking about your offer, which I appreciate more than I can say. But I'm very sorry, I can't accept it in that form.”

“My offer?”

“Mondays and Thursdays. I've decided to join the civil service, and I'm being sent abroad. To the Continent.”

“So, you're thinking to negotiate a different arrangement?” she said. “An occasional weekend pass?”

“You're a very sweet person. You can't imagine how important it is to know that you like me.”

“You're likable enough. That's not the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“I'm the problem. You're the problem. We're the problem.”

George took a sip of wine.

“Come on then,” she said. “I give in. Tell me about it. It's all to do with the Fräulein? You can't bear to say you're going to Berlin, so you say ‘the Continent.' You've decided to join the civil service, but has the civil service decided to join you?”

“They have, actually. My friend Peter put in a word. I had a couple of interviews. They made a phone call to my CO, and one to my senior tutor at Cambridge.”

“Well.”

“They must have taken a shortcut. It only took them a few days, and they said they were pleased to have me.”

“Because even though he didn't go to the right school, the boy did go to the right university and got a First and all that, don't you know.”

“It probably helped. What they said to me is that it was unusual to have someone with my command of German, who'd had military experience, and also a medical background that would be useful in public health.”

“For the reconstruction, in these difficult times?”

“You can laugh if you like, but it will feel good to be useful.”

“So are you going to Berlin? And was the lovely Fräulein much discussed in the interviews?”

“I am going to Berlin. And here's the waiter, so maybe you should decide what you want to eat.”

After the meal they walked back to Arlington Road. She made Ovaltine. She was as affectionate as ever. He couldn't understand it. Most women would be angry.

“You still like me,” George said as they sat in her kitchen.

“You feel you've been away, and while you were away you were naughty. That's what you think. And worse than that, you've been fixing things up that I don't know about, so I should give you the cold shoulder? The power of the unconscious.”

“What's unconscious?”

“You're a funny chap. I don't think you ever listen to anything I say.”

“You mean about Pardou?”

“I mean about who I am, about what I'm doing in my life. You don't grasp the idea that every woman does not want to be a wife and mother, or that every woman doesn't have her head full of romantic stuff and nonsense.”

“Well.”

“I do like you, and I do like a bit of a cuddle, and I shall miss you. But I've got a number of friends, some men, some women, and I'm a bit sad if I don't see them for a while, but I'm glad when I do see them, whether I cuddle with them or not.”

“I wish I could be rational like you.”

“Me, rational? Are you some kind of roof job? I've got an appalling arrangement, which makes no sense, with a married man. I live in a city where the Irish are treated like excrement. I hang around in a hospital in which it is well known that as a woman I've no chance of going an inch farther than I've gone, where I am treated with contempt that is only very thinly veiled. And you call me rational.”

“Can I get a weekend pass?”

“We'll have to see. You need to take the interviews. There's one starts in a few minutes, and you'd better be ready. It involves coming upstairs and taking your knickers off, and mine too, as a matter of fact. And you better not have drunk too much of that claret. There's a second interview tomorrow morning.”