“Yoo-hoo! Vicky?”
“Hullo, Lou darling!” called Amy, coming out of the bedroom with a slowness that contrasted with her eager voice.
They met at the top of the stairs and kissed.
“Where’s Stebby?” asked Amy as they went into the bedroom. She had not yet learnt the finer shades in dealing with her fellow-beings, though she was learning fast. “Isn’t he coming?”
“Stebby,” explained Lou, arranging her fur coat on a hanger and speaking with her back to Amy, who had reseated herself on the bed, “is staying over Christmas with some other friends. He sends you his love and a rather filthy bracelet he chose when he wasn’t quite sober and says will you forgive him for being so rude.”
“I’m awfully sorry he can’t come, because it would have been so much nicer for you,” said Amy soberly.
Lou came over to her and gently patted her cheek.
“One day, honey, you’ll get a prize,” she said. Her eyes moved to the roses by the bed. “And how’s Albert?”
“Oh, he’s quite well, thanks, only he’s still out on his visits and I do wish he’d come in. They’ve got ’flu down in the Polak quarter. Oh, those roses came for you.”
“So I see,” murmured Lou, who was reading the card. Then she tore it into bits, but she was smiling.
The telephone bell rang downstairs.
“Perhaps that’s Bob!” said Amy eagerly, but a minute later Myron called:
“Ellen van Damm called up. She says is the baby here yet.”
“Oh … thank her and say not yet and wish her a Happy Christmas, will you?”
“O.K.”
“Do you still have that habit of worrying yourself sick every time Bob’s a bit late?” inquired Lou, addressing the reflection of her sister-in-law which she could see in the glass. Amy’s face was fuller and rather tired. She wore an ample house-coat of dark material richly striped with satin. (This was left from her pre-Prize wardrobe: she could no longer afford expensive clothes.) She looked plain, but more dignified than she would ever look until the one thing that it seemed to lack was added to the picture she made: the child in her arms. She nodded, smiling shamefacedly, and Lou smiled at her in the glass and went on making herself a mouth in silence, while Amy listlessly glanced at two Christmas cards; a severe fourteenth-century Adoration of the Magi (British Museum, price twopence) from Miss Lathom; and a frivolous ballet scene by Degas (Heals, price a shilling) from Lady Welwoodham, who clung to the atheism that had been fashionable and advanced in her girlhood.
Presently Lou said:
“Helen called up this morning from San Francisco. She’s going to be married in the New Year.”
“Oh? Who to?” Amy’s tone was no more than polite, for her increasing nervous anxiety about Bob made it difficult to give her full attention to anything, and she had seen Helen only once, on that morning at Boone’s flat.
“A barrister out there. Much older than she is. Plenty of potatoes, Aunt Carol says. He’s got two ex-wives.”
Amy pulled a face.
“Oh, well, maybe it wasn’t his fault, he sounds the idealistic type, from what Helen said,” soothed Lou, feeling a second’s impatience with Amy’s schoolgirl standards.
“Where’ll they live?”
“In San Francisco. He’s got a ranch out there, too.”
“I’m glad,” said Amy, trying to remember Helen’s face. She made an effort to show more interest and went on, “She’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t she?”
“She is.”
“You’d think she’d have got married before.”
“You certainly would,” said Lou quietly, shutting the lid of her flapjack.
“Well, I hope she’ll be happy, anyway.”
“I hope so, too,” said Lou, turning away from the mirror with her face finished.
“Look——” said Amy, struggling off the bed. “I must go down and write a little bit of my story; you don’t mind, do you?”
The telephone bell rang downstairs.
They waited, smiling at one another in silence, until the shout came up the stairs—
“Miss Julia Cordell called up. She said——”
“Is the baby here yet——”
“Is the baby here yet——”
chanted Lou and Amy together, laughing.
“Give her my love and say not yet, and wish her a happy Christmas, please, Myron.”
“O.K.”
“I want to make a call,” said Lou, lying down on the bed and picking up the telephone. “You go down and write your little bit and I’ll be right down.”
Amy went slowly out of the room; leaving Lou to make her call. To talk in the new voice that she had acquired in a year of marriage, while she swung one foot, and stared at the roses beside her bed. So what? she thought, listening to another voice, charming and indistinct, speaking from two hundred miles away. I always knew it would be this way, and it’s lots of fun sometimes, and anyway it’ll never be any different. So what?
But Amy went slowly downstairs to the little room with walls covered with books where she usually wrote, switched on an electric plate which stood in one corner and put a saucepan on to heat; and then sat down, with a sigh, at the Heal desk which had come from London and opened the scribbled folder of blotting paper that held her Story, and tried to write.
Every two or three minutes the bell rang, and Myron or Joe, functioning in strictest rotation, came up to let in the Sicks. There are a lot to-night, he’ll be busy when he comes in, thought Amy. Perhaps he won’t have time to sit with me as he usually does. It is Christmas Eve, but I’ll try not to show I mind about it. Half of her mind was on her story and half was darkening beneath an oppression of anxiety, the legacy from that night when Bob had gone out to post a letter and had not come back. She heard the tramp of heavy boots in the lobby, and excited Jewish voices (operatives from the big new clothing factory recently opened in Alva which was helping to give the town the beginnings of civic self-respect), and the thick voices of Poles, and through all the confused sounds the voices, like flutes, of young children. Alva had already christened Bob “The Kiddies’ Doctor.”
Amy realized that the life led by Bob and herself was a most unusual one. They were young, gifted, healthy, and had some private means, yet Bob had chosen to set up in practice in a half-derelict town where the people were uneducated, narrow-minded and suspicious; and where his work was as hard as it was apparently unexciting. They lived in a comfortable but ugly and ordinary house, run with the help of an old man, a boy, and a temperamental Jewish girl who was often ill, and Amy did much of the cooking herself. “They have no real culture, no useful contacts, no social life, no fun!” Mrs. Boadman never wearied of saying with her eyes getting rounder and more spiteful at each “no.” “Crazy! They’re just two crazy people.”
But Amy and Bob were so busy and happy that they did not notice the lack of useful contacts and social life. Though at first they had found the Alvarites puzzled and prejudiced against them because, possessing most of the equipment for a good time, they did not want one, the Alvarites were gradually won over by Bob’s care of their sick children and by Amy’s simplicity. They knew who she was, of course, for the papers had made a two days’ wonder out of her marriage to Bob following on the shooting of Dan; and at first the women especially could not understand why she did not start a literary circle or otherwise try to raise the cultural standards of the town. But at last it dawned upon them (as it had dawned upon Lady Welwoodham’s set in London) that apart from her books Amy was dumb; a homey little thing; just folks; and they left her more or less in peace. It was all she wanted, for she was happy. Their love had survived those small shocks of discovery that must follow such romantic beginnings as theirs had been, and now Lou’s name for them, Victoria and Albert, was amusingly apt.
Much of Bob’s natural cheerfulness had returned to him, and his example, rather than his persuasion, was making Amy into a woman. His sweet temper inspired her to control her o
wn passionate one, and his unsuspicious friendliness helped her see the best in people. Sometimes he gave her a gentle, laughing little lecture when she had been bitter over some betrayal or slight; and did not fully know how this hesitant advice penetrated her nature and drew its suppressed sweetness, in an agony of love and remorse, to the surface. With every day and night that they were together, her character settled more certainly in those lines leading towards “an old age serene and bright And lovely as a Lapland night.” How beautiful this slow but steady disentangling of the knots in the human spirit can be, only the priest and the true lover know.
They often talked over the strangeness of their story and wondered at it, and always came to the same puzzling question that stopped all further speculation: did the things that had happened to them happen because they would have happened anyway, or did they happen because the Three Dreams had come to Amy and caused her to act in a certain way?
And all the dreams came true in time, including the dream of the Swimming Girl. On the first day that Amy went out alone after her illness, a torn piece of newspaper had blown against her ankles as she stood waiting to cross the road, and as she glanced down she had seen the loathsome speckled photograph of Dan’s cabin on the month-old page, and had fainted. That had been a moment! Never would she forget it. And on the delayed honeymoon that they took after Bob was qualified, they had motored down to Florida and swum naked from an island in the warm blue sea. (“But are we doing this because we’d have done it anyway, or because I had the dream and that made us want to make it come true? Oh heck! it’s crazy!” and Bob had dived under water, shaking his head in utter bewilderment.)
Whatever the explanation was, they felt that it could not be so important as the fact that their story made them feel that in a special way they belonged to one another.
“Fated,” Lou would say, looking at them with her philosophical smile, carefully untouched by wistfulness. “It was Meant. Even I, corrupted as I am by the life of Morgan café-society, can see that it was Meant. Vicky and Albert! Bless you, my children.”
As she sat awkwardly at the desk trying to write, Amy suddenly put her head down on her arms and stayed so, trembling.
It was thus that Bob, a few moments later, found her.
She started up and glanced round as he came into the room, then turned away with an attempt to pretend that she was writing, but it was too late; tears were running down her face and he had seen them. He came straight over to the desk, put his arms round her, and half-led, half-carried her to the couch.
When he had comforted her in silence for a little while, he said gently but in a trouble tone—
“Darling, you promised, you know.”
“I know, Bob. I’m awfully sorry. I couldn’t help it,” she answered in a stifled voice, not lifting her face from his shoulder.
“I’m not mad at you, but you must try to get a hold on yourself or where’ll we be when the baby comes?”
Then she did look up, and answered quickly and proudly, “I can manage that, I’m not afraid of that a bit. I’m longing for the baby. It’ll be a part of you and me, and then if anything happened to you or to it, there’d always be the other one, you see.”
“But darling” (he leant back against the wall and put his arms behind his head, with the briefest glance at the clock on her desk: the waiting-room was already full of patients) “why should anything happen to me or the baby?”
“Oh, I don’t know, but things do. Everything’s so dangerous nowadays. And we’re so happy that I’m afraid sometimes it seems too good to be true.”
He shook his head.
“I’m not. Whatever made the world meant men and women to be happy together with a home and kids. We’re lucky but we’re normal, too. Everybody ought to be like us. That’s what was meant.”
She listened, her fear already retreating to the back of her mind because of the comfort of his presence. If only he need never go out again! she thought; and then smiled at her own absurdity. He smiled too, and let his arms fall tiredly.
“Is that my soup?” he said, glancing at the little saucepan on the electric plate in the corner.
“Oh, I’m so sorry: you must be starved:” She got up and went over to the plate and poured out the soup, while he watched her. “That was getting into such a state—I forgot. I’m an awful wife to you.”
“Queer to think the baby might be here this time to-morrow,” he murmured, as she came slowly over to him with the tray.
She sat down beside him and lovingly watched his face. It was already losing the indefinable charm of first youth, but it was gaining the rarer charms of maturity and peace. Presently he said:
“I can’t think how to get you out of this worrying about me.”
“I’m all right now, darling, truly I am. I’ll try not to be like that again.”
“Yes, but——” he shook his head, and finished the soup. Then he said, leaning a little towards her:
“See here—suppose we admit we’re happier than most people, and so we’ve more to lose. Perhaps we’ll even have to pay for our happiness. All right, then. So what? We’ll have had it. Isn’t it better to realize how happy we are, and take the risks that may go with our happiness, than never have anything—get lost, go rotten, want the wrong things? We’ve had the right things. Nothing can ever take that away. Does that comfort you?”
She nodded, but absently, for she was looking at his face.
“I do love you,” she said at last in a low tone.
He caught her hand and held it.
“And I love you,” he muttered, returning her look. “So much.”
There was a long silence; and to both of them there seemed to grow in the room a spirit of deep happiness and peace: the spirit that can never leave the world while men and women love one another, and love the children that they make.
THE END
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Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1939
Stella Gibbons has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain by Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd in 1939
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ISBN 9780099529347
Stella Gibbons, My American
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