Текст книги "Заметки к истории болезни "

Автор книги: Дорис Лессинг

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Что касается самой Морин, то со стороны могло показаться, что она опять хандрит и уходит в себя, как тогда, когда ей предстояло стать манекенщицей или выправить свою речь. Она твердила только одно: «Ладно, мам, не накручивай себя, все будет прекрасно…» И это была чистая правда, поскольку Стэнли знал, на что идет: он прекрасно понимал, что не зря его не знакомили с родителями, пока не заарканили намертво. На ее месте он поступил бы так же. Да он так и поступил: перед его родителями она должна была предстать через неделю. Как будут одеты миссис Уотсон или мистер Уотсон, бутерброды или пирог подадут к чаю, будут в вазах живые цветы или искусственные – все это не имело значения. Уотсоны шли в придачу: как плата за публичную власть над самой соблазнительной в любом доступном ему обществе женщиной и за право после публичной ее демонстрации улечься с ней в постель. А Морин словно воды в рот набрала. Она сидела на постели и смотрела перед собой пустыми, глазами. Раза два она рассматривала в зеркале свое лицо и даже намазалась кремом. И скроила платье, но отложила его в сторону.

В воскресенье миссис Уотсон накрыл? стол на четверых по собственному усмотрению, так как Морир была слишком влюблена (так она заявляла всем кругом), чтобы заниматься такими пустяками. Стэнли ожидали к четырем, и в 3.55 Морин спустилась в гостиную. На ней было вылинявшее розовое платье трехлетней давности и материнский цветастый халат, надеваемый во время уборки; волосы завязаны куском материи, который вполне мог сойти за пыльную тряпку. Он был как раз грязно-серого оттенка. На ногах – стоптанные материнские туфли. Ее нельзя было назвать некрасивой, но она будто превратилась в собственную, подурневшую старшую сестру, одетую для генеральной весенней уборки.

Отец решил благоразумно промолчать. Он опустил газету, оглядел дочь, хмыкнул и вернулся к прерванному чтению.

Миссис Уотсон, осознав наконец, что налицо кризис, разрыдалась. Стэнли вошел, когда она все еще плакала. Он едва не сказал: «А я и не знал, что у Морин есть старшая сестра». Морин безучастно сидела на одном конце стола, мистер Уотсон, ухмыляясь, на другом, а между ними, сопя и утирая слезы, примостилась миссис Уотсон.

Морин проговорила: «Здравствуй, Стэнли, познакомься с мамой и папой». Он пожал им руки и уставился на нее. Она смотрела мимо него, вернее, встречала безмятежно-голубыми глазами неверящие, оскорбленные, негодующие взгляды. Морин разлила всем чай, угостила Стэнли сандвичами и тортом и завела разговор о погоде, о ценах на продукты и о том, как рискованно предоставлять кредит в магазине даже самым постоянным клиентам. Он сидел напротив, холеный, причесанный и приглаженный, в коричневом клетчатом пиджаке, и лицо его горело от злости и обиды. Он молчал, а Морин все говорила и говорила без умолку, неторопливо и спокойно. В пять часов миссис Уотсон снова разразилась слезами, ее всю так и трясло, и Стэнли стремительно вышел. Мистер Уотсон сказал: «Зачем было его манежить тогда?» – и включил телевизор. Миссис Уотсон пошла прилечь. Морин, поднявшись к себе, сняла свои маскарадные одежды и отнесла их в комнату к матери «Не плачь, мамочка, не переживай, ну что тут особенного!» Затем она тщательно переоделась в новый белый полотняный костюм, коричневые туфли и бежевую блузку. Она причесалась, подкрасилась и стала рассматривать себя в зеркало. И вдруг вся тяжесть последних двух часов (а может, целой недели?) обрушились на нее. От этого удара у нее заболело под ложечкой, да так, что она сжалась и заплакала. Но от слез краска растеклась по лицу, и она, зажав кулаком рот, замолчала. Ей казалось теперь, что всю последнюю неделю она была не самой собой, не Морин; а кем-то другим. Для чего она все это проделала? Зачем? Потом поняла: ради Тони. Сейчас, за столом, она так и видела, как он смотрит на нее, ухмыляется и все понимает.

Тогда она как следует вытерла следы слез и тихонько, чтобы не потревожить мать с отцом, выскользнула из дома. На углу была телефонная будка. Она шла по улице; спокойная и недоступная, уголки губ приподняты в обычной полуулыбке. Берт из бакалеи окликнул ее: «Эй, Морин, ты прямо потрясная сегодня, кто тот счастливчик?» И она улыбнулась, и кивнула по-особенному, как кивали здесь, у них, и сказала: «Ты, Берт, только ты». Она вошла в телефонную будку, думая о Тони. Ей чудилось, что он уже все знает. Она скажет ему: «Пойдем потанцуем, Тони!», он ответит: «А где тебя встретить?» Она набрала его номер, телефон гудел, гудел и гудел… Она держала трубку и ждала. Ждала минут десять – г– дольше. Потом медленно повесила трубку. Он ее подвел. Он велел ей и молча, и словами опомниться, стать человеком, а теперь взял и подвел.

Успокоившись, Морин позвонила Стэнли.

Стэнли подошел, она приветливо сказала: «Хэлло!»

Молчание. Она слышала его частое дыхание. Ей представилось его оскорбленное лицо.

– Ну что ж, так и будем молчать? – Ей хотелось говорить непринужденно, но она расслышала в своем голосе страх – да, она могла потерять и, наверное, уже потеряла его. Чтобы скрыть свой ужас, она сказала: – Неужели ты шуток не понимаешь? – И засмеялась.

– Шуток?!

Она опять засмеялась. Ничего, вышло довольно естественно.

– Я думал, ты рехнулась, совсем спятила…

Он тяжело дышал в трубку. Она вспомнила его горячее дыхание на своей шее и руках, и ее дыхание участилось в ответ, хотя думала она при этом: «Я его не люблю, совсем не люблю», и кротко произнесла:

– Ну, Стэн, ну, я просто валяла дурака.

Молчание. Осторожно, настает переломный момент.

– Стэн, ну как ты не понимаешь, иначе было бы такое занудство, правда!

И засмеялась опять.

– Очень мило по отношению к родителям, ничего не скажешь.

– Да ну, им все равно. Когда ты ушел, они так хохотали, хотя сначала разозлились. – Она торопливо добавила, чтобы он не подумал, что они смеялись над ним: – Они уже привыкли, правда.

Еще одна долгая пауза. Она сосредоточила всю силу воли, чтобы растопить этот холод. Но он молчал и только пыхтел в трубку.

– Стэнли, я же просто пошутила, ну скажи, что ты больше не сердишься?

Теперь в ее голосе угадывались слезы, она прикинула, что так будет лучше.

Поколебавшись, он сказал:

– Знаешь, Морин, мне это как-то не понравилось, я не люблю таких шуточек.

Она разрешила себе еще поплакать, и вскоре он сказал, снисходительно и раздраженно даруя ей прощение:

– Ну ладно, чего уж теперь плакать, будет тебе!

Ему досадно, что он простил ее, догадалась она, потому что и сама она на его месте испытала бы то же. За последние два часа он уже бросил ее и распрощался с нею; ему было даже приятно, что он бросает ее не по своей воле. Теперь он снова свободен, и ему непременно подвернется что-нибудь получше, он встретит девушку, которая не станет нагонять на него страх выходками вроде сегодняшней.

– Давай сходим в кино, Стэн…Даже теперь он колебался. Наконец обронил торопливо и неохотно:

– Ну ладно. Лестер-скуэр, перед «Одеоном», в семь часов. – И бросил трубку.

Обычно он подъезжал за ней на угол в машине.

Она стояла и улыбалась, а слезы текли у нее по щекам. Она знала, что плачет по Тони, который ее так подвел. Она вернулась домой подправить грим, думая о том, что она во власти Стэнли: теперь равновесие нарушено, перевес на его стороне.

Notes for a Case History

Maureen Watson was born at 93 Nelsons Way, N.I., in 1942. She did not remember the war, or rather, when people said 'The War,' she thought of Austerity: couponed curtains, traded clothes, the half-pound of butter swapped for the quarter of tea. (Maureen's parents preferred tea to butter.) Further back, at the roots of her life, she felta movement of fire and shadow, a leaping and a subsidence of light. She did not know whether this was a memory or a picture she had formed, perhaps from what her parents had told her of the night the bomb fell two streets from Nelson's Way and they had all stood among piles of smoking rubble for a day and night, watching firemen hose the flames. This feeling was not only of danger, but of fatality, of being helpless before great impersonal forces; and was how she most deeply felt, saw, or thought an early childhood which the social viewer would describe perhaps like this:

Maureen Watson, conceived by chance on an unexpected grant-ed-at-the-last-minute leave, at the height of the worst war in history, infant support of a mother only occasionally upheld (the chances of war deciding) by a husband she had met in a bomb shelter during an air raid: poor baby, born into a historical upheaval which destroyed forty million and might very well have destroyed her. As for Maureen, her memories and the reminiscences of her parents made her dismiss the whole business as boring, and nothing to do with her.

It was at her seventh birthday party she first made this clear. She wore a mauve organdie frock with a pink sash, and her golden hair was in ringlets. One of the mothers said: 'This is the first unrationed party dress my Shirley has had. It's a shame, isn't it?' And her own mother said: 'Well of course these war children don't know what they've missed.' At which Maureen said: I am not a war child.' What are you then, love?' said her mother, fondly exchanging glances.

'I'm Maureen,' said Maureen.

'And I'm Shirley,' said Shirley, joining cause.

Shirley Banner was Maureen's best friend. The Watsons and the Banners were better than the rest of the street. The Watsons lived in an end house, at higher weekly payments. The Banners had a sweets-paper-and-tobacco shop.

Maureen and Shirley remembered (or had they been told?) that once Nelson's Way was a curved terrace of houses. Then the ground-floor level had broken into shops: a grocers, laundry, a hardware, a baker, a dairy. It seemed as if every second family in the street ran a shop to supply certain defined needs of the other families. What other needs were there? Apparently none; for Maureen's parents applied for permission to the Council, and the ground floor of their house became a second grocery shop, by way of broken-down walls, new shelves, a deepfreeze. Maureen remembered two small rooms, each with flowered curtains where deep shadows moved and flickered from the two small fires that burned back to back in the centre wall that divided them. These two rooms disappeared in clouds of dust from which sweet-smelling planks of wood stuck out. Strange but friendly men paid her compliments on her golden corkscrews and asked her for kisses, which they did not get. They gave her sips of sweet tea from their canteens (filled twice a day by her mother) and made her bracelets of the spiralling fringes of yellow wood. Then they disappeared. There was the new shop. Maureen's Shop. Maureen went with her mother to the sign shop to arrange for these two words to be written in yellow paint on a blue ground.

Even without the name, Maureen would have known that the shop was connected with hopes for her future; and that her future was what her mother lived for.

She was pretty. She had always known it. Even where the shadows of fire and dark were, they had played over a pretty baby. 'You were such a pretty baby, Maureen.' And at the birthday parties: 'Maureen's growing really pretty, Mrs Watson.' But all babies and little girls are pretty, she knew that well enough… no, it was something more. For Shirley was plump, dark – pretty. Yet their parents' – or rather, their mothers' – talk had made it clear from the start that Shirley was not in the same class as Maureen.

When Maureen was ten there was an episode of importance. The two mothers were in the room above Maureen's Shop and they were brushing their little girl's hair out. Shirley's mother said: 'Maureen could do really well for herself, Mrs Watson.' And Mrs Watson nodded, but sighed deeply. The sigh annoyed Maureen, because it contradicted the absolute certainty that she felt (it had been bred into her) about her future. Also because it had to do with the boringera which she remembered, or thought she did, as a tiger-striped movement of fire. Chance:Mrs Watsons sigh was like a prayer to the gods of Luck: it was the sigh of a small helpless thing being tossed about by big seas and gales. Maureen made a decision, there and then, that she had nothing in common with the little people who were prepared to be helpless and tossed about. For she was going to be quite different. She was already different. Not only The War but the shadows of war had long gone, except for talk in the newspapers which had nothing to do with her. The shops were full of everything. The Banners' sweets-tobacco-paper shop had just been done up; and Maureen's was short of nothing. Maureen and Shirley, two pretty little girls in smart mother-made dresses, were children of plenty, and knew it, because their parents kept saying (apparently they did not care how tedious they were): 'These kids don't lack for anything, do they? They don't know what it can be like, do they?' This, with the suggestion that they ought to be grateful for not lacking anything, always made the children sulky, and they went off to flirt their many-petticoated skirts where the neighbours could see them and pay them compliments.

Eleven years. Twelve years. Already Shirley had subsided into her role of pretty girl's plainer girl friend, although of course she was not plain at all. Fair girl, dark girl, and Maureen by mysterious birthright was the 'pretty one', and there was no doubt in either of their minds which girl the boys would try first for a date. Yet this balance was by no means as unfair as it seemed. Maureen, parrying and jesting on street corners, at bus stops, knew she was doing battle for two, because the boys she discarded Shirley got: Shirley got far more boys than she would have done without Maureen who, for her part, needed – more, badto have – a foil. Her role demanded one.

They both left school at fifteen, Maureen to work in the shop. She was keeping her eyes open: her mother's phrase. She wore a slim white overall, pinned her fair curls up, was neat and pretty in her movements. She smiled calmly when customers said: 'My word, Mrs Watson, your Maureen's turned our, hasn't she?'

About that time there was a second moment of consciousness. Mrs Watson was finishing a new dress for Maureen, and the fitting was taking rather long. Maureen fidgeted and her mother said: Well, it's your capital, isn't it? You've got to see that, love.' And she added the deep unconscious sigh. Maureen said: Well don't go on about it, it's not very nice, is it?' And what she meant was, not that the idea was not very nice, but that she had gone beyond needing to be reminded about it; she was feeling the irritated embarrassment of a child when it is reminded to clean its teeth after this habit has become second nature. Mrs Watson saw and understood this, and sighed again; and this time it was the maternal sigh which means: Oh dear, you are growing up fast! 'Oh mum,'said Maureen, 'sometimes you just make me tired, you do really.'

Sixteen. She was managing her capital perfectly. Her assets were a slight delicate prettiness, and a dress sense that must have been a gift from God, or more probably because she had been reading the fashion magazines since practically before consciousness. Shirley had put in six months of beehive hair, pouting scarlet lips, and an air of sullen disdain; but Maureen's sense of herself was much finer. She modelled herself on film stars, but with an understanding of how far she could go – of what was allowable to Maureen. So the experience of being Bardot, Monroe, or whoever it was, refined her: she took from it an essence, which was learning to be a vehicle for other people's fantasies. So while Shirley had been a dozen stars, but really beenthem, in violent temporary transmogrifications, from which she emerged (often enough with a laugh) Shirley – plump, good-natured, and herself – Maureen remained herself through every role, but creating her appearance, like an alter ego, to meet the expression in people's eyes.

Round about sixteen, another incident: prophetic. Mrs Watson had a cousin who worked in the dress trade, and this man, unthought-of for many years, was met at a wedding. He commented on Maureen, a vision in white gauze. Mrs Watson worked secretly on this slender material for some weeks; then wrote to him: Could Maureen be a model? He had only remote connections with the world of expensive clothes and girls, but he dropped into the shop with frankly personal aims. Maureen in a white wrapper was still pretty, very; but her remote air told this shrewd man that she would certainly not go out with him. She was saving herself; he knew the air of self-esteem very well from other exemplars. Such girls do not go out with middle-aged cousins, except as a favour or to get something. However, he told Mrs Watson that Maureen was definitely model material, but that she would have to do something about her voice. (He meant her accent of course; and so Mrs Watson understood him.) He left addresses and advice, and Mrs Watson was in a state of quivering ambition. She said so to Maureen: 'This is your chance, girl. Take it.' What Maureen heard was: 'This is mychance.'

Maureen, nothing if not alert for her Big Chance, for which her whole life had prepared her, accepted her mother's gift of a hundred pounds (she did not thank her, no thanks were due) and actually wrote to the school where she would be taught voice training.

Then she fell into sullen withdrawal, which she understood so little that a week had gone by before she said she must be sick – or something. She was rude to her mother: very rare, this. Her father chided her for it: even rarer. But he spoke in such a way that Maureen understood for the first time that this drive, this push, this family effort to gain her a glamorous future, came from her mother, her father was not implicated. For him, she was a pretty-enough girl, spoiled by a silly woman.

Maureen slowly understood she was not sick, she was growing up. For one thing: if she changed her 'voice' so as to be good enough to mix with new people, she would no longer be part of this street, she would no longer be Our Maureen.What would she be then? Her mother knew: she would marry a duke and be whisked off to Hollywood. Maureen examined her mother's ideas for her and shrank with humiliation. She was above all no fool, but she had been very foolish. For one thing: when she used her eyes, with the scales of illusion off them, she saw that the million streets of London blossomed with girls as pretty as she. What, then, had fed the illusion in herself and in other people? What accounted for the special tone, the special looks that always greeted her? Why, nothing more than that she, Maureen, because of her mother's will behind her, had carried herself from childhood as something special, apart, destined for a great future.

Meanwhile (as she clearly saw) she was in 93 Nelson's Way, serving behind the counter of Maureen's Shop. (She now wondered what the neighbours had thought – before they got used to it – about her mother's fondness so terribly displayed.) She was dependent on nothing less than that a duke or a film producer would walk in to buy a quarter of tea and some sliced bread.

Maureen sulked. So her father said. So her mother complained. Maureen was – thinking? Yes. But more, a wrong had been done her, she knew it, and the sulking was more of a protective silence while she grew a scab over a wound.

She emerged demanding that the hundred pounds should be spent on sending her to secretarial school. Her parents complained that she could have learned how to be a secretary for nothing if she had stayed on at school another year. She said: 'Yes, but you did't have the sense to make me, did you? What did you think – I was going to sell butter like you all my life?' Unfair, on the face of it; but deeply fair, in view of what they had done to her. In their different ways they knew it. (Mr Watson knew in his heart, for instance, that he should never have allowed his wife to call the shop 'Maureen's'.) Maureen went, then, to secretarial school for a year. Shirley went with her: she had been selling cosmetics in the local branch of a big chain store. To raise the hundred pounds was difficult for Shirley's parents: the shop had done badly, had been bought by a big firm; her father was an assistant in it. For that matter, it wasn't all that easy for the Watsons: the hundred pounds was the result of small savings and pinchings over years.

This was the first time Maureen had thought of the word capital in connection with money, rather than her own natural assets: it was comparatively easy for the Watsons to raise money, because they had capital: the Banners had no capital. (Mrs Watson said the Banners had had bad luck.)Maureen strengthened her will; and as a result the two families behaved even more as if the girls would have different futures – or, to put it another way, that while the two sums of a hundred pounds were the same, the Watsons could be expected to earn more on theirs than the Banners.

This was reflected directly in the two girls' discussions about boys. Shirley would say: 'I'm more easy going than you.'

Maureen would reply: Tonly let them go so far.'

Their first decisions on this almighty subject had taken place years before, when they were thirteen. Even then Shirley went further (let them go further') than Maureen. It was put down, between them, to Shirley's warmer temperament – charitably; for both knew it was because of Maureen's higher value in the market.

At the secretarial school they met boys they had not met before. Previously boys had been from the street or the neighbourhood, known from birth, and for this reason not often gone out with-that would have been boring (serious, with possibilities of marriage). Or boys picked up after dances or at the pictures. But now there were new boys met day after day in the school. Shirley went out with one for weeks, thought of getting engaged, changed her mind, went out with another. Maureen went out with a dozen, chosen carefully. She knew what she was doing – and scolded Shirley for being so soft.'You're just stupid, Shirl – I mean, you've got to get on. Why don't you do like me?'

What Maureen did was to allow herself to be courted, until she agreed at last, as a favour, to be taken out. First, lunch – a word she began to use now. She would agree to go out to lunch two or three times with one boy, while she was taken out to supper (dinner) by another. The dinner partner, having been rewarded by a closed-mouth kiss for eight, ten, twelve nights, got angry or sulky or reproachful, according to his nature. He dropped her, and the lunch partner was promoted to dinner partner.

Maureen ate free for the year of her training. It wasn't that she planned it like this; but when she heard other girls say they paid their way or liked to be independent, it seemed to Maureen wrong-headed. To pay for herself would be to let herself be undervalued: even the idea of it made her nervous and sulky.

At the end of the training Maureen got a job in a big architect's office. She was a junior typist. She stuck out for a professional office because the whole point of the training was to enable her to meet a better class of people. Of course she had already learned not to use the phrase, and when her mother did snubbed her with: 'I don't know what you mean, better class,but it's not much point my going into that hardware stuck upstairs in an office by myself if I can get a job where there's some life about.'

Shirley went into a draper's shop where there was one other typist (female) and five male assistants.

In Maureen's place there were six architects, out most of the time, or invisible in large offices visited only by the real secretaries; a lower stratum of young men in training, designers, draughtsmen, managers, etc., and a pool of typists.

The young men were mostly of her own class. For some months she ate and was entertained at their expense; and at each week's end there was a solemn ceremony, the high point of the week, certainly the most exciting moment in it, when she divided her wage. It was seven pounds (rising to ten in three years) and she allocated two pounds for clothes, four for the post office, and one pound for the week's odd expenses.

At the end of a year she understood two things. That she had saved something like two hundred pounds. That there was not a young man in the office who would take her out again. They regarded her, according to their natures, with resentment or with admiration for her cool management of them. But there was nothing doing there– so they all knew.

Maureen thought this over. If she were not taken out to meals and entertainment, she must pay for herself and save no money, or she must never go out at all. If she was going to be taken out, then she must give something in return. What she gave was on open mouth, and freedom to the waist. She calculated that because of her prettiness she could give much less than other girls.

She was using her capitalwith even more intelligence than before. A good part of her time – all not spent in the office or being taken out – went in front of her looking glass, or with the better-class fashion magazines. She studied them with formidable concentration. By now she knew she could have gone anywhere in these islands, except for her voice. Whereas, months before, she had sulked in a sort of fright at the idea of cutting herself off from her street and the neighbours, now she softened and shaped her voice, listening to the clients and the senior architects in the office. She knew her voice had changed when Shirley said: 'You're talking nice, Maureen, much nicer than me.'

There was a boy in the office who teased her about it. His name was Tony Head. He was in training to be an accountant for the firm, and was very much from her own background. After having taken her out twice to lunch, he had never asked her again. She knew why: he had told her. 'Can't afford you, Maureen,' he said. He earned not much more than she did. He was nineteen, ambitious, serious, and she liked him.

Then she was nineteen. Shirley was engaged to one of the assistants in her shop, and would be married next Christmas.

Maureen took forty pounds out of her savings and went on a tour to Italy. It was her first time out of England. She hated it: not Italy, but the fact that half the sixty people on the tour were girls, like herself, looking for a good time, and the other half elderly couples. In Rome, Pisa, Florence, Venice, the Italians mooned over Maureen, courted her with melting eyes, while she walked past them, distant as a starlet. They probably thought she was one. The courier, a sharp young man, took Maureen out to supper one night after he had finished his duties, and made it clear that her mouth, even if opened, and her breasts, were not enough. Maureen smiled at him sweetly through the rest of the trip. No one paid for her odd coffees, ices and drinks. On the last night of the trip, in a panic because the forty-pound investment had yielded so little, she went out with an Italian boy who spoke seven words of English. She thought him crude, and left him after an hour.

But she had learned a good deal for her forty pounds. Quietly, in her lunch hour, she went off to the National Gallery and to the Tate. There she looked, critical and respectful, at pictures, memorizing their subjects, or main colours, learning names. When invited out, she asked to be taken to 'films', and when she got back home wrote down the names of the director and the stars. She looked at the book page of the Express(she made her parents buy it instead of the Mirror)and sometimes bought a recommended book, if it was a berst seller.

Twenty. Shirley was married and had a baby. Maureen saw little of her – both girls felt they had a new world of knowledge the other couldn't appreciate.

Maureen was earning ten pounds a week, and saved six.

There came to the office, as an apprentice architect, Stanley Hunt, from grammar school and technical college. Tallish, well-dressed, fair, with a small moustache. They took each other's measure, knowing they were the same kind. It was some weeks before he asked her out. She knew, by putting herself in his place, that he was looking for a wife with a little money or a house of her own, if he couldn't get a lady. (She smiled when she heard him using this word about one of the clients.) He tried to know clients socially, to be accepted by them as they accepted the senior architects. All this Maureen watched, her cool little face saying nothing.

One day, after he had invited a Miss Plast (Chelsea, well-off, investing money in houses) to coffee, and had been turned down, he asked Maureen to join him in a sandwich lunch. Maureen thanked him delightfully, but said she already had an engagement. She went off to the National Gallery, sat on the steps, froze off wolves and pickups, and ate a sandwich by herself.

A week later, invited to lunch by Stanley, she suggested the Trattoria Siciliana which was more expensive, as she knew quite well, than he had expected. But this meal was a success. He was impressed with her, though he knew (how could he not, when his was similar?) her background.

She was careful to be engaged for two weeks. Then she agreed to go to the pictures – 'a foreign film, if you don't mind, 1 think the American films are just boring.' She did not offer to pay, but remarked casually that she had nearly six hundred pounds in the post office. 'I'm thinking of buying a little business, some time. A dress shop. I've got a cousin in the trade.'

Stanley agreed that 'with you taste' it would be a sure thing.

Maureen no longer went to the Palais, or similar places (though she certainly did not conceal from Stanley that she had 'once'), but she loved to dance. Twice they went to the West End together and danced at a Club which was 'a nice place'. They danced well together. On the second occasion she offered to pay her share, for the first time in her life. He refused, as she had known he would, but she could see he liked her for offering: more, was relieved; in the office they said she was mean, and he must have heard them. On that night, taken home lingeringly, she opened her mouth for him and let his hands go down to her thighs. She felt a sharp sexuality which made her congratulate herself that she had never, like Shirley, gone 'half-way' before. Well of course, girls were going to get married to just anybody if they let themselves be all worked up every time they were taken out!