Dreams of Another Day, page 10
‘Do you make honey?’ she asked in delight.
‘David does. He says he finds looking after the bees relaxing after the frustrations of the House – and the children like it for tea. In theory David does the vegetables, too, but they got so neglected that he’s recently given in and we have a jobbing gardener twice a week.’
At the sound of a step behind them, Julia turned. Ming was aware of her making some kind of effort.
‘David, how did it go?’ she asked in what sounded like a deliberately cheerful voice. Then she turned and added in explanation to Ming, ‘He’s been writing a tricky speech.’
‘Not too bad, although it reads very dully. Hello, Mary, it’s been a long time since we met. How are you? Missing the House?’ He held out a hand, which Ming shook.
He was very tall with smooth dark hair and startling blue eyes. Ming had only ever seen him at work or at Flixe’s parties, when he had always worn impeccably cut dark suits, but on that Sunday he was dressed as informally as Julia, in baggy flannel trousers and a soft-looking lovat tweed jacket so old that it was fraying at the cuffs and buttonholes.
‘I’m very well, thank you,’ she said, thinking how much more approachable than usual they both looked. ‘Escape from Westminster has proved marvellously good for me.’
‘I can see that. You never looked so blooming in the old days. Tell me about this magazine of yours,’ said David. ‘Julia’s accounts of it sound most intriguing.’
‘Not yet,’ said his wife firmly. ‘You two have all afternoon to deal with the magazine and the interview. We need to get lunch over first. David, can you chase up those children while Ming and I dish up?’
The two women went into the kitchen, where Ming was amused to watch Julia’s almost clumsy handling of her pots and pans. She had always seemed so unassailably competent that her lack of domestic skills was rather touching. Eventually she had all the vegetables in dishes, the chicken on a warmed charger and the gravy bubbling ferociously in its enamelled roasting tin.
‘Shall I take these in?’ asked Ming, gesturing to the vegetable dishes.
‘Oh, would you? Marvellous. Where’s that spoon?’ muttered Julia, pushing some escaping hair behind her left ear. She looked over her shoulder at Ming and winced as a bubble of gravy exploded and splashed her hand. ‘There’s a spare oven cloth somewhere on the table.’
Ming found it without difficulty and, having picked up the dishes, asked where she should take them.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Amanda importantly, stressing the pronoun. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching her mother with a supercilious expression in her blue eyes. ‘Come on. It’s through here.’
She led the way into a formal dining room, papered with a Regency striped wallpaper in cherry and white. The furniture looked as though it were genuinely from the Regency, although the portraits were modern. There seemed to be a lot of silver, both on the sideboard and on the long mahogany table.
‘I’ve already laid the table,’ said Amanda, pointing to the mats where Ming was to deposit her burden. Then she giggled and admitted: ‘Well, Mummy did most of it, but I helped.’
She went on talking, telling Ming about her school, her friends, her young brother, the books she was reading, the clothes she had in her wardrobe and her Hungarian godfather. Ming was not sure whether to believe all she heard about him until Amanda turned and pointed to a portrait of herself that hung in an alcove to the right of the fireplace.
‘He’s a painter. He did that.’
‘It’s very good,’ said Ming, moving closer to get a better view.
The small painting was luminous with a kind of amused delight, as though the artist had enjoyed his sitter’s conversation as he worked. In the portrait Amanda looked both attractive and real, almost as though she had just stopped playing for a moment. There was no formality about it at all.
‘It’s very good,’ she repeated. ‘He must like you a lot.’
‘Why?’ Amanda demanded, looking pleased.
‘Because no one could paint such a happy picture if he didn’t like the subject of it.’
‘What about that?’ The question sounded almost truculent as Amanda gestured with her round arm to a much bigger painting that hung on the wall behind Ming. She turned.
‘That one, too,’ she said after she had looked at a portrait of Julia for a few moments.
Simply dressed and with her hair looking as though it were about to escape its pins, Julia smiled down from the canvas. All her strength of character was there, but there was something else as well; something that Ming had not yet seen in the real woman and which surprised her: an uncertain, almost bemused, tenderness.
‘He’s a superb painter,’ Ming said. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Tibor Smith.’
The voice was David’s and Ming swung round in surprise.
‘Isn’t it stunning?’ he said. ‘Julia doesn’t like it much, but I love it.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
Ming saw Amanda standing with her bottom lip jutting out and a hard look in her eyes.
‘He’s done Amanda beautifully, too,’ she said to distract the child.
Amanda immediately rushed into a staccato description of his studio and what had happened during their sittings.
‘Pipe down, Amanda. You’ll give Ming parliamentary earache in a minute!’ David put his son down on the floor and hugged his daughter.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, obviously fascinated by a new piece of information.
‘It’s what we get in the House of Commons when we have to listen to too much nonsense when we ought to be eating or going home or reading a book,’ he said in mock seriousness. Both Ming and Amanda laughed. ‘Jonathan, say hello to Miss Alderbrook.‘
The child, who looked quite different from Amanda, took his thumb out of his mouth and smiled at Ming. He seemed to be not nearly as robust as his sister and much shyer. He leaned against his father’s legs and put his thumb back in his mouth. His hair was a soft brown that looked almost fair where the sun fell on it and his face was more delicately modelled than hers.
‘He’s just four,’ Amanda informed her, ‘and …’
‘Pipe down!’
‘Sorry, Daddy.’ For a second she looked chastened and then her plump face creased into an infectious grin: ‘How are your ears?’
‘Aching horribly!’ he said. Ming laughed again, enjoying their ease together. But she remembered her own difficulties with her strong-charactered elder sisters and wondered how Jonathan would cope as he struggled to catch up with the dominating Amanda.
Julia appeared in the doorway, carrying the chicken and the gravy and looking as though something was about to spill at any moment. David leaned forward to relieve her of the chicken and Ming took the gravy boat.
‘Thank you. Did you wash, Jonathan?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Mummy,’ he said.
‘And poured what looks like a bathful of water on the floor,’ commented David. ‘Don’t worry, I mopped it up. That’s why we were all so long up there. Breast or leg, Ming?’
As lunch got under way, Julia began to relax again. She seemed quite happy to leave the disciplining of the two children to her husband, who cajoled them into eating, stopped Amanda talking with her mouth full, and mopped the gleaming mahogany when Jonathan spilled his orange squash.
‘He’s so much better at it than I,’ said Julia quietly at one moment as she saw Ming watching him.
Ming looked up and saw in Julia’s face some of the wistfulness her portrait showed. It made her look years younger than usual and peculiarly vulnerable.
‘He seems very efficient – quite different from Peter, who’s the only other man I’ve ever really watched with his children,’ said Ming, smiling at her hostess.
‘They’re very different sorts of men,’ Julia answered, adding even more quietly, ‘thank heavens. I think Flixe is positively saintly with what she puts up with.’
‘I don’t think she minds,’ said Ming, who had been thinking about it a lot. ‘You can see how happy she is just by looking, let alone listening to her. He does cherish her – and they get on so well.’
‘I know. It’s often hard to see why those one really values love the people they do.’
‘Who do you love?’ A sharply interested voice from the other side of the table made Ming look round.
‘Never mind, Amanda. Eat up,’ said David, looking warningly at his wife.
When lunch was over, he took Ming into his study and sat her down in a deep armchair by a window overlooking the garden.
‘Now, what can I tell you?’ he asked, sitting opposite her and taking out his pipe. ‘Do you mind this? It helps me feel at ease.’
‘I don’t mind in the least,’ said Ming, remembering some of the things that the advertising psychiatrist had told her about the reasons why men smoke. Somehow she did not think David Wallington was either seeking a substitute breast or trying to make breathing difficult for her because she frightened him. ‘This is your territory, after all.’
‘True. So?’
Ming began to ask him all the obvious questions about his political beliefs, his passionate wish for the remains of the Empire to be dismantled and the colonies to be ruled by their own people, his fears of the effects of unrestrained immigration into the British Isles, his determination that the five-year moratorium on capital punishment should be infinitely extended, and all the rest of his particular interests in Parliament. He gave her answers that were fluent and always interesting, but little different from what she had read of him in all the cuttings Max had given her to study. After a while she laid down her notebook and started to talk to him about his children.
He took his pipe right out of his mouth then and settled back more deeply into his chair. They talked for the rest of the afternoon, with Ming making notes every so often, occasionally checking with him when he said something unexpected, and in the end she was left with a picture of a rather remarkable man. He had not been afraid to diverge from strictly socialist principles when expounding his ambitions for the country, or even to admit to uncertainties, and he showed himself to be not only philosophical but also practical.
His vision was realistic but compassionate, and his personal philosophy immensely attractive with its insistence that rights imply obligations, that endowments necessitate the giving of as much in return as it is possible to give, and that every human being, regardless of sex, class, race or age, should be educated and encouraged to fulfil every scrap of potential.
‘Of course I’m glad that Julia works and is so successful,’ he burst out at one moment when Ming had asked one of her prepared questions.
‘And the effect on your children?’ asked Ming with her pencil hovering just above the page.
‘Of having a working mother?’ he asked, his voice a little less certain. Ming nodded. David ran both his hands through his dark hair, ruffling it into an attractive confusion.
‘God knows! And we’ll never know, because whatever they do or become we’ll never know how they would have turned out with Julia at home all day. All I can say is that I could not bring myself to ignore the stifling of Julia’s ambitions and intelligence that would be involved in her staying at home with them.’
‘It’s difficult, isn’t it?’ said Ming with real sympathy and was rewarded with an admission.
‘Almost impossibly so. When I look at Amanda and the way she behaves to Julia, I do wonder … and the way Jonathan sometimes clings to her when she leaves for chambers in the mornings. But the price would be too high and since it’s a price that I would not have to pay myself, I can’t even think of imposing it on her,’ he said, staring at the foaming roses just outside the window.
Ming sat, looking at his averted head and thinking that she had rarely met a man for whom she had such instant respect. He turned and, noticing her expression, smiled ruefully and shrugged.
‘You can’t imagine,’ she said, slowly picking the right words, ‘what it is like to meet someone who is reluctant to lay burdens on other people.’
‘I’m not certain I know what you mean.’
‘So many people are quite happy to lay down laws for other people that they themselves would not dream of bothering with. That’s not very elegantly put, I’m afraid.’ Ming grinned at him, looking suddenly mischievous and very pretty. ‘You don’t seem to be like that at all and, quite frankly, it gives me hope.’
David’s face relaxed and he settled back into his chair.
‘I’m glad.’ He caught sight of the notebook open on Ming’s knee and hastily added: ‘But you’re not going to print any of my anxieties about Julia’s work, are you?’ For the first time that afternoon there was an edge to his deep voice.
‘It’s interesting,’ said Ming neutrally. Her burgeoning identification with her job fought with her urge to comfort. ‘I don’t have to put it in the context of you and your wife, but as a general point about wives with careers? Please?’
‘If you don’t talk about my wife or children, yes, of course. I’m sorry to have impugned your scruples,’ he said with a smile. ‘You’re very … very sensitive, Ming.’
‘It’s got me into an awful lot of trouble in the past,’ she said, folding up her notebook. ‘Look at the time! And I’ve hardly asked half the things I wanted to know.’
‘We can squeeze a few more minutes together. What else is there?’
‘Well, where do you stand on the equal pay issue, for instance?’ Ming asked.
David picked up his pipe again and went through the performance of scraping out the half-burned residue of tobacco, refilling it, tamping down the new tobacco and laboriously lighting it. When it was smouldering to his satisfaction, he held the bowl in his right hand, sucking at the end now and again.
‘It’s difficult,’ he said by way of a preamble.
‘I know,’ answered Ming, a gleam of amusement brightening her eyes. It seemed to her that. David’s pipe was used defensively rather than aggressively.
‘I have to agree with the principle of equal pay for equal work. I don’t really see how anyone who really thinks about it could not. Equal pay for work of “equal value” is more difficult, because, after all, who can judge the value of someone’s work except in the baldest commercial terms? And even then it’s difficult in any but the most clear-cut cases.’
‘And the question of paying a single woman the same as a man who has to support a wife and three small children?’ asked Ming, intrigued that David allowed her to see the real struggle he was having with his ideas. ‘What about those schoolmasters who get so hot under the collar about spinster teachers being paid so much that they can go off on holidays to Italy and so on?’
He said nothing for so long that she applied a prod.
‘Do you accept the maxim of “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs”?’
David managed to smile.
‘Bakunin,’ he said. ‘In fact it translates more accurately as “From each according to his faculties”.’
Ming brushed aside his quibble.
‘Again in theory, yes, I accept it. But it does seem very unjust to pay someone less merely because of her sex. You might as well say, why pay a single man the same as a married man? Or why pay a childless married man the same as one with ten children? I would support any move towards equal pay, provided there were a corollary of increased welfare benefits for those whose needs were greater.’
‘Thus neatly having it both ways,’ said Ming, with a smile to take away any sense of criticism. ‘Don’t you believe that people are responsible for their own destiny? That if they choose to have a greater number of children than their neighbour, they can’t demand that their neighbour ought not to be allowed more income to spend on holidays, boats, what-have-you?’
David carefully balanced his hot pipe in a large pottery ashtray on the table at his side and then put his head in his hands.
‘You’re asking me impossible questions,’ he muttered.
‘Impossible or painful?’
‘The latter,’ he said, looking up with a smile that seemed to strip off layers of self-protection. ‘Yes, people must take responsibility for their own surroundings and destinies. But,’ he paused, obviously trying to gather his faculties, ‘but you cannot extend that principle infinitely. You could never, for example, say that only the well-off may reproduce.’
‘Almost any principle becomes absurd when taken as far as that, doesn’t it?’ said Ming with deceptive gentleness.
‘Absolutely,’ said David. Ming laughed. ‘What I was going to ask next was: and so would you say there are no absolutely right or wrong propositions? What a very difficult line for a politician to hold.’
‘It is, but compromise is essential.’
‘On that admission, I’d better leave you,’ said Ming, once more looking down at her watch. ‘I’ve absorbed almost half your one free day. I’m sorry.’
‘Painful though some of your questions are, I’ve enjoyed it,’ said David with truth. ‘And that’s as rare as hens’teeth, I can tell you. I’ll drive you home.’
‘Oh, no, I can get a taxi.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, getting up. He went out into the hall and called, ‘Julia, darling?’
‘Yes, what is it?’ she asked, emerging from the kitchen, where she had been giving the children their tea. She was very tired, her stock of patience had been badly tried by Amanda’s antics, and she still had several hours’ reading for the case she would be defending the following day.
