Dreams of Another Day, page 22
Ming waited until he had driven off before she let herself in to the flat. Then she made a pot of tea and opened the parcel to discover that he had given her a copy of Olivia Manning’s new novel. It was definitely something that she wanted to read, but it seemed a slightly impersonal present after everything they had shared.
The knowledge that she had brought that sharing to an end by her own stupidity and selfishness suddenly overwhelmed her and she leaned over the kitchen table, burying her face in her hands, and tried to stop the sound of her dreadful, howling sobs from reaching the neighbours.
She spent the next day entirely alone, battling to regain her serenity. Peter telephoned and asked whether she would join him and the girls for lunch, but she said that she had too much work. Her voice still did not work properly and it seemed to her quite impossible to face anyone when she felt she might burst into tears at any moment.
When she had finished reading the Sunday papers, there did not seem to be anything else to do except work and so she got out the notes she had written and tried to put them into a coherent article about Suez. Even that seemed unimportant and she had to struggle to concentrate.
By half-past seven she was worn out and bored, and she went into her red-and-grey kitchen to make herself some scrambled eggs. She ate them listening to the news and heard reports of a series of pathetic appeals from Budapest. The Russians had returned in ever-increasing numbers and were steadily taking over the country again. Hungary’s few short days of freedom were coming to an end, and the people who had won them for the rest knew that they had very little time left.
Listening to the pleas for help, for food, medicine, and armed protection against the ferocity of the Russian Red Army, Ming remembered Gerry’s pessimism. The wireless crackled again.
‘We ask every Western station which receives our message to transmit it in English, German and French. We need help! The people of Budapest have no food. We need food and arms. Only military help can save us. The whole nation is asking for help.’
‘Attention, attention! We ask you to forward our call to President Eisenhower. We ask for immediate intervention, immediate intervention.’
Then there was nothing. At exactly seven minutes past eight the newsreader announced that the radio stations all over Hungary had been silenced. When she was certain that there would be no more, Ming switched off the wireless and took her supper dishes to the sink.
As she washed up like an automaton, she felt a passionate, furious rage against the world’s bullies that drove her own unhappiness away for a moment.
Chapter Sixteen
Jack died attack Port Said stop letter follows stop Helen Hazeldene. Ming held the telegram in her hand and felt her teeth grinding together. All the anger she had ever felt about anything seemed to gather and swell inside her. At that moment it seemed quite monstrous that men like Jack Hazeldene should have been sent to die in such a way for such a cause by the men to whom she had listened in the House of Commons.
The memory of Jack clinging to her as he talked about Caroline was so vivid that Ming could almost feel her hands contract as they had done under the force of his grip. Her teeth ached.
She had to do something to release her fury and went straight to her desk, where she tore up the measured article she had been writing and sat down at her typewriter to compose a ferocious attack on the government. It then took her hours to tone down what she had written into something that Max and Connie might be prepared to print. Whatever their reservations, Ming was at last determined to force them to publish what Bertrand had told her.
During the afternoon, while she was still struggling with her article and her rage, Ming was interrupted by the telephone.
‘Ming? Connie here. How are you?’
‘Not so bad,’ she said, not wanting to have to talk about Jack’s death. ‘By the way, have you and Max decided whether you dare print an anti-government story?’
‘That’s what I’m ringing about,’ said Connie, surprised by Ming’s hostility. ‘We do think so now, particularly if we cover ourselves by setting out all your Paris information as speculation and putting in the received view as well. We ought to get away with it.’
‘It’s not we who are getting away with anything,’ said Ming more coldly than Connie had ever heard her speak. ‘It’s them.’
‘I don’t know that they are getting away with it.’ Connie tried to talk calmly. ‘Stories about collusion with Israel are beginning to seep out.’
‘That’s not really the point any more, is it?’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Connie, puzzled by the bitterness in Ming’s voice. ‘I must go in a minute. When will you have the piece finished?’
‘A couple of days, perhaps. Why? There’s no particular rush, is there? We ought to wait and see what happens in the end and how many more people get killed for the bloody Canal.’
‘I’d quite like to get the new issue out on the streets a little earlier than usual, and everything else is ready except for Suez and Max’s piece on Hungary. By the way, we were counting up the approving and the angry letters about Story of a Lost Love last night and they come out about even.’
To Ming just then any subject other than the war seemed irrelevant and trivial, but she did her best, saying:
‘Oh, Connie, I am pleased. Perhaps there really will be a change in the law when the Wolfenden Committee eventually reports.’
‘Perhaps.’ Connie did not sound sanguine. ‘Anyway, we can hope. Goodbye, Ming.’ She cut the connection.
Ming sat holding her receiver and looking out of her window across the muddy-coloured river to the bare trees of Battersea Park. To her right the sun hung low and blood-red in a white sky underlined by the black triangles of warehouse roofs and patterned with a few spiky trees.
She felt as though she had travelled an immense distance since Roger had enlightened her about Max’s past. It was quite hard to remember what she had felt then, the odd mixture of distaste for Max and the increasingly secure happiness with Mark. She had thrown the happiness away as though it were no more important than an old newspaper.
The buzzing in her ear reminded her that she was still holding the telephone receiver and she put it gently back in its cradle. She told herself that it was silly to feel as though nothing mattered any more. Jack’s life might have been destroyed and she might have lost any chance of happiness with Mark, but there must be other things that were important even if she could not think just what they were.
Ming watched the red ball of the sun begin to sink behind the roofs and when it had gone, leaving only a faint, pinkish glow, she looked down at the messy page in front of her. It seemed as though every line she had written was contradicted by another. Arrows shot in all directions over the page, extra comments in balloons were planted here and there amid the mess of crossed-out words and ink blots. She tried to make herself go on with it and could not. In the end she had to admit to herself that her anger over Jack’s death was stopping her from thinking clearly.
The next day she was bitterly amused to read in the newspapers that the Russians had announced that they intended to restore peace in the Middle East and were threatening rocket attacks against Britain and France. Considering the mercilessly violent revenge they were wreaking on Budapest it seemed the height of hypocrisy. Kruschev went so far as to propose to President Eisenhower a joint Russian and American force to stop the fighting over the Canal.
The Americans, not surprisingly, were strongly opposed to any such initiative, but took their own by engineering a run on sterling. The British Government bought furiously to support the pound, spending some eighty-five million dollars. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had been among the most fervent advocates of military action against Nasser, knew that such buying could not go on and advised Eden to stop the war.
With their unchallenged economic power the Americans had succeeded where all the committed opponents of war in Britain had failed and forced the Prime Minister to abandon his obsession and withdraw his troops from Egypt.
All he had achieved was the deaths of hundreds of Allied soldiers, an enormous increase in President Nasser’s prestige in the Arab world and the destruction of years of patient diplomacy. The Americans would obviously look askance at any British initiatives for a long time, while the French believed that their British allies had betrayed them, and would obviously not trust them again.
Mrs Hazeldene’s promised letter arrived before Ming was satisfied that what she had written expressed enough of her disgust and yet remained publishable. She turned away from her typewriter to open the letter:
My dear Ming,
It is hard to write about what has happened but Jack’s affection for you gives you the right to know as much as we do. His CO’s letter says that he was killed, quite quickly, soon after the beginning of the assault on Port Said. He was shot in the head and did not suffer, they say. I hope it’s true.
They will be letting us have his things back and I want you to have his watch. He cared so much for you, Ming, and you helped him so when you were here, at a time when the rest of us simply could not reach him at all.
I am at my wits’end about his children. I am seventy and Jack’s father is seventy-three and very frail. Caroline’s parents are in no position to care for them. What will happen to them? If only … No; it’s not fair to you to write that. They are very bewildered and unhappy and cannot really understand what has happened to them.
Come and see us when you are next in Gloucestershire.
Helen Hazeldene
Ming sat with the letter in her hands saying over and over again to herself: I am not responsible for those children. I did not infect their mother with polio and I did not kill their father. Even if his parents and mine wanted us to marry, he disliked the idea as much as I did. It is not my fault.
The December issue of the magazine was distributed to the usual booksellers and posted to subscribers on November the twenty-fifth. There was no reaction to it for four days, but on the fifth Ming woke to the sound of a shower of envelopes falling through her letter box. Bundled into a rug-like dressing-gown, for it was very cold, she carried her letters into the kitchen, where she lit the gas and filled the kettle. While it boiled she picked up the first envelope and ripped it open, recognising her father’s angular writing as she did so.
He had written in restrained but obvious anger at her ‘disloyalty’ and her ‘pandering to the Communists and weaklings’. Ming had winced at his first criticisms but that one made her smile wryly to herself: it was after all the Russians who had proposed a joint action with the Americans to stop the Suez expedition. She finished the page and then turned it over. As she read the second side, she stopped smiling.
It’s people like you who destroyed any possibility of success. If your journalistic colleagues hadn’t sapped the Prime Minister’s strength with your carping, he’d have listened and given the services enough time to prepare properly. As it was we didn’t have anything like adequate reserves and the Navy were stymied too. Even so we would have succeeded if we’d been allowed to fight through to the end. If people like you hadn’t been so treacherous after the attack was launched we’d never have been pulled out. Betrayed. It appalls me that you could have written such things while men like Jack Hazeldene were dying for our country.
I’ve always hated your being associated with a magazine that prints the kind of filth that appeared while you were away in Paris. It’s some comfort to know you could not have had anything to do with that issue, but other people may not realise it. Can’t you get out? I’d like you to find some other work and protect what’s left of your reputation. There must be something else you could do to amuse yourself.
What with one thing and another your mother and I will not be coming up for the christening of Flixe’s child.
Ming let the crisp sheets of writing paper drop into her lap as she sat heavily on a chair in the kitchen. Unlike both her sisters she had never found herself in serious opposition to her father until his outburst about her working for Connie the previous summer, and she hated it.
The telephone rang, startling her. She dropped the letter as she got up to answer it and was relieved to hear Flixe at the other end of the line.
‘You sound awful, Ming. I take it the old buzzard’s written to you as well,’ she said cheerfully. ‘He is absurd, and you mustn’t take him too seriously.’
‘He’s not absurd. He’s only …’
‘Well, perhaps not, but he’s never been able to accept the fact that we all had minds of our own. I suppose with mother endlessly telling him how disappointed he had made her, he hoped we’d think him marvellous and hang on his every word. Don’t let him upset you, Ming. Both Peter and I thought your article was superb, very clear and perfectly justified.’
‘Did you?’ A slight smile lifted the corners of Ming’s mouth.
‘Definitely. Don’t worry about things, Ming. All will be well. Now, about tomorrow. Would you like to lunch with us first? Then we could all go ceremoniously to the church together and meet the other godparents there.’
‘Flixe, that would be lovely,’ said Ming, feeling cheered by her sister’s approval. ‘I’m sorry about the parents, though. I know you wanted them there.’
‘You know,’ said Flixe in such a meditative voice that Ming was surprised, ‘he really is a monster. You sound as though he told you they weren’t coming because of your article.’
‘He didn’t actually put it in so many words, but …’
‘I thought so,’ said Flixe with some energy. ‘Mother has sprained her ankle badly and has been confined to bed. That’s why they’re not coming. Don’t you worry. He will get over his rage. We’ll all have a splendid time tomorrow and Nicholas isn’t going to know the difference either way. Half-past twelve, then; don’t be late.’
Ming promised and went back to her post. When she had read it all, she discovered that about half her friends and relations agreed with her father and the other half was divided between those who were grateful for her exposition of the political background to the aborted invasion, and those who thought she ought to have supported the government.
Roger Sillhorne’s letter was the angriest of all. He wrote that Ming had abused their friendship by including in her article things he had told her in confidence. Neither Helen Hazeldene nor her husband wrote at all.
Not surprisingly Ming’s anonymous correspondent had not been able to resist such a good opportunity, and wrote to tell Ming that she was an evil-minded source of filthy disloyalty who would reap her just rewards in due course.
Sighing, she slid the unsigned piece of spite back into its envelope and added it to the brimming box in the bottom drawer of her desk, telling herself that one day the writer of the letters would become bored and leave her alone. As she shut the drawer and straightened up, Ming suddenly smiled and immediately felt better. The letters were vile and she hated their writer, but that hatred was a completely legitimate feeling. No one in the world could have expected her to feel anything but loathing and anger. There was a kind of freedom in accepting her hatred.
Mrs Crook’s arrival to clean the flat provided a welcome respite from the weight of disapproval that had descended on Ming, and after they had drunk a cup of tea together and the daily had settled down to ‘do’ Ming’s drawing room, she went to have a belated bath and dress.
While she was thinking about what to put on, she looked at the suit she planned to wear for the christening and decided to go out and buy herself a new hat to wear with it.
Wearing her new hat the next day, Ming stood at the font with Nicholas Suvarov in her arms. David Wallington stood on one side of her and on the other was a short, untidy but extraordinarily attractive man whom she had never met before. Flixe had introduced him to Ming as Tibor Smith and he had shaken her hand in a warm, firm grip.
It was not until she looked down at his hands and noticed some paint caught under one fingernail that she remembered Amanda Wallington’s chatter in the dining room at Kennington. Ming was almost certain that Amanda had said that the artist who painted the two masterly portraits was called Tibor Smith.
Beside David, who was very tall, Mr Smith looked almost squat and Ming wished that she had not worn such exaggeratedly high-heeled shoes and that her new hat had a less immense brim. She edged a little further away from him so that she did not dwarf him.
David felt the movement at his side and looked down at her, but all he could see of her was the crown and vast brim of her elegant hat. He shivered. Whatever heating there was in the big church was quite inadequate to cope with the icy draughts that poured through the doors and ill-fitting windows and crept up under his trousers. Any warmth there had been must by then have been high up under the beautiful stone ribs of the vaulted ceiling.
Ming looked across to her sisters standing on either side of Peter Suvarov. Flixe had completely recovered her health and looked superb in a new coat of thick cream wool trimmed with bands of dark fur around the hem and sleeves. Her bright blonde hair was piled up at the back of her head and a small fur cap was perched on the top, accentuating the shine and colour of her hair.
Gerry looked both less elegant and less blooming. She had on a scarlet suit that made her look almost sallow and although her hair was quite as clean and well-brushed as Flixe’s it had none of the bounce or the brightness, and her hat was not becoming. But Gerry looked almost as happy as her sister, as she leaned slightly to her right so that her arm brushed that of her tall husband. Ming watched him look down at Gerry and give her a conspiratorial wink.
The child in her arms moved suddenly and Ming was distracted from everything else. Flixe had wrapped a warm shawl over the white lace christening robe he wore. As Ming smoothed the shawl away from his face with one gloved finger and smiled at him, he opened his bright brown eyes and stared up at her. Her smile shrank as he moved within her arms and turned his face towards her, opening and shutting his mouth in a plaintive rhythm as though he were searching for her breast. An extraordinary sensation shot through her, part pleasure and part pain.
