Two: Dear Dead Days

WHEN I came to, I at once knew where I was and what had happened and I cringed closer to the floor, waiting to be hit again. I stayed like that for about ten minutes, listening to the roar of the rain, wondering if the electric shock had done me permanent damage, burned me, inside perhaps, making me unable to have babies, or turned my hair white. Perhaps all my hair had been burned off! I moved a hand to it. It felt all right, though there was a bump at the back of my head. Gingerly I moved. Nothing was broken. There was no harm. And then the big General Electric icebox in the corner burst into life and began its cheerful domestic throbbing, and I realized that the world was still going on and that the thunder had gone away, and I got rather weakly to my feet and looked about me, expecting I don't know what scene of chaos and destruction. But there it all was, just as I had "left" it-the important-looking reception desk, the wire rack of paperbacks and magazines, the long counter of the cafeteria, the dozen neat tables with rainbow-hued plastic tops and uncomfortable little metal chairs, the big ice-water container and the gleaming coffee percolator-everything in its place, just as ordinary as could be. There was only the hole in the window and a spreading pool of water on the floor as evidence of the holocaust through which this room and I had just passed. Holocaust? What was I talking about? The only holocaust had been in my head! There was a storm. There had been thunder and lightning. I had been terrified, like a child, by the big bangs. Like an idiot I had taken hold of the electric switch-not even waiting for the pause between lightning flashes, but choosing just the moment when another flash was due. It had knocked me out. I had been punished with a bump on the head. Served me right, stupid, ignorant scaredy cat! But wait a minute! Perhaps my hair had turned white! I walked, rather fast, across the room, picked up my bag from the desk, and went behind the bar of the cafeteria and bent down and looked into the long piece of mirror below the shelves. I looked first inquiringly into my eyes. They gazed back at me, blue, clear, but wide with surmise. The lashes were there and the eyebrows, brown, an expanse of inquiring forehead and then, yes, the sharp, brown peak and the tumble of perfectly ordinary very dark brown hair curving away to right and left in two big waves. So! I took out my comb and ran it brusquely, angrily through my hair, put the comb back in my bag, and snapped the clasp.
My watch said it was nearly seven o'clock. I switched on the radio, and while I listened to WOKO frightening its audience about the storm-power lines down, the Hudson River rising dangerously at Glens Falls, a fallen elm blocking Route 9 at Saratoga Springs, flood warning at Mechanicville-I strapped a bit of cardboard over the broken windowpane with Scotch tape and got a cloth and bucket and mopped up the pool of water on the floor. Then I ran across the short covered way to the cabins out back and went into mine, Number 9 on the right-hand side toward the lake, and took off my clothes and had a cold shower. My white Terylene shirt was smudged from the fall, and I washed it and hung it up to dry.
I had already forgotten my chastisement by the storm and the fact that I had behaved like a silly goose, and my heart was singing again with the prospect of my solitary evening and of being on my way the next day. On an impulse, I put on the best I had in my tiny wardrobe-my black velvet toreador pants with the rather indecent gold zip down the seat, itself most unchastely tight, and, not bothering with a bra, my golden thread Camelot sweater with the wide floppy turtleneck. I admired myself in the mirror, decided to pull my sleeves up above the elbows, slipped my feet into my gold Ferragamo sandals, and did the quick dash back to the lobby. There was just one good drink left in the quart of Virginia Gentleman bourbon that had already lasted me two weeks, and I filled one of the best cut-glass tumblers with ice cubes and poured the bourbon over them, shaking the bottle to get out the last drop. Then I pulled the most comfortable armchair over from the reception side of the room to stand beside the radio, turned the radio up, lit a Parliament from the last five in my box, took a stiff pull at my drink, and curled myself into the armchair.
The commercial, all about cats and how they loved Pussyfoot Prime Liver Meal, lilted on against the steady roar of the rain, whose tone only altered when a particularly heavy gust of wind hurled the water like grapeshot at the windows and softly shook the building. Inside, it was just as I had visualized-weatherproof, cozy, and gay and glittering with lights and chromium. WOKO announced forty minutes of "Music to Kiss By" and suddenly there were the Ink Spots singing "Someone's Rockin' My Dream Boat," and I was back on the River Thames and it was five summers ago and we were drifting down past Kings Eyot in a punt and there was Windsor Castle in the distance and Derek was paddling while I worked the portable. We only had ten records, but whenever it came to be the turn of the Ink Spots' L.P. and the record got to "Dream Boat," Derek would always plead, "Play it again, Viv," and I would have to go down on my knees and find the place with the needle.
So now my eyes filled with tears-not because of Derek, but because of the sweet pain of boy and girl and sunshine and first love with its tunes and snapshots and letters "Sealed With A Loving Kiss." They were tears of sentiment for lost childhood, and of self-pity for the pain that had been its winding sheet, and I let two tears roll down my cheeks before I brushed them away and decided to have a short orgy of remembering.
My name is Vivienne Michel and, at the time I was sitting in the Dreamy Pines motel and remembering, I was twenty-three. I am five feet six, and I always thought I had a good figure until the English girls at Astor House told me my behind stuck out too much and that I must wear a tighter bra. My eyes, as I have said, are blue and my hair a dark brown with a natural wave, and my ambition is one day to give it a lion's streak to make me look older and more dashing. I like my rather high cheekbones, although these same girls said they made me look "foreign," but my nose is too small, and my mouth too big so that it often looks sexy when I don't want it to. I have a sanguine temperament which I like to think is romantically tinged with melancholy, but I am wayward and independent to an extent that worried the sisters at the convent and exasperated Miss Threadgold at Astor House. ("Women should be willows, Vivienne. It is for men to be oak and ash.")
I am French-Canadian. I was born just outside Quebec at a little place called Sainte Famille on the north coast of the Ile d'Orleans, a long island that lies like a huge sunken ship in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River where it approaches the Quebec Straits. I grew up in and beside this great river, with the result that my main hobbies are swimming and fishing and camping and other outdoor things. I can't remember much about my parents-except that I loved my father and got on badly with my mother-because when I was eight they were both killed in a wartime air crash coming in to land at Montreal on their way to a wedding. The courts made me a ward of my widowed aunt, Florence Toussaint, and she moved into our little house and brought me up. We got on all right, and today I almost love her, but she was a Protestant, while I had been brought up as a Catholic, and I became the victim of the religious tug of war that has always been the bane of priest-ridden Quebec, so nearly exactly divided between the faiths. The Catholics won the battle over my spiritual well-being, and I was educated in the Ursuline Convent until I was fifteen. The sisters were strict and the accent was very much on piety, with the result that I learned a great deal of religious history and rather obscure dogma which I would gladly have exchanged for subjects that would have fitted me to be something other than a nurse or a nun, and, when in the end the atmosphere became so stifling to my spirit that I begged to be taken away, my aunt gladly rescued me from "the Papists" and it was decided that, at the age of sixteen, I should go to England and be "finished." This caused something of a local hullabaloo. Not only are the Ursulines the center of Catholic tradition in Quebec-the Convent proudly owns the skull of Mont-calm; for two centuries there have never been less than nine sisters kneeling at prayer, night and day, before the chapel altar-but my family had belonged to the very innermost citadel of French-Canadianism, and that their daughter should flout both treasured folkways at one blow was a nine days' wonder-and scandal.
The true sons and daughters of Quebec form a society, almost a secret society, that must be as powerful as the Calvinist clique of Geneva, and the initiates refer to themselves proudly, male or female, as "Canadiennes." Lower, much lower, down the scale come the "Canadiens"-Protestant Canadians. Then "Les Anglais," which embraces all more or less recent immigrants from Britain, and lastly, "Les Amйricains," a term of contempt. The Canadiennes pride themselves on their spoken French, although it is a bastard patois full of two-hundred-year-old words which Frenchmen themselves don't understand and is larded with Frenchified English words-rather, I suppose, like the relationship of Afrikaans to the language of the Dutch. The snobbery and exclusive-ness of this Quebec clique extend even toward the French who live in France. These mother-people to the Canadiennes are referred to simply as "Etrangers"! I have told all this at some length to explain that the defection from The Faith of a Michel from Sainte Famille was almost as heinous a crime as a defection, if that were possible, from the Mafia in Sicily, and it was made pretty plain to me that, in leaving the Ursulines and Quebec, I had just about burned my bridges so far as my spiritual guardians and my home town were concerned.
My aunt sensibly pooh-poohed my nerves over the social ostracism that followed-most of my friends were forbidden to have anything to do with me-but the fact remains that I arrived in England loaded with a sense of guilt and "difference" that, added to my "colonialism," were dreadful psychological burdens with which to face a smart finishing school for young ladies.
Miss Threadgold's Astor House was, like most of these very English establishments, in the Sunningdale area-a large Victorian stockbrokery kind of place, whose upper floors had been divided up with plasterboard to make bedrooms for twenty-five pairs of girls. Being a "foreigner," I was teamed up with the other foreigner, a dusky Lebanese millionairess with huge tufts of mouse-colored hair in her armpits, and an equal passion for chocolate fudge and an Egyptian film star called Ben Said, whose gleaming photograph-gleaming teeth, mustache, eyes, and hair-was soon to be torn up and flushed down the lavatory by the three senior girls of Rose Dormitory, of which we were both members. Actually I was saved by the Lebanese. She was so dreadful, petulant, smelly, and obsessed with her money that most of the school took pity on me and went out of their way to be kind. But there were many others who didn't, and I was made to suffer agonies for my accent, my table manners, which were considered uncouth, my total lack of savoir-faire, and, in general, for being a Canadian. I was also, I see now, much too sensitive and quicktempered. I just wouldn't take the bullying and teasing, and when I had roughed up two or three of my tormentors, others got together with them and set upon me in bed one night and punched and pinched and soaked me with water until I burst into tears and promised 1 wouldn't "fight like an elk" any more. After that, I gradually settled down, made an armistice with the place, and morosely set about learning to be a "lady."
It was the holidays that made up for everything. I made friends with a Scottish girl, Susan Duff, who liked the same open-air things as I did. She too was an only child, and her parents were glad to have me to keep her company. So there was Scotland in the summer and skiing in the winter and spring-all over Europe, in Switzerland, Austria, Italy-and we stuck to each other through the finishing school and at the end we even "came out" together, and Aunt Florence produced five hundred pounds as my contribution to an idiotic joint dance at the Hyde Park Hotel, and I got on the same "list" and went the rounds of similar idiotic dances at which the young men seemed to me rude and spotty and totally unmasculine compared with the young Canadians I had known. (But I may have been wrong because one of the spottiest of them rode in the Grand National that year and finished the course!)
And then I met Derek.
By now I was seventeen and a half, and Susan and I were living in a tiny three-room fiat in Old Church Street just off the King's Road. It was the end of June, and there wasn't much more of our famous "season" to go and we decided to give a party for the few people we had met and actually liked. The family across the landing were going abroad on holiday, and they said we could have their flat in exchange for keeping an eye on it while they were away. We were both of us just about broke with "keeping up with the Joneses" at all these balls, and I cabled Aunt Florence and got a hundred pounds out of her, and Susan scraped up fifty, and we decided to do it really well. We were going to ask about thirty people and we guessed that only twenty would come. We bought eighteen bottles of champagne-pink because it sounded more exciting-a ten-pound tin of caviar, two rather cheap tins of foie gras that looked all right when it was sliced up, and lots of garlicky things from Soho. We made a lot of brown bread-and-butter sandwiches with watercress and smoked salmon, and added some sort of Christmasy things like Elvas plums and chocolates-a stupid idea: no one ate any of them-and, by the time we had spread the whole lot out on a door taken off its hinges and covered with a gleaming tablecloth to make it seem like a buffet, it looked like a real grown-up feast.
The party was a great success, almost too much of a success. All the thirty came, and some of them brought others, and there was a real squash with people sitting on the stairs and even one man on the john with a girl on his lap. The noise and the heat were terrific. Perhaps after all we weren't such squares as we had thought, or perhaps people really like squares so long as they are true squares and don't pretend. Anyway, of course the worst happened and we ran out of drink! I was standing by the table when some wag drained the last bottle of champagne and shouted in a strangled voice, "Water! Water! Or we'll never see England again." I got nervous and said stupidly, "Well, there just isn't any more," when a tall young man standing against the wall said, "Of course there is. You've forgotten the cellar," and he took me by the elbow and shoved me out of the room and down the stairs. "Come on," he said firmly. "Can't spoil a good party. We'll get some more from the pub."
Well, we went to the pub and got two bottles of gin and an armful of bitter lemon, and he insisted on paying for the gin so I paid for the lemon. He was rather tight in a pleasant way and explained that he'd been to another party before ours and that he'd been brought by a young married couple called Norman, who were friends of Susan's. He said his name was Derek Mallaby, but I didn't pay much attention as I was so anxious to get the drink back to the party. There were cheers as we came back up the stairs, but in fact the party had passed its peak and from then on people drifted away until there was nothing left but the usual hard core of particular friends, and characters who had nowhere to go for dinner. Then they too slowly broke up, including the Normans, who looked very nice and told Derek Mallaby that he would find the key under the mat, and Susan was suggesting that we go to the Popotte across the way, a place I didn't care for, when Derek Mallaby came and lifted my hair away from my ear and whispered rather hoarsely into it would I go slumming with him? So I said yes, largely, I think, because he was tall and because he had taken charge when I was stuck.
So we drifted out into the hot evening street, leaving the dreadful battlefield of the party behind, and Susan and her friends wandered off, and we got a taxi in the King's Road. Derek took me right across London to a spaghetti house called The Bamboo near the Tottenham Court Road, and we had spaghetti Bolognese and a bottle of instant Beaujolais, as he called it, that he sent out for. He drank most of the Beaujolais and told me that he lived not far from Windsor and that he was nearly eighteen and this was his last term at school and he was in the cricket eleven and that he had been given twenty-four hours off in London to see lawyers as his aunt had died and left him some money. His parents had spent the day with him, and they had gone to see the M.C.C. play Kent at Lords. They had then gone back to Windsor and left him with the Normans. He was supposed to have gone to a play and then home to bed, but there had been this other party and then mine, and now how about going on to the 400?
Of course I was thrilled. The 400 is the top nightclub in London, and I had never graduated higher than the cellar places in Chelsea. I told him a bit about myself and made Astor House sound funny, and he was very easy to talk to, and when the bill came he knew exactly how much to tip and it seemed to me that he was very grownup to be still at school, but then English public schools are supposed to grow people up very quickly and teach them how to behave. He held my hand in the taxi, and that seemed to be all right, and they seemed to know him at the 400 and it was deliciously dark and he ordered gins and tonics and they put a half-bottle of gin on the table that was apparently his from the last time he had been there. Maurice Smart's band was as smooth as cream and when we danced we fitted at once and his jive was just about the same as mine and I was really having fun. I began to notice the way his dark hair grew at the temples and that he had good hands and that he smiled not just at one's face but into one's eyes. We stayed there until four in the morning and the gin was finished and when we went out on to the pavement I had to hold on to him. He got a taxi, and it seemed natural when he took me in his arms, and when he kissed me I kissed back. After I had twice taken his hand off my breast, the third time it seemed prissy not to leave it there, but when he moved it down and tried to put it up my skirt, I wouldn't let him, and when he took my hand and tried to put it on him, I wouldn't do that either, although my whole body was hot with wanting these things. But then, thank heavens, we were outside the flat and he got out and took me to the door and we said we would see each other again and he would write. When we kissed good-by, he put his hand down behind my back and squeezed my behind hard, and when his taxi disappeared round the corner I could still feel his hand there and I crept up to bed and looked into the mirror over the washbasin and my eyes and face were radiant as if they were lit up from inside and, although probably most of the lighting-up came from the gin, I thought, Oh, my heavens! I'm in love!