Imogen

Chapter Four

A fortnight later, during Wimbledon week, Nicky had a drink with his friend Matthew O’Connor in Fleet Street. He had known O’Connor on and off for a number of years. They bumped into each other abroad — Nicky playing in tournaments, O’Connor covering stories — and they had got drunk together and been slung out of more foreign nightclubs than they cared to remember.

‘Are you going to France this year?’ said Nicky.

‘In September. Why?’

‘Any room in your car?’

The big Irishman looked at him shrewdly. ‘Depends who you want to bring.’

Nicky grinned. ‘Well, I met this bird in Yorkshire.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Got a pair of knockers you can get lost in.’

‘What else?’

‘Well she’s adorable, like a puppy. You want to pick her up and cuddle her all the time. But terribly naïve. Dad’s a vicar and a bloody tartar — like that Mr Barrett of Walpole Street.’

O’Connor grinned. ‘And you see yourself as Robert Browning?’

‘Well something of the sort. Anyway, I can’t get within necking distance on home ground.’

‘Green is she? So you fancy an away fixture?’

‘An away fixture is what I fancy.’

O’Connor ordered another round of drinks.

‘I’ve always believed,’ he said, ‘that if a bird’s worth doing, she’s worth doing well. But a fortnight’s a hell of a long time. Don’t you think you better take her away for a week-end first?’

‘I’ve got tournaments every week-end for the next two months. Besides I doubt if the old vicar would let her.’

‘Well, he’s not likely to let her go on holiday, is he?’

‘He might. I can say we’re going in a large party. Parents seem to have some totally mistaken idea that there’s safety in numbers.’

‘Will she fight with Cable?’ asked O’Connor.

‘You’ve never allowed me to meet Cable.’

‘No more I haven’t. Come and have a drink with us this evening.’

The next day Nicky wrote to Imogen’s parents. He was planning to go to France for a fortnight in September with a couple of friends who were engaged, and there would also be another married couple in the party taking their own car. He’d thought Imogen was looking tired last time he’d stayed. She needed a holiday. Could she join their party?

To Imogen’s joy and amazement her parents agreed. Even her mother had noticed how down she was, and her father, who was looking forward to his three weeks’ exchange stint in the North Riding in September (the golf course was excellent there), had no desire to have his elder daughter slopping around with a February face spoiling the fun.

‘I’ll never, never be unhappy again,’ vowed Imogen. She dialled Nicky’s number in London to give him the good news.

All the same, it was a very trying summer. Wimbledon fortnight came, and Imogen and Gloria spent most of it with the transistor on or with a pair of binoculars surreptitiously trained on the television in the Radio Rentals shop opposite the library. Nicky was in coruscating form, reaching the last eight of the singles and only being knocked out after a marathon match, and the semi-finals of the doubles with Charlie Painter. Everyone commented on his improved game. And whenever he appeared on the television screen, clothed in white tennis clothes, mystic, wonderful, whether he was uncoiling like a whiplash when serving or jumping from foot to foot as though the court were red hot beneath his feet, waiting to whistle back a shot, he seemed a God infinitely beyond Imogen’s reach.

She had also seen him in the players’ stand, laughing with some of the more beautiful wives. Nor could she miss the way the tennis groupies (pert little girls with snake hips and avid eyes) made every match he played a one-sided affair by screaming with joy whenever he did a good shot, even cheering his opponent’s double faults, and mobbing him every time he came off court. Could this really be the man who’d eaten her mother’s macaroni cheese and wrestled with her on the sofa?

After Wimbledon he moved on to ritzy places all over the world and Imogen found that a diet of almost illiterate postcards and occasional crackling telephone calls was not really enough to sustain her. Oh ye of little faith, she kept telling herself sternly, but found herself increasingly suffering from moodiness and then feeling desperately ashamed of herself.

Even worse, everyone at work, having glimpsed Nicky and learnt they were going on holiday together, had turned the affair into a sort of office Crossroads. Not a day passed without someone asking her if she’d heard from him, or how long was it until her holiday, or how was he getting on in Indianapolis. Gloria’s attitude was ambiguous too. On the one hand she liked to boast, when out, of how her greatest friend Imogen was going out with a tennis star, and let slip crumbs of tennis gossip passed on by Imogen. But on the other she was wildly jealous, particularly when the word got round and several of the local wolves started coming into the library asking Imogen for dates.

‘They ought to provide wolf hooks as well as dog hooks outside,’ Gloria said, with a slight edge to her voice. ‘Then they wouldn’t be able to come in here pestering you.’

Stung by Gloria’s sniping (You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. I bet Nicky’s playing round with all those foreign birds), Imogen gritted her teeth and went out with one or two of the wolves. But when the evening ended, remembering Nicky’s beautiful curling mouth, and the caressing deftness of his touch, she couldn’t even bear to let them kiss her; then felt mean when they stormed off into the night.

Finally, the weather had been terrible. Throughout July, August and early September, it deluged without stopping. The River Darrow flooded the water meadows and the tennis courts, and endangered the lives of several flocks of sheep. Imogen’s hair crinkled depressingly, and she had absolutely no chance to brown her pallid body before her holiday. And the vicar, whose garden and golf had been almost washed away, was in a permanently foul mood and vented most of his rage on Imogen.

At last September arrived. By scrimping every penny, she’d managed to save a hundred pounds. Nicky had told her not to worry about money, that he’d take care of everything, but she knew France was terribly expensive, and she wanted to pay her way. As most of her wages went towards the housekeeping, it didn’t leave much for her wardrobe.

‘What am I going to do about beach clothes?’ she said.

‘You won’t need much in a small fishing village,’ said her mother. ‘Which reminds me, Lady Jacintha sent a lovely red bathing dress for jumble. Red’s in this year, isn’t it? It’s perfect, except for a bit of moth in the seat.’

The jumble was also deprived of two of Lady Jacintha’s wide-bottomed cotton trousers, which didn’t really fit, but Imogen thought she could pull long sweaters over them. Her mother bought her two kaftans in a sale in Leeds.

‘This phrase book isn’t much good,’ said Juliet, lounging on Imogen’s bed the night before she left. ‘“My coachman has been struck by lightning,” “Please ask the chambermaid to bring some more candles.” I ask you!’

Imogen wasn’t listening. She was trying on Lady J’s red bathing dress for the hundredth time and wondering if it would do.

‘My legs are like the bottom half of a twinset and pearls,’ she sighed.

‘You ought to get a bikini. Bet it’s topless down there,’ said Juliet. ‘I think Mummy and Daddy are so funny.’

‘Why?’ said Imogen, folding up a dress.

‘Thinking you’ll be safe because you’ve got a married couple in the party to chaperone you. Ha! Ha! To egg you on more likely. I hope you’re on the pill!’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ snapped Imogen.

‘Well, you won’t be able to hold off a man like Nicky once he gets you in France.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Imogen, storming out of the room.

But it was all too near the knuckle. Nicky’s last letter — the only one he hadn’t written on a postcard — had ended. . and, darling, for goodness sake go and get yourself fitted up. We don’t want to spoil the whole fortnight worrying about you getting pregnant.

Time and again during the past month Imogen had walked up and down in front of Dr Meadows’ surgery, and each time she had funked it. Dr Meadows was one of her father’s oldest friends and well over sixty. How could she ask him?

In the end, once more egged on by Gloria, she had gone to a family planning clinic in Leeds on the pretext of looking for holiday clothes. Unfortunately her two brothers, Michael and Sam, still home for the holidays, had insisted on coming with her, in the hope of catching a Gillette Cup match at Headingley. But this, predictably, had been rained off, and Imogen had great difficulty shaking them off, even for a couple of hours.

‘I’ve got to buy lots of boring things like underwear,’ she said.

‘We’ll come too,’ said Sam, who at fourteen had only recently become interested in girls. ‘We might be able to see into some of the changing rooms.’

‘I don’t like people hanging round when I’m buying clothes,’ said Imogen quickly. ‘It muddles me. Look, here’s a fiver. Why don’t you go and see the new James Bond? I’ll meet you at the barrier at five o’clock,’ and, blushing violently, she charged through the glass doors of Brown and Muff. Rushing straight through and out the other side, she set off at a trot towards the clinic.

‘Where’s old Imo really going?’ said Sam, as they shuffled off to the cinema.

‘F.P.A.,’ said Michael, who was concentrating on lighting a cigarette in the rain.

‘Blimey, is she pregnant?’

‘Course not, just getting fixed up before her holiday.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘Left the address lying around in her bedroom.’ He began to cough. The cigarette went out.

‘Hope to Christ Dad doesn’t find it,’ said Sam. ‘Fancy old Imo getting round to sex at last.’

‘Just as well she’s taking precautions. They’re randy buggers these tennis players, even worse than rugger players.’ Michael’s cigarette, sodden now, obstinately refused to be lit. ‘I hope she’ll be all right, won’t get hurt I mean,’ he went on, throwing it into the gutter.

‘Do her good to grow up,’ said Sam, who was staring at a couple of giggling typists who, under one umbrella, were teetering by on high heels, heading towards the pub. ‘I say, shall we skip James Bond and go and have a drink instead?’

‘They’d never serve us.’

‘It’s pretty dark in there; you’d pass for eighteen anywhere. Fancy old Imo going on the pill.’

‘Buy anything good?’ said Sam innocently, as Imogen came rushing up to the barrier with only a few minutes to spare.

‘I’d forgotten the sales were on. There’s nothing nice in the shops,’ stammered Imogen, failing to meet either of her brothers’ eyes.

‘Got your ticket?’ said Michael, waving his. ‘We’d better step on it; they’re closing the doors.’

‘Oh goodness,’ said Imogen, ‘I’ve got it somewhere.’

And as she was nervously rummaging, her shaking hands slipped, and the entire contents of her bag, including six months’ supply of the pill crashed on to the platform.

‘I wonder if scarlet women are called scarlet because they blush so much,’ said Sam, bending down to help Imogen pick everything up.

And now on the eve of her holiday, the mauve packets of the pill were safely tucked into the pocket of her old school coat hanging at the back of her wardrobe. She’d been taking it for eight days now, and she felt sick all the time, but she wasn’t sure if it was side effects or nervousness at the thought of seeing Nicky. It was such ages since their last meeting she felt she’d almost burnt herself out with longing. Then she was worried about the sex side. She’d been taking surreptitious glances at The Joy of Sex when the library was quiet, and the whole thing seemed terribly complicated. Did one have to stop talking during the performance like a tennis match, and wouldn’t Nicky, accustomed to lithe, beautiful, female tennis players, find her much too fat?

She put her hot forehead against the bathroom window. In the garden she could see her father talking to the cat and staking some yellow dahlias beaten down by the rain and wind.

‘That’s what I need,’ she thought wistfully. ‘I’ll never blossom properly in life unless I’m tied to a strong sturdy stake.’

She wondered if Nicky was really stake material. Her father was coming in now. He looked tired. He’d been closeted with members of his flock all afternoon.

She went back to her room and found Homer dispiritedly pulling her underwear out of her suitcase. He hated people going away. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said, hugging him.

She also packed a pile of big paperbacks she’d never got round to reading, Daniel Deronda, Lark Rise To Candleford, Scott Fitzgerald and Tristram Shandy. On the bed lay a box of tissues (they don’t have the kind of loo paper you can take your make-up off with in France, Miss Hockney had told her), a cellophane bag of cotton wool balls and a matching set of Goya’s Passport she had won in the church fête raffle. They didn’t look very inspiring as beauty aids. She imagined Nicky’s other girlfriends with the whole of Helena Rubinstein at their disposal.

There was a knock on the door. It was her mother.

‘Hullo darling, how are you getting on? Daddy wants a quick word before he goes down to the jumble sale pricing committee.’

As she went into the vicar’s study, Imogen started to shake. He was sitting behind his huge desk, lighting his pipe, a few raindrops still gleaming on his thick grey hair. All round him the shelves were filled with Greek and theological books, which the vicar never looked at, and gardening and sporting works which were much more heavily thumbed. On one ledge were neatly stacked volumes of the Church Times and the parish magazine. On the wall the vicar allowed himself one modest photograph of himself surrounded by the England team. On the desk was a large inkwell. He despised biros.

Now he was looking at her over his spectacles. Was his jaundiced air due to the fact she’d been wearing the same skirt and sweater all week to save her best clothes for France, or was he remembering all the countless times he’d called her in to lecture her about inglorious reports, or misbehaviour at home?

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Are you looking forward to your holiday?’

‘Yes,’ said Imogen.

‘Wish I’d been lucky enough to gallivant off to the sun when I was your age,’ he went on heavily, ‘but times were harder then.’

Oh God thought Imogen, he’s not going to start on that one.

But instead her father got to his feet and began to pace the room. ‘I don’t think your mother and I have ever been oppressive parents — we’ve always tried to guide you by example rather than coercion.’ He gave her the chilly on-off smile he used for keeping his parishioners at a distance. His flock-off smile Michael and Juliet always called it.

‘But I can’t let you depart without a few words of advice. You are going to a foreign country — where there will be temptations. I trust you follow me, Imogen.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘We are letting you go because we trust you. We know Nicky is an attractive young man, and a celebrity, used to getting his own way in life, but we still trust you.’

He stopped by the window, absent-mindedly stripping yellow leaves off a geranium on the ledge, testing its earth for sufficient moisture.

‘It’s been a trying afternoon,’ he went on. ‘Molly Bates and her daughter Jennifer were here for over an hour. Poor Molly. Jennifer suddenly revealed she was three months pregnant and the young man concerned has disappeared. Of course every attempt will be made to trace him and persuade him to marry the girl, but if not, she will spend the next months in an unmarried mothers’ home — not the most attractive of dwelling places — but Molly Bates feels, as a member of the Parochial Church Council, that Jennifer cannot have the child at home. Whatever the outcome, the girl’s life is ruined. She is second-hand goods now.’

Poor Jennifer, thought Imogen, perhaps she’ll be sent off to the jumble sale.

‘When you’re in the South of France,’ said her father, ‘remember the fate of poor Jennifer Bates and remember you’re a clergyman’s daughter, and they, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion.’

Imogen had a momentary fantasy that the packets of purple pills must at this moment be burning a hole in her old coat pocket, that her father’s outrage was like the sun on glass. Fortunately he construed her crimson face as embarrassment at the topic of conversation rather than guilt.

He sat down and moved the inkwell on the desk. ‘Remember the words of Milton,’ he said in sepulchral tones, ‘She that has chastity is clad in complete steel.’

Imogen suddenly had a vision of herself clanking around the beach in the South of France in a steel suit of armour. Her father, she decided, must have been very much like Milton. She also suspected that he was rehearsing his sermon for next Sunday. She had a horrible feeling that he was going to make her kneel down and pray over her.

‘You are entering the school of life,’ he said, dropping his voice dramatically. ‘All I can do is pray for you night and day. Now go back to your packing and have a wonderful holiday in the sun. I must away to the jumble pricing committee.’

The contrast between her gadding, sybaritic existence and his modest, selfless toil was only too obvious. Imogen went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She went upstairs feeling hopelessly depressed. Her father had brilliantly succeeded in taking all the excitement out of her holiday. Sex with Nicky would be even more of a moral battlefield than ever. Whatever she did, bed or not, her father would be standing at the bottom of her bed in spirit, shaking his finger at her.

Oh hell, it was time to have the pill, lying in its little capsule like one of the lights round an actress’s mirror. She felt like Persephone about to take her pomegranate seed and be condemned to an eternity in Hades.

She shut her bedroom door and started groping through her half-empty wardrobe to find the thickness of her old tweed coat at the back. She couldn’t find it. She pushed aside the rest of the clothes; it wasn’t there, not even slid off its hanger on to the floor. She burrowed frantically through the landing cupboard, then ran downstairs. Her mother was peeling potatoes and reading a novel at the same time.

‘My old school coat, it’s gone,’ gasped Imogen.

‘Surely you’re not taking that to France?’ said her mother.

‘No, but where is it?’

‘I gave it to the jumble, darling. As we’d taken out Lady Jacintha’s bathing dress and those trousers I thought it was the least we could do.’

But Imogen had gone, out of the house like a rocket, belting down the garden path, slipping on the wet pavement, tearing along the moorland path, bracken slapping against her stockings, twigs scratching her face.

The coat had her name in it, the pocket contained the pills and Nicky’s last letter, the one about getting fitted up and telling her most explicitly all the delicious things he was going to do to her when he got her to France. Visions of what her father would do swept over her. He’d stop her going. Suddenly the thought of not seeing Nicky again filled her with such horror she thought she’d faint. Her breath was coming in great sobs.

There was the church hall, light, laced with raindrops, streaming from its uncurtained windows. Inside Imogen found scenes of tremendous activity and was nearly knocked sideways by the smell of moth balls, dust and none too clean clothes. Ladies of the parish in felt hats stood round laden trestle tables, rooting through other people’s cast-offs, searching for possible bargains, subtly pricing down garments they pretended they didn’t know had been sent in by fellow sorters.

‘I don’t think she’s even bothered to launder these corsets,’ said the butcher’s wife, dropping them disdainfully into the nearest bin. ‘And this hostess gown is quite rotted under the armpits.’

‘Lady Jacintha has sent in a fox fur without any tail,’ said the local midwife. ‘Rats, rats,’ she added, waving it at the caretaker’s cat, who, giving her a wide berth, leapt on to a pile of old books and records.

‘Hullo, Imogen love,’ said the butcher’s wife. ‘Come to lend a hand? I thought you were off on your holidays tomorrow.’

‘I am,’ said Imogen, frantically searching round for the piles of coats.

‘If you’re looking for your Dad, he’s over there.’

Imogen peered through the dusty gloom and froze with horror. In the far corner, in front of a long freckled mirror, Miss Jarrold from the Post Office was trying on Imogen’s school coat, which came down to her ankles, and being encouraged on either side by Mrs Connolly, her mother’s daily woman, and the vicar.

‘There’s still some wear in it,’ Miss Jarrold was saying. ‘I could get my sister from Malham to turn it up.’

‘Oh very becoming, Miss Jarrold,’ the vicar was saying jovially. He had his hearty ‘flock-off’ smile on again.

‘Not sure about the colour, Elsie,’ said Mrs Connolly. ‘It never did anything for Miss Imogen either.’

‘I’m only going to use it for gardening and walks, seems a bargain for 50p,’ said Miss Jarrold, and turning back to the mirror, she adopted a model girl’s stance, shoving her hands into the pockets. ‘Oh look, there’s something inside.’

Imogen was across the room in a flash, just as Miss Jarrold pulled the purple packets and Nicky’s letter out of the pockets.

‘Whatever’s all this?’ she went on.

‘They’re mine,’ said Imogen, snatching them from her.

Miss Jarrold was so startled she stepped back with a resounding crack on some 78s of the Mikado.

‘Imogen,’ thundered the vicar, ‘where are your manners, and what have you got there?’

‘Nothing,’ she muttered, going as red as a GPO van.

‘Love letters and photos,’ said Mrs Connolly calmly, who disliked the vicar intensely, and had seen exactly what was inside the pocket. ‘No girl likes to lose those, do they, love? Oh look, there’s Lady Harris at the door. I expect she wants to discuss the refreshments with you, vicar.’

‘Ah, yes, indeed. Welcome, welcome,’ said Mr Brocklehurst in a ringing voice, finishing off the Mikado altogether as he went towards the door.

For a minute Imogen and Mrs Connolly looked at each other.

‘Thanks,’ stammered Imogen. ‘That was terribly kind.’

‘Better to be safe than sorry,’ said Mrs Connolly. ‘My Connie’s been on them things for years. I’d beat it if I were you, before your Dad has second thoughts. Have a nice time. ’Spect you’ll come back brown as a berry.’

‘Seems in a hurry,’ said Miss Jarrold innocently. ‘Is she courting?’

‘Happen she is,’ said Mrs Connolly, who knew perfectly well Miss Jarrold read all the cards that came through the Post Office. ‘She hasn’t told me owt about it at any rate.’

The last few hours were a torment, but at last Imogen was on the train to London, her small suitcase on the rack. Her mother, Juliet and Homer, drooping and looking gloomy, stood on the platform. Suddenly Imogen felt a great lump in her throat. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so awful and boring the last few weeks. I’ll make it up to you, really I will,’ she said, leaning out of the window. ‘I wish you were coming too.’

‘We’ll all miss you,’ said her mother.

‘Don’t forget to send me a card,’ said Juliet.

‘Be careful about drinking the water,’ said her mother.

‘Remember chastity begins and ends at home,’ said Juliet. ‘Here’s something to read on the train,’ handing her a parcel as the train drew out. In it were copies of the Kama Sutra and The Sun is my Undoing.

Gradually the dark stone walls, the mill chimneys, the black-grimed houses, the rows of washing and dirty white hens in the gardens were left behind. She was on her way.