A Closed Eye Read Free Page B

had to reconstruct later, for they, understandably enough, only spoke of themselves in glowing cinematic terms. She could not, they thought, take in their wonderful romance; they had remained too close, two brave (they thought) people against the world. All their daughter knew was that they had always been good-looking. That was their birthright and their charm. As lovers they were picturesque, notable. She had been brought up on the legend of their beauty, although it was already diminished by the time she knew them. Her mother, Merle, had been a ravishingly pretty girl in the fashion of the time, petulant, provocative. As Merle Harrap she had been trained in pretty ways: singing and dancing lessons, deportment, nothing practical,for she was expected to marry young. She met Hughie Blakemore in London, just before Hughie went to Oxford. Both knew immediately that they were meant for each other, that Oxford was an interval wished on them by outside forces, that he would break free in order to spend his time with her. In any event he was restless, weak-willed, evidently not a scholar, though handsome, dashing, and conventional in every other respect. He broke his widowed mother’s heart in leaving at the end of his fourth term in order to live with Merle, who was then taking dancing and elocution lessons, prior, as she thought, to a career on the stage. They lived like birds, on Hughie’s allowance, enjoying their youth. They married, to everyone’s relief, soon after, at a scandalously young age (a fact they exaggerated in later life). Harriet was born in 1939, by which time Hughie had joined the RAF. They were so young, so dashing, that Harriet’s birth passed almost unnoticed. Except, ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Merle, when shown the baby. ‘It may fade as she gets older,’ said the nurse, pulling the shawl a little tighter round the baby’s face, where the red mark appeared so incongruous beneath the wide innocent eyes. Merle felt for her, as well as love, a kind of reluctant pity, almost a distaste. She was glad to leave the child with her nurse and to put on the little black dress, the fur cape, and the cocktail hat to go off to her young husband, equally dashing in his air force uniform, with the officer’s cap pushed back from his forehead, and the white silk scarf draped carelessly round his neck. How they drank! How they danced! In smoky basements, in hotel ballrooms, very occasionally in the officers’ mess when he wanted to show her off. And she did him proud, with her neat figure and her high heels, and her red, red lipstick which she renewed frequently, lifting her eyes provocatively from her mirror to gaze into his. He adored her, she him, although she was not having as good a time as she suspected he was. He had the gift, had always hadit. But after she got a job as a mannequin at Marshall and Snelgrove things got a bit brighter. Then there was a bad period when she did not hear from him, and then came the news that his plane had been shot down over Osnabrück and he had been taken prisoner.
    When she got him back he was different. The absence in his eyes frightened her; he seemed docile yet distracted. She resolved never to let him out of her sight again. With what she had saved, and his full disability pension and gratuity, she rented a little shop in William Street, filling it with the kind of smart black dresses that she herself liked to wear, and later with the dark greens and navies favoured by what she privately thought of as the old trouts in Pont Street. These splendid women were puzzled by the Labour government and the outbreak of an unspectacular peace. ‘We held the fort,’ they assured one another, disappointed when no one asked them how they had done it. Hughie sat in the room at the back of the shop, glad to be safe. As time went on he grew more confident, emerging for a chat with the old ladies—he was still very handsome—opening the door, carrying their parcels to the car, making coffee.