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| "How do I look, Jimmy" |
A wallflower or bell of the ball? This is what every girl asks herself on the night of her first big dance.
THE gas fire purred and glowed and made admirable little late-night popping sounds. Judy was alone; there were only her own ears to catch the soft, surprising words if she whispered them to herself-perhaps doubting, perhaps believing - I love him.
It was true. . .. Repeated, the words became entirely natural; strange and wonderful.
The invitations had come a month ago.
"It's the Tillotsons' dance," her sister Sandra had said, turning over her post.
The Tillotsons gave a big party every year; they had done so since the first of their family could be forced into white shoes and socks and velvet sashes. They had begun with conjurers and progressed, through the years, to party games and square-dancing. And at last, as their family grew up, they reached the blessed final stage of the formal dance.
These parties had always been successful and were now so hallowed by tradition that if they had chosen to shut their guests into a barn with some ginger beer and leave them to it, the result could hardly have failed to go with a swing. The Tillotson dance was an Event. . . .
Judy drew her own invitation out of its envelope with fingers made delicate with disbelief. "There's one for me."
There it was, the name on the printed card, indisputably her own: 'Miss Judy Grant'. Unprecedented, impossible, true.
"For you?" said her mother blankly. "Oh, darling, they must have made a mistake. . . . Mrs. Tillotson must think you're older than you are. . . I”ll write a note explaining--...
But Judy looked at her sister. During their childhood Sandra had been both ally and enemy; she was four years the elder. So often it had seemed that she had all the fun, all the privileges, everything-even her clothes were never handed down.
At school, with her own friends, Sandra led a secret and exotic life whose mysteries Judy was never able to penetrate: "No, you can't come with us. No, you're too young. . . ."
On rare occasions Sandra welcomed her and they brooded together over some injustice of the adult world or fought for some privilege. And sometimes Sandra fought for her. "She's nearly twelve. I had a pair of nylons when I was twelve."
Sandra was now twenty-one. In the last few years, after a short period when they had been closer companions than ever before, she had seemed to escape utterly into a different world and Judy had felt more than ever disregarded, shut out, irrevocably too young.
Now she looked to Sandra silently, and Sandra remembered and fought for her again.
"It's not a mistake," Sandra said slowly. "I met Mrs. Tillotson the other day and she asked about Judy, what she's doing and so on. She seemed quite interested that you'd left school, and said that Mary went to your secretarial place and you'll like it. Anyway, it can't be a mistake. After all, Mummy, she's' seventeen. I don't see why she shouldn't go."
Judy burst out with panicky elation, "I must go!"·
Her mother shook her head and smiled, "Well, I suppose you're right-"
Sandra took charge with blessed understanding, full of advice, information, reassurance. She was very busy these days, going out five nights out of seven, but she went shopping with Judy on successive Saturdays until they found the dress, the one that must be bought not because it would do but because it was perfect.
"Yes, a full-length dress is elegant and makes it an occasion. And if you want a
rose-coloured dress why not have one? The younger girls usually have white or blue tulle and look like nothing at all. After all, if one's old enough to go to a proper dance, one's old enough to wear what suits one. You look really lovely, Judy."
SANDRA herself was slim and invariably elegant. She had coppery curls and eyes miraculously the same colour, so that with her delicate features and clear skin she was beautiful by any standard. Beside her, Judy had always felt colourless and untidy.
She was like an unfinished model of her sister-her fair hair a drab version of Sandra's and her face, still smooth with youth, lacking. the clear' definition of Sandra's.
As a rule Judy was quite content with her appearance. It was only when she dreamed of being beautiful that Sandra's bright head appeared beside her own in the mirror of her mind, and she knew it was not possible.
But now, although Sandra actually stood beside her, the dream was not broken. Judy rose on tiptoe in her flat-heeled shoes and saw herself, in the beautiful, full-skirted dress that swung out at the back, as a slim, graceful young woman, not exactly beautiful but certainly pretty and vital, and not like Sandra at all. Like no one but herself.
Sandra had odd moods these days. She was laughing for no reason.
"You see, you're lovely," she repeated. "You'll buy it?" It was an assurance, not a question. Sandra, who was so cool and undemonstrative, laughed again and seized 'Judy's hands. "You're really lovely! Isn't it all fun?"
HER mother looked doubtful when they got home. "Are you sure, Sandra? Isn't that a little old---?"
But it seemed that Sandra could not stop laughing. She laughed now, and reached her arms round their mother's waist to kiss her. "No, it's not too old. It's a sweet dress. Judy looks very pretty. " .
That evening Judy ran over to show Jimmy her dress.
Sandra had said she need not be alarmed about the dance because Jimmy was sure to have been invited too and they could go together. Comic old Jimmy with his clumsy ways was not anybody’s ideal of an escort for a first dance, but the thought of going with him made the whole affair seem much less terrifying.
Besides, Jimmy's clumsiness was not a thing to be ever considered. His lame leg caused him to limp only very slightly now, but because he was Jimmy, the limp became a little ludicrous, like his short sight; as if it were some deliberate affectation to increase the potency of the legend of 'old Jimmy'.
'Old Jimmy,' people said, and smiled involuntarily. It would be hard to say who was the more enthusiastic about Jimmy's reputation for glorious inefficiency and awkwardness- Jimmy's friends, or Jimmy himself. Judy alone sometimes frowned instead of smiling, annoyed with him, although she could hardly have explained why.
"How do I look, Jimmy?" she asked, as she pirouetted before him, the rose- coloured skirt billowing gloriously.
"Wonderful! Jimmy told her. "I'd adore to accompany such a vision of loveliness--But I can't possibly go. It’s my exams."
"Jimmy!"
"I’m awfully sorry: I just didn't realize the date. You know what a fool I am-I'm terribly sorry, abject, anything you like, truly, but I just can’t" He twirled his spectacles and pulled a face, tempting her to laugh.
Judy's heart sank into her stomach. "Jimmy! I'll be terrified without you. You’ve got to come-"
Jimmy said, with great seriousness, "It's the middle of my exams," as if she must be deaf or mad to think he could come. Jimmy was an articled accountant, and his life seemed to consist of one exam after another.
Judy could never believe they were as important as all that and Jimmy himself would refer to them deprecatingly: ''I'm bound to fail, it's all luck." But somehow he always scraped through.
Judy had been so sure she could rely on him .
"Honestly, it's not so fearsome," he told her. "I went last year, and Mrs. Tilllotson didn't leave me alone a moment. She'll see you don't get left by yourself, she's good at that sort of thing. You don't need me." He frowned. "Look, if you really want me to-"
''No, I'm being silly. Why, of course, if you want to work-it's awful of me to try and stop you."
Jimmy muttered, "It'd be all right. I mean, exams-who cares about -exams."
But Judy had realized with no little surprise that he did care. For the first time she became conscious that he was two years older than she. He was no longer entirely a boy-and she was almost a woman.
GOING to the Tillotsons’ dance was like being born into a new world, feeling shivery and naked in spite of the velvet stole of Sandra's rapped round her shoulders.
As she climbed the stairs beside Sandra the babel of practised gaiety and the bright dresses she had glimpsed through the open drawing-room doors fell away behind them. Sandra suddenly turned and waved to someone and hurried ahead.
When Judy caught her up in Mrs. Tillotson's bedroom, she was already flinging off her wrap, her face as she turned to Judy warm and smiling and excited.
"Come down when you're ready, Judy."
"Sandra-"
But with inconceivable callousness Sandra had stared briefly at her luminous reflection in the dressing-table glass and was gone. Judy was alone, abandoned.
I can't do it, she thought, I can't face it-the women that she had glimpsed in their pale gleaming brocades and floating tulle through the open doors, the men's dark, stern dinner jackets or tails, all infinitely polished and competent. . . .
Supposing no one asked her to dance. .. It was a terrible thought and already she could see herself standing stiffly by the doors, a fixed smile on her face, her dress no longer lovely but looking limp and silly. . . .
She stood there for perhaps one minute, perhaps five.
"Ready?" said a voice behind her.
He was watching from the landing, through the bedroom door. He was tall, very dark. That was all Judy saw in her sudden rush of ridiculous guilt.
"I didn't hear you-" she began, muttering foolishly, but his smile was everything it could have been, laughing with her.
"You're Judy Grant, aren't you?" he said as she walked towards him. "I'm -David-a friend of your sister’s. There."
He drew her out on to the landing. "That's a fine dress. You look - charming. Turn around - perfect. Ready?"
Judy smiled and nodded. How kind he was. . . .
"Then let's go," he said. "I always like to make my entrance with a pretty . girl on my arm. How lucky you were here.
" After that everything was possible again, to be guided by him past that terrifying group by the doorway, safe in his patronage, and straight on to the floor.
They danced twice, and then the inevitable Paul Jones swept her away, her smile so exalted that she could not have stopped smiling if she tried. A pale, sandy-haired boy claimed her swiftly out of the slight confusion when the music stopped, and after that she never lacked a partner.
Once or twice she came out of her dream to think, 'How wonderful it is. . . ' She saw nothing that was not perfect.
She glimpsed Sandra once or twice but had no chance to speak to her. There was dancing in two rooms, with big double doors open between them, and the younger guests, the 'children,' had all drifted together in the farther one.
She did not meet David again until late, two o'clock, when the company had begun to thin. One moment she was with a group of young people and the next, she was alone with him.
"Having fun, Judy?"
She nodded radiantly.
"This is your first big dance, isn't. it?" he said gravely. "I envy you. It must be splendid to be a girl going to her first big dance. I can see you’ve been having a success-it sticks out a mile."
"Does it? How can you tell?" "Well, you look admired. It's an unmistakable look, and very flattering. Am I right?" His smile said, 'This is teasing and unfair, you don't have to answer.'
She saw now that his eyes were hazel beneath their black brows.
"You know, I don't think there's anything quite like a first dance for a young man- I suppose the nearest equivalent for a boy might be when he kisses his first girl, and finds to his astonishment that she likes it!
"That's quite a moment, you know, and it can only happen once. Of course, if she doesn't like it, it's just too bad-like the girl who doesn’t enjoy her first big dance. I don't suppose it matters in the long run."
"I suppose not," said Judy gravely, remembering her own fear and think- it would have mattered if she had been a wallflower.
He grinned "And you'll never know, being one of the lucky ones. Well, would you like to fetch your coat? I'm taking you and your sister home, if I may."
IT was over. David bundled them into a small car and tucked a rug round them, Judy wedged between him and Sandra. The night wheeled briefly by, dark now that the street lamps were extinguished, and they were home.
Judy said quickly, "Good-bye; thank you," and hurried indoors in sudden embarrassment, and she heard Sandra's low clear voice, "Goodnight, David," and his lower reply and Sandra was following her.
"Was it fun, Judy? You had a good time? You made quite a hit with Michael Phillips, you know; I kept an eye on you. But you did en joy it? "
"Wonderful-wonderful. . . ."
Judy slept four or five hours and woke abruptly as if she had not slept at all. There was an invitation to a party at the Phillips' brought round by Michael before breakfast, with a pencilled apology for the short notice, 'Do come if you can.'
"Of course you'll go," Sandra said. "You’ll know someone there anyway -David Parry."
So Judy went.
David was as kind, as apparently pleased with her, as before. All the time he was there, she was aware of his movements.
But it was Michael Phillips who took her home and Judy thought suddenly, if David is a friend of Sandra's I may see him again. . . .
She said goodnight to her parents and went upstairs. The tide of elation that had swept her up at the Tillotsons' dance was just beginning to fail. She had slept very little for two nights and now she was tired.
She undressed slowly, and smiled to herself as she remembered David's way of speaking, in quick short phrases but without any hurry. Certainly he liked her a little. She amused him, and he had said she was pretty. . . .
She could visualize his eyes and his smiling mouth, but his face was shadowy; it was ridiculous the way one could remember isolated features but not a person's whole face . . . I love him. '"
Judy drew the brush more slowly through her fair, shining hair. I love him. The words fell snugly into place in her mind, warming it. It was like a knotting-together of all the disparate threads of her life, drawn together simply so that she could be in love. .
SHE was still awake when Sandra came in much later and softly opened the door.
"You are awake? I wondered how long you'd been in."
"Not very long."
In the light of the heavily shaded lamp by Judy's bed, Sandra looked very beautiful.
"I'll get my things and take my face off in here with you, may I? Did you have a good party? Did someone bring you home?" She spoke eagerly and tenderly.
"Michael did."
"Oh I'm so. glad. It is fun, isn't it. It's taken such ages for you to grow up. . . . Oh Judy!"
She had taken off her necklace and ear-rings when she came back. Her dark dress looked bare and meek without them.
"I must tell you, Judy darling, I simply have to, but you must promise not to let anyone know, not a soul-' ,
Judy whispered, already growing cold as her nerves prepared for the shock, "Of course not, of course I wouldn't."
''I'm so terribly in love! I have been for weeks, I never imagined- You do like him, don't you-David Parry? It's got so I can't think of anything else, I'm being a perfect fool but I just can't help it.
"Do you know, when you went to your party tonight I felt so jealous, because you'd been asked and I hadn't and he'd be there-isn't it silly?" Her eyes glowed like fire. "Tell me what You think! Darling, you do. approve?"
"How lovely," Judy whispered.
"Don't you think he's wonderful? Of course I know one ought to be reasonable and balance a person's faults and virtues and so on, but it's not like that at all. He doesn’t seem to have any of either, really-he's just David. Oh, I do feel so. happy and silly."
"How lovely," Judy repeated. It was not difficult, after all, to say, with the correct degree of anxious interest, "Does he love you, do you think?"
"I don’t know. . . Yes I do, really. I do hope so -I think he does -I think he will, anyway, perhaps he does already. Perhaps Soon. . . . Oh Judy, you can't imagine what it's like."
EVERYTHING was so horribly clear now-Sandra's capricious tenderness to herself; David's 'a friend of your sister's.'
"I expect he does love you, 'you’re very attractive after all."
"That doesn't have a great deal to do with it. But I do think perhaps he does. One can tell in a way from the things they talk about, whether they re serious. . . .
Her beautiful abstracted eyes shone into Judy's face like torches. Judy thought, he must love her, he couldn’t help it.
For an hour or more she said the right things and listened and smiled, and Sandra kissed her before she went.
The separate elements of what had happened, fragments of events, tossed round in her head like- the coloured particles of a kaleidoscope. There was nothing to hold on to, no enduring meaning. Had David liked her? Or had he thought: So this is Sandra's sister. I must be nice to her. . . .
Or perhaps Sandra had not spoken to him and he had come up looking for her and seen Judy and simply guessed who she was. Had he liked her merely because she reminded him of Sandra. . . ? No, he had liked her for herself too. He had shown it. . . Or had he?
Surely she could believe something. Somewhere in all this chaos was a precious moment that could be shaken free, set on its feet and hallowed finally in memory.
In the centre of this storm of pride, vanity, love for Sandra, hatred of Sandra, envy, regret, was a pure little core of grief.
She had wanted something and for one precious moment she had known it and treasured it. . . . It was impossible to fulfil, but there had been one glorious moment when she had said 'I love him' and believed it. In a little while, the thought pacified her so that finally she went to sleep.
JIMMY said, "I've failed. I know I have."
He had appeared the next morning, a Sunday, looking so utterly lost and miserable that Judy had taken him to sit on the brick wall at the bottom of the garden, to make him tell her what was wrong.
"Jimmy dear,· you Can't possibly know you've failed." She had cajoled and expostulated for half an hour. "Everyone always thinks they've done badly in an exam."
It was dreadful, the way she hadn't given a thought to him and for days he'd been going about glooming, because he thought he'd failed.
"I mustn't fail," Jimmy said.
Judy remembered how she and Jimmy and Sandra had sat here two years ago and Jimmy had said, with the same face, "I mustn't fail."
'Then it had been something quite- different. She had listened aghast as he poured out his unaccountable and impossible ambition-how he must pass his medical and do his National Service, how his headmaster had told his parents that if he stayed on at school and worked hard he could get to Oxford but it was ridiculous, utterly untrue-how a cousin of his mother's had suggested he be articled to his firm of accountants - "but they won't listen! I'm going to do National Service first, I must."
"You're mad," Sandra had said calmly. "No one wants to do National Service. And anyway they'll never pass you with your leg and your eyes. Why not decide to do what you can do and do it well, for a change."
Judy had writhed at this cruelty, but Jimmy had become quiet, and finally said, "Very well, you'll See."
A month later he started work with his uncle.
SHE thought of Jimmy as he must have' been as a little boy, fumbling and lagging but somehow getting along so they did not discover his short sight until he was seven.
She thought of how he had returned to school after infantile paralysis, put with children two years younger than himself-big and strong but lame, looking older even than he was because of his glasses, doomed to be either a bully or a butt for teasing and insensibly learning how to make the best of it until he became 'old Jimmy', 'good. old Jimmy'.
She remembered how his headmaster had made him skip a year twice during his school career, to everyone’s astonishment and his own eloquent disgust, until he was back with his own age-group.
Each time, in the hew class, he had struck precisely the same inept and mediocre note as in the other; but meanwhile a year's work had been made up in less than three months- Jimmy complaining and protesting comically, old Jimmy the all-but-dunce, always saying the wrong thing, always armed with the amusing wrong answer in class, always putting his big lame foot in it.
That was Jimmy. Good old Jimmy, she thought vaguely. . . and turned to look at his young, haggard, despairing yet deprecating face with a sudden little pang of awe and pity. It must be all right for him, he could not fail, life could not be so cruel as to so tempt and reject both of them, him too. . . .
If Jimmy failed too, nothing could be trusted; it would all, David and Sandra and everything, be the fault of some malignant providence.
NO, it had t be her own fault -just some small personal mistake that patience and practice and growing-up would remedy-it must, it must -he couldn't let her down. He at least must be allowed to justify himself or nothing was any good.
"Oh, Jimmy, I know you've not failed, you can do anything if you try -it was just a difficult paper and everyone will have done badly, they take it into account. I know you've not failed! "
"Perhaps you're right," Jimmy said gloomily.
"It's true, I know it, I know it."
In a few minutes, she thought, she would tell him about David, and he would be comforting.· Soon the world would right itself. ------------ THE END © Jane Thomas. 1959
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