Free A Stairway to Paradise by Madeleine St John Page B

it.’
    ‘I suppose one has to do that.’
    ‘I’m sorry—I’d forgotten—you—’
    ‘It’s quite all right. I’ll have my chance next summer. And every summer.’
    ‘So you will.’
    Now they were both pensive, even sad.
    ‘I was living in a room in Camden Town in those days,’ said Barbara, trying to change the subject.
    ‘Was that nice?’
    ‘I wasn’t awfully happy at the time. Fergus was a diversion, really; I don’t know what I should have done without him. Anyway, then—’ she broke off, inhibited by miserable recollection.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Then—well—my sister’s in-laws had some friends living near Bath, who were going on a cruise, and wanted a house-sitter. So I went down there in the spring—when—yes, eighteen months ago, or so. And stayed in this glorious house. And when the people came back, I moved into a shared house in Bath and worked in a healthfood restaurant. And then when I got bored with that, I came here. I mean, to the job I’ve got now. Another Lady ad. That was almost a year ago. So now you know the whole. Sorry it’s so uninteresting.’
    ‘Not uninteresting,’ said Andrew. ‘Not in the least degree.’
    ‘Well,’ said Barbara, ‘then lacking—lacking in structure, you could say. Not to say, purpose. Couldn’t you?’

29
    Andrew poured out more wine and sat back in his chair, looking at her. It was just such a tale as an angel, precipitated into the terrible world, might have related. He felt almost defeated by the pity of it all. ‘Tell me about the future, then,’ he said. ‘What happens next?’
    She thought for a moment and her face broke into an almost reckless smile. ‘Well, there’s always teacher-training,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
    Andrew was all but overwhelmed by her predicament; there seemed nothing useful he could say. ‘I suppose it’s been pretty hard on your generation,’ he said. ‘Going out into the world in the nasty 1980s.’
    ‘Not wonderful, I suppose. Brilliant for some, of course.’
    ‘And then, one mightn’t want, after all, to be exactly the sort of person for whom it’s been brilliant.’
    ‘Still, you could argue that I’ve slightly overdone it.’
    ‘Mitigating circumstances.’
    ‘Actually, I do know someone who dropped out entirely on purpose. Conscientiously, so to speak. In fact he calls himself a conscientious objector, or did.’
    ‘Who’s that?’
    ‘A chap in Bath. I met him because he was the gardener at the house I was minding. He lived by doing odd gardening work, and things like that, but once upon a time he’d been headed for the City.’
    ‘Slight change of plan, then.’
    ‘Actually, I think he did even put in some time in the City before ideology overcame avarice. He said one had to take a stand against them , and all that pertained thereto. He told me I was doing exactly the right thing, after all.’
    ‘Ye-e-es,’ said Andrew. ‘Well, it can be problematical, trying to do the right thing. Knowing what the right thing is, for a start.’
    ‘In this case,’ said Barbara, ‘I did the right thing—if I did—only by accident, as it were. So it hardly counts.’
    ‘Perhaps that’s the only way of really doing it.’
    ‘Although one has to go on trying to do it, as occasion arises, doesn’t one? Nevertheless?’
    ‘I suppose one does. Nevertheless. Anyway—look—what about some pudding?’

30
    Barbara, waiting for her coffee to cool, carefully unpleated the gold foil from a chocolate mint.
    ‘Tell me exactly how your mother came to be born in India,’ said Andrew at last.
    ‘My grandfather was in the Indian Army. Both my grandfathers, actually. What about your people?’
    ‘My father’s father was ICS. And his father, and so on. My mother, however, was an unreconstructed English girl from the Home Counties; she actually met my father when she went out to India with the fishing fleet—in what was probably its very last incarnation, I dare say—just before the war. She