A Fragile Peace

by A Fragile Peace (retail) (epub)

  ‘I don’t need it at all!’ She was really angry now. How dare this outsider, this interloper, try to tell her what she should or should not do in her own house? She poured another large drink.

  ‘I say – steady on.’ His face was suddenly serious and the flippancy had gone from his voice. ‘Allie, do you think you should?’

  ‘What I should or shouldn’t do has absolutely nothing to do with you!’ Recklessly she tossed the drink back. She could feel the effect of the alcohol, drunk too fast, spreading in her veins. The knowledge that she was acting very badly fuelled the flame of her anger. When she reached for the decanter again, she crashed it against one of the glasses, which spun across the table and splintered on the floor. ‘Dammit!’ she said, viciously.

  Tom Robinson stepped forward and, before she realized his intention, took the decanter from her. ‘Come on now, Allie, I really don’t think—’

  She was shaking with rage. ‘I don’t give a damn what you think. How dare you! Give that back to me! Give it back!’ She reached for the decanter.

  He stepped back, avoiding her hand. ‘Allie…’

  ‘Would someone kindly tell me,’ the voice from the open doorway was icy, ‘what in heaven’s name is going on here?’

  There was a moment’s utter silence. It was Tom who broke it, his voice easy and apologetic. ‘I do apologize, Mrs Jordan. My fault, I’m afraid. We were larking about. I’m sorry about the broken glass. I’ll replace it, of course.’ They all knew that in the shattered glass that covered the floor lay the best part of a week’s meagre allowance for Tom.

  Myra’s eyes were on her daughter. ‘That won’t be necessary. I heard quite enough to determine with whom the responsibility lies for this – fracas. Would you leave us please?’

  He hesitated, then put the decanter carefully on the table. ‘Mrs Jordan—’

  ‘Please. Leave us.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go?’ Allie’s face was very white. In Tom’s attempt to defend her, she saw the worst humiliation of all.

  He shrugged, and with no further word walked past Myra and out into the hall. Once there he stopped, unashamedly eavesdropping.

  ‘What exactly is the meaning of this?’

  He heard the chink of glass as Allie collected shards from the floor. ‘I’m sorry, Mother. We were just arguing, that’s all. I can’t stand that man. You don’t like him yourself, you know you don’t.’

  The listener in the hall reflected wryly on the old adage that eavesdroppers rarely heard good of themselves.

  ‘I’m not referring to your stupid, childish quarrelling. I’m talking about this.’ There came a sharp, musical sound as if Myra had flicked a finger at the decanter.

  Silence.

  ‘Well? Do you think it…appropriate to be drinking at this time of day? Truly, Allie, I don’t know what’s come over you lately. I’m coming to believe that we simply can’t trust you at all! What your father would think of such behaviour I just cannot think!’

  Allie uttered one short, sharp bark of laughter.

  ‘That is quite enough, Alexandra. Give me the decanter. Thank you. Now, see to this mess. I’m displeased and disappointed in you. I shall certainly speak to your father when he comes home.’ Myra’s voice was cold. As she came out of the room carrying the decanter, Tom stepped swiftly into the morning room. A moment later he heard the tinkle of the bell as Allie lifted the telephone and jiggled the bar impatiently, heard the harsh ring of rage in her voice as she asked the operator for the number.

  ‘Hello, Ray? It’s me. Allie.’ Her voice softened: ‘Yes, I know. Look, Ray – I’m really sorry about last night…’

  * * *

  She hated it. Hated it.

  She lay, afterwards, looking up at a ceiling, every line of which had been dearly familiar to her since childhood. At some time in the past it had acquired in one corner a faint brown watermark that no amount of repainting had been able to eradicate. As a child, Allie had amused herself for hours at a time on light, sleepless summer evenings making pictures from its shape – a Red Indian, complete with feathers, a fairy castle with turret. At this moment it looked exactly what it was – an unpleasant and rather ugly stain.

  Beside her, Ray stirred. ‘Are you…all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She did not look at him. ‘I told you. I’m fine.’ She blotted from her mind the thought of the clumsily painful struggle that lovemaking had been. She was sore and uncomfortable; worse, she was filled with an unexpected, miserably empty ache that had no connection with her physical discomfort. She took a very deep breath and held it for a moment, before letting it out, long and slow. ‘You’re sure that – thing – worked? There won’t be a baby?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Ray mumbled, reddening. ‘I told you.’ Then, ‘What’s that?’ He came up on his elbow, listening, panic in his face.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘A car. Oh, Christ, it isn’t your parents coming back, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake…’ Allie rolled onto her stomach and rested her forehead on her clasped hands. The faint sound of the car receded. Ray laughed, nervously. Allie did not move. Hesitantly he ran his finger down her naked back to the swell of her buttocks. Infinitesimally she moved away from him. He did not notice.

  ‘Did you like it?’ His voice was tentative. ‘Did you, Allie?’

  For the space of a heartbeat she said nothing. Then she lifted her head and smiled brightly at him. ‘Of course I did.’ She knew that she sounded like an adult briskly reassuring a child; for a moment she felt truly sorry for him.

  ‘You were…’ he searched for the word ‘…wonderful,’ he finished lamely.

  ‘Thank you.’ Her voice was expressionless. She could not bring herself to return the compliment. She laid her chin on her tight-clasped hands. The room was very still.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Ray after a moment.

  She closed her eyes. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ In the lit darkness behind her lids, she saw her father, and Celia. Did they do this? Did they? It was horrible.

  ‘That’s not very flattering.’ Ray laughed another skittering, uncertain laugh that grated her nerves.

  ‘What? What isn’t?’

  ‘Your thinking about nothing when we’ve just – just…’ Ridiculously, he could not say it and his thin, marked skin coloured.

  ‘…made love. That’s what they call it, Ray. Making love. Making – love.’ She repeated the words slowly, thoughtfully. ‘It’s a stupid phrase, rather, when you come to think about it. I mean – you can’t make love, can you? You can – fall in love. Experience love. Or lose it. Or need it. But you can’t make it, can you?’

  He turned from her, swung thin legs to the side of the bed and reached self-consciously for his trousers. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  With the faintest of smiles, she watched his awkward efforts to dress himself without revealing his nakedness to her. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’

  With his trousers on, he felt at less of a disadvantage. ‘And what’s more, I don’t think you do either.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ She rolled onto her back, making no attempt to cover herself.

  In the act of tucking his long-tailed shirt into his trousers, he paused for a moment, looking at her, chewing his lower lip. Then he cleared his throat. ‘You’d better get dressed, hadn’t you? Your parents are sure to be home soon.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She did not move.

  ‘Allie?’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ She grinned abruptly. ‘Keep your trousers on.’

  Encouraged by the apparent sudden lightening of her mood, he leaned across her. ‘That’s just what I’m having difficulty in doing with you lying there like that! Honestly, Al, I just never know what to make of you! You’re up and down like a yo-yo!’

  She pushed him away, sitting up and drawi
ng her knees to her small breasts. ‘What a beastly unflattering way to put it!’ she said mildly, resting a smooth brown arm on her knees and ducking her head, her heavy hair swinging forward across her face. ‘Can you imagine Clark Gable telling a girl that? You’re supposed to say that the intriguing swing of my feminine moods has you enslaved – or something.’

  ‘I would if I’d thought of it. Now for heaven’s sake, get something on before your parents get back.’

  She climbed into slacks and sweater, fluffed out her hair with her fingers. As she walked past him, Ray caught her elbow with urgent fingers and swung her to face him. ‘Allie?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘We will – you will see me again, won’t you? I mean – we will do this again, won’t we?’

  Allie looked at him with clear, empty eyes. If at first you don’t succeed, said a mocking voice in her head, try, try, try again.

  ‘Certainly we will,’ she said.

  * * *

  It was as if she had become an entirely different person, a stranger with a familiar face and a body from which her mind was utterly divorced. She no longer knew herself, no longer knew what she wanted nor where she was going. It was as if, finally, her life had been turned upside down with no hope of salvage. Treasures had proved worthless, anchoring lines had broken, and there was nothing to fill the void. Divine retribution had not been visited upon her for the breaking of what was perhaps the greatest taboo of her sex and class. Nothing had happened whatsoever. The squandering of her virginity had been an act of unhappy bravado, of miserable spite against her father, against the whole, hateful world. Yet even that gesture had somehow proved empty, and the experience totally disappointing. She remembered whispered, intense conversations at school, recalled with a pang of almost nostalgic regret the innocent conviction that this must undoubtedly be the most important, the most wonderful experience of a woman’s life, and wondered with bitter wryness that reality could prove so different.

  She and Ray did not make love often – for she was adamant in her refusal of his urgings that they should take advantage of the local fields and woodlands and the rug he always carried, in hope, in his car. Privately she regarded the act as faintly absurd, an undignified and ungraceful exercise which, though no longer painful, brought her little real physical pleasure. She utterly refused to indulge in it anywhere but in a comfortable bed and with no chance of being interrupted. Ray, while making no secret of his disappointment, nevertheless gave in on this point with remarkable grace, and in doing so inspired in her a kind of exasperated affection that prevented her, as she otherwise might have done, from breaking off the relationship. She knew that she was using him – was at times faintly ashamed of the fact – but the new, harder Allie recognized quite clearly that she too was being used, for all Ray’s sometimes desperate attempts to dress up his adolescent lust in veils of clumsy romance. Perhaps, she reflected, that was the answer; perhaps there was no such thing as love. Perhaps there was simply mutual, selfish need, a kind of greed that demanded all and gave nothing, and the devil take the hindmost?

  ‘Do you believe in love?’ she asked Ray one Sunday afternoon as they lay side by side upon her narrow bed while windblown early summer rain beat against the window.

  He turned on his side, propped his head on his hand, regarding her with puzzled eyes. ‘Well, of course I do. What a silly question.’

  ‘Is it?’ The big house was utterly silent around them. Myra and Libby were away for the weekend visiting relations – a chore that Allie, despite her mother’s tight-lipped disapprobation, had cried off – and Robert, unable to accompany his wife and daughter because of business commitments on the Saturday, had gone off to the golf club for the afternoon. Mrs Welsh always spent Sunday afternoons in the village with her sister. ‘Is it?’ asked Allie again, moodily.

  ‘You know it is. How can you not believe in love? It’s like saying you don’t believe in – in air, or water…’

  ‘How very poetic.’ She lifted provoking eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t be clever.’

  She ran a thoughtful finger along the line of his mouth. ‘Do you love me?’ she asked, slyly.

  ‘Yes.’ He flushed a little and avoided her eyes. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ Her smile was pensive. ‘What would you do to prove it? Kill dragons? Take poison? Climb Everest?’

  ‘Daft thing.’ He laughed awkwardly.

  ‘Why do people love people, do you think? Or, rather – why do they think they do? Pretend they do?’

  He flicked his head in a quick, impatient gesture. ‘For heaven’s sake, Al, this is our first afternoon together in a fortnight and you go all philosophical on me! I don’t know. How should I know?’

  She lay in silence for a moment, then said, ‘I should like a drink,’ and, as his eyes went to the glass of water on the bedside table, ‘a real drink, ninny. Gin. Or whisky. Yes, whisky.’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Be a darling. It’s downstairs. In the cabinet in the drawing room. Bring it up here, hm?’

  ‘Do you think we should?’

  She giggled, genuinely amused. ‘Do you think we should be lying here together stark naked? Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ — this as he reached for his trousers. ‘There’s no one to see! Just go and get the whisky and the glasses, there’s a dear.’

  When he had returned and poured each of them a generous drink, they sipped in silence for a while, sitting at opposite ends of the bed, watching each other. ‘Feels wonderfully – licentious – doesn’t it?’ Allie asked, relishing the word. ‘Though, to complete the picture, I suppose this should really be a sleazy Paris attic?’

  His free hand crept to her bare foot. ‘I like it here, thanks.’

  She held up the glass, squinting at the world through its amber depths. ‘I went to Paris on a school trip a couple of years ago. I was very impressed – thought it the most romantic place I’d ever seen. Not that I’d seen much at the time. Not that I’ve seen much now, I suppose. It’d be lovely to spend a few months travelling around Europe, wouldn’t it? Not that it’d be much fun at the moment.’ She slipped off at an unexpected tangent. ‘What do you think is going to happen? In Europe, I mean? With that rat Hitler, and Mussolini and the rest?’

  The stroking hand stilled for a second. ‘You’re a great one for changing the subject, aren’t you?’ Ray’s voice was faintly irritated.

  ‘Yes.’ There was a brief silence. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t suppose anyone knows. Actually, I don’t think anything’s going to happen. Allie?’ His hand crept up her leg. She shifted a little. ‘Allie, we haven’t seen each other like this for simply ages…’

  The rain drove again in a great gust against the house. The light was dim, water-filtered; shadows gathered in the quiet room about them, investing their surroundings with an aura of attractive unreality. Very deliberately Allie poured herself another large whisky and drank it at one gulp, grimacing a little, half-laughing as she did so. Then she slid down onto the bed, spread-eagled, naked, her arms lying loosely on the pillow above her head. She could hear Ray’s breathing, heavy and irregular as he watched her. Lazily she drew up her knees and closed her eyes, waiting.

  It was the first time that she had felt anything, the first time that she had received any inkling of the pleasure that might be taken from the coupling of their bodies. It stirred and glowed, faintly, tantalizingly, somewhere deep within her and then, before she could do more than sense its existence, Ray’s inexperienced passion spent itself and he rolled away from her, panting. She turned on her side, drawing up her knees, trying desperately and in vain to recall that small, glimmering light of revelation that had warmed her a moment and then died as if it had never been.

  ‘Allie—’ They both froze at the sound of a car on the wet drive.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Allie landed upright on her feet by the bed. ‘That’s Dad! Quick – get yourself dressed and get downstairs. It’ll take him a
couple of minutes to garage the car. Hurry! Damn and blast it, what’s he doing home so early?’ She was scrambling into her underclothes, reaching for her skirt and blouse. ‘Keep him talking. Tell him I’ve gone to the loo or something. Come on, Ray!’

  Frantically Ray threw on his clothes, tugged at his socks, smoothed his hair with his hands.

  ‘Hurry!’ Allie was balanced on one leg, wrestling with a stocking that had acquired malicious life of its own.

  ‘I can’t find my other shoe. Dammit, where’s the thing gone?’

  She dropped to her knees and fished under the bed. ‘Here. Now, be quick!’

  ‘I’m trying.’ He started for the door.

  ‘Do your shoe up, stupid, or you’ll break your neck. And here’ – as Ray straightened she thrust the whisky bottle at him. ‘Take this with you. Put it back where you got it before Dad misses it—’

  They both heard the sound of the garage doors. Footsteps crunched on the gravel, hurrying through the rain. Ray flew along the landing, almost threw himself down the stairs and was caught in mid-flight by the opening of the front door. He stood, frozen, halfway down the stairs, one hand on the banisters, the other clutching the bottle of whisky, his presence of mind, never his outstanding asset, deserting him entirely. Every line of him, from his open mouth to his ludicrous, statue-like stance, shrieked guilt. Robert stopped in the doorway, shaking the rain from his coat, looking up, his perception a split second behind the more immediate senses of sight and speech.

  ‘Why, Ray, what on earth—’ His voice died as Allie swung around the corner and started precipitately down the stairs, then stopped dead at the sight of the tableau beneath her. Despite her attempts to tidy it, her brown hair was dishevelled and she was still struggling into her cardigan. She looked at her father in a long moment of silence, then, very composedly, she finished putting on her cardigan and walked quietly down the wide stairs, passing Ray who still stood as if struck agonizedly dumb.

  ‘Hello, Dad. What are you doing back so early? We were just going out.’ As if it were the most natural thing in the world, she had gently extracted the whisky bottle from Ray’s numbed fingers and then finished her descent into the hall. ‘Come on, Ray, we’ll be late.’