by Jonathan Coe
Why, though, had she herself not divorced Martin years ago, on the grounds of mental cruelty, on the grounds of physical cruelty, on any one of any number of tenable grounds? She had considered the idea, often enough, but had always decided against it, for the sake of her son, Edward. Perhaps this seems out of character. For instance, Maria has not, until now, appeared particularly self-sacrificing, and she has not, until now, appeared particularly stupid, and yet stupid she would surely have to be not to have noticed that Edward bore towards her the sort of malice which stood every chance of ending in matricide. Yes, of course Maria had noticed this, and yet she loved her child. She knew full well that he adored his father (they were kindred spirits, after all). She knew too that nothing would make Edward hate her more than to be taken away from him. At the same time she believed that to leave Edward to the care of his father alone would be to destroy him. She cherished a rather loopy conviction that if only she were to persist, to offer the ungrateful infant all that she could in the way of maternal affection and attention, she might yet save him from the path he was set upon, which seemed at present to be that of a psychopathic killer. Her motives here were not entirely selfless, all the same, for the desire to see her son improve his character was not quite as strong as her determination that she should one day win his love.
‘What about Edward?’ she asked, turning.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Martin, with polite surprise.
‘Who will keep Edward? Who will bring him up?’
‘Why, I will, of course. Who did you think?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Maria, hardly knowing why she went on, ‘it is customary for the mother to retain custody of her child.’
‘I hardly think that is likely to happen in this case,’ said Martin, ‘although, if you think the matter is worth bringing up, perhaps we might at least consult the boy’s own inclinations.’ He turned to Edward and ruffled his dark hair gently. ‘Well, Ted, who would you rather stay with, your mother or your father?’
‘You, Daddy,’ said Edward.
Maria, putting up a resistance which seemed more and more irrational, said, ‘No court would take his wishes into account. He’s too young.’
‘They would too,’ said Edward.
‘You don’t know what you’re doing?’ Maria shouted.
‘If they didn’t listen to me, then I’d tell them.’
There was a short silence.
‘Tell them what, Ted?’ his father asked, in a very quiet voice.
‘How she tried to kill herself’
Maria gasped.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I told him, naturally,’ said Martin. ‘The boy has a right to know these things.’
So, for that matter, has the reader. I should tell you, then, that on at least two occasions following her marriage to Martin, Maria had attempted to take her own life. It was on the basis of this fact that I ventured earlier to describe her state of mind as one of misery, a word usually to be treated with caution but which seemed, after mature consideration, to fit the bill in this instance. For it is very hard, as a general rule, to judge people’s states of mind from external circumstances, and yet it occurred even to Martin that his wife was, perhaps, slightly cheesed off when, returning home from work one evening, he caught her in the very act of trying to do herself in. For Heaven’s sake, dear, he had said, take your head out of the oven and pour me a gin and tonic. He had had a hard day at the office. Exactly how he felt about Maria’s suicide attempt is hard to determine, for it is very hard, as a general rule, to judge, etc., but my guess is that he was neither especially surprised nor displeased, since it increased after all his hold over her. All he had told her, anyway, was that it is no longer possible to kill yourself by putting your head into a gas oven. You can do yourself a mischief that way but this is hardly the same thing. Maria took careful notice of his advice and next time tried to do it by overdosing on sleeping pills. A messier business altogether, and one which, after four and a half hours cooling his heels in a hospital waiting room while his wife had her stomach pumped, he found it much harder to accept with equanimity. It was this incident which he had reported to his son, who received the information, as far as I know, with perfect composure, seeming to expect no less from his mother. Extraordinary sang froid for a three-year-old, I think you’ll agree. Maria had made no further efforts to do away with herself. There had been days when she had contemplated it, but the last attempt had shaken her up rather, and she had no particular desire to put herself through indignities like that again.
There were only two people to whom she ever confessed her unhappiness (two people and one cat, to be precise, but her visits home were by no means frequent). Incredulity will no doubt rear its ugly head again when I tell you that the first of these was Ronny. Not that she saw Ronny very much, for he now lived in London, and there subsisted between him and Martin a hatred of such intensity that it would have been on the whole tactless for him ever to have come to visit them in Essex. He had been mortified to hear of the marriage, and when Maria, during the early months of her pregnancy, had first come to visit him at his London flat, he had initially refused to see her, and such was his pique that it took him more than three minutes to relent. Subsequently however, he had invited them both to dinner, and it was on that evening, an evening disastrous for other reasons (Ronny was a hopeless cook) that he and Martin had first conceived their fierce and mutual detestation.
‘I can’t eat any more of this,’ Martin had said, hurling his knife and fork into the fireplace. ‘It’s like trying to eat a plate of shit.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me in the least,’ said Ronny, ‘to learn that the sensation of eating excrement is familiar to you.’
Maria looked helplessly from one to the other.
‘I like this wine,’ she said brightly. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘If you ask me, he pissed into the bottle,’ Martin quipped.
‘Your inability to distinguish between urine and Sauvignon ‘75 surprises me, I must say,’ answered Ronny. ‘May I ask where you were brought up? In a barn, I presume.’
‘At least I don’t live in a bloody barn, that’s more than can be said for some people. Where did you get this furniture, the local tip?’
‘Darling, please don’t be rude,’ said Maria. ‘Ronny will get upset.’
‘I shall never be upset,’ Ronny said, ‘by the guttural chatterings of a malignant baboon. When your charming husband utters a word of sense, then I shall respond accordingly.’
‘Fuck face,’ came Martin’s riposte.
‘Dick nose,’ Ronny countered.
And yet the curious thing was, that Martin could be quite polite about Ronny in his absence. You have a letter from Ronny, I see, he would say at the breakfast table. Is he well? Read me out the interesting bits.
But Maria would never read any of it out loud, because Ronny’s letters to her were usually along the following lines:
Dear Maria,
I hope you are well. I love you and want only to devote the rest of my life to your service. My only wish is to be near you, my only hope is to tear you away from the monster to whom you are wed and to lay myself at your feet. If ever you need me, my darling, I will be here, ready to follow your footsteps wherever they lead. Everyevening I sit by the telephone waiting for you to call.
Maria, divorce Martin and marry me. I worship you. I have always known that my only purpose in life is to bring you happiness. Be mine.
The car is at the garage again. The man says the plugs need changing.
Eternally yours,
Ronny.
Once, Maria would simply have given these letters a cursory reading, and then consigned them to the pedal bin along with the bacon rinds and discarded scraps of fried bread. But now she always folded them carefully, replaced them in their envelopes, carried them up to her bedroom and locked them away in a secret drawer. A secret drawer, I should add, the existence and function of which were perf
ectly well known to her husband, who had long ago supplied himself with a spare key, and whose habit it was, whenever Maria was in the bath, to while away many a pleasant half hour in reading, and chuckling, over Ronny’s insane avowals of devotion. Thus it was, this morning, that he was able to say:
‘Of course, I have plenty of evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’ said Maria, by now lingering in the kitchen doorway, longing to run upstairs, the tears glistening against her pale skin.
‘Evidence of your infidelity to me. Your adultery. Your obscene violation of our marriage contract.’
‘I have never been unfaithful to you.’
At this moment Maria felt a peremptory hand on her shoulder, and she stepped aside to let a figure pass through the doorway into the kitchen. It was Angela, Edward’s nanny, a woman some two years Maria’s junior, whose services had been engaged during the long trip to Italy which Maria had made the previous year. Her presence absurdly gave Maria a new energy for argument. She believed that here she had a silent witness for the defence.
‘Who do you mean? Who have I ever betrayed you with?’
‘I’m talking, my dear, about your unchastity, your vile prostitution with your lover Ronald. Your old tumescent schoolfriend. That putrid penis you knew at Oxford.’
Maria said quietly ‘Ronny and I are friends. We have never made love.’
Martin laughed.
‘Of course, I don’t believe that, and neither would a court of law. But in any case it’s quite beside the point. The point is that I have written documentation of your affair. Dozens, scores, hundreds of letters written to you in a ferment of passion. I have taken xeroxed copies of these letters and placed them in the vault of the bank. I have had them scrutinized by a team of highly qualified handwriting specialists. I have had your friend shadowed by a crack squad of private investigators. I know that he frequently spends all his spare time writing to you. I have had his telephone tapped, and have recordings of compromising conversations conducted by the pair of you for fifteen minutes at a stretch. Conversations in which you told him the most palpable lies about my treatment of you. Lies which can be refuted by a trustworthy and disinterested witness. Angela, darling…’
Both Maria, who had been leaning against the doorpost, facing the hall, and Angela, who had been wiping the draining board, turned sharply when they heard these words. Angela in response to the summons, and Maria because she was shocked to hear the nanny addressed with a term, and in a tone, of endearment. Within seconds a sudden and inevitable suspicion had formed, grown, and withered into knowledge.
In order to account for her original decision to employ a nanny in the household, it is necessary to identify the second person in whom Maria had been wont to confide the true state of her marriage. This was none other than her old and dear friend, Sarah. Sarah had returned from Italy a few months later than expected, and had been back at Oxford for more than a term before she got around to locating her old companion. Maria was pregnant by now, and passably cheerful. Sarah was pleased to find that she was married, following the doubts which she had once expressed about Maria’s suitability for that state in a conversation which had made a deep impression on the minds of both women, and which I have helpfully recorded in Chapter Three. Are you happy, Maria, she had asked, just to make sure. This was a word, as you know, towards which Maria’s feelings were ambivalent. I suppose so, she had answered.
Maria may not have known what happiness was, but she could recognize unhappiness when she saw it, and she was seeing plenty of it by the time that Sarah next contacted her. This was not for a while. Sarah had by now left Oxford. Are you happy, Maria, she had asked again, just for form’s sake. I suppose so, Maria had answered, but her answer in this case was promptly invalidated when she immediately burst into tears and sobbed on Sarah’s shoulder for no less than thirty-five minutes. (You will have noticed that Maria has started to develop quite a tendency to give vent to her emotion in this way. Don’t worry, it won’t last.) She did not go into details, however, on this occasion. It was not until another year had passed, or more, I get so confused about time, that she let everything out, all the secrets of her terrible mistake. She told Sarah the lot, she even showed her the marks. Sarah was speechless, she had nothing to say, in fact her first response was to burst into tears and to sob on Maria’s shoulder for no less than thirty-five minutes. Divorce him, was her eventual advice. But Maria would not, for the frankly feeble reasons given earlier. Time and again, then and subsequently, Sarah attempted to persuade her to leave her husband. But the child, Maria would say, and besides, where would I go, and what would I do. Finally Sarah was able to answer this question. She was offered a temporary job at a school in Florence, and her employers rented a house for her, a great, crumbling palazzo on the north side of the city. It was far too big for her to live in alone, so she invited Maria to come and stay for as long as she could. But the child, said Maria. Nevertheless Sarah’s invitation was so pressing that she summoned the courage to ask Martin whether he would approve the idea of her taking a long holiday, for the sake of their marriage, as she rather quaintly put it. To her surprise, Martin was agreeable, although in fact there was nothing very surprising about this at all, he was profoundly bored with Maria’s company and the origin ally very limited fun of kicking her about the house was already wearing off. He suggested that a nanny should be engaged to look after Edward, and chose for this purpose Angela, a typist from his office with whom he had been having an athletic sexual relationship for several months. Maria did not suspect this, for some reason. But then she had gone very soft since her marriage.
And so for nine months she enjoyed freedom, a sort of freedom anyway, the freedom to live in one of the world’s great cities, away from her husband. They were happy days, full and enriching, sunny for the most part but with always, in some corner or other, an element of shade, and not the cool and beckoning shade to which one retreats from the blaze, but the advancing gloom, dank and noisome, of her return to England and to Martin. Towards the end of her holiday this shade became so oppressive, so consuming, that Florence came for Maria to be a place of horror, and she decided to cut short her stay, leaving early one morning after writing a hurried note to Sarah, and arriving home the next day, nearly a month sooner than her husband had been expecting her.
‘There’s just one thing, Maria,’ Martin had said, that evening, after they had eaten together, and talked, for all the world as if they were a happily married couple pleased to be together again after long separation, ‘I think that Angela should continue to live here. You will find her a great help. Edward, of course, has become very attached to her. She has become indispensable to me.’
Maria now knew what he had meant.
‘You called her darling,’ she said.
Martin ignored this comment, or possibly didn’t hear it, for it was spoken very quietly.
‘You will confirm, won’t you, my sweet,’ he said to the nanny, sliding his arm around her waist, ‘that I have been the tenderest and most considerate of husbands to Maria. You would tell the court, wouldn’t you, love of my life, of her ill treatment of Edward, her cruel neglect, her failure to fulfil her obligations towards her loyal and devoted spouse.’ He turned to Maria. ‘Angela and I will marry, of course. I spoke to the vicar about it last night. The honeymoon is all arranged. We fancy a short cruise, in the Mediterranean. The tickets are all booked.’
‘Supposing,’ Maria began, but couldn’t be bothered.
‘There is no chance, my dear, simply no chance at all, of my losing the case. A divorce will be granted, on the grounds of irretrievable breakdown of marriage. Even if I choose, out of motives of sheer human decency, to suppress the fact of your adultery, I will have no difficulty in proving unreasonable behaviour. You failure to satisfy me sexually is evidence enough of that. Can you consider the humiliation involved, the self-hatred, in having to turn to a servant, a mere domestic dogsbody, for physical gratification? As for the custod
y of Edward, there will be no argument about that. Your unsuitability as a mother is obvious. You have attempted suicide. You have deserted him and left him to be brought up by a complete stranger while you cavorted around Europe. The court will have no hesitation in giving him over to the care of his father and his beloved nanny.’
After a silence, the nanny asked, ‘Are you going to put up a fight?’
She looked at her husband, and shivered, and shook her head. Maria knew when she was beaten.
7. Redunzl
To lose her son pained Maria no end, but to be free of Martin was in every other way a relief. It freed her to move to London, and to live with Sarah, to enter, in fact, upon one of her better phases. This is going to make for rather boring reading, I’m afraid. Such periods are more interesting to live through than to contemplate, as Maria herself discovered, for in later years she was never able to recall it without a yawn. It was only on the most painful experiences in her life that she looked back with any interest, whereas her months with Sarah resembled a calm sea, the dullest of all ideas. Variety was decidedly lacking. It would be true to say that the history of one day would be the history of the whole period, so we might as well have the history of that day, chosen not quite at random. The one I have in mind came towards the end of the idyll, and was quite eventful, in its quiet way.
We join Maria in Regent’s Park. It was her habit on days which, like this one, were not too busy, to walk into the park to eat her lunch and to escape, for a while, the bustle of the office. She would find a vacant bench in one of the most secluded parts of the park and sit there for nearly an hour, sometimes thinking, sometimes looking around her, sometimes dozing and sometimes feeding the birds. For this last purpose she would bring with her a paper bag full of stale crumbs. Today she also had a packet of sandwiches, egg and cress, bought at a takeaway in Baker Street. These turned out to be disgusting. She ended up eating the stale crumbs and throwing the sandwiches to the birds. That soon got rid of them. Alone, Maria closed her eyes and listened to the sounds around her. It sometimes surprised her to realize that she very rarely listened to the world, and that she was seldom in any useful sense conscious of the noises of footsteps, traffic, voices, the wind, so that lately she had taken a resolution to pay more attention to this aspect of things. It was a way of emptying her head, too, of all the scraps of conversation, real and imagined, and of music, remembered and invented, with which she was otherwise plagued night and day. It was a long time since Maria had heard silence, real silence, and it would be a long time before she heard it again. But she was not averse to the sound of Regent’s Park at lunchtime. It was a winter’s day, sunny but essentially cold, and the park was not busy. She could hear two men talking in Japanese, and a baby crying, and a woman saying, There, there, presumably to the baby, and the cooing of hungry pigeons, and the shouts and laughter of distant children. At the back of all this was the loud hum of the city going about its business.