‘Well,’ said Lizzie through her laughter, ‘now you, too, know all about life. It’s unfair.’
‘Touché,’ said Alfred. ‘Damn it.’
48
‘Kid get off all right?’
‘Oh, yes. Home and dry, as we speak. I telephoned the other evening.’
Mimi had been returned to sender some days previously; Andrew and Alex were drinking the post-squash beers; catching up. Taking stock.
‘Everything go well, then?’
Andrew drank, considering the question. ‘As well as could be hoped,’ he said. ‘She seems to have a reasonably good grasp of the situation.’
‘She’s quite happy, then?’
‘Happy enough. As far as I can tell. Yes—I’d say she’s happy.’
‘What is she now, six?’
‘Seven. Old enough to think.’
They considered the thinking capacities of the seven-year-old.
‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘I should have thought so.’
‘I’ll have to try and get over there at Christmas time. For a few weeks, at any rate.’
‘There’s a good idea.’
‘Yes.’
What else to say, on this topic? Andrew’s sorrow, his stoicism, his honourable intentions, were all beyond the reach of comment. ‘Marriage, eh?’ said Alex. ‘You might as well walk across a minefield blindfolded.’
Andrew laughed very briefly. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘Still, as long as the kid’s all right.’
Alex thought about this. ‘So you’d say,’ he said, slowly, ‘that children aren’t too badly affected by divorce, would you? That is—Mimi at any rate, seems to be all right: so for all we know—’
‘Well, everything depends on the particular circumstances, I suppose,’ said Andrew. ‘I mean, if the decision had been mine alone, or even chiefly mine, I dare say I mightn’t have taken the risk: but as it was, Janet simply took the matter out of my hands, so I had no choice. Had to get on and make the best of it. Perhaps we’ve just been lucky, with Mimi. In any case, it’s early days yet.’
‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘Still—’
‘As a matter of fact, these studies of the effects of divorce on children—’
‘Yes.’
‘—universally agreed to be deleterious, to put it no worse—’
‘Yes—’
‘—are actually pretty worthless.’
‘Are they?’
‘Well, it’s not as if these surveys are, or even can be, scientific.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘We don’t know how miserable or how maladjusted the same children would have been if the parents had stayed together.’
‘No, I suppose we don’t.’
‘So one has to take one’s chances.’
‘All the same, as you said—if it had been up to you—’
‘Well, you know what we’re like. Blokes like us. We were brought up to believe—to know for a fact—that if a certain course of action seemed alluring, it was probably—or even certainly— wrong. So, leaving one’s partner—especially for another more agreeable one—is always going to look dodgy, isn’t it?’
‘ ’Fraid so.’
‘And who’s to know,’ said Andrew, unsmiling, ‘that it isn’t, after all?’
‘Who, indeed?’
‘You pays your money.’ Alex was silent. Andrew drank again. ‘It’s impossible, really. We’re all just stumbling around in the dark. We can’t possibly know what we’re doing—not really. We just do the best we can.’
‘For what that’s worth.’
‘As you say.’
They sat there, each momentarily tasting the sensation, here and now, of being the hero of such a tale—improvised, inglorious, inconclusive and ultimately, after all (unless you believed in a divine purpose), meaningless. Andrew thought fleetingly of Barbara, now in his memory another item in the account of loss and sorrow. He didn’t know now even where she was precisely— the Harbour Bridge postcard of a few months past had been her last communication.
Alex also thought of Barbara, for whom the waiting—as a conscious, active, lively state—was done. To think of Barbara, now, was intemperately to invite mere hopeless anguish. Alex, these days, avoided thinking of Barbara.
‘After all, it’s not our fault,’ said Andrew, ‘that we’re ignorant and inept—it’s the way we’re designed, basically. Not our fault.’
‘No, you’re right. Not our fault at all. Even we can see that far into it.’
‘After all, as a species, we’re still in the experimental stage.’
‘I would have thought so.’
‘It’s obvious. Haven’t clocked up so much as our first million years, even. Not even our first half million, by all accounts.’
‘No. Long way to go.’
‘Hope they’re going to appreciate what we’ve gone through for them, we prototypes of homo sapiens.’
‘Probably won’t. Probably just take their perfect lives completely for granted.’
‘Absurd, isn’t it? Probably won’t even be speaking English.’
‘Oh, come now: of course they’ll be speaking English. In a somewhat altered form, no doubt. But it’s absolutely bound to be English.’
‘You think?’
‘Sure of it.’
‘Think they’ll play cricket?’
‘Of course.’
‘Football, obviously.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Still, they’ll never know—’
‘No, they never will.’
They each thought about what these remote successors would never know.
‘Hardly worth being human, really, in that case,’ said Andrew, after a while.
‘No,’ said Alex. ‘Utterly pointless, really.’
49
Marguerite, at the great age of eleven, a reserved and rather fragile-looking child with dark brown hair, knew many things.
A large proportion of these many were unaccountable, were phenomena which, having no evident heads or tails of cause and consequence, were unclassifiable. She hardly knew or remembered how some of them had come to her knowledge—some of them, indeed, seeming to have arrived there entirely unbidden.
All such unaccountable matter, whatever its origin, having been turned over as well as could be managed, was thereafter filed away in the hope that it might be elucidated in due course: such marvels as sexual intercourse (why should anyone, ever, want to do that?) or the Trinity (how could anyone, whomsoever, believe what could not be understood?). And others, nearer to home, such as, that her parents did not love each other and would quite certainly—but when?—be divorced.
This item—which had come to her well over a year ago—was taken occasionally from the file marked ‘to be elucidated’ and pondered afresh, but to no avail. It was knowledge which must be harboured, simply, in silence and fear—fear, not so much of the eventuality itself, as that Percy too might awaken to it: for she did not consider that Percy would be as able as was she to accommodate it. Percy was not only younger but more erratic than she. You never knew what Percy might say, or do.
Percy’s appearance was rather similar to his sister’s. He had the same dark brown hair, the same thin, almost fragile, face: but his was adorned with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses of which he was rather proud. On first trying them on, he had been invited by the optician to look in the mirror and see how he liked them, Claire, who had taken him there, standing by. Percy gazed steadily for several seconds at his new reflection. Then he pronounced. ‘They’re good,’ he said. ‘They make me look as old as I feel.’
Percy was nonetheless forbidden to come home from school without Marguerite: forbidden so much as to leave the school grounds alone, because there was a five-to-ten-minute walk between the bus stop and home, and Percy was not to be in the streets alone—not until he was ten. Because, as Claire pointed out, over his protests, ‘You’re not as old as you feel.’
The two children generally walked home from the bus sto
p in silence to begin with, Percy, as he had lately learned to do, sauntering, his mind at work. Today, early in the new school year, his saunter slowed to an almost indolent gait, and he hunched his shoulders, casting his features into a morose expression. He was doing his new form teacher.
Marguerite turned to him. ‘Come on, Percy.’
He shrugged, returning to his own person, and quickened his pace very slightly, drawing almost level with his sister. ‘I say, I’ve been thinking,’ he announced.
‘Have you?’
‘Yes. Listen. I was just wondering—do you think they’ll get divorced this year?’
Marguerite stopped walking for a moment: there was a nasty lurching feeling in her stomach. ‘Who’ll get divorced?’ she said.
‘Mum and Dad, of course. You know. Claire and Alex.’
‘Oh.’
The shock began, but very slowly, to abate.
‘Well,’ said Percy, almost impatiently, ‘do you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No, of course you don’t know, but do you think?’
The thing was, Percy’s tone betrayed no distress, or even anxiety: he seemed simply to want to know: that was all. Glancing at his face, she saw the same Percy. Marguerite still felt a sort of trembling in her chest as she spoke, but she tried to seem quite as detached, quite as cool, as her brother. ‘I don’t know whether they’ll get divorced this year, or any other year,’ she said.
‘Oh, they will get divorced, some year or other,’ Percy assured her. ‘I’ve been expecting it for a while. I was just wondering when, that’s all.’
‘I see,’ said Marguerite dazedly. She was still trying to accommodate herself to this revised Percy. You never knew, indeed, what Percy would do, or say.
‘I mean,’ Percy expanded, ‘they probably should get divorced, sooner or later. People do.’
‘Not all people.’ Marguerite still felt it best to respond as if quite ignorant, as if the topic were an absolute novelty. That did seem safest.
‘Yes, okay, not all. But they ought to. I think they will.’
‘Why do you think that?’
He seemed almost surprised at her asking, and almost stopped walking. ‘Well, I dunno,’ he said. He was now standing still, thinking; he was considering his parents. ‘They’re much nicer,’ he said at last, ‘when they’re not together.’ That was an indubitable, long-demonstrated, fact. There was no fun, no laughter, to be had with either but when the other was absent. It was like living in two—or rather, three—worlds, turn and turn about. Time with Claire; time with Alex; time with both of them present—he remote, she impatient—in the sober high-ceilinged house, where you knew, always, what came next.
‘Yes,’ said Marguerite, ‘I suppose they are, actually.’
Percy glanced quickly at her face. Had she really never considered all this before? Could she really be so ignorant? You couldn’t be sure, with Marguerite: she was liable to conceal her feelings, her thoughts. ‘I mean,’ he urged, ‘they just don’t get on; they annoy each other. They get on each other’s nerves. You must have noticed.’
‘Yes,’ said Marguerite, ‘I suppose I had, sometimes.’
‘So? ’
‘So what?’
‘Shouldn’t they get divorced? Won’t they?’
‘I suppose they might, one of these days.’
‘Well—when?’
‘How could I know?’
Percy thought for a minute. They were almost home. ‘Perhaps we’d better ask them,’ he said.
‘We can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know—we just can’t.’
‘I can. I will. I want to know.’
She could see that he did, indeed. Oh, so did she—but—
‘Percy, you can’t. They wouldn’t like it, I’m sure they wouldn’t.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I don’t know—I just don’t think they would.’
‘Oh, I won’t ask them both together, I’ll just ask one. I’ll ask Claire, while we’re having tea.’
They were turning in at their gate now, going up their path, ringing their doorbell. ‘Perhaps she isn’t there,’ said Marguerite, desperately. ‘Perhaps she’s still out, perhaps it’s only Mrs Brick.’ When Claire was delayed, she would telephone Mrs Brick—if it was one of Mrs Brick’s days—and ask her to stay on and mind the children until she got home. Oh, God, prayed Marguerite, let it be Mrs Brick. Then with any luck he might have forgotten about all this by the time Claire gets home. Please, God: please let it be Mrs Brick.
Percy pushed open the brass mail flap and peered through the slot to see whose feet should come down the hallway. ‘Well, if it is Mrs Brick,’ he said, still watching to see who was coming, ‘I’ll just have to wait until Claire gets home, that’s all. What’s the odds?’ Then he saw, at last, who was coming. He straightened up, and turned to the terrified Marguerite. ‘Guess who it is!’ he said. ‘Quick—guess who?’
But it was too late to guess: the latch clicked, and the front door began—but slowly, heavily—to open.
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART TWO
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
PART THREE
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
PART FOUR
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
A Stairway to Paradise Page 12