Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  Yes, I thought to myself, I’ll probably be happy enough with Michael.

  I had hoped that my father, for once in his life, would make some gesture of recognition that I was his daughter, and come back to England for the wedding. He did at least write, which was something. My mother read the letter out loud, as we sat around the table in her kitchen. I did not trust myself to speak after I had opened the letter, so I scanned it quickly and then handed it to her.

  ‘“Darling Betty,”’ my mother read, ‘“I was so pleased to hear that you are at last about to be wed. I remember John and Mary Gascoigne quite well, although I am not sure I have ever met Michael. He was never on parade when I encountered them, which was usually racing somewhere. The parents were very rich and rather dreary, so you are probably getting the best part of the bargain by not having living in-laws. I am sure Michael has turned out to be an excellent fellow, my darling Betty, otherwise you wouldn’t be marrying him, would you? Sadly the date you kindly mentioned when your dear old Pa was to have given you away is not free. We have asked the Billancourts down from Paris to stay that week and I simply won’t be able to get away.”’

  Here my mother raised her head and actually snorted with annoyance. The Billancourts were the parents of Marie-Claire, the girl my father had run off with, and her parents were about the same age as my father.

  ‘“I will of course be thinking of you and I hope the enclosed cheque will be useful when you come to set up home. Your loving Pa.”’

  A cheque for one thousand francs had fluttered out of the envelope and lay upon the table.

  ‘Well,’ said my mother when she had read this, ‘Your father is running true to form, I suppose. I never really thought he would come. Don’t cry, darling, he’s not worth it. You might be able to get a few coffee mugs for the kitchen with the money.’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ I said, angrily wiping away a tear.

  In the end, Henry Newark gave me away. He was one of my mother’s grander friends, and as my only other living male relative, Robert Fenham, my mother’s brother, had Alzheimer’s, we had to ask someone from outside the family. Henry was, I think, bemused by the request, but he was a kind man and enjoyed parties, so he accepted. The wedding was held in the church of Stanton St Mary, a pretty medieval building in Cotswold stone, and afterwards the reception was given in a marquee in what my mother called the Park, a rough paddock of a few acres that lay to the south of the house beyond a ha-ha.

  My mother’s house was her family home, inherited from her parents and was a charming, if not particularly large, dwelling of six bedrooms or so, which might once have been a farmhouse. Now it was what estate agents call a ‘gent’s res’, with a dining room and a drawing room and a small study-cum-sitting room where my mother actually spent most of her time. Outside was a stable block built around a cobbled courtyard although the ponies had disappeared the week my father left all those years ago, and the stalls were now used as potting sheds. On the west side of the house was a small garden surrounded by herbaceous borders, and then the paddock on the far side of the ha-ha; a strip of coppiced beech wood marked the boundary.

  The house stood on the edge of Stanton St Mary, suggesting a squierarchical detachment from the rest of the village which my mother relished, although by no means did she have the income to support such aspirations. Stanton St Mary was a quiet village, surrounded by mournful water meadows often covered in low mist. A small tributary of the Severn wound its way around the edges of the village. Today the paddock was brightened by the presence of a large marquee and, as I looked out of my bedroom window, I could see that the caterer’s van had already arrived.

  ‘Come on, darling!’ called my mother from the foot of the stairs. ‘You mustn’t be late for your own wedding.’

  The truth was, that that morning I was having a bad attack of second thoughts. Perhaps everyone does on such occasions. I had spent a long time, between three in the morning and breakfast, wondering why on earth I was marrying a man I hardly knew, despite having been in a relationship with him for several months. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why I knew so little about him, why he appeared to be without family or without friends other than fellow members of Grouchers, the club he had recently become a member of. There had even been times when I wondered whether there was not something wrong with Michael; quite badly wrong. From time to time he would retreat into a mood that seemed very like a dull kind of despair, as if life were altogether too much for him. When those fits overcame him, I wasn’t sure whether I could stand being with him for the rest of the day, let alone the rest of my life. But then the mood would pass and he would be almost normal again; almost. We didn’t laugh a lot together, though. I wasn’t at all sure that, if for some reason Michael himself failed to turn up at the church, I would really mind that much, once the initial embarrassment was over. I almost hoped he wouldn’t. What would we do with ourselves for the next fifty years or so?

  But Michael would turn up. That much I did know about him. He always turned up if he said he was going to.

  Henry Newark was there at the entrance to the church, resplendent in his grey morning suit, and when we marched down the aisle together Michael, who was waiting in front of the altar with Peter Robinson standing next to him, turned to look at me. Then his whole face lit up in the most brilliant smile I had ever seen and, for a moment at least, everything was all right.

  It was after the wedding that something odd happened. The reception in the marquee was in full swing, the speeches were over and everyone was enjoying themselves and making a lot of noise. The guests were an odd mixture of my friends, quite numerous, my mother’s friends, almost as many, a few of what my mother called ‘the locals’ from the village, and a very sparse scattering of members of Grouchers and their wives. This last group, invited by Michael, huddled together in a corner, looking over their shoulders with disdain at the other guests, and clearly wondered why on earth they had got caught up in this rout. They were Michael’s ‘friends’; of his family, there was none. The whole mixture was being entertained by a really dreadful string quartet my mother had insisted on hiring, who were sawing away at Mozart’s Hundred Greatest Hits in one corner of the marquee.

  Michael and I had slipped away to the house to change into our going-away clothes. For some inexplicable reason, I was downstairs first. I stood in the hall and saw, through the front door, which was open, that someone had parked a Land Rover in the yard. Then a tall, grey-haired man came out of the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry if I startled you. I was looking for Michael. You must be Elizabeth.’

  He was wearing an old tweed suit, and was not in any way dressed for a wedding reception. He had a full head of crinkly grey hair and a strong face that looked as if its owner spent a good deal of time out of doors.

  ‘I’m Alex Grant,’ he said. ‘I’m an old friend of Michael’s parents. The family doctor from Glen Gala. I’ve been staying with friends in Oxfordshire, who told me that you and Michael were getting married today. Wonderful news. I hope you don’t mind me dropping in like this, but I had to come and congratulate you both and drop off my wedding present. I’ve left it on the kitchen table. It’s not something I would trust to the post.’

  Alex Grant? I had never heard his name before and felt sure he was not on the invitation list. So this man must be a gatecrasher. He was a very polite gatecrasher, although I would have preferred it if he had not kept on staring at me.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘And how is Michael?’ he asked. ‘He must be a very happy man today.’

  ‘Michael is very well,’ I said. ‘He should be downstairs in a moment. I don’t know what’s keeping him.’

  Alex Grant glanced in the direction of the staircase and then said, in a lower voice, ‘I’m glad to hear it. I haven’t heard anything from him, or from Stephen Gunnerton, for quite a while, so I assumed that everything had settled down. And when I heard he was getti
ng married, I couldn’t have been more delighted by the news.’

  I didn’t know what to make of this. Who was Stephen Gunnerton? What, or who, had settled down? I felt I had to say something.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Michael will be down in a minute. Why don’t you go across to the tent and get yourself something to drink? We’ll come over in a moment and say hello properly.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I will,’ he said. ‘I’m not really dressed for a wedding, and I daren’t have anything to drink as I have to drive back to Oxfordshire in a minute; I mustn’t abandon my friends for too long.’

  I wished Michael would come downstairs. What on earth could he be doing for all this time? Then Michael did appear and when he saw Alex Grant he stood stock still.

  ‘Hello, Michael,’ said Alex Grant. ‘I hope you don’t mind me looking in unexpectedly like this - I was staying nearby and thought I would come and say hello.’

  ‘Hello, Dr Grant,’ said Michael slowly. He did not smile. ‘I am very well. How are you?’

  Michael’s voice was at its most wooden, as if he were really a cleverly constructed automaton. For a moment, although it felt like half an hour, the two men looked at each other. It was very strange: I felt as if some unspoken communication passed between them, an acknowledgement of something unsaid. Then Alex Grant looked at his watch and shook his head.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I mustn’t keep you from your guests. Elizabeth, I’m delighted to have met you, and I hope you will look me up when you come to Glen Gala. Michael, many congratulations on your ... on your new life.’

  Then he was gone, and a moment later I heard the sound of the Land Rover as it drove out of the yard.

  I looked at Michael. His face was expressionless.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Our local GP up in Perthshire,’ said Michael. ‘I should have asked him, I suppose. He was a very good friend of my parents. I forgot.’

  ‘He brought us a present,’ I said. ‘That was nice of him. He left it in the kitchen.’

  In the kitchen, unencumbered by wrapping paper, was a rather beautiful antique crystal decanter, with a card propped against it bearing the inscription: ‘To Elizabeth and Michael’.

  I showed the present to Michael.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ I said. ‘You can keep your whisky in it.’

  Michael glanced at the decanter without comment. Then he steered me out of the house and together we walked back to the marquee to say our goodbyes.

  So, we were married, and Michael, Rupert and I began our life at number 2, Helmsdale Mansions, not far from Baker Street. Despite my not infrequent doubts, I knew I had done the right thing in saying yes to Michael. There was something different about him: some quality, like a placid river at night whose dark and even surface is suddenly ruffled by a breeze and turns quicksilver in the moonlight. He was solid, dependable, steady and respectable: all those things. Dull as ditchwater might be another way of putting it, only he wasn’t dull: just when you thought he was going to be, there was that smile, which made him look years younger than he pretended to be; or an unconscious flash of poetry in his language; or that far-off look, as if he were trying to remember a dream he had. He was, I soon realised, a very intelligent man who read widely and thought deeply; but as he never told anyone what he was reading or what he was thinking about, people tended to write him off as a bore.

  But he never did anything out of the ordinary. Instead his life became ever more a matter of routine. Perhaps I had not noticed before we were married how Michael always rolled up the toothpaste tube into a tight scroll to make sure he got out every last drop. My toothpaste tube had always looked as if someone had jumped on it. Michael was the only man I had ever known who put shoe trees in his shoes every night, and folded his trousers in a trouser press. At breakfast, when he boiled an egg, he would almost be driven to distraction if I spoke to him while it was cooking, in case he left it in for too long. His routines were impressive, unvarying and claustrophobic.

  He had become a member of Grouchers not long before we were married. Now, to keep himself amused while he was in London, he accepted the position of part-time membership secretary, a ten-to-four job for a few months of the year. Grouchers was one of those institutions that could only have been invented in Britain, where men left the regimentation of their offices for a regimentation of their own invention.

  And so our life went on. Our winters were spent together in London. In the summer Michael spent time at Caorrun, and I went up for the odd weekend, but only when he made a scene about my never going there. We had no children; a matter of choice, rather than biology. I found I needed to keep going with my job, as sitting around in number 2 Helmsdale Mansions waiting for Michael to come home and tell me about the bridge tournament results might have shrunk my world a little more tightly around me than I could bear.

  I enjoyed my job, writing about the property market in central London, with occasional pieces about completely unaffordable country houses. The prices always went up, the flats and houses grew smarter every year, and it was not hard to find something to say about them. The magazine and its spurious glamour and genuine spite and gossip kept me amused, and enabled me to cope with the predictable nature of our domestic life. I suppose the income, slight as it was, gave me the illusion of independence as well.

  We varied the monotony of London life with frequent excursions, occasionally to stay with fellow members of Grouchers, or with visits to Michael’s estate in Perthshire. Proper holidays abroad seemed to be out of the question. Michael could never see the point of ‘abroad’, and disliked the heat and foreign food. He never described our absences from London as holidays. To him, one went up to Scotland, or down to London. One was either away, or in Town. The concept of a holiday was offensive to him, as if all his golf and fishing and stalking were stolen moments, instead of the main purpose of his life. And I went with him. I sat shivering on river banks while Michael stood in the middle of a river casting; or else I sat in the car with steamed-up windows, reading my book. In the end I learned to fish, and even to golf a bit, although I drew the line at stalking. How anyone could shoot those poor animals was beyond me, but Michael told me that if he didn’t cull the deer, the Deer Commission would do it anyway, to prevent them from starving to death in the winter.

  The one thing I could say about my marriage to Michael was that in those first years it was exactly as I had expected it to be. I had a large and comfortable flat not too far from the centre of London; a big improvement on the two-roomed affair well to the north of Ladbroke Grove where I had previously lived. I had the pleasure of saying to people, when they asked what I was doing that weekend, ‘Oh, we’re going to spend a few days at our place up in Perthshire’ in a way that made people who had never been there feel rather envious.

  It was a modern marriage. I didn’t have very strong feelings for Michael, but I liked him. It wasn’t the romance of a lifetime, but I’d had romances and they tended to end up looking rather shabby. Marriage was about commitment, not love; wasn’t it?

  I still remember the day my mother found my father in the hall at home. I was on the landing at the head of the stairs; they did not see me, so when they started speaking, I stopped where I was. My mother came in from the garden with a trug full of cut sweet peas, and saw my father, suitcases packed, bending down to check his appearance in the oval mirror that hung above a small side table. He was wearing a tweed suit and looked rather smart, as if he were going racing. He straightened the knot in his tie and then turned and saw my mother. For a moment neither of them said anything, then my mother spoke, so softly and slowly I could only just make out her words.

  ‘You really are going,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just talk.’

  ‘Oh, darling, there you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you. I was going to leave a note. I think the talking has gone on long enough, don’t you? We don’t seem to be getting anywhere.’

  ‘You’r
e going to go off with that girl, aren’t you? She’s barely older than Elizabeth.’

  ‘We’ve been through all of that.’

  ‘It’s disgusting. I can’t believe you really mean to do it. How could you?’

  My father took his old silver cigarette case out of his pocket and extracted a cigarette, then closed the case again with a click. He took his lighter out of another pocket and lit his cigarette. After a moment he exhaled, then said, ‘I have a romantic nature.’

  My mother gave a small scream, and then put her hand over her mouth. She made no further sound but I could tell she had begun to sob because her shoulders were shaking.

  ‘You said you would think about it,’ she whispered in a trembling voice quite unlike her normal speech. I realised this was the tail end of a conversation that must have been going on for weeks, or months. My father shrugged. He did not say anything else for a moment. Then there was the noise of wheels on the gravel outside.