by Belva Plain
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, think about it Maybe you’ll come to understand.”
“My father never would!”
Martin smiled slightly. “I’m sure he wouldn’t.”
“When I found out about Alex,” she said slowly, “it was as if a trapdoor had opened up and I’d been dropped, just dropped, out into the weather. Violently. I’d been living all my life in a cocoon. Tell me now. Tell me. What am I do do?”
“No, you tell me.”
“I”?
“Yes. You tell me what is the most important thing you have to do from now on.”
For an instant she wasn’t sure of his meaning. Then it came to her with a rush. “To take care of my children. Is that what you meant?”
“Of course.”
She smiled warily. “That certainly isn’t all one gets married for.”
“People marry for many reasons. Because they’re lonely, or need a particular kind of understanding or a companionable mind. Many reasons.”
Now he was looking straight at her again, dropping the professional manner as one slips out of a sweater and leaves it on a chair.
“Please, don’t say anything to Jessie, will you?”
“I don’t discuss other people’s confidences.”
“Excuse me. I should have known better.”
“And excuse me. I was pompous and rude just now.”
Neither spoke for a moment Then Martin began.
“Work. Work is always the salvation, Mary. You have a gift Use it. Fill your days with it.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve no true gift. Father was right about it It’s only a very little talent that I have.”
“You can’t be sure yet. Give it time.”
“Time! I’ll have plenty of that—”
“You’ll need a great deal of courage. But I think you have it.”
“Thank you.”
He added thoughtfully, “A very good thing, although maybe you can’t see its importance right now, is your home. As long as you have to stay there and have no choice. There’s great comfort to be had from ‘place.’ It doesn’t happen to be like that for me, but for some people it’s—as they say—the essence. It’s true for you, isn’t it? And Lamb House is the place?”
“Yes,” she said. “I walk around sometimes just touching things. There are certain trees, an old sycamore where I can sit and feel the world breathe. One can feel such peace among trees.”
Suddenly she was very, very tired. They had said everything there was to be said and gone as far as there was to go. She rose to leave.
“Wait I’m giving you a prescription for sleeping pills. Just half a dozen. Take one only if you need it badly.”
“I shan’t kill myself, you know!”
“If I thought you had such an idea, I wouldn’t gave them to you at all.”
He stood up, but did not come from behind the desk or offer to shake her hand. It crossed her mind that he hadn’t touched her when she had come in, either, and that perhaps in spite of the professional kindness, he really disliked her after all. She put the prescription in her handbag and thanked him.
“Perhaps I haven’t helped you, but I did try,” he said.
“It’s helped me to talk to you. Yes, it has.”
“I’m glad.” He might have been expected to say, “Come back anytime if you need me again,” but he did not, and so she repeated her thanks with a correctness to match his own, and went out.
On the rattling suburban train, she fell asleep. She had always been one of those rare, contrary souls for whom sleep in time of trouble was a psychological escape, and there would be no need for pills.
When the train swayed around the last curve before the home station, she woke up. Martin had been right: there was comfort in “place.” The High Street gave cheerful assurance. The butcher, florid and garrulous, came out on the step to remark, as always, upon the weather. The seed store had hung out its little packets of nasturtiums, delightful scraps of orange and yellow silk with a sharp, enticing perfume after rain. Fern thought wryly: But they are usually covered on the underside with black pinhead bugs. It is the underside that surprises.
Neddie came around the house. “Guess what?” he cried.
She widened her eyes, responding to his gaiety, his dare.
“I can’t guess. What?”
“We had ice cream at Rob’s house. It was his brother’s birthday.”
“You did?”
“Yes, and it was chocolate.”
He pranced, jiggling the green pompom on his woolen cap. Oh my heart, my darling! How could I ever leave you?
“Chocolate!” she repeated brightly before, remembering some other errand, he sped away around the corner.
The house enfolded her. She went slowly up the stairs, sliding her hand on the smooth old bannister. At the top she paused before the photo of Susannah.
“There was never any love between us,” Alex had told her, “after the first month or two.” He had been ruefully amused, making a joke of it “That’s when I found out that the books in her family’s library had false backs. Only, I found out too late.”
Had Susannah also found something out too late? But the cool face told nothing.
Alex, coming upstairs a moment later, knocked on the frame of the open door. “May I?”
“Yes, come in.”
They faced each other, Fern at the closet where she had been hanging up her coat, he in the doorway.
Then, astoundingly, he said, “You’ve seen Martin.”
“What? What makes you say that?”
“You know I sense things. You’ve told him everything, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Are you angry?”
“No. What did he say?”
“I don’t know exactly. That is, it’s hard to remember.” She stammered. “I suppose—he tried to explain, to help me understand.”
“I’m very grateful to him. I’ve always liked him, anyway.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t be nasty! I was referring to intelligence, compassion, humanity.”
She saw that Alex had imagined mockery in her expression. “I only meant, you don’t know him well enough, do you, to feel much of anything toward him?”
“I told you I can sense things. I judge people very quickly. For instance, I know that he’s in love with you. I’ve known it for a long time. He’s the man you should have married.”
“Don’t be absurd!”
“Haven’t you seen how he always manages to leave a room the minute you enter it?”
“What on earth are you saying?”
“You mean you haven’t noticed?”
“No, I haven’t,” Fern said tightly.
“Well, it’s true.”
She turned away. “I’ve got to get this hot dress off. It’s miserable.”
In the dressing room she put on a robe. That pain again, the little pulses in her temples! She touched them lightly. He oughtn’t to have said that about Martin! There were enough terrible things for her to think about already without adding more. She had mountains to climb! Mountains!
And anyway it wasn’t true! Martin was responsible and serious; he wouldn’t—Suddenly, involuntarily, she gave a little cry.
“Are you all right?” Alex called.
She came back to the bedroom and sat down. “It’s been a hard day, and I’m worn out.”
He knelt on the floor and took her hand.
“Fern, I’ll be the best friend you ever could have.”
He moved his cheek until it rested on her limp hand, and she could feel his tears. She wanted to draw away, yet did not; they sat unmoving through an expectant silence.
At last Alex raised his head. “I’ve been through hell,” he said.
“Have you?”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“I believe you.”
“Hell for you, too. I know that, Fern. I hope … I don’t ever want you to think th
at I—that what I am has anything to do with you. It’s just me.”
Silence again.
“It didn’t work with Susannah. But then, she was a sharp-tongued bitch and I thought it might have been partly her fault. I hoped it would be different with you. And I tried, Fern, you know I did.”
She was seeing herself objectively. She was looking through a telescope, to the end of a long, long corridor of time, during which she would mature into understanding. It was as though she were looking at some other woman, surely not at herself, who would have to endure a purgatory of fruitless, unending analysis, while anger and pain would slowly evaporate like salt in the sun, leaving—leaving what? A desert?
Alex spoke again. “I try to remember how it began. My music teacher, perhaps? He had strong fingers. Supple brown hands. I couldn’t stop looking at them.
“And there was a boy in school. Lewis was his name. He sat at the next desk. He also had brown hands and thick beautiful hair. Strange, troubling twinges went through me, very slight, I remember, very puzzling. Little devils, sitting with hot pitchforks somewhere at the pit of my brain.
“I didn’t understand yet. You were supposed to have girls’ pictures in your room, a snapshot of your own girl, or actresses, all breasts and thighs and glossy mouths. I kept thinking maybe I just wasn’t growing up as early as boys usually do, that pretty soon I’d get to be like the others. But I didn’t know, and there was nobody in the world I could ask, least of all my father … And then suddenly I was in the last form and during the long vacation a lot of chaps went up to town and brought some girls over to somebody’s flat. And the girl I was with”—now Alex was almost whispering—“the girl laughed because I—I didn’t want to. She laughed. And the news got around when we were back at school. It was a huge, splendid joke! Except for Lewis. He came to me, and we talked. He was so fine, so decent, so different from the others … He became my only friend, and I was his. In a way you might say we suffered together.”
He looked down at his hands, turning them over and back, as if they could offer him some explanation.
“There are memories, so minute and sharp they ought to have been absorbed years ago, but never have been. A burly ruffian with hairy ears and a shattering voice, saying, ‘Alex pees sitting down.’ Why isn’t it possible to forget things like that? Why should a boor’s taunt have power to torment you a quarter of a lifetime later?”
So that’s the way it is, Fern thought. She had not wanted to be so moved. She had wanted to keep the hard anger, to hold the insult which had been dealt her, to hold them both fast and neither weaken nor give in. But give in to what?
In these few minutes, night had come, and from the triangle of sky that filled the upper corner of the window, there poured an iridescent afterglow. It fell upon the man’s bowed head. Feeling her gaze, he looked up.
“Fern, everything I have belongs to you and the children. I don’t mean just things, this house or money. I mean caring. My devotion. I can’t help what I am. I’ll have to go on just quietly being what I am, you know. But I’ll never ask what you do with private portions of your life. I’ll never ask.
“So we could live here, couldn’t we, with our children, and be happy in other ways?”
“Happy!” she cried silently.
And Alex repeated, “Couldn’t we?”
In the simplicity of the words and in his face she saw, not so much a plea for pity and understanding, as a kind of wonder that they two were here like this, having learned what they both now knew. That much she saw, and also she saw disbelief, as when a man has been wounded, so she had read, and stares at the shattering, not able to believe that he is himself and the wound belongs to him.
Then pity came, after all, and she bent down to rest his head against her shoulder, rocking and swaying as if he were a child and she his mother. Or as if she were the child, panicked and lost, and he her comforter. Or as if he and she, stangers just met, survivors of some awful cataclysm, some rage of nature, avalanche or quake or firestorm, must cling together out of need and then, because of common humanity and common trust, must stay.
Book Three
PASSAGES
Chapter 11
No self-respecting institution at home would have put up with so ancient a building, Martin reflected, as he prepared to leave for the afternoon. In America this would have been torn down, or more probably abandoned for a new building in a newer part of the city. These steps on which he stood to regard the blossoming day had been laid down in the eighteenth century. The wings to right and left of the central structure were Victorian, darkly bulbous, with beetling fenestration. It amused him to imagine that they looked like the women of their era, stout in bombazine and bustles.
“Making your plans for the day?” Mr. Meredith drew on gloves and tucked his umbrella under one arm.
“Great plans. I’m going to the park with Claire.”
“Taking a bus?”
“Later. I want to walk a little before I catch it.”
“Fine. I’ll go part way with you.”
Through speckled sunlight and shade under the lime trees, they fell into step. Each man was sturdy with well-being and aware that the other was the same. A small boy came galloping with an enormous borzoi on a leash. A young woman in a yellow suit came out of a house, carrying a sheaf of tulips wrapped in green tissue paper.
“Splendid weather,” Meredith remarked with a sigh of pleasure.
Martin said, “I can’t believe I’ve been here three years.”
“Does it seem longer to you or shorter?”
“That depends on mood. Longer or shorter, it’s been wonderful. It’s opened worlds for me.”
“I must say, you’ve taken good advantage of it. Your cytology paper is impressive, Mr. Braidburn tells me. I confess I haven’t read it yet I’ll have to wait until it’s published. You’re going to the conference in Paris next week, of course.”
“I wouldn’t miss it Dr. Eastman’s coming over from New York and I’ll have a chance to see him again.”
“Have I congratulated you on your association with him? Great fortune for you.”
“I’m indebted to Mr. Braidburn forever. After all, when Eastman wrote that he was looking for a new man, Mr. Braidburn could have recommended any one of half a dozen others, and I know it.”
“What have you been offered, may I ask? Full-time association?”
“Yes, on a trial basis, naturally. If things work out well, why then it will become permanent.” Martin’s voice trailed off. The whole prospect had an air of unreality. Everything had gone so smoothly, one deliberate step after the other.
“You’ve got just two months more, haven’t you? You must come for a weekend in the country with us before you leave. Well, I turn off here. Enjoy your afternoon.”
Glancing after him, Martin thought: Funny, in the beginning, the formal manners, the bowler hats and accents put me off. He smiled, recalling some of those first impressions.
They had taught him much, those men: Meredith, Braidburn, Llewellyn and the rest. All those dark winter afternoons under electric lights in the pathology lab! Those early mornings watching Braidburn in the O.R.I And the lunchtime discussions on clinical neurology; the diagrams drawn on the backs of menus; the questions; the arguments! Yes, he would take good memories back with him.
From the top of the double-decker bus, he enjoyed the panorama of the city. How the northerners of this foggy little island worshiped the sun! This was the first real warmth of the season today and here they were already, stretched out wherever there was a plot of grass, turning their pale faces to the light Here came the Victoria and Albert Memorial, a wedding cake in stone. He had a glimpse of a deerhound on a stone frieze, pursued by men wearing classical togas. Absurd! A large stone lady perched on a kneeling elephant; an elaborate necklace fell between her naked, spherical breasts, and that was absurd, too. But the breasts were exquisite. He stared at them until they were out of sight. Now came the turn into Kensington Hi
gh Street and a few blocks to walk home. He got off and began to hurry.
Claire was dressed and waiting for him. They started for the park, she riding ahead of him on her tricycle, jangling its bell. Her dark curls just touched the velvet collar of her tiny coat. Jessie dressed her in fine taste, but then, Jessie’s taste was always fine. He couldn’t take his eyes from Claire. And he wondered whether she would ever have any comprehension at all of what she meant to him. Her bright voice, her vigor! There was such a softness in him! That nothing, nothing, should ever happen to this child! No one ever hurt her! And although he knew that this cherishing of a child was the most universal emotion known to man, still it seemed to him, no doubt foolishly, that what he felt must be unusually intense.
How irrational life could be! Now, with the way lying clear before him to support a family, he could have but one child. Alice had sent snapshots of her three, the girls not nearly as pretty as Claire. Fred taught at a village school in the potato country; it must be a struggle for them. Yet Alice was about to have another child.
Once in the park, past the Round Pond and the ducks in the Serpentine, Martin led the way to the statue of Peter Pan. (He had read the story to Claire; Jessie said it was too advanced for a three-year-old, yet he was sure she had understood it.) And, finding a bench, he settled down to watch Claire riding back and forth on the path.
Not far from the statue they were taking pictures for a fashion magazine. Lanky and lean, the models posed smartly with arched back, thrusting pelvis and long, striding legs. Their purpose was ostensibly to seem indifferent and aloof. Yet sexual invitation was written on their lovely, haughty faces.
Under a spreading bush a couple lay in uninhibited embrace for anyone to see. And it was said that the English were “cold”!
Martin breathed deeply. A tart, bitter fragrance blew from behind him: out of dark earth had come an explosion of huge geraniums, blazing and blooming like none he had ever seen at home. And these also were sexual in their exuberance.