The Mask of Memory

by Victor Canning

  For a moment or two Margaret was content to know he was going, the flurry and surprise of his coming calmed in her now. Then, as his hand touched the door knob, she heard herself say, as though some other Margaret Tucker spoke from within and through her, ‘You don’t have to go. Since you’ve taken the trouble, and on a night like this, I’d like to see your paintings.’ Having spoken, she felt a quick sense of relief. The man was polite. He might be unusual in a social sense, but to take the trouble to come up here … to think about her … and, anyway, it would only take a few minutes to look at his stuff.

  As though echoing her thoughts, Maxie said, ‘It won’t take more than a few minutes. If Mr Tucker’s here, perhaps he would like to see them?’

  Margaret said, ‘Bring them into the sitting-room. The light’s better there. My husband’s not here at the moment…’ She was tempted to say that he was out at a meeting, would be back soon, and then dismissed the idea as stupid. There was nothing to fear from this man.

  Maxie followed Margaret into the sitting-room. He looked around, knowing some of the room already, completing the picture and then watched Margaret as she cleared magazines from a table so that he could lay out his pictures. The movements of her arms and her body under the velvet housecoat told him that she had little on underneath. He pictured her body naked, without excitement, as though she were a rare bird species flown into the field of his glasses.

  Maxie put the parcel on the table and undid the rough cord which bound it. He said, ‘I’ve got about a dozen. They’re all done on that hardboard stuff. Sometimes, if people want it, I frame them. Mostly they’re content to take them as they are. Framing’s extra.’ He half-turned and smiled at her.

  Feeling easier in herself now, Margaret watched him as he began to set the pictures out. They had been done in water-colours.

  As he placed each one on display on the table he gave a running commentary.

  ‘… That’s a dipper. You get those farther up the Two Rivers and on the moor streams … Redshank, plenty of those on the estuary … That’s a little ringed plover. They’re quite rare down here in the West, but we get some in the autumn on migration … That’s a pair of knots. They come in the winter. You can mix them up with sanderlings at a distance … Common tern. We get those late summerish. They breed up north and in the autumn they take off and go thousands of miles down to the Antarctic. Unbelievable. Just a handful of feathers, skin and bone, and they were doing it long before the first sailing ships rounded the Horn or the Cape…’

  Margaret watched the pictures come out one by one and found it hard to believe her eyes. Maxie talked with complete absorption. She had the impression that he had forgotten all about her. She was glad because as he dropped the pictures one by one on the table she did not know what to say, felt that words were demanded of her but could find none. The paintings were completely unexpected.

  Maxie said, ‘That’s a red-throated diver and then these last two … an osprey and a golden eagle…’

  Without thinking, finding relief in words of any kind, Margaret said, ‘But you can’t possibly get those down here, Mr Dougall. I used to see them as a girl in Scotland.’

  Maxie straightened up and turned to her and a brief, conspiratorial grin creased his brown face. ‘No, you don’t. I’ve never seen them – did them from a book. But we get a lot of people from Scotland on holiday down here. They go for them. I have to meet the demand of the market.’ He chuckled, the sound marking his complete ease in this strange room. The slight shrug of his shoulders as he stepped back to allow Margaret to see the paintings better carried a gentle familiarity as though they had long known one another.

  From behind her – and she was glad that it was so because she would not have wanted her face to be seen by him at this moment – Maxie went on, ‘ What do you think of them?’

  The question she had dreaded from her first sight of the paintings of the dipper had come. She did not know what to say. The paintings were awful. As far as the colouring of the birds’ plumage was concerned she had a feeling that each feather had been faithfully copied. But the birds themselves were stiff and wooden without even the primitive grace or appeal of an untutored skill or an original eye. They were just very bad. They were so bad that they were almost laughable.

  ‘Well, Mrs Tucker, what do you think?’

  As he spoke, Maxie moved round the end of the table. Margaret, stepping back from the paintings, could no longer avoid his eyes. She searched desperately for words, for some kindness of phrase which would relieve her embarrassment and not wound him.

  Almost stammering, she said, ‘I think … well, I think … the colouring is very … very exact…’

  In that moment Maxie liked her, his liking an emotion isolated from all the others which she evoked. She had good manners, and a gentleness and kindness which made her slow to hurt. That he liked, that too he could use – but the character note at that moment was marginal. He just liked her, standing there finely set up, the lines of her housecoat draping her body, a firm, boldly shaped woman’s body, her fair hair still unsettled by the wind in the hall, and little creases of embarrassment puckered in the corners of her eyes.

  He said easily, ‘Frankly, I think they’re bliddy awful. But they’re the best I can do. I can shut my eyes and see the birds, every detail, every movement, and I want to put it all down on paper … re-create it. But the moment my hand touches a brush or pencil I just become a clumsy ape.’ He laughed, drawing the sound out as though enjoying his own self-criticism. ‘I’ve got the soul of a painter and the hands of a five-year-old child.’ He grinned. ‘ You must have had a nasty moment when I laid them out. I apologize for that – but, you know, I really do sell a lot of them and for a long time I couldn’t understand it. But I do now. People on holiday go a little mad. They’ll buy anything that takes their eye. Like magpies, they are. Anything bright or unusual … so that in the winter or years later they can look at it and remember a summer, a place, a whole bagful of memories with a golden frame round them.’ He paused, and then added, ‘Sorry … talking too much.’

  Margaret said, ‘What you’ve said is interesting, Mr Dougall. But what I can’t understand is why you brought them for me to see. I’m not a summer visitor.’ She felt no asperity. She was calm now. The stupid fears which had rushed in when she had opened the hall door were gone. She had no resentment, no concealed disapproval of the way he had almost taken over the room, talking with complete self-confidence. She was her own mistress now, not a disturbed woman, and in her own house she had – and was compelled to exercise – a right to ask him for an explanation.

  For a moment or two Maxie hesitated. This was the moment when his own confidence and his reading of this woman were to be put to the test. It was a measure of a slight waning of his own arrogance, a misting of the vision of the future which he had nourished for so long, that he said almost in an apologetic mumble, ‘I don’t know…’

  Quite sharply, sensing her own triumph, Margaret said, ‘ Of course you must know. I’m not a child, Mr Dougall. You didn’t go over to Lobhill, did you? There’s no dealer over there. You just came straight up here.’

  Maxie smiled. The challenge from her restored him.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was easy now. She was helping him without knowing it.

  He said, ‘I wanted to be in this house. To know what it was like so that when I went away and was thinking about you I could picture you here. It’s as simple as that. I’ve got a hundred pictures of you in my imagination. Some of them I know from life, from seeing you walk along the sands and in the dunes. Others are just made up. I wanted to make them true as well…’ He paused. She was standing with her body tensed, her lips pressed tight and her arms were crossed, hugged close below the fall of her breasts, armouring her body against him while her eyes, touched with brilliant points of anger, watched him steadily. He went on, ‘Do you know why a man would want that?’

  She said
coldly, ‘ Take your paintings, Mr Dougall, and don’t come near me or this house again.’

  Maxie shook his head. Her anger was expected and now it worked for him, gave no armour to her against his frankness. ‘ It won’t do, Mrs Tucker. Some things you can’t properly fight. You’ve got to go with them. And there’s things some people know right away in their bones if only so much as a look passes between them. You can call it just wanting of love. But call it something you must and there’s no power will lay the pain of the wanting except to give in to it. We’ve got it between us.’ He gave a small shrug of his shoulders, and then a quick, boyish smile, a smile which brought back to Margaret the innocent, mischievous face of the orphanage boy in the beach crocodile. ‘I knew you wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s the man’s part. So I came up here.’

  Margaret said sharply, ‘Take your paintings and go, Mr Dougall.’ She turned her back to him and began to move to the door.

  Maxie went quickly to her. He put one arm round her shoulders and the other about her waist. He kissed her, following her lips with his as she pulled her head back and tried to twist away from him. His body was pressed hard against hers. His hand around her waist moved with a gentling, steady stroke up the small of her back and then slowly down again as she began to struggle. But the struggle, the beginning of her body’s protest, was barely half-formed when he took his lips from hers and stepped back.

  She faced him, breathing heavily, and said, ‘Get out of here!’

  He nodded, pulled his cap from his pocket and moved across the room. With his hand on the door knob, he said, ‘It’s all right, Mrs Tucker. I wouldn’t ever hurt you. But it’s no good for some people for things to be in the air – they’ve got to be done. From then on there’s either wanting all the way or an end to it … Don’t worry about the paintings. Put ’ em on the boiler fire.’

  She said angrily, ‘Don’t ever dare to come near me again.’

  Maxie gave a little shrug of his shoulders and then left the room. Margaret heard the thud of the hall door pulled sharply against the wind.

  She ran her tongue over her outraged lips. There was the faint tang of salt on them from his kiss, the salt which had filled the air on the roaring westerly wind coming in from the sea on his night walk up here. Down the small of her back the sensation of his roving hand ran still. But now there seemed no velvet cloth to mute the caress. The hand was warm and masterly over her bare skin.

  Bernard Tucker came home that weekend. He arrived at half-past three on the Friday afternoon, coming up from the station in a taxi. He went up to his bedroom and changed from his London clothes to a tweed jacket and comfortable corduroy trousers. Margaret was out.

  He went across to his wife’s room and left the door open so that if he missed the noise of her car returning he would hear the front door opening. He liked to arrive when she was out of the house. He liked to walk around, his professional eye checking and observing the household pieces and arrangements. Margaret was a creature of habit. Things were seldom moved. There had been a time, long before he knew Warboys and the work he did now, when he would have been appalled at even the impulse to violate the privacy of another person’s room. Now he did it automatically and without any prick of conscience. Her bedtime book was a volume of Sir Winston Churchill’s memoirs. For the last three months it had rested on the bedside table. He went into her bathroom, his eyes moving around briefly, checking with a scrupulous professional accuracy. He picked up the soap from the bath holder and passed it under his nose. Floris. Stephanotis. Stephanotis or Geranium, always one or the other. There was a new bath-mat of blue-dyed sheepskin.

  Back in the bedroom he pulled out his key-ring and opened her bureau top drawer – the only one which was ever locked. He took out her diary and read the new entries since his last examination. There was nothing new. He was used to her comments about himself and the references to her queer spells when she took things from shops.

  … If I had any courage he would come back and find me gone … but where would I go? And where would I find the courage? I’m so hopeless and useless in doing things. Sometimes I get the feeling that Bernard would like to come back and find me gone…

  He would. There was no question of that. He wanted to be freed from her, but he knew that she was right when she said she had no courage to find. The only hope was that someone else would find it for her.

  He put the diary back, and picked up two paperback books which lay in the drawer. They were always of the same type. It was more often these than Sir Winston Churchill she read. Trash. But he knew why she read them. A twinge of distant conscience touched him. Once he had loved her and her body. If he had never known her and were to meet her now he knew that there would be a response in him. His appetites were alive, demanded satisfaction, but on the few and distant occasions when he had tried to recapture what there once had been between them the flesh had refused to be driven. He could find plenty of explanations but knew that he could never discuss them with her. The betrayal had not been of her but of himself.

  Through her he had once tried to escape from Warboys’ world, had deliberately put himself in jeopardy hoping to be discovered – and nothing had happened. Fate had played its own game with him. There had in those days been the strictest embargo on marriage for trainees and junior ranks. Anyone who broke it was dropped from the Service. In Scotland, with self-revulsion growing in him against all he did and represented, he had met Margaret, years younger than himself, more a girl than a woman. He had made her a woman and later when she had told him she was pregnant, he had married her, quickly and quietly. He had been sure the Department would find out. But it never had. Margaret’s pregnancy had turned out to be a myth, a semi-hysterical, emotional irregularity. He had been caught in the aftermath of sudden regret for his impetuosity and the equally sudden knowledge that he was the man whom Warboys had always known he was. The life offered him was the only one he wanted. There was a sadistic ambition in him, and a fulfilling excitement in the conceits and dark manoeuvres which would enrich his existence. From then on he had concealed his marriage, and with each month, every year, was more and more concerned that it should not be discovered, that he should not be cast out of the peculiar paradise which he had found. Years later when he had reached the status – and time, too, had changed the injunctions and vetoes against marriage – when he could have revealed his distant lapse he had still concealed it. To reveal it – no matter how distant the transgression – would have been a black mark against him. Forgiveness because of his worth could not have erased it. Carrying the mark he could never have hoped to sit where Warboys sat, never be allowed to take that seat and hope to rise even higher…

  He dropped the books back into the drawer and locked it. Margaret then. Margaret now. A stupid woman from whom he wanted to be discreetly freed, wanted to have her off his hands so much that there were even times when he contemplated the fantasy of taking some direct action himself.

  So far have I come, he thought, as he went down the stairs to the front door, having heard the sound of her car moving down the drive, from the young officer reporting to his first ship, to the cold bridge nights and Warboys beside him, moving from stranger to companion, to a friend who longed for more than friendship.

  He opened the door, greeted Margaret, took parcels from her arms, and putting them down on the hall chest turned and kissed her, laying his cheek against hers with a sudden, unexpected tenderness from which he withdrew quickly.

  The gesture was not so quick that it had been unnoticed by her for as they sat in front of the fire having their drinks before dinner, Margaret said, ‘Bernard, what has happened to our marriage?’

  For a moment he showed his surprise. Then, not wanting to waste himself in the futility of analysis, said, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You regard it as normal?’

  The tone of cynicism was clear, and surprised him. He stirred uncomfortably.

  ‘No marriage is normal. They’re all different. The
y all have something missing if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Of course they do.’ He knew what was coming and he tried, loyally for a moment, to hold down an irritation which he could not escape.

  ‘Oh, they all have something wrong, yes. But I’m not really talking about whether you can’t or don’t want to sleep with me. That can be common enough, I suppose, in a lot of marriages. But they could still have something, even without that … a sort of, well, platonic happiness. Or don’t you think so?’

  ‘Happiness? What the hell’s that anyway?’ Her mood increased his irritation and he showed it now, hoping thereby to end this line of talk.

  Quietly she persisted. ‘It’s the relationship where two people don’t – whatever else has gone – have to live in the same house in two different worlds.’

  ‘I’m not here much. This is all your world.’ He paused and then, going farther than he had ever done before, added, ‘If you wish, I’ll leave you here with it if it won’t cause you embarrassment. You can reshape it any way you like.’

  He stood up and crossed to the sideboard to pour himself another drink. His back to her, he waited for her reaction. When it came it was unexpected, following a line he had not anticipated.

  ‘And what is your world, Bernard? Sometimes I wonder about it. You’ve never been very … categorical about it.’

  The pause before the word categorical irritated him more. Whenever she used a word outside of her normal vocabulary there was always this pause, not made for emphasis but as though she were some slow learner, anxious to get an unfamiliar word right.