by A. S. Byatt
“Well, it will be.” He sighed. “Was it painful?”
“Not much.”
He seemed to be drifting into sleep. Frederica stared at the back of his hair, and reflected that she had never known him less well, or felt less close to him, than now, since they first began to talk. She had learned something. She had learned that you could do – that – in a reasonably companionable and courteous way with no invasion of your privacy, no shift in your solitude. You could sleep all night, with a strange man, and see the back only of his head, and be more self-contained than anywhere else. This was a useful thing to know. It removed the awful either/or from the condition of women as she had seen it. Either love, passion, sex and those things, or the life of the mind, ambition, solitude, the others. There was a third way: you could be alone and not alone in a bed, if you made no fuss. She too would turn away and go to sleep.
She went to sleep and was woken, after all, in a panic, by the blood. She pulled at Wilkie.
“Wilkie – please – it’s very wet, it is.”
“Hmm?”
“Please. I seem to be lying in a sea of wet.”
“That’s wrong,” said the obliging Wilkie. “Let’s have a look.” He leaped out of the bed and turned back the blankets, observing that there’d certainly been blood on the durex thing, but not such a lot he’d thought it worth mentioning.
Blood was rising and puddling round Frederica, her thighs were scarlet, it was creeping in a puddle up her back. Even the collected Wilkie blanched a little at this sight, and asked if she felt faint.
“I don’t think so. Just wet.”
“Sit up.”
She sat, and said she did feel faint, a little.
“Let’s have a look, how fast it’s coming out.”
He put his head down, and said it seemed not to be gushing, or even running, very noticeably. He said he would make a pad of a bathtowel and she would sit on that, and he would deal with the bed.
“Wilkie – it’s awful, it’s embarrassing.”
“Rubbish. Hotels are for dealing with this kind of thing. As long as you feel O.K. But I’m not sleeping in a pool of blood, there’s limits to my sang-froid. I’m clearing this up. Now sit on this towel and keep still.”
She watched, fascinated, whilst he removed the bloody sheet, rinsed it as far as possible in the basin, and hung it over a radiator. Then he remade the bed, with the over-sheet under and the blankets on top. Then he sponged Frederica with a flannel, and reinspected her and the towel.
“It doesn’t seem to qualify as a haemorrhage,” he said, with his usual cocky certainty. “Just heavy hymeneal bleeding, I’d say.”
“Has this happened to you before?”
“I can’t say it has, no. I wouldn’t like it often, either, it’s a bit alarming. And very messy. I think I’ll keep off virgins. You can be my only good turn to virgins, Frederica. Now if you get cautiously back in that bed I’ll wrap you up in all these towels and fix them on you and then we’ll get some sleep. If it were to get worse we’d have to get a doctor, but it won’t. You’re just a very bleeding sort of girl.”
“You are useful.”
“Right man at right time in right place. I told you so. Poor old Frederica. No point in bringing your swimming costume if that won’t stop, either. Now, concentrate on stopping the flow, mind over matter, and wake me up if you’re worried.”
In ten minutes he was asleep again.
44. Returns
Bill and Winifred returned to Blesford the next day. They brought with them Marcus, in an ambulance. Marcus was observedly thinner, and stared with extravagant terror at everything. When he saw the Masters’ Row house he flung himself about, and screamed, and tossed his arms, with an energy that it had not seemed likely he could summon up. He then fainted on the gravel. They carried him into the house and put him on the sofa. When he came round, he began again to scream and flail. A doctor was telephoned. The ambulance returned and Marcus left again. The hospital psychiatrist sent for Winifred, alone.
Frederica and Wilkie had a day on the beach: the wind came howling and icy off the North Sea: Wilkie threw a few stones, and Frederica hobbled beside him, swathed in cotton wool and bleeding, if not profusely, considerably more than she was used to. Finally she said she was sorry to be a drag, she must sit down somewhere, she felt wobbly. Wilkie took her back to the Grand Hotel, where she lay on the bed in a huddle, imagining looks of pity and curiosity on the faces of chambermaids and porters. Wilkie went away to make a phone call and came back to say that his girl wanted him in Cambridge rather urgently, she was a bit put out not to have been able to get in touch with him, and there was a possibility of a part in a production of The Changeling at a student drama festival in Munich. So if she didn’t mind, they ought to be getting back.
Alexander did a lot of telephoning. He was feeling buoyant. Now he was out of that garden, his success, his prospects, seemed his own. He arranged to see the BBC in Manchester, and to travel down to London, for interviews there, and then on to Oxford about the schoolmaster fellowship. He refused the interview at the school in Dorset, he had had enough of education, for the time being. He had his trunks brought out of the school basement and some tea chests from the school stores. He went to see Dr Thone, and proffered his formal resignation. He locked his door, sported his oak, put his fretwork notice to OUT and began to pack.
Daniel had a letter from Sheffield, in an unknown hand. When he opened it, he read that his mother had had a bad fall, had cracked her hip in several places and would be in hospital for some weeks, maybe months. At the end of that time it would be quite possible that she would be unable to continue to manage for herself as she had. He appeared, the hospital authorities wrote, to be her closest and indeed only relative, although she had not asked for him. He went to the station and took a train to Sheffield.
Thomas Parry developed a complex infection of the middle ear, with a raging temperature, and screamed day and night for five nights. Geoffrey and Jenny sponged him with cool flannels, tried to make him drink, sat over him.
The psychiatrist said to Winifred that the root cause of Marcus’s troubles appeared to be fear of his father, and that it was most desirable that he should recuperate elsewhere, with someone understanding and less alarming, if that could be arranged. He did not want to keep him in the hospital since the place itself was doing him no good, and had unfortunate and undesirable associations with Lucas Simmonds, who was a very sick man, and best left to professional care.
Anthea Warburton set off for a fortnight’s visit to the kind Marina Yeo, and a sunny holiday with friends and cousins in Juan-les-Pins.
Frederica and Wilkie drove, as stately as a motorbike can drive, back into Blesford, and roared along Masters’ Row. Going in the other direction, behind the Blesford bus, was Alexander’s silver Triumph. It had, as it had not had before, a roof-rack, which was tidily loaded, and roped in with a tarpaulin. Frederica saw Alexander, quite clearly, beautifully brushed, smiling, preserved and distant behind the greenish glass of the windscreen. Alexander saw Wilkie clearly enough, allowing for the insect-bulge of helmet and goggles, and saw a flicker and puff of ginger hair behind Wilkie’s clinging passenger which allowed him to identify her. He looked out at the road in front of him and continued to smile, thus missing the nervous waving and leaping of Jenny Parry at her garden gate. It was not in Alexander’s nature to let other people have the dénouement, or crisis, or climax, to which they might in life feel entitled, however well he knew that in art such things are necessary. His endings, like his beginnings, were solitary things. He let out the clutch and fled faster.
Wilkie put Frederica down, gathered up her helmet, strapped it to his pillion – “do for my girl,” he said – and pushed up his own visor to kiss her.
She said, “I will see you again, won’t I?”
“Probably. It’s a small world. Look after yourself.”
He closed up his face, too, in plastic shields and screens, and clambered ont
o the bike. She stood on the pavement, and watched him roar away after Alexander. She saw Jennifer Parry on her garden path, and began to take in the implications of Alexander’s roof-rack and comportment. She walked into the house and was met by a roar of rage from her father who wanted to know where she thought she had been, why she had left such a mess in the house, with uncooked food scattered across the kitchen, and why, when he had opened the French window, wine-bottles had shattered all over the paving. And as much mess in the garden as in the kitchen, and her mother quite distracted, and all she could think of was swanning off with smart friends. Frederica was saved from answering these reproaches, which shed a little more murky light on Alexander’s possible feelings and movements, by the telephone, which Bill answered. It was, he said, coming back hunched and suppressed, her mother. He told Frederica what Winifred said the psychiatrist had said about Marcus. He said he had always believed they all knew he didn’t mean it – the things he sometimes did and said. Frederica said testily, her mind still on Alexander, that Marcus had clearly not known, had he, and that if he wanted to know, she thought Stephanie had not known, either, but that she, Frederica, if it comforted him, was made of tougher stuff, and did know that he wasn’t going, in this crisis, to fuss about uncooked chops on the kitchen table and wine-bottles on the flowerbeds. She then took in his expression and felt a twinge of pity and more than a twinge of fear. She cast about for a practical solution. There was Daniel, she said. Marcus seemed to trust Daniel. She’d noticed. Maybe Daniel and Stephanie would have Marcus until he’d pulled himself together a bit, or whatever he had to do.
Bill said gloomily that there was hardly room in that ludicrous little flat for another person, let alone two more with a baby, and that Daniel had enough on his plate. Frederica said that was one thing about Daniel, you could never say with certainty that he had enough on his plate. Bill became tense and thoughtful, and then put on his coat and rushed out to Askham Buildings.
It had turned out, as it happened, that it was to be impossible for the Ortons to stay in Askham Buildings. Daniel returned from Sheffield and said that he feared they would definitely have to house his mother. Mr Ellenby found for them a workman’s cottage in a part of Blesford where the younger middle classes were doing up such dwellings into tiny first homes, and suggested Daniel get his Youth Club layabouts onto the decorating. Stephanie, after the surprise of Bill’s inrush, his tears of self-accusation, his dramatic enactment of Marcus’s plight and his own guilt, said to Daniel that it was as much their duty to have Marcus, if he would come, as to have Daniel’s mother. Of course, said Daniel. Of course they must have Marcus. If Marcus wanted. Marcus, when Daniel went to the hospital and asked him, said he did want. It was the only thing he said at all for several days.
Autumn came and grew cold. Marcus was brought to Askham Buildings, where he slept on the sitting-room sofa until the cottage was fit for habitation. Frederica went back to Blesford Girls’ Grammar and began to work for university entrance. It had rapidly become clear to her that Alexander had gone for good. She felt humiliated, but also, without the stress of his presence, of desire, of a crisis to work for or avoid, she felt self-contained. The most useful lesson of the summer, she discovered, had been that things, and people, could by her be kept separate from each other. She could lie on her bed and weep for Alexander, also for Wilkie, and even for Astraea, but she could then rise up neatly and discover large available reserves of energy and concentration to spend gleefully on her work. She was pleased that the simple landmark of the bleeding was, however messily, past. She was shaken and discomposed by the change in her parents. Bill had cancelled a lot of classes, and spent his time wandering up and down, restlessly, in carpet slippers. He spoke to no one, often even opening and closing his mouth silently as though physically choking back speech. Winifred spent days together in bed. Frederica worked through this, for the sake of the way out, for the sake of the books themselves. But one night, feeling the danger of emotions seeping between the laminations of her attention, she decided to go and call on Daniel and Stephanie, to see at first hand how Marcus was, what was to be hoped, or feared.
Daniel opened the door to her, did not smile, but let her in. She said brightly, “I just dropped by, to see you. It’s unbearable at home. Oppressive.”
Daniel could have said the same, but would not. He said, “Well, do sit down, now you’re here. I’ll make a cup of tea.”
Stephanie and Marcus were sitting in silence on the sofa, side by side, his thin body in some strange way propped and supported by her swollen one. Stephanie nodded at Frederica, as though Marcus was a child or invalid not to be disturbed: Marcus gave no sign of having noticed her.
Since Marcus had come, the Ortons’ whole life had changed. For the first two days Marcus had turned to Daniel, whimpering like a small child if he went out of sight. Stephanie had noticed that this irritated Daniel, and was dismayed. She tried to take over: sat for long hours next to Marcus in a neutral unmoving silence, as she had sat with Malcolm Haydock: it was not, indeed, so very different. One day she had offered him the information that Lucas Simmonds had been moved again and was said to be feeling calmer: Marcus had asked if Lucas had been hurt or attacked, and when assured that he had not, had offered Stephanie a version of his fears for Lucas and himself, of Lucas’s smashed hopes, of the photisms, the transmissions, the light. She had not understood much of this but had thought, possibly wrongly, that what was required was not understanding but “total acceptance”, and she had set with her usual conscientiousness about accepting Marcus. Animal taming came into it, as it had into her imagery about Malcolm Haydock: she had made it possible for him to lay his head in her lap for long hours and do nothing, be still. So Daniel increasingly found them when he came in from his work: he accepted her recuperative stillness, he tried not to interfere.
He went into the kitchen now, to make Frederica’s cup of tea, clattered with kettles and plates, lumbered from cupboard to cupboard. After a moment, Frederica followed him out there. She hissed, “Is it like that all the time? Will he get better?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you manage?”
“I’m not sure.” Daniel gave a brief, grim smile. He did not like Frederica Potter: he would not tell her how he felt, who in any case habitually told no one. But the answer was that he barely did manage. A moral man, he was appalled by his own reactions to Marcus’s presence, and to Stephanie herself. He dreamed nightly of murder. Pale innocent Marcus, slaughtering his unborn child. The child ripping Stephanie bloodily apart under his own eyes. Himself, Daniel Orton, pursuing Bill Potter across Far Field with Simmonds’s carving knife. And, most terrible of all, a blanket terror of smothering: his own bulk accidentally weltering on a, on the child, some unknown damp and heavy monstrosity pressing and choking away his own life. He could not speak to, or frighten, his wife, who was pregnant, and was doing what she believed to be right. He was truly sorry for Marcus. He missed the days of laughter and heat in that little flat, which would never come again. Even on a purely practical level he could say nothing: the walls were thin, the flat was tiny, the boy was always inert but alert and nervous.
“How do you manage, Daniel?” Frederica repeated.
“It’s got an end. There’ll be more space in the cottage. He’ll get over th’shock. It’s to be hoped. And there’ll be the baby.”
He stood for a moment staring out, as he often stared, as he had stared on his honeymoon night, at the black tyre turning and returning on its gallows, at the twisted thorn and the tracked muddy sea. She stared with him.
“In our house everyone’s gone passive and flabby as though energy was indecent. I work but I feel I’m attached to nothing, all in the air, loose.”
“Aye.”
“Whereas you seem – a bit clotted with problems.”
“Oh, aye,” said Daniel, staring. “In the midst of life, I am. It’s the normal course of things.” He had told himself that, often and often. But his
powers were blunted by care: for the first time since his conversion he acknowledged the possibility of being wholly impeded from using his energies. He sensed some shadow of this care in the thin silly girl beside him.
“You’ll be all right once you’ve got into t’university. It’s just the waiting time.”
“I suppose so. And you – when the baby’s born.”
“Aye.”
“And Marcus?”
“I don’t know, Frederica. He’s not my kind of practical problem.”
He piled up teacups and a packet of biscuits and they went back into the little box of a room. Marcus had his head against Stephanie’s shoulder; he sagged like a straw man; his limp hands and legs were still. She sat, like some unnatural and ungainly Pietà, looking out over his pale hair at Daniel, with what seemed to be unseeing patience. He had unfrozen her once, and could surely do so again. He said again to Frederica, “It’s a question of the waiting time – of being patient now – for all of us.”
Waiting and patience, of this inactive kind, did not come easily to him. Or to Frederica, he decided, without much sympathy for her. He gave her a cup of tea and the two of them sat together in uncommunicative silence, considering the still and passive pair on the sofa. That was not an end, but since it went on for a considerable time, is as good a place to stop as any.
About the Author
A. S. BYATT has written six works of fiction—Possession, which won the Booker Prize and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, as well as Shadow of a Sun, The Game, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Sugar and Other Stories. She has taught English and American literature at University College, London, and is a distinguished critic and reviewer. Her critical work includes Degrees of Freedom (a study of Iris Murdoch) and Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. Her latest book is entitled Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays.