An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  I said I could not be too sure of my plans, that my enquiry was for the moment tentative, but that I would let him know.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s up to you. But don’t leave it too late.’

  Chapter Four

  I could not leave it too late: yet there were days when it seemed fantastic to consider deserting Ned at all, when the realities of the present seemed to stand all around me like a fence far higher than my head, blotting out the prospect of any other kind of life but the one I lived. Sometimes it would seem to me, as I bathed and fed the baby, or played with him on my knee (his beaming, anticipatory face, eyes sparkling, lips open ready to laugh when he knew I was coming to one of our favourite jokes), that I was sufficiently happy in possessing him; that he was all I could possibly need. He was seven months old, a sweet-tempered, jolly child, increasingly responsive to me and to his small, comfortable world with every passing day. I felt for him a love that was at the same time protective, sensuous, visceral and comradely; it seemed to me, mysteriously, that we understood each other. Physically, he delighted me; the sweet springiness of his flesh, flushed through with rosiness like sunlight in coloured glass, was lovely to the touch; his hair was soft as the feathers on the breast of a bird. His hands, which he used with the unconscious and inimitable grace of infancy, were like mine; it was strange to see how, in him, my own third and fourth finger, leaning closely together, my own short, backbending thumb, were reproduced on so small a scale And when he turned his head suddenly the shape of it, so like Ned’s, disturbed and weakened me.

  If Ned had seemed really to love Mark, I could, I think, have gone on; but he did not. Lately he had displayed a renewal of pride in him; he wanted to know how much he weighed, how soon he would talk, how soon he would stand alone, and sometimes, to please me, he would hold him for a little while. The moment Mark began to cry, however, Ned thrust him back upon me, pursing his lips as if the noise were something I could hardly expect him to endure.

  One night he turned suddenly upon me in a new jealousy that I had not suspected.

  For some time past he had been making love to me rarely and always suddenly, in silence, as if solely for his own easing. Afterwards, at once, without a word, he had slept. I had accepted this mechanical love with half my mind elsewhere; he had appeared to find it enough. I might have been any woman. But in the past week or so I had noticed that he was looking at me with a curious, smiling steadiness, as if he were recognising me again at the end of a long journey. In the dark he spoke to me with a hot tenderness, asking me the questions of love: but hastening on before I could reply. He was needing me more and more; he was using his own need, his own driving impulse, in an effort to awaken love again. And as I felt the weight of his head on my shoulder, his arm thrown across me (as if, like Mark, he were seeking comfort and reassurance), I wept.

  But he was tiring me bitterly with these forcing renewals; they made me both pity and dread him. For I had not for months been sleeping well, and Mark still woke me between five and six of a morning when I had had perhaps only four or five hours of rest. One very warm night in the middle of July, knowing Ned was out with one of his friends and was likely to be late, I had gone to bed early, determined to read for half an hour, take some aspirin and, if I felt I could manage it, get to sleep before he came back. I had just put out the light when I heard him enter the house. In a few minutes he came into the room.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Only just,’ I said.

  He switched the light on again, sat upon the edge of my bed. He had the triumphant look of a confident lover. ‘Sleepy?’

  ‘A little.’ But I had never yet denied him, and would not.

  He undressed himself, humming a tune as he did so. His face was open and cheerful; I did not believe in this openness. ‘You look nice, Chris. Something smells nice. It is that cream you use?’ He bent to kiss me. ‘Make room.’ He said, in an odd, questing voice, ‘My darling?’

  Mark burst out crying. His cries, gasping and harsh, cut through the wall between us.

  Ned took no notice.

  ‘I must go to him,’ I said.

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with him.’

  ‘It’s his tooth. I was expecting it; he had a red patch on his cheek today.’

  ‘Let him get on with it, then.’

  I tried to pull away, to reach for my dressing-gown.

  ‘He’ll cry it out,’ said Ned.

  I said, ‘He can’t. If I give him a little water it sometimes helps.’

  ‘Leave him alone. You can go later.’

  Mark cried with the pain of misery and desertion. I pushed Ned from me, jumped out of bed. ‘I can’t leave him. He works himself up into such a state. He feels so lost,’ I added.

  Ned said, ‘All right. Go.’ He lay down and closed his eyes.

  It was nearly an hour before I could quieten the baby. I walked up and down his room in the faint glow of the night light, holding him first over my shoulder, then against my cheek, whispering to him, singing his favourite songs, giving him sips of water, stealthily slipping him back into his cot, and then being forced to take him up again as he roared in misery renewed and gnawed at his fists.

  At last, exhausted, I returned to Ned. He was back in his own bed, and he did not speak until I had lain down. I had hoped he was sleeping, but his voice came sharply out of the dark. ‘I won’t be made a slave to that child, if you are.’

  I told him it was a necessary slavery. The baby was in pain. It was a commonplace pain, and probably it would, to us, be trivial: to him it was an outrageous pain and a great one.

  ‘We’re going to get a nurse. You can get a working nurse fairly reasonably. I’m just about fed up with seeing you worn out and fit for nothing.’

  ‘I haven’t let you suffer,’ I said, knowing what he meant.

  ‘You throw a dog a bone.’

  I was so tired that this petty unfairness made me burst into tears.

  ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘What are you crying for? I’m the one who should cry. I wanted you. You should have stayed with me, not jumped at any excuse to go running off. You’re going to think more of your husband in future and less of that kid.’

  ‘Stop it!’ I said. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I could not check the uncontrollable wrenching of my own tears.

  ‘Certainly. But tomorrow you’ll get a nurse.’

  My nose and throat thick with sobs, the tears salt on my lips, I burst out that I had tried to please him; that not once during this past fortnight had I refused him. I told him what it was like to be aching with tiredness, to sleep only a few hours, and then drag up again, hardly knowing what I did, to look after the baby. I reminded him that, despite this, I had tried to please him. That I had taken pleasure from him, and he must have known it. But I could not let him make love to me while the child wailed in pain and in fright because I did not come to him.

  ‘All children teethe. They’ve got to get over it. We all did, and none of us died of it.’

  ‘Ned,’ I said, ‘I must go to sleep. I have got to go to sleep.’ And, indeed, the thought of sleep seemed like some unimaginable happiness, more desirable than any other human experience. I craved for it.

  ‘Tomorrow you’ll get a nurse.’

  Desperately I told him that even now, if he still wanted me, I was ready; but that afterwards he must let me rest.

  ‘I must sleep,’ I repeated; ‘I’ve got to.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s very nice of you, but I think not. I don’t enjoy being tolerated.’

  His voice sounded very near. I put out my hand and the light sprang up. He was leaning across from his own bed, his face close to mine. It was quite white, and the sweat on his forehead shone white also.

  I said, ‘You know there’s nothing left for us! Wh
y don’t you let me go?’

  ‘I’m going to get you over these hysterics, my girl. We’re going to settle down and live decently, make up your mind to that. Less of the baby, and more of me.’ Then, surprisingly, he weakened. He put his hand to my cheek. ‘It will be all right, Chris, I promise you. We’ll make a go of it.’

  I got out of bed again.

  ‘Is that Mark?’ he said. ‘I don’t hear him.’

  ‘No. But I’m going to sleep in his room.’ There was a divan there. I had used it several times before, when the baby had been smaller and had needed me more often.

  ‘No, no. Don’t. Please stay where you are. I’m sorry I upset you.’

  ‘I’d rather go.’

  ‘Please, Chris. I swear I’m sorry. I was disappointed, and I lost my head.’

  I told him I was no longer angry with him, no longer particularly distressed, only tired; and that if he wanted to be kind to me, he would let me go, just for that night.

  He said nothing more. I crept into Mark’s room, lay down and slept at once. At six I awoke and fed him, slept again. At eight I found Ned sitting beside me, his face mournful, his eyes red as if he had been weeping. ‘Come back with me now.’

  Outside the rain was pouring down, the noise of it like an interminable rush of breath.

  He half carried me back to my own bed and lay down beside me—but he did not touch me. He buried his face in the pillow, near my own, and was silent.

  Chapter Five

  This scene with Ned was not in itself a crisis, though it meant a new fear for me—the fear that he would somehow separate me from Mark. Most of the real crises of life take place in the imagination; around the main thread of worry the accretions of fear, of anticipation, of resolve, cluster secretly, thicker and thicker, till the thread snarls and knots beyond untangling, and we realise that the time has come to cut it clean away. During the last two weeks of July Ned left me much to myself, going out early in the morning, returning late after the office and often going out again immediately after dinner. He was quiet, amiable, rather remote. He did not try to make love to me. I said to him once, in a flash of hope, ‘Let me go, Ned—you must see how it is with us’, but he gave me the same reply as before.

  Mrs. Skelton called one afternoon. I had not in the least expected her; it was a long time since we had met. I had had a bad night with Mark, who was teething again, and had just lain down in the hope of an hour’s sleep, though it was always difficult for me to get to sleep in the day. When I went to answer her ring I was dazed, untidy, upset at being disturbed. She told me she was just passing and had taken it into her head to drop in for a little while—an odd fiction from Mrs. Skelton, who was usually logical in all things. I knew she was acquainted with no one else in the neighbourhood and must have made the journey on purpose. She must, I thought, be worried enough not to bother about acceptable pretences.

  For a few moments she talked of nothing in particular. She walked about the room, glanced at a new frock I had bought for Mark, picked up my library book, observed that my hair was not cut as well as it might be, and that she knew a good man, surprisingly reasonable, in Conduit Street.

  ‘I should never find time for it,’ I said, feeling all the exasperation that is aroused by someone incapable of understanding the exigencies of one’s daily life, together with a spurt of irritation that she had made me seem dowdy and ill-cared-for.

  ‘Your aunt could take the baby,’ Mrs. Skelton told me. ‘I don’t think you ought to let yourself go.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘What’s wrong between you and Ned?’ She spoke casually, as if most of her interest were concentrated upon the book she still held in her lap. Then she raised her eyes and looked straight at me. She was thin, old and handsome. For years her life had been without joy. I realised that she would be impatient with anyone less stoical than she.

  I told her that our marriage had failed, that we had nothing in common, that we were bitterly unhappy, but that Ned refused to make an end of it.

  ‘I warned you before you got married that he was difficult.’

  I accepted this I-told-you-so meekly. ‘It’s my fault as well,’ I said. I’m not right for him. He might be happy with someone else.’

  She smiled. Her face was kind and contemptuous. ‘You young people think you can break marriages as easily as breaking teacups. You really haven’t any stamina, any of you. I wanted to leave Harold years ago, but I didn’t. There were the children to consider.’

  I was young enough to be diverted by this; I was curious. I asked her why she had wanted to leave him. She grinned. It gave her pleasure to answer me, to amaze me. ‘Because he’s a hopeless womaniser. He always has been. One damned woman after the other. I thought I’d break my heart at first; and then I got used to it. It was better after I stopped him talking about them, though he hated that. Part of the pleasure was coming home to me and weeping on my shoulder when the affair was going badly.’ She told me she had been afraid Ned would turn out to be like his father, but that I had made all the difference to him. He had been entirely faithful to me; she knew this by instinct. She would have known at once had it been otherwise. He would always be faithful to me, and she thanked God for it.

  Without hope, I asked her to persuade him that he must let me go.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ said Mrs. Skelton, looking and sounding so much like him that his spirit might suddenly have taken possession of her. She put her hand on my bare arm. I felt the flesh withdraw from her touch. ‘You buck yourself up and think of the baby. Your duty’s to Ned. You’ve steadied him up. You’ve given him some sort of a decent life, and I intend to see one of my children reasonably happy.’ She paused, tossed the book down on the sofa, as if it had served its purpose and added, ‘I thought Nelly was going to be. Then her husband had to die; and now her life’s a complete stupid mess. Dogs, and silly hysterical friendships. Oh, I know. I know everything. You wouldn’t think a woman could be such a fool.’

  When she left she kissed me; it was a rare gesture, and she offered me its rareness in the hope of taking the edge from the finality of what she had said. Despite her expressed contempt for Ned, despite the way in which she would let him down in public, she passionately wanted him to live an ordinary, contented life. She wanted to salvage something from the wreck of her hopes for him. When he was a child she must have loved him with a hard, secretive force: her baby, her son, better looking than her lumpish girl, a boy of promise on whom to fasten her ambitions. Now she believed he might still become the child of whom she could be proud, and that if this happened it would be through my agency. There was no help to be had from her. She would fight on his side.

  When she had gone I was taken by so strong a sensation of being trapped that I walked about the room beating my fists upon the walls as if they were really made of stone. In a month I should be twenty-one. Before me lay fifty more years, perhaps, of life like this. I looked at the knuckle of my right hand. I had broken the skin, and it was bleeding a little. For a moment I knew a faint sense of comfort that my distress had driven me to so violent a physical expression; for I needed distress to be strong, to be the driving force in which lay my only hope of release. I was standing before the window, seeing nothing, when a change in the summer weather suddenly arrested my attention and filled the whole of my eyes.

  It had been a lowering grey day, heavy and warm, drawing all the colour from the fields and bushes, dulling the surface of the roadway. But now, far off, the sun broke through an unsuspected crevice in the clouds and spread long fingers of light downwards to touch the furthest trees. Outside the window a few drops of rain fell. The fingers broadened, widened, stretching the crevice, tearing through the grey silk of the sky, and all at once the weather was transformed. The sun blazed out in lemon-coloured rays, each melting one into the other; all of a sudden the sunlight itself began to roll forw
ard, field upon field, closer and closer, bringing up the sparkle of colour as a kerosene rag brings up for a moment the miraculous colours of a painting that has faded. It was like a golden army advancing and singing as it came. And it stopped halfway across the big field, slicing it in two. On the line of an intersection was a solitary hawthorn bush, half of it now in blackness and the other half of it shivering, jewelled and glittering as a bush in heaven.

  I saw—as for three years, I had not seen; experiencing the fullness of sight as if it were the fullness of love. It seemed to me that I should not be defeated after all, for it was essential for me to see like this again, to see innumerable wonders all my life and, as the child grew up, to make him see through my eyes till he acquired a greater vision of his own.

  That night, as I sat reading, as Ned lay on the sofa with his own book, now and then making some friendly, indifferent comment as though both of us were peacefully settled for ever, I decided to write the letter that must be posted by the beginning of August if it were not to be too late. In any case, I said to myself, he wants me to get a nurse for Mark; and if I do, then there is nothing to stop me working. If this must go on for us both, at least I shall have a wider world to live in.

  I wrote it, and concealed the answer. I had arranged to take up my business life again in September. Still it seemed unreal. I might have arranged it; I still could not believe it.

  On the following Friday Ned brought Jack Harris, who had been our best man, home for a meal and told me they were going to Frinton for the weekend to get some golf. Harris had not been to see us lately; he was a big, amiable, facetious man whom Ned seemed to find amusing.

  ‘It’s women like you drive husbands away,’ Harris said to me, following this by a timid ha-ha, less like mirth than some kind of nervous affection. ‘Ned says you ought to shut up shop and come with us.’