Against her mood, the summer was bright and hot but all those things that had looked colourful and attractive the previous year now escaped her notice. Her skin remained pale because she spent so much time indoors, while David’s became deeply tanned, the contrast presenting the most singular evidence of their drifting apart.
Often now she would not see him at all on Saturday nights. The weekends he played away he stayed away and when the matches were at home he remained at the club late into the night.
David’s birthday fell on a Saturday that year and in the afternoon Molly came to the house with a present.
David, of course, was not there, and in an unguarded rush of self-pity, Mickey told her mother that he was never there. Molly started calling her ‘Darling’ and boiling the kettle: tea and sympathy, subconscious glee and eager maternal understanding. Limply, Mickey stood by, her mother’s rag doll to be put to rights, made happy again, with a good strong cuppa, a nice biscuit and a ‘proper’ chat.
‘Darling, you’ve got to do something about this place. Now please don’t take it the wrong way, I’m only thinking of your good. It’s so, well, unhomely, so dark and there’s hardly any furniture. Perhaps if you made it a bit more, well, comfortable, David would spend more time at home.’ Molly’s expression was earnest and a little wary; she’d come fresh from an argument with Laura, the usual one about getting married.
Mickey sipped her tea and glanced over the room she and David had planned to decorate the week after their wedding, the week they’d spent in bed.
‘You’re not going to be cross with me, are you?’ Molly was saying. And no, Mickey was not. She had lost all heart for anger; disappointment weighed in her like a large lump of lead, and Molly could say what she liked: she didn’t have to take any notice. The argument did not stand up anyway, the Walrus had never spent much time at home and Molly’s rooms had always been light and soft with comfort. It had taken Laura’s baby to keep him home and now Molly wanted Laura to get married and take baby Lucien away. It was all contradiction and never being satisfied; wanting life to fall into pre-set patterns.
I am my mother’s daughter, Mickey thought.
When Molly had gone she felt she couldn’t stay in the house another minute. She went out in the car and drove about the villages, without destination or purpose. What did she want? The answer was David, David every time, but on what terms?
She stopped in a small village with a picturesque high street and a few shops. She had a sudden urge to buy something momentous for David, something extravagant and silly that would make him smile and think of her in the way she imagined he once had.
There was a small, double-fronted antique shop a few yards from where she had parked. She got out of the car and went up to its windows. Rows of dark wood furniture stretched back into the shop, but there were also smaller items, a tantalus, silver picture frames, a stuffed owl in a glass case. She pushed open the door, and an old-fashioned bell jangled.
Inside there was a smell of oldness tinged with the brown chemical odour of Rentokil. Outside the sun was still hot but within the shop there was no brightness, no warmth. Mickey shivered in her sleeveless cotton dress and stared at the unblinking wide-eyed owl. It was a possibility.
She was in the shop some minutes before anybody came and then from a doorway at the far end emerged a small man with a bespectacled round face as pale as her own.
When first he appeared she had an impression of middle age, accentuated by hair loss, but when he came nearer and spoke she realized that he could be no more than about thirty. His spectacles were completely round, circa 1930s, and inconsequentially it passed through her mind that perhaps he had bought them in a job lot with the stuffed owl and the tantalus.
‘Disturbing, isn’t it, the way its eyes follow you about,’ he said. His voice was rather high and pronunciation slightly pedantic, and again inconsequentially, Mickey decided he was probably homosexual.
‘I call it Mona Lisa,’ he went on, looking to the inert owl.
‘Yes,’ Mickey said and made a small laughing sound.
The man turned his gaze from the owl to her.
‘Is there anything in particular you’re after or just having a look?’ He smiled encouragingly and Mickey felt inclined to tell him what she wanted.
‘Ah,’ he said, when she had explained, ‘you want something that is of absolutely no practical use.’
‘Yes,’ she answered him ‘That’s exactly what I want. Something totally bizarre.’
She felt as if she had created a small conspiracy of which the man seemed eager to be a part, although probably only because he wanted her to buy something.
They moved into the back of the shop and he produced a series of strange objects, a heavy iron padlock in the shape of a Gothic castle, a copper gargoyle with hideous grimace, the breast-plate from a suit of armour.
‘All pretty useless,’ he said, ‘but each piece has its own particular charm don’t you think? Does your husband have any special interests?’
‘Oh yes,’ Mickey murmured, ‘Look, I think I’ll take the owl,’ she said. She wanted to get out of the shop, away from the man. There was something about him that made her feel uneasy, sort of ‘exposed’.
‘The owl, yes, you’re quite sure?’ he said.
‘Yes, really. It’ll do fine,’ she assured him, suddenly seized with the impression that he didn’t actually want to sell it.
He was thoughtful for a moment, his eyes strangely magnified by the peculiar spectacles.
‘Why don’t you take it and see whether your husband likes it and you can bring it back if he doesn’t.’
‘That’s very kind of you, but I’m sure it will be alright,’ she carried on, hastily.
‘No, please. Stuffed owls are not everyone’s cup of tea and I don’t like people to be disappointed.’
Mickey could see there was no point in arguing the matter further. She paid for the owl and the man carried it out to the car.
‘Here’s my card,’ he said as she thanked him. ‘Any time you want something out of the ordinary.’ He smiled at her, his eyes zooming large again in the watery doe-like manner of the very short-sighted.
That night Mickey went to the club – it was, after all, David’s birthday. For some hours she listened to the day’s play and that of previous days in previous years replayed, retold, remembered to the point of impossible tedium. Towards midnight it was suggested they adjourn to an Indian restaurant where the amount they’d had to drink became more evident. They were loud and vulgar and silly, the Steves and the Johns, and David as well.
They competed in the most puerile fashion with impressions of the unfortunately obsequious Indians who bowed and beamed and proffered menus like children feeding boisterous animals, frightened it might all get out of hand but hoping for the best.
They giggled and guffawed, canting their chairs, shaking the table. The jokes were incoherent but everybody laughed, almost sobbing with out of control hilarity. Somebody farted and it was the hugest joke ever – the curry had not even arrived on the table. Oh! Oh! What a fart!
What am I doing, sitting here with them, Mickey thought. It’s embarrassing and boring and I loathe it. But worst of all was the enforced witnessing of David as ‘one of the boys’, laughing as loudly as the others at nothing in particular, this mindless mirth. She could hardly bear it. David who she knew to be different; the serious David who was kind and wise and grown-up. Where was he? Had she merely imagined those qualities and been blind to this other person who probably didn’t care whether she was here or not as he slapped the table and slurred his words and told her to stop looking miserable.
Perhaps she was in the wrong. She’d been glad enough to be part of this sporting life in the beginning, grateful to it for making her feel alive and merry. So why did it all seem different now, tedious and pointless, eating up the lives of people like David who were fit for more noble endeavours.
Pompous kill-joy, she thought to herself on ano
ther level as David put his powerful arm round her shoulders and drew her to him.
‘Are you ready to go?’ he whispered to her.
‘But you’ve ordered the food,’ she murmured.
‘We’ll skip it,’ he said. ‘I think I should take you home.’
Outside in the car park, she paused, waiting for him to give her the car keys.
‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I’m not as bad as I seem.’ He looked at her then and added: ‘Am I?’
The question was in the wider context and seemed to open the way to a reconciliation. They moved closer, to catch one another’s expression in the night darkness. Then he slid his arms round her waist and put the side of his head against hers. He sighed, unevenly, nervously, re-entering an area of vulnerability; and Mickey was entranced again, captivated by the hero’s undivided attention upon her. It was a powerfully curative drug, this hearing and seeing and feeling the essential David again, enough to wipe away for a night the growing despair, the frustration and the loneliness.
This is why I stay. I just needed to be reminded, she thought, the elusive feeling of goodwill towards the rest of mankind flooding her senses. Love was all: at least, it was too soon after the beginning for it to be otherwise.
*
David did not like the owl, it reminded him of unpleasantness. There had been one very like it, he said (perhaps the very same, with that look of shock and fright as if it were forever aware of its terrible fate) in the dental surgery he’d been taken to as a boy; or perhaps it was the chiropodist’s – foot or mouth, he couldn’t remember, only the discomfort.
‘I can take it back, the man said so,’ she offered, sounding placatory, though why she should when it was her gift to him, but better not to think in that way.
‘That might be the best thing,’ he said.
‘Will you come with me? We could take it back on Saturday morning,’ she asked him. ‘The man in the shop was rather odd.’
‘Mickey, darling, you’re used to dealing with odd people,’ he said.
‘You won’t come then?’
‘I would but I can’t this Saturday. It’s an early start. We’re playing in Wiltshire. Why don’t you come? It would be a day out.’
Yes, Mickey thought. A day out with Emily and Simon and all the rest of them, but I want to spend Saturday with you, not a cricket team.
‘No, I’d better take back the owl,’ she said.
‘It’s up to you, but it would’ve been nice,’ he said affecting a note of disappointment, as if she was letting him down.
So the following Saturday David went to Wiltshire and Mickey took ‘Mona Lisa’ back to the antique shop.
‘She can be a rather disturbing presence,’ the little man in the shop commented as he took the owl. ‘Like I said, not everyone’s cup of tea. Would you like one, a cup of tea I mean?’
Mickey hesitated although she intended refusing.
‘It’s already made,’ he added, his own owl-like gaze fixing upon her.
Mickey followed him through the shop and up a narrow staircase. She didn’t at all want to drink tea with him but somehow had been unable to say no, or perhaps it was simply that she had nothing else to do other than return to an empty house no less dingy and depressing than the place she was in.
At the top of the stairs he led her into a surprisingly large room that was evidently where he lived. It was a sort of bedsit but quite luxurious and furnished with what must have been the pick of his stock. There was an elegant Regency table and chairs, a chaise longue covered in dark red velvet, a couple of button-backed armchairs in a matching hue, a cabinet displaying china and porcelain painted emerald and gold and deepest blue and, most amazing of all, a four-poster bed in the far corner, red velvet drapes drawn round it, a bedroom in itself.
The kitchen area was in a small recess and having indicated that Mickey might sit on the chaise longue or in one of the button-backed chairs, the owl man, as Mickey now termed him, went to his stove and a moment later produced two cups of tea.
Mickey felt it necessary to talk, as if by speaking she might prevent the strangeness of him becoming more evident, because there was that sensation in her, the instinctive animal awareness of oddity, the vaguely flesh-creeping reaction to what was not quite normal.
‘How did you manage to get it up the stairs, the fourposter?’ she asked, sitting on the edge of the chaise longue and wishing now she’d chosen one of the chairs in case he decided to sit next to her.
‘It comes apart,’ he said. ‘It belonged to my mother. She was born in it and so was I.’
He sat down opposite her and smiled, an open, friendly, hopeful smile that made her feel mean and rather foolish for feeling as she had. It was his eyes that made him seem strange and the poor man couldn’t help being short-sighted. She smiled back.
‘I’m awfully sorry about the owl,’ she went on, quickly filling the threatened silence between them. ‘I liked it. It’s been rather like having someone else in the house this week. I even talked to it once or twice.’ Nonsense now, making things up. The man was watching her, perhaps he knew.
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t even introduced myself,’ she continued, aware that she was beginning to sound flustered. ‘Michaela Evans.’
‘Arthur Heckford.’ He was still watching her, as if he saw that she was nervous and wanted to understand why.
‘This is a lovely room,’ she said next, glancing round appreciatively.
‘You sound surprised,’ he observed.
‘No,’ she said, hastily apologetic, ‘not at all. I mean, you are in the business.’
The smile remained, unchanging.
‘Perhaps I could have another look downstairs – for something else – instead of the owl, I mean?’
‘I haven’t anything new this week,’ he told her. ‘But I’m going to a house sale on Wednesday – I could look out for something then. What did you say your husband’s interests were?’ He really was very helpful and pleasant and it didn’t take long to stop noticing the strangeness of his eyes.
‘Sport, or rather games,’ Mickey said. ‘Sport is hunting, fishing and shooting, isn’t it? David plays cricket and rugger, games like that, all the time actually. I get a bit fed up with it. We haven’t been married long, you see.’
She heard herself saying all this, the words suddenly tumbling from her mouth, self-pitying, unstoppable.
‘He asks me to go to the matches, but I feel he’s only doing it so he can blame me for us not being together. You see I don’t go, not any more and I know it doesn’t make any difference to David whether I’m there or not. God, what am I saying!’ she stopped and stood up.
‘I do apologize. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I’m so sorry.’
‘Please,’ Arthur said, gazing up at her. ‘Please finish your tea.’
She sat down again, intensely embarrassed.
‘I just can’t believe I’ve said what I have,’ she murmured, staring unseeing into her cup.
‘Please,’ Arthur repeated. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s often easier to tell strangers these sort of things, and you’re not so nervous now, are you,’ he added incisively.
She looked at him, surprised.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not.’ She felt an unexpected sense of relief, an unaccountable easing of despair.
Without asking her, he poured more tea into the cups. Mickey sat further back on the chaise longue and watched him, his walk was slightly affected, the steps a little short, almost dainty as he moved between the area of the room where they were sitting and the kitchen. It crossed her mind again that he was almost certainly homosexual and following on from this thought she remembered hearing somewhere that men like him engendered the confidence of women, supposedly because there was none of the usual undercurrent, no threat of invasion. A woman could be herself, without pretence, more so, strangely, than with another woman. Perhaps it was because the relationship was outside convention and there were no expectatio
ns. There was also something magnanimous and pleasingly open-minded in being natural with the unnatural.
‘Do you like Mozart?’ Arthur asked. He had a tape deck hidden away and in the next moment the music began. He left her alone for a few minutes, going down into the shop, but it didn’t occur to her that he might be locking the front door, closing for the day.
Chapter Six
At two twenty-eight on Monday afternoon Arthur got out of the taxi, handed the driver a five-pound note and walked with his small, neat steps the ten metres from the roadside to the large front door of the nursing home.
‘Always punctual, you never let us down,’ Matron said as she let him in. She was almost a foot taller than the little man, a statuesque woman with a comely bosom, starched uniform and harsh make-up. Her voice was brusque, intoned with a lack of tolerance towards fools and a tendency to bully, though Arthur had long since won her over.
‘How are you, Mumsie,’ he said, his vision on a line with her chest. ‘Are the girls behaving themselves?’
The matron, who was not his mother, but found the term of endearment an enchanting piece of silliness, clasped her hands together as if holding in her strength.
‘Trying,’ she said, ‘but they’ll be so pleased to see you. They’re always easier, less naughty, after one of your visits.’
Arthur followed her along the passageway that led to the conservatory where a dozen or so elderly women were arranged around the room in Parker Knoll chairs. When they saw him, a ripple of delight spread round, with small exclamations of pleasure and anticipation.
‘Arthur’s here, girls,’ Matron announced, loudly and unnecessarily. ‘There’ll be a cup of tea waiting for you in my office,’ she added quietly to him.
Not Playing the Game Page 7