Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  She retreated from the room, the half-open drawer only partially obscuring Arthur’s line of vision as he watched her go.

  Her sense of relief in leaving the bungalow went some way to alleviate the feeling of cowardice and of having behaved less than creditably by departing in such a manner. She walked briskly down the track that led past the Post Office. A wind was blowing, a cold, dawn wind that searched out looseness in the ill-constructed buildings she passed, causing rattles and discordant scrapings that jarred against the rawness of her nerves. A cat ran across her path and her heart leapt. She stopped, determined to make an effort to be calm and controlled, feeling foolish over her fright. The cat had paused at the edge of the road and she squatted down to it, proffering a stroking hand but the animal recoiled, then spat at her and slithered away.

  I shall get a dog, she thought, straightening up. A golden retriever with a big teddy bear face. A dog adds something to a home.

  She moved on but her back still prickled with vulnerability although she looked round only once before she reached the hotel.

  It was now a quarter to six and mercifully the door to the hotel was open. She went into the lobby and sat down. There was no one about. The place still slumbered. She realized that the door was probably never locked, there was no need. She was marginally more calm, feeling that if Arthur were to appear now he would not be able to create a scene.

  She waited an hour before anyone appeared, and during this time concentrated her thoughts on David. She imagined going to meet him at the airport, the sheer physical delight of seeing him again. She planned what she would do to the house in the intervening days. They were solid, comfortable thoughts.

  At the end of the hour a man came in and said good morning to her.

  ‘Catching the early boat?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Only I’m not sure of the time it leaves?’

  ‘You’ll have to hurry. Seven o’clock it goes. There’s not another today until this evening.’

  New panic rose in her. She grabbed her case, nearly falling over it, and stumbled towards the door.

  ‘You’ll have to hurry,’ the man repeated. He had a slight West Country accent.

  Mickey’s legs were now heavy and sore from all the walking she had done in the past twenty-four hours, and they seemed to hold back as she tried to run with the case.

  She saw the boat when she was still some distance from the landing stage and was convinced she would not reach it in time. She jarred her toe again, the same one she’d injured against the bed, but she hurried on, her cheeks flushed and burning against the sharply cold wind.

  It was only when she was actually sitting in the vessel she could believe she had made it, and not until they had set out towards St Peter Port was she able to see the ridiculousness of the drama she had created for herself. But it was only this sense of stupidity that kept her from looking back to the island, because at the base of her neck she could feel Arthur’s peculiar gaze.

  The flight from Guernsey was delayed and her nervousness returned as she waited, expecting at any moment to see Arthur approaching. She did not have a ticket as Arthur had kept them in what now seemed further evidence of his role as captor. She bought another and mid morning boarded the small plane, the comfort of the closed aircraft door allowing her to relax and view her actions of the past few hours as somewhat paranoid. She thought then about the previous evening in the bungalow, the way Arthur had talked, the range of his knowledge, and yet she could not have endured another moment with him. David, David, she wanted David and the contrast was too great; not only between desire and revulsion, but in perception, Arthur’s shining too brightly where David’s was lacking. And she didn’t want to see that. She didn’t want to compare David in any way and find him lacking.

  She reached home late afternoon and even as she approached the front door she sensed occupancy of the house, to the point that she almost rang the bell instead of using her key.

  Josephine greeted her in the hallway and immediately Mickey saw by her expression that something was wrong.

  ‘You’re back!’ she said, but without great surprise. ‘We didn’t expect you for a few more days.’ Her voice had elements of disapproval and sympathy, both of which Mickey picked up, as well as the ‘we’.

  Evidently the question showed in her face.

  ‘David is upstairs. He’s not well, Mickey. He had to come home early. I heard about it at the club and they said you had gone away but nobody knew where. I’ve been playing nursemaid since yesterday.’ She said the last bit almost coyly and yet still with the underlying censure Mickey felt directed towards her.

  ‘I must go up and see him,’ she said, concern rising in her.

  Josephine put a restraining hand on her arm as she moved past her to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Mickey,’ she hesitated. ‘I’m not sure he wants to see you.’

  Mickey stared at her.

  ‘Why not?’ she said, her mouth and throat going dry.

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ Josephine answered, falteringly, for once her eloquence seeming to have deserted her

  Mickey didn’t respond, but hurried up the stairs, her palm cold and clammy on the banister. She paused outside the closed bedroom door then put her hand round the knob and turned it with an unintentional jerk.

  The room was in semi-darkness and had the smell of illness about it. She saw David’s form in the bed but could not see his face. She advanced across the room and a couple of feet from where he lay she saw that he was awake although he did not move.

  ‘David, I’m so pleased to see you,’ she said, crouching down beside him.

  His eyes seemed black, his beloved face made ugly by something she did not at first recognize but in a moment was to identify as cold dislike.

  He moved then, levering himself some way up the bed. Mickey stretched forward to prop up the pillows and went to kiss him, but he turned his head away. Still he had said nothing.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, knowing and finding it unbearable.

  ‘To save you having to tell lies perhaps it would be better if you read this first,’ he said, reaching for a letter which was under the bedside lamp.

  He handed it to her. The address on the envelope was typewritten. She went over to the window to gain more light and withdrew the single handwritten sheet:

  Dear David,

  If it had been possible I would have preferred to tell you in person the contents of this letter. For some months Mickey has been living with me at the weekends – a situation unsatisfactory to all three of us. I cannot believe that you have been unaware of her unhappiness, and knowing her as we both do, I am sure you must understand the added distress she has suffered by deceiving you.

  Her instinct is to be honest and fair but I think it has become impossible for her to make the choice with which she is faced; therefore we must make it for her.

  While you have been away, Mickey and I will have spent a holiday together and I cannot pretend that I will not do everything possible to advance my own chances of keeping her.

  It seems that all now rests with you, only let me assure you that I will, of course, never see your wife again if you feel the marriage can be saved.

  Yours sincerely,

  Arthur Heckford

  Mickey turned from the light.

  ‘Don’t you see what he has done?’ she said. ‘David, don’t you see!’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said, his voice weary and bitter. ‘I’m not interested.’

  Mickey felt stunned. She stood, halfway between David and the window, Arthur’s wretched, wretched letter still in her hand.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked, almost in a whisper, a terrible sense of dread enveloping her.

  ‘I don’t really care, but I think it would be easier if you moved your things out as soon as possible.’ His tone was horribly detached, addressing her like a stranger.

  ‘Easier?’ she repeated, as if the m
eaning of this single word eluded her.

  ‘Please, Mickey, please just go,’ he said. His eyes closed and he seemed to be in pain. There was a gentle tap on the door and Josephine came in with a bowl of soup on a tray. She took in the scene between husband and wife then moved past Mickey and set down the tray on the table beside David.

  ‘Do you want any help,’ she asked him, adding clumsily, ‘with the soup, I mean?’

  Mickey left the room. She remained on the landing, trying to take in the full enormity of what was happening. It passed through her mind that perhaps in a moment she might go back into the bedroom and somehow everything would be all right; but when Josephine re-emerged there was a look of embarrassed pity in her eyes and as she closed the door behind her Mickey didn’t go to open it again.

  She followed Josephine down the stairs and into the kitchen, her kitchen with her and David’s things on the shelves and in the cupboards.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mickey,’ Josephine said, awkwardness making her sound guilty. ‘What are you going to do?’ she added after a pause.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mickey said, her thoughts still with the immediate. ‘Is David very ill?’ Having to ask this from someone else produced a shrivelling feeling of shame of which Josephine was perhaps aware.

  ‘He’s very weak,’ she answered. ‘I don’t know how he managed to get back alone. He won’t say what’s wrong with him, only that it’s not contagious.’

  ‘Has he been seen by the doctor?’

  ‘Yes, she came last night. I called her.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That he needed to rest. She’s coming again this evening.’

  ‘But it must be serious then?’

  ‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t say very much, not to me. Mickey what are you going to do?’

  ‘What can I do!’ she replied, helplessly. ‘I suppose you know what’s happened?’

  ‘David only told me that you’d found someone else.’

  The words fell on her like crumbling masonry.

  ‘But it’s not like that!’

  ‘Mickey, I think you’re going to have to accept that David’s taken it badly, but that probably means he still loves you. Even so, I think it would be better if you found somewhere else to go for the time being. I can stay here for a few more days, until David can fend for himself.’

  Mickey looked into her friend’s face and saw more pity than reproach. She felt a terrible, tired despair.

  ‘It seems such an imposition,’ she said, the phrase so absurdly inadequate as an expression of defeat. ‘I should be looking after him.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll let you,’ Josephine said sympathetically. ‘Besides,’ she continued, changing her tone a little, ‘don’t deny me the chance to feel worthy. It’s such a novel experience.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Christmas was only a week ahead and Dan Lovell’s house was beginning to look festive. Mickey had brought holly in from the garden and fixed it on the walls in the drawing room. She’d even made a garland for the front door.

  The Saturday before Christmas Day, Dan suggested they buy a tree and in the evening he fetched out the old box of tree decorations and the fairy lights he and Charlotte had bought the first year they were married.

  Dan was tired, deeply so. The past few weeks had been exceptionally busy for him. He’d been out to Peking with the Prime Minister and then on to Hong Kong. Still the reluctant politician, it seemed that his rise within the party had gathered irreversible momentum. He was generally considered to be one of the more able of his generation in Parliament and this, coupled with a rare absence of personal ambition, singled him out for preferment by those chary of their own positions.

  Parliament had gone into recess the previous week, so he’d closed up the London flat and setting his mind to another purpose had joined the exodus from town.

  Mickey had been living at his house for three months, during which time he had spent only a couple of weekends there. He could, perhaps, have gone home more often, but he detected in Mickey the same sadness he had travelled through himself, and apart from a degree of fear that it might recur by association, he remembered his own difficulty in putting up with other people at the time of Charlotte’s leaving. But with the onset of the festive season he had resolved to do everything possible to make Christmas bearable for her, and even suggested they hold a small gathering on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Isn’t it rather short notice?’ she said to him. It was the Saturday they decorated the tree and she was standing on a chair at the time, placing Vicky’s playschool fairy on the topmost branch.

  ‘People will come,’ Dan said with an edge of cynicism.

  ‘Do you really want them to if it’s only for that reason?’ she responded.

  Dan smiled at her quick understanding.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said it like that.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said. getting down off the chair. ‘I should think you find the sycophancy quite nauseating at times, especially in your own home.’

  ‘At least there’s no danger of that from you,’ he remarked, handing her a string of tinsel to drape round the lower branches.

  ‘Oh don’t be too sure,’ she said, ‘I’m probably worse than the rest, after all, I work for you as well.’ It was when she spoke like this, in a self-mocking tone, that he was most aware of her sadness.

  ‘Mickey, we won’t invite anyone if you’d rather not,’ he said, concern in his voice.

  She stopped what she was doing but remained with her back to him.

  ‘Please don’t be so kind to me. I really don’t deserve it, you know.’

  ‘Have you heard from David?’ he ventured, carefully.

  ‘No,’ she said, after a pause.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see him, try and sort things out.’

  She sighed, covering emotion. ‘I don’t think there would be any point.’

  Dan felt his own old sadness, rising, expanding, the sense of pressure within his chest. ‘You know, if Charlotte had come to me . . .’

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked, Dan,’ Mickey interrupted, turning now to face him. ‘She would always have been a . . . a second-class citizen, if you like, just as I would with David. There’d be no trust.’

  Dan could not deny this, only reflect that the reason he’d hustled Charlotte into marriage in the first place was because he didn’t trust her; and then when he had he’d lost her.

  The conversation was at an end. Mickey cleared up the pine needles that had already fallen from the tree, Dan poured early evening drinks, and they sat down in front of the fire.

  ‘I’ll find a place of my own after Christmas,’ she announced, taking her drink.

  A wave passed through Dan and he recognized it as disappointment. He liked knowing there was someone in the house, even when he wasn’t there. It was, perhaps, no more than a throwback to the years he had taken for granted the feeling of warmth and expectation in coming home, the sense of having a solid base always there, waiting for him.

  ‘You know you can stay here as long as you like,’ he said.

  ‘Three months is stretching hospitality,’ she said, in the slightly brusque tone he had noticed only in that period. It was, he knew, bitterness, but directed against herself, and it was this more than anything that worried him, for he was fond of her, as fond as he imagined he might have been towards a much younger sister if he’d had one. He felt an unwarranted degree of responsibility for her because she was his protégée and because he understood that, little as she had said, she’d shown more of her suffering to him in the previous three months than to anyone else.

  ‘Dan,’ she said, her manner softening, ‘you’ve been incredible, you know, so kind, yet you haven’t made me feel like a lame duck. You haven’t taken sides.’ In saying this Mickey was thinking of her parents. She’d been surprised at how nervous she’d felt about telling them, at how much she still needed their approval. But Molly and the Walrus
had been partisan to extreme: David was an out and out bounder, someone they’d never liked or thought fit for their daughter. It was too much for Mickey. She was touched by their blind loyalty, but such injustice was impossible for her to accept. Now she had hurt them more by staying away, declining their invitation to the family Christmas, denying them their right to give her comfort.

  Dan, of course, understood all this, having been through it himself. It had therefore been agreed they would spend Christmas together, just the two of them, and there was a degree of relief and comfort for both, knowing that neither had to play a part.

  A dozen people came to the Christmas Eve party and Dan realized almost at once it was a mistake. Not one of those present was a real friend. None of them meant a thing to him, except Mickey who, tall and thin in a simple black dress, her long, thick hair cascading to her shoulders, looked quite stunning but with an unselfconscious aloofness that increased the effect. She knew none of the people that had been invited and Dan could see the role in which they had all cast her.

  Men and women alike, advanced on her, their mouths smiling, their eyes sparkling with speculation.

  ‘You’ve done alright for yourself there, old chap,’ the chairman of the constituency party boomed in his right ear.

  Dan smiled uneasily. It was no good trying to explain: the man was as deaf as a post. Mickey had been cornered by his wife, a large woman with enormously fat arms billowing from the shoulders of a sleeveless cocktail dress as if squeezed from a tube.

  The room in general had a swollen feel about it. A woman called Primrose came up to him and wanted to know all about Peking only she didn’t really and before he could respond in any way she was asking him how he would be spending the next day.

  ‘I’ll be here, at home,’ he said.

  ‘Surely not all by yourself?’ the woman probed.

  ‘No,’ Dan said, refusing to elaborate and finding himself delivering his politician’s smile.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got something planned,’ Primrose persisted. ‘You’re not seeing your little girl this year?’

  ‘Vicky’s in America with her mother,’ he explained, calmly.