Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  ‘You must miss her,’ she sympathized. ‘Christmas isn’t the same without children. I know how I miss our grandchild when our son and his wife don’t come.’

  Mercifully, she moved on and began shouting at the chairman.

  Marigold, who cleaned the house and did the washing, came round with the decanter.

  ‘Top up, Mr Lovell?’ she enquired, the decanter poised over his glass.

  ‘Tell me M, how do I get rid of these people?’ he murmured to her.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Marigold said capably and continued on her round.

  A few minutes later the first guest came up to him and said he was going.

  ‘Apparently there’s a fog warning,’ he said. ‘Excellent evening, enjoyed myself.’

  They shook hands, relief adding warmth to Dan’s grasp. After that several more people went and within half an hour they’d all gone.

  ‘Thanks Marigold, I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you’d manage,’ she said, but he knew she liked to think he would not.

  ‘You and Mrs Evans have a peaceful day tomorrow,’ she instructed. ‘You both need a rest. Mrs Evans, she never stops you know. All that brain work.’

  He saw her to the door then returned to the drawing room where Mickey was doing the last bit of clearing up. The lights on the tree glistened and induced a festive atmosphere, a feeling of promise that was probably no more than a childhood throwback, but there despite his earlier mood.

  ‘I’m sorry to have inflicted that on you,’ he said, referring to the party.

  ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ she said, turning to him. ‘Only I think some of them gathered the wrong impression.’ She smiled a little.

  ‘All of them I should think. So what,’ he said, meeting her gaze.

  They were standing quite close and for a moment the possibility was there, but simultaneously their eyes looked away; neither could have coped with second best, not from one another. The moment had happened and by tacit agreement the possibility dismissed so that only then were they able to embrace.

  The held each other for what seemed a timeless span. They were quite still, there was nothing that was going to happen.

  ‘We could have been right for each other,’ Dan said after a while, softly but with resignation.

  ‘I don’t know, I think it would have been too easy,’ she responded. ‘Doesn’t there have to be a bit of struggle?’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  They moved away from one another.

  ‘That was how it was with Arthur,’ she said, ‘although I was struggling all the time, with him and myself, and I think now it happened because I was trying to avoid battling with David when I should have been.’ It was the first time she’d talked about Arthur to Dan. He’d known, of course, there had been someone else – she was too fair to allow him to think David had not been justified in making her leave – but she’d said it without the veiled sexual pride he’d detected in Charlotte’s confession, when she’d told him there was someone else. It was David who had the pride. David Evans was a proud fool.

  ‘Perhaps friendship should be the most important thing in marriage?’ he said.

  ‘But it isn’t, is it?’ she answered. They sat down for a while before going to bed. Dan was curious about Arthur, what sort of man he was, and as if reading the question in his mind, Mickey began to tell him. She said he was clever, but strange, unprepossessing in appearance and solitary in the way he lived. At first she’d thought he could explain things, the many confusions and mysteries about self, and perhaps he had in a sense, only finding out had been unpleasant and not, perhaps, as she’d expected.

  ‘How do you feel about him now?’ Dan asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. I felt a terrible revulsion at one stage, but now, when something reminds me of him and I’m alone, it’s more like a sort of subconscious disquiet, as if one day he’ll appear and I won’t know what to do.’

  ‘It sounds as if you’re frightened of him.’

  ‘I suppose I am, which is silly, I know. You’ll think I’m crazy when I tell you how I left him. He took me to Sark in the Channel Islands. It was while David was in South Africa. I ran out on him, literally. I left in the middle of the night, while he was asleep.’

  Dan found it difficult to believe her capable of this sort of behaviour. It didn’t sound at all like the Mickey he knew.

  ‘It sounds extraordinary,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose it was. I can hardly imagine myself doing it now. It sounds so, well, excessive and dramatic.’

  ‘And have you seen or heard from him since?’

  ‘No, nothing at all, except that he’d written a letter to David, who, as you know, came back early from South Africa when he was ill. It was the letter that finished everything.’

  Dan gazed at her and thought that in David’s place he would have torn up the wretched letter.

  ‘I think for you and David it’s just a matter of time,’ he said, a little wistfully.

  ‘Oh Dan, I do hope so,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could stand this feeling of loss for the rest of my life.’

  He said no more, but he knew exactly what she meant. Charlotte had married again and lived in America, but still he thought, one day . . .

  He snapped himself out of this reverie.

  ‘It’s late,’ he announced. ‘In fact, it’s Christmas Day. Happy Christmas, Mickey. Let’s make the very best of it we can.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mickey held on to Dan’s words about it being only a matter of time, but in January she was served with a petition for divorce.

  It seemed to her as if it was over before it had really begun; that the short time she and David were together had been a false start. She tried to reason herself out of loving him, to remember his constant absence from the marriage, but the process was a painful failure. She loved him now more than ever, perhaps because he had become unattainable.

  He had refused to see her since the day she’d come back from Sark and in the months since she had regressed to her old pattern of being alone most of the time. The reversal was such that she had not even collected her clothes from the house: the bright, joyful apparel from that period of unreality when the world had moved in technicolour.

  She saw hardly anyone. Dan was back in London. Her daily contact with those at the office was never more than superficial, and Dan’s house, where she had agreed to remain for the time being on the understanding he allow her to pay some sort of rent, was the most isolated place she could have found.

  The only person she made a point of visiting was Laura who now lived in a council flat with baby Lucien and had fallen in love with a British Telecom engineer for whom she seemed to spend most of her time cooking vast meals. The engineer, who had a wife and three children with whom he also had to eat, was consequently considerably overweight, but Laura liked him this way, building him up as a bastion of flesh against the constant nuisance of Lawrence.

  Poor, puny Lawrence. He wouldn’t give up. His continued adoration of both Laura and the baby was quite pitiable in Mickey’s eyes, while to Laura it had become a source of fear.

  She thought him deranged and got the engineer to fix bolts and chains on the flat door, so that when Mickey went to see her it was like being admitted to a prison her sister had created for herself.

  ‘I just don’t understand how I could ever have gone to bed with such a lunatic,’ she said to Mickey. ‘He gives me the creeps. He really does.’

  ‘These things happen,’ Mickey responded, quietly, her own revulsion triggered in memory and causing a discomforting little chill in the pit of her stomach; but Lawrence appeared a bland recollection in comparison with Arthur about whom she had said very little to any of her family. She had seen that they wanted to know more, Laura and her parents. Laura, of course, had asked, straight out, but soon given up when Mickey failed to provide the sort of detail to feed lascivious curiosity. Her parents though held
back their questions and conversely this reticence on their part brought back the sense of exclusion she’d experienced as a child, as if she was no more than a visitor in their midst, to be treated politely but without the real concern she might have felt had they ranted and scolded.

  ‘You’re lucky David doesn’t keep after you the way Lawrence hounds me,’ Laura said, with the complete misunderstanding of someone who had only ever been the centre of attention.

  Baby Lucien crawled about, his podgy little fingers prodding Mickey’s feet, feeling the leather texture of her shoes. She picked him up and he beamed at her, his mouth gummy with new teeth. He made a gurgling noise and shook his arms up and down with sudden vigour.

  ‘Oh Mickey, I wish I was like you, with a good job, a proper career,’ Laura sighed, flopping down in the chair opposite.

  Mickey smiled but her gaze remained on the baby.

  ‘Have you seen the photographs that were taken at Christmas?’ Laura said next, jumping up again to fetch a wad of snaps.

  Mickey began to scan the pictures, taken at their parents’ house, lopsided clusters of faces, the tree, the pudding, the cake, and baby Lucien sitting beside a small-sized cricket bat.

  ‘Who gave him that?’ she enquired.

  ‘David. Didn’t you know? Mother and Father said it was ridiculous, for a child of Lucy’s age. God they’ve really got it in for him. I thought it was quite nice of him actually. I mean, he needn’t have bothered, need he? You know, I think it was a sort of gesture. I think he’d like everything to be as it was but he doesn’t know how to set about doing it. I think that bat was a sort of olive branch, or willow in this case,’ she injected a slight laugh. ‘I’m sure he’d have you back, if you wanted. He’s nice, David, I like him. He’s not wet like Lawrence.’ She continued without pause, moving on to the defects of poor Lawrence while Mickey, silently drowning in a great swell of regret, held on to the baby.

  *

  David now lay in bed until midday at the weekends and sometimes during the week as well. He lay in semi-darkness, the curtains still drawn across the window, the room stuffy, the stale stench of cigarettes and beer from the night before concentrated in the heap of clothing carelessly abandoned at the foot of the bed.

  He stayed in bed to fill the hours of idleness and because he felt unhappy and unwell. His life seemed to have lost its purpose, but this he didn’t identify, only the superficial symptoms of weariness and loss of that feeling of well-being he’d known all his life until now. He had been unable to play any games since his return from South Africa with the muscle injury in his leg that had brought him home early. The problem persisted, despite physiotherapy twice a week, and the only role left to him in the sporting life was that at the bar.

  The bedroom door swung open and the pregnant silhouette of Josephine was outlined against the light from the rest of the house. David winced as a sharp pain knifed across his temple.

  ‘You’re an idle bum, David Evans!’ she pronounced shrilly.

  He ignored her

  She advanced across the room and threw back the curtains.

  ‘There! That’s better,’ she said energetically. ‘Dear God, it stinks in here – the miasma of unhealthy living.’

  ‘Miasma,’ David murmured. ‘That’s a new one.’

  He eased himself out of the bed then sat down on the side, his naked body stiff and aching.

  ‘I can almost hear myself creak,’ he said, wincing again as he stretched.

  ‘You’re unfit,’ Josephine informed him.

  Again he ignored her, but he heard the way she spoke, the brave, insulting, jolly misery.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ she enquired.

  ‘No,’ he said, but as she came forward to move past him he reached for her hand.

  ‘You alright?’ he asked, as she responded to the slight pressure of his palm.

  ‘Never better,’ she replied, forcing a smile.

  ‘Would you like me to massage your back?’ he said.

  ‘You mean if you do will I do yours.’

  She sat down beside him and began to move her hands over the bare skin of his back. He groaned, leaning forward, his head in his hands. After a while he straightened and started to repeat the process on her.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she sighed but he heard in her tone the desire for something more and soon he stopped, getting up to put on his dressing gown.

  It had occurred to him more than once that he was being cruel, allowing her to remain with him. He knew that she loved him and disliked himself for using her love. Often she was brash and outspoken to him but it was no more than a front, thinly covering a sort of nervous trepidation because she knew he did not love her and probably never would. But Josephine was there and more tolerable that she thought. She was there to massage his ego, interrupt the loneliness, and keep him sane.

  David’s limbs ached from inaction. He felt heavy and unwell, deprived of everything, it seemed, that had been his life. At first he watched a great deal of television but after a while he had to stop: there was only frustration in seeing the sports programmes, and nothing else held his interest. At one time he had liked documentaries but he couldn’t maintain any concentration now, his brain, apparently, having become as unfit as his body.

  After a brief absence, during and just after his illness, he resumed the regularity of his presence at the club. He drank more and more and because he was no longer fit, his capacity for alcohol lessened so that sometimes he would fall asleep at the bar, resuming consciousness hours later, somehow in bed, Josephine lying beside him. And if there were sorrowful murmurings about him among his former team mates, he closed his mind to their noticing the change in him.

  Shortly after Christmas his father died. It was a sudden, unforeseen death. David was numbed by this further loss but then a secondary horror crept over him as he realized a sense of relief that his father was no longer there to be disappointed. A deep sense of shame lodged in him but was manifest in a new bitterness and irascibility.

  The funeral took place on a freezing day with thick snow on the ground. The crematorium chapel was cold and bleak, its atmosphere forlornly impersonal. They sang a dirgeful hymn and watched the coffin slide away, like a prize on the Generation Game conveyor – but to be remembered or forgotten? David’s mother whimpered at his side, a damp handkerchief screwed into her hand. David blazed with anger at the seeming clumsy insensitivity of the ceremony and yet the impossibility of anything less so, as dark velvet curtains crept round the space left by the disappearing casket, and a small intrusive whir emanated from the electric motor that drove the show.

  Outside it was snowing again but the weather had no part in the process of this final ritual and the funeral party stood about in the slow motion of respect, waiting for some official signal that it was completed. There were many ‘floral tributes’ (the term seemed to David yet another piece of undertakers’ equivocation). They were lined up in the snow, the wreaths and sprays, almost gaudy for the occasion. David limped past them, peering at the messages of sympathy, among them a simple bunch of freesias from Mickey.

  It was at this moment the cold ache in his leg intensified and seemed to spread up through the whole of his body and into his head. It was the nearest he came to losing control, breaking down with the weight of sorrow and regret.

  That night he couldn’t sleep. He had drunk a lot but remained dreadfully sober. He moved restlessly in his bed, waking Josephine who slept only lightly now that her pregnancy was advanced.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked tenderly.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ he said, in such a way that it was clearly everything.

  They lay in silence for a while, then she said what had been in her mind for some time.

  ‘David, it’s Mickey, isn’t it?’

  He didn’t respond. Josephine felt a little sick, her head tight.

  She went on: ‘You should let her come back.’

  Having said it, the momentous thing, she couldn’t le
t it slip away. It had to be resolved. She switched on the bedside lamp.

  ‘Why pretend?’ she continued, more sharply now in order to maintain control of her own emotion.

  ‘Pretend what?’ David countered, his back to her.

  ‘That you don’t care when you do.’ She felt as if she couldn’t breathe or swallow. ‘Christ! I feel as if she’s in bed with us now. There’s no getting away from her. It was the same with the last man I slept with.’ She had lost her temper now and said something stupid and irretrievably damaging. David knew that Dan Lovell was the father of Josephine’s child. She was too honest not to have told him but in doing so had sworn him to secrecy. No one else knew, least of all Dan.

  She told David before her condition was apparent, and although she might have hoped for a different reaction from him, it had not surprised her that he’d shown little interest: she was under no illusion as to the self-appointed role she played in his life at that time or since. But it was hard, this constant self-effacement, the surrogacy of her position. She’d loved him for years and in coming to live with him she’d only increased the pain of longing.

  He was, as he had always been, nice in an unstudied way. Even now, when he was sad and bitter, the niceness was as much a part of him as the sound of his voice, the shape of his head, the feel of his hand; and it was the niceness that affected her most, the casual touch of her arm when she got upset, the unfussing consideration for her condition. It made her want to weep because all the time she felt that only part of him was there, with her, and a much lesser part than the rest. But the night of the funeral day she thought she’d succeeded in intruding on the greater part of David, and she at once regretted it.

  If her own misery and frustration had not been so acute, it might have seemed no more than stupidly mischievous to have said such a thing – to intimate so clearly that Dan coveted Mickey who for the past three months had lodged at his house.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘Please, I said it without thinking. David, please!’

  ‘It’s in the past,’ he said coldly. ‘It doesn’t matter.’