Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  It seemed there was nothing more she could say. She switched out the light and lay very still, as if poised on the edge of a precipice.

  David too lay still, Mickey eluding him again when in the darkness of a few minutes earlier he’d given in, having wrestled for three months with the hurt, stubbornly unforgiving.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Patience is a virtue,’ Mother had said. Arthur remembered the very first time she’d delivered this gem of wisdom: he could have been little more than five or six years old but the occasion remained with him. It was one of the first owl days. He’d done something terribly wrong although the misdemeanour he did not remember, only the horrible sensation of having caused displeasure. Mother had been calm, her terrifying calm that seemed to hang, like a huge blanket covering something else too dreadful and fearsome to be seen. She’d led him up the steep stairs at the top of the house and propelled him into the attic room where the owl was waiting.

  ‘No sitting. No moving. Remember you’re being watched.’ And so frozen with terror had he been, there was no possibility of his committing these further transgressions.

  ‘Patience is a virtue,’ Mother then said, as if the pronouncement had come to her in that moment, like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

  He couldn’t remember her saying anything else, only that in the next second he was alone and remained so for what seemed an interminable stretch of time. Of course he didn’t understand why patience was a virtue, largely because at that age he was unable to comprehend the meaning of the last word of this heavy dictum. But Mother was right, and in years to come he learnt to be patient and even to achieve a secret pleasure in the waiting.

  Following Mickey’s departure from the bungalow he stayed on a further week. He was used to being alone, although he could feel Mother in the atmosphere of the place and several nights he talked to her.

  ‘She will come back. Oh not here, not to Sark. It won’t be too long, though. You see I know her, Mother, as well as I know you. She pushes me away just as you do, but then she wants to be forgiven.’

  The day before he left Sark he went again to the far side of the island where the cliff fell into the sea and the long-deserted pillbox stood blindly. He went inside and smelt the dankness of the earth. The atmosphere was as primeval as a cave, abandoned and forgotten.

  Crouching down, he removed from his jacket pocket the photograph of David and set it on the ground, face up, then clawed his hand into the loose earth and sprinkled it over the picture.

  He walked back to the bungalow with a vigorous step. He felt as if he had accomplished something that was part of an overall plan.

  Patience Arthur had, or so he thought; but as the weeks went by following his return to the shop it puzzled him that Mickey did not come. The letter he had written to David was calculated in exactly the way she had understood. He’d adjudged David to be an egotistical man. Of course, he’d never met him, but Mickey had lived and breathed her husband in the first weeks of her coming to the shop. David was selfish, proud and obsessed with his prowess as a sportsman. He would be a bad loser, Arthur determined. Cheating, he would not tolerate or be capable of handling in the case of his own marriage. Arthur had a very precise impression of his rival: he was in the same mould as the early achievers he’d known at boarding school, the personable boys with bright, untroubled eyes, fine, muscular bodies that had grown to normal height and which performed with graceful ease on the sports field. They were the ones that naïvely assumed their superiority, the ones that had patronized him and from whom, obsequiously, he’d accepted the crumbs of inclusion that were offered. He’d hated them all – all those boys like David. Everything had to be sacrificed to their obscenely inflated egos and it carried on, throughout their lives, the assumption of precedence, the crushing and grinding, without even noticing, of those who got in the way. But what they didn’t have, the people like David, was patience. Ah, they had no time for that.

  ‘She will come,’ Arthur said out loud to an empty room. ‘He’s finished with her.’ A smile of satisfaction spread through his lips. He felt in control, as if there were invisible strings threading from his fingers, the puppet master, out of sight but omnipotent.

  Yet Mickey did not respond and despite his certainty Arthur at last went in search of her.

  January was more than usually cold but for hours Arthur stood in the dark shadows of a disused building a short way down the street from where David lived. Night after night he went there, watching the movement of curtains, the switching on and off of lights. He observed the man who lay buried in the pillbox and then the silhouette of a woman, heavily pregnant, and cold as he was, his puny limbs chilled to the bone, a warm sensation spread through him as he deduced the meaning of what he saw. Poor Mickey, he thought, she’s assumed all the guilt and now she must be alone somewhere, perhaps hoping to be found. She would be contrite, even grateful. He must find her.

  That last night of watching the house where she had been usurped, he returned to his shop in a state of excitement and expectation, almost as if she might be there, waiting for him; and even though she wasn’t, his mood of triumph persisted. He moved about his elegant room, fractionally altering the angles of furniture, pictures, ornaments. He was caught in a kind of agitated elation, manifest by this sudden compulsion for precision, an obsessional need to set everything in its place.

  After a while his breathing began to stick. He’d failed to notice the earlier wheezing but now he had to gasp at what little air he could get into his lungs. At last he collapsed on the covers within the curtained bed and his body curled then arched in a huge convulsion. He passed out and woke some hours later, shivering with fever. For two or three days he was barely able to leave the bed. It frustrated him, this further delay, but the weakness was only in his physical being and all the time he lay shivering and sweating his mind seemed quite separated from the rest of him. His purpose was resolved and nothing else really touched him, the hallucination of fever kept away because the illness was sharper and more severe than he knew, the link between body and spirit tenuous enough for that calm clarity which comes in the last space between life and death.

  Perhaps it was only this strength of resolve that got him through. His recovery seemed swift and at the end of a week he went down into the shop and sold the owl to an American. This time he was pleased by how little he felt its loss and was even able to indulge in a sense of relief at the thought of its going so irrevocably. Often he had considered burning it but the remnants of its tyranny had prevented this ultimate disposal. He felt quite lightheaded with the combined effects of the so recent fever and freedom from this old burden.

  He waited another day, savouring the self-imposed delay, then telephoned the solicitors’ office where Mickey worked, certain now she would welcome his call.

  ‘Mrs Evans is in court all day,’ a knitting-pattern voice informed him.

  Arthur’s mind worked quickly.

  ‘It’s rather urgent, perhaps I could call her at home this evening?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to give home numbers,’ the voice recited.

  ‘I quite understand, but she did give me the number. Perhaps I could just check it with you?’ He flipped through the telephone directory and read out the number against D. Evans.

  ‘No, Mrs Evans is on a different number now. It’s the same as Mr Lovell’s,’ the girl told him ingenuously.

  Arthur experienced a sense of losing ground, a dropping away as if a chasm had opened at his feet.

  ‘Hello. Hello?’ the girl’s voice said, and when there was no reply she cut off the line.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Early in February, Dan came home for the weekend to put a proposition to Mickey. He’d rung her from London and said he would like to take her out to dinner on the Friday night. Her car had failed to start that morning so he picked her up from the office at seven and took her to a quiet restaurant.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked as they settled at th
e table. She still looked as she had at Christmas, the last time he’d seen her, although he noticed a further change. Her appearance was more ‘controlled’, her hair neat and restrained, her dark clothes a smarter cut. She was blossoming into an image commensurate with her ability as a lawyer.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she answered him and he accepted this without further question. They were so alike in many ways, he thought. She, like him, had inadvertently used unhappiness in a positive way.

  She asked him about Parliament and they talked about the great issues of the day for most of the meal, each enjoying the conversational harmony, the stimulation of a meeting of minds. He waited until coffee before saying what he’d planned.

  ‘Mickey, I’d like to offer you a partnership in the firm.’

  Her eyes widened but she waited for him to go on.

  ‘I feel you’ve earned it but there is another reason for offering it to you at this time. The work is going to involve a fair amount of time in New York and it will be easier for you, and better for the firm, if you’re a partner.’ He was glad to have this secondary reason, valid as it was. It embarrassed him to bestow favours and perhaps more with Mickey than others, Mickey whom he had nearly loved.

  ‘I accept,’ she said solemnly and then smiled, broadly.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Oh Dan, thank you.’ Work was everything to her now, just as it had been in the past, only the rewards were wider than before: work was no longer a closed affair that excluded the rest of life but a means of tapping in the other possibilities. She’d known the work would shift to America but had assumed someone else would take over at that point. She felt elated, for the first time in months, and thought she might eventually be free from the torment of a sick heart. It was four months now since she’d seen David or even heard much about him as she no longer came into contact with any of the people they’d known together.

  Dan, as if reading the counterbalance in her excitement, asked then if she’d heard anything of David, and he was aware of the different connotation in asking this now. In his way David was a traditional husband and if he and Mickey were reconciled Dan could not see New York as a possibility.

  If Dan had been a different sort of person he would have asked about the David situation before making the offer and he had considered doing so; but it had seemed an insulting way of going about the proposition and he’d decided to take the risk, leaving Mickey to make the choice, if choice there was, although for the first time he felt divisive, if only for having had the thought.

  ‘Only that he wants a divorce,’ Mickey answered the question. She made a pretence of being matter of fact. ‘It’s not what I want, you know that, but I suppose I’m coming to terms with loving and not having. For a start I don’t think I could have admitted it like this before. It sounds silly, but there’s a sort of peace in being able to accept something as unobtainable even though you still want it so badly. And, of course, it’s a protection in itself. I mean, nothing else in that area can touch you. You’re sort of emotionally safe because it’s all taken up by the one thing you can’t have. Do I make any sense?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dan said. ‘You put it very well.’

  The waiter approached their table: ‘Mr Lovell, there’s a telephone call for you.’

  A minute or so later, Dan came back to the table and said he had to return to London straight away.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to cut short the evening,’ he said. ‘Stay and have another coffee. I’ll ask the restaurant to arrange a taxi for you.’

  Mickey smiled, as if amused.

  ‘What is it?’ Dan asked, smiling back.

  ‘Oh, it’s just so wonderfully high-powered.’

  Dan paused.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ he said, as if the notion was new to him, which it was. ‘But please believe that I’d rather have stayed here this evening. You will be alright?’

  ‘Yes, really, and thank you, again.’

  She watched him walk away and felt a wave of fondness rooted in a respect that had survived familiarity. Did she respect David? No, not any more, but that didn’t alter anything.

  She went home in the taxi, the rattle of its diesel engine interrupting the stillness surrounding Dan’s house as she walked to the front door and began searching for the key. The sound diminished and the dark quiet pressed in on her. Tonight she felt vaguely spooked by the isolation of the place, her hand fumbling through her bag, failing to find the door key.

  She went round to the rear of the house and reached up to the ledge where a spare key to the back door was kept. Her fingers moved along the dusty surface. She thought she heard something out of place, some way off, in the black shadows of the garden that stretched down to the fields beyond. She felt the key and hurried to the back door.

  Inside she immediately turned on the lights and was quite overcome with a sense of relief she knew was foolish.

  ‘Afraid of the dark,’ she murmured.

  It was only ten o’clock but she decided to go to bed and think about New York. She ran a bath, steaming hot to get rid of the shivering that remained with her, and came out so warm that she skipped into bed without bothering with her nightdress.

  I’m beginning to feel better, less out-of-tune inside, she thought. Not happy, that dazzling happiness I once had, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever have that again; just not so numbingly wretched and miserable. And she fell asleep with this thought, before she could begin on New York.

  *

  Arthur heard on the ten o’clock news that MPs had been recalled to Parliament. He was sitting at the time, with a towel over his head and a bowl of very hot water on his lap, breathing in the steam.

  Methodically, he removed the towel and put it aside the water. He dried his face and felt for his glasses on the table. He put a warm clothes and comfortable shoes and rang for a taxi.

  He had to wait half an hour or more for the cab to come, living as he did in one of the outlying villages. He left the shop at ten to eleven.

  The taxi driver was a talker but after a while gave up and as if angered by the unresponsiveness of his passenger, increased his speed. Arthur, already nervous, and upset that he should be so, became rigid with fright at the driver’s seeming recklessness, but he was more afraid of speaking.

  At last the taxi stopped. Arthur got out and paid the fare handing to the driver a bunch of keys he’d found on the back seat.

  ‘In case you thought they were mine,’ he said, in a stiff voice.

  The driver took them. His face had an expression of childlike resentment. He accelerated away without reply.

  Arthur had been set down in the centre of the village and across the green a number of people were leaving the pub. He walked over to a couple and asked directions, to the road, not the house. The man, who’d evidently had a lot to drink pointed in a wavering manner. The woman disagreed with him and they started to argue. Arthur moved away from them and asked an elderly man who was by himself.

  He set off, back across the green, and some twenty minutes later came to the isolated house set among the trees.

  He had intended to go to the front door and ring the bell, but for some reason he had not yet fathomed, he went round the house and tried the back door, almost as if he had known it would be open, as if he was expected.

  He went into the kitchen then through the darkened house. He knew Mickey was there because he’d seen the car parked in the drive. He went up the stairs and reaching the landing paused to select a door.

  Until that moment he thought his purpose had been clear. Since the initial surprise (and surprises he did not like) in discovering her whereabouts and that she was with someone else, he had fought hard against the jealous rage he’d felt. It was unbecoming, undignified, uncomfortable, and he deeply resented having to experience it at all. He’d calmed himself and prepared a set of logical reasons why Mickey should and would return to him, but now, on the landing, in this other man’s house, the logic and control left him again, perhaps because t
he very manner of his coming this far had been too strange and furtive for a civilized, reasoned discussion to ensue.

  Arthur panicked. Stripped of his only asset, the power of cool, passive argument, anger and resentment rose in him like the flames from a furnace. He began to feel breathless. He moved closer to one of the closed doors but stepped back and went to another. This was the one. Silently he turned the handle.

  Mickey heard the wheezing first. Lying on her side, her back turned to the door, her body went rigidly still, like a terrified animal. The wheezing sound was almost over her, its volume huge, loud enough to drown the scream that would not come, but now the deafening roar came from within her own head. She could not breathe.

  Arthur, outside himself, observing the silent struggle, marvelled at the ease with which the pillow pressed down. He saw it happening in slow motion, and intrigued and appalled, he watched on. Who was it lying in the bed? Who was the creature now stripping back the covers and wanting to do that dirty thing, that vile and undignified act of violence. He couldn’t look any more. It was too frightful.

  Mickey fought him. She felt herself slipping away, losing consciousness as the pillow remained pushed into her face, but as the attack moved down her body the pressure against her mouth loosened a little. She gasped and her arms flew up, wrenching at the pillow then beating and clawing at her attacker. She ripped into his clothing but she couldn’t reach his head to snatch at his hair. Her fingernails bent back and started to snap. She tried to jerk up, tried to push him away with the full force of her body and her arms, her hands and fingers now burning with pain. She was being murdered and for an instant she was ready to accept death, that brief moment of floating, senses going, pain exhausted. All her fighting energy had been concentrated on the need for air, the struggle to remove the suffocating pressure of the pillow; she’d been hardly aware of what the lower part of her body was doing, but now she felt the sudden thrust between her legs, the searing penetration rousing her again, bringing her back. There were only four thrusts but each one like an enormous red hot knife, cutting through the spasm of her vaginal muscles. The whole of her body became rigid again and remained so after the final ramming stab and removal of all restraint, but the return of air came too late and in the next moment she lapsed into unconsciousness.