She thought of him in Chapel, gesturing at six hundred boys from the pulpit, in his surplice and red academic hood, releasing words from his throat that were as cold as ice and cleverly made sense. She thought of a time he had expelled two boys, when he had sat with her in their drawing-room waiting for a bell to ring. When the chiming had ceased he had risen and gone without a word from the room, his oaken face pale with suppressed emotion. She knew he saw in the crime of the two boys a failure on his part, yet he never mentioned it to her. He had expelled the boys in public, castigating them with bitterness in his tone, hating them and hating himself, yet rising above his shame at having failed with them: dignity was his greatest ally.
She sat with him once a week at the high table in the dining-hall, surrounded by his prefects, who politely chatted to her. She remembered Jackson Major, a tall boy with short black hair who would endlessly discuss with her husband a web of school affairs. ‘The best head boy I remember,’ her husband’s voice said again, coming back to her over a number of years: ‘I made no mistake with Jackson.’ Jackson Major had set a half-mile record that remained unbroken to this day. There had been a complaint from some child’s mother, she recalled, who claimed that her son had been, by Jackson Major, too severely caned. We must not forget, her husband had written to that mother, that your son almost caused another boy to lose an eye. It was for that carelessness that he was punished. He bears no resentment: boys seldom do.
Yet now this revered, feared and clever man was suggesting that they should whisper for a fortnight in their bedroom, so that the couple next door might not feel embarrassment, so that he himself might remain in a particularly uncomfortable hotel in order to fish. It seemed to Mrs Angusthorpe that there were limits to the role he had laid down for her and which for all her married life she had ungrudgingly accepted. She hadn’t minded being bored for this fortnight every year, but now he was asking more than that she could continue to feel bored; he was asking her to endure food that made her sick, and to conduct absurd conversations in their bedroom.
‘No,’ she said, ‘we could not whisper.’
‘I meant it only for kindness. Kindness to them, you see –’
‘You have compensations here. I have none, you know.’
He looked sharply at her, as at an erring new boy who had not yet learnt the ways of school.
‘I think we should leave at once,’ she said. ‘After breakfast.’
That suggestion, he pointed out to her, was nonsensical. They had booked a room in the hotel: they were obliged to pay for it. He was exhausted, he added, after a particularly trying term.
‘It’s what I’d like,’ she said.
He spread margarine on his toast and added to it some of the marmalade. ‘We must not be selfish,’ he said, suggesting that both of them were on the point of being selfish and that together they must prevent themselves.
‘I’d be happier,’ she began, but he swiftly interrupted her, reminding her that his holiday had been spoilt enough already and that he for his part was intent on making the best of things. ‘Let’s simply enjoy what we can,’ he said, ‘without making a fuss about it.’
At that moment Jackson Major and his wife, a pretty, pale-haired girl called Daphne, entered the dining-room. They stood at the door, endeavouring to catch the eye of a waitress, not sure about where to sit. Mrs Jackson indicated a table that was occupied by two men, reminding her husband that they had sat at it last night for dinner. Jackson Major looked towards it and looked impatiently away, seeming annoyed with his wife for bothering to draw his attention to a table at which they clearly could not sit. It was then, while still annoyed, that he noticed the Angusthorpes.
Mrs Angusthorpe saw him murmuring to his wife. He led the way to their table, and Mrs Angusthorpe observed that his wife moved less eagerly than he.
‘How marvellous, sir,’ Jackson Major said, shaking his headmaster by the hand. Except for a neat moustache, he had changed hardly at all, Mrs Angusthorpe noticed; a little fatter in the face, perhaps, and the small pimples that had marked his chin as a schoolboy had now cleared up completely. He introduced his wife to the headmaster, and then he turned to Mrs Angusthorpe and asked her how she was. Forgetfully, he omitted to introduce his wife to her, but she, in spite of that, smiled and nodded at his wife.
‘I’m afraid it’s gone down awfully, Jackson,’ Mr Angusthorpe said. ‘The hotel’s changed hands, you know. We weren’t aware ourselves.’
‘It seems quite comfortable, sir,’ Jackson Major said, sitting down and indicating that his wife should do the same.
‘The food was nice before,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘It’s really awful now.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say awful, dear,’ Mr Angusthorpe corrected her. ‘One becomes used to a hotel,’ he explained to Jackson Major. ‘Any change is rather noticeable.’
‘We had a perfectly ghastly dinner,’ Daphne Jackson said.
‘Still,’ said Mr Angusthorpe, as though she had not spoken, ‘we’ll not return another year. My wife is going to scout around for a better place. You’ve brought your rod, Jackson?’
‘Well, yes, I did. I thought that maybe if Daphne felt tired I might once or twice try out your famous rivers, sir.’
Mrs Angusthorpe saw Mrs Jackson glance in surprise at her new husband, and she deduced that Mrs Jackson hadn’t been aware that a fishing-rod had comprised part of her husband’s luggage.
‘Capital,’ cried Mr Angusthorpe, while the waitress took the Jacksons’ order for breakfast. ‘You could scout round together,’ he said, addressing the two women at once, ‘while I show Jackson what’s what.’
‘It’s most kind of you, sir,’ Jackson Major said, ‘but I think, you know –’
‘Capital,’ cried Mr Angusthorpe again, his eyes swivelling from face to face, forbidding defiance. He laughed his humourless laugh and he poured himself more tea. ‘I told you, dear,’ he said to Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘There’s always a silver lining.’
In the hall of the Slieve Gashal Doyle took a metal stand from beneath the reception desk and busied himself arranging picture postcards on it. His wife had bought the stand in Galway, getting it at a reduced price because it was broken. He was at the moment offended with his wife because of her attitude when he had entered the hotel kitchen an hour ago with a number of ribs of beef. ‘Did you drop that meat?’ she had said in a hard voice, looking up from the table where she was making bread. ‘Is that dirt on the suet?’ He had replied that he’d been obliged to cross the village street hurriedly, to avoid a man on a bicycle. ‘You dropped the meat on the road,’ she accused. ‘D’you want to poison the bloody lot of them?’ Feeling hard done by, he had left the kitchen.
While he continued to work with the postcards, Mr Angusthorpe and Jackson Major passed before him with their fishing-rods. ‘We’ll be frying tonight,’ he observed jollily, wagging his head at their two rods. They did not reply: weren’t they the queer-looking eejits, he thought, with their sporty clothes and the two tweed hats covered with artificial flies. ‘I’ll bring it up, sir,’ Jackson Major was saying, ‘at the Old Boys’ Dinner in the autumn.’ It was ridiculous, Doyle reflected, going to that much trouble to catch a few fish when all you had to do was to go out at night and shine a torch into the water. ‘Would you be interested in postcards, gentlemen?’ he inquired, but so absorbed were Mr Angusthorpe and Jackson Major in their conversation that again neither of them made a reply.
Some time later, Daphne Jackson descended the stairs of the hotel. Doyle watched her, admiring her slender legs and the flowered dress she was wearing. A light-blue cardigan hung casually from her shoulders, its sleeves not occupied by her arms. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, to be married to a young body like that? He imagined her in a bedroom, taking off her cardigan and then her dress. She stood in her underclothes; swiftly she lifted them from her body.
‘Would you be interested in postcards at all?’ inquired Doyle. ‘I have the local views here.’
Daphn
e smiled at him. Without much interest, she examined the cards on the stand, and then she moved towards the entrance door.
‘There’s a lovely dinner we have for you today,’ said Doyle. ‘Ribs of beef that I’m just after handing over to the wife. As tender as an infant.’
He held the door open for her, talking all the time, since he knew they liked to be talked to. He asked her if she was going for a walk and told her that a walk would give her a healthy appetite. The day would keep good, he promised; he had read it in the paper.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She walked through a sunny morning that did little to raise her spirits. Outside the hotel there was a large expanse of green grass, bounded on one side by the short village street. She crossed an area of the grass and then passed the butcher’s shop in which earlier Doyle had purchased the ribs of beef. She glanced in and the butcher smiled and waved at her, as though he knew her well. She smiled shyly back. Outside a small public house a man was mending a bicycle, which was upturned on the pavement: a child pushing a pram spoke to the man and he spoke to her. Farther on, past a row of cottages, a woman pumped water into a bucket from a green pump at the road’s edge, and beyond it, coming towards her slowly, she recognized the figure of Mrs Angusthorpe.
‘So we are grass widows,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe when she had arrived at a point at which it was suitable to speak.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid it’s our fault, for being here. My husband’s, I mean, and mine.’
‘My husband could have declined to go fishing.’
The words were sour. They were sour and icy, Mrs Angusthorpe thought, matching her own mood. On her brief walk she had that morning disliked her husband more than ever she had disliked him before, and there was venom in her now. Once upon a time he might at least have heard her desires with what could even have been taken for understanding. He would not have acted upon her desires, since it was not in his nature to do so, but he would not have been guilty, either, of announcing in so obviously false a way that they should enjoy what they could and not make a fuss. There had been a semblance of chivalry in the attitude from which, at the beginning of their marriage, he had briefly regarded her; but forty-seven years had efficiently disposed of that garnish of politeness. A week or so ago a boy at the school had been casual with her, but the headmaster, hearing her report of the matter, had denied that what she stated could ever have occurred: he had moulded the boy in question, he pointed out, he had taken a special interest in the boy because he recognized in him qualities that were admirable: she was touchy, the headmaster said, increasingly touchy these days. She remembered in the first year of their marriage a way he had of patiently leaning back in his chair, puffing at the pipe he affected in those days and listening to her, seeming actually to weigh her arguments against his own. It was a long time now since he had weighed an argument of hers, or even devoted a moment of passing consideration to it. It was a long time since he could possibly have been concerned as to whether or not she found the food in a hotel unpalatable. She was angry when she thought of it this morning, not because she was unused to these circumstances of her life but because, quite suddenly, she had seen her state of resignation as an insult to the woman she once, too long ago, had been.
‘I would really like to talk to you,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said, to Daphne Jackson’s surprise. ‘It might be worth your while to stroll back to that hotel with me.’
On her short, angry walk she had realized, too, that once she had greatly disliked Jackson Major because he reminded her in some ways of her husband. A priggish youth, she had recalled, a tedious bore of a boy who had shown her husband a ridiculous respect while also fearing and resembling him. On her walk she had remembered the day he had broken the half-mile record, standing in the sports field in his running clothes, deprecating his effort because he knew his headmaster would wish him to act like that. What good was winning a half-mile race if he upset his wife the first time he found himself in a bedroom with her?
‘I remember your husband as a boy,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘He set an athletic record which has not yet been broken’
‘Yes, he told me.’
‘He had trouble with his chin. Pimples that wouldn’t go away. I see all that’s been overcome.’
‘Well, yes –’
‘And trouble also because he beat a boy too hard. The mother wrote, enclosing the opinion of a doctor.’
Daphne frowned. She ceased to walk. She stared at Mrs Angusthorpe.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe.
They passed the butcher’s shop, from the doorway of which the butcher now addressed them. The weather was good, the butcher said: it was a suitable time for a holiday. Mrs Angusthorpe smiled at him and bowed. Daphne, frowning still, passed on.
‘You’re right,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said next, ‘when you say that your husband could have declined to go fishing.’
‘I think he felt –’
‘Odd, I thought, to have a fishing-rod with him in the first place. Odd on a honeymoon.’
They entered the hotel. Doyle came forward to meet them. ‘Ah, so you’ve palled up?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that grand?’
‘We could have sherry,’ Mrs Angusthorpe suggested, ‘in the bar.’
‘Of course you could,’ said Doyle. ‘Won’t your two husbands be pegging away at the old fish for the entire day?’
‘They promised to be back for lunch,’ Daphne said quickly, her voice seeming to herself to be unduly weak. She cleared her throat and remarked to Doyle that the village was pretty. She didn’t really wish to sit in the hotel bar drinking sherry with the wife of her husband’s headmaster. It was all ridiculous, she thought, on a honeymoon.
‘Go down into the bar,’ said Doyle, ‘and I’ll be down myself in a minute.’
Mrs Angusthorpe seized with the fingers of her left hand the flowered material of Daphne’s dress. ‘The bar’s down here,’ she said, leading the way without releasing her hold.
They sat at a table on which there were a number of absorbent mats that advertised brands of beer. Doyle brought them two glasses of sherry, which Mrs Angusthorpe ordered him to put down to her husband’s account. ‘Shout out when you’re in need of a refill,’ he invited. ‘I’ll be up in the hall.’
‘The partition between our bedrooms is far from soundproof,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe when Doyle had gone. ‘We were awakened in the night.’
‘Awakened?’
‘As if you were in the room beside us, we heard a conversation.’
‘My God!’
‘Yes.’
Blood rushed to Daphne Jackson’s face. She was aware of an unpleasant sensation in her stomach. She turned her head away. Mrs Angusthorpe said:
‘People don’t speak out. All my married life, for instance, I haven’t spoken out. My dear, you’re far too good for Jackson Major.’
It seemed to Daphne, who had been Daphne Jackson for less than twenty-four hours, that the wife of her husband’s headmaster was insane. She gulped at the glass of sherry before her, unable to prevent herself from vividly recalling the awfulness of the night before in the small bedroom. He had come at her as she was taking off her blouse. His right hand had shot beneath her underclothes, pressing at her and gripping her. All during their inedible dinner he had been urging her to drink whiskey and wine, and drinking quantities of both himself. In bed he had suddenly become calmer, remembering instructions read in a book.
‘Pack a suitcase,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe, ‘and go.’
The words belonged to a nightmare and Daphne was aware of wishing that she were asleep and dreaming. The memory of tension on her wedding-day, and of guests standing around in sunshine in a London garden, and then the flight by plane, were elements that confused her mind as she listened to this small woman. The tension had been with her as she walked towards the altar and had been with her, too, in her parents’ garden. Nor had it eased when she escaped with her husband on a Viscount: it might even have increas
ed on the flight and on the train to Galway, and then in the hired car that had carried her to the small village. It had certainly increased while she attempted to eat stringy chicken at a late hour in the dining-room, while her husband smiled at her and talked about intoxicants. The reason he had talked so much about whiskey and wine, she now concluded, was because he’d been aware of the tension that was coiled within her.
‘You have made a mistake,’ came the voice of Mrs Angusthorpe, ‘but even now it is not too late to rectify it. Do not accept it, reject your error, Mrs Jackson.’
Doyle came into the bar and brought to them, without their demanding it, more sherry in two new glasses. Daphne heard him remarking that the brand of sherry was very popular in these parts. It was Spanish sherry, he said, since he would stock nothing else. He talked about Spain and Spaniards, saying that at the time of the Spanish Armada Spanish sailors had been wrecked around the nearby coast.
‘I love my husband,’ Daphne said when Doyle had gone again.
She had met her husband in the Hurlingham Club. He had partnered her in tennis and they had danced together at a charity dance. She’d listened while he talked one evening, telling her that the one thing he regretted was that he hadn’t played golf as a child. Golf was a game, he’d said, that must be started when young if one was ever to achieve championship distinction. With tennis that wasn’t quite so important, but it was, of course, as well to start tennis early also. She had thought he was rather nice. There was something about his distant manner that attracted her; there was a touch of arrogance in the way he didn’t look at her when he spoke. She’d make him look at her, she vowed.
The Collected Stories Page 31