I didn’t want to hear him going on about that so I didn’t ask him what he meant. Even though he was considerate, I had begun to feel I was his property. It was an odd feeling, and I think it came from the other feeling I had, that he’d married me because I was part of an idea he’d fallen in love with. I used to look at the china vases on the drawing-room mantelpiece and feel like one of them, or like the carpets and the new wallpaper. I was part of something his money had created, and I don’t think he noticed that the rattling of his newspaper or the clink of the decanter against his glass had a way of interrupting my thoughts. These noises, and his footsteps in the hall or in a room, were like the noises Mrs Stritch made with her buckets and the Electrolux, but of course I never told him that.
I have forgotten a little about all that time in the house with Ralphie. He didn’t always tell me what was happening on the estate; in a way he talked more readily to Mrs Stritch, for I often heard him. He also talked to himself. He would pace up and down the lawns Mr Stritch had restored, wagging his head or nodding, while I watched him from a window of the house. As time went by, it was clear that he had done what he’d wanted. As he said, the estate was all of a piece again. He had bought our farm and the farmhouse, offering so much for both that it couldn’t be resisted. Joe and Arthur worked for him now.
Years were passing. Sometimes I walked over to see Miss Pritchard, going by the meadow we’d gone through on our way to school. I can’t quite recall what we talked about as we had tea; only bits from our conversations come back to me. There is my own cheerfulness, my smiling at Miss Pritchard, and Miss Pritchard’s glumness. Now and again I walked down to our farm and sat for a while with my mother, getting up to go before my stepfather returned. I went to see Betty and Belle, but I did that less and less. I began to think that they were all a little jealous of me. I thought that because I sensed an atmosphere when I went on these visits. ‘You’re cruel, Matilda,’ Miss Pritchard said once, seeming to be unable to control the ill-temper that had caused the remark to surface. She turned her head away from me when she’d spoken. ‘Cruel,’ she said again, and I laughed because of course that was nonsensical. I remember thinking it was extraordinary that Miss Pritchard should be jealous.
Ralphie, I believe, must have begun to live some kind of life of his own. He often went out in the evenings, all dressed up. He came back jovial and would come to my room to kiss me good-night, until eventually I asked him not to. When I inquired at breakfast about where he’d been the night before his answer was always the same, that he had been to a house in the neighbourhood for dinner. He always seemed surprised that I should ask the question, claiming on each occasion that he had told me these details beforehand and that I had, in fact, refused to accompany him. In all this I really do not think he can have been right.
I welcomed the occasions when Ralphie went out in the evenings. I drew the curtains in the drawing-room and sat by the fire, just happy to be there. I thought of the time when we were all together in the farmhouse, my father teasing Betty about Colin Gregg, Dick going as red as a sunset because my father mentioned an empty Woodbine packet he’d found. Every Sunday morning Ralphie went to church and, since Mrs Stritch didn’t come on Sundays, that was another good time. Ralphie would return and sit opposite me in the dining-room, carving the beef I’d cooked him, looking at me now and again from his pink face, his teeth like chalk beneath the trim brown hedge of his moustache. I wanted to explain to him that I was happy in the house when Mrs Stritch wasn’t there and when he wasn’t there. I wanted to make him understand that old Mrs Ashburton had wanted me to be in her house, that that was why she had told me so much when I was a child, that everything had to do with the two wars there’d been. He didn’t know as much about war as Mrs Ashburton had, even though he’d fought in one: I wanted to explain that to him, too. But I never did because his eyes would have begun to goggle, which they had a way of doing if something he couldn’t comprehend was put to him. It was easier just to cook his meals and smile at him.
There was another thing Ralphie said I had forgotten: a conversation about a party he gave. When I asked him afterwards he repeatedly assured me we’d had a conversation about it, and in all honesty I believe it must have been his own memory that was at fault. Not that it matters in the least which way round it was. What mattered at the time was that the house was suddenly full of people. I was embroidering in the drawing-room, slowly stitching the eye of a peacock, and the next thing was that Ralphie’s parents were embracing me, pretending they liked me. It seemed they had come for the weekend, so that they could be at the party, which was to be on the following night. They brought other people with them in their grey Daimler, people called Absom. Mrs Absom was thin, like Mrs Gregary, but younger than Mrs Gregary. Mr Absom was stout, like Mr Gregary, but not like polished marble, and younger also.
Mrs Stritch’s daughter Nellie came to help on the Saturday morning and stayed all day. Apparently Ralphie had given Mrs Stritch money to buy navy-blue overalls for both of them so that they’d stand out from the guests at the party. They bought them in Blow’s, Mrs Stritch told me, and it was quite funny to think that my stepfather might have served them, even fitted them with the overalls. Mr Stritch was there on the night of the party also, organizing the parking of cars.
It all took place in the drawing-room. People stood around with drinks in their hands. Ralphie introduced them to me, but I found it hard to know what to say to them. It was his mother, really, who gave the party, moving about the drawing-room as if she owned it. I realized then why she’d come for the weekend.
‘So how you like Challacombe Manor, Mrs Gregary?’ a man with very short hair asked me.
Politely I replied that I was fond of the house.
‘Ralphie!’ the man said, gesturing around him. ‘Fantastic!’ He added that he enjoyed life in the country, and told me the names of his dogs. He said he liked fishing and always had.
There were fifty-two people in the drawing-room, which had begun to smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol. It was hot because Mrs Gregary had asked Mrs Stritch to make up an enormous fire, and it was becoming noisier because as the party advanced people talked more loudly. A woman, wearing a coffee-coloured dress, appeared to be drunk. She had sleek black hair and kept dropping her cigarette on to Mrs Ashburton’s Persian carpet. Once when she bent to pick it up she almost toppled over.
‘Hullo,’ a man said. ‘You’re Mrs Ralphie.’
He was younger than the short-haired man. He stood very close to me, pressing me into a corner. He told me his name but I didn’t listen because listening was an effort in the noisy room.
‘Ever been there?’ this man shouted at me. ‘Ferns magnificent, this time of year.’
He smiled at me, revealing jagged teeth. ‘Ferns,’ he shouted, and then he said that he, or someone, had a collection of stuffed birds. I could feel one of his knees pressing into the side of my leg. He asked me something and I shook my head again. Then he went away.
Mrs Stritch and her daughter had covered the dining-room table with food. All kinds of cold meats there were, and various salads, and tarts of different kinds, and huge bowls of whipped cream, and cheeses. They’d done it all at the direction of Mrs Gregary: just by looking at the table you could see Mrs Gregary’s hand in it, Mrs Stritch wouldn’t have known a thing about it. The sideboard was entirely taken up with bottles of wine and glasses. The electric light wasn’t turned on: there were slender red candles everywhere, another touch of Mrs Gregary’s, or even Mrs Absom’s. I had crossed the hall to the dining-room in order to get away from the noise for a moment. I thought I’d sit there quietly for a little; I was surprised to see the food and the candles.
I was alone in the dining-room, as I’d guessed I would be. But it wasn’t any longer a room you could be quiet in. Everything seemed garish, the red glitter of the wine bottles, the red candles, dish after dish of different food, the cheeses. It made me angry that Mrs Gregary and Mrs Absom should have come t
o Challacombe Manor in order to instruct Mrs Stritch, that Mrs Gregary should strut about in the drawing-room, telling people who she was.
I jumbled the food about, dropping pieces of meat into the bowls of cream, covering the tarts with salad. I emptied two wine bottles over everything, watching the red stain spreading on the tablecloth and on the cheeses. They had no right to be in the house, their Daimler had no right to be in the garage. I had asked years ago that Mrs Stritch should not be here.
In the drawing-room someone said to me:
‘I enjoy to get out after pheasants, to tramp with my dogs.’
It was the short-haired man. I hadn’t noticed that he was a foreigner. I knew before he told me that he was German.
‘You have dogs, Mrs Gregary?’
I smiled at him and shook my head. It seemed extraordinary that there should be a German in this drawing-room. I remembered when Mrs Ashburton used to talk to me about the First World War that I’d imagined the Germans as grey and steel-like, endlessly consuming black bread. This man didn’t seem in the least like that.
‘Hasenfuss,’ he said. ‘The name, you know.’
For a moment the room was different. People were dancing there at some other party. A man was standing near the door, waiting for someone to arrive, seeming a little anxious. It was all just a flash, as if I had fallen asleep and for a moment had had a dream.
‘We are enemies and then we are friends. I advise on British beer, I enjoy your British countryside. It is my profession to advise on British beer. I would not enjoy to live in Germany today, Mrs Gregary.’
‘You are the first German I have ever met.’
‘Oh, I hope not the last.’
Again the drawing-room was different. There was the music and the dancing and the man by the door. The girl he was waiting for arrived. It was Mrs Ashburton, as she was in the photographs she’d showed me when I was nine. And he was the man she’d married.
‘Here I am standing,’ said the short-haired German, ‘in the house of the people who put Mr Hitler in his place.’ He laughed loudly when he’d made that remark, displaying more gold fillings than I had ever before seen in anyone’s mouth. ‘Your father-in-law, you know, made a lot of difference to the war.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was thinking of the dining-room and what would happen when everyone walked into it. It was like something Belle Frye and I might have done together, only we’d never have had the courage. It was worse than singing songs outside Mrs Stritch’s cottage.
‘In that I mean,’ the German said, ‘the manufacturing of guns.’
I hadn’t known that. My stepfather had said that the Gregarys had made a killing, but I hadn’t thought about it. Ralphie had never told me that his father’s motor-components business had made guns during the war, that the war had made him rich. It was the war that enabled Ralphie now to buy up all the land and set the Challacombe estate to rights again. It was the war that had restored this drawing-room.
‘The world is strange,’ the German said.
I went upstairs and came down with Ralphie’s gaiters. I remember standing at the door of the drawing-room, looking at all the people drinking, and seeing again, for an instant, the dancers of the distant past. Mrs Ashburton and her husband were among them, smiling at one another.
I moved into the room and when I reached the fireplace I threw the gaiters on to the flames. Someone noticed me, Mrs Absom, I think it was. She seemed quite terrified as she watched me.
The German was again alone. He told me he enjoyed alcohol, emphasizing this point by reaching his glass out towards Mrs Stritch, who was passing with some mixture in a jug. I told him about Mrs Ashburton’s husband, how he had returned from the first of the two wars suffering from shell-shock, how the estate had fallen to bits because of that, how everything had had to be mortgaged. I was telling her story, and I was even aware that my voice was quite like hers, that I felt quite like her as well. Everything had happened all over again, I told the German, the repetition was cloying. I told him about Mrs Ashburton’s law of averages, how some men always came back from a war, how you had to pray it would be the men who were closest to you, how it would have been better if her own husband had been killed.
The smell of burning leather was unpleasant in the room. People noticed it. Ralphie poked at his smouldering gaiters with a poker, wondering why they were there. I saw his mother looking at me while I talked to the German. ‘Mrs Ashburton did what she could,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with living in the past.’
I went around from person to person then, asking them to go. The party had come to an end, I explained, but Mrs Gregary tried to contradict that. ‘No, no, no,’ she cried. ‘We’ve scarcely started.’ She ushered people into the dining-room and then, of course, she saw that I was right.
‘I would like you to go as well,’ I said to Mr Gregary in the hall, while the visitors were rooting for their coats. ‘I would like you to go and take the Absoms with you. I did not invite the Absoms here any more than I invited you.’ I said it while smiling at him, so that he could see I wasn’t being quarrelsome. ‘Oh now, look here, Matilda!’ he protested.
In the kitchen I told Mrs Stritch that I’d rather she didn’t return to the house. I could easily manage on my own, I explained to her, trying to be kind in how I put it. ‘It’s just that it’s embarrassing,’ I said, ‘having you here.’
The Gregarys and the Absoms didn’t go until the following day, a Sunday. They didn’t say goodbye to me, and I only knew that they had finally departed because Ralphie told me. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he said, sitting down on the other side of the fire in the drawing-room, where I was embroidering my peacocks. ‘Why, Matilda?’ he said again.
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Yes, you do.’
He had never spoken like that before. All his considerateness had disappeared. His eyes were fiery and yet cold. His large hands looked as though they wanted to commit some act of violence. I shook my head at him. He said:
‘You’re pretending to be deranged.’
I laughed. I didn’t like him sitting opposite me like that, with his eyes and his hands. Everything about him had been a pretence: all he wanted was his own way, to have his mother giving parties in my drawing-room, to have Mrs Stritch forever vacuuming the stairs, to own me as he owned the land and the farms and the house. It was horrible, making money out of war.
‘You don’t even cook for me,’ he said to my astonishment. ‘Half-raw potatoes, half-raw chops –’
‘Oh, Ralphie, don’t be silly. You know I cook for you.’
‘The only food that is edible in this house is made by Mrs Stritch. You can cook if you want to, only you can’t be bothered.’
‘I do my best. In every way I do my best. I want our marriage to be –’
‘It isn’t a marriage,’ he said. ‘It’s never been a marriage.’
‘We were married in the church.’
‘Stop talking like that!’ He shouted at me again, suddenly on his feet, looking down at me. His face was red with fury; I thought he might pick something up and hit me with it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said.
‘You’re as sane as I am. For God’s sake, Matilda!’
‘Of course I’m sane,’ I said quietly. ‘I could not be sitting here if I were not. I could not live a normal life.’
‘You don’t live a normal life.’ He was shouting again, stamping about the room like an animal, ‘Every second of every day is devoted to the impression you wish to give.’
‘But, Ralphie, why should I wish to give an impression?’
‘To cover up your cruelty.’
I laughed again, gently so as not to anger him further. I remembered Miss Pritchard saying I was cruel, and of course there was the cruelty Mrs Ashburton had spoken of, the cruelty that was natural in wartime. I had felt it in myself when my father had been killed, and when Dick had been killed. I had felt it when I had first seen my mother em
bracing the man who became my stepfather, too soon after my father had died. God, if He existed, I had thought in the end, was something to be frightened of.
‘The war is over,’ I said, and he looked at me, startled by that remark.
‘It isn’t for you,’ he said. ‘It’ll never be for you. It’s all we ever hear from you, the war and that foolish old woman –’
‘It wasn’t over for Mrs Ashburton either. How could it be when she lived to see it all beginning again?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop talking about her. If it hadn’t been for her, if she hadn’t taken advantage of a nine-year-old child with her rubbish, you would be a normal human being now.’ He stood above my chair again, pushing his red face down at me and speaking slowly. ‘She twisted you, she filled you full of hate. Whatever you are now, that dead woman has done to you. Millions have suffered in war,’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Who’s asking you to dwell on it, for God’s sake?’
‘There are people who find it hard to pick up the pieces. Because they’re made like that.’
‘You’d have picked them up if she hadn’t prevented you. She didn’t want you to, because she couldn’t herself.’ Furiously he added, ‘Some kind of bloody monster she was.’
I didn’t reply to any of that. He said, with a bitterness in his voice which had never been there before, ‘All I know is that she has destroyed Challacombe for me.’
‘It was never real for you, Ralphie. I shall never forget the happiness in our farmhouse. What memories of Challacombe can you have?’
But Ralphie wasn’t interested in the happiness in our farmhouse, or in memories he couldn’t have. All he wanted to do was wildly to castigate me.
‘How can I live here with you?’ he demanded in a rough, hard voice, pouring at the same time a glass of whisky for himself. ‘You said you loved me once. Yet everything you do is calculated to let me see your hatred. What have I done,’ he shouted at me, ‘that you hate me, Matilda?’
The Collected Stories Page 80