‘Oh yes, thank you,’ says Clara.
She wants to say more, to offer some kind of excuse, but she realises that if she says anything else she will burst into tears again and she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to stop. She hurries upstairs and locks herself in the bathroom. She would happily stay there all day but before long, Virginia is knocking on the door wanting to get in. Clara feels like a trapped animal. Dear sweet God, is there no place she can find some peace? She looks in the mirror. Her face is beetroot red and around her eyes is swollen.
‘I’ll let you in now, darling,’ she calls.
Clara splashes cooling water in her face and hurriedly dabs it dry with a towel. Then she opens the door, lets Virginia in and goes out to face the world.
As she comes into the kitchen, Mrs Parsons says, ‘Sit down there now, Mrs Kenton, and I’ll pour a nice cup of tea.’
Clara does as she’s told.
‘The girls have taken their breakfast outside,’ says Mrs Parsons.
She places the cup of tea on the table in front of Clara, saying, ‘There now, that’s the stuff to give the troops. Now you stay there and enjoy your tea. I’m just going to start in the living room. It’s a lovely day again today, Mrs Kenton. We’ve lots to be thankful for with this fine weather, don’t we?’
It’s a rhetorical question – Mrs Parsons isn’t expecting or doesn’t need an answer. She continues as she is wont to do.
‘And your beautiful home and your two gorgeous little girls. Yes, we’ve lots to be thankful for.’
And with this, Mrs Parsons picks up the wooden box of polish and cloths and goes off to the living room. Moments later, Clara hears her softly singing some song or other as she works. Clara is struck by the fact that Mrs Parsons never mentioned Henry.
Somehow Clara gets through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. In her head she goes over what she is going to say to Henry when he comes in. She will get the girls to bed and then she’ll go at it. She anticipates the moment she will do this with a mixture of longing and dread. She is not even sure she’ll be able to act normally when he comes in at six. By mid-afternoon, her head is crowded with the words and phrases and sentences she is planning to use. They are like arrows in a quiver, just waiting to be fired off.
She and Mrs Parsons take an afternoon cup of tea together, as they normally do, but Clara hears nothing of what Mrs Parsons says. Her voice is like a fly buzzing around a room as Clara enacts, in her head, the scene that is going to play out this evening.
But then, just after she hears a bell tolling what she thinks may be five o’clock, a thought slips into Clara’s mind like somebody squeezing onto an over-crowded Tube train. It is something James said.
‘You would have to have grounds – adultery, cruelty, something like that.’
Adultery. Adultery. What a strange word. Adult-ery. Something adults do. It’s certainly that. But this word, ‘adultery,’ stops her in her tracks. ‘You would have to have grounds,’ was what James said. And now, with what appears to her to be quite unbelievable timing, she has grounds. What she might do with those grounds, with this adultery, she is not at all clear, but she doesn’t want to do the wrong thing. Should she visit a solicitor? Should she ask James? No, she shouldn’t draw him into this monstrous entanglement which has now suddenly invaded her life. What should she do? Stop – that’s for certain. Think about it. Take her time. Her father had his ‘twenty-four hour rule.’ ‘Just sleep on it, lass,’ he would say. ‘It’ll look different in the morning.’ And this is what she decides to do.
When Henry comes in, Clara finds herself looking at a different person than the one who went out this morning. Of course, he looks the same. His clothes and hair are a bit rumpled after the day and his face is tired, but whereas this morning, the man she saw off to work was her devoted husband, she now finds herself looking at a philanderer. (What a wonderful word. She loves that word. Philanderer. Philanderer. She says it over and over to herself.) And instead of the slightly pompous but quite powerful man who takes her out on Saturdays and then fucks her afterwards, she now sees a short, plump, not especially attractive man.
He comes in and she finds herself watching him as though he were an actor on stage. When he picks up the paper and shakes it out to read it, she feels like laughing. It is like watching a man playing a self-important ass in a theatre production. She knows his secret. She knows his dirty little secret so that any time he speaks or makes some kind of pronouncement, a little voice in her head keeps repeating, ‘I know your secret. I know all about you.’
She is conscious, too, that there was a power he used to have which has quite disappeared. And it is this loss of power that intrigues her most. Because if she feels that his power has gone, hers has increased. It’s almost as if his has transferred to her. Right now, as she sits across him at the table, she feels that there is nothing she could not do. Yes, she may be dependent on him financially but she feels that with this power, she could divorce him, get a job, start a new life, anything. And wait until he takes her out on Saturday night. Everything is going to be different from now on. Everything.
Earlier that same day, Mary finds an excuse to go by Henry’s office. He likes to work with the door open – ‘be able to see what’s going on,’ he once told her – and he is there now, his head down, writing. Mary stops at the door and clears her throat. He looks up. She smiles and makes a tiny wave at him. He smiles back. She looks around, sees there is nobody on the corridor, blows him a kiss and hurries on. The letter obviously arrived after he left home.
With seven deliveries a day in Metropolitan London, Mary knows her letter will arrive some time on Monday. She knows now that it will be only when Henry gets home that he will find out that his wife knows about his affair. (Mary always thinks of Clara as ‘his wife’; she can never think of her as being ‘Clara.’) When Mary planned this, she wondered whether Henry’s wife would tell him how she found out. Would she show him the note? Mary knew it didn’t matter. She has disguised her writing, sloping it very far backwards where she normally writes with it sloped slightly forwards. So all Henry will know is that his wife has found out. Mary will not be in the picture at all. Henry may have his suspicions but she’ll be able to act wide-eyed and innocent of any involvement in it.
What will happen next? Will she throw him out? Mary has already checked in the company’s files and she knows that Henry has no mortgage on the house. So, she reckons he would be able to afford to rent himself a small place. Would she then move in with him? She wondered about this but decided against it. She is going to wait until he gets divorced and then they can marry. Only then will she move in. She has a strong sense that Henry doesn’t like being alone and that, if he found himself in that situation, he would want to get out of it as quickly as possible.
There is a danger, of course, that Henry tells his wife that he doesn’t care how she feels and that he is just going to go on with his affair. But according to Henry, his wife is a bitch a lot of the time and so Mary feels that Henry wouldn’t be able to tolerate living in the same house as somebody like that, after what he was doing was out in the open. Henry likes things to be just so and this would be a permanent disturbance that Mary feels he just wouldn’t be able to tolerate.
So, essentially, Mary is hoping that the forces that will now repel him from his marriage and the attraction his wife provides will be enough to prompt Henry, whom she considers at heart a weak man, to make the move from his wife to her. Tomorrow, Mary should know all.
Chapter 33
Tuesday 21 July 1914
On Tuesday, Mary is so sure she is going to get an early morning visit from a frantic Henry that she goes into work early in case he decides to do the same. However, he is not there when she arrives and it is after eleven before she can contrive to walk by his office. He is there as yesterday, working contentedly away. Seeing her, he calls her in and asks if she would like to have lunch on Friday. He also asks when they can be together again. H
e doesn’t think he can use the ‘special meeting’ excuse again this week, but maybe next? Would that suit her? She tells him that lunch on Friday would be fine and any day next week that suits him. She walks out quite nonplussed.
But she is baffled. The letter must have arrived, Mary reasons, so obviously the bitch hasn’t told him yet. Maybe she doesn’t believe the letter and has thrown it away or burned it. Maybe the bitch believes that her precious Henry would never do something as underhand as that. Or maybe – and Mary decides this is more likely – the wife is in shock and needs another day or two before she can confront Henry.
With this calming thought, Mary decides that, if nothing happens in the meantime, she will wait until they have their lunch on Friday.
In St Petersburg, there are rumours that Austria is planning a match against Serbia and that this is being done with Der Kaiser’s blessing.
In Berlin, the German government tells both the French Ambassador and the Russian chargé d’affairs that it has no knowledge of Austrian policy towards Serbia.
In Vienna, Berchtold continues to push for haste in getting the game under way. Suppose Serbia offers compensation for what happened to the Archduke, he argues. (They might do this under pressure from France and Russia, for example.) Then all pretext for war would disappear. Berchtold’s depression deepens and his anxiety grows.
When Clara wakes on Tuesday, she is desolate. She remembers that she was crying silently during the night. As she leaves the room to go downstairs and begin Henry’s breakfast, all of the things she felt yesterday about the shift of power seem to be gone. She feels tiny and doesn’t know how she is going to deal with this vast problem.
When Henry arrives in the kitchen she feels subservient and mouse-like. It as though she is some kind of house servant – like they would have in the Atkinson Grimshaw house. She is somebody to be ordered about with no rights and no feelings. Rather than join him at the breakfast table she stands at the sink staring out the window. If he notices he says nothing, continuing to read his paper. She is relieved when he kisses her on the cheek she automatically proffers, and departs.
She knows she will have to start to think rationally about this but almost immediately, the girls are down and Mrs Parsons is fussing around. Dear God, could she not just get a little time by herself? The day passes and Clara is in bed when she can finally turn her mind, uninterrupted, to the problem.
She is tempted to just ignore all of this. How easy that would be. She could carry on as though nothing has happened. Lots of men, especially upper-class ones, have wives and mistresses. Maybe this is a sign that she and Henry have gone up in the world. She laughs a silent, bitter laugh at this.
Ignoring it would be the easy thing to do. Just go on as if nothing has happened. Get used to being one of these kinds of wives. She is sure that London is full of them. But she can’t imagine the thought of having sex with him ever again. The notion that they would come in from a Saturday night dinner and that he would be inside her is unspeakable. She can’t imagine sitting through a dinner in a restaurant with him, never mind lying under him while he fucks her.
But Clara is angry – angry that it is no decision of hers that has brought her to this point, other than the original one to marry Henry. He has made all the decisions and now she has to bear the consequences. If she ignores this, he goes scot free and that is not something she is prepared to countenance. When the time comes, she will make decisions and then he’ll know all about it.
Part of her wants to confront him straight away. Part of her wants to wake him now and tell him that she knows all about his bit on the side. She wants to be biblically angry with him – as she can be. She would like to punch him and kick him and spit in his face and call him every vile name she can think of. She wants to say all the things she has kept pent up these last few years and command him to stop.
But command him to stop? The damage is done. She knows that once he’s tasted the forbidden fruit, he’s not going to stop. She would have thought that the difficult part – if it was difficult at all for him – was deciding to be unfaithful in the first place. After that, it will just be a question of how many times. Even before she married Henry, he was always a bit of a man to flirt. She just saw it as something innocent – that he was popular, good with people, got on with them. She felt proud to be the one he had chosen. Now she knows that some of Henry’s brains are in his trousers. Maybe most of them.
If she isn’t going to ignore it, and she isn’t going to tell him to stop, then she must divorce him – and now, it appears, she has ‘grounds.’ What will that be like? What is the law? Would she have any money if she did that? Or a roof over her head? And what about the girls? Clara has made her bed; maybe now she has to lie in it. It isn’t fair that the girls should suffer for decisions that Clara has made.
And the worst part is that she will be a divorced woman. It’ll be a scandal whatever happens. She’s heard of women – they are almost always of the upper classes – who divorce and just carry on as though nothing had happened. She knows it won’t be like that for her.
She needs to go and see a solicitor. But who? Where? How does one begin something like this? And without Henry knowing?
She must talk to James. He will know a solicitor – and he said he would help her. But did he actually mean it? And even if he did, surely he doesn’t know what it’s actually going to mean now that she has become involved in this whole sordid business. James won’t want to know her once he understands what she is engaged in. If she has been starting to imagine a life with James, he won’t want to know her as a divorced woman – even though he’s divorced himself.
Ignore it, tell Henry to stop, divorce. These are her three choices. But in reality, she has only two. The middle one is no option at all. So this is what it comes down to. Live out the rest of her life like this or destroy everything – her home, the girls’ happiness, everything – and see what happens then. The prospect makes her feel physically sick.
Chapter 34
Wednesday 22 July 1914
Clara wakes very early after a few hours of restless sleep. Her first thought is how she wishes that all of this were a dream. How gorgeous it would be just to have woken up and found it was another long summer’s day and that she had nothing more pressing on her mind than to find things to entertain the girls and keep them amused.
She needs to do something. She can’t just wait about while things happen to her. She doesn’t know what it is but she has to take some action. Now that she’s had a second night to let it sink in, she is more convinced than ever she should not say anything to Henry. Her knowing his secret gives her some advantage, some kind of power. She’s just not sure what this power is or how best to use it. But she believes it will eventually become clear to her.
She is meeting James tomorrow. She is going to tell him everything. She will tell him what is happening and see whether he is with her or not. Ghastly business or not, she must find out if she has an ally. And if he doesn’t want to get involved and walks out of her life, so be it. She will do this on her own.
In Berlin, it is reported that the rumours of Austria wanting to play Serbia have been greatly exaggerated. It is true that Austria will be delivering a diplomatic note to Serbia in which it will request that some actions be taken with regard to the recent killing of the Archduke. But this note will be ‘courteous’ and will not place any time limit on the Serbians to reply. Any reports of Austrian mobilisation, it is declared, are pure invention.
It is evening, and now that Clara has decided to tell James, she is somewhat at peace. The girls are asleep, Henry is downstairs reading and Clara has some time to herself. She selects the clothes she is going to wear tomorrow. First is her best underwear. She wonders about this. Obviously James isn’t going to see it but the thought of these pretty garments against her skin excites her in a way that she cannot really explain. She chooses a skirt the colour of cornflowers, a white blouse, then her white hat with a blue ribbon
the same colour as the skirt.
She is eager to go to bed, to get the next few hours over with so that she can meet him. And she is eager for another reason – she wants to continue the Atkinson Grimshaw fantasy. Ordinarily, she would go downstairs and wish Henry goodnight. Now she just thinks, ‘fuck him.’ He’s going to be seeing a great deal more changed behaviour on her part in the near future. And he’s not going to like it. Or understand it. And that will be the best bit. She can feel her power again and she is starting to get a vague sense of where it will take her.
Her fantasy has evolved even further. It’s now becoming a story. It begins as it always does on the wet, suburban lane with the bend at the end and the wall on one side. Previously, Clara went voluntarily through the door in the wall, but now somebody – an unseen man – abducts her, throwing a coat or cloak over her head and then encircling her with arms as strong as leather straps. She is pulled into the house and taken down to the basement. Here she finds a handful of other young women – Clara seems to be the oldest. When she asks why they are being kept there, she is told, ‘For the master’s pleasure.’
Later she and the other women are taken upstairs to the master’s study. Once again, Clara doesn’t put a face or a name on the man. The women are made to strip and while the others are reluctant and wail and resist, so that they have to be beaten with a riding crop, Clara takes off her clothes haughtily, disdainfully. She is made to lie on her back on a table and has to open her legs while the master looks at her, touches her, strokes her, probes her. Then she has to bend over while he examines her hole. Clara is selected as the one the master wants. Then she is made to go down on all fours on a deep rug in front of a roaring log fire, while the master enters her from behind. All the other women have to watch while this is going on and Clara finds herself becoming wet at the idea of having an audience. She brings herself quickly to an orgasm and then falls deeply asleep.
Moonlight Page 16