‘I think I can guess,’ Pink said.
‘Yes, I thought you probably could, but when I tried to tell David this, after, I mean – strictly no dialogue at the time, not a word said until I’d hauled on my pants—’
‘Mary!’
‘Well, I told you it was prose.’
‘Yes, but there’s a kind of limit.’
‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy. I wasn’t going to leave them there, after all.’
‘I mean there’s a limit about how much you tell.’
She looked rather hurt.
‘But I wanted to tell.’
‘I know,’ he said.
She frowned deeply. ‘Now you’ve ruined it. You’ve made me feel bad.’
‘Go on,’ Pink suggested.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m huffing now. Is there something to eat?’ She walked over to the cupboard and found a tin of biscuits.
‘For you, slob?’
Pink nodded. ‘I wouldn’t say no.’ She extracted four water biscuits then put back the lid and closed the cupboard door. She gave him his ration and with her mouth full, said:
‘After all I’m only telling you. I wouldn’t shout it all out in the middle of the main street.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ he said.
‘Come to that,’ she said with a sudden laugh, ‘I’m not so sure either. D’you think anybody would believe me?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Charity. They like you round these parts.’
She said, ‘D’you believe me?’
‘In every detail, old thing. That’s what’s putting me off.’
‘It is true, you know.’
‘I know damned well it is.’
‘How d’you know?’ she asked.
‘How do we ever know?’ he replied.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I was rather savage at Stephen … Perhaps detail’s what makes you so sure.’
‘Could be the pants,’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘You’re quite wrong there. I could easily have made up the pants. In fact I think I’d be bound to hit on the pants. It only takes a mind with a practical bent. I wonder how?’
‘Probably dog’s whistle stuff,’ he said. ‘Unknown accuracy of Pink’s ear. I always know when you’re lying. And I’m often in the know.’
‘Yes,’ she said, very vaguely, suddenly. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’
‘Let’s take the pants as on,’ Pink said.
‘Well, then things frankly weren’t awfully romantic. Very, very prose indeed. I said about this girl, you know, how I’d felt.’
‘He didn’t like that?’
‘He cut me short.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Pink said, wisely.
‘Well, it did me. I wasn’t insulting him. I mean I didn’t say I was so bored I had to think her up to give myself a lift. That wasn’t true. I just fell into her. It was probably being so flat on my back like that, and concrete’s jolly hard. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if my shoulders looked like a stucco bungalow; like a bothie wall. Anyway, he wasn’t going to talk about that. We walked away, oddly enough, holding hands then, though neither of us felt terribly like it – well, that’s not quite true. I did in a sort of a way. I actually asked him to hold my hand. More from kind of wrath of God, I think, than love. I’m sure God’s moosh is just like Macdonald’s, big, gloomy, hurt, disapproving and so irritatingly patient. But even she’s been angry with us once or twice …’ She thought for a second, then asked, ‘You know that feeling when you keep looking at the sky and feel absolutely certain that your favourite dog’s going to die? Like that. So there we were, not going up the bank to his common little car, oddly enough. But along the cart track back towards here, between the red puddles, and the stones those school children fling at each other – he and me, Adam and Eve, picking our solitary way. A likely pair. Only no paradise. Not yet. There will be, though, I think. I’d have the most tremendous row with him, I know, if ever we went to Monte Carlo. Don’t scientists have conferences there? I know he’d hate gambling. He’s rather puritanical, I’m sure. I’d throw my coins or whatever they’re called, all over the board and, goodness I’d boast about Daddy like mad …
‘Well, when we came to the garden wall I thought it would be rather romantic to walk along the top of it and he could reach up and hold my hand. “After the ball is over” stuff. I felt like it. I really did want him to pick me a flower. But that suggestion seemed to bring him sharply to his senses. He didn’t walk about “mm”-ing and shaking his head like he usually did. He just stood there picking his nose or something. Kind of solidly indecisive. Not crying. But not smoking either.’ She broke off for a second. ‘Are you still worried about those pants?’
‘No, go on—’
‘You are rather stuffy sometimes, Pink. And you look awfully silly when you are. You really must fight it. Besides there’s nothing wrong at all in girls hauling off and on their pants. It’s only our terrible education that makes us so worried about that. Those schools and a touch of poor Macdonald.’
‘I’m not worried—’
‘Nor am I. I think it’s a very good thing, really. I mean that girls should. It’s part of what pants are for. So long as they’re young – the girls, I mean. Then it’s really quite a nice idea.’
‘Go on,’ Pink said impatiently. ‘You left him standing at the g-g-garden gate.’
‘Yes, well then things did go rather badly.’
‘Obviously,’ he said, and she knew exactly what he meant. He never missed a trick; recognised at once the meaning of her more hectic diversions. She talked much more slowly as she took the last hurdle.
‘I grew rather sulky, mainly, I think, because he looked the way he did. So then I just said, “You’d better not come in now. You’d better go back and then come and collect me. I’ll pack a case.”’
‘Oh yes,’ said Pink. ‘Nice going. And he said, “I never want to see you in my life again, you forward little puss.”’
‘No. Not exactly.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘Important timing,’ she said. ‘Very.’ And she sniffed. ‘A split-second first. A kind of light in his eye that might have been shock, but I’m pretty sure it was just the blue sky. I mean, this was only a few minutes ago. It was quite light. I think the look was only in my mind. But it scared me, I confess. Like you, with Daddy, sometimes. Kind of absolutely certain that now you’re down you’re going to get a kick in the teeth. All that rushing through my old nut and I stand there with my toes together, looking a little demure, I believe. That was something to do with the thought about flowers. What’s going on in his head I’ve really no idea. Probably the travelling expenses. He’s not very generous, you know. Well, he is, but he grumbles about it, always. In London, he insisted on taking me to lunch at a very swank restaurant then complained about the bill: sort of jokingly. But all this in a split-second and then he’s all smiles. Charming and rather formal, and in tails of course, at the garden gate: he even looked rather nice. You know he’s got that awful skin that makes him look as if he’s spent twenty years down a mine? So useful for a Gaitskellite … Big pores, I suppose … Anyway, even that wasn’t so noticeable. Just big black eyes and short dark hair. The answer to my sort of maiden’s prayer. He took me in his arms and kissed me and he was really nice: really hopeful. Saying, “You are a good girl” and nice straightforward things like that. I’m afraid I cried like anything. Then I sent him off and came in here, and now you’re up to date.’ She said, ‘If you have another cup of tea it’ll start coming out of your ears. You’re getting as bad as Cathie.’ Cathie was the maid.
But at the end of all that, she seemed curiously exhausted. Almost panic-stricken. Her face was sad and pale. She looked almost fierce as she took a sip from the flask. She drank another and he made a ‘glug-glug’ noise. For an instant she did not react.
‘Well, don’t take it all,’ he said. Then he made the ‘glug-glug�
� noise again. He expanded the imitation to a vivid, explosive mock nose trick, and spluttering and coughing she burst out laughing.
‘Soaked,’ Pink said. ‘The fellow’s absolutely soaked.’
Mary was holding her sides, coughing and trying to recover herself. The whisky seemed to be coming out of her ears as she cursed him and laughed, at once. She suddenly put her arms round his neck and said very breathlessly:
‘Oh, Pink darling, you are the most awful slob, but I do love you and I shall miss you most of all. But you are the most awful slob.’
The last shreds of responsibility were thrown away as Pink now played the slob. A cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, round-shouldered and pot-bellied, he shuffled in a circle, like something out of the sea. ‘The smoker’ in Scouting for Boys.
‘Oh, don’t, Pink,’ she cried. ‘It hurts.’ Her laughter was very high. ‘Don’t. It hurts both ways. D’you suppose Stephen’s killing himself?’
Pink, very uncertainly, with his hands, wide apart, said, ‘It’s not wrong. It’s better this way, isn’t it, than being maudlin and that?’
She nodded.
He went on, at first uncertainly, ‘It’s always the right time for a little celebration. But it won’t be a long parting, old trout. I’ll see you in the big city.’
‘In London?’ she asked, frantically encouraging him. ‘Will you, Pink?’
‘Absolutely. If your old man will let me in.’
‘He will. I promise he’s nice.’
Pink said, ‘We’ll have a party, by God. A big get-together in a low-down cellar. ‘We’ll trip the light fantastic, Mary and Pink, for auld lang syne and all that cock. Won’t we?’
She nodded very hard several times and ran and put her arms round his neck again. She buried her head in his coat and with long pauses in between he slapped her back. It was he who was crying.
A moment later she said rather coolly, as if the thought had just come to her:
‘I sometimes think it’s rather a pity that Macdonald wasn’t our Mum. I mean she’d have had so much more authority, don’t you think?’
TWELVE
MARY AND STEPHEN slept in the night nursery, a small room that overlooked the haugh, the ha-ha, the river and the floods, but Stephen had drawn the curtains, perhaps much for the same reason that Pink put on dark glasses. (‘I somehow feel,’ Pink once said about dark glasses, ‘that Lot’s wife could have done with a pair of these jobs.’) And Stephen’s decision to draw the frilly, gay little curtains was curiously prophetic. The worst scene of his life was later to be played in this sweet room with the big white-washed fireplace and the bright yellow paint.
When Mary had begun to pack she had switched on the light. For a while Stephen had lain, like the effigy of a knight, staring straight at the ceiling, but now he was sitting up in bed reading Cozzens: By Love Possessed.
Mary’s behaviour in the crisis of departure was marvellously female. Although her husband never took his eyes from his book, she continued to talk to him as she packed, almost as if she were preparing to elope with him, not David. It was as if she felt that pleasant chatter would dissolve an insoluble situation. It was Mary at her most typical, not only refusing to believe in her own actions, but denying reality itself.
‘Isn’t that the end?’ she asked, pressing the clothes down in the suitcase. ‘These bloody things just won’t get in.’
And then a moment later, she said vaguely, ‘I know you don’t believe me, but I really don’t want to go one bit. I mean, I hate London, and that’s just the start-off. I’ve always come back to this room,’ and she put the palm of her hand against the wall. ‘It’s quite absurd,’ she said, ‘to talk of leaving it.’
At the cupboard which was really Stephen’s but which she used as well, because she had always used it, she said, ‘You really have got the dullest lot of ties. I shall make a point of buying you one. That I promise. I’ll search and search until I get one just right for you. I’ll send it for your birthday. Maybe before. One with nice faded colours, not horrid diagonal regimental stripes like these. I …’ she paused. Then she said cheerfully, ‘You can wear it for lunch when we next meet. We obviously will meet. It would be too childish not to. I mean I’m bound to come north sometimes and we’ll have a jolly swank lunch on old Dow’s money. That’ll be fun. I’d hate it if I thought we were parting as enemies, Stiffy. You see, I do love you, kind of – well, maybe it’s not the time to say it. But I really do. We must be friends and I’ll write to you and you’ll get on much better without me anyway.’
He never took his eyes from the book. She went to the curtains and suddenly swept them back. She said, ‘They need some extra runners, we must see to that,’ as she looked at the ruffled waters of the flood. There were gulls inland, and a pair of swans. She said, ‘It’s bright too early, it’s going to cloud over and the gulls are inland – that means storm.’ And then her eyes clouded with tears.
‘Oh my darling silly Juniper Bank,’ she said, beginning to cry. ‘There’s nowhere like this in the world. I know there’s nowhere like this.’
Almost as suddenly she recovered herself, bit her lip and grabbed a big handkerchief from one of his drawers. ‘Very dramatic,’ she said. ‘Mop up.’ Then she walked straight to the telephone to ring David. She sat on the second bed, a foot away from Stephen, and said, ‘I hate the phone.’
David’s mother answered first. She was slightly deaf and feared the instrument. She took a moment to understand that the call was for her son. She asked who was speaking and Mary wondered if she should tell the truth. It was not easy lying to anyone as charitable as Edith Dow.
‘It’s Mary Cameron. Ferguson, you know.’
‘Oh yes.’ She understood at last. She sounded very worried. ‘Is something wrong then, Mary?’
‘Well, yes, there is.’
‘I’m so sorry. Is somebody unwell?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not your father, I hope?’
‘It’s not exactly that. If I could speak to David for a moment.’
She looked up and saw that Stephen’s eyes were closed again. She turned away from him.
As soon as David came to the phone she explained as quickly as she could that things were more unbearable then she had thought they were going to be. David did not sound helpful or friendly.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘We arranged—’
‘I know we did.’
‘It’s too bad, ringing this number.’
‘David, please, I can’t talk here.’
‘This is exactly the point; no more can I. It’s absurdly early.’
There was silence for a moment then she pleaded.
‘I can’t wait here as I suggested.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘Please, David, please. I can’t tell you. You must come at once.’
She could hear him sigh.
He said, ‘It sounds to me as if you’re acting in a very hysterical way.’
‘I’m not.’
There was a long pause. At last he spoke again.
He said, ‘Very well. But it seems to me a pity.’
‘I wouldn’t ask unless – David, d’you mind if I bring quite a big case? David?’
‘Let’s leave it there.’
He ended the call abruptly. Stephen opened his eyes as the telephone ‘clicked’ in Mary’s ear. Then she slowly replaced it. She looked Stephen in the eye, fiercely, for a second and then walked away from the bed. Although there was still much to be packed, she closed the trunk.
She said, ‘You heard all that,’ and he turned back to his book.
She stayed in the room, with the trunk and case packed, until David arrived an hour later. She looked exhausted again. She sat still and was quite silent. When she heard footsteps on the steep curved stairs she said very slowly, before she stood up:
‘I was thinking of a girl sitting in the gun-field blowing clock dandeli
ons, playing “He loves me” and denying “he loves me not.”’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not really like that. I mean love and life and Santa Claus and that. But it should be, I promise you.’
‘To prove it,’ Pink said, at the door, ‘he’s arrived.’
‘I know,’ she lied. Then her energy drained back. Much more quickly again she said, ‘I know, I know.’
‘Good old Mary-bags.’
She put on a big sheepskin coat that hung behind the door. Rather cheerfully now, jokingly, she said:
‘Come on, Pink, you’ve got to help. Here’s my overnight bag.’
Pink was more than astonished by the trunk.
‘They’ll like that at the Dorchester,’ he said.
‘Go on, haul! I’ll take this end.’ She pushed the trunk so that Pink never had to come properly into the room and she herself did not look at Stephen again. Immediately outside the bedroom door she dropped her end of the trunk, and closed the bedroom door sharply behind her, saying, ‘Bye!’
‘Old Sherpa Pink,’ Pink said, lifting up the trunk again. ‘What’s in it then? The family silver? Warm spooneroo-nies?’
‘Pink, do stop staggering so.’
But at the top of the stairs, he made her drop her end.
‘Work study, efficiency, method one,’ he said, pointing one finger in the air. ‘To hell with the paintwork.’
He slid the trunk on to the top steps and then pushed. With enormous crashes and bangs it somehow slid to the bottom. The banister shuddered. A huge piece of plaster was removed from the wall. Pink was delighted. ‘Bloody good,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’
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