‘Any man,’ I said, ‘ who accepts his rejected mistress’ recommendation whom he shall marry must rate high among the feeble-minded invertebrates of this world, so I take most of the flak as self-inflicted. I decided to marry Erica and she agreed. But why the recommendation in the first place?’
She hesitated. ‘ I thought you might suit each other.’
‘So did I. We don’t. But that’s beside the point. The point is that, having been turned down yourself because you couldn’t give me a child, was there not a certain satisfaction in commending me to a girl who couldn’t have children either?’ It was crude but it simply had to come out that way.
She blinked at me a couple of times with her fine Russian eyes. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Erica tells me that in her affair with Edward Cromer she got pregnant.’
‘Of course. I knew about it. Before you came between us, Erica and I were very close.’
‘And she had an abortion.’
‘Yes. It was not quite legal but it was easy to arrange. She was very upset at the time, being much attached to the Cromer man, who let her down.’
‘And then?’
‘And then what?’
‘It went wrong, I gather. So she tells me. She couldn’t have children now even if she wanted them.’
Shona went across to the windows, drew the curtains. ‘ She told you this?’
‘Who else?’
‘She never told me.’
‘D’you expect me to believe that?’
She turned. ‘What evil worm is working in you, David? My God, what is wrong with you? This is poison that you are thinking.’
‘It’s not poison that I put there.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Erica said, ask Shona, she knows all about it.’
She came back, lit a cigarette, puffed away furiously. Her face looked suddenly small and bitter.
‘David, knowing me so long as you have done, do you suppose I would do this to you?’
‘Erica said, ask Shona, she knows all about it.’
‘Perhaps she was drunk. Perhaps she was jealous. Women say strange things when they are jealous.’
‘And do them.’
That stopped her. She gasped and screwed out the cigarette. ‘All right! When I suggested that you marry Erica I have one other thought in my mind. You are – for some years you have belonged to me. To me! I have made you what you are! That is a claim you may resent; but in fairness it is the truth. You are a different man, more responsible, more normal. We have become a part of each other’s lives and I do not know how I shall survive without you! More important, how will you survive without me? Even if the sexual thing is lost, there is still much more between us – understanding, trust. Yes, trust, David, when at one time it seemed the last quality one could apply to you.’
‘Thanks a million.’
‘Do not be flippant. I am telling you the plain truth. But now … I was going to lose you, to another woman. I find it hard to bear. My life is poisoned by the thought … I am going to lose you. But if you marry Erica I think I do not altogether lose you. You will stay with the firm. And Erica is – not deep; she will not perhaps altogether satisfy you; sometimes, now and then maybe, you will come back. If not just for love, at least for companionship. Perhaps that was not a noble thought, but it was there! And after my visit to Scotland I know that if you do not marry Erica or someone like her, in London, where contact can still exist, then you will marry that woman up there and be lost to me altogether!’
I stared. ‘Up there? … You mean – Alison? Malcolm’s wife? Rubbish …’
‘Not rubbish at all. But that was my reason for suggesting Erica, no other! Why should I have any other – except a motive of petty revenge? And if I cared for you – as I do care for you – do you suppose I would stoop to that? You must think meanly of me, David, even to entertain such a thought!’
She had her back to me, but I could see her hands were trembling.
She said: ‘Did Erica tell you this herself, about her abortion, about it going wrong? I do not believe it!’
‘She ought to know.’
‘I think she was lying.’ Shona turned angrily. ‘This was no back-street operation! You know Erica, with all the money in the world; it was done, I know for a fact, at the best clinic then in England, by the best surgeon. Do you suppose anything would go wrong with that?’
‘She ought to know,’ I said again.
‘I think she was lying. Do you know she is in love with you, you fool?’
‘That joke’s gone a bit sour.’
She came across and took me by the shoulders as if to shake them. ‘She is saying these things, doing these things, to try to get a response from you! She said to me two months ago she cannot reach you! You are behind a glass screen, untouchable; there is no feeling, no emotion there. You are partly there, partly in the room with her, partly absent. I know how it is with you, I know how it was between us in those first years! Only later was there contact, fusion, communication; then I knew you cared, were feeling things as a human being should do. It did not last, of course. Three years – was it as much as that? – and then it slipped away … But I know how Erica must feel, barred away, kept at a distance. If she cares for you she will try anything to break the barrier down!’
I grabbed her hands off my shoulders, held her wrists for a few seconds, let them go.
‘Erica’s talent for communication is not of the highest either,’ I said. ‘ Except when she wants to communicate some personal insult. So conceive of it that this splendid glass screen you’ve imagined existing between us may act both ways.’
‘Yes, but don’t you realize what it is like for a woman? Not being able to get through, asking for responses, getting nothing in return; wanting even to quarrel if that is the way to break through. Demanding a meeting, an emotional exchange where perhaps each one of you can lay your feelings bare, and then begin all over again afterwards on a new footing of understanding and caring and comradeship?’
I said: ‘You tell me Erica is shallow. I think so myself. It was what I wanted. Now she complains because I won’t give her what she never had herself!’
She stood brooding beside me, then shrugged and turned away. ‘Well … what has gone wrong between you and Erica is between you and Erica. I am very sad if it has come to this pass, and I am to blame if in any way I encouraged you to marry her –’
‘Don’t bother,’ I interrupted, ‘it was my own choice –’
‘But what goes wrong between you and me is another matter and we must get it brought out into the open at once. Yes? If she told you that she cannot have children, that is your affair. If she told you that I knew she couldn’t have children, then that is mine!’ She went to the telephone and dialled a number.
‘What now?’ I said.
‘Either she must come over here or we are going over there. At once. At least this can be cleared up!’
At the window and peer through the curtains. Raining now. Not the best night for a long drive. But I was going tonight. The hell with my arm.
She slammed the receiver down. ‘There is no reply.’
‘She’s out on the town with Derek Jones and those two creeps from Beauchamp Place.’
‘Steve and Tony? I’ll ring them.’
‘They weren’t going home. They were off to some restaurant for dinner.’
‘Then it must be first thing in the morning. What time will you be up?’
‘I’m leaving for Scotland tonight.’
‘Why tonight? With this unresolved? You can stay another day! I want to know if Erica was lying about herself and I want to know how she came to lie about me!’
My sharp rage had blunted itself on Shona’s angry response. I neither believed her nor disbelieved her. All I knew now was the sickness and the frustration and the need to get away.
‘Look, Shona.’ I stopped.
‘Yes? What do you want to say?’
‘Work it out wi
th Erica tomorrow. Just now I’ve only one real need in the world and that is to drop my wife and to drop my job. I’d like it to be a clean break – but maybe you can’t have clean breaks in matrimony even these days. So if you’ll accept my resignation from the firm –’
‘I will not!’ she said.
I made a savage gesture, and then tried not to wince at the pain in my arm.
She said: ‘Take leave of absence. Take four weeks. If at the end of four weeks you still feel the same I’ll not quarrel further. Until then, let it be temporary.’
I shrugged. ‘Play it how you want so long as I’m free.’
‘What time are you going?’
‘What? … To Scotland?’ I looked at my watch. ‘It’ll take me half an hour to throw a few things in a bag. About ten, I suppose.’
‘Have you time to eat first?’
‘I’m not hungry!’
‘Then I’ll make you a few sandwiches. And a flask of coffee. It’s a long way.’
I didn’t want the food, I didn’t want her stupid attentions. After all we’d said, it was ridiculous. I wanted just to get away. You can’t suddenly turn from the cut-throat to the domestic. It was anticlimax.
But maybe to end with a whimper is the best way to end all scenes.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s a long way.’
Chapter Twenty-five
I
Shona
I needn’t have worried about my arm. Once out of London the traffic was thin, and I could hare along most of the time in fifth gear. Then after a stop for an hour near Doncaster, when I began to use the car more as it was designed to be used, I found the shoulder wasn’t too painful.
You think a lot on the way. Driving a car at night you don’t have nightmares, only fleeting visions of what you are and what you hope to be and what you pretend you’re not.
I began to think about Malcolm’s title, which he should have inherited and instead had thrown away. It didn’t belong to me. It never would belong to me. It had been bad enough sometimes believing in myself as David Abden. The ‘Sir’ in front of it seemed to make a rubbish of my existence. There’s a belief somewhere, isn’t there, that if you don’t have a name you don’t exist. And the ‘Sir’ in front of my name seemed to have dug under the foundations and left only an empty house ready to fall in.
I thought of a book I’d read once by John Steinbeck in which he says that practically all the creative sweat men put into life is an attempt to prove that point that they’re here, that they’ve been here, that they’ve left their mark. Unfortunately very few of us can be Shakespeares or Michaelangelos or Christopher Wrens. Not many can even be Shonas, building a fancy pile of bricks, a little reputation that’ll stick around for a few years.
As for me, the sum of my activities wouldn’t fill a thimble, hardly raise a drift of dust. It could be that even those narrow, conceited, bigoted Abdens, for whose original home I was now heading and who had died for this or that useless cause, leaving only a name scratched on a granite wall, were one step up.
But their causes were useless, weren’t they? Indeed what cause in the long run was not useless? Was there any purpose in life that was not better served by an early death? Maybe the faulty tyre wasn’t such a bad way out.
I drove very fast but still very steadily, the car fairly snorting its pleasure at the long run. As the night went on my head grew heavy and my legs light. This was only a continuing process based on the way I’d been feeling all last week. I might have thought I was coming down with flu, if I hadn’t known a whole lot better. All my adult life I’d hardly ailed a thing physically, never been to a croaker, never taken a pill. How about it if I stopped now in Edinburgh and went to see a quack and moaned: ‘Oh, doctor, I’m ill, help, help!’ He’d say in his stupid Scottish brogue: ‘‘What seems to be the matter?’ and I’d reply: ‘I can’t make up my mind.’ Big deal. ‘ One of these, four times a day, and you won’t have any mind left to make up.’
Dawn rose over the Grampians. I thought about the last few days. Deceit, deception, disgust. At least it looked as if Chalmers and his boys were going to make a tidy sweep of the counterfeiters. I wondered if it really would touch Roger in his Hampstead fastnesses. Very unlikely, he would have covered his tracks too well.
As the day, a fine day, settled on northern Scotland it occurred to me, not without a certain sensation of alarm, that there had been one moment in the last weeks that I had really enjoyed. That had been the almost successful attempt to throttle Charley Ellis. And it wasn’t the repayment of an old grudge I had enjoyed so much as the actual violence.
II
The roof repairs were nearly finished. They’d pretty well had to strip the whole roof off the old hall, but apart from that had been able to patch up the rest. They were still working on a steep slanted roof over two of the end backrooms, but as these were never used it wasn’t much inconvenience except for the scaffolding and the track up to the house, which was more rutted and muddy than ever.
Of course they weren’t expecting me at all this time – they were hardly up – and there was the usual panic while they made breakfast. Mrs Coppell fussed and pattered about the largely unused but now highly efficient kitchen; Coppell led the way up ladders and showed me what had been done. While I was eating eggs and bacon the roofers arrived for the day’s work.
After I’d parked my new car safely out of reach of spattering stones or turning, lorries I went to bed and, undisturbed by hammerings, slept for five hours. It was then almost time to eat again. I ate again. My life was in a scintillating mess but the juices were not deterred. Maybe the long drive up here had helped.
It had certainly helped in one way. The unclean spirits of the night had had a good innings; now for a time they were gone – not far away, but I didn’t think of them. I thought of practically nothing but went up on the roof, watching the men, talking to them and trying to help. Maybe I should have been a builder – of walls or houses or ships or cars: something to get my hands on; the old creative impulse again.
But it wasn’t much of a creative impulse I felt on the Saturday. The workmen weren’t there to divert attention; a walk in the morning, with one of the dogs, a terrier called Drago who seemed to have taken a fancy to me. He looked like a cross between a Scottie and a Bedlington; I threw sticks for him and he thought that fun. When I got back I looked up at the house and thought: it’s still as ugly as sin and the ugliest thing about it is that porch. What misbegotten, snotty-nosed, bare-legged ancestor had ever allowed it to be put up, let alone maintained with paint and polish all these years? The front door behind was a bit church-going in shape but the oak was good and the stonework OK. I disturbed McVitie at his gardening to ask if he had a pickaxe or a mallet. He had both.
Ten minutes later Mrs Coppell appeared at the front door. ‘ Holy Mary, mother of God! ’Tis you yerself, sir! I heard the banging before; but then the clatter of glass! … Are ye knocking doon the whole hoose, sir?’
‘No. Just this piece that I don’t admire.’
‘Would ye allow me to move the pot plants, sir? I can take them to our cottage if they don’t pleasure ye.’
I worked all Saturday afternoon and all Sunday. By that time the porch as a porch was not. There was a tidy muck of broken glass, another of brick and a third of wood and plaster, ready to be taken away by the workmen when they came with their lorry on Monday morning. The house looked better without the excrescence, but there were too many signs of its having been there. Some of the exposed stonework needed pointing and a cement wash would have to be used to cover the scars. I told the foreman this, and he scratched the nape of his neck and reluctantly agreed. Then I went into Ullapool to shop. Then I went on to Lochfiern House.
I saw my aunt. She said Alison and her little daughter were away for a month visiting her parents in Castle Douglas. I thanked her for her letter that I’d not replied to and said I’d be glad to inspect the military relics sometime, but as my wife was a champion fencer and unlik
ely to have children at least for some years, it might be better to delay making speculative gifts. She was right in supposing that I was not a safe repository for so much of the family history and I advised her to leave all the medals, etc., to a suitable war museum.
She heard me out gravely.
Then she said: ‘ Perhaps you might just like to see this one.’ She went to a cupboard and laboriously produced a bronze cross with a red ribbon. The cross had a crown and a lion and For Valour underneath. ‘The only one we have in our family,’ she said, hands trembling as she held it. ‘But it is something we specially prize. It was won by Colonel Cameron Abden of the Scots Guards, at Loos in 1915. He was with the 9th Division in their attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt. The piper leading the company was killed almost at once, but Cameron Abden at once picked up the pipes and led his company to capture the enemy positions, playing on through it all, though himself severely wounded. He died a year later on the Somme.’
She wanted me to hold it so I held it, wondering if she thought it would convert me to right thinking. It didn’t, but I handed it back politely enough and helped her to put it away. To say that there was a growing accord between us would be piling on the lush, but at least we weren’t actually sharpening dirks.
She said: ‘I believe your wife has money.’
‘Yes.’
‘That will be a help to you in maintaining Wester Craig.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps even in making a decision not to sell the property.’
‘I don’t think it will affect that.’
‘Your wife is not in Moscow?’
‘No. She wasn’t chosen.’
‘Oh. That would be a disappointment … I understand the repairs to Wester Craig are almost complete.’
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