A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  She felt angry. She banged her glass down on the coffee table and split it. The waiter mopped it up. Her only anxiety was that he should get the pieces out of the way before Charles came downstairs (he took longer to dress than she did), because Charles was astute at deciphering accidents like that.

  She did not want him to realize how she knew that their relationship had changed, for she did not want him to go away. She looked at the mirror hanging on the opposite wall and saw herself sitting neatly and tidily inside a trap. It wasn’t even her own trap. It was the one she had so carefully built for him. She practised smiling. If it came to a showdown she thought she could be just as sincere as he.

  But not quite. She was a woman and she was restless. They had a corner room overlooking the golf links to the sea, and she would wake early, because the light from the windows hit her from two directions, hear the golfers down below, see him sleeping in the other bed, and wonder what in God’s name there was left this morning that she could possibly go out and buy. On the last morning she saw suddenly that he was awake and was watching her with that vaguely evasive smile of his that though it was sensual had no comfort in it.

  “I was thinking”, she said, “that we haven’t been to Marsh’s. I’d like to go.”

  “Okay.” He was suspiciously affable. He got out of bed. He was so tall and thin that his pyjamas hung around him like a flag on a motionless day, and when he tied on his robe his hips were so wide, his waist so thin, that the skirts of the robe hung round him like a farthingale. There was something sexlessly Elizabethan about him, an exotic Italianate taste for intrigue and deliberately dirty clothes. If he must use cologne she heartily wished that it would not be musk.

  Outside the golfers made their ritual noises above the sound of the surf.

  The reason why she wanted to go to Marsh’s was it was part of her childhood to go there, not part of his, if he had ever had a childhood. He never talked of that part of his life and she could not imagine him as a child, but only as an homunculus that had gradually outgrown itself. She wanted to get her own back.

  Marsh’s was an oriental store. More than that it was an institution. It was the only Orient she had ever known, a rich, expensive Orient of dark corners filled with things to buy. Their establishment in Monterey was a conceit of plaster and lath, in emulation of a Chinese house, though more baroque. It had that special, hushed, reverent, attendant silence luxury stores have everywhere, in so far as they emulate luxurious houses and, of course, luxuriant houses, them. There was a miniature garden in a courtyard more Japanese than Chinese, and defaced statues stood everywhere. It was the kind of store where you can sit on a sofa and out of the canny half darkness be brought things to see. And more important, they knew her there and remembered her more as Miss Smith than as Mrs. Barnes. It was the type of store that gave you a surrogate past; and in her case, having been brought up in hotels and right now not knowing what the present or the future would be like, a surrogate past, she felt, was what she needed. They brought her boxes of feeling stones. She took off her gloves to look at them.

  “What are they for?” asked Charles. She knew that he wouldn’t know what they were for. Fascinated, his long fingers stole out over the twenty-four plush compartments and fondled the smooth stones, lapis, carnelian, jade, carved in abstract or vegetable shapes.

  “That’s what they’re for,” she said, looking up at the clerk, who seemed fascinated by Charles’s fleshless fingers that dabbled down among the stones like chopsticks.

  She took one of the stones, a carnelian fig, in her own plump hand and felt how cold it was against her flesh. But Charles would not be conscious of the cold. He would like it. And she let the stone warm in the palm of her hand and grow ripe, reluctant to put it back. He himself had strayed towards the white, abstract jade, delicately veined or cloudy as smoke. Disgusted with him she decided to keep the fig and slipped it into her pocket.

  “Do you want them?” she asked. She wanted to disconcert him.

  “Yes.” He was not at all disconcerted. “I want them.”

  She sat very still feeling that she had been trumped, and again she fingered the fig. “Very well,” she said, “you can have them. Except for this.” She rolled the fig in her fingers, not showing it to him. He did not try to see it. Instead he stared at the empty purple plush pocket of the carrying case. “I can find another,” he said. He looked up at the clerk with that smile that could be winning if he wished it to be. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a stray,” he said.

  After half an hour of choosing he had the box filled up and she knew by then that she hated him. They put the box in the car with the rest of the luggage and she realized that he had checkmated her again. They drove back to town. In town she put the fig in a drawer and pretended to forget about it. She remembered it all the same and so did he. These days he always smiled blandly at her. She was afraid that he was tired of her and wanted to get out from under. She did not want him to do that.

  So she let him do what he wished about Jerome, which was the worst mistake she ever made, and she did not know even now how she had made it, except that, once back in town from Monterey he seemed nicer and kinder’ and somehow more understanding of her. All the same she began to be afraid of him. She felt now that even on that first night on the stairs, when she had met him, she had known that she would be afraid of him. And he had known it, too.

  It was very quick about Jerome. Charles had pushed his advantage. He had not left her alone for a moment. He even insisted upon following her when she drove behind the ambulance all the way up to Napa. Of that trip she did not remember a thing. She did remember the drive back. They made the trip in the Cadillac. He watched her. She did the driving, as usual, but it did not seem to her that she was really doing it. It seemed to her that he was doing it. Napa was in the wine country. The green vines were fresh over the parched yellow hills that rose so slowly they were scarcely hills at all, but an oceanic swell. The day was bright, clear and warm. They passed not only the vineyards, but also the abandoned ruins of Italian stone presses, now roofless and inhabited by gypsies. She did not want to return to San Francisco. When she saw its dingy but sun-sparkled towers assembled at the water’s edge she felt she would stifle when she reached it. It was stronger and more recent than she was. Charles lit her a cigarette which she did not accept because she did not want him to know that her hand was shaking. She thought she now knew what a guilty criminal must feel, who knows what the verdict will be but hopes against hope for a different sentence.

  Charles was her verdict. She still could not quite understand how he had been a crime.

  The day they finally got rid of Jerome he did not offer to come back to Atherton with her and she did not want him to do so. She wanted the illusion of being able to get away from him for a while. The drive alone, once she had dropped him in town, was harrowing. When she got into the house she knew at once, without Ethel telling her, that someone was there. She even thought she knew who. She marched through the rooms without taking off either her hat or her coat and found Ford sitting in the library with his gloves in his lap, looking at the portrait over the mantel. He did not get up when she came in.

  “Are you going to take that down, too?” he asked.

  She pulled off her gloves, eager to get a drink, and feeling somehow that he was not being fair. His heavy face was angry, and when he was angry he could be pretty bad. That was the way he had always won out over her in the old days.

  “No,” she said. “Why should I?”

  He did not stir. Anger made him motionless; but his eyes grew hard and his shoulders shook the way a cat’s do, tracking a sparrow. He seemed to crouch down in his chair.

  “Jerome was my friend,” he said. “And there’s Maggie. You won’t get away with it.”

  Her nerves were far from steady. She knew she had done wrong, but what really bothered her was the knowledge that now Charles had a real hold over her. “You silly old fool,” she said. “What could you
do? You haven’t anything left yourself.” She wondered, even then, why she had said “yourself”.

  “Maybe not,” he said. He was visibly wounded. “But maybe I don’t have to do anything. You bought yourself a barracuda this time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Charles,” he said softly.

  Her hands shook on the lid of the liquor cabinet and when she threw it up it hit the wall. She looked down at the necks of the bottles, like capped guns.

  “Anytime I feel like it I can,” she began.

  “No, you can’t. It’s too late now. He’s got you right where he wants you. You poor fool woman. I don’t have to do a thing but watch.”

  “You’ll enjoy watching, won’t you?” She picked up a bottle, slipping her hand round it.

  “Yes, I’ll enjoy that.”

  She heaved the bottle at him. She saw his face clearly. He frowned and drew his head to one side. The bottle sailed over the sofa and shattered the window, but fell inside in a tinkle of mingled glass. “Get out,” she shouted at him. “Get the hell out.”

  He glanced at her and then at the cabinet, calmly. She knew she was going to have hysterics. She was afraid to be alone.

  “It’s a pleasure,” he said. With a look towards the broken window he got up and shuffled out of the room, a little bent but still determined. She hoped Ethel had not heard her, but she was sure to see the glass. Fortunately Ethel knew better than to ask questions. When she was sure Ford was gone she went upstairs and locked Jerome’s door, and for several years it stayed locked. Charles was the only one who ever unlocked it. He unlocked it from time to time to annoy her. It did not annoy her very much, for locking the door did not help. Now that Charles had ultimately tricked her she began to realize just how alone she was.

  She tried to make the best of it, but failed. She had to have Charles, if only because there was no one else she could have. So she had to put up with whatever he felt like doing, and he took advantage of that.

  In the beginning she had seen him almost every day. Now she always had to go to bed alone. There are worse things than going to bed alone, but on the other hand nothing in the world is worse. She began to drink.

  If she phoned him up on Tuesday and he said he was busy, but to phone him Wednesday at eleven—and she was damned if she would phone him Wednesday at eleven—at eleven-thirty she phoned him all the same; and sometimes in her bath she would get the idea that maybe she was mistaken and that at that moment he was thinking of her and expecting her to phone, so she phoned him. He never was thinking of her, clearly, when she phoned him. And if she had luncheon or dinner with him, it only lasted for an hour and a half, she knew it would only last for an hour and a half, which spoiled even that little time. And if he came back to the house for a drink, it was only for a drink, while he sat there looking at her with that look of maddening amusement and self-satisfaction of his. At least, that little helped somehow to fill up the time. Barracuda wasn’t the word. She found herself doing more and more for him.

  It was easy to buy him into the partnership at the law firm. If she could not have him at the house she would rather have him at a distance in the city. She knew the partnership was his idea of right payment for his silence about Jerome, but she tried to pretend that it was a gracious woman’s beneficence to a rising young man. But he was not rising and he was not a man, and she did not feel particularly gracious. He was moving horizontally through a vertical world, towards a goal she couldn’t see and did not want to see.

  It was quite by accident that he met Maggie. At least, she thought it was by accident: with Charles it was impossible to be sure.

  Maggie took after her father. She had the Barnes jaw and the watchful, slightly sad Barnes eyes. Lily could not talk to Maggie any more. She never had been able to, if it came to that. She never knew what to say to her.

  Charles could be helpful when he chose. For some reason she did not grasp, and which made her wary, he was helpful now. He was almost attentive. This surprised her, for he had made it clear that she was not to hang around him, or make him the laughing-stock of younger people who knew him. He had to have his own career, he said, and he didn’t want anybody to know how he had got it. She had flared up at that. She had told him to get out. She had said that she wouldn’t speak to him again.

  “Oh, yes, you will,” he had said. He grinned at her. For a while she did not phone him. She went to the city less and less. It was so much easier to do everything in Atherton. She felt better there and was not humiliated. Then, after a month, when she thought she could get over him, he had phoned her up. She had been evasive but, sensing that he was about to hang up, she had said she would see him. She was surprised at his affability. He had almost apologized for not seeing her.

  “But you know how it is,” he had said, and turned on his warmer verbal smile.

  She thought tilings over and decided that they could be friends. She was older now. So was he, and trying to be older than he was. Older people needed friends. She tried to make herself older yet. But if she saw him now on Thursday, or when he drove down from town and stopped off along the way to some meeting, it only made it the harder for her that she did not see him on Friday as well.

  She had to see someone on Friday. She began to play bridge, if only for the pleasure of telling him she was busy on Friday afternoons. He didn’t seem to care. He didn’t care for bridge. He played it correctly when he had to, but that was all. There really wasn’t anything he did like to do. He was moved only by an inner sense of duty. And you cannot be the successful mistress of someone else’s sense of duty.

  Maggie did not like him. Lily thought she saw the way out of that. She wanted him back and she wanted the house filled up again. What she really needed was a good hold over him; and she forced herself to remember, now that he was being kinder to her again, that some hold she must have.

  It had all been so easy and she had been such a dupe.

  She could remember the night they had caught Maggie and Luke in the library. She had felt it coming. It came earlier than either she or Charles intended, but if anything that played on her side, not Charles’s. She had made up her mind what to do. She had swallowed her pride long ago. She had none left any longer to swallow. Not pride of the private sort, at any rate; and he was content to leave her her public pride. He didn’t need it and he knew that she did. That was the frail last self-respect between them. In his case she suspected it was only pity.

  Whatever the reason for his return he was back for a while. The night they came on Maggie and Luke he phoned and said he’d be by to take her to dinner. She went immediately to the tub and soaked in rose geranium bath salts for an hour. Then she had a shower and a rub down and looked at herself in her mirror. The trouble was that every time she let herself go she had a harder time pulling herself back into shape. She could not play both the understanding matron and attractive forty at one and the same time. Not that he gave a damn one way or the other, but she did. When first she met him she hadn’t had to worry much about her dress line and now she worried about very little else. It had been seven years.

  She did the best she could with a black dress embroidered with gold thread circles, slightly, but not too much, off the shoulder. She gave a final shake to her hair and started down the stairs. He was waiting in the hall. Half-way down, almost where she had hesitated when first she saw him in her house, she hesitated now, wondering what he was up to. For a moment the thought made her sad. She had seen him, once or twice, look at Maggie as he had looked at her five years ago. She did not much mind. She had known him for so long, and she knew so few other people that she just had to go on knowing him, no matter what.

  She was fully aware that he did not like to be seen with her in town. They had been through all that many times. But now the town was moving out to the southern suburbs he was back. At least, she hoped he was back.

  The highway south of the university was dotted with neon signs and more or less smart restau
rants. They spent the evening at one of these and then went dancing. She ate mustard steak. He ate fish braised in sauterne. After they had had enough to drink she began to enjoy herself. It gave her pleasure to be seen out again with someone other than a woman with whom she played bridge. Whereas she didn’t mind being seen with other women at lunch, at night it bothered her.

  She had too much to drink and she knew he was plotting something. He was very agreeable. He always was agreeable if he felt like it. She looked at that tight, white, artificial head with its deceptively honest eyes and wondered what he was up to. He drove her back to the house at about one-thirty. Every light in the place was on. She looked at him, startled.

  “Come in for a drink,” she said. This time she knew he would. She felt exhilarated and slightly puzzled. She was aware that such an expression made her attractive. She pulled open the doors of the library, and even though she was startled, she was aware that for some reason Charles thought the scene funny. Yet he could not know that she found Luke attractive. He could not even know who Luke was. So she lost her temper since she felt she had to show off. Charles did not find that in the least funny.

  After they heard Luke slam the front door he got up and pulled the library doors closed, got the two glasses from the table, put them back dirty in the liquor cabinet, poured himself a drink and sat down on the sofa. Maggie, she noticed, had not even lit the fire. She stooped down, her coat pulling against the cinders on the hearth, and lit it. She waited until the flames had caught and then rose and took off her coat.

  “I want to marry Maggie,” he said, and crossed his legs demurely.

  It did not faze her at all, though it made her feel cold. She gave him her monkey grin. “I know you do.”

  “I thought you might help.”

  “With my own daughter?”

  “It would keep it in the family. You want it kept in the family, don’t you?” He drawled away at her, patently pleased with himself. She noticed how thin his legs were. He hoisted one of them over the other, at right angles, so he could hold his left ankle with his right hand: that was the gesture college boys of his generation always used when they wanted to be real sincere and grown-up. He was wearing black loafers and through his black silk sock there was a faint, distasteful glimmer of white flesh. They were the legs of a very old man, or of a juvenile playing a very old man in college theatricals. She wondered if he had ever acted in amateur theatricals, he had something of that sexless face.