Valley of Decision
Page 24
‘Oh, David. That’s marvellous.’ A further flood of chatter penetrated no farther than his eardrums. Her talk took the guise of a ritual he could afford to ignore.
‘Is she there now?’ What did the damned woman mean? She knew quite well.
‘Yes.’
‘Would she, I mean, could I speak to her?’
‘I’ll see.’
He asked Mary, who had assumed the expression of one trying not to listen in. She rose without fuss, as to an inquiry from a shopkeeper, a telly-hire firm, the jobbing builder.
For a time she answered in monosyllables, so that he could only guess the direction of conversation. Mary’s face was dry of tears, but she did not smile, answered without facial expression as if she concentrated on a foreign language, afraid to miss the crucial word. David thought he detected in her stance something of that stiffness which had disfigured her earlier in the afternoon.
He listened, looking at his shoes. He had been convinced that Mary would stay with him, but he saw the possibility that Anna’s impertinent intervention, person from Porlock, would give Mary the opportunity to draw back.
‘Yes. – Oh, yes. – Um. – Is it? – Well. – Yes. Do they? – Oh. – I see. – No. – I don’t think so.’
He tried to make sense of these separate dullnesses and the animated cackle between. He failed. He tensely took the arm of the chair.
‘Oh, I expect so.’
Mary turned, looked at him. Suddenly he knew joy and certainty. God knows what she expected, perhaps to run across Anna some time, but the expectation was great. She would stay. She was his wife again. He would be a father. The sourness, the disappointments had not disappeared, but were in perspective. These would, she had said, and he knew for himself, savage him in the future, but for the moment he had made his proposal, only half understanding its nature and its commitments, and she had accepted. The act had remade them; they had begun, and already the pleasure of completion warmed him.
‘Yes. I think that’s likely.’
He was suspicious, and afraid. By God he was. Three months’ hell is not wiped off the slate without trace. Smears blotch ugly.
‘It’s possible.’
What uplifted him now was the ease of his conviction. Once he had stepped up, like a sinner to the penitents’ form, another of his father’s childhood reminiscences, and declared himself he knew, without disclaimers, riders, ifs and buts that he had done right. It sang inside him. Father David and his anecdotes.
‘There’ll be snags.’ Cackle, prestissimo, cackle, goose laughter. ‘Aren’t there always?’
It did not matter to him. He had taken a stance, almost against his nature, and the reward had been out of all proportion. Mary was talking now almost as fast as Anna Talbot about something Elizabeth Falconer had said or done, quite at home.
He remembered a sentence from his sixth form days, from Cymbeline, Posthumus to his restored Imogen:
Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die.
David found his feet.
‘No, no,’ Mary was saying. ‘Not at all. Must ring off, now. Thanks for the call. Yes. See you, Anna. Bye. Yes. Bye.’
She replaced the phone.
‘I’ll ring Derby,’ she asked, ‘shall I, to tell them I’ll not be back tonight?’
She stretched a hand out to touch impossibility in an imperfect world.
Husband and father, he reached back.
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VALLEY OF DECISION
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Middleton, Stanley
Valley of decision.
I. Title
823’.914[F] PR6063.125
ISBN 9780099591931
First published in Great Britain 1985 by Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd Copyright © Stanley Middleton 1985
This edition published 1986 by Methuen London Ltd
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE