‘They might have a natural sympathy in that direction, yes. A natural inclination. But they have been known to set their inclinations aside.’
‘Yes, I know. But only for good reasons. Like the fact that Christopher used to beat me black and blue and lock me in the bedroom. I sometimes wonder if really he learned all that kind of behaviour from my father. Or whether I’d bring it out in anybody. But no, the point is, nobody could prove that Christopher beats the children black and blue because he doesn’t, he’s very good with them, he gives them all the things I won’t give them.’
‘But you don’t beat them either.’
‘No, of course I don’t. I simply deprive them. Or so he’ll say.’
‘But you deprive them of some things in order to offer them others. Or so I imagine.’
‘But do I, do I? What, after all, do I offer them but myself? And why should I of all people be able to believe that that’s such a big deal?’
‘You are their mother.’
‘Yes, I know. And so is he their father.’
He sighed, and buttoned his coat.
‘There’s no easy answer, in such cases.’
‘I must let you go.’
‘Yes, I must go, they will be wondering where I am.’ She wondered, listening, how often she had heard this delicate plural: they, meaning she. And wondered also, as she saw him off, receiving his assurances that he would look things up for her, and contact her, and give her any help he could, why he had made her so little uneasy, as some such men did. She was exposed to men, being a friendly woman, and living alone. A lot of them upset her, more because of the brutality (as it seemed to her) with which she had to treat them, than because of any offence committed by them against her. But Simon Camish, although the kind of person that ought to disseminate unease, for some reason did not. He was so angular, and thin, and jerky, that he ought to communicate restlessness. Perhaps he didn’t because he was there on her invitation, and because one could confidently rely on him not to make any kind of pass. Because the need involved was hers, not his. Or perhaps it was because he was so quick. She didn’t mind people being jerky if they were also quick.
As she went into the kitchen to do the washing-up, which she always did, these days, carefully, before going to bed, in careful repudiation of those years when she and Christopher had collapsed in drink or bitterness or fury amongst a sea of crying bodies, dirty plates, and glasses, she thought over the things she had said to him. Impossible, really, not to plead one’s cause, not to lie in one’s own defence. One became, in any dispute, incurably partisan, and she could not help but be so now that it seemed to her that it was the whole of herself and the whole of her past that were on trial. It was a matter of all that she had believed in, so she was bound to plead for those beliefs. Perhaps there was no truth to be told. She rinsed the plates, carefully, and put them on the rack to drain.
Going to bed, undressing, brushing her hair, she thought about the loneliness in which she claimed to have been reared. It had been real enough, but nevertheless she had grossly exaggerated it. Of course she had had friends, of course her parents had been concerned for her, and had done their best to accommodate her in their rather unsuitable lives. Her early childhood had in fact been happy. She thought of it, as she had not thought for a long time. It had been an innocent time, and always summer, as one’s recollections of infancy are traditionally supposed to be. When she was four, Noreen had introduced her to the village school, and there she had stayed, for years, till she was eight, until her father had decided she ought to have private tuition. She had liked the school, she had taken to it with a great simplicity. She had made a friend there. One made friends so easily, at that age. Her friend was called Joyce. She could not remember, however hard she tried to do so, their first meeting, and the way in which they had become friends: there had been no reason for it. They had just become a pair, naturally. Perhaps Joyce had said to her, let’s be friends. Perhaps she had said this to Joyce. She could not remember. Joyce was the daughter of the village cobbler, and her mother was a big woman in a flowery apron. Noreen despised Joyce’s mother and said she was simple, as an insult, an insult which Rose had not understood till years later. Joyce herself was a round child, with fair frizzy hair not unlike Rose’s own. Perhaps that was what had brought them together. They had played the golden-haired twins in a little school play about princes and princesses. They used to re-enact this play, endlessly, in the playground. Their favourite word was yonder. Neither of them knew what it meant, but they used to say to each other things like,
‘Where are you going, sister?’ and the other one would reply, ‘Yonder,’ and the word would evoke a place of such mystic and visionary loveliness, a thin aspiring castle on the brow of a green hill, a tower above the raging sea, a heavenly city. Joyce had one hand without fingers. She had burned all the fingers off her right hand on the radiant of an electric fire when she was a baby, and all that remained was a little pink scarred paw, with vestigial stumps round the diminished palm. Rose had liked this stumpy little hand, and had held it with love. It was a friendly shape, nice and rounded, more welcoming than the ordinary grasping sort of hand with poking fingers. She looked back, now, lying there in bed and listening to the rain fall, and wondered at the feelings she had had about this hand, because nowadays any deformity frightened and repelled her, as a threat to her own children. But then, she had accepted it and held it with a completely unquestioning trust: and so, moreover, had everybody in the school. She could not remember a single joke about it, a single movement of revulsion, a single hostile sneer. It had been accepted, it had been how things were. And so had Joyce herself, and all the children at that school. There had been stupid ones, and naughty ones, and dirty ones, and ones who never had a handkerchief – Miss Acomb had never commented on those dripping noses, she had kept a supply of rags in her desk and wiped children when they needed it. There had been boys who stamped on fledglings when they fell out of the nest in the school roof, and boys who stuck straws up the backs of daddy-long-legses, but although Rose and Joyce hadn’t liked these activities, and had avoided the boys who went in for them, they hadn’t been censorious. They hadn’t thought of it. She thought of the school playground, and the Elsan lavatories where the boys used to piss over the wall into the girls’, and the iron railing that had fallen on Shirley Madge’s foot, and the little hole in the wall where she and Joyce used to store scrapings of sand that they called gold dust. Miss Acomb had boxes of pictures. They showed tulip fields in Holland, and rice fields in India, and maize fields in America. They were beautiful, and all the children loved them, and used to beg her to get them out to show. They were deprived of pictures, partly by the war, partly by homes without books of any sort, and Miss Acomb’s pictures were treasures at which nobody thought to mock. It had been a world of such primal simplicity. And it was a world that she had hoped her own children would find, here, in this brick desert, in this dense and monstrous urban wilderness. It had been a foolish hope, a ridiculous expectation, but it had been justified. They had found it, it was there. She remembered those days when Konstantin had been five, and she would nervously wait with the pushchair in the playground to collect him, and he would run out to her, and show her his bubble-gum cards, and the swops he had made, and tell her about the boy who had given him a marble in exchange for a biscuit, and about the new photographs (cut out of a colour supplement) that Mrs Gomez had stuck on the classroom wall, and about the tadpoles that had grown legs and jumped out and died under the blackboard duster. And about the blackey who called him whitey and said I’ll give you a white eye, and the whitey who had taught him a very curious rhyme about Greeks and Turkeys. (She always suspected that the disseminator of this rhyme must have been a Greek or a Turk himself, but Konstantin swore he was the little boy from the pub on Elysium Road, whose name, she quite well knew, was Roberts.)
Christopher, having prized out of her in an unguarded moment some recollection about her own early scho
oldays, had looked at her with savagery, and said that if she thought there was anything in common between a village school in rural Norfolk and a primary school in North London, then she must be mad. He backed this up with a few horrifying anecdotes from his own past. Her only retort could be, people like you must have been out looking for trouble and what you look for you find. But she hadn’t been able to assert this with much confidence. It was on faith, not on evidence that she operated, after all.
She stopped thinking about the schools. There was something else that was worrying her, but she could not remember what it was. Something she had said or not said to Simon Camish. How pleasant it was, to lie alone in bed, undisturbed, with one’s children asleep, and recollect in reasonable tranquillity. Yes, that was it, it was that eight months of exile. That, she had made too little of, not too much, but there were confidences about that which could never be made, and how could anybody believe one half of the misery she had then endured? It had been the unbearable, agonizing boredom of it that had nearly finished her, but how could anybody have much sympathy for the boredom of a wealthy young girl, regaled with the choicest culture of Europe (because Sonia had been conscientious about culture, one had to give her that) and with only eight months – a diminishing eight – to wait before her total freedom? But dreadful it had been. It was hard to believe it now, when every day seemed, if occasionally painful, at least endlessly fruitful, and rewarding, and full, and above all interesting. But then, she had lived with her eyes upon her watch. She could never have believed that an hour could take so long to pass. And the image of her mother, bored without any prospect of redemption, had haunted her. The only thing she had been able to enjoy – and this was humiliating, in the last degree – had been eating. She had known, during that period of time, what her worst fate would be – to live alone, quietly eating herself to death. She had put on over a stone in those months. Luckily she had been thin to begin with, so it hadn’t shown disastrously, but a lifetime of it would have been more conspicuous, no doubt. She had lived for mealtimes. Waking up was such misery that it could only be assuaged by endless rolls and brioches and croissants, covered in butter and jam: by mid-morning she was pleading with Sonia for a cream cake: and her only interest in the hotels that they stayed in came from the quality of their menus. She had no interest in the view, or in the location, she could remember little of the cultural objects she had seen, but she could remember, alas, the steaks and the cassoulets and the langoustines and the kneidlech and the roast goose and the puddings. Sonia had been astonished by this behaviour: it was almost funny, in retrospect, to remember Sonia’s astonishment at the way her charge, officially pining away for love, had eaten course after course in expensive restaurants with obvious relish. While her jaws were moving, Rose had been able to stop worrying. It was as simple as that, though she had never explained this to Sonia. She had in fact corrupted Sonia, who had started off with the traditionally finicky British and abstemious views of all her mother’s family – a boney spinster, she was, Sonia, once a private secretary, but now too old to demean herself in however grand a job – but by the end of the holiday old Sonia had been tucking in to whatever dishes Rose took the responsibility of ordering. She too had put on a lot of weight, and looked much better for it. On her return to England she had actually got married. Rose was very relieved about that and wondered if she should take the credit. She had been more worried at the time that Sonia would relapse like herself into a middle age of comforting boxes of chocolates.
Neither of them drank much. It would have been one solution to anxiety, but Rose, determined to play Sonia’s game, had been afraid to alarm her by drinking, and also drink made her hideously miserable.
There were other things that had made her miserable. One was a tapestry of Hero and Leander in Bratislava. The story itself was what had set her mind going – her mind, which responded not at all to objects which she could not relate to Christopher – but the thought of the land and ocean separating her from her love had attached her to those tapestries. They were in sequence, showing Leander’s swimming of the Hellespont, their happy union, and his subsequent death. There was even a Sonia figure, a confidante, holding the torch as he arrived gasping on the shore. The way that the artist and the needlewoman had portrayed Leander’s limbs beneath the stitched blue curling waves had afflicted her dreadfully, because the limbs were like Christopher’s, solid, white and naked. She had suffered such pangs of desire, watching these cultural objects, that she could hardly move on.
The other thing that had distressed her had been the monkeys in the Bois de Boulogne. God knows why they had gone there, because it was a nice day perhaps, but they had gone, and listened to the sad squawks of the peacocks, and commented with incredible mutual trite dullness and distaste that it was strange that such elegant creatures made such ugly sounds: then they had gone to look at the monkeys. (Or apes, maybe, she wouldn’t have known the difference.) They were in a kind of rocky, barren enclosure, with a moat round, a whole group of them. Sad colony. Mothers grasped babies and gazed with despair in their eyes at the blank blue sky. Adult males sighed and scratched themselves in a bitter parody of boredom. A few young ones played, listlessly, without interest, in the dust. They looked like refugees, or prisoners, or exiles. Watching them, her eyes had filled with tears, and she had wept, and Sonia had patted her shoulder awkwardly, and Rose had sniffed crossly and looked at her watch and found that it was still, amazingly, only three thirty, with another five unbelievable hours to wade through until dinner and the jambon de Bayonne or lobster Thermidor she had resolved to try that night.
It was amazing, remembering such incidents, that she had survived until their return. What with all those little reports on Christopher’s infidelity that had arrived to amuse her. She had said to herself, perhaps he sleeps with those girls as I eat, to pass the time. She had probably been right about that, because the one thing she could never explain, to anyone, because she was too modest, was that she knew quite well that Christopher had not been pretending to want her for the money. Oh yes, it was quite reasonable to suppose that he wanted the money too, even she would admit that the course of events would fully justify anyone who thought that, but she alone could be sure that he had really wanted her. She knew it. One could not mistake such a matter, she did not understand how anyone could mistake such a matter. (People did, she had to admit, but then people were optimistic and hopeful and willing to be deluded, whereas she had been diffident, hopeless, and had needed endless persuading.) Christopher had wanted her, and he had had her. He hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her. It had amazed and delighted her. They had unmistakably done all the things that people do, and felt all the things that people feel. One couldn’t imagine such a thing, it had been so. And yet this was also connected with the very worst thing, the other thing that she could never admit, because it was too dreadful, too painful, too sad. And this was the fact that by the time she came back to England, it was ruined. Oh, they were faithful to one another, they were undivided, fate had not separated them, they had swum the Hellespont, she had faithfully returned, and he, summoned by the newspapers, had faithfully received her, but their absence from one another had – there was no point in denying it, she knew it now, though for years she had tried to ignore it – their absence had divided them. They had laboured and sweated to be reunited, both of them, he as well as she, and she had loved him for the effort, but that spontaneous joy and that effortless renewal had come to an end, it had died between them, it had been brutally murdered. From time to time they made it, driven by despair, or violence, or memory, or the will to have what they had had – and Christopher, Christ, she had to admit that Christopher would have got life from a stone – but it had, nevertheless, been finished, and it would never be again. Exhausted, damp, they had lain in bed and looked at one another, in that first year of marriage, and they had known that it was so. It was through no betrayal, no treachery, the crime had not been theirs, so they could share,
a little, the misery, they could reach for one another in the end and fall asleep in a communion of loss. But loss it was, and they could do nothing to revoke the death of the spirit. The spirit bloweth whither it listeth. What horrible tags her mind was packed with. It was Noreen’s fault, she had made her learn a few verses of the Bible every day after tea. One remembered those that one needed. And they were all cruel ones, like the camel and the needle, and to those that have it shall be given, and the spirit simply drifting away, idly, irresponsibly, abandoning those that so needed and so implored it.
On the boat, on the way back over the Channel, that last time, she had foreseen something of this, so she had not been entirely faithful. If she had been entirely faithful, surely she could have subdued her fears? But she had knelt there, in the first-class bar, looking through the round window, and the sky had been a dull dove grey, and the sea had been a dull grey, and they had met, softly, dimly, the sea and the sky, with no noticeable collision, a dim pall of neither air nor water seeming to separate, join and combine them, a pallid heavy uniformity, and she had known that she was afraid, and that Christopher, waiting bravely for her, was afraid too, but that he like her was stubborn, obstinate to the last degree, that he would never admit defeat, and that he would meet her and take her and keep her, for better or worse. For worse, as it so happened.
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