A Winter's Child

by Brenda Jagger

  But he had asked for her help.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘Just that. And a little more. I rarely fail in my resolve but if I should ask you to come back to me, don’t come. Can you promise me that?’

  It was the first promise she had made him.

  ‘You do understand,’ he said, ‘that it is the best we can do now – all we can do.’

  She understood.

  It made no difference.

  Chapter Eighteen

  She agreed that she had to leave him. There were times when she even wanted to do it. It became an act of love and salvation – both his and her own. She tried.

  She spent the following Sunday afternoon sitting with Euan Ash in his cold and dusty studio watching in careful silence as he painted minute petals and humming birds and butterflies on plain white china, small masterpieces created for his pleasure which he would then sell without a backward glance in Faxby Market for a shilling or two. ‘Take what you like,’ he offered, and, feeling stunned, her whole mind out of focus yet still continuing, as a result of thorough training, to go through the motions, she thanked him and selected, by no means at random, a cup and saucer alive with bluebells and perfect if improbable blue-winged sparrows.

  ‘Thanks, Euan. I’ll always keep it.’

  ‘Whatever for? I suppose you’ll hang on to that piece of red glass round your neck too.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  How calm she was: as from a hammer blow to the head: as from the freezing or the simple sweeping away of sensation by a disaster too great to be endured and, therefore, at its first shock, not even felt. How calm she was, preparing for dinner at High Meadows that night, wearing his ruby, smiling at Parker as he came to fetch her and then, fifteen minutes later, smiling at Miriam and Polly and Eunice, at Benedict himself; doing all the things she had promised, of which she had assured him she was capable. Since – of course – for Dorothy’s sake, for everybody’s sake, for her own self-esteem, she must get used to seeing him again as her brother-in-law, a Swanfield, an acquaintance. No friendship. He rejected that utterly and she did not really think it possible herself. They must be together, or not together. Very well. They could not be together. How calm she was, how very pleasant at the dinner table, how wonderfully empty and absent, talking neither too much nor too little, not looking at him yet not ignoring him, except for that single moment when, getting up from her chair to go into the drawing room, she caught his eye. But apart from that one brief moment when her stomach had lurched and her breath had got stuck somewhere like a barbed fish-hook in her chest, how well she was doing. How calm, even when he appeared in the drawing room door, looking for his victim, and said in his curt, judicial ‘Family Sunday’manner, ‘Would you come into the study please, Claire.’

  ‘Poor Claire,’ gurgled Polly who had been expecting a summons herself. ‘What have you been up to?’

  She got up and followed him, across the hall, into the study and straight on like a sleepwalker to wind her arms around his neck, sensation returning to her body as it made inch by inch contact with his.

  ‘You shouldn’t do this,’ he said roughly into her ear. ‘You shouldn’t come when I call you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t call me.’

  So it went on. Partings leading only to reconciliations which, in their turn and just as swiftly, led to fresh partings. A painfully revolving circle shading from moments when separation seemed possible to moments when it did not. The summer was hot, torturous, unbearably prolonged; sultry, airless days which brought Claire a succession of blinding headaches – what else could it be, she told her mother, but the weather? – and which produced in Benedict a loss of weight and appetite, a deplorable shortness of temper, attributable, of course, to the sorry state of trade in Fax by and to the recurring problems of an unstable wife and two withdrawn, unhappy children home from school for the holidays. His Sunday afternoons were spent with them now, inspecting abbey ruins or Roman remains at York, uneasy outings made partly to keep them away from Nola who, at every opportunity, took them up to her room and, through a fog of tobacco, questioned them about their dreams, shaking her head wisely, prophetically, as she uncovered in each one the seeds of a dozen neuroses.

  That she bewildered and embarrassed them was very certain. That they were ill at ease with Benedict was equally clear. While the presence of both parents, when Benedict invited Nola to accompany them on a visit to the Roman Wall at Hexham, produced verbal paralysis in Christian and Conrad and an unfortunate incident with Nola who, declining to ‘walk the wall’on a particularly sultry afternoon, remained at a local hotel to be retrieved by Benedict in a condition which even her wellwishers could not have described as other than very drunk. She had expected motherhood to be romantic and was finding it far more irksome than she had supposed, revolving far more around dry socks and regular supplies of beef sandwiches than any grand emotional rescue, of filling their stomachs in a perfectly conventional fashion rather than making of herself a bridge for the passage of their liberated feet. While Benedict, who could supply sandwiches in any quantity or variety and held the view that, at present, his duty was to keep them safe rather than set them free, returned from the company of the silent, critical youngsters looking jaded and worn out.

  Yet he continued, regularly and rigidly, not only to perform his duty – as he saw it – but to hold Nola, so far as he could, to hers. It was a situation from which Claire could only keep her distance. Her own childhood, stifled by her mother’s obsession with Edward, had made her unusually wary of finding herself in the same position with regard to other children. And she had no desire to complicate the already taut and complex lives of Christian and Conrad Swanfield, who had no real relationship with their own mother, by expecting them to form a relationship with her. She was neither emotionally prepared nor physically old enough to be their mother. What could she ever seem to them but an intruder, as Edward had always seemed to her? Once or twice, meeting them by chance, she tried to talk to them and dismally failed; not, she imagined, because they disliked her but because they had never given any thought to her at all. She did not concern them. Did she wish to bring herself to their attention? Was she up to it? She thought not. Benedict did not disagree.

  ‘Let’s not prolong the agony,’ he told her. ‘Where’s the sense to that?’

  ‘No sense.’

  ‘Then keep your promise this time, Claire. Don’t come back to me.’

  She promised. Six times, in fact, from May to August, a promise six times broken.

  ‘You shouldn’t come to me when I call.’

  ‘You shouldn’t call me.’

  So it went on.

  What they needed now was an event, an accident, an intervention from outside either to force them apart, which they freely admitted would be for the best, or to bind them irrevocably together, taking the decision out of their hands. She had lived her whole life according to the whims of such accidents and interventions, making the best or enduring the worst of what happened or of what had been done to her. He had lived his life, retained his impeccable composure, by ensuring that very little happened to him at all. And there were times now when the great defence of that composure began to crack, or perhaps even worse, to melt away.

  One night at Thornwick it ebbed far enough to provide a moment of destiny, one of those small vital lapses into what may afterwards be seen as great folly or great wisdom, one of those short half-hours or less which can change, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, the whole course of lives.

  The black marble bath was not quite big enough for two and so, whenever the day had been long and hot, they bathed quickly, separately, Benedict usually first, Claire second since it was then, in the expectation of making love, that she prepared herself with the sponges and creams, the paraphernalia of caution and commonsense which she kept, carefully wrapped and disguised, in his bathroom cabinet. But this evening, meeting her in the bedroom door
way as he came from the bath, finding her undressed and waiting her turn, he did not move aside but stood for what seemed a long while looking down at her intently, examining her body in a manner which suddenly embarrassed her.

  She spoke his name in enquiry. He shook his head, dismissing, denying whatever had been in his mind and then, very suddenly, as if the thought had refused its dismissal and come rushing back again, lifted her onto the bed and, covering her body with the greater strength and heat and weight of his own, filling her nostrils with the particular scents of his skin and hair which could only be Benedict, began the slow process of possession to which she surrendered at once, until the memory of her contraceptive gadgetry still reposing in his bathroom cupboard caused her a thrill of alarm.

  ‘Darling – I have to go to the bathroom –’

  ‘Ah yes – Doctor Marie Stopes is waiting is she?’

  Yet still he held her.

  ‘Benedict –?’ Her voice, to her own ears, sounded small and bewildered.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘Then let me get up.’

  ‘Yes.’ But he continued to make love to her, his recklessness – and when had he ever been reckless in his life before? – producing no further alarm in her as it should have done but a warm, rapidly stirring excitement: a glow of wonder.

  ‘Shall we take the risk just once, Claire – and see?’

  Had he really said that? She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him slowly, taking time as well as pleasure, because she wanted to think about it, to bask for as long as she could in this perilous, tantalizing madness. For of course it was madness. Wonderful and incredible but totally insane.

  Her struggle, throughout her adult life, had been against pregnancy not towards it, but now, flooding her awareness, came his entirely primitive, entirely natural male desire to fertilize, as an act of perfect union and possession, his chosen woman. Of course he would not do it. But by allowing her to see that he desired it, he had given her a treasure. She would always remember it.

  ‘Oh Lord – what am I doing?’ she said.

  ‘Loving me.’

  Yes. That was it. Loving him. And hazarding her future, as she had always done, on an act of chance or fate, risking herself, once again, on a throw of the dice and making the best she could, afterwards, of the way they fell. Loving him Trusting him. Giving herself in full. A mood of absolute abandon possessed her, going beyond sensuality, beyond all desire for such refinements as orgasm to a basic and far more primitive need. He wanted to make her pregnant. Her body was aching now and greedy to conceive. She had never, in her whole life, been so touched by madness, so aware of danger yet dazzled by what she recognized and continued to think of, long afterwards, as glory. And it was the glory that mattered. She belonged now entirely to him yet, at the same time, she had never felt so totally in possession of herself. She had agreed, by this act, to belong to him. She had consented. They had chosen to be together. All that remained to be decided now were the practicalities.

  ‘Lie still,’ he said and she obeyed him, curled warmly against him while his seed completed its journey through her womb weaving, beyond any question, the irrevocable pattern of their lives. It was the seed, she realized, which would decide.

  ‘Have we gone crazy, Benedict?’

  ‘Very likely. One learns odd things about oneself. I ought to be ashamed, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose so. I ought to have stopped you.’

  Hearing the clock chime she got out of bed feeling strange and shy, a little unreal, and, holding her for a moment in what seemed a delicate embrace, he began to dress her very carefully and thoroughly, fastening every button, smoothing every fold, tucking her into her clothes and keeping her warm as if she herself had been a helpless, precious child.

  The night had turned cold. He buttoned her coat, turned up her collar, wound his scarf around her neck, clicked his tongue in indulgent reproach because she had no gloves, tilted her chin and kissed her lightly on her nose and her forehead while she leaned, against him, weak and dizzy with this new depth of emotion. And, still safe in her sweet and wonderful madness, she believed that she was already carrying his child.

  ‘If you are so careful with me now,’ she said, still leaning against him, still safely and warmly insane, ‘how will you treat me in six months’time?’

  And, his mouth against her hair, he made, gravely and precisely, his first and only declaration of love.

  ‘I will look after you, Claire, and cherish you as much as I possibly can. It will be a great deal.’

  Yet the folly, was not repeated. And when, after two weeks of suppressed agony, she was able to tell him that she had not conceived, she understood that they had reached the end. The sweet madness had become an act of gross irresponsibility for which – once he was quite certain that there would be no consequences for her to bear – he now felt able to apologize.

  There seemed no longer the remotest possibility that he would ever lose his reason in that way again. They had taken their gamble. Had they won or lost? It made no difference now. He was going to Italy in a week or two with his sons to encourage their taste for pictures and statues and grand opera. Nola, just possibly, would go with them. Claire smiled. Yes. She hoped so. Quite definitely it would befor the best. And, as for herself, she would stay in Faxby until Polly’s wedding at the end of September, and then …? Well, as they had so often remarked, the world was full of opportunities for an independent and not precisely dull-witted woman. She would find plenty to do.

  They were very careful with one another now, elaborately courteous, so anxious to be helpful and co-operative and never – in any circumstances – to blame or criticize each other for anything, that their reticence was sometimes deeply moving, while at others it grated on their nerves.

  They no longer made love. This too, they both hastily and frequently agreed, was for the best. For if she had not conceived by intent on that strange wild night, it did not follow that she could not conceive now, by accident. The following ‘Family Sunday’ which now invariably included Roger Timms, also brought Elvira Redfearn to High Meadows at Benedict’s invitation, her presence in his car that night preventing him from being alone with Claire. Yet the next time they were alone together, when he took her to Thornwick to collect the odds and ends which Mrs Mayhew could easily have packed and sent on to her, she was aware not only that he wanted her but that if she moved only half a step towards him, he would not resist.

  But she experienced no feeling of power, nothing but a deep, damp sorrow clinging to her like seaweed, slowing her down as she went to the bathroom for her toothbrush, the bedroom for her black silk nightgown, her wispy lingerie, her perfume and powder, her discreet little embroidered wallet of contraceptive sponges and creams, all the essentials of a love-affair which, when hastily bundled together, did not even fill a small bag.

  It was over. Five minutes to pack it away, zip up her bag, and go. She sat down on the bed, feeling the room around her, remembering almost to the point of seeing and hearing herself and Benedict together here, tense sometimes and often anxious, so often in that aching state of half-happiness, of not quite daring to be happy, that terrible sense of time lost, time running out, which had been the most unbearable of all.

  They had been cruelly, mistakenly right for each other. Only the time had been wrong and the location; and the crowding demands of others. Left alone together they would have been perfectly and deeply content. He would have filled her life. She would have warmed and broadened and delighted his. In a world of half-unions and decaying unions, half-commitments and unwilling commitments, of falling standards and failing virtues, they could have been whole together, honest, and sound.

  ‘I will look after you and cherish you as much as I possibly can. It will be a great deal.’

  What a monstrous waste. What a criminal squandering of time which ought never, never, to be squandered; what an unpardonable throwing away of life and of the love which was its greatest privilege
. She had seen too much of that. The door opened. ‘Are you ready, Claire?’

  ‘Yes.’ She got up, feeling light and faintly unsteady, a note or two out of tune with herself, unable to remember just where she had put her bag. Yes – there it was, at her feet. She would never come here again. Somehow she must make herself believe it. She smiled, held out both her hands to him and, lifting her off her feet and onto the bed again, he made love to her like a man in deep water struggling for air, her body unresisting, passive, while he raged over it and then, his needs spent, shuddered and turned his back to her with a long sigh.

  It had been for both of them a terrible experience, an act of extreme compulsion beyond any control she had ever learned to exercise and beyond his entirely, it seemed. He had not intended it and now, as in their first days together, he had turned away from her, leaving her alone.

  ‘Benedict –’ She had not expected him to answer her.

  She had eased his bodily tensions, his inbred guilts and remorse so many times after making love with little more than the soft pressure of her fingertips. Dare she touch him now? Gingerly she reached out a hand, feeling the muscles of his shoulder contracting hard and rigid beneath her pahn. ‘Leave me alone,’ he snarled and she drew back her hand as if his skin had burned her.

  He got up without a word, dressed, went out of the room and after a while, her head and her bones aching, her skin sore in patches, hot in others, she put on her clothes very neatly she thought when one considered how badly her hands were shaking, and followed him.

  He was sitting by the great stone hearth, no fire in the grate, the lamps unlit, the room, without its familiar illumination of jewelled glass, the glow and crackle of pine logs burning, looking shadowy and vaguely sinister, feeling chill, giving her the uneasy impression of a stage set when the audience and the players are gone.

  This was not the house she knew. Nor the man. Or had the house ever been more than an illusion which had now lost its point and its purpose, which he was just too weary now to create?