‘Is that right’
Her account seemed intelligent, as if she suddenly livened herself, made the effort, but now she flagged, minutely expressing unconcern with her expression.
‘I don’t know.’
He should have pressed her.
‘It seemed likely enough.’ Too late, He never repaired faults with Meg. Broken meant smashed irreparably. Though he was never sure.
On their honeymoon they’d been out for a walk, on a showery day, and though both were cold they hadn’t the energy to strike out, warm themselves. They hugged each other, kissed in bleak fields, under wind-stunted trees, but seemed dazed, unable to find exhilaration in the weather, the whip of the gale, rain’s slashing. They worked their way down to a valley where a muddy lane led between hawthorn hedges and through a farm yard.
Down there all stood quiet, with the air almost warm as they consulted their map. They differed over that; Meg wanted to climb back over the hill into the next valley where they’d meet a main road; he argued that they’d do better to move straight on past the farm on to a secondary road and back home that way. He was polite; meticulously he measured the distances, courteously asking her to check every calculation. By this way they saved a mile and a half and kept to moderately level ground. She yielded, grudgingly.
As soon as they set off he knew he’d done wrong to insist. It was not the superiority of his route, nor his proof of this she resented, but the mud on this lane. Puddles clouded brown, and the top half inch of the surface shone with moisture, as slippery as glass. She put her feet down gingerly; her stockings were already splattered black. As they trudged past the outhouses, dogs barked, fierce as wolves, while at the last gate, the ground stank with mud a foot deep, churned and pitted.
‘Oh, to be in England,’ he’d said.
The grey blackened, and for a few minutes hail raked their way, so they had to stand with their backs to the storm. His arm circled her, but she no longer responded, dabbed at her reddened face with a wet handkerchief.
‘I can see blue sky,’ he said. ‘Won’t last long.’
His trousers were soaked. She sniffed.
‘We’ve more shelter here than we’d have up the hillside.’
Again she ignored him, shaking drops from her hood, shivering. Her face shone paler now, waxy with wet, as they set out again through a lane filthy as the yard.
‘We’ll walk in single file by the hedge-bottom,’ he said, mounting a narrow bank above the level of the path. ‘Shall I go first?’
She did not answer but he heard her behind him, plodding, uttering little gasps of displeasure as she slithered or brought a thrash of raindrops down from the twigs in the hedge.
‘We’re making good time,’ he called back.
He did not believe it, fearing that his feet would go from under him and he’d be flat out in the sludge.
No reply, but the sniffs, the rustle of sleeve on anorak.
‘We might have a bit of sunshine yet.’
A cloud mass was touched with gold once at its edges before the wind tore them into smoke.
Thud of feet, mud-soled; sullen silence; disgruntled breathing.
‘When we get over this little ridge we should see the road,’ he said. ‘It can’t be more than a mile off.’
Swish of coat, sleeve; toggle swing; dissatisfaction.
Here the surface was solider, grass-covered, and Fisher began to leg it, half to spite Meg. He heard her yelp of fright, the thump as she fell, but took three steps before he turned. She was down in the lane, on one knee and both her hands in the muck. Black water oozed over the fingers. He took her under the left arm and heaved her to her feet. Without a word she stepped the six inches upwards to the bank.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
He could not see her face, turned from him in its darkening hood.
Savagely, clumsy, she dragged the gloves from her hands, squeezed the pair, black drop by drop, before she flung the ball of soiled cloth into the hedge bottom. Now she lifted her skirt. Her right knee was splashed with shining mud. Immediately he snatched at his handkerchief to join her gloves.
She laughed.
He made her wear his heavy mittens, and soon they’d reached the road, arm in arm splashing. Her mood was light; he sang. Another shower did not stop them, merely caused them to walk faster and vie with each other in swearing at the weather. By the time they reached their lodgings, an hour and a half later, moderation had set in, they were temperate, but warmly friendly. That proved their best day as they talked by the sitting room fire, making subdued love in the vast creaking bed, dropping to sleep in an embrace. He remembered now the silver fat raindrops on the black hedges, bouncing and flying, the wind’s energy, the whirling débris of the disturbed sky and their walking, their strut, his proud ‘Road to the Isles.’
She had laughed.
And as he’d wiped at that muddy knee, that sweet of sex, its juicy symbol, he’d known his role as husband. She’d fallen, without humiliation, switched from sulky anger to laughter which had saved him, cleansed his faults, sainted her, manned him in youth, crowned him, serf on the wrong track, lord of all.
Perhaps that would happen now.
‘What are you smiling about?’ she asked.
When he told her, she looked puzzled, had to be reminded grudging, admitted that it had happened, but offered no corroborative detail to encourage further reminiscence. As far as he could read her expression, it showed mild exasperation, embarrassment.
‘You’d come back?’ she asked again.
‘Yes.’
She waited, in anticipation of qualifying clauses, but he left it there.
‘I’m going away,’ she said, distantly.
‘From here?’
‘Of course.’ She frowned, without anger, at his stupidity.
‘To live?’
Now she sat nursing clasped hands between her knees, in reverie. This annoyed him, because he knew now she was not trying, did not consider him, had some trick up her sleeve, but he forced himself to stay still, to rummage in his head for nothing in particular, to make a creative work of staring at the carpet.
‘I shall go on holiday,’
‘That’s good.’ A bonhomie he did not feel. ‘Where will you go?’
‘In September,’ she said, ‘I shall go to India.’
That flattened him.
‘By air?’ he said, gasping for it.
‘Yes. The monsoon is over then, and I shall get the best of the weather.’
‘Are you going on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it, is it a sort of, of package-deal?’
‘Not really.’
‘Isn’t it very expensive?’
‘Daddy will pay.’
That smacked down, reduced him in hope. Depression wrote his part. Daddy will pay. Edwin does not count. He poked a finger-end into his mouth and bit, gnawed the nail, the knuckle. He’d taken a week in Bealthorpe, in a boarding house, bed and breakfast with evening meal, h. and c. in bedroom, all mod. cons, while she made grandly for the gorgeous east, the Taj Mahal, Char Minah, Ajanta Caves, the Western Ghats, the Nilgiris. His geographical knowledge deserted him. Clive, Tipu Sahib, Akhbar, Warren Hastings, Zamindars, Gandhiji. History evaporated.
‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’ she asked.
He shook his head, sat rejected. Dejection weakened the whole of his body so that he dare not speak for fear his voice collapsed into a hoarse cry, a howl, a sob, a hiccough of tears. He stumbled up to his feet, wagging an explanatory hand towards her, shambled across to the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Back.’ The word barked, croaked.
‘You haven’t seen Daddy, yet.’
He rested his forehead on the cool white paint of the door, with no attempt to disguise his distress. There, beaten, aware of his posture, doing nothing to correct it, he bent forward like a figure from a film, shot at the prision wall. Meg seemed not to notice,
continued with her hand-hugging, until she said, sharply,
‘Oh. Come and sit down, Edwin.’
The sentence was badly delivered. Oh. Come and sit. Down. Edwin.
‘I’m going,’ he said, forcing speech through his lips.
‘Why should you? That’s not reasonable.’
He moved so that he could see himself in the ornate mirror above the fireplace. Crumpled, but perfectly normal, tie slightly askew, he gloomed back at himself, diminished, but twinned now by the elongated Modigliani face behind him.
‘I think Daddy wants to talk.’
‘About what?’
‘I’m not sure. I expect he feels the need to get us to express our minds, each before the other.’ Precious.
‘Did he know you were going to India? He must have.’
‘He didn’t suggest it, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Why did you?’
‘Travel brochures. I’m very conventional, you know.’
He could have slapped her though he realized she had not noticed his shocked defeat. He’d stood at the door, his manhood whacked out of him, and she’d not bothered to turn her head. Perhaps she had not dared; concerned with her own inadequacies, she carefully avoided his.
Now, not unhappy, she swung her legs, from the knees, almost girlishly, a child at exercise, in a pedal car.
‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘But you were glad when I left you. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s what you said.’
‘I say a lot of things I don’t mean. That’s so, Teddy. It is.’ She glared. ‘You ought to know that it is. I was furious, and you were tired.’
‘Won’t,’ he asked, without heat, ‘the same thing happen again?’
‘Very likely.’
‘Then why should we bother? If we’re going to break up, as soon now as in a month or two’s time.’
‘That’s silly.’ That dismissed him. ‘We’re married. Doesn’t that mean anything?’
‘What’s it mean to you, then?’
‘You asked me to marry you. And you wanted to. I thought about it, as hard as I could. And I wanted to marry you. I can think back exactly as I felt.’
‘Can you?’
‘I can think back, Edwin, think back. I know what I wanted . . .’
‘When we were married, was that anything like you expected?’
‘Yes, it was,’ Meg said. ‘Not in every particular, but it was. And I wasn’t disappointed in you. You annoyed me, and you were childish, but you worked hard, and you considered me, and you did your utmost when Donald died. It’s just like you now to ask all these awkward questions when we’ve almost settled things. You don’t want to be bested. You don’t want Daddy to trap you.’
‘You’ve thought about it,’ he said, ‘and you’ve decided you want me back.’
‘That’s right.’
‘On what terms?’
‘On no terms.’ She was crying, but in a flurry of anger as though she’d shake the tears to the far corners of the room. ‘We’re just spouting words. You aren’t saying what you mean. You’re making your side right for yourself, in your own little mind.’
He knew now, as well as such things could be known that Meg had been conditioned or bullied or cajoled into acceptance of the marriage, of his return, by her father and mother. Therefore this afternoon’s tears meant little. She was to try him out, to assert herself with polemics, with a stately announcement of the oriental jaunt, and then take his hand, renew her vows.
That did not displease him.
He liked her tears, hated dangerous indifference.
When he was nearly eighteen, doing ‘A’ levels, he’d visited a girl in a mental hospital. She, Valerie Watson, two years older than he, was the daughter of a shopkeeper no wealthier than Authur Fisher but who’d left the rooms over his business to live in a prosperous suburb. Valerie had been at Edwin’s school, but it wasn’t until she’d left that the pair of them struck up a friendship at a chapel social. She was shy, not unattractive, with beautifully white hands, blue-veined, and they settled at once to discuss Beethoven. Sometimes they exchanged letters, or visits and then they’d listen to records or play piano duets of Mozart Symphonies together. It would be wrong to say there was nothing sexual in the relationship, for the young Fisher could not see women in any other way but they kissed hardly at all, barely touched fingers. At this time, he saw himself in love with two other girls, but not with Valerie.
His parents, as usual, displayed gawky concern.
Valerie was ‘Ted’s young lady’ to them. They inquired about her, made a fuss of her when she came, reported that they had seen her in the street, described her character favourably as if he were incapable of making an assessment for himself. Looking back now, Fisher quessed they regarded her as a suitable match, in spite of the difference in age. Watson wasn’t short, and Val an only child. But the boy himself did not know what to make of the arrangement. She was pretty in a straight-backed way, with wide eyes open at him, and possessed of a different intelligence; he bullied her, and she allowed it, though now and then she opposed his argument, sometimes beat him. She read widely, could contradict his facts, but still preferred a secondary, submissive role, and that pleased him. He could strut and lay down, when he badly needed that confidence.
In her second year at the university she had been taken ill. He had seen her not a fortnight before his parents announced her nervous breakdown, and she had seemed no different from any other time. They had met less frequently since both were preparing for exams, but he’d been invited to tea, and they’d listened to the Beethoven Trio, Op. 70, No. 2 in Eb. They’d played it through twice, commenting favourably, and wondering why the composer had written so popular a work at this period. They’d squatted on the carpet in front of the gas fire and she had sat with her chin on her knees so that he could see her unstockinged thighs, a triangle of white knickers. This was unusual, and had excited him, but nothing came of it; they talked about William Cobbett and Spenser before she’d made him a cup of coffee at nine-thirty and sent him packing.
His parents gave no account of her breakdown. They questioned him about his last visit, and hinted that matters had not been normal for some months, that she had been under treatment. He could not say, honestly, that he had noticed the slightest difference, except for that careless exposure of underclothes, nor had her parents shown any anxiety.
This annoyed him. At eighteen he prided himself on his insight, often criticised friends for failing to notice small signs of distress and anger in others, announced that given those circumstances he would have had the nous to act otherwise. Yet Valerie had been normal, outwardly friendly and humble, listening, expressing approval of his theories about Keats’s illness, Beethoven’s professionalism.
In the next few weeks he had meant to visit the Watson house, but he was busy, with examinations, societies, games. He never admitted his fear to himself. Messages came through his parents; she was no better; consultants hovered, she had been admitted to a mental hospital; they tried bizarre treatments.
He received a summons through his mother. Mrs Watson had phoned to ask if he would accompany them one evening to the St Francis Hospital. He trembled.
As usually, he walked round to the house where the father spoke affably, even boisterously, shaking his hand, calling him Ted. The mother crept round the place, powdered white as death, drained of energy, but it was she who told him that Valerie had ‘withdrawn.’ He nodded, face arranged into seriousness, but dared not ask further. The drive to the hospital quietened the father, so that the three slunk across the car park.
As they approached the ward, a new one-storey annexe, built in the yard of the Victorian, dark-brick prison of the parent hospital, they braced themselves, put a front on, slapped feet on the coloured squares of lino in the passage, held heads up in the ward. First there was chair-sorting to be done,
and Fisher made himself useful, carting not only a third for himself, but two for the elderly ladies visiting a plump, laughing matron in the next bed. When this chore was finished, he found the parents, either side of the bed, leaning over their daughter.
Valerie appeared to sleep.
Her hands were outside the sheets, but perhaps the parents, each holding one now, had rescued them. Mrs Watson talked feverishly, in a whisper, keeping it private, head down to her daughter’s.
‘Look who’s come to see you, Valerie. Do you know him? Look who it is. It’s Edwin Fisher, y’know. Say hello to her, Edwin. She knows you. Look who it is, darling.’
Fisher mumbled.
Valerie’s face lay pasty on the pillow, as though she struggled to open her eyes, dark blue and unreal. After some moments, she murmured, sound like a sigh, and Mrs Watson jack-knifed over to catch the drift, arms astride the inert body, putting her husband away. The eyes closed; the voice died.
‘What is it, Mother?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t make out. I think she’s pleased to see Edwin.’
The blatant lie annoyed him. One must face reality. He’d come here, and not for soft soap. For the next half-hour they tried to coax the girl into communication, and though she murmured, moaned, almost by chance, and once, a tear, a single tear, formed itself from the nearly closed eye. At the end of this time, and Fisher sat aghast at the energy of the mother, bending, willing her girl back into the wide awake world, Watson touched the young man on the sleeve to announce they were going out for a smoke.
Mrs Watson lifted her head.
‘See the sister, will you?’ she ordered, and returned to her vigilance.
Certainly they called in the small room at the end of the ward, but Watson seemed relieved rather than otherwise to find it empty.
‘They can’t tell you much,’ he said. ‘We’ll look in on the way back.’
Outside it had rained, a brief shower which Fisher had not noticed, but the air blew spring-like, warm for late February. Watson flourished his case, offering his companion a cigarette which was refused. The lighting proceeded with ceremony, ritual gestures, set cupping of hands, but there was no mistaking the huge relief of that first inhaling breath.
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