by David Beaty
It was then that he noticed the stick, its surface rather knobbly and rough and with an unusual shepherd’s crook handle.
Some part of him must have known even then. He found himself staring at it frowning.
From the seat behind, big jolly Madge leaned forward and thumped his shoulder playfully. ‘No need to look like that. It’s only a perfectly ordinary stick. It’s not going to bite you!’
Paul gritted his teeth and said nothing. Most middle-aged women, with the exception of course of Harriet, got on his nerves. Madge more than most.
‘I can get around without the stick.’ Harriet said, almost apologetically. ‘It’s just that it makes life considerably easier.’
‘She can get around with it at a rate of knots,’ Madge laughed, as Paul switched on the engine, put in the clutch and pulled away from the kerb. ‘She can outwalk me.’
Paul made no comment. He supposed he should have thanked Madge for coming, but he didn’t feel like it. He should have asked about Archie, but he felt even less like that.
‘Did you have a good trip?’ Harriet asked. ‘You were nice and early.’
‘Very good trip.’
‘Who had you—?’ Madge began. But Paul brushed her aside as if he hadn’t heard. ‘You haven’t told me how you came to do this.’ He touched Harriet’s knee and pointed to the bandaged foot.
‘She says—’ Madge roared with laughter, ‘—that she didn’t fall off Fandango. That she twisted her foot as she jumped down. But I think that’s a tall story.’
‘It’s perfectly true. I was jumping down from him. We’d had quite a decent ride, when somehow … woomf, my ankle seemed to turn. And I cracked this bone apparently.’
‘Old age creeping on.’ Madge laughed again. ‘Bones getting brittle. Not to worry, we’re all in the same boat!’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Paul heard himself say with unforgivable rudeness. Then hearing Harriet’s angry indrawn breath and her hissed ‘Paul! How could you!’ he went on, ‘ Only kidding, Madge. You’re ageless.’
In the car mirror, he could see that Madge wasn’t reassured. A frown drew deep rail-tracks between her brows, her heavy cheeks hung disapprovingly like a bloodhound’s dewlaps. He felt simultaneously angry and in the wrong. Then he thought of what had happened and Fandango – a convenient butt for his rage.
‘That bloody horse! How much more trouble is it going to cause?’
‘It hasn’t caused any,’ Harriet replied indignantly. ‘ It wasn’t his fault.’
‘Of course it was! Madge as good as said so.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Madge was all set to get her own back. ‘I was only kidding.’
He was about to say ‘many a true word spoken in jest’, then stopped himself in time.
‘I’ve no doubt you were right though,’ he said instead.
‘She wasn’t even there!’ Harriet protested. ‘I told you what happened. You’re just in a bad temper.’
‘I was in a particularly good temper. Until—’
Madge interrupted. ‘Until he saw us.’
‘Until I saw you were hurt,’ he corrected slowly and with dignity.
Normally such a statement would have soothed Harriet, but she was obviously angry at his treatment of Madge. Angry about something else too. Belinda? Perhaps she sensed physical satisfaction, an aura of male well-being. Perhaps she felt waves. Whatever it was, the male soft answer did not turn away the female wrath.
‘I can’t help—’ Harriet began.
‘She can’t help being hurt,’ Madge pronounced from behind.
‘Keep out of this, Madge, for God’s sake!’
‘She can’t keep out of it.’ Harriet’s voice rose. ‘ I couldn’t have managed without her. She drove me to the hospital. To out-patients. She waited and brought me home. She ferried me around. She’s been wonderful.’
‘Thank you,’ he said stonily.
‘For heaven’s sake, sound as if you mean it!’ Harriet’s hand clenched round her stick. For a moment, he had the wild idea that she was angry enough to hit him with it.
‘Thank you, Madge,’ he said again, more warmly this time. ‘But if I might just go on. At least this proves a point. Whether it was Fandango’s fault or yours.’
‘Or no one’s,’ Harriet snapped.
‘Nevertheless, that bloody horse has to go. It’s no good you hanging onto it for Jane to come back. Jane isn’t coming back.’
‘She will, damn you!’ Childishly Harriet banged the stick several times on the car floor.
‘And even if she does, she’ll never earn enough to pay for his keep. I’m certainly not paying for it any longer. And your earnings at the hospital don’t cover it. But all that apart—’ Paul overtook a bus in a noisy acceleration before continuing,‘—he’s a menace, and there is no one to exercise him. Do I make myself clear?’
‘I’ve said repeatedly,’ Madge announced loudly beside his ear, ‘that I would exercise him if I weren’t so heavy.’
‘Quite,’ Paul said unkindly. ‘But you are, Madge. So that doesn’t get us far, does it?’
Under her breath, not loud enough for Madge to hear, Harriet whispered, ‘Don’t be so bloody rude, Paul!’
‘And,’ Madge’s cheeks trembled with offended friendship, ‘ I’ve promised I will try to find some girl to exercise him for you. I’ve made enquiries. I’ve asked everyone I can think of.’
‘But without success,’ Paul said drily.
‘For the present.’
‘Then for the present, he’s under sentence.’
‘Paul!’ This time Harriet raised the stick high enough to tap him lightly on his foot, ‘ If only you knew what a pompous ass you sound!’
Behind him Madge chuckled. He flicked Harriet a look of disbelief, and Madge one of loathing. Deciding they were both menopausal, he frowned at the road ahead.
The rest of the journey was completed in total offended silence. Had it not been for the fourth occupant of the car, his vision of Belinda, he would have thought it the most dismal homecoming of his life.
‘Damn!’ Harriet said, putting down the telephone receiver the Saturday morning of the following week. ‘They need me to do an X-ray. Stat. Motor cyclist. Fractured femur, they reckon.’ Harriet tapped her stick apologetically. ‘Would you mind dropping me off?’
‘Of course not.’ He came over, put his hands on her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. During the previous ten days, things had gone a good deal better, as if they had both glimpsed the edge of some abyss on which they teetered and from which they had now determinedly drawn back. He had been tender and thoughtful, solicitous of her foot, and full of admiration for the way in which, apart from driving, she didn’t allow it to slow up her activities. She for her part had gone out of her way to bolster him up, to get him to go out in the evenings, to see more of his friends. Last Saturday, they had revived their practice of going down to the Wheatsheaf for a lunchtime session. They’d always done that in the old days, any Saturday they were at home. The aircrew and their wives used to meet there. Until last Saturday neither of them had been there for months.
Nor apparently had many other people. Only Archie and Madge were there, sitting in their special warm corner by the log fire. ‘Not many of us come these days,’ Archie had said, in his best King Lear voice. ‘Times change. Tempus fugit. People desert their old abodes.’
‘Let’s go down to the Wheatsheaf again,’ Harriet had suggested just the moment before the phone had rung to summon her to the hospital, and though Paul had no desire to spend another session with Madge and Archie, he had agreed because he wanted to please Harriet.
‘Sure you don’t mind?’ Harriet asked, watching his expression. ‘You could drop me off at the hospital and then go to the Wheatsheaf?’ She picked up her handbag and scarf.
‘I doubt I’ll bother. There’s lots of odd jobs to do. The mower for instance.’ He opened the door for her. ‘And of course I don’t mind driving you though I don’t see why they always
call you out.’
She smiled. ‘They don’t always call me out. I said I’d stand in today. The RG who should be on call is going to a wedding. And I knew you’d be home to do the chauffeur-ing.’ She gave him a smile of such loving sweetness that he felt a strange emotional constriction in his throat.
‘Fair enough,’ he stroked her cheek with his fingertip. ‘But you do seem to be going round to the hospital rather frequently. Time someone else did a bit more.’
She caught his hand suddenly and said in a low voice, ‘ It isn’t always work, Paul. I don’t always go to the hospital to work.’
Just for a moment, some inner, more finely-tuned ear detected the urgency and the appeal. But he wouldn’t allow himself to hear it.
‘I have treatment,’ she said quietly. She moistened her lips, and looking at him steadily, waited for him to ask her what sort of treatment.
But he couldn’t bring himself to. He knew afterwards that he should have, but he persuaded himself she referred only to her foot. So instead he waited for her to continue. She in her turn seemed to wait for him to speak. The moment passed. She looked at her watch.
‘Anyway,’ he said cheerfully, as he helped her into the car, ‘your foot seems to be doing all right.’
She nodded, saying nothing more as he drove the three miles to the hospital. As she got out of the car she smiled. ‘Don’t bother to come and pick me up. I’ve no idea how long I’ll be. I’ll get a taxi back.’
He watched her for a moment hobbling with remarkable speed across the hospital forecourt. He stayed till she disappeared through the glass doors marked X-ray. Dear Harriet, he thought, she loved him. He was quite sure of that. Quite sure she was utterly faithful to him. Why then did he have this stranger feeling, that she was about to deal him some terrible blow?
The uneasy question stayed with him until he reached home. He had quite decided that he would not go to the Wheatsheaf. He would mend the mower, put on the lawn sprinkler, nip the superfluous buds off the camellias. Maybe even cut some sandwiches for Harriet’s return.
But once inside the house, his uneasiness increased to the point of depression. His old fears stirred. The house felt empty and sad, as if something had been sucked out of it.
He got as far as wheeling the mower out and inspecting it, then he mooched around the house for a while. Finally he got into the car and drove off to the pub.
As soon as he pushed open the door of the Wheatsheaf, of course, he wished he hadn’t come. There was Madge, solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, with her Campari and soda in front of her and Archie with his pink gin. They waved to him eagerly from their corner, pointing out the two chairs they had saved opposite them.
‘What’ll it be, old boy?’ Archie asked, rising. He was wearing cream cavalry twill trousers, cream shirt and a yellow cravat. Madge was bulging out of a coffee-coloured silk two-piece. They were both done up, he thought wryly, for some social occasion that wasn’t going to take place.
‘Where’s Harriet?’ Madge asked accusingly before Paul had time to finish asking for a half of bitter.
‘She got called out on duty.’
‘Oh, poor lass,’ Madge looked sympathetic. ‘ She could do with a change. A Saturday session would have done her a world of good. She’s been looking very peaky.’
‘She looks all right to me,’ Paul said.
‘Men!’ Madge sighed into her Campari. Then as Archie walked a little unsteadily over to the bar to fetch Paul his bitter, she asked. ‘You haven’t been nagging her again about that wretched horse, have you?’
He put up his hands defensively. ‘ Not guilty. No. Not a word have I said.’
‘Good!’ Madge took a sip of her Campari, screwing up her lips as though either it were too sour or she didn’t believe him.
Archie brought the beer over, put it down in front of him and then carefully wiped his fingers on a silk handkerchief.
‘What was that? What is Paul guilty or not guilty about? Did I miss something interesting?’
‘No.’ Madge shook her head decisively. ‘I was asking him if he’d been onto poor Harriet again about Fandango.’
‘And I hadn’t,’ Paul said sourly
‘Oh.’ Archie looked disappointed.
‘As I told you,’ Madge said severely, ‘Paul wants Harriet to sell it because it’s Jane’s horse and he reckons Jane isn’t going to come back.’
‘To return or not to return. Aye there’s the rub.’
Madge looked at him witheringly, and Archie, deflated, murmured that ‘it was a bad business. Children were a certain sorrow. Very true.’ After a moment he went onto ask Paul if it was true that Carruthers’ wife had gone off and left him just like that?
‘Haven’t a clue.’ Paul frowned. The conversation, rarely easy with Madge and Archie, looked as if it would never get off the ground.
‘Dunhill’s father died very suddenly last week.’ Now Archie was beginning on his usual bulletin of the latest tragedies. ‘And our Mrs Mop in the Section has got gall stones. Very painful. Can’t be dissolved.’
Christ, Paul was thinking, he couldn’t stand any more of Archie after three pink gins. He began wondering how in all decency he could take his leave without buying the Truscotts a round when the pub door opened and in came Belinda like a breath of spring.
She was wearing jeans and a white pullover. She made everyone else in the saloon bar looked over-dressed, overweight and elderly. She sailed over to the bar and climbed up onto one of the high stools. She was accompanied, Paul saw to his disgust, by that Newcastle Engineer, Griffiths, the one she had described as having hands like bricks. Those red bricks hovered obscenely, one near her waist, one on her arm, and his big red matching face hovered so near to hers that you couldn’t have put a bar menu between them.
They whispered and giggled as they chose what snack they would eat. They seemed to be on excessively friendly terms. Demonstrably intimate terms, despite the fact that Belinda had most certainly seen him, probably from the moment she had pushed open the door. Indeed she had no doubt recognised his car in the park. She knew he was there, and far from it making her less affable with the brick-handed Northumbrian, it was making her more. There was a name for that sort of behaviour, Paul thought indignantly. Cock-teasing. Unfortunately the painful exactitude of the name did nothing to relieve his confused feelings.
‘Pretty girl,’ Archie said, following the direction of Paul’s eyes. ‘‘She walks in sunlight like the rose’’. A quotation, Paul, from Tennyson.’ He looked owlish as he always did when he’d had a few. ‘She’s one of our stewardesses, you know.’
‘Yes. I thought she was.’ Paul appeared to consider. ‘I believe I’ve done a trip with her.’
‘You’d remember her, wouldn’t you,’ Archie said, totally without malice.
‘Too chocolate-boxy,’ Madge said decisively.
Then as if Belinda knew she was under discussion, she turned her head in the direction of the warm corner and smiled politely.
‘Good afternoon, Captain Harker, Captain Truscott,’ she called with a decorous little nod. Her blue eyes were friendly but perfectly blank. It was when her eyes alighted on Madge that her smile became one of dazzling sweetness. Madge, the surprised recipient of this favour, visibly melted.
‘Lovely smile,’ she said. ‘Lovely girl.’
After that the lovely girl continued to turn her lovely smile on Griffiths, while Paul clenched his fists and found himself unable not to watch. He felt tense, frustrated, indignant, aching for her. How could she, after New York, behave like this with a man like Griffiths? Was that the category she put him in? Was that all it meant to her? All he meant to her?
He wanted to shake her till her teeth rattled. But worse then that, he wanted her.
In silence and at a gulp, he downed his beer. Then he gathered up Madge’s glass and Archie’s. ‘I’ll get these. Same again?’
‘I don’t know if we should …’ Madge looked at Archie.
‘Of course you m
ust!’ Paul waved away her mild protest and headed for the bar. He had to stand so close to Belinda that her arm when she raised it brushed him. It sent electric shock waves through his whole body and his hands trembled.
To make it worse, the service at the Wheatsheaf on Saturdays was abysmally slow and Belinda had a clear carrying voice. So he had the added irritation of hearing a good deal of their conversation. They were making arrangements to go to the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford that night, or was it next Saturday? Belinda had been told it was a marvellous production. She adored Olivier. Olivier was her favourite actor.
Aware of Paul’s piercing stare, Griffiths suddenly tore his eyes away from Belinda’s animated face, looked up, flushed with embarrassment, and said ingratiatingly, ‘Hello, sir! Will you have a drink?’
‘Oh!’ Belinda turned her head as if surprised to see him there. ‘Captain Harker, yes, please do.’ She looked guilelessly up at him, ‘We’d be honoured if you would. And,’ with that dazzling smile over her shoulder at Madge, ‘I’d simply love to meet your wife.’
In a moment, it was all smilingly agreed. Belinda and Griffiths would join them in the warm corner. The drinks, Paul insisted, were on him.
Paul knew he was being foolish, but at that moment he couldn’t help himself, as with mingled pride and apprehension, he led them over.
Belinda sat herself down between Madge and Archie and set about charming both of them. If she was disappointed that Madge was Mrs Truscott and not Mrs Harker, she gave no outward sign of it. Perhaps, Paul thought, she likes to charm people. No, it was more than that. She was playing some complicated game. He ached both to slap her and to hold her. Increasingly, she was devoting herself to Madge. Paul was left in an uneasy triangle with Archie and Griffiths. They tried talking golf, pay, motor-racing and then pay again. Bits of the female conversation floated across to Paul. Belinda was telling the motherly-looking Madge about her own sad childhood. How difficult her mother was. How she hadn’t had this and she hadn’t had that. Madge was lapping it all up. Purring in the unspoken comparison to her own warm generous self.