DAVID SPENT THE last Thursday and Friday of his Easter holiday with the Trent in Lincolnshire. They performed on Wednesday evening in Stamford; drove north early next morning to Cleethorpes where they demonstrated themselves about the district for two days in secondary schools, already launched into their summer term; and concluded with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, on the Saturday in Lincoln Cathedral. David drove back in the darkness, over flat roads, to Newark, along the Fosse, tired.
He had wasted his time; fatigue plagued his limbs; he yawned all the way.
Tomorrow, without a rehearsal, he would lounge about, preparing for the opening of term on Monday. He would see nobody, as his parents were holidaying in Cornwall; he would eat out of the fridge and since he had done no shopping would need to scout round for bread before he could have breakfast. He had not enjoyed the trip as he had expected; they had played together a good deal, had socialized with schoolteachers and culture-vultures while he had drunk more beer, precious little at that, than he had for months. The three nights in bedrooms in small hotels had not been uncomfortable, but the scratch nature of the school performances, nothing longer than a Mozart first movement, seemed unnecessarily unsatisfactory. The pupils looked interested enough, listening passively; even the final full concert in the cathedral had disappointed. The organizers blamed each other for lack of publicity, and certainly the audience was not large, seeming to crouch in dwarf rows round the quartet whose playing, good enough, precise, vibrant at the point of origin, long-bowed, dissipated itself into the huge darkening spaces of that great building. The prodigality of ordered stone about them diminished Mozart and Beethoven; he had never felt this before. It was as though the Lord God hovered and listened, a Jehovah compared to whom the divine sonorities of these gifted beings were as the lisping babble of a child learning to talk. He knew, and he regretted the knowledge, for the first time that music had limitations, that in eternity one would not listen to Mozart.
Perhps he was at fault. His colleagues were not displeased. This was to them the beginning of their professional career; some hundreds of people who had previously been ignorant of their existence now could name, remember the Trent Quartet. They had started, and saying little, keeping fingers crossed, went down to their houses, justified.
‘Have you enjoyed it?’ Barton in the windy darkness in Lincoln on the castle hill where they had parked. Payne and Wilkinson were staying behind in the Bell for a last drink.
‘Yes. Very good.’
Barton pulled himself up from the boot where he was stowing away a portmanteau, took two or three steps over towards David, who stood as if uncertain of his next action.
‘You’ll have to put her out of your mind, David. Sooner or later.’
David Blackwall nodded; Barton might, like Cicero, have spoken Greek.
‘There’s plenty going for you, however it looks now.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You can’t let her ruin your life. I know that’s what it seems like, but you’ll get over it. I’ve been meaning to say this to you all week, but I could never find a minute when there wasn’t somebody else about. But you looked so down in the mouth.’ That surprised David, who had been sprightlier than usual, he flattered himself. ‘You get over these things to a large extent. They might even bring good.’
‘Thanks, Cyril.’
‘I bet you wonder who I am to be poking my nose in. A bachelor. A mother’s boy. But I think I know your,’ he paused, ‘desolation.’ The word struck chilly in that place of thick shadows and stars. ‘And you mustn’t let it beat you.’
‘No.’
‘I like you, David. It’s been a privilege for me to have dealings with you. And I won’t have you crippled for life.’ He backed away immediately and slammed down the open boot lid. He sniggered, a trivial, vulgar sound. ‘Here endeth the lesson.’ David saluted as Barton drove off.
Not three miles out of the town he passed Cyril, hooted, yawning, raised a hand. He could not make out whether the signal was returned.
‘I won’t have you crippled for life.’ He examined the words, over, over again, but they had no relevance to his situation. He had not allowed this to maim him; he’d worked, occupied the corners of his soul, bent his will so that he believed he could live without Mary. These last three months had proved it. Driving fast, but without danger, he fought to check the squalls in his head. His pride had taken a thrashing; he could not yet easily confess to others that his wife had left him for another man. He could barely grasp that this was possible; the likelihood pained rawly. He turned off at Newark, still wrestling with himself; later he rounded the traffic island built above a Roman army camp at Margidunum, crossed the Trent, half closed his eyes against the dipped headlights of returning revellers. Bedroom windows in Burton Joyce were illuminated; people had had enough of the day, or stripped for the last rites, love.
By the time he had closed his garage doors he was almost asleep. The house smelt damply stale, the letters on the hall floor were uninteresting, three advertisements, one telling him that he had won a prize, and that if he claimed it by merely signing this form and posting it off at once he was in line for a Mini-Metro, a bill, the demand exactly as he had calculated, and a note from a university friend inviting him and Mary to a wedding. He poured out orange juice, swigged it down, decided he could wait neither for a bath, nor for his electric blanket to warm his bed, staggered upstairs, dragged his clothes off and was asleep inside five minutes.
The telephone disturbed him next morning.
Seven thirty. Nobody rang him at that time on Sunday. He ran downstairs in his pyjamas, expecting a wrong number.
‘Hello, David Blackwall.’
At least they’d hung on.
‘Hello, David. It’s me. Mrs Stiles.’ His mother-in-law had never quite known how to name herself in his presence.
‘Ah, hello.
‘David, we’ve heard from Mary.’
Why had the silly woman stopped? He had no inclination towards social prodding.
‘She’s coming home.’
The sentence stirred him, but strictly within the context of his lethargy. He felt improperly awake, yet, his father’s expression, rousted about. Breathing became instantly difficult. He seemed to hold the telephone to his ear only by some long-acquired habit.
‘She rang Friday. I’ve been trying to get you ever since. That’s why I’ve rung early. I thought you might be going out again.’
‘I’ve been in Lincolnshire.’
‘That’ll be the reason then. She rang about nine, our time, on Friday, to say she was coming back.’
‘When?’
‘She’s not sure. Soon. This week perhaps.’
‘What about the opera?’
‘It’s done, finished.’
Mrs Stiles was in no hurry. Why didn’t she anticipate his questions, overflood him with information, instead of idling about with her snippets?’
‘She didn’t say a great deal, really.’
‘Is she going back?’ David asked.
‘Going back? Where?’
‘To America.’
‘That’s not my impression. She’s coming home for good.’
Again they paused. These pitiful bits of sentences carried enormous weight, stress.
‘Is she coming back here?’ he began again. ‘Home? To me?’
‘No, David.’ The voice mumbled, sluggish, miserable. ‘To us. To Derby.’
‘Did she say anything about me?’
‘Well, when she told us this, I said, “Am I to tell David?” and she said I could please myself.’
‘What about this Gage man?’ He could only bear to name him in such terms.
‘She hardly said anything. I took it that was over, though she didn’t say as much. She seemed very low. Not like her. It worried me.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘What could I? I said she’d be welcome.’
‘What about the opera, then?’
‘As far as I could make out, they came back to New York, went to Yale, would that be right?, and just finished. There were no more performances wanted. The conductor, Ulrich, had gone off somewhere else. It just finished.’
‘And left her without work?’
‘Well, yes. I should think so. She didn’t say.’
‘And she said nothing about coming back to me?’
‘No. She didn’t. She wasn’t very talkative. And I was flabbergasted. She wasn’t sure of anything, the air flight, the day, anything.’
‘Did she seem worried? Or ill?’
‘Well, yes. Listless. As if it was all too much trouble to bother. We’ve got her old bedroom ready for her, so it don’t matter much when she arrives. We’ll have to make her welcome, whether we like it or not. I said to her dad, “She’s our child, whatever she’s done.” But I also told him, “We’ve got to keep David informed.”’
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s only your right. You let her go, and many husbands wouldn’t, and then she acts as she has.’ She stopped, staggered again into speech. ‘Anyhow that’s all I know, David; I ought to have asked her more questions, but I was so taken by surprise. I mean, afterwards you think of all the things you should have said. But as soon as I know anything else, I’ll be in touch. I’m that relieved to get you. I just think if she’d come back and somebody had seen her, and said something to you, and you didn’t know a blind thing about it. What would you have thought of us?’
‘What does George say?’
‘He’s like me. Only this morning, when I told him I was going to have another go to get hold of you, he said, “You never get shot of ’em, however old they are.”’ She paused. ‘Will you pass the news on to your mother? I’ve been ringing her as well to try and find out where you were, but they were never in.’
‘They’re away on holiday.’
‘That accounts for it.’ Mrs Stiles hummed to herself, and David half-heartedly tried to make out her tune, failing. ‘If she does say anything about coming back to you . . .?’
‘I’ve already written that if she wanted it, I’d take her.’
‘That’s good. O’ course, that was when there didn’t seem any chance of it happening, wasn’t it?’ The woman was either shrewd or malicious.
‘I meant it.’ He sounded pompous, portentous even to himself.
‘I know you did. Well, I’ll ring off now. Are you all right, David? I ought to have asked you before.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
Mrs Stiles advised him to keep eating. ‘You’ve got to live, and it’s no use doing other.’ David prepared himself for a homily that did not materialize, for she breathed in, said, ‘Goodbye,’ and put the phone down.
He sat in rumpled pyjamas trying to make sense of the room about him.
After breakfast, he decided against even a token cooking of lunch, and lounged about with the Sunday newspapers which interested him less than usual. They seemed fit only to litter the floor. He had no excitement, merely a sense of grievance that just as he was about to come to terms with trouble, the situation radically altered itself. He bought a loaf, tomatoes and a packet of biscuits from a Pakistani shopkeeper who politely informed him that though the weather was unseasonably cool, he could do nothing about it. The smiling teeth, the dusky, pale-palmed, illustratively waving hand matched his own mood. He had flung down, not half-read, an article about starving children in Somalia not because it added to his discomfort, but because he lacked the mental energy to complete it. The world was heavy with death, avoidable tragedy; his present state rejected the conclusion placed it on a par with reports of politicians’ rant or literary chitchat. He opened a tin of chopped pork and was about to sit down to that, tomatoes and pickles, when his mother rang from St Austell to find out about the Lincolnshire venture.
His brief résumé was interrupted by a gabble about a morning service the older Blackwalls had attended. The singing had been poor, the organ playing dull, the parson’s sermon almost a caricature and yet Joan had been moved.
‘Not until we came out,’ she said. ‘Then I realized that the place had been holy for generations. Don’t you think there’s something in that?’
‘Yes. Larkin said as much.’
‘You sound grumpy. Well, never mind.’
‘There’s been news of Mary.’
That put religion out of her mind.
He told her what he knew, parried her excitable questions from his lack of knowledge. At the end of ten minutes, she asked, ‘What have you decided to do, then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I can see I shall get no sense out of you.’ She might have been laughing. ‘Will you go to see her?’
‘I expect so. When she arrives and I know a bit more.’
His mother was volatile with advice; his father was due, he guessed, for a lively afternoon.
When he rang off he wished he had been more cooperative with his mother. She meant well. She had vigorously promised to get in touch tomorrow and had ordered him to think positively.
‘You sound like a politician.’
‘You mustn’t lose her for want of trying.’
‘Are you sure I want her back?’
She didn’t easily give up. He left the phone with his eardrums ringing, and ate with distaste. He could not think what he should do, but cautioned himself not to be surprised by this. He was emotionally bruised; pain, grief, uncertainty racked him. Mary had thrown him down. With some shame he remembered how one night soon after he was convinced she would not return, he had taken his car and driven out to Trent Bridge to stand on the embankment in the windy darkness at quarter to eleven. All the way there a voiceless fiat had scored itself on his body, not only in the aching head but in shoulders, chest, belly, backbone: Drown yourself, drown yourself. The diktat seemed forcibly sensible, but impersonal and in no way connected with black water, cold mud, a sodden corpse. At the same time he knew he would not do it.
He had stepped from his car.
The river flowed high, greasy with the reflected distant streetlights. Above, ripped clouds raced across the luminous patch round the moon. He could hear wind and water; his hair joined the disturbance; chill nibbled at his face.
All he had to do was walk forward from the road once he had stepped over the low fence, cross the grass and the pedestrian way, negotiate the steps, and head into the river. His distress urged him forward, fuelling mad resolve, but he knew he could not. In spite of loss, the total wreck of happiness, there seemed inbuilt inside him a common sense, an everyday rationality, a kind of formidable schoolmastery which had refused permission. When he had considered this later he had decided that his affliction, desperate as it seemed, earth-shattering, must have been weak, small, compared with that of men who hacked their throats open with cut-throat razors or drove headlong into brick walls. Perhaps he was pathologically incapable of such intensity of feeling. But if one way, why not at the other end of the scale? Was he capable of love? It felt so, but he would not die for its non-requital.
He had stood that night, injured on the road, flattening his jigging hair with a gloved limb, keeping it parted. With a shudder, he dared himself to lift his feet over the railings, to march the few paces across wet, wintry grass, smack down on the flat, tread the broad concrete steps where holidaying children sat in summer, to take a position at the bottom, on the concrete, within inches of the fast lapping of revelling flood-water. He did so and once there did not move, held himself still, testing himself.
Then he had nodded at the river, in formal acknowledgement, and made a firm way back to the car, jinking his keys. For the moment he had assuaged his grief, if not for good. Broken pride, longing, embarrassment, frustrated desire would rack him again, but inside, it seemed, a limit had been imposed on himself by himself. Next time he was in trouble, he would put it into words, he could ‘do a Trent Bridge’. He remembered his father’s mock use of an expression of surprise from his childhood, ‘Well, I’ll go to Trent Bridge.’ He had been and standing there, had achieved something, a lowly place in the second division of love.
Baffled now, he decided he’d take himself out.
He drove once again through the city, past fading warehouses, duller clutters of modern housing complexes, but parked this side of the Trent. Though it was Sunday, a heavy drizzle kept people indoors. David, pulling up the hood of his anorak, walked down to the river again in the grey light. This wet spring the waters were high, threatening. He repeated some lines he had learned for A-level:
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
picked with his toe end at the pattern scored on the concrete under his feet. The rain seemed both fine and heavy as he lifted his face. Keats’s words meant nothing to him, mumbo-jumbo round one shell on the human shore, nor had this place any significance. Back to the road he walked hard under dripping trees; a pair of lovers kissed but they were in his eyes damp and disheartened. A woman clung on to the leash of a bull terrier; a smart, elderly man with a flat golfing cap and walking stick told him it wasn’t pleasant.
‘No,’ David answered, half stopping.
‘But my garden can do with any amount of this.’
He was away, the ferule of his stick tapping militarily.
David took a rapid tour of the memorial gardens where pruned rose bushes dripped, flowerless as yet. He tried a second circuit, equally unsatisfactory, before he stopped to read the names of the war dead. They meant nothing; his aesthetic judgement of the shape of the arches or the lettering meant more than the deaths these ordinary ranks, names, initials represented. What had happened to him in the last few months was as nothing compared with the grief splitting these hundreds of families caused by faceless governments and their decisions. Unenfranchised women mourned. The men who returned remembered bloody mud, stench, dirty fingernails on a headless corpse, trees and brickwork ripped to shreds. There were no Blackwalls commemorated. This piece of minor civic architecture pointed its lesson, they shall not grow old, in vain. ‘They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man.’ It was as nothing, but it was all that a silly city could do, and he, wifeless with wife returning, stared miserably at the polluted, wet marble or limestone, he did not know which. It represented the uselessness of the world, and his ignorance, gold letters and black on white, discolouring stone spelt out the message, ‘We had back luck,’ like a casual postcard from some foreign part.
It was raining more heavily; one could hear the rattle fall on the leaves of evergreens. His sinuses pained; his trousers below the anorak were damp. Dragging his mind together, he ran back to his car, arriving breathless. He had passed no one; the few pedestrians had disappeared from the face of the unsympathetic earth. He peeled off his anorak, thrust it to the floor, drove home.
He fell asleep in front of the gas fire, was woken by the telephone. Fred Payne.
‘I’m glad I’ve caught you. Is June 18th free? A Saturday? We’ve been offered a double concert in Hull. Saturday and Sunday. They want the first Rasoumovsky.’
David dolefully filled in his diary.
‘What if I hadn’t been at liberty?’ He felt awkward.
‘We couldn’t have done it.’
‘The others are all right?’
‘Yes. We haven’t long, have we?’
‘Do we play the same programme twice?’
‘We’ll need to think about it. Not very enterprising, is it, though?’
David stood condemned.
‘I’ll look the Beethoven over,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’
The word displeased him, and disgruntled he asked himself why he should exert himself to support the Trent, when they’d drop him in August on Robert Knight’s advent without a qualm. He fell asleep unanswered.
Preparation for examinations, the school summer concert, a proposed trip to London occupied him in the next few days. On Thursday morning Mrs Stiles rang him at work to say her husband had driven down to Heathrow to collect Mary.
‘What time are they due home?’
‘About four o’clock.’
‘Do you want me to do anything?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Shall I come over?’
‘No. We’ll see how she is. I’ll ask her what she thinks. That’ll be the best. I’ve no idea what she’ll be like. She just gave us the time of her plane. She sounded whacked.’ The short sentences dropped like dominoes, spelling his defeat. ‘You never know in any case, with these flights. They’re often delayed. I’ll ring you as soon as I know anything definite.’
‘It’s not very satisfactory.’
He took the call in the office of the head of the music department, surrounded by boxfiles and scores, records, cassettes, the classical repertoire meticulously neat. There was nobody about, but he expected any minute some lout would burst in for a book or an instrument.
‘I think that’s best, David. We none of us knows where we are.’
‘Who’s helping you in the shop today?’
‘Mrs Thomas. You haven’t met her.’
‘Is this your half-day?’
‘No.’ He heard a second voice raised in query. ‘I shall have to go.’ Relief with exasperation. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I can.’
She put down the phone; he went back, to ear tests for O-level.
Surprisingly his spirit lifted, so that he took rehearsals, practised that evening with élan as if on the edge of renewal. He refused a theatre ticket for Thursday evening, sat at home with his cello waiting for a telephone which stayed mute. Mrs Stiles did not get in touch with him until Saturday morning when she asked him over for a meal at eight that night.
‘How does she seem?’ he asked.
‘Not too bad.’
‘Has she said anything about returning?’
‘I can’t . . . Over the phone, y’know.’
Mary, presumably, had come into the room. Less than twenty miles away, with two nights in an English bed behind her, in the smell of the shop and kitchen she made an entrance at an awkward moment. He hurried out of the place with his Saturday lists to preclude thought. The rest of the morning was wasted on household chores, on list-making and marking; he took lunch deliberately late, practised desultorily, weeded in the borders, gave up, watched television grudgingly, went back to Beethoven. Time would not move for him. He needed every few minutes to shift his haunches from one seat to another.
By six, he had bathed, dressed himself in slacks, an open-necked cream shirt, a new dark brown pullover. With shoes polished, hair schoolboyishly tidy he sat about his house shivering. He tried to imagine the Stileses’ living room. By now the shop would have just closed, though George would probably be below there still, with his pocket calculator or his checklists keeping out of the way of the women upstairs. Eva would be sitting down to a cup of tea, shoes off, vigorously grousing about the stupidity of customers, travellers, the young men in to help, her husband. Before long she would make precise inquiries about the meal, soup, a salad with ham and tongue, a sherry trifle she had left to Mary to supervise. Once she was convinced that the preparations did her credit, she would shyly ask Mary what she intended towards David, Only the tone of voice would be diffident, not the form of questions. She feared her daughter, knew she had grown beyond her; it was highly probable that they barely shared a single, moral, social, political view, and yet she believed that the girl could be caught napping as earlier she had been certain that a crafty examiner could seize on the scale Mary played or sang most weakly, and damn her with it. She had worked in ignorance then, melodic or harmonic minor were merely names, but she knew once she had established a reasonable doubt Mary’s own intelligence would do the rest.
‘What are you going to say to him?’ she’d be asking shortly.
David, even catching in his mind the exact intonation of the question, could not return the answer. Now, when weeks of his spare time had been painfully spent accounting to himself for his wife’s behaviour, for he could easily imagine the raw temptation which had led her to fall for Red Gage and the opportunities he represented. To abort her child, to dump her marriage in order to achieve musical consequence seemed understandable, hardly even reprehensible. In a new country, flattered and admired, he himself might have acted no differently. But to come back, creeping back, and to Derby, was incomprehensible. Perhaps her permit had run out; he did not know how long she had applied to stay. The hiatus of ignorance appalled; he had let his wife disappear from his life with no more inquiry than on a half-day trip to a stately home. Mary must have been battered. She’d not return if she could have prospered, survived, or marginally existed there. And Semele. That must have collapsed past devastation.
He used the last minutes before the starting time he had decided on so carelessly, so indecisively that he set off later than he expected, but found no trouble. The roads to Derby were relatively free of Saturday-night traffic. At two minutes to eight he had parked in the side street fifty yards from the shop. As he locked his car, he bluntly asked himself what he’d know next time he inserted his key. A clock chimed, eight, from the open door of a terraced house. A West Indian, well-dressed elderly man came into the small front garden and adjusted his trilby hat. Grey jacket, sky-blue shirt, multicoloured tie, trousers with turn-ups, suede shoes. He nodded at David, then turned back with a start into the still open door, closing it behind him. David gave himself a little time to wait for the re-emergence. Nothing happened.
He turned the corner. The rear of the shop was reached by an entry and then a passage behind four backyards with short gardens. In the first, the ground was piled high with cardboard boxes, litter prolific on an earth trodden bare. One could see nothing of the second; a dirty trellis perched high on the brick wall was backed by thujas. The gate, ramshackle yet solid, carried a notice, roughly painted on a square of hardboard: ‘BeWARe of Dog AlsAtion’ in a mixture of capitals and small letters without punctuation. The spelling mistake jarred, the secrecy, but no growl or bark warned. Upper windows were black. In the third a large ash tree tilted winter-naked, leaning away from the house; music sounded, unrecognizable with a thumping bass. He pushed open the Stileses’ gate; it hung well, the hinges were oiled. A path of flagstones leading to the yard was flanked by two narrow stretches of lawn, two lengths of privet hedge. Up three steps to the back door, on which he knocked, having failed in the darkness to find a bell. He hammered again. The switching on of lights rewarded him.
In this house Mary existed.
Waiting he could neither think nor notice thought, but his numbness fell short of comfort. He had braced himself, he concluded, to face a wooden door without a knocker. This world of backyards offered him little beyond shabbiness, neat or tidy according to effort. George Stiles would come out here on a summer evening to mow his lawns inside ten minutes, or whiningly plugged-in trim his hedge. The coal place housed his mower; the outside lavatory, white-painted, was unused; the row of dustbins and full plastic bags stood in strict lines. Mrs Stiles emerged on Mondays and Thursdays to hang out her washing. The back windows were stoutly barred. He could detect no movement inside; it was as if the bar lights had flickered on, beamed steadily now by chance, not in answer to his fist.
Bolts were finally drawn. George Stiles opened up.
‘Thought we heard somebody. We didn’t expect you this way,’ he said. ‘We left the shop door open for you.’
There was something, a credit mark, with these theft-conscious burghers. David wondered at what time, ten to eight, five to, one minute to, they had made the supreme sacrifice. He stepped past his father-in-law, who bent to rebolt.
‘You go first,’ David ordered. ‘I’ll turn the lights off.’
The younger man felt antagonistic.
‘Not been a bad day,’ Stiles ventured and went unanswered.
The downstairs behind the shop was shelved storeroom; new planks were piled in the middle, with two sawing horses. The smell reminded David of the workshops at school where he had hated the woodwork master.
‘Careful with these stairs,’ Stiles warned. ‘They’re awkward. We’re getting near the age when I’ll have to put a handrail up.’
At the top of the blatantly uncarpeted treads a white door faced them out. Across the whole of the square landing before it stretched a thick institutional rope doormat on which Stiles now cleansed his feet. He was wearing, David noticed, brand-new leather slippers.
‘Go on in,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to the last light.’
The door beautifully painted, Stiles had been apprenticed to a decorator, reflected the shadeless lamp in an atmosphere without dust. As soon as David stepped through on to a landing he knew rich change. The carpets were red and navy blue, two golden frames housed oils of high trees and lurid skies done by Eva’s father, or was it grandfather?; and the space was illuminated from an elaborate candelabra and three shell wall-lights.
‘Straight across,’ Stiles shouted, as if his son-in-law were a stranger.
David knocked at the door, entered.
Curtains were drawn in this room which sparkled with an equality of brilliance. He remembered it by day when it was never properly lit, but now the place seemed to dazzle. They had imported standard lamps.
‘Come in, David,’ Eva said. She stood by the table, by a starched white cloth, by elaborate places laid, but aggressively, apprehensively welcoming. ‘You’re not late.’
‘I am,’ he answered.
‘Only a few minutes then.’
Mary sat in a high-backed modern chair by the gas fire, upright, legs together, wearing a simple white dress with blue polka dots. Her hands rested on the arms of the chair, the position awkward as her mother’s.
‘What about a glass of sherry, then?’ Stiles shouted from behind. ‘It’ll give us an appetite.’ He bustled round, out of character. ‘Mary?’ She nodded. ‘Evie?’ – ‘Yes, please.’ ‘David?’ David refused; Stiles filled three of the largish glasses straight from the bottle on the sideboard.
‘Hello.’ David greeted his wife neutrally.
‘Hello.’ She lifted her eyes, stared him straight in the face, holding the scrutiny, wide-eyed, pale, unsmiling, neither one thing nor the other.
He moved towards her holding out his hand, which she took firmly but without rising. Her palm was clammy.
‘Are you well?’ he asked. It seemed preferable to ‘How are you?’, more friendly.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘A good journey?’
‘I suppose so.’ That was grudging enough. Stiles bounced out, in front of David, with glasses for the ladies.
‘Are you sure, David, you won’t join us?’ he said on his return. ‘Good stuff. Best the beer-off could provide.’ The man sounded jovial, excitable, savouring every minute, while his women were dumb. Perhaps he could not control his delight at his daughter’s return, and nothing else mattered. ‘The good health of all.’ Up went his glass.
After the ritual wetting of the lips, there was silence which no one attempted to break. David at last in the presence of his wife felt embarrassment, nothing stronger, so that if anyone had invited him to leave he might have complied without compunction. He was sorry for Mary, in that her parents, her mother, had forced her into this situation, but she had thrown him over without excuse or word and it would do her no harm to make reparation for that. He had backed away, and stood by the door, as if to run. Hands in pockets, he tested his grievances without result. Mary wore plain blue shoes; he lifted his head no higher; little mattered very seriously. He could make his way through the evening without undue disturbance.
He realized that his jaw, his lips, his arms inside the sleeves of a well-cut dark sports jacket were stiff with tension, and he shrugged, smiled tentatively, limbering up. His mother-in-law watched him, glass in her hand, still by the table. She stood, a bundle of clothes, though her best, but crumpled by uncertainty, understanding nothing, expecting catastrophe. Perhaps, he thought, she would have imposed a vow of silence on them until they were used to each other, used to the idea that they could breathe the air of a room together, without consequent earthquake. He stole a glance at Mary who sullenly contemplated a curvetting bronze horse with pedestal which had been dumped, oddly, on the floor in the corner. Somebody had moved it, he decided, from its place of honour on the sideboard to make space for the sherry tray. Father Stiles was pouring himself a second.
‘I think we should sit down,’ he said, glass upraised.
‘Right.’ His wife found herself. ‘You that end, David. Dad, that side. Mary, this.’
‘Up to the scratch,’ Stiles shouted.
Mrs Stiles made for the kitchen and the potato dish. George hummed to himself, imbibed alcohol already potent. The other two did not speak. David, keeping his eyes religiously away from his wife’s profile, knew he acted ridiculously, but did nothing to thaw out his frozen social skills. The word ‘frozen’, it was presented to him, exactly described him; he could sit there, but he could not feel, either anger or disappointment or pity. It would have been better if he had swilled down a couple of George’s big sherries, to loosen his tongue. He straightened his puritan back as Mrs Stiles returned.
The serving of the meal, and he had guessed correctly: ham, tongue, brawn, haslet, pork pie, salad, beetroot in a cut-glass dish, pickles, piccalilli, two styles of chutney, demanded question and answer. They spoke to each other, handed large gold-rimmed plates about, organized moves with the cruet so that for a few minutes friendliness managed a bogus appearance. Stiles and his wife both stood, both issuing orders or countermanding them, piling David’s plate past reason.
‘Nothing but lettuce,’ Stiles said, forking up another segment of ham to drop without permission across David’s meal. ‘Off the bone.’
‘You sit down, Dad, and see to yourself,’ Eva said.
George laughed out loud, looking to others to join him, but obeyed only to leap up again.
‘The wine,’ he said. He knocked over his half-empty glass. ‘Oh, Hanover.’ His wife rounded the table, mopped successfully. ‘You’ll join us in a glass of red, David, now, won’t you?’ He seemed nowise abashed.
‘No, thank you. If you don’t mind.’
‘No? Why not?’
‘I have to drive back.’
‘One glass won’t stop you.’
‘No, thank you.’ He was determined on ungraciousness.
‘Mary, then?’
‘Not for me, thank you.’
‘It’s not worth opening the bottle for us,’ Eva answered. ‘It gives me indigestion, and you’ve had more than enough.’
Stiles subsided with a clown’s ludicrous face.
Such conversation as there was crossed leadenly between the parents. Stiles had been subdued. Plates were cleared of food; no second helpings were taken. Mrs Stiles brought in ice cream, tinned fruit salad; clearly Mary had taken no part in preparing the meal.
David refusing replenishment, thanked his mother-in-law.
‘It wasn’t really what I intended,’ she said bluntly, voicing perhaps her disappointment with her daughter.
‘It was delicious.’
‘You could have prepared exactly the same for yourself, with no need to go out.’
‘And when I do, what do I get? Limp lettuce, wet ham, bottled salad cream.’ He felt sorry for the woman.
‘Dad and I will clear away,’ Eva continued grimly, ineluctably. ‘And we’ll wash up. I expect you and Mary have things to say to each other. We’ll be outside for half an hour. Then we’ll bring you a cup of coffee.’
‘Or the first-aid box,’ Stiles said, recovering. Eva sneered him down.
‘Is that agreed?’ she asked, irritably. It sounded like a game of forfeits.
Nobody spoke. All four rose to clear the table, and this was not forbidden. When the dishes were piled after procession into the scullery next door, Eva replaced the white cloth with a red, and pointed the young people to the chairs in front of the gas fire. She looked at the clock.
‘I’ll knock on that door at twenty-five past nine,’ she said.
David could have smiled at her lugubriously determined goodwill. As the door clicked to, he turned to Mary for a lead. She hesitated, then gracefully took the chair she had occupied when he arrived. He did not sit down at once, but after a minute’s fidgets and feeling disadvantaged on his feet made for the chair opposite.
She said nothing, appeared to muse.
‘Welcome home,’ he burst out, and wished at once he’d kept his mouth shut.
She looked at him, dartingly. In alarm?
‘I had to make a start,’ he said.
She did not answer that. He pulled at his chin, waiting. In the end she raised her head and in a perfectly normal voice said, ‘Well, go on then. Say whatever it is you’ve got to say.’
‘What do you mean?’ He’d return unfriendliness with unfriendliness.
‘My mother thinks I should see you, talk to you. I get the impression from her that you think so too.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘It’s too late, isn’t it?’
‘For what?’
‘Talk.’
This was not good, but neither was it yet disastrous. They listened to each other testing out with something other than ‘Would you pass the mustard, please?’ Nervously awkward, his arms limp, David tried again.
‘Have you considered coming home?’ he asked.
‘To Station Road?’ That mildly encouraged.
‘Where else?’
She held her breath, mouth open, head turned away from him, nose beaky.
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Yes.’
The word was immediate. He did not know whether it gave the truth, but it was, surprising himself, like the playing of a card over which one has hesitated, a relief.
Mary did not respond, held herself away. She struggled towards speech.
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
He would not vacillate. He’d committed himself, embarked.
‘David,’ she spoke without force. ‘You don’t seem to have any idea what I’ve done.’
The one passage of decent conversation during the meal, apart from requests and Stiles’s frenetic dabs at drollery, had occurred when Eva had quizzed him about the Trent. They had gone through the history of his participation and he had understood, as he laid down his knife and fork to answer, that the interrogation was for Mary’s benefit. She would know how he had spent his time, how he had occupied himself in the period of loss, and he had talked gratefully, even strongly, to Eva. Mary had not intervened, but continued picking ladylike at her meal, but he had been convinced that she had listened, that this information had in some way united them. Perhaps he had been clutching at straws.
‘No,’ he said now. ‘That’s true.’
‘I’m not the same woman who left here in January.’
‘I realize that.’
‘I doubt if you do. I really . . .’ Her voice trailed off.
‘You mean you met somebody you preferred to live with rather than with me.’ His sentence rumbled pedantically on.
‘You could say that. Yes. But that’s not the half of it.’
He thought, and his confidence was fast disappearing, that he detected a faint Americanization of accent.
‘Go on,’ he said.
She did, said nothing; not giving even the impression of thought. She sat, in his eyes, a woman without will, bored out of her wits, prepared never again to open her mouth to him.
‘What about the child?’ he asked.
Mary glanced up, genuinely puzzled; he recognized the tiny frown.
‘Our child,’ he said.
She pulled the frock round her belly, ball-shaping it.
‘You’re still carrying it?’
‘Yes.’ Without interest, or with incomprehension at the stupidity of his question.
He had looked carefully, but had not noticed the signs of pregnancy. Why in hell hadn’t that cracked, mischievous bitch, Eva, warned him?
‘Do you still feel sick?’
‘So-so.’ She accompanied her words with hand movements.
Sedately she offered him a few sentences about her medical treatment in America, adding that she had visited her mother’s doctor who had already fixed her a hospital place and relaxation classes. She appeared sombrely pleased, answered easily as he extended the interlude with questions.
They fell silent again.
‘Will you consider coming back?’
‘It wouldn’t be fair to you.’
‘Let me be the judge of that.’
She sat as if it were too much trouble to make the effort to reply. There was no distress, only accidie. He changed the topic, and these snap decisions came easily tonight, asking about the opera. This time she looked at him not believing her ears.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘About Semele?’
‘About you and me.’
‘Leave it. Tell me about the opera. It’s three or four months.’
‘I didn’t write to you, or phone, or anything.’
‘No.’
‘I meant to. The longer you put it off . . .’
‘I think I understand that.’
Again silence groaned between them.
‘Semele,’ he persisted, ‘was it good?’
‘Oh, God. What does it matter what it was?’ Anger spurted.
‘You don’t want to come back?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
‘Will you try it? Give it a run?’ Why had he used the second, explanatory expression? Would a plain question attract an answer he did not want?
‘Why should you take me back?’ Her voice seemed stronger. ‘After the way I behaved?’
‘You mean you committed adultery?’
‘Yes. That wasn’t the important part. I mean, we did, yes. It isn’t any use denying it.’
He managed to look at her, stifling anger, and found she was crying. Her voice had given no inkling of the rolling tears. He stood, walked across, bent by her, taking hand and arm. She ignored the squared handkerchief he held out. He closed his eyes, crouching uncomfortably, on his heel like a collier, waiting.
‘Let me go.’
‘What?’ The rough monosyllable escaped his care.
‘Let go of me.’
‘No, Mary.’
She stood up but he still held on to her. When she dragged herself away, he freed her at once, rose, put his hands into his pockets.
‘Sit down,’ he said, at length, in disappointment.
She brushed with her left hand at the wrist he had been holding as if to rid herself of his presence. He could not have hurt her.
‘Sit down, Mary.’
Immediately she obeyed, and he returned to his chair.
‘You, we, need more time,’ he began. ‘So, if I may, I’ll make a suggestion.’
She paid no attention.
‘You know what I want,’ he continued, ‘so we’ll leave it for now. Then perhaps you would come over to our house, when you’ve settled down, and we’ll discuss it again.’
‘That won’t alter things.’
‘Well, you may say so. I’m not so sure. Shall we leave it at that?’
She had dried her eyes, with a crumpled piece of paper, a habit he remembered. There had always been about her person two or three tissues, never new, tatty but unattractively handy.
‘All right.’
‘Thanks. I’ll call for that cup of coffee now, shall I?’
‘If you like.’
‘We can talk to each other still. That’s something.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Mary replied. ‘I’m in no position to talk about anything.’
He could see a slight eruption on the skin under her lips. Her face was bloodless, without health, blotched. Her neck was thin, and her arms.
‘Do you sleep well?’ he asked.
‘Yes, since I’ve been home.’
‘Have the doctors given you sleeping tablets?’
‘Not with this.’ She pointed at her belly. ‘I won’t have anything. I slept badly in America, especially this last month.’
‘Your mother will look after you.’ He’d no idea why he’d made the statement.
‘She’s too energetic. It makes me tired just to see her.’
They were having conversation, banalities, routine exchanges like the rest of the world.
‘Your father’s delighted to have you back.’
‘I suppose he is.’ Had she not noticed?
‘Come and see me tomorrow.’ He threw the mild command. ‘I’m rehearsing with the quartet in the morning. So, afternoon or evening.’
‘How shall I get there?’
‘I’ll come and fetch you. You suggest a time.’
‘I don’t know.’ Back to the slough.
‘Three thirty, then. That gives you time to stay in bed, have lunch and another nap. I shan’t have much to feed you on. What my dad calls “bread and scrape”.’
‘David, I can’t promise anything.’
‘Yes.’
Perhaps he meant ‘no’, and they sat quietly, trying not to look at each other.
‘How are your parents?’ she asked suddenly.
As he began to explain, their Cornish holiday, his father’s attempts at retirement, Joan’s concerts, he realized that she had initiated the conversation, though she seemed less than animated at his answers. When he’d finished his bright paragraph she said, ‘I don’t think I can come back, David.’
He knew despair.
‘Not tomorrow, you mean?’
‘Yes, if you want me to. But I don’t want to build your hopes up. I can’t promise anything.’
David lacked the strength to answer her; he’d done well, and now the problem bested him. Some little time later he heard her say something about coffee, go to the door, call out to her parents.
The room seemed crowded with hundreds. Mrs Stiles poured into large, delicate cups, fluted edges perfect. The family talked, but incomprehensibly, with a garrulous friendliness in a language he did not understand. He heard Mary.
‘David’s coming to pick me up at three thirty tomorrow.’
‘Where are you off to then?’ Eva, facetious.
‘Station Road.’
‘For good?’ Father, father.
‘We’ll see.’
David did not stay long. Heavy-eyed, he left through the shop. In the side street he leaned on the roof of his car, exhausted. Nobody came past to see him. On Saturday evening at 10.30 this part of Derby kept itself quietly to itself.
He gnawed at his knuckle.