At the moment which became history, Ella Ferguson was wearing nightgown, dressing-gown and slippers.
She did not eat breakfast in her dressing-gown ever again.
Breakfast had been eaten. Her youngest, only unmarried child, Sophie, had left for her job as secretary assistant in a small film company and Ella was now sitting on the edge of the unmade bed watching her husband’s reflection in the dressingtable mirror.
Her husband, Professor Bernard Ferguson MB, FRCS, was knotting his tie. That was why she was watching him. For thirty-two years she had taken pleasure in watching him knot his tie, handling the rich, dark silk, sliding the tightening loop under his shirt collar, where it settled into a firm, precisely placed knot. He was still extremely handsome, having stiffened more in mind than in body, but that movement recreated for her the beautiful, earnest young man she had married. Buying him ties as presents, which seemed such a sedate occupation, was for her what the young people called a turn-on.
Usually, he concentrated on the task. This morning his glance met her gaze in the mirror and he said abruptly, ‘Ella!’
‘Yes?’
He finished knotting his tie. She said to herself later, in fury, He finished knotting his tie!
‘We have to have a serious talk.’
‘Oh, yes!’ she said eagerly.
So he knew it, too. Things had been going badly between them. Now they would get together and talk it over to make things right again.
What she saw in the mirrored face was shock, then a twitch of irritation. She began to feel chilly.
‘Things can’t go on as they are, you know.’
She stared at him, not understanding his tone, which suggested that she was the one who had been avoiding serious discussion.
Something odd happened to the next moment. It disintegrated. She heard her own voice, sounding weak and far away, saying, ‘Solution to what?’
He had said, ‘I think divorce is the best solution for all concerned.’
He did not answer her. The look on his face was one she knew, of impatience at not being immediately understood.
‘All concerned? Who else is concerned?’ she asked with assumed innocence, though of course she had known at once, in a thunderclap of enlightenment.
‘Oh, Ella!’
No you don’t. Don’t you Oh, Ella! me. You don’t slide out of telling me by making out that I know. You say it, every bloody word of it and damn your precious dignity. Dignity indeed. You dirty old man. You old goat.
‘Who else is concerned?’
‘Well, Louise.’
‘What about Louise?’
He had stopped looking in the mirror. He was fidgeting with something on the dressingtable.
‘I think you must know how it is.’
‘I know nothing. What is this about Louise?’
Say it.
He saw no escape. He took a deep breath and turned to face her.
‘Louise and I are lovers. We have been lovers for some time. We want to marry. Therefore I am asking you for a divorce.’ He added more kindly, ‘Of course we want to give you every consideration,’ but the words dwindled when he saw the look in her eyes. That was a triumph if she wanted to count such a small one – and she did. She would seize any scrap of satisfaction she could get.
‘Thank you for the information. Now,’ she sang, ‘get out. Get out of this house and stay out. Take your things and go. Don’t come back here tonight. Don’t come back here again ever.’
His face went loose with shock, then rearranged itself to the expression of a reasonable mind. The mouth opened, then shut again.
‘Out,’ she said patiently. ‘Go. Go. Go.’
He said at length, ‘Very well.’
He got a suitcase from the top of the wardrobe. She stared at the wall while he moved about opening drawers, sliding doors, very slowly, giving her time to change her mind.
Go, she thought. Go.
She hadn’t brought up his clean socks from the laundry. They were lying rolled like a clutch of coloured eggs in the laundry basket.
I cannot speak of socks to that person.
He asked, ‘Have I any clean socks?’ in a neutral tone, as if he were off to a weekend conference after a small domestic disagreement.
‘In the laundry basket. You can pick them up on your way out.’
With that trivial, spiteful remark she had reached him at last. She knew it though she still would not look at him. He snapped shut the locks of his suitcase and went quickly down the stairs.
She waited to hear the front door close. She heard the car start. What was he doing?
Of course, it was because of the suitcase. He would not walk down the hill to the station in midweek carrying a suitcase.
It seemed to be a small thing, not worth thinking about. She did not know that it was the first message from a changed world.
Exhausted from the effort of shooing him out, she was glad now not to be dressed, being one step nearer oblivion. She took off her dressing-gown and slippers and got into the bed.
After a while she got up, went downstairs and came back with the bottle of whisky and two glasses. Moving with economy, she filled one glass with water at the bathroom basin, poured whisky into the other, diluted it, set the drink on the bedside table and got back into the bed.
She did not finish the drink. Three deep swallows were enough to induce the torpor in which she lay, not quite awake, not quite asleep. When at last she stirred, she raised herself on one elbow and drank again. This time she slept.
Sophie’s voice roused her, calling, ‘Mum! Mum! Where are you?’
She was coming upstairs. Now it would all begin to happen.
Sophie was standing in the doorway.
‘What’s up, Mum? Are you sick?’
‘Your father’s gone. He’s left me. He wants a divorce.’
She hadn’t been able to look at him, but she scrutinised Sophie, who stood rigid, then said gently, ‘Bloody, bloody, bloody Louise.’
‘That’s right. Louise.’
Sophie came to the bed, sat on its edge and said briskly, ‘This is shock, Mum. You need to stay still and keep warm. Get under the covers. That pillow is a mess. Lift up your head while I straighten it.’
Nothing would ever be simple again. Every moment brought a variety of messages. Sophie was trying to be adult, which was touching. Sophie was wearing a new necklace and a new shirt, a startling shirt of tawny yellow silk. Sophie was upset but she was not shocked, not even astonished.
Now she picked up the whisky bottle and said, ‘That was a good notion. Mind if I join you?’
‘You’re too young to drink spirits, Sophie.’
‘I just aged ten years.’
Her face contorted, and she cried, ‘I’m trying to play it cool but I can’t. Everything gone, everything gone in a minute.’
Ella shook her head.
‘Not everything.’
Sophie bent and kissed her.
‘Come on. We’ll have a drink. Can you do another?’ She held up the bottle. ‘You haven’t drunk much. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d wiped yourself out.’
She hadn’t needed to. The shock had done that for her.
Sophie went to the bathroom to fetch the tooth glass. Ella was astonished to find herself forlorn in that moment of absence. Sophie brought back the glass filled with water, replenished the water glass and tactfully poured herself a very small whisky.
‘Say when, Mum.’
Ella didn’t want whisky at all. Her mouth was dry and she had a headache, but she accepted the drink because she needed to share a rite of friendship.
‘The same for me.’
She sipped once, lay back against the pillow, now smooth and cool, and said, ‘That’s a nice necklace.’
‘They call them beggar’s beads. Rob brought it back from Hong Kong. I just got it today. The shirt too.’
‘That was nice of him.’
She roused herself enough to wonder how old Rob was and whether he was married.
‘Rob’s a female, Mum.’
‘Oh.’
She closed her eyes and made a gesture for laughter.
‘You’ve spoken of her, too. Where did I get the idea she was a man?’
‘Because she’s my boss, you old sexist, you.’
That didn’t explain the sheen on Sophie, then, undimmed as it was by shock and grief. There was more to it than a new shirt and a new necklace. That orthodoncy had been well worth the expense, teeth straighter than Nature could make them being a real distinction, contributing to a new glamour. So did the hairstyle, the thick soft hair, coloured like the fur of a blond animal, now hanging in a heavy plait. The other two being such beauties, and Sophie, besides being nuggety in figure, wearing bands on her teeth, Ella had thought her plain. She had sprung up, of course, so that one could no longer think her nuggety.
‘I don’t think I’ve really looked at her for quite some time,’ thought Ella.
Now she was frowning.
‘Have you had anything to eat, Mum? Any lunch?’
Ella shook her head.
‘I’ll make you a cup of soup, then I’ll see what’s for dinner in the freezer, okay?’
‘I’m not ill, you know.’
Sophie said, surprisingly, ‘It’s best to play it that way. Call it illness for the moment, that’s the best thing.’
Where had Sophie been, to be so experienced in dealing with emotional shock at the age of eighteen? That film place, of course, probably full of suffering actors. It was outrageous that the same suffering had found her out.
Downstairs the phone rang and Sophie answered it briefly. When she came back with soup and toast on a tray, she said, ‘That was Mrs Rodd wanting to know why you weren’t at the committee meeting.’
‘Oh, dear me!’
‘I said it was a virus.’
A virus named Louise. Each had the thought, neither expressed it, each read it in the other’s eyes. Ella’s face reddened. This was like being caught naked by one of the children. The pity in Sophie’s eyes made the moment no easier to bear.
‘I’ll go and forage for dinner.’
Feeling that she must assert herself, Ella said, ‘Veal in the blue plastic box on the top shelf. You can heat it in a saucepan. It won’t take long.’
‘Okay.’
Sophie took the tray and departed.
When she had gone, Ella got up and stripped the bed, fetched clean sheets from the linen cupboard and remade it. She was dismayed by her health and strength and thought with dread of the feelings lying in wait for her. Sophie had been right – better to play sick, to lie doggo for a while. She had promised herself some satisfaction from throwing down the laundry chute the sheets in which that person had spent the night. It was too small a satisfaction.
As she finished making the bed, Sophie was at the door again, looking awkward. She was about to venture an intimacy.
‘Mum, do you have anything to take? Tranquillisers or sleeping pills? I could get a scrip from a friend and go to an allnight chemist, but I’d have to say why.’
‘No.’
Sophie said with rage and contempt, ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t think to leave you something.’
Ella giggled with shock at the informed hatred in Sophie’s voice, and Sophie joined in the laughter without knowing its cause.
She said then sadly, ‘It’s no laughing matter. No laughing matter at all. I’d better get back or the dinner will burn. It won’t be long.’
Preserving the convention of sickness, they ate dinner in the bedroom, Ella propped against pillows, Sophie in the bedroom chair with her plate on her knees. She had brought up a bottle of wine; a glass of it and the shared moment of giggling misery had made her bold.
‘Didn’t you ever suspect, Mum? Didn’t the thought ever cross your mind?’
Ella shook her head.
‘But never here and always with her. Out to dinner three times a week.’
‘He said they were doing research.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Now every word she spoke seemed to have a dirty double meaning. Research into a virus named Louise.
This time Sophie was more discreet about the shared thought, nodding without meeting her eyes.
‘Would you like coffee?’
‘No, thank you, dear. That was lovely. Nice to be waited on.’
‘No trouble.’ Sophie summoned up resolve. ‘Is it for real? I mean, is it for good? He might get over it, people do. Very likely, really.’
He might get over it, but Ella never would. The look on her face was enough for Sophie.
‘Sorry. But we’ll have to think about telling the others. Do you want me to ring up David and Caroline?’
Oh God, poor Caroline. How was she going to bear the disgrace of this?
‘Time enough tomorrow. Thanks for the dinner. I’ll be all right now.’
Sophie stacked the dishes, bent to pick up the tray and was overtaken by a loud sobbing cry of grief and outrage. She shook her head at Ella, discouraging speech, and hurried away.
Eighteen years old, thought Ella. She must see to it … see to it … it was all too much.
It had been such a tiring day, though spent mostly in bed and semiconscious, that she didn’t get up to clean her teeth, but closed her eyes and slept at once.
She woke in the dark, held fast by a fierce rage that came from outside her and was shaking her, dictating curses. She wished them illness, injury, disfigurement, disgrace, she wished them a retarded child, she wished them a beautiful child who … no, she couldn’t wish that on anyone. The check brought another kind of anger, more her own, from within. Since none of it was going to happen, why couldn’t she curse as she pleased? If she had the power to make curses come true, how much harm would she do them? None. Cursing was the privilege of the helpless, not an unlimited privilege at that. She understood now why people used to make wax images and stick pins in them: it was simply the need to move a hand, exist, assert something against the madness of rage.
She switched on the bedside lamp and looked at the clock radio: half-past 3. What she would really like to do was get up and make a cake, fill the kitchen with the good, comforting smell of baking, but if Sophie woke and found her baking a cake, she wouldn’t think of therapy, she’d think of breakdown and be frightened. What was a reasonable activity at half-past 3 in the morning? Writing. Not her thing, but it would have to do.
She went downstairs, fetched pen and paper from the sideboard drawer and hurried back to the bedroom as if it was the only safe territory. She looked at the dressing-table and felt aversion, dragged the stool over to the bedside table and used it as a desk.
Dope, she wrote. Dope, dope, dope, dope, dope, he knew what lie to tell me, that’s the worst thing, knew me and I didn’t know him coming in so dazed and happy saying he’d been doing research I know now what research but I thought that young man was back been waiting all my life for that young man walking on the beach that night after he’d just won his medal asked me if – said to add to the sum of human knowledge that’s all didn’t have to be anything to make him rich or famous wouldn’t matter if nobody else ever knew he would know and be satisfied. Could I understand that, not looking for money or advancement? Is this a proposal? I said, and he said yes. Up at the house they were dancing, the party was a celebration, we could hear the music, I said Yes to you too then, like a kid but I got it out. You can’t see the future. Lucky you can’t. Always I’ve been waiting for that young man to show. When he left the hospital for the University I didn’t mind about the money I thought this was it. Instead it was dreary dinners with people talking about jobs and who was against you. Dope or not I was beginning to wake up to myself until that night he started me off again with his talk about research. Dirty little adulterer. Dope dope dope dope
She made to tear up the scribbled pages but this was the good linen writing paper that wouldn’t tear.
Oh, stop that, she snapped, hearing herself whimper like three-year-old Becky at this small frustration. Nail scissors. That inspiration took her to the dressingtable. Odd, she hadn’t touched the dressingtable in … seventeen … seventeen and a half hours, and it still seemed like enemy territory. He’ll never stand there again, she promised herself, as she opened the drawer and took the nail scissors out of the manicure case. They had a cutting edge of one centimetre and a half, curved at that, which made the destruction of the pages a laborious affair. Time-consuming was the word. What was time for but for consuming?
Here I sit, turning writing paper into confetti. Don’t think of weddings. Why not? Very suitable, really, a beginning and an ending. It was something like making wax images, after all. Make and destroy.
She kept at it to the last millimetre, the neat curved shreds showering into the wastepaper basket. Then she began to yawn, as if the task had been a spell that freed her for sleep.