Margaret’s days were very long. Oliver spent more of each week in Cambridge and less at home, staying perhaps one or two nights and leaving early like a businessman with umbrella and suitcase, in an aroma of toothpaste and shaving soap. Margaret would pursue him around the breakfast table on these occasions, asking him why he was leaving, what had gone wrong, begging him at least to look her in the face. Last time he had shouted, ‘This is intolerable, that I should have to eat with you hanging over me, waiting to see whether I can look you in the face. If you must know, I can’t. And I don’t want to.’ He had gone out, slamming the door tidily, to his early train.
The days seemed longer as she spent less time on house and food, feeling that it was worthless when Oliver treated what she had done with love as an accusation levelled at him. Before she was married she had done these things as a training towards marriage, a labour of love on account. And she had dressed always for someone, the man of the moment, the husband of the future, and had never bought a dress or changed a hairstyle without calculating its effect on some other eyes, real or ideal. And now, with Oliver absent, in whom all these aspirations had finally settled and centred, she could not do as some other purer housewife and woman, such as Caroline might have done, take refuge in the thing itself. The carpet slippers before the fire, her own eyes and nose and mouth and skin, disappeared like the tree in the quad without the male eye on them, and Margaret was lost.
She did not go back to work because she had had no particular work, only stop-gap jobs, and could not summon up the energy to make the contacts which would open up these jobs again. Besides, she was not ready to admit in public that she was not fully occupied at home. She did not invite her friends round either. Most of them had been so annoyed by Oliver’s manner in the early days that they would not visit without pressing invitations now. She had felt, rightly, that Oliver didn’t want to see them, and had not, at the time, minded very much. So that now she would have been ashamed to call them back, and spent more and more of her days alone.
She got up later every morning, now; eleven, half past eleven, noon, and went to bed early to avoid the evening. She had learned to use sleep as a drug, to induce a torpor which calmed and slowed her. When she woke early with the sun, she told herself that she was very tired, and that if she got up there was nothing to do. Then she huddled under the blankets again, coaxing herself into a leaden sleep from which she woke some hours later, so hot and heavy and dizzy that her body ached and would not be turned, her eyes stung and would not be focused, and her mouth tasted of dry, furry mould. This sleep cost her so much effort that she could hardly drag herself about the house and always took a long rest in the afternoon, lying on the bed in her petticoat with the curtains drawn, to recover.
She ate little, and irregularly. She had come to rely more and more heavily on Bloody Marys. In the beginning there had been tomato juice with a dash of vodka, good for the figure, giving one a bit of a kick in the early morning. Now she had increased the number of drinks and the proportion of vodka; draining board and kitchen table were piled with empty tomato juice tins and dirty glasses. These she had always, so far, from a mixture of motives, managed to clear up every time she knew Oliver was coming home. But she was growing less enthusiastic and less ashamed.
That morning, she slapped into the kitchen barefoot in her housecoat, poured herself a Bloody Mary, drew back the curtains far enough to see that it was raining, drank down the first drink, poured herself a second, and slapped back into the living room to light a cigarette. It was nearly noon and felt like Sunday. Every day felt like Sunday now. Margaret smoked rapidly, standing uncertainly in the middle of the room, and wondered what to do. The curtains here, long, sunny yellow curtains with brave white daisies spread across them, were still drawn. They boxed in the room like a yellow tent and gave an illusion of warmth to the light. Margaret did not open them.
She lit the gas fire full blast, and turned on the wireless, which offered only a programme of French for schoolchildren. She put on a record of Ravel’s Bolero, turned it up as loudly as possible, and decided to have a bath. She decided to have a bath most mornings now. It filled in the gap between getting up and the afternoon rest very nicely. But she could never decide easily, and always spent time wondering whether she could not find something better to do. Whilst she ran the bath she poured herself another Bloody Mary, and fetched the cigarettes and an ashtray which she balanced on a stool beside the bath. Then she turned the Ravel back to the beginning and the bath was ready.
When she slipped off her nightdress and housecoat and stepped down into the warm water she was immediately comforted. She sat for a moment, smoking with damp fingers, chewing on shreds of wet tobacco, and ran the hot tap until the water slid up her body, warmly, round her breasts and into her armpits, so that she was almost floating. Then she took another mouthful of the drink and washed herself slowly and thoroughly. Although she had lost interest in her public face she had in recompense intense bouts of attention to personal cleanliness. She rubbed soap creamily all over her hands and body, brushed her face till it stung with a little round nylon brush, scrubbed her back with a long one, scraped her soft feet with a pumice stone and spent some time poking into every crevice, behind every nail, toe and finger with an orange stick. Then she shaved the hardly visible down carefully from under her arms and along her legs. When she got out she would spend time brushing her teeth, and even more brushing her hair, stroke after stroke for half an hour until it shone and crackled. Her body had become a thing to her to be cared for and admired. It was the residue, what was left. When she had finished the ritual of cleaning she lay back, resting her chin on the water, staring at her feet which protruded, side by side, pointed and gleaming with water between the bright taps. She watched where the water clung to the circles of her ankles like a skin peeling and thought, all the bits, the toes, and the solid bits one can see, and the vague bits underneath, all these bits are me. It is almost as though one might fall apart without the bath, as though all these lumps and circles might just float away from each other and not belong to one any more.
She lay suspended, studying herself, until her body began to chill at the water line. It was now afternoon. To judge from the small light that came through the frosted window and the pink frilled nylon curtain, it might have been any time. Margaret had no idea what time it was. She emerged reluctantly, shivering slightly, and rubbed herself until she blushed in patches all along her flanks and midriff. There were the toothbrushing and the hairbrushing to come, but she was already beginning to be afraid of deciding what to do after that.
‘You really ought to get out,’ she told herself aloud, peering down her back over one shoulder, patting the creases under her buttocks with her towel and dusting powder firmly over all the pink twisted expanse she could see. ‘You really ought to get out somewhere and do something. But I couldn’t tell you what or where?’
And today, anyway, she thought, slipping her tingling body back into her housecoat, pink quilted and stained with tomato juice, today I am far too tired. I’ll rest today, she told herself, as she told herself every day.
Teeth brushed, hair brushed, she was back in the curtained living room, with another Bloody Mary, some Twiglets and the Ravel again. Brushing might have been good for the hair’s roots. It did not improve its appearance. It had been too often washed lately and rarely pinned up. It stood out round her shoulders, prickling with electricity, like the splayed ends of a large pale broom.
‘What shall I do?’ she asked herself, and lit another cigarette. ‘I’ll just sit and look at Vogue,’ she answered herself, as she always answered herself, ‘while I think.’ She had taken to Vogue when the assurances and comfort of the central heating advertisements and the love stories of the lesser magazines had become intolerable mockery. Vogue responded to something in her present mood. It was full of things; it focused attention entirely on a delectable button, a daring sash; these things had an ingrown and sterile emphasis of their own. The masculine eye in the Vogue pictures lacked the cosiness of the husband or boyfriend with sweater and pipe in Woman’s Own, who sniffed the Oxo or the new Paris scent offer with appreciation and humour.
The men in Vogue had enormous, remote eyes, and sneering mouths like the women, they fingered silks and held hats, focused on the things. There was a sort of jungle retreat for Margaret behind all the sophistication and glitter; something which called to her solitude in a house full of things.
Margaret opened the Vogue at the Beauty Guide. It was simple enough, three magnified pictures, an eye, seven inches long, a mouth, wide open, twenty-seven inches round, and a fingernail, five inches long. Each occupied a full page, bright and bold in a magnified background of salmon pale flesh. Most days Margaret might have flicked through the pages with an approving nod but today for some reason these pictures arrested her. Seen first and quickly, they had all the lit excitement of one’s own mouth or eye, suddenly springing to life with paint in the mirror. They had the mystery, the exhilaration as Henry had seen it in the flower-films, of colours brighter than they are usually seen, the jewelled glitter of the mediaeval heaven. But Margaret looked too long, as one will sometimes look at a perfectly ordinary word until its spelling seems insane, and saw them too much, in too much detail. The eye was worst as it had at first been most satisfactory. The mouth and nail were less compelling and nastier. The mouth, a swollen pink round, with every crack of the skin magnified and glittering, seemed to her like what one of those almost animal fly-eating plants must be, moist and fleshy with a chocolate-coloured hole in the middle and three square wet teeth hanging below the upper lip. The fingernail, oval, rested on the fleshy pad on the finger and protruded over it. They had photographed the varnish being applied and the thick black hairs of the brush lay stickily on the fat pink slug, a molten lump settling slowly onto the nail, like a sweet half sucked.
The eye seemed at first more complex, more live. It lay, blue-grey, with gold spattered in the centre of the iris, between three rows of hairs curving right across the page. The brow was a half moon of scattered criss-cross black strokes like a child’s scribbling, petering out. The lashes, the upper row obviously implemented by a false strip, were two fences of curled spikes. Again, the brush had been photographed in the act of applying the glitter, and it lay at an angle across the eyelid, pointed like a knife, on a half circle of bronze streaked and dotted with white. The pores shone with sweat. Margaret thought at first that this eye – a mild eye, a thoughtless eye – perturbed her because it stared emptily at her, and then she saw that she was afraid because it was dead. Its white, ever so slightly veined, was like the dead flesh of a hard egg, and the iris so beautifully lined and shaded had two dots of white in it where the light caught the eyeball, which seemed at first to shine as they should with light, and then as she looked at them, merely two dead, empty patches of paper. The defining edges insisted – the rim of the eye, the rim of the nail, the blob of raw flesh in the inner eye corner. The blacks were more cutting, the area of background flesh vaster and less connected. The mouth was dead vegetable, the eye a dead hairy animal, the nail dead worm. Margaret experienced again, more violently, the sensation she had brushed in the bath, that she was falling apart, that bits of her were separate and falling irretrievably away. Nothing held, everything was a jumble of bright dead things. She was shaken, and began to sob and weep wildly, not, as she wept often in the afternoons, for the sake of almost comfortably having a good cry, but with real terror and an increasing lack of control.
Henry came in carefully, like a burglar, having rung the bell and had no answer. He stooped under door after door tracing the sobbing, found the right room and stood on the threshold.
‘Margaret?’ he said. Margaret looked up frantically – his voice was huge in the small room – took in the size of him, swamping the doorway, and began to scream with shock.
‘Margaret?’ he said again, timidly.
The screaming reached a crescendo, and Margaret gasped for lack of breath. He saw he must move, however reluctant, and went across the room to take her by the shoulders and shake her.
‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Stop it, do you hear?’ Margaret screamed again, and choked, and Henry held her head still and slapped her sharply across a cheek, with the flat of his hand. Margaret stopped screaming, abruptly, and slumped against him. He held her uncomfortably, trying to push her back into the chair, with all her determined weight against him. Her naked legs protruded between his and her housecoat was open in places, showing rolls and slivers of flesh. Across the cheek he had hit, the pattern of his fingers rose darkly.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
‘I knew you’d come. I knew you would.’
‘I’m sorry if I startled you. Tell me what’s wrong.’
At this Margaret’s body convulsed again, and her face puckered. She pushed the magazine towards him. ‘I got frightened. Of this picture.’ Henry took it and studied it. ‘I’ve been too much by myself,’ Margaret volunteered, in a normal voice. Henry closed the magazine and put it down on the table. ‘It’s silly to get frightened of a picture,’ she finished.
‘Not necessarily. There’s something powerful about bright out of scale magnifications. I was thinking so the other day. We see so little, ordinarily. Why has not a man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly. But there are nevertheless ways and means of dying of a rose in aromatic pain, and now and then we come across them. I suppose you find the human body intolerable, presented like that? That’s all right, it’s understandable.’ He went on, talking at random, and Margaret, lost in admiration, listened to a sentence and a half, and then gave up, and only thought how beautiful his voice was, how warm, how encouraging, like all those cheering broadcasts in the war.
Henry finished suddenly, ‘Now let’s have some light …’ He drew the curtains and pushed open the window, letting in the cold, and a spatter of fine rain, and enough grey London light to make it possible for him to switch off the lamp at Margaret’s side. He switched off the record player, took off his overcoat and dropped it on the sofa. ‘That’s better,’ he said. He had been finding the smell of stale food and stagnant, overheated air unbearable. ‘Now, why did you want me to come?’
Margaret, hunched in her chair, looked at him desperately with red and puffy eyes, and began to weep again.
Henry began to suspect that he had been summoned only to take her in his arms and soothe her. He felt a physical revulsion for her, as for most women, and felt he could deal better from the middle of the room. He stayed there, coughed, and repeated helplessly, ‘Why did you want me to come?’
Margaret found it almost impossible to communicate anything to any man if there was no physical contact – confessions and appeals should be murmured against a shoulder, not spoken into space, to be judged coldly. She wept more wildly and Henry was in the end compelled to abandon his position, and approach. He knelt in front of her, clumsily, and took her face, all wet and slippery, in his hands. ‘Now stop, please stop, don’t cry like that. You’re doing yourself no good.’ He could not embrace her, and any moment now she would slop over into his arms entirely. Tears ran warm and damp down his fingers. ‘If you can pull yourself together, we could go out for a drink – and dinner – and we could talk more calmly.’
Margaret gulped. ‘I ought to have asked you. There’s a drink in the kitchen. Would you like one?’
‘No thank you. It would do you good to go out.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret obediently. Her manner changed and became embarrassingly confidential. ‘I feel all right now you’ve come. Just having you here makes everything more possible. I mean, just watching you looking at that picture made me see it could be interesting, and not nasty. The room seems bigger with you in it.’
‘I opened the curtain …’
‘You don’t miss out on the big things, I like just to watch you thinking, things are important when you are thinking about them. I’m so frightened of being unimportant. I’m glad you’re here.’ She showed signs of coming closer again. Henry withdrew circumspectly and said, as he would have done to a child, ‘Now go and get changed, and we’ll go out.’
Margaret jumped up, pressed a kiss somewhere into his beard, and went out to change. She took some time over this. Henry wandered around her room getting his bearings, taking possession. It was very modern and restless.
The walls were all different colours, and the furniture had spiky metal legs. There was a little too much furniture – some of it had been Oliver’s and had been moved in when they married. There were a great many books, shut away in book-cases behind glass. Margaret collected glass animals; blue horses and red dragons and white swans were scattered over all the available surfaces amongst dirty plates, tomato stained glasses, and overflowing ashtrays. There was a smell of over-ripe cheese, and bad pears. Henry turned back a cushion and found more dirty plates, and a box with a small layer of molten Camembert at the bottom of it; he wrinkled his face in disgust, and put back the cushion. There was a print of a Matisse still life over the hearth, and a row of scatter cushions on the cream sofa echoed its flat washes of colour, scarlet, and citron and peacock. The colours fought for attention, there were equally small amounts of all of them, nothing was particularly powerful or particularly subtle.
Henry disliked it all, instinctively, but occupied himself busily in learning it off. He was interested in Margaret’s despair, its female intensity was a new idea to him, he thought he could use it and might write about it, some day. He dealt in facts, as a writer, not in talk; he would have been incapable of guessing at the tenor of Margaret’s interior monologue, but he was intensely aware of her state, her final exhaustion. The colours of her room would be to him when he had remembered them like the little glass buoys fishermen float over lobster pots, surface signals from underneath which he could draw up and expose, when he chose, the whole beast in its cage, dark and mottled and gleaming, strangely shaped and struggling.
When he had gathered the room into his mind in some pattern, it ceased to trouble him. Even the smell receded into an interesting stage effect. He felt he had the place and the feeling in his power, now. He could hold it up in contrast to something else – he was not quite sure what, yet – and burst open the bright prison as he had seen it done on the stage, in a production of Ionesco’s Amédée, where the box walls had risen, the furniture had trundled off, leaving the stage filled with nothing but a particularly warm and satisfying aquamarine light. He became quite excited, he would put it against some significant life, and break it down, that was what he would do. Some other woman, it must be, in a room full of air …
The prisoner, at that point, returned into the prison. He was conscious, immediately and shamefully, that his plan had done nothing for her, that he had disposed of the prison for himself and left her precisely where she was. And then his knowledge was overlaid by the further certainty that what his art’s arranging could not do for her, his presence did. She was freed, she was washed over with calm just to have him there, disposing of her predicament in his mind. She clung and clawed at his state of mind to keep from drowning. And as she looked up at him with complete trust, presenting herself for his approval, he felt that to take her trust was to be held under water himself, brought back again, partially at least, to a real presence in the prison. He shook himself, uneasily. He did not know how to behave.
It was apparent that he was expected to take her out to a very special drink and dinner. She had put on a bronze silk dress and tall, narrow bronze kid shoes, and wore a long rope of amber beads which bounced off her stomach. She had painted her face with great care; it was docile and inexpressive under the thick covering she had put over her red eyes and burning cheek.
‘You look very nice,’ he said.
‘Thank you. I don’t get out much now, and I do like to.’
‘I’m not really dressed for much myself,’ Henry pointed out, barely disguising his crossness. He disliked large meals. They slowed him. Margaret’s mouth trembled; she said, ‘Oh dear, I hope I’ve not done anything wrong …’ and gazed at him hopefully. It was obvious that she wanted to be seen with him. Caught between the fear of eating too much and the fear of Margaret’s tears, Henry capitulated. He rang for a taxi, and they drove for some time aimlessly about London until it was time for an early meal. Margaret leaned her head heavily and passively on his shoulder in the taxi, and did not seem to want to speak.
He took her to a restaurant which was informally smart enough for neither his tweeds nor Margaret’s dress to appear out of place, and which was well enough used by theatrical and literary persons to satisfy Margaret’s sense of importance. He struggled with the menu to find something he could eat comfortably without impeding his next morning’s work, and which would nevertheless not seem to Margaret to grudge the occasion. He ordered a bottle of wine and remembered that as an undergraduate he had dreamed of literary fame to be rewarded by dinners in such a restaurant, with such a beautiful woman. He smiled to himself, for here he was, neither bored nor blasé, nor disillusioned he hoped, but merely concerned exclusively with the connection between his stomach and his working routine.
Margaret seemed happy, even exalted. She clutched his arm ostentatiously when they came into the room, and peered around with a wide smile to remark how people noticed him and pointed him out to each other. She talked a great deal, leaning over and patting Henry’s hand from time to time as she did so, throwing herself back in her chair when he spoke, and staring at him, worshipping, obviously not hearing a word he said. Her talk was almost all about Oliver and details of Oliver’s personal habits which even Oliver would hardly have found interesting. The colour of a lampshade on the next table reminded her of a silk tie Oliver had nearly bought some time ago in Bath and had decided against. Oliver did not like shellfish, they brought him out in great lumps in awkward places; once he had had to teach standing up for a week. When Henry spoke of something else, Margaret immediately followed his remark with Oliver’s opinion, or probable opinion, of what he had said. Oliver thought the train services were very bad. Oliver thought that the rate of pay for university lecturers was scandalous. Was that man over there the one who had written the play about the T.B. Sanatorium? Oliver didn’t think it was a good play; he didn’t think death was either funny or dull; did Henry? She had a nervous trick of begging him earnestly to confirm views and information about which he knew nothing. ‘Oliver’s mother tried to stop him being educated, didn’t she, Henry?’ ‘He can’t work in the library all the time he’s in Cambridge, can he, Henry?’
It was only over the coffee that she came in a roundabout way, to the request she had summoned him to hear. Would he, Henry, go to Cambridge and find out whether Oliver meant to come back? Would he find out what Oliver thought, why Oliver could no longer stay with her, or speak to her? Oliver would listen to Henry; Henry was the only person Oliver would listen to. She thought that Oliver was perfectly capable of carrying on as they were forever, but she was not. She meant what she had said; she thought of killing herself.
‘Sometimes I think Oliver thinks you can’t expect marriage to be any different from this. He thinks I’ll settle to it. Well I won’t, but I can’t bring it home to him. You must, Henry, for me, you must …’ She said loudly, so that several people turned to stare at her, ‘Life ought to be better than this.’ Henry believed her, and was for a moment completely involved in wanting to make it better for her. ‘You’re all right,’ she said. ‘Please go and see Oliver for me.’
Henry promised, and immediately regretted it. He ascertained that Oliver had gone away over a week ago, leaving this time no indication of when he might return. He promised to go to Cambridge the next day – he had been more alarmed by Margaret than she seemed now to be herself, and felt strongly, once he had brought himself round to anything as unusual as taking steps about anything, that someone should bring home to Oliver his wife’s precarious mental state, if nothing else. Besides, he had rarely been asked to do anything for anyone, and did not know how to refuse. Caroline usually did the refusing for him, and he had been so perturbed by the combination of her frustration and Margaret’s that he felt, for a moment, that he had no right to let her do it any more. He adjusted his mind to the thought of seeing Oliver, which purely on his own account he did not want to do, and asked Margaret what she would like to do next.
She chose the cinema, ‘It’s so much more soothing than the theatre, isn’t it, Henry?’ They went to the last performance of an American musical, a form which Henry intensely disliked. He sat, bolt upright, conscious as he always was in places of entertainment that people were peering round his shoulders and over his hair, and were wondering audibly how anyone could be so large. He thought, as hero and heroine disappeared together under an arch of golden Technicolor clouds in a roar of celestial voices, that it could be argued that this was a debased version of his own method, gaudy, simple, larger than life and insistent, and this was perhaps why he disliked it. Margaret sat and wept softly, because it was comfortable to weep in cinemas; she slid her hand onto his knee, so that after a moment like a guilty schoolboy with a forward girl friend, he timidly covered it with his own. This completed his embarrassment; he sat miserably waiting for the end of the film, until it occurred to him that here at least he was under no obligation not to think of his work, and he began, furtively, to organize a sentence.
Afterwards, Margaret saw him off on the night train. It was not raining heavily, and steam and water were beaten back under the canopy and onto the edges of the platforms, rolling in tongues around barrows and passengers’ legs, gritty with dirt. Henry and Margaret walked into this fog as they went down towards the front of the train; his beard and the hairy nap of his greatcoat seemed to merge with it; he lost substance. Henry coughed heavily. They were early for the train; he would have liked to get in and have it over with, but that was unthinkable. Margaret must have her goodbye.
She wore an evening coat she had had for years, made of pale gold corded silk, and had unfurled her umbrella, also pale gold, before they came into the entrance hall, and had not put it down. She stood now, under this gold canopy which transmuted the anaemic station light so that her skin and coat were doubly gold, and the gloss glittered on her dress and shoes; she was an island of brightness in the dirt and hurry. She still had her hopeful look, as though Henry had only to decide to do so to change her life for her with a word or a gesture.
‘I like the umbrella,’ Henry said, for something to say. ‘It was a birthday present from Oliver,’ Margaret said evasively. Henry was aware that she was lying. He did not know why and decided that Oliver must have forgotten the birthday and the poor creature must have bought the umbrella herself from him. In fact it was not so bad: Oliver had simply given her money and told her to get herself something nice. The idea that her life must be a string of such lies exasperated him. It was a waste of consciousness, a waste of the possibilities of movement, to spend a whole human energy on such a fabrication. It was doubtless a waste of Oliver too. The man must have more in him than was necessary just to torment and evade this kind of love. He said hurriedly, and more urgently than he had said anything all evening, ‘Look, why don’t you just give up? Just let him go? Go away and do something else entirely? Something worthwhile. Start again.’
Margaret started violently, and her teeth began to chatter ridiculously. The umbrella above her wavered and trembled like a palm tree. She said at last, ‘Do you – Henry – do you really think it’s that bad? It isn’t that bad, is it, Henry?’
He had not known she was still so rooted in spite of the way she had talked of Oliver all evening. He had not realized how singly she expected him to come back from seeing Oliver with a tale of nothing but a perfectly simple misunderstanding easy to clear up. Anything else was beyond what she had power to think possible. She said, ‘It isn’t really that bad, Henry,’ pleading.
He persisted, ‘Have you ever thought of doing anything else?’
‘What would I do? There isn’t anything I want to do. Is there, Henry? I don’t want anything else.’
‘You could remarry.’
‘No …’ she said, coming closer to him. ‘No, no, that’s not what you’d do yourself, is it? I don’t want anything else. I want Oliver. I want …’ Henry retreated, and thought he must undo the damage he had done before the train left. He said clumsily, ‘I’m sorry. I only meant, think about it. I can’t really say anything until I’ve seen Oliver.’
‘No …’ said Margaret on a sigh of relief. ‘You’re a good man. He’ll take it, from you. It’ll be all right.’
The announcer began to explain, patient, metallic, hurriedly, ‘The train about to leave from Platform …’
‘I must go.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret. She scrambled into his arms, kissing his face, dropping the umbrella like an open flower over his shoulder.
‘You’re so good, so good, I rely on you. I’d have killed myself if you hadn’t come.’ She screwed at his coat collar with her free hand and said in a voice unrecognizably savage, ‘I mean that, I mean that, I’d have killed myself.’
Henry murmured something reassuring, patted her shoulder, backed a few steps, and climbed with a rush into the train. He peered out of the window at her, pathetic in her bright clothes and pool of light, with the tongues of steam reaching out to choke and the dead light from the vault, grey like dishwater, dropping down to drown. He thought as the train moved out, and she waved her bright arm into the steam, that there was no necessity about her state; she might just as easily have married someone more equable, who would like her food, and admire her clothes, and have had children early, and her view of life would have held for her lifetime, very likely. He would not have liked to be, as perhaps for the time he was, in Oliver’s place. Nevertheless anger with Oliver was stirring in him. Oliver had taken all this on. Oliver should be made to see what he had done. Or, if he had seen, to acknowledge responsibility, and undo it. This was a most unusual line of thought for Henry, but it held him for some miles.
Margaret waited and waved until the train disappeared. She thought she felt good; she had done the right thing, sending for Henry, he had made things all right again and would, having power over Oliver, fetch Oliver back and force him into the mould he should be in. But the doubt his last appeal had left with her could not be disposed of yet. He had said, why not give up? He had not meant it, he hadn’t really thought things had come to that, he knew perfectly well that everything she was and had been would become a lie if she gave up now, he didn’t want to reduce her to nothing.
But he had said it. Soon she would work out why, would silt over the pain in her mind like the grit at the centre of the pearl, would smooth it until it ceased to bother. She went uncertainly back along the platform, annoyed that her last memory of Henry should be adulterated in this way, and remembered the dirt in the flat, the unwashed glasses, the old cheese, the cigarette stubs. They were worse, seen from here in clean clothes, than they were when she was actually in amongst them. What warmth Henry had left with her wavered. She cast about for consolation, and found the imagined Oliver of their first few weeks together. She stopped and watched him, little and dark, stepping briskly across the station to meet her; she built him out of the shadow of the magazine kiosk, now closed, where it fell across the moving tea barrow; he emerged under the clock, now substantial, and kissed her face.
‘You’re late,’ she said lovingly. ‘I’m not, I couldn’t be,’ he retorted, and proved it to her. He said, ‘You’re always so beautiful. I’m glad I gave you that umbrella, even Henry Severell liked it, you see.’
‘You have such good taste,’ she told him, moving across the station, turning her head to chatter vivaciously to him over her shoulder. Several people turned to stare at her; she ignored them; she had long ago given up talking to Oliver only in her head; that was not real enough; she had told herself that people didn’t really notice in the street, they were too occupied with themselves. It was therefore axiomatic that those who looked were looking at something other than her. ‘I do love you, Oliver,’ she said. ‘When we get home, we’ll go straight to bed, won’t we, I’ve had a hard day. I’m tired. It was nice seeing Henry, but it’s better now you’ve come.’
‘I don’t want to share you,’ Oliver said. ‘Even with him.’ Margaret nodded approvingly. She said, ‘He’s a man I could have loved, if I hadn’t had you, all the same,’ hushed him with a finger, managed to engage a taxi, and continued the conversation about how they would spend the night whilst she was driven through the wet streets. Sometimes the situation got out of control, and at night, in bed, Oliver tormented her. She became apprehensive now, as they neared the house, and, after paying the taxi, and climbing the dark stairs, she turned with the key in the lock and pleaded, ‘Be nice to me, Oliver, tonight, won’t you? Be nice …’ ‘I’ll be nice,’ he said, following her into the cold hall, looking over her shoulder into the dark bedroom. Faintly the smell of old food rose to meet them. ‘Don’t clean up,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind, we’ll do it tomorrow. Let’s get to bed.’ ‘Promise you’ll be nice,’ she said, shivering as she dropped the bronze dress onto the floor, on top of a pile of others. ‘Of course, I’ll be nice,’ he said. But it was early, yet.