For several days it rained. We went for long walks in the rain, through wide cabbage fields. The huge cold cabbage leaves, some almost plum purple, clacked and clattered against our gum-boots. Joshua said he felt about cabbages like vegetarians feel about meat. He picked a large leaf and shook it, holding it like a bowl. A thousand balls of rain skidded about among the hillocky surface, looking for their holes, like the plastic balls in those children’s games in crackers. He could not eat cabbages, Joshua said.
We walked over the sodden marshes smoked up with mist and slimy underfoot. Joshua was mellow, benign, almost expansive. He made me laugh. He held a piece of tarpaulin from a haystack over my head while I wiped his steamed-up glasses on my shirt. We went to the graveyard of a Norman church where he climbed the slippery black trunk of an old yew tree. When he reached the top he battered the coarse branches, so that for a moment part of the tree was shaken out of its lethargy and a few rain drops leaked through its great hood on to the soft, dry earth beneath.
Then at last there was a clear morning. The sky, drained of its cloud and rain, was pale and weak. We went to the beach. There, the high, wind-breaking dunes ran into the sand, and the sand ran into the sea indeterminately as the meeting of water colours. It was still cold, and Joshua began to run. I kept up with him for a while, then he began to outpace me. The wet sand made the going heavy. I slowed down, walked. The distance between us quickly increased. Soon he was no more than a small moving figure.
I turned my back to the sea and walked towards the dunes. Sudden desolation cut through me, like wire through cheese. They were scrawny dunes here, with bald patches of grey white sand between clumps of tough, skinny grass. Twenty years ago, as a melancholy child, a group of children cast me out from their ball game in dunes like these. I had run from them, tears cutting down my cheeks, into the fir woods behind the dunes. I had stamped on the earth and flung myself on the ground, stupidly enraged. Then I found primroses. It began to rain, and I picked them. A long time later I went back to the dunes. The children had gone and the tide was out. I found half a biscuit in my pocket and ate it, and lay on the sand uncaring about time, looking at the flat wet landscape. And then the melancholy rolled away and I was left ashamed.
I looked at the sea now. It didn’t work like that any more.
‘Joshua!’ I shouted out loud. The voice lay flat on the wind, somebody else’s voice.
Lumps of drying sand flaked off my boots. I could taste salt on my lips. Where was he? Why clouds again?
It hadn’t been like this with Richard Storm. We had been fond of each other. Fond of each other like elderly relations who are accustomed to one another’s ways. I was in awe of his age, obedient to him. When he had written to say he was staying in Barcelona with Matilda I had been surprised, but not hurt. He wasn’t breaking up a great life between us.
It hadn’t been like that with Jonathan. His consistent attention, often claustrophobic, was a contrast to desertion. He was always there, a habit, secure, harmless. The November afternoon we married in Caxton Hall was no more elating than many other afternoons we had spent together. We went to the Savoy for dinner and he insisted I ate à la carte, although I wanted the plat du jour. Within three days of living with him it was obvious he had preconceived ideas about what should be done on what occasions. The plat du jour on the honeymoon night was only the start. But marriage with him was just as I imagined it would be, for two years. It was only lately that its emptiness and its irritations, impossible to imagine, had become apparent and then intolerable.
And now Joshua. Why had he run away again? Why did he always tease? I lay down, my face against the chill sand, and the wind scattered my hair over my eyes so that it tickled. Then a hand pulled it away with a tug. I rolled over. Joshua was squatting.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ he said. ‘There weren’t any ice creams.’ I sat up.
‘I didn’t want an ice cream. I didn’t ask for one. Why did you go? I couldn’t keep up.’
‘You might have liked one if I’d got one. But they told me the man packed up his stall last week.’ The season’s over.’ He lay beside me. ‘I must have run a mile.’ He smiled, he was pleased. ‘I haven’t had any exercise like that for ages. I feel marvellous.’
‘You’re lucky.’
‘Why, don’t you? What’s the matter?’ ‘You keep running away.’
‘Not very seriously. And anyhow I haven’t run away for four days – not since the first evening.’
‘I don’t know what’s the matter, really. I’m being inarticulate.’
‘You funny, pretty thing. You look nice in the wind.’ He brushed sand off my shoulders and pulled me down to join him. ‘Nobody ever comes here at this time of year. We’d never be caught.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely sure.’
The tough spiky grass bent all round us and the sand, which was dry in the dunes, swept about us.
*
It was at lunch that Joshua had his idea.
‘Why don’t we ask Mrs Fox to join us? She must be feeling low.’ I had almost forgotten Mrs Fox. Lunch was Irish stew and apple crumble. Rita poured Joshua a glass of lager without asking if he wanted it.
‘I don’t think she’d want to come. There’s not enough noise in Norfolk.’
‘I think she’d like it. We could entertain her.’
‘We’re quite happy entertaining ourselves, aren’t we?’ I was drinking cider and my head was fuzzy. Rita was polishing spoons very slowly at the sideboard, putting them down silently so that she could hear what we were saying.
‘Why don’t you want her to come?’
‘I’m happy as we are.’
‘I thought you weren’t.’
‘I am.’
‘Oh.’ I fiddled with the salt, making little mounds with the spoon, then squashing them flat again. ‘I’d like to ask her just for a few days,’ Joshua said. ‘Think how pleased she’d be.’ I sighed.
‘Mrs Fox’s great message is that she never wants to be a nuisance to anybody. You can ask her, but I don’t think she’ll come. Do what you like, though. But I think it’s silly, asking a dotty old woman like her to Norfolk in the autumn. Why don’t you ask your mother?’ I heard the sarcasm in my voice.
‘My mother died when I was seventeen,’ said Joshua, ‘and I never did anything for her.’ Rita started on a pile of knives.
‘Oh, I see. You think that making benevolent gestures towards one old woman will compensate for doing nothing for another.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. But, no, I don’t think that. I’m not a do-gooder, and that’s their line of thinking. Charity suddenly comes upon them like religious mania, and they cram in a few years of the gooseberry jam stuff to make up for all the years the idea hadn’t occurred to them. – No, the thing is, about Mrs Fox, I like her. She doesn’t make me feel guilty if I don’t do anything about her. And she doesn’t make me feel heroic if I do. You can’t say anything more than that about any old person, can you?’ I nodded. ‘Can I ask her, then?’ I said yes.
‘Do you mind if I clear?’ Rita was bored. We went to the empty, tea-smelling lounge.
‘Have you ever thought about the worst thing between the young and the old?’ Joshua went on. ‘I don’t mean all the obvious things, like lack of communication, lack of imagination to understand each other’s era. I mean the way they fundamentally drain each other. A daughter looks after her old mother, say, or grandparent. It takes time and energy. The old grandparent feels the uncomfortable disadvantage of having to be looked after. And they are both so confused with duties and responsibilities, that any reserves of spontaneity between them are dried up. Then the motive behind any idea or action between the generations is suspect, for all that the people involved pretend that it isn’t. It’s so exhausting – it makes so many martyrs. In China, there’s a much better system. In the compounds there, it’s the natural duty of the young to look after and entertain the old. The responsibility doesn’t have a ruinous effect, any more than here the responsibility of a mother towards her child is damaging.’
‘But you’re being too objective,’ I said. ‘The young don’t look after the old purely out of duty. Love comes into it. A daughter, say, who is fond of her old parents or grandparents, wants to help them. She isn’t wholly a martyr.’
‘She may not be to begin with. But in cases where love and responsibility are equally balanced, and responsibility means the daily grind of ministering to someone physically, then love is rarely the element that tips the scales.’
‘What would you do in that sort of case?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know exactly, as my parents died before the question arose. But I think that I’d have been dutiful to them if I had liked them, and done nothing for them if we’d never got on. I don’t believe in loyalty between relations if they don’t like each other. To me, that’s one of the worst forms of domestic hypocrisy. A great breeding ground for martyrdom. I think the whole pattern of tribal feeling, of families sticking to each other just because they are related, is misconceived. Of course, if they like each other as well as being related, that’s a different matter. But how many of them do? Do you?’
I thought of my mother, padded in maroon velvet, crocodile shoes and bag to match; her manic Conservatism, her crazy love of pets and sunshine cruises. My father: wispy, blurred, his conscience pulling him from Lords cricket matches back to his fat salaried job in industry; the signed copy of The Just So Stories by his bed. I didn’t love them, I didn’t like them, I didn’t see them.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But Jonathan is a perfect example, though, of someone who is embarrassed by his parents because they aren’t as pseudo intellectual as he is, and at the same time inextricably bound to them by duty. I don’t think he loves them, or has ever thought of loving them. They are just an area in his life that has to be visited. They have to be cared for, like his teeth. – You know how the newspapers always give people good marks for visiting their parents? When they write about a poor undergraduate who has become famous on television, say, they never stop repeating … and he goes to see his parents in Beccles every weekend. … When Jonathan reads one of those sort of reports he’s almost overcome with smug pleasure at the thought of doing the same thing himself. And down we go to Somerset again for another look round Major Lyall’s pig farm, and Jonathan lectures us all about Nabakov. None of us can argue with him, of course, so he has a clear field. But that’s irrelevant.’
‘That’s the sort of pointless mesh hundreds of thousands of people have got themselves into and endure,’ Joshua said.
He went to telegram Mrs Fox.
She arrived the next afternoon. We fetched her from the station in the taxi with the trough seats. She did not appear surprised to have been asked, but she conveyed her pleasure by delighting in everything. A Sailor’s Day flag in her usual black hat was her only concession to her new environment.
We had tea in the lounge and she sat opposite us and acted as host, pouring the tea and passing us sandwiches. Any sadness about her sister was concealed. She looked at us with merriment.
‘Henry and I nearly went away like you two, once,’ she said, ‘only in the end we didn’t. We just had to imagine it. In those days, our respective families would have been very shocked. But it wasn’t the shock that stopped us. It was the lack of opportunity. Never a chance we had! Edith and my mother guarded over me – they would hardly leave me to a private thought, let alone a weekend by the sea with Henry. As for him, he was always so busy, and all his life he put his duty – his patients – before me. So in the end, of course, when we had given up ever hoping for an opportunity, there was only one thing left to do, and we married.’
‘How does that work as a reason?’ asked Joshua.
‘It worked very well in our case. Of course, it would be a very old-fashioned reason to get married to-day, wouldn’t it? It seems to me not many modern couples suffer from lack of opportunity!’ She looked round curiously to the other people having tea – middle-aged, outdoor people, in wind-smoothed tweeds. People who seemed too big for the small flowered arm-chairs.
‘How do they take it – you?’ she asked. ‘Do they disapprove?’
‘I don’t think they know, or if they do, I don’t think they care,’ said Joshua. Then he put his hand on my knee, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. It was one of the few gestures of affection in public he ever made to me.
‘Edith, now, she had quite an experience,’ went on Mrs Fox. ‘In 1919 a solicitor asked her to go to York with him for the weekend. She said no, but she didn’t make herself firm enough. – She never was much of a one with words. Anyhow they went, by train, all the way to York. On the way there the solicitor schooled her to tell the hotel receptionist that her name was Edith Freeman, Mrs Edith Freeman, and not Miss Edith Smith. Edith promised. But she was a most honest character, and when the time came she couldn’t go through with it. She signed Edith Smith in the book and the solicitor gave her such a dig in the ribs that she had a bruise for weeks after. He was mad with rage, and she cried and said she wanted to go home. So he put her on the next train back and he never saw her again. After that, Edith said she’d rather stay a virgin. And she did, till the day she died.’ Mrs Fox laughed at her own story.
‘I was never very good on the classics,’ she continued, ‘music was more my line, but there is one author I’m well acquainted with, and that’s Jane Austen. Henry loved her. He would read her to me almost every day, every book, time and again. In the end I knew great chunks by heart. And do you know what Jane Austen said about – you?’ She waved towards us with a slight movement of her hand, and straightened herself in her chair like a child about to recite a poem. ‘She said: “While the imaginations of other people will carry them away to form wrong judgements of our conduct, and to decide on it by slight appearances, one’s happiness must in some measure be always at the mercy of chance.” ’
Three or four of the big tweedy people glanced towards Mrs Fox with some amazement, then returned their eyes to their tea. But Mrs Fox was oblivious to them. ‘I have never forgotten that. Why, if Henry had read me that particular bit before we were married, I really believe I should have insisted on an opportunity: it would have been justified for me. Oh well … perhaps it turned out for the best. But I wouldn’t like it,’ she bent close to us, ‘if your happiness was at the mercy of these people.’
‘Really, they don’t bother us, we don’t bother them,’ Joshua told her, quietly.
After Mrs Fox’s arrival, our lives in Norfolk changed. Joshua was protective towards her, and extended the protection to me. He was more approachable than I had ever known him before. He relaxed. He was mellow, and happy. I felt the same.
Mrs Fox was a perfect third party. Both of us were aware of an increasing affection for her, which we indulged in but never mentioned. It tied us, in a peculiar way, more deeply than living alone together had succeeded in doing.
The days were almost uneventful. We walked, we sailed coldly in Joshua’s small boat, we ate large amounts of filling English food. In the evenings Joshua and Mrs Fox played chess or backgammon while I read a book. Mrs Fox wrote innumerable coloured postcards, very slowly, to her friends and her enemies. Really, she explained, it was sitting at the large desk in the lounge that appealed to her: the free writing-paper, and new blotting paper, the pen chained to the ink stand. Every morning she wrote there for an hour or so, newly delighted.
One evening she insisted that we took her to the local pub. She drank three pink gins and ate half a pound of Cashew nuts.
‘They’re free, aren’t they? Henry always said it was immoral to take advantage of free food in pubs and writing-paper in hotels, but I never could agree with him.’
‘When I was travelling round the States on very little money,’ said Joshua, ‘I once lived for a whole week on the free Saltines, ketchup, chutney and water that you get in drug stores. If I hadn’t taken advantage, I’d have almost starved.’ This cheered Mrs Fox. She began on the Onion Flavoured Crisps.
Joshua and I drank three or four whiskies. Joshua talked to the local squire about his days in the Air Force. We all became warmly drunk, expansive.
‘Look here,’ said the squire, towards closing time, ‘let’s not pack in the party now. There’s a fair down the road with only a few nights till it closes for the winter. It may not be Battersea, you know, but why don’t we see what’s cooking down there?’
Mrs Fox gave a high pitched giggle of pleasure and slipped off her high stool.
‘A fair? Squire, there’s nothing in the world I would like more.’ The squire, with somewhat unsteady gallantry, took her arm and led us out to his shooting brake.
It was a scraggy little fair, a chipped-paint fair with only half its coloured bulbs working. Music from the merry-go-round screeched into the cold air and bulbs of steam rose from newly made toffee apples. In between the stalls, the earth was crusts of semi-hard mud; the grass worn away. Few people were about. A few half-hearted couples stood with hands in pockets, chins in scarves, looking. Not all the quick-worded cajoling and shouted promises of prizes could persuade them to roll a ball or shoot a tin tiger.
Mrs Fox gave life to the fair. She was what the disheartened stall holders had been waiting for all evening. She pranced from one to another, accurate in her aim, lucky in her guessing, collecting handfuls of small prizes which she stuffed into the squire’s pockets. Finally she persuaded him to escort her to the merry-go-round. There she mounted a billowing wooden horse, he took one beside her, the scratchy gramophone blasted pop music, and they galloped away.
Joshua and I went on the swings. They were large, shabby boats with curly manes of wood, bow and stern, their paint pale and cracked. They weren’t very high off the ground, but by some trick of light, we balanced midway between the curve of stars in the sky and the lumpy threads of fairground lights. Here, the music was softer. We hummed, and could hear ourselves humming. Joshua, standing looking down at me, worked the swings violently.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, suddenly, and I began to laugh. ‘No, you’re not really. But you look it in this light’. He sat beside me. The swing rocked almost to a standstill by itself, and we laughed and laughed for no particular reason.
We climbed down. The ground was unsteady. I clung to Joshua.
‘What’s happened to us?’
‘We’re rather drunk, my beautiful,’ he said.
‘But I didn’t feel like this before we went on the swings.’
‘Nor did I. It was the rush of air.’ He turned to me, three faces. ‘Think,’ he said slowly, ‘of Jonathan typing in his Roman attic’ The thought shook him with more laughter.
‘Sick joke,’ I said, and laughed too.
Then suddenly we were quite sober. The lights, the stalls, the red-faced men and the stacks of cheap prizes no longer swung crazily about. They just trembled slightly, like pacified leaves after a storm. But still we clung to one another in a dazed way, unspeaking.
Mrs Fox and the squire came round a corner arm in arm.
‘That was the best time I have had in years,’ said Mrs Fox, her hat askew, her voice familiarly high. ‘We rode for twenty five minutes without stopping, and I could have gone on, but the squire couldn’t.’
‘I had to rescue you from falling off your horse from dizziness,’ the squire confessed.
They argued happily. At midnight the squire drove us back to the hotel. He was in no condition to make the sharp turn into the drive.
The flood lighting had been turned off and we made our way up the gravel drive by the murky light of a half moon. Now it was all over, Mrs Fox seemed a little deflated.
‘When’s your birthday ?’ she asked Joshua. ‘Two weeks to-day,’ he told her, after a pause to work it out. ‘Why?’
‘Then I can give you a party,’ she said. ‘That will be nice, something to look forward to. It’s lucky it’s so soon. A lucky chance. I always like to have something to look forward to.’ She straightened her back and quickened her pace.
*
We were wakeful. We talked and half-slept for a few hours. At four, Joshua got out of bed.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Coming?’
Automatically, I asked if I should wake Mrs Fox. She had been everywhere with us since her arrival.
‘No, stupid. You’re an idiot, sometimes.’ He was irritable, unapproachable again, his mood of a few hours ago quite dead.
‘Where I’m stupid, I suppose,’ I said, ‘is ever expecting you to be consistent. You change more quickly than anybody I’ve ever met. You never remember what you say, or how you’ve felt. Or if you do, it never makes any difference to you a few hours later.’ I was pulling on thick stockings, boots, a duffle coat, by the frail grey light in the window. ‘You can’t bear the idea of surrendering yourself completely. You get halfway there, and you enjoy it, I know you do. And then you retract.’
‘Quite right. But I’m not going to change.’
‘It makes you difficult to be with, sometimes.’
He did up my scarf, frowning.
‘Shut up,’ he said.
We took the narrow wet lane to the marshes. It was very cold. Clumps of mist moved about us. On the horizon, above the thin line of sea, flaming streaks curled back into the sky like edges of burning paper, leaving an opalescent sheen beneath.
Joshua walked very fast so that I had to jog to keep up with him. I complained of a stitch.
‘Grumpy,’ he said, turning round but not slowing down, ‘on such a morning.’
Perversely, he stopped a few yards later and waited for me to catch up with him. He indicated the sky, the view, with a gesture of mock pleasure, as if to kill any intent I may have had to take the beauty seriously. Then his hand swooped to rest on my shoulder.
‘They stood there, looking at each other,’ he began, in a voice that trembled with mock seriousness, ‘there was nothing to say. It was bigger than both of them.’
‘Stop sending me up.’ I laughed. He smiled.
‘You look so hopeful, sometimes,’ he said. ‘It’s enough to put fear into any man’s heart.’
In answer he cupped my face in his cold hands, observed it seriously, then spoke once more in his spoof voice.
‘Mrs Lyall – you know something about yourself? At this time of day, you have the most extraordinarily funny face.’
The mists were rising. He took my arm, and with exaggerated slowness we began to walk back for breakfast.