Viv really was absurd. A sleeping bag for Charles’ only child! A posture-sprung four-poster was more the thing he’d have in mind. And a Regency desk or two, and the collected works of Henry James. Viv made everything so easy. Another loaf, another pint of milk, another child. Her life was built for children, like her house. Everything was shabby, grubby, friendly, worn, comfortable. Dinky toys down the lavatory and soggy biscuits embedded in the chairs. Viv would do anything for anyone, but you always had to share her – with noise, and smells, and pets and brats.
Frances brushed cat hairs off her dress, glanced around her own house, which looked chilling, almost sterile, more a show-house than a home. The photographs and ornaments were sited with exact precision. She bought flowers to match the curtains, arranged magazines in rows, as if it were a dentist’s waiting-room. She could hardly remember now if she’d been so finicky before she’d ever met Charles, or whether she’d changed to humour him. Her own home had been strict, not so much tidy as double-locked and barred. Everything was dangerous or forbidden. Her mother regarded childhood as a period of continuous peril. Ponies only existed to be fallen off; fairgrounds broke your neck or picked your pocket; holidays abroad were a foreign plot to give you sunstroke or diarrhoea. Children themselves were risk and ruination, who would wreck your figure before they frayed your nerves. It had been almost a relief to escape to Charles’ regime. At least he had a plan to beat the perils. She sometimes wondered what she might have done, if she hadn’t had a Charles. Could she have discovered that life wasn’t as hazardous as everybody claimed?
She stretched out on the Victorian chaise-longue and tried to see the room through Viv’s eyes. It didn’t look like a museum – she was too good a home-maker for that. It was elegant, yes, but comfortable. The Victorian copper log basket was filled with hand-picked logs, attractively arranged – real logs, but not for burning. The log fire was a sham, an artificial hearth, courtesy of the Gas Board. It was cleaner than the real thing. She and Charles hated grime. They also hated shams. But the real logs somehow redeemed it. She got up to switch it on. It wasn’t cold, but she felt stiff and shivery. She hadn’t slept at all, the last two nights. After hours of agonizing, they had lain in their single beds, turned away from each other, facing their own bare strip of wall. Strange how life continued. Time still ticked on, sixty minutes to an hour, exactly as before. The sun came up and set again. The milkman delivered Charles’ skimmed milk and free-range eggs.
She had stared out of the window, this dreadful, drunken morning, and everything appeared so ordinary. Dogs peeing on the grass, commuters plodding to the station, a plane doodling through the baby-blue sky. The trees were lush, unruffled; the pavements still divided into squares. She couldn’t understand it. The way she felt, the world should be uprooted and capsized, trees turned bare and blasted overnight. Her own world was in ruins, and the real one hadn’t blanched.
Other mornings, she’d looked out and felt a sort of wonder that everything was happening as it should, as if Charles had been put in charge of the whole universe – trains and planes running on schedule, delivery vans unloading bread and newspapers, postmen linking Surrey with Snowdonia, road sweepers keeping the entire planet clean. Her own shining house was somehow part of it, and Charles’ work, his lists, his notebooks, all had their place in this cosmic harmony: clocks ticking, computers whirring, machines thumping and pumping, the whole earth, ordered, punctual.
But not the last two days. The busy world whirred on, but she was a piece chipped out of it. She had been rubbed out like an error, deleted from the timetable. Her day stretched in all directions, with no point to it, no boundaries. How could she ever have thought it worthwhile to toil across the golf course, or bother with committee meetings? And what was the point of eating and sleeping, when your husband had a mistress and a daughter? She didn’t want to cook. Impossible to sit opposite Charles at the table, guzzling mouthfuls of cardboard entrecôte, when he’d betrayed her with that very same mouth.
But what would they do? Sit and drink their normal Tio Pepes? Talk about the weather? The usual platitudes seemed precious now.
‘Had a good day?’
‘Busy.’ (Always busy.) ‘And you?’
‘Quiet.’ (Often quiet.) ‘Nice lunch?’
‘Tolerable. Went to Simpson’s with a couple of accountants.’
‘Hope you didn’t choose steak. That’s for dinner.’
Well, it wouldn’t be, not now. He could get himself a sandwich, or go and ask Piroska to cook Hungarian goulash for him. Was that the woman’s name? Something outlandish and fancy. And Magda Rozsi wasn’t much better. People in their circle didn’t have daughters called Magda Rozsi Kornyai. And what about their circle? How in heaven’s name were they going to explain away a teenager? They could call her a niece, but Charles was an only child. And supposing Magda blabbed? Could they invent a deceased first wife for Charles? But why would he have hushed it up? You didn’t hide legitimate daughters for fifteen years. All their friends would jeer and tittle-tattle. They’d lose their settled, precious way of life, their reputation as decent people who could be invited anywhere.
Every time she thought about the problem, some new dimension punched her in the face. Charles’ mother, for example, his staid, sheltered mother who wouldn’t even read the newspapers because they were full of ‘shocks and horrors’. Perhaps she’d take back all her furniture, or refuse to lend them her country cottage any more.
Frances sagged down in the chaise-longue, her body like a crumpled paper bag. She turned off the fire, and obediently the flames subsided. Was she an artificial fire? So that Charles was forced to find a red-hot Piroska, a blaze of Hungarian passion burning up his schedules and consuming all his rules? She didn’t want to know. She walked slowly upstairs to the bedroom, with its whipped cream walls and rosewood furniture. The single beds looked cold and smug, as if they had never been ruffled in their lives.
She lay face downwards on the pillow and cried. She never cried. Tears ruined the complexion. She listened to the noise of her own sobbing, almost from outside it. A strange, animal noise. If only she could be more like an animal, abandoned and spontaneous, instead of imprisoned in her head. Animals cared for other creatures’ offspring. Dogs suckled fox cubs and hens mothered ducklings. But what about the cuckoo? It laid its eggs in the pipit’s nest, and soon all the other nestlings were pushed out and starved. That’s what Magda would be – a greedy little cuckoo, commandeering the nest.
But she still had five days. Anything could happen in five days. Piroska might relent, or Magda refuse to live with them at Richmond, and run away and join a commune … She eased up from the bed and rummaged in her wardrobe, looking for the lion, the toy she had bought for her non-existent baby. The only baby now was Charles’ – a stranger and almost grown-up. Even if they did conceive their own child, it wouldn’t be a new experience for Charles. She couldn’t cherish it as his first-born. That had been Piroska’s privilege.
She took the lion back to bed with her. It had a friendly sort of grin, almost a Ned grin. It looked like Ned, in fact, the same streaked golden mane and greenish eyes. Charles had raised an eyebrow when he saw it. He never encouraged anything frivolous. In the early days, when she’d wanted a kitten, or a ball-game on the beach, or a nightdress-case in the shape of a giraffe, he’d made her feel childish and stupid even for asking; bought her a real leather briefcase instead, with a combination lock.
She sat on the counterpane with the lion cradled in her arms. Her head was like a child’s tin drum, pounded by a hundred throbbing drumsticks. She couldn’t bear to think. Wherever she looked, there was only chaos and deception. She swallowed four aspirin and an Equinil on top of them, and put herself to bed.
She dreamt she was climbing up the decks of a tall ship with no solid sides or rails, but only high, trembling scaffolding. She climbed higher, higher, higher; the wind screaming in her ears, the waves like foaming troughs. Everyone else was dying – pale and hopeless bodies cocooned in tight white blankets like larvae, stacked in rows. She stepped over and over them, and suddenly she was on the topmost mast, and a harsh light was stabbing her eyes and some terrible sickly smell shoved right up her nostrils, the smell of forced carnations. A double bunch, double-wrapped in cellophane, with Charles on the other end of it. And behind him again, that harsh ship’s light, the bedroom light, assaulting her eyes.
His mouth was saying something. She tried to concentrate. Body and mind seemed to have drifted miles apart from each other, and she couldn’t join them up. She shut her eyes and the smell of carnations swooped right inside her skull. She opened them again. Charles was bending over her, the cellophane rustling against the counterpane. Carefully, she watched the movements of his mouth.
‘Are you all right, darling?’ it appeared to say. She nodded. The mouth moved again – she wished it wouldn’t. She was so incredibly tired, she’d rather sleep than lip-read.
‘Look,’ it was saying, hesitantly, almost desperately. ‘Piroska’s had to leave immediately. The grandmother’s had a stroke. I’m sorry to spring this on you, darling, but Magda’s … er … downstairs.’