That evening, Charles took her out to dinner, on her own. Magda had not returned. They studiously avoided the subject of pets; combining tolerable scampi and indifferent chocolate mousse with careful observations on the shadow cabinet’s regional funding policy and the Richmond redevelopment scheme. Charles drained his port.
‘Fancy a stroll by the river?’
‘Well, yes, but haven’t you got to work?’
‘Not tonight. It’s your evening. I wanted to spend it with you, darling. To – er – thank you …’
‘What for?’
‘For having Magda. You’ve done a lot for her. And I know it isn’t easy.’
She didn’t answer, seemed to have lost her usual easy habit of responding to Charles. Resentment had clogged it, like lumps in a cream sauce.
The evening was close, almost stifling. Small, swollen clouds were building up across the river, and a greenish light oozed its way between sky and water. A cloud of gnats buzzed above their heads. They walked in silence along the crumbling path, stepping gingerly around the puddles. In the early months of their marriage, they had walked the same path, but Charles had held her hand then, and stopped at every bench to kiss her, in the dark. It was light now, a blazing summer evening, and people were only dozing on the benches or reading newspapers which shrieked of strikes, inflation. They wandered on to where the river widened and the trees grew closer, trailing their branches in the water and staring at their own reflections. Charles stopped and took her hand, looked furtively around, to make sure no one was watching. ‘I love you, Frances. You know that, don’t you?’
She nodded.
‘Don’t let things be different.’
She shook her head, watched his neat, imperious eyebrows draw down across his steel-blue eyes in a tense and wary frown. His brows were neither shaggy nor straggling, yet somehow they managed to dominate his face. Even when she was angry with him, she could still admire the way he was put together; each of his features carefully selected from Harrods and then set in place by a design consultant. Perhaps he was right – things needn’t be different. Magda wouldn’t stay with them for ever. They still had their own life, apart from Magda; perhaps even their own baby.
A couple strolled by, the young bearded man pushing a pram. Charles would never be a pram-pusher, but at least he could try to be a father. He’d done it once, for God’s sake. But that was more than fifteen years ago, and with a Hungarian Earth Mother. Perhaps his sperm was tired now, worn out after years of jet-lag and tax conundrums. Or maybe she herself was too small, too cold, too old, and sperm only stirred themselves for hot Hungarian wombs.
But at least they could go on trying. It was absurd to swallow a fertility drug and then fail to be fertilized. How animal the whole thing sounded, except that animals got on with it, without all this fuss and bother. For them, it was becoming something of a chore. They hadn’t even slept together since Magda had arrived. She hadn’t wanted to, felt Charles was somehow polluted and defiled. Or maybe it was just a side effect of the Clomid. That would be ironical – to turn you off the sex you needed to conceive. She was taking her second month’s dose now, and it made her feel nauseous, as if she were already pregnant.
Charles, too, had shown little inclination. Maybe it was guilt, or overwork. And yet he needed sex as a sort of safety valve, an indoor rugger match. She’d noticed herself how it sucked the aggression out of him and neutralized the electric shocks between them. Now it was all electricity. She must somehow switch it off and lure him back into the double bed.
She coaxed him over to a bench and put her arm around his shoulders. ‘You’re right, Charles, we can’t let Magda ruin everything. There’s still us.’
He removed the arm, so she took his hand instead. ‘That’s important,’ she insisted. She could hear a magpie squawking at the top of a hawthorn bush, laughing at them almost. ‘Let’s go home and …’ She didn’t say it, just made a gesture with her hands against his body. It wasn’t the vital middle of the month yet, but she must get him back into practice.
‘What, now?’ The magpie screeched with laughter.
‘Yes, now.’ She inched her fingers up his forearm, kept them stroking up and down.
Charles frowned. ‘But supposing Magda’s back? I know it sounds stupid, but I feel I can’t perform if she’s around.’
‘She won’t be,’ whispered Frances.
She wasn’t. But the front door had been left wide open, and a new set of muddy footprints serpented the hall. Charles strode up the stairs to the studio and knocked loudly on the door. ‘Magda?’
No answer. Frances could hear her watch ticking almost apologetically in the silence, a tiny, golden sound.
Charles wrenched open the door. The bed was a heap of tangled blankets and dirty clothes. The exquisite Bawden watercolours had been taken down and flung on the floor, glass smashed and frames broken. The flowers were decapitated, lying in a pool of water on the stained and sodden desk. The lion was hanging upside down, its tail caught in the wardrobe door. And all over the new cornflower walls was written, in a bleeding crimson lipstick, ‘I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU.’
Charles closed the door again, quietly and deliberately, as if trying not to wake a baby. Frances listened to her watch, tried to make her mind a blank. Charles took her arm and let her downstairs. He poured them both a brandy in the Victorian smoked glass goblets. Neither spoke. Charles took a sheet of headed paper from the bureau and uncapped his pen.
‘I’m writing to the nuns at Westborough,’ he said. ‘Accepting their offer of a place. After that, we’ll …’ He leaned over, touched her face, ran a finger down across her breast.
‘Go away,’ she snapped, suddenly, irrationally. ‘Go away. GO AWAY!’