David’s reaction, when he had to accept that Mrs Temple was Anita, was to consider her the one person in the world, ahead of any other, who should have taken a sympathetic view about Poppy’s loyalties. Mrs Temple knew everything, yet she had presented herself as an innocent householder, in distress about her pet.
He began to try to remember what Cathy had told him about Anita. In the early days at Denby Hall, Cathy had said so much about herself. David had listened, letting Cathy’s past fill his own empty landscape.
How did Cathy find out about Anita? She said she had always thought there was somebody else. Her physical life with Desmond was sporadic, and drifted to an end quite soon after marriage. Cathy blamed her illness. She could never be very physical. She supposed there had to be an Anita, and feared that there would be.
She said she had identified Anita very early. She was a family friend, married to another man. Desmond had introduced the couple. Graham and Anita had been guests of the Marsdens, and vice versa. Occasionally, they had dinner together or went to a gallery. Cathy met Anita’s sister too. They used to sing in the same choir at St George’s in Camden. They would go out for coffee and a chat after choir practice. Cathy would hear from Anita’s sister what Anita was doing in the early years of the marriage. Anita’s sister didn’t divulge anything, if she knew, but it was too much of a coincidence that Anita seemed to be regularly in the same place – a town, or perhaps at a party, or other social function – as Desmond was. And Cathy had watched Desmond and Anita when they were in the same room together. Once, when they were playing bowls at a party at the Marsden’s house, and it was Anita’s turn, Cathy saw Desmond, as captain of their pair, place his hand on Anita’s bottom, and whisper some instructions in her ear. It was the exceptional, and unconscious intimacy, of those who are physically close. She had heard Anita call Desmond ‘Dear’ in an unguarded moment. In Anita’s vocabulary, ‘Dear’ wasn’t a common coin. It became obvious to Cathy, from many supposedly innocent words and gestures, that Desmond and Anita were trying to cover up the fact that they knew each other very well, and far beyond the friendliness of dinner-party conversation. Cathy said that she could ‘feel’ the bond between Desmond and Anita when she was in the same room. It was like a magnetic field which repelled her, and made her heart shrink.
“However, I decided to do nothing, because I thought Desmond would do nothing,” Cathy said. “I hinted about it, but we never talked. Desmond had two sensitive fronts in this respect. One was his children by his first marriage. He had already put them through an acrimonious breakdown, and I believed he would hesitate before breaking two more marriages, his own second one, and Anita’s. He knew he’d lose face with his children, who were then teenagers. Another sensitivity was his image at work. He was a senior executive, hoping for promotion, respectably married for the second time. In those days, a steady marriage was supposedly the sign of a steady man.
“I was right. Desmond did nothing, except continue to see Anita occasionally. Of course, we ceased to see the Temples as a foursome. In the practical way of providing material help, and comfort for me, Desmond has been a good husband. And he looked after me personally in all the years I was imprisoned at home by the disease. My hold on Desmond increased rather than diminished with the years.
“Certainly, none of this stopped him ‘secretly’ buzzing off to Lake Garda for a long weekend with Anita. But if I try to see it from Anita’s point of view – she lost Desmond to me, except for brief encounters, over the twenty years. I took over Desmond’s life. You have to understand what that means, David.
“Marriage was the bond that held us together because Desmond respected it. That was the cause of our staying together. But people stay together for all sorts of different reasons, married or not. It doesn’t really matter that marriage was the bond; it might have been something else, say love, or money or just plain habit. The point is, we were a couple, and once you’re in ‘coupledom’, for whatever reason, illogical and unsatisfactory consequences often follow.”
Cathy talked to David about what couples do to each other in alarming terms. She thought the slang phrase ‘my other half ’, referring to a spouse or partner was accurate. She said couples were really one person, each with half a brain. She drew a strange picture of a being with four legs, four arms, and four eyes. But the creature had one brain, halved, and kept in two separate compartments in telepathic communication; a weird insect, sometimes at war with itself.
“You can be talking to a man about the rose garden he intends to add to his home,” she said, “and suddenly you realise you’re talking to his wife as well, although she might be in another room, or another town. When you know a couple well, you can see that they have ceased to be Janet and John, and become ‘Janjon’. The lives of couples are twisted together like the branches of wisteria. The twisting and turning is partly involuntary and unconscious. It’s not the sum total of the rational thoughts of two brains. It’s the tangled decision-making of two half-brains, which interact, and may not connect properly. If you asked Desmond what the impact of my life has been on his, I suspect he would concede that it’s been wrought into grotesque shapes by our coupledom. And yet, he has endured it.
“Desmond’s been conditioned by what he does, like all of us. He’s an engineer. He deals with practicalities. Grey areas have little place in his thinking. There is no room for ‘might work’. All his life has been governed – and he’s still steered – by what he regards as precise and measured thought. The irony of his life is how irrational, and illogical, it has been. And the reason for that is coupledom, and the convoluted decision-making of two half-brains. Even though my halfbrain has little power left in it now, it still emits a tiny signal, which can have its effect.”
To David, this was an alarming vision. He felt that in getting close to somebody, you could be subsumed within this ‘couple’ insect, and without realising, become a part of it. David had no wish to be that close to anybody – another concern for Caroline Higgins, who was always poking around to discover if he had a close relationship with somebody. David’s father was remote, and not the material for a couple in Cathy’s sense. David supposed that he himself was closer to Cathy and Poppy, than any other living beings, but not in the way that Cathy had meant.
Cathy said that her coupledom with Desmond left only ruins for Anita. And over the years, the emphasis had changed. Now that Cathy was hospitalised, and would never leave such an environment, Desmond was free to live with Anita. But Anita could not easily desert her elderly husband. Anita was bound to him by a sense of obligation. She was bound too by years of deception, which it would pain her to reveal.
“And I’m still in the frame, David barring the way to the joint property, needing some of Desmond’s time to look after my affairs, which he gives, dwindling away the money he’ll get under my will. Yes, Anita must see only ruins. In the hot blood of her early relationship with Desmond, it could all have been very different.”
David saw that Desmond and Anita, too, were a couple, a deformed being, occasionally coming to life in holiday cottages, and hotel bedrooms, inhabiting them feverishly for a few hours, and then relapsing into a coma of telephone calls and emails, dominated for years by Cathy’s needs, squirming under them, and still tacitly threatened by them. And now checkmated by Mr Temple’s needs.
It may have been thoughtless of Desmond, in giving Poppy away, not to anticipate the turbulence that might be caused. But after thinking it over carefully, David could at least begin to understand Anita Temple’s frustration and spite, in failing to win Poppy’s loyalty, and hence Anita’s uncompromising attitude towards him.