WHEN NORAH TRIED to tell me, it was easy to shrug it off as just another proof of her decay. It was one night, when Lilian had gone up to study, and John had faded away into the wallpaper somewhere. Norah and I sat together in a tableau that might have been called Family Harmony, except that it was a parody of that: we were a pair of souls opposite each other in our armchairs, close enough to hear each other’s breathing, yet as foreign to each other as two stones. I got up to poke the fire, and Norah put out a hand in my direction, without actually touching me, and said, ‘Albion, there is something I must tell you.’ She looked up at me with those eyes of hers that were always a little elsewhere. ‘Albion,’ she murmured, and I spoke loudly, for I would have no truck with her dreaminess, ‘Yes, I am Albion, your husband of twenty-two years and two months, still Albion after so long.’
This, silenced Norah and she opened her notebook and pretended to read the columns of numbers in it. I watched the top of her head, saw grey hair, the pink of scalp, and felt nothing but revulsion for this dry withering piece of womanhood, who had once been flesh of my flesh.
But she was not to be deflected: she said again, ‘Albion, there is something I must tell you.’ It was so long since Norah had had anything to tell me that I stood, feeling my thighs taut with power, my spine upright, and placed my hands—fine hands, hands capable of anything—across my groin, like a sympathetic clergyman, to demonstrate how ready I was to listen.
My wife grew nervous at this, and flustered into her notebook. But she seemed to find there what she was looking for, for she said, in a clear elocution-class voice, as if reciting from memory, ‘Albion, I am worried about our daughter Lilian. She is not herself. She has become unladylike, and is loud.’ Norah, my pathetic wife, looked up from her notebook and said in her own wistful voice, ‘And Albion, I have seen her wearing blue and green together.’
She was alarmed then, and shot a glance at me standing there so attentive, unnerving my nerveless wife with my powerful hands across my powerful body, and she turned back to her book, but I could see there was nothing more written on the page after loud, which was underlined. ‘Loud,’ Norah said loudly, and as if she had the hang of it now, began reading again, this time as ringingly as if to reach across the bay, ‘Albion, I am worried about our daughter Lilian.’ I seized her bird-like wrist, I could not bear it, and I shouted, ‘Norah! Stop!’
From being a little erratic, it was obvious that the woman had become unhinged. I had heard of these things happening at Norah’s time of life. There were mothers, for example, who came to hate their own daughters. There was an inexorable symmetry about the whole thing: Norah could see Lilian ripening into womanhood just as she herself was shrivelling, a dry pod from which the seed had fallen. It was all understandable, and she was fortunate in having a husband who was so rational on the subject. All the same, I made a mental note to have a word with that old quack O’Hara.
O’Hara was quick to diagnose that what my wife needed was a rest and a sea voyage with one of her lady-friends. It seemed to me that Norah had been resting for the last twenty-odd years, but I was sick to death of her in every corner of my house now, staring at me with her mooning eyes. The cost of a South Seas Cruise seemed a low price to pay to be rid of her for a time.
She cried when the time came for her to leave, clung to Lilian, could not remember what she had done with her hat-pin—‘Hat-pin, Norah? What will you want with a hat-pin in the South Seas?’ I demanded, but as usual got no answer from her—but finally she was bundled into the back of the cab and the three of us, Lilian, John and myself, stood on the front steps waving her off, the picture of a happy little family. ‘I will be back soon,’ she could be heard still calling out from the back of the cab, as if to reassure us. ‘I will see you again soon.’
I surprised a certain fullness around Lilian’s eyes as she waved, and a certain reluctance to answer when I exclaimed robustly into the silence of her mother’s absence, ‘Well, Lilian, it is just us now, just us!’ With Norah gone, fetters seemed fallen away from me.
But when Rundle tried to tell me, I was forced to listen. I was sitting considering the latest column of figures in the latest ledger Rundle had left on my desk, when Rundle himself knocked on my door and came awkwardly in, filling the room like an embarrassed St Bernard who has just wet on the carpet. ‘Mr Singer, sir, might I have a word with you?’ he asked, and I was every inch the gracious host as I came around the desk to fuss him into a chair, and rang for the woman to bring us a cup of tea.
We crouched over the wretched books as usual, although it was not the books that Rundle had come about this time. But he seemed incapable of coming out with what was on his mind, and to hasten the process, I tried to put him at his ease by a little chat about the fine weather we were having, the activities of Rundle’s Sundays, and so on.
‘Oh yes, Mr Singer, the bitch is getting old now, but she is still a bit of an interest,’ Rundle said. I stared at him: had I misjudged Rundle all these years? Was he a satirist under his Creeping Jesus manner? The notion of Mrs Rundle, a vast bag of flesh now, but still partial to yellow sateen, being a bit of an interest, was certainly a difficult thing to picture. ‘On Sundays, then, Rundle . . . ?’ I prompted, and of course old Rundle had to disappoint me: ‘Her last litter was only three pups, but healthy little things, and we sold them all within a week.’
But it was not for chit-chat about pups that Rundle had come to me today.
‘Mr Singer, sir, I loathe a gossip above all,’ he began earnestly when he had burnt his lip on his tea, trying to put himself at ease by taking a sip. ‘I have been hearing gossip now for thirty years, and have never given it any credential.’ I nodded understandingly, but did not fill the silence, so that Rundle would finally be unnerved into blurting out whatever little bit of unpleasantness was troubling him. I imagined one of our pretty shop-girls in the family way, perhaps— I quickly did a few sums about the latest girl in Pens, and was reassured by them—or a clerk caught with his hand in the till, something of that order. I made my face bland and expectant while his cheeks sagged in anguished thought, and I could see an edge of shiny inner lip as his mouth struggled to shape itself around the appropriate words.
‘I hope you will forgive me, Mr Singer, but your father was as good to me as a brother, and for his sake I am speaking’—no, you are not, Rundle, you are not speaking, you turnip! I thought in my own mind, but nodded some more—‘But Mr Singer, please do not take it wrong, if I am doing the wrong thing it is far the best of intentions, I have mentioned it to Mrs Rundle and she was also of the opinion that I should speak.’ Then do it, man, open your silly mouth and be out with it! I cried in my head, but went on nodding, nodding, only allowing myself to shift in my chair and brush at a bit of fluff on my knee that did not exist, to betray the slightest impatience.
Then for the first time in all those years, Rundle, his big folded face convulsed with uncertainty, surprised me. ‘It is about your daughter, Mr Singer,’ Rundle said. I could only think that it must be my daughter who was in the family way: in my momentary confusion, a picture sprang to my mind of Lilian lying naked along one of my mahogany counters.
But Rundle was shaping his mouth around more words, trying to pick the right ones. ‘I have heard, Mr Singer, on the best of authority, that she—I may be wrong, Mr Singer, but thought I should let you know—’ Rundle seemed prepared to let phrases fall out of his mouth endlessly without getting to the point. ‘Rundle, out with it!’ I cried in what I had intended as a cheerful way, but I heard my voice rasp. ‘Just tell me straight out, man, what have you heard?’ Before he could tell me, Rundle had to turn away, look out the window, clear his throat, but finally the words were on their way. ‘Mr Singer, the word is, that your daughter has been seen intoxicated in Dixon Street with a young man, and also in the Botanical Gardens, lying on the grass with him.’ His face was convulsed now, like a twisted shoe, but he was doggedly going on, in an expressionless voice. ‘She is selling her textbooks at Fidden’s, Mr Singer, and there have been at least four separate occasions, I have it on the best authority.’
I felt my face stiffening, purpling, congesting: I saw Rundle shoot me an apprehensive glance and then stare out the window again. ‘I hope I have not done wrong, Mr Singer,’ he was bleating, at a vast distance, so that his voice was reedy and insignificant. ‘I did not know just what to do for the best.’
I tried, for the sake of the look of things in front of Rundle, to swallow the flame of my rage: I could not have him seeing me pole-axed by betrayal. But what a pain had pierced my heart! I was betrayed. My own daughter had acted as though butter would not melt in her mouth; she had let me waste my time informing her of the facts of the world, and showing a fatherly interest in her studies at the University. And all the time she had been laughing up her sleeve at me. Moreover, it had taken one of my own employees to tell me what half the town probably already knew, that Singer’s daughter was a drunken trollop!
I forced my voice to be steady, my face to be mask-like, as I said, ‘Thank you, Rundle, you did exactly the right thing. As it happens I have been aware of this for some time, but you did quite right in bringing it to me.’
Rundle was a buffoon, but he was a man with a proper sense of what was fitting, and not a complete fool. He drank off his tea in one searing gulp and got up. ‘If there is nothing else, Mr Singer, I have a few invoices to attend to,’ he said, and left me alone, closing the door as gently behind him as on a death.