Bogle recovered, but one morning his wife came round with news which nearly put me on my back.
‘Our Ed’s back,’ she said.
‘Your Ed?’
‘Our son Ed’s back.’
‘Has he,’ I said, ‘has he brought his woman with him?’
‘His woman? You don’t think I would have let him through the door if he had. Of course he hasn’t. I haven’t mentioned her, and he hasn’t either.’
I finished my breakfast quickly and went upstairs and lay on my bed, gazing at the ceiling and wondered what to do next. My wife was loose again, and my wife, when loose, had a habit of coming home to roost. But how would she know where to find me? She would never think of looking for me here, at the back of nowhere, and there was no one who could tell her where I was, except Mr Urbane-Urban, whom she would never ask, and Mrs Kamenetz-Podolsk, who would never tell her.
I was also nervous about meeting Ed. I don’t know why I should have been nervous—it was him who pinched my wife, and not me his—but there it was. I gazed at the ceiling and gazed, and remained there till I was fed up with gazing, and decided to go out and face whatever situation might arise.
I bumped into Ed almost as soon as I stepped outside. He was a bit taken aback, and looked at me as if he had seen me before somewhere.
‘It’s me all right,’ I said. ‘Me, Berl Brisker.’
His jaw sagged open and a cigarette dangled from his lower lip. He was big and red-faced, with blond hair brushed at the side and attempting to stand on end in the middle. I felt a little silly standing there looking at him. I suppose if I had been the father of an outraged daughter I would have had to horsewhip him, but what does the husband of an outraged wife do?—especially if it was the wife who did the outraging? Sentences flashed through my head like: ‘You’re a scoundrel, Sir,’ but they all seemed out of place, especially as it was raining and he looked like an over-grown mangel-wurzel.
‘Yes,’ he said, and we went round together to the tractor shed.
‘Can’t do much planting in weather like this,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘The fields need draining. The whole farm’s badly drained.’
I wanted to know what he had done with my wife. My curiosity, I felt, was not unreasonable.
‘I wonder if it’s as wet in other parts of the country,’ I said. ‘Was it wet where you came from?’
‘Pouring cats and dogs.’
‘Was it? They say when it rains up north it never stops.’
‘Yes, that’s what they say.’
‘Did it take you long to get back then?’
‘Not as long as it might have done,’ he said.
The guttering at the edge of the shed roof was broken and the water came splashing down in an almost constant sheet. I had to raise my voice.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘British Railways are pretty quick if you take the right trains, but they’re expensive, aren’t they? Specially if there’s two of you travelling.’
‘It must be,’ he said.
‘This old saying about two people being able to live cheaper than one is a lot of cock,’ I said.
He didn’t say anything to that, but stood with hands in his pockets gazing out at the rain. I decided to get nearer the point.
‘You’ve been away a long time,’ I said.
‘Nearly a year,’ he said.
‘Nearly a year?’ I said. ‘How time flies. It seems only yesterday when I was the warden at the Eastleigh home and you the gardener. It was a lovely place, Eastleigh, in many ways. I have some fond memories of it.’
‘Have you?’ he said.
‘I have.’
‘Well I haven’t.’
‘My wife was very fond of it.’
‘It’s stopping to rain,’ he said, and ran across the courtyard into the house.
In the hours which followed I was nearly eaten up with curiosity. I could hardly work. I couldn’t eat my lunch. I couldn’t do anything.
‘What’s worrying you?’ I kept saying to myself. ‘As long as he’s come back without her you’re all right.’ But I didn’t feel all right, and later in the afternoon I decided to confront him and get straight to the point. I found him unloading sacks of fertilizer from a trailer. He was by himself.
‘There’s something I meant to ask you earlier on,’ I said. ‘What have you done with my——’
‘Give me a hand with this,’ he said, ‘it’s getting late,’ and lowered an immense sack of fertilizers on to my back. It hit me with a thump and I collapsed under it into a pool of mud.
Later that evening, wearing my striped trousers (my other ones were drying) I went along to the ‘Dog and Duck’ in the village, and found him there with a newspaper spread out in front of him, eating a bag of crisps. I caught him in mid-crunch.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I was hoping to have a word with you.’
He looked me in the face for a moment and saw that the game was up.
‘I haven’t seen her for months,’ he said. ‘I got up one morning and she wasn’t there. Gone. Vanished. Not a word where she was going or what she was doing.’ He said this with his eyes on the paper, as if he was reading aloud.
‘Just like that?’ I said.
‘Just like that.’
‘And you haven’t seen her since?’
‘Not for months.’
I suddenly felt a sense of brotherhood, as if for the first time in my life I had found a relative. I bought him a Carlsberg, and another for myself.
‘Here’s to her,’ I said.
‘To whom?’
‘To our mutual friend.’
‘Here’s to her,’ and he gulped the glass down in a breath, as if to drown the memory of her.
‘She’s not an easy person to get on with,’ I said.
‘Worse than Dad,’ he said, and ordered me a Carlsberg. ‘How long was you married to her?’
‘Eighteen years.’
‘You wasn’t.’
‘Eighteen years, seven weeks and three days.’
‘I don’t know how you stood it, I don’t. I don’t know how you stood it.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know how I stood it. You’d still have been standing it if she hadn’t left you, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose I would. I must have been clean round the bend.’
‘Well it took you a good time to get on to the straight, didn’t it?’
‘Well she has a way with her, hasn’t she? Well she must have. I’d get up in the morning thinking, well I’ve had enough of her—I’m finished, for good. But it wasn’t like that at the end of the day.’
‘You kept coming home with your tail between your legs.’
‘I did.’
‘Yes, she does have a way with her, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. Perhaps she’s a sort of mother to you. We all need a mother to carry us through life.’
‘I’ve got one, thanks very much.’
‘No, I mean sometimes our mothers do not function properly as mothers, and we need a maternal substitute. That’s it I suppose. My wife’s a substitute.’
‘A what?’
‘A substitute.’
‘She’s your wife, you can call her what you like.’
‘Did, er—did she tell you anything about me?’
‘Nothing that you’d want me to repeat.’
‘I’m surprised to hear that, because actually we’ve never really had cross words—only cross attitudes.’
‘Well maybe you’ve crossed her attitude once too often because some of the things she said about you I wouldn’t say about my own dad.’
‘Such as.’
‘They were big words, I couldn’t even pronounce them.’
‘I’m surprised.’ I was also pained.
‘But that was only at the beginning. She didn’t mention you after the beginning. She told me that everything that happened to her before she was forty didn’t count. She was starting life from scratch. That’s what she said. “I’m starting life from scratch.”’
It wasn’t flattering to be part of someone’s unwanted past, but I cheered myself with the thought that it was a great deal better than being part of her future. She had now left not only me, but also Ed, and possibly even a third person. She was from me twice removed, and I felt confident that I would never see her again—confident, yet a little sorry, almost as if my constant fear of her return had been a welcome companion.
A few weeks later I got a letter from a firm of solicitors called Howard and Wayward, so worded that I had to go to another solicitor to make out what it said. My wife, it seemed, had started divorce proceedings against me.
Divorce? I felt like a film-star. But it seemed too good to be true. Wasn’t there something which always went with divorce? Alimony I think they called it. I went to Howard and Wayward to find out. Mr Howard took my hand, while Mr Wayward brought me a sherry, and both assured me that there was no alimony involved, or any other sort of money for that matter.
‘And I’ll be completely free?’
‘Completely,’ said Mr Howard.
‘Absolutely,’ said Mr Wayward.
‘It is our happy lot to tear asunder,’ said the former.
‘Those whom misfortune has brought together,’ added the latter.
‘There’s a catch in it,’ I kept saying to myself all the way back in the train, ‘there’s a catch in it.’ But there wasn’t. Two years later I was a free man.