The next day, though quite unslept, she went to a lawyer, told her story, which, as she said, was a bit of a rigmarole, and sought his advice. He was a very busy man and, from what she could see, very influential. While she was there, he took three telephone calls; two of them entailed what to do with the effects of a famous pop singer who had committed suicide—she had read about this suicide in the paper. The lawyer was quite crisp as he discussed gold watch, gold cuff links, and various other personal effects. When she rose to leave he made a little flirtatious remark about taking her for supper, à deux, once they had her mess sorted out. He knew a very good detective, he said, just the man, had caught an earl with his trousers down. It all seemed so unreal, so hard, that to keep a grip on herself she thought of her children, their eager faces, the smell of their bodies in the evening after their bath, the way they gobbled sweets, and she wondered for the first time in her whole life if when they were grown up they would accuse her of all this—“this mess,” as the lawyer called it. His office was full of tasteless furniture, onyx boxes, clumpy ashtrays, gaudy prints such as one might see in any department store.
The detective that the lawyer chose was so busy himself that he sent a junior, thought for some reason that it was a walkover. The junior got to the hamlet in the middle of the night, just as she had done and just as had been planned, rang the doorbell, and, when the woman came down, asked her if she was having a relationship with Mr. So-and-so. The girl asked him who he was and he was fool enough to tell her that he was an enquiry agent from a detective agency. She asked him if he thought she was a “Doris,” daft enough to tell him anything, and said that as a mere addendum she kept lodgers, since she had an extra bedroom. She did not allow him in.
The upshot of all this was that Nell’s chances, which up to now had been slender, petered away. Her husband realised what she was up to and wrote a letter to say that he could not be responsible for his actions, and that if she was to take the children by some foul means, he would be working night and day to get them back, no sleeping or waking moment of her life would be secure, he would see to it that her life was hell.
It was a question now of not cracking, of somehow holding the sediment of her thoughts together until she gathered the ammunition to start again. Her sons had taken up hobbies; for one it was trains and for the other it was stamps. Tristan made a small profit one day simply by buying a stamp in a shop on the Strand and selling it in another shop a few doors away. This created discord. In a mad moment of appeasement she took them to the Savoy for lunch. Once inside the glittering lobby, their delight was so great that they ran around, thumped sofas, then snatched stationery from a little occasional desk and wondered aloud whom they should write to.
“Sorry, madam … but the young gentlemen must have ties,” the headwaiter said as they stood on the threshold of the Grill Room.
“Mr. Meanie…” she said, realising that it was an absurd thing to say to an agitated headwaiter, who was already perspiring, even though the clientele had not foregathered. He prevaricated, disappeared, and returned with two very garish ties, which, when donned, made them look like children impersonating clowns. They ate like wolves. They ate steak and kidney pie preceded by a cold soup, which they returned on the grounds of it being cold. Afterwards they had steamed pudding. The red jam threaded into the very yellow cake mix made them enquire saucily if she could spare the time to make one at home. They always referred to her house as home. The waiter, who by now had befriended them, whispered the secret recipe of the steamed pudding in a conspiratorial voice, then launched into a scenario of when they would be young men, coming to his restaurant after the theatre, with ladies on their arms. They giggled over this, and she saw as through a peephole into a future when she would not be essential to them.
The courtyard outside the hotel covered with some red, trampled-upon carpet added to their wellbeing, as did the sight and sound of doormen feverishly hailing cabs. They had a notion that at last they were removed from real life, the life of buses and school and homework. They tried to imitate the whistles of the doormen all the way home and argued as to who could whistle louder.
Not long after, she went to their midterm open day and there among the cutouts, the pictures, and the painted lanterns she read her Paddy’s prize-winning composition, featuring the day out. He claimed to have tasted a dry martini and eaten a whole baby chicken. This, too, will have repercussions, she thought as they breezed past her with friends and asked if she had come by taxi. Everything would have repercussions.
It took the best part of a year before she summoned the courage to go to another lawyer, and this time it was to someone much more staid. She would sit for her weekly appointments, recalling detail after detail: the latter part of the marriage, the split, an affair she had had, how kind the man had been, an American who, though he returned to his wife and family, promised that he would always be there as a friend. Her mother sent dire warnings about the disgrace of divorce and repeated her constant anxiety about the children growing up in a pagan land.
The romantic attachment that their father had been having seemed to have ended, and he was leading a quiet life now, except for occasionally going out to the theatre and once, it seems, taking Rita to an exhibition. The children told her this, among other things, and sometimes late at night, when she went to their bedroom to cuddle them, one or the other of them would say he believed that their father would kidnap them.
Tristan was so pale he looked as though he was anemic. Walter wrote to her about this, saying her unhappiness had induced it. There was nothing for it but to fight. Her solicitor agreed with her, but was a “teetchy bit bothered,” as he said, about the affair that she had had and, moreover, about the circumstances in which she had left home.
“He had an affair!” she said, fraught, and the solicitor, an elderly man, closed his tired lizard eyes for a moment, hearing once again the raised voice that sought retribution.
It was then that things began to get really rank, like a poison, destroying her every thought. She heard through her lawyer her husband’s case against her, a case reinforced by Rita’s sworn testimony and by the doctor and the headmaster. She was worse than a deserter, she was a harlot. Rita was to say that she saw her go out of the house on Christmas night, defecting on the children, who begged her to play with them, and return after midnight drunk and maudlin. She was to describe a woman of modest means who could leave in the morning and return home with several hundred pounds’ worth of clothes on her back, which had obviously been procured in some seedy way. Her husband was to reaffirm his agony in trying to conceal from the children the bitter fact that their mother was mentally unstable. The local doctor described her as being a bit “airy-fairy,” while the headmaster told how on Sports Day she had brought a very elaborate picnic basket and was doling out largesse. Hourly the cards were being stacked against her. She had hired a child molester as a babysitter, she had made her children anemic; her only kisses and fondnesses were when she was being seen, her love a charade.
“Lies … lies … lies,” she told her lawyer, her voice loud enough to extend beyond the thin walls where the secretary sat with a hot-water bottle on her lap, typing more of these diatribes. Her solicitor joked and said that one day they would make light of it.
Her own evidence paled by comparison. She had little to say except the obvious, which was that they were not compatible and perhaps never had been. She also had to go to four men she knew, one of whom she worked for, and tell them that her husband claimed that she had frequent sex with them. They laughed it off, but even their laughter made her uneasy, as if no one quite grasped her ordeal.
Eventually, they decided on a strategy. She would seek her divorce, not on grounds of adultery, but on cruelty, which as he said, was rampant. Many things were written down in his long, sloping hand, with his old-fashioned fountain pen. She heard herself tell him about being in a shop with her husband when she had just come to England and ordering a pound of smoked salmon, but not having enough money to pay for it, because the price on the plastic holder that was wedged into the skin of the fish was per quarter pound. She saw her husband smile at her discomfort as she told the irked shop assistant that where she had lived things were always sold by the pound.
“Yes, but I’ve sliced it, haven’t I?” the assistant kept saying. This, and a million other things—not allowing her to keep her own money, not speaking for weeks on end, then notes laden with bile.
The day she served the papers on him, the children were in her house, she made certain of that. She had her own telephone by now; it lay off the hook like a dark cobra waiting to pounce. The children and she sat and watched television, and had beans on toast on their laps. She had told them that she had served the papers but didn’t know if they had heeded it or not, because their favourite programme was on.
Later, before they went to bed, Tristan said, “When I go to school tomorrow and my friend Marvell says, ‘My mummy has a fur coat,’ I’ll say, ‘My mummy has a divorce.’” They laughed over this, the raucous laughter of the desperate. Paddy said they should tell their father that she had put them in a reformatory and then he couldn’t get them. They devised daring scenes to prove to each other how fearless they were. She thought to herself, In time it will all seem like a bad dream. She had forgotten normal life, never looked at the sky or the stars, and only occasionally bought a bunch of flowers, and then only because someone was calling. She ate automatically and afterwards would wonder what it had tasted like. Sometimes she stopped in her tracks to let the wind touch her face, as if returning to some carefree state. She thought that once it was solved she would be happy, but how the happiness would descend on her remained a mystery. There was a mistiness in her brain at all times and she marveled at the fact that she could work or make sense when people talked to her. Her brain never really let go of her dilemma. She was like a dog with a bone, and she used to say, “One day I’ll bury this bone forever.” On her thirty-third birthday, she wrote in her diary: “Stasis.”
Walter went early the next day and took the eldest, Paddy, from his school. They were now in different schools because of the age gap. She collected Tristan and brought him to her studio, and so for the first time the reality of being separated from each other hit them. She rang her husband’s house and Rita answered. She said that her son wished to speak with his brother. She stood in the room while Tristan talked to Paddy, and heard this stilted conversation, in which none of the things were said that he wished to say. He just discussed with his brother what was on television and how, at school, someone had stolen his pencil sharpener. Then, it seemed, he said good night to his father and promised to be a good boy. Later, she rang Paddy, who cried and begged her to come and get him.
“I want to be with my mum,” he said, as if she were simply a messenger.
“Tomorrow,” she said. It was always tomorrow.
“Tonight,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said, “… I can’t break the law.” His voice went cold with her then, cold and pinched, because she was failing him. He said he had had fish cakes for dinner and Rita had made a very tasty semolina pudding.
In the weeks that followed, they stayed with their father. She realised that it was better that they be left together, because the night that her younger child was alone with her, he cried so badly that he had fits, and she had to hold him in a towel to steady him. Neither of them got a wink of sleep; yet he was eager for school the following morning, as if it was there and not with her that deliverance lay. She even wished now that she had not served the papers, and thought of cancelling the case, but her solicitor buoyed her along—“Keep your nerve, lass, keep your nerve.”
Her husband sent reams of letters to undermine her. They came daily, often twice daily, through the letter box. She dreaded going down into the hall for fear of another envelope. The envelopes were always manila. Her solicitor said to be glad of them, because they were ammunition, and that with each bulletin he hanged himself more.
The day before the case was due to be heard, she did two things. She had her hair cut in a fancy salon, as she had been looking rather mopey, and she went to the courts to make sure she would find her bearings easily.
The buildings all around were a mixture of old and new: a stone church, a narrow, Tudor-fronted public house with a big Toby jug as its mascot, a tea blender’s, and a modern bank. There was the sound of bells; they were pealing in the little stone church dedicated to the Royal Air Force. The church itself was closed, but she imagined a man in there dutifully pulling the ropes.
The courts themselves were grey and beige, arches and buttresses trussed with fat knuckles of carved stone. As she went up the steps and through the door and saw the sign ROBING ROOM, she felt awed. There was the vast tiled hallway, circles enclosing lesser and lesser circles, and through the long, leaded windows, the light came in pewter shafts falling slantwise on the massive portraits of judges and lord justices. There they were, in their red robes trimmed with ermine, and their absurd ringletted wigs, like little sausages framing the ponderous jowly faces. One such face would judge her on the morrow. The pictures themselves were so high up it gave her vertigo just to try looking at them. In a central glass cabinet was a list of the various cases, and she searched in vain for her own and her husband’s name. Leading off the hallway through wrought-iron gates were the numbered courts … In one of them, she would be seated the next day, with her solicitor on one side and her lawyer on the other. There were also signs that said, POST ROOM, CLOAK ROOM, REST ROOM, and TELEPHONE, and she resolved that as soon as she heard the verdict, she would ring her few friends and the man she worked for, who by now was concerned for her. She was certain of a favourable result. Everything told her so: the Latin inscriptions extolling justice, the bells, the heartening holy bells.
As a spree, she decided on a doughnut and coffee. Everything was all right, the lawyer and solicitor were confident, and she looked better as she caught sight of herself in the glass case in which were antique garments that judges and lord chief justices had worn. She suddenly thought how odd it was that her marriage, which had started in such a dizzy and romantic way, should end in this cold, impersonal place.
A small miracle occurred that evening at dusk. Her husband telephoned her, his voice low and somewhat penitent. He would not contest it. He had decided that, culpable as she was, she was still their mother, and for the time being he could hardly deprive them of that link. She thanked him profusely, said his name as if no hostilities whatsoever had gone on. When she put the phone down she blessed herself, then rang her solicitor at home.
“Now remember, he’s a man who changes his mind,” the solicitor said.
She said not this time, she was sure of it, she could tell as much by his voice as by the very words he said. She said that possibly all the pain and the children’s unhappiness had brought him to his senses. Eventually he believed her and it was decided that since the senior counsel had been promoted to silk, they could probably dispense with him and get the junior counsel to do the job, which now seemed straightforward.
“Save on the guineas,” he said, and wished her a good night’s sleep.
She had a dream that all did not go well. She dreamt that she was ironing the children’s clothes, but ironed their limbs instead, so that their skins clung to the hot chrome. They simply vanished from existence, were ribbons of charred skin.
She got to the courts far too early, mooched about, and then withdrew into an alcove when she saw her husband arrive with Rita. They both looked flushed and excited, and Rita was wearing a very fetching beret. Immediately she ran to find a public phone to warn her solicitor, who cursed both her and himself for being so gullible and who vowed to bring a pistol.
The hearing was in Court Number 17. It was a small court and there were no journalists. Her husband was the first to speak. He spoke in quiet, considerate tones. He spoke of the tragedy that indeed had touched both parties and the shadow that had come to rest on his children’s shoulders. He said that he felt fit to speak for his children, since they spent most of the time with him, and as he was lucky enough to have the services of a good Catholic girl, meaning Rita, he had tried to make home life as wholesome and as stable as possible. But that was something their mother could not endure, she who believed only in hysterics, in destruction. He cited a day on the common when Rita, he, and the children were having a harmless game of football, which their mother prevented them from having because she had felt left out. Yes, he added, she was left out because she could not agree with anyone and thought and lived only for her little self, her desires, her impulses, her advancement.
She would do it. No, she wouldn’t. She was muttering. This she knew, not by her own hearing, but by the anxious glances of the people next to her. The young lawyer put his hand out to stay her. She was standing. Yes. Half up! Up. It seemed indeed as if the chair or the wooden bench had propelled her, as a moving swing-boat might. Now she had to do it, had to make them listen, even if listening was to cause her to lose all. She saw her husband cut short his sentence and look across at her, thinking perhaps that finally the madness he had attributed to her was about to unveil itself for all to see.
“I am thought mad,” she said, addressing the judge. He was looking down at his desk calmly, as if deciphering scrolls in it. A silence then hung in the court as everyone waited. This now was her moment. A thought flashed through her mind of Judgement Day and how the designation to heaven or hell occurred in a mere instant. All the waiting at railway stations, the children’s faces, their trepidation buoyed her up, and searching hurriedly in her handbag she hauled out the letters he had written her over the years. She read at random: “What infection, it can hardly be called thinking, makes you take for granted that your wellbeing is of paramount importance?” and from another: “Healthy growing boys will not be subjected to the emotional incubator of a vile, mad mother.” She could hear one or two people around her gasp in disbelief as she read: “I will fight you. I will fight you my own way. Ill deeds beget ill deeds.”
She became aware that she was crying, crying at the words themselves and at the fact of having to say them.
“Is that all?” the judge asked. He was looking at her quietly, in a paternal way, the gaze of a man who has seen many a desperate plaintiff, has glimpsed the reeking poisons within many a shattered homestead. She waved the pile of letters as if to say, “There is much more.” Then she sat down and felt all eyes upon her. Her husband’s face was blanched and livid, his jaw firmly set. She knew what the verdict would be; she could decipher it on the judge’s face and in the hushed atmosphere around her. As she sat and heard herself being awarded custody, with provision for the father to visit them, she felt not the glorious surge of victory that she had anticipated but instead a great onset of sorrow, as if in the years to come the true consequences of it all would unfold and the heartbreak she had been party to would live like a ghost in whatever room, whatever country she happened to be in.
As she went down the steps she could feel that she was being followed. It was Rita, who had barged so quickly through the swing doors that they continued to open and shut of their own volition. A rash ran up her neck and was in patches on her face. The rouge and the rash mixed incongruously.
“You’re a bad woman,” she shouted, and with a jerking finger, “You’ll pay for this … you’ll pay for it, all your life.” Then she ran back, helter-skelter, as if the malediction had to be put somewhere safely and she herself, batlike in her black attire, the custodian of this spurious curse.