They stopped in the next village and she bought a double brandy for Wilfred and one for herself. They drank this in silence. She bought him a second and then went across the street to a chemist and got some witch hazel and sticking plaster. Presently they were off again.
After that they scarcely spoke.
It had been a terrible moment in the house when Wilfred fell. The weight, all that weight might alone cause him injury. Godfrey had stood over him fairly shaking with anger.
‘Look at him, look at him! I hardly touched him yet! What can you do? Look what he done to me! Look at my face! Look at my nose! I haven’t touched him hardly. You’d think I’d beaten his brains out! You’d think I’d killed him! You can’t get back at a slob like this!’
‘Go on, go!’ urged Pearl, pulling at his arm. She could hardly speak. Her hair was coming loose; she felt the sweat of faintness. ‘You fool, you fool, you crazy fool! He’ll have you in prison! You’re out of your mind doing this. Go on, Godfrey!’
‘I’ll kick his guts out! Look, I done nothing yet. He’s not taken enough to kill a bleeding canary. Leave go my arm or I’ll fix you next!’
‘Go, Godfrey! I tell you! Look, he’s coming round. If you’re still here there’s nothing I can do to help you! The chauffeur’ll be back any minute. This is just your one chance now to get away!’
He was so angry, so ready to be violent again, that her voice never seemed to penetrate to him at all. Only her hand clutching his sleeve and shaking him had any effect. Twice he tried to throw her off but she clung to his arm, dragging him towards the habitable part of the house where his things were scattered. It was minutes before common sense came back into his eyes, and minutes more before he could be persuaded that what she urged was best. Eventually she pushed him out through the further door as her husband began to try to sit up, and she ran back the length of the library to help Wilfred and to get his head into her lap. From there they somehow crawled together to the settee.
As soon as she saw that Wilfred had not banged his head in the fall she knew his injuries were not likely to be serious and her sick alarm turned to calculation. A fall down the stairs had been her first thought as an excuse to tell Heath – but no one would believe it. So it had to be an unknown intruder, and luck brought Wilfred back to coherence before the chauffeur came.
‘Keep it quiet! by Heaven! He shall be – shall be in prison for this if it’s the last thing I—’
‘If you bring in the police, Wilfred, I’ll leave you tonight!’
‘Damn you and curse him! I wish I’d never set eyes on either of you … Sluts! Whores! Savages!’
‘I mean it. I mean it, Wilfred. I swear it! This is the end. If you tell the police I’ll leave you tonight!’
‘How can you expect me to feel about this? You clearly agree with him! You think a young thug like that is entitled. My own wife—’
‘I don’t agree with him! Of course not. But what did you do?’
‘What did I do? When my own wife—’
‘Oh, don’t talk such rubbish. It’s too late to think of rights and wrongs. I’m only trying to stop all this, stop it, stop it, stop it! before it all begins again. If you bring in the police it will all begin again …’
So until Heath came, Angell did not contradict her story to Heath but it lay like an unexploded bomb between them all the way to London. Silence was the only hope. At any minute it might go up.
‘Thank you, Heath. If you’d help me to get him upstairs. I’ll undress him and then telephone for a doctor. Would you like to rest, Wilfred, on this chair while I put the kettle on for a hot-water bottle? Thank you, Heath. It’s only another half flight. (Do I pay him, Wilfred, or is it on account? All right, I’ll just tip, then.) Thank you, Heath it’s awfully kind of you. We’re going to ring the doctor now and then make a full report to the police …’
Even in his distress Wilfred showed extra displeasure at the pound note changing hands.
‘Who would you like to see? Dr Matthewson?’
‘No … Wait until morning. There’s a man I go to on the Health Service.’
She made him some scrambled eggs and he ate these with thin bread and butter and a half bottle of Chablis. Then he took a pill and read The Law Society’s Gazette for about an hour before dropping off to sleep. She went to her own room and spent a restless night impregnated with the most horrifying dreams. One of them was that Wilfred and Godfrey had become friends in the old cold tomb of Merrick House and had turned against her. They would not let her out of the hall, blocking her exit whichever way she turned, and when she stood at bay they whispered together plotting obscene enormities against her which she did not understand but which were half sexual and half surgical. When she tried to run up the stairs Lady Vosper was waiting at the top …
In the morning Wilfred’s eye had gone blue-black but the split skin on his cheek was scarcely noticeable. Although he was sore and could hardly move his left leg because of some sort of delayed strain, he had changed his mind and wanted no doctor. If there were to be no retribution, the less publicity the better. This was tacit between them, never given voice. Indeed that day was a full return to the arid silences following the Kio fight.
But in the evening he was still in some pain so she rang his National Health doctor who came and said: ‘There’s no damage at all that I can find beyond a few bruises. If you continue to have pain we’ll take some X-rays; but my view is that it’s mainly shock and a couple of days in bed is the answer. It’s a very unpleasant incident, though. The police haven’t found the man?’
‘No,’ said Pearl.
‘Not yet,’ said Wilfred, his injustice simmering, the bitterness, the loneliness, the resentment.
He stayed in bed for two days. Pearl waited on him and conversation remained at a minimum. Sometimes she wondered at herself. She had always thought of herself as a straightforward, uncomplicated person, and she wondered at the ready lies that had come to her lips in this crisis, the cool words slipping out, evading, concealing, explaining. It was a new talent, all born of her affair with Godfrey … and it came so easily … But one couldn’t go through life cheating, deceiving, making up pictures to fit inconvenient frames.
Wilfred clearly blamed her for the assault as well as for the forced deception afterwards. On the Wednesday he got up and spent the day rearranging his paintings. For this he needed her help and once or twice her advice: nails had to be knocked in the wall and taken out, judgments had to be made regarding height and situation. Talk began. Because it concerned a common interest it was not quite strangled with constraint. They took tea and dinner, and afterwards he claimed his conjugal rights.
It was the first time he had dared to do so since the Kio fight, and it was an astute move for, however much she might tell herself different, the assault of Saturday had left her feeling in the wrong. So, although surprised and affronted, she still did not refuse him. But it was a meeting giving little satisfaction to either of them. Physical love without the infusion of either affection or passion is flesh without spirit, and as dead. She clasped him limply, for form’s sake, and he took what he could, claiming the unclaimable.
Afterwards, without being explicit, she made it plain to him that it signified no change on her part, no change of heart towards him, no decision to stay. So long as she did stay, it could be that she would fulfil her undertakings, just as she would continue to order his house and sit at his table. But what had happened now implied no extra commitment for the future.
Yet his chief comfort from the event, however comfortless the event itself, lay in the fact that it had happened. Without Brown’s vile attack on him, it would not have occurred, so whatever she might imply to the contrary it was a move in his favour.
On the Thursday afternoon, Pearl was shopping in Knightsbridge when someone came up beside her and said: ‘Well, is he dead yet?’
She felt as if she had fallen off a step. His face was still a mess but he had shaved since Saturday. The lone wol
f. The wolf looking for its mate.
‘How can you kill a man like that?’ he said. ‘Honest to God. It’s like socking a feather bed. You have to hold it up with one hand while you thump with the other.’
‘He’s better,’ she said. ‘No thanks to you. If he had stood up to you, you would have killed him.’
‘Tell him I’ll kill him next time. Tell him if he lies down next time I’ll kick his guts out of his ears.’
‘The police haven’t been told, Godfrey,’ she said. ‘The only thing anyone knows is that a thief attacked him. So you’re free.’ She breathed out her distress, her perplexity; they made her look older, like a weight of experience. ‘This time. But I promise you that if you ever attack him again I’ll go straight to the police myself and I’ll tell them about the first attack too!’
‘You really love him, don’t you. Old money-bags.’
‘You know I don’t!’
‘You pretend you still think something about me?’
‘Why else d’you think I’ve persuaded him not to report what you’d done? If I didn’t care something, what would I care?’
‘What d’you do to persuade him? Come on, tell me what you did. Something special?’
‘I didn’t persuade him. I threatened I’d leave him.’
Godfrey sneered into her shopping basket. ‘I see he isn’t off his food. So now you’re stuck, aren’t you?’
‘Stuck?’
‘With him. You say you’ll leave him if he tells the dicks. So if you do leave him he will. Eh? So you’re stuck.’
‘Does it matter to you?’ she said.
‘Well, maybe it could, see. Maybe when I get over this it could.’
‘Like when you left hospital and I went to your room and cleaned it up and cooked you a meal and you never came!’
He gripped her arm. ‘ Look, Oyster, you stupid kook, what d’you think I looked like when I got out that day? Flaming stitches standing out on my face like pig’s bristles. Nose swelled like a big toe with a bunion. Gums with holes in ’em where the teeth had come out. D’you think I was going to face you looking like that?’
She eased her arm away. ‘Isn’t there ever anything else I can do for you but get into bed? Is that all you want? Couldn’t we have talked, had a meal, made plans?’
‘Oh, talked … Yes, when we talk you always get snotty. You’ve always thought yourself too good for me, haven’t you. It’s always been an effort to work your way down to my level. Well, I’ll tell you one thing: Flora Vosper never felt that way. That’s because she was a real lady, not an imitation one. She—’
‘It’s a pity you ever lost her, isn’t it! I suppose that’s why you went down there, isn’t it. I suppose—’
‘Yes, that’s why I went down there.’ His face suddenly contorted. ‘That’s why I went down there. Because I could get a bit of peace and quiet and time to think. About how I been let down by everybody. When you coming to see me, Pearl?’
They stood there like jammed logs in a stream, neither physically nor mentally able to make the decision to separate or to join, while the indifferent crowd moved past.
‘I can’t, Godfrey, we’re no good for each other. You – we do nothing but quarrel. I’ve brought enough trouble to you – we’ve brought enough to each other. Leave me alone.’
‘D’you want me to do that?’
‘Yes … I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I’m in a trap.’
‘I’ll ring you,’ he said.
‘No – don’t do that. Leave me alone.’
‘I make your flesh creep, don’t I?’ he said.
She took out her shopping list and studied it. ‘I haven’t bought the meat yet. I shall be late back.’
‘I’ll ring you,’ he said, ‘but not yet. I’ll choose me time – not when he’s at home. Now I know I’m in the clear I’ll go and see Jude Davis, see when I can get back into training. I’ll ring you maybe next week.’
‘Don’t do that,’ she said.
They were all glad to see him in the gym. Jude Davis and Pat Prince and the other boxers in the stable and hangers on. He found he was quite a hero. How was he feeling now; and the stitches would hardly show in a couple of weeks and had he seen the ratings; he’d gone up two places since the fight with Kio.
Jude said take it easy for another three weeks, then light training, if he wanted to see a plastic surgeon about his nose he had only to say, but actually you’d hardly notice, the kink was so slight. There’d be a couple of easy pitches lined up for him in April. You didn’t need to match him with one of the top boys just yet; he was the draw now. Put him on anywhere in London.
He was in the gym about an hour and then left wondering how he could get his own back on Jude. Jude had played it easy, him coming back. Just as if nothing had happened. Maybe Pat had never told him anything of what had been said in the hospital, but in a way that made it worse if it meant Jude really thought him such a stupid pus-head that he didn’t know he’d been led to the slaughter. The resentment of his defeat, and more particularly of having his looks spoiled, had festered during his two weeks in Merrick House. The tiny revenge on Wilfred had hardly soothed it at all. Sometimes during those days in Suffolk he had wandered through that gaunt dark building making plans to destroy them all. They were wild irrational plans; but someday, somehow, one would crop up that would work.
At present he had money to spend and not much to spend it on. He rang up Sally Beck but a man answered and said she was out of town. One thing that worried him was that at night he still couldn’t breathe properly through his nose, and sometimes during the day it stopped up with catarrh as if someone had plugged it.
Eventually, bored with hanging about, he got a job on a building site helping to clear rubble after the bulldozers had done their work. It rained most of the first day, and the place was a morass of mud; but he came home with his muscles tightened up and for the first time for a month had a night’s sleep without dreams. He worked the next four days and on Saturday morning rang Tom Bushey and they spent the week-end together in Brighton. It seemed to Godfrey that there was no colour bar nor an injury bar in Brighton: they had no difficulty about girls, and the one he took up with said she liked a man with a few bumps on his face.
But it all added up to nothing much, and he began to think more and more about Pearl. He’d been pretty mixed up so far as she was concerned right from the start. And for a time Flora’s death had knocked him right out of the ring. There had been no real time to get his sights fixed or his mind made up.
Well, it was two months now since Pearl, and distance lent enchantment. And revenge lent enchantment. You couldn’t get even with a man who fell down like a jelly at the first poke. But you could maybe make him suffer this other way. You could enjoy his wife. You could make the old man suffer by letting him know what was going on and how unfaithful his dear beloved really was. Godfrey didn’t doubt his ability to have Pearl come to him. She was hooked.
Another month went by before Godfrey’s next fight. It was an easy one, as Jude had promised: a man called Ferry, from Nigeria. Godfrey got a big hand when he went into the ring and he won inside the distance, but it was not a convincing win. Little God’s confidence was not as complete as it had been and he was too concerned to cover up his face. Ferry got a cut eye and that stopped it, but Jude made an expressive face to Prince after the fight. ‘Give ’im time,’ said Pat. ‘’E wants three cushy bouts before ’e’ll begin to look good again.’
Godfrey knew just as well as they did that he hadn’t done right, and the kindly write-ups didn’t deceive him. He nursed his resentment and spent his money on a girl called Mickey who attached herself to him and finally came to live with him. He didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him in the ring: he wasn’t turning yellow, that was for certain. But his reflexes were different from what they had been: it was something he couldn’t at present control: he had set out to beat the punk in the other corner but his reflexes had been more concerned that the punk sh
ouldn’t beat him.
He would grow out of it. It was just a question of time.
Just before his second fight he got rid of Mickey – or Mickey walked out on him, according to which side you heard. Godfrey said he never had asked the little yard-cat to come, she’d slid in where it was warm and the money was good. He was glad to be shot of her. She said she’d had enough of his moods and his tantrums and his sulks. As for him being good in bed, he was good in bed if you counted orang-utans.
For his second fight Jude had chosen a man called Ephraim. This time they had been moved down to second on the undercard; but as it turned out it was a better fight than the first and Godfrey out-fought and out-boxed his man. Everyone thought it good and Godfrey was pleased with their congratulations. But somewhere inside him there was a little cold coin of the realm which told him he still had his personal battle to overcome. He had won because he was much better than Ephraim, but his reactions weren’t fast enough or sure enough, and he knew he was being fed easy meat. And his nose was troubling him. He had catarrh every morning and sometimes in the ring it got blocked. Although he was fourth in the ratings he wasn’t sure he could beat any of the first three yet. Yet. How long before the next fall?
He rang Pearl. She agreed to meet him, but only for a meal. He said O.K. and they met in the Grill at the Cumberland, and he told her his doubts. For once they talked like reasonable human beings without obvious conflict. It was almost the first time. Always before passion and revulsion had been so strong between them, colours too violent to give a chance to any of the pastel shades. Now temporarily, so temporarily, they talked like companions. It was only when they were separating that he asked her to come back with him. She refused. He said if she came back it would make him feel better, feel he was really himself again. As he’d just told her, he’d had the confidence knocked out of him: this would help, her coming, it might even put him right on top of the world, back in the groove as a feather-weight, undo all the damage that knock-out had done. It would be doing him a favour. Besides, he wanted her. Remember what it was like those last few times?