Marnie

  I hadn’t a key and knocked on the door. Old Lucy opened it, just like last night, except that her face wasn’t so swollen. She said: ‘Oh, Marnie, we was hoping you’d come. There’s a gent to see you.’

  I went in and into the front room. Uncle Stephen was sitting there talking to Terry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The room was badly lit. This bowl thing hanging from the ceiling was supposed to spread the light, but in fact it threw most of it up so that your face was in a sort of half shadow. Terry’s face was in half shadow.

  He said: ‘Oh, good, my dear. I’ve only just come. I went to Cranbook Avenue first. I wasn’t sure.’

  He was wearing a yellow tie with a green sports jacket and a maroon waistcoat. I said: ‘How did you know where I was at all?’

  ‘I heard the SOS message. I never thought it was you until I rang you a second time today and there was no reply. Then it suddenly occurred to me, my dear. I thought, that was her mother.’

  They were drinking beer. I suppose Uncle Stephen had got it from somewhere. I sat down in a chair. ‘What have you come for?’

  ‘I thought I might be able to help. I didn’t know how you were fixed.’ He was smiling sympathetically. There was still something not quite clear about it but I was too beaten up to bother. It was like a dream – going on with one I’d begun somewhere else on my own.

  Uncle Stephen said: ‘Mr Holbrook was telling me your husband had been seriously injured in a riding accident. I’d no idea. You should have told us, Marnie.’

  I was still looking at Terry. ‘He’s not worse?’

  ‘No.’

  Lucy came in. ‘I got supper ready, dear. ’Twill do us all good. Mr ’Oldbrook? I laid four places.’

  ‘Thanks, I’d like to,’ said Terry. ‘Though I mustn’t be late starting back.’

  We had the meal in the dining-room which had all new furniture I’d bought for this house, so it didn’t remind me so much as the other rooms. I wished I could remember why I hated that clock in the kitchen. I never could. But while I sat there pecking at some cold ham and pickles I remembered the rough feel of khaki on the back of my legs when I was lifted up and put on a man’s knee. And I remembered a terrible thing like a battle, like a war, bursting suddenly over my head. It was Dad and another man who were fighting . . .

  ‘Eat your ’am, dear,’ said Old Lucy. ‘If I’d known we was ’aving company I’d have baked.’

  Nobody was talking much at the table. I suppose nobody knew how much anybody else was supposed to know, and they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. Terry and Uncle Stephen began to talk about underwater fishing.

  ‘Marnie.’ It was Terry.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why don’t you drive back with me?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Why don’t you let me run you home?’

  I dug my fork in a piece of ham but didn’t lift it off the plate.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ said Uncle Stephen.

  ‘Why don’t I what?’

  ‘Let Mr Holbrook drive you home. It’s been a hard day for you, and if your husband’s not well you should be with him, otherwise he might worry. Lucy and I can tidy things up here. Can’t we, Lucy?’

  ‘’S I reckon,’ said Lucy, and looked at me with her big eye.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ I said, ‘go home.’

  ‘You could come down again in a few days. Really, it’s much the best way.’

  ‘Mark’s still in hospital,’ I said. ‘I can’t help him that way.’

  But even while I was speaking there was a sudden flush of feeling inside me that said, why don’t you. Even though I knew it was mad I listened to it. You see, more than anybody else I suddenly found I wanted to talk to Mark. More than anyone else he’d forced me to talk when I didn’t want to, so he really knew more about part of my life than anyone. I wanted to go back to him and fill up the gaps. I wanted to go and tell him and say, this is the sort of female I am, this is what happened to me, this is the rotten stock I came from: can you wonder I didn’t fit in with your fancy notions of a wife?

  You see, there was no one else I could talk to like that. No one at all, not even Roman. I felt if I could see Mark and talk to him and explain a bit, it would help me – and also it would help him to understand. I’d say to him, d’you realize who you’ve been living with, d’you realize who you wanted to be the mother of your children? And if I said that to him I think he would have some sort of a view of it that would make me better able to live with myself.

  That was all. I just wanted to explain. It wasn’t a great ambition.

  I didn’t want to go back to him permanently – I just wanted to talk.

  Uncle Stephen said: ‘If you’ll leave tonight I’ll promise to see personally to everything here. I can stay several days . . .’ He rubbed his nose and looked at Terry and then said carefully: ‘You see, Marnie, this isn’t your life down here any more.’

  Lucy was breathing on her cup of tea to cool it; the steam went across the table nearly to where Terry was cutting the bread on his plate into squares.

  I said to Terry: ‘Why have you come?’

  Everybody looked at me. Terry said: ‘My dear, I thought I might be able to lend a helping hand.’

  ‘D’you mean that?’

  ‘Why not? You don’t think I came to this Queen of Watering places for pleasure, do you? I thought, Marnie’s in difficulties and Mark’s ill, so perhaps I can help.’ His mud-coloured eyes flickered up at the other two and he grinned. ‘Oh, I admit I feel no personal love for Mark. Would you, my dear? But I don’t believe in carrying my grudges around on my back.’

  ‘You’d – drive me home?’

  ‘Of course. Or if you don’t want I’ll leave you here. It’s all the same to me. I’m only offering to be neighbourly.’

  I was still too tired to think quite straight. I got a feeling that I had missed something, but for once my brain didn’t tick. It was still half-way through that dream.

  He said: ‘Or maybe you’d like me to do something else to help. What do you think, Mr Treville? Is there anything I can do here?’

  ‘Take Marnie home. That’s really the only thing. I’d be very grateful if you would and I’m sure she will be too.’

  Wishing is like water caught in a dam. You let a little trickle of it escape and you don’t think it’s much, but in no time the trickle has worn a channel and the edges fall in and the water’s doubled and then you get a flood carrying everything away. That’s the way it was with me then. Obviously I’d be crazy to even think of seeing Mark again; but I wasn’t answering to reason any more. I wanted to see him. I’d got to tell him.

  All the same I didn’t let on right away. I just let myself drift along to the end of supper, and then after supper I went up into Mother’s bedroom and stood there for a few minutes, and I looked at the clothes in the wardrobe and the old blue dressing-gown with the silk buttons behind the door, and the high-heeled shoes – three pairs, very small, all black; and suddenly instead of being evil she became just pathetic. All she’d done, except perhaps one thing, was pathetic, and her lies and her build up and her crazy pride . . . I thought of her for one last time as the person I’d loved most in all the world, and the person since early this morning that I’d hated most – and the twelve hours since this morning seemed as long as all the rest of life. And now I didn’t seem to have any feeling for her any longer except pity.

  And I thought, perhaps if you pity her enough you won’t have any left for yourself.

  The room was empty and cold, and there was the faint stale stink of hyacinths and corruption.

  And I went downstairs and told Terry I would go back with him.

  It was a cold night but the wind had dropped and I kissed Uncle Stephen and old Lucy and told them I’d come again in a few days, not perhaps ever really intending to.

  I didn’t imagine, I carefully didn’t think it out yet beyond a certain point. I didn’t face up to all that going back might m
ean.

  We drove fast through the night. We went through Newton Abbot and skirted Exeter and took the A30 and the A303 through Honiton and Ilminster and Ilchester towards Wincanton. I thought, life’s like being in an insane asylum. Everybody goes about with their own delusions hugging them close for no one else to see. So you plough through the wards among all the milling figures towards what looks like one sane man. That’s what I was doing now.

  Terry said: ‘Queer, you know, I rang up on Wednesday, asking you to come for a drive round with me on Friday evening – and here we are, my dear, having that drive. You never know your luck, do you. You never know which way the dice is going to roll.’

  That clicked something into place. ‘But how did you know my name was Elmer?’

  ‘My dear, I’d always felt your first marriage was a fake, you know that. I didn’t care a cuss, but it irks me to have a feeling that way and not to know. So I went to the register office and looked up the entry of your marriage to Mark, and found that he’d married a Margaret Elmer, spinster, of the parish of St James’s, Plymouth.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Care to tell me about it?’

  ‘Not now, I wouldn’t, Terry.’

  ‘Did Mark know all along?’

  ‘Fairly early on.’

  Terry whistled a little flat tune. ‘He’s a queer character, Mark. He’s like a weathercock; you never know which way he’s going to blow.’

  ‘It isn’t the weathercock that blows, it’s the wind.’

  ‘Defending him for a change? It’s so much more stimulating when a wife has a healthy antagonism for her husband. Why did you ever marry him, my dear?’

  Why did I marry him? I might know that, but did I really know why I was going back to him? Did you go back to a man simply to explain? And after I’d explained, how was I going to leave again?

  Terry said: ‘Pardon me for sounding melodramatic, but did he have a “hold” on you or something? After all, it was plain as a wall that he was mad about you – and pretty soon it was nearly as plain that, behind that lovely give-away-nothing expression, you hated the sight of him. I mean, it was enough to make any fair-minded cousin curious.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was, Terry.’ If I hated the sight of Mark, why did I want the sight of him now? Had I changed? Had something happened? Had a lot of neat little gadgets inside me all suddenly gone into reverse just because I knew a bit more about them? No, it wasn’t that, it couldn’t be that. Even in a madhouse life didn’t make that much sense.

  Anyway, if anything had happened to me, I mean had happened to me to make any sort of difference in the way I thought or felt about Mark, it wasn’t just this or that, it wasn’t just the discovery about Mother or such-like, it was an add-up of everything that had been going on for weeks. It was Roman and Forio and living at that house and mixing with those people and finding out about Mother and being with Mark all in one, all tied up in one great unravellable mess, like a ball of string a cat’s been playing with.

  ‘You haven’t answered,’ said Terry.

  ‘Answered what?’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well, Mark, dear, who else?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ My God, didn’t I? Of course I wasn’t, but it didn’t do to tell Terry everything.

  ‘And does he still love you?’

  ‘I think so.’ Does he? What have you done to keep it alive since you were married? Lived like a sulky prisoner, refused him love, thwarted his intentions whenever you could, played his psychiatrist up, tried to drown yourself and then to break your neck and his as well. Why should he love you? Now you’ve got stomach cramp. What the hell’s that for?

  We went through Andover and turned off on the Newbury road. There was more traffic here and Terry had to pick his way.

  Terry said: ‘It’s rather important to me to know if he still loves you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, unless he does, there’s not much point in my taking you back, is there?’

  ‘. . . You’re very kind.’

  ‘We all have to do our deed for the day.’

  What had Mark said once? ‘I want to fight for you. We’re in this together.’ The stomach cramp didn’t go away. Of course I knew what I was going back to. If I found Mark as I’d left him, still anxious to do something about our marriage, even with all this knowledge in front of him, and if I decided to stop and try too, then it meant facing one of the two choices about the stolen money. Even if he could, I knew he’d never settle for any other way, and I knew if I stayed with him I’d have to agree to let him go ahead with the attempt to buy people off, probably.

  But was there any sense in even thinking of staying with him, seeing I knew now what I did about myself? Would he want me to? It was pretty lunatic ever to have let myself be talked into coming back at all.

  I must have made some move because Terry said: ‘Getting stiff?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to sleep?’

  If I went back now nobody would know I’d been away – that was odd. Except Terry nobody need know.

  ‘Terry . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  But that was the old way again. Lies and more lies clogging up the pores. I couldn’t ever get straight with Mark or with myself on that platform.

  ‘Yes?’ Terry said.

  ‘Nothing . . .’

  We had to stop at a garage near High Wycombe for petrol. I thought of Estelle’s little car I had left behind in Torquay, and wondered what would happen to it. In spite of myself I was feeling sleepy, and soon after we started again I must have dozed off for a bit. I woke up with the lights dazzling across the windscreen from an oncoming car, but I still felt drowsy and in one of those moods when you haven’t got quite all your hard-boiled skin tightly buttoned on. I mean I suddenly thought, what if you do love Mark? You crazy cretinous ape, what if you think you love him now; is it any surer than the hate you felt at Ibiza? And I suddenly realized that I couldn’t reason any longer, that my brain wasn’t going to direct me what to feel any more; I was suddenly emotional and female and hopeless, and if Mark was there at that second I should have gone blubbering into his arms wanting love and comfort and protection. Hell, how feeble-minded can you get. I was glad he wasn’t there; but who was to know that I shouldn’t act like that when we did meet?

  Anyway tonight I should be alone in the house in Little Gaddesden and a night’s sleep might give me a chance to get things ironed out and put on the line.

  Dirty washing. I was a mass of dirty washing – why should I expect Mark to do the laundry for me? I ought never to have come back. There he was standing at the door and there was a thin woman in black standing next to him and as we got nearer I could see it was Mother. ‘Come in, dear,’ she said, ‘I’ve explained it all to Mark and he quite understands about the baby. He says he’d have done the same in my place.’ And she opened her mouth to smile but in place of her teeth . . .

  I reared up in the car and blinked ahead at a twisting road. We were following a lorry, and the red light kept winking in and out as we turned the corners.

  ‘All right?’ said Terry.

  ‘All right.’ After a minute I said: ‘I’m sorry about you and Mark, Terry. You know I’ve always liked you. I’m sorry we can’t all be friends.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. There’s a lot of life left. In twenty years we shall have forgiven each other for the dirty tricks we played on each other, and we shall have forgiven each other for not having forgiven each other earlier.’

  That red eye of that lorry was like Dr Roman’s eye when he tried to hypnotize me – only it worked better. It had a nasty dirty wink about it. Roman said: ‘It’s no good coming to me, my dear. I can’t help you now, my dear, it’s not psychological, it’s in the blood. Child murder, it carries on from generation to generation; if you had one of your own you’d do it in, my dear. You’re for it, my dear, didn’t you know?’

  S
uddenly the red eye got bigger and bigger and came up to my side of the car and peered in like an evil face, and then before I could scream we’d overtaken the lorry and it was gone.

  ‘Not long now,’ Terry said. I thought even he sounded tired and strung up.

  Mark was there waiting at the door again, only this time Mother wasn’t with him. He came out, down the path past the stable to the small gate. And he said: ‘It’s all nonsense, Marnie, all these barriers you’re putting up. Nothing’s in the blood, nothing’s in the upbringing, nothing happened at Sangerford that we can’t throw away for ever if you want to try, if you’ve got courage and some love. Because they’re so much stronger than all these shabby ghosts. If you once find your way through the first thickets, there’s nothing then that we can’t do together.’

  I jerked my head up as the car began to slow. I said: ‘There’s nobody here, because I sent Mrs Leonard home. But I’ll be all right tonight.’

  ‘OK.’

  I said: ‘I think I’m pretty well all in, Terry. I’d ask you in for a drink but I’m pretty well all in.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  I said: ‘I’ll try somehow to make it up between you and Mark, Terry. It may not be too late.’

  ‘It’ll be impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, my dear, I tell you it’ll be impossible.’

  The car turned in at the drive, but the gravel crackled in a different way. The house – there was a light in the house.

  Terry blew his horn.

  It wasn’t Mark’s house. I said: ‘Where are we? This isn’t our house.’

  ‘No. I had to call here. I promised. It won’t take a minute.’

  I looked at him. His face had got a shiny look as if it was damp. It was shiny like a fish, with rain or with sweat. It looked green. He was whistling but there wasn’t any sound.

  The door of the house opened. A man stood at the door, and there was another one behind him.

  Terry said: ‘You see, my dear, I’d arranged to take you for a run this evening. You promised to come so I arranged to call in and see these people – for a drink. It’s about four hours later than I arranged but that can’t be helped, can it?’