Sometimes she thought of the bed as a ship, a great safe ship floating all night on a quiet sea until morning. Waking early, she would open her eyes in the familiar haven of the lovely room, into which first light shook itself through white, trembling curtains and dappled the copper bowl of orange roses on the table. And for a few minutes she would lie quite still, feeling that fine brightness of the spirit, that tranquility of the flesh, which is called, for lack of any more apt definition, “well-being.”
But all this was of the past.
For months now, she had lain most of the time alone in the bed, on sheets gone cold and pillows crumpled by her restless, sleepless head. Alex slept on a narrow cot in the dressing room next door. He had first begun to sleep there during the winter when he’d had the flu. Its aftermath of coughing had lasted for weeks. Then, in order not to wake Fern after late meetings in town, he had kept on using the cot …
She was finding it impossible to talk about. That was puzzling, because Alex and she had been able to talk about anything. Women in particular had often remarked, with some curiosity and much frank envy, on this free and lively interchange of theirs. It was such a wonderful thing to be able to talk to a husband! Their husbands came home from work and read the newspaper—
Given, then, a relationship like this there ought to have been no reason why she could not have said: “What’s wrong? I want to know.” Yet she could not bring herself to say it.
Instead, humiliation knotted in her chest; she felt a prickling, inhibiting sense of shame. She was perfectly aware that this was only false pride and a wife ought not to have false pride. Yet she had it.
One day she bought a book about married love and left it on the table at the foot of the bed, next to the folded London Times. Alex riffled through it and put it back.
“Good Lord,” he said, “you’d think people never could have got married and lived together without having somebody write a book of instructions for them!”
The remark was so unlike him, to whom open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity were essential virtues, that Fern was astonished and said so.
In answer he laughed and went back to the Times. And she, rebuked and made foolish, said no more.
“By the way.” He lowered the paper a few minutes later. “At the Baker’s dinner Malcolm said you were the most striking woman in the room.”
“Very nice of him.”
“Well, you were! You should always wear either white or blue.” He yawned. “I’m wrung out I could drop right off to sleep. Had a meeting about the blasted German insurance today. Terrence made the report and you know how long-winded he can be. If you want to read some more, I’ll sleep in the dressing room.”
“I don’t want to read anymore,” she said flatly.
The darkness had a hollow feel as if she were alone in a cavern. How could everything have changed so quickly? Briefly Alex stroked her shoulder and brushed her earlobe with his lips.
“Good night. Sleep well,” he said tenderly.
In a minute he was asleep. She willed him to turn back to her, but her will had no effect. Yet, if he had turned and opened his arms, she would not have come into them. For was she to exist only to satisfy his odd whim? What could he be thinking of? And didn’t he wonder at all what she might be thinking?
Rain spattered the leaves close to the windows. Rain again! No wonder the English drank so much brandy and so much boiling tea! The dampness shuddered in her marrow. She got up to take another blanket and lay awake while the rain quickened and darkness deepened in the hollow cavern.
There was another woman: there had to be. Who, then? That cousin of Nora’s, she of the false voice, chirrup and chirp? She had a very convenient fiat in London. Maybe even Nora herself? Shameful to think of one’s friend; kind, strong Nora. Still, one never knew; one heard incredible things. That Irish girl, Delia somebody, who won the jumping trophy at the horse show? She was dark and the women he admired were always dark ones. The girl couldn’t be more than eighteen. She had the most absurd way of stretching her eyes, slanting them at a man even when he was no taller than she. Alex had danced with her at least five times at the Elliot’s.
Maybe it was none of these at all. Maybe it was someone he had known before they were married, some woman he couldn’t have married, because she wouldn’t have been a proper mother for his child.
She must find out She would find out.
Alex sighed in his sleep and turned over; one relaxed arm brushed Fern’s rigid shoulder. He smelled of cleanliness, of shaving lotion and Pear’s soap. And she slid away, out of touch.
Her mind sped. He’d gone riding with Delia last Thursday afternoon. They were out two hours, at least. She would have gone, too, if he’d asked her, but when she got back from errands in the village he had already left. And when she went down to the stable to saddle Duchess, they were just coming in.
“We went all the way to Blackdale. It was marvelous!” Delia cried. “You should have been with us, Fern.”
Yes, I should.
Her hair falls like black silk … It’s not possible. Things like this happen to other people. Like auto accidents and cancer, they happen to other people.
On a Sunday afternoon in dark and threatening autumn weather, Alex stood up suddenly and stretched.
“I’ve a yen for exercise. I think I’ll take Lion for a canter up to Blackdale. Not far.”
“Not far! An hour and a half there and back. And it’s going to rain.”
She knew she sounded critical and cross. But he answered pleasantly.
“I’ll be home before the rain comes, I think. And if not, I shan’t mind.”
“Well, suit yourself. I’ve no wish to get soaked.”
“Shouldn’t want you to,” he said, still pleasantly.
He had been gone half an hour before her thoughts took clear shape, and a decision was made. What sort of fool did he take her for? A country canter in this weather? And he’d been on the telephone three times before lunch today.
From the closet she pulled a mackintosh and rain hat, for the rain had begun. Then she went into the hall and called softly up the stairs. “Nanny? Let the children have tea without us this afternoon. I’ve an unexpected errand.”
She would be waiting for them at the stable, standing in the lane as they rode up. She would smile, smile dangerously, and then see what Alex would have to say.
But afterward—what would come then? She couldn’t think that far ahead. Vague images of daring courage came to mind: of those men who last summer had gone up the sheer face of a mountain in the Himalayas. The vertigo! The horror of falling! Could they have felt such panic in the pit of the stomach? No. They wouldn’t have been able to do it if they had.
Step forward. Get through it. The rest will follow.
She walked swiftly. There was no one on the road, the villagers being either at the radio or sleeping Sunday dinner off. Even the clattering crows of autumn had taken shelter from the wet.
The fools! They would be soaked! Unless they knew of some place to hide away in—she couldn’t imagine where. There was no one about in the stable yard, either. The horses had all been taken indoors. From the little office next to the tack room where Kevin, the head groom, had a desk and kept his records, came an oil lamp’s weak glow. It wouldn’t do any harm to wait inside with Kevin. She would still be able to hear them trotting up the path. Let Kevin hear or think what he might.
The window was next to the door so that, standing with one’s hand on the knob, one’s face was almost pressed against the pane, and one’s eyes were drawn into the room. Something caught Fern’s attention before her hand had turned the knob.
A cot, covered with a plaid horse blanket, stood opposite the desk along the farther wall. Someone was lying on it. She leaned forward. Blinked. Stepped back. Leaned forward again. Frowning, she flattened her nose on the wet glass. It was like looking into an aquarium. The shape on the cot—no, there were two—the shapes slid, pale and slippery, like gr
eat, gliding fish, underwater creatures twisted in some unfathomable embrace. And for a minute or two she stood there, failing to understand. She saw, yet did not grasp the meaning of what she saw.
Then a face came into view. It moved into the path of the lamplight. It was a face and a bright head that she knew … Alex spoke. She saw a flash of naked white as Kevin sat up. And she understood.
She gave a harsh cry and clapped her palm to her mouth and fled from the shaft of light into the shrubbery. She heard Alex crying, in a voice of terrible alarm, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” And she ran.
Crouched and stumbling in the failing afternoon, under a sky grown eerie as moonlight, she ran, hidden from the public road behind hedges and walls. A bramble ripped her leg. She fell. Pebbles ground into her palms. She had a crazy thought that someone was pursuing her.
“Oh my God!” she gasped. Her heart beat so! It beat so! And she put her hand to her chest. Was there some stoppage there? Even at her age, the heart could stop, couldn’t it?
She reached the house and banged the door open. A child, hearing her steps, called from upstairs, but she raced to her room. She threw the soaked mackintosh and hat upon the floor and lay down upon the bed. Her throne! Her ship! She was dizzy, sick, delirious. It was all unreal! Untrue! She had not seen, could not possibly have seen it!
Yes, she knew of such things, but very vaguely, for there was nothing in print except for some sparse definitions in the dictionaries. A girl in school had overheard her brother talking. There had been tittering, shocked laughter, so that dimly and half-comprehended, a conception of something awful and unnatural had been formed. She had been perhaps fifteen when these things had happened. And she knew now very little more than she had known then.
If only her heart would stop pounding so! It felt as though a volcano were swirling and burning in her, as if she were too full to contain the swirling and burning.
Downstairs the front door opened and then was closed with the muffled thud of solid wood. Footsteps sounded: Alex’s familiar tread. He came in and stood beside the bed.
“So it was you,” he said softly.
Fern’s dry, scared eyes stared up at him.
“Well, now you know.”
She kept on staring at him. He looked the same. The strong shoulders in the handsome riding jacket, the humorous tilt to the eyes, were the same.
“Why?” she whispered.
He shook his head. He sighed.
“I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m sorry.”
New terror passed over her, a terror like the cold wind of abandonment. She was alone. Alex was not Alex anymore. Then who was there?
“I thought it was Delia,” she whispered.
How much better if it had been Delia, after all!
“You thought it was Delia? That rattle-headed, empty fool?” He laughed.
There was no mirth in the laugh; it was only bitter, nervous, agitated. But the sound of it, and the look of his easy stance, with the riding crop in his left hand and his right hand thrust into the jacket pocket, were too much. Everything burst in Fern. Everything that had been held back for months, added now to this, burst open in one long, wild, frenzied scream. It rose and filled the room; it emptied out into the dusk.
“Stop it! Stop it, Fern, stop it!” Alex cried.
She wasn’t able to. Her mind was working clearly; she understood that this was hysteria, her first experience of it. What she had read of it was true. You slid down and down and down, hearing from some far distance your own appalling screams. Over the edge you went, over the edge.
She struggled for air. And struggling up, she ran to the window to push the casement wide.
Alex, misinterpreting, pulled her back and pinned her on the bed.
“You fool! I’m not worth killing yourself for!” He opened her collar. “Quiet! Quiet! Whatever’s happened, it’s not the world’s affair … People can hear you.”
She wept now, beating the bed with her palms. “I don’t care who hears! Let them!”
“You’ll terrify the children. You care about them, don’t you?”
The children! Ah yes, the children! And this, their father.
“Take some,” Alex said. A decanter and small green glass for his nightcap stood on the tray. He filled the glass. “Take some,” he commanded again.
She twisted away. “Don’t put your hands on me!”
“All right. All right. But talk to me. Please talk to me!”
Silently now, her thick tears rolled as smooth as glycerine.
“I know you can’t understand. I can’t expect you to be anything but horrified. And I’m so sorry, Fern. Oh my God, just so sorry!”
She thought, I can’t stay here. And for one mad instant she saw herself walking out, just walking out, leaving everything behind—this house, the children, her pictures—and most of all this loathsome man. She saw the strapped trunks and the suitcases waiting in the hall. On the top of the pile lay the patent leather traveling case which had come with her from home. The car waited in the driveway. Neddie, Isabel and Emmy stood at the foot of the stairs, their bewildered eyes asking why she was leaving them.
Alex was speaking softly, soothingly. “At least, though, you must see that Kevin’s no threat to the marriage, as Delia would have been.”
“Threat to the marriage? What marriage? If I could walk out tonight, just walk down the road in the mud; if there were a train going out, a train to anywhere, I don’t care where, I’d go. I’d go this minute.”
“You’re fogetting something.”
“Forgetting?”
“Your children—”
“They’ll go with me wherever I go.”
Alex shook his head. “No,” he said. “No.” In the straight-backed chair beside the bed he sat erect, as if in the saddle, except that one knee was crossed high on the other thigh. This easy posture alarmed her, as she recognized something she had seen before, although it had never yet been directed at her. It was an iron will in casual disguise. It was determination, not to be diverted.
“What do you mean? You’re not fit! Do you think you’re a fit father to rear a family? Why, any court would—”
“Any court would if any court could. But it would be your word against mine. Whose do you think they would believe?” He got up, walked the length of the room and strode back. “Whose word? They would say you were a demented, vicious woman.”
“I’ll find a way! There has to be a way for truth to make itself known. This is a civilized country.”
Alex held up his hand. “Wait And if you were able to prove it—you wouldn’t be, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you could—then of course, this being a civilized country, I would be relieved of my post How do you think we should all live then? If you have any idea that inherited wealth alone supports us, you’re terribly mistaken. You know very well what’s happened to investments here since the crash in America. I need to work, Fern. Keep that in mind, if you care about your children.”
“Then I’ll simply take them and go, that’s all. You can’t very well set a guard over us whenever you’re out of the house.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Where will you go? Your father’s been almost wiped out in the market and his factory’s running on one cylinder. He’d hardly welcome a returning daughter and a brood of children, would he?”
She wiped her eyes roughly. “Alex, tell me, if you can, why? Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you marry me? Of marry anyone?”
“I thought it would work. I wanted it to, how I wanted it to! From that first time at your aunt’s dinner … Fern, you were the loveliest thing I’d ever looked at. Everything, everything about you, your voice, and the quietness in you, and all the life … You think like me. We go so well together. I wanted it to be so good for us.” His face twisted as if he were going to weep. “My heart aches for you; I wish I could love you as you ought to be loved. Oh my God, how I wish I could!”
“In the name o
f decency, then, will you give me a divorce? On any grounds you want. Any.”
He shook his head.
“Alex, for God’s sake, why not?”
He wept. His tears repelled her.
“Why not?” she repeated.
“I would never see my children again.”
“I would let you see them. I swear I would.”
“I want to live with them, as much as you want to live with them.”
“You have no right! You’ve forfeited the right.”
“It’s the point of view,” Alex said, bringing himself under control. “Society’s point of view. In the society of ancient Greece, if you were living there, you would see this differently.”
“I’m not living in ancient Greece.”
“Well, but listen to me, I’m a good father. You know I am. This other thing—this has nothing to do with it.”
“You disgust me,” she said.
“Is that all you have to say?”
“I want a divorce. That’s what I have to say.”
“No, Fern, no. Freedom, yes. live as you will. I’ll ask no questions. But the household stays as it is.”
The rain shines on the window. The pale bodies twist like sea creatures underwater.
A shudder rippled down Fern’s back and contorted her face. Her teeth began to chatter.
“When you’re more calm in the morning, I’ll explain to you—”
“I don’t want explanations,” she cried. “Just get out! Get out where I don’t have to look at you. Get out!”
When he had left the room, she crept under the blankets. It was fearfully cold. She remembered a hot beach in Florida years before, walking on the sand with her mother and Jessie, picking up shells. How good to be so young, to know nothing!
A bird twittered in the blackness and a breeze puffed. It was the subtle stirring of the earth that comes just ahead of the dawn. She remembered that they had had no dinner last evening. Her dry eyes ached. She would be appalled to see them in the mirror, and at the sight of her own stricken face the tears would start again.