They did not go much to the field now. They were afraid of the car sinking in the mud. They had taken to getting further away from town. Colin would drive to the motorway intersection, slot them between the lights of other cars, and put his foot down. For miles and miles ahead the wet black road gleamed under the orange lights. Wrapped in their numb silence, their eyes on the tail-lights ahead, headlights reflected in the rear-view mirror, they were locked into the process of the road; parts on its conveyor, diminished to its function.
He would pull in at the service halt. They sat on padded seats of turquoise plastic, facing each other over the litter of stained paper cups and scraps of cellophane ripped from sandwiches.
“It’s so sordid,” she laughed. “It’s so properly sordid. Like a film.”
“I shall get a night from somewhere,” he said. “I’ll get some petrol in the car and we’ll go—drive up to Manchester, get a decent meal and find a hotel. I’ll come up with something. Just give me time.”
“Give me time,” she said mockingly. “That’s the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till my wife understands. Be reasonable, give me time, just till my children grow up, give me time. And what do you suppose time will give to me?”
“Before the winter’s out,” he said, “things will be different. I told you that first night that I’d leave her. Give me—no, no, you’re playing games. If I left her you’d laugh in my face.”
“You’ll never leave her,” she said. A ginger-haired woman moved between the tables, whisking cigarette butts into a waste bag, her white face set in lines of ineradicable fatigue. She watched them with pale bitter eyes.
“She wants us to go,” Isabel said.
“Drink your tea. Then we’ll go.”
“It’s like treacle. It’s the end of the pot. It always is at this time of night.”
She leaned forward and tears dripped into the cup and splashed onto the table. She got up suddenly, thrusting her chair back, and strode towards the door ahead of him, fastening her coat and looping her scarf around her neck. He was afraid of the clenched set of her mouth. The rain had stopped; he saw them hurrying, reflected in puddles, ghost-white flitting among the petrol pumps and headlights. She put her foot on a sodden mess of paper and slime and skidded to her knees. He ran behind her and picked her up. Holding her tightly by the waist he steered her towards the car. In her seat she unbuttoned her coat again and pulled up her skirt, rubbing at her grazed knees and picking at the shreds of her tights. She sobbed and sniffed, fumbling for a handkerchief. He reached across her and fastened the seatbelt in her lap, making the soft nonsensical sounds of comfort he used to his children.
“You must take me to your house. We can’t go on like this—”
“I’ve told you, no. Her voice shook. “No, no, no.”
“What is it, love? What’s upsetting you?”
She turned and looked at him, for a second, as if she had never seen him before. “Whatever is wrong in my life,” she said, “might have nothing to do with you.”
“But has it?” She turned her head away. “Perhaps I’ve done you an injustice. Perhaps you do feel—”
“Oh yes, I feel,” she said harshly. “I took a training course to educate me out of feeling. I’m not paid to feel. But still I do it.”
“Then it’s your job that’s getting on top of you.”
“I don’t know.” She took a deep breath.
“And your dad. Your home. Caring for him. Perhaps it’s that.”
“I see you have your theories. Just leave off, Colin.”
“Leave off? Leave me alone, you mean.” He was angry. “You want to have me around when it suits you, you want to talk about your work, you want to put the burden onto me. You burst into tears, then you say leave off.”
“I’m sorry if I upset you.” She lifted her face. “See, I’m not crying now.”
“I worry about you.” He touched her hair tentatively. “You’re getting thin.” Suddenly he saw it. “You need me, don’t you?”
He did not ask, what for? She seemed vulnerable in her distress, naked; he rushed to cover her with willing assumptions.
“How shrewd,” she said.
“You need to pack in this job. You need a husband. You need a proper secure home.”
“And you’re offering?”
“Isabel, give me something back. I’m human.”
“Sure.”
“You go on as if you hate me. As if there were some enemy in your life, and it’s me.”
“It’s not you, Colin.” She spoke slowly. “I don’t hate you. I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well…what is there to be afraid of?”
She began to laugh, a low-pitched and merciless chuckle. Or perhaps to cry? She is unpredictable, he thought; mad. Perhaps her period is coming on; I must keep a check. She pretends to be hard, to be casual, but everyone knows that women can’t have casual affairs. She and I are equal now. But still—though the question was settled in his mind—her laughter made his skin crawl; as if there were some deep derangement in the situation that she meant to cherish alone.
“I hardly like to explore my own mind,” she said softly. “I think I imagine things. I hope I imagine them. There are connections I make between events in my life, between people, and I hope they’re not real connections. I tell myself it would be too much coincidence. But coincidence is what holds our lives together. That’s why you always get it in books.”
“Do you have to be so cryptic?”
“It would be pleasant to be a victim: a victim of circumstance. If there were no patterns in our lives, we would have no responsibility. I would like to think that events were entirely random. It would be comfortable.”
“I can never see a pattern. Perhaps I can’t see the wood for the trees. Stupid saying, that. I only…I didn’t want to bandy platitudes. I only wondered if you loved me.”
“I’m afraid to ask myself what I feel.” She pressed her lips together; holding her damp handkerchief between her fingertips, she folded it into a tiny square. “I distrust all my thoughts and all my emotions; how do I know I didn’t get them out of books? I might even love you, but you can live in such a way that you get alienated from love, that you see its ghastly consequences all around you, and so I’ve tried to come to grips with it, I’ve tried to grapple with it in the back of your car. That’s what people do, isn’t it? They perform the actions and then they get the feelings?”
“Christ, I hope not.” Panic welled inside him. “You say you might love me, but love could be too big a risk, so you’re investigating, are you, at my expense? The town’s just one big laboratory, and you keep me under a glass jar until it’s time to take me out and experiment on my emotions again.”
“Human experiments are performed every day.” She sat back in her seat, her eyes closed. “Forget it, Colin. Just forget it.”
He needed no prompting. He told himself he was her anchor in the normal world; he felt her tugging at him, out to uncharted waters. No one wants to go there. Resistance was his duty; his obtuseness was all he had to offer her, the leaden anchor of habit, the steadying weight of sad routine.
“Touch of the existential panic,” he said. “I felt it too. There are some tissues in the glove compartment if you want to blow your nose.” Groping for the short end of his seat belt, his hand touched hers, hanging loosely, as cold and stiff as the hand of a corpse. Like The Duchess of Malfi, he thought at once. He shuddered. “We’d better get on the road. It’s ten o’clock.”
The alarm shrilled. Sylvia’s fingers groped for it. The noise continued to reverberate in Colin’s head. He screwed his eyes shut.
He was distressed by his lack of control over his own dreams. It seemed monstrous that your own brain was capable, in the hours before dawn, of such divisive folly. He had dreamed so vividly of Isabel that he was afraid her spectre and after-image would parade ab
out the bedroom for Sylvia to see. He had never seen her naked, but he imagined her long white limbs.
“Colin,” Sylvia said. Her voice was cautious, exploratory; the first limb of Monday morning reaching out to touch him in the dark. “Colin, seven o’clock.”
“Mm.”
Sylvia sighed. She put her head back on the pillow and her rollers dug into her skull. She was going to the doctor’s that morning to get the result of her pregnancy test. She was sure it would be positive. She was as regular as clockwork, she thought, you could set your watch by her menstrual flow. Furtively she slid a hand down over her blue nylon belly. I’ll have to get myself a couple of patterns, she thought, and get the machine out, before the school holidays start. Sewing’s all right but it makes a mess in the house. “Colin?”
“Yes, all right.” He massaged his closed eyelids with his fingers, sat up, and swung his feet out of bed. “Christ, it’s dark,” he said. “Why do we always get up in the dark? Year in, year out.”
Sylvia did not bother to say that life was arranged that way. Their morning routine did not include expostulation. A grunt, a twitch, sufficed for anything out of the ordinary. I’ll get the kettle on grunt a boiled egg grunt the milk in grunt the fire on grunt and the children out of bed, and
“Why is it so bloody dark?” Colin bellowed. “Why is life so lousy and uncomfortable?”
Sylvia felt unable to rise to the occasion. She did no more than glance at him out of the corner of her eye. It was the first time in their married life that he had asked such a question, and she could not think of a reason. She went into the bathroom, threw up neatly into the toilet bowl, pushed down the handle, and wiped her eyes, which were misty from the effort. She poured disinfectant into the lavatory, flushed it again, and rinsed out her mouth, scooping up the water in her hands. She was shivering when she got back into the bedroom, but Colin didn’t notice. She reached for her dressing-gown. That makes sure of it, she thought. I’ll put off telling him. I think I’d better.
Colin ate his egg in customary silence. His sense of grievance seemed to have subsided. He grunted once when he could not find his tie, then found it screwed up in the pocket of his jacket.
“I should take your overcoat,” Sylvia said.
“I’m late.”
“Suzanne, run and fetch your dad’s overcoat.”
“I’m late too,” Suzanne said. Her mouth was full of cornflakes. “That’s all you use me for, running up and down stairs. I bet I go upstairs ten times a day, getting things for you.”
“Twenty,” Alistair said. “A hundred times. A billion.”
“Why don’t you do it?” Suzanne said to her mother. “You’re lazy, that’s why. You’re old.”
“Christ,” Colin said. “I’ll bloody do without.”
He looked back at his children from the kitchen doorway, without hope. “I’ll be late, love,” he said to Sylvia. “Not very late. I just thought I’d pop over to Florence.”
“All right.”
“Sylvia.”
She turned from the toast she was buttering for Alistair; slowly, as if she resented the extra effort.
“You look a bit peaky.”
“I’m all right.”
“About six o’clock then. Don’t worry if it’s a bit later.”
“I’ll have your tea ready,” she said, and turned absently back.
The front door clicked behind him. He stood on the doorstep for a moment. The relief…the relief of being out of the house; the urge to confess was becoming almost unbearable. He took a deep breath of the foul air of the coming week, and began his matutinal wrestle with the damp-swollen garage door.
Muriel had taken to getting up early. Hearing the creak of the floorboards underfoot, Evelyn woke and lay stiff with alarm. Along the passage…“Muriel? Muriel?” Evelyn called hoarsely, her voice weak with apprehension. Muriel’s grinning head appeared around the door, dimly outlined in the half-light. Evelyn rolled her head around on the pillow, clutching up to her throat the old cardigan she wore at night for warmth. Her face had the look of thin old paper.
“Muriel?”
Why, she would brew her some tea, Muriel said. Brew her some coffee, brew her some milk.
“What are you doing up at this time? Are you sick?”
Muriel was not sick. She had never been sick at all during the course of her pregnancy. It had not incommoded her at all, except for the increased clumsiness of her swollen body. It was as if, Evelyn thought, the child was withdrawn and inert as its mother. A thing. A lump. Perhaps it was dead. Oh God. She struggled to sit up in momentary panic. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder. Let it not be dead. It was more than the house could contain. A ghost carrying a ghost.
“Muriel? Muriel?”
Muriel had gone downstairs. Why doesn’t she put on the lights? How does it come about that she can see in the dark?
Muriel opened each door in turn. The shiny leather parlour shrouded in shadow. The cramped back room where they sat during the day. The furniture had not moved itself. There was no material change. Muriel could never feel sure about things like this. Paper might walk and wood might laugh; and how was it possible to know whether anything existed, when you were out of the room? Very well, she thought reasonably, now I am here, now the house is playing dead. Now I turn, I turn my head, I watch out of the corner of my eye. Now I go out…she slammed the door behind her then thrust it open again as quickly as she could, propelling herself back into the room. The tables and chairs, unmoved, smirked at her knowingly. She looked at them in a passion of enmity. Once she had been at their mercy, but now she was learning how to go about things. Now she was making progress every day.
In the kitchen drawer was a ball of string. A ball of string and a knife to cut. Back to the front parlour. With savage tightness she knotted the string to the back of one of the dining chairs, and looped it round the door handle. She passed it around the back again, and pulled, the rough fibres burning her fingers; round the handle, and back a third time, lifting the chair off its back legs. She went out into the hall and dragged the door shut behind her. An example to the rest.
And back to the kitchen. She opened a cupboard and took out her breakfast egg. She balanced it on her palm for a moment and then allowed it to roll off and shatter on the floor. The result was gratifying. Evelyn made such strange noises when she bent down to clean the floor. “You’re a useless lump,” she would squall. “You never do a hand’s turn.” Useless lump, used to a bump. Muriel patted her body confidently. She thought she would go out to play.
It was very cold in the lean-to, but the cold was something that had never bothered Muriel. Over the last few weeks, when Evelyn had sternly forbidden her to go out of the house, she had taken to spending more and more time there, delving more deeply into the rotten cardboard boxes, shaking out the rusted tins and heaving aside planks of wood to see what was underneath. The recent wet weather had made it a musty, fungal place, with a private and unpleasant smell. Water was getting under the doors and soaking into Clifford’s collection of newspapers.
There seemed no likely end to the pleasures of the boxes. Here were images, for instance of people in strange clothes; furry little brown-and-white images, creased and smudged. And keys, for doors, a great bunch of them tied together. Locking doors, now there was a thing to do. And this fine garment.
An overcoat, Muriel thought. She could walk out in it. Promenade. She made a verse. An overcoat, across the moat, a man to dote, costs but a groat. It touched some chord in her heart, brushed some faint memory. She held up the coat and shook it out. It was thick and heavy, its dark wool mildewed but intact. Muriel wrinkled her nose at its ancient and complex smells. At first she wondered whether it had been left there by one of the corpses under the stones outside the door of the lean-to. Then her eye caught some writing. Writing in a coat? Who would want to write in a coat? She sniggered. She carried the coat over to the light to make sure. Yes, there was a kind of tape sewn into it, yellow and
frayed, and faint grey letters on the tape. This coat had a name. Or its owner had a name. It would be pleasant to find out who was under the stones. Evidently corpses wrote in their clothes; evidently they had a strong sense of private property.
She spelled it out for herself. CLIFFORD F. AXON. Here was another matter. She smiled gently, and began to scrape with her fingernails at the mould which speckled the collar.
Colin had the third period free. It helped, this small oasis so soon after the dire start of the working week.
Frank O’Dwyer, his Head of Department, was coming out of the staffroom.
“Any change for the phone, Frank?” Change had become his obsession, lately.
“You may be the lucky one.”
They stood opposite each other digging into their pockets, like gunslingers in difficulty.
“What’s the magic of this telephone?” Frank enquired. “You spend half your working day on it.”
“I want to ring my sister.”
O’Dwyer produced a handful of loose change and decanted it into Colin’s palm.
“Did you run me off those copies?”
“5B’s exam? Yes…only twenty-five. Will that do? Bloody machine’s knackered again.”
“It always picks its time,” Frank said. “Twenty-five will suffice, they look over each other’s shoulders anyway, miserable little sods. Once we get the exams over it puts itself right during the night, do you notice? If it went to Lourdes, it would be called a miracle.”
Colin grinned weakly. He wanted to get away, but it was not possible to have a short conversation with O’Dwyer. He was a large lanky, charming man, with heavy glasses which slipped down his nose and needed continual readjustment. His breath smelled faintly of the nip of whisky which he took to get himself started each day. Ten years ago, even five, people had said he was much too good to be a schoolmaster; ought to be lecturing, ought Frank, ought to have his doctorate. They had stopped talking in those terms, but Frank had kept his pretensions; only his clothes mirrored his state, the neckties starved narrow with dearth of variety, disappointed jackets in sagging tweed. Colin saw himself; the regalia of stagnation, the shroud of opportunity, rags of receding hope.