Midsummer Night in the Workhouse Read online

  How he saw her, she didn’t know. Perhaps he didn’t. Whenever she told him something about herself she found herself keeping it as short as possible because he was so evidently incurious.

  ‘What do you think of me?’ she said suddenly, to the news- paper.

  ‘You’ve got nice tits but you can’t make pastry . . . Listen to this: “Forty-nine per cent of them came from broken homes and in almost all cases there was a history of family disturbance.” Lot of nonsense.’

  ‘Why? Who are they talking about?’

  ‘Kids caught shop-lifting. Lot of lazy little pricks with too much pocket money and not enough grey matter to know how to use it.’

  ‘Oh come on! Thousands of spoilt kids don’t start stealing.’

  ‘I had a tougher time when I was a kid than any of this lot, I bet you, and I kept straight. No – it’s just a fashion, all this excuse-making for anyone who goes wrong. Any kid’s lazy. Any kid’ll do the soft thing rather than the hard thing, give him his own way. You just have to teach them that they can’t get away with it . . . You only have to look at them in this country, now it’s the fashion to let them do as they please.’

  ‘Thank god I haven’t got any,’ she said, ducking an argument.

  ‘Better touch wood there, baby! God – I remember when I was a kid, about eight or nine years old, I’d taken the old man’s shotgun out into the bush behind our place one day when he’d gone into town – thought I’d get it cleaned and back onto its nails up on the wall before he ever got back. There was a little creek back there, just a slither of water with the mud like chocolate cake, and one pool left deep enough to reach to your knees. And Christ knows what happened because I was a handy kid as a rule, but there I was bang in the middle of the pool and I dropped that gun. My old man and that gun! It was a sacred object, I can tell you, so when I dropped it I panicked and began to flounder and stepped right onto it so down it went into the mud, and by the time I got it out it was choked right up with chocolate cake. So I ran for home with it – I knew it would take me hours to get it cleaned – and damn me if that day of all days he hadn’t come on a neighbour who’d had an accident on the road and brought him back to our place instead of going on into town. We weren’t particular about ailments, not even in my mother’s day – couldn’t afford to be – but after my old man had finished with me I had to stay in bed three full days, and you didn’t catch me laying my hands on other people’s property after that, I can tell you.’

  While he was speaking she tried to imagine the look of the creek, and the skinny little boy who could handle a shotgun at eight years old, and she winced when she envisaged the kind of injury a three-days-in-bed flogging would inflict. A childhood so different from her own, a world so remote . . . but the images were pale. They were pale because she had heard this story before. She reminded herself that however often she heard it, it had still happened; his repeating himself didn’t make the life contained in his head less real. But she was trying to fool herself and this time she failed: listening to him now was not like it had been at first. She reached for her nail file and caught herself thinking ‘a squeezed orange’.

  The words shocked her. He had taken up the newspaper again, and there were new sounds from the garden – two girls laughing. He looked comfortable on the bed with a blanket round his shoulders now the sun had gone off the window, relaxed after his good lovemaking – her good lovemaking too – and absorbed in his reading. She stared at him, then turned quickly to her mirror because although it had been disagreeable to catch those three true words in her mind, she had started to grin. It had occurred to her that Othello probably strangled Desdemona just in time.

  A HOPELESS CASE

  It was impossible to hear or be heard and almost impossible to move. Philip Dwight had fixed a grin on his face, but he was sure that no one could be convinced by it. A moment’s genuine interest in the people round him – could they really be enjoying it, or were they just better actors than he was? – failed to distract him from his misery, and he decided that he would soon leave, whether Sarah wanted to come or not.

  She wouldn’t want to. He had lost sight of her, but twenty minutes ago she had been talking to a couple they knew and a friend of that couple’s, a thin eager-looking man with untidy red hair and hot blue eyes. The man had been concentrating on Sarah, showing off to her, and she had been enjoying it. Philip couldn’t hear her, but he knew her voice had started to sound affected. When this happened it always surprised him that instead of being put off, people laughed more than ever at what she said.

  Sometimes he tried beforehand to hope that a party would be a pleasure shared, Sarah and he responding together to the people they met, or snug in a comfortable corner, watch- ing the spectacle. She, however, saw it differently. ‘But we’re together all the time, darling – the whole point of going out is to talk to someone else for a change.’ And she would sidle away from him into the crowd as soon as she could.

  Philip began to work his way across the room to where he had last seen her, but she was no longer there. He was near the door now, he could slip out – should he slip out? He would go into the hall anyway, to draw breath and clear his head of the din.

  And there in the hall was Sarah, sitting with her feet tucked up on a velvet-covered sofa which must have been moved out of the drawing-room to make space, with the red- haired man beside her. They were both talking at once, in the middle of a laughing argument. She had raised her hand to silence him. As Philip watched, the man caught her hand, pulled it down to rest on his knee and went on holding it there as he said: ‘No you don’t! Let me finish what I was saying.’

  They hadn’t noticed him. He felt as though he had been turned then and there into one of those grotesque dummies which lollop above the heads of carnival crowds, a thing stuffed with hay, its daft and tragic face hoisted in mockery and merriment. Nothing was happening – he knew that nothing was happening. Sarah on an evening out was being reminded that she was a pretty and amusing woman, that was all. He couldn’t rage, he couldn’t sulk, he couldn’t plead, he couldn’t even run away: if he did any of those things he would look – he would be – a fool, a carnival dummy of a cocu imaginaire; and he would just as certainly look a fool if he did the only thing he could reasonably do: approach them as though he had noticed nothing and say it was time to go. It wouldn’t only be Sarah who would see at once that his calm was false, the man would see it too. What he was trying to hide would be coming off him like the smell of sweat, he knew it by experience. It was the situation’s very triviality which made it impossible to deal with in any way that wouldn’t be humiliating.

  Philip had once known a humourless and pedantic Spaniard called Cristobal who was a virtuoso in jealousy. His affairs were dull for most of the time, but when, usually for no reason, he decided to be jealous a transformation took place. He would appear to grow taller, his skin would go yellow, his eyes would stare, his mouth would twist, and once he took off his belt and started slashing at the arm of a sofa, saying ‘Don’t let me go near her tonight, don’t let me go near her or I will kill her.’ He did sometimes hit his girls, or so he said, and Philip knew that he had broken all the gramophone records belonging to one of them. The girls used to be flattered to begin with, but later they would become fed up and would leave him. Cristobal recovered quickly – he knew at bottom that he would end up with a well-brought-up Spanish girl conditioned to the rules of the game – and seemed to emerge fortified from the painful but satisfying ritual of guaranteeing his masculinity, even when it lost him a girl. Philip remembered him with envy, because his own jealousy wasn’t at all like that.

  It was, he felt glumly, essentially rational. Why shouldn’t Sarah want another man? Why, after eight years of marriage, should she be content with him? He, after all, sometimes had to think of another woman in order to make love to her convincingly. They no longer had much to talk about, he was only mildly i
nterested in her pottery classes and her beagle puppies, and she wasn’t interested at all in his work. He wasn’t a smart sort of architect, his firm’s factories were never illustrated in the reviews. Sarah couldn’t be expected to see him as important because of his job, and in himself . . . he didn’t despise himself, but there was nothing exceptional about him, nothing to keep a woman hooked. At times when he took himself to task for his jealousy – times when it was inactive – he always ended with a bleak sense that it wasn’t so silly as it seemed.

  But Sarah insisted that it was silly. The other day her old beagle bitch had been off her food, and she had called him into the kitchen and said, ‘Look – I want you to watch this.’ She put the dish of food down in its usual place and started to cajole the bitch: ‘Amber, come on Amber sweetie, come and eat your lovely dinner’, and Amber stayed in her basket. Then Sarah went to the window, leant out and called the other dogs: ‘Topaz! Jasper! Come on, din-dins!’ and Amber instantly sat up, got out of the basket, went to the dish and began furiously to eat, her hackles up. Philip had laughed, thinking Sarah had wanted him to watch only because it was amusing, but she had silenced him by giving him a wry look and saying ‘Don’t you realise that’s you?’

  No, he couldn’t put on his feeble act of not minding what he had seen. He had already backed into the drawing-room again, and turning round he came face to face with Lilian Morris.

  ‘Lilian!’ he said. ‘Look, if you happen to see Sarah will you tell her I’ve bolted. I can’t find her, and anyway I don’t want to drag her away, but I can’t stick any more of this.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ said Lilian. ‘I’m just leaving – wait a moment, I saw Jenny Boyd a second ago, she’ll tell Sarah.’

  Taking his hand, she dragged him up to Jenny Boyd so that he had no alternative to repeating his message. And Lilian, he was thinking meanwhile, having just seen him coming in from the hall, would know that he had been lying when, on the way out, she saw Sarah there. . . . But to his relief a group of people had collected, concealing the sofa.

  ‘Delicious air!’ said Lilian as they left the house. ‘I’ll say this for an overcrowded party, it makes you appreciate breathing.’

  ‘And hearing and thinking and seeing and feeling,’ said Philip, bound by the situation to play up his discomfort in the crowd. ‘I’m glad you wanted to leave too. I was beginning to think I’d become a freak in my old age – everyone else seemed to be having a good time.’

  ‘No one could have been having a good time at that party,’ said Lilian. ‘Really! I know the temptation to polish off all one’s friends at one go, but if Jake and I can resist it, they ought to be able to do the same.’

  ‘Where is Jake? Have you left him there like I’ve left Sarah?’

  ‘Oh no – I doubt if I could have got him there. No, he’s had to go to Exeter, poor lamb, to sort out the affairs of an old aunt of his who died last month.’

  They had started to walk away from the corner of the square most likely to produce taxis, and Philip stopped. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘I think I’m going the wrong way. We didn’t bring the car so I must catch a cab to my underground station.’

  ‘I’ve got my car, it’s parked just round this corner. Can’t I give you a lift?’

  The Dwights lived in Highgate, the Morrises in Kensing- ton, so Philip could only accept a lift as far as he would have taken a cab, but it would give him another ten minutes or so in company and he felt better in company than alone. He couldn’t obliterate his own absurdity, but he could glimpse it obliquely instead of facing it. To make a fuss about noth- ing was bad enough, and when the fuss might easily turn nothing into something. . . . Supposing Sarah was tempted by the red-haired man, she could have done nothing about it if Philip had stayed there; while now she had both an opportunity and a booster of justifiable annoyance towards grabbing that opportunity. And if, on the other hand, she hadn’t found the man attractive, being left in the lurch like this would almost certainly make her overlook it and accept an invitation to dine with him; and then, in a fury with Philip, and having drunk a good deal. . ..

  ‘Are you heading for anything?’ he asked Lilian. ‘Because if not, why don’t we have dinner together?’

  ‘What a nice idea. All I was heading for was a boiled egg and early bed.’

  It was Sarah’s insensitivity which baffled Philip. If it was true that she didn’t want anyone else, why did she behave as though she did? She insisted that his distress was neurotic, but neurotic pain is as bad as any other kind, she knew that, so even if she was right, and there was nothing to reassure him about, it was cruel of her to withhold reassurance. How could she love him if she wasn’t prepared to sacrifice a few small treats for her vanity (that’s what she said they were) for his peace of mind? Why, out of all that mob, did she have to pick an apparently unattached man with hot eyes?

  They went to a small Italian restaurant and when they were settled at their table it occurred to Philip that Lilian was looking her best. Sarah laughed at her for overdressing, saying that she could be trusted to put a piece of costume jewellery on any part of her anatomy which couldn’t be exposed, but this evening she was glittering less than usual, and although Sarah would certainly think her dress too low-cut for a six-to-eight drinks party, what it exposed was pleasing. She had a dark skin which looked as though it would smell spicy, and although he usually thought of her expressive brown eyes as funny – she used them a lot as she talked, rolling them and even, when she was clowning, squinting them – he noticed now how friendly they were. It seemed to give her pleasure to look at him.

  The two couples had met on a skiing holiday and discovered that they had the husbands’ work and several acquaintances in common. They hadn’t built much on the cheerful intimacy of that first fortnight, but it had been enough to make them feel like friends when they happened to meet, and they asked each other to dinner from time to time. Philip and Lilian had never been alone together.

  He didn’t know what to say to her. He’d asked after her two children in the car, and they’d done ‘Where did you go this summer?’ – Jake’s aunt – relations in general . . . swapping guilts and resentments about families was usually a good bet. But Lilian, surprisingly, turned out to have no guilts or resentments to swap. ‘No,’ she said, ‘mine are honeys. I suppose there’ll be worries when one of them dies and leaves the other stranded, but I don’t think it’ll be a burden. Parents are only people, after all. It always puzzles me, the way ‘parents’ – and ‘children’ too, for that matter – are talked about as though they were a separate species. They’re only people who’ve got old or people who are still young. I don’t suppose God sees any difference between them and us.’

  ‘God? Are you a believer?’

  ‘No, but I mean if there was something up there looking at us from a god’s-eye viewpoint, I’m sure he – or perhaps it’s she! – would be amused by all these little identical ant-like beings imagining distinctions between them. I mean, it would probably be quite difficult to have one’s widowed mother in the house, but it’s not all that easy to have a husband or wife there, is it?’

  ‘I suppose it isn’t.’

  ‘In fact it seems to me that if one can cope with marriage one ought to be able to cope with any other relationship standing on one’s head.’

  She spoke so easily that Philip quickly suppressed the question: were Lilian and Jake having a bad time? She was meaning it only in a general sense, of course, but it shocked him slightly. The only difficult thing about his own marriage, surely, was the possibility – his silly imagining of the possibility – that Sarah might take another man.

  ‘Look,’ said Lilian, resting her chin on her hand and beaming curiosity and interest full into his eyes – hers really were enormous: ‘Look, you and Sarah have no children, so you know more about marriage in its pure state, so to speak, than I do. What about it do you think
makes it worthwhile?’

  Good god, but she was different when you got her alone! She’d never talked like this at dinner parties. She was leaning forward, and the dusky cleft between her breasts. . . .

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘having one person in one’s life whom one can depend on – one person who really does know you, and whom you really know.’

  ‘Not being looked after?’

  ‘Oh really, Lilian! I didn’t know you were such a cynic.’

  ‘No, but just think. Try to imagine getting up in the morning and finding all your shirts and socks and under- pants dirty, and knowing they’d go on being dirty unless you did something about it. And that every time you wanted to eat, you had to decide what to get and then make the meal yourself. Don’t you think that not having to bother about things like that may be one of the most important things in marriage for you, even if you never think about it? I’m sure it is with Jake.’

  ‘What about sex?’ said Philip, although all he’d meant to do was avoid answering a silly question.

  ‘Oh sex – well, yes, what the books always say about familiar sex being different but still cosy is true, I suppose, but do you really think cosiness is worth more than excitement? I love snuggling up with Jake, but I sometimes have to think of someone else to work myself up to it.’

  What Philip thought was, ‘She’s had too much to drink.’ What his voice said was, ‘So do I.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Lilian, sitting back with the satisfaction of someone who has won a point. ‘The snuggling up part is nice, but it doesn’t amount to a reason for the institution. The being looked after part might – and the looking after, because most women enjoy it. But mostly I think married people are just propping each other up.’