Midsummer Night in the Workhouse Read online

  Kate thought, in those first months, how mistaken were people who spoke of children as though they were every- thing; who would comfort themselves for some woman’s loss of her husband with the words ‘Luckily she has the children.’ They might as well have said, ‘Luckily she has her hands.’ Without them God help her, certainly; but children were children and a man was a man, there could be no sub- stitution. James and Muffie came home for the holidays as much a part of her as ever, their non-existence unimagin- able. ‘Of course I love them,’ she would have snapped at anyone who had asked, angry at the pointlessness of the question, but the things about them by which she was ridden at that time were their demands, their failings, the anxieties and chores they carried in their wake. Guiltily she recognised that she had become almost unable to take pleasure in them; and worse, she would catch herself looking at them with detachment, thinking, ‘And after all, why should I? James has no imagination, he will grow into a dull man, and Muffie in her present exhibitionist phase is even displeasing.’ She felt dry and ugly, knowing herself now a woman married to a man who often bored her, loving children who could no longer enchant her.

  Robert agreed to their building out a playroom for the children, and this Kate insisted on planning and decorating herself. She worked hard. After a while she no longer had to fight against the pain’s magnetism in every unoccupied moment and even began to shy away from it. When it was touched off by a word or thought she would surprise herself by thinking, ‘Oh God, no! I can’t stand any more of that,’ and turning to something else. A whole morning would go by and she would realise, ‘I haven’t thought of David since I got up.’ And then a whole day, and she knew that she was master- ing it. But she was haunted by the knowledge that sooner or later she would come into a room and see him talking to her hostess, or run into him in the street when she was shopping in the town.

  That was how it happened at last, after nearly six months of carefulness and luck. She had warning. She had taken the children to Woolworths to do their Christmas shopping and there, studying a tray of clockwork tanks, she saw his sons. David himself was not in the shop as far as she could see, and she decided that she was probably safe. This was a mother’s job, they would be with Penelope. But still it was not pure shock when she came out through the swing doors to find him sitting in his car, waiting for his family.

  He got out and came to take her hand. ‘How nice to see you,’ he said. ‘Did you by any chance notice two of my young in that inferno?’ She had told herself from time to time during her ‘cure’ that she had built up an imaginary David and that when she met him again she would find him diminished, but no. This, she knew at once, was the face and the voice she loved.

  ‘They’re buying tanks,’ she answered, and already because he was there she was relaxing, spreading, glowing as she had done before. For some minutes they stood on the pavement, talking of this and that. She followed him in using the tone of old friends – closer friends than they would have been without their week together, but with no recognition of that week – and it was not only easy but pleasant. How could she have dreaded something that was all she longed for?

  When David’s sons came out of the shop he was angry with them because, having been given half an hour for their shopping, they had kept him waiting. ‘Into the boot with all that junk,’ he said severely, ‘and be quick about it.’ But as he opened the door for them and the youngest boy bent forward to stow his parcels, he ran his hand over the child’s head. ‘I’m bad at discipline,’ he said as the boys jostled their way into the car. ‘It’s the backs of their necks that undo me. When I want to be stern I always avoid looking at them from the back.’

  That he should have felt and said something so unexpect- edly feminine seemed to Kate like a piece of amber to be picked up on a pebbly beach. Several times, as she was driving home, she smiled at it; and that evening, when James came to show himself well bathed, she said: ‘Yes, you’re my clean and handsome one,’ and kissed the back of his neck. Later she had to struggle against tears and could not bring herself to go into the bedroom until she was sure that Robert was asleep, but the revival of loss was accompanied by a revival of a sense of David’s existence outside her mind, and this – it was strange, she had not expected it – was warming.

  Before a year had passed she had almost stopped thinking of him, but each of their few meetings she could remember down to the smallest detail of expression. In three years there had been two more encounters in the town, one occasion when the Fields’ car had been parked beside the Beestons’ at a race meeting and she and David had spent twenty minutes together in the group by the water-jump, two cocktail parties and the dinner party, four months ago, at which he had heard her talking about maids. Penelope was always there as well. At one of the cocktail parties David had smiled at Kate with particular intimacy when she made a joke that no one else noticed, and at the race meeting he had referred quite naturally to an exhibition they had visited during their week; but what she brought back from the meet- ings was chiefly confirmation of his tenderness towards his wife. ‘That woman wears the trousers,’ Robert remarked on one occasion, and Kate had agreed, getting some satisfaction from spitefulness, but what she really felt was: ‘That man knows how to love.’ To see it strengthened her ‘cure’ – and at the same time established that what had happened could not be thought away. She could stop herself – had stopped herself – from loving, but David had not changed from being a man she could love.

  ‘I was not an hysterical fool,’ she said to herself now, so long after it had happened, sitting on the kitchen table after his telephone call. ‘I wasn’t making him up because I needed to fall in love; he is the nicest man.’ That he should have thought of her, even remembered her casual words after such a long interval, made her see him as a paragon of kindness. ‘Of course he must really have remembered me quite often,’ she thought. ‘That week happened to him, too.’

  Robert shouted to her from the garden. She went out and found him on his way down to the boggy meadow which adjoined their orchard, some of which they wanted to enclose as additional vegetable garden.

  ‘If we dug a deep ditch across the bottom,’ he said, prodding the ground, ‘and then ran two drains down there and there, it would be dry enough in no time.’

  They would have to get extra labour for the ditches, she said, it would be too much for him and the gardener, and he agreed. They stood together amicably in the sun, wondering whether they could have a primula garden along the deep ditch when it was dug, or whether primulas needed more shade. The grass was young and succulent, buttercups were beginning to come out, and from the hedge round the orchard the peppery smell of hawthorn came drifting. As they walked back towards the house they both paused to look up through flowering branches at the sky, so intensely blue beyond the snow of blossom.

  ‘Can’t we go to Spain this year?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care what you say,’ he answered, ‘it would be lunacy to take the children. That revolting food would finish me at once, so what it would do to them, God knows. It beats me how you can be so unrealistic.’

  ‘But they’re not babies any more, and other people do it all the time. Anyway, what’s so dreadful about a tummy upset? We could stock up with sulpha medicines and if any of us did get ill it would soon be over.’

  She knew, though, that he would soon come up with his walking tour – not in Wales, perhaps, this time: Scotland or the Lake District, as a concession, or even Brittany. ‘Poor old boy,’ she thought, ‘it would be cruel to drag him off some- where he hated, he does work so hard all the year’ – but only twice in all the years of their marriage had she done it, while he had won again and again.

  Back in the kitchen, breading the chops for lunch, she watched him through the window. He had noticed that the clothes-line was beginning to sag and he was straightening the pole which held it. It always pleased Kate to watch him working with his
hands, absorbed and grave, like James playing with his trains, but handsome though he was – ‘And he is still very good-looking,’ she thought with surprise – it astonished her now to remember that she had once found him physically disturbing. While as for his mind . . . ‘He is extraordinary,’ she thought. ‘Fifteen years, and he still can’t even accept that we don’t always like the same things. Can he really be as impermeable as he seems, or is he a wicked old bully?’ She shook her head as she worked, but although she did not know it she was smiling slightly.

  After lunch she went back into the orchard alone. She pulled down a branch of an apple tree to look at the thick- ening green thalami, some with a few petals still adhering (one doesn’t wander in one’s own garden for no reason, she was estimating the year’s crop, they would think). She wanted to be undisturbed for a few minutes so that she could remember David’s voice on the telephone. She stood quite still, relaxed, not at all dry or ugly. ‘Well, anyway,’ she thought, ‘there is a man in the world I could love.’ She leant her cheek sideways so that it was brushed by leaves. ‘After I’m dead,’ she thought, ‘the apples will go on bearing and the hawthorn will go on flowering, year after year,’ and she felt so calm that it was almost happiness. Later that day she wrote to Thomas Cook’s for details about travel in Spain.

  AN AFTERNOON OFF

  Roger Paul, who in his good tweed suit looked more like an intelligent soldier than a publisher, began to walk slowly down the street. He saw a stationer’s noticeboard on which a muscular and broad-minded young man offered to massage either ladies or gentlemen, followed by six Italian shoes of different colours. Then a string of onions hung above a wicker basket of red peppers, two copper moulds in the shape of fish crowned an arrangement of wooden pepper-mills, an old man with one arm played a small concertina strapped to his chest and a Negro or half-Negro prostitute with blonde hair wore a sugar-pink duffel coat. Thursday afternoon in Soho, bright and clear, each object suddenly startling to Roger Paul. Even a torn poster saying And Woman Was Created, half covering another poster saying Around The World in.

  He had finished his last lunch with Herr Becker, whom he had put into a taxi and dispatched to his hotel to pack. Naomi would take him to the airport. She and Roger, who was recently divorced, had fewer social obligations than the others and undertook most of such duties. The week of bear-leading through press conferences and television studios was over and at lunch Becker had talked again, and talked well, about his life among the Berbers while Roger had watched his face and thought beastly bloody kraut. The German, once a prisoner of war in the Western Desert, had made an unlikely escape and had survived in a way which would have been impossible if he had not been brave, intelligent and likeable, at least to Berbers; which, indeed, the book he had written suggested that he was. But he had a steep narrow forehead and small light eyes set at a slant; and Roger, who for twenty years, since he was seventeen, had been scrupulous in thinking of everyone he met of what- ever race or reputation according to that person’s individual merits, had smiled at him and thought beastly bloody kraut. Expecting to be shocked by the thought, he had only had another, still more surprising: can this be what a fat woman feels when she gets home from a day’s shopping, goes up to her bedroom and unhooks her corsets?

  He had shaken Herr Becker’s hand with extra warmth (for this did not concern Becker, it concerned only himself), then he had crossed to the sunny side of the street and had begun to look at things, which had responded by bursting out of their disguises of familiarity like chestnut buds. He had a lot to do, and he had not exactly forgotten it. He might, though, have wrapped the impending afternoon in a bulky parcel and dropped it into a pool of some opaque substance through which it was now sinking. A Thursday afternoon in March submerged.

  The sun was benevolent on Roger’s face, the things he looked at were astonishing, and it occurred to him that he was not going back to the office. He, who in twelve years had never taken the full amount of vacation due to him and had worked at least one day of almost every weekend, was simply not going back to the office, and the idea was so disconcerting that he found no ready response to it. Odd was as far as he got, and he vaguely linked it with other oddnesses of the past few weeks, since Felton had won the argument about the symposium on banning nuclear tests and they had turned it down. Roger had argued for the book but he had not fought for it. It was true that it had been proposed by an addle-pated and uninfluential group.

  He never used to oversleep and he never used to read the fourth leaders in The Times, which bored him, but recently he had taken to doing both, spinning out breakfast however late and having to take a taxi to the office more often than not. And when he got there the weight of boredom he had to push aside before beginning any job, the irritation which rose like bile in his throat at almost every question or interruption, were becoming crippling. Often he could not concentrate. All through the last editorial meeting he had doodled, thinking of nothing but the precise, soaring silhouettes of the cranes at work on a building site in Oxford Street, until Felton and Naomi, noticing his absence, had looked at him in surprise. He had looked back at them, also in surprise, but not at their attitude or his own. What had surprised him, suddenly, had been them. There they were, pushing back chairs and collecting scraps of paper, quite solid, with intestines coiled in their stomachs and unseen hairs growing on their bodies. . . . It had been an effort to come out of the abstraction from which he peered at them like an animal crouching in a cave of shadow as footsteps go by, and when he did come out – come to? – he had shocked himself by saying: Do you know, I’ve been thinking. In the last twelve years we have published exactly one book without which the world would have been the poorer. Which was rubbish of course.

  Roger had stopped in front of the poster saying And Woman Was Created. It struck him that what he would like best at that moment would be to see an amusing film. At that a taxi came by empty, and with a slight interior lurch, as though the pavement under his feet had shifted an inch, he hailed it and told the driver to take him to a cinema in Regent Street which was showing a film starring Fernandel. So what, so what, so what, so what, he hummed to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’, and the parcel of afternoon settled in the mud at the bottom of the pool. He was free to take the afternoon off if he wished to; if he telephoned the office and told them his intention they would be surprised and inconvenienced but they would have no right to object; the humming, the tautness in his diaphragm, the fixed mean- ingless smile like that of a man walking into the sun, came from his certainty that he was not going to telephone. He had gone on strike.

  Pushing into what looked at first like darkness he was dizzy with elation. He found a seat, his eyes greedy on the screen because he was bloody well going to enjoy every second of this now that (good God!) he was doing it. Come Fernandel, he thought, and join the game, to hell with all of it and the lot of them, I’ve gone on strike from being Roger Paul. Eyes, ears, nose, hands and belly is all I want to be till something else starts growing. And this was even stranger than he thought it because for a long time Roger Paul had resembled closely the man he had chosen to be. Oh how glad I am, Nettie, his wife, used to say, that we at least are nice (she said it as a joke of course). It had been their pick-me-up after encounters with his family or hers, the one army, the other landed, after listening to remarks like: And blow me down if there wasn’t a ruddy great buck nigger sitting in the bar! What that place is coming to I can’t imagine. It had been years before Roger could dismiss this kind of thing without a scene, or laugh when one of them said, knowing he voted Labour: Oh but I forgot – of course you’re a Communist. But later, having gone his own way and been successful in it, he felt secure enough on his own stamping ground to be more amused than angry.

  Fernandel came and Roger laughed. He had to laugh because he wanted to. But only a few minutes had gone by before he began to suspect that he was unlucky in this film, that the comedian was not at his best. It was les
s the lack of occasion for laughter than the deliberate quality of his own response that caused a worm of anxiety to move in the back of his mind. He could still get back to the office not much later than might be explained by some legitimate after- lunch activity (cashing a cheque? buying a tie?), but to give up now would be foolish, he must stay away all afternoon. A florist’s shop, and Fernandel was about to wrap a lady’s hat instead of some hydrangeas, gazing over his shoulder at a pretty girl passing the window, and did Naomi know that when Stevenson came in about his translation of that Swedish novel he should be told . . . No, this was a waste of time, he must concentrate, and he watched hard. But when, some time later, Fernandel climbed through the wrong bedroom window, Roger had known for too long that so it would be and began to feel the emptiness of the afternoon cinema sucking at his attention. There was only one other person in his row, a girl three seats away.

  Will they have noticed yet that . . . Up sprang a paunchy night-capped husband before the goggling eyes of Fernandel who bolted through a door to be trapped in a clothes closet. The girl did not laugh. She sat with hunched shoulders, the big collar of her coat pushing out the tail of hair which sprouted from the back of her head. She felt him looking, glanced and faced the screen again, but her hand went up to smooth the hair round against the side of her neck and she straightened her spine.