Marnie

by Winston Graham

  There was a sort of scuffle at the bar, and three men began to sing through their noses. Others began to stamp and clap their hands.

  Mark said: ‘Darling, if you have memories of some sort, can’t you try to forget them?’

  ‘I haven’t any memories – of that sort.’

  He put his hand over mine. ‘Then I wish you’d help me to make some.’

  That night we spent at a hotel at San Antonio. He ordered champagne before our dinner and some sort of red wine with it, and then we had three big liqueurs afterwards. This with the brandy I’d swallowed at the fiesta should have knocked me silly, but I just haven’t that sort of head. At the end of the dinner I caught sight of myself in a mirror, and although the holiday had browned my skin the drink had only had a sort of paling effect around my mouth and nose.

  I was wearing a crimson taffeta frock, off the shoulders with three-quarter-length sleeves. It looked all right. I suppose I looked all right too, which was crazy on my part because this was the time if ever to look a frump.

  After dinner we went for a walk, but there wasn’t much to see and we came back fairly soon, and when we got into the bedroom I knew this was it. And it was too late to develop an illness. Even he would have seen through it tonight.

  He came across and tried to kiss me. ‘Darling, d’you remember that you made promises when you married me?’ He was very gentle and half teasing.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘And are you willing to honour them?’

  ‘Sometime maybe.’

  ‘I think it should be now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think it should be now,’ he said again.

  I could feel the panic growing up in me. ‘You knew what you were marrying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A liar and a thief.’

  ‘Even in this?’

  ‘Yes, even in this.’

  ‘In what particular way have you lied to me this time?’

  I looked past him at the room, at the amphora in the corner, at the beaten copper plate on the wall, at my coat carefully hung and his coat thrown anyhow over a chair.

  ‘I don’t love you,’ I said.

  He pulled a bit away from me and tried to look in my eyes. But he could only see my face, and that was empty, I should think. ‘Marnie, look at me. D’you know what you’re saying? Do you know what love means?’

  ‘You’ve tried very hard to tell me.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time I stopped talking.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference.’

  He didn’t let me go. ‘Why did you marry me?’

  The amphora thing had come out of the sea, they said, and was centuries old. Mark had been very interested.

  ‘Because I knew if I didn’t marry you you’d turn me over to the police.’

  ‘You – really believed that?’

  ‘Well, it was true, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Honestly, Marnie, dealing with you I’m in quicksands. Where does your reasoning lead you? How could I have turned you over to the police? Once I’d covered up for you it was only my word against yours.’

  I couldn’t explain anything more, so I shrugged.

  He kissed me. He took me by surprise and he made no mistake about it this time.

  ‘Don’t you hate me?’ I said, when I could get a breath.

  ‘No.’

  I tried to tug away from him, getting in a worse panic every minute. ‘You’re not listening to what I’m saying! Don’t you understand plain English! I haven’t any feelings for you at all. It was all a lie, right from the beginning, first because I wanted to steal the money and then afterwards when you caught me, I had to say something, I had to pretend, so that you wouldn’t hand me over to the police. But all the time I was playing up to you, nothing else, nothing! I don’t love you. I didn’t want to marry you but you left me no way out! Now let me go!’

  Perhaps after all the drink was in me. I know I sounded pretty shrill even to myself. Anyway I hope it was that. I hadn’t intended to blurt it out then, and when I did I’d wanted to make it sound decenter than that. He still looked at me, and now I was looking at him. The pupils of his eyes were big and the whites were slightly bloodshot. He said: ‘I’ve been thinking something of the sort for the last two or three days. But even that doesn’t answer all the questions.’

  ‘What questions?’

  ‘Never mind. When I married you I didn’t do so with my eyes shut. Love isn’t always blind.’

  ‘Let me alone.’

  ‘Nor is it always patient. Nor is it always gentle.’ I suppose the drink wasn’t lying quite silent in him either.

  I tried to swallow the panic. I’d never felt really scared since I was thirteen; I’d never been really scared of anyone, not even the police, never in my life. But I knew now I’d not gone the right away about this at all. I couldn’t tell whether he believed me, but even if he did it had worked the contrary way. Now when it was too late I said: ‘Mark, we’re both talking rubbish. We really are. We’ve both had too much to drink. I’m feeling a bit muzzy in the head. Let’s talk about this in the morning.’

  ‘All right,’ he said quietly, and then as quietly as doom began to undo the buttons at the back of my frock.

  After a minute I wrenched away and got clear of him and went towards the window; but the window was high up, miles above the rocks, and there was no other way out of the room. As I came round the corner he caught my arm.

  ‘Marnie!’

  ‘Let me alone!’ I snarled. ‘Don’t you know what I mean when I say, no? Leave me go!’

  He grabbed my other arm, and my frock slipped down. I felt an awful feeling of something that seemed to be half embarrassment and half disgust. I was fairly shivering with rage. One minute I felt I’d let him get on with his lovemaking and be like a cold statue dead to every feeling except hate, and just see what he made of that. But the next I was ready to fight him, to claw his face and spit like a she-cat that’s got a tom prowling round her that she doesn’t want.

  He took me to the bed and slipped the rest of my clothes off. When I just hadn’t anything on at all he turned off the light above us, and there was only the small pilot light shining in from the bathroom. Perhaps that prevented him from seeing the tears starting from my eyes. In the half dark he tried to show me what love was, but I was stiff with repulsion and horror, and when at last he took me there seemed to come from my lips a cry of defeat that was nothing to do with physical pain.

  Hours later light was coming in from the window, and I got my eyes open to see him sitting in a chair beside the bed. He must have been watching me because he saw right off I was awake.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I made a sort of movement with my head.

  ‘That can’t have been very pleasant for you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I looked up at the pattern that the grey light was making on the ceiling.

  He said: ‘Nor was it for me. No man ever really wants it that way, however much he may imagine he does.’

  I moistened my lips.

  He said: ‘You don’t realize perhaps what you said before this began – how much it goaded me. You threw all my love back in my face. It didn’t mean a damn to you, did it? Not a bloody damn. At least that’s what you said.’

  He waited then but I didn’t speak, didn’t deny it.

  He said, ‘Are you surprised I didn’t like it? I still don’t like it. I’m still trying to swallow it. If it’s true it’s a real poison pill.’

  I wet my lips again and there was a very long silence, perhaps ten minutes.

  ‘Cigarette?’ he said at last.

  I shook my head.

  ‘A drink?’

  ‘No.’

  He moved to pull the quilt over me, but I wouldn’t have it.

  ‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said presently. ‘Try to go to sleep again.’

  I went on staring up at the ceiling. For a bit my mind was all blank, as if everything that had happen
ed before that night had been rubbed out. I hardly saw Mark, except the arm of his pyjamas on the edge of the bed. I was watching the play of light on the ceiling, which must have been caused by some reflection from the water outside. But I watched it as if it had some sort of extra meaning for me.

  It must have been an hour before I dozed off again, and when I woke the next time it was full daylight and Mark had fallen asleep in the chair beside the bed.

  I shifted my head and looked at him. He looked very young with his head forward on his chest, and still as slight as ever. I looked at his wrist and forearm and there was nothing there to show the strength there was in it. I thought over his brutality to me last night. There was something – well, feline about him, because his strength, like a cat’s strength, didn’t show. I thought again of what had happened, at first not caring much, like someone still under dope; and then all of a sudden I was awake, and in a second my mind was full up with every second of recollection as if suddenly an empty cage was full of flapping vultures.

  Horror and rage came up in my throat, like something I’d swallowed, and chiefly it was rage. Before this I’d more or less felt for Mark the sort of dumb hostility you feel for someone who’s generally outsmarted you, a feeling of frustration and irritation. But nothing above that: in some ways, given a chance, I could have liked him. But now it was quite different, all that much more. It was like being infected with something that made your blood run hotter. It was like being stabbed and seeing your blood run.

  It was a hazy mix-up of hatred and blood. If I could have done it at that minute I would have killed him.

  We flew back to Palma and the following day went out as far as Camp de Mar. It was the warmest day of the holiday, though by now a blight had settled on us like Alaska in December. The sea in the sandy cove looked like fluid green bottles, and he said should we bathe? I said I didn’t care, so he said well, then, let’s; but when I was ready I stood for a long time on the edge hugging my elbows and afraid to take the plunge. In the end he took my hand, and I went in.

  The water was lovely after all, not really cold, and after a while we climbed on to this bathing pier and lay in the sun. I lay with my head over the edge and looked down at the water and at all the sea urchins growing like mussels on the supports of the pier. I didn’t want him to break in on my mood by talking, and in fact he didn’t try to, but sat hugging one knee with his eyes narrowed against the sun.

  Well, presently I slipped off the pier to swim back to the sand. It was so lovely that, although I’m just an ordinary swimmer and not strong in the water, I didn’t head back at once but swam parallel with the shore towards the rocks at the side of the bay.

  After I’d been going for a few minutes I lay on my back and floated and saw that Mark was still sitting where I’d left him. The slanting sun made his body dark like a spade’s, and I thought squatting there he might have been a pearl diver or something in the South Seas. And I thought how two nights ago his body had done what it wanted with mine.

  Lying in the water like this a sort of tiredness came over me. I felt as if I didn’t have the energy to hate him any longer; I just knew there wasn’t any point in me living at all. I never had added up to much, perhaps, but at least for a while I’d been some help to Mother and old Lucy. I’d counted for something the way any protest counts for something. But now my life had run bang into this blind alley of marriage, and there was nothing more to it. I was trapped for good, pinned down like a moth on a paper. If I ended now I would simply help to tidy up a thoroughly nasty mess.

  But I knew I wouldn’t have the guts just to let myself go bobble, bobble under the water. As soon as you start breathing sea you start fighting to live. It doesn’t make sense but there it is. So the important thing was to get so far out that I couldn’t get back if I wanted to. I turned over and began to swim easily as anything towards the mouth of the bay.

  As soon as I’d decided I knew I’d decided right. It just drew a simple neat little line under everything. Mark would be a widower for a second time at twenty-eight – good going that – and could look out for a female of his own type who could make something of his slushy ideas about sex. Mother could manage, would have to manage somehow. It would all be sad – and satisfactory.

  I don’t really know how long it was before I saw he was swimming after me. First I noticed he wasn’t any longer on the pier. Then I saw something on the water, a whiteness of broken water a long long way behind me. Well, he’d be too late with his help this time.

  I swam on a bit quicker, fixing on a special point at the edge of the bay. I certainly couldn’t reach it. I was getting very tired.

  When the first wave slopped in my mouth it was a nasty shock. Sea water tastes nasty and when you swallow it it makes you want to fetch up. It wasn’t going to be a bed of roses, this end, but it would soon be over. I just dreaded the first breath. All that gasping and retching. It would soon be over, though.

  And then I heard him shouting at me not far away.

  Right off all the fear went. I just stopped swimming and sank.

  Yet even though I tried not to, I found I was holding my breath the way I’d done jumping off the pier by the Hoe when I was a kid. I tried to force myself to let go of life, but I came up again like a cork choking and coughing. As I came up he got me.

  ‘You fool!’ he said. ‘You’ll drown yourself!’ He was clutching my arm.

  I shook him off. ‘Let me go!’

  I tried to dive, but it’s hard to go down when you’re already in the water, and as I thrashed away he caught me by the leg and then round the waist. We struggled for a few seconds and then I almost got free again. At that he gave me such a slap on the side of the face that he made me taste blood. I screamed and scratched his arm with my nails; then he closed his fist and hit me on the jaw. I remember my teeth clicking together with a sound like lift gates shutting; and that was all.

  When I came out of it I was lying on my back in the water. He’d got my head between his hands and was lying on his back too, swimming with his legs, towards the shore. I tried to get my head free, but he held me tighter as soon as I tried, and that way we came back to the sand.

  We lay there together, absolutely dead-beat both of us, but luckily there were no other bathers today, and the only people in sight, two Spanish women shovelling seaweed into baskets at the other end, had seen nothing and looked as if they couldn’t care less if they had.

  As soon as he got some breath back he began to go for me. He used most of the words you hear around a dockyard and a few more besides. It looked as if nothing I’d done before had got under his skin like this. I suppose it was the final insult.

  I stood it for a bit and then one of the words he used made me giggle hysterically.

  He stopped and said: ‘What is it?’

  ‘There isn’t a female of that.’

  I giggled again and then turned my head away and was sick.

  After I was better he said: ‘I didn’t know there was a female like you, but I’m learning.’

  ‘It makes a change, doesn’t it? I don’t suppose Estelle was ever like this.’

  ‘No, you blasted bloody little fool. She wanted so much to live and couldn’t.’

  ‘Whereas I want to die and can’t.’

  ‘Than that,’ he said, ‘there are few uglier remarks a woman of twenty-three can make.’

  We lay quiet, getting our strength back. Then he said:

  ‘If we stay here any longer we’ll both begin to shiver. Come on, I’ll help you back to the hotel.’

  ‘Thanks, I can manage,’ I said, and got to my feet. So we walked back a few paces apart, with him a step or two behind me, like a warder whose prisoner has nearly got away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The gardener at Little Gaddesden was called Richards. He came three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He was a quiet little man with an ailing wife and three pale-looking children under teenage. He’d a funny sort of enthusiasm about the ga
rden that I couldn’t quite understand, because it wasn’t his. He seemed to like me and he always called me ‘madam’ as if I was royalty or something. ‘We’ve got some lovely tulips over here, madam; they’ll be showing in another week or two, I shouldn’t wonder.’ ‘I’m going to tidy up these paths this morning, madam; then they’ll be nice and clear until the spring.’ He obviously got a sort of joy out of it. I shouldn’t have thought there was much joy in his life, with his wife bent up with bronchitis and him often going home wet and soaking and having to look after the children. Sometimes the eldest, a girl called Ailsa, would call in on her way home from school. She didn’t remind me of myself at eleven. I think I must have been fairly hard bitten by the time I was eleven; anyway I’d knocked about plenty. Ailsa was soft and gentle like her Dad. The chances were in this world that sooner or later she’d get trampled underfoot. Richards said she’d asked for a Bible for Christmas, an illustrated one, and Mr Mark was getting him one through the trade at cost price. I thought why doesn’t Mark give him half a dozen, but when I said something about it Mark said: ‘That would never do; he’d hate charity.’ I suppose I didn’t understand.

  The garden at Little Gaddesden was about one acre. At the end away from the golf course was an old shed and an old garage and a small paddock. Leading to this was a path bordered by a thing I thought was a yew hedge, but Richards politely corrected me. ‘It’s Lonicera, madam. I grow it in my own garden, you can train it just the same way. I’ve got a beautiful bush shaped like a church. I hope sometime, madam, you’ll come and see it.’

  I went and saw it. I met Mrs Richards and the two youngest. I didn’t know what to do about the charity side of it, but I risked buying some sweets and I baked some buns and took those along. It didn’t seem to offend them.