by Nina Bawden
I said: “I can’t leave Nora like this. She’ll expect me to go and find her.”
She said coldly: “Do you always go after her when she runs away?”
I said miserably: “I’m responsible for her.”
There was a kind of bleak impatience in her voice. “What else have you to say to her, Tom? You must make it worse for her, just by being there.”
I couldn’t explain to her that it wasn’t as simple as that; she could say that Nora would be better off without me and I could believe her, but it didn’t make any difference because Nora, didn’t think so too. She wouldn’t have understood that Nora would rather have me there as a sounding board for bitterness and anger than not have me there at all.
She started the engine and slammed in the clutch. Sanctuary Road was a dead end; by the time she had turned and come back, I was waiting for her on the other side of the road.
I had thought she was asleep but she turned her head on my crooked arm, and said:
“Tom, did we put the lights on in the car?”
Her voice was sleepy and slurred, the light from the electric fire outlined the curve of cheek and shoulder in pale bronze. She smiled at me peacefully and slowly, and stretched herself like a cat.
She said: “I like to see you looking happy.”
I said: “The car lights are on. And I am happy. And I love you.”
We whispered, not because anyone could hear us through the thick college walls, but because we were used to whispering.
She said: “What is the time?”
I held out my arm so that I could see my wrist-watch by the fire’s light.
“Nearly nine o’clock, perhaps we should go back,” I said. There wasn’t enough light to see the expression in her eyes; they were too darkly shadowed. But she was staring at me and her voice was suddenly high with fear and wide awake.
She said loudly: “Tom, I don’t want to go back. Please don’t make me go back.” She was stiff and shaking along the whole length of her body and then she began to sob in a hard, dry, childish way so that I found myself soothing her as I would have quietened Sandy if he had woken from a bad dream. She had never behaved like this before, so near hysteria and it alarmed me. It had always seemed that she walked sure-footed through places where I habitually stumbled. I had expected strength from her and support; now, suddenly, the roles were reversed and I was too bewildered to help her. I murmured words of attempted comfort and stroked her hair until she lay still and quiet again.
She said: “I mean it, Tom. I don’t want to go back. I’m afraid.”
“And I thought you were never frightened.”
She whispered: “I don’t want to go back.”
I said, disbelieving: “You aren’t frightened of Geoffrey?”
She said nothing but curled her arms round my neck and hung on to me like a drowning man.
I said inadequately: “What do you want to do? Is there someone you could stay with for a while? A girl-friend—or your aunt in London?”
The grip of her arms relaxed: Her voice had no life in it. “I’m sorry, Tom. It was silly of me. Of course I must go back.”
And she pushed me gently away, got up from the couch and began to dress, her face turned away from me.
When I turned on the light she looked pale and almost ill. It was more than ordinary tiredness, her eyes had a dull look to them and her cheeks had lost their roundness so that you could see how she would look when she was middle-aged. Her voice had an edgy brightness.
She said: “Come home with me, Tom, and have a drink. Geoffrey won’t be back. You could get a taxi home from the village.”
Her assumption that I could afford to take taxis was normally something that annoyed me; now I was too worried by her air of illness to feel even a passing irritation.
We walked in silence to the car; she got into the driver’s seat and leaned over and unlocked the passenger’s door.
She said: “Tom, how long can you keep it up? This intolerable compromise?”
She spoke with immense and unexpected anger; the car started with a violent jerk that made me bang my head on the windscreen.
I said defensively: “I don’t want to keep anything up. But I can’t take you away with me. Oh, God, don’t you know that I want to?”
She was talking very fast and rather low so that it was an effort to hear her above the noise of the traffic.
“Does it really help Nora to have you there, knowing that you love me and would rather be with me? What do you think it will be like if you stay—in that little house where you can’t get away from each other? What are you trying to do, after all? Keep your respectability or your own good opinion of yourself? And for what purpose?”
I said: “There is the child.”
Her voice was hard and unnatural. “I know there is the child.” She hesitated for a moment and then she went on, talking still rapidly but more clearly now. “I was brought up by parents who didn’t want to be together and it is something that no child should have to bear, I was lucky, too. We had a big house with plenty of rooms so that they could spend their days working out ways of living without being in the same room together more than was necessary. When they were together, they quarrelled. I used to lie awake at night, waiting for them to shout at each other. If I could hear them talking I used to pray for them to sound friendly.”
She had never talked to me of her childhood before. I can’t remember what I said in reply; I suspect it was remarkably inadequate. It was impossible to argue with her without sounding priggish. In the end I said the only thing that seemed to be important then; that I couldn’t leave Nora while she still wanted me to stay with her.
She said, quite gently now: “I’m sorry, Tom. I know how you feel. It is just that I suddenly needed you so—will you forgive me?”
I said: “You must forgive me instead.” And she took her hand from the wheel and held mine so tightly that it felt as if the bones would crack.
By the time we reached the house the anger had gone, leaving a glow of colour in her face so that she looked beautiful again.
Emily opened the front door with her latch key. We had no warning; when we went into the little morning-room the police inspector was there, waiting with his back to the crackling, bright fire.
His eyes shone like brown water in the light, the skin was stretched tightly across his, narrow face. His raincoat was spotted with mud; he had the air of a bank clerk who had run to seed.
He said, smiling gently: “Good evening, Mrs. Hunter. I am sorry to bother you so late in the evening. We were hoping to find you in at a more convenient hour.”
He looked past Emily at me with no sign of recognition on his face at all.
She said sharply: “What do you want?” And her shoulders stiffened as if she were preparing for a blow.
He said: “We are making inquiries about Mr. Parry’s death. We were hoping that you might be able to help us.”
Her voice was thin and cold. She said: “Of course, if I can help in any way …”
His eyes wrinkled with his sudden smile. He looked deliberately at me. Emily turned. She said: “Oh … perhaps you would come into the study? Tom, will you find yourself a drink?”
She went out of the room ahead of the inspector and the policeman; they crossed the hall and the door of the study closed behind them.
Chapter Seven
I had finished my fourth whisky when I heard the front door slam. Emily’s footsteps came back across the hall; she opened the door and closed it behind her, leaning against it wearily, as if she had come to the end of her strength. I think she would have fallen if I had not gone to her and put her in a chair.
She looked up at me with a spent, shocked face. I gave her a whisky, and she drank it quickly.
I said: “What did they want?” I was angry, suddenly, with the kind of anger that accompanies fear.
“It might have been worse,” she said. “It wasn’t really important—only unexpected. I made a foo
l of myself.”
“How do you mean?” I asked her. Gently because of the look of horror in her eyes and the yellow, exhausted line round her mouth.
She said, almost as if she were talking to herself: “I thought it was all over and forgotten. I ought to have known that it never would be.”
I said: “What did they want?” And she looked at me, blinking like someone waking from a nightmare.
“Of course it was David,” she said. She sounded surprised. “They don’t know about last night—I mean that we were there. They told me it was an accident. They were very kind and careful not to frighten me. Geoffrey had been to the police about David; he saw them yesterday.”
“Go on,” I said.
She was twisting her hands together in her lap. She looked very tired and almost frail so that a wave of protective love washed over me. She said simply:
“It’s not a nice story, Tom. I suppose you have to know?”
Of course it wasn’t that I had to know; rather that she had to tell me. It came out haltingly and, for Emily, in an unusually oblique fashion as if it were something that could still give her deep and immediate pain.
I had known that David had been in Belfast during the war. He was a leader-writer and working on the I.R.A. activities. He became a friend of the Hunters, having met Emily through her brother, Ruarhi, who was working with him on the same paper. They were living then in Ulster. Geoffrey was managing a shipbuilding firm and they had a house in the flat fields outside Belfast. There had been a child.
She said: “He was a nice little boy. Geoffrey was married before and his wife had died. Martin was four—a little more, perhaps, but he seemed younger, of course.”
“Why should he seem younger?” I asked and she looked at me in astonishment as though I should have known.
“Oh,” she said. “He was a spastic. Not a bad one, he could crawl and even talk a little. They said he would never develop very much, although he might learn to walk in time. He was a pretty child, very much like Geoffrey. We loved him dearly.” She stopped.
“What happened?” I tried to take her hand but she drew away from me as if she didn’t want me to touch her.
She said flatly: “I would have died rather than harm him. He was so specially dependent, you see. If he had been an ordinary child, I wouldn’t have blamed myself so much. With Martin, it seemed like murder. As if I had killed him with my own hands.”
At first, when she told me, it seemed that she was reading more into the thing than had ever been there. It puzzled me because she was not the sort of woman to get hysterical obsessions. Even later, when the story was developed more fully, there was still something that bewildered me as if one line of a poem was missing although the rest of it retained its sense and rhythm.
She had been playing on the lawn with the child; they had a nannie for him, but she was on holiday in Dublin. They were sitting on a rug near to the open windows of the study and Geoffrey was working at his desk. It was high summer and thirsty weather; when David arrived and asked her to come to the hotel for a drink she was tired by the long morning and a little dazed by the sun. She had called out to Geoffrey, telling him to watch the child. It did not occur to her that he might no longer be there.
She said: “It was inexcusable. They were all very kind—they said I was thoughtless and too casual, but it was much worse than that. I knew Geoffrey had been in the study earlier. I didn’t bother to look to see if he was still there or to wait until he answered me. I was in charge of Martin; I should never have left him.”
She had stayed at the hotel for about twenty minutes and then David had driven her back to the house. She had known something was wrong as soon as she saw the empty rug and the toys scattered on the lawn. She had felt one moment of overwhelming panic and then it had seemed logical and inevitable that they should find his strap shoe near to the pond and the little drowned body among the water weed and the lilies.
Her eyes were dark with remembered terror and she was trembling. This time, when I tried to take her hand, she didn’t draw away.
I poured her another whisky and lit her cigarette.
She said: “Of course, there was an inquest. The coroner was a friend of my father’s, he was very sweet and gentle, but he had to blame me. Everyone knew about it—Northern Ireland is an awfully small world. Then Geoffrey lost his seat in the Ulster Parliament in the 1945 election. We never talked about it and I don’t suppose it was really anything to do with what had happened, but I think he did blame me a little.…”
She looked at me sideways, squinting at me in an alarmed way. “So you can see why I was so anxious that nothing should go wrong this time.”
I said: “But how could anything go wrong? And how does David come into it?” I thought I knew but I was unwilling, even though I liked him so little, to believe he could act so shabbily.
She was vague about David’s part in it and a little shy, as though she were still afraid that I would be angry with her, and jealous. She had been ill after the inquest; during her illness and afterwards, David had been attentive and kind to her. He had, when I had first known him, been capable of great gentleness with people in trouble; in later years life had gone sour on him and he was gentle with no one.
For Emily he had been, at this point, a kind of saviour. He was the only person at hand to give her affection and comfort; that Geoffrey had been frighteningly distant she did not say but the implication was clear. I think to anyone else she would have told the truth; she was incapable of attacking Geoffrey to me.
She said: “He was kind, when he thought about it, but he was very busy. And I was stupidly silly and sensitive after my illness—I remember that I got upset because he was so pre-occupied with his job, though, of course, it was something he had to do. Anyway, in the end there was a certain amount of scandal about David and me, and Geoffrey didn’t like it. That’s why he got David sacked from his paper. David didn’t know about it at the time, though I think he found out afterwards.”
When they came to England and met him again he had clearly known about the harm Geoffrey had done him, and had blamed them both for it, although Emily was entirely innocent and unaware of what had happened. She had been pleased to see David and bewildered to find him so changed. His friendliness had been a very thin skin over his bitter antagonism. From his behaviour he must still have loved Emily after a fashion, but she was now more Geoffrey’s wife than his own past mistress, and he hated Geoffrey.
She said: “He thought he could get his own back. The policeman told me that, at the party, he had threatened to publish the story about Martin in his gossip column, the day before the election.”
I said: “If he had done that, what harm could it do?”
She looked baffled. “I don’t know. A kind of smear, perhaps? An implication that Geoffrey was a bad parent?”
It was possible, I supposed, but it didn’t sound good enough. I wondered if Emily had deliberately left something out, but she lied badly and she didn’t look as if she were lying. And even if it were only part of the truth it was an unsavoury epitaph for David Parry.
“And the police?” I said. “What did Geoffrey tell them about David?”
“That he was blackmailing him, I think. Although it wasn’t really blackmail, was it? He wasn’t asking for money. I think Geoffrey thought the police could give him a fright.”
“Then why did you go to see David? If Geoffrey had already been to the police?”
Her face was troubled. “He didn’t tell me about the police. Or that David had mentioned Martin. Just that David had said he would put something in his paper about you and me.” She hesitated and went on with apparent difficulty as though the memory was painful. Geoffrey had suggested that she should go and see Parry; she could appeal to him on the grounds of their previous closeness.
I said: “But he must have known how impossible that would be for you?”
She reddened slowly. “Why shouldn’t I try to do something? After all, t
he mess was mostly my responsibility.”
I said: “You don’t have to defend Geoffrey to me. You know, don’t you, that it was a swinish thing to ask you to do?”
She said defiantly: “You don’t understand. I felt so at fault. I’d done Geoffrey enough harm.”
I said: “You mean he told you so. But why were you responsible? Or think you were?”
She was genuinely muddled and almost tearful. She said: “I don’t know. Please, Tom, let it alone.”
She looked, suddenly, panic-stricken. There was no further point in questioning her; somehow we were touching on something that she still wanted to stay hidden. I said, all right, we would forget about it, and she smiled at me with weary gratitude.
It must have been about half an hour later that Geoffrey came in. We heard the front door slam and there was a lengthy, apprehensive moment before he came into the morning-room. We must both have looked startled and guilty.
He looked at the whisky bottle and then at me.
He said: “Sure you wouldn’t like a room in the house old boy?”
His mouth was thin with anger. I had seen him like this before, angry in this fashion and hiding it under a layer of careful, uneasy joking. He looked tired and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot.
He sat down, picked up the whisky bottle and held it to the light.
He said: “Nice of you to leave me a drink. Will you get me a glass, dear?”
Emily poured him out a whisky, carefully not looking at me. She gave him a nervous, placating smile that drained the youth out of her face and made her look crumpled and forlorn. Earlier in the evening it had seemed ridiculous that she should pretend to be frightened of Geoffrey; now I knew that she had not been pretending. I wondered what he had done to her.
He raised his glass to her, his mouth derisive.
I said: “The police have been to see Emily. I saw them earlier to-day.”
If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He raised his sandy eyebrows and grinned at me.
