The Mask of Memory

by Victor Canning

  He said, ‘You know what my world is. A damn hard slog, particularly these days. Here, there and everywhere, chasing even the ghost of a chance of business.’

  ‘You make a lot of money.’

  There was no question in the phrase. It was a clear refutation of all he had said. He had a comfortable flat in London, she was saying. He liked his life there and kept her from it. He had friends who were kept from her; women, too, no doubt. He travelled, had a good time and was unburdened by her presence, but he came back now and then to go unenthusiastically through the limited motions of being her husband.

  ‘You’re in a funny mood tonight,’ he said, turning with his drink and forcing the wraith of a smile.

  Looking at him, her face calm, her self-possession very clear, she said, ‘Perhaps I am. I know you don’t like this kind of talk, but I think there is something you should know. I think it has something to do with our relationship in a … psychological way. I go into shops and when I come out I find sometimes that I have things in my pocket. Things, Bernard, which I have stolen and can’t remember stealing.’

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ His disbelief sounded genuine, his surprise unfeigned. He had known that there might come a moment when she would tell him this. He was well prepared for it.

  He sat down, elbows on his spread knees, fingering his glass in his cupped hands.

  Margaret said, ‘I would have told you before. But I hoped it would go, that it was something … well, something to do with my age and, frankly, the way our marriage is. But it doesn’t go. Once or twice a month I just steal. Small things. And I don’t remember doing it.’

  ‘Then we must do something about it. You’ll have to see someone. Perhaps it would be better to start with your own doctor. I’ll go and ring him now and make an appointment for you. You can see what he says. He’ll probably put you on to a specialist who’ll clear the whole thing up. Good Lord, we can’t have this kind of thing. Think of all the fuss if you were caught.’

  He stood up, touched her for a moment on the shoulder, and then went to his study to telephone the doctor, carrying his glass with him. As he sat and sipped his drink before dialling, a small agony passed through him. Now that she had told him about it, he had to do something for her. Jesus Christ, how people changed and were changed. All he had had to offer was a touch on her shoulder and the cold logic of telephoning a doctor when he should have taken her in his arms and shielded her from her worry with his love. But how could you take a stranger into your arms? Even for him there were some deceits which could not be stomached.

  Margaret sat in the lounge, possessed by a cold calmness which was curiously comforting. One thing was certain, one hope now absolutely dead, their life together was finished. There could be nothing between them even if they lived together for another hundred years. His hand briefly touching her shoulder had meant nothing because he had nothing to give her. She sat there, remembering the touch of another hand recently on her body and for the first time since that had happened she made no effort to push the memory from her mind.

  Chapter Four

  Bernard went back to London on the Monday. It did not surprise Margaret that Bernard could or would not wait over until she had seen her doctor on the Tuesday afternoon.

  Her doctor, Harrison, an elderly, over-worked man who had known her for some years, and who had a shrewd idea of the lines along which her marriage ran, was sympathetic but deliberately evasive in committing himself to any specific judgment or recommending any particular treatment.

  After a few general questions when she had outlined her problem, he asked, ‘ How do you and Bernard get on … I mean as man and woman?’

  Margaret said, ‘We don’t sleep together. We haven’t for years. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes. What about children?’

  ‘We wanted them when we were first married. Nothing happened … then, after a time, well we just accepted that there would be none. Secretly, I think Bernard was relieved.’

  ‘Lots of marriages are childless. But, apart from that, are quite normal. We’ll have a look at you in a moment and see how you are physically. Just give me a general idea of your routine during the week. You know, the friends you see, the things you do. Social activities and so on.’

  She told him. The account was brief.

  He said, ‘You keep yourself pretty much to yourself, don’t you? It could help if you had more interests and contacts. There are plenty of things you could find to do. Social work, recreational stuff. Why don’t you join a golf or a tennis club? See more of your friends. If you don’t absorb yourself in outside things, with other people, you turn in on yourself and that upsets the balance of a lot of things.’ He smiled. ‘ Would you be annoyed if I suggested that this impulse to steal is merely a desire to escape, or a wish to draw attention to yourself – forced on you subconsciously – because you are dissatisfied with what you are and what you do to fill your days?’

  ‘I’m a frustrated woman?’

  ‘In a sense.’ He looked at her over his glasses, twisted his mouth wryly and said, ‘The only thing is you’ve been landed with a rather awkward form of compensation. However, since you’ve been to see me, if you do have any trouble I’m sure it can be handled discreetly. So don’t worry about that side of it. This is a small town and we know how to look after our own. Right, well now let’s have a look at you.’

  She went away with a prescription for pills which she was to take three times a day and an injunction to report to Harrison any further incidents in shops. He was confident, however, that now she had talked to someone about her trouble it would go. If it did not, he would make an appointment for her to see a specialist.

  Margaret went home, relieved to have talked to him and to have had his reassurance, but quietly convinced that in some way neither of them had really gone to the heart of the matter. She did not blame Harrison for his friendly dismissal, almost, of her problem. He had too many real problems of other people to keep him busy. Perhaps, she felt now, she had known all along what her trouble was. She had wanted in marriage what every woman wanted, a man to love her and to give her children. Bernard had denied her this. Not deliberately, maybe, but effectively. And to be fair, she could now ask herself whether part of the trouble had not been her own fault. He had been the first – the only – man to know her. And with her rapture had gone fear. She had genuinely thought in their early unmarried days that she had been pregnant. Now, she could consider quite clinically whether he would ever have married her otherwise. Without meaning to she had trapped him.

  And without knowing it, she had found herself the only true prisoner in the trap.

  When he rang that evening from London, she said that Harrison felt there was nothing to worry about, that she was run down, that the bad patches would pass, and that already she felt much more confident herself that all would be well. She was content to dismiss the whole affair as of no importance because she knew that it was now quite clear that she was of no importance to him.

  When he rang off, she replaced the receiver and went back to her chair and her book. She knew now that without any true point of crisis – unless that brief moment of his hand touching her shoulder before he went to, call the doctor had been it – the break between them was final. From now on there was nothing he could do which could touch her with even the slightest shadow of distress. She was her own mistress. From now on she was accountable only to herself. What she would do with her freedom – and she was determined to do something with it – she had at the moment no idea. There would be plenty of time to make a decision. Until then she was content with the knowledge that she was free and the options open to her many.

  Two days later, on an afternoon of November mist which hung like still wood smoke over the town and river, shrouding from sight the gulls who called through it, she stole three pairs of grey socks, children’s size, and only discovered them in her pocket when she got out of her car at the beach park. She gave them to the leading nun
at the head of the orphanage crocodile and continued her walk up the misty beach without any distress.

  Billy Ankers sat in his car and waited for her to return. She was away half an hour and came back across the dunes to the car park. She was carrying a long ribbon of dark green seaweed and two small pieces of driftwood which she put in the boot of her car. Billy saw nothing unusual in this. The beach walkers often took pieces of driftwood home to brighten their fires with salt blue flame and many took seaweed ribbons to hang outside their doors as weather gauges. He went back to Nancy and his coffee and Dundee cake. Mr Bernard Tucker was wasting his money. It would be nice, he thought, to have money to waste.

  In the next two weeks Maxie went up to Lopcommon at night and watched the house for an hour or two. Without any arrogance, he had no doubt now of what must happen. Sitting in the darkness, there were long periods when, although his eyes watched the lighted house, his thoughts were far from her directly. He looked ahead, seeing his future, not settling for any definite shape to it, planning and altering it as the fancy took him. He wanted money and he wanted freedom of a different nature from the one he already enjoyed. He had been, brought into this life with a debt owing to him and, with each day, without any self-pity, he knew the debt had grown. Somebody had to pay it. That somebody was going to be Margaret Tucker. The details of payment could be decided when she belonged to him.

  During those two weeks, too, he showed himself to Margaret on the beach and among the burrows. He never went near her, but as she walked the sands he would sit sometimes on a dune and watch her and know that she had seen him though no recognition passed between them. Once or twice he hid himself as his glasses picked her up coming on to the sands by the beach park. Unseen by her he watched her as she came up the strand. The turn of her head opposite the places from which he usually watched her told him that she was looking for him. Usually he would let her pass without revealing himself. But now and then he would suddenly stand up in full sight of her. Always she would turn her head away and walk on. But her walk from the moment of sighting him betrayed her. It lost its natural rhythm, became for a while awkward and self-conscious, and he was content to see that it was so.

  When Margaret did come, it was in no way as he had imagined it. In hiding, he watched her come along the sands. The tide was low, baring the mud flats and sea-wrack-covered rocks at the estuary mouth. The wading birds moved and flighted restlessly at their feeding. A handful of shelduck took to the air and winged in a black-and-white skein up river. He saw Margaret pause and watch them. It was a mild day for November and the westering sun streaked the wet sands with a silver lustre. The southerly breeze down the estuary took the skirts of her light coat and flared them away from her body as though she had suddenly grown wings and was awkwardly trying them. She stood facing the sea, leaning back a little into the strengthening breeze. Then she turned and began to walk diagonally across the sands towards the dunes. For a moment or two Maxie watched her, wondering where she was going.

  She came to the high-water mark and picked her way through the drift-and-tide rubbish and then into the dunes. For a moment or two he had her in sight, and then she vanished behind the shoulder of a grassy slope. For a while he watched the dunes for some sight of her, but she did not come into view. He rolled over from his lying position and sat up. She knew the burrows fairly well and he guessed that she was taking one of the many paths that led back to the car park. For a moment or two he was tempted to cut across the burrows and find some spot where he could, in full view, sit and watch her pass. Then he decided against it and began to walk slowly back to his cottage.

  There were many things which told her exactly where she was, although she had no memory of coming here. She had stood on the sands, feeling the wind against her back, watching the birds feeding on the mud flats and rocks. Five or six had taken off, black-and-white ducks, rising into the wind and going inland and she had half-turned, seeing them through the moving web of her hair blown across her face. Then, as they moved up the estuary, heading for the junction of the two rivers, she had turned further to hold them in sight and had found herself moving too.

  There was no thought in her then because a warm, assuring peace, so sure that it was almost a physical presence near her, had drawn her into movement, compelling her, making her laugh a little to herself as the odd notion took her that she had to follow the birds, wanted to follow them, to rise and join them. And then, as her feet moved splashing through the water-rilled sand, the warm pressure of familiar hands had cradled her brow and she had been drawn forward, letting herself go wherever the calmness and certainty in her should lead, abandoning herself without any fear, her consciousness taken in trust by some power outside her.

  Sitting now, she knew what had happened. For a moment she half-started to move her hands to her coat pockets, wondering what she would find, and then stopped the impulse, knowing without alarm or the brief, familiar agony of other times, that there would be nothing there.

  It was a large, low-ceilinged room, taking up most of the ground floor of the cottage. She sat on a wooden chair at a broad table whose top was covered with some flowered plastic cover. In its centre a small glass vase held a few sprigs of yellow gorse mixed with the blue faces of periwinkle that bloomed most of the year in the hedgerows here. A pile of stiff-backed exercise books sat on one corner of the table. Immediately before her was a half-finished water-colour of a heron propped against a slanting drawing-board supported by two bricks. Something about the heron’s long beak and the wooden expression in its eye reminded her of a rather dour clerk at her bank, void of personality, shoulders hunched spiritlessly. She smiled at the memory. Whenever she saw him now she would think of the heron.

  The curtains at the far window were cheap cotton, clumsily hung and the sill below them was a mess of odds and ends. An open door to her left gave her a glimpse of a small kitchen with a white sink and a brass tap from which water dripped steadily. She had an impulse to get up and busy herself doing things for this place. She could turn off the tap, tidy the mess on the window-sill. There was a fine lacing of old cobwebs above the entrance door, everywhere the small untidinesses in the general rough order and cleanliness of the place which were never registered by a man’s eyes. On the mantel over the fireplace were two brass candlesticks and a row of hermit crab shells, two of them painted with silver and gold gilt. Perhaps he collected and decorated them and sold them with his crude paintings to the summer visitors. A corner cupboard, glass-fronted, held crockery and cups and saucers and on top of it lay a bunch of thistles, their dried heads faintly touched with a fine festoon of cobwebs. He had picked them and put them there and forgotten them. She could see him coming into this room, pausing and looking for a place to put them and forget them. To one side of the fireplace was a set of shelves, standing shoulder high, crammed with books which she would have liked to examine and from them learn so surely something of him to mark more of the man he was. But she sat where she was. The time for that would or would not come. She was content now to sit and wait for events to shape themselves around her.

  She heard him coming up the garden path, half-turned and saw the inside movement of the door latch as he thumbed it from outside. He came into the room, his back to her as he shut the door, not seeing her until he turned.

  As he faced her, there was more calmness in her than she had ever known. His pilot coat was unbuttoned. The top of his shirt was open, his skin brown, a few dark hairs showing above the loose white vee of his shirt. For a moment or two he said nothing. He stood there watching her and then slowly took off his peaked cap. Without looking, he reached behind him and hung it on the door hook.

  Making no move, he looked at her and she knew that there was surprise in him. He was flooded with it and needed time to rise clear of it. She watched him slowly surface, watched the expressionless face move to a smile and then to the deeper muscle movements of a chuckle which briefly flashed white teeth against the hickory tan of his face.
r />   He said, ‘So you’ve come?’

  ‘That was what you wanted. You told me there was either wanting all the way – or an end of it.’

  ‘And which do you want to happen?’

  ‘I haven’t asked myself that. I just want to know.’

  He nodded and then said, ‘Come on then, girl.’

  He moved past her, behind her. She turned her head and watched him. Across the last third of the room two red curtains, ceiling high, were strung on brass rings along a stretched wire to close off the end of the room. Raising his arms he slid the curtains aside and then stood at the entrance he had made and waited for her.

  She rose and went to him, past him. The curtained space held a large old-fashioned brass bedstead covered with a patchwork quilt, the pillows exposed. On a wooden chest by the wall at the head of the bed was a cheap alarm clock and a pile of magazines.

  She heard him pull the curtains over, the bedroom space suddenly shadowed, lit only by a narrow window beyond the bed. He went past her and drew the cotton curtains over the window. He said, ‘I never use the upstairs rooms. The floors are bad.’

  As he turned back and looked through the gloom at her, the trance-like certainty and calm in her were ripped away as though in one magical sweep of a hand she had been stripped naked. Her body shivered and her shoulders shook and she felt all strength and acceptance ebb from her.

  He came towards her, put a hand gently on her shoulder and said, ‘It’s all right, girl. It’s all right.’

  He moved her forward and turned her to him at the bedside. His face was close to hers. She knew that he could feel her body shaking, and against the weakness of her flesh she wanted his arms around her to still her, to gentle her back to the calm and peace she had known until now.

  He put up a hand and laid the back of it against her cheek and said, ‘It’ll go. It’s been a long time for both of us.’ His hands went to her shoulders and pressed her down gently so that she sat on the edge of the bed, sat like a child, obediently, the shaking in her body easing. He knelt down and began to untie the latches of her shoes. He took them off and slowly fondled her feet with his big hands, lowered his head and kissed the instep of her right foot through the stuff of stocking, the warmth of his lips lightly stirring against her cold flesh. Then he looked up and smiled, and the smile was the smile of the small boy she had seen in the orphanage crocodile, but grown now to the smile of a man, mischievous, pleased, acknowledging the gift and the giving to come.