by A. S. Byatt
They walked, all three, along the terrace, and then through dark grassy alleys, smelling of rosemary and box. They had a brief view of a fountain between yews, bubbling in the moonlight. Frederica felt quite sick with sherry, excitement, aesthetic surfeit and financial greed.
“Such a pleasure,” said Crowe, closing her into the silver car. “Come again.”
“Please.”
Alexander said his thank you, and drove off with a jerk. He said, “What were you doing?”
“Nothing much.”
“Do your family know you’re here?”
“I doubt it. Why does it matter to you?”
“As a friend of the family.”
“Oh, as that.” She hiccuped. “It’s my life. I don’t see why you should interfere.” She hiccuped again, and added, “Particularly, particularly since I don’t interfere in your life.” She leaned back and closed her eyes.
“That’s different.”
“Maybe. In any case, I don’t, do I?”
“No. As far as I know, you don’t.”
She lolled, rolling loosely, as he turned corners. He was annoyed by her. He had been very shocked to see her perched on Crowe’s diminutive lap. She was in the way of his evening with Crowe; and he was embarrassed by the imagination of intimacies of Crowe’s, or hers, he hadn’t known about; and he had felt prudish, and something else, on seeing the shadowed round in her shirt, palped by Crowe’s fingers.
“Frederica –”
“M’m.”
“You’re very young –”
“I know. I’m getting older as fast as I can. If I keep it up I shall be quite worthy of consideration quite soon.”
“You should be careful. You have a lot to lose.”
“What? What have I to lose, that I would not willingly part withal.”
She began to laugh in a tiresome way, rolling her head from shoulder to shoulder.
“Added to which, you’re drunk.”
“Probably. I’ve no idea at all how much I’ve had. He’s deft.”
“You are a revolting child.”
“Not a child,” she said, leering up at him, making the same mistake about demureness.
“It is my duty to fill you with coffee, but I will not take you to my room.”
“No. Most unwise. The Coffee Bar’s open.”
“My God.”
“I don’t care about the coffee.”
“You had better have it.”
So Alexander took her to the winking ultramarine depths, where they consumed boiling froth and sour coffee.
“Are you the Elder Brother? Or the Attendant Spirit?”
“What?”
“Well, you got me out of that chair like one of those. Only I’d drunk the cup and chewed up lots of peanuts. I don’t believe in turning down things you may never get offered any more.”
“You are too young to know what anyone is doing. You don’t …”
“Don’t I? My sister goes to bed with the curate. Imagine that.” Alexander tried very hard, and failed, not to be interested in this information.
“I shouldn’t have thought so.”
“No, you wouldn’t. But I know. I know all sorts of things … But I don’t want to be a bridesmaid in primrose poplin like a Flower Fairy of the Spring. I suppose I don’t know enough. Not about a lot of things. I know something about the Alexandrine.”
Alexander took this as a silly oblique reference to his own affairs, which it was not. Frederica had never even thought of connecting the verse form and her beloved’s name. It was an attempt, unrecognised and unrewarded, to wrench the conversation away from sex and back to the intellect. In practice, Alexander took it as a signal to get her back home at all costs: abruptly and authoritatively he pulled her, giggling, off her chair and up the spiral stairs, propping her with both arms as she teetered, catching her once under both breasts which to his horror produced a flicker of sexual excitement in him. He hustled her into the car, drove to Masters’ Row, and pushed her out into the road where she stood, as she had landed, idiotically still like a child playing statues. Alexander rolled down the window and hissed, “Go home.”
“You are mean.”
“No, I’m not. Go home.”
Lights went on in the Potter hall. Alexander drove off in a hurry, trusting, craven, that she would at best not betray him, and at worst not blame him for what he was not responsible for. He had little confidence in this as discretion did not seem to be one of her strong points.
24. Malcolm Haydock
Daniel went round to the Haydocks’ on Stephanie’s “day”. It had somehow become impossible to see her at Masters’ Row or in the Vicarage. As he strode up the concrete path he heard a muffled din.
She opened the door to him, her hair all over, her eyes wild.
“Quick, shut the door.”
“What’s he up to?” Daniel abandoned his prepared speech on their immediate future. “You look grey and tattered.”
“I am grey and tattered. He’s washing. He’s got everything in the bath and the tap pouring out scalding water. I can’t cope. Neither of us seems to keep still the way we did.”
“Hang on.” Daniel mounted the stairs, two at a time. He stood in the bathroom door and confronted Malcolm Haydock, if that could be called confrontation in which one party shows no awareness of the other’s presence.
In the bath, soaking and steaming were: Mrs Haydock’s floral eiderdown, a knotted mass of underwear, pink and black, an octopus of suspenders and straps, several pairs of shoes, a spilt Meccano, a floating army of little grey inch-high soldiers, a dissolving jar of bright pink bath crystals, and the hoover. Malcolm Haydock was singing, endlessly, like a hurdy-gurdy, the tune, “How much is that doggie in the window”.
Daniel hoisted out the hoover and stood it, soggy and steaming, in a corner. He addressed Malcolm with grave courtesy.
“That could damage you. Or anyone, it could damage, if it got plugged in as wet as that. And I’ll have the eiderdown, my lad. Feathers don’t take too well to water.”
He hauled, bear-like, and piled it into the washbasin, soaking the front of his shirt and trousers in the process. Malcolm Haydock retreated in a shambling manner and sat down with his cheek against the lavatory pillar. He began to make a deadly even, shrill squealing noise, on one note. His eyes rolled up and round and down.
“I’ll have your mam’s woollies. Because of shrinkage, you see. And I’ll have the shoes, or they’ll perish. I don’t see why you shouldn’t go on with all this nylon stuff, though, now it’s wet anyway, Malcolm. You may as well wash it properly, I reckon.”
He held out a sopping handful of petticoats and suspender belts. Malcolm flung his head round and round on his neck. Daniel hung the garments over the edge of the bath and summoned Stephanie.
“Have you got anything we could squeeze this lot out in? It’s a right mess. The colours are running.” He turned back to Malcolm.
“We mean well. We’re not just out to thwart you. I don’t see why you shouldn’t wash things, if you want to. It just depends what things.”
Malcolm Haydock emitted, like a radio signal, the information that he was not there, that no one was there, nothing. Stephanie appeared, lugging up the staircase a galvanised bath into which working jointly against Malcolm’s most piercing train whistle noise they managed to hump and slither the sodden eiderdown. For quite a long time they worked, silently, fiercely, together wringing, squeezing, rubbing, stretching, hanging. Daniel brought the hoover down to the kitchen, wiped what could be wiped, and stood it on a newspaper. Water trickled from its works. He then peeped into the bathroom again. Malcolm was standing in the bath, one hand trailing a kite-tail of nylon underwear, the other, one would have thought painfully, twisting his own pink cheek round and round. His shoes and socks were on, and submerged. He was making another noise with Daniel slowly realised was an uncannily efficient imitation of a hoover perpetually choking on a regurgitated hairpin.
They went and
sat on the edge of Mrs Haydock’s unmade bed, in earshot of the bathroom, but out of sight. They slithered on an oyster art-silk coverlet, which Daniel angrily screwed out of the way. He put one wet black arm round her shoulder. She said,
“I’m glad you came. Please don’t go. Unless you must.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve said to me, since … for weeks – since the explosion.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t enough. We’ve got to shift all this. We’ve got to get banns called, now, and get married, now, and stop this nonsense. I know they’ve all got it in their heads that we’d be wise to go in for a long engagement – th’ Vicar’s bleating about it, as well as your Dad. But that’s just got to be stopped. Either we get married, or we don’t.”
“We can’t, before the end of term.”
“We can. We can do what we will. There’s no cash for honeymoons and such nonsense in any case. You can go on with your teaching. But you can’t go on just drifting away like this, and going grey. I won’t stand for it.”
“Daniel!”
“What?”
“Has he got the Hoover?”
“The Hoover? I put it … No, no, no, it’s him, he thinks he is a hoover. Listen, I’ll listen to him, if you’ll listen to me. What can we gain by waiting?”
“He – Daddy – might come round. You – might decide it wasn’t a good thing. I might feel less dead.”
“I doubt all that. I doubt that very much. That’s what worries me. He wants you to think he might come round, so he stays this side of absolutely intolerable, but he won’t. And as for you, you are making yourself ill, and I’m damned if I’ll let you go on. I want you the way you were that day, alive, love, not grey. I’ve seen it. I want it back.”
“Oh, Daniel. Maybe it’s all your own, the energy. Maybe you did it all. Maybe I’ve had the life knocked out of me before I was old enough to know.”
“No. That’s not true. I know. If I have to drag you into Church …”
She put her face on his wet shoulder. It was as though he was steaming from his own internal heat. She rested. She told him, “I went to see the Vicar, like you said. He likes me. I’m a fraud.”
“Told you he would. Doesn’t see anything can be much wrong with someone who likes George Herbert and has lovely manners. You aren’t the Enemy. That’s me.”
“That’s ludicrous.”
25. Good Wives
Daniel set to work to bring his marriage about. He had little help from Stephanie, who simply acquiesced patiently to everything he suggested. Daniel was wildly angry with her and also sorry for her, sensing that she doubted everything, including himself and herself. This simply made him work faster, since he had only his own energies to rely on. He had a battle with the Vicar about the banns, and another about his intention to live on the Arkwright Estate. The Vicar talked about the position the Church had to keep up, about the way in which social workers resented encroachment on their preserves. Daniel shouted, loudly, about what Christ had said, done and enjoined on his followers. He knew that the Vicar was physically distressed by his own noisiness, that if he roared the Vicar would do almost anything to have him go away and be quiet. He roared. He roared, too, about the banns, about which he was secretly convinced that the Vicar might have a stronger case than he would admit openly. But he was a man of will. In the second week of May Mr Ellenby, with a nervous glance across the choir at his frowning assistant, called the banns for the first time. Stephanie Jane Potter, spinster, also of this parish, was not, Mr Ellenby noticed, present on this occasion. The congregation shuffled. Daniel glowered at them.
He had, he found, one ally. Winifred suddenly rose up, like an ageing Valkyrie, and set about constructing a wedding. During late April and May Bill’s behaviour was uneasy and lurking. He stayed long hours in the school and longer hours with his WEA students in pubs in mining villages. He brought home surprise gifts, mostly books, mostly for Stephanie, and stood sharp-mouthed and moist-eyed waiting for a gratitude that became difficult to express. In the month of May he gave his daughter: The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Carey’s translation of the Divina Commedia, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and T. S. Eliot’s Notes towards a Definition of Culture which she already owned, and so passed on to Frederica. Stephanie told Daniel that it was impossible to tell if these were furtive wedding-gifts, or contributions to the Christian-humanist debate in her warring soul. Daniel said he had no idea what most of them were, and did she think he ought to read them. No, no of course not, said Stephanie, and relapsed into her grey silence.
Winifred, growing rapidly in political cunning, asked Bill flatly one evening whether he was, or was not, positively against wedding arrangements being made. Bill shouted out that he had told her once that he did not care what anyone did as long as no one tried to involve or consult him, and could she not see that he was working. He waited for her anxious rephrasing of her request. It did not come.
Winifred then visited Mrs Ellenby, and after Mrs Ellenby Mrs Thone, wife of the Headmaster. Mrs Ellenby’s feelings about Daniel Orton were at best lukewarm. She considered him extravagant with electricity, a spiritual nosey-parker and an unreliable attender of bazaars. But she liked Stephanie, as everyone did, disapproved of Bill, and was passionately interested in the ceremony of weddings. Winifred exposed the family differences with what she hoped was a tactful mixture of personal distress, sympathy for her daughter, and tolerant acceptance of her husband’s eccentricities. Mrs Ellenby was touched, and mildly flattered. She agreed to receive wedding presents and messages, as far as possible, so that the Potter house could be kept quiet. She suggested a dressmaker, a baker and a printer. She offered to attend personally to the Church flowers and to invite Daniel’s mother to stay in the Vicarage.
Mrs Thone was more formidable. In Winifred’s early days at the school Mrs Thone had made overtures of friendship, invitations to coffee, to dinner, of which Winifred accepted a bare minimum, and which she felt unable to reciprocate, since Bill was contemptuous about the Headmaster and Winifred feared, hardly admitting it even to herself, that if she had the Thones frequently round in the evenings Bill would engineer some monstrous rudeness which would make her tenuous social life completely non-existent.
Monica Thone looked more like a headmaster than her husband: she wore grey tweed suits and expensive silk shirts: her hair was short and salt-and-pepper coloured: she had read Greats at Oxford. The Thones’ only son had one day in 1947 fallen from a low bench in a playground, hit his head and died instantly, aged ten. The boys at the school were afraid of Mrs Thone: they said she had a witchy stare. She strode up and down the school grounds, stood in for sick teachers, and taught a curious class in English Comic Writing at Calverley Prison, where she was apparently popular.
She received Winifred coolly, and Winifred found it hard to open a conversation. They sat in Mrs Thone’s chill drawing-room, two stiff, grim, tall Englishwomen, unable to drop their English shields of cautious silence. Winifred thought: I could weep, I could fling myself about. How she would hate that. She said neutrally, “I need your help.”
“How can I help you?”
“It is my husband. I shall have to explain … my husband …”
“Are you quite sure …” murmured Mrs Thone.
Winifred, more decisively, said she was indeed sure. She offered an excellent and unemotional précis of the events so far and explained that the wedding must take place and soon, and that Bill must not be troubled, or involved.
“And what can I do?”
“I don’t like to talk about Bill. He would hate it so.”
“According to my husband, he is a difficult genius.”
“If you are married to him,” said Winifred, “you notice the difficulty more than the genius.”
“My husband says he is invaluable. And often intolerable.”
“Exactly.”
They smiled, very briefly, together.
�
��I wondered if you – if your husband – if the school – might help with a wedding reception. To be truthful I can’t even be sure Bill will come. I want her to have things done properly. All the proper things. Here, he couldn’t … object … or derange …”
“I do see. Forgive me,” said Mrs Thone delicately, “but will you be all right, in the circumstances, for money?”
“We have a joint account. I shall use it.”
Mrs Thone began to laugh.
“I must admit, I should take some pleasure in fixing that without telling him, though I shouldn’t say so. I don’t see why we shouldn’t use the Masters’ Garden, weather permitting. I don’t see why – for the daughter of a long-established colleague – we shouldn’t use the kitchen staff and crockery and glasses. I don’t think I shall bother Basil with it much. He’s scared stiff – between you and me – of your husband’s tantrums. I shall simply inform him it’s being done – that I am doing it – and that there’s no need at all for him to mention it to Bill. It’ll leak through of course.”
“I’m relying on Bill to pretend not to take any notice.”
“He might not.”
“He might do … such things and so on. But with luck he can’t stop a whole wedding.”
“Your daughter seems a good, calm sort of girl. Is the young man a solid young man?”
Solid, yes, said Winifred. And like a steamroller. Didn’t admit obstacles. Winifred, Mrs Thone said, showed more similarity to a steamroller than might have been expected. Would she – and any available Potters – and the ferocious curate – care to come and watch her television on Coronation Day? All the boys had a holiday, of course, but there were always one or two with no home to go to, whom she would ask, and a few staff. Winifred felt both obliged, and pleased, to accept this invitation.
Daniel and Stephanie had now a wedding date, June 21st, and an invitation to the Coronation (on television). Winifred got out her treadle machine and began a yellow poplin dress for Frederica. Mrs Ellenby’s dressmaker measured Stephanie. Invitations were despatched, even to unknown Potters. Stephanie wrote briefly and delicately to Mrs Orton, suggesting a visit. She received a floral postcard, depicting a huge silver jar of dahlias on a burnished table, on the back of which Mrs Orton had written, no, don’t come, it would be too much upset for all concerned, my health is NOT UP to MUCH, but I’ll be there on the day don’t worry, thanks for writing and all the best. Daniel said she was a lazy old so and so and always had been. He added gloomily that she’d irritate Mrs Ellenby proper, but what must be must be. Stephanie found nothing to say about that, either.
