by Barbara Vine
She had looked at Dickie Parfitt’s photographs. The one of the old woman was clear enough, but she was just an old woman in a felt hat and a buttoned-up coat. The man in the other photograph might have been Gerald, but it was out of focus and no face could be seen. Perhaps he owned the house. What did she know? He might have lived there himself once, kept it when he moved to Hampstead, now allowed this woman to live there.
Ursula thought she would go to the house and see the woman who lived there, speak to her, find out the truth. But the idea was at first a dream, a fantasy; she would be terrified to do that. And then she asked herself if she really would be afraid. What was there to be afraid of?
Her mother had taken to coming over while Pauline was with them. She had regularly paid a monthly visit to have tea with the children and to admire Gerald’s “way” with them, but that August she came at least once a week. Ostensibly, this was to be with Pauline, the granddaughter she seldom saw because Pauline lived in Manchester, but her true purpose was to discuss her son’s broken marriage.
In the world of Herbert and Betty Wick, divorce was so rare as to be practically nonexistent. To Betty, it had been something that happened in the lives of Hollywood film stars, and even there, she believed—or, at any rate, said—it was engaged in solely for its publicity value. Marriage was an absolute, as rock-solid and in a way as physical as birth and death. Love, compatibility, preference scarcely came into it.
She and Herbert had known each other since they were both fifteen, had married at twenty-one, had neither of them looked in anyone else’s direction. If the question of marital discord was raised, she would say that so-and-so chose his or her partner and therefore should be content with that choice forever after. Minds that could be changed on almost any other issue—Betty sometimes said sagely that it was a woman’s privilege to change her mind—must be adamant here, and the heart had no option but to remain true.
So Ian’s defection had left her bewildered as well as horrified. To Ursula, she said repeatedly, “I don’t understand it. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing. He chose her, didn’t he?”
If Gerald was present, he listened intently to what Betty said. He fixed her with his bright, dark eyes, frowning slightly, hanging on her words. And she was flattered by his attention and by the encouragement he gave her to utter further absurdities.
“Of course I blame her, as well. Marriage is a matter of give-and-take, and you have to work at it; you both have to work at it.”
“It takes two to tango,” said Gerald.
Betty wasn’t sure about that phrase, having never heard it before. Nor had Ursula then, and for all she knew, Gerald might have invented it himself. But her mother liked the encouragement, saying, “Well, exactly.”
Betty loved Gerald. He was the only husband she had ever come across who stayed at home all day and still earned money. Ursula thought then that Gerald had listened so intently to what was said because of his own adulterous behavior. He had an interest, as they said. Later on, of course, she knew why he had listened. He had been making mental notes and every sentence Betty uttered found its way into Time Too Swift five years later.
Betty said that as for the girl—Judy, who would become Ian’s second wife—Herbert thought she ought to be horsewhipped.
“How about skimmity riding?” said Gerald.
Betty didn’t know what that was, nor did Ursula then, the works of Hardy not being among her reading matter. In a grave but approving voice, Gerald explained how once in rural England women who misbehaved were made to mount a horse, sit facing its rump, and be driven around the town to loud music and the jeers of the populace. Betty took it seriously and said that those were the days.
She nearly didn’t come the following week because Ursula told her Gerald wouldn’t be there; he was going down to Devon again to do more research. Even Ursula couldn’t believe he had a mistress in Devon and another one in London, so she accepted the research story and thought of the key he had to the house in Goodwin Road. She would go there while her mother was in the house, minding the children with Pauline’s help. It was an arrangement to suit everyone.
But she was afraid of going. It happened to her often, at this stage of her life and later, to think of herself as she had been just a few years before, six or seven years before, and say to herself, This isn’t me. I can’t be doing this thing, these things. I can’t have come to this. I can’t have been treated like this, used like this; it can’t be true. And she would look in the mirror, seeing herself as very much unchanged since the time she was twenty-three, her face still round and pretty, calm and composed, her hair still smooth, shoulder-length, sand-colored, her eyes still the same gray-blue. But perhaps the self-satisfaction that had been in them was gone.
So she said to herself, I must wake up and find myself at home in Purley, in my bed with the gauzy curtains springing from the golden crown and Cicely Mary Barker’s Airymouse, Airymouse on the wall and the southern suburbs outside the window. Work to go to in Dad’s office, books from the library, watching television with Pam, getting ready to invite Colin Wrightson to the Library Users’ Association … But she awoke always in her own bed in Holly Mount, to hear the children in the summer dawns talking and laughing in Gerald’s room, and once to hear him, still in the dark, scream out a loud, terrible scream, so that she had run in to him without a thought.…
That was after she had been to Goodwin Road and seen Mrs. Eady and heard what Mrs. Eady had to say and so had no choice but to stay with Gerald. Of course, she had a choice, but it hadn’t seemed like that then. It seemed as if he had done nothing, as if it was he who had to forgive her for her suspicions, while she must take him for what he was and continue to hope.
Was it the morning following her visit to the house in Leyton that he had woken screaming? It felt to her as if it was, and yet it couldn’t have been, for he was away in Devon that night, house hunting, as she later knew. So it must have been a morning or two later, a dawn, rather, when the eastern sky had just begun to lighten.
She couldn’t understand why it didn’t wake Sarah and Hope, it was such a cry. A scream that burst from the big healthy lungs of a man in the prime of life, a howl of horror, the cry a prisoner might give who finds himself walled up in a doorless dungeon. And that was just what he had fancied he was in the dream, which had been so real, so tangible, odorous, cold, that he thought it was true, that it was really happening.
When she got to him, he was sitting up, his mouth still open, his arms raised, his hands up, quivering, beside his head. Not thinking, not remembering in that moment those slights and rejections, she had gone straight to him and put herself into his uplifted arms. For a moment, he was still, petrified, and then his hands closed around her shoulders. He hugged her to him and she clung there, gasping. She hesitated for only a little while before getting into bed with him and holding him in her arms while he told her about his dream. There, two hours later, the astonished children found them fast asleep.
Ursula got to her feet and walked back along the wrinkled sand. Up in Lundy View House, someone had put lights on in the living room, though it wasn’t even dusk yet. Tonight, the clocks would be turned back. The wind had blown leaves from the clifftop gardens down onto the beach, where they lay among the shells as if they, too, had been left stranded by the sea.
We never remember other people’s dreams, only our own, but she remembered that one, Gerald’s dream. He told her—she hadn’t known—that it was recurrent, though sometimes years passed before it came again.
He whispered it all to her, and she was touched, moved, happy. He was talking to her as people who were close did talk to each other, confiding, telling their fears and their pain. It was only later that she understood anyone would have done for him, any ear would have served, anyone’s arms and anyone’s warmth would have been enough for him. And there were some who would have been far more welcome than she. Dream people from good dreams that for some reason he could never find or
keep or confront in reality.
He had been in a city street at night. Which city, he said, he didn’t know and it didn’t matter. He had entered a tunnel. Or, rather, a passage between streets of stone houses in some densely built-up ancient place. Small stone houses in back-to-back terraces that ran up hills and down hills in parallel lines. The passage was walled and the walls were of stone, damp and glistening, and it was roofed over with stone, from which drops of water fell. Only a very few drops, and they fell only occasionally, but with a soft, dull plop onto the stone floor.
It was quite a short passage, which should have come out into one of the streets, but when he rounded the bend in it, he saw that the way out ahead had been blocked by a smooth sweep of mortar. Where the opening should have been was a wall of man-made stone. He turned and retraced his steps back to where he had entered, and there, during the time he had been in the passage, someone had blocked that end also. Someone had sealed it over with stone blocks set in mortar and the mortar was hard and firm, as if it had been there for years.
He was enclosed inside a tube of stone. And he knew that whatever the passage might once have been, it was now deep in the earth, a worm-cast tomb. All around him, the stones sweated water, falling faster now, dripping softly, forming pools at his feet. He pushed at the stones; he ran to the other end and pushed at the curtain of cement that was covered with fan-shaped prints where hard hands had pressed it in—from the inside. Yet there was no one inside but him, and it was then that he screamed and woke screaming, holding up his hands in the attitude of the stonemason who was himself.
Sarah dropped Hope at the hotel where she was having her reunion, walked into the pub, and saw Adam Foley sitting there on his own up at the bar. He looked at her and she looked at him, apparently without recognition, and she walked past him and went into the ladies’ room. When she came back, Alexander and Vicky had arrived and Alexander said, “I can’t remember if you’ve met Adam.”
“Once, I think,” she said, and Adam said yes, once, but a long time ago.
Rosie came then and a man she’d brought with her named Tyger. Tyger with a y, as he told everyone, as if they were going to write him letters. Alexander got the drinks and they all moved to a table and Rosie said she had a conundrum to put to them. Suppose someone emigrated to North America and never came back home, or only came home on a visit and then went back again—it must happen to thousands of people—what became of the five (or seven or eight) hours they had gained? Everyone had answers for this: that time didn’t work like that; that time wasn’t a pathway, but a room; that the gain of hours was illusory, not real. Adam contributed and she contributed, but they didn’t look at each other.
“Would you die five hours earlier than you would have if you hadn’t made the journey?” Vicky asked, and Tyger said, “Or five hours later?”
Then they ordered food from the blackboard and Adam went to get more drinks. He brought drinks for everyone but her; it was the same performance as last time, and Vicky said, “Hey, what about Sarah?”
He looked and shrugged and Sarah sat silent, watching, wondering what the next move would be. Vicky pushed her white wine across the table, said, “Here, you have mine,” and “For God’s sake, Adam.”
Of course Adam got Vicky a drink and the food came and Rosie said to him, “You and Sarah ought to come down from London together. Save petrol.”
Sarah gave a tight smile.
“Well, you must live practically next door to each other. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”
Sarah said, looking down at her plate, “Not really.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Rosie looked at Sarah’s bowed head and Adam’s stony face. “Have I said something I shouldn’t?”
A silence fell. Sarah began to feel very excited. She hadn’t known how easy it was to manipulate people, to create an atmosphere, to change things. Everyone (except Adam) was now embarrassed. Vicky began talking very fast about someone she knew who had gone to central Africa with a famine-relief mission and who had liked it so much that she had stayed.
“What, liked the famine?” said Tyger.
The conversation now turning to whether one should contribute to famine-relief charities, whether the money ever got to the starving, how much corruption existed, Sarah ate her fish and chips in tranquillity. There were three bottles of wine on the table, but she was going easy because she thought she should have her wits about her. She was very aware of Adam’s presence and almost painfully aware of his attractions. Their like-mindedness slightly troubled her. No one she had ever known before had so closely shared her inclinations—tendencies that, until a few weeks ago, she hadn’t known she had. Such compatibility threatened her freedom.
Which of them was to make the first move? The pub would close in half an hour and Alexander suggested they go on to Greens. Sarah said, “If I drink any more, I won’t be able to drive home.” She added, “I mean, not physically capable,” lest anyone should think she was showing respect for the laws.
When she went into the car park, he would come to her—but suppose he didn’t? Any message that could be passed, any eye signals, would spoil things. She scarcely considered them. She could drive alone to his family’s cottage, but she knew she wouldn’t. The others all got up. She heard Adam saying good night. He, too, had decided against the club. They made their way out onto the pavement. “Well, good night, Rosie. Good night, Alex,” he was saying. “Good night, Vicky. Nice to have met you, Tyger. See you.”
Sarah said, “You must be the most uncouth bastard in the West Country.” Someone gasped.
“And you are quite a bitch yourself,” he said.
She was trembling. “Good night,” she said, her voice shaking. “Good night, Rosie darling. Good night, Vicky, Alex. Nice to have met you, Tyger.” She rushed off around the back, under the old coaching arch, into the yard, into the car park. She stood by the car for a moment, for a whole two minutes in the cold. Then she got into the car, reversed, and drove out by the exit into a side street. She was sick with excitement, with terror, choking with it.
He was in a doorway, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. She pulled across to him and he got into the car in silence. No kisses, no touching, no words. Why couldn’t it always be like this? she thought. Perhaps it could. That made her draw in her breath with a sound, but he took no notice. After a moment or two, as if she were his hired driver, he told her to take Bishop’s Tawton Road and there, about a mile out, to turn into the hotel that stood at the end of a long drive.
It was eleven at night and they had no suitcases, but the reservation was confirmed and no comment was made. Once inside the bedroom, he closed the door and locked it, then turned out all the lights but one small lamp. From opposite sides of the room, they moved toward each other, and, taking her face in one hand, he began to lick her mouth, her lips first, forcing them apart, then penetrating to touch her teeth, her tongue, as if he meant to eat her alive. But slowly, with infinite time and relish. With wide-open eyes, she looked into his cold, expressionless ones. Then her eyelids fell as his did. They touched and felt each other in silence.
Hope’s taxi got her home half an hour later. Her mother and Pauline had gone to bed. She poured herself a large whiskey, thought about adding water to it but added a single lump of ice instead. For some reason, she thought the door to her father’s study might be locked, but it wasn’t. It smelled of him; it was full of him. She had continued to sit on his lap until a week before his death. Never mind what people thought. She sat on his lap and wound her arms around his neck and he put his arm around her waist and held her hand. Often she had come in here, knowing he would have finished work, and found him sitting in the big armchair, reading over what he had written. And she always kissed his cheek and sat in his lap, sometimes without speaking. If anyone had asked Hope what love was, she would have said what she had for her father and he had for her.
She sat down in his armchair in the dark. She kicked off her shoes, w
rapped her coat around her, her warm coat, which she could fancy as comforting as strong arms. The tears began to fall, but she drank her whiskey, curled her legs up under her, and soon fell asleep.
14
Faith is believing in what you know to be false.
—TIME TOO SWIFT
NOT A DISAPPEARANCE, NOT A VANISHING into another country, but a death. Ken Applestone had died of cancer four years before. His son had been expansive to Jason Thague on the phone, had talked for twenty minutes, offering unasked-for details, a painful description of his father’s final year, the burnt-out lungs, the cigarettes snatched between the gulps of oxygen.
Sarah didn’t want to hear that. It was disquieting to her even thirdhand. “He was quite old, surely.” But her father, not much Ken Applestone’s senior, had been too young to die.… “Did you ask your grandmother about the family doctor?”
“I asked her about all sorts of callers at the house,” Jason said. “There was a chair mender. He came to redo the cane seats of chairs. A Mr. Smith—he’s going to be a breeze to trace, isn’t he? The vet came. They had a dog that got distemper—I reckon we’d call it something else, wouldn’t we?—and the vet came, but it was no good and the dog was put down. She couldn’t remember what the vet’s name was. Or the milkman’s or the postman’s, if she ever knew. The doctor was named Nuttall. Dr. Nuttall.”
“Did he have a son the same age as your great-uncle?”
“My what? Oh, right, yes, I suppose that’s what he was, poor little kid. Or would have been. My nan doesn’t know; she knows he had children, but she can’t remember their sexes. Amazing to remember the name, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do.” Sarah suppressed the rather unkind remark she had wanted to make, that Mrs. Thague would be unlikely to remember the name of someone who had come to the house yesterday. “So can we find this Dr. Nuttall?”
