A Fatal Attachment

by Robert Barnard

  A sharp expression of anger crossed Lydia’s face. This was not the first time this had been said to her. Wanting to marry Robert Loxton was certainly a sign of greater discrimination than actually marrying Jamie Loxton. Still, acknowledgement of the truth of the analysis seemed to convict her of a double degree of foolishness. She left a couple of seconds’ silence.

  “Robert has certainly made himself known, done something with his life,” she said cautiously.

  “Oh, he has. When I tell people my name is Loxton they often ask if I’m related to him. When I say he’s my brother the polite ones suppress their surprise.”

  “He’s in Greenland—no, Alaska—at the moment, isn’t he? I have an address somewhere to write to.”

  Jamie Loxton nodded.

  “Alaska. Him and Walter Denning on a two-man survival expedition of some kind. No doubt it will prove something or other about the limits of man’s endurance. Not something I’ve ever been very interested in, though I suppose my own survival proves something. We write friendly letters once a year at Christmas, if he’s around. I haven’t seen him for—oh, five years or more. . . . He should have married you, Lydia. You would have made a fine pair.”

  Lydia could find no reply. She was remembering her childhood, and how vividly her elder Loxton cousin had figured in it. He and Jamie were the children of her mother’s brother, and they lived over Malton way. In her early years—the war and its aftermath of austerity—they had seen each other perhaps once or twice a year, but what happy, golden times they had been. In the fifties they had come together much more often. Lydia’s father was head of a mass-market clothing firm in Halifax, and British business appeared to be booming. Both families had cars, both groups of parents enjoyed each other’s company. Now and then, in holiday times, Lydia and Thea, or Lydia alone, would take the train to Malton just for the joy of participating in the boys’ games and projects. Something—something funny or adventurous, always with a spice of surprise or danger to it, or something to test their physical prowess—was always going on.

  Perhaps she had understood then that the originator of these games was always Robert—that of the brothers one led and the other tagged along. Certainly by the time she had reached womanhood, had completed her degree and was out in the world, she had known that the one she wanted to marry was Robert. That had been the beginning of her going wrong emotionally. It had been some years before she realised that the projects and adventures of childhood had persisted into adulthood, and that Robert would be married to them and never to any woman. He was funny and affectionate and exciting when they met, but those meetings were always when he was just back from the Himalayas or shortly off to Antarctica or Siberia. So she had married Jamie when he had asked her. And in the few months of their marriage she had learnt the bitterest of lessons. She had never again settled for second best. Second best, she now knew, was coming nowhere. It humiliated her to think that she had needed to learn that lesson, and how she had learnt it.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to marry a cousin,” she said at last dismissively. “Royal families did it all too often. It weakened them in the long run. Much more sensible to seek out new blood.”

  Jamie nodded.

  “As I gather Thea and Andy’s boy has done,” he said. “Do you see a lot of them?”

  “Maurice and his wife? Oh no, of course not. He’s with Midlands Television—lives in Birmingham of all places.”

  “I meant Thea and Andy.”

  “Of course,” Lydia lied. “They’re here in the village. We see each other all the time.”

  “I must go down and call on them before long. I always thought Thea was the best of us.”

  “The best of us?”

  “The kindest, nicest, most understanding.”

  “Well . . . perhaps you’re right.”

  Lydia was reluctant to acknowledge Thea’s moral stature, still more reluctant to acknowledge Jamie’s right to make confident judgments. There was something more . . . more independent about Jamie now, and it disoriented Lydia. She was reminded of Robert more strongly than at any time since she had decided to marry him as second best.

  “There was one other thing, Lydia.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m thinking of getting married again.”

  “Really?” She wanted to say something cutting about him really courting failure, but she refrained, “I hope you’ll be happy this time,” she said.

  Jamie dipped his head in acknowledgement.

  “She’s a lovely person. She’s been a social worker in Sheffield for nearly twenty years—not the easiest of jobs. Finally it just got on top of her and she had to get away. She has the village shop and post office in Kedgely.”

  My successor is a failed social worker and a postmistress, thought Lydia. All her old contempt returned. How pathetic Jamie always was! How small-scale his hopes and ambitions! And even in them he has failed. It humiliated her to think she had been married to him. It humiliated her to think of the sort of woman he was to marry next. It seemed to equate Lydia with her. And it would equate them in the minds of everyone in the district.

  “And when will it take place, this marriage?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing’s decided yet. Mary’s been married before too, so she doesn’t want to rush into it.”

  “You’re just ‘keeping company’?”

  Lydia used the servant-girl expression with relish, but Jamie was unoffended. He smiled.

  “That’s pretty much it at the moment. Naturally we neither of us have a lot of spare time to spend with each other. But we’re sort of feeling our way.”

  “How nice . . . but there was no need for you to tell me all this, you know, It’s none of my business.”

  “And we’re nothing to each other, as you said. Oh quite.” Jamie got up. “Still these things are always a bit disconcerting when you hear them from strangers, aren’t they? That’s why I wanted to tell you myself.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” admitted Lydia.

  “You’ve never thought of getting married again yourself?”

  “No! Good heavens, no! I’ve had the fullest of lives without it. In fact, I’m always mystified by people—filmstars and suchlike—who get married over and over again. One can learn from experience, but it seems they never do.”

  If Jamie registered that this speech was intended to hold a message for him, he gave no sign. Lydia led the way out of the sitting room and to the front door. The interview, her stance implied, was over.

  “And you’ve made a very satisfactory career for yourself, then, Lydia?” Jamie said, small-talking as he walked out of the house.

  “Very satisfying, at any rate.”

  “And a nationally known name.”

  “Oh—” she gestured dismissively.

  “But we did have happy times together as kids, Robert, you and I, didn’t we?”

  “We did. Goodbye, Jamie.”

  She shook his hand, watched him as he went out to the battered old Volkswagen, which no longer seemed such an amusing little car, only a symbol of his failures, and then shut the door without a wave of the hand.

  She went back into the sitting room, and began to fix herself another drink. She rejected gin—somehow too maudlin a drink for her present mood—and poured herself a stiff whisky. Altogether a sturdier, more combative drink. Odd that Jamie should drink it now. Because he was one of nature’s wimps, and a human disaster-area to boot. She added a little water to the glass and stood reflectively by the mantelpiece.

  It did not please her that Jamie had come to live near her—did not please her at all. He was known in the area—they had spent their brief married life in a village not far from Bly, in a tiny house owned by her parents—and he had friends here, or had had. People would recognise him, and they would talk. She was one of the local notables: she was reviewed at length in the quality Sunday newspapers, and occasionally consented to be interviewed on radio or television. Hitherto she had been a w
riter with a brief marriage in her past. Now she was a woman with an ex-husband in the vicinity. It was not a change for the better, not a change that Lydia liked.

  Because Jamie was not only a failure—he was one of her failures. He would be living and ever-present proof of the fallibility of her judgment—and in the most important decision of her life, as many people would see it. She had faced this fact within days of marrying him: when he had told her that his “job in the City” had been merely a “taking on trial” by a brokerage firm for a salary hardly more than nominal. He had shared with her his feeling that the trial had not been a success, and his judgment was confirmed within a fortnight. He was out of a job. As he was to be twice again in their brief marriage.

  She had tried to give him backbone, perseverance, self-confidence. She had tried encouragement, exhortation, pushing, nagging. He had remained a well-disposed bumbler. If he’s like this at twenty-four, she had thought with dread, what will he be like at fifty-five? “You’ll never change him,” Robert had said to her, the night before he left to trek across the Central Australian desert. “He accepts the things that happen to him, he never makes them happen. You’ll have to take him as he is. He’s nothing like me.” The next evening she had told Jamie that their marriage had not been a success and she wanted him to move out. He had nodded and said she was probably right. Within a week he was gone, and for the next few years she had heard occasional pieces of news about him, mainly from his parents, whom he moved back with when he was down on his luck and out from when something turned up. For years she had heard nothing at all.

  Suddenly she remembered that she had been momentarily reminded, even now, of Robert. And then something else occurred to her: Jamie’s demeanour during their interview had not been at all what might have been expected. He had not been in the least apologetic or hangdog: there was nothing of the whipped cur, not in his carriage or his words. He had accepted his long log of failure with resigned dignity—even with amusement. When her words had been cutting he had registered them, but he had not been cut. He had not been in the least humble. He had smiled at her. Had he, even, smiled at her? Been, somehow, amused by her? Been showing tolerance of her and her ways? That was, somehow, what his style and stance had suggested. The idea was insupportable.

  Especially when coupled with another one: that Jamie, belatedly and astonishingly, had been brought to normality and maturity by another woman. That a social-worker-cum-postmistress—a woman she would doubtless be kind to and despise in her heart—had done what she had never been able to do: had found things in Jamie which could be nurtured and strengthened, and by that loving care he had been saved. Was it that that gave Jamie that look when he gazed at her, that look of . . . amused tolerance?

  Draining her glass she was suddenly seized by rage. She picked up the cushions on the sofa and flung them one by one at the wall, sending pictures askew, breaking a small ornament that fell from the sideboard. Then she seized those from the chairs and sent them flying at the windows, kicked the desk chair viciously and then took up her glass again and sent it to shatter against the solid oak door.

  Then she ran sobbing with rage and frustration to her bedroom.

  • • •

  “Well, you did have a night last night,” said Molly Kegan, Lydia’s cleaning woman, when she saw the room the next morning. The two women smiled at each other. Lydia had not bothered to clean up. The two understood each other too well for that sort of subterfuge.

  “A little release of tension,” Lydia said.

  “Book not going well?”

  “Molly, when have you known me get worked up like that over a book?”

  “Always a first time.”

  “I had a visit from my ex-husband last night.”

  The cleaning woman smiled and nodded.

  “Oh well, there you are. Ex-husbands produce that kind of feeling. Husbands too, for that matter.” Mrs Kegan was a divorced woman herself—unqualified, but much too intelligent for the charring work she was forced to undertake for her living. She had given herself to marriage and children, and now only the children remained. “What did he want—money?”

  “Oh no—there was no question of my giving him money.”

  “Well, he surely didn’t come just to talk over old times, did he?”

  “No, he came to tell me that he has moved back to the area. He has a farm over near Kedgely. Organic, naturally: Jamie always was one for fads.”

  “And you don’t want him anywhere near you?”

  “Not in the least. Of all the farms in England he could have brought to bankruptcy, he has to choose one five miles from me!”

  “Why did he, do you think? Spite? To harass you in some way or other?”

  “I don’t know. . . . There’s a woman involved, but I don’t know which came first, the woman or the farm.”

  “Ah well,” said Molly Kegan, beginning to pick up the cushions. “What can’t be cured must be endured.”

  “What a spineless proverb!” said Lydia. “I bet if your husband came to live around here you’d do something.”

  “Apply for a court order,” said Molly Kegan promptly. “There was physical violence, as you know. And there was mistreatment of the children. But you had nothing to complain of in that way, did you, Lydia?”

  “Good Lord, no. All I had to complain of was that he was totally spineless and ineffectual. The original nowhere man.”

  “There you are. Nothing to complain of at all.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “STOP yer bawling!” yelled Kelly Hoddle to the baby in the back seat. “We’re going to Yorkshire whether you like it or not . . . And whether I like it or not.”

  The addition was said without rancour—a mere conversational gambit. Maurice Hoddle accepted it as such and grinned down at his wife.

  “You know you’ll enjoy showing off the baby,” he said. “You’ll get on fine when you’re there.”

  “I always get on fine with people who accept me for what I am.”

  It was a matter-of-fact statement that was nothing less than the truth. Her husband looked at her with affection. The glorious not-quite-for-real blonde hair, the cheekily made-up face that gave her the look of a dissolute elf, the fine breasts and glorious legs that Kelly habitually flaunted with tight short skirts. Maurice felt a sudden spurt of lust that was incompatible with driving up the M1. He turned his eyes back to the road.

  Kelly had hit the nail on the head as usual: people who could accept her as she was loved her—loved her sexually precocious gamine style, her unashamed Birmingham accent, her frank enjoyment of the physical and her uproarious love of all sorts of bad jokes. He had heard her laughter before he had seen her. It was at a casting session for Waterloo Terrace, and the moment he did see her he had known that she was right for the role, and right for him.

  The role had been that of Sharon, the relief barmaid at the Dog and Whistle. So popular had been her cheekiness and the blatancy of her sexual aggression that the original three months’ contract had been extended to two years. By then they were married, Kelly was pregnant, and was pronouncing the part “boring.” She was always wanting to go on to something else—that was part of her appeal. But the parts, when they had come (and Maurice was in a position to make sure that they did come) had mostly been variations on Sharon the barmaid. Everyone had assumed that, like most actors in soaps, Kelly had taken a part that was not too far from her own personality. But though that was true of what might be called the basic Kelly, Maurice knew that she had many different sides to her personality, that she played from minute to minute many different roles. Though he would have admitted that she was never going to play Cordelia or any of the three sisters he knew better than anyone that as yet she had not been fully stretched.

  “I suppose you’ll be going up to see that old cow,” she said now, Maurice laughed, but his hands tightened on the steering-wheel and his voice, though it was chaffing in tone, did not hold real amusement.

  “Now who c
ould you mean by that? Lydia, conceivably? Yes—I’ll go up and see her for old times’ sake. My thick skin can take all the comments, spoken and unspoken, on the undignified and shoddy world of television.”

  “I’ll be more interested to hear the comments on the common and sluttish nature of your wife. Because don’t think I’ll be going with you.”

  “On the whole it might be better if you didn’t.”

  “Snooty old cow. Thinks her farts don’t smell.”

  “You did rather overdo your act, the one time you met.”

  “Of course I did. Terribly well-bred people always give me the gips. . . . What part of my ‘act’ are you referring to, incidentally?”

  “The ‘born on the wrong side of the tracks’ part.”

  Kelly gave a throaty laugh.

  “That’s no act.”

  “I’ve never actually heard your parents use a four-letter word. Nor do they keep their coal in the bath-tub, or live off National Assistance.”

  Kelly winked delightedly.

  “I’ll be overdoing my act again if she’s unfortunate enough to encounter me in Bly. But I doubt if she will. She’ll stick to her cottage—cottage! I’ll bet it’s no cottage!—the whole weekend. The spider at the centre of her web. Or that thing that devours her males. . . . I should hate her by rights.”

  Maurice’s body was still tense, but he tried a careless laugh.

  “Nonsense. I was never devoured.”

  “Of course you were. You had to . . . recreate yourself. I’ve talked to people who knew you when you started at Midlands Television. They say you were uncertain who you were, what you were doing, and had a gigantic inferiority complex about your brother.”

  Maurice’s mouth crinkled with displeasure. Clearly this was news to him.

  “Is that what they say about me? Lovely friends I have down there!”

  “Good friends will tell the truth.”

  “If that’s what they think about me, perhaps it is time I made a move.”

  “A move?”