Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ Arthur said, evidently pleased that this was the case. ‘It just seems smaller, the island, the houses.’

  ‘Places you go back to always do,’ Mickey answered, relieved that his mood seemed to have changed.

  Ahead of them was a clump of trees and a little way further on a squat bungalow circa 1930s.

  ‘It’s just the same!’ Arthur said, delightedly, pausing at the garden gate which creaked as he pushed it open. ‘Even the gate sounds the same. I remember swinging on it and mother punishing me . . .’ His enthusiastic nostalgia trailed off. Mickey, who was watching him, observed a slight but distant physical flinch as the childhood memory went into silence and awakened in her a curiosity that had hitherto been unrealized within the insular immediacy of their relationship.

  The small front garden was scrubby with uncultivated grass and the wild descendants from herbaceous borders planted fifty years ago. The bungalow itself had signs of more recent attention although it was unmistakably no one’s home and inside there was the smell of disuse. Although double-fronted, it was shallow with only two rooms besides the kitchen and bathroom.

  ‘Nothing’s changed at all,’ Arthur repeated, passing through the living room with its box-like armchairs placed either side of a small, tiled fireplace. The front door led directly into this room which in turn gave access to the others.

  Arthur had taken their cases through to the bedroom which, with sinking heart, Mickey saw contained only one bed, a narrow double standing a good three feet off the floor and looking not unlike an oversized hospital model.

  Arthur, oblivious, or feigning so, carefully laid both cases on it.

  ‘Would you like me to unpack your things? I always used to for Mother.’

  Mickey who hated the whole business of packing and always left things behind, would, in any other circumstances, have jumped at such an offer, but not this time. Such intimacy was no longer for Arthur’s possession although she did not think this through at that moment: it was simply instinct that inclined her towards living ‘out of the suitcase’ for the days she was to spend with him, in much the same way she might have kept her coat on visiting somewhere she did not want to linger. But Arthur was insistent, perhaps because he was as sensitive to her subconscious as he was to the pattern of her thoughts. The case was open.

  She watched in the doorway as he hung her clothes in the rickety wardrobe and laid out her underwear in the top drawer of a deal chest. And then he found the photograph of David she’d foolishly slipped between the folds of her nightdress.

  ‘I suppose you had to bring him along,’ Arthur said. ‘I assume this is your husband?’ The remark was deliberately unpleasant.

  He stood holding the framed print, Exhibit Number One in the prosecution. And Mickey heard the guilty admission and experienced the full horror of being with the wrong person.

  The episode of the photograph regenerated Arthur’s aggrieved demeanour and during their first evening in the bungalow Mickey fell into the trap he had set for her. She tiptoed round his touchiness, offering indirect appeasement in the form of a gently eager tone.

  It was exhausting. They ate a cold supper prepared and left for them by the faceless person with whom Arthur had corresponded from England. They sat in the armchairs either side of the tiled fireplace and stared into the cheerless coiled bars of an ancient electric fire; Arthur, hunched into his bitterness, Mickey torturing herself as she imagined how different the place might have seemed with David in the other chair. Such meanderings served only to increase her sense of guilt and remorse over both men.

  Attempting to extricate herself from this mire of regret, she asked Arthur to tell her about the island and what they might do in the ensuing days, but her words sounded forced and banal.

  Arthur’s gaze turned slowly from the fire and then in a sudden, crouching movement he had left his chair and was on his knees in front of her and as he had once before, put his balding head into her lap and his arms round her waist.

  They kept in this attitude for some little while, neither saying anything though the bile had risen in Mickey’s throat and it took a great effort of will to remain, unflinching, while this little act of possessive affection ran its course. Then Arthur lifted himself away from her and when he spoke it was in the tone of confident superiority.

  ‘I think it’s time we went to bed,’ he said, in the way a father might speak to his child. ‘We’ll make an early start tomorrow and I’ll take you round the island by horse and trap – there are no cars on Sark.’

  Relief in the disappearance of his earlier mood and the sudden absence of unspoken reproach, lifted Mickey a little. She smiled at him and now he was looking at her and as before, seeing all that was there.

  ‘My poor girl,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could both stop struggling with the outside forces for the time we are here.’

  She smiled anew, resolving to make an effort and seeing clearly in that moment how the involvement had begun.

  ‘I can’t hide anything from you, can I?’ she murmured.

  ‘No,’ he replied, simply, still holding her gaze.

  She watched him lock and bolt the front door then followed him into the bedroom. In the bed, in the dark, she lay stiff and still although there was so little width it was impossible for their limbs not to touch. Arthur curled into her back and soon she thought he was asleep.

  He must have shared this bed with his mother, she thought. Arthur had never said much about his parents, never even mentioned his father; she knew so little about the small man lying beside her. It occurred to her that there were many people she had met once or twice, no more than acquaintances and yet she knew more about them than she did Arthur.

  His breathing was so quiet and even, she began to relax and feel a little ashamed for having dreaded his advances. So often in the weeks she had known him he’d shown how sensitive he was to the way she felt, and although sometimes he had used this cruelly in their conversations, she could not now imagine his being so crass as to attempt unwelcome sex. With David this had happened but then ultimately her body would always respond to his touch. And having had this thought, her mind’s eye focused on her husband’s nakedness and her limbs began to ache and feel restless.

  She drifted into pockets of sleep and lost control of her stillness. Dreaming, she was in a land of heavy sun and languid movement. Figures dressed in white lay on red earth, their legs idly crossed at the ankles, their elbows propping them up because they were watching some sort of game in the distance while behind them, other people who did not see the game, formed a solid, blurring mass, dark and heavy and huge. It seemed to grow and swell and move towards the unwitting figures resting on the red earth. Then it rose up, losing all human form and becoming a massive black cloud that swept along to where the game was being played in the distance. It began to disintegrate and the players started to run from it, but so slowly, their progress hampered by the ground underfoot which had become a dragging quagmire. Mickey searched the desperate faces, knowing David was there but unable to see him because it was David also who kept her pinioned in the observer’s place although she could not see herself or where she was.

  The violence and confusion brought her awake and a moment later Arthur was inside her, his mouth sucking at her breast. Her arms were already tightly round him but in the instant of realization she flung them apart, crying out ‘No!’ and jerking away from him. Panting, he remained arched over her, puny but momentarily predatory.

  She remained frozen in the dip of the bed, her hands now close to her face, as if he might strike her.

  ‘I thought you wanted me,’ he said in a breathless, oddly plaintive voice, almost like a child unable to comprehend rejection.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I was dreaming.’

  There was a momentary pause and then he said ‘I see,’ and ‘Of course,’ in his normal voice, and shifting from her, retreated to the edge of the bed.

  ‘Arthur . . .’
r />   ‘Please, no explanations. I apologize for misunderstanding,’ he said coldly.

  The night seemed very long, and in the morning the wrongness of the situation pressed more heavily over Mickey. Arthur was polite but cold as ice.

  The day was overcast, the air damp and grey, but it would have been impossible for them to remain in the bungalow. They went out, back along the track by which they had come the previous day, and in a short while met a woman with a horse and trap. Arthur asked her if they could ride with her and she allowed them to get into the trap although she said the season was over. She had a grudging tone and seemed to want to make it clear she was doing them a favour.

  The horse set off at an end of season trot, slow and uneven. There was not a lot to see on the island but even if there had been Mickey was in no mood for sightseeing. Her impression was of a place that had once had life but was now deserted. They saw no one and the small, isolated houses they passed had the closed-up appearance of holiday homes whose owners had long ago stopped coming to them. The only time the driver spoke was to point out the residence of a well-known actor who had committed suicide.

  Arthur sitting erect beside Mickey, seemed as much a part of the place as its landmarks: he had closed in on himself to an extent that even his nasty sarcasm would have been preferable.

  They reached an end of the island where the land fell sharply into the sea and a war-time pillbox remained sentinel against nothing more than a punishing wind.

  ‘We’ll stop here,’ Arthur addressed the slouched back of the woman. ‘We can walk back.’

  ‘It’s a long way – further than you’d think,’ the woman commented in a tone that said ‘But have it your own way.’

  ‘I’ve done it before,’ Arthur informed her, opening his purse to pay for the ride.

  When they were alone and the silence looked like persisting, Mickey searched in desperation for an opener, no matter how vapid.

  ‘It must have been a long walk for you,’ she said, thinly.

  ‘We came twice,’ he informed her. ‘The second time I was seventeen.’

  ‘I didn’t realize.’

  ‘I didn’t say.’

  Mickey wandered towards the pillbox, drawn to it like a child, because it was there. She crouched low and went inside. The air was suddenly still. There was a powerful smell of abandonment, the earth denied sun and growth. Mickey shivered and experienced that strange sensation in the bowel that comes when place and imagination combine to evoke the past. She saw soldiers, more particularly German soldiers, infantrymen, keeping watch. She felt their presence, her concentration struggling to keep hold of them. The fascination of the place gripped her and then the feeling of desolation returned, the oddest sense of having been left behind.

  She went into the wind again. Arthur was close by, and forgetting in that instant the awkwardness between them she tried to explain what she’d felt a moment earlier, and Arthur, of course, understood.

  ‘Those who believe in such things would call it time slip,’ he said, standing, his hands in his pockets, watching her closely. ‘Though quite often I feel that time as we accept it is not absolute.’

  She was entirely caught up in the experience and it excited and pleased her that she had been able to translate it and he had perceived so instantly and clearly the essence of such an illusory sensation.

  ‘I knew you would like it here,’ he said, evenly. ‘It’s our sort of place.’

  The warning bell had sounded within her, the realization that he did not and probably never had looked upon the trip to Sark as their farewell. But if the rest of the stay was to be endured she would have to pass over the loaded little remarks that assumed them bound together.

  That evening the full realization of what she had done, her cruelty, weighed heavy. Arthur had insisted on preparing supper and, as usual, produced a culinary delight. But Mickey had no appetite, despite the long exhausting walk back from the pillbox. Arthur, his moods so changeable, was now gentle and concerned in his manner. He coaxed her to eat and she did her best, but his sudden meekness made the delicate food seem dry and solid in her throat. She felt as if she was being monitored for the smallest signs to feed his hope and that he would find them even though she did not mean them to be there.

  The day had been doubly exhausting and as the evening progressed she found herself responding to him because she had no reserves left to resist and was too tired even to see that he had calculated this wearing-down process, that he was victorious again, but too clever to show it.

  They sat in the two armchairs, facing one another, and drank wine and talked about books they had read, writers and styles of writing. They shared the same tastes for authors who wrote with a cruel, noticing eye and they were able to enjoy the shared perception and Mickey to almost forget her defences, which was exactly as Arthur had planned.

  When they got up to go to the lean bed Mickey could not decide whether her legs felt heavy or light, only that they were at one of the extremes. She had drunk too much wine and this, combined with the long exposure to fresh air during the day now overwhelmed her with drowsiness. But as soon as she was in the bed and Arthur, beside her, had turned out the light, she lost the prelude to sleep.

  Despite the narrowness of the bed, their bodies were not touching and a tunnel of cold air was between them. Mickey lay on her back, wary of movement, her feet and shoulders cold as ice, and once more she was overcome by the sense of wrongness in being with Arthur. Insecure, night thoughts crowded in on her. She tried to think of David but couldn’t seem to conjure his image or his essence, only a sense of oppression she could not understand. And then she fell to thinking about Arthur and all the different Arthurs he had been that day and over the time she’d known him. That was the major difference, Arthur was myriad while David was one whole, himself and no other, and she ached now for that wholeness, for the simple normality of being with him as opposed to the perplexing mass of fragments presented to her with such sly intensity by Arthur.

  This place was Arthur. It was remote, difficult to reach: a place full of the past, dark and secret and strange. She wondered at his mother bringing him to such a nothing spot for his childhood holiday and in those years when the reminders of war-time occupation must have been so strong and recent. Arthur had said very little about the sort of person his mother had been and Mickey had sensed a closed door on the odd occasion she had been mentioned. She felt the relationship must have been very close and that even now, some years after her death, Arthur found it painful to talk about her. But if this were so it was strange that he had chosen to bring her here, to a place bound up with memories. She was uncertain why, but it had surprised her to discover that he had been to the island more than once, and that the second time he had been almost grown-up. Perhaps the surprise was because all his memories on the first day seemed associated only with the earlier visit.

  This train of thought continued, taking in the practicalities of the bungalow. Nothing had changed. Arthur had repeated this in each room. Everything was exactly as it had been when he had stayed before. The room they were in now was too small for more than one bed and the other room, with the chairs and table, was equally restrictive.

  She tried not to advance the notion of Arthur at seventeen sharing a bed with his mother; but suddenly it seemed to her that he had chosen the bungalow on Sark as part of a sick fantasy. His small and pedantic insistencies of the past few months now sprung forth in her overtired mind as signal to his purpose. She remembered how he had made her wear his mother’s cloak the night they’d been to Covent Garden, and other instances, insignificant at the time. And she remembered his asking her to sleep where she now lay, and how he had said it: ‘Please, you must sleep on that side.’ It was all horribly clear, if over embellished by an imagination fuelled with guilt and confusion.

  It was only then that she became aware of being frightened.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As the night went on, Mickey passed through various
stages of paranoia, her sleeplessness exacerbating a situation which faced vertically and in daylight she would have coped with quite easily.

  Arthur had brought her to Sark because it would be so difficult for her to ‘escape’ but she was resolved to leave next day.

  This decision gave her some comfort but then she began to picture the scene in the morning when she would tell him that she was going. She could hear his biting sarcasm, she could see him persuading her to stay, challenging her as if she was running away from herself. She now hated his knowing her so well: it was a sort of death by dissection, unwholesome and abnormal. She wanted to be the person she was with David, not the introverted soul Arthur would have her. She desperately wanted to return to normality.

  Shortly after 4 a.m. she eased herself out of the bed. In her nightdress she gathered together her things, opening drawers with painful care, her heart pounding at every sound. In the other room she filled her case and only when she had done all this did she remove the nightdress and pull on a pair of jeans and jumper. She thought she was ready and then she remembered the photograph of David, still lying in the drawer of the small bedside table where she had put it away from view following Arthur’s discovery of it in the folds of her nightdress.

  She crept back into the bedroom and jarred her toe on the leg of the bed. She froze. The black darkness of the room was turning to grey. Silence roared in her ears. There was no movement from the bed. With uncharacteristic stealth she moved forward. The table was on Arthur’s side of the bed – the side she had taken as hers until he had instructed her to take the other. His face was turned towards her, but she dared not look at it as she pulled out the drawer and slipped her hand inside. Her fingers moved over the bare surface of the wood and found nothing but emptiness. The photograph was not there.