The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by Various

  One night in the bedroom, Matthew asked: ‘Susan, I don’t want to interfere – don’t think that, please – but are you sure you are well?’

  She was brushing her hair at the mirror. She made two more strokes on either side of her head, before she replied: ‘Yes, dear, I am sure I am well.’

  He was again lying on his back, his blond head on his hands, his elbows angled up and part-concealing his face. He said: ‘Then Susan, I have to ask you this question, though you must understand, I’m not putting any sort of pressure on you.’ (Susan heard the word ‘pressure’ with dismay, because this was inevitable; of course she could not go on like this.) ‘Are things going to go on like this?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, going vague and bright and idiotic again, so as to escape: ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’

  He was jerking his elbows up and down, in annoyance or in pain, and, looking at him, she saw he had got thin, even gaunt; and restless angry movements were not what she remembered of him. He said: ‘Do you want a divorce, is that it?’

  At this, Susan only with the greatest difficulty stopped herself from laughing: she could hear the bright bubbling laughter she would have emitted, had she let herself. He could only mean one thing: she had a lover, and that was why she spent her days in London, as lost to him as if she had vanished to another continent.

  Then the small panic set in again: she understood that he hoped she did have a lover, he was begging her to say so, because otherwise it would be too terrifying.

  She thought this out as she brushed her hair, watching the fine black stuff fly up to make its little clouds of electricity, hiss, hiss. Behind her head, across the room, was a blue wall. She realized she was absorbed in watching the black hair making shapes against the blue. She should be answering him. ‘Do you want a divorce, Matthew?’

  He said: ‘That surely isn’t the point, is it?’

  ‘You brought it up, I didn’t,’ she said, brightly, suppressing meaningless tinkling laughter.

  Next day she asked Fred: ‘Have enquiries been made for me?’

  He hesitated, and she said: ‘I’ve been coming here a year now. I’ve made no trouble, and you’ve been paid every day. I have a right to be told.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Mrs Jones, a man did come asking.’

  ‘A man from a detective agency?’

  ‘Well, he could have been, couldn’t he?’

  ‘I was asking you… Well, what did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him a Mrs Jones came every weekday from ten until five or six and stayed in Number 19 by herself.’

  ‘Describing me?’

  ‘Well, Mrs Jones, I had no alternative. Put yourself in my place.’

  ‘By rights I should deduct what that man gave you for the information.’

  He raised shocked eyes: she was not the sort of person to make jokes like this! Then he chose to laugh: a pinkish wet slit appeared across his white crinkled face; his eyes positively begged her to laugh, otherwise he might lose some money. She remained grave, looking at him.

  He stopped laughing and said: ‘You want to go up now?’ – returning to the familiarity, the comradeship, of the country where no questions are asked, on which (and he knew it) she depended completely.

  She went up to sit in her wicker chair. But it was not the same. Her husband had searched her out. (The world had searched her out.) The pressures were on her. She was here with his connivance. He might walk in at any moment, here, into Room 19. She imagined the report from the detective agency: ‘A woman calling herself Mrs Jones, fitting the description of your wife (et cetera, et cetera, et cetera), stays alone all day in Room No. 19. She insists on this room, waits for it if it is engaged. As far as the proprietor knows, she receives no visitors there, male or female.’ A report something on these lines Matthew must have received.

  Well, of course he was right: things couldn’t go on like this. He had put an end to it all simply by sending the detective after her.

  She tried to shrink herself back into the shelter of the room, a snail pecked out of its shell and trying to squirm back. But the peace of the room had gone. She was trying consciously to revive it, trying to let go into the dark creative trance (or whatever it was) that she had found there. It was no use, yet she craved for it, she was as ill as a suddenly deprived addict.

  Several times she returned to the room, to look for herself there, but instead she found the unnamed spirit of restlessness, a pricking fevered hunger for movement, an irritable self-consciousness that made her brain feel as if it had coloured lights going on and off inside it. Instead of the soft dark that had been the room’s air, were now waiting for her demons that made her dash blindly about, muttering words of hate; she was impelling herself from point to point like a moth dashing itself against a windowpane, sliding to the bottom, fluttering off on broken wings, then crashing into the invisible barrier again. And again and again. Soon she was exhausted, and she told Fred that for a while she would not be needing the room, she was going on holiday. Home she went, to the big white house by the river. The middle of a weekday, and she felt guilty at returning to her own home when not expected. She stood unseen, looking in at the kitchen window. Mrs Parkes, wearing a discarded floral overall of Susan’s, was stooping to slide something into the oven. Sophie, arms folded, was leaning her back against a cupboard and laughing at some joke made by a girl not seen before by Susan – a dark foreign girl, Sophie’s visitor. In an armchair Molly, one of the twins, lay curled, sucking her thumb and watching the grown-ups. She must have some sickness, to be kept from school. The child’s listless face, the dark circles under her eyes, hurt Susan: Molly was looking at the three grown-ups working and talking in exactly the same way Susan looked at the four through the kitchen window: she was remote, shut off from them.

  But then, just as Susan imagined herself going in, picking up the little girl, and sitting in an armchair with her, stroking her probably heated forehead, Sophie did just that: she had been standing on one leg, the other knee flexed, its foot set against the wall. Now she let her foot in its ribbon-tied red shoe slide down the wall, stood solid on two feet, clapping her hands before and behind her, and sang a couple of lines in German, so that the child lifted her heavy eyes at her and began to smile. Then she walked, or rather skipped, over to the child, swung her up, and let her fall into her lap at the same moment she sat herself. She said ‘Hopla! Hopla! Molly…’ and began stroking the dark untidy young head that Molly laid on her shoulder for comfort.

  Well… Susan blinked the tears of farewell out of her eyes, and went quietly up through the house to her bedroom. There she sat looking at the river through the trees. She felt at peace, but in a way that was new to her. She had no desire to move, to talk, to do anything at all. The devils that had haunted the house, the garden, were not there; but she knew it was because her soul was in Room 19 in Fred’s Hotel; she was not really here at all. It was a sensation that should have been frightening: to sit at her own bedroom window, listening to Sophie’s rich young voice sing German nursery songs to her child, listening to Mrs Parkes clatter and move below, and to know that all this had nothing to do with her: she was already out of it.

  Later, she made herself go down and say she was home: it was unfair to be here unannounced. She took lunch with Mrs Parkes, Sophie, Sophie’s Italian friend Maria, and her daughter Molly, and felt like a visitor.

  A few days later, at bedtime, Matthew said: ‘Here’s your five pounds’, and pushed them over at her. Yet he must have known she had not been leaving the house at all.

  She shook her head, gave it back to him, and said, in explanation, not in accusation: ‘As soon as you knew where I was, there was no point.’

  He nodded, not looking at her. He was turned away from her: thinking, she knew, how best to handle this wife who terrified him.

  He said: ‘I wasn’t trying to… It’s just that I was worried.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘I must confess that I was beginni
ng to wonder…’

  ‘You thought I had a lover?’

  ‘Yes, I am afraid I did.’

  She knew that he wished she had. She sat wondering how to say: ‘For a year now I’ve been spending all my days in a very sordid hotel room. It’s the place where I’m happy. In fact, without it I don’t exist.’ She heard herself saying this, and understood how terrified he was that she might. So instead she said: ‘Well, perhaps you’re not far wrong.’

  Probably Matthew would think the hotel proprietor lied: he would want to think so.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and she could hear his voice spring up, so to speak, with relief, ‘in that case I must confess I’ve got a bit of an affair on myself.’

  She said, detached and interested: ‘Really? Who is she?’ and saw Matthew’s startled look because of this reaction.

  ‘It’s Phil. Phil Hunt.’

  She had known Phil Hunt well in the old unmarried days. She was thinking: No, she won’t do, she’s too neurotic and difficult. She’s never been happy yet. Sophie’s much better. Well, Matthew will see that himself, as sensible as he is.

  This line of thought went on in silence, while she said aloud: ‘It’s no point telling you about mine, because you don’t know him.’

  Quick, quick, invent, she thought. Remember how you invented all that nonsense for Miss Townsend.

  She began slowly, careful not to contradict herself: ‘His name is Michael’ (Michael What?) – ‘Michael Plant.’ (What a silly name!) ‘He’s rather like you – in looks, I mean.’ And indeed, she could imagine herself being touched by no one but Matthew himself. ‘He’s a publisher.’ (Really? Why?) ‘He’s got a wife already and two children.’

  She brought out this fantasy, proud of herself.

  Matthew said: ‘Are you two thinking of marrying?’

  She said, before she could stop herself: ‘Good God, no!’

  She realized, if Matthew wanted to marry Phil Hunt, that this was too emphatic, but apparently it was all right, for his voice sounded relieved as he said: ‘It is a bit impossible to imagine oneself married to anyone else, isn’t it?’ With which he pulled her to him, so that her head lay on his shoulder. She turned her face into the dark of his flesh, and listened to the blood pounding through her ears saying: I am alone, I am alone, I am alone.

  In the morning Susan lay in bed while he dressed.

  He had been thinking things out in the night, because now he said: ‘Susan, why don’t we make a foursome?’

  Of course, she said to herself, of course he would be bound to say that. If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let’s make a foursome!

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘We could all meet for lunch. I mean, it’s ridiculous, you sneaking off to filthy hotels, and me staying late at the office, and all the lies everyone has to tell.’

  What on earth did I say his name was? – she panicked, then said: ‘I think it’s a good idea, but Michael is away at the moment. When he comes back, though – and I’m sure you two would like each other.’

  ‘He’s away, is he? So that’s why you’ve been…’ Her husband put his hand to the knot of his tie in a gesture of male coquetry she would not before have associated with him; and he bent to kiss her cheek with the expression that goes with the words: Oh you naughty little puss! And she felt its answering look, naughty and coy, come onto her face.

  Inside she was dissolving in horror at them both, at how far they had both sunk from honesty of emotion.

  So now she was saddled with a lover, and he had a mistress! How ordinary, how reassuring, how jolly! And now they would make a foursome of it, and go about to theatres and restaurants. After all, the Rawlings could well afford that sort of thing, and presumably the publisher Michael Plant could afford to do himself and his mistress quite well. No, there was nothing to stop the four of them developing the most intricate relationship of civilized tolerance, all enveloped in a charming afterglow of autumnal passion. Perhaps they would all go off on holidays together? She had known people who did. Or perhaps Matthew would draw the line there? Why should he, though, if he was capable of talking about ‘foursomes’ at all?

  She lay in the empty bedroom, listening to the car drive off with Matthew in it, off to work. Then she heard the children clattering off to school to the accompaniment of Sophie’s cheerfully ringing voice. She slid down into the hollow of the bed, for shelter against her own irrelevance. And she stretched out her hand to the hollow where her husband’s body had lain, but found no comfort there: he was not her husband. She curled herself up in a small tight ball under the clothes: she could stay here all day, all week, indeed, all her life.

  But in a few days she must produce Michael Plant, and – but how? She must presumably find some agreeable man prepared to impersonate a publisher called Michael Plant. And in return for which she would – what? Well, for one thing they would make love. The idea made her want to cry with sheer exhaustion. Oh no, she had finished with all that – the proof of it was that the words ‘make love’, or even imagining it, trying hard to revive no more than the pleasures of sensuality, let alone affection, or love, made her want to run away and hide from the sheer effort of the thing… Good Lord, why make love at all? Why make love with anyone? Or if you are going to make love, what does it matter who with? Why shouldn’t she simply walk into the street, pick up a man and have a roaring sexual affair with him? Why not? Or even with Fred? What difference did it make?

  But she had let herself in for it – an interminable stretch of time with a lover, called Michael, as part of a gallant civilized foursome. Well, she could not, and she would not.

  She got up, dressed, went down to find Mrs Parkes, and asked her for the loan of a pound, since Matthew, she said, had forgotten to leave her money. She exchanged with Mrs Parkes variations on the theme that husbands are all the same, they don’t think, and without saying a word to Sophie, whose voice could be heard upstairs from the telephone, walked to the underground, travelled to South Kensington, changed to the Inner Circle, got out at Paddington, and walked to Fred’s Hotel. There she told Fred that she wasn’t going on holiday after all, she needed the room. She would have to wait an hour, Fred said. She went to a busy tearoom-cum-restaurant around the corner, and sat watching the people flow in and out the door that kept swinging open and shut, watched them mingle and merge, and separate, felt her being flow into them, into their movement. When the hour was up, she left a half-crown for her pot of tea, and left the place without looking back at it, just as she had left her house, the big, beautiful white house, without another look, but silently dedicating it to Sophie. She returned to Fred, received the key of Number 19, now free, and ascended the grimy stairs slowly, letting floor after floor fall away below her, keeping her eyes lifted, so that floor after floor descended jerkily to her level of vision, and fell away out of sight.

  Number 19 was the same. She saw everything with an acute, narrow, checking glance: the cheap shine of the satin spread, which had been replaced carelessly after the two bodies had finished their convulsions under it; a trace of powder on the glass that topped the chest of drawers; an intense green shade in a fold of the curtain. She stood at the window, looking down, watching people pass and pass and pass until her mind went dark from the constant movement. Then she sat in the wicker chair, letting herself go slack. But she had to be careful, because she did not want, today, to be surprised by Fred’s knock at five o’clock.

  The demons were not here. They had gone forever, because she was buying her freedom from them. She was slipping already into the dark fructifying dream that seemed to caress her inwardly, like the movement of her blood… but she had to think about Matthew first. Should she write a letter for the coroner? But what should she say? She would like to leave him with the look on his face she had seen this morning – banal, admittedly, but at least confidently healthy. Well, that was impossible, one did not look like that
with a wife dead from suicide. But how to leave him believing she was dying because of a man – because of the fascinating publisher Michael Plant? Oh, how ridiculous! How absurd! How humiliating! But she decided not to trouble about it, simply not to think about the living. If he wanted to believe she had a lover, he would believe it. And he did want to believe it. Even when he had found out that there was no publisher in London called Michael Plant, he would think: Oh poor Susan, she was afraid to give me his real name.

  And what did it matter whether he married Phil Hunt or Sophie? Though it ought to be Sophie, who was already the mother of those children… and what hypocrisy to sit here worrying about the children, when she was going to leave them because she had not got the energy to stay.

  She had about four hours. She spent them delightfully, darkly, sweetly, letting herself slide gently, gently, to the edge of the river. Then, with hardly a break in her consciousness, she got up, pushed the thin rug against the door, made sure the windows were tight shut, put two shillings in the meter, and turned on the gas. For the first time since she had been in the room she lay on the hard bed that smelled stale, that smelled of sweat and sex.