by Zoe Morrison
I moved over in the bed, close to the edge, and lay there for a long time, my heart beating, forgetting, drawing ever further away.
32.
Oxford, October, 1950
The next morning he got up and left while it was still dark. I lay in the bed pretending to be asleep. When I heard the front door close and everything went quiet, I got up and went down to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. A navy cotton apron was hanging on the hook on the back of the kitchen door. I put it on and started cleaning; I wiped the glass in the windows until it squeaked, pushed a cloth across a floor until it shone back at me.
I can see now why I was drawn to the catharsis of a clean surface, of limbs moving strong and fast. The claim of command, however transitory and unreal, that a mop can bring. Here I was, newly married. I wiped and wiped; swish, swish. Then I washed myself fastidiously, got dressed, did my hair and face and sat down at the piano. And I played. My god, how I played. I played all the pieces I knew, one after the other. Afterwards I was myself again; it helped me breathe.
I looked around the house, examining it. Then I put on my coat and walked up the street on one side, and back down the other, taking it all in.
When he came back in the evening I told him that it was a good piano. He nodded. Then I said that I had done some cleaning; we were standing in the front room at the time and he looked around and, with a half-smile on his face, he said, ‘What about that?’ pointing to the mantelpiece.
I looked at the mantelpiece but I saw nothing.
‘There,’ he said, pointing at it again. I still couldn’t see anything. ‘There!’ a little louder, ‘You’ve missed a spot, see?’ And he went close to it and pointed again. I looked at it, and back at him, and I saw a flash of something terrible, which I could not yet name, but it frightened me.
‘You’re blind,’ he said, and he walked out.
33.
Oxford, October, 1950
The night after, he came home in the evening and walked straight down to the kitchen, where I was standing at the stove.
‘Is dinner ready?’ he said.
‘Hello. Not yet. Soon, though. Are you hungry?’
‘Dinner needs to be ready at seven.’
‘Oh. Why?’
But he’d left the room.
When it was ready I called him and he sat at the table, looked at the food in front of him, his face expressionless. He started to eat. When about half the food was gone, he put down his cutlery.
‘You do realise,’ he said, ‘that this is quite disgusting?’
I looked down at the food, shocked. I had almost finished mine. It was a basic meal, I can’t remember what it was, but it was all right, I thought.
He ate some more, pushed back the plate and left the table.
I found this sort of behaviour unfathomable. The only way I could understand it was to assume that he was used to the rules and fare of High Table. I hadn’t done much cooking; I’d spent most of my life in institutions too. Maybe I still had a lot to learn, but I thought that what I cooked wasn’t bad.
He was particular about a lot of things, it turned out. How they were to be done, how they were to look. He wanted his shirt to be ironed in a specific way and ended up writing it down for me. And if there was a wrinkle it had to be done again.
‘Edward,’ I laughed, when he pointed out a crease for the first time. ‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘I think you’ll find,’ he said, entirely serious, ‘that the idea of wearing that thing you’ve ruined is ridiculous. You’ll have to do it again.’
His face had a rigid look, that intense glare.
And he continued finding fault. The cleaning, for example: when he came in, if he was in a bad mood (I quickly realised there was a correlation) he would immediately inspect something, the kitchen floor, say, and point out where there was dirt or disarray. Once, he opened the cutlery drawer and saw that I had rearranged it. This enraged him.
‘This,’ he hissed, taking up all the forks in one hand, the knives in the other, clattering them back into different places, ‘is where the forks go!’
I didn’t say anything. I had moved the cutlery because it was what I’d seen at home, what made sense to me every time I washed them, dried them, put them away.
‘Are you listening to me?’ he said.
I turned to look at him, said nothing.
‘Are you listening to me?’ he roared, and he slammed his fist down on the bench over the drawer.
I jumped, frightened.
‘All right,’ I said, in a voice as mild as I could make it, ‘all right.’
He ended up writing me a list that detailed all the housekeeping tasks, how and when they should be done, and the time each task should take. The things I felt about this officious document. Of course he didn’t have any idea how to do those jobs either, so he often overestimated the times considerably. I completed them as quickly as I could and spent the rest of my time doing what I wanted, then braced myself for his return in the evening.
As his lectures on housekeeping got longer, I learnt to look as though I was listening. I had a way of angling my head, my body, positioning my eyes, when in actual fact I wasn’t taking in a word, I was listening to music in my head, or a conversation I was having with someone, or a letter I was writing. Sometimes a few words found their way through: stupid, he would say, or slovenly, or hopeless. But I would blot it all out.
Twice a week he didn’t come home in the evenings because he dined in Hall. This was a relief. But it wasn’t supposed to be what you felt when you were just married, was it?
I wrote letters but didn’t send them. To Hetty, to my mother, to God. I didn’t know who to ask. Was this behaviour normal, to be expected? Would he settle down once we had both got used to things? Was I doing something wrong? He seemed to be very anxious about his work. He would come home obviously preoccupied, then sit in his study at his desk for most of the night, pulling at his hair.
At the time, he was pioneering a radical form of laissez-faire economics, but it wasn’t going as well as he wanted and some of his manuscripts were being rejected by journals and publishers. In those post-war years of high growth and low unemployment everyone was Keynesian. He did have some colleagues who championed his work, but at this stage they were mostly subordinates. He’d studied with Friedrich Hayek at the London School of Economics (who’d invented, among other things, the concept of ‘the invisible hand’ of the market) and spent some time in Cambridge (where the department was evenly divided, for and against Keynesianism). He visited Cambridge a few years later when Milton Friedman had come out from Chicago. But he had fallen out with Hayek (over the term ‘conservatism’: Edward embraced it, Hayek did not) and was scathing of Friedman, who moved between bureaucracy and academia, honing his ideas. Edward remained in academia and felt he was far superior. He thought he had come up with a radical free-market approach to economics that amounted to a whole life philosophy, and people were simply not recognising its brilliance. He used to tell me about it. He would beckon me into his study when he was in a favourable mood and talk to me about it, mostly in technical terms that I did not understand, but sometimes in ways that I did, and I remember thinking: this doesn’t sound right to me. Once, he showed me a page of graphs, one axis on top of the other, and he pointed to them and said, ‘The whole world, and everything in it, is explained by that.’
I passed his study one day and he was standing by the desk reading a letter. He was holding it in both hands, had his head right up close to it. When he finished I noticed that his hands were shaking. Then he placed the letter down on the desk and put both hands over his face. I nearly went to him then, but suddenly he swung around and with huge movements swept everything from the desk onto the floor, including a cup of tea, which threw a brown stain right across the carpet. I must have started because his head whipped around. Just in time I stepped out of view and went straight upstairs. I found the letter later when he was out: another manuscript ha
d been rejected. I picked up the pieces of broken china, scrubbed the tea from the carpet.
I played the piano a lot. After I finished the housework I went straight to it. Oh, that Steinway, it was a glorious piano. It was new. I had no idea how he had come by it.
After my practice I’d go for a walk in Port Meadow, a large area of open common land bordered on one side by the River Thames. I’d walk out of the bottom of North Oxford, into Jericho, then up Walton Well Road to the entrance; it took me no time at all to find it. At that time of year Port Meadow was a wet expanse (it had a tendency to flood; sometimes in winter it even iced over and people skated on it). Horse, cattle and geese grazed upon it. I would walk out into the middle and look up at the sky, which was so high, vast and grey. Then I’d return to the house in time to cook the dinner.
(I fantasised about these walks later. What if I’d kept walking all the way through the meadow instead of turning back, out into Wolvercote, where I’d eat dinner at the Trout, chowder and ale, perhaps, then get on a bus, and then a train, a boat. Or what if I’d said hello to the gypsies who camped in the meadow rather than ignored and avoided them; what if I’d gone right up to them and started a conversation and they’d invited me to join them and I’d sneaked out at dawn the next day and become a traveller, leaving Oxford at the age of twenty, a big sun rising over the spires, making the ice shine on the road.)
I kept trying with the cooking, the dinners. They seemed to me to be important, more so than the state of the floor, or the laundry. Coming together at the end of the day, sharing a meal. But it was not only that. Sometimes after dinner he’d asked me to play for him. We’d walk up to the front room together, he’d pour himself a snifter from the tray in the corner, sit down in one of the new armchairs. He would sit listening, sipping, and when I finished he would nod and say something like, ‘Thank you, that was very nice,’ then get up and go into the study. They were quite beautiful to me, those moments.
I read the little recipe books over and over, I studied them. Sometimes I shortened my walk at the end of the day to cook something more complicated (I never shortened my practice). There wasn’t much interesting food back then to work with, and it wasn’t only that there was still rationing and restrictions and shortages, it was also because he was so mean with the money. He would count out the housekeeping on a Monday morning and shove it across the table at me, muttering, Bring me the receipts.
One day I decided to try a dish I knew he liked. He’d mentioned it once or twice in the summer when we’d had those glorious picnics in the South Park. Maybe, I thought, I could make a dish so well he could not fail to enjoy it, and he would be happy; I would make him happy. The ingredients took up most of the week’s housekeeping. I took all day to prepare it. I put a lace cloth I’d found folded at the back of the linen cupboard on the table, and two crystal candlesticks, which the man with the moustache had given us as a wedding present. Then I went out and spent another penny on two tall white tapered candles at a little store on Walton Street. I began to feel a small fizz of anticipation. I could picture in detail what a successful evening meal for a newlywed couple looked like – it was familiar to me, even though I’d never had one.
When he came home and saw all this, his eyes narrowed and he said, ‘What is this?’
‘Dinner.’
‘Is it ready?’
‘Not quite.’ It wasn’t yet six forty-five; the dish was still in the oven.
Without saying anything, he went into the study.
‘It’s ready,’ I said at the door when the time came (seven precisely).
‘I’m busy now, it will have to wait.’
I stood there, flabbergasted. Then I started to panic, for what was I to do with the meat? How did you keep it warm without continuing to cook it?
In the end I took the food out of the oven, served it up on the plates and, keeping the oven on, put them on top of the stove, where they would stay warm.
When he came in I put the plates on the table, he looked at the food for a second and started to eat. At this point he would usually say something derogatory, but he said nothing that night, not for the entire meal. He finished, wiped his mouth, pushed his chair back and went back into the study.
I took the dishes slowly to the sink and stood there thinking, What on earth am I going to do for meals for the rest of the week? Thinking, in another place, in another time, there could be another couple like this, and later in the evening when the dishes were done, she would sit in a chair in the front room looking at the window, and he would appear at the door with two cups of tea, one for her, one for him. They would sit beside each other, sipping in silence. Then he would get down on his knees before her, lay his head in her lap and start to weep, and he would beg forgiveness and plead with her to play something for him. And when she acquiesced and went to the piano he would listen attentively, as if his life depended on it.
I washed the dishes, wiped down the stove-top.
It was no good, I thought, all these stories I made up in my head; they were no good.
34.
Oxford, November, 1950
I left not long after. I packed my things after he went to work one morning, walked to the station, the small amount of housekeeping money that remained for the week jangling in my coat pocket.
I watched the trains come and go. The station guard came over to me and asked if he could assist with anything. No, thank you, I said primly, I’ll just sit here for now, if that’s all right with you, and he went away. No one bothered me after that; it was almost as if they were used to such a thing. I paid tuppence for a cup of tea, a penny to use the lavatory. I sat watching the drama of people arriving and departing, trying to work out what to do. At one point I started to think about Australia, being on that pier in Tilbury, stepping onto the boat, feeling the tug of it as it sailed away from the shore, and then the buoyancy of the ocean.
I don’t know how he knew where to find me. That evening he walked onto the platform and stood there looking at the tracks. When I didn’t move he came over and picked up the suitcase. There wasn’t anger in his gesture, neither was there tenderness, it was matter of fact, as if this were yet another task in a long day. Wordlessly, I stood up, followed him out of the station and into a taxi.
When we were in the taxi he reached over and took my hand. I started to cry then. At the house he opened the front door, put my suitcase down at the bottom of the stairs, took out a hanky, held my chin in one hand and carefully wiped my cheeks. Then he kissed me on the forehead. He said, I have made a very big mess of things. I have really ruined them. Down here, he said, pointing down the hall.
I went into the kitchen and saw that he’d been trying to cook some chops, and that he had let the potatoes boil dry on the stove. I picked up the saucepan of burnt potatoes, but he said, No, I’ll do it, you do some practice, and my heart leapt. I went to the piano and started to play, although I was still listening to the sounds coming from the kitchen.
He told me to come. He had set the kitchen table with the plates of food: wilted cabbage, some nearly raw sticks of neatly sliced carrot and the cold, singed chops. We ate it all; it was late by then. I got up from the table, picked up the plates, he went into the study.
That night he read in bed before going to sleep, and when the lights were off he reached over, found my hand and held it for a while, then he moved his body towards me and held me in his arms in the dark.
The next evening there were no cruel comments about the house or the meal.
It took about a week for it to all start again.
Perhaps we could call this part ‘the honeymoon’.
35.
Oxford, November, 1950
I was running a damp cloth slowly over a windowsill. I was thinking, for a moment, that it was not unlike practising scales.
‘It’s not good enough,’ he’d said the night before. ‘It just won’t do. It doesn’t measure up.’
He’d come home late; his face was grey. T
he mutton stew had been simmering on the stove too long and had dried out, but I served it anyway because it was all there was.
‘You look tired,’ I said. ‘You must have been working very hard.’
He didn’t answer. He looked at the stew, tasted it, threw down his fork, which skittered, tines up, across the table towards me.
‘Inedible,’ he said. ‘And what have you done with your hair? It looks peculiar.’ He reached across, picked up the fork, took another mouthful. ‘Disgusting,’ he said, and he picked up the plate, held it for a second then dropped it. It broke into pieces on the floor, although the stew, strangely, stayed in the same shape.
‘Clean that up,’ he said, pointing to it. I sat there looking down at the mess. Jumped slightly when I heard the front door bang.
When he came in the next evening for dinner I did not speak. I served him something, quietly. He ate carefully. Then he looked up at me and said, ‘This is nice. What is it?’
‘It’s a chop with roast onions, mashed potato and gravy.’
‘Very nice. Thank you.’
I was speechless. I remember looking at the meal, making a quick note of the various things I’d done, wondering what had made the difference. I thought as I ate: yes, I suppose it is quite nice. I remember realising my entire body had been clenched. I sat up a little, swallowed another mouthful.
I became increasingly nervous when I cooked the dinner. This exhibited itself first in a fluttering in my stomach, which I mistook for hunger. But I was slightly short of breath too, my heart would race, my hands shake. Jesus, Alice, I thought, pull yourself together. It’s a clutch of carrots boiling, for goodness sake.
