Violet opened her mouth to say no, for she wanted some peace, but remembered the advice she had read in an American magazine - never neglect opportunities to bring enemies round - and thought better of it.
The London streets wore the distinctive air of a wet summer. Moisture oozed from the roads and pavements. Still oily from her session, Violet longed for a bath.
Sebastian indicated the nearest cafe. ‘Like a proper drink?’ Thump went the hoof on the savannah floor.
‘No, thank you.’ Violet was at her most gracious.
He did not press her but hailed a taxi and gave directions. Violet sat with her briefcase across her knees, hoping it suggested the ultimate in female power-broking and debated with herself as to whether it was sensible to bring up the changes she had suggested to the marketing meetings and which were still being discussed. Caution won, and she remained silent. Sebastian moved closer.
‘What does your old man do?’
‘Merchant banker. Why?’
‘Just wondered.’ Sebastian’s fingers wandered over her thigh and then retracted. ‘Sorry.’
Violet opened her mouth to suggest he kept his hands to himself but was forestalled by Sebastian leaning towards her, a mocking little smile stretching his lips. ‘You’re very beautiful, Vi.’
‘Thank you.’ Violet suddenly remembered that she had not planned anything for supper and it was seven o’clock.
‘Very.’ This time Sebastian’s hand found its way to the opening of her blouse.
Violet was forced to abandon thoughts of tinned soup and (wholemeal) frozen pizza. She looked at Sebastian. ‘Sebastian,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’
He squeezed, rather painfully. ‘Come on, darling.’
‘Sebastian. This sort of thing is very old-fashioned, you know, and politically incorrect.’
He paid no attention and Violet knew she had to make a decision. Bear this ridiculous performance for the sake of her ambitions at work — Sebastian being senior and rising - or not. (Actually, he did smell nice and expensive and obviously had a bit of money.)
Not. She moved her briefcase sharply to the right which blockaded Sebastian’s access, wriggled free, tapped on the driver’s partition and ordered him to stop. Safely on the pavement, she thanked the driver and said, ‘Good night, Sebastian. Thank you for the ride. See you tomorrow.’
Not in the least embarrassed, the smile still in place, he sent a little wave through the window as if to say that this was a scene he had played many times and it was neither here nor there as to how it ended. The implication that she was only a piece of skirt stung just a little. Nevertheless, Violet skimmed rapidly over the implications of the episode in relation to office politics and made the mistake of watching the taxi out of sight. Then, a pleasing thought occurred: she was smarter and tougher than Sebastian Westland and who was to say who would survive if it came to war.
Taxis being plentiful in Waterloo, she decided to walk to the rank at the station, but became confused with a temporary diversion and found herself in the station concourse.
It was busy with commuters and holiday traffic, including an army of backpackers heading for the night trains. A few businessmen were swallowing beers in the bars, the more prudent, coffee in the coffee bar. Other passengers were bunched by the magazine racks in W. H. Smith and picking over bargain books. Violet sniffed. She liked the smell of a station.
As Violet made for the taxi rank, she saw Jamie.
He was talking to a woman wearing a short-sleeved, stone-coloured linen suit with her back to Violet. She was familiar . . . but not, and was looking up at Jamie as she talked. It took a few seconds for the vignette to register properly with Violet and she searched for a comparison. Long ago, before she became ambitious, she had read a novel by a feted novelist about a meeting in a station. A residual memory fought its way up through the depths of her memory. She then recollected the clever, indulgent, detached French films she had seen many times in New York because it was the thing to do in her circle. In those films people were always meeting in stations. The rendezvous usually constituted or presaged disaster.
The man who looked like Jamie was wearing a grey suit and paisley tie - she had seen them this morning. Black shoes, yes. She was sure about those. Pink-striped shirt. Yes, yes. Grey socks. You see, she acknowledged to herself during the seconds that had stretched and billowed over her head, I know my husband down to the last thread on his back.
In the taxi, Violet stared out of the window into the dusk and noticed, for the first time, Vauxhall Bridge’s disintegrating brickwork and the queue outside the doss-house. One of the tramps, frail and bearded, was parked in a wheelchair like an abandoned species. A nuisance who had no use.
Jamie at Waterloo? Why?
Emmy, who was waiting in the kitchen with her fringed suede bag slung over her shoulder, was uncharacteristically short with Violet when she arrived home. Violet got the point.
Emmy hitched the bag over her shoulder and got to her feet. ‘Edward’s fine. He ate second helpings of all his food.’
‘Thanks, Emmy.’ Violet spoke with unusual gratitude and added, ‘I’m sorry to have kept you.’
Emmy looked at Violet and Violet found her eyes sliding away from Emmy’s direct ones which looked angry. ‘Is anything wrong, Emmy?’
Emmy wanted to reply that a few things would benefit from brushing up (wages, hours, consideration) but confined it to one. ‘I know you don’t want Edward to sleep during the day, but I let him nap this afternoon because he was so tired.’
Violet had issued the instruction on the happy assumption that it would make Edward sleep better during the night.
‘You mean you wanted a rest.’
The words escaped before Violet could reconsider her management technique. At the end of her tether after a long, fractious day, Emmy found herself shrugging. ‘If that’s the way you want to look at it, Mrs Beckett.’
Violet did see it that way. Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘It means I’ll be getting up in the night.’
Emmy’s mouth opened to say, ‘Tough titty’ but she thought better of it. Violet opened her mouth to say something cutting but was forestalled by the mixture of rebellion and genuine anger on Emmy’s face. Violet’s annoyance shrivelled and, all at once, she felt exhausted, depressed and uncharacteristically apprehensive.
‘Well, Emmy.’
‘Well, Mrs Beckett.’ Emmy resisted the urge to stick her hands on her hips and glare Violet down; she plaited the suede fringe instead. ‘I did what I thought best.’
‘Yes,’ said Violet, ‘I suppose you did.’
Emmy was thoroughly taken aback by Violet’s capitulation and told Marie-Laure in the wine bar later that her employer was in danger of going soft. Marie-Laure, who came from Brussels, and held dogmatic notions on routine and discipline and who had the misfortune to be working in a liberal family, remarked that Emmy was lucky to know where she was.
‘Am I?’ said Emmy, struck by the notion, and ordered another beer.
Normally, Violet fell like a stone into sleep from which she was only dragged by Edward’s whimpers. Tonight, she read The Wakeful Toddler: The Problem of Sleep Deprivation and Its Successful Management until her eyes felt sore. Why she had been vouchsafed a child who considered sleep a form of torture she would never know. Only that she came near murder when other mothers opened their eyes wide and made remarks such as, ‘Oh, heavens, mine slept through the night at three weeks.’
Then she lay awake, brain jogged into frantic activity as she analysed the bits of her life: motherhood, marriage, job, melded together into a rock that she was being forced to carry. Worse, at the heart of the rock was the mass - as easily chopped as the tofu she favoured - of her worry and fatigue which she worked so hard to conceal. Of her dislike of her son.
There, she had admitted it. Terrible words. Terrible meaning. But the confession brought no relief, no cooling hand over her hot, burning guilt. No sudden release of the poison draining from a boi
l.
Violet shifted tack.
No one could accuse her and Jamie of having a bad marriage. On the contrary, it was good. Violet thought back over the early days in New York when Jamie could not have enough of her and power came as naturally as breathing.
Jamie would not have been at Waterloo, talking to a woman who was so familiar, and yet not.
Under the sheets, Violet slid a hand towards her sleeping husband and touched his hip, as once he had felt for hers. Jamie lay inert and Violet sighed.
She was still awake when Edward gave his first cry, as usual in the wave band between one thirty and three o’clock, and Violet stumbled out of bed. The plan, à la The Wakeful Toddler, which had seemed so sensible and constructive during the day, was to give Edward a bottle of water instead of juice or milk, the idea being to bore him into sleeping through the night.
Edward had other, better ideas and fought for them with vigour. The house seemed to ring with the cries of the helpless, dependent — and unreasonable. At one point, Violet raised her face to the dark ceiling and her own face crumpled. She was tired, oh, so deeply tired, of the business of being in a female body, of babies and female curves, and feeding, and monthly rhythms that caged her as surely as the rat in the laboratory.
‘Oh, God,’ she whispered. ‘Is there no rest any more?’ Sweating with fatigue and a depth of anger she had never experienced before, Violet held her son’s wriggling body and pressed into it with her scarlet-tipped fingers. Edward roared in response, as much from surprise as hurt.
‘Just shut up, you little beast,’ she hissed at him. ‘Just shut up.’
Edward wailed harder. Beatrix Potter frieze, teddy bears, flickering fires, alphabet wall-paper, and empty space which her mother should have occupied, memory and need whirled like the snowstorm in the paperweight inside Violet’s thudding head. Rage, betrayal, bitter grief had been trapped there and almost unfathomable fatigue and Violet, goaded to madness by the whole damn bloody business of what she was, of what had been taken away by motherhood, slammed Edward - her unloved son — back into his cot.
The crying stopped. Just like that. Silence enfolded the room.
‘Violet! What are you doing?’ Jamie stood in the doorway.
Gasping noises came from the cot. Violet pressed her hands to her mouth, ‘Oh, Jamie,’ and felt the strength trickle away from her knees. ‘Oh, Jamie.’
During those seconds, falling like hot coals between husband and wife, anything could have happened - murder, hysteria, welcome unconsciousness.
Jamie pushed Violet out of his way and picked up his son who, red-faced with the effort, was endeavouring to suck in air. Jamie held him up and, for several desperate seconds, Edward struggled. Then he let out a howl, filled with surprise and terror. With an anguished sound, Jamie cradled the little body to his chest and swivelled towards his wife.
‘Get out.’
Violet fled to the sanctuary of her bed. Peace. Darkness. Escape?
She was cradled in her conditioner-scented sheets and duck-down duvet from Peter Jones. It was not her fault that she was so tired that she could not think any more. Perhaps not even be responsible for what she did?
An image of her son flailing for the breath she had stolen from him superimposed itself. She turned and buried her face in the pillow where her pulsebeats thudded in both ears.
She thought of death.
When she surfaced, Jamie was standing by the bed. ‘I’ve calmed him down,’ he said, ‘and given him a bottle of milk.’
‘Thanks,’ said Violet, looking up at him with an expression that Jamie interpreted as defiance.
‘I’m going to sleep in the spare room. I think you need some rest.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I also think you should go and see a doctor tomorrow.’
He spoke as if she was some distant, and tiresome, relation.
‘There’s no need to sound like that.’ Violet was aware she should apologize. ‘I’m sorry I did what I did.’
‘You should be.’
At that point, Violet realized that he was seriously angry - and the enormity of what she had done finally sank in. As she so often did, Violet responded with attack. ‘It might help if you were around a bit more. You leave it all to me.’
‘I do my bit.’
On safer ground now, Violet reared up from the pillows and her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, do you? Who thinks about the shopping, about what to eat, whether the loo needs cleaning? If we have enough nappies, writing paper, shampoo? Tell me who does all that. And tell me if it’s just a question of doing it once or week in, week out?’ She wrapped her arms around her slenderized shoulders and hugged herself tight. ‘It never ends, Jamie, and it makes me tired. Lunch, tea, supper, ironing, beds, cleaning. Chuck in a difficult baby—’
‘Shut up, will you?’ Jamie had to make a huge effort to stop himself shaking. Violet watched his fists bunch and his conscious effort to relax them. ‘Other women manage, and you have Emmy and Mrs Stone to come and clean.’ Only just in time, he prevented himself saying, ‘Prue does.’
‘Other women don’t have full-time jobs.’
Oh, God, she had fallen into that one again. Violet saw her mistake too late. Jamie leaned over her, a hand either side of her body. ‘You don’t have to have one. I earn enough.’ His breath jetted on to her cheek.
In a curious way, Violet was beginning to enjoy herself. ‘That’s right, fall back on the he-man and the bank balance. What if I want to work and I’m good at it?’ She subsided back into the pillows. ‘Anyway, you’ve missed the point.’
‘Being?’
‘The buck stops with me. You leave this house every morning confident that when you return you will be given an evening meal, your shirt will be ironed, your bed made. Yes? Who plans all that? Who thinks about it before going to their own work so you can enjoy your meat and two veg?’
There was silence and Violet, sword whirling, drove it home. ‘You don’t, do you?’
She prepared to continue the fight, to exercise magnanimity in the face of his defeat, to say again she was sorry but, suddenly, Jamie withdrew. Literally. She felt him retreat to a place that did not include her.
And that frightened her most of all - more than the battle, more than her nightmares, more than the selfish, unmaternal side of herself that she did not care to think about too much. More than what she had done to Edward.
‘Goodnight.’ Jamie sighed, tightened his dressing-gown belt and made for the door, taking this new, puzzling picture of her husband with him.
‘Jamie. Wait. Were you . . .’ Violet found herself grasping the duvet tight, ‘were you at Waterloo station this evening?’
There was an infinitesimal pause. ‘No, I wasn’t.’
He was lying. She absolutely knew he was lying.
Her mouth had gone dry and, with difficulty, she swallowed. ‘I don’t think the bed is made up in the spare room,’ she said at last, in a tone that bordered on the savage. After he had gone she sank down into the bed.
Food, lashings of it, swam across her vision. Muffins dripping with butter. Strawberry shortcake. Beef swimming in thick glossy gravy. Rosy pink shrimps curled into clarified butter, like babies tucked into their cots.
A few hours’ sleep were sufficient for Violet to grout the cracks in the carapace — and to convince herself of several things. One: she needed to take a few days off and book into a health farm to recharge her batteries. Two: she had not done anything so very dreadful. Scratch any mother and find a hidden incident, a shaming accident - or four. Three: she had not seen Jamie at Waterloo station with a strange woman. It had been a mistake. A trick of the eye. Thus Violet had no need to worry about her marriage because there was simply no question of failure. Her marriage would survive, come what may.
In the mirror that morning, she drew a line of scarlet around her lips and filled it in.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The summer holiday came and went, and as Prue wished, the Valours
did not go away. Max finished the decorating, gardened and watched Prue. Prue grew thinner, took to wearing her hair tied back and watched Max.
Jane spent a lot of time with Kate’s daughter, Judy, hours with her computer, and frequently disappeared on her bicycle. She also avoided her mother, skipping meals and being unusually difficult. Prue, dividing her time between the bookshop and running the house, unable to meet Jamie (apart from that snatched meeting at Waterloo) because of the school holidays, was driven to exasperation and, finally, a burst of temper.
Jane informed her that she was unfair, unloving and furthermore that she, Jane, was too old to be bossed around by someone like her, adding that Prue did not care one bit about her.
Not true, not true, Prue wanted to cry out.
But the cry might not have sounded entirely genuine. In her heart, Prue knew she was missing something important about Jane. But she knew that same heart was too full, too greedy for new sensations, too preoccupied, to look outside itself.
She had discovered the fascination of being entirely self-absorbed and justified it by telling herself that she was allowed to be selfish and that she was permitted a life other than the one devoted to her family.
Eventually Jane was dispatched back to school for the autumn term, with panic, on behalf of Prue, over nametapes, games equipment and rebellion, on behalf of Jane, over a pair of skin-tight leggings that she had wished to take back and Prue considered inappropriate. Jane went, hugging her software disks, quiet, secretive and distracted, as if, her mother concluded, she was listening in to conversations from another world.
Mrs Harriman, Jane’s housemistress, rang Prue. She was brisk but concerned and asked outright if something had occurred during the summer holidays to put Jane off her stroke.
‘No,’ said Prue. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘She isn’t putting any effort into her work, Mrs Valour. In fact, her work is sub-standard for Jane.’ Mrs Harriman allowed that information to sink in and then said carefully, ‘A little more worrying perhaps is her eating.’
‘Eating!’
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