The Ice Age
Page 26
Maureen was a sophisticated creature, in her own way, good at playing games. “My wife doesn’t understand me,” she would moan, whenever Derek started on that timeworn topic. Her mockery had made it easier to get into bed with her with some decent sense of equality. And now there she lay, propped up on his shoulder, a can of beer in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. She was very soft and warm, and seemed in good humor, laughing at the jokes on the television. There seemed no need for either of them to suffer remorse. He would try not to think about his wife, Evelyn, who was also, no doubt, sitting up in bed watching Esther Rantzen. He hoped she was sitting up in bed alone, but could hardly share this anxiety with Maureen, who, being a modern young woman, would not think twice before labeling him a male chauvinist pig. Which, thought Derek—uneasily, thoughtfully, with perplexity stroking Maureen’s left breast—which undoubtedly I am.
Maureen, for her part, had stopped thinking about Len. She had given him up. It was finished, with Len. It had been good while it lasted, but it was over, for Len would come out of prison a different man, not her man. He had become a different man during the trial. Now she could admit it. Now that there was no point in her loyalty, she could let him go. She’d gone off him.
Maureen was not thinking much at all. She was feeling good. It had been a cold day, tramping around a bleak site on the bleak coast, with the wind howling and the waves breaking along desolate miles of shore; it was good to be back in the warm, good to have had a warm meal, good to be in bed, with all one’s body melted away into intimate nothingness. How nice people are, she thought, as Derek’s hand caressed her breast and tried to make her nipple stand up: her nipple refused, it was too warm and tired, it had gone to sleep, and after a while he sensed this, and simply held her, kissing her from time to time on the temple. He was a solid man, a big man, with a big shoulder to lean on. A comfortable man. The television program was amusing: it showed an elderly lady in the East End sampling snails and delivering her views on the matter. They both laughed. Maureen felt happy. The last year with Len had been a nightmare. She would forget it, she would meddle in such matters no longer, she would keep to her own limits. Derek Ashby felt happy: he was pleased and moved by the way Maureen had fluttered and dissolved against his mouth and stroked his wet hair and said thank you, thank you; he was pleased to have made her content. She was a good girl, too good to be a secretary, and vague noble notions of recommending her to train for a course in management and a top job drifted pleasantly round his head, replacing the vision of the solitary austere Evelyn, perseveringly remaking her soul in this earthly vale; fantasies of promoting Maureen to better things mingled comfortably with his vision of the house he would build, gray by the gray sea and white breakers, the stone would tinge with pink in dawn and sunset, like the faint pink tinge of the sand, and from the blue-gray reflective glass windows his oil man could watch the endless roaring tides. The wood would be brown, and knotted like ship’s timber; but the house would be white and gray, like the sea, like the gulls, like the Northern sky, and it would stand there like a lighthouse, a mark of a last sail, at night the oil man would switch on his lights and they would shine forth from the windows like signals. They would ward away wrecks. I am a lucky man, thought Derek Ashby. What more can a man want, than to work, with his mind and his spirit?
It was just as well that Maureen did not know that Len Wincobank had that evening lost remission for breaking the nose of a fellow prisoner. He too had reached breaking point, and had lashed out, not at the source of the trouble, which was old Callander, but at a relatively inoffensive whey-faced cardsharper, who had happened to say something crude about Len’s Maureen. In a better mood, Len might have taken the remark as it was meant, as a joke, but the truth was that Len was being driven mad by Callander, who had attached himself to him like some old man of the sea, who followed him and pestered him with dull tales of parapsychology, with strange fantasies of mind-reading powers. It did not help that one of Callander’s mind-reading feats had also featured Maureen Kirby. “I have inner knowledge of the new laws,” Callander would tell him, from time to time. Len had joined a lot of evening classes, not, like Derek Ashby’s wife, to shore up his identity, which needed dilution rather than reinforcement, but in order to get away from Callander. But Callander had joined up too, and sat at Len’s elbow through lectures on astronomy, through lessons in art history, through demonstrations of upholstery, muttering and mumbling. Len could stand it no longer, but could hardly bash a poor old nutter, so when Bert Gifford had opened his big mouth once too often, Len had let him have it. Like Maureen, he was at first quite relieved by the fact that he had taken action, and action true to his character, even though he had lost remission thereby, and even though he had hit the wrong man. And the scene had also given him an opportunity to explain to the governor about Callander. The governor was quite sympathetic, said he would get a psychiatrist to see Callander, said that he fully understood the frustrations of prison life must be difficult for an active and independent man like Len Wincobank. He was a new-style governor, with a degree in sociology. Len left him feeling better, relieved to have spoken to somebody who took him seriously, but lay in bed awake, shocked that he had allowed himself to be soothed by promises, and by a bland tone. I must be low, thought Len, to be taken in by talk like that. Like a sick man in a hospital, believing idle encouragements from nurses, through a desperate need to believe.
And an image of Maureen, in bed with a man, flashed into Len’s mind. Unlike Callander, he did not believe in ESP, but the image was real enough. There was nothing supernatural about its arrival. It was obvious that, by now, Maureen would be in bed with another man. One did not have to suppose an alteration in the laws of nature, a reversal of the natural order, to guess right about that. And what the fuck can I do about it? thought Len. Fuck all. Astronomy, upholstery. For the first time, he felt despair, he felt that he would never live to see the end of his sentence. The wise governor had warned him about such moods. All the men go through it, he had said, there’s always a bad patch, often when you least expect it. But it doesn’t last, you get over it.
A bad patch. All the men go through it. Men and women are machines, thought Len. He found the idea of going through a bad patch, like everyone else, inexpressibly dreary. He had thought himself different. He had made himself different. But they had unmade him, and here he was, just a man, lying on a bed. Like all the other men. No wonder Callander had gone mad rather than accept so depressing a reality.
When Anthony returned to High Rook House, he returned not as conquering hero, but with bloodshot eyes, two days’ growth of beard, haggard, gray, and drunk. Relief had undone him. Alison, sizing up the situation in a glance, pulled herself together, as people do when they have no option, and took over. She shopped, cooked, cleaned, gardened, paid bills, answered phones and letters, unblocked the sewage pipes, got the builders for the leak in the roof, and listened, in the intervals, to Anthony’s ramblings. They did not make much sense, for he was drunk most of the time. The principal themes seemed to be his own inadequacy, and an alternating admiration of and hatred for Giles Peters. Alison went through all his post, and rang Giles herself to see how the company’s affairs stood: to her horror but not to her surprise, Giles, clearly undaunted by his narrow escape from disaster over the Riverside scheme, was eager to expand, was full of new ideas, was quite confident that he knew how to make another million. But you lost the last million you made, said Alison. Yes, but think how much we learned while we were doing it, said Giles.
Alison rang Anthony’s solicitor, and her own, and inquired about the dissolving of partnerships. Anthony’s behavior was so erratic that she could all too easily imagine him putting his signature to some vast new lunatic enterprise; and maybe this time no wealthy council would be there to bail him out. She was determined not to go through all that again; she had had enough. She could not tell what Anthony’s intentions were: he seemed to swing from a violent and, in her eyes, quite heal
thy loathing of the world of speculation, to a crazy conviction that it was all child’s play, that he and Giles and Rory were the greatest financiers of their generation, and that from now on they had only to lift their fingers and the golden apples would drop into their laps. When he was in the latter mood, she tried to point out to him that it was merely by chance that he was still able to call his own home his own, and that far from having made a fortune, he had merely managed to keep afloat. But Anthony did not want to listen to the voice of reason. Other voices were speaking to him. Watching him listen to them, she wondered if he were having a nervous breakdown, whether she could get him certified, and thereby prevent him from further ruinous speculation.
For the first time, she began to think about her own legal status. Maybe it was true, as Anthony had said when leaving for his father’s funeral, that they should have married; maybe they had left marriage too late, as Anthony and Giles had left their most ambitious deal too late. Perhaps the moment was past. She had never been particularly eager to remarry, and had not given the matter much thought, but perhaps, after all, there was something to be said for the old forms of commitment. As a wife, she would be better placed to restrain Anthony from future follies, both morally and legally, though the picture of herself binding him to his study chair or hiding his checkbooks was neither attractive nor plausible. She would find it hard to be that kind of wife. But her knowledge that she could, simply, walk out on him, worried her. She watched him reach for the whisky bottle at eleven in the morning, and realized that there was nothing to bind her to him: she could clear off, and no one would blame her. She would not have left him during the past year, while ruin was hanging over him, nor would she have left him had ruin, bankruptcy, and disgrace overtaken him, but the present situation, with its delicate ambivalence, left her curiously free—to think again, to reconsider. It was as though they were back at the beginning. But the beginning, this time, of what? She could not face a repetition of the past years, but what else was there, if she stayed with Anthony? Like Anthony, she wished at times that she had not been presented with this sudden freedom of choice. It had felt safer, when they had been blinkered by sickening anxiety, walking the narrow path, unable to risk a glance to right or left. Now, they stood in a flat and featureless plain, older, wiser, but somehow diminished.
She knew how Anthony felt, she sympathized. He felt as she had felt when she abandoned Jane: that the struggle was over, that the struggle had solved nothing.
Reading the morning papers, trying to follow analyses of Britain’s plight, she realized that she had no picture of the future, either her own, or the country’s. I belong to the wrong generation, she thought, the generation that had its certainties when young. We worked hard when young, we had a conception. But instead of solidifying into attitudes, opinions, convictions, however bigoted, we have fragmented and dissolved into uncertainty. Lead and water. We are dull, without shape. We are too old, with all our knowledge, to begin again, for who would embark on such struggles, knowing as we know, from the completion of the first cycle, the sad end? Who could leap in, now, knowing what we know?
It had been a mistake, perhaps, to remove themselves from the scene of action. Had Anthony been in London, in daily contact with Giles, with Rory, with gossip and scandal and propositions, he might never have paused to reflect; he might, like Giles, have been prepared to jump in again at the deep end, simply for the thrill, for the shock, for the splash. But circumstances—the heart attack, the quiet house, the disaster with Jane—had sobered Anthony, had given him too much time to brood, to dwell on consequences, on the emptiness of his success. They had sobered him; though sober was hardly the word for Anthony, these days. There was, she had to admit, something impressive in the spectacle of his determined self-destruction. And there was nothing else to watch, for Molly had gone back to school for the spring term. So they were alone, in a desert of their own making, in their own fortress. Anthony Keating, man of leisure, in his country house, and Alison Murray, ex-actress, ex-mother, unemployed. It could not go on like this forever, but what next, what next, what next?
At times Anthony talked of selling the house, returning to London, buying a flat. At other times, he talked of buying a dog and of learning to shoot. He wanted to shoot rooks. Their noise was driving him mad, he said, and he would glower at them moodily from the bedroom window, he would yell at them and abuse them. Frightening though his moods were, and seriously as Alison knew she ought to take all this drinking and depression, Alison could not help finding his passions touching. They touched her heart. She loved him, after all, and should have predicted that it would turn this way, for had she not always known that Anthony was an emotional man, a man of spirit, who would not sit quietly beneath the blows or benefactions of fate? She had not the heart to nag at him too much about the drink and the smoking, so well did she understand his state of mind. It is hard work, weaning oneself off an addiction to violent stimulants, and, the stimulant of acute fear removed, what more natural than that he should replace it with alcohol and cigarettes?
One ought to be able to find a life, Alison Murray thought to herself, as she swept out the ashes from the huge grate, one ought to be able to find a life where violent stimulants are not necessary. A life where stimulants are not destructive. Where one can be satisfied with clouds, flowers, sky, water. Anthony had tried it, for those weeks on his own, while she had been away in Wallacia. She had admired his attempt, had been impressed, almost alarmed by his success. He had survived those weeks well, honorably, with his kindness to Tim and Molly, his quiet visits to the pub, his half pints of beer, his vegetable patch.
Mrs. Bunney in the pub could not make out what had happened to Anthony. His drinking pattern had changed beyond recognition. Instead of a half pint of an evening, he now drank at home most days, with occasional drunken forays when the bottle ran out, when he would down surprising quantities. He used to be such a nice quiet man, whispered Mrs. Bunney to her regulars, as Anthony raved about the tax system and the Land Act to startled customers, as Mrs. Bunney pocketed his fivers.
Which is the real Anthony, wondered Alison, as she listened to the wild drinker playing the piano and singing to himself, loudly and with agony, some songs of Schubert: “Ich grolle nicht,” shouted Anthony, musically, making the old house echo—which is the real one, this maniac drinking speculating self-destructive gambler, or that quiet sensitive man who was quietly and tenderly and happily roping up a split elm tree when I got back from Krusograd? And which of the two do I prefer?
Alison had a nasty suspicion that she preferred the drinker. She had been upset by the quiet, kind Anthony, she had resented his success, his self-contained contentments. She had been frightened of him, excluded by him, she had felt inferior to him. Whereas this present Anthony was more manageable, in his way. One could do more for him, look after him better, protect him from himself, stop him setting the house on fire with cigarettes, pick up spilled glasses. Does that mean I want to destroy him? thought Alison, crouched in the ancient hearth, staring at the gray wood ash, the crumbled knotty joints, the charred fissured shining black stumps. Does that mean I can only like those that I manage, dominate, support? Like Molly?
Ich grolle nicht, cried Anthony. He had once had a good voice, and still sang well. Alison swept the ash into the pan. Sex was better, with the drinking Anthony. Indeed, it had been unusually interesting, of late. But then she had herself, she remembered, turned coldly away from the good sober Anthony. Also, Anthony had now decided that he did not care whether or not he died on the job, as he crudely put it. Let’s kill ourselves with it, he would say, crunching her, biting her, grinding her, wearing her out: murder me, kill me, she would cry, assenting, moaning, unresisting. Kill me, she cried, she who of all people had to stay, for the sake of another, alive.
But in the light of day, over the gray ash, she thought: I do not want Anthony to kill himself. We must be able to work out some better way of living.
That evening, s
he rang Maureen. For advice, for sympathy. It was not in Alison’s nature to ask advice, and she was not a woman with women friends of her own age; her proud defense of Molly had isolated her, as had her beauty. No other women could like me, Alison had reasonably enough decided, at an early age: they would be sure to resent me. (As her sister, Rosemary, had done.) This was a realistic decision, for other women did resent Alison, but had not, in view of Molly’s existence, and Alison’s withdrawal from competition, been allowed the opportunity to express or formulate their resentment; therefore they had resented her all the more, though they had been obliged to call her a perfect mother, a saint, even, behind her back. It was not fair on them, or on her. But life is not fair.