Holiday
Page 23
They began to walk along the tarmac paths; touches of green decorated the winter bareness of the shrubs, spiraea, beauty-bush, while clumps of purple or orange crocuses opened to the flash of sunshine.
Watson made a remark or two about gardening, then led the boy to the car park where he praised or blamed vehicles like a salesman, lighting a second cigarette from the first. The man spoke strongly, but uncomfortably, clenching his hairy right fist to slap it in the palm of the left, pointing a finger, blubbering his lips, a strong man in weakness, bolstering himself, impressing his companion. When he finally announced that they had to return, he flung his dog-end violently into the bushes, and the pair returned without a word.
From the corridor Fisher could see Mrs Watson bent over Valerie, who had not apparently moved. The father touched his elbow, and the two went into the nurses’ room where a dark woman sat at the desk, stirring tea with one hand and reading a large card she held in the other.
‘Ah, Mr Watson.’ Scots accent.
Watson placed himself in front of her desk, asserting himself, feet apart.
‘Good afternoon, sister,’
‘What can I do for you?’ A wrinkling of eyes in a false smile.
‘How is she, then?’
The woman shrugged, shrinking herself.
‘It’s a slow process, Mr Watson.’ The word, ‘slow’ dragged itself out. Dorically long. ‘But I honestly think there’s an improvement. It’s slight, but it’s there.’ She laid down the card as if to stress her certainty. The father questioned her for some minutes but got no further information, merely put back the time when they had to return to the bedside. As they left the office, Watson blew a sigh, an involuntary sound, and walked with feet outspread on legs of sponge.
Valerie lay pale as her mother, but naturally so, skin smooth and delicate. Now her eyes were open, if not fully, but she made no attempt to greet them. Mrs. Watson burst into a volley of words. ‘Here’s your father. Look at Daddy’s new tie he’s put on for you. You know Edwin, don’t you? Isn’t it kind of him to pay you a visit? Now, I’ve brought you some lemon and barley and put it in the locker. Tell the nurse to let you have some, because it’s always done you good, and it’s very hot in here.’ The garrulity was pitiful; its bright energy wasted itself, but cut Fisher deep.
When they left at the bell, Mrs Watson composed Valerie’s limbs as if she were dead, darted at the pillow, kissed the still face. Watson bent, blowing; rose, rubbing the stretched cloth of his belly. Fisher, for a moment, grasped the white left hand; it was warm, in no way unpleasant.
He went once more, when Valerie was a little better, and spoke awkwardly to her, as she pulled her bedjacket across her chest. His mother reported to him later that she had recovered, though she never returned to the university, and two years afterwards she married, some young man in business who lived in Watford. He did not visit her while she was convalescent, nor write. After his ‘A’ levels, he made for France, worked there, until he returned for a term to prepare for Oxford. His part in the affair was inconclusive, if not shameful, and when he listened to the third movement of Op. 70, No 2, he hated its simplicity of hapiness which mocked his self-approbation.
Now, this summer afternoon, he recalled the incident as Meg sat, face wooden as Valerie’s, as incommunicative as she flung words at him. His wife had not withdrawn, but had seceded from decision, left it to her father to order this part of her life. He had no time for her as a zombie, preferring her moody volatility to this flabby acquiescence. Should he say so? Should he worry her now back into her own mind?
‘I’m making it right for myself, I agree,’ he said. It sounded patronising. ‘It’s a failing of mine, as well you know. But there is one thing worrying me.’
She made a slight gesture of interrogation.
‘It’s this. Do you want me back?’
‘I’ve said so.’ Quick, firm.
‘You’ve not been pushed into it by your father?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
The answers lacked enthusiasm, delivered however promptly.
‘I want to be sure, Meg. You sit there as if you didn’t care either way. No, that’s wrong. You sit as if you’re so badly damaged that nothing matters any more.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘You’re not like yourself. There’s no go about you. You look as if you’re waiting for your father or Kathleen or somebody to push in and rescue you.’
‘What do you look like, then?’
‘Good question. I’m undecided. I’ve had this silly week’s holiday. I’ve got plenty of work to do. I think I might start my play. I promised your father I’d come back to look at you, at least.’
‘So you like what you see?’ No devil.
‘I don’t understand it. You act as if you’re ill, or drugged.’
‘And that makes you frightened to come back?’
‘I’ve said I would.’ He tried to infuse warmth into the words. She, after a second or so, dropped her hands as if at some culmination of expected idiocy. They closed mouths, hearts.
In the end, surprisingly, it was she who spoke.
‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘You see, when we broke up, though I was only too glad to see you go, it seemed wrong. If I couldn’t make a marriage with you, then who could I with?’ Words dropped like awkwardly kicked pebbles on a cliff face.
‘I don’t know about that.’ He felt he must stick his chest out with honesty.
‘It’s not rational. There may be men better suited. At least with them I don’t suppose I’d have crippled the marriage for a start. I’d be on the look-out for snags.’ She seemed to have lost control of language, but her meaning stood powerfully obvious. ‘But you’re my type of man. I think so.’
‘What type’s that?’ Dry, he accepted no olive-branches. The words seemed to make love which her flat tone denied.
‘I don’t know. When we married I though I’d chosen the right man. He’d chosen me.’
‘You may have been mistaken?’
‘That’s what you think?’
‘No, Meg, it isn’t. I want to be sure that you’re not taking me back because you’ve been told to, or because, oh, God, I don’t know, the neighbours might gossip.’
If her new tone roused nothing but suspicion in him, it concealed no wish to quarrel. Before, she’d have flared at this, sworn, told him to piss off, cried, thrown something, banged the room door damned near off its hinges.
‘I’ve thought.’ she began, ‘about this for days on end. Commonsense says we should chuck it up, try with somebody else. We’re not kids. We had a fair time, Perhaps we should start again with somebody else before we’re too old and set in our ways to mess that up. I don’t want common sense. We were married. We had Donald. We had some good times.’
‘I wiped your knee with my handkerchief.’
That was not immediately applicable, not at the forepoint of her mind. She searched for it, groped, found, remembered, smiled.
‘Rationally, there’s nothing in this. Marriage is no more than a legal contract. I don’t believe it was made in heaven. I don’t believe in heaven.’
‘But.’ He made a big sound of it, boomed.
‘But . . .’ She laughed, tentatively. ‘Upbringing makes me think otherwise.’
‘While I’ve been away from you, I’ve considered you,’ he said. ‘And I decided I’d rather be married to you than anyone else.’ He did not even know if this was the truth, but he spoke forcefully. ‘I hated the idea that we’d never live together again.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t trust myself. I don’t like change for a start. Then it may have been pride. “He’s been turfed out by his wife, you know.” And we were getting on each other’s tits.’
‘You can say that again.’ Warmer.
‘Odd,’ Fisher said. ‘We should take up the marriage again. We’re agreed. We haven’t the faintest notion why. And we haven’t mentioned love.’
‘If you had . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I’d have been suspicious.’
‘Don’t believe that,’ he said. ‘Everybody likes being told he’s loved. I do.’
She paused, patting her forehead.
‘I’m not sure that I could, quite, say, that, now.’ The last words plopped separate.
‘You will, Oscar, you will.’ She smiled again, nervous yet. ‘I like you Meg. I admit it. There’s something about . . .’ He broke off. One could overshoot the mark, and she still stared at the carpet dumbly, again without expression. We’re not talking sentimentalities, are we?’
‘Very likely.’
‘We’ll try again.’
‘I don’t think, really, that much good comes of talking. Daddy argues it does, and you. Or do you? I don’t. We’re not rational creatures. Not you and I.’
‘I know. But if we don’t act with reason, where are we? What standards can we apply? We’d go about knocking one another out with knuckle-dusters or bombs.’
‘That mightn’t be any worse.’
‘You know damn well it would. Blow a man’s hands or legs off, where is he? What is he?’
That exchange sounded livlier, so that a spot of colour burnt on Meg’s cheekbone, as she sat with a straighter back, but at the sharp knock on the door, she started, glanced wildly round.
David Vernon breezed in, smile deeply etched at his mouth, his eyes. ‘Do I intrude?’ His voice had a rich quality, a velvet, an actor’s thrust so that to Fisher the breathly sentence he and Meg had bartered during the last hour seemed thin, without life. ‘Come in, Irene.’ His wife wore purple to match his voice, managing to look pretentious and pathetic, yet scrupulously clean. A smile twitched on Fisher’s lips for this toga, from which he felt benefit. ‘Kathleen is preparing further cups of tea.’
‘We’ve eaten,’ Meg said. Certainly her tone lacked resonance.
‘Then eat again.’
He showed his wife to an armchair, stood in mid-room hands in pockets, face rugged with pleasure.
‘What’s the news, Margaret?’ Very Welsh.
Meg looked at her husband.
‘We’re making it up,’ she said.
‘You are?’ He turned a forensic expression towards Fisher.
‘We are.’
‘You have talked this matter through? It’s what you want, is it? It’s not to oblige me or your mother or some abstract principle.’
‘No. Entirely selfish.’ Meg seemed to grow in intelligence whenever she talked to her father.
‘That’s so, Edwin?’
‘Of course.’
He and Irene smiled across at each other.
‘I do not like these matters rushed. To me you are important people. What you decide affects your mother and myself. And that is the reason why I do not want any haste, any skimping, any neglect or . . .’
‘Dereliction,’ Meg suggested, merry almost.
‘You joke, my young lady.’ He leaned over. ‘Two weeks ago it was tears, depression, desperation.’
‘Were they any more real?’ Fisher asked, supporting his wife.
Vernon frowned, clenched fists in pockets, as though the question needed thrashing out.
‘They were real enough for me.’ He threw out his arms. ‘Let us offer you our congratulations, then.’
Irene made appropriate noises, but did not get up.
‘You’ve worked pretty hard at this,’ Fisher said.
‘I do not deny it.’ He took both Meg’s hands.
‘Sufficiently for me to risk a pose or two here, a striking of attitudes. We slaved, did we not, Irene, after our fashion?’ He retained one hand holding it at arm’s length to declaim,
‘“I would not with swift winged zeal
On the world’s errands go,
And labour up the heavenly hill
With weary feet and slow.”’
‘What’s that?’ Meg asked.
‘Thomas Hornblower Gill.’
Steeply, in Lincoln.
‘Is it relevant?’
‘The only verse I know is from the hymn books, and a smattering of Palgrave. And we deserve some heightening of language, do we not?’
Kathleen burst in with a larger tray, more stacked cups, a second plate of buttered currant slices. She gushed inanities.
‘Come in. Pour the tea. Then sit youself down,’ Vernon said. ‘Dance with them that dance.’
Fisher had not touched his wife, who sat beautiful, some three yards from him now. They’d not arranged the day or time of his return. Whatever she felt, he was not convinced that anything beyond a verbal agreement had been reached. Kathleen Twining pushed a cup into his hand, shouting about sugar. He, the man from holiday, who’d met Jack and Lena Hollies, Terry and Sandra Smith, Carol and Tricia, who’d thought of his father, filled his shoes with east-coast sand, talked to strangers, but at a loose-end for a week, had now, could claim, a wife again. He did not know what it meant. He felt a sexual stirring; in the brightness of the room it seemed proper. Meg did not move much, but looked pleased with her cup held high. The Twining dodged about, serving. Fisher wanted to talk to her, hear her troubles, if she had any, or her pleasures. His father used to say as he went upstairs to bed, ‘That’s enough of that day, then.’ Now the son had tired himself.
‘They should sit together,’ Irene said, gesturing with her plate.
‘Of course.’ Vernon leapt.
Obediently, Edwin as he was bid, parked himself by Meg, who acknowledged his arrival. He shivered, pleased and uncertain. Vernon held his empty cup to the light. Irene inquired about the brand of the tea. There seemed nowhere obvious for Kathleen to sit, so she took a chair in the corner of the room.
‘That’s better,’ Vernon said, pointing to the couple. ‘Much more like it.’ What banality would Authur Fisher have managed?
Edwin touched Meg’s hand, almost expecting a rebuff.
She smiled, reciprocated.
‘Tea, Kathleen my love,’ Vernon boomed.
Nobody knew anything, Fisher decided. He and his wife held hands as a sign of the new bond, bondage.
‘We’re all ignorant,’ he said aloud, not meaning to.
‘That’s just like you,’ Meg whispered.
Nothing had been settled, but he would gladly return that evening. As soon as Arthur Fisher had dumped the holiday suitcases in the hall for his wife to empty, he importantly picked up the post, usually no more than a couple of postcards from travelling friends, and the morning’s newspaper, and announced, waving his small handful,
‘I’m glad to be home.’
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Copyright © Stanley Middleton 1974
The right of Stanley Middleton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
First published in the United Kingdom in 1974 by Hutchinson
Futura Edition 1975
Arena Edition 1989
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is available from the British Library
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