She hurried along, trying to work out why she was not reduced to a state of sheer terror. Not to be there to brew the tea and carry in the tray that cook had left ready . . . not to be there to pour, while Father and Mr Dewhurst delved deep into the business of the Archaeological Society, and Mrs Dewhurst stared carpingly round the room . . . it had never happened in all the years since her mother died. It was not to be thought of!
Father would be hungry, impatient, furious. Father would tell her off in front of everybody. Mrs Dewhurst would sniff disapprovingly; Mr Dewhurst would be sorry for her, in his slow, stately way . . .
It was all the spectacles’ fault. She put her hand to her neck to take them off; then paused.
The spectacles had not let her down so far. Wearing the spectacles, she had put to flight Mrs Forbes-Formby, the greengrocer and Mr Hazlitt. Not a bad score . . .
She continued to wear them round her neck, under her frock, as she hurried up the drive, and saw Mr Dewhurst’s grey car parked next to Father’s black one.
Father reared up from the sofa as she entered; rather, in his black suit, with his drooping white moustache and bald head, like a bull-walrus defending his mating territory. She could not help smiling at the thought (quite unlike any thought she’d ever had before), saw he was disconcerted by the smile, and went directly into the attack.
‘Haven’t you started? You shouldn’t have waited.’ She glanced at Mrs Dewhurst, sitting like a full-bosomed judge about to pass the death-sentence . . . implying that Mrs Dewhurst could have poured boiling water into a pot, surely . . .
Her father opened his mouth three times to say something, then closed it again, and by that time she was past and into the kitchen, where she made firm, busy bangings with the kettle and taps.
Then she was back with the tray like a whirlwind, pouring cups of tea and passing round sandwiches with disconcerting vigour.
‘Another cucumber sandwich, Mrs Dewhurst? Brown bread. Not at all fattening, I assure you.’
Then she sat back and watched them coolly, elegant fingers poised over her own sandwich. And the magic of the spectacles continued . . . She saw that her father was wearing a suit that had been made for a bigger man; the waistcoat sagged over his once-broad chest and belly, like the skin of a fruit past ripeness . . . his double chins, once full and pink, were pale and hung like empty flaps of skin. He had adopted, unnoticed, the habit of taking off his gold-rimmed spectacles and rubbing his eyes. He was well over sixty . . . growing old. Not much left of the frightening bear who had icily, legally, bullied Mother.
The righteous bulk of Mrs Dewhurst, as heavily corseletted as a knight in armour, appalled her. She could not be more than forty . . . what would she look like, undressed for bed, naked?
The thought shocked Maude. Another sin for the back of her diary? But Mr Dewhurst, about the same age as his wife, looked so much younger . . . Another bear of a man, but kinder than her father; red-haired, red-moustached, in his ginger tweed suit and big brogues. A ripe man, a man still full of juice, not dead, like the other two.
Her mind was running away with her. She’d never had such thoughts! The spectacles . . . but there was no chance to take them off here, as the other three munched steadily, holding out their cups for a refill as they discussed the inexhaustible topic of Hitler.
Except . . . Mr Dewhurst kept giving her more little glances than his requests for tea would seem to warrant. There was a look on Mr Dewhurst’s face: tiny, timid, glancing. But that same hungry look again.
The utterly respectable churchwarden and local historian desired her, just like a common workman. It aroused a little devil in her. There were so many ways a woman could lead a man on . . . ladylike ways. The pensive turn of a head on a long neck; fingers stroking the soft down of her own cheek. Mr Dewhurst’s glances grew bolder; till Mrs Dewhurst noticed.
‘We must be off, Henry,’ said Mrs Dewhurst, pulling on her gloves and inspecting her revolting green hat in the tall dark mirror of the sideboard.
‘But we’re discussing the arrangements for the outing to the fort . . .’ Mr Dewhurst seemed disposed to argue; even Father looked affronted.
‘Plenty of time for that later, Henry. Come, I must buy some Seville oranges for cook to make marmalade. Flatt may sell out.’ She gave him a sharp look that got him on his feet, apologizing wretchedly to Father, looking a total, blushing, blundering fool. How could he stand her treating him like a lapdog in public? Then she remembered that his little book-shop hardly supported itself. He was no businessman; she had the money.
‘I can’t understand it,’ bleated Father, when they’d gone. ‘They never go this early. It’s only five past five.’
‘Obviously marmalade is more important than Roman forts,’ said Maude.
‘Woman’s a fool . . .’
‘Can I come to the fort? Mr Dewhurst’s always so interesting.’
‘I didn’t know you were keen on the Romans.’
‘Yes,’ said Maude, ‘Oh, yes.’
She lay in bed that night, thinking what she’d wear. The blue skirt was a little short. If she walked ahead of Mr Dewhurst, up the hill to the fort, looking back frequently over her shoulder to ask him questions, almost stumbling, so he would put out a hand to steady her . . . delicious!
Then she remembered she hadn’t said her prayers. How had she forgotten to say her prayers? She never forgot to say her prayers. Father Whitstable . . .
At the thought of Father Whitstable, she realized the spectacles were still hanging round her neck, under her nightdress. How peculiar, that she hadn’t taken them off! Except that they gave her a pleasant sensation as they slid around the valley between her breasts . . .
She shot upright. Maude Cleveland, you are a sinful woman! Get out of bed and say your prayers at once!
She still didn’t want to. She wanted to go on lying in bed, thinking about the glint in Mr Dewhurst’s eye . . . and other things. The feel of the rough texture of his jacket, the roughness of his hands, his faint tobacco smell.
She shot out of bed with a great effort of will, and knelt on the cold lino as a penance. But still she couldn’t pray . . . not wearing those sinful, sliding spectacles . . .
She took them off with an even greater effort of will, and put them on her bedside cabinet.
Then she was able to pray. She was really very glad she’d taken the spectacles off.
She had never prayed so greyly, boredly, resentfully, in her life. The state of rebellion in her soul alarmed her. She would not wear those spectacles again.
She got back into bed and slept very badly, which was unusual for her. She dreamt about both Mr Hazlitt and Mr Dewhurst.
Next day, it rained. All day. The sky was the dull grey of a vicarage blanket. Maude attended weekday communion at St Michael’s, but her heart did not lift. Father Whitstable preached badly, having a heavy cold. The sermon was all sniffs and handkerchief. He dropped his handkerchief three times and had to come down from the pulpit to search for it, and went on preaching as he searched . . . this did not do a great deal for the doctrine of the Transubstantiation, with reference to the Bishop of London’s latest pseudo-scientific outburst. During the communion service, the knees of the woman in front creaked audibly; she was wearing a black hat with mauve flowers, that smelt strongly of mothballs.
Going round the shops afterwards, Maude could find nothing she wanted. She left her umbrella in Elliot’s the stationer’s during a brief break in the rain, and having to walk back for it, she got thoroughly soaked. As she took off her hat and coat in the hall, her face looked pale and pinched, and (as she said to herself) wrinkled like an old boot. Her hair drooped lankly; she looked as unlikely an object for lust, let alone love, as she’d ever seen, and as a result, she had words with cook.
As a further result, cook produced a truly punitive dinner; tinned oxtail soup, fat mutton chops, limp white boiled potatoes and watery green beans, followed by tinned peaches with oversolid rice pudding. And as an even f
urther result of cook’s vengeance, and the fact that she had eaten too much of that vengeance in a hopeless attempt to cheer herself up, Maude went to bed with indigestion, and woke with it in the middle of the night.
She lay and thought of life slipping like sand through her fingers. Next year she would reach thirty, the fatal watershed. One of her back teeth was loose, and wobbled more than usual; wobbled so violently that it threatened to come unstuck altogether . . .
More unhappy than she’d ever been, she reached in the dark towards the bedside table, for the glass of water and indigestion tablets.
Her hand touched the smooth glass of the spectacles. And she thought that if the rewards of virtue were so wretched, could the rewards of vice be any worse?
In that moment, she was a lost woman.
She slipped the spectacles round her neck.
The outing to the Roman fort was truly spiffing. The day dawned blue from horizon to horizon, so that Maude was able to wear her sleeveless blouse as well as the blue skirt that was a little too short. By the time the charabanc reached the foot of the suede-smooth green hill upon which the fort lay, it was really warm, which left Maude pleasantly and becomingly glowing, and Mrs Dewhurst sweating so badly that she got left behind over and over again as they climbed ramparts and descended counterscarps. Nobody was in the least interested in hauling Mrs Dewhurst up; she finally had to retire hurt back to the charabanc with a desperate migraine, and spend her time applying her own wet handkerchief to her brow, in between casting malevolent glances uphill to where Maude was having the time of her life.
Maude was, it must be added, the principal cause of that migraine. For her effect on Mr Dewhurst had been positively devastating. He seemed to have shed ten years as he made successful little jokes about vallum and fosse, and handed Maude up as athletically as a schoolboy. Nor was he the only one. Mr Hazlitt, similarly fascinated, was not to be outdone, either in handing-up or wit, and even Tony Smethurst, fresh down from Oxford and as boringly handsome as a Greek god, seemed to find Miss Cleveland irresistible, and was so bold to inquire what Miss Cleveland was wearing on that little gold chain around her neck? If it should be a locket, was there room for a lock of his own golden hair?
‘Never you mind,’ said Maude archly, ‘you naughty boy!’
Which reference to his youthfulness he seemed to take more as a challenge than a discouragement, and grew bolder.
That was the moment Maude was to remember with pleasure for the rest of her days. The descending sun underlining every ridge and furrow of the earthworks, gilding even the individual stems of grass, and the wool of the few resident sheep. The warm early-evening breeze stroking the bare skin of her arms, and lifting her too-short skirt with gentle lasciviousness. Mr Dewhurst’s face, looking so bronzed and alive; and Mr Hazlitt’s and Tony Smethurst’s, and those of the three humbler male hangers-on who stood slightly further off, hopefully, rather like the resident sheep. And the angry distant glare of Lydia Dewhurst . . .
She felt a queen, with her little group of courtiers. What fun, playing one off against the other, encouraging them to compete, excel, yet not letting any get so discouraged that they despairingly went away. There was a skill in it, a knack in it, she would never have dreamt for a moment she had. She looked up at the distant sea peeping through the gaps in the coastal Dorset hills, and thought, ‘Can I do anything?’
Then innocent, harmless Tony Smethurst uttered the fatal words.
‘Who’s your partner in the mixed doubles this year, Maude?’
Now this was no trivial matter. Barlborough might have been despised as provincial in many things, but in tennis, never. The Tennis Club, even more than the Archaeological Society, was at the centre of Barlborough life. They had been county club champions the previous year; seven members had at one time played for the county and two actually at Wimbledon, one getting as far as the second round. Membership was by invitation, recommendation and reference. Once you were in, you were in; if you were out, you were nowhere. Maude, no mean player, had made a habit of losing gallantly in the quarter-finals of the ladies’ singles.
Now they all looked at her, expectantly. In the past, she had partnered Jack Simcock; but Jack had moved to Brighton. Now she looked round them all, her lips slightly parted, aware of a particularly furious glare coming up from the charabanc. Greatly daring, she asked, ‘Are you playing this year, Mr Dewhurst?’
‘Good God,’ said Mr Dewhurst. ‘I’m thirty-eight, Maude. Nearly thirty-nine. I think I’ll confine myself to umpiring again.’
But he’d been the one who’d played at Wimbledon; even after four years of umpiring, he was remembered. And suddenly, his face glowed with recalled youthful glory.
‘Go on, Doug,’ said Tony Smethurst. ‘Show us there’s life in the old dog yet.’
Mr Dewhurst put him in his place with a look. But it was a look containing as much pleasure as rebuke.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I shall show you, young Smethurst. If my first service goes in, God help you. But I’d better get some match practice.’
So, it was done.
Life had never been so full for Maude. Her father felt the draught at home. Dinner became a solitary meal for him; and once he found a newly-ironed shirt was missing two buttons. He spoke to Maude about it, but his icy diatribe had curiously little effect. She had this way of sitting back and looking at him these days, a little smile playing around her lips. His diatribe ran out of steam half-way, and he went back to his boring chop like a fugitive.
Maude lived at the Tennis Club, with its red gravel courts and low, pleasant green huts. Very often she practised with Mr Dewhurst. His first service terrified her deliciously, whether it whirled savagely up at her body, or whanged like the crack of doom into the net-cord. She liked to see him sweat, hear him grunt and groan, like a great red savage bear only separated from her by a three-foot barrier of netting. She saw and learnt his every mood and movement.
And there was the leaning close, discussing tactics. He gave off heat like a red furnace; she felt it on her bare arms. And sitting talking afterwards, as the shadows of the high wooden fencing that shut the world out crept across the court, and the swallows and swifts flew high and screaming in the dimming blue sky far above . . . there was no one left in the world but the two of them.
Of course, she never let him actually touch her. That was against the rules of the game . . . that would be playing into Lydia Dewhurst’s hands.
She felt herself changing in many ways, as the gold spectacles bounced and joggled against the glowing pink skin of her breasts. Her own game, long based on good straight hitting, grew sneaky, in a way she would once have condemned. She tormented Mr Dewhurst with evil little drop-volleys; and her every stroke now carried a load of back-spin, top-spin or side-spin that could drift the ball back into the corner when everyone could have sworn it was going out. She admitted to herself that she was no longer a nice person to know. Sometimes she practised with Mr Dewhurst on Sunday mornings, instead of going to church. Her father grumbled that tennis was coming between her and her wits, and he would be glad when the tournament was over . . .
But she didn’t neglect Mr Hazlitt. Especially when she discovered, on his single shelf of antiquarian books, a couple of medieval herbals. The one by Gerard she liked so much that she drew out every penny she had in the bank to buy it. Mr Hazlitt gave her a good discount, and they discussed the book frequently. When Maude read it at home, it seemed so often to fall open at certain pages.
‘Fox-glove, called by the ancients digitalis. A little taken strengthens the heart, but over-much killeth.’
Mr Hazlitt was struck by her discrimination and eagerness to learn about antiques. He explained to her the significance of an object being parcel-gilt; how to tell a Sheraton commode from a design by Hepplewhite. She respected Mr Hazlitt. His mind was good. She sensed that his thoughts were gathering towards a proposal; but she held him back gently. Certainly, not yet . . . Mr and Mrs Dewhurst were mu
ch more fun. For she found Lydia Dewhurst’s seething, leaden hatred – totally denied expression even when she and her father went round to tea in the Dewhursts’ great rambling house, full of strange uncouth African objects collected by Mrs Dewhurst’s missionary father – even more exciting than Mr Dewhurst’s great dammed-up bear-like passion.
But sometimes she mentioned the herbal to Mr Dewhurst. What secrets were locked up in an innocent English hedgerow! How easy it would be to poison, without arousing suspicion! When, greatly daring, she gathered foxgloves to decorate the lounge, and when they were past their best, did not throw them in the bin but boiled certain portions down, she showed the little bottle to Mr Dewhurst . . .
His finger lingered on it, till she snatched it away; and a look lingered on his face that was not lust, but something curiously, blackly like it. As before, she knew his moods. He was happy with her, bitterly unhappy at home. He often arrived for practice white and shaking; and when the time came to part, a look of sombreness would creep across his face.
On the night before the tournament, they had booked a final practice, late. The sun had dropped from the sky before she arrived on her bicycle, and the last members, snugly tired, with towels tucked round their necks, were getting into their cars and waving goodbye. She sat on the old wooden bench alone; she had time to think for the first time in weeks.
Something surfaced in her mind, something of what she might have called the old Maude; the Maude she had been before she first put on the spectacles . . . Recently, that little, weak, buried Maude had only approached her in dreams, leaving her to wake in the mornings with a feeling that something indefinable was terribly, terribly wrong. That she was running down a hill – keeping her feet, just, but having to run faster and faster, so that she couldn’t stop now if she wanted to. Then, as she got dressed, the little fearful Maude would fade out of sight, banished by the busy excitements of the day, the spite, the scheming, the power. Am I breaking into two, she wondered? She shivered, as if someone had walked across her grave . . .
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