A dull thud from the front of the house indicated that Dan was home. Charlotte automatically felt a sense of pleasure and then checked herself for allowing habit to deceive her.
It was Dan’s habit to linger in the hall for a few minutes, opening mail, mumbling over bills before coming through to find her. Only lately he had been forgoing this ritual and would be looking for her as soon as he was in the house. He searched her out as if he knew what was going on, or so it seemed to Charlotte, who was hypersensitive to every turn of phrase, seeing possible reproach every time she failed to avoid his gaze.
And yet old habits were hard to give up. They became instinctive like the immediate and undeniable gladness she had just felt to know that he was home. And tonight they were going out together — for the first time in months — so perverse that it should be now, when it was all too late and any pleasure in the outing was wiped away by suspicion. Why should he suddenly produce tickets for a concert if it was not a sort of doglike bribe? She was unfair to him, very unfair, she knew that and felt it hard, but then was it particularly fair of him to make an effort only now?
‘Working hard?’ he said, his face appearing round the door of the breakfast room where she kept her drawing board.
‘Hello,’ she said, with false brightness. ‘Did you have a good day?’
‘Not bad. You?’
‘The same. Not bad.’
He waited in the doorway watching her while she fussed with the bits of paper she had been staring at unseen for the past hour. She had looked up at him when he came in, a brief, direct look in order to satisfy him.
‘Been out today?’ he asked next. What did that mean?
‘Only to take Vicky to Audrey,’ she answered truthfully, and seized upon an area of conversation that would not demand any deception: ‘She was so excited about going. She had painted a picture for Audrey and another for James. You don’t think she’s getting precocious, do you?’ Charlotte was fighting off Dan’s watchfulness with prattle.
‘She’s only six, Lottie. A bit young for precocity,’ he said gently.
‘Maybe you’re right. I hope so. I don’t think I’d know how to cope with that sort of thing in my own child. When you see it in other children their parents just stand by and seem to think that it’s endearing.’
‘Perhaps it is to them,’ Dan said. ‘You know what they say, love is blind.’
And what did he mean by that?
Charlotte got up and went into the kitchen. The light was fading and the sun turning to amber low in the sky over the fields to the back of the house.
‘Supper’s about ready,’ she called, but Dan was just behind her making her start as he murmured acknowledgement. He too was watching the horizon.
‘I think it’ll be a nice day tomorrow,’ Charlotte said, a somewhat inane comment for her.
‘Maybe,’ Dan said after a pause. Every word seemed to be laden with overtones, undertones, but nothing was said. Did he know? It was not possible, Charlotte had been so careful, nobody knew. She would not allow herself to believe that Dan even suspected, and yet of course he must, just as she would if it were the other way round and he was having an affair. It was ridiculous, but the hardest part was not being able to tell him in the way she always did about everything else; although, long ago, shortly before they were married, she had told him about another man, with cruel naivety asking him what she should do.
They had been lying in bed at the time. His bed or hers, or perhaps somebody else’s, she couldn’t remember. In those days they had taken advantage of every available bed to lie naked between sheets as opposed to the semi-clothed discomfort and risk attached to Dan’s car. She had once even resorted to sticking her legs out of the window in an attempt to overcome the contortions of back-seat sex.
‘I don’t want to go off you. I’d rather stay with you,’ she had told him in the bed. ‘But I don’t fancy you any more, if you see what I mean,’ adding ‘but I still like you,’ as if the platitude could soften the blow. She had no right to demand his understanding but had assumed it and found it there; but that was ten years ago when she was eighteen and entitled to make mistakes and get away with it. The situation was different now. Dan had a right to expect more, although she had little doubt as to how he would react if she did talk to him about Nick: ultimately he would be magnanimous. The real difference this time was not with Dan but with Nick because Charlotte did not see the affair as a mistake.
Dan remained at the window, watching the last of the day while Charlotte put knives and forks on a tray and took the casserole out of the oven. ‘There’s a good play on tonight,’ she told him. ‘We could put it on the video and see it when we get back.’ Television, which she had come to detest for its regularity, was now a useful expedient to avoid Dan’s slightly probing questions which she felt hovered between them all the time now, only needing a short space of background silence to become more searching and insistent. Or maybe she was simply frightened of what she might say herself, now that she had this perverse desire to be found out.
They ate supper with no time to talk as the concert started at 7.30. Dan fixed up the video recorder while Charlotte filled the dishwasher. They were busy all the time, busy and bright and careful of one another.
The concert was to take place in a converted barn in a neighbouring village. A mediaeval structure, it stood in the grounds of a large house whose owner had sufficient money to indulge his love of music to the extent of financing a semi-professional orchestra. Dan and Charlotte knew him slightly. He was lean and stooping and had huge hands with long bony fingers which dangled and swayed as he spoke. He appeared to be the absolute aesthete and his great barn with its warped struts and beams and appliqued ancient farm implements against cobweb-laced walls had become a minor Mecca for the ‘highbrow’. Not that Charlotte and Dan put themselves in this category, although Charlotte had always loved the arts, and Dan, he got a certain satisfaction out of a sense of being easy going. He had never minded going with her to look at pictures, to see a play, hear a concert, although they would have done none of it if she had not arranged the tickets. Tonight was the first time he had ever arranged them, which in itself was indicative of the creeping panic that he might now be losing Charlotte.
The great barn hushed into silence as the lights dimmed and the musicians sat poised to play. The concert began with Mozart. Charlotte tried to listen, staring ahead through the rows of motionless heads. She had a peculiarly lonely feeling that everyone else had gone into a trance and only she was thinking about something else. At one point she became aware of Dan watching her again, the glint of his eyes caught in the half light. Charlotte straightened her back and gazed harder at the violins, the poignant clarity of their sound suddenly penetrating her and making her shiver.
In the interval they were cornered by one of Dan’s clients, who seemed to find it extraordinary that a solicitor should like music.
‘Well I never,’ he said, several times, accepting a drink from them. ‘And I hear you’ve got a clever wife,’ he went on to Dan, looking towards Charlotte, at which point she went to the lavatory.
‘Who was that buffoon?’ she whispered to Dan when they were back in their seats.
Dan murmured a name and then added: ‘He knows Nicholas Matthews, — that’s how he knows you’re clever.’
‘Oh,’ she said, briefly. ‘I see.’
Neither of them wanted to talk about Nick, but on the way home they did, as if drawn to the subject by vertigo. Dan asked how she was getting on with the design work for him. He did not know that Nick was in America and Charlotte did not want to tell him. It was better to say that she had not seen him for a week without qualifying this by mentioning that he was away. She was sunk in deception, she thought, and felt an unfair sense of resentment against Dan for making it necessary. She generally preferred to be honest.
The first lie or half-truth was always compounded, she’d found. Once you started you had to go on, so that whenever Dan spoke of Nick she tended to say unpleasant things about him in order to assuage any suspicion. It was her defence strategy, but one that made her disloyal to both men and somehow to herself as well.
It was still quite early when they reached home. The house was oddly cold for the time of year, but you couldn’t have a fire in August, so they took the television upstairs to watch the play in bed. It was about a woman who could not decide between her husband and her lover. They watched it intently, each making critical comments about the acting, direction, camera work, anything to emphasize the fiction — that none of it was real. There was a lot of sex in it, including a highly explicit scene under a bathroom shower. It ended inconclusively, and Charlotte and Dan slid down their bed and unavoidably began to re-enact the simulated passion of the play.
*
The clapping had subsided but Nick still felt hot, as if the surge of enthusiasm had generated a sudden heat that stung his face and neck. It would not show: long ago he had managed to catch sight of himself when it seemed he must be blushing but there had been no sign of redness and the sensation, though irritatingly involuntary, no longer worried him. He liked to think there wasn’t much that troubled him any more, which was probably more true than he realized.
The hotel in Anaheim seemed to hum now with muted congratulatory sound. Air conditioning, ‘pink’ noise and a generally padded decor put its own restraint on any clamour, almost like being in church, Nick thought, and advancing the notion saw a kind of religious zeal in the American PR people, their over-firm handshakes pumping sincerity, catching hold of success.
Nick acknowledged it all with his slightly wry Englishman’s smile, thanked the other delegates for their kind reception of his paper and made his way through the conference suite.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Germaine Hartnell stood by the exit into the lobby, her gold-spangled bronzed arm a barrier in his path. Nick stopped and the arm stretched up, long red fingernails like blooded talons reaching round to the back of his neck.
‘Darling boy, you were just wonderful,’ she breathed at him, planting a moist kiss on his mouth.
He thanked her in the easy-going, slightly gracious way he had cultivated to the point of second nature, and attempted to extricate himself. He wanted to make a telephone call.
‘Not now, darling,’ she drawled, taking his arm to lead him back. ‘You’ve made it. You’re big time now — you’ve got an obligation to your admirers, so give ’em what they want — you.’
Hesitating only a moment before Germaine’s manhandling of him became unnecessary he went back into the body of the suite, carefully retaining that delightful edge of ingenuous surprise, modesty and reserve that in the English so appealed to his American colleagues. Three hours later he got to his room and the telephone.
Eight, nine hours ahead in England, Charlotte would be asleep in bed with her husband and if not asleep … he tried to dismiss the thought. He already felt proprietorial over her and vaguely annoyed, as if she was somehow to blame for his missing the chance to speak to her. He went to the drinks cabinet and got a static shock when he put his key in the lock. He took out a Scotch and several lumps of ice, trickling the golden liquid over the crystal cubes — just the look of the drink made him feel better. Not that he drank a lot. He didn’t need it but he had developed a capacity for large quantities of Scotch without suffering. It was a necessary skill when drinking was part of business meetings — keeping up but staying sober. He had developed a lot of ‘keeping up’ tactics over the years and Charlotte — if he had thought about it — was one of them, but at the moment too strong a desire to be seen in context. He wanted her now for herself, which was dangerous, but then Nick did not consider the danger in what he wanted. He took and was positive about it, which was his strength.
Now he needed to relax after his triumph downstairs. His paper on the ‘Gym and Tonic’ campaign in Britain was good, he knew that, but the reception had been overwhelming, sent even him on a high. The Americans were generous with their recognition, more so than his own countrymen, and he had been taken by surprise — a new experience for him and one which was hard to contain; so that he wanted to tell someone — share it a bit. But he would not have told Charlotte. They would have talked slightly, of other things, nothing in particular, but heard each other’s voices and felt the contact. If he wanted to tell someone there was only Marion and he had not spoken to her for a week. There had been no time and nothing to say. He hadn’t thought to ring her and yet maybe she expected him to, even now.
That last night, before he left for America:
‘You’re late!’ she told him as he wandered into the kitchen. She kept her eyes steadfastly on the mixing bowl in front of her, deliberately, self-consciously continuing with the process although she had no idea what had gone into the bowl and what had not. Her hands, the fingers suddenly stiff and awkward, just kept kneading away; the lump of heavy dough could have been clay and she would not have noticed or even cared.
‘You know how it is,’ he said.
She did, but once in a while she chose not to.
He did not kiss her. He did not go near her. That was what Marion had noticed above all. He no longer touched her in the spontaneous way he always had over the years. He was a man who liked and needed physical attention, both giving and receiving. It was a facet of his character Marion had always delighted in because it was so contrary to everything else about him. It was like knowing a secret and being the only one who knew.
‘You seem to be coming home later and later these days,’ she continued, quite unable to stop herself from chastizing him even though it was not what she wanted at all, and knew it would only lead to the inevitable row.
‘You didn’t say you wanted me home early tonight. You weren’t going out were you?’ he said, still sounding conciliatory, which worried Marion even more. Tonight she wanted the comfort and security of a row.
‘Do I have to ask you to come home early only when I’m going out?’ she went on desperately, goading him but with no satisfaction. She did not want to be like this and despised herself for being unable to stop it. She knew she had never been clever with him and in a moment she would start using Paul as a weapon. Despicable and so predictable. She was too inadequate not to use their son as emotional blackmail.
‘I’ll just go up and see Paul,’ Nick said, turning away from her.
‘He’s been asleep hours,’ Marion shouted after him as he left the kitchen. ‘And I’d doubt whether he’d recognize you anyway.’ There. She’d done it now. He couldn’t pass over that one. She was frightened now. He had been in the wrong by coming home so late but she had started the row and in so doing had made herself more guilty than he.
Nick came back into the kitchen, but still he would not respond. He went over to the oven and opened the door. Inside there was a plate of dried up food which looked exactly the same as the meal she had cooked the previous night and the night before that. Unappetizing. Unidentifiable. He had been losing weight lately but not entirely due to Marion’s cooking. After all, that had not changed; nothing ever did with Marion, except maybe what there was got worse.
He closed the oven door, leaving a fingerprint on the shiny smoked-glass surface. The oven was new like everything else in the kitchen, except Marion.
‘Is there any cheese?’ he asked, studying her back. He was losing weight but she was putting it on. She looked grotesque in those trousers. Horrible Crimplene things which showed every bulge. He looked away, a great surge of guilt and distaste welling up in his chest. He coughed.
‘You can’t expect me to start cooking when you get in,’ she remarked self-righteously.
‘I didn’t ask you to, I simply wanted to know if there was any cheese in the house,’ he retorted, suddenly losing his temper. He had not wanted to, not any more, not now it was too late. He wondered whether Marion knew this. He had been avoiding watching her for weeks, at least it seemed like weeks but was probably no more than a couple. The irony of the situation suddenly struck him: he had done everything possible to prevent Marion from knowing and yet he wished that she did. Oh, she had by now undoubtedly guessed that something was going on, but that was different to actually knowing, for sure. No words had been spoken, but now they would have a row over the lateness of his homecoming, the state of his meal, the lack of cheese, their sleeping son, anything but the real reason.
‘Why don’t you get yourself some new clothes?’ he heard himself saying to her accusingly. ‘Those trousers look awful. God knows what people must think.’
‘God knows what they think about the time you come home,’ she rounded on him. She knew the trousers were awful. She knew she looked awful in them, but her newer clothes did not fit any more and she did not have the heart to go out and buy more, a size larger. She meant to diet but was too miserable to motivate a determined effort. Her anger subsided into dejection and fear; she should never have let this begin. She sensed the dangerous ground she was treading.
‘There’s some cheese in the fridge. I bought some today,’ she said quickly, trying desperately to steer away from the confrontation she had provoked. She was not ready for it and terrified that she never would be. Better to lie low and hope that everything would come right as it had before when she had suspected him of having an affair.
‘It won’t be worth eating if it’s been in the fridge,’ he declared, unwilling and unable to lose the initiative now he could see she was crumbling, an attitude which only served to heighten his irritation.
‘I’m sorry,’ Marion mumbled miserably. ‘Really, I’m sorry.’ She turned to face him. She would have liked to go to him and throw her arms about his neck. A reconciliation. But they were beyond that, and besides she had flour down the front of her jersey and Nick hated it if anything went on his clothes.
He had won again but his victory gave him no satisfaction. They stood facing one another for a brief moment which could not be sustained. It was too direct. They had to keep skirting round one another without looking. It was the only way to keep things going.
He went into the room which he called his study, and which Marion irritatingly insisted on referring to as his den. He closed the door gently, but firmly, shutting her out. He sat down in the wine-coloured leather chair which stood in front of the mahogany desk. Both pieces of furniture had been extravagantly expensive, but they were not the real thing he would have preferred. They were like him, he thought, a thin veneer of pretence covering the lack of authenticity. He experienced a shrivelling sensation somewhere deep inside and then he thought of Charlotte and felt better. She was authentic, plummy voice, the lot, and he had managed to fall in love with her. He allowed himself to dwell on this for a few minutes, thinking over the best moments, which surprisingly were not all sexual. He wanted Charlotte openly and not as a mistress. He had known this for some time but falling in love with her had complicated the issue. He had not expected it. Everything he had achieved in the last ten years had been without emotion: he had acted decisively, having discovered this to be rare in his rivals, who tended to accuse him of ruthlessness. Perhaps he was ruthless, but was that a bad thing? He had never really thought so but now he was no longer certain. Falling in love he was in danger of softening. He reflected on what had gone before; seeing his life in a different light, slightly rueful now that he could afford a degree of spiritual generosity.
He heard Marion going upstairs and the floorboards of their bedroom, which was above his study, creaked here and there as she moved about the room. He waited downstairs a further ten minutes and then went up himself. Their room was in semi-darkness but this night he did not turn on the main light to undress and hang his clothes. Marion had her back to him as he slipped out of his dressing gown and, naked because that was the way he always slept, got in beside her.
He lay on his back for a few minutes, realizing almost immediately she was not asleep. America tomorrow, and they had not even mentioned his going. Away for a week. He did not like sleeping alone. He felt her stir. After all, it was Wednesday night and they always made love on Wednesday nights.
*
Again he picked up the phone by the bed but could not remember the sequence of the number. He dialled the code for the UK and continued what he thought was his home number but replaced the receiver almost immediately, doubting the sequence he had tried. Abandoning the impulse, he left the room and went downstairs to Germaine.
Marion, who had been sitting in front of a blank television screen (all channels having long since closed down for the night) biting the skin round her fingers, leapt up nervously when she heard the telephone ring — just once. She lifted the receiver all the same, but the connection wasn’t there and hope subsided, leaving a nasty little vacuum.