Sunday Night — Frances
I had spent the weekend in Cambridge, an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment visit to American friends who kept open house in the tall Regency terraced property they rented overlooking Parker’s Piece. They had seemed pleased to see me but their pleasure was vague and preoccupied. They were always involved in something pressing, the latest, all-absorbing frantically interesting and important project — currently the saving of a county council primary school in one of the smaller villages. I spent Saturday collecting signatures for a petition and then screenprinting ‘Save our School’ on a batch of T shirts down in the basement of the house where an assortment of printing equipment and a very old Roneo duplicator were kept for just such eventualities. Barbie, whose children attended a private school in the city, came down every now and then with a flagon of red wine. The third time she had a glass for herself as well and with a casual sort of energy began folding the shirts that were dry.
‘You ought to come see us more often, Frances,’ she said. ‘We still miss you and Leonard, y’know. Do you ever hear from him now?’ Barbie asked these sort of questions in the tone of a social worker, her deep concern for the welfare of others justifying her tendency to pry.
‘No, not for more than a year, but I think he’s still in Israel,’ I said, smudging one of the slogans.
‘You two should never have drifted. You were right for one another,’ Barbie went on.
‘Maybe, but it’s too late now,’ I said, trying to sound philosophical and wishing that Barbie would mind her own business. Why had I come to Cambridge, I asked myself, when it was a cast-iron certainty Leonard would be discussed.
‘It’s never too late,’ Barbie continued. ‘I don’t wanna interfere, Frances, but Jack and I could arrange something. You see, Leonard’s coming to England next month. He’ll be staying with us. I think he’d like to see you.’
I felt my heart begin to pound and willed it to be still. Hope pressed in on me and then reason tried to banish it.
‘He knows my address in London,’ I said dismissively.
‘Well, the offer is there,’ Barbie rejoined kindly and picking up the flagon, made a move towards the door. ‘I must go fix supper,’ she said.
Sunday passed slowly, a long day full of earnest talk about the school campaign with half a dozen assorted hangers-on — no, I should be more charitable, other guests, maybe even friends, although Barbie and Jack didn’t really have time for friends, only causes, and I could see myself becoming one of them. At some time during the afternoon Jack, who has the lumpy good looks of a retired baseball player, high cheek bones, sandy hair, a faded Adonis, spoke of Leonard. Immediately Barbie glanced at me and clumsily contrived to change the subject. I had been about to leave but had to wait then or risk appearing upset. It was too silly but I had not wanted to give a wrong impression that might further encourage Barbie to set something up when Leonard came to England. So I sat in the high-ceilinged drawing room, its walls plastered with Art Deco posters, shelves bulging with books that had all been read, and everywhere, singly and in clusters, little earthenware pots with weedy-looking sproutings which I recognized as the prime ingredients of Barbie’s herbal remedies. I looked at it all, the sound of Jack’s enthusiasm droning on in the background beyond concentration. It all added up to a kind of honesty that was overall rather endearing. It was sort of naive and yet not, the naivety of those who had been to the other extreme and rejected it in favour of a ‘home-spun’ way of life. It was a very American thing to do, I thought, and saw with a sudden surge of affection the newly-naive pair. ‘Dammit,’ I almost said aloud. ‘I wish like hell they would set up something when Leonard comes.’
I went to help Barbie prepare a vat of soya-based chilli con carne but left without staying for the meal.
‘I really must go. You see there are some friends I promised to call in on before going back to London,’ I said to extricate myself. It was only half a lie, Charlotte and Dan had been as much in my thoughts over the weekend as Leonard; perhaps that was why I had gone to Cambridge, but to Jack and Barbie’s because it would have been too meddlesome to have gone straight to the other house. It went against the grain to interfere but there were times when it seemed one was not meant to stand back, not if it was possible to help: Barbie’s philosophy, but what would happen to the world without the caring Barbies?
At the top of the steps that led down from the front door Barbie and Jack in turn hugged and kissed me, the only people I knew who did that. Their open-heartedness was infectious and I hugged them back.
‘Thank you for a lovely time.’
‘Come again soon. You know you’re one of our favourite people.’
I didn’t. It had never occurred to me. I glanced back at them as I went down the steps, side by side, arms around each other, both heads slightly tilted in an attitude of affectionate sympathy as they watched me go.
‘I’m not that unhappy. I’ve got my own life,’ I thought a little peevishly as I drove out along Trumpington Road, but even the kindest of people seemed to draw strength from the supposed unhappiness of others, and it struck me that I was in danger of doing the same myself.
It was a quarter to nine when I pulled up outside Dan and Charlotte’s, and getting out of the car immediately heard screaming. The house stood dark and solid before me, the alarming, terrified screech and wail seeming deep inside but so piercing it could not be contained.
It was a child, I knew that by the timbre and level of abandonment. Vicky, and there were no lights coming from the house. I went up to the front door and pressed the bell but could not hear it sound inside. I pressed again and then went round to the back of the house. The back door was standing open. I went in. Everywhere was dark, I moved down the passageway towards the front of the house where the stairs were. I couldn’t find a light switch but the insistent wailing coming from upstairs didn’t allow time to search. I came out into the front hall and hurried up the stairs. On the landing one of the doors stood ajar, Vicky’s room, a dim, flickering light playing against the wall. I pushed the door wider. In the far corner Dan was sitting on the bed, the convulsive child quieter now but still sobbing as he held her close against him, soothing, stroking her head.
The flickering light came from a candle standing in a jam jar on a small table by the bed. I stood in the doorway for a few more moments and my heart ached.
When I said Dan’s name he didn’t start or look up straight away, but turned his head in a slow, even movement as if nothing could surprise him or matter very much any more. His eyes glistened in the candlelight and there was moisture on his face but perhaps it was from holding Vicky’s tear-drenched face against him.
‘Frances!’ he exclaimed, seemingly making an effort to reduce the poignancy of the scene. ‘There’s a power cut and Vicky’s had a nightmare. The two would have to coincide. I was in the garage, searching for a torch and she began screaming. You must have wondered what was going on. How did you get in?’
‘The back door — you left it open. Is Vicky all right now?’ I remained in the doorway, an interloper, that was how I felt.
‘I think she’s gone back to sleep. I’ll get her back into bed and then we can check whether it is a power cut or just a fuse in the house.’
I watched him gently ease the child back under the bedcovers. She seemed to have fallen into a sudden and dead sleep which gave her an oddly rag-doll appearance.
We came away from the bedroom, and treading softly and with caution in the darkness, I followed Dan down the stairs. I waited in the drawing room while he went out to the garage and found the torch and more candles, two of which he lit and placed in dishes by the fireplace. Then he went to the fuse box and I still waited, convinced I was too late and Charlotte had already left. But too late for what? What had I hoped to achieve by turning up, unannounced, to interfere in their lives; and Dan must have known I had lied to him on the phone and been an accomplice in the breakup of his marriage. I felt wretched about it and angry with Charlotte for having drawn me into the conspiracy. Selfish, silly Charlotte; unhappy, desperate Charlotte to leave all this and that little girl. The rag-doll image of Vicky persisted. I pictured her asleep upstairs and then remembered what a pain she could be when she was awake. She had a tendency to be precocious but I had always felt it was something that went unnoticed by Charlotte whose adoration and spoiling had probably caused it. And Charlotte did adore her daughter, of that there was no doubt. Surely she would not have left without her. I began to rethink the situation and the scene I had interrupted in Vicky’s room. I stared into the flickering light of one of the candles and could see Dan’s white, damp face; such desolation and despair. Why did people mess up each other’s lives so harshly?
The telephone started to ring and having lived by myself for some time I knew that meant the lights were out because of a fuse in the house. Dan was still buried somewhere in a cupboard so I went out to the front hall and answered the call.
‘Who am I speaking to?’ the voice at the other end demanded, a woman’s voice with the strange inflection, sing-songy, of Birmingham.
‘A friend. A friend of the family,’ I said, slightly taken aback by the brusqueness of the woman’s tone. ‘I’ll fetch someone.’
‘No, you’ll do,’ the woman said quickly. She sounded quite hostile. ‘Your friend,’ she continued accusingly. ‘Charlotte’s her name, isn’t it, well I think she ought to know something about her new fancy man.’
I listened to what the woman had to say and then put the receiver down. The lights came back on and I returned to the drawing room. As I was blowing out the candles Dan came in. The room was filled with the acrid smell of burnt-out wax.
‘Who was that?’ he asked.
‘She didn’t give her name,’ I said. ‘Dan, where’s Charlotte?’
He looked at me. His eyes seemed to have sunk into his head. The skin around them was as dark as bruising.
‘She’s gone out.’
I took a breath. ‘Will she be back?’
‘Probably, tonight.’
‘But after that?’
‘Probably not.’ He looked away then, dismissively, to cut the strain. ‘D’you know, I think I preferred the candles, I’ve often felt the light in here was too much, but Charlotte likes brightness, she says dim light bulbs are depressing, it’s one of the few things we disagree over.’
‘I am sorry, Dan,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that lie on the phone. I hate lying.’
‘Oh, the fictitious bath. Don’t worry, Frances. I don’t know what else you could have said.’
‘Well, the truth, I suppose.’
‘I can see that you were in a difficult position,’ he said acquiescently.
‘Don’t you ever get angry?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, still sounding unnaturally reasonable. ‘I used to get very angry with you in those early days when you tried to persuade Charlotte not to marry me. Perhaps you were right after all.’
I gazed after him as he went to leave the room. He came back a moment or two later with two glasses and a bottle of scotch. He put them down and then relit the candles and switched out the main light. We sat down then, next to one another on a rather out-of-place old sofa, goldy-coloured with fraying tassels.
‘Why did you come here tonight?’ Dan asked and then quickly added: ‘I’m sorry, that sounds terribly rude.’
‘No, perhaps I shouldn’t have come, but it’s been playing on my mind the last few days — since that telephone call — the fictitious bath. I could tell you knew something.’ I went on then to tell him how the call had set me thinking about events of the past, in particular the awful time when Charlotte’s father had been so ill. I was surprised to discover Dan knew nothing of the episode with the convent or that Charlotte had been expelled: ‘And I never said anything, when I could have. I should have done,’ I told him.
‘I don’t suppose it would have made any difference,’ he said. ‘My God, those nuns!’
‘I just felt that it might have done and I suppose that’s the same sort of feeling I had after you phoned.’
‘It’s a pity we’ve never really talked before,’ he said, refilling the glasses. ‘We’re both concerned for Charlotte. We’re the two people who know her best, and somehow that’s put us at odds over the years.’
I thought then how very nice and sane and good he was. A person to value. I had been so wrong about him, but kindness and tolerance were not virtues you recognized as making good husband material for your friend, not when you were in your early twenties. Leonard had been neither kind nor particularly tolerant in personal affairs but I had disregarded this and seen intellect and original thought as the only possible basis on which to choose a partner. And how miserable it had made me. I had told Charlotte, so emphatically, that everyone had to be their own person, and then fallen into the trap myself. Charlotte, Charlotte, I felt a strong surge of exasperation with her. She should have been able to realize herself — her potential as an individual, with a partner like Dan to share her life. I couldn’t imagine that he would ever put her down in the way Leonard had me, smiling, cruel, just a word here and there, placed with the accuracy of a poisoned dart piercing the jugular vein.
Poison. The ugly telephone call I had taken in the darkness of the hall. The great lump of evil in the woman’s voice. Who was she? A madwoman? I wished I had told Dan straight away, but the old reserve, the sense of complicity with Charlotte against him, it must have been that which had stopped me.
The feeble candle flames burned on. Dan, seeming absorbed in his own thoughts, stared into the emptiness of the fire grate, swept out clean and cold, his eyes caught in the glimmer like liquid mercury.
‘That telephone call,’ I began, ‘I must tell you about it.’
‘No need,’ he murmured bleakly, still half lost in thought, ‘although she shouldn’t have asked you to lie.’
‘I don’t mean that call, Dan. The one I took while you were mending the fuse. It was a woman, she said something about this man Charlotte’s seeing.’ The words came with difficulty. It seemed so blunt and cruel to speak openly to him of Charlotte’s lover.
‘Matthews. Nicholas Matthews is his name,’ Dan said, suddenly alert and defensive.
‘I think I must tell you,’ I went on. ‘It might not be true, but she said he had slept with his mother-in-law — although she didn’t put it quite like that.’
There, it was said. A piece of malicious tittle-tattle, that was how it sounded, perhaps that was all it was. Nasty, defiling, diminishing the tragedy with an element of farce. I thought then I should have said nothing, that by saying it I had only damaged Dan further; but it was too late, and even if true had I supposed such a revelation could restore the marriage?
‘Why not his sister, or his own mother!’ Dan exclaimed, lifting his hand and slapping it down on the edge of the sofa to emphasize the preposterousness of the whole thing. ‘And you’ve no idea who the woman was?’
‘She wouldn’t say. Middle-aged. A slight accent — not foreign, regional, I mean, Birmingham, I think. Dan, it sounds ridiculous, stupid, malicious, but she was in earnest. Do you suppose it could have been her — the mother-in-law?’ I persisted as it was impossible to leave it alone now.
‘God, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Matthews, not really, only that he’s got a wife, a pleasant, timid-sounding woman — I’ve spoken to her on the phone. She’s terrified of her husband. How about that! Perhaps I should have made Charlotte frightened of me — do you think she would have liked that?’
For a moment I was afraid that the gentle man sitting beside me was about to lose control. I saw him then as angry, with a deep, intense anger that startled me; but it had been there all along, even at that moment when I had intruded on the scene in Vicky’s bedroom and seen him fiercely clutching the child. It was the injustice, I could see that now, feel it myself.
‘I wonder how she got our number, this anonymous caller?’ Dan was saying. He had flung himself back into the corner of the sofa, one leg over the other, the ankle resting on the knee, his head hard against the ridge of the back-stay, his face turned up to the ceiling. ‘We’re ex-directory, you know — had to do it — kept getting these anonymous calls. Ha!’
‘Please don’t!’ I pleaded.
‘Where did I go wrong, Frances? You’re her friend, the one she talks to, where did I fail her?’ he cried out.
Instinctively, I wanted to touch him in order to reach him in some way, but the recognition of what I felt as pity stopped me. Pity never helped anyone, I thought, remembering Jack and Barbie’s sorrowful hugging of me, but it wasn’t hard to understand how easily it could be indulged.
I thought then of the letters Charlotte had sent me in America. Maybe Dan had failed her, but I didn’t see it as a failure he could have much helped. People couldn’t change themselves, or each other, not in the long term. Failure, reason, logic, none of it had much bearing on the vitality of being in love and how could I say to Dan that his failure was in not sustaining Charlotte’s love? Charlotte, who seemed to need more than most and had the capacity to give a lot herself but had never really given, except, perhaps now, to a man who sounded unworthy, but then wasn’t that always the way? I wondered whether I would have told her about the telephone call had she been there instead of Dan. I began to think that it had, after all, been a kind of abdication to tell him and by doing so spread the responsibility of such knowledge. I did feel what the woman had said was true, but could it really change anything or just further confuse the wretched business, adding more pain for all of them?
It was then I realized my own dilemma and the subconscious reason why I had told Dan. If nothing had been said I would have served badly the long friendship with Charlotte wherein truth had always been vital, but at the same time I knew that the telling was in a sense divisive and as such would probably be seen by Charlotte as betrayal.
‘I can’t say,’ I said, answering Dan’s question. ‘Perhaps it’s better not to see it in those terms. I think what you have to decide is whether what you and Charlotte had has run its course or whether there is something worth saving, something left to fight for.’
‘There’s Vicky. That’s what I really can’t accept, losing Vicky,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure of the dividing line any more, if you know what I mean — Charlotte and Vicky. When they say that a child complicates a marriage break-up it’s understating, it really is. God, I’ve said it enough times myself, to clients, aggrieved people fighting for custody, saying their concern is only for the child when all it amounts to is another weapon of spite. That’s the trouble, I know all the tricks. It would be so unfair.’
I had not realized that his acceptance of Charlotte’s going had reached such a point; perhaps that was another failure — conceding too easily. Unfair! The notion seemed invalid in the circumstances.
Later, on my way back to London, I knew Dan would say nothing to Charlotte of the telephone call. Decisions such as the one she was making had to be unclouded, as far as was possible. That I could understand. It was free will that counted, although such restraint on the part of people like Dan and me could reach masochistic proportions. Leonard was coming to England but Jack and Barbie must not interfere or manipulate. It would be unfair.