Monday Morning
In the early hours of Monday morning Charlotte was driving to Heathrow. The roads were empty, bleak and chilling in the silent stillness preceding dawn, but inside the car it was warm, a little too warm, she edged her hand forward and fractionally altered the heating control, and then with a sudden jerk pushed it on to ‘cold’. An icy blast immediately came into the car and after a few more minutes her passenger stirred and became irritable.
‘It’s too hot. I was feeling drowsy,’ she said before he could comment.
He said nothing, but altered the knob back to warm and pushed a tape into the cassette player. Opera, at five o’clock in the morning!
They’d had a row, the second or maybe the third really big one and she’d only just realized that Nick liked them, he enjoyed the flow of adrenalin, while she couldn’t stand them, the viciousness in him or herself. It took two to quarrel, she knew that, but what was she to do, just accept the hurt and let him get the upper hand? She couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that she had to win but she did not see why she should have to lose either.
They had been together almost exactly a year, the most traumatic of her life, during which the full spectrum of emotions had been experienced, one following on from another in no logical order, sometimes crashing in together, the possessive intensity of loving, the sudden sharp acidity of guilt; wretched, poisoning hatred, aggression, ambition, discovery, sometimes regret, but overall a sense of being alive, for that there was gratitude.
At times her attitude to Nick was one of ‘why should I be grateful to you for anything’, but at others she would fawn on him, kissing every part of his body, licking, caressing. ‘I could eat you,’ she would say, ‘I love you so much.’ ‘And I love you,’ he would respond. ‘We did the right thing?’ she liked that, the moment when he doubted her, and always when there seemed least cause. It gave her a feeling of power which she stored and guarded with small expressions of reserve. When he asked her if they had done the right thing she would not answer but to stop him searching for meaning in her silence she would put her arms around him, dispelling his need to know. It was better that he should never be entirely sure of her. The element of uncertainty had to be sustained.
In fact she preferred not to think too much about the right or the wrong in what she had done. She had left Dan quickly, within days of the weekend when it had all blown up; ‘unseemly haste’ he had accused her of in a brief and unexpected moment of anger that had thrilled and frightened her. The fear was that he might after all put up a fight to make her stay and while the notion had undeniable appeal to her vanity she wanted to remain definite over her decision to leave. From that she could draw strength. And so she had packed her things, the more immediate necessities of life and by no means all that belonged to her in the house, collected together Vicky’s clothes and toys, and left at the civilized and unromantic hour of three o’clock in the afternoon, fetching Vicky from school on her way to the furnished house Nick had rented for them. In the end it had all been remarkably straightforward. Or had it?
Charlotte, although as yet not fully aware of her discovery, was coming to realize that nothing in life, her life anyway, was ever going to be straightforward. There was an automatic tangling process that went on inside her head and her heart with relentless regularity. Her problem was that she had always looked to other people to sort out the confusion, first Dan and now Nick, when the sorting could ultimately be done only by herself. Perhaps that was what Frances had meant when she had urged her to live her own life. It went deeper than the obvious avenues of independence — having a job, financial freedom, all that sort of thing. It was independence of spirit — to be able to determine how you were and what you did from a core of certainty in self. It was the greatest and only real strength and did not have to be accompanied by selfishness or any of the other vices that caused hurt to other people. The realization was dawning in Charlotte, hard as she tried to put it aside; it still seemed easier to live according to others.
The first intensity of living with Nick had pushed out everything else. Their mutual determination to indulge themselves in each other provided a consuming interest that left little time for doubt or regret. They talked a lot about their previous lives. Each separately and silently determined not to consider the shortcomings they inevitably began to see in one another. They spent a great deal of time making love. In the daytime Nick would suddenly appear at the house and Charlotte would leave her drawing board in the tiny spare room and go downstairs to meet him in the narrow hallway, delight in his presence producing an exquisite ache in her chest. They had to touch one another, they couldn’t not. They made love in the hallway, standing up. They tried it on the stairs. In the evenings, after Vicky was asleep, they would sit in the poky little living room drinking black coffee and large brandies. They didn’t watch television, not at first — watching television had been one of the shortcomings of those previous lives. At night in bed they worked hard at performance — another area of previous shortcomings. Nothing was taboo in the headlong need to prove they had a better thing than before.
There were difficulties. Nick found it impossible to relate to Vicky who cried rather too easily and often. He made an effort but he was awkward with children and Vicky was morose with him. She had an unfortunate tendency to stop talking when he came into the room and if he told her to do something she informed him that he was not her father. The second time she did this he smacked her leg but it was Charlotte who felt the sting more than Vicky. Maternal instinct rose up in her and for an instant she hated Nick.
‘Well you ought to discipline her more,’ he retorted to the unspoken rebuke as Charlotte bore holes in him with her raging stare.
‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ she said venomously, clutching Vicky, who for once was not crying. ‘You’re son’s manners leave rather a lot to be desired.’
‘Paul’s at that age.’
‘And Vicky’s at another!’
Vicky was better after that, but Charlotte’s somewhat over-fierce mothering at that time did not blind her to the look of triumph on Vicky’s little face. Matters were also helped by a friendship struck up between Vicky and a child the same age who lived next door.
‘You didn’t have a friend to play with where we lived before,’ Charlotte said to her and then felt mean for drawing the comparison. Somehow it was underhand.
Vicky saw Dan every other weekend. He came to collect her, whisking her away as quickly as possible. He was, of course, polite to Charlotte — even pleasant, but he had bandaged his emotions, wrapped them up tight to conceal the rawness. Charlotte felt the barrier with relief and regret but she preferred not to think about that.
Vicky never said anything about the outings with Dan. There was something old and wise in her silence. She was split between two camps and would betray neither. In the early weeks Charlotte had sometimes asked her about her father, wheedling little questions to find out how he lived now that she was gone, but Vicky would cast down her head and find absorption in whatever was at hand, murmuring non-committally to Charlotte’s enquiries.
Charlotte gave up asking, but as the weeks of separation became months she began to feel the absence of Dan with a growing awareness of loss. Being in love with Nick was entirely different from the old loving of Dan. She found there were times when she disliked Nick intensely but still felt in love with him, whereas she had never not liked Dan. It was the friendship that she mourned. She had discovered a new desolation in loving and not liking.
*
During those first weeks alone Dan had felt numb. He lived and breathed, worked and slept (deeply unconscious sleep produced as an aftermath of shock) and ate — a little. He lost nearly two stone in weight and was forced to go out and buy new clothes. Hilary went with him and he found himself buying styles and colours he would not have considered had he been by himself.
Hanging on to his arm, she pulled him from shop to shop, eager and nervous, trying too hard. She went to the house in the evenings, dropping in to make sure he was all right, offering to cook his meals, wash his clothes. The more she tried to be intimate the further he backed away.
‘We’re the losers of the world,’ she said to him. ‘The failures,’ and he knew he must stop her coming round. But it was not easy. He did not want to be unkind. He began to go out in the evenings. He joined things. A squash club, a theatre group, the Conservative Club. His parents, who were mercifully silent about Charlotte’s departure, suggested he take a holiday with them, but the local council elections were coming up and he found himself suddenly immersed in organizing the Tories, campaign. He accepted every job that was going in order to fill the hours between work and sleep. The constituency members, many of whom were old friends of his parents, were impressed by what he achieved. He had the sort of dedication they were looking for and at the end of the year they approached him with the idea of putting his name forward to Central Office as a prospective parliamentary candidate.
He was neither flattered nor pleased. He felt nothing, but accepted their offer and worked on. He could not avoid noticing that other women besides Hilary were interested in him. He was genuinely surprised by the realization but kept them all at a distance, unwittingly creating a magnetic aura of mystery about himself. He had hardened without knowing it, survived, changed, become a success, but it would take longer to find joy. The ego which had been suppressed all the years he had lived with Charlotte had emerged as a potent force — more badly bruised than he would have thought possible in those selfless times, but strengthened now that he had lost what he had most feared losing.
*
He actually began to enjoy electioneering. At first he had forced himself into it but a sense of challenge grew in him and he liked calling on people, talking to them, hearing their concerns. One evening he called at a large house on a small exclusive development of neo-Georgian-style houses. A boy, in his early teens, opened the door and invited him in. The drone of pop music filled the house and the smell of baking wafted into the hallway. The place was warm and pleasantly cluttered. It was not as he had expected from the outside; two of the other houses he had been in were of the Ideal Home image, pristine, un-lived-in, houses that were not homes but status symbols.
A woman, presumably the boy’s mother, came bustling out of the kitchen, her hands floury, an ample apron covering her dress. She was of indeterminate middle age. Her hair, a faded blonde, looked slightly damp from the steam in the kitchen. An untidy but pleasant-looking little woman, Dan thought.
He told her why he had called but before he could introduce himself had been offered a cup of tea. Normally he politely refused anything like that — it took up too much time, but on this occasion he accepted. The woman asked the boy to take him into their living room. Dan sat down beside a pile of ironing and looked about the room. In the corner opposite him there was a great heap of toys — things for very young children — there was a plastic tricycle the same as the one Vicky had when she was a toddler. On one of the walls childish paintings, daubs of bright poster colours, had been stuck up in a row. Dan noticed that one of them partly concealed a crack in the plaster.
The boy sat opposite him. He had a quiet, serious look about him, a sensitive face. His mother came into the room with the tea and a plate of fruit cake. ‘Will you have some — it’s not been long out of the oven,’ she said, setting the tray down, and then to the boy: ‘Budge up, Paul, make room for me.’
‘I hope you’ll excuse the mess,’ she went on to Dan. ‘I run a playgroup, you see. It’s something I always fancied doing but it wasn’t possible until recently and I’m still trying to get things properly organized. Paul helps me with the clearing up but we just don’t know where to put everything.’ Her enthusiasm had a naive sort of charm.
Dan bit into a slice of the warm cake and regretted not telling Marion Matthews who he was from the outset, it would be more difficult now. He wondered why he had come to the house at all, why he had not simply missed it out. Was there an element of mawkish curiosity in what he was doing, or a desire to recognize his own suffering (no longer so acute he now realized) in a fellow human being — to indulge it by sharing and hearing how she had survived and coped?
The boy Paul, was studying him. Unaccountably Dan felt that he knew who he was even if his mother didn’t, but he remained silent, silent and watchful. Marion was chatting on about her playgroup, she had taken a course, done it all properly she assured him, as if he was some kind of interfering official.
‘Have you still got the donkey? Dad said there was a donkey,’ the boy suddenly asked, as if that was what had been preying on his mind.
Dan looked at Marion. Her posture had stiffened.
‘I’m sorry. I tried to tell you at the beginning. I’m Charlotte’s husband,’ he said.
‘But I thought you were …’
‘The Tory candidate? Yes, that as well. As I said, I’m sorry. I’ll leave now if you like.’
‘The donkey?’ Paul urged him.
‘Ah, the donkey. Yes. I still have that.’
‘I’d like to see it.’
‘Paul!’
The boy leapt up and ran from the room at his mother’s sharp tone.
‘Oh dear,’ she sighed when he had gone. ‘He gets upset so easily, over nothing sometimes.’
Dan stood up to leave.
‘No, please. I didn’t mean to be rude — it was just the surprise of it being you, sit down and finish your tea.’
‘I’m sorry if Paul’s upset.’
‘Oh, he’ll get over it. I worry about him a lot but when all’s said and done he’s going to have to toughen up a bit — like his father always said. The world’s so full of knocks and bumps, isn’t it?’
Dan noticed that she used the past tense when she spoke of Nick, as if he were dead — no longer living and breathing now, at this very second, as they were. Nick and Charlotte, their existence had become remote.
They talked then, Dan and Marion, discovering each other’s disguised survival tactics, urging one another to believe how they had conquered misery, and perhaps they had.
‘Do you know, I never thought I would say this, but it’s been a relief in a way. I can do as I like now. My life is my own,’ Marion said.
*
Cosi Fan Tutte, Charlotte switched it off.
‘I thought you liked opera,’ Nick yawned, stretching his arms in the constricting space inside the car and bringing one hand down to rest on her leg. The conciliatory gesture.
‘I do, but it’s like shepherd’s pie — I usually like it when I have it but I’d never choose it,’ Charlotte said, ‘and certainly not for breakfast!’
It was getting lighter. Another twenty minutes and they’d be into Heathrow.
‘You can turn out the lights now,’ Nick said.
‘Not yet.’
‘Come on, you don’t need them now,’ he persisted and lifted his hand from her leg towards the switch.
‘Who’s driving, you or me!’ Charlotte demanded, she was excited and edgy and Nick rose to the bait he had laid for her, spoiling for a fight without even knowing it.
They snapped and snarled at one another for ten, fifteen minutes.
‘You’re a bloody awful driver anyway,’ he said finally.
‘And you’re bloody rude,’ Charlotte retorted, stopping the car with a squeal of brakes. ‘You drive if you’re so bloody marvellous.’ She got out and stalked round to the passenger door. Nick levered himself across into the driver’s seat and when Charlotte had got in jerked the car forward. He waited for her to pass some sarcastic comment but she stayed quiet, and he felt all the more irritated, denied of any satisfaction in their quarrelling.
At length he said he was sorry and called her darling. She leant across and kissed his neck, but the mood was still on him and they would fight again before the day was out. He had to push it until he got to her and made sure the spark was still there, to consume and engross him. When he had time he wondered at the nature of love.
‘I hope Vicky will be good while we’re away,’ Charlotte was saying, oblivious to her husband’s continuing bellicosity.
‘She’ll be all right,’ he murmured as they approached the terminal building.
‘Ruby’s wonderful with her. I know we shouldn’t have to worry.’
‘Then don’t,’ Nick said.
*
On the plane Charlotte plugged into the film but Nick had work to do. He pulled out the file he needed to study, opening it at Germaine’s last letter, congratulatory about his achievements with Gym and Tonic (Europe), about his new marriage. He allowed himself a brief sense of pleasure and wondered how Charlotte would get on with Germaine. Her relationship with Ruby amazed him. Ruby, as inescapable as a cancer, he thought, it was she who was amazing, unfathomable, devious. She had come to see them, quite unannounced and unexpected, turning up one afternoon to find Charlotte alone in the house. He had come home late that evening, and there they were, the two of them, as friendly as could be. Ruby had put Vicky to bed, read her a story. It was incredible, Charlotte told him in the kitchen, the three of them, she, Vicky and Ruby, they’d had an instant rapport, and who would have thought it possible!
‘I like her. She’s a character. She’s had a hard life,’ Charlotte said when they were in bed and Ruby lay in the spare room beside Charlotte’s drawing board. ‘And it was kind of her to bring back the diary. She needn’t have. She said you must have left it there a long time ago but she only just found it.’
‘She could have posted it,’ Nick grunted.
‘I’m glad she didn’t. It’s not nice to feel there are people you’ve never met who may hate you.’
Ruby had met Nick’s eyes only once but that had been enough to put him on his guard. ‘If you can’t beat em — join em,’ she had seemed to say but Nick knew Ruby of old and was chilled by what might be beneath her magnanimity.
He found it impossible to make love to Charlotte while Ruby was in the house, an occurrence which grew in frequency; and he felt unable actively to discourage the association for fear of reprisal. But Nick was not a man to be cowed for long. The condition went against his nature and so he told Charlotte what Ruby might if she had a mind to. He couldn’t think quite how to put it but in the end he just told her straight. ‘I used to sleep with Ruby.’ No justification. No excuses. It seemed better to be blunt.
‘Really?’ Charlotte said, an odd tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach. ‘You mean you fucked her.’
‘Don’t be vulgar, it doesn’t suit you.’ They were lying in bed, in the dark, side by side, each alert to the other, but still, as if neither wanted the air to move.
‘You do mean that though, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it like?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
‘Go on!’
‘You don’t mind then?’
‘I’m not sure — no, I don’t think so. It’s rather a turn-on.’
‘Not jealous?’
‘Not of the past. Why, do you want me to be?’
‘You are extraordinary!’
‘Am I?’
And so it was said. Charlotte brooded upon it for a while, Nick was sure of that, but if she mentioned it to him her interest was wickedly prurient.
‘What a kinky person you are,’ he told her.
And she answered that yes she was, and wasn’t he glad. Neither of them ever suggested that he was of the same ilk. Men had a right to be kinky.
Despite her acceptance of what had happened Nick felt the friendship with Ruby might abate, but Charlotte continued to allow the visits and amazed him again by asking Ruby to stay at the house and look after Vicky while they were in America. His new wife was impossible to understand he concluded, and yet his understanding of her was greater than he realized. They were alike and that was why they fought and struggled against one another but always realigned. He felt that Charlotte was impossible to understand and yet he had never understood himself. They shared a destructive instinct that made them tear into one another but they were both survivors so the destruction would always be thwarted and perhaps each knew it deep down and they were therefore able to play their game with impunity.
The conundrum of Charlotte, of himself, held him, entranced him, angered and frustrated him, but he no longer felt boredom or despair. A part of the puzzle of his life had been solved — for the time being, because, like Charlotte, he did not possess the quality of constance.
In times past Nick would have been termed a bounder and he knew it and sometimes felt an odd quirk of resentment against himself and the world for making him so. But not for long. He did not have time to ruminate over his own shortcomings or consider where he was categorized by his fellows. Achievement was not finite, it was a continuous state and above all Nick needed to achieve.
His attention concentrated on the contents of the file in front of him and he quite forgot that Charlotte was there.
*
The sound quality from Charlotte’s earphones was poor and after a while she decided to abandon the film. Her mind was too full of her own life anyway. She was in a mood to think.
She got up and went to the lavatory to sort out her face. The plane’s atmosphere had made her sweat and she had sucked off most of the red lipstick she had bought for America. Little things, but they affected her psyche. She reapplied the make-up and gazed at herself in the mirror. She pushed back her hair and smiled a bright, happy smile, her chin well up. It was how she wanted to appear to Frances and Leonard when they met them at the airport.
She swung her way back through the aisles of seats and slipped into her own next to Nick, who was engrossed in his reading. She gazed across at him at the emptiness of the sky, at last she was going to America and she wanted to savour the realization of a so-long-held desire. She concentrated her mind on it, urging delight, but there was something missing, a void she wished she could dismiss from her thoughts. It was tied up with her sense of unreality about herself, a purposelessness that had begun to grow within her since the inevitable abatement of the initial all-absorbing intensity of her relationship with Nick. She longed to talk with Frances again, and yet it was the prospect of their imminent meeting that had heightened her awareness of her own situation. Frances was in a sense her oracle although she had never fully heeded the philosophy that had sprung from their conversations. Her muddled fallibility had prevented that. She wondered whether Frances’ life had changed now that she had returned to Leonard. In essence probably not — that was Frances’ strength, Charlotte thought with envy; envy even now — would she for ever feel envious of her friend? Would she never be satisfied with what she had herself?
She rested her head against the aircraft seat but the tangled thinking ran on and pockets of clarity began to emerge. She was going to America but she wished the going could have been by her own achievement as was planned before she knew Nick. She could not for ever live by dint of other people’s doing. Envy was a shallow emotion, counterproductive, niggling, the result of frustration with oneself, unrealized possibilities.
Charlotte sighed within herself. Nothing really changed unless it happened inside your own head, independently of others. She had never really got started, not yet. With Dan, with Nick, with neither. It should make no difference. Be true to yourself, Frances had said, but she had never fully understood until now. But how to start? That she had still to determine.
*
In California as Frances and Leonard greeted Charlotte and Nick it was still Monday morning. In England the afternoon had faded into evening. Dan had allowed himself a long weekend after the solid weeks of campaigning. The by-election was to take place on Thursday and he was expected to win. Paul, who now regularly cycled to the house after school, had just arrived and together they walked through the garden to the field where Tamara lived, but this evening she was determined to ignore them.
‘I wish she belonged to me,’ Paul sighed, leaning forward against the gate. Dan had noticed that the boy’s face seemed to clear when he saw the donkey. The mask of moroseness lifted and his innocence was exposed.
‘Tamara’s a stubborn creature but she’s got a free spirit and I don’t think she could ever really belong to anybody,’ Dan said to him.
‘Doesn’t she ever try to get out of this field?’ Paul continued.
‘When the mood takes her,’ Dan answered. ‘She did once about a year ago. She got out into the lane, she was very nearly run over. Whether that made any impression on her one can’t be sure, but she hasn’t tried again. Perhaps she’s realized that one field is very much the same as another.’
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