Saturday Morning — Charlotte
I woke to the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs. At one time we had one by the bed but Dan said it kept him awake even when it was not ringing because he always expected that it might.
I got up. Dan was still asleep, his head barely visible above the cover. I could not remember him coming back to bed.
The phone kept ringing. I hurried, anxious that it should not wake Dan or Vicky but then Vicky was not there and I had forgotten.
Of course the phone would be bound to stop ringing just as I got to it. Wasn’t that what always happened, and I had no idea how long it had been going before it had succeeded in rousing me. I glanced at the clock in the hall. It was nine thirty. We had slept late with no Vicky to wake us. I picked up the receiver. No click. No sudden dial tone, the caller was determined.
‘Hello.’
‘Charlotte. It’s Nick.’
His voice sounded tired and battered and yet there was an urgency and insistence there too.
‘Marion knows. I told her last night.’
There was a pause.
It felt like a very big moment. A turning point. The crisis had come.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.
‘You must make your own decision.’
‘Where are you, at home?’
‘No, the office, it was impossible to stay in the house.’
‘I’ll come to you there.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. As soon as I can.’
I put down the receiver. The house was silent again although beyond the garden I could hear Tamara braying to the morning, carefree and uninhibited. It was a wonderful sound, crazy and funny and sad all at the same time. I stood by the telephone, listening to the donkey and feeling as if my heart might burst out of my chest at any moment.
The stair creaked and a moment later Dan was standing at the other end of the hall, his hands plunged deep into his dressing gown pockets, his eyes filled with certain knowledge.
‘Who was it?’
‘Nicholas Matthews.’
‘What’s he doing ringing you on a Saturday morning?’
Why the question when he already knew?
‘He’s told his wife,’ I said, obliquely.
‘What?’
‘What do you think!’ I retorted, unfairly, unkindly. Why should Dan make it easy for me when it was so hard for him to take the truth, even, at last, to demand it?
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘I’m having an affair with him,’ I almost shouted. ‘No, that doesn’t sound right,’ I continued less forcefully. ‘It’s more than an affair, Dan. I’m leaving you.’ I turned away from him and went out to the kitchen. I started to make toast, mechanically, knowing there was no possibility it would be eaten. In the same way, whenever Vicky had fallen or suffered some minor catastrophe as a baby, I had immediately put her to my breast.
I waited for Dan to come into the kitchen, my kitchen with its expensive oak units I had chosen with such deliberation; the table I had found after months of scouring antique shops and auctions; the floor tiles we had waited six months to be delivered because they were just the right shade. All of it suddenly unimportant and easy to leave, part of all the trappings I had thrown off without a qualm a moment ago by the telephone in the hallway of a house which had been my home. The quick and the dead, and yet the dead had seemed so vital. How strange to be so abruptly cured of materialism.
I made coffee. Put out butter and marmalade. Arranged the table as I always did for a leisurely weekend breakfast. Dan came into the kitchen, dressed but not shaved, the black stubble accentuating the whiteness of his face. Even he seemed removed from my possession. Rights to understanding were forfeited by betrayal, were they not? Besides I did not need him to understand, only to accept. It sounds and is a selfish way of looking at things, but are not we all selfish, even those that martyr themselves to a right course of behaviour? Later I would be called courageous and honest but I always knew that I was selfish. It was simply a matter of degree.
Dan sat down opposite me at the table and then stood up again and went over to the window.
‘I don’t think I’ve really taken it in,’ he said hoarsely, clearing his throat. ‘I knew there was something but I never expected it to go this far. I hoped, I suppose I hoped that it was nothing too much, would blow over. Just a fling. Are you certain, Lottie, that it isn’t just a tenuous thing?’
‘Tenuous’, what a very solicitorish word, I thought resentfully. I was trying to dislike him, even hate him, fending off the vulnerability of a decade spent together, lives and being intertwined day and night and now suddenly severed with bleeding ends to be held in and stopped up before the flow had a chance to drain and weaken resolve.
‘No, it’s not tenuous, although certainty is another matter. I don’t want that any more.’
‘You may not want it, but I think you need it,’ he said with unbearable evenness of tone, and assumed insight. If only he would fight and be angry.
‘There’s only one thing that’s certain and that’s death. I just want to feel alive for a bit in the meantime,’ I said, resorting to a sort of desperate and profound cliche which came out sounding like adolescent rebellion.
‘Thank you,’ Dan said, a totally foreign note of bitterness in his voice.
The gap was widening. I pushed it a little further.
‘I’m not ready to do without passion,’ I scrambled on. ‘Didn’t you notice that we never touched one another except in bed?’
‘The past tense already?’ he said. ‘I didn’t think that we needed to.’ He heaved a great breath, as if there was something constricting in his chest. He was agitated, maybe even a little livid, and yet his eyes still maintained the sad and reproachful gaze of the observer witnessing a tragedy. He thought I was making a mistake, for myself as much as for him.
‘Why couldn’t we have talked about it sooner?’ he said.
‘I didn’t think it would go this far, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have left you anyway,’ I said, finding it necessary to go on hurting him in order to guard against the possibility of allowing myself to be trapped into staying. Dan had always used understanding and reason to lay the traps. Perhaps if I sounded sufficiently unreasonable and intransigent he would let go now and come to view the parting with a sense of relief. I could not allow there to be any suggestion of hope for us, neither for Dan or myself, although it was frightening to feel so determined to destroy, even something that had felt as if it was destroying me.
‘I’d better get dressed,’ I said, getting up. ‘I have to go and see him.’
‘What about his wife? Does she know?’
‘Yes, he told her last night.’
‘Poor woman, is she all right?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’
‘I see.’
‘That’s right! I didn’t ask.’
‘What time will you be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Damn it all! What have I done?’
‘Nothing. I’m sorry, Dan. It’s me. These things happen.’
‘Don’t give me platitudes, please.’
‘I can’t explain. Not now, I must go. I’ll be back later.’
Unfair, so unfair, why had I not shrivelled up in shame? Instead I felt elated, quite undeniably so, driven on by a force transcending guilt and responsibility.
*
‘Are you ready for all those responsibilities?’ Frances had asked.
‘You make it sound like some sort of sentence,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it? Mortgages, cooking and ironing shirts, answerable to somebody else.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that.’
‘With Dan I think it will be.’
‘You don’t really know him. He’s all right.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Please, Fran, I want you to like him.’
‘Oh, I don’t dislike him. It’s just that I think it would be better if you lived together for a while first.’
‘You wouldn’t have said that a year ago.’
‘Perhaps not.’
Frances was in her third year at Cambridge and had fallen in love with a post-graduate student called Leonard, an American Jew whose rooms she now shared. Frances was on the pill. She had taken the precaution before she and Leonard had become lovers.
‘Don’t you want to marry Leonard?’ I asked. We were sitting on the grassy bank which slopes down to the River Cam beyond the smooth expanse of lawn behind King’s. It was a warm day for October but the summer tourists had left and the Backs returned to relative tranquillity. Dan and I had been to Cambridge a month earlier when Frances was not there. We had called at half a dozen estate agents, looking for mortgageable houses. It was how we spent most weekends. Cambridge, Newmarket, Saffron Walden, househunting.
‘You should always buy the house you can’t afford. It’s the best way of saving. A house is the best investment you can make,’ Dan’s father had delivered sagely after he had come to accept that I had ‘turned out all right’, after all.
‘I haven’t thought about marriage,’ Frances said.
‘But you love Leonard.’
‘Yes. Do you love Dan?’
‘I suppose so. I haven’t thought about it, but of course I do, I must do, mustn’t I?’
We lapsed into silence and lay back on our coats which we had spread over the grass.
‘I love it here. I hope we get a house in Cambridge. We’ll be able to see each other more often,’ I said.
‘I don’t suppose I shall still be here this time next year,’ Frances said.
‘You might stay on. Leonard’s been here five years, hasn’t he?’ I said hopefully. I wanted to live near Frances and felt an odd sense of despair at the thought of moving to Cambridge myself just as she would be about to leave.
‘You’re not going to finish your course at art college then?’ she said.
‘Well I can’t really, not if we come here. It would be too far and impractical. Dan’s new job is more important.’
Frances sat up in a sudden movement.
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ she said. ‘You can’t!’
‘Oh. I don’t know,’ I said, realizing how it must have sounded to her, but somehow incapable of rationalizing, perhaps because I did not want to have to face up to the new role I had ascribed to myself for fear of seeing it as unacceptable.
‘Isn’t it strange,’ she said next, leaning back on one hand and gazing across the river to a meadow where sheep were grazing. ‘I always thought it would be you who didn’t conform, not me.’
‘Is it such a thin line? I mean, if you get married you are conforming and if you live with someone you are not?’ I said, defensively simplistic.
‘You know that it’s not just the fact of being married, but everything that seems to go with it, self-denial, at least as far as you are concerned.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t be so direct. What am I supposed to say to Dan, we’ll marry on my terms which means you not taking the new job because I’ve got to finish college and never mind anything else? Doesn’t there always have to be a compromise? What would you do if Leonard went back to America and there was the chance for you to go too?’
‘I’d finish my degree and then I’d go, assuming there was work for me there and that I could be independent. It would never work between us otherwise.’
‘But what would happen if you married and had a baby?’
‘That wouldn’t change the basis of the relationship. I’d still need to feel independent and having a baby doesn’t mean that you have to give that up.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘Not at all, although I can’t imagine wanting a baby, can you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I suppose one day.’ I had not told Frances about Chad or the abortion. Nobody knew except Dan. Perhaps it was the dead baby that bound us together after all. I had not felt the same since it had happened. There was a need to make amends, to retreat and comply, nothing consciously thought out but an overall guiding impulse Frances would probably have understood better than the lame stuff I had given her about practicality. But I could not tell her. Perhaps it was something to do with what had happened years ago on my last day at the convent. That was something we had never discussed although it seemed so ridiculous and trivial now, but a sin then, a shockingly wrong thing to do, and I was madder and more miserable then than when the two doctors signed me as crazy.
The sun went behind a cloud and suddenly it was cold sitting on the river bank.
‘Let’s go and have some tea,’ Frances suggested. ‘I’ll even toast you some crumpets if Leonard is back and he’s lit a fire. I’m hopeless at them, mine always go out, perhaps I’m not so independent after all,’ she said, smiling wryly and taking my arm as we got up and walked back through the colleges.
*
Leonard was back. We went into the sitting room to find him crouched in front of the old-fashioned fireplace, a sheet of newspaper held across to draw the flames.
‘Good. I promised Charlotte crumpets,’ Frances said.
‘What would you do without me?’ Leonard said, standing up and removing the newspaper to reveal a blazing fire. He stood back to admire it and then turned to face us, smiling at me in greeting.
‘We’ve just been discussing that,’ Frances said, taking off her coat.
‘Sounds interesting,’ Leonard said. He was a slightly-built man, with jet black hair, very curly, which he scratched a lot. It was a mannerism. He held his arms high when he talked, as if to give himself extra height. He scratched through his hair with one hand and with the other made expansive gestures to what he was saying. He was not at all good-looking, almost ugly, but attractive as soon as he began to talk. Frances’ manner towards him appeared almost offhand a lot of the time but if most sexual relationships between men and women consist of victim and aggressor, Frances was ultimately the victim. She adored Leonard but his intellect intimidated her so she used superficial disparagement as a defence, although Leonard seemed to let it pass most of the time as he did now in not pursuing how she would manage without him.
‘I’m afraid it will have to be muffins. I bought muffins,’ he said, briefly taking her shoulders and stretching up to kiss her lightly on the forehead as he went past towards the door where I was standing.
‘Charlotte. Nice to see you again. How’s Dan? Such a nice guy and I understand you and he are to be married. Congratulations,’ he said warmly, taking my shoulders and kissing me on both cheeks. Frances followed him out of the room and I went over to the fire to warm up.
The four of us had met in June, about a week before Dan and I went to buy the turquoise ring. It had been in London. A concert at the Festival Hall. Frances had been given the tickets. The music was Prokofiev, and Dan and I, who never thought to go to classical concerts, had surprised ourselves by liking it. Afterwards we had all gone to an Italian restaurant for supper and Leonard had talked about Vietnam although he did not mention the fact that he had been drafted out there and spent two years fighting the Viet Cong; that I discovered later from Frances. Leonard talked about the wider issue rather than his own experiences. He had startling and original ideas which he propounded with clarity and an easy modesty which encouraged the rest of us to form and express views on matters we had hitherto failed to examine or seen only with stereotyped opinion.
The evening was a sparkling taste of what seemed to me like another way of life. I thought I had glimpsed it in Chad, the exhilarating liberation of expansive thinking, but there I had been hoodwinked by a phony and retreated back to Dan and the safety of convention. Listening to Leonard the niggling dissatisfaction was roused again and yet lay dormant for nearly ten years, kept down by kindness and affection and inertia brought on by material comfort. Selfish again, but perhaps it had been the same for Dan.
Our wedding was to be a grand affair. From the moment the turquoise ring was displayed on the third finger of my left hand the arrangements were set in motion and I was carried along as if on a tide of white tulle with designs for three-tiered cakes, silver-worded invitation cards, flowers, gift lists, guest lists and going-away outfits swept along with me like buffeting flotsam. The ceremony was to take place in Dan’s church and the reception at Lakeside. His parents insisted on bearing the cost and my mother gratefully agreed to abdicate the responsibility not only for the expense but the organization as well.
‘Poor Dorothy! It wouldn’t be fair to expect her to cope with it all when she’s on her own,’ Dan’s mother said, consulting her diary to find a suitable date for the wedding and prompting Dan to ring the vicar.
It was agreed that I should go and live at Lakeside until we were married and as if Dan’s parents were still very wary as to my total conversion to stability and reasonable behaviour the wedding was fixed sooner rather than later. November, to get it over with before preparations began for Christmas, and before the weather was too awful.
I went back to college for the winter term and acquired a moped to get me to and from Lakeside. Chad, who mercifully had been granted leave of absence during the summer term to take up a short fellowship in Mexico, was back but lecturing the new first-year intake and surrounding himself with another group of awed and receptive students. I saw little of him, deliberately as if I was frightened of the hidden dark force taking over again. The sight of him, to hear his voice, filled me with a squirming revulsion, against myself as much as him.
Why I went back to college when I was to leave before the term was over was the one small obstinate rebellion against the tulle tide, although I do not want to give the impression that I was not happy with what was to be my lot. To be surrounded by the kindness, security and decency of Dan’s family made me feel privileged and redeemed. Their consideration knew no bounds and Dan’s mother, who suspended all her other activities in order to give every bit of her time to the wedding arrangements, showed not a hint of resentment at my daily disappearance while she grappled with caterers and florists and car-hire firms.
‘I have always wished that I’d had a daughter,’ she told me one evening in the kitchen as she showed me how to make flaky pastry. ‘And now I’ve got one.’
The weekend before the wedding Dan and I went for a walk, beyond the house and across the fields which stretched over the horizon. It was a cold, wintry Sunday afternoon and we both wore Wellington boots as it had been raining in the morning and the ground was damp and muddy. When we came to the patch of trees which stood beside the field where the corn had been we stopped and looked at one another.
‘Did we come this way on purpose?’ I asked him, wondering how he remembered what had happened there three years earlier. With regret? He had never mentioned it directly since.
‘It’s a pity the ground is so wet,’ he said, smiling and kicking at a stray lump of chalk. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his brown anorak. He looked down at the spot where we had been.
‘It was the chains that did it,’ he said, still smiling but seeming a little embarrassed. ‘What about you?’
‘Sheer devilment,’ I answered, almost without thinking.
‘I might have known it,’ he said, taking my arm and turning back along the way we had come. ‘Tea and Evensong. Mother will be worrying we’re going to be late.’
If only he had not said that last bit. I pulled back on his arm.
‘I don’t mind a bit of mud,’ I said, alarmed by the sudden sense of desperation that had made me say it. It was not that I wanted to churn about under the tree in the November dankness, it just seemed necessary to make an attempt at thwarting all the carefully laid plans, if only by making us too late for tea and Evensong on this one occasion.
Dan looked back at me, his expression fleetingly as surprised and bewildered as it had been three years ago.
‘How would we explain it? The mud and the wet, I mean. Come on, Lottie, just one more week and we can do whatever we like.’
‘Can we?’ I said, allowing myself to be tugged away.
‘Within reason,’ Dan replied.
*
The following Saturday I stood before the satin-draped altar, my own satin and tulle making me feel like a sacrificial offering. The vicar, a strange little man with that awful pallid and underfed look some clergymen have, stood immediately in front of us, swaying a little, back and forth in his white surplice. He bent his head forward as if he wanted to whisper to us and for an inane moment I thought he might ask us if we had taken the blood tests he had advised.
‘My wife and I did,’ he told us a month earlier at the obligatory pre-wedding ‘little chat’. But what if the tests had shown something to be wrong, I had wanted to ask him, would he and his wife have abandoned one another?
I felt Dan’s hand slip over my own, squeezing my fingers. He was trembling a little. He looked amazing in morning dress, the grey and black striped trousers and oddly-tailored black jacket. I glanced at his face but he was staring straight ahead, past the vicar, to the altar. Did he really believe in all this? That the bizarre little ceremony was being watched over by a heavenly God and a Holy Ghost? Perhaps. One never knew for certain any of these things. The trembling passed to me and I was grateful to hear the vicar begin: ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God.’
*
Someone threw rice outside the church. It hit my face and stung, but I smiled on, looking round at all the well-turned-out guests. I did not know any of them. They were all friends of Dan’s parents, shooting men, bridge players, men and women of obvious standing in life, who smiled and shook hands and kissed the bride.
Back at Lakeside my mother kept thanking Dan’s parents and looking on the verge of tears. Dan’s father had ‘given me away’ to his son. The best man was a cousin from Oxford and the two bridesmaids his twin daughters, identical seven-year-olds who had said they were going to be sick just before we had entered the church but failed to carry out their threat.
I cannot think why Frances was unable to be there, but I remember missing her and gazing with a certain amount of discomfort mixed with pride at her present, a set of pens and instruments used by graphic designers, on display with all the silver and crystal, linen and china.
‘What an odd gift, dear,’ Dan’s mother had said when we were setting everything out. ‘Perhaps you will be able to exchange it for something you and Dan need.’
‘Lottie, we ought to circulate.’ Dan had found me, alone for a moment in the conservatory where the presents were on show. ‘What are you doing in here, all alone, gloating over the haul?’ He laughed. ‘Come on, everyone’s waiting for the speeches and telegrams.’
It was the one day to feel special and important and in a way I did, although not as myself but as the bride, a curious creature set apart in her white to be admired and treasured. And Dan seemed pleased with me, even proud.
‘It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. I’ve done the right thing,’ I thought, a secret little sensation of joyous relief settling somewhere within me, warm and hopeful.
The speeches were made, the telegrams read, nothing jarred. There were no intrusions to mar the day. Dan made a joke in his speech and everyone laughed, anxious to ease and indulge. The tears at last sprung from my mother’s eyes as we drove away in Dan’s new Mini. The sun had broken through the November clouds. An old boot and a string of empty tin cans bounced along the road behind us.
‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ Dan said, and I knew what he meant although the day had been a magical one and we were happy.