Sunday Midday — Charlotte
‘It’s the children that suffer,’ Audrey was saying. ‘Poor little Amy, she’s become sullen and she can’t stop telling fibs.’
‘It seems to be an epidemic, half our friends are either divorced or separated,’ James said as he sliced through the Sunday joint, beef, tender and succulent, cooked as only Audrey knew how. I felt my stomach contract and knew I would have difficulty eating anything. It crossed my mind for an instant that Dan might have said something but then I dismissed the thought, I had never known him to be devious and Audrey and James were too straightforward to play games of innuendo; if they had known they would have said, as soon as we arrived, before we had to start putting on a show.
‘I don’t like cabbage,’ Vicky announced. She seemed rather tetchy, which wasn’t like her. She had pushed away from me as I bent to kiss her when Dan and I arrived. Dan had hugged her overlong and eventually she had scrambled away from him as well, anxious to get back to her game with James and Audrey’s children.
‘Just try to eat a little,’ I said.
‘Well I’m not going to taste it. I’ll just put it in my mouth and swallow it whole,’ she persisted.
‘Cabbage makes your hair curl,’ James said.
‘That’s carrots,’ somebody said.
‘No, stupid, they let you see in the dark,’ Vicky countered.
‘Don’t be rude,’ I said, glancing at Dan whose face was still unnaturally pale. When he spoke he seemed to make an effort to appear as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, but the effort made him sound almost hearty in sharp contrast to the way he looked now, wrung out but his eyes a little crazed as if he was only just beginning to fathom the full meaning of what had been done to him. I couldn’t look at him for long. The show had to go on. The ritual played out in front of the people who were our friends because they assumed that we all shared the same values and lived by the unspoken code of decent, honest behaviour.
James and Dan had met one another through shooting and when Frances had gone to America and Saturdays had become the loneliest day of the week, Audrey had materialized like a rescue party, full of wisdom and tolerance and the wondrous ability to make the best of things. She would pick me up in her Mini and whisk me off into Cambridge; once or twice we went up to London, although that was not so easy with Vicky and her children still in pushchairs. We would try on clothes we could not really afford and then spend a fortune on lunch.
‘James is always so mellow on Saturday nights after a day out in the open, he never complains about the money I’ve spent,’ she told me, and the sprees continued although I hated not having my own money to spend, hated the new dependence upon Dan following the arrival of Vicky and the consequent termination of the daily train trips to town where I had in fact earned barely enough to cover the cost of the fares. But it had felt like independence and would have been had I not been forced to live so far out due to Dan’s job. That was the justification and the resentment, although the latter was so well implanted by the time Vicky was born that it fed upon anything that came to hand: Dan’s shooting, his parents and their stifling solicitude; the move out of town, which at first I had wanted, only to find myself alone and isolated in the eternal quiet of the countryside where I knew nobody and nobody appeared to want to know me.
‘I’ve come to cheer you up,’ Audrey would say, calling round twice, sometimes three times a week, ‘and myself as well. Let’s go out to tea. Let’s take the children swimming. Let’s go to the church bazaar.’ Let’s. I missed Frances and thought how little she would have in common with Audrey. But Audrey was there and Frances was not and we were able to share the effortless bond between women whose lives have been put into abeyance by babies.
*
‘I went to church with Rupert and Clare,’ Vicky said, a lump of cabbage balanced on her fork between the plate and her mouth.
‘We thought you wouldn’t mind,’ Audrey said quickly. ‘Vicky wanted to come and we couldn’t leave her here by herself.’ Religion had been one of the topics over which we had not agreed. Audrey was well into the church and in the early days of our friendship had shown signs of missionary tendencies towards me, but she had long ago given me up as a bad job in that respect and even managed to joke about it in spite of her own earnest beliefs, which of course encompassed the full moral spectrum including love, honour and obedience.
Suddenly I felt wicked to be sitting at her dining table but irrationally possessive over Vicky’s soul.
‘Why don’t we ever go to church, Daddy?’ Vicky said, the cabbage back on the plate, shoved under her knife; the question was, I knew, no more than a smokescreen to divert adult attention from the green lump.
‘We will if you like,’ Dan said. Our eyes met briefly over Vicky’s head. I remained silent.
‘Mummy says church is a leaning post for people who need one but I don’t understand,’ Vicky went on.
‘Get on with your lunch, darling,’ I said, regretting my tendency to plain speaking when Vicky and I were alone and she asked big questions. I supposed I ought to have been full of regret about everything, but that was as far as it went. I had looked at Dan and been unable to stop myself from despising him, devious after all and at such a moment with accusation and guilt, strength and weakness, confusion, giddy uncertainty, roaring desire, revulsion, all rushing and receding and rushing back, crashing through me like tidal waves, crashing through him too. I felt his presence, physical and mental, stronger than ever before, quite overpoweringly there as if Vicky was the conductor between us, linking us and then shooting us apart in shock waves. Love and hate so close, so confused and compulsive. I had tricked myself into believing that I never really loved him and yet to hate with such piercing intensity, even for a moment, was surely indicative of an equal emotion, felt with fierce tenderness at some point during ten years.
‘Shall you take Vicky or will I?’ Dan was saying.
‘I will of course,’ I said, mistaking his meaning and then knowing the ambiguity had been deliberate.
‘Oh, Charlotte, I’m so pleased,’ Audrey exclaimed.
*
I was constantly amazed and gratified over the way I felt about Vicky. Her conception had been unwitting, the result of a contraception muddle over which I behaved very badly, largely because I could not find anyone to blame but myself. I brooded over it, feeling cheated and, of course, trapped, my old phobia manifest as my abdomen expanded and I became petulant and unreasonable over the little things of life. My main regret once I had come grudgingly to accept my new situation, was that Dan and I had not been aware of ‘doing it for real’. It seemed to me that it would have been rather magnificent to have made love with a purpose so permanent in mind, the ultimate gratification of the creative instinct, and I had missed it, been quite oblivious. It was a regret Dan and I shared.
As the time drew near for the birth I started going to relaxation classes. They were run by a spinster in her fifties, a health visitor who arrived at the village hall in a Land Rover with three black labradors falling over her.
‘What’s it like?’ we asked her, me and the other rotund expectants.
‘Like passing a giant vegetable marrow, I’m told,’ she said airily, ‘but I’ll show you a film.’
The film was of the stuff nightmares are made of. Down to earth, in full colour and shot at the angle from which none of us would ever have to see when it came to our turn.
The night Vicky was born it dawned on me as I lay counting the minutes and seconds between contractions that I had never held a baby, never wanted to and still was unable to countenance the one inside me as a living being to whom I would be expected to relate. Dan was by me, a tedious fondness radiating through the fear and anxiety to the point where I wanted to bite his hand on its way down from mopping my sweating brow. I said things to him, bad, unkind things that rose up and out of me from an uncontrollable anger that also seemed to generate the positive energy needed to accomplish the wretched business. But Dan was impervious to my vile tongue and I became more angry.
‘Beautiful angry person,’ he murmured and I almost spat at him.
Vicky was born and all was well. I feasted upon the sight of her, every tiny bit of her little body, so appealingly yellow with the touch of jaundice she had developed.
Dan’s mother came to see us and said she expected it would be a boy next time. I cradled Vicky in my arms and felt serenely protective, loving her, if it was possible, even more. I told Dan what his mother had said.
‘You know what she’s like. She doesn’t think what she’s saying. She’d be upset if she realized,’ he said.
‘You’re not disappointed, are you?’ I asked.
‘Of course not, and besides I’ve always rather fancied a large family.’
After he had gone and Vicky had been put away for the night I subsided into my pillows and succumbed to the blues, storing what he had said in the subconscious reservoir of indictments I had been building in my mind.
I had decided that I was not going to suffer from postnatal depression, but the decision was made long before the event and during that twilight period of retreat into the exclusive little world of pregnancy; but the sudden overwhelming reality, the great void previously filled with a sense of wellbeing, defied all such resolution. Vicky was not a difficult baby and I marvelled at how I might have coped at all had she been. But even an easy baby will deprive its mother of sufficient sleep and thus the problem is compounded with broken nights, broken spirit, and broken nails as your own share of calcium and survival is sucked away.
It was dear, kind, interfering Audrey, and by that I don’t wish it to sound as if I was not grateful for her interference, who came to my rescue with her wisdom and experience and propensity to reduce everything to practical level; solving emotional trauma with a cup of tea and a home-made biscuit.
Audrey assured me that she had been through it all herself, although I did not believe her, nobody could suffer so; it was my own unique isolated misery because that was the nature of the malady. But Audrey, who read a lot of women’s magazines, made me believe that my problem was chemical rather than psychological which, illogically, made me feel a great deal better. I suppose it was a comfort knowing that the chemistry was out of phase rather than the much more fragile psyche.
When Vicky was six months old, established and smiling, and I began to feel that I was emerging from the vegetable patch, Audrey suggested we should all take a holiday and promptly booked a castle in Scotland.
‘It’s not quite as grand as it sounds,’ she told me, but Saddell Castle, isolated and resplendent at the mouth of a small river and facing out towards the Isle of Arran across Kilbrannan Sound, seemed pretty splendid with its battlemented tower, endless spiral stairway, baronial fireplaces and massively thick walls.
Audrey and James had been there before, the previous spring, just after its conversion from near ruin:
‘We couldn’t believe our luck,’ James said enthusiastically, ‘what a place!’
It was indeed everything they had promised us during the evenings we had spent together planning the great sojourn, although arriving there at dusk, with a cloud-veiled moon casting an eerie light down the pale grey walls, set us in awe rather than enthusiasm while Audrey and James energetically vied with one another to point out the more amazing snippets of history attached to the place.
‘Do you see the floor, here by the main door. It’s removable. They used to take it up when unwelcome visitors were expected so they’d fall down into the prison beneath.’
‘And do you see up there, that corner of the battlement? That was where the woman in white stood and watched her husband murder her father and then threw herself over the edge in despair.’
‘No, it was her father who murdered her husband,’ James corrected.
‘I don’t think so. I think I’m right on that one,’ Audrey insisted.
‘Well we can check it, can’t we? There’s a book upstairs with the whole story.’
‘Does it matter very much which way round it was?’ Audrey retorted.
‘For the sake of historical accuracy I would say, yes, that it does,’ James continued pendantically.
The four of us were still standing in the cobbled courtyard, the gentle roar of a night wind building momentum through the tall, densely planted trees beyond the far side of the tower. The children, James and Audrey’s pair and Vicky, were asleep in the cars. Rupert’s dog, Pineapple, a rough-haired fox terrier, had started to bark at the strange and unfamiliar sounds.
‘Come on, we’d better get the children in and get sorted out,’ Audrey said, stalking off towards the car, her back stiff with bad temper.
Dan and I, mute and vaguely embarrassed, set to with our own unloading.
‘Oh dear,’ he murmured to me as we pulled out our bags and the general paraphernalia that goes with new parenthood. He glanced in the direction of the other two and I knew what he meant, although we were, perhaps, enjoying the touch of smugness that goes with seeing another couple at odds.
We transferred Vicky to the panelled bedroom that was to be ours, spent half an hour making it so, another twenty minutes exploring the upper levels of the great stone building and then descended the spiralling steps to join James and Audrey in the main living room where they were still engaged in the argument that had begun when we arrived.
Sniping at one another from either side of the vast fireplace they made an effort to restore civility when we appeared but the atmosphere between them remained densely hostile.
‘How about a drink?’ James said terribly brightly, rubbing his hands together as if to create a spark. ‘Scotch seems like the most appropriate thing.’
‘Yes, lovely,’ I said.
‘Yes, fine,’ Dan said.
‘I’d rather have wine,’ Audrey said. ‘Have you seen the view from this window, Charlotte? Look, before all the light goes,’ she continued as I moved forward to gaze out across the deserted beach edging the black water which looked as dense and heavy as treacle. Nothing stirred. The wind had died in the trees behind. Night was falling like a blanket, smothering movement, forcing calm.
‘It looks so peaceful, doesn’t it?’ Audrey was saying. ‘It seems hard to believe that there’s been so much turmoil here in the past.’
Having admired the tranquillity, Audrey and I went to the kitchen to prepare supper while Dan and James went out to find driftwood to make a fire.
‘Of course it’s going to be much too dark to find anything but you can’t tell James anything like that, he’s far too pigheaded,’ Audrey muttered after they had gone. ‘He’s dragged poor Dan out there too, I am sorry, Charlotte.’
‘Oh please don’t apologize,’ I said hastily, ‘I’m sure Dan doesn’t mind.’
‘No, I don’t suppose he does. He’s so good-natured, the lamb. I’m afraid James is always like this at the start of a holiday. It takes him two or three days to unwind and the rest of us just have to suffer in the meantime.’
‘I’m sure it’s not that bad,’ I said.
Audrey let out a scoffing sort of snort and in the process, which seemed to involve her whole body, knocked over the bottle of wine. There was another row over that when James returned with a handful of damp twigs and the ensuing meal was eaten with Audrey and James at either end of the long dining table, scoring points off one another while Dan and I sat in the middle attempting indirect mediation. As if to emphasize their dislike of one another, the acid jibes thrown up and down the table were interspersed with solicitous comments and questions to Dan or to me, face muscles contorting from one extreme to another, from a frown to a beam in a bizarre comedy of manners that had to be played out to a captive audience, Dan and me, who had also become part of the play.
It went on after the meal was over and we had all four settled in front of the fire, which kept smoking because the wood was so damp. We were to play cards, Newmarket and rummy.
‘Someone hasn’t put their penny on the ace,’ James said. ‘Come on, pay up whoever it is.’
‘Don’t be so officious,’ Audrey snapped at him.
‘I wasn’t!’
‘You were!’
‘I think it must be me,’ Dan interrupted, placing another penny on the card.
‘No. I remember seeing you put yours down at the beginning,’ James said. ‘It’s Audrey that hasn’t paid.’
‘Well, if you knew it was me why didn’t you say so in the first place!’ Audrey accused him.
‘I didn’t want to embarrass you!’
‘That was nice of you,’ she retorted sarcastically.
‘Well, you’ve always been a duffer at cards,’ James said, a soothing edge to his voice.
‘Since when!’
‘You know you have.’
‘How dare you call me a duffer!’
‘Look, I’ll leave my second penny on the ace and that makes it all square,’ Dan interrupted again.
‘You see, he had already paid!’ James declared.
‘Excuse us,’ Dan said, getting up and reaching for my hand. ‘I’m feeling a bit full after the meal. I think Lottie and I will take a stroll along the beach.’
‘Oh! … yes, of course. Careful of the birds though,’ James said as we left the room. ‘They nest on the beach, lay their eggs in the sand. Oyster-catchers. Might be an idea to take a torch.’
‘Know-all!’ we heard Audrey say as we made our escape.
The beach was soft-sanded and still slightly warm from the day’s sun, although the air was cold and Dan and I huddled together as we moved along with the torch beam a few inches in front of our feet.
‘They say you should never go on holiday with friends,’ I said.
‘Yes, but I always thought that meant you were likely to fall out with them, not that they would with one another,’ Dan said.
‘D’you think we’ll be able to stick a week of it?’ I asked.
‘I suppose we’ll have to.’
‘I’d no idea they were like that but then it’s not often I’ve seen them together.’
‘I don’t know which of them is the worse.’
‘Both as bad.’
‘Glad we’re not like that.’
‘Umm.’
*
When we got back James and Audrey were in the kitchen locked in a passionate embrace, the electric kettle shooting a cloud of steam over their heads.
‘Sorry,’ Audrey said sheepishly when they drew apart and saw us just as we were about to make another hasty exit.
‘Yes,’ James said, switching off the kettle. ‘A couple of silly chumps, aren’t we?’
‘It should have been us that had to go for a walk, not you,’ Audrey continued.
‘No really, we wanted a walk, a bit of fresh air,’ Dan said.
‘I’m not surprised with all that smoke from the fire. I knew it would do that with the wood sopping wet,’ Audrey said.
‘Hardly sopping,’ James interjected.
‘Well, pretty damp at any rate. Coffee?’
‘No thanks. I think we’ll go to bed,’ Dan said.
‘Where was I supposed to find dry wood?’ James was saying as we disappeared again.
In bed, the light out, our room was so densely dark I could almost feel the weight of it. Dan had fallen asleep but I lay awake, unable to dismiss the steamy little scene we had witnessed in the kitchen. My heart ached over it. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. I lay there in the dark and felt alone and inexplicably envious.
*
‘We’re thinking of taking the castle again this year, maybe for Christmas,’ James had said.
‘Yes, how about us all going?’ Audrey added. ‘It must be lovely there in winter and with any luck we might get snowed up and have to stay for weeks!’
‘Can we get down?’ one of the children asked.
‘Okay, we’ll call you when the pud’s ready,’ Audrey said.
‘I don’t think you should allow them to keep jumping up and down during mealtimes,’ James said with disapproval. ‘Apart from anything else it’s bad for the digestion.’
‘Oh, don’t be so pompous,’ Audrey snapped at him.
‘We’re not going to start that again, are we?’ James went on. ‘Audrey has this notion that anyone who doesn’t agree with her is pompous,’ he announced to the room in general, although there were only the four of us left.
‘That’s not quite true, my darling,’ Audrey countered, her voice like silver acid. ‘It’s only you that’s pompous.’
‘That’s rich, coming from you, President of the WI, Chairman of the Mothers’ Union, Treasurer of the Parochial Church Council, pomposity personified!’ James laughed, a quick, embarrassed chuckle for our benefit, to make it seem that he, at any rate, took none of it too seriously.
‘I hardly call it pompous to do one’s bit in society,’ Audrey said with simmering indignation.
‘Well if that doesn’t sound pompous I don’t know what does!’ James retorted emphatically.
‘We won’t be coming to the castle with you at Christmas,’ Dan suddenly interjected.
James and Audrey fell silent, looked at one another and then at us.
‘Oh we are dreadful, and I don’t blame you a bit for not wanting to spend Christmas with us — we’d probably ruin it for you, arguing all the time,’ Audrey said. ‘I can’t think why you put up with us at all.’
‘It’s not you two,’ Dan said, avoiding my agitated gaze. ‘It’s simply that Lottie and I are parting.’
‘What did you say?’ they both said, almost simultaneously.
‘Lottie and I, we’re separating,’ Dan repeated, lightly, as if it was a matter of small moment, but the only way he could say it a second time without the ‘bad form’ melodrama so alien to his nature.
The room seemed to contract, the air stop moving.
‘But you get on so well,’ Audrey said quietly, as if to herself, and then: ‘You’re not serious?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
I had said nothing but all three were now looking to me for some kind of explanation. Their eyes accused me, sent daggers into my soul. Traitor, destroyer, revealed at last as of no moral fibre. Suddenly it seemed quite unbearable that I might never again sit with Dan and listen to James and Audrey argue. Yet another facet to the pattern of familiarity endured, ever nurtured, through years. I had lost count of the number of times Dan and I, driving home after lunch or dinner with James and Audrey, would marvel at the degree of antagonism between them and fail to understand what kept them together — or maybe we had an inkling but chose to dismiss it for fear of recognizing what they had and we did not. In truth, far from finding their company in any way irksome or even embarrassing after the familiarity had set in, it was like being in a darkened room and suddenly having the light switched on to be with them: and their glow reflected on us; made us feel fortunate and privileged to have them as friends, real friends, sharing the same conversational wavelengths, implicitly assuming understanding, and yet not now, because I had shattered the basis of that understanding, destroyed the foundations that had made it possible.
‘I don’t understand,’ Audrey said.
‘Neither do I,’ said Dan.