Sunday Afternoon — Nick
‘I don’t understand, Nick, I just don’t understand at all,’ Ruby said.
‘It’s strange, but I thought you might,’ I said. ‘And I felt that I should tell you myself, partly because I wasn’t sure Marion would say anything. I thought she might delay it.’
‘To come all this way and to tell me this, and look at the state of you — you look as if you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep for weeks and you don’t even look happy — downright miserable in fact. Can I get you something to eat?’
‘No, thank you, Ruby, nothing. I just wanted to tell you.’
‘At least a cup of tea?’ she insisted, retaining a strong note of disapproval.
But if Ruby was angry she was also flattered that I had come to tell her myself although the decision to do so was more calculated than she realized; a PR exercise the purpose of which would never occur to her — not after all the years of seeing me as the reluctant father.
It was more than five years since the last time I had been to the house in Birmingham, although I had seen Ruby, two or three times a year, when she came to stay with us, uninvited, but too potent a force to refuse when she declared her impending visits over the phone to Marion, who would bemoan her mother’s domineering ways and had even indicated a reluctance to let her know the new address and telephone number when we moved house. Ruby, incurably divisive, would arrive and the visits, which always left their mark on Marion’s tentative ego, were somehow endured and even enjoyed at times because for all her old wickedness Ruby was never dull, and Marion and I, each in different ways finding her infuriating, ultimately accepted her as inevitable. Paul, of course, adored her, Ruby made sure of that.
‘We can’t stand here in the hallway,’ she said, brusquely. ‘You go along in there and nod at Frank. I’ll make the tea.’
I had delivered what I had come to tell her straight away before the telling could be diluted and blurred by the television and the rest of Marion’s family who doubtless were eating some sort of meal in the general living room. I went in. The scene was as I had imagined, food, hard to categorize as lunch or tea, remained half eaten on the big table. The brother, who was still poised to eat, knife and fork vertical in his hands as he gazed at the television (colour now and with a vast screen) sat nearest the door. He glanced round when he heard me come in and gave a lopsided half-smiling grimace revealing a mouth full of masticated chips. The elder of the two sisters actually spoke. She was no longer thin, in fact she had become quite fat and appeared to be growing a moustache. The younger sister was no longer part of the scene, having married five years ago — the last occasion I had been to the house, but a child, presumably hers — the one that Ruby looked after since the break-up of the marriage — sat beside the thin-cum-fat sister, its face smudged with tomato ketchup. Frank, in his usual armchair, acknowledged the five-year interim with a nod; that was all he did these days Ruby had told me, since vacuum cleaners went out of his life.
The room, which all those years ago, the first time I entered it, had transmitted a careless kind of warmth, now seemed suffused with a stultifying air of hopelessness. It felt like the concentrated source of what it was in Marion that I wanted to leave, and it occurred to me that maybe I had only come here to reinforce the decision to do so.
I sat down at the table. In front of me stood a jar of Morgan-Mackie’s with the lid off — perhaps the meal had been breakfast as well — although it had been my idea to launch the campaign promoting marmalade as the bitter/sweet flavour to go with any meal at any time; breaking down the tradition of marmalade as a breakfast-only food. Perhaps it had worked on Ruby. The notion that Ruby could be swayed gave me heart, and yet, if I had not already believed this possible why had I come? Ruby and I had long ago come to terms with ‘understanding’ one another, at least that was what I hoped and needed to believe. There was, I felt, the possibility of trust between us, and some sort of pact, but I had to be sure.
To have any hope of certainty where Ruby was concerned was perhaps somewhat asinine. There may appear to be a strong degree of predictability in what she does, but at close quarters she has always seemed to me totally unpredictable. After Paul’s birth and the heavy indictment she hurled at me with all the force of indignant mother-in-lawhood, her attitude changed again in the following months. My resignation from Parkin’s Prams, hastily written and delivered in an unbalanced mood of destruction, was, somewhat to my chagrin, accepted without discussion by Dorothy Parkin. Much later, after I had left and eventually come through the early struggle to succeed on my own, Dorothy, whom I had come to view as a friend as much as an employer, did explain the reason for her early acceptance of my departure.
‘It was time for you to strike out on your own, even though the timing itself may have been bad, and besides, no one can go on writing about prams for too long,’ she had said, presenting Marion and me with the new Parkin’s pushchair.
‘I always thought that maybe you’d upset someone in America,’ Marion said after she’d gone.
‘So did I, although it seemed all right at the time,’ I told her.
An uneasy calm existed between Marion and me as if we were putting off some undefined but inevitable crisis until a time when we would both be more able to cope with its consequences. Two months after Paul was born we had to leave the flat and move in with her family, the nightmare suddenly transformed into reality as Marion went back to her job with the newspaper and Ruby took over the daily care of our son.
Recrimination barely held back, mother and daughter rallied, stoically ‘Keeping things together’ in the face of wanton irresponsibility as they saw it on my part, while everything I had, every penny, went into my new venture, a headlong, obsessional investment in a hard to envisage future. It was six months before I got my first account, a plimsoll manufacturer in Northampton resentfully battling against cheap imports from Korea. He was equally resentful about having to waste any money on public relations but his advisers were adamant and my fees undercut everyone else’s, and this time the timing was right. Everyone started wearing jeans, and with them, variations on the plimsoll theme. As fashion took over, price was no longer the criterion and my client’s plimsolls became the expensive sneakers everyone wanted.
I had rented a small office in the centre of Birmingham and spent more and more time there, in the evenings especially, when I could catch up on the more mundane paperwork and at the same time avoid the reproachful atmosphere of the general living room at Ruby’s. The acrimony, I felt, sprang from her, but then I was not there enough to realize for some time that the source was Marion, Ruby having long since found it unnecessary to go on harbouring spite and rancour all the time her daughter was prepared to do it for her. I hardly need to say that I was far from happy with the situation. If I allowed myself to think about it I felt wretched and guilty over my failure to provide a proper home for Marion and Paul, and if Marion showed her resentment I saw it magnified because it was what I expected and yet could not accept.
Most of the time she said nothing, which could be even worse. She was getting very tired, working at the newspaper all day and still weak from the haemorrhage after Paul’s birth, and yet she insisted on being the one who always got up to him in the night. The baby would wake twice, sometimes three and four times a night, his desolate cry piercing through our sleep until we found we were anticipating it and no longer able to sleep at all except in brief, fitful spells laced with muddled dreams, sometimes hearing the relentless grizzle before it had even started.
The dreams were all that we shared. Marion, understandably, was too tired for sex, but my own need grew beyond understanding and one night I virtually forced her to make love in a desperate attempt to find a vestige of harmony between us. Marion, who had been zombie-like for days, began to whimper as I pressed myself over her and suddenly I was incapable of doing anything, the pathetic miserable sound rendering me impotent. I flopped back on my side of the bed and turned my head towards the grey dawn edging through the thin curtains.
‘I’m sorry,’ Marion murmured.
‘So am I,’ I said harshly, which was not how I had intended it to sound. At that moment I would have been content just to hold her, to draw comfort and maybe give some to her in a gesture of tenderness, but, as always, I held back and the moment passed, leaving us both even more wretched and alone.
The house in Birmingham had seven bedrooms and the following night I found that Marion had removed herself and Paul to one of the other six.
‘I think it’s better that way for a while, Nick. There’s no reason why both of us should have broken nights,’ she explained evenly, without looking at me.
‘Maybe you’re right, but it seems a bit unfair on you. We could take turns with Paul,’ I suggested, knowing she would never allow it. She seemed to wince every time I went near him, which was not often, as, if I was honest, the baby frightened me. His fragile softness was like fingering a peach and I feared bruising him, and setting off the alarming fierceness of his cry.
Marion looked up at me then, her eyes briefly scanning mine.
‘That’s nice of you to say that,’ she said. ‘Nick, I don’t want you to feel that Paul and I are shutting you out, you don’t feel that, do you?’
‘Of course not,’ I lied.
That night I slept no better than before, and the nightmares were more vivid. It was also the first time I dreamt the murder dream, waking in a cold sweat with the terrible conviction I had killed somebody, an anonymous figure tortured and mangled and then buried in a grave dug out of slimy clay, me with the shovel frantically trying to keep back the heavy orange clods long enough to heave the leaden body into the fast-diminishing hole.
The third night alone the dream came a second time and I must have shouted out loud because I came to at the sound of rapping on the door. A small but insistent little rapping, almost like an animal scratching to come in. I got up and moved across the room, stumbling against a chair, uncertain as to whether I was asleep or awake. I opened the door and saw Ruby standing in the hallway silhouetted against the white moonlight coursing down through the skylight over the stair well. She came towards me, into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
*
The nightmares were abated and life became more tolerable even if the new arrangement was beyond toleration outwardly, but then nobody knew or at least the others in the house all feigned not to know.
‘A civilized, rather sophisticated sort of arrangement,’ Ruby called it. ‘If we can’t help each other out a bit then we might just as well not be a family,’ she said with airy smugness, ‘and after all, what harm are we doing, none at all, and if it stops you gallivanting.’
How easy I had allowed it to happen. The grotesqueness of sleeping with Ruby was too huge to contemplate so it just went on happening like a bad habit one would give up tomorrow but not today. Lying in the bed, our arms and legs intertwined, we would hear the baby start to cry in the room down the corridor, and then the sound would stop as Marion got up to him.
‘No harm done,’ Ruby would say, again and again, until I almost believed her.
Guilt, I discovered, was finite. The sum of my transgressions against Marion reached such enormous proportions that it came to the point where remorse was so inadequate as to be impossible. It was as if I had swum against the tide of honour and decency for so long and found myself in such deep water that it no longer made any difference to struggle, even a little. I might just as well succumb to drowning in the murky depths and wait to see whether I would surface again.
Rescue, from the more immediate whirlpool of Ruby, came in the unlikely form of Germaine Hartnell. Germaine, glowing like a brown beacon of health, turned up at my one-room office one morning in grey, wet November and gave me my second large account. She had come to England to set up a Gym and Tonic chain in the home counties and wanted me to look after the PR.
‘Bodies are my business and bodies my criteria, so you get the job Nicky-boy darling!’ she said, letting out a ricochet laugh.
I took her to lunch, spent a fortune on food she barely touched, signed a contract and ordered a bottle of Taittinger to celebrate.
‘So you see, darling, California was worth the ride,’ she said, with wry lack of subtlety. ‘Old Dorothy’s quite a fixer.’
‘Dorothy?’
‘Yeh, Dorothy. Who’d you think’s my partner in Gym and Tonic UK?’
*
‘I thought it was all finished with her,’ Marion said when I told her the news.
I wanted to laugh then, at the absurdity of her suspicion, at the enormity of her unknowing, but instead I went over to where she was standing, in the tiny bedroom she had escaped to with Paul. She had her back against the cot in a subconscious attitude of protection, standing between me and the sleeping child. She straightened as I approached, her eyes widening a little as if it had become second nature to view me as a predator, but that night I was too full of hope for the future to react with the old form of dismissal and retreat. She flinched as I put my arms around her shoulders but it was not in her nature to resist and we accomplished some sort of reconciliation, a temporary repair.
Ruby, inscrutable, energetically helped us move the cot and Paul’s paraphernalia back into the bigger bedroom and enigmatically put a vase of flowers on the dressing table. Marion gave up her job and six weeks later we moved down to Hertfordshire, a new house attached to one exactly the same, cloned twins, repeated and repeated a hundred times in a maze of cul-de-sacs laid out on a bare hillside like virulent suckers climbing an empty trellis. The houses filled up and we had neighbours, all with young families, maximum mortgages and the single common aim to move as soon as possible off the estate. We wanted houses with four walls of individuality, not three; double garages instead of single in a block, and gardens around which we could erect fences as opposed to the open plan imposed by the developers of Meadow Fields.
Hertfordshire was Dorothy’s suggestion: ‘I think it would be a good idea for you and Marion to live in the Home Counties. People are different down there and we need to know what they want.’
So Gym and Tonic paid for the move and we compromised with an office in Cambridge as I didn’t want to lose sight of my plimsoll manufacturer. But Home Counties life on Meadow Fields was not as I had imagined. Our neighbours did not have enough money to worry about health and fitness, their lives were dedicated to the appearance of their houses, but within lurked an unexpected taste for debauchery.
‘The people at number three are having a pyjama party on Saturday,’ Marion told me soon after we had moved in. ‘They’ve invited us.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘Not really, but then we ought to make some friends.’
‘It sounds a bit silly, pyjamas, and I haven’t got any.’
‘This is not how I want to live,’ I thought, on Saturday evening as I drove in to the village to collect the babysitter. At half past nine Marion and I walked down the road to number three, the pyjamas she had bought from British Home Stores flapping round my legs, a bottle of Nicolas wine shoved under my arm.
‘I’m Ralph and this is Edwina, glad you could come,’ a prematurely balding man wearing a frilly nightdress greeted us, shaking my hand. Edwina, tall and thin and with a hook nose, was wearing the pyjamas.
‘You’re number seventeen aren’t you?’ she enquired.
‘Drinks in the kitchen. Help yourself,’ Ralph said.
The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ was coming from the living room. It ended and the Beach Boys started to sing.
‘What do you do, I’m with ICI at Welwyn, a sort of troubleshooter you know,’ a man in a black and red nightdress told me in the kitchen. ‘What number are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘Ah, we must be neighbours! Fifteen. Our wives have met over the proverbial fence. You’re the chap who makes wine, or is that nineteen.’
‘Must be nineteen. No wine at seventeen.’
‘Ah, got it wrong have I. Are you interested in model trains?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve got a complete set of first-edition Hornby double “O” set out in the loft. You’ll have to come over and take a look.’
‘How long do we have to stay?’ I murmured to Marion as we pushed our way out of the kitchen.
In the living room there were just three or four couples standing around in semi-darkness, sipping drinks and wondering what had happened to the party. Somebody asked me if I played cricket, another what sort of car I had. Marion found number fifteen’s wife and started talking about Paul. I moved away and was confronted by Edwina who thought we should dance. After that the room seemed to fill up. More and more people arrived including the winemaker whose vintage elderberry was passed round until we were all pissed out of our minds. Edwina twirled about in front of me, Ralph’s pyjama jacket flying open at every spin. I had lost sight of Marion but wasn’t looking. Somebody produced a reefer. ‘Oh my turn, my turn,’ Edwina said as I took a drag.
‘Whose is it?’ I asked.
‘Number five, he’s a policeman,’ Edwina said, taking the cigarette, holding it with her fingertips.
The party seemed to shift into slow motion and then began to disseminate. At some time during the night I found myself in number fifteen’s loft, in among the Hornby double ‘O’s on the floor with Edwina, going like an express as the trains sped around us. ‘I can’t stop the damned thing,’ I shouted, trying to reach the control panel above our heads. ‘Stop now and I’ll kill you!’ Edwina screamed.
Just before dawn I went back to number seventeen. A wind had blown up, icily whipping round the houses on the bare hillside, chilling to the bone. Edwina had scurried off up the road, furtive and liverish, her face a deathly shade of paste. The front door was bolted. I went round to the back of the house and climbed in through a window. It had not occurred to me until then that Marion might not be alone. The notion twisted a nerve in my gut and I crept up the stairs in an agony of jealous expectation. I paused outside the bedroom, wondering what I would do if Ralph or number five or number fifteen lay snoring next to my wife. I flung open the door. Marion, alone in the bed, did not stir. I stared down at her and felt vaguely disappointed, even let down.
I threw off my clothes and got into bed, lying down with my back towards her. ‘Bastard,’ she murmured in a barely audible whisper.
‘Yes,’ I said.
There were more parties. We said we would not go but we did. The wind kept blowing and the hillside remained bare. Nothing would grow properly because there were no fences, no chance of consolidation. The estate developed patches of superficial scrub grass but it couldn’t hold the dust which the wind blew up into the face. You couldn’t see where you were going.
*
There were two, nearer three, of those dusty years, a bleak lump of time in which I worked harder and longer than ever before, the effort seeming to achieve very little other than the meeting of monthly bills. There were times when I looked around at my neighbours with their new company Cortinas parked in their drives, water sprinklers on the front lawns enticing the scrub, spare time for golf and cricket, trains and winemaking; time to tend allotments away from the hill where the earth was rich and fertile. Their lives depressed me and yet at the same time filled me with a sense of futility over my own existence. Such moments still come to me. I fear them more than anything else, although now I realize they have been useful. The scramble to escape that pit of despair has forced me on, produced the drive to succeed, the negative achieving the positive, and still I scramble on, afraid of time to stop and think and see the wider futility of it all.
*
I got up and went to find Ruby in the kitchen. She was standing in the middle of the room, vigorously rubbing a blackened cloth against a tarnished silver teapot. She started when she saw me, as if she had been caught out, discovered doing something furtive.
‘Nick! I was just about to bring the tea through. I thought we’d have it in the front room.’
Her attitude had changed. She was almost shy, not calculatingly coy as I had seen her in the past, and no longer disapproving in the way she had been when I told her why I had come. She finished the polishing and filled the pot with tea bags and boiling water, placing it on a tray with two bone china cups which had dark red flowers and gold leaf painted on them. I noticed she had rearranged her hair and her lips were newly red. She had gained more weight since the last time I had seen her but her figure was still good although the clothes she wore these days were less revealing: she had gone a bit ethnic in style. Her skirt was not unlike the one Charlotte had worn the night in London.
She handed me the tray and we proceeded through the house, past the room where the rest of the family were, to what had once been termed the front parlour. The door was stiff and she rammed her hip against it as I stood waiting with the tray. Inside, the room had a musty unused atmosphere but it had escaped the ever-present cooking smells that lingered everywhere else. Ruby closed the door behind us and took the tray from me.
‘I’m sorry to have taken so long,’ she said, setting it down and starting to pour, avoiding my gaze.
‘What’s all this in aid of?’ I said, watching her fuss with the cups and saucers. ‘Silver teapot, best china, front room. What are you playing at, Ruby?’
She stopped what she was doing and glanced up at me, her eyes soft and watery.
‘You can’t do it, Nick, you really can’t,’ she made a little sob and put her knuckle to her lips.
‘It’s done, Ruby. It’s too late,’ I said.
‘No it’s not,’ she countered, regaining a little of her fierceness. ‘You wouldn’t have come here like this — come all this way to tell me, if that was the case. You would just have gone off with this woman and left it at that.’
‘But why the silver teapot treatment?’ I asked without denying what she had suggested. ‘I might have expected a good rollicking from you, but not this. The soft approach isn’t like you, what are you trying to achieve?’
‘I’m not sure I know myself,’ she said, continuing to pour the tea. ‘Do you know, I haven’t sat in this room for years. Perhaps if I had, perhaps if I had let Marion and the others in here a few times they might have turned out differently. It’s a beautiful room, don’t you think, elegant, refined.’
The room was in the past. It had stood still and unused for too long. Its colours had faded and its furnishing and decoration gone out of fashion.
‘We haven’t done right by you, Nick,’ she continued after a heavy pause. ‘You’ve become a success like I always thought you would and I suppose we’re just not good enough for you any more. What’s this other girl like, clever and posh I dare say?’
‘Please, Ruby,’ I tried to stop her, but she carried on:
‘I can’t say I blame you for wanting to leave us behind now that you’re in the money, big house, fast car, smart clothes.’ She sighed and glanced at me again, only this time I caught a gleam of something else in the sharp grey eyes.
‘Of course, I know exactly how you feel. There have been times when I’ve wanted to escape, but I’ve stuck it out, you have to, and there are always the compensations along the way. You were one of them, Nick,’ she added. Her tone, which had been mournful was gathering an edge.
‘What are you getting at, Ruby?’ I asked. ‘Are we playing some sort of game?’
‘You’re the one that’s playing games,’ she said, ‘fun and games, isn’t that right, Nick?’ Her mouth had gone into a hard line.
‘Come on, Ruby, we’ve always been able to talk,’ I said.
‘Yes, we have, so tell me what it is that you want, my approval? Is that it?’
‘I don’t even expect you to understand. I have no right to expect that. I’ve simply come to tell you and to ask that you won’t make it more difficult for Marion and Paul.’
‘Ah ha!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now we have it. You want it all nice and clean and tidy.’
‘I don’t want Paul growing up in an atmosphere of bitterness and recriminations.’
‘You are a hypocrite,’ she snapped. The pretence of subdued bewilderment and regret had disappeared, but I felt more able to deal with her in her present mood.
‘Okay, so I’m a hypocrite, but what’s gone wrong between Marion and me has nothing to do with Paul, and I don’t want him poisoned against me because of it. I’m asking you, Ruby, pleading, if you like, not to say anything to him that will turn him against me.’
Ruby leant back in her chair in an attitude of matriarchal power.
‘I never thought you cared all that much about Paul,’ she said with icy satisfaction. ‘There’s something especially dear about a child whose father can’t be bothered with him. I suppose that’s partly why I’ve always been so fond of the boy.’
‘That’s unforgivable,’ I said, feeling hot with loathing.
‘But true,’ Ruby sang out.
‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ I said, standing up. ‘I’ve wasted my time.’
‘Yes,’ Ruby said. She remained still as if she knew I would stay and hear what she was to say next.
‘Your trouble, Nick, is that you think if you’ve bedded a woman she’ll ever after do as you say. A lot of men think like that but it’s more often than not the other way round.’
I sat down again. It was the first time she had ever referred to what had happened between us.
‘Another cuppa?’ she said lightly, stretching forward towards the silver pot. I did not reply but she refilled my cup all the same.
‘If you’ll take a bit of advice from an old friend,’ she began, the recent victory having softened her tone. ‘That side of life becomes less important as the years go on. You and Marion have weathered a few storms. I know she’s not a glamour girl but she’s stuck by you in the bad times and she must have helped you a bit to get where you are now. Have a little fling here and there but don’t break up what it’s taken all these years to build.’
‘It’s gone too far,’ I said. ‘Ruby, wouldn’t you have left Frank if you’d fallen in love with someone else?’ I felt compelled to try to reason it out with her and unable to leave until we had reached some sort of pact. At one moment I hated her, felt revulsion and disgust, and the next found myself drawn to her again as if I needed her to understand.
‘I did fall in love,’ she said, ‘but there was never any possibility of leaving Frank. You see he wouldn’t have coped by himself and the other thing was impossible anyway.’
‘Who was it?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you know,’ she said.