Thursday Morning — Charlotte
Half asleep, I felt Dan’s kiss on my forehead, saw his dark shape move away from the bed, silently, as always, so as not to disturb me. He did not say anything. We never spoke at this time but communicated almost subconsciously, through this ritual of consideration and affection developed over countless mornings, always the same. Safe, secure and comfortable. The early morning before the rest of life began to intrude and destroy.
When he had gone I moved further down into the bed, relishing the warm comfort, savouring it for a little longer, but rolling over and pushing my head into the pillow to rub away the cold dampness of the kiss.
Fully awake now, I listened for the pattern of sounds that preceded Dan’s going from the house. I listened as tensely as a burglar in a cupboard to the doors downstairs opening and closing and then his footsteps crunching into the gravel outside. The pattern never changed, but today I was fearful it might because for once it was necessary that it should not. You see, I suppose I had planned everything more than I care to admit. Dan falling down the stairs, his car not starting, such mishaps seemed much more likely to happen than was reasonably probable because somehow I expected to be thwarted. Even after the noise of the car had been swallowed down into the lane I listened to the silence, expecting any moment to hear a regurgitation of the engine sound. Poor, dear, Dan, to be the cause of this nervy heightened awareness as I set about deceiving him. He had done nothing to deserve it; he was never a jealous tyrant or in any way unkind, and I can say he was not to blame, and any sympathy must be for him. I have a horrid, compelling, selfish ruthlessness in the way I act when it most matters and all I can claim is honesty in the relating of how it was.
On Thursday morning, lying in bed, I did not know what was going to happen over the weekend. The plan, if I’m going to admit that there was one, extended only into Friday, before the compulsion to force a change, wreck the calm, make others unhappy, had fully taken over.
There is, after all, something desperately suffocating about certainty, and perhaps it was that more than Dan himself I was trying to escape. But I think I still believed on Thursday morning, lying in bed feeling wonderfully wicked and amazingly powerful, that all would yet be well with Dan and me.
When you are having an affair (oh dear, that word, it sounds so passé) the planning has to be careful and detailed, (unless, of course, you reach the stage of indecision where carelessness is deliberate). Snatched interludes of nothing in particular have probably been strategically plotted days in advance and whole nights require a major campaign.
There had been no whole nights with Nick, but that was the next stage and I suppose I had an instinctive feeling Thursday night would be the first. It was coincidence that Vicky should be spending this weekend with Audrey and James and their children and not out of the ordinary that I should be going to London to stay a night with Frances. Dan, as always, had acquiesced. If it made me feel better to go up to London every few weeks then it was a good thing. He would not have minded coming too but he didn’t want to intrude, not unless he was asked, which, of course, he was not.
Frances had never really liked him. Frances, my oldest and dearest friend, going back years, to schooldays, an exclusive, critical friendship which has always allowed complete honesty without either of us having to worry about misunderstanding or disapproval.
‘You’ve got to do something,’ she said. ‘You can’t go on with things as they are. Dead and buried at twenty-eight.’
And so I had done something. I like to think it was not just because Frances prompted me, but it could have been.
‘I suppose Dan will blame me for encouraging you,’ she said when I told her, assuming — perhaps hoping for my sake — that he would find out.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ I had sounded apologetic but knew Frances did not mind at all and was probably pleased.
Frances, unmarried, career-minded and instinctively inclined to encourage ‘doing something’. It wasn’t that she actively disliked Dan. He wasn’t the sort of person to have strong feelings about, she told me rather too incisively, in the early days of my marriage when it seemed terribly important to feel intensely.
‘I may come to you on Thursday night, I may not, but if Dan telephones, I mean, I don’t suppose he will as he never has before, but if he does and I’m not there …’
‘If he does, I’ll tell him you’re in the bath. And who is this man? I want to meet him.’
‘A man I work for. Nothing too serious. I don’t want anybody to get hurt,’ I said, wanting now to finish the call. Even to Frances I did not want to talk about Nick; I did not want to be like women I had met who relished the telling. And Frances would not pry, she never had.
I think then I did not want her to meet Nick. I was worried she would see all the things I had seen and disliked but which subsequently did not matter. With injustice to both of them I was afraid that Frances would instantly categorize Nick as a monied second-rater, clever in a non-intellectual way she would not admire, rough-edged but with a degree of trappings and pretentions to conceal it. It was because Frances and I had been friends for so long that I judged she would see Nick as I had in the beginning.
‘Your husband tells me you dabble in graphics,’ had been the first words I could remember him saying to me. Horrid man for using the word ‘dabble’, I had thought.
That was six months before this Thursday morning, the telephone call, indirectly emanating from Dan who evidently had told him that I was a graphic artist. How much Dan had said I was never quite sure, although I assumed his loyalty. It was unlikely he had told Nick how little work I had managed to find since setting up as a freelance after six years of being at home with Vicky. My old contacts, the studio in London I had been with before Vicky’s birth, had suffered in the recession and could offer me nothing, not even encouragement, which was what I needed most. Working again was not so much a financial need as a means of regaining sanity and purpose, although I had a plan for the money — going to America for a month, maybe two, taking Dan and Vicky: it would be my achievement. Dan could afford to take us but that was beside the point.
So I could say it was my precarious state of mind that began the involvement with Nick. He offered me work.
‘What sort of man is he?’ I asked Dan the evening of the telephone call.
‘Self-made and trying to hide it,’ he said, sounding as if he meant to be accurate rather than give an opinion. ‘He’s got money, a nice car, he’s just bought one of those vast new houses on the Old Rectory site. We did the conveyancing for him.’
‘One of those nasty ones with neo-Georgian windows?’ I had a tendency then to judge people by the sort of house they chose to live in, an absurd division into new house and old house types which amused Dan who did not really care about such things, having always lived in beautiful old houses as if they were his natural habitat and therefore finding nothing extraordinary or special about them apart from the fuel bills.
‘They’re not all that nasty,’ he said.
‘I think they’re ghastly, especially as they caused the Rectory to be knocked down,’ I went on, but railing more against Nicholas Matthews and his patronizing ‘dabble’ than against the new houses.
‘You didn’t tell him that I dabbled in graphics — you didn’t say it like that?’ I asked, just to make sure. Dan gave me one of his long looks which said ‘How could you doubt me?’ The effect was almost theatrical. It was a mannerism that did not suit him and one which had become vaguely irritating.
It had been agreed that I should go to Nick’s office in Cambridge on a Monday afternoon, early because of collecting Vicky from school, although I did not like saying that as it sounded unprofessional, and men never seemed to understand the importance of collecting a child from school at exactly the right time. Even Dan, in every other way so reliable, had a tendency to underestimate the length of an overdue five minutes to a child, but then he had been packed off to boarding school at seven. I knew the building where I had to go, remembered it as a blank-wall steel and concrete edifice, depressingly angular and somehow intimidating.
‘I can’t understand how people can work in a place like that, it’s so uninspiring,’ I had said, defensively, to Dan.
‘They probably all live in new houses as well,’ he had replied, gently mocking.
And I suppose that is how I set off on the Monday, defensive because I hadn’t liked the sound of Nick on the telephone, worried about getting back in time for Vicky, and resentful over the meeting place because it was something solid on which to base my nervous fright. Pro-Publicity had a suite of offices on the second floor which contradicted the cold detachment of the building’s exterior with over-plush decoration and furnishing. Nick’s office, large and expensively tasteless, or so I thought in my defensive way that first meeting, was like a sort of operations room, a nerve centre with people rushing in and out looking determinedly purposeful. For half an hour I waited in the outer office, catching glimpses of a black leather sofa on a thick, cream-coloured carpet, a large, blackish picture on a white wall. I heard snatches of his voice but could not see him. I waited and worried and watched the time ebb away and because of all this and my dreadful lack of confidence at that period I became angry.
‘Now,’ he said when eventually I was allowed into the inner sanctum. It seemed that he expected me to take the initiative as if I had come to sell him something, which in a way I suppose I had. He was a big man in a gruff mood. (Later he told me he’d had toothache.) About forty, well dressed, slightly greying hair, uncompromising eyes and expression. A big, muscular man who looked out of place behind a desk. He did not smile or apologize for keeping me waiting, but stood up when I came in and asked me to sit down with a slightly unco-ordinated series of movements that emphasized a sort of awkwardness not uncommon in large people. And perhaps it was his size (not that he was a giant) which gave him an undeniable presence, overbearing I thought, even angry. I felt it at once, almost recoiling from the sensation he evoked, but then I’d had half an hour to work myself up into a state of hypersensitivity.
He was, I suppose now, rather frightening. I stared at him for a moment, determined to be indignant; put out because I was twenty-eight, a mother, married to a solicitor and, as much as I was lacking confidence at that moment, had allowed an insidious sense of status to influence the way in which I expected to be treated.
‘Now,’ he had said, and so we had to get on with it. He oozed impatient busyness, a man with no time to spare. I did not like him at all.
I told him the sort of work I did and showed him some examples, hoping he would not ask when I had done them, which was a long time ago. He didn’t, but I had a feeling he knew all the same; that was another thing about him, he seemed to have that innate ability to perceive, watching with impatience but complete attention the whole time I was talking as if he was taking in a good deal more than the words.
When I had finished my bit he told me that the work he needed was a glossy brochure for oriental brassware: ‘But if we like your work it could be an ongoing situation.’
Inwardly I winced, snobbish about buzz phrases. I thought him pompous. Behind his chair, on the windowsill, there was a photograph of a woman and a boy, obviously his wife and son. The boy looked serious, the woman pleasant but nothing special, and not the sort of person I would have imagined as his wife. Perhaps he was more human than he appeared, to have such a wife.
When he had finished explaining what he wanted, I heard myself start to mumble about not being sure how long it would take me and whether I was the right designer for the job. ‘Am I mad,’ I thought then, remembering how desperately I wanted the work. I think it is difficult for those who have never been through that awful lapse in confidence symptomatic of young mothers trying to get back where they were before, to understand the self-defeating hesitancy involved. It passes and is forgotten but at the time can feel near insurmountable.
Nick allowed a few moments of silence, an unnerving little trick I have since seen him use on others.
‘Come on, you will have wasted your time and mine if you don’t give it a try,’ he said with a mixture of encouragement and mild exasperation which I considered unjustified as he had approached me in the first place. I still had it in my mind that he had called me ‘a dabbler’.
‘All right, I’ll see what I can do,’ I said, rather grudgingly.
‘Good,’ he said, as if he had never doubted that I would comply. ‘It shouldn’t take you too long. You’re at home all day, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, at home all day with nothing else to do,’ I added sarcastically and then wondered what on earth I was saying, but the tone of the remark seemed to pass over him or he chose to ignore it.
‘You’ll let me have something in a couple of days then?’ he went on.
I was about to say that I would, but stopped myself. It would be the end of the week. I had a lot of other work on. I think he knew I was lying.
‘Friday then, if you can fit it into your busy schedule,’ he said and for a moment I thought a smile flickered across his mouth.
It was then that I saw the time and leaping up like a scalded cat made a rush for the door, blurting out that I was late to collect my daughter from school.
‘Here, telephone the school. Tell them you’ve been delayed,’ he instructed with the sort of matter of fact good sense to make me feel an utter fool. Ignominiously I took the receiver from him and dialled the number. During this little scene he stood up to move away while I made the call and as he did so almost tripped over my folio which was lying on the floor by my feet. Automatically his hand shot forward and for an instant gripped the upper part of my arm. A sort of tingling shiver ran across my shoulders and for a split second our eyes reflected what I took to be mutual distaste.
For the next three days I struggled with the oriental brassware, rejecting one idea after the other, the shadow of Nicholas Matthews’ doubtlessly high standards looming over the scattered sheets of paper. I was impatient with Vicky, telling her to go and watch television at a time when I would normally listen to her talk about school. By midnight on Thursday I felt that I had put together a reasonable design and was feeling quite pleased with myself. The following morning I took Vicky to school and went straight to Pro’s offices.
‘You managed to fit it in then,’ he said as I took out my design and carefully laid it on the desk. It was no good, he told me, the concept was wrong. Better try again. But I had spent all week on it. He was surprised. He thought maybe I’d had to rush it with all the other work I had on. My eyes flickered around the room and fixed on the photograph on the windowsill. ‘Poor, pleasant-looking woman,’ I thought aggressively, but couldn’t think of anything to say. The best force of defence was attack, Dan the lawyer had told me on more than one occasion, but I could not remember him ever using it himself and felt all the more aggrieved for being so ill-equipped to argue.
‘How did you get on this morning?’ Dan asked me that evening, unleashing the tirade of abuse I’d been bottling up all day.
‘Why ever did you have to tell him about me in the first place?’ I rounded on him. ‘He threw out my design, said I had better try again, he’s such a rude man, I just hate him, and he’s nothing, a jumped-up nobody. He uses those awful phrases like “ongoing situation” and “at this moment in time” — the sort of stuff trade union officials use on the news. He’s a Trog, Dan, an out and out thoroughgoing Trog.’
‘You don’t like him,’ Dan observed calmly. ‘Poor old Trog Matthews.’
I knew I was being disgracefully snobbish but it was the only sop left to my shattered ego. Trog had been the word used at Dan’s school for the people who actually ran the place, cleaners, cooks and caretakers and the clever masters whose accents gave away their lowly origins. Such people, no matter how clever, would always be Trogs. A nasty, snobbish word, and one of the few aspects of Dan’s expensive education I had always felt to be unworthy and demeaning. God, what a hypocrite I was after all and it had taken Nicholas Matthews less than a week to expose it in me.
‘You’re more pedantic about language than I am,’ I said with unreasonable hostility. Poor Dan, for months he had had to put up with my bad temper which had grown out of a miserable despair I felt I bore alone, but which was almost certainly shared by a considerable proportion of my female contemporaries. There we were, isolated in our comfortable labour-saving homes, women who had grown up to get married and have children, and now that we had done all that were suddenly faced with the awful dilemma of choice. But whichever choice we made would be double-edged: stay at home and we did not do ourselves justice, go back to work and wear ourselves out worrying about slipping standards at home. The boring, familiar and poignant dilemma of my generation.
‘So you have to do the work again,’ Dan said.
‘I don’t see why I should,’ I said.
‘You can’t let it defeat you,’ he said.
‘I wish I could,’ I pleaded, as if Dan could give me exemption. ‘I’ve a feeling that Trog Matthews is always going to be hard to please.’ We left it at that and sat down in front of the television to eat our supper. We saw the news but then failed to find any other programme we could bear to watch, which was unusual for Dan. He was addicted to television and I preferred it to be on even if I was not watching; the room tended to feel dull without it. I took the dirty plates, my own still piled with food, out to the kitchen, and then went into the breakfast room. My drawing board, even with the discarded designs scattered over it, had a bleak, unyielding air about it. I sat down and began again. I eventually went to bed at half past three.
So you see, the beginning of it all was not so good, although perhaps you can understand how a feeling as strong as hatred might turn into something else. After all, there are not many people you meet who engender passion of any kind.
The beginning, as I told you, was six months before the Thursday morning I lay in bed pondering the mechanical details of my illicit plan.
Nick had telephoned me three times while he was in America, that was three times in seven days, enough to make me think, which for the preceding few weeks I had deliberately avoided allowing. It may sound odd, but during those weeks I’d felt at peace with Dan, as if it had become possible to drift over the deep-rooted sense of inadequacy in our relationship. We had always been friends, which is more than can be said of many marriages, and suddenly that was enough. It did not occur to me then that I might be one of those women who need a husband and a lover — I would have considered myself too honest and I really think the notion would have appalled me. So I was in a subconscious quandary and with a total lack of my professed honesty, had succeeded in postponing the issue. Quite simply I had stopped looking to the future and without really trying had achieved the best possible situation of living in a gloriously exciting present. And here I will be shamefully honest again in saying that there is hardly anything more invigorating than simultaneous love from two sources. I glowed in the way that some women do when newly pregnant, and was filled with a sense of wellbeing and new-found confidence. People said I looked marvellous, younger, thinner. Audrey asked if I had started taking vitamin tablets.
I had not, but how could your psyche make your hair shine?
I got out of bed on the Thursday morning, arched my back in a languorous stretch, pushed my toes into the sheepskin rug. Every sensation seemed pleasurable. I felt no guilt then, I was still in the present. I poured myself a Fenjal bath, and lay in the hot scented water, for once enjoying the silent loneliness of the house; and if there was any sense of justification for what I planned it was that opportunities should not be lost, and it was my turn, before it was too late.
After the bath I dressed carefully, although the clothes, apart from a more presentable set of underwear I had bought, were quite old. To have bought new clothes would have been too precipitate, too much a denial of what I was, and besides would have meant spending Dan’s money.
I went downstairs to the kitchen and opened and closed the refrigerator. Breakfast was not only unnecessary but impossible. I went over to the window and stared out across the well-kept garden. It looked good and fresh with the dew still sparkling on the grass. It was a pleasure to look at because it was my mowing and weeding that had made it as it was. But part of me mistrusted it and remembered the lonely despair that had often preceded a sudden spurt of manic digging or pruning. The garden had been an outlet but also part of the trap, and wasn’t gardening a middle-aged activity?
Beyond the lawn and flower beds there was a small field and I could just see the ridge of the donkey’s back — Vicky’s donkey, Tamara. Her head would be bent down to the grass, obliviously breakfasting. That was what mattered to Tamara. The idyllic setting in which she passed her days was of no matter, or so it seemed, although she was a continual enigma to me. I watched her sometimes and felt that she was watching me, and had the strange feeling she knew more of me than I of her.
Turning my back on those old daydreams I glanced round the still surfaces of my expensive kitchen, feeling oddly detached from it all now.