Saturday Evening — Dan
‘Is it because our generation hasn’t had a war?’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, looking back at Hilary, staring at her.
‘We haven’t had enough excitement in our lives. Do you think that’s why everyone’s having affairs?’ she persisted, her mouth provocative, her tongue now visible and pressed against her teeth.
‘I’ve no idea. Is everyone?’ I said, glancing beyond her to the other side of the room where Charlotte stood, glass in hand, her head held high, talking with a West Indian. She’d lost weight but I had not noticed until now. The ache in my chest became stronger.
‘Just about,’ Hilary went on, although she too was more aware of someone else in the room and after a few more gins would doubtless be telling me about him just as she had at other parties. His name I could not remember. Perhaps it was another one now and I would have to listen and pretend to fancy her to make her feel better. But no, not tonight. Not possible.
I watched Hilary drain her glass, she was already swaying a little. I had hardly touched my own drink. Maybe it would have helped, numbed the queasy feeling in my gut. Why had we come to this wretched party, just as if nothing had happened and life would go on as normal, although the hope was still there that it would. I had a right to hope.
‘Not you and Charlotte, of course. We all know that,’ Hilary was saying. ‘That’s why you’re such a challenge, Dan darling. Get me another gin, will you, or I’ll die of thirst.’
I took her glass and went across the room to the drinks table where Charlotte was still talking to the West Indian. I caught her eye but she glanced away almost immediately as if she didn’t know me. I stood by the table, about two feet away from her although she had her back to me. I unscrewed the gin bottle and started pouring into Hilary’s glass. The gin reached the top and overflowed down the sides. Charlotte and the West Indian had moved to another part of the room where several couples were dancing. The lights dimmed still further. I looked for a spare glass to get rid of some of the gin, but there were none left. I started trying to pour some of it back into the bottle but my hand was unsteady and the neck of the bottle too narrow.
Hilary appeared beside me and snatching the glass from my hand took a gulp. Her eyes widened:
‘Gracious, Dan, what are you trying to do, get me drunk?’ she said, but seemed to like the idea and suggested I ask her to dance.
We moved over towards the other dancers and she threw her arms round my neck and pressed herself against me. She reeked of gin and cigarettes.
‘Oh men are such bastards. All except you, that is, darling,’ she was saying.
Nicholas Matthews was a bastard. His wife had telephoned me during the afternoon.
‘What can we do?’ she had said, sounding pretty desperate.
‘We could meet if you like, if that would help,’ I told her, but she said not yet, she didn’t want to upset her husband.
‘I understand,’ I said and she rang off.
I caught a whiff of scent, Charlotte’s, as she and her partner moved closer to Hilary and me for a moment. The perfume was distinctive and painfully evocative. Charlotte had only recently started using it again but I had been no more than vaguely aware of this until tonight. It was the same stuff I had bought for her years ago when we were first married and our life together had seemed incredibly good after all the dreadful business a few months before when I had wondered at times whether it could really work. Chad, Charlotte’s pregnancy, the abortion, it had all been horrific, but I had wanted her even more than before and pushed things along despite the possibility that she might be marrying me as a sort of escape from the harsher side of life. It was a risk worth taking. The trouble was that you could not live up to that sort of risk over ten years. Caution is relaxed, suspicion gratefully put aside and everyday life takes over.
*
At first I did things which were, on reflection, subconsciously contrived to secure Charlotte. The same day I was offered the job in Cambridge the firm I was with came up with a similar proposition. In many ways it would have been better to have stayed where I was but going to Cambridge meant moving away, far enough for it to seem impractical for Charlotte to stay at the art college. We bought a tumbledown terraced cottage in the city rather than the modern flat I would have preferred, but a home in need of renovation provided an activity Charlotte and I could share.
For six months we worked on it nearly every evening, stripping the walls and rubbing down fireplaces, ripping out the old kitchen, turning one of the bedrooms into a bathroom. During the day Charlotte carried on alone while I was at the office. She seemed to enjoy it all except when we started painting and the fumes made her feel sick.
By the end of the summer the house was about done and we invited my parents to come over one evening for dinner. It seemed important they should be our first proper guests as they had let us have some money to buy the place which was virtually unmortgageable when we found it. In honour of the occasion Charlotte had bought steak and spent most of the day preparing the meal.
‘Lovely, dears, lovely,’ my mother said as we took her on a tour of the house. ‘You’ve just got the one room left to tackle then,’ she went on as we sat down to eat. ‘Those awful clashing colours. They must be a nightmare to have in your bedroom. Don’t people have some funny ideas.’
I glanced at Charlotte, hoping she was not upset by my mother’s innocent blunder. She did not appear to be but said nothing and got up to clear away the soup plates. I followed her out to the kitchen where she pushed the door to and leaning back against it began to laugh.
‘I’m sure she doesn’t realize. She would be terribly embarrassed and upset if we told her,’ I said, relieved to see she wasn’t upset.
‘I was terribly tempted to tell her,’ she said, still shaking with laughter.
‘Her idea of a bedroom is different from yours,’ I whispered, hoping my parents couldn’t hear us.
‘And yours!’ Charlotte added.
We had disagreed over the clashing colours.
‘No, I quite like it now,’ I said. ‘It’s different anyway and better than pink.’
‘Are you sure?’ she taunted, smiling at me devilishly.
‘No!’ I said, catching her mood. ‘And for God’s sake behave yourself this evening, won’t you!’
‘Of course!’ she retorted with mock indignation. ‘Haven’t I been good up until now? For the last six months?’ she added.
She moved away from the door and bent down to take the steak from the oven. I continued gazing at her for a moment and was conscious of a vaguely worrying inference in what she had just said.
The steak was tough, a real struggle to eat and one that my mother had to give up, leaving most of her meat under her fork as if she had tried to hide it.
‘Soup always fills me up,’ she said. ‘But that was delicious, Lottie, delicious.’
After the meal was over she and Charlotte went out to the kitchen, while my father and I smoked cigars and drank port. That was the order of things with their dinner parties. The old order, archaic, maybe, but pleasant, and if I felt at all uneasy about the way we had automatically allowed their ways to be ours in this, the port and the cigar and the closed kitchen door made it seem not to matter all that much. My father asked me if I wanted to go shooting with him again and as the house was finished I said I would.
‘That didn’t go too badly, did it?’ I said to Charlotte when we were in bed.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you. It was a disaster,’ she rounded on me. ‘You and your father pompously puffing away like something out of Dickens while your mother told me in the kitchen how to hammer steak with a rolling pin.’
‘Why did you stay out there then, and I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it. You know what she’s like.’
‘That’s the trouble, you can’t say anything to her. She’d be so hurt, but she drives me mad with her well-meaningness. I wanted to scream and tell her that I’d painted the bedroom but she’d think there was something wrong with me and probably drive over twice a week to “keep me company” and make sure I looked after you all right.’
‘She would not. I wouldn’t let her.’
‘I’m not sure you’d be able to stop her.’
‘Oh come on, Lottie.’ I switched out the lights and reached for her. ‘You do look after me all right,’ I murmured, starting to make love to her.
It was late and I supposed that she might be tired but she became almost ferocious as I moved over her. She dug her fingers into my back and when it was over and we had moved apart she remained restless, although she said no more.
The shooting season began and most Saturdays I drove over to Lakeside to meet my father and the other guns before we went off for the day. Charlotte didn’t seem to mind. Often she would see Frances who was still at the university, and they’d have tea together. Occasionally, when I got back, we would then go out with Frances and Leonard, but eventually this stopped and I was glad. I found Frances too sharp. Sometimes it seemed almost as if she was trying to ‘subvert’ Charlotte, in some obscure way to make her dissatisfied. At times I felt as if I couldn’t say anything without a sideways look from Frances, hearing what she took to be reactionary. And, of course, the more she did it the more I fell into the trap without meaning to sound at all like that. And Leonard, well, he reminded me rather a lot of Chad.
Charlotte’s restlessness became more obvious. Not just in bed, but at other times as well. With no more work to do on the house her days had become long and aimless. She started to look for work but with no qualifications there was nothing very exciting on offer, although in desperation she took a job as a receptionist with one of the many estate agents we had called on. It lasted less than a fortnight before she was asked to leave.
‘You know what they say, “the more you do, the more you can do”, well, I think it works the other way as well,’ she said, justifying the sacking which upset her more than she would admit.
That night she cried in bed. She hardly ever cried. She said herself she was not the type, so that when she did it was all the harder to cope with and I felt awkward and clumsy in my attempts to show understanding.
‘Everyone gets the push one time in their life,’ I said, my hands hovering and hesitant over her heaving shoulders.
‘It’s not just that,’ she moaned.
‘What is it then?’ I demanded, more insistent than I had meant to sound.
‘I don’t know! I don’t know,’ she sobbed. ‘Maybe it’s all been a mistake.’
What this meant I dared not ask and flopped back on my side of the bed. The sobbing subsided and after a few moments she moved towards me, her face still turned into the pillows.
‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ she murmured and slid her hand down my chest. Her fingers closed over me, feeling and pumping. I remained motionless on my back, taking in the sensation of arousal but still perplexed and plagued by an indistinct sort of misery.
It was dark in the bedroom. I felt a rush of cold air as the covers lifted and Charlotte straddled me. I reached up to pull her down but she resisted and grasped my hand, pushing it down to herself, forcing my fingers to jab and knead. The pitch of excitement in my stomach was so strong and exquisite that I lost control but Charlotte didn’t seem to realize and almost angrily held on to my wrist. Her body was quivering and insistent and then she went into a sudden shudder and made a deep sort of yell. She let go of my wrist and in the darkness I could just make out the slumped arch of her back, her head hung low. She moved off me and seemed to crawl to her side of the bed, pulling up the flung-back covers round herself like a cocoon.
We were silent. I lay still and amazed, staring up into the darkness, almost disbelieving, a bit bewildered, maybe even shocked. It had been quite wonderful but where had she learnt it? If it had been from Chad then why had she waited so long? I turned over and felt disgusted with myself, analysing and suspecting. It had been wonderful. A gift. An opening up. An expression of trust. I turned again and stretching towards Charlotte pulled down a corner of the sheet from round her back and kissed her shoulder. She seemed to be sleeping.
*
It was not long after that turning point of a night that I came home one Saturday afternoon to find Chad standing in the kitchen talking to Charlotte. There had been a problem with my gun so I had abandoned the day’s shooting and driven back to Cambridge early.
They both seemed surprised to see me, Charlotte even slightly wary at first although I had the impression that she was actually relieved I had come back sooner than expected. Chad greeted me with hearty insincere pleasure, taking my hand, clapping his other on my back.
‘Chad’s been visiting one of the colleges,’ Charlotte said as if she had to give an excuse for him being there. ‘He looked up our name in the telephone book and picked the right number first time,’ she went on, looking at me directly to make me believe her.
‘I was just saying to Charlotte that I can’t stop long but it seemed a waste to come here and not look you up,’ Chad was saying. They both looked guilty, embarrassingly so the more they tried to appear casual and incidental about it all. I asked Chad how he was getting on, offered him a drink, even suggested he should stay for supper. I seemed to be taken over by a kind of masochism that wanted to indulge the awful jealousy by prolonging the thing. But Chad continued to back off; wary and of no real substance, he had no stomach for it.
‘It was like I said,’ Charlotte insisted after the front door had closed against him.
‘I didn’t suggest that it wasn’t,’ I said.
‘Only in the way you looked and spoke and made us feel as if you had caught us out,’ she flung at me.
We were standing facing one another. It was an uncomfortable moment and I felt annoyed with myself for allowing a confrontation. Charlotte’s direct look had turned into a glare.
‘Let it go,’ I said, making an effort to smile, finding some small comfort in her aggrieved tone.
Her attitude had been strained and nervous but now she sighed as if it had all been unnecessarily misinterpreted.
‘I’m glad you came back when you did,’ she said. ‘He makes me feel …’ she hesitated. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I just don’t like being with him, and you wanted him to stay for supper!’ She stepped forward, put her arms round my back, and hugged me.
‘I do love you, Dan,’ she murmured.
*
A fortnight later I came home to find the house empty, the first time Charlotte had not been there when I got in from work. She turned up half an hour later and announced that she had been to London and got a job with a studio off Regent Street. The introduction had come via Chad I discovered later, but by then Charlotte was well into the job and happier than I had ever known her. Fulfilling herself at last, Frances said, somehow pointedly in my direction as if I had been the cause of the delay. But the jibes — moderated, I noticed, since Charlotte’s daily train trips to London — no longer seemed to matter. Our life had come together.
*
Hilary, divorced and not suited to it, floundered through loneliness from one affair to the next, wanted me to leave the room with her.
‘Come on,’ she whispered, pulling at my arm, slightly unsteady on her feet, ‘I just need to get out of here for a few minutes.’
Charlotte was still dancing with the West Indian, a faster dance now, her body as rhythmic as his. I had not seen her dance like that in years, it was almost abandoned.
I went with Hilary out into the hallway where two couples were talking on the stairs. Hilary glanced at one of the men who saw her but made it obvious he didn’t want to. Further along the hall french windows were open to the garden. The night air had a balmy sort of heat left over from the day. Hilary and I went out and began to wander across the lawn, dark and enclosed by mature trees heavy with leafy branches which hung motionless in the stillness of the night. It was in sharp contrast to the house from where the sound of reggae music beat out through the open windows.
Hilary was crying, a tearful whimper that seemed to hold back the big sobs.
‘That was him, the one on the stairs, with his wife, of course. I don’t think I can bear it, Dan.’ She flung her head against me in a dramatic gesture of misery. I think Hilary feared boredom more than heartbreak.
‘What am I going to do,’ she moaned.
‘What do you want to do?’ I said, wishing now that I had stayed in the house where I could see Charlotte. It was as if she was about to make a long journey and I wanted to spend every moment left with her until she went. That was how it felt even though I was a long way from accepting her going despite the hideous sense of loss.
Hilary was looking up at me, her face quite dry, her eyes bright in the darkness, almost like a cat’s, her mouth slightly open. We had stood in that attitude before, the invitation obvious and unthought-out.
She shook her head, throwing off the pose.
‘I give up with you, Dan. I just give up!’ she said with a little laugh. ‘I know, I’ve had too much to drink, and I’ll regret it in the morning and all that, but just once, if I could only get to you just once. You’re an anachronism, darling, a faithful husband.’
‘Does that make me very dull?’ I asked her, actually wanting an answer to the question.
‘Not at all, darling, just an enigma these days,’ she supplied as we started back towards the house, her arm linked through mine.
‘Which is it, enigma or anachronism?’ I said jokingly, the ache in my chest suddenly vice-like.
‘I always get wordy when I’m sex starved,’ she went on. ‘It’s all the reading I do in bed to get to sleep.’
I liked her. She was honest and open, a good sort under all the overt nonsense she came out with, and I felt sorry for her. Perhaps we could have started an affair and been a comfort to one another, but the thought was only passing. Affairs were not, after all, anything to do with convenience.
That was what Matthews had tried to say earlier, just before we had come out to go to the party. An extraordinary presumption on his part, to come to the house and tell me what he and Charlotte planned to do; as if I had already accepted the inconvenience and of course would be reasonable about it all — just one of those things, old chap, most inconvenient, but I understand.
The three of us sitting down in the drawing room being bloody civilized. I even offered him a drink.
‘Charlotte and I want to try living together,’ he said, declining my whisky as if it would be bad form to take anything of mine. My wife, presumably, didn’t count.
He and Charlotte sat together on the tasselled sofa, given to us by my parents, the sofa where Lottie and I had made love. I sat opposite them, the cold sweat of injustice rendering me powerless to argue and reason and making my hands shake.
‘I’m sorry, I know it’s hard on you, but these things happen.’
Why did people say that: ‘These things happen’, as if they had had no part in it themselves, using fate as an excuse.
The audacity in what he had said about trying living together had not escaped me. What if it did not work between them, was it assumed that we would all go back as we were before? It was probably no more than an unfortunate turn of phrase. I knew that, and yet I was grateful for it, grabbing at the smallest chink of hope — pathetic, the drowning man clinging on to the boat that has tipped him into the sea.
‘We’ll have to find somewhere to live which might take a few days, but I’ll get a hotel room if you want Charlotte to leave tonight,’ he was saying, the practical details like weapons, consolidating and defending the ground already gained.
‘No, this is her house as well,’ I said with strained evenness of tone, desperately playing for time. ‘Wait till you’ve found somewhere.’ I could see the irritation in Charlotte’s expression as she glanced at Matthews. She had always baulked against reason, delay, impetuously guarding against her own uncertainty, but delay could perhaps retrieve the situation, for me, and for Vicky.
Vicky. If all this was going to be long term, Vicky I would lose too. Charlotte, of course, would take her, that was a deep, gnawing certainty but something I didn’t want to talk about with Matthews there.
Charlotte, maybe aware of this but too defensive to wait until we were alone, blurted it out: ‘I’m taking Vicky. 1 wouldn’t leave without her.’
She said it as harshly as possible, to leave no doubt. I wished I could hate her then and despaired at my inability to cause her any pain, but it seemed I had nothing with which to retaliate.
‘I appear to have no choice in any of this,’ I said, bitterly. ‘And I don’t suppose Vicky will either.’
‘She’s too young,’ Charlotte said.
‘Yes,’ I said heavily, seeing that I had again caused irritation.
The room was silent for a few moments, thick with dumb emotion. Why had they insisted on this meeting, or had it been my idea? I could not be sure now. Matthews was standing up. He said he was leaving. I found it hard to imagine him as Charlotte’s lover. He was quite ordinary really, nothing special. A man with a frown over his eyes, worried, not so very happy to have fallen in love. He would have liked to have done the right thing. I might even have found him quite pleasant in other circumstances.
‘Charlotte can come back if it doesn’t work out,’ I said to him, conscious that magnanimity was unlikely to please either of them at that moment but feeling the necessity to say it nevertheless.
Neither responded. Charlotte followed him out of the room and I saw them through the window, outside by his car, talking, their mouths moving in another language, her hand on his sleeve. It seemed as if they had moved into another sphere quite separate and detached from the one I still inhabited.
When Charlotte came back into the house she seemed nervous, incomplete. She skirted round me as if I posed some kind of a threat.
‘What shall we do now?’ I asked her.
‘Go to the party, I suppose. We might as well.’
‘All right.’
‘Okay.’
‘The party it is. Plenty of other people.’
‘Yes. Are you all right, Dan?’