Cushing's Crusade (14 page)

She was smiling at him encouragingly. Go, and do thou
likewise
. The band was returning. Derek got up. She took his hand and said casually, ‘You could stay at my place for a bit.’

A peculiar falling sensation in his stomach, dread, sickness and expectation jumbled together. A frightening desire to say the
right
words while the flags fluttered and the sun shone. I’ll come, to hell with Giles, to hell with Diana. I’ll be out on my ear in a week or two, but what the hell? Easy come, easy go. Fuck the future while I can fuck you. She smiled at him.

‘There can’t be too many women who’d fancy your
peculiarities
.’

A silence. Members of the band were picking up their
instruments
and tipping spittle out of them.

‘Can I tell you tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘I doubt it,’ she replied softly.

‘But I can’t just go without a word,’ he protested.

‘’Phone them from the station. Send a wire.’ She let his hand drop and shook her head slowly. ‘You won’t, will you?’

‘I have certain problems,’ he murmured apologetically.

‘Don’t we all,’ she said, turning away. As the band started playing again, he watched her disappear into the crowd.

*

Derek was in the pub trying to find out where he could get hold of a taxi when he saw Gilbert coming towards him.

‘I’ve been looking for you.’ The old man frowned. ‘What
happened
to your face?’

‘A ball intended for a coconut.’ Gilbert did not look convinced, but he seemed preoccupied with other thoughts.

‘I’ve been sitting in the church,’ he said. ‘Thinking.’ A slight pause before he added, ‘You ought to go in there. A good mural of St Sebastian’s martyrdom. So many spears in him he looks like a hedgehog.’

‘I had a slight altercation with Charles. Nothing very dramatic; but I think it’d be as well if we were moving on. You wouldn’t mind a few days in a hotel?’

To Derek’s surprise his father showed no curiosity at all. He seemed relieved rather than put out.

‘Actually I was thinking of going back to London anyway.’ Gilbert smiled sadly. ‘The fact is I haven’t been entirely happy. A certain atmosphere from time to time.’ Derek nodded. He noticed that his father seemed uneasy and was fiddling with one of his coat buttons. They were standing just outside the main bar and people were pushing past them. Beside them was a phone on the wall. Derek, who had been looking through the classified phone directory for taxi numbers before his father’s arrival,
resumed his search. Then he heard his father saying urgently, ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘I was planning to go back to London this evening.’ Gilbert sounded contrite but determined.

‘All right, talk,’ replied Derek with an irritated shrug.

‘Somewhere rather quieter?’ suggested Gilbert.

‘Anywhere you like, but quickly,’ moaned Derek.

*

He followed his father along a narrow cinder path that skirted the north side of the church. To their right was a large stone cross. Gilbert sat down on the plinth and beckoned to Derek to do the same. An inscription read: ‘This monument was erected to the memory of the officers and men of HMS
Primrose,
lost with all hands off the Lizard 12 March 1892.’ Derek rested the back of his head against the rough granite and shut his eyes. He could still hear the band playing in the square. Gilbert coughed
delicately
to get his son’s attention.

‘Those notes; the ones I lost on the train.’

Derek looked at him despairingly. Today of all days his father felt impelled to tell him things about events of thirty years before.

‘Yes,’ groaned Derek, opening his eyes.

‘I didn’t lose them at all.’

‘Does it matter?’ cried Derek, getting up.

‘I’d only been writing it all down to postpone telling you.’ The look of anguish on his father’s face made Derek relent. He sat down again.

‘I’m listening.’

Derek found himself watching his father’s adam’s apple
moving
as he swallowed. The old man was obviously nervous.

‘The fact is I met Margaret months before I arranged for you and your mother to go back to Singapore.’

‘Did what?’ gasped Derek, all traces of weariness gone.

Gilbert wiped away sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and added hastily, ‘When I said I thought you’d be safer away from England and the bombing, I wasn’t exactly lying.’

‘You just wanted us out of the way,’ returned Derek, as a cold numb feeling grew in his chest.

Gilbert looked down at the cinder path, where a straggling line of ants was crossing it.

‘When you’d both gone, Margaret moved in with me. That was before the trouble started in Malaya. When the Japs attacked Indo-China I sent warning telegrams. Did all I could, you
understand
.’

A sudden spasm of anger as Derek asked, ‘Couldn’t you have gone on keeping it to yourself? Was that too much to ask?’

‘Why does anybody want to confess anything? I needed to.’

A strange booming noise had started, like distant guns.

‘We passed some granite quarries in the car. That’ll be
blasting
,’ explained Derek, seeing his father’s bewilderment. The explosions died away. ‘Just a point of interest,’ he went on in a flat unemotional voice, ‘when you sent me away to school, did Margaret move in again in my absence?’

Gilbert nodded solemnly.

‘It was a long time ago,’ said Derek, staring out across the jumble of headstones. His anger had gone and now only the numbness remained. He remembered going to their local church with his father and praying together for his mother’s safety. Another occasion; a station platform, a woman who from a
distance
looked his mother’s double. He started to run only to see her turn towards him with surprise; a complete stranger.

Gilbert got up from the plinth and said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell the others I’m going until I’ve gone. I’ll get a taxi back to the house and ask the driver to wait till I pack my things.’

Derek expected him to go at once, but he stood where he was in the middle of the cinder path as if waiting for something. Derek waited too. At last Gilbert said awkwardly, ‘There’s
something
else. I meant to tell it you first but didn’t, and now it’ll sound utterly wrong.’ The church clock was striking the quarter. ‘Margaret’s affairs have been finally sorted out and it seems she was a good deal richer than I thought. I’d like to make over most of it to you, death duty being what it is. I had to tell you now because my solicitor will be writing to you in a week or so.’ He
paused and went on quietly, ‘I intended to do this whether I told you about the other business or not.’

Gilbert seemed to be waiting for Derek to release him with a forgiving remark. But by the time he could think of anything to say, his father had started off down the path; a badly dressed, stooping old man walking despondently away. Why, why did he have to tell me? Why when there was so little to be gained and a lot to be lost? But Derek knew the answer almost at the time the questions formed. That warm sense of altruism, that lovely
contrite
self-abasement that had urged him to confess, urged him to force what he had to say on Giles, whether the boy wished to hear or not, and he had made it very clear that he had not wanted to listen. Other memories; old, old memories. The moment his father had told him that he was going to marry Margaret. His reaction had been anger for a while, refusal to listen and then, very soon, acceptance. Acquiescence through fear: a conscious attempt to persuade his father that he didn’t care, and all because he feared rejection. And now, like some gruesome text-book case history, it was happening again. Giles refusing to listen, Giles angry and then saying he didn’t care what his father did. And Derek had sucked it up just as his own father had done those years before.

Gilbert had reached the lich-gate. Derek called out to him to stop.

‘We’ll share a taxi,’ he yelled.

Derek took his father’s arm as they walked across the square.

After Gilbert’s departure, Derek tried to find Giles, but, seeing no sign of him in the garden or anywhere near the house, he went inside with the intention of packing. Since Charles’s car was not parked in the drive, Derek assumed that neither his wife nor his host had yet returned. He was therefore surprised, on opening his bedroom door, to see Diana hurriedly packing their cases. Derek said nothing, and stood waiting for her to speak, but she went on folding shirts as though he was not there. At last he asked quite casually, ‘Where’s Charles?’

‘Having his chin stitched up,’ she replied with exaggerated calmness.

‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Derek.

‘Oh you are, are you?’ she returned with bitter sarcasm.

‘I’m certainly not glad, if that’s what you’re implying.’

Diana didn’t reply, but folded a final shirt and began straining to shut the bulging case.

‘Let me,’ he said, bending down and trying to flatten down the clothes in the case before attempting to close it. Without warning, she brought down the lid on his hands with all her strength, trapping his fingers. He let out a gasp of pain as she gave one last push before relaxing the pressure.

‘You could have broken them,’ he cried, rubbing his bruised fingers and then shaking his hands to get rid of the sharp
throbbing
pain.

‘I wouldn’t have been sorry,’ she returned, getting up and walking over to the window. A moment later she turned and said, in a voice shaking with suppressed anger, ‘I don’t give a fart for your idiotic suspicions, but as for blurting them out in front of
everybody … I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to mention them to me first before making fools of all of us?’

Derek had expected grief, contrition, maybe humiliated anger, but certainly not this righteous rage.

‘You owe me no explanations, I suppose?’ he asked icily, sitting down on the bed. ‘Hurling accusations around isn’t going to help us understand each other.’

‘Do you think I
want
to understand you after the way you’ve behaved?’ She tossed back her head in derision and said in a simpering voice, ‘My wife doesn’t understand me. Just a bad gag, Derek; and, after what’s happened, worse than that.’

‘Do you deny it?’ he shouted.

‘My affair with Charles?’ She looked up at the ceiling, as though imploring help from above; then she sighed and shook her head slowly. The sudden and unexpected disappearance of her anger alarmed Derek. Now her expression was almost one of compassion. ‘My poor Derek. There was no affair.’ She let her hands drop to her sides and looked down at the floor. ‘I wanted a change, a fling, whatever one calls it, but he didn’t.’ Derek watched her with mounting anger as she took a cigarette from a packet on the dressing-table and lit it. She blew out a thin stream of grey smoke. Her look of self-absorbed sadness maddened him.

‘You’re an accomplished liar, Diana, but you don’t begin to fool me. Clever saying
you
made the running and
he
turned you down. Nobody likes admitting to that kind of failure and you particularly hate seeming pathetic.’

She looked at him with the kind of sympathy he imagined the owners of dogs might show their pets when they had decided to have them destroyed.

‘But can’t you see, Derek, if I’d wanted to lie to you, I’d have made a proper job of it.
Trying
to be unfaithful’s not much better than
being
unfaithful.’

‘I used to fancy ladies in a certain kind of black lingerie but I didn’t rush out and lift skirts in the street.’

She gave him a puzzled frown.

‘I don’t quite see the relevance,’ she said gently.

It doesn’t matter,’ he replied brusquely. ‘If he turned you down, what the hell were you doing arranging a holiday for
yourself
here?’

‘A last try.’ She shrugged her shoulders and looked away. ‘But you put paid to that by coming. Charles wanted you to come, so he wasn’t sorry.’

Derek came up close to her. ‘Let’s try something a bit more tangible.’

‘There’s no point,’ she whispered with desperate sympathy.

‘I think I can judge that.’ He paused and went on sharply. ‘When he came to the flat that afternoon, you were in your dressing-gown.’

She gave him a sad ironic smile and said slowly, as though explaining to a difficult child, ‘I’d been in bed with a headache. Remember? I hadn’t got dressed. I’d also had a bath.’

‘I’ll get the truth out of you. Your headache went pretty quickly after he’d gone.’

‘I’d been in bed most of the day; taken some pills. Headaches come and go. So?’ Her calmness seemed too calculated to be
genuine
. Normally Diana would have told him to go to hell and leave her alone.

‘You didn’t answer the phone when I rang,’ he said.

She raised her hands and replied with the hint of a smile, ‘Do
you
get out of the bath to answer it?’

‘I phoned several times.’

She sat down on a case and put her head in her hands. Then she looked up wearily. ‘It’s weeks ago, Derek. I slept most of the morning. I must have turned off the extension by the bed. I can’t remember turning it off, but I obviously did. If I’d heard the bell why on earth would I have let it ring?’

‘You had an appointment at the dentist,’ said Derek forcefully, sensing that he had trapped her. ‘If you answered the phone your bogus Indian dentist went up the spout. That’s why you let it ring.’

‘But I had a headache,’ she cried, with real irritation. ‘Can’t you listen?’

‘And on the day you had a headache, you happened to have a
dental appointment and Charles happened to drop by. It also just
happened
to be the day Giles usually went swimming after school.’

‘So bloody what?’ She stubbed out her cigarette in the
wash-basin
and added, ‘Coincidences do just
happen.’
A slight pause before she said, ‘In any case, even if I’d expected Charles, why did I need you to think I’d gone to the dentist? I could have answered the phone with him on top of me.’

‘You told me you’d be at the dentist to rule out any chance of my coming back from work early.’

She shook her head as though trying to clear it.

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have to be in the flat for you to come back early.’ She gave him a mocking smile and added, ‘Would you have been lonely without me?’

‘I’d lost my key. I asked you to get me another but you didn’t.’ He paused to emphasize the point. ‘I couldn’t have got in, if you’d been out, so I wouldn’t have come back early.’ He stared at her triumphantly.

Diana looked confused for a moment, but then suddenly she gave a little gasp of comprehension, as though some profound mystery had been revealed to her. Her eyes were sparkling with excitement.

‘It all goes back to that bloody dentist. Well, doesn’t it?’

‘You made him up, like other things.’

‘But the dentist really matters. Right?’

Derek did not deny it. Diana had reached for her handbag and had soon emptied its contents onto the bed. Derek saw her purse, keys, compact, lipstick and a mess of letters and paper. After hastily sorting through it all, she turned the bag upside down and shook out a couple of envelopes from a side-pocket. Derek watched her impassively. Just another pantomime to convince him that she had really made an appointment and had been
unlucky
enough to mislay her vital appointment card. She looked around the room, as if hoping that some object or garment might give her a clue.

‘What coat was I wearing when I went to see him last?’ Her
excitement was still as intense. The effort she was putting into her act brought back Derek’s anger.

‘It’s summer; are you likely to have worn a coat?’

She went over to the fitted cupboards and slid back the doors. He saw her pull out her red raincoat and start turning out the pockets; a handkerchief and a few bus tickets. From the other pocket she produced an empty packet of cigarettes, the
programme
for Giles’s Open Day, several scraps of paper, receipts they looked like, and something else: a small white card. She handed it to Derek with a cry of triumph. He turned it over in his hand and read: ‘Dr H. M. Dulfakir, BDS, DOrthRCS, Dental Surgeon, 37a Onslow Crescent, London, S.W.7.’

Derek’s head was throbbing painfully; he could hear the blood thundering in his ears. Diana was looking at him with concern.

‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ he shouted. ‘Of course I’m not all right.’

‘Now do you believe me?’ she whispered.

Derek covered his ears with his hands and tried to think.
Anything
that would catch her out, anything.

‘Your face,’ he blurted out suddenly. ‘How come you had make-up on your face?’

‘What?’ She sounded frightened by the intensity of the question.

‘When Charles came to the flat. How come you had make-up on your face when he arrived? You didn’t know he was coming; that’s what you said. People in bed with headaches don’t put on make-up.’

‘I must have put it on when I went out to get him tea.’

‘You keep your make-up in the teapot?’

‘I must have gone to the bedroom. I told you, it was weeks ago. Do you remember every time you clean your teeth?’ She sounded more alarmed than angry.

Derek had jumped up excitedly.

‘I’d remember if my mistress suddenly arrived and I hadn’t shaved. I’d remember shaving in those circumstances.’

‘Your memory may be better than mine, it doesn’t prove
anything
more than that.’ Her alarm was giving way to exasperation.

‘Another thing,’ Derek went on wildly, ‘because you made an appointment doesn’t mean that you intended keeping it. You did it all to fool me.’

‘Ring him,’ she shouted, shoving the card in his face.

Derek shook his head and let out a long sigh. Already he had forgotten the sense of his last remark. He walked over to the window and rested his weight on the ledge. Far across the bay the evening sun picked out the white sails of a yacht heading for the open sea. For a moment he imagined himself on board, watching the land slipping away and hearing the slight thud of the waves against the hull. He felt Diana’s hand on his shoulder and turned to see her looking at him strangely.

‘You’re mad,’ she said. ‘I’ve only just seen it. You
want
me to have had an affair. You pretended to be upset about Charles and me, then when I prove you’re wrong, you treat it as a tragedy. You ought to be jumping for joy; instead you look at me as though I’ve shot you.’

Derek could think of nothing to say. He was still too shocked to be able to collect his thoughts.

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ she asked with a mixture of exultation and incredulity.

‘Probably,’ he conceded in a stifled voice. ‘Turn a man’s house upside down and don’t be surprised to see him walking on his head.’ The desperation in his voice got through to her at once and she took his hands in hers.

‘But why didn’t you tell me about your fears? Why did you have to wait till you couldn’t cope any more?’

‘You wanted a different person,’ he said, ‘that’s why. Good God, didn’t you make that clear enough when you stopped doing anything to the flat? You despised me enough already without my going to you and whining about whether you were having an affair.’ She took his head in her hands and cradled it as she might have done a child’s. ‘I was afraid that if I told you what I
suspected
you might feel forced to leave me.’ He took a deep breath and sobbed, ‘I thought that I’d go mad if you left me. I believed I wouldn’t exist.’ As he finished speaking he felt her freeze for a
moment before she pushed him away. She was staring at him coldly, every vestige of tenderness gone.

‘If that’s true what does it make me?’ she demanded emotionally.

Derek looked at her in astonishment. Seconds before he had felt relief, peace and love. His confession had brought him such a sense of well-being and tranquillity that at first he wasn’t able to take in what had happened to change her mood so thoroughly.

‘Perhaps I’d better tell you what it makes me then, since you’ve evidently lost your tongue as well as your wits.’ She paused dramatically before shouting, ‘A monster. A woman who bullied and degraded her husband so much that she destroyed him; making him her helpless shadow.’ She became calmer and asked him quietly, ‘Isn’t that what you implied?’

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he whispered.

‘That’s very decent of you. The fact is you like humiliating yourself. A great joke to begin with, the scholarly sage deferring to the wishes of his half-wit wife.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed and folded her arms. ‘A pity it became a habit; a pity for me at least. Fine for you. It saved you the bother of having to think about what you said to me. When in doubt agree.’

‘That isn’t quite fair,’ he protested.

‘Is it
fair
to tell your wife you’ll go mad if she misbehaves?’

‘A moment ago you were blaming me because I didn’t tell you sooner.’

She didn’t bother to answer him, but went over to the dressing table and started to brush her hair with brisk businesslike
movements
. Then she turned and said impatiently, ‘If we’re going tonight, you’d better start looking for your cat and getting Giles’s bicycle onto the car.’

‘When in doubt agree,’ he replied under his breath, and then out loud: ‘You wouldn’t like it if I refused, would you?’

She got up and came over to him and rested her hands on his shoulders. ‘You know, Derek, I’ve just been thinking.’ She
narrowed
her eyes slightly and shook her head. ‘You thought I was having an affair. So instead of mentioning it to me, you arrange to come and stay with me and my supposed lover. Not only that,
you ask your father along and bring your son and your cat.’ She raised her eyebrows and let her hands fall from his shoulders. ‘If’s that’s an example of sane Derek, mad Derek might be an improvement.’ She walked to the door and looked back at him more with pity than anger. ‘The car won’t pack itself,’ she said.

*

For almost an hour after leaving the house, Derek felt nothing at all except emptiness, as though every thought, feeling or emotion had been sucked out of him. The sky was a paler blue and towards the horizon he could see a slightly green tinge. The sun was a lot lower now and the air was cooler; but what would it matter if the grass changed to purple and the trees spouted orange leaves? Nothing would blot out the past few hours. Derek had walked about a mile down the road before turning back. Walking was better than sitting; walking was doing something after all, even if his feet seemed as remote and distant as the trees and the sky.