A Desirable Husband (12 page)

‘Really? Oh, well, you must tell me what you think of their set-up. It’s rather odd in some ways, you see Finola had the most frightful row with my mother and practically forced her out of the house. Of course, Gerard didn’t like that at all. I’m sure I told you how awkward my mother was being, it was last year’s big drama,’ he added.

‘Did she? Good Lord,’ said Winston.

‘Finola?’ said Miranda. ‘I quite agree with you, Mr Lowell. One can’t see it, somehow.’

Winston thought that he might ask Finola out to lunch with him, or to the theatre in London: he supposed he must wait till after his visit to Combe Chalcot, for he could not frighten her with a letter. He liked Gerard, but thought him now an enlightened despot. Finola would go to him, and he would not give her permission to lunch alone with a man in a restaurant, unless the invitation were casual, public and blatant.

Darcy and Miranda discovered that Winston intended to
go straight back to London after leaving them, because his dinner engagement in Cambridge had been cancelled. They decided not to be alone together at supper, but only in bed. They took him with them to a restaurant where they ate well, and talked about class in France and England, and what people meant by saying that one had had a good war.

Miranda told them about how she had worked for the Resistance, about how she had listened for the words on the wireless:
‘Les
cigarettes
Gitanes
sent
les
meilleurs.’
She described going out with torches at night in response to this code, flashing her lights as a signal to those who were to drop men or supplies, and she told them how terrified she had been of the Gestapo. Neither man, though Winston had fought with great gallantry, had come quite so close to the Gestapo as that.

When Winston took a taxi to the station, Darcy and Miranda decided to walk back to Trumpington Street. It was too cold now to look at the colleges through which they took brisk detours, and they were oddly full of energy, but they felt both better and more tired after they had paused to kiss each other harshly on Silver Street bridge.

A pale fire burned opposite the cold sunny window, where Gerard stood holding a letter in his hand. It was from Christie’s, informing him that a painting which the family had always thought to be a Brueghel was merely of the Dutch school, and really worth very little. He looked down at it, read it again, and, though he knew he should have put it into one of the metal filing cabinets which disfigured the study wall, he threw it on the fire and returned to the window.

His study looked out towards the front and the open gateway, and the road beyond where occasional cars droned past. There was talk of turning this lane into a road with cat’s eyes; Gerard had protested to the County Council, but he had as yet had no reply. He would have to speak about it tonight, at the parish council meeting.

Gerard withdrew a little from the window as he saw Finola come through the gateway with her daughter, her niece Jenny, and the dogs, which Constance had left behind though he had begged her to take them if she wanted them. Gerard knew that his wife would be troubled if she were to see him looking purposeless. He meant to sit down at his desk again, but he was surprised by the appearance in the gateway of several children with bare mauve legs and choking coats and mufflers, who were pushing each other and seemed to be saying: ‘Go on!’ Gerard realised, as two of them walked forward with a stuffed sack in a wheelbarrow, what they were doing. He remained at the window to watch.

Finola turned and hurried towards them, and Gerard saw her bend over the guy as though it were a baby.

‘Penny for the guy, Mrs Parnell?’ said one little girl in her slow, adenoidal voice, glancing over her shoulder at the group by the wall, and rubbing her legs together. ‘Please, ma’am.’

‘Of course! Let me see if I’ve got any money – yes, you’re in luck, here’s a shilling. Richard told me you were going to have a bonfire. Will you be having fireworks as well?’

The girl took a breath. ‘Oh, yes, Mrs Parnell, just by the cricket pitch. Richard’s still poorly, is he?’

‘I’m afraid so, Cathy, but he does want to go. Perhaps he’ll be better on Thursday.’

Eleanor, who had followed her mother, stared at the older girls, and they stared back. She was too young for school, but Richard had been for two terms at the village school, and now spoke with a broad Dorset accent which everyone said was charming, and would in any case soon be lost. Finola and Gerard had not liked the look of the private day school in Shaftesbury which had been recommended to them.

Cathy and her companion turned and hurried back towards the gateway with the wheelbarrow rattling. Finola, Eleanor and Jenny went into the house, and removed their coats and gumboots in the gun-room. This was a slow process, for Eleanor liked to sit down and have her outer clothes removed for her. ‘We’d better go and see poor Richard,’ said Finola, combing her daughter’s hair until she scowled.

‘Let’s!’ said Jenny, who was very obliging.

Finola ran her hands under the cold tap. She was pleased with herself for having remembered that the sturdy blonde child was Cathy Wilkes, either the second or the third daughter of Mrs Wilkes whose husband was tenant of Oak Melton Farm. The other child she had not been able to name, but she connected her face, in an uncertain way, with a sale of sheep in Dorchester.

Gerard knew that he could never ask directly anybody’s
name, for he was trying to be as courteous a landlord as his father. He had asked Finola to discover these things for him when he had returned with a terrible headache from the Michaelmas rent audit. On that day, many of those who had come to pay had chatted briefly about their families as well as the repairs needed to their houses, as they tried to learn how Gerard would really differ from Hugh. They never told him their names or which houses they lived in, and when they paid the agent or paid in cash, he could not even glance surreptitiously at the name on a cheque. He could not ask his agent, because the agent assumed that he knew. Some of the old people had faces which had been familiar to him since he was a child, but he still did not know their names. They called him ‘Mr Gerard’, and sometimes touched their caps, and made him incline his head and smile a great deal.

Gerard and Finola had discussed at some length whether it would be a good idea to ask the well-liked Katie Van Leyden who everybody was. Finola had done this occasionally, though Gerard had asked her not to: he had pointed out that the story of their difficulties with Constance was known to all the village through Mrs James, Katie’s daily, who had listened to her discussing them on the telephone.

‘He’ll miss seeing the fireworks awfully, if he isn’t better,’ said Jenny as they went upstairs.

‘I know. They’ve never seen fireworks before, either of them.’

Richard was cross, because he had been taken from his new bedroom back to the nursery, where Nanny could take care of him. He was convalescing from a bout of flu.

‘You’ll miss the fireworks,’ said Eleanor, trailing in behind her mother and Jenny, and looking at her brother, who was red-faced in bed.

‘I
shan’t
!
That’s all you know,’ said her brother.

‘Yes you will.’

‘No I won’t.’

‘There’s no need for a quarrel,’ said Finola. ‘I do hope you’ll be well enough to go, Richard.’

‘I shall be, Mummy,’ he said, looking down at the counterpane. ‘I am
now
.’

‘Perhaps.’ She wanted another baby: her vigorous, black-haired children were not enough for her. They were usually polite to their parents, as their parents were to them, but they loved and were cheeky to Nanny. Finola believed that Richard and Eleanor thought she and Gerard good, wise and dull.

‘Jenny, you play trains with me!’ said Eleanor. ‘And Richard if he
must
.’

‘Of
course
I will!’ said Jenny, blushing. ‘Can Richard join us, Aunt Finola – is he well enough?’

‘If he likes,’ said Finola. ‘I’m sure it can’t hurt you to get out of bed for a while, Richard, but do put on your dressing-gown.’

‘Thanks, Mummy.’ He sounded doubtful: he was a little too old for nursery trains, but he reflected that he could supervise the other two.

Finola smiled a little at Jenny, who was blonde and plump but had Anatole’s pointed features, and went downstairs to see Gerard. She was thinking hard about how very nice another baby would be.

‘Gerard? Are you very busy?’

‘No, not especially – what is it, darling?’

She came into the study and he got up and sat down on the sofa with her, for it seemed to him that it would be both rude and formal to talk to her from his desk.

‘It’s just this dinner-party next week, darling,’ said Finola in a low voice, looking at the door. ‘I mean – the Macleans can’t come, and who are we going to ask instead? Any suggestions?’

They discussed this. Finola was trying, as her father had suggested, to find suitable friends for Jenny, who had met no one with her parents in the North Riding. The Parnells knew few people in their early twenties, children of couples older than themselves, and Finola could not think of any young man who would make an interesting husband.

When they had settled the question, Finola did not go.
She looked at Gerard’s knees, and then at the bookshelves, and then back, and opened her mouth.

‘Is something wrong, Finola?’

‘I’ve got to – I don’t know, it’s so difficult – it’s that –’ She did not sob, but tears began to leak steadily out of her eyes, lots of tears which surprised her, and were something like a comfort.

He gave her his handkerchief, and waited. ‘You must tell me, if there is something wrong.’

‘I d-don’t –’ She put her hands in her lap. ‘It’s too stupid to cry. Gerard, I – I want you to sleep in your dressing-room. At least for a while.’

‘Why?’ he said, moving further away and tucking one hand inside his coat.

‘I can’t stand you being so
cold
all the time!’

There was another pause, and she did not cry though her face was sticky.

‘I don’t think that your asking me to move into my dressing-room goes very well with a complaint about my
coldness
,’ he said, smiling slightly and recrossing his legs.

‘Oh, haven’t you got any imagination!’ she said, watching this.

‘I’ve always suspected I must have very little.’ He had always compared himself with Darcy; and Finola had always thought he had a great deal, like Anatole.

She struggled to say the words she had practised: ‘You have no
heart
any more. Your heart isn’t in it.’ Her eyes began to water. ‘And it’s too often, Gerard. It’s just too often.’ Every third night or so, occasionally twice in one night. ‘It’s
exhausting.
I don’t like it!’

‘Nonsense,’ he said icily, blushing. ‘What absolute rubbish, Finola!’

‘Women are different, you don’t understand! I didn’t think you could d-do things –’

‘Do what? No, don’t try to tell me! Have I ever failed to consider you? Have I ever not realised that women
are
different as you call it? You said once –’ He thought he was very like a woman, and though he had silently regretted this
in men’s company, he had always resented the female view that men were without feelings, and considered love and marriage a nuisance: even Christian men.

When Finola looked up, she could see that his thoughts were turning sadly to fate and irony and religion. She did not mind his reading
The
Imitation
of
Christ
every night before he went to bed. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, in a way which was quite improper and unnatural after eight years of marriage.

‘You
do
neglect me. You do. Since Constance – because you disapprove of what I did I mean, and you won’t forgive me, and you didn’t even tell me
not
to, and after all you have gained –’ He would say it was wrong to love him, if she told him she did. Her crying began almost to be noisy.

Gerard interrupted. ‘Finola, none of this makes sense! You seem to have absolutely no logic.’

‘It’s not
logical.
It’s not a question of logic.’ She realised that she was on the point of saying she wanted another baby.

Gerard got up from the sofa and went to stand in front of his desk. ‘You’re saying that I seem to have less – affection for you than I had before?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not true.’ She said nothing. ‘I tell you it is not true!’

‘Don’t, Gerard, I don’t want to – oh,
please
don’t use my bedroom any more!’

‘Stop crying,’ he said, speaking more harshly than he had ever spoken to her before. ‘Stop it.’

‘I won’t stop if I don’t want to!’ said Finola.

‘It is not true that I have not forgiven you for what you did to my mother,’ he continued, working his right fist into his left-hand palm. ‘Do you understand? You were very wrong, you know you were, but it’s done now –’

‘Oh, be
quiet
!’

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I shan’t come to your bedroom, if that is what will satisfy you. And I hope you’ll come to regret it.’ He waited. ‘Please go now, Finola.’

‘Yes, I’ll go. I’ll
go,
as you say.’ She was still wet with
tears, and Gerard walked towards her as she raised herself from the sofa. He put his hands on her shoulders.

‘Do compose yourself, at least until you’re in your own room. Do you want Mainwaring to see you?’

‘I’m all right! Let me go.’

Gerard dropped his hands, but remained looking down at her. ‘I suppose I can’t hold this against you,’ he said, turning aside at last, and rubbing his forehead. ‘I know I must not.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Finola, who could still feel the grip of his fingers. She left him, and he looked furiously after her, but she did not see.

Gerard realised after a moment that the room was silent, and she had closed the door, and he could not go after her like a young and passionate man. He made his way back to his desk and tried to collect his thoughts; and while he stared at a letter from the Inland Revenue, his legs began to tremble.

He came close to tears as he wondered how he was to manage, alone in his dressing-room bed, and he blamed himself for self-indulgence as he looked back on his unmarried years. Before he met Finola, he had wished at times that he were like Darcy, whom he loved in spite of his being so immoral; but he had known he could never compete, although he was so much more lovely to look at.

Gerard had had a love affair with a married woman of thirty-eight when he was not quite twenty, and then he had become a practising Christian. He had left his mistress, and in the next ten years he had visited a brothel three times. He closed his eyes as he thought of all he had done, and of how kind and jolly and pleased the three girls had pretended to be.

When he was thirty-one he had fallen in love with Marjorie Pelham-Colville, who had agreed to marry him and had persuaded him to sleep with her while they were engaged; but she had jilted him for another man a month before the wedding. Women were still said to find him too polite, too old-fashioned, and too amusingly virtuous. They were like Darcy. Gerard had been almost wholly
chaste between his being jilted and his marriage to Finola, and he thought that his chastity had been without virtue, because it had not made him happy. He had not known what else to do, when he had loved nobody, and had wished himself in love without success.

He thought Finola very ungrateful for having been the only woman in the world on whom he had pressed his attentions in the past nine years, and he reminded himself that she must be far more ignorant than he was himself of what marriage was truly like. Glancing for a moment out of the window, Gerard suddenly picked up a glass paperweight and threw it at the painting of the battle of Malplaquet.

It gave a hollow bounce which stunned him, fell, and smashed on the floor. When he had recovered from the shock, Gerard was surprised by how much bolder and more sensible the action made him feel. He had only read in books of people throwing things in a temper. ‘Damn it,’ he murmured, smiling uneasily. ‘Damn it,
bloody
fool you are.’