A Few Days in the Country (15 page)

Dan insisted on being shown the few pieces of work that she hadn't destroyed, and he examined them solemnly, and felt this discarded talent of Clea's was a thing to respect. In addition (and less respectably, he knew), he saw it as a decoration of her personality not unflattering to himself. From talk of art, which he invariably started, he would find he had led the way back to that perennially sustaining subject—their first meeting.

‘At the party that night, why were you so—cold?'

‘For good reasons. Which you know. How many times do you think I can survive this sort of thing?'

They were in Clea's room on an old blue sofa by the fire. Dan turned his head away, saying nothing. She said, ‘It's no fun. You get tired. Like a bird on the wing, and no land. It's—no fun. You feel trapped and hunted at the same time. And the weather seems menacing. (No, I don't mean now. But there have been times.) And in the long run it's so much less effort to stay where your belongings are…Wives shouldn't worry too much. And even other women shouldn't. By the time they find themselves listening to remorseful remembrances of things past they're too—killed to care. And they find they can prompt their loved one with considerable detachment when he reels off the well-known items—old clothes and family illnesses, holidays and food and friends…Make me stop talking.'

It mattered very little to them where they went, but they walked a lot and saw a few plays. They went to some art galleries. And once they had a picnic.

‘It's winter, but the sun never goes in,' he said.

‘Except now and then at night. Sydney's like that.'

In the evenings Clea sometimes read aloud to Dan at his suggestion. And he would think: The fire is burning. I am watching her face and listening to her voice. And he felt he knew something eternal that he had always wanted to know. One night Clea read the passage in which Yuri Zhivago, receiving a letter from his wife after their long and tragic separation, falls unconscious.

Because Clea existed and he was in her presence, Dan felt himself resurrected and so, though what she read was beautiful and he thought so, he laughed with a kind of senseless joy as at something irrelevant when she stopped.

‘All right, darling, I suppose it is wonderful. That Russian intensity. If
I
could ever totter to a sofa and collapse with sheer strength of feeling I'd think, Congratulations, Freeman! You're really living.'

Clea laughed, too, but said, ‘Ah, don't laugh. Because if you can laugh, you make it impossible…'

One thing Clea could not do was cook. It took Dan some weeks to accept this, because she wasn't indifferent to food. If they ate in a restaurant, she enjoyed a well-chosen meal as much as he did. But when he discovered that she could tackle any sort of diet with much the same enthusiasm he was depressed.

‘What do you live on when I'm not around?' he demanded, a little disgruntled.

She thought. ‘Coffee.'

He was proud of her. He even liked her a lot. But he couldn't help saying, ‘I get hungry.'

She looked abstracted. ‘Dan, I—you're
hungry
. Oh…We had steak?'

‘Yes, but no—no
trimmings
,' he tried to joke. ‘No art.'

‘Dan—'

‘I take it back about no art.'

‘I'll—tomorrow—'

‘I take it back about no art.'

‘I will do better.'

And after this she tried to cook what she thought were complicated meals for him, and he didn't discourage her.

It was the night they came back from their picnic in the mountains that he had the brilliant idea of asking her why she had never married.

She laughed.

‘You wouldn't have had any trouble,' he insisted, trying to see her face.

Still smiling she said, ‘The candidates came at the wrong time or they were too young for me when I was young.' She looked at him, raising her brows. ‘How old were you? When you married.'

‘Twenty-one.'

‘I wouldn't have liked you then.'

‘You'd have been right. But
you
—tell me.'

She moved restlessly on the sofa, and spread her arms along the back. He felt it was cruel to question her, but he knew he would never stop. She said, ‘Oh…I met someone, and bang went five years. Then some time rolled by while I picked myself up. Then I met—someone else who was married. Names don't matter.'

He looked at her.

‘All right, they do. But not now…So, by the time you look round after that, you're well into your thirties. And a few of the boys have turned into men, but they're married to girls who preferred them—quite young.'

‘Are you saying this to blame me? You are, aren't you?' He heard the rhetorical note in his voice. He knew he had asked her.

Clea seemed to examine the stitches of the black hand-knitted sweater he was wearing. She jumped up quickly and out in the kitchen poured whisky into two glasses, carrying them back.

‘I can only say, Clea—if things were different—things would be different…All right, it sounds lame. But I
mean
it. What do you
want
me to do?'

‘And what would you
like
me to say? You'll go back to Mary. Do you want me to plead with you?'

He could see that it was neither reasonable nor honour-able in him to want that, but in her it would have been more
natural
, he felt. He said so.

Clea was biting the fingernails of her left hand, cagily. He saw again that it was cruel to talk to her like this, but he knew he would never stop.

She glanced at him over her hand. ‘You're beginning to think about your old clothes and family holidays, just as I said. And why shouldn't you? These intimate little things are what count in the end, aren't they?'

And she disposed of her hand, wrapping it round her glass as she lifted it from the floor to drink. She rolled a sardonic blue eye at Dan and he gave the impression of having blushed without a change of colour, and frowned and drank, too. Because of course his mind
had
turned lately in that direction. He
had
begun to remember the existence of all that infinitely boring, engulfing domesticity, and his vital but unimportant part in it. It was all
there
, and his. What could he do about it?

Clea knew too much, drank too much, was nervy, pushed herself to excess, bit her fingernails. She was the least conditioned human being he had ever encountered. She was like a mirror held up to his soul. She was intelligent, feeling, and witty. He loved her.

‘Many thanks.' But she wouldn't meet his eyes.

‘Marriage,' he said, harking back suddenly. ‘When I think of it! And you're so independent. What could it give you? Really? No, don't smile.'

Still, she did smile faintly, saying nothing, then said irritatingly, ‘Someone to—set mouse traps and dispose of the bodies.'

He brushed this away. ‘You hate the office. Why?'

‘Dan.' She was patient.

‘Why do you hate the office?' He did feel vaguely that he was torturing her. ‘Why?'

‘I don't see the sun. I lose the daylight hours. The routine's exacting, but the work doesn't matter. It takes all my time from me and I see nothing beautiful.'

‘And just what would you do with this time?' he asked, somehow scientifically. He would prove to her how much better off…

With her left hand, distracted, she seemed to consider the length and texture of the hair that fell over her ear. ‘Oh. Look about. Exist.'

Dan thought of Mary. ‘Some wives are busy all day long.' He was positive that Mary would be in no way flattered if it were ever suggested that
she
had had time to practise as a student of life. ‘In fact,' he went on, ‘though cultivation is supposed to be the prerogative of the leisured classes, I think women in your position form a sort of non-wealthy aristocracy all to themselves.'

‘Do you?' Clea shifted the dinner plate from her lap and went over to the deal table where she had a lot of paraphernalia brought home from the office spread out. At random she picked up a pencil and tested its point against the cushion of her forefinger, saying, ‘That's an observation!'

‘No, don't be angry.' He turned eagerly to explain to her over the back of the sofa. ‘What I mean is that however busy you are from nine till five, you have all the remaining hours of the day and night to concentrate on yourself—your care, cultivation, understanding, amusement…'

She smiled at him. ‘Don't eat that if you can't bear it. I'll make something else.'

He said, ‘Forgive me.'

They quarrelled once, one Thursday evening when he passed on Alan and Joyce Parker's invitation to drive out into the country the following Sunday.

Alan Parker was a tall mild man of fifty, who clerked with dedication among the television films of the library. His wife, whom both Clea and Dan had met at official parties, was friendly and chatty. The Parkers knew Dan was married, and they knew that (as they put it) Dan and Clea had a thing about each other. But they liked Dan because he wasn't disagreeably ambitious, though he was younger than and senior to Alan, and they implied a fondness for Clea. Dan guessed that they would be the subject of Joyce's conversation for a week after the trip, but he couldn't find it in his heart to dislike anyone to whom he could mention Clea's name.

But she said swiftly, ‘Oh no, I couldn't go with them.'

He paused, amazed, in the act of kicking a piece of wood back into the fire. ‘What do you mean? Why not?'

‘No, I just couldn't go,' she said definitely, beginning to look for her place in the book she was holding.

‘But
why
?' Dan fixed the fire, buffed some ash from his hands and turned to sit beside her on the sofa. He took the book from her, thrust it behind his back, and forced her to lift her head.

Her look daunted him. He said in parenthesis, ‘I'm addicted to that eye shadow.' He said reasonably, ‘Only last week you talked about getting out of town.'

‘I'd be bored, Dan.'

‘Bored? I'd be there!' he rallied her, smiling in a teasing way. ‘And Joyce's going to produce a real French picnic lunch.'

There was a smile in her that he sensed and resented.

She said, ‘I'm sorry.'

‘And
I'm
sorry if the fact that I like to eat one meal a day is offensive to you.'

‘Darling. Please go, if you'd like to. No recriminations. Truly.'

Mondays to Fridays he didn't see her all day. He couldn't have borne to lose hours of her company. Six months, he'd had, just days ago. Now there were ten weeks left.

He said unpleasantly, ‘You do set yourself up with your nerves and your fine sensibility, Clea. When you begin to feel that a day in the company of nice easygoing people like the Parkers would be unbearably boring,
I
begin to feel you're carrying affectation too far. If you pander to yourself much more you'll find you're unfit to live in that world at all!'

She didn't answer that, or appear to react. Instead she caught his wrist in her right hand and smoothed her thumb against the suede of his watchstrap. ‘In their car, Dan, I'd feel imprisoned. I have to be able to get away. I'd be bored, Dan.' She said, ‘I don't
love
them!'

He stared, jerked his arm away, gave a short incredulous laugh and stood up. ‘Don't
love
them!'

She added, ‘As things are.'

Throwing on his coat he went to the door still uttering sarcastic laughs. ‘Don't
love
them! Well—
good—night—Clea!
'

In ten minutes he returned. And the ten weeks passed.

‘Dan? How are you now?' Mary peered down at him, then glanced abruptly right and left, bringing her chin parallel with each of her shoulders in turn. It was dark on the balcony. ‘Do you still want your dinner? It'll be ruined, but it's there if you want it…Dan!' She leaned over him.

‘What?'

‘Well, for heaven's sake, you can still answer when I speak to you! I thought you'd had a stroke or something, sitting there like an image.' She bridled with relief and exasperation.

‘No.'

In a brisk admonitory voice she said, ‘Well, I think you'd better get yourself along to Dr Webb in the morning. It's all this extra work. And you're not eating. Sometimes I think you don't even know you're home again.'

He said something she couldn't catch.

‘What? Where's
what
? Your dinner's in the oven.' Mary waited for him to speak again. ‘Smell the garden, Dan…We'd better get ready, then. Jack and Freda'll be over soon.'

‘What?' He stirred cautiously in the padded bamboo chair. He felt like someone who has had the top of his head blown off, but is still, astonishingly, alive, and must learn to cope with the light, the light, and all it illuminated.

‘I told you this morning,' Mary accused him. ‘You hadn't forgotten?'

Carefully he hauled himself up by the balcony railing. ‘I'll be bored,' he said.

In the soft black night, Mary went to stand in front of him, tilting her face to look at him. ‘Bored, Dan?' She sounded nervous. ‘You know Jack and Freda,' she appealed to him, touching his shirtsleeve.

‘I don't care for them,' he complained gently, not to her. And added, ‘As things are.'

‘Oh, Dan!' Mary swallowed. Tears sprang to her eyes. She caught his arm and walked him through the front door, and down the carpeted hall to their bedroom. ‘Lie down, Dan. Just lie there.'

He heard her going to the telephone. She rang the doctor. Then she rang Freda and Jack to apologise and ask them not to come. He heard her crying a little with fright as she repeated his uncanny remark in explanation.

And Dan took a deep breath, and looked at the ceiling, and smiled.

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