A Rather English Marriage (22 page)

She knew better than to bring these tales to Reggie, let alone to ask him for a loan to tide her over. Instead, she visited her friend and ally, Colin Thurlwell. Leaning on the highly polished glass counter in his tiny shop, she gazed hungrily at glowing lumps of gold displayed against black velvet, twisted into molten shapes and sprinkled with diamonds.

‘Believe you me, my darling,' she told him, flashing her eyes and crinkling here long fingers at him, ‘once that fish is hooked I'll be in here once a month asking you to make me another bracelet, with earrings and brooch to match!'

‘If wishes were horses then beggars should ride,' he told her. ‘Don't be too sure. How do you know there aren't ill-begotten sons or rapacious little nieces tucked away?'

‘There aren't, I'm pretty sure. I've looked him up in the reference books and there's only a nephew, who's got the title and assets coming out of his ears. He's got a couple of daughters – clever you, how did you know? – but they're not short of the odd bob. And if they were, the old boy would have been invited to spend Christmas with them instead of having it on his own, poor darling. Wish I'd known! There was an opportunity missed. I'd have got him to take me to Paris or Florence; it never occurred to me he'd be by himself. He'll leave it to Battersea Dogs' Home, that's who. Lucky he met me first. Don't you worry, Colin: our Reginald is up for grabs. Trouble is,
he's
got to do the grabbing; and if he doesn't hurry up, I shall be in Carey Street.'

‘Business stinks?'

‘Oh Colin … never worse! I haven't shifted a thousand quids' worth of stock in a single week since Christmas! If I had any sense, I'd fold my tent and steal away. But I
can't'
.

‘Because of him? Or because of cash-flow problems?'

‘Both.'

‘If it's him you're worrying about, best thing you could do is remove yourself for a while. Let him stew. Nip off to the Mediterranean for an early summer holiday, send him some nice colourful postcards of big hotels, blue seas and pine trees saying “Wish you were here” …'

‘If only I
could.'

‘Postcards are simple. It's getting you there that's the tricky bit. Haven't you got any rich friends you could go and stay with?'

‘They're all so
boring.'

‘What makes you think
he's
interesting? Sounds catatonic to me. You're going to need the practice. Go on, think … Former customers? Schoolfriends? Early retirements? Doesn't matter who they are, and you can go by train, so it won't cost you. What you need is a little absence to make the heart grow fonder and a premature suntan to make everyone else look wishy-washy.'

‘Colin,' she said, ‘you're a genius, a scheming bloody genius!
You're right. I'll do it. I'll find someone who'll have me to stay whether they like it or not. I'll come back with a load of cheap baubles from the market: call them “new summer accessories from the resorts”, sell 'em at a 200 per cent mark-up and finance my trip!'

‘That's the spirit. Now then, what did you come in to ask me for?'

‘Can you lend me five thousand at 12½ per cent?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I cannot. That's bank-manager time. But what I will do is ring up pretending to be your accountant, give him a bit of flim-flam, say you've been a silly girl and got behind on your VAT or something, make it easy for you. OK?'

‘OK,' she said.

She telephoned Reggie a few days later.

‘Well,' he said flirtatiously, pleased that she had taken the initiative. ‘Well, and to what do I owe the pleasure?'

‘Reggie, darling, I can't bear this cool English weather a day longer. I'm fed up. I'm going away to look for a proper spring.'

‘When?' he asked, a little boy bereft. ‘Where? Who with?'

‘Oh darling, you're so sweet,' cooed Liz. ‘I've got some dear friends I'm going to stay with. They're always pestering me to go. They live in the hills behind Genoa. Heavenly view, all sea and sky … and then there's another, known him donkey's years, who lives in Rome – I might go down there for a few days as well.'

‘Who are these chaps? How long will you be gone?'

‘Not
chaps
, Reggie, just friends. Old mates. I'll be away, oh, two weeks – three – depends.'

‘When are you going?'

‘As soon as I can get a flight. Tomorrow, if there's a seat on BA to Genoa.'

‘Tomorrow?
Well, you'd better have dinner with me tonight.'

‘Reggie, my pet, you're so impractical. I've got to pack, get myself organized.'

‘Pick you up at nine, then. Nine-thirty, if you like.'

Big sigh. ‘Oh
all right
. Nine-thirty. By-ee!'

This time he took her to dinner at a soft pink and blue pincushion of a restaurant where the food was delicious and the cook round and pretty and shining with health – a wonderful advertisement for her own cooking and no competition for Liz.

‘If you'd
told
me you wanted to go away,' Reggie was grumbling, ‘
I
'd have taken you. No need to be all underhand about it. What will I do with myself while you're away?'

‘When you and I travel together, my poppet,' said Liz with a reckless toss of the head, ‘it'll be in grand style and for a very special reason. All right?'

‘Is that a promise?' he said, poor old heffalump, straight into the trap.

‘It's a promise. You can make plans while I'm away.'

‘I warn you,' he said, ‘I'm bored to tears in museums.'

‘How about casinos?' she asked.

‘Gambling? I've never gambled, not more than a shilling a hundred at bridge or a fiver on a horse. You mean roulette?'

‘Oh Reggie, my darling, how have you got through life without ever playing roulette? Never mind: I'm going to have lots of fun teaching you!'

Next morning at crack of dawn Liz caught the early train from Tunbridge Wells that connected with the boat-train from Dover. She was dressed in jeans and sandals and a big white sweater, carrying a roll-bag full of unsold resort wear. She had left behind a notice in the shop window that said : ‘Closed for collections and spring-buying trip. Re-opening end of May with new Continental stock.' This, when reported back by his wife, did not amuse Whittington, her parsimonious bank manager.

Roy found it easier to remember Grace as she had been when young, rather than as she had looked towards the end. He wondered if it were because of the intensity with which he had missed her during the wartime years when they were
separated. Then his longing gaze had burned up the curling black-and-white or brownish snapshots with deckled edges that he carried with him everywhere. He had them still, tucked away carefully in an envelope at the back of a drawer in his own house, to be looked at again when (if ever) he could do so without tears. Their wedding photographs had been taken out for the funeral and put away again; but not the youthful pictures of Grace leaning against a bicycle, laughing, or Grace lying in a meadow, propped on one elbow beside a picnic cloth. People said the past grew clearer as you got older, while more recent events were forgotten. It must also be because the past was so sweet, the days of idyll.

He thought of their early marriage in the little house they had rented. They had discussed endlessly whether – since they could only afford a carpet for one room and would have to make do, for the time being, with lino in all the rest – they should put the carpet in the lounge or the bedroom. ‘We're going to spend most of our time in the bedroom,' he had pointed out. Grace, not disagreeing nor falsely prudish, had said, ‘Yes, but it's the lounge people will see.' ‘What
people?'
he said.
‘We're
the ones who matter.'

In the end, so that they could make love on the floor as well as in bed, they'd bought a carpet for the bedroom. ‘In any case,' she reasoned, ‘it's not as though we often sit in the lounge. Mostly people chat in the kitchen, and nobody would expect a carpet there.'

Their first home. The rent had been twenty-six shillings a week. He had made a lot of the furniture himself. He'd been good at carpentry at school, so he went back to his old woodwork master and asked if, outside term-time, he could borrow the workbench and tools. The man had been touched that Roy remembered his lessons. He advised him on the best wood to buy, which pieces to make and which were too much trouble. ‘Don't bother trying to build a chest of drawers,' he had said. ‘It's not worth doing unless you do it well, and doing it well means dovetail joints, and those aren't easy. So buy your chest of drawers – second-hand is better than new; better made.'

Grace had bought lengths of sheeting cotton which she had hemmed to make their sheets, and stitched pillowcases with their initials embroidered across one corner – intertwined curlicues, skating swoops of Rs and Gs looping around an S. She had hemmed table napkins, and tray-cloths and later, when she was pregnant for the first time, she had knitted and sewed a beautiful layette: white, as befitted a first child. When she wasn't stitching, she wrote him yearning letters into which she poured her hopes for their baby, her fears about the war, and her dreams of the life they would have together at the end of it.

They had missed each other so powerfully, so painfully, that the image of his young bride was the one that had burned itself into his memory, despite fifty years of married life. Grace as she had been in their last years together, a stooped, greying, methodical figure polishing and hoovering from room to room,
that
Grace was slipping away from him. He murmured his talisman again:
‘O for the touch of a vanish'd hand/And the sound of a voice that is still!'
But although the tears pricked in his eyes and he had to swallow the lump in his throat, he was no longer battling against an arching, drowning crest of pain that, six months ago, would have thumped him in the solar plexus and doubled him up with grief.

He did not confess this to Vera, when he wrote his monthly letter to her in Australia; nor to Alan, when he visited him in prison. Alan looked pasty-faced and sullen, but the bruises had gone from his throat. Roy had never asked his son why he had not applied to the authorities for permission to attend his mother's funeral. Such permission was nearly always given; the fact that Alan did not go suggested he had not wanted to be there. Was it guilt, or shame at being seen, prison-pale and under escort, by his parents' friends and neighbours? Losing face would be more than he could stand; worse than not paying his last respects to his mother.

Roy would have been comforted by reminiscing with Alan about their family life – the outings they'd been taken on as children; days by the seaside; visits to the circus – but he knew this would unleash a flood of accusation.

One day Alan seemed mellower than usual, less inclined to go through his litany of history and grievance. After Roy had been there for ten minutes, drinking thick prison tea out of thick prison cups under the averted but wary gaze of prison warders, Alan poked his head across the table, the only privacy their circumstances allowed, and said, ‘It's like this, you see. You and Mum had, like, a really good marriage, OK? You never stopped wanting to be together. You wasn't tempted by anyone else. Well, me and Sheila have got the same. And it could be better. Much better. Perfect. For ever. I know that. She does, too. We're both sure. I've made up my mind. I'm going to get a divorce from June and me and Sheila'll marry again, I mean properly.' Roy kept quiet as Alan drew deeply on his cigarette. He stuck his head forward again, confidingly, and beckoned Roy towards him.

‘All we need now – when I get out – is a kid; a little girl to sit on my lap. She might look like Mum, be nice and dainty like her. I'd be a better Dad with a daughter. I was too rough on the boys; used to hit them; couldn't seem to not. Dad, you've got to do something for me. I want you to talk to June. You and she are close these days, aren't you? You never used to like her; well, you was wrong.'

Roy closed his eyes and hung his head in acknowledgement of this.

Alan went on: ‘My trouble was, I never got on with that Gloria. Cheeky, snotty little kid, always acting like I was the one who'd butted in. If June hadn't had Gloria it might have been different, we might have got off to a better start. But she was always there, clinging to her mum, giving me funny looks. No need to tell June that, but make her see – explain for me. It's never going to come right with us, not now. She's young still, she ain't bad-looking: she'll find a bloke. I want a divorce.'

He frowned, and lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old one, inhaling ferociously, avoiding his father's eye. ‘Junie's still a good-looking bird,' he repeated. ‘Kept her figure. Plenty of blokes could go for her. She'll get married again, find someone to set an example to the boys, keep them out of trouble.'

‘What if he feels about them the way you felt about Gloria?'

‘He won't, though, will he? They're good kids. Look, I'm telling you, Dad, she'll be better off without me. And then Sheila and me'll be free to be properly married, by law, and have what you and Mum had.'

‘And what was that, son?'

‘A good
marriage
. Like everyone wants. No fights, no hard words, no fucking around with anyone else and walking out. You two was always lovey-dovey, I never remember you shouting at Mum. Me and Sheila can be the same. We're like that, too: even with all the lies I had to tell, keeping June and Sheila secret from each other, not letting on where I was half the time – even then, Sheila trusted me. She's a really good kid and she loves me, and I love her.'

‘You loved June, too.'

‘That was different. I might never have married her if you and Mum hadn't been dead against it. Listen, you owe it to me, Dad, fucking
life
owes me another chance. I made one mistake, OK, that's why I'm here, I know that. But I've paid for it, bloody hell I have. Now it's my turn for a new start.'