Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (14 page)

Amy, clearing up the mess, wondered if her son were drunk. . Perhaps all that home-made wine had rendered him unfit for ordinary drinking.

Ernie felt that he had every right to glow with triumph – the bird so moist and tender, the cranberry sauce so brilliant, the Brussels sprouts so green. Crackers were pulled and he put on a sort of mauve tarbush. The little girls ate steadily, with their thoughts on the pudding, as if they were on the very edge of bankruptcy.

“You should be doing this, Gareth,” James said. “More in your line.”

“I’m not a surgeon. Take the stuffing out for you, if you like.”

“Will you pull my cracker with me?” Dora asked Amy. “I always think old, wrinkled hands get a better grip.”

When the pudding came, James found himself once more busy at the sideboard. His father had always manoeuvred the coin-finding, so that the little girls
should discover something – in fact the only thing to do with the pudding that they cared for. James realised that this year the matter had been overlooked. With his children’s eyes sharply on him, he wondered how to proceed.

“Has the…l.l.lucre been arranged?” he muttered to Amy, who gave him a distracted look, as if she were visualising Nick sitting above them on a cloud, saying to himself, “They can’t even arrange the pudding coins without me.”

“Too late.” James took what could only be called a swig of wine, sliced into the pudding, and began to make a speech. “Dora, Isobel,” he started off. “We must confess that when you were younger, dear Grandpa cheated a little for fun so that you always found a surprise in your pudding. But now, at your ages, we think it’s become a bit childish, so this year you are to take your chance with the grown-ups. Some may find money, others not, and if we don’t finish the pudding, no one may.”

“Dora was seven last year,” Isobel remarked.

“Yes, my darling.”

“And I am only four.”

“Four and a half,” Maggie said anxiously.

“Then I am far too young.” Isobel said complacently. “I’ve more years to go.” She put her elbows on the table and beamed at her pudding expectantly.

“O, I do wish Grandpa hadn’t died,” Dora cried.

Martha and Simon spent Christmas Day together in Martha’s bed-sitting-room and, for the most part, on
Martha’s bed, while Mrs. Francis, the owner of the house, grimly entertained an old aunt with chicken-and-all-the-trimmings. A small Christmas pudding bought from a shop proved as disappointing as the one in Laurel Walk, although for different reasons.

Martha and Simon sometimes had a snack – took a piece of salami from a paper bag, or peeled a tangerine. They also made popcorn on the gas-ring. Drink did not matter to them, and they hardly touched the half bottle of sherry Mrs. Francis had given Martha for Christmas in return for a beautiful if faded Victorian photograph Martha had discovered in a junk shop. She always gave presents that she would have liked to possess herself, and Mrs. Francis intended to throw it away as soon as it was safe to do so.

When they made love, Martha took off her clothes and then put on an old khaki sweater because her shoulders got cold.

Sometimes – nibbling salami, peeling the tangerines – they spoke of their American Christmasses – his in Minnesota, and saved up for half the year with money put by in an old cracked jug. Her Christmasses had not been lavish, but more so than his, with erratic extravagances from her mother and grandmother, such as being taken all the way to Fifth Avenue to look at shop-window displays. The extravagances running right through the family, Simon thought nervously – nervously, because he had it at the back of his mind to ask Martha to marry him. He held back from this because of his extreme caution about money, and her carelessness about it – that holiday, for instance, and a very beautiful painting of rimy branches by Elinor
Bellingham-Smith which hung frostily above the gas-fire, and had cost, he knew, two hundred pounds. Her threadbare clothes were of no comfort to him; they seemed to show a sign of neglect rather than of taking care. He was always neatly dressed himself.

If he asked her to marry him, would she, though? He knew of her long involvement with England, and he tried to understand it, but could not; and could not imagine her back home, even though she sometimes spoke – and quite wistfully – of the long, wild, winter shore of her childhood and girlhood. There would be no wild shore where they would have to go. There would be some small apartment in a town, an unknown town to her – though surely it could not be worse than this, he thought, looking round her room. His eyes stopped at the hoary, grey-white picture, and he tried to imagine it in another place, another continent, and failed.

“Have some almonds, Ernie, do,” said Amy.

“No, thanks, madam. I’m not a very nutty person. I like them; but they don’t like me.” He glanced instinctively at Gareth, who was cracking two walnuts in his hands and did not look up. “And they might set off my chest again,” Ernie added reproachfully.

James and Maggie had taken the little girls home to bed, and Ernie, feeling a sense of anti-climax to the day (he had excelled at charades), was fussing with the drinks tray.

“Do go down to the pub, if you want to,” Amy said. They had all helped with the washing-up
and there was no more to be done.

“I doubt they will be open,” he said, feeling dismissed, and he left the room, closing the door very quietly.

“I should ring up Martha to wish her a happy Christmas, though rather late,” Amy said. “She gave me an alabaster egg, and I gave her nothing. I didn’t know we were on Christmas present terms.”

She dialled a number, and Mrs. Francis answered at once – anything for a diversion, she had thought, sick and tired, by this time, of Auntie.

“May I speak to Martha?” Amy asked.

Mrs. Francis, knowing full well what was happening in that room, was only too glad to go and thud on the door, shouting, “Wanted on the phone at once.”

Gareth got up and helped himself to another drink. The telephone conversation, when at last it began, was terse.

When it was over, he asked, “Is she a counter-irritant?”

“No, just an irritant; sometimes like a dead albatross. Talking of irritants, that awful Vicar came again the other day. I do wish he would not. They simply think they can call without being invited, as in what Dora talks of as the old-fashioned days. I was so glad to see him go.”

“Then he accomplished something, coming here.”

“Do you know, of course you don’t, he said he could say the Lord’s Prayer in thirty seconds, and he took out a stop-watch and proved it. I didn’t know what expression to put on my face. He said it wasn’t a great part of the day to set aside for Our Lord, and
I rather agreed with him. In fact it seemed so little as to be hardly worth while. Of course, it’s his busy time just now, although he says that Good Friday is the really gruelling stint. And I should have thought that the reason for it must have been, too. Oh, I’m sorry, I always forget you are rather religious.”

“ ‘We are not contained within our hats and boots,’ Walt Whitman said.”

And Amy remembered his wife’s funeral, going on and on. Gareth following the coffin into the church, his hands clasped behind his back (the Welsh in him?), and her own numbed lips trying to move with the words of
The Lord is My Shepherd
– that dreadful Crimond. Watching her, he now wondered, because of her sudden change of expression, if she were thinking of Nick. The day must have been an ordeal – as all first occasions are after the death of someone who has been close: those birthdays, wedding anniversaries, all the other special and remembered times.

“You stood the day well,” he decided to say.

“Strangely enough, I was thinking then of Anna, not of Nick. Her awful funeral.”

“Awful?”

“Too many hymns to choke over. Too many words.”

“There is some need for it,” Gareth said, defending his wife’s funeral, which, after all, he had himself arranged. “In this age, we try too much to cover up the fact of death, and I believe we suffer from it in the end.”

“It’s not our fault if it’s too horrible to be brought into the open.”

He smiled. “Too gloomy a subject for today.” He leaned back, with his drink held against his chest, feeling at peace.

They had a quiet, pleasant rest-of-the-evening together.

There were still Christmas decorations in the little café where Simon asked Martha to marry him. On the polished, rickety tables, red candles were arranged amongst plastic Christmas roses, and a small artificial tree stood in a corner. They were decorations of the most discreet kind, for this was one of the so-English tea-shops Martha loved; with horse-brasses, an imitation log fire which gave out more glow than heat, and, apart from it, the darkness from black oak and low ceilings. A lady in a flowered overall had brought tea and home-made scones. A grey cat wove its way among the legs of customers and chairs.

“It is either this or that,” Simon was saying, referring to his departure to the States, with Martha or alone.

She had considerately refused cakes. It was a great deal because of this – though not consciously – that he had decided to speak of the matter which had been in his mind so long.

She looked across the table at him, wondering what life in America would now be like – and his part of America, not hers. In England, except for his work, he seemed to live in a vacuum. He had one friend – colleague, as he spoke of him – called Charles, to whom he sometimes referred; but they had little in common. Charles went out a lot, not to inexpensive evening-classes, but to pubs and cinemas. Was Simon, then, incapable of making friends, Martha wondered.
Would she, too, share his vacuum? And she had by no means done with Europe yet – a continent to which he seemed utterly indifferent. He had taken no advantage of his nearness to France, or Italy, or Spain – let alone more ancient worlds.

“Perhaps I should tell you,” she said, frowning, “I don’t want, I’m afraid….to have children.”

“Oh, children would be out of the question for many years,” he said quickly.

“I meant I don’t think I want to have them ever,” she muttered.

She bent her head, put jam on half a scone. What did she love about him? Was it just what she could do for him? He was quiet, gentle, unobtrusive – all to her good points. And he appeared to appreciate qualities in her which no one else noticed: for instance, he admired her downrightness, which may have caused her difficulties, misunderstandings in England, her way of doing what she wanted to do, asking what she needed to know. Her grandmother had once said to her, “Never marry a man you don’t admire. That’s fatal. Anything else.” Did she admire him? All this pondering seemed to suggest that she did not.

Before she had refused the cakes, he had been worrying rather about her possessions, as well as her innate need to acquire them – that oil-painting, for instance, which rankled so much, and various pieces of pottery and glass. Then there were piles of books, and all the picture-postcards, of Cotswold villages and stately homes, and reproductions from the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Everywhere she had gone, she had bought postcards. He and she –
if she came – would be obliged to fly back home, and the excess baggage cost would be enormous. It will all have to go by sea, he decided. And then he dismissed that thought, overwhelmed by his need for somebody, his need for her, for someone to cherish. He had had no real response from other women, and had been nervous of inviting any. He was aware of his timidity, but she knew of it, too, and helped him, as in other ways he felt that he could help her.

She had learned that the town where they would have to live in America was a university town; small and not in any way famous, this university; but perhaps they could make some life there, amongst people who read books, who might even have read her own books. There might be pleasant evenings of talk in one another’s houses or apartments. The place – she did not know it – knew America hardly at all— might not after all be as bad as it sounded.

“I really do need you,” he said. “I find I just can’t bear to leave you behind.” Emotion, for the first time, broke into this proposal.

“Then I will come,” she said, “We shall be together. And now that I have made up my mind, I should like some of that chocolate sponge while we make our plans. It looks real good.”

Towards the end of January, Martha and Simon were married at the Reverend Patrick Padstowe’s church behind Laurel Walk, Martha being ‘of this parish’ from Amy’s address. It was a bitterly cold and blustery morning, and Martha wore a fringed, shaggy
sheepskin coat from Afghanistan. She had bought it second-hand in a Southall souk. When it was raining, it smelled very strong, like the Turkish bag; but this morning, thankfully, it was dry. Amy, Dora, Ernie, Mrs. Francis, and Charles, Simon’s colleague, were in attendance. Afterwards, they returned to Amy’s house for drinks and some of Ernie’s fancy sandwiches.

Dora was there because some undefined ailment had dared to descend upon Isobel. A virus, the doctor said, as they habitually say. Something that was going round. He sounded fed up with it, as well he might be. At first, to avoid her being stricken, too, Dora had been taken to stay with one of Maggie’s widowed aunts who lived in Worthing. Nothing like fresh sea air for blowing away germs, had been thought. But the air seemed to have been too fresh, even for Auntie Dot, who. should have been used to it. After a day or two of Dora’s company, she developed a nasty tickle in her throat, and then a hacking cough, so Dora was fetched back, this time to stay with Amy.