Casting Off (15 page)

But years with Maud had softened her up. It had been Maud who had shopped and cooked for them both, who had made the decisions, who drove the car – her mother had never driven. It had been Maud who had paid their bills, who had got repairs to the cottage done, had taken things to be mended, had collected her mother’s prescriptions.

The days before the funeral had been spent in helping her mother clear out poor Maud’s clothes, all bought to be serviceable and most having done more than could be expected of them. The vicar said that they could go to the bring-and-buy stall for the Christmas bazaar and her mother seemed to think this was what Maud would have wished. Presumptions about her friend’s desires loomed large during those days, and chief among these was the notion that Maud would have wished her to remain in the cottage. ‘I’m sure that’s why she left it to me,’ she kept saying. After the funeral, friends had crowded into the small sitting room for tea and sandwiches and sherry, kindly donated by Colonel Lawrence, whose dog ate most of the sandwiches – potted meat and Maud’s marrow and ginger jam.

Zoë had a talk with the doctor about her mother’s health, which he said was considerably better than Maud’s had been. The Lawrences and Miss Fenwick said that they would take turns to take her mother to town to shop. Doris Patterson, who had been coming in once a week to do the rough for them at the cottage, offered to come twice, which Zoë felt her mother could afford. Everybody had been kind and helpful, but Zoë, who had noticed how her mother stood by while she struggled with meals and washing-up, was still worried. She suggested that perhaps some of Maud’s money (possibly all of it) might be spent on putting in central heating in the cottage, but her mother was dead against the idea; she was certain that Maud would not have wished it. ‘She always said that central heating was death to good furniture.’ The good furniture consisted of the glass-fronted corner cupboard and a chest of drawers in Maud’s bedroom, but there was no point in arguing.

So here she was a week later, jolting along in the local taxi-cab to catch the train for the ferry and then the train to London.

In the London train, crowded because it was nearing Christmas, she was assailed by the memory of her meeting with Jack. She had thought then that she was unhappy enough – guilty about her mother, despairing about Rupert’s still being alive . . . and then, out of the blue, had come Jack to transform her life, it had seemed at the time.

Now, although the quality of her unhappiness had changed – the only familiar part of it being her guilt about her mother – she felt that nothing could come from anywhere that could possibly transform it. The difference, she thought – she felt too weary to read – was that before Jack she had had some kind of
right
to her unhappiness, with a husband missing and presumed (at least by her) to be dead. Now it was Jack who was missing: his death, and the manner of it, was something that she was still, after all these months, unable to contain in her consciousness for more than a few seconds. Every time she thought of him – a dozen times a day or night – the same shocked imagination of his last bleak day replayed itself, his efforts to write to her and his abandonment of them in favour of writing to Archie (what would have happened if she had not taken him to see Archie that evening which now seemed so long ago, who else could he have written to, and, if nobody, how would she even have known of his death?), his driving back from some airfield to the terrible camp and finding some place where he would be alone for those last minutes of his life before he put an end to it, an act that implied courage and despair on a scale that she could not bear to consider.

She had gone back to the studio to clear out her clothes before she returned the key to the agent. It had been something she had dreaded – had nearly not done – but in the end she had felt it was necessary. She had trudged up the dark dusty stairs with her empty suitcase, resolving to spend as little time there as possible, to pack up and leave. But when she opened the door she realized that he had stayed there since their last time together: the bed was unmade and an ashtray full of stubs lay on the table beside it. She walked through to the tiny kitchen to open a window and there was a jug with coffee grounds in it and an upturned mug on the draining board. His dressing gown hung on the back of the bathroom door and there was a used razor blade in the soap dish of the basin, which had a high-water mark of greyish dried soap foam. She touched this with a finger and could see the dark bristles from his shave. All these things continued to exist.

As she went back to the studio, the loss of him struck her like a heavy cold tide that threatened to drown or suffocate her, and unable to stand, she collapsed upon the rickety divan. The pillow was still dented. She put her face where his head had lain and actually screamed.

Some time later, when she had cried herself out, she sat up and set about the packing up. In his dressing-gown pocket was the usual packet of Lucky Strikes. She smoked one before throwing the rest away, but even the familiar smell of the burnt caramel taste in her mouth evoked nothing. She had felt light and empty – as dry as a dead leaf. She had finished the packing, washed up the coffee jug and the ashtrays, cleaned the basin and folded the bed linen into a neat pile, had left the place which had contained their life together and taken the key back to the agents.

After that, the fact that he was dead was no longer a shock, but the manner of his dying continued to haunt her, and she could neither understand, nor accept, nor come to terms with it. Sometimes it seemed to her that his giving of his life was an heroic gesture of courageous love, sometimes it seemed that his taking of his life was an utter rejection of her with no love in it. Always the
difficulty
of the act terrified and appalled her: how could anyone make such a decision and live through the hours before carrying it out?

And then, an ordinary afternoon with Juliet determined to get her own way – the fruitless argument about going back through the woods or not – she had turned her head and there was Rupert walking towards her. She had thought he was an apparition, a ghost, had put out her hand to touch him, to ward him off, but when he spoke a different kind of fear invaded her and she took refuge in Juliet, had watched
their
meeting, so simple, she felt, compared to hers with him. Juliet had eased things between them: they had played her game with her; it was only when he helped her off the tree trunk that she saw that he felt as shy, as nervous as she. She had chattered about the family all the way home, faltering only when she came to Archie as she remembered how kind he had been about Jack, and she had fallen momentarily silent . . . They had not really been alone together until after dinner. She had sat trying to sew Juliet’s frock while he talked about Pipette and her mother. Then he had tried to say something about his being away and what it must have been like for her and she was overwhelmed with confusion and guilt – wanted to flee and then was ashamed that she was not welcoming him, brushed it off with the excuse that his sudden appearance had been a shock (this, at least, was true).

She had undressed in the bathroom and it was while she was unpinning her hair that the turquoise heart, lying in the hollow of her throat, caught her eye. Jack’s present to Juliet. She had been keeping it for when Juliet was older, but after Archie had come to tell her that he was dead, she had slung it on an old chain and worn it ever since, as a kind of talisman, or mourning, she was not sure which. She unfastened it and put it out of sight. She had got into bed and lain rigidly waiting for him. But when he had simply kissed the side of her face and turned out the light she had had the sudden and most violent urge to turn to him, to tell him all that had happened with Jack, to weep in his arms (for Jack) and to be absolved by him. But she did not. Once, she thought, she would have been so selfish, so absorbed in her own pain that she would have been unable to consider what he might feel. Much later – not that night – she knew she
had
to recognize that telling him about Jack would put him further in the past than she was ready for. Rupert’s reappearance had not only interrupted her grief, it had made her feel guilty about it.

Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, she wondered whether Rupert sensed something. Certainly he seemed different – withdrawn, tentative, almost apologetic. He was tired, he said, and there was a lot to get used to again – life was so different, although he was uncommunicative about what it was different from.

At the Duchy’s suggestion, they had gone away for a weekend in Brighton. This had been after Rupert was officially out of the Navy, in August. She was never very clear why Brighton had been chosen: the Duchy had suggested it, and Rupert had looked at her and said, ‘Would that be OK for you?’ She had answered that it would. There had been a lack of enthusiasm about the venture that had unnerved her; her own part in this made her feel guilty (the least she could do was to agree to whatever was suggested), but when she realized that, for reasons unknown to her, Rupert felt much the same, she felt frightened. What should they do, she wondered. What should they talk about? And then there was the business of going to bed together with the uncertainty about whether he would make love, or try to make love to her – both these things had happened at widely spaced intervals, and the occasions had been like meeting someone you hardly knew wearing no clothes at a party and pretending there was nothing unusual about it. Pretence certainly came into it. She pretended to feel what she thought he wanted her to feel; in a curious way, she felt responsible for their lovemaking, which had never happened in the old days, but she also felt
responsible
to Jack – going through the motions was not betraying him, but getting pleasure from it would be, in some way, despicable. Once, she had imagined someone telling the story of her and Jack – one man telling another – and when the teller reached the point of Jack’s death, the listener, after the appropriate pause, would ask, ‘And what became of the girl?’ ‘Oh, her!
She
simply went back to the husband as though nothing had happened.’ Smiles of worldly contempt for such a vapid, unfeeling creature.

But Jack in his letter to Archie had said, ‘Maybe that husband of hers will come back to her?’ so he must have envisaged that as a kind of solution. And there he was, sitting opposite her in the train to Brighton, a kind and gentle man, looking much older, more gaunt – indeed, as though he had been through a good deal during those interminable four years. But now he no longer seemed so much older than she, as he had done when she married him, then in her early twenties. He would always be twelve years older, but now, at thirty, she felt as old as anyone – too old for that age gap to have any significance.

He looked up from his paper, caught her eye. ‘Your hair looks very pretty.’

She remembered how – in the early years of their marriage, when she had been jealous of the time he spent with his children, and their mother, the dead Isobel, had seemed an even worse threat because he never talked about her – he would coax or reassure her by admiration for her appearance, homage that she would only notice if it was absent, and how she had longed to be admired for other things, her intelligence, her character, aspects of her that now, she felt, had not been worthy of remark.

She smiled at him, and said nothing.

Their hotel was enormous – mahogany and dark red carpets, ancient porters with waistcoats like wasps, endless corridors dimly lit. Eventually, at the end of one, the old man carrying their cases stopped in front of a door that was next to the fire escape, wheezed and fumbled with the key, and displayed their room. It had a small double bed, she noticed at once, and net curtains that did not conceal that their view consisted of another wall of hotel bedroom windows.

Rupert said, ‘I asked for a room with a sea view.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir. You could ring down to reception.’

He did, and after some argument was offered a room two floors up. They would send up a boy to meet them at the lift with the new key.

When they got to the new room, it proved to have twin beds. Rupert did not seem to have noticed this. He had given the porter half a crown and gone straight to the window. ‘That’s better, isn’t it, darling?’

She joined him to look at the sea heaving on to the stony beach like molten lead in the sunset, with black breakwaters and the pier on its spidery stilts. The sky was streaked with narrow clouds of apricot and violet.

He put an arm round her. ‘We’ll have a nice time,’ he said. ‘You jolly well deserve a hol. Shall we have a bottle of champagne up here?’

Yes, she had said, that would be lovely.

He turned to the telephone and saw the twin beds. ‘Oh, Lord! They never said – shall I have another go at them?’

But she said, don’t. They could push the beds together – she couldn’t face another move. She thought, but was not sure, that he was relieved, and she remembered with some shame how she had used to make minor scenes if things were not absolutely to her liking. She said she would unpack and have a bath and he said fine, he would go for a walk by the sea and come back with the champagne in half an hour.

That first evening during which they both drank a lot – a bottle of burgundy after the champagne and then brandy with the grey-looking hotel coffee – he said: ‘Zoë. We really ought to talk.’

Terror, and somewhere at the back of it relief – something like it – invaded her. He knew about Jack. Or knew something – or
wanted
to know? At any rate if he
asked
, she would have to tell him and having to tell was different from choosing to tell him – it felt like the difference between honesty and the wilful infliction of pain. She finished her brandy and reached for one of his cigarettes.

‘You never used to smoke!’

‘Oh, occasionally. I’m not really a smoker.’ Nor really unfaithful, she thought. You can’t be unfaithful to someone whom you thought was dead. She meant him, but then she realized that this could equally apply to Jack.