The Fallen Curtain (13 page)

“Oh, yes. I’m glad I didn’t succeed. Or—should I say?—that you didn’t let me succeed.”

“Don’t ever try that again, will you?”

“No, why should I? What a question!”

He felt strangely happy that she had promised never to try that again. “You must come and have a meal with me,” he said as he was leaving. “Let’s see. Not Monday. How about …?”

“We don’t have to arrange it now, do we? We’ll see each other in the morning.”

She had a very sweet smile. He didn’t like aggressive, self-reliant women. Lydia never wore trousers or mini-dresses, but long flowing skirts, flower-patterned. When he put his hand under her elbow to shepherd her across the street, she clutched his arm and kept hold of it.

“You choose for me,” she said when the menu was given to her in the restaurant.

She didn’t smoke or drink anything stronger than sweet white wine. She couldn’t drive a car. He wondered sometimes how she managed to hold down an exacting job, pay her rent, live alone. She was so exquisitely feminine, clinging and gentle. And he was flattered when because of the firm’s business he was unable to see her one night, tears appeared in her large grey eyes. That was the first night they hadn’t met for three weeks and he missed her so much he knew he must be in love with her.

She accepted his proposal, made formally and accompanied by a huge bunch of red roses. “Of course I’ll marry you. My life has been yours ever since you saved it. I’ve always felt I belonged to you.”

They were married very quietly. Lydia didn’t like the idea of a big wedding. He and she were ideally suited, they had so many tastes in common: a love of quietness and order, rather old-fashioned ways, steadiness, regular habits. They had the same aims: a house in a north-western suburb, two children. But for the time being she would continue to work.

It amazed and delighted him that she managed to keep the new house so well, to provide him every morning with freshly laundered underwear and shirt, every night with a perfectly cooked meal. He hadn’t been so well looked after since he had left his mother’s house. That, he thought, was how a woman
should be, unobtrusively efficient, gentle yet expert, feminine and sweet, yet accomplished. The house was run as smoothly as if a couple of silent, invisible maids were at work in it all day.

To perform these chores, she got up each morning at six. He suggested they get a cleaner but she wouldn’t have one, resisting him without defiance but in a way which was bound to appeal to him.

“I couldn’t bear to let any other woman look after your things, darling.”

She was quite perfect.

They went to work together, lunched together, came home together, ate together, watched television or listened to music or read in companionable silence together, slept together. At the weekends they were together all the time. Both had decided their home must be fully equipped with washers and driers and freezers and mixers and cleaners and polishers, beautifully furnished with the brand-new or the extreme antique, so on Saturdays they shopped together.

He adored it. This was what marriage should be, this was what the church service meant—one flesh, forsaking all other. He had, in fact, forsaken most of the people he had once known. Lydia wasn’t a very sociable woman and had no women friends. He asked her why not.

“Women,” she said, “only want to know other women to gossip about their men. I haven’t any complaints against my man, darling.”

His own friends seemed a little overawed by the grandeur and pomp with which she entertained them, by the finger bowls and fruit knives. Or perhaps they were put off by her long silences and the way she kept glancing at her watch. It was only natural, of course, that she didn’t want people staying half the night. She wanted to be alone with him. They might have understood that and made allowances. His clients and their wives weren’t overawed. They must have been gratified. Where else, in a private house with no help, would they have been given a five-course dinner, exquisitely cooked and
served? Naturally, Lydia had to spend all the pre-dinner time in the kitchen and, naturally too, she was exhausted after dinner, a little snappy with the man who spilt coffee on their new carpet, and the other one, a pleasant if tactless stockbroker, who tried to persuade him to go away on a stag, golfing weekend.

“Why did they get married,” she asked, with some reason, “if all they want to do is get away from their wives?”

By this time, at the age of thirty-four, he ought to have had promotion at work. He’d been with the firm five years and expected to be made a director. Neither he nor Lydia could understand why this directorship was so slow in coming.

“I wonder,” he said, “if it’s because I don’t hang around in the office drinking after work?”

“Surely they understand a married man wants to be with his wife?”

“God knows. Maybe I ought to have gone on that river-boat party, only wives weren’t invited, if you remember. I could tell you were unhappy at the idea of my going alone.”

In any case, he’d probably been quite wrong about the reason for his lack of promotion because, just as he was growing really worried about it, he got his directorship. An increase in salary, an office, and a secretary of his own. He was a little concerned about other perquisites of the job, particularly about the possibility of foreign trips. But there was no need to mention these to Lydia yet. Instead he mentioned the secretary he must engage.

“That’s marvellous, darling.” They were dining out, tête-à-tête, to celebrate. Lydia hadn’t cared for his idea of a party. “I’ll have to give a fortnight’s notice, but you can wait a fortnight, can’t you? It’ll be lovely being together all day long.”

“I don’t quite follow,” he said, though he did.

“Darling, you are slow tonight. Where could you find a better secretary than me?”

They had been married for four years. “You’re going to give up work and have a baby.”

She took his hand, smiling into his face. “That can wait. We
don’t need children to bring us together. You’re my husband and my child and my friend all in one, and that’s enough for me.”

He had to tell her why it wouldn’t do for her to be his secretary. It was all true, that stuff about office politics and favouritism and the awkwardness of his position if his wife worked for him, but he made a poor show of explaining.

She said in her small, soft voice, “Please can we go? Could you ask them for the bill? I’d like to leave now.”

As soon as they were in the house she began to cry. He advanced afresh his explanation. She cried. He said she could ask other people. Everyone would tell her the same. A director of a small firm like his couldn’t have his wife working for him. She could phone his chairman if she didn’t believe him.

She didn’t raise her voice. She was never wild or hysterical. “You don’t want me,” she said like a rejected child.

“I do want you. I love you. But—can’t you see—this is for work, this is different.” He knew, before he said it, that he shouldn’t have gone on. “You don’t like my friends and I’ve given them up. I don’t have my clients here any more. I’m only away from you about six hours out of every day. Isn’t all that enough for you?”

There was no argument. She simply reiterated that he didn’t want her. She cried for most of the night and in the morning she was too tired to go to work. During the day he phoned her twice. She sounded tearful but calm, apparently resigned now. The first thing he noticed when he let himself in at his front door at six was the stench of gas.

She was lying on the kitchen floor, a cushion at the edge of the open oven to support her delicate blonde head. Her face was flushed a warm pink.

He flung open the window and carried her to it, holding her head in the fresh air. She was alive, she would be all right. As her pulse steadied and she began to breathe more evenly, he found himself kissing her passionately, begging her aloud not to die, to live for him. When he thought it was safe to leave
her for a moment, he laid her on the sofa and dialled the emergency number for an ambulance.

They kept her in hospital for a few days and there was talk of mental treatment. She refused to undergo it.

“I’ve never done it except when I’ve known I’m not loved,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘never,’ darling?”

“When I was seventeen I took an overdose of pills because a boy let me down.”

“You never told me,” he said.

“I didn’t want to upset you. I’d rather die than make you unhappy. My life belongs to you and I only want to make yours happy.”

Suppose he hadn’t got there in time? He shuddered when he thought of that possibility. The house was horrible without her. He missed her painfully, and he resolved to devote more of his time and his attention to her in future.

She didn’t like going away on holiday. Because they never took holidays and seldom entertained and had no children, they had been able to save. They sold the house and bought a bigger, newer one. His firm wanted him to go to Canada for three weeks and he didn’t hesitate. He refused immediately.

An up-and-coming junior got the Canada trip. It irritated him when he learned of a rumour that was going about the office to the effect that his wife was some sort of invalid, just because she had given up work since they bought the new house. Lydia, an invalid? She was happier than she had ever been, filling the house with new things, redecorating rooms herself, having the garden landscaped. If either of them was sick, it was he. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately and he became subject to fits of depression. The doctor gave him pills for the sleeplessness and advised a change of air. Perhaps he was working too hard. Couldn’t he manage to do some of his work at home?

“I took it upon myself,” Lydia said gently, “to phone the doctor and suggest that. You could have two or three days a week at home and I’d do the secretarial work for you.”

His chairman agreed to it. There was a hint of scorn in the man’s smile, he thought. But he was allowed to work at home and sometimes, for four or five days at a stretch, although he talked to people on the phone, he saw no one at all but his wife. She was, he found, as perfect a secretary as a wife. There was scarcely anything for him to do. She composed his press releases for him, wrote his letters without his having to dictate them, answered the phone with efficiency and charm, arranged his appointments. And she waited on him unflaggingly when work was done. No meals on trays for them. Every lunchtime and every evening the dining table was exquisitely laid, and if it occurred to him that in the past two years only six other people had handled this glass, this cutlery, these luxurious appointments, he didn’t say so.

His depression wouldn’t go away, even though he had tranquillisers now as well as sleeping pills. They never spoke of her suicide attempts, but he often thought of them and wondered if he had somehow been infected by this tendency of hers. When, before settling down for the night, he dropped one pill from the bottle into the palm of his hand, the temptation to let them all trickle out, to swallow them all down with a draught of fresh cold water, was sometimes great. He didn’t know why, for he had everything a man could want, a perfect marriage, a beautiful house, a good job, excellent physical health, and no ties or restrictions.

As Lydia had pointed out, “Children would have been such a tie, darling,” or, when he suggested they might buy a dog, “Pets are an awful tie, and they ruin one’s home.” He agreed that this home and these comforts were what he had always wanted. Yet, as he approached forty, he began having bad dreams, and the dreams were of prisons.

One day he said to her, “I can understand now why you tried to kill yourself. I mean, I can understand that anyone might want to.”

“I think we understand each other perfectly in every way,” she said. “But don’t let’s talk about it. I’ll never attempt it again.”

“And I’m not the suicidal type, am I?”

“You?”
She wasn’t alarmed, she didn’t take him seriously, never thought of him at all as a person except in relation to herself. At once he reproached himself.
Lydia?
Lydia, who had given over her whole life to him, who put his every need and wish before her own? “You wouldn’t have any reason to,” she said gaily. “You know you’re loved. Besides, I should rescue you in time, just like you rescued me.”

His company had expanded and they were planning to open an office in Melbourne. After he had denied hotly that his wife was an invalid, that there was “some little trouble” with his wife, the chairman offered him the chance of going to Australia for three months to get the new branch on its feet. Again he didn’t hesitate. He accepted. The firm would, of course, pay for his trip. He was working out, as he entered his house, how much Lydia’s air fare to Melbourne, her board in an hotel, her expenses, would amount to. Suicidal thoughts retreated. He could do it, he could just do it. Three months away, he thought, in a new country, meeting new people, and at the end of it, praise for his work and maybe an increase in salary.

She came out into the hall and embraced him. Her embraces at parting and greeting (though these occasions were no longer frequent) were as passionate now as when they first got engaged. He anticipated a small difficulty in that she wouldn’t much want to leave her home, but that could be got over. She would go, as she had often said, anywhere with him.

He walked into their huge living room. It was as immaculate as ever, but something was different, something had undergone a great change. Their red carpet had been replaced by a new one of a delicate creamy velvety pile.

“Do you like it?” she asked, smiling. “I bought it and had it laid secretly as a surprise for you. Oh, darling, you don’t like it?”

“I like it,” he said, and then, “How much did it cost?”

This was a question he hardly ever asked, but now he had cause to. She named a sum, much about the figure her trip to Australia would have cost.

“We said we were saving it to get something for the house,” she said, putting her arm round him. “It’s not really an extravagance. It’ll last for ever. And what else have we got to spend the money on but our own home?”