A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, page 19
She cried more at home in the bathroom, getting ready to go out, and in the car Geoff noticed her red eyes at once and said they matched the paint. He was excessively jovial with nerves at his imminent departure: once, rather drunk, he had told her he hated, was terrified of, flying. She wanted to say she would pray for him and although she was not even sure about God she said it anyway and felt better for it. He squeezed her hand.
‘Crazy, isn’t it?’
‘Not a bit. I’m frightened of moths, that’s far crazier.’
They had nothing to say. They sat in the lounge and drank drinks they did not want and looked at each other. They had met every week for six months and never been separated. Suddenly she became aware that she was thinking of him as her brother, like Simon. Their images, once so distinct, had merged.
When his flight was called she went with him to the barrier and the tears started again. He looked at her in amazement, touched, and said, ‘Are all those for me?’
She said yes. In a way it was true. They kissed and hugged, very hard, and she noticed he was white with fear. She felt a sharp pain that she could not protect him from the flight and wondered if that was some deep-buried maternal instinct. He left without looking back and she said out loud to herself, ‘Everyone goes out of my life.’ A man passing by said, ‘Pardon?’ She shook her head and walked quickly away to where the car was parked, hers for six weeks; she could not bear to watch the aircraft take off. Driving home she was still crying and switched on the wireless to cheer herself up. She had the feeling that she had lost a friend, and no one could afford to do that.
30
SHE MOVED in haste that weekend, with her things in a hired mini-van. She was sure she detected relief in Annabel and some regret in the others; but she had never really fitted. All the same, she felt oddly desolate leaving the flat and the rows of big white South Kensington houses with their steps and pillars and balconies. She had always lived in South Ken., ever since she left home. South Ken. was home.
The new flat was so absurdly central that she felt the mini-van driver must think her a call-girl, at least, and newly promoted. She would not have found the description too incongrous either. The proximity of the flat to the office no doubt meant lunch-time sessions to make up for the evenings—most evenings—when he could not stay late. She thought it was very like the Hollywood drama she had always imagined and avoided: the stolen hours, the secrecy, the isolation. Not like her life at all. Despite deceiving people when necessary, she had always thought of her life as very open. She had not had to be furtive, merely evasive. It had been she who kept moving, set the pace. Now she felt that she was being put in storage, for use as and when required. She would be in a safe place, where no harm could come to her, but where she would be immediately accessible to him, as she had not been while sharing a flat. And he would be paying part of the rent. The greater part, she felt sure. Would that entitle him to walk in at any moment, unannounced? Would he expect to have a key? Or would he telephone first? Would she be free to invite her friends here in his absence? In fact, would it really be her home?
All these qualms chilled her profoundly. She could not understand herself. Nothing would have persuaded her to turn down the flat: it solved everything. And yet she could not rejoice in it wholeheartedly. There were the prickings of excitement, but distantly, in secret, as if under her skin or in her veins. On the surface she was very much disturbed. After the driver had moved her stuff in and left, having made a few admiring and faintly suggestive remarks, she was actually shivering and had to switch on all the fires. She unpacked as quickly as possible, to have her own things around her; nothing already in the flat felt as if it belonged to her. She found when she unpacked that she handled quite unimportant objects, like a rather ugly vase Barbara had once given her, with a new tenderness. They seemed more valuable. They made up the fabric of her life, her past. She placed them carefully, in prominent positions, to establish her identity.
* * *
She shopped, for weekend things, and put them away in the strange new kitchen. It was well-planned, and disconcerted her. She felt she was standing in a shop, in a showroom, and half expected to see people looking in the window, regarding her. She went in the bedroom and made up the bed and thought about him, but with affection, without desire. She felt in a dream, that she was going through the motions in some pre-ordained role.
In the afternoon flowers arrived, roses, with his name on the card. She was thrilled as she unwrapped them, she felt special, but at the same time there was a shaft of panic, a sense of ownership. She had been labelled. His secretary, his mistress, in his flat, receiving his flowers. She felt he had invaded her. Suddenly frantic, she rushed to the window to see the car far below where she had parked it in the tree-lined street. There seemed no problem attached to it. A simple loan, an act of friendship, fun. Geoff had not put his brand on her; he never would. Nor Simon, drifting easily round Europe, raising his thumb at passing cars. They were her brothers, providing sex and jokes, comfort and freedom.
She cried a little. And told herself it was only the anticlimax, the aftermath of moving. Someone should have been coming for a drink, to admire the flat (if it had been really hers), to take her out. But there was no one to come. Even a girl friend, to watch television, which he had thoughtfully installed. She switched it on and stood looking at it, thinking, My God, this is Saturday night. What a popular girl I must be. She could not remember when last she had spent such a fruitless evening. But she could not even summon up the energy to go out to a film. She ate some cheese and watched television and thought vaguely about washing her hair.
About nine he phoned from a call-box. She shook at the sound of his voice, which seemed an incongruous reaction in view of her earlier chilly resentment. He asked if she had got his flowers and she enthused, but guiltily, wishing she had mentioned them first. His voice and her shaking had distracted her. She wanted to say that, in case he was disappointed, but did not think it would sound convincing. Although it was true there seemed to be an artificiality about it. She asked instead how he had managed to get out to phone her, which she at once thought was quite the wrong thing to ask, and he said he had gone out for cigarettes. He sounded reluctant to give her the information. She thought desperately that the flat had made them both self-conscious, aware of the need for gestures, like flowers and phone calls, and she wanted him to be with her so she could reassure him that these things were not necessary. She said she wished he was there and he took this to mean desire and his voice became more cheerful and he said so did he, but perhaps they could lunch at the flat on Monday. She liked the use of the word lunch. But the image of him leaving the call-box and going home for the rest of the week-end disturbed her, not so much because it was apart from her as because it seemed unglamorous. Just like her image of herself shut in her new flat all weekend, admiring the roses and waiting for her lover to phone. Both seemed such old-fashioned things for them to be doing. She became frightened. Was it all slipping through their fingers, and at what a moment, when he had just signed a lease? What could they do to preserve it? But they should not have to do anything. She felt that they had made some fatal error somewhere, for which they were now paying, but which they were not allowed to correct. She said a lot of nice things to him, quickly, to counteract this impression, and when she was sure that he sounded happier she asked what he was doing on Sunday, tomorrow, so she could think of him doing it. He said Prue and Gavin were coming to lunch to show off their suntan. It was also Prue’s birthday and he had bought the gold bracelet they had once discussed, did she remember? Meanwhile, he missed her, and wished he had bought the gold bracelet for her instead, because there was no fun in it as it was, he did not know why.
31
CASSIE WAS happy. Not content, not run of the mill happy, but mindlessly euphoric. It was years since the prospect of a holiday had affected her so, and she wondered why. She was tired from Devon, from anxiety and nursing, yes; it was also the year in which concern over Prue had taken priority over all else. But it was still more than all that. She felt that they had passed some dangerous corner, narrowly averted catastrophe, faced some unnamed peril, and now it was over. She deserved a holiday. They deserved a holiday. Over the last few weeks she had sensed Manson coming gradually to terms with Prue and the situation: he was closer now, she thought, than he had ever been to acceptance. Their family life was nearly restored to normal, and this mattered more to her than anything, since there was nothing else to matter. And now she wanted to be creative about it; she was tired of being helpless. She wanted to put the final gloss on it, as if icing a cake, to restore it to all its former splendour, and she did not know how to do it other than by creating a loving atmosphere, making the house warm, cooking delicious food, and filling the rooms with flowers.
She admired Prue’s present and wrapped it carefully, asking him to write the card, but he said, ‘No, you do it,’ in a casual tone that gladdened her heart and also made her feel guilty. (Was it possible she had actually been resentful—jealous—of her own daughter?) So she wrote ‘Happy Birthday, darling, with all our love, Daddy and Mummy,’ and smiled at Manson, feeling secure and loved. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, with an overspill of generosity. ‘She’ll adore it.’ He smiled absently. ‘It’s pretty,’ he said. ‘And it certainly cost enough.’
‘Cynic.’ She tied red ribbon round the box, as much to amuse herself as to do the thing properly. She felt festive. (Why not holiday decorations, as well as Christmas? She could have festooned the house with garlands and tinsel and brightly coloured paper, and instead of Happy Christmas a message announcing ‘We are going away.’) The holiday—this holiday—seemed to belong to her, just as Prue’s baby belonged to Prue, and she hugged it to herself in the same way. She could not even speak about it much. Once he agreed to go, once he actually said, ‘All right, we’ll go to Scotland at the end of the month,’ she became almost totally silent on the subject. It was too exciting. She would be childish if she spoke about it. Or it would go wrong. As a child she had never spoken about things that mattered to her. It was too dangerous: if you put your feelings into words people could injure them. The things she loved had been physically hidden, too, in drawers, cupboards, envelopes, to spare them damage from parents, brothers, dailies, dogs, even from the air itself, from contact with something as insubstantial as reality. She did not know what she meant by that, but she knew it was dangerous. The times she felt closest to Prue were when she detected the same emotional reticence, the same instinct for privacy and secrecy, in her.
They were coming for lunch and staying to dinner, an entire day of birthday celebrations. She said, ‘Will you meet them or shall I? Only I do have a lot to do in the kitchen.’ She was doing complicated things with fish for lunch, and roasting a duck for dinner, because Prue loved duck, reversing the traditional Sunday order. She had made Quiche Lorraine and lemon meringue pie and a huge birthday cake, and was experiencing a warm, all-pervasive glow only slightly inferior to the aftermath of orgasm.
‘Yes, I’ll fetch them. Do we know which train they’re getting?’
‘No. They said they’d phone from the station.’
‘Here or there?’
‘Here. Victoria’s impossible; all the boxes are either full or broken.’
He considered this. ‘Well, it’s twelve already,’ he said, and poured them both a glass of sherry. Cassie looked out on the lawn. It was a bright, crisp day, curling at the edges, turning into autumn before her eyes. She said lightly, ‘What a pity we can’t have fireworks.’
He looked amazed, then smiled at her indulgently. She thought he was being very gentle and tolerant these days. ‘For Prue’s birthday,’ she explained. ‘It would be fun. Like a kind of royal salute. We should have thought of it before.’
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s too late now.’
* * *
Prue sat in the train and put her feet up on the opposite seat. She felt that this must surely be against some dim regulation and so it gave her pleasure, and she gazed defiantly at passing porters, daring them to challenge her, protected as she was by pregnancy.
She felt huge, and suddenly huge, at that. As if someone had secretly doubled her load in the night and left her to get on with it. She remembered similar days before, when you became abruptly aware of your size and weight, as if you had not noticed it before, but this was the worst.
‘Only two months to go,’ she announced to Gavin, who grunted but did not reply. He had brought the Sunday paper with him and was reading it.
‘I feel enormous,’ she said more loudly. A man across the carriage sank deeper beneath his hat; a pink-faced woman quivered. Gavin momentarily raised his eyes and gave her a fractional glance.
‘Yeah,’ he said briefly. ‘You look it.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘Uh-huh.’
She stared at him coldly. He had not made love to her last night when she wanted him to, and that was rare. Nor this morning. Was she getting at last too fat, too unattractive?
‘You might at least give me the colour supplement,’ she said.
He did not look up. ‘I’m reading it.’
‘No, you’re not. That’s the review.’
Silently and, she thought, a trifle sullenly, he pulled out the magazine and tossed it onto the seat beside her. Just throwing it at me, she thought. As if I didn’t count at all. What’s the matter with him?
‘Thank you,’ she said pointedly, exaggeratedly polite.
‘You’re welcome.’
There was a feature on babies. Blue-veined embryos and shiny, blood-stained new-born. She felt sick and shut the magazine in a rush. It was too much. Didn’t she have enough to contend with, being so ugly and bloated, without looking at pictures like that? She did not want to think of her baby looking so messy, so sub-human, being dragged out of her. She knew enough facts of birth without having to study technicolor pictures. It was obscene. They were going to hurt her, and all to produce an object like that. It was unfair. It was out of all proportion.
She had never felt frightened before.
‘I feel sick.’
‘Uh-huh.’
She repeated more loudly, ‘I feel sick.’
‘No, you don’t, honey.’ Keeping his eyes on the paper. ‘You’re probably hungry.’
‘I tell you I feel sick.’ She raised her voice, noticing the other passengers quivering with attention and gazing, steadfast and unconvincing, out of the windows. ‘Christ, I should know how I feel. What do you know about it? I feel sick. You don’t know what it’s like carrying this great lump around.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you should have been more careful.’ The ears of the woman across the aisle turned slowly pink.
‘Should I?’ Prue said, with all the venom she could muster. ‘Should I indeed? Well, I didn’t do it all by myself, now did I?’
‘No,’ he said equably, ‘but you were in charge, remember? And there’s no point feeling sick. This is a non-corridor train.’
She felt fury rising like bile in her throat. Perhaps she was going to be sick with sheer temper. ‘You think I feel sick for fun? You think I want to feel sick?’
‘You want attention,’ he said. ‘That’s all you ever want. And mostly you get it. But right now I’m reading the paper.’
Her stockinged feet were very close to him on the opposite seat: the temptation was too great. She kicked, catching him unawares, flipping the paper up towards his face with her toe. It was most effective. He looked surprised, annoyed, and … silly. Yes, she had actually made him look silly. She laughed. Gavin showed no emotion. He folded the paper into four and calmly hit her across the face with it. Prue let out a small, startled cry and the man across the aisle half rose from his seat, murmuring, ‘I say—’ while the woman quickly pretended to be asleep. Gavin snapped, ‘Keep out,’ and the man sank back at once as though attached to the seat by elastic that would only allow him to stretch so far. Film dialogue flashed through Prue’s mind (‘Keep out of this, stranger, if you know what’s good for you. This is between me and her’). Her heart was beating very fast and she felt slightly hysterical. She put her hands over her face and started to cry. Gavin unfolded the paper as if nothing had happened and went on reading. The train pulled into a station and both their fellow-passengers got out, the woman staring straight ahead, the man with a backward glance of concern and distaste. No one else got in. Prue went on sobbing. Doors slammed and the train moved on.
‘Cut it out,’ said Gavin evenly, still reading. ‘You got what you wanted.’
* * *
Barbara inspected everything with an appraising eye, like a dealer. Sarah felt that she could price everything, both new and second-hand, to within a pound of its market value. ‘Not bad,’ she kept saying, ‘not bad. So you’re a kept woman at last. Good for you. That’s what I should have been before I got too run down. Who’d want me now?’
Sarah studied her sister. Peroxided hair, dark-rooted and without lustre. Bitten finger-nails, nicotine-stained. An old skirt and sweater, the wool tight-shrunken over her body, which now curved rather too much since the last child. Laddered tights, scuffed shoes, smeared lipstick and sooty eye make-up. Yet she remembered, and so could still see underneath, the trim, slick, smartly obvious go-getter of seven years ago. My sister. My favourite sparring-partner. My devoted, unconcerned, loving, hostile, down-at-heel, reliable, untrustworthy sister. And she pondered the peculiar quality of the love between them, for she could find no other name for it.
