Undue Influence (9 page)

It was their contentment that baffled me. Either that or their containment. My mind kept returning all that evening to the Colliers and their world. I was unenthusiastic about a further walk. I supposed I should start walking properly when I had reached St John Collier’s instructions on the matter. This occasioned a certain reluctance: I was not yet ready to be drafted into the Collier camp. I was not like the girls, as I was beginning to think of them. I was free, certainly, but that freedom was ironic, not quite the real thing. I was free because nothing was required of me. I was therefore superfluous. This I knew to be true, but the truth was so unwelcome that I seized my purse and my keys and went out to the all-night supermarket. In the late evening this always seems to be populated by solitaries, people who look drained by the strip lighting. This is one more instance of deregulation: shopping at night. The shoppers would avoid each other’s eyes, though I read that such places are settings for romance. We are embarrassed in case anyone should think that this is our reason for picking up half a dozen eggs and a small granary loaf. This is what most people seem to buy, and our purchases look puny. This is one further reason for embarrassment, this proof of the exiguous nature of our domestic arrangements. On my way home I saw something even more shameful: a pair of men’s shoes abandoned
in the gutter. They were not even particularly worn, evidence of exasperation rather than poverty. Their owner must have gone home defiantly in stockinged feet. One sees such sights in the city, particularly in the growing dusk, yet one never learns the story behind them. Even my capacity for invention balked at the shoes, which were so clearly not connected to anything. Or anyone. Strange how one received intimations of solitude at this time of day.

I was a little piqued that Martin Gibson had not presented himself to tell me how rapturously our visit had been received. In fact, I now realized, it had been a failure. I had been mistaken: the onus was not on the Gibsons to express appreciation. It was on myself. His continued silence implied that some sort of offence had been taken. Cynthia was the sort of woman to take offence, displaying hurt feelings, but not deigning to explain them. So one-sided were her preoccupations that explanations were deemed to be unnecessary. She would consider herself to be tragically let down, by everyone, including her husband. Indeed I wondered whether he were not the source of her discontent. His tacit assumption of responsibility for her condition would be held against him, the diversions he planned for her perceived as the makeshift arrangements they truly were.

But it went deeper than that. Did she expect him to make love to her? She was still a good-looking woman; in her own eyes she would be ravishing. She would have been demanding as a wife, scornful of his weakness, though it served her well enough now. Any other man in the same position would have found a discreet alternative; she may even have despised him for not doing so. There would have been taunts … Yet that mixture of exceptional good looks and exceptional hesitation, which I myself had found so challenging, must have
concentrated her attention in the first place. I did not know her background, but I had no difficulty in inventing it: money, comfort, ostentation, philistinism. She would have had an uncertain temper, which others would rush to anticipate and to turn aside. The parents would have been in some superior branch of commerce, manufacturers of something useful, aristocrats of the middle class. She would have been Daddy’s girl, although it would have been Mummy who would have seen to her appearance. I was sure that she would refer to her parents as Mummy and Daddy even now. Presumably they featured in those wedding photographs she was so anxious for us to see. ‘Such a pretty day,’ she had said, as though it were an episode in fairyland. The honeymoon would have revealed a different woman. Presumably Martin had never got over the shock.

I was anxious to know if I were right, but clearly our acquaintance was too slight for me to make any overtures. There was no earthly reason why such an acquaintance should be prolonged. But just as irrational people do involve one in their concerns I found myself thinking about them quite a lot. They were somehow a better subject of study than the virtuous Colliers. My feelings modulated between distaste and excitement, which should have been a warning to me. When I realized that I had some stake in their relationship I repudiated the notion. It had nothing to do with me nor I with it. I would hold on to my status as an acceptable person. Not a good one, but at least not underhand, not so far.

Therefore, when he did appear, on the Thursday, I was rather annoyed. Ten large black notebooks sat next to my typewriter; I was looking forward to my day’s work.

‘I’m sorry to have left you without news,’ he said, by way of a greeting. ‘I’m afraid Cynthia has had a slight setback.’

‘Was our visit too much for her?’

I inquired. He looked startled. ‘Oh, no, not that. It was just that Sue announced that she wanted to take a fortnight’s holiday.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Yes, well, I managed to persuade her not to.’

‘You would have had to be at home all day,’ I observed. ‘Of course the agency could have sent someone else.’

‘But Cynthia might not have taken to her.’

‘But you managed to persuade Sue …’

‘Yes. She saw the state Cynthia was in.’

‘She’s all right now?’

‘Yes, but it left her awfully tired, you know.’

It had clearly left him exhausted. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ I asked.

‘Well, yes, if it’s not too much trouble. It’s very kind of you.’

He blushed slightly, as if he were not used to accepting even a token kindness from a stranger. What demons did he exorcize by constant service to others? What self-denial, what self-abnegation did he consider to be required of him? I handed him a mug. He looked round vaguely. ‘There is no saucer,’ I said. I suspected that he had had no breakfast. Beware of men who come to you hungry for nothing more than sustenance. After a moment I opened the drawer of my desk and extracted one of Hester’s rock cakes which I offered to him on a sheet of A4 typing paper. He ate it meekly.

‘Is there no one else who could give you a break?’ I asked. ‘Family?’

‘Not really. Cynthia was an only child. Her parents are both dead.’

‘And on your side?’

‘Only my mother. She lives rather far away. In Norfolk.’

‘Whereabouts in Norfolk?’

‘Blakeney.’

‘I know it.’ Our last family holiday had been in Blakeney, shortly before my father had got ill. It was perhaps the only memory of unity, of normal family life, that had stayed with me. I remembered the sea, barely sea at all, just an illusory expanse at the far rim of the marshes, the birds, and my mother’s unhappiness.

‘Perhaps your mother …’

He grimaced. ‘My mother and Cynthia don’t get on. They are both strong-willed women. In fact my mother doesn’t get on with me, particularly.’

‘Oh, that’s very sad.’

‘She married again, you see. I didn’t care for my stepfather. He took me out in his boat once, to make friends, you know, and I was frightfully sick. My mother was furious. She thought I had let her down.’

‘And it didn’t get any better?’

‘No, it didn’t. I moved to London after Cambridge. We didn’t keep in touch. They came to our wedding, of course, but they didn’t take to Cynthia’s parents. My mother, I’m afraid, is a snob.’

‘You must have been relieved to be married,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it was the happiest day of Cynthia’s life. She implied as much. And of yours?’

‘No,’ he said. I looked at him, surprised.

‘I would have been a good bachelor,’ he said apologetically. ‘I loved my work, got on well with my students. I knew Cynthia was used to a more opulent way of life than I was. She wanted all these
things
, tables, curtains, and so on. My bachelor flat had suited me well enough. And then there was the question of the students whom she insisted on advising. I knew that was wrong.’

‘Not necessarily, surely?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he sighed.

‘But you love her?’

‘She is my life,’ he said. That was manifestly true.

‘You gave up your job?’

‘It probably took up too much of my time. And when Cynthia got ill…’

This illness appeared to me to be complicated. Oh, I did not doubt that there was an underlying weakness. But that the will was involved somewhere along the line I did not doubt either. Cynthia was used to being unique, the family princess, destined to live happily ever after. Since that was her fate she had embraced it in the only way available to her. She disliked women, that much was clear. Wiggy and I had simply proved to her that we were no competition. That was why she had insisted on seeing us.

‘So if you could bear to come again?’ he said. ‘It breaks up the day for her. And she does talk about your visits, you know. It would be a great kindness …’

I made a decision. ‘Wiggy said she’d like to sketch her,’ I said. ‘She’s a professional artist, you know.’

His face lit up. ‘She’d love that. She still cares for her appearance. Well, you saw that.’

‘She’s lovely,’ I said, quite sincerely. That air of a full-blown rose just going to seed was one I could appreciate. It went with ample forms, still visible beneath the elaborate negligées, anxious eyes, and a mouth that implied that no quarter would be given. She looked like what she was: a hardened coquette.

‘Not this Saturday, perhaps,’ he was saying. After the brief and no doubt regretted burst of candour he had reverted to his worried state. ‘Perhaps in a week’s time?’

‘Saturday is a good day for us,’ I reminded him. ‘It’s when we go out to dinner.’

‘That would be so kind …’

‘Why don’t you give me a ring? We left our telephone numbers.’

‘Yes, yes, that would be best. I’ll get her over this business of Sue first. She took it rather badly.’

‘I’ll wait to hear from you,’ I said. ‘Or if you’d prefer to drop in to the shop …’

‘No, I mustn’t take up any more of your time.’ He gave me the first direct look of our acquaintance. I looked back, pleasantly. This was evidently too much for him. Within seconds, it seemed, he was gone.

Seven

I thought a lot about Martin Gibson in the days that followed. The potent irritation that he inspired in me, and no doubt in others, faded into a sort of reluctant sympathy. He now appeared as a man who had always been subject to coercion, and who had not known how to deal with it. I thought about that scene on his stepfather’s boat and of its aftermath, the mother’s anger. I could even see her point of view. The awkwardness of introducing her son to her future husband had been compounded by her son’s lamentable performance, which she would have felt bound to laugh off, to dismiss, while all the time the boy, shivering and miserable, had a higher claim on her sympathy. She would have been in the full flush of excitement at the prospect of a new marriage, while the man would have been exasperated at the puniness of his future stepson. I saw this man as the sort of man who habitually arouses feelings of fear in those less opaque than himself. I saw him as red-faced and athletic, well set up, hearty, the sort of man to appeal to a widow still of an age to marry again. I saw the boy’s infinite distress at the prospect of having to share his mother with this man. He had said that they did not get on, which implied that some sort of showdown had taken place after this incident. I reconstructed his life carefully: Cambridge, he had
said, then a bachelor flat in London, where he had been perfectly content. He would have been mildly popular with colleagues, immensely popular with students, who would have been beguiled by his handsome looks into seeking opportunities for further interviews, with in fact further intimacy in mind.

I doubt that this had ever taken place. He would have been careful, scrupulous, and beyond that genuinely wary. He would have seen his work as a safe haven, but one which could be ambushed. In order to gain total possession of such a man it would be necessary to remove him from his work, from those loyalties to dead writers which few could share. A woman like Cynthia, all instinct, would have known this. The daily presence of young people, all so much younger than herself, would have been a preoccupation. She had retaliated by annexing them. Those afternoons when she had probed for their confidences seemed to me another form of coercion. She would have claimed that she was helping him, when in fact she was undermining his authority. Besides, it is extremely underhand to extract a confidence. The intimacy that the students sought from Martin was in fact imposed by his wife. This would have seemed dubious to anyone who had the interests of the young people at heart. He would have known this, as would certain of his colleagues. A mild difficulty with the work prescribed would have been turned into a drama of divided loyalty. Confession is addictive: in addition, some of these young people would have been far from home. A sympathetic ear was not to be foregone, particularly a sympathetic ear into which it was possible to own up to a mild crush on the husband of the woman who professed complete understanding of the predicament.