A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (11 page)

Sarah said lightly, ‘She a lucky girl. My father never bought me anything like that. Oh, not that I blame him, he couldn’t afford it. But it must be fun if you can. I love my watch.’

‘Boy-friend?’ Manson kept his tone casual. He was surprised to find that it mattered to know who had given Sarah the watch. Perhaps he had been wrong about her.

She laughed. ‘Good heavens, no. Step-father. It was a piece of bribery and corruption, you see; supposed to make me love him.’ She spoke very flippantly but Manson thought he detected real bitterness underneath: the first hint that her parents’ rearrangements were perhaps not as ideal as she had painted them.

‘And did it?’ he asked. Conversations with Sarah were like trips on an escalator: it always seemed impossible to get off half-way but the end when it came was abrupt.

‘No. But he bought my sister a washing machine and a fridge at the same time and she loves him.’ She started typing again.

The phone rang. It was Prue.

‘Daddy.’

He was startled into saying, ‘Darling, are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes of course I am.’ But she did not seem to be laughing at him. ‘I just called to say goodbye.’

Called?
Called
. She had picked up the beastly word from
him
of course. ‘Goodbye? But you’re not off till next week.’

‘No, we’re going tomorrow. The cottage is empty so we may as well be there—and I hate my job.’ Pause. ‘You were quite right.’

He couldn’t say anything.

Prue went on, ‘I don’t think work suits me.’

‘Oh, what nonsense. It just wasn’t the right job, that’s all.’

‘I don’t think anything suits me.’

Prue, whatever do you mean?’

Choking sound. ‘Oh, Daddy, I’m so miserable.’ She was actually crying.

‘Darling, what
is
the matter?’ He had a tight, hard sensation in his chest, a pain like a lump of apple lodged against his rib-cage—the way he ignorantly imagined heart-cases would feel.

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘It can’t be nothing. You don’t make a fuss over nothing, you never have.’ As a child, her courage had astonished him: she had always been much braver than the twins. Falling out of a tree, burning herself, being bitten by a dog, she always, after the age of about nine, tended to turn white with shock rather than cry. He remembered in particular one hideous cut, right to the bone, on a spike, and her ashen, incredulous face at the pain and the blood and the damage she had done herself. But no tears.

She said, almost inaudibly, ‘I’m sorry we had that fight.’

‘Oh, darling, you’re not crying about
that.’

She didn’t answer.

‘Look, Prue, we were both sticking up for ourselves, that’s all. Two pig-headed old characters locking horns.’ He was too moved to disentangle the metaphor. That’s all forgotten.’

She sniffed, and he heard her blowing her nose. ‘Was that all you were crying about?’ He wondered (hoped?) that she had quarrelled with Gavin and wanted his comfort and advice.

She said faintly, ‘I ‘spect so,’ and the childishness caught at his heart. ‘I’m crying a lot these days, it must be my hormones. Well, I must go. Take care of yourself, Daddy.’

He found himself clutching the phone with both hands. ‘Have you got enough money?’ Was that
all
he could do for her from now on, for ever?

She said gently, ‘Oh yes, yes. You spoil me.’

‘Well, have a lovely time, darling.’

‘Yes, I will. I’ll get brown and send you postcards.’

‘Yes.’

‘All right then.’

‘Well, have fun.’

‘Yes. Oh, Daddy—’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I’m just being silly. Take care of yourself. ‘Bye.’ She blew a kiss down the phone and hung up.

He put down the receiver slowly, unaware how his face looked. He said, ‘That was my daughter.’

The atmosphere was so highly charged that Sarah judged she could say, ‘You love her very much, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ He spoke like a man in a trance.

Sarah said, ‘She’s lucky.’

P
RUE WAS
scared. She had actually made the phone call while crouching on the floor in what she now noticed was very nearly a foetal position. She replaced the receiver reluctantly: even dead in her hand it was some small link with her father, with the outside world. She did not know what she had expected: magic words, a healing spell, absolution? Her eye looked dreadful in the mirror; she flinched from looking at it with the other one. She had worn dark glasses to the shops but even so had imagined everyone could see behind them and would know why she was buying meat. She felt silly, too, for she had no way of knowing if this really was an effective cure: she had only heard about it. Like buying gin for abortion (not that she had ever wished to do
that)
, it was the classic remedy of folk lore to which the mind automatically sprang, but without any factual knowledge.

When she got home she had applied the meat, feeling totally ridiculous. She did not know how long to leave it on for or how bloody it ought to be. It made a terrible mess of her face and she kept thinking how everyone would laugh if they could see her all alone in a darkened room lying on the bed with a piece of meat on her eye. So presently she took it off and laid it carefully on the plate she had brought from the kitchen for the purpose. This, too, made her feel hysterical. Then she had to get up and go to the bathroom to wash off the blood and inspect her injury for signs of instant improvement.

But why had he hit her? What was so terrible about wanting to give up her job after only three weeks instead of four? She was temporary staff and no notice was required; people were coming and going all the time. Financially, it would not make all
that
much difference: they had their fares and their pocket money was dictated by the government. But if they got really short she could no doubt arrange with her father that friends of his in France could help them out and he would repay them. It could be a sort of advance birthday present. Gavin had said, ‘God, you’re a spoiled brat,’ and she had become indignant. ‘Why? Why am I? I hate the job, it gives me backache. You don’t know what it’s like being pregnant—’ using the one unfair and irrefutable argument she had, and he had said furiously, ‘Oh yes, the great out. Now you’ve got to get away with everything instead of just nearly everything, you can’t even sit at a desk for four weeks and get paid for it, well
that’s
how impressed I am,’ and he had slapped her across the face.

She still trembled when she remembered the shock of it. It was neither a heavy blow nor a light one but it took all the breath from her body with shock. It was not the pain, such as it was, that she minded: there was even a faint sense of pleasure in the stinging sensation and the knowledge that Gavin had caused it. He had always been very rough with her in bed, which she liked and had come to take for granted. But her dignity was hurt, and she could not have been more affronted if Gavin had spat on the floor. She said incredulously, ‘You hit me. You hit me.’

‘Sure I hit you.’ He had no sense of the ridiculous. He was talking and behaving like some third rate gangster in a very old B picture and it did not seem to strike him as the least absurd. The independent bit of her mind, the bit that provided the running commentaries on her life, wondered if Americans as a nation had been fed so much on their own
movie culture that they were now spewing it out in the naive belief that this was how everyone talked. ‘I’ll hit you again if I like. If I think you need it. I want you back at your desk, that’s all.’

She shouted at him, ‘But I feel ill, I told you,’ backing away from him.

‘Balls. You’re fitter than I am.’ He came nearer: with every step she drew away he came closer to her, till she felt herself sweating with fright. ‘So you’re going to work. Is that clear? I’m not having you prove your old man was right.’

So that was it. She was out of her depth now. It had started so casually, innocently, waking up with a headache (the sickness had stopped so no excuse there) and thinking how nice to stay at home. The idle thought of a day off had turned pretty swiftly, as she lay curled up against Gavin’s sleeping warmth, into not going back at all but going instead on holiday just a week early. The more Gavin, when he woke up, opposed this plan, the more set on it she became, and the more she had exaggerated (with conviction) her pains and aches, her boredom. She had never dreamt he would make such an issue of it.

‘I shall please myself,’ she said to him when backed (now literally) into a corner. She had to be brave now. But it was exciting to be so frightened. He looked like a stranger.

‘But I want you back at work,’ he said as if there was no argument about it, almost pleasantly.

‘I’m not going.’

‘Then you need an excuse.’ Still no sign of temper.

‘I’ve got one. A real one.’

‘Well, now you have,’ he said, a second after he punched her.

It really hurt. She saw all the stars in the firmament on a clear night, and the fireworks on Guy Fawkes night for good measure. It was a stabbing pain that went through to the
back of her head and somehow made her feel sick. She clutched her face and screamed.

Gavin did not attempt to comfort her. Nor, to give him his due, did he say anything about disturbing the neighbours or keeping her voice down. He said nothing at all and poured himself a drink out of their emergency bottle. When she had stopped screaming and started crying he gave her a drink too. Bourbon. Neat. She drank it all. She simply couldn’t stop crying until she had exhausted herself. In the middle of it all, he left. When she managed to ask where he was going he gave her the one word ‘Work’. But he said it in a defeated tone which suggested that she had won, as perhaps she had. So she lay on the sofa and wept for her victory, her first over him, and wondered if things would ever be the same again. Crying gave her a worse headache than before and made her eyes ache and swell more than ever. The one he had hit felt as if it would burst. It was hours before she dared to look at herself, before curiosity triumphed over apprehension. The eye was swollen and discoloured. By tomorrow, no doubt, it would be blue, green, purple. It was enormous. It was obscene. She became hysterical at the sight of it.

But throughout the course of the day hysteria cooled into fear. Gavin had been violent—no, vicious—and she was pregnant. Nearly four months pregnant. That hadn’t deterred him. She had had no way of knowing that he could behave like this, for they had never had a quarrel before, at least not one that could not be made up instantly by her giving in and him making love to her. She had never dreamt that she was tying herself for life to a man who was capable of hitting his pregnant wife. She resented, too, being made the living embodiment of a music hall joke: it was such a
comic
disability, to those not afflicted, like chilblains or a plaster-cast leg. It offered such unlimited opportunities for laughter. This worried her almost as much as the violence itself. But her mind returned to that with recurrent alarm.
Had she really not suspected? Had there not perhaps been some current of violence in Gavin, unseen but clearly sensed, as in water-divining? Was this what she needed, was this why she had chosen him? (For he had certainly not chosen
her.)
She had never seen violence in her own home, beyond the most rudimentary taps on the twins’ legs or bottoms in moments of stress. She herself could count on one hand the times she had been slapped, and at such an early age that she could not remember her reactions, though she now wondered if they had been significant. Was there something wrong with her perhaps? She became mildly excited at the very idea. It might be interesting to have something wrong with her. Did this explain why she tormented her father—did she want him to strike back? Perhaps Gavin’s intractability had fascinated her so much because it offered unlimited opportunity for provocation, and the retaliation, when it came, would be so much greater—as indeed she had now proved. Was it something she needed and did it mean she was sick—or merely clever in finding out how to obtain the desired effect, like a cat eating grass? She didn’t know.

She was still on the floor, in the dark, when Gavin returned. She shook all over at the sound of his key in the lock. He came in and switched on the light in one movement, then saw her.

‘Christ! Have you seen your face?’

She burst out laughing. The relief was too great. ‘Yes, of course I have. What d’you think I’ve been doing all day?’

‘Baby, baby.’ He was close to her, almost crooning over her. ‘Did I do that? Was that me? Oh, precious baby …’ and he was kissing her all over her face. She put her arms round him and let her body go limp. She had never felt so relaxed. She was safe, they were suited. It would not be hard to provoke him again.

‘T
HERE’S SOMEONE
to see you,’ said Annabel when Sarah got in. She looked her up and down in a new, queer way before adding, ‘He says he’s your father.’

The frosty element of doubt in her voice confirmed all Sarah’s worst fears about his appearance. She tried to be casual. ‘Then he probably is. Thanks, Annabel.’ She went into the sitting-room briskly, but suddenly feeling twice as tired as when she had left the office.

Her father was seated on the sofa and Connie was attempting to make conversation with him or rather to respond to his monologue. Sarah caught a quick flash of her childhood (‘when she was a little girl’) as she entered the room. Connie smiled gratefully at the sight of her. ‘Oh, hello Sarah, I’ve been keeping your father company but I must wash my hair so will you excuse me?’ She vanished before Sarah could answer.

‘Well, Sally,’ said her father, eyeing her critically. ‘I’ve been waiting a while for you.’

Out it came, without thought or hesitation. ‘Well, I do work, you know.’

He clicked his tongue. ‘Now that wasn’t kind. Aren’t you pleased to see me? I thought if you weren’t doing anything we might have a bite to eat together.’

Sarah sat down and said wearily, ‘I’m going out.’ She wasn’t, but it looked as if she would have to. He wanted money, obviously: the question was how much.