A Fatal Attachment (6 page)

“Yes?”

He looked down at her, a tiny smile playing around the corners of his lips. Lydia frowned, feeling she ought to know him. The man took pity on her embarrassment.

“Don't you recognise your husband, Lydia?”

“F
ORMER
husband,” said Lydia briskly.

“Former husband,” agreed the man.

“Well . . . You'd better come in, Jamie,” said Lydia, and turned to open the door, glad for the chance to hide her face. Once inside she led the way through to the sitting room, went round turning on lights to gain time in her uncertainty, then asked, without welcome in her voice:

“Something to drink? It used to be beer, didn't it? But I suppose nowadays it's white wine, like everybody else.”

He was standing there quietly, watching her, with a gentle, rather attractive smile on his face.

“If you could manage whisky with water that would be fine. Otherwise white wine, or whatever you've got.”

Lydia could find nothing disparaging to imply about whisky and water, so she mixed one, glad of the opportunity to disappear into the kitchen. She got herself a gin and tonic at the same time, then handed Jamie his drink, gestured him to one of her capacious armchairs, and sat down herself.

“Well!” she said, looking at him.

“Have I changed so much since we were married,” he asked, smiling, “that you didn't recognise me?”

Lydia had to bite back the reply that she hadn't recognised him not because he had changed but because he had made so little impression on her at the time. It would not have been true, but it would have been a very satisfying put-down.

“The beard,” she said, waving a hand. “It certainly makes you look more . . . gives you a certain air.”

“Makes me look more decisive,” said Jamie, a smile playing round his barely visible lips. “Beards cover a multitude of weak chins—the comment
has been made. No need to be tactful with me, Lydia. Though by the by I wonder how strength of character came to be seen to reside in a particular type of chin. It's rather unlikely, isn't it?”

“Rather,” agreed Lydia. “Though these popular ideas usually have something in them.” She was unwilling lightly to relinquish the correspondence between his chin and his nature. She now left a silence which said, as clearly as words would have: “To what do I owe the honour?”

“You'll be wondering why I came,” said Jamie obediently.

“Yes.”

“Well . . . I thought it was only fair to let you know that I'm back in the district.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.” He shifted easily in his chair, his eye on her. It flashed through Lydia's brain that Jamie knew her as few other people did. “I've taken a lease on a small farm over Kedgely way. Organic vegetables, free-range hens, that sort of thing.”

Kedgely was five miles or so away from Bly, by a winding hill road. The prospect of having her former husband so close was not pleasant to Lydia.

“Oh, it's farming now, is it?”

He smiled, untouched by her scorn.

“Yes, it's farming now. After the civil service, the City, local government, second-hand books, commercial travelling—”

“I haven't followed your . . . career,” said Lydia, with another wave of her hand.

“My long succession of failures, you mean.”

“You really don't have to apologise for them,” said Lydia. “You are nothing to me . . . as I'm sure I am nothing to you.”

The words seemed to be belied by the force with which she said them.

“I wasn't apologising,” said Jamie, still genial and apparently imperturbable. “I was just getting in first, and trying to emphasize how right you were to leave me. Or to persuade me to leave you. It would never have worked out. I realized in the first week that you'd married me because you couldn't marry Robert.”

A sharp expression of anger crossed Lydia's face. This was not the first time this had been said to her. Wanting to marry Robert Loxton was certainly a sign of greater discrimination than actually marrying Jamie Loxton. Still, acknowledgement of the truth of the analysis seemed to convict her of a double degree of foolishness. She left a couple of seconds' silence.

“Robert has certainly made himself
known,
done something with his life,” she said cautiously.

“Oh, he has. When I tell people my name is Loxton they often ask if I'm related to him. When I say he's my brother the polite ones suppress their surprise.”

“He's in Greenland—no, Alaska—at the moment, isn't he? I have an address somewhere to write to.”

Jamie Loxton nodded.

“Alaska. Him and Walter Denning on a two-man survival expedition of some kind. No doubt it will prove something or other about the limits of man's endurance. Not something I've ever been very interested in, though I suppose my own survival proves something. We write friendly letters once a year at Christmas, if he's around. I haven't seen him for—oh, five years or more. . . . He should have married you, Lydia. You would have made a fine pair.”

Lydia could find no reply. She was remembering her childhood, and how vividly her elder Loxton cousin had figured in it. He and Jamie were the children of her mother's brother, and they lived over Malton way. In her early years—the war and its aftermath of austerity—they had seen each other perhaps once or twice a year, but what happy, golden times they had been. In the fifties they had come together much more often. Lydia's father was head of a mass-market clothing firm in Halifax, and British business appeared to be booming. Both families had cars, both groups of parents enjoyed each other's company. Now and then, in holiday times, Lydia and Thea, or Lydia alone, would take the train to Malton just for the joy of participating in the boys' games and projects.
Something
—something funny or adventurous, always with a spice of surprise or danger to it, or something to test their physical prowess—was always going on.

Perhaps she had understood then that the originator of these games was always Robert—that of the brothers one led and the other tagged along. Certainly by the time she had reached womanhood, had completed her degree and was out in the world, she had known that the one she wanted to marry was Robert. That had been the beginning of her going wrong emotionally. It had been some years before she realised that the projects and adventures of childhood had persisted into adulthood, and that Robert would be married to them and never to any woman. He was funny and affectionate and exciting when they met, but those meetings were always when he was just back from the Himalayas or shortly off to Antarctica or Siberia. So she had married
Jamie when he had asked her. And in the few months of their marriage she had learnt the bitterest of lessons. She had never again settled for second best. Second best, she now knew, was coming nowhere. It humiliated her to think that she had needed to learn that lesson, and how she had learnt it.

“I don't think it's a good idea to marry a cousin,” she said at last dismissively. “Royal families did it all too often. It weakened them in the long run. Much more sensible to seek out new blood.”

Jamie nodded.

“As I gather Thea and Andy's boy has done,” he said. “Do you see a lot of them?”

“Maurice and his wife? Oh no, of course not. He's with Midlands Television—lives in Birmingham of all places.”

“I meant Thea and Andy.”

“Of course,” Lydia lied. “They're here in the village. We see each other all the time.”

“I must go down and call on them before long. I always thought Thea was the best of us.”

“The best of us?”

“The kindest, nicest, most understanding.”

“Well . . . perhaps you're right.”

Lydia was reluctant to acknowledge Thea's moral stature, still more reluctant to acknowledge Jamie's right to make confident judgments. There was something more . . . more independent about Jamie now, and it disoriented Lydia. She was reminded of Robert more strongly than at any time since she had decided to marry him as second best.

“There was one other thing, Lydia.”

“Yes?”

“I'm thinking of getting married again.”

“Really?” She wanted to say something cutting about him really courting failure, but she refrained, “I hope you'll be happy this time,” she said.

Jamie dipped his head in acknowledgement.

“She's a lovely person. She's been a social worker in Sheffield for nearly twenty years—not the easiest of jobs. Finally it just got on top of her and she had to get away. She has the village shop and post office in Kedgely.”

My successor is a failed social worker and a postmistress, thought Lydia. All her old contempt returned. How pathetic Jamie always was! How small-scale his hopes and ambitions! And even in them he has failed. It humiliated her to think she had been married to him. It humiliated her to think of the sort
of woman he was to marry next. It seemed to equate Lydia with her. And it would equate them in the minds of everyone in the district.

“And when will it take place, this marriage?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing's decided yet. Mary's been married before too, so she doesn't want to rush into it.”

“You're just ‘keeping company'?”

Lydia used the servant-girl expression with relish, but Jamie was unoffended. He smiled.

“That's pretty much it at the moment. Naturally we neither of us have a lot of spare time to spend with each other. But we're sort of feeling our way.”

“How nice . . . but there was no need for you to tell me all this, you know, It's none of my business.”

“And we're nothing to each other, as you said. Oh quite.” Jamie got up. “Still these things are always a bit disconcerting when you hear them from strangers, aren't they? That's why I wanted to tell you myself.”

“Yes, I suppose that's true,” admitted Lydia.

“You've never thought of getting married again yourself?”

“No! Good heavens, no! I've had the fullest of lives without it. In fact, I'm always mystified by people—filmstars and suchlike—who get married over and over again. One
can
learn from experience, but it seems they never do.”

If Jamie registered that this speech was intended to hold a message for him, he gave no sign. Lydia led the way out of the sitting room and to the front door. The interview, her stance implied, was over.

“And you've made a very satisfactory career for yourself, then, Lydia?” Jamie said, small-talking as he walked out of the house.

“Very satisfying, at any rate.”

“And a nationally known name.”

“Oh—” she gestured dismissively.

“But we did have happy times together as kids, Robert, you and I, didn't we?”

“We did. Goodbye, Jamie.”

She shook his hand, watched him as he went out to the battered old Volkswagen, which no longer seemed such an amusing little car, only a symbol of his failures, and then shut the door without a wave of the hand.

She went back into the sitting room, and began to fix herself another drink. She rejected gin—somehow too maudlin a drink for her present mood—and poured herself a stiff whisky. Altogether a sturdier, more combative drink.
Odd that Jamie should drink it now. Because he was one of nature's wimps, and a human disaster-area to boot. She added a little water to the glass and stood reflectively by the mantelpiece.

It did not please her that Jamie had come to live near her—did not please her at all. He was known in the area—they had spent their brief married life in a village not far from Bly, in a tiny house owned by her parents—and he had friends here, or had had. People would recognise him, and they would talk. She was one of the local notables: she was reviewed at length in the quality Sunday newspapers, and occasionally consented to be interviewed on radio or television. Hitherto she had been a writer with a brief marriage in her past. Now she was a woman with an ex-husband in the vicinity. It was not a change for the better, not a change that Lydia liked.

Because Jamie was not only a failure—he was one of
her
failures. He would be living and ever-present proof of the fallibility of her judgment—and in the most important decision of her life, as many people would see it. She had faced this fact within days of marrying him: when he had told her that his “job in the City” had been merely a “taking on trial” by a brokerage firm for a salary hardly more than nominal. He had shared with her his feeling that the trial had not been a success, and his judgment was confirmed within a fortnight. He was out of a job. As he was to be twice again in their brief marriage.

She had tried to give him backbone, perseverance, self-confidence. She had tried encouragement, exhortation, pushing, nagging. He had remained a well-disposed bumbler. If he's like this at twenty-four, she had thought with dread, what will he be like at fifty-five? “You'll never change him,” Robert had said to her, the night before he left to trek across the Central Australian desert. “He accepts the things that happen to him, he never makes them happen. You'll have to take him as he is. He's nothing like me.” The next evening she had told Jamie that their marriage had not been a success and she wanted him to move out. He had nodded and said she was probably right. Within a week he was gone, and for the next few years she had heard occasional pieces of news about him, mainly from his parents, whom he moved back with when he was down on his luck and out from when something turned up. For years she had heard nothing at all.

Suddenly she remembered that she had been momentarily reminded, even now, of Robert. And then something else occurred to her: Jamie's demeanour during their interview had not been at all what might have been expected. He
had not been in the least apologetic or hangdog: there was nothing of the whipped cur, not in his carriage or his words. He had accepted his long log of failure with resigned dignity—even with amusement. When her words had been cutting he had registered them, but he had not been cut. He had not been in the least humble. He had smiled at her. Had he, even, smiled
at
her? Been, somehow, amused by her? Been showing tolerance of her and her ways? That was, somehow, what his style and stance had suggested. The idea was insupportable.