A Lovely Day to Die (14 page)

She was tired, though; so very, very tired. Little cramps were running down her legs, and there was a sort of heavy numbness in her limbs which made it hard to keep going.

How
do
people drown? How
do
they? How do they prevent their exhausted, obstinate muscles from swimming just one more stroke … and then another? Exhausted, frozen, tied in triple knots with cramp, still the damn things keep on functioning … one stroke … another … another …

Another wave slopped into her face; and almost before she had got her breath, came a second one. They were coming at her faster now, more spitefully. She was aware of a threat in them now, veiled as yet, but unmistakable … each time it was harder to get her breath, to cough away one little dollop of water before the next sloshed against her nostrils.

It would get harder still. This, of course, would be the way the end would come. The moments of recovering her breath would become fewer and fewer, the coughing more desperate until, at last, that wave would slosh into her lungs which couldn’t be coughed away at all. Not ever.

With what seemed like her last strength, she swivelled over onto her back so that her face need not take the brunt of every oncoming wave; raising her weary head for a second she glimpsed, terribly far off, the line of the beach, and the tiny, sunlit holiday-makers, like dolls in the distance. This is it, she thought; now I
can’t
get back; and with the thought, there came into her body a huge and terrible force, surging from somewhere behind her ribs and spreading everywhere, into every limb. It gripped her as a terrier grips a rat, carrying her triumphantly where it intended she should go.

*

“Had a good swim, darling?” asked Rodney, not raising his eyes from the journal he was reading; and Maggie, slumped down on the sand beside him, could not believe that he would not, in a few moments, notice her shuddering limbs, her face; hear the
thundering
of her heart.

But he didn’t; and within minutes the shuddering had begun to subside, the heart-beats to slow down. Colour was returning to her face, and she lay there in the hot sand hating her body for its flawless functioning, for the perfection of its survival mechanisms, and for the speed with which it knew how to recover from almost
anything. Of what use was her decision to die, in the face of her body’s tigerish determination to stay alive? All those billions of cells in there, what did
they
care about the misery, the humiliation and the futility of her existence?
They
were all right, Jack, multiplying and dividing and regenerating, carrying on with their petty little life-cycles, with never a thought of what it all added up to for
her
!
She
was the one who had to take the consequences of their blind, idiot determination to keep going, damn them!

Damn them! Damn them!

*

It must be past midnight by now—well past. Slumped deep in the wing-chair, Maggie stirred a little; tried, feebly, to sit up straight; but the whole thing was too difficult. The muted lamp-light still seemed too bright for such sensitive retinas as hers, newly returned from the dead, and so she closed her eyes once more. Against the swirling blackness behind her lids she tried to picture Rodney’s home-coming—which surely could not be delayed much longer, so late as it was?

There was no possibility, this time, that he’d be able to ignore the thing, she’d set the scene much too carefully. To start with, she’d left the milk on the front step ever since this morning—to come home after midnight and find two full milk bottles still outside the front door would surely arrest any man’s attention? On top of this, she had left the back door swinging open into the black, blowy garden, so that the first thing Rodney would feel as he stepped into the hall would be the icy November draught sweeping through the house. What the
hell
is going on? he would inevitably wonder, striding across the hall and into the kitchen to slam the back door. And then—angrily at first, but presently with growing anxiety— he would go in search of his wife.

Not in bed? Not watching television? Not in the bathroom? And she couldn’t be out, not possibly, for neither of them ever went out without locking the back door and all the windows. And as he moved, with growing unease, from room to room, he would notice—if he hadn’t noticed it already—that the whole house was in darkness. What could she be doing, sitting in total darkness,
making never a sound ..? And now, at last, his heart would begin to thump with fear …

But there was something wrong somewhere. This delectable vision of Rodney’s anxiety and concern contained some
discrepancy
… there was something that didn’t fit properly … Her brain, with slowly returning clarity, groped uneasily for what it was that could be amiss; but it was not until, by some chance, she blinked her eyes open again for a moment, that the thing hit her with a sledgehammer.

*

The lamp! The reading-lamp, casting its dim beams across her field of vision—it shouldn’t have been on at all!
She
hadn’t switched it on—she knew with absolute certainty that she hadn’t. It had been bright afternoon, the room bathed in slanting autumn sunlight, when she’d sat down here to take the pills, there was no possibility at all that she’d have had the lamp on … and now, with an awful growing suspicion, she noticed something else.

The desk. Rodney’s big desk, wide open, and all that litter of papers—it hadn’t been like that this afternoon! It had been shut and locked—as Rodney was always accustomed to leave it—and her suicide note had been standing in solitary state on the bare polished surface—not flanked, as it was now, by papers, files, documents …

The terrible suspicion grew, it became a certainty, monstrous and almost beyond belief. Rodney must have already come in! Come in here, switched on the lamp and seen her! Seen the note: seen her unconscious, the pills beside her! Seen her—and gone away! He had done nothing—attempted nothing—to save her! He must even—so monstrous was his unconcern—have pushed right past her dying body to get at his desk!

And what then? What does a man do next, after he has looked down at his wife’s unconscious face, and decided to let her die? Where does he go from there?

Away, of course. He gets the hell out of it all. And now a new vision, hallucinatory in its intensity, took over behind Maggie’s eyelids. She saw Rodney, guilty and secretive, padding about this
room in the dim lamplight, hastily shuffling together his most important documents, cramming them into his briefcase, all the time keeping his eyes averted from the awful figure in the chair, who might or might not be dead, and who might yet, like some avenging spirit, rise up and accuse him …

*

And what next? Off upstairs to pack an overnight bag? By a tragic chance, your Honour, I happened to be away from home that night … By the time I got back, it was too late …

Something like that … and swift upon this thought, followed another in Maggie’s brain:
perhaps
he
is
still
here
!
Perhaps, if I got out of this chair, and tiptoed up the stairs very quietly ..?

*

And it was only now that Maggie discovered that she actually
couldn’t
move. It wasn’t, as she had supposed, mere weakness and lethargy, the aftermath of her over-dose; it was actual paralysis of every limb, against which her muscles seemed to brace themselves in vain. Only her head was still mobile, and raising it a little she looked down, and saw, with numbed incredulity, the ropes which bound her legs and arms; felt the bruises and the weals; and identified the strange stiffness of her jaws as a gag, professionally secured.

And so Maggie got her headlines after all.

Reading, in column after column, of her courage, her resource, her cool-headedness, Maggie did not know what to think, or which way to turn: she did not even know how to counter the undeserved admiration, the hugs and kisses, which Rodney was lavishing upon her. He didn’t seem to
want
to listen to the true story.

*

If it was the true one? What Maggie presumed had happened was
that the intruders had seized on this extraordinary chance of getting into the house without breaking-in, had made their way to Rodney’s study, switched on the light—and seen Maggie. They would not have stopped to ask questions, they were professionals, binding and gagging her would have been a matter of seconds.

Was it the strange, unresisting limpness of her body that had scared them? Or the suicide-note, which they would have seen as soon as they began to rifle the desk? Whichever it was, they plainly had not wanted to get mixed up in it, and had fled.

That was how it probably was. Almost certainly. And yet … and yet ..? There
were
these bruises, over and above the marks of the rope. Wasn’t there just the possibility that Maggie
hadn’t
been quite dead to the world when her assailants had arrived? That she
had
fought back, protecting her husband’s interests, powered by some blind, enormous instinct below the threshold of
consciousness,
and far beyond the reach, now, of her drugged memory? An instinct as enormous and as invincible as the one which last summer had wrenched her out of the depths of the sea? Had she indeed mysterious powers inside her—an untested courage of which, in ordinary life, she knew nothing?

The courage, maybe,
actually
to commit suicide? Or even, just possibly, the courage to face the consequences of loving an ambitious, highly-strung man stretched almost beyond his limits by responsibilities and pressures such as he had never known?

O
NCE AGAIN, HE
had spoiled it all. “You
have
taken it, haven’t you, darling?” he’d whispered. “You didn’t forget ..? You’re sure ..?”

Of course she was sure. How could any woman
not
be sure of having performed a duty so distasteful, so inimical to her deepest feelings, as this daily swallowing of the Pill was to Christine?

Six years ago it had been now—no, nearly seven—since Bernard had so rationally—so lovingly, even—laid down his conditions.

“We won’t tie ourselves down, will we, darling?” he’d said, his arms close about her in the summer twilight, a week or two before the wedding. “Let’s have a few years of just
us.
Just the two of us together, the way we are now … don’t you think so, Christine?”

And of course she’d said Yes. With her lips on his, her mind empty of thought, her body already trembling in the circle of his arms, there had seemed nothing else to say.

“Yes, darling … of course! That’s what I want too—just the two of us together …”

*

It hadn’t been true. Even at the time, she’d known that it hadn’t been true. But somehow, in the magic softness of the summer night, it hadn’t seemed to matter. After all, it was only a lie, a little, loving lie, just one more of the gentle sounds of a world moving over into night; as natural as the stirrings of the awakening moths; natural as the soft twitterings of the birds settling themselves to rest among the leaves of the great elms at the end of her father’s garden. Only a lie—a little, little lie; and a singularly private one at that, concerning no one in the whole world but herself and Bernard. The possibility that so very private a lie might one day bring the police pounding on her door at midnight, might plaster her likeness over the front page of every newspaper in the land—this possibility could hardly be expected to have entered her calculations.

That
something
bad might, at some future date, come out of her reckless prevarication might, perhaps, have occurred to her; but it didn’t, not really. The fact was, she wasn’t thinking about the Future at all. And why should she? When you are truly happy, the Future is nothing more than a minor nuisance that can be safely ignored. When you are truly in love, you can claim the Here and Now as your rightful heritage.

The Future is for other people.

*

But now the Future was here. It had come upon her, as it does on others, almost while her back was turned, and already—unbelievably—she was seven years into it. Seven years of her marriage had already passed—seven of those precious child-bearing years which are so few for a woman, and which will never return. She was seven years, already, nearer to that time in a woman’s life when pregnancy is going to become less and less likely, more and more of a hazard. Only a week or two ago she had been reading in a magazine that even if she became pregnant right now, she would already be past the optimum age and would be classed as an “Elderly Primigravida”—the horrible medical jargon for a woman over twenty-five having a first baby. Over twenty-five! And now here was Christine, nearly thirty-three—
“Senile
Primigravida” would they call her, or what?

Lying awake in the darkness, with Bernard breathing deeply and peacefully beside her, Christine found herself wondering, wearily, whether it mightn’t somehow have been different? If she had, at some point, handled the situation more tactfully, more wisely, might she perhaps, by now, have changed Bernard in all the ways she had secretly hoped to change him? Changed him, that is, into the sort of man who wants to settle down; a man who welcomes the responsibilities of fatherhood; who accepts willingly the ties, the hazards, the long decades of expense and worry … the sort of man
other
girls seem to meet and marry so effortlessly?

Could
she have turned Bernard into such a man? If she had nagged him more, perhaps? Or less? If she had raved less ostentatiously over her friends’ babies … become godmother to
fewer of them … been altogether less heavy-handed in her hints, her displays of maternal longing ..?

Or if, on the other hand, she had argued openly with him right from the start, standing up squarely for her point of view? If she had never allowed herself to be brainwashed by the magic of a summer night into making promises impossible to honour ..? But then, of course, she would have lost him.

Or would she? Turning her head restlessly on the pillow, Christine tried to recall something of the abortive, inconclusive discussions which were all she had dared to embark on during the early days of their marriage, when she could still hardly believe in her good fortune, and her only fear was lest something should come along to spoil the blissful harmony of their days.

Like a row, for instance.

So she moved warily, approaching the subject of parenthood deviously, and with infinite cunning, saying things like: “Now that you’ve got that marvellous rise, darling, I suppose we
could
manage without my salary, if we absolutely had to ..?

Usually, he countered this sort of thing with a blank, masculine obtuseness impossible to penetrate. He simply didn’t see what she was getting at, and would work out on the back of an envelope the hard financial facts which her pretty little feminine head evidently hadn’t been able to grasp. “So you see, darling, there’s no way we could manage. It’d be crazy. Besides, you
like
your job, you’re super at it, the brightest little copywriter in town, so they tell me—” and with a big kiss and a flow of sweet compliments he would bring the unsatisfactory and inconclusive argument to an end.

And if—as now and again happened—her real meaning
did
somehow get through to him, he would instantly bring up his sister Rose.

“Just look at the life
she
leads!” he would exhort her. “No, darling, I know you haven’t met her, not since the wedding, but don’t you see, that’s the whole
point.
That’s
why
you haven’t met her. She never meets anybody, she’s always tied up with the baby’s feed, or Charlie’s asthma, or Trudi’s school play, or something. On top of which she’s always too tired, or the house is too much of a
mess, that sort of thing … No, sweetheart,
my
wife’s not going to be condemned to a life like that!
My
wife is going to have fun! We’re going to
enjoy
ourselves, darling! We’ll travel … we’ll have a super flat … we’ll give marvellous parties … we’ll meet lots of interesting, exciting people …”

*

And as the years went by, that is exactly what happened. They’d travelled: with their two good incomes from their two good jobs they’d secured a lovely flat, and they’d given marvellous parties in it; and as for the interesting, exciting people … now, in the dark small-hours, Christine buried her face in the pillow and tried not to think about them. Not about the interesting, exciting women, anyway; glossy, beautiful women with marvellous careers as well as marvellous sex-lives; women who were witty and
knowledgeable
and self-assured; women who had no intention of having babies, ever, and could have given Bernard, quite effortlessly, the kind of life he wanted.

*

“… And jealous as any narrow-minded suburban shrew!”
Bernard
had hurled at her during one of the hurtful and increasingly bitter quarrels that had been flaring more and more of late. “Just because I gave Marcia a lift home, and then stopped for a quick drink with her! Hell, what else could I have done? I was the host, after all, and here she was, stranded, all the buses and tubes finished. Don’t you realize she hasn’t got a car any more?—simply hasn’t
got
one? Her rotten swine of a husband claimed the family car as well as half the house when he divorced her, she’s been telling me all about it. She’s had a pretty rough time, you know, I don’t see why you have to be so catty about her. What she needs is a bit of sympathy … a bit of understanding …”

A bit of sympathy! A bit of understanding! The tears of rage, of long pent-up frustration, poured down Christine’s cheeks,
uncontrollable
. “And what about
my
need for sympathy and
understanding
? How about trying to understand what it feels like to have a husband who first refuses to give you a baby on the grounds that he wants you to share his exciting life, and then goes off with other
women night after night, and stays out till two in the morning ..?”

Wildly exaggerated, as words spoken in anger are apt to be: on top of which, a more tactless moment for bringing up the delicate and long-standing argument between them could hardly be imagined.

Bernard stopped shouting. His voice became very quiet.

“A baby! That’s the only thing you ever think about, isn’t it, Christine! You’re obsessed! It’s the only thing you care about, at all! If you’d ever, for one moment, cared about
me
… about
my
feelings!
Cared
about them, I mean, instead of eternally trying to change them ..!” and before Christine could voice any protest, take back any of her damaging words, he had slammed out of the flat and was off into the wintry night. She heard the swing of the outer door downstairs … and then the car starting up … and at this last sound, still fully dressed in her new, glittering party-dress, she flung herself on the bed and cried till morning.

And in the morning, of course, Bernard came back. Well, he could hardly go to work unshaven and in his rumpled evening suit, could he?—and so Christine regarded his return warily, and as no great gesture of reconciliation. He did not speak; and neither did she; and presently, still without a word, they both went off thankfully to work.

It didn’t last, of course. They’d had quarrels as bad as this before—well, nearly—and always within a few days—a week at most—they’d be over them. Their technique—and all married couples have their own quarrelling technique, perfected over the years—Christine and Bernard’s technique was simply to pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened. They’d give themselves a few hours—a day or so perhaps—of silent hostility, neither of them speaking a word; and then, in response to some invisible
time-switch,
perceptible only to themselves, they would suddenly resume conversation. Rather stilted conversation to start with—small-talk and carefully-innocuous platitudes; but gradually—and it never took longer than a week—this would merge into ordinary, normal conversation, and the whole thing would be over. A good technique in its way. It worked.

The only trouble about it, Christine used sometimes to reflect during the uneasy days of emotional convalescence—the only trouble was that this way nothing was ever actually resolved. They never discussed the quarrel: there it lay, like a neglected
houseplant
, unfed and unwatered, until it finally died of lack of attention and could be thrown out with the rubbish, unlamented.

But not forgotten. Not by Christine, anyway; and it began to dawn on her, this time, that there were getting to be rather too many of these rows stored away in the dark recesses of her mind. It wasn’t as if anything was being achieved by this secret pile-up. She no longer believed—as she had once done—that the sheer cumulative weight of so much reiterated argument, such mounting intensity of need, over so many years, must, in the end, drag down the scales on her side.

Not so. Indeed, the contrary seemed to be happening. With every successive row—and this one triggered off by Marcia was only the most recent of many—Bernard’s entrenched attitude would harden, his resistance to the idea of a family become yet more unassailable. She was making things worse for herself—and knew she was—every time she even hinted at the forbidden subject.

She must stop it. Stop it forthwith. There
must
be some other way.

Suppose, for instance, she were to declare (silently, of course, in her own heart) a complete amnesty? Suppose that from now on she were never to let the word “baby” pass her lips again? Not, anyway, for months and months and months?

Actually it was three months, almost to the day, when this resolution was broken; and the circumstances of its breaking were such as even her most sombre imaginings could not possibly have prepared her for.

*

It had been a bad day right from the start, a grey, relentless February morning, with rain lashing against the windows. After a night of uneasy dreams and sudden, anxious awakenings as the wind hurled itself in great gusts against the fabric of their building,
Christine had fallen into a heavy sleep just before morning, had failed to hear the alarm clock, and so now here she was, rushing around the kitchen, throwing an apology of a breakfast together, and dabbing make-up on her face as she ran. When the telephone rang, it was the last straw: she simply snatched up the receiver and slammed it straight back again. Serve them right!

Bernard was in no amiable mood, either. “It might be
important
!” he scolded her, shoving the morning’s mail into his
briefcase
; and, “Yes, it might, that’s just why I won’t answer it!” she snapped back. “Important things take time, and I just haven’t
got
any time!
You
answer it if you’re so worried!”

But by the time it went again, he had already gone, and a minute later she was gone, too, racing through the downpour to try and catch her usual train.

She missed it, of course; and there was some kind of a go-slow on the buses, so that she arrived at the office chilled, wet, and very, very late. Yet another typist was down with flu, so that Christine had to do a lot of the letters herself. By mid-afternoon, it was clear to her that she would have to stay on after five o’clock, and so she rang Bernard to tell him that she’d be late home, and that he had better get on and eat the ready-prepared casserole by himself, without waiting for her.

His reception of the news chilled her a little. He was so cool, so unconcerned, as if he didn’t care whether she got home in time to have dinner with him or not. In the old days, he’d have made quite a little fuss about it.