A Winter's Child (60 page)

‘Yes, Toby. Thank you.'

‘There's a bit more, Claire …'

‘Yes?'

‘Something –
odd
I'll have to call it. You might know more about it than I do. Don't ask me why I should think that because I'll never refer to it again, you can rest assured.'

‘All right, Toby.'

‘It's like this. She started to say something – about crime and punishment, it rather sounded. Not clear to me. But Benedict understood all right. Whatever she had on the tip of her tongue he didn't want his boy to hear.
Her
boy too, although one does tend to forget it. He told her to shut up – snarled at her in fact. Very nasty. Even Miriam changed colour and it certainly made Eunice's knees and Polly's turn to water – nobody with even half an eye could miss that. But, you see, Nola had all this Light and Truth in her eyes, and I suppose it does tend to dazzle.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Nothing, Claire, that made much sense. She tried, jolly hard though. Guilt and shame and punishment, words like that – something about being pregnant which, of course
must
have been a long time ago. He tried to shout her down but she wouldn't have it. One could see that she was going to come out with it, whatever it was, or choke. Couldn't help himself.'

‘And then?'

‘He hit her I'm afraid – hard too. Knocked her clean off balance, in fact. Good thing she was standing by the sofa. It broke her fall all right and no harm done, although you could see Miriam was getting worried about her china bits and pieces –'

‘Toby!'

‘Yes. The awful thing was, of course, that one had to wonder what Conrad would do. Not easy for a chap to watch his father knock his mother down, even if she has – or hasn't – deserved it. Looked to me as if he might just have a go at Benedict, which would have been pretty terrible, because then Benedict would have had to thrash him. Benedict thought so too, because he whipped round on the lad like lightning and told him to pick his mother up and help her to bed. Hard I thought, at first, but it gave the boy something to do –'

‘And Nola?'

‘Went off like a lamb – to the slaughter that is. Never seen anything like it. Head down, barefoot certainly in spirit. If she were in the Middle Ages and he'd said “Get thee to a nunnery”, that's how she'd have looked. Eunice kept on telling me all the way home that she couldn't understand it.'

‘Could you?'

He smiled his wise, kindly smile again.

‘Well – she'd been talking about punishment. He'd punished her. Could that be it?'

She got down from the bar stool carefully, slowly, feeling stiff in the joints like an old woman.

‘Are you having lunch?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘Care to join me?'

It was a long afternoon, Benedict's voice on the telephone towards the end of it, arranging to pick her up at eight o'clock. She glanced at her watch. A quarter past five. She did not want the intervening two and three quarter hours to pass.

He looked – what? Old? Yes. She could not mistake it. Grim and taut and grey as he so often did these days. Weary. That was it. Bone-weary, heart-weary. His energy drained away.

She felt at the far end of herself too.

‘There was no choice,' he said. ‘None. There never has been. Do you believe me?'

‘I try to.'

‘The boys are my responsibility. So is she. The only way I can control her is to live with her – insofar as I do live with her. There is nothing new about that.'

‘I know.'

‘And she would never have gone through with it, Claire – do you know that too?'

She nodded her head.

‘So it would have been cruel, wouldn't it, to my boys, to you – to myself – had I done other than put an end to it? She may have meant everything she said, Claire – as she said it. But the plain fact is that she doesn't know the first thing about
doing
any of it. And I can't let her practise on my sons.'

‘No you can't – I agree.'

‘And you weren't – disappointed shall we call it – when you heard I'd refused her a divorce. Tell me the truth.'

‘Yes. Bitterly.'

‘And now?'

‘I've had it all out with myself. I see that you couldn't and I see why you couldn't. It would be like turning her loose to destroy herself. I wouldn't expect you to do that.'

‘My dear – I know you wouldn't expect it. But, just the same, don't you wish I had? Do you really think she's worth the sacrifice? Haven't you said to yourself that my boys will grow up and lead their own lives without even realizing that there
was
a sacrifice? Haven't you asked yourself all that?'

‘Yes. I have.'

‘And where does it leave us? We've been offered two partial solutions, the blue chintz bedroom and this. If we can take advantage of neither, then what else is there?'

She refused to answer him.

‘Is Conrad all right now?'

‘Not really. He didn't want to go back to school, I didn't particularly want to take him. Unfortunately I could think of nowhere safer. He was intensely miserable. So was his brother. Naturally, being my children, they refused, or didn't know how, to talk about it. I can't leave it there, can I, since they
are
my children? I shall have to discover the cause and provide some kind of a remedy. All I can say for certain is that they're better off than they might have been had I not played the villain, as usual, before Conrad's horrified eyes, and threatened his mother with exile and starvation unless she did as she was told. I doubt if he understands the law well enough to know that I couldn't really have carried out those threats. Neither does she. And then, of course, I had to knock her down. He'll never know why. He'll just remember seeing it happen. His instinct was to defend her. One can hardly disapprove of that.'

‘No. He seems a good boy.'

‘I shall have to find out – or try to. Won't I?'

Yes. She could not allow herself to be other than glad of that. And, with a boy whose instinct was to defend his mother, she knew she could have no part of it.

‘You will have to help me, Claire.'

‘Yes – of course – anything.'

There was an aching silence, a weight of dread on her heart although she had known all day what he was going to say to her and had no defence against it.

‘Benedict –?'

But his taut face was again in shadow as she had first known it, inscrutable, obscure, observing her carefully, thoroughly, while concealing everything but a bare outline of himself.

But he had asked for her help.

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Leave me,' he said. ‘Just that. And a little more. I rarely fail in my resolve but if I should ask you to come back to me, don't come. Can you promise me that?'

It was the first promise she had made him.

‘You do understand,' he said, ‘that it is the best we can do now – all we can do.'

She understood.

It made no difference.

She agreed that she had to leave him. There were times when she even wanted to do it. It became an act of love and salvation – both his and her own. She tried.

She spent the following Sunday afternoon sitting with Euan Ash in his cold and dusty studio watching in careful silence as he painted minute petals and humming birds and butterflies on plain white china, small masterpieces created for his pleasure which he would then sell without a backward glance in Faxby Market for a shilling or two. ‘Take what you like,' he offered, and, feeling stunned, her whole mind out of focus yet still continuing, as a result of thorough training, to go through the motions, she thanked him and selected, by no means at random, a cup and saucer alive with bluebells and perfect if improbable blue-winged sparrows.

‘Thanks, Euan. I'll always keep it.'

‘Whatever for? I suppose you'll hang on to that piece of red glass round your neck too.'

‘I suppose so.'

How calm she was: as from a hammer blow to the head: as from the freezing or the simple sweeping away of sensation by a disaster too great to be endured and, therefore, at its first shock, not even felt. How calm she was, preparing for dinner at High Meadows that night, wearing his ruby, smiling at Parker as he came to fetch her and then, fifteen minutes later, smiling at Miriam and Polly and Eunice, at Benedict himself; doing all the things she had promised, of which she had assured him she was capable. Since – of course – for Dorothy's sake, for everybody's sake, for her own self-esteem, she must get used to seeing him again as her brother-in-law, a Swanfield, an acquaintance. No friendship. He rejected that utterly and she did not really think it possible herself. They must be together, or not together. Very well. They could not be together. How calm she was, how very pleasant at the dinner table, how wonderfully empty and absent, talking neither too much nor too little, not looking at him yet not ignoring him, except for that single moment when, getting up from her chair to go into the drawing room, she caught his eye. But apart from that one brief moment when her stomach
had
lurched and her breath
had
got stuck somewhere like a barbed fish-hook in her chest, how well she was doing. How calm, even when he appeared in the drawing room door, looking for his victim, and said in his curt, judicial ‘Family Sunday'manner, ‘Would you come into the study please, Claire.'

‘Poor Claire,' gurgled Polly who had been expecting a summons herself. ‘What
have
you been up to?'

She got up and followed him, across the hall, into the study and straight on like a sleepwalker to wind her arms around his neck, sensation returning to her body as it made inch by inch contact with his.

‘You shouldn't do this,' he said roughly into her ear. ‘You shouldn't come when I call you.'

‘You shouldn't call me.'

So it went on. Partings leading only to reconciliations which, in their turn and just as swiftly, led to fresh partings. A painfully revolving circle shading from moments when separation seemed possible to moments when it did not. The summer was hot, torturous, unbearably prolonged; sultry, airless days which brought Claire a succession of blinding headaches – what else could it be, she told her mother, but the weather? – and which produced in Benedict a loss of weight and appetite, a deplorable shortness of temper, attributable, of course, to the sorry state of trade in Fax by and to the recurring problems of an unstable wife and two withdrawn, unhappy children home from school for the holidays. His Sunday afternoons were spent with them now, inspecting abbey ruins or Roman remains at York, uneasy outings made partly to keep them away from Nola who, at every opportunity, took them up to her room and, through a fog of tobacco, questioned them about their dreams, shaking her head wisely, prophetically, as she uncovered in each one the seeds of a dozen neuroses.

That she bewildered and embarrassed them was very certain. That they were ill at ease with Benedict was equally clear. While the presence of both parents, when Benedict invited Nola to accompany them on a visit to the Roman Wall at Hexham, produced verbal paralysis in Christian and Conrad and an unfortunate incident with Nola who, declining to ‘walk the wall'on a particularly sultry afternoon, remained at a local hotel to be retrieved by Benedict in a condition which even her wellwishers could not have described as other than very drunk. She had expected motherhood to be romantic and was finding it far more
irksome
than she had supposed, revolving far more around dry socks and regular supplies of beef sandwiches than any grand emotional rescue, of filling their stomachs in a perfectly conventional fashion rather than making of herself a bridge for the passage of their liberated feet. While Benedict, who could supply sandwiches in any quantity or variety and held the view that, at present, his duty was to keep them safe rather than set them free, returned from the company of the silent, critical youngsters looking jaded and worn out.

Yet he continued, regularly and rigidly, not only to perform his duty – as he saw it – but to hold Nola, so far as he could, to hers. It was a situation from which Claire could only keep her distance. Her own childhood, stifled by her mother's obsession with Edward, had made her unusually wary of finding herself in the same position with regard to other children. And she had no desire to complicate the already taut and complex lives of Christian and Conrad Swanfield, who had no real relationship with their own mother, by expecting them to form a relationship with her. She was neither emotionally prepared nor physically old enough to be their mother. What could she ever seem to them but an intruder, as Edward had always seemed to her? Once or twice, meeting them by chance, she tried to talk to them and dismally failed; not, she imagined, because they disliked her but because they had never given any thought to her at all. She did not concern them. Did she wish to bring herself to their attention? Was she up to it? She thought not. Benedict did not disagree.

‘Let's not prolong the agony,' he told her. ‘Where's the sense to that?'

‘No sense.'

‘Then keep your promise this time, Claire. Don't come back to me.'

She promised. Six times, in fact, from May to August, a promise six times broken.

‘You shouldn't come to me when I call.'

‘You shouldn't call me.'

So it went on.

What they needed now was an event, an accident, an intervention from outside either to force them apart, which they freely admitted would be for the best, or to bind them irrevocably together, taking the decision out of their hands. She had lived her whole life according to the whims of such accidents and interventions, making the best or enduring the worst of what happened or of what had been done to her. He had lived his life, retained his impeccable composure, by ensuring that very little happened to him at all. And there were times now when the great defence of that composure began to crack, or perhaps even worse, to melt away.