Designs on Life (18 page)

Garry tried to teach me the trick of it. He said, “A man on crutches or in a wheelchair can’t follow you all over the house, so when he annoys you, why don’t you simply leave the room?”

“But he doesn’t often exactly
annoy
me,” I said. “It’s much more complicated than that.”

“I know,” Garry said. “He frightens, bullies, hypnotizes you, so you think you have to stay there and take it. But you haven’t really, you know. He hasn’t any power over you. It’s you who have power over him. You can leave him any time you choose, and at the back of his mind he knows it.”

“But he’s very fond of me in his own way, don’t you see?” I said. “I couldn’t hurt him.”

“I wonder if he is fond of you,” Garry said, “or ever has been of anyone. I can’t see him caring for anyone but himself.”

“Oh, he adored my mother,” I said. “He simply worshipped her.”

“That’s what he says now,” Garry said. “But I wonder what she’d have told you herself, if you’d been old enough to ask her.”

This was such a shocking thought to me that I was silent. My whole relationship with my father had been built on the assumption that he had loved my mother with all his heart and that it had been his hideous suffering on her early death that had warped what had once been a fine and generous nature. For she must once have found him worth loving, after all, and my memory of her was of someone who had a lot of rich affection to give and cheerfulness and charm.

“Have you ever thought,” Garry went on, “that he may have married her for her money and that that’s why he’s so certain I married you for yours?”

I looked at him stupidly. I have always had a slow mind and it takes me time to assimilate a new idea.

He gave his easy-going laugh.

“You don’t think I don’t know that’s what he thinks about me, do you?” he said. “He came straight out with it the very first time we met. He doesn’t bother with subtleties.”

“Well, anyway,” I said after a moment, “I could never leave him. It wouldn’t be right. I told you that before we married.”

“Good lord, I wasn’t talking about
leaving
him,” Garry said. “Not leaving the house, moving away. I understand how you feel about that and it’s quite all right with me. No, I just meant, when he says something that gets under your skin and makes you go dead white—do you know you do that?—just get up and walk out of the room. Leave him to stew in his own juice for a little. That’s all I meant.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, relieved, because I dreaded an argument with him.

“Only you’ll never do it,” Garry said with a smile, and reached out and punched my cheek lightly with his fist. “You’re too damned easily put upon. You just ask to be trodden on. Well, don’t ever let me do it. If you ever find me treading on you, my darling, yell.”

The funny thing was that I wanted to yell, though of course I never did, at his devotion to Alec, at his clinging to him even now that he was married, at his dependence on him or whatever it was. Actually I was never quite sure which brother was the more dependent on the other. It must have begun by the older brother supporting the younger, but by now Garry was so much the more intelligent and wide-awake of the two that I thought perhaps this had been reversed. In any case, I hated the relationship between them. Even if Alec had been a person for whom I could have felt some affection, I should have hated it. I wanted Garry all to myself.

I used always to feel nervous and restless during the long telephone conversations that he and Alec used to have with one another. There was nothing private about these conversations. The telephone was in the sitting-room and Garry used to sit comfortably on the sofa with his feet up and the telephone to his ear, smoking cigarette after cigarette and spraying ash on the carpet and chatting on and on to Alec. Sometimes it was about something that had happened in the office, some mistake that Garry had made and was worrying about, or something that a client had said. Sometimes it was about nothing in particular. And as I listened, a weird sort of feeling that was almost like hatred used to well up in me, hatred not of Alec, which would have been silly but understandable, but of Garry himself. I used to get stiff and cramped in my chair with the effort of fighting the violence of the feeling. It frightened me a good deal.

But I felt even worse when Garry went to London to see Alec. On those occasions Garry never stayed away for more than one night and he always telephoned me in the evening from Alec’s flat and had a long conversation with me, of much the same kind as he had with Alec. But every time that he went away I became possessed by an utterly irrational, feverish anxiety that I would never see him again. I used not to show it. I would kiss him good-bye quite calmly, tell him in an unemotional, automatic way to drive carefully, and go back into the house and shut the door before the car was even out of sight. But then I would go frantic.

I would not sit down and cry, though I always felt as if I should like to. I would start to rush about the house, doing all sorts of unnecessary jobs, turning out drawers, moving pieces of furniture, and as likely as not, breaking something. I would polish, scrub, clean windows, re-arrange books, and cook enough to last the household for at least the next three days. I would keep this up until the evening, when Garry’s telephone call came through.

Usually this was at about ten o’clock. If it was much later than that I would go up to my room, because my father became fractious if he could hear me moving about downstairs when he wanted to go to sleep, and I would take the call on the extension up there. At last then I would be at peace. I would take my sleeping-pill and sleep soundly. I did not normally take sleeping-pills, but on those nights when Garry was away and my mind became obsessed, you might say almost unhinged, with terrifying premonitions of disaster, I used to take three grains of sodium amytal and have a quiet night.

At this distance, it all seems so ridiculous. I cannot think of anything that would make me act like that now.

My fears of disaster did not take any specific form. They were like a child’s fear of the dark, in which the special terror is that the perils thronging it are unimaginable. I did not see, oh no, my God, I did not see even a shadow of what was actually to happen!

It began one day in early December, when Garry set off on one of his visits to Alec in London. It was bitterly cold. The sky was the colour it has been all day today, that dirty grey that threatens snow, and it seemed to have sunk down so low that it almost rested on the roofs of the houses. There was black ice on the garden path.

It was after lunch that Garry set off for London. It was a six hour drive. I warned him that the roads would be treacherous and as usual I begged him to drive carefully. He patted my shoulder, kissed me and told me not to worry. He was a good driver, wasn’t he? he asked me. I agreed that he was. I did not, as a matter of fact, worry much about his having a crash on the road. I did not imagine the car going into a skid, shooting over the edge of a bank, turning over and over and bursting into flames, or else perhaps going head-on at seventy into a lorry. I was not afraid of anything so rational. As he got into the car I turned back into the house and quietly shut the door behind me.

Soon I began to wish that the snow would come, although I knew that it would be unpleasant for him to drive through, because there was a curious tension in waiting for it. It gave me the feeling that time had stopped and that the day and the solitary night ahead of me would never come to an end. But by the time that full darkness came and I went round the house, drawing the curtains, no snow had fallen yet. There was no wind either, but only a silent, lifeless chill that seeped into our big, old-fashioned rooms through the chinks round the badly fitting sash windows and the great blank panes of glass.

My father and I had steak and kidney pudding for dinner, followed by apple charlotte and custard and biscuits and cheese. Afterwards my father hobbled into the ‘sitting-room on his crutches to watch television for a while before going to bed, and when I had done the washing-up, I joined him. But the programme he was watching was not one that I cared about, and my usual devil of restlessness entered into me and I returned to the kitchen.

I made a chocolate cake of which Garry was particularly fond. I made a trifle with plenty of brandy in it. I made a chicken casserole with mushrooms, which I thought we could have for dinner the next evening. I made a plum tart, using some plums that I had bottled in the summer. I made an apricot flan. By then the kitchen was wonderfully warm from the heat of the oven and full of good smells, but it was ten minutes to ten and Garry had not rung up yet.

I leafed through one of my cookery books, looking for some-thing new to try. Then all of a sudden I decided that I had had enough of cooking and would vacuum the sitting-room carpet instead and give the furniture an extra good polishing. I knew my father would have gone to bed by then and the room would be empty.

I did the polishing first. There is something to be said for that heavy old mahogany. It does show results when you polish it. I quite enjoyed doing it. Then I got out the vacuum-cleaner and went to work on the carpet. I had all but finished when I realised that the door had opened and that my father, in his dressing-gown and leaning on his crutches, was in the doorway.

There was a puzzled sort of fury on his face. He said something to me that I did not hear because of the buzz of the vacuum-cleaner. I switched it off and in the silence the sound of his voice burst on me like a shout.

“You’re mad!” he roared at me. “Do you know that? That man’s driven you out of your mind. You were always weak in the head, but now you’re actually insane. What time do you think it is?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking. It’s just that I get restless when Garry goes away. I never get used to it.”

“You were used to it for long enough before you got married, weren’t you?” my father said. “You didn’t seem to mind being alone in those days. You didn’t start using that damned machine in the middle of the night.”

“It isn’t actually the middle of the night,” I said. “It’s only a little after half past ten. I didn’t think you’d want to go to sleep yet.”

“Who said I wanted to go to sleep?” he demanded. “I want to read and I want to read in peace. I can’t do it with that devil’s racket going on.”

“But you always read the paper while Mrs. Clarke uses the vacuum in the mornings,” I said.

He answered, “Of course I do. I know she’s got to use it. I know the house has to be kept clean and you can’t get a woman to go down on her knees nowadays and do a job of work like her mother did. I know all that. I’m not unreasonable. But there’s a time for everything. At half past ten at night I expect quiet. I’ve a right to quiet—even if I haven’t many other rights left in this house.”

“I’m sorry...” It occurred to me that half the things I said to my father used to begin with those words.

“Oh, you’re sorry.” His big, sallow face began to crumple as if he were about to cry. It sometimes did that in his attacks of self-pity, though tears never actually came. “D’you know what, you aren’t sorry at all. You’ve no heart. You do things like that on purpose, just to goad me, just to try to make me get angry. You know it isn’t good for me to get angry. You know about my heart. You know about my arteries. You know anything could happen to me any time if I ever lost control of my feelings. And you say you’re sorry!”

It was at times like this that I went silent. Something seemed to lock up everything inside me. I’m sure my face turned white, as Garry had told me it used to. I stood there, holding the handle of the vacuum-cleaner, thinking of all the things I might have done if I had been a different kind of woman. For, big as he was, my father was really very helpless. He was a great, half-lifeless, ruined hulk of a man. He was at my mercy. He had been for years. But I just stood there, silent

He began to turn away, moving clumsily on his crutches. But then he paused and looked straight into my face with his puzzled, fierce eyes.

“You’ll never understand,” he said. “You haven’t the brains to understand, and I’m no good at putting things. But I’ve always tried to do what was best for you. I’ve thought of you before anything else. I promised your dear mother I would, and I have, I swear to God I have. I tried as hard as I could to save you from getting into the clutches of that cheap little crook you married, and I’m trying still. I’m trying to go on living, though I’m pretty sick and tired of it, let me tell you, to stop him getting his hands on your money. Because you’ll give it all to him, every penny you’ve got, you’re so simple-minded. And as soon as you do, you’ll have seen the last of him. That’ll be the end for you. That’ll be the end of your fine daydream. But tell you that— what’s the use?”

I came to my senses then. It was the attack on Garry that did it. I remembered what he had told me to do. Quietly I wound up the cord of the vacuum-cleaner, wheeled it past my father out of the room, put it away in the cupboard under the stairs, and went up to my room.

My father called something after me, but I did not listen. I closed the door behind me, threw myself down on the bed and found that I was shaking all over. But inside I was joyful. I had won. I had been all by myself, scared, but I had won. Garry was right, I could always win. When I heard my father’s crutches thumping slowly across the hall downstairs as he returned to his room, I had to jam some of the eiderdown into my mouth to stop myself laughing aloud.

An eiderdown is full of feathers…

When I think of it I can still feel the rasp of the rose-coloured satin against my lips. The feathers seem to be choking me. I want to be sick.

It was nearly eleven o’clock and I was in bed reading when the telephone rang. I picked it up and the operator said, “Mr. Willis is calling you from London and wishes you to pay for the call. Will you accept the charge?”

Garry always did that when he rang me from Alec’s flat, so that the cost would go on our bill and not on Alec’s.

I said impatiently, “Yes, please go ahead.”