Devices and Desires (16 page)

But it was in that beautifully designed and equipped, but comfortable and homely kitchen at Martyr’s Cottage that she had found her healing. Early in their friendship, when Alice had to spend a week in London and Alex was away, she had given Meg one of her spare keys to the cottage so that she could go in to collect and forward her post. On her return, when Meg offered it back, she had said: “Better keep it. You may need it again.” Meg had never again used it. The door was usually open in summer, and when it was shut she would always ring. But its possession, the sight and weight of it on her key ring, had come to symbolize for her the certainty and the trust of their friendship. She had been so long without a woman friend. She had forgotten—sometimes she told herself that she had never before known—the comfort of a close, undemanding, asexual companionship with another woman. Before the accidental drowning of her husband four years earlier, she and Martin had needed only the occasional companionship of friendly acquaintances to affirm their self-sufficiency. Theirs had been one of those childless, self-absorbing marriages which unconsciously repels attempts at intimacy. The occasional dinner party was a social duty; they could hardly wait to get back to the seclusion of their own small house. And after his death it seemed to her that she had walked in darkness like an automaton through a deep and narrow canyon of grief in which all her energies, all her physical strength, had been husbanded to get through each day. She thought and worked and grieved only for a day at a time. To allow herself even to think of the days, the weeks, the months or years stretching ahead would have been to precipitate disaster. For two years she had hardly been sane.
Even her Christianity was of little help. She didn’t reject it, but it had become irrelevant, its comfort only a candle which served fitfully to illumine the dark. But when, after those two years, the valley had almost imperceptibly widened and there was for the first time, not those black enclosing cliffs, but the vista of a normal life, even of happiness, a landscape over which it was possible to believe the sun might shine, she had become unwittingly embroiled in the racial politics of her school. The older members of staff had moved or retired, and the new headmistress, specifically appointed to enforce the fashionable orthodoxies, had moved in with crusading zeal to smell out and eradicate heresy. Meg realized now that she had, from the first, been the obvious, the predestined victim.

She had fled to this new life on the headland and to a different solitude. And here she had found Alice Mair. They had met a fortnight after Meg’s arrival, when Alice had called at the Old Rectory with a suitcase of jumble for the annual sale in aid of St. Andrew’s Church in Lydsett. There was an unused scullery leading off from a passage between the kitchen and the back door which was used as a collecting point for unwanted items from the headland: clothes, bric-a-brac, books and old magazines. Mr. Copley took an occasional service at St. Andrew’s when Mr. Smollett, the vicar, was on holiday, an involvement in church and village life which, Meg suspected, was as important to him as it was to the church. Normally little jumble could be expected from the few cottages on the headland, but Alex Mair, anxious to associate the power station with the community, had put up a notice on the staff board and the two tea chests were usually fairly full by the time the October sale came round. The back door of the Old Rectory, giving access to the scullery, was as a rule left open during daylight hours and an inner door to the house locked, but
Alice Mair had knocked at the front door and made herself known. The two women, close in age, both reserved, both independent, neither deliberately seeking a friend, had liked each other. The next week Meg had received an invitation to dinner at Martyr’s Cottage. And now there was rarely a day when she didn’t walk the half-mile over the headland to sit in Alice’s kitchen and talk and watch while she worked.

Her colleagues at school would, she knew, have found their friendship incomprehensible. Friendship there, or what passed for friendship, had never crossed the great divide of political allegiance and in the acrimonious clamour of the staff room could swiftly deteriorate into gossip, rumours, recriminations and betrayal. This peaceable friendship, asking nothing, was as devoid of intensity as it was of anxiety. It was not a demonstrative friendship; they had never kissed, had never indeed touched hands except at that first meeting. Meg wasn’t sure what it was that Alice valued in her, but she knew what she valued in Alice. Intelligent, well read, unsentimental, unshockable, she had become the focus of Meg’s life on the headland.

She seldom saw Alex Mair. During the day he was at the power station, and at weekends, reversing the normal peregrination, he was at his London flat, frequently staying there for part of the week if he had a meeting in town. She had never felt that Alice had deliberately kept them apart, fearing that her brother would be bored by her friend. In spite of all the traumas of the last three years, Meg’s inner self was too confidently rooted to be prone to that kind of sexual or social self-abasement. But she had never felt at home with him, perhaps because, with his confident good looks and the air of arrogance in his bearing, he seemed both to represent and to have absorbed something of the mystery and potency of the power he operated. He was perfectly amiable to her on the few
occasions when they did meet; sometimes she even felt that he liked her. But their only common ground was in the kitchen of Martyr’s Cottage, and even there she was always more at home when he was away. Alice never spoke of him except casually, but on the few occasions, like last night’s dinner party, when she had seen them together, they seemed to have the intuitive mutual awareness, an instinctive response to the other’s needs, more typical of a long-standing successful marriage than of an apparently casual fraternal relationship.

And for the first time in nearly three years she had been able to talk about Martin. She remembered that July day, the kitchen door open to the patio, the scent of herbs and sea stronger even than the spicy, buttery smell of newly baked biscuits. She and Alice had sat opposite each other, across the kitchen table, the teapot between them. She could remember every word.

“He didn’t get many thanks. Oh, they said how heroic he was and the headmaster said all the right things at the school memorial service. But they thought that the boys shouldn’t have been swimming there anyway. The school disclaimed any responsibility for his death. They were more anxious to escape criticism than to honour Martin. And the boy he saved hasn’t turned out very well. I suppose I’m silly to worry about that.”

“It would be perfectly natural to hope that your husband hadn’t died for someone second-rate, but I suppose the boy has a point of view. It could be an awesome responsibility knowing that someone has died for you.”

Meg said: “I tried to tell myself that. For a time I was—well, almost obsessed with that boy. I used to hang about the school waiting for him to come out. Sometimes I had the need almost to touch him. It was as if some part of Martin had passed into him. But he was only embarrassed, of course.
He didn’t want to see me or talk to me, he or his parents. He wasn’t, in fact, a very nice boy, a bully and rather stupid. I don’t think Martin even liked him, although he never said so. He was spotty, too—oh dear, that wasn’t his fault, I don’t know why I even mentioned it.”

And she had wondered how it was she was speaking of him at all. For the first time in three years. And that business about her obsession with him—she had never mentioned that to a living soul.

Alice had said: “It’s a pity your husband didn’t leave him to drown and save himself, but I suppose that on the spur of the moment he didn’t weigh up the relative value of a useful teaching career and pimpled stupidity.”

“Leave him to drown? Deliberately? Oh, Alice, you know you couldn’t do that yourself.”

“Perhaps not. I’m perfectly capable of irrational folly. I’d probably pull him out if I could do it without too much danger to myself.”

“Of course you would. It’s human instinct, surely, to save others, particularly a child.”

“It’s human instinct, and a thoroughly healthy one in my view, to save oneself. That’s why, when people don’t, we call them heroes and give them medals. We know they’re acting against nature. I can’t understand how you can have such an extraordinarily benign view of the universe.”

“Have I? I suppose I have. Except for the two years after Martin drowned, I’ve always been able to believe that at the heart of the universe there is love.”

“At the heart of the universe there is cruelty. We are predators and are preyed upon, every living thing. Did you know that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds, piercing the weak spot in their armour? Then the grub grows and feeds on the living
ladybird and eats its way out, tying the ladybird’s legs together. Whoever thought of that has, you have to admit, a peculiar sense of humour. And don’t quote Tennyson at me.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t feel anything, the ladybird.”

“Well, it’s a comforting thought but I wouldn’t bet on it. You must have had an extraordinarily happy childhood.”

“Oh, I did, I did! I was lucky. I would have liked brothers and sisters, but I don’t remember that I was ever lonely. There wasn’t much money, but there was a great deal of love.”

“Love. Is that so very important? You were a teacher, you ought to know. Is it?”

“It’s vital. If a child has it for the first ten years, hardly anything else matters. If he hasn’t, then nothing does.”

There had been a moment’s silence and then Alice had said: “My father died, killed in an accident when I was fifteen.”

“How terrible. What kind of accident. Were you there? Did you see it?”

“He cut an artery with a billhook. He bled to death. No, we didn’t see it, but we were on the scene soon afterwards. Too late, of course.”

“Alex too, and he was even younger. How awful for you both.”

“It had its effect on our lives undoubtedly, particularly mine. Why don’t you try one of those biscuits? It’s a new recipe, but I’m not sure that it’s entirely successful. A little too sweet, and I may have overdone the spice. Tell me what you think.”

Recalled to the present by the cold of the flagstones numbing her feet, and automatically aligning the cup handles, she suddenly realized why she had remembered that summer tea-time in Martyr’s Cottage. The biscuits she would add to the tray next morning were a later batch of the same recipe provided by Alice. But she wouldn’t take them from the tin until tomorrow. There was nothing more to do tonight except to fill
her hot-water bottle. There was no central heating in the Old Rectory, and she seldom switched on the two-bar electric fire in her bedroom, knowing how worried the Copleys were by their fuel bills. Finally, hugging the bottle’s warmth to her chest, she checked on the bolts of the front and back doors and made her way up the uncarpeted stairs to bed. On the landing she met Mrs. Copley, dressing-gowned, scurrying furtively to the bathroom. Although there was a cloakroom on the ground floor, the Old Rectory had only one bathroom, a defect which necessitated embarrassed, low-voiced enquiries before anyone upset their carefully worked-out rota by taking an unexpected bath. Meg waited until she heard the main-bedroom door shut before going herself to the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later she was in bed. She knew rather than felt that she was very tired and recognized the symptoms of an overstimulated brain in an exhausted body, the restless limbs and inability to get comfortable. The Old Rectory was too far inland for her to hear the crash of the waves, but the smell and the throb of the sea were always present. In summer the headland would vibrate with a gentle rhythmic humming which, on stormy nights or at the spring tides, would rise to an angry moan. She slept always with her window open and would drift into sleep soothed by that distant murmur. But tonight it had no power to lull her into unconsciousness. Her bedside book, often reread, was Anthony Trollope’s
The Small House at Allington
, but tonight it could no longer translate her to the reassuring, comfortable, nostalgic world of Barsetshire, to croquet on Mrs. Dale’s lawn and dinner at the squire’s table. The memories of the evening were too traumatic, too exciting, too recent to be easily assuaged by sleep. She opened her eyes to the darkness, a darkness too often populated before sleep by those familiar, reproachful, childish faces, brown, black and
white, bending over her, asking why she had deserted them when they loved her and thought that she had loved them. Usually it was a relief to be free of those gentle and accusing ghosts, which in the last few months had visited her less often. And sometimes they were replaced by a more traumatic memory. The headmistress had tried to insist that she go on a racial-awareness course, she who had taught children of different races for over twenty years. There was one scene which for months she had tried resolutely to put out of her mind, that last meeting in the staff room, the circle of implacable faces, brown, black and white, the accusing eyes, the insistent questions. And in the end, worn down by bullying, she had found herself helplessly weeping. No nervous breakdown, that useful euphemism, had been more humiliating.

But tonight even that shameful memory was replaced by more recent and more disquieting visions. She glimpsed again that girlish figure momentarily outlined against the walls of the abbey only to slip away like a wraith and be lost among the shadows of the beach. She sat again at the dinner table and saw in the candlelight Hilary Robarts’s dark discontented eyes staring intently at Alex Mair, watched the planes of Miles Lessingham’s face fitfully lit by the leaping flames of the fire, saw his long-fingered hands reaching down for the bottle of claret, heard again that measured rather high voice speaking the unspeakable. And then, on the verge of sleep, she was crashing with him through the bushes of that dreadful wood, feeling the briars scratching her legs, the low twigs whipping against her cheeks, staring with him as the pool of light from the torch shone down on that grotesque and mutilated face. And in that twilight world between waking and sleeping she saw that it was a face she knew, her own. She jerked back to consciousness with a little
cry of terror, switched on the bedside lamp, reached out for her book and began resolutely to read. Half an hour later the book slipped out of her hand and she fell into the first of the night’s uneasy periods of slumber.