Night Over Water (14 page)

 

She never did tell Mervyn.

Mark’s inventive mind came up with the solution, and she rehearsed it as she drove home, calm and collected and quietly determined.

Mervyn was in his pajamas and dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and listening to music on the wireless. “That were a bloody long visit,” he said mildly.

Only a little nervous, Diana said: “I had to drive terribly slowly.” She swallowed, took a deep breath and said: “I’m going away tomorrow.”

He was faintly surprised. “Where to?”

“I’d like to visit Thea and see the twins. I want to make sure she’s all right, and there’s no telling when I’ll get another chance: the trains are already becoming irregular and petrol rationing starts next week.”

He nodded assent. “Aye, you’re right. Better go now while you can.”

“I’ll go up and pack a case.”

“Pack one for me, will you?”

For an awful moment she thought he wanted to go with her. “What for?” she said, aghast.

“I’ll not sleep in an empty house,” he said. “I’ll stop at the Reform Club tomorrow night. You’ll be back Wednesday?”

“Yes, Wednesday,” she lied.

“All right.”

She went upstairs. As she put his underwear and socks into a small suitcase, she thought: It’s the last time I’ll ever do this for him. She folded a white shirt and picked out a silver-gray tie: somber colors suited his dark hair and brown eyes. She was relieved that he had accepted her story, but she also felt frustrated, as if there were something she had left undone. She realized that although she was terrified of confronting him, she also wanted to explain why she was leaving him. She needed to tell him that he had let her down, he had become overbearing and thoughtless, he no longer cherished her as he once had. But now she never would say those things to him, and she felt oddly disappointed.

She closed his case and began to put makeup and toiletries into her sponge bag. It seemed a funny way to end five years of marriage, packing socks and toothpaste and cold cream.

After a while Mervyn came upstairs. The packing was all done and she was in her least attractive nightdress, sitting in front of her dressing table mirror, taking off her makeup. He came up behind her and grasped her breasts.

Oh, no, she thought, not tonight, please!

Although she was horrified, her body responded immediately, and she blushed guiltily. Mervyn’s fingers squeezed her swelling nipples, and she drew in her breath in a small gasp of pleasure and despair. He took her hands and drew her up. She followed helplessly as he led her to the bed. He turned out the light, and they lay down in pitch-blackness. He mounted her immediately and made love to her with a kind of furious desperation, almost as if he knew she was going away from him and there was nothing he could do about it. Her body betrayed her and she thrilled with pleasure and shame. She realized with extreme mortification that she would have reached orgasm with two men in two hours, and she tried to stop herself, but she could not.

When she came, she cried.

Fortunately, Mervyn did not notice.

 

As Diana sat in the elegant lounge of the South-Western Hotel on Wednesday morning, waiting for a taxi to take Mark and her to Berth 108 in Southampton Docks to board the Pan American Clipper, she felt triumphant and free.

Everyone in the room was either looking at her or trying not to look at her. She was getting a particularly hard stare from a handsome man in a blue suit who must be ten years younger than she was. But she was used to that. It always happened when she looked good, and today she was stunning. Her cream-and-red dotted silk dress was fresh, summery and striking. Her cream shoes were right and the straw hat finished the outfit off perfectly. Her lipstick and nail varnish were orange-red like the dots on the dress. She had thought about red shoes but decided they would look tarty.

She loved traveling: packing and unpacking her clothes, meeting new people, being pampered and cosseted and plied with champagne and food, and seeing new places. She was nervous about flying, but crossing the Atlantic was the most glamorous voyage of all, for at the other end was America. She could hardly wait to get there. She had a filmgoer’s picture of what it was like: she saw herself in an Art Deco apartment, all windows and mirrors, with a uniformed maid helping her put on a white fur coat and a long black car in the street outside with its engine running and a colored chauffeur waiting to take her to a nightclub, where she would order a martini, very dry, and dance to a jazz band that had Bing Crosby as its singer. That was a fantasy, she knew; but she could hardly wait to discover the reality.

She felt ambivalent about leaving Britain just as the war was starting. It seemed a cowardly thing to do, yet she was thrilled to be going.

She knew a lot of Jewish people. Manchester had a big Jewish community: the Manchester Jews had planted a thousand trees in Nazareth. Diana’s Jewish friends watched the progress of events in Europe with horror and dread. It was not just the Jews, either: the Fascists hated the coloreds, and the Gypsies, and the queers, and anyone else who disagreed with Fascism. Diana had an uncle who was queer and he had always been kind to her and treated her like a daughter.

She was too old to join up, but she probably ought to stay in Manchester and do volunteer work, winding bandages for the Red Cross....

That was a fantasy, even more unlikely than dancing to Bing Crosby. She was not the type to wind bandages. Austerity and uniforms did not suit her.

But none of that was truly important. The only thing that counted was that she was in love. She would go where Mark was. She would have followed him into the heart of a battlefield if necessary. They were going to get married and have children. He was going home, and she was going with him.

She would miss her twin nieces. She wondered how long it would be before she would see them. They might be grown up next time, wearing perfume and brassieres instead of ankle socks and pigtails.

But she might have little girls of her own....

She was thrilled about traveling on the Pan American Clipper. She had read all about it in the
Manchester Guardian,
never dreaming that one day she would actually fly in it. To get to New York in little more than a day seemed like a miracle.

She had written Mervyn a note. It did not say any of the things she wanted to tell him; did not explain how he had slowly and inexorably lost her love through carelessness and indifference; did not even say that Mark was wonderful.

She could not think of an appropriate way to sign off—she could not write:
Yours
or
With love—so
she just put:
Diana.

At first she had intended to leave the note in the house, on the kitchen table. Then she had become obsessed by the possibility that he would change his plans, and instead of staying at his club on Tuesday night, he would go home, and find the note, and make some kind of trouble for her and Mark before they were out of the country. So in the end she had mailed it to him at the factory, where it would arrive today.

She looked at her wristwatch (a present from Mervyn, who liked her to be punctual). She knew his routine: he spent most of the morning on the factory floor; then toward midday he would go up to his office and look through the mail before going to lunch. She had marked the envelope PERSONAL so that his secretary would not open it. It would be lying on his desk in a pile of invoices, orders, letters and memos. He would be reading it about now. The thought made her guilty and sad, but also relieved that she was two hundred miles away.

“Our taxi’s here,” Mark said.

She felt a little nervous. Across the Atlantic in a plane!

“Time to go,” he said.

She suppressed her anxiety. She put down her coffee cup, stood up and gave him her brightest smile. “Yes,” she said happily. “Time to fly.”

 

“Ayuh,
”
she said, and Eddie realized she was from his part of the world.

But Eddie knew nothing of this at the time. He felt like a king with her on his arm. He took her to dinner, then back to her apartment in a taxi. On the
doorstep he thanked her for a nice evening and screwed
up
his courage to
kiss
her cheek, whereupon she burst into tears
and
said he was the first decent man she had met in New York. Before he knew what he was saying, he had asked her for another date.

She had been sitting on the couch, wearing a denim work shirt that belonged to him and not much else, her long, suntanned legs stretched out in front, her fine fair hair lying across her shoulders like a shawl. She was reading a magazine. Her breasts were normally quite small, but lately they had
swollen. He felt an urge to touch them, and he thought: Why not? So he slid
his hand inside the shirt and touched her nipple. She looked up at him and smiled lovingly, then went on with her reading.