The Happy Prisoner (14 page)

“I wasn't going to,” she said. “I was going to say you're not really fit yet to have so many people in here all at once.”

“I know,” he said. “I love my family, but—Sunday lunch.… However, there's no stopping a habit like that once it's been started, is there?” They looked at each other for a moment, linked by a common appreciation of the delicacy of family relationships. “D'you know,” he said suddenly, “I believe if I could go somewhere with you, quite alone, I should get perfectly well. And that's not a compliment, just a tribute to your professional qualities.”

“Thanks,” she said, and picked up her tray.

“But I expect I should get awfully bored really,” he said. “Go away, I want to sleep.”

.…

Anne came back after dinner in a highly excitable state, with profuse apologies and explanations about where they had been and whom they had met. “Darling, I do wish you'd been there,” she said, sinking into the chair by his bed and lighting a cigarette. “We had such fun. But it's mean of me to say that. We'll have some fun tomorrow, shall we, you and I? What shall we do? We could play some games—backgammon or something, or whatever you like. What does one do with a man in bed?”

“You should know,” said Oliver, and Mrs. North, coming in with his hot milk and finding that her infectious giggle had set him off, reproved Anne for exciting Oliver at bedtime. He could remember her using almost the same words to an uncle who used to hurl him up to the ceiling in his childhood.

“We were just talking about playing backgammon,” he told her.

“Not now, dear,” she said. “Tomorrow it would be nice.”

The next day, Anne dutifully got out the backgammon board and had just found the dice when the telephone rang for her.

She came back looking rather sheepish. “That was Toby. He's going over to Bridgenorth to see some hunters and he wanted me to go with him.”

“Well, you're going, aren't you? You'll love it; you might get a ride. Borrow a pair of Vi's trousers.” He looked at her shape from the waist downwards. “No, perhaps not.”

“I'm not going, anyway, darling. I wouldn't dream of it. I told him I was spending the morning with you.”

“Don't be a chump. Ring him up again and tell him I say you're to go.”

“He's hanging on, as a matter of fact.”

.…

Gradually, Oliver saw less and less of Anne. She stayed on at Hinkley, using it as a base for outings with Toby. On Thursday morning she asked Oliver: “Would you mind awfully, darling, if I went back to town today instead of tomorrow? Toby's going down this afternoon and it seems silly to go in that fearful train when I might go by car.'

They parted affectionately, each pleased to think how satisfactorily they had got the other off their hands.

Can you
believe
it?” Mrs. Ogilvie asked Oliver piercingly. “Can you
believe
it?” Oliver waited patiently to hear what was to test his credulity this time. Mrs. Ogilvie, who dropped in now and again to keep him
au fait
with local gossip, had already asked him this question about the pepper shortage, a strike of bus conductresses, the engagement of two of the dullest people in Shropshire and the colour of Francis's new bathroom curtains.

“Of course, I don't want you to think I'm criticising your sister, but really, Oliver. Heather is queer in some ways. She's not a bit like she used to be. Oh, I know she's tired and all that what she'd do if she had six children like I had, I can't imagine. But can you
believe
that she's written to that poor John asking him to bring back butter and chocolate and rubber hot-water bottles from Australia?” She strode up and down in a blue gabardine mackintosh and her son's Commando beret, filling the room.

“I mean, when the poor man's been literally starving for nearly a year, it seems so heartless to think of that when all she should be thinking of is getting him home and getting him well.”

She paused just long enough for Oliver to say: “I don't see why. He's not starving now. He's living off the fat of Australia probably doing much better than we are.”

“No, but it's what I call the idea of it, the—” She snapped her lingers for a word, “the indelicacy, don't you see?” Unable to make him agree with her, she said: “Well, in any case, it's high time he did come home. Heather is getting so irritable and nervy, she's spoiling herself completely. If she goes on like this, he won't like her when he does get here.”

“Perhaps she won't like him,” suggested Oliver.

“Nonsense, my dear boy, of course she will. What she wants is a man.” Mrs. Ogilvie prided herself on not caring what she said. “What do you suppose is the reason for this Papist craze? It's a well-known thing, my dear—look at any adolescent girl. She doesn't seem to be getting much out of it, though, does she? What a rash step to take. If she wanted to go to church, why couldn't she have gone to Hinkley? Poor old Mr. Norris would have been delighted; he gets such tiny congregations. Why drag the Pope into it? And all these vows and things they have to take. Why not be a nun and have done with it? “Her questions were all rhetorical and her conversation ran itself. All you had to do was to lie back and be sapped by her vitality. If you volunteered any remark, however insignificant, she seized on it with such a strenuous “
Really
?”, and so much more excitement than it warranted, that you wished you had not spoken.

Violet barged in to get her cigarette lighter. “Oh—hullo,” she grunted and went out.

“First time I've seen that girl in a skirt for ages,” said Mrs. Ogilvie. “And indoors at this time of the morning too. What's wrong with her?”

“Perhaps her trousers have gone to the cleaners,” Oliver suggested.

“Oh, do you think so? Is that it? Yes, that might be it, mightn't it?” The Commando beret nodded vigorously. “Or do you think she's becoming a bit feminine at last? No, I don't think so,” she answered herself. “Not at her age. She's been like that for too long now. Can you
believe
that any girl could take so little trouble with herself? Tell me if I'm tiring you, won't you, dear boy?”

“Not a bit,” said Oliver faintly.

If Mrs. Ogilvie could have seen what Heather saw that evening, she would have found it even more incredible. Heather burst into Oliver's room, giving a fair imitation of his morning visitor.

“Can you believe it?” she cried. “Can you
believe
it? I've just caught Vi in front of the long glass in my room—with the light on, of course, waking up the children—and would you
believe
it—she was putting on lipstick!”

“Nonsense,” said Oliver.

“I swear it. True, she was wiping off as much as she put on—
with
one of my precious face tissues—but the fact remains she was trying.”

“By the way,” he asked. “Did she send her pants to the cleaners?”

“Not she. She likes them encrusted. Why?”

“She was wearing a skirt this morning. Mrs. O. saw her and nearly burst a blood-vessel. You know how she goes on.”

“Oh Lord, has that woman been here today? I suppose she came to let off steam to you about what I'd written to John. I met her in the village when I was posting the letter. I wish I hadn't told her about it. I thought it was a good idea, but she was horrified. Told me that it was things like that ruined a marriage.”

“You know what she is,” Oliver said. “Just because her own husband walked out on her, or, rather, had himself wheeled out in his bathchair, she can't bear anybody else's marriage to be a success.”

“Mm—yes,” said Heather thoughtfully, frowning under her fringe that was like a little straight-clipped hedge. Then she took a deep breath and said in a rush: “Ollie, I'm rather dreading John's coming home.”

“Why? D'you think he'll have changed so much?”

“It isn't that. After all, he's been a prisoner less than a year, and he's not the sort of man to be changed.”

“I know what you mean. He's stable. Outside things don't alter his character.”

“No,” she said. “Other people come back bitter, or irritable, or broody; but you'll see, Johnny'll come back with just as nice a nature as he went out.”

“It must take some living up to.” Oliver had spoken idly and was surprised to see by the quick turn of Heather's head that he had hit the mark.

“And you know,” she said, “you just can't quarrel with him. He won't. That's what makes it all so difficult. It's maddening when you feel like having a row and someone just sits there making bubbly noises with his pipe and saying: ‘Steady, old girl.'” She looked at Oliver propitiatingly, wanting him to condone. He said nothing and waited to see how much she would tell him.

“When I said I was dreading John's coming home,” she went on, sitting down and carefully pressing in the front pleats of her skirt so that she could talk without looking at him, “I meant that I didn't know what it was going to be like to be married to him again. It's all very well for people who are madly in love. Everyone pities them when their husbands go off to fight, but really they feel quite smug because they're sure of what it's going to be like when they come back. But if you're not sure—”

“For heaven's sake, Heather,” interrupted Oliver, “don't try to tell me that you and John aren't madly in love. The whole of Shropshire knows you are. It's a kind of creed.”

“Oh, we are, of course—as much as two people can be when they started discovering things about each other. I'm not sure it's a good thing to be in love before you marry; it gives you the wrong ideas.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, you know. You've been in love with people. You know how they give out a kind of glow for you, which makes them more exciting than other people. You can spot them coming a mile off, and if you see the back of a head rather like theirs in the street, that glows too, a bit, until you see the face.”

“I know what you mean,” Oliver said. “It's a sort of enchantment they have for you. It colours everything they say and do and wear. It even comes through on the telephone, I used to find.”

“Yes, that's what it is. That's what being in love is, isn't it? But listen—Ollie,”—Heather began to wail a little—“how can someone go on being enchanted when you live with them day by day and hour by hour? It's when you start letting yourself notice things that you were too dazzled to see before, that's when it starts to go.”

Oliver was surprised by the sadness in her tone. “You shouldn't talk like this, darling,” he said. “It doesn't get you anywhere. You're probably exaggerating, anyway. You're tired, you've got the responsibility of the kids all on your own, you've had five years of war, and the worry about John.” All the old facile arguments.

She brushed them aside. “It's nothing to do with that. It's something that happens to every marriage. I know that now. I've watched other people. No one's given a perfect marriage; you have to make it for yourselves out of some very unpromising situations. The point is not what you've got, but what you make of what you've got. Lord, I sound like someone preaching, don't I? I'm the last one to preach, because John and I just haven't been able to make it. That's what's been so disillusioning, to find out how inadequate we are. Are you bored, Ollie?”

“Of course not, go on.”

.…

“I've never talked to anyone like this,” said Heather nervously. “Least of all John. That's been one of our big mistakes: we don't admit things. I've never been able to make him have anything out, even that silly business about Hugh Aitcheson—remember?—when we were engaged. John was so damnably tolerant. I was just spoiling for a colossal row, but John simply refused to talk
about Hugh, and then when Hugh had drifted out of the picture, John and I just drifted back together again with everything unsaid and me feeling rather a fool.

I was a fool too. Lord, what a fool I was to think that all you had to do was to marry someone you loved and you could sit back and be happy ever after, amen. I was quite nice in those days too; at least, I felt nicer than I do now. But as John started to get on my nerves, I started to get irritable, and then, of course, he wasn't liking me any better than I was liking him. He never showed it, but I could feel him getting disappointed in me. He can't have loved me for my brain; I believe—but that was one of the things he never talked about—I believe he loved me for my sunny little nature and the air of artless youth which I detect in photographs of myself before marriage. But when the sunniness went, what was there behind it? He'd married a wife with no depth. I suppose I haven't got any, though God knows I try. I'm not quite sure what depth is.

Oh, the first year wasn't too bad really. A lot of it was lovely, as a matter of fact, with everything new and exciting. John was in Dorset, and I used to dash down there when he wasn't dashing up to London. We really were happy in that ridiculous little flat up there, which used to sway if anything dropped too close. I remember the warden used to batter on our door to try and make us go down to the shelter at night, but we wouldn't, until there was that terrific blast and the flat sucked in its teeth. I was expecting David then, you see.

They say children bind a marriage together, like glue, or the egg you put in rissoles, don't they? They're dead wrong. I can date the beginning of our discord from the beginning of David—at least from the time when he began to affect me. I used to get tired and cross and hot and sick of myself, and I was getting pig-faced, but John would insist on treating me as a sort of Madonna. I used to stick my feet up on a sofa and wail at him to fetch me things, and, silly ass, he used to fetch them instead of tipping up the sofa and telling me what the doctor said about exercise. But he's so good, you see, John is, so much too good for me, besides being cleverer, and all the time I was getting to feel inferior.