The Happy Prisoner (40 page)

He heard the stable clock strike one and two, and by the time it struck three the gathering cloud of black depression had submerged him completely. But no one was going to pander to his ego if he had a mood'now. No one was going to be bothered with his whims and try to coax him with special food and ask him whether he would like a bottle of wine opened. He would not even get the gratifying appreciation of a relieved household when the mood lifted. Probably no one would know he had had one. Serve him right. He wished that he was older, now that he appeared to be doomed for the rest of his life to useless introversion, since what he had thought was useful extroversion had failed so miserably. He would never get better, of course; that always went without saying when he had a
cafard
, and he would grow into a querulous old man who was bandied around the family, a nuisance to everybody, unable to die, and when he did, without even any money to leave to the people who had looked after him.

On top of all her other extra work, Elizabeth had remembered to make his tea. Oliver eyed the thermos sourly. Trust her not to forget a thing. What right had anyone to be so perfect? It seemed almost like an accusation. He was beginning to understand more and more how Heather had felt after her disastrous mismanagement of Lady Sandys. How could he go on living in the same house with John? But he had no Stanford Black to run away to. Perhaps he would run to Mary Brewer's pub—run on one leg and go hopping into her bedroom that would have dark leaning furniture with big knobs, and a rush mat by the washstand. Mary Brewer would sit up in a narrow bed in pleased surprise, wearing green stockinette pyjamas and a hair-net. Her underclothes would be lying over a chair. He could see the suspender belt and the black woollen stockings she wore with her uniform.

All the same, he thought grudgingly, it was a good thing Elizabeth had made the tea. He poured himself a cup, took one sip and hurled the rest out on to the lawn. The tea was half cold; she had not screwed the cap on properly. So you're not so efficient after all, he thought, illogically quite pleased, in
spite of having no tea, to catch someone else out in a fault, however slight.

Mrs. Ogilvie could not, of course, be kept away for ever. Two days after Heather's flight, when there was still no word from her to say where she was or what she intended to do, Mrs. Ogilvie arrived with a book for Oliver, all about the spiritual adventures, mostly depressing ones, of a mutilated soldier. With her unerring instinct for trouble, she had no sooner stepped into the hall than she scented that something was wrong. She nosed about until she thought she had tracked it down.

“And where is Heather?” she asked, when Elizabeth, with the children hanging onto her skirts, brought the tea-tray into Oliver's room.

“Why,” said Mrs. North quickly, a little too quickly, “she's gone to stay with friends in town,
mm-hm
. Elizabeth's looking after the children.”

“
Really?
” asked Mrs. Ogilvie. “Now, isn't that nice for her? I'm sure she can do with a change from domesticity.” She did not ask why Mrs. North's eyes were so red behind the pince-nez and her puffy cheeks unsuccessfully camouflaged with so many layers of white powder. She did not ask why John refused anchovy toast and sat staring into space with his hands hanging, jumping and answering at random when he was addressed, nor why Oliver was in such a bad temper that he did not even look at the title of the book before putting it down on his table, but her busy eyes said it all for her.

When Elizabeth came to fetch David for his bath, although he went readily enough, he had to say: “When is Mummy coming home?”.

“Soon, my lamb,” said his grandmother.

“No, but when? I say
when
?” David dragged against Elizabeth's hand. “Termorrow? Day after? Day after day after day after that?” John looked like the Spartan boy who had a fox under his shirt.

“She'll come home soon,” said Elizabeth, bending down. “You'd like her to have a nice long holiday and enjoy herself, wouldn't you?”

“She never said goodbye to me,” protested David in the whine which he had recently developed because he had discovered that it exasperated Heather into giving him what he wanted.

“Come along, dear,” said Elizabeth brightly. “Listen! I can hear your bath running.” As she took him away, Mrs. Ogilvie gave herself a brisk little nod, which plainly said: “There
is something funny going on round here.” Indeed, a less acute perception than hers could have sensed the distressed atmosphere of the house.

She had just time to circulate her suspicions in the neighbourhood when, as if to confound her, Heather came home. She came home very late at night in a hired car, which she stopped at the far end of the drive, and she let herself in quietly and crept into Oliver's dark room with a quick: “Don't be frightened, Ollie, it's me. I don't want to see anyone else yet.” He was inordinately pleased that she had come straight to him. Although she could not know of his responsibility in the affair, it seemed that because she came to him and said:' “I want to talk to you first,” he was forgiven.

“Well,” he said, not knowing what to say. “Well, have you come back for good, or just to get your toothbrush?”

“For good,” she said in a small voice. “No, don't turn on the light. Can I sit on your bed; it doesn't hurt you now, does' it?” She perched on the end of his high bed and he could see her outline dimly against the night sky. Her head, with its clumpy shape of soft hair, was framed in one open casement of the side, window of the bay. She twisted and put her head out, leaning her hands on the sill and breathing deeply.

“Mm,” she said turning back again, “it's good to smell the garden. I feel as if I'd been away ages. I've been staying in such a horrid hotel, Ollie, in Kidderminster of all places. It makes the whole thing sound like a music-hall joke, doesn't it? My window had loops of dirty lace curtains and looked out over a yard where cats made love in the dustbins. The cupboard door wouldn't stay shut unless you put a chair against it and there was a spider that came up the waste pipe of the basin.”

Oliver was so bursting with a question that he thought she must have heard him thinking it.

She gave a little laugh. “I know what you want to ask. No, he wasn't. In fact we haven't been together at all, except just at the party, and I didn't stay there long. I hadn't wanted to go at all, but of course we had to, as he was the host. No one will believe me, I know, but I've spent these three days all on my own. How are my children?”

“Blooming. Haven't missed you at all.”

“I suppose I ought to say it was the thought of the poor little motherless darlings that brought me back, but it wasn't that specially. I just came because I wanted to. Ollie—” She paused looked down and plucked at his eiderdown. “I've had the most extraordinary experience.”

“What?” he asked, and waited for her to find the words to begin.

“It happened at the party, of all the unlikely places. It was in the bar of that dreadful roadhouse—you know—the Spotted Dog. All little triangular glass tables and chromium chairs and notices saying: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we'll have a hangover.'” All the time she was talking she was plucking feathers busily out of his eiderdown, as if it were an important task.

.…

“How shall I tell you?” she asked, throwing back her head and looking at the ceiling for inspiration. “Shall I begin at the beginning? I don't know how much John's told you. You know what we rowed about? Oh yes, I suppose he told you ages ago, long before he screwed himself up to telling me.

I was livid. You know how it's been with us for ages—ever since he came back really. I did try, honestly I did, though I know you won't believe me, but I just felt so—so
wrong
all the time—nervy and jumpy and seething inside and ready to fly off the handle the moment anyone, particularly John, spoke to me. I did try, Ollie. I used to go to church and pray and pray, and then when it didn't make me feel any better I felt let down. I mean, I'd thought that being a Catholic was going to help me, like it did Blanche Arnold, and when I found it didn't, I felt I'd got no one on my side and I didn't see how I was going to go on. I had nothing. Not that I expected to see a vision of the Virgin Mary wreathed in roses or be wafted up to heaven in a kneeling position or anything like that, but I wanted help—guidance, peace, self-control, whatever you like to call it—and I wasn't getting it.

That business about Muffet put the lid on it, as you know. I felt ghastly about it, and because I was accusing myself all the time, I tried to vent my mortification by accusing everyone else of accusing me, though I daresay they weren't. I went and confessed it all right, but it didn't make me feel any better. It made me feel worse, in fact, to think that what I'd been taught to believe in was just so much meaningless ritual. I was just about at the end of my tether when John sprung his little fairy story on me. Poor darling, he did tell it so badly. I'm sure it was very romantic, but he made it sound anything but.

It was the last straw. I had been thinking of clearing out before, you know, because I felt I couldn't cope with this house any longer, and Stanford had made the sinful suggestion more than once, and it made me so mad to think that some small dregs of loyalty had kept me here faithful, while all the time John had
put one over on me. I just boiled over. I never thought twice about going; I just went. I
couldn't
have stayed here. Could you, Ollie, under the circumstances?

I didn't plan ahead—separation—divorce—I didn't think as far as that. I just thought I'd clear out with Stanford and then decide what to do. I didn't mean to come back. I know none of you like Stanny, but I've always been fond of him. We get on very well together and he'd always been sweet to me. It was refreshing to get a bit of expressive, stimulating admiration instead of just dumb devotion. That makes me a typical magazine heroine, I suppose. Depressing, isn't it, to think that all women have a standard set of reactions? I thought it would all be so easy, just to drop everything and live in the present for a bit. Even John had done it, after all, and he seemed to have a pretty good time.

Well, Stanford was thrilled, of course, in a rather triumphant, I knew-you'd-come-to-your-senses-sooner-or-later kind of way. We went to this rather grim party. I never have liked his friends particularly. They're all right on a party, and I've got on quite well with them and had fun, but that night I just couldn't stand them, especially that Doris woman with the teeth and the violet lipstick. They seemed so commonplace. Of course, they couldn't know the terrific thing I'd done and what I was feeling like. You know how you feel when you've been in a skid and fetched up half an inch off a telegraph pole—shaken and trembling and sick. I felt like that, and every time I thought about John and Elizabeth finding those letters and what you'd all say, I felt even sicker. I knew I'd never be able to go back. It seemed more and more irrevocable, and that made me feel sad. Then when I'd had a drink or two, some poisonous concoction of that familiar barman with the drooping eyelid, I felt sicker and sadder still.

Stanford was being awfully sweet to me. He kept coming up and whispering that we'd clear out soon; he knew where we would go. He said he'd got a room all fixed up for us at a quiet hotel on the river and we'd go there over the week-end and discuss what we'd do when he had to go back to Ockney. One thing I must say, he's very efficient in a situation like that. He made it all so easy. Lots of practice, I suppose.

‘Happy?' he kept asking, and I'd say yes, rather,' but I wasn't at all. The thought of him suddenly wasn't giving me any comfort. You may laugh, but it's been a comfort all this time to know there's someone around who thinks you're marvellous and is only too ready to tell you so, and that you're not appreciated by your husband. Just what you want to hear. But
now that I'd got him I found I didn't want him, not awfully, and he was all I had got. No wonder I felt sad.

Everyone had gone through to the restaurant to dance. Stanford and I were alone. He'd gone to the bar to get another drink, and it was then it happened. I always thought that kind of thing only happened in church, and I expect you did, but, d'you know, it doesn't.

How will I tell you? How can I make you understand? Promise you won't laugh or scoff, or, if you want to, wait till afterwards.

Well … well, you know one jabbers a lot of automatic stuff about the Peace of God which Passeth all Understanding, and parsons with plums in their mouths intone it at you on the wireless and it doesn't mean a thing. I suddenly—there in that sordid bar—I knew what it meant. I felt it, Ollie. I didn't realise at first. I just felt warm and comfortable and not unhappy about the future any more. It was like someone making a fuss of you when you don't feel well; like someone taking your hand—someone friendly, who you're sure knows more than you do about everything—and saying: It's all right; you don't have to worry. I'll look after everything.' That was all. That was my extraordinary experience. I expect you think it was the drink. Well, you can if you like.

All that struggling and frustration I'd been through in church, going all the wrong way about it, strenuously saying all the prayers without properly knowing what they meant, thinking that I could achieve something by getting up early in the cold and saying ten decades of the rosary very fast and putting rather more than I could afford into the plate—after all that, what I'd been trying for just happened to me in that bar without my doing a thing about it.

I felt all right then. I told Stanford I wasn't going with him, and I was able to argue quite calmly; it all seemed rather remote and unimportant. I didn't tell him why, of course; he'd have thought I was tight, like I expect you do. I told him I couldn't leave the children and that I hadn't the guts to leave my security and face social ostracism. I didn't want to hurt his feelings by making him think I didn't want him. Of course he was hurt—any man would be—and he kept on asking me why I'd suddenly changed my mind, but in the end he was awfully nice about it, and offered to drive me home. Like a fool, I never thought that if I went home then I'd be in time totear up the letters; I could have made some excuse to go into Elizabeth's room and sneak them out of her overall. I only knew that I didn't want to come home yet; I wasn't ready. I wanted to go somewhere quite on
my own, where no one could get at me till I'd thought things out.