The Lake of Darkness (10 page)

In her absence, the week passed with a dreary plodding slowness. She dominated his thoughts. Why had she asked for his promise not to look at the local paper? He hadn’t given it. Had he done so he would have adhered to his promise, but he hadn’t and she, strangely enough, hadn’t insisted. It occurred to him that the truth might be she really wanted him to see the
Post
, half-feared it, half-desired it, because it was to contain some story about herself, flattering to herself. Francesca was very modest and diffident. Could it be that she was shy of his seeing praise of her? She might have been taking part in some contest, he thought, or succeeding with honours in some examination. And he indulged in a little fantasy in which a photograph of Francesca covered the paper’s front page with a caption
underneath to the effect that this was London’s loveliest flower seller.

The postman and Mr. Cochrane arrived simultaneously. Mr. Cochrane greeted Martin dourly, said nothing about his sister-in-law, got to work at once on the windows with chamois leather and soapy water. Martin opened the letter with the Battersea postmark. It was from Mr. Deepdene. Here was no misapprehension, no paranoia, no getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. Mr. Deepdene wrote that he had never known such kindness in all his seventy-four years, he was overwhelmed, it was unbelievable. At first he had thought of refusing Martin’s offer, it was too generous, but now it seemed ungrateful, even wrong, to turn it down. He would accept with a full heart. Martin shut himself in his bedroom, away from Mr. Cochrane, wrote a rapid note to Mr. Deepdene and put into the envelope with it a cheque for fifteen thousand pounds. Then he wrote to Miss Watson, asking her to phone him at his office so that they might make an appointment to meet.

The sun was shining on the white frosted roofs that hung like a range of glittering alps beneath his window. It was going to be a fine day, it was Friday, tonight he was going to see Francesca. He stood at the bedroom window, looking down at the white roofs, the long shadows, the occasional spire of whiter smoke rising through the bright mist. Coming across the car park was the paper boy with his canvas satchel. Martin turned away from the window and went into the living room where Mr. Cochrane was polishing plate glass and the chrysanthemums were as vigorous as ever. He took the vases out into the kitchen. The big yellow blossoms seemed to look reproachfully at him as he thrust them into the waste bin.

“Wicked waste,” said Mr. Cochrane, padding up behind him to empty his bowl of water. “Not a withered petal on the lot of them!”

The two newspapers had just come through the letter
box. Martin picked them up and looked at the
Post.
The front page lead, for the second week running, was the Parliament Hill Fields murder. This time it was a report of the inquest on Anne Blake, the heading was woman brutally murdered and the by-line Tim Sage’s. Martin went through the paper to try and find what had so upset Francesca in anticipation. The
Post
was a forty-page tabloid so this took some time, but he could find nothing, no photograph, no story. It was still only ten to nine. Watched curiously by Mr. Cochrane, Martin began again, working this time more slowly and meticulously.

Because he could no longer bear the scrutiny of pebble eyes through distorting bi-focals he took the paper into the bedroom. There, using a red ballpoint, he went through each page like a proof reader, ticking its lower edge when he had cleared it.

He found what he was looking for on page seven, a mere paragraph in a gossip column called “Finchley Footnotes.”

The coming year will be an exciting one for Mr. Russell Brown, 35, whose first book is to be published in the summer. This is an historical novel about the Black Death entitled
The Iron Cocoon.
Mr. Brown, who is an authority on the fourteenth century, teaches history at a north London polytechnic. He lives with his wife, Francesca, and two-year-old daughter, Lindsay, in Fortis Green Lane.

“Since this is going to be our last meeting,” said Martin, “I should have liked to take you somewhere nice.” He glanced round the Greek
taverna
in the Archway Road where she had insisted on coming. It smelt of cooking oil, and over the glass-fronted case of raw kebabs trailed the fronds of a plastic tradescantia. “Still, I don’t suppose it matters.” An unpleasant thought, among so many, struck him. “Where does
he
think you are? Come to that, where did he think you were all last week?”

“He had flu,” she said, “and the doctor said to take a week off to convalesce, so he went to his parents in Oxford and took Lindsay with him.”

“I can’t believe you have a child,” he said miserably. “A child of two.” The waiter came to their table. Martin ordered lamb kebab, a salad, for both of them. She passed across the table to him something she had taken from her handbag. He looked without enthusiasm, with dismay, at the photograph of a dark-haired, wide-eyed baby girl. “But where is she? What happens to her when you’re at work?” It was as if he doubted the very truth of it, as if by questioning her closely, he might break her down and make her confess that she had lied and the newspaper been wrong.

“In a day nursery. I take her there in the mornings and Russell fetches her. He gets home before me.”

“I looked him up in the phone book,” said Martin. “I take it he’s the H. R. Brown at 54 Fortis Green Lane?”

She hesitated momentarily, then nodded. “His first
name,” she said, “is Harold, only he prefers his second name and Russell Brown sounds better for an author.”

“And I used to wonder all the time why you wouldn’t let me take you home. I thought you might be ashamed of your home or even have an angry father. I thought you couldn’t be more than twenty.”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“Oh, don’t cry,” said Martin. “Have some wine. Crying isn’t going to help.”

Neither of them could eat much. Francesca picked at her kebab and pushed it away. Her deep brown glowing eyes held a kind of feverish despair and she gave a little sob. Up till then he had felt only anger and bitterness. A pang of pity made him lay his own hand gently on hers. She bit her lip.

“I’m sorry, Martin. I shouldn’t have gone out with you last week, but I did want to, I wanted some fun. I’m not going to indulge in a lot of self-pity, but I don’t have much fun. And then-then it wasn’t just fun any more.” He felt a tremor of delight and terror. Hadn’t she just admitted she loved him? “Russell came home on Friday, and on Monday he said he’d, had this phone call from the
Post
about his book. I knew they’d, put something in the paper, and I knew you’d, see it.”

“I suppose you love him, don’t you? You’re happy, you and Russell and Lindsay and the Black Death?” Wretchedness had brought out a grim wit in him and he smiled a faint ironical smile.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go back to your place, Martin.”

In the car he didn’t speak to her. So this is what it’s like, he thought, this is what it had been like for all those men he had heard of and read about and even known who had fallen in love with married women. Clandestine meetings, deception, a somehow dirty feeling of being traitorous and corrupt. And at the end of it a bitter parting with ugly recriminations
or else divorce and re-marriage in some High Street register office to an experience-ravaged girl with a ready-made family. He knew he was old-fashioned. He had been a schoolboy when the word “square” was current slang, but even then he had known he was and always would be, square. A thickset square-shouldered man with a square forehead and a square jaw and a square outlook on life. Rectangular, tetragonal, square, conventional, conservative, and reactionary. The revolution in morals which had taken place during his adolescence had passed over him and left him as subject to the old order as if he had actually spent a lifetime under its regime. He would have liked to be married to a virgin in church. What he certainly wasn’t going to do, he thought as he drove up to Cromwell Court, was have an affair with Francesca, with Mrs. Russell Brown, embroil himself in that kind of sordidness and vain excitement and -disgrace. They must part, and at once. He helped her from the car and stood for a moment holding her arm in the raw frosty cold.

The place looked strangely bare without the chrysanthemums, as a room does when it has been stripped of its Christmas decorations. He drew the curtains to shut out the purplish starry sky and the city that lay like a spangled cloth below. Francesca sat on the edge of her chair, watching him move about the room. He remembered that last week he had thought there was something child-like about her. That had been in the days of her supposed innocence, and it was all gone now. She was as old as he. Under her eyes were the shadows of tiredness and suffering and her cheeks were pale. He glanced down at her hands which she was twisting in her lap.

“You can put your wedding ring on again tomorrow,” he said bitterly.

She said in a very low voice, not much above a whisper, “I never wear it.”

“You still haven’t told me where he thinks you are.”

“At Annabel’s, the girl who lives in Frognal, the one I see on Mondays. Martin, I thought we could-I thought we could sometimes meet on Mondays.”

He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself some brandy. He held up the bottle. “For you?”

“No, I don’t want anything. I thought Mondays and-and Saturday afternoons, if you like. Russell always goes to White Hart Lane when Spurs play at home.”

He almost laughed. “You know all about it, don’t you? How many have there been before me?”

She shrank as if he had made to strike her. “There haven’t been any at all.” She had a way of speaking very simply and directly, without artifice. It was partly because of this, that like him she had no sharp wit, no gift of repartee, that he had begun to love her. Begun, only begun, he must remember that. Caution, be my friend!

“We aren’t going to see each other any more, Francesca. We’ve only known each other two weeks and that means we can part now without really getting hurt. I think I must have been a bit crazy, the way I went on last week, but there’s no harm done, is there? I’m not going to come between husband and wife. We’ll forget each other in a little while, and I know that’s the best thing. I wish you hadn’t-well, led me on, but I expect you couldn’t help yourself.” Martin came breathlessly to the end of this speech, drank down the rest of his brandy, and recalled from an ancient film a phrase he had thought funny at the time. He brought it out facetiously with a bold smile. “I was just a mad impetuous fool!”

She looked at him sombrely. “I shan’t forget you,” she said. “Don’t you know I’m in love with you?”

No one had ever made that confession to him before. He felt himself turn pale, the blood recede from his face.

“I think I loved you the day I brought those horrible flowers and you said”-her voice trembled-“that no one sends flowers to men unless they’re ill.”

“We’re going to say good-bye now, Francesca, and I’m going to put you in a taxi and you’re going home to Russell and Lindsay. And in a year’s time I’ll come and buy some flowers from you and you’ll have forgotten who I am.”

He pulled her gently to her feet. She was limp and passive, yet clinging. She subsided clingingly against him so that the whole length of her body was pressed softly to his and her hands tremulously on either side of his face.

“Don’t send me away, Martin. I can’t bear it.”

He was aware of thinking that this was his last chance to keep clear of the involvement he dreaded. Summon up the strength now and he would be a free man. But he longed also to be loved, not so much for sex as for love. He was aware of that and then of very little more that might be said to belong to the intellect. His open lips were on her open lips and his hands were discovering her. He and she had descended somehow to the cushions of the sofa and her white arm, now bare, was reaching up to turn off the lamp.

Martin hadn’t much experience of love-making. There had been a girl at the L.S.E. and a girl he had met at a party at the Vowchurches and a girl who had picked him up on the beach at Sitges. There had been other girls too, but only with these three had he actually had sexual relations. He had found it, he brought himself to confess to himself only, disappointing. Something was missing, something that books and plays and other people’s experiences had led him to expect. Surely there should be more to it than just a blind unthinking need beforehand and afterwards nothing more than the same sense of relief as a sneeze gives or a drink of cold water down a thirsty throat?

With Francesca it wasn’t like that. Perhaps it was because he loved her and he hadn’t loved those others. It must be that. He had done nothing different, and it couldn’t have been any great skill or expertise on her part. She had whispered to him that he was the only man apart from Russell.
Before Russell there had been no one and for a long time now Russell had scarcely touched her. She was married and she had a child, but still she was nearly as innocent as Martin would have had her be.

She slept beside him that night. At eleven she phoned Russell and told him she would be staying the night with Annabel because of the fog. Martin heard the murmur of a man’s voice answering her truculently. It was only the second time in his life he had been in bed all night with a woman. On an impulse he told her so and she put her arms round him, holding him close to hejr.

In the morning he looked once more at that copy of the
Post
with its cover photograph of the path from the railway bridge to Nassington Road and, on the inside, the paragraph about Russell Brown. It seemed a hundred years since he had first read it, had underlined that emotive name and inserted, after a feverish scanning of the phone book, the number of her house in Fortis Green Lane. He put the paper on top of the neat pile of tabloids on the floor of the kitchen cupboard and the
Daily Telegraph
on the pile of broadsheets. Later, walking up the hill with Francesca-she refused to let him drive her-he called into the newsagents and cancelled the
Post.
Why had he ever bothered to take a local paper? Only, surely, because of knowing Tim Sage.