The Marriage Bed (2 page)

“Look, Mother, there’s somebody at the door – I’ll have to go. See you this afternoon; we’ll talk then.”

And I hung up smartly, ignoring with dignity Martha’s loud shout: “Nobody’s at the door!” As I made my ponderous way downstairs, lugging Hugh, I thought defensively that it was not a question of dislike. From the wedding-day onward, Edwina had been flawlessly kind and generous to me. To all of us. It was not her fault, maybe, that this calm, superb kindness was such a devastating commentary on her only son’s marriage – that rash, over-fertile, and wholly deplorable union.

In any case, she would arrive this afternoon like sweet Vengeance itself, with a bag bulging with homemade marmalade, something useful hand-knitted for the unborn, educational toys for the children, and in a tactfully small envelope something she would slip under a pot-plant, murmuring, “I’m sure you and Ross could use a little … 
something,
my dear.” No, it wasn’t dislike, really. More a sort of fascinated loathing.

Well, Camus said somewhere that it’s cowardly to despair over the human condition, but Mother’s upcoming visit would sure as hell put that theory to the test. For one thing, it meant hearing Ross (who is twenty-seven) referred to as “My Boy.” It also involved polishing up every sodding piece of the silver tea-set, unused for months. No choice there: she gave it to us after her own mother – as she puts it – “Went.” In order to present the image of the perfect homemaker, the gracious chatelaine (which of course was vital, because of the way I felt about Mother), I would also have to make a cake. And that, in turn, meant going out to buy lemons and walnuts, though I’d planned to skip the walk today. A grey rigour of cold air was pressed over the whole city of Toronto like a steel helmet. From time to time the windows trembled in a sharp little
wind that would soon crystallize in icy particles whipping horizontally through the streets. Ah, well. War is hell. On with it.

B
ut before getting on the treadmill that would convey me to the kitchen sink for a confrontation with neglected stacks of dirty dishes, I picked up the mail from the hall floor, where Martha had left it. As predicted, it was mostly bills. The one item of any interest was a postcard from my neighbour Margaret. In her neat hand she neatly discussed the weather in Boston. It was evidently as nasty as the weather here. There was no letter from my stepfather. This depressed me considerably. Max used the phone only for business, and he was too busy for much visiting. But he sometimes found time to scribble me silly, wise, funny, loving notes; and since Ross’s departure, these had become more and more important to me. The medium more than the message was the point; but both seemed to be addressed to the true and innermost me, seen by no one else now that Ross was gone.

“This afternoon,” Max might scrawl, “I spent three hours organizing the arrival from Taiwan of five thousand dozen pairs of men’s Y-front underpants. What a way to spend your life. Send me a bagel by special messenger.” Or a wire might arrive: “Thinking of joining the Flat Earth Society. Members so crazy they could just be right. Love, Max.” I kept all these bulletins, however ridiculous, partly because I had a superstitious fear that one day – perhaps soon – they might stop.

With some force I tore up a circular from a newly open pizza parlour, and a folder advertising smoke detectors. Ah, friend, if I installed one of those things here, it would ring so often I might never forget where hell is.

A
fter feeding the kids their cereal, I drifted reluctantly to the sink to tackle the dishes. Once actually eye to eye with the buggers, though, I lost momentum abruptly. There was a brief lull in the city’s grinding, daytime tumult. I gazed out blankly at the grey sky. A little galaxy of dust held in suspension by a weak glint of sunlight floated in my line of vision. Outside, an oil truck groaned as it filled our tank, and a dog barked importantly at nothing. A pigeon flapped across the cloudscape and made me for some reason think of seagulls. Kent. Max. Who was that plethoric old man with the red, bald head? Of course, the Captain. And the two pelican maiden ladies in cardigans, his daughters. Coffee after dinner eight years ago in the lounge of the Sea View Hotel, Broadstairs.

A depressed little family of Swiss holiday-makers looked out at the pearly rain-clouds. Alone in a corner sat Max, the newest guest, reading
The Daily Telegraph
with the help of a balloon glass of brandy. A gust of laughter came from the bar across the hall, where my mother Billie was making life amusing for a group of American tourists.

“Care for a game of chess, young Anne?” inquired the Captain in his cement-mixer voice.

“No, not tonight, thanks. I’ve got to study. O-levels begin next week.”

He gave his sharp bark of a cough and one of the thin daughters jumped as if pinched. “Game of cribbage then, Father?”

“Oh, all right, if you like.” And out came the cribbage board and the dog-eared pack with Tower Bridge on it. Max took off his thick gold watch and laid it absently on the table. Why, I wondered, just as I wondered why such a man should ever have come to our hotel. Dressed in the most beautifully tailored lightweight suit I had ever seen, he looked like some exiled duke or inexplicably displaced millionaire. Or perhaps he was some special kind of diplomat or spy, I thought, mooning and doodling over my Latin
textbook. Nobody remotely like him had ever in my time walked into the dining-room of the Sea View Hotel with its smell of brown soup, proprietor’s Peke, and damp table-linen.

And I had a special reason for observing him so intently. For some time now it had been clear to me that the only way to get the kind of life I wanted was to marry a rich Older Man with the least possible delay. I wanted a first-rate university education. Here was the old millionaire. Now all I had to do was get one to provide the other. After all, a degree wouldn’t cost him more than a mink coat, the sort of thing doting elderly husbands often provided for young wives. I’d given it a great deal of thought; there was no other way. My assets were only two: my brains, which I knew without vanity to be first-class, and my looks, which since puberty had attracted a wide variety of unwelcome attentions, specially from Older Men. For some reason, boys of my own age appeared totally uninterested in me, which was on all counts just as well for my plans.

Public libraries, where I spent most of my leisure time, had provided me with detailed technical information about the sex act, without revealing to me why on earth any woman would permit such a silly thing to be done to her. Men, however, seemed very keen on it for some reason. And Max was a handsome man with his thick, nearly white hair and magnificent dark eyes. One could imagine he was the sort of person who would at least be polite about it. The whole nasty business might be endurable with someone like that, as long as it didn’t last too long. To be sure, a chambermaid’s overheard complaint about her husband (“’E’s never
orff
of me”) was not encouraging. Better not to think about the bed part of it.

The young waitress Vera (as distinct from the old one with the varicose veins) came in to clear away the cups. Her hair was newly back-combed up into a great beehive that made her profile
look vaguely African. Max reached over his cup to save her trouble, but she neither smiled nor thanked him, only flounced out with the tray as if offended. I knew, as only one teenager can know another, that she was annoyed because it was clear the beehive amused him.

After a few minutes, Max dropped his folded newspaper on the table and stood up. The Captain’s daughters eyed him furtively. He looked irresolutely across at the bar, then strolled out to the entrance hall, where glass doors framed a moody view of grey water tumbling under a grey sky. He opened the door and stepped out into the soft English air.

“Oh, please, sir, you forgot your watch,” I said, bursting out abruptly after him. It was not, perhaps, a very subtle approach, but the best I could think of at the time.

“Ah. So I did. Thank you very much.”

I handed over the watch, hoping it was not embarrassingly hot from my moist hand.

“You’re from America, aren’t you?” I asked breathlessly.

“No, Canada.”

“Really? Are you on holiday? I’m afraid the weather hasn’t been very nice here this summer.”

His dark eyes looked at me quizzically. “Think it’s going to rain again? Can I risk a walk?”

“Oh, I’m sure you could. There’s a nice sea-front promenade just along here. I don’t suppose – I mean, would you like me to come along to – to point things out? It’s quite an interesting town, actually. Charles Dickens lived here off and on.”

Once again he looked at me and the faint smile spread from his eyes to his lips. “I’d be delighted,” he said. “But you’ll have to get permission first from your parents. That was your mother with you at dinner, wasn’t it?”

“Back in two seconds,” I promised, and shot upstairs. With frantic speed I tore off my ugly school shirt and tie and put on a too-small blue satin blouse I’d recently bought at a sale. I flung on my mac but left it unbuttoned, and hurried past the bar without troubling Billie with news of my immediate plans. Billie never worried anyhow where I went, or with whom, as long as I got home before dark. She was touchingly sure that nothing illegal or immoral could happen to a girl until after the pubs closed.

He was lighting a cigar when I hurried out, the open coat flying around the blue blouse at which he glanced with those casual dark eyes that looked so sleepy, yet seemed to miss nothing.

“Still at school, are you?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m in the Fifth at Broadstairs Grammar.”

“That’s about like our last year of high school, right? What are you going to do when you graduate?”

This was marvellous, I thought. He was interested. It could turn into one of those whirlwind courtships. So I let it all come tumbling out, too fast, repetitive, confused, as we walked along the sea-smelling promenade.

“I want to go to university, but unless there’s some kind of miracle I won’t be able to, because I’ll never get a scholarship. You don’t know what the competition’s like, and we’ve moved about so much, my mother and I … she gets restless. This is the first decent school I’ve ever been to, where they really make you work. Only Billie – that’s my mother – is getting bored with Broadstairs; we’ve been here nearly two years. She just doesn’t understand about good schools. Of course, to be fair, neither did I, until it was really too late.”

“I see. How old are you, then?” Max asked, though he hardly needed to.

“I’m nearly sixteen.” Like everything I’d told him so far, this was close to the truth.

“You seem older than that,” he remarked. “More mature.” Then he added, with more truth than tact, “In some ways.”

I kicked a small pebble several forceful yards ahead of us. After a brief pause he went on in his rather thick, slow voice, “Your name’s Anne, isn’t it? Well, if you did get a scholarship, Anne – I mean by some miracle – and go to university, where would it be, and what do you want to study?”

“Oxford, and it’s botany I’m keen on. Billie just thinks it’s silly, fiddling about with mounting specimens and all that. So even if we had the money, which we don’t … Anyhow, she used to like it because it kept me busy; but reading botany as a subject is something else; all those Latin names annoy her. She’s a bit against education anyway. Puts ideas into girls’ heads and makes it hard for them to marry people. For instance, I wanted to go to boarding-school in the worst way when I was young; but Billie said I must be mad to think of playing hockey and getting thick legs. She’s an awfully
opinionated
woman.”

He gave an abrupt snort of laughter and I paused, too, for a brief giggle. “Just the same, ever since I was twelve or so, I’ve been going up to London every Saturday from wherever we happen to be, on a day return, to make drawings of things at the Natural History Museum at Kensington. It’s a marvellous place, they have all sorts of lovely things. I’ll show you some of my work if you like.”

“I’d like that very much. But where’s your father, and what does he think about botany for girls?”

“Oh, he died when I was getting on for six. He was a Classics don at Exeter. I don’t remember him, except sort of dimly when I see my two old aunts. They’re poor and have rheumatism and dote on the Vicar … you know. They’d help me if they could, but … Anyhow, there it is. The minute the funeral was over, Billie and I got on the train, and we’ve been moving from one seaside place to the other ever since. I don’t know why she’s so restless.”

“So your mother never remarried?”

“Oh no. I think she’s afraid of being bored.” A belated loyalty kept me silent about the two or three surrogate husbands Billie had over the years lightly and briefly held. Though one was deplorable – a seedy ex-R.A.F. officer called Fred, who had disappeared with some of her money – none of the others, at least as far as I could tell at the time, had ever done her or me any harm. She had never neglected me any more or less for any of them; they had too little importance for that. It was only, she explained to me once, that she had to have a man to laugh with once in a while.

“She doesn’t like being cooped up,” I said, in an effort to summarize the situation. “When we first unpacked our things in Brighton, she said to me, ‘We’re not a family any more, you see. Just a couple of people travelling together. Trying to be considerate to each other, and amusing company. That’s all.’ ”

Max gave me a quick glance. Then he took a last draw on his cigar before tossing the butt into a tidal pool. “I think we’d better turn back now,” he said quietly. “It’s getting late.”

There was no sting in the words. I knew I hadn’t bored him, even though the blue satin blouse had not had anything like the impact I’d hoped for. In fact, it was high time, I thought, for the whole conversation to get off its present level. Then, perhaps, he would begin to look at me the way so many Older Men did, that rather absent yet purposeful look that meant their penis was thinking.

Somewhat desperately, because the flat, white face of the Sea View Hotel would soon come into view, I began, “Do you believe in affinities at all? Because I felt very … attracted to you, the minute I saw you at dinner-time.”