The Marriage Bed (21 page)

Two months and half a mile of space away from all the rashes, teething, and diarrhoea of his married life had smoothed out Ross’s face and removed some of its greyish look. He even smiled occasionally.

“Have a glass of wine, why don’t you,” I said, lifting the dewy bottle invitingly.

“Well, maybe just one. Kids asleep yet? They all right? I’ll go on up and have a look at them.”

“Don’t wake them up.”

I arranged myself as attractively as possible in a corner of the sofa, and when he came back downstairs, he sat down in the other corner after only a second’s hesitation. We sipped our wine. Nana did her thing. The house was quiet and peaceful.

“Things going all right at the office? What happened about the Bailey case?”

“We won it.”

“Oh, good.”

“The guy was guilty as hell, too. So Tim was really pleased. So was I, actually. I like winning the Legal Aid ones.”

“You hungry, by any chance? There’s some of that moussaka you like left over.”

“No … no thanks.” But he made no protest when I refilled his glass. Nor did he withdraw when I slipped my hand into his.

“Been in touch with your mother lately?” I asked him.

“Yes, she’s enjoying Florida.”

“You haven’t actually told her about us yet, have you. I wonder why.”

“No, it’s just … I thought I’d wait till she gets home. No point in spoiling her holiday.”

With care I let that pass without comment. Then I put down my glass, moved closer to him, and gave him a kiss intended to speak louder than words. He accepted it with mild surprise, but no unfriendliness. It was a minute before he drew away.

“Hold on, you are fogging my glasses. What is all this?”

“What does it feel like?”

“Well, but –”

“Why shouldn’t we? After all, we’re still married.”

“Yes, but –”

“Then come on. What’s wrong with here and now.”

He was already in no condition to put up much resistance, as both of us were well aware; but he did mutter, “Okay, but no strings attached, right? No complications – no regrets after I’ve gone?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, let’s go up, then. This sofa’s too small. And I’m too old to use the floor any more.”

We stopped several times along the way, and by the time we reached the bed in our room, his resistance, such as it was, had completely vanished. Our familiar bed was warm, deliciously
warm. The wine had turned my head into a helium balloon, floating somewhere above my drowsy, happy body, tickled by his lips and hands. Strange how very sleepy I felt, in spite of that catnap. Terribly sleepy …

My eyes blinked open to find him knotting his tie at the mirror. The face reflected there looked austere.

“There you are,” I mumbled. “What are you doing?”

“Go back to sleep,” he said.

“Oh. Was I asleep? You mean I –”

“Right in the very middle of it, to be exact.”

“It’s this crazy pregnancy. I do it all the time.” Something warned me this was no time to laugh, but how I wished one or both of us could. Instead I said, “I
am
sorry. You wouldn’t care to have another shot at it, I suppose?”

“No thanks,” he said with dignity.

So that was that. The ploy that failed, I thought, lumbering up the basement steps with the laundry basket. Just as I reached the top, the phone shrilled. I lunged for the receiver before Martha could grab it. This time it had to be Ross.

“Anne? I saw the doctor at your place this morning. Everything all right?” It was Junie’s flat voice. The jabbing pain in my back returned with vehemence.

“Yes, I … 
had
the pediatrician, as my mother-in-law would put it.”

“Oh, him.” June’s voice was already fading into boredom.

“Hugh had croup in the night. It’s lucky for us that Reilly lives so near. He just dropped in to check on Hugh before going to work. He’s terrific like that.”

“Yeah. Gee, I don’t know, such a lot seems to happen to you.”

“None of it’s good, though kid.”

“Yeah, but at least you’re –” A note crept into her voice that I’d
never heard there so clearly before – a sort of flat despair. “You know, sometimes I wake up mornings, here’s another day, and I just think,
is this all
? You know?”

“Poor bitch,” I thought. But all I could think of to say was “Cheer up. At least your mother didn’t come to see you yesterday.”

“Yeah. I saw your mum. Ever a lovely pair of boots she has.”

“Aren’t they.”

Mail thumped through the letter-box and both children ran to get it. In the race, Hugh fell, or more likely was pushed, and lay in the hall howling, and in the fracas somebody must have stepped on Violet, who added to the din by a frenzied yelping. How glorious it would be to wake up one morning stone deaf, I thought, as I clamped the receiver in position with one shoulder and fanned through the mail. It was all bills.

“There’s a sale of boots today at Simpson’s,” June was saying. “I sure wouldn’t mind going down there for a look. Would you mind a whole lot taking my two just for an hour or so this aft? I better not leave them alone. Last time Darryl built a fire on the kitchen floor. Nothing, really, but Clive got sore. At me, not Darryl. Typical.”

“Sure, I don’t mind. What’s another couple of kids? Send ’em along. The more the merrier. Happy shopping.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said almost warmly. “Do the same for you next time, Anne. They’ll be over right after lunch. See you.”

“ ’Bye, Junie.”

I
n the middle of making my bed, I had to sit down on it suddenly, hit by depression that reached right out of that brief conversation and caught me behind the knees. The kids played serenely around my legs with some Matchbox cars. Mao scrambled onto my shoulder, purring. A copy of Trollope’s
Can You Forgive
Her?
was pushed half under the pillow, and I pulled it out for comfort. His heroine was just as big a problem to everybody as I was; but any number of good people rallied round energetically to make her happy in the end, in spite of herself. The perfect plot. The book opened at my favourite sentence: “There are things which happen in a day which it would take a lifetime to explain.”

“How true,” I thought. Take my today, for instance. Every single nasty thing in it had its roots back there somewhere in that shifting childhood of mine. Explaining is easy. Understanding is something else again. Take Gary, the milkman, for instance, who let me ride with him on his rounds.…

Moving around as we constantly did often meant I had no friends, so I spent a lot of time on my own in public places, shops, hotel lounges, cinemas, rather like a stray dog. Sometimes casually encountered grown-ups were kind and spoiled my appetite with sweets; but some were threatening and mean as you might be to a stray, because it’s already in trouble. I knew by the time I was eight which ones you could trust, and Gary was one of them. He had grey hair, but his face was pink and young, he could whistle with trills, and I loved him.

We had a lot of good conversations as the bottles jingled behind us. “There’s an old lady in our hotel with whiskers, and she says God sees every single thing you do. Especially the bad things. I took an apple off the fruit dish before lunch yesterday, and she said God was watching. And he has a place full of fire that melts people’s bones if they steal.”

“Mean-minded old trout,” said Gary. “If there is a place like that –
which
I doubt – she’ll go there, not you.”

It was a considerable relief to me to hear this. Gary knew pretty well everything, and he always told the truth, unlike a lot of old people who told lies. They said, for instance, that carrots would make your hair curl, and doctors brought babies in their black
bags. I never touched carrots and my thick hair was wildly curly. As for babies, everybody knew that mothers vomited them up.

Gary was a great talker, always about interesting things, too, instead of the dull stuff schools were always on about. He liked to talk about pigeons, betting on the greyhound races, how to tell the weather from clouds, and why the price of milk kept going up. He told me a lot about his life: he’d been a Barnardo’s orphan, put out to work at fourteen. He’d had lots of interesting jobs in ice-cream factories and stables and places like that; and he said it had been a great life, really – couldn’t ask for a better. The one thing he regretted was that he’d married, he said, too young. It was a pity, really, he said, because him and the old woman didn’t get on; not at all. What he often dreamed of was having some rich, beautiful woman fall in love with him, a real high-class woman, like Greer Garson used to be on the flicks.

Then one day an old woman suddenly appeared at the side of the float. She had a straw hat skewered to her grey hair, and a large, cracked handbag; and she seemed inexplicably furious with Gary.

“Wot’s the matter, then, old lady?” he asked, setting down his basket of pints.

“You know wot’s the matter, all right, you dirty animal! Get out, you dirty thing! I wonder you’re not afraid of the police, I do. Think I don’t know you. Picking up little kids. Always girls. Think I don’t know you?” She hissed all this at him with such force that her spit made a little spray in the bright morning air.

“No, Rita,” he said. “That’s enough.” But his face had gone red in strange patches. “Better hop off now,” he said to me. “Run on home, then.”

“That’s right, get on out of it, you little bitch,” she said, turning viciously on me. I scrambled out of the float, scraping one knee painfully in my haste. She seized my arm and stooped to bring her face frighteningly close to mine. She smelled of pepper and onions
and rage. “If ever I see you again, I’ll ’ave your guts, understand? Dirty little beast, you’re old enough to know better. Now get out of it, and remember what I tell yer.”

I got out of it. I never saw Gary again. And I never knew which of them was the pervert. To the best of my recollection, he had never touched me, while she certainly had. But that was not really the point, then or now. The one thing clear was that somehow I was the guilty one. Exactly what I had done wrong was too hard to put into words. But to be alone like this was more than just my misfortune; it was my fault, for who else was there to blame for it? I scrubbed at my bleeding knee with a grubby handkerchief and went back to the hotel, where I was more careful than usual to avoid the old Christian with the whiskers. Billie was at the hairdresser’s. I never told her or anyone else about Gary.

“W
e go to work on Monday and Tuesday,” murmured Martha, running a small ambulance painfully over my foot; and with a start I put Trollope away. Today was surely Wednesday. And that reminded me there were at least twenty household jobs that urgently needed attention before I went into hospital. The thought of Margaret’s clear eyes – not to mention Ross’s expression – when they saw my linen-cupboard/pantry/clothes-closets/fridge/kids’ room was enough to fire me with a resolve at least to vacuum the entire downstairs before lunch. Unfortunately I hated our vacuum cleaner with the kind of personal and intense bitterness some people bring to politics or religion. It was a moral victory just to open the cupboard door under the stairs and drag the machine out, squealing, its long cord vindictively pulling forth all sorts of unrelated objects. When the phone rang during the process, I answered it in the brisk, resentful voice of one deeply engaged in important business.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Graham?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Sharon in Dr. Mohammed’s office calling. Just to remind you about your dental-hygiene appointment tomorrow at four.”

What I would like to have said was it couldn’t matter less if all my teeth fell out simultaneously like hailstones, as they might well do in the near future. Instead, I said meekly (Sharon being a very large girl, and mistress of many implements of torture), “Yes, thanks, Sharon; I’ll be there.”

I hung up brusquely. The vacuum cleaner grinned sardonically as I disentangled its cord from a collection of pull-toys and several pieces of material – unfinished nightgowns for the new baby, I discovered on inspection. Two months ago I’d run them up on the machine and begun to smock them around the neck and wrists; then I’d run out of embroidery cotton and somehow lost track of the whole project. But the fact was this baby needed clothes badly. Hugh’s and Martha’s outgrown things were too exhausted to be of any use a third time round. And though it was a bit odd to feel under an obligation to someone whose face you had yet to see, I did consider that this third error of mine deserved a wardrobe of its own, as a kind of compensation for being so randomly begun. It was this feeling that had made me buy four yards of blue flannelette printed with cheerful small birds in flight, and set to work.

There was not much left to do on the little gowns. I could finish them off in an hour or so. And suddenly this seemed like a better investment of time than any amount of vacuuming. With my foot I pushed the machine back into the closet, threw the toys after it, and called, “Come on, kids. We’re going to see the Loom Lady.”

A
s we approached the Craft Shop, we fell in behind two women who had been hovering at the window looking in at Jennifer’s patchwork cushions. They opened the door and were about to step in when Jen emerged from the back regions and they saw her colour. Instantly they stepped back and turned away, all but trampling my kids in their haste to escape.

“Cows,” I said to Jen by way of greeting.

“Ah well,” she said calmly. “They’re entitled. It’s a free country.”

“But it must madden you, that people like that are still around.”

“No point in getting mad. It’s just one of those things. I reckon it will always be this way – human nature. The Bible’s got it right: ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ No, they damn well can’t, either of them. So what can I do for you today? Come to buy a loom?”

“Funny lady.”

The kids disappeared to inspect the baby, who could be heard making faint, chirping noises in the background.

“No, I just need some blue cotton for smocking.”

“Right. Choose your blue.” She plucked a handful of little skeins out of a drawer and held them out to me. With a sigh I tried to identify which one matched my sample thread.