The Marrying Game (40 page)

‘Did you— aren’t there any photos?’

‘One mass grave looks a lot like another,’ Edward said. ‘I think they’re trying to make out that we photographed another one, somewhere else. There’s no shortage of them, in that bloody country.’ He kept his eyes sternly on the road ahead. ‘The whole experience was one more reason why I couldn’t take the army any more. When you see what an army can do, in the name of God knows what – the men in that grave had their hands tied behind their backs. They’d all been shot in the head, at close range. Absolutely no doubt about that – the skulls all had great gaping holes in them. Though I daresay the defence will swear they all died of fright, and the holes were nibbled by field mice. These people are atrocious. They don’t know the meaning of shame.’

‘Edward—’

‘They don’t deserve democracy. They deserve a totalitarian regime. We should have bombed the lot of them to hell.’

‘Edward – please – could you stop?’

‘What?’ He looked round at her sharply. Rufa’s face was bloodless, with lips the colour of lead and a sheen of sweat on her white forehead. Immediately he swerved off the road, braking the car on the narrow grass verge.

Rufa wrenched the door open, almost fell out of the car, and vomited over the grass. Her body was possessed and consumed with throwing up. She was being turned inside out, from the soles of her feet upwards. Distantly, through the miasma of sickness, she was aware of Edward getting out of the car, putting his arm round her shoulders, and gently pulling her upright when the horror had been expelled. She managed to draw a proper breath, and felt better. She was even vaguely pleased that she had got rid of it all so quickly and efficiently. There seemed to be a loop in her brain, which carried the horror away before it could kill her.

‘Ru, darling, I’m so sorry.’ He wrapped his arms around her. ‘I can’t believe I said that – I’m a complete insensitive idiot – I wasn’t thinking. I should have remembered.’

Rufa was determined not to remember. With her accustomed briskness, she straightened her picture of the world. ‘Sorry about that. I don’t know what got into me.’

‘Ru –’

‘Do you think it might have been the smoked haddock?’

Edward said, ‘Smoked haddock my arse. I wish you’d see someone about these nightmares.’

Rufa determinedly did not hear this. ‘Are you feeling all right? You ate more of it than I did.’

He groaned softly. She felt his breath warm in her hair. ‘Tell me when you’re feeling better, sweetheart, and I’ll take you home.’

Rufa ducked irritably away from his arm. ‘Rubbish, I’m fine now. Let’s forget it.’ She was ordering him to forget it, and he went on staring at her with that terrible compassion – couldn’t he see that going on about it would bring it back? There was nothing wrong with her. She moved back towards the car. ‘Let’s go. I don’t want to miss Linnet’s bedtime.’

‘Wait –’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘Don’t rush away from it.’

‘From what?’ she snapped. ‘I’m not rushing away from anything. I’m totally fine. Please let’s go.’

He sighed, disturbed but resigned, taking his hand away. ‘All right. Just get a breath of air first, eh?’

They stood in silence for a few minutes, both overwhelmingly aware of what could not be said.

In the most normal, conversational voice she could summon, Rufa asked, ‘When do you go to The Hague?’

‘End of next week.’ There was another silence. ‘Terry Poulter says he can manage the farm. And Tristan’s coming back tomorrow, so you won’t be alone.’

‘There’s no need for Tristan to stay. I’m fine on my own.’

He smiled, with a warmth and kindness that was, for some reason, almost unbearable. ‘Darling, you’ve never been on your own in your life. You’ve always been surrounded by a cast of thousands. You’ve never heard real silence.’

‘I have.’ There was nothing more silent than the silence you heard when you called out to the dead.

He said, ‘I’m not talking about metaphorical silence. I mean the physical kind, when there’s no other living human being for miles. That house can be incredibly lonely. And if I have to think of you being lonely, I’ll go mad.’

‘Being alone for a few weeks never killed anyone,’ Rufa said.

‘Hmmm.’ He was annoyingly sceptical. ‘I’d still rather know you have Tristan around, even if it’s just to scare the burglars. I wish I could take you with me, but –’

‘But Terry has to get in and out of the office, and you need someone to pass on messages. And we couldn’t leave the place completely empty. I do wish you’d stop treating me like the walking wounded.’ She was challenging him, knowing that if he wanted to disagree, he would have to open the closed book. Knowing also that he could not bear to put her through that pain.

He did dare to say, ‘You’re not as tough as you think. You’ve got to get rid of this idea that you have to be responsible for everyone and everything, and allow me to take care of you.’

‘Sorry,’ Rufa said. ‘It’s lovely that you want to. I’m not used to it, that’s all.’

Edward stepped forward long enough to kiss her forehead, and got back into the car. Over his shoulder, he said, ‘I feel I’ve almost worked you to death since we got back. At least you won’t be peeling grapes for Pru.’

‘I absolutely hated her,’ Rufa announced suddenly.

He laughed. ‘I gathered.’

‘Did she notice? I mean, did she say anything?’

‘No. She’s not like you. She doesn’t lie awake worrying about what people think of her.’

Letting him have her opinion of Prudence had given her a rush of exhilaration, even if his reaction had turned out to be rather an anticlimax. Rufa got into the car, and they were back on the road. They drove through a village.

Rufa, on an impulse, asked, ‘Did you sleep with her in Paris?’

He was startled – more startled than she had ever seen him – then wrathful. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘I did not.’

‘But you did sleep with her recently, didn’t you?’ The weeks of pining for his sexual attention had made her reckless. ‘Not just after Alice died, I mean.’

Edward scowled blackly at the road. ‘I can’t imagine what she’s been telling you, but it’s over. All right?’

‘Where is she now? London?’

‘Rufa, it’s over. That’s really all you need to know.’

He was silent for a long time, until Rufa began to be afraid that she had offended him. The car slowed at the new gates of Melismate, decorated with the family motto,
Evite La Pesne
. Edward turned into the drive.

He said, in his calm-but-firm officer’s voice, ‘The past doesn’t matter. I won’t say you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved, but you’re the woman I love
now
.’ He pulled the handbrake sharply, and turned to face her properly. ‘Pru may have kicked up a bit of a fuss, but you won. All right?’

They were at the door, and Linnet bounced out of it before he could say any more.

Rufa kept reminding herself that being loved by a man like Edward was a privilege. His declaration went some
way
towards driving out the poisonous snake Prudence had planted in her heart. She was ashamed of the way that her rediscovered yearning for sex made her ungrateful. It was not his fault that she was threatening the whole symmetry of the arrangement by desiring him. She longed to know exactly what had passed between Edward and Prudence. She even found herself trying to work out whether they would have any opportunity to have sex. The whole situation – the whole marriage – was hurtful, embarrassing and ridiculous.

She waved him off to The Hague with as much serenity as she could muster. Only at the very last minute, when Edward was on the point of going through to his gate at the airport, did Rufa understand how desperately she would miss him. Her world, without his reassuring presence, looked unfamiliar and frightening. He put his arms around her, and she clung to him fiercely, burying her face in his shoulder, gripping his arms with her hands.

Hurriedly, and with an air of doing something illicit, Edward kissed her on the mouth with real and startling heat. Then he was gone, and Rufa was left to feel lonely and useless, and tormented by sexual longing for him. On the first night without him, she only fell asleep when the sun came up.

Tristan came back, and Rufa had to admit that Edward had been right – she was glad not to be alone. The presence of Tristan did not exactly add to her security, but it infused the place with quickness and youth. Though he was the easiest of guests, he diffused a kind of subdued clatter, as a child would. He had arrived for what he described as his ‘one-man reading party’ with one box of books, one box of CDs and a small
rucksack
, which appeared to contain two pairs of white jeans, two T-shirts and a packet of disposable razors. Rufa gave him permission to use Edward’s shaving soap.

Tristan spent his days reading, with music pouring into him through the headphones of his Walkman. In the evenings he ate supper in the kitchen with Rufa. These evenings quickly became the focus of her day. She tenderly cooked for him, and he entertained her with the stories of his life. Words gushed from him. He could not tell her enough.

He told her about his moneyed, unsettled childhood with Prudence and a succession of stepfathers. He told her about his boarding school, and about losing his virginity on the tennis court, with his housemaster’s daughter.

Rufa said – as she had said to nobody else – ‘I lost mine in the bedroom of old Mrs Reculver’s cottage. It was enormously romantic.’

Tristan’s eyes were deep blue in his tanned face, and full of devotion. He said, ‘My experience was mainly draughty, and I felt stupid with my bare bum in the air. I wish I’d saved myself for someone more like you.’

He told her about the college production of
The Tempest
, in which he had appeared naked, to great acclaim, the previous term. The moody, gifted young director of this production had fallen wildly in love with him, and had thrown himself into the river when he discovered Tristan only liked girls.

‘It was fine, though,’ he assured her. ‘He just got wet, and he was that anyway. I didn’t understand about love then. I didn’t know what it could do to people.’

All their conversations turned to love. Rufa knew perfectly well that Tristan was in love with her. He
watched
her constantly. He moved around her with exaggerated respect. He was in a constant state of wonderment at the strength and poetry of his own emotions. If her hand brushed his accidentally, a blush surged up to the roots of his hair. He stammered if she stood too close to him.

Rufa did not feel there was any harm in this, as long as nothing was said. She congratulated herself for maintaining a distance, knowing that the distance increased his worship. She found herself watching him, noticing the smaller details of his unsettling beauty: the shadows his long lashes made on the silken skin under his eyes; the blue veins on the insides of his elbows. She was piercingly aware of him, and acutely conscious that his eyes followed her everywhere. She was sure she could handle it, however. All that blushful worship only made her more conscious of the difference in their ages. His looks were dazzling, but his immaturity could be extremely irritating. He was only just twenty. Two years ago, he had been at school. Two years ago, Rufa had been trying to earn a living. Sometimes, she felt a thousand years older.

Edward seemed impossibly far away. When he telephoned, Rufa took great pains to sound interested in his accounts of wrestling with Eurocracy and waiting in windowless, air-conditioned corridors. None of it was real, because it was happening outside the enchanted circle. With the innocent egomania of youth, Tristan filled the house with his love – the very air tasted of it.

All the surplus love washing round the house made Rufa’s longing for Edward more acute. Their nightly phone calls were deeply unsatisfactory. She tried not to remember Prudence saying he was ‘unresponsive’. He
was
as remote as Australia. She wanted him, and he apparently wanted her – why, why, was the marriage going so badly? Whatever the reason, she was determined to make it work when he came home.

An outsider might not understand the oddity of the whole situation. Rufa was careful not to let her mother and sisters come sniffing round. They would see Tristan’s infatuation in a moment; particularly Rose, who had a bloodhound’s nose for romance thanks to the antics of the Man. Rufa prevented their visits to the farm by driving herself over to Melismate, without Tristan. She described Tristan dismissively as a ‘boy’, omitting to mention that he was twenty and taller than she was. She found all kinds of reasons not to introduce him.

Fortunately, most of Rose’s attention was taken up by a new episode in the drama of Lydia. As if Rufa’s marriage really had solved all the family’s problems, Lydia was undergoing an awakening. In the face of the upheaval at Semple Farm, she was rediscovering her purpose and energy. She sent Linnet to her father with ironed and mended clothes. She helped Rose to hose away the filth that still accumulated on every surface of the restored house. She cooked, without being asked – rather well, and far better than Rose. And one morning she announced to Rufa that she had joined a choir, the Cotswold Chorus. It was a highly regarded and well-established choir, of which Edward was a patron. He had taken Rufa to a performance of Haydn’s
Creation
, at Cirencester church, the week before their wedding. Rufa, who remembered a worthy evening watching a lot of middle-aged men and women with mouths pursed up like hens’ bottoms, was surprised out of her dream of Tristan.