The Sleeping Beauty (12 page)

The vacant white light of a wet summer’s evening filled the street, was reflected in dove-coloured slates. No one went by. In the butcher’s window across the road, sheaves of paper hung on the meat-hooks; on a clean tray two pallid pig’s-trotters lay side by side as if in supplication. Next door, piles of dusty junk cluttered the window and swept back into the shop: broken furniture, old books, pictures, antlers, fire-irons. That Rita should be happy living here in this little town (facing, day after day, the pig’s-trotters – which he thought of as permanent décor – the tobacconist’s full of dummy cartons, the junk-shop, a jeweller’s window with shelves of tarnished silver) seemed astonishing and reprehensible to him, though also useful and accommodating and much to be encouraged.

Puss walked between his feet and round them in an unending figure-of-eight. Rita brought in the tea and Vinny watched her as she poured out. She was very thin and her satin frock showed up her little rounded and uncorseted stomach: even the indentation of her navel. Her face was carefully tended as it had always been. No one would mistake her age, but they might think that she was wonderful for it. Only her neck was deeply creased and she had a way of putting her hand to her throat as she talked or when she felt attention upon her. He stared gravely at her and she began to chatter distractedly to Puss. Vinny remembered that her cats started off when kittens with elaborate names – he thought that this one had been Cleopatra – but all became Puss before long.

While he drank his tea, he read some of the business letters she had handed to him; but for once he scarcely grasped the meaning of any of them and in the end he laid them aside without comment and suddenly said: ‘I came here, Rita, to ask you to divorce me.’

When he found the courage to look at her, he saw that she was blushing. He had never seen her blush before and he knew that the causes were anger and surprise, emotions that he had not previously aroused in her.

‘Our marriage cannot mean much to you – it does not deserve its name,’ he said gently. ‘And any harm I have done you was years ago. There is no more to be done.’

She pulled out her handkerchief and clapped it to her mouth, looking at him with wide-open eyes. She seemed unable to answer him.

‘Are you so shocked?’ he asked.

‘No.’

Then she raised the handkerchief to her eyes and broke into tears. ‘I thought it would happen years ago. Not now. I used to dread you coming here in case you asked it. Then I began to think you never would. And all the worry seemed over.’

‘What have I ever done for you that you should care, or be anxious?’

‘You married me,’ she said with dignity.

‘It was the worst mistake. We both decided that. If I had not … if we had not … you would have married someone else who would have been a real husband to you, made you happy, supported you.’

‘You’ve supported me.’

‘I didn’t mean money.’

‘No more did I.’

‘I have never made you happy.’

‘But I can’t divorce you. Everybody thinks you’re dead. I
couldn’t bear the disgrace. Why must I? Why change at our time of life? It seems so silly and unkind. Surely you haven’t fallen in love with someone else – with someone, I mean? At your age?’

‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘I only want to end this meaningless relationship.’

‘You’re ashamed of me.’

‘I’m ashamed of having married you. It was a great disservice I did you, though I did believe it to be quite otherwise at the time.’

He thought this barb might embed itself in her conscience, but her trickery had long faded from her mind. That imaginary pregnancy which had brought him to the registry-office was quite forgotten. For years, she had put down the failure of their marriage to his mother. She had seen films about possessive maternity and she thought that the dominating Mrs Tumulty, whom she had never been allowed to meet, had jealously, morbidly, stood between them. Vinny’s fleeing back to her was knowingly associated with uncut navel-cords and apron-strings. She had let him go with some relief; for she thought him too superior and could not live under his eternal and silent criticism. Every time she said ‘pardon me’ or ‘excusez-moi’ his face twitched as if he had neuralgia. No one before had ever thought her unrefined – quite the reverse – and she disliked seeing herself in the distorting mirror of his snobbery.

‘She cannot say that she has given me the best years of her life,’ he thought. ‘She has given nothing. And taken only a very little.’ She then confounded him by saying: ‘You meant everything to me. You were always at the back of my thoughts.’

‘The back?’ he smiled.

‘Because I was sure of you. There was no need for you to be in the foreground, as people are who can’t be relied on. The letters we mean to keep for ever we put at the back of the drawer.’

‘She
would
keep her only interesting observation until now!’ he thought.

‘But we know they’re there,’ she went on, and began to cry dreadfully, so that her lips could scarcely shape the words. ‘All the time, I knew you were there and that comforted me. Because it’s been so lonely. You talk about Miss Walker!’

‘From my point of view,’ Vinny said coldly, ‘to be some hoarded-up thing, kept lest I might come in useful …’

‘I hadn’t meant it like that,’ she said, and he knew that she had not. He had tried to work up anger, for pity would weaken him: but he was not used to anger, and pity was his old trouble. He put his hand over his eyes.

‘Who should I have left?’ she asked.

He could not say, although he had never believed she led the chaste life she described. Once, when he had stayed longer than usual, writing letters for her, she had glanced a great deal at the clock and kept taking her powder-puff from her handbag; but no one had ever come while he was there. As if against this very day, she had preserved the illusion of loneliness and martyrdom.

Her words followed all his thoughts as doggedly as if they were always in view.

‘When you would not live with me, I did not complain; though my pride was hurt and I was in despair.’

He looked for a second at her collapsed face and she said: ‘To wait until now when I’m getting old, not attractive any more … you try so hard to stave it off … looking old, I mean … all the effort … and you think you’ll manage to conquer it, or delay it, and be different from other women … all the expense of keeping yourself young … the denials …’ She glanced at the plate of cakes. Like most lonely people she had a sweet tooth. ‘And it’s never any use … just like the tide coming in … and one day you just feel scared and you give in.’

‘But don’t cry,’ he begged.

‘It’s different for men.’

‘No. I don’t think it’s different.’

‘All the time when I didn’t see you, I was planning little things so that I wouldn’t seem any less attractive when you came next time.’ She was beginning to believe every word she said.

He looked at his watch. Scenes take up so much time. So much emotion makes the minutes fly by. Nothing was settled, nothing accomplished, and if he did not catch the next bus, he would be late for Isabella, who was waiting for him in the ruins of her old home; tired, too, he supposed, and needing comfort.

He began to walk about the room and Rita sank to her weeping again.

‘I shall have to go. I hope you will reconsider all this and try to be sensible. I want to assure you that, of course, there would be no loss to you financially,’ he said stiffly.

‘That’s of no consequence. I can work. I never asked you for money.’ Her great blaze of rage astonished him. He was often amazed that money – to him a trivial thing – should arouse such overwhelming emotions.

He began to button his coat and walked towards the window, dreading his goodbye to her. Still sobbing, she stacked up the tea-cups and plates with one hand, holding her handkerchief to her forehead with the other.

He began to speak but, glancing down into the street, forgot what to say. Across the road, looking into the window of the junk-shop, was Isabella. She was examining a little dark picture, holding her head sideways to avoid the shine of the window. Then she leant forward and must have bumped her nose on the glass, for she put her hand up to her face and straightened her hat. He drew back quickly when she moved and walked on down the road. He was relieved and bewildered. Then suddenly,
as if ending her indecision, she turned and hurried back to the shop-door and tried the handle. She rattled it crossly, he could see, and frowning with disappointment or impatience, came out of the doorway and looked up at the window where Vinny was still standing. As if she had not seen him, she looked away again and then, her brain seeming to receive an unexpected message, looked back. He had tried to step behind the curtain, but when she waved uncertainly he was forced to do so in return.

At once, Rita, holding the teapot, came over to the window and showed her swollen, tear-stained face between the curtains.

When Isabella, embarrassed, had sauntered on along the road towards the square where the buses were, Rita, still clutching the teapot, began to sob more than ever; but sobbing of a different quality.

‘How dare you bring her here, and let her walk up and down in the street while you are begging for your freedom?’

Scorn swept over his protestations, but her scorn moved him less than her pleading. She would not listen to him. ‘To have her walk up and down outside, to wait across the road for you to give her the signal, because she could not constrain her impatience.’

He went to the door. ‘I will have to go. I will write. I will come again.’

‘Bring her in next time. Don’t leave her outside in the street. Bring her up to tea. Let us all be cosy together. Walking up and down outside, peering up at the windows, flaunting her new summer hat!’

It was not a new hat at all. It was last year’s pink felt and, later, sitting on a bench at the station, Isabella pulled it off her tired head and raked her hair with her fingers.

‘I shouldn’t have gone,’ she said once more.

She felt a miserable separation from and embarrassment with Vinny, having caught him out in what she supposed was something shady and unsavoury. A distaste for men and their grossness put a distance between them which she had felt the evening before in Soho when women had glanced at him from doorways and street-corners. She had once thought him such a fastidious, tender man, and now she saw that she did not know him at all. Over and over she made her explanations for being in Market Swanford and he listened courteously and smiled.

‘As soon as you had gone, I felt exposed, so dreadfully exposed: no one made a bid for Harry’s Butterfly Collection and someone giggled when they held up the Garden Figure.’

Vinny put his hand over hers and they both sat staring in front of them at their private miseries. The little station was quite deserted. The colours of the evening were intense rather than brilliant as if before rain. Swallows flew low, showing their pale, neat bellies. In distant woods, cuckoos answered one another at long intervals, haltingly – one with its June stammer already, its explosive, broken cry. At the backs of gardens along the line cumulus lilac was banked up against a navy-blue sky; roofs beyond had sharp outlines.

‘So I thought to myself, soon after lunch, “I’ll get away from all this,” and then there was nowhere to go but to find you.’

‘Those damn cuckoos!’ Vinny said restlessly.

‘I knew the bus you’d catch. I thought: “I’ll wait about in the square for him. And we can go straight back by train. It will save him coming all that way to fetch me.”’

‘It was very thoughtful.’

‘I love poking about little towns, though I hadn’t bargained for early-closing.’

‘How far can I trust her?’ Vinny wondered. But he decided that he could not trust her at all.

‘Was she what they called a kept woman?’ Isabella asked herself. ‘Or just a common prostitute? But why go all the way to Market Swanford for a prostitute? And surely prostitutes don’t cry? Harlots, still less.’ To Isabella, the two words suggested a great difference – there were common prostitutes, sly and squalid; and there were painted harlots, defiant and not un-romantic. A paramour was far removed, in elegance and education, from either.

Vinny glanced at his watch. A porter crossed the lines in a leisurely way. Then a signal came down sharply, like a guillotine, and Isabella started.

‘Your poor nerves!’ Vinny said and smiled at her. ‘You are quite right. It was a mistake to have gone there today.’ One mistake had followed another all day long. ‘The woman on the stairs – poor Miss Walker – led me into my worst mistake of all.’

‘To see all one’s
things
!’ Isabella cried. ‘People staring. One’s own friends staring. I felt they would put
me
up before long – Lot 29. Middle-aged widow, birdcage and roll of coconut-matting.’

The train came into sight, its smoke buffeted between the high banks of the cutting. When they were sitting in their empty compartment, Vinny said, looking out of the window: ‘The day has been too much for both of us. You
and
I. I had a very trying ordeal … with someone with whom I have business connections … in great trouble … great personal trouble … one feels so powerless to help.’

‘You take on too many people’s burdens,’ Isabella said, glancing at him shrewdly. ‘Oh, now, it’s beginning to rain again. What a mercy it held off most of the day!’

Long threads of moisture hit the window. As if released at a sudden command, the rain bounced and danced on rooftops, fell like knives into the flower-beds of the suburban houses below the railway-banks. The fields steamed. Down bowed all the
clotted blossom; the drenched lilac, the guelder-roses, looked ready to collapse; the air was full of grubby petals.

‘I never want to come back to Buckinghamshire again,’ Isabella said; and when she spoke her breath clouded the window.

‘Nor I,’ thought Vinny wearily.

‘Except for just one thing.’

‘What is the one thing?’

‘A little picture of a steamer painted on glass. I saw it in that shop, when I … however, the shop was shut. That made me want it all the more, naturally. It is exactly like the one I have in the parlour; only slightly different, of course. I must go back one of these days and see if it’s still there.’