Undue Influence (14 page)

‘Of course I will. You’ve no need to worry.’ Glancing at Hester I saw that she had every need. ‘And I can do your shopping for you. You’ll have to eat. I’ll come round in the evenings, shall I? Then you can tell me what you need for the following day.’

‘It was Hester who looked after that side of things,’ said Muriel. ‘I’m not sure how we’ll manage.’

‘Marks and Spencers.’

‘Too extravagant, Claire. And we eat very simply.’ I ignored this, as perhaps she intended me to.

I could see that Hester was keeping her eyes open only with an effort, so, after some hesitation, I kissed her and followed Muriel out of the room. Now the real discussion would take place.

‘You see what this means, Claire?’ said Muriel.

‘It means you can’t leave her alone for a week or two,’ I supplied.

‘Exactly.’

‘You could get a nurse,’ I suggested. ‘Yellow Pages …’

‘Oh, no, I shall look after her myself. We have always been together, you see. I could not leave her in the hands of a stranger.’

‘It won’t be for long,’ I lied. ‘And I’ll come round in the evenings to let you know how things are going.’

‘You mentioned Marks and Spencers …’

‘I’ll see to that too. Now I suggest you both settle down for the evening. It’s been a worrying day.’

I heard my new robust voice with some surprise. So did Muriel, who smiled faintly. I realized that I had been presuming, both on my own age and on Muriel’s seniority, and
stopped in some confusion. Muriel was more forbearing, and thanked me for my help. Yet when the door closed behind me I felt embarrassed.

I have to say that the following few days were delightful. I had been reprieved from unemployment. I sold a complete set of Batsford volumes, complete with dust jackets, and marked down all the review copies to half price. This was reckless and unprincipled but as they sold quickly I reckoned the enterprise had paid off. I was quite happy. The Colliers dined on poached salmon and haddock Mornay, and I sometimes ate with them. I felt competent, able to manage life. I was not at all surprised when one morning Martin Gibson appeared in the doorway. ‘Give it a push,’ I mimed. Then I sat him down, and made coffee, and concentrated on his well-being. And on mine, of course. But I can always be trusted to do that.

Ten

The summer, which had started so late and so uncertainly, became uncertain all over again, after a few misleadingly fine days. The glorious light dimmed; rain sprinkled down every afternoon, or so it seemed. When I walked home in the evenings there was a smell of damp, mingled with the scent of buddleia, which flourished even in the centre of town. Yet it was still summer, though it seemed as though autumn were only a few days away. The nights were more convincing than the days. It got dark very late, so that I was reluctant to go to bed, although I was tired after a day in the shop. And when I woke, at three or at the most four, there was a stealthy secretive light in the bedroom, as if night had never truly fallen. The light broadened into a brief spell of sunshine, so that I ate breakfast in the promise of a fine day. When I left for the shop the sun was already obscured by the sort of generalized cloud that never truly dispersed. It was only at night that I was reminded that the invisible sun was at its zenith. The fact that I could not see it made it seem paradoxically more powerful, as if it knew its timetable, irrespective of what was demanded of it.

I was happy in the shop. When the door opened I looked up to see whether it was Martin who entered or just another customer, usually the latter. I could count his visits on the fingers
of one hand: there had been precisely two, yet during those two visits he had made no pretence of looking for a book. He was there, he would have said, to express an entirely useless gratitude, though I had done nothing and now looked back impatiently to those curious visits. In fact he was there to talk about Cynthia—one subject leading quite naturally to the other—and it struck me most forcibly that he was talking to himself. I listened, of course, with every expression of interest. In fact I was interested in a way, although it was not a subject on which I thought he should dwell. But it was one he could not seem to leave alone, as though it was his sole reason for talking at all. It troubled him; that was obvious. It was as though he sought to banish the reluctance of those latter days, when his wife had been so restricted, with memories of a happier time. Yet I, listening carefully, could discern only the ruefulness, and an effort to retrieve memories which, though faithful, seemed to disturb him. His life had taken a wrong turning, and poor Cynthia was the cause of this.

‘She was so beautiful,’ he would say repeatedly, and I would concur: yes, she was beautiful.

‘But you didn’t see her at her best,’ he would protest. ‘When I met her I thought I had never really looked at a woman before. She was so feminine, had such an awareness of me!’

This I could see had been the attraction for a shy and no doubt inhibited man: the luxuriant promise of care. He would not have seen the entirely innocent calculation behind such a display. Living alone, and working hard, he would have been impressed by the delighted exclamations that greeted him, would have succumbed gratefully to the lavish welcome of the parents, whose plans were already laid. They had been the astute ones. They were prepared to annexe him, knowing him to be inexperienced, and determined to give their daughter
yet another present. And he would have seemed a suitable gift, his noble blond looks an invitation to some sort of takeover. He had probably never eaten so well as he did at that parental table, had never known such vigilance with regard to his tastes, his appreciation. Had he been another sort of man he would have been aware that what he had found was not a wife but a family, the complete antithesis of the only family he had ever known: lavish, sentimental, indulgent… That was how Cynthia would have made her mark, promising more of the same, for life.

Yet this may have been unfair of me. Even I had seen that Cynthia had the sort of corrupt exciting appeal that a man might find irresistible. And Martin in those days would have had around him an almost visible aura of innocence. Whatever fantasies had entered his head in adolescence would have been firmly suppressed. He would have shielded himself against the clumsy attentions of his students as if they represented abnormal temptation, a temptation he was bound to resist. Permission no longer to resist would have been Cynthia’s gift to him, in exchange for his gratitude that he need resist no longer. She was cleverer than he was, but her form of intelligence was one he could not hope to understand. And she was furiously attracted. Endearments would have been deployed artlessly, tempting him to reply in kind. This would have been resisted for some time, yet once they were married she became ‘Darling’, rarely addressed by her name, as if ‘Darling’ were her status, as if this endearment, this accolade, which men bestow so carelessly, applied to her alone.

It was clear from certain expressions that crossed his face when he was purportedly telling me about her illness that he had, in those latter months, found her distasteful. The ardour of their early years (and I had no doubt that this had been authentic,
all horrified excitement on his part, all confident boldness on hers) had not survived the change from his dependence on her to her dependence on him. This, in essence, was his tragedy. Although he looked like a man, and an exceptionally graceful man, he was as sensitive as a girl. It was the contrast between his looks and his apparent simplicity that had attracted her in the first place. I myself had had the same reaction. He would have had to revert to a position less of husband than of faithful servant, would have felt clouds of loneliness envelop him once again, as Cynthia, with the imperiousness of a sick woman, and something of the bitterness of a redundant lover, would have treated him with less than respect. And Martin was the sort of man who craved respect, knowing himself to be a timid character, less of a man than his appearance would lead one to expect. Because of that appearance, the tall lean figure, the slightly fatigued but regular features, the fastidiousness of gesture, the immaculate clothes, the dandyishness, it had been mistakenly assumed that he would know how to conduct himself. But I discerned a helplessness there that would have turned to misery once expectations metamorphosed into the sort of suspicions which a woman who had once been welcoming and was now both impotent and censorious had begun to exert.

He was healthy: his own body had not yet let him down, as Cynthia’s had. In her presence he was faced with the realities of another kind of physical life: what my mother would have called little accidents, the unbearable diminution of control. He would have wondered how this had come about, not quite aware that this is the rule. I had learned it early in life from my father; I too knew that wincing distaste, and the guilt and shame that accompany it. I could and did feel for him as he traversed this unknown territory. And he no longer had the
resources of his work to comfort him, for like the clever creature that she was and remained to the end Cynthia would have seen that his work was her enemy. A sensual and slightly hysterical woman would be more demanding than the more temperate company which might have suited him better (but he had not waited): she would have discerned attractions which she could not share. No matter that those attractions were literary, historical; she was thereby excluded. Her fear was that she might not understand what others might, would share as of right. Therefore she had effected a divorce, thinking that afterwards he would belong to her alone. He had done so but may not have been reconciled to this loss. Deprived of this comfort he had felt lonely, felt guilty at his quickly suppressed disappointment, had exchanged the library for the sickroom, for servitude, and had loyally made servitude his reason for living.

Thus they had both been unhappy, and like most unhappy and basically good people had not discussed their unhappiness. No wonder they relied on interruptions to their restricted way of life. This I could fully understand, although the sympathetic noises I was making were abstracted. I told myself that I knew nothing of his life, that my own construction had entirely taken over from facts which, as a gentleman, or rather just as a man, he would never divulge. It was I who discerned a darker tragedy behind his utterly routine reminiscences, which I did nothing to discourage. While he was telling me about a cruise they had taken round the Greek islands I was alert to the alteration in his voice that would let me know when the truth had broken through. None came. I made coffee, smiled pleasantly as various holidays were described for my benefit, and for his, as the legend was carefully reconstructed. The purpose of this was to negate the inevitable guilt that one feels after a
death, and in his case the shame of those divided feelings which had preceded the death for quite some time. In fact for longer than he cared to admit. Again no curiosity was shown about my own life. And every time I tried to steer him back to the present another holiday was invoked, another rich person’s diversion, as if he were guiding me through an album of illustrations to some sunny narrative, which only he was capable of expounding.

But I had seen the reality, the dark flat, and the gilt clock ticking, the voice from the bedroom. He had no friends; I saw that too. Here again I could sympathize. My own home had been free of visitors, because they had upset my father, as indeed I had. ‘Less enthusiasm, please, Claire,’ he would say as I clattered in from school. I got used to the idea that he was easily upset at a very early age, an age at which children should be joyous, and after his death I felt it would be disloyal to my mother to treat the flat as if it were partly my own: she was so grateful to have it to herself that it would have seemed selfish to have destroyed her peace. No doubt she saw this, which was why she encouraged me to take holidays. No doubt she would have hidden from herself any knowledge of how I spent them. My mother was the least prurient of women. But this hidden life, or rather those private lives, mine and hers, explained why I was so much alone and had remained so, why I made up so much in default of direct contact with others, why I kept my own counsel, which was some compensation for the isolation I sometimes felt.

My experience of life with an invalid supplemented his, although he was not to know this. I remembered the mournful inquiries: what sort of a day was it outside? Why had
The Times
not arrived? But I also remembered the querulous complaints, the heavy-breathing naps, the need at all times for his attendants
to express concern. It had become impossible to invite my schoolfriends to tea; I knew the embarrassment they would feel. As his illness took hold my father became more and more eccentric, so that in addition to the physical burden to which he (and my mother) were subject there were sudden outbreaks of annoyance, intemperate refusals, disquieting self-pity. I see now that he was not a very nice man or even a very good one, but then I had little knowledge of what had attracted my mother. Indeed I refused to believe that she had ever been attracted, and this too made me impatient. Because my father was such a sad wreck I became more and more convinced that a man must possess a high degree of physical excellence. I told myself that I could deal with any moral imperfections that might become apparent, but in fact I gave them little time to become apparent. I perfected a discreet but unmistakable approach, and also the ability to make a quick departure. I believe that I was simply beguiled by looks and charm, qualities in which my poor father was notably deficient. He too possessed an invalid’s caprices, demanding to know where we were, why we had to go out, jealous of those acquaintances to whom my mother said good morning in the supermarket…