Valley of Decision (30 page)

‘And you did not?'

She did not answer; there was no need. She bowed her head, keeping herself to herself in humiliation.

‘What about some tea?' he asked. It was 5.30; they had talked for over an hour.

‘I was shattered. I couldn't eat. I felt sick all the time. It affected my singing. People were kind, especially Katie, promising me things, that he'd come back, that, that. It only took me a week to realize. I hoped he'd . . . I kept waiting.'

‘And then you were stranded?'

‘The schedule began to break, and that, that . . . There was no work for me there.'

‘Liz Falconer's scheme didn't come to anything?'

‘No. She never even appeared. Cancelled everything, they say. But you just imagine us, performing like hell so somebody somewhere would take us up. Nothing happened. We did no worse than when the critics were all over us. But it was Red they were praising. I understand that now. For all the effect we had, we might have been singing in the street.'

‘Yes.'

‘I rang my mother and told her I was coming home.'

‘Why didn't you phone me, Mary?'

‘How could I? After the way I'd treated . . .'

Subdued anger was directed away from him, towards the hearth.

‘Tell you what,' he said. ‘Come and help me get the tea ready.'

‘You do it.'

He grasped it then, the extent of her effort. She was the husk of herself. This hour and a quarter had killed her beyond all politeness.

‘You can have salmon sandwiches or ham,' he said.

‘You choose.'

‘I will.'

David felt glad to be in the kitchen, trembling, doing tasks not beyond him, cutting bread thin, making sure the best china was spotless. When he brought in the crockery, the cutlery, he noted she had not moved, that she sat, eyes wide open, in her chair, staid and stable. He arranged Mrs Stiles's saffron buns on a doyley on a plate. Twenty minutes had passed by the time he finally carried in the teapot.

‘At long last,' he said. ‘It's salmon. Made to your taste.' He carried over a stool which he placed in front of her, and lifted her feet on to it. She allowed the advance. Next he arranged a small table by her chair, handed her napkin, plate and knife, poured out her tea. She accepted a sandwich, moistened her lips, gave no thanks.

‘Eat up,' he ordered.

She smiled, thin as water, across at him, tried a small bite.

‘To your satisfaction?'

She nodded, incapable of speech. When she had masticated the sandwich, slowly, without appetite, in misery, he, watching her covertly, gave her a minute's grace before he carried the plate across. When she refused, he pressed her, and she yielded.

‘We've got to build you up,' he said, and went unanswered.

Mary drank a second cup of tea, crumbled and ate one of her mother's cakes. David had lapsed into bleak, uncompanionable silence and was glad in the end to ask if she wanted more. She had removed her legs from the stool.

‘No, thanks. That was lovely.'

Small victory sounded in the two sentences. While he was outside washing the dishes he heard her go upstairs, presumably to the lavatory, and then almost immediately come down. He had hoped she would look about, in and out of the bedrooms, but she disappointed him. Clearing the kitchen put off his return to the dining room.

He found her again at the window.

‘Those bulbs have done well,' he said. ‘Those you set in the tubs. Narcissi.'

She returned to her seat and he opposite.

‘I've not asked you a word about yourself,' she said. ‘It's been nothing but me and my foolery.' She skirmished with the last word.

‘First things first.'

‘Tell me.' Her voice lacked power, powerfully.

He described his time with the Trent Quartet, delineating the characters, making her smile at Barton's old womanliness, Wilkinson's domestic yoke, Fred's dignified homosexuality. From time to time she threw in a question as she would have done in the old days, and he relaxed, but she would then reassume the complicated stiffness of pose which kept him uncertain. He did not give up; he outlined technical difficulties in the Shostakovich, in Britten's Third, then sketched concert organizers, discomfort in dressing rooms, audiences, the chances of the Trent's becoming professional.

‘How did you manage for white shirts for the concerts?' she asked so feebly he wondered if he were inventing the conversation for himself.

‘My mother bought me three, and kept them laundered.'

That seemed a confession of weakness.

‘I did the rest. Honestly. Washing machine on every Wednesday and every weekend. I'm quite an expert with the iron.'

She dismissed the trivialities with a short sweep of the arm, violently energetic within the context of her immobility.

‘How have you been?' she asked.

‘Pretty healthy really. Usual coughs and colds.'

‘I didn't mean like that.'

As soon as she had posed the first question he knew intensely how he had been. This afternoon he had hedged himself, disciplined himself to be her friend and host and now she came out with this demand. Depression winded him like a kick.

‘Pretty bloody,' he answered.

‘But you kept working?'

‘To the best of my ability. I was lucky in that I had interesting things to do. If I'd been at a factory bench . . .' He rubbed his chin. ‘Sometimes, even so, it was so painful it stopped me practising, but mostly I could stagger on, not very fast, not very straight.' He tried to keep his voice light. ‘I wished sometimes I had an animal, a cat to sit on my knee, or a dog to take for a walk. Of course, for weeks I kept hoping, looking out for the postman, telling myself the transatlantic mail service had slipped up.'

‘You must have . . .?' she faltered.

‘In the end. Yes. I realized something was seriously wrong.'

‘I'm sorry. It was awful, David.' She groped outwards. She was crying, soundlessly.

‘Come back to me, Mary,' he said, off balance.

The imperative passed without effect. He had decided that she was not going to answer, that he must toss his cap again into the fearful ring, when she spoke.

‘Do you mean that?'

He did not know; in his dizzy distress he had no landmarks except for this central pointer: he must take her.

‘Yes. I wouldn't say it otherwise.' That sounded weakly, unconvincing even to him. ‘I want you back.'

She said nothing, but her posture hinted of hope. She did not deny him, repel him with stiffness. She was listening.

‘Come home,' he said. He remembered a catchword of his father's from some radio show. His all was subsumed under ham acting, comedians' foolery, half-forgotten ephemerality. The gaiety of nations.

‘I have,' she said.

‘For good?'

‘You don't want me.' Silent crying began again; rolling of tears etched her grief into him.

‘I do.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I love you.'

‘But look what I've done to you.' Her voice was strong, letting him get away with nothing, checking his banalities.

‘I want you here.'

‘David.' She stopped, as if to make sure her argument was clear before she put it. ‘You'll never be able to forget what I've done to you. It'll always be there, in your mind, whether you say anything or not. It will fester. I acted abominably. How can you say . . .?'

‘I've said it.' Strongly, upstanding.

‘That's sentimental.'

The schoolmaster answered, on top of his class.

‘Expressing more emotion than the situation warrants,' he said, mock-pedantically. ‘Allow me to think otherwise.' He checked her with his hand. ‘Argument is not going to change my mind. Do you want to come back?'

‘Yes. If you'll . . . I think so.'

Her face, tear-stricken, was turned away from him. Was this wholehearted? He did not know, but he crouched, on his right heel like a miner again, by her chair.

‘You won't be able to forget what I've done, will you?'

‘I'm not perfect. No. I expect what you say is right enough, but it hardly seems worth wasting energy on just now.'

‘It's no use starting off forgetting these things.'

‘You'll be telling me next,' he said, flaring, ‘that I only took you back because I didn't much care one way or the other about what had happened.'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘I know you didn't. But what you don't realize is how glad I am to see you sitting in this room, telling me you're going to stay.'

As soon as he established it in words it became the truth. A powerful sense of, at present, satisfaction rather than exhilaration gripped him, expressed by his monosyllable ‘glad'. He could not define it, or defend it. Perhaps, these disclaimers darted, flitted at him sharp, resisted temptations, his pride had been temporarily bandaged, in so far that he had no longer to go about saying ‘My wife has left me for another man.' It did not feel like this. He could not quite disturb the universe, even shake the street and his bent legs were beginning to hurt, but his conviction grew, strong, huge, deepening, not overwhelming yet, but near flood level. Dangerous, yes, all that. But right, right. Correct. Just.

The telephone shrilled. Both started.

For a moment he thought he should ignore its insistence, but could not. He smiled apologetically at his wife.

Anna Talbot asked how he had found Mary. Her impudence astounded, half angered him. He kept his voice low. ‘She's here with me now.'

He could not listen to the welter of her answering, apologetic sentences. In the end she seemed to shout.

‘You mean she's back for good?'

‘I hope so.'

‘Oh, David. That's marvellous.' A further flood of chatter penetrated no farther than his eardrums. Her talk took the guise of a ritual he could afford to ignore.

‘Is she there now?' What did the damned woman mean? She knew quite well.

‘Yes.'

‘Would she, I mean, could I speak to her?'

‘I'll see.'

He asked Mary, who had assumed the expression of one trying not to listen in. She rose without fuss, as to an inquiry from a shopkeeper, a telly-hire firm, the jobbing builder.

For a time she answered in monosyllables, so that he could only guess the direction of conversation. Mary's face was dry of tears, but she did not smile, answered without facial expression as if she concentrated on a foreign language, afraid to miss the crucial word. David thought he detected in her stance something of that stiffness which had disfigured her earlier in the afternoon.

He listened, looking at his shoes. He had been convinced that Mary would stay with him, but he saw the possibility that Anna's impertinent intervention, person from Porlock, would give Mary the opportunity to draw back.

‘Yes. – Oh, yes. – Um. – Is it? – Well. – Yes. Do they? – Oh. – I see. – No. – I don't think so.'

He tried to make sense of these separate dullnesses and the animated cackle between. He failed. He tensely took the arm of the chair.

‘Oh, I expect so.'

Mary turned, looked at him. Suddenly he knew joy and certainty. God knows what she expected, perhaps to run across Anna some time, but the expectation was great. She would stay. She was his wife again. He would be a father. The sourness, the disappointments had not disappeared, but were in perspective. These would, she had said, and he knew for himself, savage him in the future, but for the moment he had made his proposal, only half understanding its nature and its commitments, and she had accepted. The act had remade them; they had begun, and already the pleasure of completion warmed him.

‘Yes. I think that's likely.'

He was suspicious, and afraid. By God he was. Three months' hell is not wiped off the slate without trace. Smears blotch ugly.

‘It's possible.'

What uplifted him now was the ease of his conviction. Once he had stepped up, like a sinner to the penitents' form, another of his father's childhood reminiscences, and declared himself he knew, without disclaimers, riders, ifs and buts that he had done right. It sang inside him. Father David and his anecdotes.

‘There'll be snags.' Cackle, prestissimo, cackle, goose laughter. ‘Aren't there always?'

It did not matter to him. He had taken a stance, almost against his nature, and the reward had been out of all proportion. Mary was talking now almost as fast as Anna Talbot about something Elizabeth Falconer had said or done, quite at home.

He remembered a sentence from his sixth form days, from
Cymbeline
, Posthumus to his restored Imogen:

David found his feet.

‘No, no,' Mary was saying. ‘Not at all. Must ring off, now. Thanks for the call. Yes. See you, Anna. Bye. Yes. Bye.'

She replaced the phone.

‘I'll ring Derby,' she asked, ‘shall I, to tell them I'll not be back tonight?'

She stretched a hand out to touch impossibility in an imperfect world.

Husband and father, he reached back.

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VALLEY OF DECISION

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Middleton, Stanley

Valley of decision.