Valley of Decision (8 page)

Now, it had been said, they were silenced.

‘If you've retired, there'll be no job for me to come back to,' Mary said, making a joke of it.

‘That's as may be. You sing loud,' Horace said. ‘You show them.' Then clearing his throat, ‘I tell you this, though, I shall miss you, never mind our David.'

‘Thank you.' The voice was beautiful.

‘You're going to have so much time on your hands,' his wife warned, ‘you'll be able to take a plane and go off to hear her sing whenever you like.'

‘If there's any money left.'

‘Or inclination,' Mary said.

They talked a miserable hour, never quite openly, always skirting the deepest anxieties. At the end, they kissed perfunctorily, in an embarrassment so desperate that David found himself shaking hands with his father.

‘Don't forget,' Horace told his daughter-in-law, ‘if you want anything, if you run short of money, let us know. We'll do our best.'

‘Poor as we are,' Joan said, laughing.

Mary hugged Horace, Joan, Horace again. The parents came out to the drive to wave their goodbyes. A wet wind rustled the laurel bushes. In the car Mary dabbed at her eyes.

‘I think sometimes I'm a fool,' she said, recovering.

‘Bear up.'

They drank coffee together back at home and small glasses of Drambuie, looking about for an inspired word, not finding it. He carried the pots away into the kitchen, barked his shins on a stool, swore. Both laughed uncomfortably, and as he stood at the sink he heard Mary singing, not loud, but richly, ‘Summer time, an' the livin' is easy,' lazily, putting the fingermark of her voice on the house.

They bundled themselves upstairs and made love but without forgetting imminent separation. Their naked union parted them; they were uneasily aware of otherness.

Next morning breakfast was leisurely, but breathless they punctuated silences with small controlled gusts of laughter. Joan rang from home; Horace from work; Mary cried, but meanly. When the time came they were glad to pile cases into the car and make a start. Very briefly Mary stood at the front gate, looked back at the house, but ventured no remark, her face set. As they drove along the main road near his school David noticed one or two latecomers hurrying in to begin an ordinary day, as usual, behind the time.

The journey was easier than they expected; they found their way through Heathrow without delay but had not too much time left for dawdling about in the lounges. They sipped scalding coffee, ate an iced bun, tensely, not saying much, barely trusting their lips, trying to keep still and sober as they observed the small dramas of an airport, the marshalling of children, the misplacement of hand luggage, the argument over next moves, the leaps upward after a public announcement, the handshakes, the watchfulness.

Mary's flight was called, exactly on time. The pair rose, kissed, held one another, and then she darted down for her bag.

‘Bye,' she said. ‘Take care of yourself.'

‘And you.'

They kissed again and she was marching straight-backed away. At the glass doors she turned, raised her free hand, smiled, walked on. He looked at his mud-spattered shoes, buttoned his coat, made for the car park, drove back into gathering darkness, unsure how to contain his unease.

By the time he entered his home, he had prepared himself. He would not be disturbed by the cups and saucers on the draining board placed as Mary had left them in the last joint domestic chore. Oddly they were not as he remembered them, and this jolted him. Either he had not known what he was about, or he had casually observed when he ought to have been meticulous; he felt a pang of disappointment in himself, but set about cutting the loaf they had shared not ten hours before.

At eight his mother telephoned with a string of questions. He answered these easily, but she was not to be reassured.

‘Do you want to come round?'

‘No, thanks. I'm fine.'

‘Shall we slip into the car and see you?'

‘Please yourself.'

‘Are you busy?'

‘I can always find something to do.'

‘Such as?'

‘Marking history essays.'

Joan was not pleased, but left it at that. He ought to have produced some sign, some heavenly dove descending, to suit the occasion, but he could not. His wife had stepped firmly on to a plane, and at any time now would walk off it with as much resolution, and that was that. He summoned up his energies to swear, and beat a tattoo with clenched fists above the mantelpiece where she had not left her fingermarks.

He took his cello from the case, and a copy of the Bach unaccompanied suites from the cabinet, and sat before the stand, without expectation. He turned and began quickly on the C major, boldly down, but was well into the movement before he realized how badly he played. Smoothing the copy with the end of his bow, he tried again and, failing, forced himself to continue, stumbling to the end of the Prelude, and breaking down in the Allemande. Omitting the Courante, he struck a few notes of the Sarabande and abandoned the project, taking his time as he unscrewed the bow, casing the cello, folding up the metal stand, something he never did. End of an era.

True to his word, he marked some lower sixth essays on Napoleon; they were conscientiously prepared, written with some style and energy, but they bored him. He awarded grades with equity, he thought, generously encouraging the highly intelligent, indulging in mild sarcasm in the manner of the school at the expense of misspellers or the slapdash. It was now half eleven and Mary would have been met, conducted to wherever she was going, and would be trying to prop her eyes open at 6.30 p.m. She had sense; possibly she'd demanded bath and bed; how could he know now they were on opposite sides of the Atlantic? He wound his alarm, set his radio and fell asleep immediately.

The next few days were barren.

No one at work asked about his day's absence; it had gone unremarked. At the Friday orchestral practice there were no inquiries about his wife or her travels, not even in the pub afterwards; his parents did not telephone; the postman delivered nothing interesting. The temperature dropped, and it rained harshly. These were evenings he ought to have enjoyed indoors, in the warmth, listening to the wind rattling panes or cracking raindrops bulletlike into the windows, but he was lonely.

The solitude carried no physical pain, rather a mental disorientation so that he could not concentrate for long. Twice he found himself upstairs on an errand he could not remember. He would lift down a book from his shelves and only by the most violent mental effort recall why he needed to consult it. He taught as he played sometimes in orchestral rehearsals, absentmindedly, on automatic pilot, but nobody complained, nobody noticed. The nearest he came to intellectual occupation was on the Saturday morning shopping expedition, when he needed to buy for his weekend meals, a new experience. He thought his mother might invite him for Sunday lunch, but she did not. Perhaps he had annoyed her, but he did not know how. When he rang his parents' house, Saturday at teatime, later that evening, Sunday at eleven, they did not answer the phone. He racked his brain, consulted his notepad, but there had been no prior intimation of their absence.

Lunch in the oven, two large potatoes; cold meat and salad in the fridge, he walked across to the Horace Blackwalls'. In the park he stood for a few dull minutes watching a football match, a ruthless encounter on a wet, sloping pitch. The players gasped and coughed; the thud of boot on ball had the uncouth roughness of the general strategy. With heavy kicks, furious shoulder charges, menacing shouts or appeals, muscly thighs bunched without resultant skill, men ran, sweated, blew out visible breath, steamed in the cold air, clogged their boots with mud. The referee's whistle screamed; athletic bolsheviks protested, reluctantly obeyed; the sodden ball flopped blackly skyward to no purpose.

David reached his parents' house, rang the bell, roused no one. He walked round to the back and sheltered for five minutes as a shower scudded from the northeast, whipping shrubs, bending branches. An attempt to peer into the garage failed; the sky cleared from blackish to mottled grey. His parents had gone out without informing him or he had forgotten.

At the end of the street the congregation from the parish church buttoned overcoats, held down hats, hurried for the line of cars parked along the gutter. In the park the footballers, redder in face and thigh, slogged on. Two biting showers caught, soaked him before he reached home.

After lunch, unusually, he fell asleep in his armchair over the Sunday papers. Middle age was setting in, he concluded, when he woke dazed and refreshed. It would be sensible to start a letter to Mary and slip it into an envelope for posting as soon as he had her address. He did nothing about it, deciding he would reply to her letter when it arrived. It surprised him that he did not know how long it took for mail to cross the Atlantic. Two days? A week? Longer? Sluggishly he pulled a section of a newspaper towards him, read an article on women and unilateral disarmament, discovered he had not taken in a word. Staring towards the ceiling he considered action and decided after ten minutes to make a cup of instant coffee. He turned on his radio; an unknown nineteenth-century opera screeched at his boredom, so that he had switched it off before he could identify work or composer. Wind and cold rain devilled away outside.

It was dark before he left the chair. The telephone lay dumb. As he stood for some minutes at the front window the street seemed deserted. He considered a quick descent on the pub, saw no advantage in it. At this rate he'd be better off at school, with somebody to help him pass time. He looked at his cello case, but did no more than that, and fell asleep again over the early evening television news. At nine the phone shrilled and he ran towards it. His mother inquired how he progressed. When he had described his expedition to her house and she said, not sympathetically, ‘You knew months ago that we were going to Annesley Hall last night. I was accompanying Christopher Mount. We did the
Dichterliebe
. We've been practising for weeks. In fact I offered you a ticket, but you said you weren't sure how you'd be fixed.'

Memory stirred vaguely in him as he bleated inanities down the mouthpiece. He asked how her concert had gone, and she softened. The Dyson Quartet had played Mozart's ‘Hunt' and Janáček's First; she and Mount had performed between, and their audience had applauded generously.

‘Good, good. You just did the Schumann.'

‘Not all of that.'

‘Oh. What was it in aid of?'

‘David, David.' Again she explained to him, with the implication that he ought to have known. His mother appeared depressed, perhaps because she had little to occupy her now the recital was over. He inquired about American mail, and though she offered information she could not, would not be precise as he wished. She dismally arranged for him to dine with them on Thursday.

‘You may have heard by then,' Joan said without enthusiasm. ‘She'll be all right. There's a lot to that girl.'

On Wednesday, a week away from her departure, and with no word yet, he walked out from the gates of the school playing fields. It was cold, though the pitches were unfrozen, and flakes of snow drifted. He had not brought his car.

‘Too cold for snow.'

A tall man blocked his path.

‘That's something.'

‘You one of the teachers at the high school, then?' The man nodded a cloth-capped hand in the direction of the pavilion.

‘Yes.' ‘Teacher' was not a popular term with the staff there.

‘I've seen you before. I live just down there, Sunrise Road.'

The man wore a long, navy blue overcoat, frayed at the cuffs, brown knitted mittens, an ill-tied scarf; his collar and tie were none too clean. His boots were heavy, ex-army, the laces not tight.

‘Yes.' David glanced at his watch.

‘I watch the games, sometimes. Through the fence, y'know. I like the cricket better. Don't understand this rugby. Up and under. And it's a bit nippy standing about here in the winter.' The man's face was pale, unshaven, though his growth of beard was not strong, so that individual hairs stood shining. He needed a haircut, a nailfile. ‘I have a walk out every afternoon, wet or fine. At my time of life you need the exercise, don't you?'

‘I suppose you do.'

The man's brown eyes opened more widely, suspiciously at the answer.

‘Housework and shopping and cooking in the morning. Out and about in the afternoon. That's the programme.' David said nothing. ‘My wife died two years ago. I'm on my own.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I don't know how I put up with it, at first. I don't really. It affected me that bad. My children are grown-up, married. One in Frimley, the other, the girl, up north in Gateshead.'

‘Do they visit you?'

The man opened his mouth, revealing brown, uneven teeth. He rubbed the end of his nose with the back of his hand. A gust of wind deposited wet snowflakes on the blue coat.

‘They've got families of their own. Don't come often. Don't write much.'

‘A pity.'

‘Send cheques at Christmas. Good job in a bank, the daughter's husband. My son's in car repair. I'd like to see the children, but they don't come. Not that I blame them. Just look at me. I'm not much of an oil painting, am I? And this is an improvement. When my wife died, I went to pot. I did. Didn't look after myself. Well, there didn't seem much point in it.' He blew out breath grotesquely. ‘I see now that was wrong. You've got to soldier on. I mean, if I don't look after myself, somebody else will have to, the council or the social services, and I don't want that. I want my independence while I'm capable. That's sensible, in't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘They send women in to bath you.' He eyed David narrowly. ‘One poor old man down our street. How old do you think I am?'