A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (19 page)

* * *

He said, ‘You see, when she was a child, she used to depend on me entirely. It was an extraordinary sensation: I felt like God. She’d come to me if she grazed her knee or lost a pencil or couldn’t do her homework. She was so trusting, so
sure I could fix whatever it was. When all that stops, almost overnight, it’s a terrible jolt. She was so beautiful—well, she still is—but I mean I used to look at her and think how vulnerable she was, as if she might snap in the wind, and somehow I could always protect her. She was very thin, like you, and I thought she might break, so I had to be there.’ He was rather drunk. ‘It’s uncanny to look at someone and know you’ve produced them, you’re responsible for their existence. You
have
to make everything right for them, or the whole thing’s a mockery. I used to think I’d be had up in some heavenly court and they’d say, “Well, and what have you done for your daughter? She’s actually been crying. Why didn’t you prevent it?” And I’d have no defence. Wanting to work miracles just isn’t good enough, you have to actually do it.’ And he had failed. When it came to the point you could not provide the one thing your children needed, which was luck. You could only give them love, and a good dentist, and music lessons, he thought bitterly to himself.

They had been looking at wedding pictures, sitting on the floor of Prue’s flat. He had his arm round Sarah as he turned the pages. She thought, He doesn’t love me, not the way I love him, but it doesn’t matter. She had never thought to accept so little so gratefully. She looked at the dark, pretty girl in the photographs, the blank face, the thin pussy-cat features, the look of mystery and self-containment, and searched lovingly in Manson’s face for the original. She felt the bitterest envy; she could almost taste it, like lipstick. This girl had had every atom of love and care that she had been denied. Each moment of her life had been hedged round with concern. The boy in the photographs, the husband, longhaired and patently self-conscious in the formal clothes, was as nothing to her: anyone from off a street corner. She could have said to Prue, ‘Why him? Why not another? Why anybody, in fact?’ She looked at the pictures of Cassie without guilt, even without connection: she was not seeing a woman
whose husband she was leading astray, her own position was too precarious for such clichés to be valid. But a nice woman, a kind woman, that was evident, not at ease in smart clothes, with a homely hair-do and marks of age and involvement on her face. She obviously did not care about money or status; her identification was with her family. She thought, No wonder he loves her and no wonder they can’t really talk about Prue. She even thought that she and Cassie could have been friends, had they met, had it all been otherwise. She looked at the unpainted mouth and thought, Yes, you’d be easy to hug, easy to talk to. She was consumed with envy and she could not tell him. Besides, what was there to tell? Only that her life had been different.

* * *

She began to call him Eliot, when they were alone. She could not get her tongue round Peter, and the entire name was clearly absurd for general use. The more he talked, the more he confided in her, the more desperately she made love to him, in an effort to prove something. She felt it was the only talent she had, and she used it like one under sentence of death.

* * *

Weekends he spent with Cassie in Devon, and she hoped they made love. She was not jealous, she was never jealous, and besides it would help to redress the balance. But she did not ask him and he did not tell her. Instead he would mention that Cassie was tired or the mother-in-law was rallying or the boys were getting restless. Safe information. Weekends she spent with Geoff or Simon, or divided between them, and spoke vaguely to Manson about girl friends and sewing. She thought how funny it was that, insofar as there were rules for adultery, the rules would say that it was (of course) all right for him to continue sleeping with his wife but all wrong for
her, Sarah, to continue sleeping with her boyfriends. But she was afraid to let them go and could think of no adequate reason to give (‘I am having an affair with a married man who is sure to ditch me presently.’) that would neither sound ridiculous nor hurt their feelings. It had its funny side, too, and it was good sometimes to be cynical and laugh at herself and the whole situation. She now realised that three was the maximum she could cope with unless each knew about the other two. Although Geoff knew about Simon she decided not to burden him with Manson, as she was not sure how much her image could stand, even in Geoff’s eyes. Simon and Manson had no grounds for thinking she was not exclusive to each of them: the subject was never mentioned and they could assume what they liked. Meanwhile she juggled frantically with her diary and hoped that they would never all meet head-on in a restaurant.

With Manson she soon became extremely self-conscious and furtive in public, prepared at a second’s notice to disappear under the table or on to the floor of the cab, although he repeatedly assured her that, firstly, they were unlikely to meet anyone he knew (she found this most unconvincing) and secondly, if they did, it would not mean All was Discovered, merely that he had to admit to taking his secretary out on that one occasion. But Sarah, having once become jumpy, could never relax completely again. So sometimes she would cook for him at the flat, being careful to replace everything exactly as found. She became very fond of it and sometimes wondered if this was how it would feel if they were married.

* * *

‘How long is Prue away for?’ she asked one evening when they were lying on the bed, too lazy to dress, and she was watching him smoke just one more cigarette.

‘I’m not sure. I’ve had two postcards in three weeks, and
originally they said they’d be away for a month
or two
, so I really can’t say.’

Sarah shivered. ‘We’d better be careful then.’

‘Oh, we’re all right for another week at least.’ He felt extraordinarily relaxed. All his anxiety about Prue had been dispersed: she was simply enjoying herself in the sun. His mother-in-law was not dying: there was no judgment of God there. He felt like a school-boy on holiday, knowing that the time would pass and term begin again, but
not yet
. There was another week at least before Cassie’s return, before Prue’s return. A golden week of freedom.

Sarah said anxiously, ‘What will we do then?’

‘There are always hotels.’ He stroked her shoulder. But he did not really want to think, to make plans. It was too soon to face up to the cold, real world outside.

Sarah was thinking that this would not do. She had not liked the hotel very much—she had in fact felt surprisingly self-conscious—and if it was only for a few hours instead of the whole night that feeling would surely be much, much worse. She blamed herself for being unsophisticated but could not change. She made wild plans for a place of her own, as a last resort, and yet she more than half believed that the affair would soon be over anyway. She wondered if she would have to look for another job. How did you go on working for someone who had stopped making love to you? Would her feeling of safety remain, like a legacy, or would it vanish with him, and would she be worse off than before? She looked tenderly round the room, where she had been happy, trying to imprint it on her memory, in case, as seemed likely, after another week she never saw it again.

‘You never told me,’ she said as the point struck her, ‘how you came to have a key to this place. Did Prue leave it with you?’

‘No.’ He was a little shame-faced. ‘When I took out the
lease I had duplicates made. Wasn’t that reprehensible of me?’

‘And she doesn’t know?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘But
why?
I mean—you didn’t plan to do this, did you?’

‘Good God, no. Now you
know
I didn’t.’

‘Then why?’ She thought how she would feel if anyone did such a thing to her; and here she was benefiting from something she deplored.

‘I suppose I wanted to feel still in charge. Able to walk in—if anything happened.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Trouble.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘Anything.’

‘You mean you expected it?’

‘No. I’m just making excuses. I had to have a key because I wanted to feel I could still walk in like a father. I never meant to use the key, actually. Just having it helped.’

Footsteps passed in the corridor all the time and they were used to them. These stopped, on the word key, outside the front door. Sarah stiffened.

‘Ssh.’

‘What?’

Immediately it was every farce that had ever been written. And also pure terror.

‘There’s someone outside.’

‘It can’t be them.’

She knew she should be doing something—dressing, hiding. She couldn’t move. A key was inserted in the lock and carefully turned.

‘
No
.’

The door opened and closed. The feet in the hall hesitated. Sarah lay frozen, too frightened to move.

‘Get dressed,’ Manson said in a quick, urgent whisper. ‘Get
dressed
quickly.’
He slid off the bed and began flinging on his clothes. His speech made her capable of action. She too got up, shaking all over, and started to climb into her dress, shoving her underwear into her handbag for speed.

A tap ran for a while in the kitchen. The footsteps moved about the living-room.

‘Our coats,’ Sarah whispered in agony, suddenly remembering. ‘They’re in there.’

Manson didn’t answer but merely gave a sigh of despair. They were partly dressed but barefoot and extremely dishevelled, standing on either side of the rumpled bed with its rumpled towel in full view, when the bedroom door opened. The moment of classic horror. They froze, as if by remaining motionless they could become invisible. A girl with long red hair and a jug in her hand appeared, saw them, and gasped; her eyes grew quite round while the rest of her face managed to register no expression at all, but slowly turned scarlet.

‘Oh,’ she said, retreating. ‘Excuse me.’

They both remained in their attitudes of frozen shock as they heard the door bang behind her and her footsteps going away, rather fast, down the passage. Sarah was the first to move. She sat down out of sheer weakness, looked at Manson, still quite motionless with one sock in his hand, and said, ‘Oh
Christ …’

He said automatically, mechanically reassuring, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ as if to a child, the parental reflex.

‘But it
isn’t.’
She burst into tears of anger and misery. ‘It couldn’t be worse. Oh,
God.’
She wept savagely. He was thinking hard but getting nowhere, like a vehicle spinning its wheels in sand. He put out a hand to comfort her but she flinched away, and he felt suddenly alone. Of all the insane, unlucky ways to ruin something … Then he heard the sound change, emerging from the first sound as if struggling for supremacy. She was actually laughing. He turned and looked at her in amazement as she rolled on the bed, her knees
tucked up to her chin and howled with laughter, tears streaming from her eyes, until she nearly choked and had to pant for breath. It was at that moment that he found himself thinking quite calmly and matter-of-factly, And now I have fallen in love with her. That was the only way he knew it had not happened before: it dated from that moment. If she had not laughed perhaps he would not have fallen in love. It seemed as simple as that.

‘Oh God,’ she said finally, still spluttering with laughter, ‘what a thing to happen. She looked so
shocked
—didn’t she? That
look
on her face.’ But just as suddenly she sobered. ‘Who d’you suppose she was?’

He shrugged. ‘A friend of Prue’s. Come in to water the plants, I imagine.’

Sarah was silent, retrieving her underwear from her handbag and slowly putting it on. He was surprised to find he wanted to make love to her again but in the circumstances did not like to suggest it. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.

‘There’s no hurry. She’s hardly likely to come back, after all.’

‘She might. And anyway—I just don’t feel comfortable here any more.’

He said sadly, ‘You never did really, did you?’

‘Yes, I did. In a way. Maybe too comfortable.’ She was brushing her hair, repairing her face, all with a terrible brisk coldness. ‘We started taking it for granted, didn’t we?’

‘Well, we haven’t done any harm.’

‘Who knows? She might talk, mightn’t she?’

‘Talk?’ He had not considered this: the shock of the discovery, and the aftermath, had numbed his brain. ‘You mean—to
Prue?’

‘Who else?’

‘Oh, surely not.’ A vast chill spread all over his body. He could even feel gooseflesh rising on his arms. He put on his jacket slowly, and the remaining sock, feeling numb all over.

‘Why not? It would be perfectly natural. She doesn’t know who we are—she finds us here—why shouldn’t she say to Prue—oh, God, it doesn’t bear thinking about. I shouldn’t have laughed. It just isn’t funny.’

He said, ‘I liked you laughing.’

She looked at him without comprehension. ‘You must be crazy. Come on, let’s go; I can’t bear to be here another minute.’

He did the usual tidying up while she watched him; for once she did not help. When they were outside the door she said, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and walked rather fast to the lift. He followed her. They travelled down in silence and left separately, as usual.

Outside on the pavement he said, ‘Let me buy you a drink; I’m sure we both need one.’ She was very white and he thought she was trembling slightly. ‘We’ve had quite a shock, after all. Come and have a brandy or something.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t want one.’

‘Maybe not, but you need one all the same.’

She began walking energetically. ‘I want to go home.’

‘No.’

‘What d’you mean, no?’ He had never heard her speak so coldly. ‘Why shouldn’t I go home?’

He temporised, soothed, terrified that if he let her out of his sight she would disappear for ever, as if she had never existed, like some fairy-tale creature, both magical and doomed. ‘Darling, of course you can go home, you can do whatever you like, I’m only asking you to come and have a drink first, just for half an hour, and let’s talk about it. After all, I’m as worried as you are.’