Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (9 page)

“I believe in an after-life of some sort,” said Martha.

“How strange! I know some other people who believe in that. And in a way I can see how they must.”

The front door-bell was rung, and before she could cross the room, Ernie had sped upstairs, snapping his teeth back into his mouth as he ran.

“What a terrible man,” Martha said, as soon as Amy came back into the room after saying goodbye to Gareth Lloyd.

“Terrible?” Amy was surprised.

“So noble-looking. He gives an impression of massiveness, though not tall, really. How does he manage to do that? And that rich voice. I should like to dress him up in a toga and a wreath of laurels.”

Then Amy laughed, hoping that she sensed a joke.

During Gareth’s visit, Martha had hardly spoken. She had taken a box of matches from a little table beside her, struck one, watched the light draw along its length; then blew it out. After this, she went through the whole box, one by one, having no idea of the irritation she was causing Amy, who hated waste, and thought she was behaving like a destructive child, or a mad woman. Gareth had ignored the fidgeting – if anything so rhythmical and deliberate could be called this. He had talked on, and Martha, between spurts of flame, had looked across at him with steady, narrowed eyes, as if she were drawing him.

“He seems pleased with himself,” she now told Amy, “so perhaps that’s halfway to other people being pleased with him.” She glanced round for more matches and finding none, drew her chair up to another little table and began to sort out a bowl of onyx eggs.

Amy looked at her watch, thinking of dinner.

“His wife, Anna, died two years ago,” she said, as
if this explained something of Gareth’s behaviour, which she had always thought unexceptional. “She was always more my friend than he. My only real friend, I suppose. I haven’t a gift for it.”

“You’re simply not interested in other people.”

“I didn’t have to try to be with her. I missed her. I miss her. His – Gareth’s – missing her so much, too, drew us together. He began to come here in the evenings. Often. To talk about Anna. He’d ring up and say, “Can I come to
your
surgery when mine is over?”

“Did Nick like him?”

“Oh, we all four got on very well together. But doctors always put the wind up Nick. He didn’t really feel at ease in their company. He felt that they were seeing things wrong with him that he hadn’t even suspected – and he did suspect a great many. He thought the state of his health was never for one moment out of Gareth’s mind.”

“But he didn’t mind his turning up to talk about his poor wife?”

“He was always down at the pub by then.”

Martha took up the onyx eggs two by two and held them to her cheeks, then let them rest coolly in the palms of her hands, juggled with them. Yes, she is just like a tiresome child, Amy thought – but, unlike a child, she can’t be reprimanded.

“These two are the best,” Martha said, having sorted them all over and laid them in a row.

“I think they are the worst,” Amy said.

When she had unpacked after Istanbul – forcing herself to do it – she had found the forgotten objects rolled up in one of Nick’s dirty shirts. The shirt had
given off a fusty smell of old sweat and sun-oil. She had wept into it, yet even in her furious grief, part of her observed this behaviour as theatrical. When she was over that for the time being, she had brought the eggs downstairs and put them in the bowl with the others they had collected on their travels.

“The little dark green ones are the best, I think,” she said. Wherever they had come from there was nothing against them. “Why do you say I take no interest in other people? After all, you haven’t seen me amongst many.”

“Well, you make no show of it. You ask no questions. For instance, Ernie. You really know nothing about him, where he goes on his day off. I don’t suppose you know that. Whereas I do, and a lot more besides. And also
me.
You know nothing about me, either – the sort of place where I live, the way I earn my living.”

“I read one of your books.” Amy looked as if she thought this a matter for congratulation; indeed did think so.

“I surely am surprised. But of course I can’t live on my books. So I have to give evening lectures to elderly women and earnest young men, people with time to fill in, or needing company, or longing for self-improvement. No one glamorous ever comes.”

“What do you lecture about?” Amy asked dutifully.

“I mainly lecture about American literature, but, if I feel like it, I go off at a tangent.”

“I also know you like the Norwich school… I remember you talking to Nick… “

“What I want is to see some more of his paintings.”

“He didn’t much like them being about the house.” (There was the studio yet to be entered, a thing put off; that door to open, which she could not at present bring herself to do.) “And he was mostly a portrait painter, so I’m not left with much.”

“Did he paint you often?”

“Once, when we were first married…a long, long time ago. Afterwards he was too busy. He became a fashion.”

“Can I see it?”

“It’s in our bedroom.”

Martha jumped up at once; but at that moment, Ernie passing, kicked the door open a little wider and put his head round, was carrying a dish to the dining-room. “It’s ready,” he said.

“No, the sort of man I like,” Martha was saying, as she re-arranged knives and forks about her, balanced a spoon across a salt-cellar, “is very quiet. Yes, I like very quiet men. All my men have been very quiet. The one I’ve got now is the quietest of all. If you can imagine a very quiet American. Some English people can’t His name is Simon, and that’s a quiet sort of name, too.”

“What’s he like – apart from his quietness?” Amy began to eat, but Martha seemed unready to.

“Ah, you’re asking questions at last. What’s he like?” The spoon fell off the salt-cellar and she picked it up and studied her reflection in it, longways, sideways, convexly, concavely. “What he’s like is…he’s like a cat,” she said slowly. “He moves about like a
cat, sits still like a cat, has a furry face like a cat. Very soft fair whiskers and a little bit of beard round his chin. He is a chemist for a food firm and soon he may have to go back home. But it won’t make any difference. Like you, he can’t make friends; he himself gets in the way. He keeps thinking about himself and his life, and what will happen to it. He came to my classes because he was lonely in the evenings, like so many others.”

Amy looked with anxiety at the food cooling on Martha’s plate.

“And found you,” she said, meaning to do the talking if she could until Martha began to eat. “I suppose the others were, as you said, old ladies, who hadn’t much to offer him, or people too much like himself.”

Martha cut a beef olive and took some on a fork, which Amy waited apprehensively for her to lift to her mouth, but instead, she leaned back and began to tap her knife against the side of her plate.

“There was one girl on that course. But she was too bright for him. The only bright girl I ever had. Yes, she sure knew all the answers. She set traps for me. She was too bright for me, too. Seemed to sense what I was only pretending to have read. We all got rather fed-up with Miss Smarty-boots.”

At last she began to eat, but talked as well, sometimes waving her fork in the air when searching for the right word.

Coming out from a lecture one evening, she said, they had found torrential rain, and Simon was the kind of man who never – in England, anyhow — went
anywhere without an umbrella and a folded plastic raincoat.

Under the umbrella they had bolted towards the tube station – he and Martha splashing through puddles, past closed shops and open pubs.

“
I
got the umbrella, not Miss Smarty-boots. We sat in the train, dripping and steaming and shivering, and he put questions to me about the lecture that he’d been too shy to ask in front of the others. I realised that he knew a great, great deal more than I had imagined.”

The beef olives had been eaten, without, it seemed, making much impression. A pudding that followed was also a matter of indifference.

“He got off at Swiss Cottage,” Martha said. “After that we always went home together, whether it rained or not.”

She finished her pudding, absent-mindedly helped herself to more, and said, “I was starving.” After all that messing about Amy found this difficult to understand.

“One night we went to a pub, and the next week I asked him back to my room. We were slow movers. Do you know it was only the second time he had had sex with anyone, and he is twenty-seven. So sad. Wasn’t all that good at it, but neither am I. I only do it because I feel sorry for them.”

“Some more pudding?”

“No, I don’t believe I will.”

“I hope you have everything you want,” Amy said.

Such conventional utterances Martha always ignored She could not charge Amy’s Englishness to them, remembering the same sort of phrases on everyone’s lips at home, in America. And yet Amy glanced about the bedroom as she spoke, as if genuinely concerned.

“First I’d like to take a look at that picture, and then everything will be fine.”

Unwillingly, Amy led her along the passage and opened her bedroom door. The portrait hung between the two long windows which overlooked the river, and while Martha was studying it, Amy drew a curtain and peered out at the lights on the water. She saw Ernie down there, leaning over the parapet, smoking a last cigarette. Nothing, no one passing; low tide and lamplight shining through branches on the opposite bank, and on mud.

Martha was such a long time standing in silence that Amy was reminded of Nick, staring and staring at things. She dropped the curtain and turned back to the room. She even looked at the picture herself, quite freshly, as one sometimes can at paintings lived with for a long time, which have become too familiar.

“For a portrait, you are hardly there,” Martha said.

“He
said it made it
more
of a portrait. That was always how he did them after that. He went to stay in peoples houses and followed them about the rooms and gardens until he found the right place for them, and that would be what took up most of the picture. Once he painted a rather grand lady walking in a park with a cardigan hung over her shoulders, her head bent, her arms like this…” Amy folded hers over her
breast … her face hardly showing; beautiful trees going away into the distance, two horses grazing. I wish I could see it again. Painters lose their work; writers can keep theirs. Nick thought she might be annoyed or disappointed; but everybody loved it, and then everybody wanted to be set down in their own surroundings. And the Duchess said, “Now I can walk in my own park for ever.”

Martha was looking at her. But as soon as she stopped talking, she turned back to the picture. A very young Amy had been painted sitting on a bare staircase of knotted wood with rows of nails; dusty sunshine fell over her from an uncurtained window on a landing. There was nothing but stairs, banister, window and walls, and Amy very small, like a child, sitting hunched-up, her arms round her knees, her face pale and anxious-looking below a fringe of dark hair.

“Years and years ago,” she said. “We hadn’t even got a stair-carpet.”

“It’s good. I’d like to see more,” Martha said.

When she had gone back to her own bedroom, Amy took a last peep at the river. Ernie spun his cigarette down into the water, turned and came in towards a chink of light from the hall. She heard the door being shut softly down below.

Time passing was to be the great thing about these months. Gareth had told Amy how it would be, that she must let the days go by, one by one, to look on every hour gone as an achievement; really to wish her life away until some healing could take place. He knew that it had been easier for him, with so few hours to spare anyway, and Amy’s idleness he had always seen as a hazard, and especially during the threat Nick’s illness had held. “Just put one foot in front of the other,” he had told her. “I used to say over and over to myself that bit of William Blake – ‘Labour with the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little Ones. And those who are in misery cannot remain so long.’ “

In a way, Martha became part of the passing of time. Her visits grew frequent, and after she had gone home, Amy could notch up a little score of hours passed, – not in pleasure, but passed – of a long day broken into. She discovered that something she had missed and needed were day-to-day shared trivialities; sudden thoughts, not important enough for saving, and an untidy trail of events. A relationship like this she had not had in her grown-up life, except with Nick and Anna Lloyd.

So Martha came and went in Laurel Walk, rather taken for granted than welcomed. On winter afternoons, she and Amy would walk beside the river while the slimy mudbanks became rosy in the setting
sun and gulls collected on them, squabbling; or the water ran by, carrying scum, at full tide. At home, there would be an English tea especially for Martha – crumpets, or anchovy toast. This meal suited her fidgety nature. She liked to roam about, or stand at the window, with a piece of toast in her hand while she talked.

There were moments of fury for Amy, which really did her no harm – such as the fidgeting and fiddling, objects slightly damaged, or wasted, trails of lights left on all over the house, sarcastic remarks to Gareth Lloyd, who took to coming to see Amy on the evenings when Martha gave her lectures. Amy often wondered what she lived on, how she managed about money. It was true that she spent very little on herself. Her clothes were few, and so became familiar, as if they were part of her – the old raincoat, the denim trousers, an embroidered cheese-cloth shirt from Turkey, and some shapeless knitting she had done herself, including a long, long scarf which she wore in the style of the undergraduates of Amy’s youth. She cut her own pale, streaky hair. She used no make-up, apart from, sometimes, an alarmingly bright red lipstick, carelessly put on and quite changing her appearance. She dined on pots of yoghourt, washed her clothes in her bed-sitting-room, and spent hours in warm libraries to save heating. But she was obviously extravagant in other ways and heedless about money when she truly desired something.