Dark Palace (42 page)

She should be more tender with his feelings. After all, it was a rather momentous—even courageous—thing for him to have said. ‘I suppose I'm honoured,' she said. ‘Honoured that you'd consider me now—after everything—to be a suitable bearer of your offspring.'

‘That's right,' he said, as if she'd somehow partly agreed to it all. ‘That's right. You're of good stock, I'm of good stock—there's no reason why the child or children …'

‘Children?!'

‘You start with one and then go on till you have enough. Isn't that how it happens? There's no reason why they shouldn't be very fine children.'

‘Stop,' she said weakly, as much to herself as to him as she felt herself sinking into a warm fantasy.

He stopped talking. She made an effort to pull herself out of the fantasy.

‘Robert, the marriage is finished. To put it bluntly, I am living with Ambrose.'

‘Ambrose? I don't consider that to be …' he trailed off.

‘Don't consider it to be what?'

‘A proper situation.' He looked for words. ‘A situation which could possibly be compared to a marriage.'

What he said scratched across a nerve. She was still, from time to time, discomposed by her arrangement with Ambrose. This was hard terrain.

‘It wasn't as if you
chose
to live with him. After all, it was something of a haphazard sort of arrangement.' He looked at her. ‘Wasn't it?'

Robert could be so brutally right.

She said, ‘I suppose that because we find ourselves washed up on the shores of life with someone, it doesn't mean that it doesn't suit. Or that there's something better out there in life.'

‘I thought of you as a careful planner of life.'

‘I once thought of myself that way, too. Still do, I guess. But there are other parallel things in our lives which happen and which move alongside the plan, in an unplanned way, so as to speak. It seems. Or maybe the plan simply brings in things it needs without us having to think about it.'

He then said with some emphasis, ‘You can do better. You don't have to accept second best.'

She bristled. ‘Don't be impertinent. You show how little you know of my inner being.'

He fell silent, realising he'd made a false move.

She said, ‘And, why would anyone think about having children when there could be war?'

‘What has war got to do with it?' he said.

‘For a start, you'd want to go to war.'

‘I think it's time for me to put all that behind me. To settle.'

‘It would be irresponsible to have children at this time in world affairs.'

‘Edith, you don't wait until all things in the world are
perfect before you have a family. If you did, the human race would never have got started.'

‘You make sure some things are in place.'

‘You can't wait until the League has got everything set up in the world ready for the baby.'

She smiled and laughed a little. ‘You're right' she said. ‘You're right.'

And suddenly, the having of a baby was very appealing as a misty, rosy contemplation. To do something in the face of all odds.

She played along.

‘What would be your plan then?' she said. ‘Hypothetically.'

‘We would leave Europe and its woes. Go to Canada. Australia?'

‘A farm?' They had once fantasised about a farm, she seemed to recall.

‘Somewhere out of the world's way. I really had New Zealand in mind. Cooler.'

What madness.

‘New Zealand!? What would we eat? Sweet potato? Lamb every night? What's wrong with Jasper's Brush?'

Her father would be delighted. Thelma would be vindicated.

‘Your almost mythical Jasper's Brush? A “close, caring people”, people who read books, go to public lectures, play music, and dance and sing, all set in idyllic surroundings?'

He was quoting her from some time in their life, long ago.

She felt warm and glad that she'd grown up there although some of the description was more of the Rationalists' Association than of Jasper's Brush.

‘Go on.' She wanted to hear the fantasy out. She let her mind drift with his dreaming.

He rose to what he must have seen as her warming to the idea. ‘You could write a book about the League and then become a world expert on it all.'

‘And raise children at the same time?'

‘You'd have hired help.'

‘I'm not a writer.'

‘You wrote poetry once. You could learn the ropes. Do writing for newspapers. Be the Vera Brittain of the southern hemisphere.'

There was a distant feasibility about it. He seemed to have thought about it. He'd worked it all out.

‘But wouldn't I be a bit out-of-date about things European, by the time the kids were … weaned?' She'd never used that word about her own body. And it was too intimate a word to use with Robert now.

‘We could visit Europe so you could get up-to-date.'

‘What would you do? Milk the cows? I don't believe it for one moment.'

She laughed.

He didn't.

He struggled to keep the matter serious and alive. ‘I'd write detective novelettes.'

‘The first one didn't do very well.'

‘I'd be more thrilling. Have some adventures to write about now.'

She'd never told him what she'd thought of his book—she'd been a good wife. His book was less than brilliant.

‘Had a good review in the
Manchester Guardian
,' he said.

‘By an old mate.'

‘I could try for an editorship. Of a daily newspaper. If we went to New Zealand, say. Make it as good as the
Manchester Guardian
—coming out of a provincial place—so good that London would take notice. They'd say in
The Times
, “However, the
Auckland Guardian
takes a different view”, and they'd quote me from time to time. You could write special articles.'

She found his vision charming enough, even if it were a rather egocentric fantasy.

He could never be an editor in a provincial city somewhere in the far-flung empire.

And she could never be a mother weeding a vegetable garden.

‘I'm approaching forty,' she said. ‘In a few years it'd be pretty much too late for children.'

She heard herself say ‘in a few years' and could hardly believe she'd said it. She was putting her age down. She'd scorned other women for doing that.

What was more disgraceful was that she was making herself attractive to him. She was still inviting his crazy courtship.

She glanced at him to see if he knew her age. They'd known each other's age of course, but it was away back now. And he'd always shown so little sentimental interest in such things as birthdays that she was sure he would have forgotten. She also knew that at some time she'd consciously stopped mentioning her age. She had exercised the woman's privilege even if doing so wasn't considered modern by the
Reader's Digest
.

He mused on. ‘I think you could write. Your reports are fine. Your poetry was quite good,' he said.

Ah, flattery.

‘One poem published,' she said. ‘Well, actually, two. And committee reports are a long way from readable journalism.'

‘The poetry was quite good. I remember “The Pirouette of Knowing”.'

She was pleased and surprised.

He quoted a couple of lines.

She couldn't believe he'd remembered it.

She looked over at him with suspicion. ‘You dug it up and learned a few lines—for this little show.'

‘I remember it.'

‘I don't believe you'd remember it after all this time.'

‘I do.'

‘You hate poetry.'

‘Some—most—but I know your poems, bits of them.'

Time for a splash of cold water.

‘What about last year? When you burst into the apartment? How could I put that sort of behaviour out of the equation?'

‘I have apologised for that.'

She remembered an exchange about his virility which had happened around that incident. Maybe this fantasy had to do with questions of virility? Maybe she'd stung him when she'd threatened his virility?

Was she done in her life with manhood and virility? And if she was, could that be a sign of her passing out of womanhood, at least full-blown womanhood? She still menstruated. For how much longer? She was hazy about that. She supposed she had a few good years yet.

Won't think about
that
.

She had a primitive fear, a superstition, about drying up as a woman. Because of not having children. Although it was a fear more connected to not having a full physical life in marriage—but she had a sufficiently physical life with Ambrose. She was not ‘drying up'.

‘So,' he said. He looked at her expectantly.

‘So?'

His fantasy had flattered her. And it had made her womanly instinct put its head up. Briefly. As if awakening from a quiet sleep.

The waiter was there. ‘Sir? Ma'am? Anything I can get you from the bar?'

‘Champagne?' he said looking across at her. ‘Edith? Time for champagne?'

He looked at her with his most winning smile, an endearing smile from this spruced-up Robert. From a younger Robert long ago.

If she said no to the champagne, the fantasy would blow away like so many pieces of coloured crepe paper taken in the wind of the big pedestal fan there in the lounge.

‘I can't drink champagne anymore. Except now and then when I have to—in a toast. It's heavy on my chest. Sometimes like lead,' she grimaced, as an apology for refusing the gesture.

This admission made her sound old.

‘You refusing champagne?! Edith!? You who once said that it was one of the only reliable things in the world?'

‘I've changed. I enjoy the odd glass of almost anything else alcoholic,' she laughed.

Edith, it is time to put a stop to all this.

Or was it a time to grasp the grand fantasy and hold it to her breast, this chance? This moment of destiny.

This chance of a proper womanhood.

To be swallowed up into family life. Would it mean that her life had then come out right after all?

And would she live happily ever after? Was this what she had been waiting for? For her life to come right?

The only thing which was not feasible was living with Robert. Or had he matured?

As if reading her mind, he said, ‘It can work. It can happen.' He reached over and took her hands in his.

The waiter coughed. They'd forgotten him.

The waiter said, ‘Champagne is it, then?'

Robert let go of her hands and turned to the business of drinks, he again looked to her, ‘Champagne then? For a special occasion?'

She shook her head.

‘No champagne. The same drink for me again, please, waiter.'

The waiter went away and they were back now in the land of Scotch and soda.

‘I suppose we could've tried one of the fancy American cocktails,' she said.

He looked at her. ‘It's too late then?' he said.

She felt tears at the corners of her eyes and she looked for a handkerchief in her bag.

He offered her his from his lapel pocket. She shook her head, took out her own and dried her eyes.

She noticed that his handkerchiefs seemed to have gone up a notch in quality.

‘We missed the boat,' she said, trying to laugh.

‘I'll leave the offer on the table,' he said.

Oh no. Oh God, don't do that, don't do that. She couldn't live with such an offer on the table of her life.

But wasn't she also carrying on the fantasy by that reaction? Still pretending that the offer was a possibility if it were left on the table?

‘You have a reception to attend?' he said, his throat husky.

He'd let the fantasy go. He'd given up on it.

Given up just a little too soon?

She said in a comradely way, sounding a bit as she did in the old days, ‘I invented that in case things got out of hand here between us—an escape hatch.'

‘Oh.'

‘And things did get a little out of hand.' She laughed.

She drank down her Scotch. ‘All too late, Robert.'

She took his hand. ‘Thank you for honouring me with your … proposal. The dream. Very beautiful. Very enchanting.'

‘It's Ambrose Westwood, is it?'

She looked back at her life in Geneva, saw Ambrose and his elegance and his new quiet dignity and his—their—strange intimate life and their shared living, with its artfulness, spun from within its limitations—an intimacy so against nature. Or against the nature of what Robert had offered. Yet there
was
an art—if not a passion—to the life Ambrose and she had made around them. And they shared a great cause. And they had found like-minded friends.

Motley friends.

She watched the hotel cat wind its way through the legs of chairs.

She ached for a dog or a cat. She would get both when she returned. Ambrose and she had still not got around to the dog despite endless discussion of breeds and size.

She looked at Robert. She realised then that he wanted so badly for it not to be about Ambrose.

In all this his manhood was at stake. Womanhood, manhood. Oh yes, that was at stake.

For both of them.

‘Thank you, Robert, for honouring me. But it cannot lie on the table. It's not the way for me to go now in life.'

‘Leave it on the table overnight.'

He was urging the fantasy on her again. She could have it for another day. The chance would still be there for her in the morning when she awoke.

She could lie awake with it, play with it, savour it, hold it up in her arms.