Designs on Life (14 page)

The friendship, which began as one between Sankey and Bourne, caused surprise in their colleagues, for the two men had almost nothing in common. Bourne was a quiet but ambitious man, brusque and strong-willed, who took a somewhat arrogant pride in his work and his power over his pupils. Sankey was excitable and voluble, but timid, with a fear of the boys whom he had to teach, which was immediately recognised by them and ferociously exploited. He had become a schoolmaster only because he had been unable to think of anything else that he might do better, and for this he despised himself and the whole profession of teaching, and hated the boys. That both he and Bourne were strangers in Bardley was at first the only thing that drew them together. Later, however, there was Mary Bourne. There was also Roddie.

Without Roddie the situation could never have developed. Mary Bourne was lonely and bored in the unfamiliar town. She had gone to it reluctantly from a small market-town in Somerset only for the sake of the extra money, which would help with Roddie and perhaps make it possible for her to have a second child. She had taken an instant dislike to Bardley, feeling personally outraged at the sight of the blackened walls of its buildings, of the specks of soot that settled each day on the window-sills of her home, of its drab little rectangle of garden, of the squealing trams on which she had to ride whenever she went to the shops. But she was as fond of her husband as she had ever been, and had no thought of solving the problem of her boredom by a love-affair with another man. If Sidney Sankey therefore had started his visits to her merely for the sake of seeing her when Oliver Bourne was absent, it is unlikely that she would ever have allowed them, as she did, to become more and more frequent. But Sankey always came to see Roddie.

That he arrived to see Roddie surprisingly often when Bourne was kept late at the school by a committee-meeting, or other business of which a junior master was free, ought to have aroused Mary’s suspicions. But she was not particularly vain and not at all perspicacious, and though she was only five years older than Sankey, there was something about him which made her think of him as nearer Roddie’s age than he was to hers. In spite of his fear and hatred of adolescent boys, Sankey sincerely delighted in the company of the very young and had a surprising talent for amusing them. Often Mary left him to play with Roddie in the sitting-room while she cooked the supper in the kitchen, and Roddie’s shouts of pleasure and Sankey’s softer laughter, as they played some game that Sankey had just invented, helped to delude Mary that it was only for mothering that he came to her, and to feel the warmth around him of a home, instead of the chill of his lodgings.

She still clung to this delusion even after she had realised that for the first time since she had married him, her husband was seriously jealous.

His jealousy first flared up on the evening when he found Roddie playing with matches. Coming home just after Sankey had left the house, Oliver Bourne found his son kneeling on the hearthrug, near to a blazing fire, with several match-boxes emptied on to the rug before him. He was using the matches to build a little village of log-cabins. For his age, Roddie was deft with his hands and he had been well instructed. The log-cabins were neat, square, well balanced and well roofed and he had every reason to be proud of them. But the matches were not even safety matches, and the sight gave Bourne the excuse that he had been wanting far more than he had realised to lose his temper. Not that any kind of matches would have been any safer so close to the fire, but there seemed to be some added wantonness in having put such things into the hands of a child.

He gave a shout, “Mary—come here!”

She called back, “In a minute.”

“Come at once!” Bourne shouted. “Come and see what your child’s doing!”

His voice, the sheer rage in it, brought a protesting wail from Roddie. Mary came running from the kitchen. Her face, which was a softly pretty one, with rather plump cheeks and big, mild grey eyes, was flushed from the heat of the cooking-stove, but she grew pale as she took in the scene before her. Before she could speak, Bourne said furiously, “Didn’t you
know
he was doing this?”

Without answering him, Mary dropped on her knees beside Roddie and scooped the matches up into her apron. It was a stupid thing to do, for it made Roddie, who did not in the least understand what he had been doing wrong, start screaming with disappointment and hurt pride. But the sight of the child with all those matches so near to the fire had momentarily filled Mary with blind terror. Besides that, she was not accustomed to Oliver in the kind of rage that he was in.

He was standing rigidly at the edge of the hearthrug, ignoring Roddie, fixing his bright, angry stare on Mary’s face. He was a short man, with thick, powerful shoulders, a short, thick neck and a big head, a heavy forehead and a square, heavy chin.

“How long has he been at it?” he demanded. “How long is it since you troubled to find out what he was doing? And where’s the fire-guard?”

The fire-guard was where he could see it, in a corner of the room. Supposing that he knew this, Mary answered a question that he had not asked.

“Sidney must have forgotten to put it back,” she said. “He was here with Roddie until a minute or two ago. He’s only just gone.”

“Sidney’s good at forgetting a lot of things, but never the time when I’m expected home.” Bourne’s voice shook with the violence of his feelings. “And while he’s here you forget about Roddie.”

Aghast, returning her husband’s stare with blank bewilderment, Mary’s face flushed as swiftly as a moment before it had lost its colour. In all the years of her marriage, it had never occurred to her that Oliver could say such a thing to her.

Seeing this, Bourne’s face also reddened, and with a shrug that was halfway to an apology, he went to fetch the fire-guard and place it in front of the fire. But then, because the guard was seldom left there unless Roddie was alone in the room, Bourne removed it again and put it back in the corner, muttering confusedly as he did so, “The man must be crazy, doing a thing like that. Anyway, where did all these matches come from?”

“He must have brought them himself,” Mary said. She was still kneeling on the hearthrug, with the matches heaped in her apron, while Roddie stamped and cried before her. “He didn’t mean any harm by it.”

Bourne by now was beginning to feel hot with embarrassment at the feelings which he had allowed himself to show, and because of this he appeared to accept what Mary had said with a readiness that was far from sincere. The harmlessness of Sidney Sankey was something in which Oliver Bourne never quite believed again. But he was too angry with himself for his self-betrayal to say so.

“Well, that’s a change at least,” he said, and managed a short laugh. “He usually pockets things. It’s become the hardest thing in the world to keep cigarettes in the house since he’s taken to coming here. And matches, actually, were becoming practically extinct.”

“He’s always bringing things for Roddie,” Mary said as she stood up and went to the door.

“Mary...” Bourne began.

She paused in the doorway.

“Mary, what I said just now...”

“I’ve forgotten it,” she said distantly as she went back to the kitchen, where a good piece of steak had had time to spoil and some potatoes to boil to a pulp.

Instead of attending to this now, Mary stood still in the middle of the kitchen, looking down at the matches in her apron. She had not forgotten Oliver’s words. In fact, she was only just beginning to feel the full shock of the anger that they had caused in her. As she felt it, she also felt for the first time, in a way that startled her, that Sidney Sankey was intensely important to her.

It was not, she assured herself quickly, that she was in love with him. Wasn’t she years older than he was? Wasn’t she happily married? And weren’t they all nice people, she, Sidney and Oliver?

But still, as she stood there alone in the kitchen, aware from their voices in the sitting-room that Oliver, in his brusque way, was now comforting Roddie, promising him that if it mattered to him so much, he should have matches to play with, only matches that wouldn’t be dangerous, there sprang to life in Mary a sense of Sidney as someone whom she could not bear to do without. For a long, bleak moment it seemed to her that if she took heed of Oliver’s jealousy, if she stopped Sidney’s visits, there would be nothing left for her in this grim town, where she had no other friends, but its blackness and the specks of soot that eternally settled on the window-sills and the hideous trams that went squealing past.

But that she felt this so strongly frightened her, and as soon as she had recognised the feeling, she decided frantically that Sidney’s visits must stop.

It was one of the causes of the disaster that was to follow that Mary’s mind all too often worked in this way. Just as her panic on seeing Roddie playing with a heap of matches so close to the fire had made her snatch them away from him without giving herself time to think of what this might do to Roddie, so her panic on realising how important to her Sankey’s visits had become made her blindly determine to deny herself those visits, without first trying to find out what those visits meant either to Sankey or to her husband.

When, a few days later, she nerved herself to the point of telling Sankey that he must not come to the house so often, indeed should not come at all unless Oliver invited him, she was so bemused by the sense of her own loss that although she noticed the flash of something strange in Sankey’s eyes, she did not recognise it as a warning.

She and Sankey were sitting facing each other in the chairs on each side of the fireplace, with Roddie engaged on an ambitious building project with the safety matches that his father had given him on a table well away from the fire. She had begun by telling Sidney of Oliver’s anger on finding Roddie playing with matches, then she had spoken less directly of Oliver’s jealousy. The cowardice in her nature had made her choose to play her little scene when Roddie was there, for his presence gave her an excuse to speak evasively and the right to expect Sidney to do the same. Laughing at Oliver for being so ridiculous as to be jealous, she asked Sidney if he did not agree with her that however ridiculous one’s husband might sometimes be, one ought not, if one cared for him, to let him feel unhappy.

It was then that she saw that strange look in Sidney’s eyes. But it was followed at once by one so vague and blank that Mary started to wonder if he was really listening to her. He was often abstracted, given to long silences which sometimes even Roddie found odd, while at other times he was so talkative that no one else could get a word in. The changes on his thin face, with the slightly prominent, dark eyes, the long, sharp nose and the small, lop-sided mouth, matched the changes in his mood. In a mood of animation his expression had a gay, vivid, curiously innocent quality which gave him a kind of good looks, but in one of his withdrawn moods the look that settled on his face was dull, sullen and unattractive.

It was with such a look now and only a slight, unusual mottling of his face, that he continued to gaze at Mary as she went on.

“I think perhaps it’s just because he’s generally worried and worn out,” she said. “I mean, it isn’t really like Oliver to act as he did. And that’s why I’m more worried than I would be if— well, if he was really that sort of person. I mean, I know he’s found this new job a strain, and he’s tired and he keeps having headaches. And so I’m really anxious that he shouldn’t have the chance to upset himself over anything so silly. You understand?”

She hardly knew that she was being dishonest. But Sankey knew it. He was exceedingly sensitive to the feelings of others, even if his interpretation of what he perceived was often distorted. He knew that Mary was concerned, not for her husband’s peace of mind, but for her own. She was thinking only of herself, not of Oliver, and of course not of Sidney Sankey.

As he still did not answer, Mary said nervously, “Sidney, you do agree with me, don’t you? You do understand?”

“Oh yes, I understand,” he answered absently, staring straight through Mary at some dim images that had begun to form at the edges of his mind. “I’m usually fairly understanding.”

“Oh, you are,” Mary said. “That’s why I knew that I could talk to you about it all.”

“But I’ll miss you—and Roddie. At first.”

Sankey looked at Roddie and frowned slightly. They looked so alike, Roddie and his mother, with their round, softly moulded faces, grey eyes and soft, fair hair, that it had felt natural to love them both with the same love, as if they were still part of one another. Playing with Roddie, feeling happy at the warmth of the child’s response to him, Sankey had felt as if this response were Mary’s too, as if it were merely by some accident that the arm that had slid round his neck was Roddie’s and not hers, that the eager breath on his cheek was the little boy’s and not the woman’s.

A mistake, of course. A very foolish mistake.

Standing up and crossing the room, Sankey put out a finger and gave a sharp jab at Roddie’s latest and largest log-cabin. The matches toppled over in a heap.

Mary gave a little cry. “Oh, why did you do that?”

“Why do we do any of the things we do?” Sankey asked indifferently as he turned away to the door.

Mary did not follow him to see him out, for as she looked at the heap of matches on the table and at Roddie’s bewildered face above them, suddenly, for the first time, she was frightened of something that was in Sidney Sankey and not merely in herself.

She tried to shake off this fear, yet it stayed with her throughout the evening. Oliver Bourne, coming in presently, saw that something was wrong. But he also saw that a packet of cigarettes that he had left on the mantelpiece had disappeared. This meant that Sankey had been there, and because of the rage that always overcame him now whenever he thought of Sankey, Bourne did not trust himself to ask Mary what had happened.

Sankey that evening walked all the way back to his lodgings instead of taking the tram. A thin mist of rain was falling. In the light of the street-lamps the pavements had a slimy sheen. The air felt like a sodden blanket wrapped around him, clinging to his thin body with a chill that started him fiercely shivering. He turned up the collar of his coat, sank his head between his shoulders, buried his hands in his pockets, but did not think of walking faster. With his gaze sliding along unseeingly over the mud-doily gleaming paving-stones and oily puddles, he strolled along, chewing his lower lip and sometimes suddenly whistling a half-bar of music.