For Love or Money (2 page)

C
HRISTMAS
came in the wake of the hols, or vacation as Steven now called it. He had just finished his first term at Oxford and had brought a friend with him. George asked the questions which he presumed were expected—what his friend was reading, what college he was at—and after that left them both alone. Mercifully for him they both spent most of the day outside shooting or talking upstairs in Steven’s room. David seemed bored and out of things,
irritating
George with his persistent requests to play
backgammon
or chess. Ruth treated him intermittently with conscientious interest and neglect. George had found her interest especially irksome: inane questions about what David had done at school, receiving the expected bored answers.

‘You don’t have to treat him as though he’s three,’ said George after one of these attempts.

‘But darling, I can hardly talk to him about the
tin-mining
industry or homosexuality.’ Her tone was sincere rather than sarcastic.

‘I think you might try and make him feel a bit older, that’s all.’

‘I know, I know only too well. But all he ever does is play with his trains and he’s far too old for that. I have asked you to buy him some suitable books when you go into Truro. Yet all you get him is the Marilyn Monroe calendar … Why, darling? It’ll only remind him of Victoria and that’s the last thing we want. What the eye doesn’t see …’

George winced as he looked at her expression. She stared at him with upturned face: reason murdered by the
barbarians
.
George winced. David was nearly fifteen now. Three years ago Steven and he had stripped their little cousin Victoria behind the bamboos at the back of the house. An experience that had left her unperturbed until she told her parents. The seriousness of this affront to her young maidenhood had been so severely pointed out to her that she had quite forgotten her cousins’ dumb
embarrassment
, as they gazed with guilty eyes on her naked
eight-year-old’s
body. She forgot that, far from touching her, they had turned away while she dressed and had barely assisted with her undressing.

‘I think enough has been said about that already,’ said George.

‘I don’t remember you being very active at the time,’ was her reply.

 *

Dinner was the worst time for George, for then Ruth would ask Steven’s friend, Robert, with mock slyness, about what her son had been up to at Oxford.

‘I’m sure he’s found a girl; Robert, do tell me, he has, hasn’t he?’ she smiled intimately, leaning forward her face between her hands. Steven cringed, not for himself, but for Robert.

‘What about that little girl at Boots, Steven …’ said Robert attempting to make a joke of the conversation. To his surprise Ruth took it seriously and changed the subject.

George reassured her afterwards.

‘No, darling, of course he wasn’t being serious, the young will have their jokes.’

‘I don’t like Robert. I think he may be a bad influence.’

‘Seems harmless enough to me.’

Nevertheless George felt no inclination to drink and Ruth herself remained sober. One had to be thankful for small mercies, thought George sanctimoniously.

 *

Christmas Day started well. They were drunk before lunch and sleepy by tea. At six o’clock Ruth started the drinks circulating again and George dutifully played some old 78s:
My
Ideal,
She’s
Wonderful
and of more recent vintage,
Everything’s
up
to
date
in
Kansas
City.
This was a great success. Steven, though, suggested that his mother and George gave an exhibition dance. George, who had just drunk three whiskies too close together for stability,
declined
.

‘All right then,’ said Steven, smirking at Robert, ‘this is a “ladies excuse me dance”. Come on, Mumsie, get the old man on his feet.’

George looked at him with uncompromising disgust.

‘Oh come on, George, darling, we’ll show the younger ones.’

‘Come on, George, don’t spoil the fun. Play the game,’ said Steven in a simpering voice.

Ruth was already on her feet. There was no going back now. George wondered how many gins she’d had. They put on
My
Ideal
again and tried to fox-trot. George held her firmly, trying to avoid seeing Steven over her shoulder. The dance ended without Ruth catching her high heels in the edge of the carpet. George sat down again relieved.
Everybody
laughed and they all had another drink.

David had been given two new engines and a great many rails and didn’t appear until dinner, so there were no
tiresome
requests for backgammon.

At dinner George looked across the bowl of flowers where Ruth’s white hands moved in the candlelight, doling out portions of lemon meringue pie. How much had she changed? Still good-works Ruth with the Christian soul and heathen flesh. A little more skin under the chin … after all she was forty-eight. Really remarkably few wrinkles. Of course her stomach …

Steven was passing him a plate. George’s ‘thank you’ came mechanically while his mind went back over the past
thirteen
years.

Brandy followed coffee and George sank further into his deep-wing chair, his hands folded over his stomach in those
familiar surroundings of the drawing-room. The small marble clock on the mantelpiece, the mirror behind it, the flickering fire in the grate, all seemed to shimmer against the more sombre backcloth of mottled wall-paper and darkened portraits. Steven and Robert were talking softly on the sofa. David was unusually reading a book: a book George had given him for Christmas.

The evening appeared to be fading out in
good-humoured
mellowness. Ruth, however, decided to watch the evening Carol Service on the television. There was
something
about the voices of the female members of the choir which seemed to be amusing Steven and his friend. Ruth was looking at them sideways. George winked at them
good-naturedly
, but mistimed it. Ruth was on her feet; her face flushed, her eyes shimmering.

‘Come on, old thing, only a joke,’ said George
level-headedly.

‘In a religious service?’

David looked away. Steven’s friend was looking at the carpet. George walked up to her, and held her firmly by the arm.

‘Better have a rest.’ He turned and said in a confidential undertone to Robert, ‘Had too much.’

The three boys heard the clatter of cutlery being hurled down the passage as the choir of St. Margaret’s sang on. George’s voice got fainter as he retreated towards the
lavatory
. The noise of hammering fists testified to the firmness of the lock. Back in the drawing-room Steven walked slowly towards the television and turned up the sound, ‘Ding dong merrily on high …’.

I
N
spite of his drunkenly inept behaviour several months before, George sober rarely brooded for long over such
setbacks
, they were all a small price to pay for the comparative luxury he lived in.

He hadn’t done a day’s work since he left the Army at the end of the war and that was fifteen years ago. Ruth hadn’t been precisely beautiful when he’d met her, but as the rich wife of a peer she had had other attractions for an idle young man in his mid-twenties. George was flattered and
incredulous
when she fell for him. His war record was good, true, but he’d never previously had any notable sexual success. Several clumsy fumbling affairs which lacked nobility and decorum, two qualities to which he had especially aspired. From cinema usherette to peeress was a step in the right direction.

His parents had done their middle-class best for him, he’d been sent to a public school, not one of the best, but
nevertheless
a public school. His career there had been short and uninspiring. He had not been expelled in a blaze of notoriety for stealing or perversion; his housemaster had merely suggested that the academic standards of the school did not seem suited to the steadfastness of his endeavour. It was the usual story: a succession of crammers tutored him for the Army exam but to no avail. He had just failed the first exams in the Estate Agency course, when Hitler
dramatically
changed the course of his life, and that of several million others, with the invasion of Poland. A few months later George was training to be an officer. His first action was in Egypt and it was there, at Sidi Barrani, that he won his M.C. It had been comparatively easy really. With six
shots, one hand-grenade and five men he had captured five times that many sleeping Italians. Later on he was wounded in the back and legs at Alamein. The rest of the war was passed peacefully enough in a Yorkshire hospital and it was there that he met Ruth.

As the lady of the nearest sizeable house, she emerged once a week from an old shooting-brake to enter George’s world of white corridors and sterilised floors, bringing fruit and homely small talk to the wounded.

George, who had few doubts about the war lasting much longer, had a great many more about what would happen to him when it was over. Four years ago his father had put what remained of his meagre capital into a publishing company, which he had barely lived long enough to see bankrupt. The old man had been buried in Brompton Cemetery, leaving his widow a pension and a suburban house, and his only son
£
2,000: a sum which, George thought lugubriously, would last him little more than a year of unemployment. And as he looked over his raised feet at the rose garden outside the ward he thought about suitable employment. Unfortunately the only jobs suitable for an officer and a gentleman demanded influence, money, or,
failing
that, an exemplary academic record, none of which he possessed.

The triviality of Lady Lifton’s conversation and the sight of her sensible economy war-time clothes did little to
alleviate
his depression. She would walk from bed to bed talking to the soldiers and soon even George realised that her time spent by his bedside was as long as that paid to four others put together. Her air of complacent security and well-being irritated him, as his inattentiveness well demonstrated. She pleaded with him to take more interest in the things around him. He could hardly have pointed out that, never having enjoyed circuses, the things around him were the least likely to entertain. The man in the bed to his right was paralysed from the waist down and had lost a large part of one of his cheeks, while the only mobile member of the ward clicked past mechanically on a metal leg at half-hour intervals to the lavatory. Ruth was amazed at his rejection of the old
clichés: ‘fighting to recover, learning to live again’. She talked to the Sister, who assured her that his pain was no longer great. George had already been out in a wheel-chair and had twice been taken to the bathroom: on the back of the door was a Union Jack and underneath the words ‘Keep Smiling’.

But as the long days passed and the sun slowly inched across the wall from the opposite beds to the end of his own counterpane, he couldn’t help thinking about Ruth’s home life. What was the woman doing now? Was she in the bath? On a horse? In the kitchen? Did she have dogs? What did Lord Lifton look like? How old was he? George began to look forward to those visits, visits of a person who came into his world from the security of a happier and affluent place. The kind of woman to whom he might soon be delivering groceries. What would she be like then? She probably wouldn’t answer the door but would lean out from a high turret window, ‘Leave them there. Cook will collect them.’ And yet now she talked to him with more than compassion, even with interest. They were together as equals.

George smiled at her for the first time on her next visit and noticed too, the shape of her face, the angle of her
cheek-bone
, her auburn hair and dark-brown eyes. He wondered, too, what lay beneath that loose-cut coat and skirt.

Yes, he had read the book and eaten the grapes, even the bad ones. His legs were definitely better.

Perhaps when he had recovered he might come and stay with Lord Lifton and her for several weeks?

The visit never took place; before that there had been the returned pressure hand in hand, the faster breath and the half-fearful stare into each other’s eyes, which said many things but one above all.

Ruth’s infidelity took place a week after George’s release from the nursing-home and two months before the end of the war.

The ‘Lamb and Flag’ was a small pub outside Ely in the flat Cambridgeshire countryside, far enough from Yorkshire to be safe. How well George had behaved. How gay and how carefree he had been. They had signed the book as Mr. and
Mrs. Byron because George had thought it funny. How the girl at the reception had blushed when Ruth laughed. A woman called Myrtle got terribly drunk that evening; her husband had been killed in Italy. She had been sitting on a stool at the corner of the bar and George had said ‘That woman’s had too much’. Ruth agreed, although she didn’t notice. Then Myrtle had fallen off the stool and George’s leg had prevented him being quick enough to stop a spaniel licking her face while she was on the floor. He had carried her to a sofa and afterwards helped her upstairs. And all this with his legs hardly healed. Ruth sat by in silent
admiration
. ‘And so embarrassing too, the way her jersey came up at the back when you lifted her, but you were so good, George.’ Goodness was a quality that Ruth admired.

The night itself was a success.

 *

Lifton in a fit of impulsive anger had refused a divorce. George saw that there was more than a little method in his madness. Had Lifton gained the custody of his children he would have been obliged to pay for their education. A task which the size of his income rendered impossible. Steven had been nearly five at the time. They had all gone to live in a London flat and Ruth, whose private income was
considerable
, had engaged a cook and a nanny. George had moved in first and the others joined him two weeks later. It was then that Ruth had realised that she was pregnant; she was uncertain by whom. For the sake of the child’s
legitimacy
, Lifton agreed to be the father in name. Besides, as Ruth argued to herself, George might not be with them for ever.

Meanwhile George did his best to leave no grounds for this uncertainty. He decided that the time had come to spend his
£
2,000 profitably. He bought small pieces of furniture, china, and clothes and more clothes for Ruth and Steven. She in turn provided him with silk shirts and
handkerchiefs
, two new suits and frequent visits to the theatre. They saw few people but remained happy. George had
discovered 
her to be a rich woman while still at the hospital, and the discovery had increased his determination to invest his meagre patrimony with extravagant care. His
recklessness
after Lifton’s parsimony achieved the desired effect. Ruth sold the flat and bought a house near Sloane Square. George was soon installed with all solemnity as a permanent fixture. It was in this house that David was born.

In spite of a life that exceeded George’s wildest dreams of extravagance, Ruth was not happy in London. She missed the country and hated the gossip. George, who then felt
insufficiently
sure of his position to object, acquiesced in the move to Cornwall and Trelawn. After this Ruth rarely came to London. When George left Trelawn to go anywhere he usually did so alone.

They had been at Trelawn for twelve years now.