Mr Wrong (17 page)

Percy was calling from his room, which was downstairs by the front door. Whenever she thought of him, she had to pull herself together. ‘You still have your health,’ she told
herself. Apart from a touch of arthritis, migraines that irregularly punctured her attempts to face up to things, and these freakish sweats – hot flushes by name and as amusing to those
unencumbered by them as piles or gout – she had little to complain about, whereas poor old Percy . . .

He had somehow got wind of the fact that she was going out in the car; must have heard Brian mentioning the station, although goodness knows he was deaf enough when he felt like it. By the time
she got to him, he had levered himself to his feet with one hand perilously heavy on the corner of his loaded card-table. He had always borne a marked resemblance to Boris Karloff, and since his
– fortunately mild – stroke now looked astonishingly like that actor in the role of Frankenstein’s Monster. He’d got his speech painfully back, but he kept it to a
minimum.

‘I’m only going to fetch Shirley from the station, Father.’

‘Shoes,’ he said, his hopeful smile undimmed. ‘Outdoor shoes.’ He pointed with his stick to where his black shoes – as sleek and polished as a pair of police cars
– were parked beneath his wardrobe. But his gesture with the stick involved further weight upon the card-table; it tipped, and its formidable coverage fell and rolled all over the floor as he
lurched involuntarily on to his bed in a sitting position.

‘Whoops-a-daisy,’ he said, smiling again to show he was all right, and stuck one of his dreadful old feet with its Walt Disney ogre’s toenails almost into her face as she knelt
recovering his travelling clock, his pills, his spilled water-carafe, his spectacles, his address book that he kept up to date by crossing off his friends as they died, his saucer that he’d
used for grape pips, a couple of chessmen he’d been mending and a plastic heart-shaped box in which he kept alternate rows of false teeth at night.

‘Percy, dear, there isn’t time: I’ll be late. I won’t be long.’

His lower lip trembled ponderously, like a baby’s, working up to a scene; he withdrew his foot, and then, with a look so cunning that it was pathetic, shot the other one out at her.

‘Oh – all
right
then,’ she said, and fetched his socks.

In the tack room, Eunice, the stable-girl, was applying mascara to the double pair of false eyelashes that were her second most salient feature. Brian knew that she had heard
him come in, but he also knew what he thought she liked. Coming up behind her, he put a large hand over each heavily confined breast, and squeezed them like someone tooting a horn. She
squealed.

‘Bry –
yern
!’

‘I’ll be a bit late tonight. Mind you wait.’

She did not answer, but he knew she would.

In the train from Manchester to London, Shirley decided over and over again that her marriage was a total, utter, flop. It must be, if in just over eight weeks they could have
a row like that. After he had gone off (‘Please yourself!’) – what a filthy,
stupid, childish
thing to say! – she had never cried so much before in her life; in fact
she couldn’t believe he’d only been gone twenty minutes, as she discovered he had when she went to wash her face and happened to look at her watch. She’d cleared up the kitchen
with meticulous care, wasn’t going to let him put her in the wrong about a wife’s mess in the flat, but she’d thrown away the sausage rolls so that he wouldn’t have anything
to eat when he came back – serve him right. But he hadn’t
come
back. Instead, when she was frantic with waiting and wanting to tell him what she thought of him, he’d rung
to say he was staying the night with friends. She’d been icy on the telephone, but the moment she’d rung off, she’d burst into tears again. Then, like a fool, she’d waited
to see him in the morning, but he still didn’t come back, and she’d missed the express and had to catch a slow train. It was a failure all right.

By the time she’d changed stations in London and caught the four-twenty from Charing Cross, her whole life with him had begun to seem faintly unreal. She hated the flat, she hated
Manchester – she didn’t know a single person there, she missed the country, she hated the housework and the awful, endless business of shopping for boring petty things, getting food
ready and clearing it up. None of it had turned out at all as she had imagined. Beforehand, she’d thought of being married as candlelit dinners, friends dropping in, using all the presents,
setting the table as perfectly as she did her face, moving in the television world (Douglas was a cameraman), Douglas’s friends admiring her, envying him, sometimes even making him a little
jealous . . . they’d bring her flowers and chocs and ask her advice about their girl-friends. None of this had happened at all. Instead, he’d come back at awful hours – never the
same time – fagged out, only talking about his work and a whole lot of people she never met; when she wasn’t bored, she was lonely. She missed her friends and her life at home and Dad
who’d always been so decent to her . . .

As they changed into their riding clothes, Sarah Hughenden said to Caroline Polsden-Lacey, ‘I tell you one thing. He’s got the most super heavenly sweat.’

‘Who?’

‘Brian – stupid. He smells of smoked salmon.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I sort of fell up against him.’

‘Sarah! You really
are
!’

It took Kate nearly half an hour to get her father dressed and into the car. In spite of her telling him it was a hot day, he wore a vest, flannel shirt, thick Norfolk jacket,
his burberry and a cashmere muffler she’d given him last Christmas. He also took his pocket book of British birds in case a British bird got near enough – and stayed still long enough
– for him to identify it. It was indeed hot. The wild roses were blanched by the heat; buttercups glittered in the rich grass, the chestnut trees lining the unkempt drive had leaves that were
already shabby from drought, and the Herefords clumped together under them in a miasma of flies. Without glancing at him, Kate could feel the intensity with which her father was looking out of the
car window; she was unhappily divided between going slowly to give him the maximum enjoyment, and not being late for Shirley, who would anyway not be pleased at his making a third in the car. It
was extraordinary, she felt, how much of life consisted of having to displease somebody.

As Shirley walked down the platform, she could see her mother standing at the barrier, dressed, as usual, in a faded flowered cotton skirt, a blue tee-shirt and sandals, her dark glasses pushed
up over her fringe. From the distance, she looked like a dowdy, rather arty girl. At least, Shirley thought, I’ve stopped her wearing trousers – she really wasn’t the shape for
them.

They kissed, rather awkwardly; neither was sure what degree of warmth was appropriate to the occasion. Kate said quickly:

‘I’m terribly sorry, but I simply had to bring Percy.’

‘Surely you didn’t
have
to.’

‘You know how he feels about going out in the car. How are you?’ She looked at her daughter’s incredibly pretty, apparently unravaged face, turning sulky now at the news about
her grandfather.

‘I’m all right,’ stony, snubbing, walking ahead of her mother in silence to the car.

Percy was dragging a dusty fruit-drop from his overcoat pocket. He had recently taken to eating them with the cellophane wrappers still on, and enjoyed being asked why he did so, so that he
could say he always ate his sweet papers. He longed to confound people by turning out always to have done something that surprised them. He popped the sweet in just as they got into the car, but
when neither of them asked him, he took the sweet out again, dropped it on the floor and ground his foot on it as though it was a cigarette.

‘Here’s Shirley,’ said Kate, pretending not to notice.

‘So I see. Had a good term?’

‘She hasn’t been to school, Father. She’s been in Manchester, with Douglas.’

He crunched his dentures and didn’t answer. Kate thought he was sulking because he’d got something wrong, but really he was peeved because he hadn’t embarrassed Shirley with
his pretended memory lapse (he knew she wasn’t at school, and who on earth was Douglas?).

‘How’s my father?’

‘He’s fine. He’s taking the evening ride.’

‘What’s the new stable-girl like?’

‘I’ve hardly seen her. She’s called Eunice.’

‘Is she attractive?’

Kate paused before replying evenly: ‘Oh yes, I should think she’s quite attractive.’ It had recently begun to amaze her that in all these years, Shirley had never noticed
anything . . .

‘. . . and I’m not a child! Why should he suddenly spoil all our plans just because he wants to work on his wretched film! If he can’t be bothered even to
think what I might feel, why on earth did he ever want to marry me?’ She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her room, having a post-cry cigarette, and looking, Kate thought, very
childish indeed.

‘Perhaps he
had
to do the job?’ she suggested – very gently, but not gently enough.

‘Whenever I try to tell you anything, you always take the other person’s side! You
always
do!’

‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that: I’m only trying to understand. I can’t believe he simply wanted to hurt your feelings.’

‘He doesn’t care about my feelings. All he cares about is his bloody film unit. He never stops thinking and talking about them.’

‘Could you have gone to Scotland with him?’

‘He never said so. Anyway, I’ve told him it’s not my idea of a holiday to sit about cooped up in some ghastly hotel while he’s out on an oil rig or something. He told me
he’d got three days’ leave, and he promised to come home. He
promised
me.’ She thrust her knuckles under her firm little chin and glared into space. After a minute, she
said:

‘The truth is, it’s got to be all or nothing for me. I’m jealous of his work.’ She looked at her mother with something like triumph. ‘That’s what it is! I
expect him to put me first, and he doesn’t, and it makes me jealous!’

The discovery seemed actually to relieve her. After it, she became much easier to reason with: allowed Kate to discuss with her the possibility of getting some sort of part-time job, admitted
that Douglas had said something about standing in for a friend whose wife was having a baby, and even volunteered that she could be terrible when she didn’t get her own way. She was of an
age, Kate thought, when self-recrimination seemed to be unaccompanied by pain. ‘I know I’ve got a hot temper!’ She was simply very young for a situation into which her appearance
had trapped her so early; an only and childish child, which Kate, in her turn, had to admit meant that she was to some degree spoiled, although with Brian as a father, how could she have prevented
it? He had always defended her, backed her up whatever she did . . .

‘Where’s the most beautiful girl in the world?’

He was standing at the bottom of the staircase, and Kate, in the kitchen doorway, watched her as she stood at the top – dressed now in her old jeans and a sleeveless green angora jerkin:
she posed for a moment, and then hurled herself down – hair flying, eyes shining – into his arms. He gave a great laugh, and held her at arm’s length.

‘Let’s look at you.
Mrs
Thornton: let’s have a look.’

‘I’m fine, Daddy.’ But Kate could hear that little touch of the gallant waif – knew that those dog-violet eyes were gazing at her father with the expression of quivering
self-reliance that he would find irresistible. Was she playacting, or was it real? Certainly their relationship was like the way fathers and daughters went on in bad films: even in these few weeks
she had forgotten how much and how quickly it exasperated her.

‘Mrs Thornton!’ He had picked up her left hand now, and was contemplating the gold wedding ring quizzically. ‘To think I should live to see the day! I tell you one thing. I’m jealous of Mr Thornton.’

‘You needn’t be. Oh – you smell –
nice
!’

Kate was conscious of a small, but regular, hammer thudding from somewhere inside her as she became miserably transfixed.

‘And what may I ask, does this call itself?’ He caressed the fluffy green jerkin that seemed to be fastened only in one place just below her breasts, so that the sides flew out to
reveal the slender rib cage, tiny waist and concave upper belly.

‘Really, Daddy – you are impossible! Your own daughter!’ Some luxuriant head-tossing, and his hairy wrists picked from the sides of her jeans.

‘How do you get your hair to shine like that!’

‘My herbal rinse.’ Demure now, walking towards her, ahead of him, into the kitchen.

(‘How dare you behave like this! – In front of your wife! Behind your husband’s back!’) She needed two voices to scream it, but her body felt like some roaring conduit of
surging blood, with a trap-door slammed shut in the bottom of her throat. As they approached her, she began fiddling unsteadily with the strawberries in the colander before her.

‘Oh – strawberries! How fabulous!’ Kate recognized the stringing-along-with-Mummy tone that so often came after what had gone before.

‘Don’t bother your mother now, she’s busy, and I’m going to take you for a drink at the Woodman.’ His hole-in-one technique, she called that.

‘Oh – great! Let’s ride, Dad: we can ride through the wood and up the lane.’

A few minutes later, they were gone. There had been a few last moments of ‘Sure you don’t want any help?’ ‘Sure you don’t mind?’ followed by ‘We’ll be back at half past on the dot – promise,’ and then they were off. She was left alone in silence –
except for the cold tap dripping and the distant, velvety gabble of Percy’s radio.

She discovered that things were taking on a dirty, speckled appearance, and she fumbled in her bag to find the orange pills encased in foil that helped to prevent migraine. Cafergot had to be
crunched up to work quickly, and she washed down the cheap, stale chocolate taste with a glass of tap water. She wanted a cigarette, but that would be fatal. What she must do was to sit quite
still, and relax, but that only made it more difficult to stop what she had just been thinking. After trying for a bit, it seemed reasonable – even mild – simply to dislike them,
compared with what she felt about herself.