My Policeman (28 page)

I looked around at the destruction I’d caused. Shirts, trousers, socks, books, photographs, all thrown about the room. Windows flung wide open. Our wardrobe emptied. The contents of Tom’s bedside cabinet scattered across the floor.

He was still calling for me, but he was taking the stairs slowly now, as if a little afraid of what he might find.

‘Marion?’ he called. ‘What’s going on?’

I didn’t answer him. I waited, my mind utterly blank. I couldn’t think of any excuse for what I’d done, and at the sound of Tom’s uncertain voice all my anger seemed to shrivel into a tight ball.

When he came into the room, I heard his gasp. I remained on the floor, staring at the rug, holding my unbuttoned blouse tightly closed. I must have looked a sorry sight, because his voice softened and he said, ‘Bloody hell. Are you all right?’

It crossed my mind to lie. I could say we’d been broken into. That I’d been threatened by some hooligan who went about the place smashing up our plates and throwing Tom’s things around the bedroom.

‘Marion? What’s happened?’

He knelt beside me, and his eyes were so gentle that I could not formulate any words at all. Instead I began to cry. It was such a relief, Patrick, to take this woman’s way out. Tom
helped
me up on to the bed and I sat, sputtering out loud sobs, opening my mouth wide, not bothering to cover my face. Tom put his arm around me and I allowed myself the luxury of resting my wet cheek on his chest. That was all I wanted at that moment. The oblivion of tears cried into my husband’s shirt. He said nothing; just rested his chin on the top of my head and slowly rubbed my shoulder.

After I’d calmed myself a little, he tried again. ‘What’s going on, then?’ he said, his voice kindly but rather stern.

‘You’re going to Venice with Patrick.’ I spoke into his chest, keeping my head down, aware that I sounded like a petulant child. Like Milly Oliver, sitting in a puddle of her own urine. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

His hand stilled on my shoulder and there was a long pause. I swallowed, waiting – half hoping – for his anger to hit me like a blast of heat.

‘Is that what all this is about?’ He was using his policeman’s voice again. I recognised it from our last discussion about you. He’d repressed the lilt, the hint of a laugh that was usually behind all his utterances. He has this talent, doesn’t he, Patrick? The gift of being able to remove oneself utterly from one’s words. The gift of being physically in a place, talking, responding, whilst not actually – not emotionally – being there at all. At the time I thought it was part of a policeman’s training, and for a while I told myself that Tom needed to do this, that he couldn’t help it. Removing himself was his way of coping with his work, and it had leaked into his life. But now I wonder whether it wasn’t always a part of him.

I straightened up. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Marion. You have to stop this.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It’s destructive. Very destructive.’ He was staring ahead now, speaking in a calm monotone. ‘Do I have to tell you everything immediately? Is that what you expect?’

‘No, but – we’re married …’ I mumbled.

‘What about freedom, Marion? What about that? I thought we had, you know, an
understanding
. I thought we had a – well, a modern marriage. You’ve got the freedom to work, haven’t you? I should have the freedom to see whoever I like. I thought we were different from our parents.’ He stood up. ‘I was going to tell you tonight. Patrick only asked me yesterday. He has to go to Venice for his work. Some conference or other. Just a few days. And he’d like some company.’ As he spoke, he began picking his clothes up from the floor and folding them into piles on the bed. ‘I can’t see the problem. A few days away with a friend, that’s all it is. I didn’t think you’d deny me the chance to see a bit of the world. I really didn’t.’ He scooped the contents of his bedside drawer from the rug and put them back in their proper place. ‘There’s no need for all this – I don’t know what to call it. Hysterical behaviour. Jealousy. Is that what it is? Is that what you’d call it?’

Whilst he waited for my answer, he continued to tidy the room, shutting the windows, hanging his jackets and trousers in the wardrobe, avoiding my gaze.

Listening to his perfectly even tone, watching him neatly tidy away the evidence of my anger, I’d started to shake. His coolness terrified me, and with every item he lifted from the floor, my own sense of shame at having torn through the house like a woman demented increased. A woman demented was not what I was. I was a schoolteacher, married to a policeman. I was not an hysteric.

I managed to say, ‘You know what it is, Tom – it’s what Julia said …’

Tom brushed down the arms of his best jacket, the one you bought him to wear on our wedding day. Gripping the cuff, he said, ‘I thought we’d settled that.’

‘We have – we did—’

‘So why bring it up again?’ He turned to face me at last, and whilst his voice remained perfectly even, his cheeks flamed with outrage. ‘I’m beginning to wonder, Marion, whether you’ve got a dirty mind.’

He snapped the wardrobe doors closed, pushed the bedside cabinet drawer to, straightened the rug. Then he strode to the door and paused. ‘Let’s agree,’ he said, ‘to say no more about it. I’m going downstairs. I want you to clean yourself up. We’ll have dinner and we’ll forget this. All right?’

I could say nothing. Nothing at all.

BY NOW YOU’LL
have gathered that for months I’d tried my hardest to remain blind to what was between you and Tom. But after Julia’s naming of his disposition, my husband’s relationship with you began to come into sharp, terrifying focus.
Comme ça
: the words themselves were dreadful – they conjured an offhand knowingness that utterly excluded me. And I was so stunned by the truth that I could do nothing but stumble through the days as normally as possible, trying not to look too closely at the vision of the two of you that was always there, no matter how much I wished I could turn my eyes away.

I was, I decided, lacking in precisely the way Miss Monkton at the grammar had pinpointed all those years ago. She was right.
Enormous dedication and considerable backbone
were things I did not have. Not when it came to my marriage. And so I took the coward’s way out. Although I could no longer deny the truth about Tom, I chose silence rather than further confrontation.

It was Julia who tried to rescue me.

One afternoon during the last week of term, after all the children had gone home, I was in the classroom, washing up paint pots and hanging wet artworks on a string I’d rigged across the window especially for this purpose. This gave me
the
kind of satisfaction I imagine my mother experienced on wash days, seeing the line of clean white nappies blowing in the sunshine. A task well done. Children well cared for. And the evidence pegged out for all to see.

Without a word, Julia strolled in and sat on a desk, which immediately looked ridiculously small with her long limbs on it – she was almost as tall as me. Putting a hand to her forehead, as if attempting to stem the pain of a headache, she began: ‘Is everything all right?’

There was never much preamble with Julia. No skirting around the issue. I should have thanked her for it. But instead I said, rather surprised, ‘Everything’s fine.’

She smiled, tapping herself lightly on the forehead now. ‘Because I had this silly idea that you were avoiding me.’ Her bright blue eyes were on mine. ‘We’ve hardly spoken since we took the children to Castle Hill, have we? I hope you’ve forgiven my clumsiness …?’

Pegging up another painting so I didn’t have to look at her questioning face, I said, ‘Of course I have.’

After a pause, Julia jumped up and stood behind me. ‘These are nice.’ She touched a corner of one of the paintings and peered at it closely. ‘The head mentioned that your museum visit was a great success. I’m thinking of taking my lot next term.’

When the head had asked me about the visit, it had crossed my mind to tell him that you were nothing but an incompetent toff with plenty of artistic pretensions but no real idea of how to handle a roomful of children. However, I’d been unable to lie, Patrick, despite what had happened at the end of that day. And so I’d given him a positive if brief report of your activities and shown him some of the children’s creative efforts. He’d admired Alice’s mask in particular. Needless to
say
, I’d mentioned Milly’s puddle to no one. But I was reluctant, now, to give you any more credit. ‘It was fine,’ I said. ‘Nothing extraordinary.’

‘Shall we go for a drink?’ Julia asked. ‘You look like you deserve one. Come on. Let’s get out of this place.’ She was grinning, gesturing towards the door. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m very ready for a drop of the hard stuff.’

We sat in the snug of the Queen’s Park Tavern. Julia’s glass of port and lemon looked somehow wrong in her hand. I’d thought she would have a half of stout, or something in a shot glass, but she declared herself a slave to the sweet drink, and had bought me one too, promising that I would love it if only I gave it a try.

There was something wonderfully illicit about being in the dark, slightly dingy pub, with its heavy green curtains and almost black wood panelling, on such a bright afternoon. We’d chosen a gloomy booth in the almost-empty snug, and there were no other women in the place. Several of the middle-aged men who lined the bar stared at the two of us as we ordered our drinks, but I found I didn’t care. Julia lit my cigarette, then her own, and we both blew out and giggled. It was like being a schoolgirl again, in Sylvie’s bedroom, except I would never have smoked back then.

‘It was fun,’ she said, ‘on Castle Hill. Good to get out of the classroom.’

I agreed and drank several gulps of port and lemon, getting over the sickly sweetness of it and enjoying the weak feeling it carried to my knees, the warmth it created in my throat.

‘I try to take them as often as I can,’ Julia continued. ‘We have this wonderful landscape all around us, and most of them haven’t seen anything beyond Preston Park.’

I knew I could trust her with a confession. ‘Neither had I.’

She merely raised her eyebrows. ‘I
thought
perhaps you hadn’t. If you don’t mind my saying so.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know why not, really …’

‘Your husband isn’t the outdoors type?’

I laughed. ‘As a matter of fact, Tom’s in the sea-swimming club. He goes in every morning. Unless he’s on early shifts. Then it’s after work.’

‘He sounds very disciplined.’

‘Oh, he is.’

She gave me a sidelong glance. ‘You don’t join him?’

I thought of Tom holding me in the waves and carrying me back to shore. I thought of how light I felt in his arms. Then I thought of myself with all his possessions scattered around me on the bedroom floor, my blouse open, my hands grubbied. Taking another drink, I said, ‘I’m not a strong swimmer.’

‘You can’t be any worse than me. All I can do is doggy paddle.’ Putting down her glass, Julia lifted both hands in the air, let her wrists go limp and paddled furiously at nothing, pulling her mouth into a woeful grimace. ‘If I had bigger ears and a tail, someone might throw me a stick. Want another?’

I looked at the yellowed clock over the bar. Half past five. Tom would be home by now, wondering where I was. Let him wait, I decided. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

At the bar, Julia stood with one foot on the brass rail that ran along the bottom, waiting to be served. A man with very few teeth stared at her, and she nodded at him, causing him to look away. Then she looked at me and grinned, and I was struck by how strong she appeared, standing at that bar as if ready for anything, or anyone. Her flat black hair, her red
lipstick
made her stand out wherever she went, but here she was like a beacon. Her voice, when she ordered, was clear and loud enough for everyone in the snug to hear, but she did not lower it. I wondered what she really thought of this place that was so obviously not her natural environment. Julia didn’t belong in beer-stained pubs, I thought; at least, this was not the sort of world into which she’d been born. I imagined her growing up riding a horse at weekends, attending guide camps, holidaying with her family in the western isles of Scotland. But the funny thing was, the difference in our backgrounds didn’t bother me at all. I found that her apparent independence, the way she was not afraid to look or sound different, was something I wanted for myself.

Placing our drinks on the table, she asked me cheerfully, ‘So. Marion. What are your politics?’

I almost spat a mouthful of port and lemon into her lap.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Is that an inappropriate question? Perhaps I should have waited until we’d had a few more drinks.’ She was smiling at me, but I got the feeling I was being tested in some way, and it was a test I badly wanted to pass. I remembered our conversation around the dinner table on the Isle of Wight, Patrick, and after knocking back half my drink, I stated: ‘Well. I think mothers should be able to go to work, for a start. I’m all for equality. Between the sexes, I mean.’