The Pumpkin Eater (5 page)

“Is Philpot given to fainting much?”

“Fainting?”

“The children said …”

“Well? What? What did they say?”

“They said she fainted yesterday.”

“Oh. Well. Perhaps she did.”

“They said you were there. That you caught her.”

“Caught her when she fainted?”

“Yes.”

“Why should I catch her when she faints?”

“I don't know. But did she?”

“I don't know! I don't remember!”

“There's no need to shout.”

“Shout? My God, its not me who's shouting.”

The incessant company of children leads to this kind of dialogue: it was our mother-tongue, incomprehensible to most adults, and in it we carried on the complex, subtle and occasionally tragic conversations which are the last resort of communication between men and women. Jake, although he had learned the language comparatively late in life, had a more perceptive ear and a more imitative nature than I. He was particularly expert at the intonation and the repartee. Now he said, after a moment's thought, “It's you who's shouting.”

I looked at him as carefully as I dared over the magazine I had been pretending to read. Since that afternoon, six or seven hours ago, I had felt a very curious sensation. It was like being petrified in the moment of falling: the heart had frozen in its leap, blood thrown out of its course, muscles rigid, throat dry with the onslaught of air. It seemed to me that I was frightened, but I was not sure.

It was midnight. Jake had turned the electric fire on when we came in from the cinema, but the curtains were undrawn. Philpot had left the sitting room door open when she went.

“Where has she gone?” I asked.

“How should I know.”

“It seems very peculiar.”

“What does?”

“Well, to come to the pictures and then just … go like that.”

“It's none of our business what she does.”

“Oh no,” I said, “it's none of our business certainly.”

I stared at the magazine. Jake lay in the armchair with his overcoat on. We trembled like dogs before a storm. High up in the house beds made little whining noises.

“But,” I said, “she's left all her things.”

He didn't answer. I thought of Philpot's bedroom in our house: the layers of grime-edged broderie anglaise flung over the unmade bed, the spilled powder, little stumps of lipstick and unstoppered deodorants. I thought how in the afternoon one ray of sunlight, if it was a fine day, shone through the small attic window, and how the child who was now asleep in a resented cot grumbled incessantly about the loneliness, the darkness of that room, and said nobody would hear if it died. I thought of how at ten o'clock that morning I had taken Philpot breakfast in bed, partly because the knowledge of her sleeping so tirelessly had irritated me, but partly because Philpot was a poor girl who had no one to love her, and made such a mess of life and wasn't strong and competent and in command of the situation like myself. I thought of myself strongly and competently and commandingly creeping across the heaths and parks of London every afternoon, returning home to find Philpot freshly pinned and painted saying oh damn, I really, honestly, meant to get the tea. I thought of Philpot leaving us so quietly, as though she were sacrificing herself that we might survive: eyes a little puffy, but with a great air of nobility about her, now I came to think of it, as she waved her lace handkerchief at us from the door and said goodbye. I looked up at Jake.

Possibly fifteen seconds had gone by, but during that time, under cover, as it were, of these inconclusive thoughts about poor Philpot, some of my innocence, trust, stupidity, idealism had been stripped away from me like skins. I was smaller, uglier, more powerful than I had been before, and I felt bewitched by fear.

“What happened between you and … Philpot?”

“Happened? What d'you mean — happened? Nothing happened.”

“Then why did she suddenly leave like that?”

“I've told you I don't — ”

“And you weren't surprised. Were you? You knew she was going.”

“Leave it alone, can't you? Leave it alone.”

But he did not get up, change the conversation. He hunched further into his overcoat, staring at me over the upturned collar. It was the steadiness of this stare, not its expression, that was melancholy. I looked at his eyes. They might have been made of glass. They were empty. They moved as I moved, watching me get up, walk up the room, back again, sit down on the sofa.

“You were holding her hand in the cinema,” I said. “How extraordinary.”

“What's extraordinary?”

“That I knew you were. Perhaps I actually saw you were. But I didn't believe it.”

“It's not a crime, for God's sake.”

“But you were holding mine as well. Keeping us both happy.”

“What the hell does it matter whose hand I was holding?”

The tremendous beats of my heart began to shake my body and my voice. I said, “Oh, it doesn't. It's quite … unimportant.”

“Well, then.”

“Except that you don't usually hold somebody's hand unless you, unless you want to …”

But I couldn't go on. Dignity, please, a little dignity, this is the most foolish way to behave, short-sighted way to deal with what is after all the most common …

“It was a mere peccadillo,” Jake said abruptly, as though about to recite.

“What?”

“Peccadillo. Bagatelle.”

“I don't understand.”

“It doesn't matter.” He yawned, so widely and for so long that it seemed he must dislocate his jaw. For a full half minute I looked at his back teeth and palate and quivering tonsils. His face, when he composed it, seemed rested. “I love you. So why worry?”

“Did you ask her to leave?”

“Oh lord, no. That was her idea.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. She thought you might be … upset or something.”

“Why should I be?”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, don't you
understand
?”

“No, I don't understand.”

“Well, then …” He got up, stood with his hands in his pockets and his head slightly on one side, smiling at me. “Well, then, I can't help you, can I?”

I stared at him. After some time, a few moments perhaps, he turned away and said, “Look, I can't see what you're so horrified about. I've told you it was nothing. Hell, I don't want to
leave
you. I don't want to
marry
the girl.”

“That's to comfort me?”

“You haven't exactly been a model of faithfulness yourself, you know.”

“I was never unfaithful to anyone. To anyone. Ever.”

“You really believe that? God, what a bloody hypocrite you are — ”

“But you say it's
nothing
. You keep saying it's nothing. Why bother, then? Why hurt people so much, for what you say is nothing?”

“Why do you feel so hurt?”

“Because I care about you! I care!”

“About
me
? You don't give a damn for me, and you know it. Shut up! You don't care about
me
, all you care about is the bills being paid and the bloody children, that great fucking army of children that I'm supposed to support and work my guts out for, so I can't even take a bath in peace, I can't eat a bloody meal without them whining and slobbering all over the table, I can't even go to bed with you without one of them comes barging in in the middle. If you cared about me you'd try to understand me, wouldn't you? All right, I'm a bastard! All right, I'm no good to you! But what joy do you think
I
get out of this god-awful boring family life of yours? Where do
I
come in?”

He was shouting as though I were a mile away. His shouts delighted me. I forgot Philpot. I loved him. He was yelling and bawling like a man being delivered of devils.

“What the hell are you sniggering at? It's funny when
I
tell the truth for once, I suppose? The truth is something strictly reserved for you, isn't it? Well, let me tell you, my sweet, you live in a bloody dream world. You wouldn't know what the truth was if it stared you in the face!”

“I think I would,” I said. “It is now.”

“Yes. It is now. But you don't know what it is, do you?”

“What is it, then?”

“That I'm capable of fancying someone else. That I'm a perfectly normal man who can fancy someone else.”

“I'd forgotten about Philpot,” I said.

“Good. Then what the hell are we arguing about?”

“I don't know. Nothing. I suppose it's just … nothing.”

I got up from the sofa and walked slowly towards the door. I knew that I wouldn't leave him, that I was not going out of the room, but I had to move somewhere. He said, “You're going to bed now, I suppose.”

“No. Just shutting the door. In case the children hear you shouting.”

“Give me a drink, then. I'm not going to shout any more.”

As I handed him the drink he caught me and pulled me on to his knee. For a few moments he held me tightly, an awkward, dead armful.

“I didn't mean any of that,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“Any of what?”

“About the children. I love the children, you know that.”

“You were telling the truth.”

“Was I?”

“I think so.”

“You do see how it was, don't you?”

“You mean about Philpot?”

“Well, she was here. I know it wasn't very noble of me, or anything like that. I just felt fed up. Bored to death with this script. You did rather hand her to me on a plate, didn't you?”

“I didn't think of it.”

“No. Well, you wouldn't, I suppose.”

He craned up to kiss me. Like a child, with puckered mouth and closed eyes, he waited. I looked at him carefully. I thought of my other husbands, decent, adult, unselfish men from whom I had escaped while escaping from my childhood — each one an insufficient parent, readily left alone. They seemed to watch me while Jake waited for his maternal kiss. Now it's your turn to suffer, my girl. Now it's up to you to do the forgiving and forgetting. Now it's your turn to refuse freedom or give it out inch by inch.

“You didn't tell me,” I said. “But I suppose you slept with her?”

He did not open his eyes, but shook his head violently.

“You didn't?”

“No. Of course not. Now kiss me, forget it.”

“You promise me?”

“I promise. I promise.”

I bent warily and kissed him. He was filled with the urgency and excitement of a man released from danger.

“But do you still want to?” I asked, merciless.

“Not if I don't see her again.” He smiled up at me. His eyes were still quite empty, and I realized now that they never changed, even in love. “You won't let me see her again, will you?”

“No,” I said.

For an instant, before he reached again, he looked puzzled.

I took every string and jar and puff and rubber band and hair clip of Philpot's, every velvet ribbon and safety pin, every packet and box, full or empty, every piece of her clothing down to the laddered stockings in the wastepaper basket and I tied them up in her genuine Victorian shawl with black braid round the edges and dumped them in the front garden. It was a fine, warm night. The roses were at their best in the moonlight, when you couldn't see how blackened and blighted they were. I took her sewing machine and dressmaker's dummy and portable wireless and a terrible lemon and green abstract that Jake had once offered to buy, and piled them neatly beside the dustbins. Then I sat on the front steps and probed the sensation of fear, which after all that running up and down stairs had dulled to a slight physical pain, as precisely located and bearable as mild toothache.

What, I asked myself, was I frightened of? Thirty-one years old, healthy and whole, married to a fourth husband (why four?) who loved me, with a bodyguard of children (why so many?) — what was I frightened of?

Not of Philpot, surely? Oh no, not in the slightest of Philpot. Of whom, then? Of what?

I soon began to feel cold. Unused to long, solitary bouts of thinking, I remarked to myself that I was cold and therefore got up and went indoors. It occurred to me that there was probably some etiquette for this situation which I didn't know. Perhaps I ought to sleep somewhere else. There was nowhere else to sleep, except in Philpot's bed. I didn't consider it. I walked about the house for a while. The younger children were already shifting about, rolling their heads from side to side and muttering. The one in the cot had thrown all its bedclothes on the floor and was so wet that it appeared to be drowned, not sleeping. Dinah opened her eyes and said, “There's the most awful smell in this room,” and shut her eyes and slept on.

At last I went into the bedroom, undressed and got in beside Jake. In his sleep he looked puzzled again. I thought of waking him up, but for the first time I could not touch him. This paralysis, this failure of my will to make my body move, revived all my fear, and I lay there sweating, shaken by great beats of my heart, ignorant as in a first labour but with no instinct, or memory to help me. It must have been then, I think, that Jake and life became confused in my mind, and inseparable. The sleeping man was no longer accessible, no longer lovable. He increased monstrously, became the sky, the earth, the enemy, the unknown. It was Jake I was frightened of; Jake who terrified me; Jake who in the end would survive. He rolled over, his mouth slightly open, and began to snore.

“
Most enviable New Year resolution comes from writer/producer Jake Armitage, whose latest who-done-it mirth-jerker
, The Sphinx,
starts shooting mid-January. Jake's plans? To say ‘No' at least once a week to movie moguls who are out-bidding each other to buy his services. ‘I'm a yes-man by nature,' says Jake, ‘but there comes a point when you've got to sit back and live a little.' Jake, now one of the highest paid scribblers in the business, started ten years ago on a re-write of a B-picture weepy for Lazlos Rothenstein, since when he has never looked back
.