The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (51 page)

“Ivy! Thank God you’ve come. I was worrying about you. Have … a cup of hot cocoa, have a bun.”

She chose cocoa.

“Have you got all your luggage?” he asked, in a whisper.

Ivy shook her head and said, “No, Charles dear. Dear Charles, I haven’t, I’m afraid.”

“You haven’t? Why not?” asked Charles, staring at her.

She did not speak until a waitress had put down a cup of cocoa and departed, and then she said: “Darling, I love you very much; but I
can’t!”

“Eh? What do you mean? What can’t you?”

“I can’t come away with you.”

“What the devil are you talking about? What do you mean, you can’t come away with me?”

“I was all packed and ready last night, and I was so excited, I lay awake thinking. I love you, Charles, and always have, and always will, and I’d rather go away with you than do anything else in the world. Dear Charles, I hate to hurt you. Forgive me. I got to thinking, about the girls. Edith is … just starting to be a woman. She needs me; it’s a critical time in her life—a girl needs her mother then. Charles, truly, it wouldn’t be any use. We could never be happy—we’d never know a minute’s peace of mind. We’d always be fretting over our children for the rest of our lives. We’d torment ourselves and each other; we’d feel like deserters; if we met anyone we knew we’d have to cross to the other side of the street. We’d never dare to come back home. We’d be wanderers, Charles. We must go home to our children.”

At this, Charles Small began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. He laughed until bitter bile came into his throat and salty tears ran down his cheeks. “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” he said; and “Oh, the pity of it, the pity of it!”

“We must say good-bye, now, and never meet again, my darling Charles. We’d only hurt each other.”

“I suppose you’re not hurting me now,” Charles said, bitterly.

“Oh my dear, don’t be like that! I thought you’d understand.”

“Certainly I understand. I give up everything for you”—he waved the tickets at her—“and at the last moment your children come first. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. If it’s not your bloody mother, it’s your lousy father, and if it isn’t your stinking parents it’s your snotty-nosed children!”

“Don’t talk like that, Charles—I won’t have it.”

“Turnabout’s fair play, I suppose,” said Charles, with a sneer. “First the old cows grab the smeary-arsed little ones by the tail, and then the little ones grab the old cows by the tits.”

“Charles!” exclaimed Ivy, rising.

“Oh don’t Charles me,” he said. “I don’t understand it. Just because one of your ill-mannered little bitches is starting to have a monthly period, she
needs
you. A Mother’s Care. What are you going to do? Put a cork in her, or something? What the devil do they want you for? To slobber over them? Bah! They don’t need you, you need them. You want to take your revenge for what your mother did to you. Well, fair’s fair. They eat you now; later on you’ll eat them, just as that rotten old witch of a mother ate you!”

“I won’t allow you to talk like that about my mother, Charles. I never heard such language!” She was fumbling with the catch of her bag.

Charles Small was eloquent. He knew, now, all about the Irony of Fate. “You and your darling daughters!” and he declaimed:

“Charles Small, I’m glad I found you out in time.” Ivy had her bag open and was rummaging with a gloved hand. “I wouldn’t have you if you were the last man in the world. You’re disgusting. I don’t like you any more. I never want to see your face again, never!” She threw down the bracelet he had given her—it fell into his untasted coffee—and walked firmly out of the refreshment room.

How did Charles Small feel then? He does not quite remember. He knows that he suddenly felt dry and hollow, like a mildewed nut, horribly stale. But somewhere, in one of the ventricles of his heart, there was a little light fluttering which might have been relief.

He fished the diamond bracelet out of the undrinkable coffee with a teaspoon, and went home. In the taxi, starting out of a meaningless reverie, he thought that he had had an unspeakable accident; but it was only the little tube of yellow eye ointment. He had sat on it.

He hurried home to get at that letter and burn it. Having done this he had a bath, changed his ointment-plastered clothes, and went to the office, curiously calm. He walked, enjoying the fine morning. He arrived just when Solly Schwartz was limping out of his cream-coloured Rolls-Royce.

“What,
trottel?”
said the hunchback, laughing. “I thought you were in South America already.” He hit Charles Small smartly on the backside with a gold-headed stick of tuyia wood. “Go on,
schlemazzel,
back to work. I told you you didn’t have the nerve to run away. Come on,
trottel!”

And the great glass doors closed behind him.

*

He is exhausted, now, but calm. He does not know what to make of it all, and he is tired of trying to get any sense out of it. He remembers what an African traveller told him about the scorpions that live in the cracked, sunbaked rocks. The females eat their husbands even in the act of copulation. When the young hatch out, they hop on to their mother’s back and sustain themselves by eating her alive, to get the strength to repeat the process over and over again. There is neither rhyme nor reason in it … there is family life for you! … Poor parents, poor children, thinks Charles Small, dropping tears of pity for his father, his mother, his sister, his wife, his children, himself, and everyone else’s children.

… At the same time he decides that if, within five minutes, Laura and Jules do not stop playing with that clattering
clockwork
train, he will go downstairs and beat the Bejesus out of them with a rolled-up copy of
Child
Psychology.