She began to live in a strange kind of malaise, as though her head was full of fog. She had made her bed, she supposed, and now she must lie on it. Perhaps that was another version of Dr Kellet’s amor fati. What would he say about her current predicament? More to the point, perhaps, what would he say about Derek’s peculiar character?
She was to attend sports day. It was a big event in Blackwood’s calendar and wives of masters were expected to attend. Derek had given her money for a new hat and said, ‘Make sure you look smart.’
She went to a local shop that sold apparel for women and children, called A La Mode (although it really wasn’t). It was here that she bought her stockings and undergarments. She had had no new clothes since her wedding. She didn’t care enough about her appearance to badger Derek for the money.
It was a lacklustre-looking shop in a row of other lacklustre shops – a hairdressing salon, a fishmonger, a greengrocer’s, a post office. She didn’t have the heart or the stomach (or the budget) to bother going up to town to a smart London department store (and what would Derek say about such a jaunt?). When she worked in London, before the watershed of marriage, she had spent a lot of time in Selfridge’s and Peter Robinson’s. Now those places seemed as distant as foreign countries.
The contents of the shop window were protected from the sun by a yellowy-orange screen, a kind of thick cellophane that reminded her of the wrapper on a bottle of Lucozade and made everything in the window completely undesirable.
It was not the most beautiful hat but she supposed it would do. She scrutinized her reflection unwillingly in the shop’s floor-to-ceiling tripartite mirror. In triptych she looked three times worse than she did in the bathroom mirror (the only one in the house that she couldn’t avoid). She no longer recognized herself, she thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.
Suddenly, horribly, she frightened herself by wailing, the wretched sound of utter despondency. The owner of the shop came rushing from behind the counter and said, ‘There, dear, don’t get upset. Time of the month, is it?’ She made her sit and have a cup of tea and a biscuit and Ursula couldn’t begin to express her gratitude for this simple kindness.
The school was one stop on the train and then a short walk along a quiet road. Ursula joined the stream of parents flowing through Blackwood’s gates. It was exciting – and slightly terrifying – to suddenly find herself among a crush. She had been married less than six months but had forgotten what it was like to be in a crowd.
Ursula had never been to the school before and was surprised by its commonplace red brick and its pedestrian herbaceous borders, quite unlike the ancient school that the men of the Todd family attended. Teddy and then Jimmy had followed in Maurice’s footsteps to Hugh’s old school, a lovely building of soft grey stone and as pretty as an Oxford college. (‘Savage within’, though, according to Teddy.) The grounds were particularly beautiful and even Sylvie admired the profusion of flowers in the beds. ‘Rather romantic planting,’ she said. No such romance at Derek’s school, where the emphasis was on the playing fields. The boys at Blackwood were not particularly academic, according to Derek anyway, and were kept occupied by an endless round of rugby and cricket. More healthy minds in healthy bodies. Did Derek have a healthy mind?
It was too late to ask him about his sister and his father, Krakatoa would erupt, Ursula suspected. Why would you make up something like that? Dr Kellet would know.
Trestle tables, bearing refreshments for parents and staff, were set up at one end of the athletics field. Tea and sandwiches and finger slices of dry Dundee cake. Ursula lingered by the tea-urn looking for Derek. He had told her he wouldn’t be able to talk much to her as he was needed to ‘help out’ and when she did eventually spot him at the far end of the field he was diligently carrying an armful of large hoops, the purpose of which seemed mysterious to Ursula.
Everyone gathered around the trestles seemed to know each other, particularly the masters’ wives, and it struck Ursula that there must be a great many more social events at Blackwood than Derek ever mentioned.
A couple of senior masters, gowned like bats, settled on the tea-table and she caught the name ‘Oliphant’. As inconspicuously as possible Ursula stepped a little closer to them, pretending a deep fascination with the crab paste in the sandwich on her plate.
‘Young Oliphant’s in trouble again, I hear.’
‘Really?’
‘Hit a boy, I believe.’
‘Nothing wrong with hitting boys. I hit them all the time.’
‘Bad this time though, apparently. Parents are threatening to go to the police.’
‘He’s never been able to control a class. Ruddy awful teacher, of course.’
Plates now fully loaded with cake, the two men began to wander off, Ursula drifting in their wake.
‘In debt up to his ears, you know.’
‘Perhaps he’ll make some money from his book.’
They both laughed heartily as if a great joke had been told.
‘The wife’s here today, I gather.’
‘Really? We’d better watch out. I hear she’s very unstable.’ This, too, a great joke, seemingly. A sudden shot from the starting pistol signalling the beginning of a hurdles race made Ursula jump. She let the masters amble off. She had lost her appetite for eavesdropping.
She caught sight of Derek striding towards her, hoops now replaced by an unwieldy burden of javelins. He shouted to a couple of boys for help and they trotted up obediently. As they passed Ursula, one of them sniggered, sotto voce, ‘Yes, Mr Elephant, coming, Mr Elephant.’ Derek dropped the javelins to the grass with a great clatter and said to the boys, ‘Carry them to the end of the field, come on, get a move on.’ He approached Ursula and kissed her lightly on the cheek, saying, ‘Hello, dear.’ She burst out laughing, she couldn’t help herself. It was the nicest thing he had said to her in weeks and was voiced not to her but for the benefit of the two masters’ wives who were standing nearby.
‘Is there something funny?’ he asked, studying her face a little too long for comfort. She could tell he was seething. She shook her head in answer. She was worried she might scream out loud, could feel her own volcano bubbling up, ready to explode. She supposed she was hysterical. Unstable.
‘I have to see to the Upper School’s high jump,’ Derek said, frowning at her. ‘I’ll meet you shortly.’ He walked off, still frowning, and she started to laugh again.
‘Mrs Oliphant? Is it Mrs Oliphant, it is, isn’t it?’ The two masters’ wives pounced on her, lionesses sensing wounded prey.
She also travelled home alone as Derek had to supervise evening study and would eat at the school, he said. She made herself a scrappy tea of fried herring and cold potatoes and had a sudden longing for a bottle of good red wine. In fact one bottle after another until she had drunk herself to death. She scraped the herring bones into the bin. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Anything was better than this ludicrous life.
Derek was a joke, to the boys, to the staff. Mr Elephant. She could just imagine the unruly Lower Third driving him mad with rage. And his book, what of his book?
Ursula never bothered much with the contents of Derek’s ‘study’. She had never felt any great interest in the Plantagenets or Tudors either, for that matter. She was under strict instructions not to move any of his papers or books when dusting and polishing in the dining room (as she still liked to think of it) but she didn’t care to anyway, barely glancing at the progress of the great tome.
He had been working feverishly of late, the table was covered in a clutter of notes and scraps of paper. It was all disconnected sentences and thoughts – rather amusing if somewhat primitive belief – planta genista, the common broom gives us the name Angevin – come of the devil, and to the devil they would go. There was little sign of an actual manuscript, just corrections and re-corrections, the same paragraph written over and over with tiny changes each time, and endless trial pag
es, written in ruled exercise books with Blackwood’s crest and motto (A posse ad esse – ‘from possibility to reality’) on the cover. No wonder he hadn’t wanted her to type up his manuscript. She had married a Casaubon, she realized.
Derek’s whole life was a fabrication. From his very first words to her (Oh, my, how awful for you. Let me help you) he had not been genuine. What had he wanted from her? Someone weaker than himself? Or a wife, a mother of his children, someone running his house, all the trappings of the vie quotidienne but without any of its underlying chaos. She had married him in order to be safe from that chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.
Ursula rooted through the sideboard drawers and found a sheaf of letters, the top one with the letterhead of William Collins and Sons, Co. Ltd ‘regretfully’ rejecting his idea for a book, in an ‘already oversubscribed area of history textbooks’. There were similar letters from other educational publishers and, worse, there were unpaid bills and threatening final notices. A particularly harsh letter demanded immediate repayment of the loan taken out apparently to pay for the house. It was the kind of sour letter that she had typed up from dictation at her secretarial college, Dear Sir, It has been brought to my notice—
She heard the front door open and her heart jumped. Derek appeared in the doorway of the dining room, a Gothic intruder on stage. ‘What are you doing?’
She held up the letter from William Collins and said, ‘You’re a liar, through and through. Why did you marry me? Why did you make us both so unhappy?’ The look on his face. That look. She was asking to be killed, but wasn’t that easier than doing it herself? She didn’t care any more, there was no fight in her.
Ursula was expecting the first blow but it still took her by surprise, his fist punching hard into the middle of her face as if he wanted to obliterate it.
She slept, or perhaps she passed out, on the kitchen floor and woke some time before six. She was sick and dizzy and every inch of her was sore and aching, her whole body made of lead. She was desperate for a drink of water but didn’t dare turn the tap on for fear of waking Derek. Using first a chair, then the table, she hauled herself up to standing. She found her shoes and crept into the hallway where she took her coat and a headscarf from the peg. Derek’s wallet was in his jacket pocket and she took a ten-shilling note, more than enough for the rail fare and then a cab onward. She felt exhausted just at the thought of this taxing journey – she wasn’t even sure she could make it on foot as far as Harrow and Wealdstone station.
She slipped her coat on and pulled the headscarf over her face, avoiding the mirror in the hallstand. It would be too dreadful a sight. She left the front door slightly ajar in case the noise of it closing woke him up. She thought of Ibsen’s Nora slamming the door behind her. Nora wouldn’t have gone in for dramatic gestures if she had been trying to escape from Derek Oliphant.
It was the longest walk of her life. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might give out. All the way she expected to hear his footsteps running up behind her and him yelling her name. At the ticket office she had to mumble ‘Euston’ through a mouthful of bloody, broken teeth. The ticket clerk glanced at her and then glanced quickly away when he saw the state she was in. Ursula supposed he had no precedent for dealing with female passengers who looked as if they had been in bare-knuckle fights.
She had to wait for the first train of the day for another ten agonizing minutes in the ladies’ waiting room but at least she was able to get a drink of water and remove some of the dried blood from her face.
In the carriage she sat with her head bowed, one hand shielding her face. The men in suits and bowlers studiously ignored her. As she waited for the train to pull away she risked a glance along the platform and was relieved beyond measure that there was still no sign of Derek. With any luck he hadn’t missed her yet and was still doing his press-ups on the bedroom floor, presuming her to be down in the kitchen preparing his breakfast. Friday, kipper day. The kipper still lay on the pantry shelf, wrapped in newspaper. He would be furious.
When she got off the train at Euston her legs almost gave way. People gave her a wide berth and she worried that the cab driver would refuse the fare, but when she showed him the money he took her. They drove in silence across London, bathed in rain overnight, and now the stones of the buildings were sparkling in the first rays of sun and the soft cloudy dawn was opalescent in pinks and blues. She had forgotten how much she liked London. Her heart rose. She had decided to live and now she wanted to very much.
The cab driver helped her out at the end of the journey. ‘You’re sure about this, miss, are you?’ he said, looking doubtfully at the large red-brick house in Melbury Road. She nodded, mutely.
It was an inevitable destination.
She rang the bell and the front door opened. Izzie’s hand flew to her mouth in horror at the sight of her face. ‘Oh, my God. What happened to you?’
‘My husband tried to kill me.’
‘You’d better come in then,’ Izzie said.
The bruises healed, very slowly. ‘Battle scars,’ Izzie said.
Izzie’s dentist fixed Ursula’s teeth and she had to wear her right arm in a sling for a while. Her nose had been broken again and her cheekbones and jaw cracked. She was flawed, no longer intact. On the other hand, she felt as if she had been scourged clean. The past no longer weighed so heavily on the present. She sent a message to Fox Corner saying that she had gone away for the summer, ‘a touring holiday of the Highlands with Derek’. She was fairly sure that Derek wouldn’t contact Fox Corner. He would be licking his wounds somewhere. Barnet, maybe. He had no idea where Izzie lived, thank goodness.
Izzie was surprisingly sympathetic. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ she said. ‘It’ll make a change from rattling around in here on my own. And God only knows, I’ve got more than enough money to keep you. Take your time,’ she added. ‘No rush. And you’re only twenty-three, for heaven’s sake.’ Ursula didn’t know which was more surprising – Izzie’s genuine hospitality or the fact that she knew how old she was. Perhaps Izzie had been changed by Belgravia too.
Ursula was in on her own one evening when Teddy turned up on the doorstep. ‘You’re hard to find,’ he said, giving her an enormous hug. Ursula’s heart bumped with pleasure. Teddy always seemed more real than other people somehow. He was brown and strong from spending the long summer vacation working on the Hall farm. He had announced recently that he wanted to be a farmer. ‘I’ll have the money back that I spent on your education,’ Sylvie said – but smiling because Teddy was her favourite.
‘I believe it was my money,’ Hugh said. (Did Hugh have a favourite? ‘You, I think,’ Pamela said.)
‘What happened to your face?’ Teddy asked her.
‘Bit of an accident, you should have seen it before,’ she laughed.
‘You’re not in the Highlands,’ Teddy said.
‘Doesn’t seem so, does it?’
‘You’ve left him then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ Teddy, like Hugh, didn’t go in for long narratives. ‘Where’s the giddy aunt then?’ he asked.
‘Out giddying. The Embassy Club, I believe.’ They drank some of Izzie’s champagne to celebrate Ursula’s freedom.
‘You’ll be disgraced in Mother’s eyes, I expect,’ Teddy said.
‘Don’t worry, I believe I already am.’
Together they made an omelette and a tomato salad and ate with their plates on their knees listening to Ambrose and his orchestra on the wireless. When they finished their food, Teddy lit a cigarette. ‘You’re so grown-up these days,’ Ursula laughed. ‘I have muscles,’ he said, demonstrating his biceps like a circus strongman. He was reading English at Oxford and said it was a relief to stop thinking and ‘be working on the land’. He was writing poetry, too, he said. About the land, not about ‘feelings’. Teddy’s heart had been fractured by Nancy’s death
and once a thing was cracked, he said, it could never be repaired perfectly. ‘Quite Jamesian, isn’t it?’ he said ruefully. (Ursula thought of herself.)
A bereft Teddy carried his wounds on the inside, a scar across his heart where little Nancy Shawcross had been ripped away. ‘It’s as if,’ he said to Ursula, ‘you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.’
‘I think I understand. I do,’ Ursula said.
Ursula dozed off with her head on Teddy’s shoulder. She was still tremendously tired. (‘Sleep is a great healer,’ Izzie said, bringing her breakfast on a tray every morning.)
Eventually, Teddy sighed and stretched and said, ‘I suppose I should be getting back to Fox Corner. What’s the story, did I see you? Or are you still in Brigadoon?’ He took their plates through to the kitchen. ‘I’ll clear up while you think about your answer.’
When the doorbell rang Ursula presumed it was Izzie. Now that Ursula was living in Melbury Road she had grown careless about her door keys. ‘But you’re always here, darling,’ she said when Ursula had to crawl out of bed at three in the morning to let her in.
It wasn’t Izzie, it was Derek. She was so surprised she couldn’t even speak. She had left him so firmly behind that she thought of him as someone who had ceased to exist. He didn’t belong in Holland Park, but rather in some dark place of the imagination.
He twisted her arm behind her back and frogmarched her down the hall into the drawing room. He glanced at the coffee table, a heavy wooden thing carved in the Oriental style. Seeing the empty champagne glasses still sitting on the coffee table and the big onyx ashtray containing Teddy’s cigarette stubs, he hissed, ‘Who’s been here with you?’ He was incandescent with rage. ‘Who have you been fornicating with?’