‘I don’t play fast and loose with him! I can’t bear him to touch me!’
‘I know he wouldn’t be Terry if he didn’t try.’
‘I really believe you’re jealous of him.’
He took me by the shoulders and tried to bring me round to face him. I wouldn’t move. He pulled me round.
‘You’re hurting me, Mark.’
He didn’t let go. ‘So I’m jealous, Marnie. I’m jealous of the men you speak to, of the people you go out with, of the hours you spend here alone while I’m at the works. I even have to be jealous of my miserable backdoor sham-smart wise-cracking cousin. More than ever jealous of him because he seems to be the only man you favour. The whole damned feeling is something I’ve never felt before and never need to have felt, because with any sort of proper relationship between us it wouldn’t have arisen.’
‘You’re hurting me.’
He let me go, shrugged. ‘I don’t want to start getting melodramatic . . . I’ve made my own present – and yours too. And for the time being at any rate we’ve got to live in it. I’m trying to let you go your own way and at your own pace. That’s fine – we’ve agreed to it, and if it’s wearing on me that’s my funeral. But the bargain doesn’t include your going out and staying out with Terry. I’m sorry if you thought it did, but it doesn’t. It just doesn’t, Marnie.’
I pulled my arm away and left him there at the door.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My mind sometimes went to Mark’s keys which he took out of his pocket in his bedroom each night, but so long as I stayed with him there wasn’t a thing I could do about them.
At this time I had my chief pleasure out of being friendly with the Richards and their neighbours. In the cottage next to them were two old men. One was blind and the other half blind and they used to go for walks arm in arm – one eye did for two of them, they said – it was startling how happy they seemed; but their cottage was in a mess, and I couldn’t bear to see it like that, so one day I went down with Mrs Leonard and we had a gorgeous spring-clean. I also found some old curtains which were sixty times better than the cast-off nappies or whatever they’d had over the windows till then. The two old men were puzzled but grateful. Then I found they liked my cakes too.
That week Dr Roman said: ‘We’re almost at the beginning of our third month, Mrs Rutland. We made quite substantial progress in January, but at the moment we seem to have struck another bad patch. I have been wondering whether you would submit to hypnosis.’
‘D’you mean— Who by?’
‘By me. But I have to tell you at once that unless you willingly allow it, the attempt is useless. Nobody can be hypnotized against their will.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Why d’you think we’re not going on all right as we are?’
‘I think we might get over the present difficulty. We’ve made no progress now for five meetings.’
It sounded safe enough. ‘When, do you mean?’
‘Now, if you like.’
‘All right. Do I close my eyes?’
‘No. In a moment I’ll ask you to watch this silver ring that I shall hold up. But first I’ll lower the shades a little.’
Twenty minutes later he said in a dry voice: ‘Yes, I suppose I might have expected it.’
‘Expected what?’
‘Well, you may be giving the appearance of submitting but in fact you’re resisting with all your might.’
‘I’m not! I’ve done everything you told me to do!’
I liked it better when I’d got him face to face like this. He was polishing his glasses, and he looked tired. Without his glasses you could see the bags under his eyes.
‘You always do everything I tell you, Mrs Rutland, but always with great inner resistance. Had you been a less interesting personality I should have given you up weeks ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you?’
He said that as if he was going to make something out of it.
‘If you’re sorry, may I put another suggestion? I can produce the effect of hypnosis artificially with a simple injection. You will have heard of pentothal. It has no unpleasant after-effects and will, I think, do a certain amount to help us both.’
I looked down at my nails. ‘I think I ought to ask Mark first.’
He sighed, ‘Very well, Mrs Rutland. Tell me on Friday.’
On Friday I said: ‘I’m awfully sorry but Mark doesn’t fancy the idea of me being drugged. He’s funny that way, but he has a prejudice against any form of injection.’
‘I see.’
‘But let me carry on, will you, just as we are for a week or two yet? I’ve had some extraordinary dreams since I saw you last . . .’
‘I think you yourself would never agree to pentothal, would you? Isn’t that really the truth?’
I said: ‘Mark won’t let me anyway.’
‘And you won’t let yourself.’
‘Well . . . why should I? It isn’t fair to – to get people like that. It’s like bullying them – it’s like getting them down in the street and holding them there. I won’t give my – myself – away to anybody on earth. It’s like giving away your soul.’
Later he said: ‘Tell me this, what more do you want in life, beyond what you already have?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, tell me. What’s your ambition for the future? You’re twenty-three. Most women of your age want marriage. You have it but cannot accept it.’
‘I don’t mind being with a man so long as he leaves me alone.’
‘Do you want children?’
‘No!’
‘Why not? It’s a natural instinct, isn’t it?’
‘Not for everyone.’
‘Why don’t you want them?’
‘I don’t think it’s any sort of a world to bring them into.’
‘That could be why you don’t have them. It would not be why you don’t want them.’
‘I don’t see the difference.’
‘You’re trying to find a rational explanation for something you feel emotionally.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Do you love your own mother?’
‘Yes . . . I did,’ I added just in time. ‘I love her memory.’
‘Don’t you think it right and reasonable that someone should come into the world who feels for you what you feel for her?’
‘Could be.’ God, I felt queer just then; he might have given me his drug; I was sweating all down my back and in the roots of my hair; might have been in a Turkish bath.
‘If a child could be got by an injection, without having any intercourse with a man at all, would you object then?’
‘What the flaming hell does it matter what I would object to!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t want children or anything to do with ’em! See? Now d’you understand?’
‘I understand you’re angry with me because I’m asking you questions you don’t want to answer.’
‘All right, you are! Well, you said you never pressed a patient, so now you can change the subject!’
It must have been ten minutes with neither of us saying a word. Trouble is, though, you can’t hide your breathing. I watched the brooch on my frock going up and down. Reminded me somehow of old Lucy. Not that she had much to go up and down, but she always snorted when she was mad. If I—
‘Does the thought of childbirth frighten you?’
‘What?’
‘Does the idea of giving birth to a child frighten you?’
‘I’ve told you! I’m not interested!’
‘Will you give me your free association of thought with the word childbirth.’
‘Twilight sleep. I wish my analyst would take an overdose. I wonder why he was ever born. I wonder why I was. Better if all the doctors in the world were killed off. Maybe better if all the world was. Not long now perhaps. Strontium 90. Deformed babies then. Monsters. That blasted clock’s striking eleven. If you—’ I stopped.
‘What clock?’
‘The one in
mother’s kitchen. I hate its guts. Like a bloody little coffin. It’s got a glass front. The top half is the face and the bottom half has love-birds painted on it. It was Grannie’s . . .’
‘Tell me more about it.’
‘About what?’
‘The clock.’
‘Kettle on stove. Boiling water. Nearly out of coal. Lucy Nye. Cold weather. We need more blankets. Maybe newspapers will do.’ I gave a sort of strangled cry that I turned into a cough.
‘Were you very cold?’ he asked after a wait.
‘Cold? Who said anything about cold?’
‘You said you needed more blankets.’
‘I didn’t. I was warm as warm . . . Always till that tapping at the window.’ The sweat down my back had suddenly gone different and I shivered; I really was cold then. For a minute I thought I wasn’t going to be able to stop shivering.
I said: ‘Why does Daddy tap at the window? Why doesn’t he come the ordinary way? Why do I have to be turned out?’ And I began to cry; believe it or not I began to cry like a kid. It really was like a kid in a funny way; not like me making grown-up noises. I darned near frightened myself. So I tried to stop. But all I did was choke and cough and start again.
I cried on, and in a mixed muzzy sort of way I was back as a kid being lifted out of a warm bed and put in a cold one; and just before that there’d been tapping; sometimes it was like with a nail and sometimes it was like with a knuckle, but it always meant the same thing. And it was always mixed up with that clock striking away. And I was standing with my back against the wall, the other side of the bed the light was on and the door was shut but they’d been groaning in there, and I knew in a minute the door would open and those who’d been torturing in there would come and do it to me. And God help me, just at that minute the door did begin to open, and I stood in my art-silk nightie pressed against the wall watching it. And the door came wide open, and who should be there but Mam.
But it didn’t mean the end of anything; it didn’t mean the end of the horror but just the beginning, because there she was coming in, and it wasn’t Mam at all but somebody just like her, somebody who looked like her but older and torn about, in a nightdress with her hair trailing like a witch; and she looked at me as if she knew me, and she was carrying something that she was going to give me, something that I couldn’t bear to have . . .
Roman got hold of me as I was half-way across the room. ‘Mrs Rutland, please. Do sit down.’
‘There’s a clock striking now!’ I said. ‘That’s the end of my hour!’
‘Yes, but please don’t hurry. I have a few minutes in hand.’
‘I’ve got to go! I’m sorry but Mark’s meeting me at the station.’
‘Then stop a moment and rest. Would you like to wash your face?’
‘No, we’re going out this evening. I’ve got to meet him now.’
‘Wait five minutes.’
‘No! I’ve got to go.’
I shook myself free of him, but he followed me out into the hall. There I calmed down and sat down for a minute and rubbed my face with my hankie and powdered most of the stains away; so when at last I got out in the air I looked just as normal as any other woman. It was the first time I’d cried properly since I was twelve.
Of course I wasn’t going out, and I was home ahead of Mark by best part of an hour. I went out to Forio who was grazing in a corner of the field by the golf course. We’d had to have the fence raised there because once he’d got out and we’d only just rounded him up before he invaded the seventh green. It was nearly dark but not cold and I went over and gave him a bit of apple, and he took it without ever letting me feel he had teeth at all. He was restless tonight and kept putting back his ears and stamping his feet and snorting. I’d ridden him yesterday, but it was a week since I’d given him a real work-out. I wondered sometimes about hunting. Two or three of our neighbours round here hunted, and I knew the excitement would be lovely and the jumping and the galloping.
One day last week Mark had hired a hack and ridden with me. We’d been out half the day and had stopped for lunch at a little public house, and for a while it was as if all the rows and the coldness between us had taken time off. I don’t mean that I felt loving towards him but just more natural. You could forget for a bit and act as if he was a casual friend.
I led Forio back to the stable, and switched on the light and lifted up his left forefoot. Yesterday he’d picked up a stone which in a dozen paces had wedged in tight enough to be a job to get out. He’d limped on the way home and I wondered if there would be any swelling today, but there wasn’t. I began to brush his long mane, which had grown more than it should have, but I liked it that way. It was as fine and silky as a woman’s hair. Horses don’t purr but they make noises that mean the same.
While I was doing it I kept thinking about that little bungalow we’d lived in at Sangerford near Liskeard. I suddenly remembered toddling out to the dustbin in the back yard with some old cabbage leaves Mother had told me to throw away. The smell of the cabbage leaves was as distinct as if they were still in my hands. I remembered the lavatory pan was cracked and the cheap tiles had been so badly laid that you could turn your ankle on them. And the table in the kitchen would never stand firm because the floorboards sloped. Jerry-building. Mother often said so.
After a while I tired of grooming Forio and went into the house and the telephone was ringing. It was Terry.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
So there was this dinner party at the Newton-Smiths the following week. The night it was fixed for, Mark came home early and we had our usual drink together – that was about the easiest thing in our married life – but I could see tonight he was thoughtful about something and wondered if it was because he didn’t want to go. He never had wanted to go because he thought if there was a deal being planned by the Holbrooks behind his back, a social evening wouldn’t affect them one way or the other, and it was naïve of Rex to think they could do more over dinner with women present than round the boardroom table.
But over his second drink Mark said: ‘Roman rang me today. He says you haven’t been near him since a week last Tuesday.’
‘No . . . that’s right.’
‘Any special reason?’
‘I don’t think I’m getting anywhere at all.’
‘Roman seemed worried about you, asked if you were all right.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘He said you were upset when you left him last.’
‘Upset? No . . . I was sick of being third-degreed all the time.’
I accepted a drink from him. He said: ‘I hope you don’t mean this is the end.’
‘I – think it has to be.’
He sipped his drink. When I looked at him now, I saw how much this business had meant to him, what a lot he’d banked on it.
‘Terribly sorry, Mark. I’ve tried.’
‘Roman is certain you have a deep-seated psycho-neurosis which only long and patient treatment will cure. But he thinks he could do a lot for you if you went back to him.’
‘It’s making me so unhappy, Mark. You don’t want me to be unhappy, do you?’
‘He doesn’t at all want to give you up. He asks me to ask you to go back. But . . . he stresses that if you return to him you must do so of your own free will.’
‘Oh.’
‘So I suppose I mustn’t bribe or blackmail you into anything. I can only ask you – as he asks you – not to throw everything away now.’
I didn’t feel I could say anything useful, so I didn’t reply.
He said: ‘All this is a terrible disappointment to me, Marnie. It’s like groping along in hope of finding some way out and suddenly coming up against a brick wall. If you don’t go back to him there isn’t any hope any more.’
We went up to change and went out for the evening in very much this mood. We didn’t speak to each other all the way there. I looked at his face sometimes and thought, he’s a sticker, he’s a fighter, but he’s got to
give in now.
The Newton-Smiths lived in a big house in the country, and when we got there we were surprised to find that there were going to be twelve to dinner. I thought, well, this is a funny idea, having us here for an evening with the Holbrooks apparently to talk about the firm, and then they invite outsiders. But perhaps that was true to intention; that was what they’d said, just a social evening. They were a well-meaning couple but not awfully bright. Terry was there before us looking just shaved and yellow-haired, but a bit furtive and hot as if something hadn’t turned out the way he expected it. The MacDonalds were there too and a Mr and Mrs Malcolm Leicester were introduced to me, and I couldn’t make out where I’d heard the name before. But all that was suddenly swallowed up because through the open drawing-room door I saw another couple arriving, and he was somebody I did know, a man called Arthur Strutt.
He was a partner in a firm of Turf Accountants called Crombie & Strutt who had a branch office in Birmingham. It was at the branch office in Birmingham that a Miss Marion Holland had once been employed as a confidential clerk.
Well, there it was, suddenly staring me in the face like the muzzle of a gun. At first it didn’t really knock me out at all because as usual I had the feeling that the gun was pointing at Marion Holland, not me. We were different people.
But it was going to be quite embarrassing if it turned out we both had the same face.
Mr Strutt had travelled up from London once a month while Marion Holland worked there. That meant he’d seen a lot of her. He usually spent a whole day in the office going through things with the branch manager, Mr Pringle. Twice he spent more than an hour at a time with Marion Holland.