Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (4 page)

The holiday, ill-chosen or not, had at one time been something unlikely. There had been days when she had had to speak of it firmly, as if it were certainly going to happen, and, however it had turned out, it had.

I can’t be angry, she thought. He is, after all, my dear, my only companion. She loved him in a different way now, but she believed that she had got over that short period of loving him as if he were her child.

She put her hand across the table and touched his.

“Some wine now?” he asked.

She nodded, to make amends, and he filled her glass, but she simply sat looking at it. “I’m tired,”
she said. “I’ll go to bed early.”

He was about to fall in with that, feeling desperately tired himself, but some defiance made him say, “For my part, I feel like making a night of it.”

“Go ashore?” She looked dubious.

“Probably not. Just sit up and have some drinks in the bar.”

With Martha, Amy supposed. That girl really had intruded. The word ‘intrude’ which had come to her earlier was, she could see, the right one. People shouldn’t go on holidays to leech onto other couples, she thought cruelly. She decided after all not to go to bed early.

In the bar she yawned and yawned. Nick behaved flirtatiously towards Martha who, to give her her due, Amy conceded, seemed not to notice. In the evenings, Martha always wore a crumpled cotton dress. Her streaky, sun-bleached hair still looked uncombed, probably because in moments of concentration or enthusiasm, discussing English novels or English water-colours, her hands raked through it, tousled it, twisted strands round her fingers, and shook it about until it looked like a lion’s mane.

John Sell-Cotman she was now on about, while Amy closed her eyes. It seemed incredible to Martha that they had never been to the Castle Museum in Norwich, one of her first English pilgrimages. But English people never went to look at their own things, she said. “It’s all there, and you go on as if it isn’t. I’ve never known treasures treated with such indifference.” It sometimes seemed that she liked everything about England except the English.

“We must all go there together when we get home,” Nick said.

He looked (again slyly) at his wife, who said casually, “Yes, we must do that.” I never shall, she thought.

Nick considered her acting quite superb. She has missed her calling, he thought.

He had drunk too much, and now Amy, to stave off her tiredness and boredom, began to do the same, almost heedlessly drinking brandy. When Martha said that she was going to take a turn about the deck, neither offered to accompany her. They said goodnight and went to their cabin.

“Nice girl,” Nick said, beginning to undress.

“Very.”

“Yet you don’t like her.”

“For God’s sake I hardly know her.”

“But you don’t like her.”

Amy sighed. “I like her well enough. At home, she wouldn’t be one of our friends.”

“Why not?”

He was very sharp. He wound his watch and almost flung it onto the dressing table amongst a heap of Turkish, Italian, French coins.

Amy would not answer.

“Perhaps she knows too much,” he persisted.

“About the Norwich School. I should say so.”

“And literature. She knows all about your Charlotte Brontë.” Ridiculously, he was slurring his words. Holiday mood, she had put it down to: but no, it had started before that.

She undressed very quietly, with her back to him. Then, putting on her nightgown, her patience snapped.
It was like the twang of an arrow – something she could really hear.

“I’ve had too much of this,” she said calmly, and she opened a jar and began to put cream on her face. “It’s been a bloody awful holiday, and you’ve purposely made it so. O.K. you’ve been ill, and I’ve tried to keep that in mind. But now I believe you are trying to goad me.”

He was looking at her in astonishment. She could see him in the mirror naked, with his abdominal scar very bright. Not liking to glimpse it, he quickly pulled on his pyjamas.

“You’ve taken advantage of my love for you,” she poured out, “of my wish not to upset you, to get you back strong as you were. And to work. But you’ve been convalescent for too long to be good for you or me. I suppose I blame myself for your spoilt behaviour. But I shall make no more allowances from now on.”

He had looked astonished at the beginning of her outburst, but now it was her turn for astonishment. He had covered his face with his hands (she was still staring at him through the glass, still patting in cream). For a dreadful moment, seeing his shoulders shaking, she feared that he was crying, I’ve gone too far, she thought in terror. She had never seen him weep; would not have believed he could. She turned quickly to beg forgiveness, just as he took his hands from his face and she saw that he was laughing. The sight of her white, creamed face turned to him with such concern increased his mirth. He put his arms round her. “You’re really furious with me?” he asked. “You meant all you said?”

Standing stiffly in his embrace, she rather stiffly said, “You provoked me.”

“The provoked wife. I do love you, and I’m very sorry that I’ve tried for so long to make you angry.” He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass and nodded as if to a long-lost friend. “I thought your goodness would never crack. I banged my head on your patience, getting more and more scared.”

“Scared?”

“I explained to you once. I asked you. About keeping something from me.”

“And I told you. No.”

“I believe you now. At last, I really believe you.”

“For an hour or two,” she said pettishly, adding to his sense of calm.

“No. For ever. Tomorrow, let’s go in a taxi to mosques, just skim round them, at your pace and on our own, and more or less sit and have drinks somewhere.”

“But we’ve already paid for the tour.”

“It doesn’t matter. And another year,” (he still could not avoid a suspicious glance down at her), “another year, we’ll make our own way here, and hire a car.”

“But I’m not mad on this place,” she said.

“My fault entirely, I should say.”

She then decided to wipe the cream from her face, and when she had done that, she kissed him.

“Your bed, I think,” he said. “I always think that’s more polite.”

It was the first time they had made love since his illness. Afterwards, lying down on his own bed, with just a sheet over him, he fell asleep at once.

Martha dawdled over breakfast, waiting for the Hendersons to come down, but they did not, so she collected her landing-card and went down the gangway to the bus. Amy and Nick did not appear.

The company, for some reason, seemed subdued. The Germans talked quietly to one another, looking awed or important, or both. Sometimes, as people stepped onto the bus, they beckoned them and whispered, and immediately seemed to cause consternation. They were sitting in their usual front seat, for no one else would dare to take it from them now. In the absence of the Hendersons Martha sat in the one behind them. The German woman was looking questioningly at her husband, who shrugged his shoulders, as if having no answer. She hesitated, looked backwards at Martha, and then bent her head over her guide book, turning the leaves, although it must have been impossible to read anything, as they were jolted over the cobbled road.

To Martha, the bus seemed full of uneasy murmurings. The guide – the same pleasant, half-blond woman as the day before – sat in silence beside the driver. The first mosque on the list was some way out of the city. Martha looked out of the bus window with little interest, not enjoying her morning.

It took the usual pattern of following the guide, slipping off shoes, staring giddily upwards, buying postcards, and climbing back into the bus. It was
while Martha was taking a photograph of two little children sitting in the dust under a tree, that the German woman came to her and told her that Nick had died in the night. She touched her heart and nodded with meaning, there being the language difficulty. “It is quite sad,” she said.

At noon, dazed with mosques, they toiled back up the gangway. By the purser’s office, Amy was sitting, surrounded by luggage, waiting to be taken ashore, exposed to everyone who must file by her as they came aboard. The passengers hastened past her in a shocked silence. She sat very still and rigid, as if disapproving something, or offended. She wore a shady hat, sun-glasses, and – strangely – a pair of white cotton gloves. It was as if she were trying to cover as much of herself as possible.

Martha, seeing her, panicked; did not know how to behave. For a moment, Amy lifted her swollen face, and Martha as she passed by, found herself unable completely to ostracise this grief. She put her hand on Amy’s shoulder, and was surprised that Amy’s gloved hand came up and touched hers in acknowledgement, and then was at once withdrawn and folded with the other in her lap.

There had been bad timing, for the taxi which at that moment arrived on the quay should have come before the passengers returned from their tour. The purser appeared, gently took Amy’s arm and helped her to rise. A steward gathered up suitcases, and the three of them went down the gang-plank to the waiting car.

Martha went to her cabin and found there the book on Byzantine Art which she had lent to Nick.
There was a slip of paper in it. She took it and stared at it, as if at some last message but there was only
Cabin 21. Miss Larkin
in that neat hand which had written so many postcards.

She knew that Amy’s childlike figure would haunt her – that demure, little-girl attitude, with hands clasped and ankles crossed, the gaily patterned dress (for on holiday one would not have suitable clothes for such an occasion). And the gloves. Oh, why the gloves?

The steward with the gong was now going his rounds. Martha made a brief attempt at smoothing her hair and went in to lunch, sat down at the table next to the empty one, ate ravioli, drank a little wine.

Towards the end of the meal, the purser and the ship’s doctor came in and took their places at the captain’s table. They ate in silence. They have disposed of her, Martha thought, have left her alone in some hotel, perhaps; awaiting a plane, perhaps; for the
Galatea
must leave that afternoon. She supposed they had taken Nick’s body ashore, while the passengers were miles away, looking at mosques. Not finishing her cheese, she went to her cabin. In two hours, the ship would sail for Izmir. There was so much that Martha wanted to know, so much that she would wonder about for the rest of her life, she supposed.

The hotel bedroom was draped with dark red. There was a huge, muslin-covered bed with a chandelier above it and a velvet armchair in which Amy sometimes sat down and wept. But for most of the
time, she walked up and down this strange room, too panicky to sit still; or would stand looking with alarm at a view from the window across the water.

Somewhere below her was the
Galatea.
At any minute now it might come away from its berth and make its way to the open sea. Thinking of that, she drew the curtains across the windows and went to sit down once more in the now darkened room, overwhelmed. It is for ever, she thought. For ever now. She was filled with the icy horror of travelling back in the same plane, and she cried aloud like a frightened child.

Later on that afternoon, Martha, having packed, settled her affairs on board, got from the purser the name of Amy’s hotel, disembarked. The German couple, leaning over the ship’s rails, watched in amazement as she got into a taxi. Here was something they had not been told about, something they could not explain to others in their excellent English or French, or their fast-improving Italian.

Martha stopped the cab and bought a bag of figs from a barrow. She felt that she should take something, and flowers – perhaps inappropriate in any case – seemed not to be about.

They drove away from the thronged Galata Bridge, and came through narrow streets at last to the hotel. She felt distinctly nervous. She left her suitcase in the hotel foyer and, carrying the figs, whose thin paper bag was by now damp and disintegrating, she slowly and resolutely climbed the staircase. When she knocked on the door of room two, there came no sound from the other side, so she opened the door onto the dark
room, and saw Amy standing there, looking scared, her hat and the white gloves lying on a table beside her.

“Throw me out if you will,” Martha said, “but the ship will have left by now.”

Amy sat down, and the chair seemed to absorb her. She whispered something inaudible.

Martha went over to the basin and washed the figs. Amy watched her, and when Martha came back to her, she obediently took one from the dripping hand, as if it were part of ritual.

“Do we need the curtains drawn?” Martha asked.

“I didn’t want to see the ship leaving.”

“Well, then, better leave them for a little longer.”

“Why did you come?” asked Amy, repeating what she had whispered.

“I thought I might be better than no one. In a strange place.”

“A hateful place,” said Amy bitterly, finding something at last to blame.

She is not a touchable person, Martha decided. She had wondered for a moment, if she should take this near-stranger in her arms, and by holding her fast, try to steady her. But no. Instead, she took a peep through the curtains and, across the water, she recognised the striped funnel of the
Galatea.
She was leaving, going down the busy stretch of water in a golden light, bound for Izmir and the day excursions to Ephesus. She let the curtains fall together again.