Down in the City (14 page)

‘And this thing thinks she's better than Mr Stan Peterson, better than Mr Peterson, does she? She thinks she can tell him what to do, does she?'

He snorted and poured out another drink. ‘Well, she's bloody well wrong!' he said after another long, deliberate pause. ‘And her great gentlemen brothers! Huh! All they're good for's sittin' on their great fat behinds! The al-bloody-mighty Prescotts.'

In a sudden paroxysm of rage he looked round for something to smash, and with a shout of satisfaction lifted his foot and kicked a tall vase of fine blue china from the table near his chair. It cracked as his foot touched it, and shattered as it bounced sharply against the wall.

Esther cried out involuntarily.

‘Yeah!' he said. ‘That's what I think of their presents. Silly damn useless thing.'

She started to fold her sewing with the precise movements of someone who is fighting for control. Stan jerked up in his chair, watching her suspiciously. He had been waiting for some sign of feeling from her; the night would have been tasteless without it.

‘Where d'ya think you're goin'?' he smiled.

Esther kept stacking her cottons in the basket. ‘To bed.'

‘Huh! Like hell y'are. You'll go when I'm good and ready. When Mr Stan Peterson says so. You stay where y'are!' He poured another drink and mumbled to himself, keeping his eyes fixed on her. ‘Uh-uh!' He half rose, warningly, and she said, ‘All right. I'll stay.'

Occasionally Stan pretended that he was going over to force an answer to his rhetorical questions, but his legs were tired, and his ideas of what he might do when he reached her unformed, so he relapsed, each time, into his chair with a show of forbearance.

No sign that he remembered the sober shame of other mornings showed on his bloated face, or disturbed the confident twist on his mouth. But gradually, as the hours moved by, his periods of brooding became longer, and his voice grew more thick and slurred. Finally, after many false starts, when the finger had ceased to wag, and the hand to find the bottle and glass, he drew himself from the chair with agonising slowness, and, turning on Esther one last contemptuous stare in lieu of the rebuke he could not frame, lurched from the room and banged the door behind him.

Esther did not move, but gradually, as the tension uncoiled within her, she let her weight fall on the back of the sofa, and lay as if pinned there until she heard the bedroom door slam.

‘Oh, God! Oh, God!' She shaped the words with her lips, silently, as if by even so slight a movement to prove her reality to herself; feeling, too, dimly, that the woman who could move and think must somehow comfort the woman who had been abused and could do neither. But a sense of cosmic loneliness, and of her own incapacity, swept over her chillily.

She would not remember. Her eyes opened wide with hostility at the thought. She would not remember.

At last, with a surge of energy that came from nowhere, she got up and moved about the room, gathering the broken china with animal caution lest she should disturb Stan, who, two rooms away, slept and snored. Turning off the white wall lamps then, she lay down on the sofa, fully dressed.

Moonlight had displaced air in the small low-ceilinged room, for although the windows and the balcony door were open wide, the wavering breeze could not force the silvery walls. The room was alight with subtle colour. Esther felt exposed by the light and stifled by the warmth. She hated the calm beauty of the summer night that bloomed indifferent to all human feeling.

What did I do? What did I do to change him? Her memory scurried frantically to find the reason, offering up trivialities of every kind as it dredged, but nothing that she could accept, nothing that she could reject, with certainty, as the cause. I've seemed to criticise.

Her thoughts spun round, questioning, unchanging: only the pain they produced expanded. Yet it was self-defensive, less sharp than the memories it held off. She drew her legs up and bent her head over her knees, centring herself in the smallest space possible, drawing help from the warmth of her own body.

David poked around in his pipe before he looked at Clem. Esther and Stan, Hector and Angela, had gone, and Marion was upstairs. Another family gathering was over. ‘Well, what do you think?'

Clem went over to lock the French windows. ‘Tonight? Everything was all right, wasn't it? I thought it went off rather better than usual, in fact.'

‘What about Esther?'

‘Yes…I know what you mean.' He frowned as he came back and straddled the chair opposite his brother. ‘She seemed a bit unlike herself—especially with Stan.'

‘I thought so, too,' David said heavily. ‘And I suppose the others noticed.'

Clem grasped the back of the chair. ‘There was something ingratiating about the way she behaved to him—and yet, when you think of it, it's an incredible word to apply to her. It was probably nothing. Perhaps she was only trying to keep him in a good humour for our benefit.'

David looked concerned. ‘I shouldn't like to think she had to make such efforts to keep his temper even.'

‘We've no reason to believe he's bad-tempered or anything else—there was nothing wrong with him tonight. We simply don't know the fellow, and as long as he can help it, we won't. And,' he said, looking at his watch, ‘if it comes to that—how well do we know Esther?…Well, I'm going up now, David.' He levered himself out of the chair.

His brother took no notice. ‘I don't know what I ought to do.'

‘There's nothing you can do,' Clem said, ‘short of asking her straight out if everything's under control. I don't see how you can do that without immediately letting her know that the discussions she must suspect we have about them do take place. As they do. But I think it would be a pity if she knew.'

David abandoned his pipe with a sigh. ‘You're right, of course, but your advice is a bit late. I did try to talk to her tonight—to ask her.'

Raising his eyebrows in surprise, trying to conceal his disapproval, Clem asked, ‘How did you get on?'

‘Upset her. She didn't like it. I had to pass it off.'

‘Yes. We're probably making too much of the whole thing…even Hector and Angela have an occasional row, you know.'

David looked disbelieving. ‘You think it was something like that?'

‘I don't know. She's not an adolescent. She can manage her husband without our help. She managed to get along before she was married without any interference from us. Forget it! Leave them in peace.'

There was a silence which was broken at length by David asking, ‘Where did you say you left Winter's papers? I want to look at them before I go to bed.'

‘On your desk in the study.'

Clem strolled around with his hands in his pockets for a while, his lips pursed as if he were whistling. He took a cheese straw from a dish that had been accidentally left behind and considered it very thoroughly before he finally ate it.

Quite suddenly, but some time after the wish first came to him, Stan's drinking bout ended. The delay between decision and consummation was a necessary sop to dignity, as he saw it.

As he drove from house to house, collecting completed work, delivering loose material, he spent long hours reviewing his case. He would justify his outburst and prove that as the reasons for it still existed, so he should continue in the same way. But contrariwise, and sometimes in the same half-hour, he was forced to defend the course he was going to adopt, and prove that all right lay on its side. Undoubtedly right in all his actions, past, present and future, he showed himself to be.

It was right to stop when a man had a hangover every day, and his stomach felt crook, and he couldn't keep track of the boys. But then, it had been right to start when a man couldn't visit an old friend like Vi without feeling guilty, when he had the thousands and the wife he'd always wanted, and hardly cared.

Was it Est's fault? No, he wouldn't exactly say that. All he was saying was that he wasn't in the wrong.

He had found, though he did not admit it, that baiting someone with pride was work he could take pleasure in. And when, at the same time, he regarded that pride as a kind of Holy Grail, so much the better. That was commando stuff of a high order for any man's spirit. But when the pride had been killed, or at any rate battered unconscious, then it was time to stop and wonder. To live with the grey figure of humility was retribution enough. His teeth were on edge when faced with Esther's awful anxiety. His old fear that he had been tricked into marrying the wrong woman reappeared. She was a fake, he thought, and he had been taken.

But gradually the spurious worked-up hate and indignation died away and a new kind of dread came to life. He thought he had indeed destroyed the nameless quality that meant Esther to him—the cool stillness, the apparent certainty of voice and action, the sympathy and passion.

The flow of justifications ceased, for he dimly comprehended that he had damaged the fabric of life. Rather, he had been misused by the gods.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

For five days the city had wilted under a hard sky, sweltering in a temperature that stayed fixed in the middle nineties. Even at night there was no relief from the heat. Pyjamas and nighties stuck clammily to damp skin. Half-clad, self-pitying figures rose, exasperated by insomnia, to stumble through darkened rooms in search of a cooler plot than their bed, hoping that, all accidentally, they might waken any gross sleeper the house contained.

Cold water ran hot from the taps, and the roads turned to tar. Doors and windows slid to and fro, pulled open by pro-air enthusiasts, and slammed by those who were anti-heat, and therefore, anti-air.

On Saturday, free from work, the dehydrated citizens fled to the beaches and pools to immerse themselves in as large a body of cold water as they could find; dreaming, too, that there on the shore they might suddenly lift their faces to the cooling wash of an ocean breeze, a forerunner of cool weather.

Laura Maitland sat on a folded towel, her back against the cement wall that enclosed the shingle, her face in the shade of a striped beach umbrella. Pretty, tanned girls and tall brown men strode to and fro along the beach. Sometimes she was splashed by the water that dripped from skin and hair; sometimes a flapping towel sent sand in showers round her. She closed her eyes and bore it. She opened them and looked around.

As they are on beaches everywhere, people were scattered about like narrow dark rocks, motionless, silent, sun-worshipping. They aggravated Laura.

I'm absolutely limp, she thought. This place is like a blast furnace. She removed her sunglasses and wiped her face.

‘Will you keep an eye on her, dear, while I have a swim?' Bill appeared round the side of the umbrella and dumped Anabel in the sand at Laura's feet. ‘I've given her a long play in the water. She should be a good girl now,' he said, turning from one to the other.

With a placating smile to Laura he went off to the diving boards, and in spite of her vexation she could not resist the thrill of pleasure that the sight of his legs gave her as he walked away. ‘For an old married man of thirty-six, you've got the best legs at the pool, angel,' she would say to him when he came back. She rehearsed it, and her face softened indulgently.

Anabel, sitting outside the radius of shade cast by the umbrella, had begun to dig with her painted spade. Gazing at her small serious face, with its beautiful forehead and eyes, Laura's smile deepened, and momentarily she forgot her discomfort while her eyes caressed the slender neck that was exposed by the looping up of the long brown hair.

As they came down the steps, Esther said, ‘Oh, Stan! There's Laura!'

They stood looking for a vacant space to leave their towels and sandals.

‘Maybe she won't see us in the crowd.'

‘Hello,' Laura called in a jolly voice.

Esther smiled. ‘She's waving. We'll have to go over for a minute.'

‘Wouldn't you know it!' Stan said.

Their feet sank in the dry, burning shingle as they made their way up the slope towards her.

Laura admitted that there was a certain pre-bathing elegance about the two of them: the spare brown bodies, the severe black costumes, the dark glasses and the combed hair. Stan's got good legs, too, she thought.

‘Like us, you've come for a breeze,' she said ironically when they reached her. ‘Isn't it ghastly?'

And they discussed the various, hopeless methods of keeping cool. When Bill came up, he and Stan stood a little apart from the women talking in confidential tones about a temporary shortage of bottled beer.

Lightly, Laura said to Esther, ‘You haven't been in to see me for ages?'

‘I know. I was not feeling well for a week or so, and I rested as much as I could.' She felt the sympathetic eyes go over her face.

‘And now?' Laura prompted. ‘I think you're looking marvellous, to tell the truth.'

‘I feel really well again.'

They smiled at one another with their mouths as they fenced.

‘I'd have been up a dozen times to see what was wrong, but it isn't easy when you have a poppet like this one.' Anabel looked round at her tone. ‘And then, I like to think that we're friends and that you'd let me know if I could help in any way.'

Faintly annoyed by Laura's probing, Esther said with the cool voice and face she turned to everyone but Stan, ‘You're very kind, Laura,' and left it at that.

Laura thought: I'll get somewhere with her yet. Esther pushed her hair under the bathing cap, while Stan stood watching her with proprietorial pride. ‘How about this swim?' he said.

The water was cold against hot skin, and they splashed gingerly through the shallows, a thrill of apprehension sharpening as the cold tide climbed their legs. Stan went under first, and came up laughing, dashing his hair back and blinking the salt water away. Esther dived and swam for a distance under water, keeping her eyes open. When she surfaced, gasping and exhilarated, she joined Stan, and together they swam out to the narrow ledge that formed a promenade around the pool. Heavy with water, they hauled themselves up. The heat struck them, but for the moment it was almost pleasant. Esther dangled her feet in the water and gazed around.