Marnie (18 page)

After a minute I wrenched away and got clear of him and went towards the window; but the window was high up, miles above the rocks, and there was no other way out of the room. As I came round
the corner he caught my arm.

‘Marnie!’

‘Let me
alone
!’ I snarled. ‘Don’t you know what I mean when I say,
no
? Leave me go!’

He grabbed my other arm, and my frock slipped down. I felt an awful feeling of something that seemed to be half embarrassment and half disgust. I was fairly shivering with rage. One minute I
felt I’d let him get on with his lovemaking and be like a cold statue dead to every feeling except hate, and just see what he made of that. But the next I was ready to fight him, to claw his
face and spit like a she-cat that’s got a tom prowling round her that she doesn’t want.

He took me to the bed and slipped the rest of my clothes off. When I just hadn’t anything on at all he turned off the light above us, and there was only the small pilot light shining in
from the bathroom. Perhaps that prevented him from seeing the tears starting from my eyes. In the half dark he tried to show me what love was, but I was stiff with repulsion and horror, and when at
last he took me there seemed to come from my lips a cry of defeat that was nothing to do with physical pain.

Hours later light was coming in from the window, and I got my eyes open to see him sitting in a chair beside the bed. He must have been watching me because he saw right off I
was awake.

‘Are you all right?’

I made a sort of movement with my head.

‘That can’t have been very pleasant for you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

I looked up at the pattern that the grey light was making on the ceiling.

He said: ‘Nor was it for me. No man ever really wants it that way, however much he may imagine he does.’

I moistened my lips.

He said: ‘You don’t realize perhaps what you said before this began – how much it goaded me. You threw all my love back in my face. It didn’t mean a damn to you, did it?
Not a bloody damn. At least that’s what you said.’

He waited then but I didn’t speak, didn’t deny it.

He said, ‘Are you surprised I didn’t like it? I still don’t like it. I’m still trying to swallow it. If it’s true it’s a real poison pill.’

I wet my lips again and there was a very long silence, perhaps ten minutes.

‘Cigarette?’ he said at last.

I shook my head.

‘A drink?’

‘No.’

He moved to pull the quilt over me, but I wouldn’t have it.

‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said presently. ‘Try to go to sleep again.’

I went on staring up at the ceiling. For a bit my mind was all blank, as if everything that had happened before that night had been rubbed out. I hardly saw Mark, except the arm of his pyjamas
on the edge of the bed. I was watching the play of light on the ceiling, which must have been caused by some reflection from the water outside. But I watched it as if it had some sort of extra
meaning for me.

It must have been an hour before I dozed off again, and when I woke the next time it was full daylight and Mark had fallen asleep in the chair beside the bed.

I shifted my head and looked at him. He looked very young with his head forward on his chest, and still as slight as ever. I looked at his wrist and forearm and there was nothing there to show
the strength there was in it. I thought over his brutality to me last night. There was something – well, feline about him, because his strength, like a cat’s strength, didn’t
show. I thought again of what had happened, at first not caring much, like someone still under dope; and then all of a sudden I was awake, and in a second my mind was full up with every second of
recollection as if suddenly an empty cage was full of flapping vultures.

Horror and rage came up in my throat, like something I’d swallowed, and chiefly it was rage. Before this I’d more or less felt for Mark the sort of dumb hostility you feel for
someone who’s generally outsmarted you, a feeling of frustration and irritation. But nothing above that: in some ways, given a chance, I could have liked him. But now it was quite different,
all that much more. It was like being infected with something that made your blood run hotter. It was like being stabbed and seeing your blood run.

It was a hazy mix-up of hatred and blood. If I could have done it at that minute I would have killed him.

We flew back to Palma and the following day went out as far as Camp de Mar. It was the warmest day of the holiday, though by now a blight had settled on us like Alaska in
December. The sea in the sandy cove looked like fluid green bottles, and he said should we bathe? I said I didn’t care, so he said well, then, let’s; but when I was ready I stood for a
long time on the edge hugging my elbows and afraid to take the plunge. In the end he took my hand, and I went in.

The water was lovely after all, not really cold, and after a while we climbed on to this bathing pier and lay in the sun. I lay with my head over the edge and looked down at the water and at all
the sea urchins growing like mussels on the supports of the pier. I didn’t want him to break in on my mood by talking, and in fact he didn’t try to, but sat hugging one knee with his
eyes narrowed against the sun.

Well, presently I slipped off the pier to swim back to the sand. It was so lovely that, although I’m just an ordinary swimmer and not strong in the water, I didn’t head back at once
but swam parallel with the shore towards the rocks at the side of the bay.

After I’d been going for a few minutes I lay on my back and floated and saw that Mark was still sitting where I’d left him. The slanting sun made his body dark like a spade’s,
and I thought squatting there he might have been a pearl diver or something in the South Seas. And I thought how two nights ago his body had done what it wanted with mine.

Lying in the water like this a sort of tiredness came over me. I felt as if I didn’t have the energy to hate him any longer; I just knew there wasn’t any point in me living at all. I
never had added up to much, perhaps, but at least for a while I’d been some help to Mother and old Lucy. I’d counted for something the way any protest counts for something. But now my
life had run bang into this blind alley of marriage, and there was nothing more to it. I was trapped for good, pinned down like a moth on a paper. If I ended now I would simply help to tidy up a
thoroughly nasty mess.

But I knew I wouldn’t have the guts just to let myself go bobble, bobble under the water. As soon as you start breathing sea you start fighting to live. It doesn’t make sense but
there it is. So the important thing was to get so far out that I couldn’t get back if I wanted to. I turned over and began to swim easily as anything towards the mouth of the bay.

As soon as I’d decided I knew I’d decided right. It just drew a simple neat little line under everything. Mark would be a widower for a second time at twenty-eight – good going
that – and could look out for a female of his own type who could make something of his slushy ideas about sex. Mother could manage, would
have
to manage somehow. It would all be sad
– and satisfactory.

I don’t really know how long it was before I saw he was swimming after me. First I noticed he wasn’t any longer on the pier. Then I saw something on the water, a whiteness of broken
water a long long way behind me. Well, he’d be too late with his help this time.

I swam on a bit quicker, fixing on a special point at the edge of the bay. I certainly couldn’t reach it. I was getting very tired.

When the first wave slopped in my mouth it was a nasty shock. Sea water tastes nasty and when you swallow it it makes you want to fetch up. It wasn’t going to be a bed of roses, this end,
but it would soon be over. I just dreaded the first breath. All that gasping and retching. It would soon be over, though.

And then I heard him shouting at me not far away.

Right off all the fear went. I just stopped swimming and sank.

Yet even though I tried not to, I found I was holding my breath the way I’d done jumping off the pier by the Hoe when I was a kid. I tried to force myself to let go of life, but I came up
again like a cork choking and coughing. As I came up he got me.

‘You fool!’ he said. ‘You’ll drown yourself!’ He was clutching my arm.

I shook him off. ‘Let me
go
!’

I tried to dive, but it’s hard to go down when you’re already in the water, and as I thrashed away he caught me by the leg and then round the waist. We struggled for a few seconds
and then I almost got free again. At that he gave me such a slap on the side of the face that he made me taste blood. I screamed and scratched his arm with my nails; then he closed his fist and hit
me on the jaw. I remember my teeth clicking together with a sound like lift gates shutting; and that was all.

When I came out of it I was lying on my back in the water. He’d got my head between his hands and was lying on his back too, swimming with his legs, towards the shore. I tried to get my
head free, but he held me tighter as soon as I tried, and that way we came back to the sand.

We lay there together, absolutely dead-beat both of us, but luckily there were no other bathers today, and the only people in sight, two Spanish women shovelling seaweed into
baskets at the other end, had seen nothing and looked as if they couldn’t care less if they had.

As soon as he got some breath back he began to go for me. He used most of the words you hear around a dockyard and a few more besides. It looked as if nothing I’d done before had got under
his skin like this. I suppose it was the final insult.

I stood it for a bit and then one of the words he used made me giggle hysterically.

He stopped and said: ‘What is it?’

‘There isn’t a female of that.’

I giggled again and then turned my head away and was sick.

After I was better he said: ‘I didn’t know there was a female like you, but I’m learning.’

‘It makes a change, doesn’t it? I don’t suppose Estelle was ever like this.’

‘No, you blasted bloody little fool. She wanted so much to live and couldn’t.’

‘Whereas I want to die and can’t.’

‘Than that,’ he said, ‘there are few uglier remarks a woman of twenty-three can make.’

We lay quiet, getting our strength back. Then he said:

‘If we stay here any longer we’ll both begin to shiver. Come on, I’ll help you back to the hotel.’

‘Thanks, I can manage,’ I said, and got to my feet. So we walked back a few paces apart, with him a step or two behind me, like a warder whose prisoner has nearly got away.

The gardener at Little Gaddesden was called Richards. He came three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He was a quiet little man with an ailing wife and three
pale-looking children under teenage. He’d a funny sort of enthusiasm about the garden that I couldn’t quite understand, because it wasn’t his. He seemed to like me and he always
called me ‘madam’ as if I was royalty or something. ‘We’ve got some
lovely
tulips over here, madam; they’ll be showing in another week or two, I shouldn’t
wonder.’ ‘I’m going to tidy up these paths this morning, madam; then they’ll be nice and clear until the spring.’ He obviously got a sort of joy out of it. I
shouldn’t have thought there was much joy in his life, with his wife bent up with bronchitis and him often going home wet and soaking and having to look after the children. Sometimes the
eldest, a girl called Ailsa, would call in on her way home from school. She didn’t remind me of myself at eleven. I think I must have been fairly hard bitten by the time I was eleven; anyway
I’d knocked about plenty. Ailsa was soft and gentle like her Dad. The chances were in this world that sooner or later she’d get trampled underfoot. Richards said she’d asked for a
Bible for Christmas, an illustrated one, and Mr Mark was getting him one through the trade at cost price. I thought why doesn’t Mark
give
him half a dozen, but when I said something
about it Mark said: ‘That would never do; he’d hate charity.’ I suppose I didn’t understand.

The garden at Little Gaddesden was about one acre. At the end away from the golf course was an old shed and an old garage and a small paddock. Leading to this was a path bordered by a thing I
thought was a yew hedge, but Richards politely corrected me. ‘It’s Lonicera, madam. I grow it in my own garden, you can train it just the same way. I’ve got a
beautiful
bush shaped like a church. I hope sometime, madam, you’ll come and see it.’

I went and saw it. I met Mrs Richards and the two youngest. I didn’t know what to do about the charity side of it, but I risked buying some sweets and I baked some buns and took those
along. It didn’t seem to offend them.

The trouble with Richards, I soon saw, was that he was too conscientious. What’s the good of a conscience if it makes you stay out in the rain when you can potter around and pretend to do
things in the greenhouse. Mrs Leonard and I began to work out schemes for him to do jobs in the house on the bad days.

I was somehow managing to live with Mark. When we got home he’d given me a separate bedroom, and although the rooms had connecting doors, he hardly ever came in and never without knocking.
He never
touched
me. I suppose I’d frozen him up, at least for the time being. We were quite polite to each other, the way we had been during the last ghastly days of the honeymoon.
When he came home at night he told me things that happened at the firm. Once or twice we went into London to the theatre, but he didn’t suggest a race meeting and I didn’t ask. I could
never be quite sure what he was thinking.

Luckily I got on well with Mrs Leonard. I told her right at the start that I had never run a house before and could only cook the simplest things, and she seemed quite pleased to carry on as she
had before Mark married me. Of course I could talk her language, and I knew how she looked at things. Perhaps I should have pretended, but I didn’t, and soon she was calling me dear, instead
of Mrs Rutland.

The house was peculiar to live in because I kept coming on things belonging to Estelle. A pair of slippers in a cupboard, two old blouses, a pair of nylons still in their cellophane – they
were too short for me – books, a notebook, an engagement diary. And of course the photographs in the drawing-room and in Mark’s bedroom. I could see how a second wife could be made
jealous. Not that I was. I only wished she could come back and claim her man. I mean I never for a second felt
married
to Mark. Perhaps married isn’t a thing anyone feels, it’s
something that grows on you. Well, it didn’t grow on me.