The Marrying Game (52 page)

Anxiety gnawed at him. Rufa was somewhere in the world, pregnant and alone. She had run away from her husband, she had been rejected by the father of her child. The fearful surrounding darkness had come to claim her at last. He had to find her.

In the meantime, here was Tristan, weeping in the burnt-out ruins of his great passion. Edward found his anger had evaporated. Tristan would survive, because
he
was mourning something that was finished. It would never be finished for him, until he had rescued his runaway bride.

He touched Tristan’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘Come on, think. Think of everything she ever said to you. Where would she go? Was she afraid I’d be angry?’

Tristan raised his head. ‘She was angry with you. You hurt her.’

‘Me? What the hell had I done?’

‘You told Prudence about your sex life. Or rather, the inexplicable lack of it.’ Tristan was rallying, now that he had something to fling back at the wronged husband.

Edward exhaled heavily, reining in another spasm of fury. ‘And Prudence told you.’

‘Of course. What did you expect?’

Well, of course, Edward thought. He should have remembered not to trust Prudence with anything that could be used against him in the future. He should never have let her coax and flatter and flirt him into confiding in her. The temptation to confide in someone had overwhelmed him. Now Rufa would be thinking he had betrayed her; and she would be right.

‘Every single man she’s ever loved has let her down,’ he said. ‘God only knows what she’s going through now.’

Tristan sat up. ‘Edward –’

‘Mm?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re apologizing to the wrong person. But I forgive you, anyway.’

‘Thanks.’ Tristan blew his nose, limp with relief. ‘And sorry about the car.’

Edward almost laughed. The smashed car was ancient
history
, ridiculously irrelevant. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m glad you emerged in one piece.’

They stared at each other uncertainly, testing the atmosphere.

‘Thanks,’ Tristan whispered.

God, he looked so young. ‘Don’t let all this mess up your work, Triss,’ Edward said, on an impulse. ‘You will get over it – it won’t always feel this humiliating. One day you’ll look back on it, and realize what a complete little shit you were. And then you’ll probably write a novel.’ He rubbed Tristan’s hair, affectionately and slightly contemptuously. ‘So put it all down to experience, is my advice.’ He left the room.

Clytie was hovering in the kitchen. She caught Edward as he struggled past the bicycles in the hall, laying her nail-bitten hand on his arm. ‘Please,’ she murmured, ‘please don’t be too angry with him. I think his heart is broken.’

Bitterly, Edward wondered what on earth this child knew about broken hearts.

Chapter Eleven

IN RUFA’S DREAM
, the Man called to her. She saw herself, sitting beside the window of her bedroom at Melismate. At the same time she could see the Man in the downstairs sitting room, holding his head with his two hands. Rufa could not make the self in her dream get up to mend it, though she knew he needed her. She sat and sat; the Man called and called.

She was suddenly awake, her face awash with tears. The woman on the other side of the little table eyed her sympathetically over the top of her copy of
Good Housekeeping
. Rufa straightened in her seat, and turned towards the window. Outside, the undulating grey fields – the standard view from any train window in England – were darkening in the dusk. She saw her pale, wild-haired reflection in the carriage window, superimposed upon the landscape. She turned away from it, to fish a tissue from the bag on the seat beside her.

‘I kept an eye on it for you,’ the woman opposite said.

‘Sorry?’ It took Rufa a few seconds to realize she was being addressed.

‘Your bag. You want to be careful, when you fall asleep.’

‘Thanks.’ Rufa sketched a smile.

The woman’s lips twitched several times before she
found
an outlet for her curiosity. ‘I’m just popping to the buffet – can I get you a cup of tea? You don’t look well.’

Rufa dredged up a laugh, grimly thinking this must be the understatement of the year. ‘Oh, I’m fine – it’s just –’ The woman looked kind. Her face was made of pillowy, interlocking buns and upward curves. She was as motherly and comforting as Mrs Noah. On impulse, testing the sound of it, she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’

Here was a perfectly satisfying explanation – one that even covered sobbing on a train. The woman smiled, relieved.

‘Morning sickness? Oh dear. Isn’t it hell? A good cup of tea is just what you need, then.’ She stood up briskly, grabbing a businesslike handbag and smoothing her tweed skirt. ‘It always worked for me.’

‘I’d love one,’ Rufa said, grateful to be accepted as normal. ‘You’re very kind.’

‘I remember how it feels.’

Left alone, Rufa took off the smile, which was painful. She would bet this woman did not know how it felt to run away from a husband and a lover, carrying the lover’s child. She thought how odd it was that she had cried for the Man, when she had not yet shed a single tear over the wreckage of her hopes.

Calm enough, at last, to look over the smoking ruins, Rufa thought back to the beginning of her descent into nightmare-land. It had been gradual at first; though the signs had been there, if she had only had the sense to read them.

The dreamlike heatwave had ended overnight. The lovers had woken one morning to a solid downpour. Rufa, who needed only Tristan’s presence to be completely whole and happy, had built a crackling log fire in
the
drawing room. And – incredibly – Tristan had not wanted to make love to her in front of it. Still more incredibly, he had announced that he was feeling ‘claustrophobic’, and suggested they drive over to Melismate. He had refused to understand why this was out of the question. There had been a quarrel. Not a life-threatening row, but a scratchy, bickering, irritable quarrel – mostly on his side, since he had very quickly reduced her to tears. Alarmed, but also gratified, to find that he had this much power over her, Tristan had repented and consoled. They had renewed their lovers’ vows naked, in front of the fire, as Rufa had wanted all along. Now, she wished she had paid attention to his inability to face the future, and admitted that it lay between them.

At some level, she thought, I knew perfectly well what was happening.

The nightmares had begun again that night, while she slept in Tristan’s arms in the cramped spare bed (her refusal to sleep with him in her own bed had been another thing he did not understand). She had dreamed that she knelt on the floor of the small sitting room at Melismate, sweeping the fragments of something precious into a dustpan. The voice of the unseen Man had been around her, assuring her that she could fix it. Rufa, in her dream, had known this was something she could never fix. She had woken in tears, and, at the moment of awakening, had felt a pang of disappointment that Tristan was not Edward.

Tristan had been sweet, but his comforting was not up to the standard of Edward’s. During Rufa’s halting description of the dream, he had fallen asleep. At the time, she had reminded herself that he was young, and
innocent
of death – never having experienced death close to him, he could not see that it applied to him even remotely. She reproached herself, not Tristan. How could she have risked driving him away with these dismal spectres from her subconscious?

Throughout the following (also rainy) day, she had made great efforts to keep the atmosphere as light as gossamer. She had coaxed and flirted, until Tristan had been unable to help falling back into enchantment. The magic bubble had been sealed again. She had stopped time, and pushed away all thought of Edward. But she had been moving towards a hope – really, little more than a fantasy – that Edward would forgive her, and allow her to start again. The prospect of life without Edward had started to seem seriously frightening.

On her last full day with Tristan, the sun had returned for a final bow. It was less hot this time, with a freshness that blew in the outside world. Tristan’s ability to ignore the future was extraordinary, but even he had accepted that he must return to Oxford. They had taken last walks in their lovers’ haunts, and he had suddenly panicked. He had begged Rufa to come with him, stay with him, live and die with him.

Wistfully, Rufa had wondered aloud if she ought to apply for a place at a college. Tristan had reacted with white blankness, giving her the buried message that he did not consider this a good idea, and she did not mention it again. She had been too moved by his appeal to spoil it.

The question was, would everything have been different if she had gone with him to Oxford? And would he have been less horrified by her pregnancy if they had discovered it together?

Useless to speculate, of course. At the time, she had thought it important to take formal leave of Edward, as if on her deathbed. Or as if asking for permission to desert him.

Perhaps, she thought now, I was hoping he would find a way to save me, and keep me.

Rufa and Tristan had both, in an agonized sort of way, enjoyed their
Brief Encounter
parting at the station. They had clung together, shedding delicious tears. Rufa still did not understand why she had wept on the phone to Edward later, pleading with him to come home. Those tears had not been delicious at all. They had sprung from a momentary terror of the surrounding blackness, and when Rufa was calm again, she had marvelled at her own baffling behaviour.

With Tristan gone, the clocks had started again. Rufa had distracted herself by catching up with the duller aspects of shopping (washing powder, bleach, J-cloths), which she had neglected during her idyll. At Boots she worked her way down each shelf methodically, filling her basket with toothpaste, shampoo, soap, and some attractive flannels that were on special offer.

And then she had paused, as she always did, in front of the sanitary products. With her hand upon a packet of Lil-lets, she had found herself wondering – with a sudden freeze of panic – when she had last had a period. Normally, she marked the onset of each period in her diary.

The next few moments ran in her mind with the awful clarity of a film. She never would forget her stillness, as she had put down the basket, and taken her diary from her handbag. She had turned the pages back, gagging with panic, to find that she was nearly two and a half
weeks
late. Time did pass, apparently, even when you kidded yourself it was standing still. She had bought a pregnancy test, and struggled to take in the incredible, unreal fact that she was pregnant.

After that, there had been only one course of action open to her. She had decided that regrets for Edward were irrelevant, because they had come far too late. For better or worse, she belonged now to Tristan – and that was all that had stopped her going out of her mind. She had felt such warmth, such love and joy about Tristan, and the beautiful child who would enter the world in the little house in Jericho. She had been awed by the vastness of the new love that opened out before her, when she thought about her baby. Perhaps it would be a boy, to fill the vortex in her heart left by the death of the Man.

The kind woman was swaying back up the aisle between the seats, carrying a small paper bag. Rufa found it restful to observe the comfy way she sat herself down and unpacked her searing plastic cups and tiny drums of milk.

‘I got you two milks,’ the woman said, ‘because one is never enough. And a couple of ginger biscuits.’

‘Thanks so much, but I honestly don’t think—’

‘You might not think you fancy them,’ the woman interrupted firmly, ‘but the minute you get one down you, you’ll feel heaps better.’

Rufa smiled, pulling the cellophane packet towards her. ‘Did this work for you, too?’

‘When I was expecting my daughter, they were all that kept me from keeling over. I was teaching a class of eight-year-olds at the time, and I ate so many they used to call me Mrs Gingernut.’

Rufa politely took a sip of railway tea, and a bite of railway biscuit. To her surprise, they made her feel better. The giddy, weak feeling passed, and she felt ready to start thinking properly.

‘Told you,’ said Mrs Gingernut. Smiling and tactful, she picked up her magazine.

The windows were black mirrors, reflecting a cosy image of the lighted carriage. Rufa felt she now had nerve enough to start tackling the enormous mess she had made of her life since her marriage – since the death of the Man. All roads wound back to that. She wondered where she had been; what had driven her to forget herself so drastically.

For Tristan to overlook the unromantic question of contraception was understandable, if not forgivable. He was young, and had assumed that she would take care of it. But, until now, Rufa had taken a serious pride in her perfectly ordered life. Nancy or Lydia might go out in laddered tights or chipped nail varnish; Rufa never. The Man had been quite capable of arranging a picnic and forgetting the food, and Rufa had been the stage manager, contriving sandwiches behind the scenes. Rose, as a slip of a girl, had considered contraception an irrelevance. Rufa – who owed her existence to this foolishness – had always faintly scorned her mother for flinging herself straight into passion without thinking of the consequences. She was now ashamed.