The Marrying Game (53 page)

What a starchy little cow I’ve been, she thought; fancying myself for virtuous self-control, and condemning the others for their weakness.

She could hardly bear to contemplate that previous self, so scrubbed and righteous. So blind, repressed, inhibited. She wanted to wipe herself right off the face
of
the earth. Facing them all would mean having that unbearable self reflected right back at her. She was not strong enough to have her nose rubbed in her sordid fall from grace.

When she ran away from Tristan’s house, she had managed to get herself and her suitcase to Oxford Station and on to a London train. She had intended to take refuge at Wendy’s. She had been on her way there, kneading her fingers in anguish in the back of a taxi, when she suddenly realized she could not face Nancy, Wendy or Roshan. They would tell Edward, and Rose. It could not be endured – their eyes would strip her like acid. Impulsively, she had told the driver to take her to King’s Cross; the only mainline station she could think of through the internal tempest.

At King’s Cross she had stopped at W.H. Smith’s, to buy a postcard and a book of stamps. She did not want people to worry too much – she would tell them where she was when she got there, and it would be very, very far away. She would have some time, before they caught up with her.

This train, to Edinburgh, had been on the point of leaving. Rufa thought Edinburgh had a sonorous, historical ring to it, which she liked. She remembered a dinner-party customer of hers, who had a house there. This amiable and well-connected lady might be a useful contact – she would need to work again. Her account was full of money at present, but it was Edward’s money. He would be bound to stop her allowance now. And if he did not, Rufa would be obliged not to touch it. She would kill the pain with hard work, and atone for her stupidity by building a life for her baby. It was oddly comfortable to be worrying about work and money again.

The postcard was a photograph of Buckingham Palace, yellow as butter under a turquoise sky. Rufa spent a long time tapping her chin with the end of the pen, struggling to find the words which contained least of her stupid self. She wrote: ‘I am very sorry.’ (She thought of ‘Please don’t hate me’, but immediately rejected this as too whiny.) ‘Please tell everyone not to worry, I am fine. Love Rufa.’ She addressed the card to Nancy in Tufnell Park – Nancy being the least likely to judge her harshly.

The countryside was giving way to lighted buildings. A mass of lights and houses leapt up around them. The wheels dragged as they pulled into Durham. The kind woman in the opposite seat had pulled on her coat, and neatly stowed her belongings into various neat bags. She had been sitting, fully gloved, for the past half-hour.

The train stopped, and she stood up. ‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, smiling. ‘Good luck.’

Rufa held out the card. ‘If it’s not too much trouble, could you possibly post this for me? It’s got a stamp, and everything.’

‘Well, of course. No trouble at all.’

‘Thank you,’ Rufa said. The parting smile she gave the woman was not painful. She was reeling with euphoria, stunned by her own dastardly cunning. Nancy would receive a postcard from Durham, and they could search every corner of Durham without finding her. She would be invisible, in Edinburgh. For the first time in her life, nobody would know where she was. How frighteningly easy it was, she thought, to disappear.

Waverley station was a maelstrom of lights and people.
Rufa
, a lonely speck in the crowd, considered what to do next. It was late. She was tired in a new way, to the core of her bones. She had an urgent longing to lie down – the baby was giving the orders now. Impressed by her own presence of mind, she accosted one of the guards and asked for the nearest hotel.

The man looked her up and down, taking in her Mulberry suitcase, her Prada handbag, the jewel on her wedding finger, and directed her to the Balmoral. Rufa found his accent a little hard to understand, but gathered she would not need a taxi. She hefted her case out into Princes Street. The Balmoral Hotel was impossible to miss. Fortunately, she was too exhausted to worry that its solid opulence was unsuitable for a Fallen Woman.

At the gleaming desk, she showed her gold credit card. She had no idea how to avoid giving them her real name, and signed in as Mrs Reculver. How very lucky, she thought, that she had posted the card at Durham – it would surely be ages before anyone thought of checking hotels in Edinburgh.

The room was wondrously comfortable. The moment she had tipped the porter a pound and shut him out, Rufa shrugged off her coat and collapsed on the firm, fatly quilted double bed. The relief of it made her head swim. She devoutly hoped it was not going to be like this for the whole nine months. Tomorrow she would think about finding herself a flat. She would buy a local paper, and scour the job columns. She would phone Diana Carstairs-McSomething, informing her that she was available for dinner parties.

Her hand strayed to her stomach. She laid her palm over her flat belly. She closed her eyes. For the very first time she visualized a real baby, and was ambushed by a
fierce
, pagan joy that refused to take into account the Man’s death, Tristan’s hideous inadequacy or Edward’s anger. The baby overrode them all. The soft little creature would nestle in her arms, and open its tender little mouth to her aching breast. She would feel its downy head against the crook of her arm, and it would make her strong enough to laugh at her misery, and the misery she had caused to all the others. She began to sing to it, with the Man’s voice in her mind, singing her to sleep in some lost, primeval era.

Chapter Twelve

RUFA HAD ALWAYS
heard Edinburgh described as a beautiful city. The view from her window the next morning was bleak and forbidding. Roofs and spires were clustered around the hem of the Castle Rock, with the grey Castle carved into its summit. In the foreground the statue of Sir Walter Scott sat in his Victorian gothic space rocket, gazing thoughtfully towards Holyrood. She could see the shops along one side of Princes Street, facing perished gardens and a railway line that ought to have been a river. Autumn had arrived here ages ago, unpacked its bags and settled in permanently.

The radiator under the window was hot, and made her hair crackle, but the glass was cold. The people in the street below wore thick coats, and bent their heads against the wind. Rufa put on her cream cashmere sweater, soft and warm as an embrace, and went down to breakfast.

She was still tired, but the sickness had receded. She ate porridge, bacon, eggs, a sausage and two racks of toast. The waitress looked surprised, and Rufa did not blame her – she was surprised herself. These attacks of giddy hunger had started before she knew she was pregnant. You just had to hurl food at them, by the bucketload.

Once her stomach was full, she could think more rationally. She had been amazingly silly yesterday, going through that pantomime with the postcard from Durham. Edward would know exactly where she was as soon as he saw her credit-card statement. If she were serious about hiding, she would have to take out a big wedge of cash, and live anonymously on that until she found work. The priority was a flat. Rufa had never rented a flat, and had no idea how you went about it. Timidly, she asked the young woman at Reception.

She could see that the girl was puzzled by her urgency – why would this cashmere-clad Englishwoman want a cheap flat in a hurry? The girl gave her a local newspaper, in which there was a page of advertisements for letting agencies. Rufa chose the agency with the largest advertisement, and ordered a taxi. She returned to her room. In the gleaming white bathroom, she plaited her hair. She applied a light shield of make-up. Her lipstick tasted of soap, and she had to swallow several times to subdue the queasiness. These attacks could be handled, with enough strength of mind. She had only lost control once, at Tristan’s.

It was like remembering a terrible dream. Quite apart from the pain, there had been the humiliation of looking such a fool – turning up on the doorstep with a suitcase and a smile, ridiculously sure of her welcome. Tristan had opened the door to her. For a noticeable moment, he had looked more shocked than pleased. A second later, they had fallen into each other’s arms.

He had murmured: ‘It’s been agony – I’ve been longing for you – out of my mind with wanting you –’

In the kitchen, he had proudly introduced her to a girl eating cornflakes. ‘She’s here! It’s Rufa!’

The sweet-faced girl had, evidently, heard amazing things about Rufa. With a gleeful show of tact, she had taken her cornflakes out of the room. Tristan had kissed Rufa again, his hand caressing her thigh. Rufa sighed and arched against him, but noticed that her body was not responding to him in the usual way; possibly because of the eternal and unromantic queasiness. The private language of their intimacy did not contain a word for queasiness.

And then Tristan had asked, ‘So what are you doing in Oxford? How long can you stay?’

That was the first sign of the distance between them. Foreboding had pinched at Rufa’s heart. He had left her with the whole, heavy task of explaining that she had come to Oxford because it was the only place left to her, and she would be staying indefinitely.

Rufa began to tidy the hotel bathroom, neatly folding towels and laying out her small, immaculate collection of Chanel cosmetics. There was, unfortunately, no easy way to tell a man he had made you pregnant. In old films, the man always reacted with clumsy, endearing tenderness: fussing rather comically and making his wife sit down. Tristan’s reaction had been blank disbelief, growing into horror.

After that, it had all come crashing down around her with terrifying speed. The man she adored changed before her eyes, into a cold stranger she did not recognize. He had mentioned clinics, and friends who had used them. He had been relieved to hear that Edward did not know.

‘Thank fuck for that – if we’re quick enough, he’ll never find out.’

That was the point at which her stomach had risen in
protest
. Everything had gone misty. She had gasped that she was going to be sick, and Tristan had roughly pushed her to a terrible lavatory stained like a smoker’s teeth. She had vomited copiously, feeling she was throwing up every hope and dream, every fantasy and illusion.

The housemate had been kind. She had heard the sound of retching, and run downstairs to make Rufa peppermint tea. Her kindness had only underscored the fact that Tristan was not being kind at all. He had been stiff and defensive, as if she had done him an injury.

Perhaps I had, Rufa thought now. He was too young to cope with any of this. Her miraculous, gilded youth had turned out to be a scared, selfish boy. Everything he said had hammered home the realization that the great passion was dead. He expected her to kill their child.

‘You shouldn’t think of it in such emotional terms,’ he had said. ‘It’s not a child, it’s a cluster of cells.’

Rufa counted the cash left in her purse, thinking that Tristan had not been entirely without heart, and that this had made the pain worse. The moment he sensed her love had died, he had wept and begged her not to reject him. By then it had been far too late. Rufa, through her anguish, had understood that there was to be no support, no rescue. Though she had not expected this – would have died if she had foreseen it – she was alone. It was a fiendishly appropriate punishment for the inventor of the Marrying Game. The booby prize, the Single Mother Game.

The telephone beside the bed rang. Rufa jumped, and backed nervously against the wall. She picked it up with a shaking hand. ‘Yes?’

It was not Edward. It was the girl at Reception, telling
her
the taxi had arrived. Rufa was ashamed of her disappointment. How stupid to be disappointed that it was not her furious, mistreated husband. She must learn to be independent; to get by on her own without running to Edward every five minutes. It was going to be a hard habit to break.

Outside the hotel, the wind pounced on her like a tiger, stinging her eyes. The air smelt of burnt toast, edged with the aftertaste of an acidic belch. The taxi carried her through streets of unrelenting grey stone and small windows staring in high, blank walls. There was not one shred, one sprout of green. No trees, no parks, no window boxes. No tufts of grass clinging to cracks in walls, no moss bubbling up between the paving stones. Nature was powerless against the stones. The sterile chill of the city made her ache for the fat fields at home.