A Closed Eye (9 page)

W
HEN
did the feeling of dread begin? She could neither quite date it nor place it. She thought it might have been the consequence of the visit to her parents, and of the memories it aroused. Or possibly of the move to the big house, which did not seem entirely favourable. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Freddie had said on their last evening in Cornwall Gardens. ‘What
we’re
doing,’ she corrected him. He did not answer. This, he implied, was not why he had married her; he had not bargained for upheaval, expense. Momentarily she wondered what on earth she was doing, sitting in this denuded room with a man who seemed to her a complete stranger, like someone with whom she was forced to spend time while waiting for a train. Their first evening in Wellington Square left them similarly estranged. The room was glassily bright; not all the lampshades were yet in place. They were too tired to talk, nor could either think of anything encouraging to say. After a while she roused herself, went into the kitchen and scrambled some eggs, which they ate from unmatched plates. Then, since there was nothing more to be done, they went to bed. At least the bed was familiar. But the window was in the wrong place, and when Freddie got up in the night he walked into a wall where the door should have been.

Her tiredness of the following days she put down to natural
causes. There was so much to do, too much; she would not be able to resume her dreamy existence for some time. The activity, although unwelcome, concentrated her mind; she feared an encroaching dullness, which her ordinary life did nothing to discourage. But in her fatigue she found the house exorbitant, overwhelming. She longed for a small remote sunny room to which she alone might have access. The picture of this room was quite clear in her mind; it was the private place which she had never quite been permitted. The new house, when measured against this fantasy, alarmed her. I am not quite up to this, she thought.

Because he had been led unwillingly to the house Freddie failed to sympathize with her fatigue, but merely carried out the obvious tasks assigned to him. He was discomposed; he did not see why they should not have stayed in Cornwall Gardens. ‘But babies need a nursery,’ Harriet had protested. ‘They have a lot of equipment. You wouldn’t have wanted it all in your bathroom, would you?’ He had not replied. He thought at this time that there was a certain dignity in silence, his usual resource when outfaced by events. His earlier pleasure in Harriet’s pregnancy (or rather the announcement to his friends of her pregnancy) had evaporated silently, leaving a certain bewilderment behind. He had bargained for none of this. His first wife had been a woman of uncertain temper, well-bred enough to be fearless; he had been criticized at every turn, frequently humiliated. Marrying a much younger woman had been the first and last romantic action in a dull but reasonable life; he did not see why he should not be allowed to relax completely once the deed was done. Harriet’s simplicity had appealed to him. With a shrewd and self-preserving instinct he knew that she would never do battle with him, betray him, make fun of him. He had appreciated all this and had come to cherish her. He would not now willingly live without her.

But he wanted her to remain cherished, and as simple as she
had been when he had first found her. Independent action on her part, as he saw this pregnancy, and this removal, disturbed him profoundly. He also suspected that she herself was disturbed by it. She was not bred to this, he told himself silently; he was too honourable to tell her the same thing. From time to time he had seen young men in his group of companies, men with excellent qualifications, simply overreach themselves, make some error through sheer enthusiasm, mistaking enthusiasm for judgement, without the proper controls to slow them down. He usually saw to it that they were redeployed, not wanting to risk them in situations which might reveal their lack of background. He could not do this with his wife, since there was a certain logic in her behaviour. He was, in addition, ready to concede that the new house was in every way desirable. Simply, he had preferred his life as it was, with just the two of them. Harriet had allowed him to retain all or most of his bachelor habits; his house was well run, his wife was agreeable in the ways in which he thought a wife should be agreeable. In return for her docility he wanted to protect her from those who might wear away her confidence. He saw the frowns of anxiety on her face as she surveyed her domain, saw her fatigue, her thickened figure. All of which, he thought, could have been avoided. He was too kind to tell her so, except in moments of unusual exasperation. He knew, and was disarmed by the knowledge, that she wanted what all her friends had long possessed: a proper house, a proper family. He saw that she would lose some of the simplicity which had first attracted him to her in her efforts to be like everyone else. He saw that in some ways she was not qualified. He was familiar with the phenomenon, which he could never explain to her.

She saw none of this, although she was aware of a certain disharmony. This she attributed to her condition, to which she was now obliged to make certain concessions. In the
afternoons she rested, tensely, in her spacious new bedroom. In the evenings, bathed and changed, she awaited Freddie in her new and rather too grand drawing-room. Furniture looked stranded on expanses of pale blue carpet, which she now saw should have been pale green: Freddie’s Persian rugs, over which she had tripped continually during the first year of her marriage, must now be laid end to end until she plucked up the courage to change the whole room. Fortunately the white curtains, with their pattern of flowers, looked well, and the windows were wide and high. Her commitment to this house was not total; part of her retreated in her imagination to that small empty room of her own devising, in which she might read unpretentious books, think unpretentious thoughts, even eat unpretentious meals quite unlike the ones she conscientiously prepared for Freddie, although her own appetite suffered. Like her father, she craved sweetness, and was forced to make do with a healthy diet. Their evenings were a little forlorn, neither wishing the other to see disappointment. Sometimes they took a walk round the square. Leaning on his arm she felt secure, as she no longer felt secure when she was alone.

In the morning she was out a great deal, mostly in department stores, buying towels, pillowslips, kettles, soap dishes for the basement flat, which she now saw would have to house someone quite specific, someone strong and cheerful and experienced to look after the baby; she felt suddenly unequal to looking after anybody other than herself. Freddie, anxious to restore some semblance of home comforts, the onus of providing which he would willingly have discharged on any half-way competent stranger, drafted an advertisement, and within a week they had interviewed and acquired Dawn Molyneux, a South African girl with dazzling teeth, who was working her way round the world. Just to know that Dawn was in the house made Harriet feel better. The girl had
completed two years of medical studies before deciding that she would rather see the world outside Durban, where her father was a fashionable dentist. She had promised him that she would be back within a year, eighteen months at the outside. ‘Eighteen months!’ Harriet had exclaimed. ‘But we hoped you might stay longer.’ ‘Not me,’ said Dawn. ‘I’ve got something lined up in Italy for next year. Of course, if it falls through I’ll let you know. Now, what about a cup of tea?’ It was ten o’clock in the morning, but the nice thing about Dawn was her homeliness. Cups of tea were drunk all day, biscuits were proffered. Harriet soon found her way down to the basement on most mornings, and sometimes in the afternoons, when she had rested and changed. She loved to see Dawn making herself up for her nightly forays into town, where she met up with other girls like herself, or with her boyfriend, Ronnie. On boyfriend evenings circles of colour were applied to eyelids and cheekbones; lipsticks nestled next to the teacups. ‘You’ve got your key?’ Harriet would ask. ‘And enough money? Always keep enough money for a cab.’ She liked to think of the girl having a high-spirited time, knowing that she would hear all about it the following morning. ‘And what about yourself?’ Dawn would ask kindly. ‘You out tonight?’ ‘No, I expect we shall stay in,’ was the usual reply, for now she craved her bed, and silence. She tired swiftly these days, and her sleep was dreamless. Only her waking hours contained dreams.

She could not remember such a splendid autumn. While the leaves fell in the windless air the sun still shone out of a blue sky. Gradually she regained a little energy, and thought, belatedly, of Tessa, from whom she had not heard. This was not unusual; it was usually she who did the telephoning. She rang the Beaufort Street number and got no reply, walked round there once, only to hear no movement from inside the flat. She was a little surprised not to have been informed of
any absence; she was sure that she had sent out change of address cards. When Dawn came up with tea and said, ‘There was a telephone call for you,’ she automatically replied, ‘From Mrs Peckham? What did she say?’ ‘Mrs Collins,’ said Dawn, adding sugar to her own tea and energetically stirring. It took Harriet a minute or two to remember that Mrs Collins was the former Pamela Harkness, whom she had not seen for a couple of years. She tried the number twice before Pamela’s discouragingly brisk voice answered. Make it snappy, it seemed to say. What you are interrupting is far more important than anything you have to impart. One did not telephone Pamela; one was telephoned by her. In the old days Harriet had preferred to find out what Pamela was thinking or doing indirectly; mediated, the news seemed less peremptory, more normal.

‘Harriet? Message from Tessa. She’s gone away for a few days. Jack turned up, apparently. I think she said Paris.’

‘Oh,’ said Harriet, bewildered. ‘Did she not have my number?’

‘No idea. That was what she said to tell you. Of course she dropped everything when he materialized. She rang from the airport, actually.’

‘I see. I expect she’ll get in touch when she gets back. How are you?’

‘Surviving. I’ll be in London next month, probably see you then. Are you still presentable?’

‘Getting rather large. But it will be lovely to see you. Ring me when you get here. Or I expect Tessa will.’

‘Okay. Keep well. Bye.’

So I did send the change of address cards, she thought, as she replaced the receiver. I thought I did. I must have been out when Tessa called. Oh well, never mind. I’ll stay at home for a bit. It will do me no harm.

‘Dawn,’ she said. ‘I think we might go out this evening. I don’t feel like cooking.’

‘Good idea,’ said Dawn cheerfully. ‘I’ll do the ironing, shall I?’

Such a pleasant girl, thought Harriet. More my own type, was what she really thought. Pamela always had that effect on her.

‘You’re looking pretty,’ said Freddie, breaking a roll. In fact she was not; her face was too thin, her eyes too big. He loved her diffidently, although he could never quite say so. Her unhappiness, he thought, was due more to moral than to physical upheaval. All he could do was ease her through it. No doubt she would want to give parties for her friends as soon as she was back to normal. But whereas his own friends always found her delightful, he saw that she would be in some ways inadequate when faced with another kind of hierarchy. Contact with her own friends brought on, or left behind, a complex of feelings which made her look older than her years. He resented anyone or anything that took away her youthfulness, which was to him unique, not to be compared with that of her contemporaries, whom, he thought, she did not resemble. He wished to bestow on her calmness and good order, and sighed inwardly at the thought of all the changes she must undergo, and he with her. At this rate I shan’t be able to retire, he thought, although the idea attracted him. All his travelling had been done when he was in the forces, or away on business. He would have liked to explore different worlds, at his leisure. India appealed to him, Malaysia. Without the child he could have afforded to take things a little more easily. They could have followed the sun: the West Indies in winter, Greece in the spring, and summers in a house they might even have bought in the country, or near the coast. He was a discreetly wealthy man, and none of Harriet’s current expenditure seriously inconvenienced him,
but he could see that it was not making her happy. And he had always had a desire to see the autumn leaves in Vermont, or Canada. He sighed again at the prospect before him: unremitting work, and short trips on Concorde.

‘Very pretty,’ he said.

‘You never speak of Helen,’ said Harriet. She felt on edge, ready to provoke, and at the same time ashamed of herself.

‘I never think of her,’ he replied, although he did, remembering her harsh hilarity, her frequent jibes at his cautious manners. The differences between his first wife and his second were so profound, and at the same time so obvious, that he did not see how he could ever explain them to her. Hearing in his mind’s ear Helen’s laughter in the bedroom—and it was always that laughter, or more properly speaking the cruelty of that laughter—he wished to spare them both what to him had been almost constant humiliation. A marvellous hostess, of course; her household was impeccable, her dinner parties brilliant. ‘Without me you’d be nowhere,’ she had flung at him. ‘You’d have no friends at all if I didn’t attract them.’ He thought she was probably right. But he had found the task of living up to her onerous and increasingly uncomfortable. After Helen, Harriet had had the appeal of disembodied kindness, of timidity allied to the desire to please. He had felt himself gently released from the restrictions and the disruptions of his earlier marriage. He knew that he did not make Harriet happy, but tended to disregard this. Happiness was what young people wanted; at his age he knew that comfort was more important. He had made her comfortable, and in that he was prepared to take a grim pride. After all, nobody else had done as much. He had no regrets, no misgivings: at least, he would have said as much a few months ago. Now, of course, it was all in the balance, as it had never been before.