A Rather English Marriage (6 page)

‘Right you are,' he said.

‘Should you write it down?' she asked. ‘Or will you remember?'

He walked through to the little study and bent over Mary's desk. His week-at-a-glance pocket diary was empty, but Mandy Hope was too far away to be able to see that.

‘July the fourth. Independence Day. Yes, I can fit you in at five,' he said as he walked her towards the front door. ‘Jolly good show.'

She drove round the corner and parked the car beside the road while she scribbled down first impressions in her casebook.
Conynghame-Jervis, Reginald
, she wrote.
Aged 71. Likes to be called Squadron Leader, otherwise friendly and sociable. Health apparently good; no complaints. Financially secure. Large house in good order due paid help and p/t gardener; fridge emptying; drinks cupboard full. Client appears in good spirits with few signs of grief or depression; cd become lonely in near future and physically neglected very soon. Needs (a) company & friends (ch. this next time) and (b) stimulus (ch. hobbies, interests, clubs etc.). Look out for alcohol abuse. Visit booked 2/52 July 4 at 5 pm
.

After she had gone, Reginald turned the oven full on and put the Pyrex dish into it. He went back to the drawing-room and poured himself a stiff whisky. He stared out of the window. There were foxgloves and delphiniums climbing up the red brick wall at the end of the garden, and the pleached apple trees that linked arms along its length were ripening nicely. The edges of the lawn were looking a bit whiskery, but
then old Fred was pretty whiskery himself, soon be too stiff to straddle the motor-mower. Straddle, eh? The bad boy twitched again, just slightly. Reggie sat himself down at Mary's desk and tried to concentrate on a letter.

Dear Betty and Pongo
, he wrote,
thank you for your very kind note about poor Mary. Her death came as a great shock, though she had been ill for some time, the last few weeks in hospital, but not in any pain. She passed away peacefully in the middle of the night, unfortunately I got there too late to be with her during the final moments
.

His last words that evening had been, ‘Stop fussing, Mary.' Not much of a farewell. What else could he have said? They'd never been the sentimental sort, once the baby language of their early marriage had petered out in self-consciousness. In the very early days he'd called her ‘Nanny' and she'd called him ‘Rumble-Tum' or ‘Rumbly' for short; and in the secret darkness of their bed they'd called his penis the ‘naughty boy', the ‘big boy', or (deep, gruff voice) ‘the big bad boy'. Mary was virginal and shy so they'd called her breasts ‘the bunnies', her private parts ‘the warren'. This nursery vocabulary had enabled them to grow quite bold under cover of its innocence. ‘Does that
naughty
boy want to poke about in the warren again, and romp with the bunnies?' she might ask – Mary: the most sexually shy girl he had ever known – and at the thought he thrust his hand into his pocket and rolled his penis to and fro between his fingertips. Back to the letter.

If ever you find yourself in this part of the world I do hope you'll look in for a natter about old times. Thank you again for your kind message, yours ever, Reggie
.

He looked up their address: Commander and Mrs R. S. G. Fiennes-Hampton, The Old Watchtower, Ardnahein, Near Carrick, Scotland. Dammit, why did people have to go to the ends of the earth when they retired? A few drinks with old Pongo would set him up nicely; Mary and Betty pottering about in the kitchen doing their women's chat. Well, not Mary of course.

Time for another drink. Gin this time. Whisky getting a bit low. Save it for later. Nightcap. He shook three drops of Angostura Bitters into the glass and watched the oily gin flowing thickly over it, shinier and more transparent than water, diffusing the pink into the faintest gleam. He whooshed in some tonic and took a deep gulp, relishing its acid clarity. Right-ho, Reggie, concentrate now.

He detached a crisp dark blue sheet of paper from the unanswered pile of letters of condolence. Wendy and Chaggers Fortescue. Never liked the woman. Sharp-nosed and sharp-tongued. God knows why Chaggers had tied the knot. She used to patronize poor Mary, telling her to go out and find herself some charity work. ‘That would take you mind off, you know,
things
…' she always said, and Mary would nod and give her sad smile.

Chaggers was a good sort; excellent man in a crisis. The steadiness of his voice over the RT, cutting through the hiss and crackle, calm and measured as all hell broke loose. Reginald gazed out of the window, lost in a reverie that owed much to memory, something to Kenneth More, Richard Todd and the cinema, and not a little to wishful thinking.

He and Chaggers had been pilots together when the squadron, at that time eight-strong, attacked a tight, defensive circle of twenty yellow-nosed ME 109s, the hardest formation to break up. The usual tactic – risky – was to form up into a line astern, encouraging them to attack, and then at the last moment to haul hard back on the control stick and do a steep climbing turn. In seconds, you'd have the advantage. Reggie's eyes blazed as he relived it. Another second, then I'd fired, saw Chaggers fire his own four-second burst, and we were both safely away. My Messerschmitt hung motionless; time was suspended; had I got him? Yes! A jet of red flame shot out and upwards and he spiralled away down, out of sight. Moments later another 109, bent on revenge, flashed across my bows, followed by a Spit, chasing him with the same motive. I gave him a quickie - his number was up! ‘That's for Eric Johnson, you swine!' I shouted. No doubt about this one! and
heard Chaggers across the RT: ‘Yours, Reggie!' The skies blazed in a chaos of flame, smoke, gunpowder and sudden death.

An hour later we'd be tucking into ham and eggs back at the mess. That was the life! thought Reginald. Nothing in the next fifty years had ever equalled the glory and the recklessness of those times. Life? Death? You didn't stop to think about it. And your victim: married or single? Husband to a fat Frau with two fat blonde German children? Or a lean, ascetic young bachelor, not keen to tie himself down? Fighting men were better off without a young bride to worry about. Only hamper your freedom of action - or so he'd thought, till he met tender, gentle, trusting Mary. Until you were married, you didn't care. The Germans weren't individuals, hardly even rivals; they were just targets, the object of the day's exercise.

Am I still the same person, Reginald wondered, as that daredevil boy? How they praised us, the women and the old men; they talked of our bravery, courage, valour, gallantry, envying us our clouds of glory. But among ourselves
we
knew we were competitive young daredevils, superbly tuned to physical and mental health, who had been given a wonderful fighter plane with which to play aerial games. We were playing God, dicing with life, giving or taking death. That shrunken old woman who died in hospital three weeks ago: was
she
the same person as my slender, clinging girl?

When the gin bottle was empty, Reggie steered past the walls and through the doors towards the kitchen. An acrid smell stung his nostrils. He reached for the oven glove, but it wasn't in its usual place, so he opened a random drawer and found a couple of neatly folded tea-towels. He crouched down awkwardly, opened the oven and manoeuvred the Pyrex dish on to the worktop beside the cooker. The shepherd's pie was blackened at the edges and dark brown on top, but he could always scrape that off. He dug a spoon in, blew on it several times, and began his supper.

Roy Southgate woke early, disturbed by some distant clamour in his mind that would not be harmonized into his dream. He opened his eyes, looked at the alarm clock beside the bed, and remembered that Grace was dead. ‘O Lord, look after my dear wife Grace, who is now with Thee in paradise,' he prayed, as he had done each morning since her death. He remembered the little dead bird chucked into a rubbish bin up by the allotments, flies busy in its eye sockets, its scrawny bunch of feathers an empty rag, the innards eaten away; remembered above all how bad it had smelt, and squeezed his eyes tightly shut to banish the vision and all that it implied … maggots … change and decay … crawling and rotting … He had seen enough dead bodies to know what disgusting changes happened within days of breath ceasing.

He'd spent the war with an assault unit of the Royal Engineers, petarding houses and road blocks, launching assault bridges, ferrying powered rafts and, after going through France and Belgium in the wake of Jerry, he knew all too well what death looked like, not only in its immediate aftermath but weeks later. Charred bodies were more bearable; their blackened flesh and bloodless corpses hardly seemed as though they could ever have been alive. It was the sight of flesh decomposing, caving in on itself, returning to compost and anonymous matter that was hardest to reconcile with his belief that the living were merely at one stage of their path towards eternity.

He'd been such an eager lad before it all began. Joined the local Territorial Army after Munich, when he was just eighteen. Always wanted to be an engineer; he'd loved working things out, could imagine weights and stresses in his head. First he'd been a sapper, then in 1941 they made him a lance
corporal, and by the end of the war he'd been promoted to sergeant. How proud Grace had been when he came home with a third stripe to sew on to his khaki uniform. No matter how much he protested that it was automatic, she had disagreed. She knew better, she said, as she stitched it to his sleeve. She'd been right, too; he'd distinguished himself at the D-Day landing.

Right, he thought, that'll do for now. Cup of tea and then I can get in a quick two hours up at the allotment before anyone else arrives. He liked the silence of the dawn: the earth still damp and the scent of the flowers strong and clear, clearer than it ever was later on in the day, as though they withdrew from the competition of pipe tobacco and clothes saturated with smoke. The birds sang fearlessly first thing in the morning, and the usual robin would come and perch on his spade or watch him from a nearby bush, turning its head from side to side, its black eyes checking for worms.

He liked doing housework because it made him feel like Grace. She had always taken a pride in her shining kitchen, put together item by item as they began to discard the bits and pieces they'd started out with when they got married. Nobody in their two families had money to spare, but people had given what they could; and what they hadn't got and couldn't afford, Roy had made.

‘Royston Southgate, you're a wonder, you are!' Grace would say after he had showed her how he had sawed and planed and fitted joints together, working in the evenings up at his old school on the workbench where he had learned his carpentry. He'd built their table, and two benches with nice firm legs splayed to take the weight; he'd built a wardrobe for their bedroom and, while they waited for the first baby, an old-fashioned cradle which Grace had trimmed by cutting up her wedding dress.

‘I'm not likely to need it again,' she'd joked. ‘Might as well put it to good use.'

Their child lay like a little prince in a bower of yellowing satin with lace ruffles encircling the sides. The pair of them
had leaned over him at night, straining to hear him breathe - their boy, their precious boy, their son and heir - smiling at each other in relief when the infant face crumpled in a petulant frown.

‘What can he be dreaming?' he would wonder. ‘He doesn't know anything to dream yet.'

‘He's dreaming of before he was born, wishing he was still inside me,' Grace would answer; and Roy would say, ‘So do I,' and they would smile at one another and go back to bed.

He washed his teacup, rinsed the pot, poured milk from the jug back into the bottle and put the bottle back into the fridge. Painstakingly he scoured the sink and work surfaces till they shone.

Moving through the familiar chores, he felt as though he inhabited Grace's body, yet stood outside it too, watching as her sinewy wrists wrung out the cloth and draped it limply over the taps. Her physical shape was so familiar to him that his mind was slow to believe that she no longer existed. He kept walking into rooms and mistaking an arrangement of colour and shape for her, so strong was his continuing expectation of seeing her. The eyes, he discovered, have their habits too, and the habit of seeing his wife was hard to relinquish.
O for the touch of a vanish'd hand/And the sound of a voice that is still!

He had never ceased to find her attractive. It made no difference to him when she aged or became gaunt and stringy from the illness that chewed away her vital substance. She was always his girl, the only woman he'd ever known. Physical love was identified with her body. In their darkened bedroom, the street lamp shining through the bobble-edged slit between the curtains, what did lines and folds matter so long as the dear flesh still accommodated his?

They had made love for the last time only a few days before she went into hospital.

‘No, love, you don't have to,' he had said. ‘I'm afraid of hurting you.'

‘But I want to. I may be a bit slow - you'll have to be careful - but I want to, really I do,' she had assured him.

Gently he had gathered up her nervy body, feeling the bones like knife handles in his grasp, and she had stood docile and childlike as he undressed her. He folded her clothes on the chair and eased the eiderdown over her, for being so thin she felt cold and shivered, even in this warm weather. He undressed himself and slipped in beside her.

Her noises had never changed; the quick intakes of breath that accelerated and held and shuddered a little … and then relaxed in a long smiling sigh.

He looked at the clock on the wall. Seven. Five regular pips, and one longer one. Time for the news, and then he'd go up to the allotment. Must keep busy. Tomorrow he'd wear her apron, to bring her closer. He'd wear all her clothes if he could, if it weren't that someone might catch him at it and think he was going a bit gaga. He could wear her nighties in bed, that was the answer. Not the hospital ones, but the brushed nylon ones in soft, pretty colours. No one would see, and it would feel as though he still had her next to him. Time to bring some fresh flowers down from the allotment for her shrine.