Crimson (9 page)

“It’s perfectly clear why you married. her, darling. She is a very good-looking girl and, luckily, she has that charming American accent. But perhaps you might tell her in the most tactful way, of course that she really cannot sit at my dinner table and say nothing: she must learn to talk, to listen, to sparkle.”

“She sparkles enough when she’s feeling confident,” Billy said.

“I think you might all be a little more patient and generous-spirited. Whether you like it or not, Elinor is now part of this family.”

“Ali! That’s the point. This is some sort of punishment for me, isn’t it? Heaven knows what I have done to deserve it except not give birth to you first! Don’t you think it’s a little unkind to have married someone out of your class, Billy?”

, . I’m penniless, I have no prospects, I’m slightly disabled, and I can’t get a job, Mother. What sort of class does that . ?I put me in.

“You know you can always live here.”

“And watch Madorie count each mouthful of her husband’s inheritance that we consume? No thank you!”

With that, Billy turned and entered the bedroom. He found Elinor staring tearfully at her reflection in the cheval mirror.

“Oh, Billy, I feel so sad … I so much wanted your family to like me.”

“Don’t be silly. The family thinks you’re a corker.” He stood behind her and pulled her body against him, his arms encircling her, his hands caressing the thin fabric that covered her breasts.

Elinor knew, however, that she had not misinterpreted what she overheard. She felt hurt, inadequate, and inferior in this nest of effortless superiority. And for the first time in a very long while, Elinor was aware of just how far away from home she was.

Billy slipped her nightgown from her shoulders, but for once Elinor did not immediately respond to his lovemaking. She was overcome by indignation. She was an

American who had just survived a war, and she had earned her place in the world. She was not about to be put down by these out-of-date, supercilious, upper-class Britishers of unearned privilege. They regarded her as inferior because she came of humble folk who worked with their hands. Well, she would show them.

But Elinor was unaware of the degree to which her bullying father had conditioned her, and how this would adversely affect her future, and her ability to show them.

Even after they were comfortably settled in their own flat, Billy

visited his home as often as possible. For him, it was a place of security, a refuge from a world that made demands he was not yet ready to face None the less, he obviously Ot himself to be anybody’s equal; Elinor wished she could be as comfortable and secure as he seemed, in the presence Of the O’Dare family.

“I feel I’m not as good as them,” she confided to Billy as, on a subsequent visit to Larkwood, they lay in bed, “and sometimes I suspect they want me to feel like this.” “They doll’t mean to embarrass you, old girl,” Billy comforted her as he stroked her body.

“You just aren’t used to our offhand English ways.”

“But I only feel this way with them,” Elinor puzzled.

“I feel comfortable and equal to anyone at school.” Elinor now attended evening classes at the polytechnic, hoping that an improved education would enable her to hold her own more easily against Billy’s standoffish family.

“And so you are,” Billy murmured, caressing’ her pale flesh. ret understand,” Elinor sighed.

“Because you can “You do Wn anywhere.” hold your 0 But Elinor was wrong. True, Billy was an educated, well-mannered gentleman, handsome, sensual, and possessed of animal grace. He had experienced life’s abundance and assumed it would continue, for he knew that he was intelligent and clever. What he did not know, or could never ado lit was how very lazy he was.

Indeed, to all appearances, Billy was a sophisticated man-about-town who knew the ways of the world. Before the war” he had already made an impression in the drawing rooms and ballrooms of London as a charming young fellow and a polished conversationalist.

In the masculine world of London’s clubs, however, Billy had projected a different image. There it was recognized that the sexes had clearly defined and different purposes: Men shared sport and danger; they gambled and provided other with companionship and conversation. Women sexual pleasure, children, and home comfort. In these clubs, Billy had not been considered the equal of his respected father and elder brother; rather, he was rumoured to be unreliable and unscrupulous dangerously close to a cad with perhaps too practised an eye for a pretty ankle. Jealous men referred to him as a ‘ladies” man” For his part, Billy remained impervious to their remarks; he seemed to feel it was his duty in life to charm all women, debutantes and married women alike His selfconfidence appeared unassailable.

in prewar London’s plush bordellos, Billy’s careless generosity, his atypical concern for the sexual fulfilment of his partner, his voluptuous exploits, and his sometimes delicate, sometimes harsh exploration of human flesh had also made him a favourite of expensive whores. For Billy, sexual pleasure consisted not only of lust but of frivolity, licentious play, and a perverse, detached curiosity. He was as inventive and imaginative as he was unscrupulous, as adventurous as he was amoral. He was almost irresistible in bed.

Postwar London, however, was different, especially for a penniless married man.

At first Billy had no anxiety about his future. His wonderful, get-rich-quick schemes were put to Elinor with such confidence that, for a short time, she believed in them. Gradually, though, she realized that the mercurial Billy incautious and impractical, feckless and immature was not the stuff from which successful self-employed businessmen were fashioned. Finally he tried to find a job, but could not get one.

Still, they had to have a home, and in Earls Court Square Billy found a cheap, shabby, two-room apartment with one communal bathroom.

“It will do for a few weeks,” he said. Elinor, with a newlywo’s enthusiasm, tried to make the depressing flat into a comfortable home.

She seemed to be able to do little, however, to improve the increasingly depressed spirits of her husband or to shore up his.rapiddly eroding selfconfidence.

One morning, six months after the war had ended, Elinor, still in her teens and now pregnant, lay in bed and watched as Billy shaved. She was bewildered and distressed by the transformation of the assertive, devil-may-care air ace she had married into a man who grew more and more bitter and morose, who seemed mired in apathy, frozen in a state of anxious despair. She wanted to reach out and comfort him, to try to reassure him, but she knew she dared not.

“You might stop looking at me so reproachfully!” Billy said, catching Elinor’s eye in his shaving mirror.

“Honey, I’m only a little concerned. You seem so tired.” Already she had learned not to say more.

What Elinor wanted to say to Billy was, “We are alive, aren’t we? We aren’t about to be blown to bits at any moment. And we surely won’t starve so long as there’s food to feed the family servants at Larkwood!” And they had each other, didn’t they? Surely she and Billy could enjoy being together, able to comfort each other and cheer each other’s spirits when life was tough. Wasn’t that the whole point of being married being loving and protective and struggling together through the hard times? That was a lot more important than sailing through the sunny days.

Elinor still failed to understand that Billy, the golden boy, so brave and dauntless as a sky fighter, was uniquely unprepared for life’s real and continuing battles. There he proved himself to be not only a dispirited and disheartened, combatant but a bad loser as well.

Billy looked into his own eyes, reflected in the shaving mirror, In that same mirror he had watched his face develop from a handsome lad’s into that of a selfconfident man. Gradually, however, since the war, since he had mar Elinor that splendid male hero had been replaced gance anxiety” soon followed by desperation, as Billy searched unsuccessfully for his place in the postwar world. His failure left him feeling ashamed, emasculated, bereft of selfrespect. What had gone wrong? He really had been a golden boy, and he still couldn’t quite believe that he had been abandoned by the gods. They had smiled upon him so indulgently for the early part of his life, given him his privileged background, his good looks and fine body. Surely they had guided and protected him as an air ace? He had not only survived, he had been called a hero.

But now the gods seemed indifferent, abandoning him to this postwar purgatory. where heroes were two a penny and there were no jobs.

Billy had originally tried to get a job that involved aeroplanes but so had every other ex-flier, and many did not have the disadvantage of an injury. It was ironic that so few flying jobs should be available, when Billy was certain that aviation to carry mail and even, perhaps, passengers was one of the few industries that could be expected to expand rapidly.

But there were just no jobs for him, and Billy found it humiliating. How was it that he couldn’t manage what was surely the basic requirement of a man to care for his wife and family? Observing the frustration reflected in Billy’s face, Elinor considered how fortunate it was that she knew one surefire way to bolster his selfconfidence.

In bed, Billy was in charge of their world. There, he regained, if only fleetingly, a sense of potency something that seemed to be inexorably dissolving from the rest of his life. Making love, he felt the power that he knew was his due.

As Billy stropped his razor, Elinor lay back in the bed and stretched languorously. She smiled at her husband.

Mver-swn,anyone with eyes like yours they’re the ‘colour of sea water over white sand; they shine with secrets.

No wonder all the nurses fell for you. But I was the lucky one.” in the shaving mirror, his eyes met Elinor’s and he smiled. Billy recognized her invitation. He wiped the lather from his cheeks and turned towards the bed.

With each month of Elinor’s pregnancy, Billy’s disposition worsened. She, of course, worried that her husband’s changed attitude was due to her increasing inability to provide the full sexual involvement he needed. In truth, Elinor could never provide what Billy needed, which was selfrespect.

At first Billy seemed merely sullen. Gradually he became volatile, short-tempered, sarcastic, and deliberately unkind. Elinor became more and more disconcerted, eventually immobilized by her own confusion. What had become of the man who had made love so real, indeed almost tangible? The loss of his affection so depressed her that it became an effort to do anything. A year earlier, she would not have put up with such behaviour, but rebellion was now the last thing on her mind because, quite simply, Billy and pregnancy had knocked it out of her. Little by little, Elinor7s vivacity, bounce, and drive were submerged, buried in despair.

Almost childlike in his determined self-absorption, Billy became Elinor’s master. If he wanted her to do something, she knew she was expected to drop whatever she was doing and turn her attention to him; otherwise he sulked. Billy also attempted to overcome his insecurity by subtly reminding Elinor that he had the education, the worldly experience and knowledge that she, as a woman, lacked. He attacked her humble background, and once introduced her to a male friend as his “American bumpkin’. Billy enjoyed her helplessness and her inability to stand up to his glib, facile, verbal cruelty.

Elinor watched Billy struggle with his demons as, bewildered and frustrated, he increasingly sought oblivion in drink. And whenever he drank, the dashing, popular charmer became aggressive and maudlin, occasionally even abusing her verbally. On the day after a drinking bout, however, Billy would always be childlike in his remorse, relentless in his contrition, and he was always both hurt and astonished if Elinor did not forgive him immediately.

By being wistfully contrite and then making her laugh, Billy could coax and wheedle his wife into doing anything he wanted. On the rare occasion when that ploy didn’t work, Billy would withdraw in sullen temper: immediately anxious, Elinor always crumpled before his projected disapproval. Sometimes Billy would become exasperated by her timidity; sometimes he found it erotic. Invariably these episodes ended the same way, for he was always forgiven in bed.

But in the long run, nothing really worked. because nothing fully erased Billy’s sense of failure and of despair.

Feeling powerless outside his home, Billy compensated by being dictatorial within it. Like the chairman who snarls at his secretary, like the secretary who snaps at the office boy, who then kicks the cat, Billy externalized his anxiety upon the only person willing, to put up with his bullying his wife. He was contemptuous of her meek acceptance of his bad behaviour.

But Elinor had learned from her mother, who had humbly accepted her husband’s tyranny, that authority was a masculine concept. Vaguely she understood that a bearded God possessed ultimate power in the universe, before which everyone bowed down; the equivalent domestic power was a husband. From her mother, Elinor had learned that every woman needed a

man and a shouting bully was better than no man at all-At least, Elinor comforted herself, Billy never walloped her, as her father had done; at least life could never be as terrifying as it had been when she was young.

Then, one Sunday, Billy didn’t turn up for the major meal of the week until mid-afternoon after the pubs had closed. Elinor took the dried-out leg of lamb from the oven and placed it on the table.

“That’s not fit to cat,” Billy said. He grabbed the joint of meat and threw it at the wall.

As Elinor stared at the greasy, dark stains and the gravy dripping down, she remembered another time. She had been helping her ma to prepare their Thanksgiving dinner. Eleven-year-old Nell had slapped her small brother’s fingers away from the cranberry sauce and Paul had yelled in protest as their father came in from the barn.

Seeing his son’s tears, Marius jumped forward and boxed young Elinor’s ears. As he turned to comfort Paul, Nell crept towards the door. Marius yanked her back.