Give Us This Day (59 page)

4

A sense of deep, personal failure had attended Edward from the very beginning, from the first moment they were alone after the hurly-burly of the wedding reception, the plaudits, and the send-off of trailing the usual assortment of threadbare slippers and old boots. And it was the more oppressive because he had no previous experience of personal failure and would have found it very difficult to put into words, even to old George, in whose shadow he had stood ever since he could remember. For until then he had been concerned with tangible things, with nuts, bolts, gradients, time schedules, metal stress, trade potential, and profit margins, inanimates that responded to patience and logic, whereas Gilda, the prize that had fallen to him so unaccountably and after so long a siege, did not respond to approaches that had solved his problems as an engineer, a regional manager, and master of his trade.

In the first few weeks of their life together he tried variants of all the methods that had served him so well in the past. Flattery, bribery, a careful study of the opposition’s defences, aggression, compromise, the storming salesman approach favoured by George, and even craftiness, but all in vain. He had won her on paper and lost her in practice. Her very passivity was her strength and his weakness. His experience with women was no more and no less than that of most young husbands, but he had a conviction that an accomplished masher would have retired baffled from the single room she had insisted upon occupying as one of the articles of her surrender. Yet this is not to say she had denied him access to her on any occasion. She betrayed no sign of fear, shame, or even embarrassment that he had expected when she was obliged to share his bed during their touring honeymoon into the west.

In the first weeks of married life in their new Birmingham home, surrounded by the highly-trained staff he had enrolled for her, she spent the time he was absent in reading, walking, and writing letters acknowledging their array of wedding gifts. When they were together on excursions about the city, dining, or merely sitting by the fireside, she performed all her domestic functions faultlessly, acceding to his every wish save the one that began to obsess him. All he was to be granted, it seemed, was her presence. A beautiful slave, obedient to his every caprice but enjoying, by some feat of legerdemain, far more freedom and personal privacy than was available to her owner.

Turned back upon himself by her stillness and chilled by her impersonal acknowledgment of his affection, he began to change in a way that his intimates were not slow to observe. He had always been an amiable young man, unruffled by minor setbacks of the kind that came the way of every regional manager in the course of a working day. Now he became strangely intractable, given to gruff replies and short, explosive bursts of temper. And at the same time his methodical approach to problems involving consultation with senior subordinates and customers became casual and off-hand as he took to spending much of his time closeted in his office, leaving all but the major decisions to deputies.

That was before the weekly letters from Paris began to arrive for her, the first of which merely excited his curiosity, so that when he asked who had written it she passed it to him and he ran his eye down the page, discovering that it was written in French and turned at once to the final page to look at the signature.

“Who is this ‘Clothilde’?”

“A friend.”

The reply was typical of her replies to all his questions, polite but yielding nothing.

“What kind of friend?”

“We shared rooms.”

“Where?”

“At Tours, when I was teaching English at the University. Her name is Clothilde Bernard.”

“How old is she?”

“About my age.”

“What does she write about?”

“Mutual acquaintances. Shall I translate?”

“No, no, it doesn’t matter, I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You are not prying.”

He forgot the incident almost at once but recalled it when, almost as regular as a Swann hardware haul to Coventry, identical-looking letters arrived, always from Paris, always on a Wednesday, and always, presumably, from Clothilde Bernard, so that his curiosity concerning them became so intense that, taking advantage of her temporary absence one day, he opened her bureau and counted them.

There were twelve, all looking alike save the most recent delivery, a bulkier package containing photographs. He took them out and found they were not the ordinary amateur photographs he had expected but professional pictures, depicting what looked like some kind of entertainment, a melodrama presumably, for they depicted dramatic confrontations between a young, spade-bearded man wearing evening dress, and a young woman in a ballet costume. The little ballerina, it would appear, was being victimised in some way, for the man in the pictured numbered “one” was threatening her, arm upraised. In the picture numbered “eight” she lay dead at his feet and he was being arrested by gendarmes, a revolver in his hand. He made nothing of these, but a ninth picture interested him. It was a still of a young actor in the costume of the eighteenth-century and he looked very elegant and selfassured. It was signed “Etienne” and below, in handwriting so full of flourishes that it defied analysis, was some kind of greeting.

He returned the photographs thoughtfully, wondering at her preoccupation with this kind of frivolity, for over here she had given no indication of an interest in theatricals. But curiosity nagged at him so persistently that, when a thirteenth letter arrived, he asked outright what subject it was that Clothilde found so much to write about. She answered, quietly, “As I explained, what goes on at the universities. She is now at the Sorbonne, teaching drama. Upstairs I have some photographs of her work. Would you care to see them?”

“Yes, I would. Very much.”

She got up from the table and glided away, moving as noiselessly as she invariably did, and a moment later she was back with the photographs he had already seen. He made a pretence of looking at them and asked, “Who is Etienne?”

“Clothilde’s brother.”

“Another university tutor?”

“No, a professional actor. There he is playing Monsieur Beaucaire.”

“What has he written under the picture?”

“Souvent femme varie—Bien fol est qui s’y fie.”

“What does that mean?”

“Woman often changes; he is a big fool who trusts her.”

“Was the picture meant for you?”

“Of course.”

“You knew him that well?”

“We were friends.”

“Is he implying you broke a promise to him?”

“Perhaps.”

“No, not ‘perhaps’. Surely this is a direct reference to you getting married.”

“He made no proposal of marriage to me.”

It did not tell him much but enough, once he had left for the Swann Bull Ring depot, to disturb him deeply so that he began to ask himself if she had been as frigidly unresponsive with Bernard as she had been with him since he led her to the altar. His wits were very woolly these days and he realised that, without further elucidation, he could make no real attempt to gauge the relationship that existed between her and this actor fellow.

As the days passed, however, the shadow of Etienne Bernard, and the childlike trust he had reposed in her, began to gnaw at him until uncertainty became unbearable. A week later he went to her room with the intention of reopening the subject and persuading her, if that was possible, to tell him more.

It had been customary, until then, for him to tell her when he would come to her after she had retired, but on this occasion he said nothing and did not even knock when he entered her room, discovering her seated at the dressing-table in a silk shift, engaged in brushing her lovely, corn-coloured hair. The sight of her, so bewitching and vulnerable, disarmed him and he moved over to stand behind her, taking the brush and applying it in imitation of her own sweeping strokes. She made no protest and he remarked no change in her expression as he watched the reflection in the mirror but then, bending low, he kissed the nape of her neck, saying, “I’ve been a bear lately, Gilda. I don’t mind admitting that I was jealous.”

“Jealous of whom?”

“That actor chap, Bernard, the one who sent you those pictures. It’s foolish, I know, for whatever he meant to you or you to him is of no consequence now. How could it be? It was before we met.”

She said nothing, so he went on. “Do you mind if I stay?”

“If you wish it, Edward.”

Her voice was so impersonal that it stirred in him a kind of fury. “If I wish it? Good God, of course I wish it! We’re man and wife, aren’t we? If I had my way, we’d share a bed every night!”

“But that was agreed, Edward.”

“I know it was agreed, but I never imagined it would be like this, living together under the same roof but behaving as if we hardly knew one another. It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of and no man I know would put up with it.”

At least he had made some small impression on her. Her face flushed and for a moment it seemed as if she would match his anger, but then, with a shrug, she stood up and when she turned her features expressed the familiar and dreaded blankness of all the other occasions he had come here as a supplicant. She said, “I will go to bed. Come back if you wish. The door will be ajar,” and lifting her nightdress from the eiderdown where her maid had laid it, she shrugged herself out of the flimsy shift and raised her arms to replace it with the linen gown.

It was the smooth ripple of her breasts that stimulated him to a degree that nothing else could have done. He saw it, swift and infinitely sensuous, as the lifting of a curtain in everything about her that he had coveted, won and was now so infamously denied. He said, huskily, “Wait, Gilda!” and reached out, taking the nightgown from her and tossing it aside, then seizing her and crushing her against him with such impetuous force that she cried out involuntarily as her flesh came into contact with his clothes. Half distinguishable words, fierce but caressing, accompanied the kisses he rained on her face and shoulders and then, gathering her up, he hooked the open door with his foot and carried her across the landing to his own room. Once here, momentarily undecided how to dispose of his prize, he paused and set her down, turning his back on her for a moment to slam the door and turn the key in the lock.

The click of the tongue slipping home had a curious effect on him, proclaiming perhaps his unexpected victory over her reservations and his own apparent mastery of the situation. He said, gruffly, “Like it or not you’ll stay here tonight,” and began to pull off his clothes, tossing them in a heap on the floor.

She said, still very quietly, “No, Edward, not this way. I had your promise,” but the sight of her standing there stark naked and proposing terms for a conditional surrender increased his sense of outrage. He found he was able to look at her in a way that had never been possible before, objectively and impersonally rather than the summit of all he had ever hoped for from women. His eyes took in every part of her, not sensually, as in her room a moment ago, but coolly and almost mockingly. He went on undressing but less hurriedly, retrieving his jacket and waistcoat from the floor, putting them over a chair and saying, as he sat to remove his boots, “Sometimes I can’t imagine why you married me. Since you have, I’ve rights to exercise whenever I choose.”

She remained perfectly calm, a fact that secretly astonished him in the circumstances.

“I’ve never denied you access.”

“Aye, but always on your terms.”

“On terms we agreed.”

“I renounce them.”

He had got as far as removing his trousers and she had him at a disadvantage. Her movement was like the spring of a cat. Before he could regain his balance she was at the door, had turned the lock, and laid her hand on the door knob.

He caught her before she could pull it open, seizing her round the waist and dragging her back into the centre of the room where she writhed from his grasp and made as though to try again, but he shot out a hand and caught her by the ankle so that she fell flat on her face, a flailing arm coming into sharp contact with the fender.

Her fall, and the metallic clang of displaced fire-irons, brought him up short so that he paused, suddenly aware of the farcical element in the quarrel, she sprawled naked on the carpet, he half entangled in his trousers.

“You aren’t hurt, are you?”

She rose to her knees, her left hand holding her wrist where it had struck the metal. She looked so childish and pitiful that shame invaded him. The light of the bedside lamp fell on her back and her crouching attitude, with her hair touching the carpet, suggested the pose of a wounded animal.

“Gilda, it doesn’t have to
be
like this! I’m sorry I treated you that way, but in God’s name try and understand how I feel! I love you and want you. Why can’t we be like any other married couple? In God’s name, why not?”

She rose slowly to her feet, still massaging her wrist.

“Let me see your arm.”

She turned facing him and her eyes were blank.

“Do what you have to and let me go back to my room,” and she began to walk slowly towards the bed.

Anger ebbed from him. Submission, on these terms, wasn’t worth exacting. Sullenly he unlocked the door and threw it open.

“I’m damned if I’ll beg, not even from you—wait, you can’t go like that,” and he stepped out, crossed the landing, and entered her room, retrieving her nightgown and returning with it. She took it wordlessly and slipped it over her head. Then she went out, closing the door.

* * *

The moment he was certain she was not in the house, he forced himself to think logically, rummaging in his mind for possible refuges at her disposal. He could think of none other than her mother’s house in Northampton, so he went out breakfastless and summoned a cab to take him to the station, with every intention of boarding the first available train for Peterborough, and some half-formed plan of confronting her in Edith’s presence. He did not know what her mother would make of it. He did not know what anybody would make of it. Their quarrel, seen in retrospect, was pointless and childish, and while he had sacrificed his dignity she, in her mysterious way, had succeeded in rescuing hers. He was like a fugitive with the hounds on his heels, brought up short against a twenty-foot wall, and had no alternative now but to face the consequences of the ridiculous episode, already, no doubt, the subject of gossip among servants, who would know that she had fled during the night and that he had gone in pursuit without so much as a cup of coffee.