Mr Wrong (7 page)

Christine had bought herself a white stetson hat at the tourist stall. In it, she contrived to look both dashing and demure. Instantly Julie had wanted one, but when she put it on, she looked
like a schoolgirl in a fancy-dress hat. ‘I look so
healthy
!’ she wailed – trying to make a joke from her disappointment. Her friend merely looked at her and in a voice of
damning neutral frankness, said: ‘Your calves are too thick.’ ‘I know.’ She didn’t even look down at them. ‘Better when they’re brown, though.’ ‘Mm.’

‘She might at least agree with
that
,’ Julie thought sadly. Her parents were gesticulating.

‘Your mother thinks we should have lunch, and I think we should have a bathe.’

‘I didn’t say we should have lunch
now
; I meant we should go and see whether we can buy bread and wine and so on by the picnicking place, because if we can’t we’ll
have to drive somewhere to get it before we bathe.’

‘Why – “before we bathe”?’

‘Alan, you
know
why. Because all French shops shut for the afternoon.’

‘French shops!’ he repeated derisively – as though she had invented them to be a nuisance. He turned to the boot of the car. ‘Right! Let us defer our bathe. Let us repack
the boot. It won’t take all that long if we all help.’

‘Daddy, surely we needn’t repack the boot just to see if they sell food?’

‘Now which are we to do? Are we going to have lunch and then bathe, are we going to pack up the boot or not? I simply want to know. I don’t care in the least
what
we bloody
well do if only you’d make up your minds.’ His face, scalded by sun, was also steaming from sweat; his sparse, pale ginger hair had gathered into sodden spiky strands, his dry white
forearms were blooming with yellow freckles. He was far too hot, Ruth thought: he insisted on spending his holidays in the heat, and it really didn’t suit him.

‘I’ll go and find out,’ she said, and ran to the steps down on to the picnic place. But when she returned to tell him that all was well; they could buy anything they needed to
supplement their meal, she found them still standing paralysed round the boot of the car, Alan in that attitude of exaggerated patience that had always depressed her.

‘We still don’t know whether you want to unpack
every
thing, or simply the bathing things.’

‘Alan, for goodness’ sake! Of course we don’t want to take all the picnic to the bathing place.
Ob
viously we don’t!’

He straightened up from trying either to wedge or unwedge a basket from the boot. ‘Obviously? Obviously?’

Ruth turned to the girls. ‘Why don’t you go on, you two? Down there and there’s some steps down to the river-bank just before the bridge.’

‘O.K.’ They trailed off, wandering slowly rather than walking, in a way that made them look as though they were going to bump into everyone else. When she thought they had got far
enough, she said:

‘Let’s go and have a cool drink before we join them.’

He shut the boot after two irritable attempts without replying, and Ruth, who could now hear her own heart beating, repeated: ‘Why not have a quick one? The children will be perfectly happy now they can bathe.’

‘If you’ve
quite
made up your mind,’ he began savagely, but she interrupted.

‘Alan, I’ve had all I can stand this morning. If you’re determined to have a row, at least let’s have it on our own. It’s not fair on Julie.’

They walked without speaking along the car-park and down the steps to the picnic square. Here were small iron tables and battered chairs, and by the steps a large booth selling much what any
French grocery shop sells – fruit, bread, drink,
pâtés
and cheeses.

‘I’d like a beer,’ Ruth said before that could become a point of argument.

‘Go and sit down then.’ He went to the booth and began to wait with ostentatious patience while a French family bought their lunch.

Ruth lit a cigarette. Her hands were shaking.

Julie and Christine eventually reached the rocks at the edge of the river. They had not spoken during their short, hot walk there; Christine did not usually start
conversations, and Julie, who admired her deeply, felt too much ashamed of her parents to know what to say. Loyalty fought with her embarrassment – after all, everyone knew that parents were
a drag in some way or other: it just seemed extraordinary the way hers could turn what was meant to be a nice, easy, normal day into something cross and complicated. They argued about everything,
which was the same as nothing; and even when they weren’t actually rowing, they seemed unable to
do
anything without endless discussion. She supposed it was their age – or ages
– Mummy was five years younger than Dad, but when you got as old as they were, five years wouldn’t seem much. Anyway, even she seemed too old to enjoy anything. ‘Past it,’
she thought sadly. ‘Going to try the water,’ she muttered to her friend, but Christine seemed not to hear her.

There was a good shelf of rock at the very edge and sheer below it, so that one could sit and put one’s legs in the river, which was now the light greeny brown of unreliable eyes. Below
were crowds of little, dull, silver fish darting aimlessly about. Above, and high on the left, hung the Pont du Gard – giant, honey-coloured arches crammed with sky like blue cream. The
people on top walking through the aqueduct looked tiny, and their voices seemed louder than their size. The water felt unexpectedly cool. ‘I won’t swim yet,’ she thought, and got up to join her friend, saying, ‘I do want to walk right across the top, don’t you?’

‘Not especially. I mean, what would be special about it?’

‘Oh – I don’t know.’ What she meant was that she did know, but felt embarrassed about explaining. To walk on stones put there by the Romans – to imagine the water
coursing through and try to imagine how deep it must have been, to look down on the wooded gorge with its pebbly shoals and its deep pools and to think that it must always have looked the same
– since the Romans, anyway – seemed worth doing and something that one would always remember, but of course, if people didn’t feel like that, you couldn’t make them. Anyway,
Christine was probably a bit upset by the awful parking scene.

‘I’m sorry about when we got here.’

‘That’s all right. You couldn’t help it.’

‘You can’t imagine how awful it is to have your parents still married to each other.’

Christine didn’t answer, and Julie looked anxiously to see why. She had taken off her jeans, and now wore the briefest brown bikini and her stetson. Her feet were bare, her toenails
painted white: she was rubbing oil into her long, wand-like legs, that seemed all skin and narrow bones. Lucky, lucky her.

‘It simply means they don’t have to try. Whereas, if they’d both started again with someone else, they’d all be terrifically friendly out of guilt. Do you think
it’s Change of Life?’

Christine took a glass out of her Greek bag and examined her face. ‘Just their age, I expect. After all, they haven’t got much to look forward to.’ She felt and prodded the
spot. ‘I don’t think old people have any emotional depths. At that age, their whole lives are ruled by boring things like money and comfort. I don’t mean just your parents,’
she added generously, ‘I should think it’s just general lack of sex.’

‘It must be.’ Julie felt that it was most likely that her parents’ mysterious but boring malaise should be due to something equally mysterious – although not boring, of
course. Sex was part of some brave state she passionately aspired to – prevented, she sometimes felt, by the shape of her legs, but in her more optimistic moments feeling that it might just
be a matter of stopping being sixteen. Christine was seventeen and a half, and in love with her English teacher at school. He was also in love with her, but married, and Christine was frightfully
brave about it. Christine knew a terrific amount about sex and her view of marriage was simple and damning. ‘It’s just a way of not having to worry any more,’ she had said at
school . . . Julie had become her confidante last term as her older friend had left. This meant that she could tell Julie everything she wanted to tell, with Julie being in no position to
counter-attack. Nothing whatever had happened to Julie; even her elder sister getting married earlier this summer had been written off by Christine as a bourgeois happening. Julie hadn’t
discovered whether her sister and Simon had had any sex before marriage, and after that, Christine simply hadn’t wanted to know. ‘Mortgage on a house,’ she had scoffed, when Julie had produced this as adult earnest of their intentions. ‘Nothing to do with real love. Just a cart before the horse.’
Julie had felt snubbed, which had taken the form of making her wonder – with a sudden, but very convincing fear – whether she might never
grow up
; simply stay in this outside
inferior state with nobody falling in love with her for years and years – her heart breaking, her virginity intact . . . She was jolly well not going to let Christine get into the mood to
snub her now. ‘Have you heard from Jasper?’ she asked respectfully.

Christine’s face softened to self-interest and she started burrowing in the Greek bag. ‘A fabulous letter,’ she began.

It wasn’t difficult to keep her in a good temper.

‘Can I have a cigarette – quickly – before they come?’

‘Yeah. I can’t read you all of it, of course. But his wife has found out.’ She had produced the bulky letter in its flimsy envelope.

‘Of course you can’t. I understand that,’ said Julie.

To begin with Ruth watched Alan trying to get the beer, but when two German tourists had eased – if that was the word for it – their way in front of him at the
counter, she gave up; tried to relax before the storm. Because now, she felt, she would have to tell him. It seemed to her then that for years she had been seeking excuses to avoid a showdown, as
much as she had sought to appease her guilt. The last excuse (and it ought to be the last) had been their elder daughter’s marriage. Margaret, bless her heart, had always been so average a
child in every way (not bad-looking, not unintelligent, not absolutely without a sense of humour), that Ruth was irrationally confounded when she returned from Leeds with another student who
looked, in jeans, gold-rimmed glasses and long, dry, brown hair so much like her that her mother had thought they might be taken for sisters until he turned out not only to be a man, but her future
son-in-law. Margaret’s wedding had to be gone through with the utmost convention: any hint of a rift between her parents would have upset Margaret; she was training to be a social worker like
Simon, and already felt that the upper-middle classes had no right to emotional upheaval. But that was over.

Then there had been the question –
was
being – of Julie’s summer holiday. At sixteen she still needed the family set-up. A friend from school completed her idea of a
good time, but she was not yet old enough to want to go and stay away on her own. So here they were. Alan had chosen the place; she couldn’t imagine why he always imagined that he liked heat
when every year it made him come out in rashes and bumps and get so cross . . .

Alan at last brought their beers to the table, but then announced that he was going to find a gents. His bringing the beer forced her to get back to her problem – was it a crisis, or not?
She simply could not go on living with him in this angry and sterile atmosphere of pointless, cheerless fault-finding and argument. It was obvious that he was unhappy too, and with the children
nearly finished, surely she could come clean, tell him everything and get the hell out? For a moment she imagined the getting out, but before she was beyond her first picture of it –
Mervyn’s face when she told him that at last she was free – Alan had returned.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, in tones of one to whom the practice was unfamiliar. ‘I feel I ought to – look, I’ve been feeling so awful, you see – the
least I can do is explain a bit . . .’

‘Oh God,’ she thought; ‘he’s ill! He’s got some ghastly illness he’s been trying to face by himself!’ She took another cigarette and handed the packet
to him; her hands, she noticed, had started to shake again.

‘I’ve been having this affair, you see. I expect you knew, really, there didn’t seem any point in actually telling you . . .’

She didn’t say that there had been so many affairs that she no longer distinguished between one and another. He had only once told her about a girl; after it was over, and then he had made
it painfully plain that Melanie had been the one (and only) love of his life. He had been too distraught then for her to bring up the previous occasions. It was before she had even met Mervyn, and
she had thought her own world was coming to an end. After that, she had slipped slowly and painlessly out of love with him . . .

‘. . . for months I didn’t notice her – well, I thought she was a nice girl – jolly good secretary and all that – until one day I came into my office and found her
crying – some bloody bastard had let her down . . .’

Mervyn’s lined and craggy face with eyes both brilliant and kind beneath amazing eyebrows rose up before her – annihilating any impatience, any cruelty – however oblique
– with her husband and his Everyman saga. Mervyn never thought ill of people, and anyway, was not one of those boring men who said all he thought.

‘. . . started by us just having a drink after work: she led an awful cramped little life at home with her parents – she’s never had anyone to talk to before . . . Anyone
decent, I mean,’ he added with a self-deprecating laugh. And I used to sit at home wondering whether to have the casserole with Julie after her homework, or whether to put it back in the oven
and wait.

‘. . . an only child, which always makes that kind of sterile, suburban life worse . . .’

You get only wives too. They don’t have other wives to moan at or gossip with. They have to be alone all day, and all evening too, if their only husband doesn’t come home. You
can’t talk to children; they have to be protected. There’s a case for saying that being an only child is a jolly good preparation for being a wife.