Nest of Sorrows (18 page)

‘Well!’ He swivelled abruptly on his heel and stared through the large rear window. ‘And you never told me. You never tell me anything. But this? Something as important as this? You never told me,’ he repeated lamely.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ He stared at her over his shoulder. ‘Why ever not?’

Kate took a deep and shuddering breath. ‘I’m already a freak. You and your mother have made that plain enough in the past. So I forbade the doctor to tell you unless I became comatose or seriously ill. The termination was judged to be necessary, believe me.’ Her shoulders were suddenly straighter. ‘Though I might have wanted it anyway.’

He took a step in her direction. ‘You would have wanted the baby?’

‘No. The abortion. I know it’s wrong, and I probably couldn’t have gone through with it. But for once, I was grateful for my inadequate pancreas.’ Endlessly slow seconds ticked away. ‘I’m not happy, Geoff. I don’t seem to want anything any more. No more children, nothing to fasten me . . .’ Just in time, she bit off ‘to you’. ‘Sometimes, I’ve even thought of taking myself off somewhere, leaving the insulin behind, just . . . oh . . . I don’t know . . .’

‘Suicide?’ There was shock and what sounded like real concern in his tone.

‘Not quite. Just to see what would happen, let nature take its course, as they say.’ She checked herself. She had seldom confided in him, never since those first few happier years. Confiding in him was confiding in Dora, who had a communication system that might have put the daily press to shame.

‘Kate! You must not think like that. It’s stupid and dangerous.’

‘This is what’s stupid and dangerous.’ She swept an arm across the room. ‘We shouldn’t be together. You’re not happy either. My misery is ruining everybody’s life here.’

He ran to her and clutched at her hands. ‘Stop this now! I’ve told you before that I will not listen to such talk. Things will get better. Mother’s going to move into the flat soon, and she’ll take over the lighter housework. I’ll get a woman in for the heavy stuff. And there is no need for you to teach. Why, with a serious illness like diabetes, do you insist on continuing to do that taxing job? Why?’

She pulled away from him. ‘That’s it, treat me like a freak again. Good old Kate, she can’t help it, have you heard she’s diabetic? And poor Geoff, what a brick, having to live with such a sick and difficult woman. No! I won’t have it! And bring your mother here by all means, but don’t expect me to put up with her!’

‘The flat’s separate.’

‘Separate? Her house is separate now – five miles separate – but she still haunts me. What about my poor mother, eh? Don’t you think she’d like a flat on the edge of the countryside? But the difference between my mother and yours is greed. My mam is not a greedy woman, she expects little and gets nothing. Your old girl grabs and I cannot stand the woman!’

‘Stop this! Stop! You’re becoming hysterical again. Mother needs us. Her heart isn’t good and she needs a reason to . . .’

‘There’s nothing wrong with her heart. Her heart is about as healthy as a brand new pneumatic drill. I will not have her fussing around me. You know how morbid she gets about illness, how fascinated she is by everybody’s symptoms. You mustn’t tell her about my insulin.’

‘All right, calm down. Now. When did you last see Dr Coakley?’

‘I’ve given him up along with the gin, he was becoming just another bad habit.’

He swallowed. ‘That’s a damned good man, highly recommended for managers with stress . . .’

‘I’m not having a shrink, Geoff. He digs about in my head with a pick and shovel, trying to find out what I had for breakfast on a certain Monday in 1942, asking me stupid questions about my difficult relationship with my father. And not content with that, he wanted to plug me into the mains like a bloody kettle! I was fine till you sent me to him. Just because I don’t dance to your tune, a tune invented by your wretched mother, I’m mad. You don’t give a damn about me, Geoff Saunders. Only my performance. What am I? One of Pavlov’s dogs?’

‘Where are your Valium?’ He was suddenly pale with fear.

‘Down the toilet with your son!’ Her voice cracked, so she deliberately took some deep breaths. ‘Listen to me. This one last time, listen.’ She walked away and sat down on a chair by the front window. ‘We talked. During what I decided was to be my final appointment with him, we really talked. He knew I wouldn’t take the electro-convulsive therapy, wasn’t really sure anyway of how it might affect my diabetes, so he had to resort to treating me like a human being. Not a woman, a person this time. At the end of our talk, he was quite surprised. Perhaps he’s actually read some books at last, maybe he realized that you’ve wasted your money all along. “Mrs Saunders,” he said, “I have watched you now for thirty-five minutes. Your blink rate is correct and you make bloody good sense. You are certainly not psychotic,” he said. It’s taken him twelve years to find that out! Then he decided that I wasn’t even terribly neurotic. Don’t you see? He told me to go home and look at my life, analyse it, treat myself, much as I treat my physical illness. And I’ve done just that – I can handle my own therapy. There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s . . . it’s . . .’

‘Me? Is it me? I’m too old for you, is that it?’

‘No! Please don’t think that, Geoff! I won’t have you thinking that! It’s us. It’s you and me together. Like some chemicals, we simply don’t mix.’

He sank on to the sofa. ‘I see. Then what are we going to do about it?’

‘“We” don’t do anything. I work it out. I’m the one with the problem. You haven’t changed, love. You’re still the man I married. It’s me – I’m changing all the time, don’t know what I want, don’t know where the hell I’m going. But that’s not insanity. It’s female maturation and I can’t help it.’

‘So . . . so none of it’s my fault?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t absolve you completely. You haven’t exactly improved my lot, nor has your mother. Always putting me down, forever undermining my confidence. Of course she does it because she has to be top dog at any price, needs all the attention she can get. She’s stupid. But you, well, I’d say you’re afraid of me.’

‘What?’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Afraid of you?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded cautiously. After years of deliberately sitting on all of this, of holding it tight to herself, the whole thing had taken on the massive proportions of a long-dormant volcano. She must not go too far; she must not let things get right out of hand. A worm should turn quietly, not to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning! ‘I don’t do your bidding,’ she said softly. ‘I’m not a servant like your mother was and I don’t fit in with your Victorian concept of womanhood. It’s probably not all your fault, it’s more likely to be hers. Your mother has been to women’s liberation what the iceberg was to the
Titanic
. I cannot be like her. And you have been wrong in trying to mould me.’ She folded her arms and leaned back in an attitude of great calm. ‘You’re afraid because I’m a professional woman with a degree of ability. That is a challenge to your supreme masculinity.’

‘What absolute rot!’

‘You don’t want me working. You know I have a good chance of a headship, so you want me here, trapped and ordinary. Geoff, you really ought to have married someone like Pristine. She’s good with a feather duster and doesn’t know her Cartland from her Trollope. It would have suited you to have a wife who could scarcely read and write, because you have an inferiority complex. In order to prop yourself up, you need the reassurance of a so-called lesser being. Well, I’m not a lesser being and I’ve no intention of becoming one.’

He sighed loudly. ‘I suppose there’s no point in arguing, though I never heard so much rubbish in my life.’ He paused. ‘Are you . . . are you going to leave me?’

‘I don’t know,’ she lied. Because she had to lie now, just as she had to leave.

‘What about Melanie?’

‘Again, I don’t know. Unlike you, I don’t pretend to have the answers. There is nothing positive here for me, and there’s much that’s negative. Your mother in permanent residence will be the icing . . .’

‘Then I’ll keep her away!’

‘No point. Nothing can make matters worse, and you know damned well that she won’t stay away for two days together. No. Life’s bad. I had to make a terrible decision the other day, a decision that involved a poor little unborn soul. After that fiasco, your mother is easy meat. I can’t stand the woman, but she can’t hurt me. Not now. Nothing can hurt me now. Because, you see, I’ve already gone away in the truest sense. Now that you know everything about how I feel, well, it’s rather like being divorced already.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’

‘Nothing at all.’

His head was bowed now as he spoke. ‘I don’t know how I feel about you any more, Kate. You’ve changed so much . . .’ His voice tailed away as if he were lost in some private memory. ‘Can’t we keep it going?’ he asked then. ‘On the surface at least?’

‘Why? To save face, to stop you appearing a failure? Look, I know you have other women. Go off with one of them and make it look like your decision. It won’t bother me. As my mother always taught me, pride won’t pay the rent.’

‘Bloody hell,’ he cursed quietly. ‘Poor Melanie.’

Kate watched Jemima waddling across the road to the brook. Jemima looked after her ducklings, just as Kate had, whenever Dora had allowed it, seen to Melanie’s physical requirements. But Kate didn’t always like Melanie. Obliquely, she found herself wondering whether or no the duck always liked her offspring.

‘Are you listening to me, Kate?’

‘What? Sorry . . .’

‘I said you can’t take Melanie with you if you go.’

‘No.’

‘And even your daughter cannot hold you here?’

‘Stop trying to blackmail me! She’s thirteen now. It’s too late for me to put right the ruination performed by your mother. In fact, Melanie is so much like Dora at times that I almost dislike her too.’

‘I see.’ His voice held an icy tone. ‘So none of us is required by you, is that it? And we’re to sit here in the pending tray until you decide whether we’re incoming or outgoing?’

‘Shut up.’

‘You always were a selfish and arrogant bitch, Kate. Too good for Ladies’ Circle, too good to support me at Round Table. I was actually relieved to turn forty! And for the last eight years, you’ve shown no interest in my Rotary work. Even my job is a bloody joke to you, isn’t it? All those remarks about American companies and how you hoped they’re better run than the war was. These things are noticed. Your sense of so-called humour is twisted to the point of being dangerous, Kate. What makes you so different? What sets you apart from all the other wives?’

She gazed at him steadily. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I sure as hell am going to find out!’

She spent the rest of the evening with Maureen, Phil having taken his sister to meet some remote cousin up in Rochdale.

‘I can’t go on,’ wailed Kate. ‘I’m sick of men. My father was useless and made me feel useless, Geoff treats me almost as badly.’

‘Stop feeling so bloody sorry for yourself. You got yourself pregnant by him, didn’t you? How the hell can you get pregnant by a man you loathe? I couldn’t sleep with Phil if I didn’t love him.’

Kate half-smiled. ‘You’re so naive, Mo. I pretend he’s somebody else. Most women pretend their husbands are somebody else, don’t they?’

‘Eh?’ Maureen’s eyes were round with shock. ‘I don’t. I’ve only ever needed Phil. Who do you pretend about?’

‘Someone I used to know. Another spineless bastard, but at least he was gifted at something.’

‘Good God!’

They stared into the fire, each lost in her own private thoughts. Maureen was worried, Kate sensed that. And it was nothing to do with the abortion or with the topic of conversation tonight. Whatever it was, Maureen was not yet ready to open up. When she did become ready, Kate would be the first to hear about the trouble.

But what was she going to do about her own mess? Where could she go, who would take her in? Rachel? Oh, Rachel would never turn her back, not completely, not on her own daughter. But Kate had the need for a completely fresh start in a place of her own, yet she had not the money to buy a house. It would have to be rented. Where? Where would she go?

Maureen broke into this glum reverie. ‘What do you do when he’s unfaithful?’

‘Why? Is Phil at it now?’

‘No!’ The denial was rather swift and emphatic.

Kate raised her shoulders and arms in a hopeless gesture. ‘What can I do? What could I ever have done about it? Of course, I blamed myself at first. I wasn’t a good wife, wasn’t lively enough in bed, couldn’t keep him interested. It took a long time for me to realize that I didn’t count, except as an image of a wife. No matter who he’d married, Geoff would have been unfaithful. It’s in his nature, it’s his personal weakness. So I’ve tended to ignore it.’

‘How? How can you ignore such an enormous problem?’

‘By stopping caring. It was an act of will, Mo. Funnily enough, it had precious little to do with my emotions. I just decided not to worry when he was away. Now, I don’t even think about it except when I need to throw it in his face. Of course, I never speak of it in front of his mother, she simply wouldn’t believe me. It would be nutty old Kate all over again, imagining things, getting it all wrong.’

Maureen sighed. ‘You’ve had a hard life, love, what with your father and all.’

‘Yes, but I’m still here. I do have some faith in myself, you know. Somewhere, buried under piles of rubbish in my brain, there’s a lot of personal ambition and drive. It won’t be long now, Mo. The tide of my life is shifting. As Macmillan said just a few months ago, there’s a wind of change.’

‘What the hell are you up to now, Kate? Wasn’t the abortion enough?’

‘The abortion was just the beginning.’

Kate refused a lift from Maureen, choosing to walk the half mile or so that separated their two houses. Beside the brook, she stopped and searched the twilight for Jemima. ‘Where do you go at night,’ she whispered. ‘And is there room for me?’

Maureen Carter ran past the
Golden Lion
, her bright bleached hair streaming behind her like the wake of a boat. For once, she took no leisurely joy from her surroundings, didn’t care to study the Victorian village hall, the beautiful church spire, the rows of ancient gravestones. She paused for breath beside St Peter’s boundary wall, a hand straying along grey stones as she fought for breath and composure. Across the way, the top of a familiar reddish head was just visible in the doorway of the supermarket, the rest of her friend’s body being obscured by a gaggle of gossiping females in the shop’s broad entrance. It must be Kate, had to be Kate! And she had better be coming out, not going in to start on the week’s list. ‘Kate!’ she yelled, her tone wavering, ‘Kate, it’s me, over here!’