The Light of Evening (20 page)

Scene Eight

a year had gone by.

Late May. The plane trees in flower, the pollen dust, a chimera in the air, pink and white peonies, their edges furled, in bunches of five outside the greengrocers, the fat buds plump as an egg.

Her husband was in the doorway of the children’s bedroom where she had been writing her novel on the wide windowsill. There it lay, the finished book, a peacock’s feather placed across it, ceremoniously.

He stood, pale, haggard, but in contrast his eyes blazed, as if hot coals had been bedded in them and though still in his pajamas, he had donned his brown mohair jacket over the top. She realized that he must have set his clock early and got up in order to go into the room while she was out to confirm his suspicions.

“So you have achieved your aims,” he said.

“We don’t know yet,” she said, resorting to the plural to appease him.

“A work is completed without deference to a husband, an absurd epic of maudlin childhood is about to be sent to a pimp, before a husband is allowed to correct it,” he said seething.

“You would only tinker with it,” she said fearless, though fearing.

“O pray enlighten me …”

“I wrote ‘It was a country road tarred very blue’ and you deleted it, said there was no such thing as a blue road.”

“There isn’t,” he said savagely.

“There is,” she said savagely back.

It was too much, too much altogether. He almost sprinted across the room and was by the windowsill looking down at the evidence of her betrayal, he who had taken such pains to tutor her, who had sacrificed his own gifts to serve hers, he who knew more about grammar, syntax, style, story than she could muster in a million incarnations, he was aghast at the sight of it, now completed.

“Tear it up … burn it if that’s what you want,” she said defiantly.

“Too late to burn it … your jackass of a publisher, your pimp, has already seen chapters of it, fawned over it, yours is the voice of your lamenting race, O marvel, O deep diabolic crookedness, he is deceived into thinking that you write like an angel, whereas in fact you could not pen a word when I met you.”

“You hate me, don’t you?” she said.

“So now we revert to our habit of hysterics, we depict ourselves as the wronged one, the one who is hated … the little victim.”

“But you do, it seeps out of you.”

“I don’t call it hate … I call it an awakening … you were the girl I chose, pure, loyal, untainted, an exemplary wife, and instead I get a schemer, plotting to pursue her own rotten ambition under the rubric of poetry … what a mockery, what a marriage.”

“So what do we do now?” she asked, daring to meet his eyes.

“He that will eat the kernel must crack the nut,” he said.

“Do your own writing … stop filleting mine,” she said in triumph.

It was too much, something violent and unbalanced was unleashed in him as he stood over the high stack of pages, his hands spread out to eclipse them and almost unknown to himself the words fell out: “You have done it and I will never forgive you.”

She left, not even caring if he did tear it up, because in her

was a feeling of exhilaration as if she had been waiting all her life for this moment.

She sat by the pond; two fishermen on stools sat a short distance away in utter silence, casting their rods again and again to no avail. It was hot, muggy, scarcely any ripples on the water and swarms of minute insects, the same mustard yellow as the pollen. She began to write it again, the words carrying into the soundless air, the sentences in a ream, like a spool unwinding inside her.

The fishermen paused, poured tea from their flasks, and began to talk. She could hear them, yet she was detached from them, like voices in a dream, not impinging
,
as she filled one page after anothe
r
.

“It was in the Blackwater River in southern Ireland,” one began.

“In the Blackwater River in southern Ireland,” his friend answered lugubriously.

“The longest drag I ever had … I let him run … and run.”

“You let him run,” his friend repeated.

“Five hour
s …
going on to six
…
when I saw him turn over
…
saw the old white bell
y …
I knew the game was u
p  …
knew h
e’
d had i
t.”

“The old white belly.”

“Took over an hour to net him … a ten-pounder … turned out he was a hen.”

“A hen … you got the priest on her …”

“I did … what a night in the pub …”

“Big night in the pub was it …”

“Big night … what they call a ceilidh.”

By the time she got up they were silent again, their rods stirring purposelessly on the green, near-luminous slime, under the overhanging willows.

The garage door was propped open and his car was gone. On the oak table in the hall the manuscript lay and beside it a large brown envelope that served as his governance to let her send it.

Scene Nine

she had taken from him that which was rightly his. He was convinced of it. Aloud he remembered what he had meant to write, what he should have written, what he had not written in his midwifery to her.

The logbook he kept and made no effort to hide had for its title “Little Eleanora.”

Besides hating the countryside she wanted to meet more people and so we moved and there she found her lothario, crazed to have something in print, skittish sentimental rubbish, which at night after she had gone to bed I took the trouble to work on, to perfect. I had left my beloved Lake House to come and live in a gray suburb of London for what. Apparently to make it possible for my wife to conduct an affair with her publisher so that he would publish her books. The machinery was in full motion, the greatest publicity charade ever, advance booklets about her, specially appealing photographs taken of her, her name spread far and wide, laudation for work rewritten by me over and over again, whole chapters written from start to finish when her pen petered out or she was too puerile to handle difficult scenes.

Early in our marriage she began to show periods of hysterical jealousy and these states began to take a regular pattern

and it was not long before I began to be aware of her personality change, a personality change of a schizophrenic nature, intense depression and quarrelsomeness, feelings of persecution, periodic outbursts, and deciding that her husband was not nice, was not kind, was in fact “cruel.” The pattern she set up of compulsive deceit and self-interest, of jealousy and paranoia, naturally began to corrode a relationship that might have been the only saving thing in her life. She was led relentlessly on by sickness and by a sick vanity and ambition. Nothing I could do would stop her. Her name would be in lights. Sooner or later everyone has to face the consequences of her or his action. Seeing her over the years from the girl I first knew or rather did not know to the kind of female monster she has become has been like watching someone slowly die without being able to do anything about it.

I do not even doubt that at times she hates herself, surely she must seeing the harm she is inflicting on others, but these childish pangs of conscience are short-lived, so entrenched is she in her pathological state. She is incapable of working on herself, on digging herself out of the hole of her own emotional slaughter, yet with the peasant cunning that she is weaned on, she hangs on, she chooses to remain married and why, because she would be nobody, the tosh she writes and is determined to write, there being idiots as gullible as herself who want to read it, this tosh is made bearable only by virtue of that husband’s honing of it, making it so to speak, intelligible.

There is a saying that we are responsible for our own faces after forty. At twenty-five her face and her whole appearance has cheapened. Whither the bloom. Unloved and unlovable, her whole life has been the crooked using of others. She uses me and no doubt she will use my children in time to come to blacken my name.

Scene Ten

as they foregathered that summer morning at the coach station and stood in huddles, eyeing each other with a shyness and the wariness of people not accustomed to travel, Eleanora upon hearing a woman say, “I think, Mavis, you’ll see big changes in us all before the week is out” could not but feel it was a prophecy of some kind.

Some in the party knew each other as they worked in the same factory in Dundee, joking, bantering:
aye, John, aye, Muriel, aye, Geordie.
Others were from various parts of England, the men somewhat stiff and untalkative in their best suits, women in flowered dresses with straw hats and perms, rummaging in their rush baskets, asking of their baskets if they had forgotten this or that and the evident relief at finding a bottle of pills or a crochet pattern. Two women were thrilled to discover that they were called Violet, lamenting that it had gone out of fashion and deciding that they would be Violet One and Violet Two for the journey. Jesse, a youth in a leather jacket, a gold sleeper in one ear and leather thonging around his neck, shook uncontrollably, bit on his cigarette, and covered up his nervousness with the same salute to all:
no sweat, John, no sweat, Muriel, no sweat, Geordie.

Standing under the sooted glass roof of the coach station, none could have guessed how stifling the journey, how claustrophobic, how grating the voices, and how for the smallest things tempers would flare then fester, or that the inns along the way would be so nondescript, sunless dining rooms in which they

would mutiny over the dishes they were served, poky bedrooms merely partitioned from one another, up at cock-crow for the next leg of the sweltering journey.

Gianni their guide, with jet-black hair and black molasses eyes, busied himself, making himself known to all, helping the stouter ladies up the steps
—
“For you anything, English lady; after you, English man”
—
unctuous in his immaculate white suit with the fresh carnation in his lapel. He waxed theatrical in his welcome address, his “wilkommen” as he put it, saying what a privilege it was to be in the company of English and Scottish travelers, with, no doubt, the fabled English and Scottish conquering spirit. How fascinating for him to be the one to awaken them to a new life, new dreams, new sights, art galleries, churches, restaurants, the rugged scenery, the flora and fauna, glaciers and peaks, then rest and relaxation in their alpine castle, clean bracing mountain air, not to mention haute cuisine and tęte ŕ tętes by candlelight.

The holiday was her idea, other couples went on holiday, other couples were reconciled on holiday, holidays took the poisons out of everyday life. The children, hearing that they were going to her mother’s, were unabashedly happy, believing that their tree house would be unharmed and that all the magic of the previous summers would be restored to them. Her husband had booked the trip and all she knew was that it entailed journeying through several European countries and ending up in a mountain resort in Switzerland, all for a ludicrously small sum.

London suburbia, occasional parks, high streets with funeral parlors and bespoke tailoring, a chip shop, a cinema, another chip shop, ahead of them the continent that few had been in, but one man’s father had fought and died at Flanders. Would they visit the fields of Flanders? No one knew.

Her husband had leaned back on the headrest, his handkerchief over his eyes, yet even in sleep flinching when his arm brushed against hers. The driver, determined to discharge them as speedily as possible, drove insanely, the vehicle like some

runaway beast, trees on the horizon skidding before their eyes, treacherous roads, treacherous bends, shouts and inducements to slow down wasted on him and once on a swerve almost mowing down a group of cyclists, knights in identical black armor, who, fixed to their gleaming vehicles, hurled fists and torrents of abuse at him.

On and on and sometimes it seemed to Eleanora as if they had reversed their journey, the same hayfields, the same cornfields, poppies in a pink and crimson swoosh, women with kerchiefs around their heads, stooped over their labors, a solitary bird, a hawk or a buzzard, way way up, nearly motionless in the hazed sunlight. The farmhouses so snug, coral roofs set among apple orchards and in the narrow streets of small towns pedestrians ran for cover as the bus tore through, raising swirls of thick fawn dust in its wake.

You drive for one hour. For a lifetime. The little towns shuttered and somnolent. Your one companion Chekhov’s “The Steppe.” You are with Yegorushka, the knowing boy of nine, looking and listening, with the cheeky coachman Deniska, a wagon party of merchants, and a few holy men, expatiating on life and learning, petrels with their wild joyful cries, bustards either battling or mating in the blue heavens, the endless brown-hued steppe, the parched plains, the windmills like sails, then at night by a fire in the yards of the posting inns, bloodcurdling tales of robbers, everything new and strange, made stranger by mist or by moon or by storm, sky thoughts and grass thoughts, the melancholy and wonder of the little boy seeping into you and suddenly a realization, the botched, subordinate, and puerile instants of your life starting up before you, and turning to the husband who is your enemy, who has come half-awake, who guesses in you the frenzied and futile schemes to leave him, to rob him of his children, to wrap them in the garments of forgetting, you say in a voice that is perhaps theatrical: “To the steppes, for there’s dying to be done,” and he winks a crooked satyr’s wink.