The Silent Tide (32 page)

She was falling into sleep when Hugh said in her ear, ‘I wonder if you’d do something for me while I’m away in London.’

‘Mmm,’ she said drowsily. ‘What?’

‘I’ve got to a tricky part in my novel. Could I show it to you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, waking up a bit.

He hadn’t told her anything about his writing for a while, had brushed questions about it away, and she’d been hurt. After all, it was the thing that had brought them together in the first place. She’d worried that he thought less of her professional opinion now that she was his wife. Did he view her differently? It wasn’t a topic she felt she could explore with him so she’d stayed silent. In one sense it was perfectly natural that their relationship had evolved into something else. She’d told herself he wanted emotional support from her now, not criticism.

‘Are you sure you want me to, though?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘I need to know I’ve got certain things right.’

She found the stack of typed pages left for her on the breakfast table the next day, after he’d gone. Since there was nothing else urgent she had to do for McKinnon & Holt, she said firmly to Hugh’s mother that she had promised to do something Very Important for Hugh, and shut herself away in their bedroom all morning, where she sat in bed, ate apples and read.

As before, the writing engaged her at once. He’d given the novel a title,
The Silent Tide,
and redrafted the early chapters according to her suggestions all those months ago before their marriage. Nanna emerged now, through the male narrator’s eyes, as a vividly drawn character, strong, passionate and individual, but unselfconscious, too, not concerned by others’ expectations of her. Isabel read, enthralled, how she forged a career as a newspaper journalist, keen to report hard news, while encountering resistance from her male colleagues. And then – Isabel turned a page – she fell in love with one of them, the narrator.

Soon after this, Isabel read something that tugged at her memory, a phrase: ‘I feel as if I’m two people,’ Nanna was saying. ‘One is the real me, and the other is the person men expect me to be. Why can’t I just be myself ?’

She remembered saying something like that to Hugh once, soon after discovering she was pregnant. Never mind, it was hardly of great originality. She read on.

Every now and then she’d stop, arrested by something Nanna said or did, some detail of her life that seemed faintly familiar, though the actual words were changed, had become part of the seamless voice of the fiction. Yet they were about her, about Isabel herself, she began to realise. Hugh was writing something utterly magnificent and important
but he had used her as his model.

She reached a description of Nanna getting up in the morning to go to work, and Isabel remembered with clarity that time in early pregnancy when she’d been doing that exact same thing, examining her stockings for holes, complaining about her mother-in-law, and she’d noticed Hugh scribbling some notes.

A variety of emotions passed through her at this realisation, but above all, shock. She hadn’t asked to become part of his book – indeed, he hadn’t asked her permission to do this – but now it was clear that all the time he must be observing her, secretly recording his impressions. She couldn’t quite take it all in.

Unable for the moment to go on, she laid the pages in two piles on the counterpane, the bigger pile that she’d read and the smaller one she hadn’t, and eased herself off the bed. She roamed about the room, picking items up and placing them down again, then sat on the stool in front of the dressing table and stared at her reflection.

She hadn’t troubled to look at herself closely for a while, not generally liking what pregnancy was doing to her body, but now she did, imagining how Hugh saw her, how he’d describe her now. Fat and pasty, she thought. Her hair badly needed cutting and the auburn waves were difficult to tame. She picked up a brush and began to tidy it as best she could. Probably Jacqueline would be able to recommend a hairdresser, she thought, as she gazed at the result with dismay. She threw down the brush, unable to stop thinking about Hugh’s novel.

If he’d taken notes then they must be somewhere. He was never without a small black notebook, and would have the latest with him today, but he must keep the old ones in his study. She got up and hastened downstairs, almost tripping in her hurry.

In the study she felt she was intruding, then it struck home that he had been intruding on her by writing about her. She went straight to the desk. There were three drawers on each side and one long one across the middle where he kept blotting paper and other stationery. In one of the deep bottom drawers was a bottle of brandy, half-empty. A smaller drawer was stuffed with various letters and receipts. These weren’t what she was after, though, so she scooped them out to check underneath, then shoved them all back, hoping he wouldn’t spot that they’d been moved. In another drawer she smiled when she found a box of liquorice sweets, one of his weaknesses, but nothing of real interest. She turned and looked about the room. There was a big filing cabinet behind the door. It was locked, but she remembered seeing the key and recovered it from the desk.

In the top drawer of the cabinet was a stack of bank statements and, at last, a pile of his old notebooks. She picked up the first one and flicked through the pages. The shorthand wasn’t always easy to decipher, but in between jottings about conversations overheard, and descriptions of strangers, were sections about ‘N’. ‘N’ was described variously as having ‘bright coral lips, slightly parted, plumply beguiling’, as ‘throwing herself into a tantrum when she burned some fried chicken’. That was unfair, it hadn’t been a tantrum, she’d merely cursed a bit. She read on with increasing horror. There were comments on episode after episode of their life together, and not all of them were flattering.

Finishing that notebook, she dropped it back in the drawer and picked up another. The first page fell open at a stinging little comment about Alex Berec being ‘old womanish’. Hugh had drawn a little cartoon of Berec, too, which exaggerated his beaky nose. It was perceptive but cruel, she thought, remembering how she’d last seen poor Berec.

Two notebooks in, she suddenly couldn’t bear it any longer. She replaced everything in the drawer as it had been, locked it and returned the key to its hiding place. She sank down into the baggy leather armchair, where she hugged a cushion for comfort and wondered what she should do next. The discovery had shifted her view of their marriage. Hugh had been observing her, like a creature in a bell jar. She remembered how she used to joke with him sometimes when they went to some stuffy party, or if something unplanned happened like being stuck on a bus in traffic, that even if they didn’t enjoy it there might be some ‘good material’ in it. All human relationships might be for a writer as shiny loot to a magpie. She knew this, but the irony was that now she herself was loot, she didn’t like it at all. How could she be natural, her husband’s other half, if he offered her up in this way to the public view, in a book to be discussed, as universal modern woman? It made her feel grubby.

She had just determined that she’d return upstairs and finish the manuscript when there came a knock, then the door opened a crack and her mother-in-law’s head appeared. Lavinia didn’t see Isabel at first, but when she did she came in, a look of suspicion on her face. ‘Oh, what are you doing in here?’ she said.

Isabel couldn’t help feeling guilty. ‘I was checking something for Hugh and felt tired,’ she explained. This was more or less true. Her mother-in-law’s face softened.

‘And no wonder. I was going to ask if you’d like to come and look at some things for the baby, but perhaps you should go back to bed. Mrs Catchpole could take you a cup of tea.’

‘I’m better now. What did you want me to see?’

‘Come,’ Hugh’s mother said, and Isabel edged herself out of the chair and followed.

Mrs Morton walked stiffly ahead of her up the stairs and along the landing, and opened a door at the end to a room Isabel hadn’t been in before, but which she knew was full of junk. She gazed about. There was an old standard lamp with a heavy tasselled shade, several odd chairs with broken arms or unravelling seats, a couple of ancient trunks. She shivered. It was noticeably colder in this room. Hugh’s mother picked her way through the jumble to get to a huge built-in cupboard on the back wall.

There are one or two things in here that might be suitable,’ she said, pulling open the double doors. ‘Ah, Hugh’s old cot. He can take that out for us.’ The pieces of it had been neatly stacked against the back of the cupboard. A set of shelves ran down one side and Hugh’s mother began exploring the contents of a cardboard box.

‘Can I help?’ Isabel offered. Her mother-in-law was coughing at the dust.

‘No, no,’ the woman replied. ‘I’m seeing what’s here.’

Behind them, something started buzzing at the window and Isabel turned round to see a bumblebee. Poor thing. She went over and managed to get the window open to let it out. On her way back she glanced at a large painted fire screen propped against the wall opposite the door they’d come through. From this angle Isabel saw that it half-covered a second door. A door presumably to an inner room. She stepped across to look more closely.

‘What’s in here?’ she asked and her hand went to the door knob.

‘You’ll find it’s locked. It’s private.’ Hugh’s mother sounded so fierce that Isabel snatched her hand away.

The woman was holding what looked like a dress box in her arms. ‘Now,’ she said, lifting the lid. ‘There are some cot sheets in here. And that case up there,’ she nodded towards the top shelf of the cupboard. ‘I’m sure there are some matinée sets in it. One hopes that the moth hasn’t got to them. Can you reach?’

Isabel pulled down the small suitcase indicated. The little costumes, wrapped in paper, were intact, though they smelled unpleasantly of mothballs.

‘I can’t think what I did with that sailor suit Hugh hates so much. He looked perfectly sweet in it when he was two.’

‘The baby won’t need it at once,’ Isabel said. She knew she ought to feel grateful for all this, but instead she felt depressed. None of this old stuff felt anything to do with her or any baby she might have.

The dust and the smell of naphthalene was making both of them cough.

‘That’ll do for now,’ Hugh’s mother managed to say.

As they left the room, Isabel’s eyes rested on the locked door. What was beyond it that her mother-in-law didn’t want her to know about?

She spent the rest of the morning washing the little woollen jackets and matching leggings in soapy warm water, gently squeezing out the excess. As she pegged them up to dry outside she glanced up at the house. A thought occurred to her. She started counting the windows on the upper floor. Hers and Hugh’s room looked out to the front. At the back there were two bedrooms with a bathroom in between then a blank wall stretching under the eaves to the right. The window of the box room was to the front. She fiddled with the sleeve of the last matinée jacket, and pinned it with the peg she took from between her teeth. It was strangely satisfying to see the little costumes dancing on the line. The matter of the secret room still bothered her. She scanned the downstairs windows to make sure her mother-in-law wasn’t spying on her, then left the wicker washing basket and strolled round to the front of the house to scrutinise the windows on that side.

Yes, next to Lavinia Morton’s room was the window to the box room. So where was the window to the room beyond the locked door?

An ancient wisteria grew up the side of the house there, snaking around the box-room window. The flowers had long blown, but the leaves were lush, and in between them she glimpsed something she hadn’t seen before, a small round window like a porthole. The glass glinted, opaque. From that moment on, Isabel’s curiosity as to what lay in the room behind it began to grow.

After lunch, she retired to her bedroom and took up Hugh’s manuscript once more, finding a stub of pencil to write notes. It was again disturbing to read about herself. Like her, Nanna had become pregnant soon after her marriage and struggled to maintain her normal work patterns, though in Nanna’s case she received no sympathy from her male colleagues. The narrator, Nanna’s husband, had got himself involved in some political intrigue that involved Russian spies, a plot line which Isabel thought worked well, and so skipped over. Instead she found herself marking again and again infelicities in his observations about Nanna. The script ended quite abruptly at a point where Nanna had to all intents and purposes been fired from her job. Isabel lay back and considered this scene, thinking how Hugh could make it more convincing. Then she turned back to the beginning and started to read again, making more detailed notes for Hugh. She was still angry with him, but at the same time she was caught up in Nanna’s story and desperately wanted the character to emerge sympathetically. She worked all afternoon.

Hugh returned from London the following evening somewhat out of sorts. When they sat down to a dinner of roast mutton, he brushed off enquiries with, ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘Come now, Hugh,’ his mother said, unrolling her napkin. ‘I can always tell with you.’

‘Oh, it’s simply . . . You remember my story about the ageing impresario? Well, at the last moment the magazine wants alterations or they won’t put it in. It’s bad form, if you ask me.’

‘I think you should stick to your guns, dear,’ Hugh’s mother told him. ‘More potatoes, Isabel? You are eating for two, you know.’

Isabel, who already had three potatoes on her plate, shook her head. ‘But it’s a shame if it means they won’t print it,’ she told her mother-in-law. ‘What exactly does the editor want you to do, Hugh?’

‘That’s the trouble. It’s not the same editor, it’s a new man. He thinks the ending should be more decisive. Says the readers won’t understand it as it is.’

‘I should just insist,’ Hugh’s mother said, liberally piling salt on the edge of her plate.

‘Mother,’ Hugh said, ‘it doesn’t work like that.’