He imagined he heard her father’s questions in the background. He hoped he did; that she would not be so curt for no reason. Better if he had not made the call; if he had only dreamed of doing it.
The house was silent when he let himself in, with the foreboding silence of places struck by disaster and bound to be struck again; criminal neighbourhoods, earthquake zones, the more popular battlefields of Europe. The children had been downstairs and the floor of the living-room was littered with their cast-off toys—plastic hand- grenades, broken railway tracks, battered dolls with torn frocks and twisted necks.
Sylvia had gone up to bed, exhausted by the day. He followed her. She was in her nightdress, sitting on the bed, a torn Christmas wrapper lying beside her. Grotesquely, she waved to him with both hands, like a performing bear. She had found Isabel’s sheepskin mittens.
“You were going to surprise me,” she said coyly. “I wondered what on earth they were.”
“Do they fit?”
“Oh yes, they fit anybody. Lovely. I’ve always wanted some of these.”
What depth of the lover’s imagination are here plumbed? he asked himself. How are they formed and educated, men who give a mistress sheepskin mittens, all one size?
“Why didn’t you get some, then?” he asked her.
“Well…I didn’t like to.”
“I see you managed to get them to bed.”
“Alistair had a bit of a do. Screaming. He broke his sub-machine-gun. They quietened down, though. They’ve worn themselves out. Poor little pets,” she added fondly.
Colin did not comment. His thoughts on his children, heated by alcohol, were unseasonal. Sylvia could not have chosen a less opportune moment, but it seemed to her that nobody could be angry with fecundity on Christmas Day.
“Colin, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.” She watched him take off his tie, roll it up around his hand, thrust it into a drawer. “I’ve started another baby.”
He stared at her, his neck stretched and his chin tilted up, so that he could release the stiff top button of his shirt. For a moment she thought he had simply not heard her. His eyes closed momentarily, and his mouth opened, as if he were being slowly choked. The button slipped through its buttonhole; his hand, trembling a little, stayed in mid-air.
Sylvia held up her sheepskin paws defensively.
“I’ve started another baby.” He turned his back on her and walked to the window. He wanted to stare out into the night. He understood why, in books, people did this, but he pictured them in rooms worth striding across, gazing out onto blasted heathlands silvered by the moon. He laid his hand on the rampant ready-made daisies, on their lilac and pink, and tried to scoop them aside.
“Mind my curtain hooks, love,” Sylvia said.
The estate was shutting down for the night. The screaming children were tranquillised and the tipsy wives flicked off the fluorescent lights and climbed the stairs. Mountains of turkey giblets passed before their dreaming eyes. What will next year bring?
So either, Colin thought, I must tell her now, I must tell her now and pack a bag and go to Florence’s…he felt her behind him, waiting. At the same time, a great weariness crept up and engulfed him. He felt the weight of the winter, of the short sterile days and early dark. Already, his affair was passing into the realms of fantasy. He, a history teacher, a married man; he did not have affairs. He was not attractive to women, he went to evening classes, no one would look at him. Duty with her steel teeth gestured to him from beyond the windowpane, obscenely inviting him to the realms of the just.
“Take your mittens off,” he said. “You look silly.”
Unwillingly, she extricated her hands, which now looked stupidly small and inadequate. She put the mittens on the bed, stroking them with one finger.
“Say you’re pleased,” she asked flatly. “I know you’re not, but just say you are.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only way to go on.”
“Oh, you say that. But we do go on. Pleased or not pleased.”
“It is your baby.”
“I didn’t for a moment suppose it belonged to anybody else.”
“I mean, you are responsible for it. It’s part of you as well as me. Draw the curtains. You’re letting the heat out.”
Colin turned away from the window. He could think of nothing to say. He sat beside her on the bed and patted her knee with small mechanical taps. Still his throat felt constricted, almost bruised. His face twisted in a horrid parody of emotional generosity. A clock struck. Boxing Day.
Evelyn felt so tired. Her arm ached, there was a pain in her chest, her legs felt too heavy to move. She sat by the electric fire and stared at her feet, puffy inside her old bedroom slippers. “You’ll have to get the dinner today,” she said to Muriel.
Muriel was in no mood for cooking. She was busy making her rhymes. The farmer’s wife, the blind clock mice, Jack and Jill and time to kill.
“You’ve got it wrong,” Evelyn said. Fatigue and hunger pinched her into savagery. “You’ve got it all hopelessly mixed up. Sometimes I think you’re a mental case.”
Colin drove Isabel to the field where he had first made love to her, and pulled the car off the road. There seemed no danger of the wheels sticking in the hard frosty ground. He pulled out a small bottle of brandy and handed it to her.
