‘Marriage is brainwashing. Not necessarily a bad thing. Your brain could do with a wash. Oh God, I feel so tired. That bloody long drive-I think your mind’s going, you’re getting senile, you’re living in a dream world, a rather nasty one. Shall I tell you something to wake you up?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘You say you “always wanted a son”. That’s just a sentimental lie, you didn’t want trouble, you didn’t want to know. You never put yourself in a situation where you could have a
‘All right, you’ve had your say, now go.’
‘I haven’t started yet. I never told you this at the time, I thought I never would. You made me pregnant. I got rid of the child.’
I drew a circle in the dust on the radiator of the car. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because you weren’t there to tell, you’d gone, gone off with Lizzie or whoever was the next dream girl. God, the sickening casual brutality of men-the women who are left behind to make agonizing decisions alone. I made that decision alone. Christ, how I wish I hadn’t done it. I was crazy. I did it partly out of hatred of you. Why the hell didn’t I keep that child. He’d have been nearly grown up by now.’
‘Rosina-’
‘And I’d have taught him to hate you-that would have been a consolation too.’
‘I’m sorry-’
‘Oh, you’re sorry. And I daresay I wasn’t the only one. You broke up my marriage deliberately, industriously, zealously, you worked at it. Then you walk off and leave me with nothing, with less than nothing, with that horrible crime which I had to commit by myself, I cried for months-for years-about that-I’ve never stopped crying.’ Her dark eyes filled with tears for a second, and then she seemed to magic them away. She opened the door of the car.
‘Oh-Rosina-’
‘I hate you, I loathe you, you’ve been a devil in my mind ever after-’
‘Look, all right, I left you, but you drove me to it, you were responsible too. Women’s Lib hasn’t stopped women from putting all the blame on us when it suits them. You tell me this terrible story now to-’
‘Oh shut up. What’s the name of that female?’
‘You mean-Hartley-?’
‘Is that her surname?’
‘No, her surname is Fitch.’
‘Fitch, OK. Mr Fitch, here I come.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘He lives here, doesn’t he? I shall find out where he lives and I shall go and console him. It’ll do him good to meet a real live woman instead of an old rag-bag. He’s probably forgotten what women are like. I won’t hurt him, I’ll just cheer him up, I’ll do him less harm than you’re doing her. I’ve got to have some amusement on my holiday. I thought of seducing pretty-boy, but it would be too easy. The father would be a far more interesting project. After all, life is full of surprises. The only thing that’s become absolutely dull, dull, dull is you, Charles. Dull. Goodbye.’
She got into the car and slammed the door. The car shot off like a red rocket in the direction of the village.
I stared after her. Soon there was nothing on the road but a cloud of dust and above it the pale blue sky. For a short while I felt that I should go mad if I reflected too much on what Rosina had told me about what happened in the past.
The rest of the day (before something else happened in the evening) passed like a feverish dream. The weather, sensing my mood, infected by it perhaps, became hotter but with that sinister breathless heat that betokens a thunderstorm. The light was darkened although the sun blazed from a cloudless sky. I felt weak and shivery as if I were developing the ’flu. My impression increased that perhaps Hartley was ill. Her eyes glittered, her hands were hot. Her stuffy smelly room had become that of an invalid. She was rational, not frenzied, she actually argued with me. I begged her to come downstairs, to come outside into the sun and air, but she lay back as if exhausted at the very thought. Even her rationality had something unnerving about it, as if it were the reasoning of a quiet maniac or an exercise undertaken simply for its own sake. She constantly said she wanted to go home, that there was no alternative, and so on and so on, but she seemed to me to lack the final real will to go. I kept on trying to regard this absence of will as a hopeful factor, but somehow now it was beginning to frighten me.
And Ben’s silence was getting me down. What did it mean? Had he decided on reflection that he did not want Hartley back? Was he settling down to a happy bachelor life with the dog? Or had he some secret girl friend to whom in relief he had now run away? Was he making complex plans either to rescue her or to take some terrible revenge on me? Had he summoned some roughs, old army friends perhaps, who would arrive any moment to beat me up? Had he gone to a lawyer? Or was he just playing a subtle game, waiting for my nerve to break, waiting for
I was now trying very hard to steel myself to take Hartley to London, to drag her to the car, to delude her by telling her she was going home. I felt the time had come to do this, although I was far from sure that it was the right move. Shruff End might have ‘bad vibes’ as Titus put it, but it was my home, I was used to it. And here I could communicate quietly with Hartley, there was a thin pure stream of communication, especially when we talked about the past. In an odd way we were at ease together. Surely there must soon be some break-through, some dialectical change. What on earth would I do in London with a distraught weeping Hartley in that awful little flat with the chairs piled on the table and the china not unpacked? To
However, since Rosina’s visit, Titus and Gilbert had been in a state of subdued revolt, they were mutinous. I think Ben’s silence was upsetting them too, in different ways. They wanted a showdown, a denouement. They wanted an end to the situation which would relieve their minds. Gilbert was simply frightened of Ben, afraid of fights and thuggery. What Titus felt I was unsure. Sometimes I felt terrified of what Titus might be thinking. Since Hartley’s arrival I had not talked to him properly. I ought to have done, I wanted to do so, but I had not. It was possible that Titus was in an agony of tension and indecision, wanting and yet not wanting to run to his father, to be reconciled, or even to suffer punishment, to escape from his mother, to escape from me. The possibility of anything so awful in the boy’s state of mind made me afraid to probe him when I had so much else to envisage and decide. Meanwhile he had withdrawn, a little sulky, wanting to be wooed. I would woo him, but at present had not the wit or the strength. And I was disappointed in him. I needed his help, his loving support, with Hartley, his ingenuity, his commitment. But he showed plainly that he had, at any rate in this weird context, given up the problem of his mother. He preferred not to reflect upon the obscene embarrassment of her incarceration. He did not want to associate himself with me as a fellow gaoler. This was understandable. But he annoyed me by seeming to enjoy himself. He swam, he sang, he sat on the rocks with Gilbert drinking white wine and blackcurrant juice (their latest drink). He behaved like the scrounger he had so proudly denied himself to be. As Gilbert now declared that he was afraid to go shopping by himself, Titus went with him and they bought quantities of expensive food and drink with my money. They did not run into Ben. Perhaps Ben had gone away? Where to? Whom to? These mysteries did me no good.
One form taken by the mutiny of Gilbert and Titus was that they began to suggest that I should do something about Ben. At least Gilbert made the suggestions, but Titus was certainly associated with them.
