Night Over Water

be raped by blond Nazis in gleaming jackboots, would you?” It wasn’t very funny and she regretted it immediately.

That was when he took an envelope out of his suitcase and handed it to her.

She pulled out a ticket and looked at it. “You’re going home!” she cried. It was like the end of the world.

Looking solemn, he said simply: “There are two tickets.”

She felt as if her heart would stop. “Two tickets,” she repeated tonelessly. She was disoriented.

He sat on the bed beside her and took her hand. She knew what he was going to say, and she was at the same time thrilled and terrified..

“Come home with me, Diana,” he said. “Fly to New York with me. Then come to Reno and get divorced. Then let’s go to California and be married. I love you.”

Fly. She could hardly imagine flying across the Atlantic Ocean: such things belonged in fairy tales.

To New York. New York was a dream of skyscrapers and nightclubs, gangsters and millionaires, fashionable heiresses and enormous cars.

And get divorced. And be free of Mervyn!

Then let’s go to California. Where movies were made, and oranges grew on trees, and the sun shone every day.

And be married. And have Mark all the time, every day, every night.

She was unable to speak.

Mark said: “We could have babies.”

She wanted to cry.

“Ask me again,” she whispered.

He said: “I love you. Will you marry me and have my children?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and she felt as if she were already flying. “Yes, yes, yes!”

She had to tell Mervyn that night.

It was Monday. On Tuesday she would have to travel to Southampton with Mark. The Clipper left on Wednesday at two p.m.

She was floating on air when she arrived home on Monday afternoon; but as soon as she entered the house her euphoria evaporated.

How was she going to tell him?

It was a nice house: a big new villa, white with a red roof. It had four bedrooms, three of which were almost never used. There was a nice modern bathroom and a kitchen with all the latest gadgets. Now that she was leaving, she looked at everything with nostalgic fondness: this had been her home for five years.

She prepared Mervyn’s meals herself. Mrs. Rollins did the cleaning and laundry, and if Diana had not cooked she would have had nothing to do. Besides, Mervyn was a working-class boy at heart, and he liked his wife to put his meal on the table when he came home. He even called the meal “tea,” and he would drink tea with it, although it was always something substantial, sausages or steak or a meat pie. For Mervyn, “dinner” was served in hotels. At home you had tea.

What would she say?

Today he would have cold beef, left over from Sunday’s roast. Diana put on an apron and began to slice potatoes for frying. When she thought of how angry Mervyn was going to be, her hands shook, and she cut her finger with the vegetable knife.

She tried to get a grip on herself as she washed the cut under the cold tap, then dried her finger with a towel and wrapped a bandage around it. What am I afraid of? she asked herself. He won’t kill me. He can’t stop me: I’m over twenty-one and it’s a free country.

The thought did not calm her nerves.

She set the table and washed a head of lettuce. Although Mervyn worked hard, he almost always came home at the same time. He would say: “What’s the point of being the boss if I have to stop at work when everyone else goes home?” He was an engineer, and he had a factory that made all kinds of rotors, from small fans for cooling systems to huge screws for ocean liners. Mervyn had always been successful—he was a good businessman—but he really hit the jackpot when he started manufacturing propellers for aircraft. Flying was his hobby, and he had his own small plane, a Tiger Moth, at an airfield outside town. When the government started to build up the air force, two or three years ago, there were very few people who knew how to make curved rotors with mathematical precision, and Mervyn was one of those few. Since then, business had boomed.

Diana was his second wife. The first had left him, seven years ago, and run off with another man, taking their two children. Mervyn had divorced her as quickly as he could and proposed to Diana as soon as the divorce came through. Diana was then twenty-eight and he was thirty-eight. He was attractive, masculine and prosperous; and he worshipped her. His wedding present to her had been a diamond necklace.

A few weeks ago, on their fifth wedding anniversary, he had given her a sewing machine.

Looking back, she could see that the sewing machine had been the last straw. She had been hoping for a car of her own: she could drive, and Mervyn could afford it. When she saw the sewing machine, she felt she had come to the end of her tether. They had been together for five years and he had not noticed that she never sewed.

She knew that Mervyn loved her, but he did not see her. In his vision there was just a person marked WIFE. She was pretty, she performed her social role adequately, she put his food on the table and she was always willing in bed: what else should a wife be? He never consulted her about anything. Since she was neither a businessman nor an engineer, it never occurred to him that she had a brain. He talked to the men at his factory more intelligently than he talked to her. In his world, men wanted cars and wives wanted sewing machines.

And yet he was very clever. The son of a lathe operator, he had gone to Manchester Grammar School and studied physics at Manchester University. He had had the opportunity to go on to Cambridge and take his master’s degree, but he was not the academic type, and he got a job in the design department of a large engineering company. He still followed developments in physics, and would talk endlessly to his father—never to Diana, of course—about atoms and radiation and nuclear fission.

Unfortunately, Diana did not understand physics, anyway. She knew a lot about music and literature and a little about history, but Mervyn was not much interested in any kind of culture, although he liked films and dance music. So they had nothing to talk about.

It might have been different if they had had children. But Mervyn already had two children by his first wife and he did not want any more. Diana had been willing to love them, but she had never been given the chance: their mother had poisoned their minds against Diana, pretending that Diana had caused the breakup of the marriage. Diana’s sister in Liverpool had cute little twin girls with pigtails, and Diana lavished all her maternal affection on them.

She was going to miss the twins.

Mervyn enjoyed an energetic social life with the city’s leading businessmen and politicians, and for a time Diana enjoyed being his hostess. She had always loved beautiful clothes and she wore them well. But there had to be more to life than that.

For a while she had played the role of the nonconformist of Manchester society—smoking cigars, dressing extravagantly, talking about free love and communism. She had enjoyed shocking the matrons, but Manchester was not a highly conservative place, and Mervyn and his friends were Liberals, so she had not caused much of a stir.

She was discontented, but she wondered whether she had the right. Most women thought her lucky: she had a sober, reliable, generous husband, a lovely home and crowds of friends. She told herself she ought to be happy. But she was not—and then Mark came along.

She heard Mervyn’s car pull up outside. It was such a familiar noise, but tonight it sounded ominous, like the growl of a dangerous beast.

She put the frying pan on the gas stove with a shaking hand.

Mervyn came into the kitchen.

He was breathtakingly handsome. There was gray in his dark hair now, but it only made him look more distinguished. He was tall, and had not got fat like most of his friends. He had no vanity, but Diana made him wear