‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Yes, you do.’
He had never spoken like that before. All his considerateness had disappeared. His eyes were fiery and yet cold. His large hands looked as though they wanted to commit some act of violence. I shook my head at him. He said:
‘You’re pretending to be deranged.’
I laughed. I didn’t like him sitting opposite me like that, with his eyes and his hands. Everything about him had been a pretence: all he wanted was his own way, to have his mother giving parties in my drawing-room, to have Mrs Stritch forever vacuuming the stairs, to own me as he owned the land and the farms and the house. It was horrible, making money out of war.
‘You don’t even cook for me,’ he said to my astonishment. ‘Half-raw potatoes, half-raw chops –’
‘Oh, Ralphie, don’t be silly. You know I cook for you.’
‘The only food that is edible in this house is made by Mrs Stritch. You can cook if you want to, only you can’t be bothered.’
‘I do my best. In every way I do my best. I want our marriage to be –’
‘It isn’t a marriage,’ he said. ‘It’s never been a marriage.’
‘We were married in the church.’
‘Stop talking like that!’ He shouted at me again, suddenly on his feet, looking down at me. His face was red with fury; I thought he might pick something up and hit me with it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said.
‘You’re as sane as I am. For God’s sake, Matilda!’
‘Of course I’m sane,’ I said quietly. ‘I could not be sitting here if I were not. I could not live a normal life.’
‘You don’t live a normal life.’ He was shouting again, stamping about the room like an animal, ‘Every second of every day is devoted to the impression you wish to give.’
‘But, Ralphie, why should I wish to give an impression?’
‘To cover up your cruelty.’
I laughed again, gently so as not to anger him further. I remembered Miss Pritchard saying I was cruel, and of course there was the cruelty Mrs Ashburton had spoken of, the cruelty that was natural in wartime. I had felt it in myself when my father had been killed, and when Dick had been killed. I had felt it when I had first seen my mother embracing the man who became my stepfather, too soon after my father had died. God, if He existed, I had thought in the end, was something to be frightened of.
‘The war is over,’ I said, and he looked at me, startled by that remark.
‘It isn’t for you,’ he said. ‘It’ll never be for you. It’s all we ever hear from you, the war and that foolish old woman –’
‘It wasn’t over for Mrs Ashburton either. How could it be when she lived to see it all beginning again?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop talking about her. If it hadn’t been for her, if she hadn’t taken advantage of a nine- year-old child with her rubbish, you would be a normal human being now.’ He stood above my chair again, pushing his red face down at me and speaking slowly. ‘She twisted you, she filled you full of hate. Whatever you are now, that dead woman has done to you. Millions have suffered in war,’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Who’s asking you to dwell on it, for God’s sake?’
‘There are people who find it hard to pick up the pieces. Because they’re made like that.’
‘You’d have picked them up if she hadn’t prevented you. She didn’t want you to, because she couldn’t herself.’ Furiously he added, ‘Some kind of bloody monster she was.’
I didn’t reply to any of that. He said, with a bitterness in his voice which had never been there before, ‘All I know is that she has destroyed Challacombe for me.’
‘It was never real for you, Ralphie. I shall never forget the happiness in our farmhouse. What memories of Challacombe can you have?’
But Ralphie wasn’t interested in the happiness in our farmhouse, or in memories he couldn’t have. All he wanted to do was wildly to castigate me.
‘How can I live here with you?’ he demanded in a rough, hard voice, pouring at the same time a glass of whisky for himself. ‘You said you loved me once. Yet everything you do is calculated to let me see your hatred. What have I done,’ he shouted at me, ‘that you hate me, Matilda?’
I quietly replied that he was mistaken. I protested that I did not hate him, but even as I spoke I realized that that wasn’t true. I hated him for being what he was, for walking with his parents into the farmyard that morning, for thinking he had a place in the past. I might have confided in him but I did not want to. I might have said that I remembered, years ago, Miss Pritchard coming to see my mother and what Miss Pritchard had said. I had eavesdropped on the stairs that led to the kitchen, while she said she believed there was something the matter with me. It was before the death of Dick, after I’d discovered about my mother and the man who was now my stepfather. ‘She dwells on her father’s death,’ Miss Pritchard had said and she’d gone on to say that I dwelt as well on the conversations I’d had with old Mrs Ashburton. I remembered the feeling I’d had, standing there listening: the feeling that the shell-shock of Mr Ashburton, carried back to Challacombe from the trenches in 1917, had conveyed itself in some other form to his wife, that she, as much as he, had been a victim of violence. I felt it because Miss Pritchard was saying something like it to my mother. ‘There are casualties in wars,’ she said, ‘thousands of miles from where the fighting is.’ She was speaking about me. I’d caught a mood, she said, from old Mrs Ashburton, and when my mother replied that you couldn’t catch a mood like you caught the measles Miss Pritchard sharply replied that you could.
