father and Dick, and the times they had lived in. It was right that the cruelty was there.
‘Of course I don’t hate you,’ I said again. ‘Of course not, Ralphie.’
He did not reply. He stood in the centre of the drawing-room with his glass in his hand, seeming like a beast caught in a snare: he had all the beaten qualities of such an animal. His shoulders slouched, his eyes had lost their fire.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘You may stay here,’ I said, ‘with me.’ Again I smiled, wishing to make the invitation seem kind. I could feel no pity for him.
‘How could I?’ he shouted. ‘My God, how could I? I lose count of the years in this house. I look at you every day, I look at your eyes and your hair and your face, I look at your hands and your fingernails, and the arch of your neck. I love you; every single inch of you I love. How can I live here and love you like that, Matilda? I shared a dream with you, Matilda, a dream that no one else but you would have understood. I longed for my quiet life, with you and with our children. I married you out of passion and devotion. You give me back nothing.’
‘You married me because I was part of something, part of the house and the estate –’
‘That isn’t true. That’s a rubbishy fantasy; not a word of it is true.’
‘I cannot help it if I believe it.’ I wasn’t smiling now. I let my feelings show in my eyes because there was no point in doing otherwise any more. Not in a million years would he understand. ‘Yes, I despise you,’ I said. ‘I have never felt affection for you.’
I said it calmly and bent my head again over my embroidery. He poured more whisky and sat down in the chair on the other side of the fireplace. I spoke while still embroidering, magenta thread in a feather of my peacock’s tail.
‘You must never again touch me,’ I said. ‘Not even in passing me by in a room. We shall live here just as we are, but do not address me with endearments. I shall cook and clean, but there shall be no parties. Your parents are not welcome. It is discourteous to me to give parties behind my back and to employ people I do not care for.’
‘You were told, you know perfectly well you were told –’
‘You will fatten and shamble about the rooms of this house. I shall not complain. You will drink more whisky, and perhaps lose heart in your dream. “His wife does not go out,” people will say; “they have no children. He married beneath him, but it isn’t that that cut him down to size.’ ”
‘Matilda, please. Please for a moment listen to me –’
‘Why should I? And why should you not lose heart in your dream because isn’t your dream ridiculous? If you think that your Challacombe estate is like it was, or that you in your vulgarity could ever make it so, then you’re the one who is deranged.’
I had not taken my eyes from the peacock’s tail. I imagined a patch of damp developing on the ceiling of an upstairs room. I imagined his lifting the heavy lead-lined hatch in the loft and stepping out on to the roof to find the missing tile. I stood with him on the roof and pointed to the tile, lodged in a gutter. I had removed it myself and slid it down the incline of the roof. He could reach it with an effort, by grasping the edge of the chimney-stack to be safe. I heard the thump of his body as it struck the cobbles below. I heard it in the drawing-room as I worked my stitches, while he drank more whisky and for a while was silent.
‘Damn you,’ he shouted in the end, once more on his feet and seething above me. ‘Damn you to hell, Matilda.’
‘No matter what you do,’ I said, still sewing the magenta thread, ‘I shall not leave this house.’
He sold everything he’d bought except the house and garden. He sold the land and the farmhouses, the Fryes’ and the Lazes’ and what had been ours. He didn’t tell me about any of it until he’d done it. ‘I’ll be gone in a week,’ he said one day, six or seven months after we’d had that quarrel, and I did not urge him to stay.
It is a long time ago now, that day. I can’t quite remember Ralphie’s going, even though with such vividness I remember so much else. There are new people in all the farmhouses now, whole families have grown up; again the tennis court is overgrown. Miss Pritchard died of course, and my mother and my stepfather. I never saw much of them after Ralphie went, and I never laid eyes on Ralphie or even had a line from him. But if Ralphie walked in now I would take his hand and say I was sorry for the cruelty that possessed me and would not go away, the cruelty she used to talk about, a natural thing in wartime. It lingered and I’m sorry it did, and perhaps after all this time Ralphie would understand and believe me, but Ralphie, I know, will never return.
I sit here now in her drawing-room, and may perhaps become as old as she was. Sometimes I walk up to the meadow where the path to school was, but the meadow isn’t there any more. There are rows of coloured caravans, and motor-cars and shacks. In the garden I can hear the voices of people drifting down to me, and the sound of music from their wireless sets. Nothing is like it was.
Perhaps nobody ever did wonder what Torridge would be like as a man – or what Wiltshire or Mace-Hamilton or Arrowsmith would be like, come to that. Torridge at thirteen had a face with a pudding look, matching the sound of his name. He had small eyes and short hair like a mouse’s. Within the collar of his grey regulation shirt the knot of his House tie was formed with care, a maroon triangle of just the right shape and bulk. His black shoes were always shiny.
Torridge was unique in some way: perhaps only because he was beyond the pale and appeared, irritatingly, to be unaware of it. He wasn’t good at games and had difficulty in understanding what was being explained in the classroom. He would sit there frowning, half smiling, his head a little to one side. Occasionally he would ask some question that caused an outburst of groaning. His smile would increase then. He would glance around the classroom, not flustered or embarrassed in the least, seeming to be pleased that he had caused such a response. He was naive to the point where it was hard to believe he wasn’t pretending, but his naivete was real and was in time universally recognized as such. A master called Buller Yeats reserved his cruellest shafts of scorn for it, sighing whenever his eyes chanced to fall on Torridge, pretending to believe his name was Porridge.
Of the same age as Torridge, but similar in no other way, were Wiltshire, Mace-Hamilton and Arrowsmith. All three of them were blond-haired and thin, with a common sharpness about their features. They wore, untidily, the same clothes as Torridge, their House ties knotted any old how, the laces in their scuffed shoes often tied in several places. They excelled at different games and were quick to sense what was what. Attractive boys, adults had more than once called them.
The friendship among the three of them developed because, in a way, Torridge was what he was. From the first time they were aware of him – on the first night of their first term – he appeared to be special. In the
