June 17th. ‘Honestly, you’ll split your sides, Edwin.’
‘Yes, all right, I’ll tell her,’ he said as coldly as he could. He replaced the receiver without saying goodbye. He’d never cared for Angela, patronizing kind of creature.
Deborah knew it had been Angela on the telephone and she knew she would have given Edwin the date she had arranged with Pansy and Peter, who’d been the doubtful ones about the first date, suggested by Jeremy. Angela had said she was going to ring back with this information, but when the Chalms sat down to their chops and broccoli spears and noodles Edwin hadn’t yet passed the information on.
‘Christ, what are these?’ he said, poking at a brown noodle with his fork and then poking at the burnt chop.
‘The little things are fried noodles, which you enjoyed so much the other night. The larger thing is a pork chop, which wouldn’t have got overcooked if you hadn’t started an argument.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’
He pushed his chair back and stood up. He returned to the sitting-room and Deborah heard the squirting of the soda syphon. She stood up herself, followed him to the sitting-room and poured herself another gin and vermouth. Neither of them spoke. Deborah returned to the kitchen and ate her share of the broccoli spears. The sound of television came from the sitting-room. ‘Listen, buster, you give this bread to the hit or don’t you?’ a voice demanded. ‘O?, I give the bread,’ a second voice replied.
They’d had quarrels before. They’d quarrelled on their honeymoon in Greece for no reason whatsoever. They’d quarrelled because she’d once left the ignition of the car turned on, causing a flat battery. They’d quarrelled because of Enid’s boring party just before Christmas. The present quarrel was just the same kind of thing, Deborah knew: Edwin would sit and sulk, she’d wash the dishes up feeling miserable, and he’d probably eat the chop and the broccoli when they were cold. She couldn’t blame him for not wanting the noodles because she didn’t seem to have cooked them correctly. Then she thought: what if he doesn’t come to the picnic, what if he just goes on being stubborn, which he could be when he wanted to? Everyone would know. ‘Where’s Edwin?’ they would ask, and she’d tell some lie and everyone would know it was a lie, and everyone would know they weren’t getting on. Only six months had passed, everyone would say, and he wouldn’t join in a bit of fun.
But to Deborah’s relief that didn’t happen. Later that night Edwin ate the cold pork chop, eating it from his fingers because he couldn’t manage to stick a fork into it. He ate the cold broccoli spears as well, but he left the noodles. She made him tea and gave him a Danish pastry and in the morning he said he was sorry.
‘So if we could it would be lovely,’ Deborah said on her office telephone. She’d told her mother there was to be another teddy-bears’ picnic, Angela and Jeremy had arranged it mainly, and the Ainley-Foxletons would love it of course, possibly the last they’d see.
‘My dear, you’re always welcome, as you know.’ The voice of Deborah’s mother came all the way from South Bucks, from the village where the Ainley-Foxletons’ house and garden were, where Deborah and Angela, Jeremy, Pansy, Harriet, Enid, Peter and Holly had been children together. The plan was that Edwin and Deborah should spend the weekend of June 17th with Deborah’s parents, and Deborah’s mother had even promised to lay on some tennis for Edwin on the Saturday. Deborah herself wasn’t much good at tennis.
‘Thanks, Mummy,’ she managed to say just as Mr Harridance returned from lunch.
‘No, spending the whole weekend actually,’ Edwin informed his mother. ‘There’s this teddy-bear thing Deborah has to go to.’
‘What teddy-bear thing?’
Edwin went into details, explaining how the children who’d been friends in a South Bucks village nearly twenty years ago met from time to time to have a teddy-bears’ picnic because that was what they’d done then.
‘But they’re adults surely now,’ Mrs Chalm pointed out.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Well, I hope you have a lovely time, dear.’
‘Delightful, I’m sure.’
‘It’s odd when they’re adults, I’d have thought.’
Between themselves, Edwin and Deborah did not again discuss the subject of the teddy-bears’ picnic. During the quarrel Edwin had felt bewildered, never quite knowing how to proceed, and he hoped that on some future occasion he would be better able to cope. It made him angry when he wasn’t able to cope, and the anger still hung about him. On the other hand, six months wasn’t long in a marriage which he hoped would go on for ever: the marriage hadn’t had a chance to settle into the shape that suited it, any more than he and Deborah had had time to develop their own taste in furniture and decoration. It was only to be expected that there should be problems and uncertainty.
As for Deborah, she knew nothing about marriages settling into shape: she wasn’t aware that rules and tacit understandings, arrangements of give and take, were what made marriage possible when the first gloss had worn off. Marriage for Deborah was the continuation of a love affair, and as yet she had few complaints. She knew that of course they had to have quarrels.
They had met at a party. Edwin had left a group of people he was listening to and had crossed to the corner where, she was being bored by a man in computers. ‘Hullo,’ Edwin just said. All three of them were eating plates of paella.
Finding a consideration of the past pleasanter than speculation about the future, Deborah often recalled that moment: Edwin’s eager face smiling at her, the computer man discomfited, a sour taste in the paella. ‘You’re not Fiona’s sister?’ Edwin said, and when ages afterwards she’d asked him who Fiona was he confessed he’d made her up. ‘I shouldn’t eat much more of this stuff,’ he said, taking the paella away from her. Deborah had been impressed by that: she and the computer man had been fiddling at the paella with their forks, both of them too polite to say that there was something the matter with it, ‘What do you do?’ Edwin said a few minutes later, which was more than the computer man had asked.
In the weeks that followed they told one another all about themselves, about their parents and the houses they’d lived in as children, the schools they’d gone to, the friends they’d made. Edwin was a daring person, he was successful, he liked to be in charge of things. Without in any way sounding boastful, he told her of episodes in his childhood, of risks taken at school. Once he’d dismantled the elderly music master’s bed, causing it to collapse when the music master later lay down on it. He’d removed the carburettor from some other master’s car, he’d stolen an egg-beater from an ironmonger’s shop. All of them were dares, and by the end of his schooldays he had acquired the reputation of being fearless: there was nothing, people said, he wouldn’t do.
