because, quite suddenly, she had seen her state of resignation as an insult to the woman she once, too long ago, had been.
‘I would really like to talk to you,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said, to Daphne Jackson’s surprise. ‘It might be worth your while to stroll back to that hotel with me.’
On her short, angry walk she had realized, too, that once she had greatly disliked Jackson Major because he reminded her in some ways of her husband. A priggish youth, she had recalled, a tedious bore of a boy who had shown her husband a ridiculous respect while also fearing and resembling him. On her walk she had remembered the day he had broken the half-mile record, standing in the sports field in his running clothes, deprecating his effort because he knew his headmaster would wish him to act like that. What good was winning a half-mile race if he upset his wife the first time he found himself in a bedroom with her?
‘I remember your husband as a boy,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe. ‘He set an athletic record which has not yet been broken’
‘Yes, he told me.’
‘He had trouble with his chin. Pimples that wouldn’t go away. I see all that’s been overcome.’
‘Well, yes –’
‘And trouble also because he beat a boy too hard. The mother wrote, enclosing the opinion of a doctor.’
Daphne frowned. She ceased to walk. She stared at Mrs Angusthorpe.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe.
They passed the butcher’s shop, from the doorway of which the butcher now addressed them. The weather was good, the butcher said: it was a suitable time for a holiday. Mrs Angusthorpe smiled at him and bowed. Daphne, frowning still, passed on.
‘You’re right,’ Mrs Angusthorpe said next, ‘when you say that your husband could have declined to go fishing.’
‘I think he felt –’
‘Odd, I thought, to have a fishing-rod with him in the first place. Odd on a honeymoon.’
They entered the hotel. Doyle came forward to meet them. ‘Ah, so you’ve palled up?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that grand?’
‘We could have sherry,’ Mrs Angusthorpe suggested, ‘in the bar.’
‘Of course you could,’ said Doyle. ‘Won’t your two husbands be pegging away at the old fish for the entire day?’
‘They promised to be back for lunch,’ Daphne said quickly, her voice seeming to herself to be unduly weak. She cleared her throat and remarked to Doyle that the village was pretty. She didn’t really wish to sit in the hotel bar drinking sherry with the wife of her husband’s headmaster. It was all ridiculous, she thought, on a honeymoon.
‘Go down into the bar,’ said Doyle, ‘and I’ll be down myself in a minute.’
Mrs Angusthorpe seized with the fingers of her left hand the flowered material of Daphne’s dress. ‘The bar’s down here,’ she said, leading the way without releasing her hold.
They sat at a table on which there were a number of absorbent mats that advertised brands of beer. Doyle brought them two glasses of sherry, which Mrs Angusthorpe ordered him to put down to her husband’s account. ‘Shout out when you’re in need of a refill,’ he invited. ‘I’ll be up in the hall.’
‘The partition between our bedrooms is far from soundproof,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe when Doyle had gone. ‘We were awakened in the night.’
‘Awakened?’
‘As if you were in the room beside us, we heard a conversation.’
‘My God!’
‘Yes.’
Blood rushed to Daphne Jackson’s face. She was aware of an unpleasant sensation in her stomach. She turned her head away. Mrs Angusthorpe said:
‘People don’t speak out. All my married life, for instance, I haven’t spoken out. My dear, you’re far too good for Jackson Major.’
It seemed to Daphne, who had been Daphne Jackson for less than twenty-four hours, that the wife of her husband’s headmaster was insane. She gulped at the glass of sherry before her, unable to prevent herself from vividly recalling the awfulness of the night before in the small bedroom. He had come at her as she was taking off her blouse. His right hand had shot beneath her underclothes, pressing at her and gripping her. All during their inedible dinner he had been urging her to drink whiskey and wine, and drinking quantities of both himself. In bed he had suddenly become calmer, remembering instructions read in a book.
‘Pack a suitcase,’ said Mrs Angusthorpe, ‘and go.’
The words belonged to a nightmare and Daphne was aware of wishing that she were asleep and dreaming. The memory of tension on her wedding-day, and of guests standing around in sunshine in a London garden, and then the flight by plane, were elements that confused her mind as she listened to this small woman. The tension had been with her as she walked towards the altar and had been with her, too, in her parents’ garden. Nor had it eased when she escaped with her husband on a Viscount: it might even have increased on the flight and on the train to Galway, and then in the hired car that had carried her to the small village. It had certainly increased while she attempted to eat stringy chicken at a late hour in the dining-room, while her husband smiled at her and talked about intoxicants. The reason he had talked so much about whiskey and wine, she now concluded, was because he’d been aware of the tension that was coiled within her.
‘You have made a mistake,’ came the voice of Mrs Angusthorpe, ‘but even now it is not too late to rectify it. Do not accept it, reject your error, Mrs Jackson.’
