An Accidental Man (31 page)

‘I don't want to. Sorry, Mavis. Don't let Clara take me away. I'll go away soon somewhere, I promise, I know you want — But not with Clara. I'll see Austin soon. But I won't go to Clara's, please —'

‘Dear dear child, I love you,' said Mavis. ‘You shan't go anywhere. You shall stay here with me. Time will help us somehow, it must.'

‘There's nothing left but time, is there,' said Dorina. ‘That's the only thing that's inevitable here. Yes, yes, I'll rest. I may sleep. Go, please, dearest Mavis.'

‘Shall I pull the curtains a little?'

‘Yes, please.'

The door closed softly and Dorina's tears began to flow again. What had happened to her mind? She knew in some sort of abstract way that she must see Austin, talk to him, try to make things ordinary and workable again. But in the part of her mind that dealt with real day to day things this simple act seemed impossible, and it was almost a luxury to give herself over to fears of all kinds. If only she could become unknown, become nothing. So many people thinking about her, this paralysed her.

She lay on her back in the shadowy room. There was a dark patch upon the wall and a strange truncated shape leaning out of it. With her will she could send it away, and yet with her will it crept, making the room horrible. Why was she thus destined to carry her fears outside her? She lay looking with fixed fascinated lightly weeping eyes upon the room of fear.

When Mavis came down to the drawing-room Clara and Charlotte were just leaving. They seemed to have been having some sort of argument which they wanted to continue elsewhere. Mavis was relieved.

‘It was premature, that's all,' said Clara. ‘Give her a day or two to get used to the idea. You do understand, don't you, Mavis? I've thought a lot about it and I'm quite certain she should come to us. It'll sort of break the deadlock, if you see what I mean. Don't you agree?'

‘Yes, I do understand,' said Mavis. ‘You're very kind. Give it a few days. Are you going too, Char? Come back soon. Goodbye, dear. Goodbye.'

Mavis forgot them before the purr of Clara's departing car had made itself heard. She sat down in the drawing-room in the most comfortable chair. She let the sweet thought form itself in the silence. Mostly it was with her simply as a cloud which gilded all that she looked upon. Now she spelled it out in letters of gold. She was in love and she was loved. The angel of miracles had come to her, to her. Each day luxuriously she put off the full realization of her felicity. She teased herself with thinking that it could not be, blessed with the knowledge that it was. Out of this, she thought, good will come to everyone. Out of this, in the end, we shall all be saved. She lay there limply with closed eyes and almost slept for sheer joy.

In the car Charlotte was saying to Clara, ‘I think I shall have to have all my teeth out, my gums are rotting. Does my breath smell awful?'

‘Not at all,' said Clara, averting her head.

Charlotte touched the pieces of paper in her pocket. A handbag was a thing she never carried. She did not possess one. She had seen and understood Mavis's dazed look. She knew what happiness looked like. She had never experienced it herself but she could recognize it in others. The sight sickened her.

She felt constrained with Clara. For nearly a week now Clara had taken to sending her picture postcards every day, carefully chosen with some sort of tender witticism inscribed thereon. Clara had done this once before when Charlotte had been in hospital for the removal of a cyst. Did Clara think that Charlotte was ill again? The stream of affectionate postcards irritated Charlotte and somehow alarmed her. She felt she was being touched by a slimy hand. One thing she would not stand for was being treated as sick by Clara.

‘Thank you for the postcards.'

‘Not at all.'

‘But why send me postcards all the time? I'm not a schoolchild with the measles.'

‘I thought — I just felt I —'

‘I suppose you'd like to feel I put them in a row along the mantelpiece?'

‘I just wanted to —'

‘Oh never mind. Do you really want Dorina to stay with you, or is it just some sort of ploy or pose?'

Clara, driving, was silent for a moment. ‘Why are you getting at me so?' she said. ‘Of course I really want her to come, and I really think it would do her good. Almost any change would. Don't you think so?'

‘Maybe,' said Charlotte. ‘I haven't any theory really. How about Gracie? I can't see her nursing Dorina, can you?'

‘Gracie is full of her own life. I'll nurse Dorina.'

‘How kind and good you are!'

‘Char — please —'

Clara suddenly steered the car in to the side of the road, stopped it, and burst into tears. It was a quiet road in Kensington, pretty with pastel-painted stucco and wistaria. Charlotte was surprised, upset. She turned and stared at her sister.

Clara took off her smart hat and tossed it into the back of the car. She rumpled her cascade of well waved, well dyed, chestnut brown hair. Tears blurred the carefully applied make-up. She looked uglier and younger. Charlotte was appalled.

‘Sorry, Char.'

‘I should be saying sorry,' said Charlotte. ‘What's all this in aid of?'

‘Oh nothing to do with you, sorry, I mean it's not your fault. It's just everything. I suppose I'm growing old. I know everyone sees me in a certain sort of way, as a sort of busy interfering person, you know, and I act it too, I act it, but it's not me at all. Oh I can't explain.'

‘I think I understand,' said Charlotte. ‘Sorry, old thing.'

‘Even George doesn't really see — Well, George is a man, he has so many interests and he's getting so important now, he has all sorts of things to think about which aren't personal things, and I have only personal things, and when they sort of fail or become different one feels so let down. And I do try to help people and I do sometimes really do it, and it's not just a ploy or a pose.'

‘Sorry, Clara. What do you mean by personal things failing or becoming different?'

‘Oh well, the children. I don't know. I feel I've lost Gracie. And Patrick was just rude, rude, all the time when I went down to school. He said he had his own troubles. He said, “Oh fuck off, ma.” He actually used those words to me. And I can't get on with Ludwig really, I think he despises me. No, well, he just thinks I'm a nonentity. I suppose I am a nonentity. I'm just George's wife and Gracie's mother and so on, I'm nothing in myself and I can't even help people properly, everybody just laughs at me, I know they do. Oh I do wish Gracie was marrying Sebastian. Sebastian understands me and Ludwig never never will. I could have loved Sebastian like a son. But Ludwig will never even notice me. I'm already beginning to look forward to my grandchildren. That's how desperate I am, that's what it's come to. And I'm not fifty yet. I feel I've got nothing in my life at all.'

Charlotte looked at the row of pretty little houses with their wrought iron porches and their climbing roses and their well-clipped creepers, all very trim and very expensive. She thought, I am an absolute swine, but there it is. It's years since I really thought about Clara. And now there's nothing I can do for her, I can't even think what to say to her. I am so absorbingly sorry for myself I can't even enact being sorry for Clara. Anyway she'll hate me later on because she broke down like this.

‘Sorry, Clara,' she said again. ‘I think we're both still suffering from shock from mother's death. That changed so many things. We'll settle down again. Life isn't an ideal business at the best. We are all disappointed. One just has to jog along, give cheerfulness a chance to break in. One should count one's blessings. There are a few.'

Clara pushed back her hair and started the car again. She said, ‘I never thought to hear this sort of dreary worldly wisdom from you, Char. You were always the intense one. However I expect you're right. Where shall I drop you, at the flat?'

‘No, I'm not going to the flat. Drop me at High Street Ken Station. Cheer up, Clara. Things aren't too bad. The children are just going through a phase.'

‘Life is a phase,' said Clara. ‘Here's High Street Ken if you really want it.'

‘You're bloody lucky to have any children,' said Charlotte.

‘I know. Goodbye, Char. Forget all that stuff. Goodbye.'

As soon as Clara's white Volkswagen had turned the corner Charlotte hailed a taxi and went on to the flat. She climbed the stairs, came in, listened carefully, as she always did, prowled, and then went into the little sitting-room. She always feared that somebody, Austin, Mitzi, Garth, would have come in in her absence. I don't belong here, she thought, I must move. But with her tiny income, where to? She could not rent even a single room in this part of London for what she was paying Austin. She would have to move out to — where? Already the solitary evenings were terrible. She saw herself in the mirror, blazingly blue-eyed and full of strength, her pale grey hair tied in a negligent yet elegant bun, her plain dress sufficiently smart. She looked like the head of a woman's college, an eminent doctor, a scholar, all the things she might have been and ought to have been and was not. She looked brave. She also looked unmistakably like a single woman.

She sat down and drew out of her pocket the three items which she had been carrying with her. She laid them on the table. The first was a snapshot which had been torn into several pieces and then mended (not by her) rather crookedly with sellotape. It was a snapshot taken many years ago and showed Matthew and Betty outside Matthew's cottage in Sussex. Betty looked sportive, juvenile, very dated. She was wearing shorts and a satin blouse and high-heeled shoes and a great deal of lipstick, and her hair was bobbed and stiffly waved. She was turning towards Matthew and laughing. Matthew was staring self-consciously at the camera with his distinguished scholar of Trinity look, which was also curiously dated.

The next item which Charlotte laid on the table was a letter which had also been torn to pieces and also mended (not by her) with sellotape. It was in Betty's rather schoolgirlish hand and it read as follows,

Charlotte stared at this thoughtfully for some time. The letter and the snapshot she had found together in an old leather wallet. The third item, which she now began to consider, she had discovered separately among a lot of Betty's old school magazines at the bottom of the trunk. It was a certificate issued by a sports committee of the Fulham Swimming Baths to attest that Miss Elizabeth Granger had obtained a first-class diploma in General Swimming, comprising breast stroke, crawl, butterfly and life-saving.

Charlotte pushed her chair back. One of her lower front teeth was loose and she rocked it painfully with her tongue. It had been general knowledge that Betty Gibson Grey could not swim. Yet why was it general knowledge? Because Asutin had always said so. And when had Austin always said so? After her death.

In retrospect it seemed an odd marriage. Betty was not considered to be a good match by those who care about good matches. She was a typist in a firm that did business with Austin's firm. Clara had said she was ‘without distinction but jolly'. Betty had certainly been, in the mode of a by-gone age, jolly. She danced and sang and played the guitar badly. Her guitar in fact still existed, at the back of the cupboard where Charlotte found the trunk. Presumably on Dorina's advent the relics of Betty had been just bundled into the darkest place. Charlotte could not imagine Dorina sorting these things out and asking Austin if they should be kept. Dorina walked innocent and blind over the remnants of her predecessor.

Poor Betty. Destined for a happy ordinariness, what demon had set Austin in her way? And how was it that Austin was so attractive to women? Every woman thinks of herself as a healer. Did they somehow sense the leprosy within and feel confident that they could take the world-resentment out of those fine eyes? Dorina had thought it.

Poor Betty. How had a good swimmer managed to drown herself accidentally in a calm river on a summer afternoon? She fell into a lock. Armidale Deep Lock, the name came back to Charlotte. Austin found her there already drowned. Well, she could have hit her head on the side of the lock, only no one had suggested that.

Austin was a curious man. He inspired love. He inspired fear. Dorina feared him. Everyone had got used to regarding Dorina as a crazy little thing. But perhaps Dorina was not being just irrational and neurotic. Perhaps there was some quite other pattern behind it all.

Charlotte took the things from the table and put them back where she had found them in the trunk. It was lunchtime, whatever that meant now. She leaned into the darkness at the back and drew out Betty's guitar. She touched a string and it twanged with a surprised painful loudness in the quiet flat. Charlotte sat down nursing the guitar. She forgot Austin and began to think about Matthew. Tears came to her as she sat alone and rocked her decaying tooth with her tongue and strummed tunelessly upon the strings of the guitar.

During luncheon at Pitt's Lodge Clara was exceptionally gay.

George said, ‘You're in high spirits, darling. Have you bought a new hat, or what?'

‘No, Pinkie, it was just this morning at Valmorana. It's awful to laugh I know, but it really was such a hoot.'

‘Well, what did happen, you tell me.'

‘We were all so solemn and what everybody said was quite idiotic, it didn't make sense. Dorina said, “I have no friends”, and Char said, “I have no friends either”.'