Marking Time (63 page)

‘I have and I haven’t,’ he had replied. She had later tried saying that troubles shared were troubles halved, but he had seemed, or affected, not to understand her. She watched
him chewing, wincing a little as the jam reached his bad tooth, and then a thought occurred to her.

‘It’s a wicked war all right,’ she said, ‘and the worst of it is the way it keeps loved ones away from each other. Mrs Rupert without Mr Rupert; Mrs Hugh missing Mr Hugh
all week, Mrs Edward hardly ever seeing Mr Edward . . .’ she paused, ‘and then there’s you, Mr Tonbridge. I sometimes wonder if you don’t miss
your
wife . .
.’

He swallowed the last of the tart, and cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Cripps, I wouldn’t say this to most people – well, I wouldn’t want to let it slip to anyone – but
the honest truth is, in strictest confidence, mind – I’m not one for bandying my private affairs in public – that I
don’t
miss her. Far from it. Quite the contrary.
She’s become a weight off my mind. I wouldn’t mind if I never set eyes on her again. Which I shan’t, if yours truly can help it. She’s a – well, you’ll have to
take it from me, that she’s turned out to be not a very nice type of person.’

‘What a shame!’ She was thrilled.

‘A shame it is. I wouldn’t like to tell you what she’s done. I really wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be fit for your ears.’

In the end he told her all the same. About George (although not in detail what had happened on that dreadful day, not the throwing of his clothes into the street) – about his going home
and finding George there. ‘And you remember I got that letter?’ he said.

She nodded, so vigorously that a kirby-grip fell onto her plate and she covered it instantly with a wrinkled, dimpled hand.

‘Well, that was from a solicitor. She wants a divorce. She wants to marry that bloke.
And
she wants to keep the house.’

‘Well, I never! You’ve no call for the house, though, have you?’

He thought of all the years of service that had paid for it. A home of his own, he’d called it. In reality it had been nothing of the kind.

‘I don’t think I do,’ he said slowly but his voice trembled and it was then that she could see that he’d been through a lot of distress: being bossed about by that London
tart, she guessed, and possibly her boyfriend as well. It was too bad, she thought; look at his little scrawny neck and his sad eyes, and his legs were all bandy in his gaiters – he was just
the kind to get bullied . . .

‘It would mean,’ he said, with difficulty, ‘that I wouldn’t have much to offer.’

‘Offer,’ she repeated; she was so delighted by what she thought he might mean that she wanted to be sure she hadn’t got him wrong.

‘I was hoping,’ he said, ‘that we could have come to an understanding.’ There was a pause, while they both waited for the other one to say something. She won.

‘I am in no position,’ he said, floundering. ‘I have no call to say anything seeing as I am, as you might say, a married man. But this letter has cast a new hue on the
situation. All the same it wouldn’t be right for me to ask you – on the one hand I wouldn’t want you to think of me as a bigamist—’

‘I should hope not,’ she said; she hadn’t the slightest idea what a bigamist was, but it sounded very nasty to her.

‘But, on the other hand, there’s no knowing how long lawyers take over these things?’ He ended almost as though he was asking her.

‘They take their own time, no doubt,’ she said. She had never in her life had anything to do with a lawyer, and was unclear what they were
for
except that she could now see
they had something to do with divorce – a thing which so far as she knew was only gone in for by film stars and other people with time on their hands. But she
did
know what an
understanding was. It was the next best thing to an engagement.

‘I have always thought of you as a fine woman, a real woman,’ he said gazing respectfully at her bust.

She could stand it no longer. ‘Frank, if you’re asking me to have an understanding with you – I don’t mind if I do.’

He went suddenly dark pink, and his eyes watered. ‘Mabel – if I may—’

‘Silly,’ she interrupted. ‘What else could you call me?’

To begin with Sybil was hardly able to believe it – she told herself that she had simply had an unusually good night’s sleep, or that the cold weather was making her
hungrier. But after a week of not feeling sick at
all,
and her back only aching if she tried to pick up Wills or carry him anywhere, she
had
to believe it. She still felt weak and
tired easily, but otherwise she felt as though she was perceptibly recovering. People
did;
she was sure that really wanting to must make a difference, and, heaven knows, she had prayed
that she might get better – for Hugh, for the children, particularly for Wills. For as she well knew, losing your mother when you were as small as that was too soon. He would not remember
her. Would not have remembered her, she repeated silently.

It was Friday, and the thought of Hugh arriving in the evening had a completely different feeling about it. She was looking forward to him seeing her. She would be very careful all day, have a
rest after lunch, and then Polly would bring her the life-saving very weak tea. At her worst, she had craved hot water with a slice of lemon in it, but there were no lemons. But in this last week
she had halved her dose of the pills and this, too, made her feel more alert. She would still spend ages putting rouge on her face, and then rubbing it off until she considered that Hugh would not
notice that it was rouge, and then put on her newest dress that she had made (she could not bear anything tight round her waist and had taken to keeping her stockings up by twisting a shilling in
the top until it was tight round her leg). She wished it were summer, because then she could have gone for little walks with Hugh, but even if there was sun, it was too cold for her to enjoy being
out at all. Sometimes Villy took her to Battle in the car for a little outing, but that had been happening less and less often. The house was too cold for her and only a constant supply of
hot-water bottles enabled her to get through some days – even in bed.

But now, she said to herself, as she parted her bobbed hair on the other side to see if it looked better, I shall start going for short walks in the weekdays – a little further each day,
and when I’ve got up to half an hour, I shall tell him I’d like him to take me for a walk. He’ll be so surprised!

It was morning, and she had woken really wanting to know what sort of day it was. When she had first realised, or thought that she had known, that she was going to die – she had become
obsessed with the weather, the season – it had been the end of summer. She had watched the summer flowers dying away; fewer roses, phlox and delphinium becoming seed heads, oaks beginning to
become bronzed in the weaker sunlight, swallows leaving, the single old apple tree that she could see from her window becoming portentous with rosy fruit, chrysanthemums, red-hot pokers, and the
white Japanese anemone that the Duchy so loved coming to flower in the crisper air, the hint of frosts glinting on the lawn in the mornings, each sight, she had felt, to be her last of that. She
would see no more swallows or roses or new green leaves, or mornings when blackbirds stabbed away at the fallen apples. Before that, and almost immediately she had thought that she had only
measurable time left, she had forced herself to make the trip to London to equip Polly with winter clothes and clothes beyond the winter, to last her for the first year at least after Sybil had
gone. Rachel had urged her to combine this with a visit to Mr Carmichael who had seemed to her a kind, infinitely experienced and practical man. After he had examined her and said almost nothing,
she had asked him first whether there was any hope for her. ‘There is always hope, of course,’ he had said, ‘but I don’t think you should count on it.’ And when,
before she had allowed this actually to reach her, she had asked how long she had got, he had said that it was not possible to say – several months, he thought – and as though she was
thinking of Simon, he had said, ‘Don’t worry about Christmas. You have a son away at school, haven’t you? If we do the operation, there may be more Christmases,’ and she had
only been able to nod. He had given her a prescription with strict instructions about how it should be used, and then, when she had got up to leave, he had come round from his desk, put his hands
on her shoulders and said, ‘I’m so sorry, my dear. You asked me, and lying to you would be no kindness. I’ll write to your GP. Your husband—’ He had hesitated and she
had interrupted him saying quickly that she did not want him to know – yet, and particularly not to know that
she
knew. He had looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and then said,
‘I expect you know best.’

He had told her that she could ring him, and even given her his home number; he had been very kind. It couldn’t be much fun having to tell people that sort of thing, she thought as she
walked down the steps of the large Harley Street house and into the hot, dusty street. To have to tell people that they might die . . . and then it hit her: she realised that she hadn’t
actually believed it, been able to face the inexorable certainty – her legs had started to give way, and for minutes she held onto the iron railings that flanked the steps. It was then that
she realised that she couldn’t face going back on the train with Polly and Villy and behaving as though nothing had happened. She needed some time alone. She decided to miss the train, and
blessed her own foresight that had made her give Polly her train ticket. Then she walked slowly down through the streets until she came to a pub. A drink: that was the thing to have when you had
had a shock. But, of course, it was too early: the pubs were not open. Anyway, she thought, I can’t drink
drink
any more – it made her feel awful, and going into a pub on her
own without a man would already be an ordeal; ordering a soft drink would make it worse. She saw a cab and asked it to take her to Charing Cross, but when they reached Piccadilly Circus she saw the
News Cinema, paid off the cab and went in. It would be dark and anonymous and she could simply sit for as long as she liked.

She sat through the Gaumont British News recited in the usual tight-lipped, slightly heroic tones that so lent themselves to heroics and patriotism, as though the news, any news, was designed
both to inspire and to soothe the recipients, two cartoons, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, a short film of a munitions factory . . . and then it was the news again which she hadn’t taken in
anyway. She sat there, mindlessly watching blurred newsreel of the Blitz, now, the announcer said almost triumphantly, intensifying.

As she emerged, blinking, into the street looking for another cab, she thought fleetingly of Hugh, making his way from the East End to their desolate house in London, not knowing that she was
still in town, not knowing that she was to die. My darling. What can I do to make it less awful for you? Not tell him, she thought, as she climbed stiffly into a cab. Telling him would condemn him
to weeks – or months? (it seemed strange not to know which) – of waiting. It would be like standing on a platform, she thought when she was doing that at Charing Cross, waiting and
waiting for the train to depart, to say goodbye; she could spare him that, or at least most of it. Her thoughts were very few, and far apart from one another; what happened between them she hardly
knew.

In the train she had fallen asleep.

This morning she remembered again Mr Carmichael saying ‘there is always hope’. Of course there was, but also, of course, he would not have felt that he could raise her hopes. It was
a beautiful morning with white mist and, above it, a sun the colour of pimento. There were lacy icicles on the window panes. Simon would soon be back from school; it would soon be Christmas. She
had made Hugh four pairs of socks and a sweater in an impossibly elaborate stitch and for Polly a party dress, in coffee-coloured organdie. The house was filling up with these innocent secrets.
Christopher and Polly were making a dolls’ house for Juliet, and Sybil had stitched a minute drawing-room carpet for it in
petit point
. Polly was growing fast which was probably why
she looked so pale. She would take her to see Dr Carr who would give her a tonic. She might even take Simon to Hamley’s in London to choose his present, she thought, shutting the small top
casement window, and suddenly remembering standing there, just before Wills was born, with the Albertine rose, ‘look thy last on all things lovely every hour’, and thinking that she
might die in labour. But she had survived; it had been that poor little twin who had not lived. Well, she would not think that any more; she was going to get better, to live.

That evening, after her first dinner downstairs for weeks, when she and Hugh had retired, at his insistence, and she was undressing, Hugh said, ‘Darling, aren’t you tired?’

‘Do I look tired?’

He leaned over her at the dressing table so that she could see him looking at her face in the mirror.