Marnie (21 page)

I thought he was sure to want to be put in the picture sometime or other. Nobody ever talks any other way nowadays. I was sitting on the usual black leather couch. But it was fairly wide and
there were two green cushions on it to give it the glamour treatment.

‘What, now?’ I said.

‘When you’re ready. No hurry.’

Naturally no hurry, I thought, at X guineas a visit.

I thought of Forio. We had driven down to Garrod’s Farm on Sunday morning, almost before my eyes were open. (Mark must have guessed I was late back but he didn’t mention it.) It had
been a lovely drive because the sun was shining, and for miles and miles at every church we passed the bells were ringing. Sort of royal procession.

‘I’m twenty-three,’ I said. ‘I was born in Devonport. My father was a draughtsman in the dockyard. When war broke out he joined the Navy and he was drowned at sea. The
same year my mother was killed in the Plymouth blitz and I was brought up by a sort of aunt called Lucy Nye. I went to the North Road Secondary Modern School for Girls. Then my Uncle Stephen paid
for me to go to St Andrew’s Technical College, where I learned shorthand and typing and bookkeeping and accountancy.’

I didn’t much like the idea of him being behind me. I was telling him exactly the same mixture of truth and make-up that I’d given Mark, but I couldn’t see how he was taking it
all. When I stopped he didn’t speak, so I waited. I waited while a clock somewhere chimed the quarter hour and I thought, well, that’s fifteen minutes of the first visit gone
already.

That cheered me up, so I went on with the rest of the stuff, about going to work and Lucy Nye dying and leaving me a house, and me getting a job in Bristol. Then I said I’d used all my
money and taken work in London. Then I moved to Rutlands and met Mark and we got married. It all sounded so straightforward that I believed it myself.

When it was over he said: ‘That’s excellent. That’s exactly what I wanted – a brief biographical sketch. Now, what I would like you to do for the next few minutes is to
tell me about some of the personalities involved in your life.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, starting with your mother and father. Do you remember much about them? What they looked like, for instance.’

‘My father was a tall man, with greyish hair and a quiet voice. He had very strong hands with the nails cut short and keen grey eyes that seemed to know what you were thinking before you
said it. He was the one who first called me Marnie, and it has stuck ever since.’

‘And your mother?’

It was pretty well only as I stopped speaking that I realized I hadn’t described my father at all, but Mother’s brother, Stephen.

There was a long pause. ‘I don’t remember my mother so well.’

‘Anything at all?’

‘A bit. She was smallish, with high cheek-bones, rather strict. She worked very hard,
always
; when we were poor she did without things to give to me. Everything was for me. I always
had to be
respectable
. That was the
most
important thing. She took me to chapel, three times every Sunday.’

After a wait. ‘Anything more?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve already told me far more about your mother than your father.’

Another wait. He said: ‘I don’t quite understand one thing. Why were you poor?’

‘Why not? We hadn’t any money. That’s the way you are poor.’

‘But your father was in work?’

‘As far as I remember. I was too young to remember much.’

‘You’d get a pension, of course, as the orphan of a sailor killed in the war?’

‘I don’t remember. I expect Lucy Nye drew it for me.’

‘After your father died, how long was it before your mother was killed?’

‘About nine months.’

‘And then this aunt, this Mrs Nye, took you in?’

‘Miss Nye. Yes.’

‘Can you tell me about her?’

I told him about her.

It really wasn’t bad, talking like this. Three-quarters of the time you could tell the truth, and the other quarter was already fixed in your mind and you could play around with it as you
pleased.

If he asked you a question you didn’t want to answer, you simply said you didn’t remember.

If I stopped he didn’t hurry me on, and once or twice I was able to go off into pleasant little day-dreams about Sunday. When we got to Garrod’s, a loosebox Mark had ordered was
already waiting. I’d gone running through the yard and out into the field to find Forio, and he had come galloping across at the first sound of my voice. Mark had really done his best to be
nice all the time, and I could see the Garrods liked him. He seemed to know a bit about horses and he didn’t hurry me to start back. In the end we left about three, driving slowly behind the
horsebox; and just before dark we got home and let Forio loose in the paddock, and I rode him round bareback half a dozen times just for the sheer pleasure and just to let him know we were going to
be together again.

‘Were you not an only child, then?’

I dragged myself back and heard a clock striking. It was all over for this afternoon anyway, and I could forget it till Friday.

‘I had a brother but he died at birth.’

‘How old were you then?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You don’t remember anything about it?’

‘No.’

‘Do you remember anything about when your father died? Do you remember the news being brought?’

I had to think about that. My father hadn’t really been killed until I was turned six. That is, I knew he was killed after we’d been blitzed out of Keyham and gone to live at
Sangerford, because he died in June 1943, and my brother was born in the September, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember coming home from school and being told, or seeing Mother get a
telegram and collapse, or even hearing of it second hand from Lucy Nye.

‘No,’ I said, still thinking.

‘It’s not unnatural. Your memory is remarkably good. It’s most exceptional in that you have hardly had to hesitate over a date or anything.’

‘No?’ I said. So I was being too pat.

‘And do you remember anything of your mother’s death?’

‘I remember being told. But I wasn’t there. I’d been evacuated to this bungalow in Sangerford, near Liskeard where my aunt Lucy lived. Mother was – was going to join us
but she left it too late . . .’

‘Well,’ he said, rising. ‘I think that’s a very good preliminary talk. On Friday perhaps we shall be able to go into a little more detail.’

He helped me on with my coat and saw me out. It was still raining, but I walked to the tube instead of spending money on a taxi.

I played poker again on the following Saturday. It was much the same crowd. I won six pounds. I was coming along fast. Except for the film director and Alistair MacDonald, they
weren’t all that good. They weren’t mathematical about it. They went by ‘hunches’ and by watching how many cards their neighbours drew. They’d never get any
better
. All the same I didn’t really enjoy playing. It was too nerve-racking.

The Friday visit to Dr Roman had run on the same track as the first. I did the talking, he asked the questions. They were the sort of questions I’d have asked anybody for nothing, not
expecting to be
paid
. It was such a bogus business; we could have worked it all out over a cup of coffee in an espresso bar for eightpence each. This man put his name on a brass plate and
people paid him
pounds
just to sit on his couch and talk. It made you think. Maybe I had been an honest citizen, just taking money out of tills.

When it was over for the day he had offered me a cigarette and said: ‘You’ve done well so far, Mrs Rutland. It always heartens me to be trying to help someone of your
calibre.’

‘My – er—’

‘Well, for a patient to benefit from psychiatric treatment at all, he or she must be intelligent. It’s simply a waste of time working on dullards.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Please don’t think me patronizing. But I do feel you have a quick and clear brain. It stimulates an analyst, to work with you.’

I gave him a quick and clear smile. ‘Next Tuesday?’

‘Next Tuesday. Mind you . . .’ He had stopped and scratched his chin, which hadn’t been shaved too closely that morning. ‘The intelligence in our work can be both a
springboard and stumbling block. There is a point at which you will have to decide which yours is to be . . .’

‘I’ll think of that,’ I said, but I hadn’t thought of it or had time to think of it until I happened to remember it at this poker party. Now I did remember it I got a
slightly uneasy feeling as if there was more in the saying than met the ear. There’d been something in the way he’d said it. It wouldn’t do to underrate Roman and imagine you were
doing awfully well with him if you weren’t doing awfully well at all. It was never clever to be too sure. I’d learned that early in life.

After Christmas things were better between Mark and me, even though it didn’t last. I think he’d probably had a word from Roman that I was playing fair; so he was
hoping I might be cured of whatever he thought I needed to be cured of. And also he was very quick to notice when I was brighter.

I felt better than I’d done since when he caught me in Gloucestershire. I could ride every day, and if that wasn’t being free it was a fair copy.

Also Mark still kept his distance. I suppose if I’d been as bright as some people thought, I should have guessed how much this was costing him. But the longer he left me alone the less I
thought of it.

Money for Mother still nagged. At Christmas I’d sent her twenty pounds and explained I was frightfully sorry I couldn’t get home; but thought, in the New Year I’ll look for a
part-time job afternoons, say, in some shop or something. It would be easy to get there in my car and Mark need know nothing about it. I could work under another name; but it seemed doubtful if I
could do anything worth while. Of course you could lay a false scent, but it wouldn’t really
ever
be satisfactory or safe to be anything but honest so long as I had to come home every
evening as Mrs Rutland.

I thought around the idea of a begging letter in the Personal Column of
The Times
and even went so far as writing out an advertisement. ‘Will a few kind and generous people help
Reverend Father, working in great poverty in East End, to purchase a small second-hand car for use about his parish? All gifts personally acknowledged. Write Box etc.’

You could easily fix an address for
The Times
to post the letters on to, where you could pick them up, and you could easily get notepaper printed ‘St Saviour’s Vicarage’
for your letters of thanks. But I thought somebody in
The Times
office would see the forwarding address wasn’t a clerical one and might start asking questions. It would need more going
into before I did anything.

On Twelfth Night we had Mrs Rutland coming for dinner. I’d had a busy morning. I’m no cook, not really; but cakes I do well and I’d been baking a big birthday cake for Ailsa
Richards. Mrs Leonard had been helping me to ice it. It’s pathetic, I know, but sometimes you get more fun out of doing things for other people than doing them for yourself, and even missing
a ride didn’t matter compared with taking the cake down to the Richards’s cottage and seeing their pleasure.

I felt fine. When I got back Mark was just in from a round of golf. He kept wanting me to try, as the eighth tee was practically at the bottom of our garden, but I kept putting it off and saying
I’d be awful. We laughed about this. We didn’t often laugh together, it was quite a change. Mark had a funny side that I’d hardly had a chance of seeing. Just for a few minutes it
was as if that horrible night at San Antonio had never happened.

Somehow at the end of lunch talk of the firm came up, and I thought, I’m not playing fair with him, not telling him about those two letters I’d read; it’s up to me to tell him
and then he can think what he likes. So I told him.

He heard it all through without saying anything. Then he gave an uneasy shrug as if his coat was uncomfortable, and looked at me. ‘The Glastonbury Investment Trust. That’s Malcolm
Leicester. I wonder what Chris is
playing
at. Is he trying to get control of the firm entirely out of my hands? Or is he trying to sell? If he’s selling on the one hand, why buy on the
other?’

‘That’s all I know. Terry’s never mentioned it to me.’

‘D’you mean before we were married?’

‘Yes, of course.’ I covered up.

‘In any event they should have brought the whole thing, whatever it is, to the attention of the board. It’ll have to come out now.’

‘Don’t say how you got to know.’

He wrinkled his forehead. ‘No . . . On second thoughts it hadn’t better come out – yet. But I’ll make inquiries . . . I’m enormously grateful to you for telling
me.’

‘Not at all,’ I said, copying his politeness, and that made it sound more off-track than ever.

He lifted his head and half smiled. ‘D’you feel married to me, Marnie?’

‘No.’

‘Nor I to you. Perhaps it will grow . . . Have you ever been to a concert?’

‘What sort?’

‘Orchestral music. Festival Hall stuff.’

‘No.’

‘We’ll go next week. Like to?’

I said: ‘I suppose it’s the sort of thing you hear on the radio.’

‘Very much. But it sounds different not coming out of a box.’

‘All right . . . You’re very patient, aren’t you, Mark?’

‘Have you only just realized that?’

‘Patient,’ I said, ‘but you keep on. There’s no let-up.’

‘I’m playing for high stakes.’

‘You want a nice cosy wife, who’ll be here every evening to warm your slippers and – all the rest. I could pick six for you.’

‘Thanks, I do my own picking.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and got up. ‘But it doesn’t always work out. What are you taking me to hear?’

I suppose that talk was about the high spot. After that we went down.

It was that next week that Roman began different tactics.

As soon as I sat down he said: ‘Now, Mrs Rutland, I think we’ve been making enough progress these last two weeks to pass on to the next stage. It’s very simple really, and
really very much the same. But I shall stop asking you to tell me about your life and instead I just want you to talk. In the course of the hour I shall put one or two questions to you or perhaps
even just one or two words – and I shall ask you to talk about whatever ideas come into your head as a result of that question or that word. I don’t want you to reason anything out, I
just want you to say the first thing that comes to you, even if it’s nonsense – more than ever perhaps if it is nonsense. Do you understand?’