Staring at the Sun (10 page)

Settled. They used that word a lot. Settling down; getting settled; settle yourself. What else did you settle, Jean wondered. Of course, a bill. You owed money, and you settled the bill. It was like that with growing up. Your parents looked after you, and they expected something from you in return, even if neither of you defined that expectation. There was some bill to be paid. Marriage settled the account.

It didn’t mean you would be happy ever after. It didn’t mean that. It just meant you were settled. You’ll do: Michael had said that, just as Mother had. You’ll do. Some test had been passed. Even if you were unhappy, you would be looked after. That was what happened, that was what she had seen. There would be children, of course, and this always made the man more responsible. Not that Michael wasn’t responsible: he was a policeman, after all. And she would spruce him up a little. There would be a house. There would be children. The war would end. She was a big girl now. She was still—she still could be—Michael’s little girl; but that was another matter. She was grown-up. The children would confirm that. Their helplessness would prove that she was grown-up, that she was settled.

The next morning, alone, she looked in the mirror. Brown hair which had lost its childhood yellow. Blue eyes with flecks of indeterminate colour in them, like knitting wool. A squarish jaw which no longer dissatisfied her. She tried smiling at herself, but it didn’t really work. She would do, she supposed; she wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t complacent, but she would do.

As she stared into the mirror and the knitting-wool eyes stared back, Jean felt that now she knew all the secrets; all the secrets of life. There was a dark, warm cupboard; she had taken out something heavy, wrapped in brown paper. There was no need to cheat—no need to unscrew a tiny viewing hole and peer in with a torch. She was grown-up. She could carefully and seriously unwrap the paper.
She knew what: she would find. Four slim ochre points. Golf tees. Of course. What else would you expect? Only a child would take them for hyacinths. Only a child would expect them to sprout. Grown-ups knew that golf tees never sprouted.

2

Three
wise men—are you serious?

—
GRAFFITO
,
c
. 1984

M
ICHAEL STRUCK FIRE
with his heels. That was how, in later years, Jean was to remember him. In the toolshed he kept a shoemaker’s last—a heavy, three-footed iron object, like the coat of arms from some comic country—and on it he would hammer steel corners into the heels of each new pair of shoes he bought. Then he would walk ahead of her, a little too quickly, so that every few strides she would have to break into a clumsy half-run. And as he walked she would hear the sliding scrape of a carving knife on a back step, and fire would be struck from the pavement.

Jean’s marriage lasted twenty years. After the guilty disappointment of the honeymoon came the longer, slower dismay of living together. Perhaps she had imagined too strongly that it would be just like not living together: that the life of high, airy skies and light, loose clouds would continue—a life of good-night kisses, excited greetings, silly games, and unspoken hopes miraculously fulfilled. Now she found the hopes had to be spoken if they were to come to anything, and the games seemed far too silly if played by only one person; as for the excited greetings, they followed so closely upon the good-night kisses, and so regularly, that they could hardly stay excited all the time. No doubt it was the same for Michael, too.

But what puzzled her was how closely you could live beside someone without any sense of intimacy—or what she had always imagined intimacy to be. They lived, ate, slept together, they had jokes no one else could decipher, they were familiar with one another down to their underclothes; but what seemed to emerge from
all this were mere patterns of behaviour rather than prized familiarities of response. Jean had imagined—hadn’t she?—that the honeysuckle would wrap itself round the hawthorn, that the saplings planted side by side would twine themselves into an arch, that a pair of spoons would nestle their contours together, that two would become one. Silly, picture-book thinking, she realized. She could still love Michael even if she couldn’t read his mind or predict his responses; he could still love her even if he seemed complacent about her inner life. A spoon couldn’t nestle with a knife, that was all. It had been a mistake to imagine that marriage could alter mathematics. One plus one always made two.

Men changed when they married you; that was what the village women promised. You wait, my girl, they had said. So Jean was only half surprised by the slow dulling of enjoyment and the arrival of tired discourtesies. What dismayed her more was how the very kindness and gentleness Michael had displayed while courting her now became a source of irritation to him. It seemed to make him cross that he was expected after marriage to behave as he had done before; and this crossness was itself a source of further crossness. Look, he seemed to say, you think that earlier I was deceiving you about what I was really like, don’t you. I wasn’t. I wasn’t cross then and I am cross now: how dare you accuse me of dishonesty? But it struck Jean as a matter of small importance whether or not he had been honest then, if he was cross now.

Of course, it must be largely her fault. And it was, she supposed, normal that her inability to bear a child should set off inexplicable rages in Michael. They were inexplicable not because there wasn’t a cause—or at least a justification—but because her inability to conceive remained constant, yet his rages were always untimely.

At first he had wanted to send her to a specialist. But she remembered the previous occasion when he had persuaded—no, tricked—her into going to London. One Dr. Headley was enough specialists for a lifetime. So she refused.

“Perhaps I just need some Alpine air,” she said.

“What
do
you mean?”

“Alpine air restores the vitality of the subject.” She quoted it like a proverb.

“Jean, darling.” He took her wrists and squeezed them as if he were about to say something affectionate. “Has anyone ever told you how abysmally stupid you are?”

She looked away; he held her wrists; she knew she would have to look at him—or at least reply—before he would let go of her. What was the point of his being nasty to her? She probably was stupid, though she half suspected she might not be; but even so, why should that make him cross? She hadn’t been any more intelligent when he met her, and he’d seemed not to mind it then. She felt a pain in her stomach.

Finally, with a small measure of defiance, but not looking him in the face, she said, “You promised you wouldn’t send me back if I was defective.”

“What?”

“When I went to see Dr. Headley, I asked if you’d send me back if I was defective. You said no.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, if you do think I’m defective, you can send me back.”

“Jean.” He held her wrists more tightly, but still she declined to look at that big red face on the boyish neck. “Christ. Look.” He sounded exasperated. “Look, I love you. Christ. Look, I love you. It’s just that I sometimes wish you were … different.”

Different. Yes, she could see that was what he wanted. She was abysmally stupid and childless. He wanted her intelligent and pregnant. It was as simple as this.
Heads we have six children, Tails we keep a cat
. They would have to buy a cat.

“I’ve got a pain,” she said.

“I love you,” he replied, almost shouting with exasperation. For the first time, after five years of marriage, this information failed to move her. She didn’t disbelieve him, but the whole thing was way beyond a question of honesty now.

“I’ve got a pain,” she repeated, feeling cowardly about her inability to face him. No doubt he despised her additionally for having a pain.

Eventually, he let go of her wrists. But over the following months he returned to the question of her “seeing a specialist.” Jean agreed to the evasive terminology, though inwardly she rehearsed phrases she had read while Sun-Up Prosser snored in the next room.
Maladjustment of the organs
, she remembered, and
congestion of the womb
. Congestion—she thought of men coming to unblock the drains, and shuddered. Barren, that was the proper word, the biblical word. Barren. And barrenness. Barrenness made her think of the Gobi desert, which made her think of Uncle Leslie. Don’t let the club head drop or there’ll be more sand flying than on a windy day in the Gobi desert. She saw a golfer in a bunker, hacking, hacking, hacking with his club, and the ball never coming out.

At times, though, she wondered if her condition was quite the failing Michael obviously thought it. During their courtship she had found herself tensing whenever he mentioned children. One thing at a time, she had thought. And then her experience of the first thing had made her a little sceptical about the second.

Perhaps she was unnatural, rather than barren. Or as well as being barren. Abysmally stupid, barren and unnatural: that was how she must look from the outside. It felt different from the inside. She could shrug off being barren and unnatural, if that was how people found her. As for being abysmally stupid, she could see Michael’s point, but she could also see beyond it. It seemed to Jean that intelligence wasn’t as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person’s company and yet wicked in another’s. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence. Though Michael was her husband, who had led her from virginity and adolescence to womanhood and maturity (or so the world presumed), who had protected her physically and financially, who had awarded her the name of
Curtis in exchange for that of Serjeant, he had strangely failed to give her confidence. In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent. It seemed an unkind turn of events: first Michael made her less intelligent, and then he despised her for being what he had made her.

Perhaps he had made her barren too. Was that possible? Anything, she thought, was possible. So the next time they argued about her defectiveness, she looked up, held his eye and quickly, before the courage went, said, “I’ll go if you go.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll go if you go.”

“Jean, don’t talk like a child. Repeating yourself is not the same as explaining yourself.”

“Perhaps you’re the one that’s defective.”

That was when he hit her. It was, in fact, the only time in their life together that he did, and it was less a punch than an awkward round-arm cuff which landed where her shoulder joined her neck; but she was not to know this at the time. As she ran from the room, words seemed to descend on her from all angles.
Bitch
, she heard for the first time, and
imbecile
, and
woman
, this last word beaten and sharpened until it had an edge for slashing with.

The words continued to be thrown after she had shut the door behind her. But its presence emptied them of meaning: two inches of close-fitting wood drained a violent anatomy of your character into mere noise. It felt as if Michael were throwing objects at her which all made the same sound as they hit the door: was that a plate, an inkwell, a book, a knife, or a tomahawk hung with feathers and still sharp despite its many previous victims? She couldn’t tell.

She was grateful for this, as she thought back over the incident in the next few days, as she accepted Michael’s apologies and declined his caresses. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me: why did people formulate such proverbs unless they feared all too accurately that the opposite was the case? Pains
healed, she knew (that first wound in her stomach had gone within the hour), but words festered.
Woman
, Michael had shouted at her, screwing the sound up into a ball first so that he could throw it farther and more accurately.
Woman
, where the word itself carried no venom, but the poison was all in the tone.
Woman
, two anodyne syllables which he redefined for her:
all that exasperates me
was the new meaning.

After that, they stopped discussing children. Over the years they continued to make love, perhaps once a month, or at least whenever Michael seemed to want to; but Jean felt passive about the whole business. When she thought of Michael and sex she imagined an overfilling water tank which occasionally had to be drained; it didn’t have to be done too often, it wasn’t exactly a nuisance, it was just part of running the house. As for herself and sex, she preferred not to think about it. Sometimes she pretended to more pleasure than she felt; this was only polite. She didn’t find sex funny anymore; she just found it ordinary. And all those phrases she had once learnt—silly, exciting phrases which had seemed to flirt with her—now came from a very long time ago, from the island of childhood. The island you could not leave without getting wet. She thought of two wave patterns meeting at right angles, and felt a little guilty. As for those slogans—the one about the curve of normal desire and the other about the feeble and transient upwelling in women suffering from fatigue and overwork—they seemed like faded graffiti briefly glimpsed on the wall of a country bus shelter.