The Fallen Curtain (17 page)

“Never mind,” the manageress was saying. “You can’t go wrong, it’s very simple. When you’ve put your fivepence in, you just turn the handle to the right as far as it will go and you hear the coin fall. Then you can switch on the fire and light the gas. Is that clear?”

James said it was quite clear, thanks very much, and immediately the manageress had left the room. Nina, who wasted no time, said, “Can you tell me one good reason why we couldn’t have come here tomorrow?”

“I could tell you several,” said James, getting up from the floor, turning his back on that antediluvian thing and the gas fire which looked as if it hadn’t given out a therm of heat for about thirty years. “The principal one is that I didn’t fancy driving a hundred and fifty miles in a morning coat and top hat.”

“Didn’t fancy driving with your usual Saturday morning hangover, you mean.”

“Let’s not start a row, Nina. Let’s have a bit of peace for just one evening. Sir William is my company chairman. I have to take it as an honour that we were asked to this wedding, and if we have an uncomfortable evening and night because of it, that can’t be helped. It’s part of the job.”

“Just how pompous can you get?” said Nina with what in a less attractive woman would have been called a snarl. “I wonder what Sir William-Bloody-Tarrant would say if he could see his sales director after he’s got a bottle of whisky inside him.”

“He doesn’t see me,” said James, lighting a cigarette, and adding because she hadn’t yet broken his spirit, “That’s your privilege.”

“Privilege!”
Nina, who had been furiously unpacking her case and throwing clothes on to one of the beds, now stopped doing this because it sapped some of the energy she needed for quarrelling. She sat down on the bed and snapped, “Give me a cigarette. You’ve no manners, have you? Do you know how uncouth you are? This place’ll suit you fine, it’s just up to your mark, gas meters and a loo about five hundred yards away. That won’t bother you as long as there’s a bar. I’ll be able to have the
privilege
of sharing my bedroom with a disgusting soak.” She drew breath like a swimmer and plunged on. “Do you realise we haven’t slept in the same room for two years? Didn’t think of that, did you, when you left booking up till the last minute? Or maybe—yes, that was it, my God!—maybe you did think of it. Oh, I know you so well, James Armadale. You thought being in here with me, undressing with me, would work the miracle. I’d come round. I’d—what’s the expression?—
resume marital relations.
You got them to give us this—this cell on purpose. You bloody fixed it!”

“No,” said James. He said it quietly and rather feebly because he had experienced such a strong inner recoil that he could hardly speak at all.

“You liar! D’you think I’ve forgotten the fuss you made when I got you to sleep in the spare room? D’you think I’ve
forgotten about that woman, that Frances? I’ll never forget and I’ll never forgive you. So don’t think I’m going to let bygones by bygones when you try pawing me about when the bar closes.”

“I shan’t do that,” said James, reflecting that in a quarter of an hour the bar would be opening. “I shall never again try what you so charmingly describe as pawing you about.”

“No, because you know you wouldn’t get anywhere. You know you’d get a slap round the face you wouldn’t forget in a hurry.”

“Nina,” he said, “let’s stop this. It’s hypothetical, it won’t happen. If we are going to go on living together—and I suppose we are, though God knows why—can’t we try to live in peace?”

She flushed and said in a thick sullen voice, “You should have thought of that before you were unfaithful to me with that woman.”

“That,” he said, “was three years ago,
three years.
I don’t want to provoke you and we’ve been into this enough times, but you know very well why I was unfaithful to you. I’m only thirty-five, I’m still young. I couldn’t stand being permitted
marital relations
—pawing you about, if you like that better—about six times a year. Do I have to go over it all again?”

“Not on my account. It won’t make any difference to me what excuses you make.” The smoke in the tiny room made her cough and, opening the window, she inhaled the damp, cold air. “You asked me,” she said, turning round, “why we have to go on living together. I’ll tell you why. Because you married me. I’ve got a right to you and I’ll never divorce you. You’ve got me till death parts us. Till death, James. Right?”

He didn’t answer. An icy blast had come into the room when she had opened the window, and he felt in his pocket. “If you’re going to stay in here till dinner,” he said, “you’ll want the gas fire on. Have you got any fivepence pieces? I haven’t, unless I can get some change.”

“Oh, you’ll get some all right. In the bar. And just for your
information, I haven’t brought any money with me. That’s
your
privilege.”

When he had left her alone, she sat in the cold room for some minutes, staring at the brick wall. Till death parts us, she had told him, and she meant it. She would never leave him and he must never be allowed to leave her, but she hoped he would die. It wasn’t her fault she was frigid. She had always supposed he understood. She had supposed her good looks and her capacity as housewife and hostess compensated for a revulsion she couldn’t help. And it wasn’t just against him, but against all men, any man. He had seemed to accept it and to be happy with her. In her sexless way, she had loved him. And then, when he had seemed happier and more at ease than at any time in their marriage, when he had ceased to make those painful demands and had become so sweet to her, so generous with presents, he had suddenly and without shame confessed it. She wouldn’t mind, he had told her, he knew that. She wouldn’t resent his finding elsewhere what she so evidently disliked giving him. While he provided for her and spent nearly all his leisure with her and respected her as his wife, she should be relieved, disliking sex as she did, that he had found someone else.

He had said it was the pent-up energy caused by her repressions that made her fly at him, beat at him with her hands, scream at him words he didn’t know she knew. To her dying day she would remember his astonishment. He had genuinely thought she wouldn’t mind. And it had taken weeks of nagging and screaming and threats to make him agree to give Frances up. She had driven him out of her bedroom and settled into the bitter, unremitting vendetta she would keep up till death parted them. Even now, he didn’t understand how agonisingly he had hurt her. But there were no more women and he had begun to drink. He was drinking now, she thought, and by nine o’clock he would be stretched out, dead drunk on that bed separated by only eighteen inches from her own.

The room was too cold to sit in any longer. She tried the gas fire, turning on the switch to “full,” but the match she held to
it refused to ignite it, and presently she made her way downstairs and into a little lounge where there was a coal fire and people were watching television.

  They met again at the dinner table.

James Armadale had drunk getting on for half a pint of whisky, and now, to go with the brown Windsor soup and hotted-up roast lamb, he ordered a bottle of burgundy.

“Just as a matter of idle curiosity,” said Nina, “why do you drink so much?”

“To drown my sorrows,” said James. “The classic reason. Happens to be true in my case. Would you like some wine?”

“I’d better have a glass, hadn’t I, otherwise you’ll drink the whole bottle.”

The dining room was full and most of the other diners were middle-aged or elderly. Many of them, he supposed, would be wedding guests like themselves. He could see that their arrival had been noted and that at the surrounding tables their appearance was being favourably commented upon. It afforded him a thin, wry amusement to think that they would be judged a handsome, well-suited and perhaps happy couple.

“Nina,” he said, “we can’t go on like this. It’s not fair on either of us. We’re destroying ourselves and each other. We have to talk about what we’re going to do.”

“Pick your moments, don’t you? I’m not going to talk about it in a public place.”

She had spoken in a low, subdued voice, quite different from her hectoring tone in their bedroom, and she shot quick, nervous glances at the neighbouring tables.

“It’s because this is a public place that I think we stand a better chance of talking about it reasonably. When we’re alone you get hysterical and then neither of us can be rational. If we talk about it now, I think I know you well enough to say you won’t scream at me.”

“I could walk out though, couldn’t I? Besides, you’re drunk.”

“I am not drunk. Frankly, I probably shall be in an hour’s time and that’s another reason why we ought to talk here and
now. Look, Nina, you don’t love me, you’ve said so often enough, and whatever crazy ideas you have about my having designs on you, I don’t love you either. We’ve been into the reasons for that so many times that I don’t need to go into them now, but can’t we come to some sort of amicable arrangement to split up?”

“So that you can have all the women you want? So that you can bring that bitch into my house?”

“No,” he said, “you can have the house. The court would probably award you a third of my income, but I’ll give you more if you want. I’d give you half.” He had nearly added, “to be rid of you,” but he bit off the words as being too provocative. His speech was already thickening and slurring.

It was disconcerting—though this was what he had wanted—to hear how inhibition made her voice soft and kept her face controlled. The words she used were the same, though. He had heard them a thousand times before. “If you leave me, I’ll follow you. I’ll go to your office and tell them all about it. I’ll sit on your doorstep. I won’t be abandoned. I’d rather die. I won’t be a divorced woman just because you’ve got tired of me.”

“If you go on like this,” he said thickly, “you’ll find yourself a widow. Will you like that?”

Had they been alone, she would have screamed the affirmative at him. Because they weren’t, she gave him a thin, sharp, and concentrated smile, a smile which an observer might have taken for amusement at some married couple’s private joke. “Yes,” she said, “I’d like to be a widow,
your
widow. Drink yourself to death, why don’t you? That’s what you have to do if you want to be rid of me.”

The waitress came to their table. James ordered a double brandy and “coffee for my wife.” He knew he would never be rid of her. He wasn’t the sort of man who can stand public disruption of his life, scenes at work, molestation, the involvement of friends and employers. It must be, he knew, an amicable split or none at all. And since she would never see reason, never understand or forgive, he must soldier on. With the help of this, he thought, as the brandy spread its dim, cloudy euphoria
through his brain. He drained his glass quickly, muttered an “excuse me” to her for the benefit of listeners, and left the dining room.

Nina returned to the television lounge. There was a play on whose theme was a marital situation that almost paralleled her own. The old ladies with their knitting and the old men with their after-dinner cigars watched it apathetically. She thought she might take the car and go somewhere for a drive. It didn’t much matter where, anywhere would do that was far enough from this hotel and James and that cathedral clock whose chimes split the hours into fifteen-minute segments with long brazen peals. There must be somewhere in this town where one could get a decent cup of coffee, some cinema maybe where they weren’t showing a film about marriage or what people, she thought shudderingly, called sexual relationships. She went upstairs to get the car keys and some money.

James was fast asleep. He had taken off his tie and his shoes, but otherwise he was fully dressed, lying on his back and snoring. Stupid of him not to get under the covers. He’d freeze. Maybe he’d die of exposure. Well, she wasn’t going to cover him up, but she’d close the window for when she came in. The car keys were in his jacket pocket, mixed up with a lot of loose change. The feel of his warm body through the material made her shiver. His breath smelt of spirits and he was sweating in spite of the cold. Among the change were two fivepence pieces. She’d take one of those and keep it till the morning to feed that gas meter. It would be horrible dressing for that wedding in here at zero temperature. Why not feed it now so that it would be ready for the morning, ready to turn the gas fire on and give her some heat when she came in at midnight, come to that?

The room was faintly illuminated by the yellow light from the street lamp in the alley. She crouched down in front of the gas fire, and noticed she hadn’t turned the dial to “off” after her match had failed to ignite the jets. It wouldn’t do to feed that meter now with the dial turned to “full” and have fivepence worth of old-fashioned toxic gas flood the room. Not
with the window tight shut and not a crack round that heavy old door. Slowly she put her hand out to turn off the dial.

Her fingers touched it. Her hand remained still, poised. She heard her heart begin to thud softly in the silence as the idea in all its brilliant awfulness took hold of her. Wouldn’t do …? Was she mad? It wouldn’t do to feed that meter now with the gas-fire dial turned to “full”? What would do as well, as efficiently, as finally? She withdrew her hand and clasped it in the other to steady it.

Rising to her feet, she contemplated her sleeping husband. The sweat was standing on his pale forehead now. He snored as rhythmically, as stertorously, as her own heart beat. A widow, she thought, alone and free in her own unshared house. Not divorced, despised, disowned, laughed at by judges and solicitors for her crippling frigidity, not mocked by that Frances and her successors, but a widow whom all the world would pity and respect. Comfortably-off too, if not rich, with an income from James’s life assurance and very likely a pension from Sir William Tarrant.

James wouldn’t wake up till midnight. No, that was wrong. He wouldn’t
have
wakened up till midnight. What she meant was he wouldn’t wake up at all.

The dial on the gas fire was still on, full on. She took the fivepence coin and tiptoed over to the meter. Nothing would wake him but still she tiptoed. The window was tight shut, with nothing beyond it but that alley, that glistening lamp, and the towering wall of the cathedral.