A Fortnight by the Sea. Emma Page
made up his mind sometimes to refer to Godfrey’s wife by her Christian name when he was talking to her husband. He had after all called her Pauline when they knew each other as children. But when it came to the point his nerve always failed. In conversation with the lady herself he had since her marriage grown quite skilful in avoiding calling her anything at all.
‘Very well, thank you.’ Godfrey added a few remarks about the busy season and end of term and then suddenly said, ‘Oh yes, you knew the Lockwoods, didn’t you? My wife’s arranging with them to come and stay with us very soon. I dare say you’ll see them about the village.’ It would never cross his mind, Henry thought with savagery, to ask me up to Oakfield for a meal while they’re here.
He stopped and grasped the handles of his shopping bags, he spoke in an expressionless voice. ‘I was at school with Stephen Lockwood.’ A fact he was likely to remember when most of the other facts of his existence had dwindled into hazy recollection. He found it difficult to realize that he would shortly see Marion again. It was some years since he had caught a glimpse of her going by in a car on one of her brief visits to the area. It was more than sixteen years since he had spoken to her. He wouldn’t mention her name now, wouldn’t by any word of his own evoke her image to hover like an airy ghost in the brilliant sunlight, he hugged the memory of her to him, away from casual tongues.
‘By the way.’ Godfrey held up a warning finger. ‘Don’t say anything to Miss Tillard about the Lockwoods, not about their visit, that is. It isn’t definitely settled, in fact my wife is ringing them up about it this evening. I wouldn’t like Miss Tillard to be disappointed in case they can’t come. Or if they don’t come for some time.’
‘No, I won’t mention it.’
‘I’m pretty certain they will come, though,’ Godfrey said in a flat tone. The last thing he wanted just now was for Stephen Lockwood – reasonably successful, securely placed – to go poking and prying into his business, asking shrewd questions about the future of the firm; he would probably want to go into Chilford with him and prowl round the workshop. Oh – that’ll be all right, he remembered suddenly, the men will be on holiday from the end of next week. He closed his eyes briefly against the notion that as far as Barratt’s was concerned the holiday might be a permanent one. ‘July the twenty-fourth,’ he said aloud, forgetting for a moment that he was standing a yard or two away from Whittall. ‘I was just thinking,’ he added, recollecting himself, ‘that Barratt’s will be closed for three weeks from the twenty-fourth. It would be pleasant if my wife could arrange for the Lockwoods to come at that time.’
The twenty-fourth, Henry repeated in his mind a few minutes later as he trudged round yet another curve in the road. He had three weeks’ holiday still owing. Might take a week or two soon, he pondered; things were fairly slack at the office. By the time he set the shopping bags down on his doorstep he had reached a decision.
‘I’m just slipping down to the post, dear.’ Marion Lockwood was patting her hair in front of the hall mirror when her husband came slowly down the stairs. She gave him a mechanical half-smile and let herself out into the warm sunlight of early evening.
Stephen went into the sitting room and crossed to the window. He stood looking out at Marion walking down the path to the gate, casting his eye – without the faintest trace of affection – over the back view of her rather short, slightly plump figure. He yawned and glanced at his watch. Half past six. Not a minute before seven, Fiona had said. He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and began to pace moodily about the room. How did Fiona occupy herself away from the office during the long stretches of hours when she wasn’t seeing him? She never offered any information, certainly didn’t encourage direct questions, answered teasingly or evasively if he so far forgot himself as to ask one. ‘Not really any of your business,’ her smile would imply, ‘I’m not married to you . . . yet.’
A few minutes later he was roused from his thoughts by the sound of his wife returning. He flung himself down into an armchair and stared critically at the walls, the furniture, the proportions of the room. They should have moved out of this part of Barbridge ages ago when he got his first really good promotion at Alpha Fabrics, but Marion had always been ready with an apparently sound reason why they shouldn’t make a change just yet. During the last couple of years he had at last ceased to bother taking Marion out for those evening and weekend runs in the car which had always ended up in front of desirable detached residences sporting For Sale boards. His attention had finally wandered from Marion, strayed about for a while and eventually settled firmly on Fiona Brooke.
‘I thought we could have the last of the lamb for supper,’ Marion said as soon as she came into the room. ‘I saw a very nice recipe in a magazine at the hairdresser’s. I copied it out while I was under the drier.’
‘I won’t be in to supper,’ Stephen said brusquely. Marion’s standards of domestic economy, suitable enough in their early married life but no longer relevant, now merely the result of a temperamental inability to adapt to changing circumstances, grated on him with increasing force.
‘Oh, you have a business appointment.’ Marion didn’t appear in the least put out. She would quite enjoy fiddling with the bits and pieces of her recipe, would eat the resulting dish in contented solitude, would settle down happily enough afterwards in front of the television set or pick up one of the romantic novels she was so fond of.
Stephen didn’t bother to reply, merely flicked over her an expressionless glance. I do believe, he thought, that it is mostly thrift which keeps her tied to this arid marriage, she simply cannot countenance the idea of throwing away something that is legally hers. She would mind scarcely at all if I were dead, she would see widowhood as a common and natural sequel to marriage, she would bed herself cosily down into it – but divorce . . . He shook his head. She would have nothing to do with divorce. However the case was conducted she would feel herself besmirched, marked with failure, inadequacy, she would be unable to relax pleasurably into cushioned singleness as she could if she had first of all watched his coffin descend towards the consuming flames.
‘She hasn’t rubbed that dirty mark off the window sill,’ Marion said suddenly. She fought a genteelly vicious campaign of attrition against whatever cleaning woman she currently employed. She got to her feet and went out to the kitchen in search of a damp cloth. ‘I told her twice yesterday before I went to the hairdresser’s,’ she said when she returned. ‘You really have to watch them all the time,’ she added in that tone of satisfaction and self-congratulation that caused a tremor of irritation to run along Stephen’s nerves. She attacked the mark with vigour.
All that endless concern with microscopic detail, never a large sweeping notion of transforming the entire interior of the house by some new and imaginative scheme of decoration . . . Stephen closed his eyes in distaste. He sometimes felt that the word housewife was the most terrifying in the English language.
‘There, that’s better.’ She turned and gave him the same automatic low-voltage smile that she gave the butcher, the baker and the man who came to read the meter. ‘What time is your appointment?’
‘I’ll leave just after seven.’ She must know perfectly well that I haven’t got a business appointment on a Saturday evening, he thought with cold dislike; deep down inside that knitting-wool brain she must know with total certainty that I have a mistress. But nothing in the world would tempt her to dig down and take an honest look at that knowledge. He experienced a moment’s wild desire to say, ‘My mistress asked me not to arrive before seven,’ just to see if anything would force her to tear the sealing strips from her eyes.
‘We really ought to settle something about your other two weeks’ holiday,’ she said when she had disposed of the cloth and settled herself into an easy chair. Stephen went abroad two or three times a year to trade fairs and exhibitions and would have felt little deprived if his official four weeks’ holiday was abolished. In recent years he found an undiluted dose of his wife’s society so grey and dull that it was really only because of the look of the thing that he troubled to take his holidays