‘Fairly battered the delphiniums,’ Odo said.
‘Hasn’t it just.’
She smiled a little. You had to accept what there was; no point in brooding. They had been hurt, as was intended, punished because one of them continued to be disappointed and repelled. There never is fairness when vengeance is evoked: that had occurred to Charlotte when she was washing up the lunchtime dishes, and to Odo when he tidied the dining-room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he had said, returning to the kitchen with forks and spoons that had not been used. Not turning round, Charlotte had shaken her head.
They were not bewildered, as their birthday visitor was: they easily understood. Their own way of life was so much debris all around them, but since they were no longer in their prime that hardly mattered. Once it would have, Odo reflected now; Charlotte had known that years ago. Their love of each other had survived the vicissitudes and the struggle there had been; not even the bleakness of the day that had passed could affect it.
They didn’t mention their son as they made their rounds of the garden that was now too much for them and was derelict in places. They didn’t mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was.
Child's Play
Gerard and Rebecca became brother and sister after a turmoil of distress. Each had witnessed it from a different point of view, Gerard in one house, Rebecca in another. Two years of passionate quarrelling, arguing and agreeing, of beginning again, of failure and reconciliation, of final insults and rejection, constituted the peepshow they viewed.
There were no other children of the two wrecked marriages, and when the final period of acrimonious wrangling came to an end there was an unexpected accord as to the division of the families. This, it was decided, would be more satisfactorily decreed by the principals involved than by the divorce courts. Gerard’s father, innocent in what had occurred, agreed that Gerard should live with his mother since that was convenient. Rebecca’s mother, innocent also, declared herself unfit to raise the child of a marriage she had come to loathe, and declared as well that she could not bring herself to go on living in the house of the marriage. She claimed that suicidal tendencies had developed in her, aggravated by the familiar surroundings: she would suffer the loss of her child for her child’s sake. ‘She’s trying all this on,’ the other woman insisted, but in the end it appeared she wasn’t, and so the arrangement was made.
On a warm Wednesday afternoon, the day Quest for Fame won the Derby, Gerard’s mother married Rebecca’s father. Afterwards all four of them stood, eyes tightened against strong sunlight, while someone took a photograph. The two children were of an age, Gerard ten, Rebecca nine. Gerard was dark-haired, quite noticeably thin, with glasses. Rebecca’s reddish hair curved roundly about her rounded cheeks. Her eyes were bright, a deep shade of blue. Gerard’s, brown, were solemn.
They were neutrally disposed to one another, with neither fondness nor distaste on either side: they did not know one another well. Gerard was an intruder in the house that had been Rebecca’s, but this was far less to bear than the departure from it of her mother.
‘They’ll settle,’ Rebecca’s father murmured in a teashop after the wedding.
Watching the two children, silent beside one another, his new wife said she hoped so.
They did settle. Thrown together as helpless parties in the stipulations of the peace, they became companions. They missed the past; resentment and deprivation drew them close. They talked about the two people whom they visited on Sundays, and how those two, once at the centre of things, were now defeated and displaced.
At the top of the house, attic space had been reclaimed to form a single, low-roofed room with windows to the ground and a new parquet floor that seemed to stretch for ever. The walls were a shade of washed-out primrose, and shafts of sunlight made the pale ash of the parquet seem almost white. There was no furniture. Two bare electric light-bulbs hung from the long, slanted ceiling. This no-man’s-land was where Gerard and Rebecca played their game of marriage and divorce. It became a secret game, words fading on their lips if someone entered, politeness disguising their deceit.
Rebecca recalled her mother weeping at lunch, a sudden collapse into ugly distress while she was spooning peas on to Rebecca’s plate. ‘Whatever’s up?’ Rebecca asked, watching as her mother hurried from the table. Her father did not answer, but instead left the dining-room himself, and a few moments later there were the sounds of a quarrel. ‘You’ve made me hate you,’ Rebecca’s mother kept screaming so shrilly that Rebecca thought the people in the house next door would hear. ‘How could you have made me hate you?’
Gerard entered a room and found his mother nursing the side of her face. His father stood at the window, looking out. Behind his back one hand gripped the other as if in restraint. Gerard was frightened and went away, his brief presence unnoticed.
‘Think of that child,’ Rebecca’s mother pleaded in another mood. ‘Stay with us if only for that child.’
‘You vicious bitch!’ This furious accusation stuttered out of Gerard’s father, his voice peculiar, his lips trembling in a grimace he could not control.
Such scenes, seeming like the end of everything that mattered, were later surveyed from the unemotional safety of the new companionship. Regret was exorcized, sore places healed; harshness was the saviour. From information supplied by television a world of sin and romance was put together in the empty attic room. ‘Think of that child!’ Rebecca mimicked, and Gerard adopted his father’s grimace the time he called his mother a vicious bitch. It was fun because the erring couple were so virtuous now.
‘I can’t think how it happened.’ Gerard’s version of the guilty husband’s voice was not convincing, but it passed whatever muster was required. ‘I can’t think how I could have been such a fool as to marry her in the first place.’
‘Poor thing, it’s not her fault.’
‘It’s that that makes it such an awful guilt.’ This came from an old black-and-white film and was used a lot because they liked the sound of it.
When romance was to the fore they spoke in whispers, making a murmuring sound when they didn’t know what to say. They tried out dance steps in the attic, pretending they were in a dance-hall they called the Ruby Ballroom or a night-club they called the Nitelite, a title they’d seen in neon somewhere. They called a bar the Bee’s Knees, which Rebecca said was a name suitable for a bar, although the original was a stocking shop. They called a hotel the Grand Splendide.
‘Some sleazy hotel?’ Gerard’s father had scornfully put it. ‘Some sleazy pay-at-the-door hotel for his sleazy one-night stands ?’
‘No, actually,’ the reply had been. ‘It was rather grand.’
Downstairs they watched a television serial in which the wronged ones made the kind of fuss that both Gerard and Rebecca had witnessed. The erring ones met in car parks, or on waste land in the early morning.
‘Gosh!’ Rebecca exclaimed, softly astonished at what was occurring on the screen. ‘He took his tongue out of her mouth. Definitely.’
‘She’s chewing his lips actually.’
‘But his tongue — ’
‘I know.’
‘Horrid great thing, it looked.’