“You think he does have affairs?”
“I’ve just said: maybe, maybe not.” The unbidden image of Clive looking down at Gloria entered my mind. I pushed it away.
“And you don’t?”
“As I told you last time you asked: no.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Not close to it?”
“Oh, stop it, for goodness’ sake.”
“Do you and your husband have a satisfactory sex life?”
I shook my head at her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”
“All right.” Once again, she was unexpectedly gentle. “Do you think that your husband loves you?”
I blinked.
“Loves me?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a big word.” She didn’t reply. I took a breath. “No.”
“Likes you?”
I stood up.
“I’ve had enough,” I said. “You’re going to walk away from this conversation and write it up in concise notes, but I’m going to live with it, and I don’t want to. Clive isn’t sending me razor blades, is he, so why do you want to know all this?” I stood at the door. “Has it ever occurred to you that what you do is rather cruel? Now, I’m rather busy, so if you’ll excuse me.”
Dr. Schilling left and I stood alone in the sitting room. I felt as if I had been turned upside down and emptied all over the floor.
NINE
I could hear the wind rippling in the trees outside. I wanted to open the windows, let the night breeze blow through all the rooms, but I couldn’t. I mustn’t. Everything had to be closed and locked. I had to be secure. The air inside was stale, secondhand. Heavy, hot, dead air. I was shut up in this house, and the world was shut out of it, and I could feel it all returning to chaos and to ugliness: wallpaper hanging off the walls, plasterwork abruptly stopping, floorboards torn up so you could see the dark, grimy holes beneath. The dust and bits and pieces of years and years working their way back onto the surface. All the unfinished work, all my dreams of perfect spaces: cool white, lemon yellow, slate gray, pea green, the stippled hallway, a fire in the grate throwing shadows across the smooth cream carpet, the grand piano with gladioli on top, the round tables for drinks in cut-glass tumblers, my prints hanging under picture lights, long views through the windows of green lawns and graceful shrubs.
I was sweating. I turned my pillow over, to find a cooler patch. Outside the trees rustled. It wasn’t quite dark; the street lamps cast a dirty orange stain across the room. I could see the shapes of my surroundings, my dressing table, the chair, the tall block of the wardrobe, the paler squares of the two windows. And I could see that Clive still wasn’t here. What time was it? I sat up in bed and squinted across at the luminous numbers on the alarm clock. I watched a seven grow into an eight and then shrink into a nine.
Half past two and he hadn’t come home. Lena was out till tomorrow morning, staying with her boyfriend, so it was just me in the house, me and Chris, and all those empty disintegrating rooms, and outside a police car. My finger throbbed, my throat hurt, my eyes stung. It was quite impossible to sleep anymore.
I stood up and saw myself dimly reflected in the long mirror, like a ghost in my white cotton nightdress. I padded across to Chris’s room. He was sleeping with one foot tucked under the other knee and with his arms thrown up like a ballet dancer. The duvet was in a heap on the floor beside him. His hair was sticking to his forehead. His mouth was slightly open. Maybe, I thought, I should take him to Mummy and Daddy’s house down in Hassocks. Maybe I should go there myself, get away from all this ghastliness. I could just leave, get in the car and drive away. Why not? What on earth was there to stop me and why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down. The light was on in the hall, but all the rooms were dark. I gulped. Suddenly it was hard to breathe. Stupid. This was stupid, stupid, stupid. I was safe, absolutely safe. There were two men outside, all the doors and windows were locked, double-locked. There were ugly iron grilles on the downstairs windows. A burglar alarm. A light that turned on in the garden when anyone passed it.
I went into the room that would be a spare bedroom, and turned on the light. Half a wall was papered, the rest just lined. The rolls of wallpaper were stacked in the corner, waiting beside the stepladder and the trestle table. The brass bed was in pieces on the floor. The room smelled musty. There was a hot bubble of rage in my chest; if I opened my mouth it would come out as a scream. A scream that would go on and on, ripping into the silent night, waking up everyone in the city, telling them to beware. I pressed my lips together. I had to put my life in order. Nobody else was going to do it for me, that was clear. Clive wasn’t around. Leo and Francis and Jeremy and all the rest of them had gone, as if they’d never been here. Mary crept round me as if I was contagious, and I was lucky if she emptied the wastepaper baskets nowadays. Tomorrow I would tell her I didn’t need her anymore. The police were all stupid, incompetent. If they had been my workmen, I would have fired them by now. I would just have to rely on me. It was just me, now. I felt a tic start up under my right eye. When I put my finger there, I could feel it jumping, like an insect under my skin.
I picked up the box of wallpaper paste and read the instructions. It all seemed simple enough. Why did everybody make so much fuss about it? I would start with the room and then I’d move through my life, putting it all back together again, just like it was before.
Clive arrived home about half an hour later. I heard the key in the door and froze for an instant, until I heard him take off his shoes and pad into the kitchen, where he turned on the tap. I didn’t stop what I was doing. I didn’t have time. I was going to finish this before morning.
“Jenny,” he called when he went into our bedroom. “Jens, where are you?”
I didn’t reply. I slapped the paste onto the wallpaper. “Jens,” he shouted, from our bathroom this time, the one that was going to have Italian tiles one day. The hem of my nightdress was sodden with paste, but that didn’t matter. The bandage on my hand was soaked as well, and my finger throbbed harder than ever. The most difficult part was putting the paper on straight, and without any bubbles. Sometimes I put on too much paste and it stained through the paper. That would dry, though.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” He stood in the doorway in his white shirt and red boxer shorts and the socks that bloody Father Christmas had given him last year.
“What does it look like?”
“Jens, it’s the middle of the night.”
“So?” He didn’t say anything, just stared around the room as if he didn’t quite know where he was. “What does it matter if it’s the middle of the night? What does it matter what time it is? If nobody else is going to do it, I’m going to do it myself. And you can be pretty sure that nobody else is going to do it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that if you want something done, do it yourself. Mind where you step, for goodness’ sake. You’ll ruin everything and then I will have to do it all over again and I don’t have time for that. Had a good day, did you? Good day at the office till three in the morning, darling?”
“Jens.”
I climbed up the ladder, holding up the sticky paper, which twisted round on itself.
“I blame myself,” I said. “I’ve let everything go to pieces, that’s what. I didn’t notice at first, but now I see. A few silly letters, and we let the house fall down, fill up with dirt. Stupid.”
“Jens, stop this now. It’s all crooked anyway. And you’ve got glue in your hair. Come off that ladder now.”
“The master’s voice,” I hissed.
“You’re behaving in an unbalanced way.”
“Oh really! How should I be behaving? I’d like to know. Take your hand off my ankle.”