“Good night, Charles.”
“Sure there’s nothing else I can bring you?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’m sorry you had a bad dream.”
“That’s all right.”
“Good night, Martha.”
“Good night.”
Even then her suspense wasn’t over. He would drift away so slowly, as if he hoped she might change her mind and call him back. It was only when she heard him getting into bed in the next room that her muscles would relax. She would lie trembling, loathing herself and Charles and Steve and wishing all of them dead.
Once Charles left but came back to her room again in five minutes. In the five minutes he had altered. He was no longer shy or ineffectual. His eyes were wild and there were patches of sweat on his pajamas. He strode over and turned on the lamp beside her bed.
“Wake up!” His voice rasped and he breathed as if he’d been running. “Wake up, you bitch.”
She sat up, holding the covers over her.
“Look at me!” he shouted. “Look at me!”
She looked, but said nothing.
“Do I have to go to a whorehouse? Do I have to get down on my knees and beg you?” He was shaking uncontrollably, and he kept looking down at himself as if he were fascinated and repelled by what he saw. “Do I have to go to a whorehouse?”
Without speaking she pushed away the covers and slid off the bed. She went over to him and pressed her body hard against his.
“Charles, Charles,” she said.
He pushed her away, half-heartedly. She clung to him, clasping her arms around his neck and kissing him passionately on the mouth. She felt a rare, impersonal pity for him because he was helpless and it was so easy to help him.
Charles jerked out the lamp plug with his foot and pity dissolved with the light. Wordless, in the dark, Charles had lost his identity and become a hard, insistent body which fitted into her own. She felt her breasts swell and become erect as if all power to think and be alive had concentrated there, leaving her mind free to doze and dream in some warm, soothing fluid that moved gently back and forth. In the fluid were gentle, anonymous faces and elegant languorous bodies weaving like sea grass; flashes of color like green from an eye half-closed, and gold like a fish.
The fluid drained off with a spurt, leaving her senseless for a moment. Then she became aware that her breasts were bruised and aching, her nightgown lay torn on the floor, and she was soaked in sweat, whether her own or Charles’s she didn’t know.
“Charles, wake up. Please wake up, you can sleep in your own bed, Charles.”
But he was already asleep. He lay on his side, naked and somehow helpless again. He had his hand up over his eyes as if to shield himself from a blow, and though he slept, his face had nothing of peace or satisfaction in it. There were bitter little lines around his mouth, as if even in sleep he could not forget that he had had to fight too long and too hard for his victory.
“Charles, won’t you please wake up?”
He didn’t stir, but she fancied that he groaned. The pity returned, and with it an agonizing sense of failure and futility.
No, you do not have to go to a whorehouse, Charles. You can stay home with me. I try to be as professional as possible.
Oh, God. Oh, God. It is four o’clock in the morning.
She got up and covered him, not knowing whether she did it because she didn’t want him to catch cold or because she could no longer stand the sight of him lying there naked.
Four o’clock. She heard the grandfather clock in the hall mourning the hour, preaching the imminence of doom and then stepping down from the pulpit with a final, solemn “A-hem!”
Silence again. She could not even hear Charles’s breathing, and when she put on her bathrobe and went to the window, she could see nothing stirring in the blackness outside. Everything had died quite suddenly. This was her punishment because she was a bad woman: to sit alone and alive in a dead world.
This was her punishment, it was just. She accepted it. She sat there until daylight. She had always been terrified of the dark, but she sat quietly and did not turn on the light.
How long ago was that? she thought. Two years? Three? She couldn’t remember and it was not important, anyway. She and Steve and Charles, they had had their chance and they had, all three of them, made a mess of their lives. The only one who mattered now was Laura.
I must protect Laura, she thought. I can’t let her make the mistakes I did. I’ll have to get rid of Steve.
Chapter 13
Mrs. Shaw was peeling a tangerine. It was not a very important task but she gave it all her attention. Important things were no longer demanded or expected of her, and this state of affairs suited her. It left her free to concentrate on little things; she could waste a whole hour, if she wanted to, on peeling a tangerine, separating the sections with delicate precision, and laying them in a row to count. Ten, of course. There always seemed to be ten sections. So orderly, tangerines were. Except for the pits. The number of pits varied. Still, that didn’t matter much. It would have been nice, though, if they hadn’t, so she could say to someone, “Guess how many pits a tangerine has?”
She ate each section slowly, relishing not the fruit itself, for it was dry and fibrous, but the exquisite sensation of having nothing more to do after it was eaten than to eat another. A wonderful feeling. How Harry would have enjoyed it if he were still living. They had both worked so hard, harder than other ordinary people, because they were both muddlers and they’d had to work that much harder just to get along.
She was never bored alone in her room, though the girls often told her she must be. They were continually urging her to go out for a walk, to see the shops, to take in a movie. They didn’t understand that she was not idle up in her own room. She thought things. She plucked threads from the past, a grey one here, a red there, and wove them together. She had had a full and happy life, but it had never seemed, while she was living it, to have a pattern. Now, of course, she saw that it had. The grey and red threads blended, harmonized. Rather like a tangerine, she thought, always ten sections but an unknown number of pits.
She felt pleased with herself, as if she had, without help from anyone, discovered an important scientific truth. Maybe some day she would say to someone, “Guess what scientific truth I discovered today?”
No, it would probably be better not to say it. It would shock the girls. They would think she was losing her mind. They were both, really, incapable of appreciating the importance of a tangerine, and what was still odder, they were easily shocked. Especially by me, she thought. They made up their minds years ago what I was like, and if they found I wasn’t like that after all, they would be shocked, or perhaps even hurt.
One must be very careful with such decisive, positive people. They were so vulnerable. Like glass, they couldn’t bend.
But it was nice that they were cleverer than Harry or herself. Harry had been clever enough, but he wasted it on little things. Once he’d invented something to stop windows from rattling, a wedge-shaped piece of rubber with a handle. It worked very nicely, but Harry lost interest in it because he said if people could afford to buy something to stop windows from rattling, they could probably afford to have their windows re-fitted. It was one of the few times in his life that Harry had sounded bitter. He had taken all the wedges and thrown them into the trash box. Without them, the windows rattled a great deal, but she was too wise to bring the subject up. They rattled for ten years and she became quite used to the sound eventually.
She finished the last section of fruit and scooped up all the pits in her hand. Twenty-one. She was reluctant to throw them away, recognizing dimly that in some way these pits were alive and capable of growth. So of course they wouldn’t like to be thrown away. In the end, she removed, from its red velvet box, the diamond clip Martha had given her and put the pits in it instead. Then she placed the box carefully in one of her bureau drawers. If there had been a pen handy, she might have labeled the box, “Pits. The day I discovered number of sections in tangerines. June 10.”