By the time coffee arrived, wine had considerably loosened Harriet’s tongue.
‘Well,’ said Cory, re-filling her glass, ‘how’s it working out, looking after the children?’
Harriet smiled nervously. ‘Fine, I’m awfully happy here.’
He didn’t smile back. ‘I’ve been watching you for the past two hours. You still give the impression of a girl who cries herself to sleep every night.’
‘Black or white coffee?’ asked Harriet, confused.
‘Black, please, and don’t change the subject. Sure, you think you’re fine. You’ve filled out, you’ve got some colour in your cheeks, but your eyes are still haunted; you get flustered far too quickly. And you’ve torn that paper napkin you’ve been clutching into shreds.’
‘I’m OK,’ she muttered. Then added in a trembling voice, ‘Are you trying to say you want me to go?’
If she had looked up then she would have seen his face soften.
‘You don’t know me very well yet,’ he said gently.
‘If I wanted you to go, I’d tell you straight. Tomorrow you’re going to see my doctor for some tranquillizers and sleeping pills. You’ll only need them for a few weeks. I don’t want you cracking up, that’s all. Now, I suppose you’d prefer I talked on impersonal subjects. How did you meet Simon Villiers?’
Harriet choked over her coffee, then shrugged her shoulders. She so badly needed to talk to someone.
‘I met him at Oxford. It was snowing like today. Simon drove round a corner and knocked me off my bicycle. Of course, I knew who he was. Everyone knew about the Villiers set — all night parties, fast cars, models down from London. I wasn’t hurt, but he insisted on my going back to his rooms. There was a party on. Later he kicked everyone out. When we woke up next morning, he asked me what my name was. You’re not shocked?’
Cory lit a cigar. ‘Not unduly.’
‘It was the first time I’d been to bed with anyone. It was like stumbling into Paradise.’ She looked at her hands. ‘I thought it would last for ever. Then one morning we were drinking coffee and he suddenly announced I’d have to move out as his regular girlfriend was coming back that day. I was so stunned, when I found I was pregnant, it seemed unimportant compared with losing Simon. The reason I kept William really was because he was the only thing of Simon’s I had.’
She looked at Cory with huge, troubled, slate-grey eyes.
He smiled. ‘Do you think Jonah’s happy at school?’
She was intensely grateful that he realized she didn’t want to talk about herself any more.
Chapter Twelve
Life became much easier for Harriet after Cory Erskine arrived. It was having a man to make decisions, to shoulder responsibilities, to shut up the children when they became too obstreperous and, most of all, to talk to.
Cory was, in fact, not easy to live with — aloof, peremptory, exacting, often extremely bad-tempered. But in a good mood, Harriet found him lovely company, amusing, never pulling intellectual rank on her, an inspired listener. Yet as weeks passed, she didn’t feel she knew him any better.
He was very unpredictable. Some days he would bombard her with questions, what did she feel about this, how would she react to that. On other days he was so abstracted she might not have been there, or he would suddenly get bored with a conversation and walk out leaving her mouthing like a goldfish in mid-sentence.
He also kept the most erratic hours, working most of the night. Often when she got up because William was crying she would hear the faint clack of the typewriter against the gramophone pouring out Verdi or Wagner. Then he would appear at breakfast looking terrible, read the paper, drink several cups of impossibly strong black coffee, and go out and ride across the moors for a couple of hours.
After that he generally snatched a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in his study (Harriet had a feeling he couldn’t bear sleeping alone in the huge mausoleum of a double bed), and emerged at teatime absolutely ravenous, and often as not wolf all the sandwiches Harriet had made for the children’s tea.
He was also drinking too much. Every day Mrs Bottomley, her mouth disappearing with disapproval, would come out of his room with an empty whisky bottle.
He was obviously miserably unhappy. The drinking to drive out the despair would plunge him next day into black depression, which made him irritable and arbitrary. While he was working he hated interruptions. The children had to be kept out of his way. The telephone rang all the time for him, and he went spare if Harriet didn’t catch it on the third or fourth ring. Always she had to make the same excuse: ‘I’m afraid Mr Erskine’s working. If you leave your number I’ll ask him to ring you back,’ which he so seldom did that Harriet was on the end of a lot of abuse from people — mostly women — who rang a second and third time and were convinced Harriet hadn’t passed on the message. He also made notes, as thoughts struck him, on bits of paper and telephone directories all over the house; and after the day, when she had to go through four dustbins to find the magazine Cory had scribbled a few lines of script on the back of, she learnt not to throw anything away again without asking him.
One afternoon in early March, however, Cory was sitting in the kitchen eating raisins absent-mindedly out of a packet and reading one of Jonah’s comics. William sat propped up on a red rug spread out on the flagstone floor, beating a saucepan aimlessly with a wooden spoon, gurgling happily and gazing at the gleaming copper pans that hung from the walls. Harriet, who’d that morning read an article in a magazine about the dangers of an all-tinned-food diet for babies, was rather dispiritedly sieving cabbage and carrots, when the telephone rang. Glad of any diversion, Harriet crossed the room to answer it, but it stopped on the third ring, then just as she got back to her carrots, it started again, rang three times and stopped. Then it started again and this time kept on ringing:
Sighing, Harriet put down the sieve again.
‘Don’t answer it,’ snapped Cory. He had gone very pale. ‘It’s only someone playing silly games.’
Then it stopped, then started the three rings stop, three rings stop formula again. Then kept on ringing for about three minutes. Harriet noticed the way his hands gripped that comic.
‘I’m going out,’ said Cory. ‘And don’t answer the telephone.’
Next minute she heard the front door slam.
The ringing kept on. It must be the secret code of someone he doesn’t want to talk to, thought Harriet. It was getting on her nerves. She’d run out of bread, so she decided to walk William in his pram down to the village and get some. She enjoyed shopping; she was beginning to know all the shop people who made a tremendous fuss of William.
It was a cold, cheerless day. The only colour came from the rusty bracken and even that lay flattened by the recent snow. The village was deserted except for a few scuttling, purple-faced women in head-scarves. Harriet came out of the bakers, warming her hands on a hot french loaf, and went into the supermarket opposite. She immediately noticed one customer, a girl with bright orange curls, wearing an emerald green coat with a mock fur collar and cuffs, stiletto-heeled green boots, and huge dark glasses. Taking tins down from the shelves she was attempting to lob them into the wire basket she had placed in the middle of the floor.
‘Loves me,’ she muttered as a tin of lemon meringue pie filling reached its destination safely, ‘Loves me not,’ as she missed with a bag of lentils, ‘Loves me not, oh hell,’ she added as she also missed with a tin of dog food. A child with very dissipated blue eyes, and a pudding basin haircut was systematically filling the pockets of his waisted blue coat with packets of fruit gums. The shopkeeper, who was trying to find a packet of washing-up-machine powder for another customer, was looking extremely disapproving.