So much speaking before midday undermined his self-confidence, and made him sweat. If he were late for work he would never forgive himself. He hardly ever said anything at breakfast, and neither did she. He awoke from sleep as if he were recovering from a dose of poison that hadn’t been quite fatal. God knows what he dreamt. On once asking, he answered proudly that he didn’t, and never had. He slept like a stone that water dripped on, a torment he was only vaguely aware of on waking up, which made his temper so vile that it was best, they had long since agreed, if neither spoke.
Button-lips, he told himself, was the order of the day. Everything he thought, she spoke usually before he had any notion of saying it. Internal and disputatious life was blocked off. He wanted to make her feel deficient about not properly caring for him, so put on the usual mask of a little boy who had been abandoned by all the supports he had grown accustomed to, the real face underneath surfacing only to indicate that he hadn’t had many good things to get used to in his hardworking life anyway. He wasn’t aware of this, she felt, so the toll it took of him drained the life out of her.
‘I think you’ve got to have a bit of selfishness to get through life,’ she said, still wondering whether she would leave him today.
Her clear statement surprised him. ‘Selfishness is next to godlessness,’ he retorted and, in the same breath: ‘Fry my eggs and bacon, duck. I’ve got to be going soon.’
‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’ Her request came from the misery of a greater plea that she hadn’t been able to make, because to do so would give her even more into his mercy. She tried to see him as if for the first time, hoping not to be so strident in her conclusions. For reasons of self-preservation she adopted the obvious rather than the speculative, seeing a man of five feet six inches in height, and solid like a barrel, with muscular arms and big hands. When he walked, the world made way, especially in his own small factory where twenty workmen at lathes and milling machines turned out precision parts which could not yet be mass produced. He went to work in a boiler-suit to prove he was one of the men, but she had to make sure that a clean one was laid over the stair rail every morning for him to get into. When he stood before a machine to do a special piece of engineering that couldn’t be trusted to anyone else, his underlip pushed out in intense concentration, he kept his shirtsleeves rolled down so that a pair of gold cufflinks glittered.
He stood, and leaned towards her. Plain, incontrovertible statements upset him most, as well as the simple pleas which he never had the generous pleasure of acceding to because she only made them after he had already ridden rough-shod over her.
She had never seen him so angry, probably because he hadn’t been properly frightened before. ‘What, for God’s sake, is wrong with asking you to fry my breakfast? How can such a natural request be seen as “getting at you”?’
‘That’s all you’ve lived for ever since we met,’ she heard herself shouting.
He methodically laid strips of bacon on the grill, and cracked two eggs into the smoking lard. ‘In the final analysis,’ he called over his shoulder.
When, she wondered, had there been a first analysis? She didn’t know what sort of wife he’d be happy with, because it was impossible to decide what kind of woman he himself was capable of making in any way content. It wasn’t her. No more of that. The serrated breadknife on the table was not to be resisted. Didn’t like it here.
The dazzling backplate of the electric cooker showed what he thought of as the last horror. He turned as the knife spun towards his throat.
She remembered everything as having taken place in silence, though it was conceivable that the neighbours heard the combination of shriek and bellow that came from him. The inner noise of bitter rage which forced her to spring was fit to burst all panes of glass in the house.
In spite of her speed and the spin of the weapon, he parried the thrust with an ease that astonished her. A hand made a painful chop at her elbow and sent the knife across the room. Clenched into a fist, his other hand struck her face, pushing her back and half stunning her at the same time.
She discovered, now that it was too late, that to be violent was to be kind to him. Such a life-and-death attempt was far less disturbing than when she had asked him simply to let her alone, action of any sort being the only form of reconciliation that he could understand. The truth was, he didn’t want her to kill herself, or to leave home. Though she had never expressed to him her hope of one day doing so, he sensed the possibility so strongly that he liked to taunt her with the idea.
The bout was over before the bacon scorched. He sat down hungrily, though he wasn’t altogether happy, in spite of eating the rind as well, because he was the sort of man who knew that whenever things looked like getting better, they got worse. He was no simpleton, and had built up his business by driving himself more intensely during the good times than in the bad. Her resort to violence seemed a hint that he ought now to relax his continual craving for work and take her out for the day, but as he sated his appetite, the conflict took on another aspect, in that he could afford to feel cheerful now that she had tried to kill him and failed. There weren’t many men who’d had that to put up with before breakfast.
She couldn’t live any more with the kind of person who made her pay for everything before she’d had time to enjoy what he occasionally led her to expect and never gave her. He felt it, too, and being disappointed in himself turned into a bully, which made him babyish. During twenty years she had been so busy learning about him that she had learned nothing of herself, except that much of what she had taken in concerning his character had bitten so painfully that it had become part of her. She resented such gains at the price of her soul, that had pushed her own self out of the way till she often didn’t know who she was when in the same room with him, and she was never away from him long enough to begin finding out. She didn’t even know who she was when she was alone, which was worse because it frightened her into believing that her memory was failing as well.
His knees were trembling, but he took his plate to the sink by walking side-on. ‘Cheer up, love! See you tonight. I’ll try not to be late.’
He didn’t know what was wrong, so she felt that whatever wasn’t right between them could only be her fault. His eyebrows lifted, an unfailing mannerism: ‘No talkie-talkie this morning? It’s not that bad, Pam, is it?’ He winked: ‘Just think how lucky you are. You haven’t got cancer, have you? If not, then you’ve nothing to worry about.’
‘Goodbye,’ she said flatly.
‘You’ve got good clothes on your back. You aren’t starving. You aren’t being dive-bombed, are you? Well then, you should be grateful for it.’
‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘I thank God for every breath I take.’
He smiled because he’d won. ‘That’s better!’
The only victory is in being alive, she thought, when he went whistling out of the door. She didn’t believe any good would come of giving her meagre victory to him by killing herself. Pulling the living-room curtains aside, she watched him drive on to the street. He rolled the car window down and waved. She gestured back to make sure he went away happy enough to work well and make more money, which was all he wanted out of life. He left her as usual to close the garage door when she went shopping. Steely-edged rain clouds filled the sky, drops already spitting at the privet.
2
A bottle of Golden Miracle Skin Lotion, a tin of Super-Quick Hair Eradicator, a flask of Nutritious Fast-Working Pore Food, and a jar of the most efficient Blemish Flattener that science had so far been able to concoct, broke and scattered under the hammer. A fragment of cream-coated glass hit the dressing-table mirror, and she stopped before the next swing because it seemed that her elbow was about to crumble. Blows from everywhere crossed her heart.