Above me the rain was whispering against the window-panes with stealthy, lewd suggestiveness.
But what had happened, I asked, again convulsively licking my lips that by now had gone dry and cracked, what was it exactly that had happened to convince him that Polly was betraying him? He gave a despairing shrug, and corkscrewed himself around himself more tightly still, and began rocking backwards and forwards, too, making a soft, crooning sound, limp strands of damp hair hanging down about his face. There had been a fight, he said, he couldn’t remember how it had started or even what it had been about. Polly had shouted at him, and had gone on shouting, as if demented, and he had — here he faltered, aghast at the memory — he had slapped her face, and his wedding ring, of all things, had cut her cheek. He held up a finger and showed me the narrow gold band. I tried to picture the scene but couldn’t; he was talking about people I didn’t know, violent strangers driven by ungovernable passions, like the characters in, yes, in a particularly overblown operatic drama. I was simply unable to imagine Polly, my shy and docile Polly, shrieking in such fury that he had been goaded into hitting her. After the slap she had put a hand to her face and looked at him without a word for what seemed an impossibly long time, in a way that had frightened him, he said, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together in a thin, crimped line. He had never known such a look from her before, or such a silence. Then above their heads a wailing started up — the fight had taken place in Marcus’s workshop — and Polly, white-faced except for the livid print of his hand on her cheek and the smear of blood where his ring had cut her, went away to tend the child.
I felt as if a hole had opened in the air in front of me and I was falling into it headlong, slowly; it was a not entirely unpleasurable sensation, but only giddy and helpless, like the sensation of flying in a dream. I have known the feeling before: it comes, a moment of illusory rescue, at the most terrible of times.
“What am I going to do?” Marcus pleaded, looking up at me out of eyes that burned with suffering.
Well, old friend, I thought, feeling suddenly very weary, what are any of us going to do? I went and opened the cupboard. Prudence be damned — it was high time to break out the brandy.
—
We sat side by side on the sofa and between us over the space of an hour drained the bottle, passing it back and forth and swigging from the neck; when we started it had been at least half full. I was sunk in silence while Marcus talked, going over the highlights of the story — the legend! — of his life with Polly. He spoke of the days of their courtship, when her father had disapproved of him, though the old boy would never say why; snobbery, Marcus suspected. Polly was not long out of school and was helping on the farm, keeping chickens and in the summer selling strawberries from a stall at the front gate, for the value of land had fallen, or some such, and the family had subsided into a state of genteel penury. Marcus had finished his apprenticeship and was in the employ of an uncle, whose watch-repair business in time he would inherit. Polly, he said, his voice shaking with emotion, was everything he could have hoped for in a wife. When he began to speak of their honeymoon I braced myself, but I needn’t have worried: he’s not a man to share the kind of confidences I feared, even with the friend he thought me to be. He couldn’t have been happier than he was in those early days with Polly, he said, and when Little Pip came along it had seemed his heart would burst from such an excess of bliss. Here he broke off and struggled to sit upright and tears welled in his eyes, and he gave a great hiccupy sob and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. His grief was grief, all right, lavish and unconstrained, yet, as I couldn’t help noticing with interest, it might as well have been a kind of euphoria: all the signs of it were the same.
“What am I going to do, Olly?” he cried again, more desperate than ever.
I still had that sense of buoyant falling, which intensified now, due to the brandy having its inevitable effect, into a growing and wholly inappropriate lightheartedness. How could he be so sure, I asked again, that what he suspected of Polly was really the case? Wasn’t it possible he was imagining the whole thing? The mind when it starts to doubt, I said, knows no limits, and will credit the most outlandish fantasies. I should have shut up, of course, instead of which I kept on tugging at that loose end of yarn. It was as if I wanted it all to come unravelled, wanted Marcus to pause, and think, and turn and stare at me, his eyes widening in astonishment and gathering fury as the terrible truth dawned on him. Some desperate part of me wanted him to know! Yet how perverse to dread one’s fate while at the same time reaching out eagerly to draw it close.
At this point Marcus did pause, did turn to me, and with another lugubrious hiccup put a hand on my arm and asked in a voice thick with emotion if I realised how much my friendship meant to him, what a privilege it was, and what a comfort. I mumbled that I, of course, in my turn, was glad to have him for a friend, very glad, very very very glad. I had a feeling now as of everything inside me slowly shrivelling. Encouraged, Marcus embarked on an extended soliloquy in praise of me as trusted companion, stout soul and, incidentally, world-beating painter, all the while looming into my face with eager sincerity. I wanted, oh, how I wanted, like the buttonholed wedding guest, to make myself turn aside from that glittering eye, but it held me fast. Yes, he declared, more fervently still, I was the best friend a man could hope for. As he spoke, his face seemed to swell and swell, as if it were being steadily inflated from inside. At last, with a mighty effort, I managed to tear myself away from his brimming, soulful stare. His hand was still on my arm — I could feel the heat of it through the sleeve of my coat, and almost shuddered. Now he broke off his peroration and leaned his head far back and sucked a final drop from the bottle. It was clear he had a great deal more to say, and would certainly say it, with ever-increasing passion and sincerity, if I didn’t find a means of distracting him.
“You were telling me,” I said, with demurely lowered eyes and fiddling at one of the sofa buttons, “you were telling me about the fight with Polly.”
Some distraction.
“Was I?” he said. He heaved a fluttery sigh. “Oh, yes. The fight.”
Well, he said, putting on his spectacles again — I am always fascinated by the intricate way he has of looping them on to his ears — after he had slapped Polly and she had gone off upstairs he had stalked about the workshop for some time, disputing with himself and kicking things, then had followed her, angrier than ever, and confronted her in their bedroom. She was sitting on the side of the bed with the child in her arms. Was there, he demanded, someone else? He hadn’t imagined there was, not for a second, and had only said it to provoke her, and expected her to laugh at him and tell him he was mad. But to his consternation she did not deny it, only sat there looking up at him and saying not a word. “The same look again,” he said, renewed tears springing to his eyes, “the same look, only worse, that she gave me in the workshop when I hit her!” He hadn’t thought her capable of such blank remoteness, such calm and icy indifference. Then he corrected himself: no, he had seen her look like that once before, a little like that, in the early stages of her pregnancy, when the baby had begun to kick and be a real presence. That was a case too, he said, of someone coming into her life, of a third party — those were his words, a third party — getting inside her — those too, his very words — and absorbing all her concentration, all her care; in short, all her love. At the time he had felt excluded, excluded, yes, but not rejected, not like now, when she sat on the bed like that with her cold and frightening gaze fixed on him and the realisation came to him that he had lost her.