Martin Edwards – Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (страница 6)

‘My dear boy, don’t you worry about me!’

At breakfast, she used common sense.

‘Be a sensible boy and go back home. You can stick it, my dear. It’s better than this? Come over and see me whenever you get too fed up. Will you?’

He told her earnestly that he would never have been unfaithful to his wife if only she’d played the game.

‘I can assure you I’m being eminently fair,’ he told her. ‘I can assure you I never thought there could be anything worse than an unfaithful wife, Queenie. But there is.’

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘The Hell you know’s never so bad as the Hell you don’t know. That’s a true enough saying. Be a good boy and go back. Or I shall worry.’

‘It’s immoral to live with a woman you don’t love.’

‘But you don’t make love to her, do you? Be like neighbours! Friendly enemies!’

And they laughed again.

Later in the morning, he took the tube and went home. But there was a strange new happiness in his heart, the feeling of having both found love and made a friend. He already felt it so strongly that he wanted to divorce Ivy and marry Queenie. He was far from sure that Queenie was the kind for marriage, and in any case she had told him she would marry for security when she got the chance, and for nothing else, she would be insane not to. But he had been so happy with her, he was vain enough to think he could break this down. His feelings about it were strong, although he had got over it by evening, when he realised she was not a lady. This was a practical thought, not a snobbish one, it was whether a gentleman could live happily married to somebody a bit different. Ivy was a lady, and look what that meant?

What a mess it all was.

He let himself in.

She was there, as he knew jolly well she would be there, and she behaved in the way he jolly well knew she would behave; she said and did simply nothing at all: she just sat around with that particular expression on her face.

Her face was pinched and had always been a bit sallow, a sort of brown that was not sunburn. There was that about her which made the name Ivy seem dry and hard and right. Her hair was black and dry. She was thirty-eight at that time, his present age, and she looked more than that. Poor old Ivy. It wasn’t her fault, any more than anything was anyone else’s fault. And she was every bit as unhappy. Hardly any friends, only a few callers, and cut off from her parents. It was bad luck. But they were long past the stage of trying to console one another, it had all been run through before, and was threadbare. There were deep wounds, and any words now only lead to louder words, and which made for nothing. He just let himself in, and there she was, and she sat and sewed and he wandered about. He finished up at the piano. About late evening they would have a fine old bust up, he’d have to say about the money owed to the landlady, and she’d have to fork it out; then she’d say the old one about how she always thought he was going to do such wonders with his music, and he’d trot out about how a woman ought to be an inspiration to a man, and not a hindrance. And all the rest of it. Then he’d trot out the divorce topic again, and get the usual defiant No. She challenged his religion with it, ‘I thought you said you were religious?’ and that was always that. Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. ‘We were married in church, weren’t we?’

‘Yes, Ivy. But the marriage has never been consummated, has it? And do you know that even the Pope is impressed by that?’

‘Well,’ she said then in her quiet voice, ‘why don’t you do something about it, then?’

‘No money.’

‘What about the Poor People’s Act?’

‘Now, Ivy, you know quite well I’ve applied. They refused my application.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘Now, Ivy, I have it on good authority they only accept a small percentage of applications, they get so many. It does not mean I have not got a case.’

Her expression continued the dialogue, triumphantly, without the need of words. He thought her cruel about it, and he was not cruel himself, always wondering what would happen to her if he did get a bit of cash together, and divorced her. Where would she go?

On this occasion, the bust up was much as usual. There were no tears, it was past that. She’d known he would come back with his tail between his legs, she supposed he was starving, she supposed he’d been sleeping with other women.

Then she slammed the door and went to bed with her Bible.

He hadn’t any money to get tight with, so he played the piano furiously for an hour, and then slammed a door himself and went to bed, not with the Bible, but with a box of matches and twenty Gold Flake. In earlier days, there would have been tears from the next room. He’d have gone in.

‘Now, Ivy, this won’t do, my dear child. Can’t we straighten this thing out?’

But there was nothing to straighten out. She just wasn’t meant for men.

When he first met her—and they only met at all by the merest chance, a tragedy in itself—she’d looked so kind and well-bred and quiet, he’d fallen for her at once. ‘That’s the girl for me.’ Her smile was a tiny bit pinched, and her lips inordinately thin, with a dark down on top, but her eyes were straight and bright, they were dark blue. It wasn’t Angel, but it was perhaps Angel with dark hair. He’d been taken to a musical show by the aunt he stayed with during his school days, not many months before the old girl died. She was to meet a friend at the theatre, and when they got there this friend had just bumped into a Mr and Mrs Faggot, and their daughter. ‘This is our daughter—Ivy.’ They’d made a party of it, getting the seats changed at the box office so they could all sit together. And if they hadn’t just chanced to see the Faggots, he would never have seen Ivy. But there, wasn’t history made up of these ifs? He and Ivy seemed to have got on fine. He hadn’t fancied the old birds much, but you couldn’t get on with everyone. ‘No, I’ve got musical ambitions, really,’ he confided in Ivy in the interval. ‘Not this kind of thing, I’m afraid. The more’s the pity. There’s money in it.’

‘Classical?’ she asked, sounding interested.

‘Well, yes. I’m not saying I spurn the other. That will sound young. But I want to write. And play, too, of course.’

‘The violin?’

‘No. Piano.’

They went to several concerts, and one summer night at the back of the Albert Hall he discovered she’d never been kissed. She was rather shocked at being set upon in the street, so to speak, but he laughed.

‘You mustn’t mind, Ivy. What other chance do I get? Your people watch me like a pair of hawks, I’m afraid they don’t approve of me at all.’

‘Yes, they do,’ she lied.

‘Well, won’t you kiss me? I mean, there’s nobody about?’

‘Don’t be so common, William. I know you aren’t common, but we oughtn’t to behave like servants.’

He laughed.

‘Why not? If we don’t feel like servants?’

Their very first row was when he slapped her bottom good-humouredly, never a habit of his with ladies, but solely in an effort to make her a bit more human. To his astonishment, she turned pale with anger and humiliation and fainted. When she came round, he couldn’t help laughing because, if she wanted the truth, she never let him touch her anywhere else. He laughed and told her.

The first shock of realising she literally knew nothing, was a pretty stiff one. Victorian novels and all that, he thought. And he thought of her stiff and starchy and exceedingly stupid old mother, and felt no longer surprised, only angry. Poor kid.

‘Look,’ he sat on the bed and said, ‘Don’t you worry, old dear? I’m not a lout, I’d simply no idea, honestly.’

He could see she believed him, but she was too embarrassed to do anything other than huddle in the hotel sheets, like a wan and rather too old fairy who has just been assaulted by a hitherto virtuous gnome. ‘Look, Ivy, we’ll just talk. Or, shall I clear out? Whatever you say, my pet? I’ll dress again and go for a bit of a tootle by the sea, what?’ They were at St Leonards, of all Godforsaken places, The Hotel Criole, a fearful affair up the hill. Her mother had known of it, needless to say, and practically insisted. The old crab. But he’d laughed—you knew what that kind of woman was. ‘Whatever you say, Mrs Faggot!’

‘It is what my daughter says, I should hope,’ the silly cow said. My word, to think that kind of person lived safely through her seventy years and then died comfortably in her bed.

But he laughed.

‘Hastings,’ Ivy confirmed, so Hastings it was, at least, they seemed to call it St Leonards down there, though it looked all one to most people.

It was a bit of a job explaining to Ivy, in one’s best public school manner, where babies came from. She seemed to know, and yet she didn’t. She vowed she did know. ‘Of course I do, Bill, but …!’

‘But what, my dear child?’ he smiled. ‘Silly old thing!’

She sniffed and sobbed.

‘Never mind. Don’t even think about it,’ he said kindly, he went out of his way to be kind and considerate for months and months. ‘It’s quite unimportant,’ he pretended.

When he decided it was time to stop pretending, they were in the half-house in Blythe Road, Fulham, a basement, ground floor, first floor affair, some other family living upstairs. The marriage was already gravely threatened; quarrels, hair falling out in the bath, and other nervous disorders too despairing to mention, he thought. It dawned on him that he ought to have seen Doctor Elliot about her ages ago, though Dr Elliot was usually too fuddled to be seen about anything except elbowitis. But he tootled along and tackled him in the saloon. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘confidentially, old man, I want to talk to you about the wife. She’s driving me balmy.’ He laughed, being slightly embarrassed, but old Elliot wouldn’t send a bill in, this interview would only cost a pint of bitter, eightpence.