‘I wasn’t serious about ending it. Stop this talk.’
‘I shan’t. You were thinking it. You’ve often hinted it. If you want to run off with some girl for a dead and comfortable life, it’s up to you, but I’d never forgive you your lack of backbone in doing it.’
He smashed his fist on the table, shaking half his coffee out. ‘You’ve said enough. Stop it. You’re poisoning it. I can’t stand to have my love killed. The ancient feminine wrecker is on the move again!’
She stood by the sink, hands shaking, turned on a tap to stop them. Water ran out uselessly. ‘I’ve said all I want, but if you think I was raving like a lunatic, and that what I’ve said doesn’t mean anything, you’re a fool.’
‘You open your mouth, and kill things. It’s disgusting.’
‘Go on. I’ll never stop you. Why don’t you just go outside and throw up that rotten bile that’s choking you? Just because some tuppenny journalist has been twisting you around his little finger you have to come in and vent you spleen on me. Not, I notice, until after you’ve had your dinner. Oh no! Food usually sweetens people, but it makes you bilious and sour. I won’t put up with your tantrums. You’re not dealing with those spineless people from London who only say “What a genius!” but never see you as you really are.’
‘So that’s it! Jealous, are we? Jealousy brings out the spite, and all the things you weren’t quick enough to get out in our other quarrels but remembered afterwards when you brooded on them. Jealous! I thought you were bigger than that, sweeter and bigger, more intelligent, perhaps. But no.’
‘Life’s full of disappointments for the poor of spirit,’ she mocked.
‘Turn that tap off. You’re wasting water.’
‘I’m not the gallery owner. You don’t have to act the knowing peasant with me!’ But she turned it off, and wiped up his coffee mess. He snatched the rag, and threw it like a dead cat into the sink. ‘You’re going right to the bottom,’ she said. ‘One move and down you go, right into the mud. And once you’re there you’re like an alligator that rips at any living thing.’
They stood at each end of the kitchen. ‘You can’t run my life,’ he said. ‘You never could and you never will.’
‘It’s not worth running. Keep your life and foul it up in your own way. But leave mine alone. I want it for myself, out of what’s been good between us.’
‘Have it, then. I’m making you a present of it, tie it up in an old chocolate-box with blue ribbon. I’ll get the undertaker to make you a coffin, bury it with a bloody prayer book, send it to the bottom, all your love and ideals. You can have them, mine as well, when they take a turn for the worse like this.’
He didn’t see her hand shift. A full dinner-plate seemed to cut off the top of his head, stutter and break on the doorpost behind. ‘I don’t want this sort of marriage,’ she raved. ‘It’s nearly twenty-five years, and I’ve not put up with this. It’s low. It’s ignoble.’
He staggered, eyes closed, a wetness above the left eye. The salt of blood stuck like a leaf on his palate. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We had fine instincts, but you want to alter all that, crush it, destroy it.’ He spoke calmly, a ribbon of blood on his face. ‘You can’t do such a thing to me. I’m even more in the real world than you are.’ Keep away from it, he said to himself, a precipice in front of him, don’t throw anything. Smile. For Christ’s sake lick away the blood and smile, or it’s over for ever. Twenty years in jail and only bars to paint.
‘You’re weak,’ she cried, ‘bone weak. Your whole life’s been built up on weakness. You can’t pit your will against the ordinary hard life of the everyday world.’
His hands pressed onto the heavy kitchen table. ‘That’s what you always wanted, me going out to work every morning and bringing money in on Friday night, a nice steady husband with a nice steady job, an aspirin-wife and crispin-haired kids, a bungalow and little car. I’ve long suspected this.’
‘It’s not true. I mean weak in a better way than that. The way I mean is just not in your consciousness. You don’t know. You’re of poor material. You never could understand, because you’re idle, unreliable, a liar …’
He reached her with clenched fist, brought it at her, then emptied the sink of dishes, a demon scattering all the confetti of Sheffield and the Potteries at wall and window. ‘Go on,’ she cried. ‘What else can you do? This is the end, though, the end, I tell you.’
He spun like a windmill. Chairs shook and toppled, the table flew, drawers skimmed and blocked off the door. Deafness and blindness, the awful force of his own movements crushed him, caught him up so that he couldn’t stop. ‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she wept. ‘Never, Never.’
‘You’ve got absolutely what you wanted at last,’ he said, sitting on the floor. ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘We’re done,’ she said, in tears. ‘Finished.’
‘Finished,’ he said. ‘That’s it, then.’
‘I can’t take this again.’
‘You won’t have to. All your so-called love isn’t worth it. Nobody’s going to possess me in that way.’
‘Nobody wants to, if only you could understand. You’d better go then. Let’s get it over with.’
‘I’m not leaving like a bloody lodger.’
‘Neither am I,’ she said. ‘It’s my house, remember. You got it in my name. You were too weak to get it for yourself. “I won’t be a property-owner,” you said. So I’m not going.’
‘Neither am I, I won’t be thrown out.’
‘It’s my house,’ she exulted.
‘Get the police then, you turncoat bourgeoise slut. You’d stoop to anything.’
From a sitting position his long thin body ricocheted across the room and caught her uplifted wrist. ‘Let go, or you’ll break it.’
She put the plate in the sink. ‘I’ll never give in,’ she said. ‘Not even if you crawl.’
The idea of it made him laugh, brought a spark of humour into his black day. ‘That’s what you’ve wanted all your life, but there’s less chance of it now than there ever was, and there was none then.’ He drew back, in danger being so close, though not of blows flying. He refused all temptation to inspect his aching cut, or touch the congealing blood.
‘I want nothing from you,’ she said, holding a hand over one eye. ‘If I’d ever wanted anything we wouldn’t have been together two minutes.’
‘But you’ve had plenty. I’m the sort of person who doesn’t even know when he is giving.’
Her voice was quieter, more even in tone. ‘Not knowing when you give is the same as not giving.’
‘You can wrap those bloody semantic floorcloths around your aphoristic neck.’ He couldn’t hold back, in for the kill when he didn’t want to kill, didn’t need to, and when there was nothing to kill. She stayed quiet, knowing it had to stop, her own impetus gone. Choler sharpened his face, staring for a reply that never came.
The door opened, pushed the table a few inches into the room, and when he snapped around Mandy stood by the pot dresser — the only furniture still upright, apart from her parents. ‘You two been arguing again?’
He was angered by her buxom insolence, long auburn hair and wide sensual mouth ruined by lipstick. ‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing, except a couple of quid to go to the pictures. I’ll go schizoid with boredom if I stay here.’