Charles said he would ask Sir Thomas.
‘Ask him not to let The Pump get hold of it.’
Charles contemplated that possibility with about as much horror as I did myself.
The bell of the side door rang distantly, and Charles frowned at his watch.
‘Who can that be? It’s almost eight o’clock.’
We soon found out. An ultrafamiliar voice called ‘Daddy?’ across the hall outside, and an ultrafamiliar figure appeared in the doorway. Jenny… Charles’s younger daughter… my sometime wife. My still em-. bittered wife, whose tongue had barbs.
Smothering piercing dismay, I stood up, and Charles also.
‘Jenny,’ Charles said, advancing to greet her. ‘What a lovely surprise.’
She turned her cheek coolly, as always, and said, ‘We were passing. It seemed impossible not to call in.’ She looked at me without much emotion and said, ‘We didn’t know you were here until I saw your car outside.’
I took the few steps between us and gave her the sort of cheek-to-cheek salutation she’d bestowed on Charles. She accepted the politeness, as always, as the civilized acknowledgment of adversaries after battle.
‘You look thin,’ she observed, not with concern but with criticism, from habit.
She, I thought, looked as beautiful as always, but there was nothing to be gained by saying so. I didn’t want her to sneer at me. To begin with, it ruined the sweet curve of her mouth. She could hurt me with words whenever she tried, and she’d tried often. My only defense had been — and still was — silence.
Her handsome new husband had followed her into the room, shaking hands with Charles and apologizing for having appeared without warning.
‘My dear fellow, anytime,’ Charles assured him.
Anthony Wingham turned my way and with self-conscious affability said, ‘Sid…’ and held out his hand.
It was extraordinary, I thought, enduring his hearty, embarrassed grasp, how often one regularly shook hands in the course of a day. I’d never really noticed it before.
Charles poured drinks and suggested dinner. Anthony Wingham waffled a grateful refusal. Jenny gave me a cool look and sat in the gold brocade chair.
Charles made small talk with Anthony until they’d exhausted the weather. I stood with them but looked at Jenny, and she at me. Into a sudden silence she said, ‘Well, Sid, I don’t suppose you want me to say it, but you’ve got yourself into a proper mess this time.’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No, I don’t want you to say it.’
‘Ellis Quint! Biting off more than you can chew. And back in the summer the papers pestered me, too. I suppose you know?’
I unwillingly nodded.
‘That reporter from The Pump,’ Jenny complained. ‘India Cathcart, I couldn’t get rid of her. She wanted to know all about you and about our divorce. Do you know what she wrote? She wrote that I’d told her that quite apart from being crippled, you weren’t man enough for me.’
‘I read it,’ I said briefly.
‘Did you? And did you like it? Did you like that, Sid?’
I didn’t reply. It was Charles who fiercely protested. ‘Jenny! Don’t.’
Her face suddenly softened, all the spite dissolving and revealing the gentle girl I’d married. The transformation happened in a flash, like prison bars falling away. Her liberation, I thought, had dramatically come at last.
‘I didn’t say that,’ she told me, as if bewildered. ‘I really didn’t. She made it up.’
I swallowed. I found the reemergence of the old Jenny harder to handle than her scorn.
‘What did you say?’ I said.
‘Well… I… I…’
‘Jenny,’ Charles said again.
‘I told her,’ Jenny said to him, ‘that I couldn’t live in Sid’s hard world. I told her that whatever she wrote she wouldn’t smash him or disintegrate him because no one had ever managed it. I told her that he never showed his feelings and that steel was putty compared to him, and that I couldn’t live with it.’
Charles and I had heard her say much the same thing before. It was Anthony who looked surprised. He inspected my harmless-looking self from his superior height and obviously thought she had got me wrong.
‘India Cathcart didn’t believe Jenny, either,’ I told him soothingly.
‘What?’
‘He reads minds, too,’ Jenny said, putting down her glass and rising to her feet. ‘Anthony, darling, we’ll go now. OK?’ To her father she said, ‘Sorry it’s such a short visit,’ and to me, ‘India Cathcart is a bitch.’
I kissed Jenny’s cheek.
‘I still love you,’ I said.
She looked briefly into my eyes. ‘I couldn’t live with it. I told her the truth.’
‘I know.’
‘Don’t let her break you.’
‘No.’
‘Well,’ she said brightly, loudly, smiling, ‘when birds fly out of cages they sing and rejoice. So… good-bye, Sid.’
She looked happy. She laughed. I ached for the days when we’d met, when she looked like that always; but one could never go back.
‘Goodbye, Jenny,’ I said.
Charles, uncomprehending, went with them to see them off and came back frowning.
‘I simply don’t understand my daughter,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘She tears you to pieces. I can’t stand it, even if you can. Why don’t you ever fight back?’
‘Look what I did to her.’
‘She knew what she was marrying.’
‘I don’t think she did. It isn’t always easy, being married to a jockey.’
‘You forgive her too much! And then, do you know what she said just now, when she was leaving? I don’t understand her. She gave me a hug — a hug — not a dutiful peck on the cheek, and she said, “Take care of Sid.” ’
I felt instantly liquefied inside: too close to tears.
‘Sid…’
I shook my head, as much to retain composure as anything else.
‘We’ve made our peace,’ I said.
‘When?’
‘Just now. The old Jenny came back. She’s free of me. She felt free quite suddenly… so she’ll have no more need to… to tear me to pieces, as you put it. I think that all that destructive anger has finally gone. Like she said, she’s flown out of the cage.’
He said, ‘I do hope so,’ but looked unconvinced. ‘I need a drink.’
I smiled and joined him, but I discovered, as we later ate companionably together, that even though his daughter might no longer despise or torment me, what I perversely felt wasn’t relief, but loss.
Chapter 10
Leaving Aynsford early, I drove back to London on Thursday morning and left the car, as 1 normally did, in a large public underground car park near Pont Square. From there I walked to the laundry where I usually took my shirts and waited while they fed my strip of rag from Northampton twice through the dry-cleaning cycle.
What emerged was a stringy-looking object, basically light turquoise in color, with a non-geometric pattern on it of green, brown and salmon pink. There were also black irregular stains that had stayed obstinately in place.
I persuaded the cleaners to iron it, with the only result that I had a flat strip instead of a wrinkled one.
‘What if I wash it with detergent and water?’ I asked the burly, half-interested dry cleaner.
‘You couldn’t exactly harm it,’ he said sarcastically.
So I washed it and ironed it and ended as before: turquoise strip, wandering indeterminate pattern, stubborn black stain.
With the help of the Yellow Pages I visited the wholesale showrooms of a well-known fabric designer. An infinitely polite old man there explained that my fabric pattern was woven, while theirs — the wholesaler’s — was printed. Different market, he said. The wholesaler aimed at the upper end of the middle-class market. I, he said, needed to consult an interior decorator, and with kindness he wrote for me a short list of firms.