“I’m afraid to ask myself what I feel.” She pressed her lips together; holding her damp handkerchief between her fingertips, she folded it into a tiny square. “I distrust all my thoughts and all my emotions; how do I know I didn’t get them out of books? I might even love you, but you can live in such a way that you get alienated from love, that you see its ghastly consequences all around you, and so I’ve tried to come to grips with it, I’ve tried to grapple with it in the back of your car. That’s what people do, isn’t it? They perform the actions and then they get the feelings?”
“Christ, I hope not.” Panic welled inside him. “You say you might love me, but love could be too big a risk, so you’re investigating, are you, at my expense? The town’s just one big laboratory, and you keep me under a glass jar until it’s time to take me out and experiment on my emotions again.”
“Human experiments are performed every day.” She sat back in her seat, her eyes closed. “Forget it, Colin. Just forget it.”
He needed no prompting. He told himself he was her anchor in the normal world; he felt her tugging at him, out to uncharted waters. No one wants to go there. Resistance was his duty; his obtuseness was all he had to offer her, the leaden anchor of habit, the steadying weight of sad routine.
“Touch of the existential panic,” he said. “I felt it too. There are some tissues in the glove compartment if you want to blow your nose.” Groping for the short end of his seat belt, his hand touched hers, hanging loosely, as cold and stiff as the hand of a corpse. Like The Duchess of Malfi, he thought at once. He shuddered. “We’d better get on the road. It’s ten o’clock.”
The alarm shrilled. Sylvia’s fingers groped for it. The noise continued to reverberate in Colin’s head. He screwed his eyes shut.
He was distressed by his lack of control over his own dreams. It seemed monstrous that your own brain was capable, in the hours before dawn, of such divisive folly. He had dreamed so vividly of Isabel that he was afraid her spectre and after-image would parade about the bedroom for Sylvia to see. He had never seen her naked, but he imagined her long white limbs.
“Colin,” Sylvia said. Her voice was cautious, exploratory; the first limb of Monday morning reaching out to touch him in the dark. “Colin, seven o’clock.”
“Mm.”
Sylvia sighed. She put her head back on the pillow and her rollers dug into her skull. She was going to the doctor’s that morning to get the result of her pregnancy test. She was sure it would be positive. She was as regular as clockwork, she thought, you could set your watch by her menstrual flow. Furtively she slid a hand down over her blue nylon belly. I’ll have to get myself a couple of patterns, she thought, and get the machine out, before the school holidays start. Sewing’s all right but it makes a mess in the house. “Colin?”
“Yes, all right.” He massaged his closed eyelids with his fingers, sat up, and swung his feet out of bed. “Christ, it’s dark,” he said. “Why do we always get up in the dark? Year in, year out.”
Sylvia did not bother to say that life was arranged that way. Their morning routine did not include expostulation. A grunt, a twitch, sufficed for anything out of the ordinary. I’ll get the kettle on grunt a boiled egg grunt the milk in grunt the fire on grunt and the children out of bed, and
“Why is it so bloody dark?” Colin bellowed. “Why is life so lousy and uncomfortable?”
Sylvia felt unable to rise to the occasion. She did no more than glance at him out of the corner of her eye. It was the first time in their married life that he had asked such a question, and she could not think of a reason. She went into the bathroom, threw up neatly into the toilet bowl, pushed down the handle, and wiped her eyes, which were misty from the effort. She poured disinfectant into the lavatory, flushed it again, and rinsed out her mouth, scooping up the water in her hands. She was shivering when she got back into the bedroom, but Colin didn’t notice. She reached for her dressing-gown. That makes sure of it, she thought. I’ll put off telling him. I think I’d better.
Colin ate his egg in customary silence. His sense of grievance seemed to have subsided. He grunted once when he could not find his tie, then found it screwed up in the pocket of his jacket.
“I should take your overcoat,” Sylvia said.
“I’m late.”
“Suzanne, run and fetch your dad’s overcoat.”
“I’m late too,” Suzanne said. Her mouth was full of cornflakes. “That’s all you use me for, running up and down stairs. I bet I go upstairs ten times a day, getting things for you.”
“Twenty,” Alistair said. “A hundred times. A billion.”
“Why don’t you do it?” Suzanne said to her mother. “You’re lazy, that’s why. You’re old.”
“Christ,” Colin said. “I’ll bloody do without.”
He looked back at his children from the kitchen doorway, without hope. “I’ll be late, love,” he said to Sylvia. “Not very late. I just thought I’d pop over to Florence.”
“All right.”
“Sylvia.”
She turned from the toast she was buttering for Alistair; slowly, as if she resented the extra effort.
“You look a bit peaky.”
“I’m all right.”
“About six o’clock then. Don’t worry if it’s a bit later.”
“I’ll have your tea ready,” she said, and turned absently back.
The front door clicked behind him. He stood on the doorstep for a moment. The relief…the relief of being out of the house; the urge to confess was becoming almost unbearable. He took a deep breath of the foul air of the coming week, and began his matutinal wrestle with the damp-swollen garage door.
Muriel had taken to getting up early. Hearing the creak of the floorboards underfoot, Evelyn woke and lay stiff with alarm. Along the passage…“Muriel? Muriel?” Evelyn called hoarsely, her voice weak with apprehension. Muriel’s grinning head appeared around the door, dimly outlined in the half-light. Evelyn rolled her head around on the pillow, clutching up to her throat the old cardigan she wore at night for warmth. Her face had the look of thin old paper.
“Muriel?”
Why, she would brew her some tea, Muriel said. Brew her some coffee, brew her some milk.
“What are you doing up at this time? Are you sick?”
Muriel was not sick. She had never been sick at all during the course of her pregnancy. It had not incommoded her at all, except for the increased clumsiness of her swollen body. It was as if, Evelyn thought, the child was withdrawn and inert as its mother. A thing. A lump. Perhaps it was dead. Oh God. She struggled to sit up in momentary panic. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder. Let it not be dead. It was more than the house could contain. A ghost carrying a ghost.
“Muriel? Muriel?”
Muriel had gone downstairs. Why doesn’t she put on the lights? How does it come about that she can see in the dark?
Muriel opened each door in turn. The shiny leather parlour shrouded in shadow. The cramped back room where they sat during the day. The furniture had not moved itself. There was no material change. Muriel could never feel sure about things like this. Paper might walk and wood might laugh; and how was it possible to know whether anything existed, when you were out of the room? Very well, she thought reasonably, now I am here, now the house is playing dead. Now I turn, I turn my head, I watch out of the corner of my eye. Now I go out…she slammed the door behind her then thrust it open again as quickly as she could, propelling herself back into the room. The tables and chairs, unmoved, smirked at her knowingly. She looked at them in a passion of enmity. Once she had been at their mercy, but now she was learning how to go about things. Now she was making progress every day.