‘Is there something funny?’ he asked, studying her face a little too long for comfort. She could tell he was seething. She shook her head in answer. She was worried she might scream out loud, could feel her own volcano bubbling up, ready to explode. She supposed she was hysterical. Unstable.
‘I have to see to the Upper School’s high jump,’ Derek said, frowning at her. ‘I’ll meet you shortly.’ He walked off, still frowning, and she started to laugh again.
‘Mrs Oliphant? Is it Mrs Oliphant, it is, isn’t it?’ The two masters’ wives pounced on her, lionesses sensing wounded prey.
She also travelled home alone as Derek had to supervise evening study and would eat at the school, he said. She made herself a scrappy tea of fried herring and cold potatoes and had a sudden longing for a bottle of good red wine. In fact one bottle after another until she had drunk herself to death. She scraped the herring bones into the bin. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Anything was better than this ludicrous life.
Derek was a joke, to the boys, to the staff. Mr Elephant. She could just imagine the unruly Lower Third driving him mad with rage. And his book, what of his book?
Ursula never bothered much with the contents of Derek’s ‘study’. She had never felt any great interest in the Plantagenets or Tudors either, for that matter. She was under strict instructions not to move any of his papers or books when dusting and polishing in the dining room (as she still liked to think of it) but she didn’t care to anyway, barely glancing at the progress of the great tome.
He had been working feverishly of late, the table was covered in a clutter of notes and scraps of paper. It was all disconnected sentences and thoughts – rather amusing if somewhat primitive belief – planta genista, the common broom gives us the name Angevin – come of the devil, and to the devil they would go. There was little sign of an actual manuscript, just corrections and re-corrections, the same paragraph written over and over with tiny changes each time, and endless trial pages, written in ruled exercise books with Blackwood’s crest and motto (A posse ad esse – ‘from possibility to reality’) on the cover. No wonder he hadn’t wanted her to type up his manuscript. She had married a Casaubon, she realized.
Derek’s whole life was a fabrication. From his very first words to her (Oh, my, how awful for you. Let me help you) he had not been genuine. What had he wanted from her? Someone weaker than himself? Or a wife, a mother of his children, someone running his house, all the trappings of the vie quotidienne but without any of its underlying chaos. She had married him in order to be safe from that chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.
Ursula rooted through the sideboard drawers and found a sheaf of letters, the top one with the letterhead of William Collins and Sons, Co. Ltd ‘regretfully’ rejecting his idea for a book, in an ‘already oversubscribed area of history textbooks’. There were similar letters from other educational publishers and, worse, there were unpaid bills and threatening final notices. A particularly harsh letter demanded immediate repayment of the loan taken out apparently to pay for the house. It was the kind of sour letter that she had typed up from dictation at her secretarial college, Dear Sir, It has been brought to my notice—
She heard the front door open and her heart jumped. Derek appeared in the doorway of the dining room, a Gothic intruder on stage. ‘What are you doing?’
She held up the letter from William Collins and said, ‘You’re a liar, through and through. Why did you marry me? Why did you make us both so unhappy?’ The look on his face. That look. She was asking to be killed, but wasn’t that easier than doing it herself? She didn’t care any more, there was no fight in her.
Ursula was expecting the first blow but it still took her by surprise, his fist punching hard into the middle of her face as if he wanted to obliterate it.
She slept, or perhaps she passed out, on the kitchen floor and woke some time before six. She was sick and dizzy and every inch of her was sore and aching, her whole body made of lead. She was desperate for a drink of water but didn’t dare turn the tap on for fear of waking Derek. Using first a chair, then the table, she hauled herself up to standing. She found her shoes and crept into the hallway where she took her coat and a headscarf from the peg. Derek’s wallet was in his jacket pocket and she took a ten-shilling note, more than enough for the rail fare and then a cab onward. She felt exhausted just at the thought of this taxing journey – she wasn’t even sure she could make it on foot as far as Harrow and Wealdstone station.
She slipped her coat on and pulled the headscarf over her face, avoiding the mirror in the hallstand. It would be too dreadful a sight. She left the front door slightly ajar in case the noise of it closing woke him up. She thought of Ibsen’s Nora slamming the door behind her. Nora wouldn’t have gone in for dramatic gestures if she had been trying to escape from Derek Oliphant.
It was the longest walk of her life. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might give out. All the way she expected to hear his footsteps running up behind her and him yelling her name. At the ticket office she had to mumble ‘Euston’ through a mouthful of bloody, broken teeth. The ticket clerk glanced at her and then glanced quickly away when he saw the state she was in. Ursula supposed he had no precedent for dealing with female passengers who looked as if they had been in bare-knuckle fights.
She had to wait for the first train of the day for another ten agonizing minutes in the ladies’ waiting room but at least she was able to get a drink of water and remove some of the dried blood from her face.
In the carriage she sat with her head bowed, one hand shielding her face. The men in suits and bowlers studiously ignored her. As she waited for the train to pull away she risked a glance along the platform and was relieved beyond measure that there was still no sign of Derek. With any luck he hadn’t missed her yet and was still doing his press-ups on the bedroom floor, presuming her to be down in the kitchen preparing his breakfast. Friday, kipper day. The kipper still lay on the pantry shelf, wrapped in newspaper. He would be furious.
When she got off the train at Euston her legs almost gave way. People gave her a wide berth and she worried that the cab driver would refuse the fare, but when she showed him the money he took her. They drove in silence across London, bathed in rain overnight, and now the stones of the buildings were sparkling in the first rays of sun and the soft cloudy dawn was opalescent in pinks and blues. She had forgotten how much she liked London. Her heart rose. She had decided to live and now she wanted to very much.
The cab driver helped her out at the end of the journey. ‘You’re sure about this, miss, are you?’ he said, looking doubtfully at the large red-brick house in Melbury Road. She nodded, mutely.
It was an inevitable destination.
She rang the bell and the front door opened. Izzie’s hand flew to her mouth in horror at the sight of her face. ‘Oh, my God. What happened to you?’