The distant gush of water ceased after four or five minutes. It was succeeded not by silence but by a faint, sustained vibrancy. Odd, how someone’s presence in the bathroom always produced this subtle difference in the timbre of the house.
The woman was projected to him in a succession of tiny sounds. All had a muffled yet ringing quality, imparted by the tiled walls and the metallic drum belly of the bath. The echo of a discarded slipper striking the floor. A soft boom of weight travelling down through a naked heel. He heard the lick and swirl of water as she tested its warmth. The smile died quickly from his face.
Julia was bending low, half turned, and sweeping fanned fingers just below the surface. It was the same action as smoothing sand on a summer beach. The water lapped back into stillness. Fingers, glistening, converged upon the button at her throat, like wet bathers clustering at a tent. It was she now who smiled. Pensive, sensual amusement. She put first one hand, then the other into her nightdress’s open front, wrists crossed, then slowly lifted her breasts up and apart within the hands’ cupped caress. Her lower lip projected coquettishly. Slowly the hands turned, miming beneath the fabric the weight and fulness of their burden. Her body tensed and narrowed. The self-embracing arms tightened. The hands, suddenly stiff as surfboards, slid from breasts to shoulders and down, denuding them. She stepped into the bath as carefully as if before a critical audience, then gradually relaxed until she lay at full length, immersed just sufficiently for the tides born of her breathing to lap the white islands of her breasts and to suck her groin like currents in a seaweed grove.
There was a separate shower next to the bathroom. David used it energetically. The violent drubbing, arm-flailing and posturing beneath the needle-sharp onslaught of cold water he described as “toning up”. Julia told her friends that he looked on these occasions like a discus thrower desperate for a pee.
David returned to the bedroom, leaving two pieces of soap, his pyjama trousers and two wet towels in the shower basin. Naked, he did eighteen press-ups on the floor in front of the mirror. Another towelling and a little muscular massage with finger tips. He examined his hands, turning fanned fingers this way and that. They were short and inclined to pudginess.
“Thornton! Thorney, darling!” Julia’s voice from the landing. She had emerged from the bathroom to rouse their eight-year-old son, home on holiday from his boarding prep school.
The child, already up and dressed, answered from the kitchen where he was persuading Mrs Cutlock to feed him cake and cold tinned mushroom soup. Mrs Cutlock was the daily help. She had just arrived from her council house home in Simpson Road.
“Down soon, old chap!” cried Thornton’s father, cheerily.
The whine of a vacuum cleaner signalled that Mrs Cutlock was at large. David opened a couple of drawers and sorted their contents around until he found a pair of nylon briefs in silver and yellow checks, which he pulled on. Approvingly he adjusted the bulge produced by his genitals.
Julia entered, fully dressed. She glanced at the open drawers, the disturbed contents. Ignoring her husband completely, she sat for a moment before the dressing table and applied some makeup. She rose and walked towards the door.
“Julia...”
She stopped and waited, not looking at him.
“I’m seeing Weatherby today. I want to be able to tell him to go ahead with the divorce preparations.”
She said nothing.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Julia began to leave.
He grabbed her wrist and twisted it upward, into the small of her back. “I said, did you hear? Did you bloody hear?”
On the staircase, the hoovering Mrs Cutlock had found an angle of observation through the banisters—a sort of leper’s squint. She noted the raised voice and watched Mrs Harton suddenly double forward.
David was still smiling but there was a pale rigidity about his mouth. He pulled the woman close by holding her trapped wrist low, so that she had to crouch in an attitude of subservience.
“Now then, are you going to be reasonable?”
Mrs Cutlock saw Mrs Harton shake her head, then give a jerk. What, she asked the vacuum cleaner, could Mr and Mrs Harton be doing? Mrs Harton had jerked again. Surely Mr Harton wasn’t kicking her? Oh, but yes, yes he was. With his bare foot. Short jabs with that big toenail of his. Poor Mrs Harton. Ooo—another one...
The involuntary grimaces of sympathy made by Mrs Cutlock were suddenly replaced by one of shocked wonderment as she saw Mr Harton reel backward, bent low and holding himself between his legs. The poor gentleman was white as a sheet, but she supposed it served him right. Who would have thought it of Mrs Harton, though? A headmaster’s daughter. Grabbing her husband’s balls. Quick as a terrier.
Julia crossed the landing and spent a couple of minutes more in the bathroom. When she emerged, she was singing.
Her voice was high and firm and possessed an almost professional accuracy of pitch. “If you go down to the woods today...” The Teddy Bears’ Picnic was Thornton’s special favourite, or so it had been when he was four.
Mrs Cutlock stood aside on the stairs and grinned as Mrs Harton went by. Her employer did not interrupt her song, but in mid-note she made a bow of greeting, playfully arch, like a princess in musical comedy. Mrs Cutlock giggled and reflected that Mrs Harton was a cool one all right.
“...for every bear that ever there was...”
David listened and scowled. He tossed a few things about until he found his watch. He strapped it on, taking care not to catch any of his profuse, black forearm hair in the gold linkage. The watch told him the date, temperature, air pressure, and could be used as a currency conversion calculator. Its mechanism was accurate to within two seconds in five years. David kept the watch quarter of an hour fast.
He picked up the APPLE LOFT deodorant, aimed at his left armpit and pressed the button. Nothing happened. He shook the can and tried again. He twisted the button and took different aim. The country-fresh tingle remained imprisoned within its man-size pack. David angrily wrenched the nozzle from side to side. Suddenly it came away. David’s torso was hit by a stream of foaming APPLE LOFT like the contents of a fire extinguisher. It was searingly cold and of ghastly pungency.
His yell of shock and pain penetrated to the kitchen, where Julia was humming a reprise of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic for Thornton’s benefit while she broke eggs into a basin.
“Daddy’s calling, darling,” she said. “Go and see what he wants.”
Ten minutes later, David was dressed, composed, and seated with his son in the dining enclosure that was screened from cook top and sluice unit by rubber plants and shelves of spice jars.
“Mummy was in good voice this morning, wasn’t she?”
Thornton, a frail boy with ash-blond hair, looked at his father, then at his mother. His eyes were wary.