They did settle. Thrown together as helpless parties in the stipulations of the peace, they became companions. They missed the past; resentment and deprivation drew them close. They talked about the two people whom they visited on Sundays, and how those two, once at the centre of things, were now defeated and displaced.
At the top of the house, attic space had been reclaimed to form a single, low-roofed room with windows to the ground and a new parquet floor that seemed to stretch for ever. The walls were a shade of washed-out primrose, and shafts of sunlight made the pale ash of the parquet seem almost white. There was no furniture. Two bare electric light-bulbs hung from the long, slanted ceiling. This no-man’s-land was where Gerard and Rebecca played their game of marriage and divorce. It became a secret game, words fading on their lips if someone entered, politeness disguising their deceit.
Rebecca recalled her mother weeping at lunch, a sudden collapse into ugly distress while she was spooning peas on to Rebecca’s plate. ‘Whatever’s up?’ Rebecca asked, watching as her mother hurried from the table. Her father did not answer, but instead left the dining-room himself, and a few moments later there were the sounds of a quarrel. ‘You’ve made me hate you,’ Rebecca’s mother kept screaming so shrilly that Rebecca thought the people in the house next door would hear. ‘How could you have made me hate you?’
Gerard entered a room and found his mother nursing the side of her face. His father stood at the window, looking out. Behind his back one hand gripped the other as if in restraint. Gerard was frightened and went away, his brief presence unnoticed.
‘Think of that child,’ Rebecca’s mother pleaded in another mood. ‘Stay with us if only for that child.’
‘You vicious bitch!’ This furious accusation stuttered out of Gerard’s father, his voice peculiar, his lips trembling in a grimace he could not control.
Such scenes, seeming like the end of everything that mattered, were later surveyed from the unemotional safety of the new companionship. Regret was exorcized, sore places healed; harshness was the saviour. From information supplied by television a world of sin and romance was put together in the empty attic room. ‘Think of that child!’ Rebecca mimicked, and Gerard adopted his father’s grimace the time he called his mother a vicious bitch. It was fun because the erring couple were so virtuous now.
‘I can’t think how it happened.’ Gerard’s version of the guilty husband’s voice was not convincing, but it passed whatever muster was required. ‘I can’t think how I could have been such a fool as to marry her in the first place.’
‘Poor thing, it’s not her fault.’
‘It’s that that makes it such an awful guilt.’ This came from an old black-and-white film and was used a lot because they liked the sound of it.
When romance was to the fore they spoke in whispers, making a murmuring sound when they didn’t know what to say. They tried out dance steps in the attic, pretending they were in a dance-hall they called the Ruby Ballroom or a night-club they called the Nitelite, a title they’d seen in neon somewhere. They called a bar the Bee’s Knees, which Rebecca said was a name suitable for a bar, although the original was a stocking shop. They called a hotel the Grand Splendide.
‘Some sleazy hotel?’ Gerard’s father had scornfully put it. ‘Some sleazy pay-at-the-door hotel for his sleazy one-night stands?’
‘No, actually,’ the reply had been. ‘It was rather grand.’
Downstairs they watched a television serial in which the wronged ones made the kind of fuss that both Gerard and Rebecca had witnessed. The erring ones met in car parks, or on waste land in the early morning.
‘Gosh!’ Rebecca exclaimed, softly astonished at what was occurring on the screen. ‘He took his tongue out of her mouth. Definitely.’
‘She’s chewing his lips actually.’
‘But his tongue -’
‘I know.’
‘Horrid great thing, it looked.’
‘Look, you be Mrs Edwina, Rebecca.’
They turned the television off and climbed to the top of the house, not saying anything on the way. They closed the door behind them.
‘OK,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’m Mrs Edwina.’
Gerard made his bell-ringing sound.
‘Oh, go away!’ Staring intently into space, Rebecca went on doing so until the sound occurred again. She sighed, and rose from where she’d been sitting on the floor. Grumbling wordlessly, she ran on the spot, descending stairs.
‘Yes, what is it, please?’
‘Mrs Edwina?’
‘Sure I’m Mrs Edwina.’
‘I saw your card in the window of that newsagent’s. What’s it called? The Good News, is it?’
‘What d’you want, please?’
‘It says you have a room to let.’
‘What of it? I was watching Dallas.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Edwina.’
‘D’you want to rent a room?’
‘I have a use for a room, yes.’
‘You’d best come in.’
‘Cold evening, Mrs Edwina.’
‘I hope you’re not planning a love nest. I don’t want no filth in my house.’
‘Oh, what a lovely little room!’
‘If it’s for a love nest it’ll be ten pounds more per week. Another ten on top of that if you’re into call-girls.’
‘I can assure you, Mrs Edwina -’
‘You read some terrible tales in the papers these days. Beauty Queen a Call-girl! it said the other day. Are you fixing to bring in beauty queens?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. A friend and myself have been going to the Grand Splendide but it’s not the same.’
‘You’d be a married man?’
‘Yes.’
‘I get the picture.’
Rebecca’s mother had demanded to know where the sinning had taken place. Gerard’s mother, questioned similarly, had revealed that the forbidden meetings had taken place in different locations – once or twice in her lover’s office, after hours; over lunch or five-thirty drinks. A hotel was mentioned, and finally a hired room. ‘How sordid!’ Rebecca’s mother cried, then weeping overcame her and Rebecca crept away. But, elsewhere, Gerard remained. He reported that extraordinary exchanges had followed, that great importance was attached to the room that had been specially acquired, great offence taken.
‘I’m tired of this ghastly hole.’ Rebecca was good at introducing a whine into her tone, a bad-tempered, spoilt-child sound that years ago she’d once or twice tried on in reality before being sharply told to cease immediately.
‘Oh, it’s not too bad, darling!’
‘It’s most unpleasant. It’s dirty for a start. Look at the sheets, I’ve never seen sheets as soiled as that. Then Mrs Edwina is dirty. You can see it on her neck. Filthy dirty that woman is.’
‘Oh, she’s not too bad.’
‘There’s a smell of meat in the hall. She never opens a window.’
‘Darling -’
‘I want to live in a house. I want us to be divorced and married again.’
‘I know. I know. But there’re the children. And there’s the awful guilt I feel.’
‘What I feel is sick in my bowels. Every time I walk in that door I feel it. Every time I look at that filthy wallpaper I get vomit in my throat.’
‘We could paint the place out.’
‘Let’s go to the Bee’s Knees for a cocktail. Let’s never come back here.’
‘But, angel -’
‘Our love’s not like it used to be. It’s not like it was when we went dancing in the Ruby Ballroom. We haven’t been to the Nitelite for a year. Nor the Grand Splendide -’
‘You wanted a home-from-home.’
‘I don’t think you love me any more.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then tell Mrs Edwina what she can do with her horrid old room and let’s live in a house.’
‘But, dear, the children.’
‘Drown the brats in a bucket. Make a present of them to Mrs Edwina for all I care. Cement them into a wall.’