She had been perhaps ten minutes in the flat but it now felt as if she had burned huge dirty holes with a flame-thrower in floor, walls and ceiling. I wanted to go outside and walk in the fresh air, but could not persuade Tilda to move or turn her face from the wall. I tried soothing words but she stayed silent. I laid my hand gently on her shoulder but she shook it off and sat where she was until long after nightfall. When she came to bed at last she would not let me cuddle her but lay as far from me as possible. Next day she did not get up and hardly touched the food I brought. I could not bear to leave her alone in the house that afternoon. At night when I came to bed I discovered she had peed in it. That made me furious enough to drag her out and wash her. While making a clean bed on the floor I told her I would send for a doctor if she did not pull herself together. She said nothing. I asked if she wanted me to send for a doctor. She said, “If you do I will scream.”
I told her that if she screamed when a doctor came he would quickly whisk her into a mental hospital. At this she turned her face to the wall again.
“Tilda,” I said, pleading, “I realise your father’s death has been a terrible shock, but you mustn’t just lie down and fall apart. Is there nothing I can do to help?” She muttered, “You know what you can do.”
“Honestly, Tilda, I don’t know! How can
I know?”
“Because she told you.”
“Who told me?”
“My mother told you. Twice.”
That our wicked little visitor was Tilda’s mother had never occurred to me. I thought furiously back over her words then said, “If you mean, Tilda, that you want us to marry, of course I’ll do it if that will restore us to being as friendly and loving as we were before she stormed in.” “Don’t bank on it!” said Tilda bitterly between clenched teeth, sounding so like her mother that I felt the short hairs on my neck bristle. I tried to be reasonable and explained there was no point in marrying if it did us no good. She neither answered nor turned her head but I saw tears pouring from her eyes, saw she was shuddering with soundless sobs. What horrible training had taught her to weep noiselessly? The sight maddened me. The madness took the form of promising to marry her as soon as possible. At last I got her into the clean new improvised bed and we fell asleep cuddling again. Something had been regained and something lost. Tilda’s mother had brought me to the same start as my previous marriages.
Several days had to elapse before the marriage. During them Tilda refused me the lovemaking I had once taken for granted, but we cuddled at night and steady cuddling has always nourished me more than the irregular pleasures of fucking. I was also fool enough to think that, despite the past, we had a honeymoon ahead and suggested visiting Spain, Greece or Barbados.
“Why?” asked Tilda.
I pointed to colourful pictures in a spread of travel brochures and said, “Bright sunshine. Blue skies. Warm sea. Soft sand.” “Foolish extravagance and a waste of good money. We aren’t exactly rolling in it.”
“The money is mine, Tilda, and I promise I have enough to easily pay for a trip.”
“Nobody who knows anything about money ever has enough,” she said contemptuously. I was glad she no longer seemed pathetic. Nowadays on rising she sat around the sitting room instead of joining me in the workroom. It was a healthy sign of growing independence, though I missed her silent company.
I wrote to tell Tilda’s mother of the wedding, suggested one of her family should witness it, received in reply a card saying, “My brother-in-law will attend.” We met him at the registry office: a big laconic man with an expression suggesting all that happened was his own very private little joke. I suspected him of being a highly self-controlled drunkard though he smelled of nothing worse than the tweeds he wore. The witness I had invited was Henderson, a freelance programmer whose character was like mine — we shared business when one of us had too much of it. After the signing I took the four of us for a meal at The Ubiquitous Chip despite Tilda muttering, “Do we have to do this?” She refused to drink anything but soda water and lime or eat anything but ice cream. For us men her uncle ordered preprandial brandies, wine with the food, and after the dessert an astonishingly expensive champagne with which he gave a toast prefaced by the words, “Be upstanding.” He and I and Henderson stood holding fluted glasses with what resembled mist arising from them while Tilda sat glowering into her third dish of ice cream. Her uncle said, “Here’s to the blushing bride. Here’s also, more importantly I think, to a very honourable groom. You!” — he suddenly stared straight at me without the faintest trace of a smile — “You are a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” He emptied his glass, said he must rush for a train and left. I am unable to regard him as a parasitic clown because later I found he had paid for the drink, which cost much more than the food.
Tilda and I went home, both entering the flat with sighs of obvious relief. Tenderly I helped her off with her outer garments and was about to undo inner ones when she said, “Don’t be silly.”
I shrugged and we sat facing each other across the hearth rug. Then she said slowly and firmly, “I think. It is time. I had a bed of my own.”
I gaped at her for at least a minute before asking why. She said, “Why not? My mother and father sleep, no, slept you cunt in different beds, in fact different bedrooms. The best people do.”
That thrust me into a confusion of thoughts and feelings from which the most definite to surface was the most mean and triviaclass="underline" I regretted having thrown out the old mattress and getting another, because if she insisted on sleeping alone she could have done it on the bedding she had wet. And she did insist on sleeping alone. I argued with her of course, at one point was on the verge of threatening violence when tears started from her eyes and I knew unbearable silent sobbing would begin if I persisted. I made a bed for myself on the sofa then decided to go for a walk and brood over this new, alarming development, but she screamed, “You can’t leave me alone here now!”
And I couldn’t. I saw that without me Tilda would melt down into nothing but helpless, terrible misery. I was trapped and could only break out of the trap by acting like a beast. I could not call a doctor and tell him that the woman I had married that afternoon was now certifiably insane.
I made myself a bed on the sofa. Without Tilda’s body to snuggle against I was unable to sleep but found the situation oddly familiar. She was now rejecting me like three previous wives who began by liking me then found they could not. I had blamed neither them nor myself for that — a calm, uncomprehending acceptance had seemed the sanest attitude. It now felt like madness to try seeing why everyone I loved had rejected me, but I had nothing else to do. The simplest explanation was the old Freudian one that, like most men, I married women who resembled my mother, thus condemning myself to enact the same stupid drama with each. But my mother had been nervous and clinging, a type I avoid. Apart from strong wills and their wish to marry me wives 1, 2 and 3 had been as different from each other as they were from wife 4.
Number 1 had this in common with my mother: she expected and wanted to be a housewife. Before the 1960s most wives outside the poorly paid classes expected to be supported at home, because they were fully employed there. Before washing machines, good housewives scrubbed and wrung clothes for body and bed by hand — ironed and mended them — knitted socks and other woollen items — cut, sewed, embroidered garments, curtains, cushions and chair covers. Before vacuum cleaners they drove dust out of carpets by hanging them outdoors and whacking them with canes. Shopping was more frequent before refrigerators and freezers because foods had to be eaten near the time of purchase. Good wives baked scones, biscuits, cakes, tarts, puddings, made jams, jellies, pickles and an exquisite sweet called tablet, for which everyone had a slightly different recipe. They regularly cleaned and polished linoleum, glass, metal and wooden surfaces. Their homes were continually restored works of art, exhibited once a week at a small afternoon tea party for friends and neighbours who were similar wives.