“Not my kind, either,” Bunty sighed, and reached over into the back seat for her basket and handbag, as the car hissed to a standstill in the thin ooze alongside the kerb. “But if you’ll believe me, this is the only place in Comerford where I can buy whole black pepper!”
At this last moment it felt like tearing herself in two to get out of the car and leave him behind, but a kerbside stop affords no time for hesitation. She cast the usual quick glance behind, opened the door of the Morris, and slid her feet out to the greasy pavement, tilting her cheek back at the same moment for George’s customary kiss.
“Good luck, then, mate! I’ll expect you when I see you.”
“Just as soon as I can make it. ’Bye, darling, take care of yourself.”
“Listen who’s talking,” said Bunty derisively. “I’m not the one who goes hobnobbing with gunmen and such.”
She was on her feet in a light leap, the door slammed, the car gathered way and was gone, its rear lights dwindling to cigarette-ends just visible in the soiled, wet darkness, as it rounded the curve by the White Hart. And that, thought Bunty, is how it should be done, when it has to be done at all. She furled in the frayed cords of her personality that had been torn loose with George’s departure, but this time the ache did not dull, and the bleeding did not stop.
Any one of those separations in the past twenty years might have been the final one; even before the armed professionals arrived on the scene, a policeman’s hadn’t been the safest of careers. Is it only on the edge of middle age, she wondered, that you begin admitting the possibility? Or, more simply, do you never even notice it until then?
Overheated air closed round her like warm treacle as she pushed her way into the supermarket, and made for the dry goods’ shelves. Even husbands who take their cars out in the morning to drive tranquilly to work in banks and shops may be heading unawares for a pile-up at the first corner, or a hold-up and a shot over the counter. But life would be impossible if their wives spent every separated moment thinking so.
She sat in the empty, silent house, brushing her hair before the glass and watching her mirrored face as if the secret of this unforeseen and inescapable dismay lay there behind her own eyes. She had avoided the bus, after all, and walked all the way home through the thin, unclean rain, in the dim, amorphous colourings of evening and autumn, inexpressibly elegiac and sad. And where there should have been shelter, under her own roof, the other darkness had closed down appallingly on her spirit, the darkness you see when you look over your shoulder half-way through life.
How was it that she had turned forty without a chilling thought, and now at forty-one must run head-on into the skeleton in the way?
It happens to everyone, sooner or later, even the best balanced and happiest, that sudden hesitation and the long first look behind, the first qualm of wondering whether all has been well done, whether there is really anything there at all to record the course of a lif e suddenly seen to be half-over. October is a searching time even for the young, but for them it is only a seasonal disquiet, they have the renewal of Spring within them, they have good cause to believe in it. Bunty’s heart ached inconsolably for the beauty that was gone, for the youth that would not renew itself. She looked into her own eyes, and they were no longer unaware of passing time, and no longer innocent of the implications, age, infirmity and death.
She had turned out the main light in the room. Her brush crackled and sparkled through her thick brown hair in the dimness, and her eyes stared back at her unwaveringly from the glass, sometimes obscured by the swaying strands of hair, but always constant and naked in their questioning when the curtain parted again. What is the matter with you? she asked the image that fronted her. They were two, not one, there might even be an answer. You’re a lucky woman, a happy woman. You’ve always been aware of it. You have a husband you love, and a son you adore, you are equable and outgoing by temperament; in a modest way, which has always satisfied you up to now, you have every possible blessing. Even a sense of humour! Or have you? Or has it only been mislaid for a short testing time?
And that’s all? wondered the eyes confronting her. And that’s enough?
The clouds were breaking outside the window, but only in tormented shapes of scudding flight and bitter pursuit, driven by a sudden wailing wind. All the too static air was abruptly in motion. She felt time rushing away from under her feet, leaving her falling through space in a howling greyness. There had once been a certain Bunty Elliott who had known beyond question that she was going to be a great singer, and leave a treasury of recorded music that would make her immortal. But she had never put her gifts to any serious test, because she had met and married George Felse, and turned into a mere wife, a policeman’s wife. And what was she now but George’s wife—no, George’s grass widow at this moment, and this moment was her whole life in microcosm—and Dominic’s mother? Did she exist, except as a reflection of them? Was she condemned only to act, only to be anything at all through her husband and her son?
What had become of Bunty herself? Somewhere she had got lost between George and Dominic, and rediscovery would not be easy. George’s face looked up at her from the photograph on her dressing-table, ten years younger than now but essentially the same, grave, thin, thoughtful, with dark, steady eyes, and sensitive lines about his mouth. She could paint in for herself the new furrows that had grown deep into his flesh since the picture was taken, and they added to his worth and significance, which were not and never would be in question. She loved him so naturally that she had never had cause to stop and assess how much she loved him. He, nevertheless, had an identity of his own, and was in no danger of losing it. And she?
If you were here now, she thought, you would be enough to restore the balance; I should be over the crest and on my way home. Why aren’t you here? Why did you have to be somewhere else on this night of all nights?
And her son? Dominic was complicated, fascinating and absorbing, because he was half George and half herself. They had been devoted friends all his short life. She could even laugh at him, and not be excommunicated. But they grow up, and grow away. Dominic was at Oxford, with exams hanging over him, and Dominic had chosen a girl, and chosen her for life, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, for all time and with all his heart. Maybe he himself didn’t yet know it, maybe he was too close to Tossa Barber to take in her full significance. But Bunty knew it. And approved it. He might have made so many mistakes, but in the event his instinct was true enough, and his choice sharp and sure. And she was glad. But where, now, was Bunty?
She had been prepared, insofar as any woman can be prepared, to be sloughed like an outworn skin. It presented no problem in her relationship with him, or even with his Tossa. But she was confronting the shell of Bunty Felse, and coming to terms with that gutted presence was not so easy.
What am I now? she thought. Am I anything? Yes, to George, certainly. I have a reason for going on being, I have a hollow to fill, maybe a bigger hollow than before. But whether I have enough substance to supply the vacuum, that’s another matter. And whether anything exists which is truly me, and not reflections of these two, God only knows!
The bed was smooth, sterile and cold. She lay in the panting, unquiet darkness, and did not sleep. And in the morning, which was her forty-first birthday, there was no letter from Dominic and no telephone call from George. The early light of Saturday was grey, chill and calm, and she was utterly alone for perhaps the first time in her life. In a life which was half over, and shrinking in upon her even as she dressed to face it.