‘No, she wasn’t with him. He was walking by himself. He looked pale and haggard – older. I tried to phone later but no one answered.’
‘I wonder if – ’ Antonia began. If Sally’s left him, she was going to say but didn’t. Well, she’d always maintained that this kind of thing wouldn’t last. Richard, after all, was old enough to be Sally’s father. She felt a thrill at the thought that she’d been proved right, and she didn’t like it. She told herself it wouldn’t do to gloat – that giving way to schadenfreude was beneath her.
‘Do they allow women in the club?’ Bethany asked.
‘They didn’t use to, but now they do. Wives and sisters and, I suspect, mistresses. One can’t always tell which is which.’
‘Don’t mistresses have a certain… air?’ David said.
‘I don’t know. I may be entirely wrong, but I think they tend to laugh a lot. Exhilaration, exultation – or nerves. I don’t know. There are widows of club members too. One of them, Mrs Vollard, relic of Admiral Vollard RN, was rumoured to have started a secret brothel on the premises. It’s an apocryphal story. Part of the club mythology.’
‘Hookers or rent boys?’ Bethany said.
They all laughed.
Afterwards Antonia was to remember what a happy occasion it had been up till that moment. Emma had stomped around the place, keeping up her prattle of separate words, kissing her grandmother with exaggerated affection and allowing, nay demanding, to be kissed in return, being charming to Antonia’s two cats and generally lovable. Then, suddenly, and without the slightest provocation, it turned to tempestuous tears, shrieks, ugly anger and violence. Reaching out, she swept two teacups off the table, causing them to smash. She then kicked the pieces.
Emma’s face had become dark and suffused, the usually friendly eyes flashed alien and hostile. In the stunned silence that followed she picked up a slice of Bakewell tart from the cake stand and flung it at her grandmother. It hit Antonia on the chest and disintegrated on her lap. Never having seen this side of her granddaughter before, Antonia was appalled and distressed.
‘She’s just tired, it’s nothing,’ Bethany said in a matter-of-fact voice, picking Emma up, only to have her face hammered at by two vicious little fists. David intervened at once, taking Emma away and slapping her bottom lightly. The child screeched and jabbered and tried to claw at his face, writhing like a snake the while. Then she started sobbing uncontrollably. Despite their reassuring smiles, Antonia could see that David and Bethany were discomposed and puzzled. Soon after, they left. She felt shaken up by Emma’s outburst, more than she thought possible. She had imagined an accusatory glint in Emma’s eyes. For a moment Emma had reminded her of somebody…
Antonia’s mind became clouded by a certain unidentifiable sense of dread that wouldn’t go away. She had the very palpable feeling of – well, the only way to describe it was, of something having been unleashed.
She knew it was absurd of her to feel like that and sought a rational explanation. No doubt the tantrum had been the sort that three-year-olds experience every day. She was overreacting – she was being neurotic, getting things out of all proportion. She was still smarting from her divorce. Her confidence had been dealt a blow. She hadn’t recovered yet. The trip abroad hadn’t really done the trick. She was in a fragile state. She was still feeling tired after her long plane journey. (There had been a four-hour delay and they had arrived at Heathrow at three in the morning.) She had also drunk champagne on the plane, which she shouldn’t have done. She was a poor drinker. She should have resisted the Roscoes’ well-meant attempts to cheer her up. And why had she needed cheering up? Well, she had been depressed. She had burst into tears. That hadn’t had anything to do with her marriage. She had convinced herself that she could never possibly put pen to paper again.
‘Unleashed,’ she said aloud. ‘Nonsense.’
But the dark cloud wouldn’t go away. Tired. That was it. Terribly tired. That was the reason. When she was tired she became subject to odd fancies, like a pregnant woman – a proclivity she did not always succeed in keeping well under control. It had all happened before. The fact that she was going back to work tomorrow morning and had to write a report for the club committee by the end of the week didn’t help either.
Antonia sat down and listened to a Haydn sonata. She managed to persuade herself that that was the salve she had needed. (Haydn’s common sense had ‘penetrated’, was how she thought of it.) She then glanced at the twenty pages of the novel she had started writing and thought the whole thing implausible in the extreme – rather silly, actually. She had got the premise of self-imposed amnesia – of repressed memory that turns out to be false memory – from an article she had read in The Times, but she didn’t seem to have been able to do much with it. Did people behave like that? Did people think like that? Did that sort of thing happen to people? Why had she chosen a subject she knew nothing about?
Exasperated, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pushed the pages in. The bottom drawer was the one she opened only when she wanted to get rid – no, to half get rid of something. It contained various discarded papers. She was waiting for it to get full before she made a bonfire in the back yard and burnt its contents. (Not an entirely rational thing to do, but then she had to admit she wasn’t an entirely rational person.)
The drawer wouldn’t shut. There was something at the back that had got jammed. After two attempts, she gave up, leaving the drawer gaping. She refused to take that as a sign, though she did imagine it might be a sign. She vaguely wondered what it was that had caused the jamming but felt reluctant to investigate.
‘Hate writing but love having written. Dorothy Parker said that. Well, not true – I hate both,’ Antonia told her cats as she fed them a little while later. ‘I am afraid this is a writer’s block from which I may never recover. My first novel will also be my last. I may be going mad too.’
The cats looked back at her with indifference and licked their whiskers.
She had a cup of hot milk, took two sleeping pills, turned off all the lights and went to bed.
Antonia hadn’t expected to sleep well and she didn’t.
She woke up in the middle of the night, feeling hot, drowsy and confused, her heart thumping in her chest. She turned on the bedside lamp and reached out for her glass of water. Once more she had a sense of foreboding. She also felt consumed by guilt. And this wasn’t the familiar dread of facing a lonely future, nor the guilty feeling she had had over her failed marriage. She was conscious of having done something appalling. Something that had resulted in disaster – no, not the disaster of losing a husband to a younger woman, something worse. Much worse.
Falling back on her pillow and shutting her eyes, Antonia found herself remembering, of all things, a production of Eliot’s The Family Reunion which she had seen a couple of years back. In it the Eumenides had been presented as children, which she had thought an extremely spooky and effective decision on the part of the director. One didn’t expect children to look and sound menacing, accusatory, slyly knowing
…
Violence and children… one particular child… something unresolved… a death that could have been prevented… something she had allowed to happen… a little girl… no, not Emma…
As she drifted into an uneasy sleep, she heard a man’s voice hum, ‘When I am King, Dilly, Dilly, You shall be Queen…’
She saw a doll floating on a river… blood coming out of a hollow in the middle of an ancient tree… a Mary Poppins-like figure disappearing into the sky…
2
The Day the Earth Stood Still
It was the following morning as she took the Tube to work that she knew what it was her subconscious had been trying to tell her. Somebody standing beside her on the platform was reading the Metro and she saw the date.