On the Edge [= Dead Gorgeous]

3

Hector was holding forth about the Britain Can Make It Exhibition as a shop window for his products, which Antonia thought was rich considering he was a Czech. She smiled at a couple at another table and said something about the weather and Hector didn’t even pause for breath. She reached across the table and pulled his plate away.

It got a reaction. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

‘Haven’t you finished? I have.’

‘That’s my dinner you took away.’

‘It’ll walk away by itself if you carry on much longer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Never mind.’ She handed back the plate.

‘I forget what I said now.’

‘Good. Will you give me a divorce?’

‘What?’

‘I want a divorce, Hec. I want to marry Vic and go to America. He’s been offered a job at Princeton University.’

Hector chuckled and brought the dimples to his cheeks, which always infuriated Antonia because it made her feel like a cradle-snatcher. In reality he was twelve years her senior, yet such a shrimp that people thought of him as not much over twenty. His springy red hair was the sort that looked no different after it was combed.

‘Vic is leaving? Your fancy man is leaving?’

‘I’m going with him. I’m getting a divorce from you and going with him.’

‘Not possible.’

A harsher note came through in her voice. ‘You’re going to say it’s against your religion, aren’t you? Listen. You don’t go to Mass. You don’t make confessions. You’re not exactly one of the flock, sweetie.’

‘Christmas I go to Mass.’

‘Face it, Hector, you’ve lapsed.’

‘Do I treat you bad?’

‘We’re bored with each other. Admit it. We made a mistake.’

‘This is possible. Divorce is not. We will stay married till death. Understand?’

She took a gulp of wine and leaned forward in her chair. ‘Have you thought of this, Hec? If you gave me grounds, I could divorce you. It’s not against my religion.’

‘Grounds? What are you talking about? I don’t understand what you need grounds for if you want to leave the country.’

‘Grounds — a reason, sweetie, not a piece of land. Misconduct, as they put it in the papers. You’d simply pay some woman to spend the night in a hotel with you.’

He laughed again. ‘You make it sound like money for jam. How much do such women charge? Five pounds? Ten? You think I’m a complete chump? It isn’t just a divorce you’re planning. You want costs. And maintenance. For ever and ever. You want to carry on eating in restaurants and buying expensive clothes. I may not be a great husband, Antonia, but I’m a pretty good businessman, and that’s bad business, terrible business. No deal. No divorce. Forget it.’

She said, ‘Bastard. I’ll just leave you.’ But the words didn’t carry conviction.

Already he was talking about the bloody exhibition again. The people on an adjacent stand had told him that Prestcold were planning to have domestic refrigerators back on the market within a year — far more disturbing to Hector than the prospect of his wife abandoning him.

All around them in the glitter and red plush of Reggiori’s, couples were gazing dewy-eyed at each other over the wine.

‘... I could speed up production easy, but I depend on suppliers, you see. I give you this example. Take aluminium alloy.’

‘Hector.’

‘Essential in manufacture.’

‘Hector, I’ve got a question for you. A technical question.’

‘You have?’

‘How many volts of electricity do they use in the underground?’

‘Over six hundred. Nominally six hundred and thirty DC. Why do you ask this?’

‘Enough to kill someone?’

‘Easy.’ He grinned. ‘But I never use the tube, so you’d better think of some other thing.’

Antonia smiled back serenely. ‘Ah, but I might be thinking of suicide, mightn’t I, little man?’

‘You?’ This amused him greatly. ‘You’ve got to know which rails to jump on.’

‘The live rail.’

He handed his plate to a passing waiter and removed the cruet from the centre of the table, welcoming the rare chance to impress his wife with some electrical knowhow. ‘Pass me those knives.’ He arranged four knives in parallel between them. ‘Now, two long knives — this and this — represent running rails, understand?’

‘The wheels of the train move along them.’

‘Good. Small knives are conductor rails.’

‘Two live rails?’

‘Positive and negative. Positive goes between the running rails, negative outside them. In a station’ — he moved his place mat alongside the knives — ‘the negative conductor rail is right over there, along the opposite wall. Now, you want to electrocute yourself. For best results, you should be in contact with both conductor rails at the same time.’

Antonia frowned. ‘I’d need to be an athlete or a contortionist.’

‘Difficult, yes.’

‘What would happen if you just hit the nearest conductor rail?’

‘In theory you could still earth six hundred and thirty volts.’

‘And in practice?’

Hector smiled and pressed the tablecloth with both hands to make a furrow between the knives. ‘Here, below the rails in each station they have a pit. The suicide pit. Chances are that you will fall between the rails.’

‘Without getting a shock? This isn’t very helpful, Hec. People do get killed sometimes, so how does it happen?’

‘Simple. They jump in front of the train, so it’s not electrocution that kills them.’

She pulled a face. ‘Messy.’

He laughed. ‘You want to look pretty in your coffin? You’d better take phenobarbitone.’

Rose had been in bed an hour when the key turned in the front door. Barry took each stair as if it were put there to trap him, then loosed a huge belch as he passed the bedroom door on his way to the bathroom. This, she reflected, is the Battle of Britain hero, the dashing fighter pilot I promised to love and cherish.

So how will I deal with him? I’ll pretend I’m asleep. I don’t want a scene. Probably I won’t even mention it tomorrow. The plain truth is that I’m resigned to this every Friday night. I’m resigned to being ignored when he’s home every other night of the week, so why should I object when he stays out and comes home drunk?

I’m trapped in this nightmare. I haven’t just slipped in my standard of living since the war. I’ve slipped mentally. I’ve practically given up.

He thrust open the door and switched on the light.

Rose closed her eyes.

She heard him lurch to the bed, then felt his hand on her shoulder. He turned her over. She opened her eyes. He stood swaying there in his braces, no collar attached to his shirt.

‘Bloody trains.’

‘Where are your waistcoat and jacket?’ ‘Bathroom.’

She got out of bed to retrieve them. If she could possibly help it, there wouldn’t be a scene. Fixing her mind on the things she regarded as the duties of a wife helped to control her anger. It was a woman’s job to keep her husband decently kitted for work. He owned this blue pinstripe and his demob suit and one pre-war flannel monstrosity that he refused to part with.

The waistcoat and jacket lay in a heap beside the lavatory. Mechanically she picked several long fair hairs off the sleeves and dropped them into the bowl. She shook the jacket and something rattled in a side pocket. She took out a hotel key and glanced at the disc, replaced it and took the clothes to a hanger in the wardrobe.

He was face down on the bed, still in his day things.

‘Are you proposing to sleep in your trousers?’

He made a show of clawing the braces off his shoulders.

‘Roll over.’

She unbuttoned him at the front and peeled off the trousers.

He tugged the bedding aside and crawled underneath.

‘Had a few after work.’

She emptied his pocket and placed the loose change in the ashtray on the chest of drawers. She smoothed the trousers and lined up the creases.

‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Some time after midnight.’

‘Quite a bit later than usual.’

‘Yes.’

She clamped the trousers in the wooden press beside the tallboy. She knew why he was late. Not because he had had a few whiskys after work. The drinking was incidental to his pursuit of women. She knew all about his infidelities. She was used to being looked at by friends in a certain way and told that her husband had been sighted again in the bar of the Strand Palace Hotel. They didn’t have to say any more. The entire scene was in the look.

What had delayed him then? One thing was certain: it wasn’t an excess of passion. He couldn’t contain himself for more than a minute even when sober. He was late because he’d gone to a different hotel, in Hammersmith. Presumably he’d failed to find a pick-up in the West End. So he’d started again. More whiskys. More than he could handle.

He was making an effort to sound rational.

‘Did you get worried about me?’

‘Worried?’

‘I mean, did you think I’d had an accident?’ ‘An accident?’ Her conversation with Antonia outside the Ritz flitted into her mind and out of it. ‘No.’ ‘Callous bitch.’ ‘Barry, you’re in no state—’

‘I could have been dead for all you care. You don’t bloody care, do you?’

He was working himself up. She was angry, too, and entitled to be. What was picking his clothes off the floor if it wasn’t caring? Rescuing his clothes that reeked of some woman and dutifully hanging them up for him. Yet she didn’t want an argument. She took her dressinggown off the hook.

‘I’m going to sleep in the spare room.’

She reached to pick up her pillow and with surprising speed he grabbed her wrist and jerked her off balance. She fell across the bed.

‘You’re staying here and that’s an order.’

‘Barry, let go of my arm.’

He started wrestling with her. She was pushed face down into the eiderdown. She was shocked by the force of the attack. He had never been violent before. She twisted her head for breath and she felt her nightdress tearing at the armpit. He clapped his hand on the back of her neck.

‘Don’t you dare move, woman.’

‘Barry, you’re hurting.’

‘You don’t know what it is to be hurt.’

His voice had a cruel edge she had never heard from him. A horrid possibility crept into her mind. His imagination had been stoked up by the newspapers reporting those vile murders by Heath.

‘Please, Barry.’

‘Getting above yourself, aren’t you? Bloody vicar’s daughter. Need bringing down a peg or two.’

He slid his hand upwards, took a grip on her hair and twisted her head with such force that her shoulders and torso followed the movement. She was turned face up like a playing card. His leg straddled her thighs and trapped her. Whisky fumes gusted into her face.

She was rigid with fear, certain he meant to bite her. She could see the teeth bared.

‘Barry, no!’

‘Shut up.’

His face moved closer, rasping her cheek with his moustache. He spoke in her ear.

‘You’re a sanctimonious bitch. Admit it. Out with it, loud and clear.’

‘Please—’

‘Say it.’

‘I’m a sanctimonious bitch.’

‘Louder. Tell the neighbours what you are. Tell the whole bloody street.’

She shouted the words.

‘Better. And you were worried sick when I was late.’ ‘I was worried sick.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Come on. Why were you worried sick?’

He was speaking between clenched teeth. He expected an answer fast. And this time he expected her to supply it.

Her face twitched. She was too terrified to think.

‘Come on!’

‘I thought...’

‘Yes?’

‘I thought you must have had an accident.’

‘What sort of accident?’

‘What sort?’

‘I want to know if you’re speaking the truth. You say you thought I had an accident.’

She couldn’t fathom what satisfaction this gave him and she dreaded where it was leading. She just hoped to God she could keep the right answers coming. If it spared her from physical pain she was willing to supply whatever he wanted to hear.

She blurted out the first thing she could think of. ‘Er — an accident on some stairs. You fell down some stairs and broke your leg.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know — the office.’

‘They’d have let you know. Someone would have let you know by seven, easily. Better think again.’

‘You fell off a bus. You hit your head on the road and got concussion. Nobody knew who you were.’

‘So what did my poor distracted wife do about it?’

‘Phoned the police. And all the hospitals.’

‘How touching. And all this is true, isn’t it, Rose, darling, because you were brought up to believe that lying is a sin before God?’ He pressed his forefinger under her chin and pushed upwards. ‘Have I caught you out?’

‘I’m confused. I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘Say you were lying through your teeth.’

‘All right, I was.’

‘And I caught you at it.’

‘You caught me at it.’

This appeared to satisfy him, because he gave a grunt and withdrew the leg that was pinning her down. He rolled right away from her and sat up.

‘I’m going for a piss. Don’t move a muscle.’

Rose’s nerves gave way to the stress. She shivered uncontrollably. Too fearful to run out, she dreaded his return. She listened to him pass water, then flush the cistern. It was all she could do to stop from whimpering when he came back. Yet she still had sufficient detachment to despise herself. That made it harder to endure, knowing what a spineless creature she had become.

He turned out the light as he came in. Then he dropped on to the bed like a felled tree, on his own side, close to Rose, without touching. She prayed that he might sleep now, but he still wanted to taunt her.

‘What a flaming liar! I said what a flaming liar! Lord bloody Haw-Haw isn’t in it. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t lose any sleep if I ended up in hospital. You were nicely tucked up in bed when I finally got in, weren’t you? Weren’t you?’

‘Is that what upset you? I didn’t realize.’

She felt slightly easier in her mind for finding a reason for his behaviour. She hadn’t pictured it from his point of view. He wasn’t home by midnight so she had gone to bed. Evidently he regarded this as a betrayal. It was the silliest nonsense considering how he had spent the evening, but that was the way his mind worked. He felt rejected. God, what she was reduced to!

‘Shall I make you some coffee?’

‘Coffee be buggered.’

‘Just as you wish.’

‘I’m accident-proof, if you want to know. I got through the war without a prang, didn’t I? Over seven hundred flying hours. After that I’m not going to fall down the moving staircase at Victoria, am I? Or walk into a lamp post.’ He made a smug chuckling sound. ‘The only accident I ever had was with a certain WAAF sergeant at Hornchurch.’

She tensed again. ‘What do you mean?’

He could hardly speak for laughing now. The words came out in a wheeze.

‘You know what I mean. An accident. One that got away. A bun in the oven.’

‘You got her pregnant?’

‘That was the upshot, so to speak.’

Rose’s hands crept up to her neck.

‘She had a child?’

‘A bouncing baby boy.’

‘At Hornchurch? After we were married.’ She sat up in bed in the dark. ‘You had a child after we were married? You’re lying.’

‘Who are you calling a liar? There’s only one liar in this house, and it isn’t me.’