Shuttlecock

[6]

When we went to bed Marian raised again the issue of the television. It is not that she is argumentative (haven’t I already pointed out that my wife’s principal attraction is her pliancy?) or that she would care herself if we dispensed with the television. But she acts as a kind of automatic counter-weight to my relations with my sons. Sometimes I think she is scarcely aware of doing it. If she thinks I have been too hard on them, she doesn’t stop me at once, but she tries, later, to put some separate, compensatory restraint on me. She doesn’t take my sons’ side against me. She knows better than that. But something in her, almost independent of her, wants stubbornly to restore the balance, like water finding its level — and it’s not easy to ignore. Perhaps this is her subtle and discreet way out of a difficult and hazardous predicament — for if I ever found her deliberately siding with my sons, I know — and she knows — what I would do. I would hit her. But it isn’t like that. This something in her is almost involuntary, it is almost part of her pliancy.

After our set-to over the television, for example, I did not let the boys come in from their punishment in the garden till after night-fall. Not only did they have to search for non-existent stones but they had to do so in the dark as well. When Marian tried to go out to fetch them in I held her by the arm. It was not until nearly nine — a good half-hour after dusk — that I went out myself to have the satisfaction of seeing their bewildered, chastened faces as they trooped in.

And now, a few hours later, in bed, because of this (in her view) excessiveness on my part, Marian was once more questioning my threat to have our television removed — not with the bluster of our earlier row in the kitchen, but with the neat, just and almost disinterestedly expressed argument that since I had already made my point by my stern penalty, wouldn’t it be going too far to confiscate the television as well?

All the time Marian was pleading in this way I was making adjustments to her body and manoeuvring her limbs into one of my favourite positions for love-making. I won’t go into exact details; it is something developed over the years which requires a little setting up. Marian is quite accustomed, almost indifferent to these preparations. She lies back, lets me continue and lets herself go like putty. I was determined, you see, to take my consolation for a taxing day.

She kept on talking. ‘So I’m not taking that television back,’ she concluded, firmly — though hardly in a posture that went with command. It was rather as if she were saying (it’s a kind of argument which Marian is always, in a way, silently, wearily advancing): ‘See what I’m letting you do to me, I don’t resist one bit, I let you go ahead — and you still want everything your own way.’

‘All right, all right,’ I said. I had almost finished my adjustments, had become quite aroused in the process, and now the matter of the television seemed not so important after all. I was ready to take my place in the structure of flesh I had been building.

‘Now —’ I said.

And then Marian said: ‘Tough’ — in a quite mild voice. ‘I haven’t put my doo-dah in.’

When Marian says her ‘doo-dah’ she means her diaphragm. I looked her in the face — which was not, in fact, in our present position, such an easy action. I knew she was probably lying. But I didn’t risk it. Martin and Peter are enough by themselves.

I held out for a few more, tormented seconds. I thought to myself: now is the time when I could tell her about my promotion. This might break the impasse. Then she might say: ‘Oh — it’s all right darling — I’ve got my doo-dah in really’ — and give some coaxing wiggle.

But I didn’t. I said: ‘I’ll bloody well take the television back myself.’