A Fortnight by the Sea

I wouldn’t mind in the least if Barratt called me Whittall in the friendly way that men do when they’re on an equal footing, Henry thought with suppressed anger, but he always speaks to me as if I were a servant. He listened with an air of scholarly concentration to Godfrey’s account of Miss Tillard’s latest illness, her wish to see him. He didn’t look Godfrey in the eye but kept his head inclined at a polite, impersonal angle, his gaze fixed on the creamy florets of a luxuriant weed in the hedgerow. A very tidy sum to leave, Miss Tillard.

‘Certainly I’ll call at the bungalow,’ he said as soon as Godfrey had finished. ‘I can look in during the next day or two.’

‘That should suit very well.’

‘I trust Mrs Barratt is in good health? And the boys?’ Henry said as Godfrey showed signs of setting off again for Oakfield. He made up his mind sometimes to refer to Godfrey’s wife by her Christian name when he was talking to her husband. He had after all called her Pauline when they knew each other as children. But when it came to the point his nerve always failed. In conversation with the lady herself he had since her marriage grown quite skilful in avoiding calling her anything at all.

‘Very well, thank you.’ Godfrey added a few remarks about the busy season and end of term and then suddenly said, ‘Oh yes, you knew the Lockwoods, didn’t you? My wife’s arranging with them to come and stay with us very soon. I dare say you’ll see them about the village.’ It would never cross his mind, Henry thought with savagery, to ask me up to Oakfield for a meal while they’re here.

He stopped and grasped the handles of his shopping bags, he spoke in an expressionless voice. ‘I was at school with Stephen Lockwood.’ A fact he was likely to remember when most of the other facts of his existence had dwindled into hazy recollection. He found it difficult to realize that he would shortly see Marion again. It was some years since he had caught a glimpse of her going by in a car on one of her brief visits to the area. It was more than sixteen years since he had spoken to her. He wouldn’t mention her name now, wouldn’t by any word of his own evoke her image to hover like an airy ghost in the brilliant sunlight, he hugged the memory of her to him, away from casual tongues.

‘By the way.’ Godfrey held up a warning finger. ‘Don’t say anything to Miss Tillard about the Lockwoods, not about their visit, that is. It isn’t definitely settled, in fact my wife is ringing them up about it this evening. I wouldn’t like Miss Tillard to be disappointed in case they can’t come. Or if they don’t come for some time.’

‘No, I won’t mention it.’

‘I’m pretty certain they will come, though,’ Godfrey said in a flat tone. The last thing he wanted just now was for Stephen Lockwood – reasonably successful, securely placed – to go poking and prying into his business, asking shrewd questions about the future of the firm; he would probably want to go into Chilford with him and prowl round the workshop. Oh – that’ll be all right, he remembered suddenly, the men will be on holiday from the end of next week. He closed his eyes briefly against the notion that as far as Barratt’s was concerned the holiday might be a permanent one. ‘July the twenty-fourth,’ he said aloud, forgetting for a moment that he was standing a yard or two away from Whittall. ‘I was just thinking,’ he added, recollecting himself, ‘that Barratt’s will be closed for three weeks from the twenty-fourth. It would be pleasant if my wife could arrange for the Lockwoods to come at that time.’

The twenty-fourth, Henry repeated in his mind a few minutes later as he trudged round yet another curve in the road. He had three weeks’ holiday still owing. Might take a week or two soon, he pondered; things were fairly slack at the office. By the time he set the shopping bags down on his doorstep he had reached a decision.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_cec53761-cf2b-5b19-ac0c-8b00ecb80fc5)

‘I’m just slipping down to the post, dear.’ Marion Lockwood was patting her hair in front of the hall mirror when her husband came slowly down the stairs. She gave him a mechanical half-smile and let herself out into the warm sunlight of early evening.

Stephen went into the sitting room and crossed to the window. He stood looking out at Marion walking down the path to the gate, casting his eye – without the faintest trace of affection – over the back view of her rather short, slightly plump figure. He yawned and glanced at his watch. Half past six. Not a minute before seven, Fiona had said. He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and began to pace moodily about the room. How did Fiona occupy herself away from the office during the long stretches of hours when she wasn’t seeing him? She never offered any information, certainly didn’t encourage direct questions, answered teasingly or evasively if he so far forgot himself as to ask one. ‘Not really any of your business,’ her smile would imply, ‘I’m not married to you . . . yet.’

A few minutes later he was roused from his thoughts by the sound of his wife returning. He flung himself down into an armchair and stared critically at the walls, the furniture, the proportions of the room. They should have moved out of this part of Barbridge ages ago when he got his first really good promotion at Alpha Fabrics, but Marion had always been ready with an apparently sound reason why they shouldn’t make a change just yet. During the last couple of years he had at last ceased to bother taking Marion out for those evening and weekend runs in the car which had always ended up in front of desirable detached residences sporting For Sale boards. His attention had finally wandered from Marion, strayed about for a while and eventually settled firmly on Fiona Brooke.

‘I thought we could have the last of the lamb for supper,’ Marion said as soon as she came into the room. ‘I saw a very nice recipe in a magazine at the hairdresser’s. I copied it out while I was under the drier.’

‘I won’t be in to supper,’ Stephen said brusquely. Marion’s standards of domestic economy, suitable enough in their early married life but no longer relevant, now merely the result of a temperamental inability to adapt to changing circumstances, grated on him with increasing force.

‘Oh, you have a business appointment.’ Marion didn’t appear in the least put out. She would quite enjoy fiddling with the bits and pieces of her recipe, would eat the resulting dish in contented solitude, would settle down happily enough afterwards in front of the television set or pick up one of the romantic novels she was so fond of.

Stephen didn’t bother to reply, merely flicked over her an expressionless glance. I do believe, he thought, that it is mostly thrift which keeps her tied to this arid marriage, she simply cannot countenance the idea of throwing away something that is legally hers. She would mind scarcely at all if I were dead, she would see widowhood as a common and natural sequel to marriage, she would bed herself cosily down into it – but divorce . . . He shook his head. She would have nothing to do with divorce. However the case was conducted she would feel herself besmirched, marked with failure, inadequacy, she would be unable to relax pleasurably into cushioned singleness as she could if she had first of all watched his coffin descend towards the consuming flames.

‘She hasn’t rubbed that dirty mark off the window sill,’ Marion said suddenly. She fought a genteelly vicious campaign of attrition against whatever cleaning woman she currently employed. She got to her feet and went out to the kitchen in search of a damp cloth. ‘I told her twice yesterday before I went to the hairdresser’s,’ she said when she returned. ‘You really have to watch them all the time,’ she added in that tone of satisfaction and self-congratulation that caused a tremor of irritation to run along Stephen’s nerves. She attacked the mark with vigour.

All that endless concern with microscopic detail, never a large sweeping notion of transforming the entire interior of the house by some new and imaginative scheme of decoration . . . Stephen closed his eyes in distaste. He sometimes felt that the word housewife was the most terrifying in the English language.

‘There, that’s better.’ She turned and gave him the same automatic low-voltage smile that she gave the butcher, the baker and the man who came to read the meter. ‘What time is your appointment?’

‘I’ll leave just after seven.’ She must know perfectly well that I haven’t got a business appointment on a Saturday evening, he thought with cold dislike; deep down inside that knitting-wool brain she must know with total certainty that I have a mistress. But nothing in the world would tempt her to dig down and take an honest look at that knowledge. He experienced a moment’s wild desire to say, ‘My mistress asked me not to arrive before seven,’ just to see if anything would force her to tear the sealing strips from her eyes.

‘We really ought to settle something about your other two weeks’ holiday,’ she said when she had disposed of the cloth and settled herself into an easy chair. Stephen went abroad two or three times a year to trade fairs and exhibitions and would have felt little deprived if his official four weeks’ holiday was abolished. In recent years he found an undiluted dose of his wife’s society so grey and dull that it was really only because of the look of the thing that he troubled to take his holidays at all. Last year he had been able to nerve himself to enjoy only three out of his four weeks and this year he was hoping to be able to get away with a bare fortnight.

‘Perhaps in October. Or November,’ Stephen said without enthusiasm. He had a sudden startling flash of memory, Marion coming towards him over the velvet lawns sixteen years ago, so fragilely beautiful in her pale floating dress.

‘Chilford,’ he said aloud into that treacherous vision from the past, astounded yet again by the way the glorious romance he had grasped at had turned into this sterile union stapled now chiefly by custom and notions of respectability.

‘Funny you should mention Chilford,’ Marion said amicably. ‘I was only thinking the other day I wouldn’t mind running down there again.’

She was just a small-souled, small-minded, small-town girl, he said dismissingly in his mind. But she had been so lovely, so breathtakingly beautiful. He closed his eyes. How much our lives are ruled by chance, he thought with recurrent wonder. But was that after all the case? Didn’t every action spring from character seizing and moulding chance to its own purposes?

‘I don’t suppose Pauline will be all that keen to see us,’ Marion said ruminatively. ‘I dare say she’s very well in with Aunt Elinor by this time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Aunt Elinor didn’t leave her most of her money. Not that she has much to leave.’ I bet you’d have trotted down to Chilford fast enough and often enough if the old girl had a fortune to leave, Stephen thought sourly. But a moment later honesty compelled him to admit, No, that isn’t altogether true, she isn’t passionately interested in money. What she likes is for one day to follow another in cosy, reassuring succession, with just enough excitement to dimple the surface of living. Money was useful to pad the sharp corners of existence, she wasn’t really concerned with it for its own sake.

‘Elinor might take it into her head to leave the lot to Theresa,’ he said with idle malice.

‘Oh, Theresa.’ Marion’s lower lip pouted, a habit left over from her radiant girlhood when there had always been a dozen admirers to find the expression delightful but now somewhat less than entrancing. ‘I wouldn’t trust Theresa any farther than I could see her.’

Stephen glanced at the clock and saw with relief that it was ten minutes to seven. If he drove very slowly he could leave now. He got to his feet.

‘What about it?’ Marion said. ‘We could use some of your two weeks now, we could have a few days in Chilford. Then we could go to Italy or Spain in October.’

‘Please yourself,’ Stephen said shortly, conscious now only of Fiona a few minutes’ drive away.

‘It would be all right then as far as your work is concerned?’ Marion persisted.

Stephen raised his shoulders. Not the busiest of times at Alpha, the middle of the summer. ‘If you like to fix it,’ he said with one hand on the door, ‘I dare say it will be all right.’ If he was going to be compelled to spend a few days with Marion he didn’t much care where it was, and at least Chilford would require less effort from him than a trip to the Continent. He opened the door and paused suddenly as a fresh vista of thought opened up. ‘Actually,’ he said on a warmer note, ‘Chilford isn’t at all a bad idea.’ He turned and looked at his wife, his eyes had a bright, friendly look. ‘Yes, you arrange it. Make it a week if you like.’ He paused again. ‘Or even ten days.’

Marion was still wrinkling her brows over the pages of her diary when the phone rang a few minutes later.

‘Why, Pauline!’ she cried as soon as she recognized her sister’s voice. ‘If this isn’t a coincidence! Stephen and I were just talking about you—’

Stephen parked his car in the shade of a clump of trees that screened it from the road, and walked swiftly towards Fiona’s cottage. It really was the sheerest piece of luck that she was currently renting this conveniently isolated little place on the outskirts of Barbridge. If she’d still been in the modern flat she occupied during her first six months at Alpha Fabrics, it was highly doubtful that he would have risked embarking on the affair at all. The Chairman at Alpha was a formidable Scot of sixty, bristling with rectitude; he most emphatically would not look with favour on an employee he even suspected of harbouring dubious moral principles. And these days Stephen considered himself in line for a seat on the Board.

He reached the garden gate and walked up the narrow path. The situation was getting a bit tricky, to put it mildly. Fiona was twenty-eight. She very definitely intended to get married and she wasn’t going to wait for ever. Stephen didn’t in the least resent the core of steel running through the centre of Fiona’s backbone. Sixteen years of living with a wife who saw life as a succession of trivia and expressed her views in a stream of banalities had left him more than ready to admire a woman who took a purposeful view of her own existence.

He raised a hand and pressed the bell. Fiona threw open the door almost at once. ‘You certainly don’t believe in losing time,’ she said as the grandfather clock in the hall began to chime the hour.

She didn’t look overjoyed to see him, but then she never did. Her habitual manner was cool and composed. One of the things that fascinated him about her was the way in which the surface coolness would gradually fade, disclosing a temperament of a very different kind. Lately though, the coolness had tended to persist longer and return earlier. He knew the reasons well enough. She wasn’t a woman to hold a gun to his head in any brash or vulgar way but she was sounding all the same a warning signal, strong and clear.

He waited till the door was safely closed before he slipped an arm round her waist and kissed her gently on the cheek. She was wearing a trimly tailored summer dress; through the open door of the sitting room he could see a handbag and parcels lying on the table. She had spent the afternoon shopping then, and – even more important – she would have spent it alone. He felt a strong sense of relief as he registered the fact, he was sharply aware these days of time gathering speed, beginning to press in on him, forcing on him the necessity for decision. Fiona was an elegant, striking-looking woman with intelligence and personality. More than one man at Alpha – to say nothing of the wide world beyond its gates – would be only too delighted to slip a ring on her finger. Whenever he stood back and took a cold, level look at the whole situation he experienced a powerful feeling of danger and exhilaration.

‘You must be tired,’ he said lightly. ‘Shall we bother to go out?’ He tried this one fairly regularly; it hardly ever succeeded.

She smiled, put up a finger and ran it across his lips. ‘I want a very good dinner and I most certainly don’t intend to cook it myself.’ She was an excellent cook. He saw himself living with style and elegance in a house presided over by Fiona, his entire existence lifted on to another, altogether more harmonious plane. She put her arm through his. ‘I was in the kitchen, putting things away. I’d better finish it.’

He followed her into the tiny well-ordered room and helped her to unpack the groceries. He watched her movements with pleasure. She was tall, handsome rather than pretty, with a smooth white skin, very finely moulded cheekbones and straight black hair, very long and thick, taken up in a casual knot on top of her head. He wasn’t a man to be ceaselessly infatuated with the same type of beauty; he had in fact fallen in love this time with a woman about as different in appearance from Marion as it was possible to discover within the confines of Barbridge.

It won’t last, he thought with sudden piercing sorrow as she smiled at something he had said. I’ll marry her – I’ll manage it one way or another – and in fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years we will look at each other with indifference or hatred. But I won’t mind by then, he told himself with force, by then I will no longer be young enough to care. If he could bargain with the Fates for a limited span of happiness he’d be satisfied, he wouldn’t complain.

‘Did you have anywhere special in mind for this evening?’ he asked as he put the butter, the cream, the cottage cheese in the fridge. They always drove a good thirty or forty miles out of Barbridge; he usually took a discreet look round the bar and the dining room first. Just in case. So far they’d been lucky.

When they’d settled on a place she went upstairs to change, leaving him to mix himself a drink in the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa and switched on the radio. A powerful sweep of music, some classical symphony he couldn’t identify. He settled back and let the tide wash over him, strong, insistent, filled with yearning. He saw for an instant the dark face of depression that had looked out at him with increasing frequency in recent years. An only child, born to the astonishment of his parents in their middle age, doted on from the day of his birth, he had been the object of all his mother’s obsessive love after the death of his father. His mother also had been dead now these five years or more. It was since her passing that he had begun to be afflicted by this terrible sense of aloneness. It would come on him sometimes at strange moments, in a train, walking along a gleaming corridor at work, waiting for a drink in a crowded bar. He had to stiffen himself to resist the compulsion to reach out and touch a hand, any hand. And when the irrational moment passed he would be left with a black surge of depression that might take hours to fade.

He took a long drink from his glass. Above the sound of the music he heard a cupboard door close sharply upstairs. He tilted back his head and glanced up, thinking of Fiona moving about the bedroom. With Fiona he was able to forget depression. In her company he felt himself years younger than the set-faced husband of Marion; gayer, livelier, farther distanced from the arid shores of middle age.

He drained his glass and set it down. Our emotional needs are programmed in the cradle, he thought with resignation, we are stuck with them for the rest of our days. For me it is a deeply loving woman currently wearing the face of Fiona Brooke. And whatever it is for Fiona, he added with a wry smile, I can only hope it continues to be moulded in the image of Stephen Lockwood.