Cushing's Crusade (16 page)

As he started walking the agony of the night before flooded back. He felt cold and ill; his limbs seemed to have been stretched and twisted out of place. And yet his despair had lessened. The sun rises every day. Should witnessing a sunrise change anything? And yet his growing optimism could not be denied. As he hurried on across the rough grass, the belief became stronger that when he reached the house Giles would be there.

Like a shipwrecked sailor in a bad storm, in sight of land, but still in danger, Derek made vows. If he comes back I will not indulge my indifference and lack of will by allowing Diana to coerce me, nor will I pretend that my laziness with people is
really self-effacing reticence. If he comes back, I will never again fool myself into the belief that I am happy because of my cautious lack of expectations. I will hope for more and therefore give more, if he comes back.

When Derek reached the narrow lane that led back to Tregeare he started to run. Ahead of him a lorry had stopped to take a couple of milk churns from a farm gate. A final effort and he reached the vehicle before it moved off. The driver helped him up into the cab.

It was just after six when he jumped down onto the grass verge at the end of Charles’s drive.

The hall door was shut but had not been locked. Derek paused at the bottom of the stairs. If he hasn’t come back? For almost a minute he could not bring himself to go up. Around him the stillness of the house, only broken by the distant ticking of the kitchen clock. He started violently as something rubbed against his leg. He looked down to see Kalulu, arching his back and purring. At last he began climbing, slowly at first, but then faster until by the time he reached the landing he was running up three at a time. At the end of the corridor he pushed open Giles’s door.

The boy was sleeping with one hand half-covering his face. Derek denied his first impulse to go across and touch him. Instead he leant against the door-frame and looked and looked at the boy as if afraid that if his eyes left him for a moment his son would vanish again. Tears filled his eyes; relief flooded through him, soothing his aching limbs. He let himself slip down to the floor. Never before such relief. The sudden disappearance of fear left a strange vacuum inside him, but soon a great bubble of happiness was expanding. He scrambled to his feet. A desperate desire to shout and sing his happiness. He dashed across the corridor to his own bedroom.

Diana was asleep. She had not drawn the curtains the night before and early morning sunlight filled the room. Derek could hear birds singing in the garden. He sat down on the bed.

‘He’s back, he’s come back.’

Diana stirred a little and buried her face deeper in the pillow. Derek shook her gently.

‘When did he get in? Where has he been? I knew he’d come
back. I knew. I sensed it; you won’t believe this but I went to sleep by the sea and woke up when the sun was rising. I knew then.’ A lump in his throat made him pause. ‘I thought I saw him dead on the beach but he’s back, he’s come back.’ Tears were running freely down his cheeks. Diana had turned over and was shielding her eyes against the light. Derek was still too excited to notice the way she was looking at him. ‘Where did he go?’ he asked again.

‘He tried to book in at a hotel in Falmouth with no money and no luggage. The clerk phoned the police.’ She raised herself on an elbow. ‘They brought him back between two and three.’ Derek put down the flat tired way she had told him this to continuing drowsiness.

‘You weren’t hard on him?’ he asked anxiously. ‘You’re not angry, surely? He’s back; that’s all that matters.’

Diana shut her eyes and sighed. ‘I wish it was.’

‘He’s not in any kind of trouble?’

She shook her head.

‘Well then, smile, for God’s sake.’ He went up to her and put his arms round her shoulders.

She made no movement at all. Then she looked up at him and said in a dead expressionless voice, ‘He told me, Derek.’ Seeing his look of incomprehension, she added, ‘Giles told me.’

‘Told you what?’

‘Everything, as the saying goes,’ she replied in the same thin lifeless voice.

‘About Angela?’

She nodded. For a moment Derek couldn’t adjust to the new situation. He still felt elated.

‘But can’t you see that it doesn’t matter?’ he cried. ‘A few hours ago we thought Giles might be dead. What happened with Angela was nothing, an accident.’ He looked at her imploringly. ‘Last night changed everything.’

She sat up very straight and said quietly, ‘An accident?
Copulation
by accident. A strange notion.’ She shrugged her shoulders and frowned. Her breasts looked very white against the browner skin of her arms and shoulders. ‘Actually,’ she went on, flicking
the hair back out of her eyes, ‘I don’t care about what you did with each other. It’s a bit sad that you had to have your first fling in years with a nymphomaniac, but there it is. You could have left it just a day or two after her bloke had gone, but then they don’t exactly throw themselves at you, do they?’ She looked at him scornfully.

‘It wasn’t quite as crude as that,’ he said.

‘I’m sure the trees caught fire and each blade of grass shone like silver.’

‘But we agree about it. It didn’t matter much. That’s what you’ve just said.’

She glanced at him sharply. ‘Then what do you think I’m so sick about?’ he shrugged and raised his hands in supplication. ‘You told that boy what you did and then you left him. That’s what makes me sick. You fooled around tossing balls at coconuts while all the time you knew what Giles must have been going through.’

‘He wouldn’t come,’ Derek protested. ‘Should I have forced him to or followed him about all day?’ He looked at her
reproachfully
and added, ‘Anyway, he didn’t seem shaken or upset.’

‘It never occurred to you that he might keep his real feelings to himself?’

‘Of course it did,’ exclaimed Derek. ‘But what could I do? Twist his arm till he told me how he really felt? My sin was in telling him what I did, not in leaving him to himself.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘If only I’d known he hadn’t seen us.’

A short silence. Derek thought he detected a hint of sympathy breaking through her contempt as she said, ‘He
did
see you.’

‘He never saw us. He went on a footpath and not by the road.’

‘There was never any footpath,’ she said emphatically.

‘There was,’ he shouted, with sudden anger. ‘Isn’t it enough for you that he betrayed me? Do you have to pour acid into the wound too?’ She was looking at him with the same cool derision. ‘Why the hell should he lie about the path? I’d told him by then.’

‘Can’t you guess?’ she asked quietly, with a taunting smile. ‘To save your dignity. He didn’t want you to think he’d seen his
father thrusting away in a field, bottom up, bottom down.’ She pushed back the bedclothes and got up briskly. Derek watched her pulling on her pants. For a moment he felt angry enough to hit her, but the feeling passed, as rage gave way to humiliation and shame. Giles had told
her.
Mummy, who never really listened, who couldn’t be bothered to read the books he gave her, who made jokes about her studious son at dinner parties. The worst of it was that Derek believed that she had told the truth, that Giles
had
seen them but had pretended not to, simply to save his father’s dignity. Derek’s limbs had started to ache again and he was overwhelmed by a leaden numbness of spirit.

Diana was making up carefully in front of the mirror, pursing her lips and then opening her mouth a little as she finished with her lipstick; next she set to work with her eye-liner. He watched her methodical movements in the mirror.

‘Why bother?’ he asked suddenly.

‘The heart pumps, the bowels churn. Life goes on.’ She dabbed powder on her forehead and then snapped her compact shut. ‘The sort of thing you say.’ She turned round and faced him again. ‘I think I could have forgiven you everything—Giles, your sad little fumble in a field, the lot—if it hadn’t been for the way you behaved at the ox roast. Sanctimonious, self-righteous, spotless Derek ranting on about adultery as though he hadn’t had a sexual thought for twenty years, while all the time he was wondering when he could get into Angela’s pants again.’ Outside the birds were singing as loudly as ever; another glorious day ahead. ‘Hypocrisy can’t be more blatant than that,’ she said.

‘I’m not all bad.’

‘Just bad for me,’ she replied.

‘All the time?’

She got up from the chair by the dressing table and came and sat down beside Him on the bed.

‘It’d make you feel better if I said yes, wouldn’t it? Help you to dismiss everything else I’ve said.’ A slight pause. She intertwined her fingers and held a knee in her hands. ‘No, you’re not bad all the time. I liked you more before you got bored; it’s hard to get on with people who find one dull, who think they’ve found out all
there is to know about one.’ Her tone was reflective; almost like somebody talking in an empty room, he thought bitterly. She gazed at him for a moment. ‘I liked you while you tried.’

‘Tries hard but could do better if he tried less. You mean
I
bored you.’

‘Nothing wrong with trying hard; it’s the opposite of
indifference
, after all.’ She was staring ahead of her with a faint smile parting her lips. Diana the wise, the omniscient. ‘You knew much more than I did. I liked listening. Sometimes I found you a bit too earnest but you could be funny too. I often thought, how strange that he still wants to impress me. I was flattered that you thought me worth impressing.’ She scooped up a red sandal with her toes and started to fasten the strap. The last time you bothered with me was in Greece. Five years ago. Then you got tired of trying.’

‘You drained me,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. All right for her to be so cogent after six hours’ sleep in a comfortable bed; she hadn’t spent most of the night stumbling over rocks. She shook her head and gave him a sad, knowing smile.

‘Remember telling me that love is really ignorance? Imposing your own fantasy figure onto a real person?’

‘That’s one kind of love,’ he conceded.

‘Your kind?’ she asked innocently.

‘Not now,’ he begged. ‘I’m very tired.’

‘When you got to know me, you stopped bothering. When I tried with you, you said that you were fed up with conversational opinions; just a way of discovering old arguments and fallacies and dressing them up in new clothes. That’s what you said.’ She bent down and picked up the other sandal. When she had done up the strap, she went on calmly, ‘Everybody has his or her limits, so face facts and recognize them. Never expect too much. Don’t use any other person to compensate for your own
deficiencies
. Be bored and be boring with your wife or husband; it’s bound to happen and, when it does, accept it.’ Her voice had risen slightly while she had been speaking. ‘Your arguments, I think,’ she concluded sharply.

Derek looked down at his mud-stained trousers and shoes and
saw them blur as his eyes misted with tears. A clinical
posthumous
résumé of the evidence before passing sentence. Derek
Cushing
, I find you guilty of the brutal and senseless murder of your own marriage. How do you plead? Diana was looking at him coolly, as though he had already ceased to concern her. He got up and said passionately, ‘I stopped trying because
you
stopped wanting me to. My opinions bored you, so I said no opinions mattered. I said everyone was limited, because you found me dull. Excuses to hide the size of your rejection and to reduce the pain.’

‘If that’s true, it makes your silence at the time all the more unforgivable.’

‘It takes two to have a conversation,’ he replied.

‘Easier to explain years afterwards when it’s too late.’

‘That’s what you’re doing,’ he came back angrily.

‘Why didn’t you shout at me, then? Why, if you cared so much? Because it was less trouble to change tactics and say, “If I can’t impress, I’ll ingratiate, cajole, please.”’

‘Would you rather I’d insulted and infuriated?’ he asked. ‘To please demands effort too.’

She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise.

‘As much as lying down in the street and letting people walk on one.’

‘That’s easy?’ he cried.

‘If you like footprints on the face—very.’

Derek grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her roughly to her feet so that her face was inches from his own.

‘Why do people ingratiate themselves?’ he asked in a trembling voice.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she said softly.

He let her go and went on intensely, ‘They do it to
stop
people walking on them, they bow down so that people won’t knock them down. They give a lot, to retain a little.’

She didn’t reply at first, and Derek was surprised to notice that she did not seem displeased; it was almost as though she had wanted him to say something of the sort.

‘You’ve had a very hard time.’ She spoke with no apparent
sign of sarcasm. Her sympathy made him feel uneasy; nor could he understand the gentle way she took his hand and kissed it—a gesture he remembered well from the early years of their
marriage
. She was looking at him expectantly as though she wanted an opinion on her last remark. A moment later he realized that he should have argued, should have said that he was happy, that everybody had hard times, but by then she had taken his silence for assent. He heard her say with tragic brightness, ‘At least we don’t hate each other. Far better to call it a day before that happens, before you can’t take my demands any more.
Forbearance
can’t go on for ever.’ Her face frozen for a moment, then tremors at the corners of her mouth; her shoulders shaking; tears. What incredible courage she had needed to remain poised so long. How dreadful when the mask of capability slips to reveal a helpless woman’s grief. Derek grasped her by the shoulders and shook her hard.

‘Stop it,’ he shouted.

She sucked in quivering cheeks and looked at him with outrage and incredulity, then drew herself up with dignity and stifled a sob.

‘It’s no use,’ she choked out.

‘You tricked me,’ he came back furiously. ‘You forced me to defend myself by attacking me, forced me to criticize you.’ He paused and took a deep breath to control the shakiness of his voice. ‘I came in happy, I came in wanting to start again. Of course I argued. Don’t we all exaggerate when we argue? How can anybody be logical when they’re confused and angry? You made me angry, made me go too far and then you sprung the trap; making it seem that
I
wanted you to leave me.’

‘What does it matter who leaves who? Let’s both do the leaving if it’s so important.
I’ll
leave
you
if it makes you feel better.’

As though she were arguing with an unreasonable child. How often had she spoken to him like that when she wanted him to blame himself?

‘It matters,’ he said, ‘because you wanted me to feel
responsible
. To think that I loused it up. You didn’t want my misery on your conscience.’

Her green eyes opened very wide with surprise as she said, ‘But Derek, it isn’t a competition. Let’s share responsibility. Nobody’s ever entirely to blame where two are concerned.’

‘But I want you to stay with me,’ he protested.

She gazed at him wistfully, as though their conversation had taken place several months before and she was now trying to remember it. Then she screwed up her eyes as if recalling herself to the present.