Cushing's Crusade (2 page)

‘I’ll meet you outside the tube station at half-past five.’ She had not bothered to lower her voice and Professor Elkin was
looking at her disapprovingly. She gave him a friendly wave as she went out. Derek was still trying to work out what her evident change of mood meant when five o’clock came.

Having politely ejected Elkin and the Kenyan, Derek locked all the manuscript boxes used by readers during the day into the safe upstairs. Security arrangements at the Institute amused him. He liked to imagine a small band of historians with masks, sticks of gelignite and metal-cutting-gear, blasting their way into the main archives and making away with everything. But scholarly thieves, he reflected bitterly, were rather less spectacular than bank robbers in the manner of their operations: a letter furtively slipped into a briefcase or casually folded between innocent pages of notes, all under the archivist’s eye—that was their cowardly way. That was how almost the entire Raffles collection had
disappeared
two years before.

Outside in the evening sunlight Derek started walking towards his rendezvous with Diana. Across the road on the building-site the pile-driver thumped out a brisk marching rhythm. Buses, cars, motor-bicycles, taxis, even the occasional invalid-carriage swept by as the heart of the city pumped men and metal
outwards
towards far-flung suburbs. The sun glittered on office
windows
and secretaries hurried home on high heels. Cotton frocks and flimsy underwear. Women wear less in summer. To rub genitals against the thighs or buttocks of strangers in the tube is called ‘frotteurism’ and is an offence: technically an assault. It is virtually impossible not to assault people in the tube. Fascinus was a classical god whose image was the erect male organ. Virgins celebrated his festival with ceremonies of public defloration; their implement was a suitably sized replica of the god. The useless verbal lumber in Derek’s head was extensive, and growing year by year; the thought did not displease him; words to replace dying brain cells. A losing battle but life was that anyway, little man against an unfathomable universe. Libraries and archives were arsenals for the battle against time, voices for the dead, and archivists pursued the noble cause of guarding the produce of brains long since decomposed. There were other ways to look at it, and Derek often looked at it in other ways. Libraries were
vomitoriums, places for storing gobbets of half-digested matter for living men to feed upon, escapist palaces where past
regurgitations
could make the present palatable.

Some distance from the tube station Derek could see a
gradually
increasing traffic jam. The cause of it seemed to be an untidily parked car not unlike the Cushing family saloon; inside it was a woman not unlike Mrs Cushing. The resemblance was too great for coincidence. Derek started to run towards the offending vehicle. Diana flung open the passenger-seat door and motioned him to get in. From the direction she drove off in, Derek assumed that they were on their way to the crowded chaos of Oxford Street.

They had blundered through the semi-darkness of five boutiques before reaching the one where Diana spotted what she thought Derek could do with for the summer: a light cotton suit in a delicate pale-blue material, with a battledress-style jacket and breast pockets picked out with darker blue thread at the edges. Derek was so delighted with his wife’s apparent recovery that he did not feel able to suggest that brown, green or even mustard versions of the same would have looked less overtly homosexual. Struggling into the light blue hipster trousers behind a flimsy curtain, he found that their figure-hugging cut was such that if he wore them regularly, his testicles would be forced into his lower abdomen. Armed with this certainty he objected, making sure to look disappointed rather than relieved. In the end Diana chose him a blue-and-white-striped jacket and an innocuous pair of beige flared trousers.

Before her recent malaise Diana had always decided what clothes he should buy, so Derek saw her resumption of this habit as a sign that all would now be well. Incredibly he appeared to have won a significant marital victory. He had never minded Diana’s desire to dress him up in clothes more suitable for men ten years younger, and today he minded still less. She had often told him that he was burnt-out and dull, so he had never resented her attempt to make him look more vital and alive. It was rather like the macabre habit of some undertakers who put rouge on the cheeks of corpses to make them more life-like, but there was no
sense in getting worked up, even though he could not share the spurious sense of individuality experienced by many who bought fashionable clothes. But better to adopt off-the-peg fashion than off-the-peg ideas. Whatever indignities his acquiescence inflicted on his appearance, his mental clothing, he hoped, remained his own.

*

The sitting-room in the Cushings’ flat was a large room with a high ceiling and french windows leading out on to the narrow balcony. They had inherited half the furniture from the previous tenants, whose taste had been unusual. There was a terrible standard lamp with peculiar fluted swellings carved at intervals on the wooden column, a large reproduction Jacobean table and an equally dark and heavy-looking sideboard. Diana had tried to brighten up the flat by putting down a red carpet but this had merely emphasized the sombreness of the furniture. Two modern chairs, with metal frames and canvas seats, also tended to accentuate the bulk of the large Victorian sofa with its ornate wooden scrolls on the arms. Diana particularly liked ferns, palms and other rubbery dark-leaved plants, which, Derek thought, gave the room an unnatural underwater look. Diana tossed him his parcel of clothes.

‘Don’t just stand there. Take off your trousers.’

Derek did as he was asked and then slipped on his new
garments
. Diana watched him critically. She had often told him that his legs were short and stubby, quite wrong for his long torso, and that his head was too large for the width of his shoulders. Derek had always admitted she was right. She looked him up and down for a few moments and smiled.

‘You’ll do,’ she said generously.

Derek stood awkwardly in the middle of the room.

‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she replied after a pause. ‘The jacket looks just right for the sea.’

Since they rarely went to the sea, Derek decided she was being sarcastic. He was mistaken.

‘Charles rang up this afternoon,’ she went on. ‘He’s bought a
house on a Cornish estuary; wants us to stay there for a couple of weeks.’

Diana’s evident excitement made Derek cautious. He hated sitting on beaches and swimming.

‘That’s jolly good of him,’ he said. ‘Of course there shouldn’t be any problem about getting time off. When does he want us to go?’

‘Last week in July and the first in August.’

Derek sank down on to the Victorian sofa.

‘I see,’ he replied quietly. How could she possibly have
forgotten
that he had arranged to spend those very weeks in
Edinburgh
at the National Library of Scotland going through the Macnair papers: documents vital to his East African research. So that was her game. She’d clean up the house and stop messing him around if he gave up his crucial research trip. Diana was going on about how much Giles would enjoy himself. He could even learn to sail, and the opportunity for looking for his precious rocks along the sea shore could scarcely be bettered. Derek had a very fair idea of how Diana would respond if he said he intended going on with his research. What sort of a man could put a load of yellowing papers before a child’s enjoyment? If his research actually had any importance she might feel differently, but what was it except a dead-end subject about dead people? A
convenient
escape from the real world and real people.

‘Those were the only dates?’ he asked helplessly.

Diana nodded. ‘So I can let him know it’s all right?’

He took a deep breath and prepared himself for the worst. ‘I’m going to Scotland then.’

‘Doing what?’ said Diana, as though he had just made a uniquely disgusting proposition. ‘You can’t intend to prevent us going.’

Derek put his head in his hands. Dear God, to think that he’d thought he had won a victory over the flat and her lethargy; if he had, she was going to make him pay for it all right. She wasn’t even remotely aware of the ludicrous irony that all her efforts of the last six weeks had been designed to make him assert himself, and now, when he did so, she wanted him to revert to his old
obsequiousness. Suddenly the solution came to him.

‘You go,’ he exclaimed triumphantly, as though announcing an idea of amazing brilliance. ‘You and Giles go to Cornwall and I’ll go to Scotland.’ He smiled at her and started laughing. ‘That’s the answer.’

To his surprise Diana did not argue with him. He had been sure he would have to deliver a lengthy monologue on his
personal
feelings in order to convince her that he would ruin the holiday rather than contribute to it, but now, mercifully, there was no need.

A few moments later Diana said, ‘Apart from my wanting you to come, don’t you think Charles is going to find your refusal rather peculiar?’

Derek laughed. ‘He only likes me because he thinks I’m peculiar.’

Diana laughed too and asked no further questions. Derek had known Charles Lamont for almost twenty years, but did not exactly like him. Yet Charles went on asking him to dinner parties and he went on accepting because he didn’t dislike the man either. Derek certainly wasn’t jealous of Charles’s wealth or his successful art gallery, nor did he feel hurt by his
near-certainty
that Charles only enjoyed producing him at dinner parties to demonstrate the wide range of his acquaintance. You see, I don’t just meet people in the art and business worlds, and here to prove it from the eccentric world of scholarship is Derek Cushing, the unassuming archivist. Ever been to the Afro-Asian Institute, by the way? No? I’m not surprised at all; it’s the sort of place one thought had died with the Empire. Straight out of the Victorian era: masses of pictures of Empire builders and elephants all jumbled up with Rhodes’s inkwell and Livingstone’s toe, and thousands of books which nobody reads. Yes, it is a funny sort of job, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Lives in a dark and cavernous flat near Kilburn. It’s in one of those mock Tudor monstrosities; all white plasterwork and fake beams. Strange thing is he’s got a rather good-looking wife. That’s her over there; the bored one with that slightly embittered look. I was at university with Derek, same college; the dons all said he was
brilliant. And today … well, look at him. But there’s something rather attractive about lost causes and wasted opportunities. Derek’s the best example of it I know. I’m thinking of having him stuffed actually; something for my private collection. I wouldn’t be able to sell him in my gallery, but at home he’ll look rather fine with the Etruscan statuary. Of course it was just possible, Derek conceded, that he had misjudged Charles, but he didn’t think so.

So he had saved his research and Giles and Diana would get a good holiday in Cornwall; for the first time in weeks Derek felt happy. To think how narrowly he had escaped the tedium of lying for hours on some nasty beach with his stubby legs burning, and the top of his head going redder and redder and starting to peel, and suffering the enforced bonhomie and the drinking, and the walks in the rain, to show that one was determined to make the most of every situation, and the conversations about plays and films and art and life and above all the gratitude for what we have received at your lovely house in such lovely country and, yes, how incredibly clever of you to have got it all for only seventy thousand and …

‘I’ll ring him and explain,’ offered Derek magnanimously.

‘I’d be much happier if you came,’ murmured Diana.

But Derek was already dialling Charles’s number.

Shortly after 4.00 p.m. on July 13, ten days before his scheduled departure for Scotland, Derek Cushing lifted the receiver of his phone in the Afro-Asian Institute and dialled his dentist’s number. Derek was not worried about his teeth but wished to leave a message for his wife, who had informed him that morning that she had a dental appointment for four o’clock. The
receptionist
was apologetic and regretted that she could not give Mrs Cushing a message, since to her certain knowledge no Mrs Cushing had an appointment that afternoon. Did Mrs Cushing have an appointment on any other day that week? The
receptionist
denied knowledge of any such appointment. Derek thanked her and rang off. He had simply wished to let Diana know that he intended going straight from work to the address where they were having dinner and would not go home first.

Diana could be absent-minded and mistake a day, but to
mistake
the week of a dental appointment was taking
absent-mindedness
further than Derek thought probable. She had lied to him on occasions in the past and he had been known to lie to her and perhaps there was nothing in it, and if there was
something
in it perhaps it didn’t matter anyway. If she felt like telling him that she had gone to the dentist and had instead spent the afternoon in a sauna bath, that was her business. Derek was irritated only because he now felt impelled to go back to the flat before going on to the dinner party.

At breakfast the following day, after eating an all but
hard-boiled
egg without complaint, Derek cleared a visual path between the three large packets of cereal on the table and said, ‘I
really am a selfish sod. I forgot to ask how you got on at the dentist.’

‘Better late than never,’ replied Diana. ‘A couple of fillings; that was all. I’ve got to go back on Friday to let the hygienist have a go at my gums. Hygienist, my foot; it’s as bad as calling dustmen “disposal operatives”.’

So she had added another lie. If one lie was innocuous, were two lies rather different?

‘Why did you change dentists?’ Derek asked abruptly.

She was buttering some toast. He watched carefully to see whether her knife stopped dead or whether she seemed put out in any less obvious way.

‘Christ, how awful. You didn’t go to meet me at Gilchrist’s, did you?’

‘I phoned and you didn’t have an appointment.’

‘I’m surprised I didn’t tell you. I’ve got a new man.’

‘What was wrong with Gilchrist?’

There was no sign of embarrassment, no surprise, no evidence of quick thinking. Diana took a sip of coffee and smiled.

‘I didn’t like Gilchrist’s eyes. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but they’re yellow, not the pupils but the whites. They’re usually bloodshot too. They made me feel ill, the way he used to peer into my mouth with his eyeballs brushing my cheeks.’

‘And the new dentist has white whites?’

‘Very white. He’s an Indian so I suppose that might make them seem whiter than they are.’

‘Should I go to him too?’

‘If you don’t like Gilchrist’s eyes, it mightn’t be a bad idea.’

Could anybody possibly leave a dentist because of the whites of their eyes? Derek pondered the question for a few moments before conceding that Diana was capable of it. Or had she just thought of it there and then? Suddenly he felt irritated. Nobody ought to leave dentists because of their eyeballs. That might be a reason to leave an oculist. The only physical defect that could possibly justify leaving a dentist was a mouthful of bad teeth; no, delirium tremens and Parkinson’s disease should be added.

‘I’ve never heard such a lousy reason for leaving a dentist,’ he
said. Diana was looking at him with unfeigned surprise. He was being assertive, which was unusual enough, but, more unusual still, he was being assertive at breakfast. ‘What I mean is,’ he went on, ‘I don’t understand such a reason.’

Diana lit a cigarette and exhaled twintusks of smoke from her nostrils. She seemed amused now.

‘I would have thought I’d made it pretty clear. Anyway, why should you understand? Is my one aim and object in life meant to be making myself comprehensible to you?’ she paused and then added, ‘There’s no reason to look so persecuted. You’ve as good as said you don’t believe me. Fine. If you don’t, it’s your tough titty.’

‘Thank you for being so explicit.’

‘Pleasure,’ she replied.

Diana had started to read the paper, and since Derek could think of nothing else to say he left for work.

*

For Derek the morning rush-hour was a special violation. He was convinced that people who worked in shops or other crowded places did not detest the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure and the constant buffeting as he did. How could they know the agony of the timid archivist, accustomed only to the womb-like security of his library, when he was plunged into the alien maelstrom of the commuters’ cauldron? On some mornings Derek managed to establish a scholarly distance to the whole sub-human business by making classical comparisons: Charon the ticket-office clerk to whom he gave his coin, the lift Charon’s boat, the doors of the train the gates of Hades, and Pluto himself the power of money that sucked all men into the bowels of the earth. But on this particular morning such thoughts held no consolation. In the tube, just as the train was leaving Baker Street, it came to Derek that Diana had been lying to him. Since she lied to him quite often, it was not the lying itself that alarmed him, but the
conclusion
that on this particular occasion it might matter that she had lied. Although he mistrusted intuition he could not escape this feeling. My wife, Mrs Cushing, has this morning attempted to persuade me that she spent the greater part of Wednesday
afternoon
at the premises of an Indian dentist. If she lied to me what am I to understand? Derek was now on the escalator, gliding upwards past many underwear advertisements. Dear Mr Cuckold, if you are so blindly and wilfully stupid, is it surprising that your wife is deceiving you, deceiving you furthermore with grotesque and improbable stories? Can you think of any reason except the most obvious one why your wife should have lied to you? Pure bloody-mindedness is admittedly a possibility, and a desire to tease, irritate and wound should not automatically be ruled out; but since your wife has recently started an afternoon course in antique furniture restoration, and has during the last four months purchased as much clothing as in the past four years, can you reasonably suggest that such arguments hold water?

During the morning, to try to take his mind off his wife, Derek retreated to the basement archive room. Having locked himself in, he went behind the stacks containing the Institute’s Far Eastern Missionary Correspondence and opened a carefully
concealed
tin chest. Inside was the private correspondence of the Imperial British East Africa Company for the years 1879 to 1901. Since the donation of these documents, by an elderly Scottish widow, at the beginning of March, Derek had known that he would be able to write a far more comprehensive account of the British intervention in East Africa than Professor Elkin, who was writing a book on the same subject. All Derek had to do was to refrain from cataloguing the chest’s contents till the professor’s finished manuscript was with his publisher. Normally, reading these previously unpublished letters, written by Lugard, Mackinnon and Kirk, banished all other thoughts from Derek’s mind, but this morning their usual magic failed. His thoughts repeatedly returned to Diana.

For some reason he kept on imagining himself in his bedroom at the flat; but the room had changed dramatically. Gone from the dressing table was the clutter of pots of cosmetics, scraps of cotton wool, spilt powder and hair-rollers, usually left by Diana; gone too were her clothes and the two Indian rugs on the floor. No trace of her remained. The emptiness of the room struck him so forcibly that for a moment he had to hold on to the tin chest to
remind himself where he was. A sudden stab of panic under the diaphragm made it hard for him to breathe for several seconds. This was not grief, not self-pity, but naked fear. Fourteen years suddenly dismissed; the safety net of habit gone, his assumptions and expectations splintering like glass. When he had recovered sufficiently he returned to the manuscript room, where he was immediately accosted by a scholarly Asian wishing to know about population figures for Perak in the 1790s.

Only when most of the readers had gone out to lunch was Derek able to think about his panic in the archives. Any decent man would surely not have trembled in such circumstances. Rage, jealousy, sorrow, reproach would have been more
appropriate
than fear. Would a normal red-blooded male sit helplessly on a tin chest and suffer without disgust or distress the idea of a strange tongue stroking his wife’s nipples? Would he not roar out in savage abandonment: ‘Some scheming bastard has besmirched my wife!’? Yet no biblical denunciations had formed in his brain; instead, under his diaphragm, tremors of panic still quivered. What really puzzled and distressed him was the certainty that although he thought he loved Diana, separation from her did not in itself terrify him. His fear had been far more personal and overwhelming. He had not been so much afraid for his marriage as afraid for himself.

Early in the afternoon Derek went home, leaving the Institute in the hands of his assistant Miss Prideaux. An hour later he was sitting in the bedroom which he had imagined stripped of all traces of Diana; around him the evidence of her continued
residence
was plentiful and reassuringly real. Yet he was far from happy. His panic had shaken him so badly that he felt impelled to discover the precise reasons for his fear or, if that were
impossible
, at least find some formula that made it seem less
frighteningly
irrational. Certainly the simple loss of having her around was not in itself alarming; the real change would be the absence of her decision-making. He tried to envisage a life with no Diana to organize his social life, no Diana to choose his clothes, decide about holidays, or about new chair covers, or a room to be painted, a meal to be bought, a present to be given, a film to be
seen. She always knew what she wanted, but did he? Again slight tremors of panic troubled him. For so long he had persuaded himself that his acquiescence was a defence, a way to protect himself from her disappointment in him; an infallible method to stave off quarrels and stop real clashes; a protective wall around the real Derek. Yet what if the wall had enclosed nothing? What if he had deferred to her wishes for so long that he no longer had any wishes and preferences of his own? If that had happened, her desires had defined and even constituted his existence, and
without
her all orientation would disappear. He fought against the idea, accusing himself of crass amateur psychology. Every married person had to defer to the wishes of his partner almost every day. Nothing extraordinary in that. He had just taken
surrender
a bit further. Nothing to be alarmed about. In any case he wasn’t really sure that she was having an affair. Her fit of
clothes-buying
earlier in the year, her lies about the dentist and the furniture course, were not in themselves proof of anything. Her long period of inactivity in the flat and her refusal to go out hardly indicated the existence of a lover, although it was just possible that he had jilted her before her decline and then taken her back, thus causing her recovery. But even if there was a lover, this didn’t mean that she would leave her husband. Derek got up from the bed and walked over to the window. An ordinary summer day. The radio told of no disasters, natural or otherwise; cars passed and people went about their business as usual. There were leaves on the trees, clouds in the sky, glass in the window frames. Everywhere he looked, normality. Traffic lights
functioning
normally; the Thames, although he could not see it, was doubtless flowing calmly along its usual course. All was well. He tried a laugh, and when that sounded rather hollow he smiled to himself. Then he felt the panic again; not overwhelmingly, but fluttering disconcertingly in his stomach; a slight but
unmistakable
reminder that it might take a lot more than logic to solve his problem.

*

A scene of tranquil amity and calm repose. Midnight and the Cushings are in bed. She is reading, and he stares thoughtfully at
the ceiling, as his mind unwinds after a rich and varied day. Her face is glistening with moisture cream, which, according to the advertisers, will keep her skin younger longer and help build new cells during the night. His face is solemn and a little strained, as though he needed some relaxing evening beverage to pave the way for a profound and untroubled sleep.

Diana had put down her book and was reaching for the
light-switch
when Derek said, unexpectedly, ‘Tell me about your furniture course.’

‘Now?’ She turned round to make sure he was being serious. ‘You’ve never shown the least interest before.’

‘What sort of things do you learn?’ he asked innocently.

‘How to tell a Sheraton chest from a Victorian copy, when a Hepplewhite tallboy isn’t what one thinks it is. Satisfied?’ She reached for the switch again.

Derek said hastily, ‘How
does
one tell a Sheraton chest from a copy?’

‘I want to go to sleep.’

Derek’s heart was thumping. She was trying to get out of it because she didn’t know; because the whole course was an
invention
. ‘Tell me,’ he murmured.

Diana sighed and shut her eyes. Then she opened them
reluctantly
and replied in a distinct emphatic voice, as though he were deaf or cretinous, ‘The keyholes will be different, the back will have been hacked about, and the curved front will have been cut through in the middle. All right?’ She snapped off the light and curled up with her back to him. Of course she could have read it all in a book, or might even have invented it on the spur of the moment.