The Heart of the Country (3 page)

The first thing Natalie did after Hilary left in dudgeon was go round and see Arthur. It was her afternoon for visiting, anyway. Thursday. Arthur’s wife Jane went round to one of the local schools to ‘hear reading’ every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon between 2 and 3.30. Not much time, you might think, for Natalie and Arthur to do what they liked to do and still have time for a little talk about this and that, and a courtship ritual or so. A murmur in the other’s ear about life, love, happiness, remorse, the state of their own and the other’s soul. That, if you ask me, is the main pleasure of adultery. Not the sex, but the painful, pleasurable examination of the psyche, that acknowledgement of sin which accompanies the sex. Marriage declines into what’s for dinner? Who’s going to pay this month’s mortgage? Is buggery okay for you? When all we really want to think about is God and eternity. Guilt brings us nearer to God. Natalie, Mrs Tippy-toes, trit-trotting on her little high heels into Arthur’s shop, (she wore absurd shoes for someone living in the country: as if her natural habitat was Bond Street) was doing her best to get nearer to God.

You believe that? You’ll believe anything.

Arthur specialized in old English oak and oriental antiquities: a peculiar mixture but one which worked well enough in Eddon Gurney. His wife Jane dusted and cleaned around, and when Arthur was out kept shop. Sometimes, when she was really angry and upset by Arthur, she would drop and break something and there’d be a few hundred pounds down the drain. Arthur looked on it as a kind of tax he had to pay to the God of Marriage. He fucked, she dropped. It was inevitable. He sighed but did not scold. It kept the balance between them. Jane would clean the little back room behind the shop; smooth the covers on the chaise longue, shake out the pillows, hoover and straighten the rag rug, polish the register grate in which, in winter, Arthur liked to keep a coal fire going. It was in this room that Arthur did
his books and added up his VAT, and where he retired when customers came in he couldn’t stand the look of. Jane had a pretty good idea this was where he brought his women, but she cleaned and dusted it all the same.

Jane and Arthur lived above the shop. They had an excellent view of the stone walls of Gurney Castle. Jane was a little, pretty, anxious woman: she jumped if anything startled her. She was too thin: she looked as if a harsh word would make her snap in the middle. Arthur was tall, big, broad, serene, handsome. A villain: of course he was a villain: but his chest was large enough for at least two or three troubled women to lay their heads upon – it seemed wasted otherwise. What could Jane do? She couldn’t not go out, ever, for fear of what Arthur would do in her absence. She did try for many years to leave the house unexpectedly, to keep altering her shopping-visiting routine, as those who live in danger of kidnapping do, but a pattern kept emerging even in her unpredictability. Or else it was that Arthur could read her mind? She’d say on a Wednesday evening she was going to stay overnight with her mother who needed cheering up. On Thursday lunchtime she’d come back and there was just that
feel
in Arthur’s back room: a butterfly hair clip under the rag rug: once a pair of bikini pants stuffed in a Venetian punch bowl –

‘They must have been there when I bought it – overpriced anyway’ – was all Arthur said.

So really she gave up. She took up the Tuesday and Thursday work at the school – unpaid of course, but someone has to hear the beginners, and the teacher sure as hell doesn’t have the time, what with thirty or so little faces staring up in every class – and Jane and Arthur had no children of their own, and Jane loved children, loved them – and took some comfort from the fact that Arthur always made love to her on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Sex begets more sex. Made love, I said, not fucked. Arthur loved his wife. Otherwise he might not have bothered to torment her so and she’d have been an altogether plumper and younger-looking woman, who warmed her hands by the fire and laid her head on Arthur’s chest. Jane wondered who it was who visited. She had thought it might be Natalie Harris but when Natalie asked her and Arthur to dinner at Dunbarton, out of the blue, she decided it couldn’t be. If she was Arthur’s secret woman she wouldn’t have the nerve.

Wouldn’t she just!

Anyway, that Thursday afternoon Natalie went into Arthur’s shop in quite a state. Now Natalie was very much alone in the world. Both her parents were dead. Her father had been in the air force: he’d been forty when she was born, her mother thirty-five. The family had moved from one air-force base to another throughout the world. Her father had died of bone cancer: nothing to do, the authorities swore, with the fact that he was on the maintenance side of the air-force business, and his speciality the nuclear missile-carrying capacity of conventional aircraft. And God knows what his fingers had dabbled in since 1946, or what warning bells and flashing red lights he had ignored in the pursuance of his duty.

Be that as it may, he was dead by fifty-five and his wife died of throat cancer fairly soon after. Natalie seemed healthy enough; just parentless and friendless. She’d been to twelve schools throughout her childhood, and childhood friends just hadn’t had a chance to stick. She was halfway through secretarial college when she was sent for work experience to temp at Harrix, then assembling not home computers but digital watches, in East London. Harry took her out a few times and then proposed, and she accepted. It had not even been a good secretarial college. Natalie could arrange flowers and man the front office, but she couldn’t shorthand-type. Or was it wouldn’t? She was bright as a button, pretty as a picture and just plain stunned: hit hard on the head by loss and loneliness. If now, unloved by Harry, she laid her head on Arthur’s chest, who was to blame her? Not me: all I blame her for is splashing me on the way to school that morning. That I do find hard to forgive. Even orphans should take a look at the world outside and notice what’s going on.

‘I suppose
you
can’t pay my wages?’ Hilary had asked that Thursday morning when the wages of sin announced their intention of getting paid, and Natalie had shaken her head. How? Hilary had looked round the dream kitchen, and slid her foot over the parquet floor, and raised her eyebrows, just a little.

‘It’s not just your bad news,’ observed Hilary. ‘It’s all our bad news. Sixteen of us working up there at Harrix, not counting Marion Hopfoot, who never does a stroke anyway, and no wages for two weeks. Some of the men with mortgages! And if this job goes where are any of us going to find another one? You know what it’s like round here.’

Natalie pondered.

Natalie said, presently, ‘The last thing Harry said to me this morning was that he’d see me at six-thirty. So I’m just going to carry on as usual, and at six-thirty this evening he’ll turn up, and explain everything.’

‘You are a fool!’ Hilary had banged on a kitchen cupboard as she spoke and the cups and plates inside trembled. ‘Of course he’s not coming back. The petty cash is empty. I rang the bank: he went round to collect the wages all right, first thing, and he had to argue and fight for them, from what I hear; then he just disappeared. He’s gone. Done a bunk.’

‘There’s no need to get so excited,’ said Natalie. ‘If the bank’s proving so difficult, he’s probably changed to another. My husband is always changing banks. In fact I expect that’s where he’s gone. To Bath, or Bristol. He’ll be back!’

“You’re mad!’ said Hilary, banging away, bosom bouncing.

‘We had a half-a-million-pound order coming in, and he borrowed on the strength of it, and then the order didn’t come through. No bank’s going to look at him after that. Mrs Harris, I repeat, your husband has
done a bunk.’

‘Um,’ said Natalie politely, and Hilary had left, without so much as being offered a cup of anything. Natalie had run out of instant coffee. Not surprising. These days it costs one pound ninety-five pence the jar. Monstrous! How hard it is to keep the mind off minor irritations even when major disasters threaten. Natalie bathed, changed into her best slip and knickers, and walked all the way up to Arthur’s to save petrol. But somehow not even the walk relaxed her.

‘Nat-Nat,’ said Arthur, drawing the unusually stiff-limbed but silkily clad Natalie into his back room. ‘It’s been a long long time since Tuesday.’ His suit was agreeably warm, and smelt of Antiquax, the best polish available for real wood. Natalie laid her head briefly upon his chest, in a kind of obeisance to past pleasures. But then, surprising herself as much as him, she drew back and away.

‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Time of the month?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mind.’ He didn’t either, unlike Harry, whom menstruation made nervous.

‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘Just perhaps we shouldn’t go on doing this.’

‘Is it having Jane and me coming to dinner tonight? Is that the matter?’ he asked. ‘You mustn’t worry. I won’t give you away.’

‘That’s nothing to
do with it,’ said Natalie. And it wasn’t, though it should have been. How many meals have
you
taken, do you think, when there’s been something going on between your partner and A. N. Other that you haven’t known about? Don’t to this day? What winkings, glimmerings and nudgings? Doesn’t bear thinking about. Could quite put you off your food.

‘What, then? Hubby hot on the trail?’ He was concerned. He had kind, thoughtful eyes, for a villain. He made love beautifully, gently, commandingly, unerringly and altogether without doubt, as it were, as to his capacity for his pleasure or his partner’s – though always, of course, in something of a hurry in case his wife came back.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Natalie, but she did wonder. Perhaps Harry had found out, taken offence, taken off. What then? But she couldn’t admit it; nor could she understand the phenomenon of her sexual reluctance. As well take off her clothes now for Arthur as take them off in Wells Cathedral in the middle of Sunday Service! She was afflicted, in fact, by superstitious dread. If she put another foot wrong the ice might crack; she’d go through, go under, drown. It might indeed be true that Harry
was no more, that six-thirty would come and go and he not appear: not a trace of him left behind – except the children, that is. She must reassemble herself in her own head as an ordinary, faithful wife to which untoward events did not occur. Then surely everything would be all right. Oh yes, wife and mother Natalie, neat and clean, looking out of the mirror back at her complacent self. Smile for the camera, Natalie! Good Natalie! Keep your fingers crossed, not to mention your legs!

You wonder how I know all this? What goes on in one woman’s head goes pretty much on in another’s, or else why can doctors (male) ask their ritual questions about hormonal levels – viz: Do you feel murderous
before
your period or after your period, madam? – and feel safe in prescribing dangerous drugs according to your answer?

We are all of us part of one bleeding body, if you ask me.

So Natalie went home from Arthur’s with her hair unruffled and her skirt unlifted, leaving Arthur puzzled, but at least able to get on with filling in his VAT forms. And as it happened Jane came back from school almost as soon as she’d arrived, the teachers having called a one-day strike in the furtherance of a pay claim, and ventured to surprise her husband in the back room. But she found him just sitting there, all innocence.

Whew!

‘I’m mad,’ Jane told herself. ‘Paranoid. I need treatment. Why do I have these neurotic fantasies that my husband’s being unfaithful to me? It must be something to do with my relationship with my father.’ She went to group therapy on Monday evenings. Arthur had a WAEADA meeting at the same time. He was a leading member, along with his friend Angus, of the West Avon Estate Agents, Dealers and Auctioneers.

Unfaithful! What an absurd word – a concept, not the description of an act. Yet it’s the concept that does the hurting, not the deed itself. Does infidelity as such matter? Jane going round breaking plates matters; Jane’s hair going grey before its time matters; Natalie not caring about the way she makes Jane break plates matters; the way both women use Arthur to reinforce their view of themselves matters. But Natalie leaning her head against Arthur’s Antiquax-impregnated jacket and receiving comfort – that matters too, righting scales, and so does the excitement and the thrill of adultery – they
matter.
They’re wonderful. Doesn’t Natalie’s pleasure somehow make up for Jane’s grief?

No wonder I, Sonia, am shut up in a madhouse waiting, even as I write, for an injection to stop me twitching and shouting. Trying to establish a moral framework for our existence, to decide exactly who to blame for what, and why, is enough to drive a sane woman mad, and a mad one even madder. In the meantime just accept that though I’m diagnosed as both insane and dangerous, and am a convicted arsonist, my intentions are of the best. My search after truth is absolute. In the telling of this story I am bending over backwards to be fair to absolutely everyone.

So, the wages of sin and the pleasures of adultery now discussed if not quite settled, let’s get on with the story.

I’ll try and keep out of it, I promise you, except in the third person.

Dinner

Natalie didn’t tell the children anything about the rumour that their father had run off with a beauty queen. She was not that kind of mother. Now me, I used to tell my children everything, because there was no one else to tell and I’m a blabbermouth. This may be part of the reason they’ve taken the children away from me. People think kids ought to be spared the truth: it really upsets them when they’re not. Though I don’t see why the mere fact of their childhood should earn them this special concession. What happens happens; and when the bailiffs come what’s the use of telling the children it’s the ratcatcher? The television goes and the rats stay, and the kids are the first to notice. But that’s another story.

What Natalie did, on the way home from Coombe Barrow School, was to pass me, Sonia, filing home with my three little girls, Teresa, Bess and Edwina. And she actually stopped to give us a lift. Too late for me to lift the curse, of course, but better than nothing.