"In the rubble at Quantum, they"ve found a clock hand stuck onto some white plastic-covered wire."
"Oh, my G.o.d," Thomas said miserably.
"So what?" Berenice demanded."Dear Thomas does over-act so."
"So," I said,"someone who knew how to make these time-switches blew up Quantum."
"What of it?" she said. "I can"t see Thomas doing it. Not enough nerve, have you, darling?"
Thomas said to me,"Have a drink?"
Berenice looked disconcerted. Asking me to have a drink had been for Thomas an act of rebellion against her wishes. There hadn"t been many of them, I guessed. I accepted with thanks, although it was barely five-thirty and to my mind too early. I"d chosen the hour on purpose, hoping both that Thomas would have returned from his day"s wanderings and that the daughters would stop at their grandmother"s house on their way home from school.
Thomas squeaked across the floor to the kitchen, which was divided from the main room only by a waist-high counter, and began opening cupboards. He produced three tumblers which he put clumsily on the counter, and then sought in the fridge interminably for mixers. Berenice watched him with her face screwed into an expression of long-suffering impatience and made no move to help.
"We have some gin somewhere," he said vaguely, having at last found the tonic, "I don"t know where Berenice puts things. She moves them about."
"Dear Thomas couldn"t find a book in a library."
Thomas gave her a look of black enmity which she either didn"t see or chose to ignore. He opened another cupboard, and another, and in his wife"s continued unhelpful silence finally found a nearly full bottle of Gordon"s gin. He came round into the main room and poured from the bottle into three gla.s.ses, topping up inadequately from a single bottle of tonic.
He handed me a gla.s.s. I didn"t much care for gin, but it was no time to say so.
He held out the second gla.s.s to Berenice.
"I don"t want any," she said.
Thomas"s hand was trembling. He made an awkward motion as if to raise the gla.s.s to his own lips, then put it down with a bang on the counter, and in an uncoordinated movement accidentally knocked the gin bottle over so that it fell to the floor, smashing into green shiny pieces, the liquid spreading in a pool.
Thomas bent down to pick up the bits. Berenice didn"t help.
She said,"Thomas can"t get anything right, can you, darling?" The words were no worse than others, but the acid sarcasm in her voice had gone beyond scathing to unbearable.
Thomas straightened with a face filled with pa.s.sionate hatred, the worm turning at last, and by the neck he held the top part of the green bottle, the broken edges jagged as teeth.
He came up fast with his hand rising. Berenice, cushioned in complacency, wasn"t even looking at him and seemed not to begin to understand her danger.
Malcolm said I had fast reactions... I dropped my own drink, grasped Berenice by both arms and swung her violently round and out of the slicing track of the razor-sharp weapon. She was furiously indignant, protesting incredulously, sprawling across the floor where I"d almost thrown her, still unaware of what had been happening.
Thomas looked at the damage he"d done to me for a long blank second, then he dropped the fearsome bottle and turned to stumble off blindly towards his front door. I took two strides and caught him by the arm.
"Let me go ..." He struggled, and I held on."Let me go... I can"t do anything right... she"s right."
"She"s b.l.o.o.d.y wrong."
I was stronger than he. I practically dragged him across the room and flung him into one of the armchairs.
"I"ve cut you," he said.
"Yes, well, never mind. You listen to me. You both listen to me. You"re over the edge. You"re going to have to face some straight facts."
Berenice had finally realised how close she"d come to needing st.i.tches. She looked with anger at the point of my left shoulder wherejersey and shirt had been ripped away, where a couple of cuts were bleeding. She turned to Thomas with a bitterly accusing face and opened her mouth.
"Shut up," I said roughly."If you"re going to tell him he"s incompetent, don"t do it. If you"re going to complain that he could have cut you instead, yes he could, he was trying to. Sit down and shut up shut up."
"Trying to?" She couldn"t believe it. She sat down weakly, her hair awry, her body slack, eyes shocked.
"You goaded him too far. Don"t you understand what you"ve been doing to him? Putting him down, picking him to pieces every time you open your mouth? You have now completely succeeded. He can"t function any more."
"Dear Thomas -" she began.
"Don"t say that. You don"t mean it."
She stared.
"If he were your dear Thomas," I said,"you would help him and encourage him, not sneer."
"I"m not listening to this."
"You just think what you stirred up in Thomas today, and if I were you, I"d be careful." I turned to Thomas,"And it"s not all her fault. You"ve let her do it, let her carp all this time. You should have stopped her years ago. You should have walked out. You"ve been loyal to her beyond reason and she"s driven you to want to kill her, because that"s what I saw in your face."
Thomas put a hand over his eyes.
"You were dead lucky you didn"t connect with her mouth or her throat or whatever you were going for. There would have been no going back. You just think what would have happened, both of you. The consequences to yourselves, and to your girls. Think! Think!: I paused.
"Well, it"s beyond facing."
"I didn"t mean it," Thomas mumbled.
"I"m afraid you did," I said.
"He couldn"t have done," Berenice said.
"He did mean it," I said to her."It takes quite a force to tear away so much woollen jersey. Your only hope is to believe to the depths of your soul that he put all his goaded infuriated strength behind that blow. I"ll tell you, I was lucky too. I was moving away fast trying to avoid being cut, and it can have been only the points of the gla.s.s that reached my skin, but I"ll remember the speed of them ..." I broke off, not knowing how else to convince her. I didn"t want to say, "It b.l.o.o.d.y hurts," but it did.
Thomas put his head in his hands.
"Come on," I said to him, "I"m taking you out of here. On your feet, brother."
"Don"t be ridiculous," Berenice said.
"If I leave him here, will you cuddle him?"
The negative answer filled her whole face. She wouldn"t have thought of it. She was aggrieved. It would have taken little time for her to stoke up the recriminations.
"When the firemen have gone," I said, "fires often start again from the heat in the embers."
I went over to Thomas. "Come on. There"s still life ahead."
Without looking up, he said in a dull sort of agony, "You don"t know... It"s too late."
I said "No" without great conviction, and then the front door opened with a bang to let in the two girls.
"h.e.l.lo," they said noisily, bringing in swirls of outside air. "Granny turned us out early. What"s going on? What"s all this gla.s.s on the floor? What"s all the blood on your arm?"
"A bottle got broken," I said, "and I fell on it."
The young one looked at the bowed head of her father, and in a voice that was a devastating mimic of her mother"s, vibrating with venom and contempt, she said, "I"ll bet it was Dear Thomas who broke it."
Berenice heard for herself what she"d been doing to her husband. Heard what she was implanting in her own children. The revelation seemed to overwhelm her, and she sought for excuses.
"If we had more money... If only Malcolm... It"s not fair ..."
But they had two cars, thanks to their trust fund, and a newly-built townhouse, and Thomas"s unemployment had brought no immediate financial disaster: money wasn"t their trouble, nor would it cure it.
"Why didn"t you get a job?" I said. "What did you ever expect of Thomas? That he"d set the world alight? He did the best he could."
Quantum in me fuit...
I wanted a son," she said flatly. "Thomas got a vasectomy. He said two children were enough, we couldn"t afford any more. It wasn"t fair. Malcolm should have given us more money. always wanted a son always wanted a son."
Dear G.o.d, I thought: flat simple words at the absolute heart of things, the suppurating disappointment that she had allowed to poison their lives. Just like Gervase, I thought. So much unhappiness from wanting the un.o.btainable, so much self-damage.
I could think of nothing to say. Nothing of help. It was too late.
I went across to Thomas and touched him on the shoulder. He stood up. He didn"t look at his family, or at me. I put my hand lightly under his elbow and steered him to the front door, and in unbroken silence we left the wasteland of his marriage.
Sixteen.
I took Thomas to Lucy"s house.
It seemed to me, as I drove away from the pretentious Haciendas, that Lucy"s particular brand of peace might be just what Thomas needed. I couldn"t take him to Vivien, who would demolish him further, and Joyce, who was fond of him, would be insufferably bracing. I frankly didn"t want him with me in Cookham; and Donald, influenced by Berenice, tended to despise him.
Lucy was in, to my relief, and opened the front door of the farm cottage where she and Edwin led the simple life near Marlow.
She stared at us. At my red arm. At Thomas"s hanging head.
"Sister, dear," I said cheerfully. "Two brothers needing succour come knocking at thy gate. Any chance of hot sweet tea? Loving looks? A sticking plaster?"
Edwin appeared behind her, looking peevish. "What"s going on?"
To Lucy, I said, "We cracked a bottle of gin, and I fell on it."
"Are you drunk?" she said.
"Not really."
"You"d better come in."
"Ferdinand has been on the telephone," Edwin said without welcome, staring with distaste at my blood as we stepped over his threshold. "He warned us you"d be turning up some time. You might have had the courtesy to let us know in advance."
"Sorry," I said dryly.
Lucy glanced swiftly at my face. "This is trouble?"
"Just a spot."
She took Thomas by the arm and led him out of the tiny entrance hall into her book-filled sitting-room. Edwin"s and Lucy"s cottage consisted of two rooms downstairs, which had been partly knocked into one, with a modern bathroom tacked on at the back. The stairs, which were hidden behind a latched door, led up to three rooms where one had to inch round the beds, bending one"s head so as not to knock it on the eaves. Laura Ashley wallpaper everywhere covered uneven old plaster, and rag rugs provided warmth underfoot. Lucy"s books were stacked in columns on the floor along one wall in the sitting-room, having overflowed the bookcases, and in the kitchen there were wooden bowls, pestles and mortar, dried herbs hanging.
Lucy"s home was unselfconscious, not folksy. Lucy herself, large in dark trousers and thick handknitted sweater, sat Thomas in an armchair and in a very short time thrust a mug of hot liquid into his unwilling hand.
"Drink it, Thomas," I said. "How about some gin in it?" I asked Lucy.
"It"s in."
I smiled at her.
"Do you want some yourself?" she said.
"Just with milk." I followed her into the kitchen. "Have you got any tissues I could put over this mess?"
She looked at my shoulder. "Are tissues enough?"
"Aspirins?"
I don"t believe in them."
"Ah."
I drank the hot tea. Better than nothing. She had precious few tissues, when it came to the point, and far too small for the job. I said I would leave it and go along to the hospital later to get it cleaned up. She didn"t argue.
She said, "What"s all this about?" and dipped into a half-empty packet of raisins and then offered me some, which I ate.
"Thomas has left Berenice. He"s in need of a bed."
"Not here," she protested. "Take him with you."
I will if you won"t keep him, but he"d be better off here."
She said her son, my nephew, was up in his bedroom doing his homework.
"Thomas won"t disturb him," I said.