himself, and had sold one short story to an equally unknown magazine. She had long ago given up trying to understand his poetry. He himself wavered between thinking that he was a good poet as yet unrecognised and a black despair which made her impatient and often angry with him. In any case the people they lived among didn’t know about writing and certainly couldn’t have cared less about poetry: if you didn’t appear on TV you weren’t quoted. They lived in a council house in a noisy neighbourhood which seemed to have more than the average share of large dogs and small grubby children who stared at you as you went by.
The fair was really immense and she looked down at her small daughter now and again to make sure that she hadn’t got lost. She sometimes worried about her daughter’s silences, thinking that perhaps they were a protection against the two of them.
Hugh said to her, ‘We could spend a lot of money here, do you know that? There are so many things.’
She was suddenly impatient. ‘Well, we only get out once in a while.’ She knew that Hugh worried about money because he himself hardly earned anything, and also because his nature was fundamentally less generous than her own. He had given up working two years before, just to give himself a chance to see if he could succeed as a writer. Before that he had worked in a library, but he complained that working in a library was too much like writing, and in any case he was bored by it and the ignorant people he met. As far as she could see nothing had in fact happened since he gave up writing, for when he wasn’t writing he was reading, and he hardly ever went out. He would sit at his typewriter in the morning but most of the time he didn’t write anything or if he did he threw it in the bucket. When she came home at five she would find the bucket full of small balls of paper. She herself knew very little about literature and couldn’t judge whether such work as he completed was of the slightest value. She sometimes wondered whether she was losing her respect for him: his writing she often thought was a device for avoiding the problems of the real world. On the other hand her own more passionate nature dominated his colder one. Before she met him she had gone out with other men but her resolute self-willed character had led to quarrels of such intensity and fierceness that she knew they would eventually sour any permanent relationship.
As they walked through the fair, pushing their way among crowds of people, they arrived at a stall where one could throw three darts at three different dartboards, and if one got a bull each time would win a prize.
‘Would you like to try this?’ she asked him.
‘Not me. You try it.’
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I’m going to try it.’ She took the three darts from the rather sour-looking unsmiling woman who looked after the stall and stood steady in front of the board. She was always a little dramatic, wanting to be the centre of attention, though she didn’t realise this herself. She didn’t know about darts, but she would try to get the bulls, for she was very determined and she didn’t see why she couldn’t throw the darts as well as anybody else.
‘Ten pence,’ said the woman handing her the darts with a bored expression.
A number of other people were there, and she smiled at them as if saying, ‘Look at me. I don’t know anything about darts but I’m willing to try. Aren’t I brave?’ She threw the first dart and missed the board altogether. She laughed, and threw the second dart which this time hit the outer rim of the board. She looked proudly round but her husband’s face was turned away, as if he was angry or ashamed of her. She drew back her round pretty tanned arm and threw the dart and it landed quivering in a place near the bull. She turned to him in triumph but he had moved on, little Sheila clutching his hand. There was some scattered ironic applause from the crowd and she bowed to them with a flourish.
When she came up to him, he said, ‘You didn’t do so badly. But these darts are rigged. Some of them don’t stick in the board. All the fairs are the same. They cheat you.’
‘Oh cheer up,’ she said, ‘cheer up. We came here to enjoy ourselves.’
Two youths carrying football scarves in their hands went past and whistled, and Hugh’s face darkened and became stormy and set. She smiled, aware of her slim body in the yellow dress. She hoped that he wouldn’t settle into one of his gloomy childish moods and spoil the day. He looked quite funny really from the back, as he had had a haircut recently: most of the time he wore his hair long like an artist’s or a poet’s but today it was much shorter, showing more clearly the baldish patches at the back.
‘All fairs cheat you,’ he repeated as if he were worried about the amount of money they might spend, as if he were busy adding a sum in his mind. For a poet, she thought, he brooded rather much on money, and far more so than she did. Her philosophy was a simple one: if she had enough for the moment she was quite happy. But today she didn’t care, she actually wanted to spend money, positively and extravagantly, as if by doing so she was making a gesture of hope and joy to the world. As they were passing a machine which emitted cartons of orangeade when money was inserted she bought three and they drank them as they walked along. She threw hers away carelessly on the road, but Hugh and Sheila waited till they came to a bin before depositing theirs.
The heat was really quite intense and she was annoyed that he showed no sign of removing his jacket.
What had she expected from marriage? Was this really what she had expected? Before her marriage she had been lively and alert and carefree but now she wasn’t like that at all. She was always thinking before she made a remark in case she said something that would wound her husband, in case he found buried in it a sharp intended thorn which he would turn over masochistically in his tormented mind.
They came to a shooting stall and she said, ‘Would you like to try this then?’
‘Well …’ She put down the fifteen pence and he took the rifle in his hand, looking at it for a moment helplessly before breaking it in two. The woman gave him some pellets which he laid beside him, inserting one in the rifle after fumbling with it shortsightedly for some time. He snapped the broken rifle together and took aim: it seemed ages before he was ready to fire. She kept saying to herself, Why are you taking so long? Why don’t you fire? Fire.
He sighted along the rifle and fired, and one fat duck in the moving procession fell down. Again he aimed steadily and carefully, at one point putting the rifle down in order to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but then raising it and firing. He looked extremely serious and concentrated as if there was nothing in the world he liked better than shooting down these fat slow ducks passing in procession in front of him. And again he knocked one down. So he had a talent after all—another talent, that is, apart from his poetry. He steadily aimed and again hit a duck.
‘What do I get for that?’ he asked the woman excitedly.
The woman pointed without speaking to a miscellany of what appeared to be undifferentiated rubbish but which on examination defined itself as clay dishes, cheap soiled brooches and a teddy bear.
‘Take the teddy bear,’ Ruth suggested and he took it, handing it over proudly. She in turn gave it to Sheila who gravely clutched it like a trophy.
‘I didn’t know you could shoot,’ she said as they walked along together.
‘I used to go to fairs when I was younger,’ he replied, but didn’t volunteer any more. She was proud that he had won a prize though it was a not very plush teddy bear and she put her arm momently in his. He seemed pleased, and relaxed a little, but she wished that he would remove his jacket.
‘The prize wasn’t worth the entry fee,’ he commented as they walked along.
‘That’s true.’
‘All
