make a change just yet. During the last couple of years he had at last ceased to bother taking Marion out for those evening and weekend runs in the car which had always ended up in front of desirable detached residences sporting For Sale boards. His attention had finally wandered from Marion, strayed about for a while and eventually settled firmly on Fiona Brooke.
‘I thought we could have the last of the lamb for supper,’ Marion said as soon as she came into the room. ‘I saw a very nice recipe in a magazine at the hairdresser’s. I copied it out while I was under the drier.’
‘I won’t be in to supper,’ Stephen said brusquely. Marion’s standards of domestic economy, suitable enough in their early married life but no longer relevant, now merely the result of a temperamental inability to adapt to changing circumstances, grated on him with increasing force.
‘Oh, you have a business appointment.’ Marion didn’t appear in the least put out. She would quite enjoy fiddling with the bits and pieces of her recipe, would eat the resulting dish in contented solitude, would settle down happily enough afterwards in front of the television set or pick up one of the romantic novels she was so fond of.
Stephen didn’t bother to reply, merely flicked over her an expressionless glance. I do believe, he thought, that it is mostly thrift which keeps her tied to this arid marriage, she simply cannot countenance the idea of throwing away something that is legally hers. She would mind scarcely at all if I were dead, she would see widowhood as a common and natural sequel to marriage, she would bed herself cosily down into it – but divorce . . . He shook his head. She would have nothing to do with divorce. However the case was conducted she would feel herself besmirched, marked with failure, inadequacy, she would be unable to relax pleasurably into cushioned singleness as she could if she had first of all watched his coffin descend towards the consuming flames.
‘She hasn’t rubbed that dirty mark off the window sill,’ Marion said suddenly. She fought a genteelly vicious campaign of attrition against whatever cleaning woman she currently employed. She got to her feet and went out to the kitchen in search of a damp cloth. ‘I told her twice yesterday before I went to the hairdresser’s,’ she said when she returned. ‘You really have to watch them all the time,’ she added in that tone of satisfaction and self-congratulation that caused a tremor of irritation to run along Stephen’s nerves. She attacked the mark with vigour.
All that endless concern with microscopic detail, never a large sweeping notion of transforming the entire interior of the house by some new and imaginative scheme of decoration . . . Stephen closed his eyes in distaste. He sometimes felt that the word housewife was the most terrifying in the English language.
‘There, that’s better.’ She turned and gave him the same automatic low-voltage smile that she gave the butcher, the baker and the man who came to read the meter. ‘What time is your appointment?’
‘I’ll leave just after seven.’ She must know perfectly well that I haven’t got a business appointment on a Saturday evening, he thought with cold dislike; deep down inside that knitting-wool brain she must know with total certainty that I have a mistress. But nothing in the world would tempt her to dig down and take an honest look at that knowledge. He experienced a moment’s wild desire to say, ‘My mistress asked me not to arrive before seven,’ just to see if anything would force her to tear the sealing strips from her eyes.
‘We really ought to settle something about your other two weeks’ holiday,’ she said when she had disposed of the cloth and settled herself into an easy chair. Stephen went abroad two or three times a year to trade fairs and exhibitions and would have felt little deprived if his official four weeks’ holiday was abolished. In recent years he found an undiluted dose of his wife’s society so grey and dull that it was really only because of the look of the thing that he troubled to take his holidays at all. Last year he had been able to nerve himself to enjoy only three out of his four weeks and this year he was hoping to be able to get away with a bare fortnight.
‘Perhaps in October. Or November,’ Stephen said without enthusiasm. He had a sudden startling flash of memory, Marion coming towards him over the velvet lawns sixteen years ago, so fragilely beautiful in her pale floating dress.
‘Chilford,’ he said aloud into that treacherous vision from the past, astounded yet again by the way the glorious romance he had grasped at had turned into this sterile union stapled now chiefly by custom and notions of respectability.
‘Funny you should mention Chilford,’ Marion said amicably. ‘I was only thinking the other day I wouldn’t mind running down there again.’
She was just a small-souled, small-minded, small-town girl, he said dismissingly in his mind. But she had been so lovely, so breathtakingly beautiful. He closed his eyes. How much our lives are ruled by chance, he thought with recurrent wonder. But was that after all the case? Didn’t every action spring from character seizing and moulding chance to its own purposes?
‘I don’t suppose Pauline will be all that keen to see us,’ Marion said ruminatively. ‘I dare say she’s very well in with Aunt Elinor by this time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Aunt Elinor didn’t leave her most of her money. Not that she has much to leave.’ I bet you’d have trotted down to Chilford fast enough and often enough if the old girl had a fortune to leave, Stephen thought sourly. But a moment later honesty compelled him to admit, No, that isn’t altogether true, she isn’t passionately interested in money. What she likes is for one day to follow another in cosy, reassuring succession, with just enough excitement to dimple the surface of living. Money was useful to pad the sharp corners of existence, she wasn’t really concerned with it for its own sake.
‘Elinor might take it into her head to leave the lot to Theresa,’ he said with idle malice.
‘Oh, Theresa.’ Marion’s lower lip pouted, a habit left over from her radiant girlhood when there had always been a dozen admirers to find the expression delightful but now somewhat less than entrancing. ‘I wouldn’t trust Theresa any farther than I could see her.’
Stephen glanced at the clock and saw with relief that it was ten minutes to seven. If he drove very slowly he could leave now. He got to his feet.
‘What about it?’ Marion said. ‘We could use some of your two weeks now, we could have a few days in Chilford. Then we could go to Italy or Spain in October.’
‘Please yourself,’ Stephen said shortly, conscious now only of Fiona a few minutes’ drive away.
‘It would be all right then as far as your work is concerned?’ Marion persisted.
Stephen raised his shoulders. Not the busiest of times at Alpha, the middle of the summer. ‘If you like to fix it,’ he said with one hand on the door, ‘I dare say it will be all right.’ If he was going to be compelled to spend a few days with Marion he didn’t much care where it was, and at least Chilford would require less effort from him than a trip to the Continent. He opened the door and paused suddenly as a fresh vista of thought opened up. ‘Actually,’ he said on a warmer note, ‘Chilford isn’t at all a bad idea.’ He turned and looked at his wife, his eyes had a bright, friendly look. ‘Yes, you arrange it. Make it a week if you like.’ He paused again. ‘Or even ten days.’
Marion was still wrinkling her brows over the pages of her diary when the phone rang a few minutes later.
‘Why, Pauline!’ she cried as soon as she recognized her sister’s voice. ‘If this isn’t a coincidence! Stephen and I were just talking about you—’
Stephen parked his car in the shade of a clump of trees that screened it from the road, and walked swiftly towards Fiona’s
