Chapter Thirty-Nine
Maureen
Maureen was surprised that Duff came to her room.
She hadn’t expected him. But as soon as she saw his face, she understood.
He was there because his anger was such that he couldn’t not be.
She dismissed the maid and, once the girl was gone, turned to Duff.
She ran through the idea of disarming him, of trying to, by apologising, but nothing she saw in his face told her that he would allow that. And so she went the other way.
‘What brings you here?’ she asked, almost idly, turning from him back to the dressing table. Leaning close to the looking-glass, she began to paint her mouth red with lipstick.
‘Damn you, Maureen,’ he said. His voice was low.
‘You’d better shut the window if you’re going to quarrel with me,’ she said.
‘You don’t want the entire house to hear.
’ He crossed to the sash window and pulled it down violently.
It landed with a snap and rattled in its frame.
‘Or maybe you do,’ she added. ‘Honestly, there is hardly time to have a proper row. The dinner bell is about to go.’
‘Stop,’ he demanded.
‘Stop what?’ She looked up at the mirror, meeting his eyes in it with an expression of bland innocence.
‘Stop it, Maureen.’ He almost shouted. His hands, she saw, shook. He pushed them into the pockets of his jacket, either to hide them, or keep them occupied. ‘What did you mean by it?’ he demanded.
‘Mean by what?’
‘By your vile interference? Your insults and jeers at the tennis. Your mocking of my mother. And leading me to tell that story about McMahon.’
‘Everyone knows your mother is odd. And as for the tennis, I was only saying what was obvious. Frankly, I was embarrassed for you. You could hardly hit the ball. You were slow to everything and missed even easy shots. I thought you would welcome someone saying aloud what everyone must be thinking.’
‘Did you? Did you really think that?’ He stared at her through the mirror with such intensity that she wondered it didn’t shatter. Unable to meet his eyes more, she turned and got up. ‘And McMahon? You encouraged me to tell that story. Prompted me.’
‘You should have realised what you were doing,’ she said nastily. ‘How is it my fault if you’re too drunk to weigh your words?’
‘You did it on purpose. But why?’
‘You and Madam Ambassador were getting altogether far too fond.’
‘You are joking! For that, for nothing, you did this …?’
‘Hardly nothing.’
‘Nothing. How can you think it?’
‘And why should you care now what I think? Why care, or even notice?’ She moved past him towards the wardrobe but he grabbed her arm as she went by, holding it just above the wrist. She watched as the white skin around the bones turned red. ‘You’re hurting me.’
‘You hurt me too,’ he said. ‘And what’s more, you know it. Your words are never idle, Maureen. You know exactly what you do.’
‘Well, and what of it?’ She let her own anger boil up to meet his. ‘I must have some defence.’
‘Except it is not defence, it is offence.’
‘It is defence!’ she spat. ‘How else am I to counter the insults you deal me?’
‘What insults?’ He was shaking visibly. He kept his voice low but that shook too.
‘I try so hard to make you happy. To keep up with you. You exhaust me, Maureen. You exhaust everyone.’ How often she had heard that, she thought.
All her life – how exhausting she was, how much she demanded, how she was too much.
‘And so I drink,’ he continued. ‘Yes, I drink, far more than I should, and more and more I see that the drinking has consequences. There are times when I am slow, and confused, when I make mistakes. Like today when I didn’t notice how you set me up. And yet I find I cannot stop myself.’
‘You do not try to keep up with me. You don’t even notice me. All you talk about is Churchill and politics. It’s all you think about, care about.’
‘What else am I to do? No one understands, no one sees the seriousness. Do you have any idea what war will mean?’
‘How do you know it’s war? Everyone has been saying that for a year now, and still there is no actual war. What makes you right, rather than Chips or Ambassador Kennedy? Or Chamberlain – who, after all, is our prime minister, and not Churchill, for all that you and he behave otherwise.’
‘They’re wrong.’ He released her hand and went to sit on the side of the bed.
Maureen rubbed her wrist, tracing the pattern of his fingers, pressed deep and picked out in red and white.
‘It will certainly be war. If not in six months, then in a year. And when it is, we’ll be ready, despite the efforts of men like Chamberlain, and Chips, and the American downstairs, with his film projector and cowardice. ’
‘Probably in his room now, not downstairs,’ Maureen corrected him. She spoke automatically, busy thinking about what her husband had just said. She didn’t think the ambassador was a coward, not exactly. It was something else with him. She was about to say this, but she was too slow.
‘Must you always contradict?’ Duff said wearily.
Then, ‘I will leave tomorrow. My visit here has been a failure. The ambassador and I can’t find common ground.
Certainly not after this afternoon.’ He sighed.
‘If I go soon I can take a few days and go to Clandeboye. I can bring Sheridan and see the girls. One of us, at least, should be with them from time to time. If I must fail at state business, at least let me not fail them.’
‘But Nanny is there.’
‘They aren’t puppies, Maureen, to be raised entirely by servants. Besides, I have business in London first.’
‘What business?’
‘With Churchill.’ He said it almost triumphantly, knowing, she thought, how it would infuriate her.
She moved to stop him – ‘Wait!’ – but it was too late.
He was gone. The door closed quietly behind him.
Maureen went to run after him, then stopped herself.
What was she to do? Chase her husband down the corridors of a house that was not hers?
Where any door might fly open and a curious face look out: ‘Is everything alright, Maureen?’ She imagined the sly look on Elizabeth’s face. On Chips’.
The dinner gong went. Could it really only have been ten minutes that he was in her room? Ten minutes to pull down the certainty of everything she thought she understood about their marriage?
She needed time, but there was none. Now they must both go downstairs and sit through the evening, and behave as though nothing had happened.
She twitched at her dress, lining it up better with her hips and waist. It was too long: she must change her shoes to a pair with higher heels.
She went to pick up the new pair and found that her hands, too, were shaking.
Her heart hammered at her chest, whether because of the quarrel, or what Duff had just told her, she didn’t know.
She sat on the side of the bed, where he had sat, and tried to think but nothing would come clear.
All she knew was that he had swept away what she had believed, and she didn’t know what to put in its place.
She had always believed that he was the one who was aloof and out of reach; only slightly, but enough that she must stretch for him and work to keep him alert and unsure of what she would do next.
She had believed her role was to entice, his to be enticed.
And now he had changed all that. Recast it by what he said.
And she didn’t know where she was any longer.
She went to the window and opened it again, leaning out over the sill into the evening air.
It had stopped raining, although the sound of water was everywhere.
Beyond the garden, she could hear the river, louder now, swollen with a thousand tiny rivulets that rushed towards it, as well as the rain that had fallen all afternoon upon it.
A movement in the gloom made her look down.
Someone sat on a low wall beneath her window.
Maureen couldn’t see who it was. As she watched, the figure stretched arms up into the air and leaned backwards, with back arched and head dropped down behind.
A woman. Not Honor – too slim – but as for who it was, she couldn’t tell.
There was something contented, even expectant, about the movement that made her think it could not be Elizabeth; must be one of the young girls.
Envy ran through her with a bitter rush.
Envy for a time when it was possible to sit on walls and look out into the evening and feel certain that it was full of good and exciting things.
That out there in the dark, waiting, were the wonderful things that would happen.
That all one needed to do was be there to receive them.
She sighed. Was it age or marriage, she wondered – the closing off of all that joyful certainty?
She wished there was someone to ask, but Honor was no good for that sort of thing; her sisters Aileen and Oonagh would seize on what would seem to them weakness, and ask was something wrong with her.
Maybe Doris, she thought. There was something different about her, since Germany.
The gong went again.