Питер Ловси: On the Edge

The waistcoat and jacket lay in a heap beside the lavatory. Mechanically she picked several long fair hairs off the sleeves and dropped them into the bowl. She shook the jacket and something rattled in a side pocket. She took out a hotel key and glanced at the disc, replaced it and took the clothes to a hanger in the wardrobe.

He was face down on the bed, still in his day things.

‘Are you proposing to sleep in your trousers?’

He made a show of clawing the braces off his shoulders.

‘Roll over.’

She unbuttoned him at the front and peeled off the trousers.

He tugged the bedding aside and crawled underneath.

‘Had a few after work.’

She emptied his pocket and placed the loose change in the ashtray on the chest of drawers. She smoothed the trousers and lined up the creases.

‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Some time after midnight.’

‘Quite a bit later than usual.’

‘Yes.’

She clamped the trousers in the wooden press beside the tallboy. She knew why he was late. Not because he had had a few whiskys after work. The drinking was incidental to his pursuit of women. She knew all about his infidelities. She was used to being looked at by friends in a certain way and told that her husband had been sighted again in the bar of the Strand Palace Hotel. They didn’t have to say any more. The entire scene was in the look.

What had delayed him then? One thing was certain: it wasn’t an excess of passion. He couldn’t contain himself for more than a minute even when sober. He was late because he’d gone to a different hotel, in Hammersmith. Presumably he’d failed to find a pick-up in the West End. So he’d started again. More whiskys. More than he could handle.

He was making an effort to sound rational.

‘Did you get worried about me?’

‘Worried?’

‘I mean, did you think I’d had an accident?’ ‘An accident?’ Her conversation with Antonia outside the Ritz flitted into her mind and out of it. ‘No.’ ‘Callous bitch.’ ‘Barry, you’re in no state—’

‘I could have been dead for all you care. You don’t bloody care, do you?’

He was working himself up. She was angry, too, and entitled to be. What was picking his clothes off the floor if it wasn’t caring? Rescuing his clothes that reeked of some woman and dutifully hanging them up for him. Yet she didn’t want an argument. She took her dressinggown off the hook.

‘I’m going to sleep in the spare room.’

She reached to pick up her pillow and with surprising speed he grabbed her wrist and jerked her off balance. She fell across the bed.

‘You’re staying here and that’s an order.’

‘Barry, let go of my arm.’

He started wrestling with her. She was pushed face down into the eiderdown. She was shocked by the force of the attack. He had never been violent before. She twisted her head for breath and she felt her nightdress tearing at the armpit. He clapped his hand on the back of her neck.

‘Don’t you dare move, woman.’

‘Barry, you’re hurting.’

‘You don’t know what it is to be hurt.’

His voice had a cruel edge she had never heard from him. A horrid possibility crept into her mind. His imagination had been stoked up by the newspapers reporting those vile murders by Heath.

‘Please, Barry.’

‘Getting above yourself, aren’t you? Bloody vicar’s daughter. Need bringing down a peg or two.’

He slid his hand upwards, took a grip on her hair and twisted her head with such force that her shoulders and torso followed the movement. She was turned face up like a playing card. His leg straddled her thighs and trapped her. Whisky fumes gusted into her face.

She was rigid with fear, certain he meant to bite her. She could see the teeth bared.

‘Barry, no!’

‘Shut up.’

His face moved closer, rasping her cheek with his moustache. He spoke in her ear.

‘You’re a sanctimonious bitch. Admit it. Out with it, loud and clear.’

‘Please—’

‘Say it.’

‘I’m a sanctimonious bitch.’

‘Louder. Tell the neighbours what you are. Tell the whole bloody street.’

She shouted the words.

‘Better. And you were worried sick when I was late.’ ‘I was worried sick.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Come on. Why were you worried sick?’

He was speaking between clenched teeth. He expected an answer fast. And this time he expected her to supply it.

Her face twitched. She was too terrified to think.

‘Come on!’

‘I thought...’

‘Yes?’

‘I thought you must have had an accident.’

‘What sort of accident?’

‘What sort?’

‘I want to know if you’re speaking the truth. You say you thought I had an accident.’

She couldn’t fathom what satisfaction this gave him and she dreaded where it was leading. She just hoped to God she could keep the right answers coming. If it spared her from physical pain she was willing to supply whatever he wanted to hear.

She blurted out the first thing she could think of. ‘Er — an accident on some stairs. You fell down some stairs and broke your leg.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know — the office.’

‘They’d have let you know. Someone would have let you know by seven, easily. Better think again.’

‘You fell off a bus. You hit your head on the road and got concussion. Nobody knew who you were.’

‘So what did my poor distracted wife do about it?’

‘Phoned the police. And all the hospitals.’

‘How touching. And all this is true, isn’t it, Rose, darling, because you were brought up to believe that lying is a sin before God?’ He pressed his forefinger under her chin and pushed upwards. ‘Have I caught you out?’

‘I’m confused. I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘Say you were lying through your teeth.’

‘All right, I was.’

‘And I caught you at it.’

‘You caught me at it.’

This appeared to satisfy him, because he gave a grunt and withdrew the leg that was pinning her down. He rolled right away from her and sat up.

‘I’m going for a piss. Don’t move a muscle.’

Rose’s nerves gave way to the stress. She shivered uncontrollably. Too fearful to run out, she dreaded his return. She listened to him pass water, then flush the cistern. It was all she could do to stop from whimpering when he came back. Yet she still had sufficient detachment to despise herself. That made it harder to endure, knowing what a spineless creature she had become.

He turned out the light as he came in. Then he dropped on to the bed like a felled tree, on his own side, close to Rose, without touching. She prayed that he might sleep now, but he still wanted to taunt her.

‘What a flaming liar! I said what a flaming liar! Lord bloody Haw-Haw isn’t in it. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t lose any sleep if I ended up in hospital. You were nicely tucked up in bed when I finally got in, weren’t you? Weren’t you?’

‘Is that what upset you? I didn’t realize.’

She felt slightly easier in her mind for finding a reason for his behaviour. She hadn’t pictured it from his point of view. He wasn’t home by midnight so she had gone to bed. Evidently he regarded this as a betrayal. It was the silliest nonsense considering how he had spent the evening, but that was the way his mind worked. He felt rejected. God, what she was reduced to!

‘Shall I make you some coffee?’

‘Coffee be buggered.’

‘Just as you wish.’

‘I’m accident-proof, if you want to know. I got through the war without a prang, didn’t I? Over seven hundred flying hours. After that I’m not going to fall down the moving staircase at Victoria, am I? Or walk into a lamp post.’ He made a smug chuckling sound. ‘The only accident I ever had was with a certain WAAF sergeant at Hornchurch.’