Jon Cleary - The Climate of Courage

“I’ve been wondering how to tell you,” she said at last. “Greg, I don’t love you any more.”

He heard her say the words quite distinctly and he knew what they meant: it wasn’t as if she had gabbled something in a foreign language. But he was so totally unprepared for what she had said, she might just as well have not spoken at all. He just lay looking at her, listening with the back of his mind to a woman laughing somewhere in the hotel.

Sarah turned her head on her pillow. “I suppose that’s a shock to you?”

He sat up, leaning on one elbow. “Don’t joke like that, Sarah!”

“I’m not joking, Greg.” Her voice was calm but definite: she had always known what she wanted to say. “I’m not in love with you any more.”

He reached up quickly and switched on the bed lamp. “When did this happen, for God’s sake? It’s bloody sudden. You didn’t say anything in your letters——”

“I didn’t think I should tell you while you were away. Somehow it wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I first got back?”

“It would have spoiled the other business, wouldn’t it? The fanfare, the publicity——”

“Are you narked about that? Is that the cause of the trouble?”

“I was out of love with you before you won the V.C.,” she said. “I stopped loving you six months after you sailed for the Middle East.”

He dropped back on the pillow. He felt words bubbling up inside him, but he suddenly felt too weak to say them. Somehow they wouldn’t have meant anything. He just lay in silence, aware of his own heartbeats, till she spoke again.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” Her face was turned towards him, but he didn’t look at her. “Say something, Greg. Don’t just lie there.”

“What is there to say? You’ve said about everything there is. I could start swearing at you—that would come pretty easy. But what good would that do?”

He got up and walked across the room to the dressing-table. He picked up a cigarette packet but it was empty. He could feel his hand shaking as he dropped the packet back on the dressing-table.

“Have you any cigarettes?” Even now he had to depend on her. He wished he could have done without a cigarette, but he knew he must have it. “I’m right out.”

She took one for herself from the packet on the bedside table, lit it, then threw him the packet and the box of matches. He lit a cigarette, his hand still shaking, then walked across to the window. From here he could look down one of the many gorges of the Blue Mountains. The gaunt ridges were folded into a pattern of deep shadow and bright moonlight, and across the gorge a steep cliff-face shone like a wall of green ice. Down in the far valley the long beam of a car’s headlights came and went, tentatively, like a blind man’s tapping stick. The distant white beam only made the countryside more lonely.

“Hadn’t you better put on your gown?” said Sarah. “There’s no point in getting pneumonia.”

He had been so used to her looking after him, he picked up the gown now and put it on almost automatically. “Is there someone else? How long’s it been going on?”

“There’s no one else.” She was sitting up in bed now, propped against the pillow. One arm was folded across her breast, the hand holding the elbow of the other arm. She was smoking, much more calmly than he was, not attacking the cigarette as he was but almost enjoying it. “I’ve been faithful to you that way. Which was more than you were to me.”

He didn’t answer that.

“I’m sorry, Greg. Really. This hasn’t been much of a homecoming for you.”

“Yeah, that’s the bit that worries me, the spoiled homecoming.” There was sarcasm, but little edge of anger to his voice. He was still too let-down to feel anything but shock. His voice was carrying on automatically for him: it seemed to know the words for the part: “Do you want a divorce?”

“That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Though I don’t know what grounds we can have. Unless I leave you and you sue for restitution of conjugal rights, or whatever it is. Then the next step is desertion, I think. You can get a divorce on those grounds.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it,” she said. “Eighteen months.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and went back and sat on the bed beside her. “Look, hon, are you sure you’re right about this? What makes you so sure you don’t love me? Maybe once you get used to having me around again, you’ll find you’re wrong.”

She drew on the cigarette slowly. The action suddenly made him angry, the one small thing needed to root him out of his shock, and he snatched the cigarette from her. He dropped it in the ashtray on the table beside the bed, grinding it savagely with the ball of his thumb. She looked at him for a moment, her eyes and lips narrowing, and he waited for one of her cutting remarks, one of the few things about her that had sometimes annoyed him. Then she seemed to make an effort and the tenseness went out of her face.

“This is going to surprise you, Greg,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking back and I wonder if I ever loved you. Really loved you, that is.”

He wanted to hit her, all at once hating her, but he knew dimly this was one time when he had to control himself. He was on his own here in this, the biggest crisis their marriage had ever had, and she wouldn’t help him as she had in the past. This was all his burden, and giving way to anger wouldn’t help at all. “You’re just making things up now. Why can’t you be honest? Are you trying to hurt me or something?”

“I’ve already done that. I can see that. Why should I try and rub it in? I told you I didn’t write and tell you while you were away because I wanted to hurt you the least I could.”

“Well, what do you mean, you wonder if you ever loved me? Why did you marry me?”

“I did love you in a sort of a way, I suppose. But not in the way that keeps marriages together. I think that was the trouble, Greg. Getting married. If we hadn’t married, I might have gone on loving you. The trouble with you, Greg, is you’ve never grown up. It often appeals to a girl when she hasn’t got to live with it every day. It appealed to me. I’ll admit. I always enjoyed seeing you, you were such good company. And you knew how to pay attention to a girl—even if you sometimes had trouble taking your eyes off other women.” Then she said, “That was one of the main troubles, Greg. The other women. When you had gone I started to think about them——”

“You’re not giving me any credit for having changed since those days.”

“Have you?”

He was silent, unsure himself if he had changed, remembering how much he had looked forward to women’s company when he had gone on leave to Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem and Beirut, and after a moment Sarah went on: “I don’t want to have to look after you all my life, Greg. Always having to hold our marriage together. A marriage, a good solid one, shouldn’t need holding together. It’s not some jerry-built thing that any wind can blow over. Your mother and father’s marriage, my people too, their marriages have never needed holding together. Some girls enjoy the mother role, I mean towards their husbands, but I don’t. I’d like to be a mother, but I want children, not a grown man! And what if we did have kids, Greg? Could I depend on you to help me care for them? All your life, Greg, you’ve waited for things to fall into your lap, and when they haven’t you’ve just turned around and borrowed off someone else.” For the first time she lost her calmness, and passed her hand wearily across her eyes. When she took away her hand there were tears on her cheeks. “I tried, Greg, you’ve no idea how I tried! But it’s just no use, no use at all.”