The Heart of the Country Read online

  ‘Marion?’ Natalie had never heard her name before. Truly. It’s most often a bolt from the blue which strikes down a good wife and mother, especially when she’s economically dependent. Don’t let me frighten you – unless it’s into getting a training and a job. You know what the statistics for these things are? You know how many marriages end in divorce? One in three. And a recent survey shows that a woman’s standard of living falls on average by 42 per cent after divorce, and a man’s actually rises… Enough!

  ‘Marion?’

  ‘Marion Hopfoot,’ said Hilary. ‘She’s his secretary. He’s been seeing a lot of her. That is to say, not just in office hours, which would be natural, but after hours as well. Well, you must have known. Oh. No? Oh dear! But Marion told us it was all okay, you knew all about it and didn’t mind. And one of the fellers told me you and that antique dealer up by the Castle – but that’s none of my business. Well, every marriage is different, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Natalie.

  ‘But this morning, when Mr Harris didn’t turn up, and Marion didn’t either, we got to wondering and one of the technicians called her home and Marion’s mother answered. She said Marion had left a note saying she was running off to Spain with Harry Harris. And it must be true because she’d taken her passport. So everyone reckoned that was that. They called the police because of the unpaid wages.’

  ‘Police?’ said Natalie.

  ‘And then you rang, Mrs Harris. So I reckon that’s that. Sixteen people out of a job, if you don’t count Marion Hopfoot.’

  Natalie sat on the kitchen table, swinging her left leg idly and thinking of Hilary’s frog eyes and that Hilary’s bosom was over the top but unable to take in all that much of what Hilary actually said. She felt like a cobra which has swallowed a donkey and finds it too large to digest and too awkward to spit out. She couldn’t somehow make sense of anything.

  ‘There’s hardly any petrol in the car,’ she observed.

  ‘So?’ inquired Hilary. Hilary was having to do without two weeks’ wages and none at all in lieu of notice, and felt that Natalie was not the only one with troubles. ‘And I’ve got no money and Harry doesn’t believe in credit cards – not for me, anyhow – though he’s got a gold American Express. There’s enough petrol for this afternoon, I expect, but how am I going to get the children to school tomorrow morning?’

  How indeed? Of such boring problems are tragedies made. Natalie, the perfect mother, the tidy dresser, she who turned up at school every morning with her tights unladdered and her face properly made up and a pretty little scarf round her neck, bringing out the colour of her somewhat blank blue eyes – I tell you, little Mrs Tippy-toes was sleepwalking, poor thing, and had been for 15 years or so, ever since she married Harry Harris. Only now she suddenly perceived she might not be able to get to the school gates at all. And this, it suddenly came to her, might well be the wages of sin. The first thing a woman who suffers misfortune feels is guilty. My fault, she is convinced. Something I did wrong. She may well be right.

  And Natalie had a great deal to be guilty about, when you come to think of it. Consider her sins that very day.

  The sin of lust: as envisaged with Arthur. She was looking forward to it. It’s as bad to contemplate it as to do it.

  The sin of envy: envying Flora’s looks, and making her dust an already dusted sideboard. Mahogany – veneered, but sealed with polyurethane and very, very shiny.

  The sin of pride: despising Hilary because she had a too-large bosom (by Natalie’s standards) and frog eyes.

  The sin of sloth: not bothering to know what was going on in Harry’s life, heart and bank account; asking Pauline to deliver her groceries, instead of collecting them herself. Pauline was older than Natalie and had a harder life,

  The sin of gluttony: buying smoked salmon for dinner. Scottish, not Canadian. Twice the price, and pity the poor fish! Followed up by chicken. Horrid white stringy stuff, from a mangy bird which lived and died to a box.

  The sin of avarice: underpaying Flora on Harry’s instructions. The less she paid Flora, the more pairs of shoes Natalie could buy. Natalie loved shoes: they were her extravagance. She owned eighteen pairs, and fifteen of these had high heels, so when the hard times came she had only three for getting about in, and two of those were sandals.

  And the special sin of splashing the poor.

  You may not know about this one: it’s a modern sin. It’s what happens, say, on the School Run. If you’re driving the children to school on a rainy day and you pass too close to the mothers and children who don’t have cars, who have to walk, and you drench them with the mud of your passing. We are here in this world to be scavengers: to pick up the dregs and dust of creation and save what’s possible and render it back to the Almighty, not to hang about carelessly, adding to the mud, the trouble and confusion. We are meant to be salvagers, not wreckers.

  Natalie had sinned badly that morning, taking her children to school (private, of course), driving too close to Sonia, an unsupported mother, who, with Edwina (4), Bess (5) and Teresa (6) filed along the busy road in the rain, as close in to the prickly hedge as they could, for fear of sudden death on their way to a school (not private, of course) which all three children hated, but which the law obliged them to attend. Natalie simply didn’t see them: she didn’t even notice they were there.

  Alice, Natalie’s little girl, noticed. Alice said, ‘It’s raining. Why don’t we give them a lift?’

  Ben said: ‘You’re so stupid, Alice. We don’t give lifts to people like that.’

  But Natalie just said, peering through a misty windscreen, which neither wipers nor demister at full blast would clear: ‘Do be quiet, children,’ without actually hearing a word they were saying. In her defence it was a nasty morning for driving, but that is not the kind of excuse the Prime Mover likes to hear. He, after all, sends the rain. He worked in his mysterious way, and Sonia helped. She looked after the retreating five-door Volvo Estate. (Of course it was a Volvo. What else?) Jax the Alsatian, the Harris’ dog, looked back at Sonia and grinned. Even the dogs of the rich live better than do the new poor. The dogs ride; the poor walk, or go by bus. There are very few buses anymore in the countryside. The rich don’t take them. That means buses don’t, on the whole, make profits. So they have to be subsidized. But who’s going to subsidize them? The rich, who don’t need them or use them? Ho, ho!

  ‘God rot her,’ said Sonia aloud. ‘Rich bitch!’ Sonia had been born a nice round pleasant thing. Her life and times had turned her sour, so now she could deliver a curse or two, effectively. God heard. God sent his punishment on Natalie. Or was it the Devil? He forgave her other sins, but got her for this one. Natalie committed the sin of carelessly splashing Sonia. Sonia cursed her. Misfortune fell on Natalie. Cause and effect? Surely not. Let’s just say coincidence, and remind ourselves that the trouble at Harrix and in the Harris household long predated this particular event. Except of course God may send his punishments retrospectively. We may all of us be being punished now for sins we are about to commit. Time may not be as linear as we suppose.

  ‘What have I done?’ asked Natalie, pretty white sinful hand, used to exploring Arthur’s chest hairs, to her mouth. She addressed the universe as much as Hilary.

  Well, as I say, the wages of sin! There’s no telling. The day Natalie Harris splashed Sonia with mud was the day Harry Harris left for work in the morning and did not return home, ever. Some sins are obviously worse than others.

  The Pleasures of Adultery

  Pleasure I said, pleasure I meant. Adulterate means to spoil, to pollute. It also contains the sense of dilution by poison. It’s dropping a spot of cochineal into the white icing sugar and water mix and watching the colour spread – great streaks of vile red circling out with the first stir from that single central drop, gradually easing and diluting as you work into bland universal pink. So what (to change the metaphor, while keeping it domestic) if it’s like a blind tumbling right off its rol
ler when you tug, bringing down with it in a cloud of dust every concept of honour, dignity, integrity, fidelity or trust you ever had! So what if you can’t raise the blind, and have to stay in the dark for ever! It’s worth it. That’s what I think.

  Rot you, I said to Natalie. Rich bitch! Rot you. I, Sonia, cursed her. And her world fell down, clatter, clatter, clatter. Good!

  There, I have blown my cover. The ‘I’ who speaks to you is Sonia. In my quest for sanity and self-improvement I do my docile best, as instructed by my psychiatrist, to objectivize myself and see myself as others see me – that is to say in the third person – when and as I enter into Natalie’s story. In Chapter One I reckon I just about succeeded. But ‘The Pleasures of Adultery’ have clearly been too much for me: in my excitement I have revealed all. Well, let’s get on. The tale is about Natalie, not me. A writer’s exercise in ego reduction! I do apologize for the ‘good!’ at the end of the previous paragraph. One should wish no one harm. But it’s what I felt, so there it stays, unedited.

  The first thing Natalie did after Hilary left in dudgeon was go round and see Arthur. It was her afternoon for visiting, anyway. Thursday. Arthur’s wife Jane went round to one of the local schools to ‘hear reading’ every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon between 2 and 3.30. Not much time, you might think, for Natalie and Arthur to do what they liked to do and still have time for a little talk about this and that, and a courtship ritual or so. A murmur in the other’s ear about life, love, happiness, remorse, the state of their own and the other’s soul. That, if you ask me, is the main pleasure of adultery. Not the sex, but the painful, pleasurable examination of the psyche, that acknowledgement of sin which accompanies the sex. Marriage declines into what’s for dinner? Who’s going to pay this month’s mortgage? Is buggery okay for you? When all we really want to think about is God and eternity. Guilt brings us nearer to God. Natalie, Mrs Tippy-toes, trit-trotting on her little high heels into Arthur’s shop, (she wore absurd shoes for someone living in the country: as if her natural habitat was Bond Street) was doing her best to get nearer to God.

  You believe that? You’ll believe anything.

  Arthur specialized in old English oak and oriental antiquities: a peculiar mixture but one which worked well enough in Eddon Gurney. His wife Jane dusted and cleaned around, and when Arthur was out kept shop. Sometimes, when she was really angry and upset by Arthur, she would drop and break something and there’d be a few hundred pounds down the drain. Arthur looked on it as a kind of tax he had to pay to the God of Marriage. He fucked, she dropped. It was inevitable. He sighed but did not scold. It kept the balance between them. Jane would clean the little back room behind the shop; smooth the covers on the chaise longue, shake out the pillows, hoover and straighten the rag rug, polish the register grate in which, in winter, Arthur liked to keep a coal fire going. It was in this room that Arthur did his books and added up his VAT, and where he retired when customers came in he couldn’t stand the look of. Jane had a pretty good idea this was where he brought his women, but she cleaned and dusted it all the same.

  Jane and Arthur lived above the shop. They had an excellent view of the stone walls of Gurney Castle. Jane was a little, pretty, anxious woman: she jumped if anything startled her. She was too thin: she looked as if a harsh word would make her snap in the middle. Arthur was tall, big, broad, serene, handsome. A villain: of course he was a villain: but his chest was large enough for at least two or three troubled women to lay their heads upon – it seemed wasted otherwise. What could Jane do? She couldn’t not go out, ever, for fear of what Arthur would do in her absence. She did try for many years to leave the house unexpectedly, to keep altering her shopping-visiting routine, as those who live in danger of kidnapping do, but a pattern kept emerging even in her unpredictability. Or else it was that Arthur could read her mind? She’d say on a Wednesday evening she was going to stay overnight with her mother who needed cheering up. On Thursday lunchtime she’d come back and there was just that feel in Arthur’s back room: a butterfly hair clip under the rag rug: once a pair of bikini pants stuffed in a Venetian punch bowl –

  ‘They must have been there when I bought it – overpriced anyway’ – was all Arthur said.

  So really she gave up. She took up the Tuesday and Thursday work at the school – unpaid of course, but someone has to hear the beginners, and the teacher sure as hell doesn’t have the time, what with thirty or so little faces staring up in every class – and Jane and Arthur had no children of their own, and Jane loved children, loved them – and took some comfort from the fact that Arthur always made love to her on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Sex begets more sex. Made love, I said, not fucked. Arthur loved his wife. Otherwise he might not have bothered to torment her so and she’d have been an altogether plumper and younger-looking woman, who warmed her hands by the fire and laid her head on Arthur’s chest. Jane wondered who it was who visited. She had thought it might be Natalie Harris but when Natalie asked her and Arthur to dinner at Dunbarton, out of the blue, she decided it couldn’t be. If she was Arthur’s secret woman she wouldn’t have the nerve.

  Wouldn’t she just!

  Anyway, that Thursday afternoon Natalie went into Arthur’s shop in quite a state. Now Natalie was very much alone in the world. Both her parents were dead. Her father had been in the air force: he’d been forty when she was born, her mother thirty-five. The family had moved from one air-force base to another throughout the world. Her father had died of bone cancer: nothing to do, the authorities swore, with the fact that he was on the maintenance side of the air-force business, and his speciality the nuclear missile-carrying capacity of conventional aircraft. And God knows what his fingers had dabbled in since 1946, or what warning bells and flashing red lights he had ignored in the pursuance of his duty.

  Be that as it may, he was dead by fifty-five and his wife died of throat cancer fairly soon after. Natalie seemed healthy enough; just parentless and friendless. She’d been to twelve schools throughout her childhood, and childhood friends just hadn’t had a chance to stick. She was halfway through secretarial college when she was sent for work experience to temp at Harrix, then assembling not home computers but digital watches, in East London. Harry took her out a few times and then proposed, and she accepted. It had not even been a good secretarial college. Natalie could arrange flowers and man the front office, but she couldn’t shorthand-type. Or was it wouldn’t? She was bright as a button, pretty as a picture and just plain stunned: hit hard on the head by loss and loneliness. If now, unloved by Harry, she laid her head on Arthur’s chest, who was to blame her? Not me: all I blame her for is splashing me on the way to school that morning. That I do find hard to forgive. Even orphans should take a look at the world outside and notice what’s going on.

  ‘I suppose you can’t pay my wages?’ Hilary had asked that Thursday morning when the wages of sin announced their intention of getting paid, and Natalie had shaken her head. How? Hilary had looked round the dream kitchen, and slid her foot over the parquet floor, and raised her eyebrows, just a little.

  ‘It’s not just your bad news,’ observed Hilary. ‘It’s all our bad news. Sixteen of us working up there at Harrix, not counting Marion Hopfoot, who never does a stroke anyway, and no wages for two weeks. Some of the men with mortgages! And if this job goes where are any of us going to find another one? You know what it’s like round here.’

  Natalie pondered.

  Natalie said, presently, ‘The last thing Harry said to me this morning was that he’d see me at six-thirty. So I’m just going to carry on as usual, and at six-thirty this evening he’ll turn up, and explain everything.’

  ‘You are a fool!’ Hilary had banged on a kitchen cupboard as she spoke and the cups and plates inside trembled. ‘Of course he’s not coming back. The petty cash is empty. I rang the bank: he went round to collect the wages all right, first thing, and he had to argue and fight for them, from what I hear; then he just disappeared. He’s gone. Done a bunk.’

 
‘There’s no need to get so excited,’ said Natalie. ‘If the bank’s proving so difficult, he’s probably changed to another. My husband is always changing banks. In fact I expect that’s where he’s gone. To Bath, or Bristol. He’ll be back!’

  “You’re mad!’ said Hilary, banging away, bosom bouncing.

  ‘We had a half-a-million-pound order coming in, and he borrowed on the strength of it, and then the order didn’t come through. No bank’s going to look at him after that. Mrs Harris, I repeat, your husband has done a bunk.’

  ‘Um,’ said Natalie politely, and Hilary had left, without so much as being offered a cup of anything. Natalie had run out of instant coffee. Not surprising. These days it costs one pound ninety-five pence the jar. Monstrous! How hard it is to keep the mind off minor irritations even when major disasters threaten. Natalie bathed, changed into her best slip and knickers, and walked all the way up to Arthur’s to save petrol. But somehow not even the walk relaxed her.

  ‘Nat-Nat,’ said Arthur, drawing the unusually stiff-limbed but silkily clad Natalie into his back room. ‘It’s been a long long time since Tuesday.’ His suit was agreeably warm, and smelt of Antiquax, the best polish available for real wood. Natalie laid her head briefly upon his chest, in a kind of obeisance to past pleasures. But then, surprising herself as much as him, she drew back and away.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Time of the month?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mind.’ He didn’t either, unlike Harry, whom menstruation made nervous.

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘Just perhaps we shouldn’t go on doing this.’

  ‘Is it having Jane and me coming to dinner tonight? Is that the matter?’ he asked. ‘You mustn’t worry. I won’t give you away.’