‘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 andMadam Ambassadorwere getting altogether far too fond.’
‘You are joking!For that, for nothing, you didthis…?’
‘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 makesyouright, 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 somethingwrongwith her.Maybe Doris, she thought.There was something different about her, since Germany.
The gong went again.
Chapter Forty
