Staring at the Sun Read online

  Eventually, he let go of her wrists. But over the following months he returned to the question of her “seeing a specialist.” Jean agreed to the evasive terminology, though inwardly she rehearsed phrases she had read while Sun-Up Prosser snored in the next room. Maladjustment of the organs, she remembered, and congestion of the womb. Congestion—she thought of men coming to unblock the drains, and shuddered. Barren, that was the proper word, the biblical word. Barren. And barrenness. Barrenness made her think of the Gobi desert, which made her think of Uncle Leslie. Don’t let the club head drop or there’ll be more sand flying than on a windy day in the Gobi desert. She saw a golfer in a bunker, hacking, hacking, hacking with his club, and the ball never coming out.

  At times, though, she wondered if her condition was quite the failing Michael obviously thought it. During their courtship she had found herself tensing whenever he mentioned children. One thing at a time, she had thought. And then her experience of the first thing had made her a little sceptical about the second.

  Perhaps she was unnatural, rather than barren. Or as well as being barren. Abysmally stupid, barren and unnatural: that was how she must look from the outside. It felt different from the inside. She could shrug off being barren and unnatural, if that was how people found her. As for being abysmally stupid, she could see Michael’s point, but she could also see beyond it. It seemed to Jean that intelligence wasn’t as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person’s company and yet wicked in another’s. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence. Though Michael was her husband, who had led her from virginity and adolescence to womanhood and maturity (or so the world presumed), who had protected her physically and financially, who had awarded her the name of Curtis in exchange for that of Serjeant, he had strangely failed to give her confidence. In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent. It seemed an unkind turn of events: first Michael made her less intelligent, and then he despised her for being what he had made her.

  Perhaps he had made her barren too. Was that possible? Anything, she thought, was possible. So the next time they argued about her defectiveness, she looked up, held his eye and quickly, before the courage went, said, “I’ll go if you go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll go if you go.”

  “Jean, don’t talk like a child. Repeating yourself is not the same as explaining yourself.”

  “Perhaps you’re the one that’s defective.”

  That was when he hit her. It was, in fact, the only time in their life together that he did, and it was less a punch than an awkward round-arm cuff which landed where her shoulder joined her neck; but she was not to know this at the time. As she ran from the room, words seemed to descend on her from all angles. Bitch, she heard for the first time, and imbecile, and woman, this last word beaten and sharpened until it had an edge for slashing with.

  The words continued to be thrown after she had shut the door behind her. But its presence emptied them of meaning: two inches of close-fitting wood drained a violent anatomy of your character into mere noise. It felt as if Michael were throwing objects at her which all made the same sound as they hit the door: was that a plate, an inkwell, a book, a knife, or a tomahawk hung with feathers and still sharp despite its many previous victims? She couldn’t tell.

  She was grateful for this, as she thought back over the incident in the next few days, as she accepted Michael’s apologies and declined his caresses. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me: why did people formulate such proverbs unless they feared all too accurately that the opposite was the case? Pains healed, she knew (that first wound in her stomach had gone within the hour), but words festered. Woman, Michael had shouted at her, screwing the sound up into a ball first so that he could throw it farther and more accurately. Woman, where the word itself carried no venom, but the poison was all in the tone. Woman, two anodyne syllables which he redefined for her: all that exasperates me was the new meaning.

  After that, they stopped discussing children. Over the years they continued to make love, perhaps once a month, or at least whenever Michael seemed to want to; but Jean felt passive about the whole business. When she thought of Michael and sex she imagined an overfilling water tank which occasionally had to be drained; it didn’t have to be done too often, it wasn’t exactly a nuisance, it was just part of running the house. As for herself and sex, she preferred not to think about it. Sometimes she pretended to more pleasure than she felt; this was only polite. She didn’t find sex funny anymore; she just found it ordinary. And all those phrases she had once learnt—silly, exciting phrases which had seemed to flirt with her—now came from a very long time ago, from the island of childhood. The island you could not leave without getting wet. She thought of two wave patterns meeting at right angles, and felt a little guilty. As for those slogans—the one about the curve of normal desire and the other about the feeble and transient upwelling in women suffering from fatigue and overwork—they seemed like faded graffiti briefly glimpsed on the wall of a country bus shelter.

  She didn’t need any Alpine air; and the fatigue she suffered from was not physical in origin. She kept house for Michael; she gardened; she owned a succession of pets, aware that the village considered them substitutes for children. She kept a pig that escaped and was found eating the cat’s-eyes in the middle of the road. She had dealings with secret animals, the ones who would come only when she was out of the way. At times, lying in bed, she would hear the hedgehog rattling its jampot lid of milk as if in thanks, and she would smile.

  For twenty years she maintained a normal part in village life; she took tea; she helped, she donated; she became, in her own mind, rather anonymous. She wasn’t miserable, though she was scarcely happy; she was well enough liked, without joining any of the village’s central conspiracies; she was, she slowly decided, rather ordinary. Michael certainly thought her ordinary. But there were worse things than that. As a child, she had sometimes thought she might become special, or at least wife to someone special; but then all children thought that, didn’t they? Extra flesh softened the angles of her face. A low, grey sky, in which single clouds could scarcely be discerned, always threatened rain.

  At times, over the years, she wondered if Michael might be having an affair. There were no lipsticked collars or furtive photographs, there was no hurried replacing of the telephone; but then, given Michael’s profession, there probably wouldn’t be. The only evidence came from the way he sometimes looked at her, as if peering down from eighteen thousand feet towards a smoking merchantman. She never asked; he never volunteered. Who could tell about another life?

  Her parents died. When she was thirty-eight her periods stopped, a matter for neither surprise nor regret: her existence, she felt, had long since finished defining itself. Did she sometimes want to scream in the middle of the night? Who didn’t? She had only to look at the lives of other women to realize things could be worse. Her first grey hair appeared, and she did nothing about it.

  Almost a year after her periods stopped she became pregnant. She made the doctor test her twice before accepting his decision, and explained the surprise this information caused her. He replied that such things were not unknown and murmured with a polite vagueness about trains to London. Jean thanked him briskly and went home to tell Michael.

  She wasn’t really aware that she was testing him, though in later years admitted to herself that she must have been. At first he was cross, in an unfamiliar way, almost cross with himself; perhaps he wanted to accuse her of having an affair but couldn’t, either because of the improbability or because of his own bad conscience. Then he said firmly that it was too late for them to have children and that she should get rid of it. Then he remarked on what a strange turn of events it had b
een after twenty-odd years. Then he elaborated, declaring the whole story pretty rum and chuckling at the surprise the chaps would get. Then a relaxed, bovine expression came into his face, and he went silent; perhaps he was playing out short scenes of paternity in his head. Finally, he turned to Jean and asked what she thought about it all.

  “Oh, I’m going to have the baby and leave you.” She had not intended to say anything like this at all; but somehow the words, spoken out of instinct and with no conscious courage, failed to surprise her. They seemed not to surprise Michael either; he just laughed.

  “There’s mah lass,” he said in a funny accent she would normally have found embarrassing; now, she just found it puzzling. Michael clearly didn’t understand anything about anything.

  “But I expect I’ll leave you and then have the baby. I expect I’ll do it that way round.” Again, the words failed to surprise her; now that she was rehearsing them, they seemed not merely irrefutable, but almost a banality. She felt no fear either, even though she expected Michael to be cross.

  Instead, he patted her on the arm, said “We’ll talk about it in the morning,” and started telling her about a series of clothing thefts from a local department store which had finally been cleared up. A two-way mirror had been installed in a ladies’ changing room, and an alarmed detective-sergeant, crouching in a cupboard, had apprehended a transvestite shoplifter stuffing blouses into his bra.

  She wanted to say, Look, it’s not really anything to do with you; the decision, that is. I want a more difficult life, that’s all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It’s to do with me, not you; so don’t worry.

  But she wouldn’t be able to say any of this. There was a decorum to be observed, like the decorum about whether or not Michael had affairs. You had to obey certain rules, permit certain angers, respect certain forms of lying; you had to appeal to feelings in the other person which both of you pretended were there even if you suspected they weren’t. This, of course, was part of what she meant by a second-rate life.

  She realized that Michael might be hurt by her departure; but this awareness, instead of urging her to stay, made her slightly despise him. She felt no pride at such a reaction, but couldn’t deny it. For the first time in their marriage she knowingly had a certain power over him. Perhaps power always encouraged contempt—perhaps this was why he had thought her abysmally stupid. If so, there was all the more reason for leaving.

  She wanted to go at once, but didn’t. It was best for the child, she decided, if it slept through its first months without too many dinning reverberations from the life ahead, the life outside; better not to start its troubles before she had to. And there was a little farewell consideration to be had for Michael. If she vanished now, a couple of months pregnant, the village would mutter that she had run away to join a lover, some tea-dance gigolo or circus strongman. Whereas if she left with the child, or in late pregnancy, they wouldn’t know what to believe. Perhaps they’d think she had gone mad. Women often went mad, it was said, after giving birth; no doubt the probability was greater in a woman of her age.

  Neighbours told her that a late child was a blessed child. The doctor warned her quietly about mongolism, and mentioned trains to London again. Michael watched her warily, moving between boyish self-congratulation and unfocussed fear. She sensed this fear, and did nothing to allay it; instead, she used it. She knew that pregnant women were meant to turn in on themselves, that mother and unborn child set up an autonomous republic, and that the old magic of the tribe taught men to behave differently as their wives swelled—taught them an awe which frequently expressed itself in soppiness.

  So Jean allowed herself to appear more inward than she really felt. She began to behave capriciously as well, since this was half expected of her. Sometimes, indeed, she did feel capricious—the rich, mealy smell as she mixed the chicken feed made her want to put the bucket to her lips and take a swig; but she didn’t mention these normal oddities of her condition. Instead, on long afternoon walks beneath a dull grey sky, she practised a wider capriciousness. Deliberately, she behaved against her character and against her feelings. She found herself able to express anger and boredom with Michael, although she never displayed these emotions when she really felt them; she merely tried them out when they might have been appropriate.

  Pregnancy seemed to nudge her into wider expectations, and her easy capriciousness whispered like a secret breeze that character need not be fixed. She did not particularly enjoy this phase of dishonesty, but thought it important; she was not yet brave enough to be completely honest. Perhaps that would come with her new life, her second life. She remembered Uncle Leslie’s disappointing hyacinths. Well, maybe a tee could sprout. After all, it was made of wood.

  Under the flat, uncommitted sky of that autumn, with a soft wind parting her mackintosh and showing off her belly, she would sometimes think of Sergeant-Pilot Prosser. His posting had come through a few weeks before the wedding. He had stood by the creosoted gate with the sunrise motif, shifting from one foot to the other, occasionally jerking his head down to check that his case was safely underneath his arm; finally, he smiled without looking at her, and stamped off. Jean had wanted to ask him to the wedding, but Michael had frowned. What had become of Prosser? Jean looked up at the sky, half expecting it to answer.

  Prosser had been brave. He said he was windy, he said he was burnt, but that wasn’t the point. There was no courage without fear, and without admitting fear. Men’s courage was different from women’s courage. Men’s courage lay in going out and nearly getting killed. Women’s courage—or so everyone said—lay in endurance. Men showed courage in violent bouts, women in patient stretches. This fitted their natures: men were more prickly, more bad-tempered than women. Perhaps you had to be cross to be brave. Men went out into the world and were brave; women stayed at home and showed courage by enduring their absence. Then, Jean thought wryly, the men came home and were bad-tempered, and the women showed courage by enduring their presence.

  She was seven months pregnant when she left Michael; and that morning she shopped for him. There would be difficulties, no doubt, with things like … well, income tax; but whereas earlier the fretful half-awareness of difficulties might have prevented her departure for years, now such things seemed unimportant. She didn’t feel wiser in pregnancy, just that her angle of vision had changed; though this in itself might be a form of wisdom. She thought of other marriages in the village and was relieved hers hadn’t been worse. Mrs. Lester, who sometimes didn’t leave the house for days if the bruising was bad, had once said to her, “I know he’s a bit difficult to control, but who’d do his washing if I left?” To Mrs. Lester, the logic had a melancholy perfection; and at the time Jean had nodded agreement and thought that Mrs. Lester was a bit simple, though not that simple.

  The village women (and Jean did not exclude herself from their number) managed their husbands. They fed them, waited on them, cleaned and washed for them, deferred to them; they accepted men’s interpretation of the world. In return, they got money, a roof, security, children and irreversible promotion in the hierarchy of the village. This seemed a good enough deal; and having got it, they patronized their husbands behind their backs, calling them children, talking of their little ways. The husbands, for their part, thought they managed their wives: you had to be firm but fair, they said, but if you let them know who was boss, gave them the housekeeping regular and didn’t let on how much you were keeping back for beer money, then things would work out all right.

  The partner who left was always the guilty one. “She just upped and offed”; “he walked right out on her.” To leave was to betray; to leave was to give up your rights; to leave showed weakness of character. Stick it out; rough with the smooth; devil you know; ups and downs; can’t last forever. How often had she heard such phrases, cheerfully delivered and cheerfully believed?
Running away, people said, showed a lack of courage. Jean wondered if the opposite might be the case.

  Abysmally stupid, Michael had said. If I’m abysmally stupid, you can’t have been too bright to marry me. That’s what she should have replied. Or rather, yes I am abysmally stupid to have put up with you for so long. Except that it hadn’t been as bad as all that—Mrs. Lester had had it a lot worse. But when Michael had yelled woman at her, and the word had screamed its shrapnel round the room, she should have quietly replied, man. Meaning: of course you’re behaving like this, it must be hard for you too, I pity you. Men should be pitied, Jean thought; pitied, and left. Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren’t. They weren’t even one of the questions.

  I said I would. That was all she put in the note. She had to leave one, otherwise Michael might get the wrong idea and start dragging the gravel ponds. But she didn’t have to give explanations; and above all, she mustn’t apologize. I said I would. The words, on a blue-lined sheet of writing paper left on the kitchen table, were weighted down with her two rings: silver with a single garnet for engagement (from Michael’s mother), platinum for wedding. As the train took her away, she repeated to herself, I said I would. For too long she had listened to, acquiesced in, and herself pronounced a we she didn’t believe. Now it was I. Though soon enough, she supposed, it would be another we; but a different one. Mother and child: what sort of a we was that? She dug in her handbag and found a thin strip of tin. JEAN SERJEANT XXX, it said reassuringly.

  She was unconscious during Gregory’s birth. It was better that way, they said; woman of your age, possible complications. She didn’t object. When she came round they told her she had a beautiful boy. “Is he”—she seemed to be reaching into that part of her brain which was still asleep—“Is he … defective?” “Perish the thought, Mrs. Serjeant,” came the reply, and the tone was scolding, as if less than perfect children reflected on the hospital. “Shame on you. He’s got all his working parts.”