sough of chances missed, the memory of a relationship you allowed to starve to death through inattention, the place you might have been that stares reproachfully through the window of the place you are. But such resentments, born of the slow experience of how each choice must bury more potential than it fulfils, were always seeking incarnation. Then their tormentingness could be given shape, their slow corrosion be dynamic. In the shared closeness of a marriage, it was very easy to exorcise the growing awareness of the inevitable failures of the self to live near to its dreams into the nature of the other, to let the lost parts of yourself find malignant form in unearned antipathy to the other one’s behaviour.
It had happened to them, not dramatically but in small, daily ways. But then habit commits its enormities quite casually, like a guard in an extermination camp looking forward to his tea. Each day Betty sensed something in herself she didn’t like but couldn’t prevent from happening. She knew that what presented themselves to her as random thoughts were taking careful note, like shabby spies compiling a dossier against him.
One reiterated secret accusation concerned his propensity for violence. She knew it was grossly exaggerated in Thornbank. He had said to her once, Thank God, one fight avoids ten years of scuffles.’ He had confessed to her that he had never been in a fight without experiencing rejection symptoms of fear afterwards, a shivering withdrawal, a determination not to do the same again. She had seen that at first hand. Once he had struck her, one open-handed blow on the side of the head after – she admitted to herself afterwards – she had gone on at him for hours. His disgust at himself had been alarming, an almost tribal shame as of a native who has disturbed the graves of his ancestors. After her elaborate description of how far he fell short of being a man, she had stopped and begun to worry about his stillness. In the end, it had taken her two days to coax him like a small boy out of his self-contempt. He had promised her that it would never happen again, and it never had.
She believed she knew the truth of his reputation for violence. When he was young, it had been a gesture he knew how to make, which earned him an easy acceptance in the rough context he was born in, and it had remained something he could never believe in seriously. He had never hit the boys, even in a token way. Yet in the moments when her frustration with her own life left her with no charity for him, a voice in her that was like an echo of her mother would say he was a violent man.
The housing scheme they lived in, too, she would sometimes use against him. She liked their council house but she would keep handy in her mind her awareness of the haplessness of neighbours, the aimless family quarrels that they had two doors down, the way several people whom they knew organised their lives with all the precision of a road accident.
But all her accusations were subsumed under the one basic charge: he was wasting himself. He let days happen to him, that was all. Somehow, although less effectively and with increasing difficulty, he still provided a decent enough home, saw that she and the children lived more or less all right. But he seemed to make that his only purpose, had a life but no sense of a career.
She had loved that in him when he was younger. But she sensed, around her, friends she had known at school constructing weatherproof lives for themselves against all the inclemencies of middle age and she and Dan still lived as if they didn’t know the weather would change. He had no ambition. Under the constant abrasion of that thought, something she had always known about him, and had liked, turned septic and became a constant irritation. At school he had given up an academic course because it separated him from his friends. At one time she thought she had understood. He loved being out on the streets. He was big and strong and wanted to be in about life. There had been something in that she had admired. But it looked a lot less attractive to her now.
Part of the reason was a transferred guilt she felt about herself. When they got married, she had given up university. He had wanted her to go on but she had lost belief in what she was doing, felt she was dealing with hothouse concerns that would wither into irrelevance if you took them out into the open air. But though the action had been hers, it had turned with time into an accusation against him, as if she had given him herself and he had failed to justify the gift.
She knew the sense of betrayal was mutual. The openness between them had diminished and she sensed him believing the blame for that was originally hers. She knew he felt that no matter what he did now it would be misconstrued, that she attributed motives to his actions he had never imagined being there, so that he sometimes called her Mrs Freud. It must have felt to him that whatever small present he tried to give her, of a compliment or a generous remark, it was held cautiously to her ear and shaken, as if it might explode. He had once said to her in total frustration, Jesus Christ! Ah was tryin’ to be nice. If a fucking gorilla gave you a banana, ye would take it. It might be a gorilla. But it’s still a gift.’
These days she found herself wondering more and more what was wrong with the gift he had tried to give her. It wasn’t that he had welshed on the giving. Perhaps it was connected to the fact that he had from the beginning seemed to her potentially more than himself, to be in some way a future (not a past and not a present) that had somehow never been fulfilled. There was a dream in her he had never realised. The irony that hurt her was that the dream was perhaps inseparable from him. But perhaps it wasn’t. Lately, she had been thinking that maybe she had been too harsh to her own background. It wasn’t that she was in any danger of agreeing with her mother. But perhaps there was another form of that kind of life that she could live. The offer had been made to her.
Automatically, she lifted her coffee cup and found that the remains of her coffee were cold. The noises from the back green returned to her awareness. Putting down the magazine her mind had long ago abandoned, she crossed to the window and looked out. Seeing him preoccupied in playing with the boys, she found it easy to admit how much she still felt for him. She saw his attractiveness fresh and in the wake of the thought some of the good memories surfaced.
She remembered him coming in one night when he had been given a rise in wages. They were renting a small flat, waiting for their name to come to the top of the council housing list. She had felt cumbersomely pregnant with who was to be Raymond. Dan came in, glowing like a new minting, and smiled and shuffled his shoulders gallously in that way that could still make her feel susceptible. The memory of him then was something she wouldn’t lose.
‘What’s for the tea, Missus Wumman?’ he had said.
‘Fish.’
‘Wrong.’
‘How? It’s fish.’
‘No, it’s not.’
He danced briefly in front of her.
‘Ye know what it is? Ye want to know what it is? It’s Steak Rossini. Or Sole Gouj-thingummy-jig. That’s fish right enough, isn’t it? Or a lot of other French names that Ah can’t pronounce. It’s anythin’ ye fancy. Washed down with the wine of your choice. As long as it’s not Asti Spumante. Ye can put yer fish in the midden, Missus.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
Crossing towards the tiger lily she had bought, he proceeded to festoon it with notes.
‘We have here an interesting species. The flowering fiver plant. A variety of mint. Heh-heh.’ He turned to her and smiled. ‘Ah’ve got ma rise. We’re worth a fortune.’
‘That’ll be right, Dan. We need to save the extra. For furniture. When we get the house.’
‘That’ll be right, Betty. Trust me. Ah’ll sort that out when it comes. Tonight’s just us. We’re for a header into the bevvy, Missus. A wee bit of the knife and forkery in nice surroundings. Here, you been eatin’ too much again?’ He had one arm round her, stroking her stomach with the other. ‘You’ve got a belly like a drum. Ye want to see about that.’
The doctor says he knows what’s doing it.’
‘Right. Change into one of those tents you’ve got in the wardrobe. An’ I’ll hire a lorry to transport you to the restaurant of your dreams.’ He put his head against her stomach. ‘Okay in there? You fancy going out?’
He straightened up. She hadn’t moved. He turned her