Quicksand Read online

  A quarter of a mile before he reached home, however, the engine of his car spluttered and died. With a wrenching sense of his own stupidity he recalled that this morning, on the way to work, he had noted the low reading of the fuel gauge, but neglected to stop and fill up because he was late. Tonight he had been so wrought up he hadn't glanced at the instrument board.

  Cursing, he rolled to the side of the road and got out. He could do one of two things: walk home and collect the two-gallon can which ought to be in the car but wasn't, because the other morning he'd found there was no dry kindling to start the living-room fire with and he'd had to pour petrol on the hearth before he could make it burn; or walk back to the filling station in Yemble and borrow a can from there, which would mean driving back to collect the ten shillings deposit and wasting extra time.

  It would be quicker to go home.

  Of course, it would undermine the impact he hoped to make on Iris if he started by admitting he'd run out of petrol. Best of all would be if he could sneak around the back of the house without her noticing, collect the can from the kitchen, and slip away again, returning noisily with the car in another ten minutes.

  -- Lord, I wish I wasn't built the way I am! Running out of juice can happen to anybody, but I have to take it as an insult to my ego and I'm reduced to creeping around by back doors and hoping my wife won't notice. This isn't how I thought marriage would be. I expected to be able to share everything, even the big disheartening problems, spread their load and make them easier to carry.

  Nonetheless, shamefacedly, he put his plan into effect. When he quietly entered the gate, he was relieved to see Iris's silhouette on one of the leaded windows; she was talking on the phone. He heard a peal of laughter as he passed.

  -- Keep at it. I never thought I'd be glad that you can't enjoy a phone-call if it lasts less than twenty minutes.

  The kitchen door was unbolted. He tiptoed inside and found the can of petrol where he had left it. Just as he was about to pick it up, Iris's voice came to him clearly.

  "How do you spell that? . . . S -- W -- E . . . Swerd. Good, thanks a million."

  It was exactly as though someone had opened the top of his head and poured ice-water into his brain. The world froze.

  -- Oh my God. No, it can't be true. Not Swerd. Not that slick bastard with so many rich patients the law daren't touch him!

  Like a man in a dream he forgot what he was in the house for, forgot about returning to the car and making his triumphant official entry armed with his good news and the suggestion they go out to dinner. He walked to the door of the kitchen and flung it open.

  At the phone Iris exclaimed in alarm, spun on the stool where she sat to make long calls, and dropped a pencil tap-tap on the tiled floor. Her face went milky pale.

  "Paul!" she whispered. "Goodness, you gave me a fright!"

  And, with a creditable attempt at recovery, continued to the phone: "No, it's okay, Bertie. It's just Paul coming in. Thanks very much -- see you."

  She put down the hand-set and made to tear a sheet from the memo pad on the telephone table. Paul strode across the room and clamped his fingers on her wrist.

  "Paul! What's the matter? Stop it, you're hurting me!"

  Teeth so tightly together the strain on his jaw muscles made his ears sing, Paul roughly forced apart her grip on the paper. Crying out, she let go and retreated a couple of paces.

  "Paul, what's wrong?" she whimpered.

  "You damned well know what's wrong!" he snapped. Stomach knotted in anger, voice thick with anguish, he shook the incriminating note at her. She had copied down the name "N.J. Swerd" and a telephone number.

  "It's . . . it's nothing! It's a friend of Bertie's! He rang up just now and -- "

  "Liar," Paul said. "Dirty, rotten, stinking, silly liar. Do you think I don't know who Newton Swerd is? Christ, he's a standing bloody joke in every medical school in Britain, the dean of the Harley Street abortionists, five hundred guineas and no questions asked!"

  Her mask of prevarication crumpled. She began to edge away from him as though to avoid a physical attack; when she had managed to get the high back of a black oak chair between them she halted, teeth chattering.

  "How the hell did you think you could keep that sort of secret, living in the same house as a doctor? Did you imagine I wouldn't realise you were pregnant?"

  -- This isn't the way I wanted to start talking about my child. I wanted it to be a happy thing. How did I come to tie myself to this selfish, bossy, greedy woman Iris?

  Staring at her, his anger too cold to blur his eyes with tears, he read on her face that indeed she had hoped to deceive him until the job was done. She was trembling so much she had to cling to the chair for support.

  He waited. After another minute she regained enough self-possession to speak coherently.

  "What the hell do you mean by sneaking in and spying on me?"

  "Spying on you!"

  -- Where do women like her learn such effrontery? Raised to it, I suppose. Taught it in the nursery by starched nannies, the hands slapped when the lesson isn't properly absorbed!

  "God damn it, Iris, I want to be a father! Can't you get that through your head? I want children! It's natural to want children! Marriage is about children!"

  "It's easy enough for a man to say that! Men don't have to produce the babies!"

  "If you're that scared of childbearing you need treatment!"

  "Don't I get it from you every day of the bloody week? This isn't a home -- it's an asylum! You can't take off your professional hat long enough to behave like a normal husband!"

  "How in hell is a normal husband supposed to behave when his wife goes behind his back to her dirty-minded friends begging the name of an abortionist?"

  "What the hell makes you so sure it's your child I want to get rid of?"

  Uttered in a near-scream, the words filled the air like choking smoke. Behind the screen of their echo, Iris realised what she had said. First her hands clamped on the chair-back so tightly all the blood faded, leaving the skin dry and stark as parchment; then she began to shake in terror, her jaw moving up and down, so that her white teeth tapped and tapped at the brilliant red of her lower lip, the only remaining trace of colour in her whole face being the lipstick and mascara that she wore. Her eyelids had dropped like curtains to shut out the fearful world.

  At last the dam broke and the tears came. Blinded, she stumbled towards the stairs, while Paul stood stupidly in the middle of the floor, folding and refolding the sheet of paper with Swerd's name on it as though his hands had taken on independent life.

  "But I don't care," he heard himself say, and then when she showed no sign of having heard, repeated in a shout: "I don't care, you silly woman. I just . . . don't . . . care !"

  *29*

  Overhead there was a soft heavy plumping noise: Iris throwing herself on the bed, her usual refuge from a row. Paul stood with one hand on the banister rail, feeling the rage drain from him and leave nothing behind but a hollow emptiness.

  Shaking, he took out a cigarette, and realised when he had finally got it to his lips why the job had been so difficult: he was still holding the scrap of paper on which Iris had written Swerd's number. With conscious theatricality he rolled it into a taper and thrust it at the embers of the fire. It caught. He raised the flame of his cigarette and let the rest of the note fall among the ashes.

  -- What can I do if she persists? It's not in my nature to make threats and carry them out. I could say that if she goes ahead I'll report the matter to the GMC and the police, and where would it get me? What weight will Paul Fidler's word carry against the famous Newton Swerd and his two tame psychiatrists certifying that the child would "permanently impair the health of the mother?"

  He drew on the cigarette with quick ragged puffs.

  -- It'd be grounds for divorce. . . . But I don't want to be divorced. If someone asked why not, when Iris can behave like this, I wouldn't be able to explain, but it's somewhere in the fact
that I don't want to have to start all over again at that adolescent business of picking up and making a good impression on and wearing down the resistance of . . .

  At that point his thinking became too incoherent to form words. He waited, mind blank; eyes fixed on the fire, until the cigarette burned his fingers; then he turned and began to walk upstairs, movements sluggish from a vast invisible load.

  Iris was lying on the bed, face buried in the pillow, moaning softly. He sat down beside her and tried to take her hand, but she jerked it away from him.

  He stayed where he was. In a little while, as he'd expected, she quietened and stole a glance at him which she hoped he wouldn't notice.

  "Iris?"

  "Leave me alone, damn you."

  -- So that next time we have an argument you can use my going to charge me with heartlessness? No thank you.

  Alarmed at his own cynicism Paul said, "Iris, please!"

  "Oh, shut up," she muttered.

  "You must try and understand! Look, we went over this when we first got married, didn't we? It made sense then to put off having a family. But I'm not a struggling new doctor any longer -- I'm holding a pretty responsible post, and even if it's not overpaid it does carry a reasonable salary. We aren't compelled to delay our family now."

  "All you can think of, isn't it?" Iris whimpered. "How much is it going to cost, can we afford it?"

  Stonily Paul said, "I never made it a secret that I want children."

  "You didn't try and make me like the idea, did you? You just kept your mouth shut until I was caught by surprise and now you're spying on me and threatening me and I could kill you, I really could."

  The venom in her tone startled him. He lost the thread of what he had been about to say. While he was silent she swung her legs to the floor and reached for a cigarette from the bedside table.

  "Look, darling," he ventured at last, "if you're really so terrified of having your own children, we could do what we thought of doing before, and adopt . . .? I mean, could we sort of make a bargain? We could apply to an adoption society right away, and I'm sure I could make the . . . uh . . . the arrangements you want without your having to go to Swerd, who charges the earth."

  The words almost choked him, but he was so desperate for compromise that he spoke them regardless.

  "Thank you for that, anyhow," she muttered.

  "For what?"

  "For not saying that if I don't like the messing painful business of having children I must be out of my mind. Christ, what kind of an ivory tower do you psychiatrists live in, with your glib generalisations? None of my women friends like having kids! Why don't you stop making these wild statements about what's 'normal' and go and ask some women how they actually feel?"

  "You're not going to take your selfish pampered glamour-girl friends as a fair cross-section of the human race!"

  What makes them more selfish than men, for God's sake? They're not asking any more than the same advantage men are born with!"

  "If you want to make excuses, surely you can do better than that."

  "What?"

  "If it was just the bearing of children that you couldn't face you wouldn't be so anxious to avoid talking about adoption, would you? What you're trying to get away from is the ordinary adult responsibility of looking after children, bringing them up, educating them!"

  "With the mess I've made of my life, why should you want me to?"

  "What sort of a mess?"

  "You heard what I said downstairs."

  "About the child not being mine? For God's sake, woman, I haven't got your obsession with biological parenthood!"

  "'Biological parenthood!'" she echoed in mockery of him.

  "Raising children is being their father in the only way that counts! I don't give a damn whose the children are, yours or ours or neither."

  She stubbed her cigarette. "So you don't even want to know who else's it might be?"

  "What for? So I could go and . . . and horsewhip him, or something?"

  "Don't make me laugh. You'd never do anything like that in a million years. You're too spineless."

  He jolted to his feet, fists folding over with a faint clapping sound. She cringed away as though expecting to be punched.

  "A nice juicy divorce case," he said after a pause. "Is that what you want? To keep up with your smart friends, I suppose! Which wife has Bertie Parsons got to now -- his third, isn't it? I suppose you're a nobody in your circle unless you're divorced or queer or sleeping, with your grandmother!"

  "Paul, I -- "

  "Move!"

  "What -- ?"

  He dragged the arm on which she was leaning away from the pillows, turned them over and retrieved his pyjamas from underneath. Seizing his overnight bag, he tossed into it slippers, razor, toilet gear.

  "What are you doing?" Iris cried.

  "Going to spend the night at the hospital. The company there may be mostly insane, but at least they haven't got your particular kind of nastiness." He slammed the lid of the case.

  "But you . . ."

  In the doorway he glanced back at her, baring his teeth in a skeletal parody of a grin.

  "I'm sorry if I've proved a disappointment to you, Iris. But there are some things you should have reckoned with before marrying me. I'm not scared out of my wits by the idea of children, and I don't take kindly to being used as a child-surrogate, which is what you've been trying to make of me, and it doesn't take a hysterical row or the threat of a lunatic with a broken bottle to work me up to the pitch where I want to make love. I think if you had to marry a doctor you should have picked on someone like Swerd. He must be a pretty cold fish to make such a success of his line of business."

  Her face was absolutely white as she reached for the bedside clock and hurled it at him. He pulled the door to, and heard it shatter into ringing fragments of glass and metal on the other side.

  -- So that's that.

  And yet somehow he could not accept what his intellect told him: that this was final. It had grown to seem a part of being married, as far as he and Iris were concerned, that mortal insults should be tacitly ignored the morning after.

  -- Maybe she'll realise what she's done; maybe she'll decide that she wants to patch it up after all. . . . I'm bound to be asked what I'm doing at the hospital. Whose duty is it? I hope to God it's Mirza's. I could confess the truth to him, and just possibly to Natalie, I think, but Ferdie and Phil are the next thing to strangers, so . . .

  He was out of the house, out of the gate, before he realised with a shock he had forgotten to collect the can of petrol. He hesitated. Without tilting back his head he looked up at the bedroom window. Iris was there, watching.

  -- If I go back in now, it'll start all over again. No, this has to look serious no matter how willing I am to climb down if she gives the least sign of relenting.

  Dismally he trudged off along the road. When he came to the car, he locked the case inside and continued to the Yemble garage to collect a gallon in one of their cans. The dying impulse of his anger sustained him as he retraced his steps, poured the petrol into the tank, and drove back to return the can and buy another couple of gallons for safety's sake.

  Waiting for the attendant to bring him change, he debated with himself: give in, or . . .?

  -- It's no bloody use. She was right to say I'm spineless. I haven't the heart to make the final break. If she forces me into it, say by sneaking away to Swerd while my back is turned, then I can probably go through with it. But I seem to prefer to let things drift on as they are rather than face the prospect of starting afresh.