Spencer Lovers in War

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32599-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

First published in 1970, Lovers in War was the third of a quartet of novels by Colin Spencer concerning the Simpson family. This volume finds brother and sister Matthew and Sundy Simpson suffering fresh emotional turmoil. Sundy has divorced her philandering husband, Reg, and is living with Jamey Best-David, whose Catholic wife will not grant him a divorce. Matthew, resisting the homosexual world to which he feels drawn, has married his boyhood sweetheart, Jane. But when Reg resurfaces, both Matthew and Sundy succumb again to his incorrigible charm. This Faber Finds edition includes a new preface by Colin Spencer wherein he reflects on 'how the ethics of loving, its agonies and joys, are so unchanged'.

Colin Spencer

Autoren/Hrsg.

Spencer, Colin

Leseproben

Two

The old coach house in their small courtyard garden had been converted by a large skylight into a studio. There Sundy carved wood, a slow, physically exhausting and laborious craft, the finished work rising slowly out of shapelessness after weeks. She did less and less painting, finding that objects she could feel and touch, objects she could hold and embrace, were more potent as images, and finding also that the almost gruelling monotony of chipping and hammering, carving and cutting, had a peaceful, mesmeric effect upon her life. When painting she had been torn apart, she would come out of the studio angry, feeling she had lost a part of herself, but a part that was ineffective and unconvincing; the opposite happened when carving wood, she felt replenished.

Her exhibition last spring had been reviewed with moderate fervour, and slowly she had collected a circle of patrons who cared, and visited her studio regularly. Last summer she had been commissioned to carve a Madonna and Child for a new church in Birmingham. This was the largest piece she’d ever done, and after struggling for months with it she had at last been pleased with its grace and delicacy; it was a standing figure, carved out of one piece of wood so that the Child sprang from the cradled arms like a branch of a tree, this rhythm being echoed below by a twist of drapery that seemed to make the figure almost levitate. She worked from ten in the morning until six, not stopping for lunch but drinking strong black coffee, a Gauloise always in her mouth, puffing away and sometimes growling at the carving, other times pleading or exhorting it to become what she wanted. Jamey, coming back from the publishing house of Glass and Littmann, would sometimes hear her cursing: ‘Goddamn you, why do you have to be so bloody rotten there?’ and her voice raised hysterically: ‘You make me sick, what can I do? I’m not going to plug it, I won’t!’

While Jamey was in Rome she drove Becky down to Croydon. She sat in the garden listening to Hester, who sighed and said: ‘I do hope nothing comes of it. Don’t you think it would be a mistake for Matthew to marry her?’

‘Lawd.’ Sundy rolled her eyes. ‘I’d say no. But he can’t be serious.’

‘Sundy, you know how intense he is, and you can’t give him advice.’ Hester laughed. ‘I’ve stopped doing that years ago, and if he wants to marry Jane, he will.’

‘Well, you’ve had two divorces in the family,’ Sundy said cheerfully, ‘this will be the hat-trick.’

Hester shook her head sadly. ‘Oh no, I hope not, you haven’t seen him, have you?’ she asked, looking suddenly worried.

‘Matthew? No.’

Hester passed a weary hand over her forehead. ‘I told him not to bring Steven here,’ she murmured. ‘Eddy does loathe him.’

‘Well you know why,’ Sundy said spiritedly. ‘All because of your good works….’

Her mother half-smiled. ‘Well dear, I thought Steven was sincere about Christianity, and I’m sure Gordon Knot helped him a lot.’

They were referring to an occasion when Hester had taken trouble over Steven, feeling him to be in need of Christian love, and Steven, who had a perennial thirst for mother figures, greedily lapped up the attention. On one weekday evening he rushed down to Croydon and came to Hester saying that they must both be in the church at seven, as someone important and high in authority in the ecclesiastical world was praying for him at that time. But the church was locked, and Steven’s agitation was getting more and more intense; then they discovered that the Mothers’ Union was holding a meeting in the crypt, they rushed through it, Hester apologizing as best she could while Steven threw open the door that led up to the church. Unhappily it was only a large cupboard, and while he was floundering about in the darkness among coats, buckets and mops, amidst the startled astonishment of the women, Hester opened the right door, extricated Steven and managed to get him into the church.

‘I know. He arrived for the weekend and stayed for three weeks,’ Hester added.

‘I think Dad was very patient,’ Sundy said, ‘I did warn you, Mother.’

‘He was patient until the night he got up and said: “Steven, I want to propose a toast. Bon voyage, lad…. We’ve enjoyed having you here, it’s now time to go.” Steven just looked puzzled,’ Hester chuckled, then she turned and hugged Becky. ‘And how’s my bright darling? Are you going to dance together?’

‘Yes please, Nanny,’ Becky’s face lit up with joy.

Sundy laughed. ‘Wish I could see this. I do think you’re mean keeping it to yourselves.’

‘It’s our special treat,’ Becky said solemnly, hugging herself with glee.

*

Sundy woke up on the Saturday morning knowing that she was alone in the house and that it was today that Jamey was expected back. Then she heard Mrs O’Connell letting herself in by the kitchen door, and the almost immediate clatter of plates and glasses being moved and washed. She dressed and called out: ‘Good morning,’ and Mrs O’Connell looked up the stairs, enquiring: ‘Is it today Mr Best-David comes back?’

‘Yes today. Tonight I think.’ And as Sundy walked down the street, crossing Notting Hill Gate, and going into Kensington Gardens, she thought: It’s an odd thing that Mrs O’Connell, who is Irish and a devout Roman Catholic, who knows that Jamey’s wife was a Roman Catholic, should always have behaved so warmly and generously to me and my daughter when I’m so blatantly living in what she would call ‘sin’.

For God’s sake why wouldn’t Catherine let him have a divorce—she was a high-class bitch of course, no doubt about that, came from an old county family, she even hunted, was certainly a deb and had grown up into her marriageable years feeling that life, which was men in particular, owed her nothing but pleasure; the only work she had done was to stand outside Harrod’s with a collection box on Poppy Day.

She bought three-dozen red and yellow roses, and, the most extravagant gesture of all, she spent five pounds on lilies, for she wanted the house to smell of flowers. When she returned she got all the vases out of the cupboards and spent an hour arranging the flowers, moving a vase to one room and then to another, matching the colour of flower against furnishings, and as she removed the large vase of lilies from the hall to the dining room for the third time the doorbell rang.

An elderly man in a dirty fawn raincoat stood there, his iron-grey hair long and matted, the dome of his head bald; he stood erect, unsmiling, imposing and slightly frightening in his shabbiness. ‘Yes?’ Sundy said.

‘Mrs Pearson?’

She nodded.

‘It’s been a long time. You don’t recognize me?’

She began to edge the door shut, she shook her head; his voice was educated but slurred. She knew that whoever he was and whatever he wanted he should not have come here today.

‘We’ve certainly got a lot to talk about, Mrs Pearson. Or may I call you Sundy?’

‘Who are you?’ she said, then she found herself laughing nervously. ‘What do you mean, why all this mystery?’

‘Now I know you because I’ve seen photographs of you, and that’s why I thought you’d recognize me.’

She thought: He’s one of those, out from a bin, he’ll open his raincoat soon in another minute and show me his cock.

‘You are my daughter-in-law, after all,’ he added.

‘What?’ she cried, unbelieving, and in the same breath because she had convinced herself that her reading of the situation was the true one, she said: ‘If you don’t go, I’ll call the police.’

His expression was unchanged, but his voice was softer, kinder, when he said: ‘I’m Reginald’s father.’

She stared down at the doormat. ‘I’m not your daughter-in-law,’ she muttered, ‘we were divorced three years ago.’

He had regained all his composure. ‘But he was proud of you. He wrote to me. He sent me a photograph, well it was only a snapshot, of you and Becky, that’s why I’m here. I’d like to see my grand-daughter.’

Then of course she realized. ‘So it was you …’

‘I beg your pardon. May I come in?’

‘Waiting around at Becky’s school, following her.’ She felt furious with him. ‘Giving us all a bloody fright.’

‘But I did want to catch a peep of her.’ He extended his hands palms outwards. ‘I’m all alone, you don’t know how alone.’

She stared at him. The lines in his face were darkened and textured by him, perhaps also dirt. He looked old and wretched. She nodded and opened the door wider. ‘I’m afraid she’s not here at the moment. But … if you’d like to come in.’

He smiled and stepped into the house. Sundy led the way up the stairs to the drawing-room on the first floor, suddenly ashamed of the room’s largeness, the distinctive taste, the carefully chosen modern paintings and the restrained period furniture; she went to the desk and took the red-leather folder, filled with photographs of her daughter at all stages of her eight years. ‘Perhaps you’d like to look at these.’

Mr Pearson took the two frames gingerly, almost reverently, and held them in his hands like a prayer book. He stared down and said nothing.

‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked.

‘Tea?’ he echoed, ‘as well as this? Tea!’

‘Or perhaps a drink of something?’ she added in sudden desperation.

‘I never drink,’ he said, shaking his head grimly, but still staring at the photographs. ‘She’s far prettier than this really,...