The Narrow Road to the Deep North(45)

Nothing? Keith Mulvaney said. He was as ever smiling, a smile that horrified her and shamed her in equal measure. Your stomach didn’t bunch up? he continued. You didn’t feel somehow excited or nervous talking to him?

Not wishing to lie, she said nothing, knowing that silence was a damning admission but that words were somehow worse.

You see, I know you, Amy. And I know you were.

How could he know? she wondered. How could he have known when they hadn’t? And yet he did.

If he had been a different man, she might have thought he was bluffing. But Keith Mulvaney was guileless. He had an unfortunate relationship with truth that she had made herself lose since meeting Dorrigo. She never said the first thing that came to her, but rather the third or fourth, and then only after it had been tested and checked for faults and flaws. But when Keith spoke, he said exactly what was on his mind. He had known, he had always known, and he had carried his terrible knowledge as he did so much else, silently, patiently, uncomplainingly until that night, returning from the Robertsons’, something had opened up in the blackness in front of him and made it impossible for him to carry it any longer.

Their marriage had remained comfortable over the summer—perhaps, when Amy thought about it, it had grown even more so. It felt like the Edwardian horsehair furniture he had refused her requests to replace after their marriage: sagging, comfortable if one nestled in the soft spots and avoided the hard. He was unselfish and he was kind. But he was not Dorrigo. And she was finding it more and more difficult to delude herself that this was love. She felt their marriage withering. She returned to his presence, to their bed, with its thinning yellow corduroy cover she folded back each hot night, amicably, quietly, but hiding an inner life, a turmoil, that took her elsewhere.

Sometimes she had the strongest urge to fall to her knees and confess. Her guilt she could live with of a day. But of a night, early in the hours of the morning, it filled her stomach and pressed so hard on her chest that she had to slow her breathing to bear its crushing weight. She did not want his absolution, only the purity of reconciling her truth and her life, and, having done so, of standing up, turning away and leaving forever.





24



IF AMY HAD enjoyed the attentions, the gifts and the flattery of the ageing, bearish publican in the first few months that she worked at the King of Cornwall—perhaps even unconsciously encouraged them—she had also begun to be disturbed by them. One night, after the bar had closed, she ended up with Keith alone. She did so because she thought it would offer the right moment when she could tell him kindly that his silly attentions must end, that nothing would or could come of them. But instead of that happening she found herself in a labyrinth of caresses and touches. She did not know when or how to escape him, and finally it just seemed easier and wiser to go along with it all, and wait for another moment to tell him.

And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.

After the abortion, when guilt took hold of Keith and his mind turned to marriage, Amy was too undone and too lost to make any decisions, and Keith worked assiduously at bringing her so fully into his world and that of the hotel that she had little time for anything else. Perversely, his proposal of marriage—in its certainty and its respectability—seemed the only way out of the mire. She told herself that their differences, which seemed so pronounced, were perhaps really no greater or less than those of any other couple.

And perhaps they weren’t. She came to discover a gentle, generous, caring man. She had for the first time in her life security and moderate wealth. And in deference to the difference in their ages—some twenty-seven years—Keith accorded her a certain freedom to come and go as she wished, and she was not ungrateful. No, it was not hellish.

She knew there was much to like about Keith. He could be easy company. He made sure the hotel was in good repair, provided well for her, kept the fires loaded with wood in winter, the kitchen with ice in summer. He cared for her. She felt she existed as the hotel did for him, as a part of his life with needs that must be serviced, in all of which he had an interest but no fundamental passion. The emptiness of their life he kept at bay with industry, working hard at the hotel, and in what little spare time remained in his capacity as secretary of several sporting clubs and as an alderman.

But Amy wanted more than maintenance, comfort, split kindling and iced milk; more than a fading yellow corduroy bed cover falling neatly into creases worn into the fabric by years of identical folding back. She wanted disrepair, adventure, uncertainty. Not comfort, but the inferno.

Sometimes of a night he would lie at her back, caress her hips, her thighs. She would feel his hand on her breast and think of a fat huntsman spider. Then those same fingers would be between her legs, seeking to pleasure her. She never responded. She found that the best way to deal with his attentions was to do nothing. She neither resisted nor accepted. When he placed one leg here, when he entered her there, she just went with him, saying nothing. But always she refused his kisses. Her mouth was her own.