Compulsory Games Read online

  And, for better or for worse, that evening she remained every bit as boring as ever, as unproductively self-concentrated. It was always as if Eileen mined more and more persistently into herself without ever finding a trace of gold. Here the change in the relationship between the two of them made no difference whatever. How could it, of course? And most assuredly the meal was of an improvised character: bits off the shelves and out of the fridge, jumbled and mingled without discretion. The thought distinctly crossed Colin’s mind that Eileen might have been too wrought up to organise the gastronomic delicacies that are supposed so to subordinate men. But he dismissed the notion. Eileen’s hospitality was never very original, even when directed at fellow seniors in the public service. And of course she had had no time. She never had time. I suppose it’s possible that she really has all that work to do, thought Colin.

  Tonight there was a heavy, strong, very dark wine: much of it; in a big, rather clumsy, decanter. Both of them drank it down freely, if only because it could hardly be said that they were any more en rapport than was ever the case. What about me? thought Colin. I wonder what Grace really thinks of me. He had not wondered very much about it before. What was Grace doing at that moment? Perhaps she was merely asleep somewhere (he was hazy about the international time system). Even so? People in bed alone are different from people in bed with someone else in the room. All that Eileen was able to contribute in the way of a spell left ample time and space to brood upon such generalities, upon alternative companions.

  Eileen had always had a way of half offering in advance some such treat as the playing of a Beethoven recording by Moiseiwitsch, or the examination of an illustrated work on the campi santi of Sardinia; and then forgetting all about the matter when the time came. Colin could not remember when a single one of these promises had ever specifically materialised. But now as the meal drew to an end with less than half of the Florida peaches drawn from their glass bowl and devoured, he felt himself on familiar ground when Eileen jerked herself up and said, “I’ll go and make us some coffee. Then you might care to listen to a record I’ve been given. It was a deputation from Israel, and it’s Gilbert and Sullivan in Hebrew. I don’t know what it’s like. It’s the kind of thing Bobby used to be mad about. Go into the drawing room, will you, and wait for me.”

  The drawing room was on the other side of a passage, both wide and high; and there was nothing to do when one arrived there, though Bobby in the distant past had doubtless contributed what he could. Colin wondered if he should not in the first place proceed to the kitchen (some way off) and offer to carry the tray. It was a thing that never arose when he had been there with Grace.

  There ensued a substantial pause; with nothing in the house audible above the noise of the traffic in the road outside, and nothing to diminish a guest’s sense of time. In the end, Colin was seriously wondering. Could Eileen be seizing the chance to wash up? Women snatched odd moments to do that, he had observed; and notably women with big outside responsibilities. Ought he to offer to dry? He even went to the drawing-room door, which he had left ajar to facilitate the ingress of the laden tray; but he only stood there for a bit, hesitant and a little strained. There was nothing at all to be noted: not even the noises of a tenant upstairs (though he had understood that at the moment there was one). This house is so empty that it’s terrifying, thought Colin. Then he slowly returned to his armchair, and huddled there, trying not to hear the passing cars and lorries and motorbikes and aircraft, many more of them than where he and Grace lived.

  Ultimately, Eileen returned to him quite normally, with a silver tray bearing an engraved inscription to herself, and supporting a load of coffee accessories, bought second-hand but once the perquisite of a noble family, whose crest appeared on each piece. She really could be still very attractive, thought Colin, as she stooped, moved about, and smiled.

  She and Colin sat on opposite sides of the room and conversed vacantly, though valiantly. But in the end there was an innovation. “You don’t want to be bothered with that Hebrew lark,” observed Eileen with sudden alertness. “What about this?” She made a characteristically swift plunge into the record cabinet, almost as if she had “Softly awakes my heart” set up for the plucking; but what came out was only something modern. “Will you excuse me a moment,” said Eileen. “Let me give you some more coffee.” She jerked the decorated pot at him and was instantly gone.

  This time the pause was quite brief and then Eileen reappeared. She had changed into a pale blue silky dressing gown. There was a darker blue girdle tightly tied round her waist, but her neck was very uncovered. She was wearing the same near-evening shoes as before.

  She stood for a few seconds in the doorway, looking determinedly away from him, and perhaps coping with herself. Then, anticlimactically, she swept Colin aside by saying: “There’s no point in remaining all dressed up, is there?” He could not mistake her ennui or her finality. She was not advancing, but withdrawing. All the same, it was as if in departing, she had for the first time momentarily arrived, become really present in the room, in the house, in life.

  Once more she crossed to him with the coffee pot. He thought that her hand was shaking. He could smell a sweet, faint savour from her skin.

  He had been at a loss for what could possibly be an appropriate thing to say, but now he spoke. “I was enjoying the evening,” he said. “Our evening.”

  “Well, why not?” she replied, still looking entirely away from him.

  She returned with the coffee pot to the other side of the room, and, he noticed, set the pot down without refilling her own cup. She seated herself in the armchair behind the presentation tray, with her elbow on one of the arms and her face in her hand. He suspected that in her own way she was weeping.

  He drank a little coffee. “Eileen,” he said in a low voice, “you’re a very attractive woman, very attractive. Have you ever considered re-marrying? You could have a wide choice, I’m certain.”

  Even more disconcertingly, she said nothing.

  “It’s no business of mine, obviously, but perhaps you’ve got into the habit of being too much alone.”

  “Yes,” said Eileen. “That must be it.” Colin could not pretend to himself that this was other than hostility.

  “Alone every minute of the day,” continued Eileen, “except of course for nearly three thousand others, mostly bastards.”

  Colin was not so much astonished as alarmed. But it was no moment for weakness. “We all feel like that sometimes when we work for a large organisation,” he said steadily. “I wasn’t so much thinking of your work.”

  “No?” enquired Eileen.

  “You perhaps need an interest outside it as well,” said Colin. “With me, it’s books. Not that it’s anything serious. But books take you away. And of course they often have a financial value, nowadays. There’s that too.”

  But one of the most noticeable things about Eileen’s house, or at least most noticeable to him, had always been that there were no books in it of the kind that people read; so that he feared that, quite without intention, there had been some malice in what he had said, a detectable self-preening. He had noticed before that Eileen brought out malice in him, even when he was consciously determined upon the opposite.

  “Books aren’t life either,” said Eileen in exactly the same attitude.

  “In some ways, they are much better. Augustine Birrell said—” But Colin perceived that he was addressing the wrong person. Not that he often came upon the right person.

  The cacophony from the record-player stopped suddenly, as modern music does; but Colin could hear the record still rotating. Eileen did nothing to retrieve it.

  “There are other hobbies than books,” said Colin. “Outdoor ones as well as indoor.”

  “My fingers are not green fingers,” said Eileen. “But I’m perfectly all right, thank you. Probably I’m undergoing the change of life.”

  Colin would have supposed she was past that.

  •

&n
bsp; It transpired that during the very period of time (or as near as they could work it out) when Colin was sharing the scratch meal with Eileen McGrath, Mrs. Cooke, Grace’s mother, was passing away; so that, after all, Grace was back within little more than a week, even the funeral having taken place almost immediately after the death, as, for good reasons, is customary in the Orient. After that, there was nothing for Grace to stay out there for, as she herself observed.

  When for as much as a week or ten days thereafter nothing was heard by the Trenwiths of Eileen, Grace asked Colin, “What have you done to her?”

  Colin owned up about the scratch meal, but, for the rest (if rest there had been), said merely: “I think she is very unhappy.”

  “I expect that was for your benefit,” observed Grace.

  •

  By the time a further fortnight had passed, Grace was feeling concern, not to be mistaken by herself or by others. Something was missing from her life, though Grace might not have admitted to it.

  “I suppose she’s all right? You did say that she seemed so unhappy. I never felt that she was particularly unhappy. You don’t think she’s been lying on the kitchen floor all this time, and no one has noticed?”

  “The Ministry would have noticed,” remarked Colin.

  “But they are under no obligation to tell us,” rejoined Grace. “I tell you what I’m going to do. If we don’t hear anything by Sunday, I’m going round on my own, Sunday morning.”

  “You always used to say we saw far too much of her,” said Colin. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to leave well alone?”

  “We need to know,” said Grace. “Or at least I do. You can please yourself. That’s why I propose to go alone.”

  Colin reflected that Grace had not returned to that quiet little job of hers.

  All the same, that was the moment when first he began to see Eileen as having far too much power over the two of them; an idea the more disturbing because, once admitted, there seemed no limit detectable, or even imaginable, to how far that power might in the end range, for how long, or of what quality it might prove to be. After his own fiasco (and what else was it?), Eileen had been just sitting there, judiciously waiting for Grace to return. Except, of course, that Eileen spent most of her life elsewhere, far more than average people do. There was Whitaker’s Almanack to prove it.

  It was a truly astonishing fact, after the persistent events of so many years, but Eileen never took an initiative with them again. She never again needed to. When (naturally) nothing had been heard from or of her by the Sunday morning, Grace put on some rather better clothes than she would otherwise have done, and set off as she had said. She was gone for a long time; and well before she returned, Colin was not merely apprehensive (he had been that for most of the week) but famished also.

  “Do you know it’s twenty past three?” he exclaimed, as Grace came through the front door. It was not at all the way in which he spoke to her normally—or to anyone else, if he could help it.

  Grace burst out laughing; which was equally unlike her customary behaviour. She neither explained nor apologised, but as Colin had to admit, busied herself with unusual vigour and thoroughness in assembling a very good luncheon, however belated. All the time she seemed to be charged with good spirits, which had seldom been a way in which he would have described her (or would altogether have wanted her). Sometimes she hummed: which he always disliked in anyone. In the end, she suggested that they have a bottle of Côtes du Rhone. He could think of nothing to say, and she drew the cork herself, which he could not recollect her ever having done before in all the time he had known her. She did it with an odd flick of the wrist apparently without effort. Of course it was not a good wine that might have been disturbed by such treatment.

  She kept him in suspense, so that he lost most of his former appetite. He was certainly not going to take the lead in broaching the subject of Eileen, though there was no positive reason why he should not.

  When the wine had softened both of them, and induced the usual illusion of fuller communion between them, she said not only that Eileen McGrath had decided to make flying her hobby, amateur aviation to be learned, qualified in, and practised from a club; but that she had persuaded her, Grace, to go along with her in the adventure. They were to experience and suffer all jointly, and, when the time came, they were to pool their resources and purchase a Moth for their joint use. “I may not have enough cash to pull my weight properly, but Eileen said that didn’t matter, and she’d make up any gap. That’s what it is to have seven thousand a year, and no real expenses. Do you know those tenants of hers actually pay for the whole house? Well, most of the time.”

  “Some of the time,” said Colin. And he could only think to add, “But what do you want to learn flying for?”

  “For fun,” replied Grace with some aggression. “Eileen says that when you have a plane and can fly it yourself, there is nothing you can’t do.”

  “I doubt that. Not in the modern world, anyway. There are more restrictions on flying than on almost anything else you could think of.”

  “Oh, Colin! Don’t be a spoilsport about this.”

  He was sincerely aghast at the implication. “When have I ever been a spoilsport? You shouldn’t say that, Grace.”

  “Always. Always, always.”

  What could he rejoin? Except to enquire, “But do you really propose to do all this with Eileen McGrath of all people?”

  Grace replied quite quietly: “I find there’s much more to her now she has something to take a real interest in.”

  “But, Grace, you can’t stand her. For years and years, you haven’t known where to put yourself, when she was there.”

  “That’s the most absurd exaggeration. It’s simply that Eileen has been very unhappy all this time. Ever since we first knew her. You said that yourself.”

  “She’s only doing this in order to mix with men,” said Colin.

  “I should have thought there were enough men in the Civil Service,” said Grace.

  •

  The most immediate practical upshot was that Grace was never there. Previously, her quiet little job had ended in time for her to be back in the house each day and completely in control before Colin returned. Now, on many evenings of the week, there could not be said even to be a regular meal, because Grace was attending a lecture, or otherwise committed to her “course.” The weekends were worse: then she would be actually flying or otherwise in the bronzed hands of an instructor. At the public holidays, there were mass junketings, airborne and otherwise. He had no place in any of these, nor did Grace invite him as a guest, or even as an onlooker. And as for Eileen, she, for better or for worse, had dropped right out of his life. Ruefully he concluded that it was for worse; though in any past year he would have been astonished at himself.

  By now the blunt fact was that Colin was entirely alone in life. It was not easy even to seek sympathy, had Colin been a sympathy-seeker by temperament, which he was not. He had never for one moment had the slightest inkling of how dependent upon Grace he had become for almost everything (though with physicality nowadays far, far down the list—as was to be expected). Still less had it even occurred to him that such as Eileen were contributing anything of value to his days. His life had seemed settled on a path peaceful, pleasant, and preferred; and, he had thought, chosen for the two of them as much by Grace as by himself. That, indeed, had been why he had become so fond of Grace.

  •

  Grace said little to him of any kind about her new preoccupation, though she perpetually mentioned Eileen in trivial contexts that very much irritated him. “I asked Eileen to post it for me,” Grace would say. Or “Eileen lent me this out of her store cupboard”: “this” being what Colin was then called upon to make the best of for his untimely and disjointed supper. It was as if Grace spent her entire time with Eileen, and most of it doing silly and unimportant little things.

  “Has Eileen still got a job?” he asked one day sarcastically.

/>   Grace seemed not to perceive the sarcasm. “Yes, she has,” Grace replied, “but she hopes to get out of it fairly soon. She will still be able to draw a pension of a kind, and she can do paid work connected with flying.”

  “What sort of work?” asked Colin, even more nastily.

  “Delivery of planes. Community linkage. Private pilotage. There’s plenty of choice. When one’s qualified, of course.”

  Colin abstained from asking when that would be, because he had no wish to know. Likewise he abstained from enquiring of Grace whether a niche was being kept open in these plans for her. He suspected that, had he raised the matter, he would have received a reply both perfectly straight and vigorously affirmative. One of the things that upset him most was that Grace refused to acknowledge that she was doing anything much out of the ordinary or outside her own wont; still less anything that could entitle him to make even the smallest moan. One man whom he had ventured timidly to tell what was happening, had been similarly dismissive: “Women go in for these things nowadays. We men just have to wake up and accept it. Nothing else we can do, is there?” And the man guffawed.

  Colin had noticed that the more hopeless and tragic a situation, the more the English resorted to laughter.

  Few in any case would use such words as “hopeless” and “tragic” about the mess he was in. Grace was fully within her rights, and he had no comparable rights he could wield against her. When he raised the question of their next holiday (the date, always settled by his firm far in advance, had been known to Grace for an eternity), she replied casually and genially that she proposed using the time for some really hard practice.

  “But it’s the only holiday I get in the whole year,” cried Colin, taut and desperate. “You don’t have to choose just those weeks.”