The Marriage Bed Read Free Page A

come tumbling out, too fast, repetitive, confused, as we walked along the sea-smelling promenade.
    “I want to go to university, but unless there’s some kind of miracle I won’t be able to, because I’ll never get a scholarship. You don’t know what the competition’s like, and we’ve moved about so much, my mother and I … she gets restless. This is the first decent school I’ve ever been to, where they really make you work. Only Billie – that’s my mother – is getting bored with Broadstairs; we’ve been here nearly two years. She just doesn’t understand about good schools. Of course, to be fair, neither did I, until it was really too late.”
    “I see. How old are you, then?” Max asked, though he hardly needed to.
    “I’m nearly sixteen.” Like everything I’d told him so far, this was close to the truth.
    “You seem older than that,” he remarked. “More mature.” Then he added, with more truth than tact, “In some ways.”
    I kicked a small pebble several forceful yards ahead of us. After a brief pause he went on in his rather thick, slow voice, “Your name’s Anne, isn’t it? Well, if you did get a scholarship, Anne – I mean by some miracle – and go to university, where would it be, and what do you want to study?”
    “Oxford, and it’s botany I’m keen on. Billie just thinks it’s silly, fiddling about with mounting specimens and all that. So even if we had the money, which we don’t … Anyhow, she used to like it because it kept me busy; but reading botany as a subject is something else; all those Latin names annoy her. She’s a bit against education anyway. Puts ideas into girls’ heads and makes it hard for them to marry people. For instance, I wanted to go to boarding-school in the worst way when I was young; but Billie said I must be mad to think of playing hockey and getting thick legs. She’s an awfully
opinionated
woman.”
    He gave an abrupt snort of laughter and I paused, too, for a brief giggle. “Just the same, ever since I was twelve or so, I’ve been going up to London every Saturday from wherever we happen to be, on a day return, to make drawings of things at the Natural History Museum at Kensington. It’s a marvellous place, they have all sorts of lovely things. I’ll show you some of my work if you like.”
    “I’d like that very much. But where’s your father, and what does he think about botany for girls?”
    “Oh, he died when I was getting on for six. He was a Classics don at Exeter. I don’t remember him, except sort of dimly when I see my two old aunts. They’re poor and have rheumatism and dote on the Vicar … you know. They’d help me if they could, but … Anyhow, there it is. The minute the funeral was over, Billie and I got on the train, and we’ve been moving from one seaside place to the other ever since. I don’t know why she’s so restless.”
    “So your mother never remarried?”
    “Oh no. I think she’s afraid of being bored.” A belated loyalty kept me silent about the two or three surrogate husbands Billie had over the years lightly and briefly held. Though one was deplorable – a seedy ex-R.A.F. officer called Fred, who had disappeared with some of her money – none of the others, at least as far as I could tell at the time, had ever done her or me any harm. She had never neglected me any more or less for any of them; they had too little importance for that. It was only, she explained to me once, that she had to have a man to laugh with once in a while.
    “She doesn’t like being cooped up,” I said, in an effort to summarize the situation. “When we first unpacked our things in Brighton, she said to me, ‘We’re not a family any more, you see. Just a couple of people travelling together. Trying to be considerate to each other, and amusing company. That’s all.’ ”
    Max gave me a quick glance. Then he took a last draw on his cigar before tossing the butt into a tidal pool. “I think we’d better