Other women became invalids, and the relentless morning sickness made it no lie. But days on a sofa are dull indeed, and I could not bear to spend my life watching the stripe of sunlight from the window creep across the floor, waiting for night. In any case, Mr Macarthur was not much discouraged by my faint-voiced murmurings about a headache.
– Let me rub camphor into your temples, he would say. A guaranteed cure.
He would get up and by the light of the lamp would sit on the side of the bed, rubbing the dreadful stuff into my forehead in a perfunctory way before turning his attention to parts further south.
There were occasions, now and then, when the business was very much worse than other nights, pain and humiliation beyond bearing. I cried out against it, there could be no mistaking the word no! But at such moments Mr Macarthur became as deaf as any mad dog. In the morning I could not look at him, a husband who had inflicted such a thing on his wife.
THE USE OF NUMBERS
Mrs Spencer seemed over-tightened, as if about to snap, and one day among the teacups she did indeed snap.
– Men are such beasts, she blurted, and put her cup into the saucer so hard I thought it would crack.
Her features were creased up into a grimace that for a second made her dainty head into a screaming skull. No one said anything, there was only a tiny movement of the corner of Mrs Borthwick’s mouth. As the silence extended itself, I imagined that each of us was privately viewing the way in which our particular man was a beast in the darkness of the marriage bed.
Then Mrs Spencer put her hand around the teapot and declared it warm enough for another cup, rang for more milk, and the afternoon resumed. She handed me my fresh cup of tea: dainty, smiling, and had I imagined the words she had said, or misconstrued what she meant by them?
As Mrs Borthwick and I walked back to our quarters, neither of us mentioned Mrs Spencer’s outburst. We had never talked of the parts of our lives that went on behind closed doors. But now Mrs Borthwick spoke of her husband George in such a way as to let me understand that she found no pleasure in the conjugal bed. Pacing beside me as sedately as a nun, she went further. There was a gentleman, it seemed. A gentleman not her husband. With whom she was able to take a considerable degree of pleasure.
– Yes, my dear Mrs Macarthur, she said. I hope you are not too shocked.
Gave me a quick sideways look.
– Naturally I am obliged to see dear George. Every month seems prudent.
Prudent? I wondered, then in a spurt of understanding saw what she meant. I looked sideways at her but she was so impassively handsome and poised that I thought I must be wrong.
– Oh yes, she said. I find, my dear, that it helps to have some rhyme or what-have-you to say over, just in your mind. I have one or two things that work particularly well.
She sang out suddenly in a fine strong contralto: Girls and boys, come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day.
– I can recommend it, Mrs Macarthur, she said, for those particular times. Counting is also a great comfort. With dear George I have never needed to go beyond forty-five.
A bird lived somewhere outside our windows and many was the dawn that I lay still, listening to it sing, a short snatch of tune, over and over. Dah dah, di di di, da da! A lovely song. But there was no variation. I pictured the bird perched among the dark leaves, its feathers ruffling in the breaths of pre-dawn wind, trapped in that one sad utterance. Dah dah, di di di, da da! It might have had everything to say of what it was like to be alive in the hour before the sun rose and life began again. But it had only that one phrase. I imagined the bird weeping in frustration, opening its beak to let out all it knew, and hearing again that parody of what it had in its heart.
AMBITION
Mr Macarthur was a man on the make. Ambition propelled everything he did. For myself, nowhere would be home and Gibraltar was no worse than anywhere else, so I was prepared for a life in that place. But the prospect of marching around the ramparts of Gibraltar was failure to my husband. Only a dunce would meekly go where the regiment sent him. Unless a war broke out, there was no hope of advancement in the 68th, for there were already too many junior officers in the regiment, whose only hope of promotion was for a sickly season among their superiors. He chafed against the narrowness of his prospects and was full of plans to burst out of them.
He would sell his commission—it would be worth four hundred pounds! Sell it and set up at the Bar! He had read all the books, knew the law as well as any lawyer. He would set himself up, and word would get about, and in no time men would be clamouring for John Macarthur to represent them!
He paced up and down the room, laying it all out before me. The embers fell against each other, a flare of light across his features, the pockmarks standing out very rough in that brightness, and his eyes avid with the conviction of his glorious future.
– John Macarthur of Lincoln’s Inn, he said, does that not have a ring to it?
– Why yes, I said. A splendid ring.
Unworldly country woman though I was, I doubted if it could be so easy, but did not want to dash cold water on his certainty. Let the world do that, rather than his wife. And perhaps it was possible after all. I allowed myself to think for the space of a minute how much more agreeable Lincoln’s Inn would be than Gibraltar.
But within a week no more was said about Lincoln’s Inn. Now it was that he would speak to a gentleman his father knew, who would find him a post at the Office of Ordnance in Portsmouth—oh, it would be a plum position, it would be the best thing in the world!
– But the Bar, Mr Macarthur?
I did not intend to needle him, it was that my life was locked in with his.
– Oh, do not keep me to every syllable I have ever uttered, he said. Your understanding is superior, wife, but your knowledge of the world does not equip you to instruct me.
– Mr Macarthur, by no means am I instructing you, I said. Only, since our destinies are joined, to learn what mine might be!
– I thank you for reminding me, he said. Indeed, it is our joined destinies—he put a little mocking weight on the words—that I am straining every fibre to ameliorate!
Stared me down, watching me try to pick apart what had just happened: something had been simple, and had in the space of half a minute’s exchange become snarled beyond untangling.
A FLECK OF TRUTH
Grandiose schemes were as necessary to Mr Macarthur as food and drink. Each scheme remade the world in the light of his conviction. He was remade, too, into a more glorious version of himself, so the two John Macarthurs ran side by side like a pair of well-matched carriage horses: similar but not the same, close but never quite touching.
He would speak to his brother, who had been school chums with Evan Nepean, who was now an important government official. He would speak to a cousin of a close friend of Sir Joseph Banks, who would give him a position of secretary to someone in the House of Lords. He would write to a fellow he had met through Captain Moriarty, to write to this fellow’s brother-in-law, who was now high up at the Palace.
The Palace! I let out a sound that could only be described as a snort, that I had to change into a cough smothered in my handkerchief, but Mr Macarthur noticed nothing.
The first need, though, was to sell his commission, and it seemed that the obtuse, narrow-minded, hidebound men who made those decisions would not agree to that. Their view was that they had not given Ensign Macarthur a post on active service and full pay in order for him to fund his leaving of that service.