Read Online Holiday by Stanley Middleton - Free Book Online Page A

though his wife was not impressed, and in this state of half inebriation could imagine that she celebrated with him. They made love languidly last thing at night, but she lay relaxed, pleased with him, delighted to be his love, his wife.
    In the morning both were edgy with headache, fearing the size of the bill, but by lunch-time they’d walked, skimmed stones and were ready to make fun of the residents. Meg mimicked their voices, or rather fluffed them up out of her imagination. She growled comically military for a moustachioed man with oiled hair.
    ‘Two yahs in the Grenadahs for you.’ She pointed at her husband, who’d failed because of acne to do national service. ‘Set you up, young fellah, sloppin’ about like a stretch of four-by-two in a watah-closet.’ Where she’d learnt that expression he’d no idea. One black-beaded old lady with round glasses and a pinched mouth she specially watched, and then, in the bedroom suddenly squeaked, so that Fisher knew immediately whom she mocked, head nodding, ‘I would never allow my late husband, the bishop, to enjoy his conjugal rights unless there were an ‘o’ in the month.’
    ‘Why, madam?’ Fisher said, catching the spirit.
    Meg pursed her lips.
    ‘It is not for you, young man, to know the times and seasons.’
    The old voice crackled, but he reflected uncomfortably that he seemed to be only a casually admitted spectator to her satirical self-entertainment. In her head he’d be bleating some banality, or worse some magnificence of poetry that would ring ridiculously pretentious as she imitated his voice or her walk.
    Not that she gibed all day. She could laugh so that her beauty, which was statuesque, transformed itself into an adolescent helplessness. The green eyes flashed as she giggled; shoulders shook and she clutched him for support. He loved her, then.
    This sense of unease, of peril about his marriage did not deeply disturb him. His life had been a series of obstacles, O and A, Scholarship, Schools, and though he shaped excellently as an examination candidate, he’d always been nervous, grew to live with it, be glad of it, use it to advantage. Thus he did not expect his new life to be anything but dangerous. As his first at Oxford proved its worth in jobs and attention, so the beauty of his wife. But neither was gained without sacrifice. One got nothing for tramtickets as his father told him. And yet he felt immature, unready for marriage, only satisfied when the pair of them managed to share something, a game, a drinking-bout, sex, mindlessly, never in the abstract. Perhaps that was usual.
    He eyed his married friends, and made nothing of them. They behaved with such variety that he could draw no conclusion. He observed only their public life. One husband did the washing; another bathed the children; one plangently described his sexual performances; another claimed drily to envy adulterers.
    Of course he was verbally adroit enough to give himself satisfactory answers. This lack of equilibrium, this uncertainty would disappear, so that he and Meg would settle to a workaday routine of children, promotion, househunting, retirement with honour. He neither wanted nor believed that. The snag could be bluntly put: though he desperately loved his wife, he was not convinced that she returned his love. She said so, often enough; muffled his fear with kisses, dragged him into bed, shrilled fiercely for him, even lay tenderly by him when she was satisfied, but then he remembered when he’d not done so well and she’d cried for what he could not give, and beaten him, in a curse of tears. On no more than chance, then, than chance, success depended.
    Marriage, that oath, that sanctified state seemed nothing to her.
    She’d talk about Malcolm, or her other boy-friends, until he flushed, jealous, near mad with anxiety. If she’d seen them, and they could serve her, then that service could be taken at her pleasure, without reference to vows and solemn