Holiday by Stanley Middleton Read Free Book Online

marriage, but the joint bank account swelled. Fisher felt he ought to be sorry for the woman, but she showed no sign of needing his pity. The right man had married her, she’d told him often, and they’d achieved a modus vivendi, and though this appeared to allow her husband the pleasure of doing what he liked when and where he wanted, she seemed completely satisfied. Perhaps Meg’s tantrums developed from her mother’s calm.
    ‘Come and sit in my car’ she said. He followed, meekly enough. ‘I don’t suppose it’s any use asking you anything, about Margaret, is it?’ No one else called his wife that; Meg, the father’s contraction, was not as he’d thought, from the Welsh. Margaret Adelina Savile Vernon.
    ‘I’ve left her.’
    ‘I know. Could you help us out? A little? You see, she tells us nothing. She swears, and shrugs, but we don’t get any sense from her.’
    ‘Not her father?’
    ‘David’s both furious, and blind, as far as she’s concerned. He’d do anything for that girl, and he can’t do anything with her.’
    ‘That’s quite witty,’ Fisher said.
    ‘It’s not meant to be.’ Usually she basked in flattery. ‘What have you been up to?’
    Fisher considered, made her wait. In this large comfortable saloon car he could stretch his legs out to full length. Bridling, he determined to confess nothing. Immediately he rejected this; the woman had every right to question him, and deserved, at least, some sense in his answers. He laughed, laid a hand on her arm.
    ‘I’ve never been married to anyone else,’ he said, indicating objectivity by preciosity of diction, ‘and so I can’t say whether our home life was normal or not. But I’d had enough.’
    ‘Did she not love you, Edwin?’ He grinned at her voice, act one, scene two.
    ‘She hated the sight of me. And vice versa.’ Detemined on flippancy. ‘It was either the door or the poison-bottle for one or the other of us.’
    Mrs Vernon did not move, or nod, settled massively in her seat, wearing a bright straw hat. Her legs, in immaculate tights, were large, but beautifully shaped, tapering to fine ankles, small feet. The ringed hands on her lap lay dead, motionless, white, unlined, delicate, plump.
    ‘Disappointing,’ she said, in the end, on an outgoing breath.
    They talked, guardedly, for ten minutes, before she asked,
    ‘Are you willing to give me your address?’
    ‘Why?’ Rude.
    ‘David likes you.’ She took no offence. ‘He also hopes that this’ll mend. He’ll help if he can, and being able to track you down immediately might be of assistance.’
    ‘Do you believe that?’
    ‘That’s what he said, Edwin. He’s optimistic. More so than I am. He’s also clever. And very experienced in this sort of affair. Not that that means much with Margaret.’
    She talked on, equably, about her husband, as if she were making discoveries. Sometimes Vernon described himself in the same sane, careful way, laying out the evidence before nailing the yet unreached conclusion. Small solicitor’s office in Wrexham; University College, Aberystwyth, First Class Honours in Law; with Evans and Gough-Jones, Swansea, Law Society Prize in Finals. And then he described how these had meant working fifteen hours a day, killing religion, sex, drink and social grace to win these baubles he now thought nothing of. ‘Maimed as a human being, ruined as an immortal soul,’ he’d intone, his face bright with irony.
    Fisher had enjoyed this performance more than once, and was not adverse to comparing it with the gentility of an anglicised version. Finally, apologising to himself, he’d written down his address in Bealthorpe, and back home, before opening the door into the freshness of sunlit air. Mrs Vernon smiled at him, adjusting her white gloves, and drove off when he was a bare dozen steps from the car. He’d done wrong, he was sure, but it couldn’t matter.
    He walked inland into the dull fields and the poky houses, both solid and ramshackle,