Fell of Dark. Reginald Hill
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disliked Peter from the start. As his interests were in quite other directions, he never really expressed any opinion of her.
I met them both at about the same time, early during my three years at Oxford. Peter attracted my attention instantly. He was charming, witty, entirely unselfconscious, impulsive in his actions, generous in his attitudes. At least he seemed so to some of us. The sight of his slightly-overlong, over-thin figure, hands and arms waving in a graceful semaphore, was enough to make us smile with pleasure.
But to others he seemed like ‘a third rate actor cocking-up the role of Shelley’. I forget whether the words were Janet’s, but the attitude certainly was.
My relationship with Janet took much longer to develop. At first she seemed merely a pleasant enough girl, rather vain, capable of being amusingly bitchy about most of her fellows; a not uncommon type in university life. It was a chance meeting during my first summer vacation that started our relationship. It took place, by one of life’s little ironies, in the town towards which the police-car was now bearing my reluctant body, Keswick.
I had known vaguely that Jan was a Cumbrian. She had often made us all scream with laughter as she enacted in an almost incomprehensibly broad dialect ‘typical’ scenes of rural life, involving incest, witch-burning, or the pursuit of sheep.
Here, far from all the pressure of her position as a college wit, she was very different. I was on holiday, touring with my father for a couple of weeks before going off to France with Peter and some others for the rest of the vacation. She obviously envied my money, or rather my father’s. I gave her a lift home at the end of a very pleasant afternoon. She lived in a tiny village some distance to the north. At first she seemed reluctant to invite me into the small, not very picturesque cottage outside which we stopped. But when her father came to the door and stared at us suspiciously and with open curiosity, she introduced me.
He was a farm labourer, utterly content with his lot, but by no means a stupid or uneducated man. He questioned me closely about myself and my background, demonstrating an acuteness of mind and economy of language which I recognized in a more sophisticated form in his daughter.
Jan, who usually delighted to shock, was obviously very distressed by his uninhibited curiosity. I got up to go.
‘Have you bedded her?’ he asked casually, jerking his head at his daughter.
‘No!’ I denied with undue emphasis.
‘Aye, well,’ he said. ‘She needs it.’
This became a catch-phrase for us later, but then it obviously was not in the least comic to her. This was the source of the tension between them. As far as old Will was concerned, women were created only to look after men. His wife, Mary, was perfect in this role, a bright-eyed determined little woman who watched over the needs of her husband with desperate care. A strong-minded school staff had got Jan to where she was, but her father continued to treat her as he would any woman, that is, he acknowledged domestic and biological needs, but intellectually, spiritually, she hardly began to exist. It was the complete lack of response to her arguments, protests and outbursts that frustrated Jan the most.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said as I got back into the car.
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Look, if you ever do need it, come to me first!’
That brought a faint smile to her face. But it was I who sought her out right at the start of next term. Some seed had been sown during those hours in Keswick and I needed her.
We were married two years later after we had finished with Oxford. Peter was best man. She refused to be married in her parish church. ‘They baptize pigs there if they’re doubtful about their parentage,’ she maintained. So we made do with a registry office. Mary came, but Will didn’t. He sent me a letter, however, neatly penned, cordially phrased, full of advice. I didn’t dare show it to Jan.
After the honeymoon, I started work in Leeds, in the Northern Area office of my father’s business. We deal in stationery and associated products. We were near enough to Cumberland to make visits there fairly easy, but Jan refused. I had practically to drag her home once a year, and we never stayed there overnight.
Peter stayed on at Oxford to do some research and two years later was appointed to a lectureship in the Midlands. I saw him infrequently over the next couple of years and got the impression that he was becoming involved with some rather unsavoury people. But it seemed none of my business at the time. He came to stay with us a couple of times and would obviously have liked to come more often but Jan was still not keen, so I preserved the peace. Then my father died and we moved to London. I was so involved with gathering up the various threads of the business and steering through a series of crises which had arisen partly because of my father’s death and partly coincidentally, that I hardly had any time for Jan, let alone Peter.
The next year was the hardest of my life. For Jan it must have been even harder. She had enjoyed queening it in the provinces as the boss’s son’s wife. Now as the boss’s wife in London she found herself more and more neglected. I had little time for friendships old or new and the kind of people she met through me were business contacts only.
She began to voice her dissatisfactions, mildly enough at first I suppose (I don’t recollect ever noticing) but more and more vociferously after a while. All I wanted was peace and quiet after a long hard day. I never seemed to get it. I started coming home later to avoid the rows. The rows increased proportionately in intensity. She ended up by accusing me of being worse than her father. I ended up by telling her that my sympathies were now entirely with old Will.
When Peter turned up very late one night, haggard, unshaven, with no luggage, he was at first almost a welcome diversion. But not for long.
A scandal had blown up at the University. It involved drugs and homosexuality. We never learned the full details as Peter was never wholly forthcoming about it and no court case was brought. But Peter had been emotionally involved with a young student whose ‘moral tutor’ he was. His parents, people of wealth and influence, had come across some letters Peter had foolishly written – ‘things of charm and beauty, flowerily Elizabethan in style, almost Platonic in tone’, he was able to describe them later – and this had been the first crack which brought the whole edifice tumbling down. Peter, who had been sucked into the group as much as any of the younger members, somehow became labelled the ring-leader. More distressing still, the young man concerned, probably in an effort to divert his father’s wrath, confessed to far more than had ever happened and shifted the blame completely on to Peter, who was too shattered emotionally to be able to deny anything.
Also he had obviously been on some kind of drugs and was still suffering from the effect of these when he came to us, or the effect of being deprived of them.
We put him to bed. He woke up crying in the early hours of the morning. During the day, he said little, but sat staring vacantly at the window, as now he was sitting beside me in the police car. This pattern was repeated for three days, at the end of which Jan told me that either I got him out of our flat, or she went.
On our doctor’s advice, he was moved into a nursing home the next day. As far as Jan was concerned, that was that. I accused her of complete callousness and started visiting Peter more frequently than was strictly necessary, just to rub it in. The thing spiralled, Janet’s protests plus the doctor’s assurance of the beneficial effects of my visits to Peter took me to the Home nearly every night for an hour at least. Some weeks I hardly saw Jan at all. I took to sleeping in the guest room to avoid disturbing her if I arrived home very late. I was not encouraged to move out.
Finally early in the summer after Peter had spent nearly two months in the nursing home, things came to a head. He had made tremendous progress in the last fortnight and the doctor was sure he was ready to be discharged. ‘He’s not coming here,’ said Jan flatly, unemotionally. I didn’t argue.
‘The best thing in the world for him,’ the doctor had told me, ‘would be a holiday. Fresh air. Sunshine. Lots of exercise.’
I felt like a holiday myself. I had worked too hard, too long. I don’t think there was any malice in my choice