Watching Me, Watching You

Breakages

‘We blossom and flourish As leaves on a tree, And wither and perish But nought changeth thee —’

sang David’s congregation in its laggardly, quavery voice. Some trick of acoustics made much of what happened in the church audible in the vicarage kitchen, where tonight, as so often, Deidre sat and darned socks and waited for Evensong to end.

The vicarage, added as a late Victorian afterthought, leaned up against the solidity of the Norman church. The house was large, ramshackle, dark and draughty, and prey to wet rot, dry rot, woodworm and beetle. Here David and Deidre lived. He was a vicar of the established Church; she was his wife. He attended to the spiritual welfare of his parishioners: she presided over the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute and ran the Amateur Dramatic Society. They had been married for twenty-one years. They had no children, which was a source of acute disappointment to them and to Deidre’s mother, and of understandable disappointment to the parish. It is always pleasant, in a small, stable and increasingly elderly community, to watch other people’s children grow up, and sad to be deprived of that pleasure. ‘Oh no, please,’ said Deidre, now, to the Coronation Mug on the dresser. It was a rare piece, produced in anticipation of an event which had never occurred: the Coronation of the Duke of Windsor. The mug was, so far, uncracked and unchipped, and worth some three hundred pounds, but had just moved to the very edge of its shelf, not smoothly and purposively, but with an uneven rocking motion which made Deidre hope that entreaty might yet calm it, and save it from itself. And indeed, after she spoke, the mug was quiet, and lapsed into the ordinary stillness she had once always associated with inanimate objects.

‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise — In light inaccessible —’

Deidre joined in the hymn, singing gently and soothingly, and trying to feel happy, for the happier she felt the fewer the breakages there would be and perhaps one day they would stop altogether, and David would never, ever find out that one by one, the ornaments and possessions he most loved and valued were leaping off shelves and shattering, to be secretly mended by Deidre with such skills as she remembered from the early days, before marriage had interrupted her training in china restoration, and her possible future in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Long ago and far away. Now Deidre darned. David’s feet were sensitive to anything other than pure, fine wool. Not for him the tough nylon mixtures that other men wore. Deidre darned.

The Coronation Mug rocked violently. ‘Stop it,’ said Deidre, warningly. Sometimes to appear stern was more effective than to entreat. The mug stayed where it was. But just a fraction further and it would have fallen.

Deidre unpicked the last few stitches. She was in danger of cobbling the darn, and there is nothing more uncomfortable to sensitive skin than a cobbled darn.

‘You do it on purpose,’ David would complain, not without reason. Deidre’s faults were the ones he found most difficult to bear. She was careless, lost socks, left lids unscrewed, taps running, doors open, saucepans burning: she bought fresh bread when yesterday’s at half price would do. It was her nature, she maintained, and grieved bitterly when her husband implied that it was wilful and that she was doing it to annoy. She loved him, or said so. And he loved her, or said so.

The Coronation Mug leapt off its shelf, arced through the air and fell and broke in two pieces at Deidre’s feet. She put the pieces at the very back of the drawer beneath the sink. There was no time for mending now. Tomorrow morning would have to do, when David was out parish-visiting, in houses freshly dusted and brightened for his arrival. Fortunately, David seldom inspected Deidre’s drawer. It smelt, when opened, of dry rot, and reminded him forcibly of the large sums of money which ought to be spent on the repair of the house, and which he did not have.

‘We could always sell something,’ Deidre would sometimes venture, but not often, for the suggestion upset him. David’s mother had died when he was four; his father had gone bankrupt when he was eight; relatives had reared him and sent him off to boarding school where he had been sexually and emotionally abused. Possessions were his security.

She understood him, forgave him, loved him and tried not to argue.

She darned his socks. It was, today, a larger pile than usual. Socks kept disappearing, not by the pair, but singly. David had lately discovered a pillowslip stuffed full of them pushed to the back of the wardrobe. It was his wife’s deceit which worried him most, or so he said. Hiding socks! That and the sheer careless waste of it all. Losing socks! So Deidre tried tying the socks together for the wash, and thus, in pairs, the night before, spun and dried, they had lain in the laundry basket. In the morning she had found them in one ugly, monstrous knot, and each sock oddly long, as if stretched by a hand too angry to know what it was doing. Rinsing had restored them, fortunately, to a proper shape, but she was obliged to darn where the stretching had worn the fabric thin.

It was always like this: always difficult, always upsetting. David’s things were attacked, as if the monstrous hand were on her side, yet it was she, Deidre, who had to repair the damage, follow its source as it moved about the house, mending what it broke, wiping tomato purée from the ceiling, toothpaste from the lavatory bowl, replanting David’s seedlings, rescrewing lids, closing doors, refolding linen, turning off taps. She scarcely dared leave the house for fear of what might happen in her absence, and this David interpreted as lack of interest in his parish. Disloyalty, to God and husband.

And so it was, in a way. Yet they loved each other. Man and wife.

Deidre’s finger was bleeding. She must have cut it on the sharp edge of the broken Coronation Mug. She opened the table drawer and took out the first piece of cloth which came to hand, and wrapped her finger. The cold tap started to run of its own accord, but she ignored it. Blood spread out over the cloth but presently, fortunately, stopped.

Could you die from loss of blood, from a small finger cut?

The invisible hand swept the dresser shelf, knocking all sorts of treasures sideways but breaking nothing. It had never touched the dresser before, as if awed, as Deidre was, by the ever increasing value of its contents — rare blue and white pieces, frog mugs, barbers’ bowls, lustre cups, a debatably Ming bowl, which a valuer said might well fetch five thousand pounds.

Enough to paint the vicarage, inside, and install central heating, and replaster walls and buy a new vacuum cleaner.

The dresser rattled and shook: she could have sworn it slid towards her.

David did not give Deidre a housekeeping allowance. She asked for money when she needed it, but David seldom recognised that it was in fact needed. He could not see the necessity of things like washing-up liquid, sugar, toilet rolls, new scourers. Sometimes she stole money from his pocket: once she took a coin out of the offertory on Sunday morning instead of putting a coin in it.

Why did she stoop to it? She loved him.

A bad wife, a barren wife, and a poor sort of person.

David came home. The house fell quiet, as always, at his approach. Taps stopped running and china rattling. David kissed her on her forehead.

‘Deidre,’ said David, ‘what have you wrapped around your finger?’

Deidre, curious herself, unwrapped the binding and found that she had used a fine lace and cotton handkerchief, put in the drawer for mending, which once had belonged to David’s grandmother. It was now sodden and bright, bright red.

‘I cut my finger,’ said Deidre, inadequately and indeed foolishly, for what if he demanded to know what had caused the wound? But David was too busy rinsing and squeezing the handkerchief under the tap to enquire. Deidre put her finger in her mouth and put up with the salt, exciting taste of her own blood.

‘It’s hopelessly stained,’ he mourned. ‘Couldn’t you just for once have used something you wouldn’t spoil? A tissue?’

David did not allow the purchase of tissues. There had been none in his youth: why should they be needed now, in his middle age?

‘I’m sorry,’ said Deidre, and thought, as she spoke, ‘I am always saying sorry, and always providing cause for my own remorse.’

He took the handkerchief upstairs to the bathroom, in search of soap and a nailbrush. ‘What kind of wife are you, Deidre?’ he asked as he went, desperate.

What kind, indeed? Married in a register office in the days before David had taken to Holy Orders and a Heavenly Father more reliable than his earthly one. Deidre had suggested that they remarry in church, as could be and had been done by others, but David did not want to. Hardly a wife at all.

A barren wife. A fig tree, struck by God’s ill temper. David’s God. In the beginning they had shared a God, who was bleak, plain, sensible and kind. But now, increasingly, David had his own jealous and punitive God, whom he wooed with ritual and richness, incense and images, dragging a surprised congregation with him. He changed his vestments three times during services, rang little bells to announce the presence of the Lord, swept up and down aisles, and in general seemed not averse to being mistaken for God.

The water pipes shrieked and groaned as David turned on the tap in the bathroom, but that was due to bad plumbing rather than unnatural causes. She surely could not be held responsible for that, as well.

When the phenomena — as she thought of them — first started, or rather leapt from the scale of ordinary domestic carelessness to something less explicable and more sinister, she went to the doctor.

‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘do mumps in adolescence make men infertile?’

‘It depends,’ he said, proving nothing. ‘If the gonads are affected it well might. Why?’

No reason had been found for Deidre’s infertility. It lay, presumably, like so much else, in her mind. She had had her tubes blown, painfully and unforgettably, to facilitate conception, but it had made no difference. For fifteen years twenty-three days of hope had been followed by five days of disappointment, and on her shoulders rested the weight of David’s sorrow, as she, his wife, deprived him of his earthly immortality, his children.

‘Of course,’ he said sadly, ‘you are an only child. Only children are often infertile. The sins of the fathers —’ David regarded fecundity as a blessing; the sign of a woman in tune with God’s universe. He had married Deidre, he vaguely let it be known, on the rebound from a young woman who had gone on to have seven children. Seven!

David’s fertility remained unquestioned and unexamined. A sperm count would surely have proved nothing. His sperm was plentiful and he had no sexual problems that he was aware of. To ejaculate into a test-tube to prove a point smacked uncomfortably of onanism.

The matter of the mumps came up during the time of Deidre’s menopause, a month or so after her, presumably, last period. David had been in the school sanatorium with mumps: she had heard him saying so to a distraught mother, adding, ‘Oh mumps! Nothing in a boy under fourteen. Be thankful he has them now, not later.’

So he was aware that mumps were dangerous, and could render a man infertile. And Deidre knew well enough that David had lived in the world of school sanatoria after the age of fourteen, not before. Why had he never mentioned mumps? And while she wondered, and pondered, and hesitated to ask, toothpaste began to ooze from tubes, and rose trees were uprooted in the garden, and his seedlings trampled by unseen boots, and his clothes in the wardrobe tumbled in a pile to the ground, and Deidre stole money to buy mending glue, and finally went to the doctor.

‘Most men,’ said the doctor, ‘confuse impotence with infertility and believe that mumps cause the former, not the latter.’

Back to square one. Perhaps he didn’t know.

‘Why have you really come?’ asked the doctor, recently back from a course in patient—doctor relations. Deidre offered him an account of her domestic phenomena, as she had not meant to do. He prescribed Valium and asked her to come back in a week. She did.