The Big Day Read online

  THE BIG DAY

  BARRY UNSWORTH

  THE BIG DAY

  1

  On the morning of her fortieth birthday Lavinia woke earlier than usual. She lay in her room in the Regional College of Further Studies, of which her husband Donald was Founder and Principal, drowsing through the songs of birds from the garden below, feeling against her eyelids the strengthening light, thinking in a sleepy, sliding way about her fancydress party, only a few hours off now, and about the people she had invited, people she knew quite well, for the most part, but they would be transformed, unrecognizable, completely unpredictable in their costumes and masks. Nobody would know who anybody else was. That had been her idea, the beauty of her idea, from the start: a beauty which illumined her musings now. Nobody would know, until midnight. She had forbidden anyone to reveal what they were coming as, and masks were to be kept on till midnight. A real carnival party.

  Morning light continued to seep in, reddened by its passage through Lavinia’s ruby curtains. Though more or less awake now, she kept her eyes closed. It was strange to be forty. This warm heap of flesh that was herself in the bed had kept its blood moving somehow, and its nerves strung, for forty years. She felt vulnerable, this morning. Not fragile, but in need of careful handling, easily spilt. I am at my full, she thought. That is the way to put it. What I need is a man with steady hands. Immediately, by what seemed the action of some magnetic field in the mind, other attributes clustered around this primary one of steadiness: tall, erect carriage, thin but wiry, greying at the temples. A picture emerged of a randy, soldierly person. Such men existed – it was part of Lavinia’s world-view that men to suit every need were perpetually circulating – but they were only to be found by romantic accident. They were certainly, she thought, not in the next bedroom, where her husband Donald lay, presumably still sleeping. Perhaps Mr Honeyball, who was coming to tea that afternoon … But he was not a steady man either. Indeed, it had been the glint of fanaticism in Mr Honeyball, the promise, beneath his rather mincing exterior, of a frenzy she hoped would prove sexual, that had first attracted her interest. She would learn more about that, she hoped, this afternoon …

  Meanwhile, she suddenly recalled, as it was a Monday, she would have to go and see old Mrs Mercer at the Home, as usual. The fact that it was her birthday did not affect obligations of this kind. The old lady looked forward so to her visits. Besides, she would probably need to be reminded about the party. She was coming too, the only guest to be excused costume. It would be a treat for the old thing, Lavinia thought vaguely. Her guests in various disguises began passing in procession through her mind again, attempting to converse through their masks.

  ‘Donald!’ she called. ‘Are you awake?’

  There was no reply from the next room. Lavinia opened her eyes wide and stared up at the ceiling, still dark above the bed.

  In the State Institution for the Aged, which Lavinia was to visit later that morning, many of the old folk were already up and about. Mrs Greenepad, extracting toast from her electric toaster at a few minutes before seven, heard on her radio forecasts of showers, some of them prolonged, and bright intervals. There was word also of an articulated vehicle wrecked across a motorway in the Midlands, causing inconvenience to motorists. Mrs Greenepad did not give this her full attention. At seventy-nine, though active still, she tended to regard all such happenings as outside her sphere. She listened assiduously to the news bulletins, not in quest of detailed information, but for the satisfaction of having her belief confirmed that total world collapse was just round the corner and that she might yet live to see it.

  Noticing on the table margarine instead of butter, she directed a look of sharp reproof at the dishevelled back of Mrs Mercer’s head. Mrs Mercer was her room-mate, and there was already some bad feeling between the old ladies, as Mrs Greenepad was jealous of Mrs Mercer’s being invited to a fancy-dress party that evening. Now, with peculiar obstinacy, Edwina had again laid out margarine, instead of butter. It did not occur to Mrs Greenepad to replace the margarine with butter, nor quietly to lay butter alongside. She was keen to have the matter out with Edwina Mercer, once and for all, and was on the point of speaking when the pips for the seven o’clock news intervened. There were some vague introductory phrases, then a man’s voice, rather jubilant in tone, said,

  First the news headlines. The Prime Minister and leaders of the opposition parties will be meeting later today. No details have yet been published as to the agenda, but in the light of the worsening economic situation it is widely believed that the main purpose of the meeting will be to explore possibilities of forming a Government of National Unity. Most experts however, in view of the differences …

  ‘Edwina,’ Mrs Greenepad said. She was meaning to embark on the margarine question, but at that same moment Edwina turned her head and began speaking.

  ‘What a lovely voice,’ Edwina said, evidently referring to the news-reader. ‘Hasn’t he got a lovely voice?’

  … now entering its third day with no immediate prospect of a breakthrough in the negotiations.

  ‘That is a new voice,’ Mrs Greenepad said. ‘That man is a newcomer to the B.B.C.’ It was her radio; Edwina only listened to it by her permission, and she felt herself to be an authority on all that it put forth. ‘That is a young voice,’ she said.

  … struggling to mobilise both domestic and international support to combat famine conditions that it is feared may persist well into next year. The latest central government estimate of the number of starvation deaths in the past three months is thirty-two thousand, but other sources put the figures …

  ‘He will be one of the younger echelons,’ Mrs Greenepad said. ‘One of those they are training up.’

  ‘Younger echelons?’ Mrs Mercer looked straight before her, concentrating deeply, stealthily. They had announced the man’s name, and it had been a name familiar to her. The prospect of catching Emily out made her quite forget the cramp in her left leg.

  … speak of scenes of complete chaos and terror in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. Police and ambulance teams describe piercing cries from the wrecked interior as they dug in the rubble with bare hands in order to reach the victims. One eye-wittness …

  ‘Blythe,’ Mrs Mercer said suddenly. She twisted her tangled head round so that she could watch Emily, get the maximum effect. ‘His name is Blythe. He is an old hand at the studios; he has been a news-reader for a good many years now.’

  Emily’s face was too old and crumpled to give much away, but Edwina could tell by the agitated way her room-mate smoothed her palms down the front of her dress that the shot had gone home.

  ‘Well, that is news to me,’ Emily said, in an offended voice. ‘You left the margarine out again,’ she added, after a moment.

  Edwina made no reply to this, merely raising to her eyes, which were discharging rather badly this morning, a small white cotton handkerchief. She dabbed at her eyes, watched over the border of her hanky Emily repeating that tell-tale gesture of the hands down the front of the dress.

  ‘Donald!’ Lavinia called again, looking up wide-eyed at the tremulous encroachments of light on the ceiling overhead. She thought, not for the first time, how nice it would be to have a large mirror, gilt framed to go with the rest of the décor, set in the ceiling over the bed, so that people could watch themselves. No good suggesting such a thing to Donald, of course – it would simply bring out all his latent conservatism. He was forward-looking in other ways; when it came to the School, for example, he had plenty of vision. He was fond of saving, and it was quite true, that he had built up the business out of nothing; but in sexual matters he showed no such initiative; he was a creature of habit. And lately, even that could not be depended on. Still, she thought, it is my birthday
after all, so why not, and she called again, ‘Donald, are you awake?’

  Cuthbertson heard these calls, as he had heard the first, but he made no response. That morning, every morning for weeks now, he had awoken very early, before dawn, to a sensation of intense fear. He had no defence against this, as it attacked him always before he was ready, before he had dressed, donned his glasses, summoned fortitude. It was a sense of danger acute but unlocalized, like walking through long grass in which a beast lurked somewhere. Sky clear above, but every step attended with dread. To avoid snake bite or crocodile crunch the best thing to do is keep still, and Cuthbertson did his best to achieve perfect immobility. He lay there, quite still, and the day stretched before him, a perilous savannah.

  He was lying on his back, hands rigidly down by his sides. He licked the dry roof of his mouth and his mind moved cautiously among memories. The past was dangerous too, but in a different way. Somewhere, at some point, he had taken a wrong step, made some ghastly mistake. He knew this, because it was the only way of explaining his present sufferings. If only he could be patient and painstaking enough he might locate that moment, and somehow nip, sterilize, douse it, before its consequences gathered and engulfed him. The effort required was great because to the normal labour of recollection was added the impossibility of knowing whether the moment had seemed other than commonplace at the time. He was not required to remember highlights only. No incident, however trivial, could be safely disregarded. At present he was thinking of a time twenty-two years and three months previously, when he had given Lavinia, to whom he was then engaged, a bunch of daffodils.

  Daffodils, jonquils, narcissus. He checked, as always, the type of flower. Big, yes, and yellow all over, a more or less uniform yellow. Daffodils. Hyperbolical yellow in that white room. Clumsily untying the string or perhaps twine. The clumsiness was partly that and partly actually giving them, how to behave, what to say. What did I say? They were very yellow in that light. The bay below the hotel was a generator of white light, and the walls, the walls of the room were white. Her eyes filled with tears. I was trying to untie the string, twine. The stems were pale green, and they were thick, fleshy. The string, twine, cut the stems and some of it got on my hands, afterwards it turned brown. A brown stain. No, that was not daffodils, that was dandelions, that was years before. Where the stems were cut and bruised, the stems of the dandelion, no, daffodil, this thin milky stuff came out. Sap? Her eyes filled with tears. She was regarding the daffodils in some way differently. What impulse led me to buy them? How can I ever know? Those brown stains, I was a child then, that was dandelion for the rabbits …

  A terrible sense of having lost control assailed Cuthbertson. He tried to fight his way back to the white room, yellow flowers, Lavinia’s face, but rabbits obtruded their faces, staring fastidiously through wire-mesh, he was a boy again, bare-kneed, cutting dandelion … He groaned, raising his head a little from the pillow, as if seeking help, or struggling to break through delirium. There was daylight in the room now. Each leaf and loop of the moulded wreath on his ceiling was visible. He raised his rigid left arm, bent it towards him, looked at his watch. It was eight minutes past seven.

  … describe it as a scene in a nightmare, dismembered bodies lying on the pavement outside, people wandering about amid the wreckage in a state of shock, some of them bleeding from face wounds …

  ‘Listen to the timbre of that man’s voice,’ Mrs Greenepad said. ‘That is a young man’s voice.’ She compressed her mouth so that her thin bluish lips disappeared altogether, and stared inimically at Mrs Mercer. ‘You put the margarine out again,’ she said.

  … situation in the interior is extremely grave. It now seems that even if supplies …

  ‘You thought I wouldn’t notice, didn’t you? I can tell by the colour.’

  … whole villages of dead and dying …

  ‘You haven’t got a weight problem, not like me.’

  … lie out in the open, where dying mothers still try to feed babies too exhausted to …

  ‘You haven’t got a weight problem, Emily, that is what it is.’ Mrs Mercer paused. Then with a sort of despairing effrontery, because Emily always proved stronger in the end, and because it was Emily’s radio, she said, ‘You are an old bag of bones, that is what you are.’ Losing more nerve, she added quickly, ‘Speaking from the medical viewpoint, not personal.’

  ‘How dare you?’ Mrs Greenepad said. ‘Have you forgotten that it is my radio?’

  ‘I am not likely to forget.’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Greenepad said. ‘Nor are you likely to have a radio of your own.’

  ‘Speaking in the medical sense,’ Mrs Mercer said, ‘and in that sense only, you are skin and bone, Emily.’

  ‘Pronouncing his name to be Blythe. You cannot possibly be as conversant with the personnel as I am.’

  … aged twenty, said that one of the soldiers ripped off her clothes and she was …

  ‘Not like me. I’ve got a bit of flesh on me.’

  … repeatedly…

  ‘Such rudeness. I could cut you off from the source of your information, just like that.’ Mrs Greenepad attempted in her rancour a snapping of the fingers, but succeeded in producing only a brief, dry, crepitant sound, ‘How dare you make personal aspersions?’ she said.

  … tried to take a nine-month baby from one of the soldiers, saying she was its mother …

  ‘And my hair the same colour it had when I was a girl.’ Mrs Mercer’s eyes were discharging badly again.

  … The naked body of a young girl was found last night hidden in thickets near her Sunderland home …

  ‘I’d be ashamed,’ Mrs Greenepad said, ‘if it was me. Appearing for breakfast in that state of dishabille.’ She was referring to her room-mate’s disordered hair, and the gaping front of her pale-blue candlewick dressing-gown.

  ‘The same colour. Not like some. Even my worst enemies – ’

  ‘You wallow in it. Edwina, that is the only word. You ought to wear a girdle.’

  … aged eight, had been sexually …

  ‘– admit I have good legs, in every sense of that word.’

  ‘You ought to confine yourself within stricter limits.’

  Edwina Mercer dabbed at her eyes again. The pain had returned to her leg. ‘I cannot help it,’ she said, thinking of Mrs Cuthbertson’s fancy-dress party, ‘if some of us are more in demand than others.’ She was conscious of her resources of defiance draining rapidly away. ‘You know what you can do with your radio,’ she said, with almost her last flicker.

  … At Woolston in Buckinghamshire yesterday Henry Wilson ate six live frogs in seventy-one seconds to win fifteen pounds and the title of All England Live Frog Swallowing Champion.

  ‘My goodness,’ Edwina said. ‘What a strong constitution.’

  ‘Slut!’ Mrs Greenepad shouted, losing control of herself completely at the sight of Edwina’s mild round face, partially obscured by the dishevelled hair, listening with no apparent sense of gratitude to announcements about frogs on a radio not her own. ‘I will report you to the council,’ she shouted, ‘for trying to attract the glances of workmen.’

  Not like mine, Edwina thought, and she let the other’s voice go over her head. Not like mine, which say what you like, is flesh and blood still, and my hair the colour it had when I was a young girl…

  … The frogs went down between mouthfuls of –

  With trembling fingers Mrs Greenepad switched her radio off.

  ‘Donald!’ Lavinia called again, less tentatively now, for she had heard that groaning noise from her husband’s room.

  Cuthbertson sighed heavily, clambered out of bed, padded over three yards or so of carpet and, still in the grip of the anguish that had woken him, opened the door to his wife’s room. He stood for a moment, looking in warily, a pale, bulky man in dark blue pyjamas. Sensing the nature of this summons he had not bothered to put his glasses on, and so things were rather indistinct in his wife’s room. However, the sweet synthetic o
dours of her existence came wafting to him.

  ‘Come and get in beside me,’ he heard her husky voice say.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ he said, suddenly remembering. He moved obediently towards the bed, feeling under his bare feet the alien luxury of her carpeting, so much thicker than his own. He got into the bed, sank down beside her. She turned to him, and he laid hands on her abundant, sleep-heavy breasts. Ritual endearment and caress, however, effected no change in him, none whatsoever. He lay heavy and tense beside her, and Lavinia, who knew nothing of his morning fears, began quite soon to reproach him, first for lack of ardour, an old grievance; then for his unwillingness to experiment.

  ‘A man of your experience,’ she said, ‘I should have thought…’

  Cuthbertson failed to hear the next few words, then he heard ‘variations’. He could not make out what his wife was talking about. He could not make out what he was doing, thus recumbent beside her. His mind was confused among yellow flowers, the oozing roots of daffodils, rabbits’ nervous ears and noses.

  ‘Different and exciting things to do,’ Lavinia said, with sudden distinctness.

  Cuthbertson made non-committal noises. He felt like a member of the audience who has been called upon to assist without knowing how the trick is done. The string, twine. That little bay an aimer of sea light…

  ‘Thirty-six positions,’ she said ‘At least. And we go on in the same old way.’

  ‘Dispossessions?’ he said. This word, which he thought she had said, chimed in with one of his current anxieties, one which had been deepened by a person named Honeyball, an official at the Ministry of Education, who had been a frequent visitor lately, and who hinted constantly at a State take-over. ‘No fear of that,’ he said, with assumed confidence. Suddenly, in some remote recess he felt intimidations of sexual excitement, but these faded almost at once, to be replaced by anxious thoughts about Mafferty, a member of staff recently appointed, who was proving unsatisfactory.

  ‘Would you like to try it from behind?’ Lavinia said, in the tone of one offering biscuits.