Short story of Eton vintage (north Oxford, domestic, autobiographical)

In More Danico

From the highest window of the vertical house, the abandoned apples were still visible to the practised observer. Edith counted six. She had thought there had been six and a half, or perhaps a sixth, merely the day before. Was she witnessing the swift and ineluctable processes of Nature, in the ruthless form of biodegradation? Or did urban foxes eat fruit? And why had six perfectly good apples-Coxes, she was inclined to think-been left in their cramped, treeless garden in the first place?

She heard the front door opening, followed by several sounds and shriek, cat or child she was not certain. It was an interesting place for sound, this house. Everything was overheard. She and Harold had been quite ignorant of this fact early in their, marriage, taken in by the discreet, calm look of the Georgian walls, imagining a haven of secrets. But before a week had passed there, each had fallen into the trap of listening to sour confidences. They were both more careful afterwards.

“Edith, Edith, where are you woman?”

That was how he stressed it, as if he was enquiring about her gynaecological anatomy, not her location. Harold’s syntax was peculiarly Danish when he was puzzled. Edith did not bother answering; she wanted to hear for how long he would rail before he began to ascend the stairs. Her smile had the cruelty of serenity about it as she stepped out of her high-heeled shoes and threw herself backwards onto the bed. But the petulant squawk of a disturbed cat destroyed her stratagem. It really was a squawk, and it came from Edmund, who really did, at certain moments, resemble a disconcerted cockatoo.

“Upstairs? What are you doing?”

Edith was a woman of expedient emotion. She began to cry, at sufficient volume to reach Harold in the front hall, but without losing any measure of dignity. She played with her hair as she did so.

“Stop that woman, stop that. No need. None.”

Harold tripped over a pile of books arranged on the stairs for later transportation to Magnus’ bedroom as he hurried upwards. A copy of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, a third edition that Edith was quite fond of, struck a glancing blow against an inopportunely arrived cat, Edwin, who let out a loud protest, clearly giving it to understand that he would not be on speaking terms with Harold for some time. Harold ignored the animal, but thoroughly condemned the books. He was always irritated by those little turrets of matter he could not thoroughly analyse or understand. He regarded them as fortifications against his movements. Particularly the English ones. He could talk English perfectly well of course, whatever his wife might say to the contrary, but his literary tastes remained solidly Danish.

But now the treachery of this bookish booby-trap was combined with that underhand womanish attack, weeping. It was embarrassing and it was un-English. Honestly, Harold thought, anyone would think it was his woman, not he, who was the foreigner...but he could not put off the conflict any further. He had to face his own guilt within and deny everything without, as usual.

“I’m here woman, here, shhh...” He was half way up the stairs now, on a pale uncluttered landing.

“But are you here in the Danish manner? Or in the English manner?” Edith replied, now, shoeless, coming down the stairs to meet him. “And where is your wife?”

“You are my wife, as far as it matters,” Harold spluttered in exasperation.

“Maybe. But you married Astrid Ranaldsen last month. And you will leave me before this month is gone. I was your Danish marriage. But she is your Danish wife.”

Harold bubbled with useless anger. It was only fortunate the boys were away at school. This was quite unseemly. He had intended to time and to control and to ease and to oil this matter. Now this idiot of a little woman thought it her duty to wrack and to spoil and to dramatise and patronise. He was the offender. But that did not stop him from being appalled at how much Edith was enjoying this.

“I’ve made your sandwich for the train,” Edith added quite naturally. “Ham. With the Jarlsberg you always like.”

***

The queue at the station was, as would be expected in the circumstances, an unpleasant affair, but hysteria was made still harder to stave off by the presence of several Frenchwomen, old, proud, mothers, grieving, glamorous wives, haughty sisters complaining about England, all in the most fashionable mourning black of French femininity..

“There was a party of French businessmen on the train, you see, madam,” a platform attendant explained to Edith. “From Grenoble, which happens to be twinned with this town. Tragic, really.”

“Yes,” Edith replied politely. She was wearing her best grey suit.

“Goddard, Anne,” the loudspeaker announced, “please proceed to the forensic team to offer immediate assistance.” A fat woman with swollen red eyes left, abdicating the front of the line to Edith.

“Do you have kids then?” the platform attendant asked, cultivating further polite conversation in the context where it is perhaps most impolite.

“Yes,” Edith answered.

“Godwin, Edith, please proceed to the forensic team to offer immediate assistance.”

“Bye then,” the platform attendant remarked. “Business as usual, that’s my motto, or the terrorists have won, ent they?”

The forensic team was, Edith could only assume, so named in order to brighten up the process of corpse identification, rather than to fulfil a semantic function, as the sight that greeted her was scarcely a cooperative one. Doctors, of nurses, or non-gender-specific forensic personnel, swarmed in increasingly dirtied white coats-not by anything so dramatic as blood, but by sweat, and the miasma of filth that British stations acquire through decades of bombardment by chewing gum and cigarette ends-swarmed, in any case, like flies competing for refuse, over the dead, leading silent relatives between the messes of failed biological structure. All the identifiers seemed quite lost, and far more dead than the vibrant butcher’s displays of those who were.

“Madam,” one of the swarmers started, “could you help us decide which one of these was your husband...? The bodies from his compartment were over here...”

Edith looked at the closest one to her and said, “What luck. I’ve found him already. That’s him, no doubt about it.”

“Harold Godwin, passenger GY096, seat D4, British-Danish dual nationality?”

“Absolutely,” Edith replied, and Guillaume Nord, passenger M6265, seat D6, French nationality, was packed up into a specially provided Health Service container, which was in turn wrapped in a black bag. Edith, helped by a couple of porters, got her new, unswervingly faithful, husband into a taxi and set the course for the vertical house, in the front garden of which six Cox apples still decayed.