Chapter 14. Marital Disharmony
On the very day Scarlet sent Candi’s telegram, Ian suddenly announced he must go up to London. Scarlet battled hard to suppress her instant jealousy. Jealousy placed her in an invidious position – the Ball and Chain carping wife. Who WOULDN’T want to escape from that? Ian argued that he had appointments about “employment options”, but Scarlet knew and stated that he’d received no calls or mail.
“Oh no?” he’d returned loftily. He’d always had these appointments, he simply didn’t tell Scarlet because “she would react like this”.
Scarlet was stumped. Stymied. How on earth had this happened? They’d been so happy just a couple of months ago, when they moved in – they’d always been a happy, get-along couple. The envy of their friends. Suddenly he had become a “high-flier” and she was a stuck at home as The Complainer! Why, oh why hadn’t she listened to India, her own Sister Anne, who warned her about Wives Stuck In the Country?
The seeming inevitability of rigid roles loomed over them. There was the “hardworking long-distance husband” who needed and deserved whatever relaxation, rest and entertainment he could find in The Big City versus the “trapped, bitter drudge” of a wife who didn’t appreciate all she’d been given and always wanted more. It was the “battle of the sexes” they’d read about (and laughed over) during courtship. It could never apply to self-aware, intelligent artists: lucky people who knew where to find and how to value “true love”.
Charming as Wyvern House was slowly becoming, it could never be worth a loss this devastating. Scarlet was facing nothing less than the total corruption of her love relationship. Worst of all, they couldn’t discuss it. She daren’t even mention it. She knew with absolute certainty that Ian would blame the baby, not the house! Wouldn’t he be simply playing to “type”? And wouldn’t everyone agree with him? Wasn’t this what the “world” insisted always happened to everyone else? The mother fell in love with the baby and the father, feeling the loss, sought attention elsewhere. He became freer, she became more burdened, then the fights began. She’d never – and Ian said HE’D never – thought any of this could possibly apply to them!
He changed, not me, thought Scarlet mutinously. Suddenly his mind was closed to her. It happened the instant we walked into this house. But how could she have stopped Ian from buying a house she’d neither heard of nor seen? Talk about inevitability! They’d planned her pregnancy together but the house idea was his alone. Although when Scarlet thought honestly about it, hadn’t agreed they needed more space? It was a hopeless mess.
Scarlet felt uncomfortable requesting fidelity from her husband considering they were banned from having sex. Although she couldn’t feel confident in his devotion, she did ask him – “will you be true to me?”
His horrible answer was, “What do you think?” Either he scorned her for raising the question, or he dared her to tell him the truth, which was, that she thought he wouldn’t be. But her pride couldn’t allow her to beg from this stranger. Who was he? The more responsibilities Ian had, the more different he became from the playful, imaginative student she had married, and the more he seemed to be turning into a hostile alien driven by unreadable compulsions.
But mightn’t he say the same of her? She kept secrets, too.
For example, she had originally considered Nicholas would have better childhood in the country. Ian considered it “American” and “suburban” (both pejoratives) to dread the dirt and despair, the “rat-race” of big cities and to conjure up instead a green Eden where Nicholas could grow slowly, while studying the past’s best minds.
Scarlet had known she must eventually brace herself to fight the English craziness of sending eight year old boys away to boarding school but in the old days she had enough confidence in herself and her marriage to feel this was a battle she might win.
Now she saw he considered marriage a partnership only when the wife agrees with her husband. When she didn’t, it was easier to ignore her.
Before the most recent trip to London she had taken care to mark him with her scent so to speak, to bathe him in her love, remind him of their passion, but after the guest weekend she felt too dispirited and if she must be honest, too angry at his cultivation of someone like Candi and his apparent willingness to use her as a goad against his own wife. How dare he! So disloyal! Her itch to scratch his face was decidedly de-rousing.
He was claiming the Holy Grail – a proffered permanence at the BBC. According to him, “everybody knew” television was THE modern workplace nowadays for money and advancement. Scarlet hadn’t cared for the BBC people she had met. They seemed so relentlessly – even aggressively, proudly “unpoetic”. Couldn’t Ian see that these people quashed rather than enhanced creativity? But such concepts only made Ian angrier. Their new obligations were expensive. She couldn’t contest that.
She found herself yearning hopelessly for the carefree days of courtship and poverty – a honeymoon in Spain for pennies a day – a dingy flat with a toilet on the landing. Too late for such nostalgia. Those days were pre-Nicholas, and now that he was here he needed the best care possible. The universe required Nicholas. It was Scarlet’s deepest belief that Nicholas needed to be born. One could even argue that Scarlet needed to become a mother, for Nicholas’ sake. Everything Ian knew of this atavism he instinctively despised. She was certain he considered Wyvern House more important than his son.
A cynic would say this was the oldest Tale Ever Told. Men and women had different investments in children. Who was that American scientist in the thirties who wrote about how important any particular man was to a woman, and how unimportant any particular woman was to a man? Men didn’t comprehend the process of giving birth, didn’t need to because in biological fact they could father hundreds of children every year. Women, on the other hand, must invest years in bringing up a mere handful of children.
Scarlet certainly didn’t want to hash any of this out with Ian. Back in their courting days, he was interested in her thoughts and they could talk about anything; now he seemed resolved on turning her own words into weapons against her.
One morning Ian galvanized her with a totally unexpected argument.
“You know, if I got this job, we’d have to get a place in town. What a Christmas that would be!”
This was casually stated while he was looking in the mirror, tying his tie.
Scarlet’s mouth fell open. “A flat in town AND a house in the country?”
“Why not? Other people do it.”
They certainly did: rich people. Ian did have that thousand pounds – if he hadn’t already used it to stave off debts. They’d already agreed to skip Christmas presents in the face of all these expenses – but a shared apartment hunt would be a gift in itself!
Wouldn’t that be the perfect solution? Had she jumped too fast to all her negative conclusions? Her face burned – was he right when he called her “The Doomsayer?”
He didn’t need the mirror to tie his tie – he was using it to study her face. She had never been one who aspired to mask her emotions – especially from her husband! But this time she really tried. In her mind she saw their lives unspooled – dinners with fake people like Candi, hours spent rushing from town to country and back again, passing the baby between them and multiple caregivers as they sought to keep a precarious footing in the world of “the lucky ones” – was that really the life she wanted? She felt certain that even in the midst of these complex preoccupations, people found time to feel lonely and hopeless. Equally she felt certain that such a busy chatelaine would never write a worthwhile word.
Money was universally supposed to solve all dilemmas. She was beginning to see that wasn’t true. And yet – if she needn’t scrabble for a job herself, a flat in town would solve the education dilemma. And so she said,
“Sounds wonderful,” and was touched when he sighed with visible relief. He still cared what she thought!
Alysse Aallyn 
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