LITMIR.BIZ

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front of the board. She was always a little dramatic, wanting to be the centre of attention, though she didn’t realise this herself. She didn’t know about darts, but she would try to get the bulls, for she was very determined and she didn’t see why she couldn’t throw the darts as well as anybody else.

      ‘Ten pence,’ said the woman handing her the darts with a bored expression.

      A number of other people were there, and she smiled at them as if saying, ‘Look at me. I don’t know anything about darts but I’m willing to try. Aren’t I brave?’ She threw the first dart and missed the board altogether. She laughed, and threw the second dart which this time hit the outer rim of the board. She looked proudly round but her husband’s face was turned away, as if he was angry or ashamed of her. She drew back her round pretty tanned arm and threw the dart and it landed quivering in a place near the bull. She turned to him in triumph but he had moved on, little Sheila clutching his hand. There was some scattered ironic applause from the crowd and she bowed to them with a flourish.

      When she came up to him, he said, ‘You didn’t do so badly. But these darts are rigged. Some of them don’t stick in the board. All the fairs are the same. They cheat you.’

      ‘Oh cheer up,’ she said, ‘cheer up. We came here to enjoy ourselves.’

      Two youths carrying football scarves in their hands went past and whistled, and Hugh’s face darkened and became stormy and set. She smiled, aware of her slim body in the yellow dress. She hoped that he wouldn’t settle into one of his gloomy childish moods and spoil the day. He looked quite funny really from the back, as he had had a haircut recently: most of the time he wore his hair long like an artist’s or a poet’s but today it was much shorter, showing more clearly the baldish patches at the back.

      ‘All fairs cheat you,’ he repeated as if he were worried about the amount of money they might spend, as if he were busy adding a sum in his mind. For a poet, she thought, he brooded rather much on money, and far more so than she did. Her philosophy was a simple one: if she had enough for the moment she was quite happy. But today she didn’t care, she actually wanted to spend money, positively and extravagantly, as if by doing so she was making a gesture of hope and joy to the world. As they were passing a machine which emitted cartons of orangeade when money was inserted she bought three and they drank them as they walked along. She threw hers away carelessly on the road, but Hugh and Sheila waited till they came to a bin before depositing theirs.

      The heat was really quite intense and she was annoyed that he showed no sign of removing his jacket.

      What had she expected from marriage? Was this really what she had expected? Before her marriage she had been lively and alert and carefree but now she wasn’t like that at all. She was always thinking before she made a remark in case she said something that would wound her husband, in case he found buried in it a sharp intended thorn which he would turn over masochistically in his tormented mind.

      They came to a shooting stall and she said, ‘Would you like to try this then?’

      ‘Well …’ She put down the fifteen pence and he took the rifle in his hand, looking at it for a moment helplessly before breaking it in two. The woman gave him some pellets which he laid beside him, inserting one in the rifle after fumbling with it shortsightedly for some time. He snapped the broken rifle together and took aim: it seemed ages before he was ready to fire. She kept saying to herself, Why are you taking so long? Why don’t you fire? Fire.

      He sighted along the rifle and fired, and one fat duck in the moving procession fell down. Again he aimed steadily and carefully, at one point putting the rifle down in order to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but then raising it and firing. He looked extremely serious and concentrated as if there was nothing in the world he liked better than shooting down these fat slow ducks passing in procession in front of him. And again he knocked one down. So he had a talent after all—another talent, that is, apart from his poetry. He steadily aimed and again hit a duck.

      ‘What do I get for that?’ he asked the woman excitedly.

      The woman pointed without speaking to a miscellany of what appeared to be undifferentiated rubbish but which on examination defined itself as clay dishes, cheap soiled brooches and a teddy bear.

      ‘Take the teddy bear,’ Ruth suggested and he took it, handing it over proudly. She in turn gave it to Sheila who gravely clutched it like a trophy.

      ‘I didn’t know you could shoot,’ she said as they walked along together.

      ‘I used to go to fairs when I was younger,’ he replied, but didn’t volunteer any more. She was proud that he had won a prize though it was a not very plush teddy bear and she put her arm momently in his. He seemed pleased, and relaxed a little, but she wished that he would remove his jacket.

      ‘The prize wasn’t worth the entry fee,’ he commented as they walked along.

      ‘That’s true.’

      ‘All these fairs are the same. They cheat you all the time.’

      She knew that what he was saying was true but she thought that he shouldn’t be repeating it so often: after all there were more things that they could talk about than the deceitfulness of fairs. When she had married him his conversation had been less monotonous and more enterprising than this, but she supposed that sitting in the house all day, every day, there wasn’t much new experience flooding into his life.

      A woman on toppling heels and wearing blue-rinsed hair walked past them.

      ‘Did you see that woman?’ she asked. ‘Do you see her hair?’

      ‘What woman? I didn’t notice.’

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she sighed.

      Yet he had aimed carefully and with great concentration at the ducks as if more than anything else in the world he had wanted to shoot them down. He was pretty well as quiet as Sheila most of the time; she herself wasn’t like that at all, she liked to talk to people, that was why she worked in an office. She liked the trivia of existence. She would take stories home to him at night but he hardly ever listened to her or suddenly in the middle of what she was saying he would talk about something else. He might for instance say, ‘Do you think poetry is important?’ And she would answer, ‘I suppose so,’ and immediately afterwards, ‘Of course it is.’ And she herself would have been thinking about her boss whose wife had visited him in the office that day and how he had shown her round as if she had been a complete stranger. Or about Marjorie who had told her how she had thrown a frying pan at her husband with the eggs still in it.

      And he would say, ‘It’s just that sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I …’ They had come to the Hall of Mirrors and she said, ‘What do you think? It costs fifteen pence.’

      ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

      Why was he always asking her what she thought? She wished he would accept some responsibility for at least part of the time. But, no, he would always ask, ‘What do you think?’ If only once he would say what he himself thought.

      She didn’t know what a Hall of Mirrors would be like but she said aloud, ‘Why not?’ It was she who always walked adventurously into the future, throwing herself on its mercy without much previous thought.

      ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in.’

      Hugh and Sheila followed her into the large tent.

      It was hilarious. When they entered they saw two people whom they assumed to be husband and wife doubled over with laughter in front of a mirror, the wife pointing at her reflection and unable to utter a word. The husband glanced at the three of them and at her in particular, raising his hands to the roof as if saying, ‘Look at her.’ Hugh stared at his wife angrily and she thought, ‘To hell with him. Can’t I even look at another man?’

      Then she turned and looked in the mirror. Her body had been broadened enormously, her legs were like tree trunks, and her large head rested like a big staring boulder on massive shoulders. It was like seeing an ogre in a fairy story, in a world

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