Night Over Water - Ken Follett [38]
What would she say?
Today he would have cold beef, left over from Sunday’s roast. Diana put on an apron and began to slice potatoes for frying. When she thought of how angry Mervyn was going to be, her hands shook, and she cut her finger with the vegetable knife.
She tried to get a grip on herself as she washed the cut under the cold tap, then dried her finger with a towel and wrapped a bandage around it. What am I afraid of? she asked herself. He won’t kill me. He can’t stop me: I’m over twenty-one and it’s a free country.
The thought did not calm her nerves.
She set the table and washed a head of lettuce. Although Mervyn worked hard, he almost always came home at the same time. He would say: “What’s the point of being the boss if I have to stop at work when everyone else goes home?” He was an engineer, and he had a factory that made all kinds of rotors, from small fans for cooling systems to huge screws for ocean liners. Mervyn had always been successful—he was a good businessman—but he really hit the jackpot when he started manufacturing propellers for aircraft. Flying was his hobby, and he had his own small plane, a Tiger Moth, at an airfield outside town. When the government started to build up the air force, two or three years ago, there were very few people who knew how to make curved rotors with mathematical precision, and Mervyn was one of those few. Since then, business had boomed.
Diana was his second wife. The first had left him, seven years ago, and run off with another man, taking their two children. Mervyn had divorced her as quickly as he could and proposed to Diana as soon as the divorce came through. Diana was then twenty-eight and he was thirty-eight. He was attractive, masculine and prosperous; and he worshipped her. His wedding present to her had been a diamond necklace.
A few weeks ago, on their fifth wedding anniversary, he had given her a sewing machine.
Looking back, she could see that the sewing machine had been the last straw. She had been hoping for a car of her own: she could drive, and Mervyn could afford it. When she saw the sewing machine, she felt she had come to the end of her tether. They had been together for five years and he had not noticed that she never sewed.
She knew that Mervyn loved her, but he did not see her. In his vision there was just a person marked WIFE. She was pretty, she performed her social role adequately, she put his food on the table and she was always willing in bed: what else should a wife be? He never consulted her about anything. Since she was neither a businessman nor an engineer, it never occurred to him that she had a brain. He talked to the men at his factory more intelligently than he talked to her. In his world, men wanted cars and wives wanted sewing machines.
And yet he was very clever. The son of a lathe operator, he had gone to Manchester Grammar School and studied physics at Manchester University. He had had the opportunity to go on to Cambridge and take his master’s degree, but he was not the academic type, and he got a job in the design department of a large engineering company. He still followed developments in physics, and would talk endlessly to his father—never to Diana, of course—about atoms and radiation and nuclear fission.
Unfortunately, Diana did not understand physics, anyway. She knew a lot about music and literature and a little about history, but Mervyn was not much interested in any kind of culture, although he liked films and dance music. So they had nothing to talk about.
It might have been different if they had had children. But Mervyn already had two children by his first wife and he did not want any more. Diana had been willing to love them, but she had never been given the chance: their mother had poisoned their