Chapter Fifty-Five
Meanwhile, Charlotte and Arthur Drig—remember them?—were having a good, old-fashioned, throw-the-crockery-about row. Arthur had happened to come across their children—who, the reader will remember (if perhaps requiring a little nudge), were last seen coping in their various ways with the death of Betsy’s beloved Inspector Pluck—running about the hotel, smashing things and bellowing like savages (the boys were, anyhow; Betsy had found a reading room to herself and was contemplating profounder concerns).
“Don’t you care what they’re doing?!” Arthur asked.
Charlotte, sat in a corner of the sitting room, drinking a cocktail, whose composition she’d misjudged but about which she was too drunk to notice, shook her head. “No.”
Arthur didn’t have much hair, but he pulled at what remained. “Can you even remember their names?” he finally asked, in exasperation.
“Of course I can. Don’t be a fucking moron.”
“Go on, then.”
“What?”
“List ’em.”
“List the names of our children?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to list the names of our children?”
“That’s right.”
“I won’t stoop to your level.”
“I’ll start you off: Betsy.”
“Of course I remember Betsy. She’s the only girl, and the only one with any dignity or self-control.”
“So who’s next?”
“Well—I don’t know why I’m doing this, but. . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, there’s Dougie.”
“You mean ‘Doobie’.”
“Of course that’s what I meant; it’s what I said, weren’t it?”
“No.”
“What did I say then?”
“‘Dougie’.”
“Liar. Go fuck yourself.”
“Then who?”
“I won’t play your games.”
“I insist.”
“If you’re so obsessed with our children’s names, why don’t you list ’em?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you! Go on, genius! Tell me another name!”
“But it goes without saying that I know ’em!”
“Then tell me! Go on! Let’s see just how bright and dependable is our patriarch!”
Arthur stared at her, then at the ceiling. Sweat spontaneously generated from beneath his sideburns. His mouth hung open. “. . .It’s a disgrace,” was all he could finally observe.
“There, you see?”
“Both of us. I can’t even picture their faces.”
“It don’t matter, y’know.” She drained her glass, and got up, walking with the dexterity of a giraffe with two broken legs, to pour another. “You and I will die. They’ll take over, whether they want to or not, till they, too, pass. And so it goes: on, and on, and on and on, deeper into nothing. Just, nothing. A bloody hole, in the mud, our species has been digging since the first day. What more can we do? That’s what God wants, apparently. So I say we give God what He wants, and drink ourselves into an early grave.”
Arthur took the glass from her hands on its way to her mouth; she smiled, faintly, at the thought that he cared enough to save her from making good on her whimsical reference to a liquid suicide; until he drained it himself in one whalish gulp. He paced about the room, avoiding her glance. She finally said: “I want a divorce.”
“Don’t be an arse.”
“If I’m gonna die in this hotel, frozen and starved, I don’t want it to be by your side.”
“By whose side, then?”
She grabbed the glass back from him, and cat-hissed: “Whoever’ll have me.”