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WIFE: [Turning to regard him contemptuously.] What are you going on about?
HUSBAND: I’m saying that you knew.
WIFE: Knew what?
HUSBAND: About the goings on.
JOHN CLARE: The ins and outs. That’s what he means.
WIFE: The goings on? You’re saying that I knew about them?
HUSBAND: All along. That’s what I’m saying.
WIFE: Oh, how dare you? How dare you sit there and say I knew about the goings on? If I’d have known about the goings on then I’d have stopped them there and then. They wouldn’t have been going on at all.
HUSBAND: You knew. You looked the other way.
WIFE: The other way?
HUSBAND: Deliberately. You know you did. It was convenient.
WIFE: [Guardedly.] Convenient? I don’t know what you mean by that.
HUSBAND: Celia, yes you do. You know the whole of what I mean by it. We’ve hardly touched each other in this last twelve years of marriage. Or had you not noticed?
WIFE: That’s just normal. That’s how everybody is. The thing with you is you’re sex mad, trying it on every five minutes and not bothered if the other party feels like it or not.
HUSBAND: You never felt like it, not every five months, let alone five minutes. And when I stopped bothering you, when I stopped trying it on, did you really believe that I’d lost interest too? That I’d stopped having feelings of that nature just because that’s how it were with you?
WIFE: I … I suppose that I assumed you’d made other arrangements. That you had resorted to a dirty book or something.
HUSBAND: Oh, and what would something be? Would it be an affair outside of marriage, knocking off the barmaid round at the Black Lion, something of that nature?
WIFE: [Appalled.] Oh God, Johnny, tell me that you didn’t. Not with that Joan Tanner. Everyone would know! What would they think? What would they think of me?
HUSBAND: Don’t be so daft. Of course I didn’t. I knew that you wouldn’t want that, everybody knowing.
WIFE: [Relieved.] Oh, thank God. Of course I’d not want anybody knowing. If you’re going to do a bloody stupid thing like that, then you should …
HUSBAND: Keep it to meself?
WIFE: [Uncertainly.] Well … yes.
HUSBAND: Keep it indoors?
WIFE: Yes, I suppose so.
HUSBAND: Keep it in the family? [The WIFE stares at her HUSBAND in silence for a few moments, realising her own unacknowledged complicity, then turns from him to stare into space with a haunted expression. The HUSBAND looks away, down and to one side.]
BECKETT: Well, it’s a fair point. In my own
experience, I think it very rare a woman doesn’t know what’s going on in her own home, even if she’d prefer she didn’t. In the case of Miss Joyce that I mentioned earlier, the trouble that she may have had when she was ten, if that was what occurred I can’t imagine Nora – that was Lucia’s mother – I cannot imagine that she would not know of it. I think that very often women are more adept at the managing of a whole spider’s nest of secrets than most men would have within their capability.
JOHN CLARE: I’m still not utterly convinced in my own heart that ten’s too young.
THOMAS BECKET: The victim’s age, I think, has no material bearing on the sin, nor on its gravity. They are condemned, these wretched creatures, to unending misery, sat here on these hard and unyielding steps awaiting absolution that shall not arrive.
BECKETT: They’re damned then, and beyond the reach of mercy or forgiveness. You appear to be quite certain of the fact.
