A Book at Bedtime

by Barrie Shore

  Eva interrupts with an ear-splitting shriek. Oh, good grief, what is it now? Is she too suffering a surfeit of biscuit? Is she about to vomit again? She’s reaching her hand, so he takes it and gives it a little squeeze, but she flaps him away, irritably, points to the tin on his lap: it’s a biscuit she’s after, not a caress. So he shrugs and laughs and gives her another and is rewarded with a smile. That smile of hers that is still so beguiling.

  ‘No, we were happy, weren’t we, old chap? Happy in the end. Especially when the baby came.’

  She looks at him sharply, biscuit halfway to her mouth, smile gone.

  Oh, hell.

  Hell’s bells, bugger and damn. Where did that come from? Why did he say it? The one word that’s completely taboo, that he wishes unsaid as soon as it’s out, but wishes too late: the word hangs in the air like a speech balloon.

  Baby.

  She sits very still, frowning at the biscuit, as if she’s searching the pages of an ancient dictionary. Ba, baa, baboon, babu, babul, babushka…

  ‘Baby,’ she says.

  It’s an accidental repetition, it must be, as meaningless as yum. She enjoys the feel of the plosive b between her lips, the little growl at the back of her throat that separates them, the cheerful cluck of the y at the end. But she says it again, beaming with pride, as if she’s coined the word herself. ‘Baby.’

  Does she know what she’s saying? She can’t, she wouldn’t be smiling if she did. Unless she can say a word, knowing it’s a word, without having any idea what it means. She might equally well have said biscuit without making a connection with the actual biscuit in her hand. Or does she think a baby is a biscuit, or a biscuit a baby? And whatever she thinks, if she’s thinking at all, is she waiting for his reply? If so, what on earth shall it be? Yum was all very well, they’d had a joyful exchange of yums; but the meaning of yum is perfectly clear, no need for analysis, no train of emotion carried in its wake. Whereas baby… baby comes swaddled about in a complex history of joy and pain that he’s tidied away into a drawer, like baby clothes, long since outgrown but too precious to throw away. A drawer he hasn’t dared to open for almost half a century.

  Does she remember that day? Such a fine day, mild and dry with a thin sun hinting at spring. When they shut up shop for early closing and took themselves off on a trip to Castlebridge market.

  Wednesday, 8th March, 1961

  The baby was due at the end of the month and Eva walked slowly, heavily, leaning on her husband’s arm. Jack adjusted his long step to hers as they strolled in a self-conscious manner from stall to stall, buying for the baby. Eva had never been greatly liked in the town. She was too modern, too urban, too smart. But now there was a new serenity in her, as if she had left the sharp edges of the city behind at last and absorbed the slow tenor of provincial life. She had nothing to prove any more, her existence justified by the burden she carried; she shone with the prospect of motherhood and her happiness brought responsive smiles and kindness from the very people who had previously avoided her.

  Their last stop was at the toy stall where a china doll sat in pride of place, staring disdainfully at her prospective buyers. She had painted cheeks and rosebud lips and a fine head of golden curls and improbable lashes through which she gazed with an unblinking stare. Jack picked her up gingerly, held her uncertainly, as if she might suddenly spring to life and start up a wail at the sight of his face.

  ‘How pretty she is. She seems almost real.’

  ‘She’s revolting.’ Eva was examining the soft toys, puppies, kittens, bunny rabbits, bears. ‘And in any case, we’re having a boy.’

  ‘Are we? How can you be sure?’

  ‘Oh, we know these things.’ Eva patted her bump in a superior way. ‘Don’t we, Will?’

  ‘Will?’

  ‘William. Our son.’

  ‘Oh. You mean after my father?’

  ‘And you. You’re John William, the baby’s William John. Will.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Of course I am, I’m delighted, it’s just that I thought…’

  She picked up a teddy bear. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Well, what about…’

  She stroked the teddy bear’s nose. ‘What about what?’

  ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ He took refuge in the doll to hide his confusion. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but we’re having a boy.’ The doll closed her eyes in resignation. ‘Mamma,’ she bleated.

  ‘Mercy on us, did ever you see a grown man looking so silly?’ Old Mrs Moxon, larger than life and twice the weight, as Jack’s mother had used to say, rolled up to the stall in her wheelchair. She suffered lately from a mysterious affliction to which she referred, equally mysteriously, as her legs. ‘It’s my legs are the trouble. Nobody knows the pain I’m in, and what’s more nobody cares. Least of all her.’

  Poor put-upon Miss Maiden, huffing with exertion as she brought the wheelchair to rest and put on the brakes. She was still as thin and stringy as ever, and had lately developed a scattered look, like a piece of old knitting that’s gone into holes and which, with one tug at a loose strand, might unravel completely, never to be knitted together again.

  ‘So you’ve done your duty at last, young man.’ Mrs Moxon fixed Jack with a beady eye. ‘And not before time. First time gravid at her age, there’s bound to be trouble.’

  ‘Take no notice.’ Miss Maiden, in spite of her flyaway appearance, had a new authority in her as though by her elevation to Moxie’s minder, she was freed at last to speak her mind. ‘Poor Moxie has grown mighty bad-tempered of late.’

  ‘I heard that.’

  ‘And so you were meant to. It’s sorry I am for those legs of yours, but that’s not to say we should all be made to suffer for your misfortune.’ Miss Maiden gave a little toss of her head and turned her back on her charge. ‘I’m so glad of your news,’ she whispered to Eva, as if the pregnancy were a secret that only she was party to. ‘How are you, my dear?’

  ‘Very well. I’m the happiest woman in the whole world.’ Eva held up the teddy bear for Miss Maiden’s inspection. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, such a bear he is, how perfectly fuzzy and sweet.’

  ‘I never knew such nonsense.’ Mrs Moxon grumbled and scowled. ‘In my day we made do with a rag doll and a wooden spoon, and who’s to say we weren’t better off?’

  Nobody answered, nobody listened any more, which didn’t improve her temper. Jack felt a pang of sympathy for her: this, after all, was his mother’s best friend, they had been at school together, had shared secrets in corners, and he’d known her all his life, she deserved his compassion at the very least.

  ‘Dear Moxie, how much you must miss my mother.’

  ‘Must I.’ She was tight-lipped, feeling his compassion and resenting it. ‘If you ask my opinion, she should have gone to her grave heretofore and saved us the long wait for your celebratory news.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ He was already regretting his charity. ‘Mother would have been so happy about the baby.’

  ‘Happy? Happiness wasn’t a word easy to find in the lexicon of your mother’s mind, as you very well know, it being a slimmer volume than any to be found in the shelves of that shop of yours.’

  ‘No, I’m not having that. She was happy as a girl, you’ve told me yourself, and when she and my father met and were married.’

  ‘Oh, and I suppose you think marriages are made in heaven, but you’re wrong, they’re no more than a manner of means to stop filling the world with bastards, as your mother and father discovered to both of their costs.’ If she was trying to shock him, she succeeded, but her punishment hadn’t finished yet. ‘You’ll be telling me next that you’re happy.’

  He looked at Eva and Miss Maiden with the teddy bear, Eva catching the look, smiling back at him.

>   ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

  ‘Then you’re either a fool or a liar.’

  Now he was angry, wanting to say more, take issue with her, but prevented as a couple arrived at the stall that made him forget whatever it was he was going to say.

  Ned Styles. Leaning on his crutch, with a woman hanging onto his arm, blonde, beribboned, heavily pregnant, who joined Eva at the stall, greeted her warmly, linked arms, the two of them twittering, laughing together like old friends, while Ned lounged at the end of the stall watching them with a proprietorial smirk as if both women belonged to him. Even Miss Maiden, fluffing about, offering to fetch him a chair, patting his arm with fluttering fingers, was included in his ocular caress.

  Ned Styles.

  Jack hadn’t followed, had taken pains not to follow, his career after they’d left school. He knew that he worked in the market, not a legitimate trader, a wide boy, a bit of a spiv, selling black-market goods from a greasy suitcase, the police turning a blind and indulgent eye because he’d lost a leg in the war, Dunkirk, was it, Dieppe? Because he had a medal for bravery in the field of battle pinned to the breast of his slick silk racketeer’s suit, and because he kept them supplied with cheap cigarettes. The rest of his time seemed to be spent lounging in the doorway of The Market Tavern, flashing his cash, flaunting his women, fathering their kids.

  They greeted each other, Ned with his easy smile, Jack managing only a stiff little nod, inwardly furious to find himself feeling the same sense of inferiority he’d had as a boy.

  ‘Bet’n you mine’s bigger’n yours.’

  Eva glanced at Ned briefly, then ignored him (too pointedly was it?) and turned back to her friend who had picked up the china doll with the improbable eyelashes and was cooing with delight.

  ‘Oh, look, isn’t she darling?’

  ‘Oh, yes, how pretty she is. She seems almost real.’ Eva echoing his words with an answering coo. And this the doll she’d rejected not a moment before?

  ‘Oh, Neddy, I’ve simply got to have her. Please? Pretty please?’

  ‘Women, eh?’ Ned shrugged at Jack. ‘Still, whatever Rosie wants, Rosie gets.’ He produced a wad of notes from his trouser pocket and counted them out with a grubby thumb, while Rosie clutched the doll and kissed her rosy-red cheeks.

  The doll gazed up at her with her china blue eyes. ‘Mamma,’ she bleated, sounding less than ecstatic.

  Ned favoured Jack with a long-suffering look, man to man, father to father. ‘Kids. Who’d have ’em?’

  He trousered his cash, took the woman’s arm with a rough gesture that seemed simultaneously to possess and reject her, and sauntered away. Can a one-legged man with a crutch actually saunter? Ned Styles could. Ned Styles did, happy with himself and his public display of largesse.

  Mrs Moxon watched them go with a glint of malice. ‘So and that Styles boy may have lost his leg, but there’s nothing wrong with the rest of his bits, judging by the look of that floozie of his, nor is she the first or the last to prove it.’ She turned to Jack with a spit of spite in her face. ‘Better look out to that wife of yours.’

  ‘What?’ Jack’s discomfort with Ned vented itself in fury with Moxie, all sympathy gone. Oh, what a witch she was! ‘That’s a wicked thing to say.’

  ‘My, my, what a take you’re in.’ Moxie, all injured innocence. ‘When I’m only saying it’s all very well this happy state of yours, but what about her? Is she happy too? Ask yourself that, my lad, and don’t tell yourself lies when you answer.’

  And although Jack understood with the better part of himself that Moxie’s venom wasn’t truly directed at him, but came from the helpless fury she felt as her life slowly wasted away; and although he was able to let his anger go, he couldn’t stop the Giant that was called Despair, that terrifying giant he’d fought so hard to conquer, come raging back into inglorious life.

  Monday, 5th September, 1960

  Total lunar eclipse

  There was something wrong with the morning. A stillness, an absence, that he couldn’t account for. He thought at first that she’d gone off to work early, forgetting that she’d suddenly left the library the week before, didn’t say why and he hadn’t asked.

  Then the note. On the chessboard, tucked under her king, black king, that she’d toppled over, conceding defeat.

  Gone to Dodie. Don’t ring.

  No explanation, no regret, no promise of return. And her suitcase gone too, the battered blue suitcase she’d brought with her when they married, its absence making hers the more final.

  Gone to Dodie. Don’t ring.

  What did he do? Follow her? Threaten her? Bully her back? With thumps and threats and draggings by the hair? He thought of it, dreamed of it, woke up in a sweat from nightmares of bloody revenge. Did nothing. Opened the shop each morning, closed it again at the end of the day. Haunted the salerooms, bought boxfuls of books. Sold a few, didn’t sell others. Didn’t care. Rearranged the shelves, disarranged them again. Catalogued backlogs of stock, checked his accounts, watched for the post, longing for the letter that never came. Smiled at customers, parried enquiries: Eva upset by the recent death of his mother, needing to rest, back again soon. Hovered by the phone, willing it to ring, dialled Dodie’s number a dozen times, hung up before the connection got through.

  Don’t ring.

  Filled the dead hours of the night with obsessive imaginings. Eva in London. Eva smiling. Eva forgetting him. Buried his face in her pillow each night to catch her smell, the smell that was fading fast, and begged whichever God it was that he did or didn’t believe in – someone, anyone – is there anybody there? Bring her back. This year, next year, sometime.

  Never.

  Wednesday, 8th March, 1961

  ‘…it’s all very well this happy state of yours, but what about her? Is she happy too? Ask yourself that, my lad…’

  And was she? When they sat upstairs after supper that night, on either side of the fireplace, she knitting for the baby, he reading aloud from Winnie-the-Pooh? With the teddy bear perched on a footstool between them, assessing his new surroundings.

  While the Giant that was called Despair waited silently in a corner of the room.

  ‘“So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”’

  The three of them sat on in harmonious silence, thinking of boys and bears and related matters.

  And the Giant Despair in the corner of the room.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew Mrs Styles.’ Jack set the teddy bear’s arms and legs into more symmetrical positions.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That girl you were talking to in the market, Ned’s wife.’

  ‘Oh, Rosie, you mean. Yes, she works at the Tavern.’

  ‘The where?’

  ‘The Market Tavern. She’s a barmaid.’

  ‘Oh.’ How did she know?

  ‘And they’re not married.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Filling the world with bastards. ‘I didn’t know you’d been in the Tavern.’

  ‘Well, I have. It’s very jolly, reminds me of the old Hope.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Hope and Anchor. It’s a pub in Bethnal Green, my dad used to drink there.’

  ‘Ah.’ He walked the teddy bear’s feet along the table. ‘Ned and I were at school together.’

  ‘I know.’ How did she know?

  ‘We didn’t really get on.’

  ‘Yes, you told me.’ When had he told her?

  ‘Ah.’ He jumped the teddy bear onto his knee. ‘You see, the trouble with Ned is…’

  ‘Oh, honestly, Jack, who cares about him?’

  Thursday, 8th December, 1960

  What time was it? Morning or afternoon? Day or night? He’d lost all track
of time, the distant chime of St Peter’s wearing away the endless hours, echoed by the grandfather clock at the top of the stairs. Fixated by chess: if he won she would come back, if he lost, she wouldn’t, stretching the game out for days and weeks to a stalemate. He was vaguely aware of the door jangling open but he had no heart for customers and didn’t look up.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  He was stupid with shock. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’ve cut your hair.’

  ‘Yes.’ And she went upstairs.

  Either one of them could have said more, could have shouted and railed, laid blame on each other, perhaps even exchanged blows. But each of them was as bad as the other, so they didn’t.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’ve cut hair.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. And she went upstairs.

  And how did they spend the rest of the day? As if nothing had happened. He downstairs in the shop, she going placidly about her domestic tasks: shopping, cleaning, cooking, restoring order to the chaos of her absence. She brought a snack lunch into the shop as she’d done every day since his mother had died, which they ate together in discomfortable silence. Ate supper at either end of the storeroom table. Smiled at each other, carefully, painfully, distantly. Said nothing.

  And later that night? Sitting on either side of the fireplace in the living room upstairs, listening to a record of The Magic Flute on the gramophone, with the late sun shining into the open windows, the sound of the music drifting out, hanging in the still air before trickling away.

  Eva was knitting. He was pretending to read, the Great Man’s Last Poems lying open on his knee, watching her from the corner of his eye. Eva knitting? When had she ever knat before? Knitted. Started to knit. And told himself how reassuring it was to see her so peaceably occupied, fearing all the time that she was only a figment of his imagination, that if he closed his eyes for a moment, she might disappear and never come back. And as the Queen of the Night started to sing, ‘Be not afraid, oh, noble youth’, he knew he’d do anything, anything at all, as long as she never left him again.