‘I’ll get a job. We are letting the house to some Americans.’
Barbara’s hand flies to her mouth, as if someone has died. ‘Your home, Lily!’
‘It’s only a house. There are plenty of other houses where we can live. I couldn’t afford to stay in London, even if I’d kept my job. The tenants will pay the mortgage.’
How hard she sounds, Barbara thinks. It’s shock. It’s how Lily is. If you didn’t know her, you might think she was as hard as nails, sometimes. She won’t let anyone near her.
She wants to touch Lily, to comfort her, but she daren’t. She scolds herself. Really, Barbara, this is not about you and your silly old feelings. Be practical. Lily is losing her job, and heaven knows that husband of hers won’t be able to give her any money. No wonder she looks worried half to death. ‘Lily, dear,’ she says cautiously, ‘you know what a dull creature I am. All I seem to spend money on is coffee and cigarettes. I put away half my salary: I simply don’t need it.’ Oh dear, was that the right thing to say? Does it sound odiously smug? But Lily seems to be listening. Quickly, she goes on. ‘There it sits in the bank, mounting up like old newspapers. No good to anyone. If I could help at all, you’ve no idea how much it would please me.’
Lily’s face changes. ‘You’re a good friend, Barbara,’ she says, and now Barbara hears it: the German accent of Lily’s early years, the ‘d’ of ‘good’ shading very lightly into a ‘t’. In spite of herself, there is a jar. ‘But it’s all right, I don’t need money,’ Lily continues. ‘We have savings.’
She won’t let me know how she really feels, thinks Barbara. She never will. Once she’s left the school, I shan’t see her. Perhaps it’s better that way. Outside school, we’d find that we had nothing in common. She remembers herself stepping back into the shop doorway, so as not to meet Lily with her little girl. For a moment she imagines herself stealing to the front door of Lily’s house, after dark, with a bundle of banknotes in an envelope, and pushing it through the letterbox.
She pictures Lily, stooping to pick up the envelope and knowing straight away that Barbara had posted it through the door. She wouldn’t like it. She’d find a way to send the money back, and it would embarrass her. It would spoil her memory of me.
What self-indulgent idiocy. Barbara, my girl, you are going to have to give yourself a good talking-to. Spoil her memory of you, indeed. She won’t be thinking of you. A Christmas card once a year if you’re lucky. And why on earth do people say that, as if Christmas might come twice a year?
‘That’s better,’ says Lily. Quickly, fleetingly, she takes Barbara’s hand, squeezes it, lets go.
‘What?’
‘You’re smiling.’
‘Am I?’
The smile wavers, becomes uncertain and even pleading.
‘It’s freezing out here,’ says Lily. ‘I’d better go in. Two more lessons to go.’
‘See you later,’ says Barbara, and keeps smiling as Lily walks away.
18
How Prison Works
Simon doesn’t know how prison works, but he watches and listens. He knows that he has the right to refuse any visitor. As a remand prisoner, he also has the right to wear his own clothes, receive more visits than convicted prisoners, write letters …
Quite soon he understands that for many of the others on remand, prison is like a station on the very end of a Tube line. Epping or Cockfosters, say. You always know that these are real places, even if you never travel that far. For these men, it’s the same with the Scrubs, or Wandsworth, or Pentonville. They may not have been to that end of the line, but they know someone who has. There’s a boy in here for the first time, that the other men call Gobbo. He looks like a boy of fifteen although he is four years older. He has a sharp, pretty face, which might get him into trouble but won’t, because anyone that went near him, Gobbo’s dad would get him. He’d be shivved in his peter.
Simon listens. Gobbo looks like a confirmation candidate. He’s always talking about his brother or his cousin or his dad’s mate, all of whom are or have been in prison. Soon, he’ll be in communion with them. He’ll be doing his bird. Gobbo goes on about his case and his brief and his trial date, and the other men put up with it.
What Simon hadn’t known was how quickly prison would change him into a prisoner. He can’t read most of the prison map yet, but he isn’t the same Simon Callington who walked along the Embankment, swung on and off the Tube and sat Bridget on his knee to hear her sing ‘Catch a Falling Star’. That other man’s daily hot bath and splash of cologne after shaving seem impossible luxuries, and yet there the fool was, carrying on as if all that was perfectly normal and would go on for ever. Simon, lying awake, knows enough now to be glad he’s not in Pentonville. That’s the end of the line all right; you don’t want to end up there. He watches his former self mooch around his house, whistling, pouring himself a drink or asking Lily whether she fancies the concert that’s on the Third, or the play. But it’s not always like that. The other Simon Callington sometimes sits in his red leather armchair by the fire for hours without speaking. He stares into the fire but doesn’t talk to Lily because he’s feeling – Christ! What can he have been feeling to stop him saying a single word to her? When he was in his own house, free to do whatever he wanted, with Lily sitting opposite him? Lily glances across at him, notes the look on his face, says nothing and carries on with whatever she’s doing. Marking, probably, or some of the children’s mending. Simon would like to step back into the past, and beat himself up.
Instead, he does what the fool forgot to do. He returns, slowly and carefully, to the room where he sat so often without even thinking about it. There’s the fire. In its heart is a slump of red ash, from the logs he brought home when they felled the trees in Highgate Wood. He and a couple of others filled the boots of their cars for five shillings. Now for the chair in which he sits. Comfortable; yielding. He thinks of Lily’s face when the men delivered the new furniture, and took off its protective sacking. They heaved the old brown sofa out into the garden, for the children to jump on. Lily and the children sat in a row on the new red sofa, all of them smiling.
The leather armchair has its own smell, especially once the flames have warmed it. There might be a gin and tonic on the little table that the children call the pastry table, because of its fluted edges. Quinine and juniper. A saucer of the salted peanuts for which he and Lily are both greedy. Lily’s skin and hair; her perfume. All taken for granted.
Now there’s the smell of men together, like the smell of school but worse, because men smell worse than boys. Sweat and feet and breath. The smell of his own excrement, collecting overnight in a bucket in the corner of his cell. The smell of all of those buckets at slopping out. He hadn’t known what that meant. By morning, he can’t even smell the bucket, because he’s deadened by a night in the stink of his own piss and shit. The warders’ faces, when they came in fresh from the outside air for their morning shift, tell him how disgusting his cell is. After slopping out there is time to wash and shave, but never enough time. The soap doesn’t lather properly. He knows better than to say anything. He learned that when he was eight years old. You didn’t ask questions and you didn’t cry if Mr Arkwright hooked his stick round the handle of the lav where you were sitting, and pulled the door wide open so everybody could see you with your shorts around your ankles. Older boys said the lavs didn’t even use to have doors. They were going to take them all off again, said one, with his eye on the new bugs. You listened and didn’t catch anyone’s attention. You kept quiet.
Lily is allowed to bring in fresh clothes for him, because he’s on remand and not yet a convicted prisoner. She takes away the dirty clothes to wash. He thinks of her gagging at the prison smell as she unfolds them and pushes them down into the twin-tub.
He’s been put in a single cell, although most cells are shared. It may be because of the nature of the charge against him. It’s hard to believe that two or even three prisoners can share a cell this size. He has paced it out,
and it’s seven feet by eleven. He tries some physical jerks he remembers from the RAF, but there’s not enough space. He remembers Lily switching on the wireless for Keep Fit with Eileen Fowler. Bridget must have been about two then, and Simon was at home for a week when he had flu and then bronchitis. He was still as weak as a cat. Lily had rolled back the rug in the sitting room and Bridget was scarlet with excitement as she pranced on the bare floorboards. Both of them were laughing so much they couldn’t speak.
An hour’s daily exercise outdoors is another of his rights as a remand prisoner. The men walk in Indian file, silently, because talking is not permitted. However, Simon soon realises that other prisoners know how to speak without moving their lips, in a low murmur without sibilants so that they can’t be heard by the warders. Simon doesn’t yet call warders screws, even to himself. The word is part of a language that he’d have to become a different person in order to speak. Or perhaps he is already becoming that person, without knowing it. He eats prison food. He excretes prison excrement made out of that prison food. He washes in prison water and he drinks it too. His body moves, not because it wants to but because it’s time for it to do so. Simon believes that even in this short time his muscles have started to atrophy, and that soon his legs will become an old man’s legs, with thin, flabby thighs and spindle shanks.
In the exercise yard there is weather, and sky. The sky is grey and cold, or blue and cold, or sometimes there’s yellowish fog that comes down on them like another wall. If it’s raining, the exercise period is cancelled. He likes to watch the rain. It has come from far away: from Ireland, perhaps, or the Atlantic beyond. The best thing is if they’ve been outside for almost an hour, and then the rain comes. When exercise is cancelled, a feeling of suffocation flashes over him. So far it has been cancelled twice.
He’d like to walk faster. He can’t get into a rhythm when they shamble round at the pace of the slowest, while the warders watch. Although the walls of the exercise yard are high, you can still hear the traffic. The cold air is good. He breathes it in and smells London. There are no weeds in the yard. They make sure that none poke through the asphalt. Round they go, with Kipper coughing and hawking phlegm in the back of his throat. He says that he has emphysema and that if he gets more than a year, he’ll be dead before he’s out. He is coming up for trial in two weeks’ time. Think of dying here. Or do they let you out, to go into a hospital for your last days?
Through the traffic, Simon sometimes hears the shriek of a train. He listens for it as he walks, and just before the end of exercise, it comes. If there were a net that could catch such sounds, it would be slung over the yard so that prisoners could never hear them. Now there are three good things from today’s exercise: cold air against the skin of his face; the way the man in front of him glanced at the sky, sizing it up like a farmer and not like a prisoner; and the whistle of that distant train.
There are many rules. There’s a list of them on the back of the door in Simon’s cell, which he is supposed to have read. The rules make prison sound organised, but while it is full of restrictions, it is also chaotic. It is full of contradictions. Frightening, yet dull. Enclosed and guarded, but not safe. The building clangs, day and night, as doors are unlocked and slammed shut again. It is like living inside an engine which is being built and demolished and rebuilt around you. You can never get away from the noise. On a good night, the prison vibrates around you, but on a bad one the screech of metal and voices penetrates every crevice of your brain. There are locks on cells, locks on landings, locks between the wings.
At night the warders tramp from door to door, slide up the covers on spy-holes and peer in. Simon lies still with his eyes closed until the cover slides back and the boots tramp on to the next cell. Sometimes there are ferocious outbreaks of shouting, swearing and banging on cell doors. Prisoners bang with tin mugs, boots, plates, spoons, and the short metal pole that secures the bed and is meant to be fixed fast but can sometimes, with strength, time and ingenuity, be detached. Sometimes that metal stump is put inside a sock, where it forms a cosh. Simon has never seen this, but he’s heard of it. Such things rarely happen on the remand wing, because the prisoners here have more to lose. The sound rises to a crescendo which makes him fear that the prison is about to burst inwards. If that tide swept from cell to cell, he doesn’t know where he’d be taken.
Simon has already noticed that not only are the paving stones of the prison uneven, but they are also pushing up from their bed. The building is damp, as if one of London’s hidden rivers runs beneath it. He pictures brown water, quick with rats. This is the time of night when he would throw on his overcoat and walk along the ridge of Muswell Hill and down and round, street after street, until the wind had blown such thoughts out of his head. He turns from his back to his side, and wraps his blanket closer. The walls of his cell are cold and greasy to the touch. He pulls his hand away and wipes it on the blanket. Better not to touch these walls. They are sweating out all the lives that have been lived in here: if you call it life.
He got himself in here.
He goes back in time again. It’s evening. He’s sitting with Lily. They’ve got a bottle of cider to drink while they listen to the play. The telephone rings, and Lily goes to answer it. She comes back and says, ‘It’s Giles Holloway for you.’ Instead of getting up and going into the hall, he whispers to Lily, ‘Did you say I was in?’ and she understands at once, enters into the conspiracy and says, ‘No, all I said was, “Just a minute.”‘ ‘Go back and say you can’t find me. Say you think I must have gone down to the pub for cigarettes.’ ‘All right,’ says Lily, and she smiles. She’s pleased that their evening isn’t going to be broken up. Off she goes to the hall, and he hears her apologising, ‘I’m sorry, Giles, he’s gone out. I think he must have gone to the pub.’
Over and over, he sees himself rise to take Giles’s call.
19
A Bendix in the Scullery
Lily wakes suddenly to find herself sitting up in bed, her nightdress damp and clinging. She must have had a bad dream but she can remember nothing. Perhaps she heard Bridgie? She listens, but there is no sound from the children. The wind has got up and the window sash is rattling. The hands of the alarm clock glow green: half past three. She must go back to sleep, because she’s got to be up at six to clean and tidy before Dr Wiseman comes to see the house. If Simon were here, he’d get up and wedge the window with an old handkerchief.
Lily throws back the blankets and gets out of bed. She doesn’t need to put on the light: she reaches into the top left-hand drawer of their chest and takes out a soft, folded handkerchief. She ironed a pile of them yesterday, for Simon.
She crosses to the window and parts the curtains. The window is open a few inches at the top, for fresh air. She’ll have to close it. As she stretches to push the sash window up, she catches movement under the branches of next-door’s cherry tree. The shadow is still, and then it moves again. It’s just outside the front gate.
There’s someone there. Lily freezes. If she keeps perfectly still, they won’t see her. A moment later a flame jumps in the darkness, and then disappears. She waits. A red point of light appears, and then dims. Lily lets out her breath. Of course. He’s lit a cigarette, and now he’s smoking it. The branches of the cherry tree thrash in the wind, confusing the shadows underneath them. Is he still there, or has he gone?
She’s not imagining things. Inch by inch, she lets the curtains fall together. Thank God she didn’t put on the light. If he was busy lighting his cigarette, he may not have seen her.
Lily retreats to her bed, and wraps herself in the blankets. She ought to check that the children are all right. In a minute, she tells herself. She must think. Perhaps they’ve put a policeman outside the house to watch the comings and goings of any night visitors. Perhaps they still think she is part of it all. They may still come to arrest her. What would the children do? Who would look after the children? Erica might take them for a week or so, but any longer would
be impossible in a house that size, and Tony might not want it anyway. Whatever happens, they mustn’t go to the Callingtons.
What if it isn’t a policeman? Her skin prickles. The briefcase. The police came looking for it, but perhaps they aren’t the only ones who want to know where it is. The police might arrest her, but those others wouldn’t care what they did, as long as they got what they wanted. They might do anything.
Now the suburban street is dark and full of shadows. She has dropped her guard: she has taken too much for granted. England is an island, Lili. That is why we will be safe. But all at once it seems as if anything might happen here.
By morning, Lily’s fear has hardened into resolution. She must get the children away as soon as she can. By half past five she is up, noiselessly putting away the toys and washing. She wipes the surfaces, and polishes the tables. The children have barely swallowed their breakfast before she whips the crockery into the washing-up bowl. As soon as they are off to school, she tidies their rooms ruthlessly.
Dr Wiseman is coming at ten-thirty to see the house. If he likes it, he will get a contract drawn up. His family’s passages to England are booked, and they arrive on 17 January. On the telephone he was efficient but preoccupied, in the way of a man who is used to considering his own time more important than that of the other person. If he decides to take the house, he would like to move in at least a week before his family arrives.
Dr Wiseman is short, solid and dark, with a brush of hair, and he shakes Lily’s hand with old-fashioned courtesy.
‘Mrs Callington? A pleasure to meet you, ma’am.’
It reminds her of the war. GIs always said ‘ma’am’. She asks him in, and offers him a cup of coffee. He thanks her, but says he doesn’t believe he will. His next clinic is at mid-day.
She shows him the kitchen first, and is not surprised when he looks around with bright, expressionless eyes and makes only the politest of murmurs. To an American, her kitchen must look shrunken and primitive, with a fridge fit only for a doll’s house.
Exposure Page 19