She was restless and uncomfortable. There was the odour of sweat and something pungent and clinging, like fish glue. Even so, she was upset when he jumped out of bed and said he wanted a cup of tea. She had thought they might lie there for hours, dozing and chatting – and doing it again. He didn’t mind at all about Pamela; he sauntered out into the sitting room, wearing only his trousers, and she heard them talking together.
Ann dressed with special care, though casually, so he wouldn’t guess she was doing it for him. She wore her blue smock and she put blue eye-shadow on her lids. She rubbed it off again in case Pamela said, ‘What are you tarted up for?’ She was surprised that her face hadn’t altered – been plumped out with love and self-satisfaction. I love you, William, she told the bathroom glass. I really love you.
When she went into the sitting room he was on the sofa with his arm round Pamela. She was leaning her head against his shoulder.
‘She’s sick,’ he said. ‘She ought to have a hot bottle for her stomach.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Ann. She sat unwillingly beside Pamela and felt her forehead.
‘She’s pregnant,’ said William. ‘She did tell you.’
Ann was going to deny it, but she half remembered Pamela talking about being late for a period.
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘How awful. You poor thing.’
She thought Pamela had confided in William rather too quickly. She couldn’t imagine her telling Gerald anything so personal. She looked at William’s arm about Pamela’s shoulder and wanted to tear it away. God damn it, she thought, please leave her alone – stop holding her like that. She had to look down at the brocade material of the sofa, the fold in Pamela’s dressing-gown, the one waxen shin shining bare above the bedroom slipper. She had to hide her eyes, the jealousy in them, the hatred of William. It wasn’t her fault she was afraid of him: it was her mother’s – her upbringing. She had been taught that men were different; she had digested the fact of their inferiority along with her banana sandwiches and her milk. Men were alien. Her mother and Aunt Bea preferred the society of women: all girls together – leave the nasty men alone with their brutish ways and their engorged appendages. Men were there to pay the mortgages and mend the fuses when they blew. Send them out onto the path to clean the car and hose the drains, brush the lupins from the grass. And she thought her mother was right after all – that was the difficult part of it. Out of William’s arms and beyond his full attention, she was terrified of him, of the power he exercised. She didn’t want to love him if it hurt like this; she would be better off despising him.
They spent a quarter of an hour discussing Pamela’s problem. She had a friend in Brighton who had promised her some pills if the gin didn’t work.
‘I could go to Clapham,’ she said. ‘But I keep ringing and there’s no reply.’
She didn’t say which one of the group was responsible for her condition.
‘Was it George?’ asked Ann. She felt it might be. She hadn’t met him, but he was the one who had thrown bricks at a policeman and spent two nights in jail.
‘I don’t want to tell you,’ said Pamela stubbornly.
She leaned even closer to William, as if Ann was persecuting her. They were moulded in bronze together on the sofa, her chestnut head on his shoulder, his fingers welded to the brown arm of her dressing-gown. They were a set piece, a loving statue.
‘He ought to be told,’ persisted Ann, cheeks burning with hostility. It was irresponsible of Pamela to have taken such a risk. She could have gone to a clinic and pretended she was going to get married and been fitted for a Dutch cap. Lots of people did that nowadays. She wondered how they had managed on those communal cushions in the black-painted living room. There weren’t any doors, because George had insisted the barriers must be torn down: no one should be shut in or shut out – they must all be free. Pamela had taken him a little too literally.
It occurred to Ann suddenly that she too could have made a dreadful mistake. The shock drained the colour from her face. She looked directly at William, alarm in her eyes. He said, ‘Better go home and take the pills, Pamela.’
‘Yes,’ said Ann. ‘It would be best.’
She wanted her to jump up and leave for Brighton there and then, so that she could be alone with William and be told who she was and to whom she belonged. She had lost her identity. She tore savagely with her teeth at the nail on her thumb. Had she been alone she would have rolled on the floor. She remembered being told that certain animals when injured, paralysed by disease or rifle shot, no longer recognising their own unfeeling limbs, lay down in the shade and gnawed away at paw or foot in an act of self-devouring greed.
William said, ‘The pills may not work … except to give you a belly ache. But if they do, and it starts, you best come back and stay here with us.’
His use of the plural seemed to echo in the room – us. The curtains shook at the windows. Downstairs in the hall someone entered from the porch and slammed the door. The foolish Pamela was excluded.
The change in Ann was immediate. She stopped biting the ends of her fingers and grew calm.
‘Yes,’ she agreed gratefully, generously. ‘We’ll look after you.’
He leaned forward then and kissed her on the mouth. The colourless stubble scraped her chin. She wondered how she had ever been afraid of him. It was entirely right and proper that he should be gentle with Pamela and want to comfort her. Who was she to limit his capacity for compassion and goodness? Because he was good and kind, he cared for people and for herself more than anyone. She touched his cheek with her hand, stared deep into his pale eyes and saw her own love reflected there. Between them, dry-eyed, sat Pamela with her hands bunched on her stomach.
For almost a week he spent every day with Ann, lying in the unmade bed, talking, putting his record on the gramophone. She waved her arms about in the air and shouted tum te tum tum tum, in time to the music, and he watched her, leaning back on the pillows with his hands clasped behind his head. He made her fried-egg sandwiches and she grew not to care about the crumbs or the grease upon the sheets. They spilled tea on the crumpled coverlet, which lay discarded on the floor among the congealed plates and his worn-out raincoat. She loved it being so messy – the way his clothes and his plimsolls lay in a heap on Mrs Walton’s rug. William said they were having an idyll, a pastoral episode, time spent beneath the blue sky of the nursery ceiling.
‘But I want it to go on for ever,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it to be an episode.’ He told her it was in the nature of an idyll to be episodic: it wasn’t meant to last.
Every evening at eight o’clock he left her to go back to his children.
‘Sheila has a night job,’ he said. ‘I have to read the wains a story.’
She couldn’t think what Sheila did in the night and she didn’t like to ask. Perhaps she was a charwoman in an office block, or worse, a night cleaner on the railways, taking her mop and her pail along the dark tunnels beneath the city.
When he had gone she bathed and cleaned her teeth and burrowed under the blankets – the headlights of cars washed across the pink walls as she slept – until he slipped in beside her at four, five in the morning, smelling of soap, enveloping her in goose-pimpled arms, his toes like cold pebbles in the bed, his breath fragrant with cinnamon.
He’d always known he wanted to write: he liked dialogue, the language of the bible, the cadence of rhetoric. It was on account of his father being in the Salvation Army, the hymns he sang as a boy.
‘My father’s an army man,’ said Ann. ‘A Captain.’
William went one better and said his dad was practically a General: he wore a blue uniform, the collar edged with scarlet braid. ‘Have you never,’ he asked, ‘read the Lives of the Saints?’
‘Never,’ she was forced to admit.
‘The punishment,’ he said, ‘the martyrdom. There’s glory for you.’
It was odd that he liked sacrifice and retribution. She hadn’t thought he was a Pur
itan.
He had worked as an electrician when he left school, and he married Sheila when he was eighteen. He met her at a dance hall and she was small and dark and refined; she wore a headscarf with wavy lines of yellow and gold. He played football in the street at night; his wife watched him from the doorway and when he kicked the ball close to her, he ran with his eyes on her face, and she turned her head away to hide the pleasure she felt.
‘It was a bit of an idyll,’ he said thoughtlessly, and Ann shifted with pain. He soothed her with caressing words, clapping her back in that now familiar motion of reassurance, saying, ‘Not like this, my love, not like this, hen.’
He’d slept on a truckle bed in the wall when he was a child. She never tired of hearing of his infant self, lying in soiled grey sheets, face turned to the firelight as his mother and father sat by the coals; of the shadows on the brown-leaved wallpaper, stained with damp, the chink in the curtains through which the yellow light shone – a slit of gold – from the lamp on the stone landing at the top of the outside stairs.
‘I wish I had known you,’ she said, conscious that she had lost that part of him, never to return.
Her own childhood by comparison, with its laundered linen and attention to diet, was insipid and valueless. She shared vicariously in that vanished existence he described so vividly – watched him as he slumbered freckle-faced on the truckle bed, stood beside his wife in the doorway of the street.
‘Oh, you’re beautiful,’ she cried, surprised at herself. He was a life-enhancer. She told him she had been much loved as a child, surrounded by warmth and understanding. ‘My parents are very real people,’ she said, as if to breathe life into them, and he looked at her and said nothing.
Her mother rang on several occasions – they heard Mrs Kershaw calling from the stairs. Ann pulled the blankets over her head and refused to budge.
Towards the end of the week, he said she must get up and dress.
‘What for?’ she asked, loth to leave the bed.
‘You just must,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you when you’re in your clothes.’
She did as she was bid, feeling strange and convalescent in her stockings and her skirt.
‘Now tell me,’ she said, coming to him in the kitchen, where he was washing the plates and the cups they had used.
‘I’m going to live here,’ he said. ‘You know that.’
‘You are here,’ she said.
‘Aye, I know. But properly … my things, my typewriter.’
‘Oh,’ she said, thinking of Mrs Kershaw. They couldn’t go on hiding, she supposed. She was due to start work next week. What would Mrs Kershaw say when she saw William coming down the stairs every morning? ‘What about my landlady?’ she asked. I don’t know how she’ll take it.’ She put her arm round him at the sink and leant her cheek against his broad back.
‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘I’m not bothered about her.’
He wiped his hands on the tea-towel and loosed her grip on his waist. ‘My wife is coming round to see you. I couldn’t very well forbid it. She’s a right to meet you.’
‘Your wife,’ she said. ‘Sheila?’
It was something she hadn’t expected; they were divorced, after all. She had thought it would be interesting to have her pointed out in the street, but not here in the flat, with William.
‘Not Sheila,’ he said. ‘Edna. My wife.’
The shock, though monstrous, was not fatal. She stayed leaning against the wall of the kitchen with her hand still on his arm. His face had altered. He was now withdrawn and pompous, with pinched nostrils and lower lip sucked inwards. He spoke very slowly as if to avoid having to repeat any of it again.
‘We were married two years ago. She’s got a son who’s grown up.’
‘Where is she?’ she asked, baffled.
‘At home, of course,’ he said, with some surprise. He turned his back and ran cold water into a glass.
‘But why didn’t you mention her before … in there … before?’
He was bulky at the sink, and confident. He stood barefooted and gulped the water noisily.
‘We were talking about the past,’ he said reasonably. ‘In Glasgow. It had nothing to do with now.’
She sat down at the table and curved her shoulders in terror.
‘Sit up straight,’ he told her. ‘I’ve not harmed you.’
‘But you’ve harmed her,’ Ann cried. ‘What about Edna?’
He said sternly, ‘Let me do the worrying for Edna. It doesn’t concern you.’
She was dreadfully alarmed that his wife knew he had been coming to see her, spending nights, whole days. ‘Then why does she have to see me?’ she asked, spitefully. ‘I didn’t know you were married.’
She wished he would step away from the sink and comfort her. But he stood, arms crossed on his chest, slouching against the draining board.
‘I’m her husband,’ he said. ‘She has a right to see for herself the sort of person you are. I care about Edna.’
Then he did come to her. He patted the top of her head like a schoolmaster with a favourite pupil.
‘I’m not good like you,’ she moaned. ‘I’d run if I could. I’m scared of what she’ll say.’
He stroked her neck. He said Edna was a great woman. Ann had no need to be frightened.
‘You’ve lived a bit of a fantasy life, I imagine,’ he said. ‘You haven’t learned to face things for what they are.’
She supposed he was right. She had spent most of her life putting things off, making excuses. However, there had never been any question of Douglas, the married man at the BBC, neglecting to mention he had a wife. He showed everybody photographs of her, and his children. He had a sort of miniature shrine in his car, with them all grouped lovingly at the end of a garden, framed in plastic on the dashboard. She still felt in the back of her mind that William ought to have mentioned Edna. She’d mentioned Gerald.
‘There’s you and me,’ said William. ‘And there’s my wife. No getting away from it. That’s reality. We’ll face it together.’
All the same, he didn’t stay in the flat to be there when Edna arrived. He said he had to go and see his agent. Ann ran to the bedroom window and heard his footsteps on the gravel, saw his head bobbing above the serrated edge of the privet.
William’s wife came an hour later. Outlined behind the frosted glass of the door, she waited for Ann to let her in. She ducked her head and bounced into the small tiled hallway, her grey hair swinging forwards to obscure her face. Ann had difficulty in breathing. She stared at the floor and saw two bright green ballet slippers on Mrs McClusky’s feet.
‘Well,’ said Edna, ‘this is very distressing, isn’t it?’
She had a deep expressive voice and she glided into the sitting room weightlessly and floated about the room. Above her head a cluster of white dots danced on the ceiling. She had a long swan-like neck and bright inquisitive eyes.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Ann. ‘I didn’t know about you.’
She stood foolishly clasping and unclasping her hands, puzzled by the shifting pattern on the ceiling. Only after several moments, when she moved to the window, did she realise it was the reflection of the sun on a puddle of water on the flat roof outside. Relieved, she looked at Edna’s mortal mouth, chapped and brown. Under the aristocratic nose the lips pursed upwards, shaping words. She was saying, ‘I knew about you two days ago.’ She wore a black jumper and skirt under a green cloth coat, and she was holding in her hands a small red handkerchief with a white border.
‘Honestly,’ said Ann. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I won’t see him again.’
Edna, who had been prancing about the room looking at the cream walls and the few pictures hung on them, came to a halt on the carpet, with her feet in a ballet position. She turned her head dreamily and rested her chin on her left shoulder. She was graceful and a bit silly. Ann couldn’t look at her for fear of smiling. She herself hunched her shoulders and stood loutishly beside the shelf of
books.
‘William,’ said Edna, ‘would like to do what’s best for all of us. I know what I want. I’d like to hear what you want.’
She’s very civilised, thought Ann. Or simple-minded. She couldn’t bear the sort of introverted conversation they were embarking on. She had, on a very few occasions, been involved in discussion with friends of Mrs Kershaw. They had asked her the most penetrating questions – it had all been extremely sincere and interesting – but she hadn’t been able to discover what it was they needed to know.
‘I don’t want anything,’ she said mulishly. ‘I’m not in any position to say what I want,’ she added, thinking maybe she had sounded impolite. ‘I mean, it’s nothing to do with me, is it? It’s your husband.’
‘I don’t know how much experience you have of men,’ began Edna. She was on the move again, darting towards the bunch of carnations long since dead in the glass.
‘I’m engaged,’ said Ann, remembering a convenient fact. ‘I have a fiancé in America.’
‘So I’ve heard. I gather he doesn’t count.’
Ann felt indignant. ‘Well, he does,’ she said. ‘Really he does.’ She could see Gerald surrounded by his friends at the farewell party, drinking beer from a cup and growing red in the face.
‘Have you told him about William?’
‘He’s only just left. There hasn’t been time.’ Ann paused, thinking how awful it sounded. Hardly out of the country, hardly landed at Idlewild Airport – and here she was, involved with another lover.
‘William,’ said Edna, ‘is a beautiful man. A good man.’
‘Oh, I know,’ cried Ann. ‘I know he’s good.’ She could be confident about that. She herself felt more and more wicked as the moments ticked by. She was out of her depth with this dancing woman, the grave theatrical eyes fixed on her, the funny green slippers tripping about the carpet.
‘We’ve known each other for a long time,’ explained Edna. ‘I met him when he was living with Gus. We have a good marriage. We care for each other.’
Inside, Ann was saying, Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know, you have him, I’m going off to Gerald. She watched the red handkerchief in Edna’s hands, neatly folded.
Sweet William Page 5