‘You know I don’t want to go,’ she said. ‘Not with our baby coming. But I don’t see what excuse I can make.’ She longed to say that if only William would discuss, let alone consider, divorce, things would be easier, less complicated, but she hadn’t the courage. ‘My mother’s super,’ she said. ‘She’s a wonderful person, really. But she’s had a disappointing life … I don’t want to upset her.’
Till she put it into words she hadn’t known how disappointed Mrs Walton had been. With her gaiety, her passion for card-games, it was she who should have met someone like William, years ago when she was young; she would never have run home for Christmas.
‘You could tell her you’ve met someone you’d rather be with,’ said William. He didn’t look at her.
‘Oh no,’ she said instantly. ‘I can’t. I can’t do that.’
‘It’s maybe for the best,’ he said slowly. ‘There’s my bairns. I ought to spend time with them. And Edna’s son will be coming with his wife.’
He was out a lot, seeing to changes in the script, looking at costume designs, approving the sets. The phone never stopped ringing. They were usually women who called. Sometimes they asked was she Edna; once, was she Sheila. William said the whole of the English theatre world was staffed by women and they were all bloody fools. She was not to take any notice; he knew who she was and that was all that mattered. He was angling for the out-of-work Gus to play a small part in one of the pool-room scenes – amongst the old men bothered by the dust on the table – but there was a difficulty about Equity membership. A friend of William’s from Glasgow days had been engaged as touring manager; someone he had known four years ago was doing the lighting. He seemed to have a lot of friends. When people telephoned they asked for Sweet William.
‘Try to understand,’ he said. ‘I know it’s not easy for you. But I’ve worked hard for this, I really have. It doesn’t look much, I grant you’ – he touched the few stacked sheets on his desk bearing the title of his play – ‘but it represents a lot of work. I did it on my own, in the wee hours, not knowing if anyone would bother to read it.’
She wanted to say he hadn’t been alone, that Edna had been there cooking him meals. Or Sheila, or the woman who had knitted the scarf in bands of blue.
He gave her a fur coat, not the beaver lamb, but one made out of pony skin, in brown and white. It might have been rabbit; the white parts were yellowish and it didn’t suit her complexion. She wore it when she went in a taxi to the bank with him. He had on his blue overcoat, and when he got out of the taxi he was covered in strands of saffron-coloured fur. She had moulted all over him. He said it didn’t matter, but she felt it was her fault. She watched him go through the doors, picking fastidiously at the fluff on his expensive lapels. He slapped his shoulders vigorously and pieces of fur floated upwards and caught on his lip.
He brought home a pair of Chinese slippers for her. They reminded her of Edna’s, except these were made of red satin. She liked them, but she wore them as little as possible.
As an early Christmas present he gave her a variety of geranium in a pot. It was five foot high. He said it was a symbol of their love, and she watched it on the window sill, leaves reaching towards the light, terrified it might wilt and die. Every day she watered it. Dennis Law on the wall behind, framed in gilt, stood with his arms crossed on his football shirt, fragmented by foliage and the pale sea-green stems.
She looked up the word ‘conception’ in one of William’s medical dictionaries on the shelf. It was an old book and there was a drawing of something that looked like a bunch of grapes. It said one of the first signs of approaching motherhood was a decided languor.
‘I haven’t got that, have I?’ she said.
‘You’re bone idle,’ said William. ‘You and Gus are the idlest people I know.’
She was hurt, though she tried to hide it. She hadn’t thought she was lazy.
Occasionally, the book said, there could be a good deal of spitting of a frothy, cotton-like substance. Nothing so sensational happened to her. However, she began, every morning around six o’clock, to retch into the lavatory.
‘You won’t love me any more,’ she gasped, nauseous above the porcelain bowl. But William wiped her mouth with his hand and laid her down on the bed and told her she was his Michaelmas daisy girl.
One morning there was a letter in the hall addressed to her. She didn’t know the writing. William was still asleep. He had been away for the night, staying with his producer in Windsor. He had meant to come home, but the producer’s car had broken down on the way to the station and they’d missed the last train. He hadn’t gone back to the house; he had stayed all night in the waiting room and had breakfast in the railway cafeteria and caught the seven o’clock to London. There was a beautiful graveyard near the producer’s house, but he hadn’t gone to look at it. He knew she would want him to come home. Quite important people ate in the cafeteria, even at that hour in the morning: poets and solicitors – a biographer he knew with blue eyes. Everywhere William went he met someone he knew.
She opened the letter in the sitting room. It said –
My Dear Ann,
You are younger than I. Time stretches ahead of you. Don’t take my husband. I need him. I have no life waiting for me in America. I beg you, give him back to me. I feel as if I am locked away in prison. The nights are so long, the sentence so savage. I don’t know what I am being punished for. I dream of being free but someone must be waiting for me when I come out.
Forgive me,
Edna.
Ann read it again. Tears filled her eyes and splashed onto the notepaper. The ink ran. She went into the bedroom and shook William by the shoulder. His skin was honey-coloured, his eyes startled.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Let me be.’
She tugged at the bedding. She told him to get up.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, stumbling naked into the sitting room and collapsing onto the sofa. He sat with the letter on his knees. There was a blue vein in his leg, a tuft of ginger hair beneath the pout of his belly.
He spent a long time explaining that Edna had no justification for writing in that way. It was emotional blackmail of the worst sort. Ann was to put it from her mind. Edna had married him, been loved, was still cared for. If he had chosen to fall in love with someone else, she couldn’t hope to hold him by force. He thrust his arm, in a gesture of liberation, outwards, with fist clenched. He looked military and unloving. She didn’t care for his use of the word ‘chosen’, as if he had picked her deliberately from the group of women in the church hall, instead of dropping willy nilly, besotted by feelings, into her life.
‘But she sounds so unhappy,’ she cried, looking down at the sad letter on his knee.
‘Don’t be taken in,’ he said fiercely. ‘Look at the calculated splodge on that particular sentence.’ He read aloud – ‘Someone must be waiting for me’. He flung the letter contemptuously to the floor and said she had probably held the paper under the tap to make it seem tear-stained. Ann wanted to correct him, but he sounded so vindictive, as if for the first time his love for Edna was wavering. She didn’t want to prevent that.
‘Maybe,’ she said, drying her eyes on the back of her hand. ‘All the same, I do feel … shabby.’
Secretly she would have liked to reply to Edna, saying she was having a baby but she would go away at once. She was unable to, because she feared Edna would show her letter to William and because, being pregnant, there was nowhere to go. She toyed with the idea of buying a ticket to America, jumping into bed with Gerald, having a premature child. But it would be blond and snub-nosed, and the energy required for such an undertaking was beyond her. Maybe she was bone idle, as William had suggested. William promised he would not be too hard on Edna, but he would point out how foolish she had been to send such an emotional plea for security. ‘After all,’ he said. ‘I’m not a dummy for her mouth. I’m not a comforter.’
His reaction, Ann supposed, was splendid. Still, he didn
’t explain why he hadn’t told Edna she was having a child. Considering he ate there three times a week, she would have thought he might have mentioned it.
He stumped back to bed, weary after his night in Windsor, and slept till the afternoon.
As the preparations for the provincial tour progressed, William became morose. He picked at his food. He catnapped on the sofa. He stopped buying new clothes; he took to wearing the torn sweaters he had owned when Ann met him, the plimsolls without laces. She liked him better out of his tasteful suits, his shoes of real leather, the alien, successful overcoat. Apart from her pony skin and her blue smock, she had few clothes herself. As she didn’t go out much, except to do the shopping, it hardly mattered.
He had taken her once to have breakfast in a little café, next door to the tobacco kiosk on the Finchley Road. They ordered bacon-and-egg and tomatoes. Though it was barely nine o’clock in the morning, he poured H.P. sauce onto his plate. She felt sick. He ate with his knife and fork held like two pencils; she could hardly bear to look. She hadn’t noticed it at home. It was so common. ‘William,’ she said. He looked up. He was hunched low over his food, his mouth shiny with grease. ‘I don’t like to mention it … please forgive me … but couldn’t you …’ She went red in the face. ‘Jesus,’ he said in alarm. ‘What’s up?’ When she told him, when she suggested he should tuck the handles of the cutlery into his palm, his eyes widened. ‘It’s important is it?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. He held his elbows to his sides and pointed his fingers down the middle of the knife. ‘That’s lovely,’ she said. He was very quiet, very subdued. Now and then she caught him looking at her with a curiously sad expression in his pale eyes. He’s embarrassed, she thought, that he’s let me down.
Before he grew depressed he had intended to take her to rehearsals, to have dinner with the cast. But he was too upset about his play.
‘It’s not good enough,’ he said, striding up and down the sitting room, his hands clasped behind his back. ‘When they first read it, it was pretty powerful – know what I mean? It had something. Now I’m not so sure.’
His hair had grown again. It curled on his neck, wound in tendrils about his small ears.
‘It’s just you’ve heard it too often,’ said Ann. She hadn’t read the play all through – she pretended she had – only that one scene in the billiard hall.
He said, ‘I can’t pin-point what’s wrong. But it’s false. The girl who plays Moira is no good. She’s got a plum in her mouth. She was never born in a tenement.’
Ann was glad he was displeased with Moira. She had visualised her as perfect and talented. She kept thinking of him at rehearsals, chatting to the cast, the men and the women, complimenting them on their hair, tugging at their clothing and asking was it Donegal tweed. She saw quite clearly Pamela on the sofa, convalescing, and William taking the Turkish necklace between his fingers, twisting it toward the light, the edge of his hand brushing the soft skin of her throat.
‘Some of it’s all right,’ he said. ‘But pieces of it are just no good.’
‘What pieces?’ she asked, trying to be helpful.
He took the script from the desk. He shuffled the pages until he found the dialogue that disappointed him. He had no need to read it – he knew it by heart:
‘You’re restless, Gus.’
‘Aye, I’m restless.’
‘What’s making you restless, then?’
‘I canna tell. I’m just restless.’
Ann wondered why all his characters repeated themselves so often. And why was the man called Gus? Why not Jock or Hamish?
‘You’re going away fra’ me.’
‘I’m not going away fra’ you, woman.’
‘Aye, you’re going away. I know it here.’
‘That’s very nice,’ said Ann.
‘Wait,’ he said impatiently. ‘Wait.’
He stood with hunched shoulders and lips aggressive.
‘I feel as if you’re going away, and I’m locked up. Walled up, maybe. When I come out, I’m wondering will there be anyone waiting?’
It was real, Ann thought. It was reminiscent of something. She didn’t know what, but it struck a chord. She did feel for Moira.
‘I don’t see why you’re critical,’ she said truthfully. ‘I think it’s wonderful. I do really.’
But he wasn’t convinced. He stuck the script under some newspapers and stared out of the window. She would have liked to help him, but she wasn’t equipped. He was so good to her, so loving. He made her swallow her vitamins; he encouraged her to drink glasses of orange juice. She was only seven weeks pregnant, but he suggested she learned to knit.
‘I can’t,’ she said bashfully. ‘I can’t knit.’
So he bought some needles and a ball of pink wool and began to fashion a small drooping garment, vest or dress, that might have fitted a doll.
He telephoned her two evenings later from a call box. He sounded agitated. ‘I’m on the Watford by-pass.’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘I’m not sure. I’m just here. I just had to get away.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ she cried out, careless of Roddy in the downstairs flat. Her eyes stung with tears of self-pity.
‘I’m not going away from you. I’m getting away from my play. Don’t you see that?’
She couldn’t answer.
‘Ann … Ann … Don’t let me down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Have you got your scarf with you?’
It didn’t matter who had knitted it for him, just as long as he was protected against the December wind.
‘I have,’ he said. ‘That’s one thing I have.’
He was trying to tell her something. She mustn’t let him down. ‘Little boy,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry … I’m here.’
‘Dear Jesus,’ he said, and hung up.
She telephoned Pamela almost at once. Her fingers as she dialled were numb with cold. Beyond the porch the privet hedge heaved in the wind. William was marching, with pallid lips, towards Watford.
Pamela sounded as if she had been woken from a dream; she didn’t seem to be able to speak properly. Yet she couldn’t have been in bed: the radio was on; there was music in the background.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me – Ann.’
She could hear Pamela breathing, the mournful strains of a violin.
‘I can’t take it. I don’t really understand him. He’s gone walking.’
Silence.
‘Pamela … are you there? Pamela?’
After a moment Pamela said distantly – ‘Yes.’
‘Where do you think he’s gone? Where’s he gone?’
‘Perhaps he’s looking at graveyards,’ said Pamela. ‘He likes graveyards, doesn’t he?’
Ann had forgotten about graveyards. ‘But it’s dark,’ she said.
There was another long moment of silence. Tum te tum tum tum te tum went the piano in the background. ‘Say something,’ she begged. ‘Please say something.’
‘I can’t,’ said Pamela. The receiver was replaced.
4
Ann went home to Brighton, unwillingly, two days before Christmas. William promised to water the geranium when she was gone. He bought presents for her parents – a book on military campaigns, bound in leather, a fur stole for her mother. She couldn’t be sure how Mrs Walton would react. She might insist on it being returned.
‘It’s lovely,’ she said, aghast at his generosity. ‘It’s just the sort of thing she likes.’
She wouldn’t allow William to wait on the platform until the train departed; she kissed him at the window and urged him not to forget to take the sheets to the laundry. He was wearing a new tweed jacket and a cap to match, with a little jaunty brim. He looked broad-shouldered and sporty; he had a woollen tie, leather gloves buttoned at the wrist. She herself, by comparison, was careless and unstitched; her skirt hung below the hem of the new coat; the boots that William had bought her, of black leather, lin
ed with crimson, gaped on her thin legs. She was eclipsed. She felt like some strange hybrid insect, with her stick-like limbs, her fur body moulting at the window, drifting above the grey platform. Relieved, she watched him stride away, turn under the clock, wave his last fond farewell. On the kitchen table she had left him a surprise, a present wrapped in green shiny paper, tied with ribbon. It was an electric shaver. There was a letter with it, saying she knew things had been difficult lately – her disturbing dreams, his play, her possessiveness – but she loved him very much.
Her father met her at the station. He laid his cold lips against her cold cheek. He put her suitcases in the boot of the small car and drove her home to Mummy.
The house was in a terrace, three streets away from the seafront. It was made of brick with a front door painted yellow. In the summer months Mrs Walton put up a gay shade of canvas to protect the paintwork from the sunshine and the salt air. There was a Christmas tree in the bay window, threaded with lights and coloured balls.
‘Darling,’ cried Mrs Walton, throwing open the door and laughing immoderately. In her cocktail dress of green rayon, her earrings, she was every inch the hostess. Across her nose was an orange smear of powder, short-sightedly applied.
The banisters shone, the tufted rugs half-mooned the hearths set with electric fires. All doors were open, to the sitting room, the dining room, the kitchen: glimpses of tables and chairs, chintz cushions, bowls of fruit. Everything burnished and glowing – mahogany sideboard, the bronze statue of the angels wrestling, the apples and the tangerines piled on the baskets made of silver plate. Above the wall-to-wall carpeting, flecked with purple, the looped streamers quivered in the heat. What trouble her mother had gone to, to make it seem like home. The fur was admired, the boots. ‘My word,’ said her mother. ‘We have been throwing our money about.’ Reluctantly Ann removed her coat. The thistledown flew about the hall. She held her breath and clasped her hands on her stomach.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ her mother said. ‘You’ve been working too hard.’
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