They piled everything into the van and sat on the front seat with the driver. Mrs Kershaw didn’t come out to say goodbye. The wardrobe remained in the hall. William put his arm round Ann and she couldn’t thrust him away for fear he fell out of the door.
The new flat was in a Crescent not far from Regents Park – one large room and a small bedroom. There was a patio at the back, divided from the main yard, paved with slate, by a row of tubs planted with small bushes. The kitchen was in the living room and the bathroom was one flight up. Everything was painted white.
William hung his suits and jackets inside the built-in wardrobe; there was hardly room for Ann’s blue smock and the unrestored coat. She couldn’t help noticing his overcoat was missing, the tweed jacket, his silk dressing-gown. From the front windows she could see the houses opposite, children playing on the pavement, the street lamps melting in a curve of steel over the camber of the road.
There was a surprise for her, he said, in the bedroom.
She felt she’d had enough surprises to last the rest of her life. Reluctantly she went to look. Braked against the wall was a pram in cream and chrome, the hood encased in polythene. It had a shopping basket at the foot.
‘That’s jolly useful,’ she said.
He put a packet of tea and his plimsolls in the shopping compartment and made her wheel it up and down the room.
She felt nothing at all. She was empty, absent. Blank.
He hadn’t had time to buy any furniture. There weren’t any chairs or a table. They drank tea and ate toast, sitting on suitcases at his desk. The pram stood with gleaming mud guards and white wheels at the centre of the white room. She breathed in and out, sat sedately on the suitcase buckling under her weight, munching her buttered toast.
He left for Newcastle the following day.
5
The play, though poorly attended, received good notices in the local press. William sent Ann copies of the papers. She didn’t read them all through. Chuck von Schreiber had travelled up from London to see the play and seemed not such a bum after all.
William had decided to rewrite one of the scenes in the tenement, and cut out a scene towards the end where the boy was in a graveyard looking for the tomb of his mother. The mother must have died halfway through the play, she thought. She hadn’t realised it was a tragedy.
He said there wasn’t time to come back to London before they went on to Liverpool. She was to be patient and take her vitamins and he would send her the fare to Liverpool as soon as he was settled. In the meantime she should polish the furniture and wash the rugs and make her nest ready for the bairn. He loved her. He was her dulcimer boy. She didn’t even bother to look the word up in the dictionary.
Clinical and bare, save for the desk, and the plates and cups on the draining board, the white room encircled her. She threw a blanket over the pram in the bedroom and sat for several hours a day in her fur coat on the patio looking at the row of shrubs. A woman in the upstairs flat called down once from her window. Ann pretended not to hear – she had been quite friendly with Mrs Kershaw and look where that had landed her.
When William sent her the fare to Liverpool and a timetable of trains she could take, she was surprised. She hadn’t thought he had meant her to come. She wrote and said it would be better if she stayed where she was. He sent a series of telegrams, expressing reproach and love. I NEED YOU. I LOVE YOU. WHAT IS WRONG? After some days she wrote again, in more detail; she said she couldn’t come, feeling as she did. There were too many unexplained things. She didn’t like mysteries. She knew she was odd and suspicious, but it seemed such a funny thing to have happened – being ill at the dentist’s and losing all one’s clothes, etc., etc. She had never known anyone before to whom that had happened. Surely the dentist had been overbearing to throw away the new jacket and trousers; he could have sent them to the cleaners. And what did William wear between the time he left the dentist’s and bought the new corduroys?
William sent a further telegram saying tersely, I NEED YOU. She didn’t reply. She stayed indoors and thought of herself as a snail-like creature, similar to those under the leaves of the shrubs on the patio, curled within shells, motionless.
It was her mother who brought about the change. Mrs Walton had telephoned Nethersole Road and been told by Mrs Kershaw that Ann had left. There was no telephone number. She had then rung the BBC and was informed that Miss Walton had handed in her notice before Christmas. She wrote that she was disgusted at Ann’s lack of decency. She had been given a wonderful education, a stable background; sacrifices had been made on her behalf – holidays, a larger car. She had no right to give up her job without first consulting her. All the years spent struggling to do without. God knows it hadn’t been easy; there were things she could mention if only she was as selfish as Ann. The deceit was what hurt most of all. Ann owed her something – yes, owed. She demanded to know what Ann was up to.
The letter was such a tirade of pride and possessiveness that Ann was shaken. There was no mention of love or her father’s health or the state of the garden and the Wine Society. There was no mention of anything but Mrs Walton’s divine right to be at the centre of the universe. The letter ended, ‘You foolish girl. Don’t expect me to come running when your fancy man lets you down.’
Ann put the letter on the floor. She walked into the bedroom and looked at the pram. She tore off the polythene hood and was amazed to see a small storm shield, with a square of plastic, through which, at some point in the future, when it rained, she would see her sleeping baby. She made breakfast, rocked the pram with one hand as she ate her toast. She looked at the timetable that William had sent her. If she went out now and bought some new clothes, she could be with him by supper time. She sent him a telegram at half past nine. CATCHING TWO O’CLOCK TRAIN. STOPPING AT CREWE. I LOVE YOU. YOUR FOOLISH GIRL.
She chose a grey tunic dress. She didn’t look pregnant. Even sideways. It would go with her grey coat which still fitted her. She bought purple stockings and purple shoes of patent leather. She wanted to tell the shop assistant about William, how beautiful he was, how clever. She was terrified at the thought that she had nearly lost him.
She washed her hair and dried it sitting on the patio. She waved at the woman leaning out of the top window shaking a yellow duster. Only when she bent over her stomach to swing her head to and fro in the breeze did she catch her breath. The baby was taking up space beneath her ribs.
Everything about the journey she was determined to store up in her mind to remember for the rest of her life. Nothing must be forgotten – no detail of landscape or cluster of buildings glimpsed from the carriage window as she sped towards William. She would tell her baby about it, when it was a grown man or woman. Before you were born, she would say, we had a misunderstanding, your father and I, a parting. Then he sent for me to come to him, and I went to Euston in a new grey dress and boarded a train to the North.
She was so busy visualising the scene with the adult child, that she missed entirely the passage through the embankment, the slope of Primrose Hill, where William walked his children. Her own mother and father had never discussed those early days of love, the bombing days of wartime when Captain Walton enjoyed his life. She had never seen them kiss, touch hands, lie together in a bed. Only in photographs – the wedding picture, just the two of them: Captain Walton, his cap gripped beneath the biceps of his arm, and her mother smiling in a frock with square shoulders, her hair in a roll above her ears, a tilted hat – a little veil like a wisp of smoke – behind which the eyes stared out hungrily, glittering with gaiety. And another celluloid image of her parents on honeymoon, side by side on deckchairs at Torquay, clutching each other, faces turned to the camera, smiling inscrutably with vanished, slitted eyes. She hadn’t any photographs of William to show the baby when it came.
She was aware of an old man, seated in the corner opposite, fast asleep with carefully composed limbs and a strawberry mark on his cheek. She needn’t worry – it didn’t hap
pen any more, that kind of blemish: if it did they scraped it off at once, as soon as the child was born.
The train slowed. Behind a hawthorn hedge a man rode a hefty horse down a lane. Plump and skittish, it swished its tail, dipped its head at the sound of the rolling wheels. She had never lived inland, away from the sea. She was travelling through an area of devastation, a rubbish tip of piebald fields filled with falling barns of rusty tin, chicken coops, lumpy cows lying down under a pale sky. How dirty they were, the cows, splattered with dried mud, sullenly munching. What a mess it was, the countryside, fractured and torn, threaded with abandoned canals, tyres floating along the thick green water – caravans, ruined cars, obsolete tractors, bushes ghostly with lime from a kiln ripped out of the ground; sheep, yellow and grazing, soaring on a strip of wet field, high into the air above the telegraph wires, as the train dipped downhill.
She would tell William that she hadn’t meant to make demands. No matter how many times she failed to understand his manipulations, the devious routes he travelled, she wouldn’t be possessive. He didn’t owe her anything.
She remembered, as a child, being home for the holidays, and a friend of her father’s calling to take her and her mother for a ride in a car. They stopped at a tea-shop in Lewes; they had cream cakes with jam leaking from the sides. The man, dapper and dark, removed the fox fur from her mother’s shoulders. Her painted nails, like talons, curved the handle of the teapot; her rounded chin doubled as she gave that sharp and thrilling laugh. She kissed Ann repeatedly, she called her my own darling, she told the dapper man that she was the cleverest little girl in the world. When they went home, her mother took off her cheeky hat, her smile, her flowered dress. She stood grimly preparing the evening meal, the thin mouth fading as the scarlet lipstick wore away. Was that why she was so fierce when Ann mentioned this man or that – Gerald or William? Was she afraid that the cleverest little girl in the world might peel potatoes, all her life, for the wrong man?
The train leapt along the track, county to county. The fields flew, black and brown and tender mauve. ‘William, William, William’ went the wheels on the steel rails above the cinders and the stones. Then another train, dark red and rocking, coming out of nowhere, rattling alongside the carriage – people drinking coffee, holding cups with both hands against the sway – gone again, left behind, swerving sideways into the distance. More fields, cut into furrows by the plough, glinting with strips of rain water. A church set among juniper and laurel. Horses running, men chopping wood.
The train stopped at Wolverhampton. The old man woke up and unwrapped a cigar. The mark on his cheek was deep purple. William had a mole on his back, below his shoulder blade. When he smiled the edges of his teeth showed. The enamel was thin. He said it was to do with a lack of calcium as a child. Same with his feet. Neglected. The toes curled inwards like claws, the fault of the cheap footwear passed on from Charlie Clintoch, Andrew Baines and the boy two flights up in the tenement whose name he had forgotten.
She wished she had brought the newspapers he had sent her. She should have read his reviews. But he would understand, surely, when she told him how cold she had gone inside, how resentful. It showed a certain kind of love, even if it was the wrong kind.
The train left the station, out into a waste land of goods-yards and sidings. You see, William, she explained in her head, I was so suspicious of you that I couldn’t believe you’d gone to the dentist and been ill. I know it sounds silly.
She didn’t really think it was silly, even now. It still nagged in her mind, that business of the thrown-away clothes and the naked journey to the rehearsal rooms.
Gardens slid past the window – allotments, fences made of doors, shacks of corrugated iron, potting sheds, greenhouses with smashed panes of glass, two women tossing cabbages into a tall and battered pram.
She’d never thanked him for the pram. And she’d hurt him, she knew, when she’d sent Pamela away, that she should be so uncharitable. The holiday he wanted to give them – how happy he’d been showing his brochures, talking about Barcelona in the mild wintertime. And she’d stopped him. All the same, deep down she was glad it had come to nothing.
The old man in the corner was dozing again; the cigar hung from his lip. It was odd how, at both ends of life, people slept in the day. Her father napped in the morning and in the afternoon. Quite suddenly his eyes, scanning the newspaper or the military book, would close, his head slip sideways, his jaw slacken: as if he had been overcome by gas. When he went to bed he complained of waking before dawn. Dentists gave gas for extractions … sometimes … William hadn’t said he’d lost a tooth … Pamela was a dental receptionist …
The day brightened. The thick white sky broke up into clouds threaded with blue. She could hardly keep her eyes open. When she awoke, her nose hurt. She had been lying with it pressed to the window. She rubbed her face. All through her childhood, her mother had stroked her nose downwards, before brushing her hair. ‘Believe me,’ she had said. ‘A straight nose is an asset to a girl.’ It had worked, though perhaps a little too well. Nobody had worried about William’s assets. The baby, for sure, would have a button of a nose.
The old man in the corner was awake, re-lighting the stump of his cigar. She asked him whether they were near Liverpool yet. He stared at her disapprovingly, as if she had importuned him. Perhaps he was deaf. She looked out of the window. There were poplars along the horizon and pale fields of green grass. Gone in a flash, replaced by buildings and blackened walls. A signal box. The beginnings of a station – was it Liverpool? She leapt up at once, eager to read the name on the white-painted board. Crewe. She was disappointed that she wasn’t at journey’s end. She went to the toilet to wash her hands and comb her hair. She would have liked to use the lavatory but she knew it wasn’t allowed when the train was halted. Suddenly she remembered Uncle Walter singing about a porter who wanted to go to Birmingham. Humming, she went back along the corridor. The train was now filled with passengers. It took her several minutes to reach her seat. The old man had taken her suitcase down to secure her place. ‘Thank you,’ she said. He pretended not to hear. A whistle blew. The guard waved a green flag on the platform. The train moved on. She watched the people in the carriage with interest: a woman with two children, a commercial traveller, case of samples on his knee, a merchant navy man in a shiny brown suit, pin-striped. He had something blue, like a flower or a badge, tattooed on the back of his hand. She prided herself on being observant. There was a constant flow of people passing down the corridor, looking for somewhere to sit. There was a woman in trousers, ducking her head to see if the empty seat was reserved. A man followed her, dressed in a blue dufflecoat and wearing sunglasses. It was William. He passed her by. She let him go. She felt foolish.
‘William,’ she called, standing up and looking after him.
He turned and came towards her. He took her in his arms and kissed her. He pushed his knee between her legs, his tongue right into her mouth. She pulled away from him. She was worried in case he behaved as he had done in the hospital. The old man was watching her.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
‘I could’na wait.’
He took off his sunglasses and his eyes were red-rimmed, as they had been all that time ago when he had gone swimming at Swiss Cottage.
‘I do love you,’ she told him, swaying against him, clinging to his warm blue coat.
‘Ahhh,’ he went, loud above the rattle of the carriage. He leaned sideways, reaching with his hand to steady himself on the web of the luggage rack. He pulled the communication cord. The old man saw him – Ann saw, nobody else. She wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t seen his fingers dragging on the little metal chain. After a minute the train began to decelerate.
‘Oh William,’ she said. ‘What will we do?’
She stared out at the fields that were slowing down – cuts of oak and beech and chestnut in a timber yard, rotting in the damp air. There was a long drawn out groan as the train cam
e to a standstill. People read newspapers. The children whined and scrabbled on the dusty floor for dropped crayons. The old man looked steadfastly at William, the butt of his cigar clamped in his mouth like a dummy. The guard came in his suit of blue serge. He had his notebook ready.
‘Now then,’ he said, like a policeman in a pantomime. ‘Who done it and why?’
Ann giggled. William took two five-pound notes out of his wallet, white and folded like pocket handkerchiefs.
‘I want to get off,’ he said.
He gave his name and address, though Ann couldn’t hear it, because her face was burning, her heart thumping. She wished the old man would stop staring.
The guard said William hadn’t heard the last of it. He unfolded the five-pound notes and held them up to the light. William said he didn’t mind. If that was all, he was getting off now. He pushed Ann in front of him, carrying her suitcase. She stumbled past the outstretched feet, the crawling children. He opened the door. Below, the track was covered in pebbles, like the beach at home. He jumped onto the stones, held out his arms. Ann hesitated. The guard stood outraged behind her. She stepped down, and William lifted her onto the grass verge and pulled her up a small bank into a field. He put his arm round her. He swung her suitcase into the air and laughed. They plodded over the grass towards a clump of elms, grey as smoke, and a road beyond. Her patent-leather shoes filled slowly with mud. She looked back at the train, still stationary, the blurred faces at the windows of the carriages.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, floundering over the marshy field, her stockings splashed with dirt.
‘Cheshire,’ he told her, lifting her almost off her feet, kissing her cheek whipped by the wind.
He stopped a car on the main road and asked for a lift. The driver and his wife were going into Crewe to visit their son-in-law; he was something quite big in the timber trade.
Sweet William Page 12