The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  ‘You’re late,’ he said at last.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Eleanor’s voice was throaty and only now did she realize she was on the verge of tears. ‘I’m very sorry. I thought I wouldn’t, and then – I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sure now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, though she felt only a sense of vertiginous terror at what she was setting in motion.

  ‘You know what you’re doing?’

  What was she doing? Hurting Gil, betraying her sister, paying no heed to her future, putting this blind besotted love before her own freedom and autonomy.

  ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  She thought he would put his arms round her, kiss her. Instead he said, almost coldly, ‘Will you come with me, Nellie?’ and when she nodded mutely, he gripped hold of her hand and started walking, fast enough in spite of his dragging leg so that she almost had to run to keep up. They were heading east, into the tumbledown poverty that many of her pupils came from but which she usually avoided. Men stood in groups on the street corner, under the gas lamps that were now being lit, the day over and night-time beginning. Shapes in doorways and light spilling out from public houses, bursts of raucous laughter. A woman with a painted face leaning against a wall, and Eleanor had to look away from her gaze that was both contemptuous and beseeching. Michael didn’t slacken his pace. They went down a small street with cracked paving stones. There were no lamps here, and it was suddenly darker and cooler. She was only wearing a thin blouse and she felt chilly, goosebumps on her skin. She thought of rats among the scattered rubbish and had a sudden image of Gil, sitting at his table in a newly laundered shirt, with a glass of wine in front of him. Too late to think of all that now, though for a moment his imagined expression made her stumble. They were in front of a narrow door and Michael was reaching into his pocket for a key.

  ‘Where are we?’ she said.

  ‘My friend’s. He’s on nights. I’m using his room for a while.’ He turned to her. ‘It’s not much but it’s a place we can be alone.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’ Close to her ear. ‘I am so scared and so happy I feel I could die of it.’

  The door swung open on to a narrow, dank hallway. She could hear voices through the thin wall to her right: young children squabbling and a woman’s high, angry remonstrating. There was a smell of meat cooking. Michael went up the stairs and she followed. Another doorway, and again he reached for the key, which was stiff in the lock. The door swung open and he turned on the light, just a bulb in the ceiling that swung slightly on its flex, sending a queasy pattern over the room.

  For some reason, she’d been expecting squalor, but it was clean and quite neat: just a small stove in one corner under shelves on which stood a few tins of food and a whisky bottle, and in the other corner a single bed with a red blanket pulled over the sheets. An old bike leant against the far wall. Several piles of books stood near it, and there was a jumbled heap of clothes in the corner, next to two large, bashed-about suitcases. A woven rug covered some of the wooden boards. There was a chair near the window and a candle stuck into the neck of a liquor bottle on the sill, amid puddles of hardened wax. One of the windowpanes was broken and a plastic sheet had been taped across it, which billowed in the gusts of wind.

  Eleanor stood in the middle of the room and watched as Michael bent to light the candle on the windowsill, and then another that was on the wooden crate that served as a bedside table. He fetched down the whisky bottle from the shelf, pouring a generous measure into a glass and a mug.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and handed her the glass.

  She took a sip, blinked, took another. It was raw, medicinal, and it scorched its way down her throat and made her eyes water. Something loosened inside her; her terror was dissolving, her stomach softening and her throat thickening. She felt a soft, loose thud of pleasure inside her, like the insistent pulse of gravity. She finished the glass and put it down, then undid the coil of her hair.

  ‘Eleanor,’ said Michael. ‘Nellie.’

  ‘Will you turn out the light?’

  Now the room had no walls or ceiling; it was just a guttering space, everywhere and nowhere, now and for ever, and she could see the shine of his eyes and the paleness of his torso when he took off his shirt. Someone was shouting outside in the street, just beneath their window, but that seemed a long way off. Here, they were cocooned by candlelight and the quiet rustling of their clothes, the unsteady rasp of their breath. He unbuttoned her blouse and put his face into her newly washed hair and between her breasts, and she put her arms around him and felt the bumped ridge of his spine and the sharp cage of his ribs. He tasted of whisky and tobacco, unfamiliar. He was a stranger – and she was a stranger too as she lay back on the narrow bed, the blanket scratching at her bare skin. She watched herself turn into a woman who lifted up her arms, twisted her body; she heard herself give a high moan of pleasure. His face between her thighs, and her own face burned. Then he was inside her with a violence that shocked her; she pressed her mouth against his shoulder to stop herself from crying out. When she looked at his face, it was screwed up in a kind of bitter anguish that made her want to gather him against her. This felt almost like despair, she thought: this urgent blind striving.

  Afterwards they lay close together on the bed. He raised himself up on one arm and pushed her hair away from her face, staring at her intently, then closed his eyes and lay down again, his fingers tracing her jaw-line, trailing down her throat to her neck as though he were memorising her. After a while, he got up and poured them both some more whisky. She looked at his bare back with the sharp shoulder blades, like wings, and his pale narrow buttocks, his legs with muscles that tautened as he moved. He turned and his penis swung between his legs. In spite of her times with Gil, she had never seen a man naked before, not really, and she found him beautiful and strange, almost sinister. Had he really laid that pale body over hers? She pulled on his shirt and went to the bathroom, which was out on the landing. The children had stopped wailing and the mother shouting. She washed her face and between her legs. Her body ached. The face in the mirror was someone else’s – the woman who had thrashed on the bed and uttered animal cries, not Eleanor Wright the teacher. Not Eleanor Wright the fiancée of Dr Gilbert Lee.

  When she returned, Michael, still naked, was sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette and knocking the ash hissing into a chipped mug. He watched her as she crossed the room and she was acutely conscious of her own nakedness under his thin shirt. She felt appraised. She had become an object, like someone in a painting. Woman after Making Love. With Gil, sex had been toilsome and untransforming. He had, it seemed, left her intact, even as her blood spotted the sheets. She had still been herself when she had risen from the bed: Eleanor Wright. Now she wasn’t so sure. She felt that she had been pierced and ruptured by passion. She had lost herself, cried out with a voice that wasn’t her own, let waves of desire sweep through her inner spaces. Her body ached, her skin was sore and she herself felt fragile, knocked about and close to tears. She didn’t even know who he was and yet he had seen her as no one else ever had, writhing and arching on the bed as his fingers found her out.

  She sat on the floor and put her back against his legs. He leant forward to kiss the top of her head, then slid his arms around her and pulled her closer. She took a gulp of whisky and handed him the glass.

  ‘What now?’ he asked. She twisted her head to look at him. ‘I mean, what will you do?’

  ‘I will tell Gil it’s over. I was going to anyway, even if—’ She didn’t finish the sentence. She thought of Gil’s face, his world, the lovely familiarity of him. ‘But it’s hard to make someone unhappy,’ she added. ‘It’s very hard.’

  ‘One of us was going to be unhappy.’

  ‘But you’re stronger than
he is.’

  Her words surprised her, and yet as soon as she had spoken them she knew them to hold a truth. There was something about Gil that was passive and already defeated. He wouldn’t defend himself against blows that were aimed at him; he wouldn’t be angry with her or even try to win her back. He would simply let her go and suffer.

  After a silence, Michael said: ‘Do you love him still?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And me – do you love me?’

  Eleanor twisted and knelt, looking at him with a bright, fierce gaze.

  ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I chose you.’

  He pulled on his trousers and cooked for them – at least, he emptied a tin of watery, salty stew into a pan and heated it, carved hunks of stale bread, made a pot of tea in a tin teapot with a cracked spout that they drank bitter and strong, without milk. He asked her questions about her dead father and her living mother, always wanting more detail than she gave, trying to strip away outer layers of her self-protecting story and go in deeper, darker, stranger. He listened intently, trying to hear what she wasn’t saying. He wanted to know the things that she never told anyone, to ferret out her secrets and to make crooked and shaded the things that had seemed straight. She felt that she was learning a new language, one that made her feel giddy with possibilities.

  She didn’t want to talk about Merry, but he made her. He said they should look at what they were doing full on, not bury anything. ‘It will return to haunt us if we don’t,’ he said.

  ‘When we’re old together,’ he said, and at that she took his face between her hands and kissed him and felt his mouth smile under hers.

  He made her talk about her and Merry as girls: her resentment and the sense of being overlooked, and of losing her mother, somehow, to this new family with the kind husband and adorable, winsome daughter. ‘It made me feel sick at myself,’ she said and he nodded. ‘I was someone I didn’t want to be: mean and jealous.’

  ‘And what about her – did you make her mean and jealous as well?’

  ‘She didn’t need to be. She was the princess in the fairy tale, remember: she always got everything she wanted.’

  Then she put a hand over her mouth.

  ‘Do you think that’s why?’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t.’

  ‘Am I that cruel?’

  ‘No, Nellie.’ He was round to her side, holding her. ‘No. But you have to look at it clearly; you have to see it from all sides.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Before I go away.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I want us to think about this together,’ he said patiently, ‘so that when we’re apart you won’t be filled with doubt and guilt.’

  ‘Doubt and guilt.’ She repeated the words as though their taste was in her mouth.

  ‘Because you can’t leave me,’ he said. ‘Not any more. Not for any reason.’

  He talked of himself, too – offering things up. He told her about the poverty of his childhood, the cockroaches on the ceiling and the privy in the yard, shared by six families. How he used to hear his mother crying at night, when she thought everyone was asleep.

  ‘She looked worn out by thirty-five,’ he said. ‘She was pretty when she was young; a little thing with curly hair and a smile like spring. But being poor isn’t good for the looks. At the age when rich women still look young and strong, she’d lost half her teeth, her hair was thin and her skin bad. Five of us and two that didn’t survive, in that little house with damp coming in through the walls. My father was a disappointed man. He could have been kind in a different life, but he’d come back from the public house fighting-drunk and you could hear him in their room, going at it for all he was worth, like a bloody piston engine, and then he’d despair when she fell pregnant.’

  He’d been good at school. He couldn’t afford university but after his Highers he’d gone to night school, working during the day at any job he could turn his hand to. He was always ardent for books and learning, he said. He talked of education with a kind of reverence that Eleanor had encountered in some of the parents of her pupils: not just as the thing that could rescue them from the life they were born into, but with an almost religious sense of its virtues. He was a member of the Left Book Club; he read about science and politics and history, whatever he could lay his hands on. He knew he was a mixture of the ignorant and the oddly well informed. He had learnt the Greek alphabet and had taught himself rudimentary Spanish before going to Spain. But Spain, he said, was going to hell in a handcart. He pulled books out from under the bed and found a pamphlet that he read passages from. It was a poem about Spain – Eleanor later discovered it was by Auden, but at the time, all she knew was that the words rang out in that little room like a curse. He liked marches and protests and impassioned meetings; he knew more about what had really happened during the anti-fascist march in Cable Street than she did, even though she’d been there; he had strong feelings about the divorce bill; he thought women should rise up in righteous anger. He didn’t believe in the monarchy; the abdication crisis had been an irrelevance; who cared? He pulled her closer to him; his mouth against her throat. She could feel the painful beating of her heart. He didn’t believe in any kind of God. He didn’t believe in marriage but he’d marry her if she said the word. He’d do anything for her. He thought they should live abroad, or perhaps in Scotland. What did she think of Scotland, once the war was done with? Or even America, land of the free. He lit a cigarette and the acrid smoke stung her eyes. He kissed her and she tasted blood on her lip, and whisky. He told her they had found each other. She felt she was being drawn into a whole new world that was dark with danger and bright with joy.

  They briefly slept and when they woke they made love again, dreamily, while outside in the street the sounds of early morning were starting up again. Summer rain pattered against the window; the blanket was scratchy against her skin; her lips were swollen and she hurt between her legs. Her breasts felt tender. There was a bruise, purple against the milky paleness of her thigh; she didn’t know how that had got there but she probably had others she couldn’t see. Her whole body felt bruised. Her heart too. Any touch could hurt her, yet when he pressed his fingers into her flesh she was glad. She wasn’t really sure how she had got here. Yesterday evening seemed a dream now, and last night unreal, not occupying time or space.

  At last Michael got up and made coffee. He filled a bowl with the rest of the hot water from the kettle and dipped a thin cloth into it, then washed her. She let him, standing in the middle of the floor with water streaming off her body. He was good at it and she thought: he’s done this before; but it didn’t matter. She put the clothes from yesterday back on. They were slightly grubby, creased; a button had gone missing; her stockings had a ladder. She looked like what she was, she thought: a woman getting dressed after a night of sex and almost no sleep. She had no comb (she had nothing in fact; she’d run out as she was, without even a coat). But he got a fork from the drawer and she tried to tame her hair with that, tugging it through knots and her eyes watering.

  ‘I need to go home before I go to school,’ she said. ‘I can’t be seen like this.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Take me?’

  ‘On the bike. We’ll have plenty of time.’

  He lifted the bike down the stairs and she followed, conscious of a face looking at her from behind a half-opened door. He helped her on to the thin seat and she gathered up her skirt with one hand and put her other hand on his waist and he stood up in the pedals and cycled her back towards Islington. She could see the effort in the back of his neck. Her skin stung in the damp breeze.

  ‘You’d better let me down here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone seeing me.’

  He stopped and she dismounted.

  ‘I’ll wait outside your school this afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘No. Let me tell Gil first.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This Sa
turday. After the dance.’

  ‘That’s days away.’

  ‘I have to tell him before I see you again.’

  ‘Will you come to me then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He pulled her into the shadows and kissed her, long and hard, his hand against the small of her back and her body soft with desire again.

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ he said, and she turned and walked up the long street, knowing he was still there, watching her until she was out of sight.

  Gladys let her in because she’d forgotten her key. Eleanor felt the woman’s bright, canny gaze take in her swollen lips and disordered hair and stained, creased blouse. But she didn’t say anything.

  ‘She always knew everything,’ Eleanor said to Peter now. ‘She didn’t have to see things to know they were going on. She knew everything before it even happened.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Peter, bumping the car up the drive, over the potholes. The lights were all off and the house looked abandoned.

  ‘Then I told Gil.’

  21

  The dance was over, the band had packed up and departed. Gil walked Eleanor home along the deserted streets. It was raining, and he tucked her arm through his and held his large umbrella above them both. She wore her borrowed gown that was slightly too large for her; Emma had fastened it with pins, but she had to hold up the skirts with one hand to prevent them trailing.

  ‘So,’ began Gil cheerfully, ‘what did you make of—?’

  ‘There’s something I have to say,’ cut in Eleanor. Her voice sounded sharp, almost rude.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I have made a mistake.’

  ‘A mistake?’

  ‘I cannot marry you.’

  For a moment, everything continued as it had been. They walked at the same pace, under the dome of the umbrella; Gil’s arm remained tucked around hers; the expression on his face didn’t alter, but remained genial. Then he slowed and his arm slackened. His face slackened as well.