Imaginative Experience

by Mary Wesley

  Recognizing stout calves above neat ankles and extremely high-heeled shoes, he said, ‘Rebecca! I’ll come up.’ He wedged the area door open with an empty milk bottle.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Rebecca leaned to peer through the area railing. She had immense black eyes popping either side of a handsome nose and sensual lips parted over large competent teeth.

  ‘I’ll let you in.’ Sylvester retreated from the area to hurry upstairs and open the front door.

  ‘Are you aiming to catch pneumonia?’ Rebecca stepped into the house. ‘It’s freezing.’

  ‘Celia has been here.’ Sylvester closed the door behind her.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Removing the last of her clobber.’

  ‘I see.’ Rebecca moved into the sitting-room. ‘But why the howling gale?’ she enquired.

  ‘Can’t you smell it?’

  Rebecca sniffed. ‘M–m. How long was she here?’

  ‘Long enough. I don’t know.’

  ‘It won’t linger,’ said Rebecca. ‘“Emotion” doesn’t. I thought you were still away,’ she said. ‘I brought a note asking you to telephone when you got back, thought you might like a meal or something, thought you might be lonely.’

  ‘I am,’ said Sylvester. ‘It’s lovely. Great.’

  Rebecca laughed. ‘If you are going to keep all the windows open I’ll borrow a coat,’ she said.

  ‘Just a few more minutes,’ said Sylvester. ‘I’ll put the kettle on and give you tea.’

  ‘Coffee, please,’ said Rebecca, ‘and I shall shut the windows now. You are imagining the smell.’

  ‘I saw her from a distance,’ said Sylvester. ‘She was piling her stuff into a taxi as I got back.’

  ‘You talked to her?’

  ‘I dodged.’

  ‘Coward,’ said Rebecca. ‘I wonder what else she took.’

  ‘She’s taken everything floggable already, probably sold it to pay for her new outfits.’

  ‘Don’t you mind? The house looks dreadfully bare.’

  ‘No.’

  Rebecca closed the french windows and followed Sylvester down to the kitchen. ‘Has she left you a kettle?’

  ‘I bought a new one. Oh, confound it, she’s taken it!’

  ‘Come round to my place,’ said Rebecca, laughing. ‘I’ll make you tea.’

  Sylvester said, ‘I’ll boil a saucepan.’

  ‘Get the locks changed,’ said Rebecca, ‘or you will come home one day to a completely stripped house.’

  Not fond of unsought advice, Sylvester boiled water in a saucepan and made coffee for Rebecca and strong Indian tea for himself.

  ‘That stuff will rot your guts. Celia was right there,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Coming up in the train,’ said Sylvester, putting their cups on a tray and setting off up the stairs, ‘I saw the most extraordinary thing.’

  ‘What?’ Rebecca sat on the sofa with her legs apart.

  About to sit in an armchair opposite, Sylvester changed tack to sit next to her on the sofa. The brevity of Rebecca’s skirts unnerved him. ‘I am easily unnerved,’ he said.

  ‘You are too easily unnerved. What was this thing?’ Rebecca reached for her cup.

  ‘A sheep.’

  ‘A sheep?’

  ‘On its back.’ Sylvester explained the sheep, the rescuing girl, the drama, the guard, the twitcher, the broken glasses.

  ‘The train must have been going very slowly,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘InterCity trains go very fast, at least a hundred miles an hour.’ Sylvester gulped his tea, hot, strong, just as he liked it.

  ‘Not on Sundays. On Sundays they mend the track, the trains go slow. The train must have been going very slowly or it would not have been able to stop still within reach of the sheep. The girl would have had to run back miles to reach it if the train had been going fast.’ Rebecca, knowing best, gripped her saucer. ‘I expect you were asleep when she stopped the train,’ she said.

  ‘I smelled the brakes,’ said Sylvester.

  ‘You and your sense of smell! Did you speak to her?’

  ‘No. I told you.’

  ‘You wanted to, but you hesitated. You are a terrible hesitator,’ accused Rebecca.

  Once, for a brief moment, I was tempted to make love to you but I hesitated, thought Sylvester, and laughed.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ asked Rebecca. ‘The way you tell it, it’s a sad story. You said the girl looked mad.’

  ‘No. The oafish bird-watcher suggested she was mad—she looked terribly sad, not mad at all. I should say she was perfectly sane.’

  ‘How could you see all this without your glasses? You say you broke them. Let me see your hand.’ Rebecca took Sylvester’s hand. ‘Gosh, Sylvester, that’s a nasty cut. Shouldn’t it be stitched? Let me get you a plaster.’

  ‘No.’ Sylvester withdrew his hand. ‘Thanks, but no. It’s OK.’

  ‘And you must get new bifocals. Shall I make an appointment for you?’

  ‘You are no longer my secretary,’ said Sylvester.

  ‘I’ll ring your oculist tomorrow.’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Sylvester and thought: mustn’t tell her I no longer go to him.

  ‘Have it your own way, I’m only trying to help.’ Rebecca pursed her lips. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘sad story, poor little sheep.’

  ‘It was a very large sheep, probably a Texel. They are the largest breed.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Rebecca was tiring of the sheep.

  Sylvester said, ‘No.’

  ‘So what else did Celia take?’ Rebecca’s eyes probed the room. ‘Books?’

  ‘She hardly reads.’

  ‘I see she has taken the Meissen pugs and the Chelsea bowl, oh, and the Capo di Monte snuff boxes.’

  ‘She gave them to me. She’s taken everything she ever gave me. And her furniture, of course.’

  Rebecca said, ‘Oh my!’

  ‘She never gave me anything unless she wanted it herself.’ Sylvester stretched his legs and looked round the room, savouring the lack of clutter.

  ‘I think Celia has been utterly outrageous,’ said Rebecca, ‘and I am a feminist. Has she left you any sheets? I remember when you married, it was she who brought the bed linen. If she has purloined the sheets I can lend you some. Bath towels, too. She’s probably taken those. I’d better go and look.’ Rebecca rose, stabbing a sharp heel into the parquet, raising her bulk from the sofa in a surprisingly spry movement.

  Sylvester said, ‘No, no. Please don’t bother, Rebecca. Everything is fine. I’ll see you out,’ he said, assuming she would go, thinking that there would be another carry-on if she saw all the new stuff he had bought at Habitat.

  ‘I’ll just wash our cups,’ said Rebecca, gripping the tray. ‘I gave you these cups when you married,’ she said. ‘I’m glad Celia left them with you.’

  ‘So you did. No, Rebecca, please leave it. I am capable of washing a teacup.’ Sylvester inclined his torso towards the door.

  ‘Promise me you will let me know if there is anything I can do,’ Rebecca relinquished the tray but stood her ground. ‘I’m glad she left you the sofa,’ she said, her eyes making an inventory of the room. ‘Did she leave you the bed?’

  Sylvester said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘M‑m. That figures, yes. You will need somebody to come in and clean. I’ll ring the agency I deal with and get you a cleaner.’

  ‘Please don’t bother,’ said Sylvester. ‘I propose to manage without.’

  ‘You can’t possibly manage, I—’

  ‘I don’t want a cleaner. I don’t want the noise of Hoovers. I cannot cope with all the talk.’

  ‘Talk is part of the wage, you have to talk. You learn a lot, it’s interesting.’

  ‘No, thank you. I shall manage, Rebecca.’

  ‘The house will be a shambles within a week, unwashed dishes, soggy bath towels on the floor and you will run out of loo paper. Marriage has not changed you.’

  ‘Rebecca, please stop bossing me. You
are no longer my—’

  ‘Secretary. I know, but I will get you a cleaner who comes when you are out, and while I am about it I will get the locks changed. You will live to thank me and be properly grateful.’

  Sylvester laughed. ‘You are a bossy lady.’

  Rebecca said, ‘I am. I should not tell you this,’ she said, moving at last towards the door, ‘but Celia once told me that you bored her.’

  ‘I bored her because she bored me,’ said Sylvester equably and pecked Rebecca’s cheek. ‘Goodbye.’

  Closing the door on Rebecca’s departing back Sylvester

  Wykes sniffed the air of his empty house and, sensing no lingering trace of ‘Emotion’, let out a whoop.

  FOUR

  THE TWITCHER, WHOSE NAME was Maurice Benson, assumed he would have little difficulty in locating Julia Piper. He had what he liked to think of as flair, a talent developed during a brief career in the police and a slightly longer period snooping for a private detective agency. Neither career had remotely satisfied those who employed him and in consequence had given him small job satisfaction. So when his widowed mother died, leaving him a small but adequate income, he turned bird-watching, which had previously been a hobby, into a way of life. He was not married; he was as free as the birds which were his passion to travel wherever and whenever he pleased.

  One pleasure was getting into conversation with strangers. He would tell those who would listen that he was writing a book, although this was not strictly true, his writing having got no further than an article or two in his local paper and a paragraph promised in the RSPB magazine. Returning from an autumnal trip to the Scilly Isles and observing from his seat near the buffet the wading birds on the Exe estuary, the swans and heron further up the line, and with binoculars focused on a kestrel hovering above a field mouse on the railway embankment, he was able to get a sighting of Julia when she leapt from the train and later exchanged words with the guard.

  If Sylvester had not been so withdrawn and toffee-nosed Maurice might not have bothered to do more than tease; as it was, his stuffy and protective attitude annoyed him and aroused his curiosity; he resolved to include Julia and the sheep in an article he might write on ‘Autumn Birdlife as Viewed from a Train’, or some such guff.

  Banned as Sylvester had hoped he would be from contact with Julia by the guard, he had yet managed to read her name on an overnight bag a fellow traveller identified as hers by the seat she had vacated when she leapt on her errand. The traveller volunteered, too, that Julia had joined the train at Tiverton Parkway.

  Irritated by Sylvester’s attitude, Maurice thought he would find out what the girl was about and what had roused the interest of a bloke like Sylvester who, smelling of expensive soap, had visibly and offensively reared away from his own well-worn and pub-scented Barbour. It would serve Sylvester right, Maurice told himself, if he located Julia; for already he linked the two in his mind, just as he would the hen when he spied a cock bird; there might be a place for Julia in his notebook marked ‘useful contacts’. It would be agreeable, too, to queer Sylvester’s pitch in some revengeful way.

  On arrival at Paddington, Maurice became convinced of Sylvester’s interest in Julia when, on seeing him hunting for her through the crowd, he had barred his way and, watching him stumble and fall, had done nothing to help. Then, obviously thinking he would have lost the girl, he stalked on towards the cab rank not noticing that, rather than pursue Julia, Maurice had followed to listen for and note the address he called out to the driver.

  This done, Maurice Benson wandered back along the concourse to fortify himself with a beer before chatting with old friends in the police and people he had formerly known in the station hierarchy. While drinking his beer, he decided it would be better to leave the police out of his quest and confine his enquiries to old associates among the railway staff. But he was disappointed to find most useful contacts he had known had moved on and the two who were left were less than co-operative. True, they were willing to tell him Julia Piper’s name, since he knew it already, and they agreed that she might be charged for stopping the train. And, should she be charged, she might be fined.

  ‘Then again, she might not,’ said a man called Bates. ‘So much gets dealt with by post these days.’

  He occupied a far more senior post than Maurice remembered and was viewing him now without much friendship.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ he enquired, but before Maurice could think of an answer his colleague, whose name was Smith, volunteered the suggestion that since the train had scarcely been delayed and unless somebody lodged a complaint, the whole episode would most likely be overlooked, since stopping a train to rescue a sheep was a trivial and laughable matter which did little to enhance British Rail’s image.

  ‘You wouldn’t be in the business of writing for the newspapers, would you?’ asked the man called Bates, beginning to scowl. ‘Because if—’

  Remembering belatedly the terms he had once been on with Bates, and that Bates owed him no favours, Maurice voiced a hasty denial and said quite humbly that he ‘only wanted the lady’s address’.

  To which Bates riposted, ‘We are not in the business of giving ladies’ addresses to casual enquirers.’ Enjoying himself, for he too remembered Benson, he added, ‘And now, if there is no more we can do to help, we have other, more urgent matters to attend to.’

  Feeling that he now had nothing to lose, Maurice said, ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like IRA bombs,’ said Bates. ‘Didn’t you once have Irish connections? Have you any contacts with your boggy cousins? ‘Cos if you have, we might be interested.’

  Maurice, feeling bullied, denied any Irish cousins or knowledge of that country. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘all I wanted was—’

  ‘A bird’s address,’ said Bates.

  ‘Which you won’t give?’

  ‘Didn’t we say?’ Smith picked up a folder.

  ‘Well then,’ said Bates.

  Maurice Benson said, ‘Goodbye, then,’ and muttering, ‘Thanks for nothing,’ left the office. As he left he heard Smith laugh and Bates ask, ‘What was his interest, anyway?’

  Smith replied, ‘Search me. The birds he takes an interest in are of the tweet-tweet variety.’

  Solacing himself with another beer in the station buffet, Maurice Benson comforted himself with the thought that he had Sylvester’s address in London and the knowledge of where Julia Piper had joined the train. There was plenty of time, no hurry at all. It might some time be amusing, when in that part of the country, to hunt tail, snuffle round the region of Tiverton Parkway.

  FIVE

  IN LATE AFTERNOON JULIA Piper, having walked from Paddington, shuffled through a pile of letters and circulars which had dropped through the letter-box during the preceding week; she did not pick them up, but climbed the stairs to the flat she and Giles had occupied during the years of their marriage. On the top floor she fumbled for her key, unlocked the door, stumbled in and, without taking off her coat, lurched forward to lie face down on the divan which served as sofa and occasional bed in the room that was her sitting-room. As she fell her hat slid off, and she lay inert, spent.

  In the flats below people came in from work, turned on their televisions, cooked their suppers, talked loudly, slammed doors, ran baths and subsided into bed as night closed in, not to silence but the muted roar of a vast city interrupted by occasional police sirens and the distant sound of tugs hooting on the river. Some time in the night an ambulance raced fast through the street, bell ringing. Half-conscious, Julia eased her shoes off, pressing one foot against the other in a state between sleeping and waking.

  In the early hours the sound of rain lashing against the window roused her. She got up stiffly, pulled off her coat and went to the window. A wild wind was blowing the rain in slanting lines into a river which was the street, as though a million fishermen cast for trout in the pools forming among the parked cars whose humped roofs resembled rocks. So she had once described them to her child
, holding him in her arms warmly wrapped in a towel after his bath, nuzzling his neck where his hair was damp from soapy water. ‘Look,’ she had said, ‘a rushing river, darling. If we look hard we may see a fish.’

  ‘A trout?’ He had jogged in her arms. ‘A salmon? A shark?’

  ‘No, no, my love, a dolphin! You shall ride on its back.’

  She had held him tight, kissed the nape of his neck, rolled him into his pyjamas, put him into his cot, promised to show him a real river, a real dolphin, yes, soon.

  Cramp seized her tired feet, knotting her toes into twisted shapes, moving up to her calves until she gasped with pain. Stamping and trying to tread away the agony, she drew the curtains, switched on the light. There was no river, no fish, no child. In bleak desolation she padded to the kitchen, poured water from the tap and drank the chlorinated stuff in thirsty gulps until, surfeited, she gagged.

  In the bathroom she filled the basin and splashed icy water over her face and ran wet hands through her hair. Doing so, she was aware of a tang of sheep dung and lanolin and briefly remembered her train journey. Moving back to the kitchen she found stale bread, made toast and tried to eat. She was ragingly hungry but could not swallow. She put the toast into the garbage-can.

  In the cupboard under the sink, searching for the plastic bin-bags she used for rubbish, she remembered that she had run out. Taking her purse she let herself out of the flat and ran down to the street, hurrying through the rain to the Corner Shop, which was just opening ready for its first customer.

  ‘I need bin-bags, Mr Patel.’

  ‘A packet of three, Mrs Piper? You have been on holiday?’

  ‘A lot of packets, please, Mr Patel.’

  ‘Three packets, Mrs Piper?’

  ‘At least six, Mr Patel.’

  ‘So we are having a grand after-the-holiday spring clean, Mrs Piper, an autumn clear-out, I’m thinking.’

  ‘A clear-out, yes.’