In the police station Doris was asleep, lolling across two chairs. The policemen who were present were good-humoured and appeared to regard the incident as a joke. In the end a second police-car took Julia and Doris to the flat in Fulham and two other policemen carried Doris into the bedroom she shared with Joy. ‘I go for that Nancy Kwan,’ one of them said in the sitting-room, pausing for a moment to watch the action on the television screen. ‘Your friend’ll sleep it off,’ the other one said to Julia. ‘You might tell her in the morning not to cause trouble again. She’s lucky not to get herself booked.’
Julia thanked them. ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea,’ she said to Joy, who had returned to The Corrupt Ones.
But in the kitchen she didn’t make tea. She filled the kettle, and a moment later she heard Joy’s voice saying something above the rumble of the television programme. Then Doris was in the kitchen, in her maroon mackintosh with her handbag hanging from a shoulder, just as she’d been when the policemen had deposited her on her bed. ‘Julia,’ she said.
‘I think you should be lying down.’
‘I’ve run out of ciggies, dear.’
‘She wants me to get them for her,’ Joy said, appearing in the kitchen also. She added that she’d given her mother some Maxwell House when she’d been in a similar condition last Sunday.
Doris was leaning against the door-frame, unable to focus her eyes. Joy said she didn’t see why she should go down to the machine for cigarettes. She offered to make the Maxwell House instead, so Julia asked where the machine was and went herself.
When she returned Joy was watching the tail-end of the film and Doris was seated at the kitchen table. The desire for sleep had apparently left her, but she still had difficulty with her eyes and had to keep screwing them up. ‘You’re lovely,’ she said when Julia gave her the cigarettes. She found it hard to light one and in the end Julia did it for her.
Slurred and not making sense, Doris talked for hours. The sound of the television ceased in the sitting-room, more cigarettes were smoked, cups of Maxwell House coffee refused. Every time Julia said she had to go Doris pleaded with her not to. She cried a little until Julia promised to stay, and then began again. She told of the killing of Susanna Music and of the death of Francis in Italy. She’d been walking at night, she said, just walking along, hoping for a drink. She spoke of the Indian floor supervisor in such a way that Julia for a time was under the impression that he had been with her as she walked. ‘It was only bits and pieces I took,’ Doris said. ‘I had to keep going, dear.’
At half past one Julia made the journey to the cigarette machine for more cigarettes, and when she returned it all began again: the bits and pieces sold in Crawford Street, the meths drinkers, the German woman with the bee buzzing round her, the man in the off-licence. Sometimes Doris laughed, describing the man’s tobacco-stained moustache and the feather in the German woman’s hat.
‘Don’t you think you should go to bed now?’
‘The trouble is I’ve had a few drinks.’
‘That’s why you should go to bed.’
‘Will you smoke a ciggy with me, Julia? Do you never, Julia?’ ‘No, I don’t.’
‘You’re good. The trouble is you’re good, Julia.’
‘Look, I’ll help you get to bed. And then really I must go.’
‘If he hadn’t married Lucille I could have made him happy, Julia. Instead of which she threw the sewing-machine at him.’
‘It isn’t a help, you know, going over all this.’
‘The food she cooked him he couldn’t eat.’
‘You must try and forget her.’
‘You can’t forget, Julia. All these years she wouldn’t die.’
‘You must try, Doris.’
But Doris shook her head. She began to talk about the sea, and the wind agitating its surface, and the canvas of the deck-chairs flapping about. Her dad was kindness itself, helping her with her sandcastles. She’d wanted to take his hand but unfortunately he wasn’t there any more and when she looked around poor Frankie wasn’t either. She dropped off to sleep while she was still speaking. Her head kept slipping sideways and then collapsed across her arms on the table. It was twenty to five.
Julia stayed. She sat in the sitting-room, hoping to doze so that the last few hours of the night would easily pass. She imagined Doris waking when Joy began to move about the flat. She imagined her terrifying the child, screaming because she had woken up sober, as such people screamed in films. But whether that happened or not, at least Susanna Music was unharmed. Her foreboding had been wrong, or perhaps indeed her prayers and Father Lavin’s had been answered. ‘Thank You,’ she said. ‘Thank You for that.’ Francis’s smile blinked stylishly in her mind, and when she tried to shut it away it returned and brought with it the gentleness in his eyes. For a moment it seemed absurd that she’d ever believed in what had apparently been a fantasy of her own: that Francis had left his vengeance behind him. It seemed as bizarre as Doris believing that he’d committed suicide. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, uncertain if she was addressing the God she’d just thanked for looking after Susanna Music, or Francis himself. Soon after that she actually slept for a while, and even vaguely dreamed. Francis had taken slips of the escallonia and wanted to replace the raspberry canes with new ones. ‘It’s nice he’s back again,’ her mother said, and Henrietta and Katherine quite agreed. ‘Thank you for the dog,’ she said herself, and when she woke there were shafts of light in the room. She pulled back the curtains and sunshine fell on the pictures of Negresses and jungle animals. It was five past seven.
In the kitchen Doris was still asleep. Julia boiled a kettle in order to make coffee. She rattled cups and saucers, hoping to wake Doris up and in the end succeeding.
‘Good morning,’ Julia said.
Doris reached out for her cigarettes. Her hands were shaking, her face the colour of paper. She didn’t scream because she’d woken up sober but when she spoke she did so excessively slowly, as if pronunciation hurt her. She said she intended to have a bath. ‘I’m not going to drink again,’ she said, with such assurance that this appeared to be a decision she had carefully arrived at.
Joy drank Maxwell House and ate the remains of a sliced loaf. Doris returned from her bath. She was wearing a crumpled grey blouse and a grey skirt, and she’d put on some lipstick. Speaking to Joy in the same quiet way she repeated that she did not intend to drink again. She had made up her mind to get on to an even keel, as the floor supervisor had advised. She intended to try again with her table-mats. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to her child, ‘for all this unpleasantness.’
Joy had been about to lift a piece of bread to her mouth when Doris had begun to speak, and the bread now crumbled between her fingers, an expression of the astonishment she was experiencing. ‘Can she mean it?’ she whispered as she said good-bye, and Julia replied that apparently she did. She said good-bye herself, and hoped the Comprehensive would take a turn for the better. Joy made a face.
‘You’ve been very good to me, Julia,’ Doris quietly insisted. ‘I’ll never bother you again. I promise you that, dear.’
‘I actually came here to take Joy to see Francis’s parents. His mother wanted to meet her.’
Doris nodded, as if the visit didn’t surprise her. ‘Straight away after I’ve washed the things up,’ she said, ‘I’m going to start in on the mats.’
Julia slept on the train. She woke up at Reading because the ticket-collector had come around and was clearing his throat beside her. She found her ticket and handed it to him. There’d been a couple sitting opposite her, but they were now gone. Faintly she remembered their getting up, the girl saying they were leaving their newspaper for her when she felt less sleepy. The newspaper was there, dark black headlines about Rhodesia, pictures of politicians and footballers, a girl in a bikini. Idly she read it, turning the pages between glances at the passing landscape. A cricketer had made a hundred and eighty-three runs. Two men disguised as house-painters had been chase
d and caught by the police. In the London Zoo an elephant was ill. In Folkestone an elderly dressmaker had been battered to death with a tea-pot.
14
Julia’s
They watched Julia, unable to help themselves. Mrs Anstey watched her in Swan House, as did Mrs Spanners. Father Lavin made excuses to visit her. Her daughters came at weekends.
Julia was silent. She drove her mother through the town and through the summer lanes, to the house that meant so much to the old woman. An act of charity she thinks it is, Mrs Anstey guessed, accepting the charity for her daughter’s sake. Young men in anoraks continued to go about their business in the grounds of Anstey’s Mill, looking through the sights of instruments on tripods. Julia stood with her mother on the grassy path that had been the railway track, where once she’d trotted her pony, but Mrs Anstey didn’t tell again about the parties there had been when she and her husband were young. Trees were being felled at Anstey’s Mill, but that was irrelevant also. ‘She don’t say a word,’ Mrs Spanners reported to her husband. ‘Don’t hardly open her lips.’
Nevil Clapp was struck as well by Julia’s changing demeanour and said so to Diane of the Crowning Glory, with whom he was still going steady. ‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Diane replied, which was much the same response as Mr Spanners’s. Too much had happened to Julia since she’d met the unsavoury man, and the final twist of the screw had been too terrible to bear. It wasn’t fair, the verdict was, though some said also that fairness was neither here nor there.
When weeks had passed Father Lavin went on his postponed holiday to Co. Cork, to see his mother. In the farmhouse near Clonakilty he listened to the news of the neighbourhood, news of children born, of deaths and illness, and high prices paid for land. His mother and his sister recalled the past, when the family had been younger in the farmhouse, but the reminiscing was blurred this year for Father Lavin, and without á life of its own. He had brought to Ireland an English tragedy and could not rid himself of it. The wolds of Gloucestershire shadowed the past there’d been in the farmhouse; the yellow-grey stone of the town he’d settled down in was all around him, and the charm of nearby Cheltenham. Julia’s tears formed blots on the linen of her dress, the knuckles of her fingers tightly shone. ‘Ah yes,’ he said in the farmhouse. ‘Ah yes, of course.’
As for Julia herself, the silence that enveloped her could not be shaken off. She did not wish to think, or ever again to lose herself in introspection. Nor did she intend to fill another diary. There’d been too much of all that in her life, too many thoughts and too much wondering, too much bothering. Her mother’s and her daughters’ view of her, never expressed yet clearly there, was quite correct: her compassion made a victim of her. And Father Lavin’s protest that she sought connexions which didn’t exist was valid also. She would continue to go to mass, for it would be too much like a gesture never again to practise her Catholic faith. But the last thing she wanted was to have to talk about herself to a priest, to listen to arguments and be assured she was prayed for. Just at the moment the very thought of prayer made her feel as cold as ice.
The first letter came, its grey German stamp tidily affixed. It did not speak of love, or any kind of reconsidering. Forgiveness was owed, one to the other, it stated inexplicably: the gift of the dog she’d paid for was a sign of this. Yet reading the letter, it seemed almost eccentric to question its sincerity: it sounded perfectly the truth that the marriage had taken place out of kindness to her, because she’d passionately wished for the formality of being joined to him. She sent the money that was required.
‘My dear,’ her mother said, ‘I often wonder about that child, you know.’
They sat in the garden, watching the water of the river. Julia made a nodding motion and then slightly smiled, not wishing to seem entirely unreceptive. Her mother was as hard as a nut and always had been: charity begins at home, tread warily. Yet here her mother was, exchanging roles with her, her eyes implying that the child would carry with her for ever a picture of a woman killed in an alcoholic fervour, a face suddenly dead.
‘We mustn’t dwell on the child.’ Julia made the same nodding motion again, and drifted back into her silence. She hoped she might type long pages of legalities until her very death, that her fingers would never grow too stiff or her mind too blunt. Every notice convening a General Meeting shall comply with the provisions of Section 136 (2) of the Companies Act 1948 as to giving information to Members in regard to their right to appoint proxies…
Such jargon filled her future perfectly, the antiquated Remington taken from its cupboard, the words imprecise and awkward, black on white. Her mother would die, her daughters would marry, and still the jargon would go on. Nevil Clapp would commit another theft; Mrs Spanners would no longer wish to make the journey to Swan House on Mondays; the garden would become too much, the house would acquire a grubby look. The lien conferred by Clause 11 in Part I of Table A shall attach also to fully paid-up Shares registered in the name of any person…
She didn’t understand the jargon but that didn’t matter either. The letters from Germany would continue to arrive, and she would continue to send money. She would live her life as best she could, still pitying a wreck of a human being who had taken everything away from her, still longing to forgive because it was her nature to.
‘I’m perfectly all right, you know,’ she assured her mother.
‘Yes, dear, of course you are.’
The days of summer shortened. When the grass ceased to grow and the trees were brown, when suddenly it turned cold, there was the story of Constance Kent. In Gloucestershire and in London, all over England, fifteen million people were held enthralled. The people of the cocktail party were aware of a special interest. The people of the drill-hall observed their own faces with admiration or distaste. Nevil Clapp and Diane watched. So did Mr Humphreys of the cheese and bacon counter in Dobie’s Stores, and so did Mrs Spanners and her husband, Charle. Father Lavin and Father Dawne watched, and Irene in Handbags and Sharon of House Beautiful, and the kindly floor supervisor. The tall policeman who had come to see Julia remarked to his wife that this was the kind of stuff that gave people ideas. Mr and Mrs Music applauded the performance of their daughter; but in their bungalow in Cheshire the elderly Massmith sisters made no comment, nor did the doctor and his wife in Lincolnshire. Henrietta was at the theatre that evening with a man called Colin Halifax who was keen on cricket. Katherine was falling in love in a restaurant with a man she’d met a fortnight before. Neither of them saw the drama, for neither of them had wanted to, and Doris didn’t see it either. Long ago she had forgotten Francis Tyte and the dressmaker who had clung on to life so. That evening, as every evening now, she played with wooden pieces in the room that had been allocated to her.
Mrs Anstey didn’t watch, nor did the Kilvert-Dunnes on the Isle of Wight, always put off by anything ghoulish. But the two male nurses, George and Cyril, enjoyed the production greatly; and there was silence in the television lounge while it was invaded by the figures in Victorian dress. Miss Purchase had urged an alternative programme on the residents, an account of life in Madagascar, but had met with little success. Observing her son again, and so strangely garbed, Mrs Tyte softly sobbed.
Francis spoke his few lines clearly, Julia considered; the man who’d been his best man was adequate also. The scene in the plum orchard took place, and then the scene in the breakfast-room. The crippled groom held the horse’s head, the dog-cart waited in front of the house, hooves pawed the gravel. An unbalanced girl revenged herself on the television screen, but it was not her story which had a point to make in the bow-windowed drawing-room of Swan House.
Julia wished her mother hadn’t mentioned the child. The act of murder that was premeditated in the steamy Victorian household had been carried into the child’s life, inspired by her father, perpetrated by her mother. The child was the victim of other people’s worlds and other people’s drama, caught up in horror because she happened to be there. There was that re
ality in the drawing-room while the ormolu clock quietly ticked beneath the portrait that was false, while a glossy diversion came from a machine. In subtle colours the violence was conveyed, the throat so keenly cut that the head was almost severed. It didn’t mean a thing.
Forever the child would remember the flat she’d lived in, the Negresses and the jungle animals, the partition wall. The child would grow into adolescence and womanhood, pinning the fragments together: her mother and her father, victim and predator, truth and illusion. It was too late to change Francis’s fate, or Doris’s, or the debt-collector’s or the dressmaker’s. Signor Guzzinati’s devotion to tourist women would continue until he was too weak to walk the streets of Pisa; the sin of envy was part of Sister Burkardt by now. The Tytes had suffered all they could, the Pentecostal missionaries were dead. It was the child’s story that mattered.
The television screen emptied and was grey again. Julia sat on, trying to prevent herself from slipping further into the introspection she thought she’d finished with. Mistily, a scene gathered in her mind, seeming like a family photograph: an old woman and a child, a middle-aged priest and a middle-aged woman, a spaniel asleep in the sun. Out of all the ugliness her mother had hinted that this end should come and it was almost a miracle that she had, even if the time for miracles had passed.
Julia pulled back the curtains. She unplugged the television set and turned the lights out. Slowly she went upstairs. The end seemed like make-belief again, yet equally it wasn’t: Kim Novak wasn’t there, nor Doris’s dream-come-true, nor Francis as he should have been. A crime of violence didn’t gorgeously happen, like a dream or an advertisement. Four people sat ordinarily beneath a tree, cows grazed in the meadows beyond a river.
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