by Nina Bawden
He drew the heavy curtains and said it looked as if it were blowing up for a nasty night, and that you never knew what the weather was going to do at this time of the year. He was a little, chatty man with a face like a friendly weasel and a perpetual, wrinkled smile. He seemed to stay interminably, laying out the tea and putting on the fire, talking all the time with sparrow brightness until my nerves were stretched to breaking point. When he had gone I left the desk and crouched in front of the angry bars of the electric fire, smoking one cigarette after another.
Then I remembered that I was expected at the Fosters’ at at six-thirty; teaching their crippled child was an act of charity that I suspected in myself and for this reason I never missed his weekly lesson. The boy was the younger brother of one of my bright, working-class pupils; I had taken on the voluntary task with a kind of dedicated enthusiasm, seeing it as a magnanimous act of rescue, half-believing that I should find a quick intelligence that could be sharpened into brilliance. By the time I had realised that the gesture was worthless, that the boy’s brain was as handicapped as his body, I had grown so ashamed of my own motives in starting the lessons, of my own deluded picture of myself as a knight in shabby armour, that it was impossible to put an end to them.
I got up reluctantly and went to the sheds for my bicycle. It was raining now, in small cold flurries that stung my face and froze my hands. The roads were slippery and there was no moon. The late, surprising sun of the afternoon had been the last of the summer.
The Fosters lived in a new council cottage near the river. The estate was not yet finished; the roads round the houses were unmade and muddy, and the spoiled fields were littered with lengths of pipe and concrete mixers. The defaced country was hidden by the wet, dark evening and as I turned off the lane on to the new road that led to the houses, their welcoming windows glowed with warmth like oranges on a Christmas tree.
Steven was waiting for me in the front room of the house, his wheel chair drawn up to the table, his hands lying loose on the rug that covered his useless legs. He was a nice child, he had a slow smile of astonishing sweetness and he watched my mouth all the time I was talking to him with a rapt concentration that had at first encouraged me to think that he understood what I was saying. Now I knew that it was an illusion; that he had been told so often that he was a lucky boy because I had offered to come and teach him that he was terrified of offending me by saying that he didn’t understand. I had tried, since I had realised his limitations, to force him to tell me when the lesson was too difficult for him. Sometimes I would succeed and he would ask me a question but always, by the next week, he had returned with careful obstinacy to his first habit of sitting in silent, awed stupidity. He was fifteen and he had the mental capacity of a child of ten. I was not equipped to teach him or to help him; the hour that I spent, every week, in the polished parlour was a penance for me and, I suspected, a misery for him. This week I had brought my stamp album with me in the hope that it would help him to learn geography. He turned the pages with cries of pleasure because the stamps were pretty; he listened dutifully to my short monologues and when, at the end of the hour, I said that he might keep the book, his peaky face softened and glowed with such rapture that I felt ashamed. I swung his chair round and he propelled it to the door, opening it with his stick and wheeling himself into the kitchen beyond.
“Look, Mum,” he said. “Look what Mr. Harrington’s given me.”
She put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and smiled gratefully at me. She was a big slatternly woman with a kind, worn face.
She said: “It’s ever so kind of you, Mr. Harrington. Stevie, did you say thank you nicely?”
He looked at me and hung his head in a confused way.
I said quickly: “Of course he did, Mrs. Foster.”
She said effusively: “You’re too good, Mr. Harrington. There’s not many who’d come and teach Stevie. I’m sure we can never be too grateful, can we?” She smiled gently at the boy and offered me a cup of tea.
I told her that I had to get back and felt my face colour at the lie. It would have been pleasant to sit in the warm kitchen after the cramping cold of the unused parlour, but to-night I felt rather more of a fraud than usual. To sit and listen to her gratitude would have been ari unbearable reproach. She said that of course she understood, that it was too good of me to have given up so much of my time already and that she had no right to keep me any longer. She was regretful about it, and I felt that I had denied her a pleasure.
Outside the wind was stronger than it had been when I came, blowing in chilling gusts of fine rain. I free-wheeled down the rutted road and out into the lane.
I tried to brake as soon as I saw the headlamps of the car sweep the high, grass bank, but the tyres of my bicycle were slimy with mud and would not hold on the tarmac. The big car slewed round the bend in the lane, rocked a little and caught my front wheel with its offside wing. The bicycle frame buckled beneath me and I fell miraculously clear, landing in the narrow ditch with a sharp pain in my groin. The car went by with a rush of wet air; it was a grey drop-head Bentley, and when I saw the letters on the number plates I knew who was at the wheel.
The car was being driven badly; I had heard the brakes whine on the road and she had taken a difficult corner at a speed that was dangerous in the wet and the dark. Geoffrey was by instinct and training a cautious driver; he handled a car in the way that he would have ridden a horse, with solicitous care. I picked myself out of the ditch, angry and scared and sore, and wondered why Emily should be driving down to the river. The lane came to a dead end at the tow path.
Then I knew where she must be going and the knowledge was physically painful, like an unexpected blow. The doubts and the perennial jealousy came back in a flood of sick anger. I picked my shattered bicycle off the road and flung it into the ditch. I began to walk along the lane towards the river. My hands were throbbing with nettle stings. I had pulled a muscle in the upper part of my thigh and limped with the pain.
It was about half a mile to the river. By the time I got there the rain had soaked through my raincoat and dripped off my hair and was running in small streams under my collar and down my cold back. My right trouser leg was torn and flapped damply against my knee. I had forgotten about Nora. I had forgotten about Geoffrey. Nothing and nobody was real or important except Emily and my love for her. And my own bitter, jealous anger.
The Bentley was parked at the end of the lane, one front wheel in the ditch. On the tow path, out of the shelter of the hawthorn hedges, the wind was almost a gale and sobbed like a maddened banshee in the branches of the tall poplars that lined the river bank. The river was high, almost up to the level of the fields, and the creaming lips of the waves were luminous in the darkness. The barge was a heavy dark hulk against a dark and moving sky. It rose and fell with the wind and the water and the ropes that moored it to the bank creaked against the iron bollard.
I went up the gangplank, stepping softly as though I was afraid they would hear me coming. It was an absurd piece of melodrama. If anyone had been expecting me they would not have heard me in the noisy night, and there was no one inside the barge to expect me. There was only a pair of guilty lovers. So my anger had made them; there was no reasoning behind my expectation, only an uncontrolled and almost terrifying emotion. I do not know what I thought I would see when I opened the cabin door. I suppose a conventionally incriminating scene.
Instead they were standing as far apart as the length of the cabin would allow, more enemies than lovers. Emily had her back against the far wall, the flat palms of her hands outstretched against it, her head flung high and defiant in the general attitude of a tragedy heroine facing the villain of the piece. She looked angry and magnificent. Her hair was wet with rain and darkened to a copper colour. She saw me in the doorway and went scarlet.
David turned at the direction of her eyes. He did not look surprised and the smile on his face was as sneering and as confident as I had ever seen it. His eyes were clea
r and shining so brightly that they might almost have had tears in them. It was hot in the cabin of the boat; he had discarded his jacket and was wearing only a checked woollen shirt that showed his wide chest and his enormous, rippling shoulders. He looked triumphant and nearly handsome.
I closed the door behind me and shut out the frenzied sound of the night. The barge had been built well and when the door was closed it was dead quiet in the cabin. So quiet that I listened to myself breathing, small quick breaths through my nose that sounded like the wind through dry grass.
The barge lurched gently with the movement of the water and a beer bottle toppled gently to its side on the table, rolled in slow motion to the edge and bounced on the floor with a hollow, soggy sound.
The tension broke. Emily moved from her crucified attitude against the wall and David sat down on the bunk, folded his arms and stared at me. His short legs stuck out in front of him, he wore dirty canvas sandals on his feet and his heavy belly rested on his thighs. He didn’t look handsome or triumphant any longer. Just sly and confident and middle-aged.
He said: “Well, Tom. It’s an odd night for visiting. I’m more popular than I thought.”
I looked past him at Emily. I said: “What are you doing here?”
She moved one hand in what seemed to be a gesture of despair. The tweed suit she had worn at lunchtime was spotted with rain. Her stockings were wet and wrinkled and I saw, with a kind of distant pity, that her light shoes were sodden and smeared with mud. She couldn’t have looked more guilty if I had found them in bed together.
She said flatly: “I had to see David. There was something I had to talk to him about.”
She sounded as if she didn’t expect to be believed. Her eyes had a dark and glassy look as if she were afraid. She didn’t look like a bitch. I told myself that the successful ones never did. I hated her. I hated the beauty of her body and the lying honesty of her face.
I said savagely: “I haven’t given you enough time to work out a good story, have I? But perhaps you think it isn’t necessary. Perhaps you think I’m fool enough to believe whatever you tell me. You should have remembered, when you told me about David in the Woolpack, that I knew him well. Well enough to know that he wouldn’t make a pass at someone he wasn’t sure about. David’s too proud for that, you know.”
The skin felt tight round my eyes. I could hear my own voice as if it didn’t belong to me, light and cruel and full of hate. She was staring at me in a fixed, fascinated way, the way a rabbit is supposed to look at a snake.
She said, and her lips moved stiffly as if her mouth were hurting her: “Please, Tom. Please. Don’t talk like that.”
I said: “For Christ’s sake don’t cringe at me.” I was shouting at the top of my voice and there was a hot, twisted pain in my stomach. It was airless in the cabin and there was a thick, steamy smell of wet clothes.
David said, very softly, very gently: “Now, now, Tom. Remember your manners. That’s no way to speak to a lady.”
I had almost forgotten that he was there. He had unfolded his arms and was leaning forward, his hands on his knees. The sweat glistened on the bone of his high-bridged nose and the mouth beneath it was thin and sour and smiling.
He said: “This isn’t an assignation, Tom. But you’re a clever boy, aren’t you? Clever enough to spot the lie once it is pushed under your nose. You should have believed me, you know, when I told you to keep clear of her. You should never despise other people’s experience, especially when it has been as dearly bought as mine.”
I said: “What the hell do you mean? Why is she here?”
He grinned like a fox. “You must ask her yourself, Tom. She’s not here to go to bed with me. That’s all in the past now, over and finished. And, anyway, I wouldn’t want anyone else’s leavings. She just wants a favour from me, don’t you, dear?”
He looked at Emily, still savagely smiling, his long teeth yellow in the light.
She was blazing with anger and her voice shook.
She said: “Don’t listen to him, Tom. He’s evil. A nasty little man. Will you please take me home?”
David got to his feet and stood between us. He stared at Emily, the hot blood bright in his face. He was swaying a little with the motion of the boat, his powerful shoulders and thick, lowered neck making him look suddenly menacing, like an angry bull.
His voice was suave and controlled, but with an edge to it like sharpened steel.
He said: “That’s what I am, is it? A nasty little man. A nasty, common little man. Not fit to lick your pretty, wellborn feet. You didn’t think me so despicable a few minutes ago, did you? It was ‘dear David,’ then, and how fond you’d always been of me and would I do something for you for an old friendship’s sake? Now I’m a nasty little man and you despise me. I don’t do what you want, so you don’t have to be polite any more. You can say what you think of me because there’s nothing to be gained by hiding it. You think you can get rid of me as you got rid of me before. You and your charming Geoffrey. But it isn’t so easy this time. I know too much about you. And not only the things you don’t want Tom to know.”
The lines of her face had softened. She said: “David, stop it. It doesn’t hurt me. Don’t you see it doesn’t hurt me? You’re only damaging yourself.”
There were bright tears on the ends of her lashes and she was looking at David as if they were alone together. It was the pity that finished him, that snapped the last, frayed cord of self-respect.
He was breathing quickly and noisily. He said, in a thin whisper of a voice: “You bitch. You filthy bitch.” He bent his broad back and picked up the fallen beer, bottle by the neck and cracked the base against the table edge.
I had only seen it done once before, in a drunken fight, and the splintering sound of the glass and the wicked look of the jagged bottle took me back ten years to the dirty Whitechapel pub so that what was happening now had the added terror of a familiar nightmare. I saw David’s face briefly, the unmasked hatred and the lips curled back from his teeth. He lunged at Emily’s face with the bottle. She threw herself sideways and I heard her high, astonished cry, but only as a background to fear, the anonymous scream in the night. I tackled David from behind, my arms round his shoulders. He was stronger than me, a great deal stronger. He twisted round and hit me in the pit of the stomach so that the sick pain came up into my throat. His breath was sour with garlic and I remember that I wrenched myself away from him as much to get away from the smell as for my own safety.
He came after me, head down, punching wildly, his arms flailing like windmills. I had no chance against him, against his weight and his strength, and his desperate anger.
The knowledge of my own weakness defeated me. I was helpless, like a frightened child being beaten up by the school bully. I remember that I didn’t try to hit him. All I wanted was to avoid contact with his sweating, powerful body. He punched me in the diaphragm and I went down in a corner, crouching on my knees, my arms up to protect my head.
But the expected blow did not come. I shook the hair out of my eyes and saw that he was lying by the bunk on the far side of the cabin. He was very still.
Emily said, from a great distance: “I think he slipped on the bottle.” And I saw it in front of me, rolling gently backwards and forwards on the cabin floor until there was no more impetus to move it and it was still.
I got to my feet. Everything was out of focus and swimming in mist; nothing was real except the agony of trying to breathe again.
Emily said: “Are you hurt?” She was standing near me, her eyes enormous with terror and compassion. I put my arms round her and felt that she was shaking although her voice was controlled and she did not cry. She smelt of damp tweed and it is a smell that I shall always remember with the panic of the moment and the sweet taste of blood in my mouth. I held her tightly and kissed her face and her hair.
She said, in a high, clear voice: “Tom, look at David.”
He was lying with one leg twisted sideways; it lo
oked absurdly short and thin and without bones like the leg of a ventriloquist’s doll. His arms were flung wide; the hands defenceless, the fingers uncurled. His face was purpling red, he was breathing with an unpleasant, grunting sound. I lifted, him gently and there was blood on the floor where his head had lain. His hands were limp and cold.
Emily said: “Tom, is he going to die?”
I tried to laugh at her. “Don’t be a goose. He’s just knocked himself out. He isn’t as bad as he looks.”
She said slowly: “I pushed him, Tom. And he slipped on the bottle. What are we going to do?”
I took the pillow off the bunk and pushed it under his heavy head. I thought of trying to get him on to the bunk, but my limbs felt as if they were made of rubber, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself or to ask Emily to help me.
I said: “We’d better get a doctor.” I went over to the telephone and picked up the receiver.
Emily said: “Don’t, Tom. Please.” I looked at her and she was as white as paper. “Tom, don’t you see? He’ll have to tell the police.”
I didn’t understand. I said: “What does it matter? There isn’t anything else to do.”
The operator answered and I gave her my doctor’s number. The bell rang for a long time and all the time it was ringing Emily was watching me from where she was standing by the bunk with a still, pale face. Her hair was dry now and shone like honey under the bare light.
The doctor’s wife answered the telephone. She said no, the doctor wasn’t in. Who was it, please? … Would I leave a message?
I looked at Emily’s face and at the rigid set of her mouth. I said no, it was nothing important. A personal matter. I would ring again.
I put the receiver down and Emily exhaled, a long sighing breath. The lines of her face relaxed and she moved to a chair as if a weary burden had been lifted from her shoulders. She looked at me in a stiff, scared way, and said:
“Tom, what are we going to do?”
It was a cry from the dark. I didn’t know, then, why she was so afraid although I was half-aware of the extent of her fear and now I began to feel it too. I had counted on Doctor Rogers. I had known him for years and I knew, suddenly, that I was unwilling to face the questions of a stranger, David was Nora’s brother and it was my fault that he was lying there. If he were badly hurt a stranger would be suspicious, unwilling to take responsibility. And he might be badly hurt. He might be going to die.