Repeat It Today With Tears

by Anne Peile

  ‘Yes, you can, just take it easy.’

  ‘No, I can’t, I can’t breathe properly.’

  ‘I tell you what, we’ll go out and get some fresh air. Come on, I’ll help you to dress.’

  Down in the street the cat materialised out of the shadows of the basement railings. Jack pushed him gently inside the hall. ‘Don’t you go waking Eunice now,’ he said.

  In the night some of the colours of the spectrum were missing from the street scene. Jack held my hand and we walked towards Albert Bridge. Oakley Street was quiet and empty; only one taxi passed us, its hire sign turned off. At the building site where they had demolished the Pier Hotel the watchman’s lamps glowed red. The bridge was empty and still, a film of dew on its black road surface. For months it had been closed to all traffic for repairs. We passed the wooden notice board that warned troops to break step. We stopped halfway across. Jack leant with his back against the parapet and enclosed me within his arms, now and then lifting strands of my hair so that the cool river night touched my face. ‘So, are you steadier now?’

  I nodded and leant forward upon his chest.

  ‘Sometimes, with all the things we do, I forget… how very young you still are… my fault, stupid of me.’

  I stood and looked from the bridge, up towards the City and across to darkened Cheyne Walk. Along the deserted embankment ran the impish silhouette of a man; perhaps he was a thief. On the other side the park was locked in by gates, beneath our feet the Thames’ unhurried tide. The moon was two-thirds full and there were some stars and an aeroplane crossing. I was comforted that what I could see from within my father’s arms was the whole world.

  Later, sensing that he must be chilled and weary, I reached up for his face and kissed him. The skin of his cheek and his lips was cold and dry. To warm his hands I took them inside the clothes which he had only recently helped me to fasten. He said to me, ‘It will be all right, you know. I won’t let anything bad happen, little one, I promise.’

  ‘We could go back to the room now, if you like.’

  ‘Yes, let’s do that. And do you know what, I have some very questionable Spanish brandy in the cupboard under the sink. I shall put some in hot milk with brown sugar and I shall insist upon you drinking it all up. You will sleep like a top, best beloved.’

  On the evening of the day that I sat my last O-level I found my father very drunk. Someone had left the street door open to the warm air. Haddock the cat lolled over the step and batted his tail warningly as I stepped carefully across him.

  In the room Jack was semi-prone in the armchair. ‘Oh hallo, sweetness, I was going to put on some music but I couldn’t find the bloody thing… ’

  One hand hung over the chair arm, wearing a record sleeve like a huge glove. I went to sit on the bed, waiting to see what would happen next.

  ‘God,’ he said, ‘God, I so badly want to come over there and jump on you but I don’t think my dick would work.’

  I observed that his hair was dishevelled, sticking out in tufts at the back of his head. Also, intoxication seemed to have softened the lines of his gaunt face; this was oddly in accord with his next remark: ‘Drink is a great thing. Drink is a great thing because it blurs the sharp edges… ’

  He closed his eyes briefly and his face looked quite young and defenceless, as his parents must once have seen it. I inspected my bare legs to see how much the sun had caught them. I had tried to acquire a tan in the Clapham County garden while revising for my exam. It had been Greek Literature in Translation, Herodotus and The Odyssey. I turned my calves, Jack opened his eyes.

  ‘Do you know why I’m so pissed, actually?’

  ‘Because you’ve had a lot to drink.’

  ‘Hah! Miss Answer-me-back, clever… but no, no actually, it’s because I saw my wife today. Before, or after she went to Bentall’s which is, as we all know, Kingston’s most finest department store…’

  Beside him on the painting desk was an opened bottle of red wine; the label read Sans Chi Chi. He poured some into a glass already half full.

  ‘Mind your sketches,’ I warned him.

  ‘No, no, you’re all right, we’re all right, there, that’s it.’

  He drank some then held it out towards me, ‘Share this one, sweetness, don’t mind, do you… I can’t find another glass. What’s yours is mine, mine is yours, all yours, for ever and ever… ’

  There was a thrill through me at this phrase, albeit so slurred.

  ‘She said something that made me think, made me drink.’ He laughed miserably at the word play.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was the do… end of term staff party thing, we’re all there, standing round bitching and sniping and passing this filthy stuff… sans souci… sans chi chi… I don’t bloody know. Then the Pat Pell woman starts on about someone’s doing this with somebody… who’s having affairs with who else’s spouse… then they all chip in… this that… at it like knives. Then Olive, my wife, do you know what she says… ?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘She says, oh well, Jack and I, we don’t worry about that sort of thing anymore, do we, Jack. We’ve done with all that between the sheets lark… ha ha bloody ha. Rather read a good book nowadays. Too old, she says, past it… she says that I am past it… no one’s going to want me, she says… ’ He looked towards me to focus on my reaction but one of his eyes was semi-closed. ‘Christ, I think I’ll start smoking again.’

  ‘No, don’t do that.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right then, I won’t. But it’s a fact, according to bloody Olive, no woman could ever possibly find me attractive any more… ever again. And yet here, here I am, in this room, old and worn out as I may be, and, but I’m with you… you, you who are the most beautiful girl in the world bar none and I am king of the world, king of the bloody world when I bury myself inside you… but you… you won’t want me… won’t want me, not at all, not on your bloody life… ’ There was the flicker of an expression across his face which might have prefaced tears or laughing of the uneasy, self contempt kind.

  I decided it was the time to do the thing that Julian and I had discussed weeks before. I thought that if I really found it distasteful I could, until it was over, think about the essay I had written in that morning’s exam.

  I got up and went across to Jack’s chair. I took the wine glass from him and set it out of harm’s way. Then I dropped to my knees in front of him.

  ‘What… ’ he began.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. I watched my fingers at their task. I drew down the heavy brass zip on his cord trousers. I felt for the opening in his underwear. I hesitated for a moment and thought of how that morning I had written that for all the terrible things he does, Homer still manages to make us feel pity for Polyphemus. Then I bowed my head and hid my face and my father wound strands of my hair around his hands like ropes.

  When it was over he said, ‘Let us lie down together. I want you beside me. I want to hold you.’

  I helped him across the little stretch of lino to the bed, his legs were still unsteady. I was holding his arm as if he were old and infirm and I was guiding him across a hospital ward. We lay side by side on the narrow bed and the sounds of people out in the summer evening floated up through the open window. Jack said that I was a miracle and that he had never done anything to deserve me. He dozed and I watched him with such love that through my skin I absorbed the presence of him – his smell and the sound of his breathing and his warmth and the air that he breathed out – like green wood does. Later on he opened his eyes and said, ‘Come away with me. Let’s go away, you and I, let’s run away and live in France.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You would too, wouldn’t you, just like that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My dear, sweet, girl, it’s all so very simple to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said a second time, for it was. Even now, at the distance of all those years,
it appears just so. All absolutes are simple.

  On an evening in August I knew that I was going to be ill again. Jack had gone away early.

  ‘There’s a gallery thing, part of the festival. I have an exhibition so I have to talk to people and be nice. I can’t get out of it… you know I would if I could. I’ll leave as soon as I decently can… ’

  The Chelsea Potter had tables out on the pavement in Radnor Walk. The ground was stained with the stickiness of spilt drinks. Julian was anticipating without enthusiasm the water sports holiday for which he would depart next morning. He now had a girlfriend in Putney; they had had sex on the night that they met. Although only a fortnight had passed, Julian was already blasé, or at least he pretended to be so. He had met Jill, the Putney girl, on a bus returning from Knightsbridge. Having finally summoned courage to approach the Estée Lauder counter in Harvey Nichols, he was told that the object of his desire no longer worked there. She had successfully applied for the coveted company post in Nassau.

  ‘It was a real downer, but then I just got on this bus and met Jill.’

  I wanted to make him talk and laugh and be amusing to take my mind off the horrible feeling beginning in my throat. The same feverishness that hurried on the infection also hastened my anxieties, which tripped and stumbled one over another. If I became ill with tonsillitis I would have to stay at home, in bed. I would not be able to see my father. I would not be able to tell him why or to telephone from the flat. He would think I had gone and was not coming back or he might seek me out among the quiet lobbies of Prince of Wales Drive. If he did think that I had gone he would believe that I had left him for good, as he had once told me that I would. He would think that the time had come for me to take up that permission that he had tried so carefully and so fairly to offer me when we began. He would believe what Olive had told him about no longer being desirable; he would be convinced that she must be right because once he had relied upon her so much and I would not be there to show him otherwise and prove her wrong. He would start drinking again and he would not be able to work. I must not let it happen. I tried to sound very bright, with Julian. ‘So, what is it like then, is it how you thought it would be?’

  ‘Yeah, it was really quick, at first, but not as bad as it might have been. Jill has done it before, so she knows stuff.’

  ‘Do you want another drink?’ I determined to see if I could block the pain away with neat vodka and ice.

  ‘Okay, just a quick one. I haven’t packed yet and my dad will start getting twitchy.’ Inside there were few people. Seated at the bar the drummer was playing at spoof with Barry the painter. On the stretcher of his stool his feet were bare and very dirty. ‘So, are you still seeing Mr Phene?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t he, I don’t know, much older, don’t you want to go with other people sometimes? Like boys of our age for instance.’

  ‘No. I don’t want anyone else. I’m going to stay with him, always.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you say that now.’

  ‘I mean it. I will never, ever leave him.’

  My emphasis must have been fierce, Julian looked taken aback. ‘Okay, okay, I was only saying, but anyway, isn’t he married?’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t matter, she doesn’t live in London.’

  We took our drinks back to a pavement table and sat for a while longer in desultory silence. Julian picked at the sole of his shoe. On the opposite pavement a couple started to have an argument. The man’s hips were very narrow and his permed hair curled halfway down his back.

  ‘You’re just a slag, Vanessa, d’you know that,’ he was leaning forward from his sapling waist to berate her.

  The girl was holding on to the pole of the Belisha beacon; they were both kohl-eyed and seemed to be drugged. On other occasions Julian and I would have enjoyed watching such a scene, even making a wager on which protagonist would come off best. We had still that unfeeling adolescent myopia which generally allowed us to see only the pantomime amusement of such incidents, without any comprehension of the ramifications of people’s misfortunes or discomforts. That evening, however, the public row seemed only discordant and uncomfortable. Soon afterwards Julian and I parted on the corner of Flood Street. I knew that we had each found the other to be dull and a disappointment. If I had not been so preoccupied by the fear of being ill this failure in our companionship would have made me sadder and sorrier than it did; I would have felt the burden of responsibility for putting it right.

  Next morning I was waiting on the doctor’s doorstep for his wife to unlock the door. He gave me penicillin and he looked me up and down as though to indicate that he could say more. I must have been a strange and dishevelled sight. I wore the clothes of the day before because I had felt too ill to undress. I had not removed my make-up and probably I smelled of stale sex. With enormous difficulty I swallowed two of the penicillin tablets as I walked through the sunny morning streets. The milk float was finishing its round and a woman cleaning windows called out some cheerful comment to its driver. I was glad to find that the flat was empty. I told myself that if I lay down and concentrated single mindedly I could force the infection to go away. My throat had swollen too tight to swallow.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ Lin had said when I had to let saliva drool onto the pillow. I did not want that to happen in Jack’s bed.

  I woke up to noises from the kitchen and my mother looked in at me. ‘Oh, you’re in, are you? What are you doing in bed at this time of day?’

  ‘I’ve got the tonsil thing again. I’ll be fine though, I’ve got some stuff from the doctor.’

  Two tears came from the pain of the effort of speaking the sentences. She said, ‘If it’s not one bloody thing it’s another. Do you want tea?’

  I could only shake my head. I heard her go back into the kitchen, banging the kettle on the gas ring, not especially in anger, but because she always performed tasks like that with force.

  At some time during the night I woke again. People in a neighbouring house were having a party and it had spilled out into the back garden. I looked down at the light falling on women in long flowered dresses. A curly haired man was passing among them with glasses and the music of a classical guitar was playing beneath the chatter. I got up for water to take more penicillin. I did not know whether the sour taste was my own mouth or the London tap water which had been lying, warmish, in the old lead pipes. I tested how I felt, reviewing my body part by part. I thought that the tonsillitis infection was abating but I sensed that there was something else wrong. The penicillin was supposed to be two stat and then one four times per day but I calculated that I must have missed some doses by sleeping through and so I took two more tablets.

  When I woke again I could smell that my mother was cooking a Sunday roast. The air was full of the odour of lard which she heated to smoking point to roast the potatoes. I felt very strange. When I lifted my head from the pillow there seemed to be another head inside it, moving separately from the outer case.

  I told myself that a bath would help. I undressed and as I did so I gasped to see that my body was covered with livid scarlet blotches. The shape and distribution was like the patterning on a giraffe’s skin or dappled sunlight beneath a summer tree. Instinctively I pulled a towel around me to hide it although there was no one there to see. I knew that there must be something seriously wrong. Momentarily I was afraid enough to consider calling out and seeking the help of my mother or Lin. Then, holding on to the cold rim of the bath, I realised that if I admitted that there was a problem while I was in the flat it could preclude any contact with my father. I was appalled to think how close I had been to giving in to fear and thus to separation from him. I despised myself for such weakness. Slowly and deliberately I washed and dressed. My hands shook so much that I had to support my elbow with the other arm in order to apply makeup.

  In the living room there was the malty smell from beer bottles and chatter on the radio. It almost seemed then that it could be a comfortabl
e and homely world and for a moment I wished that I was not an outsider.

  ‘Are you in for dinner? Here, beat this.’ My mother put a basin of yellow Yorkshire pudding batter and a spoon in my hands. I leant against a chair back for support.

  ‘No, thank you. I’ll see if they need me at work, then I might go down to Alison’s.’

  The big tablespoon was stamped with the name Hotel Somerset. During the war my grandmother had bought goods from the sales held to dispose of the equipment from bombed-out hotels.

  ‘Quicker than that, for God’s sake don’t slop it. Oh, give it here.’

  ‘Bye then.’ Again I wavered, tempted to seek help, I feared that I might fall over in the street.

  ‘Yes, off you go then… it’s all bloody lumpy now… ’

  I turned away and left my mother frowning as she began to fiercely beat at her batter. Out in the sunlight white bubble and bar shapes floated over my vision. I decided that I would cross the Common for the bus, to be seen by fewer people. I walked over the hummocky stretch of grass where groves of hawthorn grew. On one slope a teenage couple were lying wrapped together, my balance was disturbed and I veered far too close to where they lay; they looked up in annoyance as I passed and their eyes were like currants in faces of dough. At the centre of the Common the bandstand rose as for a shipwrecked swimmer, with the distance between never diminishing. At last I reached Cedars Road and I leant against the concrete bus stop for support, pretending to be lounging in Sunday idleness. When the bus came I sensed the conductress staring at me and I was afraid that she would make me get off. I sat looking resolutely forward on the top deck, fixing on the brick chimneys of the power station. When the bus stopped on the bridge I looked down and noticed a patch of flotsam in the water, bits of wood and plastic and gull feathers; the current, in chevrons, worried at the edges.

  From Sloane Square I walked behind Kings Road, seeking out the privacy of the small rich streets that I had learned so well in the spring. I wished that Julian was not away and that I could find him in the Chelsea Potter to help me. I knew that despite us being out of sorts last night he would seem young and flippant and that he could stop me feeling as if I was slipping away, like the mucky white feathers on the flotsam island.