Repeat It Today With Tears

by Anne Peile

  ‘No, Susie, this really doesn’t seem right.’ He had come to lean over the bed and was gently reinstating the shirt around my shoulders.

  ‘Why doesn’t it seem right to you, Jack?’

  ‘Because… because, one, you were half dead yesterday, two, because it’s broad daylight out there and I have these benighted lecture notes to finish and three… three is because you only look about twelve without that stuff on your face.’

  ‘Okay.’ Meekly, I lay back upon the pillows. Jack stood beside the bed, tall and undecided like an awkward visitor. I sighed and stretched under the snuff brown cover which lay spread out like a relief map.

  ‘I suppose I could just lie down with you for a little while, that wouldn’t hurt. A sort of siesta if you will… ’

  ‘Okay,’ I said again. The end of the fever had made me thirsty. I watched him undress. He was close enough for me to lift a hand without effort and touch him, as you would a window pane, when you are idly following the course of raindrops down the glass.

  Sometimes, on the occasions without urgency, I used to look at his body and consider the thought that I had come from there, that Jack had made me. Brought forth in iniquity. But there was, to me, no deviancy in my returning, again and again, to this place where I had begun. Indeed, in my mind it was a Manichaean opposition to wrongdoing, because what I did, I did out of love. And it was a love which was all but unbearable, I couldn’t help it if I tried. And it was instinct too, I suppose. People would say different, but I know that there was nothing else I could have done. I believe that for a time I was blessed because the person that loved me so was the person always so loved by me; nothing else. In the Editor’s Notes to the school’s old brown-edged Penguin editions of Greek literature there was a section on Logic and an explanation of syllogisms. I tried to turn Jack into one.

  I loved the man that I knew was the best man in the world.

  That man loved me.

  Therefore, I must be lovable.

  Jack made me viable in two senses.

  I pushed his lips open with my tongue. My father said to me ‘Your mouth tastes of berries, it seems apt, somehow.’

  The following day he said, ‘You’re well enough for some fresh air this morning, I think. Shall we go across to the park?’

  First he washed my hair for me. There was no shower in the bathroom, he made me sit on the cork-topped stool and lean my head back. He had rolled up the sleeves of the Jean Machine shirt. ‘We must be quick, we don’t want you to get a chill.’

  But once he had started he became transfixed by the way my hair floated in the water, playing with the strands like seaweed and curling them around his fingers. He was rapt in his attention, my neck ached from leaning back but I would not have said so. Afterwards I sat by the window while he dried my hair on a rough white towel. ‘There’s so much of it, it will take forever, shall I brush it for you?’

  At the Ricci Burns salon on Kings Road they told you never to brush your hair when it was wet because it stretched it and gave you split ends but I did not want him to stop so I said nothing. I heard how his breathing changed and I watched him looking at me. He was so entranced.

  I recalled what my mother had said, about the other women, especially the one in Pont Street with the silver swizzle stick.

  ‘Did you have a lot of girlfriends, when you were young?’

  He smiled, ‘Yes… yes, I suppose I did really. More than my fair share, anyway.’

  ‘Was there ever one special one?’

  ‘No, no there wasn’t. For that I had to wait until I was old, didn’t I.’

  In Battersea Park we walked along the path beside the river. To our right the yellow painted concrete areas left over from the Festival of Britain looked now as redundant and disregarded as the derelict emplacements on beaches, erected for the defence of the south coast.

  We stopped to lean on the wall and look down on the water. The floating restaurant boat, the Sloop John B, was moored below us. On board someone was moving crockery and a radio played ‘American Pie.’ My father said that he liked the song, ‘One verse is supposed to be about Kennedy, so they say.’

  When the song had finished we walked on along the path. I had my arm through his and I held his upper arm as well, with my other hand. We had not often walked outdoors together; we learned to match the other’s pace, our footsteps in rhyme. Every so often I inclined my thigh sidewards so that it was against him in his stride. In the London air there was that sense of noise and populace that it always has on days that promise heat, when the doors and windows of buildings and cars are opened and people lie on patches of grass with radios playing. From across the park someone had started to call my name; for a moment, because being ill and being in the room in Oakley Street had been another world, I did not recognise the voice nor did I realise that it was me being called. Then briefly I was alarmed but I saw that it was Julian, walking his mother’s Dalmatian dog. Jack gently extricated his arm and retreated apart from us, appearing to be absorbed in the river view. Julian was delighted to see me.

  ‘So, Susie, you and Mr Phene man, what are you up to?’

  ‘Oh, you know… anyway, I thought you were away still.’

  ‘I was supposed to be, but my dad did something to his back on a dive so we had to come home early. Are you coming to the Potter tonight?’

  ‘I might, I’m not sure, I was ill and stuff.’ Even though I would enjoy Julian’s company, I did not intend to go. I wanted to be closed in the room in Oakley Street again.

  ‘So, are you two still together and everything?’

  We each and separately looked across at Jack. I knew how differently we were seeing him; I supposed that Julian primarily noticed his age in the bright glare of the sunlight.

  ‘Yes, we are. He’s been taking care of me while I’ve been ill. How’s Jill?’

  ‘I’m going to see her this afternoon. She has the place to herself when her parents are out at work.’

  ‘I’m pleased for you that it’s all worked out so well.’

  We parted and I watched him walk away across the grass, whistling and calling to the dog running in the distance. Suddenly he stopped and turned back, ‘Hey, Susie, how did your exams go?’

  ‘Okay,’ I nodded, willing him to go away again.

  ‘Good, mine too,’ he beamed.

  I counted the paces along the path until Jack would ask, ‘What exams, Susie?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I thought you had left school some time ago.’

  ‘I have, ages and ages ago. These were just re-sits. I didn’t say anything in case they went badly, that’s all.’

  ‘But they didn’t go badly, they went well?’

  ‘Okay, I think.’

  ‘Good, that’s good for you. I wish you’d tell me things, Susie.’

  * * * * *

  Jack had piled the windfall apples in a pottery bowl on the painting desk. Some of the unripened skins were bumpy, greenish brown and frog-like.

  ‘The sun through the window glass will sweeten them up a bit. This variety is Lord Lambourne, I think.’ Using the penknife from his pocket he cut one of them into quarters for me while he scanned the newspaper. ‘It is the universities section today. Have you decided what you are going to do?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  I thought of the envelope that had arrived and all my exam marks being A except maths and physics which had been deemed U for unmarkable.

  ‘But you must think about it. What do your family say?’

  ‘Nothing, we don’t really talk.’

  ‘You have to take opportunities.’

  Oxford was too far away from Jack.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to go away, not from here, not from you.’

  ‘But, Susie, this isn’t just a matter of here and now, it’s your future.’

  ‘I couldn’t, I don’t want to leave you… this room… ’

  ‘This room will always be here.’

  I shook my head.
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  ‘Susie, the world isn’t going to stop turning because we don’t spend every single day together.’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘Life won’t end for you, I promise.’

  He was wrong.

  ‘Susie… ’

  He thought that if he said any more that I would start to cry.

  ‘Can you cut me up another apple, please?’

  As the beginning of the school year approached I decided that I would not go back at all. Returning home for clothes one day I saw that a letter had arrived from Oxford. The mark for my scholarship paper had been excellent, it said; I was therefore awarded a place to study for the degree of Literae Humaniores. We were invited to attend an open day at the appointed college. Included was a map with travel directions for road or rail and a detailed timetable for the day, the people we would meet, the library we would visit and where we would have lunch. Although I had no intention of going I imagined what a party we should make if we did, presumably my mother would insist on Ron driving us in the learner car or the van he used for his night security work. She would be short-tempered and resentful and people would think that Ron was my father. I would feel hot with shame and appear dumb and doltish in my embarrassment. I thought that I was glad that it would not happen.

  The manageresses at The American Dream asked me to work more shifts. Mireille had returned to France to commence a degree in History and Politics. I hardly went home at all. The days with Jack took on a pattern. The one single room in Oakley Street became an abridged version of domestic life.

  Sometimes in the early morning before the traffic started my father took me for walks along the embankment, we stopped to watch the river mist rising and he showed me where, a century before, Whistler must have stood to plan the Battersea paintings. Also he told me that when his drinking had been very bad he had often found himself walking by the river in the early mornings, without memory of the night before. ‘But that was a long, long time ago,’ he said.

  On the way back from the walks we went to the old-fashioned bakers on the corner of Bywater Street to buy breakfast. There were grilles in the pavement and the bread smell rose from the basement ovens on gusts of warmth. I thought that this was how my life would be forever; it was exactly as I had always wished it to be.

  Sometimes, before Jack began work at the desk and I went to open the restaurant, we went back to bed. I could lie for ages on the cover, just kissing him, taking myself into some sort of trance, away from ordinary time. The rest of my body would ache in its suspended animation, like being made to stand still as a child while the hem of a dress is pinned, but all my concentration was focused in the intricate work of my mouth and the small, hidden darts of my tongue which might find sweet crumbs from the breakfast we had taken. At other times we gave each other little episodes and envelopes of pleasure wherever we happened to be. I know that Eunice saw us on the stairs one day and that she stepped back inside her room until we were done. I hoped that we did not make her late for work.

  In the room the fireplace had been covered over with a sheet of plywood but Jack said that he would speak to the landlord so that we could open it up again and when the weather was properly cold we could have real fires in the grate.

  ‘Have you ever done that,’ he asked me, ‘fallen asleep in a bedroom where there is a fire lit so that you can lie watching the patterns in the embers? It is quite magical, you wait and see.’

  I wish that someone could have painted a picture of the room to preserve it. Jack had begun to teach me about paintings. He showed me Dutch interiors and how the light touched on the man and wife within their home. While the man might display external concerns in the energy of his curls beneath his hat, in his ruffs and the turnover tops of his boots, the wife was stilled in impassive content, her face as smooth and moony and luminous as the oval of an honesty pod.

  If not painted, I wish even that our room could have been sealed up completely, around the door frame and everything, like a tomb when we were gone. Then nothing would have been lost; every speck of the dust which was precious to me, the way the morning sun had bleached the wood of the painting desk, the multiple baby plantlets which trembled on the bracts of the parent spider plant.

  At least I do not forget; when I close my eyes I find my way around that room as if I had lived there until I was old and blind. There is a nail in the kitchen drawer where I always caught my finger and a bump in the wall plaster by the bed. I used to feel for the bump in the small of my back when I held Jack in my arms and watched him sleeping. I was a devoted watcher, with the same depth of absorption as a mother when she watches her child sleeping, holding her own breath and absolutely still, the better to hear the drawing in of breath by the beloved one.

  You could say that my father died because of the Family Allowance. Tragedy should be kept separate from the mundane. If human beings must be eviscerated by grief and loss then they should not be made to have ordinary lives as well. A photograph I cannot bear to look at is that one of the piled-up shoes.

  On the third Tuesday of September my mother received an official letter stating that as I was no longer in fulltime education she was no longer entitled to claim the allowance for me. I imagine that on receipt of this letter she was very angry. She would have cared most about the accusation of a false claim against her as she sat behind the post office counter, stamping books and disbursing benefits and refusing monies to those who had not signed or dated the correct portions of a form.

  My mother contacted Clapham County School. There she was already held in low esteem due to the comportment of Lin and because we had made no response to the letter from Oxford.

  My mother would have taken the offensive, maintaining, ‘She’s been coming into school every day, even if she does travel in sometimes with that James girl.’

  But from the school secretary came the reply, ‘She has not attended since the end of her O-levels. Nor did she come to collect her certificates at Prize Day. We were quite surprised at that, considering she had done so well. I must add that the Head is extremely disappointed to learn that you have not yet replied to Oxford.’

  ‘There must be a mistake.’

  ‘I can assure you that there is no mistake. By the way, if by the James girl you mean Alison, who used to be in Susanna’s form, she left us many months ago. The family moved out of London.’

  My mother did not challenge me immediately, she waited. She discussed it with Lin and with Ron. Subsequently, when she had discovered where I spent my days and my nights, she sought advice from Lin’s boyfriend who had contacts in the police. At that time the connection and cooperation between established villainy and the Metropolitan Police was very close.

  One afternoon I was helping Eunice to re-hang the curtains in her room. Jack had gone to deliver some drawings to a publisher. Eunice had been telling me about her childhood in Leicestershire and her father who had been a railwayman and champion at the pub card game of euchre. Standing on a chair to reach the curtain rail, I looked down at Oakley Street far below and I thought that I saw Ron’s car from the driving school. Then I reminded myself that the British School of Motoring had many cars that looked the same, with signs screwed to the roof and identical livery.

  I left Eunice to prepare for her evening at the pub on Cheyne Walk. I had begun to feel ill again. I wondered if it might be the weather, unnaturally hot still for the autumn. The city seemed to be radiating back the stale heat trapped all summer, there was a sickly heaviness to it. I decided that I would go home to fetch clothes and return to Jack in the cool of the evening. I did not have a door key and so I telephoned home to see whether anyone was there. I felt better when I saw Julian in Kings Road.

  ‘I don’t have to wear uniform, now I’m in the sixth form,’ he explained; the boys were allowed tweedy sports jackets and grey trousers instead. ‘I’m going for University of East Anglia, I think, they’re really good for English, apparently. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t kn
ow, I haven’t been back.’

  ‘What, not at all… why the fuck not, Suse, you’re so much cleverer than me, you’ll be Oxford or Cambridge for sure.’

  ‘I don’t know really, things happened.’

  ‘Are you pregnant?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Look, I have to go, my dad’s picking me up, but meet me in the Picasso on Friday afternoon, and then we can talk properly and stuff.’

  I watched him walk away towards Chelsea Town Hall. The funny haircut feathers bobbed at the crown of his head, emphasising his liveliness and his general open and good-natured outlook upon the world. I never saw Julian again.

  When I arrived at the flat my mother came into the hallway and pushed past me to the door I was about to close, slamming it shut. I had seldom seen her so galvanised by energy and emotion. At first I thought it was a joke, it was faintly ridiculous. Then she screamed into my face, ‘You dirty, twisted little bitch. How could you? How could you do it, with him? With your own father? Who do you think you are, Lolita?’

  With one hand she pushed me in the small of the back towards the living room. They had all arranged themselves there; they had been waiting for me since I telephoned. I could tell by the disposition of the tea cups and the ashtrays. Lin was sitting in the armchair with one leg tucked up beneath her. She was not animated except when she leant forward to flick the ash from her cigarette. Ron was standing up, hitching at the belt on his trousers.

  ‘You’re sick,’ my mother’s voice was quieter now, but with more timbre to it, ‘you’ll be put away.’

  Ron said, ‘It’s him that should be put away.’

  ‘He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that I am his daughter.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, of course he knows, he’s your father.’

  ‘He doesn’t know. I lied, about everything.’

  Lin made a noise by clicking her tongue and teeth and then smiled in a sneer, which was ugly, ‘You can say that again.’

  My mother said, ‘You’ve got a damn sight more than lying to worry about, my girl. Now get out of the way, go and shut yourself in your room so that none of us has to look at you, you dirty little bitch.’