No Greater Love - Box Set

by Prowse, Amanda

  Dot took a deep breath and looked skyward; one last silent wish for a different solution. As she lowered her eyes, they fell upon a shadowy figure standing to the left of the cedar tree at the side of the church. Her heart lurched in her chest. The figure side-stepped behind the wide trunk, moving quickly, not wanting to be seen – but not quickly enough to hide the familiar hairdo and favourite jacket of her friend Barb.

  I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.

  Reg and his daughter marched a little too quickly down the aisle. The pews were empty on the bride’s side, bar her mum, Dee and Mrs Harrison, who was perched on one of the back pews, not exactly invited, but no one was going to turf her out. Dot noticed that she had removed her curlers for the occasion, the nosy cow.

  Wally stood in front of the altar in his black drainpipe trouser suit; she hadn’t noticed how tall he was before. Dot felt sick. Wally turned to face her as Reg delivered his daughter; she felt like a parcel, wrapped in off-white satin. He smiled, not with love or longing, not the way that Sol had smiled at her so many times; this was more of a nervous smirk, like when an awkward teenager is given a compliment. He took her hand and placed it on his crooked arm.

  ‘You look really lovely.’

  She was sure he meant it, but rather than encourage or recip­ro­cate, she closed her eyes for a second as if to say, ‘Leave it out.’

  As they exchanged vows, Dot stared at his mouth, studied his profile, noticed he had long eyelashes; she’d never looked at him for this length of time, this close up. She watched his mouth as it turned towards the vicar, moved up and down, uttered the words that completed the transaction and sealed her fate. It didn’t feel real, any of it; it felt like a horrible dream.

  ‘I now pronounce you man and wife!’

  Dot closed her eyes and fought the urge to scream. Strangely, she wasn’t filled with panic, but something closer to numbness, as if a slow burn of indifference had been lit in her veins that would smoulder away for the foreseeable future, filling every gap inside her until the fight finally left her.

  Wally and Dot, the new Mr and Mrs Day, led Wally’s par­ents, sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbours and mates from the sheet metal in a laughing, smoking procession along the street to 38 Ropemakers Fields. They poured into the house, filling every corner with their back-slapping, fag-toting banter. They were a family of strangers who dived into her mum’s buffet, stuffing sandwiches and sausage rolls into their gobs, digging into trifles and popping cubed cheese into greedy mouths. She felt sick, again. It was as if she was invisible, and when one of the Crimplene-clad fatties hugged her to their cigarette-scented bosom and welcomed her to the family, it shocked her as though it must be a case of mistaken identity.

  Her dad put the record player on and some of the aunts shimmied a little where they stood, with paper plates held aloft to a Motown track. Dot looked at Wally as he drank pale ale from the bottle and sat on the arm of her dad’s chair. One of the aunts caught her staring, ‘Oh bless her, that’s a look of love alright, you love him don’t you girl?’ Dot was unable to reply, she knew the answer was no, not tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that…

  Joan smiled at her from the other side of the room. Unusually, Dot stared back. What was her mum saying, with her covert smiles and wave? I’m proud of you; it’s done, look forward, not back.

  Someone put a slow waltz on and Dot felt the tears pooling in her eyes; she missed her lover, oh God! She couldn’t cry here, not in front of all these strangers. Wally, engaged in conversation with some of his mates, kept glancing nervously in her direction; she wished he wouldn’t, didn’t want to feel responsible for his misplaced concern. She ventured outside and looked around her at the back fence, she wondered if the Rusalovas saw any of the goings-on in their back garden or wondered about the family that lived a few shelter panels away and yet they had never really spoken to. She would have liked to have seen the garden that yielded the occasional rose, a thing of beauty that accidentally bloomed in this barren shit hole of a back yard, remembering how she’d been too embarrassed to tell Sol the truth about their excuse for a garden.

  ‘Here she is!’

  One of the guests was clearly delighted that she had been located.

  ‘We want to get a photo, Dot.’

  Her stomach flipped. Oh, please, not a photo!

  Wally sauntered over and removed the fag from his lip, tossing it into the flower bed that on occasion produced a chrysanth­emum. He put his arm around his wife’s waist and pulled her towards him. Dot drew breath sharply and was about to push him away when two things registered: firstly, everyone was watch­ing, she was trapped; and secondly, he was entitled, she was his wife. His wife.

  Dot tried to find a smile, but it was difficult. Just as the photographer was about to click the button, capturing them forever, Dee popped up beside them. It was the first time Dot had properly looked at her little sister since they’d left the house. Only now did she notice the inch-high blocks of bright-blue eye shadow that Dee had caked under her eyebrows and all over her eyelids, and the circles of black eyeliner she’d drawn around the blue. Dot beamed at her lovely little sister, who looked part clown, part panda. She smiled and at that precise moment the shutter clicked, capturing forever the grin­ning Wally and his laughing bride. She looked beautiful and happy and for that split second she was.

  The crates of beer were soon drained and the men loosened or removed their ties, rolled up their sleeves and with braces hung down onto suit trousers, threw their arms around the next fellow’s shoulders and started the singing. Her dad was in the thick of it, pissed and happy.

  A couple of the aunties who were sozzled on sherry slept open-mouthed in the back room, their heads lolling against the lace antimacassars on the settee. Mrs Harrison hovered, sniffing around the depleted buffet and having a good look at the decor while she had the chance. Joan ran back and forth from kitchen to table, capturing her guests’ compliments as if they were butter­flies, ready to pin and dissect them at a later date. She replenished empty plates with slices of pork pie and tipped crisps and Twiglets into Tupperware bowls.

  Dot sloped off to her room – her old room, as it was now – stepping over her niece by marriage, who was snogging her latest spotty beau on the stairs. She changed into her grey pleated mini-skirt and polo neck, placed her wedding dress on a hanger and hung it on the wardrobe door, running her fingers over the silky skirt. What a waste of bloody money.

  There was a rap on the door and it opened straight away. She expected to see the flushed face of her mum, but it wasn’t Joan.

  ‘Hiding up here, are you?’ Wally put his hands in his pockets and straightened his shoulders, trying for masterful, but achiev­ing awkward.

  Dot drew breath to tell him to get out, when again a wave of realisation hit her that she couldn’t – she was his. She plop­ped down on the single bed as the strength left her legs. She felt uncomfortable and nervous, she’d never had a bloke in her bedroom before and she didn’t like it.

  ‘Reckon we’ll push off in a minute, if that’s okay.’ There was a quiver to his voice.

  She nodded into her lap.

  These were the first words they had properly exchanged as man and wife. They were strangers.

  Dot carried her suitcase into the hallway and spied Dee sat on her bed, kicking her legs and chatting to her stuffed bunny. ‘Don’t cry, bunny, you silly sod, course you’re gonna see her again! She’s only going to Walthambloodystow.’

  Dot knocked on the door frame. ‘Y’all right, tin ribs?’

  ‘Yep.’ Dee looked up, her face smudged with blue eye shadow and the remnants of strawberry jam around her mouth.

  ‘Now, I’ve told Mum that you should come and stay with me. How you fixed next week?’

  Dee visibly brightened. ‘All right, I think!’

  ‘Great, that’s settled then. We’ll get fish and chips and you can help me get settled.’

  ‘F’ya like.’ Dee beamed.
<
br />   ‘I do like. Keep learning them tables, Dee, you’re gonna need them if you want to be an air hostess.’

  ‘D’you think I’ll be a good air hostess?’

  Dot dropped to her knees in front of her little sister. ‘I think, Diane Simpson, that you can be anything you want to be and that you can go anywhere you want to and whatever you choose, you’ll be bloody brilliant at it!’ She kissed her firmly on the cheek and stepped out of the room.

  The guests at 38 Ropemakers Fields crammed into the hall­way and spilled out onto the pavement. Holding fags and bottles in the same hand, the strangers waved and hooted as Dot placed her suitcase in the boot of Wally’s cousin’s car. Her dad was waving with his eyes half closed, so pissed he could barely keep them open.

  Joan stepped forward. ‘Bye then, Dot.’ She leant over and kissed her daughter on the cheek. ‘Well, that’s it then, me first­born off me hands!’ She tried out the joke.

  Dot bent her mouth towards her mother’s ear. ‘Consider yourself lucky, Mum, that you had me under your roof for nineteen years. I only had my firstborn for fourteen days.’

  Joan pushed her hand against her mouth as her eyes clouded with tears. She threw her arms around her daughter’s neck, holding her tight. Her body shook as her tears fell. ‘I did it for you, love, and I did it for your future. You wouldn’t have had a life! And I loved you too much to watch that happen.’

  ‘He was so beautiful, Mum.’

  ‘Did he… did he look like you?’ she stuttered through her tears.

  ‘No.’ Dot shook her head. ‘He looked just like his dad.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Simon. His name’s Simon.’

  ‘Simon.’ Joan repeated.

  Dot stared at her mum before climbing into the back seat of the Austin Cambridge, her boots squeaking against the grey vinyl upholstery. Wally hung out of the open window, his fag resting on his lip, waving and enjoying the salacious nudges and winks from his mates. Dot pretended to search for some­thing in her handbag; she couldn’t bear to look at the posturing pack of strangers, to watch her childhood home getting smaller and smaller or see the stricken expression of her mum in the rear-view mirror.

  The drive from Limehouse to Walthamstow was not a long one, half an hour at most, but for Dot it might as well have been another continent. Her mum and dad’s house had been a refuge of sorts and the cul de sacs of this East End corner were all she knew, having lived there her whole life. She could walk the streets with confidence, knowing every lane and house en route. Every time she ventured from the house she would raise her palm at several neighbours, people she’d grown up alongside, whose children she’d been to school with or who knew her mum. The corner shops, pubs and bakeries were guaran­teed to hold a familiar face: Limehouse was her family. It felt inconceivable to her and more than a little bit frightening that this had come to an end. Tomorrow she would wake in a different neighbourhood, where she didn’t know the bus routes, or where to pick up a loaf, or who lived to either side of her.

  It was late afternoon by the time Wally’s cousin dropped them off, beeping the horn in a rhythmic tune as he left. The two had ignored her as they drove, talking about West Ham – the Irons’ chances in the league, was Fenton still up to the job, and the various skills of Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters. She had felt excluded, awkward. How had she come to be in a strange car with these two people, heading God knows where on her wedding day? Her wedding day… It was still surreal.

  She had kept her eyes fixed on the passing shops and lock-up garages as the two discussed her.

  ‘Blimey, Wall, she’s quiet. You know what they say about the quiet ones…’

  Dot felt her cheeks flush, but made out she hadn’t heard.

  The cousin wasn’t done. ‘Maybe once she starts she won’t stop, rabbit rabbit, nag nag…’ He lifted his left hand from the steering wheel and snapped his fingers against his thumb like a crocodile; this was supposed to represent Dot’s gob apparently. ‘And you’ll look back on this moment and wish that she’d shut her cakehole!’

  Wally laughed. ‘I don’t know, I think I’d like to hear her chatting. Her mum and dad chat all the time, don’t they, Dot?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘You got the keys, mate?’

  Wally fished in his inside pocket and pulled out a key ring with a miniature pint of beer on it, complete with plastic foaming head. Attached to this was a shiny silver Yale key.

  Dot had taken little interest in the planning for her nuptials and even less in the council place that Wally had acquired for them to live in. It hadn’t seemed in the slightest bit important, until now. Dot had believed up until the moment that she stood at the altar that something would occur to stop the wedding and therefore prevent her moving to a place she had never been to before. It had to; surely no force on earth would want to see her hitched to a stranger that she disliked.

  Please, please let me have a garden. Dot hoped that she would have a bit of outside space; it didn’t have to be acres, but a small patch, a square, anywhere that she could grow veg and cultivate a bit of grass, somewhere to escape to, breathe, be alone.

  ‘I’d love a nice garden, y’know. I’d like to grow flowers and all me own veg.’

  ‘Oh, be careful, once you get the gardening bug it can take you over!’

  ‘I think I’d like to cook what I’d grown. I could do fruit and make jams and crumble; be lovely that, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been much of a cook, it’s kind of me mum’s thing, but I reckon I’d love cooking for you. I’d experiment and you’d have to eat all my disasters!’

  Wally bent to pick up the suitcase. Dot beat him to it and gripped the handle; she wanted to show him that she didn’t want or need his assistance. She followed her husband across the tarmac car park in which they had been deposited. Wally shoved his hands in his pockets and looked a little sheepish. Almost as if he didn’t know how to act, as if he hadn’t thought much past this point either. He had been quite cocky all day – the big man, the groom – but right now, without the audience and with his quiet bride trailing in his wake, he didn’t know what to do or say. It was excruciating.

  Dot looked around at the pale concrete buildings that sur­rounded her. Each block of flats was five stories high and was joined to its neighbouring block by sky-high walkways. The buildings formed a square of sorts. Each was identical, each balcony or walkway faced the other, the only difference being that one block had front doors painted red, another green, another blue. Dot and Wally’s block had yellow doors.

  Dot walked timidly behind Wally, trying not to look over the third-floor balcony to the patch of tarmac below, in which she could see large communal bins and a couple of vans. There would be no garden here for her. She thought about Rope­makers Fields with its squashed-together terraces and cobbled streets with wide pavements and tall sycamore trees planted every twenty feet. Tonight it felt like a different world. Here, every­thing was square and cold to the touch: concrete, moulded and formed into slabs. The windows had no familiar sashes or stained glass, but instead were large single panes that looked functional, but not homely.

  Dot could not imagine living in one of these boxes, so close to other families in other boxes, some above, some below and some on each side. She couldn’t imagine opening a front door and not finding herself on the street but instead on a walkway high up in the air, like a bloody pigeon. She couldn’t envisage opening a back door and not stepping into the back garden to check on the progress of the determined chrys­anthe­mums. She was breathing the cool night air but felt inexplicably claustro­phobic. Placing two fingers inside her polo neck, she pulled the woolly fabric away from her skin, as though she was struggling to take a breath.

  ‘Here we go.’ Wally stopped at a yellow door that looked exactly like all the others and put the key with its little swinging beer glass in the lock.

  Dot wondered what that expression meant. Here we go, home at last; or here we go, the first step into a concrete
prison that will trap us until we wake one day and realise we are already old – a slow death.

  Wally glanced at her face, but could make out little in the failing light. He disappeared inside and flicked the bare bulb into life in the square hallway. Dot hovered on the walkway, wondering how far she could get if she ran – not very far, she figured, not without a penny and only a change of undies and very little else in her crappy little suitcase. She considered the tradition of carrying the bride over the threshold and was grate­ful that her new husband had not attempted it.

  She stepped inside, holding her case with both hands against her chest. She could see the small galley kitchen straight ahead and spied a frying pan full of bacon fat sat on a two-ring burner on the worktop. Wally had obviously managed to master the art of bacon cooking in the week that he’d had the keys, but not washing up. He came from a side room.

  ‘This is the front room.’ He stood aside to let her pass.

  It was a square room, with an electric fire and nothing else; no curtains, no furniture and not so much as a lampshade.

  ‘All it needs is a woman’s touch, but you can get it done up, eh? Get all the bits and bobs you want to make it home.’ He tried out a small smile before striding out. Dot followed him. He stood in the hallway and pointed to three identical doors. ‘Bedroom, box room…’ The third door at the back of the hall was open. ‘And our bedroom.’

  Dot swallowed the bile that rose in her throat; the way he’d said ‘our bedroom’ made it quite clear that they would be sleep­ing in it together. Of course they would, they were a married couple. That room was not empty; its windows also had no curtains, but there was a mattress on the floor with a candlewick bedspread on it, almost identical to the one she had slept under for most of her life. This fact did not give her any comfort; in fact, it just made her feel more homesick, more isolated and more desperate. It was as if she was lost – where was she? And how could she be homesick for a home that no longer existed except as a fantasy.

  Dot was speechless: how could she spend even one night in this environment with this man? She looked at the bare concrete floor, which was peppered with splats of the white paint that had been used on the ceiling. They reminded her of tears.