The other women watched with no role in it, Moira resigned and Jan looking for a way in. I saw her think of her jelly, and jump up from the table.
She had agreed to do the pudding last week and brought it with her in a large rectangular Tupperware.
‘No peeking, and not a word from you, Ian,’ she had said, when they arrived. Stowed it in the fridge after lowering a shelf.
‘Or shall I show you? No. Why not leave it as a surprise.’
Now she crept into the room, her wrists straining, and stood back from the table waiting to be noticed.
A loaf of gelatine in tiers of red, green and yellow. Fruits – strawberries, grapes and pineapple – suspended in their relevant stripe. The wobble and bounce of a Carry On film that made me honk and earned a look from Chris. Everyone oohed as she lay it down, and cut thick wedges off a tinfoil-covered board with a cake slice she had brought from home. She poured a dribble of cream on each and we passed them round.
At first there seemed no taste to it, just texture, smooth and evasive, dodging my teeth. Then a sweetness and astringency that filled my mouth with saliva. We looked at each other and exclaimed.
Later we left the dining room, us women clustered in the kitchen, smoking and exchanging intimacies. Jan stood by the window, drying the glasses with a fresh tea towel, breathing on their outsides and rubbing again. Music started from the lounge and the men called for us to come through. The others went in, skittish, but I crept upstairs, pretending I’d heard a cry.
I sat with her, the pump of her chest under my hand, listening for the odd bubble of sound from below that broke in her room. Sue’s voice, in particular, seemed to travel.
‘Let me choose, let me choose next,’ she called and I heard the girl in her, and that was something new.
Halfway back down the stairs, and the acoustics changed. I paused. A quietness landed, a blanketed hush.
A curl of worry. I got into the lounge. Sue and Moira stood close, Sue borrowing Moira’s anxious face until she noticed me and dug out a grin.
‘Oh, there you are, Maggie. Come on over. Come on. What should we play?’
When I was close enough, she pulled me to her, leaving her hand on my arm. The same song started but she made no move to change it.
Across the carpet, Tony and David bent to Ian. He looked set to stand, clutching the arms of his chair, until the loll of his head tipped him forward. He dropped to one knee and I thought I understood.
‘Oh, it’s no problem. Are you not feeling too well, Ian? Don’t worry!’ I said, in a lively tone.
‘Come on. It’s all right. Let’s get you home. Where’s Jan?’
I pushed between the men and hoicked him under an arm.
‘I’m here. Just leave him, Maggie. I’ve called a cab.’
Then everyone was moving. The Millers and Franks gathered their things, there was a jumble of goodbyes and they were folded into their car, leaving silence and a sense of aftermath.
Chris paused at the front door, wearing a distracted expression that made no sense. Then he looked up and past me and I swear, I felt Jan at my back. I turned, and there she stood, with her still way of being; her drunken husband just visible behind her.
‘Let’s go into my office,’ Chris said and Jan followed.
I felt confused and syrupy slow, but did what I was asked in the absence of a better plan.
Inside, he stood behind his chair.
‘Look, Maggie. Let’s get this done. I don’t want to spend another night in this marriage, and I’m sure that you don’t either.’
Not out of the blue, exactly, but still, a jolt.
‘Come on. No nonsense. We can make this easy or difficult. It’s entirely up to you.’
I’ve never flown in a plane that Chris had captained but there could be no one better in a crisis. He was so disciplined, so lucid.
He snatched up his hands and reached for a cigarette from a box on the desk that I hadn’t known existed.
A flash of irritation at that; at the times I’d had to get the baby up and out when I’d run out of cigs and all along he’d had a stash of his own.
‘Why is she here?’ I said, though I knew the answer by then.
‘We’re together, Maggie, why do you think?’
Jan’s eyes led the rest of her in a kind of spasm towards the door. Chris saw it too and said: ‘No, Jan. Stay here. Not after the way she’s behaved.’
I found I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
I remembered her tears, late; Cointreau tinkling in heavy bevelled glasses. Her and Ian and their problems. The way she passed on gossip, with an appetite she never showed at the table.
‘Maggie, I just need your agreement, OK?’
And she sat, crossed her legs and locked her hands and in that moment I saw her quite differently. The badminton round robin, of all things; that suburban staple. Jan in her ready position, the spectacle of her resolution set against the stripe of creme blush, the girlish skirt, and her weirdly splayed fingers, to mind the nails. She always won. And I realised then that she wanted to be here. She had been asking Chris’s permission, with that glance; thought she knew men and their weaknesses and that without her he might not see it through. But that was not Chris; he would never start something that he couldn’t finish.
In another room, Ian coughed richly and finished with a swallowed belch. The wheel of his chair gave a sharp squeak and I wondered if he was about to appear. Instead I heard him piss, long and deep.
‘Concentrate, please, Maggie. I know you’re drunk but can we just get this done?’
‘Yes. Fine. If that’s what you want,’ I said.
‘Good. At least we’re in agreement.’
He and Jan risked a look.
‘I’ll leave tonight,’ he said. ‘Stay at the hotel.’
A place near Gatwick that he used for early flights.
The doorbell went and she ran to it; a provocation, perhaps, but I didn’t respond. It was the cab.
‘Chris. D’you mind?’ she said, and he went with her and heaved Ian to his feet.
He woke briefly and mumbled, ‘Thanks, thanks a lot’, as though they were strangers.
Chris held his head like a policeman as they bent him in to the car and moved to the front window to give the driver some instruction. The taxi pulled away, leaving the two of them in the street.
‘I’m going to pack a bag,’ Chris said, when they came inside.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’ she said, and I had to admire her lack of apology. She was wary, together.
‘She’s coming too,’ Chris replied.
I didn’t have the stomach for a row. Chris took the stairs in twos.
He was down in a minute, all business, with the solid mid-size bag he liked and an emotion rose in me; a sort of child’s feeling of injustice, of it all being just so unfair. Chris saw it, he knew me, that I can’t deny, and was angry.
‘Don’t start, Maggie. I’ll make sure you’re OK, I will. If you behave. But you do need to behave. There will be terms. There is a baby to consider now after all.’
I looked for Jan and felt hate, hot but positive. She had the good grace, at least, to drop her head.
Chris watched, and waited, but I found I had nothing more to say.
‘That’s that then,’ he said, and left, trailing Jan.
When they were gone, I found myself in a light-headed excitement. It was true, I didn’t want him, or any of this. I would miss none of it. I looked in on my child and felt a rush at the idea of a better life. I wanted gone.
I went downstairs and saw my keys on the hall table. I jammed my thumbnail between the rings, ripping it back to the quick, and worked the house set round. I lay these on the sideboard. There were two more bundles, the car – his now – which I edged off too, and the spare for my mum’s. That I kept, thinking then that I would need it. The fob was featherweight and tinkled as it swung. I crept into the lounge.
There wa
s a long jellied stain on the piano. I reached a finger, felt its gluey touch, and flared out lines to make a Christmas tree. I almost wiped my hand down my front, but at the last, on a whim, sucked my finger instead, tasting sweet jammy alcohol.
Then I took a key, the gold one – the Yale – and stabbed at the instrument hard; once, twice and a third time too. I made three edged dents in the wood; the first suggestions of cracks running outwards.
A stupid thing to do. A regret that I carry to this day.
25
November. London deep in rain. I was afflicted by memory. Assaulted by the past at every turn.
I pulled my knee removing a boot and it was the day that I slapped Uncle Stan.
No uncle really, just a cruel, if perceptive, old man, but he slighted me – I can’t remember how – just that I’d been given a drink and he’d taken the rise. I’d hit him before I knew it and when she got me home, my mother slapped the back of my leg so hard there were pinpricks of haemorrhage for weeks. Her ring gouged a neat chunk from the bend of my knee; more than forty years later I can still feel that knot of mended flesh.
I brought a mirror downstairs and tried to find it but could not contort myself enough to see.
The knee got worse and so I took myself to the doctor’s on the bus and saw the young man in front, a student, perhaps, pull up ‘Prufrock’ on his screen; my favourite poem from a distance-learning course I never completed. I read it clearly over his shoulder in a large exotic font; he plugged in his earphones to listen – what a thing! – but it was another of Eliot’s verses that started up in my head.
I was thirteen again, stood on the makeshift stage of a late-summer talent show on the beach, performing ‘The Naming of Cats’.
Thirty-one lines but the challenge was not its length. That poem has a life of its own. Its syllables run away with you; trip you up, if you let them, but I had finished, word perfect, and looked out across the audience, breathless from beating that last, impossible line.
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
I could still call it up, it came to me instantly.
An eddy of applause and then a sharp throaty sound from a single spiteful girl. A silence began, a contagious sort of silence; a ripple of embarrassment that spread like blown sand, in shuffle and glance. Half an hour later, the prize awarded to a pair of bendy sisters, there was Mum, yanking my arm, my feet struggling to gain traction on the stones. We got off the beach and she took my chin in that fierce grip that I loved.
‘I have never been more proud of you, Margaret,’ she said. ‘You were. Brilliant.’
An ordinary word but one I’d never heard her speak. Too much pleasure in it. Too much commitment. She realised this at the same moment as me, and looked away, embarrassed.
That recollection physically hurt. It stabbed low in my stomach, a twist of pleasure pain that made me gasp there on the bus.
I put my hand down to the place. Mentioned it to the doctor, when I got there – I thought it might be the startings of a bladder infection – but next day it had gone.
And there was Anja. I called her and she came and I wondered if I was using her like the men before me, because I paid her, with as much as she would take, in gifts and treats and things for the baby, and she made me feel good with her youth and her simplicity and her ready laugh as against my age and weariness and mistakes.
She knew something was up; she was softer, kinder. Trying to be what I needed, I supposed.
She made me forget myself, just like the Lou Reed song.
Was that so very bad?
26
Monday, and she wasn’t due, but arrived in tears, banging on the door, wild-eyed. She had seen a man who worked for Goran. He had come up behind her at the bus stop, too close, and when she turned, he smiled a slow growing smile. He got on the next bus, her bus, but she stayed stuck to the pavement and watched him as he moved through its body, still wearing that lazy grin.
‘It was to warn me. Do you see?’ she said, standing in the hall, sweating and crying and moving from foot to foot.
‘I don’t know. It seems possible. Are you sure it was him?’
I tried to catch up. I’d been expecting a package of books. She was certain. It was his smile. Its leisured passage up his face. All the girls had remarked on it. Even in their context, he stood out as a creep.
I saw him in my head. Simple, or a sadist.
I watched her travelling back. The changes in her posture and a collapse of the contours of her face. He never came close, she said. A family member, working on the outskirts of the business. She gave a shudder.
‘We should go to the police, Anja, straight away. I’ll call them for you now, if you like. What’s his name?’ I said, in some imitation of action.
But Anja didn’t know and pushed past me to the sitting room. She sat, shoving away the jab of Buster’s snout, crying with an insistent rhythm, powering along under its own momentum.
I laid an awkward arm across her shoulder, but she didn’t respond. Her body throbbed, rigid.
‘Anja. We should call the police. They’ve probably got one of these Photofit things and you can pick him out.’
‘Yeah but so what? What did he do? He’s just a guy.’
‘But you’ve seen him with Goran. It might be important. Come on. We should make an appointment,’ I said.
‘What will I get from that?’ she asked.
I didn’t know, other than it felt loosely like the right thing to do.
‘Well, it might help your case, I suppose. You know. Get everything agreed.’
‘OK, I need to think right now,’ she said, more to herself.
She stopped crying. I tried to think too. I stroked the dog and waited.
‘Nothing. We do nothing. That’s the best plan,’ she said.
‘Well, yes. If you want. As long as you’re OK. I suppose you’re safe there, are you? In that place you’re staying?’ I asked.
She answered with a sideways look and a shrug.
‘They say, my case worker, they will help me if I press charges or not,’ she said.
‘Right. Well, that’s good to know,’ I said. ‘So. What are you saying? Are you having second thoughts?’
A knee-jerk of moral indignation that I tried to hide.
‘Who knows, Maggie? I have to think for my baby right now.’
‘I understand. I do. Look. Whatever you decide.’
I patted her knee. What else was there?
She nodded.
‘How about I make a tea for us both?’
‘Yes, please,’ she said. Then: ‘Maggie, do you think I could have a bath?’
I saw gin, coat hangers, razor blades.
‘There are only showers in my place,’ she said.
‘Oh, how awful! I couldn’t stand that. Get up there. Yes. I love a bath,’ I said, though I hadn’t taken one for years. ‘I’ll bring you a fresh towel.’
Thank god for a task. I rushed to the kitchen, put the kettle on and three teabags in the pot. Upstairs to the laundry cupboard where I chose my largest towel, in aubergine, of the sort you get in a smart hotel. I’d bought it as a treat but barely used it; far too heavy and it never quite dried through.
I laid it outside the bathroom door. Steam had moistened the paintwork and I could hear water running and smell the first hit of scent that lifts when bath foam meets hot water. She would have used the glass-stoppered bottle my daughter bought, its contents originally rose-scented – a joke of sorts about her name. I had refilled it with something thick and purple and marketed as relaxing. Laying claim to lavender, but closer to travel sweet.
I went down for the tea and as I came back up, bent over the scalding mug, I realised why I was hurrying.
‘Anja?’
I gave a mouselike knock.
‘I’ve got your tea, I’ll just leave it outside, shall I?’
‘I’m already in. Could you bring it to
me, if you don’t mind?’
I am not comfortable with other women’s bodies. I pushed open the door, and immediately my glasses fogged, which helped. There was nowhere to rest a drink within arm’s reach of the bath, save its rim; I knew this from experience.
‘I’ll just put it there,’ I said and reached in from the furthest distance feasible.
Her face, raised to me, looked boiled, but that was as much the tears as the heat and I thought again that those whose features hold in trying times have an advantage. But it is the same for me and so I felt a solidarity too.
Her hand broke the surface of the water and grabbed for mine, transmitting a fierce heat. We stayed like this for a while; my back beginning to hurt, the ripples steadying and the suds splitting out into scum. She looked ahead at the islands of her knees.
‘Anja, do you think it’s time to talk to your parents about this?’
The prints of my subconscious all over it. I felt a certain easing but also a shame.
‘They are not bad people. But it is not their problem. She will only worry.’
‘Well, you are their daughter. I’m not sure they would see it that way.’
‘When it is better I will call,’ she said.
‘OK. I’ll leave you to it. Do you want to stay for some food?’
She said yes, and I went downstairs and opened a bottle.
I had been thinking of an omelette for myself, but when I checked, the eggs wouldn’t stretch. I poured myself a couple of inches of wine and swallowed it in three long gulps, my mind rushed and jumpy.
I tried to recall what I had cooked for Rose. Cod in butter sauce was her favourite – frozen, boil in a bag, a dish I would no longer find, nor choose to eat.
There were things in the cupboard that could work in combination and I remembered a meal a lover once made; whore’s pasta, he had called it, in Italian. I hadn’t taken offence. Garlic and a tin of tomatoes. Capers, and an anchovy, whizzed. He’d cooked it in a previous kitchen but the blender hadn’t travelled, so I chopped the fish instead, feathered and acrid, sticking to my knife. No herbs, alas, but I put what I had together and when I came back later, the ingredients had rearranged themselves into something new. The smell was deep and meaty; a surprise. I recoiled, though my mouth filled with saliva all the same.
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