A Kind of Loving

by Stan Barstow

  ‘How d’you like your new job?’ she says when we’re in the booth.

  ‘Oh, it’s grand.’

  ‘I was surprised to hear you’d left Whittaker’s. A bit sudden, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’d been a bit restless for some time. When this chance turned up I took it.’

  I’m putting the first record on the turntable and I’m thinking that more than anything I want to see her again. I have to see her however I might feel later. I say, ‘Tonight, half past seven, the park gates nearest your place.’

  She says okay and I let the needle down on the record. There’s a brassy intro and then this bod starts to yawp, ‘I can’t get chew out of my mind, What ever I do, oh baby, I find, I keep thinking of ye-ew…’ It’s crap, but if she likes it it’s her dough.

  When she’s gone I nip out back to the bog because my guts seemed to have turned to water. It’s no good though because it’s all excitement, excitement at the thought of seeing her again and…

  III

  ‘Do you love me, Vic?’ she says, and I put my face down in her neck where she can’t see it. All I want now is to get away from her because I feel as lousy as I ever did about it all. And to think not an hour ago I didn’t know where to put myself I was so mad for her. If only she hadn’t come into the shop I think now. I was doing all right without her. I hardly ever thought of her. But no, she has to come in and let me see her again and set me off remembering what it’s like to kiss her and hold her, remembering how firm she is and how soft her skin is in places you can’t see. The private places. And maybe that’s half the attraction – they’re private to everybody bar me. In a way it’s a gift the way she is about me and somebody like Willy would be sure to say I was a twerp if I passed up the chance…

  But now she’s got to talk about loving and I thought she’d got the position about that straightened out long since.

  I know she’s waiting for me to say something and I can’t tell her a barefaced lie. And how can I say no, straight out, after the way we’ve just been? I wonder if she’d understand if I could explain it all – just how I feel. What I want is somebody to explain it to me! I wonder anyway if a girl could ever feel the way I do, and I reckon women are different that way and they have to have love.

  Well, she’s asked me and now she’s waiting for an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  She waits a second or two, then she says, ‘D’you love anybody else?’

  ‘No.’ And that’s a lie in a way, only not in the way she’d call a lie because I don’t suppose she means a bint I’ve never yet laid eyes on, that exists only in my mind.

  We’re lying on my raincoat under some trees up the top end of the park where nobody ever goes except courters. It’s a fine night for a change; the sun’s warm and there are leaf-shadows on the grass round us. I’m looking away down the slope and it’s nearly as though Ingrid reads my mind when she says, ‘D’you remember that night on the seat down there and what you said?’

  ‘Yes … I remember.’

  ‘Did you mean it then, Vic?’

  ‘Well, I must have done or I wouldn’t have said it. I was a bit carried away.’

  ‘You meant it then,’ she says. ‘I know you did. You didn’t want to see me then just for what you could get, did you?’

  Put like that it’s a bit straight from the shoulder and I feel myself colouring up. It’s one thing feeling you’re a bit of a louse at times and another being as good as told you are. And the thing is, I’m not like that really. I’m not. I don’t want to be rotten to her or anybody else. I don’t want to hurt her. But she wants me to go out with her, doesn’t she? And as for all this – she started it, didn’t she?

  ‘I’d never have gone as far as I did that night if you hadn’t let me know you wanted me to.’

  ‘Let you know?’ she says. ‘How did I let you know?’

  ‘Kissing me that way… You know… with your tongue. I thought you were inviting me…’

  ‘I didn’t know it meant that. I just wanted to kiss you properly… You’ll have been thinking all this time I’m easy, then?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I didn’t think so then and I don’t now. I… oh, I can’t explain, that’s all: I just can’t explain.’

  I want to tell her I know she loves me and that’s what makes the difference; but how can I come out with a thing like that without sounding conceited? And anyway, it would make me seem to be taking advantage more than ever.

  ‘You didn’t believe all those things Dorothy said that time, did you, Vic? You don’t think I’ve done all this with anybody else, do you?’

  ‘No, course not.’

  I don’t really care, I don’t think for a minute I’m the first bloke who’s had his hand up her skirt, but maybe that’s all. And she’d have to think a lot about whoever it was to let him that far. She’s that sort of girl. She slides her arm up round my neck and pulls me down to her. ‘You know I like you, don’t you, Vic? I’ve liked you since before you asked me out.’

  And that’s one of the funniest things about it: the way the whole thing’s switched since the beginning. Well, I have to kiss her when she says this but it’s a dead loss as far as I’m concerned.

  A couple saunter down the slope not far from us and I say, ‘C’mon, we’ll have the park-keeper after us.’

  ‘Why should he bother us?’

  ‘Anyway, it’s getting late.’

  She sits up and take her powder compact and lipstick and comb out of her handbag and starts titivating herself up. I lie there and watch her, wishing she’d make it snappy so’s we can go. I can’t understand it. I just can’t understand what goes on inside you to make you change like this. She checks that all her buttons and zips are fastened and I tidy myself up, itching for her to get a move on.

  ‘How’s everything at Whittaker’s?’ I ask her for something to say as we walk down to the gate.

  ‘Oh, pretty much as it always was.’

  We reach the gate where she goes down the road to her house and I cut back down the edge of the park to ours. She looks at me and I know she’s waiting for me to say something.

  ‘Can you take phone calls?’

  She nods. ‘The best time’s during the dinner hour. About twenty past one when we’re back from the canteen.’

  ‘Well I’m pretty busy just now. I don’t know when it’ll be, but I’ll give you a ring one day next week. Okay?’

  ‘If you like.’

  I can tell from the look on her face that she’s thinking I don’t mean it. Maybe it’s just as well. Maybe if she was to turn round on me right now and tell me to take my hook for good it would be the best thing that could happen.

  But she doesn’t. She says okay, and we say good night and I watch her walk away down the avenue. I can tell she’s feeling pretty miserable and I don’t feel exactly on top of the world myself.

  IV

  And that’s the way we go on right through the last of the summer and autumn and into winter again. Sometimes I’ll see her twice a week and other times a fortnight might go by. Then she either rings me or I’ll ring her and we’re off again. She never talks about love again and it seems we’ve both come to accept things the way they are. She wants me as she’s got me if the only other way is not having me at all; and as for me, there’s times when I feel I never want to see her again and others when all I want is to take all her clothes off and roll her on a bed. Only we don’t go that far. I don’t know what she’d say if I offered and I’m not daft enough to take the risk if she was willing. Only I can’t help thinking about it. I have my twenty-first birthday in October and I start paying my board at home. I think the Old Lady’s always fancied throwing a party for me, but I’m not in the mood, so her and the Old Man buy me a gold wrist watch, a real beauty.

  I see Ingrid a day or two after. She’s sent me a card and I thank her for it, though I wish she hadn’t done it because naturally the Old Lady was on to it like a shot. It’s a cold
night and teeming down with rain and we don’t fancy any of the pictures showing in town so I take her into the Bluebird for a cup of coffee. I don’t usually take her into places like that because we might see somebody I know and they’re sure to get all the wrong ideas.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she says when we get sat down at a table at the back. She’s wearing a green mack and it’s wet on the shoulders. She takes her headscarf off and her hair’s dampish and pressed down to her head.

  ‘I’ve been to the blood donation centre. I’d forgotten it was tonight or I’d have said half-an-hour later.’

  ‘I didn’t know you gave blood.’

  ‘Every now and again.’

  ‘How did you come to start doing that?’

  ‘Oh, they had a bit of a drive on to find new donors and a chap came to the door one night. I reckoned if it was all that important to ’em I might as well give ’em a pint now and then.’

  ‘Does it hurt? When they take it, I mean.’

  ‘Naw, there’s nothing to it. Me dad goes an’ all. They got two new names when they came to our house.’

  She sips her coffee, dainty like, with her little finger sticking out. She’s got all sorts of little ways that put me on edge.

  ‘I don’t think I could face the sight of so much blood,’ she says. ‘Especially my own.’

  ‘You don’t see any blood. The bottle’s on the floor all the time. You can see it if you lean over, but you don’t have to.’

  ‘But I thought… I’ve seen them on the pictures.’

  ‘That’s when they’re being given blood. That’s when the bottle’s up above.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Then they send you a card to tell you how it’s been used.’

  ‘Have you ever had yours used in anything exciting?’

  ‘Well I’m a common group – “O” – and I’ve only been four times.’ I fish out the little blue card and show her the stickers on it, one for each visit. ‘Usually it’s just ordinary transfusions after operations. But it all helps. You’re got to think of all the poor devils who need it and remember you never know when you might be in the same boat. It’d be hard cheese if they hadn’t any, wouldn’t it?’

  She shivers. ‘I hope I never need any. I hate the thought of hospitals and operations. I had enough with my arm.’

  ‘You never know,’ I say.

  She drinks some more coffee, and I look past her at the room. It’s fairly full, it being a wet night, and there’s all sort of people in, but mostly young ’uns passing the time on and flirting with one another, like that crowd in the middle with the lasses with hedgerow haircuts and jeans and the lads in jeans as well, some of them, and striped sweatshirts under their jackets. One of them has a leather jacket and a crewcut. He looks as though he’s walked out of an American picture. It’s all Yankeeland these days. If it goes big in America it takes here, like rock ‘n’ roll for instance. Me, I like to look English because I reckon it’s the finest country in the world, bar none. Not that it’s heaven for everybody, I suppose. There’s an old keff sitting on his own down there by the wall and I wonder what he thinks to it. Even from the back you can he hasn’t had a shave for a week and he can’t have sat in a barber’s chair for months. There’s a ragged hole in the top of his old trilby and he has a double-breasted navy blue overcoat that’s dusty and without buttons and tied round the waist with a length of string. It gives you a kind of shock to see people like him about these days and you can only think it’s their own fault. He might have boozed his way into that condition for all I know. He might be a no-good waster that’s scrounged his way through life, too idle to do a day’s work. You don’t know.

  But whichever way it is, there he is, old and on his own, and probably without two ha’pennies to rub together and you can’t help feeling sorry and kind of sick inside to look at him.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Ingrid says, watching me.

  ‘Nothing, I’m just looking. My face is pointing that way.’

  ‘Are you scared you’ll see somebody you know?’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘I sometimes think you’re ashamed to be seen with me,’ she says, looking down into her cup.

  ‘Why should I be?’ I say, feeling my face go hot.

  She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I just get the feeling sometimes.’

  I’m drawing patterns with a matchstick in a drop of spilt coffee on the table-top and she turns her head and takes a look round the place herself.

  ‘Well,’ she says in a minute, ‘how does it feel to be a man?’

  I give a laugh. ‘Ask me another.’

  ‘Did you get any nice presents?’

  I stretch my arm across the table to show her the watch. ‘Me mother an’ dad bought me this. Isn’t it a gem, eh?’

  She takes hold of my wrist and turns it so she can see the watch better. ‘It’s lovely… What else did you get?’

  ‘Oh, Jim bought me a tie and Chris and David got me a book of crime stories and an L.P. record of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetic Symphony.’

  ‘My, my,’ she says, lifting her eyebrows. ‘Haven’t we gone Highbrow lately!’

  This niggles me no end. She’s so satisfied that these yawping crooners are the last word.

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with it?’ I say. ‘It was written for people to like, wasn’t it? What’s wrong with me liking it?’

  ‘Oh, nothing at all. Only there’s lots of people who pretend to like that kind of thing just because they think it makes them Somebody.’

  ‘You know me better than that.’

  She shrugs. ‘Oh, if you like it you’re welcome to it. Personally I can’t stand it. I like something with a tune.’

  ‘But there’s bags of tunes in Tchaikovsky,’ I say. ‘You can’t get away from ’em…’ I stop. Be damned if I’m going to defend myself for liking something that’s worth something instead of the latest boy wonder from Clacknecuddenthistle who gets on television because he happens to have a check shirt and a guitar and a lot of bloody cheek.

  We just sit there propping our chins on our hands and say nothing else for a bit.

  ‘Would you like another cup o’ coffee?’ I ask her after a minute or two.

  ‘May as well,’ she says. ‘We can’t go anywhere in this rain.’

  ‘It might have stopped now.’

  ‘The grass’ll be wet.’

  I look at her. ‘You’re in a funny mood tonight. What you want to make a crack like that for?’

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘it’s the wrong time.’

  ‘Oh, that’s what’s wrong with you, is it?’

  ‘That and other things.’

  I look away from her and wish I hadn’t come. I didn’t know I was walking into this. I’ve never known her like this before. Quiet sometimes, brooding a bit, maybe; but she’s never been sort of bitter like this. Well… I can’t really blame her, I suppose…

  ‘I’ll get some more coffee.’

  I go over to the serving counter that runs down one side of the place with glass cases on top full of sandwiches and sticky cream buns and eclairs and whatnot and this big shiny steaming coffee machine in the middle. It kind of puts you off, the sight of all that grub when you’re not hungry.

  When I get back to the table I see a flat brown-paper package on the table by my place.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Open it and see.’

  I strip off the brown paper and take this cig case out and hold it in my hands.

  ‘Many happy returns,’ she says.

  I turn it over, looking at it. There’s a little square with my initials engraved in it: V.A.B. She’s even remembered my middle name. All of a sudden I’m touched, right deep down. I want to take her hand and say, ‘I love you, Ingrid. From now on it’s all going to be different.’ But I can’t do it, because it wouldn’t be true.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s lovely… honest it is… Thanks ever so much, Ingrid. It’s
just what I need as well… I haven’t got one…’

  I look at the case and not at her when I say, ‘I… I wish it could be different, Ingrid. I really do.’

  ‘But it can’t, can it?’

  ‘I don’t want to be rotten to you, y’know.’

  ‘I don’t think you do.’

  I open the case. ‘How many does it hold, fifteen?’

  ‘Yes, fifteen.’

  ‘And it’s got one o’ them metal things for holding the cigs. I like them better than the springs: they don’t squash the cigs.’

  ‘I was going to fill it for you,’ she says, ‘but I didn’t have time to get to a tobacconists’.’

  ‘Did you buy it today?’

  ‘They were engraving it. I collected it tonight, after work.’

  ‘Well it’s lovely, Ingrid, it really is.’

  I snap it shut and look at the time by my new watch.

  ‘What say we try and make the last show at the Ritz? It’s that war picture. It might not be so bad.’

  She nods, ‘All right.’

  We drink up and go out. As we pass the old keff I see that he’s making his tea last as long as he can and just as I’m going by him something makes me put my hand in my pocket and fish half a crown out. ‘Here you are; have another one on me.’ I drop the half-dollar by his cup and he just looks up sort of bewildered like as I move on and follow Ingrid out.

  ‘What was he saying to you?’ she says as we go down the steps.

  ‘Oh, nothing much.’

  ‘Did he ask you for money?’

  ‘No, he never said a word.’

  ‘You gave him some, though, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, what if I did?’

  ‘How much did you give him?’

  ‘Half a crown.’

  ‘Half a crown! Whatever made you do that?’

  ‘I just felt sorry for him, that’s all. There’s no law against it, is there? You make me feel as if I’d thrown half a crown down a drain.’

  ‘You probably might just as well have. Very likely he’ll make a bee-line for the nearest pub.’

  ‘Well, that’s his fault, isn’t it, not mine? If he’s daft enough to booze it, it’s his lookout, not mine.’