by Stan Barstow
He gets up. ‘I’ll run you up in the car,’ he says.
‘That’s very good of you.’
‘It won’t take five minutes,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to be hanging about waiting for buses at a time like this.’
‘No. Thanks very much.’
‘What about your tea?’ Mrs Oliphant says. ‘Have you had anything to eat? You can’t go running off on an empty stomach. You might have to wait a while.’
‘I don’t want anything to eat, thanks.’
‘I can make you some sandwiches in just a minute.’
‘Thanks all the same, but I don’t think I could face anything.’
Mr Oliphant finishes fastening his tie and puts his jacket on. ‘Come on, then,’ he says. ‘I’ll run you up.’
The woman in the office isn’t the one who was on the phone. Her voice was nice and clear but this one talks as if she’s got a mouthful of toffee and she twists her words about it till you can hardly tell what she’s saying.
I tell her who I am and what I’m here for and she asks me to sit down round in the hall. I go round the corner into this big high waiting-room with windows in the roof and long benches covered with blue leather and sit down. I seem to remember coming here when I was a kid. I look round at the brass plates with the names of all the local big-wigs who gave money to build this wing and at the double doors with ‘Casualty Department’ written over them. It must have been when I cut my head open on the railings and I probably sat here in front of these same doors, shivering from stem to stern, scared stiff at what they might be cooking up for me behind the porthole windows. There’s a light on in there now, but nobody else waiting. I suppose they’re ready to deal with anything that crops up. Always at it, somebody needing help.
Is she going to die? I wonder again. Is this the way it’s all going to work out, with her dying and taking the baby with her? And they say there’s a pattern to life. A plan. What plan? For me to fall in love with her and then fall out of love with her but still want her enough to give her the baby, so that we have to get married when I don’t love her and she can fall downstairs and kill herself and the kid and leave me free again? What sort of a plan’s that, except maybe a plan to have me spending the rest of my life telling myself I killed her and if I’d held out that night in the park she’d be still alive?
I don’t want her to die. I don’t love her, but I don’t want her to die.
The hospital smell’s beginning to make me feel sick. I haven’t got rid of the headache yet: the aspirins didn’t do a bit of good. I don’t like hospitals. I’m like thousands of others, I reckon – scared of the people who’re here to help, scared of the pain that makes you better. I sit sideways on the seat and pull one knee up and rest my arm on the back so’s I can put my forehead in my hand.
‘Mr Brown?’
I jump, she’s come up so quiet on rubber soles. I look at her, a little dark women with glasses and a white coat unbuttoned, showing a dark frock underneath.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Doctor Parker. I’ve just left your wife.’
‘How is she?’
‘As well can be expected. She’s had a very uncomfortable afternoon and lost a lot of blood, but we’ve given her a transfusion and she’s going to be all right. I’m sorry about the baby, but I’m afraid we couldn’t do anything to save it.’
‘No.’ I look at the floor.
‘How long have you been married?’
‘Three months.’
‘I see… you…’
‘She was having the baby before.’
‘I see. Well, you’ll have other children, all being well. This won’t be the end of it for you.’
‘Can I see her?’ I say this without hardly thinking, as though it’s something I think she’s expecting me to say. But I’m not so sure I want to see her and it’s a kind of relief when she says, ‘I’d rather you didn’t tonight.’ I don’t know how I’d feel to see Ingrid poorly. I might hate her and it show.
‘Her mother’s just left,’ the doctor says. ‘I’m afraid she wasn’t very good for her. A rather emotional person. She’s trying to get some sleep now. If you’d come earlier…’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘But it happened quite early this afternoon.’
‘I was at work. I didn’t get to know till I came home.’
‘You mean your wife’s mother didn’t let you know?’
‘The neighbours told me. I’d be the last one she’d think of telling.’
She looks at me without saying anything and I stand up.
‘You can ring up first thing in the morning and visit tomorrow night at seven.’
‘If she doesn’t come.’
‘Oh, you’ll have priority for visiting.’
She walks me out to the door. ‘Will you tell her I’ve been, and I came up as soon as I knew?’
‘Yes. Anything else you’d like me to tell her?’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so. You can tell her not to worry; about the kid, I mean. I couldn’t get used to the idea of being a father anyway.’
There’s a bus coming down the hill as I go out of the hospital drive and I run and jump on as it stops. I go upstairs. Somehow I can’t care about the kid because it never really was a kid. It wasn’t really anything except an egg growing in Ingrid; something that made us have to get married. It wasn’t a person so I can’t feel bad about losing it. It’s rotten to think it would have been a person, though, sometime, and now it’s finished like this, all mangled and dead from being bounced down the stairs. ‘A very uncomfortable afternoon,’ the doctor said. I shut my eyes and I can see her there on her back with her legs open and them pulling this bloody mess out of her.
The bus stinks of petrol and stale tobacco smoke and because it’s practically empty it jolts and jumps about the road all down the hill, shaking my tripes about till I break out in a cold sweat of sickness. I run down the steps and jump off as it slows at the corner and make straight for a Gents across the road. I find a penny and go into one of the bogs and the bolt echoes about the place as it shoots home behind me. It all seems to hit me at once: being married, not loving Ingrid, Ma Rothwell, the niggling and nagging, now the miscarriage, and me not feeling well, and I lean over the lavatory and retch and retch fit to bring my boot soles up till finally I throw up. And then I’m saying out loud, ‘Oh, bugger it, bugger, damn, and blast it all,’ till there’s nothing else to come up and nothing else to say and I’m just standing there trembling and empty and cold.
I must have made some noise because when I come out the attendant’s standing their waiting for me.
‘You don’t want to take it if you can’t hold it,’ he says, the interfering little bastard, the bossy little shithouse cleaner like the world’s full of.
I just walk past him and say, ‘Go f– yourself,’ as I go out. He shouts something after me but I take no notice.
I can’t make my mind up whether to go to Rothwell’s or go home. I’ve a good mind at first not to go to Rothwell’s ever again after this lot but then I think what a rough time Ingrid’s had and I can’t add to her troubles. Let her get out of hospital first and then see what happens. I wander round town for a bit, knowing I ought to go up home and tell them what’s happened and knowing I’ve only got a second-hand tale and they’ll want to know more than I can tell them and then it’ll bring it all out and I can’t be bothered going over all that tonight. Anyway, in the end I go up there and reckon I’m in a hurry and I’ll call tomorrow when I’ve been up to the hospital. Then I push off over to Rothwell’s and walk in and find Ingrid’s mother sitting with Mrs Oliphant, telling her all the tale – or her side of it. They’ve got the teapot going and Ma Rothwell’s face is shocking to look at, all puffed up and ugly from crying.
Ma Rothwell won’t look at me, but Mrs Oliphant says, ‘Here’s Victor now. How did you find her, Victor?’
‘I haven’t seen her,’ I say, shooting a look at Ma Rothwell that’s plain for Mrs O. to see. ‘
I was too late. She was going to sleep.’
All at once Ma Rothwell starts to cry out loud and it’s horrible to hear her and watch the way her face kind of goes to pieces. ‘I wish Ingrid had never laid eyes on him,’ she says in a strangled sort of voice through this crying, and Mrs Oliphant says, ‘Come now, Esther, you know it can’t be Vic’s fault. This sort of thing can happen to anybody.’
I’m standing at the back of the room and I feel myself going white and beginning to tremble with rage. It’s only Mrs O. looking up and giving me a signal with her eyes that stops me from going for Ingrid’s mother there and then. I go out and up to the bedroom and walk about there, still trembling and swearing out loud, calling Ma Rothwell every filthy name I can think of.
II
Late that night I hear a car pull up outside and when I get up in the morning Mr Rothwell’s home. It seems she’d time to let him know even if she couldn’t ring me. As it is I think it’s only him coming stops me from having it out with her and packing up and leaving. He seems to calm her down and make her see sense. I don’t know how much poison she drops in his mind about me but it doesn’t seem to make any difference; he’s the same with me as he always is when he comes home, quiet and friendly and decent. You kind of get the feeling with him that he respects you as a person like and not for the first time I think it’s a pity he’s not at home all the time. Anyway, he takes a week of his holidays and stops till Ingrid comes home. They tell her they really should have kept her ten days or a fortnight but they let her come out providing she takes things very easy for a bit. Then Mr Rothwell’s away back to his job and we’re like we always were, only worse. It’s like we’re living in a dream, waiting for things to get back to normal, whatever that might be. Ma Rothwell hardly ever speaks to me and I don’t say a dicky bird more to her than I have to. It’s Ingrid who gets my back up more now. Weeks after she’s home her mother’s still telling her how poorly she is and she mustn’t do anything strenuous, and take it easy all the time. And Ingrid laps it all up and sits about all day as though she’s in the last stages of a decline. To me she’s just a pain in the neck, neither use nor ornament, sitting about like an invalid on Scarborough Spa all day and keeping me at a distance in bed. It goes on so long I tell her she ought to put a notice up: ‘Fragile, don’t touch.’
‘How long’s this going on?’ I ask her one night when she’s given me the cold shoulder again. ‘You’ll have to snap out of it sometime, y’know.’
‘What d’you mean “snap out of it”?’
‘What I say. You can’t act up on the strength of your miscarriage for ever.’
‘So you think I’m just putting on an act, do you?’
‘Mebbe you don’t know it. I think you an’ your mother between you have got you into a frame of mind where you really think you’re still poorly, and I’m getting a bit tired of it.’
‘Always thinking of yourself,’ she says. ‘Never any consideration for me.’
‘I married you when you were in trouble, didn’t I? It’s three months since the accident now and it’s time I could make a pass at you without feeling like a dirty old man.’
She’s drawn herself up all stiff and rigid now, just like her mother. If she knew how much like her mother she looks and how much I hate Ma Rothwell I don’t think she’d risk getting on her high horse so much.
‘If that’s all you can think of,’ she says, ‘you’ll just have to show a bit of willpower, that’s all.’
It might be her mother talking, the way she says it. I look at her and I can hardly see the hot little bit I used to snog with in the park. I don’t know what’s happened to her. I think they must have taken away her sex glands with the kid.
‘Till when?’ I say. ‘Till your mother gives the word? You know what your mother ’ud like to do, don’t you, or are you too dense to see it? She’d like to make me do something that’d give her an excuse to push you into getting a divorce. Well, she’s going the right way about it, I can tell you. I could have packed it in the day you had your accident for two pins. It took some doing, coming back here after the way your mother treated me.’
‘Why did you come back, then?’
‘Because we’re married, and you’d got a plateful of trouble without me adding to it by walking out.’
‘Very noble and kind,’ she says, real sarcastic, as though she doesn’t believe a word I’ve said.
‘Well you think of a better reason, then.’
‘I don’t have to thank you for doing what any normal husband would do, do I?’
I could hit her, honest; I’m coming a bit nearer to it every day, and I’ve never struck a bint in my life.
‘No, you don’t. But it looks like I’ve to go down on my knees to get you to do what any normal wife would do. Well, I’ll tell you straight now; I’m getting fed-up with this lot. I was all for making the best of it, but if we’re married we’re married. I’m not going to be just the lodger with special permission to share your bed providing I keep my hands to myself.’
And so on, etcetera, etcetera. And it gets us nowhere except maybe a bit nearer scratching each other’s eyes out and dropping all pretence of making a go of it.
It’s not hard to see that all these little dos are leading the way to a big dust-up. And it’s not long in coming now.
I think it starts over a new winter coat for Ingrid. It’s a small thing that’s really a big thing and there’s more to it than meets the eye. Anyway, Ingrid’s got a wardrobe full of clothes, and I mean that. I think she must have spent all her money on them before we were married. Well, she needs a new winter coat like I need a new mother-in-law and besides that we’ve more or less agreed between us to do without things we don’t really need so’s we can save every penny towards the time when we can have a place of our own. And now here’s Ma Rothwell talking Ingrid into spending twelve or fifteen quid of my money on something she can do without and never miss it. I tell her as much and we get lined up, Ma Rothwell on one side, me on the other, and Ingrid in the middle. As it happens I’m wanting to go out to the pictures that night and ask Ingrid if she fancies it, thinking that us going out will break the argument up before it gets going. Straight away her mother tells that there’s some television programme on she said she wanted to see.
So there we are: it’s either pictures or television. On the face of it, that is. But I know that here and now we’re going to settle something. It’s Ma Rothwell or me, that’s how I see it, and now’s the time for Ingrid to show her mother she’s got a husband and he comes first.
She ums and ahs for a bit while I get wilder and wilder, and then before she can say which she’s going to do I settle it for her when I grab my coat and slam out in a black rage.
I’m still trembling on the bus. I feel the only way to relieve my feelings is by violence. I want to break windows, smash furniture up, and bash my fist into somebody’s face. My idea of delight would be to get my hands round Ma Rothwell’s neck and squeeze and squeeze till her stupid eyes drop out of her stupid head. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I never used to be like this. I’m beginning to get an idea of how blokes can be driven to murder.
III
I’m actually going up the steps to the pictures and feeling in my back pocket for the money when it strikes me I don’t really want to go in at all now, and I stop. A bloke blunders into me from behind and I give him a ‘sorry’ over my shoulder as I turn round and go back to the pavement. I stand there and think how I’m going to spend the evening. I think about all my old mates and wonder what they’re doing. I had a lot of mates and we had some good times together. Now I’ve nearly lost track of them. I haven’t seen most of them in months. Being married’s put me out of circulation and I haven’t felt like meeting them anyway after the Charlie I made of myself. It’s starting to drizzle and this only makes me feel lower. I walk up the road a bit and take shelter under an archway that leads between the shop fronts into a little cobbled back street. I stand there for a minute o
r two with a smart bint in a blue raincoat waiting for her boy friend. He comes along nearly straight away and collects her, a big fair lad in a short raincoat, and they walk off arm-in-arm to the pictures. I look round and see this pub-sign swinging up the street and I go under the archway and up to the door.
There’s a bottle-blonde behind the bar in a frock made out of a sort of ice-blue chainmail that sparkles and glitters in the light reflected like splinters in the mirror that covers the top half of the wall behind the wine and spirit bottles and upturned glasses. Her skin’s a nice soft creamy pinkish colour and she has a black beauty spot on her left cheek. I don’t know what colour she’d be at half past seven in the morning with no heat in the bedroom and the curtains stiff with frost but I like it well enough now. The colour spreads from her neck on to her chest, which is nicely covered and promises well for lower down. I sit there with half a pint of bitter in front of me and watch her. I’ve always had a fancy for bints like this; real tough bints, hard as nails, know all the answers, ready to put blokes like me in their place in two ticks, but as sexy and willing as you could wish for with the right kind of chap. She comes and reaches down for something under the bar right in front of where I’m sitting and I see further into the top of her frock than’s good for me in my frame of mind. Now, I think, if I’d had plenty of cash I could have picked up with a bint like this and I’d have been landed. Sex without complications, and love could wait till the right girl came along. Instead of that it all gets mixed up and complicated and before you know where you are you’re miles and miles up the creek with not a paddle in sight. And then I get the old dragging feeling inside me, because I’m married, hooked, and even if I turn my head this very minute and see the right girl standing behind me with Welcome, Vic, written all over her face there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I’m a marked man.
Well while I’m thinking this, which isn’t more than a few seconds, the blonde’s tinkering about under the bar and I’ve got my peepers trained into the neck of her frock, but without really seeing what’s there, which shows what sort of a state I’m in. Then she straightens up and this chainmail flashes and sparkles and brings me back. I know she’s seen me looking and I’m caught a bit short; but I can’t say I wasn’t looking really and I didn’t see anything beyond the first glimpse. So I try to look her in the eye like a proper man of the world and for a couple of seconds she looks back, real cold and hard, like she’s a duke’s wife and I’m some little runt of a footman who’s tried it on. Then she moves off along the counter and I see her wedding ring as she lifts her hand to work the beer pump.