by Fiona Shaw
They were in the hall and nearly leaving when Charlie remembered the irises.
‘You told me to remind you,’ he said.
Jean found a pair of scissors. ‘Cut the stems long, and at an angle,’ she said.
The two women stood waiting, somewhat awkward, in the hall.
‘Your husband might like some cake?’ Jean said, and Mrs Weekes gave a shrug.
‘He’s a lovely boy. An unusual boy,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ But Mrs Weekes seemed to have left already.
Afterwards Jean went into the garden. Charlie’s switch of wood lay on the lawn. She picked it up and whipped it through the air. She remembered his excitement at the beekeeping things, and the way he had left the table and just run. She remembered that he had his mother’s eyes.
And then she ran. Down across the grass, past the hives and through the rough tangle, till she reached the gate in the bottom wall and stopped, panting and scratch-legged, and leaned a palm against the warm, flaked paint.
She was laughing, elated, her breath catching in her chest, her eyes wide. Perhaps she had caught something of Charlie’s pleasure, his exuberance, but she wanted to leap and shout out.
It might have been five minutes or fifty before Jean walked back to the house. She didn’t know why, but as she carried the tea tray in, she could feel a pulse of exhilaration beating out beneath her ribs.
She had intended to cook herself an omelette and then do some paperwork that evening, but her appetite had gone and she couldn’t settle to working. Instead she put Dinah Washington on the gramophone, poured herself a deep Scotch and stretched out on the sofa.
Later, before bed, she opened the door to her father’s books. The room was dusty, warm with the stored heat of the day. She had grouped the books roughly by subject – history, science, literature, philosophy – but never got further. Now she ran her finger over the titles of old novels. Eventually the telephone put an end to it, but even a late-night callout and the demands of an anxious and querulous patient couldn’t entirely cover the pulse she still felt, and she slept finally, in the small hours, with a hand to her breast, nursing this new beat.
11
They didn’t speak of the tea in the doctor’s garden, either Lydia or Charlie. It was understood between them that it would be better if Robert did not know of it.
The day following, the Sunday, they went to eat dinner at Pam’s house. They had done this almost every other Sunday since Lydia had moved to the town. It would take a bullet to stop Robert visiting his sister. Or something bigger even. An earthquake, or an H-bomb. Not such a bad idea, Lydia thought. But she winced.
It was a fifteen-minute walk. When Charlie was smaller, Robert would fret at the pace and hoist him up on his shoulders. Now it was Charlie who chafed at the speed, and ran on ahead. There was a patch of waste ground on Pam’s street and Lydia knew they’d find him there when they arrived.
Robert walked in front and Lydia carried a bowl with trifle, her best Coronation tea towel keeping it decent. She watched Robert nod his greetings in the street, charming, genial. People would be thinking them such a fine pair, so well-suited.
The sun hid as they walked and a fine drizzle began to fall. It was humid. Lydia watched the tea towel darken and her arms mist with rain.
Since their conversation last week, he had stopped talking to her, answering her questions only with a yes or a no, or the shortest alternative. She wondered what people knew when they smiled at him, and greeted her.
He’d been out all Saturday evening and she found him asleep on the settee in the morning.
‘I think it would be better if you and Charlie went to Pam’s for lunch on your own,’ she said. ‘She’ll wonder what’s going on between us. She’ll say something.’
‘She’ll wonder more if you don’t turn up.’
‘She doesn’t even like me,’ Lydia said.
‘You’re still coming.’
‘You could make an excuse. I’ve got a headache. A cold. She doesn’t like other people’s sickness.’
‘No,’ he said.
So they walked together through the streets, each on their own, and when Robert went on to his sister’s house, Lydia went to find Charlie.
The waste ground was in the space between number 19 and number 29. Four houses’ worth. The council had said they would rebuild but the wind had seeded trees there now and it was green with wild growth, the bricks’ torn edges softened by moss and elder. Charlie had seen a fox here once at twilight, and there were often hedgehogs. The woman at number 31 regularly called the council man about the rats.
Trails made by children, or tramps, or lovers, cut in and around the tangle, and there was the usual furniture – dead mattresses, a signboard for something, rusted wire, an armchair sprung with ferns.
Charlie was leant against a bit of wall, his back to the street, staring off into the waste ground, and he didn’t see her approach. For a second Lydia saw him as the older boy he was becoming, slouched and lean, the softness in his body gone, his gaze off and out, away from her.
‘Charlie?’ she said.
She saw the start in his shoulders before he turned, as though she’d caught him out. It was Sunday dinnertime and she’d thought there was nobody about. But then beyond him, she noticed three bigger boys, huddled round something.
Charlie came towards her, eyes to the ground, scratching at his ear.
‘Time to go,’ she said.
They walked back towards the street in silence. The air smelled sweet, rising off the warm ground. As they reached the pavement, Charlie looked up.
‘It was a cat,’ he said, lengthening his stride to walk ahead.
Lydia couldn’t make out his tone. She stopped and turned. The boys were laughing, their adolescent voices chopping high and low. One raised his arm and swung a small dark bundle high, then brought it back towards him, cradling it, then setting the bundle to the ground. He bent to it, then the three boys stood away, watching, waiting, silent now and expectant.
She couldn’t tell, from her distance, whether the cat was standing on its legs, or whether it was lying down. Perhaps it was dead. It seemed very still. The boys moved away a step, almost in unison as if their action were choreographed, beautiful even, in the washy, wet light. Then the cat moved, and suddenly it was running, jolting and urgent over the waste ground, and three tin cans tied to its tail tossed and pitched in their own squall of sound.
They stood outside Pam’s house and Lydia found she was shaking. She handed Charlie the trifle.
‘You give it to her. Don’t mention the cat.’
‘I know that,’ he said.
Annie opened the door. She grinned at Charlie, bearing the trifle before him like a tribute, and feinted a jab at his ribs.
‘You can’t touch me,’ he said, ‘else I’ll drop your dessert.’
‘What kind?’
‘Trifle.’ He spoke it like a trump card.
She tossed her head and winked at him.
‘I’ll have to get you after dinner, then,’ she said, and Lydia saw her son bridle with pleasure.
In the kitchen Pam and Robert stood at the cooker together. The room was hot with whispered words and cabbage water.
‘Dinner smells lovely,’ Lydia said.
Pam put a quick hand to her brother’s shoulder. She turned, her eyes sharp.
‘You crept in very quiet. Didn’t hear you.’
‘Annie let us in. Charlie’s got dessert.’
‘It’s trifle,’ Charlie said.
Pam put her hand on his head. ‘Isn’t your mother marvellous?’ she said, and Charlie flinched and was gone.
‘What can I do?’ Lydia said.
Pam shook her head. ‘Annie’s seen to it all.’ She turned away with a disapproving mouth.
Ten years Lydia had been coming here for Sunday lunch, and still it brought her out in a sweat. Her blouse was sticking under her arms and the back of her neck prickled. Years back she’d tried to explain it to Robert, but he
hadn’t understood, only told her that Pam was a proud woman, and mother and father to him, all of which Lydia knew already.
Head bent to the gas, Robert lit himself a cigarette and stepped out of the back door, sucking the flame hard against the drizzle.
Lydia watched the door close. He’d always just walked out when he felt like it. Films, conversations, washing up. And in these last years after making love even. Didn’t ask anybody, didn’t wait to find out, just left. Now Lydia was waiting for him to walk out of their marriage, both dreading it and hoping he would do what he’d always done and simply go.
She turned back into the kitchen. She didn’t know what to say to Pam, or what to do. She always put herself wrong, said or did something that changed the colour of the air, something she couldn’t see beforehand. She looked at Pam’s back, the hard angles of her hips and shoulders pushing at the nylon housecoat, the widowed grudge that clipped her movements and cast her voice with a fine mesh of grievance.
‘Busy at the works, this last week,’ Lydia said. ‘We’ve been nearly frantic on our line. Mrs Levin’s had our noses pressed down at the belt.’
Pam took the cruets from the shelf and put them on the table.
‘Mrs Levin. Wouldn’t expect anything else from her sort.’
‘It’s the new four-valve T110 model,’ Lydia pressed on. ‘It’s in the magazines now. I saw an advertisement. There’s a rush for them, so Mrs Levin is saying.’
Lydia hated the sound of herself. She didn’t want to talk about the factory; it bored her rigid. But they both worked there, and it was safe to mention. Safer than most things.
‘Mrs Levin can say as she likes. I haven’t found it any different to the usual,’ Pam said.
Through the window Lydia could see her husband’s head, his curls tight in the damp air. She should say something now about how hard Pam worked and about how everyone at the factory knew it, name some names. That was her usual route back; that was the way to curry favour.
Robert flicked his wrist and Lydia caught the shift of his shoulders, so familiar, as he ground his cigarette butt into the concrete. That was what he did to her, she thought, and she shook her head, angry.
‘Robert might not be so hungry. He wasn’t back till the small hours,’ she said, and she’d timed it well. Pam had time to turn but none to say a word, because a moment later Robert pushed open the back door.
‘Dinner ready then?’ he said.
‘Hungry are you?’
He shrugged and kicked a foot against the table, making the forks and spoons ting. It irritated Lydia. He only behaved like this, like a boy, when he was with Pam, and where Lydia found it pathetic, Pam thought it charming. ‘Plenty of women would give their eye teeth …’ she’d told Lydia more than once.
‘No,’ Robert said, ‘not very.’
Lydia stared at the blue Formica. It shone back at her; uniform, shiny. Her eyes swam and she blinked. Now there were tiny flecks of other colours; suspended, random.
‘Smells delicious,’ she said. ‘I’ll call them down.’
It was on their third date that Robert seduced her with his bringing up. He was late arriving at the café and she was angry, mashalling crumbs around the oilcloth with a finger. She was angry with him, and angry with herself for wanting him so badly. When he came through the door finally, she was on her second, slow cup and wishing she was with her girlfriends and on to her second gin and French instead of tea.
He hadn’t apologized or made an excuse, and back then, though still angry, she’d been impressed by this. Even in that early time she hadn’t thought he was much to look at. She’d been on the rebound from her lovely Yank with the gentle smile who danced like a dream and who’d gone away promising the earth, which he said was the best in the world, if she’d ever heard of Minnesota. He didn’t turn her stomach over, didn’t make her pulse jump, but he was so handsome and he treated her so well, until he left.
Robert was the first thing in trousers to say hello. Unlike her American’s smile, Robert’s seemed to take him by surprise. Unlike her American he didn’t promise her the earth. He didn’t promise her anything, but somehow that was a stronger lure. He didn’t seem to care what anybody thought, and he didn’t go away.
‘I was just about to leave,’ she said that day. ‘I’ve been drinking this tea for an age. I’m getting looks.’
He sat down opposite and chafed at his hands.
‘Thought you might have gone round to my digs,’ she said, ‘till I remembered you don’t know where they are.’
‘I’ll get my hands warm and then I’ll be here,’ he said, and something in the way he said it made her look at his hands then, and stroke his knuckles, his fingers.
‘No gloves,’ she said, and he shook his head. ‘Poor boy,’ with only a little mockery in her voice and then, at last, he’d looked hard at her, frowning.
‘I could knit you some. Like I did for my uncle. He’s serving on a ship too, somewhere he says is very cold, and he gambled his gloves.’ She looked down at Robert’s hands, pink on the yellow oilcloth. ‘He says it’s like gambling away your future, what with frostbite. Silly man.’ She laughed. ‘Perhaps you’ll meet him one day.’
Robert made no reply and she looked up. His gaze was over her shoulder, so intent that she thought God, perhaps a pretty girl had sat down behind her. She waited for him to look away, back to her, and when he didn’t, she turned to see. But there was only an empty table and another bit of wall like theirs, with grubby silk flowers hung up in a vase.
Then he looked at her again and got to his feet.
‘Shall we go somewhere else?’ he said, and he took her hand and kissed her on the lips as she stood up.
I was so easy, she thought, standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling the children to dinner. Like jelly when he kissed me. I’d have killed to get inside his trousers. Then dead parents and a sister like a mother to him so there I was, nearly pleading to look after him.
*
He told her his tale in the first pub they came to, warming his hands against the stove, and afterwards they’d walked all the way to her digs and his story had flowered in her breasts. When he sat down on her bed and looked away beyond her shoulder again, his gaze faced this time by the shelf beside the basin with its Colgate and Ponds, this time she didn’t need to turn, but she felt such a heat inside that she held his head between her hands and pulled his gaze back and then found his mouth with her mouth, while her fingers touched his young man’s hard belly and traced the thick line of hair downwards.
Then she sat down on her bed, stood him before her as a mother stands a child, and undressed him. Lifted things over his head, pulled them down around his ankles and off, till he stood, before her. She stared, wondering.
‘I’ve never seen a naked man before,’ she said. She touched his hip, ran her finger up to his nipple and he covered her hand and, gently, led it down.
Afterwards while she lay still, her fingers sticky with him, her skin growing cold in the grey light of wartime winter, he pulled his coat around his shoulders, and sang. She watched him, the sharpened profile of his nose, the curl of his hair breaking round his head, eyes invisible, looking out – she knew the view so well – to the flats across, beyond the plane tree, and dim-lit scraps of other lives made out between the branches. The unlit room grew dark and she climbed inside the counterpane and slept inside his voice.
They had only three more dates before he returned to his boat, and each time she asked him questions and he told her a bit more about himself and they came to her room and made love. Each time afterwards he sat and sang beyond the window while she lay beneath the covers and drifted. By the time he returned to his ship, she’d heard his favourite songs, especially all the thirties tunes, and she knew all about him. About his family and his old loves; about the work he’d left for the war, and his plans for after it ended. She knew about his scorn for people who thought themselves better, and she loved that because her father was one of those
people and it had left him with a bitter spirit.
She even knew something of his orphan heartsickness, and she didn’t notice how little he wanted to know of her, didn’t think about it. Not much more than her name, and that she was happy to listen to him. By the time he returned to his ship, Charlie was seeded in her womb, and now she was here, calling up these stairs for him to come for dinner, and the end of it all was pressing up close behind her.
They stood in their usual places; Robert at the table’s head, Lydia and Pam at either side, Charlie and Annie opposite one another, a space at the foot where John would have been. Lydia noticed how pretty Annie looked, like a flower in its early flush. The food steamed and Charlie said grace with his eyes open.
‘Bless thou this food dear Lord that we are about to eat …’
Lydia watched him, his crown of dark hair, the parting slender white. He lifted his head and glanced at Annie.
‘… We thank thee for thy mercies.’
Annie winked at him, her face still held solemn.
‘Amen.’ Charlie’s voice cracked slightly, and Pam’s eyes were open, her glance like a claw, but he had his eyes down again, and Annie’s were shut, and they sat down to eat with grace unchallenged.
Lydia made herself eat dinner like someone with an appetite. She would give Robert no quarter to think he had her sad. Roast pork slicked with gravy, potatoes, vegetables. The food caught in her throat, hurt her ribs, sat like lead in her stomach. Robert was solicitous, passing her the condiments, refilling her water, offering her more potatoes, more cabbage, keeping an eye out for his sister. She saw his hands – the veins proud, jutting, the square line of his fingertips. They would touch another woman’s face tonight, and his mouth would kiss her lips. Another woman would hold the curve of his shoulder that she had once. Some other woman. Not Lydia. It would never be her again. She didn’t want him, she didn’t want to hold him, touch him as the other woman would, but this minute here, with Pam’s coach clock ticking her days away on the mantelpiece, she couldn’t bear the sadness of it. She couldn’t bear the fury.
I don’t want this, she said to herself. Everything in her tightened and she pressed her nails into her palms so fiercely that later she saw she had broken the skin.