Right from the beginning, Julian had loved to give important little dinner-parties. Even in the early years, when they could ill afford it, he had always insisted that there should be wine, and flowers, and at least four courses of excellent food for their guests. Luckily, Milly was a good cook, though slow, so by dint of anxious planning and long hours at the stove, she always managed to produce a meal that was inexpensive and yet came up to Julian’s exacting standards: and if, by the time they sat down to table, the hostess was too flustered and exhausted to join much in the conversation what matter? It was Julian who was the star of the evening, Julian who led the conversation, filled up the glasses, radiated hospitality and charm. Sometimes he would chide her, afterwards, for being “such a little mouse!” but she knew that he liked it really, and she exerted such womanly guile as she possessed to see that her inadequacies remained a joke between them, and never became a serious issue.
But they did become a serious issue, of course, in the end. As the years went by, and success followed success for Julian, the dinner parties became larger, and grander. Little lions from the social and artistic worlds were invited to them, and then bigger lions. Until, at last, secure in his own unassailable reputation, Julian began to feel the need of a wife who would be a credit to him. Not one who would outshine him, of course—as if such a thing were possible! —Oh no! But he needed someone elegant, sophisticated; a fitting hostess for a man in his position. And one night, he looked at his existing wife, nervously sipping her sweet sherry, boring the Finnish Ambassador, and allowing her anxieties about the chestnut soufflé to show on her round shiny face. He contemplated her faded ginger perm, her freckles, and her thickening figure bulging under her black velvet dinner dress; and that had been the beginning of the end.
Milly had seen it coming, of course. She had known, long before he did, that she wasn’t going to be able to “keep up with him”. It often happened, of course, in their sort of circle. She had seen it with her own eyes, over and over again, among their acquaintances: the brilliant, ambitious husband rocketing his way to the top and discarding his dowdy, middle-aged wife en route, like a snake shedding its outworn skin in springtime. She’d met the wives, too, after the amputation was over: drab, dejected creatures, moaning on and on about the meagreness of their alimony, and about “his” ingratitude after all they had done and all they had sacrificed for him during the early years of struggle.
Had they no pride? It was all true, of course—but even so, surely a woman could keep her lips closed and her head held high? And as for alimony, Milly had thought—and sometimes, to selected cronies, had actually said—that if her husband ever deserted her, she would starve in the gutter before she would take a single penny from him!
But she took it, of course, when the time came, just like all the others. When it came to the point, there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do. There she was, in the Kensington flat, and with bills pouring in for services and commitments that she hadn’t even known existed; and even while she drifted about looking for somewhere cheaper to live, with landladies laughing in her face when she mentioned the sort of rental she had in mind—even in that short time, the second round of bills had begun to arrive. Demands, Final Demands, threats of legal action—what could she do but accept the hundred and fifty pounds a month offered by her former husband, so generously and with such calculated spite? It was, in fact, a larger sum than had been awarded by the Courts, and he explained this gratuitous munificence in a letter written to Milly just after his much-publicised marriage to Cora Grey, the up-and-coming young movie star who had divorced her nonentity of a husband specially for Julian. The two of them had made the front page of the evening papers at the time, and since then their bronzed faces, full of improbably glittering teeth, had leered up against a background of sea and sky in at least two of the colour supplements. No doubt it had all gone to Julian’s head a bit: and this explained—or Milly supposed it did—the schoolboy spite, the easy, throwaway cruelty, of the letter he chose to write to her, from his honeymoon paradise, at the very height of his triumph:
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he wrote, “that things had to end this way; but there it is. I suppose it’s just one of those things, and for my part I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life before. Cora is a marvellous girl, we are made for each other. To show you what a marvellous girl she is, let me tell you that it was her idea that I should allow you fifty pounds a month more than I am legally obliged to do. Wasn’t that terrific of her?—she is the most generous-minded person I have ever known, and just doesn’t know how to bear grudges.
“Needless to say, I agreed with her that you should have the money. As she says, a woman in her forties has little chance of starting a new life, and so she really needs money: whereas a man in his forties is still in his prime, with a whole marvellous life ahead of him, I’m sorry, my dear: it seems unfair of Nature to have arranged things like that, but that’s the way it is: and as you see from this cheque, Cora and I are trying to do what we can to make up to you for the fact that hope and happiness are all on our side.
“Well, that’s all for now. We’re dining with Lord and Lady Erle tonight, on their new yacht, so must hurry and get into our glad rags. Cora joins me in sending greetings, and she asks me to tell you that she hopes that your remaining years will bring you some sort of contentment. She tells me that she once had a great-aunt who, when her life’s work was over, derived a lot of pleasure from growing mustard and cress in the shapes of letters of the alphabet. It was very interesting, she says, waiting for it to come up.
Yours, with all good wishes
Julian.”
“I’ll show him!” Milly had thought, as she tore the letter into tiny shreds.
*
And show him she did. Which was how, all these months later, she came to be crouching here, in this freezing seaside shelter, battered by wind and spray, with no food, no home, and, very likely, only a few more hours to live.
*
What would Julian say, she wondered, when he read the whole story in the papers tomorrow, or perhaps the next day? Would he just say, with that familiar curl of the lip, “God, how sordid!” Or would he, perhaps, murmur, with a tiny glint of unwilling admiration in those self-satisfied eves: “Good Lord! I’d never have thought she had it in her!”
CHAPTER III
MILLY STIRRED INFINITESIMALLY on the hard bench, and found that by now even her hips were numb. What was the time? Two o’clock? Or even three? Could it be that she had evaded in sleep some appreciable fraction of her nightlong sentence? There was no knowing. No way of measuring the dreaming and the not-dreaming that wove in and out of her head from the darkness and the storm. When she dreamed of cold, of a cold sharper than human flesh could bear, it was only to wake and find that it was not a dream at all. Her limbs were still there, jutting out of her in four places, and enduring in reality what could not be endured in dreams. It was their suffering now, rather than her own, that troubled her; for she, herself, had become very, very tiny, and was moving inexorably, and at an accelerating rate, out of range of their sufferings. She was deserting them, leaving them to fight their losing battle as best they might … and then, from she knew not where, there would come upon her a fit of shivering so violent that her soul would be jerked back into its proper place again, in charge again, suffering again, sharing to its excruciating limit the agonies of every far-flung cell.
Strange lethargies intervened, and strange awakenings where there had been no sleep; until at last the darkness seemed to break like a dropped cup, and she felt in her dream that some mighty change, some unimaginable glory, was coming over the earth: and when she woke she found that it was so. For when she opened her numbed eyelids there was a faint yellow light spreading over the tumbled waters; the wind had dropped; and it was day.
The light grew, and Milly was aware of something akin to worship as she contemplated her own body. This was the body that had brought her alive through the
incredible winter night by the application of first one marvellous mechanism and then another. She remembered how it had first withdrawn blood from the extremities, the hands and feet, in order to feed the vital machinery in the centre: and then, without her even noticing it, it had curled itself up into this bundle in which she now found herself, mathematically arranged so as to expose the absolute minimum of surface area to the searing cold. And after that, when her limbs were numb and all her willpower gone, it had kept her blood circulating and her heart minimally beating by means of bouts of shivering alternating with bouts of drowsing apathy. By these magical, unbelievable mechanisms it had kept death at bay all through the livelong night, and without any sort of help or co-operation from her—as far as she was concerned, she had been leaving herself to die. And with all this, it had launched at her no reproaches for having landed it in this desperate situation: it did not ask her why it had to be kept out like this all through the coldest night of the year, in wet clothes, and with no food inside it. Like a true and loving friend, it had accepted her decision without reproach, and then had put all its energies, all its varied and wonderful skills, into sustaining her through the consequences. I’ve never had a friend like it!—thought Milly, staring down at her bedraggled person in the growing light; and with this thought there came to her a blazing determination to survive. She die of exposure? Not on your life! Why, she hadn’t even got a sore throat! Slowly, painfully, she set herself to restore the power of movement to this numbed, miraculous body of hers. As soon as she could move, she would buy it some hot coffee, a roll and butter … she felt almost dizzy at the thought of such wonders, and at the realisation that they were still within her reach. She still had some money, after all; eighty or ninety pence at least.
At the thought of this sum, the strangest thought imaginable came to her. There was something to spend it on even more important than food. She must have her hair set!
Wasn’t this the least she could do? How could she allow her body, her faithful, miraculous body, which had protected and steered her through the deathly perils of the night, to go about looking like a scarecrow?
*
And it was only much later, as she sat staring at her transformed appearance in the hairdresser’s mirror, that she realised that this way of spending her last shillings had also been downright sensible. Now she would be able to look for a job, bargain with landladies, invent stories about lost insurance cards. She was equipped now, to face the brand-new world.
CHAPTER IV
“YES, WELL, CAN you start tomorrow?”
Choking back the rest of her imaginary life-story, Milly stared at her prospective employer incredulously. The woman wasn’t even listening! When Milly had first seen the advertisement for a Daily Help, on a board outside a newsagent’s, it had seemed obvious to her that the first thing to do was to think out some plausible sort of past for herself: and so for more than an hour she had loitered in an arcade of deserted slot-machines, concocting this wonderful tale which so cleverly explained just how it was that she happened to have no address, no references, and no employment card. And now here was this woman interrupting her in mid-sentence to offer her the job, just like that! For a moment, Milly felt affronted rather than relieved. All those carefully-plotted details about the invalid father, the requisitioning of the family home, the loss of all her personal papers in the move: and then the death-duties, and the mysterious Family Debts—all, all were wasted! Mrs Graham (for such it seemed was the name of this anxious, thirty-five-ish person who kept glancing at the clock and fidgeting with paper-clips)—Mrs Graham didn’t want to know one thing about any of it! She didn’t want to know Milly’s age, her capabilities, or why she had suddenly dropped into Seacliffe like a visitor from Mars. All she wanted, it seemed, was to clinch the deal before (to judge by her agitated glances) Milly should disappear into thin air with a rattle of ghostly chains, or re-embark in her flying saucer, or whatever. Were Daily Helps really as rare as that? Milly could only suppose that they must be, and her spirits rose a little. It was a long time since she had felt rare.
“Can you start tomorrow?” Mrs Graham repeated, torturing the inoffensive paper-clip with nervous fingers. “You see, my other woman let me down rather badly … not a question of money, it wasn’t that at all. I’m willing to pay thirty-five pence an hour, and lunch as well, she always had a good lunch. And it’s light work, Mrs—er—; nothing heavy, you’ll find it’s a thoroughly labour-saving kitchen, all the equipment and everything, brand new. And a Hoover! With fitments! And there’s the Dustette, you can use it for the shelves and everything, you won’t need to get your hands dirty….”
By this time, Milly had realised who it was who was interviewing whom, and she adjusted her posture accordingly, leaning back a little in the chair on whose extreme edge she had so far been timorously perching. Now, in her newly-relaxed position, she set herself to listening graciously while her victim reeled off, with anxious haste, the variegated delights in store for Milly if she accepted the job. Up-to-date waste-disposal. Non-rub polishes. No scrubbing…. There seemed no point in interrupting, though in fact Milly had already quite decided to take the job. Or, rather, it never occurred to her not to. From the first moment when she began scanning the newsagents’ advertising boards this morning, she had taken it for granted that she would take the very first job that she was offered—if, indeed, she was offered anything at all. Never, in her wildest dreams, had she supposed it would be as easy as this! She, an unknown woman, past forty, with no skills, no qualifications, no references, and wearing a coat still damp from sitting out in it all night! Why, for all this Mrs Graham knew, she might be a murderess….!
*
“You will turn up tomorrow, won’t you?” Mrs Graham was saying anxiously. “So many of the women I’ve seen, they’ve said they’ll come, and then they just don’t turn up! You won’t let me down, will you, Mrs—er—Oh dear, what is your name? I ought to have asked you before.”
Milly was just opening her mouth to answer, when she realised that “Milly”, alone, wasn’t going to be enough. A surname! Quick, quick! She racked her brains to think of something … anything … Oh dear, Mrs Graham must already have noticed her hesitation in answering…!
And indeed, Mrs Graham had: but, as is so common with people in a state of anxiety, she had immediately integrated this new phenomenon into her own special network of worries, and imagined that Milly’s hesitation meant that she was wavering over her decision to take the job.
“You will come tomorrow, won’t you?” she urged, for the second time. “I’m counting on you! I get so tired of people who promise to come and then just disappear! Promise me you won’t do that!”
Gleefully, Milly promised. Disappear! —when by this time tomorrow she could expect to have one pound forty in her pocket and a free lunch inside her? Not likely! Besides, Milly had already done enough disappearing, in the last thirty-six hours, to last her a lifetime.
*
She spent the afternoon in the station cafeteria, where it was warm. She had gone there to steal food, but had found, rather to her surprise, that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Absurd, really, that a woman capable of the deed she had set her hand to yesterday, should today find herself unable to reach out that same hand just to purloin a two pence bread roll!
If she hadn’t been so hungry, she would have laughed.
Oh, well. So she wouldn’t be able to eat. But there were other bodily pleasures to be enjoyed—pleasures which were now for the first time being fully revealed to her in all their glory: and one of them was sitting down. The sight of a vacant seat in a corner by the radiator filled her with such a passion of longing that she almost fainted with the fear that someone else might get there first! Through trays and trolleys, and all the detritus of Consumer-Man, she battled her way towards the haven of her desires.
At last! Here she was, her head resting against the dark-green décor, and her legs, throbbing with sheer comfort, stretched
out in front of her under the table. She felt her eyes closing, but it didn’t matter, no one was going to notice. This was a station, wasn’t it, an outpost of the wonderful, anonymous world she had inhabited yesterday? The world of commuters, where hurrying takes the place of existing—“I hurry, therefore I am!” If you aren’t hurrying, then you aren’t existing, and that makes it quite all right to sit with your eyes closed, your damp coat steaming—you can even snore—for a whole afternoon, and never a glazed eye will swivel in your direction, nor a single, screwed-up consciousness detach itself from its inner speedometer for long enough to wonder who you are and why you are so tired.
People came, they sat down opposite her, they ate their buns, looked at their watches, and went: and still Milly slept on, secure in the knowledge that she didn’t exist. A black cat in the dark: white square on white: what an aeroplane looks like out of sight: you can’t get much safer than that.
For two hours Milly slept like the dead, or like the not-yet born; and when she woke, there was an object in front of her so marvellous that for a second she thought she must have died and gone to Heaven. The object was white, and delicately carved; the edges formed a frieze of fantastic beauty and complexity—no, not a frieze exactly; more like petals, petals of a flower, opening out before her, offering itself, in total, smiling friendship.
Milly blinked. Her vision cleared (for one moment she would have said rather that it dulled), and she found herself gazing hungrily at a broken roll, partially buttered, that someone had left to go to waste on a crumb-strewn plate, only a foot away from her.
Milly was amazed. How could things be so easy? No one could call this stealing! She twitched the plate furtively towards her, and as she bit deep into the broken crust, and felt the soft, feather-whiteness of the bread against her teeth, she murmured a soundless prayer, she knew not to what or whom. Already the sense of revelation was fading: induced by starvation, and lowered blood-sugar, the vision was being systematically blotted out, gleam by evanescent gleam, with every delicious mouthful.
Appointment with Yesterday Page 3