Collected Stories

by Beryl Bainbridge

  I went to London and after a day or two Moona rang up my Aunt and asked to speak to me.

  ‘Hallo, flower,’ she said. She calls everyone that. I expect she thinks it’s friendly. ‘Why don’t you come round and talk to me. I’ve got a letter from your Ma and there’s a few things she wants me to ask you about.’ Moona’s got an odd voice, slightly clipped and a bit hoarse. She sounds as if she’s heading for cancer.

  I went round to see her. She lives in a big house in a terrace. The front door has two knockers on it, a plain black one and an ornate tarnished thing made out of brass. It’s one of Moona’s jokes. She always asks if you like her knockers.

  ‘I’m in a bit of a crisis,’ she said, as soon as she saw me. She showed me into the sitting room which has a sofa as old as the hills. When I sat down lots of dust went up to the ceiling. Moona’s all right, really. Every time I’ve ever met her she’s been in a bit of a crisis.

  ‘There’s this man,’ she said. ‘He’s terribly odd. I can’t fathom him at all. First he says he loves me, then he says he doesn’t. He swore he’d come and see me today, but he won’t.’

  I didn’t have to say anything; she wasn’t really talking to me. She kept rubbing the side of her neck with her hand, the one holding her cigarette, as though there was something tied too tightly round her throat. I thought it was probable she might set fire to her hair.

  Suddenly she asked, ‘Have you got a boy-friend? A real one? You can tell me, flower. I won’t breathe a word to your mother.’ I knew she would; she wouldn’t be able to help herself.

  ‘Sort of,’ I told her. I couldn’t figure out what she meant by real.

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  I stared at her and said nothing.

  After a bit, she asked, ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ I said.

  She seemed bothered about something. I helped myself to one of her cigarettes.

  ‘Do you smoke already?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  ‘When I was your age,’ she babbled, ‘I was in love quite badly. He worked for an insurance company. I can even remember his name.’ She couldn’t, not right away. ‘It was Gerald … no, Gerard – Gerard Carr. He was quite old. There was something odd about him. How old is your boyfriend?’

  I said he was nineteen. Actually, that creep William Hornby is only sixteen. He doesn’t even shave.

  ‘I never liked young boys,’ said Moona. ‘It was always some friend of my father’s that I got a crush on. They used to pinch my bottom.’ She laughed quite loudly. ‘What do you talk about?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said. I rested my head against the back of the sofa and closed my eyes. I felt sleepy. She was saying, ‘I suppose it must seem strange to you that someone like your mother should have a friend like me.’

  I didn’t find it strange. I don’t imagine my mother is the person she presents to me. I wasn’t very interested. It’s nothing to do with me.

  Someone came into the room and I heard Moona say, ‘Oh, Bernard, you must meet Katie.’

  I opened my eyes and this large man with brown hair was standing there. I think he wore glasses. Moona told me he was her lodger. She told him that I was the daughter of Agnes, her oldest and dearest friend. ‘Agnes is a wee bit worried about her daughter growing up and all that,’ she said. ‘I do think it’s sad the way the young can’t communicate with their parents. They always turn to those outside the family circle.’ She did look dreary about it; it really seemed to bug her.

  Just then there was a knock at the front door and Moona ran to the mirror and fiddled with her hair and threw her cigarette into the hearth. She suddenly looked stoned out of her mind. ‘Oh, Christ,’ she moaned. ‘It’s him.’ She sort of sank into a heap onto the carpet.

  ‘Steady up,’ said Bernard. He sounded like one of those instructors at a riding school.

  ‘Dear God,’ wailed Moona. She was grinding her teeth and looking up at me. ‘Don’t ever wish,’ she implored, ‘for something very badly when you’re young, because you just might get it when you’re middle-aged.’ I hadn’t a clue what she was going on about.

  Then she clutched Bernard around the ankles and begged him to take me down into the basement. ‘Please talk to Katie,’ she pleaded. ‘I must be alone with him.’

  ‘Right-ho,’ Bernard said, and I followed him downstairs.

  You could hear Moona greeting someone in the hall. Her voice was all breathless as if she’d been running for miles. I supposed it was her odd man calling after all.

  Bernard was pretty odd too. He cooked some food and I lay on his bed and read magazines. Most of them had pictures in them of women without clothes. There was a lot of music and thumping about going on upstairs.

  Two days later Moona telephoned and suggested that I come over for lunch. We had chops and a salad and some bread that Moona said was Greek. ‘How did you get on with Bernard?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘He’s sweet, really. He pays forty-five pound a week for that basement and he’s lovely with it. He was married once, you know, but something went wrong. We’re very close but we’ve never had an affair … isn’t that odd? He’s my best friend.’

  I had thought my mother was her best friend. Possibly Moona has lots of best friends. It’s no skin off my nose.

  ‘Do you know what I did the other day?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Me and this odd man I’m mad about put on records and we danced. Did you hear us jogging about?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry I left you alone with Bernard but I have been a bit unhappy lately and I did want to talk to this man and tell him one or two things.’ She lit herself a cigarette but she didn’t offer me one. ‘I always feel better after I’ve talked things out … don’t you?’ She looked at me and her eyes glittered. Maybe she was feeling weepy. ‘You won’t understand yet,’ she said. ‘You wait until you have children and fall in love.’

  I thought at the time it was a weird thing to say. The children coming first, I mean. Actually, I never think of Moona as having children. They’re always out at discos or gone hop-picking.

  ‘Look here,’ said Moona. ‘Your Ma is a bit worried about you. She doesn’t know how far you’ve gone.’

  I helped myself to one of her cigarettes. She fidgeted and plucked at the skin on her neck. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘have you or haven’t you?’

  I kept quiet.

  ‘You do know what I’m getting at, don’t you?’ she asked.

  I shrugged.

  ‘I can’t think why she didn’t ask you herself,’ said Moona.

  ‘She tried,’ I said.

  ‘And did you tell her the truth?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  I don’t see what it’s got to do with Moona or my mother. I don’t ask them what they do with men. I doubt my mother does anything, seeing she’s got my Dad. Actually, me and William Hornby haven’t done anything either. Nothing to write home about, that is. We used to spend hours in his bedroom listening to records, just sitting there. His hands used to shake when he changed the record. Once he put his hand on my jumper and I punched him. I don’t fancy him any more. He’s shaved his head and he’s got a tattoo on his arm.

  When Moona was washing the dishes she talked a bit more about her man. I didn’t really listen. He’d bought her a book of poems or something. She’d bought a new dress to go out with him later that afternoon. She showed me the dress. I said it was all right. She complained again that she couldn’t fathom her man.

  I lay on her bed while she busied herself getting ready to go out. He was sending a taxi for her. She had a bath and came back wrapped in a blue towel. She looked a hundred years old. The skin at the tops of her arms was all loose. When she was ready she didn’t know what to do with me. ‘I could give you a lift part-way in a taxi,’ she offered.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I told her. ‘I’ll
go and talk to Bernard.’

  When she had gone I looked about for cigarettes but there weren’t any. I read a letter in a drawer from some man who wanted to tweak her nipples. It wasn’t very well written; it was about the same standard as a letter from that creep William Hornby. I went down to the basement.

  ‘Oh, it’s you again,’ said Bernard.

  I lay on his bed and after a time he lay down too. He didn’t touch me; he just lay there with his arms at his sides and his eyes wide open staring at the ceiling. It was raining somewhere. You could hear water trickling down a gutter. There were no traffic noises, no cups rattling, no clocks ticking. It was like being in a cave and as if there were no other people anywhere in the world; as if Bernard wasn’t there either. Just me.

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like him being so quiet. I asked him to give me a cigarette but he shook his head. I don’t know whether he meant he didn’t smoke or that I couldn’t have one. After a while he kissed me. I expected he would. You can generally tell. He was covered in after-shave lotion. William Hornby says that only creeps use aftershave. I thought that maybe, in between kissing me, Bernard might say something. But he didn’t. It spoilt it really. There was a man I met in a cinema once, and another man last Christmas at a party. They asked me questions. They made noises. They wanted to know how old I was and all sorts of different things about me. I never answered them, but at least they asked.

  I didn’t want to stay in the basement with Bernard, not without cigarettes and nobody talking. I said I had to go now.

  ‘Righty-ho,’ he said.

  I didn’t see Moona again. When I went home my mother didn’t have much to say for herself. ‘Moona phoned me,’ she said. ‘I must say I was a bit ashamed. She mentioned you helped yourself to her cigarettes.’

  Fancy Moona noticing that. I don’t suppose Bernard told her anything about me. I feel sorry for both of them. Probably they should talk to someone.

  THROUGH A GLASS BRIGHTLY

  Norman Pearson went to the meeting because his neighbour’s wife, Alison Freely, told him he ought to mix more. He was afraid that Alison’s reference to the meeting was a roundabout way of telling him that he was taking up too much of her time, and instantly said that he had every intention of going, that indeed he had already made inquiries about it long before she had brought up the subject.

  Two years before, his wife had left him for a career woman with a villa in Spain. He had never met the woman, but his wife had cruelly left a photograph of her in the suitcase on top of the wardrobe. He often took down the photograph and studied that unknown face, those eyes that had winked at his wife across a crowded room and spirited her out of his life. In spite of every effort, he had not yet adjusted to being on his own. He had read that single men were in demand at dinner parties and things, but though he had casually let drop, in conversations with colleagues at the office, that he was on the loose, in a manner of speaking, no one had ever taken him up on it, not even to the extent of asking him round for a cup of tea. Last February he had become quite pally with a divorcee in Mount Street – patting her dog, passing the time of day – until she sent him a note complaining about the dilapidation of the party wall at the back of his house. It wasn’t that he objected to sharing the cost of doing something about it, rather that he dreaded some cowboy builder mutilating the rambler rose that he had planted against the wall in happier times. Actually, his wife had planted it; lately, he couldn’t rid himself of the superstitious thought that if the rose didn’t thrive, neither would he. The divorcee was still sending him solicitors’ letters, because of course they were no longer on speaking terms and even the dog ignored him. He had come to the conclusion that if there was a demand for deserted men, men on the loose, then it existed somewhere else, in exotic Islington perhaps, or Hampstead, and had not yet reached East Croydon.

  The meeting was called to discuss arrangements for the Mary Street Carnival, and was held upstairs in the Hare and Hounds. The accountant from No. 111, who owned a typist and a photocopying machine, had sent out the notices. It went without saying that his close friend J. J. Roberts, who was something controversial in the television world, took the chair. Not that people were fighting for the privilege of being that involved; not any more. Mary Street had organised a carnival, in summer, for the past eight years, and those serving on the Committee usually ended up out of pocket. It was a headache trying to recuperate expenses once the Steel Bands and the Inter-Action Groups had muscled in on the occasion. Nor had anyone forgotten the year the Committee, accused of being too middle-class in its attitude, had been persuaded to join forces with the Youth Centre at the end of the street. The youth leader, who was called Sunday and was an ethnic minority, had talked the landlord of the Hare and Hounds into applying for an extended licence. Afterwards, a majority of the residents, particularly those who had suffered broken windows, had protested that it was meant to be a day for the children. There was no denying that the Carnival itself had been a great success, at least until eight o’clock when the Committee were counting the day’s takings in the Church Hall. Then someone shouted out the word ‘Fire!’, and naturally they had all run to see what was up. They only went as far as the door. Even so, when they turned round the cash boxes had simply vanished into thin air. There were the usual reasoned arguments along the lines of shooting being too good for ‘them’, and, send ‘them’ back on the next banana boat, but nothing came of it. The accountant had gone so far as to have notices printed, which were wired to the lamp posts, promising forgiveness all round and pleading for the money to be returned anonymously. Needless to say, he never heard a dicky bird. Since then, the accountant and J. J. Roberts, accompanied by a minder from the Leisure Centre, had gone round the stalls every half hour collecting whatever had accumulated in the cash boxes.

  Carnival Day had evolved out of a desire to beautify the street. The proceeds of that first event had gone towards buying, and subsequently planting, trees along the edges of the pavement. This idea of environmental improvement was abandoned shortly after it was discovered that no one had taken into account the camber of the road. In no time at all the roots of the trees had begun to interfere with the drains, and the Council had to come round and uproot them – it came out of the rates, of course – and stick them back into huge concrete tubs that were an eyesore. Alison Freely had a tub right outside her house, which meant she couldn’t park her car properly. She put poison in the soil and killed off her tree, but the Council said they hadn’t the manpower to remove the tub. Now nobody really knew what the Carnival was in aid of, or indeed what happened to the proceeds. For many it was just an excuse to get rid of worn-out clothing and broken furniture.

  At the meeting, when suggestions were called for, Mrs Riley the architect said what about a competition for a model of the street as it might be in fifty years time.

  ‘Marvellous,’ said J. J. Roberts. ‘Bloody marvellous.’

  Nobody else came up with anything quite as complicated, though the graphic designer from No. 89 attempted to persuade people that it would be a fun thing to paint their balconies in different colours. He said it wouldn’t cost much and urged them to think of those sticks of rock one used to buy at seaside resorts: such colours – such luminous pinks and greens.

  Betty Taylor, whom J. J. Roberts always referred to as Elizabeth Taylor, and who lived in compulsorily purchased property, said that it wasn’t fair on people who didn’t have balconies. A senior citizen, she had recently attended a talk given in the Church Hall by a member of the Women’s Workshop and was becoming increasingly aware of the divisions caused by privilege. She said that if sticks of rock were only going to be distributed to balcony owners, then she would vote against it. The accountant told her that in his opinion balconies gave easy access to thieves, and she should thank her lucky stars she was without one.

  It was then that Norman Pearson remarked that his mother had once been burgled in Streatham. The swine had taken her television set and the tr
ansistor radio but ignored her crystal ball on the mantelpiece. He was astonished at the reaction resulting from this routine, though undoubtedly sad, little tale.

  ‘Fortune telling,’ hissed Mrs Riley. ‘Fortune telling.’ The accountant beat at his thigh with his fist and laughed uncontrollably. ‘Christ,’ exploded J. J. Roberts. ‘How bloody marvellous.’

  The next morning, when they were both emptying rubbish into their respective bins, Alison asked Norman how he had got on at the meeting. He said he had found it stimulating. ‘That show-off Roberts was in charge.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alison said. ‘Many others turn up?’

  ‘One or two,’ he said, and as she was going back into the house, called out, ‘I’m going to tell fortunes.’ But his words were lost in the slamming of her door and he was glad that she hadn’t heard, because he had promised not to tell anybody, so as to be more mysterious on the day.

  He collected the crystal ball from his mother’s a week before the Carnival. She didn’t want to part with it; she said it was valuable. In the end he almost snatched it from her, and was surprised at its weight. Though he looked into it for hours, even after he had drunk three-quarters of a bottle of retsina, he could see nothing within its depths but a milk-white cloud. Irritated, he shook it, as though it was one of those children’s snow-flake scenes encased in glass, but still he saw nothing beyond that impenetrable mist. His own life, he thought, staring gloomily out at the bunting already strung across the street, was becoming equally opaque. Deep down, he blamed his wife, for if she had not been so flighty he would never have been in such a predicament.

  Preparations for the Carnival began at eight o’clock in the morning. They were lucky with the weather, in that it wasn’t actually raining. J. J. Roberts strode up and down in a pair of shorts, chalking lines and circles on the surface of the road, and pointing at the sky. ‘Lots of blue,’ he shouted optimistically, whenever anybody appeared on the balconies. When he saw Norman, he cried out, ‘Looking forward to it, Pearson?’