She had also made attempts to make friends with Mrs Miller. The two of them could even drink together. But Mrs Miller wouldn’t let anyone into her flat and she stank as well in these unmentionable furs, and she went with men who lived in caves. No, Mrs Miller wasn’t respectable, and neither were her friends. She quite liked the Masons, especially John who had driven her to the hospital once or twice when she had her dizzy spells. He looked like an Italian or a Spaniard and had a handsome moustache. Linda she kept at a distance, because she sensed that the latter disapproved of her. John perhaps disapproved of her as well, as his own father was an alcoholic who came to the house and made trouble even when Linda was pregnant. She had heard that John had knocked his own father down.
Sometimes she would get letters of Mr Porter’s by mistake, for the postman was rather careless. She would open the letters without looking at the address. Once she went in and handed Mr Porter a letter addressed to him, which she had inadvertently opened, and he was angry. He didn’t say much but she could tell that he was seething. That bloody woman, he would be thinking to himself. Actually it had been from a magazine and it had been the return of a poem. So that’s to you, old fart, she muttered under her breath. Anyone would think that she wasn’t a human being. Of course she should never have opened the letter, but most gentlemen would have accepted her apology with good grace.
She dreamed that she and Mr Porter would get married and she would be no longer on her own. She would move into his flat which was much bigger than her own. Maybe some day Mr Porter would become famous and she would travel with him all over the world. But she didn’t think that he would become famous, not like Catherine Cookson. Still she would not be alone. Loneliness was a disease, worse than a disease, it was a living death. It ate into one. Nights she thought that she would scream out loud. She felt imprisoned, in solitary confinement. She had been sentenced and condemned by an invincible destiny which was laughing at her. Maybe she ought to go to church but she didn’t want to do that. She couldn’t remember when she had been in church last and she didn’t like the thought of it. It was an affair of stained glass windows, middle-aged women with hymn books, a silly minister and a cross. The church hadn’t helped her when Alex died. No one had helped her then, no one. She had stared down at his cold tranquil scholarly face which was as if carved from stone. She hardly recognized him, he looked so boyish, so austere. Her brother had to organize the funeral for her. She remembered the undertaker, very correct in his black tie and black jacket. He had been in his own way a very humane man, had even tried to tell jokes. He had told her a joke about a worker of his who had been hit by the fist of a corpse jerking into rigor mortis.
“What did you do that for?” the worker had shouted, “I didn’t do anything to you.” He had been trying to calm her down for she was in hysterics. She had thought that the end of the world had come, that she would never recover. It had taken all her strength to sell the hotel and move into this flat which she now didn’t like. But she didn’t want to move again. There were no children here, there was an air of decay, people had come to their last resting place, it was like a grave.
“I didn’t notice that address,” she said to Mr Porter. But he had stared at her and taken that letter without a word. Later, she had passed him on the stair and he had ignored her. Once he had locked himself out, he wasn’t very practical. Strangely enough she hadn’t done that yet, though she probably would. It was her husband who had filled in the forms to do with the hotel and dealt with the accounts. When he died she found that she didn’t understand what was happening. While she was having her affairs he had been shoring up the place. The lawyer, however, with whom she had slept many years before, had kept her right. Monstrous. She had been a monster. But she had always had a strong sexual drive and he hadn’t. He always thought sex dirty. He preferred his books.
It was awful being in a single bed night after night especially in summer, when the tenement was really hot. Below her window she could hear the voices of lovers as they strolled past and, with a bitterness that she could not believe possible, they reminded her of her lost youth. She would flutter about the flat in her nightgown like a lost butterfly blinded by light, beating against an invisible panel of glass. The broken narratives she heard intrigued her, excited her.
One night when she was drunk she had rung the bell of Mr Porter’s door (his wife’s name had been removed).
“I wanted to tell you,” she said, “that your wife was a very unhappy woman.”
“Is that all you wanted to tell me,” he said.
“You think you’re better than me. But she told me you used to have trouble with your classes.”
“Oh?”
“We used to have coffee together. You didn’t know about that, did you? She told me that you and your son didn’t get on.”
All she could see was a tightening of Mr Porter’s lips. The poison poured out of her, but she couldn’t stop herself.
“He never comes to see you,” she said.
“He was here about a week ago,” said Mr Porter, “if it interests you.”
At least this drunken aggressive conversation was better than silence.
“She told me he never came to see you. You weren’t on the same wavelength,” she said. And Mrs Floss swayed in the lobby, almost falling down.
“And another thing, I asked my boys. They didn’t like you in the school.”
Mr Porter said nothing, but slammed the door in her face. She was about to strike on it with her naked fist, but decided against it. God damn him, who did he think he was with his air of superiority! Were we not all human? The door was a flat wooden wall. The holes where the nails had been for the nameplates showing Mrs Porter’s name winked at her in the light. She nearly screamed at him, “You old bastard”. But there was a deep silence everywhere.
When she went back in she lay on her bed and wept. What sort of woman was she becoming? She hated herself. Alex, Alex, she cried, beating on the pillow with her fists. But there was no answer. Alex was dead. Everyone was dead. Only she was alive. Alex was happy, she was not.
But there was one thing that unlike Mrs Miller she wouldn’t do. She would never go into the town on her own and drink. If she drank she drank in the house. She had enough pride and dignity to do that.
One day a Jehovah’s Witness came to the door. He was a middle-aged man and he worked on the roads.
“Are you saved?” he asked her. She didn’t know what to say. He kept her talking for more than an hour. She had invited him in but he wouldn’t come in. He referred to texts from the Bible, naming them by chapter and verse. He really must be a clever man, though he only worked on the roads. He was most eloquent and sometimes seemed to speak with a voice that was not his own. She had seen him drinking tea by himself in the station buffet.
“If we are not saved by Jesus, what are we?” he said. “Some people think we come from apes, that’s what they call the Darwinian theory, but no one can believe that really. We were created by God in his own image in the Garden of Eden, see Genesis. Don’t you believe that?”
“What can we do about loneliness?” she asked him. His eyes shifted. “Put yourself in the hands of God,” he said. “That is all we can do.” Eventually on his sixth visit he did come into the house and they had a gin. “Not, mind you, that I’m a drinker but a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.”
She looked forward to his visits. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk to her. He brought her a Watchtower which she used for lighting the fire, though the paper wasn’t all that good quality.
She knew that he was from the town and that he knew all about her previous history. He could have known Alex too. Latterly Alex would sit by the fire watching TV. The first stroke had only affected his legs, not his speech. One night he had started to cry helplessly and couldn’t stop himself. It had been awful, appalling.
“You’re married?” she said to the Jehovah’s Witness.
“Yes, happily married. Th
e condition of wedlock is a blessed one. Without a companion what are we in this world? But Jesus too is our wife, our husband, Jesus too helps us as a spouse would, more than a spouse would.”
“Does he wash the dishes?” she nearly asked him.
He was a funny man. He was a roadsweeper, she had seen him on the street in the early morning with his brush and his metal cart.
One night when she was drunk she shouted at him, “All you come here for is my money. You’re an old hypocrite. My son told me about you. He takes drugs and has been to India. I wanted him to become a lawyer, but he didn’t want to. First of all he drove a taxi and then he got a girl into trouble. I can’t do anything with him. But he told me about you. You used to drink a lot yourself.”
“That is indeed true. I was an alcoholic, but I found the Lord. He showed me the correct path. You should do the same.” His voice was insufferably mild like Alex’s: nothing she said to him offended him.
“Money is everything,” she said. “If I was poor I would be even worse off. I wouldn’t have a flat. I know that.”
“God said that the meek shall inherit the earth. Look what happened to Dives, the rich man.” He spoke like a clock that had been wound up. Like one of those robots that she had once bought Stewart for a toy.
Eventually she slammed the door in his face, and drank a huge glass of vodka. He never came again. And when she passed him in the road, he would bow his head like Jesus on the cross.
Tinkers, too, would come to the door asking for rags, and she would give them good clothes. A tramp came and asked her if she wanted any knives or other instruments sharpened. Apart from that she had few visitors.
She used to watch the TV a lot, but she had gone off that too. She became fed up with Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies. The only films she really liked were horror ones but as they were on late at night and she was alone in the house, she thought twice about watching them. She had to take a lot of drink to tolerate the fear, but the difficulty was that then she couldn’t see the screen very well. One of the horror films really terrified her. It was about a couple touring in a caravan who found themselves the victims of a Black Mass ceremony. Even the local minister was involved. The caravan was eventually ringed with mad addicts of the devil, while the faces of the man and wife looked out pale as chalk, as paper. That night she had an awful dream. Alex’s face was peering out of a caravan which was going on fire. Alex had been cremated, that was what he had wanted. She herself would be buried. Alex’s face was burning, the flesh was melting on it, and she was shouting as the curtains hissed and crackled. “We’ll go bankrupt. The tourists are bringing their own caravans.” It seemed to her that the tenement was full of voices, clawed hands reached for her. Bony fingers. Oh, God, I can’t bear any more, she would say, putting her fingers in her ears. But she did bear more and more. She had to. In the mornings she slept late. In the light of day, the world didn’t look so bad. She went to Barrets’ and ordered a new sideboard.
Her world would be like this for ever. She would pay for her sins, deceiving Alex. Her friends had been hypocritical, they had been waiting patiently for her downfall. The day that Alex had been cremated was in April. The ground flickered with shadow and light. The coffin slid into an inferno of flame. He winked at her, holding a book in his hand. The book burned leaf by leaf. And his face became vague as he, burning, read the burning book.
“Please give this to the baby,” she said to Linda one day. It was a beautiful white shawl which she had been given for Stewart, her first born. “Please take it.”
“Yes,” said Linda, “thank you. How beautiful, how really beautiful. Thank you very much.” TREVOR STUDIED THE diary day after day. It went back to his time in the war. It talked of his father, but not him, playing with Robin.
“My jealousy is great,” she wrote at one point. “Why is that?” She was referring to one night when that woman Lydia Lawson had visited them.
“You talked about education all night,” she had said to Trevor. “You never referred to me. Of course I was only a secretary. Is that it?”
“It never occurred to me that you felt like that,” said Trevor. As usual he was helpless before her. Her mind was keener, quicker than his. He had met her in his first school. She was young, fresh, enthusiastic. She had come to Scotland because she had read about the country as a girl and also, if the truth be told, to set some distance between herself and her mother. But latterly she began to miss Devon. She and Robin would sometimes go to the farm on holiday. The ducks with their proud red masks would strut past them: the hens would pick at the corn: and the pigs wallowed in a great grey ocean of their own. Trevor thought that perhaps he should apply for a small undemanding school in Devon. But he knew that he would miss the city, the town: he was an urbanite by nature.
All these days he had underestimated Julia. Because he was a poet he had thought her in some way inferior: he was an unconscious élitist. But in fact she was more intelligent than him, more acute in seizing the essentials of a practical problem and solving it. And now he was discovering her secret life that had been hidden from him.
Love, what was it? Often at night she would say, “Do you love me?” And he had never been able to say the words. Why was that? Some deep instinct, spare and Puritan, had kept his lips shut. And yet he had loved his wife. Now he knew it. She had held his life together. And she had been so brave at the end, keeping from him exactly what was wrong with her, though of course he suspected. “Are you in pain?” he would say to her.
“No, I’m not in pain.” And yet she must have been. The crab had been gnawing at her. The outlaw restless cells had been proliferating.
She had bought a lot of plants for the house. These were her substitute for a garden. She was more superstitious than him, and had even spoken to the plants. She had a strange theory about the afterlife: she didn’t believe that either of them would die. She believed that when Jesus said, “In my father’s house are many mansions”, he had meant that the mansions were planets, arranged in a special order. To the best planets the perfected spirits migrated. Trevor himself had no belief in an afterlife. On the contrary, he believed that, when one died, that was the end. He would never meet Julia again. And this bothered him; and made him feel an ultimate desolation.
I am Robinson Crusoe on his island, he thought. There is desert, sand, all about me. I have to begin again, rebuild. He began to paint the walls and the doors and the sills of the windows and the ceilings. He bought huge cans of green paint. He wanted to start again but something was preventing him. The Camerons haunted him. He felt he should have confronted Cameron while Julia was still alive. But he had been too frightened. Now, he didn’t want to move because he felt that by doing so he would have taken advantage of Julia. He must suffer like her, to the end.
“You should do something about Mrs Cameron,” Julia had often said to him.
“What can I do? It’s none of our business. Even the police won’t interfere unless she charges him.”
“But she won’t do it. Where can she go?”
“Well, I can’t do anything about it.”
He had cringed away from all decisions, leaving them in the end to her. At times he felt that he should leave the flat and go on some sort of tour. At other times he was tempted to drink heavily. But he did neither of these things. On the contrary he spent part of his time in doing crosswords, puzzles. He remembered their Sundays together when he would tackle the Azed crossword in the Observer.
“Is there a word ‘pavis’?” he would say. “It means a shield for the whole body.”
“How should I know,” she would say, looking up from her knitting.
And then again, “Is there a word ‘paxwax’?” Then he would say, “This is a brilliant man, Azed.” And she would answer without looking up from her knitting (she was always knitting things for her grand-daughter), “You’re only saying that because you’ve solved the crossword.” He would spend hours on the Azed crossword as if it was the most imp
ortant thing in the world. But he would never try to solve the puzzles presented by their daily lives.
One day they had stood at the window watching a wedding. The bride was in white and her husband stood beside her. The photographer was bending down as if about to shoot. The taxi, like a hearse loaded with flowers, was ready. Tired women stood at the wall staring at the bride with envious eyes. That too had been the greatest day of their lives, the only day when they had been the centre of attention. The wind blew the bride’s gown about. The husband nearly always had a suit that didn’t quite fit him. The minister held up a benevolent hand. Julia loved weddings, christenings. She had looked forward with so much eagerness to the birth of their grandchild: Trevor hadn’t. He hadn’t realized how much the birth had meant to her. But then his son was in Cambridge, and he was here.
Robin came to visit him again and they had a cup of coffee, in the huge kitchen, out of two mugs, one of which had Taurus inscribed on it, the other Capricorn. (Capricorn was the goat who lived frugally, was determined to attain its purpose, was mean and persistent. Taurus was the fleshly one who loved comfort, the sensual flesh.)
“Everything okay?” said Robin again. It was clear that he was visiting his father from a sense of duty and would rather have been elsewhere.
“Fine,” said Trevor. They drank their coffee in silence. Trevor didn’t want to talk about intimate family things. He asked his son about computers: would they take over from men? Did they have a single-minded evil intelligence? Would they be able to write King Lear?
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