All the Beggars Riding

by Lucy Caldwell

  She stays for a glass and a half at the Langham, choking the sharp-sweet sips of fizz back, then slips away when he’s gone to the toilets. Her heart is hammering and her palms sweaty as she hands over the cloakroom ticket. She is angry, furious with herself for feeling this way. It is the moment she realises that she’s devoted more time to thinking about him than any of her past boyfriends, or the lads she occasionally goes out with now. None of them have his charisma: they pale beside him, weedy and insubstantial, and she has stopped enjoying – or pretending to herself she enjoys – the cinema dates, the house parties and home-made punch, the desultory fumbles on piles of smelly coats in spare rooms, or alleyways, or when it’s her night to have the living-room sofa. She has started to think – she hates herself for thinking it, but somehow doesn’t stop it – that he’d know what he was doing. The day she heard, through Jackie at reception, that his wife was having a baby any day now: it was as if someone had punched a hole right through her, and out the other side. She’s hated every minute of this ridiculous drink at the Langham. The opulent chandeliered lounge, a second, third bottle of champagne: it’s grotesque, inappropriate, more than any of them earns in a week, in two weeks. On the bus home she works herself up into a righteous rage. When she tells the story to her flatmates, Lydia laughs and says, You’re completely in love with him. I’m not, she says, taken aback, and Lydia just laughs again. That night, wide awake and miserable, the image flashes into her head: him pinning her down, throwing her around, taking her. This time, she doesn’t stop it. God, she thinks, later, smoking one of Lydia’s stinking Russian cigarettes out of the bathroom window. I bloody am. She splashes water on her face and vows to redouble her efforts at being cold to him.

  A month later, he asks her for a drink after work and she says yes. It’s an awful hour and they talk about nothing, the time flies by thinly and then it’s over. On the pavement outside the pub she bursts into tears and can’t explain it and can’t stop it, either. Just shag him, says Lydia. Get it out of your system. The next time he’s across in London, there’s no drink, no dinner, no pretence. He’s consulting that day, no surgery, and after the last client has left she goes into his room, carrying fresh paper covers for the bed. It’s the first time they’ve been alone all day.

  ‘Drink after work?’ he says. ‘Meet you at the place we went before?’

  The door is ajar, and she can hear the receptionists giggling over something.

  ‘Shall we . . .’ she says, and swallows.

  ‘Have you been OK,’ he says, ‘since the last time, I mean? God, when you left like that . . .’

  The consulting room is just off the main reception. She glances out. She’s got no excuse to be in here. Her heart is pinballing around in her ribcage.

  He lowers his voice. ‘I haven’t stopped thinking about you. Please. Just one drink, that’s all I’m asking.’

  She’s rehearsed the words so many times in her head, over and over at night, and on the bus to work and while she’s meant to be doing other things, like listening to her flatmates’ stories or Lydia’s theories of men, at last weekend’s house party while she kissed someone else whose face she didn’t recognise even five minutes afterwards. Choosing material for a new dress at Liberty’s, material she couldn’t quite justify or afford, fingering it and letting herself imagine him unpeeling her from it. In the bath last night, wasting shillings on the meter for the water, and hoping no one asked what she was doing washing and curling her hair on a Wednesday night.

  ‘God, Jane Moorhouse . . .’ he says, his voice low and rough, and she can’t imagine how she ever found that accent ugly before.

  It’s wrong. She knows it’s wrong, it’s utterly, completely wrong.

  ‘Shall we go back to yours?’ she says. She doesn’t look at him as she says it, and she can feel him start and wonder if he’s heard her right.

  ‘I’ll meet you at the entrance to Regent’s Park,’ she says. ‘By the Park Square Gardens.’

  Then she turns and leaves, quickly, before anything else can be done or undone. Just shag him, lass, and get him out of your system.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he says, as he puts the key into the door of his flat. They’ve barely talked on the journey here – the Tube to Piccadilly, the Tube out west. She’s barely been able to look at him as they shared the same pole, bodies swaying, bumping and not-quite-bumping as the carriage jolts and shudders. The warmth, the solidity, the smell of him close. The hand he touched on the small of her back, as she stepped from the carriage at Earls Court. It sent heat racing, pulsing down her spine and in her pelvis. She’s blanked all thoughts, all else, from her mind, but them, here, now.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, pretending she’s Lydia, Helen, someone who knows what they’re doing. Her experience of sex until now has been with fair-haired junior doctors who come within seconds, apologising. Dates who take a whole film to work up to brushing the edge of her breast or thigh, and can’t meet her eye when the lights go up.

  ‘We don’t have to do this,’ he says as they get into the lift.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ she finds herself saying, and she looks him straight in the eye for the first time and sees him swallow; the flicker of surprise and then desire in the way he looks back at her. So that’s how it works, she thinks, and another rush of heat goes through her.

  She is still in her uniform: a simple, white, fitted dress that buttons down the middle. She wishes she could have changed into her newly made halter dress – from a Vogue pattern, cut tight at the bodice, and low – but one of the others would have seen and teased her, or asked questions; and if she’d gone home first she might never have found the courage to come back out. He moves towards her. They are standing in the living room of his flat, haven’t even made it to the bedroom, haven’t even bothered with a coffee, or a tour around. He unbuttons her from the collar down, sinking to his knees as he gets to her waist. He tugs her tights down over her hips and presses his face to her, and she feels her whole body shudder.

  They fuck there, on the rug, on the living-room floor. He pulls her on top of him and holds her tightly by the waist as she arches back and moves. Then they’re on all fours. Then he flips her over onto her back and raises her legs up, crooks them over his shoulders and bends forward, his whole weight bearing down on her. Again and again he pushes now, urgently inside her. The part of her that loathes herself for what they are doing is gone now and she is desperate for it, for more. She finds herself shouting out, urging him on. Afterwards she feels bruised inside; stinging and tender, torn. She panics and says she has to go. He offers her a shower – coffee – a drink – begging, now – but she says no to all of them. She buttons up her crumpled dress, stuffs on her shoes, tightless, and leaves. The red haze gone, she is disgusted with herself. That’s that, she tells herself. Never again.

  She takes the Friday off sick, and the Saturday, so she won’t have to see him. He phones: the landlady heaves herself up to the half-landing and yells that there’s an Irishman on the phone. She pretends she doesn’t hear: knows the landlady is too fat and lazy to come up the final flight of stairs to see if she’s in. He phoned, she thinks. He found a way of looking up my address and telephone number and he phoned. Something in her ripples with fear.

  What they both thought, then, would be an ending – something finally done, worked out – proves just to tangle and complicate and worsen things more. Something each thought would be sated has in fact been unleashed.

  She swore to herself it wouldn’t happen again, perhaps even believed herself.

  He did, too. Went back to his wife and baby girl and promised himself he’d start again. He’d had affairs before, broken them off before. They’d been desultory, playful flings; essentially meaningless, easy to extricate yourself from. But this – she – is different. He doesn’t understand it.

  Next time he’s in London, it happens again, and then again, and they are having an affair. They tell themselves – and each
other – it’s strictly physical, as if the physical entangling is less important than the emotional. But soon they are having long dinners, spending hours getting slowly drunk in out-of-the-way pubs. It’s spring now, and summer: walks through the rose gardens in Regent’s Park, a picnic in Hyde Park, once – even – boating on the Serpentine. One Sunday, they go to the cinema, like a couple, like any Sunday couple. She starts staying over in his flat, the odd night.

  When he’s away from her, he longs to see her: a longing that’s deep and hollow in his gut, stronger and emptier than cravings that can be cured by sex alone. His wife, his child: even when he’s with them, she’s stronger; even, especially, in absence, in his mind.

  In his absence she’s stronger than him. She promises herself, each time he leaves for Belfast, that this is the last time. And yet it somehow never is.

  The sex is always urgent, as if it is the last time ever, and so they don’t take the care that they should. That autumn, she notices the tender breasts and stomach, the secret new semaphored language of strange twinges and sudden dizziness. The first missed period, the urine sample at the doctor’s, Miss Moorhouse, I’m afraid the test confirms . . . He’s a kindly man, the doctor, with a balding head and milk-bottle-bottom glasses and a slow, precise way of speaking, who offers her his own handkerchief and a chocolate lime from the bowl on his desk. A strange detail to remember, the chocolate lime, but she never forgets it, and she never eats a chocolate lime again; the splintering shards of it, the sickly dry sourness, the way it sticks, undignified, in her teeth as he reaches awkwardly and tries to pat her shoulder: it makes her feel like a child. She tries to explain but it doesn’t come out right; she’s not crying out of sadness, or not just sadness.

  Without thinking it through, she telephones, from a payphone outside the surgery, his hospital, the Royal Victoria on Grosvenor Road, and asks if Mr Connolly could please telephone Miss Moorhouse from the London clinic, he’ll know the number, and no, it’s not an emergency, although it is rather important, thank you ever so much. She replaces the phone in the cradle trembling, realising too late that when he rings the clinic – rings for her – Jackie or Pam will suspect something. Even if he disguises his voice, or pretends to be someone else, they’ll know it’s him: who else with a broad Ulster accent would be calling the clinic? She panics, then. She’d planned to take the morning off work but rushes back in case he phones. They’ve been so careful, up to now, in order that no one at work suspects anything. They carry on in public colder to each other than they were when they were really cold. They don’t banter – she’s come to love that word – and nor does she try and sneak moments alone in his consulting room, as she did in the earliest days. She hasn’t let anything slip to any of the other nurses. She’s made a point of inventing dates, of telling stories of past dates as if they happened last night. Once or twice she’s even gone to the cinema on her own, so that she could report back to them on the plot of the film, and she’s used the names of boys she was at primary school with. She’s used this tactic with her flatmates, too: pretending it was a one-off thing with Patrick, nothing, a one-night fling. She hasn’t fooled Lydia. Lydia narrows her eyes, and although she says nothing, Jane knows there is a rack of black marks against her for not sharing, not confiding, or seeking advice.

  He doesn’t phone back: he’s cannier than her. She waits by the payphone at the bottom of her street, the rain coming down sideways, and he doesn’t ring then, either, not even at their usual time. They have the conversation the following morning in her landlady’s living room with its stench of cats and soup and warm urine: a guarded, coded conversation. It feels like an ending.

  The sense of an ending continues to build through the next week before he’s due over. She feels stupid, wretched. She had let herself wonder, let herself wildly hope. This decides things, then. I’ve meant everything I’ve said when I’ve said I have to be with you. After work she wanders blankly down Regent Street and Oxford Street. There are no Christmas lights this year – the economic climate, the miners’ strike – and the streets feel drab and cheerless. It’s mild, too, unseasonal. Everything feels wrong. She stops letting herself think what she’s thought these last few months, in dark, secret glints; that maybe a baby would force things the other way. She tries not to think of it as a baby, their baby. Sometimes she forces herself to imagine just a seething mass of cells doubling and doubling inside her. An apple pip – a pea – a grape. Not a baby, not their baby. A blackberry clot of swelling, bursting, multiplying cells. Already it’s 1.6 cm and will be 2.3 by the time he’s over. She looks it up in a book in the library. Its hands now bend at the wrist, and its feet are already losing their webbed appearance. Its eyelids cover more of its eyes and taste buds are forming on its tongue. She closes the book, the thick, greasy plastic covers; shoves it back on the shelf. The dry smell of the muffled coughs and carpet dust makes her feel sick. She tells herself it had to end, somehow, some time. She tells herself she’s even looking forward, in a dull sort of way, to the termination. She’s not strong enough – it seems – to end things by herself, or he’s too persuasive, or they mean to and then think: one last time. After this, she’ll have the reason – the excuse – not to see him again. After this, they won’t be able to carry on the way they have been. Because you couldn’t, could you? Knowing it could happen again, knowing that when it came to it, the decision was made the other way. She’s been unhappy – not sleeping, losing weight. Mistresses are elusive, and glamorous, and French. She’s just a shy, foolish Yorkshire girl. She gets ready to say goodbye to him. One of her flatmates knows of a cottage on the Suffolk coast, a loose relation, or family friend, who lets it out in summertime. There’s no central heating, the flatmate warns her, and it’s completely tumbledown. She doesn’t care. They can’t say what they need to say in his flat. There are too many memories there: they need to be away. She arranges to borrow it for the weekend.

  She tries her hardest to be rational, practical, to be stern with herself. She shouldn’t have got into it in the first place. Though that’s no help now. She’s being punished. That’s no help, either. She’s being given a chance to get out of it. That’s the best way of looking at things.

  But then there are the other times, too. The times when she knows that she wants – more than anything – because it’s them – the both of them – and damn the practicalities, and damn the consequences. Lydia – Helen – Jackie and Pam – her parents: they chew through their lives like cows, blinkered carthorses on the plod. She has known extremes of joy and despair beyond any of them, in the last few months. Awoken parts of herself she didn’t know existed. Glimpses into what she, Jane Moorhouse, plain Jane mousy Moorhouse, was capable of doing. It fills her with a wild sort of power, this kind of thinking. She knows he feels the same: he says he does. It’s more than love, it’s need, I need you, Jane.

  She lurches from one way of thinking to the other, one certainty cancelling out its opposite. In the endless week before he arrives, she gets thinner and paler than she’s ever been, burned up from the inside with the need and fear and desire. She can’t be without him. They have to have the baby. How can they have the baby?

  Orford, Suffolk, December 1972

  The garden of the house is walled, and up the lichened, crumbling bricks climb glossy ivy and a type of clematis which is flowering even now, in December, little puffs of rosy-white petals on stark bare stalks. Pots of winter-blossoming jasmine are placed on either side of the back door, slender dark wands bursting into tiny golden stars of flowers, like a magician’s trick caught in action. Once, someone who knew about gardens has loved these plants, chosen and nurtured them, so that there’s life and colour even in the depths of midwinter. The garden is unkempt, though, these days; roses that should have been dead-headed frozen and blackened on the stem; a trellis torn in half and bent under the weight of its wisteria. Damp rotting leaves in mounds. Great drifts of tangled grass and weeds on the pathway, moss on the back step two inches th
ick.

  It is morning; not early morning, perhaps ten or so, eleven. They are sitting, not quite touching, drinking oily coffee from chipped-lip mugs on an old tarpaulin they hauled from the shed. The tarpaulin is streaked with oil, clumped with dried mud, dirt. The rugs they are wrapped in smell of damp and dog. She wore, stupidly, a new plum-coloured jumpsuit, sewn from crushed velvet she bought off Portland Place. The hems of the legs are tattered and stained, unsalvageable, and her platforms are caked with mud from the lane. She has given up caring about her clothes. They’ve hardly slept. All night they held each other and cried and she feels wrung out, turned inside out. The exhaustion and the emotion have made the morning feel strange and new, and she feels light and transparent, as if she’s already passed through the worst that could happen, and now she can start again, and anything’s possible.