‘Nothing.’
They walked past Len Parrish the baker, the dry cleaner’s, the Express Dairy Supermarket, the newsagent’s and post office, the off-licence attached to the Northumberland Arms.
‘There’s that fella,’ Susie Crumm said. ‘Denny Price.’
His head was awkwardly placed on his neck, cocked to one side. His hair was red and long, his face small in the midst of it. He had brown eyes and thick, blubbery lips.
‘Hullo,’ he said.
Susie Crumm giggled.
‘Like a fag?’ he said, holding out a packet of Anchor. ‘Smoke, do you, girls?’
Susie Crumm giggled again, and then abruptly ceased. ‘Oh God!’ she said, her hand stretched out for a cigarette. She was looking over Denny Price’s shoulder at a man in blue denim overalls. The man, seeing her in that moment, sharply called at her to come to him.
‘Stuff him,’ she said before she smiled and obeyed.
‘Her dad,’ said Denny Price, pleased that she had gone. ‘You want a fag, Eleanor?’
She shook her head, walking on. He dropped into step with her.
‘I know your name,’ he said. ‘I asked Liz Jones.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Denny Price. I work in Grimes’.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re at the Comprehensive.’
‘Yes.’
She felt his fingers on her arm, squeezing it just above the elbow. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘Come down by the river, Eleanor.’
She shook her head again and then, quite suddenly, she didn’t care what happened. What harm was there in walking by the river with a boy from Grimes’? She looked at the fingers that were still caressing her arm. All day long they had handled meat; the fingernails were bitten away, the flesh was red from scouring. Wasn’t it silly, like an advertisement, to imagine that a man would come one day to marry her in white lace in a church and take her, Air France, to Biarritz?
‘We’ll take a bus to the bridge,’ he said. ‘A thirty-seven.’
He sat close to her, paying her fare, pressing a cigarette on her. She took it and he lit it for her. His eyes were foxy, she noticed; she could see the desire in them.
‘I saw you a week back,’ he said.
They walked by the river, away from the bridge, along the tow-path. He put his arm around her, squeezing a handful of underclothes and flesh. ‘Let’s sit down here,’ he said.
They sat on the grass, watching barges going by and schoolboys rowing. In the distance traffic moved, gleaming, on the bridge they’d walked from. ‘God,’ he said, ‘you have fantastic breasts.’
His hands were on them and he was pushing her back on to the grass. She felt his lips on her face, and his teeth and his tongue, and saliva. One hand moved down her body. She felt it under her skirt, on the bare flesh of her thigh, and then on her stomach. It was like an animal, a rat gnawing at her, prodding her and poking. There was no one about; he was muttering, his voice thickly slurred. ‘Take down your knickers,’ he said.
She pushed at him and for a moment he released his hold, imagining she was about to undo some of her clothing. Instead she ran away, tearing along the tow-path, saying to herself that if he caught up with her she’d hit him with the briefcase that contained her school books.
But he didn’t follow her and when she looked back he was lying where she had left him, stretched out as though wounded on the grass.
Her father talked of who might come that night to Daisy’s. He mentioned Princess Margaret. Princess Margaret had seen him wrestling, or if it hadn’t been Princess Margaret it had been a face almost identical to hers. The Burtons might come tonight; you never knew when the Burtons were going to pop in.
Her mother placed the fried fish, with chips and peas, in front of him. She never really listened to him when he went on about the night-club because her mind was full of what had happened on Crossroads. She put her cigarette on a saucer on the draining-board, not extinguishing it. She remembered the news items she’d read at breakfast-time and wondered about them all over again.
Tomorrow would be worse, Eleanor thought. Even at this very moment Denny Price’s blubber lips might be relating the incident to Liz Jones, how Eleanor had almost let him and then had drawn back. ‘I went down by the river with a boy,’ she wanted to say. ‘I wanted to get done because it’s the Class 2 fashion. I’m tired of being mocked by Liz Jones.’ She could say it with her eyes cast down, her fork fiddling with a piece of cod on her plate. She wouldn’t have to see the embarrassment in her father’s face, like she’d seen it when she’d asked for money for sanitary towels. Her mother wouldn’t hear at first, but she’d go on saying it, repeating herself until her mother did hear. She longed for the facts to be there in the room, how it disgusted her to imagine her father taking off his uniform in the mornings, and Rogo Pollini doing Dolly Rourke. She wanted to say she’d been disgusted when Denny Price had told her to take down her knickers.
‘Extraordinary, that woman,’ her mother said. ‘Fancy two days stuck in a bath.’
Her father laughed. It could be exaggerated, he said: you couldn’t believe everything you read, not even in the newspapers.
‘Extraordinary,’ her mother murmured.
Her mother was trapped, married to him, obliging him so that she’d receive housekeeping money out of which she could save for her morning glass of gin. He was trapped himself, going out every night in a doorman’s uniform, the Prince of Hackney with a bad back. He crushed her mother because he’d been crushed himself. How could either of them be expected to bother if she spoke of being mocked, and then asked them questions, seeking reassurance?
They wouldn’t know what to say – even if she helped them by explaining that she knew there was no man with delicate hands who’d take her away when the leaves in London were yellow-brown, that there were only the blubber lips of Denny Price and the smell of meat that came off him, and Susie Crumm’s father doing Mrs Rourke, and Liz Jones’s father doing her also, and the West Indian railway porter, and Mr Rourke not aware of a thing. They wouldn’t know what she was talking about if she said that Miss Whitehead had divorced herself from all of it by lying solitary at night in a room in Esher where everything was clean and neat. It was better to be Miss Whitehead than a woman who was a victim of a man’s bad back. In her gleaming room Miss Whitehead was more successful in her pretence than they were in theirs. Miss Whitehead was complete and alone, having discarded what she wished to discard, accepting now that there was no Mr Right.
‘Nice day at school?’ her mother inquired suddenly in her vague manner, as though mistily aware of a duty.
Eleanor looked up from her fish and regarded both of them at once. She smiled, forcing herself to, feeling sorry for them because they were trapped by each other; because for them it was too late to escape to a room in which everything was clean.
The Original Sins of Edward Tripp
Edward Tripp had often noticed Mrs Mayben at her sitting-room window, putting bread on the window-sills for the birds. Her hair was white and she was dressed always in the same way, in several shades of grey. She had, he considered, the kindest face in all Dunfarnham Avenue, and when she saw him she would nod at him in a dignified manner, befitting a woman of her years. He had never rung the bell of Mrs Mayben’s house as he had rung the bells of the other houses; he had never held her in conversation on her doorstep, but he knew that the day would come when his sister would ask him to cross the road and speak to the old woman. Edward was notorious in Dunfarnham Avenue, yet he felt whenever he considered the fact that Mrs Mayben, who kept herself to herself and did not gossip with the other people, was perhaps – just possibly – unaware of his notoriety. He thought, too, that when the time came, when eventually he found himself face to face with Mrs Mayben, he would tell her the truth: he would speak to her bluntly, and Edward guessed that an old woman with Mrs Mayben’s dignity, who was a Christian and who never forgot the birds, would listen to him and would say a word or two of co
mfort. He imagined how things would be after that visit, he himself passing by Mrs Mayben’s house and the truth hanging between them, she nodding with a smile from her window and he giving thanks to God for her understanding heart.
On Sunday August 26th Edward Tripp’s sister, Emily, spoke of Mrs Mayben and Edward knew that on this morning he would hear himself protesting in a familiar way and that in the end he would cross the road to Mrs Mayben’s house.
‘We have watched the neighbourhood go down,’ said Emily. ‘Mrs Mayben was the last who was a decent sort of person. And now she’s gone too. In cold blood.’
Edward, slicing some ham that he had purchased the day before in Lipton’s, had been thinking to himself that the piece of gammon was not as satisfactory as usual: there was, for instance, a certain stringiness and a confusion about the direction of the grain. Before his sister had mentioned Mrs Mayben he had been allowing his thoughts to consider the meat as once it had been, an area of living flesh on the thigh of a pig. He imagined that something might have troubled that pig, some physical disorder that caused it to wriggle and dash about its sty, banging itself against the concrete sides and causing the stringiness to develop in its flesh.
‘In cold blood,’ said Emily again.
Edward looked up and regarded her back. He stared at the blackness of the material of which her long, old-fashioned dress was composed and at the roll of her hair, neat and formal on her neck.
‘No, no,’ said Edward. ‘Not dead, dear. Not dead.’
But his sister nodded, denying his denial, and Edward shook his head with firmness.
‘I remember when she came,’ said Emily. ‘Fourteen years ago. Her husband with her.’
Edward agreed with that. ‘Her husband,’ he said, ‘died in 1955.’
‘Death again,’ murmured Emily, and Edward sighed. His sister was standing by their dining-room window, observing through it the house of Mrs Mayben opposite. Her left hand gripped the grey curtain that had flanked the window for almost thirty years, her right hung limply by her side. Edward guessed what was in her mind and did not care to consider it, since soon, he knew, he would be obliged to consider it whether he wished to or not. Attempting to keep the workings of his sister’s brain at bay, he cut deeply into the ham. The image of the living animal appeared again before him. He said:
‘After lunch why don’t we try to repair the sitting-room carpet? It gets worse, you know. Quite a hole has worn through. It seems a pity.’
‘The carpet?’ said Emily, and Edward added:
‘Father used to talk about that carpet, d’you remember? About its quality. The years have proved him right.’
Emily, continuing to stare through the window, made no comment.
‘It’s lasted a couple of lifetimes,’ Edward said quickly. ‘It’s a shame to let it go.’ His eyes again travelled over his sister’s back, moving upwards, to the roll of her hair. Emily said:
‘There was a man here yesterday. Looking at Mrs Mayben’s windows.’
‘A robber,’ suggested Edward, again slicing the ham, and in an automatic way beginning to feel sick in his stomach. He said, in a slow, low voice, that Mrs Mayben was probably now in church, or else within her house, cooking a simple lunch for herself.
‘She hasn’t been about,’ said Emily. ‘I haven’t seen Mrs Mayben for four days.’
‘I thought I saw her yesterday. I’m sure, you know.’
‘He came,’ said Emily, ‘in a light-blue motor-car. The kind that’s called a tourer, is it? Out of that he stepped at a quarter to four and stood on the pavement gazing up at her house – returning to his scene, God knows. He was indecently dressed, Edward: canvas shoes and light-weight trousers that matched the blue paintwork of his motor-car, and nothing at all where a shirt should have been. He was like a lunatic, I’ll tell you that, walking on the edge of the pavement in the August sunshine, his eyes uplifted to the house. And I said to myself: “There’s evil there”.’
‘Mrs Mayben’s in church,’ repeated Edward, ‘or maybe home already, doing her Sunday chores.’
His sister shook her head. ‘It’s past her time for returning from church. She hasn’t returned today, for I have watched at the window, being worried about her. Mrs Mayben, as well you know, Edward, is by now in two places at once.’
Edward imagined old Mrs Mayben delayed in a traffic jam in the hired car that called for her every Sunday at half past eleven to take her to church. He imagined the chauffeur, the sallow-faced man who always came, with a green peaked cap, apologizing to her about the delay, apologizing about all the traffic, since she was the kind of woman who inspired apology, he imagined. Emily said:
‘You know what I mean, don’t you, when I say she’s in two places at once? In heaven and in some cupboard, Edward; strung to a hook.’
There was a look, Edward knew, that must be there by now in his sister’s eyes as she stared through the glass, ready to inflict her punishment. He thought, as he had thought before on similar occasions, that she was like a woman entering a fit.
‘Now, now,’ said Edward softly.
‘Read the papers,’ cried his sister, turning about to face him and speaking with emotion. ‘A man has killed eight nurses in Chicago.’
‘Oh no,’ began Edward.
‘Prize-fighters turn on their children. Mothers go out with the tide.’
Edward placed the ham knife on the polished mahogany of the dining-room table. Slowly, he raised his eyes to meet his sister’s.
‘An old woman living alone,’ said Emily.
Edward watched her tongue moving over her lips, begining at one corner and returning to it. The tip of her tongue protruded at that corner for a moment and was then withdrawn. Again he raised his eyes to hers and they looked at one another in silence for a while, a brother and a sister who had lived all their lives in this house in Dun-farnham Avenue, Number Seventeen. Edward remembered the past and he knew that his sister was remembering it too. In the past were the children they had been, two other people, a different relationship: a girl thin and tall, four years older than the brother, he a boy who had laughed and had had his way, who had grown to be a man of slight build, permitting a small moustache to accumulate on his upper lip. The house that had been the house of their parents had changed only a little over the years. Wallpaper, the colour of good oatmeal, had hung all over it for three decades, placed there one spring when Emily was fourteen. Large engravings that featured the bridges of London decorated the hall and the stairs, and in dark bookcases, dustless behind glass, were volumes by Sapper, and The Life of a Bengal Lancer, and poems by Austin Dobson, and the collected works of Kipling and Scott. Edward often felt strange in the house now, feeling the present dominated by the past, remembering everything. From her own private flowerbed he had pulled her pansies, roots and all, when he was five years old; and with a pair of scissors he had cut through the centre of the buds of her roses. ‘I have played a trick on you,’ he used to say, sidling close to her. He had given two of her books away to an old woman who came seeking alms at the door. He had lit a fire in a fireplace of her doll’s house, and had been punished because it was, so they said, a dangerous thing to do. He had taken one of her guinea-pigs and put it in her bed, where by mischance it had died. ‘I have played a trick on you’: he had said it repeatedly, bringing out her temper and her tears and running away himself. In middle age Emily was still taller than her brother, and had a hint of beauty about her features that was not reflected in his. Edward had developed a stoop in early manhood, and the child who had been bright with darting mischief became, in his own opinion, a shrimpish creature, fond of the corners of rooms.
On that Sunday morning, August 26th, Emily continued to speak about the man who had loitered in Dunfarnham Avenue in the sunshine. She spoke of the baldness of his head and the evil that she had recognized in the pupils of his eyes. He had worn no shirt, she repeated, emphasizing the fact, and she said again that his shoes, placed over bare feet, had been of light-b
lue canvas, the same colour as his trousers and his car.
Listening to his sister’s voice, Edward prayed in his mind. He prayed that she might turn from the window and walk away from the room, saying that she was going to the kitchen to make mustard, since mustard would be necessary with the ham. But his sister only stood before him, strange and thin as she had been as a child.
‘I wish you could have seen him,’ said Emily. ‘I think I dreamed of him last night. The man is on my mind.’
‘Why not sit down, my dear? Why not rest and try to forget?’ As he spoke, Edward prayed for a day that was to come, a day that God, he felt, had promised him. His sister said:
‘Perhaps on Wednesday night it was, or early on Thursday morning, that he slipped into the old woman’s house to do what he had to do. And in his madness, Edward, he could not resist returning later to the scene of all the violence. I have read of this kind of thing. It has happened with other men.’
‘Come along now –’
‘Not at all unusual,’ said Emily. ‘Criminal history is not being made in Dunfarnham Avenue, if that’s what you’re thinking. He came and acted and returned, as others have in a similar way. D’you understand? D’you follow me?’
What was there to follow? Edward thought. What was there to understand except the facts from the past? – the quiet child of four and the son who was suddenly born in the house and allowed to go his way. The son growing up and his sport becoming the game he played with her, until her days were filled to the brim with his cunning smile and the baby tricks that everyone excused. Wasn’t the simple truth that those cruelties in their thousands had fallen like a blight upon her nature in the end, wrenching some bit of it out of shape, embittering the whole?
When Edward was seventeen their parents had died, one after the other within a month. He remembered still standing at his mother’s funeral, the second funeral of the pair, and seeing on his sister’s face the look that by now he had become familiar with, a look of reproach and sorrow. They had returned together to the dark house with the oatmeal wallpaper and Emily had said: ‘There was a woman in a red coat, Edward. Did you see her? I thought it odd, you know, a woman dressed in red at the grave of another woman.’ Edward had seen no woman in red and had said so at once, but Emily, making tea, had continued about this figure, and then had ceased to make tea and had stood quite still, gazing at him and talking at length, on and on, about the woman. ‘What should we do?’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t we try to find out a thing or two?’ And then, in a moment, she had seemed to forget about the woman and had poured boiling water into a china teapot that both of them had known as a family possession all their lives. Afterwards, in the back garden, Edward had examined in detail his early sins against his sister, and he had closed his eyes and prayed to God. He prayed for forgiveness and he prayed that she in turn might forgive him and he prayed that the damage might not mark her for ever. From the garden, that day, he returned to the house, having found his duty, to live there with her, in that cool and silent place, to keep an eye on her for ever, and to atone as best he might. God had spoken harshly to Edward in the garden, and God had spoken harshly since. Every morning and evening Edward Tripp prayed at length, kneeling by his bed, and during the day he prayed as well, seeing her before him, she who never now walked out into Dunfarnham Avenue, who dressed herself in black and forgot her beauty. No longer children, they were reticent now in what they said one to another; they were polite in their relationship as their thoughts filled the rooms of the house and were not spoken. She played her game in a vengeful way, acting a madness and saying to him in silence that this was the state she should be in, warning him that her bitter nature needed his tenderness. And Edward prayed and often wept, accepting the punishment as his due.
The Collected Stories Page 23