The music of Tchaikovsky gushed over these reflections, as if to soften some harshness in them. But to Valerie there was no harshness in her contemplation of these people’s lives, only fact and a lacing of speculation. The Skullys would go on ageing and he might never turn to his wife and say he was sorry. The O’Neill sisters would lose their beauty and Bewley Joal his vigour. One day Woolmer-Mills would find that he could no longer launch himself on to the balls of his feet. Kilroy would enter a home for the senile. Death would shatter the cotton-wool cosiness of Honor Hitchcock and the Reverend.
She wondered what would happen if she revealed what she had thought, if she told them that in order to keep her melancholy in control she had played about with their lives, seeing them in childhood, visiting them with old age and death. Which of them would seek to stop her while she cited the arrogance of the Professor and the pusillanimity of his wife? She heard her own voice echoing in a silence, telling them finally, in explanation, of the tragedy in her own life.
‘Please all have a jolly Christmas,’ Mrs Skully urged in the hall as scarves and coats were lifted from the hall-stand. ‘Please now.’
‘We shall endeavour,’ Kilroy promised, and the others made similar remarks, wishing Mrs Skully a happy Christmas herself, thanking her and the Professor for the party, Kilroy adding that it had been most enjoyable. There’d be another, the Professor promised, in May.
There was the roar of Ruth Cusper’s motor-cycle, and the overloading of Kilroy’s Mini, and the striding into the night of Bewley Joal, and others making off on bicycles. Valerie walked with Yvonne Smith through the suburban roads. ‘I quite like Joal,’ Yvonne Smith confided, releasing the first burst of her pent-up chatter. ‘He’s all right, isn’t he? Quite nice, really, quite clever. I mean, if you care for a clever kind of person. I mean, I wouldn’t mind going out with him if he asked me.’
Valerie agreed that Bewley Joal was all right if you cared for that kind of person. It was pleasant in the cold night air. It was good that the party was over.
Yvonne Smith said good-night, still chattering about Bewley Joal as she turned into the house where her lodgings were. Valerie walked on alone, a thin shadow in the gloom. Compulsively now, she thought about the party, seeing again the face of Mrs Skully and the Professor’s face and the faces of the others. They formed, like a backdrop in her mind, an assembly as vivid as the tragedy that more grimly visited it. They seemed like the other side of the tragedy, as if she had for the first time managed to peer round a corner. The feeling puzzled her. It was odd to be left with it after the Skullys’ end-of-term party.
In the garden of the hall of residence the fallen leaves were sodden beneath her feet as she crossed a lawn to shorten her journey. The bewilderment she felt lifted a little. She had been wrong to imagine she envied other people their normality and good fortune. She was as she wished to be. She paused in faint moonlight, repeating that to herself and then repeating it again. She did not quite add that the tragedy had made her what she was, that without it she would not possess her reflective introspection, or be sensitive to more than just the time of year. But the thought hovered with her as she moved towards the lights of the house, offering what appeared to be a hint of comfort.
Being Stolen From
‘I mean I’m not like I used to be.’
She had married, Norma continued, she had settled down. A young man, sitting beside her on the sofa, agreed that this was so. He was soberly dressed, jolly of manner, not quite fat. His smiling blue eyes suggested that if Norma had ever been flighty and irresponsible she no longer was, due to the influence he had brought into her life.
‘I mean in a way,’ Norma said, ‘things have changed for you too, Mrs Lacy.’
Bridget became flustered. Ever since childhood she had been embarrassed when she found herself the centre of attention, and even though she was forty-nine now none of that had improved. She was plump and black-haired, her manner affected by her dislike of being in the limelight. It was true that things had changed for her also in the last six years, but how had Norma discovered it? Had neighbours been questioned?
‘Yes, things have changed,’ she said, quite cheerfully because she’d become used to the change.
Norma nodded, and so did her husband. Bridget could tell from their faces that although they might not know the details they certainly knew the truth of the matter. And the details weren’t important because strangers wouldn’t be interested in the countryside of Co. Cork where she and Liam had come from, or in the disappointment of their childless marriage. London had become their home, a small house in a terrace, with the Cork Weekly Examiner to keep them in touch. Liam had found a job in a newsagent’s, the same shop he and the woman now owned between them.
‘Your husband didn’t seem the kind,’ Norma began. ‘I mean, not that I knew him.’
‘No, he didn’t seem like that.’
‘I know what it feels like to be left, Mrs Lacy.’
‘It feels like nothing now.’
She smiled again, but her cheeks had become hot because the conversation was about her. When Norma had phoned a week ago, to ask if they could have a chat, she hadn’t known what to say. It would have been unpleasant simply to say no, nor was there any reason why she should take that attitude, but even so she’d been dreading their visit ever since. She’d felt cross with herself for not managing to explain that Betty could easily be upset, which was why Betty wasn’t in the house that afternoon. It was the first thing she’d said to them when she’d opened the hall door, not knowing if they were expecting to see the child or not. She’d sounded apologetic and was cross with herself for that, too.
All three of them drank tea while they talked. Bridget, who didn’t make cakes because Liam hadn’t liked them and she’d never since got into the way of it, had bought two kinds of biscuits and a Battenburg in Victor Value’s. Alarmed at the last moment in case there wouldn’t be enough and she’d be thought inhospitable, she had buttered some bread and put out a jar of apricot jam. She was glad she had because Norma’s husband made quite a meal of it, taking most of the ginger-snaps and folding the sliced bread into sandwiches. Norma didn’t eat anything.
‘I can’t have another baby, Mrs Lacy. That’s the point, if you get what I mean? Like after Betty I had to have an abortion and then two more, horrible they were, the last one a bit of trouble really. I mean, it left my insides like this.’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry.’
Nodding, as if in gratitude for this sympathy, Norma’s husband reached for a ginger-snap. He said they had a nice flat, and there were other children living near by for Betty to play with. He glanced around the small living-room, which was choked with pieces of furniture and ornaments which Bridget was always resolving to weed out. In what he said, and in the way he looked, there was the implication that this room in a cramped house was an unsuitable habitat for a spirited four-year-old. There was also the implication that Bridget at forty-nine, and without a husband, belonged more naturally among the sacred pictures on the walls than she possibly could in a world of toys and children. It was Betty they had to think of, the young man’s concerned expression insisted; it was Betty’s well-being.
‘We signed the papers at the time.’ Bridget endeavoured, not successfully, to make her protest sound different from an apology. ‘When a baby’s adopted that’s meant to be that.’
Norma’s husband nodded, as if agreeing that that was a reasonable point of view also. Norma said:
‘You were kindness itself to me, Mrs Lacy, you and your husband. Didn’t I say so?’ she added, turning to her companion, who nodded again.
The baby had been born when Norma was nineteen. There’d been an effort on her part to look after it, but within a month she’d found the task impossible. She’d been living at the time in the house across the road from the Lacys’, in a bed-sitting-room. She’d had a bad reputation in the neighbourhood, even reputed to be a prostitute, which wasn’t in fact true. Bridget had alway
s nodded to her in the street, and she’d always smiled back. Remembering all that when Norma had telephoned a day or two ago, Bridget found she had retained an impression of chipped red varnish on the girl’s fingernails and her shrunken whey-white face. There’d been a prettiness about her too, though, and there still was. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she’d said four years ago. ‘I don’t know why I’ve had this kid.’ She’d said it quite out of the blue, crossing the street to where Bridget had paused for a moment on the pavement to change the shopping she was carrying from one hand to the other. ‘I often see you,’ Norma had added, and Bridget, who noticed that she had recently been weeping and indeed looked quite ill, had invited her in for a cup of tea. Once or twice the sound of the baby’s crying had drifted across the street, and of course she’d been quite interested to watch the progress of the pregnancy. Local opinion decreed that the pregnancy was what you’d expect of this girl, but Bridget didn’t easily pass judgement. As Irish people in London, there was a politeness about the Lacys, a reluctance to condemn anyone who was English since they themselves were not. ‘I’ve been a fool about this kid,’ the girl had said: the father had let her down, as simple as that. He’d seemed as steady as a rock, but one night he hadn’t been in the Queen’s Arms and he hadn’t been there the next night either, in fact not ever again.
‘I couldn’t let Betty go,’ Bridget said, her face becoming hot again. ‘I couldn’t possibly. That’s quite out of the question.’
A silence hung in the living-room for a moment. The air seemed heavier and stuffier, and Bridget wanted to open a window but did not. Betty was spending the afternoon with Mrs Haste, who was always good about having her on the rare occasions when it was necessary.
‘No, it’s not a question of letting her go,’ the young man said. ‘No one would think of it like that, Mrs Lacy.’
‘We’d always like her to see you,’ Norma explained. ‘I mean, it stands to reason she’ll have got fond of you.’
The young man again nodded, his features good-humouredly crinkled. There was no question, he repeated, of the relationship between the child and her adoptive mother being broken off. An arrangement that was suitable all round could easily be made, and any offer of babysitting would always be more than welcome. ‘What’s needed, Mrs Lacy, is for mother and child to be together. Now that the circumstances have altered.’
‘It’s two years since my husband left me.’
‘I’m thinking of Norma’s circumstances, Mrs Lacy.’
‘I can’t help wanting her,’ Norma said, her lean cheeks working beneath her make-up. Her legs were crossed, the right one over the left. Her shoes, in soft pale leather, were a lot smarter than the shoes Bridget remembered from the past. So was her navy-blue shirt and her navy-blue corduroy jacket that zipped up the front. Her fingers were marked with nicotine, and Bridget knew she wanted to light a cigarette now, the way she had repeatedly done the first day she’d come to the sitting-room, six years ago.
‘We made it all legal,’ Bridget said, putting into different words what she had stated already. ‘Everything was legal, Norma.’
‘Yes, we do know that,’ the young man replied, still patiently smiling, making her feel foolish. ‘But there’s the human side too, you see. Perhaps more important than legalities.’
He was better educated than Norma, Bridget noticed; and there was an honest decency in his eyes when he referred to the human side. There was justice above the ordinary justice of solicitors’ documents and law courts, his decency insisted: Norma had been the victim of an unfair society and all they could do now was to see that the unfairness should not be perpetuated.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m sorry I can’t see it like that.’
Soon after that the visitors left, leaving behind them the feeling that they and Bridget would naturally be meeting again. She went to collect Betty from Mrs Haste and after tea they settled down to a familiar routine: Betty’s bath and then bed, a few minutes of The Tailor of Gloucester. The rest of the evening stretched emptily ahead, with Dallas on the television, and a cardigan she was knitting. She quite liked Dallas, J.R. in particular, the most villainous TV figure she could think of, but while she watched his villainy now the conversation she’d had with her afternoon visitors kept recurring. Betty’s round face, and the black hair that curved in smoothly on either side of it, appeared in her mind, and there was also the leanness of Norma and the sincerity of the man who wanted to become Betty’s stepfather. The three faces went together as if they belonged, for though Betty’s was differently shaped from the face of the woman who had given birth to her she had the same wide mouth and the same brown eyes.
At half past nine Miss Custle came into the house. She was an oldish woman who worked on the Underground and often had to keep odd hours, some days leaving the house shortly after dawn and on other days not until the late afternoon. ‘Cup of tea, Miss Custle?’ Bridget called out above the noise of the television.
‘Well, thanks, Mrs Lacy,’ Miss Custle replied, as she always did when this invitation came. She had a gas-stove and a sink in her room and did all her cooking there, but whenever Bridget heard her coming in as late as this she offered her a cup of tea. She’d been a lodger in the house ever since the break-up of the marriage, a help in making ends meet.
‘Those people came,’ Bridget said, offering Miss Custle what remained of the ginger-snaps. ‘You know: Norma.’
‘I told you to beware of them. Upset you, did they?’
‘Well, talking about Betty like that. You know, Betty didn’t even have a name when we adopted her. It was we thought of Betty.’
‘You told me.’
Miss Custle was a powerful, grey-haired woman in a London Transport uniform which smelt of other people’s cigarettes. Earlier in her life there’d been a romance with someone else on the Underground, but without warning the man had died. Shocked by the unexpectedness of it, Miss Custle had remained on her own for the next thirty years, and was given to gloom when she recalled the time of her loss. Among her colleagues on the Underground she was known for her gruffness and her devotion to the tasks she had performed for so much of her life. The London Under-ground, she occasionally stated in Bridget’s living-room, had become her life, a substitute for what might have been. But tonight her mood was brisk.
‘When a child’s adopted, Mrs Lacy, there’s no way it can be reversed. As I told you last evening, dear.’
‘Yes, I do know that. I said it to them.’
‘Trying it on, they was.’
With that, Miss Custle rose to her feet and said good-night. She never stayed long when she looked in for a cup of tea and a biscuit because she was usually tired. Her face took on a crumpled look, matching her crumpled uniform. She would iron her uniform before her next turn of duty, taking ages over it.
‘Good-night, Miss Custle,’ Bridget said, observing the weary passage of her lodger across the living-room and wondering just for a moment what the man who’d died had been like. One night, a year or so ago, she had told Miss Custle all about her own loss, not of course that it could be compared with death, although it had felt like it at the time. ‘Horrible type of woman, that is,’ Miss Custle had said.
Bridget cleared up the tea things and unplugged the television lead. She knew she wouldn’t sleep properly: the visit of Norma and her husband had stirred everything up again, forcing her to travel backwards in time, to survey again all she had come to terms with. It was extraordinary that they’d thought she’d even consider handing Betty over to them.
In her bedroom she undressed and tidily arranged her clothes on a chair. She could hear Miss Custle moving about in her room next door, undressing also. Betty had murmured in her sleep when she’d kissed her good-night, and Bridget tried to imagine what life would be like not having Betty there to tuck up last thing, not haying Betty’s belongings about the house, her clothes to wash, toys to pick up. Sometimes Betty made her cross, but that was part of it too.
She lay in the darkness, her mind going back again. In the countryside of Co. Cork she had been one of a family of ten, and Liam had come from a large family also. It had astonished them when years later they had failed to have children of their own, but in no way had the disappointment impaired their marriage; and then Betty’s presence had drawn them even closer together. ‘I’m sorry,’ Liam had said in the end, though, the greatest shock she’d ever had. ‘I’m sorry, dear.’
Bridget had never seen the woman, but had imagined her: younger than she was, a Londoner, black hair like silk, predatory lips, and eyes that looked away from you. This woman and her mother had bought the newsagent’s where Liam had worked for all his years in London, the manager more or less, under old Mr Vanish. The woman had been married before, an unhappy marriage according to Liam, a relationship that had left her wounded. ‘Dear, it’s serious,’ he had said, trying to keep out of his voice a lightness that was natural in it, not realizing that he was opening a wound himself. In everything he said there was the implication that the love he’d felt for Bridget, though in no way false, hadn’t been touched by the same kind of excitement.
The newsagent’s shop was in another neighbourhood, miles across London, but in the days of old Mr Vanish, Bridget would just occasionally take Betty on a number 9 bus. When the woman and her mother took over the business some kind of shyness prevented the continuation of this habit, and after that some kind of fear. She had been ready to forgive Liam, to live in the hope that his infatuation would be washed away by time. She pleaded, but did not make scenes. She didn’t scream at him or parade his treachery, or call the woman names. None of that came easily to Bridget, and all she could wonder was what life would be like if Liam stayed with her and went on loving the woman. It wasn’t hard to imagine the bitterness that would develop in him, the hatred there would be in the end, yet she had continued to plead. Six weeks later he was gone.
The Collected Stories Page 110