‘Liam, could I have a word?’
The old woman appeared to be asleep. She hadn’t moved when Bridget had spoken. She was wearing a hat, and seemed a bit eccentric, sleeping there among the bundles of magazines.
‘Of course you could, dear. How are you, Bridget?’
‘I’m fine, Liam. And yourself?’
‘I’m fine too, dear.’
She told him quickly. Customers hurried in for the Evening Standard or Dalton’s Weekly, children paused on their way home from school. Liam looked for rubbers and ink cartridges, Yorkie bars and tubes of fruit pastilles. Twice he said that the New Musical Express didn’t come out till Thursday. ‘Extraordinary, how some of them forget that,’ he said.
He listened to her carefully, picking up the thread of what she told him after each interruption. Because once they’d known one another so well, she mentioned the intuition she felt where Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle were concerned. She watched the expressions changing on his face, and she could feel him nodding inwardly: she felt him thinking that she was the same as she’d always been, nervous where other people were concerned, too modest and unsure of herself.
‘I’ll never forget how pretty you looked,’ he said suddenly, and for no reason that Bridget could see. ‘Wasn’t everything great long ago, Bridie?’
‘It’s Betty we have to think of, Liam. The old days are over and done with.’
‘I often go back to them. I’ll never forget them, dear.’
He was trying to be nice, but it seemed to Bridget that he was saying she still belonged to the time he spoke of, that she had not managed to come to terms with life as it had been since. You had to be tougher to come to terms with a world that was tough itself, you had to get over being embarrassed when you were pulled out of the background. All that hadn’t mattered long ago; when Emir Ryall had stolen her atlas she hadn’t even complained. Being stolen from, she suddenly thought.
‘I don’t know what to say to them,’ she said. ‘The man keeps telephoning me.’
‘Tell him to leave you alone, Bridget. Tell him he has no business bothering you.’
‘I’ve tried saying that.’
‘Tell him the thing was legally done and he hasn’t a foot to stand on. Tell him he can be up for harassment.’
A child came into the shop and Liam had to look for drawing-pins. ‘I’m afraid I have to shut up now,’ he said when the child had gone, and as he spoke the old woman in the armchair stirred. She spoke his name. She said she’d fancy peaches for tea. ‘There’s a tin set aside for you, dear,’ Liam said, winking at Bridget. He had raised his voice to address the old woman. He lowered it again to say goodbye. ‘The best of luck with it,’ he said, and Bridget knew he meant it.
‘Thanks, Liam.’ She tried to smile, and realized that she hadn’t repeated the young man’s remarks about Betty being brought up in a hostile atmosphere. She almost did so, standing at the door of the shop, imagining Liam angrily saying that the man needed putting in his place and offering to meet him. But as she walked away she knew all that was make-believe. Liam had his own life to live, peaches and a sort of mother-in-law. He couldn’t be blamed for only wishing her luck.
She collected Betty from Mrs Haste and later in the evening, when she was watching television, the telephone rang. The young man said:
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lacy, I didn’t mean to bring up that thing about your nationality. It’s not your fault, Mrs Lacy, and please forget I mentioned it. I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t telephone me again. That’s all I ask. I’ve given you the only answer I can.’
‘I know you have, Mrs Lacy. You’ve been kind to listen to me, and I know you’re concerned for Norma, don’t think I’m not aware of that. I love Norma, Mrs Lacy, which has made me a little unprofessional in my conversations with you, but I promise we’ll neither of us bother you again. It was just that she felt she’d made a terrible mistake and all the poor thing wanted was to rectify it. But as my work so often shows me, Mrs Lacy, that is hardly ever possible. Are you there, Mrs Lacy?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘I’ll never stop loving Norma, Mrs Lacy. I promise you that also. No matter what happens to her now.’
She sat alone in her living-room watching the ten o’clock news, and when she heard Miss Custle in the hall she didn’t offer her a cup of tea. Instead of Betty’s rattling feet on the stairs there would be Miss Custle’s aged panting as she propelled her bulk to her upstairs room. Instead of Betty’s wondering questions there would be Miss Custle’s gloom as still she mourned her long departed lover.
The television news came to an end, an advertisement for Australian margarine began. Soon after that the programmes ceased altogether, but Bridget continued to sit in her living-room, weeping without making a noise. Several times she went upstairs and stood with the light on by Betty’s bed, gazing at the child, not wiping away her tears. For Betty’s well-being, and for Norma’s too, in all humanity the law would be reversed. No longer would she search the faces of Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle for the signs of what they really believed. They would put that into words by saying she was good and had courage.
In the countryside of long ago her failure in marriage and motherhood might be easier to bear, but she would be a stranger there now. She belonged among her accumulated odds and ends, as Betty belonged with her mother, and Liam with the woman he loved. She would look after Miss Custle when Miss Custle retired from the Underground, as fate dictated.
Mr Tennyson
He had, romantically, a bad reputation. He had a wife and several children. His carry-on with Sarah Spence was a legend among a generation of girls, and the story was that none of it had stopped with Sarah Spence. His old red Ford Escort had been reported drawn up in quiet lay-bys; often he spent weekends away from home; Annie Green had come across him going somewhere on a train once, alone and morose in the buffet car. Nobody’s parents were aware of the facts about him, nor were the other staff, nor even the boys at the school. His carry-on with Sarah Spence, and coming across him or his car, made a little tapestry of secrets that suddenly was yours when you became fifteen and a senior, a member of 2A. For the rest of your time at Foxton Comprehensive – for the rest of your life, preferably – you didn’t breathe a word to people whose business it wasn’t.
It was understandable when you looked at him that parents and staff didn’t guess. It was also understandable that his activities were protected by the senior girls. He was forty years old. He had dark hair with a little grey in it, and a face that was boyish – like a French boy’s, someone had once said, and the description had stuck, often to be repeated. There was a kind of ragamuffin innocence about his eyes. The cast of his lips suggested a melancholy nature and his smile, when it came, had sadness in it too. His name was Mr Tennyson. His subject was English.
Jenny, arriving one September in 2A, learnt all about him. She remembered Sarah Spence, a girl at the top of the school when she had been at the bottom, tall and beautiful. He carried on because he was unhappily married, she was informed. Consider where he lived even: trapped in a tiny gate-lodge on the Ilminster road because he couldn’t afford anything better, trapped with a wife and children when he deserved freedom. Would he one day publish poetry as profound as his famous namesake’s, though of course more up-to-date? Or was his talent lost for ever? One way or the other he was made for love.
It seemed to Jenny that the girls of 2A eyed one another, wondering which among them would become a successor to Sarah Spence. They eyed the older girls, of Class 1, 1A and 1B, wondering which of them was already her successor, discreetly taking her place in the red Ford Escort on dusky afternoons. He would never be coarse, you couldn’t imagine coarseness in him. He’d never try anything unpleasant, he’d never in a million years fumble at you. He’d just be there, being himself, smelling faintly of fresh tobacco, the fingers of a hand perhaps brushing your arm by accident.
‘Within the
play,’ he suggested in his soft voice, almost a whisper, ‘order is represented by the royal house of Scotland. We must try and remember Shakespeare’s point of view, how Shakespeare saw these things.’
They were studying Macbeth and Huckleberry Finn with him, but when he talked about Shakespeare it seemed more natural and suited to him than when he talked about Mark Twain.
‘On Duncan’s death,’ he said, ‘should the natural order continue, his son Malcolm would become king. Already Duncan has indicated – by making Malcolm Prince of Cumberland – that he considers him capable of ruling.’
Jenny had pale fair hair, the colour of ripened wheat. It fell from a divide at the centre of her head, two straight lines on either side of a thin face. Her eyes were large and of a faded blue. She was lanky, with legs she considered to be too long but which her mother said she’d be thankful for one day.
‘Disruption is everywhere, remember,’ he said. ‘Disruption in nature as well as in the royal house. Shakespeare insinuates a comparison between what is happening in human terms and in terms of nature. On the night of Duncan’s death there is a sudden storm in which chimneys are blown off and houses shaken. Mysterious screams are heard. Horses go wild. A falcon is killed by a mousing owl.’
Listening to him, it seemed to Jenny that she could listen for ever, no matter what he said. At night, lying in bed with her eyes closed, she delighted in leisurely fantasies, of having breakfast with him and ironing his clothes, of walking beside him on a seashore or sitting beside him in his old Ford Escort. There was a particular story she repeated to herself: that she was on the promenade at Lyme Regis and that he came up to her and asked her if she’d like to go for a walk. They walked up to the cliffs and then along the cliff-path, and everything was different from Foxton Comprehensive because they were alone together. His wife and he had been divorced, he told her, having agreed between themselves that they were incompatible. He was leaving Foxton Comprehensive because a play he’d written was going to be done on the radio and another one on the London stage. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, daring to say it. ‘Oh, Jenny,’ he said.
Terms and holidays went by. Once, just before the Easter of that year, she met him with his wife, shopping in the International Stores in Ilminster. They had two of their four children with them, little boys with freckles. His wife had freckles also. She was a woman like a sack of something, Jenny considered, with thick, unhealthy-looking legs. He was pushing a trolley full of breakfast cereals and wrapped bread, and tins. Although he didn’t speak to her or even appear to see her, it was a stroke of luck to come across him in the town because he didn’t often come into the village. Foxton had only half a dozen shops and the Bow and Arrow public house even though it was enormous, a sprawling dormitory village that had had the new Comprehensive added to all the other new building in 1969. Because of the position of the Tennysons’ gate-lodge it was clearly more convenient for them to shop in Ilminster.
‘Hullo, Mr Tennyson,’ she said in the International Stores, and he turned and looked at her. He nodded and smiled.
Jenny moved into 1A at the end of that school year. She wondered if he’d noticed how her breasts had become bigger during the time she’d been in 2A, and how her complexion had definitely improved. Her breasts were quite presentable now, which was a relief because she’d had a fear that they weren’t going to develop at all. She wondered if he’d noticed her Green Magic eye-shadow. Everyone said it suited her, except her father, who always blew up over things like that. Once she heard one of the new kids saying she was the prettiest girl in the school. Adam Swann and Chinny Martin from 1B kept hanging about, trying to chat her up. Chinny Martin even wrote her notes.
‘You’re mooning,’ her father said. ‘You don’t take a pick of notice these days.’
‘Exams,’ her mother hastily interjected and afterwards, when Jenny was out of the room, quite sharply reminded her husband that adolescence was a difficult time for girls. It was best not to remark on things.
‘I didn’t mean a criticism, Ellie,’ Jenny’s father protested, aggrieved.
‘They take it as a criticism. Every word. They’re edgy, see.’
He sighed. He was a painter and decorator, with his own business. Jenny was their only child. There’d been four miscarriages, all of which might have been boys, which naturally were what he’d wanted, with the business. He’d have to sell it one day, but it didn’t matter all that much when you thought about it. Having miscarriages was worse than selling a business, more depressing really. A woman’s lot was harder than a man’s, he’d decided long ago.
‘Broody,’ his wife diagnosed. ‘Just normal broody. She’ll see her way through it.’
Every evening her parents sat in their clean, neat sitting-room watching television. Her mother made tea at nine o’clock because it was nice to have a cup with the news. She always called upstairs to Jenny, but Jenny never wanted to have tea or see the news. She did her homework in her bedroom, a small room that was clean and neat also, with a pebbly cream wallpaper expertly hung by her father. At half past ten she usually went down to the kitchen and made herself some Ovaltine. She drank it at the table with the cat, Tinkle, on her lap. Her mother usually came in with the tea things to wash up, and they might chat, the conversation consisting mainly of gossip from Foxton Comprehensive, although never of course containing a reference to Mr Tennyson. Sometimes Jenny didn’t feel like chatting and wouldn’t, feigning sleepiness. If she sat there long enough her father would come in to fetch himself a cup of water because he always liked to have one near him in the night. He couldn’t help glancing at her eye-shadow when he said good-night and she could see him making an effort not to mention it, having doubtless been told not to by her mother. They did their best. She liked them very much. She loved them, she supposed.
But not in the way she loved Mr Tennyson. ‘Robert Tennyson,’ she murmured to herself in bed. ‘Oh, Robert dear.’ Softly his lips were there, and the smell of fresh tobacco made her swoon, forcing her to close her eyes. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, yes.’ He lifted the dress over her head. His hands were taut, charged with their shared passion. ‘My love,’ he said in his soft voice, almost a whisper. Every night before she went to sleep his was the face that entirely filled her mind. Had it once not been there she would have thought herself faithless. And every morning, in a ceremonial way, she conjured it up again, first thing, pride of place.
Coming out of Harper’s the newsagent’s one Saturday afternoon, she found waiting for her, not Mr Tennyson, but Chinny Martin, with his motor-cycle on its pedestal in the street. He asked her if she’d like to go for a spin into the country and offered to supply her with a crash helmet. He was wearing a crash helmet himself, a bulbous red object with a peak and a windshield that fitted over his eyes. He was also wearing heavy plastic gloves, red also, and a red windcheater. He was smiling at her, the spots on his pronounced chin more noticeable after exposure to the weather on his motor-cycle. His eyes were serious, closely fixed on hers.
She shook her head at him. There was hardly anything she’d have disliked more than a ride into the country with Chinny Martin, her arms half round his waist, a borrowed crash helmet making her feel silly. He’d stop the motor-cycle in a suitable place and he’d suggest something like a walk to the river or to some old ruin or into a wood. He’d suggest sitting down and then he’d begin to fumble at her, and his chin would be sticking into her face, cold and unpleasant. His fingernails would be ingrained, as the fingernails of boys who owned motor-cycles always were.
‘Thanks all the same,’ she said.
‘Come on, Jenny.’
‘No, I’m busy. Honestly. I’m working at home.’
It couldn’t have been pleasant, being called Chinny just because you had a jutting chin. Nicknames were horrible: there was a boy called Nut Adams and another called Wet Small and a girl called Kisses. Chinny Martin’s name was Clive, but she’d never heard anyone calling him that. She felt sorry for him, standin
g there in his crash helmet and his special clothes. He’d probably planned it all, working it out that she’d be impressed by his gear and his motor-cycle. But of course she wasn’t. Yamaha it said on the petrol tank of the motor-cycle, and there was a girl in a swimsuit which he had presumably stuck on to the tank himself. The girl’s swimsuit was yellow and so was her hair, which was streaming out behind her, as if caught in a wind. The petrol tank was black.
‘Jenny,’ he said, lowering his voice so that it became almost croaky. ‘Listen, Jenny –’
‘Sorry.’
She began to walk away, up the village street, but he walked beside her, pushing the Yamaha.
‘I love you, Jenny,’ he said.
She laughed because she felt embarrassed.
‘I can’t bear not seeing you, Jenny.’
‘Oh, well-’
‘Jenny.’
They were passing the petrol-pumps, the Orchard Garage. Mr Batten was on the pavement, wiping oil from his hands with a rag. ‘How’s he running?’ he called out to Chinny Martin, referring to the Yamaha, but Chinny Martin ignored the question.
‘I think of you all the time, Jenny.’
‘Oh, Clive, don’t be silly.’ She felt silly herself, calling him by his proper name.
‘D’you like me, Jenny?’
‘Of course I like you.’ She smiled at him, trying to cover up the lie: she didn’t particularly like him, she didn’t particularly not. She just felt sorry for him, with his noticeable chin and the nickname it had given him. His father worked in the powdered-milk factory. He’d do the same: you could guess that all too easily.
‘Come for a ride with me, Jenny.’
‘No, honestly.’
‘Why not then?’
‘It’s better not to start anything, Clive. Look, don’t write me notes.’
‘Don’t you like my notes?’
‘I don’t want to start anything.’
‘There’s someone else is there, Jenny? Adam Swann? Rick Hayes?’
The Collected Stories Page 112