Running Away
It is, Henrietta considers, ridiculous. Even so she feels sorry for the girl, that slack, wan face, the whine in her voice. And as if to add insult to injury, Sharon, as a name, is far from attractive.
‘Now, I’m sure,’ Henrietta says gently, ‘you must simply forget all this. Sharon, why not go away for a little? To… to…’ Where would a girl like Sharon Tamm want to go? Margate? Benidorm? ‘I could help you if you’d like me to. We could call it a little loan.’
The girl shakes her head. Hair, in need of washing, flaps. She doesn’t want to go away, her whine protests. She wants to stay since she feels she belongs here.
‘It’s only, Sharon, that I thought it might be easier. A change of scene for a week or two. I know it’s hard for you.’
Again the head is shaken, the lank hair flaps. Granny spectacles are removed and wiped carefully on a patchwork skirt, or perhaps a skirt that is simply patched. Sharon’s loose, soiled sandals have been kicked off, and she plays with them as she converses. She is sitting on the floor because she never sits on chairs.
‘We understand each other, you see,’ Henrietta continues softly. ‘My dear, I do want you to realize that.’
‘It’s all over, the thing I had with the Orange People. I’m not like that any more. I’m perfectly responsible.’
‘I know the Orange thing is over. I know you’ve got your feet quite on the ground, Sharon.’
‘It was awful, ’smatter of fact, all that.’
The Orange People offer a form of Eastern mysticism about which Henrietta knows very little. Someone once told her that the mysticism is an excuse for sexual licence, but explained no further. The sect is apparently quite different from the Hare Krishna people, who sometimes wear orange also but who eat food of such poor quality that sexual excess is out of the question. The Orange People had camped in a field and upset the locals, but all that was ages ago.
‘And I know you’re working hard, my dear. I know you’ve turned over a new leaf.’ The trouble is that the leaf has been turned, absurdly, in the direction of Henrietta’s husband.
‘I just want to stay here,’ Sharon repeats. ‘Ever since it happened I feel I don’t belong anywhere else.’
‘Well, strictly speaking, nothing has happened, dear.’
‘It has to me, though, Henrietta.’
Sharon never smiles. Henrietta can’t remember having ever seen a smile enlivening the slack features any more than a hint of make-up has ever freshened the pale skin that stretches over them. Henrietta, who dresses well and maintains with care the considerable good looks she possesses, can understand none of it. Unpresentable Sharon Tamm is certainly no floosie, and hardly a gold-digger. Perhaps such creatures do not exist, Henrietta speculates, one perhaps only reads about them.
‘I thought I’d better tell you,’ Sharon Tamm says. ‘I thought it only fair, Henrietta.’
‘Yes, I’m glad you did.’
‘He never would.’
The girl stands up and puts her sandals on to her grimy feet. There is a little white plastic bow, a kind of clasp, in her hair: Henrietta hasn’t noticed it before because the hair has covered it in a way it wasn’t meant to. The girl sorts all that out now, shaking her head again, taking the bow out and replacing it.
‘He can’t hurt people,’ she tells Henrietta, speaking of the man to whom Henrietta has been married for more than twenty years.
Sharon Tamm leaves the room then, and Henrietta, who has been sitting in a high-backed chair during the conversation, does not move from it. She is flabbergasted by the last two impertinent statements of the girl’s. How dare she say he never would! How dare she imply some knowledge of him by coyly remarking that he cannot hurt people! For a moment she experiences a desire to hurry after the girl, to catch her in the hall and to smack her on the face with the open palm of her hand. But she is so taken aback, so outraged by the whole bizarre conversation, that she cannot move. The girl, at her own request – a whispery whine on the telephone – asked to come to see her ‘about something urgent’. And although Henrietta intended to go out that afternoon she at once agreed to remain in, imagining that Sharon Tamm was in some kind of pickle.
The hall door bangs. Henrietta – forty-three last month, dressed now in a blue jersey and skirt, with a necklace of pink corals at her throat and several rings on the fingers of either hand, her hair touched with a preparation that brings out the reddish brown in it – still does not move. She stares at the place on the carpet where the girl has been crouched. There was a time when Sharon Tamm came quite often to the house, when she talked a lot about her family, when Henrietta first felt sorry for her. She ceased to come rather abruptly, going off to the Orange People instead.
In the garden Henrietta’s dog, a cairn called Ka-Ki, touches the glass of the french windows with her nose, asking to be let in. Henrietta’s husband, Roy, has trained her to do that, but the training has not been difficult because the dog is intelligent. Henrietta crosses the room to open the french windows, not answering in her usual way the fuss the dog makes of her, scampering at her feet, offering some kind of gratitude. The awful thing is, the girl seemed genuinely to believe in the extraordinary fantasy that possesses her. She would have told Roy of course, and Roy being Roy wouldn’t have known what to do.
They had married when Roy was at the very beginning of his career, seven years older than Henrietta, who at the time had been a secretary in the department. She’d been nervous because she didn’t belong in the academic world, because she had not had a university education herself. ‘Only a typist!’ she used bitterly to cry in those early, headstrong quarrels they’d had. ‘You can’t expect a typist to be bright enough to understand you.’ But Roy, urbane and placid even then, had kissed her crossly pouting lips and told her not to be so silly. She was cleverer, and prettier, and more attractive in all sorts of other ways, than one after another of his female colleagues: ever since he has been telling her that, and meaning it. Henrietta cannot accept the ‘cleverer’, but ‘prettier’ and ‘more attractive’ she believes to be true, and isn’t ashamed when she admits it to herself. They dress appallingly for a start, most of the women in the department, a kind of arrogance, Henrietta considers.
She clears away the tea things, for she has naturally offered Sharon Tamm tea, and carries them to the kitchen. Only a little less shaky than she was in the sitting-room after the girl’s final statements, she prepares a turkey breast for the oven. There isn’t much to do to it, but she likes to spike it with herbs and to fold it round a celery heart, a recipe she devised herself. She slices parsnips to roast with it, and peels potatoes to roast also. It isn’t a special meal in any way, but somehow she finds herself taking special care because Roy is going to hate it when she mentions the visit of the girl.
She makes a pineapple pudding he likes. He has schoolboy tastes, he says himself, and in Henrietta’s view he has too great a fondness for dairy products. She has to watch him where cream is concerned, and she insists he does not take too much salt. Not having children of their own has affected their relationship in ways like this. They look after one another, he in turn insisting that she should not Hoover for too long because Hoovering brings on the strain in her back.
She turns the pudding out into a Pyrex dish, ready to go into the oven in twenty minutes. She hears her husband in the hall, her own name called, the welcoming bark of Ka-Ki. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she calls back. ‘Let’s take a drink to the garden.’
He is there, by the summer-house, when she arrives with the tray of sherry and gin and Cinzano. She has done her face again, although she knows it hardly needs it; she has tied a red chiffon scarf into her hair. ‘There now,’ she says. ‘Dinner’ll be a while.’ He’s back earlier than usual.
She pours gin and Cinzano for him, and sherry for herself. ‘Well, then?’ She smiles at him.
‘Oh, nothing much. MacMelanie’s being difficult.’
‘That man should be shot.’
>
‘I only wish we could find someone to do it.’
There is nothing else to report except that a student called Fosse has been found hallucinating by a park keeper. A pity, apparently, because the boy is bright and has always seemed to be mature and well-balanced.
‘Roy, I’ve something to tell you.’
‘Ah?’
He is a man who sprawls over chairs rather than sits in them. He has a sprawling walk, taking up more room than is his due on pavements; he sprawls in cinemas and buses, and over the wheel of his car. His grey hair, of which there is a lot, can never acquire a combed look even though he combs it regularly and in the normal way. His spectacles, thickly rimmed and large, move about on his reddish face and often, in fact, fall off. His suits become tousled as soon as he puts them on, gaps appearing, flesh revealed. The one he wears now is of dark brown corduroy, the suit he likes best. A spotted blue handkerchief cascades out of an upper pocket, matching a loose bow tie.
‘Sharon Tamm was here,’ Henrietta says.
‘Ah.’
She watches while he gulps his gin and vermouth. His eyes behind the pebbly glass of his spectacles are without expression. His mind does not appear to be associated with what she is saying. She wonders if he is thinking that he is not a success in the department, that he should have left the university years ago. She knows he often thinks that when Mac-Melanie has been troublesome.
‘Now, Roy, you have to listen.’
‘Well then, I’m listening.’
‘It’s embarrassing,’ she warns.
‘What is?’
‘This Sharon Tamm thing.’
‘She’s really pulled herself together, you know. She’s very bright. Really bright, I mean.’
‘She has developed a fantasy about you.’
He says nothing, as if he has not heard, or has heard and not understood.
‘She imagines she’s in love with you.’
He drinks a mouthful of his drink, and then another. He reaches out to the tray on the table between them and pours himself some more, mostly gin, she notices. He doesn’t gesture towards her sherry. He doesn’t say anything.
‘It was such an awkward conversation.’
All she wants is that it should be known that the girl arrived and said what she did say, that there should be no secret between them about so absurd a matter.
‘I had to tell you, Roy. I couldn’t not.’
He drinks again, still gulping at the liquid rather than sipping. He is perturbed: knowing him so well she can see that, and she wonders how exactly it is that MacMelanie has been a nuisance again, or if he is depressed because of the boy, Fosse. His eyes have changed behind the glass of his spectacles, something clouds his expression. He is trying not to frown, an effort she is familiar with, a sign of emotion in him. The vein that comes and goes in his forehead will soon appear.
‘Roy.’
‘I’m sorry Sharon came.’
Attempting to lighten the atmosphere, she laughs slightly. ‘She should wear a bra, you know, for a start.’
She pours herself more sherry since he does not intend to. It didn’t work, saying the girl should wear a bra: her voice sounded silly. She has a poor head for alcohol of any kind.
‘She said you can’t hurt people.’
He pulls the spotted handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes sweat from his chin with it. He runs his tongue over his lips. Vaguely, he shakes his head, as if denying that he can’t hurt people, but she knows the gesture doesn’t mean that. He is upset by what has happened, as she herself has been. He is thinking, as she did, that Sharon Tamm was once taken under their wing. He brought her back with him one evening, encouraging her, as a stray dog might be encouraged into the warmth. Other students, too, have been like daughters or sons to them and have remained their friends, a surrogate family. It was painful when Sharon Tamm left them for the Orange People.
‘Of course I know,’ Henrietta says, ‘that was something we didn’t understand.’
Vaguely he offers her more sherry, not noticing that she has had some. He pours more of his mixture for himself.
‘Yes, there was something wrong,’ he says.
They have been through all that. They talked about it endlessly, sending themselves to sleep with it, lazing with it on a Sunday morning. Henrietta found it hard to forgive the girl for being ungrateful. Both of them, she considered, had helped her in so very many ways.
‘Shall we forget it all now?’ she suggests, knowing that her voice has become nervous. ‘Everything about the wretched girl?’
‘Forget?’
That is impossible, his tone suggests. They cannot forget all that Sharon Tamm has told them about her home in Daventry, about her father’s mother who lives with the family and stirs up so much trouble, about her overweight sister Diane and her brother Leslie. The world of Sharon Tamm’s family has entered theirs. They can see, even now, the grandmother in her special armchair in the kitchen, her face snagged with a sourness that has to do with her wastrel husband, long since dead. They can see the saucepans boiling over on the stove because Mrs Tamm can never catch them in time, and Leslie’s motor-cycling gear on the kitchen table, and Diane’s bulk. Mr Tamm shouts perpetually, at Leslie to take his motor-cycling clothes away, at Diane for being so fat, at his wife, at Sharon, making her jump. ‘You are stupid to an extent,’ is the statement he has coined specially for his wife and repeats for her benefit several times every evening. He speaks slowly when he makes this statement, giving the words air, floating them through tired exasperation. His noisy manner leaves him when he dispatches these words, for otherwise – when he tells his wife she is ugly or a bitch – he shouts, and bangs anything he can lay his hand on, a saucepan lid, a tin of mushy peas, a spoon. The only person he doesn’t shout at is his mother, for whom he has an exaggerated regard, even, according to Sharon, loves. Every evening he takes her down to the Tapper’s Arms, returning at closing time to the house that Sharon has so minutely described: rooms separated by walls through which all quarrels can be heard, cigarette burns on the edge of the bath, a picture of a black girl on the landing, a stair-carpet touched with Leslie’s motor-cycling grease and worn away in places. To Henrietta’s sitting-room – flowery in summer because the french windows bring the garden in, cheerful with a wood fire when it’s cold – these images have been repeatedly conveyed, for Sharon Tamm derived considerable relief from talking.
‘Well, she told me and I’ve told you. Please can we just put it all aside?’
She rises as she speaks and hurries to the kitchen. She opens the oven and places the pineapple pudding on the bottom shelf. She bastes the turkey breast and the potatoes and the parsnips. She washes some broccoli and puts it ready on the draining board. He has not said, as she hoped he would, that Sharon Tamm is really a bit pathetic. Ka-Ki sniffs about the kitchen, excited by the smell that has come from the oven. She trots behind Henrietta, back to the garden.
‘She told you too, didn’t she, Roy? You knew all this?’
She didn’t mean to say that. While washing the broccoli she planned to mention MacMelanie, to change the subject firmly and with deliberation. But the nervousness that Sharon Tamm inspired in her when she said that Roy couldn’t hurt people has suddenly returned, and she feels muzzy due to the sherry, not entirely in control of herself.
‘Yes, she told me,’ he says. ‘Well, actually, it isn’t quite like that.’
He has begun to sweat again, little beads breaking on his forehead and his chin. He pulls the dotted handkerchief from his pocket and wipes at his face. In a slow, unwilling voice he tells her what some intuition already insists is the unbelievable truth: it is not just that the girl has a silly crush on him but that a relationship of some kind exists between them. Listening, she feels physically sick. She feels she is asleep, trying to wake herself out of a nightmare because the sickness is heaving through her stomach. The face of the girl is vivid, a whitehead in the crease of her chin, the rims of her eyes pin
k. The girl is an insult to her, with her dirty feet and broken fingernails.
‘Let’s not mention it ever again,’ she hears herself urging repetitiously. ‘MacMelanie,’ she begins, but does not continue. He is saying something, his voice stumbling, larded with embarrassment. She can’t hear him properly.
There has never been an uneasiness about their loyalty to one another, about their love or their companionship. Roy is disappointed because, professionally, he hasn’t got on, but that has nothing to do with the marriage. Roy doesn’t understand ambition, he doesn’t understand that advancement has to be pursued. She knows that but has never said it.
‘I’m sorry, Henrietta,’ he says, and she wants to laugh. She wants to stare at him in amazement as he sprawls there, sweating and fat. She wants to laugh into his face so that he can see how ridiculous it all is. How can it possibly be that he is telling her he loves an unattractive girl who is thirty years younger than him?
‘I feel most awfully dejected,’ he mutters, staring down at the paving stones where they sit. Her dog is obedient at his feet. High above them an aeroplane goes over.
Does he want to marry the girl? Will she lead him into the house in Daventry to meet her family, into the kitchen where the awful grandmother is? Will he shake hands with stupid Mrs Tamm, with Leslie and Diane? Will he go down to the Tapper’s Arms with Mr Tamm?
‘I can’t believe this, Roy.’
The Collected Stories Page 131