‘If I really bothered, darling,’ she often tells me, ‘if I really cared to dress up, darling, they’d kill me with their jealousy. Oh God, they’d smother me with their bloody rotten jealousy.’
Actually I think she was jealous of Billie. She resented his being in my house, spending hours with me which should have been given to her. Shebah had all the time in the world. She still has. When I used to tell her to go home she’d stall for time, talking and fidgeting, leaning in mock exhaustion against the wall, festooned with her parcels and carrier bags. She always carried a little bit of fish for tomorrow, and last Sunday’s paper folded at the theatre criticism, and a quarter pound of wurst in an envelope. She detested my opening the front door and helping her down the steps. She clutched at the railings like a suffragette, determined not to let go, her fish and her paper and her wurst falling among the milk bottles. She knew when I shut the front door that I would pelt back up the hall to Billie with my arms open. She was overjoyed when he skedaddled to Australia, because then there were nights when I would call her back and tell her she could stay. I liked her. She’s good company. We drank stewed tea. When we went to bed she told me to turn my back while she removed her boots, her two coats and her three cardigans tied round the waist with darning wool. I slept on the sofa. I thought it was more dignified for her, being old, to have the bed to herself. She groaned as she hauled herself on to the brass bed, shrieked with laughter as she lay half in and half out, called on God for help, damned all her bloody relations, and coughed as the rain beat against the broken windows. Regularly at two in the morning, Victorian Norman used to walk, as if up a rock face, along the hall and into the kitchen for his clock. We heard his muttered chat to the automatic time exchange … ‘Thank you … Ta very much’; then the sound of the clock being wound, the locking of the kitchen door, an explosive cry of rage from the brass bed (nothing articulate); then two sets of snoring, one loud, a foot or so away from me, one faint, coming from the recumbent Norman, stark naked and arms flung wide on the truckle bed in the room above.
Norman’s fond of her too, even if he won’t travel with her. They’re a bit alike, the way they think. Or rather, the way they’ve both been schooled in the University of Life. That’s what Norman calls it. He’s awfully clever. You’d never think he worked in a factory. He never stops reading, and his mind’s very active. He’s always quoting things at me. His reaction to what I tried to do after Billie came back from Australia was strange. I thought he’d be kind to me and show lots of sympathy, but he said I was stupid. He didn’t even seem glad I’d survived. I don’t suppose I really meant to die. I just wanted a bit of peace. I remember going to see Peter Pan when I was small and thinking how weird it was when Peter said to the lost boys that to die must be an awfully big adventure. I didn’t like it when my father died. I didn’t even know he was poorly, though I thought he ate too much and took too little exercise. When my mother rang me up and said he was dead, it didn’t seem like an adventure at all. The funeral was terrible. I nearly missed it because it was foggy and the trains were late.
On the way to the church the hearse kept vanishing in the fog. At the kerb, four men in black took my father away in his wooden box and bore him off into the mist. It was a shock, bent in the pew, to straighten up and see the coffin, such a little coffin, right alongside me near the altar rails. It was made of white wood and had a wreath of flowers on top. The flowers were supposed to be from me and my mother, but I hadn’t contributed anything to them because I hadn’t any money. The vicar spoke a lot of words about how cheerful my father was and how he always had a cheerful word for everyone (God forgive him for the years and years of never speaking). He omitted to mention that my father suffered from severe melancholia at least once a month; nor did he mention the misery he caused my mother, the long evenings she sat in the bedroom with red eyes, the sugar bowl dented because it had missed her and hit the wall behind, the smashed window in the hall (‘The blitz, you know. Surprising, isn’t it?’). My mother cried noisily, her snuffles fanning out the veil of her hat. The deaf man in the coffin lay with his feet pointing at the vaulted roof. Many a time we’d rolled cursing in each other’s arms on the kitchen floor, each of us struggling to get the upper hand, me trying to bash his head on the fender because he made my mother cry, and he spitting out that I was a little bastard, a filthy animal with no respect, a dirty little beast who should have died in the grass. My mother generally hid if there was a row, but eventually she’d come downstairs and she’d say, ‘Don’t upset yourself, my pet. Run out into the garden and play.’ She never said that at the funeral. After the vicar’s speech, the church doors opened and the four men swooped to lift my father up. Fog rolled like a carpet down the aisle. We followed the coffin, one foot after the other, tracking him, the procreator of my hooked nose, my skeleton of bones. How sad it was, how dark it was! The organ music was pretty mournful; I’d have preferred them to play ‘Lily of Laguna’ as they carried him towards the grave. I’m sorry he’s gone. I think babies ought to have grandfathers, I expect he would have known how to be loving second time round.
It was nothing to do with my father, me wanting to get married and have this baby. I’m more scared of my mother than I ever was of him. I’d like to win her approval and have a wedding. I’ve led rather a rackety life and it’s not much fun for her; neighbours are always leaning over the fence and asking her, ‘How’s your Lily? Not married yet, I suppose?’ She probably tells them I’ve got better things to do, but she’s upset about it, I know, and if I don’t settle down soon she’ll stop going out altogether and she’ll draw the curtains against the world. She’d do it to spite me. And really I haven’t anything better to do. I never had. I expect that’s what drove Billie away to Australia. He wasn’t brave enough to say right out that he didn’t consider me suitable to be his wife. He said we’d have a house in the country and we’d get a dog for our children, and all the time he was talking about the dog and nice things like that he was enquiring about tin-mines, and sending off for emigration papers. During that first year, after he’d gone, he only wrote every three months or so. I thought it was very good of him. Suspect goodness above all things, Victorian Norman says. But then later, in the middle of the second year, Billie wrote to me every day – love letters – and he asked me to marry him. I’m glad I had the sense not to tell my mother and raise her hopes needlessly. Thinking about it, I imagine it wasn’t sense that stopped me, but disbelief.
The night before Billie returned from Australia, Victorian Norman watched me try on some clothes.
‘How did he use to like you?’ he asked.
‘Oh, sort of arty, I think,’ I said.
Once I had a white coat like a smock and Billie had said in the street, ‘Oh my little Rose of Sharon, O my little pretty.’ Maybe he didn’t. He did sometimes say I looked nice.
I tried on a check skirt and a striped sweater. Victorian Norman shook his head above his starched collar. ‘No, not really,’ he said.
I tried on a brown and black dress, very tight and split under one armpit. Norman liked it; he liked the split arm-piece and the frilled petticoat that hung down.
‘He’ll think it a bit messy,’ I said, and I took it off. ‘I’ve got to appear as if I’ve made an effort but am really not superficial or made up, just the old eternal child of nature I ever was.’
Norman laughed and went on reading his paper.
Nothing seemed the thing to wear. Reflected in the blotched mirror over the sink, my face looked empty – or maybe it was my face that was blotchy. I had two lines on my forehead, just above my nose, as if I had frowned for two years.
‘Why didn’t I go to bed early?’ I asked Norman, looking at the dark circles under my eyes.
Later I put ‘Party Doll’ on the gramophone and twisted my hips. But suddenly neither of us was convinced, because all the other nights when we had made a noise and played the oldest records (why did they all have meaningful titles – ‘I’ll Never Make
the Same Mistake Again’, ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Somewhere in France with You’, ‘Silver Threads among the Gold’) the mornings had been predictable and tomorrow wasn’t. It wasn’t going to be an ordinary day. I went to bed without washing properly, and before I turned out the light I kissed the photographed face of Billie. And truly I think I did feel optimistic. I did feel safe and happy and hopeful.
The following evening at six-thirty I was washed and ready for him. A fire burnt in the grate beneath the Sicilian lions; the brass bed under its white coverlet glittered in the firelight. At the table in the kitchen I arched my eyebrows and folded my hands together on the lap of my dark plaid skirt, watching the shadow of the lampshade twist round and back again above the blue oilcloth. There was new lino on the floor, carried painfully all the way from the shop two days before, an outsize roll of black-and-white squares, oily under the rain. There were new curtains on the windows, white ones hemmed with blue cotton and drawn against a backyard under a layer of soot and a row of cats on a high brick wall. On the balcony of the house next door the husband threw washing-up water in a flood down the wooden steps and lost the bucket in a welter of noise. Two chops in silver paper, garnished and rubbed with garlic, lay on the draining board. I’d prepared a pan of sliced potatoes under water and there were two packets of frozen vegetables, one yellow, one green, to give colour to the white plates painted with columbine. The most important thing, Shebah had told me two days before, was the expression reflected and transferred from the eye at the first moment of meeting. Let him know who you are, she said, and let him know where you are. I am here, I told myself, but who am I?
A knock shattered the house; through the keyhole I spied the returned Colonial Boy, outline blurred behind the glass, raising an arm to smooth his hair. Cold air rushed in as the door opened; all I could see was a coat, a check coat, clean and alien. The coat came into the house.
How was I to know that the sun would have made him brown, bleached the line of hair on his cheekbone, paled the nails that tipped his fingers? His palms opened and showed cream as he handed me a package.
‘Go on, open it,’ he said. ‘It’s for you.’
Inside the tissue paper was a box, a small jewel box with velvet backing. To the accompaniment of suitable music from a dream film, shot close up to show the dewy eyes of a girl looking at her very first engagement ring, mouth curved in a tender smile, someone, me, picked out the toffee laid so carefully inside the box. I unwrapped it and placed the sticky sweet upon my thick and waiting tongue. Like a consecrated wafer it stayed in my mouth. My lips wouldn’t close. I turned to the meat, bloody on its silver foil, and lit the grill.
‘You’ve been here all this time?’ Billie asked. His eyes took in the dirt, the line of grease above the cooker, the cobwebs on the ceiling. With the grilling of the chops, the twisting of the red-fringed shade above the oilcloth on the table, love flickered, struggled to evoke some past echo of delight and began wholly to be extinguished. Still I fought for something, some period of reprieve, eyes down to the spitting fat, not looking at my executioner, my pen-friend, my blue-eyed bully-boy in the beautiful coat.
‘I left my cases at the station,’ he said. ‘I ought to be thinking about looking for a hotel.’
I didn’t believe him. The striped sheets on the brass bed were laundry-fresh. I couldn’t reply, I couldn’t breathe. At last we reached the bedroom with the fire – only the fire was nearly out and I hadn’t the heart to put more coal on, and he kept looking at everything. And when I looked too, at each picture, at each article of furniture, the brass candlesticks on the mantelshelf, the brass samovar, the stuffed owl in its case in the alcove, nothing shone any more, nothing gleamed, everything bore fingerprints of neglect. The filigree neck of the samovar was cracked, the glass eyes of the moth-eaten moose stared dully at the Sicilian lions. The whole room was a monument to despair.
‘You look tired,’ he said.
Dumbly I prepared for the night. I found my face-cream and sat at the table. I was trying to be natural. ‘Hold the mirror for me,’ I said.
With each circlet of grease I rubbed away one more layer of romantic love and sat exposed with shining nose and oily mouth, suburban, self-tormenting, waiting to be hurt. I moved towards the cupboard to put my jar away, parodying those other figures moving at night across his two years of travelling, those golden girls fresh from showers who raised slender arms to push away their damp, bleached hair.
At last he said, ‘Your ankles are thick.’
‘Thanks for telling me,’ I said.
‘I’ll come back first thing in the morning,’ said Billie.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I’ll be very tender,’ said Billie suddenly, bending down to kiss me.
In a welter of cloth, in a smother of check overcoat, with an adroit convulsive roll a penetration unpremeditated and untender took place. There was toffee in my teeth. He wore his coat all night. It might have been a coat that opened and sheltered me. I could have lain warm within it, if he’d bothered to unbutton it.
In the morning I went out to buy some bacon for his breakfast and when I returned to the house he’d gone, and Norman sat stricken, and the turtle’s back had gone out of the hall, and the brass horn from the piano top, and I never saw him at the house again. Victorian Norman did. Billie came back for his boxing gloves when I was in hospital. He said I had deteriorated physically and that he preferred me as I was before. Then he and Norman shook hands and Billie went down the hall as he had done so many times in the past, only this time I wasn’t there to put my arms about his shambling waist, and out he went, never to return. Positively a last appearance, if indeed it was he who had returned in the first place. He left behind nothing, nothing beyond the new lino in the kitchen and the new curtains already turning a rich grey. Of course, that’s what I thought at the time. I never guessed what he’d left behind, in me. And if I’d known, I wouldn’t have done what I did. I don’t remember planning it.
I sat at the kitchen table, the blue oilcloth franked by the ringed impressions of a dozen mugs of tea, my head in my arms, and I waited. On the table was the bacon I’d bought and one large empty bottle of gin, purchased duty free at the bar of Billie’s homecoming ship. I only wanted to sleep, to cease upon the midnight with no pain. I heard a sound from the telephone, like the buzzing of a fly trapped behind glass. I remember picking up the receiver and hearing a voice repeating my name, making a persistent enquiry, until with boredom, because it wasn’t Billie’s voice, I dropped the earpiece with a dull plastic thud on a white square of lino, the third from the closed and paper-choked door, and fell beastlike on all fours. I slid finally, the toes of my winkle-picker shoes curled up, cheek to cheek with the cool surface of the floor, one finger held up for silence in the small groove under my nose which Claude says is the imprint of God’s finger in the wet clay. With mouth clumsily ajar, first with a gentle soughing of air, then with a frantic galloping of hooves, I went into a long cave of dreamless sleep. I suppose it was wicked of me; my friends would have missed me and my mother would have cried.
Claude told me I must never tell Billie what I’d done, but I did. After all, I’ve never attempted anything as big as that in my whole life, and it should have made Billie proud. Not everybody knows somebody who’d die for them. Anyway, it didn’t work, and that’s why this weekend is terrifically important to me. I wish I didn’t have to lie to Edward. It would be so nice if the baby were really his, and I could have told him the news as a sort of birthday present. He was twenty-nine yesterday. Last night Julia cooked a celebration dinner. Shebah was cross at us for making a fuss over Edward. She thinks any admiration or affection should be directed towards her. We drank bottles and bottles of wine.
‘It’s a bloody marvellous life,’ said Norman, and he hit Edward on the back in friendly fashion. Edward is a man of few words. He just grunted. Shebah, of course, said life was rotten. We were all swine, she said. She didn’t know what Norman found so marvellous a
bout living.
‘I drink,’ shouted Norman, ‘I copulate.’ He was only trying to annoy Shebah. She hates sex being mentioned, particularly when she’s eating.
‘I reckon you’re right,’ said Claude. ‘I reckon that Edward here should cleave to this woman.’ He held the bottle towards Edward. ‘More wallop, man?’
‘No, no more,’ said Edward.
‘I should have brought my hat,’ I said, lolling weakly against his shoulder so that he would feel I belonged to him. I began telling him about the hat I wear on festive occasions. ‘I wore it,’ I said, ‘when that policeman was calling and chaining his bike to the railings, and when we all went to the club, and that night you came, Claude, and you wore that Indian frock coat that somebody left behind …’
A Weekend with Claude Page 3