by A. L. Barker
Alice went on waving after the road was empty. It was a pleasant road with grass verges, almond and laburnum trees would soon come into bud. Nobody gossiped or kept watch through the curtains, the tradesmen came early. Unremarked, Alice waved. There was nothing else to be done until she was alone. But even while she put off the moment she sensed that it was already past and done with and there wasn’t anything left for her to do.
It came, just the same—no sign of life in the street, not a cat prowling, nor a bird on a tree, only the chalky beginnings of dusk and herself waving. She went into the house and shut the door with her shoulder.
It was a warm house, all thick orangeade light from parchment shades and a fortuitous, almost jokey assemblage of furniture. The overstuffed chairs and floral carpets, they too were ready to see what she would do. She had said, ‘You haven’t told me anything I didn’t know’, but that was a lie which had started earlier and from another source. Why should she believe anything that had been said? It wasn’t likely, or possible, it was the most impossible story she had ever heard. A week ago a group of women stood apart as she passed them and they might have been leaves parting in the wind for all the significance she saw. Now it signified, now she knew that there was a division between herself and everything else under the sun.
Unthinkable—in all their married life she hadn’t thought it; out of character—it would be easier for the leopard to change his spots, but from the first preposterous word the story was true.
She sat down with a groping movement. She did not know what she felt, there was a great fist inside her, cramping the ordinary functions of her body. This was the answer to a question she had never asked.
Someone had told her once that she was too ready. She didn’t see what else she could have done—except what the other woman had done, and she found that hard to specify. She had seen her several times, at a band concert in the park, pointed out as belonging to the oldest family in the district; and again, on an island among the Saturday traffic she had glimpsed a dark untidy head and thought that’s Lilly Warren whose grandfather had orchards where the Technical College is now. Not a pretty woman, past girlhood, but with some gawkiness left. She had a look of battle in her face, of private fight—Alice thought her discomfiting even then.
She imagined them together in the brassy rumpus of the park or among the dognosed buses, caught when they had to escape. For him escape might have been the idea because of the two he was the most tied. It would have seemed the wrong word if she hadn’t heard him use it himself, with gratitude—“I’ve got the family to think of, I’m tied.”
After twenty years of marriage she was used to seeing round him, to being ready and waiting with his reactions, so used that sometimes she had them for him. “Your father wouldn’t like it,” she’d say to the children and so save him the trouble.
She blamed herself for not having been ready with Lilly Warren. If she had known she might have scotched the affair by getting in first, no man cares to have his wife rough out his sins for him. But she hadn’t known, and he had brought Lilly Warren into the house as surely as if he’d led her by the hand. It was like a germ, every time he looked at his children he passed on whatever he and she had come together for. (Make no mistake about that—tinker, tailor, good husband, loving father, the germ is the same germ.)
She got up and walked about, touching the furniture roughly and aimlessly. She wanted to punish everything that had given houseroom. She herself had given so much more. Not knowing was worse than foolish, it was a crime, and when she thought of him coming in here with Lilly Warren written over him she knew herself to be the criminal. She was to blame, she had no right not to know. If she was deaf and blind she should have felt it rubbing off on all of them.
She held the back of a chair between her hands. It was not exclusively his chair, but he often sat in it and she tried to see him now and see the clues in his face because there was nothing profound about it, there must have been clues. But she could only see parts of him, the shortcomings—his backing hairline, the scarlet threads under the skin of his nose and the black peppering of pores on his chin. Between was the sense of a man, as irreducible as the sense of home. Lilly Warren could not be pinpointed in either.
Yet she was here. He brought her and he never quite took her away.
Alice gripped the chair so that the leather crackled. She ached for violence, to beat out the other woman like dust out of a carpet. She wanted to strip the place clean of Lilly Warren, her hands yearned to start. She thrust them under her armpits and the energy ran up her arms and exploded inside her head.
She fell back on words. They came off her tongue, breathy at first, then like a flock of dirty birds—words decent women find they know when put to it. It was some relief to utter them until they started dropping back—slut and harlot and whore came plumping all round her. In the thick of it she caught sight of her daughter.
The moment was raw, and the girl stood there fixing it in her bright green memory. She had taken off her hat, with the first and middle fingers of her left hand was pinching the waves into her hair. The fingers moved scrupulously over her head as if they belonged to someone else. Her mouth had dropped open in alarm.
Alice pushed her own hair roughly back from her forehead. “I was letting off steam.” How long had she been there, what had she heard? Would she know what she’d heard? She could learn, perhaps she had learned. Then you’ve got to unlearn, Alice thought of saying, because you don’t need to be taught this, it comes naturally and it’s better if it never comes at all. “You’re early.”
Grace Oram had finished with her hair, the same hand began slowly and dubiously to unbutton her school coat. “I had a lift home.”
“Who with?”
“John Ewing.”
“Oh—not on that contraption of his?”
“On his scooter, yes.” Grace switched to being assured, business-like. She stripped off her coat and dropped it on a chair. “Who were you shouting at?”
“No one.”
“John wanted to come in for a moment. It’s fortunate I didn’t invite him.” She was not yet sixteen, it was still the time with her when sin slipped off like water over a duck’s back. “Suppose one of the boys had heard you—they’re too young to understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand.”
“Shouting at nobody needs understanding.”
“I was just letting go, we all have to sometimes.” Frank’s smile pinned up the corners of the uninformed mouth and an old hurt came from a new quarter. “I wish you wouldn’t ride with John Ewing.”
“It’s quite safe. There’s something wrong with the clutch and he can’t do more than twenty miles an hour. He brings Mrs Ewing home and all her shopping on it. If she can ride I suppose I can.”
“I’m not really concerned about Mrs Ewing’s safety.”
Alice could see Grace’s thoughts busy with what she had heard. All she had heard was a voice, loud and vulgar, no worse than a wireless programme through a closed door. The words themselves wouldn’t mean anything—in cold blood Alice had forgotten them—there was nothing to be made of it except a momentary loss of control. Alice, of course, would have to live that down.
“What do you mean by safety?”
“There’s only one meaning that I know of.”
“Having things stay the same? They can’t. Even while you think they’re the same they’ve started to change. There’s no such thing as safety, it’s a word without a meaning.”
“Meanings came first, I thought, and the words after.” Alice picked up the poker and broke the embers into flame. “You’re right about things changing, of course you are, but I must try to stop them changing for the worst.”
“Did you try? Honestly?”
That voice wasn’t so quickly silenced: she was afraid her mother might be going mad, madness would be the worst as she saw it.
“Yes dear, honestly. Will you bring the tray to the kitchen? I’ll make toa
st. Silly of me, poking the fire like that. I never like toast so much when it’s done under the grill—Grandfather Oram used to say it was a matter of combustion—though I can’t see what the difference can be—it’s only scorched bread whichever way you do it—”
Grace said sharply, “Mother, hadn’t you better sit down?” Her forehead shone with the effort she was making.
“I’m not tired, dear.”
“You’re incoherent and illogical.”
“Am I? We’re neither of us making much sense.”
“You’ve had a shock, and going on about toast and Grandfather and all that is a natural reaction.”
Alice did sit down then because she had an idea that the worst was coming.
“We can’t pretend, you know,” said Grace. “Not now.”
There was an element of nightmare, the same single-mindedness, a ganging-up of the appalling and absurd so that the horrors had something ridiculous about them and there was a funny side to fear.
“If you go and brood it’ll be awful for all of us.”
Or was it Frank’s conscience she was feeling? They had got into the habit of sharing so much of their selves, why not his sense of guilt if he still had one?
“I know who was here, I saw her crossing the Parade and I can guess what she talked about.”
“Oh?”
“About Lilly Warren.”
Someone sighed, probably only Alice, though it seemed that the room relaxed with her. After the moment of disaster a moment of nothing, a finished moment because it would have been logical, and kind, to finish there. First a thrust to the quick, then unbelief, not of the facts but of the scope of pain, then anger at being called upon to bear the unbearable, and then loneliness. That name had cut her off from the rest of them like a knife. She was one side of the blade; husband, children and Lilly Warren were on the other, and if there was a heart to the matter, surely that was it.
“I can’t imagine,” said Grace, “what she talked about before. She’s got no other topic of conversation. The only reason her husband gets his dinner is because she can talk in the butcher’s and baker’s and the fish-shop and the grocer’s. Every word, every single solitary word is that, and now she’s told every living soul, every single solitary soul—”
She was running out of emotion; this one legitimate rage, which was all that self-preservation allowed her, had begun to dry up. She must have used it over and over again in lieu of understanding.
“She’s told every single living soul,” said Grace, “because now she’s told you.”
“Told me what?”
“That Lilly Warren is my father’s mistress.”
She had said it before, in front of the mirror, trying it on her tongue, tasting the word ‘mistress’, swallowing the indigestible phrase. Now it lay like lead over what was going to be her heart.
“You do see it’s best to talk?”
“To you?”
Withholding so much, a kind of derision came through.
Grace coloured up. “Who else is there? I know how it must hurt—”
“It hurts to hear you talking like this.”
“Stop thinking I’m a child! Isn’t this enough to cure me? You don’t have to pretend. I know why he goes to her—”
“Why?”
There’d been no rehearsal for that. Grace opened her mouth and shut it, primming her lips as if at a taste of vinegar.
Alice was trembling. Disaster was complete, more than complete, but there must be no loophole afterwards, she must not be able to hope that she had misunderstood. She, of all people, was so liable to misunderstand.
“Tell me.”
A dew of alarm showed on Grace’s upper lip, she was beginning to see the weapon. “You know as well as I do.”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t want to. But I must.”
“To make love—that’s what he goes for.”
The words stuck in Alice’s throat. She ached with anger against herself and with pity for Grace, for everyone young enough to use those words. Till now the fears she had had for her children had been practical, nothing like this dread of life and what it could do—was bound to do—in the legitimate business of living. Here was Grace with one foot in the fairy-books, talking about ‘love’. She was going to have to learn, not by national or personal disaster, but in a small way. She was going to have to lose a little of herself each day, rubbed away, worn off, quietly and inexorably until one day in the mirror she caught the eye of a stranger. It had begun already, already there was that word ‘love’, and her father, and Lilly Warren.
“There’s nothing personal in it—to you, I mean. She’s—well,” Grace shrugged, “not so old as you, but she’s not young either. I don’t like the way she talks down into the front of her dress—”
“You’ve talked to her?”
“I made it my business to. She gives piano lessons to Megs Tanner in my class at school, so I went with Megs and said I’d thought of having lessons too. Naturally I didn’t mention Father, and neither did she, but she knew who I was. She said right away she couldn’t take any more pupils.” Grace looked up sharply. “We haven’t a piano so I can’t learn anyway, of course.” She wet her thumbnail and scraped at an old stain on her skirt. “I haven’t enjoyed it, you know. I couldn’t forgive him for being my father. All the time between, when he was only my father, didn’t seem to count, the other thing, the sex thing, seemed to come first. I kept thinking he had no right to a family and I blamed you for not seeing what he was before you married him.” Some of the remembered rage tightened her mouth. “I wanted to shout it at you. I got over it, of course. Someone had to be sensible. I decided not to say anything and I made the boys promise not to either.”
“The boys?”
“They pick things up at school. I don’t know how much they know, but they giggle about Lilly Warren. They don’t really think it’s funny, they’re only kids and they don’t know what else to do.”
Alice unlocked her hands and turned them palms up. There was nothing to hide, her children had relieved her of that last necessity.
Grace looked uncomfortable. She fidgeted about as if the air had bristles, she went to the mirror but, she wasn’t looking at her own face, she was watching her mother’s. “He’s not in love with her—You don’t think that, do you?”
Alice was thinking if she could ask it in all good faith—and her face shone with good faith—how would it seem to the ten-year-old twins? Alice could have no illusions. Not long ago she had found them with a drawing. When she showed it to Frank he laughed. Alice wasn’t able to laugh, she felt a sickness out of proportion to the incident. She felt it again now, but the proportion was about right.
“It’s not like that at all. Nobody likes her—Megs doesn’t and Megs’ mother says she’s a misplaced person, meaning people don’t cultivate her. I can see why. Leaving aside Father and all the rest of it, she’s not comfortable. She’s not pretty, she doesn’t even dress well. I don’t see what you’re worrying about, she simply couldn’t matter less.”
Somebody, then, thought there was something to save. Here was Grace trying to spare feelings her mother hadn’t had. It explained the division between them, they weren’t within shouting distance.
“It’s something he can’t help, like being ill. Sex is complicated, it’s a vital force and it takes so many different forms—” Grace was letting the classroom into her voice. “We mustn’t condemn and we can’t expect to understand, but perhaps we ought to be prepared because it might happen again with someone else. Men of his age have this trouble adjusting themselves to getting old—”
“Be quiet!” Alice came round the table, knocking it askew in her haste. “You don’t know what you’re talking about—I’m trying to remember that.”
Grace faced her squarely. “I’m trying to help.”
“Please don’t try any more. The only way you can help is by minding your own business.”
“It is my business, he’s my father!”
“He’s my husband. Do you think I had to wait for Ada Lawrence to tell me? Or you? He told me himself.”
“They why didn’t you stop it?”
“It’s no use stopping some things. They have to be finished.”
*
When the twins were in bed and Grace was sitting in front of the television, Alice put on her coat and left the house. She went out the back way because she didn’t want questions. She had to think what she was going to do, and trying to think in the house was like trying to get dry in the water.
Along the road she felt the edges of the paving-stones under her feet and realised she was wearing her old house-shoes. She wasn’t much of a walker, anyway, but she felt she had to keep moving so at the corner stop she got on a bus.
As it rocked away she thought, now there’s no excuse not to think and she took a sixpenny ticket, though she was going to need more than sixpennyworth of time.
The bus was full of people going on night shift in the factories along the Greenway. She imagined them all wrapped up in themselves, their lives staked out round them, safe as houses. She had been the same, thinking she knew her family, knew their minds, and thinking that if there was a corner she didn’t know she could always make a good guess.
The air was fogged with cigarette smoke. She put a hand to her smarting eyes and the woman next to her said, “Got the dazzles?”
“It’s the smoke.”
“It’s the nights. If we were meant to see in the dark we’d have got electric eyeballs.”
This was the time of day when Alice started to doze over whatever she was doing—mending, reading, watching television—about now she could lose herself for an hour.
“I’m on mouldings,” said the woman. “I’ve seen you about—a packer, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re the one that fetched the wadding when Mrs Hollis cut her leg. I never forget a face. You were sharp, I said so at the time. She’s sharp, I said, to think of wadding.”
“I don’t work in a factory.”