by A. L. Barker
“You ought to better yourself, anyone can do packing. Of course moulding’s tricky, but you’d pick it up if you put your mind to it. And it’s more money—skilled, you see. I do it for company. It’s five years since I spoke to my husband. The last thing he said to me is engraved on my memory and it’ll take the twelve Apostles to clean it off.”
Alice kept her hands over her face. The woman leaned close, her lips almost touched Alice’s fingers. “Ever lived like that, not talking, not being talked to? Sometimes I do everything out loud, I breathe like a lion and I rattle all the china. For company.”
“Please, I’m trying to think—”
“That’s my trouble too, I start thinking and next thing I know the furniture’s talking. I’ve got a table that keeps harping on why don’t I get a lodger. I’ll be laying the cloth and it’ll say, ‘There’s that back room, you could let to a nice young man. Get him a meal at night, wash out his shirt, and he’d talk.’ ‘What about the old chap?’ I say, ‘what’s he going to do?’ ‘He’ll have to listen’—that’s what it says, ‘he’ll just have to listen!’” The woman was laughing, rubbing her chest to help the laughs out. “And any day now the piano’s going to say something. It’s one of those black German things, it might talk me into something violent. Mind you, I wouldn’t do it, he’s not worth burning for. What are you thinking about?”
“That’s my business.”
“That’s right. If you don’t talk about it no one else can. I’ll tell you something. Those women in packing, they’re not women, they’re hyenas. They smell trouble a mile off, they spread it and eat it for their tea-break.”
“I don’t work in a factory.”
“You don’t want to go there with trouble.” She twisted in her seat and brought her eyes on a level with Alice’s. “That’s right, turn your face away, I can read faces. You’re worrying about a man.”
“I’m going to sit somewhere else.”
“There is nowhere else. We’ll be getting off next stop. It’s like watching fish in a fish-bowl to watch your thoughts. You’re afraid he’s found out about the money.”
“The money?”
“I don’t listen to what people say, I listen to what they think. It’s a gift. There was someone used to do it on the stage and up in aeroplanes—sordid I call that, cashing in on a mark of grace.”
What I did was worse, thought Alice. I did my children’s thinking for them.
The bus had jolted to a stop. “Here we are,” said the woman, “here’s the rough to go with the smooth.”
Everyone seemed to be getting out, the gangway was filled with raincoats.
“How much was it?”
“How much was what?”
“I know your sort, ten pounds is a fortune till you get it, then it’s a drop in the ocean.”
Alice stood in the gangway to let her pass, but she sat on the end of the seat looking Alice over with candid appraisal.
“I never tell people what to do, I can see what they’ve made up their minds to. A great creature like you needn’t do anything, you’ve got might on your side, it won’t matter who’s in the wrong.”
“Everyone’s getting off.”
“I’m going to get a lodger. You won’t see me next winter, we’ll be sitting by the fire, the lodger and me, talking—” The conductor rang his bell and the bus moved off. “Here, this is our stop! Wait! Wait for us—” She went blundering to the top of the stairs crying, “Wait, damn you!”
Alice was left alone on the upper deck. She heard argument below and then the bell rang and the bus stopped. It started again almost immediately.
Now that there was only stale air and the smell of clothes she thought about the people who had gone. She missed them, there had been some comfort in being surrounded. She didn’t know any of them—well, she didn’t even know her own children. But her children knew her, they pitied and allowed for and that was pain, not consolation. Pain which was already familiar. She went into it as into a cage, knowing there could be no variety. The routine lost nothing by repetition. How many times had she been through it since this afternoon? Lifetimes they were, each one longer than her own forty odd years. They were the present, as far as she could see they were the future, too.
The bus was romping along, cold air doused the cigarette-smoke and dried the dribbles of steam off the windows. She pushed her fists under the collar of her coat and held it up round her throat.
If ever she got used to it and the pain stopped there’d be nothing left, not if she was honest. She would be honest in a vacuum, getting from one chore to the next. But it never would stop, it did not come from a wound that would heal or a sickness that would pass. It was alive and healthy and it was going to grow up and move away, but never so far away that it couldn’t reach her, never so adult that she wouldn’t be reaching out to her children—three people she knew by sight and anything they let fall about themselves. The rest was wishful thinking.
She rested her arms along the back of the seat and put her face down into them. Was there any other way of thinking? How hard must she wish with Lilly Warren at the heart of things?
“You can’t sleep here.”
The bus stopped, as the engine was switched off silence pricked up all round. She lifted her head and saw the conductor standing over her.
“This is as far as we go.”
“As far as we go? You mean, for sixpence?”
“Or six pounds. It’s the end of the run.”
“Oh, I see. I’ll stay on and go back.”
“You won’t stay on and you won’t go back, not on this bus. It’s going into the garage. You’ll have to wait for the next one to turn round.”
“When will that be?”
“Hour.” He went to the front to wind on the direction board.
She couldn’t see much through the window, rain had splintered the few lights over the glass. “Where are we?”
He answered something which she didn’t hear and when she asked again he slammed the indicator trap and came towards her with the key in his hand.
“You won’t get anywhere just sitting.”
“I’ve got to get home—”
“One hour, if it’s not cancelled. It is, more often than not. Here, I’ll show you.” He went to the head of the stairs, knocking about him with the indicator key and calling her to come on as if she were a dog to be brought to heel. On the platform he took her by the shoulder and pointed into the darkness. “Five hundred yards on your right you find a lane. It takes you on to the bypass and you can pick up three routes: 48, 26 and the Green Line.”
“Is it far?”
“Might be a mile. Next time you go on a mystery tour try the Inner Circle.”
*
Alice looked back once. The bus was an oasis and she didn’t like leaving it. There were other lights a long way off—car headlamps on the road she supposed she was making for—swooping about like swallows and no company. She held up her collar against the rain. Being so sharply brought back to herself she couldn’t think for a moment what she was doing out here.
But there was no forgetting Lilly Warren. Consciousness had layers like an onion, the best she could hope for was to push her under the top one now and then.
She was on some minor road with hedges and flat land that might be football pitches or allotments. She was coming to something a degree more solid than the air around it, a building, a thicket of trees, it could be either. The rain pricked her cheeks, in a burst of anger she started running. Finding herself out here miles from anywhere in pitchy blackness looked like defeat, like one up—another one up—to Lilly Warren. But soon her breath gave out and she turned her ankle. Then she worried whether Grace was looking for her, or whether one of the boys might be sick, or whether Frank was home for his supper.
No one else opened the door like Frank did, slowly and tidily as far as it went, standing back smiling as if it was a bit of a triumph to get home at all. She could see now that it might be.
She hadn’t gone in for analysis, she took him at his face value. If he smiled, she supposed he was pleased. When he said something, she believed it. When he said he was going to Birmingham on business she packed his pyjamas and a hot-water bottle and told him to leave it on the bed so that the chambermaid at the hotel could fill it. Being sure he would forget she had pinned a note inside the lid of his suitcase to remind him.
They must have smiled, he and Lilly Warren, when they found it. And the children, seeing her write the note, seeing her fix it in the lid, how much did they know, guess, make up, were they born with? Enough to share the joke?
A small light was coming across the fields, a bicycle lamp perhaps. She watched it winkling between the hedges. Either it was moving slowly or the bypass was considerably more than a mile away. She was tired already, her feet hurt and the darkness smelled of mud.
She didn’t like the country. Not like him, he could have been happy in a cottage. They had quarrelled about it before they were married. She remembered the glass flowers in the café where they used to meet. She always looked at them while he was talking about how they’d live in his grandmother’s cottage—on Exmoor it was—and how he’d get a job in the town and ride in every day on his motor-bike. He talked about the vegetables they’d grow, the chickens they’d keep, the generator he’d build and the snowbreaks, summer rides to the sea and winter walks on the moor—it went on for weeks. She had looked at the glass flowers. They were stiff and artful, coloured like chemist’s bottles, they didn’t look like flowers. They were bits of glass that couldn’t even hold a drink of water and somehow they identified themselves with what he was talking about. They conjured up the cottage on the moor, little dark rooms smelling of paraffin oil. She had stopped listening then, she didn’t need to be told. The glass flowers brought it home to her—two up, two down, old-fashioned furniture, wintergreen ghosts and the dead weight of stone walls. She looked at the flowers, she hardly looked at anything else, even Frank noticed it and asked what she was staring at.
She could still see them, she was in their element now—dirt and ditches and an empty sky-socket—she was in the country, miles from anywhere, not even sure how she could get home, like some panicky girl who has run out of the house because she couldn’t face her own music. She was a fool—that was something else she had to measure up to. Only a fool would get herself lost at a time like this and only a born fool could have had Lilly Warren in her pocket without knowing it.
That would explain why she had been happy, thought Alice. One day following another without let or hindrance, that was her brand of happiness and she had had it for years. The changes had been gradual, the pains mostly growing pains, the joys unrefined—if there was any other way of living she hadn’t needed to know. It seemed so natural, and no more than anyone had a right to. Sometimes when other people’s problems reached her—uncalled for troubles, applicable disasters—she applied them and had her moments of dread. She still believed that immunity could be deserved, her occasional stepping into other people’s shoes was a small part charity and a great deal superstition.
Frank had been privileged too. They were his children, it was his home—what other joys did he want? She could answer that now. Coupling him with Lilly Warren she felt squeamish, the fundamentals were no more nor less unthinkable than the fundamentals between any man and woman.
The cyclist passed at that moment. She heard his grunt of alarm as he swerved to avoid her. It was so dark she would have missed seeing the turning if he hadn’t swung out of it.
Now the road began to climb, she felt it in her knees and then in her chest, but she kept going because she hadn’t come here for this and she wanted an end to it. She could smell the no-man’s land of cabbages and ditches, the rain was soaking into her clothes and her hair.
Now it was painful to think. She knew what she had to do, but all she could bring to it was cursory distaste. Defeat had not left her even a griping of pride. She knew the scene, there were moments of it she lived already in a ragtime way. She felt the weight of humiliation she would be carrying for them both. Face to face she could never pin it on him, he had a gift—yes, she would call it a gift—of disassociation. He managed it without being in any way remote or inhuman, as if they spoke different languages. Other people didn’t notice it. ‘Your husband is so kind,’ someone had said, ‘such a kind man.’ It was an unexpected word to use of him. Yet it was true to say, as it was true to say he was tall and getting bald. He was what other people called ‘a good husband’—her own mother did.
The words were a convenience, what she knew him by couldn’t be put into words. It was a displacement in herself which he had filled because she was a practical woman and did not seek the impossible, even in marriage.
Something came at her out of the air. She saw what looked like a handful of solid dark. It didn’t actually touch her though she got the gust of its passing full in the face and a shrill piping that pricked her eardrums. Panicking she spun round, beating about with her hands. Hitting empty air soon took the spirit out of her and she stood still with her arms over her head.
A bat, a mouse on wings, that’s all. It wasn’t true that they tangled in your hair—why, they wouldn’t tangle with a spider’s web.
Robert had told her that, pushing his glasses up and down his nose as he did when he was in earnest. “We haven’t done anything new, you see, it’s all here already—bats are born with radar, there are electric eels and fish have stabilisers, and I’ll bet there’s some old worm somewhere that splits atoms.”
She remembered wondering if it had been said before. He had a clever forehead, she had seen it on scientists and tycoons and television quizzes. His interests were what he called ‘biological’—frogs, newts, jars of green water and bones. It was his ambition to be able to assemble the skeleton of a rabbit in the dark, he practised with a handkerchief over his eyes and when she doubted if he would ever need to assemble the skeleton of a rabbit in the dark he pointed out that it was a criterion of skill. He brought home bits of fungus and scabby lumps which he called ‘organisms’ and kept under an old glass cheese dish. He made daily notes of their progress, when there was no progress he wrote, ‘No change to the n.e.’ ‘N.e.’ stood for naked eye.
That drawing had been his, it had the same look as the drawings of his ‘organisms’—that was one time he hadn’t been thinking of them. She remembered the boys’ heads together over the drawing and then their faces upturned, Mick pale and shifty-eyed with shame, Robert with ears blazing. But there was something hardier than dismay, Robert couldn’t help himself and he had looked at her openly.
She would never know what Lilly Warren had set off in them, in Mick and Robert and Grace. Grace was two parts woman, and wide open. Whatever she made of it would be larger than life.
Alice knew how people could have murder in their hearts—if killing had been the way she could have killed Lilly Warren. But it wasn’t the way. There was no wiping her out, she was a childhood memory to them now.
In some slow baneful way Alice had been taking fire. Everything she felt, even distaste, had been piling-on, her mildness burned up and she saw what she had to do, her tongue watered over the words. ‘It’s their business, you’ve made it the children’s business,” and she would tell him that she knew, that everybody knew. Especially the children—she’d have them there when she told him. “You’re finished with Lilly Warren—we all are. Tell them, they must hear you say it.”
He would have to say it, all his ways out would be blocked by the children. No disassociating himself from them. He would see himself and Lilly Warren as they did, with that primary obscenity which was akin to innocence. It would come to him that they’d always see him like that, they’d have it in their mind’s eye and how was he to know at any given moment that one of them wasn’t taking a look?
She began to hurry in a blaze of purpose, not seeing the dark nor feeling the uphill pull of the road. It told on her like a tide holding her back
, but she struggled on, panting, swallowing the damp wind that blew into her face. She wouldn’t wait to rest, the lights on the upper road were fleering past and any one of them could have got her home.
By the time she reached the bypass she was spent. She told herself there was no hurry, this time tomorrow they’d still be there. But the hurry was her own, her flesh felt as if it was running off her bones. She floundered on to the grass verge, she’d got wind of home and she turned her face towards it. Headlamps flashed past showing her a greased road and foreign grass where paving-stones should be. There were enough noises in her head, surely one of them was a bus, surely she could hear a bus coming?
It occurred to her that the stop would be on the other side. She had started across the road when something white and violent surged up round her. For a split second she blazed in every pore, then the darkness ran over her like ink over a fly.
*
Harry Bissett saw a woman on the bench outside the Wheatsheaf and thought it was Mrs Robarts who had missed the ten o’clock bus. He had picked her up there once before—she had no other use for the Wheatsheaf, so far as he knew, than the seat outside it to rest her legs and the lights for company. When she lifted her head it did cross his mind that Mrs Robarts looked untidy, but he put that down to the rain and wind.
“Come on if you don’t mind a rough ride—I had to take the other seat out.”
She did not move and he added to reassure her, “It won’t be too bad, you can sit on my coat.”
He leaned into the back and made a place for her, but when it was ready she still sat there on the bench. “Don’t you want to get home?”
It seemed she did, though she was groping and hesitant as if she wasn’t sure. He helped her in and she had to sit crouched up behind him because the load of timber he was carrying stuck through into the cab.
“Mind the nylons, eh? You’ll be home before the bus, any rate.”
She wasn’t much of a talker, it didn’t bother him that she hadn’t yet opened her mouth. He sang to himself as he drove, his thoughts were miles away when she spoke up.