by A. L. Barker
Would she ever know? Did she need to? She couldn’t care more and she didn’t need a reason for how she felt about the woman in black. That could be the one reason for knowing—so that she could get her hands on her. She was trembling with the same ungovernable hunger as when he had touched her, only now it was murder she hungered for and her fingers had a rage of their own, twisting and vicious as if they were tearing paper.
She climbed out of the bunk, made herself fumble about for her clothes. She knew what she had to do, paper or devil—would he go to bed with a paper doll?—she had to tear it apart and trample it into the ground so there could be no decent burial. But there was bound to be flesh and blood under the dirty black and she would have the joy, the special joy of killing a whore.
When Garnett came in from the galley she had started to dress. He stood in the doorway, she was bending over pulling on her stockings and the first she saw of him was his feet. She had never liked his feet, they were too white for him, they broke out of his shoes like something that ought decently to be kept covered. She felt herself coil and grow tight with the old readiness which was not readiness so much as disgust. He made her flesh creep, so did any unwholesome creature coming near.
But when she straightened she saw him grinning and that was defeat, as always.
He moved towards her, treading carefully as if he were stalking. She saw his hands come up with the thumbs spread and she thought he was going to choke her. She backed against the wall but she wasn’t frightened. If he did, it would be the end and she would not need to try any more.
He put one hand at her back, rolling and pinching up her skin between his finger and thumb. With the other hand he touched the bruises on her forearms, tracing each one as if it were a map.
“Funny colour, an’t they? Ironmouldy.” He was so close she could feel his paint-scabbed overalls rubbing against her. She could not get away, yet she was draining out of herself and he was pouring in—sight, smell, feel—he was even taking over in her head. She tried to push him away, it was the last thing she did for herself, the rest she was driven to.
“This is what you want.” His hand moved across her breast, “I know you, missis, this is what you’ve been fixing for.”
He used his body with a practised clumsiness to batter and hold her against the wall. His hands moved over her, working rather than caressing, he was watching her all the time with his dogfaced grin.
After that she saw nothing, knew nothing except her need of him. She clung, pressing his hands on her, pulling his head down, covering his open mouth with hers. His teeth bit into her lips and the taste of him was salt with her own blood. She was neither self nor woman, just a ravenous hunger without pride or pity or palate. He had to fill her, she was taking him every way she could, she even tried by the pressure of their bodies to take him in through her skin.
It lasted for the moment of impact—having no wits to find, only instinct, he ended it that much sooner. He fought to free himself, dragging her arms down and beating her off with his fists. She fell away from him, heavily to the floor.
Coming to herself was the worst thing she had ever experienced. There was a separate pain for each place he had hit her, she could have charted the blows one by one, but there was no ease to be got from touching herself. They were blows that wouldn’t rub off, she would carry them on her breasts, her throat and between her thighs where his upthrust knee had struck. In these places she would remember the butt end of pain that dogs knew, and cattle.
She crouched on the floor, she couldn’t get low enough. Coming to herself meant coming down every peg there was. Who was she to object that the grit and dust stuck to her skin? There was more, much more of her kind of dirt.
She had no will to move. A kind of anguish was all that was left of her hunger. She thought of the phrase, ‘eating her heart out’. Not heart, she thought, not there—
“Get up.”
Sourness welled up in her mouth, she felt sick, or her better nature did—always supposing she was respectable. Why should she be? Could she know so much what she wanted if this were the first time?
“Get up, why don’t you?”
He tried to pull her to her feet and the breathing space was over. She began a guttural helpless crying, no burst of grief or chagrin, for she felt neither. It was more like the running out of the dregs. She wept open-eyed, the tears balling in her throat, she could feel herself rocking to and fro and hear the noises, raw uncivilised noises that she—or something—was making.
Garnett had let her go and she had fallen forward on her knees. She was past knowing where he was, his face kept pumping up and collapsing overhead like a pink bladder.
“I was fooling, you should see I was. Chrissakes, missis, can’t you pull yourself together?”
She couldn’t, any more than the earth could in the middle of an earthquake.
“It an’t my fault. How do I know why? It an’t never happened before—all I know is I couldn’t. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s yours.”
He was wasting his breath and now she was having to fight for hers.
“Missis, for Chrissakes don’t carry on like that. Here—” He pushed something into her hand, “take this, it’s yours, take it.”
She never did pull herself together. It simply stopped in a natural way when there was no more to come. That was one thing it was—natural. After a while, quite a long while because the light had strengthened and it was full day, she listened. She was alone, there was no sound, no movement, nothing. For the first time it was a blessing. She was in a bubble of peace and she prized it, thinking how soon it could be pricked. She thought this entire sweet emptiness could be death and what had stopped for her could be life itself. She thought she wasn’t real, she was sure she was a ghost, clear as daylight and as pure. None of her was real—except one hand, in one hand there was a real spot. She closed her fingers on it, it was hard and small. She didn’t want to look, but it was the only real thing left and it was keeping her back. She opened her hand and saw a ring.
That surprised her. A ring was harmless enough, a ring could be dropped down a drain, it couldn’t start anything. She looked at it pityingly. It wasn’t even impressive, gold with a pattern of facets that had lost their edge from wear. Some woman’s wedding-ring. She turned it in her fingers, ready to let it drop and roll away. There were initials on the inside—she had known there would be. A.O. Some woman’s initials.
Her legs had gone to sleep. She straightened them, painfully, one at a time. Stretched out in front of her they were white and clownish. The bubble of peace was pricked, she was full of herself again. She pulled her petticoat down over her knees. There was something on the tip of her tongue.
“A.O.”, she said. “Alice Oram.”
The next thing to do was to put the ring back on her finger.
III
A LIKELY STORY
ARTHUR BULOW’S disenchantment took shape so that he was aware of it as the dispelling of a doubt about a doubt—in a quarter where he did not reckon to have any. It turned out to be a long-drawn, lackadaisical process somewhere out of mind, coming up armed with events rather than growing out of them. Nothing catastrophic, yet it was catastrophe because he loved his wife, he assembled in her a rarefied best, a special bunch of virtues based on commonplace integrity. Deceit he expected and allowed for from all places else, but not from her. She had one face which she could not mask even in fun. In fun he had to pretend to be taken in and he had so pretended for the eighteen months of their married life until the day she told him she had had a visitor. She put it like that—‘a visitor’—conjuring up a picture of someone arriving nicely turned out for the occasion. It evidenced how few visitors she did have.
The day was a Monday and from a business view moderately successful. Once in a while he took samples of the slower-moving lines and called on wholesalers who supplied the canteen. With luck he disposed of a few gross and the wholesalers got orders for jam and pineapple chunks. Reciprocal trading it was c
alled at board meetings. Bulow called it the Squeeze because it was a degree of blackmail, but he had no compunction about putting it on. It often looked to him as if all business and all living was a degree of blackmail.
He had taken out some samples of plastic display shelves which had hung fire for a year. They were strong, light, adaptable, and coloured. Transparent or white would have sold, but not toothbrush pink and baby blue: someone designed a really nice article, proportion, weight, capacity, strength, just right, and someone else nullified the calculations for lack of common sense, too common to use, perhaps. The blue was unlike anything in nature, it killed everything round it. Put it in the shop, put the nice bright packaged goods on it and the first thing the eye had to do, and keep doing, was fight with the colours. That blue would draw the eye back, it was magnetic and in the right place it would have been valuable.
Bulow took that line in his sales talk. “Tie down your background? As a matter of fact, it does just the reverse. This blue is a focussing agent, our design department have been into it, they know. You know yourself, white’s clinical and transparencies are nothing. But this blue will throw your other colours up.”
He unshipped a few hundred shelves, it was more like bartering than buying: so far as tinned fruit, jam and condiments were concerned, Rainbirds would eat at a slight profit for a few days.
Meat was another matter, it was impossible to score on meat. The suppliers did their own canvassing and for their deep freezers and coldrators everything had to be made to measure. Besides, the consumption at Rainbirds was fabulous: if all the animal carcasses that went into the kitchen in three months were put together there wouldn’t be room for the plant let alone the workers.
When Bulow was made catering manager he contemplated sweeping reforms. The only golden rule he knew was that economy equalled success on all fronts. Management believed it, and as Management had picked him for the job he believed they knew what they were doing, so he bought half quantities of meat and made up the portions with vegetables, principally cabbage which was cheap just then. The result was collective action, alarming to Bulow who was on the uncollected side for the first time. It reminded him of a trick where the cloth is whipped from the table without disturbing the dishes on it. One more trick and it would be the ground that was whipped from under his feet.
The meat went into the kitchen and the dinners came out, and short of following each joint into the ovens he had no way of knowing if it could be done on one cow, pig or sheep the less. As for the waste check, Mrs Worcester, the cook, took the attitude that while he was at it he might as well check up on her nail parings: Management, on the other hand, expected him to try the thickness of the potato-rinds with a gauge.
Driving back to the factory he rewarded himself with a cigarette. Before he was married he went through forty a day despite no-smoking regulations. Now he had five and each one came as a deserved peak of pleasure. There was more money in being canteen manager, but there was more to do with it. His wife was no economist, she saw money on trees, literally. Last autumn it was beech leaves: “If they were gold sovereigns think what we could buy.” She had more fun out of pretending than other people had out of actual possession. At Rainbirds economy was a Management word and had only noise value; but bring it home and it meant pinch and scrape, it was a blight that crept to everything under the sun. After they were married he knew what it was to be in want, which was not the same as wanting, not when it meant weeks of saving to get his shoes mended, when a coal bill could haunt him and he couldn’t afford a bus-ride to work. She had been spared the details, she didn’t ask for much anyway, it was enough to have a house and furniture and be able to do as she liked.
Having, after not having, was an experience which absorbed her. Her joy was in the physical possession of the house. It was a nice house, nicer than they could afford and she had chosen it, going straight to it like a water diviner. There was no tying her to his bank account. Bulow guessed by the piecrust roof-tiles and the wrought-iron bell pull that the mortgage would be steep. It turned out to be crippling, but he was glad that she had wanted something which was in his power—just—to give.
He felt repaid by her joy in it. She was excited and fearful, it cut him to the quick to see how unsure she was. There had never been anyone she could trust herself to—that would have been like trusting quicksilver to a net bag—and seeing how, even in her happiness, she tried to equip herself for disillusion, he would not let one fly into the ointment. He would make her believe that with him she was safe, she was supreme, with him and with no one else.
She loved coming back to the house, she used to get him to go with her as far as the corner just for the delight of walking back to their own place. “You can see our chimneys, and that’s our smoke, and our roof, every single tile is ours—” he didn’t remind her of the mortgage. “Now you can see our windows and our tree—it’s going to be a Cedar of Lebanon.”
“It’s an almond tree, it’ll be nice in the spring.”
“The house is like a wedding-cake. No, it isn’t then, it’s small like a sugar-lump.”
“It’s big enough for us.”
“It’s property, isn’t it? Oh, but I could never own property!”
“Why not?”
She said, turning away, “Can you see it?”
“Good grief, girl, it isn’t an estate, it’s our home.”
“Is it, Arthur? Is it? I’m ready when we go to the door to find it’s someone else’s—”
“I’ll tell you what, you’re an old married woman and you must settle your mind to it.”
That she couldn’t do, and he was glad because it kept her from noticing how tight things were. So tight he sometimes thought that even his blood couldn’t move and thinking about it brought the pressure back even now, the skinned feeling. Just in time he had got the canteen manager’s job, and he still didn’t know how. He had angled for it, and so had others. It was a nice safe job without a future: he couldn’t afford a future, not with the price of the present. Possibly Mr Dollomore had swayed the Board for him. Mr Dollomore knew of Bulow—he no more than ‘knew of’ anyone—and it would be a condemnation the way he would do it: “If you want an economist, I’ve seen Bulow pick up a grain of salt and put it back on his plate.”
Turning into his gate, Bulow observed that the house was still white and tidy and reckoned that by the time it needed painting he should have enough saved to get it done. They were safe, within reason, which did not cover illness or holidays, but they were healthy and they had never had a holiday and wouldn’t miss it. Checking through his sources of worry was something he did: other people had to get up in the night to check that the taps were turned off.
She was waiting that evening to tell him what had happened. She always told him everything that happened during the day. In a semi-detached house on a new housing estate it was next to nothing, it was the way she saw it. If he tried to isolate the quality in her which gave significance, he thought of it as an unclouded eye that saw colours where everyone else’s saw garden brown.
He went in by the back door and the rich breath of the oven met him in the kitchen. She had news in her face, her sort of news that people would pass over as the incidentals, the crepitations of the day.
“What’s this—baking on Monday?”
“It’s something special.”
“Anything you make’s special.” There was this, too, about her: besides the fancy were plain things she could do, like cooking, and do well. “I was thinking of the cold beef.”
“It’ll still be cold tomorrow and it’ll still be beef.”
“Well, what’s special about today? Being Monday, it’s specially raw, of course.”
“I’m making something of it then.” She pinched up crumbs of pastry from the table with her fingertips.
He appreciated that having made her wait so long to tell he ought to show some impatience to hear. “What happened today?”
“What could happen?” The
re was no bitterness in that, she never needed to ask herself the question. “The baker came and the milkman and, oh yes, I had a visitor.”
“Who?”
“Jessie Munn.”
“Munn!” He stopped with his coat half off. “What did she want?”
“Nothing. Perhaps a good laugh.”
“I’d have made her laugh the other side of her face.” But he could remember being swallowed alive by Jessie Munn’s laughter. “Are we so comical?”
“She’s getting old, I expect. She’s short of something to laugh at.”
There were cups and saucers on the draining board. They had had the best china, and a sponge-cake—there was the empty carton—and fancy biscuits and paper doilies.
“Why do you bother?” Forgiveness, was it? He never had been able to think like that. “After the way they treated you?”
“She wasn’t so bad,” said Esther. “It was him, it was Joe,” and Bulow didn’t miss the way she drew herself together as if she were cold.
“Did you know she was coming? Did you ask her to come?”
“I wouldn’t ask her if she was the last person in the world.”
“She is the last person—for you.”
She bowed her head. “No, there’s him.”
Joe Munn—not a name to conjure with, not before her, since he could not make it vanish. He had tried, but he did not know how to cast out devils.
Bulow took his wife in his arms, took the devil, too, and caressed with his thumbs the brittle blade bones of her back. “I don’t want you reminded. I don’t want hint nor hair of any of them to remind you.”
She folded against him, sighing. “I do try to forget.”
“Just keep telling yourself it was a bad dream, nothing gets forgotten quicker than a dream.”
“A five-year dream?”
“It just takes a bit longer to fade.”
“You’re so good to me. Who else cares if I was unhappy all that time ago?”
“That’s why I want to know what she came here for.”