by Jane Rogers
“I wasn’t patronizing you, as a matter of fact,” he persisted. “I’ve spent a large number of lunch hours working out the occupations of the people in this room, on the evidence of their clothing. Men and women.”
She looked at him and raised her eyebrows briefly, in acceptance of the statement. Then she turned to Robinson. “You will be there tomorrow, then ? Do you want me to call for you? At nine-thirty?”
“No, no,” muttered Robinson like a naughty schoolboy who’s been caught out. “I’ll be there.”
“Good. Bring some boots. It’s very muddy.” She nodded briefly at both of them, picked up her tray and left. Alan noticed that she had thin, rather fragile-looking legs, and was wearing cream-coloured stockings. She moved well, with a long flowing stride.
“You may look,” murmured Robinson insinuatingly, “but that’s as close as you’ll get. She’s a les – lives with a load of other women.” He sat back in his chair, expansive and relieved now she had gone. “Not my type anyway. Too skinny – not enough on top, eh, eh?”
Alan avoided replying by swallowing his coffee very slowly. Robinson was a nauseating jerk. He was embarrassed that Robinson had noticed him looking at her legs. He made his voice matey and conspiratorial.
“Well what are you up to then, young Robinson, meeting a man-hater at nine-thirty for a muddy tryst?”
Robinson humphed. “I wish she’d get off my back. It’s the new park site – she’s got some beef about the contractors not finishing off the earth moving properly. Well they’ve started some demolition work for us, over that side – and now she’s going overboard about the thaw and her bloody planting season. I’ve got to be dragged along to look at some mess they’ve left, so she can persuade me to send them back. What she needs is a good fuck, in my opinion; that’d give her something else to think about. Bah.”
They stood up.
“Why d’you call her a les?” Alan asked casually.
“You are interested aren’t you!” Robinson nudged him so that his cup slid off the saucer and spilt coffee dregs over the tray and his jacket.
“Sorry old man. Keep your pecker up, eh, eh!” Robinson departed. Alan told himself that the coffee dregs were divine retribution for the complicity in which he placed himself with Robinson.
A few days later, she was sitting alone at a table near the till, surrounded by her heaps of discarded clothing.
“May I?” He sat opposite her on impulse. She looked up, nodded, and continued to eat.
“You must work out on site a lot,” he said, indicating the clothes.
She swallowed her mouthful.
“A–At the moment – I’m doing someone else’s job really.” She took another mouthful and he waited then saw that she needed prompting.
“What’s that?”
“Oh – we got one of these Manpower Services schemes through, to do canal reclamation – so we appointed a Project Officer to look after them. It’s a shame, he’s been ill on and off since the thing started, and he’s a nice bloke –” She took another mouthful.
Alan wondered if she was in a hurry, or just very hungry. He noticed that although she wasn’t wearing any make-up the skin around her eyes was dark and purplish, and that her eyelids were full, almost puffy. She looked as if she might have been crying. “So what have you done?”
“Well, we haven’t replaced him. They look after themselves pretty well, but I do about three mornings a week with them at the moment.”
“On canal reclamation, you said?”
She nodded.
“Where are you working?”
“We’re on the stretch between Gorst’s Mill and Bailey Hill Railway Station. D’you know where that is?”
Alan nodded. It was close by. “Isn’t there going to be a new park round that area?” he asked. “Robinson was saying something about it.”
“Yes.”
There was a silence.
“D’you only come in here when you’ve been working outside, then?” asked Alan, realizing that he had only seen her the once in office clothing.
“Usually. It makes me hungry. I don’t get hungry in the office.” She finished her potatoes and turned immediately to the apple pie and custard. The conversation was beginning to feel like an inquisition. Alan concentrated on his food, and there was another silence. At last she said, “Are you new in Architects’?” and they talked briefly about Lark and Clarkson, and the frustrations of working for the Council. She excused herself as soon as she had finished her food. After she had returned her tray she came back to pick up her boilersuit and jumpers, and smiled at Alan as she left.
Alan didn’t have lunch in the canteen for a week or so after that. He had various lunch-time meetings, and spent quite a bit of time on site at a partially built clinic where unforeseen drainage problems were developing. It was a messy job – he had been given it half done and each time one problem was solved another seemed to arise. On the one day when he was heading for the canteen he recognized Robinson entering the building, so he turned back around the corner and went to a pub instead.
He had to call in at an estate management office near Bailey Hill Railway Station, at the end of the week, and found himself leaving there at eleven forty-five. It was a stupid time – too early to go for lunch, but not a long enough stretch to do anything useful in the office. The sun was shining weakly, for the first time that year, it seemed. On the spur of the moment he cut across the railway car park, over the footbridge, crossing both railway and canal, and down on to the canal towpath. He started to walk in the direction of Gorst’s Mill. The surface of the canal was clean and silky smooth; the bordering flagstones had been uncovered and a red ash path laid beside them. Small straight saplings had been planted in the mound of raw mud that ran parallel with, and to the right of, the path. He ran up the mound to look over the landscape on the other side. It was behind a tall wire-mesh fence. There was an expanse of featureless muddy ground, running away to a bare hill, some distance to his left. Much nearer, the ground was staked out, and some digging had been done, on what was obviously intended to be the foundations of a fairly large building. Behind the digging rose another naked hill, lopsided in shape. It all looked rather arbitrary and silly. There was a group of people up ahead, clustered around a lock beyond a bend in the canal. He ran down and walked on quickly, slowing as he came within sight of the lock. The narrow space to the right of the path opened out into a sloping area where two stark new picnic tables stood. There were several people standing around the tables, and another group, who were laughing and shouting, on the bridge over the disused lock. The lock had been blocked up. Water cascaded in a steep waterfall from the higher level to the lower, under the near side of the bridge. Three large steps had been built to break the force of the falling water, and low iron railings ran across the edge of the lowest step. The railings were clogged with plastic bags, bits of wood, a tyre, clumps of weed; a mass of rubbish which blocked the whole lower step. Alan saw that Caro was in the centre of the group on the bridge. She said something and there was a burst of laughter. She was holding up a coil of heavy rope and demonstrating something – then she began to wind the rope around the waist of a tall boy, amidst cheers and wolf-whistles. Alan watched her fasten the rope and hand the coil to two others. The boy started to climb down the side of the waterfall steps. She spoke to them again, then ran down over the bridge towards the picnic tables. Alan moved forward quickly.
“Hello.”
“Hel–hello, what are you doing here?”
“Just taking a quick breather. I was at the station, so I thought I’d come and see what you were up to.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “Well – this is it –” She glanced up to the picnic tables. It was obvious that they were waiting for some sort of instructions from her.
One of the lads on the hill wolf-whistled, and a girl shouted, “That your boyfriend, Caro?”
She laughed and turned away from him. “No Kerry – he’s all yours, if you fancy hi
m.” Under the burst of laughter that came from the kids she turned back to Alan, her face flushed red. “I – I’m sorry,” she said, laughing herself. “It’s awfully hard not to sink to their level.”
“That’s all right,” said Alan, feeling irrationally pleased. “The same sort of thing happens to me in the company of fat pig Robinson.”
She glanced at him with a fleetingly serious expression, then laughed. The kids were calling to her from the lock.
“I must go – look at Kevin! He’s showing them his mountain-climbing skills, would you believe – he’ll break his silly neck.” The tall boy was leaning out at right angles to the stone wall. She moved quickly. “I’ll explain the park to you sometime. Have you had a look? Over there –” She waved an arm and ran up to the lock again.
Alan headed back for the station. He found himself in a good mood for the rest of the day.
She joined him at his lunch table a couple of days later, and asked him what he thought of the park.
“Well – it’s a very nice field of mud. It hasn’t got pretensions to being anything else yet, has it?”
She laughed, tilting her head back quickly as if to duck out of his teasing. Eating and talking with astonishing speed, she began to describe the features of the park, as if they were plain for anyone to see. Her enthusiasm struck Alan as almost eccentric; he poked fun at her for a while, then found himself being drawn into the sort of serious discussion which he had not experienced since he was a student. They were conscious of the canteen emptying around them, but even when they returned their trays and hurried to the doors, it was impossible to stop talking. Afterwards it seemed to Alan that the conversation had been stopped in mid-sentence, literally torn apart, as they had separated at the outer doors, each to go in their own direction.
He thought about her as he drove home that night. She was too serious. Too serious for what? he asked himself. The question made him squirm.
Alan had indulged in several brief sexual adventures since his marriage, but they had all been of the sort Robinson would approve –physical and functional. He did not describe them to himself as infidelities, because they were both different from and irrelevant to his relationship with Carolyn. Naturally he hid them from Carolyn, out of good taste, and because he knew that she would have been upset to a disproportionate degree. She would have assumed all sorts of depths and threats which simply did not exist.
He found himself becoming angry as he drove home, angrier and angrier as if he were being squeezed by an invisible fist. When he reached the end of the road he drove past it, went round the next roundabout and took the road for the city. He drove to Lark and Clarkson’s. As he had expected, Mike’s car was still there. Alan parked beside it, to wait for Mike to come out. He considered telephoning Lyn to tell her he would be late. Better to do it from the pub in an hour or so. It would seem less premeditated. If he rang now he would save her the trouble of preparing an unnecessary meal, but he knew she would be less offended if he rang later, made it sound casual and impetuous. (“Carolyn love, I’m terribly sorry – bumped into Mike out of the blue – went for a drink, you know what it’s like – never realized the time. I might as well make a night of it now. Don’t worry about food – I’ll get some fish and chips on the way.”) If he rang now she would say, “Oh, well, I’ll have tea with the children then,” with that reproachful edge to her voice; “Will you be late?” Knowing, of course he would be late, if he was drinking with Mike. Suggesting that his choice to go drinking with Mike, rather than coming home to her, was a form of treachery. She would forgive him for being forgetful, scatter-brained, not knowing the time – childish faults – but not the adult fault of preferring anyone else’s company, however briefly, to hers.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love her. Often he enjoyed her company, her cooking, her body. It was the way she seemed to be constantly hovering, slightly reproachful, around the perimeters of his days, as if to say, are there any crumbs of time for me? At weekends she offered him the children, as if they were sweets in a box. “Why don’t you take Chrissy fishing for the day? He’d love it Alan, he really would. It’s ages since you spent any time with him on his own.” There was a reproach in the very request. He hated the way she engineered his meetings with his own children. And he sensed that the children agreed to them only because of her insistence. They would all be much happier spending the day together without him, he was sure. Mike suddenly ran down the steps two at a time like a kid escaping from school, and Alan leant on the horn.
He didn’t go to the canteen for lunch for a while after that, consciously depriving himself of a chance of meeting Caro, but also holding it in reserve, as something which he could continue to look forward to as long as he didn’t let it happen. Then he met her leaving the building one afternoon.
“Hello!” she said. “Have you been ill? I haven’t seen you for ages.”
“No, just busy.”
She nodded and they stood awkwardly silent for a moment.
“Well, I’d better go –” she said. Her eyelids, he noticed again, were full, as if they were swollen. Her grey eyes were very clear and open. She was wearing red dungarees.
“Wait – are you busy? Care for a drink before you go home?”
She shook her head. “It would be nice but I’ve got a meeting at six, I’m sorry –”
“What sort of a meeting?”
“Women’s Aid Support Group.”
“What’s that?”
“For a Refuge. For battered women.”
“Oh. Well – I’ll see you.”
“We could have a drink on Friday after work, if you’re free,” she offered.
“I’ll see,” he said ungraciously. “I’ll let you know.”
It was not what he intended, to arrange a meeting.
But on Friday morning he enquired the way to her office and, finding it empty, left a note on the desk. “Rose & Kettle, 5.30? Alan.”
She was sitting there when he arrived, with a pint of beer on the table before her. He apologized and made a crack about women usually being late.
“Rubbish.”
“They are. Most women are habitually late.”
She shook her head.
“Well all the women I’ve met are. My mother’s always hours late for everything.” He was conscious of not mentioning his wife and wondered whether he would.
“Well it’s probably because she’s got too much to do and doesn’t get enough help from her family. Or because she’s ner–nervous and insecure, and afraid of having to sit alone or sustain a conversation alone.”
“How can you sustain a conversation alone? You mean, like you were doing till I arrived?”
She pulled a face and made the now familiar gesture of shaking her head back, out of his mockery. He told himself that he didn’t like her shapeless hairy jumper. But when she picked up her drink her wrist sliding out the wide sleeve looked so slender and fragile that, ridiculous impulse, he wanted to clasp his fingers round it and help her raise the glass.
“Why are you so skinny?”
She shrugged. “Why not? Why do you make so many offensive personal comments about me?”
“You can’t accuse me of being sexist, anyway; if I was sexist I would try to flatter you. Why do you have your hair cut so short?”
“I like it like this,” she said simply, “Why do you wear yours short?”
Gradually the tension between them eased, and the conversation began to spark and flow of its own accord (oiled, perhaps, by beer). He was suddenly curious about everything about her, her house, friends, family, past. He had never met anyone who seemed so singular. When she had described her household she asked him, “Do you live alone?”
There was a fractional silence.
“No. I live with my wife and three children.” He watched her face carefully.
“Oh. I didn’t know you were married.” She said it simply, without any emotion. He could not tell if she was hiding a reaction, or if she simply
had none. “How old are your children?”
They started to talk about children. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter to her that he was married. Perhaps nothing would happen anyway. Perhaps she hadn’t imagined anything would. Perhaps Robinson had been right about her. Alan suddenly felt that he didn’t know the rules. He could not predict what was going to happen. He found himself talking about the children in ridiculous detail. She listened with her head bent, the warm furry top of her head tilted towards him. They had had quite a few drinks. Suddenly she looked at her watch.
“God, I’ve got to go – I said I’d be in for supper.”
“Can I give you a lift?”
“Well I’m on my bike.”
“I can give your bike a lift too, if you like.”
“I – OK – if it fits.”
Outside suddenly it was cold and dark and very quiet, and the conversation they had been cocooned in fell away, leaving them naked. Caro ran across the street to the car park, and unlocked her bike from the attendant’s hut. The car park was empty.
“It makes it seem ridiculously late, doesn’t it?” she said nervously into the silence.
“It’s only half-past eight.”
There was another cold silence as they manoeuvred the bike to rest in the boot, unlocked the car and got in. He started the engine.
“Which way?”
Caro described the route then sat back in the seat, hugging her jacket round her.
They were each disappointed – almost angry, with the other. They drove to the Red House without speaking again. Alan got out and helped her unload her bike, and she said, “Thanks for the lift.”
He nodded curtly, then drove away without smiling.
Caro parked her bike in the hall and leaned against the wall for a minute, before going into the kitchen.
Chapter 17