After a long silence, he started again. ‘She was the youngest, just eighteen. Only just out of school . . . She had been spoilt by everybody because she was good-natured and affectionate. It was only a game at first, pretending to be fighting, wrestling on the floor. The kind of thing we used to do at school . . . Then her parents went away for a few days’ holiday, leaving their grown-up children to look after the house. That was the first time. I took a day off sick from work. She was always the last to leave, but this day she decided at the last minute not to go to school. We hadn’t planned it. We had not arranged it or anything, but we did after that, whenever the rare opportunity presented itself. There was nothing reckless about it, no vows or passionate declarations. We did it like it was dirty, hurriedly and silently . . .’
‘Ken!’ Dottie said, pained and made jealous by these descriptions despite herself. ‘I don’t think you should tell me more. Not if it makes you feel so bad.’ She did not say that she did not want to hear more, although she was glad he had told her as much as he had. The hurt she had seen on his face had a little more meaning now. She had taken the quivering of his lips, the long, terrified silences, to be signs of some ancient instability and fear. Why else would he be with her, unless he was frightened of normal people? Without thinking of it clearly, she had taken him to be damaged goods, deformed in some deep-seated region that was no longer visible. The thought brought a bitter smile to her face as she acknowledged the extent of her self-contempt. Really there were no depths she was not prepared to sink to, to persuade the world to despise her, she thought, filled with self-pity. She looked at Ken sitting up beside her in the dark, his shape upright and tense, and felt the first stirrings of revulsion for him. She was not sure whom she felt more sorry for, the man demoralised with shame, or the young girl he had injured, and who thought she was only playing.
Eventually he laughed. It was a sudden, strained, wheezing laughter, false with melodrama. ‘I suppose she thought she would get away with it, as she’d always done with everything. She used to say that nothing bad had ever happened to her. Everything always worked out . . . She would apologise nicely and give someone a warm hug, and everything would be all right again. She was like that, very loving,’ he said. In the dark, Dottie imagined him looking sad and wistful as he recalled the girl and her affectionate nature. She smiled wryly to herself, and wished that she was not the lucky recipient of these confidences. ‘No, not thought! Thought is too strong a word for what either of us did,’ he continued after a moment. ‘Perhaps she hoped . . . It’s always the woman who has to pay, though. She must have known that . . . you’d have thought. When she told me, she did not cry or beg or anything like that. She just told me, and waited.’
He laughed again, this time a note of real mirth bubbling underneath the surface of his mockery. ‘She waited while I uttered my exclamations of horror and my reassurances . . . until I had run out of the easy things to say. And she still waited. I don’t know where she could’ve learned such cunning. I could feel the words being dragged out of me, being hauled out like . . . like . . . like they were life itself. I said something, you know, a vague mumble in the midst of which came marriage. Even then she did not say anything, did not even look up, but I heard her sigh. My mother insisted I should marry her. We’re Catholics, did I tell you? What are you? She was frightened by all the fuss, all the troubles she had caused. Diana, that was her name. Diana. She was plump and slovenly but . . . I should not have done what I did. It shames me to think of that time, and the way I was. Her parents were devastated, but that was only at first. They came round. After the wedding we were to go and live on the farm. I ran away rather than go back there.’
‘But you liked it on the farm,’ Dottie said at last, when it seemed that by his tense silence Ken was waiting for her to say something before he continued. She said this gently, asking for the explanation that she thought he wanted to give rather than making an accusation, but that was not how he took it. He moved suddenly, punching out at her in the dark.
‘You want me to go back there like another cripple? What the fuck do you take me for, you stupid bitch!’ he shouted, landing blows on the arms she had thrown up to protect her head. She waited until he had calmed down and had turned away from her, breathing heavily in indignation. Then she moved nearer and touched him on the shoulder. He sighed and turned to her with tearful apologies, kissing her arms where he had hit her, making her better.
Later, in the silence that made Dottie think that he had gone to sleep, he started again. ‘I was a complete bastard. I left her in the hotel where we were spending our ridiculous honeymoon. On the third morning, while she was still sleeping, I walked away from her. I ran away.’
‘Is that where you’re going now? Back to the farm?’
She did not care whether he answered or not. In her mind, it was as if he had already told her that he was going, leaving her. And although she was sorry, and guessed that the pain would get worse when he was no longer there, she wished he would stop talking and just leave.
‘You don’t know what such pain is like,’ he said. ‘You’re such an innocent. I’ve been wandering the world for four years, carrying that kind of burden, not even knowing how my parents are . . . whether they are alive or dead. I felt completely alone. Not that I didn’t get to know people, but that was just in passing. None of it could last. How could it when I was being torn apart inside? When I met you, you seemed so good, so gentle and pure that I thought perhaps the innocent pleasure you took in things would rub off on me. It seemed like that for a while, didn’t it? I don’t know whether you can understand the kind of loneliness I’m describing, the kind of guilt. That’s what makes me so restless.’
Dottie started to say that he should not worry, that he should do whatever he thought was right, but he interrupted before she had got more than a few words out. ‘No, please don’t insist. Don’t cling! I can’t stand that,’ he said, softening his voice but obviously speaking through gritted teeth. ‘I would stay if I could, but I just can’t make those kinds of promises. Don’t make it any harder than it is already. It may seem mad to you . . . Oh I wish I could make somebody understand! This life is driving me crazy.’
He suddenly turned away from her and curled himself up as if he was going to sleep. She resisted the urge to protest that she was not clinging, was not a pathetic little innocent that he could talk to as if she could not feel pain. Let him go to sleep, she thought bitterly, and she felt a sneer crossing her face. She had not forced him into this, had not pursued him into her bed. She would not have known how to. He had appeared to her in that gloomy cave where she spent her daylight hours, like an angel with his golden hair and fragrant breath, and touched her with his warmth and his maleness. She had felt herself shrivelling into a shape that would announce her deformity to the world, abandoned even by those she would have sacrificed life for. He had come and breathed life into her, held her and warmed her and made her feel whole and ordinary. But she knew from what he had told her that she could offer him little that would assuage the pain that he felt. She felt her own lack too much to be able to do much for him. It was almost, she thought, as if he relished the agony. And in the end, she suspected, he had already made up his mind to return to his parents’ farm, and was only delaying the prodigal’s return with anguish-ridden dalliances on the road. She smiled grimly as she made herself ready for sleep, and thought she should kick the backside he had stuck out at her, just to show him that she had seen through him and was not going to be made an idiot of.
In the morning, she left for work while he was still sleeping. She stood at the door for a long moment, wondering if she should wake him, but the anger she had felt in the night returned and made her shut the door decisively behind her. The women asked after Ken, as did Mike Butler, coming round with a message from Ken’s charge-hand that he was getting fed up of the absences. Dottie shrugged, and saw Mike Butler smile sadly.
‘I’ll tell him,’ she said, disliking the
presumption of that pitying smile.
She did not know what to expect as she hurried home. Many times during the long day she regretted that she had closed the door behind her without a word. Instead of leaving him asleep, she thought, she should have repeated his own words to him: live life as it comes. But he had not really meant that, and she did not believe in it anyway. They were only words, a manner of speaking, to show himself that he lived a full life because he had been elected to bear pain. She suspected that he would have gathered his things and gone, and as she sat on the bus she made herself ready for the emptiness she would find in that room.
He opened the door for her and held her in his arms for a long time. Sorry, he whispered, again and again, while she clung to him with joy. Please don’t hate me, he said. He had been to the market and bought her flowers, lilies and fat, white daisies, which now stood resplendent in an old Blue Band margarine tin. He had cleaned the room, and had tidied everything away, had found an old bed-sheet in one of the boxes and used it as a rag to clean the window-panes. Hudson, she thought, suddenly seared with guilt. Where was that poor boy? They really came out filthy, he said. The windows. He suggested they go out, to escape the room which was beginning to make him feel cramped and hemmed-in.
They walked all the way to the river that evening, down Clapham Road, past the Oval, and along the Embankment to Lambeth Palace Road, walking slowly for hours until they crossed the river at Westminster Bridge. They stopped for bangers and chips in one of the grimy cafés on the other side of Waterloo Bridge. The nights were getting chillier and they decided to take a bus back to Balham, laughing at everything they saw, as they once had done. He wanted to stop at the Common and take a walk by the pond, buy a beer in the pub and take a stroll across the rimy green, where mist was rising like passion in the moist air. But she was too tired and begged him to come home. The next day he came to work with her but there was a swagger in his manner which suggested that he was doing this satirically, and did not hope to continue for long in this indenture.
4
It was as if he was only playing for time. She did not believe his smiles any more, and thought of his love-making as something crude, which he disguised with excess. There were longer silences between them, unless Ken wanted to talk about an event in his past. Usually their conversations were about the petty details of their lives. In the evenings they went out rather than sit in the room, skirting their misery.
‘There was a painting I was trying to do once,’ he said one evening as they sat in the pub. ‘I was staying with some people in the country. I didn’t really know them. They were just people I met while I was wandering around England in those first weeks after I ran away from Diana. The man was an electrician and the woman was not quite right in the head, I remember that. They offered me a room in their cottage. It was two cottages knocked into one, full of rooms that were half-decorated and half-gutted, with bare floorboards and sometimes no floorboards at all. There were naked wires hanging down from the ceiling and thrusting out of the crumbling, buckled walls. It was as if there had been a blast near by, and they had not yet got round to clearing up properly. Like some of the towns I had been in, still with their bomb craters and crumbling houses, derelict sites with water-filled pits and piles of rubble. I don’t know why they offered me a place to stay, I don’t remember now. I must’ve met them at a party or in a pub. These things happen to you when you’re young.’
Dottie wanted to ask about the people: couldn’t he try to remember how he had met them, how the woman was not right in the head? But she guessed he would not want to talk about that. He was looking into his glass of beer with singular concentration, and he winced slightly as if he was seeing things in there that were causing him pain. She kept her eyes on Ken, but she had seen out of the corner of her eye that a group of men at the bar were glancing at them every so often. It was not so unusual for that to happen, and it always made her a little anxious. She saw that one of them was very drunk, wobbling as he rolled against the bar.
‘When they found out that I painted, they were very pleased. Very protective. They got me an easel from somewhere, and some canvas and frames,’ Ken said, looking up with a grin on his face. ‘They were incredible. He was like a great, soft animal. Everything made him laugh and he performed the most wonderful kindnesses as if he had never given them a thought. I’d say silly things and he’d just go and do them. I fancy a beer. How about a picnic tomorrow? I would say that kind of thing . . . and he’d act as if it was the best idea he’d heard in ages. They set me up in one of the rooms, overlooking the fields at the back of the house. Perhaps they thought I’d like to paint that landscape, and perhaps I would have done, but only one picture kept appearing whenever I tried to work.’
Dottie must have looked sceptical, because Ken smiled wryly. ‘I know, it sounds all arty-farty. However hard I tried, only one picture came out any good,’ he said. ‘I did paint other things, but they were rubbish. I wasn’t interested in them, only this one . . . It was a picture of a deformed man writhing in some kind of a struggle, squatting on bent knees and glancing upwards as if he was about to be crushed by something he expected to fall on him. There were sores and wounds on his back and shoulders. He was a short, ugly creature with a flattened head and a powerful-looking body, but he was bunched-up like an overdeveloped muscle. He looked very frightened, terrified. It made me desperate to work out what the picture meant. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was obviously something to do with my brother, something to do with his squalid, truncated life. He used to look like that sometimes, as if he understood what had happened to him. I was thinking about that painting last night, and even when I slept it came to me in nightmares. I think that is how I have become, wounded and terrified.’
‘No!’ Dottie said, smiling at him and reaching out to touch him on the cheek. ‘You are beautiful, nothing like that.’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ he said, shaking his head violently, shaking her off, and suddenly frowning. ‘I feel like that. Deformed and crippled! Dying! I have nothing good left in me.’
She wished they were not in such a public place so she could hold him and make him better. She looked round her in the pub, and saw that the drunk was making his way in their direction. The other men were looking at him and laughing, glancing at Dottie and Ken as well. ‘Oh God,’ she said, torn in confusion between the man in front of her and the humiliation that she could see approaching them.
‘I don’t think you can imagine what it’s like,’ Ken said, looking down at the table.
The drunk slid into a chair at a nearby table and leaned towards Ken. ‘Excuse the interruption, guv,’ he said, his head reeling a little but his face breaking into a large, delighted grin. He pointed an unsteady finger at Dottie and slowly swivelled his head towards her. ‘Can I have a talk with the woman when you’ve finished with her?’ he asked.
Ken smiled vaguely and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘No rush! When you’ve finished,’ the man said, leaning back as if he intended to wait beside them like that.
‘I don’t think she’s interested,’ Ken said, frowning.
A long, stertorous and dramatic sigh escaped the drunk. ‘You lucky bastard . . .’ the man said, croaking with laughter and clutching his loins.
Without a thought, Dottie rose and tipped the drunken man out of the chair. He crashed into the table and slid to the floor, swearing with anger and surprise. She glanced towards the men at the bar, frightened of what would now follow, but she saw that they were rolling with laughter, holding on to each other as they bellowed their cruel and noisy mockery. Ken took her arm at the elbow: ‘Let’s go,’ he said. She shook him off and went back to her chair, shaking with righteous and frightened fury. The landlord came round and helped the drunk to his feet. Ken spoke softly to him, and Dottie thought she saw some money change hands. In the end, the landlord nodded silently and gave Dottie a long, cold glance.
‘There w
as no need for that,’ Ken said as they walked home.
‘You heard him!’ Dottie said.
‘I said there was no need for that,’ he said sharply. ‘He had just had too much and was behaving obnoxiously. You should’ve left it to me. Instead you demean yourself by behaving at his level. Couldn’t you see that he was not worth the trouble? You’ve got to learn . . . For your own sake as well as for others like you. I’ve told you before, if you react like that you’ll go on receiving that kind of treatment.’
‘When did you tell me?’ she asked, playing for time, not liking what she thought he could mean. She had never done anything like that before.
‘Well, all right! I should’ve told you then,’ he said, and then sighed. ‘There’s no point getting annoyed with people like that. You’ve got to show yourself superior to them. That’s the only way you’ll be accepted in England.’
She knew what he was trying to say to her, but she did not want to hear him say it. She made no reply, and walked silently beside him while he talked. Perhaps if she offered no challenge, he would stop, and would restrict his homily to advice about how she should conduct herself in the land of the Romans. But he circled nearer, unable to resist the temptation to spell out her ignorance. ‘That squabbling fishwife kind of indignation will only expose you to further prejudice,’ he said in a pained voice, hinting at the discomfort her silence was causing him. ‘You may think I’m just being tiresome, but I assure you I’m on your side. And there are many who aren’t, just remember that! It isn’t only yourself you’ve got to think of but other coloured immigrants as well.’
Faces glanced out of car windows, looking Dottie up and down. Strollers in the late September twilight also looked at her. This was street-walker country, and most of the oglers were punters looking for a woman. ‘Anyway, I was trying to tell you something important,’ Ken continued in the uncomfortable silence, his voice sounding wounded again. ‘About how I felt. Instead you get involved in a bar-room brawl.’
Dottie Page 14