A Good War
1
She should walk in from work one evening, pick up the gun that he leaves wrapped up in oiled sackcloth in their bedroom and shoot him, she thought. Right through the heart. She had seen the gun there once. If it wasn’t there when she went for it, there was bound to be another one in the shed. Gangsters always had guns. And rather than wait for him to pursue her round the house like a headless monster thrashing the last of its life out, she would give him another one to make sure. Take that you eater of putrid flesh! Then she’d like to see him gouge lumps of flesh out of her face with his nails. It would be easy, and in one leaping bound she would set herself free!
Patterson did not like her friendship with Estella and tried to stop it. He drove Dottie mad with his set-piece sermons and his chants of duty. Hudson needed her in the house, he said, or Sophie was not well, and did she not know better than to make friends with white people? Did she not know that the dirty girl intended to use her in some way?
‘What are you talking about?’ Dottie asked, guessing at his meaning. ‘What do you mean dirty girl?’
‘You’ll find out,’ he said.
That was brave coming from a drug-pusher or worse, Dottie thought. ‘Do you mean I’m in danger?’ she asked, mocking him. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘You’ll find out,’ he said, getting annoyed.
Despite his disapproval, it was obvious there was nothing he could do. Dottie had not lost all her fear of him, but the intimidation she felt from him had always been more general than specific. It had not usually been precise enough to dissuade her from what she actually intended to do. It was more like an oppression, standing in the way of possibilities, enforcing the limits that Patterson thought they should live by. Nothing like Estella had happened to Dottie before, and the resentment she felt at Patterson’s interference with her friendship gave her the courage to defy his bullying. When Patterson said anything about Estella, Dottie ignored him, did not even bother giving explanations or excuses. She went about her business in the house, went to her classes, and saw Estella when it suited the two of them.
Sophie too had turned against her. She was steadily sinking under the burdens of her illness and had become short-tempered and lethargic, spending most of the day in bed or reclining on the settee in front of the television. The drugs were making her like that, but Sophie burst into tears when Dottie tried to persuade her to speak to the doctor. She complained to Patterson, who came to rebuke Dottie for her lack of compassion. ‘Do you want your sister to die?’ he asked in his gloomy and ancient voice. Sooner or later, Dottie guessed, Sophie would have to go into a hospital. It was not necessary to be a doctor to arrive at that diagnosis. There was no point in trying to make Sophie see that, though, because she would only assume that Dottie was wishing ill on her. To Dottie it seemed as if Sophie was already decomposing, parts of her melting and turning into jelly under that mountainous bulk. When she saw her lying wretchedly on the sofa, with Patterson coming to take bites of her during the day, Dottie almost wept with disgust.
She still could not talk about these things to Estella. That friendship was something that made her feel clean, that uplifted her from the sense of drowning she had felt. Sometimes she thought the feeling of well-being was quite unreal, a kind of a lie. It was not that she pretended, or acted free of worries and full of joy when she was with her, although she did a bit of that too, but that she did not feel hopeless and defeated. Estella talked about extravagant plans and laughed at their grandiose unreality, but she was not afraid of contemplating serious ambitions for herself. The conversation about ambition kept coming back, and Dottie could sense the urgency with which Estella pursued the subject, and admired the need it expressed. She saw Estella striving in her own way not to waste her life, to do something with it, and Estella did not stop at that. She was already organising Dottie as well, chiding her for her self-neglect, laughing at her self-deprecating terrors. With her urging and encouragement, Dottie had been applying for jobs in the most interesting places, laughing with delight as she made an outrageously crazy list: Somerset House had sent her a whole volume of forms, and made dark hints about the Official Secrets Act, the BBC replied with a scrappy, printed letter, telling her politely to take a walk, the Foreign Office sent a much delayed reply regretting the impropriety of her application. Most of the rest did not bother to reply or sent a rejection typed on an intimidatingly thick, letter-headed parchment, enough to chase off and silence any upstart looking to rise above her proper station.
One blessed application yielded a reply. Dottie was invited for an interview at Lever House just off Blackfriars Bridge. She borrowed some smart clothes from Estella and went, expecting nothing. The man who interviewed her looked amused when she walked in, and asked her the question that had earned her the appointment in the first place. What on earth made you think we would consider you for a job like this? Your background is not at all adequate. You know that, don’t you? Dottie grinned with the pure joy of having successfully pulled off a prank, and the man laughed too and shook his head. I hope you won’t just waste my time, he said.
The interview itself was exhilarating. The man did not spare her blushes, and asked her merciless and shameless questions which she deflected or addressed as if she had done this already time out of number. The man shook his head with admiration, remembering stories of other unlikely-seeming people who had been marked by destiny. He could not offer her the job they had advertised, he said, because she needed experience for that, but she could join the typing pool on condition that she passed the typing and shorthand examinations. It would be hard work, of course, but it would give her the beginning of her experience.
The offer of a job made her stronger, and made it easier to bear the frustrations she lived with. She felt herself at the start of a new time, when she could begin to turn her life around. All she needed to do was pass her examinations. The new confidence made her feel as if she could stroll among the filth and slime at her place of work without being soiled: through the meat drying section, or the fish and shellfish freezing unit, or the vegetable canning lines. Not for much longer would she have to shift for herself in this filth. The money in her new job would be less to begin with, but the man had said there were opportunities, and in any case it would change her life. Estella tried to warn her not to expect too much, but Dottie had no delusions. She wanted to start again, begin anew. Estella nodded. ‘And then what?’ she asked, but Dottie just shrugged. There’ll be time enough for all that later on, for God’s sake, she said.
Sometimes she took Hudson with her when she went to see her friend in Wimbledon, and he was at once comfortable with Estella in his good-humoured way. It was through talking about Hudson that she began to tell Estella about the life she led and the things that had happened to her. She told the story slowly, bit by bit, delving a little deeper each time she spoke to her. It was still only the outline, and she only took small steps at a time. There was too much to tell, and perhaps not much to be gained in letting it all out, but she spoke about the elder Hudson, and about Sophie, and about Ken. Estella’s eyes grew moist over the story of Ken. ‘You should write that down,’ she said. ‘You tell it so beautifully.’ She told her about Patterson, and how determined she was that sooner or later she would rid herself of him, or if she failed that she would leave and start again. More likely than not, she said, she would have to do the latter.
‘Didn’t you guess any of this when you told me your story in the Regency that night? I thought you must’ve done, as if you’d taken me by the hand . . . I know it sounds unlikely, but we always see our own lives in this dramatic way, don’t we? Everything that you said seemed to be about me.’
‘What about Marcel? There’s no Marcel in your life,’ Estella said, intrigued but also made uncomfortable by Dottie’s intensity.
‘Not about me in every detail,’ Dottie said, beginning to feel a little embarrassed, as if she had greedily appropriated Estella�
��s story for herself. ‘Of course it wasn’t about me like that. Not for real, like that. More to show me how my own life would end. Do you know what I mean? Even what your aunt Madeline said about Georgia not wanting anything for herself, even that was about me, I thought. Did she really say that?’
Estella shook her head, smiling, but nervous of the clairvoyant powers Dottie seemed willing to grant her. ‘My aunt Madeline is very useful to me sometimes. I can make her say things I am not sure I can say myself. What I said to you is what I always thought about Georgia. It’s just easier to blame Madeline for it, seeing as I hardly knew Georgia.’
‘Is Estella your real name? Is it your given name?’ Dottie asked suddenly, leaning forward, pressing.
‘Yes, why do you ask that? I told you how important names were to my parents,’ she said, looking surprised and a little suspicious. ‘Why do you ask that?’
Dottie shrugged, a gesture that hinted at some disappointment. ‘I’m interested in names,’ she said quietly, succeeding in sounding evasive. ‘I’m interested in how they get from one place to another. Imagine Hoggar, tunnelling its way from the Ahaggars in Algeria to here. Where did Estella come from? And I just wondered if you had found it for yourself.’
‘Madeline chose it. Marcel was in France when I was born,’ Estella said. ‘I was too young to choose a name for myself then. It’s the kind of name you’d expect of her, isn’t it? She’s proud of having chosen it. You know, I’ve talked about her so much that sometimes I forget that you’ve never met her. I hope she’ll be back after New York. You never know with her. She’ll probably fall in love with someone and follow him to Mexico or something. She has lovers all over the place.’
After a silence, Dottie went on with her story of Patterson describing her suspicions in the most colourful and lurid way, and making Estella hoot with laughter. ‘Where do you get such pictures?’ Estella said. ‘You really must write them down.’
Dottie told her about her ritual visits to the library, and how she had not been in recent months. She was not even sure if she was entitled to be a member of the Balham library any more, having changed boroughs. The thought of presenting herself at the Brixton library made her nervous, all the questions she would have to answer and something about her doctor signing her application form, if she remembered rightly. She had faked a signature the first time, when she joined Balham library. Brenda Holly had dismissed the question, waved her hand over the application form and told her to sign it herself. Anyway, she was attached to the old library, with the Sacred Church of the True Christ down the road and the half-dressed women always lounging at the open windows of the terrace next door to it. It was not the place she missed and lamented but the time, when other possibilities had seemed available. Her sadness was not regret that those times had passed, she said, but a kind of mourning for the way things had been, for events and feelings that could no longer be reached or made different. Estella said they should go and visit the library and the street with the church, half-disbelieving the tales of languorous beauties leaning out of windows, but none the less curious.
‘We can make a pilgrimage to the shrine,’ Dottie said, feeling self-conscious. She must have been too intense in her identification with Georgia, she thought, and must have injected a tone of hysteria in the recounting of her nostalgia. Having no one to talk to for all those years. She had better be careful not to drive Estella away with devotion.
‘So long as you don’t expect me to go worshipping in a church,’ Estella said, frowning. ‘I’m an atheist, you know.’
Dottie looked shocked, which made Estella laugh. She assumed Dottie was joking.
2
Dottie’s absences from the house in Brixton had become serious irritations to Patterson. Sophie stopped speaking to her altogether, using Hudson as the intermediary for all her complaints. Your auntie is too busy with her friends to bother with such a naughty little baby as you. Perhaps she’s never heard of the saying that pride goes before a fall. Dottie was not sure what the saying meant. She had heard it used before: why does pride go before a fall? How will this fall occur? Where will I be standing when it happens? She could not mistake the point of her sister’s whining, though. Usually she made no answer. She thought of it as Sophie’s plaintive meanness. Sometimes she felt guilty about her, thinking that Sophie was only looking for reassurance, but everything had gone too far between them to be retrieved by hugs and kisses and kind words any more. She knew they wanted her out of the house, or at least that they wanted to bring her to order by making her see that defiance would eventually lead to her expulsion. Their resentment had become like an obsession with them, almost laughable in the end.
She told them about the prospect of her new job, and her news was greeted by a moment of stony silence. ‘I’m glad,’ Sophie said when she could manage the words. That seemed to them the final straw, the last act of betrayal from her. Dottie guessed that they took her to be aspiring higher than was natural for someone like her, and that in due course she would come to grief. Laura and her daughter Veronica showed more pleasure at her news. Even Daisy’s approval was appealed for, and she emitted a single, polite bark of congratulation.
With her neighbours Dottie was able to indulge herself at last and describe every moment of her triumphant interview to people who would understand its true significance and daring. Even with Estella she had had to play down her excitement, to make out that she was cool and not unused to ambition. Laura wanted a careful account, and needed to have many details filled in: the colour of the carpet in the man’s office, his name – which Dottie did not really listen to and therefore could not remember – the title of her new job, the position and size of the office building. Dottie was required to demonstrate the exact tone that the supercilious porter at the main door used to direct her to the lift, and had to mime the shock of the stricken secretary whose jaw fell open at Dottie’s appearance. Laura and Veronica sucked their teeth in a chorus of disdain, and then joined in Dottie’s laughter of celebration.
In her own house, though, what she had done was seen as only cause for blame. Patterson and Sophie stopped talking when she walked into a room. They took to eating their meals separately. When she went to call them after she had cooked, they told her to go ahead and they would be along later.
Gradually, the cupboards in the kitchen were divided, one shelf for Dottie, another shelf for them. Sophie cooked their meal after Dottie had finished, and Patterson, who had never bothered about such things, did the washing up. Months before, in the early days of his ascendancy, he had taken over the paper-work for the house, the fuel bills, mortgage payments, rates, and only asked for a contribution from Dottie. Now if there was a bill, he left it on the table in the kitchen with her share calculated on a piece of paper. She left her money beside it. If she was short of money and was forced to delay, the bill and the paper sat angrily staring at her until she paid. At night, she heard grumbling whispers slithering through the floor-boards instead of the gurglings of their former passion.
In the end Patterson’s exasperation with her grew so intense that he began to seek her out. When he cornered her in the kitchen or in the dining room, he would place himself at the door and refuse to let her pass until she had listened to all he wanted to say. She learned to laugh in his face when his accusations became too strident, but she could sense him restraining himself.
One evening he approached her and took her in his arms, kissing her angrily and then blaming her for provoking him. In such a small house it was impossible to avoid him if he was as seriously determined to pursue her as he seemed to be. Then, within a few days of starting on his campaign of attrition, he came into the kitchen one night while she was doing the washing and tried to take her by force. She had sensed this would happen, that he would be unable to put up with her diminishing dependence and would try to crush her in just such a way. He had seen how she had once been when he climbed her, had seen her abject loss of control, and how her defiance had turned i
nto jabbering submission.
He was on her before she realised his presence. He put one hand across her mouth to prevent her screaming, using the arm and elbow to pin her against the wall. With the other hand he tried to undress her, but as their struggle progressed he simply tore at her clothes. She fought back with a ferocity and strength that took him by surprise. She made no attempt to call for help, or to scream like a frightened innocent, but clawed and kicked and twisted and bit until he released her. In the end, he raised his arms in surrender and stepped back from her, smiling with a pretence of amusement. He stepped forward once and feigned a blow. She backed against the wall, panting with terror and the effort of putting up a defence. Her eyes were blazing with anger and tears, and her fists were clenched in readiness to continue the fight. He made a noise that was something between a chuckle and a snort, and left.
When her panic subsided, she sat down on the floor, shaking with relief. She could hardly believe that it had really happened, that he had done that. For a long time she sat on the floor, the tight-strung quivering of her sinews running up and down her body, her torn clothes gathered in knots in her hands. Even when the feeling came to her that this could not be real, there was no mistaking the shivers of shock which ran through her.
He had thrown his tantrum because he could not have his way, she thought, could not prevent her from doing what he had forbidden. So instead he would break her on the old wheel, pinion her and draw the cracked reed of her defiance in small pieces. He would dazzle her with his power, overwhelm her with the dread musk of his masculinity. It made her glow with self-delight that she had known to fight back, to see him off. Yet once she had thought of him as something carved out of a noble wood, and felt his presence among them as an eye of judgment over everything they did. Now he was a bully exasperated by his inability to control her, and all he could think to do was to destroy her.
Dottie Page 29