A Five Year Sentence

by Bernice Rubens

  She went up the lift to ‘Materials.’ She was disappointed to find that all the assistants were male. What’s more, they were all young and cocky-looking, and their self-confidence and youth unnerved her. She looked around and picked on the very youngest of them, who perhaps had not yet caught the arrogance of those who thought they’d inherited the world.

  ‘Can I help you, Madam?’ he said.

  ‘I’d like to see some heavy white satin,’ she said, ‘and some silk net.’

  He winked at her and disappeared, but he was back before she had decided whether or not he had insulted her. He laid the cloth on the counter. She fingered it.

  ‘It’s a wedding, isn’t it?’ he said, marvelling at his powers of deduction.

  She felt herself blushing. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

  The assistant was a chatty lad, and new at the game. He was a nosey-parker too. ‘Your daughter getting married, is she?’

  Again Miss Hawkins had to consider whether or not the lad was being offensive. On the one hand, he’d not entertained the possibility of herself as a bride, yet on the other, he’d happily envisaged her as a mother. Miss Hawkins decided that the balance was even.

  ‘Is that the best you have?’ she said.

  ‘It’s the only white satin. It’s specially made for weddings,’ he said.

  She was glad not to have a choice. ‘I’ll have eleven yards,’ she said as Mrs Church had ordered her. The silk net, too, was a straightforward purchase. She watched him as he measured the cloth. He gave her a little extra. ‘That’s for luck,’ he said, and he winked again. He wrapped it carefully. ‘That’ll be £37,’ he said.

  ‘Will you take a cheque?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  She wrote it out, chuckling to herself with tin and bank-manager thoughts. The boy took it to his superior who was standing at an adjacent counter. He looked at the cheque and motioned to the boy that he would deal with it himself. Miss Hawkins trembled. The man was courteous.

  ‘We’re not allowed to take cheques over £30 without checking first with your bank. So if you’ll give me a moment, Madam, I’ll make a phone-call.’

  She nodded, trying to hide her fear. When he had gone she looked about her, expecting immediate arrest It crossed her mind to leave the shop there and then. There’d been no order in her diary to buy the material. The act, she thought, was so easily executed, it was too unprofessional for her little book. So she could leave the shop without any risk of disobedience. Yet Mrs Church could not lift a finger without the material, and so in a roundabout way, she would be revoking an earlier order. She decided to stand her ground. She looked about her haughtily as if nothing were amiss or ever likely to be, while she imagined the conversation that was buzzing over the wires between the well-intentioned assistant and her speechless and spluttering manager. She fully expected that in his tin-ignorant rage, he would simply replace the receiver. And she worked herself into a state of indignation that anyone should question her solvency. But the counter-hand returned smiling.

  ‘That was all right,’ he said, and he handed over the parcel. Now she had nothing to do with her gathered indignation, so she modulated it to dignity, and with her head held high, she left the shop.

  On her way home, she called in on Mrs Church. The dressmaker told her that she could fit her in sooner, since the wedding she had been preparing for had been cancelled. ‘They changed their minds,’ Mrs Church said. ‘Well, better before than after.’ Miss Hawkins took it as an ill omen, and wondered whether she should change her dressmaker. But Mrs Church was stroking the material with such affection that it would have been cruel to deny her, and an arrangement for fitting was made for the following week. Miss Hawkins looked once more at her cherry-blossom pattern and was delighted. She would tell Maurice about it at dinner.

  As she passed the newspaper stand.at the corner of the street, she saw a headline in the early evening paper. ‘Fulbright freed.’ The name was familiar and attached to a gruesome affair of many years ago. She could not remember the exact story, so she bought a paper to jog her memory. When she reached home, she put Maurice on the wall, dusting him down gently with her handkerchief. There was no need for him to be alone until supper-time. He could watch her while she read.

  After the first few sentences, she recalled the whole story. It had been a particular recollection of hers, because the crime had been perpetrated on the very day of her promotion to head cashier, and she’d felt ashamed to be so elated when Fulbright’s poor victim had so cruelly met her death. There was a quarrel, Fulbright said in his confession, and he’d pushed his wife into a blazing log fire, held her down, and watched her burn. He was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, and the hanging brigade had come out in force. She remembered that on her way home from the factory that day, she’d been forced to make a detour to avoid the crowd of eager volunteers to put a rope round Fulbright’s neck. And now he was free. He’d been a model prisoner, the report said, and had earned full remission. She worked it out quickly. Fulbright had been inside for twenty years. It was logical that she should relate his experience to her own. When her sentence had been passed she had never considered remission as her legal right. She had been a model prisoner. Of that there was no doubt. She had obeyed every single order and the confetti of little red ticks in her green book was testimony to her excellent behaviour. She was entitled to remission, and it was a legal entitlement. She started on her calculations, and then refrained. The fear that she might already be free confounded her. What would she do with her freedom, with her orderless days? She could not afford to be free. At least, not until she had become re-fettered, and that meant marriage to Brian. That meant another source of order and command. Brian would replace the little green book, and she would continue to live in the daily fulfilment of duty. But she could not resist the temptation to add up her months of detention. They totalled sixty, which, minus a third in remission, gave her forty months to serve. She was surely near the end. She dared herself to work it out. On her careful reckoning, try as she did to err on authority’s side, she had two months more to serve. ‘It’s enough,’ she said to Maurice. ‘It’s got to be enough. My dress must be ready in time.’ She was more concerned with the availability of a bridal gown than with someone along whose side to wear it. She was not worried about Brian. She knew that it was only his shyness that prevented the offering of a free hand. Over the next few weeks, she would encourage him, and, if pushed for time, her diary would finally order the proposal. ‘Maurice,’ she said, ‘I’m inviting you to the wedding. You’ll be our most important guest. We’ll have the reception in this room, so that you’ll feel at home.’

  She decided to make a guest-list. It was her job to organise the wedding. She would trouble Brian as little as possible. She sat with the blank piece of paper in front of her, chewing the end of her pencil. She couldn’t think of a single name. The two salient locations of her life were the orphanage and the factory, and out of neither could she dredge a single invitee. She would have had poor Morris for sure. She looked around for her knitting, but postponed her anger till she had at least made a start on the guest-list. She scratched in her mind for a name. There was a group of people in the cashier’s office, and all those with whom she had worked daily for over forty years. They would be bodies good enough to fill her sitting-room, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember a single name. Suddenly she recalled Mr Connell, the shop-steward. He would do. She would go back to the factory on a visit, she decided, about a week before the wedding, and she would identify the faces by name and issue a blanket invitation. Then there would be Brian’s mother, and possibly he had one or two friends he would want to invite, though she doubted it, feeling his isolation as acute as her own. She would have to prepare the wedding breakfast too. Perhaps Mrs Church would help her, and she was suddenly excited at the prospect of a real live name with familiar face attached as a guest and possible helper in the preparations. And if there was a Mr Church he
could come too. The room was filled to overflowing. There would have been no room for poor Morris anyway, and her swaying shadow became a merciful blur. For the first time in many years Miss Hawkins hoped that matron was still alive, and perhaps findable, so that she could give her to understand that her starched guardian blight had not, after all, utterly managed to destroy her. This thought was not quite enough to keep her from her knitting, but it needed only a few plaining lines to stitch her irritation away. She put down her needles, and looked in the mirror. ‘Maurice,’ she said, ‘I’ve decided that you shall give me away.’ He was all things to her, husband, brother, and now father, all that she had never known, a kindred of boot-blacked reflection.

  Chapter 14

  A month later, Miss Hawkins collected her wedding dress. That morning she’d had another letter from her bank. It queried her lack of acknowledgement of an earlier letter inviting her to discuss once again her financial entanglements. It wondered whether she had been out of town. It suggested that at her current rate of spending she would soon be into an overdraft situation without any visible securities. Would she please call in and clarify her position. The letter was angry in the politest terms, and she chose to ignore it as she had done its forerunner. If she pretended that the letter wasn’t there, it would cease to exist. After reading it, she had hidden it away, and so successfully that she had already forgotten its hiding-place. She made sure the cheque-book was in her bag before leaving for Mrs Church’s, and she was out of the house and half-way up the street before she remembered that there was no current order in her diary. Lately, as her sentence drew near to its close, her fear of the little green book had become more and more acute, as if each dwindling prison day made a greater demand on her obedience.

  She went back to the house. When she opened the diary to the current page, she found an order already inscribed. She shivered. She had absolutely no recollection of writing it. Yet it was without doubt in her own handwriting. She read it with fearful curiosity. ‘Sold some furniture,’ it said. She was horrified. In the light of the letter from the bank manager, it was the obvious thing to do. But the idea of selling up her home, even marginally, was a frightening one, unless of course, she cheered herself, unless it were in the name of matrimony. She convinced herself that that must have been the point, conscious or otherwise of the order, and she set to making a list of near-dispensibles. She wrote out a little card, advertising items of furniture for sale, giving her name and address. On her way to Mrs Church’s, she took it into the newsagent’s shop, and paid for a week’s display. The discovery of the day’s order weighed heavily upon her, and desperately she tried to recall writing it down. Over and over again, she recollected every movement she had made since rising. Her ablutions, her dressing, her collection of the post and hiding of same, but where, she had forgotten. It was therefore possible, she realised, to have forgotten the writing too, but such a devastating order was, to say the least, memorable. In all her activities that morning, she simply could not see herself standing over the diary, her pen in her hand. She envisaged herself doing just that, but it was totally unreal and simply did not belong to that day. She was profoundly disturbed by the incident, for she feared the irrevocable lengths to which it might lead. As if her impending freedom was threatening her own free will. She was frightened. The element of the unknown and uncontrollable that had, that morning, slipped into the back door of her life, could colonise her for ever, with heaven knew what consequences. She would watch herself, she decided. She would watch her every move but she knew it was her thoughts that needed watching. The writing was a mere formality, and how could one set a sentinel on the mind. She trembled. She was glad to reach Mrs Church’s house.

  The dress was laid out in the bedroom, draped over the counterpane, the cherry-blossom tiara at its head. Miss Hawkins burst into tears, and Mrs Church took it as a compliment. ‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Try it on, dear.’

  But Miss Hawkins was not weeping for its beauty. She wept for the hollowness of it, for its utter lack of habitation. Try as she would, she could not envisage herself inside, and as she stood there, willing herself into its satin folds, it took on the gentleness of a winding-sheet, and in such a manner, it shrouded her.

  ‘I haven’t time to try it on,’ she managed to say.

  ‘Then I shan’t ever see it,’ Mrs Church was disappointed.

  ‘I’ll ask you to the wedding,’ Miss Hawkins said, clinging with a frantic despair to the frayed remnants of her fantasy.

  ‘And when is that going to be?’

  ‘Next month,’ she said. ‘I’ll send you an invitation.’ She took out her cheque-book and wrote out the required amount, omitting to fill in the stub since there seemed to her no longer any point in itemising money that simply wasn’t there.

  Mrs Church wrapped the dress tenderly and with disappointment. She was surprised at how well it had turned out and it had given her confidence to scout for other orders. She was the second person whom Miss Hawkins had unknowingly launched into business.

  When she got home, she checked on her diary. The order was still there, and simply required ticking off. But there was less joy than usual in the credit, for she was simply not wholly convinced that the order had been hers in the first place. She unwrapped the dress and was sorely tempted to try it on. Perhaps seeing herself inside it would revive the dying embers of what she knew now to be an illusion. She opened her mouth involuntarily, and as the words came out, she heard herself calling to Maurice, ‘Would you like to see my dress?’ She was suddenly glad that the reality of Maurice had persisted, and if he was there, waiting for the bridal parade, then so would Brian wait at the altar and Mrs Church at her attending side, and the bank manager, tin-satisfied in the aisle.

  She ran into the bedroom. She kept her eyes shut as she put the dress on, feeling for the small pearl buttons that ran from neck to waist. She opened her eyes only to put the tiara in place and even then, she avoided the full-length mirror, and concentrated only on a small hand mirror, large enough to contain the reflection of her head. When it was fitted, she held the mirror at arm’s length. Her sheer delight in the results swept away once and for all the doubts that had accumulated in her mind. She was a bride-to-be, and the train proclaimed that certainty.

  She turned to face the full-length mirror. Her reflection astounded her. Mrs Church’s doubts as to the fitness of the childish style would have been steadily confirmed had she seen her model on display. But Miss Hawkins saw only that which her wishful thinking prompted, and with this blinkered view, she saw a picture of youth, that was nothing faded by delay. Through the virgin veil, she saw a bright hope for the future, a logical entitlement of the very young. She forgave the years that had stumbled by, stunned by non-events, and the disappointments and griefs of her childhood years. All but one.

  Miss Hawkins shut her eyes tightly, trying to obliterate the naked bathroom bulb caressing with its tender shadow the twisted rope of unwanted womanhood. Not to be forgiven. Never. ‘I hope matron’s dead,’ she hissed. ‘I hope she’s in hell. I hope every part of her is burning slowly. Slowly enough to last for ever. Kill, kill,’ she felt the words hiss out of her mouth like a snake. They were words to eat, to relish, to regurgitate, and relish again. ‘Kill kill,’ she shouted, and she opened her eyes and wondered what devil had crept inside her, and wondered whether it had been there all along, and writing orders in her diary when she wasn’t looking. She laughed aloud because she had to, else she might have given a small credence to the untenable thought that had crossed her mind. ‘I’m a bride,’ she said to the mirror, ‘and in a few weeks, I shall be Mrs Brian Watts. I’m coming Maurice,’ she called and she swept her train into the sitting-room.

  She sat opposite him at the table. ‘D’you like it?’ she said. He smiled. ‘But you can’t see it all. I’ll stand on a chair.’ She aligned a chair in front of the mirror, and presented Maurice with the whole of her. She hoped he had some sense of perspective. His
moustache was aligned with her waist band, and she had the impression it drooped a little. ‘Now don’t sulk, Maurice,’ she said. ‘We’re still going to be friends. You’ll come to dinner like always, but Brian will be here too.’ Once again, the slippery dream had found a secure foothold. She poured herself a little port and drank to her future.

  The doorbell rang. She was expecting nobody. It had to be Brian, she thought. He was coming without an appointment. He was coming for free, to offer to donate his services to her for ever. It was no accident that she was trying on her bridal gown. It was because she knew, deep in her heart, that today he would come to claim her. She rushed into her bedroom to remove the evidence of her brash anticipation. It took her some time to undo the buttons, as the doorbell rang again and again. ‘I’m coming,’ she shouted. She laid the dress on the bed, and covered it with a blanket. Brian must see no evidence of her expectation. She assumed a look of surprise on her face and opened the door.

  ‘I believe you have some furniture for sale,’ the man said.

  The first of the bailiffs had arrived.

  Brian was stocktaking. He looked up from his ledger and sniffed at the dinginess that surrounded him. His mother’s presence had somehow validated the dreariness of the flat. Her absence now only served to accentuate it. He had to get out of there. But he didn’t have enough money to buy a new house. There was only one solution. Could he afford to give his services to Mrs Makins for nothing? Could she, as his wife, live comfortably and acceptingly on his immoral earnings? He totted up his weekly income, excluding his favourite customer. It was more than adequate. Violet would certainly not want him to retire. What he liked most about her was that she recognised his trade as legitimate. She acknowledged the need for such a service, and often wondered why it was not officially licensed. He had no doubt that Violet would accept him. Often enough she had hinted at a need for a constant companion, but he did not intend to take up her suggestion until his income had stabilised. Besides, there was the question of the poor Miss Hawkins, in whose simple mind dwelt the hopes and aspirations of the new Mrs Watts. And expectations that he himself had shamefully nurtured. For the first few years of their trading, he had been unspecific about her savings, and his vagueness had led to conjecture on her part with a strong bias towards matrimony. Even when he translated her savings into fictitious tin, the goal of her expectations remained stable. She had hinted at it often enough. Any day now, he dreaded she might propose to him, or insist on getting her money back, or at least some concrete evidence as to its returns. He could of course drop her entirely, but her contribution, small as it was, was regular and reliable. Besides, she had a certain sentimental value for him, and there was always the hope that after her last spending spree, she might one day make his patience and indulgence worthwhile. Meanwhile his lies and oblique promises would delay for ever the final showdown.