The Stick

by David Beaty

  He had adjusted them on his nose, had turned her round a little for a better light, had bent over the bra strap, his head at an angle, when suddenly he saw their reflection in the mirror – Mr Hyde in half-moon spectacles fiddling ineffectively with the bra strap, while Goldilocks’ big blue eyes watched him in an agony of fascinated horror.

  It was hooks after all – three tiny ones half hidden in the fabric.

  ‘I only use them for reading,’ he said, when the undressing deed was done and he was slipping the new lace nightgown over her head. But the look had been there, and not even the champagne of the evening could keep bubbled up the enthusiasm of that wedding night.

  Outside the rain was still dashing against the window panes.

  ‘I expect you’re tired,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all … not at all.’

  If only we’d laughed together things would have been different, he thought as they lay in the scented darkness. He felt she had been disappointed at his response to the lace and silk fripperies she’d bought to please him. She had responded mechanically to his caresses. The bespectacled mirror image seemed to be lying in the bed between them.

  ‘I practically never use them even for reading,’ he said. ‘ Didn’t put you off, did they?’

  ‘Paul, of course they didn’t! It was just I’d never seen you wearing spectacles before.’

  ‘It’s my Mr Hyde disguise if you did but know …’

  Next day, it was still raining. For all its romantic name, Silvercote could only provide a drenched village street and a couple of ancient inns. They decided, after a ploughman’s lunch at the one that actually had a fire in the lounge, to return to Elmtrees for the rest of the honeymoon.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was still raining when they returned home. Elmtrees, its steep pitched roof dark with rain, its gutters tinkling with water, its windows weeping, looked hostile and unwelcoming. There was a puddle in front of the porch, and the tubs of flowers on either side had a bedraggled look. Harriet’s little Mini, now inherited by Belinda, looked forlorn and lonely tucked to one side of the garage.

  ‘Shall you carry me over the threshold?’ she asked, as he turned the key in the door and threw it open.

  ‘Would you like me to?’

  ‘Of course!’

  She stretched out her arms. She looked sweet and fetching and childlike in a vivid yellow mackintosh and cap. He bent down and scooped her up, holding her against him. She kissed his cheek.

  ‘You’re so strong,’ she said. ‘I love you. You make me feel safe. Do I make you feel you want to look after me?’

  He smiled. ‘Of course.’

  Stepping into the hall, he made as if to put her down. But she clung to him. He glanced round the familiar place. Though they had been away such a short time, the house smelled shut up, the hall looked different.

  ‘Kiss me,’ Belinda said, putting one hand round his neck and pulling off her cap with the other. She shook her curls free. ‘Kiss me properly.’

  She held up her face to him, her lips parted.

  ‘That’s better,’ she sighed, pulling her face away. ‘Now take me upstairs.’

  He kicked the front door shut behind him with such force that the whole house echoed. Belinda gave a low sensuous laugh and snuggled against him. He stood for a moment, still holding her soft little body. He no longer felt as if he was floating an inch or so above the ground, but he still did not feel himself. He seemed to have divided into two irreconcilable people. One, the sober, sensible middle-aged man, the paterfamilias, looking round the home upon which most of his adult life was printed as if it were a stranger’s place; the other a young man, whose eager vigorous body responded to Belinda’s guileful little movements, and who wanted her as urgently as she did him.

  ‘Come on,’ she breathed again, ‘ take me upstairs. You know you want to.’ She nibbled his ear. ‘I can tell you want to. And it will be all right this time. I promise you it will.’

  Slowly, the middle-aged part of him still pondering why his first impression had been that the house was alien and the hall a stranger’s, he carried her upstairs. He had just turned the handle of the bedroom door, when he realised why. Harriet’s stick was no longer in the alcove in the hall.

  ‘Put me down on the bed,’ Belinda whispered, her eyes half closed. She suddenly gripped the lapels of his jacket as he put her down, so that he half fell on top of her. She laughed at his expression, then brushed her mouth over his. Momentarily, he was aware of her moist lips close to his, of her blue eyes, curiously drowsy and heavy with desire, of her little hands, relinquishing their grip on his jacket to steal skilfully over his body.

  Then, just when he should have taken charge, the virile youngster deserted him. The middle-aged man took over. The stick. Where in God’s name was Harriet’s stick? The question hammered obsessively in his head. Not roughly, but determinedly, he pulled himself away from her, and without a word went downstairs.

  He found the stick eventually in the cloakroom cupboard. Mrs Webb or Madge must have felt it ought to be put away. He restored it to its rightful place in the alcove and went upstairs again.

  Belinda was still lying on the bed where he had left her, but she had divested herself of the yellow mackintosh which was tossed on the floor. She lay with her back to him, knees drawn up under her chin. She was crying, though she stopped when he came in, and looked over her shoulder at him reproachfully.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Something important?’ she asked, dabbing her eyes.

  ‘Yes. Very important.’ But he offered no explanation. He came over and lay beside her. After a while, she turned over, put out her hand and caressed his cheek. He smiled. She raised her head, wriggled further up on the bed and pressed her mouth warmly, wetly, expertly on his, her neat round breasts pushing against his chest. But the virile youngster could not be induced to return. He felt old again, unsure of himself, wary of her.

  After a while he said stuffily, ‘I’ll go and make us some tea.’

  As he went downstairs he heard her let out a horrid sound, half a derisive laugh, half a cry of despair. Passing the telephone in the hall, he pulled out the little data flap on which Harriet had written the tradesmen’s numbers. He dialled the local florist and ordered two dozen red roses to be sent round at once.

  Belinda had always been a charming receiver of gifts. When the roses arrived, she melted. And somehow that gesture established a precedent in their life together. When he failed her, he made a gift of restitution. As the weeks went by, he made an increasing number.

  Not that life was all restitution. Nor had the virile youngster entirely deserted him. Nor were all Belinda’s cries derisory or despairing. At the end of August he took her to Paris at the company’s ninety per cent discount. Belinda enjoyed queening it over her former colleagues on the flight there, even sending back the champagne as insufficiently chilled. Harker stifled a momentary urge to slap her. Belinda did everything so charmingly, even her complaining.

  She had no complaints about the shops. He escorted her to the Champs Elysées, let her loose with their wallet of travellers’ cheques. He gave her strict instructions to get a taxi back to the hotel in time for lunch. He spent most of the morning at a pavement café, drinking red wine and watching the world go by. Like other old men, he told himself with distant wry amusement, except that they smoked pipes and chatted to one another. The sun was warm, the pavements full of girls in summer dresses. His wife was as young and more beautiful than any of them. Life was sweet surely? He returned to the hotel and ordered a cold lunch to be sent up to their room, and a bottle of Chablis, well chilled.

  The ice in the bucket had almost melted by the time she returned laden with parcels, her pretty face flushed with pleasure. She had bought a black silk dress, very chic and sophisticated she told him, a white broderie Anglaise blouse, two leather handbags with matching belts and shoes, a large flagon of perfume and a package whose contents he wasn’t allowe
d to see until after dinner.

  At first, he thought she had unconsciously fallen into Harriet’s habit of always buying him some little thing when she went shopping, and he composed his mind to being suitably grateful for some article he probably neither needed nor wanted. But the parcel contained a frothy piece of pale pink nonsense which purported to be a nightgown and which she confessed had cost the earth. The hem came just below her bottom, the ruffle at the top revealed half her breasts. She pirouetted around in it, affecting to be uproariously amused at his disapproving expression.

  ‘If you could just see your face, Paul,’ she giggled, helplessly collapsing on the bed in mirth, burying her face in the pillow, her little body quivering.

  Anger acted as a powerful aphrodisiac. He was simultaneously angered by her extravagance, amused by her wilfulness, captivated by her squirming, seductive body. The virile youngster returned with a vengeance. A youngster released from the inhibitions of the marriage bed at Elmtrees. That night when Belinda screamed and squealed, it was with pleasure and surprised delight. The velvet-hung Parisian bedroom muffled her cries. She buried her face in his chest, bit his arm, dug her nails into his back. He was fully restored to his youth again.

  That period of marital achievement continued throughout the first weeks of September. It coincided with a spell of hot late-summer days. Belinda lay in the garden smothered in suntan oil, timing herself with a little alarm clock to get her body evenly baked. She was joined occasionally by the plump brown-haired Polly, her ex-flatmate, and by a sloe-eyed stewardess called Chloe. Halfway through September Harker came home after a test flight to find a couple of stewards spreadeagled on the lawn.

  He got irritated, because the house looked a tip, the camellias were drooping for want of water and there were no cold drinks in the fridge. The stewards beat a hasty retreat.

  ‘You are so severe with my friends,’ Belinda pouted. ‘And I do my best with yours.’

  ‘You have rather more than I have.’

  He filled a watering can and took it through into the camellia house. Belinda followed him, preening herself. ‘Hardly surprising. Even Archie says you’re too brusque and off-putting.’

  ‘You’ve got Archie round your little finger.’

  She smiled. Last night, they had gone to Thatched Cottage for drinks. Archie had taken Belinda to his ‘ den’ as he called it. There he had shown her his glass case full of the models of aeroplanes he had flown going right back to the big biplane, the Handley Page Hercules, that used to do the London-Paris Service before the war. All his photographs too. The commendations from the company. His Queen’s Medal for valuable service in the air.

  Madge and Harker had sat in the sitting room for nearly an hour waiting for them to return, talking trivialities. Madge hadn’t mentioned Harriet, which in the circumstances wasn’t surprising. But neither had she mentioned Belinda, and that was. Come to that he couldn’t remember Madge mentioning her any time after that initial glowing report from the pub months ago about ‘ that wonderful girl who was going to look after Fandango’.

  ‘This wonderful girl of yours is so interested in old aeroplanes,’ Archie announced, pink-faced and pleased with himself after they eventually returned. ‘Paul, dear chap, you are a lucky devil!’

  Obviously he thought he had made a hit with a pretty girl. Madge said nothing. Neither did Paul. And all Belinda said on the way home was, ‘God, Paul! Archie’s really weird.’

  She kept to herself a small piece of information which Archie, the old gossip, had seen fit to impart to her. Having brooded over this information for twenty-four hours, Belinda taxed Paul with it over a scratch supper a couple of hours after the stewards and the stewardesses had departed.

  ‘I hear your beloved Operations Superintendent is about to retire,’ she said coyly, chewing a forkful of quiche.

  ‘Laurie Leigh? Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘Archie said so.’ She pouted, ‘Good thing someone tells me something.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell, He’s sixty-five this month. Everyone knows that. So he’s retiring. End of news flash.’

  ‘Ah, but it isn’t is it? There’s more to tell.’ She smiled archly. He knew what was coming. But he affected not to.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as his successor.’

  ‘That’s another story altogether.’

  ‘And I know what the ending of that ought to be. So does Archie. So does everyone.’

  ‘Belinda! You haven’t been gossiping with your friends?’

  ‘Only Chloe. And why shouldn’t I? She thinks the same as I do, and Archie. You should get the job. There’s only you and Osborne being considered. Archie said so. And Osborne isn’t popular. And his wife is like the back end of a bus.’

  ‘I doubt very much I’ll get it, Belinda. I’ve put it out of my mind. If I get offered it, that would be nice. But I think it’ll be Osborne.’

  ‘You don’t stand up for yourself, Paul. You ought by rights to have got that Flight Captain’s job back. This would mean much more money. And status. And you can’t get yourself pushed aside twice.’

  The trouble was, he could. And did. Not that he minded all that much. He was ambivalent about the Operations Superintendent’s job altogether. If he was sure he was physically and mentally up to it, he’d prefer to soldier on flying till he retired. On the other, hand the Operations Superintendent’s job meant security and status till he was sixty-five. No flying. No Checks. No medicals. No youngsters telling him he was past it. But it also meant he would be in the office five days a week and home every night and almost all weekends. The job would be a very mixed blessing. But his own self-esteem dictated it would be nice to be offered the job, if only to turn it down.

  The chance seemed to come a week later. He’d just returned from a five-day trip to New York and had got up late. Belinda was at the hairdresser’s. He was trying to work up enough energy to mow the lawn, when the telephone rang. It was Woodhouse, the general manager, greeting him very affably yet enigmatically and asking him if it would be out of his way to pop in and have a natter. Today if possible. How about twelve-thirty? Just time for a snifter.

  ‘Here it comes,’ Paul told his reflection in the cloakroom mirror. There was no one else to tell. ‘One way or the other, this is it.’

  He smoothed his hair, and knotted his tie and shouldered his way into his sports jacket. Then he straightened Harriet’s stick as he passed and let himself out of the house.

  It was a day of windblown cloud and fragile sunlight. Though he was quite sure Woodhouse wasn’t going to offer him the job, he felt more ebullient than he’d done for months. He drove fast and arrived early.

  Woodhouse’s secretary was clacking at her typewriter in the outer office. She gave him a smile of shielded friendliness. Woodhouse actually came out of his office to welcome him, drew him in, exclaimed heartily that he and Mrs Wood-house had seen far too little of him lately, winked roguishly, and wiping the smile off his face said sadly, ‘ Of course you know we’re losing Laurie Leigh. That’s why I asked you to drop in. Great loss. A wonderful colleague. A difficult man to follow.’ And then after a few more eulogies to Laurie Leigh he slipped the knife cleanly in. ‘I really felt I had to apologise to Osborne when I offered him Laurie’s job.’

  Woodhouse had a job, however, for Paul. As Senior Pilot, would Paul organise Laurie’s present and actually have the honour of presenting it to him?

  Paul laughed wryly to himself all the way home. Harriet would have relished his account of that little interview. He could almost hear her laughter echoing his. Belinda was on the telephone when he got in. She said, breathlessly, ‘Yes. He’s just come in now. I’ll tell him,’ and put down the receiver.

  ‘That was Woodhouse’s secretary. You left your gloves behind.’ She threw her arms round him. ‘Was it because you were so excited? Did you get the job? You did, didn’t you? I can tell by your face. You clever you!’

  It took him several minutes to convin
ce her. He was more saddened by her disappointment than the knowledge that their little belated summertime was over. All she said when she was finally convinced was, ‘Fancy leaving your gloves behind! You’re getting absent-minded in your old age.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  He took out the Service to New York a week later and he spent more than he could afford on a bracelet from Tiffany’s and a scarf from Saks. The trip was uneventful except that his Engineer was Griffiths. The youngster seemed to regard him in rather an odd manner, friendly enough, but wary.

  Paul tried to be friendly. As they walked together to the car park he said, ‘I hear you live just outside Maybury now?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘Very much.’

  Griffiths’ Volvo followed the Citroën almost in convoy down the Thames valley.

  Paul arrived home to find Belinda sitting in front of the television in the sitting room, blow-drying her hair. For a moment, she didn’t hear him come in. She was in jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers. When she caught sight of him, she jumped to her feet, switched off the drier and the television and threw her arms round him.

  The sitting room looked grubby and untidy. He tripped over a half-drunk mug of coffee, which spilled on the carpet as he went to hang his cap in the cloakroom. The house didn’t look as if it had been touched even by Mrs Webb since he left. But at least the stick remained as it was in the alcove.

  ‘I bought a nice quiche from the delicatessen, and I’ve made a salad.’ She came and slipped her hand through his arm. ‘Did you have a good trip? Did you see anyone I know?’

  ‘Griffiths,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, that clot! Did he ask about me?’