South of the Lights

by Angela Huth

  ‘Our bedroom,’ he said. ‘Picture window, according to the brochure, overlooking the garden here.’

  ‘Don’t know how you can imagine it all,’ said Brenda. ‘Walls and everything, conjuring them up in your mind.’ She was pouting, face gleaming with sweat, bored.

  ‘Lucky one of us can.’ Evans turned to Lark. She squatted on the wall that was to divide the lounge from the kitchen. They had brought her along because she had looked depressed, nothing to do with her evening except drink gin while she painted her nails. ‘What do you think of it, Lark? What’s your professional opinion?’

  ‘Marvellous.’ Lark grinned. She liked to be flattered by Evans. She’d let him have her opinion by the hour, given half the chance. ‘Bloody marvellous, you lucky sods.’

  Her glance followed Evans’s to the sky. She could see it all: the bedroom, a simple square. White paint, patchwork quilt on the bed, the one she was making them for their wedding present: hexagonals all different reds. (She’d had the devil of a job finding enough different shades to make it dramatic.) A white dressing-table, kidney-shaped like she’d seen in a old Ginger Rogers film, its drawers hidden by frilled curtains: red roses would be nice, with curtains to match. One of those soft white carpets, of course, that tickle between your toes when you’re bare-foot. Matching tables each side of the bed, piles of magazines. Pictures of flowers on the wall. Evans’s clothes on a chair. . . Evans slumping down on to the bed, on top of the quilt, not bothering to draw it back. Work over, but no time to wash: the smell of ink and rubber stamps on his fingers, lunchtime pork pie still on his breath. Evans wanting her before supper.

  And then the lazy straightening of things. Sated. The slow descending of the steep stairs, dressing-gown half undone, not bothering: the slumberous feeling of walking breast-high against a gentle current, limbs weak, eyes blurred as if with rain water. Here, where she was sitting, the kitchen neat and sparkling. A small roast in the oven, frozen sprouts in the freezer, toasted sliced bread and Cheddar cheese. Later, the television, there where Evans stood now in the lounge. His arm round her shoulder. His presence every day, every night. His weight on the sofa, his hand on her knee, wanting her again.

  He was beside her on the low wall, thigh touching hers, clumsy fingers kneading the top of her spine.

  ‘Glad you like it,’ he said.

  ‘Leave off, tickling,’ she said. He removed his hand. Brenda was looking down at them.

  ‘Can’t keep his hands off anything in skirts, can he?’

  ‘Piss off, woman.’ He stood up, smiling good-naturedly, rubbed at one of Brenda’s nipples. ‘If you had as much imagination about what it’s going to be like as you do about what I do with other women – you’d be better off.’

  Placated, because she was never really alarmed by his flirting with Lark – he did it to be kind – Brenda gestured towards the invisible bedroom.

  ‘Faces north,’ she said. ‘That’s no good.’

  ‘West, excuse me.’ Evans was playing with the lobe of her ear, pressing it between thumb and finger. ‘Sun in the evening.’

  ‘Who wants sun in the evening?’

  ‘Shut up being so difficult.’ Evans leant over her to kiss her on the cheek, but Brenda, whole body stiffening, thrust her tongue into his mouth. From where Lark sat they looked tall as giants. She felt a sudden spasm of nausea and buried her head into the darkness of her arms folded on her knees. The familiar pain in her chest began to tick, rhythmically as a clock. Scarlet petals of a destroyed geranium swooped dizzily in her mind. She tried to shut out the voices from above her.

  ‘First time you have me, it’s got to be before we move in, right?’

  ‘All right by me. November, some time.’

  ‘On the bare floor.’

  ‘Bloody hard, bloody cold.’

  ‘I fancy that.’

  ‘Bloody sex maniac, you are. Here, come on.’

  When Lark opened her eyes they had parted. Evans looked down at her, gave her a hand, helped her to her feet.

  ‘You all right? You’re white as a sheet.’

  ‘Fine.’ Lark smiled. Even open-eyed the red petals still swam in her vision, but the sickness had gone.

  ‘Look to me as if you could do with a drink. Coming?’

  They left the outline of the future house, crossing a strip of bare earth that within months would be lawn. Evans walked between the two girls, an arm round each of their shoulders.

  ‘You’ll have to come and babysit, Lark,’ said Brenda. Lark nodded. Her head was pushed forward by the weight of Evans’s arm on the back of her neck. She relished her few moments of discomfort.

  In the Star they found Henry sitting by himself, a double whisky on the table in front of him. At the sight of them he made some attempt to stir himself from his reverie: he invited them to sit down, and gave Evans a pound to buy a round of drinks. From his half-smile it might be guessed he listened to what they said, idle chat about the house: but a glance at his vacant eyes indicated his mind was on other things. Lark noticed that each time the door opened he shifted a little, as if expecting someone. His breath smelt quite strongly of whisky, and his hand shook when he raised his glass to his lips. Had there been a chance, Lark would have asked Evans if there was anything the matter with Henry: perhaps he had not fully recovered from his chill a couple of months back. But in front of Brenda she didn’t like to appear inquisitive: Henry’s well-being was none of her business, and Brenda never liked to discuss her future parents-in-law. She had little interest in them.

  So Lark kept her queries to herself. At closing time, Brenda and Evans gave her a lift back to the flat, though she would have been quite happy to walk the two miles. They themselves were to spend the night at Wroughton House – it had become their habit. They were there most nights, now.

  Evans saw Lark to the door. He kissed her on the cheek, as he sometimes did after a late evening, and said he was glad she liked the house, such as it was. She must come there often, he said. He and Brenda would like that. They’d be expecting her there most evenings, he and Brenda would, or there’d be trouble.

  Henry resisted Rosie’s dreadful idea for two weeks. Finally worn out by her enthusiasm he agreed to go.

  The elusiveness of the Leopard was taking its toll and he no longer much cared what he did, where he went. The only thing he looked forward to was opening time at the Star. He sat there at a corner table for hours each day, refusing to be drawn into any kind of conversation, waiting. Each time the door opened a small pain of hope flickered within him, only to swell into a more universal ache as the new arrival turned out not to be the Leopard. Pain, ache: pain, ache: he was growing accustomed to the rhythm, and when it became too bad he ordered whiskies more quickly. Far from a complete remedy, at least they helped to blunt reality. And reality, this summer, was confusingly blank. No news, that was the worst of it. In all the hours he had sat in the Star listening for the smallest scrap of information about the glamorous stranger, Henry had heard no word of her. It was as if she had never existed, never sat at the bar asking for a Dubonnet with a twist of lemon, never cast her spell upon the place. The Boy had not mentioned her: that was the only minor consolation. Henry had observed him carefully over the last few weeks, and concluded that the Boy was as much infatuated by Brenda as ever, and that no other woman existed in his life. He must have been giving the Leopard a lift somewhere, to the bus, perhaps, out of kindness. If on that occasion Henry had gone ahead with his plans of suicide, he reflected, then his death would have been untimely. Not that he had saved himself for any rewards: his present life was an ordeal he doubted he could endure much longer.

  The evening of the outing he fortified himself with three drinks before going home. He walked back from the pub slowly, reluctantly, the warm evening air irritating his eyes, making them water. He thought, as he always thought, that if the Leopard was here beside him, on his arm, that would be strong. Upright, firm. A man to be proud of, a man she could rely upon. As it was, letharg
y dulled his limbs, making the act of moving at all difficult: the only release was to move his lips as silently he mouthed to himself her private name: Leopard, my Leopard.

  On reaching home, Henry directed himself to his parked car. With great effort he took off its plastic cover. Folding this up seemed to take a very long time, longer than he ever remembered. It took his breath away, he needed to rest. He opened the driving door and sat in the small green seat: that, at least, was familiar, comfortable. He liked the smell of warm plastic and clean carpet: he noticed with pleasure the shining paint of the snub-nosed bonnet: he gripped the steering wheel with confidence. Then he let his hand pat the empty seat beside him. How many times, in his imagination, had it been filled by the Leopard! In his heart he was convinced she was a Jaguar lady, but she was no snob, his Leopard, and she would appreciate the feel of his car. She would wind down the windows and cry out for joy as they spun down the lanes, white with May, off to somewhere . . . somewhere far away where they could drink a Thermos of tea in the shade and she would invite him to hold her hand.

  Henry looked up to see a different hand waving at him through the windscreen: Rosie, anxious. He must come at once and wash, or they would be late. Rosie was wearing the absurd straw hat again, God knows why. It would only irritate people behind her in the cinema. But Henry could not find the energy to tell her so. He could feel a pulse thumping in his temples, and getting out of the car was a less simple matter than he might have supposed.

  Twenty minutes later he was back in the driving seat, hair greased flat, Rosie beside him. She could never embark on an expedition with the kind of calm that Henry respected, and the thing that troubled her now was the question of the window on her side.

  ‘How do you open it, Henry?*

  ‘Turn it to the right.’

  ‘There.’

  Henry started the engine. They moved a yard or so. Rosie let out a little shriek.

  ‘Oh, my! I’ll have to close it again. My hat will blow off, won’t it?’

  ‘There’s not a breath of wind.’ Henry’s mind was so far from the problem in hand his patience could not be ruffled.

  ‘There will be once we get going. You know how you drive.’

  ‘Well then, close it.’

  After several attempts at turning the handle the wrong way, Rosie closed it. She folded her hands, gloved in nylon lace, on her lap. From the corner of his eye Henry saw her turn the colour of a beetroot. Such maroon flesh, he thought, was particularly nasty against the electric blue of her blouse.

  ‘Oh, Henry love,’ she said, ‘I do believe I can’t breathe, now, this dreadful heat.’

  Henry wound down his own window a couple of inches. He wondered if he had the energy to request her not to speak again: it interrupted his concentration. Besides, her voice, sharp with its various worries, exacerbated the throbbing pain behind his eyes.

  He guided the small car down the lane, swinging it a little from side to side as if to pay his respects to both pavements. He had not the slightest inclination to show his mastery of the car: it would all be wasted on Rosie. All he required from her was continuing silence, right up till the time they had to decide on the price of the seats. As a precaution, to keep her quiet, he drove at a shameful twenty-five miles an hour, a speed at which he hoped he would meet no one from the Star who had in the past heard tell of his acemanship at the wheel.

  He might have known it, though: his cornering troubled Rosie, for all his care.

  ‘Brakes, Henry love,’ she screeched. ‘Did you get them seen to?’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. You can never trust brakes.’

  ‘I can trust these brakes.’

  ‘Henry!’ She fell against him as they swerved round a bend: his judgement had not been as accurate as he calculated. ‘Brake! You’ll have us in the ditch.’

  ‘If you could keep your voice down, I could put my mind to concentrating more.’ He glanced at her hideous fat fingers, gripping each other. He despised himself for ever having said he’d come. It would be the last time, positively the last. He’d sell the car, take the Leopard on holiday with the money and not tell Rosie where he was going. Probably he’d never come back, for that matter – not to all Rosie’s pestering to spend good money on a film neither of them wanted to see: not to all this shouting. Full of such resolves Henry crushed his foot down on the accelerator, goading the old car into a burst of speed accompanied by much triumphant snorting of the engine.

  It took Rosie quite some time, settled in her cinema seat, to recover from the journey. Not for worlds would she mention it to Henry, but her heart was thumping alarmingly fast. To add to her discomfort, her blouse was damp from nervous sweat, and her feet had swollen uncomfortably in her shoes. Henry had always been a terror in a car and this evening, Rosie couldn’t help thinking, it was almost as if he had driven dangerously to provoke her: well, he had not succeeded. After her first few shouts, too spontaneous to control, she had sat quietly, gripping at the door handle for support as they lurched about, praying for God’s mercy. And He had granted it, for miraculously they had arrived at the cinema car park intact. Once out of the car, of course, Henry reverted to his usual mild self. He had bought two expensive seats without quibbling, and also a bag of toffees, now wedged between his knees, when Rosie had made the suggestion. It was true he had snapped at the usherette when she made off too fast down the steps with her torch beam, leaving them in darkness: but now he seemed quite settled, content, staring with expressionless eyes at Tom and Jerry. In spite of the inauspicious beginning, Rosie’s spirits recovered. She felt that after all they might achieve an enjoyable evening, if the Lord continued to watch over them on the journey back: and, who knows, things might even develop unexpectedly.

  If they had come last week, or the week before, as Rosie had suggested, they would have been able to benefit from films of a romantic nature. As it was, by the time Henry had agreed, the Odeon had switched its programme to an adventurous film of bloodshed and violence, the kind of thing which held little appeal for Rosie. But she had said nothing, taken her chance while it was there: Henry might not let himself be persuaded another time. Besides, there had been a picture of a battleship on a stormy sea in the advertisement, and, as Rosie had pointed out, it would do him the world of good to get a look at the sea again. And what mattered most, this evening, was Henry’s pleasure.

  Rosie sensed that this was unfortunately short-lived. The director had used the sea merely for a series of dramatic pictures before the titles, then had swung his attention to shots of mountains and jungles, and Rosie felt Henry slump beside her. She herself tried to concentrate, but within moments violence prevailed, corpses spewing blood all over the screen, which made her feel quite queasy even though she’d heard tell it was only tomato ketchup. The last film Rosie had seen was Spring in Park Lane. She let forth a sigh of nostalgia for Michael Wilding’s gentle manners, so much more satisfactory than all this decapitation. What’s more, it was hardly the stuff of romance, hardly the kind of thing that would encourage Henry to slip his arm round her shoulders and remember his youth. To take her mind off the general disappointemnt, Rosie reached for the bag of toffees. Henry, she saw, was asleep. Snoring, slightly. She hoped he wouldn’t disturb the people nearby. She slipped a toffee into her mouth. Its familiar sweetness was a wonderful comfort. In no time she had finished the bag. Then, in spite of all the groaning activity in front of her eyes, drowsiness came upon her. She felt her eyelids droop, and a lovely confusion of food came to her mind. Perhaps they could go out for a meal when the film was over. It would make a change to eat in a restaurant again: she could not remember how long it was since they had last been out. Years. She’d like to try that new place – French, she thought it was, with gingham curtains in the window. By candlelight, she could look quite girlish, and surely there’d be some things on the menu that wouldn’t turn her stomach: a nice fresh vegetable stew, perhaps, and French rice pudding.


  Rosie woke with a start to find people all round her standing up. For a moment she was confused: the music certainly wasn’t God Save the Queen. Then she saw the gold curtains falling over the screen and realised it was all over. She arranged her hat, which seemed to have slipped over one eye, and nudged Henry. She saw that on waking he, too, was confused, and a little guiltily found herself taking advantage of his befuddled state. Determinedly she guided him out through the crowds, across the street and through the doors of the small restaurant she had observed when she came in to do her weekly shopping.

  At once Rosie realised the place was not all it might be when it came to hygiene. For a start, there was a strong smell of garlic in the air, and burnt cheese. The tablecloths were paper, splattered with grease from candles stuck in bottles. High fire risk, she thought. Funny people. No sense of order. Didn’t look as if business was doing too well, either. There was only one customer, at a single table in a corner, dressed in a blue and white fisherman’s jersey. He got up, wiping his mouth.

  ‘Did you book?’ he asked, in a heavy foreign accent.

  ‘No,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Did you want a table?’

  Insolent type: what else would they be here for?

  ‘I don’t know we do, we could get a bite at home if you like,’ Henry said to the waiter, blinking his eyes fast, focusing. But Rosie was already sitting herself down at a table near the window. She could make herself quite clear when her mind was made up.

  ‘You could sit there,’ said the waiter, indicating the table Rosie already occupied.