‘Oh, another problem, it's so unfair, why do people always give me their problems? There're lots of bedrooms, just pick one.’
‘Shouldn’t she be sleeping in the child’s room?’ Hattie was interfering again talking to Angel but with one eye on me.
‘Don’t be silly, she can’t sleep in there. Putting another bed in my Toy Soldier’s room would make the room look a mess.’
‘She could sleep on the floor.’
‘You can have the room next to baby’s, he won’t mind.’
Never have I been prone to depression. I’ve heard about people who’ve contracted it, but then they just disappear, vanish from life just as if they had emigrated. But arriving in my allocated room and hearing the last cries of an unhappy child, the belt of anger released itself and without its tension, I felt the full attack of despair. It would have been a relief to cry if I had any tears to shed but everything was drenched up inside of me. Like a washing machine of emotions and unable to stop, I was on a perpetual cycle of wash and dry. And I was inside the machine while Angel was on the outside controlling all the buttons.
Helplessness, the helplessness of my situation and tiredness had all reduced me to this state, and giving into it seemed my only choice, yet, I could not sleep. The only option I could think of was to go and help myself to a drink. I knew where they were kept. And I am an adult, not a child. I am used to doing what I pleased – I have rights… And yet, walking out of this room and through the house, not sneaking, I never sneak was proving a problem. What would I say if someone, for example, Hattie, found me and told Angel that I was helping myself to her drinks? There are things done in other people’s houses which are a definite no, especially if one is supposed to be an employee, and yes even if in disguise.
Ransacked of everything, there was one thing Angel could not swindle me from and that was my temper. I slammed the door behind me and went heavy-footed along the carpeted hallway drawn towards by the shielded pink lights left on as a guide for all malingers who traversed through the night.
Brandy is a wonderful drink, but then so is whiskey. Wine is okay if one has nothing to fall back on but it sits on the palate wanting time and attention. All the fuss of a prima donna, and if it doesn’t achieve, it turns sour and ages before one's very eyes. A bottle uncorked is a bottle doomed. While whiskey and brandy, the true friends of the beleaguered, have stout hearts, faithful and loyal, who will sit and wait for you year after year if required. Or if they have the chance to remain in their oaken or glass vessels they would. But still, I needed a drink.
It is truly wonderful how after enjoying – who’s counting or, measuring the pleasure drawn once to evacuate the contents into an appreciating mouth. How different everything looks and becomes to this inebriate eye into physically beautiful. I was beautiful, I was not only brave but wise and remarkably intelligent. If Angel were to see me now, she would be shocked to see how superior I am to her and humbled that she had not seen it before. In fact, I had a mind to go and knock on her door and let her see this incredible transformation.
Gliding along, stroking the walls for walls have feelings as do doors. There is also the carpet and the stairs. How wonderful stairs are and clever to do such a talented job. And as long as I didn't fall down them, I would tell them this myself for everything should be loved and appreciated. Everything, including fat, ugly gays. Well, who cares? I’m sure life would be so much better if we learned to love each other more.
Good lord, what was that noise? The coarse grain of a guitar strummed against its will, hankering to be put out of its misery; it was a sound turned sour by too much enthusiasm. I followed; my ear guided in by the operational landing lights on the flight path. The noise was being transmitted from the environment of Angel’s room. It was obvious to me now where the child inherited his talent for destroying all eardrums. I knocked on her door and waited.
‘Yes,’ the racket had stopped. Sobriety can hit one very suddenly and usually without thoughtful warning, or I should say, I was not as nicely padded by the effects of alcohol as I was before. The door opened, and there she was. The impact of her heavy-handed perfume, expensive though it was, and still spangled and sparkly, Angel stood before me dressed in a long and flowing negligee of baby pink.
‘I just wanted to…’ I began but what? The only thing I could think which was running through my mind was to stop her from singing. So, I told her. ‘I have come to tell you that you have a beautiful voice.’
‘Oh.’
‘You should really think about taking up singing professionally.’
‘Really, I’ve always been so shy about my voice. Come in. Come in.’ She beckoned excitedly. ‘I can sing to you some more. Do you really think I should sing professionally? I was going to ask my Johnikins for some singing lessons, but I never had the courage, and then he died.’
‘Death should not prevent you from achieving your life goals. Take the plunge and take singing lessons not just for your own amusements but professionally for we only live once, I think.’
Sometimes, the idea still hovers through my mind that John is not really dead but hiding somewhere. The last time I saw John, or rather the memory that mostly sits in my mind was him in his silly old well-worn dressing gown, looking at me across his cup of cocoa. And yet, somehow, not looking at me at all. Because remembering now, recollecting his eyes on my face had opened out the very possibility that he was considering someone else which was her. This thought still hurts. How could he have ever chosen her over me? But he did.
‘I don’t know anyone to give me lessons.’
‘Oh yes, lessons, singing lessons, that’s no problem. Leave it all to me, I have contacts. Of course, it will cost the best usually does.’
‘Money isn't any problem. I only want the best. My Johnikins always insisted I had only the best.’
What it is to have patience and live by the theory that Justice will have its day. And what a contrast to the person I used to be. John on one of those unusual occasions had found the voice to criticize me. I remember the instance well for I had looked up surprised that he had shown a spirit of exasperation. 'You are the most impatient person I know, haven’t you realized yet that everything comes to those that wait?' and then he smiled and then uncharacteristically ruffled my hair and next, he put his index finger underneath my chin, 'But then you wouldn’t be you, would you?' I watched him walk away with something like a query in my head with the idea of asking him something. Something which I should have done then instead of leaving it to the future, to the future which is now haunted by the past. I should have asked him if he was happy with me. But I let the observation slip because I was too busy chasing up silly telephone interviews of people, who incidentally we did not use for the magazine.
I did not have any contacts of the sort she wanted. A modern-day Svengali who could pump her voice into one of those mixer boxers and blow it out under conditions sensitive to the eardrum. But the sprung proposal gave me the chance to dabble once more into the wordy life of names.
When I was the co-editor at the magazine, there had been this man who had written to me and said that he would do anything to get his foot in the door. He sounded desperate, to me he appeared to be a bit of a loser and a nut. He did not send me a resume because he said he didn’t believe in them explaining that they were all false, that people wrote in them what they wanted. But he did mention he played the guitar. He said he would have had his own group if only all his friends had not emigrated.
I have always had a good memory for postal codes, don’t ask me why, maybe because I try to visualize them on the map by seeing them as connections on a grid. Odd because I have no sense of direction. Equipped with the postcode, the rest of the address followed easily into place. He lived in Portsmouth with his parents’, at a house called The Jolly Roger, so named because his father had aspirations of being a sailor but was rejected after discovering he had a phobia of deep water. Horatio had told me all this in his second letter asking me to
call him Francis because this was his second name.
The following morning, with a clear head, I wrote to him, giving him a version of the plot. I wished him to give him the impression that I was still with the magazine, but currently working undercover at the above address. I told him I needed someone to act as a singing teacher for a very pretty and wealthy widow whom I was doing a story on. The money was good so would he consider taking on the assignment? And finally, hoping to hear from him soon, etc, etc.
Pesker took my letter later in the afternoon to the post office. Angel was excited when I told her what I had done, which rather alarmed me as I could not say for certain that this Horatio Francis would accept, or if the letter would even arrive at his nautical establishment.
Adaptability has always been natural to me. I learn the rules of the game and play it accordingly. After a while, I discover that every rule has a certain flexibility, for rules are only for the guidance of people, and once one has come to know the person or persons, these social requisites become diluvium. This for me is my adaptation of the game of life. Still, I was surprised at how well I was managing by fitting into the scheme of things in somebody else’s house. I had survived a divorce, a car crash, a loss of career and face, and now poverty and I was surviving by living with my dead husband’s mistress as her employee. And I was even managing to have her think of me as a friend.
It did not take a high IQ to debunk the system. Angel’s habits were furtively regular. She was not what one would call a complicated person. Her mornings began after eleven. Eat, dress, eat, dress, eat, dress with snacks in between and then late in the evening, she would go out either with some mysterious stranger who came to collect her or go out in a taxi on her own.
This repetitive routine I thought would bore me but somehow, I was oddly soothed by the constancy. The conclusion was that I needed balance and harmony for now as previous events had been hectic. It had affected me a trifle more than I was prepared to admit and without any willingness on my part to participate in the collapse of my previous life.
Though I had no fond feelings for Angel or her brat, I found that life as her housebound employee gave me security that had been stupendously absent from my life before. I had no bills to worry about, no shopping to do and in truth, not any housework either.
It was a holiday if one took into account the demands of the child which to be quite honest was surprisingly modest. If he cried, the only thing I need to do was walk into his room and as soon as he saw me, he shut up. Why he became silent, baffled as well as disturbed me, but not to any massive extent. I would sooner have a voiceless child to tend to then one screaming the odds. As I told him, it mattered very little to me if he yelled himself into a headache. It was up to him if he decided to bellow his head off when I was there, if so, I would go out and away from him.
Talking, I told him is far more conducive to a productive relationship. Crying only produces anger and frustration, while talking is the means to reason by stimulating the interest and providing many excursions into the polite world of the imagination. Although talking can also generate the painful arts of anger and frustration, it remains preferable to that of the fitful battering of yells. And so, I used to take him books from the library downstairs, (books were John’s handiwork, I was sure of this) and began reading them to him. The classics were the first I started. Afterward, we would have an interesting discussion about plot, descriptions and characters and how all these elements comprised to make a work that gripped the imagination, as well as the present figurative state of our consciousness.
He never fell asleep as I supposed all children do when one reads to them especially from the adult catalog, he never went to sleep but lay there watching me. With John’s eyes, he gave me the idea that he was taking in everything I was saying to him. But perhaps that's what children do in order to learn and live in our unpolished world. As long as he didn’t bother me, I was happy about the arrangement. I wasn’t doing any harm to him, and in all probability and in years to come, he would never remember anything about me. He would forget about the person who used to read to him and debate the merits of the book afterward.
Comparing it to my childhood is difficult, for strangely I have no memory of it. I awoke one morning at the age of thirteen.
Angel did not come to see him not once. Hang on, there was one occasion when she looked in, I believe it must have been out of curiosity aroused by the amassed silence which hung over the house like the mantle of doubt. She looked in her hair pinned together in rollers ready for the afternoon’s affairs which were most likely shopping.
‘Is he asleep?’
‘No,’ but then I looked into the large, veiled blue cot, and witnessed that his grey-blue eyes were veiled, curtained by his young long eyelashes. What was going on? Why had a young child decided to close his eyes and avoid his mother’s advances? This was a decision that could only have been made by a more elaborate intelligence. Not one that could not even dress or deduce an essay. Where had come the thoughts to conceal his consciousness come from, for a child doesn’t fall asleep at the drop of a hat, or perhaps they do? Regardless, I had no choice but to defend him, (if this was what he wanted) in his determination by retracting my previous statement. ‘Yes, as you can see, he’s asleep.’
‘I suppose that's good,’ she said with a frown as if there was something else on her mind which was bothering her. ‘I'm going out.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘That's none of your business,’ she looked shocked I had asked.
I had asked because she had told me, very rarely would she tell me anything.
‘I asked just in case your son takes sick. You would like to know wouldn't you, if anything was wrong with him?’
She was thinking about this question. ‘Yes, but I can ring you.’
Watching her walking off, I was aware of the changes in Angel. Sometimes, it made me wonder what it was all about.
Every day, she would go out and today was no different from the rest. She got herself dressed as if she was going to some grand occasion. Hattie did not go with her, and so I presumed she was going to a nightclub, perhaps to find herself someone else who was rich and able to support her.
But tonight, Hattie was also going out, he had a date. After Angel had left, I found Hattie had been raiding Angel’s wardrobe. Active in what he was doing, he didn't see me, but I saw him, waltzing downstairs in one of Angel's fluffy boas with several of the feathers falling off. Did he imagine himself as Angel?
It did not take me long to work out that since both were out of the way, I would have the chance to look into John's room again without Hattie keeping watch. I had been idle long enough; it was time I got on with my life. And if there were any secrets, for I believed there were then I would be able to hunt them out.
Retracing my steps to John's bedroom, I felt I was stalking the man who had died on me. It is hard to believe that someone's love could perish especially when we both spent so many years together. I had some good memories of him in the beginning, surely he held some of me.
There is no reason why I should knock on his door to gain entrance, I was going in regardless, but somehow it must have been from some respect to this man who had left this earth. No one called out to say come in as no one shouted out, to go away. John had never told me to go away in our married life, our privacy was as intimate as could be. Our lives were an open book to each other for I think he guessed that I had come to despise him. Not that I didn't love him, I was just very disappointed with him, while he was busily planning another life without me. Did he ever think I would come looking for him to ask him those questions like, why?
There was already a thick layer of dust settling over the contents of his bedroom.
‘Oh, John, you are such a fool, she has forgotten you as quickly as you have forgotten yourself,’ suddenly I felt I could cry for him for it seemed that we both had been fools.
And there was his old chest of drawers from our home
together, two wooden things John had kept faithful and loyal. Seeing the dust on them, hurt me. Strange to be moved by something like neglect. The compulsion to dust his chest of drawers when I had never dusted them before came upon me. But I had already left fingerprints, which would lead to incriminations and she, who never entered his room anymore, might feel compelled to look in.
With my sleeve, I erased the rest of the dust until the old friend smiled back at me. Stupid to feel so tearful. Once, I had caught John polishing his old bedroom furniture. These pieces had followed him from his childhood and had been taken to this grand house from which he had left this world.
‘What are you doing,’ I had said mocking him, catching him polishing the wardrobe and the chest of drawers with such love and affection. Oh, John, I miss you.
‘I'm just looking after the things that have looked after me.’ I now see that what he had said that day had come to be very prophetic, at least it did for me. Because I had forgotten to look after him.
There was the old key in the lock of the chest of drawers, which never worked yet, had been kept there faithful and not to be divided from the marriage set of this piece of furniture. I gave it a little twist which twisted my heart. This was foolish because once someone has fallen out of love with someone, it is ridiculous to fancy oneself back in love with them again.
The tug of the drawer was still as heavy as it was before. Only once had I gone into John's department of clothes. I had stopped doing his laundry some years ago, we were both adults, we could each do our own. At the time, I needed something an old pair of boxers, a pair of old socks and a vest. I was looking in John's drawers without his permission, well, it was important, and we were supposed to be man and wife.
There was a photo shoot and we needed a man's underwear, I mean, old underwear and I knew I would find what was needed in John's things. And there they were exactly what I wanted. The article was called, Lady and the Tramp, we used them for the shot. One of the agencies we used was able to find someone, I think he was actually a tramp from off the streets an alcoholic, he's probably dead now. He wore John’s underwear for the shoot. I believe this weathered man was hoping to keep John’s clothes. And I should have let him, but I suppose at the time I still had one shred of decency, they were still John's. So, I brought them home and hand washed them and ironed them as well. I meant to return them back to the drawer, but somehow, I couldn't. Guilt catching up on me I suppose and so, I threw them away into the trash. But a few days later, I saw John wearing his old tartan shorts. He had missed them and gone looking for them, and for the first time and the only time in our marriage, I felt like a bitch.
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