by Tanith Lee
By the time Anne got back, triumphant with Macey’s bags, Susan was all ready for the show. She had put on the ghastly white dress, which rode up over her fat hips. She had painted out the large round stones of her spots, two more of which had come up since her talk with Wizz.
“All set?” cried Wizz. He was buoyant as a balloon, lightened of his load.
Whenever he was ‘nice’ to her through the evening, Susan thanked him. She tried to smile and the smile cut her face like a knife.
In the interval of the show she went, (alone) to a cubicle of the ladies room, and retched and retched, embarrassed also by the noises she made, and by the kind woman who, when she came out, pale and sweating, said, “Are you okay, honey? Was it something you ate?”
Which was, in a way, quiet apt, for if not precisely eaten, certainly swallowed.
“I thought you were going to be late,” said Jo, “and you are.”
“Sorry. The train didn’t come for ages.”
“Well, let’s get cracking then, it’s just down this road.”
English autumn, no longer fall, the yellow leaves hung out from the trees. It was raining, and cars splashed through an overflowing drain on crystal tidal waves.
“I thought your mother must’ve delayed you.”
“Oh, no. No, that’s all right.”
“She didn’t mind, then?”
“Oh no. No. She may not be going, anyway.”
“Fallen through has it?”
“Maybe.”
“My dad says you can’t ever trust a Yank. He learnt that in the War.”
“He isn’t a – I don’t want to talk about him.”
The houses were in a terrace, each one narrow, with pointed purplish roofs.
“We’re number 17, Flat 3.”
Their room was about the size of the main room in Anne’s flat overlooking the common. Here the two girls must do their best, with the two mattresses, the gas rings, the light which would flicker like a gas lamp and was always going. With each other’s contrary personalities. The bathroom one floor down. And with the wit of the jovial father of Jo, who sometimes called on them to bring them things they ‘might need’ and catch them out.
“Will your mother want to come over?” Jo asked, that first morning. “Will she want to look round?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
No, Susan didn’t think so. Anne would soon be back in the States, but Jo wasn’t going to know that.
Susan had lied to Jo, ably. Long practice. Oh my mother’s only at a neighbour’s. She’s only in the flat by the common. But the flat by the common had already been given up. Next month someone else would live there, and Susan would only have to pretend, now and then, to visit.
“If you don’t let me, I’ll run away.”
“Oh Susan don’t be so dramatic. And silly.”
“I mean it.”
“What is the matter with you?”
“I don’t want to go. I’ve said. I want to stay here and go to art school.”
“You could have fooled me.”
But Susan did fool Anne. Even when Anne said, “Is it still this idiotic thing you’ve got about Wizz –?”
“I haven’t. I got over that. We had a chat one night.” Susan, her voice coming cool and steady from far off. “He’s all right. He’ll take care of you. It was him really. He said, if I wanted, I ought to start making my own life.”
“He – said that?”
“Yes. And he said how he felt about you, how he thought so much of you. So I feel I’d just be in the way.”
“Susan, that isn’t true –”
“Yes. Oh come on, Anne. You’ve never had a life either, have you? Go on, go with Wizz. It’ll be great. Everyone here can think I’m eighteen, except at the college, and they’ll think you’re still in England. It will be okay.”
Anne phoned Wizz long distance.
Susan would not even listen to her voice, speaking to Wizz over the Atlantic wires.
But at length Anne came into her room. “He said let you.”
Susan said, airily, “Told you.”
“I said you’d said you liked the talk you’d both had. It made you more confident in yourself. He laughed. He sounded pleased. Well… you’ve never had a father, have you?”
“Oh, look at that sparrow on the sill,” said Susan. “Look, isn’t it sweet.”
“Susan, you will be all right?”
I always was, when you left me. And if you don’t leave me now, if you make me go and live with him, I will never be all right. I will die.
“I’ll be all right, Anne.”
Anne’s grey eyes, startled, evasive. “If anything doesn’t work out – you must write – no, call me collect – reverse the charges. I’ll show you what to do. And I’ll be over, often, of course I will – we’re bound to be. I’ll send you some money. The grant isn’t much.”
She’s glad.
I may never see her again. Is that possible? Oh yes. She isn’t mine any more. She’s his. What I’m seeing now, this woman with grey eyes and dyed red hair, it isn’t my mother.
“Oh, don’t cry,” said Anne. “What am I to think now? I don’t know. What should I do?”
But she did know, and she would do it. And the tears meant nothing, not grief really, a reflex, like that drain overflowing in the downpour.
III
Patrick was like an animal which changed its coat for the season. In summer he tanned quickly and easily, the long thick hair, that hung most of the way down his back, turned gold, his eyes a light brown. But in winter his eyes darkened like his hair, while his skin paled. Then he resembled, in his long black leather greatcoat, a straggler from some nineteenth century war. He was well-built and slim, but only about three inches taller than Susan was today, in her flat sandals.
She looked at him covertly. It still half surprised her, to see him there, to be with him, even though they had gone around together for over fifteen months, and had sex regularly.
Fierce May sunlight hit the pavement. She was glad they had left the crowded, noisy pub – but was not quite so sure, however, about their intended destination.
“Patrick – you really do still want to go over there?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be three buses from here.”
“I thought you said the train, then the bus.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“What’s up?” he said. He spoke kindly, but she knew he had made up his mind and would lose patience if she now tried to dissuade him. He would say, justifiably, she was making a fuss about nothing, and look, he’d brought his stuff, and the painting stuff too, and so had she, so what was the problem suddenly.
And what was the problem suddenly?
Last night, sitting over their glasses of beer and wine in the Silver Tavern, she had touched, without thinking, on the subject. Finding him interested in what she said, which always inordinately pleased, foolishly almost inebriated her, she had gone on and on.
“This place. Sounds visually fantastic. Especially with all those trees. Could it still be like that?” he had asked.
“Oh, I’d think so. More like it really. More overgrown and so on. They weren’t into domestic stuff, just cats.”
“Three years ago.”
“About three years.”
“So, for a donation… They’d let me paint there, wouldn’t they?”
“What would you donate?” she had asked playfully, glancing into his summer-golden eyes.
“A fiver. Why not? And give them a painting maybe, for their jumble sales. Anyhow, they’ll remember you.”
“They might not,” she said carefully. “I only met that woman once, and I’ve changed a lot. I was only sixteen.”
By then they had walked back to Patrick’s room in Belmont Court. Sitting on the floor with the coloured candles lit, they discussed their – Patrick’s – plan. By midnight, when they lay down together on the bed, it was all decided. The next day was Thursday and life-drawin
g, but everyone already knew the regular model had bronchitis and might not come, which would mean improvised still life of something unappetising, like stacked books and chairs. They were into their third year, both worked generally with application; blind eyes were sometimes turned to absences.
After their lovemaking in the bed, with which the room was furnished, and as Patrick slept, Susan lay looking up at the two authentic plaster roses in the high ceiling. The electric wiring was tied off there, only the roses remained, like the ornate acanthuses at the big room’s corners, and in the halls outside. Then the last candle flickered out. An odd thought came to Susan as she drifted asleep, that the plasterwork had actually physically vanished now it was no longer visible.
Belmont Court’s old Victorian lift woke her, as it always did when she was there, clanking up and down from six thirty a.m. onwards.
Susan got up, used the bathroom on Patrick’s floor, and left. It was only twenty minutes through the early streets to her own room – space no longer shared with Jo, or with anyone.
Susan’s room though was not so gracious as Patrick’s, nor did she have Patrick’s small fridge, and the milk, left under cold water, had gone off in the warmth of savage May.
She had arranged to meet him in the college pub at noon. They would have a sandwich and a drink and then set off for the house. For the house that was, which had once been her grandmother’s.
Even in the bright morning, gulping back Nescafé and washing underclothes in the grubby bathroom downstairs, Susan did not feel any qualms about having elaborated to Patrick on the jungles of the vegetable house. Or about travelling over there with him later, and asking the cat women if they could paint in the wild garden, or stay overnight a couple of nights in a sleeping bag, on one of the empty floors.
“After all, it’s your rightful ancestral home,” had said Patrick, jaunty. “From what you said, they’re not going to object, unless we evilly molest their cats.”
How had she got on to speaking about the house, the garden, her grandmother? By nine the next morning, she began to wonder, but couldn’t recall. Of course, Susan had mentioned Catherine to Patrick before, just as she had told him rather a lot more about her elusive mother, Anne.
Patrick himself seldom commented on what Susan revealed, though he listened thoughtfully. But then he rarely made comments on anyone, apart from their looks. He was always more interested in appearances, objects, views, the things which were integral to his work as an artist. He was, she thought, a very good artist, an active artist. For herself she seemed only able to copy what she saw to a more or less adequate degree, but Patrick – reinvented.
He hoped to get to one of the top schools in London after his time at Silverguilds, to which he had anyway migrated, halfway through Susan’s post-foundation first year, from Manchester. But they never discussed that at any length either. Just as they never discussed any protracted or developed union between them, or its cessation. Sometimes, when she caught herself surreptitiously watching him in shock, Susan considered if they, as a pair, were bound to go anywhere beyond their present condition. Really she did not think so, could not imagine it. The future was endless, but indefinite. Even now, she never made demands or suggested extensions, such as their living together. That was from a sort of lazy fear of his possible – probable – unwillingness. And from disbelief too, for Patrick never seemed entirely real. Though she admired him, was quite happy when with him, he also placed a definite sense of duress upon her – because he was another person. He was a stranger. Susan thought she didn’t understand him, could never do so, beyond the most obvious elements. Perhaps she did not try. She was, in a way she did not fully know then, and only saw years after, afraid – not only of upsetting or offending him – but of him. Of his presence in her life.
So, to lose him simply inevitably through the course of time and events was a miserable idea she did not dwell on, but one which also brought her a feeling of relief.
As she pushed another T-shirt into the canvas bag, Susan realised she didn’t want to go to Catherine’s house.
Between one thrust into the bag and the next, her mood was altered. It had seemed all right, mildly adventurous, last night or earlier today. But now it seemed – wrong.
She knew it would be difficult to change Patrick’s mind. That much she had learned about him. He was absolute in what he wanted to do where it concerned his work.
The first time he had come up to her had been to do with his work. She had already seen him here and there in the college building, next in the pub. Although she was casually friendly enough with members of her class, she had made no personal friends, no one to nudge about Patrick, “Look at him,” as other girls did. Then Patrick was moved into Susan’s class, and at the second coffee break, he came over to her table and stood next to her, only one inch taller since she was wearing her boots with heels. “Can I sit here?” She said he could. Other tables were quite full. She thought it was that. Then he said, “I want to talk to you. I’ve been looking at you. You’ve got this wonderful face. You’re like a Mediaeval painting – do you know the ones I mean? Only you’re prettier. I’m just so drawn to your face. I’d like to paint you. Could we do that?” The combination of politeness and calm effusion was arresting. And exhilarating. All the times after that when they met, had a drink, and then went to Patrick’s flat where he sketched her, Susan thought the end of the painting would be the end of their connection. But by the time he had primed the canvas, he had also kissed her, standing barefoot on the earthing utility carpet of his room, holding her in a circle of his arms.
Presently, “I’m sorry, I’d better say now, I’m not on the Pill.”
Patrick had been unfazed, indeed munificent and gentle. Susan had been nearly businesslike. Anne had seen to it her daughter knew exactly what she must do, and which, therefore undone, had resulted in Susan.
“I can wait,” he said.
Susan visited the Family Planning centre the next day. She took no chances, and observed the full four weeks, while the Pill became effective, before allowing herself to make love with Patrick. Armed with knowledge, Susan was not shy or disillusioned by the pain of her first times, or the seeming unpreparedness of her body. She thought Patrick’s body very beautiful, with its lightly muscled spare maleness.
She was also no longer ashamed of herself physically. The shame had gone with an alteration in her shape, both physique and face, that had somehow happened during her foundation year. Though her body was heavier than those of many of the girls she saw, her form had acquired contours, an indented waist and smooth belly, and breasts which, she had suspected, and which Patrick soon showed her, were lovely. The acne had also perished, due perhaps to her total avoidance of cheese, which she had one day read, in a dentist’s waiting-room magazine, might trigger spots. Her clear skin was very white, luminous. Better even than Anne’s.
Even so, sexually, Susan felt herself awkward, and eventually inadequate. As pleasure began regularly to overwhelm her on Patrick’s bed, she noted a curious limitation in herself. She was so completely and utterly satisfied always. Surely there was more to the act of sex than this? What she was looking for she didn’t know. Love? Perhaps. But then it would have to be the great hopeless yearning love of obsession or fantasy, which she had felt brush her in earliest youth when only unattainable beings off a screen were the fodder of her desires.
Sex, as she had it, was like eating. You were hungry, you ate, enjoyed the food very much, felt good, went on to do something else.
For Patrick it seemed to be the same.
They were not, perhaps, very experimental – but why did they need to be when fairly straightforward caresses and positions brought such exquisite paroxysms? Nor was it some sort of sexual acrobatics which Susan craved. As with everything to do with Patrick, she did not ultimately evolve a theory, or dwell on any of this very much.
At the station, as on the bus, they bought their own tickets. The train seemed exciting, as if they
were going away together on holiday to some new place – instead of back into a disintegrated past.
Susan stared at the railway banks of grass, the purple and lemon weeds and white butterflies.
Patrick sat reading a set book from the college. He was conscientious, in an off-hand way.
Then the light became a blond strobe between rows of poplars, and Patrick burned golden, dark, golden, dark…
Why don’t I want to go back? I don’t want to have to explain to those women about us painting. Ask them if we can. But why does it matter? And they’ll like Patrick. They won’t mind.
Do I remember her, Catherine?
The image of an old woman, like a hard grey cobweb, superimposed upon the gold-dark-gold of sunlit Patrick.
Perhaps the house isn’t there anymore. Like the flats when I lived with Anne.
Susan thought of Anne, doing something with Wizz in the U.S.A. What time was it there? About eight a.m. Probably having breakfast then, in a coffee shop, or at the bar in the loft. Coffee and bagels, or donuts or English muffins. Or Eggs Benedict.
The last letter had contained a postcard view of Central Park, some news, (like what they ate for breakfast this spring) and some money. Quite a lot of it, in the form of an International Money Order.
Susan thought of the first money order Anne had sent, and how she had decided to break away at once from Jo, though she had only been sharing the room at Number 17 with her for three months. How Jo’s face had disapprovingly fallen. How Jo had said, doggedly, “You won’t manage on your own, you know. You make a mess. The washing up will be up to the ceiling and you’ll get mice.” Whatever happened to Jo? She sent Susan a Christmas card, also doggedly, every year, a conservative card with a slightly religious theme, inside which Jo had always written, Hope to see you in the New Year, Best Wishes, Josie D. Cartwright.
The train stopped and shadow came, and it was their station.
In fact, the only way to go that Susan could remember was the old one, along Constance Street, into Dun-Captain-Kirk Street, the park and Tower Road.
She was bracing herself then, in Constance Street, for the place where the flats had been removed. Bracing herself more for not caring now, than for astonishment or affront. And then they were walking by the open lunch-time off-licence and Susan saw the two women she remembered from the cats, coming out of the shop, with a pack of coke in cans and a bulging carrier bag. A man followed them on to the sunny pavement.