‘Not sordid,’ he objected. ‘My life has never been sordid.’
‘Well, squalid, then. You were bothered about growing old.
‘Whereas now,’ he observed sharply, ‘I doubt if I’ll live that long.’
It seemed to put her in a better mood, his fear of untimely death. She laughed a lot and told him he was lovely and that if he was very good she wouldn’t argue with him for a whole week.
When he put the phone down his hands were trembling.
2
Binny was disturbed in the middle of washing down the paintwork in the kitchen by the arrival of her friend Alma Waterhouse who had come in a taxi to borrow the hoover.
It was an awkward situation with the meter ticking over.
‘It won’t work,’ improvised Binny. ‘Someone’s taken the plug off the end.’
Alma went into the street to send the taxi man away. Binny dragged the hoover from under the stairs and threw it down the back steps into the yard. It wouldn’t do to let Alma know that she herself wanted to use the machine. It would arouse suspicion. Binny rarely hoovered. If she admitted that guests were coming for the evening, Alma would expect to be invited. She was having husband trouble and needed taking out of herself.
On the draining-board glittered four cooking apples, stuffed with raisins and wrapped in silver foil. Hastily bundling them into a carrier bag, Binny dropped them behind the fridge. Alma returned. She took from the pocket of her camel coat a quarter bottle of whisky and approached the cupboard where the glasses were kept.
‘I can’t allow it,’ said Binny. Defiantly she barred the way.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ cried Alma, astonished at her attitude. ‘We could do with a little swiggie, darling. It’s awfully cold out.’ Alma was a great believer in swiggies, whatever the temperature.
Binny stood her ground and adopted a crucified position against the mahogany wall cupboard. She gazed seriously at Alma and after a pause added the words ‘Not now’, holding aloft a pink sponge with which she had rinsed the woodwork; lukewarm water trickled down her arm. Impressed, Alma stepped back and put away the bottle. Binny said she had shopping to do. She tied a scarf over her newly washed hair and pushed Alma out of the house, striding ahead along the alleyway toward the High Street. Behind the wire netting of the play centre, children crawled along concrete pipes, screaming.
‘Have I said anything out of turn?’ asked Alma, teetering over the cobblestones in her high-heeled boots.
Binny was feeling terribly emotional. She wished she hadn’t spoken so harshly to Edward on the telephone and regretted she’d been unkind about his friend, old Woodford. It wasn’t very nice, the government taking his money off him like that. She wouldn’t like it. It was the way Edward hadn’t said Hello that had put a damper on things. She’d been in perfectly good spirits when dialling his number. She’d scrubbed the bath, hung clean towels over the edge and done all that raisin business with the apples. Then quite suddenly, on hearing his clipped and well-bred voice, she had dropped into somewhere dark and confined – she was shut inside a box beneath a river. She felt he wouldn’t be able to hear her even if she shouted. This feeling of being locked away from him had something to do with visualising Edward, on the other end of the telephone, leaning against a desk polished by somebody he had never met, blotting the corners of his mouth to remove traces of a meal he hadn’t cooked, with a handkerchief that came fresh and laundered out of his breast pocket as if by magic. It was the privileged style in which the man lived that silenced her.
When she’d first seen him, stepping through the doorway of the outer office in Chalk Farm, he’d reminded her of various portly relatives glimpsed only in the pages of photograph albums. He wore galoshes and held, either in his hand or teeth, the stem of a small and blackened pipe. His face, which was pale and fair, had a curious swelling between the eyebrows as though he had been stung by an insect. Bitten by life, she thought, watching his mouth open and close behind a drift of tobacco smoke. The way he told it, there wasn’t much point to his existence. He had always done the right thing, supported his wife, educated his son, made sure the garden was tidy. There had been that trouble years ago – here he waved his hand rather vaguely in the air as if turning the handle of a gramophone – but he had learned to live with it. Binny pretended at first she was still married, to avoid complications. But later in the evening, rather charmed by those galoshes and the manner in which he constantly puffed, sucked and fooled over his pipe, she allowed him to see her home. He kept looking at himself in the mirror. She couldn’t be sure if the swelling upon his forehead made him appear hideous, or distinguished in a Roman sort of way. She couldn’t tell at all now because, loving him as she supposed she did, she no longer saw him as he was. That first night he had spoken confusedly of his time at boarding school. Captain of the cricket team . . . head of his dormitory . . . That rotter Jonas . . . If it hadn’t been for Muldoon – what a stinker he’d turned out to be. He was obviously re-living the heyday of his prep school years. There was something too about his father and a pair of gloves, and a beastly rumpus over a prefect’s badge. She could make little sense of it. Having attended grammar school and forgotten all about it, Binny was touched by his continued preoccupation with those far off boyhood days.
If she hadn’t been touched, she thought gloomily, she wouldn’t be out in this weather, catering for his friends.
On the pavement outside the British Rail warehouse, lying in disorder across the rusted springs of a double bed, sprawled several elderly men and women drinking out of a communal bottle. Binny retraced her steps and caught hold of Alma’s arm.
‘It’s everywhere,’ she whispered. ‘Where are the police?’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ scolded Alma. ‘The last thing we need is a policeman.
Smiling and nodding ingratiatingly, she led Binny forward. An old woman in a fur coat and a pair of tennis shoes, reclining on one elbow as though in a punt on a lake, stared at Alma in admiration. ‘My goodness,’ she shouted. ‘You’re a bonny girl. Will you look at that hair on her head?’ Alma’s hair, rinsed to an unusual shade of strawberry blonde, was blowing in all directions.
Pleased, Alma stopped and confessed it wasn’t altogether natural. ‘I use a little something,’ she confided. ‘Hint of a Tint . . . every second or third wash.’
Bouncing in excitement on the dilapidated bed, unsettling her geriatric companions wrapped in sacking, the old woman laughed and leered her approval. Two men struggled upright into a sitting position and spat violently into the gutter. Their eyes, half averted, were those of animals existing in darkness. Binny ran away, and emerged breathlessly on to the High Street looking for someone in authority.
“You’re a bundle of nerves,’ decided Alma some moments later, coming across Binny leaning against the wall of a public house. ‘You should have had a little swiggie when I pressed you.’
‘I don’t know how you could talk to them,’ said Binny. ‘They looked dangerous.’
‘Silly girl. They were only enjoying themselves.’
‘She had iodine dabbed all over her face,’ said Binny.
‘Well, she had one or two cuts on her nose,’ defended Alma. ‘It’s natural. Old people are always falling over. Think of your own mother when she dislocated her hip.’
‘She stumbled getting out of a taxi,’ Binny said. ‘She wasn’t rolling about in the gutter with a bottle of meths.’
In silence they walked down the street. Alma slowed her steps expectantly at each shop doorway, but Binny hurried on. She had no money.
At last, made miserable by the chill wind and deafened by the roar of traffic, they fled inside the Wimpy bar for a cup of coffee. The waitress was affronted at the bold way they expected service. After five minutes of hostile inactivity she relented and left two cups of pale yellow liquid at the edge of the table.
‘I wouldn’t mind a doughnut,’ called Alma, but the waitress had better things to do.
From
where she sat in the window, Binny could see both the perambulator braked at the steps of the bank and the clock above the door of the shoe shop. It was ten minutes to three. If the bank closed before she had time to cash her cheque, she wouldn’t be able to afford cream for the baked apples, or Greek bread, or buy enough salad to make a splash. She was tempting fate. She wanted the dinner party to go well for Edward’s sake, but she didn’t want to strive for success. All her life she had found that when she went to a great deal of trouble, the results were never satisfactory; her greatest triumphs had been accidental.
A man in a bowler hat, strolling backwards and forwards in front of the bank, took a rolled-up newspaper from under his arm, and pausing in his stride proceeded to tap the hood of the perambulator.
Alma was in the middle of a story concerning her son Victor, who only the day before had behaved badly in a car. ‘He told me to throw it away,’ she was explaining. ‘He said the smoke irritated his throat. So I did. Not at once, I grant you – after a few quick puffs. I know it’s not fair to give the young cancer. We’d been for an Indian meal. I opened the window and threw it out and he told me to shut the window. He jostled me. Then he called me a toe-rag.’
A thin woman in a mackintosh came out of the doorway of the National Westminster and stood for a moment looking at the traffic. The bowler-hatted man dropped his newspaper on to the hood of the pram and walked briskly away.
‘Look at that,’ said Binny, pointing. She watched him disappear into the entrance of the tube station.
‘Don’t be fickle, darling,’ reproved Alma. ‘You be content with your lovely Teddy.’ She was keen on Edward and he liked her, though he was not over fond of being called Ted.
The woman in the mackintosh descended the steps of the bank awkwardly, as though afraid she might lose her balance. Using her stomach to propel the pram, she picked up the rolled newspaper and tipped it over the edge of the storm shield.
‘Poor little thing,’ cried Binny, aloud. It was unthinkable that any mother should shove a dirty newspaper on to the pillow of a sleeping child. The world was menacing and full of alarms. ‘I can’t stand it,’ she told Alma. ‘It’s disgusting and frightening.’
‘What is?’ asked Alma, gazing in bewilderment at the plastic table top and the sauce bottle in the shape of a tomato, a crust like blood rimming the imitation stalk.
‘Anywhere you can possibly go,’ said Binny. ‘It’s waiting round the corner. Faces with scabs . . . hit-and-run drivers . . .’
Though most of her life she had rushed headlong into danger and excitement, she had travelled first-class, so to speak, with a carriage attendant within call. The world was less predictable now. The guard was on strike and the communication cord had been ripped from the roof. It wasn’t the same. In her day dreams, usually accompanied by a panic-stricken Edward, she was always being blown up in aeroplanes or going down in ships.
‘There, there,’ soothed Alma, taking Binny’s hand and patting it. ‘It’s probably the change that’s upsetting you, darling.’ And indeed Binny’s normally pale cheeks flamed a deep and fierce red.
‘I can’t help noticing details,’ said Binny. ‘Little clues and suchlike. I’d like to switch over, but I can’t.’
Alma looked at her.
‘I keep thinking I’m watching television,’ Binny said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much difference.’ She stared mesmerised out of the window.
Alma asked for the bill and said she’d phone in the morning to see if Binny felt more settled. Better still, she could call round this evening for a little chat.
‘No,’ said Binny. ‘I shall go to bed early.’ At this lie her face flushed more than ever. ‘But I doubt if it will do any good. I don’t know how you can be so blind. The whole world’s changed. It’s not my little change that’s making the difference.’ Seeing that Alma appeared unconvinced she added, ‘I don’t suppose you called your mother a toe-rag.’
Alma agreed she hadn’t, but then in their day the word had been unknown. ‘Old cow,’ she admitted. ‘Or flipping swine. I got my face slapped.’ She touched her cheek at the memory.
‘I said bugger once,’ recalled Binny. ‘I said it to a chair in Mother’s bedroom and she overheard. She said a policeman would come round and wash my mouth out.’
‘You’re always looking for policemen,’ said Alma thoughtfully. She looked at the bill and was astonished at the service charge.
‘I wonder,’ asked Binny, ‘if we should hit the children more?’ She never had, not even when they punched her or broke something valuable. When she was younger she would have argued to the death that it was wrong to beat a child. Now she wasn’t so sure. Somewhere along the line mistakes had been made: the way everyone accepted those telephone calls in the night from the police holding the children in the cells for disorderly behaviour; the way the children lolled about the house, refusing to go out until the pubs opened. She had started with such liberal leftish ideas upon most things – education, socialism, capital punishment, sex and so forth – and then, like an old and tired horse knowing the road home, had veered inexorably to the right. Only the other day her son had called her a fascist pig. It was true she didn’t want to share anything any more, particularly not with the children.
‘You are in a state,’ Alma said. ‘Perhaps you need a little holiday.’
‘You know I can’t leave the children,’ said Binny hastily. Alma was always trying to get her to go on little holidays. Binny had accompanied her once to Brighton for three days and returned practically an alcoholic. Last summer Alma had wanted her to fly on a package deal to Tunisia. She said it was very cheap and would do her the world of good. Binny hadn’t gone. Alma had come home with a stubborn case of crabs which she said she’d caught off a camel.
‘I must get on,’ said Binny, worriedly, rising from her seat, thinking at this rate she wouldn’t reach the bank before nightfall.
They kissed and parted outside Boots the chemist. Alma decided to wait for a taxi. Trying to keep warm, she hopped cheerfully from one leg to another, shouting Goodbye repeatedly above the din of traffic, as though for the very last time.
Binny went into the bank. In the queue at the cashier’s counter waited a thin woman in a mackintosh. Binny was so surprised she darted back to the door and looked outside. Perhaps the baby was parked in a side street – after all those warnings about leaving children unattended! She walked down the steps, though it was none of her business, and round the corner. There was no sign of a pram. The wind tore at her clothes. She thought she saw familiar faces, framed in windows, flickering past her as the cars swarmed toward the High Street. Confused, she raised her arm in greeting, imagining she heard above the fluttering of her headscarf a voice crying her name. ‘I’m all at sea,’ she said out loud and, trying not to tremble, returned to the bank.
The woman was now third in line at the cashier’s grill. Binny couldn’t see her face. She had short colourless hair, and grey stockings with a seam, and she carried a plastic shopping bag. At the counter, the fishmonger from Barretts, two fingers clumsy with sticking plaster, was stacking cellophane packets of small change into a hold-all. As he struggled with the zip of the canvas bag, the woman slipped from her place in the queue and joined the end of a third line of customers further along the counter. She looked directly at Binny. Many years ago, behind a wall and across the road from Binny’s house, there had stood a home for fallen girls. On Sundays, with heads grotesquely shaven to eliminate lice, the inmates formed in twos upon the pavement. In the bold eyes of the woman, Binny recalled instantly the glances of those other, indecent girls, bobbing beneath the branches of almond trees in bloom, swaying, with fragile necks exposed like stalks of flowers in a brutal crocodile to church. She blushed.
When she had cashed her cheque and was out in the street, she found that the noise and the cold no longer bothered her. Something had pleased her, raised her spirits, though what it was she couldn’t be sure. She bought the bread she needed and a car
ton of double cream. She swept in and out of shops and didn’t complain when various men jumped the queue and were served out of turn. She was able to smile quite charitably, after she had leapt to safety, at a youth on a bicycle who failed to run her down on the zebra crossing.
3
Edward met old Simpson for a drink in the Hare and Hounds. The place was filled with tired businessmen pepping themselves up before returning home.
‘I see no reason why you shouldn’t claim a certain proportion for entertainment,’ said Edward. ‘None at all. Providing you can produce the restaurant bills.’
‘Quite so,’ agreed Simpson.
‘But I don’t feel we can justifiably put forward your wife’s hairdressing expenses. Not for the golf club night and so forth. It’s not strictly business. See what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Simpson, disappointed.
‘I mean, it’s not as if she’s a hostess in a night club, for instance. Or a television personality.’
‘I may have misled you about the wife,’ Simpson said. ‘She’s not altogether sympatico to this evening.’
‘Good Lord,’ cried Edward, instantly alarmed. ‘I thought you said she was a woman of the world?’
‘She’s that of course,’ said Simpson. ‘But the way she sees it, it’s a bit not on.’
‘She will come, won’t she?’ asked Edward. He felt like hitting old Simpson between the eyes with his fist. All that rubbish he’d talked about it being a bit of a lark and what a terrific sport the old woman was.
‘The way she sees it,’ explained Simpson, ‘it’s definitely a bit tricky. How would you like it if Helen was meeting some fellow on the side and she asked me round to your house to meet him?”
It seemed to Edward a highly unlikely situation, knowing what Helen thought about Simpson and fellows in general, but he nodded his head and pretended Simpson had a point there.
Injury Time Page 2
