‘I’m not too old,’ Edna said, ‘to have a child. William would like one. You yourself are very young, you have many years ahead of you.’
‘Yes’, said Ann.
‘I should like,’ said Edna, ‘to keep my husband.’ The red handkerchief turned in her hands, lost shape and smoothness, twisted like a rag between the long white fingers. All at once her eyes became large and luminous with unshed tears.
‘Please,’ said Ann. ‘Please forgive me. Don’t cry.’ She took a step forward as if to comfort the older woman. The flecks of light fled from the ceiling. She arrested her hand in the act of patting Edna’s back, let it slide instead down the thick wing of grey and crackling hair.
‘I’ll go away,’ she said. ‘To America. As soon as possible. You’ll see.’
‘You can’t,’ said Edna contrarily. ‘You misunderstand William. If you leave him now at this stage, he’ll follow you wherever you go.’
‘Stage’ was an evocative word. There above the footlights stood William, head flung back, holding out his arms imploringly. Ann had never met anyone like Edna before. She thought maybe her mother had tried to be this single-minded, this dogmatic, but time and social milieu had been against her. She couldn’t help a small smile of triumph coming to her mouth. She was perfectly willing to escape from William – she wasn’t being awkward – but if he wouldn’t let her and Edna wouldn’t let her, then she couldn’t be blamed.
‘Well, what am I to do?’ she said belligerently.
‘Let him live with you for a little while … till his play comes on. Believe me, that’s best.’
Ann thought she was absurd. Fancy handing your husband over to someone in that way. It came of living in London and mixing with improbable people. That’s why William was turning to her; that’s what he meant when he spoke about reality. Edna talked about the play in rehearsal, how important it was to William. She said he’d already been commissioned to write a series of half-hour dramas for ITV. ‘He’s earning a vast amount of money. He’s very extravagant, very generous.’ She appeared to be staring at the television set on the window ledge.
‘What’s his play called?’ asked Ann. ‘The one in rehearsal.’
She wondered why Sheila had to go out to clean at night if William was so rich.
‘The Truth is a Lie,’ said Edna. ‘It’s very earthy, very moving.’ It was about a boy in a tenement room who was different from his parents.
The more Edna talked so proudly of William, the less sympathetic and guilty Ann became. She couldn’t understand why this deceived wife didn’t rant and rave and call William a despicable beast. No wonder he hadn’t mentioned her: she was more like a good friend than a lover – on a par with Gus, who had also been given a ring.
The boy in the tenement went out and played pool in a hall in the city. Two old men took care of the tables.
Ann didn’t know what pool meant.
Edna said, ‘They love the boy, but they love taking care of the tables more.’
While she was talking there were footsteps on the stairs, the rustle of paper, a striking of matches. When the doorbell rang Ann was amazed to see a messenger boy on the landing, holding a large white cake bound with pink ribbon, crowned with flaring candles of red and gold.
‘Mrs McClusky,’ he said. ‘Special delivery.’
It was Edna’s birthday. She said she was forty-two. There were pink roses made from icing sugar and her name written in gold.
‘He said I was to expect a surprise,’ she cried, her face glowing, her long fingers picking and tearing at the circle of small hard roses. She insisted they cut into the cake; she blew out the candles and made a neat incision, extracting a thin sponge slice, layered with cream.
Ann didn’t know what to say. It was such an extraordinary thing to do, sending your wife a cake to the flat of another woman. She couldn’t for the life of her wish Edna many happy returns of the day.
They sat opposite each other, mouths blocked with the birthday surprise, a faint lingering smell of wax in the room.
There were one or two practical details, according to William, that had to be seen to. Ann’s job for one. He said she should hand in her notice.
‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ she protested. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘Are you fond of your work then? Is it absorbing to you?’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Chuck it in. There’s no virtue in working if you don’t have to. I’ve enough money for us all.’
Then there was the question of who should tell Mrs Kershaw he had moved into the flat.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she’s a reasonable kind of woman.’
He was downstairs for two hours. Ann suffered lest he was being persuaded not to stay. She knew William would then insist they should move somewhere else – and what would her mother think about that? She hadn’t had the courage to mention William yet, but she was working up to it. Perhaps Mrs Kershaw knew Edna – they moved in the same sort of circles. Perhaps she was telling William to go back to his wife, that she didn’t approve of immorality. It wasn’t very likely and Ann knew it, but half of her wanted someone, somewhere, to make a decision for her, so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty. She hadn’t told William what Edna had said about having children, about wanting to keep him. He hadn’t asked. He just wanted to know how her face had looked when the cake arrived. Mrs Kershaw raised no objections. She even gave William an extra key.
‘She’s a great woman,’ he said, lying down on the sofa and kicking off his pumps. ‘Who’s the chap she lives with?’
‘Roddy,’ Ann said. ‘Was he there? Did you meet him?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t in.’
‘Didn’t she mind at all? Wasn’t she worried about my mother finding out?’
‘Aye, she mentioned your mother. She said you were grown-up now.’
As if that had anything to do with it. ‘People are funny,’ she mused. ‘In London, they don’t seem to object to anything.’
‘A woman like that,’ he said. ‘It would be a strange thing if she raised objections.’
Ann felt he disapproved of Mrs Kershaw, though she had offered to lend him her bicycle whenever he wanted.
They mustn’t, William said, go on staying in bed all the time, however much he wished to. There were rehearsals he ought to be attending, discussions with his agent.
‘Yes,’ said Ann, nodding her head violently in agreement. ‘You’re right.’
But it was difficult planning to get up at a reasonable hour when he came home at four in the morning. There was the love-making, the egg sandwiches. Then he would sing to her the folk songs he had learnt in the wardrobe with Gus. He taught her his father’s favourite hymn, ‘The Sea of Love is Rolling In’. There were two lines in particular she never tired of hearing, because they rhymed so well and she could get the tune immediately, not like the cello concerto he still played from time to time on the gramophone.
If I perceive
What I believe –
She would join in the chorus –
It’s rolling in,
It’s rolling in …
holding him in her arms and rocking from side to side in the bed –
The sea of love is rolling in …
The man in the flat next door hurled himself against the wall and groaned audibly. During the day she crept down the stairs like a mouse to collect her mother’s letter, in fear and trembling lest she met him. She didn’t bloom like it said in the library books; the smudges of fatigue under her eyes only served to accentuate the thinness of her face.
Finally, William made her write to Gerald. She remembered her promise to Edna, the fact that William was on loan, that she had to give him back. Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth at the memory of the birthday cake. She swallowed and thought it unfair that she had to give up a husband and a home in America. If she was going to be unhappy, doomed to spend the rest of her
life without William, then she might as well have the next best thing. William said she was a daft wee hen. He was never going back to Edna. He loved only her. They would grow old together by the fire.
‘We haven’t got one,’ she said, looking at the blocked-in grate and the central-heating pipes circling the room.
She had already descended into the painful habit, whenever he mentioned meeting some woman or other, of asking him had he been to bed with her. He always said he had. It was very honest, but for someone who had been struck by the glory of the lives of the saints, it was contradictory. Resentfully she wrote the letter he dictated –
My dear Gerald,
I don’t want to hurt you. I would avoid inflicting pain if I could. I have to be truthful. I have fallen in love with someone else –
‘He’ll think it’s a bit sudden,’ she said. ‘I was always telling him I hadn’t known him long enough to be sure of my feelings.’
‘Well then,’ said William. ‘It won’t come as a shock.’ And he stroked her breast and urged her to finish the letter. It was two pages long and quite unlike her own style of correspondence.
She said, ‘Isn’t it a bit emotional?’
‘It’s meant to be,’ he said. ‘You’re turning the poor bugger down.’
He told her they must post it right away.
They both appeared pale and languid in the street. She imagined he must have lost weight; his raincoat hung on him, the plimsolls flapped on his bare feet. They walked hand in hand up the hill to the stationers. It was only the second time she had been in the open air with him, unless she could count the moments they had leaned out of the bedroom window to watch the dawn. When they had bought the airmail envelopes, she realised they couldn’t send the letter. There was no address, as yet.
‘I feel so weak,’ she said. ‘We ought to buy some food.’ She had eaten nothing in six days save the portion of Edna’s cake, and the fried-egg sandwiches.
‘Loving you,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel the need for food.’
She thought how romantic it was that he was going without nourishment because of her. And yet he looked so well on it. It was a compliment to the quality of her love. She knew what she should buy – butter, bread, cheese – but apart from a bottle of H.P. sauce that William wanted, she couldn’t concentrate. He was walking between the shelves with her, nibbling the corner of her mouth, pushing his hand through the opening of her coat.
She wandered up and down the shop, undecidedly. Eventually, without buying anything more, they walked out into the street, up the road to the Heath. There was pale sunlight. The grass glittered as it bent in the wind. They lay huddled under the drooping trees and touched each other with cold hands. She liked being indoors better; outside she had to keep asking him what he had said, what he meant. His voice was high and dragged away by the wind. He had found in the pocket of his coat a scarf in different bands of blue. He wound it round his neck. She wondered who had knitted it – his mother or one of those women he had continually met in the past. He told her the breed of ducks on the pond, the name for the clouds swelling in the sky, the particular metal on the green dome of the church beyond the bridge. He knew everything – trees, plants, seasons and conditions – he talked about racehorses, painters, the excellence of footballers. There was no end to the detail of his knowledge.
‘Arkle,’ she said. ‘Why is he so different? This Arkle.’
He explained that once in a generation a foal was thrown that was superior to any that had gone before. A miracle. That was Arkle.
‘What about Samuel Palmer,’ she said. ‘Why is he so nice?’
He told her about a self-portrait, the smear of flake white in the pupil of the left eye. ‘What he did,’ he said, ‘was to paint his face one side at a time. It explains the rustic quality, lop-sided, the mouth, the squashed-down hair.’
‘What hair?’ she wanted to know.
‘His hair,’ he said. ‘Like as if he had gone into the yard and put his head under the pump.’
‘Is that all he did,’ said Ann. ‘Self-portraits?’
‘He painted sheep under the moon.’
‘And Dennis Law?’ she asked. ‘What’s so special about him?’ She was becoming irritated by all these people who were so close to him.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘He’s a great man. The greatest of them all.’ He went into a description that she couldn’t follow, involving muscles in the leg, turns of speed on the pitch, the way a ball was kicked into the net.
‘Oh, a footballer,’ she said, scornfully. He looked at her as if she was simple.
He spoke then of his father in Glasgow, his blue uniform, the manner in which he polished his trumpet with a bit of rag and spat into the fire.
She liked hearing about his father. She thought maybe he was a little like William to look at. He was a saver of souls. What a friend he had in Jesus! She shivered with the cold under the October sky and William said he would buy her a fur coat of beaver lamb.
‘I’ll get you a grey woollen dress with a white collar,’ he promised. ‘Would you like that, my beauty?’
‘Yes,’ she said submissively.
They were too frail to walk home. He signalled a taxi in Heath Street and they sat leaning against each other with the sauce bottle balanced on his knee. On Haverstock Hill the taxi was slowed by a line of traffic at a school crossing. Ann saw a woman on the pavement with bushy black hair. She wore a strange expression of excitement and curiosity as she trotted beside the crawling taxi.
‘Concentrate wholly on me,’ said William. He pulled Ann to him and began to kiss her neck. He wasn’t tired any more. He was urgent and amorous. He pushed her to the floor of the moving vehicle as it swung round the corner and down the hill. He lay on top of her. His nails hurt her thigh; her head was flung against the door. Suddenly there was a jolt and her foot flew upwards at the impact. Her shoe came off.
‘Now,’ said William. ‘Now’.
She was covered in dust. She was aware of argumentative voices – the sound of car horns. The branches of a tree rocked outside the window. William’s door opened. He raised himself on to his knees. There was a circle of men about the bonnet of the taxi. The driver was in the road thumping a small, expensively-dressed man on the shoulder. ‘Fuck off,’ he was shouting. ‘Fuck off in your plastic gondolier, back to the promised land.’ They moved backwards and forwards, retreating and advancing; they circled one another, like dancers.
The cars had been involved in some sort of collision. The driver said you could see by the state of his passengers that it had been fucking serious. People came to the window and peered in at Ann. She wiped at her coat with her fingers, searched for her shoe. William’s trousers were undone. The abused man climbed back into his car and drove away in a cloud of exhaust fumes. The leaves leapt from the gutter and bowled down the brow of the hill. The cab driver apologised for the rough journey. He said his name was Lionel. Ann held the sauce bottle and lay with her head in William’s lap. All the way home he and Lionel kept up a spirited conversation about bloody Yids.
‘Are you prejudiced?’ asked Ann, and William shook her by the shoulder and said he was anything anyone wanted him to be.
At eight o’clock that night he left, as usual, to read his children a story. He rode the hill now on Mrs Kershaw’s bicycle, back bent under the street lamps, trousers flapping as he pedalled upwards.
She went trembling to the telephone in the hall. She wanted to talk to her mother.
‘Mummy,’ she said, whispering in case Roddy heard. ‘I’m in such a muddle.’
‘Oh yes. And what about, pray?’
The voice was hostile but Ann was undeterred. Exhaustion and emotion had blurred her sense of judgment.
‘I’ve met someone. I really am in love.’
‘Oh indeed. And what does he do?’
‘He’s a writer.’
‘A writer. What school did he go to?’
‘I don’t know, Mummy. He’s very rich. Oh Mummy, he�
��s married.’
‘It’s every woman for herself,’ said Mrs Walton.
‘But his wife?’ Ann could see Edna in a come-dancing mood, gliding about her home, devoid of husband. ‘It’s all wrong, isn’t it?’ she asked, wanting confirmation.
‘What does his father do?’
‘He’s a General, Mummy, in—’
But Mrs Walton was over the moon with delight. A General. How pleased Captain Walton would be.
It was too late to mention the brass band playing in the gutter – the sea of love was rolling in.
‘I’ll come down and meet him,’ Mrs Walton threatened. ‘Just say the word.’
‘Wait,’ said Ann. ‘Not yet. Wait.’
She cursed herself for having told her mother about William. From then on she lived in constant fear of that step on the stair, the veiled hat with the primroses stiffly waving, emerging from the taxi, the gloved hand extended to greet the General’s son.
3
Pamela sent a telegram to say she was arriving from Brighton on the midday train. William had an appointment with a man who was going to help him with his income tax. Ann had intended to go with him, but in the circumstances she said she would stay behind and wait for Pamela.
‘Don’t fret yourself,’ said William. ‘I’ll fetch her in a taxi from the station.’
He didn’t say why Ann couldn’t go too – perhaps it was because he might miss Pamela at the station. He appeared from the bedroom wearing a brown Ivy League suit and a pale green shirt with button-down collar.
‘You do look smart,’ said Ann. She supposed he had collected it from Edna’s some time during the week. She didn’t like to ask if he saw Edna at all – sometimes there were fairly mysterious telephone conversations that made her go into the bathroom and run the taps for fear he would think she had been eavesdropping on the landing. In certain ways she sensed he was like her father, private and reserved.
His desk and typewriter were now installed in the living room. Her own books had gone from the two shelves above the blocked-in grate, replaced by a row of dictionaries and several volumes of Shakespearean plays. He said he could just pile his books on the floor, but she thought it looked untidy; so she took down the few volumes of poetry, her collection of detective stories, the miscellaneous novels she possessed, and stacked them neatly under the bed. She didn’t mind in the least.
Sweet William Page 6
