Sweet William

by Beryl Bainbridge

  She came into the sitting room in the familiar dressing-gown tied with string, her short hair untidy. There was a smear of clay on her sandal. The conversation was about Christmas, about presents. Ann looked at the pattern of the carpet. Three borders, a space – her mother loved the earthenware bowl – another two borders, another space – her mother had been speechless over the fur stole – three large squares, each with a border repeated in alternate bands of reddish brown and blue: how intricate it was. Her father had read the book on military campaigns from cover to cover. Her skirt, hanging in folds above the calves of her black boots, cast a large purple shadow. In the shadow she saw two shapes, or was it one? William and Pamela. Now, why Pamela? William had just this moment come home and Mrs Kershaw had been examining the ceiling for damp. In the dark.

  ‘I don’t like this place any more,’ she said out loud.

  William unbuttoned her coat, unzipped her boots. They were no longer black and supple; the sea had bleached them. Maybe they weren’t real leather. He went on talking about Christmas, the walks he had taken with his children on the Heath, flying a kite, pushing a dog on wheels. During this, Mrs Kershaw went downstairs – one moment she was there and the next moment the chair was empty, if she had ever been there at all. Ann watched William stroke the surface of her ruined coat.

  ‘It fell in the sea,’ she said.

  ‘No matter,’ said William. ‘We can have it restored.’

  ‘I thought it was Pamela,’ she said.

  He touched her face. ‘What’s wrong, girl?’ he asked. ‘You’re so nervy. It’s not like you to imagine things. What ails you?’

  She frowned deeply.

  ‘Is it the baby?’

  She shook her head and gave a fleeting smile to indicate the baby was lovely and dear to her heart. She grew sullen again; her mouth dropped. After a moment she said, ‘I’m not a fool, you know.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You’re not a fool.’

  She opened her mouth to say she had seen him on the bed. His thumb clung to her lip. ‘My mother was dreadful to me. And my father. They know something’s up.’ She stared at him accusingly.

  ‘You told them about the baby?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She was indignant at his stupidity. ‘How could I? My mother’s furious with me. I told her you were married and that was bad enough. She turned all the fires off in the house. I was freezing.’

  He said, ‘But it’s warm now.’

  ‘She said why didn’t you mention wedding bells.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  He stopped touching her face and squatted on his heels, rocking backwards and forwards with his hands brushing the carpet. But he said nothing else. There were no sounds in the whole house, no aeroplanes in the sky, no dogs barking on the squares of grass. The lack of talk, of words, was like a great chasm appearing in the floor. There was nothing but darkness.

  ‘Did you have nice walks with the children?’ she asked. Anything to step backwards from the chasm.

  ‘Ann,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry your mother was upset about me being a married man. If she hurt you on my account, then I’m ashamed. I’ve failed you.’ He was dreadfully serious, mature; she was moved by him. She wasn’t going to forgive him immediately, but she did feel happier.

  ‘But,’ he persisted, lip thrust out, brow furrowed, ‘if you’re sore on your own account, I can’t help you.’ His mouth snapped shut, like a trap.

  She looked down at him, baffled.

  ‘It’s not your mother’s business if you’re having a love affair with a married man,’ he continued. ‘She can feel concern for you, I grant you. But it’s nothing to do with her. You’re a grown woman. Having a baby is nothing to do with your mother, either. Not your kind of mother, leastways.’

  She went cold inside at the implication that she had made her mother out to be a monster. It was as if she was in the next room, listening to every word.

  ‘But it is,’ she protested. ‘The shame—’

  ‘It’s her shame,’ he said quietly, moderately. ‘Not yours.’

  It was like one of his plays.

  There was a knot tied in the cord of the electric light that she hadn’t noticed before. The brown leaves of the dead geranium lay sprawled upon the window sill. He’d taken out the bulb from the centre lamp because he said the light was too harsh.

  ‘I don’t mean shame,’ she muttered.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘You do mean shame.’ Any moment now he would start talking about dust. ‘I don’t blame you. You’ve led a very unrealistic sort of existence. You see things differently from the rest of us.’

  ‘I know what I saw in there,’ she cried out, jerking her head in the direction of the bedroom. ‘I know that. And you not mentioning you had another wife, and people ringing up all the time and you keeping your voice low.’

  He jumped to his feet. He clenched his fists. ‘Ann, Ann,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘Believe me, it’s all in your head. I’m not like that. You’ve made me up.’

  She sat there, looking at him. Her face wore a distressed uncertain smile.

  ‘I’m not your man in America, Ann. I’m not your mother. I’m me.’ And he thumped his fist on the front of his washed-out sweater, scowling at her.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. The tears ran down her cheeks and her mouth opened in a wail of misery.

  ‘I didn’t force you,’ he pointed out. ‘I never walked in here against your will. You met my wife, you let me through that door.’

  He flung his arm out, pointing it towards the hallway, meaning the door of the flat, but all she could see was the pink bedroom that he had spoilt for ever.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ she repeated stubbornly.

  She cried for a long time. He walked about the room. He cuddled her. He forced her to the floor and made love to her. The tears never stopped. He picked her up and attempted to carry her into the bedroom and she struggled and fell on the floor, scrambling back towards the sofa, as if there were wild beasts out there, in the pink and onetime lovely room. She felt better, moaning and carrying on. Sometimes she had to think of something really dreadful, like her mother being mangled under a bus, to keep the tears flowing. She was so tired. She curled up on the sofa and he crouched on the floor, holding her hand, saying it was all in her head, the bad things weren’t real, everything was beautiful.

  ‘I know,’ she moaned, almost asleep. She dozed. She saw Pamela standing on the gangplank of a ship, waving. ‘Pamela’s been living in Hampstead,’ she said loudly, opening her eyes and tugging at his hair. ‘With a woman who does modern dance.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ he asked, fuddled with sleep.

  ‘That time she came,’ she said, ‘when she had a birthday. Hopping all over this room in those silly ballet slippers.’

  She fell asleep and when she woke in the night, he was in the kitchen, his head against a green parcel tied with ribbon, his cheek stuck to the painted surface of the table.

  ‘I want to leave here,’ she said. ‘I hate this place.’

  He was firm then. He laid her down on the divan and stroked her forehead. He sang ‘The Green Oak Tree’, softly, over and over.

  He thought she meant it. He looked for another flat.

  In the daytime, when he was out, she lay down in the double bed and rested. When she heard his footstep on the stair, she leapt up and busied herself in the kitchen. The electric shaver, still in its green paper, stayed like a cruet set or vase of flowers, in the centre of the table. She reproached him about the geranium.

  ‘You let it die,’ she said bitterly. ‘You promised to water it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed, exasperated. ‘It’s only a plant.’

  He found a flat in Regents Park, though they couldn’t move in for another two months.

  ‘You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘It’s on the ground floor and there’s a patch of garden where you can put the baby in the pram.’

  She didn’t know what to say. As her
mother would have put it, she felt she had been hoisted with her own petard. She faced Mrs Kershaw. She went downstairs and knocked at the door. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said. ‘We’re leaving … soon.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mrs Kershaw. ‘I know. William mentioned it. There’s work to be done on the roof anyway.’ She fiddled with the draw-string of her gypsy blouse. ‘I’ll have to take the ceiling down.’

  Ann looked at the clay pots, the dead tree against the wall. Someone had painted the word PEACE on the back of the door. She met Mrs Kershaw’s eyes. Mrs Kershaw looked away. She said, ‘Perhaps, Ann, dear, it’s for the best. Roddy is a little put out by William. I expect William told you.’

  ‘No,’ said Ann. ‘Is it the bicycle?’

  ‘Roddy and William had a skirmish. He was going to the Northern Star on Christmas Eve, with Eric.’

  ‘I don’t know Eric,’ said Ann.

  ‘Roddy’s friend. He’s very young and emotional. William never asked Roddy if he minded.’

  Ann was smiling. It was wonderful to think of William on Christmas Eve, going out with someone called Eric. He could have been with Edna or Sheila or Moira – there were so many women in the world – but he’d gone with Eric.

  ‘He came down in a tweed jacket.’

  ‘It’s new,’ said Ann. ‘He has a cap to match.’

  ‘We didn’t see the cap,’ Mrs Kershaw said. ‘Only the jacket. You see, Roddy lost a parcel some time ago. A friend in Ireland sent him some tweed. Roddy chose the material himself from samples. It was woven specially. William happened to find the material on the hall table. He took it to a tailor he knew.’

  ‘Found it?’ Ann said.

  ‘That was exactly Roddy’s tone of voice,’ said Mrs Kershaw. ‘He knocked William down.’

  ‘Hit him?’ said Ann. She was horrified.

  ‘Didn’t you notice?’ asked Mrs Kershaw. ‘Didn’t you notice his eye?’

  Ann hadn’t. But then William’s face was never the same; it changed daily, like his clothes. ‘Were you really looking at the roof?’ she said. If William and Roddy had come to blows, if William had stolen Roddy’s length of tweed, then surely Mrs Kershaw might be moved to tell the truth.

  ‘I won’t let the flat again, for some time,’ said Mrs Kershaw. ‘Not until we’ve had the roof done.’

  Ann went back to sleeping in the bedroom. Her stomach swelled slowly. She bought a bottle of olive oil and placed it in a prominent position on the shelves above the cooker. William used it to fry his breakfast eggs. He never mentioned her stretch marks. The provincial tour had been postponed for a further six weeks. They were opening at the Palace Theatre in Newcastle. He said Ann must come to Liverpool when the cast had settled down.

  ‘But why can’t I come to Newcastle?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll be in the middle of moving. Someone has to be there when the men come to connect the gas,’ he said reasonably.

  An American telephoned. He said his name was Chuck von Schreiber. William was out.

  ‘I’m his wife,’ Ann told him. She had never said that before.

  ‘Now look here, sweetheart,’ said Chuck, ‘tell Willie I need to hear from him. Tell him he can contact me at Brown’s Hotel.’

  She told William. He was excited at first. After he had spoken to the American he seemed cast down.

  ‘He’s just a bum,’ he said. ‘He’s nobody special. He thinks he wants to take my play to the States.’

  She remembered her dreams about William leaving from airfields and docksides.

  ‘I expect he will,’ she said. ‘Bum or no bum. If not him, then somebody else.’

  She wondered if she dared write to Gerald, a letter wholly from her, telling him she was engaged to be married. They had been good friends; they’d gone to the theatre together, and to a concert once at the Albert Hall. If her dreams were wrong and it was she in the shadows, waving, then she could look him up in America and they would have dinner, the three of them. She didn’t write to him, however, because William had torn the address from both the letters, and she couldn’t find the pieces in the drawer of his desk.

  At the end of February they prepared to move into the new flat. William was more settled now that he could visualise a stage and his play upon it, with scenery and an audience and a curtain going up and down. He had arranged for a small van to collect the clothing and the books, the pictures, Mrs Walton’s pink rug. The only furniture they owned was the divan bed, the desk and the wardrobe in the hall. He said not to worry, he would buy tables and things before he left for Newcastle. She was to leave everything to him.

  The weather was mild. Already there were buds on the sycamore trees; the forsythia bush by the fence was spiked with yellow blossom. William discarded his overcoat and wore a new jacket brought up from the wardrobe in the hall, of brown and white check. It had narrow lapels and a lining of shot silk.

  He was going out to the rehearsal rooms in Euston. He said he wouldn’t be late, he wanted to help with the last-minute packing. The van was due at nine o’clock the next morning.

  When he had gone, Ann washed the crockery that was hers and put it in a cardboard box and carried it on to the landing. She placed the clean sheets on top. She tied her books into bundles bound with string and piled them at the side of the cardboard box. Inside a suitcase, with some of her clothes, went the despised electric clock, the kettle and the electric shaver, still wrapped in Christmas paper.

  She took Dennis Law and Samuel Palmer off the wall. Across the back of the footballer’s frame was written in pencil – ‘To my own William, from Edna.’ She turned over Samuel Palmer but there was nothing to read. She daren’t empty his desk; she longed to rifle the secretive drawer, but she hadn’t the courage. It was too reminiscent of her mother.

  At midday she went on to the Finchley Road and shopped. On an impulse, as she passed the hairdressers, she went in and asked if she could have a shampoo and set. She had thought they would be too busy, but they covered her shoulders with a towel and sat her at the basin; she hadn’t washed her neck and she worried about it. She went scarlet under the drier. Her ears burned. An hour later she came out with lacquered waves, a small rash upon her chest. She ran with averted head and carrier bag up the hill, desperate in case she bumped into William. She doused her head under the cold water tap and dripped on to the carpet. She talked to herself as she straightened her crinkled hair. We’ve been married for over a year … yes … we met at a church hall … no, I haven’t been here before. Oh, I love it. She smiled into the room. Oh, it means so many things, being the wife of a celebrated writer … travel … interesting friends … yes, I suppose my life has been enhanced. She stayed with her head on one side, the comb caught in the bedraggled strands of hair, motionless. He makes me feel alive … I’ve grown in so many ways.

  She never saw Olive or Mrs Kershaw or friends at Bush House. She hadn’t any letters to read from her fiancé. She was leaving the flat she had lived in for six years. Pamela no longer came to stay. ‘It’s as if,’ she said aloud, speaking now only to herself, ‘I’m not really here at all. I’ve gone funny inside somewhere. I’ve been taken over, requisitioned.’

  She walked to the window, looked down at the garden. Mrs Kershaw was bending over the grass verge digging energetically at the soil with a trowel. Ann felt she mustn’t go and lie down; William might come back and say she was lazy. He never had said anything like that, no matter how many times he caught her asleep on the sofa, but she hadn’t forgotten how he had described herself and Gus as the idlest people he knew. Nor had she put from her mind his accusation that she had made him up. She thought it was possibly more accurate to say that William had made her up; she certainly felt very unreal. She stayed awake until nine o’clock and fell asleep watching the television.

  She woke at eleven and switched off the set. She looked at the food in the oven. The casserole had dried up, the potatoes fell like black stones on to the floor.

  She waited a long time. There were all his clot
hes to sort out, his books. She sat on the window sill in the bedroom and watched for his taxi to come down the hill.

  At four o’clock she tiptoed downstairs and rang Edna. She dialled very softly, under the impression that maybe the telephone would ring less offensively at the other end. After a long time Edna answered. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s Ann. Is William there?’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened to him.’

  ‘Surely you don’t want sympathy from me,’ said Edna.

  Ann started to make sniffling noises. She tried to control herself. ‘I’m sorry … I just thought …’

  ‘It is final rehearsals,’ said Edna. ‘They don’t keep civil service hours.’ And she put down the phone.

  At eight o’clock William returned, white-faced and exhausted. He wore, unaccountably, corduroy trousers and a white fairisle jumper. Ann was on the landing stacking the pictures and the suitcase. He kissed her on the lips.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Have I had a time.’

  ‘Did the rehearsal go badly?’ asked Ann. She did her best to sound interested and reasonable.

  ‘Get away,’ he said. ‘The rehearsal went fine. I had lunch with that bum, von Schreiber—’

  ‘Chuck?’ Ann said, severely.

  ‘Aye, Chuck. We had snails at a place he knew in Wardour Street. I got toothache. I’ve never known such toothache. I went to a dentist.’

  ‘What dentist?’ asked Ann.

  ‘A bloke someone recommended. He gave me gas. When I came round he was hitting me in the face, he was belting me. And I vomited all over my breeches, down my coat and shirt, my socks, over the floor …’

  ‘How awful,’ Ann said. She would have liked to look in his mouth for proof. She wondered if she could kiss him suddenly and feel with her tongue for any new fillings. But she couldn’t bear to touch him.

  ‘I had to buy new clothes,’ he went on. ‘The dentist threw my old ones away. I went back to rehearsal and I had a bath in Euston station. Andy put me to sleep on the set. I only woke up an hour ago.’ He yawned.