After Purple

by Wendy Perriam

  “Thea, look, there’s something I ought to tell you.”

  “What?” I took a large, noisy bite from my apple. His voice sounded tight and sort of solemn, as if he were about to lead the prayers in Assembly.

  “It’s about … Janet.” I felt scared, suddenly. I crammed in a chunk of cheese along with the apple. I felt I needed ballast.

  “How are her parents?” I asked. I needed to distract him. Janet’s father was a vicar, and with any luck, we could move away from Janet and on to the ecumenical movement or transubstantiation. But Adrian didn’t even appear to have heard. He was fiddling with the cheese knife — tapping it, caressing it. He suddenly flung it on the table and turned around to face me. “She’s … we … er … I mean, we’re … going to have a baby.”

  I still had the apple cradled in my hands. It felt heavy, suddenly, as if I were clutching the whole spinning planet earth, struggling to hold it steady, while dark empty space plunged and roared around me.

  “What did you say?” That was one of Leo’s tricks, repeating the question. It gave you time and a sort of dignity.

  “Janet’s … pregnant.” The word sounded brutal, smug, uncaring.

  I scraped my front teeth against the hard shiny skin of the apple, then yanked it away. I could see two neat little teeth marks breaking the skin. Pure cold white underneath. Apples don’t bleed.

  “Oh … nice,” I said.

  He looked relieved. “Yes, we’re very pleased. Look, Thea darling …” (That darling was deliberate — a gift, an offering, a reparation for the baby.) “It wouldn’t work, you and me. We know that. We’ve tried it. You need a new start, a decent job. If you’re happy in your work, other things seem far less important. Why don’t you go to a proper employment agency? Get some help. Even do a course in something.”

  “Yes,” I said. Janet used multi-coloured Kleenex. There were boxes of them everywhere, sheaves of tissues, yellow, lilac, pink. She’d probably have a pastel-coloured baby, zip him into lilac paper nappies, lay him on a primrose-crocheted doily. Her breast milk would come out pink and scented. Her baby would shit flowers.

  “You mustn’t let yourself go, Thea. You’re attractive.” (I’m not.) “There’s no need to wear Leo’s old clothes. Buy yourself some new ones.”

  If Adrian had been the type to hate anyone, he’d have hated Leo, but he didn’t believe in strong irrational feelings. He had visited me in Notting Hill and been suitably appalled.

  “You ought to stand up to Leo, not let him take you over. It’s as much your place as his.” (It isn’t.) “Clean it up. Take a pride in it. Assert your rights.”

  “Yes,” I said again. It was the easiest word I could think of. Janet had installed a waste-disposal unit where I had had an overflowing bucket. You can see pictures in a bucket — landscapes of tea-leaves, still lives of lemon peel and tins.

  “How many months?” I asked, as casually as if I were merely inquiring how long it was till Easter. I tossed a piece of cheese rind into the waste-disposal unit and listened to it spit and grind.

  “What, darling?” Adrian was cutting up his apple into eight neat segments. He never cut apples when he lived with me. That’s what teeth are for.

  “Janet. How far gone is she?”

  He handed me a piece of apple, as if I were a toddler or a chimpanzee. I knew he wanted to make it up to me, give me treats, distract me. I was already awash in darlings.

  “Look, Thea darling, let’s not go into it. I just wanted you to know, that’s all. But I don’t really like discussing Janet with you. It only upsets you.” (It doesn’t.) “Janet’s all right. She’s got a job. She knows where she’s going. Frankly, Thea, you don’t. You need to sort yourself out. Start again.”

  “You mean leave Leo?” I shut my eyes and saw Leo lean and naked in his double bed. He had long, thin feet like that picture of Christ on the Cross in the Scottish National Gallery.

  “Not necessarily. But don’t let him rule you like he does. Establish some rights in the place. Tidy it, redecorate, cook proper meals, stick to a timetable.”

  For five ruled and dotted years, I’d watched Adrian plotting out his own school timetables: first period — Hanoverians with the Lower Fifth; second period — Norman Invasion with the first formers. Janet probably had her own ante-natal timetable: first month — cells divide; second month — baby’s limbs begin to form. I flung my half-eaten apple in the sink.

  Adrian took my hand. He looked angry and anxious and tender all at once. I stared at his clean grey trousers. I could see his thing rearing up, tearing into Janet, leaving babies behind. Messy, almost careless. I wanted to hack the baby out of her, rip it out through her rose-scented frilly little cunt, the way it had got in.

  “I’d better go,” I said.

  Adrian’s relief was almost comic. He hymned and scooped me to the door, pressed a bank-note into my hand, picked up the bag of apples and pushed it after me. Now I had my pocket-money, my tuck-box for the train. When I turned the corner, Adrian was still standing grey against his French Blue door. His and Janet’s door.

  I spread out the bank-note in the train and stared at it. It was a whole ten pounds. I wondered what it was for. Hush money, guilt money? Janet had Adrian and his (our) house and blond hair and a baby. And I had a ten-pound note. I stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans. I took out the apples and laid them in a line on the seat. (It was another empty carriage. Twickenham is much divorced.) There were five French Golden Delicious, all exactly the same size and perfectly rounded. Adrian and I had always eaten English apples, rough, blotchy ones in odd shapes and colours.

  I picked one up and sniffed it, but it didn’t smell. Janet deodorised everything, even apples. I pushed down the window of the carriage. The cold air rushed in and slapped me in the face. The train was juddering past rows of trim little semis, their neat back gardens running down almost to the edge of the railway track. Bare, cold, empty gardens, with only sooty privet or shivering brussels sprouts. The only colour was the washing, drooping on the lines. It was all Janet’s washing — interlock vests and nylon overalls, everything non-iron and easy-care and pastel-coloured. Except the nappies. Rows and rows of nappies. Janet’s baby’s nappies. All smug, white, flapping, mocking …

  I cupped an apple in my hands and aimed it at the nappies. Missed. It didn’t even make the hedge. I flung another. Missed again. We had already left the nappies far behind. But there’d be more. There’d always be nappies. Other people’s nappies. Other people’s babies. I threw the last three apples so violently, they broke and squashed against the rails. I crumpled up the bag, kicked it under the seat and closed my eyes. Someone would wake me when we arrived at Waterloo.

  Chapter Three

  I was almost back at Leo’s, when I suddenly turned round again and trudged back to Notting Hill. There were half a dozen employment agencies just a minute from the tube. I stopped in front of the first one and stared at all the little white job-cards snowing up the window. They were tacked against a sheet of gold foil with coloured cut-out holly sprays prickling between them, and a reindeer or two nosing around the best ones. I suppose it was their way of jollifying slavery. Ruled and timetabled slavery is probably safer, anyway, than great lumps and voids of freedom. Adrian is often right. He’ll never set the world alight, but he’s the sort of man who keeps it ticking over.

  ‘Sous Chef,’ I read. ‘For large West End Hotel. C. & G. training essential.’

  ‘Maintenance Electrician. Must have own tools. Free meals and overalls.’

  I had neither tools nor training. In fact, when it comes to jobs, I don’t have much at all; no glowing references, nor strings of letters after my name, no father in High Places. Everybody wanted secretaries, or machine operators. Machines break down as soon as I go near them.

  ‘Retail Clerk, Ledger Clerk, B.H. Clerk, Credit Control Clerk …’ Between the rows and rows of clerks, I could see my own face gazing back at me. It didn’t look good job material. My hair was tousled an
d un-brushed. The collar of my shirt (Leo’s) was grubby underneath the shapeless sweater and the yellowing sheepskin. I knew already how the interviewers would look — long scarlet talons and eyes trailing three-tier lashes, trained to spot the ladder in your stocking or the hole in your story.

  Lower down the window, a fully employed Santa Claus was emptying a pile of job-cards almost on to the pavement. ‘Receptionist,’ I squinted. “Required for smart Mayfair firm.”

  That was Janet’s job. Only read City for Mayfair. Janet worked in a tall glass cage near Moorgate, with thick pile carpet even in the lifts. She was Indispensable. The partners and directors popped in and out, of course, but it was Janet at her twenty-foot reception desk who kept the whole firm going. Well, that was her story. Frankly, I suspect anyone can be a receptionist. You’re just a smile strung between a blow-wave and a clean white collar. I’d work on myself tomorrow, and by Monday, I’d make that job in Mayfair. Just a matter of a change of style. Throwing out one face and clamping on another. You could be Maggie Thatcher and Madame Curie combined and still be shown the door, if you marched into the bureau in the wrong identikit. Thatcher would never have become Prime Minister at all if she’d worn a sheepskin or let her perm grow out.

  I hailed a taxi. The driver looked at me suspiciously, but I pulled out Adrian’s ten-pound note and waved it at him like a boarding pass. Taxis expect you to dress for them — like jobs. They stop in droves if you’re wearing Persian lamb. It cost me £3.80 to the City. I almost enjoyed squandering Adrian’s money on a visit to his wife. Janet could have bought three dozen nappy-liners with it, or a year’s supply of foot deodorant. I knew I had to see her — well, not her exactly, but the baby. I suppose I hoped it would all turn out to be a gigantic hoax, some phantom pregnancy I could puncture with a pin. I over-tipped the driver who said, “Good thing the snow’s held off”, which I suppose was a sort of apology for having looked suspicious in the first place. He set me down in London Wall. The buildings were so high, I felt dwarfed and dizzy. The whole area had a bleak, castrated look, as if the bulldozers had been in and smashed up anything that was cosy or homely or merely man-sized. Trees, clouds, colours, had all been confiscated. Even the sky looked like a slab of pre-stressed concrete. Huge cranes peered between the tower blocks, like spies, checking up that everyone was working. This was labour-land. They hadn’t spent twenty million pounds on twenty-storey buildings just to let people live in them, or laugh in them, or play or fuck, or simply lark around. Those rows and rows of prison offices were all identical, with the same grey files, grey phones, steel desks, steel manacles. If there was a mural or a window-box, it was only part of the production drive, to cheer the workers and make them slave still harder.

  Janet’s block was so new and shining, it looked as if it had just been scaled and polished by a dentist. As I walked towards it, it grew taller and taller until the top half was bent back against the sky. There was a half-demolished building opposite, which was reflected and distorted in its glass, so that I felt as if I were walking straight into a pile of rubble. The automatic doors slid open, gobbled me up, and spat me out into the foyer. It had mock-marble pillars and a mock-stone fountain with plastic plants grouped round it. The pictures were mocking squares of colour, chosen to match the mock-leather chairs and the mock-silk wall hangings. There was real water splashing in the fountain and a real doorman with a real frown. I dodged him by nipping round the corner, up the stairs. Janet’s firm was eleven floors up and I stopped at every floor and stared down at the City, until I gradually felt less like a human and more like a crane. At the eleventh storey, I paused for breath, then walked down the corridor and concealed myself behind the double-glass doors which said ‘Mercantile Development and Investment Limited. Reception and Inquiries.’

  I could see Janet clearly through the glass. Her desk looked rather like a coffin, in highly polished wood with lots of brass handles, and awash in flowers. There was nothing fake about the flowers. I could have fed myself for a fortnight on the price of just one bloom. They were re-arranged each morning by a girl in a magenta jumpsuit and a matching mini-van whose primary purpose in life was to set Janet off. It wasn’t difficult. Janet had one of those television commercial complexions which never need to use the lotions they’re advertising. She’d grown up in the country with extra milk and ballet lessons and badges from the Girl Guides for Stitchery and Housecraft. You could tell that her father was a vicar just by looking at her face which was all manna and ambrosia. Leo’s father was probably a witch-doctor or ambassador to Satan. That’s why he’s dark and lean and sallow and has Armageddon in his eyes. Janet’s eyes are the sort of blue you read about in Mills and Boon. She was simpering into one of the four cream telephones. Everything was cream — her blouse, her teeth, the thick pile rug, the hessian-covered walls. I could see her sitting in the country as a child, with pink ribbons on her plaits and a blond buxom mother pouring double Devon cream on her all-milk porridge. She was made of double cream. It spilled down her cleavage to her soft, swelling breasts, which had always been large, but were now gallon-sized. (My own breasts are smallish and unspectacular. I haven’t even got a proper cleavage, unless I fake one with what Adrian used to call an armoured bra.)

  A man marched through the double doors and almost knocked me over. He was cream as well. Top-of-the-milk shirt, an exactly matching tie and a suit which looked as if it were pretending it was summertime in Acapulco. He and Janet exchanged double-cream smiles. Janet scribbled something on a pad, pushed back her orange Dralon chair and stood up. And then I saw it. The baby. Janet’s baby. Adrian and Janet’s baby.

  It was huge, monstrous, pushing out her stomach like some malignant growth, blocking all the space between her and Acapulco. I was prepared for one month (cells divide), two or three months even (baby’s limbs begin to form), but not this vast, completed hulk, jutting out like a gargoyle, almost overbalancing her. It wasn’t just a clutch of cells, but a living, breathing, kicking, finished creature which might drop out any moment and claim its name, its rights, its milk. It might even demand its father — my father, my husband, my Adrian.

  Janet was still standing up. She no longer stood upright, as she had in all those years of Girl Guide Posture Badges and deportment lessons, but tipped back against the weight. She was totally transformed; not just her shape, her stance, her breasts, her breathing, but something else more subtle, more sublime. She had Entered The Kingdom, and been transfigured, glorified. Those preening hothouse flowers were nothing to do with Mercantile Investment. They were an offering to her alone — to fertility, to motherhood. Adrian had swelled inside her and sanctified her. She was growing round him like ivy round a tree, bursting into flower. I realised now I would never get him back.

  Janet had sat down again and the baby vanished from my view. Only her flower face was left, and those lumbering milk churns weighing down the desk. The man from Acapulco was walking back towards me, whistling through the double doors. I darted after him into the lift and tried to stand close, so that some of Janet’s glory would rub off on my own unhallowed, concave form. He had been in the Presence and was beatified. When we reached street level he shot away, and all I picked up was the tailwind from his expensive camel coat.

  I turned left out of the building, across the road into Moor Street and along to Chiswell Street. The streets looked grey and empty, as if somebody had dumped all children, pets and people underground, and then tipped concrete over them. Not that I really cared about my surroundings — I was far too busy working out Janet’s dates. That baby must have been in there before I’d even got the Decree Nisi. I’d thought I’d left Adrian, but really he’d already left me. He’d allowed me to play the role of deserter and destroyer, while he hung on to the house and his good name and the judge’s sympathies, and Janet swelled and burgeoned on the sidelines. At least Leo had the decency to admit he was a swine, whereas Adrian confused you with ten-pound notes and darlingses and read the Guardian and New Society, and
joined in all the agonisings about Northern Ireland and the slaughter of the seal, so that you thought he had a conscience. Yet all the time, he must have been sleeping with Janet and me in shifts. I saw it now. Janet had had the lunch and evening slots, while I got nights and breakfast. And while Adrian and I simply thrashed around like animals, he and Janet had been engaged in a sacred act. Easy for me to dismiss Janet’s prowess between the sheets, imagining her wasting half her stint on douching, or refusing to remove her vest. In blazing fact, she and Adrian had been creating life — begetting, engendering, propagating — all those glorious, gloating, biblical words which kept the earth spinning and the grass thrusting and piled man on man on man.

  I crossed the road and turned into Bunhill Row. I knew where I was going — St Joseph’s church, a place of sanctuary when your stomach is a bombsite and your head a half-demolished building. It’s one of the poorest Catholic churches in the whole of London. It isn’t even consecrated, but God still lives there (when He’s not at the Vatican or Lourdes or Knock or Compostela). I collect Roman Catholic churches like other people collect coins or stamps or Chinese restaurants. The only reason I know my way around, is because London for me is the bits between churches. St Joseph’s is so hidden away and hard to find, that even a lot of priests have never heard of it. You can walk past it in the street and still be asking, “Where’s the church?” It’s built in a basement, underneath a school which has now closed down, and all you can see is a door and a flight of dark stone steps with wild cats peeing on them. Most of the time, it’s empty.

  I slunk down the steps and into the church, which smells of chalk and ink and punishment and unwashed hands, like an old school hall in Dickens. There’s nothing sublime about it — no towering nave, or shimmering mosaics, no Gothic tracery, or whispering arches. I didn’t feel like splendour. I wanted a Cinderella church in a dark cellar, where I could hide away and be solitary and idle, after all the glass, the toil, the tower blocks. I was trying hard not to think of Janet.