Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  A face youthful at the window, craning. Consternation seizing the face. Not Daniel, because of course Daniel was grizzled now, on the cusp of middle age. The young face was jabbering but she failed to make out the words. His eyebrows worked, his hands flapped. Her heart’s sap surged, with painful warmth. If she could have moved, Elizabeth would have shooed Jason the Milk away. Now it was all up, they would resuscitate her. Having got so far, the deathly cold having seized her feet and calves in such a vice that she could no longer feel them at all, certain bones having snapped, her mind having pitched down this cliff, they would abort her journey. They would importune her, You must rise again, so that you can die again. Like all acts of public benevolence, this alienation of her rights would be reinforced by violence.

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Vaughan, my love, don’t you be scared, darling, I’m coming through the window. Only way, see.’

  A fountain of glass smithereened; the morning imploded; but its shock was unregistered until the warm male hand cupped her head, lifting it from the tiles on to her sheepskin. Then she was shaken with grief at the sight of Jason’s tears as he stammered into his mobile phone, rushed for a blanket, covered her and chafed her hands with their great knots of vein, so that warmth prickled into her slow-sliding blood.

  ‘Don’t you worry now, darling, ambulance is on its way. Thank goodness it’s one of your milk days.’

  A slight, fair-skinned boy, crew-cut, a ring in one earlobe. Observing the gleaming lobe in the sun-slant, Libby despaired. You ran the egg and spoon race, ran it for safety not for speed, loping on your long legs, plaits bouncing on your shoulder blades, balancing the egg carefully: and though you came in last and all the other lasses had vanished, vanished long ago (because you excelled in caution and stamina, longevity was in your maternal genes, frugality and a spartan diet in your traditions, a brainy, resourceful, bookish girl) – despite all this, you had the tape in sight. And now just within reach, you dropped your egg.

  ‘What was that, Mrs Vaughan, lovely?’ The earring bent to her mouth.

  ‘Humpty.’

  ‘Don’t you worry now, be here any minute.’

  He treated her like a child. Thought she’d gone off her rocker, when in point off fact she had never known such luminous clarity. For (it burst upon her now, with Jason’s hand cradling both hers) she never should have had a child. Even the one. Too bony, too hawkish, cerebral, opinionated. She had done wrong by Daniel from the first. Reading Sophocles – Sophocles! – while she fed her baby in the night. Not to be born is best. Oh yes, a very nice lullaby when you are hesitantly sucking your rubber teat, a lovely welcome to this world. Closing her ears when he cried. Banishing him to the Siberia of school at the earliest opportunity.

  Life means life. When the judge imposed his sentence, he stipulated, in this woman’s case, life must mean life.

  She was raised on the stretcher by men in yellow coats, wheeled out into the mouth of the morning. Her own lips gaped apart and she lapsed asleep.

  The intuition reared that Danny had died: that he had lain prone on a cold floor with people kicking him, coiled foetally to hug his head. She’d sent him into this zone of violence, driven him out. For every time he had to go away, Danny had wrung his hands at the station, at which she betrayed him, saying, You’ll be all right, Daniel. Soon as you get there. And he had begged, every time, But. She spoke over his but. They both did. She and Huw, who’d crammed Dan’s blazer pockets with sweets till they bulged, not meeting those brimming eyes. She had driven him off, out, away, go, shoo. The train pulled in with roars, hisses, shocks of smoke and the stink of sulphur. Her fingertips poked into the boy’s tender back as he mounted the steep steps. Up he must go, up; stand tall, like the other boys. She waited, desperate for the whistle to blow. And he said But Mam please. Now he had fallen. Under the train? She wanted to ask the man in the yellow coat but a plastic beak over her mouth and nose, with oxygen flowing through it, impeded speech. No, she grasped the recognition, the reassurance, as it flashed through her brain, it was not Danny who had fallen, thank God, but herself who had been lying on the kitchen floor with the cold kicking up into her slack belly, her pouched cheek.

  ‘Come to see your mam? We were becoming quite concerned, Mr Vaughan, we couldn’t get hold of you. She’ll be so relieved to see you, thinks you’ve had an accident. Ah, a lovely lady, your mam. Don’t worry, she’s doing just great.’

  His shoulders sagged. His eloquent eyebrows drooped.

  Yes, Elizabeth seemed to hear her son say. I sometimes think she’s immortal.

  ‘Well, of course, she took a nasty fall. But she came through the operation lovely.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Be a relief to you, I know. Mrs Vaughan, here’s your son to see his mam. Doesn’t say much at present, there’s always an element of trauma.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Danny. You needn’t have come, I’m quite all right, I didn’t want you to fall, you know that. But I should have kept you safe. You should have had an alarm, one of those gadgets with a bleep, it’s connected to a carer, you didn’t even have a phone, did you, and if you had, how could you have reached, darling, being such a little boy for your age? Actually of course we didn’t have a phone either in those days, and if we had, would I have answered? They say my hearing’s acute, but is it? I sometimes think I’m congenitally stone-deaf. I was preoccupied, it was my books, you see, but what excuse is that? I don’t ask your forgiveness, no, for letting you fall under the train, it was sheer negligence, I can see that now, and you never got over it, never, I can see that too just from the way your shoulders hunch and you duck your head to one side as if someone were going to cuff you. You should have had home helps, you should have had more than just someone popping in to check up on you and breezing out and then I’m convinced you would not have fallen.’

  She spoke her mind with her usual crackling asperity. Daniel was leaning forward and appeared to be listening intently. His breath came fast and shallow as his hand crept toward hers across the starched linen.

  But Mam, he said, and couldn’t go on.

  THE ENEMY

  Tessa Hadley

  When Keith had finished the second bottle of wine he began to yawn, the conversation faltered companionably as it can between old friends, and then he took himself off to bed in Caro’s spare room, where she knew he fell asleep at once between her clean white sheets because she heard him snort or snuffle once or twice as she was carrying dishes past the door. (She experienced a moment’s disrespectful relish, at the thought of his rather ravaged fifty-five-year-old and oh-so-male head against her broderie anglaise pillowcases.) Caro herself felt awake, wide awake, the kind of awakeness that seizes you in the early hours and brings such ultimate penetration and clarity that you cannot imagine you will ever sleep again. She cleared the table in the living room where they had eaten together, stacked the dishes in the dishwasher ready to turn on in the morning, washed up a few delicate bowls and glasses she didn’t trust in the machine, tidied the kitchen. In her bare feet she prowled round the flat, not able to make up her mind to undress and go to bed. Tomorrow was Sunday, so at least she didn’t have to get up for work.

  What was it about Keith, after all this time, that could still make her restless like this; could make her feel this need to be vigilant while he snored? When they sat eating and drinking together she hadn’t felt it; she had felt fond of him, and that his old power to stir and upset her was diminished. He was nicer than he used to be, no doubt about that, and more thoughtful. They had talked a lot about his children; the ones he had had with Penny, Caro’s sister, who were in their twenties now, and then the younger ones he had with his second wife, Lynne. She had been amused that he – who had once been going to ‘smash capitalism’ – took a serious and knowledgeable interest in the wine he had brought with him (he had come to her straight from France; he and Lynne seemed to spend most of the year at their farmhouse in the Dordogne).

  None the
less, the thought came involuntarily into her head as she prowled, that tonight she had her enemy sleeping under her roof. Of all things: as if instead of a respectable middle-aged PA living in suburban Cardiff she was an Anglo-Saxon thane, sharpening her sword and thinking of blood. Just as the thane might have, she felt divided between an anxious hostility towards her guest and an absolute requirement to protect him and watch over his head.

  In May 1968 Caro had turned up for a meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation at her university wearing a new trouser suit: green corduroy bell-bottoms with a flower-patterned jacket lining and Sergeant Pepper-style military buttons. The meeting was to organise participation in a Revolutionary Festival in London the following month, to generate support for the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation. The festival was supposed to make its appeal to a broader section of the people than more militant demonstrations, although it was already provoking all kinds of ideological dissent: the Trotskyists thought the whole project was ‘reformist’, and the Communist Party were nervous at the use of the word ‘revolutionary’. The Young Communists were going to appear riding a fleet of white bicycles which they had collected and were donating to the Vietnamese.

  Caro had bought the trouser suit because her godmother (whom she had adored as a little girl but had stopped visiting recently because of her views on trade unions and immigration) had sent her twenty-one pounds for her twenty-first birthday. She could have put it aside to help eke out the end of her grant, but instead on impulse she had gone shopping and spent it in a trendy boutique that she had never dared to go inside before. It was months since she had had any new clothes; and she had never possessed anything quite so joyous, so up-to-the minute and striking, as this trouser suit. She knew that it expressed perfectly on the outside the person she wanted to be within. With her long hair and tall lean figure it made her look sexy, defiant, capable (in skirts she often looked gawky and mannish).

  The meeting was in a basement room in the History Department as usual. As usual, it was mostly men, though there were three or four girls, bright history and politics students, friends of Caro’s, who came regularly. (The girls really did get asked to make the tea: and really did make it.) They sat at desks arranged in a square under a bleak electric bulb with an institutional glass shade, surrounded by maps on the walls that were of course nothing to do with them – Europe after the Congress of Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 – but none the less gave the place an air they all rather enjoyed of being a command centre in some essential world-changing operation. By the time Caro arrived the usual thick fug of cigarette smoke was already building up (she smoked, too, in those days). She was greeted, because of the trouser suit, with a couple of wolf whistles, and everyone looked up. It was complicated to remember truthfully now just how one had felt about that whistling. A decade later it became obligatory for women to be indignant at it and find it degrading; at the time, however, she would probably have felt without it that her trouser suit had failed of its effect. She could still recall how the whistle seemed to slice thrillingly through your clothes; and how you met it without making eye contact but with a little warm curl of an acknowledging smile, a gleam of response.

  Two men had come from Agit Prop, to talk to the meeting about the festival (Agit Prop was a loose association of activists and artists named after Trotsky’s propaganda train and dedicated to promoting revolutionary messages through aesthetic means). That was how Caro met Keith Reid for the first time: when she arrived he had already taken his place in a chair at the centre of things, commanding the whole room. Keith was a very attractive man – it was the first thing you needed to know about him, to get any idea of who he was, then. Not handsome, exactly, but whatever it is that in men is better than handsome: off-centre quirky features held together by a fierce fluid energy, fragile hooked nose, hollow cheeks, a lean, loose, strong body, a shoulder-length mess of slightly greasy dark curls. He had a rich Welsh accent: it was a Valleys accent, in fact – he was from Cwmbach near Aberdare – but in those days Caro had never been to Wales and couldn’t tell one accent from another. At a time when left politics was saturated in the romance of the workers, his accent was in itself enough to melt most of the women (and the men).

  He looked at Caro in her trouser suit.

  ‘Don’t you find,’ he said, ‘that dressing up like that puts off the working classes?’

  She thought about this now with stupefaction. Had she really once inhabited a world where such absurdities were a real currency? She should have laughed in his face. She should have turned round and walked out of the meeting and never gone back.

  ‘No,’ she said, calmly taking a place directly in Keith’s line of sight, so that he could get his eyeful of the offending item. ‘I find it gives them something good to look at.’

  Of course she wasn’t really calm. She was raging, and humiliated, and struggling with a muddled and not-yet-confident sense of something fundamentally flawed and unfair to do with men and women in what he had said and all that lay behind it: everything that was going to overflow into the flood of feminism in the next couple of decades. And no doubt at the same time she was scalding with shame at her bourgeois depraved frivolity in the face of decent, suffering, working-class sobriety, just as Keith meant her to be. And she was thinking how she would make him pay for that.

  They had such energy, then, for all the battles.

  After the meeting the visitors from Agit Prop had needed a floor to stay on and Caro took them back to the big, disintegrating old mock-Tudor house, its garden overgrown as a jungle, that she shared with a motley collection of students and friends and politicos. (Later she had had trouble with that house; it was rented in her name, and some of the people using it refused to pay their share. She had to hassle them for it, and came home once to find ‘Rackman bitch’ scrawled in red paint on her bedroom wall.) They sat up until late smoking pot and sparring; Caro and Keith arguing not about the trouser suit, which wasn’t mentioned again, but about the dockers’ support for Enoch Powell and its implications for the alliance between left alternative politics and the working-class movement. Caro had been on the anti-racist march to Transport House: Keith thought she was overstating the problem in a way that was typical of bourgeois squeamishness in the face of the realities of working-class culture.

  The way Keith dominated a room and laid down the law and didn’t seriously countenance anybody else’s opinions should have made him drearily dogmatic; but his ironic delivery in that Welsh accent of his made it seem as though there was something teasing even in his most exaggerated assertions. Everyone was willing to listen to him because he was older and his pedigree was impeccable: a miner’s son, kicked out of Hornsey Art College for his political activities, he had been working on building sites ever since. In any case, that sheer imperturbable male certainty was intriguing to women in those days. They felt in the face of it a complex mix of thrilled abjection with a desire to batter at it with their fists; also, probably strongest, they believed that given the chance they would be able to find out through their feminine sexuality the weaknesses and vulnerable places behind the imperturbable male front. (This last intuition was all too often accurate.)

  Eventually Caro found sleeping bags for everybody and they distributed themselves around mattresses and sofas and floors in the high-ceilinged damp-smelling rooms. And then at some point in the night Keith must have got up again and wandered about until he found not Caro, who had half expected him, but her sister Penny, who happened to be staying with her for a few days. Penny was a year older than Caro but didn’t look it: most people took her to be the younger sister. She was smaller, softer-seeming, prettier. Caro found them in the morning twined round each other in their zipped-together sleeping bags. All she could make out at first was the mess of Keith’s dark curls and his naked young shoulders, tanned and muscular from the work he did; and then she saw that down inside the bag Penny’s head with its swirl of auburn hair like a fox’s b
rush was wrapped in his brown arms against his chest.

  She remembered that she had felt a stinging shock. Not heartbreak or serious sorrow: she hadn’t had time to do anything like fall in love with Keith, and, anyway, love didn’t seem to be quite what it was that could have happened, if things had gone differently between them. It was more as if she felt that, if you put the two of them alongside Keith Reid, it was in some obvious way she and not Penny who was his match, his mate. Penny all through the loud debate of the night before had sat quietly while Caro met him, point for point, and smoked joint for joint with him. Also, there was unfinished business between her and him: some contest he had begun and had now abruptly – it made him seem almost cowardly – broken off. Even as Caro recoiled, just for that first moment, in the shock of finding them, she knew she was learning from it something essential she needed to know for her survival, something about the way that men chose women.

  Penny had given up after one year at art college and was living at home again with their parents in Banbury. She was thinking about going to do teacher training. Instead, she embarked on the relationship with Keith: it did almost seem, in retrospect, like a career choice. That whole long middle section of Penny’s life, twenty years, was taken up in the struggle with him: pursued by him; dedicating herself to him; counselling him through his creative agonies when he was writing; bearing his children; supporting his infidelities, his drinking, his disappearances, his contempts; making every effort to tame him, to turn him into a decent, acceptable partner and father. It seemed an irony that, when Penny had finally finished with him once and for all, he slipped without a protest into cosy domesticity with his second wife, as if there had never been any problem. ‘I was just the warm-up act,’ Penny joked about it now. ‘Softening him up ready for the show with her.’