Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Thomas was opening his own front door to her knock, irritated. Maria would never wait for him to come downstairs, although he told her to do so and he knew she liked to be visited on any other day. On the Sunday mornings when he obliged with his presence as escort, she always came upstairs to him, ludicrously early for mass in the cathedral in case he forgot or left the whole expedition too late. If he was late, she’d probably chew her carpets, such as they are, Thomas thought wryly.

  ‘Ah! Yes, I can see you’re ready.’

  And so she was. A brown dress merging from beneath a mud-coloured coat, twenty-year-old boots with thick soles elevating her stumpy feet above the pavements she trod with such unease. She wore a hat, of course: a crumpled beret green with age, because she was of the generation which knew you could not go to church without a hat, but even with that decorum she looked appalling. They went to Westminster Cathedral for morning mass, left right, left right, Thomas keeping a strict momentum with his umbrella, she panting to keep up. Halfway there, he stopped suddenly.

  ‘Would you like me to go and fetch the car?’

  She shook her head dumbly, pouted.

  ‘Come on, you can speak, you know.’ Another shaking of her head: so far she had not said a word. He was not really aiming to encourage her. Out of a kind of devotion, she had aped his own enforced silences when he had been ill and speechless himself and, now that he was not, she seemed disinclined to recover any facility for talking, found she did better without it. Perhaps it was mere laziness, perhaps a form of blackmail supposed to make him feel bad, perhaps her desire not to irritate, but although this dull and persistent silence of hers often provoked the sort of rage which made him want to strike her, poor helpless thing, he did not want her cured of it. Since the last time he had been hysterically, woundingly angry with her, she had spoken scarcely a word. That suited him and suited his current plans even better

  ‘Behave,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll leave you in the square.’ The square outside the cathedral was full of pigeons, fluttering in scorn for the faithful. There were also vagrants, men who begged with little less scruple than the birds. Maria nodded, not deterred. They walked into the main door out of the light and into the hushed, half dark, both of them in silence. She scurried ahead and he restrained her by the arm. ‘Shhh,’ he said, unnecessarily, meaning, Don’t move so fast, stumbling himself in the sudden gloom, the tip of his heavy umbrella striking against the wooden seats as he moved. Finally they sat, the umbrella between them. Thomas refused to move further into the row: already he felt trapped, supposed in a flash of angry and defensive guilt that the pleasure this gave his companion might have reconciled a different, more dutiful man to the pain it gave himself. Maria glared round at him, first angrily and then in a mute appeal when he did not bend his head. ‘I will not kneel,’ he hissed at her, forgetting his own exhortations to silence. ‘Don’t stare like that!’ She buried her face in the palms of her hands, but not before he had noticed the onset of tears.

  ‘Let us confess to almighty God …’ intoned the far distant priest, the voice reverberating back through the sonorous loudspeakers. I will not ask for bloody absolution, you old bastard, Thomas told himself as the incense wafted past and his nose wrinkled in disgust at the fumes Maria snuffed with the same enthusiasm she had when she doused herself with holy water at the cathedral doors as another woman might smother herself with cologne in her bathroom. Holy water was Maria’s perfume: at the stoup, she reminded him of an ugly duckling in a bird bath.

  ‘I have sinned, Oh Father, I have sinned …’

  Oh, shut your mouth, thought Thomas. He hated the mosaics of the place, the iconlike walls, with their dramatic but cold depictions of the stations of the cross which, with the cold marble, made the interior both rich and austere. Maria did not like these: she preferred more blood in her illustrations, wanted Veronica who wiped the face of Jesus to come away with a kerchief loaded with gore. I am not sorry for what I do and I shall never confess my sins, Thomas promised between gritted teeth. Next to him, her eyes shining artlessly, her pathetic face illuminated with holy joy and the ardent simplicity of all her muddled beliefs, Maria suddenly burst into song with the fervent sound of an amorous frog.

  ‘Sweet heart of Jesus! We-ee implore,

  Make us love thee! More and more …’

  So she would sing, even if she would not speak. Only no one else was singing: the back of the priest shivered in distaste as he failed to turn from the blessing of his bread and wine. Ho, ho, thought Thomas: this was your bit, wasn’t it, not hers. He sat back and folded his arms. Maria went on singing.

  ‘Sweet heart of Jesus, make us know and love thee …’

  Children from the row in front turned and stared, their adults, more circumspect, facing straight ahead. The round eyes of the children became creased into helpless giggles, stifled into handkerchiefs or sleeves, as one pulled the other, to look again, giggle again, until the snorting was almost as loud as her voice. Thomas sat still, did not join in the chorus of ‘shhh, shhh’, which came among tut-tutting from the row behind. He did not quite like to feel Maria being so thoroughly despised, which was his own, cruel, prerogative, but part of him wanted to applaud her for being such an embarrassment in any house of God. Look, God, look what you started. Maria persisted through one whole verse and drew breath before starting another. Two ushers were toiling towards her down the aisle, looking like a pair of uncomfortable bouncers.

  ‘Sweet heart …’

  Suddenly she noticed, after the first phrase of the verse she was about to repeat. Registered the heaving shoulders of the sniggering children, in particular the one looking towards her with a chubby hand held over his eyes, the first finger and second parted to reveal one vibrant, transfixed eye. The song died in her throat. Thomas stiffened, unfolded his arms, ready for movement. Too late. She had grabbed the umbrella, seized it halfway down the black material and lunged at the boy. The action was more than a gesture: she thrust the umbrella in the direction of his smile, but the eyes rounded into an oh! and he turned into the safety of his stiff-necked, well-upholstered mother, catching the vicious poke in his arm and squealing with pain. Thomas embarked on a fit of coughing, loudly artificial. The mother turned: he glared at her, his hand now holding the umbrella firmly, tussling for possession. They were both strong, he and his sister: she did not relinquish it easily. The ushers hovered. Thomas linked his left arm through Maria’s, the umbrella bracing both their elbows like a splint on a fracture, his other arm reaching across her in mock affection. Thank God they had already got past the part when they were all supposed to shake hands, something they both refused to do as a matter of course. The protective glare of the mother intensified: the boy rubbed his arm and began to make small gulping noises of distress. Thomas coughed louder, until at last, in a timely cue, the distant priest signalled the congregation to sing, all of them, with no unseemly solos. There was an audible shuddering of relief as they rose and cleared their lungs.

  We will dwell no longer on this amorphous substance of a God today, thought Thomas, catching the confusion and pain on Maria’s face as she refused to sing on cue. Damn your God, and all who sail in him. He tightened his hold until his arm and the umbrella were braced like a painful tourniquet. Maria did not seem to mind, bowed to necessity, looked at him with affection and a great big, open smile. Perhaps that was all she wanted, to stand there arm in arm, that little bit of contact, a pauper’s mite of affection.

  Elisabeth saw people spill out of a Seventh Day Adventists church, full of colour and hats and bonhomie, nicely exhausted by singing. The bus home was a meandering hour through Sunday streets and the public life of the East End, littered markets and all their detritus spied from the top deck of the bus. All this rubbish abandoned, all these unprivate lives, herself outside them, not contemptuous, never that, merely aloof. For the third time, she pulled out the cream envelope Enid had delivered. The address was embossed, the paper sti
ff and smooth. Someone needs me: someone’s pictures might want me, and it was pointless to have any other reason for living. Closing her eyes, Elisabeth wondered what it was like to feel secure. Freed from the cocoon of warm transport, walking the last half mile home, she anticipated the footsteps, but as long as her hand curled round the pompous promises of the envelope in her pocket, she heard nothing, saw nothing but a prospect of warmth and calm, light and colour, an image of rooms as yet without shape.

  When she got inside, she found herself, like an automaton, putting a change of clothes into a bag, including a working smock without quite knowing why. Afterwards, when she went out again, she slammed the front door. It was unlike her to be noisy, but the reverberations had a satisfyingly and oddly final sound.

  The slamming of the door haunted Enid, who heard it in her own silence, resisting the urge to go out and complain. Hours later, she imagined the same sound when she went out into the garden.

  ‘My, aren’t we excited? Bedtime, isn’t it, sweetie? Into little cat flappie.’ Enid spoke in the honeyed, babyish tones she considered appropriate for cats as well as human beings, remembering to modulate her tones even when there were no witnesses, even at the end of her dreaded Sundays, always speaking in expectation of being over-heard. Enid never let up: she never even told herself what she thought.

  ‘What’s this then, kitten? Is her downstairs being ever so tidy? Shut you out, has she? Rubbish doesn’t go out till Tuesday. Why did she put all hers out here in the garden today? Doesn’t she know? Pity. She’s so popular, but then, she’s no one really, no one at all, pussy, no one. Sad, I think, don’t you? Putting her rubbish out. I wonder … I wonder. Gone away, has she? Her car’s gone. I know ‘cos I went to see. Some of us don’t have the chance to go away. Or a car. Even a wrecked car. I did try to tell her.’ Enid giggled. Surreptitiously she moved closer to the cat, disliking but wanting the comfort of response, anything for touch. Free of pretence, the cat moved away from her, leapt nimbly on to a wall, sat there licking and smiling in that half light which was slanted and obscured by the taller houses behind. It was vibrant in its black and white, a great, wide face with luminous eyes, destined for automatic beauty in movement or repose. Caught in the walled garden, owned communally and therefore rarely used at all, the cat on an autumn evening was the only thing of grace among a scrub of newly bared trees and an unmown lawn covered in leaves. For Enid, the cat who loved Elisabeth was a vivid reminder of Elisabeth’s self-sufficiency, the colours and the glamour and the invisible sustenance, all her effortless living which took no account of the rest of the world labouring away. Another boyfriend in at her pussy last night, one of a string, but no one knocked for Enid. Nothing but rudeness this morning for Enid, plus a closed door on the avid curiosity which was now running riot.

  ‘Poor pussy,’ she said in a half-hearted attempt to persuade the animal down off the wall so that it would look less omnipotent in movement. ‘Poor puss. Who’s a little skunk, then?’ Never mind the whispering of insults: Enid’s voice broke along with her control, suddenly bereft of cajoling syllables. The sky had rained, stopped, drizzled again, given Sunday a second chance and then condemned it with rain in earnest as Enid was left shouting for nothing but her furious responsibility for a neighbour’s pet, while the cat gazed down, nonchalantly, towards the rubbish mysteriously cleared from Elisabeth’s flat. Then further down towards Elisabeth’s windows, so often spilling an eerie, neon light into the garden, like some pornographic peep show, but now dark, uncharacteristically and definitely closed.

  The lanky youth from the garage patronized by Elisabeth had gone home at five o’clock, every bone in his body stiff with fatigue from going time and time again out to the raw cold from the fuggy warmth of the kiosk on dad’s bloody forecourt. His mum and dad were back from their day out and all he understood was that, yet again, numbing boredom and family responsibility had combined to ruin his day. His forehead shone white against the red of his nose and the purplish marks of his acne. The only enjoyable moment of the day had been making that woman leaving the red car look so stupid. A cosy car, he thought: a bit bashed but the heater still worked and no one would be able to see through that crazed, back windscreen. The least he was owed for his pains was the use of dad’s motor for the evening, so he could go and see Janet Potter, like him seventeen, who lived five miles away. But dad was only going to listen on a day when pigs had wings. Meanness radiated through his house from the chilly upstairs to the yard full of motor spares. After a row which reached a crescendo of shouting and three blows, Janet Potter’s boyfriend ran back to the garage and the car he had not mentioned to his father. He retched his ill-digested food, spitting the aftertaste through the window. Still cold and angry, he drove past his own home and, in passing, waved his fist in the air.

  ‘Aw, come on, Janet. C’mon; feel it again. No harm in it, is there?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. That’s not what I heard.’

  ‘C’mon. You can feel mine if I can feel –’

  ‘Thank you very much. Now why would I want to do that? This isn’t half a funny car,’ she said by way of postponement, sitting in the front passenger seat with her arms across her unbuttoned blouse, the hands which had just pulled down her skirt now tucked under her armpits, which were sweating slightly. ‘It smells, this car,’ she said, embarrassed by the other smell she would withdraw on her fingers.

  ‘Who says?’ he answered, distracted for a moment and suddenly defensive about this vehicle he had claimed as his own, which could go like a bomb. ‘Who’s saying it smells?’

  ‘It smells,’ she said, wrinkling her nose for effect. ‘Of medicine and stuff. Ointment. Or that calamine lotion you put on mozzie bites. Germolene, or something. Pooh.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I can’t smell nothing.’

  ‘Have you been putting stuff on your spots?’ She giggled in the darkness, her hands rebuttoning the blouse with unsteady determination. ‘I’d best be going home. And you’d better be taking me. Dad’ll kill me if he knew what you were wanting.’

  He was suddenly furious at her defection, her insistence that this fumbling was something only he wanted; nothing to do with her but only tolerated until she got away from his dirty little desires and the spots she had pretended to ignore, as if she had none herself. He turned on the engine, shoved the car into reverse so suddenly the movement pushed her forward in the seat, her face satisfyingly alarmed. When they reached her house, both of them still speechless, he sat staring ahead, offering nothing as she scrambled out, and he took off again with the same speed and a spurt of mud, denying her the chance to have the last word or even slam the door. He was trying to hold back tears of rage and frustration, the accumulation of a cold day’s emotion, swearing at her out loud as he accelerated on to the open road towards home. Faster and faster, this car was old but could go like a bomb, was a bitch, what a bitch, the needle creeping towards seventy and he felt like flying. Then a bend he had forgotten, the red car slewing out of control, bumping off the tarmacadam, everything in focus and the speed slow before the windscreen shattered on a branch. When he came to, he was colder than ice; colder than his hands on the forecourt in December and all the rage had turned to whimpering. He was slumped across the passenger seat, with his head angled down to the floor, blood dripping slowly and copiously from a cut to his nose and one to his scalp. The whole of him was spinning from no point as he sat upright; then he thought he was blind as the blood flowed into one eye. Miraculously the headlights still worked; his first orientation to where he was. They were angled, full beam into the woods less than a mile from home, the car drunkenly resting in the undergrowth fifty yards from the road. Once he knew where he was and knew he was alive, panic made him function, the fear of disgrace far more terrible than blood. Listen: no one knows about this car. I told her a week, but didn’t tell dad: if only she never came back for her bloody car. Stumbling home, hugging the side of the road, he was inventing his story of a fight, a mugging, a
falling down, a swinging into a lamp post, anything to forestall that evil hour of accounting.

  If only she never comes back.

  ‘Why don’t you stay? Don’t think me presumptuous, please. I’m hardly a danger. Nor our Butler. He is, I think, my greatest concession to luxury.’

  The dog put a bony head on his knees. If she ever owned a dog, it would be one like that: big, ugly, flawed, old and affectionate. Elisabeth laughed, cradling the brandy glass in her hand, watching the colours dance in the flames. Gas, he explained: he could not haul coal, but wasn’t it convincing? She was warm from a glass half the size of a child’s balloon but comfortably weighty, a prism for the light and a catalyst for the taste, held in the hands like a trophy, a generous measure of everything. They were high above the world, in an eyrie, settled for hours in one of the most beautiful rooms she had ever seen, part of the vastness of this strange apartment so large and long it had actually taken time to walk in here from the door. There were other rooms as splendid, bedrooms and bathrooms. Here there were two leather winged chairs, a burning fire, a rug between their feet, a pre-ordained room, uncannily similar to the canvas which by way of dim contrast sat on the easel in her chilly studio. The conviction of knowing exactly where she was had been confusing, as prevalent as the taste of brandy on her tongue, but, along with that similar feeling of knowing him, melded into a sensation of warm familiarity. She loved me for the things which I had done, said Othello of Desdemona. Elisabeth trusted, no less intensely, the man who sat opposite her for the things he owned and for the glorious light, which late in the afternoon still filled his rooms. The rain threw itself against the windows, a harmless onslaught on their comfort.