A Clubbable Woman

by Reginald Hill

  ‘I was just opening my gates,’ he added, climbing into the car.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Fernie graciously. ‘I’ve just been down the match. Were you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Connon. ‘I mean, no. I was at the rugger match.’

  ‘Oh, that. I meant the football. We won, 3-1. How did your lot come on?’

  ‘Oh, we did all right.’

  ‘Good. Rugby, eh? Here, you used to do a bit of that, didn’t you? My wife saw the pictures.’

  ‘Yes, I did once.’

  He turned the key in the ignition and felt the turn in his skull so that the pain in his head shook with the roar of the engine, then settled down as quickly.

  ‘You OK?’ asked Fernie.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Well, good night then.’

  ‘Good night.’

  He swung the car over the road and into the drive, slamming his foot hard on the brake as the branches of an overgrown laburnum slapped against his wing. He was used to this noise, but tonight it took him completely by surprise. He had stalled the engine and this time it took two or three turns of the starter to get it going again.

  At last he rolled gently into the garage. He shut the main doors from the inside and went through the side door which led into the kitchen.

  In the sink, dirty, were a cup and saucer, plate and cutlery. From the lounge came music and voices. He listened carefully and satisfied himself that the television was the source of everything. Then he took off his coat and hung it in the cloakroom. He looked at himself in the mirror above the hand basin for a moment and automatically adjusted his tie and ran his comb through the thinning hair. Then, recognizing a desire to delay, he grinned at his reflection and shrugged his shoulders, grimaced self-consciously at the theatricality of the gesture and moved back into the entrance hall.

  The lounge door was ajar. The only light within was the flickering brightness of the television picture. A man was singing, while in the background a lot of short-skirted dancers sprang about in carefully choreographed abandon. His wife was sprawled out in the high-backed wing chair he thought of as his own. All he could see of her were her legs and an arm trailed casually down to the floor where an ashtray stood with a half-smoked cigarette burning on its edge. The metal dish was piled full of butt ends, he noticed. The burning cigarette had started another couple of stumps smoking, and Connon wrinkled his nose at the smell.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ still hesitating at the door.

  The music and dancing seemed to be approaching a climax. The trailing hand moved slightly; a gesture of acknowledgment; a request for silence, a dismissal.

  Connon let his attention be held for a moment by a close-up of a contorted face, male, mixing to a close-up of a shuddering bosom, female. The cigarette smell seemed to catch his throat.

  ‘I’ll just get a cup of tea, then,’ he said and turned, closing the door behind him.

  Back in the kitchen he found a slice of cooked ham, evidently his share of the meal whose debris he had noticed in the sink. He slapped it on a plate and lit the gas under the kettle. Even as he did so, he felt his head begin to turn again and this time his stomach turned with it. He pressed his handkerchief to his mouth and moved shakily upstairs. Distantly the thought passed through his mind that he was well conditioned. Being sick in the downstairs toilet might disturb Mary. Now he was on the landing and his knees buckled and he gagged almost drily. Wiping his mouth, he pulled himself up, one hand on the handle of his bedroom door.

  The next time he fell, he fell on to the bed and the wheels in his head went spinning on into darkness.

  ‘Do we have to have that tripe on? ‘asked Dave Fernie.

  ‘Please yourself,’ said his wife. ‘You usually like it. All those girls. You must be getting old.’

  ‘Too old for that.’

  Alice Fernie glanced across at her husband with a smile, half ironical, half something else.

  ‘Old enough for what, then?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to switch it off?’

  ‘I didn’t switch it on.’

  ‘No. I did. So you could see your precious football results after you rushed back from your precious match. And when you didn’t come, I even marked them down for you. Don’t you want to see?’

  Fernie reached across and took the paper from the arm of his wife’s chair.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  The singer was off again, alone this time; a ballad; his voice vibrant with sincerity.

  ‘For God’s sake, switch that bloody thing off, will you!’

  Angrily she rose and pulled the plug out of its socket.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you these days. I’m getting pretty near the end of my tether with you. Other women wouldn’t put up with what I do.’

  Fernie ignored her and peered down at the newspaper, but she sensed he wasn’t really seeing it. She stood in the middle of the room and glowered down at him. He was in his early thirties, the same age as herself, but there was a puffiness about his face and a sagging at the belly which made him look older. Normally the contrast to her own advantage pleased her. Now she screwed up her face in distaste. Then, quickly as it came, her anger drained from her and she sat down again.

  ‘Are you ready for your tea yet?’

  ‘No, love. I told you I wasn’t hungry.’

  ‘Is there anything bothering you, Dave? Are you feeling all right?’

  She steeled herself for the irritability her concern for his health always seemed to cause, but unnecessarily.

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘You were late tonight.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I got held up. It was a good gate. I met his lordship on my way up the road.’

  He jerked his head towards the window which faced the street. Alice affected not to understand.

  ‘Who’s that you mean?’

  ‘You know who. Connon. Bloody twat.’

  ‘Why? What’s he ever done to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he grunted. ‘I just don’t take to him, that’s all. Too bloody stand-offish for me.’

  ‘That’s what he was. A stand-off.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Stand-off. His position at rugby. Mary told me.’

  Fernie laughed. ‘Stand-off, eh? That’s bloody good. Wait till I tell them on the bench. That fits him.’

  ‘Anyway I think you’re wrong. When I met him he was very nice. Charming. A bit quiet perhaps but he’s just a bit shy, I think.’

  ‘If he’s shy he shouldn’t be a bloody personnel manager, should he? Anyway he’s more than that. He’s a snob.’

  Alice laughed with a slight edge of malice. ‘I’d have thought you could say that about Mary Connon. But not him.’

  Fernie shook his head dismissively. ‘Her. That’s different. She’d like to be better, but knows she isn’t. He believes he is. Bloody rugby club.’

  ‘Oh, Dave, don’t be daft. It’s not like that these days. Anybody plays rugby. Maisie Curtis’s boy next door, Stanley, he’s in the Club.’

  ‘So what? Things don’t change all that quick. What a game. Organized thuggery, then they all sing dirty songs like little lads. Yet they all tut-tut like mad if one of our lads runs on the field and someone shouts “shit” from the terraces.’

  ‘There’s no need to get excited, Dave.’

  ‘No? No, I suppose not. Here, I think I’m ready for my tea now.’

  Alice rose and went into the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll tell you something about your precious stand-offish Mr Connon, though.’ His voice came drifting after her.

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘He’d had a couple tonight. He was swaying around a bit. And I thought he was going to drive across his lawn and in through the front door.’

  Alice came back to the sitting-room door.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like him.’

  ‘Doesn’t it? Don’t tell me that you’ve only heard good of him f
rom Madam Mary?’

  ‘She doesn’t talk much about him at all.’

  ‘I don’t know why you bother with her. You’ve only got your age in common.’

  Alice took an indignant step forward.

  ‘What do you mean? I can give her ten years, and more.’

  Fernie caught her hand and pulled her down beside him on the settee.

  ‘As much as that? Mind you, she’s well preserved. And game too, I should think.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Alice, struggling to get up.

  ‘She must have caught him young then, very young. He’s only thirty-nine, you know.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He didn’t answer but went on, ‘And they’ve got that girl of theirs …’

  ‘Jenny.’

  ‘Yes, Jenny, at college. He must have been caught young. Very young. She’s a pretty little thing, now.’

  ‘Don’t you want any tea, Dave?’

  Fernie’s brawny arm held his wife in a clamp-like grip round the waist. He looked thoughtfully into her face, then pressed gently with his free hand where it rested on her leg just above the knee.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve changed my mind again.’

  Jenny Connon hadn’t quite made up her mind what to do about the hand on her knee. Adaptability was an important quality in a teacher, her education tutor had told the class that morning. How to cope with the unexpected.

  Though, as she herself had arranged that her room-mate should go out and she herself had turned the key in the door to prevent interruption, the situation was not all that unexpected.

  ‘Do you really want to be a teacher?’ she asked brightly.

  Antony (he insisted on the full name) pushed the hair back from his brow with a gesture almost girlish (but he used the hand not on her knee) and smiled.

  ‘If you mean, have I got a sense of vocation, no. If you mean, are my natural inclinations to be something else being repressed, the answer is equally no. Being at college is less distasteful than most of the alternatives, and it pleased my parents. Anyway, think of the holidays. I have a sense of vacation very strongly developed.’

  Antony Wilkes was without doubt the smoothest man in the South Warwickshire College of Education at the moment. As he was in his third year and Jenny was in her first, the opportunities for the relationship to develop were limited. As it was, Jenny had decided to feel flattered that she was the second girl he had chosen from the year’s new supply. Her college ‘mother’ in the second year had assured her (rather sadly) that Antony was most discriminating in his selection. Her room-mate had been even more positive. She had been the first of the year. This gave Jenny the advantage of being well briefed in the Wilkesian technique, but being forewarned she was discovering did not prevent her from being disarmed. Antony was one of the few people she had met who really did talk in long well-organized speeches like people in plays. Most of her acquaintance, she realized, hardly ever strung together more than a couple of dozen words at a time except when telling an anecdote, and in fact the few who did talk at length were down in the catalogue as bores and therefore to be avoided.

  But Antony talked eloquently, interestingly, without strain; with none of those changes of direction, grammatical substitutions, syntactical complexities, whose existence her linguistic lecturer assured her was the real framework of the spoken language.

  His speech, Jenny decided, was the smooth, reassuring surface of his amatory technique. Even the slight sense of staginess it conveyed worked for him, creating a faintly non-real, therefore non-dangerous, context. But beneath the surface …

  The obvious survival tactic was to stay afloat. She seized at a bit of driftwood in his last speech.

  ‘Is it important to please your parents?’

  ‘But of course. It’s important to please everyone who deserves it, even a little beyond desert if possible. Financially it’s not important. My father has a strict scale of values. He gave me the precise amount necessary to bring my grant up to the level he has worked out to be sufficient for my well-being. Less would be neglect; more would be luxury. So I never get more or less for any reason. And to use money as punishment or reward is quite out of the question.’

  ‘He sounds like a Puritan banker.’

  ‘Not at all. If you wish to combine his religion with his profession, you’d have to call him an Aston Villa butcher. Mind you, my mother slips me the odd note now and then. But, as I say, this has nothing to do with the question. The only real answer is that, despite the fact that in many ways they find me utterly incomprehensible, they have always felt inclined by nature to please me; similarly I them.’

  ‘You mean you love them?’ asked Jenny, half-consciously trying to embarrass him.

  ‘Yes, of course. Had I not made that clear? I’m sorry. And you, do you love your parents?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. My father, I like him a lot and we mean a lot to each other. It’s a matter of talking and understanding, but my mother’s different. Irritating in so many things. I want to scream at her sometimes.’

  ‘But you never do?’

  Jenny grinned. She had tried to stop grinning. She thought it made her face fall apart in the middle, and she still had to count her teeth to assure herself she had not got twice as many as other people. But she kept on forgetting.

  Antony Wilkes was glad she forgot.

  ‘Oh, sometimes. I give a quick forty-second-psychoanalysis. Rather nasty stuff it can be. She’s a bit of a snob; uses me to get at Dad, whom she resents in some odd way. She’s a few years older than he is, though I only use that as a last resort. I don’t know why, I suppose I just know that for her age is the ultimate insult, stuck a long way after vanity and dishonesty! But sometimes I feel I’m a lot more like her than Dad, than I’m like Dad I mean, though I like him more.’

  Ruefully she compared her own performance as a speech-maker with Antony’s. Still, it wasn’t all that bad. And her hesitancies arose from uncertainties of emotion. Perhaps it would have flowed more smoothly if she hadn’t been so aware of the tensions, the fight for survival at home.

  Antony’s hand patted her knee sympathetically. She realized that her attempt to stop on the surface had somehow gone wrong. She had entered into a conversational intimacy with him without even noticing it. She would have to keep very much on the alert now. His other hand was pressing her shoulders round. She turned to him and he kissed her. She’d have to do something about his other hand. But not yet. Mini-skirts and tights, she thought dreamily. Action and reaction. The invitation to attack might be more compelling than ever before, but the defences were stronger. She grinned again, which produced a very invigorating kind of kiss.

  She could postpone her decision for a while yet.

  ‘Christ, Marcus, where the hell have you been? You just said half-an-hour. It’s been more like an hour and a half.’

  Marcus Felstead manoeuvred his bulk under the flap into the bar.

  ‘Sorry, Ted, old son. Got held up a bit. Look, have a pint on me and push off now. I’ll spell you when you’ve got a Saturday.’

  ‘OK. And I’ll have that pint. I’ve been so bloody busy that not a drop’s passed my lips since you left.’

  ‘It’ll do you good. Give you an edge when they start fighting for the spare.’

  ‘Some hope. There won’t be much of that around now. See you, Marcus, Sid.’

  Sid Hope, the club treasurer, looked askance at Marcus.

  ‘Nice of you to come back and give us a hand.’

  ‘Come off it, Sid. I did get Ted to stand in.’

  ‘Ted! Have you seen him at the till? He’s got some peculiar decimal system of his own. Where have you been to anyway? On the prowl?’

  ‘Nowhere important. Just out.’

  A peal of uninhibited female laughter cut through the noise and fume of the bar. Marcus turned. Sitting in the furthermost corner surrounded by half a dozen men was the woman he expected to see after hearing that laugh. Dress
ed in a low-cut cocktail dress whose demure whiteness set off the gleaming black of her hair and the shining silver of her tights, she was looking up and smiling at the young man who bent over her, obviously telling a story.

  The treasurer followed Marcus’s gaze and shook his head.

  ‘Trouble,’ he said laconically.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what Arthur is. He’s been hopping around like a cat on hot bricks all evening waiting for his precious wife to turn up. Finally off he goes about half an hour ago to fetch her. Decides she must have forgotten. Forgotten! Well, he’s hardly out of the place before she comes sailing in like the figurehead on the good ship Venus. And of course within two minutes of coming into the most crowded room in the county with a queue six deep at the bar, she’s sitting in the corner surrounded by drinks. Just wait till Arthur gets back.’

  Sid drew a couple of pints for a complaining customer, then looked over at Gwen Evans again.

  ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘what a pair of bristols, Jesus! There hasn’t been anything like that in here since Nancy Jennings went off with that traveller. And Mary James - Connon, I mean - was the only thing I’ve ever known who could have beaten it.’

  ‘Connie’s wife?’

  ‘Yes. She doesn’t get in here much now, does she? Nor does Connie for that matter. But I can remember the days. Jesus! Connie was married when you came to live here, wasn’t he, Marcus?’

  ‘Yes. Just.’

  ‘It must have been a full-time business with that one. No wonder he lost his edge after that. God, he once looked a cert for a cap. First we’d have ever had. Never been a sniff since. All for love.’

  Marcus poured himself a scotch.

  ‘He did crack his ankle.’

  ‘Of course he did. I’m not really suggesting, mind you, that kid of theirs came out pretty smartly. Like Connie’s pass, they said. And the responsibility can’t have helped.

  But they seemed to make out all right. Didn’t see all that much of Mary after that. But it was before. Like her over there. And Nancy Jennings. Trouble.’