by Melvyn Bragg
‘I’ll earn money some day.’
‘That isn’t what I meant. The village. It’s so - it’s where his mother lives. In the Eden valley. It’s not like where we are, Joe. It’s different.’ It had all been different and she had felt free, relieved from Joe’s never-ending jealousy and pressures - on her, on himself, on them, on everything.
‘What does that matter?’
‘It was something different, Joe.’
‘It’ll wear off.’
The more placating her tone, the more hurt and angrier Joe grew.
‘The train now approaching Platform Four is the eleven-o-five from Glasgow Central. Calling at Penrith, Lancaster, Preston, Crewe, Watford Junction and London Euston. This is the eleven-o-five from Glasgow Central.’
‘So will you come out with me tonight?’
‘I’ve promised.’
She looked at him and looked away immediately. ‘I’m sorry, Joe.’
‘That’s all right.’ His words were tight, his movement as he stood up stiff. He forced back the feelings which threatened him. I’ll go then.’
He turned and all but marched along the platform as the heavy engine hissed and puffed towards him, slowly drawing along its retinue of coaches.
Rachel watched him until he went through the ticket barrier and then, wearily, she took off and wrapped up the gleaming bangle and put it back in the brown carrier bag. Just before he had turned away, standing there, he had looked great, she thought.
‘Can a mother say you’re making a mistake here?’
Brenda turned from the mirror and presented herself.
‘Charming! You’re utterly charming.’
‘Thank you, kind mother.’ Brenda giggled and curtsied.
Her mother took another sip of gin. Only the second of the day so a big sip was allowed. She eased herself into the fatly cushioned sofa and looked both at her daughter and at her elegant sitting room with no little satisfaction. With Brenda safely off to Edinburgh University in a few weeks and Henry now boarded at school at Sedbergh, all was well.
‘I suppose you have to get it out of your system.’
‘He’s different since he came back from Paris.’ Brendä frowned seriously. ‘Paris matured him.’
‘Did it now?’
‘He went to every gallery there was and every church. He talks about it.’
‘Does he ever? Fag?’
‘No thanks. He broadened his horizons.’
‘Brenda, darling, he’s a pub boy and he always will be a pub boy. You can take the boy out of the pub but you can’t take the pub out of the boy.’ The bell rang. ‘He’s on time. Must be keen, darling.’
‘This is the fifth time we’ve been out in just two weeks,’ Brenda said, driving a little too fast along the Roman stretch of road to Carlisle. Joe had not been prepared for her father’s car. ‘That’s if you discount Saturday two weeks ago.’
Joe had finally forced himself to go to the County Ballroom on that first Saturday night. Maybe just to be in the same city as Rachel at her ‘Tennis Club Social’: maybe she would abandon it and come to the County Ballroom. Maybe she would be waiting for him in the train. Maybe he would bump into her as a few of them walked through Church Street on the way back to Brenda’s house to have a final cup of coffee. Brenda had been very helpful. Every time they danced she had shown her concern about Rachel and listened to his few tight-lipped confessions, nursing every drop. Her father had popped his head around the door of the handsome room of which the half-dozen of them had taken possession after coming back from the dance. After a general greeting he had said,
‘And how was Paris, Joe? It was Paris, wasn’t it?’
‘It was great.’
‘You must come to a Rotary lunch and tell us all about it, Joe. I’m sure we’d be riveted by what you had to say.’
Later, as Brenda stood outside on the step, in no hurry to see him go, she said,
‘My father really respects you, Joe. He really respects you. I can tell.’
There was some comfort there. Brenda had been keen to help. Then they had met as it seemed by accident at a Former Members of the Anglican Young People’s Association Get Together; again the following Saturday at the County and twice during the week for walks. On both these walks there had been strong kissing but Joe was worried about it and Brenda sensed that a little. But the kissing, she reflected, was nevertheless strong.
They were going over 80 m.p.h. Joe took out a cigarette.
‘Light one for me?’
He did. Two in his mouth at the same time. Who had done that? Humphrey Bogart? Robert Mitchum? It felt very adult. He guided it over to her outstretched fingers. He was not too happy about her driving at this speed with one hand but he would never have said.
‘I thought we’d go to the Crown and Mitre,’ she said, ‘away from the gang.’
Joe nodded. He had been there once with Rachel on his birthday. It was much grander than the County. It had a real hotel bar beside the ballroom - in the County you had to go across the road to the pub in the interval. In the Mitre there were tables and chairs, some of them easy chairs, around the ballroom perimeter. Dancing opinion held that the Mitre’s floor was second to none. And the band was not only bigger but had broadcast twice on BBC Northern Radio. It was more expensive to get in and Joe had noticed a definite mark-up on the price of drinks. Away from the gang? Maybe just as well. The gang were so used to Rachel and himself being together. He was glad not to have to brazen it out.
‘It means we’ll be stuck with each other all night,’ said Brenda as they went into the first quickstep, ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ She giggled and Joe smiled and looked at her. Mostly he had looked away from her. For dances, she let her hair down and it rested, blondly, silkily, on her shoulders, which were almost bare, the dress designed to reveal as much flesh as possible above the breasts without risking strapless. There was a dark purple ribbon in her hair which Joe liked and a necklace which she called ‘costume jewellery’. She was good-looking, Joe thought, some would say very. Not as fine a dancer as Linda, but, he had to admit this, better than Rachel, less stiff and always happy to be close together whatever the dance. Since they were embarked on the unusual, unique adventure of dancing every dance together, they would simply stand at the side of the floor, between dances, their arms around each other’s waists, ready for the off. Brenda was never short of something to say and Joe’s hurt, which had made him much more reticent, welcomed the balm of her intelligent chatter. She was attractive, he thought, and nice, he concluded, she had changed, he thought, and once or twice when she pecked him on the cheek proprietorially, he pecked in return and hugged her closer.
That was how Rachel first saw them and her head rocked back as if she had been hit on the chin.
‘Do you think,’ Brenda asked, as they went through the motions of a foxtrot, ‘that we are the two most intelligent people in this ballroom?’
Joe did not know how to answer that. But when he laughed, and Brenda laughed, she added, ‘You pig! I’m serious.’
Was being called a pig, in fun, O.K.? He had to suppose so, she had said it so inoffensively.
‘I think we should get to the bar before the interval and beat the crush,’ he said.
‘Intelligent!’
And she pulled him towards her, burying her head into his shoulder. Joe’s face was up against one of her big earrings. He let it bounce against his mouth.
Rachel was in the queue for the Ladies’, when he came out of the Gents’. His heart leapt up. She saw the look that transformed him and knew she was the cause of it and her face reached forward for a kiss but in an instant all that vanished and they tried to be cold to each other. She stepped out of the queue.
‘You seem to be having a good night,’ she said, careful to keep it neutral.
‘Brenda. Yes. Have you been here very long? I didn’t see you on the floor.’<
That was because I steered well away from you. ‘It’s a big ballroom.’
/>
But I should have seen you. Or known you were here. I knew things about you that never needed explanation. Why didn’t I know you were here?
‘Are you with -?’
‘Garry. Yes. We’re going soon. He’s not the world’s keenest dancer.’
And he is understandably fed up that for no reason he can fathom I have gone dead on him. ‘So you’re off.’
To make love somewhere? To go to that pub in that ‘moneyed’ village of his? In that sports car? To spend time alone with him? Without me?
‘You and Brenda seemed to be chatting away ten to the dozen.’
‘She said we were the two most intelligent people on the dance floor!’
‘Big head! That’s terrible! What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘More fool you. Sorry. It’s none of my business. Look, Joe, I really do have to get back in this queue or there’ll be a nasty accident. You’d better get back to Brenda.’
I don’t want to.
I don’t want you to.
‘Away you go.’
His sole purpose in the dance that followed the interval was to get a close look at Garry. What he saw was not too upsetting. The man had very wavy blond hair, corrugated, Joe thought, or permed; he was not that much taller than Rachel; he was not much of a dancer; some people might just have found him good-looking; and although they danced close together, Rachel was miles away from clinging while this Garry’s head never kept still, twitching around in every direction, picking people out, for one moment even picking out Brenda, passing on.
They were not there for the next dance. Nor the next.
‘They’ve gone,’ Brenda said, rather drily but with humour. ‘It must be funny seeing her with another man. How long were you together?’
In the frill dark of the return journey, Brenda drove the car no less recklessly but she did slow down at the zigzag death trap of Carlisle Bridge, a mile outside Wigton. She stopped, looked back, and reversed the car unsteadily down a tiny side road. Then she knocked off the lights.
‘This was the best place I could think of,’ she said. ‘Let’s get in the back’
It ought not to have worked, his thoughts infected by the sight of Rachel, his spirits lifted by the sight of Garry, his hopes raised by the way Rachel had said what she had said outside the Ladies’, but it did; that is they kissed without restraint and began to move on.
Brenda talked and made noises whereas he and Rachel tended to be intensely silent, but the noises were encouraging and the talk was even appreciative, sometimes an instruction - ‘keep your hand there’, ‘keep doing that’: the back seat of the car was peculiarly erotic. Making love was what you did not do in the back seat of a car, making love was the last thing it was designed for, making love was all but impossible in the back seat of a car, even the elementary, early and opening stages of making love, even sitting side by side and getting close was an acrobatic feat but all the difficulties added up to an enclosed, claustrophobic, tented excitement. The back seat provoked performance.
He slipped off one of her shoulder straps and slid his hand down and not only did she not object, she pushed her breast into his hand with words and sounds that matched the crude urgency of his own growing involvement. This was not really betraying Rachel, was it? After all, she had gone off with Garry in his sports car. That evened it out. What were they doing in the sports car? He stroked Brenda’s breast more emphatically which seemed to give equal pleasure to both of them. And there for a while they stayed, in a state of mooncalf sex, confused but with intent, breasts now bared, jacket off, shirt undone, shoes long discarded, each wanting to see if there would be a next move, what it would be, most of all, who would make the next move.
But for a while they stayed as they were, young, inhibited, chained to their place and time, already looser than they’d anticipated this early on in their dating game but was there even more? They smoked a cigarette, between them: passed it across. That seemed the best way. Brenda opened the window and threw out the red-tipped stub. The fresh night air zipped into their sex cave and she shut the window tight and then turned to Joe and they draped themselves against each other, bared against each other, poised to consider the next stage.
The approaching car did not dip its headlights and almost blinded them. It drew up a few yards beyond them and the driver sounded his horn, several times, before making off. Brenda was jelly.
‘It’ll be someone who knows my father. Oh God!’ she said. ‘They’ll know his number plate. They’ll know it’s me. Oh God!’
Finding shoes, buttoning the shirt, trying to clip on the bra, losing the tie, oh God! They drove into the town soberly. Brenda stopped in front of the house. The lights were still on.
‘They’ll expect you to come in,’ she said.
‘Should I?’
‘It’ll be obvious, won’t it?’
‘Yes. Will it? Yes. I won’t then.’
‘I’ll say -’
‘Tell them I have to get up to go to early communion.’
‘Will you?’
‘No.’
Brenda took a deep breath, opened the window wide and said, ‘Calm down, Brenda.’ She took several deep breaths. ‘We can deny doing the worst of it,’ she said, ‘and there’s nothing wrong with just kissing in the back of the car.’
‘Nothing.’
Joe just wanted to go. By Church Street. To see if Rachel had left her bicycle there. Brenda was so sensible. ‘It was good, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, truthfully. But not the same: nothing like the same.
‘Maybe just as well’ All the time Brenda had been talking she had been putting on make-up, patting her hair, fiddling with her dress. ‘That they came. The headlights.’ She giggled. ‘Maybe it saved us!’
It had done, Joe thought, it had done.
‘Are you sure you won’t come in? It might arouse less suspicion.’
‘Next time, I think. Next time.’
‘Okey-dokey.’ She turned a face now calm and cool towards him. ‘Last kiss?’
A tame one. ‘Ring tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
He got out of the car, waited until she had parked, got out and reached the front door, then waved and hurried towards Claire’s in Church Street, too frill of too many contradictory sensations to be able to think at all.
Sam waited until Ellen had gone upstairs to read in the parlour as she did on Sunday afternoons now that Joe was not immersed there in his work. The room had to be lived in, she said. Joe cleared the last of the tables and sat down with that unrelenting feeling of emptiness: usually at this time on a Sunday he would be off to see Rachel or out on Market Hill phoning her.
‘I saw Rachel yesterday,’ Sam said, On the street. She’s back working in Wigton.’
Joe had tried his level best to avoid seeing her. It seemed only fair. But twice he had found himself opposite the bank at the time she came out and both times had been embarrassingly awkward.
‘I’ve seen her once or twice.’ Sam took his time. Joe’s face was fastened on a page of P.G. Wodehouse. He had gone back to him over the past fortnight.
‘I always liked Rachel,’ said Sam. She had looked unhappy.
‘I think she might not object to a call,’ he said. ‘She looks a bit down. Of course it’s none of my business,’ he said.
Sam took his time.
‘If you love her, Joe, you should see this other fella off. At least try.’
Joe turned over the unread page.
He was on the phone to her for over an hour. He had to come back twice for more change. Before he set off to bike out there, he phoned Brenda, took a breath and told her he was going back with Rachel.
‘So it’s all over then, darling,’ her mother said. ‘Mother did tell you so.’
‘It was just a fling.’
‘Good for you.’
‘We’ll be at different ends of the country in a few weeks’ time.’
‘Good thinking. Edinbu
rgh will be jam packed with eminently more suitable bachelors. Just forget him.’
‘I will,’ said Brenda, firmly.
‘He’s a type,’ said her mother, finally. ‘He’s good of his type, but I’ll never like the type. Nor will you. You’ll see after you’ve met much better boys in Edinburgh. He just isn’t worth you and there’s an end to it’
Rachel and Joe took a short pause for breath and then continued what might have seemed an attempt to crush each other’s faces together through the act of kissing.
‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry.’
Never, they knew, they vowed, they said repeatedly, they would never ever split up again. Never.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Joe was there, on the street at the legendary time they came around the corner. He was forever grateful that he had been there. It was just a couple of weeks before he was due in Oxford, a drifting time, nothing to do but wait, nerves stretching by the day. It was mid-evening, still a clear September light. He was talking to Alan at the mouth of Meeting House Lane when they came around the corner into King Street, past Middleham’s the butcher’s, past the Fountain, and began what Joe saw as a fierce, almost savage and imperial progress. He would have sworn that everyone on the streets that night, the lads leant against the Fountain, strollers, window shoppers, those turning up early for the second house of the pictures, all of them were as frozen to attention as he was by the force of the two of them, transfixed by them. Speed, with Lizzie close, holding tight onto his arm.
There was murder in his eyes, unmistakable. Violence in every step he took, a terrible raging for vengeance about him. Tall, black-suited, wide-open-necked white shirt, blond hair long, heaped back from his brow, a face set in stone. And her, almost as tall on high heels, a matching stride, a black skirt, lavishly scalloped black blouse, extravagant black hair extravagantly styled, face white, barely concealing the fear, holding his arm tight, holding on, Joe understood, for dear life.
He would never forget those moments when Speed brought Lizzie into the heart of the town. He wanted to shout ‘Hello!’ but like everyone else was too much in awe.
