by Evie Wyld
‘Ha, yes – perhaps you really ought to see about this horse riding, rather than playing underwear detective.’ But something had passed between them. If she could have slowed the moment down, she would have captured the look. His eyes, asking her to drop it, telling her not to notice. And her eyes telling him back, I cannot un-know this.
But the moment lasted only a grain of salt.
They walked downstairs together in silence. In the hallway, as he dressed in his coat and hat, she remembered Betty had made lunch for him.
‘Betty left sandwiches for your journey.’
‘Oh really, how beastly, some sort of ham and piccalilli disaster no doubt. There’s a perfectly good dining car.’
‘I know, but at least take them with you.’ She ducked into the kitchen, where Bernadette sat doing her homework at the table. She looked up and Ruth smiled.
‘Just getting Mr Hamilton’s sandwiches for him,’ she said.
‘They’re ham and piccalilli,’ said Bernadette dutifully.
‘Oh, he will be pleased,’ she said as earnestly as she could.
The sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper and tied with string.
‘There you are, darling,’ she said, handing them over while Peter stood in the open doorway looking at his watch. ‘Don’t put them in the station bin, because if she goes into town Betty stands at that end of the platform.’ Peter made a drama of having to hold both his case and the sandwiches.
‘Righto,’ he said, ‘see you in a few days, must dash.’ Another peck and he was off.
Was it not an unusual thing, to keep underwear at your office? Where in your office? Perhaps they had a special dispensation for their employees who stayed over. It seemed very unlikely. And it wasn’t as if he kept a room at a hotel in London. The sound of his footsteps faded. Ruth wandered back to the kitchen, where Bernadette appeared to have been waiting for her.
She smiled again, went to open her mouth to ask what she was working on, or some other platitudinal observation, but instead she said, ‘Can you tell Betty that I’ve gone to see my sister? There’s a small emergency I need to attend to. I’ll return tomorrow, hopefully not late.’ She’d already started to back out of the door, Bernadette nodding seriously.
What she needed was her coat, her hat, her purse; all hung by the door, and she shrugged into her coat and stumbled out, searching her bag as she walked – for her chequebook, for money – and then breaking into a run on the balls of her feet so that her steps wouldn’t echo in the empty street.
She got to the platform in time to see Peter board the first-class carriage, which was good, as it kept the dining car between them. She stepped up into the coach and closed the door behind her, feeling her heart hammering in time with the pistons. Before they departed the platform she noticed Peter’s sandwiches resting at the top of the full station bin, visible to all.
Her carriage was mercifully empty and she breathed deeply, tried to become calm. Then she began to laugh – what a ridiculous thing to do, stalk your husband because of his underwear habits. For a while she smiled and shook her head at herself, even considered getting up and moving to first class, she could surprise him and then stay at the hotel waiting for him to finish work. Why had she never thought to do that while the boys were at school? It seemed something a wife might do. She tried hard to imagine a look on his face that might be pleasing, but somehow the picture escaped her. He would more likely feel ruffled at being surprised, and it was a work trip, so he was probably sitting there working right now. Better to wait and see, and perhaps talk it through with Alice. Alice, she was fairly sure, understood this sort of thing. Mark, after all, was a member of a lunch club.
They drew into Edinburgh and a man boarded her carriage. He smelled strongly of tobacco and whisky, and the smell put her in mind of the notebook in Peter’s drawer. It would have been better not to have seen it. She wouldn’t like Peter to have access to her inner thoughts, wouldn’t dream of writing them down. The man cleared his throat in a greeting, and she smiled, looked at her shoes and then focused her eyes out the window, just as the train started to move. The man produced a paper and made a fuss of opening it, flipping through the pages and sighing contentedly when he found the article he was looking for.
A woman with an open green wool coat and a tight yellow jumper ran down the platform, moving at the same speed as the train for a few moments. It was funny, Ruth thought, how sometimes you knew exactly how things were going to go in the moments before they happened. The woman was smiling and had red lipstick on and thick eyeliner. She was easily five years younger than Ruth, barely an adult. The man coming to meet her was Peter, and he wrapped an arm around her waist and buried his head in her neck. And then the picture was gone and left on the platform, and the conductor came to take her money.
‘Where to, madam?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said very quietly, and the man with the paper looked up. To be done with the transaction, she said, ‘London.’
There had been the slightest suggestion of a bump in the front of the woman’s skirt. Ruth held her ticket in both hands, kept both feet flat on the floor for the entire journey.
‘Shall we go out to eat? Or should you prefer to stay in?’
Alice had greeted her as though they had made prior plans, without surprise, and told her maid to make up the spare room. The maid looked quite unhappy at the request.
‘I hope I’m not arriving at a bad time,’ Ruth said once the maid had gone.
‘A bad time?’
‘I mean just showing up like this without warning.’
Alice put a hand up to her chest. ‘Oh, thank God. Honestly, I assumed I’d forgotten we’d arranged something – that makes me feel so much better. I’m delighted you’re here. Rebecca is just annoyed because we’ve had a few unplanned late nights recently. In fact, what serendipity, I was just thinking it time for a drink, and Rebecca looks flatly revolted when I drink alone.’ Ruth smiled. ‘So are we going out? Or will we stay in?’
‘I’m not sure I have the clothes to go out.’
‘You didn’t bring a scrap with you?’ Alice looked Ruth up and down. ‘I’d offer you something of mine but you’re awfully long, aren’t you? Come on. We’ll stay in – I can mix a passable martini and make a rather efficient little sandwich – we won’t involve Rebecca, she’ll only pull a face.’
They went into the drawing room and Ruth sat on the sofa while Alice opened the drinks cabinet. The room hadn’t been in service when last she’d visited – the couple had moved in shortly after they married, but Alice had insisted on doing the interiors herself, something that had never occurred to Ruth to want to undertake. She wondered if she ought to make more of an effort with the Berwick house to make it feel like her own home.
Alice’s sofa was dark red and very deep. If she leaned against its back, Ruth’s feet would dangle off the end like a child’s, so she perched instead and watched Alice pour one and then two drinks, the light from the window behind her cold and white. There was a wicker chair suspended from the ceiling, like a child’s swing. She wondered if it was for show or if it held a person’s weight. Books covered the walls in a way she couldn’t imagine their mother approving of. Many of them were large books with names of artists on the spine, she guessed, though she had not heard of most of them. On a glass-topped coffee table, a statue of a man on a horse, with a large member. The horse’s buttocks were more defined than they needed to be. Ruth found herself looking away from it, not because it disgusted her but because it made her feel so prudish to have noticed it in the first place. Alice saw her turn away.
‘Is it a bit much?’ she asked. ‘Mark’s very into that sort of thing – he likes to buy young artists, likes to think he’s giving them a helping hand. But in all honesty, I’m not sure he knows as much as he thinks he does about art.’
‘It’s a lovely room.’
‘We don’t let Mother in here, if that’s what you’re thinking – this is our livin
g room. We have quite a plain ordinary room with nice kind willow print for when Mother and Father come. Mark’s so lucky – his are dead.’ Alice handed the drink over and sat in the wicker chair to drink hers. She dislodged her feet from her shoes and curled them up underneath her. From somewhere a blue cat came and settled itself on her lap. They swayed gently together. ‘Darling, do relax, kick off your shoes, won’t you? And tell me why, after all this time, you’ve finally decided to visit?’
If it was a barbed remark, it felt soft and already forgiven. She’d had no intention of telling Alice anything, but there was, after the first few sips of her drink, an overwhelming need to. She bent down and slipped her feet from her shoes. They were blistered – she hadn’t thought about changing her shoes before running to get the train, and then she had walked to Alice’s house, looking at the Christmas lights and trying to balance her thoughts, make sense of what she had seen in Edinburgh. She held the drink in one hand and shifted herself deep into the sofa. This room was so unlike their own drawing room, which had the puffed-out cushions, pale blue and cream stripes she had been used to in her parents’ house. But Alice’s house was not at all tasteful, it was something else that Ruth felt outside of. It was the kind of decor a young fashionable beautiful woman had control of. She wondered what the girl in the yellow jumper’s drawing room looked like.
‘I’ve come to understand, recently,’ she said, taking her time to place the words correctly, and then sipping from her drink to make sure it was all quite what she meant to say, ‘that Peter has another girl.’
‘Swine!’ Alice said and her voice peeped a little. ‘Absolute swine, darling. When did you find out? How did you find out?’
‘This morning. I saw them. And I have a suspicion she may be pregnant.’
‘Oh for God’s sake.’ She shooed the cat off herself and came to join Ruth on the sofa. They sat at opposite ends, their feet touching.
‘And what are you going to do about this? Are we thinking divorce? Mark has a great man, he’ll get you sorted, and Peter’s loaded, you’ll come and live down here close to me, get yourself a pad, I’ll introduce you to—’
‘No – I, I don’t think so, Alice. I don’t think. I don’t know.’
‘Have you confronted him?’
‘No.’
‘A child. I mean Mark’s no angel, but if he had children with someone else . . .’
‘Has Mark had other girls? After you?’
‘Oh, darling.’ Alice shifted herself around a little. ‘Well, yes, but – he’s never got anyone pregnant. Men are so . . . driven by their blood. I mean if Mark didn’t occasionally have a – an interlude with another woman, I wouldn’t get anything done, ever. I view it as a lessening of the load, but if he did get someone else pregnant, I don’t know. I would expect him to take care of it. Before I found out.’
‘By which you mean get rid of it?’
‘By which I absolutely mean get rid of it. And you must speak to him about that. You tell him things are absolutely not allowed to progress.’ She leaned over and caught a nearly empty bottle of sherry that was on the sideboard with her fingertips. She motioned for Ruth to finish up her martini, which she did, and Alice poured for Ruth and for herself.
‘Honestly. If I’d have known men were going to be such hard work, I’d have moved to France and found myself a lesbian.’
‘I suddenly feel like he had this plan all along. Like he would get me and put me in Scotland, so the boys have somewhere to retreat to. Like when they’re back from school, we do this dance of being a family. Sometimes it really feels very good. And now I wonder if the whole time he’s been elsewhere in his head.’
‘Darling Puss. Darling Puss, men just are, that’s the truth of it. They are made differently, they want different things. And in order to be able to enjoy your life there are certain things that one has to accept. It’s not being deluded, I won’t have that – it’s seeing things for what they really are, and buggering on until eventually the penny drops and you find yourself living a very fruitful life partly with them but partly with yourself. And the great thing is, they almost always die first.’
Ruth thought of the path down to the sand dunes, the wind, the black lumps of tar that stuck to her boots on a walk, her jumper sleeves wet and sandy from reaching into rock pools. The quiet sigh of the house as she came home, as she saw it, and smelled it. The feeling of danger in the water. Betty’s kitchen table and all its history. Cigarettes in the back garden. Perhaps it had crept into her bones and become home without her noticing.
Her drink was empty again and so was Alice’s. Alice stood, took their glasses and kicked the cat out of the way, went to the drinks cabinet and brought over a new bottle of sherry and two new, more appropriate glasses. She poured uneven quantities into both and left the bottle within reach.
They sat quietly for a moment, then Alice moved forwards and took Ruth’s glass from her, and set it on the floor. She held both of Ruth’s hands and positioned herself so that she had to look her in the face.
‘If it’s more than that, it can be taken care of. I know a man who can get proof and you can move down here with us until you find something for yourself. I have two friends who are divorced and they live very happily.’
It was the quiet in Alice’s voice that made Ruth’s eyes fill up. It was the pity. She imagined her mother’s face. She imagined Michael’s face, Christopher’s, Betty’s, even Bernadette’s. She imagined the woman in the yellow jumper in her house with those people. Peter’s face did not make an appearance in her thoughts, though she did find herself thinking of that ham and piccalilli sandwich, all neatly tied in its wax paper and sitting in the bin while the rain fell on it.
Alice sat back. ‘Well, my darling, I don’t know what else to say. Those are your options. What would Antony have said to you?’ On the mantelpiece was a framed black-and-white photograph of Alice’s wedding day. Ludwig on his back on Alice’s trail, which pooled in the foreground. Mark next to her, heels together like a penguin. Their parents to the left, her mother as proud as Ruth remembered her, her father a man on the edge of fat. Her own face and her long frightfulness a step back from the rest of them. A gap left that Antony ought to have filled, but of course he had been four years dead already. The distant and now even further-away dead. If he had been present, the photographer would have taken a shot of the three of them, and Antony would have draped his arms over their shoulders.
I
I take the train because I need to sleep. I want the bad coffee and packaged sandwich and the time to rest, but instead I sit upright and alert, my feet hot in their shoes as though I might have to spring from my seat at any moment. I know this feeling, of the wolfman catching up. By the time I arrive in North Berwick, I have convinced myself something is very wrong. I have this heat, a heavy heat in my body, and I scan it constantly to locate the cause of the feeling. Nothing is clear. Yes, I am sad for my sister, but I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a tiny thrill that something in her life was not going to plan. Perhaps the heat came from the guilt of feeling that thrill. Then the worry that I would enter the house and find that Maggie’d turned it into a sex house with sex people.
The police have cordoned off the alleyway that is my shortcut down to the promenade. Four police cars and two vans line the street beyond it, and policemen and women stand at regular intervals down the road. I struggle to think if I’ve even seen one policeman before in the town. They could be here for any number of reasons.
I see a man dressed in a visi-vest sprinkling white powder onto a dark patch of the ground. I’ve seen that at a car accident, the powder for soaking up the blood. I think of cake. There is a small white tent and a lady’s shoe on its side at the entrance to the alleyway. I only see it for half a second, between the navy legs of the police officers who guard it, but it has a white chalk circle around it and a little paper marker by it with the number 3 on. Which could mean anything. It could be a car accident.
The s
hoe is brown and round-toed. The heel, a wooden blocky thing. It would have made a clopping noise as the woman walked. And then the clopping would have stopped. Along the seafront the sky begins to darken; there is a slice of sunlight left on the Bass Rock. It is golden and yellow and makes me sad.
At the house, I close the door behind me and I don’t take my coat off, or even unsling my bag from my shoulder. I am tired. I sit down in the kitchen with the lights off and stay there, looking at a damp patch where the wall meets the ceiling, and thinking of nothing I can put a name to.
‘Maggie?’ I call out. No reply. She is gone. I sit until I am hungry and then I get up and take a slice of bread out of the bag on the kitchen counter and spread on some peanut butter. I struggle out of one half of my coat, recognise the urge to pee but ignore it and sit back down with my shoed feet on the table to eat my dinner. Something has followed me. Some feeling of certainty that my life is a series of boring mistakes or fortunate accidents that will amount to nothing more than a puck of flesh-coloured cake, blood soaked up by flour.
I don’t get up again until the need to pee overtakes me. I shed my coat and leave it in the hallway. I sit too long on the toilet so that when I stand up I have pins and needles in my thighs. I stare at the toothbrush on the edge of the basin, cannot imagine where the energy would come from to use it. I scratch at my scab to feel a reassuring wetness on the tips of my fingers, but it doesn’t yield tonight. I have started to put lights on around the house when the doorbell rings. It has just turned 10 p.m. It is Maggie, and she is drunk.
‘I left you a key,’ I say.
‘Can you feel it?’ she asks, grabbing for my hands as she enters, looking glassily into my eyes and letting me take an inhalation of her beery breath.
‘Feel what?’ She doesn’t answer but pushes past me down the hall to the bathroom. She pulls her tights down and sits on the toilet, and I try to walk past without looking but she calls me back once her flow has started.
