I hadn’t felt able to tell her what Dad had told me, because she was upset by his death. She’d done a lot of snivelling. Not that she’d loved him, but she’d lived in the same house with him for eighteen years so she was bound to notice his absence. I was too numbed to cry. I’d got through the days by keeping busy and being politely distant to her.
And now here I was, my ambition achieved, a university student on my way to London. Only scared. And miserable. And trying desperately to keep all the horrors buttoned down in the bottom of my mind: Mum, unbelievably, disgustingly, rolling on the grass with so many casual airmen that she couldn’t even put a name to the one who made her pregnant; and Dad, dear Dad who wasn’t my father at all, lying broken under the apple tree. And most dreadful of all, Dad writhing in the hospital bed because I’d forced him to tell me, making him so ill that he died. If only I hadn’t, if only I hadn’t, if only I hadn’t.
I’d read of people wringing their hands and I thought it was just a figure of speech. But that was exactly what happened to me as I sat in the train with my hands on my lap and the newspaper spread on the table in front of me, reading the pages over and over. As I fought to keep the terrible thoughts from crowding to the surface of my mind, I wrung my hands.
But it was an involuntary action. They wrung themselves, squeezing and pulling and snatching at each other until the half-healed work cuts opened and wept. And all the time I absorbed the world of the personal columns: Winter Cruises to the Bahamas … Horses need Holidays … Are you a Beneficiary? … Ski-ing Parties for the Under 30s … Incontinence? … Try Oxfam’s Perfect Worry Cure and put your Problems in Perspective.
I’d been to London just once, for my college interview, and afterwards I’d written to the lodgings bureau to find myself a place to live. Obviously I’d hoped to be near my college in Regent’s Park, but what I’d eventually had to settle for was a share in a room in West Kensington, miles away.
It took me a long time to find it, by underground and on foot, dazed by the noise and the traffic. I was wearing my poncho and my boots to save carrying them, but the afternoon was sunny and by the time I arrived I was sweating, my arms nearly pulled out of their sockets by the weight of my luggage.
I’d assumed that I should be living in some squalid back street, but obviously I’d been watching too many television plays. This area was tree-lined and grandly alarming, with rows of tall white-painted houses with pillared doorways. Some of the paint on Number 54 was cracked and peeling, but I was apprehensive as I hauled my gear up the steps to the front door. I wiped my damp forehead before gingerly ringing the bell.
I waited for a long time, then rang it again, and a tall fat woman with her hair in rollers bounced open the door and snapped, ‘I heard you the first time! What do you want?’ Then she saw my luggage. ‘Oh, you must be Miss – er –’
‘Thacker,’ I said.
She briefly exposed some teeth that would have interested a dentist. ‘I’m Mrs Dooley, the housekeeper. I can’t help you with your luggage, not with my bad leg. Miss Forbes, the student you’re sharing with, is here already. With her boy-friend. I daresay he’d give you a hand with your cases if you want to leave them down here.’
I said I could manage. I didn’t want to begin by asking favours of a stranger’s boy-friend.
Mrs Dooley went up the stairs ahead of me, puffing and grumbling. It was an imposing staircase, with a carpet thick enough to muffle the clop of my boots. I was puffing too by the time we reached the second landing, where the carpet was a good deal thinner.
‘Miss Forbes’, panted Mrs Dooley, stopping for a rest, ‘was here last year so she can tell you anything you want to know. Only one thing I’ll tell you myself.’ She leaned towards me, gathering breath that filtered back nastily through her teeth. ‘Don’t you dare put them down the pan, or I’ll have your guts for garters. I mean it. The trouble I have with blocked drains … Do you hear me?’
I nodded, trying not to breathe in, and then we hauled ourselves up another two flights of stairs to what appeared to be the top of the house. The carpet was reduced to a threadbare runner.
‘This is as far as I’m coming.’ Mrs Dooley opened a door that led to a much narrower staircase with scuffed lino on the treads. ‘Miss Forbes!’ she bellowed. ‘Do you hear me, or do I have to come up?’
‘What do you want?’ A very cross voice.
‘Your new room-mate’s here.’
‘Oh God … All right. Just give me a few minutes –’
‘Bloody boy-friends,’ grumbled Mrs Dooley. ‘If I catch her at it she’ll be out on her ear. It’s your room as well as hers, Miss – er –, you’re paying the same rent, so you’ll have to stand up for yourself.’
She nodded at me and lumbered down the stairs. I stood waiting, feeling an intruder. From the corner of my eye I thought I saw a door on the landing open and a little old lady peek out, but when I turned my head she disappeared like a mouse in our living-room wainscot.
‘Come on up,’ called down the voice at last. The stairs were too narrow for me to carry my luggage all at once, so I heaved the cases up one at a time to a gloomy top hallway. At one end was a sink and a couple of gas rings. There were several doors, one of which stood ajar. I thought I ought to knock.
‘Oh, come in,’ said the voice impatiently.
Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, the room was as dark as evening. There was one very small window framing a square of sky, but you’d have had to stand on a chair to see out of it. A girl in a mini skirt considerably shorter than mine switched on a fluorescent tube as I went in, and stood blinking in the light. She was dark, small, nice-looking except that her face seemed to be oddly blotched and blurred. I wondered if she were sickening for something. A man with extravagant sideburns sat in an armchair reading a newspaper.
‘I’m Libby Forbes, this is Ed Newson.’ She didn’t sound superior, which was something, but she was confidently middle class. I told them who I was, and Ed said ‘Hi,’ without lowering his newspaper.
Libby introduced me to the furniture that crowded the room. ‘This is your bed, that’s your wardrobe, this is your dressing-table. You’ll have to use it as a desk as well. We go shares in this food cupboard. There’s another on the landing, but if you leave anything out there it’s liable to disappear.’
‘Wine bar at six?’ said Ed to Libby, getting up and putting on his jacket. ‘See you,’ he told her, then he nodded to me and strolled off.
‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said, putting Nescafé into mugs and carrying them out to the landing. I moved my luggage to my own patch of territory, took off my poncho and started to unpack. Libby’s trunk was open and her things were scattered about the room. She seemed to have a fantastic quantity of clothes. I didn’t see where she kept them all, until I opened my wardrobe and found it half filled. But there was plenty of room for what I’d brought, so there was no point in making a fuss.
Libby returned with black coffee. I hadn’t drunk it black before. As a friendly gesture I brought out my cigarettes. ‘Good God,’ she said, inspecting the packet. ‘No thanks, I’ll smoke my own.’
‘Bathroom and loo on the first landing down,’ she continued. ‘There’s never enought hot water and it’s wickedly hard, ruins your skin.’ Her blotches had subsided completely, so she couldn’t be sickening for anything after all. ‘Will you be going away at weekends?’ she asked hopefully, and looked vexed when I shook my head.
‘Haven’t you got a boy-friend, then?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said quickly. I’d intended to tell the truth once I got to university, but I had to keep up my morale somehow. ‘His name’s Andrew, he’s a farmer’s son –’
Libby didn’t seem impressed. ‘Are you a good cook?’ she asked.
‘Well – er – scrambled eggs, that sort of thing. But I’ve never used gas rings before.’
She sighed. ‘Jill, who used to share with me, was a fabulous cook. Great fun, too. I’m going to miss her.’<
br />
‘Has she graduated?’
‘Not exactly. The pill made her feel dizzy, so she stopped taking it – can you believe it?’ Libby looked at me. ‘Well, yes, you probably can …’ She sighed again.
I had a feeling that I depressed her, sitting there large and awkward in my boots. I’d hoped that my room-mate would be someone ordinary and sympathetic to whom I could mention in passing that my Dad had just died. None of the details, of course, and not because I wanted to be fussed over, but simply to establish that I needed time to adjust. But Libby was too sophisticated, not at all the sort of person I’d had in mind.
‘This is a much bigger house than I thought it would be,’ I ventured. ‘Is it mostly students’lodgings?’
‘Students’lodgings! Don’t let Mrs Dooley hear you say that, or she’d throw a fit. This is a guest house, if you please. The only reason we’re allowed to live up here in these servants’ rooms is that the old girls can’t manage the stairs.’
‘The old girls?’
‘The residents, inmates. This is where decaying gentlewomen come to die.’
It sounded a dismal place to start my university life. Recalling the old lady I thought I’d seen on the stairs, I said, ‘Aren’t there any other young people here?’
‘There’s a Canadian couple opposite, newly-weds over here on post-graduate scholarships. And there’re two Indian medical students at the top of the stairs, and a girl journalist in the single room opposite them. Hardly ever see any of them, but the bathroom’s always occupied when you want it. That reminds me, I’d better get ready.’
She disappeared for a few moments with a towel and sponge bag. When she came back, and was changing in to a dolly-rocker dress, I asked her which college she was at. I was pleased when I heard that we were at the same one, because I thought it would give us a common interest. It seemed, though, that Libby had a very poor opinion of college.
‘Ghastly place,’ she said as she did her face, putting on thick foundation, false eyelashes and some very pale lipstick. ‘I never spend any longer there than I have to. It’s full of women.’
‘But I thought it was mixed.’
‘Mixed! Ha! Five women to every man, and most of them are weeds anyway.’
‘Is Ed there?’
‘Certainly not. He’s post-grad at UC.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
Libby sorted through scattered piles of clothing and chose a coat to wear. I wondered for a moment if it was her year in London that had made her so well-dressed and self-assured, but then I decided it was probably the way she came.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ she said. ‘Lord knows when I’ll be back, we’re going on to a disco. I’ll try not to wake you. There’s an Indian grocery on the corner if you need any food tonight, but if you don’t want to go out you can borrow my Nescafé. See you.’
A moment later she put her head back behind the door. ‘No doubt Mrs Dooley said her piece about the loo?’
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘She does that at the start of every term. It’s never been blocked, to my knowledge. Stupid old trout’s never heard of Tampax.’
The room seemed very quiet after she had gone. There was no one about on the top landing, though I could hear a Beatles record playing behind one of the closed doors. I found the bathroom but it was a grotty place, with flaking plaster, stained plastic window curtains, a ferocious-looking geyser, grey high and low tidemarks round the bath and permanent brown drools below the taps. The seat-cover of the loo was badly cracked. It was the only room where I was likely to find much privacy, but it wasn’t the sort of place you’d want to linger in.
There was no point in going out to buy food when I still had the remains of Mum’s sandwiches. This time I was hungry enough to eat them. I experimented with the gas rings, made myself a small mug of Libby’s Nescafé, and then set about finishing my unpacking.
In the bottom of my suitcase I found a mysterious wodge of old newspapers. I tore them apart, and discovered that Mum had gone and packed me an unasked-for couple of pots of her blackberry and apple jam.
It’s a fiddling jam to make but she does it well and she knows that it’s my favourite. I don’t know whether the sharpness of the apple sets off the sweetness of the blackberries, or the tartness of the blackberries offsets the sweetness of the apples, but either way the combination is delicious. You can taste the autumn sun in it, and see the blackberries glistening on the bushes at the edge of Spirkett’s Wood.
Mum seals each pot with a transparent disc and a cover held down by an elastic band, and she writes a careful label and the date. I lifted the pots out. This year’s, made in the middle of September when my dear Dad was alive and we were happy … I felt suddenly overwhelmed by a rush of longing, not only for him but for home.
And then I realized that one of the pots was only partly filled. The cover had split and the jam had oozed out through the newspapers, spreading itself over the sleeve of the new oatmeal sweater that Mum had knitted for me.
I had to laugh. If once I’d started crying I wouldn’t have known where to stop.
Chapter Eighteen
I disliked college from the start. When I first saw it, in the spring, I’d been delighted by its parkland setting because I knew how much I would miss the countryside. Now, the falling leaves and the sharp, earthy smells of autumn induced nothing but melancholy.
Difficult to say whether I’d have enjoyed college in other circumstances, if I hadn’t been weighed down by my load of misery and guilt. As it was, everything seemed pointless. I combined my new-girl-up-from-the-country awkwardness with a depressing sense of oldness and experience.
I’d been fed up with school, where you had to be all day whether you wanted to or not, and where they chivvied you into doing something the whole time. What I’d most looked forward to at university was freedom from supervision. But now that I’d got it I didn’t want it. There was too much time for thinking.
I didn’t like my course, either. I’d chosen Sociology because I thought it would be full of human interest, but all it was full of were statistics. I found it difficult, and the books I needed were always out of the library.
College was crowded with people, but I knew no one outside my fortnightly tutorial group. There were ten of us – including two men, one bumptious, one who sat picking his pimples – and we usually gravitated towards each other at lectures. But as soon as lectures were over we drifted apart again, scattering to our habitations in distant parts of London.
There were plenty of clubs and societies I could have joined, of course, but I didn’t feel like joining anything, not that first term. Next term, perhaps, when I’d had time to come to some kind of arrangement with myself, it would be different. Until then, I preferred to be on my own.
Finding my way about London, with an A-Z guide, had to be a priority. It was supposed to be a swinging place, but I found it just crowded and confusing. Everywhere was rush and push, and it didn’t take me long to discover that country good manners were out of place. There was no need to stand back to let old ladies on to buses or tubes first, because they were experienced shovers with very sharp elbows who knew all about city survival.
What really dismayed me, in all the noise and hustle, was that London was such a very foreign city. The streets were packed with people of every conceivable nationality and colour, and I began to wonder whether any genuine native Londoners existed or whether they had all fled to the country, as Mrs Marks had to Byland, leaving the foreigners in occupation.
I longed for some escape from the traffic and the strangeness, but my shared room was no haven. I knew I’d have to find somewhere else. It was essentially Libby’s room, overflowing with her things and her personality even though she was rarely in it. When she had gone out that first evening, apologizing for the mess, I’d assumed that she simply hadn’t had time to put her clothes and books away. Then I discovered that she lived in a permanent muddle, and presumably liked it.
&nbs
p; Nothing to do with me, except that she used my bed and dressing-table as additional dumping-grounds. It made me furious to come in and find that there wasn’t a square inch I could call my own. I remembered Mrs Dooley’s remark that I’d have to stand up for myself, but there was no point in having a row with Libby until I’d found somewhere else to live. Certainly no point in sending to Mum for my trunk until I had a room of my own to unpack it in.
And that was clearly going to be difficult to find. I bought the Evening Standard and searched the small ads, but single rooms were wildly expensive, their rents geared to the £1,000-a-year secretary market. But at least the search gave me an occupation and a purpose. I set about seeing how little I could live on and how far I could stretch my grant.
I hadn’t smoked since I arrived. I didn’t much enjoy it anyway. I lived on Nescafé and brown bread and eggs – though I hated paying good money for such small pale objects – and canned soup and baked beans. Fruit was fantastically expensive, eating-apples two-and-something a pound in the street markets, when at home we tripped over them in the grass … But apples no longer appealed to me.
Fares for my journeys to and from college were another expense that could be pared. There were several possible routes and I walked for long distances, taking public transport only between the most economical fare stages.
The underground, with its hot stale wind, depressed me. I preferred to walk or ride on buses because there was always something to see and, looking and listening, I could sometimes forget about Dad for a few minutes. And then the desolating facts would come crowding in on me again, worse than ever.
I hadn’t realized how physically painful grief would be. It gave me a terrible, persistent ache inside. Once, when I was waiting on an underground platform at Leicester Square, I heard myself cry out loud with the pain: ‘Dad, Dad!’ But no one took any notice; that sort of thing goes on in London all the time.
Cross My Heart and Hope to Die Page 18
