by Helen Harris
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, giggling nervously. ‘You think I’m seeing someone else? You think I’m being unfaithful to you?’
Rob made an impatient brushing gesture with his hand. ‘The melodramatic turn of phrase is yours, not mine,’ he answered coldly. ‘But in a word, yes. I do think you are possibly seeing someone else. In fact, if you want my frank and honest opinion, I’m absolutely convinced of it.’
He stood with his back to his bookshelves, his arms folded, and he confronted me with a righteous stare.
I hesitated for a moment. I know that what I wanted to say risked infuriating him. But I replied, ‘Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose you’re right; I am seeing someone else. I am seeing Mrs Queripel.’
‘Fuck Mrs Queripel!’ Rob exploded. ‘Will you for once keep that wretched old bag out of this? That’s something else that’s really getting on my nerves. Why d’you have to keep dragging her into everything all the bloody time? She’s got nothing to do with this, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Ah,’ I said sagely, ‘that’s where you’re wrong. She’s got everything to do with this. In fact –’
‘If you’re deliberately trying to provoke me,’ Rob interrupted furiously, ‘then I see no point in continuing this discussion. I had hoped you might have a more mature attitude.’ He paused. ‘Just let me tell you one thing: I warn you, I’m not going to be able to take very much more of this.’
He turned away to tidy his tapes, so I had to try and explain what I meant to his shoulders. When I stopped talking, there was a terribly long silence. Rob turned to me. He said, ‘This is ridiculous. Are you seriously trying to persuade me that you’re questioning our relationship, everything we’ve built up together, just because of some romantic tale a half-witted old lady has told you? That’s the most half-baked load of nonsense I ever heard!’
‘I know it sounds a bit strange,’ I said desperately, ‘but I promise you it’s the truth.’ I put my hand mock-theatrically to my heart. ‘It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!’
Rob turned abruptly back to his tapes. ‘I don’t see why I should be made fun of like this,’ he mumbled. He added curtly, ‘As I see it, you could do one of three things: you could have the grace to come clean and tell me what’s really going on, you could stop seeing that pernicious old cow or you could get therapy. I’d recommend all three.’
That was on Friday evening. We maintained a cold unhappy truce all of Saturday and, on Sunday afternoon, Rob left reluctantly for Liverpool because he wanted to be at a particular dole office to meet people signing on on Monday morning. A few minutes after he had left, the front door was suddenly opened and he came back inside. He gave me a considerable shock because I hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs and normally I can hear his crêpe-soled feet thudding louder and louder all the way up the six flights. He had come up specially quietly. He bounded into the hall, as though he thought he might catch me on the phone to that supposed ‘someone else’ or possibly spiriting him out of a cupboard. And of course I looked guilt-stricken, standing there with my bicycle lock and chain in my hands, because as soon as he had gone out the first time, I had started to get ready to ride down to Shepherd’s Bush.
*
‘It’s my belief that nothing came out right again after we moved back to London. Which is funny really, considering we were both quite glad to get away from the sea. But, strange to relate, we couldn’t seem to settle, you know. In ten years, we must have moved half a dozen times. Let me see, there was Aden Road and Adelaide Road, Mrs Pritchard’s and Pretoria Street. There was Albion Crescent – no, Albion Crescent and then Pretoria Street. That was a mistake. Then we had that flat in Gascoigne Gardens. We didn’t move here until the July of 1969. Quite honestly, I don’t know why we moved around so much. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t had our fill of the open road in our day. Always on the move all those years, and then, when we finally had our chance to stay put, we just couldn’t seem to. It wasn’t itchy feet, Lord knows. I don’t rightly know what it was; cussedness, perhaps. Leonard always liked everything to be just so, you know. Anywhere with noise or inconveniences or a dodgy neighbourhood, he wouldn’t stick for long. Even if I couldn’t see anything wrong with a place, a few weeks would go by, a few months, and I’d notice Leonard was harping on something again and I’d think, “Oh Lord, here we go!” Not that I blame him, mind. I’m sure he was right to want only the best. He never let his standards slip. I daren’t think what he would say if he saw how I was living today – in just one room, with everything higgledy-piggledy –’
‘But you’ve done the room up so nicely now,’ Alison interrupted her. ‘Every time I come, you’ve done something more.’
Alicia smiled bravely. ‘It’s good of you to say so, dear. But you don’t need to put on any pretence with me. I know the place is a perfect pigsty. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve stuck it. You must have got used to my pigsty. What you must have thought of me in the beginning! An absolute fright, I dare say. It’s not true, you know, that just because a person is living in bad conditions, he doesn’t notice them. He notices dreadfully. I think Leonard felt that he had to make twice the fuss because all those furnished places were such a come-down. The truth is that we didn’t get what we’d hoped for Regency Villa. Apparently the building needed a lot done to it, which we had never had the extra to see to. And, other than that, we had no nest-egg. Of course, prices in London were a good bit higher than on the coast too. But we couldn’t sit around for ever waiting for a better buyer or hoping we’d find something nice a bit cheaper in London. The doctor had more or less said we shouldn’t dilly-dally on the way. We decided, in any case, that it would be easier to look for somewhere in London once we were on the spot. So we accepted an offer that was way too low, really, from a widowed lady called Jacobs who was planning to turn the place into an old people’s home, and off we went. We took a furnished place in Paddington to begin with; that was Aden Road. We weren’t very particular since it was only temporary. But we must have been there six months when we realized that, for the money we had, and with prices going up all the time, we weren’t going to be able to afford anywhere very nice at all. Somehow, we had both set our hearts on a house; we just couldn’t see ourselves in a flat. So we decided that I’d get a job and maybe Leonard would do some little retirement job too and we would stay put in rented accommodation until we’d saved up a bit more. Well, I suppose it was easier for me, being out at work all day and dead-tired when I got home; I didn’t notice the place so much. But Leonard was miserable. He said the downstairs neighbours disturbed him and the smell of fish frying at all hours of the day and night from the take-away over the road put him off his food. At night he couldn’t sleep for the trains, though they never bothered me. So we decided to look for somewhere else, seeing as it was going to be a bit more permanent than we had thought originally. We moved to a lovely flat a little way away from Kilburn; that was Adelaide Road. But what we didn’t know was that the lady in the flat above us was a musical lady, and mad with it. You may well smile, but we endured torments from that woman; scales suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the night. You’d look at your watch and it would be two o’clock in the morning. Leonard used to bang on the ceiling to begin with, with a broom, but that’d set her marching. We’d have her overhead, singing and marching and banging back half the night. It was terrible. It was midsummer when we moved there and she’d have her windows wide open all day long, with opera blaring forth from her gramophone. Always opera, never just soothing instruments; passion and shrieking and wailing. You could hear her from the end of the road. Someone put in a complaint about her to the authorities, I believe, but you know how long they take to deal with these things. We just couldn’t wait that long. They said she’d been unlucky in love. Well, let me tell you, I know people who’ve been unlucky in love who didn’t turn that peculiar! We stuck it for three months before we moved to Mrs Pritchard’s in Queen’s Park. Mrs Pritchard’s
wasn’t a flat, exactly, it was the upstairs of her house and she lived in the downstairs. We had the hall and the stairs in common. Well, maybe it was cussedness, but that time it was me who took against it. It was a pleasant enough house, I’m not denying that, with its own little garden, just the sort of place we had our eye on for ourselves. But I didn’t like the lack of privacy; Mrs Pritchard knew all about our comings and goings and you never quite knew how much she could hear. There was nothing dividing us, you understand. I’d come home from work sometimes and I’d find she had invited Leonard down for tea, cool as a cucumber, and they’d be sitting there together in her front room, passing the time of day. She always went to a lot of trouble, made him cakes, and it would be set out all nicely on her table with the cake on a paper doily, and cake forks and pretty napkins. You may well laugh, but I didn’t like it one little bit. I started imagining things. Not that I had any grounds for suspicion, not on Leonard’s account. Never, in forty years of marriage! But I didn’t trust that woman. She had nothing else to do all day but pretty herself and then there was Leonard, so conveniently placed, to display her handiwork to. I don’t mind saying that even pushing seventy, Leonard Queripel was still a fine figure of a man. It was worrying me sick. I would tell them at work that I had a bad headache and I’d come hurrying home early, thinking I was going to catch them at it. Of course, I never did. Leonard would have said it was my own fault I got those sorts of ideas. But it’s a short step from saying you’ve a headache to actually having one. I knew that if I kept coming home early, it would lose me my job. In the end, I couldn’t stand it. I told Leonard that I wanted a place with our own front door, I wasn’t going to be anybody’s lodger any more. He didn’t want to budge at first; of course, he was well content there. But in the end, I had my way. I treated him to a dose of my nerves, didn’t I? It was all very well him telling me nobody ever died of nerves. I threatened to. So we upped and moved to Albion Crescent in Willesden. It’s funny, we were moving further and further west all the time. I’d been an East Ender originally, of course, but I had no desire to go back there. We were a year in Willesden. It was a nice flat, bar the decoration. It must have been a colour-blind person who did it! But, by then, we had a new problem, our savings seemed to be going on rent nearly as fast as I was topping them up. Leonard pointed it out to me. He’d been sitting at home doing his sums. Well, that flat in Albion Crescent was the most expensive we’d had yet and Leonard said he thought we ought to move somewhere cheaper. I don’t mind telling you, I think there was a bit of tit-for-tat in it. You know, I’d got him out of Adelaide Road, where he was living the life of Riley, and he didn’t see why I should have the enjoyment of Albion Crescent, which was a lovely neighbourhood. I may be being quite unfair, of course. It’s true, you do get more particular as you get on and Leonard was nearing seventy. He found the stairs a trial; we were up on the second floor. And we were a long way from any shops or entertainments. But it was the money question which decided me. We moved to a horrid little flat not a long way away from here, in Pretoria Street, between the Westway and the Uxbridge Road, on the ground floor for Leonard’s sake. That was our big mistake. I’ve never been that keen on ground floors anyway, with all the people who can look in. We hadn’t been there a month when we were burgled. Leonard had just popped out to the shops and it’s my suspicion he didn’t shut up properly after him. Whatever it was, they turned the place upside down, although all they took was the television and twenty-five pounds. Still, it was enough to put you off a place. And when, six months later, it happened again, that was the last straw as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t sleep in my bed at night. We’d been in London over five years by then, shunted from pillar to post and still with no home of our own. I told Leonard I’d had my fill of it. I saw no sense in me working myself to the bone in that department store for the sake of a home we would never get the chance to appreciate. I never spoke a truer word. We had it all out and we came to an agreement; we’d give it two more years at most – we knew in any case that we couldn’t afford the sort of property in the sort of area we’d dreamt of originally – we’d move out of Pretoria Street for my sake, and we’d find ourselves a home of our own at long last.
‘We moved to Gascoigne Gardens and that was all right. Well, we were neither of us going to take against it, were we, when we knew it wasn’t for long and the next place was going to be for good. We used to go out looking every Sunday. I can’t pretend when we finally found this place that it was my idea of paradise. But, to tell the truth, I was sick and tired of looking. I would have been happy with anywhere by that stage, nearly, provided it had a roof and four walls and was within our price range. We knew the neighbourhood and, while it wasn’t Belgravia, it was nothing like as bad as it’s got now. In its own way, it even had charm. Then. So we put together all we had and we bought it. We had to pay off every penny there and then, you see. We were hardly of an age where anyone would have considered us for a mortgage. We moved here in July 1969. I shall never forget it. The beginning of July 1969. A boiling summer’s day.’
‘Like today,’ said Alison.
‘Oh, it was much hotter. Our belongings came in the removal van and we followed in a taxi. I remember stepping down and standing out there in the street while Leonard paid the driver, looking up at the house and thinking, “And they both lived happily ever after.”’
‘May I ask you a question which is a bit indiscreet?’ asked Alison.
What – now? thought Alicia. Not now when we’re nearly done, when she’s swallowed all I’ve told her, when I’ve got her eating out of my hand.
‘What is it?’ she asked a bit tetchily.
‘Well, listening to you talk about those years – I know this is an awful cheek – but it doesn’t sound as if you were always really quite as happy as you make out, you know. I know it’s frightfully rude of me to ask, but didn’t you ever have any regrets?’
Alicia drew breath. She felt just how she used to when all the other lights in the house went down, but the spot on her. Out there in the dark, the audience waited for the Big Speech. She squared her shoulders. She gave her hair a quick pat and she began, ‘Why ever should I, with a man like Leonard Queripel? What do you suppose I would have regretted? No, I counted my blessings year in, year out. I know what other women have to make do with. But I was the lucky one. I had the best of husbands, I know I did, and the best of men.’
It was so silent in the theatre that you could hear the rewarding sound of each little sniff, each little gulp, the rustle of every hanky being unfolded, and you knew that your performance had done the trick.
‘I won’t pretend our life together was always a bed of roses. That would be wrong. When you have a man as superior as Leonard Queripel, it’s not surprising that now and again those around him find it hard to match up. But I knew he was always in the right, you see – had to be – so it made it easier to put up with any little differences. Besides, I worshipped him. He was my guiding light. And I know I can say that in forty years of marriage, he never so much as looked at another woman. We were everything to each other.’ She sighed a heartfelt sigh. ‘I only wish for your sake, my dear, that you’ll find such happiness one day too. Once you’ve known perfection like that, you’ll never accept second-best.’
The silence seemed to last for an eternity. Alicia stole a sideways look at Alison’s face, lost in rapt contemplation of this rosy vista.
‘So you think Rob’s second-best?’ Alison asked bluntly.
Alicia pretended to be embarrassed. ‘Put it this way, dear,’ she said kindly. ‘You’re like me. You’ve got a sweet tooth, as it were. What you crave is a piece of gateau, but your friend keeps serving you beans on toast.’
She waited for a long while after she had said this, worried that at the mundane mention of beans on toast, the whole multi-coloured many-storeyed edifice which she had built up so artistically might crumble.
Alison sat still for a long while too. She didn’t seem to have been
brought out of her reverie by the unfortunate introduction of beans on toast. She was gazing down at her hands, which Alicia noted promisingly, she seemed to be wringing in her lap. Then suddenly Alicia saw one, two tears trickle down Alison’s face. She sat back in her chair and she listened to the applause rise tumultuously from the stalls.
In the pink peace of the summer evening, she tried on her seaside outfit again when Alison had gone. She paraded in it up and down the landing, one hand now and then on the banister railing, closing her eyes as if it were the railing on the promenade and she were breathing sea air. It was awful to go back into the bedroom and catch sight of her face between the sky-blue dress and the matching hat. The dress and hat hadn’t aged.
Maybe she had struggled upstairs once too often, against her better judgement, to take a look at the outfit. Maybe it was the turmoil of emotions brought on by telling Alison today’s instalment which caused it. Coming down the stairs again afterwards, she had a turn. Or rather, the house turned around her. She had to sit down sharply on the bottom step. Something like a tidal wave washed over her, taking her breath away. She could hear the sea roaring in her ears, like in one of those shells.
*
On Tuesday evening, I think it was, Jean of Jean and Eddy telephoned. I started to remind her that Rob was away in Liverpool, but she interrupted me. ‘It was you I rang up to speak to, believe it or not. We wondered if you felt like coming over to eat with us one night while you’re on your own?’
