by Jill Dawson
Locking it behind her, she rewrapped the newspaper more firmly around the rabbit’s bloodied head so that she couldn’t see again its open glassy black eyes. It reminded her of an English fish-and-chip packet; it was still disgustingly warm. She would put it out in the garbage tomorrow; somehow she didn’t want to venture outside at the moment. The sense that something – not a fox, but a person – was watching her now through that slit in the curtains made her want to go back into the living room, find her cigarettes and smoke two, one after the other. Her new concern was how on earth she would spend a weekend, an evening or afternoon in the cottage with Sam and the goddamned snooper just over the lawn like that. At least there’d been the mention of a grandson. Perhaps Mrs Ingham went away sometimes to visit him. Pat made a note to introduce the question into the conversation at some later date to try to discover when. She changed her mind suddenly about the rabbit and quickly unlocking and wrenching open the back door, lobbed the newspaper package into the metal garbage can at the side of the house (the lid propped beside it was knocked rolling to the ground). The rabbit made a satisfying thud, and the lid clanged rudely. Strange noises, new sounds. Mrs Ingham had better get used to it.
She drifted to sleep thinking of Sam. The portrait she was working on in her little art room next door loomed up, life-sized and luminous, as if it was finished at last. But instead of her picture of Sam, there was a Modigliani painting that she’d seen many times in Paris. It annoyed her, the way this image superimposed itself on her consciousness, as if she wasn’t able to create anything new at all, only to inhabit the form of another, ghostly, artist. Every time she closed her eyes, she had a troubling sensation of something small and worm-like swarming over her nose. She remembered the snails suddenly and opened her eyes, reaching for the little square button to press on the base of the bedside lamp. Of course the snails were still on the window ledge. In the lamplight they seemed to be paused, waiting for something. Or – she peered harder – utterly still. They had abandoned their earlier behaviour with no sign of anything amorous or aggressive at all. To all intents and purposes they might be dead. She felt an urge to get out of bed and go check them with one finger, pick them up and poke inside the shell to be sure they had not met the same sad fate as Bunnikins. She lay still and fought the urge. She had a bottle of Scotch beside the bed and she needed a large tooth-mug full before sleep at last descended on her. She thought of sleep like an anchor, a plumb-weight, pulling her down.
‘It’s an easy route – the A1120. You pass a mill as you approach the village, then cut right. You’ll know the cottage when you see a little bridge – there’s a stream runs through the garden. Oh, and you can’t miss the colour – salmon pink! Well, I guess plenty of the houses round here are that colour.’ Pat tried to slow down. She was gabbling, her warm breath steaming up the telephone booth, and she feared again that Sam might accuse her of being ‘intense’.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can, darling, as soon as Gerald leaves for golf. Do write something first and don’t worry about me. I have a map. You know you’re awfully cranky if you haven’t managed to write.’
What a stroke of luck! Minty had rallied and gone to spend the weekend with her cousins, as arranged, and now it was Saturday, and Sam said she was feeling a little better, and could come after all. The pips went and Pat hurried back to her cottage; the door was on the latch.
Her typewriter was still snug in its coffee-coloured cover, stickered with the peeling labels of the many countries visited, tucked under the bed. She had told Sam proudly that the new cottage had three small rooms upstairs and sang to herself as she unwrapped the typewriter: ‘“I’m gonna hug you in the morning, hug you in the evening too . . .”’
The disturbing thing about moving house, not to mention the boxes and cases that were meant to follow one but usually went missing, were the days lost while deciding where to set up her workroom. The options were the cramped kitchen table downstairs (risking being interrupted when Mrs Ingham or Ronnie came by and opened the back door on her, like shining a flashlight on a specimen in a Petrie dish . . . No, that would never work). Or a makeshift desk in her low-ceilinged bedroom with the flaking overhead beams and the portrait of herself in the red jacket looking like grim death that Allela had painted, and that she had brought with her to every house she lived in and then regretted, longing to turn its face to the wall . . . No. That left the living room and the problem of the front door and the mailbox. The mailman and his little stooge (she thought it was his son, somehow), the newspaper boy. He was particularly unexpected, with his rude and forceful thrusting of the goddamn Ipswich Star. Last week she was so shocked she’d opened the door after him and shouted: ‘What’s the idea?’ But he was already on his bike and away as far as the row of almshouses near the bar.
Such interruptions sounded trivial to others (to Sam, for instance), who seemed to believe one should recover momentum at once, continue typing as if nothing were amiss. But being in the throes of a novel when it was going well was like being submerged under water. Being disturbed was like coming up for air too quickly. It gave one the bends. And it was not easy to go back under again.
And here, yes, just as she’d dreaded, here already was more knocking at the kitchen door and more disturbance. ‘Yoo-hoo!’ came a voice. A female voice, but not Sam’s. A young voice.
‘Sorry – the back door was open!’ She had stepped into the kitchen, uninvited. Pat was astonished.
Smythson-Balby. Looking awful fresh. Washed hair. Sunny yellow shift dress, straining over the bust, short; worn over tan pantyhose and topped with a fringed suede jacket. The same banana boots. Huge owl sunglasses pushed up into her hair.
‘I’m so sorry. But you don’t have a telephone,’ the younger woman said. ‘And I wanted to ask if I could drop the article off tomorrow – my deadline is Tuesday – and whether you wouldn’t mind awfully checking it over. You know. For facts. Errors. Titles of your books, that kind of thing. Might that be OK?’
‘Tomorrow? Sunday? No. I – I’ll be out.’
‘Monday, then?’
Pat heard the engine now. Realised that Smythson-Balby was not alone. Both women wandered into the front room where Pat distractedly opened the living-room curtains to see through the window that another young woman was at the front of the house, smoking in the driving seat of a red sports car, its roof opened, like a peeled tin.
‘That your friend?’ Pat asked.
‘Yes, Izzie. She gave me a lift.’
‘Where do you happen to live?’
‘Beg your pardon?’
‘Do you live here in Suffolk?’ Pat’s difficulty with asking direct questions made her sound brusque, she knew, but too late to check that now.
‘No. I live in London. In Notting Hill, in fact. But I’m staying at Aldeburgh. With Izzie . . .’
Damn her. Aldeburgh. Half an hour away. Damn girl could keep materialising like this at any moment. She would have to start locking the doors when she was home. Use the excuse of Mrs Ingham’s ‘intruder’ if anyone queried it. Or perhaps her being from Texas would be explanation enough.
The girl was waiting for an answer.
‘Bit chilly for the roof down, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sorry?’
Pat nodded towards the window, towards Smythson-Balby’s pretty friend in her headscarf.
‘Oh, Izzie doesn’t mind. She loves driving with the wind in her face!’
Pat watched Smythson-Balby carefully for the way she said ‘Izzie’ but there was nothing to be read there.
‘Yes. That’s fine,’ she replied. ‘Monday. If the door is locked, knock loudly. I might be writing.’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t want to disturb you. Toodle pip!’
And then she was gone. Pat heard the driver say something like ‘Hey, Ginny,’ and the little car roared into a youthful burst and took off up the road. Pat was left adrift in a fog of oppressively sweet perfume. Once more she had the impression that the girl r
eminded her of someone she knew and couldn’t identify. Now she wondered whether she’d met Smythson-Balby before, in another life. In another country. Neither thought was comfortable.
And then at last she’s here, and filling the little cottage with the scent of honey and almonds. It’s a baked tart in a little blue dish that she made herself and brought for after lunch; it hangs around her when I kiss her, her cheeks and hands smelling of vanilla and marzipan. She has on the peacock-patterned shirt-dress in a gauzy material that we bought together in Paris, the one I always picture her in. Her hair is artfully piled up, perfectly smooth, Grace Kelly-style, and when she stands in the garden to admire the stream and the deep English green of it all in her wellingtons, holding the little glass of Italian vermouth and soda I’ve made for her, the material becomes transparent in sunlight and I can see her legs through it. Over that she’s slung a thick fisherman’s-style sweater in dark brown wool, man-sized, probably one belonging to Gerald. It emphasises her slenderness, her elegance, and though it looks casual, thrown on, it isn’t. Nothing about Sam is unstudied; no effect unsought. A woman of elongated lines – I sometimes feel she has been pulled and stretched, so tall, so slim, like a kind of pliable clay, but this could never be true, because nothing about Sam is pliable. Isn’t that why I love her? The one woman I’ve ever met who in her quiet, solid, cool way matches my strength of personality with hers, matches me steel for steel.
I’m showing her a handful of delicate hazelnut-sized snails, explaining how many I’ve already amassed. She laughs at me, but her eyes are vivid, glittering: two vivid blue fish. Around her neck is the gold locket I gave her. When she frees her hair from its exquisitely well-arranged grips the last pale coil of it will reach down to her marzipan-scented waist. She will allow me to kiss her there: maybe, maybe.
Sam couldn’t make it. More waiting, lunchtime passed, 2 p.m., another pained conversation in the telephone booth, more excuses (as far as Pat was concerned), something whispered about Gerald not having left yet, changed plans again, and then in anger, and suddenly sober as a trout, Pat clomped home and threw a splat of steak onto the lit fire in the front room, watching it melt into a fat black lump, stinking the place out with its acrid greasy smoke.
Pat was mad enough to hit someone. She smoked three Gauloises, one after another, letting out a loud shriek when she realised the packet was empty. She paced the room. She considered going back to the telephone, risking Gerald answering, and making some kind of demand. An ultimatum. A declaration. Gerald had a temper, he was volatile; Sam, she knew, was sometimes afraid of him. There had been that time. The very first occasion of meeting Sam: a small dinner party for some publishing people in London at the home of one of them, a dozen or so people present and Pat there too, eating quietly, hoping no one would speak to her, stealing glances at the beauty at the end of the table, the wife of a banker, someone connected to the publishing world only by some association she hadn’t understood. Then Gerald had suddenly – there had suddenly been some commotion, Pat wasn’t sure what, but others at the table had fallen silent and become embarrassed, aware of shouting, and there was Gerald, his silly skinny self, leaping up and bellowing something, and a glass of wine had been knocked over, and she hadn’t really seen or heard properly what had happened, but with her antennae flickering she’d felt her pulse quicken anyway, her ribcage tighten, and she’d understood. Violence always has a smell, a temperature, to those familiar with it.
And Sam, tense, charming, trying to look as if nothing had happened, had stared gracefully down the dinner table at the guests, with her look of absolute poise and grace, murmuring to her husband, ‘Darling, do sit down,’ but she hadn’t dared to touch him, Pat noticed. Sam – trying to stare at no one in particular – had accidentally caught Pat’s gaze and somehow, between them, something fizzed.
Strange that Gerald did not know about his wife’s tastes. The man was not naïve. There had long been rumours; even Pat had heard them before meeting the exquisitely lovely source of so much gossip. He preferred to remain in ignorance, like Queen Victoria. If such things were not named they could not exist. When We Dead Awaken, Pat thought bitterly – the title of the Ibsen play she’d seen with Sam in London once, a phrase she loved and that had lodged fast. ‘“When we dead awaken . . . we see that we have never lived . . .”.’ Pat had whispered it urgently into Sam’s ear that night, outside the theatre in Soho, kissed her hard in the glare of a streetlamp, repeating the phrase again and again, saying: ‘If you never leave Gerald, you will never live . . .’
Sam had pulled away from her, smoothed down her coat, retied her silk scarf under her chin, said coolly: ‘Please, Patsy, don’t . . .’
And Queen Victoria, the thought of her now jogged something. There were two bars in the village: the Falcon and the Victoria. There would be cigarettes there (why hadn’t she thought to buy some in Ipswich?) and ‘a change of scene’, as Mother used to call it, when she was in the doghouse with Stanley. ‘Honey. You need a change of scene. Freshen yourself up and let’s take a drive.’
She freshened herself up now. It was – she checked the watch by her bed – still lunchtime opening hours. She changed her shirt – her drawer was full of folded white shirts, and nothing gave her more pleasure than seeing them there, neat as sheaves of paper. She picked one out and splashed water on her face. Even swiped a smudge of pink lipstick around her mouth, patted powder on her chin and nose, a concession. (There was only so much being talked about that she could stand.) A visitor, a foreigner, a still-handsome woman in her forties (this wasn’t vanity: all her girlfriends had said so), with no husband or children; a famous writer. The ‘pub’, the English village hub, with its dangerous darts players, would be the greatest test so far. Buying cookies for slimmers at her local store would pale in comparison.
She locked the door behind her and shoved her hands into the pockets of her Levi’s. The hedges at the front of the cottage bristled and a leaf flipped over and over on the road, as if trying to escape. She marched in the direction of the bar, head down, over the little bridge, which the stream in her garden passed under; in her coat pocket bounced one of the snails. This time it was empty, an empty shell the birds had plucked, and she slipped her little finger into the comforting space, wearing it like a ring.
And yet what greeted her, as she scraped the creaking wooden door over the red tiled floor (she entered through the back door that led from the car park, figuring this for a less brazen way in), was surprisingly dark and consoling. Smoke, the smell of smoked fish, if she wasn’t mistaken, and two fireplaces blazing in a rather cosy, masculine space. They were all men, of course. Most were elderly and sat alone, cradling their pint glasses. They did nothing more than nod at her or suck on their pipes. The appraising eyes – female eyes – she’d expected were not there. The men would have assessed her at once as attractive but not young, and not game, and with that appraisal over, her invisibility would be assured. The faded tar-coloured curtains were closed. The nicotine-stained walls and the wallpaper the exact shade of smokers’ teeth, all testimony to a bar of dark secrets and noiseless musings by men used to their lonely days in the field, who did not see why they should forfeit silence.
‘Would you push the door shut? We’ve just got the fire going,’ the toothy redhead behind the bar asked smilingly, and Pat obliged by returning to the door and closing it with a firm shove. She ordered a whisky with ice – the ice was a luxury as she had no way of making it at the cottage – and, that received, arranged herself at one of the rickety wooden tables, nearest the fire. The table, she discovered, when she tried to tuck her feet underneath, was a Singer sewing-machine table, complete with little drawers that she longed to peek in and a metal frame trailing cobwebs. Everything about this bar surprised and pleased her – the curious portrait of Queen Victoria above the fireplace, with her wistful gaze, and below that the cartoon with its considerably less respectful take on ‘the longest reign in history’; the weird trophy above the firepla
ce that had three horns (what goddamn animal had three horns, for Christ’s sake?) and its great swags of straggling black hair; a laughably tiny and wobbly wooden bookshelf with no rhyme or reason to its presence (it was lined with dusty bottles); floor tiles pocked black by a lifetime’s cigarette butts, ground under farmers’ boots. She would not have been surprised if a pig had sauntered up to the bar and asked for a drink.
No one would speak to her here; the English pub was not what she’d imagined at all. She could think about the Problem over her whisky, stare into the fire, watch her face burnish in the reflection from the copper kettle beside it, and not one lousy lunk would care to chat to her. She rubbed her thumb against the ridged shell of the little snail in her pocket before removing her coat and hanging it from the back of her chair. She had brought a book along in the other pocket; a paperback she’d picked up in Ipswich, in the second-hand store next to the television rental place. It was a book on Gastropoda. She felt confident no one would start up a conversation about that.
She had scrutinised each snail, but there was no further strangeness, except for that one tiny snail with the particularly beautiful, glazed shell – whorls of pearlescent amber alternating with hazelnut brown – it was her favourite and it wasn’t moving. She was thinking about that now – was that poor snail about to die? – and about Sam, and opening the cellophane on a fresh packet of cigarettes, Embassy (beggars couldn’t be choosers) bought from a machine next to the ladies’ room, when the door opened and a blast of daffodil yellow heralded the arrival of Virginia Smythson-Balby.
Damn girl! I thought she was staying in – where did she say? Aldeburgh? What was she doing in this village then, every minute of every goddamn day?
‘Oh, hello! I hoped I might find you here. I brought the article, you know. I finished it sooner than I thought.’
Wasn’t it only a matter of hours ago when she’d promised to bring it round Monday? She must have had it with her all along.
