Those who had watched each seam laid on, or who had spread each one themselves and witnessed the fresh colour glow, and been fascinated at every layer ageing to acquire its own peculiar shade, made her relish the same experience for herself, proving that her eyes and spirit were in harmony. There was no need to explore more surfaces with thumbnail or knife, for she could analyse their complexity as one saw into the depths of a lake without going under the water. On these evenings alone in her room the vision was intense, occasionally painful – but it was always part of herself and never unnecessary. The sensation made her smile, content without turning to the mirror as she scratched an itch out of her clean hair, and pushed the chair back from the fire because her legs were too hot.
As a child she had put a poker between the bars of the kitchen fire till it glowed red, then pressed its point into the brown paint of the cupboard door. The hissing contact sent up a coil of smoke, showing a rainbow of colours before the poker-end reached wood. The effect delighted her, but her father rushed in from the parlour. ‘Good God! What’s that smell?’
He snatched the poker away, and slapped her because she might have caused a fire. From the earliest age layers were forming under the surface of the spirit, each one covering the one below but none forgotten when the hot iron of piercing experience bit deeply through.
She felt her way anticlockwise to the next wall – such a blank space that any colour could be put there. Its surface did not exist on coming in from shopping or wandering the streets, until she allowed it to show what she wanted portraying. On the Underground between Gloucester Road and Victoria she looked at reflections in the opposite windows. The train rattled up speed. She would stare at the river from Hungerford Bridge, then walk to Trafalgar Square to feed the greedy pigeons before going into the National Gallery for half an hour’s peace among the pictures.
A woman four seats along on the same side was observing two young women across from her. Pam counted several times to make sure the position was correct. She wasn’t interested in the two girls but in the woman looking at them with quiet avidity and whom she could see tantalizingly reflected. The girls were talking, and didn’t register the woman’s scrutiny. Nor could the woman be aware of Pam watching her, since she for whatever reason was busy herself.
The woman was about her own age, but dressed with an elegance Pam could never achieve. Perhaps she was a tourist from Italy or Spain. Her smooth dark hair showed under a felt hat. Shoes and handbag weren’t English. Her pale features vibrated when the speed lessened. The indistinct face at such reflected distance was full of a promise which she could not define. There was a risk involved, and she wondered why, though her curiosity would not let her dwell on it.
She was straining to see her as if in a dream, for the person’s head was now and again hidden by the movement of the two girls during their lively discussion. All Pam had to do, however, was stand and walk along the carriage to bring the woman’s face to greater clarity. No pretext was needed to look directly on it as she passed. But it seemed as impossible to do this as it would have been to put her hand into a fire. There was in any case a greater attraction in keeping the image remote and mysterious, for in this way her speculations gained in depth, and held off a future she was not yet ready to face.
The train stopped at Westminster, and Pam was disappointed at not seeing the woman before she got off. It was too late, like so much had been, because people between them stood at the same time and blocked her view. She let her go, being left with no other option.
Going to sleep that night she grieved at a loss that could never be made up. She was amazed, as the effect wore away, at having been caught by the force of a shadowy reflection in the window of an Underground train while plain flesh-and-blood people rarely had such influence.
For days she regretted having told herself that she would only follow her out if she left at Charing Cross like herself, and hoped afterwards to recognize the half-seen face during her walks, though how could she say to someone she hadn’t met, and who didn’t even know she wanted to meet her: ‘I saw you on the Tube the other day.’? The woman would look at this short-haired, pale, hard-faced, mad-seeming person speaking to her on the street and say: ‘Excuse me,’ in whatever language, and push her aside.
The room was too comfortable, weakeningly warm. Rainbow colours swirled on the blank wall, a lit wheel moving against the grain of her senses. The surface spun in its own good time, frightening her adult mind one moment and then intriguing her as if she were a child. To let herself float into the vortex of so much dazzle would take whatever nights and days were left. She could neither go back nor stay where she was. She didn’t want to find out what the world was made of, nor be crushed into lunacy by it.
But she had to make up her mind what to do with her life, and the only consolation was in knowing that it was up to her alone whether or not she made an attempt to go on. Her own will was the arbiter, the power she had nursed all her life, and that had preserved her, till the time came when she needed to move in a direction she had always wanted to take, using mechanisms impossible to analyse but whose purpose had always been central to her being, proving that the more hidden the will, and the more shocking the move to her reason, then the more it was no other than her own urge for independence coming into action. The notion that she had lived all her life only to develop the necessary will to leave her husband filled her with a rage that made her want to destroy the wall. If she spread paraffin and put a light to the room, gaudier colours would arise than the tinselly façade she saw by squinting her eyes.
The air was stifling. She took off her jersey and blouse, and put them folded on to the table. Her will had finally done good by landing her in a place whose colours no longer made her shake with dread. Their deadly swirl didn’t fascinate, and the wall became ordinary, fit only to stop the outside world from persecuting her.
The window dominated the next wall. She pulled the heavy table and box of books clear, to open the flimsy plum-coloured curtains. A crack in the lower pane cut the door of an opposite house in two. A taxi bringing someone from the theatre or airport stopped near by. If George had tracked her she would bite him like a wolf. The feel of freedom made her wolfish at the idea that it might end. A cat ran from under a parked car to the middle of the street, then walked to another car on the far side. She hated the thought of herself as an animal waiting to be dragged to a slow death in captivity. The lighted needle-end of a plane glided slowly enough across the sky for her to wish she was inside.
The taxi driver must have misunderstood the number he had been given, for he rounded the curve of the street and set his passenger down too far along for her to see who it was. The sodium lights of Shepherd’s Bush made the pale moon superfluous. Its yellow orb owned the roofs and chimneypots while she stood at the window and felt as if she owned the moon. Her room was inside it, and she stood at its window looking at herself calmly observing it and not knowing where she was.
The window was the most important wall because it gave her the power to see other people without having to look into her mirror. She drew the dusty curtains, and threw her brassiere on the bed. The colours of the fireplace wall were locked inside her with the moon. The room was a home where she could be herself and think what she liked. She could buy tins of paint and decorate the walls with zigzags and circles, stars and ampersands. She could lock herself in whenever she cared to, or abandon the den at an hour’s notice and look for another if she felt the refuge growing so familiar that it turned into a prison.
The rectangular block of orange gas-fire warmed the whole room. There were no set meal times, so she had put on weight, and it wasn’t easy to undo the catch on her slacks. She folded them, and hooked the hanger on the back of the door. The heat rushed to her legs and thighs. She was tired, and ready to sleep, but relished her detachment in the surrounding space. ‘I went into marriage myself, and came out by myself,’ she said to the tall mirror carried home from the ruins. ‘It is only possible to do thin
gs for yourself.’
She took off her woollen drawers but kept her dressing-gown open. It was pleasant to stroke her skin. Her figure was firm, but there was no tension left. Nothing could go on for ever, and the break had been made. She felt her arms, and pressed the flesh, thinking of how she had never been idle in George’s house, though he had once said how lucky she was being a woman because she didn’t have to go to work, as if domestic service on tap twenty-four hours a day came about by the press of a button. In any spare time there’d been the exercise of cycling to the shops, or going for a walk, or pulling up weeds from the patch of garden. The rule of life was never to be idle, though in the last weeks she had done nothing more than work at her room till it became a home. Now it was perfect, and the time had come to leave, one way or another.
She sat with legs outstretched at the fire, smoothing the life-giving heat along her firm thighs as if the half-seen woman on the Tube train were now observing her. But, belonging to herself alone, she let that image drift away, and tried to stay fond of herself in spite of the woman’s absence.
Her breasts responded when she placed her palms over them. They had never been big, though she loved them because stroking the warm circle of corrugated flesh around the nipples calmed her. During a bath she could lift and soothe each in turn, and love the body that belonged to her alone. No longer sleeping with someone she didn’t love, she felt herself more attractive in the sight of other people when walking the streets. Going to the shops, a grey-haired elderly gas-fitter with a well-lined face whistled softly from a tent erected over a hole in the pavement. He was being ironic, aiming his call at her, even cruel, for a man of his age would wolf-signal anyone, though on the way back he was standing on the pavement, and had looked with more serious interest as she had passed.
Imagining things! But who would want her? It didn’t even matter. When she put on the table-lamp her body that she had never much considered lengthened in shadow. The body had cared for her, and rarely made her ill. Aches didn’t matter. Pains would go away before a day was out, and if they didn’t, and you fainted or screamed, then something was wrong, though it might only be ‘a bit of a turn’. She had ignored her body because it hadn’t belonged entirely to her, so perhaps she was still lucky to be alive on suddenly acknowledging that at long last it did.
Her white stomach had softened. She crossed arms and caressed each shoulder, she and her body in the same world at last. She would walk more, and decide what work to get. You couldn’t live for ever in London, so there must be something for her to do, and if not, there was a bigger world beyond, providing she mustered the energy to push into it.
Such speculations were not material to go to bed on. Her fingers parted the inner lips, and smoothed in a rhythm till an indescribable feeling convulsed her. But she resisted the impulse to rub until the end, suspending her fingers till normal breathing came back, when she drew both legs into the chair before closing her eyes.
The only wall beyond the shape of her own body was the enclosing border of her mind, within which she was beginning to perceive secrets till now concealed, yet still not to be clearly divined in case they sowed chaos and nothing else. Frightened, she would be satisfied with no more than a glimpse of those secrets, hoping that by the time full clarity came she would be willing and strong enough to accept them. From dying alone at the brick-end of a tunnel, like a coward evading all problems, she was recovering within her own warm tent of self-love. The final act was, for better or worse, impossible to resist. Intense and prolonged pleasure drove out shame, and was overwhelming.
Startled by someone treading up the stairs, she quickly put on her dressing-gown. Whoever it was was either vast in weight or carried heavy luggage – and must therefore be a man. The landing floor creaked. Suitcases thudded on to the boards, and keys jingled. He muttered in anger while sorting out the one that mattered. She put a hand over her breasts, as if to stop her heart bursting. He was a few feet away, and she couldn’t be sure that the key wouldn’t be pushed into her lock, and the door swing open. She stepped across and put on the latch, though any firm tap would smash the lot. What would she do if he did? Fight, scream, cry for George, and raise the street with sounds of murder and mayhem? She felt apprehensive, inexplicably guilty, but no real fear.
He cursed at so many keys packed into one bunch, and perhaps, she thought, at not having used the vital one for so long. In the darkness he couldn’t sort them out. She heard a match strike, and hadn’t known that such prolonged swearing was possible. He had burned his hand.
The key went into the lock. His door hit the wall, and he dragged the suitcases in. The almost biblical rhythm to his cursing both fascinated and appalled, yet made her less fearful, since the tone of his voice held no threat. The slamming of his door vibrated the house.
She was afraid to get into bed. He was moving about. She felt as if he had no right to do so, wanted to knock on the wall and tell him to turn his radio down but, as if he had picked up her thoughts, the noise decreased to become hardly audible. Unlike other nights, sleep seemed neither important nor necessary, even though it was past midnight and she had to be out early in the morning. The day had been good, and she didn’t want it to finish. But she got into bed and, on waking up, couldn’t remember a time when she had gone so quickly into oblivion.
22
She put a spoonful of coffee and two of sugar in the dry mug, and boiling water sent a tideline to the top, and was too hot for her lips. She took orange juice from the cupboard, some bread, a pot of jam and a saucer of butter. She went downstairs to the toilet in her dressing-gown, leaving her door open. If anyone was so poor as to want whatever was inside they were welcome. The radio was still on in the next room, but only at the same low pitch as last night. He had either gone to sleep and forgotten it, or he liked such moaning through his dreams.
The orange juice was sour, and went down the sink. She threw the crushed carton into the cardboard wastepaper box. Her small wireless sent out the five-minute news in a Donald Duck squawk: industrial stoppages, terrorist assassins killing innocent people, an air disaster, a financial scandal, a by-election with the Tories back, and a pub-yard slanging match between Russia and China, loud-mouthed notifications that had no reality, unless it was you being bombed, shot, kidnapped or burnt to death. If it happened to you it would only be news to other people, and therefore the sort of story you could well do without.
She switched off, and wrote a shopping list on a piece of cardboard: food to be bought, a newspaper to scour for jobs, tampons, a roll of wide sellotape (no, she had got that already), and more coins for the gas, though there was a demon jar full of them on the shelf with angled blue eyes, crooked lips, and fair hair.
The sky was clear, a cold day good to walk in. She would get ten pounds from her post office account, leaving a hundred and thirty. When it whittled to nothing she would not apply for National Assistance. It was worse than death to go begging at government offices where you filled in forms and had all sorts of questions asked. She’d heard Bert, Alf and Harry laughing over it many a time. That’s what it must be like to be a beggar, because people in such places always turned you into one. They might not want to, but it was their job, and that’s what happened. If you could no longer stand on your own two feet there was only one way to take care of yourself.
Impossible to find ease in the world, but she enjoyed her coffee, and bread and butter. She couldn’t go out, even though she also needed a new tub of cold cream to put on her drying skin; but would look at the changing sky while staying in her own safe body. Or she would appear her most responsible at the interview for an office job. Not much chance. They would want a young girl whose legs and bosom they could stare at while she typed. Get work in a chemist’s, stationer’s, newsagent’s, or maybe in Selfridges. She had noticed women the same age, shape, height and aspect as herself – a bit more style perhaps, but that wasn’t hard to acquire. Yes; madam, can I help you? Would you kindly put that pair of knick
ers back on the counter (and that nice Indian headscarf – or is it Italian?) or go to the cash desk and pay for them?
The room spun. She stopped dancing. She put on her best underwear, her smartest skirt and blouse, and zipped up her leather boots. On turning to her favourite mirror nothing looked back. She combed her hair, losing a strand of grey among the brown. If George’s mob came on a thieving expedition she would call for the floorwalker and have them chased off. That tall one there: he’s got ten tubes of lipstick in the inside pocket of his overcoat. Yes, that’s him. Looks like a ferret – or will soon enough. The poacher’s pocket, I think they call it. Full of stuff he’s stolen. If I don’t, and they get caught, they’ll swear I said it was all right for them to loot. Then I would get hauled to court. Oh yes, I saw them. I saw them once in fact at a fancy-dress night at the Railway Club, when Alf went – no, it was Bert, of course – decked as a tall woman with a battered face and short grey hair wearing a fur coat. He walked across to George and showed his white satin blouse, and stockings held up by suspenders. The men chaffed him, and the women said how handsome she was, and later when everybody got drunk he did a striptease down to his jockstrap, and then changed into ordinary clothes which Alf had brought in a plastic bag. They kicked the women’s clothes around the hall, a frolic which ended by Harry getting into a fight with the man who ran the place.
She put ten coins in the gas. Cold in here. She took the extra-wide tape and stood on a chair to close the window. Don’t like it. She ate a hearty breakfast when the game was up. The day couldn’t be finer for a trip to Ancient China. The transparent paper stuck to her wrist, but she pulled the band free and pressed it firm between wood and wood to keep out the air. In a few weeks it wouldn’t be possible. Better now than never. Don’t like it here, but where could she like it except nowhere?
She stepped down, satisfied at the job, and threw the empty reel on the floor. The curtains were drawn flick-flick and the light put on. Don’t cry, don’t cry, or you’ll wash out the sky. To write a letter would take what life was left, and she couldn’t wait. There was too much to say, and what she couldn’t explain to herself was no use telling George or Edward, who wouldn’t want to listen. There were too many tales in the world, and too many people who didn’t want to hear them, so what was the world for except to get out of?
Her Victory Page 15
