A Weekend with Claude

by Beryl Bainbridge

  2

  LILY

  I don’t know whether I’ve had a nice time or not, though I suppose that wasn’t the object of the exercise. Anyway, it’s settled now, though it may be foolish to believe anything is really settled. This morning, when I first got up, before Shebah was shot, I felt wide awake. Now I feel tired and would like a bath. I could have one, but it would mean walking away from them down the garden and into the house, and Edward would follow in case I was being molested by Claude, so it’s not worth it.

  When we arrived yesterday, the four of us, I shouted loudly in the street outside so as not to sound nervous. I wasn’t confident about all the luggage we had brought, because it looked as if we had come for a month, rather than for a night and a day and a morning. Victorian Norman had his haversack, because he’s going straight up north afterwards and will camp on the way, and Shebah had her usual bag full of letters and lawsuits and cuttings from the Observer. We came Indian file, partly because the pavement was narrow and partly because we wanted to look self-effacing and less of a crowd. We did look interesting in a sort of way, and I felt rather proud and rather ashamed of us all. Deep down, I don’t seem to have grown used to having come so far from my childhood environment. Even living in London seems odd, not to mention having a flat with carpets. And my friends are a bit funny. Not exactly funny – not in the ha-ha sense – though I suppose Shebah is a bit comical. She’s not talking at the moment, which makes her look different, almost clumsy. Just now she sits on a white cane chair, pouting, eyes closed behind her glasses. She likes sitting in the open air among the daisies. Like me, she’s probably thinking how they approach most closely to the image she has of herself – little and pretty and white.

  I don’t really think I’m like a daisy – it’s more that I’ve trained my mind to think these thoughts – and I’ve found lately that maybe I haven’t an image at all. Or if I have, it’s blurred. Coming here on the bus I had an image of myself as a chatterer, with ‘Oh, that’s a lovely house’ and ‘Oh, what a super house’. At least I said all that because Victorian Norman never said a word, just stared out of the window, and I did want us to sound as if we were animated. Shebah kept handing us sweeties, but I didn’t take one. I don’t eat sweets any more. Edward sat in front of me, and it meant I could lean forward and put my hand on his neck, and I liked that, because I thought if anyone was watching us it looked as if we had been married for years and I was still adored. I mean, I feel fairly certain I’m still adored – but then I’ve only known Edward a little while and he doesn’t know me very well. I met him at a party, and I always make an impact at first meeting – that is, if the person involved is lost enough, or odd enough, or something. At least it’s always been like that before. They usually go off me equally quickly. Edward seems to be the exception at the moment, and he just might marry me if I’m nice enough long enough. And I simply have to get married this time, because of the baby not yet born, and that’s why we all came here this weekend – for me to make Edward the father of the baby. I’ve never been so cunning before. Never. It’s not really such a mean trick to play on anyone – well, not on Edward, because he’s always smiling at children and patting them on the head. I made Shebah and Norman come with me because they’re my friends, and they’ve spent most of the weekend having little chats with Edward and putting me in a good light. They haven’t told me yet what they said, but it must have been nice, and maybe tomorrow Edward will ask me to marry him. With a bit of an effort I could be a good wife. I could even help him in his career. I don’t know much about geology – I haven’t had time to go to the library – but rocks shouldn’t be too difficult to brush up on. I’ve got to have this baby. It would hurt not to have it.

  On the way here I thought I recognised the road, since I went to school nearby. But it was like in those cowboy films when there seem to be an awful lot of Indians falling off horses, but it’s only the same Indian on the same old horse. I kept thinking I knew the next bend in the road, but I didn’t. It was just like a thousand other roads bordered with green hedges and ribboned with grass, and the same old tree bending down. I remember one ride to school, in the dark, my very first term. I’d had my hair permanently waved and it had the same texture as my grey school coat. The bus turned off the road into a drive, and there were shapes of trees and a notice board showing faintly, and someone said we’d arrived. We ate egg on toast in a basement which might have been a dungeon, and there were long loaves of bread with wet insides, and most of the girls seemed elderly and lit cigarettes after the meal. One girl had bunches of yellow curls hanging like grapes above each ear. She wore a clever, amused expression, and after yawning she said, ‘My God, I’m tired.’ Then we walked in the darkness outside, under some trees and through a door that had horses’ hooves nailed up all over it, and up some stone steps into a room with three beds. The girl with the clever face said I’d better make my bed, and another girl came in and began to eat an onion. I turned my back and fiddled with my bedding and looked at the name tapes my mother had sewn on the blankets, and tears came into my eyes because I didn’t know how to make a bed, and I felt foolish and sad and not at all beautiful. I wasn’t beautiful, but every day at the same time I said to God ‘Please make me better looking’, and that made my inside feel better. In the end I had to turn round, and the onion-eater said ‘Aren’t you the girl that’s had no schooling?’ in a funny sprawled voice – a South African take-me-back-to-the-old-Transvaal voice. I said, ‘Yes.’ She must have been mixing me up with someone else, because I’d hardly had a beastly day off school for years; but it was easier than saying I hadn’t got a bed of my own at home and that I slept with my mother, and that she always made the bed anyway, and that my brother slept with my father. There were two empty bedrooms as well and we all slept without nightclothes, except my father, who wore cream combinations. If there had ever been a fire, God help us, we would all have had to burn rather than come down a ladder so unprepared, and if one of us went to the lavatory in the middle of the night Father would shout out, ‘Many there, luv?’ This girl, who was later quite nice, and who used to break into the Prince Igor dances at the drop of a hat (proving to me how lucky I was to possess greater sensitivity, seeing I was thinner than her but would have died rather than dance anything and show my muscular calves), helped me make the bed. The other girl lay back looking wrier than ever, and I thought I’d better worry tomorrow over the misunderstanding about my former expensive education. There’s very little about my schooldays I remember now, except the snow coming down one winter Sunday when we went to church. In the square the Salvation Army band was playing ‘The Sea of Love is Rolling In’. It was a bit like a Christmas card, and I think I felt like crying. I don’t mean I was homesick or anything. It’s just that sentimental moments like that generally make me forget how special I could be if only I had the chance, and I get all lost and puny and dwindle right down to almost nothing. Anyway, I remember that particular morning because later, in church, I didn’t kneel down quick enough, and Matron thwacked me on the shoulder with her umbrella, and I almost swung round and bashed her. Not that I minded too much about the umbrella, but I’d been daydreaming about the vicar, alternating between thinking he was Rochester and I was Jane Eyre (what, leave Ferndale and all that I hold most dear?) and the idea of him being Charles Boyer in that film about the Titanic. We were sinking together with the violins playing – and Matron spoilt it with her brolly tapping. I haven’t mentioned to Edward that I went to school here, or about the vicar. Once or twice when I’ve told him little anecdotes about my past, he’s given me a funny look. I’d like him to be jealous, but I don’t want to overdo it. Men are funny like that – their way of showing jealousy is to disappear off the face of the earth.

  I’ve told Norman about the school. He was impressed, I think, despite his being a Communist. Anyway, he didn’t laugh, which was a blessing. His laugh is terrible; his nostrils flare like a horse. When I first heard him sniggering I was interviewi
ng him about a room to rent in my house in Morpeth Street. I’m not really a Bloated Capitalist. The house had been left to me by my Auntie Edith, and it was falling down. Some of the windows were missing. There was only me living there, and Miss Evans, the hair-remover, who changed into gum boots and a mackintosh when she returned from work because the place was so damp. She carried a torch because she was afraid the light switches would give her a shock. She was over-cautious, but then her career in electrolysis had probably unnerved her. Someone had told me they knew a man who would be suitable as a lodger; he was clean and quiet and kept himself to himself. I needed the money, so I said he could come round and I’d talk to him. When I opened the door to him at our first meeting he appeared small and somehow old-fashioned. He had narrow trousers and wore a detachable collar with rounded edges, like the ones my father affected, and a flat peaked cap. He took his cap off and sort of bowed. There was a fire in my living-room. I was proud of that room. The wallpaper had a pattern of Sicilian lions with their tongues sticking out, and there was a brass bed and a piano, and the stuffed head of a moose on the wall with a paper garland twisted round its horns. It wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but that room had style. I felt very like a landlady, which I was, and I behaved very formally at the beginning. I started to say that I liked to be quiet, but Norman didn’t stop at a distance to listen; he advanced closer and closer, neck stuck out like a tortoise above his wing collar, till we were nose to nose, and my skirt began to smoulder. Oh ho, I thought, this is a right one all right, and then he spun me round and beat at my bottom with his flat check cap. After he had come to live in the house he said he couldn’t believe his luck – me catching fire like that. I said it was no wonder and did he always have to talk to one so intensely. He said he had wax in both ears and had to lip-read to understand what people were saying and that was why he moved so near. I did once get him to have the wax cleaned out, but for weeks afterwards he suffered terribly from all the cups rattling in the Kardomah, and the machines at work, and I had to buy him ear-plugs till the wax re-formed.

  I haven’t had much chance to talk to Norman this weekend. When we lived in the same house we used to talk for hours. We haven’t even been able to discuss Shebah being shot in the leg. We won’t ever be able to talk about it, not for ages. Norman will be going back up north and I’ll be returning to my new bedsitter in London. It’s a pity there’s not more time. It’s all so final, so serious. A crusade to end all crusades, in a sense. I don’t really think it’s that serious. Norman was going to tell me what he thought of Edward, whether he was suitable, but Shebah’s accident got in the way. I think Edward will be all right. He is, after all, according to Claude, the reflection of the tenderness I bear myself. It’s always ourselves we love, Claude says.

  Yesterday, when we arrived and went through the door into the shop, Claude held his arms out so wide that there was no way to go but into them. At the moment of penetration into the shop, or partial penetration, because our embrace had piled the others into a heap behind, Victorian Norman trod on Shebah’s foot, which lay exposed in an open-work sandal. She swore at him.

  ‘Man,’ said Claude, shaking Edward’s hand, ‘good to see you.’ Then Julia said nice things, and we were through the shop, into the hall and going up the open staircase to the living-room above. A wooden angel tethered to the wall held praying hands above Shebah’s Napoleonic pigtail.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she breathed.

  I wanted to hug Edward – I wanted to stand on tiptoe and pirouette on the Indian carpet and show him everything at once – but I was torn by wanting to show Shebah and Victorian Norman too. I pointed quickly in all directions – the jade for Shebah, the Boucher nudes for Norman – and I brought my hand round past the piano and the glass and the silver in a sort of circle until I was pointing at myself. I suppose I really meant Edward to understand ‘All this and me too’. Actually, it was wasted on him. He wasn’t watching. Claude was, though, and he knew what I meant and I nearly shouted with laughter, though again I might have felt like crying. All this emotion is so wearying, as Shebah would put it. I think it’s inherited. My father always wept when they played ‘Silver Threads among the Gold’ on the wireless.

  Upstairs in Claude’s room there was so much to look at and touch that for a while we didn’t have to talk. Then Julia showed me into a bedroom with pink-washed walls and a china cherub with a pot belly holding up a lamp bulb, and she said, ‘This room is for you and Edward. How are things? You look well.’

  ‘I feel marvellous,’ I told her. I did mean it. Loud laughter came from the living-room, and a sort of shivering sound as though someone had touched the harp.

  Last time I came here, I saw Billie. He sat near the harp, he touched it with his knuckles and it lurched sideways. The flaps of his stupid flying helmet swung on either side of his face like a spaniel’s ears. Everything in the room trembled – all the little glass things and the little china things: a thousand, tiny dying vibrations in the crowded room. It was Claude’s idea that we should meet here. Neutral ground, he called it. Just talk to him, he told me. He said I might get Billie back if I found the right words. When it came to it, in spite of the years spent apart and the years spent together and the millions of words written on paper when Billie went away to Australia, all the words seemed the wrong ones. I remember in my head what he had written in letters –

  ‘I think of you constantly. If I said, come out here to me, would you?

  ‘I sat on a balcony overlooking Sydney harbour, and watched the lights and thought of you. I drove into the bush last night. The gum trees sprawl in the dust. We shot a kangaroo later. When it was skinned there was a naked fleshless baby, not quite breathing. I thought of you.

  ‘How you would revel in this heat, how it would suit your unconventional ideas of summer dress …’

  I hadn’t been able to begin to imagine what sort of heat he meant. Sometimes, when we had a warm day in the backyard of Morpeth Street, I had put sun oil on my stomach. Across my throat had spread a line of black specks, a necklace of sooty beads. I had lain on the paving stones unaware of just how pitiful, how callus-footed, how unbelievable I was. I didn’t believe in heritage, in what is handed down – the curve of bone, the thickness of the skin – I thought everything was juxtaposed by brain and mind and lovely thoughts. And Billie told me the truth. Which I couldn’t accept. I had to talk it out, I had to tell him something. He had to help me rebuild that image of myself he had so cruelly shattered. A knife thrust into the personality, Claude says, can lead to loss of life.

  ‘I can’t help it if I don’t love you, can I?’ Billie had said finally. ‘I have been so ashamed of you, so embarrassed.’

  ‘But I’ve been ill,’ I told him. ‘It was my father dying and the shock of you coming home.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work, you must see that,’ he said. ‘You would never fit in with my parents.’

  I would have preferred a kick in the face, or a removal of my front teeth. ‘I suppose really I never really loved you,’ I lied.

  He spun round. For an instant he was the old lovely, sentimental Billie … ‘But I loved you,’ he said.

  We didn’t say anything else. We can lose actualities, Claude says, but to have dreams torn from us is too much.

  The vintage car, the one Billie and I had made love in, went out of the yard. Billie’s face at the wheel seemed so cheerful. He waved, he touched the cap on his head. A thin trail of exhaust rose in the warm air. There was nothing more to do but hunch my shoulders and bow low to protect my damaged heart. I went for a walk along the road with Claude and cried out at each tree, because there was no one to hear, and Claude put his arm round my shoulders (already not drooping quite so much) and a chill breeze made us walk faster and faster.

  I don’t know why I’m so stuck on Billie. Maybe it had a lot to do with my mother. She liked him – you could say she encouraged him. She thought because he wore a bowler hat he must be a gentleman. She invited him to supper, and s
he didn’t bat an eyelid when he stroked my leg under the table. It was quite obvious what he was doing, because I went bright red. She had practically screamed when the hotel waiter had put his arm round my shoulder; she thought hotel waiters were common. My father didn’t like Billie. I’ve got a photograph of my dad as a child in knickerbockers, taken after a board-school concert in the year dot, when he sang ‘Lily of Laguna’: he has a weird expression on his face, as though there was something nasty jumping out of the camera at him. He looked at Billie in the same sort of way – though, come to think of it, that was his normal expression.

  The first time Billie ever took me out we went to a charity night at the Empire Theatre. During a selection from Rose Marie, I was sick. Most of it went over Billie’s trousers. He dragged me out of the auditorium. All the retching sounds echoed up and down the stone corridor. I’m not usually sick; I think Billie made me nervy. After that we didn’t go out much. When I moved into Auntie Edith’s house we played ping-pong in the evenings, on a small table. Billie didn’t actually live with me, in case my mother dropped in and accused me of being a whore. He stayed most nights, though. Shebah hated him. She kept telling me she’d met him before in compromising circumstances – at a poetry group, at a drama meeting, somewhere very unlikely. ‘It’s not possible,’ I said, but when they came face to face in the kitchen you could tell she recognised him, though Billie denied knowing her from Adam. He was probably telling the truth. Shebah’s one of those people who once seen are never forgotten. She wears bright red lipstick and her upper lip is quite hairy. Most people refuse to walk down the street with her. Norman says she looks like a demented nun, but I think she’s more like a crazed pirate. Coming here, Norman refused to travel with her. He put her on the London train and then walked away. She was wailing, he said, and waving all her scarves. Until this weekend she’d always vowed she would never go on a train because of sitting with all the scum, and yet the idea of travel appeals to her. At one time we discussed the possibility of her making a permanent life for herself on the railways – at night, when she wouldn’t see so many people. ‘Living is what gets me, darling,’ she said, ‘but if I could move about sitting down, and just see things through windows without being observed, it would be splendid.’ Actually she desires people like some people desire money or fame. Through people, Claude says, she transcends her ageing body. She’s over sixty now, and I don’t think she’s ever looked any different. She has a photograph in her handbag of herself as a girl on a charabanc outing, and even then there was a shadow above her top lip. Claude says her conception of herself, the young bosoms bobbing on the waves, the plump shoulders touched by the sea at Blackpool, is based on a snapshot taken forty years ago. She thinks other women are out to get her.