The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  Black was what I reached for. Dark and dramatic. It was the only thing that didn’t terrify me. I bought the long straight elegant black one. And a black cashmere top with a deep v. Black bra from next door to go under, because of that deep, revealing v. Make-up from the little pharmacy smelling of deodorant and hairspray. Next door to that the shoe shop and the new boots that took me less than five minutes to see in the window, try on in the shop, carry out in a bag. Those black leather boots took my breath away.

  ‘Do you want me to bag these for you or bin them?’ The assistant waved a cheery shoe-shop hand at my old boots; the appalling worn and mended, worn again and mended again state of them. They looked forlorn, abandoned on the countertop and I couldn’t do it to them. They bore the imprints of my feet, they had moulded themselves to me and it just isn’t that easy.

  So I carried them with me in a bag. Plus the bag containing my old clothes. I boarded the bus that grinds up the hill to the university campus and I looked like a bag lady.

  When I dropped my workaday rags at the cloakroom before entering the exhibition I felt suddenly naked in my new boots and my black clothes, until someone handed me a glass of sharp grassy wine and I felt myself stretch and uncoil like a waking cat.

  It was all very civilised, people in good clothes standing around chatting over the grassy wine and the catered food, ignoring the hardworked art. My face was tired of smiling so I sipped more wine and took a look at the walls.

  I had not expected the paintings to be good. I had anticipated an exhibition of someone’s hobby paintings that would be at best decorative and at worst talentless. I had not expected to be moved or touched or slapped in the face by them. My heart raced and I couldn’t work out whether it was simply that I was unused to the alcohol or the colours of the paintings and what they were doing to the inside of my head.

  It was as if my memory flashed and blared on me, as if one moment I was there and the next I wasn’t; I was revisiting some purple and amber tinted moment that should have been deleted. The squares and rectangles were like passages to me, places I had been, places I should never, never go again. And then the black clothes didn’t seem such a haphazard choice. The black clothes cast their spell of invisibility.

  I tried to cut a steady path through the room, drawn first to the huge rectangular daubing on the far wall that hummed at me with a deep teal blue splodged with a bright leaf green. It was a portrait. No, it was more. It was paint transformed into a woman. The hands reached out and slid themselves letterlike through the slats of my ribcage and tugged me towards it.

  I drank more wine and as the room started to smudge around the edges and take on pastelly hues and broad strokes I thought that I was foolish. I had to get home on the bus, after all. In fact I was going to be a real Cinderella, not just because of the glass boots but because the last bus left campus at midnight and I had to be on it. Almost the moment I thought it, Tierney appeared. Charming. Alone.

  Alcohol is a poison. This is how it works. That night, in the crisp white space of the University Gallery Mackenzie Tierney did not seem like a bad idea. In the miasma of pinot grigio he was handsome, desirable, dressed in a baggy and crumpled charcoal grey linen jacket with a black fine-knit sweater underneath. There was a suspicion of white T-shirt beneath the very slightly bristled chin. The granite-cliffed edge of jawline and the hand that reached up to smooth at the emerging bristle. A square hand; neat but not manicured nails. They were the nails of a man who gardens or cuts wood for fun.

  His hair was the same salt and pepper it had been in the library when he had stood at the desk. But the alcohol had had enough time to steep itself into my blood. As I looked now at the well-clipped clean of his hair, the pepper was very black and the salting of white and grey gave it other hues, like slate.

  The artist, Joan, swept up to him in a flowing linen outfit complete with big boots, soft and worn and making me feel homesick suddenly for my old boots in the cloakroom. I watched them as they spoke, thinking that either he was very tall or she was short because he had to stoop down, like a giraffe, towards her. His smile was warm. His lips brushed against her cheek and as her arms folded around him and they embraced, I couldn’t breathe. I wanted that cheek to brush against my skin. I craved it. I wanted to know his smell. I wanted what Martha had had with him. My heart was racing as if it had legs and was running. Running. I couldn’t stomach any more of the wine. I needed some water, my mouth had dried. I wanted his tongue to wet it.

  I couldn’t have been more obvious if I’d had a sign round my neck. I was all eyes, all greedy, all shot to hell.

  Yes. He did lean towards me and he smelled the way heaven probably does, something sandalwood and cinnamon. I didn’t dare put the glass to my lips, my teeth would have knocked against it. His eyes. Don’t look in his eyes, I thought, but I couldn’t turn away.

  Well, what did I see? Because I’ve said there’s nothing to be gleaned from them. They’re as deceitful as the tongue. I turned my head in the direction of the painting on the far wall. I started to get a crick in my neck from looking away so I stepped once, twice, to turn my back to him. As if we were dancing an elegant tango he stepped once, twice, and was beside me. Tierney raised his glass, swilled the wine a little as he surveyed the painting on the far wall, A Study in Three Greens. Then I saw it, before it came, I saw it wheeling towards me.

  ‘A Study in Black, she is dressed in the night.’ He leaned, inclined his head, barely and purposefully brushing against my hair to speak directly into my ear. His voice a whisper, firing up every nerve ending in my neck and it seemed that my nipples were channelling electricity directly from the light fitting. The words so low I felt them spangling between my legs.

  Only now, when he was so close I could lick him, I thought there might be an undernote to his smell, something bitter and unpleasant that I couldn’t name. My hands began to shake so much it was all I could do not to drop the stupid wine. He was not anything I had imagined. I had taken a huge detour and it was in the wrong direction. I’d lost control of the steering wheel and the wheels were skidding out from under me. What was I doing? Why had I even come here? I had known what was possible. I was naked again, in the wrong boots. I wanted the painting to be a portal then, somewhere to jump through to find myself…

  Anywhere but here. Get me out.

  Tierney gave a shrug, chinked his glass against mine as if what he had said didn’t matter, but it mattered. It mattered the way it matters if the sky falls on your head, the way it matters if you fall off a cliff and your grasping hands miss the seapinks by a mile as you plummet gracelessly to the waves below.

  He hovered for a moment, like a cat picking over a mouse to see if there’s life left. There wasn’t. I averted my face, looking into the face of the nearest portrait. It stared disconcertingly back, as if it understood everything that was roiling in my head. Some sort of backslapping presentation began then, and I slunk out.

  In the back of the cloakroom I took my real self out of the carrier bags and put it back on. I couldn’t let Mrs Hyde out again. This was a lesson that I thought I had learned so long ago.

  * * *

  The Union Bar was almost empty. A birthday group of girls laughed and screeched and stubbed out cigarettes in the dregs of spent glasses. Against the neon flashing background of students playing slot machines and the metallic clatter of coin and electronic music, I sat. I was going to miss the bus but I didn’t care by then. I needed to sit in a neutral zone and have a drink, even if it was only a ginger beer, to clear my head.

  And I realised that my head has been too clear these last couple of years. It is filled with light; a harsh and blinding white light that illuminates everything.

  Nasureru na!

  Dont’ forget!

  Mrs Milligan asked Martha how the evening went and Martha fudged it hopelessly. In the process she hurt Mrs Milligan’s feelings. There was a sense sometimes that because Martha had the Affairs she was somehow a layer above us, ‘us’ be
ing the spinsters and widows and divorcees.

  ‘Ruby, you wouldn’t like to go to the exhibition would you?’ Mrs Milligan asked. This clearly was a measure of how desperate she was. At this comment, Martha gave out a huffy sound, glared at the back of Mrs Milligan’s head and strode out.

  ‘Erm.’ I had no fudge. Mrs Milligan backtracked immediately.

  ‘I’d like to go one evening, only I don’t know if I can go on my own. I know it sounds silly, I am a grown up after all. Heavens, you probably go to lots of places on your own…’ and then she thought about how that sounded. I didn’t let her off the hook. I thought we would be even then. ‘Oh, look Ruby, you wouldn’t have to stay with me. Just get me there. You know, like the shuttle being piggybacked into space. You know what I mean? Once we got there you could just abandon me, you know, troll off and do your own thing.’

  I looked at her with a thousand things to say, too cowardly to utter one of them. I have been here; I ought to draw her a detailed map of the ways out. And then the moment was gone and we were going to move forward and forget it.

  ‘You’re an independent young woman you see Ruby. I remember what it was like. Vaguely. You lose sight of it once you’re a wife and then someone’s mum. You get your life back eventually, but by then you’ve forgotten what you wanted to do with it.’

  Mrs Milligan, clinging to her mug, managed an extremely jellified smile and turned to sit on the sofa. Her island refuge. I too gripped the lifebuoy that was my tea mug and sailed for the other island refuge, my seat by the window.

  In the reflection on the glass I thought I saw something in Harvey’s face as he stepped away from the table with his mug of tea. I thought he opened his mouth to speak to her, but instead of words coming out, a mouthful of tea washed in.

  But I couldn’t look out that day anyway. A couple were exhibition kissing by the war memorial.

  * * *

  I was in the archive later, tracking my laundresses through 1888–89. I had found an invoice in the household ledger that showed the domestic portraits were commissioned in the summer and autumn of 1889. I wandered through the blue marbled ledger for that year, my head filled with white linen snapping on strung out washing lines across the yard outside the laundry. I had walked there so often, picked my way round the buddleia and valerian that grew now between the thick cobblestones. I had found three of the laundresses. The first two, Maisie and Elsie, were local girls; another, Alice, was from a farm on the border with the neighbouring county.

  But the name that leapt out at me was Mary-Ann Penny. The housekeeper, Mrs Mason, had noted in her neat household journal that Mary-Ann had been born miles away from Kite House, in Totnes in Devon. I looked up Totnes online, found the neat streets rising from the River Dart, and took a virtual tour of the market town Mary-Ann had known before her washhouse and mangle.

  I moved through the pages of the ledger, keeping my eye on the line that belonged to her, just below Maisie Arkwright and above Elsie Whitley. I saw the shillings and the stoppages that Mrs Mason had made and thought of all the days Mary-Ann had steamed away at the linens. Then, one week late in 1890, she was gone. No mention of reason, just a blank in the blue-marbled ledger where her name had been.

  I felt a terrible panic for her. Where had she gone to? I noted the dates, flicked back and forth through the domestic ledgers, the household records for soap and raddlestones, finding anything and everything that could be chased up as a clue.

  As I was scribbling down the details I heard a voice…Lick…a syllable punched out of the air. I listened… Why not?… It was Martha on the phone in the archive office. She was talking with…Mac…but half of their conversation was muffled, not just by distance but by the surreptitious way Martha was talking. She’d come down to the office specially while Mrs Atkinson was on her lunch break and had gone to the bank. Martha didn’t want anyone to overhear. The few words I could tune into made no sense except for a sudden…promise.

  They made some sort of date and I wanted to walk in there and slap her roundly. My palms itched. I didn’t move as she hung up and moved off down the corridor. She probably thought I was on my lunchbreak too, that I had gone to the bank.

  I followed her home after closing. It was easy to do. I just left earlier than her and made certain of my vantage point in the little side street that cuts down the side of the bank called Red Hat Lane. No one came through there so I could just lurk until Martha left the library and pick up her trail. She walked towards the centre of town, towards the new retail and luxury apartments development by Tripp Tierney Associates at the canalside. It’s called Dry Dock because the canal doesn’t go anywhere and no one from town could afford to live there.

  Except, it turns out, for Mackenzie Tierney. I followed Martha until she slipped between the edges of the buildings. The early evening punters were arriving at the pubs and canalside restaurants, a couple of hen parties getting an early start on the drinking and some corporate people, indistinguishable in their suits.

  Their suits. I had forgotten the crispness of a good suit. I had forgotten what gentleman’s grooming could be, the cedar tang of expensive aftershave, the hair cut in a salon by the style director. Men with all their edges knocked off, or rather their edges polished and honed, chins chiselled out of bristle and jawbone.

  For just a moment I took my eye off Martha and nearly lost her amongst the charcoal flannel and moss-green wool. A glimmer of cufflink. The clean footprint of a leather soled shoe. They appeared like camouflage to distract and befuddle me. It was the suspension bridge that brought me back to earth. Just as she crossed it the floodlights came on, illuminating the glory of the spun-steel wires cobwebbing Martha’s hurrying, scurrying figure.

  Tierney was waiting at the other end of the bridge. He came striding to meet her, still in his lucky linen chat-up jacket, and I saw what he didn’t. I saw her flinch as his arms enfolded her. There was no escaping the sight of that flinch. I saw her shoulders did not lose their tension as his linen-clad arm rested across them and they walked to a nearby doorway, glassy and lit. I could view them through the glass wall, making their way up the staircase as a woman with a great dane made her way down. They exchanged a greeting. It was like an ant farm.

  I watched, standing in the darkness between the candlelit Italian restaurant and a smoky, rowdy pub. It was almost as if they sucked all the light out of the alleyway into themselves. There were tiny floor lights set into metal runners alongside the pavement that ran between the two buildings that should have illuminated me, the watcher. But they didn’t.

  Martha and Tierney moved all the way up to the top flat, to the roof terrace. To a tiny brushed-metal door in a wall of golden-hued wood cladding and the shelter of waving greenery. At the door she was hemmed in by his hands. On her face, in her hair. At her neck. I had seen what he had not; I had seen her flinch.

  * * *

  Sometimes we are in a web of our own spinning. We are the spider. When we’re kids there’s always the idea that our parents will pluck us free from the knots and strands. I know, it doesn’t always work because they’re spinning their own disasters into intricate design. But sometimes. Just sometimes. There should be someone for all of us, ready to catch us, should we fall.

  * * *

  I occupied no space at all in the farthest corner from the patio heater. I sipped at a Guinness and watched the cold autumn stars on the surface of the canal and did not look at the coin in my hand. I felt as if the world was all sharpened edges and there was nowhere to be at rest. All I could think of was the heat in the twenty pence piece turning between my fingers. The second the barman handed it to me, it had seemed to catch like a distress flare, a signal. Flash. I closed my eyes and—this is important, this is how hard I have tried—I stowed it in my pocket.

  I zipped it. Metal teeth biting. Done.

  Then I sat and waited. Who knew what for, I was grown up enough to know that she wasn’t going home. She was there for the night, there for Tierney to make brea
kfast for in the morning. Except no, that was wrong. Tierney would expect her to make breakfast.

  I waited because she had flinched, because there was something not quite right and I knew I wouldn’t settle anywhere else. When the barman finally moved me out into the night and the lights started to click off all around the canalside, I realised I had missed the last bus home.

  Kotowaza: ‘Uma no mimi ni nenbutsu’

  Japanese Proverb: ‘A prayer in the ears of a horse’

  There was, indeed there still is, a lot of time in the library to think. A library is everything hushed between the covers. If all the books were talking the noise would be horrendous, when you think about it. Not that I imagine people do, unless they happen to spend their time loafing behind the desk of the local library.

  There is consequently a lot of space for brooding and torment. We aren’t hustled or bustled, not even when the clock is ticking towards closing time and the last few Townswomen’s Guild members are fighting over the latest Josephine Cox. If your life happens to be filled with angst then it can stew in the library. Thus it was that Mrs Milligan, mild-mannered librarian Mrs Milligan, was the one who spoke out against Martha.

  Mrs Milligan had been on an emotional white-knuckle ride ever since her daughter-in-law Naomi had strayed. I have never had a child but it was plain to see that as time ticked on and the divorce proceedings soured, Mrs Milligan was struggling with the urge to do Naomi serious harm. Despite the fact that he was scorned, Mrs Milligan’s son persisted in loving his errant wife and to be frank, that was all that saved her. Mrs Milligan’s dreams might be filled with the fantasy of meeting Naomi in a back alley and ripping her face off, but saving Alex from further hurt prevented her from actually doing it.