The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  Which meant that this rage had to find an outlet somewhere. No, this is not cod psychology. This is common sense. Everyone knew Mrs Milligan hungered for this, especially after the Tuesday evening when she was leaving work and Naomi was arriving, presumably to borrow a book, and Mrs Milligan trapped her in the revolving door.

  She didn’t say one word, didn’t even look at her, she just made certain that as Naomi pushed to go in, she herself pushed to go out so that neither moved. She was utterly stilled, utterly patient until her soon-to-be-ex-daughter-in-law turned to face the street.

  Mrs Milligan turned back into the library and they pushed in tandem, Naomi cast out into the street and Mrs Milligan thrown back under the carved gaze of Queen Victoria in the lobby. Mrs Milligan hurrying back to the staffroom for an umbrella she had not forgotten. Harvey trying to joke (‘Does it have a wild goose on it?’) as Mrs Milligan, voice squeaky with tears and fury, bent more than double to peer under the formica table.

  It seemed Mrs Milligan had found out, rather as I had, that the art exhibition was not a private sell-out. What she had not found out was that the art exhibition was a raw nerve for Martha too.

  ‘Did you enjoy going to the art exhibition with Mac, Martha?’ was her opening salvo. And Martha knew it, it was squeaking out for all of us to hear. Harvey took four biscuits and ducked out into the office.

  ‘Not much.’ Which was, somehow, not even half a lie. Something hissed in Mrs Milligan as she stiffened; it made a sound like steel cable being tensioned. As usual I was in my seat at the window and could pretend to be looking out whilst catching the whole show played out in reflection.

  ‘Were there many naked people?’ Mrs Milligan pursed her lips. Martha looked her over, trying to assess her. ‘Well, were there? Nudes are something of a speciality for Joan.’

  ‘It was all a bit colourful for me. Lots of purple.’

  Martha was either exceptionally good at busking or she’d had a look at the catalogue.

  ‘She has a fixation about penises you know.’

  Mrs Atkinson walked in on this, as baffled as the rest of us as to whether Mrs Milligan was talking about Joan of Art, Martha or possibly the hated Naomi.

  ‘Who has?’ Mrs Atkinson, ever to the point.

  ‘Joan. The artist, Joan Twydall. Always has had, ever since art college. If you ask me the show she should put on is her own very personal collection of penile portraits. She’s very hands on, experimental. A suck-him-off-and-see sort of woman.’ Her pursed lips lent the words a lemony tang. Mrs Atkinson’s lips also pursed and I wondered at what memory.

  ‘I should mention that to Mac. I don’t think he knows about that side to Joan.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he does.’ Mrs Milligan, horribly jolly. ‘I think you might find Number 5 Violet looks familiar.’

  Mrs Milligan didn’t blink. She was offering information. A warning, warped slightly out of shape under the pressure of her anger.

  Martha tried to sit down then, with a pleasant, peacemaking smile and her mug of tea. Mrs Milligan took one graceful step, as if learning a dance, approaching Martha as her partner. They were almost touching, Mrs Milligan’s small bosom just level with Martha’s more ample breasts.

  ‘You mention it to Mac Tierney. Perhaps he can have a laugh about it with Anita.’

  ‘Anita?’ Martha sat down, pulled a magazine from the side pocket of her bag.

  ‘You know Anita don’t you?’

  It was obvious, even in the reversed world reflection, that Martha had no idea who Anita was.

  ‘Professor Winstanley?’

  Martha blew on her hot tea, shook her head vaguely; really not very interested.

  ‘Tierney’s wife.’

  Pins dropped all over town and we heard each one of them in the silence. Mrs Milligan said it simply and sharply. No malice. No triumph. Just the bare fact. Then she walked out. Martha did not look up, but as she sipped at her tea the smallest drop splashed out onto the front of her top.

  * * *

  It was like waiting for the next episode of your favourite serial. Everyone was aware that Martha had shut herself into Harvey’s office at around four o’clock and although there had been a sudden rush on and no one had the spare time to earwig on the conversation, we all knew that she had called Tierney. I was hoping she had a strategy, that her news about Mrs Tierney would give her a cast-iron reason to ditch him and she could live happily ever after, on her own or with anyone else.

  But then, maybe Martha didn’t want to live happily ever after. I began to wonder what she thought of bleeding hearts, pierced by the arrows of desire, dripping the O-positive of passion into your lungs until you suffocate on it.

  It rained very hard after the phone call. It drummed on the cobwebby chickenwired safety glass that they put into the cupola dome. Mrs Atkinson had to get a couple of buckets out for the leak in the corner of the staffroom. Call me over-dramatic if you will, but I felt all that day it was as if the sky was crying for Martha and her outright stupidity.

  Mrs Milligan was red-eyed and if anyone pressed her too hard, for instance the man in the reference section who requested Keesings Archive, her voice cracked. She hid from Martha, trolleying up and down the shelves like a bibliophilic air steward to keep away from the desk. Shelving and reshelving and sorting out the Dewey numbers and God help anyone trying to take out a book.

  I pushed out through the revolving doors into a street lit early with sulphurous orange. The sky was plum-like, bursting with the ripeness of rain, and the air had that clean smell that downpours always bring. How disheartening then to see a sleek and far-too-expensive sports car pull up next to the bank and Martha, skipping and hopping through the puddles near the zebra crossing before she skipped and hopped into the passenger seat.

  I saw them. Tierney grabbing her neck, like someone throttling a rabbit, pulling her to him and kissing her, hands moving around her shoulders, encapsulating her. Then the windows steamed up and a big artic pulled up at the lights and blocked them from view.

  O mi haru

  To keep watch

  The next day the plum-ripe sky had not lifted and you could not tell where yesterday had ended and where today began. They ran into one another, like the paintings the kids do in the Arty Starty sessions that we hold on a Thursday.

  Martha arrived late, smug and oversexed in a particularly textural outfit. A black embroidered skirt that looked as if it had done time at the Moulin Rouge swished beneath a persian lamb gem of a jacket, all foraged from the vintage place. She strode across the carpet in purple boots, laced, and with a striped-wood louis heel.

  I’m unsure whether I felt shame that I ended up sobbing in the toilets over those boots. The freedom of the purple, the confidence of the shaped heel, as if everything I wasn’t, right at that moment, was in that footwear. As if, in fact, someone else was wearing my shoes. Is this how Cinderella felt, I thought as I splashed my face with cold water, when she saw the ugly stepsisters trying to crush their bunions into that which was rightfully hers? Then I looked in the mirror and I knew who was the ugly stepsister.

  The door creaked arthritically. Mrs Milligan slipped in, startled to see me and my eyes, a perfect red-for-red match for hers.

  ‘I’m sorry Ruby, I didn’t know anyone was in here. I’m sorry.’ And she was slithering back out again, despite the fact that there are two cubicles in here. But of course only one sink. I stopped her leaving.

  ‘That’s all right Mrs Milligan. I’m on my way out.’ And I pulled the door just slightly wider for her. She managed the wobbliest of smiles and it took such effort that I knew things had gone beyond her anger at Martha. I knew at that instant that everything about Martha was only the icing on the cake of Mrs Milligan’s troubles. Something terrible was happening to Mrs Milligan. Her actions had seemed harsh but it was clear that Mrs Milligan had also seen some of the different angles in the Mac/Martha relationship, seen for herself that Martha needed to be helped. Assisted. Saved.

&
nbsp; On my lunchbreak, I cheated the queue at the post office. I had put the letter together with those rub off letters that you can buy at the stationers and posted it on my way back to the library. I let it slip into the box marked ‘all destinations’, which seemed appropriate. I had no idea where it was going to take me. It would be a couple of days before it reached her but, as I have mentioned, I am a patient woman.

  The very next morning, however, while Imogen the Arty Starty tutor was hanging out of the window having a post-Arty-Starty cigarette, Martha put the kettle on and smiled broadly at Mrs Milligan,

  ‘Thanks for the advice by the way. You’re entitled to your opinion.’ And proffered her teacup as if toasting free will. Mrs Milligan looked up at Martha as though she were speaking Intermediate Japanese and said nothing.

  Martha has a redeeming feature. That day, when she felt herself both cheated and vilified, when she felt like the Whore of Babylon, she had the courage to be brashly rebellious and devil-may-care, tossing her auburn hair and keeping up the pretence that she was proud to be her. She did not let go of her Self.

  Who knows what Martha’s reaction was on opening the letter but she had certainly thought about it. Why else would she comment to Mrs Milligan? He is not for you is what I had rubbed off onto the paper, and trusted that she would read the meaning properly.

  Now I could see that she might misinterpret this. In the face of Mrs Milligan’s comments she might be infuriated, see it as homewrecker censure instead of wisdom. I had my fingers crossed that the Martha underneath, the bronze, inner Martha, would hang onto the truth of the words and they would seep inwards. I had seen how she was that night at the canalside and the snatch-and-grab embrace in the car. Tierney was a classic, a married man taking his pleasure. Not giving, for he had nothing to give.

  Make the leap, Martha, I thought, willing her onwards.

  * * *

  Therefore, I composed the next letter more thoughtfully. It needed more magic, I saw that now. I should have seen it before, woven into the raw silks and velvets and that persian lamb jacket. I chose a different set of letters from the whirligig display at the stationers, only just catching them open on my way to Intermediate Japanese.

  I sat in my usual seat at the back like a miscreant schoolgirl, rubbing at the letters instead of listening as Setsuke took the class through the minefield of true adjectives. As the words atarashii kutsu…new shoes filtered into my head like music… atarashikunai kutsu…not new shoes…I knew what had to be said.

  * * *

  Break from the false for you are true.

  He is a very bad idea.

  Trust me.

  * * *

  I knew the day she’d got it even though she didn’t mention one word, rubbed off or otherwise. I was in the archive again so I didn’t see her myself, but I knew. I felt a draught at the back of my neck as I sifted through the census looking for the laundresses. It was as if Martha’s temperature had dropped that day, you could stand at Books In as she manned Books Out and feel the chill. She fumbled. She dropped. In the staffroom she put the kettle on to boil and forgot to put the lid on. Then she went to cry in the toilets. If Mrs Milligan hadn’t happened along, the wallpaper, such as it is, would have been peeling off. In the end Mrs Atkinson shouted.

  ‘What on earth is the matter with you today Martha?’ In a very tired and weary voice, like a schoolteacher after a long day with the learning-impaired having to come home to her own annoying offspring.

  It had been a long day at County Hall for Mrs Atkinson. Every quarter, she found herself shoehorning her feet into her fancy shoes so that they’d take her seriously at the budgetary meetings in the Great Chamber at County Hall. The Councillors smacked their greedy lips over our stately sandstone building, and Mrs Atkinson fought to keep the library full of books instead of menus.

  The day was stretching further into the evening as the book club ladies were due, in tandem with Harvey’s It’s a Crime Not to Read These! promotion on detective novels.

  The book club meet once a month and I generally loiter at the desk pretending to be working, but in fact I’ve usually got a copy of their latest read and I sit and listen. I can’t decide whether I prefer an evening of Intermediate Japanese or the book club. Although that sobriquet doesn’t nearly cover them, they are so much more than that, they are a coven. Wise with all their years.

  As they sorted out their coffee mugs and opened up some of the cake tins that had been brought along they discussed the fact that Angharad (redhaired history teacher, recently traded in by husband for very much younger woman, a woman in fact, three years younger than the youngest of their four daughters) had spent an hour in the morning hiding under her kitchen table. She had been up as usual at six, and whilst brewing up a mug of peppermint tea had chanced to look out into the garden.

  ‘There I am, expecting to see that woodpecker that’s wrecking the apple tree and instead it’s him. Five pairs he took. Five. And I wouldn’t mind, but they’re granny pants. There’s no understanding it. Big cotton granny pants.’

  The knicker thief, wearing a ski mask, had set her head as well as her rotary clothes line spinning.

  ‘It’s such an invasion. I haven’t been able to unlock the back door all day. I just can’t. And yet I know he’s gone. I heard him going over the fence—which he’s cracked. One foot on the fork of the plum tree and he’s up and over, but that fence is only held together with paint. I keep telling Dinah next door we need to replace it. Cracked it like a twig.’ She took a revitalising swig of the Australian shiraz Harvey had trawled from the internet. ‘I hope the bastard hurt himself.’ And they fussed and buzzed around her making a sound like a hive of bees.

  As I turned to the computer, I hoped that somewhere the knicker thief was sweating with their curses. Then I noticed the movement in the lobby, an adjustment of shadows.

  I tried not to crane forwards to see what was happening out there. Two figures partly obscured by the freestanding noticeboard pinned with Harvey’s It’s a Crime Not to Read These! promotional poster. And then Martha took a step back, edging into view beside Queen Victoria’s fossilised petticoats.

  I could see her shoes under her swirling turquoise hemline. Some 1920’s Mary Janes with a stubby heel. The skirt swished again as Martha sidestepped Tierney’s attempt to corner her. He seemed to have made himself much taller, looming over her, casting a shadow.

  Martha’s head shaking. Martha’s eyes not looking at him. His eyes never moving from her face, his body filling all the available space and then, suddenly, the moment he had got what he wanted he stepped aside, his arm reaching out to the small of her back to shepherd her to the doors.

  I was shaking, my fingers flabby on the keyboard, typing gibberish.

  The book club ladies were taking their seats. Angharad came to the desk, looked over the top of the monitor at me.

  ‘Ruby, have you seen Martha?’

  ‘I found her.’ We turned at Tierney’s voice. ‘Is there a prize?’

  Martha stood beside him, expressionless as his hand smoothed down the curve of her bottom. ‘Shall we join them?’ he asked, increasing the intensity of charm in his smile. Martha moved ahead of him and his hand never left her back. He seemed attentive, gentlemanly. He turned to Harvey, pouring out wine beside the display of crime novels. Tierney looked up at the display with a sneering smile before he snaffled a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc from the end of the table.

  ‘It would be a crime not to drink this.’ A patronising smirk at Harvey.

  Taking his seat beside Martha, Tierney realised he did not have a glass. As he wandered back towards Harvey, Jill D’Eath swooped on Tierney’s stolen bottle and began to pass it around. The book club have coffee as a rule, but now they topped up their mugs, earthenware ones made for them by Brid who does pottery at the Tech on Thursdays just before I turn up for Intermediate Japanese. They emptied the wine between them and then began to discuss Garganey Watch as Tierney returned, glass in hand, t
o wonder where his wine had vanished to. Ellen Freethy began to read a passage, and Tierney fumbled about, feeling for a wet and winey patch on the carpeting beside the empty bottle.

  Abandoning the search he leaned back in his plastic chair, reached a relaxed arm around Martha’s shoulders and let his hand—hairy, a heavy gold ring on the pinkie finger—drape so that it was at all times in contact with her breast.

  Martha. She didn’t squirm but her body began to close up, her leg casually crossed, her body turned just slightly away from him. She leant forwards to reach for her mug of wine, to disentangle his straying fingers from the fabric of herself. From the Books In desk I could see the patch of sweat on her back spread like a lake across the silk of her vintage blouse.

  As Tierney sloped back to the crime promotion for more wine, Harvey made sure he received a bottle that contained a cocktail of dregs he’d funnelled from two bottles of sour sauvignon blanc and the book club ladies executed a neat and clever musical chairs manoeuvre. Ellen Freethy (tall and white haired; her son and daughter-in-law recently took over the Paintball Pandemonium combat zone out in the woodland) made as if to go to the loo then turned on her heel to take up Tierney’s place next to Martha. Returning with his vinegar drink, Tierney found himself ousted.

  ‘There’s a seat over here Mr Tierney,’ smiled Angharad.

  ‘This is my chair, I think.’ His hairy hand rested on the moulded plastic chair back. Ellen, cut off mid-sentence in her theory that Esben Komstadius, hero of Garganey Watch, used boatmaking as an outlet for the masculine energy of his deep but unrequited love for the stubborn and independent Hannah, looked up at him, astonished.

  ‘Your chair? What are you, seven?’

  And it was as if a roman candle ignited in those eyes. Tierney held the silence for just long enough before he sat beside Angharad. He did not lounge now. He sat upright, shoulders broadened, powerful. His arm stretched across the back of Angharad’s chair. Angharad leaned forward to talk, her legs crossed away from him too.