by A. L. Barker
“It don’t bite, that kind of bacon,” said Joe.
She did not smile. “I don’t like the smell to get in my hair.”
When it was ready she set the plate in front of him. He cut the middle out of the bread and filled his cheek with it. “Where’s yours?”
“I don’t eat breakfast.”
Joe grunted. “You don’t look as if you eat anything.”
The bacon was fat and strong and the bread was fried as he liked it, soft in the middle and crisp at the edges.
“Did you do the cooking for her?” She looked at him swiftly, then down at her fingers. “Where you lived before?”
“Sometimes.”
“Old party, I suppose?”
“Not very.”
“You don’t cook so bad. About as good as Ma. So what did she die of?”
“Who?”
“Your old party. What was her name?”
“Camilla.”
“Funny sort of name—”
“She wasn’t a party.”
“Why not?”
She unhooked her fingers, they touched each other tenderly. “Nobody liked her.”
“She was good to you though. She kept you, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what more you’d want.” Joe took the bacon rind out of his mouth and put it back again between his front teeth. “What did she die of?”
“Poison.”
Joe stared. “You mean somebody poisoned her?”
“She did it herself—with fungus.”
“What’s that?”
Esther glanced up sharply. She had very pale blue eyes and it was like looking into two pieces of empty glass.
“Stuff that grows in the woods. She was always trying bits of it.”
“What for?”
Esther lowered her eyes. “She said it gave her feelings.”
“Loopy,” said Joe. He stood up, notching his belt. At the door he looked back and she was messing about with her hands again. “Thanks for the breakfast.”
*
He was worried when Mrs Martineau didn’t open the door. He knew she wasn’t out, she never went out. People were always saying she’d have a stroke with no one able to get in.
He knocked again and put his ear to the door. After a bit he heard a sawing noise, slow and laboured, and the bolt was drawn.
She was waiting on the other side of the door. It startled him, he was so used to not seeing anyone at first. She looked queer, too, as if someone had been drawing on her face. There were lines scored in deep from her nose to her chin and her eyelids were the colour of a new bruise. The sawing noise was her breath. She had to open her mouth to get it, one minute there was a black hole with her lips dragging back, the next they were buttoned up so tight the point of a needle couldn’t have got between them.
“What’s up?”
She turned away. He couldn’t be sure if she meant to shake her head at him or if she just couldn’t keep it still. “Thought you were asleep when you didn’t open the door.”
She got to the bookcase and held on. The spasm was soon over. It petered out at her fingertips; from clinging like limpets they emptied like the frozen claws of a bird.
“I was listening to the sea.”
Joe would have laughed once, but he had learned to wait for the grain of meaning.
“The tide’s coming very heavy, it’s the proper time of year.” She brought out a cowrie shell from the bookcase. “Listen—”
“No thanks.” Joe sat on the cabin trunk and searched his pockets for a cigarette.
She put the shell to her own ear. “I can hear the waves and the little stones rolling back.”
“And the man shouting ‘Any more for the Skylark?’”
Her mouth opened in a black gape of laughter. “You’re listening to the sea at Brighton!”
“Tuned to the wrong wavelength,” said Joe, breaking up a dry stub.
“I’m listening to Spellane where I was born. It’s cool there.” She was holding the shell to her cheek. “Do you taste the salt in the wind?” and touching her lips with her tongue as if they were parched. “Listen, you can hear the crying now, a long crying.”
“It’s a shunting whistle from the Junction.”
“It’s the sea going in under the Point. At low tide you can get down to the cave. You can drown there,” she said brightly, as if she were promising candy. “My brother did, my brother Ted.”
“Honest? Your brother?”
She rocked herself gently. In the balaclava bonnet and the swaddling clothes she looked like a dingy baby. “It wouldn’t be anything without the salt. Salt cleans. All those dirty rivers in India, cows and people with sores and dead dogs—”
“I can’t swim either,” said Joe. “I keep meaning to learn and then we start fooling about. Everybody ought to be able to swim.”
“Victor had a servant who kept a snake in his turban—”
“I told you, I don’t believe that.”
She faced him with sudden spirit, her small head poking out of the carapace of clothes. “I don’t tell lies. I keep my soul and cheat the devil.”
A fit of coughing caught her on the last word. It was like a dry retching, regular, almost mechanical, and quite pitiless. There didn’t seem any reason why it had started or why it should ever stop. Joe watched her face go scarlet, then crimson and then grapey dark and shining as if the skin would burst. Her hands kept snatching at the air, she didn’t seem to get a chance to breathe.
He fetched her a drink of water which she couldn’t take. After that there was nothing to do. He didn’t like leaving her, nor did he want to stay and watch. He found a piece of fuse wire and cleaned his nails.
Presently the spasm began to pass. She groped her way to the cabin trunk and sat down beside Joe. But as the coughing ceased, her breathing started to saw and her cheeks glazed with sweat.
“If you’re so sick,” said Joe, “you should get the doctor.”
She couldn’t speak, but he saw her eyes roll in alarm. “Well, why not? It wouldn’t cost you anything.” Scowling, he dug into the black grease under his thumb nail. “And if you don’t like the medicine you can put it down for the beetles.”
He’d been talking for years, telling her what to do, and he still hadn’t got used to her not doing it. His ideas weren’t special, anyone else in her situation would have had them without being told. But anyone else wouldn’t have been in her situation.
“A doctor?” she said, so sharply that he looked up in surprise. “That would be the thin end of the wedge.”
“What?”
“They’d take me away.”
“Why should they? What would they want you for?”
“To shut me up.” She closed her eyes, held herself with both arms, trying to get a grip on the cocoon of clothes. “To make me a prisoner.”
Sometimes Joe couldn’t stand it, sometimes he shouted—he felt fit to kill her. Now he was wondering if there was anything in what she said. She was mad all right, hiding behind this ribby furniture, running about with saucers of whisky to catch the cockroaches. Right-thinking people would say she ought to be put away.
Yet she did no one harm. Sometimes she did herself a bit of good, she was even happy, and played an old gramophone behind the wardrobe—always the same record, ‘Bluebell, my own Bluebell’.
What was right thinking and how was it right? If they smoked her out of her burrow and locked her in some clean tidy place she’d die of fright and the right-thinkers could take the rap for that.
*
“A crazy old bird,” said Alec, “who lives in the basement under a mountain of furniture and never goes out and never lets anyone in—except Joe.”
Jessie yawned. “Why Joe? I never did understand that.”
It was a standby topic, Joe was used to its never getting any farther.
“If she’d picked you you’d have gossiped, and if she’d picked me I’d have talked to you, and any other
kid would have confided in his parents.”
“All day, shut up there.” Jessie lay back in her chair, her big breasts rolling. “What’s she do, Joe?”
“Anything she could do?” said Alec.
If they remembered, it was always on Sundays, about this time. She took her turn along with the Stogumbers and the Jamaicans and anything else that offered. Today there was more to it, there was Esther Munn, sitting mimm and tidy in the corner with a line of washing sprawled above.
“I suppose you know you’d be liable if she was to break out and do any damage? Harbouring and abetting—they could take you up for that.”
This was an old chestnut too. There had been times when Joe was very young when he had been afraid, when Alec, with sober face and gentle voice promising monsters and hangmen and red-handed butchers could make him mean with fear. Until he learned that the bogey was Jessie’s laughter, which he could never lay. Alec played to a gallery of one. He needed that laughter, if he provoked it he could ride it, he was safe on the crest. But if it sprang unawares he drowned deeper than anyone.
For all Joe knew it was the regular thing for parents to tie up together against their children. He bore no malice; if he had ever been lonely it was only at the first go off and it passed as soon as he saw the homework in Alec’s horrors.
Nowadays it was Christy’s turn, and Joe didn’t waste sympathy on him. He was only going through something that was part of childhood, part of the misery of being piping small.
“These people get funny ideas. Like the one that poured castor-oil in the pillarboxes. How would you like to be on the run for that?”
The girl flinched almost before Jessie’s laughter hit them. Her neck sank into her shoulders like a watchful cat’s.
Alec’s wit was at the level it had always been. It was a question now of habit, of who usually looked the fool. Joe had not minded. It did not matter what they thought of him, they were his parents and what they thought could never be right.
Jessie wiped her hand over her laughter. “I bet it’s high in there. Mrs Stogumber wants to get the Sanitary.”
“They could put a spray-gun on Mike Stogumber too. If they came at opening time they’d catch him out of bed.”
“It’s not natural to live like that. She’d be better with others of her own sort.”
“She hasn’t got any sort,” said Joe.
“What about all those old women at Frigate House? They live very cosy together. They make their beds and wait for dinnertime. I like to think of it,” said Jessie, “I like to think of anyone having it easy.”
“She doesn’t want to live with other old women.”
Alec said, poker faced, “This is the Welfare State, Joe. That means everyone’s welfare. How do you think mine feels with that crazy old bird underneath us?”
They could have played ludo or snakes-and-ladders, thought Joe, and at least someone would have won.
“She never did anyone any harm, she never even thought anyone any harm. It’s her place and no one goes in there without she wants. She’s got a right and she’s got a bolt on the door.”
“What about the Sanitary?”
“I’ll take care of the Sanitary.”
As Jessie’s laughter broke over them, Esther Munn looked up, looked at Joe, and something short of a smile crossed her face. Whatever it was—amusement, hope, or plain fright—it was meant to be shared.
*
As Evie pushed the tea across the counter Rumbold leaned over and said, “Let’s see, tonight, isn’t it?” as if he had doubts, as if he had other things to think about.
He had the other things, why didn’t he think about them? What was this, after all? In black and white, leaving out the flesh tints, just a yea or nay to an evening with a waitress.
Someone called her from the other end of the counter and she went. Rumbold watched her every movement, trying to relate it to himself. There was a qualm under his belt, the stirrings of rage and fright and self-tenderness. He wanted to talk, ask for cigarettes, wake the man who was dozing in the corner. Anything to put off the moment that had always been coming, that had started on its way the first time he touched her and had kept travelling through the days and nights, even through that day at Cookham when he beat down the long grass for them to lie on, and smelt the spilled sap drying in the sun and the raw fume of the river, and deep in his throat, deeper than smell or taste, the sweet hot spice of her flesh. That moment had threaded the grains of happiness, caught them all on a string—a short string.
She came back to his end of the counter and now it wasn’t black and white, it wasn’t an evening with a waitress, it was the difference between having and not having.
“Today’s Saturday, it’s always best at Mario’s on a Saturday night.” That was just for something to say, something to bring the moment on.
Evie took up a cloth and began to wipe the counter. She had a certain way of moving, a certain rounded, finished way of doing everything.
“My sister’s started having her baby. They rang through to tell me. If she’s anything like our Kathy, she’s in for a bad time. Eighteen hours—that was a breech birth and they had to assist Nature.”
Her arm made firm generous sweeps over the smoking zinc. Fascinated, he watched the ripe blue vein in the hollow of her elbow.
“I’ll be going straight there when I finish tonight.”
It was as if she had hit him casually in the face. There was a sudden burst and everything dissolved in a welter of sparkling light. The hot salt pricked out over his cheek.
“Why don’t you say it? There are words, why don’t you use them? Not tonight, nor tomorrow night, nor any night. Finished—” his tongue almost choked him—“that’s the word you want.”
She picked him up and dropped him with a look. “Don’t be a fool.”
Rumbold kicked a chair aside. It went down with a clatter, rebounded and fell across his feet. He swung at it again, missed, and staggered sideways, striking his lip on his knuckles as he flung up an arm to save himself. For one dizzy moment he thought someone had hit him and that the wetness on his face was blood. He was aware of men watching as he gingerly touched his cheek. His fingers came away glistening but unstained.
“Real tears,” said someone.
Yes, they were real—their salt grizzle was on his tongue—real tears, real salt. The chair lay where he had kicked it and his anger was gone so completely that he couldn’t remember how he felt when he did it. But he could remember the clatter it made, that took him back to the church hall at home, the pitchpine chairs being dragged out for Sunday school, being dragged and dropped and kicked over the boarded floor. Now he remembered those Sunday afternoons, the holy way the sun came through the pink glass, and Ursley Milligan in her beeskep hat, getting the boys to swear on the Bible never to break the seventh commandment. He was the one who refused to swear, out of bravado and suspicion of the brass-backed Book. Then Ursley’s lips shone as if she’d been eating fat. She laid both hands on the Bible and cursed his manhood.
Rumbold picked up the chair and put it tidily under the table. There was no harm in Ursley, it was just that she liked a bit of Sin. But perhaps her credit had been good that day, good enough to secure not a complete drouth so much as a watering down of his natural sources. The idea struck him as comic and his stomach warmed to the joke. He would have liked to share it.
But Evie was still putting a face on his tears. There was pity in it and a lot of kindliness. It was the warm top side of her nature she was offering, the skimmings that went to hurt animals and lame children.
She said, stirring sugar into his tea, “Drink up and you’ll feel better.”
He looked at the smoking orange brew. If he was half a man he would have thrown it at the wall and perhaps had some satisfaction out of it.
Evie touched his hand. “It’s her first, Barty.”
He thought of Ursley again in her beeskep, virgin and yellow, winkling out the poor little seeds of sin, laying her han
ds on the Book of Genesis and the Song of Solomon and stopping up Nature at its source. It was funny, it was painful and it was a mistake, but he couldn’t stop. His stomach quivered and the tears started to leak over his chin.
*
It occurred to Rumbold that if he worked for success he would have to work to achieve the state of mind that went with it. He sat in the office and got himself to believe that he had Evie, that his garage was paying and his wife had gone to China. He could reproduce the circumstances in his mind, and there was an easing of pressure as if a gripe had let up for a moment. That was all. No glitter, no bubble, no world under his thumb. He wondered if perhaps success didn’t exist in the round. And failure the same—you were as good as you felt.
Through the window he saw Joe hooking back the air hose and staring across the street. He was about to call to him to lift the nozzle clear of the ground before it was run over and crushed when he saw what Joe was looking at—Brind’s car outside Evie’s and Brind getting out.
He heard the shop bell ring as Brind went into the café. He told himself it was no different from any of a hundred other times. It was worth the price of a cup of tea or a packet of cigarettes, no more. Then he told himself he’d seen it coming, now he’d seen it come.
It was all he could do to keep from going back across the street. But once a day was enough for making that kind of fool of himself. Brind had the success feeling, he made no provision for failure. From a material point of view what did it amount to? A source—Rumbold suspected a rich mistress—that supplied him with ready money, not so ready that he could afford to relax, not ready enough to buy him any better risk than partnership with Rumbold. Nothing to envy unless, from the material point of view, it was going to amount to Evie, too.
Surely she wouldn’t be such a fool. But why wouldn’t she? All she knew of Brind was that he could offer more than Rumbold—what was foolish about taking it?
He couldn’t do without Evie, he knew too well what he would be missing. Yet the funny thing was that he had never had her, except perhaps that day at Cookham when it seemed as if the miracle might work. When he saw that she wasn’t for him, that should have been the end of it.
