by Angela Huth
‘When are you coming again?’ he said.
‘I can’t really come again, can I?’
‘I hope you can and you will,’ he said.
‘It would be so difficult, another time. The plans. The lies. I’m not very good at the lies.’
‘Divided worlds,’ he said. ‘We should all have our divided worlds. They shouldn’t conflict, or be hard to separate.’
She laughed.
‘Do you find that easy?’ she asked.
‘Well, yes, I do.’
‘You’re lucky,’ said Anna.
‘I mean, visits to fairyland are nothing to do with anything else. If you plan them right they can go on for ever and ever. Just things to look forward to, and to look back on. With tremendous excitement. And pleasure. Aren’t they?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She had to agree. Couldn’t explain.
‘Well, it’s up to you,’ he said.
‘I’ve seen it happen so often. When people start this kind of thing,’ she said. Trying. ‘It’s the stuff of divorce.’
‘It needn’t be,’ he said. So easily. ‘It’s only difficult if fundamental, impossible changes are visualised. Best only to think of the good, possible times. Within their limitations.’
‘The strength of you,’ she said.
He drove her home on the back of his motorbike. Nose in his wet hair. Arms round his shoulders. He kissed her without heed by the front gate. Said she smelt wonderful in the rain. Some kind of flowers. And he’d be in touch. Exhilarated by such parting news, tea with the children was a lovely time. Mama, you look so happy today, one of them said. But such wet hair.
Well you see that’s because K. Beauford insisted I should ride on his rusty old motorbike in all this rain dodging the buses I thought death every time smelling the earthy smell of his hair shouting into it be careful for God’s sake I’m the mother of three children and now my love my love not many days will pass before we’ll speak again. . .
Next postcard of Buckingham Palace behind the Victoria Memorial. From somewhere in Wales. Am writing this in a bus shelter. Two days later – sorry I forgot to post it. Will ring Tuesday morning, much love K. Beauford. Much, Anna noted. Before it had been just love. Much love, and by now the destructive forces of infidelity crowded in all about her. Her family all strangers. Resentful of them. Resentful of their needing her presence. Their demands so irritating. Their puzzled eyes sniping her guilt at her own unfriendliness. Nothing was but what was not. Lady Macbeth’s undoing. The house itself was an insubstantial thing. Tiny flaws in the fabric of daily life. The clear picture, familiar for so long, shattered. A private mosaic. It couldn’t go on. She couldn’t survive it: Mark’s appalling tolerance. The children’s constant forgiveness. The sleepless nights. Where had all the orderliness gone? Quiet content? Precious habit of unexciting love? All she had thought she wanted. Could never return, now. Not in the same way.
In the silence of a dun-coloured afternoon Anna stood by the tall windows of her house, fingers hunched up like spiders on the cold glass of the panes. Blasted, her life. Inadvertently, she had let it happen. Linen cupboard disorganised. Deep freeze empty. Husband and children squeezed by the rats of her mind to a faraway place. No longer of prime importance.
Rain. It began to rain on the leafless trees. Falling silent on the square of plantless London earth she liked to call her garden.
Oh I’m not as strong as you K. Beauford at dividing worlds perhaps because I love you and that’s where it’s all gone wrong though you must never know but in the spring I’ll visit you again and we’ll send postcards of Buckingham Palace for years and years until we grow old and calm and the visits between our separated worlds can’t unground us any more. But oh, my love, can that ever be?
Dirty Old Man
After Lily died, Tom fell very quiet. There was no lack of people – his old friend Jack Grass, for instance, and a couple of neighbours – who were prepared to listen, had he wanted to talk to them. But the fact was that nowadays the small things that used to flow into his mind, the trivial observations of everyday life that invariably made Lily laugh, no longer came to him. He felt quite dead himself.
After Lily died, Tom forced himself to pack up her dressmaking things. He covered the old sewing machine that had stood for twenty-five years in the corner of the front room with a polythene sheet, and sent a bundle of old materials to a jumble sale. These scrap ends of fabric made his hands tremble for a while, as he gathered them up awkwardly, pricking his fingers on pins that only Lily would have known were there, and tied them with a ribbon from the neat sewing box. A triangle of shiny green satin brought back to him the trouble Lily had had with Vera Finch, fat old spinster, self-important member of the council who, convinced she would be mayor years before she actually was, got Lily to make up a whole trousseau. A more unlikely set of clothes for a stumpy mayor-to-be Lily and Tom had never seen: décolleté evening dresses to show off the spongy flesh of Miss Finch’s appalling breasts; frills round every hem to call attention to her thick ankles; huge sashes that spread over her wide bottom. Lily had done her best to persuade Miss Finch into something a little plainer, but Miss Finch remained adamant. She had stamped her solid foot in the front room crying, ‘Flair! I know how to dress with flair, Lily Greville, and you would do well to learn a thing or two from me.’ Lily good-humoured as ever, gave up the battle and laughed about it with Tom later.
A small piece of cream calico dropped to the floor. As Tom bent to pick it up he recalled the skirt it had come from – a voluminous thing with an elastic waist that was meant to hide poor Lovelace Brown’s condition. Lily and Tom had been the only ones to know her secret for a while, until the skirt, for all its cunning folds, swelled to obvious proportions. Lovelace had never managed to pay for it and Lily had told her to forget it. She was a good dressmaker, Lily. Good in many ways.
Tom locked the door of the front room and never went in it again. Otherwise, he resumed his normal life. At eight-thirty every morning, having cooked his breakfast and washed it up, he walked a mile to the small brown room behind a shop that sold antique pictures, and settled himself to the restoration of frames. He had spent his entire working life in this room, starting as apprentice at sixteen. Now, forty years later, he was the most skilled and conscientious frame restorer the firm had been fortunate enough ever to employ. He in his turn had no assistants to teach. Times were hard, prices rising: people had better things to spend their money on than repairing frames. The firm was struggling for its life, and although nothing was ever said, Tom and Mr Lewis, the kindly owner, silently acknowledged that the struggle would soon be over.
While he worked, no such melancholy thoughts were able to trouble Tom. He concentrated wholly on his tiny world of scarred wood and chipped gold paint, filling the cracks with a fine paste of his own invention and, when each crack was smooth and dry, covering it with the blob of gold that swelled his paintbrush – each stroke delicate and light to avoid the gold leaf clotting.
To concentrate wholly on his craft, Tom worked in near silence. The radiators choked, sometimes, and he himself hissed a little, mid-winter, when his asthma was bad. But to Tom, to whom these noises had become part of his being, the silence was pure and satisfactory. Often, at twelve-thirty, he would forget to stop work to eat his pork pie and half a pint of brown ale lunch, and be surprised to find that when Mrs Lewis came in with a cup of tea, at three, he was quite hungry. When he did stop for lunch he took off the minimum amount of time, sat happily among the waiting frames, looking forward to the afternoon.
It had always been his habit, when Lily was alive, to join Jack Grass at the Fighting Cock on Friday nights, on the way home, for a couple of pints. He did not look forward to this Friday night date with any particular enjoyment, as he had no great partiality for beer, crowds, or noise. But he felt it was a friendly thing to do, and Jack Grass was his friend. When Lily died, Jack had sent a wreath of pink carnations in the shape of a racehorse and jockey. Lily had known or ca
red nothing for horses, but Jack was a great betting man and the idea had obviously been an inspiration to him. Tom appreciated this and when, the Tuesday of the funeral, Jack had suggested Tom should join him at the Cock for something stronger than beer, Tom, who had nothing else planned, hardly liked to refuse. Since then, two nights a week at the pub had become the custom. That was the only major change in Tom’s life since Lily died.
And she had been dead nearly three years now. The small terraced house, so full of her for thirty years, functioned still, but without life. Increasingly, Tom was aware that without her he was a dying thing himself, a mechanical being devoid of spirit. Time did not heal, time did not numb. Jack, with his theories about time taking care of all things, was talking nonsense.
Once, guiltily aware of the indulgence, Tom tried to express the ashy feeling within him in his weekly letter to his daughter, Betty. In the old days he and Lily had written a joint letter, two sides, every Wednesday evening. Betty lived in Bristol, married to a man who had made something of a name for himself in sherry, and had no time for his working class parents-in-law. Betty never replied to the letters: a card at Christmas, and one when each of the grandchildren was born, was all they ever heard from her. She didn’t manage to come to the funeral, and the brief letter of condolence and apology to her father had been without thought or feeling. But for all her rejection, Lily and Tom would have no word said against her, and however little it meant to her, to them the weekly letter was a point of honour.
Now, Tom found the whole responsibility of writing two sides once a week a struggle: Lily had always written the greater part of the letter. She had been the one with the news. He had no news: he found himself stretching his hopes for his grandchildren’s well-being in to a whole paragraph, and reporting on the state of the weather for the last six days. He bought writing paper without lines, which meant that he could make bigger spaces: still the letter took him an hour or so of careful thought. The week that he decided to confess his feelings of increasing despair to Betty meant a particular battle. After many attempts, all of which he deplored and rejected because of their self-pity, he ended up with a single sentence: ‘It is rather lonely here without your mother.’
Three weeks later Betty replied on a postcard: ‘Cheer up, life’s not so bad’, and Tom, trying to control an imminent sob, brought on a fit of asthma. That evening, at the pub, he decided to tell Jack Grass.
‘Jack,’ he said, ‘my hands, they feel like paper.’
‘Do they now?’ said Jack.
‘And my body,’ Tom went on, ‘feels all dried up. It feels as if there’s no blood in my veins. No life in me.’
‘Ah,’ said Jack, ‘now you’re talking.’ He thought for a while, the concentration pulling his forehead into a pattern of deep jagged lines. Then he said: ‘You know what you want, Tom me old fellow, you want the odd thrill.’
‘I’d like to feel full of fire again, full of life,’ replied Tom, not understanding. Jack wiped his mouth, which always seemed wet whether he was drinking or not, with his sleeve.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘leave it with me. I’ll fix you up so you never had a better time.’ He looked at his friend and, for the first time that Tom could recall, winked.
‘How?’
‘My sideline. I’ve always had a sideline, matter of fact. Reason I haven’t brought it up with you before is, I thought you wouldn’t be interested. You can usually tell. But try anything once, that’s what I say. Friday, after our drink, we’ll go back to your place for a natter.’
This prospect filled Tom with some apprehension. No one had been to the house since Lily died, and he did not know how he would feel about voices in the kitchen again, albeit his own and Jack’s. But he was eager to know what his friend was plotting for him.
It rained hard on Friday night. Jack and Tom walked back from the pub hunched up against it. They had drunk more than usual during the evening and clutched each other, stumbling a little, as they crossed roads.
In Tom and Lily’s cold and cheerless kitchen – cheerless now it was no longer filled with Lily’s flowers and warm cooking smells – they huddled round the small fist of fiery coals in the grate, and hung their dripping coats over chairs to dry. Tom brought out half a bottle of whisky, which he’d been keeping for years for some unspecified occasion, and they drank from the bottle in turn.
After a while Jack tapped at the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve brought the goods.’
He took from the pocket a bulging unclean envelope from which he extracted a bundle of photographs in an elastic band. He handed them over to Tom.
‘Take a look at these, mate. Just for starters.’
Curiously, Tom looked at the first picture, postcard size, underdeveloped, cracked till its surface was soft. He saw a middle-aged woman lying on a bed, legs wide apart, no clothes on apart from a cardigan which covered one breast only. She had very made-up lips and was smiling a horrible smile.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘Pictures to keep you happy,’ said Jack. ‘Porn.’ He gave a smile.
‘I’ve never seen anything like this before in all my born days.’
Fascinated but shocked, Tom continued to study the picture. There was quiet for a while, except for the dripping of rain from the coats on to the floor.
‘Flip through them,’ said Jack, at last. ‘There’s a good assortment’
‘I don’t know whether I should like to, Jack.’ What with the beer and the whisky, Tom was feeling a little out of control. Only one thing was firm in his mind: these weren’t the sort of things that should be in Lily’s kitchen.
‘Go on,’ urged Jack, ‘they’re lovely. Full of imagination.’
With some reluctance Tom went through the pictures. It turned out the cardiganed lady was mere hors d’oeuvre: compared with some of the photographed activities performed by Negroes, muscle men and tarty girls with vast breasts, she was pure innocence. Tom could think of nothing to say.
‘Do something to you, don’t they? Make the old blood run faster? You’re never alone with a bit of porn, Tom, take it from me.’ Jack laughed.
Tom blinked. He handed the package back to Jack who shuffled through it, chuckling.
‘I don’t like them very much,’ Tom said at last.
‘Well, it’s something takes some people a little time to get round to,’ replied Jack. ‘You may not feel full benefits right away. Tell you what, keep them a few days. Take them to bed with you. Look at them under the sheets, if you know what I mean. And if you’re not a happier man in the morning, I’ll be surprised.’ He got up, in a sudden hurry to go, picked up his coat and shook it. Tom stared with distress at the muddy marks their shoes had made on the kitchen floor. ‘If they do the trick, I can supply a lot more – films, stories, books, anything you like. It’ll cost you a bit, mind, but it’s worth it, I reckon.’ He left the envelope on the kitchen table.
When he had gone Tom threw it in the fire, watched two small hands of flame leap up and devour it, then fade. He felt quite sickened, and set about cleaning the floor.
But having found a possibly new ally in his old friend, Jack Grass was not one to give up easily. Over the next few months he persuaded Tom to persevere, and gave him every encouragement. Tom, dizzied by the pressure Jack was putting upon him, found himself leading a new and furtive life: two to three nights a week he would go with Jack to Soho and pay large sums to see erotic films. On other occasions they would loiter in the back regions of sleazy bookshops flipping through pictures of people performing revolting acts with animals or children: the kinkier the more expensive. Once, they watched a live orgy through a peephole. Screwing up one eye for an hour gave Tom a headache for days. Whatever they did, whatever literature he took home to read, sickened him; and yet believing that among all this filth he would find something to cheer him one day, he continued to follow Jack and do as he advised.
On one occasion, after several mon
ths of relentless porn pursuing, Tom tried to extract himself from his new life. He and Jack sat opposite one another on a late train home. Tom was very tired. He knew his work next morning would suffer. He looked forward to it, though, with greater fervour than ever before. Only in his world of gold leaf paint could he put away the horrible images that now constantly plied his mind.
‘It’s not that I’m not grateful for all you’re doing for me, Jack,’ he began. ‘It’s just that, well, the thing is it’s not exactly sex that I’m looking for. Who’d want that, after Lily? What I’m looking for is something, you know, more to live for.’
‘Ah,’ replied Jack, ‘sex is the remedy. Sex mends all things.’ He chuckled to himself. Tom despised him for the evident pleasure Jack found in their pursuits: but in despising his friend he felt he was being disloyal. He said nothing and reprimanded himself. ‘Had a bloody marvellous night with the Girls of Corsica book,’ Jack added, and Tom felt very weary.
He had been a good sleeper all his life and now his undisturbed nights had gone. He would toss and turn in the bed, straying into Lily’s side (a thing he meant after her death never to do), head aching, throat dry, his body wracked with asthma, his mind tortured by pictures of people doing things to each other that he and Lily could never have dreamt of in their wildest moments. Would these pictures be with him for the rest of his life? Was he ill, that they didn’t excite him? Was he mad that he should be sickened by them?
Then he began to worry about money. At Jack’s request he was spending far more than he could afford on their film shows, books and pictures. Once he was late with the rates, a thing that had never happened before, and he began to save by cutting down on food. His appearance changed, and Mrs Lewis, who brought his tea every afternoon at work, noticed it
‘Anything wrong, Tom?’ she asked, when he jumped at her entrance. ‘You do look poorly. All pinched and thin. Anything I can do?’
