by Angela Huth
Quickly, Miss Pears decided she must do her bit. Mrs Grace after all was her friend – well, more or less her friend. She’d done her hair so nicely yesterday, not pulling once. She’d every right to her seat. She deserved support.
Miss Pears ran faster than she’d run for years across the green, the screams and weird laughs pounding in her ears. The homemade cake stall was empty now except for the one dreary sponge. With a heave Miss Pears tipped over the table. The single cake rolled away like a coin into the grass, brushing it with icing sugar. And there, exposed by the tipped up table, lay Mrs Radcliffe’s cakes in a box, waiting for arrangements to be made to get to her car.
With an almighty cry Miss Pears jumped into the box, and felt them squashing beneath her feet. She stamped on them with all her force, bashing the chocolate and pink roses to an ugly pulp: coffee icing, white icing, strawberry fillings, crushed almonds oozed over her shoes and ankles, warm and soft. She began to laugh, her mouth widening over the whole of her face. The strong knot of her scarf snapped and the scarf fell off, but she didn’t care. She kept on stamping, mincing the cakes to a multi-coloured mud, and then the rain came. It fell into her mouth, turning black, and began to fill her eyes and nose and mouth till she cried out to breathe. She felt her feet turn to ice in the mess of cake, and her hands, icy too, rose like rags in the air, calling for help.
Miss Warburton and Mrs Radcliffe had just finished their tea when they heard the screams. With everybody else left in the hall, they hurried out to see what had happened. Mrs Radcliffe shoved her bottle of tomato ketchup into her pocket so that she could run. Miss Warburton held on to her hat.
As soon as she turned the corner and saw the fight, Mrs Radcliffe hissed out loud: ‘You can never rely on those people. They should be properly supervised.’ But Miss Warburton was far behind her, so her observations went unheard.
Mrs Radcliffe quickly made up her mind that there was nothing she could usefully do to help the situation. A fat policeman was blowing his whistle and grappling with a woman who appeared to be having hysterics by the bandstand. The district nurse was leading away a bloody man with a red beard. A thick-set woman in a navy uniform and stocking seams all askew was running about shouting unheeded orders, and a monster woman, standing on a chair, fists thrust into the sky, screamed obscenities. And there was Miss Warburton, suddenly very fast on her feet, chasing a woman with a completely bald head, dabbing at her with her straw hat, as if she was trying to catch a butterfly.
I hope to God the local reporter has gone home, thought Mrs Radcliffe. This sort of publicity wouldn’t help the next election. For Christopher’s sake, in fact, it would probably be better to make a discreet exit and write a letter explaining to Miss Warburton – who was in no way fit to say goodbye to at the moment.
She threw away the bottle of ketchup, which was digging into her hip bone, cursed the rain, and began to tiptoe as inconspicuously as possible round behind the trees. At one moment a man crossed her path – he looked like a bus driver – dragging a crying woman, the one who’d had the blue scarf, and whose feet were now covered in some kind of revolting mess. The woman’s cries, and ugly twisted face made Mrs Radcliffe feel sick: she had never been any good at coping with scenes, as she was the first to admit.
Unnoticed, she got into her car. Quickly she closed the window, which half shut out the hysterical yells of fear, hatred, abuse and despair. She switched on the wipers. The water on the windscreen blurred the writhing people among the upturned tables, and scattered brass instruments of the band. She shut her eyes for a moment as the bald-headed woman ran quite close by, still screaming – Miss Warburton still chasing her, her wet polkadotted dress now clinging to her thick body.
Mrs Radcliffe switched on the engine, glanced at her watch, very calm. If she put her foot down, she reckoned, she could still be home by half past five.
Deception is so Easy
‘My wife,’ said Angus, ‘has been getting up at a ridiculously early hour ever since we’ve been married. Over the years she’s instilled in me an unnecessary feeling of guilt. I wish she hadn’t.’
Angus lay naked on the bed, the sheets a crumpled foam round his ankles, smoking. By day – on the infrequent occasions he and Sarah met for lunch now, he called his wife by name, Lorna. In bed, he always referred to her as his wife.
Beside him, Sarah sighed. They had had a happy night. Happy nights always inspired Angus to remember his wife with particular affection in the morning. Sarah wondered which recollections would come to him today.
‘She has this old dressing gown,’ he was saying. ‘Filthy thing. She says she has it cleaned twice a year, but you’d never know. You never know what to believe. Anyhow, she wears it till about eleven o’clock in the morning.’ Love in his voice. Sarah gave him a moment.
‘And where does she think you were last night?’ she asked. Angus’s deceptions gave her the temporary pleasure of false security.
‘Sheffield.’ He felt safer if he named a town north of the Home Counties. ‘Conference.’
‘Common Market again?’
Angus nodded.
‘God knows what’ll happen once my particular negotiations are settled,’ he said, and they both laughed. ‘We’ll think of something. My wife’s the most trusting woman on earth. I love her for it.’ He slapped Sarah’s thigh affectionately.
You can’t win, thought Sarah, if you’re mistress to a man who needs no one to console him about his wife. Aloud she said:
‘You realise it’s been seven years now?’
‘What has?’
‘Us.’
‘Oh. Us.’ Angus stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Eleven years married. Seven years – us.’ He scratched his chest, a sign that he would be getting up in a moment, his mind on other things. Sarah took her chance.
‘Why don’t we meet for lunch today?’
‘Lunch?’ He stopped scratching, quite surprised.
‘All our meetings seem to be in bed, these days. I practically never see you dressed.’
‘Nonsense, darling. Nonsense.’ He patted her hand.
‘It’s true. Why can’t we have lunch?’
‘Absolutely out, I’m afraid.’
‘Why?’
‘Lorna’s mother’s birthday.’ He paused.
‘Is that true?’ Sarah asked.
‘Of course it’s true. She’s eighty-six and wants to go to the Post Office Tower. Awful idea. I hate heights. It’s been arranged for weeks.’
Sarah frowned.
‘I don’t mind your putting me off for business reasons, but putting me off for your mother-in-law is a bit hard to bear.’ She heard herself sounding petulant. Angus sighed.
‘I’m not putting you off if I didn’t ask you in the first place, am I? Silly one. Hell, you made the suggestion. I merely said it wasn’t possible. I’m sorry.’
‘All right, all right. I understand. It doesn’t matter.’ Sarah smiled, her humour restored. ‘You deserve to get giddy, whizzing around in that tower.’
‘My mother-in-law will survive it better than me, I don’t doubt,’ said Angus. ‘She doesn’t drink. She’s a remarkable woman, as a matter of fact. She climbed a considerable way up the Matterhorn at the age of seventy-three, and only last year I saw her dive off the second top board.’
‘My mother-in-law,’ said Sarah, rummaging in the packet of cigarettes on Angus’s stomach, ‘has just organised an exhibition of needlework which is going to be opened by the Queen Mother, and she’s seventy-four.’
Angus swung his legs out of bed.
‘Everything you have ever told me about your mother-in-law has always led me to imagine her as a woman of quite remarkable dullness,’ he said. Again Sarah smiled. One of the things that she loved about Angus was that he made his bitchiest observations in a voice warm with benevolence.
Standing legs astride on the floral carpet, Angus screwed up his fists and punched himself gently on the chest. In the pale light from the window, strained through a net
curtain, his body was grey white, a homogenised colour. These days, his ankles were still puffy in the mornings. When Sarah first knew him they swelled at night but would have returned to their normal trimness by breakfast time. His paunch was increasing, too. One day, she thought, he would die of a heart attack. What would she do without him? She needed a little comfort.
‘Gus?’
‘What?’ He was getting a bit deaf, too.
‘Kiss me.’
‘What?’ He leant over and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I didn’t mean that about your mother-in-law,’ he said.
‘That’s all right.’ Angus was moving away again, towards the bathroom. Briefly Sarah had felt like persuading him back into bed, delaying him for half an hour. Now she had lost her chance. Making love in the morning, like lunch with Angus, was a rare thing these days.
In the bathroom Angus turned on the bath taps, and the noisy hot water sent up a cloud of warm comforting steam. He had slight indigestion and a board meeting at ten, otherwise he might have obliged. Sarah, in accordance with the cliché, was getting randier with middle age. Randier and flabbier. He sometimes wondered how much longer he would be able to go on satisfying her the way that he could now – just. Perhaps the occasional lunch would make up for a slacking off on the sexual side of things, he thought. It was an idea.
‘Gus?’
‘What?’ Stupid, she was, shouting against the taps. Irritated, he turned them off. The water wasn’t half deep enough for real enjoyment. He got in.
‘Can I come in and talk to you?’
‘If you like.’ That meant he wouldn’t be able to turn on the water again. Something of the pleasure of his morning went from him.
Sarah, wrapped in a very white towel, curled herself up on the wide edge of the bath. Angus, peering at her through the steam, noticed that her eyes looked very small without mascara. When he first knew her she would get up early, before he was awake, and spend half an hour in front of the mirror. Then she would greet him with a face that was not visibly made-up, but burnished and glowing, eyelashes darkened, teeth fresh and shining. He had liked that very much. It had always roused him again.
‘We’re terribly lucky, you know,’ she said, blowing smoke into the steam. ‘Aren’t we? Don’t you think?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, our arrangement. We’ve never had any real trouble, I mean, have we? No nasty scenes or anything.’
‘Ah.’ Sarah tended to ruminate in the mornings upon subjects which Angus could only find stimulating after a few drinks late at night. At 9.00 a.m. he could find little to say about their relationship. He lifted one leg heavily out of the water and noticed, sadly, the huge ankle. It would be down by lunch time, with luck, though the central heating in that damned tower could bring it up again.
‘Look at Sebastian and Jessica,’ Sarah was saying. ‘Jessica found out he was sleeping with Felicity only three weeks after they’d started their affair, and all hell was let loose. He had to give her up. It was too complicated. I mean, nothing like that has ever happened to us, has it?’
‘No,’ said Angus.
‘And yet I suppose some people must know.’ Angus shut his eyes against a flannel of soap. Like this, there was no need to answer. ‘What always amazes me,’ Sarah was going on, ‘is how the person one lives with can go on for years without having a single clue. Even now, you know, Adrian has absolutely no idea about us, I swear. Not that he’s very observant or inquisitive, so that makes life easier . . .’ Angus, washing his ears, couldn’t hear very well.
Later, Sarah followed him back to the bedroom and sat on the bed while he dressed. For some inexplicable reason she felt a little cheerless this morning, still in need of some small measure of comfort before Angus left her for the office and lunch with his mother-in-law.
‘To go on with what I was saying,’ she said, though they had spoken of no other subject in between, ‘I mean, what does Laura think you do in Sheffield or Birmingham or wherever?’
Angus was easing himself into his braces. By mistake he let one snap down on to his shoulder. It hurt.
‘Hell, Sarah, I don’t know what she thinks.’ Sarah’s questioning about Lorna never failed to irritate him.
‘She must have some suspicions. She’s not unintelligent.’ Sarah knew she had trodden on dangerous ground. She watched Angus’s reactions carefully.
‘My wife is no fool,’ he agreed, struggling with the zip of his flies, aware he sounded pompous. He went over to the bedside table, picked up his glasses and fitted them into the permanent dent on the bridge of his nose. ‘Perhaps she just turns a blind eye,’ he added, and at once regretted having said it.
Sarah swivelled round, the towel drooping from her shoulder.
‘Do you mean . . .’ She spoke slowly, each word sonorous. ‘Do you mean you think she might know?’
With his glasses on Angus could see her quite clearly now, her nosey little face, peeked with a macabre kind of interest and some fear, her hair stiff, greasy and unbrushed, the soft flesh of her underarms oozing on to the pristine fabric of the towel. He disliked her considerably at this moment.
‘You little fool,’ he said, ‘of course she knows. Of course she’s always known.’ He paused. ‘I think you would agree she’s behaved with quite remarkable dignity. I admire her for it’
There was a long silence. When Sarah spoke at last her head bobbed up and down, puppet-like. Her face, small anyhow, had shrunk: her tiny eyes were gauzed.
‘How long has she known?’ she asked.
Angus shrugged.
‘Almost since the beginning, I should say.’
He had always dreaded a scene, a show down. He knew there would never be one with Lorna: she was much too intelligent. Now there was one with Sarah he was quite enjoying himself. Besides, you couldn’t go on deceiving for ever. She had to know sometime. He was running out of places to tell her he had told Lorna he was going . . . With Lorna, he never had to lie. He simply said he’d be away for the night, and that was good enough for her.
‘You pig,’ hissed Sarah, finally. ‘All these years you’ve been deceiving me.’
‘Ah,’ said Angus, fiddling with his tie.
‘And to think, all those times we’ve laughed about how easy it was to fool her . . .’ Sarah gave a great cry, suddenly, so that the towel slipped from her shoulders completely, revealing her small, yellowish breasts. Then she threw herself face down into the pillows and gave herself up to sobbing.
Angus looked at the clock. By the time he’d paid the bill and walked to the office it would be ten o’clock exactly. Sarah raised her head. Her face was red, and wet with tears. For a moment Angus thought she might break into her old smile, a smile she sometimes produced at the most awkward moments between them, and forgive him. Instead, she spluttered almost incoherently.
‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve slashed up the last seven years, just like that. Slashed them all to pieces. You’ve taken all the fun out of it, ruined it all. Talking about me with her – is that what you did? Oh God, I can’t believe it. Her, knowing . . .’
Angus was no longer enjoying himself. He had seen Sarah angry before, but never like this, wracked and bitter. He felt a trickle of sweat beneath his arms seep into the stiff clean silk of his shirt. Reluctantly, he went over to her, touched her shaking shoulder.
‘Sarah . . . don’t. I must go, I’m afraid.’
She seemed not to hear him, but continued to sob. He spoke a little louder.
‘I tell you what, next week . . . I’m a bit tied up in the evenings as a matter of fact. Why don’t we have lunch one day? Say Tuesday?’
Under the spread of his hand Sarah’s small head moved in such a confused manner that he was unable to tell whether she meant to accept his invitation, or to refuse it.
Last Love
Beth Soper bent her head to avoid seeing the clouds in the sky and set off down the Bermondsey Street to St Michael’s Church. There, Thomas Harrow was waiting for
her and they were quietly married. Beth was seventy-eight and Thomas was eighty-two.
They had wanted no fuss, just a simple private ceremony. Their friends in the Sunset Home had asked permission to come to the church, eager for an outing. But when they had been refused, they understood. There was promise of some kind of celebration later, after the honeymoon.
Man and wife, Thomas and Beth returned to the street hand in hand. The vicar had offered them a lift in his car, but they said no, they would enjoy the walk. They hadn’t gone far when it began to rain.
‘Dratted weather,’ said Thomas.
‘My hat,’ said Beth. With her free hand she patted at the pale blue feathers which were becoming clotted in the wet.
Thomas had not seen the flat furnished, and it seemed to please him. Beth had just managed to get it all ready in time, with the help of Madge and Eileen from the Sunset, and the lady from the Welfare. Beth pointed out every detail to Thomas lest he should miss something: green tiles in the bathroom, nice yellow kitchen curtains, velvet three-piece suite in the sittingroom, patchwork bedspread (one of the few things she had kept when Christopher died). Thomas said he thought it was all grand. He said their savings had been well spent.
When he had seen everything, and repeated his approving comments several times, Beth lit the gas fire and they sat side by side on the sofa, noting with pleasure its firm springs. It was only eleven-thirty, a good hour before Beth should heat up the tin of Swiss ravioli for lunch, but she suggested they should wait no longer to cut the cake. It was a rich fruit cake iced in pink and white. Kept in a tin, it would last for weeks. Beth’s daughter Annie had sent it with best wishes from Plymouth.
They ate their slices slowly, to guard against indigestion. After a while Thomas said,
