Getting a Life

by Helen Simpson

  Every woman who left the train after that made a point of sidling past the hero on her way out and muttering some praise or thanks. He acknowledged each tribute with a nod, and continued to read. Lois, who had gone back to her seat, turned to him and murmured that it had been brave of him but shouldn’t he be careful in case of a knife? He regarded her with unsmiling eyes.

  “Someone has to stand up and say it,” he said.

  “I suppose so . . .” she began.

  “There is too much freedom,” he told her, closing down the conversation.

  Too much freedom, she thought as she changed trains at Embankment. Too much freedom! That’s not the sort of moral you want to hear. Not from a hero.

  Holly was already at a corner table sipping from a liter of Bulgarian red when Lois appeared with her shopping.

  “There was a drunk on the train,” began Lois, struggling out of her coat.

  “All those ossif parties,” said Holly. “I hate it when they vomit and you still have several stops to go. Let me pour you a glass.”

  “Cheers,” said Lois. “Are your sixth formers all coming in with hangovers?”

  “Fourth-years up,” said Holly. “I think we should give them compulsory lines in December. Write out a hundred times, I must drink a pint of milk before I go down the pub.”

  “Or they could choose instead, Never drink when you’re angry, lonely, tired, hungry or bored.”

  “So, never,” said Holly. “Basically. Cheers.”

  “They’ll all be at raves soon,” said Lois, raising her glass. “Safe from the demon drink.”

  “Red wine is good for you,” said Holly as she glugged away. “Although it has to be at least four units a day before there’s any effect on the bad-cholesterol lipoproteins.”

  “I needed that,” said Lois. “This sentimental line on the family they trot out every Christmas, it makes me angry; as though there’s some transformative magic wood.”

  “I blame Dickens,” said Holly. “The memory of sorrow softens the heart. Does it hell.”

  “Such coziness,” Lois hissed, glaring at the menu. “Such lies. I can’t think of a single family that isn’t dysfunctional in some way. That’s what they’re for.”

  They studied the list, its barszcz, its stuffed cabbage in white sauce and its meatballs in red.

  “I’m ravenous,” said Holly. “Meatballs for me. I’ve come straight from a very long Nativity play. Dave’s youngest was a shepherd.”

  “The boys had theirs yesterday,” said Lois. “You know the bit when there’s no room at the inn? They said, Unfortunately everywhere is fully booked.”

  “How very Sydenham,” said Holly. “We don’t get that sort of language out in Ilford.”

  They ate and drank and discussed Holly’s plans to abandon teaching and go into computer programming. Although she thought this might drive her mad with boredom, it would pay enough to enable her and her partner Dave to move out of her flat and into a house; and since Dave’s children were staying most weekends now, this had its advantages. His wife still would not give him a divorce. His children blamed her, Holly, for their parents’ separation. She and Dave wanted their own baby but she had had a miscarriage last year and time was running out. Meanwhile her own father’s second wife had left him a couple of weeks ago and he too would be coming to Holly’s for Christmas.

  Lois listened to more about Dave’s vile wife, his malevolent children, about how it was Dave’s duty to himself they were ignoring, and noticed how this always happened with Holly now after the first few drinks. She lost her honesty. She would look at the complicated and painful equation she and Dave had had to draw up in order to be together, then she would have another drink and boldly claim the moral high ground as well. This was all done in what Lois privately called Polonius-speak.

  “What do you think?” asked Holly at last, staring at her with a certain loss of focus.

  “I’m on the side of love and happiness,” said Lois tactfully.

  “So how’s William these days?” asked Holly, ordering another half-liter of wine without reference to Lois.

  “I don’t really know,” said Lois. “He’s stopped talking to me and he’s drinking too much.”

  “Make him say limericks,” said Holly with relish, then attempted the one about round the rugged rock but fell at the third syllable.

  Lois watched her heaving with giggles and realized almost casually that William had borrowed more money from somewhere, without telling her, and had lost it again. That was why he could not talk to her. Her thoughts strode ahead of her in seven-league boots.

  By the end of the meal Holly had drunk a good deal. Her eyes looked skew-whiff, as though they were trying to regroup on the same side of her nose, like a flounder. She was challenging Lois’s memory as to the origins of English carols, which had been the subject of a college essay they had both tackled twenty years ago. It was hot chocolate then, thought Lois.

  “Lullay, lullay,” sang Holly, causing heads to turn. “Thou little tiny child . . .” and her voice cracked and her face weakly crumbled.

  “It’s that tune,” she whispered as Lois hastily paid the bill and passed her tissues under the table.

  Oh hell, thought Lois, Oh bloody hell, while trying to hail a taxi and reassure her that nobody had noticed.

  “I’ll be all right,” mumbled red-eyed Holly, tripping over a carrier bag. “Got a return ticket.”

  “Ilford, please,” said Lois, giving her a cross hug and bundling her into the back of a black cab, countering the driver’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for his fare with a twenty-pound note up front.

  “She all right then?” said the driver, casting a leery look over his shoulder at the figure slumped across the backseat.

  “Of course she’s all right,” snapped Lois, slamming the door. “She’s a teacher.”

  The trains were in chaos that night but she took one as far as Lewisham, then caught a bus which was destined eventually to pass through Lower Sydenham. She even had a seat on the end of the three-person banquette behind the driver, with a large sleepy woman lolling between her and the man at the other end.

  “Stay awake,” said the man now and then into the sleepy woman’s ear. When he stood up to get off the bus at the corner of Catford Road, the woman tottered after him and crashed to the pavement. That seemed to rouse her a little, and she looked up into the bus with a puzzled expression and said, “Drummond Road?”

  “She’s not with me,” called the man to the driver. “Says her stop’s Drummond Road.”

  “Anybody getting off at Drummond Road might see this lady right?” called the driver down the bus into the crowd of blank embarrassed faces.

  Oh bloody hell, thought Lois.

  “I am,” she said grimly, helping haul the woman back on. Her black tights had split into a web of white holes and wet red knees.

  “Shorry, darling,” the woman slurred, and slumped against her on the seat and fell asleep.

  “Wake up,” said Lois. “What’s your name?”

  “Treesa,” mumbled the woman. “Tess. Tess.”

  “Come on, Tess. It’s our stop next. Drummond Road.”

  “Drummond Road,” said Tess, sitting up, eyes closed.

  “You be all right then?” said the bus driver as Lois, festooned with carrier bags, helped her down.

  “I don’t know, do I,” snapped Lois, followed through the window by thirty pairs of eyes as the bus drove off.

  “Drummond Road,” she said loudly. “What NUMBER. Stay awake!”

  “Hundred shirty sor. Shirty sick,” said Tess, fishing out an enormous bunch of keys and handing them over. Her eyes were closing again.

  “A hundred and thirty-four?” shouted Lois. “Thirty-six?”

  “Kiss,” said Tess with a great effort. “Shirty kiss. Hunnard shirty kiss.”

  “A hundred and thirty-SIX?”

  “Us,” said Tess exhaustedly. She was wearing stilettos, which made her lurch fearsomely, but she
would not take them off.

  “Keep going,” said Lois through gritted teeth. It was like coaxing along a gigantic toddler.

  At number 136 she tried every key on the bunch without success. She pressed the seven doorbells in turn, but nobody answered. She tried the keys again. On the second time round the lock gave and they were in. Tess led the way up the carpetless stairs, and as Lois followed her she glimpsed one of the downstairs lodgers open his door a crack. She saw a slice of a face, the glitter of an eye, and then the crack closed noiselessly.

  “Smine,” said Tess exhaustedly, indicating a door on the landing. Then she went into the lavatory beside it and bolted herself in.

  “Oh bloody hell,” said Lois, putting down her carrier bags and going through the business with the keys again, twice, because this door had two separate locks. It opened at last.

  “Are you all right in there?” she called through the bolted door.

  “I’m grand, darling,” came the voice, with effortful enunciation. “Don’t you worry about me then.”

  “But you’ll come out in a minute?” called Lois.

  “Sure I will, baby.”

  Lois picked up her bags and pushed her way into the room. There was a brown-sheeted bed with clothes heaped all over it and round it on the floor. The kitchen sink in the corner held underwear soaking in a plastic washing-up bowl, a wooden spoon sticking out as though to stir it. There was nothing else except two Christmas cards above the blocked-in fireplace, and a huge bare fir tree which almost touched the ceiling.

  Lois rinsed the cups and mugs on the draining board, filled them with cold water and set them up by the bed. She held her breath and emptied the underwear into the sink, then put the bowl down by the bed too. Next she pleaded and bullied through the bolted door for the woman to come out.

  “All right, darling,” came the reply in conciliatory tones. “All right. I’ll get you something to eat, baby. Can I get you something to eat?”

  “But first of all you must come out,” begged Lois. “Please.”

  The woman said she loved her, and offered to feed her again. Lois leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.

  “Please come out,” she repeated. She was nearly finished. She had had enough.

  The door rattled open at last, with Tess emerging like a big shamed child, clutching more underwear.

  “It’s all right,” clucked Lois, faint with relief. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m shorry, darling,” moaned Tess. “I’m shorry shorry.”

  The vulnerability of this big soft woman, her gaping handbag, her bunch of keys so readily handed over and really the lack of fight in her, made Lois think back almost with nostalgia to the spiteful goblin on the train. She helped Tess onto the bed, where she curled in a fetal hump and, growling, pulled the covers tightly over her head.

  Lois stepped back to the door and realized she was holding her breath. The main thing now was to leave Tess inside the room, with her handbag and keys beside her; and for her, Lois, to be outside the room, with her carrier bags, pulling the door shut. This she managed. Her heart was thumping hard with tiredness and uselessness and she clumped down the hollow stairs as fast as she could, with a panicky apprehension on her way out that she would have to pass a wolf at the door on his way up.

  Outside in the cold she felt safe again. She walked on for a while past kebab bars and minicab offices, then noticed a rip-roaring bevy of boys at the next pub and decided to turn off the main road. The side streets would be a quieter route home, even if they took longer. In their tiny front gardens ivy leaves had been chilled to shagreen, and all the leaves on the privet hedges were pewter-plated. That’s what I want, she thought; I want to be pewter-plated.

  The curtains in this road had mostly been left undrawn, and at nearly every window glowed a well-lit tree in a darkened room. When she got home she would open the front door and there would be the tree she and the boys had decorated two days ago.

  She was very tired. She trudged on under the streetlamps. Safe as houses. Safe as trees. Sane as trees. Mad as trees. Why had Tess dragged that mad great tree up into her room? What business had a tree inside a house anyway? You shouldn’t let trees indoors, they belonged outside.

  The house would go too, that was it. And he couldn’t tell her. Bloody hell, she thought, stopping in her tracks. Why couldn’t he tell me that before, she wondered. I know why, he thinks it’s a competition and he’s failed. So that’s what it is, she thought, relieved after all the silence; though of course it was terrible. Better out than in, though. So to speak. She stood heaving gale-force sighs and shaking her head.

  A church clock struck the hour, lengthily. It was midnight. She heard the chugging past of a distant night bus, and laughter from people leaving a house further along the road. When she looked up at the roofs of the houses she saw there was a white velvet pelt of frost on the tiles, just as there was on the slats of the garden fences. This frost glittered superbly in the glow from the streetlamps.

  A forest of trees stood shining in their front-room havens, winking their fairy lights at her as she stood out on the pavement. Round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran. The rooms which sheltered them would be balmy with spice, evergreen and zest. In the light of their beauty she felt a kick of stubborn happiness as well as everything else. She blew her nose like a trumpet. Then she picked up her carrier bags of presents one by one and set off on the rest of the walk home.

  WURSTIGKEIT

  What have you told them at work?” she asked. “What have you told them at yours?” I countered.

  “I don’t need to tell them anything,” she said, looking down her long nose at me unsmilingly. “I’m in charge.”

  We had met as arranged on the pavement outside the Huguenot house in Fournier Street, the one whose area railings are headed with thistles rather than spears. I had been out east that morning to see a man at the Regulators about some recent embarrassing losses suffered by Leviathan Bank, whose compliance department I was running. On the way back from Canary Wharf to my lunchtime assignation in Spitalfields I had had the bad luck to be driven by one of those furious obsessive cabbies who hate traffic and know a thousand secrets about London’s back streets. He scorned the obvious routes, refused Commercial Road, shot off up in the direction of Bow, then lost his temper at the first red light and tore off round Salmon Lane to grind to a swearing, cursing and of course entirely forseeable halt on the Mile End Road. I was feeling mildly sick by this point, but he would not be satisfied until he’d swung us madly north up into Bethnal Green. At Weavers Fields I began to despair of ever escaping, but then at last he dropped me at the top of Brick Lane, expressing indignant incredulity at the one-way system, which, as any child knows, is nothing if not long-established.

  Even so, I was early. I was feeling buoyant and restless when I looked forward to the next hour or so. While I waited for Isobel Marley, I watched an old man running for a bus which had overshot the stop. He was creeping along, legs low down like a jaguar stealthily approaching its prey through the rain forest, with a broad ingratiating grin of pain on his face. I’m not really young anymore, it came to me, wincing in sympathy; but then (cheering up) I’m not all that old yet either.

  Isobel’s black cab drew up at last, gleaming and purring. She took her time unpacking her long-limbed full-bellied self from the back. It had taken her over twenty minutes just from Gray’s Inn Road, and she made the driver write out a receipt. We exchanged nods, avoiding each other’s eyes. Guilt and complicity hovered in the air like creaky old stage conventions.

  “So,” she said after we had exchanged formal greetings. “Where is this secret cavern of temptation?”

  “I’m not allowed to say,” I said, truthfully. “You’ll just have to follow me.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” she hissed as I led her down past Fashion Street and the police station, then left into Chicksand Street. “Ludicrous! Who do they think they are?”

  We had
met two days before at Iddon Featherstone’s reception for their corporate finance clients in Seething Lane. The partners at Iddon Featherstone are always hoping I’ll put work their way. Sometimes I do. I went along this time because I’m curious about their mooted merger with the German law firm Marbeiter Rotenhart, which is looking both inevitable and, for some Iddon Featherstone partners, disastrous.

  “The trouble is, we need more than a toehold in Frankfurt,” fretted Keith Mannion, head of corporate finance. “We may not like it but we’ve got to bite the bullet.”

  “Difficult,” I commiserated, taking a sip of mineral water. I glanced round the room and narrowed my eyes. It was a picture by Manet rather than Monet. Everyone there was in the self-concealing monochrome of corporate life. The only flashes of color to contradict the moonlit effect were provided by the men’s ties.

  Not far from us a very tall strong-featured woman stood talking to Iddon Featherstone’s managing partner, Graham Groton. She must have been six or seven months pregnant, and I couldn’t help thinking how much better pregnancy looks in tailored worsted than in the more traditional maternity smocks.

  “Of course, it’s the way the whole world’s having to go now,” I said. “There’s been a positive stampede of mergers in the broking sector. Everyone’s very jumpy.”

  We both watched as a waiter approached and the tall woman held out her glass for more champagne.

  “That’s illegal now, isn’t it?” said Keith Mannion. “Boozing while up the duff? You’d get lynched in the States for less than that.”

  “Good luck to her,” I said.

  “It’ll be her fourth,” said Keith Mannion, and for a moment I thought he was referring to her alcohol intake. “Isobel Marley, Q.C. She’s done a great job for us on that money-laundering case in the Philippines.”

  “Oh yes,” I frowned, recognizing the name from an article about high-flying women in that week’s Financial Times. “In the Updraught.”