Four Bare Legs In a Bed

by Helen Simpson

‘I’m not very good at this,’ she said.

  ‘Sure you are,’ he said. ‘Foot on the gas, that’s right, a little roaring never did any harm. All you have to do now is keep the left foot steady while you press the right one down.’

  Zoë did as he said and felt the car buck softly. She held it there at biting point. Triumph percolated through her veins as she released the handbrake and held them together in stasis for another second or two. The engine hummed obediently. Then they glided away.

  ‘There now,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t have done better if you’d been the Queen of Sheba.’

  While she was driving them back to the school, she also realised with the same delightful ease that she would move out from Roger’s flat that same week, and if he tried to block her with his familiar analysis of their relationship and all its side-dishes of exactly how and where she was mistaken she would not bother to listen, she would not be deflected by the rights and wrongs and stories about nights away on sofas, no, instead she would tell him such words were a waste of breath, and that she was off for the obvious simple reason appearing to her in this well-lit moment, that she did not like him.

  Send One Up For Me

  THE LIGHT HAD gone, but Tess could hear it was pouring again by the hiss of car tyres. She retrieved her rain-spangled packet of sausages from the outside windowsill, then lumbered around the room collecting saucepan, frying pan, knife and fork, and, from inside the wardrobe, a net of sprouts. She was trying to slim, so had not bought potatoes.

  Very slowly, like a circus elephant, she struggled down onto her haunches, then pressed her ear to the floor. Through the grubby piece of carpet wafted the noise of ‘Light’s Abode, Celestial Salem’. Good. Mrs Waley was watching Songs of Praise.

  Tess put her food and pans into a carrier bag for the stealthy advance downstairs in the dark. Brighter than the heart can fancy, she crooned under her breath to the television’s distant keening; mansion of the-er highest king. The ribbed plastic coating which Mrs Waley had chosen to protect her stair carpet from the feet of tenants rasped beneath her shoes.

  As always, the kitchen light socket was empty. Mrs Waley carried a bulb round in her apron pocket to illuminate whichever room she was visiting for more than a few minutes. Tess did not dare follow her example, as Mrs Waley had an unpredictable temper, and that was putting it mildly.

  She sat munching sprouts by the light of her pocket torch and thought back to three weeks ago when it had all promised so well. Mrs Waley had seemed a nice old lady who was letting rooms in her Balham house for security and to supplement her pension. For forty pounds a week Tess had been promised the use of her washing machine and kitchen whenever they were free.

  Now Mrs Waley came into the kitchen, sighing and moaning like the east wind.

  ‘Oh goodness gracious, I didn’t mean this house to be a bedsit,’ she began, her eyes everywhere in the crepuscular kitchen but on Tess’s plate. ‘I’ve done the wrong thing, the house is no longer my own, I didn’t mean my last home to be full of strangers.’

  ‘I’ll wash up very carefully. You won’t even know I was here,’ mumbled Tess. ‘You did say this was where I could eat.’

  Mrs Waley called Tess a liar and told her not to touch the washing machine or she’d have the police round, then returned to her television. Tess sat on in the dark and grizzled over the remaining sprouts. She would have to start looking for another room again. It was under a month since she had last done this and the horrors of stalking the A-Z’s least inviting pages in this sort of weather after work were still fresh in her mind.

  *

  Work was mere escapism compared to evenings and weekends, reflected Tess, as she typed her way through Monday morning. ‘We are pleased to announce the completion of this superb block of newly converted flats close to all the amenities of Victoria including the Army & Navy stores, etc.’ she typed from Caroline’s scrawl, progressing to details about extractor fans, spotlights, mixer taps and the occasional delightful patio. Her desk looked out onto a quiet nougat-coloured street slippery with wet sycamore leaves, bristling with scaffolding and estate agents’ boards which included those of Ratcliffe & Staunton, her employers.

  At the other end of the room, Caroline and Emma were smoking untipped Gauloises with conscious elegance. They inhaled emphatically, narrowed their eyes and, with fish-like pouting, ejected little blue clouds.

  ‘Who is she?’ said Emma softly, as they watched Tess’s bitten hands move over the keys. ‘I mean, where does she come from?’ Emma was lean and leathery-faced, a self-styled satirist.

  ‘Oh, Tess is all right. She’s just a bit slow,’ said Caroline, shifting her leg in its plaster cast (a souvenir from the slopes) to a more comfortable position.

  ‘Just look at her! She’s a great pop-eyed lump. She looks like she’s from another planet. I doubt she even knows the meaning of body pride,’ continued Emma.

  Caroline admitted that Tess was overweight; all right, then, gross, if Emma wanted to describe her like that.

  ‘And she’s so dim!’ said Emma with unnecessary gaiety. Caroline smiled wanly. She remembered their school days, when Emma, an anorexic and unpopular girl, had first latched on and claimed her as ‘friend’. Emma had not been exactly top of the class even then.

  ‘Well, we’ve all three ended up working in the same room,’ she pointed out.

  ‘You know it’s different for us,’ snapped Emma. ‘But that barrel of lard has dead-end written all over her. Hasn’t she even thought about what will happen to her when we go computerised?’

  ‘Poor old Tess,’ murmured Caroline. She stubbed out her cigarette and limped over towards the window. Tess looked up abstractedly.

  ‘When did Mr Ratcliffe say he wanted the details on Moreton Street? I can’t get them done by three o’clock after all.’

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s out on one of his long lunches today,’ said Caroline; and then, heaving her plaster cast forward on a kind impulse, ‘I wondered if you’d like to add your signature to my leg, Tessie.’

  On the way back Tess bought a bottle of sherry from an off-licence in Victoria Street to nerve herself for the bath which she had been delaying for the past week. It would have to be another torchlit affair. In front of her an old man who had obviously not had a bath for several weeks or possibly months was haggling with the sales assistant over the price of a quarter-bottle of Bells.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t operate a barter system, sir,’ snapped the assistant as the old man offered his donkey jacket in lieu of the missing eighty pence.

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ snapped the woman behind Tess. Undeterred, the old man was continuing the long and pungent business of removing his jacket. Tess thought about a donation to speed things up, but, reminding herself exactly how much was in her purse, thought better of it.

  ‘Close to the amenities of Victoria,’ she muttered as she ploughed comfortably through half a sliced loaf with a block of cheese and drank several glasses of the warm brown sherry. ‘Including the Army & Navy Stores, etc.’ She began the depressing business of undressing. Strange that the dinted extra padding of flesh seemed to make her feel colder rather than well-insulated. In the wardrobe mirror she noticed how the goosepimples on her arms and thighs gave her the appearance of freshly plucked poultry. She looked away fast and concentrated on thinking her own thoughts.

  Sponging herself down while holding herself ready to spring to the boltless door should she hear Mrs Waley climbing the stairs, she sang the ‘Skye Boat Song’ through chattering teeth. Back in her bedroom, the shivering would not stop until she had put on all her jumpers beneath a dressing gown and crawled into the bed’s welcome hole. Here she drank more sherry and sang ‘Strangers in the Night’ softly and with emotion.

  There was a drumming at the door, and quick as a flash the bottle was inside the wardrobe.

  Mrs Waley tried to push past, but Tess stood blocking her way.

  ‘I’m not having it, the bathroom cannot be used by all
and sundry,’ said Mrs Waley, who did not believe in greetings or prefaces. ‘If you don’t make an appointment to use it there will be chaos. I should never have agreed to take girls, with their wet stockings hanging up making the room damp.’

  ‘Tights,’ said Tess. ‘Is that why you charge me more than the boys on the third floor? I met Simon on the stairs and he told me you only charge him eighteen pounds.’

  At this, Mrs Waley went berserk, stamping her little feet and shouting. ‘It’s a conspiracy!’ she raged, ‘You’ve been stirring them all up!’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ said Tess reassuringly, buoyed up by the sherry. ‘But it isn’t fair, is it.’

  Mrs Waley went quiet, and the two red patches on her cheeks grew redder.

  ‘I’m very tired after my day at work, so I’ll say goodnight,’ said Tess and closed the door.

  ‘Carry the lad that’s born to be king,’ she warbled, tunnelling her way back into bed. ‘Baffled their foe.’

  Five minutes later came another tapping. Yemi from across the corridor stood there with a bumper packet of Prawn Cocktail crisps.

  ‘That was a brave feat,’ she whispered.

  Tess invited her in, and poured the last of the VP.

  ‘Best of British,’ she said, handing her the glass.

  Yemi sat on the edge of the bed and refused the sherry, explaining that she was a Seventh Day Adventist and so avoided alcohol, cigarettes, tea, coffee and all unnatural stimulants.

  ‘So how do you get by?’ asked Tess.

  Yemi shrugged and smiled broadly.

  ‘People say, everything’s all right in moderation,’ she said. ‘But moderation is very difficult. Much easier is, All or Nothing.’ Tactfully she averted her eyes from the empty bottle.

  ‘It keeps me cheerful,’ said Tess.

  ‘My joy is in the Lord,’ said Yemi. Tess sighed noisily. She opened the crisps and they sat side by side on the bed rhythmically working through them.

  ‘I hate this place,’ said Tess. ‘I wish I could live somewhere where I couldn’t be chucked out. I wouldn’t care what it was like.’

  ‘I have rented many rooms,’ said Yemi, ‘and they are all the same to me.’

  ‘Mrs Waley’s a Bible basher too,’ said Tess.

  ‘Bible basher!’ chimed Yemi, and laughed.

  ‘At work they say it’s just a matter of getting your foot on the first rung,’ said Tess, back on her old track. ‘The mortgage people lend you three times what you earn, but even so at that rate I’d have to earn three times more than what I earn now before I could afford even a studio flat round here.’

  Yemi shook her head and giggled.

  ‘They tell you to save,’ said Tess. ‘I can’t save on what I earn. It hardly keeps me in sherry.’

  ‘You worry too much,’ said Yemi.

  ‘I know,’ said Tess. ‘Next thing you’ll say is, trust in the Lord.’

  Yemi was examining the bookshelf. She pulled out a Bible.

  ‘That’s Mrs Waley’s,’ said Tess. ‘The only free extra that comes with this room.’

  ‘This is old,’ frowned Yemi as she leafed through it with expertise. ‘She should buy some in normal English so it goes to your heart straight away.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Tess resignedly. ‘You’re not going to let me get away without the Good News. I’ve heard it before, but that won’t stop you.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Yemi. ‘Let’s hear it from Matthew.’

  She sat up straight and formalised her face so that her mouth was stern and her cast-down eyelids gleamed like the backs of teaspoons.

  ‘Take no thought for your life,’ she intoned, ‘what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?’

  ‘That makes me so mad,’ said Tess. ‘Where’s it all supposed to come from, then? You’ve got to eat, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Behold the fowls of the air,’ continued Yemi with measured sonorousness, ‘for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.’

  ‘Birds lose half their body weight every day in winter,’ said Tess. ‘Two days and they’ve had it.’

  ‘Our flesh shall be transformed,’ said Yemi absently. ‘Maybe we should sing now.’

  ‘Something holy, of course?’

  Yemi wheezed in mock-apology. Tess launched herself into ‘Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning’. Yemi started to improvise a descant, but had to stop when Tess started sniffing and gulping during the second verse.

  ‘The words are so sad,’ she whimpered with a hiccup. ‘Cold on His cradle the dew-drops are shining.’ Yemi stood up and shook crisp crumbs from her lap.

  ‘I must go,’ she said.

  ‘Can I pat your hair?’ asked Tess. ‘There was a black girl at school used to let me pat her hair; lovely and springy, like moss.’

  ‘Another time,’ said Yemi. ‘You go to sleep now.’

  ‘Send one up for me,’ giggled Tess as the door closed.

  That night she dreamed she was standing thigh-deep in a field of lilies, ready to go bird’s-nesting. She was wearing a donkey jacket and the sun was beating down. ‘Speed bonny boat,’ she sang again and again, filling her lungs so that she became buoyant and able to float several steps at a time above the ground, moving faster than witches, faster than foxes.

  ‘Please, please,’ she shouted, trying to curl herself up into a particularly inviting crow’s nest. But the shaking would not stop. She woke up.

  Mrs Waley was standing by her bed, shaking her by the shoulder. Tess groaned and covered her eyes to block the sight of the night-greased face and front hair pinned into snails.

  ‘I’m being terrorised in my own house,’ stormed Mrs Waley. ‘I don’t dare sleep at night for fear of what you might do, you great fat trollop.’

  ‘What?’ said Tess, still submerged in her dream.

  ‘Conspiracy,’ she hissed. ‘I’ve been suffering from my old gall-stone trouble ever since you moved in.’

  Awake now, Tess was seized by a fit of the giggles. She lay shuddering and heaving under the coverlet while Mrs Waley ranted on.

  ‘You may well laugh! And as for that hottentot across the corridor, she’s all part and parcel of it. I heard you two last night, plotting. I heard you, singing so-called hymns. Well, one thing I won’t have in my house is blasphemy.’

  There was a pause. Tess had stuffed some sheet into her mouth, but tears still spurted from the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Black as the ace of spades,’ added Mrs Waley thoughtfully. She wandered over towards the door, then turned and eyed Tess with new spite.

  ‘I want you out by this evening,’ she said, suddenly calm. ‘My son will come round and if you aren’t gone, lock, stock and barrel, he’ll put your stuff out on the pavement. And there’s to be no talk of deposits. Nothing but talk of moneymoneymoney these days. Never give in to bullies, that’s my motto. I may be only an old-age pensioner but I didn’t live through the doodlebugs for nothing.’

  Some while after she had gone, Tess sat up and pulled on her dressing gown. She saw from her clock that it was still before six.

  She went to the window and looked out at the empty street. The sun was already strong, straw-coloured, magnanimous towards the dust-bloomed privet hedges and tub-bound daffodils, winking from car wing mirrors and the hundred-year-old stained glass of front door panels. Looking harder, Tess noticed plaster acanthus leaves sprouting above lintels and a glittering snail track on the bonnet of the sporty little Triumph parked opposite. Outside her own window the flowering cherry shook a handful of whiteness into the early wind, and next door’s striped cat trotted by with an air of modest purpose, while Tess found to her rage that she was crooning ‘Strangers in the Night’ quite cheerfully as though nothing much was the matter.

  The Seafarer

  ‘OH, THANK YOU, Mr Ericson,’ she breathed. ‘I’ve always wanted to travel.’
>
  Back at the flat she tried not to crow over Peter. His job at the bank was safe, yes, but then it would never involve a business jamboree along the coast of Norway. Sally’s position as personal assistant to the head of Ericson Public Relations and, to be honest, her own personality, had earned her this assignment.

  ‘I bet old Ericson wanted to get out of going himself,’ was all that pen-pushing Peter would say.

  The Hurtigruten steamer sailed at midnight. Bergen’s lights stretched into stilts on the harbour’s ink, streaming from there across hollow lifeboats, portholes and the blondness of coiled rope. Sally felt her face stiffen in the salty air; her hair was already crisp with frost. She leant on the rail and watched the progress of the tug’s guiding lamp as they followed it out to sea.

  Down in her cabin, she could hear metal coathangers tangling on the rail next door. The wastepaper basket was chained to the wall. She unpacked her clothes into a wardrobe no bigger than a coffin.

  ‘What am I doing here,’ she said aloud, but smiling. Soon she was asleep.

  At breakfast, her beefy fellow passengers tackled roll-mops, prunes and slices of fuschia-pink salami with apparent gladness. It was certainly the cold light of day, she thought, as she watched their dewlaps working. Nobody else in the dining room was under the age of seventy, nor spoke a language understood to Sally, who knew only English.

  Soon, parcelled up in sealskin boots and suede helmets, they were stamping and thwacking their padded sides up on the passenger deck. Sally stood at the rail again, trying to decipher the coastline through opaque fog, telling over the several winters she had wasted in Peter’s company, listening to the slam of the waves while sudden regret sighed hot as indigestion inside her. She had not packed the right clothes and soon her hands were palely cerulean. Sorrow freshened again when she remembered her father.

  At Trondheim, a young man stood waiting to embark, hunched as a cormorant against the wind, dodging from foot to foot. Sally shifted her position to gain a better view. Beneath the cowl-like hood of his oiled jacket she saw angry pale eyes, pleated forehead and a sulky mouth.