A Five Year Sentence

by Bernice Rubens

  She decided to try the reference section, but as she opened the door, the solid wall of silence frightened her, and quickly she withdrew, knowing that nothing pertaining to her commission could be accomplished among its shelves. She stood disconsolately on top of the stairway, wondering where next to go to fulfil her duty. Then at the foot of the stairs, a man appeared, an oldish man, but spry in his gait. His head was bowed, checking each foot on the steps, and unseeing, he walked straight into Miss Hawkins’ trap. She looked down on him and waited. When he was almost at the top, she herself started the descent. Seeing another pair of feet in his line of vision, the man stopped and looked up. Miss Hawkins stopped too and smiled at him. ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ she said, giving voice to the line she had rehearsed all the way to the library. He stared at her. Then, with his hand, he swept the raindrops down the front of his coat, a token of his opinion of her meteorological talent.

  ‘Well, it was a lovely day,’ she said limply. ‘The rain must have just started.’ Then he smiled at her, pitying her embarrassment. He made to walk on. Miss Hawkins didn’t want to lose him. The miracle of finding him in the first place was not likely to be repeated. ‘Oh, I forgot a book,’ she said, following him back up the stairs. He seemed pretty indifferent to her company, but she insisted. ‘What book do you want?’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to borrow some for my mother.’ He stopped and looked at her. Then shyly, and with almost an inbuilt knowledge that he would regret it later, he said, ‘Perhaps you could help me choose.’

  Miss Hawkins had read about love, and she’d sometimes eavesdropped on the factory girls’ courting accounts. She had no more expected it to happen to her than she would be party to a lottery win, but at that moment, Miss Hawkins was convinced that the tremors that tingled through her body could only be labelled as love, and this recognition so astonished her that she was afraid to move her body lest the tremblings became audible.

  ‘Would you?’ he said. It was not a plea, but a mere follow-up of what he had said before.

  She nodded her head and could not stop it nodding. The man continued the ascent, and with stiff steps, she followed him. When they reached the shelves, she said, ‘What sort of books does your mother like?’ She heard a caress in her voice, and she decided she had fallen in love with his mother too.

  ‘She likes thrillers,’ he said. ‘She’s read most of these anyway, but if I let enough time elapse between the borrowings, she forgets she’s read them before.’

  Though his accent was distinctly working-class, Miss Hawkins was impressed with his vocabulary. He was a man of some education, probably self-taught, and she already felt herself unworthy.

  ‘I like thrillers myself,’ she said, sensing that the way to his heart was through an alignment with his mother.

  ‘Woman’s stuff,’ he said, and he blunted his contempt with a laugh. But contempt it was, all the same. Inside herself she agreed with him. Women were silly and of an inferior nature.

  ‘D’you live with your mother?’ she said. It was perhaps a way of asking him whether or not he was married, and she congratulated herself on the deviousness of the question.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he was clearly not going to say any more.

  ‘What a good son you must be.’

  And again he laughed and again the laugh was a cover. He picked out a book with a singularly lurid jacket. ‘This is the sort of thing,’ he said, flashing the naked blood-dripping torso before her eyes. She shivered, more from embarrassment than horror.

  ‘Too gory for you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. If it suited his mother, it had to be fit for her. ‘I like to frighten myself.’

  ‘Just what she says,’ and at that moment, Miss Hawkins saw herself well and truly married, sharing the house with the old woman, feeding her with dead bodies in closets, blood stains on carpets, the smell of burning flesh, a million malevolent malignities that would keep her busy and out of sight and eventually out of mind.

  ‘Here’s another,’ he said. He showed her the cover. A young girl hanging from a meat-hook. She thought of Morris, or rather, the thought of Morris surfaced, for it was a permanent subtenant in Miss Hawkins’ mind. It was all matron’s fault, she thought, who took the money that bought the ink that marked the rags that made the string that choked the maiden all forlorn. She wondered how matron had died, if dead she was, and hoped with fervour that her demise had been slow and infinitely painful. She felt her teeth clench with the outrage. Sooner or later she would have to share Morris with somebody. Sooner or later she would gently have to cut her down and bury her. More and more as she grew older, the ghostly image swung relentlessly in her head, to and fro with metronomic regularity, the up-turned toe sheering her nerve-ends, orchestrated to the screaming apology of a young white face that had proved itself to be that of a woman. Miss Hawkins looked at her companion. ‘What’s your name?’ she said. She had to know that, and she had to know it in full.

  ‘Brian,’ he said. ‘Brian Watts. And yours?’

  ‘Miss Hawkins,’ she obeyed her time-honoured conditioning.

  ‘Miss what Hawkins?’

  Out of her past she plucked that infrequent monosyllable. ‘Jean,’ she said.

  He had by now gathered a half a dozen books. ‘I wonder if it’s stopped raining,’ he said. He walked over to the window. She took in the full-length view of him for the first time, and she noticed that his shoes needed heeling. She ascribed it to negligence rather than poverty. How could a man who spent his life looking after his mother find time for personal attention. Soon her diary would order her to take Brian’s shoes to the mender’s. He came back to the shelves. ‘It’s pouring,’ he said.

  She wanted to detain him, to give him some reason to shelter from the rain other than that of her own company. On her way into the library, she’d noticed without interest that there was an exhibition of war pictures in the basement. It would do. She told him about it. ‘We could look at that until the rain gives over.’ She thought of all the orders she could have given herself that morning in her diary. ‘Helped a man to choose books for his mother.’ ‘Went to an exhibition’ and heaven knows what events would follow. So many red ticks in such an abundance of obedience. But the diary would never be that ordinary, even though there was now more than adequate copy in her life to justify a journal. Her diary was an order book, and would continue to be so if her life were to have any purpose at all. She might never see Brian Watts again. She might be alone for ever, and the single reliable joy in her life, was the daily red-crayoned tick, and that pleasure she could not jeopardise.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  They descended the stairs and she waited while he checked out his mother’s borrowings. The exhibition was in the annexe of the library and they had to walk through a covered way to reach it. The narrow path was irregular with grassy humps and holes, and without thinking of the consequences, she crooked her arm so that he might lend her his for her support. And he did, because he could not leave it just jutting out into the air. At the touch of his arm, Miss Hawkins had a sudden desire to go home. She feared that her body could no longer tolerate the battering of such frequent and unaccustomed pleasure. Even though she had invited it herself, she could not believe that she was the object of anybody’s attention, and she tightened his elbow on her hand as if she would keep it there for ever. She wanted its imprint indelible on her skin so that it would be proof to Maurice at dinner that this had really happened to her, and that it was no mere figment of her frustrated imagination. At the end of the path she released her grip. There was a revolving door into the exhibition, and Brian hesitated. It was a contraption that he always tried to avoid because it frightened him a little. But there was no other means of entry. He wanted Miss Hawkins to go first, and to this end, he placed his hand on her shoulder, guiding her as the path-beater through the door. Miss Hawkins’ body was now feverish and she would have liked to sit awhile on one of the leather settees that fla
nked the exhibition. But she did not want to call attention to a fatigue that might have betrayed her age, for she was suddenly conscious of that too.

  ‘I’ve a stone in my shoe,’ she said, marvelling at her sudden duplicity.

  ‘D’you mind waiting?’

  He sat down beside her. She turned her back slightly, needing to hide the stone that wasn’t there. At the end of the settee stood a large potted plant, and coating the earth was a lining of small white stones. Surreptitiously, she slipped one into her hand and into her shoe as she eased it off her foot. She smiled to herself. She was discovering talents that she never thought existed, and it encouraged her to be henceforth more bold in her diary’s orders. For almost everything was accomplishable. She held up her shoe and ostentatiously emptied it, catching the rolling stone and replacing it where it was found.

  ‘I’ve never been to an exhibition before,’ she said, unashamed of this display of unworldliness.

  ‘Not even the National Gallery?’

  ‘Where’s that?’ she said.

  ‘In Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘I’d like to go there one day.’

  He couldn’t leave that hanging in the air. She had made an obvious request, and there was no-one else around to fulfil it, so he said, ‘We’ll go there one day if you like.’

  She wanted to beg him to desist, to avail himself no more, to give her time and peace to assimilate the momentous gestures and words he had already donated. After such a long emotional fast, her lustful appetite was large only in principle. Her capacity had sorely shrunk and any overload was painful. ‘One day,’ she said.

  They sat in silence, and though she was grateful for the pause, she was equally afraid that, if prolonged, she would lose him. ‘Shall we look at the pictures?’ she said.

  He got up and stood beside her. Then, in a deliberate movement, he crooked his arm, as if ordering her to take it. Out of his own weakness, and lack of self-assertion, he rarely took the initiative in any situation, but when he did, it was performed with the vicious aggression of a bully, as if he despised himself for his own weakness. ‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said.

  She took his arm quite naturally, as if it were her proper due, and she worried that after a lifetime’s deprivation, she could so quickly attune herself to its very opposite, and more than simply attune but to actually take it for granted. Yesterday and all her yesterdays, she had walked alone, her body-skin hard-calloused with disuse. Now suddenly it craved attention and with wanton appetite, not simply as a plea, but as a downright expectation, peppered with anger at being so long deprived. She would have to take a strong hold on herself not to become too greedy.

  They were facing a collection of factory pictures, with single close-ups, or straightforward rows of girls packing munitions. She had been one of those girls, with the same white muslin turban, and white overall that gave an odd look of purity to the lethal poison that shuffled between their fingers. During the war, the ‘For Your Pleasure’ sweet factory was given over to munitions and the same girls who so deftly wrapped the mints, now equally skilfully encased the bullets. She had never questioned the dubious morality of her work. For her it was simply a question of packaging. Her wage had increased considerably and it was during that time that she was able to put down a deposit on the small flat where she still lived. The manager of the factory had said she was sensible. Flats were cheap in bomb-risked London, and she was wise to risk the advantage. The other girls thought her staid and middle-aged before her time. They could all be killed tomorrow. What was the point in paying out good money for a future that one might never live to enjoy. And, in fact, some of the girls turned out to be right. Especially one, she remembered, who had particularly sneered at Miss Hawkins’ husbandry. Downes it was, one of the orphan-women, who, one day, sitting alongside Miss Hawkins at the conveyor belt, fell suddenly forward, her small face too frail an obstacle to impede the belt’s smooth running. But the bullets accumulated in a heap on the side of her cheek, and then over her head, before Miss Hawkins, too astounded at the crumpled vision beside her, was able to drag up the turbanned head and let the bullets pass. ‘Downes,’ she screamed into the alabaster face. In its eyes gleamed a defiant I-told-you-so look, that proved that there wasn’t any point in mortgages after all. ‘A blood clot,’ the factory foreman told the girls in the canteen. ‘Went out like a light. Couldn’t have felt a thing.’ Miss Hawkins was angry. Not even a bomb. Not even a shrapnel splinter. Just a simple death from an unnaturally natural cause. Somehow, in wartime, it seemed an illegal way to die.

  ‘Were you in the army?’ she asked Brian as they reached the ‘Men in Combat’ section.

  ‘Yes. But I never saw any action. It was my mother, you see.’

  ‘How could she stop you?’

  ‘She did. But it wasn’t her fault. That’s what she says anyway.’ He steered her away from the black and white sacrifice others had been called upon to make. ‘Let’s sit down,’ he said. He obviously intended to tell her the whole story and he wished to make a recital of it. Miss Hawkins was glad of the rest and grateful that he seemed to value her confidence.

  ‘I was posted to the Far East in ’41,’ he said. ‘A couple of days before I was due to sail, she had a heart-attack. I’m the only child you see, and my father, well, he’d disappeared. So I got compassionate leave. She recovered but only after my regiment had sailed. Then twice more I got posted abroad and the same thing happened. She was rushed to hospital each time, so it was quite genuine. But since the end of the war, she’s not had a day’s illness. No, I never had a proper war,’ he said, and there was no attempt to hide the bitterness in his voice. ‘My mother saw to that.’

  ‘You should be grateful,’ Miss Hawkins said. She looked up at the photographs. ‘I wonder how many of those poor men didn’t come back.’

  ‘I’d have been better off,’ he said, almost in a whisper, and though she heard it, she sensed that it was not hers to question. It would be a conversation topic for another time, and she would order it in her diary. She was confident that she would see him again, for he had told her a story that was patently only a beginning. ‘The rain’s stopped,’ she said, as a sudden shaft of sunlight pierced the window.

  He led her towards the door. ‘The old woman’s incontinent,’ he said, and again she made no comment except a mental note to remember the word and to look it up in her little pocket dictionary.

  Outside, he looked at his watch. ‘I must get back with the books,’ he said. ‘I come here every Friday at this time.’

  ‘So do I,’ she said quickly, and added, with her new-found cunning ‘It’s strange we haven’t met before.’

  ‘Next Friday, then?’ he said.

  She nodded as he fumbled in the inside pocket of his coat. ‘Here’s my card,’ he said. ‘And you’d better be here.’ He didn’t bother to conceal the authority in his voice, and Miss Hawkins found nothing strange in his tone. The switch from weakling to bully seemed the most natural thing in the world. She held the card in her hand till they reached the end of the makeshift path, where they went their separate ways. Once out of his sight, she took out her glasses and read the print on the card. It simply gave his name and address. She’d hoped for some indication of a profession, but he was obviously a full-time mother-minder. He seemed an odd man to be carrying a visiting card, and she had an instinctive feeling that poor Brian needed so desperately to have his individuality acknowledged, even if it was only by the hand of a printer. On the way home, she read and re-read his address and repeated the word ‘incontinent’ on every second step. Her first task on reaching home was to proudly tick off the day’s order in the diary. Then she went to look up Brian’s word. She was shocked by its definition, and realising the manifest inconveniences of such a condition, she resolved there and then, that it was time Mrs Watts went into an old age home.

  That night she put the mirror on the wall and had Maurice to supper. She told him of the events of the day, re-living the pleasures
in the telling, and of her decision as to Mrs Watts’ future. She was glad that he was seen to agree with her. He was a good guest that evening, for she made no demands on him. He shared her excitement, and thrilled to her anticipation, and above all, he confirmed that the old lady should be put away. She got up from the table. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s the only sensible thing to do.’

  Chapter 5

  The following Friday Miss Hawkins rose early. During the week her diary had sent her to the cosmetic counter at the local supermarket and she had invested in some simple aids to beauty. Though she had practised their application many times, and studied their varying effects, she was still a novice in the art of self-disguise, and that morning she removed and re-applied the pastes and the powders many times before she was satisfied. She put on her best dress and opened the virgin bottle of ‘Stream of Violet’ which had been her most extravagant purchase. It had a very powerful smell, and she was not sure where to put it on her person. It had been too expensive to use in rehearsal, so she deliberated long before applying it. The logical site seemed to be on her upper lip, so that she, if no other, could personally benefit from the ‘exotic power’ that the label promised. The smell was overwhelming and she wondered whether it was too obvious a seduction ploy. But it was too late now to wash it off, since that would have necessitated a renewal of make-up. She hoped that in the fresh air, the smell might lose some of its pungency, and by the time Brian caught a whiff of it, its exotic promise might have evaporated to a mere suggestion.