When the doorbell rang, she almost feared to answer it. If she refused to admit Brian, then she couldn’t propose to him, and that would be a disobedience of the diary’s order. For how could she propose to someone who just wasn’t there? The bell rang again, rather faintly and without appetite, and she feared that if she didn’t answer right away, he would leave, and possibly she would never see him again. At this thought, she bounded to her slippered feet and arrived at the front door breathless. Brian took her panting for lust, and a possible sign that after so many years she had decided to take the final plunge. She led him into the sitting-room.
If Brian noticed the denuded furnishings, he did not show it. His eye went straight to the piles of silver coin, and by their height, he gauged them as normal. In a way he was relieved. In view of his long-term plans for poor Miss Hawkins, he was glad not to be offered her most valued possession, which year by year gathered worth like an antique. The leaden sponge sank on its plate on the table, and just looking at it gave him indigestion. He noticed that the label on the bottle was different. So, in a way, was Miss Hawkins’ demeanour. The timidity was absent, and she looked almost angry. He began to fear that this meeting would be a turning point in their affairs and that she would pin him down, once and for all, on his fraudulent tin, wanting to know its name on the market, its present price, and the exact profits accrued over the years. He wanted very much to go away, but it was now too late to withdraw.
‘I haven’t much time today, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘My mother’s not very well. In fact,’ he said, ‘would you mind if I came tomorrow? It would be much more convenient.’
‘Yes, I do mind,’ she said. ‘I’m busy tomorrow. All day.’ She couldn’t postpone her diary’s order. And she kept worrying about the scarf and the gaps in the room. And she began to dislike Brian too, and with all these feelings of anxiety and displeasure, it was difficult to produce the accents that should accompany a proposal of marriage. She helped herself to some port, and went into the kitchen to make the tea.
The diary lay open in front of the tea-caddy, though she could have sworn she had closed it, as she always did, for part of the pleasure of ticking, was to open the book and find the right page, all teasing acts to postpone the thrill of climax. She saw the current order and knew that she had no alternative but to carry it out. She closed the book and locked it, then she manufactured a smile and carried in the tea.
He had drawn the curtains and lit the candles. She thought she would wait for the service to begin before plighting her troth on his shy behalf, since the words might then seem a natural result of his paid affections. She passed him his tea and cake, and sensing her unease, he decided to cheer her up. ‘I think we’re due for another anniversary, my dear, you and I. Shall we drink to that?’ He raised his cup and smiled at her, and she thought that he surely was on the brink of proposal. She waited, the cup to her lips, smiling. ‘To my first and only customer,’ he said.
She sipped some tea and waited again. He patted the settee beside him. She sat down, crossing her ankles and hovering on his next utterance. ‘And what service does my ladyship want today?’ he said. He put a gratis hand on her knee. The thought crossed Miss Hawkins’ mind that for the first time, she would actively disobey an order. It ran too much of a risk of his refusal, and he might never come again. And these were not pleasures she could easily forgo. Yet on the other hand, there was no talk of her investment, and there was little enough left for her to live on. She took a deep breath and removed his hand. ‘Brian,’ she said.
He gulped on his tea, and the resultant coughing fit postponed the showdown that he feared. He couldn’t go on coughing for ever, but at least he’d stalled her prepared moment. ‘Give me a minute,’ he spluttered.
She took away his cup, grinding her teeth, doubting that she could find the courage for a second attempt. She waited for the coughing to subside, then she handed him a little port. ‘That’ll soothe your throat,’ she said, ‘Sip it gently.’
He took it gratefully. Sickly as it was, it would prolong the delay, and give him time to think of a reason why she shouldn’t be told the name of her shares. She hadn’t given him much port, he noticed. Even with the tiniest sips it soon had to come to an end. Besides, she was standing over him, waiting for him to drain the glass. Then she sat down again, with a determined look on her face that indicated that she was not in the least bit thrown by the coughing interruption. He trembled.
‘Brian,’ she said again.
‘What is it, my dear?’
‘I think it’s silly for us to go on like this.’
For a moment there was a glimmer of hope. Was she, of her own accord, giving him the push? But then he realised that if that were the case, she would want to finalise her account. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Don’t you enjoy it?’
‘Oh yes. I enjoy it very much.’
‘Well, what is it then? Why can’t we go on as before?’
‘I would like something on a more permanent basis,’ she said. Now it was out, or almost all of it, enough to merit at least half a tick in the diary.
‘But we are permanent,’ he said. ‘I’ve been coming here every Monday for over three years.’
It was clear to her that he’d not got the message and again she feared his refusal. ‘I don’t mean that,’ she said.
‘Then what do you mean?’ He regretted his question the moment it was out. He knew very well what she meant and he had given her carte blanche for a proposal.
And she took it readily. ‘Brian,’ she said.
He thought it was such a silly name, and the way she said it made it sound even sillier. She whined it like a cry of pain.
‘I’m proposing to you,’ she said.
‘Proposing what?’ It was his last pathetic stand for delay.
‘Marriage.’
The word echoed round the empty spaces of the room finding no obstacle that might have muted its doomed reverberation. Marriage. It was an offer of nothing but her impoverished availability. She unlocked her ankles, satisfied that she had done her duty. The tick was secure, which was more than she could at present say of her future. She hovered for his reply.
Again he temporised, taking her hand, his mind an utter blank.
‘Well, what d’you think?’ she said, encouraged by the hand-holding.
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought of it,’ he said, ‘many times.’ Now having spilt the first falsehood, it was easy to elaborate and he set off on a whirl of lies and fabrication, with a certain secret enjoyment, though he was careful to maintain a look of worried helplessness. ‘I just don’t know how I can manage it,’ he said. ‘It’s my poor mother.’ He tried not to think of her lapped in Petunia luxury, and probably at this very moment relishing the hot buttered scones of a Petunia tea. ‘I couldn’t leave her,’ he said.
‘You could put her in a home.’
He smiled. ‘I couldn’t afford that,’ he said.
‘But there are homes on the National Health,’ she protested.
‘No,’ he said, with determination. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to put her in one of those.’ He saw her lip curl in anger, and he regretted the finality of his declaration, fearing that she would jettison all her marital hopes, and in their stead, make a desperate move to get her money back. ‘But don’t give up hope,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll work something out. I promise I will.’
She didn’t quite see what he had in mind, but she was afraid to ask for details in case it would seem like nagging. ‘Are you sure it’s only your mother?’ she dared to ask.
She had given him a clue for another objection, and he was quick to grasp it.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a bit difficult to put into words.’
‘Go on,’ she said, encouraging. She was prepared to be anything for him, do anything for him, to remove whatever obstacle he had in mind. He for his part had hit upon the very stumbling block that he confidently knew Miss Hawkins would never surmount. ‘I know we’ve known eac
h other for a long time,’ he said, ‘but, well – well, we don’t know each other all that well.’ He couldn’t say ‘intimately’. It was too brash and allowed for no misinterpretion. He preferred to leave it ambiguously in the air, so that she could do what she wished with it. And though Miss Hawkins knew perfectly well what he meant, she pretended it was beyond her understanding, so beyond in fact, that there was no point in elucidating. She quickly changed the subject. ‘Will you have another cup of tea?’ she said, and as she poured she understood exactly what she had to do to win Brian’s hand. She was delighted that the solution was so abundantly clear, yet the thought of its execution was devastating. But not today. The diary had not ordered it, and in any case, she didn’t have that kind of money, and no means of getting it she thought, as she looked round the room evaluating what was left of her chattels. If her eye rested on the settee, she told herself she was looking at Brian. That’s all she was doing, she said to herself, simply because he was sitting there. ‘I’ve got five pounds to spend,’ she said, like a child in a toy-shop. It was what a dealer had given her for a gold armistice medal that was found around her neck when the wrapped-up bundle of her was delivered to the Sacred Heart Orphanage. It was sufficient evidence to prove to matron that the infant had been sired by a common soldier with the help of an even commoner camp-follower, and the medallion was never removed so that it should serve as a reminder of the nothingness from which she came. Miss Hawkins had worn it most of her life, thinking that it was probably a birth-mark. Until one day at the factory when the fudge-wrapper foreman saw it as an opportunity for mamillary investigation and whipped it out of her cleavage. His interest in the medal soon superceded that of its nestling-place, and he turned it over and over with envy. ‘Worth quite a bit, that is,’ he said. That day Miss Hawkins took it off her neck as much for its value as to discourage further lecherous probings. She kept it in a little box on her dressing-table, her only clue to her parentage. Now she had sold it for her pleasure. According to matron’s standards, her parents would have been proud of her.
She drew the curtains and lit the candles, but this time she had to admit that there was less pleasure in their exchange. She was anxious to get it over with, to spend her money quickly, so that he would go away and leave her alone to tick off the little order in the book. More and more she realised that this act was the major pleasure of her life as well as its prime justification. She didn’t particulary want to marry Brian. She was wedded to her diary, a union as tyrannous as it was pleasurable. But the diary couldn’t support her. It couldn’t replace her furniture or underwrite her weekly expenditure. In any case, it would soon have run its course, and Brian was its only possible replacement. ‘D’you promise you’ll find a way?’ she said.
‘To what?’
It was clear even to the gullible Miss Hawkins that Brian found the whole matrimonial prospect faintly resistible. ‘To marrying me,’ she said, wearily brazen.
‘Of course I promise,’ he said, ‘we’ll find a way. Don’t you worry.’
‘Where will we live?’ she said, then before he could answer, ‘I’d like you to move in here. But we’ll need a bit more furniture.’
What the hell, he thought, he might as well play her along totally. ‘That’ll be very cosy,’ he said. ‘And when your tin-ship comes home, we’ll re-furnish completely.’ By then he would be safely installed on Violet’s velvet cushions well out of the Hawkins’ reach or pleading. He was filled with utter contempt for her measly provincialism and he stretched over and pocketed the last silver pile. ‘Till next Monday then,’ he said getting up.
‘Perhaps you’ll have news for me then,’ she said.
‘Nothing’s going to happen in a week,’ he said. ‘But don’t you worry, I’ll think of something.’
His assurances should have appeased her, but somehow her anxieties remained. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him. She was sure that he would do his best to find some solution, but there was no doubt that his mother was a formidable obstacle. They could only wait for her to die. She wished suddenly that she seriously believed in God so that she could offer a sincere prayer for Mrs Watts’ painless passing, bearing in mind that if she hung about much longer it would be at the cost of two people’s happiness, and in God’s reputed fairness, He would be judge. She saw Brian to the door, and stood there looking after him up the street. In her worried weariness, even the ticking appetite had deserted her, and it was a full five minutes before she left the porch and returned to the kitchen.
The diary lay on the table. She was faintly surprised that it was still locked. Had it been lying open it would have been almost as she expected. Her life had taken on such a pervading unreality, that she no longer felt herself personally responsible for any turn of events. She looked around her denuded home and could not accept that she herself had stripped it. For a brief moment she recalled her pre-Brian days, when her nest-egg thrived cosily in the bank, when her accrued possessions hugged her like a womb, when the green book was locked and orderless. She looked back on those days with longing, and she wondered how, and on whose behalf, such confusion had invaded her nest. She tried to concentrate on her Monday pleasures, trying to see in them fair compensation for her loss. But now they appeared to her wasteful, disgusting even, and obscene, and she remembered matron’s terrible prophecy. She had been right. She was indeed a fallen and penniless woman. At the thought of matron, and especially at the thought that she had proved so exact, Miss Hawkins rushed to the sitting-room, reaching automatically for her knitting, then froze with fear as she recalled that it was no longer there. That disappearance too was an unreality outside her own making and it left her defenceless and unarmed against the searing memories of her childhood. She was loathe to look for the scarf. She feared that, even if she found it, she could not accommodate the shape or texture it might have assumed. The scarf had colonised her almost as tyrannously as the diary, and her need for them both was equally obsessive. She could not bear to be in the house any longer. She needed the proximity of another human being, she needed to partake of some human enterprise, to re-assure herself of the existence of a certain reality, and that given a chance, she would recognise it. She rushed to the wardrobe for her coat. And there, swinging its overburdened length from the skeleton hanger, hung the scarf, its needles upturned in one of her shoes. And in its hanging shadow, she saw Morris. She was not frightened, for after all, that was what the scarf was all about, a multi-coloured winding-sheet for an unburied grief. It was right and proper that Morris had appeared for a fitting. What did frighten her though, was a total non-recollection of putting it there. Why on earth should she change its normal resting-place? It had taken itself there, she was sure. It had hung itself snugly next to her coat, as if it had in mind to go somewhere, to seek and find some target for its accumulated rainbow spleen. She smiled, not knowing why, or understanding the sudden stab of pleasure its discovery had given her. Tenderly she took it down from its hanger and folded it, admiring its proud enduring length. It crossed her mind to cast off the stitches and hope that her occasional anger would subsequently abate. But she needed it, only a little longer, she thought, until Brian would take her hand and give her peace.
She took the coloured folds and gently placed them in the bottom of her large shopping basket. Thenceforward the scarf would accompany her everywhere. Before leaving the house, she looked again in her diary. She was free of orders for the rest of the day having already dutifully acquitted herself. She flicked through the remaining years’ pages. And though she felt it was against all the rules to anticipate the future with any certainty, she turned the pages to her expected day of release. Just barely two months to go. She picked a small African violet that grew from a plant on the kitchen windowsill. Very gently she pressed it on to the page. By the time her sentence ended it would be dry and filigree-aged, a fitting farewell to her green-leathered bondage. As she was closing the book, she caught sight of the day of her freedom. It was Easter Monday.
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Chapter 16
Every subsequent Monday, Miss Hawkins was tempted to play her last alarming card. But the little green book withheld the order. Besides, she did not have the necessary service charge, but she feared that one day the diary would prescribe the offering and she would not have the wherewithal to obey. It was as well to be prepared. She looked about her. The only object left in the flat that could possibly fetch the required amount was the settee. To dispossess herself of that time-honoured accoutrement of service would be a major undertaking. And if she sold it, what then would serve as the altar for her supreme sacrifice? She knew it would have to be the bed, with Maurice tucked for shame underneath, but since that would be its future setting, she might as well get used to it. The location bothered her far less than the deed itself, and far less than its actual cost. She pictured her shy unmarried self in the attitude of wilful surrender, and recalling matron’s promise of the purgatorial fire, she shuddered. She tried to attach less value to that gift on which all her life she had kept such a tight hold. In matron’s terms she was already a fallen woman. For years now she had indulged her filthy pleasures, and sullied them further by payment. What difference now if she merely extended the range of her desire. So she tried to belittle herself, to rate as trash the last remnant of her virtue, but with all her reasoning, she could not deny its worth. If she hung on to it, it might not give her entry into heaven, but it would certainly help to save her from the fire. But then she thought Brian was sure to marry her, and no-one need ever know that the loss of her virtue was premature. God wasn’t that clever. For a long time she weighed in her mind the advantages and disadvantages of the diary’s possible order, and in the process of her considerations, she grew more and more excited, and she regarded that as a sin too, and knew that no matter what she did, she was irretrievably damned. There no longer seemed to be any point in limitations.
A Five Year Sentence Page 17
