She went to the kitchen and unlocked her diary. She flicked through the pages. Her release was barely three weeks hence, and the African violet had already wept its bondage dry. The proximity of the date frightened her. She had so much to achieve in so short a time. She turned the pages back to the day’s date. And boldly she wrote, ‘Sold the Settee.’
She wrote out a little notice giving its description, and taking care to state the required price of £50. She took it straightaway to the newsagent’s, and returned quickly in order to make full use of her last solid possession while there was still time. But first she took Maurice off the wall and leant him against the corner of the settee. Then she snuggled up beside him. ‘Maurice,’ she said, ‘only another few weeks to my wedding.’ She looked up at him, and had to adjust herself so that he could see her and hear her properly. And when he did, she thought he looked at her disbelievingly. ‘It’s true,’ she said angrily. ‘You just wait and see.’ Now he looked angry too, and he began to get on her nerves with his lack of enthusiasm. She was going to tell him about the settee and why she was selling it, but she didn’t think he deserved her confidence. But she had to tell someone. She had to air the terrible words, as if by confession, the deed itself would absolve her. ‘He’ll have to marry me, Maurice,’ she said defiantly. ‘You know why, don’t you? It’s because I’m going to …’ She stopped, choking on the blasphemous words. ‘Well, you know what I mean,’ she said.
He looked at her, his moustache drooping. She wanted to bash his face in. She turned her back on him and sulked into the cushion. She couldn’t bear Maurice’s disapproval. She ought never to have told him. He had been deeply disappointed in her. She turned round quickly. ‘I was only joking,’ she said, and she saw him smile with relief. At the time she meant it. She, Miss Jean Hawkins, would remain a maiden until her wedding night, but during Brian’s service she would assume the role of someone else, an act of sacrifice that was not hers, but performed on behalf of another whom she would gladly consign to the fire. She would be proxy for matron, she decided, and whether she was dead or alive, God would take careful note, and kindle the flame. It would be a joy to attend such a service. She was delighted with her new-found solution, and she leaned towards Maurice and embraced him. ‘Can’t take a joke, can you?’ she said.
The following day, while she was polishing what little furniture was left in her flat, the bell rang. She took off her apron and answered the door.
‘You have a settee for sale,’ the man said.
She started. She had forgotten her little notice. She hadn’t slept most of the night and now she recollected what had been nagging her. ‘Yes,’ she said hopelessly. ‘Come in.’
He followed her into the sitting-room. He loosened his scarf, and she saw with gathering dismay that by his collar, he was a priest of sorts, and she was tempted to grasp his sleeve and beg absolution. How could she take money from a man of God in order to buy herself a sure ticket to hell. She wanted to tell him that the settee was not for sale, that she’d changed her mind, but he was already appraising it, fingering the moquette caressing it as if it pleased him well. ‘We’re building a little community centre,’ he said. ‘For the old people, you know. We need a lot of comfortable chairs. There’s no better way to serve our Lord than in the care of the old and lonely.’
Oh my God, she thought, if only he knew to what iniquities that settee had been witness, in what heathen delights it had played such a pleasured role. She almost begged him not to touch it.
‘I like it,’ he said with a happy unbearable innocence, ‘but it’s a little more than the kitty can afford. Can you sell it a little cheaper?’
She wanted to give it to him, as a way of cleansing herself, as an atonement, but such largesse was impracticable for one only bent on further trespass.
‘I need £50,’ she said simply.
He looked at the fireside chair. ‘Are you thinking of selling that too?’ he said.
It would leave her with nowhere at all to sit, but her scarf no longer needed that resting-place, and she was happy to throw it in for nothing.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ the cloth said.
She looked round frantically for anything else that would help furnish his centre. ‘Is there anything else you want?’ she said.
‘Are you moving?’ he said, noting the overall bareness of the room.
‘Yes,’ she said brightly, ‘I’m getting married. We’re moving to the country.’
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘That’s happy news.’ And almost in the same breath, ‘Are you taking your dining-table with you?’
‘No, you can have that too,’ she said. ‘It’ll come in handy for the old people.’ God must surely be Listening, she thought, and taking note, and marking up her credits.
‘You’re much too kind,’ he said.
‘It’s to celebrate my wedding,’ she laughed, thinking that Maurice and she would henceforth have to eat off the floor.
He paid her £50 in crisp £5 notes, saying that he would send a van in the afternoon. He blessed her for her kindness, and wished her well in her marriage. Miss Hawkins felt little scruple in having hoodwinked him. She had, after all, given him more or less what was left of her home. She decided that in the evening, she and Maurice would have a last supper together. In three days Brian would come, and during that time, she would prepare matron for her eternal damnation.
On Monday morning, Miss Hawkins woke up screaming. In her dream, there had been no location, no people, and no sign of life or habitation. Just sound. The sound of bells that had begun as a gentle tinkle, almost inaudible. She’d strained her ears, and in response, the volume increased and assumed a hint of a melody which she half recognised as wedding chimes. She smiled and listened, urging them with her humming, until they pealed out, piercing the bright void with their nuptial message. Unmistakable. She lay back and listened, as the whole invisible world tolled her freedom. The morning would bring her wedding day, not in the Law’s mind perhaps, but certainly in Brian’s and her own. His service to her would conscript him into matrimony, and the bells rang out their sanction. And rang and rang, faster and louder, and so fast and so loud that the melody stumbled as the speed and volume overtook it in a cacophonous and deafening din. Her head had become the bell-tower of a great cathedral, and the noise pierced her ear-drums, and she awoke screaming with the stab of pain. She got up quickly. She wished she could miss out on this day, that some proxy would swallow it on her behalf, that next morning she could wake and survey the ruins or otherwise of her aching hopes. Knowing what she had to do, and knowing too that there was no alternative, deeply depressed her, and wandering through her bare and desolate home did little to raise her hopes. There’s nothing for it, she thought, there’s no longer anything to lose. The final humiliation, if such it turned out to be, would belong to matron. With this thought she steeled herself to dressing and making breakfast. She would need all her strength for this day. When she had eaten, she set about to clean the flat. In its denuded state, it did not take her very long. She spent most of the time in her bedroom, changing the linen and covering her shameful stratagem with her best counterpane. She wondered whether she should turn the bed down. She considered that that was part of the service, and Brian’s department. She would be glad to leave it to him. She could contribute nothing more. She would pay the price, shut her eyes tightly, invoke matron, and unlock her sensible legs. She shut the door quickly behind her. For some reason she could not bear to stay in the room.
In the kitchen the diary lay open with seven full pages to her freedom. Its current blank page called her attention. Somehow an order must be prescribed. To delay it, she flicked through the years of good conduct and obedience and she experienced a small pleasure of achievement. If she could acquit herself as well in the remaining days of her sentence she would have gained a small victory, even if everything else around her had crumbled in its name. The thought cheered her a little, and gave her sufficient courage to p
ick up her pen and consider the day’s terrible order. It wasn’t that she was wanting in the courage to prescribe it, rather that she was lacking in words. As a literary exercise, her diary was a monument to purity, unsmudged by a single unsavoury word. She couldn’t imagine that there was a clean expression for what she was about to do, and she could not sully her diary with its description. After a little thought she wrote, ‘Spent £50.’ The diary would understand what she was trying to say. As she read it over, she realised that there were loopholes in the order. It could have meant the expenditure of £50 on anything or in any place. Miss Hawkins had always been very strict with herself, so she added specifics to the original order so that it finally read, ‘Spent £50 on Brian’s service, and on one single item.’ That order was air-tight, with no loophole for escape or misinterpretation. She read it over. It was written down once and for all, and it was now inescapable.
She wondered whether she should bother to make a sponge. It would be the first Monday for many years that she had bypassed this leaden trimming of the ceremony. But there was no longer anywhere comfortable to take tea, or any surface to bear the candlelight, or any altar to curtain from the daylight. No, she decided, today there would be no ceremony. It would be a simple service, shrineless, and without cake, but God was everywhere and He could be wooed direct, without the trappings of ritual. So having decided against making a cake, and having made out the order, there was nothing for her to do until Brian came. She wanted to go into her bedroom to fetch a handkerchief, but she was afraid to enter the room lest the sight of the clean sheets and their avowed purpose would shake her firm intent. For now there was no turning back. It was indelibly written.
She sat on the floor of the sitting-room and tried not to think of what the afternoon would bring. But it was difficult not to think about it. In that empty room there was no solid object on which to focus her attention, and all her slippery day-dreams led to the white-sheeted shrine. She concentrated on matron, and hoped that her hatred would freeze her image long enough to endure the service. She had no idea of how long it would take, but she hoped it would be quick and easily forgettable, and she could tick it off in her little book, and when no-one was looking, she could transfer the same order to her wedding day, where it would find proper and legal timing. She thought of matron, and for once could not hold on to that reliable irritant, and she feared that her dark shadow would lurk somewhere else that afternoon, out of her desperate reach. She feared that her intended proxy would not materialise, and it would be she, Miss Jean Hawkins, and no other, who would taint those sheets, and who would cry out to God for mercy, pleading that she was only obeying orders. She decided that she would straightaway put on her wedding dress, just to satisfy herself in her own mind that she was a bride and that the sheets were her God-given entitlement.
Slowly she entered the bedroom and laid the bridal gown on the bed. As she dressed, she felt the need for some music, and she switched on the radio to the morning service. She was glad the organ was playing. For the first time in many years she thought of her mother, and she had a sudden longing to have known her. She was pretty certain, and matron had lost no opportunity to confirm it, that her mother had never worn such a dress, but had doubtless day-dreamed herself into the white and pure veil. She looked upon her own prospective marriage as vindication of the unjustness of her mother’s life, and a chance to give the lie to matron’s calumny.
When she dressed, she drew the veil over her head and walked slowly around the flat to the organ’s mournful tune. In such a way she spent what was left of the morning, acclimatising herself to her new status, and in doing so, validating in advance the events of the afternoon. And so vivid and real was her marital status, that by the end of the morning she was eager to claim her conjugal rights, and almost resented that she had to pay for them.
She took off the dress and hung it beneath its cellophane cover. Already she had ideas of having it altered now that it had served its original purpose, of cutting it down to serve as a cocktail dress for the dinner-dances that Brian would take her to. The tiara and veil she would keep as a souvenir to ensure her of a passport to heaven.
She was too excited to eat any lunch. She straightened the counterpane where the tiara had left its print. In her excitement, she’d forgotten to set out the service charge. She took the vicar’s wad of bills, and placed them on the table next to the lamp. She wished they weren’t so clean. As her final preparation she took Maurice off the wall, and wondered where to put him. She couldn’t put him under the bed for that was his punishment place, and he had done no wrong. But she had lied to him, and was about to cheat him, and he had to be well out of the way of her deception. She would put him in the kitchen, in the pantry against the wall. Afterwards she would try to explain to him. She might even tell him the truth, and risk his desertion as well. In any case, she would soon be a respectable married woman, and perhaps she ought to think of giving Maurice his marching orders. She placed him gently on the floor, facing the wall. ‘We’ll talk it all over this evening,’ she said.
The doorbell rang and in the instant splintered all her morning illusions. Now the reality of the afternoon’s programme could no longer, and in no way, be disguised. Her knees sank to the cold pantry floor, and she prayed to God to forgive her.
At the sight of the bunch of flowers in his hand, she took heart, and knew that, whatever the price, all would be well. He for his part, mindful that this was his last Hawkins call, was prepared to court and to promise and to offer her his all. He followed her into the sitting-room. He was shocked by its bare appearance, but he was careful not to comment. Whatever excuse she made, it was clear that poverty was overwhelming her.
‘I’m buying new furniture,’ she said, hugging the flowers, and regretting that there was no table to put them on. ‘I got so tired of the old stuff. In any case,’ she prattled on, ‘if you’re to start a new life, you need new things to go with it.’ She giggled, almost crushing her bouquet in a hot spasm of embarrassment.
For a moment, he felt ashamed, but finding such an emotion so inconvenient to accommodate, he changed it easily and quickly into anger. He could have hit her for being so gullible.
‘Did you think about your mother?’ she said.
‘Yes. I’ll find a solution, don’t worry. You’re right. We should be together, you and I,’ he said.
Her heart leapt with gratitude, and she crushed the flower stems so hard that the sap seeped through her fingers. ‘Oh Brian,’ was all she could say, and he winced at the whine in the name. But it wasn’t the name, he assured himself. Miss Hawkins would have whinnied Felix too.
‘Well,’ he said, businesslike, ‘where are we going to trade this afternoon?’ As he said it, he realised that the brave little Miss Hawkins was finally going to sample the deep end, and that the leaden sponge and sickly port were probably on the bedside table. She looked up at him shyly and confirmed his thoughts.
‘Follow me,’ she said. Her voice came out as a plaintive squeak and he walked behind her and noticed that every part of her poor unyielding body was a-tremble. For a moment he thought he might refuse, as a last single act of decency. But what the hell. £50 was £50, and it could go towards the honeymoon. He decided instead that he would be extra gentle with her and that he would give of his best. All she would ever have of him was a memory. The least he could do was to make sure that it was beautiful.
And that he honestly intended, and perhaps it was not his fault that the legacy he bequeathed her proved otherwise. She lay in the semi-darkness, with her eyes screw-tight closed, trying with all her strength to enlist even the shadow of matron into her shame. She wept with the fear and failure of it all, and prayed that the dear and gentle Maurice, with his ears to the pantry wall, did not hear her cry of pain.
‘Why don’t you put your flowers in water?’ he said, when they returned to the sitting-room. She hadn’t recalled dropping them, but they were strewn over the floor. She hadn’t the strength to bend a
nd pick them up. ‘I’ll gather them for you,’ he said. He put them back into a bunch, and re-presented them. ‘To my future wife,’ he said.
‘Oh Brian.’
He tried not to hear it, but pressed on. ‘Would you mind if my mother lived with us?’ he said. ‘It’s the only solution.’
‘She’d be very welcome,’ Miss Hawkins said, not daring to accept what was meant by it all.
A Five Year Sentence Page 18
