She unlocked her front door, but there was no note in the letter-box. Beside it she off-loaded her shopping bag, her scarf prepared for another sortie, for she knew she could not stay in her empty flat and wait for him much longer. She looked at her watch. Six o’clock. It seemed to her now that there was little reason in hoping any longer. At this thought she began to tremble, she went into her sitting-room and stood rigid in its emptiness, trying to control the convulsions of her body. She thought she might be having a fit, but she was afraid to lie down for fear of not being able to rise again. She clutched the knob of the sitting-room door. She was sweating, yet she was cold. She was quivering yet she was not afraid. All she knew was hate and anger, and a bruised and harrowed heart. She saw that her grip on the door-handle was so tight, that her knuckles were white with strain. A small dribble of spit oozed over her chin. She had a strange and hysterical notion that her body was leaking its fury. And for the first time she gave way to fear. And that fear loosened her white grip on the door-knob and bullied her into the kitchen to face the first un-obeyed order of her long sentence. The red tick was unachievable, and for the dutiful Miss Hawkins, it was the final deprivation. With a small and desperate scream, she drew an angry line through the ill-written order. She had never written it. It had never been there. She hadn’t meant to get her money back. Ever. It was something different she’d had in mind. Something very different indeed. And she wrote it boldly, in large capitals.
The four-letter word dropped from her pen as naturally as blood from a wound. For she had to bleed somehow, for her injury was deep and burning with pain. As she dropped the pen from her hand, she dribbled once more her spleen, and her blood-shot eyes recorded what her diary had ordered, ‘KILL.’ She picked up her shopping-bag and fled from the house.
She’d picked up two weeks of her pension money in advance. The Post Office always made that concession prior to Bank Holidays. It was her minimal housekeeping money, but for some reason she felt she would not need it. She would take her turbulent rage to The Petunias by taxi.
She found one cruising at the corner of her street. She tried to sit back comfortably on the upholstered seat as the written instructions suggested. She had, after all, not sat in a comfortable chair in many weeks. She was very unused to taxis, and in any case, her stumbling rage would not allow her to relax, and she sat stiffly on the edge of her seat, wiping the endless spittle from her chin and in her cold sweat, looking out of the window but seeing nothing. Unlike the bus the taxi was speeding, and tuned harmoniously with her growing rage. By the time they reached The Petunias’ drive, she was once more a-tremble in each part of her body, and when she stepped from the taxi she tried to steady herself, but her body quivered like a lately-rooted arrow. She shuddered up the drive.
A gardener was weeding one of the border flower-beds, and as she approached, she shouted, ‘Mrs Watts?’ She didn’t want to stop. She hoped his answer would come during her transit. ‘Over in the annexe,’ he called to her without looking up from his hoe, and he waved an arm in the direction of a separate building on the side of the main house. So with no interruption of her clenched footsteps, she made her way across the lawns.
The door to the annexe was open, but there was no-one about. Without stopping she called down the long corridor, ‘Mrs Watts?’ There was no response. She turned about and tried the other side of the rectangle, shouting her plaintive summons. This time, a door opened and an old lady peered out, and seeing another human being and the prospect of some company, flung a large smile in her direction. She waited for Miss Hawkins to reach her door.
‘Are you looking for somebody?’ she said, though it was difficult to imagine that a visitor was bent on any other errand.
‘Mrs Watts,’ Miss Hawkins said, loud and clear.
‘She’s been out, I know,’ Miss Winters said. ‘I don’t think she’s back yet. I’ll go and see. Would you like to wait in my room for a moment?’
Miss Hawkins was in no mood for pleasantries, but she could have done with a chair as some means of calming her taut and quivering nerves. And she had to stop her footsteps if only to wipe the dribble from her chin. She followed Miss Winters into her room and took the easy-chair that she offered.
‘I’ll just go and see if she’s back,’ Miss Winters said. ‘Won’t be a moment.’
She wasn’t a moment either, but it was long enough to give Miss Hawkins time to catch sight of a large framed photograph on the dressing-table, time enough to stir a strange and unnerving interest, time to scan the small pale unhappy faces, time enough to curdle a sick flicker of recall. Then Miss Winters was back standing in the doorway.
‘You can wait here for her if you like,’ she said. She moved over to the bed and sat down. Miss Hawkins stared at her. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘Miss Winters.’
It rang no bell. She turned and looked again at the photograph. She wanted to be sick and she didn’t know why. ‘Where’s Mrs Watts?’ she said.
‘Oh she had a big day today. Went to her son’s wedding. I was asked, but I’m not feeling too well. Brian is his name. A charming man.’
The news did not register immediately for Miss Hawkins was too concerned with the nightmare of the woman’s identity. She looked again at the photograph, and picked it up to examine it closer. In the front row, she saw her pigtailed self, and next to her, poor Morris, in her unhanged pre-woman freedom.
‘My little orphans,’ the woman on the bed was saying.
‘Married?’ Miss Hawkins said, very, very gently.
‘Yes. A nice lady too. Violet something or other. Mrs Watts looked so smart in her new bonnet.’
Very slowly Miss Hawkins took her scarf from out of her shopping-bag. She ran its serpentine length through her fingers looking for a suitable colour that would translate her rising bile. Somewhere around the middle, she found a foot of olive green. It would do. Slowly she approached the bed as if to embrace her, and she placed the green against matron’s rigid and starched throat. Then she wound it round once, slowly and strongly, pulling tightly on each end, watching the old woman’s bewildered stare, the bulging tearful eyes, the jutting forehead vein, and at last the lolling tongue. How like poor Morris she looks, Miss Hawkins thought, and a strange calm invaded her. She pushed the dead woman back on to the pillows and as she did so, matron’s arm knocked over the polythene-wrapped singing Mary, and a muffled, unseasonal off-key ‘Silent Night’ tinkled like a cracked passing bell.
Miss Hawkins stared long at the terrible face, and the starched neck so full of scarf. She marvelled that out of all the yardage of her years’ anger, out of the long, long distance of her shattered childhood, it had taken but six inches of olive green to wipe the jagged slate clean. From the ends of the stranglehold, Miss Hawkins picked up the knitting needles, and slowly and with infinite care, she cast off the stitches. She placed the empty needles, one on each side of matron’s head and the symmetry pleased her. Matron would have said that she was a good girl. Then she picked up her empty shopping-bag, and left for home.
In the kitchen, she unlocked her diary and ticked off the final capital order with a small and secret joy. She noticed that the African violet had crumbled into frail dry lace, as if freedom was too burdensome a bondage. She gathered up Maurice from under the bed and took him into the sitting-room. She sat on the floor and held him before her. ‘I am innocent, Maurice,’ she said. Then, holding him close, she sat and waited for them to come and look after her.
Note on the Author
Bernice Rubens was born in Cardiff, Wales in July 1928. She read English at the University of Wales and married young; she worked as an English teacher and a filmmaker before she began writing at the age of 35, when her children started nursery school. Reubens’s first novel, Set on Edge (1960), was threaded with the themes of Orthodox Judaism and family life. The book was a success, which encouraged her to continue with writing: her second novel, Madame Sousatzka (1962), was filmed by John Schlesinger, w
ith Shirley MacLaine in the leading role, in 1988, and her fourth novel, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker prize. She was shortlisted for the same prize again in 1978 for A Five Year Sentence.
Reubens was an honorary vice-president of International PEN and served as a Booker judge in 1986; her last novel, The Sergeants’ Tale, was published in 2003, a year before her death at age 76.
Discover books by Bernice Rubens published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/BerniceRubens
A Five Year Sentence
I, Dreyfus
Madame Sousatzka
Nine Lives
Sunday Best
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain
references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1978 by W. H. Allen & Co Ltd
Copyright © 1978 Bernice Rubens
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eISBN: 9781448210923
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A Five Year Sentence Page 20
