‘No thank you, pet. They seem to make me sleepy.’
I grabbed hold of her arms roughly and urgently. She sat up, recognizing the signs.
‘Barbara,’ I said in the pleading voice. ‘Barbara!’
‘Don't be angry again, pet,’ she pleaded, clutching her handbag full of oranges in alarm.
‘I'm not angry, just sad. Barbara – you know you're making me ill, don't you?’
‘Poor Billy! Why am I making you ill?’
‘Dalling! Have you ever heard of repressions? The nervous reactions that affect men who aren't, well –’ – the only ending I could think of for the sentence was a phrase of Stamp's, ‘Getting it regular.’ I let the thing peter out.
‘I know what you mean, pet,’ the Witch said, gently but desperately, as though she were soothing a dangerous lunatic. ‘But we must be patient. We must. We'd only regret it.’ But I was already regretting it. I found myself, quite suddenly, not caring a damn one way or the other, only wondering what I was doing here in a cemetery with a stone woman, anyway.
I muttered ‘Forget it’ and leaned back in the hard wooden shelter with my eyes closed, calculating how soon I could get away. I had been meaning to scheme out some way of keeping the Witch out of the Roxy tonight, out of the way of Rita, and I decided that it was high time I got to work on it. A tentative plot began to form in my mind; arranging to meet the Witch outside the Odeon, not turning up, and then explaining the whole unfortunate misunderstanding when she came to tea tomorrow. A warning bell sounded in my brain on the idea of the Witch coming to tea. See Witch re Captain. The words I had scribbled down hours before suddenly flashed like a neon sign in my head. I sat up again, sharply.
‘Dalling!’
‘Mmmm?’ She was almost asleep.
‘Dalling, are you still coming to tea tomorrow?’
The Witch sat up herself and shot me a keen glance, daring me to wriggle out of it.
‘Of course. That's why I was hoping you would have got my engagement ring back.’
‘Good.’
I swallowed. I had rehearsed this once, but that was days ago. I tried to visualize the stage instructions, looking studiously down at the stone-flagged floor and tracing one of the cracks with my foot.
‘There's something I want to tell you,’ I said in the low voice.
The Witch said nothing but, employing her main de-fence mechanism, stiffened.
‘You know what you were saying about loving me even if I were a criminal?’
‘Well?’ in her icy voice. We had had a fairly tortured evening once when the Witch had cornered me into admitting that I would love her in every conceivable circumstance – age, infirmity, unfaithfulness (the idea of her being unfaithful had rather charmed me), and criminal record being taken into account. I had had no option but to fire the same litany back at her, and had got so far as to make her agree that even if I shot her father and mother she would still, she thought, love me.
‘I wonder if you'll still love me when you've heard what I've got to say,’ I said.
The Witch was rapidly withdrawing into a cocoon of formality.
‘You see – well, you know that I've got a fairly vivid imagination, don't you?’
‘Well you have to have, if you're going to be a script-writer, don't you?’ she said smugly. There were occasions when I would have willingly shot her, never mind her relations.
‘Well being a script-writer,’ I continued ponderously, ‘I'm perhaps a bit inclined to let my imagination run away with me. As you know.’
The Witch said nothing, but she was beginning to breathe heavily through her nostrils.
‘You see, if – if we're going to have our life together, and the cottage, and little Billy and little Barbara and the wishing-well and all that, there's some things we've got to get cleared up.’ I nearly added ‘and implemented’.
‘What things?’
According to my stage instructions I was to give her a frank, honest glance. I was unable to do it, and decided to rely on a frank, honest profile.
‘Some of the things I'm afraid I've been telling you.’
The Witch said, in her direct, devastating way: ‘Do you mean you've been telling lies?’
‘WeWell not lies exactly, but I suppose I've been – well, exaggerating some things. Being a script-writer…’ Another idea crossed my mind, that of slapping the Witch across the mouth and striding out of the cemetery, never to meet her again. I put it away. ‘Well, for instance, there's that business about my father. Him being a sea captain.’
In a weak moment, or rather in a panoramic series of weak moments, I had told the Witch that during the war the old man had been the captain of a destroyer. He had been partly responsible for sinking the Graf Spee before being captured – one of the first men to be captured by U-boats, as a matter of fact – and had spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp. He had been wounded in the leg, which still gave him some trouble.
‘You mean he wasn't a sea captain, I suppose?’ said the Witch, and I was surprised that she didn't seem surprised.
‘He wasn't even in the navy,’ I said.
‘And what about him being a prisoner-of-war? Don't say that was all lies.’
‘Yes.’
The Witch turned away with a quick movement of the head, bringing tears to her eyes without difficulty. I suspected that she had perfected the whole action in front of a mirror. Its point was to make it quite evident that she was turning away and not just looking away. Reaching out for the most banal remark I could find, I said:
‘Are you cross?’
There was a practised silence. The Witch gave it thirty seconds and then said:
‘No, I'm not cross. Just disappointed, that's all. It sounds as though you were ashamed of your father.’
I sat bolt upright and steamed the heat into my voice. ‘I'm not ashamed, I'm not, I'm not!’
‘Otherwise why say he was a sea captain? What was he?’
I had to stop myself from saying ‘A conscientious objector’ and starting the whole thing over again. I said: ‘He wasn't anything. He wasn't fit. He has trouble with his knee.’
‘The knee he's supposed to have been shot in, I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ and I was now talking belligerently. ‘Another thing, we haven't got a budgie.’
I had told her that we kept a yellow budgerigar called Roger. I had regularly given her communiqués about its antics and there had been a highlight when Roger had flown out of his cage and nearly been caught by Sarah, the tabby.
‘Or a cat,’ I said.
The Witch was shuffling her handbag about and buttoning her coat to give the impression that she was about to leave.
‘How many other lies have you been telling me?’
‘My sister.’ The Witch had roughly the same story about my imaginary sister as I had given to Arthur's mother.
‘Don't tell me you haven't got a sister.’
‘I did have, but she's dead.’ This time it was out before I could prevent it. I ran rapidly over this new turn, and within seconds I had established death from tuberculosis, and a quiet funeral. ‘If you still want to come tomorrow, they never talk about her,’ I said.
‘I'm not sure I shall be coming, now,’ said the Witch. She shuddered elaborately. ‘I've always hated – lying.’
A happy thought struck me. In my pocket I still had the miniature silver cross that had spilled out of her handbag in St Botolph's churchyard – the one she was supposed to have given back to her cousin Alec.
‘Have you?’ I said. I decided against producing the thing triumphantly and waving it under her nose, for the moment at least. I went into the hard voice and said: ‘Look, Barbara, we all have our faults. I have mine. You have yours.
‘I don't tell lies,’ said the Witch.
‘Don't you?’
‘No!’
‘What about that cross or whatever it was that you were supposed to have given back to your cousin?’
‘Well, I did give it back,’ said t
he Witch. I was satisfied to see the same smooth expression on her face that I wore so regularly myself.
‘Did you?’ I said cryptically. She looked down at her handbag and back at me.
‘I told you I'd given it back and I gave it back.’
‘All right.’ I stood up as though washing my hands of the whole business. From the hard voice into the matter-of-fact voice. ‘Look. I've got to go into town now. You probably won't believe anything I say after this, but I may as well tell you that I've been offered a job in London. It depends on your attitude whether I take it or not.’
The Witch got to her feet, contriving a dazed expression. I felt like gripping her by the lapels of her coat and saying coarsely: ‘Look, chum, I do all these tricks myself. I know them. Pack it in.’
‘I shall never know whether you're telling the truth after this,’ she said. She walked with me down the gravel drive towards the cemetery gates, almost falling over her own feet in her attempts to look straight in front of her.
As we were passing the last grave I said in the bitter voice: ‘Well I know what my epitaph will be.’
She did not reply at first, so I let her wait for it. At length she said: ‘What?’ reluctantly.
‘“Here lies Billy Fisher”,’ I said.
I put just the right amount of ruefulness in my voice, and it took effect. She caught my hand impulsively and said: ‘Don't be cross with yourself.’
At the cemetery gates she stopped and held my hands at arm's length, as though for inspection. ‘Billy?’
‘Yes, dalling?’
‘Promise me something?’
‘That I'll never lie to you again?’ She nodded. ‘I'll never lie to you again,’ I said.
Holding hands, we walked out of the cemetery. The first person I saw, coming towards us and too near for me to do anything about it, was Arthur's mother, carrying a bunch of pansies.
Out of the side of my mouth I said rapidly: ‘Do as I say, explain later!’ ‘As Arthur's mother came alongside us, I smiled broadly.
‘Hullo, Mrs Crabtree. I don't think you've met my sister. Sheila, this is Mrs Crabtree.’
Arthur's mother looked at me as though I had hit her. It suddenly struck me that I had made the wrong decision. She said indignantly:
‘I'm afraid you've picked the wrong person to play your tricks with this time. I happen to know Barbara very well.’
The Witch, for public consumption only, gave me her tolerant, more-in-sorrow look.
‘I think it's his queer sense of humour,’ she said.
‘Got to catch a tram,’ I gabbled. ‘Bus.’ A No. 17 was pulling slowly away from the bus stop. I jumped on and galloped up the stairs, getting the Ambrosian repeater gun into position.
8
‘WHAT, is this for me as well?’ asked Rita incredulously.
I nodded, my mouth so full of egg sandwich that my eyes were watering. ‘Been robbing a bank,’ I chuntered, splu-ering food. It was already five o'clock, and the first time I had eaten since breakfast.
‘Cugh! Got owt else you don't want?’ She was genuinely delighted, more pleased, in fact, than she had been over the engagement ring. She put the silver cross round her neck fumbling under her metallic blonde hair to fasten the slender chain.
‘Joan of Arc,’ said Arthur.
‘Oo, it's woke up again!’ She bared her teeth at him, registering exaggerated scorn. Afraid that she had perhaps been sounding too grateful and had made a fool of herself, she said dubiously, peering down at the cross: ‘Aren't you supposed to go to church or summat when you wear one of these?’
Arthur said: ‘Yes, you've got to take a vow of chastity.’
‘Get back in the knifebox, bighead!’ Rita picked up my empty plate, a move I recognized as an obscure gesture of affection. ‘You can bring me a fur coat tomorrer,’ she said genially. She went back to the counter, leaving us sitting at the rockety table in the corner of the Kit-Kat by the huge, throbbing refrigerator.
‘The sexfulness is terrific,’ Arthur said, watching her go.
I was back in the buoyant, almost hysterical mood.
‘Lo, she is the handmaiden of my desires!’ I said, raising a solemn right hand. Arthur took the cue to go into the Bible routine.
‘And a voice spake,’ he said in a loud, quavering voice. ‘And the voice said Lo, who was that lady I saw ye with last cock-crow?’
‘And Moses girded up his loins and said Verily, that was no lady, that was my spouse,’ I responded.
‘Yea, and it was so.’
‘Yea, even unto the fifth and sixth generations.’
We finished our coffee and got up, guffawing and blowing kisses at Rita. ‘Don't do owt I wouldn't do!’ she called, in an unusual mood herself.
We left the glass doors wide open, the doughnut-eaters yelling ‘Door!’ after us, and walked out into Moorgate and across the road towards Town Arcade.
I had got over the feeling of guilt at meeting Arthur so soon after the hideous contretemps with his mother. I had been thinking of telling him about it, in one form or another, but now I was glad that I hadn't.
We walked into Town Arcade shouting: ‘Paymer! Paymer! War declared! Paymer!’ and our voices echoed under the arched glass roof. The women shoppers, shuffling miserably after each other with their string bags and their packets of cream biscuits, stared at us. ‘Paymer, lady?’ I called, flourishing an imaginary Echo. To my own surprise, I found that I was still carrying under my arm the gramophone record I had taken out of the house hours ago.
‘Let's go take the piss out of Maurie,’ I said.
Maurie was the owner of the X-L Disc Bar at the top of the Arcade, a slight, dapper little man who looked like an Armenian. He was interested in youth work and all the rest of it, and was always going on about showing tolerance and treating everybody as adults. When we had nothing to do we would go in and bully him. ‘Hey, Maurie, this record's got all grooves in it.’
‘Wonder if we'll get any buckshee records out of him?’ said Arthur. We opened the door with our feet and almost fell into the shop.
On Saturday afternoons the X-L Disc Bar was crowded with girls in gipsy ear-rings and youths in drainpipe trousers. They were the same people that we saw in the Roxy every week, but we never saw them anywhere else in Stradhoughton. They seemed to be transported invisibly from one place to another. They made me feel curiously old-fashioned in my stained raincoat and my crumpled suit, and I put on the intellectual act, sloping one shoulder down and trying to look as though the record under my arm was a copy of Under Milk Wood. One of the Kit-Kat crowd, doing a sort of skaters' waltz round the shop, called ‘Rag-bones!’ but nobody else took any notice.
The Disc Bar would not have made a good subject for Man o' the Dales’ Yorkshire Sketchbook. It had been a quite passably modern record shop when Maurie first opened it, but under his policy of live and let live it had been quickly reduced to a glass shambles. The cone-shaped ashtray stands, their bright yellow smudged with black, were already tilted, broken, and abandoned. The showcases, which were supposed to hang in mid-air on steel wires, sagged and lurched so dangerously that they had to be propped up on old packing cases. One of them was broken, a great jagged crack going along one corner. There were scuff marks all along the orange walls.
The girls in their tartan trousers swarmed around the record booths, leaving the doors swinging open untidily, so that half a dozen melodies – the pop songs, the trumpet specialities, and the jazzed-up hymns – met and collided somewhere in the middle of the shop. A boy of about sixteen in a leather lumber jacket was leaning against the counter, juggling with a plastic record sleeve. Little Maurie, in his red braces, was trying to make himself heard. ‘Would you mind? I know it's a great temptation, but would you mind?’
Arthur pirouetted across the shop like a dancer, using the peculiar gliding steps that seemed to be more or less obligatory in this centre. He found a cluster of friends from the band that played at the Roxy, and was immediately swallowed up with th
em in the corner. I stood by myself, hesitating. The odd thing was that he seemed to know everybody and I didn't. In the No. 1 thinking it was sometimes the other way round.
I heard a familiar, grating voice behind me and looked round. It was Stamp, holding up an L.P. and shouting: ‘Hey, Maurie, is this a record?’ – a joke, if you could call it a joke, that he had used a hundred times before. Stamp was never out of the Disc Bar. Little Maurie was the leader of the youth club whose illiterate posters Stamp was always designing. ‘Hey, Maurie! Maurie! Is this a record?’ I cuffed his arm so that he almost dropped the L.P. ‘No, slipped disc,’ I said.
‘Oh, they've let you out, have they?’ jeered Stamp, his eyes narrowing maliciously.
‘Yes, they wanted to make room for you,’ I said. I was glad to have met even Stamp. I turned away, looking around the shop to see if there was anybody else I knew.
‘I say!’ Stamp called me back.
‘I wouldn't come in on Monday if I were you,’ he said.
‘I wouldn't come in on Tuesday if I were you. Why not?’
He was grinning in the malevolent way he had when he had got hold of a piece of rich bad news. ‘I've just been back to the office to get some stuff,’ he said. ‘Shadrack's adding up your postage book.’
‘After you with Shadrack,’ I said. I suddenly felt ill. In the light voice: ‘Did he say anything?’
‘What?’
‘Did he say anything, dozey! About the frigging postage book?’
‘No, he was just muttering to himself. He had all the money and all the stamps out, though. He was adding it all up. How much have you knocked off?’
‘Haven't knocked anything off.’ Some of Stamp's friends were hovering round, staring at me. ‘Only the book's not up to date, that's all,’ I said.
‘Borstal here we come,’ said Stamp. He turned back to his friends, tittering. Over his shoulder, he said casually: ‘Your mate's upstairs.’
I knew at once, with a quick vibration running through me, whom he was talking about, exactly as I had known when he mentioned her this morning. I glanced involuntarily up the stairs where the classical department was, all thought of Shadrack going out of my head before it had time even to take root. One of Stamp's friends, a dopey-looking youth in an Italian striped suit, said: ‘Git in there, Charlie!’ I walked slowly up the stairs, the noise fading into a cacophonous backwash. Things I had forgotten came back and I was already steeped in the familiar atmosphere, the sense of freshness, relief, absurd comfort, anticipation, and the hint of some elusive scent that I knew for a fact did not exist. I was already telling her, ‘I could remember how you smelled, even!’ The last thing I heard was Stamp shouting, away in the distance, down in the shop, ‘Hey, Maurie, this record's got a hole in it!’
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