by Annie Murray
‘I know I’ve been married twice before, but it’s still so important. A ring makes it all so special, doesn’t it?’
The day passed successfully, so far as he could tell. He took her to the more picturesque places – not Twyford, but Goring and Henley, Cookham and Marlow. In a jeweller’s in Marlow, he found himself buying her an engagement ring.
‘Oh George!’ She sounded almost faint with excitement as she pushed the ring, tiny diamonds clustered round a central sapphire, onto her third finger. She extended her hand to him to admire, a rapturous expression on her face. ‘Oh you darling – I’ve never had anything so beautiful!’
She advanced on him, kissing his cheek. George smiled, gratified but surprised. Surely Tragic Lionel or Darling David must have come up with something similar in their time?
‘Would you like me to wrap it for safe-keeping?’ In a flourish of disclosure George could only admire from someone proffering what was in fact an empty box, the jeweller opened a little silk-lined case.
‘Oh no – I’ll keep it on,’ Sylvia said. ‘After all – it means we’re truly engaged now, doesn’t it, George?’
Apparently it did, George thought, as he signed what seemed to him an enormous cheque.
As they stepped out onto Marlow High Street, a voice assailed them at screech volume.
‘Oooh! It’s Mr Baxter!’
Sylvia grasped his arm, startled. They turned to see a spry figure in a little powder-blue suit, with the shingled hair and bright peeping eyes, behind spectacles, of Maud Roberts. She clapped her hands and clasped them together under her chin.
‘Oh it is you! Oh it is nice to see you, Mr Baxter. But you’re very naughty – you haven’t been to visit me like you said you would, have you?’
As George mumbled an apology Maud came up very close and seized his free arm, her eyes now fixed on Sylvia, who was smiling in a bemused sort of way.
‘Who’s this then?’ Maud demanded.
‘This is Sylvia,’ George began. He felt weary already. Maud stepped even closer and Sylvia, not wanting to be left out, shrank in nearer to him as well.
‘EH? You’ll have to speak up, dear – you know I’m a bit—’
‘SYLVIA!’ George bawled.
Maud looked Sylvia frankly up and down.
‘Well who’s she then? I’ve never seen her before.’
Sylvia, attempting rescue, held out her left hand, bearing the new ring. ‘I’m his fiancée,’ she purred.
‘Eh? What did she say?’ Maud cupped a hand round her ear. ‘Is that the sort of ring I think it is?’
‘She’s . . .’ George began. There was nothing for it. Conscious that people were already having to swerve off the narrow pavement along Marlow High Street to avoid the three people standing abnormally close together and yelling their heads off at each other, he decided to get it over with.
‘SHE’S MY FIANCÉE! WE’RE GETTING MARRIED!’ As he declared this to Maud and the public at large, it all felt heartily improbable.
‘Ooh!’ Maud laid her free hand over her heart, her blue eyes alight with excitement. But her face clouded.
‘GETTING MARRIED? BUT WHO IS SHE? I’VE NEVER SEEN HER BEFORE!’
And so it went on. With eventual promises to Maud and anyone else within earshot in Marlow that he would visit her very soon to explain all (even then he wondered quite how he was going to do that), they managed to take their leave.
‘Who on earth was that?’ Sylva said, rather huffily.
‘Oh, that was just Maud.’ George gave a fond grin, which made Sylvia look even more put out. ‘She’s a good sort really.’
‘I’ve been thinking, dear,’ Sylvia said, clearly dismissing Maud as not worth considering any more. ‘You must come and meet Mother and Jean.’
3.
‘Goodbye, darling – see you tomorrow!’ Sylvia blew him a kiss, making sure the two elderly ladies passing along the pavement did not miss this touching moment.
George was released at long, long last out of the door of number 29 of the solid railway terraces where Sylvia lived with ‘Mother and Jean’.
‘Toodle-ooo!’ she called after him, so loudly – despite the fact that he was only about four yards away – that the two old ladies turned their heads again in a faintly affronted manner.
George waved, his other hand seeking out the van key in his pocket. The Morris, waiting for him in the road, felt to him vaguely like an ambulance. He climbed in as fast as he could, throwing his jacket off and onto the seat beside him. He would have liked to sit very still and begin to come to terms with the situation into which he had, in the past two days, apparently hurled himself. But though Sylvia had shut the front door, he was certain that at least one pair of eyes was watching from behind the net curtains of number 29. He started up and drove off, muttering.
‘Oh George. Oh deary, deary, dear . . . Oh goodness me – oh Lord above . . .’ This lamentation did not help in any obvious way. A stiff drink might help fractionally more, he thought. Did he have the flask in the car?
He drove with the window wound down, the clammy air passing sluggishly across his face. The heat of this summer just went on and on. His clothes were clinging to him, his back damp. Just beyond South Moreton, he could stand it no longer. He pulled the van off into a gateway, ran his hands down over his face and reached into the glove compartment. Flask in hand, he climbed out into the mellow afternoon.
In the field were several ponies. As he went to rest his arms on the wooden gate, the faint breeze cooling his shirt, the ponies, of varying colours, raised their heads and regarded him with chirpy suspicion. There was only a trickle left in the flask, damn it. He drained the last drops of warm comfort from it and they oozed down inside, the caress of an ally.
‘God,’ he said. ‘What a crew.’
The terraced house had been stifling inside. Despite the heat, the windows in the back room in which he met the two gargoyles, were clamped shut. George felt an even higher degree of sweatiness come over him than he had been experiencing outside. His neck began to prickle under his collar. He wiped his palms stealthily on the sides of his jacket.
‘Mum,’ Sylvia announced to the seated females. ‘I’ve brought George to meet you. George is my new fiancé – look at the lovely ring he’s bought me!’
George could now recall barely a word of the conversation that had followed. He had not been in the house above ten minutes and there had been no offer of tea or any other sort of hospitality – thank heavens. Imagine having to stay any longer in that prison of a room. It was stuffy as hell and crammed full of grim furniture: two massive armchairs in scuffed, toffee-coloured leather; a utility table and chairs, the table covered by a drab embroidered cloth; brown linoleum on the floor. The mantelshelf, of bile-coloured tiles, held an array of knickknacks of a spectacularly depressing kind: cheap little jugs, children with exaggeratedly large eyes, china Alsatians . . . In the middle squatted a wood-cased clock which ticked with such ponderous slowness that it felt as if time itself was heading for oblivion.
It was not the quality of ornament itself that dragged at him. He was not a snob. Obviously not many people decorated their houses the way his wealthy customers liked to. But this place was mesmerizingly cheerless, permeated by a mouldy vegetable smell mixed with the odour of stale coal dust. He found it stifling, horrifying.
On top of which was the sight of Sylvia’s kith.
The mother looked impossibly old. His mind raced. If Sylvia was in her early forties, the sister – a glum, stolid-looking creature – must be considerably older. Then how old was this mother, with her clicking false teeth and grey straggling hair? She wore a sickly orange frock and grubby sheepskin slippers.
She got to her feet, clasping thin, veined hands together and seeming at a loss. Her eyes were watery and not unkind. He could see Sylvia staring, her face seeming full of fierce, explosive feeling, as if willing her mother to say something.
‘So – you’re going to marry Sylvia, are you?�
�� She seemed neither surprised nor pleased nor dismayed by this possibility. She might have been asking the milkman if he would leave an extra pint.
Jean, the sister, in a tweed skirt and sleeveless white knitted top, said nothing and sat staring ahead of her.
‘Sit down then, won’t you?’ Sylvia’s mother said. He realized he had never even learned her name.
‘That’s it, George, dear – do sit down for a moment,’ Sylvia purred at him. She remained in the doorway, leaning on the frame. There was no sense that he would be staying long.
He sat at the edge of one of the predatory-looking armchairs. The heat only seemed to get more intense. His temples were throbbing. Brimming in him was a sense of dismay that was fast turning into panic. He had promised – somehow! – to marry this woman. This was what he would be marrying into. He tried to salvage some of his own basic decency. It was Sylvia he was marrying, not her mother or sister. She was quite separate from them and he was being unkind. They were probably very decent people when you got better acquainted with them.
But beneath this reasoning, inchoate feelings seethed . . . A second’s flash of memory showed him a heavy door closing, a black jacket swaying gently behind it . . . Claustrophobia which was about more than this stuffy room swelled in him, an outraged sense of having been duped, yet a familiar paralysis that left him unable to assert himself, to protest or escape . . .
Standing by the field gate, he tilted the flask up again. One warm drop flowered on his tongue. As he righted his head again he felt a breeze and darkening atmosphere: a storm gathering at last. He then saw that a paler brown creature stepping towards him across the pasture was not a pony at all. It was hands smaller, the ears longer, with a meal-coloured muzzle. A delighted tenderness spread through him.
‘Hello, little moke,’ he said, leaning closer over the gate.
The donkey took a few steps more towards him, its ears straight and alert. It watched him with a gentle expression. Its very being brought back the suck of mud on his boots, the pull on his legs, head bowed against the wet, the reassuring warmth of the mule beside him.
‘Come on . . .’ He held out his hand, clicking his tongue. The donkey stepped forward, and reached its head just close enough for him to stroke the silky give of its nose.
Slowly, so as not to alarm the animal, he climbed over the gate, glad no one could see this ungainly operation. The donkey showed no objection to his arrival and he stood beside it, stroking the creature’s mushroom-coloured coat.
‘You know, I once had a good friend like you,’ he murmured into the twitching ears. ‘She was a mule of course, bigger than you and darker than you too. Lovely, she was. Clotilde was her name. I called her Lottie. Poor old Lottie.’ He thought for a second, glancing at the sky turning thick and grape-coloured over the fields. He felt the pressure in his head, his body.
‘I don’t think I ever talked to anyone the way I did to Lottie. Well, maybe my dog – but those were different times, during the war. I suppose none of us were quite ourselves. She was a beautiful animal, Lottie was. I always got the feeling she understood what I was saying.’ He sighed. ‘She met a very terrible end, I’m afraid.’
The donkey, unmoved by these disclosures, lowered its head to snuff at the thin grass near the gate, but it didn’t move away. He gave it a final pat and went back to the van.
By the time he reached home, the sky seemed to be pressing down all around them, a deep mauve grey. The wind was getting up, buffeting back and forth. As he climbed out of the van, lightning crackled across the sky followed by thunder, low and still far off. Inside, as he quieted Monty with a dish of food, he heard the rain begin in an elongated swish of sound.
4.
He poured a tankard of homebrew and, Monty at his heels, went and sprawled in a chair in the back sitting room, comforted by the familiar smells of coal dust, beer and dog. He was exhausted, he realized, yet so strung up that no sense of rest would come to him. The rain made him feel imprisoned in the house, solitary and full of pent-up emotions.
How was it that Sylvia managed to lull him when they were together? A sense of horror stole through him. That sister; the mother! And now he had actually promised to marry her, had bought a ring and she was making arrangements by the hour. In a month’s time he would be married – she would have moved in here.
Lifting the silver tankard, he took a mouthful and swallowed as soulfully as if it was hemlock. That body of hers . . . All summer she had kept him in a simmering state. She was in the right, of course, he corrected himself. Sexual relations only within the state of marriage – nothing wrong with that. But in his longing he had only so much as to hold her and was so tormented by desire that he seemed to lose all mental capacity.
He closed his eyes. In the cave of his body he could feel the blood drumming round. His nerves flailed about like loose wires. He was promised to this woman. Quite how had he allowed this to happen? What was it he had seen in Maud Roberts’ eyes when they met her? Was it incredulity at the news that this was the woman he was going to marry? Or had he imagined that? You could never be sure with Maud.
‘What the hell am I going to do?’ he groaned. Monty raised his head, assessed this question as rhetorical and subsided again. The only short-term solution that presented itself was to go and fetch another helping of beer. He went to the kitchen, Monty’s nails clicking on the floor behind him. Rain hurled itself at the window. He stood in the kitchen in his socks, feeling sorry for himself. All the same, he didn’t want to become an old soak, boozing all evening. Better have some tea. He had just filled the kettle and switched it on when Monty erupted into barking so loudly that he jumped, an unpleasant sensation.
‘Damn it, hound – what’s the matter with you?’
But the dog had already dashed, roaring, to the front door. Surely no one could be out there in this? A horrible suspicion came to his mind. Not Sylvia, not again? But surely she wouldn’t have climbed aboard that absurd pink Vespa of hers in this weather to come and talk his hind leg off all evening again?
As he walked along the hall there was a tap on the door. Bracing himself, he opened it. The sound of sheeting rain increased. On the step, hands gripping a black umbrella, weeping, was Maggie.
For a few moments there were no sounds except Monty’s whines of greeting and Maggie gulping and sniffing. George left her umbrella to drip on the hall tiles, stood her wellingtons by the door and led her to the kitchen. He hung her rain-spotted jacket over the back of a chair. She was wearing a long, flowery skirt and pale green blouse. George handed her a towel and Maggie wiped her face and hands, but not as if she was thinking of what she was doing. As she handed it back to him, her face crumpled and she began to cry again.
‘I’m sorry, George, for crashing in on you like this, only John’s gone to the pub – as usual.’ These last words were delivered with a venom he’d never associated with Maggie, ‘And I need to . . . I knew you’d understand.’
‘Of course,’ George said, hoping to goodness he was going to. He stepped over to stand before her and gently prompted, ‘What’s the trouble, old girl?’
‘It’s Linda,’ Maggie burst out with more sobs. ‘Linda, my eldest, my baby girl – she and her husband are going to live in Australia!’
‘Ah – oh!’ George said. A skein of muddled emotions twisted in him. Relief – he’d thought it was going to be some sort of trouble with John; disappointment – he’d thought it was going to be some sort of trouble with John. And a bewilderment which even in those seconds made him wonder whether he could ever be cut out to be a father. Was Linda’s departure really such dreadful news? The ‘baby girl’, who presently lived somewhere on the outskirts of Oxford, must be getting on for thirty, so far as George could remember.
Trying to sound a fraction more helpful, he added, ‘Oh dear.’
‘I knew you’d understand,’ Maggie said, eyes streaming. ‘I can’t believe it – the other side of the world! How can they even think of it? It’s cruel,
that’s what it is. He says he’s going to work making cars. I mean, why can’t he carry on making them here, instead of taking my girl all the way over there?’
She looked up at George with red-rimmed eyes, her face swollen and raw. ‘I can’t even imagine it,’ she concluded.
‘Well,’ George said. He raised his hands, then unsure what to do with them, reached into his pocket for his handkerchief. ‘You never know – it might be nice.’ He handed her the handkerchief. ‘It’s clean.’
‘But it’s so far away,’ Maggie wailed, pressing the hanky to one eye, then the other. ‘And John – I know he doesn’t like it. He’s as upset as I am. But he won’t say – not a word . . .’
The kettle boiled. George stepped over and switched it off. Turning back to Maggie, he was about to offer her tea, but he saw something in her eyes, a frank, hungry look which he could only answer with a look of his own. She stepped towards him and they reached for each other. It felt familiar and reassuring to hold her, to kiss the damp auburn top of her head.
‘Maggie, Maggie,’ he murmured, half tender, half despairing.
Her arms tightened round him in the straightforward, kind, needful way she had. Feeling himself held and needing himself, he cradled her head against him. Sylvia held him, of course, but any moment when he allowed himself to relax into wholehearted desire, she pushed him away again.
‘Oh God, George,’ Maggie said into his chest.
All his pent-up need fastened on her, reached out for her. He fumbled for her hand.
‘Come on, my dear,’ he said.
They climbed the stairs together, hand in hand, like children.
In the bedroom, knowing that for once this was a woman who would not toy with him, he began to let himself go, kissing her deeply, allowing the full surge of desire to course through him.
Seeing her again, the generous pinkness of her as she lay back on the bed, he almost wept. All his senses focused hungrily on this one act, of aching, needing . . . And at last someone was here for him. She was here. She came with tears and he with a cry of relief and freedom.
