All the Beauty of the Sun

by Marion Husband

  Standing in front of her bedroom mirror Iris turned sideways, splaying her hands over her stomach. Perhaps she could go to George corset-less so there would be no red marks; knickerless, without stockings or garter; perhaps run across the road only in her dressing gown, like wee Willie Winkie … Barefoot? With a candle, its flame cupped by her hand, but if she saw someone she would have to blow the candle out, hide behind a tree, shivering amongst the graves, all those angels and crosses and obelisks, all the dearly departed, George’s own wife amongst them; Grace Harris, beloved wife and mother. Grace who had pushed out Paul and fell back dead before he even cried, Grace’s doctor being so busy saving the baby he barely noticed the mother. ‘He was frantic,’ George said, ‘and so was I. But she just gave up. Gave up. Nothing I could do.’

  She’d thought how unfeeling he was to say that Grace had given up; he had surprised her because he seemed caring. But his wife’s death had been a long time ago, and he was a doctor, men she often thought to be impatient in the face of frailty. She forgave him, but didn’t forgive herself for the ridiculous rush of pride she had felt at her own perseverance in childbirth.

  He had told her about Grace’s death years ago, before she met Paul or Robbie, before she had seen those two boys in their officer uniforms and greatcoats, impersonating men. Two brothers of the same height, same build, with the same dark, too-short hair beneath their eye-shading caps. No wonder Margot fell for them both, one after the other, quick as spit-spot. If she had been seventeen she would have fallen for them herself, although she would have guessed how dull Robbie was.

  And, even at seventeen, she would have guessed that Paul was not quite right. All the same she would have fallen for him, hoping for some change, just as Margot had. She would have bought a pretty dress and some silk and lacy nonsense, a lipstick even: she would have made him see her; but it would all have been for nothing, a waste of time and money and tears. ‘I love him,’ Margot had said, and the tears fell down her face just as they had when she was a little girl, unchecked, her nose all snotty. ‘He says he loves me! He says he does!’ Perhaps he did. He loved Bobby. That was love. All that terrible, raw affection, as if he’d never loved anyone in his life.

  She turned away from the mirror. Of course she would dress. She had bought new underwear – silk and lace that would be just as wasted on George: these garments would be off in no time, she knew this. It wasn’t vanity to know how much he wanted her; she wanted him as much. Their courtship – she couldn’t think of the last few years as anything else – had been too long, too agonised.

  That morning Daniel had said, ‘I’m not sure about going to see Reverend Carter. What if he doesn’t remember me – he’s quite senile now...’

  Too loudly she had said, ‘You can’t let him down!’

  ‘Let him down? But if he doesn’t remember me … I don’t know …’

  ‘He’ll remember you – you say yourself even the senile have moments of awareness.’

  ‘I do say that. You’re right, of course. Of course I must go. It’s only that I don’t like leaving you here alone.’

  ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.’

  He didn’t notice the rush of smiles her relief brought, only nodded absently and turned away, searching his desk for something. She left the room before he could ask her if she had seen whatever it was he had lost, running up the stairs to look across the cemetery to George’s house. He wasn’t home, he was hardly ever home, but seeing Parkwood helped her to feel she might see him at any minute. Any minute he could walk up the path, up the short, shallow flight of steps with the loose slab that rocked when it was stepped on. She would watch him take his key from his pocket and unlock the door, perhaps stoop to pick up the post from the mat as he walked inside. He might turn and look towards the vicarage – he had once, she remembered, once he caught her out; he had turned and raised his hand as if to shield his eyes from the sun so that he might see more clearly. But she could have only been a shadow – the distance between their two houses that little bit too great. She could only hope that he had sensed her watching.

  That afternoon she had waved Daniel off at Thorp Station. The station master had tipped his cap at her as she walked out, smiled at her as though he understood that now she was a free woman, one with a spring in her step, she could do as she wished: not go home, perhaps, but to Robinson’s Department Store, browse around the dress floor before taking the lift to the top floor café, where the tables looked out over the High Street and waitresses in lacy white aprons would call her madam. She could order tea and chocolate éclairs because there was no supper to cook or spoil. Or she could go straight home and read a book in the bath, turning the hot water tap on and off with her toes until there was no more hot water to be had, no one banging on the door to ask what on earth she was doing in there so long. No one to ask anything at all; no one glowering in their study, or worse coming out of their study, wanting cocoa, wanting something, they didn’t know what, couldn’t pin it down, neither could she, a different life, perhaps, one that hadn’t run into the buffers.

  At least she knew what she wanted even if she also knew the fulfilment of that want wouldn’t change anything. She would still be the vicar’s wife when she left George’s house, still dutiful to Daniel and the parish, still Margot’s mother and Bobby’s grandmother. Nothing would truly change, she would only know a little more about George. She would know if he was shy or bold without his clothes, or padded around naked quite unselfconsciously. She paused, struck by this thought; she would know another man’s body, and this was astonishing to her after so many years of Daniel.

  George was not like Daniel, but shorter, slimmer, more elegant and not at all untidy; his voice was lighter; he had more hair on his head and less in his nose; his eyebrows were tamed; his ears were smaller, as were his feet. He was younger than Daniel, only by a year or two, but it showed. And he had a different smell, of course; George’s smell was soapy, near clinical, a smell that wasn’t his own, unlike Daniel, who smelt only of himself, of nothing very much, a faint whiff of sweat perhaps, pipe tobacco sometimes. George wore rather good suits: she suspected that clothes were his one indulgence; Daniel wore his cassock, sometimes stained with soup, always faded, his dog-collar cutting him off at the neck so that she wondered how he bore it day after day. In the same way she bore her corset, she supposed. One became used to life’s discomfort.

  Leaving the station that afternoon, she had smiled back at the station master, happy because that was the first moment in a long list of moments that she had looked forward to: the moment Daniel was gone and she could allow herself to show her excitement. The next moment would be standing in front of her mirror, bathed, dressed, powdered, finished. The next – perhaps the best – would be the moment George saw her, the moment she saw him, his lovely face. After that she couldn’t think further, couldn’t really imagine following him upstairs to his bedroom and closing the door behind them. She had never been upstairs in Parkwood. She thought of Grace falling back dead on the bed. She closed her eyes and bowed her head because the guilt she felt was like a slap across the face, snatching her breath away.

  She pressed her hands to her body and breathed in. She wouldn’t feel guilty; she wasn’t doing any harm, not even to Daniel who would never know and never suspect. She loved George, and had loved him for a very long time, and she knew him so well, almost as well as she knew Daniel. Tonight she felt she would know him better than she knew her husband.

  At five to seven she let herself out of the house. She walked quickly, as she always did – no one would think anything of her hurry. But there was no one about, and even Oxhill Avenue was quiet. She closed Parkwood’s gate softly, but didn’t go up the wobbly steps to the front door but around to the back. The light was on in his kitchen and she put her hand to her chest in relief, smiling and smiling as she opened the door.

  He didn’t walk around naked at all. He wore a beautiful silk dressing gown, tied loosely with its tasselled cord
, although his feet were bare and she worried he might catch a chill because Parkwood was a cold house as well as a gloomy one and only his bed was warm. He had given her another dressing gown to wear, an older, warmer garment, the one he used when he couldn’t sleep and got up in the night to make tea, he said, and to stare across the road to see if there was a light on in the vicarage. He had smiled, drawing her into his arms, and she had felt the spring of the hairs on his back beneath the smooth silk; his hairiness had been a surprise, his toughness, his strength and stamina, all a surprise as though she had expected him to be somehow insubstantial; before that evening he had only ever been his face, his voice, his hands; she hadn’t known him at all.

  In his kitchen, wearing the silk robe, he said, ‘I’ve made soup, and there’s that good bread from Marshall’s. Is that all right? Is that enough? I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you to feed me … You made soup?’

  ‘Now you look terrified.’

  ‘No! I’m sure it will be delicious.’

  ‘Well, the boys always liked it.’

  She had heard him refer to his sons in this way occasionally. But now the informality of it touched her; more than that, he had made her feel as though they were her sons, theirs. She sat down at the kitchen table, drawing his red tartan dressing gown closer around her, watching as he lit the gas beneath a pan and moved from the pantry to the stove, setting out the loaf of brown bread, butter, plates and spoons and knives in front of her. He smiled at her from time to time; once he had to walk around her to fetch a breadboard from the dresser and he placed his hand lightly on her shoulder, brushing his lips against her hair.

  He placed a bowl of soup in front of her and she breathed in its steam: leek and potato. She smiled up at him and without thinking said, ‘Daniel’s never cooked a thing in his whole life.’

  ‘He’s always had you to do it for him.’ He smiled and she realised it was all right that she had mentioned her husband; they had always talked about him, often alone in this kitchen, at this table.

  Relieved, she said, ‘Yes, I suppose he’s never even needed to learn to boil an egg.’

  He sat down opposite her and cut some bread. ‘I can’t stand boiled eggs. I do make a good omelette, though. That’s what we’ll have tomorrow night.’

  ‘What else do you do?’

  He glanced at her from buttering bread. ‘I can’t cook much else, really. I live on bacon and cheese and bread … I eat too much cake, which is very bad. During the war Paul would say he should be sending me food parcels, not the other way round. Have some bread.’ He frowned, ‘Are you as hungry as I am?’ He laughed. ‘You look very beautiful. You’re here, and I can hardly believe it. When I was making the soup … I thought, this is an awful lot of soup for one.’

  ‘You thought I wouldn’t come.’

  He hesitated. ‘Yes, I thought you might not come … But you’re here … Anyway, we’ll eat the soup – and I have cake, I always have cake.’ He reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘And then we’ll go back to bed, yes?’

  His eyes were so bright that she laughed. ‘Yes, we’ll go back to bed.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ANN CLIMBED INTO LAWRENCE’S bed and he rolled on his side, opening one eye to look at her. ‘Are you angry with me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sighed. ‘No. Except you promised you wouldn’t drink during the day.’

  ‘I know. Bad, bad boy, eh?’

  ‘I worry.’

  ‘Do you?’ He sat up, groping on the bedside table for his cigarettes. Lighting one he asked, ‘Will you stay here tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ He got up. ‘I’m going to bathe and then I’m taking you out for supper. Share the bath with me?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  He ran the bath, singing All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor, happy because he was usually happy; ‘I never lose my temper,’ he’d once told her. He did lose it, especially when he was drunk. She didn’t believe that he had never lost his temper when he was sober: how could anyone not get angry, not want to scream and shout and jump with rage and frustration? Even if you suppressed that rage, how could you not feel it getting big inside you so that you couldn’t keep still but had to pace or throw a vase at the wall or say something vicious so that another person had to step back, away from you and your nasty, vicious tongue, as though you’d spat in their face?

  Paul Harris had stepped back. He’d said, ‘What a foul mouth you have.’ He’d sounded astonished.

  ‘Not as foul as yours,’ she’d said.

  Earlier that day, in the pub’s back room, Harris had shaken his head as if trying to clear it of the names she’d called him, as if his ears were ringing, although she hadn’t shouted, aware of Fred’s thin walls, of the drinkers just beyond them in the bar who had watched her lead Paul into Fred’s private living room, who were listening now, she could sense their straining to listen. Paul glanced over his shoulder as though he sensed them, too. He turned to her and she saw how white he looked, as though she’d shocked all the blood out of him. ‘Would you mind if I sat down?’

  Too angry to speak, she gestured towards one of the two easy chairs in front of the banked-down fire. He sat on its edge, fumbling through his pockets for his cigarette case. His hands shook. Finally, with his cigarette lit and the case and lighter returned to his pocket, he said, ‘Sorry. I just need to catch my breath and then I’ll go.’

  They were mirroring each other, each on the edge of their seat, their bodies angled towards the door.

  He drew on the cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. There was one on the mantelpiece and he got up, taking it back to the chair, sitting down on its edge again, his awkwardness showing in every movement. Unable to look at him, she looked around the room instead. She had only been properly inside this room once before, on the night she met Matthew: there were the two white pug dogs facing out on the mantelpiece, the thin line of gold paint around their necks that couldn’t be seen from the door. There on the sideboard was a bowl of wax fruit with Fred’s Racing Post folded beside it, on the wall a picture of the Virgin, blue and white, the same shades of virgin on her daddy’s wall. Beside Paul’s chair was Susie’s sewing box, a darning mushroom rolling on top of it; he had kicked the box as he’d got up, surprising her because she hadn’t imagined such a man would be clumsy. Then she remembered the glass eye, that lack of peripheral vision. The wooden mushroom made a peculiar noise on the sewing box’s tin lid and he reached down blindly and stilled it.

  Unable to tolerate him any more she stood up. ‘I have to get back to work. The pub’s busy.’

  She had held the door open for him and he had got to his feet. Quickly he said, ‘I’ve been a fool – it’s only just occurred to me – you’re Ann McNamara, aren’t you? Matthew Purcell’s friend? He wrote to me about you. He wrote that you worked in a pub called –’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘I went to see him yesterday …’ He paused; more hesitantly he went on, ‘You are his friend, aren’t you? Ann McNamara? You do know about that place he’s in?’

  She nodded.

  ‘He’s very poorly, isn’t he?’ Harris’s voice was pained. ‘I don’t know what you think but he seems so ill … more ill than I’ve known him to be for a while, and I’ve been wondering if anything happened before he was committed this time … I know there isn’t always a cause, only sometimes …’ Despairingly he said, ‘It’s just I’ve never seen him quite like that before … Ann?’

  She had looked away, wanting him to be quiet because the pain in his voice was too much, as though he loved Matthew, properly loved and cared for him, making her ashamed and frightened. She saw Matthew crouched like a troll in the corner of her room and her hand tightened around the door handle.

  ‘I have to get back to work. The pub’s busy.’

  ‘Please –’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ She felt her face colour, the heat spreading to her chest; she needed to get
away from him looking at her like that, like a nice, kind man; she didn’t want him to be any of those things, she only wanted him to go away and not care about any of this.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you need to get back to the bar.’ Quickly he added, ‘Matthew did write a lot about you, for a time – I was so pleased he’d found such a good friend.’

  She had held the door open for him and he had stepped past her into the corridor that led to the public bar. He turned back. ‘I hope you can forgive me.’

  She couldn’t help herself, the words were too easy to say, and she said them harshly. ‘You hope so, do you?’

  He held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Ann. Thank you for seeing me.’

  * * *

  In Lawrence’s bed she remembered how hard and cool his hand was, but still she had wiped her own hand down her skirt when he let her go, not caring if he saw her do this and immediately ashamed that he had. She watched him walk through the pub – all eyes were on him, everyone curious, speculating. She’d had an urge to run after him and say that she was sorry, but sorry often led to the truth and at that moment she had felt as if she would rather die than tell Paul Harris the truth.

  Lawrence’s bed was warm and soft and she wished she could sleep; she wanted oblivion from herself, from her anger and guilt.

  A smell of roses seeped in hot water came from the bathroom along the passage. Lawrence stood in the doorway, a towel wrapped around his waist. He had stopped singing and was gazing at her, such a look on his face. All at once he was beside her, pulling her into his arms, rocking and hushing her as she wept.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘I WANT TO TAKE you somewhere,’ Edmund had said. ‘I want to be seen with you.’