by Morag Joss
Mr David closed at five thirty, sometimes earlier on a slack day. Michael set off with the backpack towards the London Road and Mr David’s shop in Walcot Street. Steve walked up the hill in the opposite direction to Fairfield Stores and bought a Sun, a pasty, a bag of crisps, a Galaxy and a Coke. It was on the way back to the cab to wait for Michael that he heard the banging from inside the van.
When Michael got back with the now flattened backpack over one shoulder, Steph was in the passenger seat of the pickup swigging at the Coke and having a laugh with Steve, for whom Michael’s weirdness was now confirmed.
‘Oi!’ he called as Michael approached the driver’s window, ‘you never said you got your flaming girlfriend in the back! She could have froze to death. Dangerous and all, illegal that is, I could have got done for that!’
Michael stared into the cab, too depleted by Mr David for anything like surprise. Steph looked back at him with a mixture of defiance and entreaty.
‘Needed a rest, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘In the van. Don’t mind, do you? He doesn’t mind,’ she added, nodding at Steve.
Steve patted her knee and said, ‘Got a bit warmed up now, have you, sweetheart?’ He turned to Michael. ‘You want to take better care. Got the cash?’ As Michael counted off the notes he went on, ‘You should have said. She should’ve gone up in front between us. There’s room for three. Even three and a half!’
Michael, wordless, stared at him. Steve looked again at Steph, reminding himself that it was none of his business. The girl seemed happy enough to be left with this guy, so maybe she was weird herself.
Steph laughed and handed back the Coke can. ‘I’ll give you three and a half! I told you, I was asleep. I’ll sleep anywhere, just at the moment. Thanks for the drink. And the warm-up.’ She slipped down from the cab more easily than would have seemed possible, for her size.
‘And the lift!’ She sauntered round to Michael. Steve shoved the notes into his jeans pocket and started the engine. ‘Van’s all yours,’ he said, nodding back over his shoulder. ‘Uncoupled it when I heard your friend banging to get out.’ With a faintly regretful wink at Steph, he drove off.
They watched the pickup truck stop at the bottom of the road, its light winking, then turn into the stream of cars heading out of the city. The sky behind the black twigs of the television aerials across Snow Hill had grown pink. Streetlights were already casting an orange gleam over satellite dishes and roof tiles. Above the noise of traffic from the London Road the shouts of a group of kids on bikes, wobbling home up Snow Hill along the gutter and trading their insults and goodbyes on the street corner, were faint. Twilight crushed the whites and reds and blues out of the clothes of girls with dogs and pushchairs as they passed by on the pavement below; it stole their colours and discarded them in the greying winter air of the afternoon.
Steph said, ‘I’m freezing. I’m going to freeze to death if I stay out here.’ She placed her hand in Michael’s. ‘See? I’m freezing.’ He nodded but did not tighten his fingers round her hand, nor let it go. People walked home, receding into shadows under walls. Across the estate, strip lights blinked on in kitchens where women dumped bags and made toast and put on kettles; the sick blue pulse of unwatched televisions in rooms with undrawn curtains winked a message to Michael and Steph on the cold pavement- a message about other people, not like the two of them standing there as the sky emptied its darkness into them, but of other people, people who had homes to go to. And when, a moment later, Michael turned without speaking and began to make his way up the hill to his own flat at the end of Maynard Terrace, Steph pulled her T-shirt over her stomach and went too, knowing that the frailty in his eyes and his failure to drop her hand were the nearest she would get to an invitation.
Michael opened the door of the flat and snapped on the bleak overhead light in the sitting room. Dropping the backpack, which sagged at his feet and then fell over, he sank onto a small and unreliable-looking sofa. It seemed to be made entirely of blocks of sponge covered in some brown material which, as he eased into them, shifted behind his defeated back like rectangular rocks in a soft earthquake. Apart from a low table on thin black legs that stood between the sofa and a square fireplace with a cold gas fire, there was not much other furniture: just two chairs, metal folding ones, standing at a small circular table in one corner and two low wicker stools, one with an empty candlestick and a box of matches, the other with a pale blue lamp, at each side of the sofa. Three shelves by the side of the fireplace held toppled-over books, newspapers, a dead plant in a plastic pot, some shoeboxes. On the lowest shelf were a group of small brasses, a stack of plates and jugs, and three or four unsuccessful and empty vases. The arrangement looked as if the things were being stored rather than displayed, as if the person who had placed them there had no faith in them as decorative objects.
Steph, to whom the look of things mattered, gazed for a while, wondering what it was that she recognised in this room. She had thought a great deal about rooms. She had planned rooms in the detailed way that some girls plan their weddings, and just as putative brides mentally arrange in ‘the perfect fairytale setting’ a full entourage of co-ordinated guests and attendants and bridegroom, but leave the faces blank, so Steph had dreamt up rooms beyond her means in houses that did not exist, where she would imagine living with a family she did not have. The only places where Steph actually had lived, since her mother had moved in with her boyfriend when Steph was fifteen, had been places which, no matter how long she stayed, remained other people’s. Even when she had had a bit of money from some job or other to spend on a rug or a picture or some cushions, gestures which she intended to at least legitimise if not cele-brate her presence, she found herself still inhabiting places whose surfaces she could not soften and whose depths would not admit her. She only half-recognised that it was a kind of belonging that she ached for, and only half-acknowledging the ache, she fell short of any belief that she deserved relief from it. She grew to believe that the shortcoming was hers, and that something more profound than a different paint colour or new cushions was called for, something beyond aspiration, outlay and some colour sense, beyond even the intensity of her need. Steph watched the man under the pitiless light, collapsed on the sofa, and understood why the room was familiar. His listless attempts at homemaking betrayed the same ache, and perhaps the same lack of conviction.
She stood in the doorway, unsure of what she should say or do. A remark about how cold it was? He was sitting hunched up with his head almost on his knees, and had not moved to turn on the gas fire. How unwelcoming he was being. She was beginning to wonder if he was quite aware of her presence. She should think of something teasing and sarcastic to say, about the cold or the salty smell, or there being no lampshade or proper curtains, something to make him laugh and break the ice. But the window’s reflection was showing her to herself, hesitant in the doorway, too heavy for the empty metal chairs and too clumsy for sassy remarks. She pulled the T-shirt down, feeling there was too much of her and that she did not fit; although the walls were neutrally patterned and beige, she clashed with them. Just then from above their heads came the bark of a large-sounding dog, followed by pounding noises, which could have been the upstairs neighbour’s feet or missiles missing the dog and landing on the floor. From farther off the sounds of traffic and occasional calling voices from the street reached into the silence of the room through the black glass of the window.
‘Got a toilet?’ she asked. Michael raised his head and nodded past her, through the doorway where she was standing. She backed out, closing the door behind her, into the tiny entrance hall. At least now he had sort of given her permission to find the toilet, so she could try the other doors and see what kind of place it was. A tiny, practically empty kitchen. Only the one bedroom as she’d expected, and the smell was coming from there, which surprised her because the man himself was beautifully clean. A freezing bathroom, not exactly fresh but not filthy. Either he kept it fairly nice or he didn’t use it. But he
must, because he was definitely clean himself and he even shaved. It was a pity about the bedroom, not that she would be sharing it, the way things were going. But just getting warm would be enough. Or almost enough, because now she thought about it, she was also starving.
When she returned, the cold bright air of the room had swollen and grown cruel with misery. Michael was hunched forward, crying. Steph dropped down beside him and pulled his hands away. He turned his twisted face from her and tried to bury his head in the back of the sofa. She looked round, working out that there would be no talking to him for a bit, even if she could think of anything to say. Meanwhile, he had pulled his legs up and was hugging his knees, as if to stop up a great overfilled sump of grief somewhere inside him. The sound of his sobs made Steph want to cry too. She was so cold. At least if they got warm, they might both still want to cry, but how could they feel any worse? She got up and turned the dial on the top of the gas fire. After some cranking and twisting, a blue flame whupped behind the chrome bars and the room filled with the smell of burning dust. Michael pulled himself upright and opened his mouth, gulping.
‘Can’t do that- costs a bomb, that fire.’
‘Got to warm the place up, haven’t we? Or we’ll freeze to death.’
Michael sucked in a deep breath. He should explain how he didn’t ever turn the fire on. He should explain about Ken across the way, how Ken’s place was always warm and that Ken was always in. How Ken seemed content to share his heat and hot water in return for a bit of company, even if the occasions when he and Michael were both capable of conversation did not often coincide. He should explain about the money, the fines, getting the stall going again, the electric, the TV licence. He should explain about Mr David and the sudden drop in price, how he only got two hundred and fifty for the figures, half of what he had been promised, and how half of that had already gone on getting the van towed back and it still needed fixing. But talking was too difficult, as would be the effort of making this woman go away. What did she want from him?
‘Got any money?’ Of course. She had seen him count out the notes for the man in the pickup and must have noticed that he hadn’t given him the lot. Michael leaned forward again and covered his face, feeling the backs of his hands soften in the first heat from the fire. Steph picked up the backpack from the floor, watching him carefully, pulled it open and brought out two crumpled magazines. Michael lifted his face but said nothing while she shook them about as if there might be banknotes lurking in them. Then she peered again into the empty backpack, stuffed the magazines into it and dropped it back on the floor.
‘Haven’t you got any? Go on, give us some money and I’ll go out and get us something to eat. Go on.’ She spoke with an odd mixture of authority and impatience, like somebody much older than she appeared. Like somebody much older than he was, Michael thought, looking closely at her face for the first time. Like she was his mother or something, and she must be twenty years younger. He pulled a tenner from his pocket.
‘Give us another. Go on, twenty’s better. I’ll bring you the change.’ As she folded the second note she said, ‘I could do with a bath. Don’t suppose there’s any hot water, is there? While I’m out you can put the hot water on, OK? And don’t turn the fire off.’
Michael cleared his throat to object, but sank back in the sofa.
‘Bloody freezing out there,’ Steph said, lingering. Would he not volunteer to go instead?
There was a silence while Michael looked at the slice of pink mottled belly between Steph’s T-shirt and skirt. Clumsily he stood up.
‘Take this,’ he managed to say, pulling off his jacket as if he had just remembered what it was for. Holding it out, he said, ‘It’s warm.’ He retreated back into the sofa.
It was better than nothing. Steph slipped on the jacket, smiling in the manner of all women trying on something new with somebody else waiting to see her in it. It fitted over her bump. She did up the last button, thrust her hands in the pockets and looked up, but Michael’s eyes were closed and his face was crumpled again with crying. Upstairs the dog barked and was yelled at once more.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked, fingering the two ten pound notes in the pocket.
Michael’s eyes blinked open. ‘Michael.’
‘Mine’s Steph.’
It may have been in the exchange of names, but when the door closed behind her Michael felt oddly certain that she was not going to disappear with his jacket and twenty pounds, and Steph was confident that when she returned he would not still be weeping.
***
That evening winter returned. It was dark by the time I came in from the garden, knowing that the sunshine that afternoon had been only the illusion of spring. I ached all over and I was chilled from being out for so long. My exertions had kept me warm for as long as I worked, but as soon as I stopped I could feel that the cold had got right into me. I ran a very hot bath in my lovely white, green and yellow bathroom and lay in it, luxuriating in the knowledge that the drawing-room fire which I had just lit would be blazing for me when I came down. It crossed my mind that it was burning unattended, but I didn’t worry. It was such a benign presence, the drawing-room fire, I knew no sparks would fly from it and burn the rug. A fire can be a great comfort.
After her bath Jean sat by the fire in her alpaca dressing gown and silk pyjamas. Her face burned from the warm water and the tingle of soft cream after the punishment of the wind in the afternoon. Beneath the pyjamas, that were slipping over her shoulders and breasts and across her stomach as she breathed, her body felt and returned every stroke of the supple silk, yet it was stiffening up after all her work in the garden. The hardness in her arms and legs made her slightly triumphant, aware less of the age of her limbs than of their strength, as if she were a schoolgirl flexing them ready to make a long jump. But although the skin all over her body was soothed, at her core she was still cold and it was difficult to tell if she felt better than usual, or about to become ill. Better, she decided. Better, and more than that: it was as if her mind had just made the discovery that she actually had a body, and her body, just very slightly sorry for itself, was basking in the attention.
The body might, she also thought, be telling her that she was actually very, very hungry, a thing it had not told her, or that she had not heard it say, for years. In fact she ought perhaps to be listening a little more carefully, because she had the feeling that since she had arrived she had grown if anything a little thinner. As Jean had begun to enjoy the loosening of the customary austerity with which she managed her physical needs, she had been considering herself with a new gentleness. Her habitual tone of self-chastisement had quietened down; if she felt like resting in the afternoons, she did so, the word lazy barely crossing her mind. And she did now recall that she had made a little half-promise to herself, on what she now thought of as Wardrobe Day, that she would try to fill out her new clothes a little more convincingly. She was still a little small for them. Now, she recognised, if she were properly to fit her new life, the time had come to attend to the matter of feeding herself as if she still had some growing to do.
First, though, the chill in her joints called for a drink. She had noticed without concern or surprise on her first or second day that the decanters in the dining room were empty. She should have preferred to make her first visit to the cellar in daylight and when she was feeling less tired, but she rose, fetched the key, opened the low panelled door in the corner of the dining room and descended the cellar steps.
In the sudden fluorescent light and thick underground smell, Jean paused. From the bottom of the steps she could see, stretching down both sides of the cellar, a series of whitewashed, arched bays that were filled with metal racks laden with bottles. At Jean’s end, close to the steps, stood an old oak table. She looked at it closely. It was like nearly everything else in the house: old, imperfect, beautiful, and although the wood now looked hungry, having been left so long unpolished, Jean could imagine it being used as a dining table
in many houses not much humbler than this one. On it sat a small torch, a candle in a metal holder, a leather-bound book and a number of corkscrews, one of which had, inexplicably, a brush on one end. There was also an unnerving sort of circular cutter that looked as if it had been designed for removing fingertips. On the wall behind the table a pair of metal tongs hung from a hook. Jean immediately felt intimidated, as if she had happened upon the instruments of a painful, semi-surgical religious ceremony of quite Masonic abstruseness. She scraped quietly along the flagged floor, peering into the racks and reading labels which told her nothing except how ignorant she was: Lйoville-Poyferrй, Batailley, Domaine de Chevalier. The shape of the bottles changed; she read Chambolle-Musigny, Vosne-Romanйe and sighed, unenlightened. It was easy to recognise the champagne bottles by their corks but it was not champagne she wanted now. Some treacherous-looking bottles on the lowest racks had lost their labels altogether and bore only a number and a daub of white paint, presumably having been caught by a swipe of the brush when the cellar was being whitewashed. Passing by them, knowing better than to open such dangerously old, unlabelled bottles, she walked on, reading names she could not pronounce and feeling, rather aggressively, that the whole thing was unnecessarily complicated. A nice red wine, or a glass of port or sherry, was all she wanted. It was absurd to be frightened by a lot of foreign names, but the trouble was not simply that they were the names of places she had never been to and of wines she had never drunk. They spoke of qualities she did not possess. Permanence and graciousness, let alone pedigree, had scarcely been the hallmarks of her life so far, she thought, lapsing for a moment into old habits and almost forgetting that she was not that Jean any more. She pulled out another bottle, of which there were at least half a dozen identical ones in the rack. Above the words ‘Chвteau Palmer 1982’ was a picture of the chвteau and she sighed again, this time with relief. At last, a name she could read, a nice ordinary English name. She recalled that there had been a Palmer family in Oakfield Avenue. And the chвteau on the label was, really, just a house when it came to it. Or rather not just a house like the one in Oakfield Avenue, it was a house like this one, Walden Manor. Her house. The thought gave her confidence. She scanned the drawing, imagining the heavy French furniture behind the tall drawing-room windows. There might be a pretty boudoir upstairs with another window looking over the back perhaps, onto a view of a terrace and gardens and vineyards. She turned the bottle in her hand, almost as if she thought that the far side would show the back of the house, and turned it back to the drawing. Who would live in this place? A woman, certainly. Madame, a woman of Jean’s age, would be at her dressing table under the window attending to her hair, pinning it into a simple, elegant chignon. I shall grow mine, Jean thought, patting her own, which was still damp at the ends from her bath. In fact, now that she thought about it, she would have to grow it, since she was not going to go out any more. The label drew her attention again. What a delightful place it was. On a summer morning, the chestnut trees- that Jean felt sure were there, flanking the courtyard just out of the frame of the drawing- would rustle in the breeze with a soft shivering note that would carry upon it the fluting calls of pigeons and doves. Madame would hear them from the open window at the back as she embedded the final long pin in her coiffure, and then she would look up to see- who? Her son, perhaps. Yes, definitely her son, some way off, moving thoughtfully between the vines, inspecting the grapes. Madame would know by the tilt of his head as he passed down the rows and as he paused to look up at the sky, that he was worrying a little, wondering if the weather would hold. Would the sun shine right up until the last day before the harvest? Jean smiled, then turned and made her way up the cellar steps, picking up a corkscrew as she went. The label had told her all she needed to know about the wine, whatever it might taste like.
