‘You’d like some tea now, Sidney?’ Vera offers. ‘You’d like a cup before you begin?’
Vera has sharp cheek-bones and hair dyed black because it’s greying. The leanness in her face is everywhere else too; a navy-blue skirt is tight on bony hips, her plain red jumper is as skimpy as a child’s, clinging to breasts that hardly show. Her large brown eyes and sensuous lips are what you notice, the eyes expressionless, the lips perhaps a trick of nature, for in other ways Vera does not seem sensuous in the least.
‘Tea later.’ Sidney hesitates, glancing at Vera, as if fearing to offend her. ‘If that’s all right?’
And Vera smiles and says of course it’s all right. There is a Danish pastry, she says, an apricot Danish pastry, bought yesterday so she’ll heat it up.
‘Thanks, Vera.’
‘There’s Father, waking now.’
Lace Cap is the colour chosen. Sidney pours it into the roller dish and rolls it on to the ceiling, beginning at the centre, which a paint-shop man advised him once was the best way to go about it. The colour seems white but he knows it isn’t. It will dry out a shade darker. A satin finish, suitable for a bathroom.
‘The tiling,’ Mr Schele says in the doorway when Sidney has already begun on the walls. ‘Maybe the tiling.’
Clearing away his things – his toothbrush and his razor – Mr Schele noticed the tiling around the washbasin and the bath. In places the tiling is not good, he says. In places the tiles are perhaps a little loose, and a few are cracked. You hardly notice, but they are cracked when you look slowly, taking time to look. And the rubber filler around the bath is discoloured. Grubby, Mr Schele says.
‘Yes, I’ll do all that.’
‘Not the tiling before the paint, heh? Not finish the tiling first maybe?’
Sidney knows the old man is right. The tile replacement and the rubber should be done first because of the mess. That is the usual way. Not that Sidney is an expert, not that he decorates many bathrooms, but it stands to reason.
‘It’ll be all right, Mr Schele. The tiling’s not much, two or three to put in.’
While the undercoat on the woodwork is drying he’ll slip the new tiles in. He’ll cut away the rubber and squeeze in more of it, a tricky business, which he doesn’t like. He has done it only once before, behind the sink in the kitchen. While it’s settling he’ll gloss the woodwork.
‘You’re a good man, Sidney.’
He works all afternoon. When Vera brings the Danish pastry and tea, and two different kinds of biscuits, she doesn’t linger because he’s busy. Sidney isn’t paid for what he does, as he is for all his other work – the club, delivering the leaflets or handing them out on the street, depending on what’s required. He manages on what he gets; he doesn’t need much because there is no rent to pay. Just enough for food, and the gas he cooks it on. The electricity he doesn’t have to pay for; clothes come from the charity shop.
They let him live above the club because there’s a room. At night he takes the ticket money, protected in his kiosk by Alfie and Harry at the door; in the daytime he cleans up after the night before and takes the phone messages. All the club’s facilities are his to make use of, which he appreciates. Sidney is thirty-four now, thirty-four and one week and two days. He had just turned twenty when he first helped Vera.
In Mr Schele’s house they do not ever mention that. They do not talk about a time that was distressing for Vera, and for Mr Schele too. But when Sidney’s not in the house, when he’s private and on his own, in his room above the club, he talks to himself about it. ‘Shining armour,’ he repeats because it said that in the paper; still says it if he wants to look. Knight in Shining Armour, all across the page. Sometimes, when he’s trying to get to sleep, he lies there polishing the armour, laying all the pieces out, unfolding cloths, setting out the Duraglit and the Goddard’s.
‘Sidney, you stay with us for supper tonight?’ There is enough, Vera assures him. Another cup of rice will make it enough, and she recites this Saturday’s menu: chicken cooked her way and her good salad, strudel and just a little cream. Then Casualty on the TV, five past eight.
It is a plea, occasionally made when Sidney is in the house as late as this. Vera begs for company with her invitation, Sidney finds himself reflecting; for another presence besides her elderly father. Vera would have been glad when he didn’t come in the morning because he’d have finished earlier, too long before supper, and staying to lunch is never the same.
‘I should be getting on.’
‘Oh, do stay with us.’
And Sidney does. He sits with Mr Schele in the sitting-room and there’s an appetizer, salty little pretzels Vera has bought. No drink accompanies these. Mr Schele talks about his childhood.
‘The big rosebush has blown down,’ Sidney interrupts, standing by the window now. ‘This wind has taken it.’
Mr Schele comes to look and sorrowfully shakes his head. ‘Maybe the roots are holding,’ he suggests. ‘Maybe a little can be done.’
Sidney goes through the kitchen to the garden. ‘No,’ he says when they all three sit down to eat: the roots have snapped in the fall. The news upsets Mr Schele, who remembers the rose being planted, when Vera was a child. He’ll not see another rose grown to that size in the garden, he predicts. He blames himself, but Vera says no and Sidney points out that even roses come to an end.
A strudel enriched with sultanas follows the chicken cooked Vera’s way and her good salad, and then they stand in the bathroom doorway, surveying Sidney’s work. The bathroom is as new, Mr Schele says, greatly cheered by the sight of it. It is the bathroom as it was the day the house was built. Everything except the linoleum on the floor, which has been there since 1951, Mr Schele calculates.
‘A nice new vinyl,’ Mr Schele suggests, and Vera adds that not much is necessary. Two metres and three-quarters, a metre wide: she measured it this morning. ‘You lay it down, Sidney?’ Mr Schele enquires. ‘You lay it for us?’
They know he will. If Vera chooses what she wants and brings the piece back to the house he’ll lay it. There is adhesive left over from the time he laid the surround in Mr Schele’s small bedroom. In windy weather draughts came up through the cracks between the floorboards, the bedroom being on the ground floor. There’s been no trouble since Sidney cut out the vinyl surround and stuck it down, except that Mr Schele still can’t get used to the colour, shades of marbled orange.
‘For a bathroom,’ he states his preference now, ‘we keep to pale, heh?’
To go with the Lace Cap, Vera agrees. Maybe even white, to go with the bath and washbasin and the tiles. A flush of pink has crept into Vera’s hollow cheeks, and Sidney – knowing Vera well – knows it is there in anticipation of the treat that lies ahead: choosing the floor material, the right weight for bathroom use, a shade to match the paint or the porcelain.
‘You can wait another minute, Sidney?’ Vera says, and briefly goes away, returning with a piece of card she has torn from a cornflakes packet. ‘You brush the paint on that for me, Sidney?’ she requests, and Sidney does so and washes out the brush again. His Stanley knife slipped when he was cutting the orange vinyl for the bedroom; he had to have three stitches and a tetanus injection.
‘Time for the hospital programme,’ Mr Schele reminds Vera, who’s disappointed when Sidney shakes his head. Not this Saturday, he explains, because he’s on early turn at the club.
‘You’re good to come, Sidney,’ Vera says in the porch, whispering as she always does when she says that. She’s older than Sidney, forty-one; she was twenty-seven when he first helped her, the time of her distress.
‘It’s nothing,’ he says before he leaves, his unchanging valediction.
They took Vera in because in the end they didn’t believe her story about an intruder while she was at the cinema. They had accepted it at first, when everything hung together – the kitchen window forced open, the traces of dry mud on the draining-board and again by the door, where the shoes had been taken off.
Forty-eight pounds and ninepence had been taken, and medals and a silver-plated stud-box. The hall door and the porch door were both wide open when Vera returned to the house; Mr Schele, employed in those days in a radio and television shop, was still at work. They took Vera in because there was something that didn’t seem right to them about the entry through the kitchen window, no sign on the path outside of the dried mud, no sign of it on the window-sill. There was something not quite right about only a stud-box and medals taken, not other small objects that were lying about; and no one could remember Vera at the cinema. Then, in the garden, a dog sniffed out part of a glove that had been burnt on the garden fire, and the wool matched the fibres found in the room upstairs. Odd, it seemed, that gloves had been burnt, even if they were old and done for.
All that passes through Sidney’s thoughts, as it usually does when he walks away from the house. He isn’t late for his Saturday duties at the club; he doesn’t hurry. After an afternoon inside, the air is good. The wind that blew away the rain is noisy in the empty trees, lifts off a dustbin lid and plays with plastic flowerpots in the small front gardens. He’ll walk until it rains again, then take a bus.
‘Come, Angus! Angus!’ a woman calls her dog, a Pomeranian. ‘What a wind!’ she calls out, going by, and Sidney says what wind indeed. He knows the woman from meeting her and her dog on this particular stretch. Several times a day she’s out.
Walking through the ill-lit suburban avenues and crescents, leaves scattered on the pavements or gathered into corners by the wind, Sidney remembers the photograph of Vera, her big lips a little parted, her hair - blonde then – falling almost to her shoulders, her eyes innocent and lovely. She was in custody when he saw the photograph; her solicitors, not she, were appealing for anyone who’d seen her entering or leaving the cinema to come forward.
Sidney passes into streets with closed shops and minimarkets, dentists and chiropodists advertised, the Regina take-away, the Queen’s Arms at a corner, Joe Coral’s betting shop. Then there is a quiet neighbourhood, the yellow caravan still parked in the garden, the open space that’s not quite a park, litter sodden on its single path. The film was French Connection 2. He went to see it as soon as he saw the photograph, so that he knew the plot.
On the bus Sidney feels like sleep because last night, being Friday, was one of his late ones. But he doesn’t sleep because he hates waking up on a bus. Once he went past his stop and had to pay the extra, but that hasn’t happened since. Something wakes him, some worry about having to pay the extra again; one stop before his own he always wakes now, but even so he’d rather not sleep. He closes his eyes though, because he wants to go back in his thoughts, to run it again, to make sure it’s all still there: usually after he has been to the Scheles’ he does that. ‘The ice-cream girl was going round,’ he said, and every word was written down. ‘The lights were up.’
He needn’t have sat next to her but he did, he explained. He wanted to; soon’s he saw the hair he wanted to, soon’s he looked along the row and saw her lips, moving as it happened, sucking a sweet maybe, or chocolate. ‘You make a practice of this, Sidney?’ the sergeant asked. Well, once or twice before, he said, a woman he liked the look of.
The bus draws in again, three people get off, two men and a girl, the men much older, as if one of them’s her father. ‘You’re certain, Sidney?’ the sergeant pressed him, and he said the ice-cream girl took her time, not that anyone was buying from her, a good five minutes it was the lights were up. And there was afterwards too, of course. No way he wasn’t certain, he said. ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘Oh, yes.’ The other man came in then, and asked the same questions all over again. ‘You tell us what clothes she was wearing, Sidney? Take your time now, son.’ It said in the paper about the clothes, and he remembered because he’d learnt it off.
The club is in darkness when he reaches it, but he turns the lights on as soon as he’s inside. He tidied this morning, the time he always tidies. Everything is ready. Alfie and Harry arrive, and he makes them Maxwell House the way they like it, and they sit there, drinking it and smoking. Tomorrow he’ll go back, Sidney says to himself, tidy up that rose that’s come down.
The Sunday bells of a church are sounding for an early service when Vera glances from the kitchen window and there he is, cutting up the big rosebush that the wind brought down. A warmth begins in Vera, spreading from some central part of her to her shoulders and her thighs, tingling in her arms and legs. It is the warmth of Vera’s passion, heat in her blood that such an unexpected glimpse always inspires. He came to help yesterday. Why today also? The blown-down rosebush could have waited.
‘Sidney’s come,’ her father says, having looked out too. ‘Twenty-five years, that rosebush. High as a tree and now we must begin again.’
‘Oh, I’m not sorry it’s gone. It darkened the garden. Sidney, you like some coffee?’ Vera calls from the back door and Sidney waves and says in a minute.
‘Is Sidney wearing the garden gloves?’ Mr Schele fusses. ‘You need the gloves with a rose.’
‘Sidney knows.’
Once, working in the garden, sawing up old planks of wood, he got a splinter under a thumbnail and Vera saw to it: Sidney’s hand laid flat on the kitchen worktop, a light brought specially in, a needle sterilized in a match flame, TCP and tweezers. In her night-time fantasies she has comforted Sidney, whispering to him, asking him to talk to her. Sometimes, when he has worked all through a weekend morning, she turns the immersion heater on early in case he’d like to have a bath before he goes. The time he cut his hand she staunched the blood flow with a tourniquet.
‘Ready, Sidney,’ Vera calls from the back door. ‘Coffee.’
Mr Schele senses something in the air. His thoughts reflect Vera’s: unsightly though it is, the thicket of twisted branches on the grass could easily have stayed there for a week. It is Sidney’s pretext, Mr Schele tells himself; it is a reason to come back so soon. He pours hot milk on to his bran flakes and stirs the mixture with his spoon, softening the flakes because he does not like them crispy. Is this, at last, the Sunday of the proposal? He watches Vera at the stove. She remembers her fluffy slippers and hurries away to change them. The glass disc rattles in the milk saucepan and Mr Schele rises to attend to that. He cannot last for ever; each day, at seventy-eight, is borrowed time. What life is it for a woman alone?
Moving the saucepan to one side of the gas jet, Mr Schele accepts that when he is gone Vera will have no one. Going out with chaps – and there used to be quite a few – has been a thing of the past since the trouble. Vera will be alone for the rest of her days: he understands that, although the subject is never mentioned. He understands that her luck might even change for a while, before some new chap she makes friends with has second thoughts, even though at the time she walked away without a stain. That is how things happen, Mr Schele knows, and knows that Vera has worked it out too. Sidney is different because of coming forward, and in a sense he has been coming forward ever since, as good a friend to Vera as he was at the time, a saviour really: in Mr Schele’s opinion that word is not too strong. It took time for the opinion to form, as naturally it would in a father, the circumstances as they were.
‘It’s good of Sidney. Just because that rose blew down.’
‘Yes, it is.’
Vera nods, saying that, lending the words a little emphasis. Her father knows what other people know, no more. He came in at his usual time, just after half past six. He saw the white police cars outside and was in a state before he passed through the porch. ‘You sit down now,’ she said, and told him, and the policewoman brought him tea. ‘It can’t be,’ he kept saying. Later on, she had kippers to boil in the bag, but they didn’t want them. She folded up the wheelchair and put it in the cupboard under the stairs, not wanting to look at it. Best to get it out of the house, she decided when everything quietened down, a month gone by, and they got a fair price for it.
‘You take your chances, Vera.’
She knows what h
e means, but Sidney’s not going to propose marriage, this morning or any other time, because marriage isn’t on the cards and never has been. The intruder would not have guessed there was anyone in that room because when he’d watched the house he’d only ever seen two people coming and going: the policemen explained all that. An intruder always sussed a place, they explained, he didn’t just come barging in. Her father out all day from eight-fifteen on, and the villain would have followed her to the cinema and seen her safely in. Cinemas, funerals, weddings: your house-thief loves all that. ‘Oh no, that’s crazy,’ her father kept muttering when they changed their minds, suddenly taking a different line. He had always thought it was crazy, their groundless probing, as he put it. He had always believed their case would fall to bits because it didn’t make sense.
‘You know what I’m saying, Vera? You take your chances.’
She nods. Changing her slippers for shoes because Sidney had come, she decided as well to change her drab Sunday skirt for her dog-tooth. She stood in front of the long wardrobe looking-glass the way she used to in the old days. She liked to be smart in the old days and she still does now. Sometimes a man looks at her in a supermarket or on the street. And Sidney does, when he thinks she isn’t noticing. She heats the milk again and is ready to make fresh coffee.
‘You like an egg, Sidney?’ she offers when Sidney comes in. ‘Poached egg? Maybe scrambled?’
‘No, honestly. Thanks, Vera.’ It’s too windy to risk burning the rosebush, he says, but he has clipped it up, ready for a calmer day.
There’s a leaf in his hair, and Vera draws his attention to it. ‘You just sit down.’
‘Only a cup of coffee, Vera.’
That morning Sidney woke when it was half past six, the light just beginning. He thought at once about Vera, although it had been a particularly rough night in the club and usually that comes into his mind first thing. Harry and Alfie had had to separate youths who began to fight, one of them with a knife. Later, after two, a girl who was a stranger in the club collapsed. But in spite of the intervention of that excitement, this morning it was Vera he woke up to, her face as it was when her hair was blonde. Fleshy you’d have called her face then, soft was what he’d thought when he first saw the photograph, in the Evening Standard someone had left behind in the club. It doesn’t matter that Vera is leaner now, it doesn’t matter that her hair is different. Vera’s the same, no way she isn’t.
Selected Stories, Volume 2 Page 22
