South of the Lights

by Angela Huth

  She was sitting at her table, shoulders hunched, back to him. She gave no sign of having heard him.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said.

  Brenda turned her head. Even in the etiolated light Evans could see there was a kind of silvery sheen over her face, perhaps sweat. It was so hot in here. Then he noticed two curling rims of what looked like fine sand at the corner of one of her eyes: the salt of dried tears.

  ‘You can’t come in here,’ she said. ‘You know you can’t come in here.’

  But Evans remembered the lesson he had learned that terrible night. Brenda responded best to mastery.

  ‘I’m in here,’ said Evans, half shutting the door behind him. ‘Is anything the matter?’ He could not be sure – this dimness was confusing after the bright sun outside, but he thought Brenda was regarding him with antagonism. He found it difficult to breathe in the close, grey cardboard air, and Brenda’s silence was troubling. ‘Anything the matter, Bren?’ he said again, and let his eyes wander from her face over the small mountain ranges of eggs. Trays and trays of eggs, piled almost to the ceiling – brown ones, speckled ones, white ones, he wondered how many –?

  ‘Get out,’ said Brenda. ‘Go on, get out.’

  Evans stepped back, pushing the door completely shut behind him.

  ‘Come on, Bren, don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘Look, I got off early – risk the sack for that, you know. But I thought it was such a nice evening we could go up to the house and take a turn round the garden, take a sniff at the roses, you’ve been on about the roses, Bren, haven’t you –?’ Under her gaze he found himself running on, anything to break the silence, to appease her. In one movement she rose from the chair and sat on the table. This way she did not have to look so far up at him: her head was at his shoulder level. She folded her arms under her breasts, heaving them up, forcing a cleavage to show in the undone neck of her shirt. She swung one foot backwards and forwards, gently hitting the chair each time.

  ‘I’m not coming up the house or anywhere else with you, Evans Evans, thank you very much. I’m going back down the Air Base. There’s another dance on tonight.’

  ‘What?’ Evans could hear his own heart, its sudden booming thump.

  ‘I’m going to a dance.’

  Calm, Evans, calm, he said to himself. I’m not understanding right. There must be some mistake.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps you’d understand if I told you I know all about you and your blonde.’ Brenda gave her breasts an almost enjoyable heave.

  ‘My blonde?’ For a moment Evans could not think what she meant. His mind broke into a blinding white star of guilt, and yet he could not think why he was guilty. ‘My blonde?’ he said again, and he knew his mouth had fallen open and his bad eye was beginning to twitch.

  ‘Oh, come off it, really! Don’t waste my time with your pretended innocence. You know quite well what I’m talking about.’ Her voice was nasty beyond recognition.

  ‘I don’t, Bren. I really don’t know what you mean.’ But even as he said it, he did. Even as he uttered the feeble denunciation, he knew what must have happened. She must have seen him, wondered, brooded all afternoon . . . Oh, really, it was laughable. His slow smile reflected the pace of his clearing thoughts. Brenda jumped down from the table. She faced him eye to eye. Christ, what a stupid drama all for nothing . . .

  Evans stumbled back as Brenda hit him on the cheek. She was shrieking something about it being no laughing matter. What did he think he was? The shit, the swine, the deceiving bastard, getting at her like that the other night when she’d done nothing wrong, when all the time he’d been having it away with some filthy blonde tart – the words shot out, ricocheting off the darkness of Evans’s comprehension. There was cuckoo spit at the corners of her mouth. Her hair was swinging about in heavy chunks, cider coloured, conker coloured, changing as she moved. As her hand rose to swipe him again Evans caught hold of her wrist.

  But she twirled around, snakily escaping his grip, shouting all the while.

  ‘Deny it, deny it, deny it!’

  She’s gone mad, thought Evans. Off her bloody head. He snatched her wrist again, missing it.

  ‘And keep your fucking hands off me. Just you try denying you were in a car with her this afternoon.’ Brenda paused for a moment, backed up against the table, breasts quickly rising and falling as she panted.

  ‘That’s quite true,’ said Evans, ‘but keep calm a moment while I explain.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Brenda screamed, and suddenly her arms seemed to be flailing everywhere, filling the whole small mottled space. Vaguely, as he backed himself against the door, shielded his eyes with an arm, Evans saw her clutching at a tray of eggs. He saw the jolting of their neat mountain ranges as Brenda raised it above her head – he smelt a new whiff of cardboard. It bashed down upon him, a mad cloudburst. He heard the prickling sound of three dozen cracking shells, small explosions beneath the wild soprano screech of her voice.

  Then he felt the mess. Slime among his fingers, threads of yolk, less rubbery, skulking through his hair, falling in a fringe over his bad eye. He saw an abstract pattern of yellow on the wall, a glinting pool of transparent slime on the floor. And Brenda’s wide mouth, screaming screaming screaming unjust abuse.

  He hit her. He left a mess of yolk on her face. She swung about, reaching for another tray of eggs, but slipped. Quickly Evans snatched the tray and saved it from falling: as Brenda tried to right herself, tried to stand, Evans crashed it down upon her head. It covered her hair with a web of yolks, whites and broken shells. He felt her fists in his stomach, his balls. He lashed back, enraged by the pain. They both reached for single eggs, clumsily hurled their ammunition at each other, screaming obscenities all the while. In the moments of timeless insanity Evans saw the raw eggs as injured eyes, the foul yellow of their pupils split and running into the liquid shapeless globs of their eyeballs. Christ, the bitch the bitch the bitch, he’d kill her.

  Then Evans felt a searing pain in his own eyeball, the bad one. Cowering against the shelves he shouted to Brenda to stop, he had eggshell in his eye. He heard his own moan from a long way off, and felt a warm jet of tears stream from the eye.

  Brenda stopped, sat back on the desk. Through his good eye, Evans focused on the absurd sight of her – hair, face, arms, breasts, legs, everything enskeined in dripping yellow, chips of shell, translucent slime.

  ‘Help me,’ he said.

  Brenda came over to him. He dropped his hands, which he had made into a mask over his eye. Brenda gently lifted up the lid with trembling fingers that smelt of egg.

  ‘I see it,’ she said. Tears from the smarting eye ran among her fingers, ran over the egg whites like oil over water. ‘Here, wait. My hanky.’

  She pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her shirt. Part of its hem was stained yellow. She screwed up a corner and pulled Evans nearer to the dun light of the window. With her spear of white cotton she skimmed about his eyeball. Evans clenched his teeth and ground his fingers into his palms to stop himself screaming. It was as if she was nicking at him with a razor: he tried not to think what happens to a sliced eyeball.

  ‘There.’ Her head was bent over a tiny chip of shell on the handkerchief. ‘It’s out. Sorry if I hurt.’

  Evans put out a hand to Brenda’s shoulder. His eye still overflowed with water and he could not see her clearly. Her shoulder was covered in mess, gritty with broken shells. He felt the movement of a noiseless sob.

  She moved away from him, sat back in her old position on the table.

  ‘Glory be to God, Evans, I don’t know what got into me.’

  Evans ran a hand through his gluey hair, and round the back of his neck. He could feel trickles of liquid slobbering down his back.

  ‘She wasn’t my blonde,’ he said quietly. ‘You got it all wrong. She was a woman I never saw in my life before. And, good God, I never want to see her again. She was waiting for some fellow in the Star who didn’t show up. Sh
e had no way of getting back to the station. I took her out of the goodness of my heart, otherwise she would have missed her train.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Brenda. She looked up. Her eyelashes were stuck together, yellow spikes blurred by fresh tears. Evans managed a smile.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve ever seen such a sight as you in all my life,’ he said.

  ‘You should take a look at yourself,’ said Brenda. ‘What are you going to do about all this?’ She looked around.

  ‘We’ll think about that later.’ Evans pulled her towards him. ‘Here.’ They kissed, tasting the raw egg splayed round each other’s mouths.

  ‘God, we’re revolting,’ said Brenda.

  ‘I love you, girl,’ said Evans. ‘I love you, you silly jealous bitch. I wouldn’t go out with a blonde. You know I wouldn’t go out with a blonde, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t suppose you would, as a matter of fact.’ With the useless handkerchief Brenda was trying to rub off some of the egg from her shirt.

  ‘Lucky I got the car at the top of the yard,’ said Evans. ‘I daresay we can get there with no one seeing us, and slip in through the back of the house. Mrs Browne never seems to be around.’

  ‘Just a minute. We’ll go in a minute.’ Brenda let the slimed handkerchief drop to the floor. She seemed quite exhausted, but her tears had stopped. They remained in silence for a while, looking round at the ludicrous mess left by their violence. ‘What was all this about, Evans? What was all this about?’ She reached behind her and picked up the folded note she had written two hours before. ‘I wrote you this letter saying I was going because I saw you in the car with that woman.’

  ‘You always act so hasty, Bren. Without thinking.’

  ‘So do you. Who beat me up for going down to the Air Base?’ She scrunched up the piece of paper and threw it on the floor.

  ‘Let’s talk about it later. Let’s go. Come on. It stinks in here. We’ll come back later and clear up.’

  Out in the yard, dazzling with evening sun, they laughed at the sight of each other. The egg whites were beginning to congeal, streaking their skin with silvery trails: splatterings of yellow yolk clung to them everywhere. They held sticky hands.

  ‘I just saw red,’ said Brenda.

  ‘You drove me mad,’ said Evans. ‘So unreasonable.’

  ‘A person has every right to be unreasonable sometimes.’

  ‘Never knew you had it in you, jealousy.’

  “Course I wasn’t jealous, silly. I was just angry at being deceived. That’s quite different.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Evans, ‘but you weren’t being deceived.’

  ‘Thought I was, so it comes to the same thing.’

  ‘Bloody women,’ said Evans.

  They managed to get unseen in the car to the back drive of Wroughton House. They slipped through the back door and along the passage to the narrow flight of stairs that led directly to the attic. But halfway up they heard Mrs Browne below them, calling. It was almost as if she had been waiting for them. They stopped. They turned to her, noticing small blotches of egg yolk in their wake. For a moment Mrs Browne’s eyes trembled with enquiry, then she smiled.

  ‘You both look as if you could do with a bath,’ she said. ‘There are masses of spare bathrooms.’ She sounded apologetic. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

  She led Brenda to her own bathroom, Evans to one that overlooked the walled garden. She provided towels and soap and shampoo. She asked no questions and they volunteered no explanations. Later, she helped Brenda rub dry her hair. Brenda would only talk about the size of the bathroom, which impressed her.

  ‘Twice as big as our living-room at home,’ she said. ‘If I had a place like this I’d lie in the bath hours and hours just looking at the view and thinking nice thoughts.’

  ‘I do.’ Augusta was being efficient, folding towels. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I seem to have made myself far too much kedgeree, and there’s lots of cheese and salad. Would you and Evans like to stay for supper?’

  ‘That would be smashing.’ Brenda, sitting on the mahogany lavatory seat, bare-breasted, was dabbing at her hair with a comb. ‘Smashing, if it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘Lovely. I’ll go and get some wine. Help yourself to anything you want. There’s make-up and stuff in the bedroom.’

  She left the bathroom very quickly. Brenda, in a kind of day-dream, continued ineffectually to comb her hair, staring all the while out of the window at violaceous shadows fluttering over the lawn. She did not question the unreality of her present position just as, earlier, she had not questioned the unreality of the extraordinary fight. Sometimes, things just surged up, grasped you so tight you couldn’t breathe or reason, swallowed you up, spat you out and left you sitting there, chewed, torn, exhausted. Then you recovered and went back to normal. Only when you looked back on the event could you see what it had all been about. Well, that’s how she saw it, anyway. Meantime, this particular process of recovery, with a nice supper cooked by someone else in a posh kitchen to look forward to, was far from disagreeable.

  Brenda and Evans changed into clothes they kept in their attic room, and joined Augusta Browne in the rose garden. She flitted from bush to bush, gently touching puffy blooms, bending her head sometimes to smell them, contradicting herself about her favourite – carrying on just like his mother, thought Evans. His eye still smarted and continued to spurt odd tears, blurring the rose colours in which he politely tried to show some interest. Brenda really did enjoy them: there was Mrs Browne telling her she should take as many as she liked, whenever she liked – it was a pity for them to be wasted. Women were a right soppy lot when it came to flowers: but still, it was pleasant out here, warm evening air and all that, and great slack feelings of release after all the tension and daft fighting.

  Later, they ate in the kitchen. Mrs Browne had put a bowl of yellowish roses on the table, of course, and when Brenda had said they were the colour of egg yolks they had all laughed. There were a couple of lighted candles and three bottles of wine. Brenda, by candlelight, not quite dark sky in the window behind her, looked bloody marvellous, Evans thought. He had a good idea they would stay in the attic all night, tonight. So thinking, he scarcely concentrated on Mrs Browne’s funny stories. She was making Brenda laugh a lot: oh yes, she seemed to be very gay, Mrs Browne, tonight. Her gaiety, it seemed to him after four glasses of iced dry white wine – went down easy as anything – was almost visible, spinning about the candle flame like a moth or something, rubbing up against them, affecting them – him and Brenda – too. Hell, he couldn’t half be fanciful when he was a little drunk.

  ‘Yes, just another glass, thanks.’ He shouldn’t have said yes, by rights, he’d have an awful head in the morning. But tonight, everything considered, seemed to be rather a special night: fight over, Brenda’s flesh to look forward to – Christ, he’d show her how he loved her. Christ, he would. He picked up his glass.

  A combination of gin and sleeping pills eventually eased Lark’s pain. Weak with relief at its going, she struggled to keep awake, but hopelessly. The last real thing she remembered was ash coloured sky in her window. The last picture against her closed eyelids was of Evans bearing down upon her. She imagined his weight. She put a drowsy hand on her ribs, where he would lie. Painless, now. Pain gone. She remembered she would be fine in the morning. Have to go to work, after all.

  For Rosie Evans it was another wakeful night in the bed beside Henry. She had much to reflect upon, much to sort out in her mind.

  Already, eyes blinking at the summer stars twinkling through the elm leaves, she had been over the whole afternoon a hundred times. For all the rush, her plan had, surprisingly enough, gone almost perfectly. Henry had found her, and hadn’t seemed to notice her slight limp caused by pins and needles sitting all that time on the tree stump. Judging by the look in his eyes he was nicely surprised by her appearance – hadn’t gone so far to comment upon her romantic choice of clothes – but, then, he’d never been one for obse
rvations, and his very lack of comment was a compliment in itself. True, he had spoken a little gruffly, asked her to go away: but that was a natural reaction by anyone taken by surprise when they think they’re on their own. And in the end, she’d won him over, of course. He came with her very meekly, biting on his pipe happily enough, listening to her reflections of the warmth of the evening and the blueness of the sky. At home, he’d settled down in his armchair and eaten three slices of newly baked bread spread thickly with honey, three chocolate biscuits and two lumps of fruit cake. Rosie hadn’t seen him eat so much for weeks. The sight had overjoyed her. She had busied about, full of encouragement, trying to convince him he’d be quite better in no time if he kept eating like that. He’d refused the rice pudding, it had to be admitted, but that was quite understandable, considering the amount he had eaten before. When he’d finished, he got up and put on his coat, said he was going back down to the Star.

  For a moment Rosie thought he meant her to go with him, like on Christmas Eve and her birthday, though he didn’t go so far as to say that. ‘Won’t be long,’ was all he said, and swung out of the door, wanting to be alone written all over his back.

  Rosie was stung. Disappointment jabbed all through her, making her sniff and blow her nose loudly, as she would never have done in front of Henry or Evans. She was bemused. Her plan had gone so well till then. Why now had it failed?

  Still, husbands were puzzling things and it was a wife’s duty not to be got down by them. She tidied everything she could think of tidying, chose a tin of tomato soup to warm up when he came home, and sat down to read the paper. But she was restless. An uncomfortable feeling of nervousness jangled through her, stopping her concentration. She realised, suddenly, she was still wearing her boater. Well! In the excitement of Henry’s large tea she must have forgotten to take it off. What a silly old thing she was. She must have looked ridiculous, serving him his tea in her hat. Why hadn’t he said anything? Unlike Henry not to point out a mistake like that. She puffed up her hair and found herself making for the larder. It would be foolish to waste the end of the rice pudding, and it didn’t look as if Evans was coming home. She scraped it up slowly with a small spoon, leaving the bits of gold skin till last, enjoying its sweetness. Then she went back to pace the kitchen.