Appointment with Yesterday (3 page)

But they did become a serious issue, of course, in the end. As the years went by, and success followed success for Julian, the dinner parties became larger, and grander. Little lions from the social and artistic worlds were invited to them, and then bigger lions. Until, at last, secure in his own unassailable reputation, Julian began to feel the need of a wife who would be a credit to him. Not one who would outshine him, of course—as if such a thing were possible! —Oh no! But he needed someone elegant, sophisticated; a fitting hostess for a man in his position. And one night, he looked at his existing
wife, nervously sipping her sweet sherry, boring the Finnish Ambassador, and allowing her anxieties about the chestnut soufflé to show on her round shiny face. He contemplated her faded ginger perm, her freckles, and her thickening figure bulging under her black velvet dinner dress; and that had been the beginning of the end.

Milly had seen it coming, of course. She had known, long before he did, that she wasn’t going to be able to “keep up with him”. It often happened, of course, in their sort of circle. She had seen it with her own eyes, over and over again, among their acquaintances: the brilliant, ambitious husband rocketing his way to the top and discarding his dowdy, middle-aged wife en route, like a snake shedding its outworn skin in springtime. She’d met the wives, too, after the amputation was over: drab, dejected creatures, moaning on and on about the meagreness of their alimony, and about “his” ingratitude after all they had done and all they had sacrificed for him during the early years of struggle.

Had they no pride? It was all true, of course—but even so, surely a woman could keep her lips closed and her head held high? And as for alimony, Milly had thought—and sometimes, to selected cronies, had actually said—that if
her
husband ever deserted her, she would starve in the gutter before she would take a single penny from him!

But she took it, of course, when the time came, just like all the others. When it came to the point, there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do. There she was, in the Kensington flat, and with bills pouring in for services and commitments that she hadn’t even known existed; and even while she drifted about looking for somewhere cheaper to live, with landladies laughing in her face when she mentioned the sort of rental she had in mind—even in that short time, the second round of bills had begun to arrive. Demands, Final Demands, threats of legal action—what could she do but accept the hundred and fifty pounds a month offered by her former husband, so generously and with such calculated spite? It was, in fact, a larger sum than had been awarded by the Courts, and he
explained this gratuitous munificence in a letter written to Milly just after his much-publicised marriage to Cora Grey, the up-and-coming young movie star who had divorced her nonentity of a husband specially for Julian. The two of them had made the front page of the evening papers at the time, and since then their bronzed faces, full of improbably glittering teeth, had leered up against a background of sea and sky in at least two of the colour supplements. No doubt it had all gone to Julian’s head a bit: and this explained—or Milly supposed it did—the schoolboy spite, the easy, throwaway cruelty, of the letter he chose to write to her, from his honeymoon paradise, at the very height of his triumph:

“
I’ll
show
him!” Milly had thought, as she tore the letter into tiny shreds.

*

And show him she did. Which was how, all these months later, she came to be crouching here, in this freezing seaside shelter, battered by wind and spray, with no food, no home, and, very likely, only a few more hours to live.

*

What would Julian say, she wondered, when he read the whole story in the papers tomorrow, or perhaps the next day? Would he just say, with that familiar curl of the lip, “God, how sordid!” Or would he, perhaps, murmur, with a tiny glint of unwilling admiration in those self-satisfied eves: “Good Lord! I’d never have thought she had it in her!”

M
ILLY
STIRRED INFINITESIMALLY
on the hard bench, and found that by now even her hips were numb. What was the time? Two o’clock? Or even three? Could it be that she had evaded in sleep some appreciable fraction of her nightlong sentence? There was no knowing. No way of measuring the dreaming and the not-dreaming that wove in and out of her head from the darkness and the storm. When she dreamed of cold, of a cold sharper than human flesh could bear, it was only to wake and find that it was not a dream at all. Her limbs were still there, jutting out of her in four places, and enduring in reality what could not
be endured in dreams. It was
their
suffering now, rather than her own, that troubled her; for she, herself, had become very, very tiny, and was moving inexorably, and at an accelerating rate, out of range of their sufferings. She was deserting them, leaving them to fight their losing battle as best they might … and then, from she knew not where, there would come upon her a fit of shivering so violent that her soul would be jerked back into its proper place again, in charge again, suffering again, sharing to its excruciating limit the agonies of every far-flung cell.

Strange lethargies intervened, and strange awakenings where there had been no sleep; until at last the darkness seemed to break like a dropped cup, and she felt in her dream that some mighty change, some unimaginable glory, was coming over the earth: and when she woke she found that it was so. For when she opened her numbed eyelids there was a faint yellow light spreading over the tumbled waters; the wind had dropped; and it was day.

The light grew, and Milly was aware of something akin to worship as she contemplated her own body. This was the body that had brought her alive through the incredible winter night by the application of first one marvellous mechanism and then another. She remembered how it had first
withdrawn
blood from the extremities, the hands and feet, in order to feed the vital machinery in the centre: and then, without her even noticing it, it had curled itself up into this bundle in which she now found herself, mathematically arranged so as to expose the absolute minimum of surface area to the searing cold. And after that, when her limbs were numb and all her willpower gone, it had kept her blood circulating and her heart minimally beating by means of bouts of shivering alternating with bouts of drowsing apathy. By these magical, unbelievable mechanisms it had kept death at bay all through the livelong night, and without any sort of help or co-operation from
her
—as far as
she
was concerned, she had been leaving herself to die. And with all this, it had launched at her no reproaches for
having landed it in this desperate situation: it did not ask her
why
it had to be kept out like this all through the coldest night of the year, in wet clothes, and with no food inside it. Like a true and loving friend, it had accepted her decision without reproach, and then had put all its energies, all its varied and wonderful skills, into sustaining her through the consequences. I’ve never had a friend like it!—thought Milly, staring down at her bedraggled person in the growing light; and with this thought there came to her a blazing determination to survive.
She
die of exposure? Not on your life! Why, she hadn’t even got a sore throat! Slowly, painfully, she set herself to restore the power of movement to this numbed, miraculous body of hers. As soon as she could move, she would buy it some hot coffee, a roll and butter … she felt almost dizzy at the thought of such wonders, and at the realisation that they were still within her reach. She still had
some
money, after all; eighty or ninety pence at least.

At the thought of this sum, the strangest thought
imaginable
came to her. There was something to spend it on even more important than food. She must have her hair set!

Wasn’t this the least she could do? How could she allow her body, her faithful, miraculous body, which had protected and steered her through the deathly perils of the night, to go about looking like a scarecrow?

*

And it was only much later, as she sat staring at her transformed appearance in the hairdresser’s mirror, that she realised that this way of spending her last shillings had also been downright sensible. Now she would be able to look for a job, bargain with landladies, invent stories about lost insurance cards. She was equipped now, to face the
brand-new
world.

“
Y
ES, WELL, CAN
you start tomorrow?”

Choking back the rest of her imaginary life-story, Milly stared at her prospective employer incredulously. The woman wasn’t even listening! When Milly had first seen the
advertisement
for a Daily Help, on a board outside a newsagent’s, it had seemed obvious to her that the first thing to do was to think out some plausible sort of past for herself: and so for more than an hour she had loitered in an arcade of deserted slot-machines, concocting this wonderful tale which so cleverly explained just how it was that she happened to have no address, no references, and no employment card. And now here was this woman interrupting her in mid-sentence to offer her the job, just like that! For a moment, Milly felt affronted rather than relieved. All those carefully-plotted details about the invalid father, the requisitioning of the family home, the loss of all her personal papers in the move: and then the death-duties, and the mysterious Family Debts—all, all were wasted! Mrs Graham (for such it seemed was the name of this anxious, thirty-five-ish person who kept glancing at the clock and fidgeting with
paper-clips
)—Mrs Graham didn’t want to know one thing about any of it! She didn’t want to know Milly’s age, her
capabilities
, or why she had suddenly dropped into Seacliffe like a visitor from Mars. All she wanted, it seemed, was to clinch the deal before (to judge by her agitated glances) Milly should disappear into thin air with a rattle of ghostly chains, or re-embark in her flying saucer, or whatever. Were Daily Helps really as rare as that? Milly could only suppose that they must be, and her spirits rose a little. It was a long time since she had felt rare.

“Can you start tomorrow?” Mrs Graham repeated,
torturing
the inoffensive paper-clip with nervous fingers. “You see, my other woman let me down rather badly … not a question of money, it wasn’t that at all. I’m willing to pay thirty-five pence an hour, and lunch as well, she always had a good
lunch. And it’s light work, Mrs—er—; nothing heavy, you’ll find it’s a thoroughly labour-saving kitchen, all the equipment and everything, brand new. And a Hoover! With fitments! And there’s the Dustette, you can use it for the shelves and everything, you won’t need to get your hands dirty….”

By this time, Milly had realised who it was who was interviewing whom, and she adjusted her posture accordingly, leaning back a little in the chair on whose extreme edge she had so far been timorously perching. Now, in her
newly-relaxed
position, she set herself to listening graciously while her victim reeled off, with anxious haste, the variegated delights in store for Milly if she accepted the job. Up-to-date waste-disposal. Non-rub polishes. No scrubbing…. There seemed no point in interrupting, though in fact Milly had already quite decided to take the job. Or, rather, it never occurred to her not to. From the first moment when she began scanning the newsagents’ advertising boards this
morning
, she had taken it for granted that she would take the very first job that she was offered—if, indeed, she was offered anything at all. Never, in her wildest dreams, had she supposed it would be as easy as this! She, an unknown woman, past forty, with no skills, no qualifications, no
references
, and wearing a coat still damp from sitting out in it all night! Why, for all this Mrs Graham knew, she might be a murderess….!

*

“You
will
turn up tomorrow, won’t you?” Mrs Graham was saying anxiously. “So many of the women I’ve seen, they’ve said they’ll come, and then they just don’t turn up! You won’t let me down, will you, Mrs—er—Oh dear, what
is
your name? I ought to have asked you before.”

Milly was just opening her mouth to answer, when she realised that “Milly”, alone, wasn’t going to be enough. A surname! Quick, quick! She racked her brains to think of something … anything … Oh dear, Mrs Graham must
already
have noticed her hesitation in answering…!

And indeed, Mrs Graham had: but, as is so common with
people in a state of anxiety, she had immediately integrated this new phenomenon into her own special network of
worries
, and imagined that Milly’s hesitation meant that she was wavering over her decision to take the job.

“You
will
come tomorrow, won’t you?” she urged, for the second time. “I’m counting on you! I get so tired of people who promise to come and then just disappear! Promise me you won’t do that!”

Gleefully, Milly promised. Disappear! —when by this time tomorrow she could expect to have one pound forty in her pocket and a free lunch inside her? Not likely! Besides, Milly had already done enough disappearing, in the last thirty-six hours, to last her a lifetime.

*

She spent the afternoon in the station cafeteria, where it was warm. She had gone there to steal food, but had found, rather to her surprise, that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Absurd, really, that a woman capable of the deed she had set her hand to yesterday, should today find herself unable to reach out that same hand just to purloin a two pence bread roll!

If she hadn’t been so hungry, she would have laughed.

Oh, well. So she wouldn’t be able to eat. But there were other bodily pleasures to be enjoyed—pleasures which were now for the first time being fully revealed to her in all their glory: and one of them was sitting down. The sight of a vacant seat in a corner by the radiator filled her with such a passion of longing that she almost fainted with the fear that someone else might get there first! Through trays and trolleys, and all the detritus of Consumer-Man, she battled her way towards the haven of her desires.

At last! Here she was, her head resting against the
dark-green
décor, and her legs, throbbing with sheer comfort, stretched out in front of her under the table. She felt her eyes closing, but it didn’t matter, no one was going to notice. This was a
station,
wasn’t it, an outpost of the wonderful, anonymous world she had inhabited yesterday? The world of
commuters, where hurrying takes the place of existing—“I hurry, therefore I am!” If you aren’t hurrying, then you aren’t existing, and that makes it quite all right to sit with your eyes closed, your damp coat steaming—you can even snore—for a whole afternoon, and never a glazed eye will swivel in your direction, nor a single, screwed-up
consciousness
detach itself from its inner speedometer for long enough to wonder who you are and why you are so tired.

People came, they sat down opposite her, they ate their buns, looked at their watches, and went: and still Milly slept on, secure in the knowledge that she didn’t exist. A black cat in the dark: white square on white: what an aeroplane looks like out of sight: you can’t get much safer than that.

For two hours Milly slept like the dead, or like the not-yet born; and when she woke, there was an object in front of her so marvellous that for a second she thought she must have died and gone to Heaven. The object was white, and delicately carved; the edges formed a frieze of fantastic beauty and complexity—no, not a frieze exactly; more like petals, petals of a flower, opening out before her, offering itself, in total, smiling friendship.

Milly blinked. Her vision cleared (for one moment she would have said rather that it dulled), and she found herself gazing hungrily at a broken roll, partially buttered, that someone had left to go to waste on a crumb-strewn plate, only a foot away from her.

Milly was amazed. How could things be so easy? No one could call
this
stealing! She twitched the plate furtively towards her, and as she bit deep into the broken crust, and felt the soft, feather-whiteness of the bread against her teeth, she murmured a soundless prayer, she knew not to what or whom. Already the sense of revelation was fading: induced by starvation, and lowered blood-sugar, the vision was being systematically blotted out, gleam by evanescent gleam, with every delicious mouthful.

A shame, really, after all this, that she couldn’t manage to finish the roll! After only a few bites, all her ravenous hunger
was gone, and she felt quite bloated. She was just about to slip the remainder of the roll into her handbag, to eat later on—for tomorrow’s breakfast, perhaps—when a tray lurched into her field of vision. It swayed for a few seconds in front of her eyes, and then came to rest on the table. The owner of the tray, a middle-aged man with greying hair, settled himself comfortably in the seat opposite Milly, reached first for salt and then for vinegar, and then, having besprinkled his
sausage
and chips liberally with both, he proceeded to unfold an evening paper, prop it against the vinegar bottle, and
thereafter
seemed to bury himself in it, ladling forkfuls of chips into his mouth like an automaton.

At first, all that the little scene meant to Milly was that she could now, perhaps, slip the rest of the roll into her handbag unobserved. Surreptitiously, she pulled the handbag into her lap, and opened it in readiness behind the screen of the table: then, just before snatching at the roll, she gave a quick final glance across the table to make sure that her companion was still thoroughly engrossed in his paper.

He was. Why, then, did Milly not seize her chance, grab the piece of roll, and snap her handbag shut on it? Instead, she just sat, staring.

… F
OUND IN
F
LAT
was all she could see of the headline, but it was enough: enough to freeze her hovering hand; to drive all thought of food from her shocked consciousness. Vainly she screwed herself this way and that, trying to see the hidden portion of the page: vainly she tried to assure herself that it was too early … too soon … they couldn’t have discovered anything yet.

They could, though. It wasn’t too early at all. This was a London paper. Of course the news could be in it—this was just exactly the length of time you would expect the thing to take, allowing for the snail-like reactions of the inhabitants of that haunted street. Or was it? How long would Mrs Roach, on the floor above, have sat listening inertly to the strange sounds in the basement? How long would it be before her dulled senses became aware that something was amiss? And
even after she was aware, how long would it have been before she dragged her bulk out of the ancient fusty chair in which she spent her days, and took herself, slip-slop in her
downtrodden
slippers, curlers twisted this way and that in her sparse hair, out of the front door and down the gusty street to the telephone box at the corner? For there was no telephone in the house—a deficiency which Gilbert had actually boasted of to Milly, in his gentle old voice, as if it was some rare and expensive luxury. “It’s the only way to get any peace, these days,” he’d said, that day when he took her to his home for the first time: and it was only afterwards, and gradually, that Milly had become aware of what it was that Gilbert meant by “peace”.

How long had it taken her to understand? How long was it before she began to guess what it was that she had let herself in for by marrying Gilbert?

Marrying him had seemed, at the time, the answer to all her problems: and so, in a way, it was, for at that time all her problems had been simply the variegated facets of the same problem: the problem of how to
“show”
Julian! Show him that “a woman in her forties” is
not
finished and done for: show him that she, the discarded wife, could still attract, still find herself another man. Show him that what he had thrown away like an outworn glove was a treasure for which other men came begging. Show him, in fact, that she didn’t care
that
for him and Cora, and for the divorce, and for all the humiliating publicity! Show him that she could still bounce up again, unquenched and unquenchable, ready to start life all over again. And to show him, above all, just what he could do with his alimony!

“I am returning your cheque,” she had written—and the composing of this letter had given her, perhaps, the most exquisite ten minutes of her whole life. It seemed, looking back, that it was just for this ten minutes that she had undertaken the whole thing: had bartered, knowingly, the whole of her future life, with no doubt at all that a lifetime of frustration and boredom was a small price to pay for ten
minutes of triumph so perfect and so complete. “I am returning your cheque,” she wrote, “as I no longer have any need of—or indeed any right to—further support from you. You will be pleased to hear that I am getting married next week, and am happier than I have ever been in my life. Gilbert is a widower, just sixty, tall and most
distinguished-looking
, and has a pleasant home of his own in South London….”

She hadn’t known, of course, at the time of writing, how much of all this was lies: though she had known that some of it was, and she hadn’t cared. She knew, for example, that Gilbert wasn’t sixty, but a good many years older: his stiff gait, his feathering of snow-white hair, and above all his hands, tortoise-slow and spotted with old age—all this had made it quite clear, from the very beginning, that he was deceiving her about his age. But so what? All she had felt at the time was a mild gratitude towards him for taking upon himself the burden of telling the lies, instead of leaving it to her. For, if he had not done it for her, she would, of course, have subtracted the decade herself in boasting about her suitor to Julian.

What she
hadn’t
known, at that time, was what the “pleasant house in South London” was actually like. But even if she
had
known—even if she could have seen with her own eyes the boarded-up windows, the peeling, ancient paint, and could have heard the slip-slop of Mrs Roach’s slippers on the stairs—even then, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Because at that time she simply didn’t
mind
what the rest of her life was going to be like, any more than she minded what Gilbert was like. All that mattered was that Julian should
think
she had made a catch and was living happily ever after. Real life seemed a trivial thing compared with impressing Julian.