Clover's Child (30 page)

‘He was so beautiful, Mum.’

‘Did he… did he look like you?’ she stuttered through her tears.

‘No.’ Dot shook her head. ‘He looked just like his dad.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Simon. His name’s Simon.’

‘Simon.’ Joan repeated.

Dot stared at her mum before climbing into the back seat of the Austin Cambridge, her boots squeaking against the grey vinyl upholstery. Wally hung out of the open window, his fag resting on his lip, waving and enjoying the salacious nudges and winks from his mates. Dot pretended to search for something in her handbag; she couldn’t bear to look at the posturing pack of strangers, to watch her childhood home getting smaller and smaller or see the stricken expression of her mum in the rear-view mirror.

The drive from Limehouse to Walthamstow was not a long one, half an hour at most, but for Dot it might as well have been another continent. Her mum and dad’s house had been a refuge of sorts and the cul de sacs of this East End corner were all she knew, having lived there her whole life. She could walk the streets with confidence, knowing every lane and house en route. Every time she ventured from the house she would raise her palm at several neighbours, people she’d grown up alongside, whose children she’d been to school with or who knew her mum. The corner shops, pubs and bakeries were guaranteed to hold a familiar face: Limehouse was her family. It felt inconceivable to her and more than a little bit frightening that this had come to an end. Tomorrow she would wake in a different neighbourhood, where she didn’t know the bus routes, or where to pick up a loaf, or who lived to either side of her.

It was late afternoon by the time Wally’s cousin dropped them off, beeping the horn in a rhythmic tune as he left. The two had ignored her as they drove, talking about West Ham – the Irons’ chances in the league, was Fenton still up to the job, and the various skills of Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters. She had felt excluded, awkward. How had she come to be in a strange car with these two people, heading God knows where on her wedding day?
Her wedding day…
It was still surreal.

She had kept her eyes fixed on the passing shops and lock-up garages as the two discussed her.

‘Blimey, Wall, she’s quiet. You know what they say about the quiet ones…’

Dot felt her cheeks flush, but made out she hadn’t heard.

The cousin wasn’t done. ‘Maybe once she starts she won’t stop, rabbit rabbit, nag nag…’ He lifted his left hand from the steering wheel and snapped his fingers against his thumb like a crocodile; this was supposed to represent Dot’s gob apparently. ‘And you’ll look back on this moment and wish that she’d shut her cakehole!’

Wally laughed. ‘I don’t know, I think I’d like to hear her chatting. Her mum and dad chat all the time, don’t they, Dot?’

She shrugged.

‘You got the keys, mate?’

Wally fished in his inside pocket and pulled out a key ring with a miniature pint of beer on it, complete with plastic foaming head. Attached to this was a shiny silver Yale key.

Dot had taken little interest in the planning for her nuptials and even less in the council place that Wally had acquired for them to live in. It hadn’t seemed in the slightest bit important, until now. Dot had believed up until the moment that she stood at the altar that something would occur to stop the wedding and therefore prevent her moving to a place she had never been to before. It had to; surely no force on earth would want to see her hitched to a stranger that she disliked.

Please, please let me have a garden.
Dot hoped that she would have a bit of outside space; it didn’t have to be acres, but a small patch, a square, anywhere that she could grow veg and cultivate a bit of grass, somewhere to escape to, breathe, be alone.

‘I’d love a nice garden, y’know. I’d like to grow flowers and all me own veg.’

‘Oh, be careful, once you get the gardening bug it can take you over!’

‘I think I’d like to cook what I’d grown. I could do fruit and make jams and crumble; be lovely that, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been much of a cook, it’s kind of me mum’s thing, but I reckon I’d love cooking for you. I’d experiment and you’d have to eat all my disasters!’

Wally bent to pick up the suitcase. Dot beat him to it and gripped the handle; she wanted to show him that she didn’t want or need his assistance. She followed her husband across the tarmac car park in which they had been deposited. Wally shoved his hands in his pockets and looked a little sheepish. Almost as if he didn’t know how to act, as if he hadn’t thought much past this point either. He had been quite cocky all day – the big man, the groom – but right now, without the audience and with his quiet bride trailing in his wake, he didn’t know what to do or say. It was excruciating.

Dot looked around at the pale concrete buildings that surrounded her. Each block of flats was five stories high and was joined to its neighbouring block by sky-high walkways. The buildings formed a square of sorts. Each was identical, each balcony or walkway faced the other, the only difference being that one block had front doors painted red, another green, another blue. Dot and Wally’s block had yellow doors.

Dot walked timidly behind Wally, trying not to look over the third-floor balcony to the patch of tarmac below, in which she could see large communal bins and a couple of vans. There would be no garden here for her. She thought about Ropemakers Fields with its squashed-together terraces and cobbled streets with wide pavements and tall sycamore trees planted every twenty feet. Tonight it felt like a different world. Here, everything was square and cold to the touch: concrete, moulded and formed into slabs. The windows had no familiar sashes or stained glass, but instead were large single panes that looked functional, but not homely.

Dot could not imagine living in one of these boxes, so close to other families in other boxes, some above, some below and some on each side. She couldn’t imagine opening a front door and not finding herself on the street but instead on a walkway high up in the air, like a bloody pigeon. She couldn’t envisage opening a back door and not stepping into the back garden to check on the progress of the determined chrysanthemums. She was breathing the cool night air but felt inexplicably claustrophobic. Placing two fingers inside her polo neck, she pulled the woolly fabric away from her skin, as though she was struggling to take a breath.

‘Here we go.’ Wally stopped at a yellow door that looked exactly like all the others and put the key with its little swinging beer glass in the lock.

Dot wondered what that expression meant. Here we go, home at last; or here we go, the first step into a concrete prison that will trap us until we wake one day and realise we are already old – a slow death.

Wally glanced at her face, but could make out little in the failing light. He disappeared inside and flicked the bare bulb into life in the square hallway. Dot hovered on the walkway, wondering how far she could get if she ran – not very far, she figured, not without a penny and only a change of undies and very little else in her crappy little suitcase. She considered the tradition of carrying the bride over the threshold and was grateful that her new husband had not attempted it.

She stepped inside, holding her case with both hands against her chest. She could see the small galley kitchen straight ahead and spied a frying pan full of bacon fat sat on a two-ring burner on the worktop. Wally had obviously managed to master the art of bacon cooking in the week that he’d had the keys, but not washing up. He came from a side room.

‘This is the front room.’ He stood aside to let her pass.

It was a square room, with an electric fire and nothing else; no curtains, no furniture and not so much as a lampshade.

‘All it needs is a woman’s touch, but you can get it done up, eh? Get all the bits and bobs you want to make it home.’ He tried out a small smile before striding out. Dot followed him. He stood in the hallway and pointed to three identical doors. ‘Bedroom, box room…’ The third door at the back of the hall was open. ‘And our bedroom.’

Dot swallowed the bile that rose in her throat; the way he’d said ‘our bedroom’ made it quite clear that they would be sleeping in it together. Of course they would, they were a married couple. That room was not empty; its windows also had no curtains, but there was a mattress on the floor with a candlewick bedspread on it, almost identical to the one she had slept under for most of her life. This fact did not give her any comfort; in fact, it just made her feel more homesick, more isolated and more desperate. It was as if she was lost – where was she? And how could she be homesick for a home that no longer existed except as a fantasy.

Dot was speechless: how could she spend even one night in this environment with this man? She looked at the bare concrete floor, which was peppered with splats of the white paint that had been used on the ceiling. They reminded her of tears.

‘Why did you marry me, Wally?’

It was the first time she had spoken to him in hours and the question caught him off guard.

He too looked at the floor, as though that was where the answer lay for them both.

‘You’re lovely… Who wouldn’t want to marry you?’

She looked at him and, despite the compliment, felt nothing but a wave of pity – not only had he trapped her, but he’d unwittingly trapped himself too.

‘Don’t you think people should really know each other before they get married? Or be in love?’

‘I think it’ll all come in time, Dot. It’ll all come in time if we let it, if we work at it.’

There was nothing else for Dot to do but nod. Any words that might have found their way out of her mouth would have severed this quiet optimism and she could not be that cruel.

For Dot and Wally Day it would be a very long time before such sentiments would be discussed again.

Dot brushed her teeth in the cold bathroom, grappling with the unfamiliar taps on the pale green sink before slipping into her nightdress. The rayon skirt clung to her legs; she tried to pull it away from her body and felt the tiny pins and heard the crackle of static against her skin. She patted her hair into place and put some talcum powder on her armpits before trying to slide into the room unseen. But Wally was sitting up on the mattress, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. The bedroom light was off, but an orange light from the street lamps flooded the room with their glow.

Dot was fascinated and sickened in equal measure by his naked white torso. He was very slim: wiry, with tight bunches of muscle to either side of his belly button. His skin was near translucent, revealing clusters of spider-like meandering purple veins. She doubted that his body had ever seen sunlight. It was inevitable that Dot would compare his body to that of the only other man she had seen naked. Sol’s brown skin had shone. His strong arms and broad, muscular chest on which she used to love lying her head had felt like home. The two men could not have been more different, and that at least was some small mercy, for had Wally been a poor imitation of Sol, it might have been confusing. Tonight there was no confusion: if Sol was warm, Wally was cold; if Sol meant strength, Wally weakness; and if Sol was love, Wally was indifference.

Dot tiptoed around the mattress to the vacant side and crouched down, pulling back the corner of the bedspread with a trembling hand. She climbed in and lay as stiff as a board on her left side, facing the wall, shivering with cold and fear. She screwed her eyes tightly shut and prayed, prayed that he would let her sleep. She wasn’t comfortable but was far too nervous to pull her nightie further down her legs or change position so her knees were not resting on each other. Her feet were cold and her muscles tense, but still she didn’t move, didn’t want to risk any part of her body inadvertently touching any part of his.

An hour passed, maybe more. Dot listened through the pretence of sleep as Wally drew rhythmically on his cigarettes and flicked ash into a glass ashtray that he’d placed on his thigh. He coughed a few times, a phlegm-filled rattle that reminded her of her dad first thing in the morning. She sniffed surreptitiously at the pillow from her childhood bed, knowing that it would soon lose its perfume of apple shampoo, hairspray and Coty L’Aimant.

Finally Wally placed the ashtray on the floor with a thud and slunk down on the mattress. He pulled the blanket up, which loosened it from Dot’s grip under her chin. She ground her teeth and tried to stop her limbs from shaking. Pushing her eyelids even closer together, she held her breath, which meant she then exhaled more loudly and obviously than she had intended, betraying the fact that she was awake. There were a couple of seconds of stillness when she thought she might have got away with it before she felt his thin hand grip her right shoulder.

Dot felt herself jump; her arm jerked. He didn’t attempt to move her, thankfully. Instead he gently squeezed her shoulder and touched the hair that hung down her back.

‘Night then.’ He withdrew his hand and turned over.

They lay like actors, both feigning sleep, both praying for and dreading the relief that daylight would bring. It would mean they could leave this room, but what would they do tomorrow? With no wedding for distraction, it meant a whole twenty-four hours in each other’s company, with nothing to say and nothing to do.

Dot heard the change in his breathing and knew that he slept. That was when she started to cry. Hot, silent tears leaked down over her nose and cheekbones and into the pillow. She cried both with sadness at her newly married state and with relief. She had expected a violation – how could she not? They were man and wife. It wasn’t just the thought of having to lie with a stranger, it wasn’t even the revulsion she felt at her husband’s physique. It was much more than that. Wallace would be entering a space, both physically and mentally, that had been the sole reserve of her love, her Sol. It would be an invasion that threatened to erase the perfect memory of their union and dilute the act of creating Simon.

Dot lay awake long after Wally slumbered, appreciating the solitude. She blinked into the ether and tried to answer the big question: how long could she live like this, with this man, in this horrible, cold flat before she started to lose her mind?