England and Other Stories (12 page)

Sue said, as if she hadn’t thanked him enough, ‘Why don’t you come in for a moment? I could introduce you to the girls.’ It was a strange impetuous suggestion and was perhaps only meant jokingly.

‘It’s a bit late in the day for that sort of thing, isn’t it?’ He smiled. He hadn’t meant to sound rueful.

She said, ‘All okay, with you and Sophie?’

‘Yes. Fine.’

‘And the kids?’

He snorted. ‘I hardly think of them as kids any more. They’re eleven and twelve.’

There was a little weighty pause. She could just get out. It didn’t need a speech.

‘You know, Bill, all I’ve ever wanted, all that’s ever made me happy, is to do something for other people that makes them feel nicer. That’s all, nothing special, nothing more than that. They come into my salon, they walk out again a little later—feeling nicer.’

His hands still held the steering wheel. He hadn’t had a drink yet. He thought of Alec, waiting for him, staring at a (still virgin?) bottle of Macallan. He thought how many months since he last saw Sue? When would he see her again? And when would he again, if ever at all, sit beside her like this, just the two of them, in the convenient bubble of a car?

Across the road, Hathaway’s was lit up, but curtained. If Christine and Anita were inside waiting, they couldn’t be seen.

He said, ‘I love you, Sue. I love you. I could say something like “I’m very fond of you”, but I love you. I don’t mean I don’t love Sophie. I don’t mean I don’t love lots of people. But I love you. Don’t you think there should be as much love as possible?’

There. He held the steering wheel. He held it, looking straight ahead as if he were still driving.

He heard, eventually, the slow punctilious creep of a woman’s clothing as she moves deliberately to kiss a man. It was barely a touch against the side of his face, by his ear, as if she wished to say something that could only be whispered, but he felt just the brush of her lips and a small expulsion of warm breath.

‘Well,’ she said, drawing away, ‘I better not ask you in then. You better not meet the girls.’

She could never have been so suave years ago.

She opened her door and got out, but then lingered on the pavement, despite the cold, one hand on the open door, her coat unbuttoned, leaning in while he leant across, constrained by his seat belt.

What was there to say? It was as if it was late and he was dropping her off.

‘Enjoy your evening,’ he said like some polite stranger. Like a cab driver.

‘And you. Don’t get sloshed.’

‘Nor you. I’ll see you later.’

‘Yes. But—’

‘But what?’

‘Don’t wait up.’

What did that mean?

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘It’s cold. The girls are waiting.’ To puncture the mood and effect a disengagement he added, ‘I can see down your top when you lean like that.’

It was a fifteen-year-old bottle, to be treated with respect, so they sipped slowly, both acknowledging how they couldn’t cane it like they’d used to. And there was the shepherd’s pie to mop it up. It was a very good shepherd’s pie. Perhaps he praised it too much, but Alec had simply said, waxing Caledonian, that short of a decent haggis there was no finer accompaniment to a good whisky. Decent haggis. That word again.

All the same, after a certain point—he could recognise the symptoms—he knew he should start to put his hand over his glass or ask for a coffee. And he really didn’t want, now, to have that moment when Alec would say, ‘There’s a spare bed upstairs, mon. No problem.’ He didn’t even want, now, to be around when Sue returned. Don’t wait up.

The point should come, before Alec launched off on some other topic, when he should say, ‘Look, if you don’t mind, I’ll head back now.’ And make whatever feeble excuses. He’d already told Alec that, strictly speaking, he was under doctor’s orders. It wasn’t true, though he’d had a fairly schoolmasterly doctor’s warning.

On the coffee table were two abandoned plates and the dish, with an encrusted serving spoon, that had contained the shepherd’s pie. They’d eaten like slobs, on their laps. He wondered how the table was looking at Hathaway’s with Christine and Anita.

He should make a move before he lost his power of decision—he was near that—and, yes, definitely before Sue returned. He needed a pee, so he went upstairs, resolving that when he came down and while still on his feet he’d mouth his garbled adieus. It had gone eleven. No, he was okay to drive. He had work to do tomorrow.

But he made the mistake, when he came out of the bathroom, of peeping into the room with the just-open door along the landing. Why did all kids want to sleep with the door just open? Had he once? He peered in, even crept in a little, and stood inside the doorway. There was that barely-lit atmosphere of utter peace, utter immersion in sleep—sleep like no grown-ups have. There were the two little concentrated forms beneath blankets, each in their own small bed. A guarding clutter of inert toys.

He knew about this from his own experience. It was a primal parental joy. But here there was an extra magic, an extra harmony and rapture: twins. He stood and looked, as if these were his own children. His heart turned over.

He stood there long enough, if it was only seconds, to hear the noise of a car creeping up the quiet cul-de-sac outside. He felt sure it was a taxi bringing Sue home. So she, at least, had kept her power of decision and made her departure before things got late and disorderly. Or—they all had their salons to think about—there’d been a general sensible dispersal.

He hurried downstairs, if only to get to the living room before Sue could reach the front door and to avoid the awkwardness—was it an awkwardness?—of coming face to face with her as she let herself in. And of course as he re-entered the living room Alec poured him another slug, even as they both heard a car door close outside, and Alec said, ‘That must be Sue. Rather early. The good wee lassies.’

Half past eleven wasn’t exactly early and there was a tiny touch of tension in his voice. Was he still smarting from his earlier blunder? He went through to be at the front door.

‘Hello, precious,’ Bill heard, holding his topped-up glass and feeling the edge of the waft of February air that Sue brought in with her. He knew now he had no control over how things would proceed. He saw himself in the spare room—further along the landing—in solitary inebriated confinement in a house of couples.

She appeared in the doorway, just as before, Alec behind her now, removing her coat. Yes, the shimmer was all hers. There was a light inside her. It was only a girls’ night out, he thought again, it wasn’t a ball. Life wasn’t a ball.

‘All well here?’ she said, quickly stooping to release her high-heeled shoes. One hand on the door frame, leaning in.

‘Yes,’ Alec said over her shoulder. ‘Look how much whisky we haven’t drunk.’

Alec slipped back into the living room, touching Sue’s bottom with his palm as he did so.

Bill said, ‘And how was your evening?’ It sounded, again, absurdly polite.

She smiled. She drew herself up, smoothed her skirt, shook her hair a little, then took a deep and, so it seemed, utterly thrilled and pure breath, like someone on a mountain top.

‘Oh, I’ve had the most wonderful evening.’

N
OBODY SPOKE
, nobody said anything. They spoke about the dead who couldn’t speak back, they stood around with poppies, but the ones still alive, they shut up and got on with it. Wasn’t that the best way, anyway, of being grateful to the dead? It’s what you did, it’s what everyone did.

And what did she know or care, a schoolgirl, a teenager on a bicycle whizzing down Denmark Hill, flashing her underwear? It had all been over before she was born, it had all been over for nearly twenty years. Her mother called her ‘flighty’, as if it was her new name, though her real name was Daisy. Daisy Leigh. She said, ‘You’ll end up in trouble, Daisy, one of these days.’ But her father said nothing, he shut up and got on with it. He coughed.

She quite liked ‘Daisy’, she liked being a daisy, but she liked ‘flighty’ too. She told Larry it was her middle name, it was what her mum called her. He said, ‘Flighty? Well, that settles it then, doesn’t it?’

And now Larry was sleeping in the spare room. What did it mean? They’d been married for over fifty years. Her name wasn’t Leigh, it was Baker. What was flighty about that? But Larry was sleeping in the spare room.

Her hair flying and her skirt too. Well if they saw it wouldn’t be for long, would it? Sometimes she’d let go of the handlebars, just because she knew she could do it, and hold out her arms like wings. Wheeee! She must have been saved up for Flight Sergeant Baker.

Trouble?

All over for nearly twenty years, but it hadn’t been so long since they’d told her, or rather since her mum had told her, as if it was something to be whispered between women about the man in the next room. But it must have been agreed between them. You tell her, Gracie.

‘Your daddy was gassed at Wipers.’

And what was that supposed to mean? She said the word gassed as if it was a bad word that shouldn’t be repeated. She said it in the way she’d hear people later say the word cancer. And she said Wipers as if it was a real name you might find on a map.

And how, at nine or ten or whenever it was, should she, Daisy Leigh, have known otherwise? All she knew was that her daddy had a ‘chest’, a ‘funny chest’, it went with him just as surely as he wore trousers. And he was still, so far as she was concerned, her same daddy with his same funny chest.

But the fact that she’d been told this thing like a secret not to be passed on had something to do, though she couldn’t have said what, with her becoming the sort of girl who didn’t mind too much if her skirt blew up and who got to be called flighty, not Daisy. It was a bit like the word Wipers.

Then along came another war anyway to take your mind off the old one, to wipe it away. Just come home, Larry. Just come home to your Flighty. She might be in or out of her nightie.

And now Larry was sleeping—or not sleeping—in the next room, but it was just like one of those black nights when he might never have come home. What did it mean? Tomorrow there was going to be a police investigation. He was going, voluntarily, to the police station, to ‘clear all this up’. He was going
voluntarily
. No one was being arrested. So there was still this night, it could wait till the morning. And what was he going to do anyway, run off somewhere? At seventy-two?

He was going to the police station, voluntarily, to help with inquiries. He was cooperating. But then? All hell let loose, she was sure of that. All hell, either way, whatever the outcome, whatever the decision. Never mind the voluntarily. All hell, she was sure, if this wasn’t hell already.

Which was what they’d all said when they didn’t want to say—or couldn’t think of how to say—anything. All hell. You don’t want to know.

But there was still this night, this black interval, and she wished it could be truly lastingly black. She wished when she opened her eyes—what was the point of shutting them if it didn’t make things go away?—there’d not be that glow, from the streetlights, round the edge of the curtains. My God, she wished she had blackout curtains. She saw them again as if it were yesterday, the dusty black brutal things they’d had to get used to, instead of the swirls of flowers or the Regency stripes. The curtains in her old bedroom in Camberwell had daisies. Of course.

What did it mean? Voluntarily. ‘Clear all this up.’

And what did this mean, right now, him being in the other room? That he didn’t want to be near her, touching her, let alone talking to her? Or that he thought that
she
wouldn’t want him there, not now, next to her? That she wouldn’t want to be touching him or, my God, for him to be touching her?

She told herself it was his confession, his way of saying it. She told herself it was just the disgrace, the sheer disgrace at the very idea of it, the very suggestion. Imagine. Either way, he was contaminated, not to be touched. Either way it was all hell.

And how could you ever tell anyway when things themselves went right back into blackness? It was what Addy herself had said, it was her trump card.

‘We’re talking here, Mum, about earliest memories. No, not even that. We’re talking about when you shouldn’t have any memories at all. But you have them, don’t you, if they’re strong enough, if they’re bad enough? You just suppress them, don’t you, submerge them? You pretend to forget.’

Suppress? Submerge? It had gone through her head to say, ‘You’re not in one of your classes now, my girl, you’re not in front of a blackboard.’ And she’d seen for a moment (something she’d never ever actually seen) her daughter facing rows of young faces. Why had Addy chosen to be a teacher? The thought of her becoming one had once vaguely scared her. She’d seen herself back at school, a target for her own teachers.

Pretend to forget?

What
could
you say about that time where memory vanishes into darkness? You could say nothing. Or you could say anything, you could say what the hell you liked, it was anyone’s guess, and no one could prove you wrong.

My girl. Addy—little Addy—was forty-eight.

‘You tell me what your earliest memories are, Mum. Go on, try it on me.’

She actually said that, to her own mother, as if she was accusing
her
, or as if she was saying, ‘Come on, join me.’

And now here she was
doing
it, at three in the morning, trying to go back in her memory as far as possible, to where memory slips down a black hole. And she couldn’t tell if it was because she was searching for something—and why the hell should she be?—or because she just wanted to slip, herself, down that black hole and never come out again . . .

She could remember being held against her father’s chest, when she was small enough for most of her to fit against it. She had a blue cotton dress, it was her first dress. She could remember him hugging her to his chest and her hugging him back. What was wrong with that? She could remember having her ear against her father’s chest and hearing the strange sounds it made, like rocks or pebbles shifting inside a cave—a cave by the sea with waves washing into it. She could remember it being as though he was letting her listen to the sounds, just her specially. What was wrong with that?