England and Other Stories (13 page)

She could remember being in the paddling pool in the children’s playground in Ruskin Park, though she couldn’t say how old she’d have been, and a man had popped out from behind a big tree with his trousers undone and all his stuff showing. He’d done it very quickly and cleverly, just as she’d looked up and when no one else was looking, because she’d turned round and everyone was looking the other way. And when she’d looked back the man had gone as if he’d never been there. But she could remember his stuff showing, his red bobbing thing. She couldn’t have invented that. She could remember thinking what was wrong with him, what sort of—disfigurement—was that? Though she didn’t know then the word disfigurement.

Anyway she’d got over it and never said a word. And it wasn’t her daddy.

Her face was wet. Addy was making her do this. The bitch.

And if it had been all right to hug her father still, her father who’d been gassed, and for him to hug her since he was still her same daddy, then it was all right to hug Larry now, no matter what, to hold him and hug him against her own sad chest, against her own flat breasts, and say, ‘It’s all right, Larry, I’m here. You’re still the same Larry.’

Except he wouldn’t let her. He’d gone to the spare room. What did it mean? It could mean that he thought that
she
must think that he’d really—

The bitch, the evil bitch. She was making them lie like this in separate rooms, both in their own separate blackness.

And he was lying, for God’s sake, in Addy’s old room. It wasn’t, at least, in her old single bed. That had gone ages ago, it had been the spare room for ages with a new double bed from Debenham’s. But it was the bed where Addy and Brian had slept enough times when they’d visited, and they’d visited enough times in nearly twenty years. Brian had said once it had ‘tickled’ him to sleep in Addy’s old room. He’d said that. And then they’d brought their kids, Mark and Judy, first one then the other, in their carry-cots, to sleep with them in that same room.

And if all this, now, was true, then how could they have done that, come here, kept visiting, with their kids too? Though it had been a while, it was true, since any of them had visited, and the kids weren’t kids any more. She should have said, perhaps, like some interfering mother, ‘Is everything okay?’

Which was just the point Addy was making. Years went by and people never talked, did they? She, Adele Hughes, born Baker, hadn’t talked for over forty years, but she was talking now. She’d kept it to herself, she’d ‘struggled’, but now she had to ‘speak out’. And she was talking face to face, notice, she wasn’t flinching. She was looking at her own mother, hard in the eye, as if her own mother might have known all along what all this was about and covered it up. And she wouldn’t be the only one to speak out, would she, not by a long way? The world knew that by now. It was others speaking out that had given her the courage.

Courage?

She said she’d been ‘traumatised’. All her life she’d struggled. But it had to stop now. She had to have her ‘release’. At forty-eight? And had she talked to Brian first about it all? ‘Tickled’. Had she had
him
sleeping in another bed?

Or was he doing that anyway?

She said that when she was very small, almost too far back for memory—there she went again—Larry, her own father, had done things to her, had interfered with her. He’d molested her. He’d traumatised her.

‘He what? He did
what
? Where? When?
What
?’

She’d exploded into questions—which seemed to be all she had now. She was lying in this bed, under a rubble of questions.

‘You better have some facts, my girl! You better know what the hell you’re talking about!’

It had surprised her, the fierceness and quickness of her answer. She hadn’t been lost for words exactly, or for a way to say them. She’d spoken in a certain voice and with a certain look. She knew she had a certain look, because Addy had actually stepped back. She’d flinched—for all her being unflinching. And whatever else that look was saying, it was saying, ‘I’m not your mother any more, my girl. I’ve just become your deadly enemy.’

And whatever Addy had thought that talking to her mum would achieve—she’d wanted comforting? To be told she had guts?—she knew now she’d been seriously mistaken. And anyway she’d crossed a line for ever and there was no going back. But she must have thought of that—she should have thought of that—long before she opened her mouth.

Then her own mouth had opened again and she’d said to her own daughter, her own child of forty-eight years, ‘You lying evil bitch.’

He was stationed in Yorkshire. Flight Sergeant Baker, wireless-op Baker. As it turned out they were from barely a mile apart, he was from Streatham, but he was stationed in Yorkshire. It might as well have been another country. He said on the phone, ‘I’m safer here than where you are, I have it cushy here.’ But she knew it was a lie, or a daytime truth and a night-time lie, since any night he could be killed. That was the truth, that was the deal now. It wasn’t hanky-panky any more in the back of the stalls, though there was some of that, it began with that, but it went beyond.

Night-time, bedtime. How everything was turned round. How could she sleep when he might be over Hamburg or Berlin? But she never knew where, or even if, he’d be flying that night—so she might be scaring herself stiff for nothing. She’d actually preferred it when she had to be in the shelter. At least she could think: Well he’s dropping bombs on them. She didn’t care about Germans at all. That was their hell.

But the nights when she just lay in bed were terrible. They were like this night now. She didn’t even know where in Yorkshire, just Yorkshire. ‘Believe me, Flighty, you wouldn’t know where, even if I told you.’ But because she didn’t know anything, which nights or where, Yorkshire itself became like the place, the word for all things terrible. Yorkshire terriers. Like the word for terror itself.

That’s where he was now. Or she was.

And that’s where you came from, my girl.

He never talked either. He shut up and got on with it too. The fact is he came back, he always came back, but she never knew, nor did he, that that was how it would be, till it was all over. He came back and he never talked. ‘I’d rather talk about this, Flighty.’ His hand you know where. In the Air Force they called it Lack of Moral Fibre if you didn’t shut up and get on with it. Larry never had Lack of Moral Fibre.

He had nightmares, of course, for a long time afterwards—so yes he talked, even screamed a bit, in his sleep. But that was something she could deal with simply, easily, gladly. ‘You were dreaming, Larry, only dreaming. Look, you’re here beside me, you’re alive, these are my breasts. Put your head in my breasts.’

If only she could say that now. ‘You’re here, Larry, you’re not in Yorkshire.’

And then, in 1947, Adele was born. Little sweet Adele. And wasn’t that the universal cure? Everyone was doing it. Little babies galore. And didn’t that help to wipe things away?

And if Addy had been waiting all this time to talk—if there were any reason to—then she might have waited till the two of them were dead. If she’d waited anyway till she was
forty-eight
. Or she might have waited till they’d lost their marbles, gone doolally, so they wouldn’t know a thing anyway. Same difference.

But to say it now when they were seventy-two and seventy-one, though still going strong, in their ‘sunset years’ and trying to make the most of them. Having passed their Golden and hoping to make it to their Diamond (what was flighty about that?). Not to mention to the year 2000, to a new millennium. Think of that, Larry, we’ve lived through a millennium.

But Addy had actually given
that
as her reason. If she’d waited till they were dead, till
he
was dead, then there wouldn’t have been any justice, would there?

Justice?

She actually said it was the thought of them reaching the end of their lives that had ‘forced her’ to it, the thought of them being dead and the thing just disappearing into the past, then her having no ‘redress’ and just having to carry on living with it till she was dead herself.

She actually said that. All her life she’d protected them, but enough was enough.

Protected them?

Well, she’d made the sun set now sure enough. There was only this night, which she wished would go on for ever.

No matter how tightly she closed her eyes, she couldn’t make it black enough. To
want
night, to want blackness! Yet to be made to feel at the same time that you had to shine some nasty poking torch into it, like a policeman at a murky window. And there could be no stopping it, could there, no end to it, once you got into that area where memory itself stopped and no one could say what was true or false? Beneath everything a great web of—disfigurement. It must be there because no one talked about it.

How she’d dreaded it, once, sunset—the thought of the sun setting over Yorkshire. Now she wanted only darkness. She couldn’t say what Larry wanted.

She saw herself on a bicycle, arms outspread. She saw again her little room in Camberwell, bands of light from the street. Her daisy curtains. Her father’s cough across the landing.

Though she’d never felt it before and never imagined she might feel it, she felt it now like some black swelling creature inside her. The wish not to have been born. Or was it the wish not to have given birth? She felt it, decades on, but as if it were happening all over again, the exact, insistent, living feeling of carrying Adele inside her. Though was this Adele? At four months, at six months, at eight, at—

Then she woke up and felt sure she’d been screaming, screaming out loud. She felt sure she’d screamed—so loud that Larry, in the next room, must have heard, even if he’d been sleeping. Yes, he was in the next room, but it was only the next room, so he must have heard, a scream like that. And she wanted this to end it, she wanted it to be the thing that would make him snap out of it and leap up and come back to her and hold her and soothe her and crush her against his chest and say, ‘It’s all right, Flighty, you were only dreaming.’

H
OLLY LIKES TO
say—and Holly likes to say everything—that we’re in the introduction business. We can’t make anything happen, but we can bring the parties together. She’ll say this to men in bars when they home in on us. It’s a wonderful thing to watch a pair of them edge our way and to see the light in their eyes before they get the full picture.

‘So, don’t tell us,’ one of them says, ‘the two of you work in a dating agency?’

‘No, but you’re close,’ Holly says. ‘Sure, getting the date right can be an important part of it.’

‘You wouldn’t be Irish by any chance?’

‘By every chance. But that’s not what you’re guessing.’

Isn’t it a wonderful thing—isn’t it
the
most wonderful thing—how things come together in this world, how they can even be meant for each other? But you can’t tell, you can’t guess it in advance.

‘So—you’ve got one more guess. Yes, we work together. It’s not an office. And it’s not a dating agency. You two wouldn’t be after a date now, would you? Without the agency?’

‘We’re thinking,’ the other one says. ‘Don’t talk, we’re thinking.’

Then the first one says, ‘No, you’ll have to tell us. We give up, you’ll have to say. I’m Matt, this is Jamie.’

‘I’m Holly and this is Polly. Yes, we know. But look now, we’re doing what Polly and me do all day, we’re making introductions. We’re clinical embryologists. Have you heard of those people? We spend all day looking at sperms. We’re experts on the little fellers. We pick out the good ones, the best from the rest, and then we introduce them to eggs. We say to them, “There now, say hello, youse two, and on you get with it.”’

And then the lights go off, or they go brighter. A turn-off or a turn-on. They might want to get mucky. And Holly can do mucky.

And they haven’t even seen the full picture.

You can’t make it happen. You can bring the parties together. But tell me, please, how does
that
happen? How does it happen that there was Holly Nolan, raised in a convent (though you might not think it) somewhere in Ireland and there was me, Polly Miller, meek and mild, but raised in a comprehensive in Bolton, both of us fired by the same thing (‘Sure, isn’t it the only subject now, the science of life?’), both of us getting, in different places, our B.Sc.’s and our certificates, so that she should cross the sea (it not being a field that Ireland’s big in) and we should meet in a brand-new clinic, in a clean white room with clean white counters and white expensive instruments, like two specimens ourselves in some sort of clinical trial, both of us in the pea-green scrubs we were provided with.

So that we would be introduced to each other.

‘I’m Holly.’

‘I’m Polly.’

‘Would you believe it? Hello, Polly. We’re to work together.’

‘Yes.’

‘In these things! Have I come all the way from County Kildare just to wear green?’

Both of us only twenty-three (
junior
clinical embryologists), but both of us qualified and trained for a job that some people say is the job of playing God.

‘Well I like that now! Are we not a pair of goddesses?’

So that we would come together, so that it would happen. So that my life would at last begin.

When I’m out with Holly in a bar, teasing men, I sometimes see the touch of red in her black hair—what she calls her ‘burn’. I see her tarty brashness, what they think is her being up for it. I hear her unstoppable voice. I think: Not my type, not my type at all.

How wrong can you be?

‘Well now, Polly dear, there’s such a thing as the attraction of opposites.’

When she first arrived here she used to say things about her Catholic upbringing that could make me blush. Or blush inside. That could make me think: Hold on, that’s wrong, that’s blasphemous. She said that she and her convent-school friends used to sing a plainsong rendering of the sexual act, in Latin. And she sang it for me—intoned it for me—in her purest priestly voice: