Married Love (7 page)

— I’m sorry, Shuggs, but he does look funny.

— It’s all right, Sheila said. — I know he does.

She was taken aback by this stranger of hers, ensconced so outrageously in the innermost sanctum of her family home. The shock of it was voluptuous; she felt with a shudder that the closer Neil came to her, the less familiar
he
was. She would have liked to see her life as he saw it, stripped of its ordinariness; she wished that she could possess him as he only was when he was alone. She heard a soft thud and a rattle of glass; Neil heard it too from inside the room, and turned his head. Hilary had picked out one of the tiny half-rotten apples from the bucket and pitched it at the study windows, dropping to hide herself behind a stretch of overgrown wall where there had once been a greenhouse. When Neil looked away again, she stood up to pitch another one; Sheila joined in. Neil got to his feet. It must have been difficult, with the light on, for him to see them in the murky day outside. He came over and peered through the French windows and they threw apples at him, not bothering in the end to hide, standing out in the grey daylight as he watched them, hurling all the apples at him, one after another, until they reached a layer of impossibly mushy ones at the very bottom of the bucket.

IT’S AN APRIL
morning and a young man waits at a black-painted front door in a decent street in Tynemouth. It’s a much more decent street than the one where his home is. Both streets are terraced, but here the scale’s quite different; a curving flight of stone steps climbs to the door, flanked by railings also painted black. Dropped behind more railings there’s a basement area, and rising from down there are the sounds of pans clashing and women’s voices, and the steam of cooking – but he’s determinedly not looking down. He fixes his attention on the front door as if he’s willing it to open – he has tugged at the bell-pull and heard a distant jangling inside, but doesn’t know if he’ll have the nerve to pull it twice. The year is 1920. This young man has missed the World War – he has closed his mind now even to the idea of the war, which, it seems to him, has devoured everyone’s pity and imagination for too long.

The street is quiet. It’s past the hour when the kind of men who live in these houses leave for their offices
and
boardrooms – he has meant to avoid them. But he’s hoping it’s still early enough for the women to be at home. He has only a vague idea of how the kind of women who live here pass their days. The wind is tearing scraps of cloud in a fitfully gleaming sky, and combing through the twigs of the hornbeam trees (the trees are another difference between this street and his), setting them springing and dancing like whips. Last night it rained heavily – he lay awake listening to it in the bed he shares with his brother – and the stone walls are still dark with wet, though the wind has dried the pavements. Beside the door an iron implement something like the upside-down end of a hoe is set into the stone step; too late, just as the door swings back, he realises that it must be for scraping the mud off your boots before you go inside the house. He’s walked or run down this street a hundred times before, and never noticed the boot scrapers or given any thought to their function, because then he was a boy with no interest in going inside. There’s no time now to check whether his boots are dirty.

A maid has opened the door – he knew that would happen and worried that she might be a girl he’d known at school. But she’s a stranger, tall and big-boned with a smut on her cheek, so he’s able to push past her into the hall, doffing his cap. It’s only as the still atmosphere of the house envelops him that he’s aware of the particular weather of the morning left behind – its touch on his face and tug at his coat, the urgings of the onset of spring, the twigs glowing russet, swelling into bud.

— Can I speak to Miss Ellen, please? he says, with the aplomb he has rehearsed at home.

The cessation of the wind is so abrupt that he feels for a moment as if he were deaf; it must be the quiet that makes this house seem so different to his own, because the smells are familiar enough: furniture polish, scalded dish-rags, boiling cabbage. The maid is frowning at him sulkily, not knowing if she should have let him in. He guesses that she spends her life afraid of trouble from one side or another.

— Don’t know if she’s at home.

— I should think she’d like to see me. She’ll be sorry if she misses me. I’m her cousin. I’m going away to sea.

The maid dithers fatalistically.

— I’ll go and tell Missus. What’s your name?

— McIlvanney, he says. — Tell her it’s James McIlvanney.

— Do you want to wait here, then?

— Here’s all right.

She puts out her hand to him and he waits a moment too long, not knowing what she wants. Then blushing he gives her his cap and sees a little light of contempt come into her eyes, which are round and hard and wet like blue pebbles – but it doesn’t matter, he’s got this far. Going up the stairs, she makes a show of stamping her feet heavily, as if she’s actually too weary to climb to the first floor.

He’s only sixteen, despite the man’s overcoat and the new tweed cap. His hair is jet black and very straight, and his face is composed of strong fine lines, clean and clear and exquisite like his clear pink and white skin; his
eyebrows
are as well-shaped as a woman’s, his curved lips pressed shut as if he’s holding in important news. The jut of his cheekbones and jaw is masculine enough – strained and resilient; his expression is keenly alive with self-interest, which makes him appear blind and alert at the same time. The air in the hall is thick and dim and greenish because the blinds are all drawn down – as they are in the parlour at home – to save the light fading the furniture. It makes him remember floating underwater once, when he dived into the canal and hit his head on an old bedstead dumped in there. A clock ticking in the hall is like his own pulse urging him on. He can hear the maid’s voice upstairs, other voices responding, impatient, querulous – he has dropped an interruption into the smooth unfurling of the women’s morning. Without warning, he experiences a slight nausea and dizziness.

He holds his head back warily, defiantly on his shoulders, so that the furnishings in here won’t get the better of him: the dado with its raised pattern of diamonds under thick brown paint, the polished wood of the hall stand glowing dark, yellow gleams of brass among the shadows – the face of the clock, a rack for letters, a little gong hanging in a frame with a suede-covered mallet balanced across two hooks, a tall brass pot for the umbrellas. He doesn’t look down at the pattern of blue and cream tiles underfoot in case he has trodden mud on them. Through an open door he glimpses low chairs fat with stuffing, crouched on a sea of flower-patterned carpet. The smell of brushed carpets tickles in his nose.
Everything
in this house is slick with prosperity, with the labour of servants. In his own home, there’s only a girl who comes in two mornings a week to help his mother with the heavy work.

What James McIlvanney thinks is: I’ll have all this one day.

He doesn’t particularly like it, but he wants it.

He stores it up, so that he knows what to want.

But there’s no definite plan of how to get it. It wasn’t a plan that brought him here today. Ellen Pearson really is his cousin – second cousin, at least. She belongs to the branch of his family who have done well for themselves; his mother’s uncle, Ellen’s grandfather, made money in India, then came home to set up a company importing jute. Ellen’s mother is related to the Fenwicks, who own a department store in Newcastle. Ellen’s a pale blonde girl James has seen on a couple of family occasions but never spoken to, attractive in a sickly kind of way, and shy; though the truth is, that when he last saw her at a family party he didn’t bother to notice whether she was attractive or not, because then he was only a boy, chafing in his prickling wool suit, consumed by the idea of escaping to his cronies out on the streets, whose adventures at that point of his life absorbed him wholly. But since leaving school and getting a proper job, he has begun to open his eyes to the world from this altered perspective, and has found himself interested in Ellen, attributing a kind of mystery to her and her blonde languor, to the life he imagines she leads as a privileged only child.

He hasn’t said a word to his mother about coming here.

All he had in mind was that Ellen would be a useful friend to have. He hasn’t followed this through into any idea of paying court to her or advancing himself in the world that way; he doesn’t like to think about courtship or marrying at all – and he really may be going away to sea soon. His mother wanted him to settle in his job in the office at a local boatyard, where they make the pleasure boats that run up and down the coast. But he’s persuaded her to let him sign up for an indentured apprenticeship with the Prince Line, which runs cargoes across the Atlantic to South America – coal out, grain home – and up the western seaboard of America and Canada. He had to borrow money from his grandmother, for the fifty-pound deposit.

There’s someone coming downstairs now. It’s not the maid – he can still hear her yapping. And he knows that it’s not Mrs Pearson either, because women that age move loudly, rustling their skirts or clearing their throats. James has his back to the stairs, he’s gazing at the hall stand. He refuses to look round. His neck is stiff with the awareness of subtle, furtive movements behind him – a slithering, a creaking. He thinks it must be Ellen, creeping down to take a look at who he is. Let her look, he thinks. It isn’t a bad feeling. He gives himself up to her looking, with straight shoulders.

— Jimmy Mac, someone says in a teasing, gloating voice. — What are you doing here?

Caught out, he spins round to confront whoever it is.

It’s a girl – not Ellen, too dark and too small. She’s grinning, peering out at him from between the banisters, sitting on the stairs as if she’s come shuffling down them on her backside.

It’s Connie Chappell.

Because he can only see one narrow stripe of her face, it has taken him a moment to recognise her – and also because she’s changed. She’s had her hair chopped off and waved. She seems to be wearing some kind of pink silky pyjamas – the last thing he would have expected in this house, and halfway through the morning too. He’s washed through with disapproval like strong, tarry medicine, furious that Connie is here before him, spoiling things. He remembers now hearing that Ellen had taken a shine to Connie, that there was talk of Connie moving in with the Pearsons as some kind of companion to their daughter. He must have disregarded this, because he couldn’t take seriously anything to do with Connie. She isn’t even properly related to Ellen – only through his own family, on his father’s side.

Connie is four years older than James, though she doesn’t look it. When he was a baby, apparently, she used to wheel him in a pram. He believes he can dimly remember being pushed across rough grass, standing up at the front of the pram, holding on to the hood with both hands. Didn’t he go flying out when the pram hit a rock? Anyway, he can’t bear to think about it now, at this moment in the Pearsons’ hall. There had been something consecrated about his mission to this house, as if
it
might mark a kind of turning point for him – but Connie’s presence has punctured that mystery.

— I came to see Ellen, he says.

— Did you now? And what’s all this about you going away to sea?

She is laughing at him, as if she didn’t believe him. When she stands up, hanging on to the banister rail, she stretches one leg out along it like a dancer, pointing her toes and yawning. He sees that the soles of her bare feet are dirty. She’s like a cat, James thinks. A sloppy little cat. Under the neat-fitting cap of her new hair, her face is intensely familiar – small and precise like a muzzle, freckled and snub-nosed, the brows exclamation points, always slightly raised.

— Come on then, she says. — If you want to see her. Ellen and me are getting dressed upstairs.

— Where’s Mrs Pearson?

— Oh, somewhere about, I expect.

Connie is casually indifferent.

— You can help us decide what to put on. I know – we’ll blindfold you. We’ll blindfold you with a stocking. Then we’re going out to walk round the shops. You can come out with us. Why aren’t you at work – are you on holiday? Did you take a holiday, just to come and see Ellen?

James hates the feeling she knows everything about him. The lace curtains thickly shrouding the window on the stairs suddenly seem stifling – he wants to fight through them, to get to air.

* * *

He has sisters, but they are older than he is and both married now. Even when they were at home, they would never have been dangling around in their nightclothes at eleven in the morning; they would have been at work for hours already, in the kitchen or turning out the lodgers’ rooms, with their sleeves rolled up and coarse aprons tied over their clothes. He has never been anywhere like Ellen Pearson’s bedroom before. Heavy curtains are still pulled across the windows and the beds aren’t made. The air is musky as if the girls have been spraying scent, and there’s a stuffy smell too, from the crumpled sheets and bodies hot from sleep. The water in a basin is scummed with soap. Ellen is standing to look at her reflection where one curtain has been dragged back to let the light in, mirror held up in one hand and a swansdown puff in the other. Motes of her face powder spin in a yellow beam of sunshine. She cries out when James steps into the room, letting the mirror fall on to the thick Turkey carpet, where it doesn’t break. There’s another mirror set in the door of a massive wardrobe, its bevelled edge reflecting darts of light around the papered walls. Ellen is taller and heavier than he remembered, though she is only seventeen, not as old as Connie. Her apricot-coloured wrap is trimmed with lace flounces. As James takes her in, the beam of light is extinguished abruptly, clouds cover the sun outside.

He would never have come up if he’d known it was their bedroom. He was thinking Connie was going to show him into some sort of upstairs drawing room: who knew how they arranged the rooms in a house like this, with so many to spare?