Owls Do Cry (11 page)

And she stood there handing out tea. She was getting withered and old but what would Bob and Toby have done without her, she was like an old worn letter-box standing there year after year and having posted in her all the bits of news and worry and fear and love that came from her husband and son. And then she would jiggle the news inside her, to pass it from one to the other and establish peace between them. So

—Oh Bob, Toby’s got a special invitation from Fay Chalklin to go there for her birthday on Sunday.

She spoke calmly, torturing herself with the meaning of the words.

—Got you in her clutches at last, has she Toby?

Toby remained silent. He rustled the newspaper, to revenge himself and make his father realize that here was the evening paper and Toby was first to read it. Bob Withers leaned forward,

—Give us the outside page, Toby, he said.

Toby got up from the sofa. —You can have the lot, Dad, I’m finished with it. It’s full of nothing. And Fay Chalklin, by the way, is engaged to be married.

—You’re teasing, said his mother delightedly.

Toby looked at her as if to say, Yes, I’m teasing, it’s not true; then he gave a mysterious smile and went to his room and sat down upon the bed. He withdrew the letter from his pocket and read it. He thought, Yours sincerely Fay Chalklin. Putting her surname too, and saying, Mum and Dad would like you to come Mum and Dad would like you to come. If I tear off the bottom bit and leave the letter lying around, no one will know that she did not say Yours passionately, Fay. Or Very much love. But who would find it and where would I leave it lying around? And who would care if they found it, or wonder what it said. Love from Fay. But if only. He read the letter aloud, every word of it, from the beginning, Dearest Toby, to the end, Yours passionately, and he smiled as he read it. Then he smelt the letter. Lavender, lily of the valley, French Fern, what were the scents his sisters had used? Chicks who was up north and married with children, in a posh house with all the latest gadgets, and Francie who was burned young, and he had sat on the sofa in the Harlows’ house, that was Chicks’ mother-in-law’s place now, and taken a fit because a giant hedgehog squeezed through the door after him, its quills on fire; and Daphne, in hospital and strange for a long time now.

Yours passionately, Fay.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors
a thousand windows and a thousand doors

Not one of them was ours, my dear
.

Not one of them was ours
.

He had read that somewhere, why did he remember it?

Then he tore up the letter and took his purse from his pocket to count his money, for money was the chief treasure now; and he rubbed his thumb around the serrated edges of the sixpences and shillings and florins and halfcrowns. He rolled the silver and coppers along the dressing-table until they lost balance and fell still. By next year, he thought, I should have enough money to set up a real business of my own. Or earlier. And sit back and relax.

Toby did not go to the birthday party. Nor did he go, in the spring time to Fay Chalklin’s wedding to Albert Crudge, though he read about it in the paper and he received an invitation done in curly silver writing.

—You will send a present, though Toby, his mother said.

—What can I send her?

His mother said, —Well, not something personal, like underclothes or jewellery; just something small, perhaps for the household, the kitchen or dining room, or something to put flowers in, anything small and useful. That’s how it was done in my day.

So Toby bought a pair of best linen sheets and half a dozen tea-towels and took them round one afternoon a week before the wedding. Fay was at home by herself and
she asked him past the front room where the presents were lying on the table and upon the settee.

—Thank you so much for the useful present, Toby. Everybody has been so good to me.

She sounded surprised.

—You’ve no idea how kind everybody is. The old lady along the road has sent me the dearest linen teashower, done in blue in the corners, willow pattern, with the lovers crossing the bridge and those lovely wavy Chinese trees. I would so much like to go to China. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Albert and I ended up in China?

—Yes, Toby said, thinking, She worked at the Woollen Mills. I wonder if she is blind and if her eyes have changed to neon bulbs. Her face is pale. Her hands move backwards and forwards like shuttles filled with dream of her tomorrow when she will die.

—China is my favourite country, Fay said. I’ve always liked China.

She spoke of it as if it were a food that had been offered her since childhood, and that she had eaten and relished while others refused it as unpalatable.

—I like India, Toby said.

—Do you, Toby? How curious. Come and sit down while I make a cup of tea. You know Albert of course?

Toby said Yes, that he knew Albert. He did not say that Albert Crudge was the little boy who used to wait at the school gates and pitch into Toby every afternoon, and Toby could never hit him back because Albert had been a cripple then, and walked with a stick.

—Ya, fits, fits, fits, Albert used to say.

But he was only a boy then. Now he was a man working in the Social Security Department, helping people to fill in forms and decide how much money they earned; stamping envelopes and sending out benefits for sickness; interviewing people in confidence. His was a high-up job now, and though he was still partly a cripple he drove through the town in a modern green car that crouched low on the ground and had venetian blinds in the back.

He is one of the men who wrote in the ledgers, perhaps, thought Toby. And Fay is one of the girls who rode their bicycles, how did Daphne and Francie say it,

into the north wind, or chased by the south wind that brought snow the white parcel, unravelled and scattered.

And now the two marry, the imprisoned man and the white as milk woman, and they will die. They are my own age but they have lived since I was a little boy, and then they were the same age as they are now, for they have stopped, have been wedged in a dark since I was a small boy and watched them, with Francie and Daphne and Chicks, who was youngest and had to catch up and have stones or sand emptied out of her shoe. Or they are different bodies but the same people.

Fay went from the room to put the kettle on for a cup of tea. She was singing,

Seven lonely days make one lonely week

la-di-la-la-la-la-la-di-da.

Ever since the day that you came along.

She’s happy, thought Toby. She has long hair like all the mill girls when the fashion is that way, done with a kind of
bob thing at the back, some say it is false hair, that you may buy it in the hairdressers where plaster heads of women sit in the window with their gold and dark permed hair and the place is filled with the smell of burning as you pass the door. Perhaps, he thought, Fay wears false hair, and she will take it off at night and hang it on a nail in the corner of her bedroom. And Albert will not mind, for he wears a false heart; his other heart was eaten out by corrosive ink and typewritten upon like a form to be filled in.

And Fay, Toby thought, wears lipstick, to pretend there is blood in her pallor, that all her blood has not been drawn, year after year, into the neon sunlight of the mill that draws blood as the natural sunlight draws flowers. She ties her lips with red ribbon, in a bow, that Albert Crudge will undo, and both will find their empty strongbox of heart, and not know that the Social Security Department and the Woollen Mills have the key and will not part with it, ever. And if I had really loved Fay, and she loved me, and we married, I should have paid instalments of myself to the factory till I became bankrupt and a whirling spiritless machine that makes the same speech day after day till its life ends.

Toby looked at Fay as she entered the room and wondered if the brand of the mill girl was still on her shoulder where she had been whipped and led with the factory strap.

Was the mark of it there, as it had been that afternoon when she went with him to the beach and he threw her hair upon the water and shot her heart and plucked her bird-feathers?

Fay set the tea down beside him on the table.

—Don’t stare at me, Toby. I’m practising for when I’m a real hostess. Do you have milk and sugar? Weak or strong?

—Milk and sugar, Toby answered promptly. Please.

She regarded him, smiling and thinking, He certainly knows what he wants. They say his mother looks after him too well. I hope Albert remembers to treat me as his wife and not as his mother to be fetching and carrying for him.

As she poured Toby’s cup of tea she thought with excitement, Albert has strong tea with no milk. I shall remember that all my life. And he takes
two
teaspoons of sugar.

—Have a cake, Toby. I made them.

Toby listened while Fay gave the recipe for the cakes she had made.

—And you must weigh everything very carefully when you are cooking particularly the flour, and never let the baking powder get moist. Now don’t think I’m getting all domesticated just because I’m getting married. Don’t think it because it’s true.

She smiled at him once more. She felt sorry for Toby Withers, shingle short that he seemed to be, with his goofy look and his fits and his obsession with money, though
that
wasn’t anything to be sorry for, in fact admired. Albert had it. Oh Oh, she thought, I have got the right husband, I know. And the house will have the new type of venetian blind that you don’t have to dust, the latest of latest blinds. Poor Toby. He’s never had a girl that I know of.

—No, I never liked cooking before, Toby, but I do now, she said proudly.

—Do you like them?

Toby said he liked their flavour. He felt tired of being in the room; he believed he had been having a kind of fit, but could not be sure. But he wanted to leave Fay and go home and count his money to make sure of it all. He wanted to go home and take out the new Atlas he had bought, and read it through and through, the places with their names and the beautiful colours of the pastureland and cornlands and the pictures of the mountains with their tiny threepenny caps of snow. He wanted to sit alone in his room and trace his finger over the lands of the world. And read in the diagrams about gold and iron and steel, and see the compressed bundles of wheat and the various blue seas, his own Tasman and Pacific, and oceans further off and bluer, Indian, Antarctic, Adriatic.

But Fay said, —You must see my presents Toby.

And she led him to the front room that seemed full of blankets and sheets and towels and pots and pans and knives and forks and cups and saucers and clocks,

—And this is my dinner service from the Mortons.
And this is the teashower. Isn’t it lovely? I’m showing you all these because you say you are not coming to the wedding. I’m really having an evening to show off my presents. And look at all the handkerchiefs and salad servers.

She was overwhelmed and excited.

—And the girls at work gave me a pop-up toaster and toast racks, I had a presentation, and the manager gave a speech and said what a good worker I had always been. I don’t know, when you are getting married people treat you different all together. I used
to get told off for lazing and then they say I was a good worker and they were sorry to lose me.

—What was it like working at the Mill?

—Oh, the same as anywhere, I suppose. Machines and noise, but morning and afternoon tea sharp. And ten per cent reduction, or more, on the woollen goods. I got the blankets for my box almost as soon as I started at the mill.

—And will you sleep in them, in your new house, and they won’t remind you?

—Don’t be silly, Toby. It’s not the blankets I’ll think of when I go to sleep.

Toby looked embarrassed. Then he asked seriously,

—Did you wear a leather strap?

—A what?

—A leather strap. Around your neck so that it made a mark. They used to say–

Fay interrupted, —Oh, that was an old story, surely you didn’t believe
that
. It was a
child’s
story, and not true.

—But child’s stories are always true.

—Giants and fairies as well? Toby Withers!

—Yes, giants and fairies, in different shapes. There’s a giant bomber and a giant loneliness.

Fay looked sympathetically at Toby. Poor man. To think he was thirty years old or over thirty. And believed about the strap and its mark.

Fay put on a mischievous air, —You can look if you like, about the strap, she said. Would you like to look and make sure?

—Don’t be silly. I just wondered.

—I dare you to look.

Fay was enjoying herself. She pulled down her jersey to reveal her shoulder and part of her breast. She wore a pink flimsy thing underneath, with lace. Toby could see through it. He stared horrified and fascinated while Fay smiled at him enticingly

—Toby Withers, haven’t you seen a bare shoulder in your life before? Don’t look so scared.

—I’m not scared, said Toby, blushing, and the more he thought of himself as not scared, the more he blushed.

I think, Fay Chalklin, that you’re a common woman to half undress in front of me when you’re nearly married.

—I’m sorry Toby, but you’re so
raw
. But thank you for the lovely presents and I’m sorry you can’t come to the wedding. Goodbye Toby, and I’m sorry I haven’t the mark on my shoulder.

Toby turned as he went outside the door, —But you
have
got the mark, Fay. I saw it there. We all carry some kind of mark like that because we are all branded in our lives, as I was. That is true. I don’t know much, not how to spell anyway, I shall never learn to spell and what to say to people like you, but I’ve got my books in my room, atlases that tell about the world and the seas and the first map of everywhere.

And he did not say goodbye but hurried down the path to his truck. He climbed in and drove away while Fay watched through the window. She was thinking, I’m
frightened. In spite of the teashower done in blue and the plates and sheets and the silver apostle teaspoons. I’m frightened, because there’s something going to happen, and Toby Withers is so strange he makes me feel the mill has captured me and wound me up like a mummy. And she buttoned up her jersey and put her hand across her shoulder where the mark of the leather strap was said to be; and then she burst into tears, and when her mother came home she found her there with all her presents and crying, and said,