Vacillations of Poppy Carew (24 page)

‘You bitch. Why are you so bloody?’ The two women glared at each other across the baby’s head. Barnaby crowed, reaching pudgy hands towards Penelope.

‘He likes me.’ Penelope pursed her lips, blowing a kiss towards the baby. ‘Is it Fergus’s child?’ she asked. ‘Those eyes—’ Mary stared at her, stony faced. ‘And something about the mouth—’ Penelope persisted dangerously. ‘When one’s—well, you know what I mean obviously—one sees people from a different angle when one’s—’

‘Jesus,’ murmured Mary holding the baby against her face, staring down at Penelope. ‘Christ.’

‘Who are you anyway, what’s your role around here?’ Penelope felt a sadistic desire to wound this woman who would not let her touch her child.

‘I’m part of the scenery.’ Mary was recovering fast.

‘I didn’t know Fergus was fond of scenery, that’s not a side of him I know.’ Penelope reached back for the safety belt. ‘Is your baby teething?’ she asked, looking up at Barnaby from whose open mouth trickled a stream of saliva. With her arm stretched up behind her, her hand fumbling for the buckle, she showed in her open shirt a pretty cleavage.

Mary dipped Barnaby forward so that his spittle dropped between Penelope’s breasts. ‘You don’t see much scenery when you’re flat on your back,’ she said. ‘Mind you remember the cat,’ she called over her shoulder as she moved back into the house.

Penelope started the engine, put the car in gear and drove off. As she drove she composed apt rejoinders, tart replies, crushing last words she might have inflicted on the girl with the baby had she been fast enough on the rejoinder.

V
ICTOR, WAITING TO BE
served, watched a hurried spectacled youth buy mackerel, next a thickset woman hesitate between halibut and Dover sole, making vocal allusion to her husband, his penchant for shrimps or oysters with or without cream in the sauce. Victor costed her silk shirt, cashmere sweater, St Laurent jeans, gold bracelets, double row of pearls. How many advances for novels would pay for all that? Shifting his shopping basket from one hand to the next, he exercised his mental arithmetic.

The fish lady, apparently patient, ran a sardonic eye over the marble slab. The loquacious customer changed her mind, decided her husband would enjoy ray
au beurre noir
which, with out of season asparagus miraculously grown in Israel and new potatoes ditto, might deceive him now in October to believe it spring.

‘Spring,’ said the fish lady, slapping the ray on the scales, naming the price, wrapping the fish. ‘Spring,’ she said with lofty contempt for the seasons, looking past the customer’s head at the street and its passers-by.

The woman took a notecase from her Hermès bag. Victor goggled at a wad of fifty pound notes; he opined that the metier of mugging would show greater dividends (always supposing one had the nerve) than writing.

Unmoved, the fish lady took the money, gave her customer change, handed her her fish, turned to the next customer. ‘Yes?’ Victor had watched this man when in the early halcyon days of their marriage he had shopped with Penelope, unable to bear her out of his sight, carrying their shopping in the very basket he now held. The man now being served invariably bought lobsters, taking his time, discussing the particulars of each crustacean as the fish lady lifted them for his inspection, their bound claws forlornly semaphoring. Penelope had voiced the opinion that the man was homosexual, Victor thought not but in those early days rarely contradicted his wife.

The present loneliness of shopping sharpened his powers of observation so that he took note of people’s dress and mannerisms in case they might fit into some brief paragraph of a future work.

‘Yes?’ said the fish lady, jerking him out of his reverie. ‘Yes?’ Contempt in her voice.

‘Oh! Half of unshelled prawns please.’

Why should I be humbled, he thought indignantly. Not all of us can afford lobster and sole. Prawns with brown bread and butter make an excellent lunch with salad. ‘The salmon looks nice,’ he said for the sake of saying something. The salmon wore a leering expression and had an undershot jaw. ‘Cock,’ said Victor to illustrate that he wasn’t a complete fool, could tell the sex of salmon, hopefully insult the fish lady.

The fish lady did not answer but weighed the prawns indifferently.

‘All girls,’ said Victor, listening to the prawns tinkling frozen into the scales. ‘All the prawns I buy have eggs.’

‘Scotch,’ said the fish lady, referring to the salmon. ‘Iceland,’ she handed Victor his prawns, took the money he proffered. ‘Wait a minute,’ she paused by the till. ‘Or Greenland.’

‘I gave you the exact money,’ said Victor defensively.

‘Your change,’ said the fish lady, handing Victor some coins.

‘Oh?’ Victor was at a loss. ‘Why?’

‘You neglected your change,’ said the fish lady, turning towards the next customer, ‘when you bought your trout,’ she tossed over her shoulder. ‘Yes sir?’ She was already in spirit with another.

The old bitch, thought Victor morosely as he turned towards home. She used to call Penelope ‘ducks’, now she pretends not to know me, doesn’t call me anything. Feeling excluded from the human race he made for home, for his desk, to lose himself in his work.

As usual Victor approached his novel at an angle hoping to take it by surprise, to be at work on it before he or the novel became aware. He ate his lunch, buttering brown bread, sipping a glass of lager, peeling the prawns, crunching them, swallowing a lot of the shell as he ate. Penelope had said the roughage was good for him, she never bothered to peel her prawns thoroughly, sucked the contents of the heads, then licked her fingers.

Victor, eating his prawns, listening to the lunchtime news, thought of Penelope’s fingers and other more delectable parts. By writing about her it was his intention to expunge her from his system so that he could the better concentrate on Poppy Carew. Finishing his lunch he tossed the débris into the pedal bin, washed his hands and went to the telephone where he dialled Poppy’s London number. There was not, as there had not been for days, any answer. ‘Still away.’ Victor sat down at his desk. ‘Not back yet.’

He read: ‘The day I decided to drown my wife dawned crystal clear.’

He tore the paper from the typewriter, crushed it between both hands, tossed it towards the grate. He would answer his mother’s letter lying in its envelope on top of the pile. The very act of typing would lead him smoothly into the novel by artful trickery.

Re-reading his mother’s letter Victor felt mounting annoyance. What right had she to criticise, not for her to find Penelope irritating, not for her to denigrate her ex-daughter-in-law. Even though their divorce was several years old, Victor still had difficulty in thinking of Penelope as ex-anything. I shall exorcise her by writing about her, Victor told himself.

‘Dear Mother,’ he wrote. ‘Thanks for yours. Are you coming up for the Horticultural Show or the exhibish at the Hayward? We might have a bite and go together. So glad you are glad about my book’ (two ‘glads’ in a sentence but never mind, this is only a letter, she’s lucky to get it). Victor tapped a little more about his novel, the advance he was to receive from Sean Connor, Sean’s connection with Julia. His mother deplored Julia whom she had once accused of hooking him, did she know what a hooker was? Poor mother, he thought, as he typed, spacing the lines widely to fill the page, recommending a new novel she would enjoy (get it from the library), giving her a pungent piece of family news which might not yet have reached Somerset of a second cousin twice removed discovered in buggery. She would enjoy the use of the word ‘buggery’, feel ‘with it’, an expression she was fond of. I must telephone her soon, thought Victor as he typed ‘with much love as always—’ Poor old thing, she wishes me to be happy, she always says ‘how lovely to hear your voice’, she has no bloody business to find Penelope irritating, it’s not for her—Victor tore the letter out of the typewriter, signed it, folded it, crammed it into an envelope, licked the envelope, addressed it. Now for the novel.

‘The day I decided to drown my wife dawned clear and sweet—’ Oh God what bilge.

How sweet had been Penelope in those far-off days when they decided to go to bed after lunch, take the phone off the hook—oh God, he was thirsty, those prawns, so salt. Victor left his desk and went into the kitchen for a glass of water, gulped it down as he looked out between the fat little pillars of the parapet at what they had laughingly called ‘our view’, a view constricted to a piece of pavement at the corner by the pillar-box outside the paper shop. Often and often Victor had waited for Penelope to come into view, stand hesitating, looking left and right at the traffic before stepping off the pavement and out of sight. And Penelope had done the same. Lovers watching.

On the parapet the pigeons strutted and cooed. Victor flung the window up. ‘Fuck off,’ he shouted. ‘Fuck off.’ He slammed the window shut, drank another glass of water, felt even less like working, gave up. Hoping to expunge Penelope in another way, he ran down to the street, got into his car and drove.

As he drove Victor made slighting comparisons between his ex-wife and Poppy, hands, feet, fingers, noses, hair, eyes, teeth, arms, legs. The trouble was he had never seen Poppy naked so that comparisons stopped short. Were her tits brown or pink, was her bush mouse like her hair, or astonishingly dark and secret like Penelope’s, darker than the hair on her head, or even her eyelashes? Penelope, who had not bothered him seriously for weeks or even months, imposed herself between him and Poppy.

When he got around to drowning her in his novel would she cease to torment him?

W
ILLY WALKED WITH POPPY
to the airport bus carrying her bag with his own. She walked stiffly, holding her head high, her shoulders unnaturally straight. He stood aside to let her climb on to the bus, blocking the way to the other passengers so that she need not hurry, then he followed her to where she settled in a seat next to the window, stood between her and their fellow travellers while he heaved the bags on to the rack, then inserted his bulk into the seat beside her. The torrential rain streaming down the window made it impossible for anyone looking in to see Poppy; within the bus he shielded her with his body. Her bruised face, dishevelled hair, the way she sat ravelled into herself reminded him of the rabbits dying of myxomatosis he had seen as a child, too stupefied, too blind to get out of the rain. Then he had joined his father in awful retching sorties to shoot or club the miserable animals, putting them out of their misery. Sitting with Poppy in the bus Willy experienced the rage of pity and fury he had had as a child magnified tenfold.

It was clear Poppy had not been in a car accident.

The passengers all seated, luggage stowed, the driver brought to an end an altercation he had been having with somebody out of sight, climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The bus trundled slowly through the downpour out of the airport, crawling through wind and flood towards Algiers. After a quarter of a mile the bus stopped to take on board a policeman whose cape and boots streamed water on to the floor of the bus. The policeman shouted and gesticulated at the driver who yelled back, released the handbrake and jerked onwards. The policeman continued to shout to make himself heard above the noise of the engine and the roar of the storm, the driver constantly taking his eyes off the road to confront the policeman, yelled back.

In the bus the passengers sat glum, barely exchanging a word, lighting nervous cigarettes, their collective breaths steaming up the windows.

Beside Willy Poppy made a small desperate movement, glancing up at the window.

‘Want some air?’

She nodded.

Willy stood up, swaying with the movement of the bus, leant across her and forced a window open. In rushed wind and rain, there was a stormy protest from the seats behind in nasal American.

‘Would you rather she vomited?’ Willy shouted savagely. ‘That better?’ he asked, resuming his seat. ‘Let them get wet.’

She nodded slightly.

The drive was long, several times the road was blocked by floods and débris. The driver stopped, cursed, shouted, reversed. The policeman got out, got in again, directed a detour. Eventually the furious sounds of the gale altered their tone, they sloshed through partly built-up areas, then streets.

Willy said, ‘If you would like to give me your passport and so on I will see about rooms, then you can get to bed and rest.’

Poppy did not answer but opened her bag, found her passport and handed it to him. Her knuckles and the backs of her hands were blue, he had the impression that she was near the end of her resistance, could not hold out much longer. He said, ‘Soon be there.’ She huddled in her seat like an old woman.

The policeman shouted, the driver changed down, crashing the gears, and drove in a rush up a steep hill. It was like driving up a watercourse, and floodwater whooshed over the bonnet in a muddy wave, the policeman stood beside the driver shouting encouragement. They proceeded thus for half a mile, then the bus stopped, the policeman and the driver slapped one another’s backs, laughing. The bus had made it. Triumph. The fellow passengers, breaking out of their torpor, gave tongue, struggled with their luggage, urgent to get out.

‘Wait till the rush is over.’ He was afraid she might be knocked down. Poppy waited. Willy lifted down their bags. ‘Okay now, can you manage? Follow me.’ Between the bus and the hotel storm water rushed in a foot-deep torrent. ‘Wait.’ Willy splashed to the entrance, dropped the bags in the shelter of the portico, came back to where she stood on the step of the bus, held out his hands, led her through the water into the hotel lobby, noticed that she flinched, was lame.

Willy sat Poppy on a sofa beside their bags. ‘A little more waiting.’ Elbowed his way into the hubbub round the reception desk.

Twenty minutes later they were in a large room on the fourth floor with a panoramic view over the harbour where little boats tossed like corks and large vessels strained at their moorings.

Poppy’s face under the bruises was grey, her lips bloodless. Willy searched and found whisky in the hotel refrigerator, held a glass for her.