A Five Year Sentence (24 page)

A few miles away, the nearly-Mrs Watts was checking on her ‘something borrowed, something blue.' A friend had lent her a beaded handbag, and she'd bought a small piece of blue ribbon that she tied, garter-like, round her thigh. Violet Makins was a superstitious woman, and though she had no doubt about the Tightness of her marriage with Felix Watts, she was taking no chances. Her horoscope had pointed to Easter Monday as an auspicious date for their union. Some weeks before she had attended a séance, and dear George had materialised to wish her well, and to advise a wedding breakfast in his old country club in Berkshire. This she had arranged, together with a honeymoon in Casablanca which was prompted not by the stars but by
her cousin's availability list. No matter. Her clairvoyant had prophesied a tropical holiday, so all in all, the astral influence had been fully respected. She took out her manicure box and set to polishing her nails.

Another few miles away, and in a different direction, Brian Watts, twice-promised groom, sneaked out of his house carrying a large hold-all. In his pin-striped suit, and pointed shoes, he looked like a travelling salesman with a suitcase full of cunning. Unlike his mother before him, he stopped in the street, put down his case, and looked back at the house in which he'd lived for over forty years. He saw the dingy net curtains, and the squalid peeling paintwork, and he wondered how he'd lived there for so long. He hailed a taxi at the corner of the street, and once inside, he pinned a white carnation in his buttonhole.

Not far away, Miss never-to-be-Mrs Watts was making the biggest and richest sponge-cake of her culinary career. She loaded it into the oven, and went back to her pile of pillows on the sitting-room floor. Between sips of port, she flicked through the holiday brochures she had gathered in armfuls at the travel agency. For a long time she studied each hand-out, weighing the comparative lures of the Riviera and the Adriatic and the more expensive Atlantic. She couldn't help feeling that they all looked the same. But Spain looked extra romantic with its hotels right on the beaches, and dancing by moonlight on fairy-lit terraces. She would try to persuade Brian to a Spanish honeymoon. She looked up at Maurice on the wall. She knew she must take him down soon because Brian was expected within the hour, yet more and more she was reluctant to part with him. His disposal seemed always to be a prelude to some move of deception and even now, when the future seemed plain sailing, she wasn't quite convinced that her powers of guile and persuasion, such as they were, would not be called upon again. Maurice had become a kind of moral straitjacket, that, when discarded, left her prey to all manner of immodest temptation. ‘I wish you could come to Spain with us, Maurice,' she said. He wasn't looking at her and his expression was inscrutable. She took it as disapproval and was annoyed at this right he'd assumed to judge
her behaviour. In one area of her consciousness she knew that one clean swipe with a wet sponge would obliterate Maurice once and for all, but over the years she had renewed and revitalised that moustache as if it bristled from a pad of warm and human flesh, and to wipe him clean would have been tantamount to murder. On the other hand, she really did not know how to accommodate him after her marriage. He was essentially a private companion, and therefore unsharable. She could not imagine that in her future life she would need a great deal of privacy. Such a need, she thought, would reflect poorly on their union. In any case, privacy required space, and what with Brian and his old mother-lodger, there would be little of that. The problem of how to accommodate Maurice seemed to her insuperable, and all she could do was delay the decision until she came back from her honeymoon. Meanwhile, she would put him in the pantry.

She got up to take him off the wall, and sniffed an ominous smell from the kitchen. She had forgotten to take out the sponge. She rushed to open the oven door and through the smoke she discerned a charred platform with something of an apron-stage jutting over the rim of the mould. She pulled it out with a hasty oven-glove and her eyes smarted from the smoke. Then turned to tears with the realisation that on this, of all days, she could offer Brian no delicacy. And if Brian had been coming, he would most certainly have thanked her for it. She regarded the burnt offering as a terrible foreboding and she blamed Maurice and all the deliberations about his future that had so detained her. Angrily she went back to the sitting-room, and unhooked him from the wall. Now she would put him under the bed because she had to punish him. She forebore from looking at him as she carried him into the bedroom. Then she opened all the windows in the flat in an attempt to get rid of the smell of burning.

It was almost three o'clock, and Brian was always punctual. She made a neat pile of the brochures in the sitting-room, putting the Spanish folder on the top. Then she sat on the floor and waited. In the silence of her echo-less sitting-room, she listened for footsteps on the pavement outside. It was holiday
time, so there was less than the usual activity in the street. People had gone to the seaside or the fairs, and for the first time in her life, she thought about other people's pleasures without envy. Soon all the fairs in the world would be hers, and every inch of sandy beach. She wished the street well of its Bank Holiday and gave a small but undisturbed thought as to why Brian was late. He was probably walking, she thought, since buses were few and far between, and to pass the time, she shadowed him from his terraced house in Romilly Road, past the closed shops in the High Street, generously timing his waiting at kerbs for the occasional car to pass, until he reached the corner of her street. Then he stopped perhaps, to look at his watch, and he would note that he was late and he would quicken his stride to his bride-to-be. She listened for his hurried footsteps, and all she heard was a distant church bell. She was afraid to look at her watch for the seeds of panic were undeniably sprouting. She wished she had Maurice to talk to. She thought she might retrieve him for a while, but there would be no time. Brian was bound to come shortly. They had so much to discuss and so many arrangements to make. Idly she opened the Spanish folder, and as she did so, she could not help but look at her watch and register the time. Ten minutes to four. Quite irrelevantly she wished that her room was furnished as before, so that she could rise from one chair and agitatedly move across the room to another. But now surrounded by all that bareness, there was no punctuation to her fear, no resting-place for her mounting panic, and she froze in her squat on the floor and tried not to think that he had jilted her. She scratched in her mind for some excuse on his behalf, and decided that his mother, through illness or sheer bloody-mindedness, had delayed him. She began to hate her, and fear her future role as mother-in-law. But it was a role that she had to envisage, else face the outrageous reality of a life in ruins. She would put Brian's mother in her place, she thought. She would let her know in no uncertain terms that any part of the flat outside the spare room, was strictly out of bounds. That once a week she could have a bath and once a week she could sit diapered in the hall while her room was being cleaned.
Brian would arrive any moment now, full of apologies and begging her understanding. She would withhold it for a while, then gradually give in, and they would get down to the arrangements for their future. Perhaps, in view of the sponge-cake fiasco, he might even offer to take her out to tea, for there would be no time for servicing this afternoon. In any case, she could no longer afford it.

She got up from the floor and crossed the room to the front window. She drew back the net curtains which she knew was a very vulgar thing to do for it indicated an unhealthy interest in other people's business. But she felt justified, since it was her business, her very own, that she was investigating. It was, in fact, a life or death investigation, and a single footfall in that shattering holiday silence could tip the scales. She noticed a woman in the window of the house opposite, engaged in exactly the same pursuit, and she wondered as to the comparative urgency of her search. On seeing Miss Hawkins, the woman dropped her curtain, ashamed to be discovered in such idleness and curiosity, humiliated by the screaming loneliness she may have betrayed. But Miss Hawkins did not lower her curtain. The loneliness and fear behind her net, had, at that moment, far less priority in her thoughts than the possibility of deliverance from outside. If that deliverance did not come, even tardily, she would turn her back on the street and there would be ample time and tears to flood the ruins of her hope.

She stood at the window for a long time. Once she heard footsteps, but even with her optimism, she had to dismiss them as the skipping steps of a child. She hoped it would not skip by her door, for she feared she might have gone out and done it harm. She forced herself to look at her watch. Four-thirty. She would not give way to sorrow or mourning, for that would have pronounced finality. Instead, she battened on to anger, and held on to it fast, refusing recourse to her knitting, which would have tempered it and weaned it altogether. She needed her anger now as never before, she needed to cling to an infinite fury, for any alternative now was a show of abdication. She turned from the window and she screamed long and silently into the empty
room, knowing that Maurice, from his punishment pen under the bed would, like a dog, hear that cry of pain that lay far beyond the reaches of the human ear.

She rushed to her diary. She was determined to hold on to her hope, yet what she wrote down on the current page indicated a small act of surrender. ‘Went to Brian's and got all my money back,' she saw that she had written and she noticed that her handwriting was unusually untidy. The diary had ordered it, she thought. It had nothing to do with her. Her wise diary was simply being sensible, ensuring at least a future roof over her head, even it it sheltered an unbearable and aching void. She put on her coat, grabbed her large shopping-bag, irritated by its commodious bulk, but feeling the need for the scarf's protection as an escape-route for her spleen. She was going to go straight to Brian's house, and if he wasn't in, she would go to his mother and tell on him.

She had to walk all the way since there was no transport, but her anger did not abate. In fact, it accrued with each wearisome step, and by the time she reached her mother-in-law's house, she was seething with a weary rage. There were three doorbells and she rang them all. When there was no immediate reply she leaned against them listening to their triple echo. And when the front door opened, she flung her wrath at the poor unfortunate woman who had, in all innocence, answered the emergency holiday call.

‘Brian Watts,' Miss Hawkins shouted as a summons.

A small look of suspicious recognition passed between the two women. Each knew they had seen the other before, but Miss Hawkins had neither time nor inclination to enquire where they had met.

‘You were at my Dad's funeral,' the woman said. She had recalled Miss Hawkins as a gatecrasher, and her manner was by no means friendly.

‘He's the middle bell and he's out,' she said.

‘How d'you know he's out?'

‘Cos he hasn't answered his bell, has he?' she said insolently. ‘You've rung it hard enough.'

‘I want to see his mother then.' Miss Hawkins demanded, as if the poor woman were Mrs Watts' keeper.

‘She doesn't live here any more.'

‘Where has she gone?' Miss Hawkins' voice had suddenly lost its tone of command. With Mrs Watts' disappearance, she had an instinctive feeling that she was going to need this woman as a source of information. She must be polite.

‘She's in an old-age home. The Petunias. Hoity toity.'

‘Do you have the address?' Miss Hawkins said, and added, ‘Please,' plaintively, knowing that her arrogant manner hitherto had not merited the woman's co-operation.

‘Just a minute,' she said. She left the door and disappeared into a room off the hall.

Miss Hawkins had time to consider this latest piece of information, and she certainly did not warm to its deceptive implications. The woman came back to the door with a small white card. She handed it over. Miss Hawkins didn't want to bother her further, but there was one question that needed to be asked. She was so afraid for its answer, that she hesitated and the woman was already closing the door.

‘How long has she been in the home?' Miss Hawkins panted through the crack.

‘Must be three months now,' the woman said. ‘She moved out on New Year's Day.' Then the crack closed. From that side of the door at least, there was nothing more to say.

Miss Hawkins grabbed at the scarf in her shopping-bag as some contact for comfort. She couldn't understand why Brian had lied to her, but she dared not allow herself to connect it with his non-appearance that afternoon. He would have an explanation, she was sure. He must have arrived while she was out, was probably even now waiting on her doorstep or perhaps he had left a note explaining his late call. She had to get back home immediately. In the distance she was relieved to see a lone bus travelling down the High Street. She ran as fast as her shopping-bag would allow and she reached the stop in good time. On the slow ride home, she convinced herself that Brian or a note would be waiting for her, and it would explain everything. She now
regretted that she had trusted him so little and had left the house with no-one to wait for him. That was no way to be a good and loving wife, she told herself, and she would beg Brian to forgive her for her mistrust. She wished the bus would hurry. There was very little traffic about and no need for extra caution, yet it dawdled at every stop and traffic-light and finally announced an all-change at the library. The wheel had come full circle, and Miss Hawkins regarded it as a fitting terminus and a good sign that all would be well. Now she hurried down the maze of side-streets, short-cutting to her home, primping her hair with her free hand so that she would look well for her groom. She hadn't given another thought to his mother since leaving his house, but now as she turned the corner of her street, his gross deception suddenly grazed her heart and her anger returned. There was no Brian waiting at the door and as she turned to open the gate, she caught sight of the woman across the street dropping her net curtain. Miss Hawkins levelled with her veiled steady stare, and stuck her tongue out as far as it would go.