Complete Short Stories (VMC) (48 page)

‘I shall soon have to go,’ Peter said and as he glanced at his watch, Lucy pushed herself closer to him, almost asleep.

Singing together now, the girls and boys were beginning to pack up – one of the girls turned cartwheels, and Sarah suddenly spun round, her belllike skirt flying out.

‘Are you staying at the pub?’ Catherine asked.

‘No, I am catching the last bus, then the last train.’

‘The last train,’ Lucy murmured cosily, as if there were no such thing save in a story he was telling her.

Catherine shivered.

‘Are you sure you won’t write to me?’ Peter asked her, as quietly as he could. ‘Or let me write to you?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘She will,’ said Lucy. ‘She writes to Sarah and Chris every day when they are at school.’

‘Then there wouldn’t be time for me,’ said Peter.

Catherine packed the basket wishing that she might pack up the evening, too, and all that it had brought to the light, but it lay untidily about them. The children ran to and fro, clearing up, exhilarated by the darkness and the sound of the sea, the tide coming up across the sands, one wave unrolling under the spray of the next. The boys took the baskets and the girls looked the beach over, as if it were a room in some home of their own which they wished to leave tidy until they returned.

‘Who will remember the evening?’ Catherine wondered. ‘Perhaps only he and I, and Sarah.’ Little Ricky had attached himself to the others as they left the beach. He walked beside Sarah, clinging to her skirt. Peter had Lucy on his back, his shoes dangling by their laces round his neck as he walked unsteadily on the cold, loose sand.

‘We live only once,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ said Lucy, awake now and laughing. She wriggled her sandy feet, trying to force them into the pockets of his jacket.

‘Lucy, sit still or walk,’ her mother said sharply.

A little surprised, she sat still for a bit and then, when she could see the house, the lights going on as the others went indoors, she slipped down and ran away from Peter, down the bank and across the lane.

Catherine and Peter sat down just below the sea-wall and put on their shoes.

‘Will you forgive me?’ he asked.

‘I might have done the same.’

‘There is far too much to say for us to begin talking.’

‘And no time,’ she said. She fastened her sandals, then looked up at the sky, as if she were scanning it anxiously for some weather-sign, but he knew that she was waiting for tears to recede, her head high, breath held. If he kissed her, she would fail, would break, weep, betray herself to the children. ‘To have thought of her so long, imagined, dreamed, called that child “Catherine” for her sake, started at the sight of her name printed in a book, pretended her voice to myself, called her in my sleep, and now sit close to her and it is almost over.’ He stood up and took her hand, helping her to her feet.

In the lane the children were trying one another’s bicycles, the lamp light swung over the road and hedges. Lucy was crying and Sarah attempted to comfort her, but impatiently. ‘The same old story,’ she told her mother. ‘Stayed up too late.’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘I didn’t undo my sand-castle,’ Lucy roared.

‘Hush, dear. It doesn’t matter.’

‘I like to undo it. You know I like to undo it and now the sea will get it.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Don’t
say
it doesn’t matter.’

‘Peter, do borrow Chris’s bicycle. You can leave it at the pub and he can fetch it tomorrow.’

‘I like the walk.’

‘I am not leaving her like that,’ he thought, ‘not bicycling off up the road with a mob of adolescents.’

‘Good-bye, and thank you for the picnic,’ the children began to say, coming one after another to shake hands with Catherine.

‘You should have
reminded
me,’ shrieked Lucy, at the end of her tether.

‘Oh, Christ …’ said Chris.

‘Chris, I won’t have that,’ said Catherine.

‘Good-bye, and thank you so much.’

‘I hope you will come again.’

‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ Chris shouted.

They swung on to their bicycles and began to ride away, turning often to wave.

‘Good-bye, Fanny! Good-bye, Sue!’ Chris shouted.

The voices came back, as the lights bobbed along the lane. ‘Good-bye, Sarah! Good-bye, Chris!’

Sarah called once, then she shook hands with Peter and turned towards the house, gathering up Ricky, who was swinging on the gate as if hypnotised, too tired to make the next step.

‘Good-bye, Catherine, or I shall miss the bus.’

‘Yes. Good-bye, Peter.’

‘Take care of yourself. And
you
take care of her,’ he said to Chris with bright jocularity, as he began to walk away down the road.

‘What, my dear old mum?’ Chris said, and flung his arm across her shoulder so that she staggered slightly. Then, hearing a faint cry in the distance he rushed from her into the middle of the road and shouted again, his hands cupped to his mouth. ‘Good-bye, good-bye.’

Coming down the hill in the bus. The tyres lick the hot road. Four o’clock is dazzling. Down the new roads of the estate, the houses ranked shoulder to shoulder; thin trees let down into the asphalt; double daisies, dirty pink, dirty white, with dirt scraped up round them, in the new gardens descending the hill.

Eva moued, fringing her mauve ticket, her case lying squarely on her lap. When you opened it, out flew the smell of cardboard and egg sandwiches and rubber soles.

‘—noon miss. G’bye miss.’ Some of her class shuffling by her down on the gangway, getting off the bus. Once by, sniggering behind hands. In the front panel her reflection, striped silk dress, felt hat, glasses. Eva. What others saw. The children. Shooting up their arms in class. ‘Miss! Miss!’ She hated them, really, thinking she loved them. And they hated her, drawing her with bits of chalk on bridges and blank walls among obscenities, plaguing her subtly with their sycophancy. ‘Miss! Miss!’ It rang in her ears at night. At night, lying in bed, dividing up the day into what she had approved and what she had not. Condemning what she was denied and sentimentalising what she dared not condemn. Closing her mind firmly, snapping it up, on little shafts of truth which threatened it. (That it was odd her headache kept her away from week-night service when the old Vicar was taking them. But was clear as a bell on young Mr Beaver’s nights.)

‘Craigie Avenue.’ The bus still but shuddering while she pushed her way out, case held in front.

Up in the avenue laburnums were out. She didn’t see them, going on with her head bent, the pain beginning again as soon as she stood up, the pain descending again through her body, like tiredness drawn down to one point, crystallised, her body a shaft for the pain to drop down. She dragged up the hill in the heat, between rowan trees and the board fences of gardens. At Abercrombie she trailed up the path and opened the door. Empty house, you could tell at once, by the smell and sound of it and the tick of the clock. Her tea laid on a corner of the plush cloth. Slices of bread-and-butter, curling up at the edges; the stub-end of a cucumber; the
waxen-looking cake dotted with sultanas. She made tea, reaching her horoscope in the paper. Step out today; sign letters; grasp opportunities. That’s what she ought to do.

She dropped sugar in – three. ‘I’m sweet enough already,’ Ada would say, shaking her head. Ada. ‘I thought you
knew
.’ That was another of the things she was always saying, having shattered your world. The one before Mr Beaver, who left and got married, took another living, anyway. ‘She’s
sweet
. I thought you
knew
.’

And this morning, drinking tea at eleven, elbows on the
Daily Sketch
, while the children raced and shrieked across the asphalt and the whistle blew. In a corner, whispering together.

‘Well,’ said Eva, blushes engulfing her. ‘He said something about ovaries.’ Her voice swerved.

‘Who is it?’

‘Dr Petrie.’

The eyes lengthening, surveying her above the cup of tea.

‘I’m surprised you went to him.’

‘Oh, why?’ He … he’s oldish, and
nice
– as nice as he could be, I suppose.’

‘Oh, I expect he’s
nice
. That’s hardly the point when one’s reputation’s involved.’

‘I don’t see …’ After all, Ada had made her go, worrying about her cancer. And one day, seeing it on the surgery door – Gerald Petrie, M.R.C.S. – she had swung it suddenly in, not knowing how she would ever say it, but had, with his help.

‘In Manchester, I think,’ said Ada. ‘Pretty serious for him. Interfering with one of his patients. A young girl. Wonder he wasn’t struck off. But I quite thought you
knew
.’

And now she had to go again. This evening. Her hands were damp over the bread-and-butter. That sort of man. And he seemed so kind. Too kind, perhaps. Visions of the forbidden made her inside plunge wildly. She drank her tea and fetched her Chain Library book. The sweet, tasteless tea and the sweet, tasteless story.

At half-past five she went and washed and got ready. Mrs Profitt came back.

‘Just off to the doctor’s about my indigestion,’ said Eva.

‘I’m surprised he never gave you no peppermint,’ Mrs Profitt said, unrolling a haddock on the draining-board. ‘Always gives me a bottle. That shifts it like nothing else I know.’

‘Perhaps he will, then,’ said Eva, setting off, scarlet at her own duplicity.

The shadows, longer, deeper now, lying down the avenue. There it was,
as soon as she put her feet to the ground, the pain gathering itself together, like an animal that has lain in wait. That pounced on her as she stood on hot afternoons, the whistle round her neck on the teeming playground.

So she took the quick cut over the fields to the town, the grass short and slippery and full of thistles. The unemployed walked here with dogs and prams, listless and oppressed. Plumes of smoke rose stiffly off the town in the valley.

In the waiting-room she sat with cold hands and feet, her nostrils sickened by the rich smell of the
Sketch
, the
Tatler
, her bowels turned to water, it seemed, by nervousness and dread.

‘Any improvement?’ he asked, the man going grey in the white room with the brown linoleum, signalling her to the chair.

‘No.’ Her eyes riveted on him, fascinated.

‘Oh, come now. Not even a little?’

She shook her head.

‘Well, then, I’ll examine you today. Unloosen your clothes and lie down, will you?’

He turned away. He began to wash his hands. Behind the screen, shaking, fearful, charged, she unclasped her pink corsets and lay down. The noise her heart. The walls covered with grained paper, imitating wood.

He came and laid his hand on her side, pressing intolerably. As if he were a snake she watched him, horrified. ‘How dare he,’ she thought. ‘In Manchester. I thought you knew. A young girl.’ But she wasn’t young and his eyes fixed on the wallpaper were vague, impersonal. ‘Interfering with one of his patients.’ The way thoughts leapt up quite uncontrolled. What he had done. And how did she know? Out of what steaming stew of her mind emerged the cool and certain picture of what he had done, might do to her, lying here, defenceless and exposed.

‘OK,’ he said, moving away, leaving her.

‘OK,’ he said. Stupidly she fastened her corsets. Back at the desk, couldn’t listen. Greying hair and tired voice. ‘I love him. I loathe him,’ she thought hysterically.

She waited for her medicine and clutching the white, red-sealed parcel set off home, something destroyed in her. Back across the scented fields. The men on allotments. Children shouting. Tomorrow, school, and the children shouting. At the top of the hill a decaying haystack, dark and hacked away. The pain dragged at her. She went and sat down, leaning against the wall of the haystack, facing the valley which began to blossom faintly with lights. She sat there for a long time, until it grew nearly dark, and voices on the other side of the haystack disturbed her. She got up, clasping her bottle of medicine, and walked round the stack to the footpath.

‘Silly!’ giggled the girl, lying on her back in the darkness of the wall of hay. She rolled her head from side to side teasingly to avoid his kisses, the man pressing her down into the grass with the weight of his body.

Eva reached the footpath. Stumbled back home. How dare they! She felt filthy, just seeing them.

‘Did he give you anything?’ Mrs Profitt asked, coming in from the kitchen. There was a damp steam of haddock everywhere. ‘Well, what’s wrong?’

For Eva slumped forward over the table, dropping her parcel, retching up dreadful sobs. ‘The filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy …’ she babbled.

‘Filthy what?’ asked Mrs Profitt.

And then Eva sat up as if she saw visions before her.

‘The doctor,’ she said quietly. ‘He – he – insulted me.’

‘Insulted? How?’

‘I can’t tell you.’ She dropped her head and began to sob again on her silk sleeve.

At last Mrs Profitt gasped: ‘You don’t mean interfered with you?’

‘Tried,’ said Eva, drumming her fists on the table, blotting out those two under the haystack.

It took no time for Mrs Profitt to turn the gas low and put on her hat.

‘See to that haddock. I’m going straight to the police. Dirty monkey! Upsetting a decent girl like you.’ Off she went. Eva tormented, the picture of those two writhing on the hay, went and stuck a fork in the fish, moving like a sleepwalker.

‘You can’t be sorry for a man like that,’ said Ada vehemently, drinking her sugarless tea. ‘With a wife and children, too. He ought to think of them. And decent girls. Why doesn’t he go after his own kind? But they never do.’

‘No,’ said Eva.

‘Well, it’s stopped his tricks. Serve him right. He shouldn’t abuse his position.’

‘What will he do?’ Eva asked herself. Wife and children. Going grey a bit at the sides. Kind, but impersonal. ‘What have I done? What’s left to him?’

Ada’s eyes followed her everywhere with a new kind of filthy respect. She put down her cup and picked up a pile of books. ‘What’s left to him?’ she wondered. And then a surge of anger rose up in her, drove the colour up her neck into her face. ‘But he shouldn’t have done it,’ she thought, clenching her fingers up, going downstairs to the class-room. ‘Dirty monkey. Serves him right. He shouldn’t have done it.’