Complete Short Stories (VMC) (70 page)

At last it was closing time and she put on her suède jacket, was again admired in it and, feeling herself the object of envy – which was like wine to her – said good-bye.

Miraculously, it had stopped raining. It was quite dark and blurred; shaggy lights were reflected in the wet road and pavement. She walked along close to the shop windows, sauntering, waiting for Derek, who was already three minutes late. Not once, all day, had she given a thought to what might be happening at home.

Returning late, as she crossed the canal bridge, she could see the lighted upstairs window, and it was then – as it was every night – that her thoughts for the first time turned homewards, and it was as if a blind were drawn over her gaiety.

Her mother greeted her with some more of the accustomed phrases – ‘This is a fine time … while you’re under my roof … piece of my mind … a sight too big for your boots.’

Rita unhooked a cup from the dresser and poured out some milk. Standing, sipping it, still wearing her jacket, she appeared preoccupied, obviously not listening. This, as was intended, angered her mother more. The phrases tumbled over one another and were forlornly reiterated. Her voice rose until, remembering her husband lying upstairs, she hesitated and turned away. In a despairing way, she began to lay the table ready for the morning.

‘What’s the use of coming home?’ asked Rita. ‘You only go for me the minute I put my nose round the door.’

Now her mother took her turn of remaining silent, moving about the room, her lips pressed together. Rita would rather have had the familiar spate of words and her mother realised it. ‘How’s Dad?’ she asked, after a while, her voice gruff and uneasy.

‘Much the same.’ ‘As if you care’, the wounded expression said.

I wish I were on the top of a mountain, Rita thought. I would take deep breaths, feel clean and light again. She pictured her real mother like that, living a wild and carefree life among the mountains, in Canada, to which she had emigrated.

‘Well, I’m going up,’ her mother said. ‘And so will you, if you’ve any sense. I don’t know how you expect to do a proper day’s work …’ The
phrases were a dire temptation to her. ‘Say good-night nicely to your father, won’t you?’ she asked, turning at the door with an appealing look.

Grandmother had always been against the adoption. ‘You can’t know what you’re taking on,’ she had told her daughter-in-law. ‘Impossible to tell.’ Now they knew. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ the old woman would say, taking her hot drink up to bed, night after night, and Rita still not home. ‘You’ve spoilt that girl. Nothing to be done now, bar wait for the consequences. Letting her have those dancing-lessons. That began it. That made her wilful.’

Everything went back to the dancing-lessons, years ago, when Rita had been a bouncy little girl with disarming manners. They had been very much resented at the time, for the expense; and, later, for the fact that, after a while, they had changed the child. She had lost the wheedling, simpering ways they had found so endearing and scowled at them instead.

It was after one of the early dancing-lessons that she had learnt of her origins. Unsure of her position after that, she had ceased to boast to her friends about her lessons or anything else; no longer, tossing her curls, swinging her ballet shoes by the ribbons, went out of her way to be seen on Saturday mornings, to be able to say ‘I’m just going to dancing’, enjoying reactions of envy. From then on, Grandmother’s plaint became built into the domestic fabric – ‘It started with those dancing-lessons.’

When the world was broken apart, it was her grandmother who seemed to Rita to become her first enemy. At the earliest signs of rebellion – the scowling silences, the ducking when her curls were stroked – the old lady saw signs of bad blood, as she had long expected to. There is no relationship between us, both she and the child thought, though they held their secret. Mother humbly bore the brunt of their differences, and hid them from her husband.

‘It’s a good thing your granny’s gone up to bed. I can smell drink.’

It was this beginning, as soon as Rita opened the kitchen door, that began an evil dialogue. She had taken off her jacket and thrown it over a chair … ‘you haven’t had it but a couple of days and look at the way you’re treating it …’ and began to comb her hair … ‘all over the breakfast table. I don’t know what’s come over you …’ She shrugged her shoulders.

Imitation is the sincerest and the most infuriating form of flattery, and Diane’s having bought a jacket so much like her own had clouded the day, spoilt the evening. Moments of pleasure there had been, dancing under the arched, smoke-wreathed roof where balloons hung in a net. It was the place where she was always happiest and she found beauty in it which stirred her in the same way as the look of the canal sometimes did, when the lighted
street-lamps were reflected in it. The dance hall had a livelier beauty – the girls with their full skirts, their quickly turning profiles as they spun round, their hair flicking from side to side, their lips parted. While she was dancing, she forgot her annoyance, but as soon as she sat down at one of the orange-painted tables with Derek or any of what she called ‘the Crowd’, crossness returned. She scarcely listened to them; she smoked and wagged her head to the music and wondered what she could do – not to get even, but to raise herself far above Diane, right out of her reach, where she would know she could not hope to follow. The balloons had been released and there was the usual horseplay, but she sat still, not turning her head. It was frustrating that whatever was beyond Diane’s reach should also be beyond her own.

‘I don’t know what’s come over you,’ her mother said again; but she did know. Her real mother had come over her.

Another step was taken towards the evil outcome of their conversation – Rita said: ‘I shall please myself, you know.’

‘Not under my roof, you won’t.’ Her mother gripped the edge of the table and leant forward to spit out the words. She dared not raise her voice because of her husband upstairs; instead, she gave a venomous clarity to what she said.

Rita rasped her thumb along the teeth of her comb, looking patiently down.

‘You’ve got to be a better girl,’ her mother said, raising her voice just a little, altering her tone. ‘You’ll only worry your father.’

‘It’ll be you who’ll be worrying him, if you want to make any fuss. I shall still do as I like.’

‘All I’ve got to do, looking after
them
, and you never so much as wash up a cup. What sort of a daughter do you think you are?’

‘You know what sort of a daughter I am.’ Rita lifted her eyes for a second.

‘What do you mean?’

There was a fearful silence. ‘It’s a relief she’s not really my mother,’ Rita thought. ‘No risk of growing up to be like her – dowdy, grey-faced.’ (There was a photograph upstairs of her own mother, the younger sister, a bold laughing girl.) ‘My mother and me, we’re not a bit like you,’ she thought staring across the table, meeting those anxious eyes. ‘What do you ever do for me?’ she asked. ‘To make up for all this. It’s not much for anyone young to come back to – it’s depressing. As soon as I put the wireless on, you tell me to turn it down. This house! I’ve never been happy here.’

‘You ungrateful girl.’ Her mother hadn’t the words to express grief and bitter disappointment, only the old and worn-out phrases of blame. ‘All we’ve done for you … It would break your father’s heart if he could hear …’

‘There are other things you don’t want him to hear, aren’t there? Such as what
I
heard the doctor tell
you
when he came back from the hospital.’ The dialogue ahead of her lay in darkness, but each line she spoke revealed another in its time.

Her mother stared at her in a dazed way, then sank down into a chair and covered her face with her hands.

‘There’s nothing to cry about,’ Rita said. ‘There’s no need to make such a fuss. I shan’t go running upstairs to him with the bad news.’ Her mother dabbed her eyes. ‘Not so long as I get my way about things.’

Her mother struggled to control herself, remembering that she must not cry, especially as it was time for her to go upstairs and that she must do so without tears in her eyes. She breathed deeply to steady herself, then rose and walked past Rita without a word. She climbed the stairs slowly and Rita listened to the dragging steps. ‘I hate slow-moving people,’ she thought. ‘My real mother and me, we walk fast.’ She pictured her clicking along a Canadian pavement on high, thin heels.

She lingered in the kitchen, pondering the new relationship she had made with her mother, and putting off looking in to say ‘good-night’ to her father. She cut a slice of bread, spread it with butter, sprinkled sugar over it and, eating it slowly and with great enjoyment, wandered about the kitchen, making her plans.

The dancing-lessons were quite forgotten when Rita brought home the real suède coat. For kindling caustic comment, it bettered any other fuel. The dancing was regarded as the starting-point of the girl’s evil ways; but the suède coat was proof of how far gone she was in them.

‘I bought it in a sale,’ she said, avoiding her mother’s eyes, as she had begun to do. Sometimes, it was a strain keeping her gaze constantly lowered, and she was relieved when she was outside the house and could raise her head and look at the sky and the tall buildings on the other side of the canal.

‘Bought it in a sale,’ her grandmother repeated. She repeated nearly everything that Rita said, giving her words an extra exposure to ridicule. ‘And what with, we should like to know.’

‘What do you think? Money.’

‘Oh, money, of
course
. I didn’t think you’d got it for a handful of glass marbles. We’re just interested in where the money came from in the first place.’

‘Mother! Leave the girl alone, for pity’s sake. It’s her business.

‘It’s
your
business where she picks her money up, or so I should think … out till all hours of the night. I can see the end of this as plain as I can see this cup in my hand. Well, we’ve seen it before, haven’t we?’

‘That will be enough, Mother.’ It won’t be long, she thought. This can’t go on for very long. Her spirit bruised from blackmail, she could only go automatically about her long day’s work. She was like a watch-dog, whose power of protection was running out.

Rita felt uplifted when, wearing her new coat, she walked to work in the mornings. She liked to hang it beside Diane’s if she could, and cared not at all that the girls made the same insinuations as her grandmother. She wished to be envied, not liked.

She spent her mother’s savings quickly. Towards the end of them, she had to put up a fight for what she wanted – going threateningly to the door at the foot of the staircase, knowing that she would soon be called back. She was always relieved when her mother gave in. ‘I wouldn’t really tell him,’ she would think, picking up the money that had been thrown from trembling hands upon the table. ‘Not unless she really made me mad.’

‘Who rules this house?’ her grandmother once asked, unnerved by the calm power her granddaughter now exerted. ‘Who rules this house, I’d like to know.’

‘I do,’ Rita said, and went from the room, leaving her mother to smooth out the matter.

She was happier at work. A little money and her mother’s nagging tongue stilled made a world of difference to the day, and the envious hostility of the other girls was much to be desired; but she had lost her ascendancy with the Crowd and was under suspicion. Once or twice there had been quarrels, which made the boys wary, quarrels especially with Diane – rather one-sided quarrels, for Rita for the most part ignored the enquiries about where she had left her mink coat and why she was slumming at the Majestic Dance Hall or the Piazza Coffee Bar. She simply smiled and turned her head, basking in jealousy. ‘Oh, pardon me for living,’ Diane would shout, deliriously losing her temper.

Derek was puzzled. Rita’s money worried him. She bought him cigarettes and gave them patronisingly, and when at last he refused to take any more, she threw the packet into the canal, along which they were walking.

It was a Sunday afternoon and very cold. Through the knotted branches, the sky looked scratched and bleeding and there was a pinkish reflection on the water ahead of them.

‘I don’t smoke that kind myself,’ she said, in reply to his amazed reproach.

She flung her arms out, walked forward airily, fancily, as if on a tightrope. ‘The sky’s pretty,’ she said. Then her moment of exuberance passed, her arms dropped and she put her hands back in her pockets.

‘Better turn back?’ he suggested. ‘It’ll get dark soon.’

And she wore him out with her changing moods.

‘
You
can,’ she said.

They plodded on. The towing-path ran under an old iron bridge, across whose parapet she had once walked, balancing precariously in her stockinged feet. Someone – she had forgotten who – had dared her to.

Shapes – of the arthritic-looking trees, of the iron girders of the bridge – had become menacing, and the sky was now colourless behind them. The dark indeed came quickly. It piled up behind them and they fled before it, like refugees. Death was behind her, too, and it was from this that she was really fleeing, taking the unwilling Derek along with her. ‘I’m no good at anything like that,’ she told herself; ‘don’t know what to do when people are sick.’ All day, neighbours had been in and out of the house, trying to comfort and support her mother and giving Rita black looks. ‘I can’t do anything right,’ she thought defensively.

Her mother was grim and brusque; she seemed no longer to fear her daughter, paid no heed to her, was engrossed, dedicated. Her grandmother, however, made up for her with phrases – ‘at a time like this … your poor mother … never so much as lift a finger.’

‘I think I’d like to go to Canada,’ Rita said suddenly to Derek.

He walked along, hunched up, his hands in his pockets. He had no warm coat, like Rita’s.

‘Oh, all right, then; we’ll turn back,’ she said.

They faced round and saw all the lights of the town against the darkness.

‘Why Canada?’ he asked at last.