Complete Short Stories (VMC) (91 page)

He moved on down the street towards the Underground. In your own home. In your own home the torn linoleum in the passage and the dusty untidiness on the mantelpiece. At the front door, the key fidgeting reluctantly in the keyhole, you take your last breath of the day. Enter the darkness. Smell of parsnips, from dinner. Up in the steamy bathroom taps rushing, cistern refilling, child being slapped; through the steam the voice. The Voice. ‘What did I tell you … Always the same … When I say a thing … Now here’s your father …’ and so on. The Voice accompanied him now, down the street. ‘I’ve only one pair of hands … because I said
so … and that’s for answering back!’ Answering back! he mused. That’s the trouble. When you are older no one answers back. You speak and no one listens. You send the dove out on its journey, you send it forth, but it never returns with a leaf in its beak. It does not return at all.

He raised his eyes to the pearly sky, the high, leaden balloons, turning idly, veering, nosing clouds. Soon the Underground, the soft, hot rush of air. When he emerged again the evening would be dead. He walked resolutely past the smell of the Underground and continued down the street.

First editions pressed their brown-spotted title pages to a shop window. Coloured plates of fruit and birds. To have something beautiful of your own. ‘You’re late tonight … It’s always the same … Food’s like a cinder … Spoilt for me too … Backache … Gave her a good hiding … What’s the use …’ This is the first time I ever
meant
to be late. Nine years. Hard to believe. Better be, though, with Veronica eight the other day. Veronica – once loved that name. ‘
Veronica!
How many more times. Did you
hear
me?’ Christ! how can you help hearing? The Voice. Peace one needs. Peace like this evening. And gentle sounds.

Here were the steps of a church – small London church between shops – and the rambling, elephantine sounds of an organ – ‘I
mean
to be late,’ he said again to himself. And went up the steps. Inside, the impersonal smell of stone and wood and old books. Pale pillars rose to the black and indigo shadows.

He sat down at the back, so that he might easily escape should anyone … What? What harm was he doing? ‘I should kneel down and begin to pray,’ he decided. But gradually he relaxed. The sounds from the organ trailed away and presently recommenced. Nice to come in here alone and play. Peace. Even the Voice could not pursue him here. Nine years. Sin they had committed before that. He thought of it with tranquillity now in church. Nice to look back upon. Might not have been the same person. Now, always to ready to condemn all the young ones. That type often turns to the other extreme. ‘I’m broad-minded but …’ Now it finished with ‘but’. The ‘but’ at the end means the first part was a lie.

A woman came in and sat against a pillar. With her hand on the end of a pew, she had bent her knee towards the altar. The grace and gravity of this gesture caught his interest. He watched her drop down on to a hassock, bow her head, watched the pale profile net in prayer. Creamy face, the eyes a sloe-dark smudge. Black clothes against the pillar. Something
in
religion. Beautiful. Catches your throat. Now with black-gloved hand she crossed herself. Couldn’t bring myself to do that. Feel daft. Think people laughing at me. Quiet she is. Violets pinned on her … no … the smell of them is cool and fresh … breast … no … cool and fresh … something beautiful … of your own … my own. A nice picture, wild-flower book, marsh-marigolds,
hand-painted lilies, fritillaries, violets. Would like to hear her speak. Voice. ‘If you men aren’t the bloody limit!’ Hate women to swear. ‘Good-evening!’ I would say, holding that level with face. Respect. ‘Oh!’ Her eyes lifted, startled, velvet sloes. Can’t go home. After nine years, can’t go home at last.

He slid to his knees – no one watching – and rested the bridge of his nose against the back of the next pew. Not praying. Don’t believe in it, only want the peace, want something beautiful of my own. ‘Good-evening!’ She wouldn’t answer. Draw back away from me. Wouldn’t like that. ‘Lovely evening.’ She wouldn’t answer. That one’s for answering back. Please God. The heart is encircled by silence. Nothing enters there, nor breaks the ice of it. Nothing. As we die, we know that, if we don’t know before. When we are lonely we dwell there. Life shouldn’t be that, sitting alone with our own silence. We should speak to one another. ‘Good-evening!’ And stretch out our hands to one another. Violets. Black and black fur and a little veil. Widow. I would comfort her. Put my arm across her shoulder while she weeps.

As the image of that drew clear from the mists of his mind, he was stirred and shaken. He raised his head. She was standing now by the pillar, smoothing her gloves. For a second, her face turned in his direction. Pale, closed, remote, like a nun. The church darkened as she left. He picked up his hat. For nine years the first time he would be late deliberately. Down the steps. She walked not like a nun, like a queen, one foot before the other. At the corner, by the chemist’s shop, she paused, began to saunter. From the swirl of people on the pavement a man detached himself and joined her. They spoke and moved on together.

‘Remember me?’

‘Course.’

‘Your legs I noticed first, coming down those steps. Nice stockings. I like nice stockings. I thought it was a church at first …’ He sounded disconcerted.

‘It was.’

He seemed to await her explanation.

‘Sometimes want to look nice to myself,’ she was thinking as she walked carefully down a meaner street. ‘Want to act nicely just for myself alone. Do something beautiful and not for other people to see.’

‘Oh, it made a change,’ she said impatiently, shifting her fur on her shoulder, fingering the linen violets. ‘Used to go every Sunday once, when I was a girl. Sometimes week-nights. Reverend forget his name – High Church. People used to complain.’ What had she expected? What experience was it which she dimly perceived, but which always evaded her? ‘It is the same thing for ever,’ she told herself. She trailed her fur behind her now, as they went up some stairs at the side of a tailor’s shop. It comes to the same thing in the end. Yet does it?

He followed her upstairs, his eyes on the seams of her stockings. He felt gloomy, dubious, put out.

‘Yes,’ she thought, glancing out of the window on the half-landing. ‘I feel as if I had missed something. Yet I know that there is nothing to miss.’ She looked back and grinned, puffed, panted from the stairs and blew out her lips comically.

‘That’s the girl,’ he said.

Phyl was always one of the first to come into the hotel bar in the evenings, for what she called her
aperitif
, and which, in reality, amounted to two hours’ steady drinking. After that, she had little appetite for dinner, a meal to which she was not used.

On this evening, she had put on one of her beaded tops, of the kind she wore behind the bar on Saturday evenings in London, and patted back her tortoiseshell hair. She was massive and glittering and sunburned – a wonderful sight, Stanley Archard thought, as she came across the bar towards him.

He had been sitting waiting for her. They had found their own level in one another on about the third day of the holiday. Both being heavy drinkers drew them together. Before that had happened, they had looked one another over warily as, in fact, they had all their fellow-guests.

Travelling on their own, speculating, both had watched and wondered. Even at the airport, she had stood out from the others, he remembered, as she had paced up and down in her emerald-green coat. Then their flight number had been called, and they had gathered with others at the same channel, with the same pink labels tied to their hand luggage, all going to the same place; a polite, but distant little band of people, no one knowing with whom friendships were to be made – as like would no doubt drift to like. In the days that followed, Stanley had wished he had taken more notice of Phyl from the beginning, so that at the end of the holiday he would have that much more to remember. Only the emerald-green coat had stayed in his mind. She had not worn it since – it was too warm – and he dreaded the day when she would put it on again to make the return journey.

Arriving in the bar this evening, she hoisted herself up on a stool beside him. ‘Well, here we are,’ she said, glowing, taking one peanut; adding, as she nibbled, ‘Evening, George,’ to the barman. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘My God, you’ve caught it today,’ Stanley said, and he put his hands up near her plump red shoulders as if to warm them at a fire. ‘Don’t overdo it,’ he warned her.

‘Oh, I never peel,’ she said airily.

He always put in a word against the sunbathing when he could. It separated them. She stayed all day by the hotel swimming-pool, basting herself with oil. He, bored with basking – which made him feel dizzy – had hired a car and spent his time driving about the island, and was full of alienating information about the locality, which the other guests – resenting the hired car, too – did their best to avoid. Only Phyl did not mind listening to him. For nearly every evening of her married life she had stood behind the bar and listened to other people’s boring chat: she had a technique for dealing with it and a fund of vague phrases. ‘Go on!’ she said now, listening – hardly listening – to Stanley, and taking another nut. He had gone off by himself and found a place for lunch:
hors d’œuvre
, nice-sized slice of veal, two veg,
crème caramel
, half bottle of rosé, coffee – twenty-two shillings the lot. ‘Well, I’m blowed,’ said Phyl, and she took a pound note from her handbag and waved it at the barman. When she snapped up the clasp of the bag it had a heavy, expensive sound.

One or two other guests came in and sat at the bar. At this stage of the holiday they were forming into little groups, and this was the jokey set who had come first after Stanley and Phyl. According to them all sorts of funny things had happened during the day, and little screams of laughter ran round the bar.

‘Shows how wrong you can be,’ Phyl said in a low voice. ‘I thought they were ever so starchy on the plane. I was wrong about you, too. At the start, I thought you were … you know … one of
those
. Going about with that young boy all the time.’

Stanley patted her knee. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, with a meaning glance at her. ‘No, I was just at a bit of a loose end, and he seemed to cotton-on. Never been abroad before, he hadn’t, and didn’t know the routine. I liked it for the first day or two. It was like taking a nice kiddie out on a treat. Then it seemed to me he was sponging. I’m not mean, I don’t think; but I don’t like that – sponging. It was quite a relief when he suddenly took up with the Lisper.’

By now, he and Phyl had nicknames for most of the other people in the hotel. They did not know that the same applied to them, and that to the jokey set he was known as Paws and she as the Shape. It would have put them out and perhaps ruined their holiday if they had known. He thought his little knee-pattings were of the utmost discretion, and she felt confidence from knowing her figure was expensively controlled under her beaded dresses when she became herself again in the evenings. During the day, while sun-bathing, she considered that anything went – that, as her mind was a blank, her body became one also.

The funny man of the party – the awaited climax – came into the bar, crabwise, face covered slyly with his hand, as if ashamed of some earlier
misdemeanour. ‘Oh, my God, don’t look round. Here comes trouble!’ someone said loudly, and George was called for from all sides. ‘What’s the poison, Harry? No, my shout, old boy. George, if you
please
.’

Phyl smiled indulgently. It was just like Saturday night with the regulars at home. She watched George with a professional eye, and nodded approvingly. He was good. They could have used him at the Nelson. A good quick boy.

‘Heard from your old man?’ Stanley asked her.

She cast him a tragic, calculating look. ‘You must be joking. He can’t
write
. No, honest, I’ve never had a letter from him in the whole of my life. Well, we always saw each other every day until I had my hysterectomy.’

Until now, in conversations with Stanley, she had always referred to ‘a little operation’. But he had guessed what it was – well, it always was, wasn’t it? – and knew that it was the reason for her being on holiday. Charlie, her husband, had sent her off to recuperate. She had sworn there was no need, that she had never felt so well in her life – was only a bit weepy sometimes late on a Saturday night. ‘I’m not really the crying sort,’ she had explained to Stanley. ‘So he got worried, and sent me packing.’

‘You clear off to the sun,’ he had said, ‘and see what that will do.’

What the sun had done for her was to burn her brick-red, and offer her this nice holiday friend. Stanley Archard, retired widower from Hove.

She enjoyed herself, as she usually did. The sun shone every day, and the drinks were so reasonable – they had many a long discussion about that. They also talked about his little flat in Hove; his strolls along the front; his few cronies at the Club; his sad, orderly and lonely life.

This evening, he wished he had not brought up the subject of Charlie’s writing to her, for it seemed to have fixed her thoughts on him and, as she went chatting on about him, Stanley felt an indefinable distaste, an aloofness.

She brought out from her note-case a much-creased cutting from the
Morning Advertiser
. ‘Phyl and Charlie Parsons welcome old friends and new at the Nelson, Southwood. In licensed hours only!’ ‘That was when we changed Houses,’ she explained. There was a photograph of them both standing behind the bar. He was wearing a dark blazer with a large badge on the pocket. Sequins gave off a smudged sparkle from her breast, her hair was newly, elaborately done, and her large, ringed hand rested on an ornamental beer-handle. Charlie had his hands in the blazer pockets, as if he were there to do the welcoming, and his wife to do the work: and this, in fact, was how things were. Stanley guessed it, and felt a twist of annoyance in his chest. He did not like the look of Charlie, or anything he had heard about him – how, for instance, he had seemed like a fish out of water visiting his wife in hospital. ‘He used to sit on the edge of the chair and stare
at the clock, like a boy in school,’ Phyl had said, laughing. Stanley could not bring himself to laugh, too. He had leant forward and taken her knee in his hand and wobbled it sympathetically to and fro.