Complete Short Stories (VMC) (93 page)

‘We could easily have got in here,’ Stanley said. ‘I’d like to wring that bloody barman’s neck.’

‘He’s probably some relation, trying to do his best.’

‘I’ll best him.’

They seemed to have spent a great deal of their time together hoisting themselves up on bar stools.

‘Make them nice ones,’ Stanley added, ordering their drinks. ‘Perhaps he feels a bit shy and awkward, too,’ Phyl thought.

‘Not very busy,’ he remarked to the barman.

‘In one week we close.’

‘Looks as if you’ve hardly opened,’ Stanley said, glancing round.

‘It’s not
his
business to get huffy,’ Phyl thought indignantly, when the young man, not replying, shrugged and turned aside to polish some glasses. ‘Customer’s always right. He should know that. Politics, religion, colour-bar – however they argue together, they’re all of them always right, and if you know your job you can joke them out of it and on to something safer.’
The times she had done that, making a fool of herself, no doubt, anything for peace and quiet. By the time the elections were over, she was usually worn out.

Stanley had hated her buying him a drink back in the hotel; but she had insisted. ‘What all that crowd would think of me!’ she had said; but here, although it went much against her nature, she put aside her principles, and let him pay; let him set the pace, too. They became elated, and she was sure it would be all right – even having to go back to the soup-specialist’s dinner. They might have avoided that; but too late now.

The barman, perhaps with a contemptuous underlining of their age, shuffled through some records and now put on ‘Night and Day’. For them both, it filled the bar with nostalgia.

‘Come
on
!’ said Stanley. ‘I’ve never danced with you. This always makes me feel … I don’t know.’

‘Oh, I’m a terrible dancer,’ she protested. The Licensed Victuallers’ Association annual dance was the only one she ever went to, and even there stayed in the bar most of the time. Laughing, however, she let herself be helped down off her stool.

He had once fancied himself a good dancer; but, in later years, got no practice, with Ethel being ill, and then dead. Phyl was surprised how light he was on his feet; he bounced her round, holding her firmly against his stomach, his hand pressed to her back, but gently, because of the sunburn. He had perfect rhythm and expertise, side-stepping, reversing, taking masterly control of her.

‘Well, I never!’ she cried. ‘You’re making me quite breathless.’

He rested his cheek against her hair, and closed his eyes, in the old, old way, and seemed to waft her away into a different dimension. It was then that he felt the first twinge, in his left toe. It was doom to him. He kept up the pace, but fell silent. When the record ended, he hoped that she would not want to stay on longer. To return to the hotel and take his gout pills was all he could think about. Some intuition made her refuse another drink. ‘We’ve got to go back to the soup-specialist some time,’ she said. ‘He might even be a good cook.’

‘Surprise, surprise!’ Stanley managed to say, walking with pain towards the door.

Mr Radam was the most abominable cook. They had – in a large cold room with many tables – thin greasy chicken soup, and after that the chicken that had gone through the soup. Then peaches; he brought the tin and opened it before them, as if it were a precious wine, and no hanky-panky going on. He then stood over them, because he had much to say. ‘I was offered a post in Basingstoke. Two thousand pounds a year, and a car and
a house thrown in. But what use is that to a man like me? Besides, Basingstoke has a most detestable climate.’

Stanley sat, tight-lipped, trying not to lose his temper; but this man, and the pain, were driving him mad. He did not – dared not – drink any of the wine he had ordered.

‘Yes, the Basingstoke employment I regarded as not
on
,’ Mr Radam said slangily.

Phyl secretly put out a foot and touched one of Stan’s – the wrong one – and then thought he was about to have a heart attack. He screwed up his eyes and tried to breathe steadily, a slice of peach slithering about in his spoon. It was then she realised what was wrong with him.

‘Oh, sod the peaches,’ she said cheerfully, when Mr Radam had gone off to make coffee, which would be the best they had ever tasted, he had promised. Phyl knew they would not complain about the horrible coffee that was coming. The more monstrous the egoist, she had observed from long practice, the more normal people hope to uphold the fabrication – either for ease, or from a terror of any kind of collapse. She did not know. She was sure, though, as she praised the stringy chicken, hoisting the unlovable man’s self-infatuation a notch higher, that she did so because she feared him falling to pieces. Perhaps it was only fair, she decided, that weakness should get preferential treatment. Whether it would continue to do so, with Stanley’s present change of mood, she was uncertain.

She tried to explain her thoughts to him when, he leaving his coffee, she having gulped hers down, they went to their bedroom. He nodded. He sat on the side of the bed, and put his face into his hands.

‘Don’t let’s go out again,’ she said. ‘We can have a drink in here. I love a bedroom gin, and I brought a bottle in my case.’ She went busily to the wash-basin, and held up a dusty tooth-glass to the light.

‘You have one,’ he said.

He was determined to keep unruffled, but every step she took across the uneven floorboards broke momentarily the steady pain into burning splinters.

‘I’ve got gout,’ he said sullenly. ‘Bloody hell, I’ve got my gout.’

‘I thought so,’ she said. She put down the glass very quietly and came to him. ‘Where?’

He pointed down.

‘Can you manage to get into bed by yourself?’

He nodded.

‘Well, then!’ She smiled. ‘Once you’re in, I know what to do.’

He looked up apprehensively, but she went almost on tiptoe out of the door and closed it softly.

He undressed, put on his pyjamas, and hauled himself on to the bed. When she came back, she was carrying two pillows. ‘Don’t laugh, but
they’re “His” and “His”,’ she said. ‘Now, this is what I do for Charlie. I make a little pillow house for his foot, and it keeps the bedclothes off. Don’t worry, I won’t touch.’

‘On this one night,’ he said.

‘You want to drink a lot of water.’ She put a glass beside him. ‘“My husband’s got a touch of gout,” I told them down there. And I really felt quite married to you when I said it.’

She turned her back to him as she undressed. Her body, set free at last, was creased with red marks, and across her shoulders the bright new skin from peeling had ragged, dirty edges of the old. She stretched her spine, put on a transparent nightgown and began to scratch her arms.

‘Come here,’ he said, unmoving. ‘I’ll do that.’

So gently she pulled back the sheet and lay down beside him that he felt they had been happily married for years. The pang was that this was their only married night and his foot burned so that he thought that it would burst. ‘And it will be a damn sight worse in the morning,’ he thought, knowing the pattern of his affliction. He began with one hand to stroke her itching arm.

Almost as soon as she had put the light off, an ominous sound zigzagged about the room. Switching on again, she said, ‘I’ll get that devil, if it’s the last thing I do. You lie still.’

She got out of bed again and ran round the room, slapping at the walls with her
Reader’s Digest
, until at last she caught the mosquito, and Stanley’s (as was apparent in the morning) blood squirted out.

After that, once more in the dark, they lay quietly. He endured his pain, and she without disturbing him rubbed her flaking skin.

‘So this is our wicked adventure,’ he said bitterly to the moonlit ceiling.

‘Would you rather be on your own?’

‘No, no!’ He groped with his hand towards her.

‘Well, then …’

‘How can you forgive me?’

‘Let’s worry about you, eh? Not me. That sort of thing doesn’t matter much to me nowadays. I only really do it to be matey. I don’t know … by the time Charlie and I have locked up, washed up, done the till, had a bit of something to eat …’

Once, she had been as insatiable as a flame. She lay and remembered the days of her youth; but with interest, not wistfully.

Only once did she wake. It was the best night’s sleep she’d had for a week. Moonlight now fell over the bed, and on one chalky white-washed wall. The sheet draped over them rose in a peak above his feet, so that he looked like a figure on a tomb. ‘If Charlie could see me now,’ she suddenly thought.
She tried not to have a fit of giggles for fear of shaking the bed. Stanley shifted, groaned in his sleep, then went on snoring, just as Charlie did.

He woke often during that night. The sheets were as abrasive as sand-paper. ‘I knew this damn bed was too small,’ he thought. He shifted warily on to his side to look at Phyl who, in her sleep, made funny little whimpering sounds like a puppy. One arm flung above her head looked, in the moonlight, quite black against the pillow. Like going to bed with a coloured woman, he thought. He dutifully took a sip or two of water and then settled back again to endure his wakefulness.

‘Well,
I
was happy,’ she said, wearing her emerald-green coat again, sitting next to him in the plane, fastening her safety-belt.

His face looked worn and grey.

‘Don’t mind me asking,’ she went on, ‘but did he charge for that tea we didn’t order?’

‘Five shillings.’

‘I
knew
it. I wish you’d let me pay my share of everything. After all, it was me as well wanted to go.’

He shook his head, smiling at her. In spite of his prediction, he felt better this departure afternoon, though tired and wary about himself.

‘If only we were taking off on holiday now,’ he said, ‘not coming back. Why can’t we meet up in Torquay or somewhere? Something for me to look forward to,’ he begged her, dabbing his mosquito-bitten forehead with his handkerchief.

‘It was only my hysterectomy got me away this time,’ she said.

They ate, they drank, they held hands under a newspaper, and presently crossed the twilit coast of England, where farther along grey Hove was waiting for him. The trees had not changed colour much and only some – she noticed, as she looked down on them, coming in to land – were yellower.

She knew that it was worse for him. He had to return to his empty flat; she, to a full bar, and on a Saturday, too. She wished there was something she could do to send him off cheerful.

‘To me,’ she said, having refastened her safety-belt, taking his hand again. ‘To me, it was lovely. To me it was just as good as if we had.’

On a Thursday morning, soon after Mrs Mason returned from shopping – in fact she had not yet taken off her hat – a neat young man wearing a dark suit and spectacles, half-gold, half-mock tortoiseshell, and carrying a rolled umbrella, called at the house, and brought her to the edge of ruin. He gave a name, which meant nothing to her, and she invited him in, thinking he was about insurance, or someone from her solicitor. He stood in the sitting-room, looking keenly about him, until she asked him to sit down and tell her his business.

‘Your sister,’ he began. ‘Your sister Marion,’ and Mrs Mason’s hand flew up to her cheek. She gazed at him in alarmed astonishment, then closed her eyes.

In this town, where she had lived all her married life, Mrs Mason was respected, even mildly loved. No one had a word to say against her, so it followed there were no strong feelings either way. She seemed to have been made for widowhood, and had her own little set, for bridge and coffee mornings, and her committee-meetings for the better known charities – such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Her husband had been a successful dentist, and when he died she moved from the house where he had had his practice, into a smaller one in a quiet road nearby. She had no money worries, no worries of any kind. Childless and serene, she lived from day to day. They were almost able to set their clocks by her, her neighbours said, seeing her leaving the house in the mornings, for shopping and coffee at the Oak Beams Tea Room, pushing a basket on wheels, stalking rather on high-heeled shoes, blue-rinsed, rouged. Her front went down in a straight line from her heavy bust, giving her a stately look, the weight throwing her back a little. She took all of life at the same pace – a sign of ageing. She had settled to it a long time ago, and all of her years seemed the same now, although days had slightly varying patterns. Hers was mostly a day-time life, for it was chiefly a woman’s world she had her place in. After tea, her friends’ husbands came home, and then Mrs Mason pottered in her garden, played patience in the winter, or read historical romances from the library. ‘Something light,’ she would
tell the assistant, as if seeking suggestions from a waiter. She could never remember the names of authors or their works, and it was quite a little disappointment when she discovered that she had read a novel before. She had few other disappointments – nothing much more than an unexpected shower of rain, or a tough cutlet, or the girl at the hairdresser’s getting her rinse wrong.

Mrs Mason had always done, and still did, everything expected of women in her position – which was a phrase she often used. She baked beautiful Victoria sponges for bring-and-buy sales, arranged flowers, made
gros-point
covers for her chairs, gave tea parties, even sometimes, daringly, sherry parties with one or two husbands there, much against their will – but this was kept from her. She was occasionally included in other women’s evening gatherings for she made no difference when there was a crowd, and it was an easy kindness. She mingled, and chatted about other people’s holidays and families and jobs. She never drank more than two glasses of sherry, and was a good guest, always exclaiming appreciatively at the sight of canapés, ‘My goodness,
someone’s
been busy!’

Easefully the time had gone by.