Stories (38 page)

And again after work they climbed up, but still there was nothing to be seen of her. Stanley kept repeating that if it was as hot as this tomorrow he wasn’t going to work and that’s all there was to it. But they were all there next day. By ten the temperature was in the middle seventies, and it was eighty long before noon. Harry went to the foreman to say it was impossible to work on the leads in that heat; but the foreman said there was nothing else he could put them on, and they’d have to. At midday they stood, silent, watching the skylight on her roof open, and then she slowly emerged in her white gown, holding a bundle of blanket. She looked at them, gravely, then went to the part of the roof where she was hidden from them. Tom was pleased. He felt she was more his when the other men couldn’t see her. They had taken off their shirts and vests, but now they put them back again, for they felt the sun bruising their flesh. “She must have the hide of a rhino,” said Stanley, tugging at guttering and swearing. They stopped work, and sat in the shade, moving around behind chimney stacks. A woman came to water a yellow window box opposite them. She was middleaged, wearing a flowered summer dress. Stanley said to her: “We need a drink more than them.” She smiled and said: “Better drop down to the pub quick, it’ll be closing in a minute.” They exchanged pleasantries, and she left them with a smile and a wave.

“Not like Lady Godiva,” said Stanley. “She can give us a bit of a chat and a smile.”

“You didn’t whistle at her,” said Tom, reproving.

“Listen to him,” said Stanley, “you didn’t whistle, then?”

But the boy felt as if he hadn’t whistled, as if only Harry and Stanley had. He was making plans, when it was time to knock off work, to get left behind and somehow make his way over to the woman. The weather report said the hot spell was due to break, so he had to move quickly. But there was no chance of being left. The other two decided to knock off work at four, because they were exhausted. As they went down, Tom quickly climbed a parapet and hoisted himself higher by pulling his weight up a chimney. He caught a glimpse of her
lying on her back, her knees up, eyes closed, a brown woman lolling in the sun. He slipped and clattered down, as Stanley looked for information: “She’s gone down,” he said. He felt as if he had protected her from Stanley, and that she must be grateful to him. He could feel the bond between the woman and himself.

Next day, they stood around on the landing below the roof, reluctant to climb up into the heat. The woman who had lent Harry the blanket came out and offered them a cup of tea. They accepted gratefully, and sat around Mrs. Pritchett’s kitchen an hour or so, chatting. She was married to an airline pilot. A smart blonde, of about thirty, she had an eye for the handsome sharp-faced Stanley; and the two teased each other while Harry sat in a corner, watching, indulgent, though his expression reminded Stanley that he was married. And young Tom felt envious of Stanley’s ease in badinage; felt, too, that Stanley’s getting off with Mrs. Pritchett left his romance with the woman on the roof safe and intact.

“I thought they said the heat wave’d break,” said Stanley, sullen, as the time approached when they really would have to climb up into the sunlight.

“You don’t like it, then?” asked Mrs. Pritchett.

“All right for some,” said Stanley. “Nothing to do but lie about as if it was a beach up there. Do you ever go up?”

“Went up once,” said Mrs. Pritchett. “But it’s a dirty place up there, and it’s too hot.”

“Quite right too,” said Stanley.

Then they went up, leaving the cool neat little flat and the friendly Mrs. Pritchett.

As soon as they were up they saw her. The three men looked at her, resentful at her ease in this punishing sun. Then Harry said, because of the expression on Stanley’s face: “Come on, we’ve got to pretend to work, at least.”

They had to wrench another length of guttering that ran beside a parapet out of its bed, so that they could replace it. Stanley took it in his two hands, tugged, swore, stood up. “Fuck it,” he said, and sat down under a chimney. He lit a cigarette. “Fuck them,” he said. “What do they think we are, lizards? I’ve got blisters all over my hands.” Then he jumped up and climbed over the roofs and stood with his back to them.
He put his fingers either side of his mouth and let out a shrill whistle. Tom and Harry squatted, not looking at each other, watching him. They could just see the woman’s head, the beginnings of her brown shoulders. Stanley whistled again. Then he began stamping with his feet, and whistled and yelled and screamed at the woman, his face getting scarlet. He seemed quite mad, as he stamped and whistled, while the woman did not move, she did not move a muscle.

“Barmy,” said Tom.

“Yes,” said Harry, disapproving.

Suddenly the older man came to a decision. It was, Tom knew, to save some sort of scandal or real trouble over the woman. Harry stood up and began packing tools into a length of oily cloth. “Stanley,” he said, commanding. At first Stanley took no notice, but Harry said: “Stanley, we’re packing it in, I’ll tell Matthew.”

Stanley came back, cheeks mottled, eyes glaring.

“Can’t go on like this,” said Harry. “It’ll break in a day or so. I’m going to tell Matthew we’ve got sunstroke, and if he doesn’t like it, it’s too bad.” Even Harry sounded aggrieved, Tom noted. The small, competent man, the family man with his grey hair, who was never at a loss, sounded really off balance. “Come on,” he said, angry. He fitted himself into the open square in the roof, and went down, watching his feet on the ladder. Then Stanley went, with not a glance at the woman. Then Tom, who, his throat beating with excitement, silently promised her on a backward glance: Wait for me, wait, I’m coming.

On the pavement Stanley said: “I’m going home.” He looked white now, so perhaps he really did have sunstroke. Harry went off to find the foreman, who was at work on the plumbing of some flats down the street. Tom slipped back, not into the building they had been working on, but the building on whose roof the woman lay. He went straight up, no one stopping him. The skylight stood open, with an iron ladder leading up. He emerged on to the roof a couple of yards from her. She sat up, pushing back her black hair with both hands. The scarf across her breasts bound them tight, and brown flesh bulged around it. Her legs were brown and smooth. She stared at him in silence. The boy stood grinning, foolish, claiming the tenderness he expected from her.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I … I came to … make your acquaintance,” he stammered, grinning, pleading with her.

They looked at each other, the slight, scarlet-faced excited boy, and the serious, nearly naked woman. Then, without a word, she lay down on her brown blanket, ignoring him.

“You like the sun, do you?” he enquired of her glistening back.

Not a word. He felt panic, thinking of how she had held him in her arms, stroked his hair, brought him where he sat, lordly, in her bed, a glass of some exhilarating liquor he had never tasted in life. He felt that if he knelt down, stroked her shoulders, her hair, she would turn and clasp him in her arms.

He said: “The sun’s all right for you, isn’t it?”

She raised her head, set her chin on two small fists. “Go away,” she said. He did not move. “Listen,” she said, in a slow reasonable voice, where anger was kept in check, though with difficulty; looking at him, her face weary with anger, “if you get a kick out of seeing women in bikinis, why don’t you take a sixpenny bus ride to the Lido? You’d see dozens of them, without all this mountaineering.”

She hadn’t understood him. He felt her unfairness pale him. He stammered: “But I like you, I’ve been watching you and …”

“Thanks,” she said, and dropped her face again, turned away from him.

She lay there. He stood there. She said nothing. She had simply shut him out. He stood, saying nothing at all, for some minutes. He thought: She’ll have to say something if I stay. But the minutes went past, with no sign of them in her, except in the tension of her back, her thighs, her arms—the tension of waiting for him to go.

He looked up at the sky, where the sun seemed to spin in heat; and over the roofs where he and his mates had been earlier. He could see the heat quivering where they had worked. And they expect us to work in these conditions! he thought, filled with righteous indignation. The woman hadn’t moved. A bit of hot wind blew her black hair softly; it shone, and was iridescent. He remembered how he had stroked it last night.

Resentment of her at last moved him off and away down the ladder, through the building, into the street. He got drunk then, in hatred of her.

Next day when he woke the sky was grey. He looked at the wet grey and thought, vicious: Well, that’s fixed you, hasn’t it now? That’s fixed you good and proper.

The three men were at work early on the cool leads, surrounded by damp drizzling roofs where no one came to sun themselves, black roofs, slimy with rain. Because it was cool now, they would finish the job that day, if they hurried.

I
t would be easy to say that I picked up a knife, slit open my side, took my heart out, and threw it away; but unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as that. Not that I, like everyone else, had not often wanted to do it. No, it happened differently, and not as I expected.

It was just after I had had a lunch and a tea with two different men. My lunch partner I had lived with for (more or less) four and seven-twelfths years. When he left me for new pastures, I spent two years, or was it three, half-dead, and my heart was a stone, impossible to carry about, considering all the other things weighing on one. Then I slowly, and with difficulty, got free, because my heart cherished a thousand adhesions to my first love—though from another point of view he could be legitimately described as either my second real love (my father being the first) or my third (my brother intervening).

As the folk song has it:

But if one were going to look at the thing from outside, without insight, he could be seen as (perhaps, I forget) the thirteenth, but to do that means disregarding the inner emotional truth. For we all know that those affairs or entanglements one
has between serious loves, though they may number dozens and stretch over years, don’t really count.

This way of looking at things creates a number of unhappy people, for it is well known that what doesn’t really count for me might very well count for you. But there is no way of getting over this difficulty, for a serious love is the most important business in life, or nearly so. At any rate, most of us are engaged in looking for it. Even when we are in fact being very serious indeed with one person we still have an eighth of an eye cocked in case some stranger unexpectedly encountered might turn out to be even more serious. We are all entirely in agreement that we are in the right to taste, test, sip and sample a thousand people on our way to the real one. It is not too much to say that in our circles tasting and sampling is probably the second most important activity, the first being earning money. Or to put it another way, if you are serious about this thing, you go on laying everybody that offers until something clicks and you’re all set to go.

I have digressed from an earlier point: that I regarded this man I had lunch with (we call him A) as my first love; and still do, despite the Freudians, who insist on seeing my father as A and possibly my brother as B, making my (real) first love C. And despite, also, those who might ask: What about your two husbands and all those affairs?

What about them? I did not really love them, the way I loved A.

I had lunch with him. Then, quite by chance, I had tea with B. When I say B, here, I mean my second serious love, not my brother, or the little boys I was in love with between the ages of five and fifteen, if we are going to take fifteen (arbitrarily) as the point of no return … which last phrase is in itself a pretty brave defiance of the secular arbiters.

In between A and ? (my count) there were a good many affairs, or samples, but they didn’t score. ? and I clicked, we went off like a bomb, though not quite as simply as A and I had clicked, because my heart was bruised, sullen, and suspicious because of A’s throwing me over. Also there were all those ligaments and adhesions binding me to A still to be loosened, one by one. However, for a time ? and I got on like a house on fire, and then we came to grief. My heart was again a ton weight in my side.

Having lunch with A, then tea with B, two men who between them had consumed a decade of my precious years (I am not counting the test or trial affairs in between) and, it is fair to say, had balanced all the delight (plenty and intense) with misery (oh Lord, Lord)—moving from one to the other, in the course of an afternoon, conversing amiably about this and that, with meanwhile my heart giving no more than slight reminiscent tugs, the fish of memory at the end of a long slack line …