The Love Object (6 page)

‘Is that you, Dad?’ She was upstairs when she heard him come in. The ‘Dad’ was an affectionate word since one of the three times when Mr Farley was almost a father.

‘It’s me,’ he said. She came down in a flowered summer dress, her face newly-freckled, because she’d done a bit of gardening while the dinner was cooking. Afterwards she undressed upstairs, and had a good look at herself in the mirror. If the neighbours knew they would have the Welfare Officer on her.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said to Mr Farley, as she got his slippers from under the stairs. He put them on, then walked across to the laid table and put three pound notes on her side plate.

‘What’s that for?’ she asked.

‘Well, I got enough hints,’ he said.

‘No you didn’t,’ she said, ‘and not even a card with it.’ She sulked a bit. If she looked too happy he might take the money back. Happiness was the one thing he could not abide.

‘What use is a card?’ he said.

‘I may be sentimental, but don’t forget I’m a woman.’ she said. The three-piece suite was hers and she could hardly contain herself with excitement.

After dinner he went out and got a card which had ‘To my dear wife’ on the outside.

‘I suppose I have a lot of the schoolgirl in me,’ she said, putting it on the mantelshelf. She was doing everything to humour him. They discussed what shirt he’d wear on the outing and she said she’d make sandwiches in case he got peckish on the journey. They were having lunch, of course, in Brighton.

‘Don’t fall for any young girl in a bathing-suit,’ she said.

‘Is that what you think I’ll be doing?’ he said.

‘Well, who knows? A handsome man, fancy free.’

That pleased him. He offered to share some of his beer. That night she couldn’t very well refuse him his rights, but it was her friend’s body she imagined that circumferenced her own.

Next day when Mrs Captain Hagerty was shopping, Mrs Farley took the opportunity to telephone the furniture shop. She arranged to call in Saturday to pay the balance on the suite and asked if they could deliver it the same morning. The man – she recognized him as the one who took her money each week – said certainly.

On the Friday night she slept badly. For one thing Mr Farley had to be up early to catch the coach at Victoria Station. Also she was in a tremor over her friend’s visit. Would he like the lounge? Would the pork chops be a little greasy? What would she wear? She’d offer him a sherry when he first arrived, to break the ice. She thought of the doorbell ringing, of a kiss in the hallway, then walking ahead into the room where the three-piece suite would instantly catch his eye. And thinking of these things she fell fast asleep.

‘No, no, no.’ She wakened from a nightmare with tears streaming down her face. She’d been dreaming that she met him at a bus stop and his face was more wretched than ever. He couldn’t come, he said. His wife had found out and threatened to kill herself. He had to promise never to see Mrs Farley again. In the dream Mrs Farley said she would go to his wife and beg her to show some mercy. She ran to his house although he called after her not to.

His wife turned out to have the long, coarse face of one of the women Mrs Farley worked for.

‘If you let me see your husband every Saturday for an hour, I’ll scrub your house from top to bottom,’ Mrs Farley said. The coarse-faced woman seated on a chair nodded to this and from nowhere a bucket of water and a scrubbing-brush appeared. Mrs Farley knelt in that small room and began to scrub the linoleum which had some sort of pattern. She scrubbed with all her might, knowing that it was bringing her back to her friend. Just when she scrubbed the last corner, a wall receded and the room grew larger, and the more she scrubbed the greater the room became, until finally she was scrubbing a limitless area with no walls in sight. She turned to protest, but the coarse-faced woman had vanished and all she heard was the echo of her own voice cursing and sobbing and begging to be let out. She knew that her friend was at the bus stop waiting for her to come back, and greater than the pain of losing him was the injustice. He would think she had betrayed him. It was then she cried ‘No, no, no’ in her dream and wakened to find herself in a sweat. She got up and took an aspirin. At least it was a relief to know it was a dream. Her legs quaked as she stood at the window and looked out at the garden that was grey in the oncoming dawn. Sometimes she turned to glance at Mr Farley in case he should be awake. The sheet rose and fell over his paunch – he had thrown off the blanket. He was snoring slightly. Tomorrow he was going away, far away to the seaside, on an outing with thirty other men. Thirty other wives would have a day alone. And it came to her again, the conviction that he would die in exactly four years when he was sixty-six. A man in the flat downstairs had died at sixty-six, and because he too had been fat, and grumpy, and had a paunch, Mrs Farley believed that a similar fate awaited her husband. She would be fifty, not young, but not too old. The widow downstairs had bloomed in the last few months and begun to wear loud colours and sing when she was tidying her kitchen. Guiltily Mrs Farley got back into bed and prayed for sleep. Without sleep her face would look pinched and tomorrow she would need to look nice. She shook. That dream had really unnerved her.

By morning she had composed herself. She cooked a big breakfast for Mr Farley and stood at the gate while he walked out of sight towards the main road. Then she dashed back into the house, washed up, dusted the lounge, made a shopping list. By nine o’clock she was at the furniture shop. The assistant smiled as she came forward with the money. When she had paid he murmured something about not being sure whether they could deliver on a Saturday.

‘But you promised, you promised,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to deliver it, where’s the manager?’

Being easily intimidated the assistant fled to find the manager. She walked back and forth, hit her clenched fists together and finally to distract herself she went across to look at the cut-glass vases. Her face in the mirror of the display table was purple. Bad temper played havoc with her circulation. She held a vase in her hand and with her thumb felt the sharp, cut edges. Her eyes were fixed on the door through which he’d disappeared – if only he’d hurry. The vase she held in her hand cost nine pounds and shivering she put it down. ‘Lovely to look at, delightful to hold, but if you break me, consider me sold.’ An accident like that could wreck her plans for weeks, to think that the vase cost the same as the three-piece suite, to think there were people who could buy such a thing and run the risk of breaking it.

‘Madam, I’m very sorry but I’m afraid we can’t.’ A sly, unaccommodating person he was.

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t let me down.’

‘It’s not me, madam, I’d be only too glad. The manager has got on to them now and they say they simply can’t.’

‘Where is he?’ Mrs Farley asked, and instinctively she went towards his office door. She’d get that suite delivered if she had to carry it on her back.

The manager met her halfway across the shop. He wore thick, blue-tinted spectacles and she could not be sure what his attitude was, but he sounded sorry enough.

‘Is it very urgent, madam?’

‘It’s my whole life,’ she said, not knowing why she said such a rash thing, and then heard herself telling him an elaborate lie about how her son was graduating as a doctor that day and how his friends were coming in to tea and she wanted something for them to sit on. As a father himself the manager said he understood how she felt, and he would have to do something. Another customer stared, as if Mrs Farley had admitted to some terrible crime, then, when she caught his eye, he slunk away, embarrassed; maybe he thought he might be drawn into an argument or asked to contribute money.

‘We can’t disappoint your boy on a day like this, can we?’ the manager said. Mrs Farley thought it the saddest thing anyone had ever said to her. If Mr Farley was listening, or her friend, she’d die!

The upshot was that the manager got another van from a removal firm who were willing to deliver the stuff. There was an extra charge of a pound. Mrs Farley protested. The manager said she could either wait until Monday and have it delivered free, in the shop van, or settle for the removers. She gave in of course.

The movers arrived in an enormous pantechnicon, and she was worried that some of the neighbours might mention it to Mr Farley and ask if he was moving house or something. That was why, when they pulled up, she asked them could they move their van down the street a little, as it was blocking a motor-car entrance. They were very nice about it.

The men put the three pieces of furniture where she told them and then, half-heartedly, she offered them a cup of tea. That delayed her another twenty minutes. When they were gone she went into the front room to re-affirm what she already knew. The three-piece suite was not a success; it did nothing for the room. It was dark and drab. Mr Farley would be right in thinking that it was a mistake. Frayed threads, dimmed stains, a leftover from someone else’s life. What had she been thinking of the day she chose it? Of him, her friend, the man she was going to see in a couple of hours. She got a clothes brush and began to brush the couch carefully, hoping that when she’d done it it would look plush. She came on a ludo button that was stuck down in one of the corners and for a minute she thought it was a shilling. After she had done it carefully with the clothes brush she got out the vacuum cleaner and cleaned it thoroughly all over.

Just in case anything went wrong, Mrs Farley and her friend had previously arranged to meet outside the pub. When he saw her come towards him he knew there was something amiss. She held her head down and wore her flat, canvas shoes.

‘Hello.’ He came forward to greet her.

‘He didn’t go,’ she said. ‘He got suspicious at the last minute.’

For the two hours Mrs Farley had debated what she should say to her friend. One thing was sure: she dare not have him in the front room because he would catch her out in her boasting. Always when she described that room she described the three-piece suite. What he would see was a drab piece of furniture in a drab room where brown paint prevailed. Mr Farley did his own decorating and insisted on brown because it did not have to be renewed so often. She could not let him see it. He would say she was no better than his wife and she did not want that.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Come and have a drink.’

‘You’re all dressed up,’ she said. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt and a lovely striped tie. He looked wealthy. He looked like the sort of man who would have a wallet full of fivers and a home with easy chairs, and a piano.

‘I’m sorry,’ she was saying to his disappointed face.

‘We’ll have a nice day anyhow,’ he told her. He worried if the pound he had would see them through. He had not banked on spending any money other than the drink in the pub when they met and a small bottle of liqueur as a little gift to her.

‘What will you have?’ He’d brought her into the lounge bar and sat her on a high upholstered couch that circled the wall.

‘Anything,’ she said. He got her a sherry.

‘Cheers,’ he said, and pushed her cheeks upwards with his hand until she appeared to be smiling.

‘I dreamt about you last night,’ she said.

‘A nice dream?’ He smiled so gently.

‘A lovely dream.’ She couldn’t disappoint him any more.

Mrs Farley insisted on buying lunch. They ate in the restaurant that adjoined the pub and they talked in whispers. It was a lovely place with embossed wallpaper and candlesticks on the tables. Everywhere she looked she saw wall couches and easy, comfortable chairs. He wondered if they put candles into the candlesticks at night and she said they probably didn’t because there wasn’t a trace of candle grease. Under the table they gripped hands every few minutes and looked into each other’s eyes, desperate to say something.

The lunch cost over a pound, the amount she had set aside anyhow to get the pork chops and sherry and things. While she was in the ladies’ room, he debated whether he should propose pictures, or a bus ride around London, or a short boat trip up the Thames. With his money, it had to be just one of those.

They settled on the pictures. They were both thinking that they could snuggle down and have a taste of the comfort they might have had in Mrs Farley’s front room.

The picture turned out to be an English comedy about crooks, and though the handful of people in the cinema laughed, neither Mrs Farley nor her friend found it funny at all. It bore no relation to their own lives, it had nothing to do with their predicament. They said, when they came out, that it was a pity they’d stayed inside so long as the day was scorching.

‘Do I look a show?’ she asked. Her mouth was swollen from kisses.

‘You look lovely.’

What to do next?

‘Let’s have a walk by the river, and then tea,’ he said. He knew a cheap cafe up that way.

‘Are you superstitious?’ she asked. He said not very. She said she’d broken something that day and was afraid she’d break two other things. A splinter from a kitchen cup was in her finger.

‘I’d like that black one,’ he said. He’d been admiring boats that were moored to the riverside. He’d rather have a boat than a car, he told her.

They’d sail away under arched bridges, over locks, out to a changeless blue sea.

‘Is it true that the blue lagoon isn’t blue?’ she asked.

‘We’ll go there and see when I get my boat,’ he said.

She would wear trousers and a raincoat on the boat, but when they came ashore at Monte Carlo and places she would have flowered dresses.

‘You never asked me what I broke,’ she said.

‘Oh, tell me.’

‘A cup.’

‘A cup.’

Possibly he thought it was silly but it worried her.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘Get a couple of old cracked ones and break them and then you won’t have anything to worry about.’

The cups reminded them both of home and duty. He would have to go shortly.

By five thirty they had talked and walked for an hour. But they had said nothing. He apologized for the bad picture, she said she was sorry she couldn’t bring him in.