A Kind of Loving (44 page)

Anyway, he takes a week of his holidays and stops till Ingrid comes home. They tell her they really should have kept her ten days or a fortnight but they let her come out providing she takes things very easy for a bit. Then Mr Rothwell's away back to his
job and we're like we always were, only worse. It's like we're
living in a dream, waiting for things to get back to normal, what
ever that might be. Ma Rothwell hardly ever speaks to me and I
don't say a dicky bird more to her than I have to.

It's Ingrid who gets my back up more now. Weeks after she's
home her mother's still telling her how poorly she is and she
mustn't do anything strenuous, and take it easy all the time. And
Ingrid laps it all up and sits about all day as though she's in the
last stages of a decline. To me she's just a pain in the neck, neither
use nor ornament, sitting about like an invalid on Scarborough
Spa all day and keeping me at a distance in bed. It goes on so
long I tell her she ought to put a notice up: 'Fragile, don't
touch.'

'How long's this going on?' I ask her one night when she's
given me the cold shoulder again.,'You'll have to snap out of it sometime, y'know.'

' What d'you mean "snap out of it"?'

'What I say. You can't act up on the strength of your mis
carriage for ever.'

'So you think I'm just putting on an act, do you?'

'Mebbe you don't know it. I think you an' your mother
between you have got you into a frame of mind where you really
think you're still poorly; and I'm getting a bit tired of it.'

'Always thinking of yourself,' she says. 'Never any considera
tion for me.'

'I married you when you were in trouble, didn't I? It's three
months since the accident now and it's time I could make a
pass at you without feeling like a dirty old man.'

She's drawn herself up all stiff and rigid now, just like her
mother; If she knew how much like her mother she looks and how
much I hate Ma Rothwell I don't think she'd risk getting on her high horse so much.

'If that's all you can think of,' she says, 'you'll just have to
show a bit of will-power, that's all,'

It might be her mother talking, the way she says it. I look at her
and I can hardly see the hot little bit I used to snogg with in the
park. I don't know what's happened to her. I think they must
have taken away her sex glands with the kid.

'Till when?' I say.' Till your mother gives the word? You know
what your mother 'ud like to do, don't you, or are you too dense
to see it? She'd like to make me do something that'd give her
an excuse to push you into getting a divorce. Well, she's going
the right way about it, I can tell you. I could have packed it in
the day you had your accident for two pins. It took some doing,
coming back here after the way your mother treated me.'

'Why did you come back, then?'

'Because we're married, and you'd got a plateful of trouble
without me adding to it by walking out.'

'Very noble and kind,' she says, real sarcastic, as though she doesn't believe a word I've said.

' Well you think of a better reason, then.'

'I don't have to thank
you
for doing what any normal husband
would do, do I?'

I could hit her, honest; I'm coming a bit nearer to it every
day, and I've never struck a bint in my life.

'No, you don't. But it looks like I've to go down on my knees to get you to do what any normal wife would do. Well, I'll tell you straight now; I'm getting fed-up with this lot. I was all for
making the best of it, but if we're married we're married. I'm not
going to be just the lodger with special permission to share your
bed providing I keep my hands to myself.'

And so on, etcetera, etcetera. And it gets us nowhere except
maybe a bit nearer scratching each other's eyes out and dropping all pretence of making a go of it.

It's not hard to see that all these little dos are leading the way
to a big dust-up. And it's not long in coming now.

I think it starts over a new winter coat for Ingrid. It's a small thing that's really a big thing and there's more to it than meets
the eye. Anyway, Ingrid's got a wardrobe full of clothes, and
I mean that. I think she must have spent all her money on them before we were married. Well, she needs a new winter coat like
I need a new mother-in-law and besides that we've more or less
agreed between us to do without things we don't really need so's
we can save every penny towards the time when we can have a
place of our own. And now here's Ma Rothwell talking Ingrid
into spending twelve or fifteen quid of my money on something
she can do without and never miss it. I tell her as much and we
get lined up, Ma Rothwell on one side, me on the other, and
Ingrid in the middle. As it happens I'm wanting to go out to the
pictures that night and ask Ingrid if she fancies it, thinking that us
going out will break the argument up before it gets going. Straight
away her mother tells her that there's some television programme
on she said she wanted to see.

So there we are: it's either pictures or television. On the face
of it, that is. But I know that here and now we're going to settle
something. It's Ma Rothwell or me, that's how I see it, and now's
the time for Ingrid to show her mother she's got a husband and
he comes first.

She ums and ahs for a bit while I get wilder and wilder, and
then before she can say which she's going to do I settle it for her
when I grab my coat and slam out in a black rage.

I'm still trembling on the bus. I feel the only way to relieve my feelings is by violence. I want to break windows, smash furniture
up, and bash my fist into somebody's face. My idea of delight
would be to get my hands round Ma Rothwell's neck and squeeze
and squeeze till her stupid eyes drop out of her stupid head. I
don't know what's happening to me. I never used to be like this.
I'm beginning to get an idea of how blokes can be driven to
murder.

III

I'm actually going up the steps to the pictures and feeling in my
back pocket for the money when it strikes me I don't really want
to go in at all now, and I stop. A bloke blunders into me from
behind and I give him a 'sorry' over my shoulder as I turn round
and go back to the pavement. I stand there and think how I'm going to spend the evening. I think about all my old mates and
wonder what they're doing. I had a lot of mates and we had some
good times together. Now I've nearly lost track of them. I
haven't seen most of them in months. Being married's put me out
of circulation and I haven't felt like meeting them anyway after the Charlie I made of myself. It's starting to drizzle and this only
makes me feel lower. I walk up the road a bit and take shelter
under an archway that leads between the shop fronts into a little
cobbled back street. I stand there for a minute or two with a
smart bint in a blue raincoat waiting for her boy friend. He comes
along nearly straight away and collects her, a big fair lad in a short
raincoat, and they walk off arm-in-arm to the pictures. I look
round and see this pub-sign swinging up the street and I go under
the archway and up to the door.

There's a bottle-blonde behind the bar in a frock made out
of a sort of ice-blue chainmail that sparkles and glitters in the
light reflected like splinters in the mirror that covers the top half
of the wall behind the wine and spirit bottles and upturned glasses.
Her skin's a
nice soft creamy pinkish colour and she has a
black beauty spot on her left cheek. I don't know what colour
she'd be at half past seven in the morning with no heat in the
bedroom and the curtains stiff with frost but I like it well enough
now. The colour spreads from her neck on to her chest, which is
nicely covered and promises well for lower down. I sit there with
half a pint of bitter in front of me and watch her. I've always had
a fancy for bints like this; real tough bints, hard as nails, know
all the answers; ready to put blokes like me in their place in two
ticks, but as sexy and willing as you could wish for with the
right kind of chap. She comes and reaches down for something under the bar right in front of where I'm sitting and I see further
into the top of her frock than's good for me in my frame of
mind. Now, I think, if I'd had plenty of cash I could have picked
up with a bint like this and I'd have been landed. Sex without
complications, and love could wait till the right girl came along.
Instead of that it all gets mixed up and complicated and before
you know where you are you're miles and miles up the creek
with not a paddle in sight. And then I get the old dragging feeling
inside me, because I'm married, hooked, and even if I turn my
head this very minute and see the right girl standing behind me with Welcome, Vic written all over her face there's not a damn
thing I can do about it. I'm a marked man.

Well while I'm thinking this, which isn't more than a few seconds, the blonde's tinkering about under the bar and I've got
my peepers trained into the neck of her frock, but without really
seeing what's there, which shows what sort of a state I'm in. Then
she straightens up and this chainmail flashes and sparkles and
brings me back. I know she's seen me looking and I'm caught a
bit short; but I can't say I wasn't looking really and I didn't see
anything beyond the first glimpse. So I try to look her in the
eye like a proper man of the world and for a couple of seconds she
looks back, real cold and hard, like she's a duke's wife and I'm
some little runt of a footman who's tried it on. Then she moves
off along the counter and I see her wedding ring as she lifts her
hand to work the beer pump.

'It's no good giving Maude the eye,' says somebody at my side. 'She's spoken for.'

I look round as Percy Walshaw pulls himself up on to the
next buffet.

'Doesn't look as though that'd stop her, Percy.'

'Ah,' he says, 'you can't always go on appearances. She's as
respectable as the vicar's wife.'

'Which vicar's that?' I say, and Percy laughs as the blonde
bint comes along behind the counter and says good evening to
him. He says good evening back and calls her by her first name.

'The usual?' she says, and Percy nods. 'Please.'

She takes a tankard off a hook and draws half a pint of bitter.
I watch Percy take a good pull at it.

'How come the tankard?'

'I'm a regular, old cock. They look after the regulars.'

Still the same old Percy, I think to myself. He's a bloke about
my age who I was at Grammar School with for a while, till he
left among a lot of rumour that he'd been kicked out for having a bash at one of the lasses during the lunch-hour (I never did know how much truth there was in it) and went to a boarding school in
the Midlands somewhere. Good pals we were for a bit, me and
Percy, and though we don't see so much of one another nowadays
we've always kept friendly. What I always liked about Percy was
that he didn't throw his money in your face, though he liked to
make the best of it. I had to find out he lived in a house with seven
bedrooms and they had a maid and a housekeeper, and I liked
him all the more for not bragging about it or thinking it made him any different from the other lads. I liked him even at his barmiest,
and he could be pretty barmy at times, believe you me. I reckon
it came from having too much money too young and an old
man who didn't lick the tar out of him often enough. You don't
have to look twice now to see there's plenty of lolly hanging on to
him. He looks the part in this checked cap and fur-collared short
overcoat that must have set him back nigh on thirty quid. And if I
know him he won't have walked here either, nor come on the
bus.