After Purple (52 page)

“I don't feel well,” I faltered. “I must lie down.”

Adrian stopped sweeping. “Thea …” he murmured. I could see a “darling” sneaking out, but he swept it strictly up again. “You see, Janet thought it might be more … well …
convenient
if you …” His voice tailed off. The crumbs fell on the floor.

“Yes?” I prompted. I fixed my gaze unflinchingly on the pupil of his left eye and challenged him and Janet to turn me out. It's a trick I learnt with dogs. It intimidates even fierce Alsatians. Karma's the only dog it's never worked with. I wondered what they'd done with him. You can't take half an Afghan hound to Kashmir. I could hear him howling in my head.

Adrian had dropped the brush and was twisting his thumbs together the way he does when he has to tell a boy he's been expelled. I never heard what Janet thought, what chill little guest-house or cosy prison cell she'd booked for me, as far away from Twickenham as possible.

“Look, Jan,” he whispered. “She'd better stay here.
Please
. Just tonight. She's shocked.”

Oh, so it was Jan, now, was it. He'd be darlinging her next, snuggling up to those double-bolster breasts while I shivered in the spare room, and Leo and Otto coupled in the back of a lorry speeding towards the border, one coat flung over their two panting bodies …

Adrian was still whispering. He'd never learnt to do it softly enough. “You take her up, Jan. She looks awful.”

Janet marched me into the spare room which was cold and so square-rule tidy, it seemed to recoil from me in distaste. Everything was green and slippery. There was a green satin bedspread and a matching pond-green frill concealing the legs of the dressing-table. The walls were shiny and the ceiling glared. Even the Kleenex were green, those fancy-packaged ones meant only for admiring, not for weeping into. There was a fringed shade on the bedside light, the colour of a sick weeping willow, and green crocheted doilies smirking on the dressing-table. Everywhere I looked, Leo and Otto were whispering in comers, snuggling under blankets, slipping off their clothes. I held on to the wardrobe and tried to find my way back from Kashmir. It was cold and dark and lonely on the roads.

Janet flicked a non-existent speck of dust from the bedside table and turned the counterpane down, as if she feared I might contaminate it. I undressed in front of her. My legs were longer than hers and at least I had a waist. If she could parade her Devon-cream complexion at any hour of the day or night, and point those vast tits at me across the table, then it was time I answered back. Leo liked small breasts. More like a man, I suppose. I could see his hands caressing Otto's nipples. I stood there naked while Janet pursed her lips and stared at a picture of a vase (green) of flowers (mauve) which hung just above the bed.

“Haven't you got a nightdress?”

I didn't bother answering. She'd seen me arrive with nothing more than my sheepskin and a shoulder-bag, so, “Haven't you got a nightdress?” meant “Slut, whore — that Camembert was meant to last all week and why can't you choose a boyfriend who's
respectable?”

She returned with the sort of garment they sell in mail-order catalogues for the overweight and house-bound. It had long sleeves and a high neck and was made in some school-knicker fabric in a shade they probably described as “Dawn” or “Oyster”, but was more like puke. It even smelt of Janet, though, mercifully, I couldn't see a ‘J' on it.

“Night,” I said, crawling in between the slimy nylon sheets which lapped damply at my legs.

“The bathroom's next door,” she primmed. That was Janetesque for “Decent people wash themselves before they get into bed.” But if she thought I was going to drag myself out again and waste their precious, budgeted, cheap-rate, cut-price water, then she was seriously mistaken. I'd been travelling for an entire day and a night, sitting on a step another day, and now my whole life and God and home had been blown to pieces, and all Janet could suggest was soap and flannel. They weren't even necessary. The way she sterilised everything, I'd probably be fumigated just by lying on her bed linen. I could feel the germs simply giving up, dropping off me in groaning little clusters as they whiffed the Ibcol on the sheets.

I couldn't sleep. I tried to count germs instead of sheep, but I kept limping after Leo, stopping in squalid cafés on roaring foreign motorways, watching Otto's soft fairish hair drip on to Leo's shoulder. They were sharing everything — coffee, curry, beds, bodies, mouths. I had driven Leo away by landing myself in hospital with a bill he couldn't pay, by being poor and dim and ill and unemployable, by messing up my looks. He had turned to a man whose soul was a piece of Sung — a flawless specimen neither cracked, nor chipped nor riveted. A man with a proper mouth whose lips were always open, and a proper four-square father who had grown up with him and played with him and had only finally died so that Otto could inherit all his Ming. A man he could get it up for, a man he didn't despise, a man he had to deceive me over because he had invested all his wealth and passion in him. There had been a hundred thousand clues and I had turned my back on all of them. The time they spent together, the way they sat so close, the Ganymede Club, the bum-boys in dark glasses, the sleazy bars they haunted, the naked greed in Otto's boiled-fish eyes.

Leo had never said “I love you” because he was saving it for Otto,
saying
it to Otto whispering it in bars, in bed, in ecstasy. I could hear him now, that caressing dark-brown voice rubbing against Otto like the bristles of a beard. They were both tangled up in bed with me, cramping me, ignoring me, taking up all the room. I punched and kicked them out again. Better to be alone than be betrayed.

I lay in the darkness listening to the purr and leer of their departing car. It was cold and clammy in the nylon sheets. I had taken off the nightie because I didn't like the feeling of being wrapped from neck to toe in Janet. There was only one blanket, a thin, grudging sort of dishcloth thing she had probably bought because it said “non-iron, non-crease, no-fuss”, not to mention non-warm, no-use. I crept out of bed and opened the bottom drawer of the dressing-table. I hoped I'd find one of Adrian's sweaters which would come down to my thighs and smell of Mars bars and medieval kings and pencil sharpenings.

There weren't any sweaters, only a stack of baby clothes wrapped in tissue paper. I stared at the matinée jackets with their miniscule pearl buttons, the tiny Viyella nighties and midget woollen vests. There were three dozen towelling nappies, a white fluffy shawl, a muslin christening gown; two little bibs with bears on, even a bobbing bunny for hanging in a pram. Everything was white — white and dead like Janet's baby was. Opening that drawer was like ripping off a Band-Aid. I'd thought I was grazed before, but now my wounds all shrieked and poured with blood. Lucian, Lourdes, Ray, God; my cold, hopeless suitcase still shivering on the doorstep, Mike gasping and dying in a foreign hospital, Ray in mortal sin. And roaring, revving, honking through them all, Leo and Otto blazing into Kashmir with the sun shining on their wild and spoken love.

I picked up a tiny dress with smocking on the front and pink ribbon threaded through the sleeves. Janet had wanted a girl-child. She'd had a boy and I'd murdered him. These were the corpse's clothes. Increase and multiply, the priest had said and all I had done was kill. Leo was in Otto's bum in Kashmir, and Karma was in kennels, and Janet's baby was rotting in a hole. I didn't cry. It would only disturb Adrian as he nuzzled into Janet in the master bedroom.

I carried the baby clothes very gently in my arms as if they were still living. I laid them on the bed, spreading them underneath me like a nest. I kept the shawl to one side while I snuggled in and arranged my limbs against the towelling nappies and the little piles of vests. It was warmer now, and softer. I tucked the shawl across me and pressed the bobbing bunny between my breasts. I closed my eyes. The road to Kashmir dwindled, softened, slumped, until it was only a length of soft white baby ribbon curling through a sleeve.

I slept.

Adrian woke me in the morning with a cup of tea. I refused to open my eyes. Babies sleep nineteen hours out of twenty-four. All I wanted was to be a baby — to lie on my back and kick my legs and crow, and shut out all the grown-up things like loss and sex and pain and God and Kashmir, which had come choking and screaming into the room when Adrian drew the curtains.

I took a sip of tea. He had forgotten I take sugar. I had been married to Adrian for six and a quarter years, with three cups of tea on average, every day, two spoonfuls per cup. I tried to multiply six and a quarter by three hundred and sixty-five, by three, by two. I'm no good at arithmetic but I knew it must be near a ton or so of sugar. And now, not even a saccharin. It was as if he had slapped me in the face. I could feel slow stupid tears sliding down my cheeks. I pushed the cup away — it was cold, in any case.

“Thea …
darling
…” He came and sat beside me on the bed. He was wearing a fuzzyish blue sweater which made him look cuddly like a child's toy. But above the neck, he was man. There were newly minted frown-lines running down his forehead, and on his chin a tiny glower of blood where he had cut himself shaving. He smelt of the sort of strong, cheap soap they use in public washrooms.

He laid his hand, palm upwards, on the bedspread, as if it were an offering to me, like a piece of toast or the morning newspaper. I was naked underneath the covers. The baby clothes had worked themselves down to the bottom of the bed and were now all creased and tangled with the sheets, the bobbing bunny just a hard lump in my side. I struggled up and took his hand. My breasts looked pale and puny against its broad, freckled tan. He dragged his sweater off and slipped it over my head. I felt his hands brushing down my chest, clumsy and tender both at once, as if he were trying to dress a baby. He left his arm around me. I could hear a bird singing one astonished note over and over in the laburnum tree outside. The sun was throwing gold-dust at the clouds. How could birds sing and suns shine when Leo was in Kashmir and in love with Otto, and Adrian didn't belong to me?

“Adrian,” I said.

“Mmmm … ?”

“May I stay here? Just a week or two?
Please
. Just till Leo gets back.”

“He's … er … not
coming
back, Thea. I think you ought to know that.”

“Yes,” I said. Then “No”. There didn't seem much difference between the two. I could see Leo growing old in Kashmir, hair white against his sallow skin, blue veins raised on frail, shrivelled hands. Otto wasn't older. Otto was still young, pale, flabby, narrow, sly — hair fine as a child's, eyes like runny eggs. Louis de Gonzague.

“I know it's hard, darling, but it'll be better in the end, honestly it will. Leo was never right for you. You can start again now. Find a nice little bedsit somewhere and a new job. I'll help you, Thea — you know I will.”

“Thanks,” I said. A cold wind from the Himalayas was cutting through my head.

“Let's have breakfast, shall we? — and try and make some plans. Janet's gone to work already, but she said goodbye and hoped you were feeling better.”

Goodbye. That's what Janet
would
say. Maybe she'd even left the details of a few bedsitters on the breakfast table. No — nothing there except the damask napkins, and some dusty looking starch-reduced wheatflakes and a slice or two of slimmer's bread which was so white and light it was like eating Aertex knickers. The wheatflakes weren't even in a carton, just measured out into two small bowls, so we couldn't pig ourselves. I glanced around the kitchen. Nothing was in its packet, as if manufacturers' wrappings were too bright and tawdry to be allowed to expose themselves. Everything had been decanted into matching tins and jars. No vulgar competitions, no shrieking advertisements. The six multi-coloured cereals no longer sat and juddered on the fridge. There wasn't even the judder. It was a new fridge which didn't need defrosting. Janet always bought things for what they didn't need. Perhaps she saw Adrian like that — her non-iron, non-feed, non-screw husband.

I tried to force the food down, but Leo and Otto's breakfast kept getting in the way. Hot, steamy, foreign things they were gulping down in bed, Otto dripping coffee on to Leo's naked chest, feeding him little morsels of goat's-milk cheese or bean curd, fingers touching lips.

“If I stayed
here
,” I said, spreading my bread with some low-calorie margarine which smelt like paraffin, “I could help Janet in the house. I mean, if she's working in the City, she can't have much time to …”

Adrian put his knife down. “She … er …
won't
be working much longer, Thea.”

“Oh?”

We both stopped chewing and there was a silence in which all the dumb, silent, stupid things like sinks and cupboards and draining boards started to writhe and shriek and wring their hands and I knew they were only waiting for Adrian to take a hammer to them and batter them to pieces.

He had torn his slice of bread into ragged little shreds, as if it were an unwelcome item on a newspaper. “You see, Thea …” He put his knife down, picked it up again, jabbed it through the tablecloth. “What I wanted to say was …” There was a little rent in the non-iron terylene, which showed through the dark wood of the table like a tiny smear of blood. “We — I mean, Janet. She's …” He stopped.

“Pregnant,” I breathed.

“You
knew
, Thea?” He crammed all the bread bits into his mouth, almost in relief, and mumbled through them. “You
can't
have done. She
promised
not to tell you and I …”

“No,” I whispered. “I didn't know.”

I waited a moment while the kitchen stopped spinning and howling and tearing out its eyes. Stupid to be so hysterical. Pregnant was only a word — eight letters, nine months. Adrian wasn't her non-screw husband, that was all. He had screwed her through the stitches, maybe even at the hospital on the National Health. She had hardly recovered from the D and C, the patching up, before he had flung her on her back and ripped her apart again. The baby clothes I had creased and spoilt were for a
living
child. Janet was no longer a nine-to-five receptionist, but a full-time womb. That was her job, now. She would be at home with Adrian every minute of every single day, swelling and sanctifying a little more each month, rationing her husband while she and her baby grew to fill the house. There wouldn't be room for me. They'd need all the space for white muslin dresses and bobbing bunnies and cans of no-fuss baby food sitting on the non-judder, non-care fridge.