Rose carefully pulled off the lint dressing and grimaced. From inside oozed a yellowish grey, foul-smelling liquid. ‘We’ll have to dress it again,’ she said.
The nurse had recommended packing the wound with lint and a concoction of whipped egg whites, something which Rose had a decreasing amount of faith in as a remedy. When they had finished they tucked a bottle between his legs to try and keep the urine off the sheets, and covered him up again.
‘D’you want your tea now, Alfie?’ Grace asked him gently. Almost imperceptibly he nodded his head.
Rose met Michael on other occasions after that. What was the harm in meeting a friend, she reasoned. Except – and the thoughts hovered around and were pushed to the back of her mind – she couldn’t bring herself to tell Grace.
Michael was like a lifeline. How could she give that up when the rest of life, the drab, everyday routine of illness and Turner’s and rationing and struggle offered so little?
As she got out of bed that March morning, the dream of Falcone gradually sliding from her mind, she tried to quell her excitement at the thought of meeting Michael in the evening. After all, they were both married people with families meeting for a chinwag. So why should her feelings be so stirred?
‘I needn’t go tonight,’ she told Grace, her guilt making her wish that her sister would demand her presence. ‘I’ll stay if you think you’ll need me.’
Alfie had a bad cold which had gone to his chest, and she had been helping Grace to prop him up so that he could cough and clear his lungs.
‘No, you’re all right. You go,’ Grace said, seating herself on the wooden chair beside Alfie’s head. ‘I can always fetch Gladys in.’
Rose wondered if she was imagining that Grace really preferred it when she was out of the way. Or did she suspect that Rose was not going to a class at all?
‘Well, all right,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll get back as early as I can.’
‘No need.’ Grace pulled some knitting out of an old cloth bag. ‘We’ll get on fine – won’t we, Alfie?’
As she walked into the cosy light of the Mermaid she saw Michael raise an arm to her. He was as usual dressed immaculately. She had never seen him wear anything the least bit worn or shabby. He had on a dark blue suit which emphasized the already powerful outline of his body.
‘Sorry I’m late, Michael,’ she gasped, sitting down at last with relief on the bench opposite him.
‘Oh, no need to apologize.’ He got up as she unbuttoned her coat. ‘What’ll you have?’
Clearly he’d managed to fit in a couple of drinks already. When he came back to their table with the glasses and sat down, Rose immediately sensed a tension between them, something which made her feel self-conscious, and she found it hard to look him in the eyes.
She chatted to him nervously. They must keep things normal and conversational. Within bounds. She must not let him touch her hands across the table as he had done before. Otherwise she could not carry on persuading herself that she was justified in meeting him.
‘Your family all right?’ she asked. ‘How’s Mary? And the babby?’
‘Mary’s getting more sleep nowadays,’ Michael told her. He was sitting with a generous tumbler of Scotch in front of him. ‘They’re all OK. They’re doing fine.’
He sounded evasive, as if he didn’t want to go into how things were between him and Mary. Rose had begun to realize that Michael only found it possible to confide in her if she first disclosed something about herself or showed emotion in front of him, and she was deliberately keeping that at bay.
Suddenly Michael said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something. About your . . . about Alfie.’ Rose waited. ‘Well, how is he?’
Rose was puzzled. ‘Well, he’s not too good. He never is of course. But he’s got a chill at the moment.’
‘I meant . . .’ Michael looked down at the floor between his legs. ‘Is he never going to get right again?’
‘No. There’s nothing anyone can do for him. No cure. Michael, you know that. I’ve told you endless times.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘I thought – I was just making sure.’
‘Anyroad,’ Rose went on. ‘The next thing is George is coming out, next week some time. God knows I’ve wished him out of there often enough, but now he’s really coming I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do with him. I’m scared at the thought, Michael, to tell you the truth.’
‘Where’s he going to live?’
Rose shrugged again. ‘I s’pose he’ll have to come home. I mean where else? Grace hasn’t said a word about it and Dad might as well have forgotten who he is. We’ll just have to see if he can hold down a job.’
‘Can he do anything?’
‘Thieving. He’s good at that.’
Michael laughed, pulling out his cigarettes. Rose felt as if his blue eyes were piercing right through her. ‘You only see your family as they are, don’t you, Rosie? Not like me. Always wanting to put Mary on a pedestal like a plaster statue.’
‘Well, how else?’ Rose joined in his laughter and accepted a cigarette. ‘Bit late to go making up fairy stories about them, isn’t it?’
‘Not for me. It’s just the way I like to dream about people.’ And again the sadness crept back in to his eyes. ‘Trouble with statues on pedestals is that one way or another they keep getting knocked off.’
Then he asked, with the kind of intensity she had started to dread from him, ‘What about you, Rosie?’ He asked the question as if he wanted something from her: some pronouncement or decision. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to look for a new job,’ she told him. ‘I should be able to get better money now, so I’ll be looking around. I’ve got one place in mind, but really I’m being a bit cheeky. It’s in town, with a solicitor. But I might as well have a try.’
Michael was draining his glass as she spoke. He put the glass down excitedly. ‘Maybe I could find you something. I’m sure I could.’
Rose decided to treat this as a joke. ‘Let me try out my wings first before you rush in to rescue me. But thanks for the offer. Now, let me get the next one in.’
But Michael stubbed out his cigarette with sudden resolve and picked up his coat. ‘Come on, Rosie. It’s not cold out. I’ll take you to see my place. It’s only a walk along the road.’
‘Your house?’ Rose asked, astonished.
‘Jesus, no. I’ll show you the business.’ Seeing her hesitate, he urged her, ‘Come on, what’s the harm? I’d be proud for you to see it. You’ll be home with time to spare.’ He took her arm.
It was a cloudy night and mild, with a threat of drizzle. The shop was only a few streets away, and they walked in silence, well apart, as if they were afraid even of their hands touching by accident. It was an apprehensive, embarrassed silence. Rose knew why he was taking her there, and he knew that she knew. It all seemed inevitable after their meetings, but suddenly so very uneasy. Not at all a comfortable progression from confiding friendship to possible lovemaking, but driven, and somehow at odds.
He stopped outside a quite smart-looking shop front and, looking up, she saw ‘
GILLESPIE
’
S
’ in bold dark letters above the window. He didn’t go into the darkened betting shop. Instead he led her up a narrow staircase, between walls covered with brown, chipped paint and smelling of stale cigarette smoke and general dirtiness.
‘Not too nice, that bit,’ he apologized when they reached the top. ‘Come on in here. This is my office.’
He produced another key, and she stood waiting behind him, looking at the weave of his suit, depressed by the smelly seediness of the staircase and wondering what to expect from the room on the other side of the door.
‘People have to knock to come in here,’ he told her proudly.
Once he had pushed the door open and switched on the light she looked round in real surprise.
In contrast to the staircase, the room was freshly decorated in cream paint, and she found her feet suddenly cushioned by what looked like brand new carpet with a crimson background patterned with fashionable skater’s trail curves in black and white. All the furniture was brand new as well: a sideboard, its wooden veneer still gleaming with the sheen of newness, and two easy chairs covered in a vivid green woven fabric. In the middle of the room stood an enormous desk behind which Michael evidently presided from a chair covered in bright red and black material.
‘Blimey, Michael!’ Rose said, laughing. ‘This furniture’s a bit bright, isn’t it?’
Proudly he joined in her laughter. ‘Right up to the minute that,’ he told her. ‘Makes a change from all that blooming depressing brown stuff, doesn’t it? Makes me think of nothing but the war that does. Mary still likes it though. So I thought, well, if I have to put up with all that old-fashioned look at home, then I’ll have my own little place here where I can do just what I want!’
Although the room did not seem all that warm, Michael took off his coat and hung his jacket over the back of the red chair. Rose watched his broad, muscular frame with some curiosity as he went over to the sideboard and squatted down to open one of the low cupboards. He was really such a stranger to her.
‘I’ll get us another drink,’ he said. ‘Will you be having a nip of Scotch? Haven’t got much else.’
‘Oh – no ta,’ Rose replied quickly. She already felt light-headed from the pace he had set drinking in the Mermaid. ‘If I have any more I’ll get bad.’
Unbuttoning her coat, she walked round Michael’s very tidy desk. From one of the frames facing his chair Mary smiled sweetly back at her. Face like an angel, Rose thought. Poor cow. Her wavy hair looked as if it must be a middling brown, and the camera had caught her glancing up, as if it had taken some persuasion to make her look in that direction at all. Round her neck you could just see a small crucifix gleaming at the bottom of the picture.
She’s lovely, Michael, Rose wanted to say. She’s beautiful. But she couldn’t bring herself to speak. To say such things would be to bring Mary into the room between them.
There was a second photograph, evidently more recent, of Mary holding the baby Geraldine, with Joseph leaning into the picture beside her. The little boy’s expression was solemn. Geraldine had that startled kind of baby face, all eyes. Michael’s eyes. Mary was smiling. Did being married to Michael make her happy, Rose wondered?
She realized Michael was watching her. She glanced up at him. His eyes looked slightly glassy: at once sad and lustful. She pitied him, but with a sense of panic. Everything about this was wrong.
‘Come away from the window,’ he said. She didn’t resist when he took her by the hand and led her to a corner of the room. She wanted, needed him to hold her, to allow herself to feel excited by him. She wanted that dreamlike, swimming feeling which would allow her to make love with him, give herself up to the swell of it and forget everything else.
As soon as he moved against her and they began to kiss, she felt her body come alive with all the sensations she had not known for so long. His hands reached insistently inside her clothing to touch her skin, to close over her breasts, and her eyes closed as she gave way to the pleasure of it.
Michael released her slightly, his eyes half closed. ‘God. It’s been so long since she’s let me.’
Something like icy water sluiced through her mind and she was out of the dream, eyes wide open and seeing herself and Michael with clinical clarity as if from a distance. She was in a room above a betting shop, with a man’s body pressed to hers, his black hair close to her cheek. Black hair which could almost have been Falcone’s but wasn’t. A man who aroused her, filled her with sexual desire, but whom she did not love. She thought of the last time she was forced to the floor by a man in an office where photographs of his family looked on from the desk, and she knew that whatever it was she’d desired of these few minutes, she could only ever see them as cheap afterwards. Soiled and cheap.
Michael felt her stiffen and straighten up, withdrawing from him. She pulled on her blouse, buttoning it over her breasts.
Michael’s eyes opened and he made a despairing sound. ‘Oh God, Rosie,’ he implored her. ‘Don’t pull out on me now. Please.’
She removed his arms from round her and moved away, rearranging herself. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you. You know that. But I can’t do it. I feel as if everyone’s here watching us – Mary and Alfie and everyone. I’m sorry, Michael.’
He turned from her abruptly and went to pick up his glass, draining the last gulp from it. He lit a cigarette and sat down on one of the green chairs in silence. She knew he was not going to try to force her.
‘I don’t go with women, you know,’ he said finally. ‘That’s not the way I was brought up. It’s just – you’re different Rosie, I can talk to you, and we go back a long way. There was always something there between us, wasn’t there?’
‘There was. And there is, in a way. But I can’t do this. We’d be doing wrong to so many other people.’
There was an awkward silence before Michael spoke. ‘What you said, about your husband, him being bad and that. I mean you and him, you don’t . . . ?’
‘Not any more, no.’
‘Then why?’
‘He’s still my husband. He’s had enough bad luck without his wife going bad on him. And there’s Mary. I looked at that picture and I thought I’d like her if I met her. That’s daft I know, because what difference does it make? But I couldn’t do it to her either. Or to myself.’
‘But they’d never know. I don’t want to hurt anyone either. It’s between you and me, Rosie. Even if it’s only the once, it’s just for us.’ His blue eyes suddenly looked very young in their appeal.
‘I’m not going to come here any more, Michael.’
‘Not come?’ He made to stand up and she turned away from him. ‘What? Not even for a drink now and then?’
‘I can’t. If I keep coming it’ll always come to this, won’t it? Because it’s always there between us. Soone or later I’d give in to you and I’d hate myself for it. And you wouldn’t be happy either. Not in the end.’
Michael shook his head. ‘You always were more grown-up than me, Rosie. I can’t help admiring you for it. Come here, will you? Just for a moment?’
She went to him and they held each other again briefly.