“Oh, don’t you do them now? Ag will be that disappointed.” Mrs. Deakin bobbed up on her toes. “Don’t put that roast ham away, I want six ounces,” she called out in a piercing voice. “Well, I mean, it’s no good letting them wrap it up and put it away again, is it? Only I mentioned you, you see, I’d a
feeling you’d given seances at one time, and I asked Florence Sidney, and she said she’d a feeling you did as well.”
“I’ve given it up.”
“That’s a shame. Only you ought to be more sociable, Mrs. Axon. Florence was saying she never sees you. Couldn’t you just do one for Ag? You might enjoy it. Take you out of yourself.”
“Thank you, but I really have given it up.”
“Only can you recommend anybody? Mrs. Dobson in Argyll Street has a ouija board.”
“Has she? She must be careful that she doesn’t get more than she bargained for.”
“How do you mean, Mrs. Axon?”
“Oh…” Evelyn sighed. Could she really be bothered to explain, on the chance of saving Mrs. Dobson, whom she did not know, and who probably deserved what she invited? “Oh, people get in…things get in…the house gets overcrowded.”
“She says she does limit it to six people. Because their rooms aren’t big, you know, and that’s all she can get round the table.” The queue shuffled forward a bit. “I mean, it’s only harmless fun,” Mrs. Deakin said.
When Evelyn got to the head of the queue she asked for steak, two large pieces. She would have been appalled at the price if she had stopped to think about it, but in the event she pushed some crumpled notes into the man’s hand, leaving him to hand one back to her and then sort out her change; she snatched it from him, thrust the parcel into her bag, and made for the door without a word. The man shook his head comically, and made little circular motions with his forefinger. The queue went tut-tut, at this insult to a paying customer, and crackled their stiff raincoats. Mrs. Deakin said, “You can’t expect that lady to waste her time chatting with tradesmen. She’s a very well-regarded Spiritualist.”
Evelyn arrived home, and put down the parcel of meat on the kitchen table. The brown blood was seeping through the
wrapping. She heard a rustling noise from the lean-to, and went to investigate it. When she returned, having found nothing, the meat was gone. A trail of dark drops led towards the kitchen door and out into the hall. Bending painfully, she peered at the floor. On the parquet of the hall she lost the trail, but there was another splash, on the staircarpet, halfway up.
Evelyn sat down on the bottom step, and rocked herself back and forth like a child. Such appetites, she thought, such vile appetites for raw and bloody meat. Were their jaws at work, behind the spare-room door? And if she went up there would she hear them, salivating and sucking, smacking unpicturable lips? Baby flesh would tear like butter.
They do not have claws, Evelyn told herself, they do not have claws or jaws, they do not have faces at all. But one thing was for sure, she would not dare to stand in their way. Muriel might, if she liked; self-sacrifice is a mother’s prerogative, and Muriel would be a mother soon enough.
Since Christmas, Muriel had become more and more lethargic. Her ankles swelled. She took no interest in anything.
“I have to think of everything myself,” Evelyn complained. She worried quite often about what she would do if Muriel got into difficulties. “You ought to be all right,” she reassured her. “You’re a strong type of woman. There’s nothing wrong with you, Muriel. Not physically anyway.”
Conscious of the responsibility facing her, she went to the public library to borrow some books. She chose first aid books, which told you how to deliver babies in an emergency. The library had changed a good deal, she noticed. The old wooden desks had gone, and the newspapers in racks. There were low vinyl seats that an elderly person could not get in and out of comfortably. There were modern pictures on the wall, sun-bursts of yellow and orange, and a part marked “Children’s Play Area.” Children did not play in it, but ran about, loud and healthy. Fluttering notices on a cork board advertised yoga classes and Community Welfare Programmes, playgroups and
Councillor’s Surgeries. People talked quite unashamedly, in ordinary voices; there had been only an odd subdued whisper in the past, in the old days when Clifford used to step down to get a detective story, and she used to ask for a nice mystery from Miss Williams on the desk.
Evelyn shuffled up to the counter, cradling her books. “Where’s Miss Williams?” she asked, as she put them down.
“Who?” A fat girl looked up at her, a fat girl in a fluffy pink cardigan, very like the one that Muriel used to wear.
“Miss Williams. The Librarian.”
“We don’t have a Miss Williams here.”
“Has she left?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember any Miss Williams. Frances!” she called. “Frances, have you got a minute?”
“Shhh,” Evelyn said.
“What’s the matter?” The girl was irritated. “You asked me a question, didn’t you? I’m trying to find out, aren’t I?”
Frances glanced up from the books she was stacking onto a trolley. “There’s been no one of that name while I’ve been here. Miss Williams? No, I don’t think so.”
“Never mind,” Evelyn said. She put her tickets down by her books.
“What are these?”
“Oh, really,” Evelyn said, “don’t be so foolish.”
The girl picked the tickets up and held them by one corner, as if they were contaminated. “These expired thirty years ago,” she said. She looked at Evelyn, a strange sideways look, as if she were considering calling for help. “You’d better fill in a form,” she said at last. “Are you a ratepayer?”
“Where did you get that cardigan?” Evelyn demanded.
“What?” The girl’s head jerked back, her eyebrows raised, her leaky ballpoint pen poised in the air. Evelyn turned her back and made for the door.
“Just a minute—” the girl said, but she didn’t come after her. Somebody laughed. Evelyn found herself back on the street.
She walked down to the town centre, to the Central Library. They had the same books, the ones she wanted. She just put them under her arm and walked out, past the desk, nodding to herself. Nobody saw her go, nobody tried to stop her. It was easier that way.
It was a cold, misty day. The town was full of people tramping to the January sales. The buildings seemed distant and insubstantial, walls of air and smoke. Nobody looked at her, stumping along in her old grey coat. Nobody looks at an old woman to see if her clothes are fashionable; old women have a set of fashions all their own. The crowds clutched their parcels and their slippery plastic bags, heading for home, weary and overheated from the department stores. Evelyn stopped on a street corner, by the entrance to a great cavern brilliantly stacked with scented soap and woollen hats. She felt a kind of safety and peace that she had not known in years, or that perhaps she had never known; but it touched her with a warm finger of nostalgia. Treading in the footsteps of the crowd, no demon would know her. She would get herself a parcel, jostle in a bus-queue, she would never, never go home. Impulsively, she turned to go into the store, and a young woman collided with her, a pale woman with dark almond eyes that seemed familiar from somewhere.
“I beg your pardon,” Evelyn said; but the girl did not look at her, simply closed her arms about her burdens, gathered them to her chest with an irritated twitch of her lips, and hurried on, her eyes downcast. City manners, Evelyn thought, the vast indifference of the heated crowds. She shrugged inwardly. Courtesy had gone, gone with Miss Williams, no one remembered that it had ever existed. But then another thought struck her. Had the girl seen her at all? Was there anything to be seen? In sudden panic, she started to walk, seeking her reflection in the plate glass windows. She saw other women goosestepping with their stout legs, the glow of their faces almost warming the glass, their big check coats and their big boots; and then,
faint and flickering, a wraith of herself, her melting face with its hollow eyes, her hatchet nose like the nose of a corpse. She began to hurry, faster and faster, trundling up the hill to Lauderdale Road, panting, trying to outpace the fate she had seen for herself.
The week before half-term, Frank O’Dwyer made good his long-standing promise, and invited Colin and Sylvia to a dinner party. Sylvia would normally have worried about what to wear, but in the circumstances had no choice but one of the all-purpose floral smocks she had kept from one pregnancy to the next. Colin thought, I should have noticed that she had not got rid of them, after Karen. If he looked in Sylvia’s wardrobe more often, he might be able to divine her intentions.
Sylvia had been to the hairdressers. Her pale hair, heavily lacquered, was fluffed up like a ball of cotton wool. With her pink face, and her cheerful frock of red and green leaves and sprigs, she looked like a badly constructed Christmas decoration that someone had forgotten to put away. It occurred to Colin now that he had never told anyone his wife was expecting. Would they congratulate him, and then mock him behind his back, or would they pretend not to notice?
Since September he had rehearsed imaginary conversations in which he told his colleagues about the break-up of his marriage and about his new relationship with a young professional woman with no ties. This way and that he put it to them, in his
head. These monologues had become a habit, and a ghostly parallel to his real speech. Sometimes he interjected his listeners’ exclamations of amazement, incredulity, and envy; sometimes he elaborately countered difficulties they raised. Now these conversations would never be held, but they were hard to give up all the same. He let them run, little hallucinations to accompany his pain.
He woke up in the mornings, and Isabel was his first thought. For this reason, he tried to delay the moment of waking. “You’re ever so dozy these days, Colin,” his wife said. “We’ll have to make an effort to get to bed earlier.” The sick pain of loss jolted through him before he had opened his eyes. He saw images of himself staggering through the days, grey-faced, with fatuities on his lips. Daily he took the matter in hand, promised self-discipline, tried to shut her out of his mind. His thoughts fled back to her as the dieting obese think of food, an abstract orgy of longing and inner greed, one thought for the pain and one for the world, systole for living and diastole for Isabel.
The telephone was ringing. It was the night of the dinner party, wet and black. Seven
P.M.
“59428.”
“Mrs. Sidney?”
“This is Mr. Sidney.”
“It’s Tracey here.”
“Sorry?”
“I said it’s Tracey. I’m supposed to be babysitting for you.”
“Oh yes, hello Tracey,” Colin said with an excess of bonhomie. “When are you coming along then?”
“I’m not coming, that’s what I’m phoning for, sorry.”
“Oh but Tracey, now—”
“Me mam says I’ve got to stop in because me Grandad’s coming.”
“But surely, Tracey—look, would you have a word with Mrs. Sidney?”
“No point, is there?”
“Could I have a word with your mother, do you think?”
“She’s gone down our Doreen’s shop for a lettuce.”
“When will she be back?”
“Dunno.”
“Look, Tracey, are you sure you can’t come?” Colin took his schoolteacher’s tone, full of aching reasonableness. “You see, it’s letting us down rather badly. This was an important evening for us, and it’s too short notice to get anyone else, so it does put us in difficulties. Now you did promise, Tracey. Did you explain that to your mother?”
“No point.”
“Surely she’d understand that a promise is a promise.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Anyway, Tracey, look at it this way, you want your pocket money, don’t you?”
“Well, it’s only one fifty, isn’t it, and if Grandad sees me he gives me a fiver.”
“Oh, I see,” Colin said. “Well, I’m afraid I’m not prepared to engage in an auction for your presence, Tracey, that wouldn’t be right at all. So we’ll just have to manage without you.”
“Tough life, innit?” Tracey said. “Bye.”
Colin bellowed up the stairs, and Sylvia came out of the bedroom in her bra and half-slip. She had powdered her face and lips very white, preparatory to painting them back in again, and she smelled of Coty’s
L’Aimant
, which was not this year’s Christmas present.
“What’s up? Who was it?”
“It was some half-witted child called Tracey who it seems you’ve engaged as babysitter. She’s not coming.”
“Oh, no!”
“Her grandfather’s coming over, and will probably give her a fiver, so she’s not going to put herself out for one fifty.”
“Oh, dammit,” Sylvia said venomously. She began to scramble down the stairs, her stockinged feet large and flat. “Give me the phone.”
“Don’t you offer her any more money,” Colin said. “It’s blackmail. We can’t have that.”
Colin went into the bedroom and contemplated the clean shirt laid out on the bed. He heard Sylvia’s voice raised in expostulation. Shortly she came back into the bedroom, slamming the door.
“She won’t come. Honestly. It’s not often, is it, it’s not often, that I get a night out? You wouldn’t think one night was too much to ask.”
“Well, it’s no good taking it out on me,” Colin said.
“I’m not taking it out on you. What on earth are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, but honestly, Sylvia, that girl sounded half-witted. When I picked up the phone she said, ‘Is that Mrs. Sidney?’”
“How could she be expected to know who picked the phone up?”
“Because I spoke, didn’t I? I said ‘59428,’ I don’t just pick the phone up and breathe into it, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting yourself worked up for.”
“I’m getting myself worked up because we’re due at Frank’s in forty-five minutes, and we haven’t got a babysitter, because you make arrangements with some half-witted child that doesn’t turn up. Do you really think it’s safe, leaving them with somebody as clueless as that? How old is she?”
“She sounded pretty sharp to me,” Sylvia said. “She’s fourteen. I know her mother. Anyway, they’re not going to be left with her, are they, so what are you talking about?”
“We’ll have to ring Florence,” Colin said.
“Florence never babysits for us. She doesn’t know how to manage them.”
“Are they as bad as that? What do they need, qualified nannies or policemen?”
“There’s no need to get nasty. It’s not the kiddies’ fault, Colin.”
“Have you got a better suggestion?”
“Ask her if she’ll have them for the night, then. Go on. Phone her.”
“You phone her,” Colin said. “You got us into this mess.”
“I’d like to know why it’s always my problem to fix up a babysitter. You always leave it to me and then you criticise. It’s you that wants to go to this dinner, not me.”
“All right,” Colin said, “all right. Then I’ll just phone up Frank and say we can’t make it, shall I? Frank goes to a lot of trouble over his dinner parties. He’s very interested in cooking and he goes to a lot of trouble, trying to select the right guests.”
“And I go to trouble every night of the week. You don’t think about that.”
“Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, Sylvia. Are we going or aren’t we?”
“Well, if I phone Florence, you’ll have to go down and get them their sausage and beans. Children have to be fed as well, you know.”
“I’ll phone,” Colin said. “You see to them.” He stumped off downstairs. He took deep breaths. Self-command, he thought, control, order; he realised, amazed, that this upset had dismissed Isabel from his mind for at least fifteen minutes. But he could not arrange to live in a permanent row. “They can bring their sleeping bags, tell her,” Sylvia shouted after him. Here was material for reworking, for weeks and weeks of quarrels. Colin could hear the children shouting each other down above the noise of the TV set. I’d be more adept at feeding lions, he thought, or giving rabbits to pythons.
Florence sounded doubtful, mildly shocked. “But the beds aren’t aired, Colin. It’s such short notice.”
“Sylvia says they can bring sleeping bags.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound very suitable to me, but I do admit
it might be the lesser evil.” Oh, cut it out, Colin thought, yes or no? “They can’t sleep in beds that aren’t aired,” Florence said.
“Okay, but if we bring the sleeping bags, and listen Florence, they’ve been fed, and I’ll be over for them first thing tomorrow.”
He put the phone down, relieved. He would have felt such a fool, making his excuses to Frank; Frank seemed to have smart intellectual friends who would not have problems like babysitters, and he would probably not understand. He had been looking forward to this evening, relying on it to take his mind off Isabel. He would rise above his situation tonight, he would be witty and carefree and relaxed, and not, he vowed, not have too much to drink, so that Sylvia gave him warning glances in front of everybody and nagged him all the way home about the breathalyser.
All he had to do was change his shirt. He ran a comb through his hair and was ready by a quarter to eight, standing expectantly in the hall. Sylvia had painted her eyelids with a luminous stripe of sky-blue, and her eyes beneath, rather bloodshot, appeared angrier than ever. Fuming quietly to herself, muttering under her breath, she dumped bundles and baskets in the hall, marshalling the children with little pushes and taps on the backs of their skulls.
“What are you standing there looking so useless for?” she demanded. His brief ebullience vanishing, Colin took her by the arm, steering her into the kitchen for a little private row.
“I do wish,” he hissed at her, “I do wish that you could manage not to talk to me like that in front of the children. How do you expect them to have any respect for me? What are they going to think about me, if you speak to me like that?”
Sylvia glared at him. Then she dropped her eyes and disengaged her arm from his grasp. “What does it matter?” she said tiredly. She swerved past him and back into the hall.
“You undermine me,” he shouted after her. “You’ve got
enough stuff there for an Antarctic expedition. One night, they’re going for, woman, not a bloody month.”
The children were complaining at being dragged away from the TV. They had been looking forward to bullying their babysitter and getting the better of her, and forcing her to let them stay up long past their usual bedtime. Florence was an unknown quantity; she alternated with them between doting and frigidity, and she had no TV set. Packed into the back of the car, they became instantly fractious. They flailed their legs and jostled for room, jabbing each other with their elbows. Karen began to sniffle, and Suzanne took out a pencil she had about her person and dug it into her brother’s leg.
“For God’s sake, will you stop it?” Sylvia twisted round in her seat to deliver slaps left and right.
“How can I drive?” Colin demanded. “How can I concentrate on the traffic? There’ll be an accident. You’ll cause an accident if you go on like this.”
“Oh, Dad, Dad, Dad,” Alistair wailed. “She’s made a big grey hole in my knee. It’ll go septic, Dad. I’ll have to stay off school.”
At the traffic lights Sylvia lurched over the back of her seat and snatched the pencil from Suzanne. She wound down her window and hurled it out. It struck the windscreen of the car drawn up next to them with a noise like a gunshot and rolled with an astonishingly loud clatter down the bonnet.
“My God,” Colin said. People in other cars were staring. Scarlet with embarrassment and breaking out in a sweat, he accelerated away from the green light.
He drew up in Florence’s driveway, under the dark shapes of the dripping trees, and took out his new clean handkerchief to mop his forehead. “Well, we’ve made it.”
Sylvia swivelled her legs out of the car. “These damn mouldy leaves,” she said. “My evening shoes will be ruined.”
Florence appeared immediately, looking apprehensive. She must have been watching from the front room, standing in the
dark. Sylvia propelled the children towards the house and Colin followed, his arms loaded with their baggage. A sleeping bag escaped from his grasp and unrolled itself like a serpent on the wet path. He dragged it after him, hoping no one would notice. Sylvia was saying, “They’ve been fed, they’re to get straight to bed, they don’t want anything.”
“But what if they do?” Florence said. “I mean, what will I give them, and in the morning—”
“Look, you don’t need to give them their breakfast even, we’ll come for them,” Sylvia said.
“I’m not unwilling to give them their breakfast,” Florence insisted. “It’s not that, don’t think that, Sylvia, but I don’t know what they’re used to, for instance if they have fresh bread or stale.”
“Stale bread? What would they have stale bread for?”
“Yuk,” Suzanne offered. “I’m not eating stale bread.”
“Well,” Florence said, “when we were children we never had fresh bread. Children didn’t have it. It’s bad for them. They can’t digest it.”
“Go on.”
“It’s no joke, Sylvia. You ought to be careful what you give them.”
“Sylvia, it’s gone half-past eight,” Colin said. “We’re late.” Florence turned to him, looking stubborn.
“Perhaps you can convince her, Colin, as she doesn’t take any notice of what I say.”
“Florence, if we had stale bread when we were children I expect it was because Mother was too lazy and disorganised to have any fresh in the house.” He turned to Sylvia. “She got fussy as she got older, you know, but when we were kids it was a different story.”
“I think that’s very disloyal, Colin.” Two red spots appeared on Florence’s cheeks. “I don’t know how you dare. She was an excellent mother, and there was nothing wrong with the way we were brought up.”
“I’ve not got time to discuss it.” Colin hauled his cuff up again and tapped the face of his watch. “Sylvia—”
“You’ve not answered my question,” Florence said stubbornly. “About the bread.”
“Bread?” Colin’s self-control fled now with a great yell into his sister’s face. “Bread? They chew nails, this lot. You could feed them nitroglycerine and ground glass and they’d bloody digest it.”
Sylvia pulled at his arm, and Alistair, red-faced, wormed among the overnight bags and took Florence by her skirt.
“Aunty Florence, I’ve got a septic hole in my knee.”
“What, my pet?”