Her Victory (19 page)

Sitting at the fire she was alone yet not lonely, wary but unafraid, hunted though not threatened, and willing to dwell for as long as the mood lasted on why she had been born as a small piece of bottle-green glass over which people could walk barefoot without cutting themselves. Such humiliating pressure had driven her to a place where neither George nor anyone she had known would be able to set the mark of judgement on her more convincingly than she could put it on herself.

Now that she was free it was easier to forgive George, and at the same time admit that she too needed forgiveness. Being the one who had left the happy home she was guilty in the eyes of the condemning world; but knowing that somehow or other she would have to pay made her wonder whether the whole cakewalk was worth the bare reward of being able to go on breathing.

The face in the mirror looked wryly into her sparsely furnished room. She was free. She had left everything behind. Even a few bits of furniture would have made some difference to the desolation. Her father had been apprenticed as a cabinet maker, but left the trade at twenty-five to become a shop assistant. No one knew why. He made things out of wood in his spare time, saying it was a consolation for not being able to do much else. He put together an ornamental mantelshelf for her wedding, with borders of elaborate beading, and six diamond-shaped mirrors along the front, a well-varnished box-like structure to fit over the plain shelf in the living-room. It was out of place among the furniture George and she had chosen, but would stay with him for ever.

She sat through the long evening, the mirror-image telling her that idleness was a sin unless you took advantage of it by wasting time, as her father used to say with a seriousness that deceived her for years. There's nothing wrong with idleness, as long as you don't get into mischief, he would say. Idleness is its own reward, and the greatest pleasure in life, because you can do so much with it.

His only idleness was in those few minutes during which he came out with such homilies, usually between ending one job and starting another. She had never seen him idle. With his peculiar humour he taught by first saying the opposite of what ought to be done, and then setting such an example at doing the right thing that the emphasis was even more sure than if he had plainly told her what to do in the first place.

The occasional idleness did not make her feel guilty, yet she was aware of being so. When idleness turned into freedom she contemplated the wallpaper in order not to feel imprisoned. Each wall was a different colour, its pattern a scruffy map she had damp-ragged to get clean. At first she couldn't tell one direction from another when glancing out of the window at so many buildings. Their bedroom in George's house looked west, the builder told them when they first went to see it, from which she gathered that the front door pointed east, and that the other sides of the box faced north and south, confirmed when winter came on the estate of private houses where crescents curved in all directions.

In London, figuring it by the A to Z, her window appeared to face south-east.

Perhaps four young men had once shared this room, each choosing the paper for his wall. Women would have used pleasanter designs – though the room was certainly too small for four to live in. But suppose she herself had four different people careering around inside her? She would settle a wall on each, and to do so would start on the one with the door.

The rectangle of entrance and exit made the least interesting wall of her abode, since she hadn't come in by it for hours and had no intention of going out till morning, if then. The dullest and the least conspicuous. She turned her back because the brown shade was tonally dead. It had been a plush russet judging by the section curling down under the top of the skirting board, that she had picked out with her longest fingernail when sitting on the floor one afternoon while entranced with a shabby old copy of
Wuthering Heights
got from a stall at the market. The embossed pattern of Grecian urns would have been almost funereal but for the fern and sprig of alfalfa springing from each as if they had just been born and were full of life.

The door was a paler brown, and may have been more recently dabbed on, though this seemed unlikely because down the inner edges of each panel the paint had bubbled and cracked. When she pressed with her fingertips, bits flaked off and darkish green showed underneath. Out of curiosity, she forced the blade of her carving knife against it, and, like going through the archaeological layers of an ancient city, found three more levels of colour before reaching wood.

Those who had watched each seam laid on, or who had spread each one themselves and witnessed the fresh colour glow, and been fascinated at every layer ageing to acquire its own peculiar shade, made her relish the same experience for herself, proving that her eyes and spirit were in harmony. There was no need to explore more surfaces with thumbnail or knife, for she could analyse their complexity as one saw into the depths of a lake without going under the water. On these evenings alone in her room the vision was intense, occasionally painful – but it was always part of herself and never unnecessary. The sensation made her smile, content without turning to the mirror as she scratched an itch out of her clean hair, and pushed the chair back from the fire because her legs were too hot.

As a child she had put a poker between the bars of the kitchen fire till it glowed red, then pressed its point into the brown paint of the cupboard door. The hissing contact sent up a coil of smoke, showing a rainbow of colours before the poker-end reached wood. The effect delighted her, but her father rushed in from the parlour. ‘Good God! What's that smell?'

He snatched the poker away, and slapped her because she might have caused a fire. From the earliest age layers were forming under the surface of the spirit, each one covering the one below but none forgotten when the hot iron of piercing experience bit deeply through.

She felt her way anticlockwise to the next wall – such a blank space that any colour could be put there. Its surface did not exist on coming in from shopping or wandering the streets, until she allowed it to show what she wanted portraying. On the Underground between Gloucester Road and Victoria she looked at reflections in the opposite windows. The train rattled up speed. She would stare at the river from Hungerford Bridge, then walk to Trafalgar Square to feed the greedy pigeons before going into the National Gallery for half an hour's peace among the pictures.

A woman four seats along on the same side was observing two young women across from her. Pam counted several times to make sure the position was correct. She wasn't interested in the two girls but in the woman looking at them with quiet avidity and whom she could see tantalizingly reflected. The girls were talking, and didn't register the woman's scrutiny. Nor could the woman be aware of Pam watching
her
, since she for whatever reason was busy herself.

The woman was about her own age, but dressed with an elegance Pam could never achieve. Perhaps she was a tourist from Italy or Spain. Her smooth dark hair showed under a felt hat. Shoes and handbag weren't English. Her pale features vibrated when the speed lessened. The indistinct face at such reflected distance was full of a promise which she could not define. There was a risk involved, and she wondered why, though her curiosity would not let her dwell on it.

She was straining to see her as if in a dream, for the person's head was now and again hidden by the movement of the two girls during their lively discussion. All Pam had to do, however, was stand and walk along the carriage to bring the woman's face to greater clarity. No pretext was needed to look directly on it as she passed. But it seemed as impossible to do this as it would have been to put her hand into a fire. There was in any case a greater attraction in keeping the image remote and mysterious, for in this way her speculations gained in depth, and held off a future she was not yet ready to face.

The train stopped at Westminster, and Pam was disappointed at not seeing the woman before she got off. It was too late, like so much had been, because people between them stood at the same time and blocked her view. She let her go, being left with no other option.

Going to sleep that night she grieved at a loss that could never be made up. She was amazed, as the effect wore away, at having been caught by the force of a shadowy reflection in the window of an Underground train while plain flesh-and-blood people rarely had such influence.

For days she regretted having told herself that she would only follow her out if she left at Charing Cross like herself, and hoped afterwards to recognize the half-seen face during her walks, though how could she say to someone she hadn't met, and who didn't even know she wanted to meet her: ‘I saw you on the Tube the other day.'? The woman would look at this short-haired, pale, hard-faced, mad-seeming person speaking to her on the street and say: ‘Excuse me,' in whatever language, and push her aside.

The room was too comfortable, weakeningly warm. Rainbow colours swirled on the blank wall, a lit wheel moving against the grain of her senses. The surface spun in its own good time, frightening her adult mind one moment and then intriguing her as if she were a child. To let herself float into the vortex of so much dazzle would take whatever nights and days were left. She could neither go back nor stay where she was. She didn't want to find out what the world was made of, nor be crushed into lunacy by it.

But she had to make up her mind what to do with her life, and the only consolation was in knowing that it was up to her alone whether or not she made an attempt to go on. Her own will was the arbiter, the power she had nursed all her life, and that had preserved her, till the time came when she needed to move in a direction she had always wanted to take, using mechanisms impossible to analyse but whose purpose had always been central to her being, proving that the more hidden the will, and the more shocking the move to her reason, then the more it was no other than her own urge for independence coming into action. The notion that she had lived all her life only to develop the necessary will to leave her husband filled her with a rage that made her want to destroy the wall. If she spread paraffin and put a light to the room, gaudier colours would arise than the tinselly façade she saw by squinting her eyes.

The air was stifling. She took off her jersey and blouse, and put them folded on to the table. Her will had finally done good by landing her in a place whose colours no longer made her shake with dread. Their deadly swirl didn't fascinate, and the wall became ordinary, fit only to stop the outside world from persecuting her.

The window dominated the next wall. She pulled the heavy table and box of books clear, to open the flimsy plum-coloured curtains. A crack in the lower pane cut the door of an opposite house in two. A taxi bringing someone from the theatre or airport stopped near by. If George had tracked her she would bite him like a wolf. The feel of freedom made her wolfish at the idea that it might end. A cat ran from under a parked car to the middle of the street, then walked to another car on the far side. She hated the thought of herself as an animal waiting to be dragged to a slow death in captivity. The lighted needle-end of a plane glided slowly enough across the sky for her to wish she was inside.

The taxi driver must have misunderstood the number he had been given, for he rounded the curve of the street and set his passenger down too far along for her to see who it was. The sodium lights of Shepherd's Bush made the pale moon superfluous. Its yellow orb owned the roofs and chimneypots while she stood at the window and felt as if she owned the moon. Her room was inside it, and she stood at its window looking at herself calmly observing it and not knowing where she was.

The window was the most important wall because it gave her the power to see other people without having to look into her mirror. She drew the dusty curtains, and threw her brassiere on the bed. The colours of the fireplace wall were locked inside her with the moon. The room was a home where she could be herself and think what she liked. She could buy tins of paint and decorate the walls with zigzags and circles, stars and ampersands. She could lock herself in whenever she cared to, or abandon the den at an hour's notice and look for another if she felt the refuge growing so familiar that it turned into a prison.

The rectangular block of orange gas-fire warmed the whole room. There were no set meal times, so she had put on weight, and it wasn't easy to undo the catch on her slacks. She folded them, and hooked the hanger on the back of the door. The heat rushed to her legs and thighs. She was tired, and ready to sleep, but relished her detachment in the surrounding space. ‘I went into marriage myself, and came out by myself,' she said to the tall mirror carried home from the ruins. ‘It is only possible to do things for yourself.'

She took off her woollen drawers but kept her dressing-gown open. It was pleasant to stroke her skin. Her figure was firm, but there was no tension left. Nothing could go on for ever, and the break had been made. She felt her arms, and pressed the flesh, thinking of how she had never been idle in George's house, though he had once said how lucky she was being a woman because she didn't have to go to work, as if domestic service on tap twenty-four hours a day came about by the press of a button. In any spare time there'd been the exercise of cycling to the shops, or going for a walk, or pulling up weeds from the patch of garden. The rule of life was never to be idle, though in the last weeks she had done nothing more than work at her room till it became a home. Now it was perfect, and the time had come to leave, one way or another.

She sat with legs outstretched at the fire, smoothing the life-giving heat along her firm thighs as if the half-seen woman on the Tube train were now observing
her
. But, belonging to herself alone, she let that image drift away, and tried to stay fond of herself in spite of the woman's absence.