Authors: Elaine Feinstein
*
And now she and Eli met less frequently. Now she went out more on her own. Very often. To listen or simply to drink. And one night one black rainy night she stood with three men she hardly knew who began to fight, to hurtle against one another, against cars, slithering on the pavement in the rain, their jackets open, their shirts smeared, and their legs twisting. She watched one of them thrown into the road get up staggering, heard glass break as a bottle fell out of his pocket. And stood quite relaxed watching.
The whole world floated. This was the furthest edge of absurdity to which she had come, the most meaningless and mindless flight from whatever mattered to her. What was she doing there at all? and what serious connection could any of this make to the substance of her life. She had so long and so stubbornly neglected. For what? In pursuit of what dream? Of what
freedom
?
The car was a long walk away. And she wanted only to be home, to be back; homesick and lonely for somewhere: there was anything like tenderness. Her own
drunkenness had not yet really made itself felt; kept off, she supposed, by some unconscious chemical of fear. Now she began to feel the damp air on her face. Realised her cheeks were running with perspiration, had to stop walking, and wipe them with a piece of tissue, began to shake with cold at the same time.
For a moment she leant against a lamp-post: feeble. She was completely enfeebled. What a ridiculous exercise. The car two hundred paces off. She made her feet take her there. And once inside her whole body ran with the sweat of that effort. She swivelled the car mirror, and looked in the face that met hers: a white shining mask with black fixed holes for eyes.
She went on staring bewilderedly into those big
unmoving
holes for a moment, and knew she had to lie down. So she climbed into the back seat, shivering, her head reeling; just to be horizontal was bliss. She did not feel sick. At the same time she was incapable of moving a muscle. Except every so often she looked at her watch and noticed, startled, that another half hour had gone by. At last, at midnight, she made herself sit up. Slowly. At some risk. The blood running dizzily from her white brain. The sweat starting again. –Taxi? She felt in her pockets. Nothing. Where –bag —Did she even?
The mirror again. White face, black eyes. She straightened it. Looked out through the back window. Rain. The streetlamps were out. The roads silent. Black rain. She put her wet hands on the steering wheel considering. How drunk she was. Opened and closed her eyes. The street was like black glass. But she put the key in, and pressed the lever for the windscreen wipers. With the clearing of her view she felt better. She was all right, she decided. The car stirred, moved forward. Oh, it was great, easy, she didn’t feel ill at all; the black
streets rolled shinily underneath her wheels like the air in a dream: she was flying. Not fast (slow on that corner) flying; down through a narrow street and over the water, down to the sea with the sulphide lights still blaring into the street in orange lines, and the piers still alight, floating; as she was floating; like strange monstrous arms held up by some invisible swell. She slowed for the traffic lights. She was driving beautifully. Round the curve (give way) round the next road. Home, why not, her hot face had dried out she was feeling better. Swing. Round the dug-out hole in the road. Down. Between houses again, an unlighted road, and there: she turned. A fraction too soon catching the rear window. But there she was. Laughing. A bit ashamed. Looked in the mirror again and.
There
was the bag (money in it after all) never mind and a Rimmel Cologne stick. No comb. She pushed her hair into some sort of shape and rubbed the cologne on her forehead.
Ben was waiting up for her. As he always did, it was doubtful if he would go to bed whenever she got back, he’d just read and doze downstairs she supposed. But now she saw he was awake enough. And received her babble pushing (out of long habit) into the logic of it, but not viciously saying: there was a call for you. Your friends, he said conversationally, thought you’d had an accident.
–Well, I may have scraped the side of the car a bit, she remembered guiltily. But he laughed. Why do you smell so awful? Have you been drinking eau de cologne.
–Rimmel, she said.
–And what happened to Eli? he asked. There was an edge on his voice then, she thought, but it didn’t matter, she didn’t care, she was too sleepy.
*
Later that night she woke several times to see him
fully dressed still reading, one arm in the pillows. Reading, not looking at her.
–You don’t care, she said. Out of her last dream. What I do. Do you?
–Still, I wish you wouldn’t lose the current week’s
Listener
,
he answered. And the
Radio
Times
.
Before you go out on the booze.
–Oh God, she fell back.
In the morning he brought her a cup of coffee.
She received it incredulously. What’s the matter? Do I look as though I’m dying?
–You look all right, he said.
And she could not read his face. There seemed to be some pain, but it was probably the difficulty of finding a clean cup and saucer downstairs. That morning. She slept off three months’ dream of dissipation.
Blue and white. Neat. Shining. The savoury fish,
fresh-cooked
, and balled in jelly in their glass containers. The salads, crisp in polythene; the meat, freshly washed, and salted, and ready on the teak board. All the sacred ritual of preparation and eating, she remembered: that she had put aside as not for her. That she envied as it must be sweet to receive such attention. To walk in so firm a chosen world. Down to the smallest drawer, the most minute articles and cards; all given their appointed places.
For these, these were the gods she had renounced, and they called to her mournfully (if seldom); whenever she returned to her mother’s house to watch; brisk, tight-mouthed, and tired, her old mother; at the shrine of her kitchen, tending and placing. And the food that shone under her hands as she laid: white linen and bright silver.
But it was not just her mother who entered her houses (
any
of the houses they’d lived in) with
bewilderment
: she and Ben also were astonished, any time, coming home, with the peculiar unchosen nature of their lives. Moving house moving house; like nomads; letting go every
thing
that was not immediately needed
for survival; worse, unfree, because cluttered
hopelessly
, so that they had the worst of both worlds; nomads who didn’t know how to pack their tents and insisted on carrying the library of the world’s poetry on their backs and the unsorted rubbish of their children. Worse, because they lived inside circles of their own making, across which threshold only chosen spirits entered; cutting themselves off from whatever
neighbourhood
they set themselves down in.
And the last circle she remembered; had come as near a chosen place as they had ever found. A monstrous old house, with a red wall of leaves that shone in the autumn sun; an anomaly, in an old street of Victorian terrace-houses.
Sometimes in the sun an old man with a wooden leg and a dog stood in front of his doorway watching the bicycles that went down the street to the end of the cul-de-sac. Under his long grey hair, his face was polished red and shining. If it was hot, he wore a khaki shirt and braces. He watched everyone; he did nothing, but watch. So that he knew; how late she and Ben went out in the morning, and how the plum trees were dying and how the grass was beginning to grow up through the floor of the wooden shed where they left the car.
Otherwise it was a street of old ladies, thin silk-printed ladies; not the confident felt-hatted ladies who waited at the bus stop for town, but the true and tight-lipped poor of another age; who remembered bitterly the old house at the corner when people of grace lived in it; as it might have been once, employment to half the street or at any rate made some ancient feudal
connection
to them. They were not unfriendly. But they too kept their lives invisible with net, and sometimes on their white doorsteps they would look up at Lena over the hump of their buttocks and notice her. As a
stranger. As one of the new ones in the big house. And sometimes they complained, Lena remembered, when an uncut piece of hedge caught one of them in the face coming by in the darkness.
One day the bell rang, and Michael answered it.
–Who is it, she called.
–Some old woman, he called back and she went to see.
His eyes were shining with delight, and a small black animal with a long pink tail was sitting on his shoulder at his neck.
–Look! she said: had I lost this? he said cheerfully. She’d just picked it up in the street. It’s a hamster isn’t it?
–Do hamsters have tails? asked Lena uncertainly. And knew it was not a hamster. It was a small baby rat; mysteriously quiet on Michael’s shoulder.
–Michael, she said quietly. Don’t stroke him love and don’t do anything quickly for a minute because I want to take him off your jumper and I don’t want to frighten him.
–He’s all right, said Michael. Look: he’s perfectly tame.
The line of the creature’s back ran straight and sharp to the twitching nose; the eyes, aware of her hostile gaze were bright and frightened. She could see the claws were fast in the wool of the jumper.
–What’s the matter? said Michael.
–It’s a rat, she said helplessly. It doesn’t look very fierce, so I think it must be somebody’s pet, I hope so anyway, but I bet it’s been living wild. Now. I want to lift it off but I don’t know how to do it, so it won’t bite you.
–You can’t, said Michael.
And she was afraid.
Michael said: I bet it likes milk. Look, go and get it some milk and I’ll just stand here.
Which he did. While she rootled desperately for one of those silver foil pie-dishes that frozen foods came in. And filled it, with nervous fingers.
She came back, and put it on the floor, uncertain how to proceed.
–Now just keep still, said Michael, or you’ll frighten it. And weakly she watched the creature walk the
unfrightened
young arm on to the floor and put its ugly mouth in the milk.
–Now get away get away, she said. And wash. And take your jumper off. But he stood there watching it drink.
–You’re always so frightened of
everything
,
he said contemptuously. Look he
was
hungry, wasn’t he? I like him.
–He’s a rat, she said, helplessly.
–But he’s a nice rat. I like him. It was given to
me
.
–He’ll be full of fleas, she explained. They carry horrible diseases you know. And we couldn’t just let him run around he’d get hundreds of children and we’d be overrun with the things.
–I know, said Michael. What about those old cages in the cellar?
She’d already thought of those as a matter of fact; but the whole idea of keeping the creature was abhorrent to her.
–Look, said Michael, practically. Whatever we do we have to put it in a cage, don’t we?
–I suppose so, said Lena. She didn’t see how she could kill it.
–I’ll stand guard, said Michael.
And when she came back he put the silver tray of milk inside the cage and lifted the door and the creature ran straight in:
–You see, he said. It’s
used
to cages. What a coward you are, Mum.
And she was, because she intended to destroy it. Not
now, while he was looking at it, but later, when he was asleep; or perhaps if Ben came home, he would agree to carry it off to the lab and. It could be murdered there without pain or.
But when Ben came home, and peered in the cage she could see it would not be so simple.
–Of course its someone’s pet, he said. I’d like to see you jiggling a wild rat in there, the pair of you.
–Who’ll look after it?
–Well, he will, said Ben.
–Clean its cage?
–Hm.
Lena felt hysterical.
–Some lousy old woman comes to the door and gives my child a flea-ridden old rat and I have to clean its floor out every day for the rest of my life do I? she shouted. Where do we keep it? In the kitchen? The bedroom? Or the cellars? Where he probably has the rest of his family, or soon will have.
–Oh well, said Ben indifferently. The greenhouse I thought.
The rat was moved into the greenhouse. And at first Michael tended him with enormous enthusiasm. And Lena watched the cooling of that enthusiasm cruelly. She let what must happen happen; really, her own original suggestion would have been kinder.
*
About this time Lena heard that Danny had left his wife. And it moved her with peculiar pain. Remembering Lisa’s whiteness, her delicate beauty; and Danny’s hand feeling and feeling at that other broad bottom. But when she told Ben of it he would only shrug from his bed and say: who knows? What it was like inside for her anyway? And if she’s so lovely.
–There are always alternatives.
Alternatives. Yes. As half-joking they indulged in fantasied ideals for one another.
–A secretary bird.
–A daddy man.
Guying one another’s earlier loves. And she found herself defending. Why she hadn’t married Julian, for instance. Because she never really knew. Had even stopped wondering. Except in conversation with Ben. Then she would argue. That yes, she could have married him. Have handled the real world with his help. Though he embodied. All the virtues she and Ben lacked utterly. And Eli with them. He was so opposed a figure. As that bold-faced woman Danny had taken off with was so opposed. To the delicate woman he was leaving. Lisa’s long thin legs, her delicate mouth twitching. Now she must wander round a big and lonely house, holding her frightened child. Or what. Getting up early to walk in early morning light over the fields, her pale hair flying. As one morning Lena had found her, rain-coated and lovely, face wet with rain, at 7 a.m. making coffee in the kitchen.
Could Danny really have left her, for so simple a piece of gaiety? Were there such extreme possibilities then, were other people so flexible? In their love as in their lust which is commonly various? Could she in action have married Julian and into what shape would she have grown?
*
He was a fiction by now in her mind, a creature of their conversations only, the boy she had nearly married before Ben. The memory tracks of his presence had all gone, lost in that image of him. And she could never ever tell the story the same way twice.
As she remembered it, she must have talked most of
the time to his
father
,
a wizened old dealer, wise as a hawk with his own code of eccentric finality. She remembered how he was outraged at the pettiness of someone who didn’t buy a ticket from the bus-conductor; how he was quite likely to intervene and expose the culprit.
–But I don’t mind a big swindle, he’d say, grinning.
He was contemptuous of all the small activities of the world; it was scale that obsessed him. The small business, little shop-keepers; he hated them all.
–The worst of the lot, he’d say. They’re all in it for
pride
.
Not money, he’d explode over the breakfast table. They’d all do better working for someone else, they manage on pitiful sums, but no. They want their name on the door. Fools.
–My Father used to be rich, she’d volunteered once, a bit ashamed of saying it, but somehow moved to defend him from those sharp beady eyes.
–Aye. Well, any fool can make money, he’d said cogently. It’s holding on to it is the hard thing.
And when he looked at Julian she could see that he was a bit anxious for him, as to whether he understood. The importance of the big break, the big-time, that had to be taken when it came. Because Julian was a dogged, almost innocent boy. And Lena? She must have seemed like a creature from another planet. He lectured them both continuously.
–Now I’ve been flat on my uppers, he’d say. You don’t get the world right till you know that. Flat. On my uppers. Without even sixpence in my pocket for a cup of tea.
And he’d stare at them both savagely over the table. Perhaps he thought she was stupid that she couldn’t see the relevance of what he was saying to their bizarre engagement.
He was not an austere man. At the weekends she and Julian slept in the same room with his tacit consent; although sometimes she wondered whether that silent piece of permissiveness wasn’t a piece of the old man’s cleverness, a way of satisfying their fierce sexual desire for one another. Without marriage. Because he must have seen what a disastrous wife she would have made in his scheme of things. Poor. Unpushing. Casual about success. Faintly mocking about Young Conservatives; socially ungracious to most of the useful people Julian knew. He must have been simply waiting. For the break-up. And when it came, he must have rejoiced at his son’s escape. And no doubt of it they were ill-suited; except in their narrow bodies pushing together in the small bedroom; they were wholly unsuited.
Sometimes
she remembered Julian as stupid, knowing it was not exactly stupidity she meant but rather a sort of invincible commonsense in his way of taking hold of the world. Lacking the sharp cut of his father. (Maybe it was the father she’d loved.) And when she’d tried to tell Julian about poetry. Or more likely, it was he, puzzled, who wanted the key to it. She didn’t know how to do it. She tried Donne first because he was sexy; but the lines were all snarled up with complexities; and then she’d tried to show him the lovely lines from the
Second
Anniversary
that made her blood sing just to say them; but he felt nothing. And she tried Keats, but he thought it was all wordy and (he killed two poems for her) then Yeats, because he had a kind of mad wisdom that she wanted to break through to him, and then finally in desperation, she tried Williams, and then he became furiously indignant. That he could understand all right, if that was a poem, and in that case. He wouldn’t take any more time for it. After that, he had it quite straight about poetry. It was some nut business;
which she could play with if she liked (it might have been bingo or clabiash or anything) he didn’t mind. Women were like that; but it wasn’t
serious
.
*
For several years after losing Julian Lena had fantasies about meeting him again that went like this. She would be: famous and rich and beautifully dressed and driving a low white car and. She would pull up outside some smart restaurant. And there he would be having married some dumpy rich girl (he hated fat women) and going into the place for some boring business reasons and she would say:
–Hello. Julian isn’t it?
And he would say: My god Lena how beautiful you look.
And then sometimes in her fantasy they went off immediately and made love and sometimes they went instead down long streets of crowds who recognised her instantly or stared at her covetously or did something anyway that made him realise the full enormity of his mistake. But the years went by and they never met at all.
As she and Ben talked, Julian became ever more incredible as an alternative life; the embodiment of order and normalcy. Was it ever really open to her? The real Julian dwindled; to a single narrow image, for some reason holding its power: a slim figure sitting at a café table and taking out a wallet. She could recall the slenderness of his fingers, and the perfection of his nails; and as he opened his wallet to pay she registered. The stiff blue notes, the number of them there; like a sexual jolt in the stomach.