The end of her sentence was put off by the commencement of a high-pitched screaming from above. It was Polly. The two of us immediately started up the stairs again—me first, Mrs. Taylor in hot pursuit. When we got to the ladder, there was a
brief, somewhat undignified struggle as to who would go first. I won.
At the top of the ladder, I found Sheba and Polly in roughly the positions that I had left them, except that Polly was now sitting up on her bed, holding her hand to her cheek. When she saw me, she broke off from shrieking for a moment. “She hit me!” she gasped.
“For God’s sake, shut up, Polly!” Sheba said.
Polly leaned forward now and made a clumsy effort to claw at her mother’s face. But Sheba was quicker than she was. She grasped Polly by her thin little wrists and held her at arm’s length. For a few moments, the two of them rocked back and forth on the bed, as in some children’s game.
“Stop it at once. Both of you!” I shouted, but neither of them paid any notice. Sheba, gaining a momentary advantage, pushed Polly back down into a recumbent position on the bed.
“You cow,” Polly panted. “I hate—” Before she could finish, Sheba swooped down and slapped her again. It looked to me as if she put some force into it. When her hand met Polly’s cheek, there was a distinct and not unsatisfactory
thwack
, and Polly’s cries seemed to rise at least an octave higher.
Mrs. Taylor was scrambling off the top of the ladder now. “Sheba!” she shouted. “Sheba! What have you done?”
Sheba looked at her mother quite blankly, and then she burst into tears. “Oh, bugger you all!” she cried. She walked over to the ladder and began to climb down. I followed her, of course, but when I reached the top-floor landing, she called up to me to leave her alone. Then she ran down the rest of the stairs and, shortly after that, I heard the front door slam.
I hovered on the stairs for a while, uncertain of what to do. I opted, finally, for going back down to the living room, where,
for the next hour or so, I sat on the sofa, flicking through back issues of
The New York Review of Books
. (Mrs. Taylor never reads them, according to Sheba; she’s just too vain to cancel her late husband’s subscription.) Polly and Mrs. Taylor remained upstairs. Presently, rain began to speckle the living room window. I was rather hungry by now and had started to think wistfully of Mrs. Taylor’s turkey leftovers. But I didn’t want to risk being caught helping myself, so I stayed where I was and read a very long article about the Balkans.
By the time Sheba came back, I was ravenous. I hurried out to the hall as soon as I heard the front door click. “Where are they?” she whispered when she saw me. Her face was ruddy, and her hair was sticking to her scalp like a cloche. I pointed upwards.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I
am
sorry, Barbara. I didn’t realise I was letting you in for this.”
I shook my head. “No apology needed. Come on, let’s get you out of those wet things.”
She sat down on the stairs, and I began pulling off her shoes. “Would you be a love, Barbara,” she said, “and call the airline for me? Find out if we can get on an earlier flight tomorrow?”
I was just beginning to dial directory enquiries for the number when there was a loud cough from the first-floor landing. Looking up, we saw Polly, staring down at us. “I’m not going back with you, you know,” she said.
“Oh yes you are,” Sheba replied.
Mrs. Taylor appeared now, at her granddaughter’s side. “Perhaps,” she said, “it would be for the best, Sheba, if she stayed here a bit longer.”
“No,”
Sheba said.
The two of them retreated murmuringly. I went ahead and
called the airline, made the arrangements for an earlier flight. When I’d finished, the two of us sat listening to the faint mewlings of Polly in her grandmother’s bedroom and the thunderous rumblings of my stomach. After a while, Sheba said dully, “I don’t suppose I would ever have had children if I’d known it was going to be like this.”
Later, after everyone had gone to bed, I got up to use the toilet and found Sheba in the hall. She was sitting in the dark, dialing a number on the phone. She quickly replaced the receiver when she saw me.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
“No,” Sheba said. “Of course it isn’t. You know it isn’t.”
“No, I meant … you were on the phone. It’s so late. I thought maybe something was wrong at home.”
Sheba shook her head. “No.” She paused. Then she dropped her head into her hands. “I was trying to call Steven.”
The taxi that took us to the airport arrived at six the next morning. Mrs. Taylor was still in her dressing gown when she came out onto the doorstep to bid us good-bye. As the car moved off down the driveway, Polly, who was sporting a faint red wheal on her left cheek, knelt on the backseat and waved plaintively through the rear window at Mrs. Taylor’s receding figure. Sheba, sitting up in front, stared stonily ahead.
When we got back to Highgate, I insisted on seeing the two of them into the house. As we entered the front hall, Richard was running downstairs from his study, three steps at a time. “Polly!” he cried, hugging his daughter to him. “Darling, please don’t ever do that again. We were so scared …” He held her away from him to look at her. “What happened to your face?”
“I hit her,” Sheba said quickly. “We were having a row.”
Stirred by the recollection of her sufferings, Polly pressed her face against Richard’s chest and began to sob. Richard stared at Sheba with a puzzled expression.
“What?” Sheba said to him, irritably. “Oh, for God’s sake!”
She turned to me. “Barbara, thank you so much for everything. You must be getting home now.”
I offered to stay awhile and help prepare supper, but she was adamant. “You’ve done more than enough,” she said, leading me to the front door.
We kissed good-bye, and I left. Just as I got to the bottom of the front steps, she came back out again. “Barbara!” she called, “you will let me know if you hear anything more from Bangs, won’t you?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
After I went home, Sheba went straight up to her bedroom and rang Connolly’s pager. She waited for five minutes, but he did not call and, when she came downstairs again, Polly was huddled with Richard in the sitting room, recounting in a tremulous whisper Sheba’s terrible behaviour the night before. Silently, Sheba picked up her handbag and coat and left the house.
For the next three hours, she rode aimlessly through London on her bicycle. At first she stopped every fifteen minutes or so to ring Connolly’s pager, but after a while she gave up. He must have turned the pager off, she decided, or else have left it at home. It was two days before New Year’s Eve, and London was still in its post-Christmas lull. The streets were almost empty. There was a sharp, silvery quality to the air and, when Sheba breathed in deeply, she felt as if she were inhaling splinters. Slowly, as the afternoon wore on, a freezing fog descended. The light on Sheba’s bicycle was not working, and she began to
keep, where possible, to the pavements. Occasionally she would encounter pedestrians—bundled up figures looming suddenly out of the soupy grey. One woman called out, “Happy New Year” as she passed. A little while later, a man stopped and cursed at Sheba, with startling passion, for not having a light on her bicycle.
By five o’clock, she was frozen. She rode through the deserted City, looking for a café that was open. In Clerkenwell, she found one—a cramped, overheated place filled with cooking fug and the tinny clatter of cutlery. She ordered eggs on toast and a cup of tea and then, as she peered through the café’s misted-up windows at the dark street outside, she considered what to do next. She ought to go home, she told herself—placate her peevish daughter, explain herself to her reproachful husband. She knew they would be worried about her by now. But she couldn’t. To go home without at least speaking to Connolly would be intolerable, she felt. Somewhere in the back of her head, there was the conviction that, if she didn’t manage to talk to Connolly that night, she never would again. Then an idea came to her. She would go to Connolly’s house! She could not present herself at his front door, of course. But she could call up at his window, throw pebbles if necessary. As her plan took shape, the gloom that had been hanging over her throughout the afternoon fell away. She grew exhilarated at the prospect of seeing Connolly. She paid for her meal and left the café.
It was a long ride to Connolly’s estate and, when she got there, she spent a frustrating half hour getting lost in the maze of buildings. By the time she found his square, she was quite worn out. She went up the back alleyway, as she had done the first time with Connolly, before remembering that his bedroom was on the other side of the house. She turned and wheeled her
bicycle round to the front. When she saw a light on in his window, she let out a small yelp of happiness. At last, a lucky break.
She stood looking up for a few minutes, willing Connolly to sense her presence. After a while, she called his name quietly. She was uncertain how to pitch her voice, and at first it came out as a broken squawk. She kept on.
Steeee-ven. Steee-ven.
There was no sign of Connolly, but in the window of the next-door house a curtain twitched and a woman’s face briefly appeared. Sheba stopped when she saw this. It wouldn’t do to have to explain herself to a neighbour. She looked about her on the street for appropriate missiles to throw at the window. But there was nothing. Not even a bottle top.
Then a second idea came to her. She would go to a phone box and call Connolly’s home phone. She didn’t know what the number was—she and Connolly had always chosen to rely, for safety’s sake, on his pager—but it was sure to be in the directory. If Mr. or Mrs. Connolly picked up, she would pretend to be one of his school friends. She couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t thought of this sooner.
The first phone box she tried was out of order. She was luckier with the next one, which she found outside an off licence on Albany Way. It smelled of wet cigarettes and old pee, but it was operative. Once she had located the Connollys’ number in the book, she stood for a moment or two, practising her teenager’s voice. Then she picked up the receiver and dialled.
The receiver was clammy against her ear. When Connolly’s mother answered, Sheba was so astounded by her own temerity that, for a moment, she was unable to speak.
“Hello?” Mrs. Connolly repeated. Sheba could hear the noise of a television in the background.
“Yeah, hello,” Sheba said. “Is Steve there?” (I once persuaded Sheba to do a bit of her London schoolgirl for me; it’s astonishingly unconvincing.)
Mrs. Connolly didn’t reply. Sheba thought for a moment that she had put the phone down. But then she heard her shouting. “Steven! The phone!”
After a few moments, another phone was picked up, and Connolly came on the line. “Hello?”
“Steven? It’s me, Sheba. I’ve been trying to get through to you all day but you’ve had your pager off or something.”
“Oh.” She could tell by the nylon crackle in the background that he was lying in his bedroom on his Grand Prix bedspread.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Fine.” His voice was blank.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I pretended to be one of your friends. Listen, I’m nearby. On Albany Way. Can you come out for a bit and meet me?”
There was a long silence. “Steven?” she said.
“Nah, not really,” he replied. “It’s a bit difficult.”
“Please. I’ve been dying to see you. I need a hug.”
“Nah, I can’t make it.”
“Polly ran away,” she said. “I had to go and get her from Scotland.”
“Right.”
“Steven?”
“All righty then.”
“Steven.” Sheba was struggling now, she recalls, to keep the anger from her voice. “I’ve got important things to talk to you about, Steven,” she said.
“Well ta for phoning,” Connolly said. “See you around. Ta ra.” He put down the phone.
Sheba stood staring at the phone box wall for a full minute, she says. Then she replaced the receiver and stepped back out into the street. She wheeled her bike across the street back into the estate.
She had almost crossed the square and was about to start down one of the little alleys that led back to Hampstead Road when she heard voices across the way. She looked around to see two young people—a boy and a girl—leaving Connolly’s house. Behind them, standing on the doorstep, was Connolly. “Take care,” she heard him say. There was more conversation that she couldn’t quite make out. And then Connolly came down the steps and kissed the girl. Sheba gripped her bicycle. She felt dizzy. She hadn’t been able to see whether the kiss was on the girl’s lips or her cheek. The other boy said something now that she could not make out, and the three of them laughed. “Fuck off, yer only jealous,” Connolly said in a jovial tone.
The boy and the girl turned and began to walk down the street towards where she was standing. Sheba scurried on. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” she remembers moaning to herself, as she broke into a trot. “Please, God, don’t let him be in love with someone else.”
When Sheba got home that night, Richard was waiting for her. She found him in the living room, perched primly on the leather armchair.