The Likes of Us (43 page)

‘Are you on the phone?'

‘No. Well, there is a communal phone, but it depends on someone answering it and I might not get the message.'

‘I'll give you my number,' Dawn said. She wrote on a slip of paper.

They left after another round of drinks, which Otterburn bought.

‘Well,' she said, ‘I'm afraid I wasn't much help.'

‘Oh, these things often take a little time,' Otterburn said. ‘Perhaps I'll try thinking along the lines you suggested.'

‘Just whereabouts do you live?'

‘Along here.'

They strolled along the embankment. It was a fine night. The river slid by. Lights were reflected in its smooth broad surface. Here they were, Otterburn thought, walking by the river in one of the oldest cities in Europe. He felt elated, buoyed up by the beauty, the mystery, the boundless possibilities of it all.

‘That's me, up there.' He pointed as they paused before the house. ‘Third floor front.'

‘Yes,' Dawn said. ‘Well, you won't get your feet wet there.'

‘Hmm?'

‘The river comes up and floods these houses practically every year.'

‘Perhaps I shan't be here long, anyway.'

‘You're not settled, then?'

‘Oh, no. Sort of in transit, really.'

She asked him the time. ‘I'd offer to come up with you,' she said then, ‘but I really must go.'

‘My dear young woman!' Otterburn said.

‘What's the matter?'

‘I hope you don't say such things to every strange man you meet.'

‘There you go again, thinking you're no different from anybody else.'

‘You flatter me.' Otterburn said.

‘I must be off, anyway. Thank you for a very pleasant evening.'

‘Thank you,' Otterburn said. ‘But won't you let me see you home?'

‘No. I can get a bus just across the bridge. Goodnight.'

She was moving away from him, quite rapidly. He called after her. ‘Goodnight.'

He let himself into the house and went straight to bed. He thought that he would lie awake for some time, but only a few minutes after he had started to retrace the evening from the moment she walked into the restaurant, he fell asleep.

He slept quite late. An idea had formed in his mind and he lay on his back, the house still around him apart from the hum of a vacuum cleaner somewhere below, and considered the sheer audacity of it. In a while he got up, breakfasted on cereal, toast and coffee, washed himself and dressed. He looked for coins, found the paper with the girl's number on it and went down to the wall telephone on the ground floor. He dialled. A woman's voice answered.

‘Could I speak to Miss Winterbottom, please?'

‘Just a minute. I'll get her.'

‘Hullo?'

‘Dawn? It's Malcolm Otterburn.'

‘Oh, hullo.'

‘I was thinking...'

‘Yes?'

‘What you were saying about broadening my scope.'

‘Oh, yes?'

‘I was wondering how far ten thousand pounds would take us.'

‘You were what?'

‘We could get quite a long way on that, I should think. Wouldn't you?'

‘Pretty well all the way round.' She laughed. ‘Are you serious?'

‘Oh, quite.'

‘Look,' she said, ‘I was just going out. I'll see you in the Ferryboat at seven.'

‘Will you think about it?'

‘Oh, yes. And I hope you will too.'

‘I've done that.'

‘All right. But I'm late for an appointment so I must rush. I'll see you in the Ferryboat at seven.'
She hung up.

Otterburn saw the envelope on the mat behind the front door as he turned from the telephone. He picked it up. It had his name on it. He slit it open and took out the single folded sheet of paper. ‘
I saw you
,' the note said, in the same hand, ‘
but you didn't see me. I like your new outfit
.' He folded it and pushed it into his trousers pocket. Checking that he had his keys, he left the house and walked along the embankment and up into the town. In a branch of W. H. Smith he bought a pad of feint ruled A4 paper and some cartridges for his fountain pen.

Back in his room, he pulled the table over to the window and sat down with the pad of paper before him. He got the ink flowing in the nib of his pen, looked out at the river for a few moments, then rested his cheek on his left hand and began to write:

 

‘Otterburn had come to live in this cathedral city when he left his wife. He rented a room and kitchen, with a shared bath and lavatory on the next landing. He had never lived alone in his life before and from his window he could look down three floors at the river flowing between its stone banks and think that at least he hadn't far to go if he decided to do away with himself.

The Pity of it All

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday afternoon, it was – as if she'd ever forget – half-day closing, and Nancy's mother was going on while she cleaned the house around Nancy, who was doing the week's wash. Since Nancy seldom went out in the evenings and couldn't watch television forever after she had put little June to bed, the house was near spotless before Nancy's mother started on it; but she had to occupy herself and Wednesday afternoon had become a ritual. Nancy's mother came and cleaned the house and went on about something.

What she was going on about now was what she had gone on about ever since Jim had been killed. Where was the sense, she asked, in Nancy tying herself to this house when there was a place for her at home, a garden for little June to play in instead of a short length of street and a deathtrap of a through-road at the end of it, and herself and Nancy's father to look after the child while Nancy went out and enjoyed herself?

Oh, and didn't she go on! Saying the same things, week after week. She had decided what she thought was best, and wouldn't leave it alone.

‘I like my independence,' Nancy always told her. ‘I like to have a life of my own.'

‘You bring June to me on your way to the shop,' Nancy's mother said, ‘and you collect her on your way home. You can't go out on a night because she's got to be looked after. If you call that having a life of your own. You never get out and see anybody.'

She saw enough people in the shop during the day, Nancy always told her. She was happy enough in her own home when she'd done her day's work.

‘A young woman like you, shutting yourself off,' her mother said. ‘You'll never get anywhere if you don't get out and about.' She would never find another husband, Nancy's mother meant. Jim had been taken suddenly, and that was sad; but Nancy was a young woman, with time to have another two or three bairns, but not if she never went out and mixed with people socially.

It was the first week of the school holidays and children were noisy in the street. Some young ones had been and fetched June straight after dinner. June herself would be starting junior school in the autumn. Then, with Nancy tied at the shop till six in the evening, Nancy's mother would accept the extra chore of collecting June in the afternoon. All the more reason, Nancy could hear her mother saying, why Nancy should listen to sense and sell this house and move back home. But though Nancy had often spoken to Jim of ‘popping round home' when visiting her parents' house, she no longer thought of it as such. Here was home, the house she and Jim had bought and done up together, talking of the day they would get something better: a semi, they thought, with a lawn at the back to sit out on and a vegetable patch where Jim could grow things. There had been no rush.

Then they had come to tell her about Jim, baffled themselves by the tragedy of it. In a safe pit with a low accident rate, and no fatalities for years past, he had walked alone into a heading, where a stone had fallen out of the roof, pinning him down and, so they told her as a crumb of comfort, killing him instantly. She was carrying the child and thought at first she would surely lose it. The doctors told her she was tough. Her mother had been known to call her hard. But Nancy had never paraded her feelings; she did not know how to behave to impress others. Her duty was to hang on and think of the new life growing inside her: a bit of Jim that he would now never see. Perhaps she would re-marry one day; but she would not go out and look for a chap, and he would have to be pretty special for her to notice him. That she had told her mother. It seemed to Nancy that she told her every Wednesday, while her mother went on.

Now she was telling Nancy that she'd had a reply from a guesthouse in Bournemouth, whose address a friend had given her, and they could have accommodation for the last two weeks in August. Nancy's mother thought the south coast would be a pleasant change, but if Nancy wanted to go elsewhere with a friend it would be no trouble for her and Nancy's father to take little June with them. But no, there was nowhere else that Nancy wanted to go.

Afterwards, Nancy found she could remember that moment with vivid clarity, though its components were all familiar ones. There was the attitude of her mother's body as she held the vacuum cleaner while she wound the flex on to the hooks; the sudden rush of water in the automatic washer as it performed its last rinse; the sunlight on the step outside the scullery door. The voices of the children were no longer near.

‘Just have a look out at June, will you?' she said, as she opened the washer and passed clothes over into the drying compartment. ‘They've gone quiet.'

Then a minute or so must have passed, but it seemed like no time at all before Nancy's mother was calling at the end of the yard. ‘June! June, where are you? Ey, you two, bring June back here. Don't you know how busy that road is? No, keep hold of her! Don't let her -!' And Nancy was out and running across the flagstones and into the street, as though she knew before she heard that awful screech of tyres and saw the car slewed round and the little legs in the blue and white Marks and Spencer socks, washed just once, and the stupid, older girls who had led her into it, standing petrified, soundless, and she herself making no sound – not yet – while her mother set up an endless moaning chant beside her: ‘Oh! oh! oh! oh! oh! ...'

 

Nancy's father could not eat his food. Nancy had had nothing but cups of tea for over twenty-four hours. They talked behind her in low voices. ‘It's the shock,' her father was saying. He couldn't take it in.

Nancy's mother was saying what she'd said ever since Jim died; that there had been no sense in Nancy living on her own with the bairn, when a good home had been waiting for them here. Nancy told her to shut up; let it drop.

‘I don't care, Nancy. You could have come here and been as free as you liked. You can't stop living just because –'

‘Just because what?' Nancy challenged her. ‘What are you talking about? I don't know how you can fashion to bring it all up. You never let things rest; you just go on and on. You were sick to get me out of that house, and now you've got something you can hold against me for the rest of your life.'

‘Nancy!'

There might have been a row then, because if what Nancy accused her mother of was not strictly true, her mother talking like that would not help Nancy to stop thinking that if only she had taken her advice little June would not have been in that road at the moment that car came along, and... And if Jim had not walked into that heading, or he had come out of the pit into a safer job, and if she had never met him and she'd never had the child
…
?

But the doorbell rang.

Nancy's mother, on her feet, went to answer it, coming back a few moments later to stand, curiously tongue-tied, inside the living-room doorway.

‘Who is it?' Nancy's father asked.

‘It's a chap, to see our Nancy.'

Nancy's father began to get up from the table. ‘She can't see anybody now. Can't they leave her in peace? Some folk...'

‘No, Cliff, wait a minute. It's the feller at...'

‘Who?'

‘He's come to see our Nancy.'

‘Who is he?' Nancy asked.

‘They call him Daymer. If you don't want to see him, just say so.'

‘No. If he's come we can't turn him away.'

‘Look, Nancy,' her father said, ‘there's no law says you've got to see him.'

And she didn't want to, but he'd come and she must.

Her mother showed him in. ‘This is a sorry house you've come to.' That tongue. It could spare nobody.

In the one direct look she could manage, Nancy saw that he was nicely dressed, still young. She wondered if his eyes always looked so hurt, or if it was only because of what had happened. Of what, she suddenly realised, had happened to him.

‘Mrs Harper... I'm sorry to intrude on you at a time like this, but I felt I had to come. There's nothing I could say that wouldn't be hopelessly inadequate. You do understand that I hadn't a chance of avoiding your little girl? It was over in a flash.'

‘Nobody's blaming you,' Nancy said. ‘It was an accident. They do happen.'

‘It was an accident that took her husband,' her mother told him. ‘In the pit.'

His voice was shocked. ‘Oh, I'm... It sounds worse than useless, Mrs Harper, but if there's anything I can do, anything at all.'

‘You can't bring her back, can you?'

No mercy there. Her mother was, in fact, a good-hearted woman. But that tongue...

‘Have you any family, Mr Daymer?' Nancy asked.

‘A boy, Peter. He's away at school.'

‘I expect he'll be well looked after there.'

‘Well...'

‘It wouldn't be easy for you to come. I thank you for it.'

‘If there's any way I can help, any way at all, please let me know. I'll give you a card and put my private address on the back.'

Her mother took the card. ‘Oh, you work at Ross's, do you? I used to know Mr Finch's wife, before she died. We did charity work together.'

‘He's my father-in-law. I married his daughter, Elizabeth.'

‘A lovely woman, she was, Mrs Finch.'

‘Yes, indeed. And now I must go. Goodnight, Mr Frost, Mrs Harper.'

‘Is he in his car?' her father asked when her mother came back from showing Mr Daymer out.

‘Yes.'

‘I don't think I could drive a car again, if anything like that happened to me.'

But, Nancy thought, you'd got to keep going. There were times when you thought you couldn't. But you'd got to.

They sold cigarettes and tobacco and cigars, sweets, and newspapers and magazines in the shop. Some of the magazines Nancy was not keen on selling. They had pictures in them of women with their legs open, showing all they'd got. Sometimes the women had their hands down there, as if they were touching themselves up. Not that she was prudish herself, but it embarrassed her when men were embarrassed by buying them. Some of them were. Some were really brazen about it, eyeing her up and down as they threw the book on to the counter, as though she chose them all herself and guessed exactly what they would like. Still, they were dear and the owner said they made a good profit. Marjorie, the other girl, younger than Nancy and not married, thought they were a giggle, and when things were quiet she would pick one out and read the letters, which were all about sexual experiences. ‘They must make them up, Nancy. Don't you think so? Honest. It's dreamland. Hey, listen to this one!' Well, they knew what men were like, didn't they? Marjorie would say. Jim himself had not been averse to a look and a laugh, though when it came to the thing itself he'd been easily enough satisfied so long as he got what he called his ‘night-cap' regular. He was always pretty tired and it didn't last long. It was all right. She'd loved him and couldn't complain, though just every now and then she'd find herself wishing for a bit of finesse, that they might linger, enjoy it for itself, not just for the end of it. And it had been a long time now... Marjorie had a boyfriend, a cocky lad called Jeff, who sometimes called in to buy a packet of fags and make arrangements with Marjorie. When Marjorie couldn't resist telling Nancy what a smashing lover Jeff was, she nearly always stopped at some place, cutting off the subject in a way which told Nancy she was sorry that she hadn't got anybody now. And Nancy wished she wouldn't, because she didn't want that kind of pity. It had been a long time... But she still missed Jim and could not bring herself to think of anyone taking his place.

Marjorie's big blue eyes brimmed with tears the morning Nancy returned to the shop. Nancy had to steel herself to accept this kind of sympathy. It was natural, but it threatened the defences she was building along the slow path to days in which there would be moments when her mind was not obsessed with what had happened. The nights were the worst, before she managed to sleep; then the mornings when she woke ready for a routine – the kisses, cuddles and chuckles, the dressing of a child's warm plump body – that was no longer there. It was why she was still with her parents: her own house had an atmosphere of expectancy, as though waiting for someone to come back from holiday, or a spell in hospital, and resume life as it had known it.

Sometimes Nancy took sandwiches to the shop – there was an electric kettle in the back room where they could make tea or coffee – but it was nice to get out for a while around midday, and she went for a snack then to the Bluebird Caf
é
, a clean place run by a Cypriot family, a couple of streets away. This particular day she had gone in perhaps a few minutes later than usual to find it full, and she was standing looking for somewhere to sit when a man she hadn't so far noticed spoke to her.

‘Mrs Harper...'

It was Mr Daymer, at a table for two, with one of the few empty seats in the place opposite him. She said, ‘Oh, hello,' and he asked how she was.

‘I was just going to order,' he said. ‘Perhaps you'd...' There was a newspaper on the other seat and
one of those slim zip-up cases for papers, as though
he'd been keeping the place for somebody. He reached over and moved them. ‘Please,' he said. ‘There's not much choice, anyway.'

She thanked him and sat down. As he said, there wasn't much choice, and she couldn't be rude.

‘I haven't seen you in here before.'

‘No. Do you come in much?'

‘Yes, I suppose I'm a regular.' But he knew that. She somehow knew that he'd known. So what did he want with her that he had to pretend things and cap his pretence with a downright lie – she was sure he was lying – when he said, ‘I had an appointment in town and just happened to spot this place.' He tried to smile, but it was a poor attempt. He wasn't
easy. But how could he be? In his place she would have run a mile before meeting her face to face. So why was she so certain he'd been waiting for her, expecting her to come?