Till We Meet Again (9 page)

‘Nor me.’ She grinned. ‘But I’m blowed if I’ll commit myself to someone just for the dubious pleasure of having company in the distant future.’

‘Do you ever feel lonely now?’ he asked curiously.

Beth thought about that for a moment. Loneliness was something she had always denied, after all she wasn’t like some people she knew who couldn’t bear to be alone for one night without phoning someone to break it up. But then she had trained herself to make sure she wasn’t stuck with time hanging on her hands and nothing to do.

‘Only on the occasional wet weekend,’ she said. ‘I suppose I keep myself too busy to succumb to it.’

‘So I have to invite you out on a wet weekend then?’ he said with a wide grin.

Beth felt herself recoil, just as she always did when someone tried to move in on her. She liked Roy, his intelligence, his sense of humour and his integrity, but she didn’t want him getting any romantic ideas about her.

He must have sensed what she was thinking for when she didn’t reply he laughed. ‘I feel an amazingly dry spell coming on,’ he said. ‘It’s okay, Beth, I was only thinking of going to the pictures, or a meal together, not forcing you to be my sex slave or getting you to do my washing.’

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said, laughing as she tried to hide her confusion at having her mind read. ‘Now, I’m starving, so how about going and getting something to eat? I’m paying.’

Later that evening, once she was in bed, Beth pondered on why she couldn’t be like other single women and feel optimistic about every eligible man she met. Roy was extremely eligible, nice-looking, tall, amusing – he had a good job, and she had enjoyed his company. He’d even been too gentlemanly to let her pay for the pizza. Why did she always have to be so wary?

But she knew the answer to that only too well.

She was frightened of intimacy. It wasn’t that she didn’t ever fancy anyone enough. There had been dozens of times when she’d got all the right signals, felt an electric current flowing between her and the man, even an overpowering desire to make love. But once she was in bed with him she kind of froze up.

Up until a few years ago, every time she met a new man, she really believed that this time it was going to be different. When it failed, she blamed the man for not being a good enough lover. He was too rough, coarse, quick, he wasn’t clean enough, or too clean. She was too drunk, or not drunk enough. She’d used any excuse rather than face the truth, which was that the fault had to lie within her. She couldn’t admit any of this to the man, so she put on an act, pretended everything was wonderful, and hoped against hope that the next time it would be.

She couldn’t bring herself to do that any more. It was better to remain celibate than go through the misery of pretence and the bitterness which came with it.

Self-help books, she’d read them all. They taught her what was to blame of course, but then she’d known that all along. Putting the blame in the right quarter didn’t solve the problem, however.

Beth loved her brother and sister, but every time she saw them together with their partners and children, she felt wounded. She could sense the joy they got from sex, it kind of oozed out of them. With each one of her sister’s and her sister-in-law’s pregnancies she’d felt a mixture of envy and disgust. She squirmed with embarrassment when they breast-fed their babies, it was all too animal-like for her to take.

So she had kept her distance. Her visits were short and infrequent, and she avoided occasions like Christmas which she’d found to be emotional mine-fields. Expensive presents took the place of the involvement she would have liked to have had with her nieces and nephews. She had deprived herself of their love and affection.

A tear trickled down her cheek as she lay there, unable to sleep. She knew others saw her as a woman who had everything, an absorbing career, plenty of money, beautiful clothes and a nice home. They couldn’t be blamed for assuming she had never wanted a husband and children.

And she would never admit to anyone that she would gladly give up everything she had for a man who could make her feel like a real woman.

Chapter six

Susan carried her food tray across the canteen, keeping her eyes down to avoid looking directly at any of the other prisoners. She had been here for only nine days, but it seemed more like nine months. Seeing two vacant seats at the end table, she made straight for it, but suddenly she tripped on something, and the tray fell from her hands as she tried to stop herself falling head-first on to the floor.

A roar of laughter burst out as the tray clattered to the floor, the dinner of cottage pie, cabbage and rhubarb tart and custard flung out in all directions. It looked like vomit against the green tiles.

Susan realized immediately that she had been tripped up purposely, and frightened by such malice, her first thought was to run and hide. But running wasn’t an option, for Miss Haynes, one of the prison officers, was already advancing on her, grim-faced.

‘Pick it up, Fellows,’ she yelled, as if Susan was deaf as well as clumsy.

Susan knew by the sniggers around her that it would be folly to make any sort of complaint, and as she knelt down to try to scoop the mess back on to the tray she fought back the desire to cry. She wouldn’t put it past Haynes to make her eat it. She had already discovered that humanity didn’t exist in prison, not from the other prisoners or the officers.

‘Scrape it into the slop bucket and get a pail of water to clear it up,’ Haynes yelled again. She looked round at the women grinning at the nearest table. ‘I suppose you think that was funny?’ she said. ‘Little things please little minds!’

Susan rushed to do as she was told, embarrassed by the way everyone was looking at her.

A blowsy woman in a pink sweatshirt was standing by the slop bucket, scraping the remains of her own food into it. ‘Don’t let it get to you, love,’ she said. ‘They do it to everyone new. They like to see how you’ll react.’

‘It’s a bit childish,’ Susan said with a sigh.

‘We’re all like kids when we’re in here,’ the woman said, and handed the bucket and cloth to her. ‘Some cry all the time, some fight, but the best way to cope with it is to laugh.’

As Susan hurried back to clean the floor, she wondered what anyone could find to laugh at in here. She wished now she’d turned the gun on herself after she’d shot the doctor.

In her naivety she had imagined prison to be something like going into a religious retreat. No comforts of course, but a chance to be alone most of the time, and in utter silence. But the noise in here was deafening and relentless. It never let up, not even at night: women shouting, swearing, crying, even screaming, trying to pass messages on to one another, others banging on the doors. She was in a cell with another woman called Julie who prattled on about nothing all the time and even the sound of her voice grated on Susan’s nerves.

It was so hot and airless, she would lie there at night in the dark feeling as if she couldn’t breathe. The cell was so small, just the bunks and a toilet and wash-basin, nowhere even to sit properly for there wasn’t enough headroom on the bottom bunk. She hated having to wash and dress in front of Julie, and having to use the toilet made her squirm with embarrassment – she would hang on for hours in the hopes of getting a minute alone. But Julie didn’t suffer from the same problem, she even laughed about it when she made terrible smells and noises.

Then there was the brutality.

On her second day Susan had seen one woman punched in the face by another prisoner while they were exercising outside. Since then she’d witnessed countless cat-fights and overheard all kinds of hideous threats to prisoners who weren’t liked for some reason. But worse still than the open aggression was the semi-concealed kind. She would see women whispering to one another in association time, and could sense by their scowls and gestures that they were plotting something against someone. She lived in fear that it might be her.

Once she’d cleaned the floor and taken the bucket back to the kitchen, her appetite was gone. It was perhaps as well, for it was time to go back to the cells.

Once there, she lay down on her bunk and picked up her book. But she was only pretending to read, she couldn’t see well enough and it occurred to her she needed glasses.

It seemed very strange to her that she kept becoming aware of things which hadn’t affected her outside. Her eyesight was one of them. Of course, she hadn’t tried to read anything for a very long time, so her vision may have been impaired for some while. She hadn’t noticed smells outside either, yet here it was so airless she was aware all the time of odours of stale food, toilets, sweat and feet. There was her own appearance too. She had no sooner got here than she saw how awful she looked; her hair was a mess and her face was so red that it stunned her that she’d got like that without ever noticing.

But she realized now that she had been in a kind of stupor ever since she got the idea of avenging Annabel’s death.

She had never given any thought to what would happen to her after she had achieved her objective. It hadn’t mattered to her. But if she had considered it, she certainly wouldn’t have expected that her mind would suddenly become sharper, or that she would find herself thinking about how she had once looked, the meals she used to cook, the pleasure she took in country walks or gardening. And now that her mind turned to these things, she missed them terribly.

The first weekend in here hadn’t been so bad, for the other women on her wing were quite welcoming. They had already found out what she’d done and seemed in awe of her. Julie had been a hairdresser once, and she had insisted on washing and cutting Susan’s hair for her. Another woman, Sandra, had offered her some makeup, and Frankie, a real tough nut who looked like a man, had set to work to tell her which screws and other prisoners she should be careful with and advised her to ask for work so she got some money every week.

But sympathy and awe soon faded once they realized she wasn’t tough or cunning. They began to snigger at the way she spoke, her shyness and her naivety, and by the end of her first week all the women on the wing were openly ridiculing her, calling her a ‘muppet’, their word for someone mad or simple-minded.

Susan couldn’t fight back in any way. She had neither the physical strength nor the verbal skills to knock anyone down. So she did what had always served her best in the past, tried to be as inconspicuous as possible and voiced no opinions.

But as she lay there in her cell, looking at a book she couldn’t actually read, she felt angry with herself. She had always allowed people to walk all over her, and if she hadn’t, her life might have been very different. Her mind slipped back to the day when her mother came home from hospital, seeing it as clearly as if it were yesterday, not twenty-eight years ago.

It was in early December, and as Susan ran to open the front door when she heard her father’s car pull into the drive, she wished it could have been better weather for her mother. A bitterly cold north wind was swirling the last of the fallen leaves into the air. Apart from the holly bush by the gate which was covered in berries, everything else looked as drab as the sullen grey sky.

Grabbing the wheelchair her father had just bought, she ran out eagerly, full of excitement because she had been dying to show Mother all the changes that had been made downstairs. Father’s old study next to the dining room was now Mother’s new bedroom, and the old downstairs cloakroom had been converted into a bathroom. Susan had worked like a slave to get things ready. It was she who humped pile after pile of books upstairs, cleaned up after the builders, painted, cleaned and arranged the furniture.

‘It’s so good to have you home again, Mummy,’ she exclaimed as she opened the passenger door where her mother was sitting. ‘You’re going to be as right as nine-pence once you get inside.’ She folded down the side of the wheelchair and pushed it right up to the car seat the way a nurse had shown her. Her mother had lost a lot of weight and regained the use of her left arm, so it wasn’t too difficult to get her into the wheelchair.

‘Good girl,’ Mother said. She could speak a little by then, only the words were slurred, almost as though she was drunk, so she didn’t speak unless it was important. She brought up her left hand and caressed Susan’s cheek. ‘It’s good to be home.’

‘Not too much excitement all at once,’ Father said warningly as Susan pushed the chair back indoors and he followed on with Mother’s suitcase. ‘You’ll have to curb that desire to show her everything the first day, Suzie. She needs rest and quiet still.’

It was wonderful to see her mother’s face light up at the converted study, to see the way her good hand reached out to touch the pretty quilt on the bed and precious little ornaments Susan had brought down from upstairs. The fire was blazing away, a couple of lamps were on to banish the cold grey weather outside, and when Susan carried in a tea tray laid with the best bone china and a plate of butterfly cakes she’d made, a tear of emotion rolled down Mother’s cheek.

Susan sighed at the memory of that day. She had been so sure then that her mother would make a full recovery once she was settled in at home. She felt so important, dynamic, and so tender towards her. She had rosy visions of cosy chats by the fire in the winter, of sharing little chores, neighbours calling and the house ringing with laughter, and of taking her mother out visiting in the wheelchair when the weather was fine.

But it wasn’t like that at all. A few people called at first, but they didn’t come again when they saw how difficult it was for Mother to speak. There was no further recovery. Her speech didn’t improve, she never managed to walk again, and as the months went by and she found her disabilities more frustrating, she became tetchy and demanding.

She developed an irritating habit of tapping her wedding ring on the spokes of the wheelchair whenever she wanted to draw Susan’s attention to something. It could be anything, usually trivial, a cobweb in a corner, an unwashed glass, a smear on the window, and she wanted Susan to deal with it at once. Often a pot on the stove would boil over while she was called away, making even more work for her.

Susan felt guilty at being irritated with her mother, so she’d tried even harder to anticipate anything she might find to complain about. It left her in a state of exhaustion from which there was no respite.

The weeks, months and years became an arduous circle of washing, cooking, cleaning and waiting on both her parents. Father never helped out with anything, he took the view that as he was paying Susan a wage, that relinquished him from any responsibility. He didn’t even keep his promise that she could have Saturdays off. More often than not he would pretend he was going into the office to catch up with some work, when in fact he was going shooting or playing golf.

A nurse came in twice a week to give Mother a bath, and a physiotherapist came for an exercise session for one afternoon. But everything else fell to Susan – getting her mother up and dressed in the mornings, taking her to the lavatory countless times during the day, cutting up her food, giving her medicine and helping her do the exercises the physiotherapist recommended.

As well as tapping on the wheelchair, Mother would also ring her little bell if Susan left her for more than half an hour on her own. She liked to be wheeled into the kitchen or sitting room or wherever Susan was working. It was painful to listen to her mother trying to ask questions, but even more annoying was the criticism, for although she knew she couldn’t do anything much for herself, she was determined Susan should do everything her way.

If she could just have gone out on her bike now and then lain on her bed to read a book, or sat in the sun in the garden, maybe she wouldn’t have felt so weary. But she never got the chance. She hated herself for resenting the hard work and the responsibility, for having no friends and day-dreaming of going out to work in an office, or going off to a dance or the cinema in the evenings.

She hardly even had time to read the newspaper or a magazine, and when she did it made her lot in life seem even worse. England was in the grip of Flower Power, and it seemed to Susan that every other young person in the country was going to rock concerts, love-ins and wild parties, but the nearest she got to feeling like a hippy was buying an embroidered cheesecloth smock in Stratford and singing along with ‘The Marrakech Express’ on the radio.

She remembered the dejection she felt when Beth wrote in the summer of ’69 and said she was going to university in London to study law in October. Somehow Susan just knew that would be the last letter. Beth even prepared her for it by saying she wouldn’t have time to write so often and she didn’t know where she’d be living in London. But then her suspicions that Beth had found new friends when she said she couldn’t come to Stratford two years earlier had grown even stronger in the past few months when a sudden chill had come into her letters.

All the humour was gone and there were none of Beth’s usual accounts of what went on in the shoe shop where she worked on Saturdays and in the holidays. She didn’t bother to report on boys she fancied, the way she used to, or clothes she’d bought and films she’d seen. It was as though she’d long since grown out of her old friend, and now found writing at all a tedious chore.

It was particularly hurtful to Susan when she re-read letters Beth had sent less than a year before. In those she had been full of concern for Susan, advising her to stand up to her father and make him get a nurse or housekeeper for her mother, so she could be free to have a career. She had even suggested that they could still share a flat in London.

There was no further mention of sharing a flat in that last letter, no more pleading with her to tackle her father. Beth didn’t actually say goodbye, yet it was there, invisibly, in every word. She was moving on.

At that time the newspapers and television made much of ‘Free Love’. According to them, every single person under twenty-five was sleeping with anyone they fancied, the fear of pregnancy now removed by the contraceptive pill. Yet Susan’s sexual experience was limited to kissing the boy who had walked her home from the dance in Stratford when she last saw Beth. She knew she wasn’t going to gain any more experience either, she never had a chance to meet any boys.