Wish Her Safe at Home (15 page)

There was, unexpectedly, an exclamation. And a second later I was aware of something rather warm, felt its warmth even through nylon, a fluid which spurted along one of my thighs, slipped down the inside, copiously, some just above the stocking top, dripping and growing cool between my suspenders.

“Oh,
God
!” he said. “Rachel, I’m sorry! I am so sorry. Oh,
God
!”

It took me a moment to realize what had happened but the first thing I recognized, even perhaps before the fact of my own disappointment, was the pure misery of his. “It doesn’t matter,” I cried, “it’s all right! Oh, my darling, it doesn’t
matter
!” And I soothed his damp brow, tried to ease away its creases (that I could sense rather than see), ran my hands around his ears, stroked the back of his head and neck, endeavoured to comfort him in any way I could. “Oh, my darling, it doesn’t matter at all! And I enjoyed myself, I really did. Was it...
was it...
was it fairly okay for you?” I think he gave a sob.

“It was a farce,” he said.

“Oh, no, don’t call it that. It was fantastic. It was a truly wonderful experience.”

“I couldn’t even get it into you,” he said. “Here’s my handkerchief. You’d better clean yourself up and then I’ll get you home.”

I took his handkerchief: it was larger than my own. He began to readjust his clothes. He told me, still tonelessly: “I’m sorry for the mess.”

“But you mustn’t be. Not for anything. I honestly don’t mind the mess.”

I added after a moment—it didn’t strike me as being crude:

“In fact I’m
happy
to have it. Shooting out like that. All devil-may-care and imperious. You know, in some ways it’s a big compliment that he got so excited, just couldn’t wait, young Mr. Thingummy...
”

Then I laughed—no, I assured him, I hadn’t forgotten his name. “I’m not calling
you
young Mr. Thingummy!” I tried to make an even better joke out of it. “All nicely chambré-d, too. The perfect room temperature.”

I even capped my own pleasantry. I so much wished to see him smile.

“The perfect womb temperature!”

I felt inspired.

“It didn’t get there,” he said.

He moved into the driver’s seat. It took him less than a minute to drive the length of Paradise Street, even allowing for his having to turn the car around in a seriously restricted space.

“I’ll wash this out,” I said, “and give it back to you.”

He shook his head. “Oh, don’t bother. There’s a bin over there. I’ll just get rid of it.”

“But it’s a
lovely
handkerchief. I wouldn’t let you!”

I got out of the car. I didn’t feel a complete woman. He crossed the pavement beside me. We stood at the front door.

“Rachel?”

“Yes, darling?”

He faltered. “If you should ever meet any of the others...
and any of them should ever allude to this in any way...
well, I mean, you’d never let on, would you? That it all turned into such a bloody farce?”

“Of course not, Tony! What do you think I am? Besides—how could any of your friends ever
possibly
get to know...
?”

But I wasn’t annoyed that he had asked me. I had read about the tremendous vulnerability of male vanity in matters such as this—and he was obviously upset and not himself. Oh, it was such a dreadful shame!

No, I wasn’t annoyed. What afterwards annoyed me more—long afterwards—was the thought that I’d once been so very close to a man, almost at the very root of him, and yet I’d never...
had never...

So close and yet I’d never even touched it. Never placed my fingers lovingly about it.

Nor was that all. What somehow seemed worse...
what made me on several occasions actually want to cry out with the bleak awareness of an opportunity wasted...

I had never even seen it.

* * *

But that was for the future: that bleak annoyance or regret. For the time being I was still extremely positive; and what had made me especially happy was the way he suddenly seemed to cheer up. After he’d taken my key and opened the front door he stood facing me for a moment. A long moment. He had a hand on each of my arms and was looking at me as though in some strange way I was indeed a different woman.

“Rachel, you’ve been very sweet about all this. Shall I tell you something? I think perhaps I’ve been a little blind.”

“Really, Tony? In what way?”

“I’ve got to say you’re quite a girl!”

Even his kiss felt different.

“I’ll give you a ring tomorrow night,” he said.

“Really? So soon?” I was delighted. “Though haven’t you forgotten something? Tomorrow night you’ll be in Edinburgh.”

“Yet people tell me that, by now, the telephone may even have reached Scotland! Incredible, isn’t it? But if they’re right...
yes, then, definitely tomorrow night!”

I had it ringing through my dreams: if they’re right, tomorrow night, if they’re right, tomorrow night. And the dreams I had during those very few hours’ sleep before my breakfast—I was called extremely early, as I now knew would always happen if I stayed out late with my “persistent young suitor”—those dreams were among the best I’d ever had.

I felt almost from its beginning that the August Bank Holiday represented a travesty of hospitality. For the first time in that house I lost my inner peace.

To make matters worse it rained through most of the weekend and Sylvia—never at the best of times an outdoor person—didn’t seem at all disposed to come out and explore. She sat around and read the newspapers and looked at television and did the crosswords and the air appeared to get thicker and bluer by the hour. I opened as many windows as I could but along with the rain there had sprung up a driving wind and I seemed to be faced with the alternatives of either getting everything drenched or of having all my cushions and furnishings smelling pungently of tobacco. Though—in reality—there was no alternative. Sylvia enjoyed a fug.

“Is it
always
like this in Bristol?” she asked, with quiet satisfaction.

“No, just the opposite. We’ve had a lovely summer.”

She laughed, derisively. “Strange—when the rest of the country seems to have had one of the coldest on record.”

Also she liked to belch; she was a loud and inveterate belcher. “‘Whoever you are, wherever you be,’” she had formerly been disposed to quote, “‘always let your wind go free. For not doing so was the death of me!’” She claimed it was a factual epitaph.

“I still don’t see why you have to be
quite
so flagrantly earthy and natural about it,” I used to complain, whenever I felt driven to it—and once, wittily, “But
your
letting it go free will probably be the death of
me
!” And this weekend it appeared she was extra intent upon remaining alive. Or had I just forgotten?

In any case, during the whole of those three days until the Monday evening, I hardly raised my voice in song. And even when I did, the attempt was only tentative and couldn’t be sustained.

Fortunately the television was on the ground floor—in the breakfast room—so for much of the time I was able to get her downstairs. (“
Some
of us still have to make do with black and white,” she announced with the same somewhat gloomy satisfaction. “But then, of course, I’m not one of the gainfully unemployed, am I?” Well
really
, I thought, remembering the video.) Yet though the radio was there as well and I kept on returning the crumpled newspapers, folded as best I could, to the table where we ate our meals; and though I left one bar of the electric fire on,
all the time
...still, it seemed that nothing could keep her from drifting up the stairs again, as though even she, despite her blindness and bad manners, was somehow drawn uncomprehendingly to be often in
his
presence.

Indeed, as I saw that she appeared to be quite fascinated by the picture—because she couldn’t ever leave the room if I was there without making at least
one
casually disparaging remark—I did, a little, begin to soften towards her. After all, who had hated Christ more thoroughly than Saul of Tarsus? And I started to think that even for slovenly Sylvia there might come her slightly soiled Damascus. Notwithstanding my carefully suppressed sensations of resentment and my unwillingness (now) to share anything important, I began to be intrigued to see if it might possibly happen by train time: that opening of the skies and great blinding flash of revelation. “You
could
do it!” I thought. “I know that you
could
do it. If you wanted.”

During Sunday breakfast Sylvia said, “Won’t you be rushing off to church this morning? To ogle your responsive and—what was it now—rather
physical
vicar?”

“No, not with you here. It would scarcely be polite.”

“In fact I wouldn’t mind rushing off with you, to do a bit of ogling on my own account. Inspecting the field, as it were. Studying form!”

“Sylvia, don’t be crude. Anyhow, at present he’s away. Vicars sometimes go off on retreats.”

“Bizarre! This is clearly the weekend for a mass exodus from Bristol! Can he, too, be visiting his widowed old mum?”

I didn’t answer; but a bit ironically, hurriedly looking for some sort of distraction on the radio, happened to catch a few moments of the morning service. “Tom Lehrer once said modern math was so simple only a child could understand it,” was the preacher’s first comment that we caught. “Well, it’s precisely the same with prayer and trust. So simple only a child can understand them! Which is exactly why Jesus said we must all become like little—”

“You can’t really want to listen to this muck?” said Sylvia. She reached across and switched it off.

“I was hoping it might entertain you.”

“I don’t
need
entertaining for Christ’s sake! I’m your best friend. You shouldn’t have to
work
at entertaining your best friend.”

Then, inexplicably, she flipped the radio back on. The preacher was winding up his sermon. Hymn number something-or-other was announced.

“‘Christian, seek not yet repose,’

Hear thy guardian angel say:

‘Thou art in the midst of foes;

Watch and pray.’

“‘Principalities and powers,

Mustering their unseen array,

Wait for thy unguarded hours;

Watch and pray.’”

Presumably she had meant to be considerate, had been thinking more of me than of herself. But her kindness wasn’t up to it. “Oh, no, you really
can’t
want this!” she cried a second time. “I shan’t allow it! It may be okay for infants and loonies but as us two don’t happen to be either...
at least not yet...
” She turned it off, and this time very finally.

“No, I’m honestly not so convinced you
could
do it,” I said to myself—or, of course, not at all to myself—with possibly quite praiseworthy humour.

And I continued to remain cheerful, as I had promised him I would.

I even relented so far in my attitude towards her (“I’m your best friend,” she had said) as to suggest she might like to come and help me window-shop for a christening present.

But I was greatly relieved when she declined.

“You go if you want to. You can leave me here.”

“No. I’ll have plenty of time during the week.”

I was somehow reluctant, though it would have given me an hour or two of welcome respite, to leave her in the house alone. I don’t know quite what I imagined. Certainly she wouldn’t have done anything to harm my picture. No, that was too preposterous.

Perhaps I thought she might have snooped and come upon my precious book—in the drawer where I had hidden it. That would have been as bad as any grubby-fingered burglar rifling through my underwear.

(There had recently been a spate of burglaries. The police had issued a warning to every householder in the vicinity. It was one of my greatest worries; but not of course for the sake of my underwear. Fire worried me for the same reason. So did ants. I kept fearing ants might eat up my manuscript—ants or some other hoard of tiny nameless insects, less visible, that feasted on paper like woodworm did on wood. Each night I blew between the pages and laboriously inspected for the onset of attack. But none of my precautions could ever wholly rid me of anxiety.)

Besides, through jealousy and malice, she might decide to change things. Well, suppose she contrived it so skillfully as to utterly defy detection? What then?

So we stayed indoors and somehow managed to pass the time. (“My God, you’re a compulsive polisher! You were never like this at home!”) We talked desultorily. I would almost have welcomed some of those earnest topics I had formerly been dreading: apartheid in South Africa, our responsibility towards the animals, our ceaseless consumption of junk foods. (Yet hadn’t she brought me a battery chicken and biscuits and a box of chocolates?) Even on the Saturday evening when there had been little to watch on TV and when we had opened the second of her bottles of wine “in an attempt,” she had said, “to cock a snook at the President of the Lord’s Day Observance Society” (for the first few seconds it simply hadn’t occurred to me whom she meant) “and hopefully stir him into some sort of action with a show of debauchery and bacchanalia!”—even then our conversational flights had remained obstinately earthbound. There was only one exchange in any way worth recounting—and that, certainly, not for the sake of its intellectual content. It came a minute or two before she decided she would probably do better to go downstairs and watch the cricket.

“I’ve been thinking recently,” I said, “that I might start to wear a brighter shade of nail polish.” I held out my fingers as I spoke and regarded them reflectively.

“Yes,” she said, “I saw it mentioned in the paper.”

“In London I always wore clear; since coming here I’ve worn pink. Now I’m wondering about something deeper...
scarlet, maybe? My toenails, too? Or does it all sound—still—a bit too jazzy and Bohemian?”

“My dear Rachel,” she answered. “Bristol may be a bit of a backwater but I daresay it can just about stand the shock of scarlet nail polish.”

Suddenly she stopped.

“No,” I said, “you’re right! I don’t care if it
does
sound too jazzy and Bohemian.”

“You know—something’s been bothering me. I’ve only just realized what it is. At times it doesn’t even sound as if you’re actually talking to
me
.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

There was a pause. She shrugged. She gave her characteristic snort of laughter.

“Oh, search me. I don’t know. I think
I
must be going round the twist even if you’re not.”

She heaved herself to her feet.

“Or perhaps it’s that romantic chemist,” she added, inconsequentially.

* * *

Late on the Monday afternoon I was clearing away the tea things while she, I supposed, was packing her suitcase. But suddenly I heard her heavy tread on the staircase and she came into the kitchen holding a cut-glass bowl.

“Ah ha! Bet you thought I’d forgotten!”

“Forgotten what?” Early indoctrination dies hard.

“Housewarming present,” she said.

“Oh, Sylvia!” I quickly wiped my hands and took it from her. “But, Sylvia, it’s
exquisite
! It must have cost you a week’s wages!” I wondered what she had done with the packaging it would have come in.

“Not quite the £39,000 bowl that Charles got from the Reagans!”

“But not far from it.” I laid it down with great care, put my hands upon her shoulders and kissed her fondly on the cheek. I imagined her spending her lunch hours browsing attentively through John Lewis or Selfridge’s, or else some pricey little place in an arcade, until she was totally satisfied she’d found the right thing to please me. “I shall treasure it for ever,” I said.

“I wish it was still you I was living with, not Lucy!”

Oh dear. What could I possibly say to that? Was there already more friction between her and Miss Carter than there had eventually been between
us
?

But I knew, anyway, she hadn’t meant to say it; that she had embarrassed herself quite as much as she had me.

“I hope you won’t mind,” she hurried on bluntly as I turned back a little awkwardly to looking at the bowl. “I used the box and the carrier bag for something else and I really couldn’t be bothered to wrap it.”

“You could never have done it justice.”

“It had my nightie and cardigan and things wrapped round it in the case: a new kind of presentation pack...
” We laughed companionably at that; that moment of awkwardness left mercifully behind. “But I bet you
were
telling yourself that I’d forgotten! Or that I was just too mean to have done anything about it!”

“No, really. I hadn’t given it a thought.”

Yet suddenly I smiled and nodded.

“Yes, you’re right—actually I did believe you might have forgotten. You see now? A new way of life. I’m aiming at telling nothing but the truth!”

“Oh Christ!” she said. Not because I had been honest but because I had told her I wanted to be.

“Is that so terrible?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s infantile. And nauseating. And bloody dangerous.”

I wasn’t sure if she was making a joke or not but sadly by the time we set out for the station some fifteen minutes later I was having consciously to hold on to my feeling of reawakened affection and the hope that after all there might just be something left between us to blow on and resuscitate.

Then, still more sadly, as I was locking the front door she seemed to notice for the first time my darling’s plaque. (Surely it hadn’t been that dark when she’d arrived on Friday? Though to be fair there
had
been something of a deluge and her large black umbrella—“bloody-minded article; want to bet it’s because I was stupid enough to lend it to Lucy?”—appeared to have sprung a leak.)

“Politician!” she scoffed now. “Philanthropist! Busybody! Aren’t there still enough around today without our having to commemorate all those sententious old buggers who preceded them? Do-gooders it seems to me have always been such a complete pain in the arse!” She shifted her suitcase to the other hand.

This was scarcely—in view of the magnificent obsession we had spoken of at the beginning of her visit—the most tactful thing she could have said.