But Olive knew that she would not.
10
SHE HAD SLEPT with Malcolm. Or Malcolm had slept with her. Because although she had not rejected or resisted, somehow it felt as if it had been only his doing. She was naive, she was innocent. But not ignorant. Her mother had never once talked to her about any of it, and so, along with some facts, she had also picked up the old wives’ tales everyone seemed to believe.
‘You can’t get pregnant the first time.’ She believed that, and by now, she had proved it, at least as far as she herself was concerned. But she had accepted the invitation to Malcolm’s birthday celebrations and he would surely expect her to sleep with him again. Perhaps his parents had guessed or at least suspected. Perhaps not.
But it would no longer be the first time. Presumably she would now be at risk.
‘You were bloody lucky, ask me,’ Margaret Reid said.
They were lying propped up on their elbows on a grassy bank in the park, eating ice-cream cornets. In the playground nearby, children were sliding, swinging, spinning round.
‘And you are quite sure?’
‘Of course I am, it was weeks ago.’
‘Bloody lucky.’
‘So … so what should I do?’
‘You?’ Margaret lay on her back and watched an aeroplane trail uncoil itself slowly across the sky.
She was the only person Olive could ask. There would probably have been a book in the library, if she had dared to go there. She wanted to tell Margaret about Biddy French too but that would be impossible. What was there to tell? If she thought about it, the whole incident evaporated and disappeared, like the plane smoke. Telling about Malcolm had been surprisingly straightforward.
Margaret’s eyes were closed and she was swivelling a grass stalk between her front teeth.
‘Marg?’
‘You?’ she mumbled round the stalk. ‘You do nothing. That’s his responsibility and he should know that and if he doesn’t then you have to tell him, Oli.’
Olive rehearsed it in her head for the next few days, whispering, taking walks and muttering the dialogue aloud. Have you … will you … shouldn’t you … wait …
It was impossible. But perhaps he …
No. If he hadn’t thought of it the first time, why would he think of it now? He might not know, she had said to Margaret, and got a sideways look. The stalk still went to and fro in her mouth.
‘Maybe I should … I could go and see the doctor.’
Dr Bonney, who had known her since she was two, who had vaccinated her and listened to her bronchitis and soldered her warts and stitched her upper lip after a dog had bitten her.
Of course not.
No.
She just wanted to leave it. Trust to luck.
Yes, and perhaps Malcolm wouldn’t …
But he would.
‘I can’t go to Dr Bonney, I just can’t.’
‘There’s that new surgery – the Welmer Health Centre. I don’t know anything about it, mind you.’
It was a bus ride away, and served the expanding Welmer estate and she felt an inexplicable sense of relief when she saw it, a single-storey building with a red-tiled roof. Nobody would know her in the neat rows. Briar Close. Bracken Close. Gorse Avenue. Cherry Crescent. New, hopeful little houses, the paint on the front doors still bright, grass linking them together. No front gates. No walls. No high hedges. It would be filling up with couples, families. Cats. The bareness took her aback. There were no trees. But things would soon grow – even the saplings, sleeved in plastic. They would grow. The health centre had windows to the ground and rows of chairs joined together, upholstered in tweed. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. Red. Abstract murals, red and blue but also yellow. It smelled of newness.
The glass doors closed by themselves.
‘I’d like to see a doctor. Please.’
‘Appointment day or open surgery?’
‘I don’t …’
‘We’re trying out a new system … You can either come and wait, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, or make an appointment for Wednesday or Friday.’ It was Monday.
‘I’ll wait.’
‘Dr Freeman and Dr Singh are on this morning. Are you registered with either of them?’
‘No.’
‘With Dr Ferney or Dr Mansell then.’
She had very shiny very bright pink nails and very shiny matching lipstick. Olive thought she would try painting her nails for the birthday weekend.
‘So, which doctor is it?’ Her eyes looked past Olive, who felt a queue lengthening behind her.
‘I’m not … I haven’t joined this surgery. Yet.’
She sighed, though it was a sigh more implied than audible.
‘Right. Your name and address?’
Olive lowered her voice, afraid the whole queue and the whole packed waiting room ahead would hear. Hear and know. Hear and repeat.
‘Where is that?’
A bright pink nail tapped a street map on the wall.
‘Oh – here, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘We don’t cover that part of the town. You can see the red circle? Only streets inside that. You want Dr Bonney’s surgery. Belvedere Road.’
As she turned away, she caught sight of the noticeboard. The notice. She had no pen or paper, but in any case, there would have been embarrassment in writing down the details with the room full of people watching. She stared at information about hearing loss while memorising the address and phone number on the notice above.
An hour later, she leaned against a wall, the sun glaring in her eyes, which gave her a public excuse for crying. It was hot again. The summer was stale.
They had been so nice to her. Kindly, the word seemed to be. It had been unexpected. The tears had already pricked the back of her eyes as the nurse, the kindly nurse at the Family Planning Clinic, had told her that she could not have an appointment. Three other women were waiting, much older than Olive. One turned the pages of a magazine she was not actually reading, the others just sat, staring ahead. Another woman came out of a door marked Room 3. A buzzer sounded.
‘Mrs Derricks?’
The magazine woman had got up.
Perhaps no one had been listening.
‘I’m afraid we can only see married women. Or those about to be married, if they have evidence of a wedding date. It’s just the rule. Do you understand? We’re very strictly regulated. I’m so sorry. But when you …’
She felt angry now, leaning against the hot brick wall. Angry with them, angry with herself. She should have checked first, should have thought. She could have thought. Checked. Someone would have …
How strange that it should be humiliating to be unmarried.
11
ON THE FRIDAY afternoon, the day before Malcolm’s birthday, Belinda and Nigel’s daughter Penny was killed, running out from behind an ice-cream van into the path of a lorry. Belinda, waiting on the opposite side of the road, talking to another child’s mother, saw everything. Saw. Shouted a warning. Saw. Heard. Screamed.
As it was happening, Olive was on the train and almost at her station, taking her bag down from the rack, looking out for Malcolm, who was not there and did not come, and so she got a taxi and arrived in the middle of the agony and chaos and police presence and disbelief.
‘I’ll go back. I shouldn’t be here.’
There would be a train home in an hour. But Malcolm, in the kitchen making tea, because that was all there was to do, clung to her. His face seemed to have sunken in, like a cliff after a landslip. He looked at her out of desperate, baffled eyes. Help me.
And then the house emptied, cars drove away, without anyone having come near them, and then the place was as still as death. He took Olive’s bag upstairs. Came down. Filled the kettle again and lit the gas and every separate sound was a drumbeat falling into the silence. They sat at the kitchen table next to one another and Olive put her hand out and he took it and clutched it. She had only known one death, and that h
ad been untimely and shocking, but not like this. There were neither words nor thoughts and not yet even feelings for this. She saw Penny, running in from the rain, laughing, and turned her mind away from the image.
They came back in the early evening, and still no one knew what to say. Peter. Moira. Malcolm. Olive. Someone poured drinks. Gin. Sherry. Olive cut sandwiches which no one ate, but they all drank again.
Naturally the dinner and the lunch were cancelled, but people telephoned. A neighbour left flowers fresh-cut from her garden. Another left a cake. Peter switched on the television and switched it off again.
‘You’re a dear girl,’ Moira said, as they washed up cups and glasses later. ‘So good of you to stay. So good.’
‘I had to. I couldn’t have gone home. Of course I couldn’t.’
And that was the truth.
Moira Crowley came over and put her arms round Olive and wept.
What should she say? What did people say? What did they do?
She could say nothing. Do nothing. Endure.
Malcolm came to her as soon as they had all gone upstairs and cried, lying pressed against her, clutching her again, and Olive caught his tears and held his head to her breast to comfort him, in spite of a feeling, deeply buried, that she should not do this, because it was the wrong way of things and somehow hurtful to him, and unfair. But she pushed those thoughts away and all she could do after that was let him find some closeness and comfort from her.
12
SHE WAS IN the middle of an essay comparing two villains in novels by Trollope and George Eliot.
The Victorians were more sinewy with stronger backbones than she had expected, having read little of them beyond Jane Eyre, but they still seemed over-rich and diffuse, their poetry even more than their prose, when she preferred rich but spare. Her tutor had told her that she was too devoted to form at the expense of content, and asked why she was afraid of ‘lavishness of expression’.
If she worked and did nothing but work, she could keep other thoughts at bay.
But the next morning, a letter came from Moira Crowley.
We are all carrying on as best we can. We have to, for Belinda and Nigel’s sake. But it is hard. Timothy is very quiet and withdrawn, and when Nigel tried to talk to him about his sister, he stuffed his fingers in his ears. Poor child.
Dear Olive, we hope you may be able to come and see us soon. We so love having you. Perhaps Malcolm will bring you one weekend before too long. You have been the greatest support to him. This is a time when our affections are tested and you have sailed through that test with flying colours.
But she had done little or nothing, of that she was sure. She had found it distressing and felt an intruder into their appalling shock and grief and pain. She set the letter down.
She liked them. There was nothing about any one of them that she could possibly dislike. But she was still an outsider, and wanted to remain so. She wanted to mean nothing to them.
Messages to say that Malcolm had rung were left in her pigeonhole, and when she was in and he called she pretended not to hear, and so he wrote to her, a rather formal, and yet raw, infinitely sad short letter, asking her to ring him, wanting to take her home with him in a fortnight’s time.
She did not reply.
Several girls from school were married that year. The local paper ran photographs. Sally Redgrave wore a white trouser suit, which shocked the town and got her picture on the front page. Joan Curtis married a Spanish horse rider and wore a mantilla. Joan Loomis married a man she had first met when they were in their prams. The photograph showed them as babies, side by side, and then as a married couple in the church porch. Her father sent the cuttings to her. She stared at them, friends quite altered, astonished that only a short time ago they had been wearing navy-blue skirts and white shirts, gold-and-navy-striped ties, and house and games captain and prefect badges. They had all been looking forward to a future of training, careers, new places, new horizons. Doors seemed to have closed on them all now. But they probably wanted them closed. None of them looked unhappy or unwilling.
Margaret Reid sent a piece of crumbling wedding cake in a paper-lace-lined box and the smell of dried fruit and sherry puffed out as Olive lifted the lid.
She felt that she had escaped from something but wondered if freedom was better, when uncertainty and the unknown were its boundaries.
Her tutor for the Victorian novel had written books about it, whose titles appeared regularly in footnotes and bibliographies. He was a generally mild but occasionally excitable man who, if the subject stirred him, or an essay was laden with errors or opinions at odds with the text, would seem to explode and wave his arms about. Then he would subside and sit, eyes half closed, listening, still as a cat waiting to pounce.
She feared ridicule for her essay, though she had come to appreciate George Eliot and Trollope for previously unsuspected depths and for their occasional moral abrasiveness. When she had finished reading it aloud there was a silence, from her three fellow students and from the tutor, who she thought had barely been listening.
But after a moment, he said, ‘Miss Piper, would you be so kind as to read your final paragraph – the summing-up?’
She read it.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have set out your stall and your conclusion is well argued … you have sold it to me. Let me hear what the others have to say, but for me, that is a very fine piece of work.’
She had been given praise and high marks before, for the work on her poets, but those essays had been a labour of love. This had been hard work and represented some sort of conversion. She could do more than she had expected, and she smiled to herself, going up the old staircase that curved at the top and curved again, where it led to the new wing and the second-year rooms. She was reminded of being four or five years old, when suddenly words in the newspaper her father was reading had, by some magic, gone from meaningless hieroglyphics to something understood, as she had stared at them.
‘Sun and rain,’ she had read aloud. ‘Sun and rain.’
And her father, on checking the page, had laughed and applauded and praised her and she had felt that there could be no greater joy in the world than this clear and visible transformation of nonsense into sense.
The following morning, she realised that she had missed her period for the second time.
13
ONLY THREE OTHERS got off the train, and they quickly disappeared, one into the only waiting taxi.
Olive went to the booking office. She had a full duffel bag and her purse. Nothing else. It felt cold.
‘I wonder if you can help me?’
He said nothing.
‘I’ve come here for … for a few days. I’m not sure. But I haven’t booked anywhere to stay. Do you know a hotel or … well, somewhere that would be …’
Cheap? Quiet? Safe for a young woman on her own?
‘You by yourself?’
‘Yes. But I’m meeting friends … tomorrow. Or maybe the day after.’
He looked at her, as if he could see through her to her soul. Certainly he could see that she was lying.
She could hear the sea. The wind was banging a gate.
‘The Seagull. They’re on the top terrace. B&B. If you can run to a hotel you’d be best off at the Belmont. End of Shore Street, turn left onto the front. You can get a nice room looking over the sea, I hear – if you’d want that.’
‘Would they have a vacancy, do you think?’
‘This time of year? They’ll bite your hand off. I could ring and ask for you?’
There was no other taxi, and in any case, it was a short walk, he said. For the first stretch, street lights and those from a few houses helped her make her way. Plenty of the cottages were dark. Holidays were over. Then the lights petered out and she found her way by the sound of the sea.
On the open front the wind blew hard into her face, whipped up her hair, and the tide rushed in on the other side of the wall.
The Belmont Hotel was
at the far end. She hesitated in the doorway, caught in a moment of panic, wondering how she came to be here. Getting away, anywhere, anywhere, had been her only need. She had gone to a station, looked up at the departures board and bought a ticket and got on a train, and for four and a half hours, she had slept, huddled in her coat. The train was full for a while but then emptied out at one station and the next, and then it was two hours on her own in the carriage. She had tried to blank out all thought. She had brought books, but in the end she just slept and after sleep went into a waking trance as they juddered through the dark.
The hotel was silent and smelled of beer and polish but they had a room at the front, and as they were ‘quite quiet’, the woman said, she could have a small double for the single rate. They went up two flights and everything was the colour of port wine and the shades on the wall lamps were pink. But the room was pleasant and not pink – the curtains were a dusty gold. She could hear the roar of the sea.
‘Will you want supper? It’s served from seven until eight but most people come early.’
She was hungry. She had only eaten a bar of chocolate from a vending machine on the station platform.
‘Do you think … would it be possible for me to have a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, but you’ll have to come down for it – we don’t do room service.’
She washed her hands and face. Brushed her hair and tied it back. Looked in the mirror and did not know herself. Unpacked her bag and took Bleak House downstairs. Her feet made no sound on the port-wine carpet. A door swung open with the wind behind it, and bumped shut again, but in that moment, let in not just the boom but the smell of the sea.
She hesitated at the door marked BAR, heard loud male laughter, and turned away, into LOUNGE.
One quiet couple, one woman alone.
She chose a seat near the fire which was made not of real but of electric coals. Port-wine velvet curtains were drawn against the night.
She opened Bleak House. She could dispense with other novels by Dickens, but never this.