“Tell him I’ve made him a father.”
Then they were rolling over and over each other with explosions of sniggers and giggles that turned suddenly into sex, preoccupied, wounded, experimental, libidinous, long, slow and greedy. When their unsynchronized orgasms had let them down, back into the crumpled bed and into the grey light from the grimy window, Sophy could not even be bothered to repair her lips but lay there in a kind of trance of consent.
“One day, Gerry, you’ll be the filthiest old man.”
“Filthy old woman yourself.”
The grey light washed through Sophy like a tide.
“No. Not me.”
“Why not you?”
“Don’t ask me. You wouldn’t understand anyway.”
He sat up abruptly.
“Psychic are we? Snap out of it. What do I keep you for?”
“In all this luxury?”
“I’ll say one thing for you, angel. You aren’t a libber.”
That made her laugh.
“I like you, twin. I really do! I think you’re the only person for whom—”
“Yes yes?”
“Never mind. Like I said, I’ll go. I could have left my ring down there. So precious my dear and besides it’s not just the money it’s the sentimental value—oh Fido darling I’ve done a terrible thing can you ever forgive me? No it’s not Gerry—but dearest I’ve lost our ring! Well of course I’ve been crying! Oh darling it must have cost at least two pounds fifty—where shall we ever find that sort of money again? You know, Gerry he’s—what’s the meanest thing there is?”
“You’re pretty mean with hand-outs.”
“One of these days I shall swipe you.”
“Yum yum.”
“Will you keep this bloody ring for me? No—come to think of it, I’d better find it somewhere in the school, hadn’t I? More convincing.”
“Don’t forget to look under Fido’s pillow.”
“You are the—”
And then out of the complications too vast for understanding, out of the lies not admitted but nevertheless known to be lies, out of the surmises and the complexities and the seamy side they collapsed in each other’s arms, shaking with mutual laughter.
So she took her ring back to Wandicott House and got a shock. For one thing, when Fido heard the ring was lost he was very angry indeed and told her what it had cost. It was considerably more than two pounds fifty and some of it was still outstanding. For another thing, the news that pretty Miss Stanhope had lost her engagement ring flashed through the school and brought it to a full stop. The whole place reorganized itself. Masters whose names she did not know revealed themselves as leaders of men. As for the boys—! But of course the operation, though it was ideal for her purpose, was not without a certain degree of embarrassment. Dr Appleby, the headmaster, impressed on everyone the first thing to do was to establish with precision Miss Stanhope’s exact movements during every moment of her previous stay; and though Phyllis Appleby with practised ease turned his remarks in the direction where they would sound as little silly and suggestive as possible, he had nevertheless sown a seed. The news, therefore, that Miss Stanhope had visited her fiance’s room to inspect his photographs was greeted with a solemnity that creaked. Sophy managed to weep and this was a huge success. Fido was told gently by Phyllis what a lucky man he was, that a ring was only a ring and that what a girl really needed was to be assured by her fiancé that she was ten thousand times more precious than any mere object. The headmaster came near to ticking Fido off.
“You know, Masterman, what it says in the Bible. ‘The price of a good woman is above rubies.’”
“It was an opal.”
“Ah well. We’re not superstitious, are we?”
It was a great relief when Sophy or the odd-job man—this bit was not quite clear—found her ring under one of the dying elms. It must have been the odd-job man because she was heard thanking him effusively and smiling at him sweetly for all his awful face. But when she told Fido he ought to reward the man, Fido appeared never to have seen or heard of him. The only real drawback after that was that Phyllis insisted they should take her car and go for a drive together. Oh never mind the reading lesson! She would take it herself, so long as the little men didn’t have to be told how to spell “accommodation”. Now you two young people go off and be alone for a bit. Fido don’t sulk! And don’t be a brute! Girls aren’t like your soldiers you know! They need—Sophy, take him off and pull his ears for him. Go over to have a look at the abbey, the west front is simply marvellous!
So they drove off. Fido doing it moodily and unhandily but gradually thawing and simmering down, then heating up a bit so that he became amorous. Sophy happy in the knowledge that this was the last time she would have to put up with him, explained that it wasn’t any good today. He did know that about girls, didn’t he? Apparently he did; but not much else; and the information made him moody again.
All at once Sophy’s boredom with him flowed over. It even spilled out to Gerry and Bill and Roland and the whole world of men. She thought to herself, I won’t go back to the flat tonight. I’ll ring the pub and ask them to give Gerry a message and I’ll sleep in the stables and to hell with it. I need something bigger, I—need something I—
Respect? Admire? Fear? Need?
She made him drop her in Greenfield High Street and because she was in such a temper with him, the outside girl was even more flashing as she walked briskly down the street to Sprawson’s. Jauntily she swung her plastic bags past the laundromat, the Chinese takeaway, Timothy Krishna, Portwell Funeral Directors, Subadar Singh’s Gent’s Best Suiting. Gaily she greeted Mrs Goodchild as she crossed to the front door, still so splendid in its eighteenth-century manner. She nudged sideways through the door into the hall and a solicitor’s clerk proceeding in the other direction hoped she was a client but feared not; and Edwin Bell, climbing the stairs to his flat over the solicitor’s office thought—I know that positively breezy way of coming in—Sophy, dear Sophy is back!
Sophy listened outside the column room but heard nothing, so walked straight in to use the telephone.
“Daddy!”
He accepted a peck but cried out as her arm brushed the table.
“Mind what you’re doing! Damn it must you girls be so confoundedly clumsy? You’re supposed to be—where’s the other one—Antonia?”
“How should I know? Nobody knows.”
“Oh of course. Well. Neither of you need think I’m going to pay for more flips by air. If it’s a question of money you might as well know straight away—”
“It isn’t a question of money, Daddy. I just came to see you. After all, I’m your daughter. Forgotten?”
“You want to use the phone.”
Pause.
“Later perhaps. What’s this thing?”
He looked down at the scattered pieces and began to arrange them again on the little machine.
“They call it a computer but it isn’t really. More what I’d call an adding machine. It works through a few variables and then—”
“Can it think?”
“Did they teach you nothing at school? There! Look at that for a move. The thing’s moronic. I’ve worked out a way of mating it with white to move, in eight moves. And you’re supposed to pay hundreds of pounds for it!”
“Why bother?”
“I’m supposed to review the thing. There’s a certain mild interest in working out from what it does how they’ve made it. Takes me back to my code-breaking days.”
She picked up her bags to leave and was amused to see how he sat back and with a conscious effort set himself to show a little interest, like a father in a book.
“Well. How are things, er, Sophy?”
“The agency was too, too boring.”
“Agency? Oh yes!”
“I’m thinking of looking for something else.”
He had set his fingertips together, legs stretched under the desk, was looking sideways at her. He smiled and
his face lit up, was conspiratorial—was—and she saw at once with what ease he must have persuaded the aunties to come one after the other out of the bedroom across the landing.
“Have you got a boyfriend?”
“Well. What do you think?”
“I, mean, are you—going steady?”
“You mean am I having it off with a bloke?”
He laughed soundlessly up at the ceiling.
“You won’t shock me, you know. We used to have it off too. Only we didn’t call it that and we didn’t talk about it so much.”
“All those aunties after Mummy—went. When Toni pushed off with the Butlers she was looking for Mummy, wasn’t she?”
“That crossed my mind.”
The awareness at the mouth of the tunnel spoke but used the voice of the outside girl.
Lightly.
“I hope it didn’t come between you and your toys.”
“Toys? What are toys? How would you define toys?”
“Mummy didn’t like chess either, I suppose.”
He became restless. It was not so much movement as a kind of deliberate stillness out of which his voice came a tone higher and with a hint of strain in it.
“Use the phone if you like. I’ll go. Private I suppose. Only I don’t ever want to talk about her. Understand that.”
“But I do understand that!”
He blared out at her.
“Like hell you do! What do you know, any of you? This, this romantic stuff, this, this—”
“Go on. Use the word.”
“It’s like stinking treacle. It swallows, drowns, binds, enslaves—that—” and he gestured sweepingly over the desk with its litter of papers and games—“that’s life. A meanwhile, a what the man said, a surcease, even a cleanness in the stink in the wetness, the milk, nappies, squallings—”
He stopped; then went on in his normal, cold voice.
“I don’t want to seem unwelcoming. But—”
“But you’re busy with your toys.”
“Precisely.”
“We’re not very wholesome are we?”
“That’s a good word.”
“You, Mummy, Toni, me—we’re not the way people used to be. It’s part of the whole running down.”
“Entropy.”
“You don’t even care enough about us to hate us, do you?”
He looked at her and moved his body restlessly.
“Push off, er, Sophy. Just go away.”
She stood there, half-way to the door, between her plastic shopping-bags full of gear. She looked back at his frown, the old-fashioned hair-do with its side parting, the collar and tie, the grizzled sideburns, the lines on his stripped face, his eagle’s face that nevertheless was so wholly male. All at once she understood. It had been so, always so, back beyond the birthday when she had lost him for ever, back to the time of the rectangle and the tiny girl looking up and woo’d, yes woo’d for those few minutes, that half hour; was so even now, not in a Gerry way or Fido way or Bill way or, or—but in a wide passion rooted beyond the very stars in which I fancy you was trivial as a single bubble on a stream, a nothing, a joke—
Her mouth began to talk in a cover-up, partly arch girl, concerned daughter, partly fugitive from this last piece of outrage.
“But look Daddy, you can’t go on living by yourself. You’ll get old. You’ll need, I mean you can say sex is trivial but what do you do about it, I mean—”
And then, facing him, unable to take her eyes off his face, the severe, masculine mouth, the eagle’s beak, the eyes that surely could see as far as she through a brick person—then, both hands trapped by her sides by the swinging bags, her splendid, idiotic body took charge, and before him, her unbra’d breasts rose up, their vulnerable, tender, uncontrollable, enslaving points hardened, stood out and lifted the fabric of her shirt in a sign as clear as if it had been shouted. She saw his eyes move their focus from her own, move down, past her flushing face and throat until they stared straight at the overt signal. Her mouth opened, shut, opened.
“What do you do—”
At these words that she could only just hear over the pounding of the blood in her ears she saw his eyes lift to hers. There was a redness in his cheeks too. His hands had shifted back and were clutching the arms of his revolving chair. His nearer shoulder was hunched as if to get between them and he was staring at her round it. Then, as if to demonstrate his freedom, boldness, his power to say anything that might be thought unsayable, he spoke directly into her face. He even swung his chair round a little to show there was no concealment, not even from his shoulder. His words were like blows, driving them apart, destroying them, hurling her away from the toy room, the column room, the room that was so secure from people.
“What do I do?” Then with a hissing kind of hatred—“You want to know? You do? I masturbate.”
So there they were, he, crouched in his chair, trapped between his hands, she by the door, trapped between her bags. With great deliberateness, as if he himself were a lay figure, a puppet which he was rearranging, he shifted his position, his head moved to look down at the chess machine, body moved round and forward, the hands lifted one after the other from the arms of the chair; picture of a man absorbed in his study, his job, his business, his all, his. What a man is for.
She stood there; and for once the presence at the mouth of the tunnel was not able to make itself felt. There was too much of outside girl. Her face felt swollen and water was building up under and behind her eyes.
She swallowed, looked at the window, then back at his indifferent profile.
“Don’t we all?”
He did not reply but stayed where he was, looking down at the chess machine. He picked up a biro in his right hand and held it ready but for nothing. The hand and the biro stayed there, shaking slightly. She felt full of lead, full of pain unexpected and not understood; and this storm of emotion that filled the room was like a physical thing and must surely be confined to a cuboid shape by the walls, not understood, only one thing understood, the great slash he had made between the two of them, through what had not existed, oh no, could never have existed, and where there was severance, goodbye and good riddance, cruel and contemptuous act of will.
“Well—”
Her feet seemed stuck to the floor, stuck in it. She pulled them out of the floor with an effort that made her stagger, turned, and was swung at least partly by the weight in her either hand and went through the idiotic business of getting the door wider open, then pulling it to with one foot behind her. It closed on the silent figure with the quivering hand and she hurried through the hall, got the glass door open somehow, then pulled it to with one foot behind her, like the other door, more or less fell down the steps, hurried along the asphalt under the buddleias, past the riot of rosemary and mint and the straggling roses that were overtaken by their own stock. She climbed the narrow stair to the old room with the dormers and collapsed on the cold comfort of her divan. Then she began to cry, and rage against everything. It was in the middle of this rage that she heard an unspoken sentence from her own inside that the secret of it all was outrage; so she looked among her hot tears, her rage and hatred for the outrage that would go with the unravelling, and there it was right in the front of her mind so that she stared at it. There was a girl (oh not with an addled egg in her hand) going up the garden path with her girl’s body, her scent and her breasts, laughing she went, back to the hall, the door, flung it open and there laughing offered what she had to him; and now a real, solid girl’s body staggered down the stairs and along the path after the phantom girl, up the steps, got open the glass door; and the electric typewriter was going and going, chattering the apegame in the column room and she could not, could not, her body would not, would not, and she came away, tears streaming and she got back to the unaired divan and lay there, failed in outrage, and seething with the hatred that was a thing all on its own, bitter in the mouth and the belly, worse than bitter, acid burning.
At
last she lay without either thought or feeling, and with a sentience that neither commented nor criticized but was a naked and unemotional “I am” or perhaps “It is”. Then the interior, nameless thing was there again, the thing that had sat from everlasting to everlasting, staring out. Now, for an aeon at the mouth of its tunnel it stared out and was aware, too, of that black angle, direction behind that stretched, widening, as far as there was to stretch. The thing examined the failure to outrage, noted it; was aware that there would be some other occasions for outrage; even said (but silently) a word.
Presently.
Sophy became aware of the divan, the place, her body, her ordinariness. She felt how diagonally across her right cheek a wrinkle in the coverlet had pressed it and had done so with more effect than usual because the flesh of that cheek was pulpy with a suffusion of the blood of rage and hatred and shame. She sat up and swung her feet off the divan. She went to the mirror, and there it was, the crease mark on a face that tears had reddened round eyes even redder.
Sewn in with red worsted.
Who had said that? An auntie? Toni? Mummy? Him?
She became very busy talking to herself.
“This will never do, my old soul! We must repair the damage, mustn’t we? A girl’s first duty is to get herself up as a lollipop a nice bit of crumpet what would our dear fiancé think or our dear boyfriend? Or our dear—”
Someone was coming very softly up the wooden stairs. There was almost no sound from the feet and only the faintest of creaks from the weight. She saw a head appear, a face, shoulders. It was a dark head of hair and curly as her own. The eyes under it were dark in the delicate face. A scarf, a long raincoat open, to show a trouser-suit too sharp for Greenfield, trousers tucked into the tops of long, high-heeled boots. The girl drew clear of the stairs and stood looking across at her expressionlessly. Sophy stared back. Neither of them said anything.
Sophy felt in her shoulder bag, got out her lipstick and mirror, busied herself repairing her face. It took quite a time. When she was satisfied, she put the things back in the bag and dusted off her hands. She spoke conversationally.
“I couldn’t get mine under a wig as easily as that. Contact lenses too. Or did you cut it?”