‘You argue like Mark.’
‘Your husband?’
‘My husband.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘He’s no longer important.’
‘Sometimes, Marnie, I feel very guilty, going off to sea the way I did, first letting Edie take the brunt of Dad and then letting you take the brunt of Edie. Somehow I’ve got to stay now and help you – try to help you – to see things right.’
We turned up Belgrave Road. I said: ‘I know you helped years ago. I think in a way you’ve helped now. But there isn’t any carry on from here – between us, I mean. Tomorrow or the next day you’ll go back to Liverpool, and I shall go – wherever I decide to go. If we talked this over to the end of our lives there wouldn’t be an easy answer, because an easy answer – or an answer of any sort – I mean, it probably doesn’t exist. You’ve told me your side of the story. Lucy’s told me hers. But the one who could really tell me everything, from the inside, can’t any longer. All my life she fed me with lies and she’s gone to the grave never saying a word. That’s a fact. There’s no getting round it, and I have to live with it – if I want to live at all. And the only way I can live with it is fighting it out myself alone. So will you leave me now? I’ll come home later. I can’t face that house yet. I expect I’ll be back some time tonight.’
He put his hand on my arm, and we stopped. ‘Marnie, will you promise to come back?’
‘Yes. I promise.’
‘I’d rather stay with you.’
‘I’d rather be alone.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
When he had gone, I turned back down Belgrave Road and began to walk back along the promenade. The wind was behind me now and it kept whipping at my skirt and thumping me in the back as if I ought to hurry.
The sun had just set, and there was a smear like a blood-stain in the sky over to the west, and the sea kept tumbling against the wall and then sucking itself away again. Two nuns were coming along the promenade and the wind was making ugly wings of their habits. They struggled past me, not looking up, their heads bent against the wind.
Well, I suppose I could go and be a nun. That would be one solution, getting rid of my sickness on God. If I took the veil I was at least out of harm’s way. Or I could go to the opposite end of the seesaw and try some top-pressure whoring. I wondered if there were any professional whores in Torquay. I wondered how you went about it.
Or were the stones the best way out? Over these railings, and the sea would soon take away all the remains. That was easiest. In order to live, there had to be a reason for living, even if that reason was only staying alive. I hadn’t any. The can was empty.
Funny, I thought, I’m free. Free for the first time in my life. I’ve told myself this twice before today, and it should have given me a thrill. Well, it hasn’t.
What was the difference? Mother was dead, and she’d left a poisonous smear behind like a snail that’s gone underground. But my sickness lay deep, deep, deeper than that.
I stood by the rails and got hold of them hard and then I went one by one over the things that had made life pleasant enough during those long months working in Birmingham and in Manchester and in Barnet. I counted them and not one of them helped me. I’d a mainspring gone. My life had been turned inside out like some gigantic awful conjuring trick, and I was like an animal turned physically, disgustingly inside out, walking the wrong way, looking cross-eyed, split down the middle of my soul.
I got moving again. I went past the Pavilion and then turned away from the sea towards the town. It was quieter and less blustery here, and there were quite a lot of people about. But it wasn’t like Plymouth.
I walked up the main street. I turned into the pub on the corner and ordered a brandy. Although it wasn’t long after opening time the place was nearly full. The man next to me had a mouth like the back of a lorry that falls down to let the gravel out. He was talking about the football match he’d been to last week. ‘We was playing twelve men,’ he kept saying. ‘Twelve men. The ref. ought to’ve been strung up. Little runt. Twelve men we was playing. If it’s the same tomorrow I’ll do for him.’
The man next to him started eyeing me. He was a little type in a check cap, and his eyes were all over. You could see what he was thinking; I didn’t need to be Edie’s daughter for that.
It was getting as smoky as an opium den in here already. The bar was wet and the barmaid, a fat black-haired girl, wiped it over with a cloth. I only had to smile at check-cap, just the one smile. He’d do the rest. I thought, what are you scared of? Coming to have a child and murdering it and living with that all the rest of your life? Wanting sex and telling yourself you hate it and it’s dirty? Is that what you’ll come to?
Well, what was stealing but lies? Why did I blame mother more than myself?
I turned away from check-cap and took my drink to a table. There was this one woman sitting at it. She was about forty and she was floppy, with big eyes and big lips and big comfortable breasts. She was wearing the sort of dress and coat I’d have worn five years ago before I began to learn. She said: ‘Hullo, dear. Hot, ain’t it?’ One of those brown ale voices.
As I sat down, there was a mirror advertising Teacher’s Highland Cream that reflected us. I saw her, and sitting down next to her was this girl in the short brown coat and the curling hair, and the fringe, with the yellow blouse with the stiff-pointed collars. She didn’t look much different from usual. She didn’t look like that crazy animal pulled inside out.
‘Feeling queer, dear?’ said the woman. ‘All this smoke . . .’
Four new people pushed their way past. A fat man with check trousers and slits in his jacket bumped the table and nearly upset it.
‘Clumsy clot,’ said the woman. There were three empty glasses by her and a fourth half full of Guinness.
I thought, but it isn’t only the lies that matter, is it? It isn’t just mother sleeping with soldiers, it isn’t even her strangling her kid. It isn’t just all those things. It’s everything that’s happened to me on top of it. You get a bad foundation and then you build crookedly on that . . .
‘Try a Guinness, dear,’ said the woman. ‘Them short nips are no good. What is it, brandy?’
Yes, I said to myself, but not to her. It was the first brandy I’d drunk since that evening in that other pub in Ibiza, when all the crowds had been revelling and I’d argued with Mark. And suddenly I found there were tears squeezing out of my eyes. God knows what they meant, but they came.
‘What’s the matter, dear? Quarrelled with your boyfriend?’
That girl in the mirror was fumbling about, and then she got a handkerchief out and dabbed at her face, but it took a time to stop. I thought, Teacher’s Highland Cream? Rat poison for you.
‘I had a boy-friend once,’ said the woman. ‘Here, swallow that down and let me buy you a Guinness. It’s settling, is Guinness. Here, you, two Guinness. See?’
She said this to a barman in a white coat that was spotty and unbuttoned. She leaned her breasts on the tabletop. ‘He was a sailor, this boy, this partic’lar boy . . .’
I thought, Mark didn’t know what he was taking on. Neither did Roman. Some hopes they’d got, either of them, of making a normal woman of me. Oh, Mark, I thought, I did make a mess of it for you, didn’t I . . .
‘. . . I said, Bert, you’ve got a kind heart, and kind hearts are more than what’s-its; but it ain’t enough. You got to be loyal. I thought afterwards ’twas a funny word to use. Of course I meant faithful . . .’
Loyal, I thought. Well who’d been loyal to who in all this? There wasn’t any loyalty except maybe Mark’s for me. It wasn’t a thing human beings dealt in much. Keep that for the ‘lesser’ animals, horses and dogs.
I drank some of the Guinness this woman had bought. Had I even spoken to her yet? I couldn’t remember. Supposing I told her everything? What would she say? All her experience was with the normal things gone awry. Mine was with the abnormal ones. Supposing I began: ‘I’m
a thief and my mother’s a whore . . .’
After a minute I looked in this mirror again and I saw to my surprise that the girl was talking. And the blowsy woman had stopped. I mean, she’d stopped talking and she’d got her big comfortable mouth open listening. And she looked startled and uncomfortable, like somebody who’s picked up a blind worm and found it’s a rattle-snake.
I think I told her everything. I’m not sure. I told her enough to make her wonder if she’s been getting acquainted with an escapee from the local mental home. Which I suppose was near enough to be true to make no matter.
While I talked I looked in the mirror and thought there goes Marnie Elmer, the old Marnie Elmer. She wasn’t a bad-looking girl, and although she was hard-boiled, she didn’t really want to do anyone any harm. She was just a certain dead loss from the day she was born. Better if her mother had done for her as well.
Well, she was done for now anyhow – this was the end of her, in this pub. When she’d finished telling this woman all her sad, sad troubles she’d walk right out and disappear for ever. Was there anyone going to be born in her place? Was there anything worth saving? Not Mollie Jeffrey, not any of those people. It had to be somebody utterly fresh.
Perhaps I was a fool to take it the way I did. While I talked I unburdened some of the horror and the shock. At least I was free. It was the fourth time I’d told myself that. I kept saying it, expecting a reaction, because all the time I was married to Mark I’d so desperately wanted to be free.
I could go out of here and say, maybe I am a bit mad like my mother, but what about it? I’d got by so far, and no one could call me a fool. I could live off my wits . . . Muriel Whitstone . . . that was a nice name . . .
I said: ‘So that’s about all. You wanted to know what was wrong with me. Well, now you know. Thanks for the Guinness. Can I buy you one?’
She fairly gaped at me. I said: ‘I’m not batty – or not very. It’s all true, what I’ve told you. Funny what happens to some people, isn’t it?’
I ordered a Guinness for her and a brandy for me. Some more people had come in and that man with the mouth started his same old story: ‘We was playing twelve men. I tell you. That blasted ref.’
The woman said: ‘You’re having me on, dear.’
‘God’s truth, I’m not.’
I suddenly needed the brandy. I realized for the first time why some people take to drink. It’s to drown the pain in their guts that being alive has put there.
The waiter came and I paid him and I splashed a bit of soda in and had gulped the glassful down while the woman was wiping a moustache of froth off her upper lip after her first swallow.
She said: ‘But why did you leave your hubby, dear? Didn’t you hit it off?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it was more than that.’ But I looked at her big easy breasts and broad gentle face and thought, it’s no good, I can’t explain that to her – or I could explain it but no amount of talking would ever clue her up. Because for her sex was like a comfy chair, a warm fire, a glass of Guinness. It didn’t mean more and it didn’t mean less. How could she ever understand what it had been like to be screwed up, horrified, disgusted; how would she have a notion if I explained that the repulsion, the dislike had been something more than I could deal with? Had been? Still was? I didn’t know.
I said: ‘I’d better be going.’
‘Well, dear, you sure give me a fright. You look so young and innocent. Reely . . . But I shouldn’t worry if I was you. Life’s all right if you don’t weaken. You can’t help what your Mam did, can you? I mean, it’s not sense. How do I know what my mother did when she was twenty? She was a dear old soul when she was seventy, but that’s different. Dear life, I’d not want to tell my kids everything!’
As I left the pub check-cap was there. ‘Like a lift, miss? Which way you going?’
‘Not your way,’ I said.
‘Oh, come on, be a sport. I got a nice little Sprite round the corner. I’ll give you a run round in it first.’
‘I bet you would,’ I said, stepping off the pavement.
He stepped off beside me. ‘It’s over there. See? The red one. New last year. Ever been in one? It’s an education.’
‘Being in yours would be,’ I said, and shook his arm off and walked away. He followed for a few steps and then gave up.
I walked right up to the top of the street to where there was a church at the top. It was quite dark now. Muriel Whitstone, I thought, blowing out a breath with brandy on it, Muriel Whitstone is being born. I’ll go and spend the night in Cuthbert Avenue and tomorrow I’ll pick up my few things and push off. I’ll go first to Southampton, and then I’ll take a bus for Bournemouth. There I’ll have my hair done a different way and my eyebrows plucked and maybe some other things done, and on Tuesday I’ll leave for Leeds. It’s all exciting really, just the way it used to be, building up a new history, making a new person. And this time the money I get I’ll spend entirely on myself. To hell with the world.
At the iron gate by the church there was a kid crying.
I said: ‘What’s up with you?’
He said: ‘I lost me Mum.’ He was about eight.
‘Where d’you live?’
‘Davidge Street. Number ten. Over there.’
I thought, crazy, leaving a kid of his age to wander about after dark. ‘Is it far?’
He shook his spiky head. ‘Dad’s there.’
It was nearly on my way. ‘I’ll take you if you like.’
‘Don’t wanna go.’
‘Why not? Your Mum might be home before you.’
That started him crying again and then coughing. He’d got a lousy cough, like a shovelful of wet coal. I got hold of his hand, and began to walk with him. Under the light of the lamp he looked thin and hot. Dressed all right but thin and hot.
I thought, maybe if I was a nun I could care for sick children; maybe that would make up for the one that was put under my bed . . . This kid’s hand was in mine, as trusting as if I was his maiden aunt.
‘How did you come to lose your mother this evening?’
‘Didn’t,’ he said.
‘Didn’t what?’
‘Didn’t lose Mum tonight.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Lost ’er Wednesday.’
We went on a bit. We came to Davidge Street and went down it. I hadn’t got a toffee for him or anything. I thought suddenly, I don’t care a damn for Muriel Whitstone. I don’t care if she never comes to life at all! I’m not interested in her and her lousy secretarial jobs and her thieving. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Muriel Whitstone, but Marnie Elmer has had it. She can’t invent other people any more. And she can’t go on living herself.
‘What d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Your Mum went away on Wednesday? When’s she coming back?’
‘She ain’t never coming back,’ this kid said. ‘They telled me she’d gone visiting but I knew better. I seen her. They carried her out in a box. She’s dead.’
He began to cry again, and I put my hands round his head and held him to me. I thought that’s right, be a mother for a change. Bite on somebody else’s grief instead of your own. Stop being so heart-broken for yourself and take a look round. Because maybe everybody’s griefs aren’t that much different after all.
I thought, there’s only one loneliness, and that’s the loneliness of all the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I don’t know what time I got back to Cuthbert Avenue. I suppose it couldn’t have been all that long. I saw the boy in and saw his father and then walked home. It may have been seven or half past.
The kid’s father was a thin weedy type with sandy hair.
‘We come here from Stoke because of them saying the weather was better. Not so hard for Shirley. I changed me job. Three pound a week less. But so soon as she come here she started spitting blood. They wanted her to go to hospital, but no. “Never again,” she says. “I’ll die in me own home,” she says. Bobby slipped out when
I’d me back turned. He knew. Tried to keep it from ’em but they all knew.’
If he’d asked me I’d have stayed. There were three other children and he looked very down. But he didn’t ask and I couldn’t offer. Afterwards I wished I had. It might have given me something to do instead of just thinking.
If I could have something to do that took up sixteen hours of every day.
When I got to Cuthbert Avenue there was a car stopped outside No. 9, and I thought I’d seen it before, and I suddenly had a funny feeling that it might be Mark.
Of course it wasn’t Mark; he didn’t know where I was, and anyway he didn’t get out of hospital till Monday. But seeing the lights of the car reminded me of that time coming out of Garrod’s Farm where he’d traced me and been waiting for me, and I thought, well, he wouldn’t be as unwelcome now as he was then. I mean, in a way, I could have told him everything the way I’d told it to that woman in the pub, and perhaps in his case he might have partly understood. He’d always made a great effort to understand. You could hate him and yet have to admit that he did his best to understand.
Perhaps I didn’t hate him any more. I was too tired and beaten up to hate anyone, least of all him.
And as I walked up the avenue I knew I would have been glad to talk to him. That was quite a shock but I had to admit it. Compare what the rest of my life had been, and the time I spent married to him had been comfort and sanity and decency and order. Oh, there’d been the big stumbling block, and perhaps it was still there and perhaps it would always be there, but the rest was all right.
And you could talk to him.
There was one personality I hadn’t thought about when I was writing off all the Mollie Jeffreys and the Muriel Whitstones. That one was Margaret Rutland. What about her?
But anyway it was all too late. She’d gone out of the gun with the rest.
I was thirsty again and I stopped at the door wondering if there’d be any drink in the house. Not likely. Mother would see to that. Had she secretly wanted to be a drunkard too?