He loved her langour; he even forgave her slovenly ways. She was too high-class for a life of drudgery; she was born to be a princess, to be pampered and adored, and he had come to save her.
For Neville had plans. Eithne was sitting on a valuable asset and his job was to help her exploit it. He didn’t tell her the scope of his plans, not in those early weeks, for a woman needed to be coaxed. Eithne had a volatile temperament; he hadn’t forgotten her outburst at the Café Royal. She was a creature of powerful loyalties, and he admired her for that. Now he was her husband, he presumed she would do the same thing on his behalf. No, he needed to take her one step at a time; he needed to outline the benefits and make her feel that she too would have come to the same decision if only she had thought of it first. After all, it was all to her advantage.
But how soft-hearted she was! When Neville inspected the rent-book he was astonished to see the paltry sums paid by her lodgers.
‘Haven’t you heard of inflation, my love?’ he said. ‘The price of bread’s doubled.’
‘I know it’s doubled. I’ve been buying it.’
Mrs O’Malley, the oldest resident in the house, had been paying the same rent for the past three years. ‘She must think all her Christmases have come at once,’ said Neville.
‘The poor dear. She doesn’t know when it is Christmas.’
The Spooners were five months in arrears. ‘You’ve let them get away with it all this time?’
‘What can I do? Throw them out on the street? His medicine is very expensive, she’s supporting two of her sisters and their children. She works nine hours a day, she’s doing her best. How can I ask them for money with the state he’s in?’ She glared at him, pushing back her hair. ‘They’ve stuck with me and I’m sticking with them.’
Eithne’s stubbornness enchanted him, for he was newly in love. Neville gave up this particular fight; there was time to deal with that later.
Nor would she countenance the employment of a housekeeper.
‘I’ll pay the wages,’ he said. ‘You can’t carry on like this. I’m not seeing my wife on her hands and knees.’
‘Winnie would hate it, taking orders from a stranger. Why don’t we make her housekeeper and get in a parlourmaid to help her?’
Neville had to tread carefully here. The truth was, Winnie’s work left a great deal to be desired. Neville had yet to inspect the lodgers’ rooms, for their inhabitants seemed permanently in situ, but the common parts were in a deplorable state. The carpets were filthy, the wallpaper was stained; cobwebs looped the light fixtures. In the bathroom the linoleum was peeling and the lavatory chain had broken and been replaced by a length of string. Even in summer there was a musty smell, as if the windows were never opened. As for the kitchen, the less said the better. Neville, however, kept his mouth shut. Years of living with his mother had instructed him in the arts of diplomacy.
And like all diplomats, Neville possessed a low sense of cunning. He guessed there might be some resistance to his grand plan for the house. So one day in June he had an object delivered. When he returned from work he found Winnie and her mistress standing in the hallway, gazing at it.
‘It’s a vacuum cleaner,’ he said. ‘Mr Hoover’s Electric Suction Sweeper.’
A motor, with brushes attached, was mounted on a stick. A limp cloth bag was attached to the engine and hooked to the support. The two women stood well away from it, as if it might explode.
‘No more backache!’ he said. ‘This little fellow will do the job for you. It was invented by an American, and they know what’s what.’
Winnie took a step nearer; she touched it with her finger. ‘How does it work?’
‘By electricity.’
‘But we don’t have electricity,’ said Eithne.
‘I’ve noticed that, my love.’ He twinkled at her. ‘Unlike some people, I’m not blind. I have a good friend in the building trade who’s prepared to install it at a very reasonable price. Very reasonable. He owes me a favour.’
‘Install what?’
‘Electricity. This is the twentieth century, my dearest love. We can’t go on bumping around in the dark.’
Eithne gazed at him, her eyes wide. His eyes fell to her breasts, straining against her blouse. She wore the jet necklace he had bought on their honeymoon.
‘What about the mess?’ she asked. ‘What about the lodgers? Who’s going to pay?’
‘Don’t you bother your pretty head about that.’
‘What about the freeholder? What’s he going to say?’
Neville smiled. ‘You’re looking at him.’
There was a silence. Outside in the street, the rag-and-bone man rang his bell.
Eithne whispered: ‘What did you say?’
‘You’ll be getting a letter tomorrow. It’s all done and dusted.’
‘You’ve bought the freehold?’
Neville nodded. He felt a warmth in his groin, a surge of power.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked.
‘Thought I’d give you a surprise.’
The door opened and Mrs Spooner appeared, home from work. She looked at the three of them, standing around the vacuum cleaner. They moved aside and she scuttled past, casting a backward look at the machine as if it might chase her.
Winnie said: ‘How am I going to lug that up and down the stairs?’
Eithne was still gazing at her husband. ‘Where did you get the money?’
Neville tapped the side of his nose. ‘Let’s just say he was only too glad to get it off his hands. Riddled with dry rot.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Oh no! Is it?’
Neville grinned. ‘That’s what the surveyor told them.’
‘What surveyor?’
Neville’s smile widened.
‘I haven’t seen any surveyor,’ Eithne said.
In the silence, the clock struck six. Winnie disappeared down to the kitchen. Husband and wife stood there, in the hallway.
‘Ah,’ said Eithne.
It was very close; Eithne’s face was sheeny with moisture. Neville pictured it trickling between her breasts.
‘So it’s ours,’ she said.
Neville nodded.
At last – at long last – Eithne smiled. Neville felt the voltage of it, like an electric shock. Her eyes glittered.
‘Well well,’ she said. ‘You’re quite the man, aren’t you?’
He whispered in her hair. ‘And when do I get my reward?’
‘Later.’
But Neville was pressing against her, pushing her along the corridor. He bundled her into the back room and shut the door. This room was now reserved for their particular use; Neville had declared it out of bounds to the lodgers. Still, the boy might come in. Neville jammed his wife against the door. He rummaged under her skirt and petticoat, flinging them up.
‘We can’t,’ she whispered. But now he was ramming his hand up, between her legs. How moist she was, through the silk of her drawers!
Eithne’s legs buckled. Neville had to keep her propped up, to stop her sliding to the floor. Trembling, she stepped out of her knickers, helping him, using one foot to pull them off the other one.
‘From now on, I don’t want you wearing these,’ he whispered hoarsely, into her hair. ‘Right?’ He kicked the underwear out of the way.
She nodded wordlessly. He fumbled with his trouser buttons, wrenching them open one by one.
‘I want to think of you walking around without them, with only me knowing,’ he murmured. ‘Outdoors too. I want to picture you in the street, with nothing on underneath.’ He laughed, softly. ‘Besides, I’m a freeholder now. I want access to my property.’
He and she were the same height; trousers round his ankles, he planted himself in position and pushed himself inside her.
*
Eithne shuddered; she held his bare buttocks, pressing him into her, deeper. Far away, the bell rang for supper. He thrust in and out, hard. Eithne’s head bumped against the door. He cradled it wit
h one of his hands, steadying her with the other for her legs were like butter.
Eithne stared past Neville’s head. On the mantelpiece stood the photograph of Paul, dressed in the uniform of the Middlesex Regiment. Suddenly she found herself sobbing – fierce, dry sobs. She heaved with them, juddering like an animal, and then she cried out, as the pleasure flooded through her, and Neville had to press his hand across her mouth to keep her quiet.
*
On Monday the workmen arrived, to install the electricity. Winnie had covered the floors with dustsheets, in readiness for the invasion. They were armed with hammers and drills, and carried great spools of wires. Where did Mr Turk recruit them? It was a mystery, that in the middle of a war he could summon up four able-bodied men at the click of a finger.
The lodgers had been warned, of course. ‘What happens if it bursts into flames?’ wailed Mrs O’Malley. ‘We’ll be burnt to a crisp.’
Neville assured her that it was perfectly safe. The piped gas, in fact, was far more liable to explode.
When the men arrived, however, Mrs O’Malley thought they were the Germans. She locked herself into her room and sang Schubert lieder in her high, cracked voice. ‘Aus diesem Felsen starr und wild, Soll mein Gebet zu dir hinwehen,’ she sang. ‘Don’t shoot! I’m a friend of the Kaiser!’
Nor did the Spooners like it. They cowered in their room like hares hearing the approach of the beaters. Eithne was irritated by their behaviour. Didn’t they realise how she had saved them from possible eviction, quite apart from her generosity over the rent? Paul had always been kind to them, and it was in his memory that Eithne indulged them, even though their presence intruded on her privacy now that she was a married woman and liable to be interrupted by a timid tap at the door. Sometimes she longed for the house to be empty. She pictured Neville and herself scampering downstairs, naked and laughing, sharing the bath with the door open, as they had done during those magical days in Brighton.
But now the house was in a state of chaos, with dust everywhere, with hammerings and drillings, with the alarming crack of pipes being pulled from the walls and endless cups of tea to be made. The workmen promised that the disruption to the lodgers would be miminal, that they could wire up each room in a day if they had a clear run at it.
‘What shall we do about my husband?’ whispered Mrs Spooner. Eithne suggested putting him into the parlour for the day but one look at Mrs Spooner’s face told her this was out of the question. Mrs O’Malley came to the rescue.
‘We must all pull together in this perilous time,’ she said. ‘I, for one, will do my duty.’ She offered Mr Spooner the use of her room for the duration. After all, he would be back in his own bed by nightfall.
Eithne was touched by this spirit of co-operation. It spoke of the boarders’ appreciation of her husband. If they had any sense they would half-way love him by now. Neville filled their bellies with meat every night, he had rescued them just as he had rescued her, and now he was salvaging the dilapidated house, banishing the gloom of the past and bringing light to their lives. In a week they could click a switch and – hey presto! all would be illuminated.
In addition, the workmen had a further task. This was to remove the double-doors that connected the two bedrooms, on the first floor, and replace them with a wall. Ralph had been consulted about this, of course. Mother and son both knew the reason, though neither of them mentioned it. Sealing him off would afford them both some privacy.
Ralph had agreed to it with a shrug. He had hardly spoken to his mother during these past few weeks, there had been too many distractions. Though he stubbornly remained a vegetarian, he had been polite to Mr Turk, and showed no further signs of rebellion. In fact, they seldom met. The butcher was out of the house before anyone awoke and in the evening Ralph took his supper with the lodgers in the parlour, whilst Eithne and her husband ate together, at a later hour, in the back room. This new regime had been suggested by Neville in the first week of their marriage. Ralph had been invited to share this meal with them, but to his mother’s relief – yes, she could admit it – he had declined. The arrangement suited everyone.
Despite the dust, Eithne was happy. The workmen whistled, clumping up and down the stairs, carrying bags of lime for the partition wall. What a change it made, to have the house filled with healthy young men! They seemed a different species to her broken lodgers and pale, solemn son. The workmen flirted with her; they strode around in their great boots and urinated as lustily as horses in the outdoor privy. She hadn’t seen young men of that kind for years. They filled her with hope.
Silently she dared them to guess that, under her skirts, she was naked. The sun beat down; London was in the grip of a heatwave, but how free she felt, how unconstricted! Flushed with her secret, she smiled at them as they drank their tea. I want access to my property. In the evening she sat in the back room, leafing through a catalogue of light fixtures. As she did so her husband’s hand stole up her skirt, feeling upwards like a blind thing, until the catalogue thudded to the floor.
*
Winnie was worked to the bone. Bone-tired she was, trying to create some sort of order in the sweltering heat. The house was a maelstrom of activity. This sort of thing happened when Mr Turk was about: he was like a tank, crashing through everything in his path, leaving debris behind. The world outside, like the war, had long since drifted into a kind of stalemate. Nothing got done because there was nobody to do it. Down the road, a broken window had remained unrepaired for the past four years, ever since somebody had discovered that Henry Tong was a conchy and threw a brick through it. Henry Tong had long since disappeared, like so many familiar faces. But that had been the only change in the neighbourhood. Shops struggled on, with their diminished staff; people struggled on, living from day to day. In the midst of this torpor, Mr Turk was a galvanising force. Winnie remembered him taking over the neighbouring shops, the armies of workmen, the lights blazing into the night.
How did he manage it? Alwyne hinted that Mr Turk had made a fortune out of the war, but how did he know?
She and Alwyne Flyte had continued their relations. With the arrival of the newlyweds they had initially taken more care, but soon discovered that Mr and Mrs Turk’s oblivion to anyone but themselves made the risk of discovery remote. Wedged against her in bed, Alwyne said Mr Turk was the sort of man he despised.
‘He’s a plutocrat disguised as a working man,’ he said. ‘They’re the worst.’
‘He treats me well enough,’ said Winnie.
‘Can’t you think about anything beyond your own little world?’
‘Look who’s talking,’ she said. ‘You and your niggles. Who got all fussed about the marmalade this morning?’ They could talk like this now. After all, Winnie had seen him at his most undignified; she had long ago lost any respect. In this particular way Alwyne had indeed liberated her. All that class stuff could go hang. ‘I trust him, even though you don’t. I think you’re jealous.’
Alwyne laughed. ‘Of that great oaf?’ He inhaled his cigarette; the red tip glowed in the dark. He had urged her to smoke, to ward off the influenza, but Winnie had tried it once and it was an experience she didn’t care to repeat.
The two of them were close during those weeks. Between them lay the unspoken acknowledgement that nobody else would want them. This was the brutal truth. Even the workmen, a breed known for their interest in the opposite sex, treated Winnie with a brotherly jocularity that was as disheartening as it was familiar. The truth was that nobody took a plain person seriously. They didn’t give them their full attention, there was always somebody else to catch their eye. And if that person was a servant she had no chance at all.
Alwyne, however, was different, and Winnie would always be grateful to him. He listened to her. Perhaps because nobody listened to him either. Blind people, she had noticed, were treated like mental defectives. And yet Alwyne was more intelligent than the lot of them.
‘He’s a bully,’ said Alwyne.
In the d
arkness, Winnie turned to him. She wanted to unburden herself at last. She wanted to tell him how even Elsie, her friend who worked in the Woolwich Arsenal, how even Elsie treated her as a confidante rather than a fellow-combatant in the war between the sexes. Elsie presumed, rightly, that Winnie was out of the running. Even Elsie had a sweetheart, and she was as yellow as a canary. They called them canaries. And her fringe had turned ginger
‘My sergeant-major was a man like him,’ said Alwyne. ‘A tinpot little tyrant.’
This caught Winnie’s attention. Alwyne never talked about the war. ‘What did he do?’
‘You wouldn’t want to know, my dear.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Let’s just say that war strips a man down to his essentials. For this we can be thankful, for it’s the only good thing that might come out of this bloody mess.’ Alwyne laughed mirthlessly. ‘Who’s going to listen to orders from now on, when they’ve seen how their CO saved his own skin, how he sat eating omelettes in a village they were forbidden to enter when they’d spent two weeks at the Front up to their bloody waists in mud? When they’d seen their comrades blown to pieces? Don’t you see, that’s the only thing that gives me any hope in this whole bloody blasted business?’
Winnie forgave him the language; warfare coarsened a man. There was a silence. Soon the dawn would break; it was mid-June and the nights were over almost as soon as they had begun. Alwyne should be going back upstairs.
‘You can’t put the genie back into the bottle,’ he said, flicking his cigarette into the fireplace. ‘Not now.’
‘What did you do in the war?’ she asked.
‘Stretcher-bearer. I didn’t want to enlist, I didn’t want to kill anybody.’
‘Even the Germans?’
‘Even the Germans. We’re all indoctrinated, you see. You’re indoctrinated, it’s part of the system.’
He carried on but Winnie stopped listening. His lectures exhausted her. She was dog-tired and, to tell the truth, she didn’t give a fig about indoctrination, whatever that was. The simple fact was that she would sell her soul for a lie-in. Whatever Alwyne’s sergeant-major did, however bad, she would do it, if it meant that at six o’clock in the morning she could turn over and go back to sleep. They could put her in handcuffs and march her off to the court-martial but, in Alwyne’s words, she wouldn’t give a bloody blasted damn.