‘Mist' William Fisher, wanted on the telephone.’
I beckoned to Liz, and followed Shadrack at a respectful distance down the stairs.
11
IT was quiet outside the Roxy. The evening was warm, but on the crisp side. The sodium lamps were beginning to flicker on and off dismally. The old gaffers who manned the Alderman Burrows memorial bench at the abandoned tram terminus were beginning to crane themselves stiffly to their feet and adjust their mufflers. The last children had left the piles of builders' sand that marked every exit from Stradhoughton, warning of new territorial ambitions in the way of brittle new roads across the moors.
I stood at the entrance to the Roxy, looking at the showcases full of cracked, shiny photographs and the glue-streaked placards advertising the Autumn Leaf Ball. There was one showcase devoted to the Miss Stradhoughton contest and Rita, with her cardboard crown and her satin sash, smiled toothily down at me. On the broad brick steps, the commissionaire in his threadbare uniform, dry-cleaned to a thin blue and tied with an army webbing belt dyed navy, eyed passing youths with his fixed policeman's stare. Two of them, shiny-haired and wearing dazzle ties, strolled self-consciously up towards the paybox. I recognized them as friends of Stamp from the crowd he had been with at the X-L Disc Bar that afternoon.
The commissionaire moved forward. ‘Not tonight, my friends,’ he said, putting his arm out. ‘Not after last week.’
‘Why, what's up?’ said one of the youths.
‘Never mind what's up, or what's down. You don't come in, that's Mr Bottomley's strict orders.’
‘After you with Mr Bottomley,’ said the other youth.
‘We're not coming in, we just want to get a mate out,’ said the first one.
‘You're getting nobody out,’ said the commissionaire. The two youths retired into the shadows.
I looked up the blue-carpeted foyer at the cluster of girls gossiping outside the Ladies, and saw them part to let Liz through. Some of them stared after her. I noticed, not for the first time, how scruffy she was in her old suéde jacket and her dusty black skirt, and it occurred to me that I had rarely, if ever, seen her wearing anything else. She came and went in her green suéde coat as though it were a uniform or something, and even when I pictured her at the celebration parade after the November riots in Ambrosia, she was still wearing it.
She came and stood beside me, by the showcases.
‘Miss Stradhoughton,’ she said mechanically.
‘They gave the title to the wrong girl,’ I said with a clumsy attempt at gallantry.
We strolled away from the Roxy and the block of tobacconists' shops, chemists and hairdressers that was built in with it, and over the waste ground to the New Road. We walked up New Road past the Houghtondale Arms, the bus sheds and the crematorium and then, where the dump of cracked drainpipes and the crusty little hills of tar marked the last gasp of housing development, we turned into the unadopted road that led down into Foley Bottoms.
At some point during the evening, probably in the flight from the pub concert-room, I had started walking like a man with flat feet, and I was trying hard to stop it. ‘Do you find life complicated?’ I said as we walked along. I was long past caring one way or the other about anything very much, and what I said was the first thing that came into my head.
‘Hmm-hmm,’ said Liz happily.
I said: ‘I wish it was something you could tear up and start again. Life, I mean. You know, like starting a new page in an exercise book.’
‘Well, it's been done,’ said Liz. ‘Turning over a new leaf.’
‘I turn over a new leaf every day,’ I said. ‘But the blots show through.’ I was rather pleased with this.
We came to the end of the unadopted road and crossed over the broken-down chestnut fencing and the backwash of old bricks and bottles that was the entrance to Foley Bottoms.
‘Why are you walking like that?’ said Liz.
‘Like what?’
‘Sort of leaning forwards as though you were on roller skates.’
About half a dozen selected falsehoods skimmed through my mind, ranging from bad shoes to middle ear disease. ‘I'm pretending I've got flat feet,’ I said at length.
‘Fathead.’
Stradhoughton clung tenaciously on to the woods for the first few yards: old prams, cement bags flapping, an electricity sub-station, the trees dying on their feet. But wading through the soggy cardboard boxes and the rust-rimmed bicycle wheels we came to the woods with the acorns falling and the ferns waist-high and green about us.
‘I turn over a new leaf every day,’ I said. ‘But the blots show through the page’
‘Well,’ said Liz. ‘Perhaps a new leaf isn't good enough. Perhaps you need to turn over a new volume.’
She was even better than I was at carrying metaphor to inscrutable lengths. I thought of pursuing the theme a little further, and was weaving a pleasant fancy about trying not only a new volume but a new library, when Liz started on the problem afresh with an entirely new set of illustrations.
‘You know, my lad, the trouble with you is that you're – what's the word – introspective? You're like a child at the edge of a paddling pool. You want very much to go in, but you think so much about whether the water's cold, and whether you'll drown, and what your mother will say if you get your feet wet –’
I hesitated to go with her into the paddling-pool zone, which seemed to me to be fraught with peril, but there was nothing for it but to interrupt her.
‘All I'm doing is wondering whether to dive or swim,’ I said obscurely.
‘Perhaps you need a coach,’ said Liz, giving me the sly glance. It was perfectly apparent where this one was leading to, and I decided to leave her floundering in her own paddling pool for the time being. We picked our way over the low blackberry branches in silence.
I searched around in my mind for some fresh nonsense to keep us pleasantly occupied. I felt a quick gust of warmth for Liz for her readiness to go so far with me along the well-trodden paths of fantasy. I decided to try her on the London theme.
‘Do you know why I'm so fascinated by London?’ I said.
‘No, Mr Bones, why are you so fascinated by London?’ She was not consciously imitating Arthur.
‘A man can lose himself in London,’ I said. ‘London is a big place. It has big streets and big people –’ I tailed off, because she would not be drawn, and in any case I had forgotten the end of the sentence. Liz stopped abruptly, and I turned back to face her, expecting the sudden, rash embrace that was a feature of her impetuous temperament.
But she folded her arms and looked at me with her inscrutable, chubby smile that only faintly looked as though, like the Witch before her, she had practised it in a mirror.
‘Billy?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Tell me something?’
I said in the soft voice: ‘Of course.’
‘Do you really know Man o' the Dales?’
In the hard, defiant voice: ‘Course I do.’
‘Really and truly?’
‘Well, know him, it depends what you mean by know him. I've met him –’
‘Count five and tell the truth,’ said Liz. It was an old recipe of hers, and one that I always found distasteful. I said in the high-pitched voice, putting an elaborate hand to my heart, ‘I cannot tell a lie, I've never met the man.’ The phrase ‘I've never met the man’ was just not suited to the range of voice I had chosen, and the whole thing sounded forced and ridiculous.
Liz grinned composedly. ‘You are a fool.’
I wiped the whole matter out with the repeater gun levelled at Man o' the Dales, and we walked on. ‘Perhaps I need to turn over a new paddling pool,’ I said.
‘Write that down,’ said Liz, just as Arthur would have said.
Foley Bottoms was largely a botanic clump of nothing, but just before you started getting out of the woods again and on your way to the Strad Lee housing estate – a hideous zoo of orange brick which it would have
done Man o' the Dales a power of good to walk through, cobblestones, handlebar moustache and all – there was a knoll or hill of what I always thought of as picnic grass, a kind of lush, tropical green velvet that looked as though you could buy it by the yard in Marks and Spencers. It was a regular custom for me to stop here with whoever it was, Liz, Rita, or the Witch; thereafter the custom would vary according to the personality involved. With Rita, it was the film finale clinch prior to sinking down on the grass; with the Witch, a moment of studied casualness in which we both sat down apparently independently, about a yard from one another. I wondered how the Witch was getting on with her cupful of passion pills. In the case of Liz, part of the regular custom was to hold each other at arm's length, scrutinizing faces and then, as at a given signal, sit down.
‘Who d'you love?’ said Liz.
‘Thee, lass,’ I said, finding refuge in the Duxbury dialect.
‘Yes, it sounds like it, doesn't it?’
‘Ah do, lass.’
‘Say it properly, then.’
‘I do, Liz, I do,’ I said soberly, and wondering if I meant it. I knelt down on the grass and reached my arm up to her. Liz remained standing.
‘What about Barbara?’
So rarely did I think about the Witch under her given name that I had to think for a minute who Barbara was when she was at home.
‘Well what about her?’
‘Well what about her?’ said Liz. I began pulling at her hands, trying to decide whether to pass the ball back again with another ‘Well what about her?’ Finally I said: ‘All over.’
‘You've said that before.’
‘I know. This time the goose is cooked.’ I did not explain whose goose I had in mind. I tightened my grip on her hands and pulled her down, so successfully that she fell on top of me. This should have been the signal for the beginning of some rural by-play but in fact the weight of her knocked me sprawling and by the time I had recovered she was sitting beside me, lighting a cigarette – a delaying trick as annoying in its way as the Witch's oranges.
‘I want to marry you, you know, Billy,’ Liz said, holding her cigarette to a blade of grass.
I said: ‘I know, Liz, I know. We will, one day.’
‘Not one day. Now.’
The idea of actually getting married now was so incomprehensible to me that I thought it was part of some new ritual, and I played along with it.
‘Tonight?’
‘Next week will do. Before you go to London. Or when you get there. Whichever you prefer.’
I began plucking at the glass buttons of her blouse, imagining the court scene where my mother, weeping, opposed my application to marry. The unfastening of Liz's blouse had become a more or less routine affair and it was done in a detached way, rather as if I were helping her off with her coat.
‘I think I get engaged a bit too often,’ I said.
‘I don't want to get engaged. I want to get married.’
‘Is that why you keep sloping off every few weeks, because you want to get married?’
‘I want to get married,’ said Liz stubbornly.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right.’
By now I had begun to grow fairly absent-minded in my responses, for it had suddenly struck me that there was somebody in the bushes, listening to us. There was no wind, but every so often one of the rhododendrons behind us would rustle and there would be a crackling of twigs. I looked up sharply, but there was nothing to see.
‘How do you mean, all right?’ said Liz. ‘I've just proposed to you, and you say all right. Aren't you supposed to say this is so sudden, or yes, or something?’
I was groping for some obscure phrase that would comfort her and at the same time leave me uncommitted. I dis saw something moving in the bushes behind us. The notion that the Witch had followed us here and was taking everything down in her faultless Gregg shorthand possessed me with an unpleasant vividness.
‘If I'm going to dive in,’ I said, ‘I think it might as well be at the deep end.’
Even if the Witch had got down this remark satisfactorily, there was little that she could make of it in a breach of promise trial. ‘Now Mr Fisher, according to these notes you said that if you were going to dive in, it might as well be at the deep end. Now what did you mean by that?’ I got Liz's blouse out of her skirt and began stroking her, like a cat.
Liz screwed her eyes up tightly in the way she did when she was going to say something she thought brazen. Without seeing, she stubbed her cigarette out on the grass.
‘You know what you wanted me to do that night on Stradhoughton Moor, and I said another night?’
I remembered very well the cold night on Stradhoughton Moor, in the old folks’ shelter, the night before Liz had last disappeared. On that night I had actually proposed, a pretend proposal that we had used for kindling, toasting our hands on it until the early hours when, stiff with cold, we wandered home quietly, the future spent like fireworks.
‘I remember,’ I said. My heart had begun to beat swiftly. Stamp's phrase, ‘Are you getting it regular?’ sprang irreverently back into my head. The bushes stirred again, and this time I thought that it might be Stamp himself with his German camera, fitted with infra-red. Either him or the Witch with a portable tape recorder, one or the other.
‘Well,’ said Liz. ‘It's another night tonight, isn't it?’
I kissed her eyes meditatively. So far our relations had been on a thus-far-and-no-farther basis, frustrating to both of us but of such a well-established pattern that it came as a slow shock to suggest that the barriers now be taken down.
‘Are you sure?’ I said, clearing my throat. She nodded, her face full of meaning. Out in the rhododendron bushes the Witch put on another spool. A new notion, that Shadrack was crouching there with a warrant for my arrest, seized me for a moment, then I put it aside to deal with current problems.
‘Er - what do you think we ought to do about, you know, babies?’
‘Have them,’ said Liz luxuriously. ‘Lots and lots of them.’
‘No, I mean tonight. I mean, I haven't got – you know.’
‘It's all right,’ said Liz. I peered unhappily out into the bushes. The Witch turned up her volume control, Stamp changed his film and Shadrack crouched forward in the dusk, licking his lips. Liz nestled plumply up to me and bit my ear. We held each other helplessly, doing nothing, the passion seeping away at a dangerous rate.
Liz said: ‘Billy?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Ask you something?’
‘Uh-huh.’
She screwed up her eyes again and said: ‘Do you know what virgo intacta means?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well. I'm not.’
I sat there quietly, listening. Something had gone wrong with the Witch's tape recorder. Stamp and Shadrack, fiddling with the batteries, were adjusting it for her. ‘No,’ I said finally. ‘I somehow didn't think you were.’
‘Want me to tell you about it?’
‘No.’
I began to fondle her breast, spanning it in my hand and pressing gently with each finger in turn, compulsively. Liz began to breathe heavily and to tremble out of all proportion to the ardour I thought I was drumming up. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.
‘No, not now.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Liz sat up, almost impatiently, pulling her suède coat around her. She stared out into the darkness. Then she began to trace little circles in the grass with her fingers.
‘You think that's why I'm always going away, don't you?’ she said.
I shrugged, saying and thinking nothing.
‘Ask me where I've been for the past five weeks.’
‘Does the geographical location make any difference?’ I said with simulated bitterness, hoping to keep it all on this same sparring level.
‘No, I don't suppose it does,’ said Liz. I reached out and touched her breast under her coat, but it was cold and lifeless. She began to speak in a rhythmical, reaso
ning sort of prose, as though she had rehearsed all the words before she met me.
‘Every so often I just want to go away. It's not you, Billy, I want to be here with you. It's the town. It's the people we know. I don't like knowing everybody, or becoming a part of things – do you see what I mean?’
We had been over this before, but from a different route. It had never led so beautifully into the point of contact between us. I began to feel excited, as though on the verge of a discovery.
‘What I'd like is to be invisible,’ said Liz. ‘You know, to do everything without people knowing, and not having to worry about them, not having to explain all the time. That's why I so enjoyed that night on Stradhoughton Moor. We were both invisible. We –’
‘Liz,’ I said urgently. ‘Liz, listen, listen.’ I took her hands, trembling almost, and began to speak rapidly, leaving staccato, deliberate pauses between my words.
‘Liz, do you know what I do? When I want to feel invisible?’ I had no experience of wanting to feel invisible, but the text was perfect. I was doctoring my words as I went along, quickly and carefully. ‘I've never told anybody. I have a sort of – well, it's an imaginary country, where I go. It has its own people –’
‘Do you do that? I knew you would,’ cried Liz triumphantly. ‘I knew you would. Why are we so alike, Billy? I can read your thoughts. A town like Stradhoughton, only somewhere over by the sea, and we used to spend the whole day on the beach. That's what I used to think about.’
I was full of excitement, frustrated, painful excitement at not being able to tell her properly, yet at the same time knowing she would understand it, knowing that she would know. I wanted to drag her into my mind and let her loose in it, free to pick and choose.
I began counting to myself to slow myself down, and said, only half-feverishly:
‘This is more than a town, it's a whole country. I'm supposed to be the Prime Minister. You're supposed to be the Foreign Secretary or something –’
‘Yes sir,’ said Liz with grave, mock obedience.
‘I think about it for hours. Sometimes I think, if we were married, and living somewhere in that house in the country, we could just sit and imagine ourselves there –’