‘What's he paying you, then?’ He was as bad as my mother.
‘Wait till next week.’
‘No, what's he paying you?’
‘Wait till next week. You don't believe me, so wait till next week.’
We were back in St Botolph's Passage. I started on an indignant sliver of No. 1 thinking. ‘The Danny Boon Show! Script by Billy Fisher, produced by –’ Before I could get any further with this, I detected the pale shape of Stamp, hopping about in Shadrack's doorway, making an elaborate show of tutting and looking at his watch.
‘Where'e you been for your coffee – Bradford?’
‘No, Wakefield,’ I said, bad-tempered. Stamp buttoned his splitting leather gloves.
‘The Witch has been ringing up for you,’ he said. ‘She rang up twice. I'm off to tell Rita you're two-timing her.’
‘Piss off,’ I said.
‘Anyway, she said if she doesn't ring back, she wants to meet you at one o'clock, usual place.’
‘She'll be lucky.’
‘Does she shag?’ said Stamp, speaking the phrase as though it were a headline. I snarled at him, half-raising my elbow, and went into the office.
4
AT the far end of St Botolph's Passage, past the green wrought-iron urinal, was a broken-down old lych-gate leading into the churchyard. St Botolph's, a dark, dank slum of a church, was the home of a Ladies’ Guild, a choir, some mob called the Shining Hour, and about half a dozen other organizations, but so far as I knew it had no actual congregation except Shadrack, who went there sometimes looking for trade. The churchyard itself had long ago closed for business and most of the people in it had been carried away by the Black Death. It had a wayside pulpit whose message this week was: ‘It is Better To Cry Over Spilt Milk Than To Try And Put It Back In The Bottle,’ a saw that did not strike me for one as being particularly smart.
I reached the lych-gate at one o'clock, straight after work. The Witch was fond of the churchyard as a rendezvous. We had first met at the St Botolph's youth club and she was a great one for the sentimental associations. She was also very fond of the statues of little angels around the graves, which she thought beautiful. She shared with Shadrack a liking for the sloppy bits of verse over the more modern headstones. I would have liked to have seen her as Stradhoughton's first woman undertaker.
I sat down on the cracked stone bench inside the porch and collected at least some of my thoughts together. The first thing was to get the stack of creased calendars out from under my pullover. My stomach felt cramped and cold where they had been. I pulled the envelope of soggy paper gingerly out of my jacket pocket. Then I bundled the whole lot together and shoved it under the porch seat, where no one would ever look. That seemed to dispose of the calendars. I took out of my pocket the folded carbon copy of a letter I had written to Shadrack on the firm's notepaper when I got back from the Kit-Kat.
Dear Mr Shadrack,
With regret I must ask you to accept my resignation from Shadrack and Duxbury's. You probably know that while enjoying my work with the Firm exceedingly, I have always regarded it as a temporary career. I have now succeeded in obtaining a post with Mr Danny Boon, the London comedian, and I do feel that this is more in line with my future ambitions.
I realize that you are entitled to one week's notice, but under the circumstances I wonder if it would be possible to waive this formality. May I say how grateful I am for all the help you have given me during my stay with the Firm.
My best personal regards to yourself and Councillor Duxbury.
I was rather pleased with the letter, especially the bit about being grateful for Shadrack's help, but still apprehensive about the interview it would be necessary to have with him when I had finished with the Witch. I speculated idly on what he was getting at by saying it was about time we had a little talk. I looked out at the church clock and thought: never mind, in one hour it will all be over. I put the letter away again and began thinking about the Witch, the slow and impotent anger brewing up as it always did whenever I dwelt on her for any length of time.
The point about the Witch was that she was completely sexless. She was large, clean, and, as I knew to my cost, wholesome. I had learned to dislike everything about her. I did not care, to begin with, for her face: the scrubbed, honest look, as healthy as porridge. I disliked her for her impeccable shorthand, her senseless, sensible shoes, and her handbag crammed with oranges. The Witch did nothing else but eat oranges. She had in fact been peeling a tangerine when I proposed to her during a youth-club hike to Ilkley Moor, and her way of consummating the idea had been to pop a tangerine quarter in my mouth. She had not been very much amused when I said, ‘With this orange I thee wed’.
What I most disliked her for were the sugar-mouse kisses and the wrinkling-nose endearments which she seemed to think symbolized some kind of grand passion. I had already cured her of calling me ‘pet lamb’ by going ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ explosively when she said it. The Witch had said sententiously: ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.’ I disliked her for her sententiousness, too.
Part of the booty in my raincoat pockets was a dirty, crumpled bag of chocolates that had been there for months. I had bought them when Stamp handed over his white box of passion pills. ‘You'll need snogging fodder to go with them,’ he had explained. I took the chocolates out and inspected them. There had originally been a quarter of a pound, but as one opportunity after another slipped by, I had started to eat the odd chocolate and now there were only three left at the bottom of the bag, squashed and pale milky brown where they had melted and reset.
I put the paper bag on my knee. Fumbling about in my side-pocket I found Stamp's little box. That too was squashed almost flat by now, and most of the pills had rolled out into my pocket. I took one out, a little black bead that looked inedible. I wondered again where Stamp had got them and why he had given them to me, and also whether I could be prosecuted for what I was doing. ‘Fisher, pay attention to me.’ I fished around for the most presentable chocolate I could find, and tried to break it in half. It would not break properly. The chocolate covering splintered like an eggshell. It was an orange cream. I stuffed the round black bead into it and tried to press the chocolate whole again. The result was a filthy, squalid mess. I ate one of the remaining chocolates, and then the second, leaving only the doctored orange cream in its grimy paper bag.
I lit a cigarette and stood up, and stretched. Looking down St Botolph's Passage, I saw the Witch picking her way disdainfully through the swaying little groups of betting men who were beginning to congregate.
I felt the usual claustrophobia coming on as she marched up to the lych-gate, swinging her flared skirt like a Scot swings his kilt; an arrogant and not a sexy swing. I disliked the way she walked.
‘Hullo,’ the Witch said, coldly. She was always cold whenever we were anywhere that resembled a public place. Later on she would start the ear-nibbling, the nose-rubbing, and the baby talk. I said: ‘Hullo, dalling.’ I could not say darling. I was always trying, but it always came out as dalling.
We sat down together on the hard stone bench, under the spiders' webs. She eyed my Player's Weight viciously.
‘How many cigarettes today?’
‘Two,’ I said.
‘That's a good boy,’ the Witch said, not quite half jokingly. She had got hold of some idea that I was smoking only five a day.
‘Did you have a busy morning, dalling?’ I said, giving her the soulful look. The Witch raised her eyeballs and blew upwards into her nostrils, a habit for which I was fast getting ready to clout her.
‘Only about thirty letters from Mr Turnbull. Then he wanted me to type out an agreement…’ She rattled on in this vein for a few minutes.
‘Did you talk to any men today?’ I asked her. This was another idea she had. I was supposed to be jealous if she spoke to anybody else but me.
‘Only Mr Turnbull, and Stamp when I rang up. Did you talk to any gurls?’
‘O
nly the waitress when we went out for coffee.’
The Witch put on a mean expression. ‘Couldn't your friend have spoken to her?’ she pouted. She wouldn't speak Arthur's name, because even that was supposed to make me jealous.
‘Dalling!’ I said. ‘Have you missed me?’
‘Of course. Have you missed me?’
‘Of course.’
That seemed to be the end of the inquisition. I grubbed around in my pocket and produced what was left of the chocolates. ‘I saved this for you,’ I said.
The Witch peered doubtfully into the sticky, brown-stained depths of the paper bag.
‘It looks a bit squashed,’ she said.
I took the chocolate between my fingers. ‘Open wide.’ She opened her mouth, probably to protest, and I rammed the chocolate in.
‘Nasty!’ said the Witch, gulping. I craned my neck, pretending to scratch my ear, and glanced out of the porch at the church clock. Stamp's passion pills were supposed to take effect after a quarter of an hour at most. He had once given me a description of a straight-laced, straight-faced Baloo who ran a Wolf Cub pack over in Leeds, and she had started pawing his jacket and whimpering only five minutes after he had slipped her a passion pill in the guise of an energy tablet.
‘What were you ringing up about this morning? Anything?’
‘Just wanted to talk to you, pet,’ said the Witch, wriggling herself into a position of squeamish luxury. ‘I've seen the most marvellous material to make curtains for our cottage. Honestly, you'll love it.’
Eating oranges in St Botolph's churchyard on the long crisp nights, or sometimes in the public shelter at the Corporation cemetery, another favourite spot, we had discussed at length the prospect of living in a thatched cottage in the middle of some unspecified field in Devon. At times, in the right mood, I could get quite enthusiastic over this rural image, and it had even figured in my No. 1 thinking before now. We had invented two children, little Barbara and little Billy – the prototypes, actually, of the imaginary family I had told Arthur's mother about – and we would discuss their future, and the village activities, and the poker- work mottoes and all the rest of it.
‘It's a sort of turquoise, with lovely little squiggles, like wineglasses –’
‘Will it go with the yellow carpet?’
‘No, but it'll go with the grey rugs in the kiddies' room.’
‘Dalling!’
The yellow carpet and the grey rugs we had seen in a furniture-shop window on one of the interminable expeditions round Stradhoughton that the Witch sometimes dragged me on. They had all long ago been sold, but many had become part of the picture of the cottage, along with the Windsor chairs, the kettle singing on the hob, the bloody cat, and also the crinoline ladies from my bedroom wall at home.
We continued on these lines for a few minutes, until at a reference to the wedding ceremony in some village church that would precede it all, the Witch stiffened.
‘Have you got my engagement ring back yet?’
‘Not yet, crikey! I only took it in this morning!’ The Witch had parted with it suspiciously and reluctantly, not really convinced that it needed making smaller.
‘I feel unclothed without it,’ she said. She could not bring herself to say ‘naked’, yet, from her, ‘unclothed’ sounded even more obscene than she imagined nakedness to be. The reference reminded me that her time was nearly up.
‘Let's go in the churchyard, away from all the people,’ I said, standing up and taking her cold, chapped hands.
She looked doubtful again, into the dead-looking graveyard. ‘It's a bit damp, isn't it?’
‘We'll sit on my raincoat. Come on, dalling.’ I was almost dragging her to her feet. She got up half-heartedly. I put my arm around her awkwardly, and we walked up the broken tarmacadam path that was split down the middle like the crust of a cottage loaf, round to the back of the old church. Behind some ancient family vault was a black tree and a clump of burnt-looking, dirty old grass. Sometimes I could persuade the Witch to sit down there, when she was not inspecting the vault and reading out aloud: ‘Samuel Vaughan of this town, 1784; alfo his wife Emma, alfo his fon Saml, 1803.’ I threw my raincoat on the shoddy grass and sat down. The Witch remained standing and I pulled her impatiently, almost forcibly, to her knees. By now, even allowing extra time for a difficult case, Stamp's pill should be working.
I stared at her gravely. ‘I love you, dalling,’ I said in the stilted way I couldn't help.
‘Love you,’ said the Witch, the stock response which she imagined the statement needed.
‘Do you? Really and truly?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Are you looking forward to getting married?’
‘I think about it every minute of the day,’ she said. I disliked the way she talked, tempering her flat northern voice with the mean, rounded vowels she had picked up at the Stradhoughton College of Commerce.
‘Dalling,’ I said. I began stroking her hair, moving as quickly as possible down the side of her face and on to her shoulder. She started the nose-rubbing act, and I seized her roughly and began kissing her. My lips on hers, I decided that I might as well try to get my tongue into her mouth but she kept her lips hard and closed. She pulled her face away suddenly so that my tongue slithered across her cheek and I was licking her, like a dog. It was not a very promising start.
‘Don't ever fall in love with anybody else,’ I said in the grave, sad voice. ‘Love you, pet,’ she said, leaning forward and nibbling my ear. I caught hold of her again and started fumbling, as idly as I could manage it, at the square buttons of her neat blue suit. The Witch struggled free again.
‘Let's talk about our cottage, pet,’ she said.
I counted seven to myself, seeing the red rash in front of my eyes. Obviously the pill was not working yet, or perhaps in the Witch's case I should have given her three or four.
‘What about our cottage?’ I said in the dreamy voice, containing myself.
‘About the garden. Tell me about the garden.’
‘We'll have a lovely garden,’ I said, conjuring up a garden without much trouble. ‘We'll have rose trees and daffodils and a lovely lawn with a swing for little Billy and little Barbara to play on, and we'll have our meals down by the lily pond in summer.’
‘Do you think a lily pond is safe?’ the Witch said anxiously. ‘What if the kiddies wandered too near and fell in?’
‘We'll build a wall round it. No we won't, we won't have a pond at all. We'll have an old well. An old brick well where we draw the water. We'll make it our wishing well. Do you know what I'll wish?’
The Witch shook her head. She was sitting with her hands folded round her ankles like a child being told a bedtime story.
‘Tell me what you'll wish, first,’ I said.
‘Oh – I'll wish that we'll always be happy and always love each other. What will you wish?’ the Witch said.
‘Better not tell you,’ I said.
‘Why not, pet?’
‘You might be cross.’
‘Why would I be cross?’
‘Oh, I don't know. You might think me too, well, forward.’ I glanced at her face for reaction. There was no reaction, and in fact when I looked at her again she seemed to have lost interest in the wishing well. I tried the lip-biting trick, combined with the heavy breathing.
‘Barbara –’ I began, making a couple of well-feigned false starts. ‘Do you think it's wrong for people to have, you know, feelings?’
The Witch looked at me, too directly for my liking. ‘Not if they're genuinely in love with each other,’ she said.
‘Like we are?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with less certainty.
‘Would you think it wrong of me to have - feelings?’
The Witch, speaking briskly and firmly as though she had been waiting for this one and knew what to do about it, said: ‘I think we ought to be married first.’
I looked at her sorrowfully. ‘Dalling.’ I got hold of the back of
her neck and kissed her again. This time, making a bold decision, I put my hand on the thick, salmon-coloured stocking, just about at the shin. She stiffened, but did not do anything about it. I moved the hand up, the voice of Stamp floating into my mind, ‘His hand caressed her silken knee.’ As soon as I reached her knee the Witch tore herself free.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ she said abruptly.
‘Of course, dalling. Why?’ I said, not moving my hand.
She looked pointedly down at her knee. ‘Look where your hand is.’
I moved it away, sighing audibly.
‘Dalling, don't you want me to touch you?’
The Witch shrugged.
‘It seems – indecent, somehow.’ I leaned forward to kiss her again, but she side-stepped abruptly, reaching for the leather shoulder-bag that she always carried with her.
‘Would you like an energy tablet?’ I said.
‘No, thank you. I'm going to have an orange.’
I saw the red rash again and felt the old, impotent rage. I jumped to my feet. ‘Ai'm going to have an or-rainge!’ I mimicked in a falsetto voice. ‘Ai'm going to have an or-rainge!’ On a sudden urge I booted the leather handbag out of her hand and across the grass. It came to rest by an old gravestone, spilling out oranges and shorthand dictionaries.
‘Billy!’ said the witch sharply.
‘You and your bloody oranges,’ I said.
She sat there looking straight in front of her, obviously wondering whether it was going to be worth her while to start crying. I bent down and touched her hair.
‘Sorry, dalling,’ I said. I put on a shamefaced look and slunk off after her handbag. I started collecting her oranges and things together, looking closely into her open handbag to see if there were any letters from men I might be able to use. There was nothing but her lipstick and a few coins, but on the grass close by I saw something small and gleaming. I recognized it as a miniature silver cross that the Witch used to wear around her neck. Until a few months ago she had never been without it, then she had revealed that it was a present from some cousin called Alec who lived in Wakefield. Under the jealousy pact between us I had made her promise to give it back to him, and according to her story she had done so.