‘I did, but you weren’t very interested.’
‘I didn’t want to be nosy.’
‘Are you only saying that because you don’t want me to go on about you, and your past? I know you aren’t who you say you are, but I don’t care. I like it that way, in fact. I knew who my other boyfriends were, only too well, and they bored me to tears. I don’t care where you came from.’
‘Well, I respect that opinion.’ And he did. ‘But I still don’t know much about you,’ which he realized was more of a lie than not.
‘I think you do. Anyway, not much happened in my life. I went to Mundella Girls till I was sixteen. Then I went to work. My father could have kept me at home, but he told me to get a job, so that I’d know what it was like to earn a living. Not that I minded. What would I have done, staying at home?’
He wondered how many men she’d really had. She was at least thirty, but he thought there couldn’t have been many. When he asked she said it was no business of his, and he had to agree that it wasn’t, because she didn’t want to know how many women he’d been with. In more ways than one she seemed older than himself.
They walked up gloomy Mansfield Road, all shops shut, and few people about, though with fists clenched he marked each shadow until it had gone by. They turned off by the cemetery. ‘I’m on my own in the house for a couple of weeks,’ she said into his ear. ‘Mum and Dad have gone on holiday to France in the car.’
His heart went bump in the night. ‘Really? Where to?’
‘They’re staying a night in Paris, then going down to Nice.’
‘That’s really good news. Thanks for telling me.’
She looked at him as if he were a fool – as he’d supposed she would. ‘Why not? I only hope their travel allowance lasts out, and they don’t come back too early.’
‘Your father must have stuffed his back pocket with five-pound notes, you can bet.’
She pulled her arm away. ‘He’d never do anything like that.’
Oh, wouldn’t he? She had no right to be so naive at her age. He really was a fool. She only meant you never said that kind of thing.
The large house had its own space, lilac bushes and trees heavy from rain, a damp soil smell reminding him of muddy and murderous rugby matches on the playing fields at school. ‘I’d like to see inside. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a big house like that.’
She squeezed his arm, at being able to grant his wish. The kitchen covered the same acreage as Mrs Denman’s ground floor, but the decoration reminded him of his clergyman uncle’s place near Malvern, all pine wood and marble top. ‘What sort of work does your father do?’
‘Work? He goes to business. He has property. Shops in town. Things like that.’
He watched her make a pot of tea, so prissy and precise with the doses of leaf it was bound to be as weak as gnat’s piss, but at least she did it with her coat off, a white blouse over slender bosom from neck to wrists, all done up, with beads as well, which made her look, as Archie would have said, like lamb and lettuce. ‘What’s upstairs?’
Her smile of amusement was real, though time would tell whether it was because she had already arranged everything. ‘Just bedrooms. Why?’
‘Can I see?’
‘If you promise to behave’ – a positive laugh this time.
‘Of course I promise.’
On the landing at the top he said: ‘I suppose you have a woman in to clean all these carpets?’
‘Oh, I vacuum them sometimes, on Saturday afternoon.’
He put both hands forward over her breasts, finding some shape after all. Encouraged by a trembling hand at her shoulder he kissed the ringlets from her neck and licked the warm skin, a hard-on pressing into her skirt. ‘I’d love to be intimate with you,’ he whispered, on an all or nothing course.
He expected to be pushed away, but she turned, and he tasted the cachou breath around her mouth. ‘Can you cope?’
If he answered yes she would take him off for a rake who had a dozen women on the go. But if he said no she might write him off as inexperienced, such virtue not doing him any good at all. Remembering the triple-packet of frenchies in his left waistcoat pocket he had to say that he could.
He knew he would have to take special care with her delicate body, in any case, otherwise she might break up under his bit of rough stuff. Another thing was that a pregnancy would be fatal, the baby so big it would end up having her. He felt as if he had never before been in such a situation, that his time with Eileen was puppy love from another age, almost from another country, which with fiery Alice in Cyprus it had been, though their love had been full-blown, and he hoped Cecilia would come up to it; but going into the furnace of a new affair cut off the others as if such phases of his past life were like the carriages of a train, each abandoned to rot in a siding when done with.
He stood by an armchair as she took off her clothes, needing minutes to come down from three-o-one with so many pearl buttons to her blouse. Her brown eyes glowed, and a faintly modest smile made her look like the whore of Babylon, apt for the moment, but something she could never otherwise be as she unclipped her pretty white brassiere and gave her tits a stroke before attending to her stockings and skirt. Had she put on her best underwear knowing how the evening would end, or did a woman like that always wear such clean and flimsy stuff?
The light was clinical, which must be what she wants, he thought, the full-length mirrors of the white wood wardrobe doors seeming to multiply the dazzle. She neither wanted to hide the slight wrinkling of her mouth nor diminish the intensity of his scar. Her figure was thin but not inelegant, and he lustfully noted her charming breasts with their delicate carmine nipples. Seeing her whole nakedness appear, though she was no Aphrodite parting the waves and coming into land, he noted how shapely her legs were now that he could see them all the way up, and robust as well, as if made for a fuller figure than she had, and which some day she might grow into. Dark ringlets turned her into a houri, out of an illustration in some fairy-tale book he had once seen.
‘I always knew you were beautiful.’ He smoothed a palm down the neat bush of pubic hair. ‘But you’re far more so with no clothes on.’
She blushed almost to her shoulders. ‘Thank you. I like looking at myself in the mirror, as I’m doing now.’
‘Do you do it often?’
‘Why not?’ She drew back the covers of the bed, and their first tentative slow-motion movements hardened him more. He had taken the precaution of being already sheathed and, by midnight, three well-blobbed specimens lay discarded around the bed.
‘Weren’t you good?’ She seemed an entirely different person to him now. ‘Don’t you think it was worth waiting for?’ Her smile was brief, faintly teasing, which he liked because it drew them even closer together. ‘I think it was, certainly,’ she went on, wanting him to agree, while he could only wonder that she saw an altered man in him as well. ‘You’d better flush those things away, though, and be careful not to spill anything.’
She was nothing if not practical, influenced no doubt by reality, which he couldn’t care less about at such a time. He bombed them into the toilet bowl, each making a satisfying splash, as if retaining their individuality to the end, then pulled the chain, but even after a ton of water one of them surfaced like a poor benighted jellyfish that didn’t want to go into that bourne from which no traveller returned. He waited for the cistern to build up, and tried again, but the same forlorn homunculus spluttered up and eased its bulbous tail out for another circuit. The head of number two peaked from under the porcelain lip to see how his brother – or sister maybe – got on. Two more attempts, but number three still wanted to survive. Herbert didn’t fancy plunging a hand in to drag the recalcitrant bleeders out and throw them from the window for fear Cecilia’s parents would think a funny bush had grown in their garden during their time away.
She knocked on the door. ‘Are you all right, darling?’
‘Yeh, fine, coming.’ Another massive flus
h sent the final unwilling spunk bag to its doom – or he hoped so. Maybe it would surface in the morning for a final pathetic look at the sunlight coming through the mock stained-glass window, and only then do the decent thing and drown itself. At least he wouldn’t be there to hear her comments if the bloody thing didn’t succeed.
On the way home he told himself he was in love, said it over and over on the long depressing stretch through town, not even complaining at the thought of having to be in his overalls by seven. Words, however, were not rivets to fasten his emotions into place. He loved her compliance, and the pleasure of going round the world on her body again and again on her parents’ great bed. If he saw no more of her he would surely miss such delectable copulation. It was not, on the other hand, the profound and life-long love he ought to have felt, for it didn’t have that rootish tug of the heart, the all-enveloping sinking into the depths as between him and Eileen in the old days, which memory surfaced after his flesh to flesh fucking with Cecilia as if it had been only yesterday – though when seemingly flying home he felt no reason for complaint.
On Sunday morning he saw Archie and his pansy brother Raymond out by the shallows of the Trent near Clifton, both in their waders and hoping for a bite from fish that had just about had time to congratulate themselves at escaping the peril of the weir. Raymond went off to moon by himself, and Archie complained to Bert that the pair of them hadn’t been out for a booze-up lately.
‘It’s all right for you,’ Bert told him. ‘You can see your women in the week because they’re married, but me, I’m courtin’, and I can only meet my tart on Fridays and Saturdays.’ After a genuine no-nonsense berserker laugh, he added that his backbone was turning slowly, almost without him knowing – though he would most fully by the end – into a string of shiny Wollaton Park conkers.
Archie sat on the bank to watch his float. ‘Who is she, then?’
About to blurt out the truth, honour forced Herbert into an account of how he met a young woman called Joanna on his way back from guzzling a jar or two in the Admiral Rodney at Wollaton. He described how he sat next to her on the top deck of the bus, rain peppering at the windows all the lumbering way uphill and down into town. ‘I didn’t know how it was. We just got talking.’
Archie soaked in the account, enjoying the story whether true or not – though Herbert realized he took it for gospel, because why shouldn’t he? What you said to people they believed, as he would have taken in a similar story from Archie. ‘You clicked good and proper.’
‘Yeh, we talked the hind leg off a donkey. Then we got off the bus in Slab Square, and went for a drink in the Old Salutation. Lovely, she was. Dark hair, and a nice slim figure. She towd me she worked in an office and had a room of her own at West Bridgford, in a house owned by a Polish bloke.’
Archie clapped him on the back, saying what a ram he was. ‘I’d like to meet her sometime.’
‘Fuck off!’ Bert said. ‘If you did you’d only tek her away from me. I’m keeping her to myself.’
‘No, not me, Bert. I’d never tek my mate’s girl. I don’t need to do that.’
He returned the thump on the back. ‘I know you don’t. I was only jokin’. Look, yer float’s bobbin up and down.’
Three weeks after their first session of love Cecilia told him, with much regret, that her parents would be back next day. Herbert wasn’t worried. They had fucked as much in that time as if they had been married for six months, and a rest before he melted away would be no bad thing. They smoked the usual cigarette over a mug of coffee in the kitchen after their couple of hours upstairs. ‘We’ll go on seeing each other, though?’
‘Whenever we can. You make me know who I am,’ she said, ‘and I love you for it.’
His high opinion of her changed from that moment, to something of what it had been before their bonus of a honeymoon, because he couldn’t think much of a woman who didn’t know who she was every minute of the day and night, and who put the responsibility of defining herself on to someone like him. She had a year or two’s advantage in age, so such a statement made her seem almost childish. On the other hand he knew that his juvenile denigration had to be set against the intensity and delight of a passion never to be obtained from such as Eileen, a sort who knew herself to the core and would spit in anybody’s face if they tried to tell her who she was. She also never wanted to try any position except the hydraulic up and down.
Maybe Cecilia was flattering him, and knew very well who she was, and if so that was even less tenable. She was secretly smiling because he was younger and, rarely being capable of deciding which of these states she was in, hinted that even he did not know who he was. She wasn’t to know that the only time he did was while sitting in his room to write, and he saw no reason to tell her.
Nor was that entirely the case, for in his dark thoughts he knew to the marrow and back again who he was, certainly in a more complicated way than anything she could mean. He was two people instead of one, and knew them both intimately, even if only because they were so widely separated and he could see them from every angle. You couldn’t be more deeply aware of yourself than that.
The advantage of such thoughts was that before knowing what part of the town he strode through he was almost home, having hardly noticed his part in the real world at all.
The word love came up all too often in their encounters, especially after they had been together in his room, which she liked even less than the district roundabout. She sat on the bed fixing her suspenders. ‘Where do you think all this is going to lead?’
His mood hardened. Not another discussion about that. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, are we just going to go on like this forever?’
He opened the curtains and looked out over the dismal backs, not a good sight for his morale. ‘What would you like us to do?’
‘If you don’t know, how can I?’
She was proposing to him, but wouldn’t come right out with it. He put on his jacket, fastened the top button. ‘I like things as they are.’
‘Oh, like, like, like,’ she cried out. ‘I don’t care what you like. That’s not what I mean.’
He passed the ever clean handkerchief from his lapel pocket, in case tears were close. ‘I love you so much I want it to go on like this forever.’
‘Well, I don’t know.’ She sniffed into his linen. ‘I don’t, I really don’t.’ And threw the handkerchief on the bed. ‘You can see me home now.’
Her kisses were just as passionate at the gate, and he was more than in the mood to match them. Quarrels were meaningless when they were finished. Let things go on forever, until for some reason they stopped. Marriage to her or anyone would be a loss of freedom, and as serious as suicide.
They said they loved each other, genuine sentiments on either side, though at times he thought guiltily that they couldn’t altogether be so on his, otherwise he would indeed have known there was somewhere to go from where they were now. To latch himself on to her style of life would mean climbing the ladder to where he came from, which was unthinkable. Maybe their love in bed was only so satisfying because they disagreed on almost every issue, the one pleasure that stopped them running a mile from each other.
Having written down his thoughts on the matter, and put the papers into a folder for possible use in the future, he yawned and got into bed.
Fifteen
Herbert was happy to see steam coiling from the chimney of Wilford pit, and hear the jangle of laden coal trucks in the shunting yards. ‘Work, you bastards, work!’ he made Bert shout. ‘Flat out, day and night! Work! Keep at it!’ – then pulled him to rein but not before he had pictured a cartwheel, and a maniacal laugh with a thumb at his nose.
He passed through the area to reach his favourite strolling ground by the sluggish but insidious Trent, under towers of humming transmission lines, where surveyors were checking levels and mapping the alluvium to make roads and lay out factories.
The city spread its buildings for people to en
joy, better dwelling places than those on the crummy acres of the Meadows where Archie lived. The new estate across the river caused arguments when Cecilia said what a shame it was there’d soon be no countryside left. Her complaint reminded Herbert of tedious belly-aching books by D. H. Lawrence and others, who wanted people to live in cottages without bathrooms but with the Greenwood Tree at hand to dance around at the weekend; while at night they would read those same writers’ books by oil and candlelight. He erased the picture, and walked more quickly, glad when he was beyond all sight of the city.
A notebook on his knee, he sat by the weir at Beeston, green water sliding over the lip as smooth as paint. In the warm sun, when the breeze slackened, smoke from his cigarette kept off the midges. Instead of stories and sketches he thought he would use his experience of the last seven years and write a novel. People on the street and at work, and his digs, led intense and unique lives. They did everywhere, but few seemed to realize that they did here as well. Everyone he knew thought themselves the centre of the world, as far as they were concerned. Burdened in the morning with fatigue, headaches and unresolved dreams on their way to the factory, they were quick to be offended if anything unexpected was put in the way of routine, not wanting to work but knowing they must to earn a living. Only when fully awake in the middle of the day, and aware that all they had to do was endure until evening, could they afford to be cheerful. They slogged home at half past five, as if having stood so long at a machine had solidified legs and feet into lead. Yet when a sluice of water had gone over chest and face, and they’d eaten a tea of the cheapest food, the daze cleared from before their eyes, and what seemed like the length of another day opened for them to do what they liked in. Eight hours of sweat had been traded for eight hours of freedom, and everyone was different in the use they put it to. Likewise with Bert, who Herbert at times knew better than himself. The permutations of stories from such existences were endless, and even incidents out of his imagination could be described in sufficient detail to seem credible. He mulled until clouds darkened over the eddying water, giving reason to hurry home and make a beginning.