If ever she was to leave she would choose her own time. ‘No.’
His tone was half between a wheedle and a demand: ‘Go on. Come on. Why not?’ – she’d heard it all before. ‘My wife won’t mind. We do a bit o’ swapping now and again. I swap her, she swaps me. It don’t mean much, as long as we’re happy. In fact it keeps us together, doing a bit of swapping now and again. We’re in the Aspley Swap Club.’
She wouldn’t be surprised. ‘There isn’t an Aspley Swap Club.’
‘I know,’ he admitted, ‘but there ought to be.’
She laughed, then was horrified at talking to him at all. If he came out of the car she would swing her handbag with the Bible inside. ‘I’ve said no, so get going.’
He was disappointed, but his smile was fixed. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’
She waved as he drove away. He waved back. No harm in trying, he must have thought. When the moment came it would not be with another man. That sort of escapade would mean even less freedom. She couldn’t understand the disturbance of a trivial lie to George, and forgot her sore heel as she went over the hill towards the city centre, reflecting that some day she might indeed go away to live on her own in a place too far off for him to come and find her.
The preacher she had hoped to hear was gone. The circuit might not bring him back for another year, in which time who knew where she would be? Perhaps it was for the best. Every month a different speaker came with text and message. ‘Grief,’ she heard, ‘is heavier than the sands of the sea, therefore my words are swallowed up. The things that my soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat.’
Her thoughts became settled, in that she seemed for a time to have fewer of them, but she was comforted, and grateful to live secure in her own mind. The weekly hour of peace strengthened her, verse and exhortation soothing the turbulence of her false life.
She walked through the pedestrian area on her way to the bus stop.
‘I didn’t think it could be you, coming out of that place,’ Bert said, ‘but by God it was! How are you getting on then, duck?’
He used to be good-looking, but his close and interesting features had developed into the face of a ferocious but all-knowing bird about to peck anyone into the ground who got in its way. ‘You like going to chapel, eh?’
She could sense his silent laughter in the space behind his face. ‘Why not?’
‘Didn’t think you was like that.’
‘I am, when I want to be.’
He glanced at the upper windows of surrounding shops, as if someone might be observing him, or perhaps as if reconnoitring for a way inside, like the old days when he hadn’t been averse to doing a discreet job or two. ‘Looks like it’s going to rain.’
‘It might.’ She glanced at the clouds. More reason to hurry for the bus.
‘I’m just off to the “Salutation” for a couple o’ jars o’ Shippoes. Do you want to come? I’ll buy you a short.’
‘I have to get home. Thank you, though.’
He nudged her. ‘Lots of ’em do, after coming out of chapel. Meks ’em thirsty! It would me, I know that much. I en’t bin in a place like that since I got married, and then it wor a forceput!’
The lie to George had been wasted. She had become a ‘religious maniac’. They had seen it happening years ago. Her sort probably gives pots of money to the chapel. Alf phoned George and asked to borrow ten quid, and laughed out the information on hearing him refuse.
She didn’t go any more, but it wasn’t important, since the only thing she thought was that she would walk out on George, even if it meant leaving Edward as well. It was certainly true that she couldn’t take either of them with her.
16
A woman by the outside steps of the house, wielding a sweeping-brush to clear leaves from a flooded grating, scooped several clutches of mould from the end of the drainpipe and flopped them towards the pavement. ‘That should fix it for a while.’
‘Should,’ Pam said.
She looked up. ‘Are you the person from the top floor?’
Pam stepped aside to see water rushing into the grille. Even her plastic hood and galoshes hadn’t stopped her getting soaked.
‘Yes.’
They walked up the steps, and the woman opened the door for her. ‘You look drowned.’ She hung the brush on a hook by the outside door. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea.’
She was tall and dark, and Pam was going to add ‘handsome’, but wasn’t sure it was the right word. A tail of hair swung down her back, and she wore a woolly black sweater, and rather baggy purple slacks so that you couldn’t tell whether she was broad behind or not. Her heels clattered on worn lino. The large ground-floor room had two single beds along one wall and a wide divan against the other. Pam thought the place must have been furnished off the junk-end of the Portobello Road, or from a War on Want depot. A series of orange-boxes in a recess made a book case of well-kept hardbacks. One or two lamps were fashioned from bottles and weighed down at the base with coloured marbles. The heavy square table was surrounded by odd chairs and a couple of boxes.
She looked at Pam’s face. ‘It may not be up to much as a London residence, but it’s home to me.’
‘It’s fine.’ She didn’t want to become too matey, but on the other hand would not like to seem either stuck-up or daft. She wondered which of the cups she would have to drink from. An electric fire glared reddish-pink from the wall, and a paraffin heater made the room damp rather than warm, producing a steamy atmosphere of uncertain temperature. She opened her coat. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘Six years. I’m Judy Ellerker.’ She poured tea in a cup sufficiently ornate to have come out of Buckingham Palace. Pam had seen her name on the outside door.
‘My name’s Pam – Hargreaves.’
‘Left your husband, then?’ Judy laughed. ‘Sugar?’
None of her business. ‘Please.’
‘I can tell a mile off. You look shell-shocked. Happens to us all. It’s the only hope for the future.’
‘I’m fine,’ she felt bound to say.
‘Why don’t you sit down, then?’ Judy faced her across the table on which was a newspaper, a doll with no head, and a machine-gun. She pushed them aside to make room for cups and elbows. ‘You will feel better, but it’s like when somebody dies: it needs a year to recover. Took me longer, if I remember. You’re lost. Nothing means anything. No references bouncing back at you from somebody you hate more than you love them. Oh, I remember it very well.’
There was less bitterness in her voice than the words suggested, though one or two lines around her mouth showed where plenty had been. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Pam said.
‘I am for myself, and that’s for sure. Fag?’
‘Not just now, thanks.’
‘You got kids?’
She felt too weary to resent being questioned. ‘I’ve left a son of eighteen behind.’
Her neatly trimmed eyebrows lifted. ‘He’s off your hands, then. You’re lucky.’
‘Yes.’
‘Wish mine were. Don’t let your tea get cold.’
She drank.
‘Are you looking after yourself?’
‘Oh yes, very well.’
‘I have no option, with two young kids. That’s what a man would like when you leave him though, that you would just fold up and die. That’d make him feel really good, the bastard.’
‘I shan’t do that.’
‘But they’d like you to. Anyway, men are the most boring objects in the world as far as I’m concerned, so I’m glad I hit the lid when I did. What did the man in your life do?’
Don’t hold back, she told herself. There’s no point any more.
‘Ran a small factory.’
‘Mine was political – very. Active, as they say. Radioactive was more like it. He was in one of those extreme leftwing parties. He was always jabbering on about workers’ rights and the rights of the underprivileged, but when he brought his mates home I was t
he tea-maker and envelope-licker and general tweeny. I once asked why his party was so small, and he said it was because it was only a splinter group, so I said well you had better get the idle lot from under my fingernails because the next time you bring them here they can make their own tea and sandwiches. He said I was a stupid reactionary woman who lacked political sense, because they first had to free the workers, and then it would be the women’s turn. So I said how about letting it be women first for a change? He said we had to work today so as to build the world of tomorrow, so I said I’d be dead by tomorrow, and that if he wanted a little slavey-helpmate he’d better shove off and get one from the Third World with a veil around her face, because I’d had enough. Then he lectured me in the usual baby-language on the realities of the class struggle, and when I thought he would go on for ever I dashed him away with the smoothing-iron and threw his pink shirts out of the window. No more jig-jig, and sleeping with the wet around your arse all night. I didn’t know I was born.’
Pam laughed, and listened. Oh lucky woman, who knew her own mind.
‘But let’s talk about you,’ Judy said. ‘I’ve seen you coming in now and again, and wondered who you were.’
The front door slamming sent a tremor under the floorboards and an eleven-year-old boy ran into the room and threw his schoolbag on a heap of old clothes. He went to the stove and poured a mug of tea, then came to the table. ‘Mum?’
Judy leaned across and lay a hand on Pam’s shoulder. ‘Women often don’t know how hard it was till they’ve been free for a while. How long were you in the M.G.?’
‘M.G.?’
‘Matrimonial Gulag.’
‘Oh, twenty years.’ Pam saw that her face was lined, and yet she was undeniably handsome, with her fine bones, lustrous eyes, and a well-shaped mouth marred only by the sight of two bad teeth when she spoke.
‘Mum?’ the boy demanded.
‘Shut up,’ Judy turned to him, ‘or I’ll cut it off!’
Pam thought it unsociable not to give some confidences in return. ‘I suppose I left because I thought I’d go mad if I didn’t.’
‘There’s nothing else to do when it gets to that stage.’
Then she didn’t want to talk, thinking the subject best left alone when she was with other people. Judy guessed, and decided not to ask, but fetched a loaf from the bread tin and cut two thick slices. ‘Sam, spread this for your tea.’
‘I want you to buy me a cassette,’ he said, defiantly so that she wouldn’t be able to accuse him of whining.
‘The jam’s over there.’ She said to Pam: ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to get a job now?’
She felt more friendly. ‘What do you do?’
The boy sat down to eat, and said between one mouthful and the next: ‘I want a cassette.’
‘You can’t have one, so stop nagging. I’ve worked as bus conductor, traffic warden, checker-out at the supermarket. You name it, I’ve done it. I wanted to be a street-sweeper but the council wouldn’t let me. I suppose they thought I’d go on the game with my tin barrow!’
‘You was a waitress once, don’t forget,’ her son said.
‘I’ve done a bit of everything.’
‘Mum, I want a cassette.’
She leaned over and struck another blow for freedom against his head that would have made someone twice the size stagger.
‘I get National Assistance,’ she said to Pam, ‘and all the other handouts I feel I’m entitled to. Then I do odd jobs like painting and decorating, as well as wallpapering, baby minding, car washing, helping at a stall up the market on Friday, and on Saturday I do the windows of four different flats at five quid each. It’s bloody hot in here. The thing is, love, don’t ever get a full-time job. Find part-time work, because you can change around, and it’s more interesting that way, as long as you don’t let those you sweat for know that you do for anyone else. Get National Assistance, don’t declare your jobs, and never pay tax. You’ve got to beat the system, because if you don’t it’ll beat you, specially when you’re a woman.’
She stood up to take off her sweater, her loose and shapely bosom moving under her shirt. There was a warm and not unpleasant smell of sweat. ‘I don’t get a penny from the father. I don’t mind, because if I did he’d only come sniffing around now and again to put his head between my legs and cry. He’s in the computing business now, and doing quite well after getting over his political tantrums – which I suppose all his sort do sooner or later – going from one grubby-knickered little dolly to another. I said the service of the dead over him years ago.’
The boy finished his tea, rubbed his injured face a couple of times, then sat on the settee and opened a schoolbook. ‘I only said I wanted a cassette.’
‘Get a paper round then, to pay for one,’ she said.
‘I’m too young.’
‘Say you’re twelve.’
The door banged again, and a ten-year-old girl came in, her schoolbag spewing pens and books when aimed at her brother.
‘That’s Hilary,’ Judy said, ‘the other bundle. But at least she’s a girl.’
‘Am I?’ Hilary examined the machine-gun knowingly, unclipped the magazine and set the bullets in ranks on the table, then removed the stock and wondered whether to take the rest of the gun to bits before having her tea. ‘I sometimes wonder.’
Judy stroked her hair, then drew away as if the feeling burned her. ‘You were when you had your bath last night,’ she laughed.
Pam pointed to the gun. ‘Is it real?’
‘It’s a replica,’ Judy said. ‘My husband would spend hours assembling and taking it down, like saying his beads. We lived in a house then, and he used to practise jumping from the back window fully armed. But one day he broke his ankle. He left the gun when I threw him out, and Hilary took it over. She used to watch him playing with it from her cot. I think she thinks it’s him now. I swear to God I heard her call it Daddy the other night. Leave it alone, and get your tea.’ She cut and buttered some bread. ‘I’m going to take that gun into the garden tomorrow and give it a decent burial.’
Dark-haired Hilary smouldered under the deadly insults, but set it down as she was told. ‘No, mummy, please don’t. I like to play with it.’
She turned to Pam. ‘When you think you’re fit for a job, come and tell me. If I hear of anything I’ll let you know. Or whatever else you need, just come and see me, even if you only want to rest your head on my bosom and tell me your troubles. I know how it is. It’s bloody hard for a woman of any age who pulls out of the slave-state. You work like hell for a Lord of Creation because that’s what your mother told you to expect out of life, and you don’t even get any good sex for it. I don’t think I ever had a thrill from a man, unless he did it deliberately before starting in on me, but I can give myself a thrill any time, and get an even better one from my girlfriend. Maybe you can’t always trust a woman, either, but at least you know what to expect.’
Pam stood up. ‘I really think I must be going.’ Her clothes were damp, and she felt herself sweating in the steam.
Judy laughed. ‘Do I shock you?’
She made an effort to smile, and sat down again. Everyone did what they liked, as long as they didn’t bother anyone else. ‘Of course not. Why should you?’
‘I don’t know. But I shan’t try to seduce you. It only comes on me now and again. I don’t do it for scalps, like men. You should see all the notches my husband cut into the butt of that gun. I never knew what they meant till Sam told me, though he was only six. “Daddy cuts that gun with his penknife when he goes with that girl,” he said. I’d been so innocent and trusting. Good job I was, I suppose. One day I threw the hot iron at him, and he left in fear of his handsome features, not to mention his life. I was a Judy he’d never seen. Six months later I was shopping on the Portobello Road and met this prissy little fair-haired woman with glasses who worked in Whitehall. She was a ready-made MoD type, and I carried her shopping home. From that moment I never looked back.’
In spite of her confidences Pam noted the occasional fragility of her expression. Whatever she was, her marks of servitude were undeniable, and no one broke free without wounds. Pam liked her for being so friendly and sympathetic. She certainly knew a great deal about herself. ‘Do you like living in this place?’
‘Why? Want to make an honest woman out of me? I’m always waiting for someone to do it, man or woman, I don’t really mind, as long as it’s under my conditions and not theirs. After all, they’d be getting more from it than I would.’
‘I really must go.’ But it was hard to get up. There was much that was likeable about the place, and the people.
‘Don’t forget, then, any time you want to talk, or watch the telly, just walk in. I let these two look at it for three hours a week. Don’t stew too much by yourself up there. If you get depressed, remember that your big troubles are over. You’ve only got little ones from now on, such as feeding yourself and keeping warm. Come down for a chat with Judy. She’s harmless, really!’
‘Thank you for the tea. I enjoyed it.’
‘Come any time you like. Don’t forget.’
‘I don’t want to intrude.’
‘Fucking lesbians!’ said the boy.
Judy’s large hand clenched and reached out, but she drew back as if thinking he had been knocked silly enough for one day. He didn’t flinch. With such an upbringing, he’ll probably go out and conquer the world, Pam thought.
‘I won’t mind if you do,’ Judy said to her.
If she didn’t move she would be here all night. The miasma of cooking – there was a huge long-handled iron pot on the stove from which a meaty smell emerged – was sending her into a doze. She stood up, but stayed near the door.
‘Phyllida never comes here,’ Judy was saying. ‘She’s got a thing about children, which is understandable, considering these two. So I go there. Makes a change.’
‘She don’t like us,’ said Hilary, stripping the gun for a second time, and setting parts over the table, ‘but she gives us presents.’