Mr Botham moved past Mary towards the door. It was clear from his face that he had nothing on his mind. He walked slowly down the passage. He knew he would get there in time . . . They heard the door open. They heard Mr Botham’s smothered rising shout, and then a double-thud, a thud in two stages, the second somehow more abrupt than the first. There was only time for Mrs Botham to start screaming before the men were in the room.
Mary saw it all.
To his palpable confusion and distress, Jock found himself in the lead. Trev had lingered to do some more loud stomping in the hall. Egged on by time, Jock dashed miserably across the room and started doing one or two things to Mrs Botham. Instantly and galvanically her reinforced foot shot up in hair-trigger self-protection, catching Jock a mighty blow between the legs with its heavy black brick. Jock gasped, clutched himself, and wandered dreamily away before subsiding slowly to his knees. By this time Trev himself stood in the doorway, already past his best, half-winded by all that stomping. But then he saw Mary and lumbered hungrily forward, seeming to have no time for Gavin, who stood up and with a short arc of the arm drove a muscular fist into the lower half of Trev’s face. Trev paused, glanced sideways with a vexed, put-upon expression, before being snatched backwards flailing through the air to land upside down and motionless by the passage doorway. Jock, meanwhile, was on his hands and knees, vomiting (by some last courteous reflex) into the ornamental coal-scuttle. Mrs Botham screamed so much the louder. Gavin rubbed his knuckles, frowning, and stepped over Trev into the passage.
Mary never moved.
She did the next day: she had to—there was no choice. The next day she found herself alone again. Mary always knew a thing like this would happen to her some time.
‘I said if I saw you again there’d be trouble. Didn’t I.’
‘Yes you did,’ said Mary.
‘And now I’m seeing you again.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And there’s trouble.’
‘I know.’
‘How old are you . . . Mary Lamb? Do your parents know what you get up to?’
‘I’m in my twenty-fifth year,’ said Mary carefully. ‘My parents died.’
‘Of what?’
Mary hesitated. ‘One of consumption,’ she said, ‘the other of a broken heart.’
‘People don’t die of those things any more. Well they do, but we call it something else these days . . . What did they die of, Mary—if of course this isn’t too painful?’
But it was. More out of a desire to change the subject than from any real indignation, Mary said, ‘I’m not sure you’re allowed to talk to me like this.’
‘Oh I am, I am. You ought to know that I am.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ve broken the law.’
Mary didn’t know what this meant. Her first instinct, understandable in the circumstances, was to ask if the law would ever get better again. But she said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. What do you get when you break the law?’
‘Time,’ he said.
His room was like his breath; it had that dead, hospitalic tang. There was something extra, something acrid, in its taste, the taste of headaches and wax.
‘I see,’ said Mary.
‘Don’t worry.’
‘Why not?’
‘You haven’t done anything that serious yet, not in the eyes of the law.’
Mary turned away from him. His eyes terrified her: they knew too much. They were a feminine green, narrow and oddly curved at the outside edges. Instead of light they contained only a glint of yellow, a bad yellow, the yellow of urine and fever. Or were these just law’s eyes, she wondered, the eyes of authority and change? He stood up. He was shaped into his clothes with the obedient indifference of a shopwindow dummy. Who had put him together, who had dreamed him, the thin wedge of the nose, the perfectly horizontal mouth, the short but innumerable hair? He took out a white handkerchief and waved it lightly.
‘You’re crying,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry. Thank you,’ said Mary.
‘Listen to me. You’ve started badly. You’re going to have to cut away from that kind of life, that kind of people. You don’t belong there and they’ll just spit you out every time. You’ll need a job. You’ll need a place. Hang on.’ He leaned over his desk and started writing something, very fast. ‘You can stay here for a while. I’ll call them. If you need help you know where I am. My name’s John Prince. I’ll put it here.’ He straightened up. He held Mary’s eye for several seconds. She didn’t think that face could ever look puzzled, but that’s what it looked. She could tell he was trying to place her in his mind.
‘You’re trying to place me, aren’t you,’ she said in fear.
He laughed and said, ‘I’ve got a lot of time for you, Mary.’
Mary and Gavin went back on the Underground. Gavin had made a statement, but didn’t want to talk about it. Mary had never travelled on the Underground before, though she’d used the red buses once or twice with Mrs Botham in the past. Gavin gave her laconic warning, and Mary was grateful. He didn’t want to talk much on the way back and neither did Mary.
When you considered this world—people winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cages and speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking shut everywhere, and arctic winds mingled with dusty gasps of fire from the planet’s core—it was hard to believe how delicate life was, how breakable things were. Things were easy to break; things were terribly delicate. Evidently Mary had broken the law now, just as the night before she had broken Mr Botham’s back. Yes she had—crack, she had broken it for him. It wouldn’t have broken if it hadn’t been for her. Trev would get time for this, but so would Mary in her way. Mr Botham’s condition was ‘most serious’, everyone said. Mary agreed, but she thought it could have been more serious: she could have broken his heart or his nerve, and people died of that. But it was still very serious indeed. Mary had heard from Gavin that Mr Botham was a carpet-layer when he could find work. Well, he wouldn’t be able to find it now; he wouldn’t even be able to look. No one knew if his back would get better again. And he was old, which made it even more serious.
The small house was well aware that things had changed; it didn’t like being looked over at a time like this. The expression it wore was vulnerable and strained. There was no one inside, of course. Mrs Botham was at the hospital day and night, by her husband’s side; she was drinking more heavily now, or more openly anyway. Mary couldn’t stay—really there was nothing to stay with—but she said,
‘Why can’t you and I stay here and hope they come back?’
He looked at her with reluctance—and with scorn. She knew she shouldn’t have said it. ‘Be serious,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford to have you here. We never could. We’re not—there’s no leeway here. Don’t you understand?’
‘I’m sorry.’
He said, ‘Where will you go?’
‘Here.’ She took out the piece of paper she had been given.
‘Christ,’ he said.
‘He said he’d call them. He said it would be all right.’
Gavin looked away. ‘I suppose it’ll be all right for a while,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to like thinking of you in there.’
Together they packed Mary a suitcase; there were some clothes of Sharon’s, and some of Mrs Botham’s that were more or less Mary’s by now. Mary would have liked to take along a book or two, but she didn’t want to risk asking. He told her how to get there on the Underground. He gave her four pounds: it was all he could spare. He embraced her quite tightly at the front door but Mary could tell he was already on the other side; she broke away quickly and hurried down the steps.
Mary didn’t want to go underground again.
She walked. The suitcase was light at first but became steadily heavier as the day closed in. She asked other people the way, holding up the small sheet of paper. They read the address and did what they could. Some were no help; some were so bad at talking tha
t they couldn’t have told her anyway; some found the piece of paper distasteful in itself and moved on without answering. She got there in the end. It didn’t take too long.
On the way she had her first memory. It made her stand still and put the case down and lift her hands to her hair. She heard a child shout and turned round shyly; she was in a quiet street, one marked by an air of prettiness and poverty; its small houses were clubbed together with their doors and windows open, and the staggered gardens displayed the family clothes. She was in a quiet street—but then, nowhere was a quiet place for Mary. She wanted to be somewhere the same size as herself and indolently dark, a place where she could shut out the clamorous present. But Mary stood where she was, her hands on her hair, and remembered.
She remembered how as someone young she had wanted to shine a light through other people’s windows, to see into other people’s houses . . . She was standing on the grey brow of a terraced hill at evening. The spiked gates of the city park have just been shut; the keeper walks back into the distance, glancing sideways and pocketing his keys. The boys have all gone home. They are all safe and having tea in other people’s houses, behind other people’s windows. Turning her head, she could look down the hill and into the square. Here in all their rooms they were shoring up against the darkness. She wanted to see them, to shine a light, to sense the careless ripples of their carpets, the unregarded cracks in their papered walls, the shadows on their stairs. She knew it was impossible—she would never be let inside. She turned and ran wherever she was supposed to go.
Mary dropped her hands to her side. That was all: she could follow herself no further. She looked up. Immediately, the street—the air, the incorrigible present—seemed a little less bright and unanimous to her eyes. She picked up her suitcase and walked on, quicker than before, anxious to find her place. She knew now that she would find it in time.
7 Don’t Break
The young women at the Church-Army Hostel for Young Women have all taken smashes recently. They have all taken big ones. Some have broken. (Some are not so young, either.) They have all gone out too deep in life.
They have all done too many things too many times with too many men, done it this way, that way, with him, with him. They are all inside here because they have all used everything up on the outside—used up money, friends, chances, all their good luck. They have all taken a smash and turned a corner. Some are trying to turn back. Some have stopped trying. They are fallen women.
Their position is shameful, or could be considered so. But shame is not the word for what they feel. That’s fine by me. But what are they supposed to feel instead? Who did this to them? How would you feel?
. . . Have you ever taken a smash in your time? What, a big one? Will you get better again? If you see a smash coming, and you can’t keep out of the way, the important thing is—don’t break. Don’t break! . . . Can you see another smash coming? How big will it be? If you see a smash coming and can’t keep out of the way—don’t break. Because if you do, nothing will ever put you back together again. I’ve taken a big one and I know. Nothing. Ever.
* * *
So now Mary started living by the rules.
She awoke in the basement with her two room-mates at six-thirty sharp, to the sound of a bell. She always woke up in fright, quickly gathering her scattered senses. She got dressed at the same time as Trudy, a shrill-faced, chain-smoking divorcee, and together they joined the queue outside the bathroom while Honey, an apathetic young Swede, was left to linger moaning in bed before rejoining them later for breakfast in the dining-room upstairs, among all the other girls. There they would be stared at with cursory severity by Mrs Pilkington, the Sri Lankan co-superintendent, who ate alone at a table set apart. Her husband, lean Mr Pilkington, the other co-superintendent, would already be thrashing flusteredly through the day’s paperwork in his hot office near the front door. Any trouble and the girls were out. Breakfast cost sixty pence, so Mary just drank her tea.
‘You’ll go blind, you will, girl,’ said Trudy.
‘No blind,’ said Honey, blinking.
‘You will, you know. You can’t leave yourself alone, can you? She can’t. Knowing you, you’ll probably nip down for another one, won’t you, before clear-out. Just a quick one, just in case.’
‘Is good, it says.’
‘What says? All those pussy cookbooks you read?’
‘Is not cookbook. It say is good to touch yourself.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Is good for tension.’
‘What’s so tense about you, brilliant? What have you got tension for. All you do is lie around wanking all day.’
‘I want a job,’ said Mary. ‘How do you get one?’
‘Oh you want a job, do you,’ said Trudy, turning to Mary and nodding slowly. Beneath the table she waggled a crossed leg. ‘I see. Well what’s your calling, Madame? What sort of thing have you done before?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Mary, who often wondered what sort of things she had done before, before she broke her memory.
‘You people . . .’ said Trudy. Trudy disliked Mary’s good looks. She did: Mary could tell. She disliked Mary’s looks because they were better than hers. On her bad looks Trudy blamed all her bad luck. Mary used to watch her staring out of the bedroom window, at nothing at all, with her stretched, smarting face. Mary knew what she was thinking. She was thinking: If I could have just traded in some of my good brains for some good looks. Boy, could I have done with some good looks . . . Mary thought that people were probably quite right to go on complaining in their minds about this sort of thing. But she wasn’t sure. Were things changeable? They had to be. People couldn’t just be wasting their time.
Honey was quite good-looking too, so when she said, ‘I go down now’, and began to move away with her cup and saucer, Trudy called out loudly, ‘Off for another quickie, are you? You’ll get dishmaid’s hand, you will, Honeychile. Dumb split,’ she added to Mary. ‘She’s amazing, that girl. Wanked to a frazzle. I mean, she’s just all wanked out.’
‘I want a job,’ said Mary. ‘I want to make some money.’
‘Hang on, girl,’ said Trudy. She looked at Mary narrowly. ‘Jobs—they take time, you know.’
‘I know they do,’ said Mary.
You had to be out by nine. You couldn’t come back until twelve. Time was slow on the streets when you had no money. Time took for ever. Through diamond-wire Mary watched children playing in the sun. Children gave off noise and motion helplessly all the time. She watched the tublike housewives plod from shop to shop. Housewives accumulated goods grimly until they could hardly walk, martyrs to their carrier-bags. She watched the men idling in loose knots outside the turf accountants’ or on the corners by the closed pubs. Men moved their heads around in the wind and gestured freely, having for the time being nothing that they needed to do. A big dog lay panting in the parched gutter. Ants weaved up from the cracks and over the planes of the uneven pavement. The fat white creatures of the sky loved it on days like this. They were all there. Not one of them had been left behind.
Mary was looking for a job. She didn’t know whether you found them by moving or by staying still. Where were they? Who gave them away? She had all this time to sell, but didn’t know who might want to buy it. She thought about the jobs she had seen other people doing, and the special kinds of time they had to sell. They were all the masters of their conspiratorial skills. The grocer with his lumpy racks, the adroit swivel of his paper bag, the jerking, centipedic apparatus that dealt him money: but he had food to sell (layered like ammunition in a cave), as well as time. The bus-conductor, clambering through the day with his expert handholds, yelling news about his progress, unravelling his costly paper from the machine beside his moneybag: but as well as time he had the bus he shared with the man in front, and the travel they sold. Who paid the roadsweeper for his buckled back, the gladiatorial dustmen with their poles and shields, the policeman and his lucrative swagger? They all got paid by s
omeone. It was only tramps who chose to waste their valuable time . . . When she walked the streets Mary often looked up at the spangled canyons and saw with a sense of glazed exclusion the people up there behind the high windows, all intent about the sky’s business.
Mary had lunch because lunch was what everybody had at that time. In the afternoons you could stay in the common-room so long as you stayed quiet. Girls wrote letters hunched over the table, or knitted things, or sat watching dust move. The day was already getting to them, reducing them to themselves, prying at their emptinesses . . . You could read the books in the cupboard if you put them back. Mary read them all. The girls in the books in the cupboard were taunting parodies of the girls condemned to read them. Will Alexandra marry elderly Lord Brett or the young but unreliable Sir Julian? When Bettina goes to stay at Farnsworth, all the Boyd-Partingtons except Jeremy treat her shabbily until she saves little Oliver from drowning and turns out to be an heiress after all. Lonely lodges, postillions, horses ridden to death, forests, vows, tears, kisses, broken hearts, rowing-boats in the moonlight, happiness ever after. Like many stories, they ended when marriage came; but they couldn’t make you care. They made you sure of something that other books made you only indifferently suspect: that stories were lies, imagined for money, time sold.
Then at evening the girls gathered here and on the stairs and in their rooms. The talk was all about good luck and how they had never been given any. The talk was low. If only I hadn’t, if they just didn’t, if it only would. Some of them had been given babies by men and then had them taken away again by somebody else. They talked all the time about these babies who had passed through their hands, and about how, if they ever got them back or were given another one, they would treat them properly this time and never neglect them or have fights with them again. Some girls kept having fights with their men, and always losing. They bore the marks. Why would a man fight a woman? wondered Mary. He would always win; he wasn’t fighting—he was just doing harm, doing damage. The girls talked about the men they had fought, some with fear and great hatred, some with languor, some with haggard wistfulness for this inconvenient but at least unmistakable form of attention, as if a black eye were a valued emblem among the spoken-for. Some were prostitutes, or were trying to be. Most of them weren’t very good at it, apparently. They were prepared to offer their bodies to men for a certain price; but the men never thought the price was worth it. So they offered their bodies for nothing instead. Mary watched them closely, these adepts of men, acquiescence and time. They talked about the things that money could buy as if money were a game, a trick, a word. Some girls were drunks. They talked about . . . well, Mary already knew what drunks talked about. She knew about drunks. She knew what drunks did.