‘Is true! Admit it, goo on. Here all right darlin, here’s to you. Your good elf.’
‘Yeah cheers,’ said Alan, raising his glass.
‘Tell you what, girl,’ said Russ, ‘you really livened the place up, you have. Strew. The one we had before was a right dog. A right old poodle.’
‘No,’ said Alan, ‘strew. That’s right.’
‘No,’ said Russ, ‘you have.’
‘No,’ said Alan, ‘this is it.’
‘I’ll tell you what and all. The voice on her. She talks like a fuckin princess, she does.’
‘Strew. Like a fuckin duchess, mate.’
‘Like a fuckin empress mate! She does. I could listen to her all day and all night. Here’s to you Mary! Your good elf!’
You see? she wanted to say. I’m good—I am.
Mary looked round the public house. Though only mildly furious in its pattern of exchange, the room was as crowded and cacophonous as the place she remembered from her second day—when she had been with Sharon, and with Jock and Trev. But how much less loud and various things seemed to her now. Oh, it was still interesting all right, interesting, interesting: did you see the way that woman looked up from her evening paper and towards the stained window with a ragged gasp, or the way that man tried to suppress a beam of love at his patient dog, lying under the table with its nose on its paws? Yes, but it’s not enough to fill my thoughts, even here with friends, spending money earned from time sold. She thought, I’m becoming like other people. I’m getting fear and letting the present dim.
* * *
But it had to happen, Mary.
Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I’m too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
Don’t eat fear soup. Send it back.
Some people have fear but some have confidence instead. Which do you have? You’re not confident, I know that. I know that, because actually no one has confidence. The most confident men and women you know—they haven’t got confidence. No one has. Everyone has fear instead. (Unless they have that third thing, which men call madness.)
They fear they are a secret which other people will one day discover. They fear they are a joke which other people will one day see, which other people will one day get.
Do you know, for instance, what little Alan is afraid of now? He is afraid that Russ and Mary will shortly go off together somewhere for a protracted session of hysterical sex. He is. He can see Mary unfurling her immaculate white panties, glancing shyly over her shoulder, while the mightily hung Russ lolls smiling on the bed. And Alan can see himself, Alan, watching the whole spectacle from some abstract vantage, silent, unblinking, and perfectly bald, like a being from the future. Russ, on the other hand, is afraid that Alan will tell Mary, or that Mary will inadvertently discover, that he, Russ, can neither read nor write. (Russ has a further heroic foible: he refuses to believe that he has an unusually small penis. He is wrong about this; he ought to stop refusing to believe it; he does in fact have an unusually small one.) Whereas Mary is afraid of the address in her bag. She is afraid of Prince and what he knows. She is afraid that her life has in some crucial sense already run its course, that the life she moves through now is nothing more than another life’s reflection, its mirror, its shadow. Everything she sees has an edge on it, like prisms in petrol, like faces in fire, like other people hurrying through changing light—visions that we sense ought to reveal something, or will soon reveal something, or have already revealed something that we have missed and will never see again.
* * *
‘Time,’ said the man behind the bar, ‘time, gentlemen, please.’
Alan sprang up guiltily, barking his kneecap on the table and toppling an empty glass. As it fell, Russ tried to catch it, but only slapped the glass still faster to the floor. It didn’t smash or break. It rose up to live again on the wet tabletop.
‘Here, let’s uh—we’ll walk you home,’ said Alan quickly.
‘Yeah, where d’you live?’ said Russ.
‘Near here. With some girls,’ said Mary.
‘I’m not coming,’ said Russ. ‘I can’t risk it.’
But Russ risked it. They all did. They all walked through the shouts and shadows of the night. For every slammed car door a light went out. This was the week ending with a nervous sigh, and getting ready to start all over again.
‘You’ll have a word with them, won’t you, on my behalf,’ said Russ. ‘Explain and that.’
‘If you like,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t think you’ll see them. You can’t come in.’
‘It’s one of those places, is it?’ said Alan. ‘Landlady on the stairs, no radios, no cats.’
‘And no film stars,’ said Russ. ‘That’s the big itch.’
‘It’s not really like that,’ said Mary.
They came to Mary’s place. Two girls were sitting smoking on the steps. The girls gazed out blankly for a few seconds, then went on talking. Mary could read the smoke coming in thin wafts from their mouths. They weren’t talking about anything much. Through the open door you could see the old green passage, and the notice-board breathing softly.
Alan swung his head round at her. ‘You don’t live there, do you Mary?’ he said in a stretched, pleading voice.
‘Yes,’ said Mary, ‘I do, I’m afraid.’
‘How’d you end up here, girl,’ said Russ.
‘There was nowhere else.’
‘Can’t have this,’ said Russ gravely.
‘What happened to you?’ said Alan, with his beseeching eyes. ‘I mean—haven’t you got any family or anything?’
Mary couldn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say any more. Now Mrs Pilkington loomed in the doorway, the ring of keys in her hand. The girls stood up and flicked their cigarettes into the air, then turned with their heads bowed. Mary moved forward. There was nothing to say. On the steps she turned and waved. The boys looked on, their hands in their pockets, then they too turned and started off down the long defile of the street.
‘This is you,’ said the driver.
And what have you done in your life, thought Mary, as she lowered herself from the hungry red bus. The driver watched her, breathing through his mouth. He was big and fat and red like the bus he drove. She returned his stare, or she let it bounce back off her, as if she were no more than the mirror of his gaze. Obediently the red bus lay there, breathing through its mouth, panting to be off again. The door slid shut, and with a snorting shudder they rode away.
Mary started walking. Grey, bookish, moss-scrawled houses with many windows stood stoically back from the road, beyond shallow stretches of grass where water-machines washed the transient rainbows of the air. In the treacly shadows beneath the garden walls confetti butterflies and corpulent bees flew in their haze . . . All this Mary saw in the Sunday morning light. There was a time when she would have let her senses out to play in the voluptuous present, but now her mind was hot and ragged. She had lost the knack of choosing what she wanted to think about; it seemed she could no longer call her thoughts her own.
Clearing her throat, straightening her shirt, needlessly clicking her handbag, Mary asked other people the way. There weren’t many of them about—men carrying bales of newspapers, women pushing prams, children, the old—but asking the way was a sound method of getting to other places. It always worked in time.
She had found the street and was counting numbers, missing a beat, missing a beat, when she halted and lifted a hand to her mouth, and another memory came her way . . . Not now, not now, she thought, and remembered how as someone young she had had to leave her own room and enter a different room containing other people. She was putting on a pink dress, a dress her skin loved. Its pink was not the pastel that little girls ought to wear; it contained tenderness but also blood, the colour of gums and the most intimate flesh. She lifted
the dress and blinked as its shadow slipped past her eyes. She smoothed the material out along her hips as if it were the same colour and texture as her soul. She glanced swiftly round her room—her room, which again was no more than a setting for her self—then opened the door and moved down the passage to that other door with its voices and its eyes.
Will it open? thought Mary, stalled on the silent street, her hands on her hair. Well, now I’ll find out.
11 Whose Baby?
The door opened. It revealed a woman in black.
Mary tried to begin but couldn’t.
‘Why, Baby,’ said the woman, with worry or concern in her voice.
Mary’s teeth shivered. ‘Baby?’ she said.
The woman leaned forward, her eyes flickering in simple puzzlement. ‘Oh I do beg your pardon. Goodness!’ She stepped back with a hand on her heart. ‘Don’t take any notice of me. Can I help you, dear?’ she added matter-of-factly.
‘Oh I see. I’m sorry, I’m . . .’
‘I say, are you all right, dear? You look quite . . . take my . . . George!’
Five minutes later Mary sat drinking a cup of tea in the sun-washed kitchen. Like the woman in black, Mary held her cup with both hands. She thought, I’m a girl, so I drink hot drinks with both hands. Girls always do that for some reason. Why? George uses only one. Men use only one hand, although their hands aren’t nearly so steady as ours. Perhaps girls’ hands are just colder hands. The kitchen, the passage, the house, meant nothing to her, nothing.
‘It must be the heat,’ said the woman in black. ‘And I probably gave you a turn. I thought she was Baby, George. I could have sworn for a moment she was Baby come to see us. Don’t you think she looks like Baby, George?’
‘Not really,’ said George.
‘I’m sorry—whose baby?’ said Mary.
‘Baby’s the youngest. She’s called Lucinda really, but we always called her Baby. I’m sorry, what did you say your name was, dear?’ she asked in her other, more neutral voice.
‘Mary Lamb. I came here to ask about Amy Hide.’
The effect of the name was immediate—what a strong name, Mary thought with a wince, oh what a powerful name. The woman in black stared at her shrilly in surprised anger, and George turned away, seeming to give in the middle, his head ducking slightly on his neck. Mary sometimes had the same reflex when she thought about what she had done to Mr Botham.
‘Well the least said about her the better,’ said the woman with finality. George grunted in agreement, and reached for his pipe.
Mary said quickly, as she had half-planned to say, ‘I’m sorry. I knew her a long time ago, before she . . . I know it’s very sad, what happened.’
The woman then did something that Mary had only ever read about. She gave a bitter laugh. So that’s what a bitter laugh is, Mary thought. It wasn’t a laugh at all, she realized: it was just a noise people made to conjure a unanimity of dislike.
‘Sad?’ she said. ‘It isn’t sad. Nothing about that girl was sad.’
Mary was desolated. She said, ‘Well it’s sad for me.’
‘Oh I’m sorry—of course it is, dear. Are you feeling better now? Have another cup, dear,’ she said, standing up and reaching for the pot.
‘No thank you,’ said Mary.
‘No, it’s just when I think of the pain she caused her poor parents. I swear her mother died of a broken heart over that girl. Ooh, I could . . .’
‘Marge,’ said George.
Marge sat down suddenly She lifted both hands to her forehead, the fingertips spread along the pierced tender lines of the brow. Mary was appalled to see brilliantly clear and icy tears jump on to her cheeks.
‘Marge,’ said George.
‘I—I’m sorry, I’ll be myself again in a minute.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary. Everyone was so sorry.
‘Isn’t it funny? She can still do this to us even now.’
Mary began crying too. She could feel the tears tiptoe down her face but she couldn’t reach up and wipe them away.
‘Oh Lord, you’ve started too.’
George ambled to the sink, returning with a large scroll of paper. He tore off sections and handed them out. He kept one for himself, into which he explosively blew his nose. Then, as if it were the natural thing, the three of them laughed softly, with weariness and relief.
Mary said, ‘One more thing. I’m sorry, I’m very sorry. I really never meant to cause you pain . . . Can I see her room, Amy’s room? It would mean a great deal to me.’
Or it might, she thought. It might.
They moved in file down the first-floor passage. If Mary had had time, she would have wondered why people needed so much space and so many things to put in it. There was so much space in between things. But she was numb, she was raw, she just wanted the next thing to happen quickly.
‘Here we are,’ said Marge.
Mary felt another gust of heat in her head. Marge hesitated, and George came up close behind Mary, bringing the smell of earth and the sound of his slow breath.
‘Of course it’s all changed,’ said Marge, her hand idling on the white doorknob. ‘She hasn’t, Amy’s not been back here for, let me see, ooh it must be eight or nine years. It’s a visitors’ room now. But some of it is still the same.’
The door opened, let them in, and closed again.
The room looked Mary up and down. It was a normal room and it looked Mary up and down with intense suspicion. The white-clothed table basking in front of the window held her gaze for a few seconds, then glanced downwards and became itself again. The thin bed cowered in the corner, with its head covered in cushions. On the four walls the romping sprites and goblins of the paper pattern must have once provided food for tenacious nightmares but they held no message for her now. The elderly, slow-ticking clock on the dressing-table would not show its face and had turned its back on her in disdain, as if its arms were folded and its foot tapping with impatience. Mary caught her own eye in the mirror, and the mirror told her plainly that it did not know whether she belonged here, and that, besides, whatever soul the room once held had disappeared or died a long time ago.
‘What’s that?’ said Mary to hide her panic.
Splayed photographs in steel wallets lined the mantelpiece. Mary and Marge approached and ran their gaze together along the shelf. There were people in scattered groups, waving or beckoning. There was a dog standing in a bar of sunlight, panting happily, perhaps hoping that the camera might turn out to be food. There was one of George and Marge themselves, cheek to cheek and looking pretty well stuck with each other. There was a larger and less formal study of a man, a woman and a young girl, standing in a field against a warlike sky. The man was tall and angular with starry grey hair, his narrow face half-averted in a forgetful smile; the woman—lean and dark, old but still a woman, still with the feminine light in the points of her face—reached up a hand to his shoulder, her face full of gentle insistence; and between them, encircled by their lines, stood the young girl.
‘That’s Baby,’ said Marge. ‘Years ago, of course.’
‘Yes, and who are they?’
‘That’s the Professor,’ she said with a warm gulp, ‘and Mrs Hide.’
Mary turned to her and said, ‘Aren’t you Mrs Hide?’
‘What? Good Lord no dear! Goodness me. We just, you know, we’re just keeping house while the Professor’s away.’
‘Oh I see.’
‘Mrs Hide . . .’ Her face stiffened. She placed a hand on the black bosom of her dress. ‘I’m not wearing black for Amy, you know,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry.’ So she did break her heart, thought Mary. Amy did break it.
Marge looked back towards the shelf. The last photograph contained a smartly posed young man, his chin on his knuckles, gazing out at them with patient, serious eyes.
‘That’s Michael,’ said Marge huskily. ‘He’s famous now of course. He phoned the Professor, you know, when he heard. Such a thoughtful boy.’ Her eyes sl
ipped away. ‘None of Amy,’ she added quietly.
Mary spent the rest of this day of heat sitting on a bench in the nearby park, watching the families play. They spread blankets, and hunched down on them in clumps. The whirring children cried and complained, spilt things and ran away. Most of them got beaten at some point or another, often hard and nastily. Their tall keepers were often quite unpleasant to each other too, or just frazzled by heat and dislike. In fact there were several families in which no one seemed to have any time whatever for anyone else, no time at all, just no time. But at the pall of the day when the light was used up the families always went home together, usually in pairs, the big holding hands with the small, and the old, too, edging along behind.
The next day when she went back to work it seemed that everything had changed.
Even the flies shunned her—even the flies had found her out.
Russ worked grimly behind his counter. As he handed her the plates he declined to meet her eye. It was difficult that way. Mary dropped one—a writhing egg flapping helplessly in a tempest of tomato blood and chipped plate. As she was clearing it up she glimpsed Russ’s reflection in the glass panel—a vindictive grin splitting his fat-nosed face. Even Alan had greeted her coolly. She no longer felt him gently beaming her with his eyes, and when she turned to him nervously he was always looking the other way, seeming to snigger in silence at her and her losses. I can’t bear it, thought Mary. It’s unbearable. What do you do when you can’t bear something like this?
At mid-morning Mary still trembled alone over the dishes in the smoked and yellowed kitchen. Her mind, too, churned and splashed in the villainous water. Why did they hate her? She thought it must be the Hostel. Was it so bad to be there? Did that part of you seep into all the other parts? Or was it the books! When she returned to the Hostel the night before she found that Mrs Pilkington had confiscated four of the boys’ books, without explanation. Two remained: Britt and Management: An Introduction. Mary did not know how serious this was or what she was going to do about it. Then she had a thought that made her whole body fuss with heat. Was it out? Did everybody know about her now? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she chanted to herself, and worked on. The flies still circled her, in widening arcs of anxiety. Oh, how vile you must be now, she thought. How vile you must be, when even the flies shun you.