Every Day Is Mother's Day

CHAPTER 2

“Isabel,” Colin said. “Isabel.”

“Don’t slobber, Colin.”

“You are unkind.”

“Oh?”

“You are vastly too good, Isabel. You make it plain.”

“Yes.” Isabel wound down the window of the car. A dank semi-rural darkness entered. She lit a cigarette.

“Colin, why do you always lock the doors?”

Heaving and sighing.

“The car doors, Colin, why do you insist on locking your passengers in? Oh, come on, Colin. A bit of coherent conversation.”

“The A6 murder,” Colin said.

“What?”

“This. Murder. Similar. Circumstances. Night, a field, or a tract of, I don’t remember, some open ground, I suppose, by the side of the road. Hanratty. Before your time.”

“Oh, Colin.” She put out a narrow cold hand to find his face. “Colin, you are a worrier.”

“Personally, I think the conviction was unjust,” Colin said. “I’m against capital punishment. The truth is, Isabel, now forgive me, it’s rather maudlin I know, but the truth is Isabel, I’m against death. Death in any form.”

She sighed, in the damp darkness of the passenger seat.

“Sylvia,” he said. “Sylvia is forbidding me eggs. My arteries. She read these things. Aagh.” He let out a long breath, releasing his tie further with one hand. He heaved across to her, wet and sweating. “Do you know, sometimes I feel very much like suicide. But I had a good idea the other week. I thought I would buy myself a record of the Marches of Sousa. And if I felt really tempted to suicide, I would play it. You wouldn’t kill yourself after that—after you’d marched about a bit. It would be too ridiculous. Isabel, Isabel.” He pressed his face into her neck. It was a source of constant amazement to him that she did not pull away; not every time.

This is October. Isabel is just a name on a letter, received by someone else.

This is Colin off to his evening class. Sylvia is clattering the dishes together in the sink, slamming them with dangerous force onto the stainless-steel draining board. It is clear that she thinks Creative Writing a waste of time. Early evening bouts of violence echo from the lounge; the air hangs heavy and blue with gunsmoke, the children squat before the TV set, their mouths ajar.

“You see nothing of them,” Sylvia says. (This conversation has been held before.)

Colin reverses himself and strides back into the room, swerving to avoid cracking his shins on the coffee table. Blocking the TV he treads the carpet before his offspring like a Lippizan stallion; but not very like.

“They,” he reports, “see nothing of me.”

“What?”

“I wafted in there and stood in front of the television. They didn’t address me by name. They saw me merely as an obstruction to their view.”

“Waft?” Sylvia says. “You couldn’t waft. Never in a million years could you waft.”

“They’re in a state of advanced hypnosis. Deep Trance. Tell me,” he says, “why couldn’t I have gifted children? It would have been an interest for me. Why can’t they all be little Mozarts?”

“We haven’t got a piano,” Sylvia says.

“I’m away.” Going out, Colin stuffs his notebook into his pocket.

In the hall mirror he glimpses his own face, weakly handsome, frowning, abstracted. He loosens the knot of his tie. Despite what Florence said about him aging, he looks years younger than his wife. He tries the effect of a boyish lopsided grin. It reminds him of something; his father’s hemiplegia perhaps. He erases it from his face and departs, banging the door behind him.

There were some eighteen people in the classroom, rather more female than male, rather more old than young. Teacher was rubbing the leftover algebra off the board, a plump lady in a cardigan, and chalking up the words WRITING FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT. Excuse me, said Colin, stumbling through the desks and finding himself a seat to overflow. He looked around for Zelda Fitzgerald. She wasn’t there.

“Perhaps if we all introduced ourselves,” Mrs. Wells said. “Perhaps if we all say a few words about the sort of writing we want to do. How we see ourselves.”

How we see ourselves, Colin thought in querulous alarm, how we see ourselves? I am a history teacher, a teacher of the benighted past to the benighted present, ill-recompensed for what I suffer and despairing of promotion. My feet are size eight and a half, and I belong to the generation of Angry Young Men, though I was never angry until it was too late, oh, very late, and even now I am only mildly irritated. I am not a vegetarian and contribute to no charities, on principle; I loathe beetroot, and the sexual revolution has passed me by. My taste in clothes is conservative but I get holes in my pockets and my small change falls through; I do not speak to my wife about this because she is an excellent mother and I am intimidated by her, also appalled by the paltry nature of this complaint or what might be construed by her as a complaint. The sort of writing I want to do is the sort that will force me to become a tax-exile.

He looked across the room and saw a woman, directly opposite him in the semi-circle into which they had lumbered the desks. He wondered why he had not looked up before. Habit, he told himself. Habit ends here.

“My name is Isabel Field,” she said. “No, I have never tried to sell any work. I am not interested in writing commercially, I am interested in increasing my clarity of expression. I am a social worker.”

You are twenty-four or twenty-five, Colin thought, self-contained, reserved, sardonic. What struck him was that she had not hesitated; when she closed her mouth you knew she was not going to open it again until a fresh topic was raised. Her voice was accentless, or almost so. She had the fractured face of a Modigliani, clever yet obtuse; the long darting almond eyes and long supple neck. Her neat competent legs crossed when she sat down, crossed at the ankle and tucked under her chair. Her hands were long and lean, strong and beautiful, like the hands of the Lady with an Ermine.

The lady next to her said she was Mrs. Higginbottom, would they please call her Sheila, and that she wanted to write for women’s magazines. Now that is a difficult market, said Mrs. Wells with extreme vigour, a very difficult market indeed. The Reader’s Digest, a man said, those anecdotes, you know, page-fillers, Humour in Uniform, I could do a lot of those, because a lot of funny things happened to me while I was in the army. Mrs. Wells seemed enthused. He was a man whose ears stuck out. Colin looked back at Isabel Field. He felt suddenly like a refugee, the past a memory of blazing ruins; the future, the long grey road and transit camp of the displaced heart.

Unanchored, Evelyn’s mind moves backwards and forwards over the years. In the 1950s Muriel inhabited her body as though it were a machine. She had a powerful urge to bite, to tear with her teeth. For this reason, she kept her mouth covered with her hand, and swallowed her food without chewing. Reasoning that her teeth were seldom used, Evelyn did not try to take her to the dentist.

The first years were spent in cleaning Muriel, in reconciling herself to her existence. Evelyn wanted to be alone in the house; the house filled up, more than she had dreaded. After some time, Muriel began to appear sufficiently normal to be sent to school, but Evelyn was well aware that she was concealing her true nature. She spoke now more like other people, though she was still both clipped and sententious. At first she had said, “Mother, Mother,” and Evelyn thought it was “Murder” she had called out in the dark.

1950: a neighbour buys Muriel a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas, and she works it without fumbling on the parlour floor, blank side up. 1960: Muriel flings back at her statements once heard, a song from the radio, taunting her with the empty echo of her own speech. At the same time, the spare room becomes tenanted; the same mockery greets her on the stairs. Muriel has a passion for giving objects the wrong name, even when she knows the right one; it is a technique of bafflement she is practising. She glances only surreptitiously around her, moving her eyes, never her head; she can see, for self-preservation she must see, but she is not sure that she is supposed to look. Once she watched in wonder Evelyn’s ritual with the milk-money. Now she has learned that coins pay for desires. She wonders about the changing face of the clock. Is it related to the lines on her mother’s face, her increasing deafness and feebleness, the accumulation of dust upon their lives? Is it possible that every year is not the same, not just the same? Hurry, hurry, Evelyn always says: or you will not be on time…Yesterday, she says, today, tomorrow. Without causality there is no time, and there is no causality in Muriel’s head. Evelyn’s speech is just a noise, like the clatter of dustbin lids or the crack of bone, the incessant drip of the guttering. Events have no order, no structure, no purpose. Things happen because they must, because they can. Each moment belongs in infinity, each infinity cherishes its neighbour like turtle-doves on a bough. Muriel’s heart is a mathematical place, a singularity from which, in time, everything will issue.

Mrs. Wells had a flute-like voice; it would have been suitable for opening Parliament, and it seemed a pity that she would never get the opportunity.

“Rejection after rejection,” she was saying, “until finally—” and she would go on to read her class the story of the wealth and acclaim that had come to some struggling author overnight. But they were not much encouraged, for it was always some American of whom they had never heard, with a wildly improbable name. Colin had long ago ceased listening. Classrooms do not smell like classrooms any more, he thought, where is the scent of dried ink and bullying, where is my childhood?

“I also write fairy stories,” said the man whose ears stuck out. Mrs. Wells stared at him glassily, at a loss.

And Autumn does not smell like Autumn, Colin thought; where is the woodsmoke and the russet apples packed in barrels, and what are russet apples anyway, a breed or only a colour? Where are the swallows twittering on the wires? What will the swallows do when we all communicate by telepathy? I have only seen one, this year, and it did not make a summer.

I will never be a writer, he thought, I will never learn it, just as last year I did not learn Russian, I will never do it, my mind runs to clichés like abandoned plots to seed.

“You have to give people what they recognise and understand,” Mrs. Wells was saying sweetly.

Autumn is only the wet lamplight on the black wet road, soup out of Sylvia’s packets, a splutter and a cough from the car engine at eight in the morning; kids whining and defaulting dragged by their scruffs from September through to Advent, transistor blah-blah, only two thousand shopping days to Christmas, blah-blah, God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.

“Mushrooms,” said Mrs. Moffat with pride. “I have sent an article to The Edible World on the cultivation of mushrooms.”

My vegetable love will grow, thought Colin, vaster than Empires and more slow.

“Do read it to us,” Mrs. Wells shrilled. “Could you, would you, read it to us, and we might help you with helpful hints. But first we must have our little assignment, shall we? ‘An Interesting Experience.’ Mr. Sidney?”

Colin grinned. “I’m sorry, I haven’t done my homework.”

“Oh, now, that’s a pity, Mr. Sidney.”

Her tone was light; if there was genuine grief, she kept it out of her voice. It is commendable, he thought, her restraint. A bare branch tapped and tapped against the window, dice in the evening’s pot.

“I couldn’t think of anything to write about.”

Mrs. Wells was shocked into reproach. “But Mr. Sidney, there’s always something to write about. That’s the whole point.”

“I didn’t think any of my experiences were interesting.”

“But there’s a book in each of us, Mr. Sidney.”

“Is there?” said Colin, engaged by this. “I wonder if people would like to tell us what book there is in them? I should like mine to be Les Liaisons Dangereuses or The Brothers Karamazov, but more likely it is something like Famous Five Join the Circus.”

“I should like mine to be Mansfield Park,” said Isabel, without a smile.

“Now, Mr. Sidney,” Mrs. Wells said, “you know I meant a book of our own, of our very own. We may think that we lead very ordinary lives, but believe me, it’s this very ordinariness that is the stuff of great books of all time. Look at Jane Eyre.”

“I wouldn’t call that ordinary,” Colin said. “Having this madwoman up in the attic, biting people.”

“Stabbing,” Isabel said.

“Stabbing, biting…though come to think of it, it happens all the time in the classes I teach.”

“Well, there you are then,” Mrs. Wells said. “Miss Field, have you got an interesting experience?”

Colin turned in his chair, all attention. The Duke of Norfolk, he thought; not altogether inconsequentially, because it was the name of the pub to which he hoped to take Isabel Field.

The lounge of the public house was heaving with wet raincoats, smelling of damp fake-furs and warming plastic. Electric coals twinkled merrily; above the bar, coloured Christmas lights winked around the calendar, and a notice informed the public that spirits are served in measures of one-sixth of a gill. Colin read it avidly, and the notice which said he didn’t have to be mad to work here but it helped. It was half-past nine, filling up. Colin manoeuvred for a corner table, and read the beermat as he pulled out Isabel’s chair, thinking, nobody pulls out chairs in a pub, what do you think it is, the bloody Dorchester? He was very anxious about the impression he was making.

“It’s the nearest,” he said apologetically, “and it’s quite nice really, you never get any rowdy people.”

“No horse-brasses. Good.”

“Plastic beams are my bête noire. What will you have to drink?”

She hesitated. “Gin.”

“Righto.”

Colin began to push his way to the bar. Singularly failing, as always, to catch the barmaid’s eye, he took time to look back at Isabel. Her eyes were cast down; perhaps she also read beermats. Her fingers were interlaced on the table in front of her in a formal pose, as if she were about to deliver a public statement. Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, Colin thought. This terrible habit of inappropriate quotation. How do you know she has a grief, perhaps she is just waiting for her drink, perhaps she doesn’t like to stare around her. Absolutely the worst you can do, he thought, is to fail. Isolated in his gaze, she gave the effect of a study, monochrome, perhaps the unnoticed frame on the back wall of an exhibition, or one of those grainy smudged photographs of Russian streets, a woman looking indistinctly for a moment into the lens of a strange culture. Her clothes were always beige or charcoal or grey, or a peculiarly soft dead green which he had never seen on anyone else. But then he had never looked.

He set the glass down in front of her, gin and orange.

“Oh, no, no,” she said quickly, “this wasn’t what I meant.”

Colin’s face creased with concern. “I’m sorry, was it gin and tonic you wanted, you didn’t—”

He began to get heavily to his feet. She arrested him with a quick flicking motion of her hand.

“This will be fine.” She picked up the glass and looked down into it, as if it contained a rare fish. “I’ve never had one of these before,” she said.

She sipped the drink very quickly. She’s nervous, he thought, not as collected as she likes to appear, she’s a highly strung young woman.

“You have to ask for what you want,” he said gently, as if instructing a child.

She smiled. “Yes, I know.”

There was a pause.

“Sylvia always—Sylvia is my wife.”

“I didn’t think you were married.”

“No? I don’t look married?”

“You look unkempt.”

“She tries,” Colin said dismally. “I’m just an untidy person. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I brought my wife into the conversation.”

“There was no conversation for you to bring her into,” Isabel said. “There seems to be one now.”

“I suppose now that—well, you won’t want to…”

“What?”

“Have a drink.”

“Because you are married?”

“Yes.”

“Drinking gin is not really the same as committing adultery. Though I daresay it sometimes precedes it. I don’t know. I have no experience.” She took a sip from her glass, her eyes fixed on his face. “Would she mind?”

“I don’t know,” Colin said. He honestly did not. He wracked his brains, but could get no further. It must be very remote from Sylvia’s reckoning, that anyone would agree to have a drink with him. He wanted to say, why are you here, I am not good-looking, I have nothing you could possibly want.

“There’s Mr. Cartwright,” Isabel said. “His ears stick out, don’t they? I hope they’re not all going to come in here. Mr. Cartwright writes fairy stories.”

“What? Oh, yes,” Colin said. “I thought he wrote Humour in Uniform.”

“And fairy stories. Didn’t you listen?”

“No, I never listen.”

“He showed me one last week. I suppose he thought I might be sympathetic.”

Colin looked at her appraisingly. He would not have thought so, himself.

“Do you find it, you know, valuable, this class?” he asked her.

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“It’s not much our sort of thing, is it?”

Then she did see, she did feel, that there was some bond between them; Colin put the back of his hand to his forehead, as if he expected to find it warm. “Then why do you come?” he said.

“I don’t know. Why do you?”

“To get away from Sylvia.” He hunched forward. It had taken such a long time to grasp, such a short time to say. “Last year I took Italian conversation and car maintenance and Poets of the First World War.”

“Ah, yes,” Isabel said.

“You see some connection?”

“No.”

“You sounded as if you saw some connection. As if it were significant.”

“There is no connection. That is what is significant.”

“I am a schoolteacher,” Colin said.

“Ah, then the general information is of use to you.”

“No, not really.” He felt defeated. “I just do it, as I say, I want to get away from my wife.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing. She’s a nice woman.”

“How many children have you got?”

“Three. Suzanne, she’s eight, Alistair’s nearly six, Karen’s three.”

“Are you going to have any more?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“I was watching you,” she said. “In the classroom. Trying to analyse you. You seem so discontented.”

“Do you like analysing people?”

“It passes the time.”

“Is that a main concern of yours?”

“Well, not really,” she said. “It passes itself, without our assistance. It has the knack.”

“I’m in love with you,” Colin said.

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, yes,” he insisted. “Absolutely true. Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“That’s academic,” Isabel said. “This is not first sight.”

“But I have been in love with you, since the first week. Tell me, do you believe in it?”

“I don’t think I believe in love at any sight,” she said grimly.

Colin’s face fell. “That’s a terrible shame. A terrible admission. For a young woman.” He took thought. “Another gin?”

“Please.”

“With tonic?”

“With tonic.”

“Look, you must feel my pulse,” he said. “Go on, feel it. My pulse-rate’s sky-high.”

“I don’t know.” She ignored his hand. “I don’t know anything about pulse-rates.”

“Am I embarrassing you?”

“No.”

“I thought I might be embarrassing you.”

“Do I look embarrassed?”

“No, I must admit, you look quite calm. I had to say all this, I hope you understand why. I couldn’t have lived with it for another week. To tell the truth, I can’t stand seeing you only once a week. Will you meet me some other night?”

“Where?”

He was aghast. “You will?”

She gave him a level stare. “I didn’t say whether I would or not, I said ‘Where?’”

“Wherever you like. I’ll collect you. I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?”

“I’ll write down my address.”

“Have you got a pen?”

“Of course,” she said, “I have a pen.” She took a small pad out of her bag, scribbled her address, and handed him the leaf. He put it in his wallet. His face showed disbelief.

“I live with my father,” she said.

“Do you? I didn’t think…”

“Why not?”

“I imagined you having a flat somewhere. With other girls. You know. To be honest I’m glad. I couldn’t see myself calling at a flat for you. I wouldn’t like to, you know, present myself.”

“You don’t think you’re presentable?”

“What about your mother, is she…?”

“Dead.”

“Sorry. Will you introduce me to your father?”

“I don’t think you’d have much in common. He’s old…he’s retired. He was a bank manager. He has hobbies.”

“Oh yes?”

“Early railways. Numismatics. Military history.”

Colin smiled. “I’ll have to take some more evening classes.”

“I’d rather you didn’t meet.”

“Would he disapprove of you…going out with me?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine what his opinion would be.”

“Aren’t you close?”

“We lead our own lives.”

“Isn’t it a bit dull, living at home?”

“No. It’s not dull.” She leaned forward. “So, Colin, am I right? Are you discontented?”

“Of course I am.”

“And do you think you will ever leave them?”

“Yes, I…” He dropped his eyes, shifted his feet a little under the table. “Yes, I think it quite possible that one day soon I won’t find it possible to go on as I am.”

Colin drained his half-pint. He took out a clean folded handkerchief and dabbed his top lip with it. Already he was making giant strides.

Out in the conservatory. It is not really worthy of the name, just a glass lean-to at the back of the house, but Evelyn calls it the conservatory. There have never been plants in it. Clifford had not been much of a gardener. Get some flagstones down, had been Clifford’s idea. Muriel could not tell flagstones from gravestones. She referred to them as such. Her morbid fancy has by now taken a thorough grip on Evelyn, who often imagines she is walking on the dead.

Out in the conservatory are Clifford’s collections. Newspapers: the local Reporter for all the years they had lived at Buckingham Avenue. There was no topic which had interested him, no local good work or sport or sewerage scheme. He had merely laid them aside in the spare room, week after week. After his death Evelyn had left them for a while, and then, sensing that the room was needed, had dashed them in great bales down the stairs and humped them along the hallway and out through the back door. It is absurd to say, she tells Muriel, that we do not have newspapers. They are all there, with stopped clocks and defunct lightbulbs and a mousetrap, postcards from relatives escaped to Bournemouth, Little Dorrit with the back off, a cakestand, a china duck, a railway timetable from 1954. They yellow and moulder. In a lesser neighbourhood, there would be rats. Perhaps there are.

Muriel often comes to sit here. She thinks it as good and orderly as anywhere in the house. Sometimes she looks inside the decaying cardboard boxes which are piled almost to the roof. There is dust an inch thick in places, spiders’ webs like veils from long-postponed weddings.

Isabel Field, standing on the Axons’ front path, was growing irritable. Why is it, she thought, that I am sure there is someone in there? There was no movement behind the curtains, nothing to hear, and in fact the house had less life about it than most properties standing empty; yet she was sure that someone was there. How many letters? Three or four. What do they do, throw them away or leave them on the mat in the hall? It’s their privilege, she supposes. Most of the mildly handicapped, people like Miss Axon, live in the world with no one pestering them. She has more urgent cases, wretched and worn women keeping house for incontinent parents who have ceased to recognise them; the paranoid and the dangerously deluded and the terminally ill, the children in institutional cots staring without comprehension at the bars. With the very old and the very young, Isabel feels afraid. At the two poles of birth and death, she sniffs unbearable conjectures in the wind. She functions on the middle ground. By temperament and habit of mind, she is unsuited to her work.

I have of course, she thought, a right to be here. It was more with herself than with the Axons she was irritated. She stepped off the path and peered into the bay window of the front room. It was too dark to see very much, just the outline of a fireplace and an old-fashioned dining suite. The high lattice gate to the back was not bolted. It creaked; of course, it would creak. These are two women alone, they do not maintain their property. She stepped through dead leaves, along a blank brick wall. A low sky, a neglected garden; October in melancholy retreat towards November. Sharply she knocked at the side door. It was four in the afternoon. She could see her own breath in the air, and a distant sickle moon. She knocked again; nothing. She felt that someone was watching her, watching with interest; discounted it as absurd. The house was built on a slope, higher at the back than at the front, so that when she tried to peer into the kitchen window it was too high for her, the bottom frame almost level with the top of her head.

There were steps down onto the overgrown lawn. She looked around for something to stand on—a bucket, perhaps. She jumped into the air to try to see into the kitchen, but she caught only a glimpse of a varnished cupboard door with a calendar pinned to it. If anyone is watching, she thought, I must look absurd. She wondered if she could get a grip on the windowsill and pull herself up for long enough to see if there was anyone in the kitchen. No, she thought, I draw the line at gymnastics, I am not trained for it. There must be another door, she thought, going into the kitchen or the hall from this sort of greenhouse. The panes were so filthy that she could hardly see inside. It seemed to be full of rubbish, boxes piled high. Something scurried away from her feet and she jumped aside. It was beginning to drizzle, and she realised suddenly that she had become very cold, and wanted a cup of tea. She pushed up her coat sleeve to look at her watch in the fading light: something past four. She walked back around the side of the house. It was like a place not occupied but still furnished, she thought, where some old person has recently passed away; and the relatives are going to come next weekend with a van, and take away what they call the decent stuff, and sell the good solid wardrobes for a couple of pounds each. There was a clean milkbottle with an envelope inside it. She bent down and touched it; coins jingled. Milk-money. She removed her hand quickly, feeling like a petty thief. She could not grow accustomed to the license her profession gave her to enquire into the lives of other people. To look through their letterboxes, which she now did. It is beyond me, she thought, how anyone learns much by looking through letterboxes. The doormat said WELCOME, in green. There were no letters, no pile of circulars, no bills left to lie by a person broken-hipped or hypothermic. It was early in the year for hypothermia. And the daughter was quite young, wasn’t she, and able-bodied, and reasonably capable? She had enough sense to get help, if anything was really wrong. The note in the milkbottle, left early, suggested people who had gone out and would be away for the evening; as if they might come back late, talkative and giddy, and forget to do it. It seemed an unlikely picture, but she supposed they might have friends, this odd mother and daughter who were familiar to her only from a buff-coloured file. The strangest people have friends, she thought, even me.

On the front path, she hovered again. One day, she thought, I shall always know what to do in these doubtful situations. When I am perfectly wise. When I am thirty years old. The rain began to fall harder. Deciding quickly, she turned and dashed back to the car, splashing the back of her tights. She was just going to miss the rush-hour traffic.

Up at her bedroom window, Florence turned away, to resume the living of her own life.

The new offices were open-plan. It was four-thirty-eight when Isabel got in. The day was winding down. In the old offices, with their brown peeling doors, over-subscribed lavatories, dingy walls, you could shut yourself into the little cubbyhole that was designated to you and rub your hands over your own one-bar fire. They had merits, but they were not pleasant for the clients to visit.

“Tea?” she said unhopefully.

“We’ve had it.”

“Messages?”

“On your desk.”

She walked over the expanse of blue cord carpet. There had been a phone call from the Probation Service. The Housing Aid office reported their failure to find housing for someone. A child with leukaemia would have to go back to hospital. What concerns are these of mine, she thought tiredly. The Education Welfare office had been ringing. And Mr. Sidney. This year social workers had become “generic.” It was a new dispensation, for everybody to know everything about everything: and how to heal it.

“What’s this?” she said to the secretary.

The woman looked up resentfully. “Your messages.”

“This last one—Mr. Sidney. Who is Mr. Sidney?”

“A personal call, that was.”

Oh yes, Isabel thought. Colin. Who’s going to leave home for me. She sat down at her desk and took the evening paper out of her bag. She read of a car-crash and a dog that had drowned. She did not want to go home, did not relish the evening ahead of her. But then she did not look forward, either, to the next working day. There is something radically wrong with my life, she thought, that I have fallen to such vicious amusements; and such stretches of emptiness between them.

It was almost seven when Isabel arrived home. The house was a brick-built bungalow, ten years old, of a solid and uninspired design. The lamps burned at each side of the wrought-iron gates, but Mr. Field had not drawn the curtains. She put the car into the garage, and let herself in at the front door.

There were no lights on in the hall, and before she found the switch she caught her foot against something soft, lying beside the telephone table. She bent down and explored it with one hand. It was a plastic carrier bag, a small one full of laundry. A tablecloth—which had been clean, she thought—a few pairs of socks, one shirt. Token laundry, this. Damp blue powder clung to her fingertips. She flicked it off. Her heart began to beat faster. Anger and fear, she thought, fight, and flight. If only we could ever do either. She tried to calm herself, standing with one hand against the wall. Mr. Field appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Is that you, Bella? You’re very late.”

“Just as well, it seems to me.”

He cringed at her tone.

“Come down here,” she said.

“I’ll make you a cup of tea. Oh Bella, please don’t work yourself up.”

He came down and stood before her, blinking and contrite, a man of seventy.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said.

“Just a nip.”

She kicked out viciously at the bag of laundry. “There’s nothing wrong with the washing machine.”

“Bella, I have to have some life. Your mother left me.”

“The launderette. Why?”

“Meet someone.”

“Anybody in particular?”

“No,” he mumbled. “But you can always find someone at the Washerama.”

Her mouth was dry. She could picture them, loose-mouthed women with bare blue legs, buttons hanging off their coats. It was in the autumn that you noticed them. Had they any homes to go to?

“I suppose you brought her back with you. Do you have to bring them here?”

“It’s too cold for the park. Be human, Bella.”

“Oh, I feel sorry for you, I really do, having to get a bundle of washing together. I suppose otherwise the attendant turns you out, does she?”

“They watch you. They’re mean old cows. But they can’t stop people talking to each other, can they? Lonely people, Bella, like your father.”

“Oh, don’t start with that pathetic tone. You nauseate me. What happened to Woolworth’s café? That was favourite last year, wasn’t it?”

He turned away, moving slowly towards the kitchen. “I’ll put the kettle on,” he said.

“You disgust me,” she shouted after him. “Take the sheets off your bed and put them in the machine. I’m not going into your room.”

I always say that, she thought, but I shall have to go, and look at his clothes for lice. What can I do to stop him, whatever can I do? Unshed tears were choking her. She blundered into the living-room, snapped on the TV and slumped in front of it, staring without seeing, biting her lip till it bled.

“London Bridge is falling down,” Muriel sings, “bawling round, trolling frown.” One word is as good as the next. Her mother tells her she is going to have a child. She is making plans to sing to it.

When is it going to be born, Muriel wants to know. Tonight? You stupid, stupid girl, Evelyn says to her. She glowers. You should know that, not me. Despairing, she reminds herself how little comprehension Muriel has ever shown of past or future. Look, she said, you count, nine months. Nine months from the day you…got it.

There are two things she can do. Take Muriel to a doctor, or go to the Welfare and tell them what has happened. Lay the blame at their door, where it belongs. If she had stayed in the house with me, Evelyn thinks, she would have come to no harm, or comparatively little. If she does either of these things, it will be in an extremity. She is afraid that Muriel will be taken away. “Taken away,” she says. “There are places for people like you. There are places for girls who have babies and no husbands.” She thinks of the uniformed guards taking Muriel away, to shave her head and beat her. It is something she has often imagined. But then she imagines closing the door, finding herself alone; alone with her companions. When Muriel follows her up the stairs at night, and she feels them creeping up, creeping up snapping from the bottom stair, she always plans that if they get too close she will put her hand on Muriel’s chest and push her slithering down to them, fat bait, something to lick their lips over.

Sunday: Sylvia cooked roast beef (she does it brown, a full twenty-five minutes per pound plus twenty minutes), roast potatoes, carrots, frozen peas: rhubarb crumble, at which she is a dab hand, and custard.