Every Day Is Mother's Day

CHAPTER 5

Christmas morning.

“Just shut the door on them,” Sylvia said. It was six A.M. She was huddled into her quilted dressing-gown. The children shrieked and howled from Suzanne’s bedroom. “I’ll go down and brew some tea,” Sylvia said. “There’s no point in going back to bed.” And on this as on almost every other day, a grey fatigue shook her; another baby, what for, when the three were too much for her, but if only she could think sensibly about this, think logically, if only she could run all the strands of her thinking together for just half an hour. She never seemed to have half an hour, that was the trouble. In the cold kitchen she bit into a corner of dry toast; all she could face, these last couple of weeks. The electric light was brilliant and hard, like an operating theatre; her laminate surfaces gleamed empty and scrubbed, ready for the severance of 1974 from 1975. Condensation ran down the windows. Already the fights had begun upstairs; she could hear Alistair working himself into one of his fits. When he was younger, he used to go blue with temper and stop breathing. She moved about the kitchen, aimlessly dazed with bowls and spoons and teapots. She pulled back the curtains onto the blue-black morning; a streetlight burned fuzzily on the opposite side of the road, the great artificial moon which shone each night onto her marital bed. Already in the neighbours’ houses lights were clicking on, the children rampaging downstairs shredding wrapping paper and mauling cats, shaking the ornaments from the Christmas trees. She put her hand against the radiator. It would soon be as warm as they could afford. She had always wanted a cosy house, low and cream, with plump flowered cushions; now she was as cosy as a fish under ice. Another year almost gone, the house no nearer paid for: the piling up of the interest on the debts.

Colin stood by the small window on the landing at the top of the stairs, looking out, with a damp towel from the bathroom in his hand. Some people, unbelievable as it seemed, lived in such a way that they had their own towels. A door opened and Karen lurched towards him, her face streaked with tears and dirty—how could it be dirty?—already. Grasped in either hand she had by the wrist identical dolls, fatly flaxen, improbably frilled.

“Come on now, pet,” he said, but she avoided him with a warning growl and swayed downstairs. Suzanne came out, glowering, her face heated.

“Florence has brought me a rotten sewing machine,” she said. “I never get anything decent.”

“What’s the matter with Karen?” Colin asked mildly.

“She’s a crybaby. Stupid kids. I’m fed up pretending about Father Christmas. Daft stupid kids.”

“I didn’t know you’d been enlightened,” Colin said. “Could you just manage to pretend, for your brother and sister? Just for this year, at least. It would spoil it for them, you see.”

“Spoil it for you,” Suzanne said, acutely.

“You’re eight years old,” Colin said, with ferocity; the accumulation of pinpricks. She stared at him and laughed, and went downstairs.

Sylvia was doing an explanation when he arrived in the kitchen. She held out the two dolls and looked helplessly from one to the other.

“Besides, I’ll make them new dresses,” she said. “Then they’ll be different.”

“When? Today?”

“Well, soon, lovey, but not just today, because your Aunty Florence is coming. Besides, isn’t it nice, what they are, you see, they’re identical twins.” Karen stopped crying, but her mouth drooped dangerously; Suzanne was openly sneering. “I’ll make them on the machine,” Sylvia promised. “Special little dresses.”

“Just as long as I’m not expected to do it,” Suzanne said. “I’ll get filthy Alistair for his breakfast. Get his pigswill out.”

“Come here,” Sylvia said to her husband. They backed off into the corner by the fridge. Her voice was dangerous. “Florence. I bloody told her. I bloody told her what I’d got for Karen but she won’t be told.”

“I can’t help it. She didn’t do it on purpose, did she? Look, just leave it, just leave them to fight it out amongst themselves.”

“A finely practical attitude,” Sylvia said. “Do you want the house wrecked? Alistair, if you don’t stop messing about in that sugar basin I’m going to come over there and slap you, Christmas or no Christmas.”

Colin moved and took her by the arm. A corner of the vegetable rack caught him painfully on the shin.

“This is what I stay for,” he said. “They’re your children, you wanted them. Can’t you manage better than this? Do you realise this is what I stay for?”

“Stay?” Sylvia gaped. “And where are you planning to go? What are you talking about? Who else in the name of God would want you?” Her mouth quivered like Karen’s, in disbelief, and suddenly tears plopped out of her pale blue eyes and ran down onto her housecoat, Christmas or no Christmas, the first in years.

At mid-morning, Colin slipped away. He went up to the bedroom, and from his briefcase drew out Isabel’s present. He had missed the opportunity to hand over her mittens. They would have to be a late gift; when would he be able to deliver them? Term started on January 12th, and then, perhaps, there would be excuses: Parent’s Evenings, visits to Frank O’Dwyer, extracurricular drama. Even sports, as the night grew lighter; but how to sustain it, through another winter?

It was a flat parcel, in red paper; a record. He pulled the paper off. “Marches of Sousa.” In the field, maudlin after physical pleasure, he had spoken of suicide and his plans for evading it. For the season, it was a bitter joke.

Because it cannot be sustained, he thought. Last time they met, the strain was telling on her. These days she forgot things, lost her files, she jumped when she was spoken to. He saw her corroded spirit in her eyes, watched her twist her fingers together, frail, timid, flawed. She was not the woman she had been in September.

He thought of Sylvia weeping in the kitchen, her face cruelly blotched. His marriage had not disappointed him; his grief was that it had turned out exactly as he had expected. The past can’t be changed, but you should be able to change the present. My present isn’t under my control, he thought, it doesn’t seem mine to dispose of.

He slipped the record back into his briefcase; then, on second thought, retrieved it. He carried it downstairs and intruded it into the pile on the radiogram. Sylvia would never know.

Until well into the morning Evelyn did not remember it was Christmas Day. She knew it was near, of course, because of the festive irruption of Florence, and because the signs she had seen in the shops a few days ago when she went to buy food. She had not made plans to mark the festival. They were not religious.

Some time ago, two cards had fallen through the letterbox. At least, they were lying on the hall floor, as if they could have come through the letterbox. One was Florence Sidney’s, she knew by the writing. She sent one every year, as one of her impertinences. Gingerly, she held up the other one and peered at the address. It was to Muriel. From the father? Possibly. Who else did Muriel know? Evelyn did not succumb to curiosity. She carried the two envelopes into the lean-to and thrust them both into a pile of damp newspapers.

Far back in her memory was a picture of another Christmas Day, at her family’s house in Shropshire. She stood at the window of the morning room, the long french window, an overgrown girl of thirteen. She was wearing the party dress that had been bought for her when she was ten. It was too short now, and her great bony knees and wrists seemed like the exposed parts of some terrifying machine. Outside the glass the wind whirled the sleet into eddies. Goose pimples prickled her bare arms, and she shuddered at the thought of the festivities. They were to be meagre this year. Father had died of influenza. Water had got on his lungs, they said. She listened at doors. Blaise had been careless; the policies were not in order. Matters were outstanding, they said. Matters matters matters. A woman from Craven Arms had come up to the front door; bold as brass she had said outright that she had two children by Blaise and had been promised all sorts. She demanded compensation. In other ways, too, Blaise had been careless.

Mother was to be brought downstairs for Christmas dinner. Mother was an invalid and never left her room, but she would do so on this occasion because it was understood that this was the last winter in their own house. They were to be sold up, said voices in the air.

Evelyn rubbed her arms, clamping them across her thin chest. The garden had gone to seed; snow drifting in the hollows and a single blackbird scavenged in the weeds, pecking without hope at the iron-hard ground.

Remembering that Christmas, hands now slack in her lap, Evelyn felt no inclination to busy herself for Muriel’s sake. An accustomed weight lay around her heart. In February the house was sold. She left with one box-trunk for her Aunt Norah, in Liverpool. She cried as the taxi took her down the drive, not because her childhood had been happy, but because crying passed the time.

Aunt Norah had a tall black house, a city house with many staircases. Half a mile away skinny children played in the streets. On certain days a smell drifted up from the docks, of rubber and salt and decaying fruit. At Aunt Norah’s she cried every night. She stood by her bedroom window looking down at the pavement far below, tempted by the wicked railings of the street frontage. When she opened the window, a preparatory step, the night howled about her ears. She closed it again quickly, hearing her quick breathing in the dark, and watching the faint crack of light that crept under her door from the passage. She felt as if she were suffocating. But she was not more unhappy than she had been before.

Her mother, smelling of urine, was now confined to a nursing home. Evelyn visited her four times a year. Latterly, she screamed if she was touched. When she finally died, Evelyn was seventeen.

Aunt Norah now gave her notice that she must make her own way. She had performed her duty to her sister and had, indeed, met the hospital bills for the past six months. There was no more money from any source, and every mouthful of bread Evelyn ate had been put there by the charity of her Aunt and her Uncle Reggie. Every mouthful of bread.

Three weeks after this ultimatum came Clifford Axon. He was a senior shipping clerk who worked for Uncle Reggie. He had decided recently that his life would be better regulated if he had a wife to oversee his domestic arrangements and provide him with a few small comforts. Explaining this, he had proposed to as many as four young ladies, and they had all turned him down on the spot. His misfortune was the subject of general merriment in Uncle Reggie’s Chambers. Uncle Reggie bet Clifford five pounds that he knew a girl who would be willing to marry him at once, on first meeting.

“Is she ugly?” Axon asked.

“Ugly? You’d not say so. Plain, perhaps, but what would you?”

He did not say, faintly peculiar, but poured himself a glass of whisky, a little pale fire on a foggy afternoon, a toast to the Gaiety Girl.

Evelyn accepted. After the wedding, Axon, who did not care for the jibes of his colleagues, left the firm and went into an insurance office, and was moved away from Liverpool. Afterwards, Uncle Reggie was vaguely sorry. He suspected Axon of indulging in sexual deviations. But it was too late to do anything about that.

When Evelyn thought of her childhood, it seemed to have taken place in another century.

When the meal was over the children went upstairs, screaming and bawling, to play with their toys. The sound of their disputes punctured the air at intervals, like machine-gun fire.

Sylvia yawned, and reached out for the congealing dishes with their remains of pudding. She began to scrape the leftovers into one dish.

“Florence doesn’t think you ought to scrape the plates at the table,” she commented. “She carries them out two at a time. It’s hard on the feet.”

“I’ll do it, if you like,” Florence said weakly. After the heavy meal, Sylvia’s activities were making her nauseous.

“That’s all right,” Sylvia said. “You can sit still, if you’ll allow me to suit myself at my own table.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Florence protested.

“No, but you looked plenty.” Sylvia reached across for a sprout which one of the children had rolled onto the table cloth, chopped it into a general mess, and stood up to carry the pile of dishes away.

“I’ll help you,” Colin said. He made movements to show that in time, after preparation, he would push back his chair and rise to his feet. He felt gross and sated. He eyed the last inch of red wine. Self-indulgence was tripping through his blood-vessels, tiptoe on warning feet.

“Get the presents,” Sylvia said. “We might as well have them in peace while the kiddies are out of the way.”

She went into the kitchen, and Colin took the presents from the sideboard. Sylvia had refused to have a proper tree, on account of the pine needles, the sweeping up they entailed, the danger to children’s feet, and their habit of appearing imbedded in upholstery, to next September and beyond. Every year she set out her argument, passionless, step by step, and every year Colin refused to put the presents under her Tesco artefact with its stiff tinsel branches.

“This tree,” he said to Florence. He shook his head. “I like a tree. A proper one.”

“It’s not worth quarrelling over,” Florence said. “They only came in with Prince Albert.”

“Nonsense,” Colin said. “It’s a pagan custom.”

“I didn’t know you were a pagan,” Sylvia said, returning. “I thought you were an agnostic.” She sat down and wiped her hands on her paper napkin, and looked expectant. Impelled to goodwill, Colin placed two parcels before her, and doled out the same to Florence.

“Well,” Colin said. “Another drink, anybody? Such largesse. I always think this is the nicest moment. I mean giving, of course, as well as receiving.”

“It’s a pity you weren’t a vicar,” Sylvia said.

“If I were a vicar, Sylvia, we should have even less money than we do, and certainly none to spare for presents.”

“Really, do you have to go on like this?” Florence muttered. They composed their faces to amiability. From upstairs came Alistair’s long-drawn and hideous wail; his sisters were pinching him and calling him pig. There was a loud, almost shocking rending of paper, as Sylvia pulled out of its wrapping the bottle of scent Colin gave her every year.

“A new one,” she said. “You’ve bought a new kind.” She opened the box, prised it out, unscrewed the cap, and began to dab the scent on her wrists.

“Steady,” Colin said. “Don’t waste it all.”

“This was imaginative of you, Colin,” Florence said.

“I thought, oh, you know, try a change.” He looked modest.

“I don’t think I was praising you,” Florence said. “I think I was being sarcastic, really. Have you actually bought her the same each year?”

Sylvia held her wrist to her nose and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes. They snapped open, and a flicker of surprise crossed her face.

“Well?” Colin demanded. He was eager to get on with his own parcels.

Sylvia hesitated, and proffered her wrist.

“Very nice,” Colin said. “Very nice indeed.”

“Let it warm up on your skin, Sylvia,” Florence suggested. “That might make all the difference.”

“I hope so,” Sylvia said.

“It wasn’t cheap,” Colin said. “It wasn’t bloody cheap, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He thrust his chair back, glowering.

“I know,” Sylvia said quietly. “I know the prices of perfumes.” Because I walk around the shops and covet them, she might have added. “It’s my skin. It doesn’t suit it.”

“Well, surely it cannot be intended to smell like that,” Florence said. “They must take into account that people have different skins. One would think so.”

“I don’t think they took mine into account,” Sylvia said.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’ll get you something else. How was I to know? Oh, Sylvia, for God’s sake don’t start crying again. It is Christmas.”

Sylvia took out a handkerchief smeared with gravy. She applied it to her heated face and smudges of mascara and tan foundation adhered to it as she patted her skin vigorously.

“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” She whimpered and sniffed. “Just…it’s only once a year…and I’ve been working hard to get the dinner and make everything nice, and I don’t feel myself—” With a neat and surprising movement she slipped under the table. Florence gave a cry of alarm, and half-rose from her place. “It’s all right, I’m only picking up these peas from under Karen’s chair before they get trodden in the carpet. Stay where you are.”

She sniffed loudly again, hidden under the cloth. Relieved at the return to normality, Colin handed Florence her book token. Sylvia had given him a blue shirt with a matching blue and white tie, pinned together under their cellophane wrapper. He thought this a very neat idea, because he always had trouble matching shirts to ties, and had to call on Sylvia to do it for him. She would be out of patience, because she was trying to get the children fed with their breakfasts, and she would snap at him, and fling his clothes across the room; but if he chose for himself she would mock at him at the breakfast table, and ridicule his efforts. His first thought was how much simpler life would be with this innovation; then immediately he saw something sinister in it. Was Sylvia preparing him for life alone? Did she know something, and had her words been more, that morning, than a vicious stab in the dark? He saw himself alone, crushed by alimony and abandoned by Isabel, spending his Christmas in a dirty bedsitting-room, with a bottle of milk on the table, and the cheapest kind of card, from each of his children, scrawled hastily and collapsed in the draught from the cracked window. A tin of fruit and a walk about the street; such a complete and vivid picture of his future desolation came to him that tears of self-pity welled up into his eyes. Sylvia did not notice. She was staring at Florence’s gift to her, twelve plain cream linen tablenapkins, requiring to be washed, starched, and ironed.

“Blimey,” Sylvia said. “Real serviettes, Florence. I always have paper ones, you know, when there’s company, otherwise I don’t bother with any.”

“Ah well,” Florence conceded pleasantly. “Of course you’re not newly-weds now. When you are putting your household together these gay little informalities are excused you, but as we get older, and established, it is not always becoming to be casual.”

“Why didn’t you put a message in them?” Sylvia asked. “Just to make the point? A little motto, like you get in the crackers?”

“We never had linen at home,” Colin said.

Florence caught his eye. She looked betrayed. “No?”

“No.”

“Your memory is at fault, Colin.”

“’Tisn’t.”

“I think it is.”

“We had paper.”

“Oh,” said Florence drily, “if you are right, I must have learned it out of books.”

Sylvia had been extravagant. She had bought Florence a cookery book, lavishly illustrated, called Entertaining for Two: Menus for Candlelit Evenings. Her second present showed how long she thought these evenings were likely to last, for it was a candlewick dressing-gown, of a spinach shade and a formidable stiffness.

“And this is your other one from me, Colin.”

It was a Five-Year Diary, with a lock and key.

This time he saw the implication immediately. She felt he had secrets. She knew he had. She was laughing at him, asking him to place them between covers of leatherette. It was hardly the world’s most secure object; she could have bought another identical, with the same key. He was damned if he would write anything in this book. He turned it over admiringly in his hands.

“How did you think of this?” he asked her. “Very useful. I never miss not having a diary till about April, and then I really need one, and there aren’t any in the shops.”

“I don’t think you’re meant to put your engagements in it,” Sylvia said. “It’s not that kind. You’re supposed to put down what you do, so that you have something to look back on.”

“That’s right,” Florence said. “You will be able to look back at the date and see at a glance that this day four years ago, you were at the dentist. For example.”

“I hope more will happen than the dentist,” Colin said. “I hope there will be more than that to record. You know,” he said, with a strained chuckle, “there’s a saying that only virgins and generals keep diaries.”

This epigram left the company listless. Renewed howls erupted from upstairs. Virgins and generals, he thought; and I need the sentiments of the former and the strategic sense of the latter. Or perhaps it is the other way round.

At ten o’clock, Colin drove Florence home. There was too little drink in the house for him to be the worse for it, and he was under the necessity of saving some of it to get him through the rest of the holiday.

As Florence got out of the car, her presents balanced in her arms, she said, “I wonder what sort of day the Axons have had. I do feel guilty about them, in a way.”

Colin wished she would shut the car door. He was getting frozen.

“Goodnight, Colin. Thank Sylvia for me.”

“Don’t mention it, Florence. Goodnight. Merry Christmas.”

She slammed the door and started towards the gate. Colin watched her until she was safely inside her front door, and turned the car for home. He thought of Isabel, not of the Axons. He stopped at a telephone box. There was a delay before she answered and her voice sounded chilly, remote, and strained.

“Oh yes. Merry Christmas,” she said. “Yes. Goodnight.”

He imagined he heard her father’s questions in the background. He hoped he did; that she would not be so curt for no reason. Better if he had not made the call; if he had only dreamed of doing it.

The house was silent when he let himself in, with the foreboding silence of places struck by disaster and bound to be struck again; criminal neighbourhoods, earthquake zones, the more popular battlefields of Europe. The children had been downstairs and the floor of the living-room was littered with their cast-off toys—plastic hand-grenades, broken railway tracks, battered dolls with torn frocks and twisted necks.

Sylvia had gone up to bed, exhausted by the day. He followed her. She was in her nightdress, sitting on the bed, a torn Christmas wrapper lying beside her. Grotesquely, she waved to him with both hands, like a performing bear. She had found Isabel’s sheepskin mittens.

“You were going to surprise me,” she said coyly. “I wondered what on earth they were.”

“Do they fit?”

“Oh yes, they fit anybody. Lovely. I’ve always wanted some of these.”

What depth of the lover’s imagination are here plumbed? he asked himself. How are they formed and educated, men who give a mistress sheepskin mittens, all one size?

“Why didn’t you get some, then?” he asked her.

“Well…I didn’t like to.”

“I see you managed to get them to bed.”

“Alistair had a bit of a do. Screaming. He broke his sub-machine-gun. They quietened down, though. They’ve worn themselves out. Poor little pets,” she added fondly.

Colin did not comment. His thoughts on his children, heated by alcohol, were unseasonal. Sylvia could not have chosen a less opportune moment, but it seemed to her that nobody could be angry with fecundity on Christmas Day.

“Colin, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.” She watched him take off his tie, roll it up around his hand, thrust it into a drawer. “I’ve started another baby.”

He stared at her, his neck stretched and his chin tilted up, so that he could release the stiff top button of his shirt. For a moment she thought he had simply not heard her. His eyes closed momentarily, and his mouth opened, as if he were being slowly choked. The button slipped through its buttonhole; his hand, trembling a little, stayed in mid-air.

Sylvia held up her sheepskin paws defensively.

“I’ve started another baby.” He turned his back on her and walked to the window. He wanted to stare out into the night. He understood why, in books, people did this, but he pictured them in rooms worth striding across, gazing out onto blasted heathlands silvered by the moon. He laid his hand on the rampant ready-made daisies, on their lilac and pink, and tried to scoop them aside.

“Mind my curtain hooks, love,” Sylvia said.

The estate was shutting down for the night. The screaming children were tranquillised and the tipsy wives flicked off the fluorescent lights and climbed the stairs. Mountains of turkey giblets passed before their dreaming eyes. What will next year bring?

So either, Colin thought, I must tell her now, I must tell her now and pack a bag and go to Florence’s…he felt her behind him, waiting. At the same time, a great weariness crept up and engulfed him. He felt the weight of the winter, of the short sterile days and early dark. Already, his affair was passing into the realms of fantasy. He, a history teacher, a married man; he did not have affairs. He was not attractive to women, he went to evening classes, no one would look at him. Duty with her steel teeth gestured to him from beyond the windowpane, obscenely inviting him to the realms of the just.

“Take your mittens off,” he said. “You look silly.”

Unwillingly, she extricated her hands, which now looked stupidly small and inadequate. She put the mittens on the bed, stroking them with one finger.

“Say you’re pleased,” she asked flatly. “I know you’re not, but just say you are.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the only way to go on.”

“Oh, you say that. But we do go on. Pleased or not pleased.”

“It is your baby.”

“I didn’t for a moment suppose it belonged to anybody else.”

“I mean, you are responsible for it. It’s part of you as well as me. Draw the curtains. You’re letting the heat out.”

Colin turned away from the window. He could think of nothing to say. He sat beside her on the bed and patted her knee with small mechanical taps. Still his throat felt constricted, almost bruised. His face twisted in a horrid parody of emotional generosity. A clock struck. Boxing Day.

Evelyn felt so tired. Her arm ached, there was a pain in her chest, her legs felt too heavy to move. She sat by the electric fire and stared at her feet, puffy inside her old bedroom slippers. “You’ll have to get the dinner today,” she said to Muriel.

Muriel was in no mood for cooking. She was busy making her rhymes. The farmer’s wife, the blind clock mice, Jack and Jill and time to kill.

“You’ve got it wrong,” Evelyn said. Fatigue and hunger pinched her into savagery. “You’ve got it all hopelessly mixed up. Sometimes I think you’re a mental case.”

Colin drove Isabel to the field where he had first made love to her, and pulled the car off the road. There seemed no danger of the wheels sticking in the hard frosty ground. He pulled out a small bottle of brandy and handed it to her.

“We don’t usually have this,” she said. She took it from him, tipped back her head, and swallowed a little. “I’ll be warm in a minute. It’s a good idea. We couldn’t do what we used to do. It’s too cold to uncover an inch of flesh.”

“Sylvia’s pregnant,” he told her. Faintly, the headlights of cars crept along the main road, like lost souls. She passed him back the bottle without comment. “So you see,” he said, “you must understand, I can’t leave her now.”

“I expect you’re glad,” she said.

“Glad? Glad? Why should I be glad?”

“Off the hook, Colin. You’ve felt it, these past few weeks. Or at least, back on the old familiar hook. Don’t people get used to the pain?”

“I expect you mean there’s no chance of us carrying on.”

“Carrying on?” she laughed. “That’s what people used to say, they’ve been carrying on together. Weekend bags and seaside hotels and tipsy hilarity. Well, now they’re not carrying on. Let’s go, Colin, just save the explanations and preserve some dignity and let it go.”

“You sound bitter,” he said dully.

“Do I? Give me a chance. Time hasn’t had a chance yet to do its legendary healing work, but the sooner time gets on with it, the better it will be. How long does it take?” She spoke rapidly, the syllables tripping after each other into a dim future. “One year? Two? Three?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, if it comes to that.”

Triteness was in his mouth like a foul taste long incubated; but what can you expect from the tired old situations, except the tired old phrases? “I can’t imagine the future without you.”

“You can’t imagine it with me, though.”

“You know I had very little to offer you.”

“And what you had, you weren’t prepared to give.”

“Isabel—”

“Memory will make you a cosy selection. In time you’ll forget the motorway and the field and the humiliating telephone calls. You can give yourself better lines, make yourself more potent.”

“That’s cheap. Isn’t it, cheap?”

“Yes. Ah, what’s the point? We knew at the beginning it would end up like this. We knew but we did it—I did anyway—because there are some mistakes you have to make.”

They sat in the damp darkness of the car, no sound but their steady breathing, almost hoarse, like people who had exerted themselves and were not used to it. He was conscious of their last moments trickling away.

“Give me a cigarette,” she said. He lit it for her. “I want to tell you something. A little story.”

“Bearing on us?”

“No, it has nothing to do with us at all. I tell it to anyone I think might be able to tell me what it means.” She took the cigarette from her lips and smoke curled out of them, out of her body. For a minute he thought he was seeing torments, the damned in hell, smouldering viscera and dripping flesh. He blinked. “It’s a true story,” she said. “I read it in a book when I was a student.” He tried to ease himself back in the driver’s seat, but he did not feel at ease. He took out a cigarette and then pushed it back into the packet.

“Are you running out?” she asked.

“No. I think I might give up.”

“Well, it will save expense. You are making changes in your life. Isn’t it going to be too much for you, all at once?”

“Tell me the story.”

“All right. It was in the war, the last war. There were two people, Jews, in Poland. The man was a weaver. He saw this woman whom he wanted to marry. But she—she wouldn’t have him. Everybody thought it was ridiculous, quite unsuitable. They had nothing in common, they were from different backgrounds, different classes. But he was very persistent.”

“This was before the War?”

“Yes, this was before the War. But when the invasion came the man knew what was going to happen. He had a friend who was a farmer; he wasn’t Jewish but he was prepared to help him. Under the floor of his friend’s farmhouse he made a hole in the ground. He got a handloom, and a lot of wool, as much as he could lay his hands on. Then when the Germans started rounding up the Jews he went to this sort of dug-out and shut himself in and began to weave the wool.”

“Yes?”

“And he asked the woman again, would she live with him? She refused. At first she said she would rather be dead. But soon most of her family had been killed or taken away on the cattle-wagons. She was on her own and there was nowhere to hide. He couldn’t come out of the hole now, but he kept sending messages to her, and in the end she was so frightened, with everyone else gone, that she agreed. She went to join him under the farmhouse floor. But she said she would never marry him, she wouldn’t have sex with him.”

“But that’s asking the impossible,” Colin said. “In that confined space.”

“Look, will you just shut up, Colin?” He turned, startled. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes alight. She snapped another cigarette into her mouth and her anger blazed and flickered in the lighter flame. It began to rain, harder and harder, thundering on the metal roof. “Will you just keep quiet and let me tell you the story?”

“I’m sorry.” He thought, how long will this take, will it turn to mud, is the car going to start sinking? What will Sylvia say about the mud on the wheels?

“When the man had made some cloth the farmer sold it, and this kept them going, all three of them. But this hole was so small they couldn’t stretch out. Every night they had to take the loom down before they could sleep, and set it up again every morning. The wool was around them all the time, they slept in it and breathed in it, it must have almost suffocated them, I think. Imagine their dreams.”

“I can’t imagine. Why don’t you just tell me the facts?”

“The facts only? But these must have been the facts. This little hole, no air, no light, the clay and the fleece all around them. Sometimes I think I am not sure of the facts.”

“What’s the point then?”

“The facts were in dispute anyway. Do you think they told the same version afterwards? Long, long after, the story came to light. Who couldn’t imagine? You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t try.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“The hole was under a trapdoor inside the farmhouse. The floor of the farmhouse was made of earth. Soldiers came a few times, but they didn’t find it.”

“How was it ventilated?”

“I don’t know. Barely, it must have been. They couldn’t cook down there.”

“What did they eat?”

“Raw vegetables.”

“God,” Colin said. He turned his face away and looked out at the rain. “I’d better move the car.”

“Yes, you’d better.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you.”

“It’ll keep.”

“Where shall we go?”

“Just drive me home.”

“Do I have to?”

“I think that would be best.” She stared at the stub of her cigarette, greedily, and wound down the window to hurl the glowing end out into the night. She put on her seat belt.

“Will you finish the story?”

“For a year they didn’t have sex, and then they did. They say—he, the man, said—that she had lost her will to live by then. At least he had the work, weaving, putting up the loom and taking it down. She had nothing except the earth and the wool, and thinking over the past and hating him. All this time, you have to remember, she hated him. But she says differently, that he threatened to drive her out of the hole if she wouldn’t have sex with him.”

“He could have raped her. Who could she have complained to?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps he did. After another year they had a child. It was a girl.”

“But how could they?” He was aghast. “How could they, in that hole?”

“You fool,” she said bitterly. “Now do you see why she didn’t want to have sex? Do you think she could pop out and go to the chemist’s for something? Sometimes…very occasionally…they went up into the world and walked about. Only at night. Not very often. They wanted, you understand, to scream at each other, just scream, but the farmer said he’d throw them out if they didn’t keep absolutely quiet.”

“But the baby must have cried, mustn’t she?”

“They put their hands over her mouth. For a year and a half. For a year and a half, the mother had milk, but then it gave out. The baby had to eat the raw vegetables. But you see then, the mother couldn’t kill herself, could she, she couldn’t walk out of the hole. She had the baby.”

They were on the main road now, driving through town. An odd figure under an umbrella scurried away from their sight. A gang of boys huddled under the yellow lights of a shopping centre.

“Shall we stop for a drink?” He looked sideways at her. “Anywhere. It doesn’t matter now if we’re seen. Anywhere you like.”

“Better go home, I think. Shall I finish the story?”

He sighed. “Yes, go on. It’s a terrible story. I don’t like to think about things like that.”

“None of us likes to think of other people’s hells. We avoid it if we can.”

“But you’re paid to do it, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but even so. You see there was food of a kind, shelter, and it was warm—at least it was warm. That’s how they survived. And nobody found them, they did survive. The Russians came. They were sent to a Displaced Persons Camp. I think, later, they went to America, and the couple split up. I don’t know. The end of the story isn’t important.”

“But what about the child?”

“Well that’s what’s most horrible. She was like a wild animal. When she was brought out of the hole she screamed and clawed and attacked people. At other times, she was completely mute. As if they still had their hands over her face.”

“But they’d had to do it. I suppose. Or her existence would have destroyed them all. But later—what became of her?”

“Oh, she went from one institution to another. No one could keep her. I told you, she was like a wild animal.” She paused. “What is the point?”

“The point?”

“Of the story.”

“I don’t know,” Colin said. “I wish you hadn’t told it to me. It’s one of the most horrible things I’ve ever heard.”

Isabel looked at him appraisingly. “Would it have been more bearable if the child had grown up in some other way?”

“Normal?”

“Yes, normal.”

“I suppose so.”

“At that time, when they were buried in the hole, the people above them were much worse than animals. Animals have no cruelty; we always defame them. At least, whatever became of the child, she had no opportunity to become cruel.”

“But you can’t speculate…you don’t know about these people. To survive like that you would have to be a different breed.”

“I think they must have been terrible people, to breed such monstrosity out of desire for life. But not different.” She turned her head. “Do you see how he made her suffer, by loving her? When she had the child she could not even walk out and go to Treblinka. Now I know all about it…the stifling power of love.”

They had reached her front gate. Colin stopped the car. He was afraid to look at her, knowing that he had failed to find any meaning in the story, to give anything at all back to her.

“I didn’t know such issues preoccupied you,” he said. “Have you found some moral in it to apply to me?”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that light, but now that you speak of it—”

“Isabel, kiss me, don’t just go.”

She unclipped the seat belt, swung open the door, and paused halfway out of the car.

“Now that you speak of it, when you are so spiritually stifled, what kind of life can you hope to give birth to?” The door clicked behind her. “I’ll miss you, Colin. You think I won’t, but I will.” She walked around the back of the car and bent her face to his window. “When you are fifty you will be able to tell people what a gay dog you were. What an untrammelled life. And look at the heap of ashes you live on, and blame Sylvia.” He stretched out a hand but she pulled away almost playfully, and with a little smile turned and walked in at the gate. She was playing all the time, Colin said to himself. Hunched in his seat, he sat for fifteen minutes watching the front of the house; lights going on, upstairs curtains drawn, light finally switched off. She has slipped through my fingers, he thought. He drove home.

Muriel looked pale. Suspecting her to be undernourished, Evelyn got her coat on, picked up her purse and her basket, and set off for the butcher’s shop on the Parade. When she got to the door she saw that there was quite a queue waiting to be served. Her first thought was to pretend she had not wanted anything and walk away down the street. But she hesitated for a moment, and heard a voice behind her:

“Liver looks nice. Hello there, Mrs. Axon. I thought I saw you passing.”

She would have to go in now. After all, nobody looks into a butcher’s window for idle amusement, they would think she didn’t have the money, they might talk about her. Evelyn turned her head stiffly. Josie Deakin from number four, a woman of forty-five in her brown leather knee-boots and pixie-hood. She heaved up to Evelyn, bustling with her shopping bags, edging her into the shop doorway.

“Nasty weather, Mrs. A.,” Josie said cheerfully.

Mrs. A.? Evelyn thought. As if she were the subject of an experiment.

“Seasonable,” she replied.

“How are you keeping then?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“And Muriel?”

“Very well.” Some residue of social unction oiled her tongue. “And you, Mrs. Deakin?”

“Can’t complain.” Mrs. Deakin took off her woollen gloves and rubbed her hands together. “Haven’t seen Muriel about for a bit. Too cold for her, is it?”

“Yes. Too cold.”

“I used to see her last summer, striding along, you know, not a care in the world, and very nice she looked in that pink angora cardigan. You do keep her lovely, Mrs. A. I said to Dennis, Mrs. Axon keeps Muriel lovely, to look at her you’d never know. Well, I said to Dennis, if people only knew. I bet Muriel’s got more about her than people give her credit for.”

“And what did Dennis say?” Evelyn enquired.

“Well…I expect he said, I agree with you. I don’t remember exactly what he said but he certainly agreed with me. To tell you the truth, Mrs. Axon, it is a coincidence me running into you today like this.” She craned her neck to look at the counter. “Oh, aren’t they slow in this shop! The thing is, do you still do seances? Only Uncle Bill’s passed on, end of September, liver complaint, he’d had it for years—and Auntie Agnes—she’s my father’s sister, you remember our Ag—she’s mislaid one of the policies.”

“And so she wants to get in touch with him?”

“Well, I know you do that sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid I don’t any more.”

Evelyn was careful to keep all colour out of her tone, all emotion off her face. And no doubt, she thought, this about Dennis Deakin thinking Muriel attractive, it was something and nothing, a passing fancy. She imagined Mr. Deakin coming softly down the path in his bedroom slippers, putting his hand on Muriel’s arm, guiding her down the garden to the shed; the smell of grass cuttings, compost, the lawnmower oil, and Muriel’s dumpling thighs exposed in the broad sunlit afternoon. No, he could not be the father, flies undone amongst the diving swallows, Ena Harkness rotting softly towards midsummer. Deakin’s beds were orderly ones.

“Oh, don’t you do them now? Ag will be that disappointed.” Mrs. Deakin bobbed up on her toes. “Don’t put that roast ham away, I want six ounces,” she called out in a piercing voice. “Well, I mean, it’s no good letting them wrap it up and put it away again, is it? Only I mentioned you, you see, I’d a feeling you’d given seances at one time, and I asked Florence Sidney, and she said she’d a feeling you did as well.”

“I’ve given it up.”

“That’s a shame. Only you ought to be more sociable, Mrs. Axon. Florence was saying she never sees you. Couldn’t you just do one for Ag? You might enjoy it. Take you out of yourself.”

“Thank you, but I really have given it up.”

“Only can you recommend anybody? Mrs. Dobson in Argyll Street has a ouija board.”

“Has she? She must be careful that she doesn’t get more than she bargained for.”

“How do you mean, Mrs. Axon?”

“Oh…” Evelyn sighed. Could she really be bothered to explain, on the chance of saving Mrs. Dobson, whom she did not know, and who probably deserved what she invited? “Oh, people get in…things get in…the house gets overcrowded.”

“She says she does limit it to six people. Because their rooms aren’t big, you know, and that’s all she can get round the table.” The queue shuffled forward a bit. “I mean, it’s only harmless fun,” Mrs. Deakin said.

When Evelyn got to the head of the queue she asked for steak, two large pieces. She would have been appalled at the price if she had stopped to think about it, but in the event she pushed some crumpled notes into the man’s hand, leaving him to hand one back to her and then sort out her change; she snatched it from him, thrust the parcel into her bag, and made for the door without a word. The man shook his head comically, and made little circular motions with his forefinger. The queue went tut-tut, at this insult to a paying customer, and crackled their stiff raincoats. Mrs. Deakin said, “You can’t expect that lady to waste her time chatting with tradesmen. She’s a very well-regarded Spiritualist.”

Evelyn arrived home, and put down the parcel of meat on the kitchen table. The brown blood was seeping through the wrapping. She heard a rustling noise from the lean-to, and went to investigate it. When she returned, having found nothing, the meat was gone. A trail of dark drops led towards the kitchen door and out into the hall. Bending painfully, she peered at the floor. On the parquet of the hall she lost the trail, but there was another splash, on the staircarpet, halfway up.

Evelyn sat down on the bottom step, and rocked herself back and forth like a child. Such appetites, she thought, such vile appetites for raw and bloody meat. Were their jaws at work, behind the spare-room door? And if she went up there would she hear them, salivating and sucking, smacking unpicturable lips? Baby flesh would tear like butter.

They do not have claws, Evelyn told herself, they do not have claws or jaws, they do not have faces at all. But one thing was for sure, she would not dare to stand in their way. Muriel might, if she liked; self-sacrifice is a mother’s prerogative, and Muriel would be a mother soon enough.

Since Christmas, Muriel had become more and more lethargic. Her ankles swelled. She took no interest in anything.

“I have to think of everything myself,” Evelyn complained. She worried quite often about what she would do if Muriel got into difficulties. “You ought to be all right,” she reassured her. “You’re a strong type of woman. There’s nothing wrong with you, Muriel. Not physically anyway.”

Conscious of the responsibility facing her, she went to the public library to borrow some books. She chose first aid books, which told you how to deliver babies in an emergency. The library had changed a good deal, she noticed. The old wooden desks had gone, and the newspapers in racks. There were low vinyl seats that an elderly person could not get in and out of comfortably. There were modern pictures on the wall, sun-bursts of yellow and orange, and a part marked “Children’s Play Area.” Children did not play in it, but ran about, loud and healthy. Fluttering notices on a cork board advertised yoga classes and Community Welfare Programmes, playgroups and Councillor’s Surgeries. People talked quite unashamedly, in ordinary voices; there had been only an odd subdued whisper in the past, in the old days when Clifford used to step down to get a detective story, and she used to ask for a nice mystery from Miss Williams on the desk.

Evelyn shuffled up to the counter, cradling her books. “Where’s Miss Williams?” she asked, as she put them down.

“Who?” A fat girl looked up at her, a fat girl in a fluffy pink cardigan, very like the one that Muriel used to wear.

“Miss Williams. The Librarian.”

“We don’t have a Miss Williams here.”

“Has she left?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember any Miss Williams. Frances!” she called. “Frances, have you got a minute?”

“Shhh,” Evelyn said.

“What’s the matter?” The girl was irritated. “You asked me a question, didn’t you? I’m trying to find out, aren’t I?”

Frances glanced up from the books she was stacking onto a trolley. “There’s been no one of that name while I’ve been here. Miss Williams? No, I don’t think so.”

“Never mind,” Evelyn said. She put her tickets down by her books.

“What are these?”

“Oh, really,” Evelyn said, “don’t be so foolish.”

The girl picked the tickets up and held them by one corner, as if they were contaminated. “These expired thirty years ago,” she said. She looked at Evelyn, a strange sideways look, as if she were considering calling for help. “You’d better fill in a form,” she said at last. “Are you a ratepayer?”

“Where did you get that cardigan?” Evelyn demanded.

“What?” The girl’s head jerked back, her eyebrows raised, her leaky ballpoint pen poised in the air. Evelyn turned her back and made for the door.

“Just a minute—” the girl said, but she didn’t come after her. Somebody laughed. Evelyn found herself back on the street.

She walked down to the town centre, to the Central Library. They had the same books, the ones she wanted. She just put them under her arm and walked out, past the desk, nodding to herself. Nobody saw her go, nobody tried to stop her. It was easier that way.

It was a cold, misty day. The town was full of people tramping to the January sales. The buildings seemed distant and insubstantial, walls of air and smoke. Nobody looked at her, stumping along in her old grey coat. Nobody looks at an old woman to see if her clothes are fashionable; old women have a set of fashions all their own. The crowds clutched their parcels and their slippery plastic bags, heading for home, weary and overheated from the department stores. Evelyn stopped on a street corner, by the entrance to a great cavern brilliantly stacked with scented soap and woollen hats. She felt a kind of safety and peace that she had not known in years, or that perhaps she had never known; but it touched her with a warm finger of nostalgia. Treading in the footsteps of the crowd, no demon would know her. She would get herself a parcel, jostle in a bus-queue, she would never, never go home. Impulsively, she turned to go into the store, and a young woman collided with her, a pale woman with dark almond eyes that seemed familiar from somewhere.

“I beg your pardon,” Evelyn said; but the girl did not look at her, simply closed her arms about her burdens, gathered them to her chest with an irritated twitch of her lips, and hurried on, her eyes downcast. City manners, Evelyn thought, the vast indifference of the heated crowds. She shrugged inwardly. Courtesy had gone, gone with Miss Williams, no one remembered that it had ever existed. But then another thought struck her. Had the girl seen her at all? Was there anything to be seen? In sudden panic, she started to walk, seeking her reflection in the plate glass windows. She saw other women goosestepping with their stout legs, the glow of their faces almost warming the glass, their big check coats and their big boots; and then, faint and flickering, a wraith of herself, her melting face with its hollow eyes, her hatchet nose like the nose of a corpse. She began to hurry, faster and faster, trundling up the hill to Lauderdale Road, panting, trying to outpace the fate she had seen for herself.