The Lime Twig

2

It was Tuesday next and Margaret began to miss Michael in the afternoon. She tried to nap, but the pillow kept slipping through her fingers; she tried to mend the curtain, but her knees were in the way of the needle. Something was coming toward the window and it made her lonely. She went to the closet and from behind the duster and pail took down Banks’ bottle of spirits and drank a very small glass of it. The missing of Michael came over her, the loneliness, the small grief, and she was drifting quickly down the day and time itself was wandering.

“Here puss, here puss. …”

Limping, bristling its hairs, the cat appeared near the pantry door. It ate quickly, choked on every mouthful, the head jerked up and down. The silver of the fish and speckles of the cat’s eye caught the light. Now and then the dish scraped a little on the floor. Her back to the window, kneeling, Margaret watched the animal eat. And the cat, creature that claws tweed, sits high in the hallway, remains incorrigible upon the death of its mistress, beds itself in the linen or thrusts its enormous head into an alley, now sucked and gagged on the fish as if drawing a peculiar sweetness from the end of a thin bone.

But there was nothing sweet for her. She had dropped crumbs for the birds, she had leaned from the window, she had given the cat its dish. In the window — it looked out on the laundry court, was hard to raise — she had smelled the cool drifting air of spring and glanced at wireless antennas pulled taut across the sky. Annie must have heard the frame crash up, or must have caught the sound of her humming. Because Annie had come to the adjoining window, thrust out her blonde head, at twenty past two had jammed her sharp red elbows on the sill and talked for a while.

“Rotten day,” Annie had said to her.

“Michael mentioned it would be clear.”

“It’s a rotten day. How’s his horse?”

“Oh, he’s a fine horse. A lovely horse. …”

“I don’t know who Mike thinks he is, to go off and get himself a horse. But I’ve always wanted to kiss a jockey.”

And Annie had taken up a little purse and counted her change in the window. Together they had heard a tram eating away its tracks, heard the hammer and hawking of the world on the other side of the building. It was spring in the sunlight and they leaned toward each other, and the smell of cooking mutton had come into the courtyard.

Now, between three and six, there was nothing sweet for her. Even her friend Annie had left the flat next door, and Michael was gone.

“I’m dead to the world,” she said aloud.

Behind cataracts of pale eyes the cat looked across at her, cat with a black and yellow head which a good milliner, in years past, might have sewn to the front of a woman’s high-crowned feathered hat. Margaret scratched on the floor, for a moment smiled. Her cat circled round the dish. It was so dark now that she could not see into the kitchen. From somewhere a draft began blowing the bottom of her skirt and she wondered what a fortuneteller — one of those old ladies with red hair and a birthmark — would make of her at this moment. There was the beef broth, water to be drawn and boiled, the sinister lamp to light, a tom photograph of children by the sea. Cold laurels in this empty room.

“He has only gone to look at the horse in Highland Green,” she said. “It isn’t far.”

Once the madame of a frock shop had tried to dress her in pink. And even she, Margaret, had at the last minute before the gown was packed, denied the outrageous combination of herself and the color. Once an Italian barber had tried to kiss her and she had escaped the kiss. Once Michael had given her an orchid preserved in a glass ball, and now she could not find it. How horrible she felt in pink; how horrible the touch of the barber’s lips; how heavy was the glassed orchid on her breast.

Feeling lucky? Soon Michael would ask her that, after the sink was empty and her apron off. It was never luck she felt but she would smile.

In the darkness the cat swallowed the last flake of herring — Michael usually fed it, Michael understood how it wanted an old woman’s milk to drink — then disappeared. It was gone and she thought it had left her in search of the whispering tongue of some old woman in a country cottage. So she stood, picked up the dish, made her way toward the smells of yellow soap and blackened stove. There was a bulb in the kitchen. But the bulb was bleak, it spoiled the brown wood, the sink, the cupboard doors which she had covered with blue curtains. She washed the cat’s dish in the dark, lit the stove in the dark. For a moment, before the match flame caught at the sooted jets, she smelled the cold endless odor of greasy gas and her heart commenced suddenly to beat.

“Michael. Michael, is it you?”

But she turned, struck a second match, and the gas flames puffed up from the pipe in a circle like tiny blue teeth round the rim of a coronet and she herself was plain, only a girl who could cook, clean, sing a little. And then, in the light of the gas, she saw a stableboy’s thin face and, outside, the mortuary bells were ringing.

… The thin face of a pike and dirty hands — not black by earth, soot, or grease, but the soiled tan color of hands perpetually rubbing down a horse’s skin — and wearing riding trousers of twill but no socks, and from the belt up, naked.

“Now then, Mr. Hencher’s with the horse, is that it?”

Together they walk in the direction of the stalls, passing a shovel in an iron wheelbarrow, a saddle pad covered with black flies, a whip leaning against a whited post. Over one stall, on a rusty nail, hangs a jockey’s faded green-and-yellow cap.

They continue and from the rotted wood in the eaves overhead comes the sound, compact, malcontent, of a hive of bees stinging to death a sparrow. And the stable-boy, treading hay wisps and manure between his shoes and the stones, points to the closed stalls and tells him of Princess Pat, Islam, Dead-at-Night, the few mares and stallions within. And he hears them paw the dark, hears the slow scraping of four pointed hoofs.

“Smoke, Mr. Banks? I’ll just have a drag or two before I go back in with him.”

A growth of wild prickly briar climbs one side of the stall. There are no sounds within. Michael steps away, draws in his cuff, stares at the double doors — while the stableboy shoots back the bolt, slips inside. The horse stands head to the rear wall, and first he sees the streaks of the animal’s buttocks, the high point that descends to the back. Then he sees the polished outline of the legs. Then the tail.

And at the same moment, under the tail’s heavy and graying gall, and between the hind legs, he sees Hencher’s outstretched body and, nearest himself, the inert shoes, toes down.

“How do you like him, Mr. Banks? Fine horse, eh?”

“Hencher,” he whispers, “here’s Hencher!”

Together they will bury Hencher with handfuls of straw, bolt the doors, wipe their hands, and for himself there will be no cod or beef at six, no kissing her at six, no going home — not with Hencher kicked to death by the horse. And forward in the dark the neck is lowered and he sees the head briefly as it swings sideways at the level of the front hoofs with ears drawn back and great honey-colored eyes floating out to him.

She heard the distant mortuary bells. Outside, over all this part of the city, returning fathers were using their weary keys. It was time to feed the cats, the dogs, the little broken dolls. It was never luck she felt, but Margaret waited, standing beside the coal grate in which they built no fire, waited for him to hang up his hat, untie her apron strings. When Banks had first kissed her, touching the arm that was only an arm, the cheek that was only a cheek, he had turned away to find a hair in his mouth.

Feeling lucky?

In how many minutes now she would nod, smile again, sit across from him and hold her pencil and the evening five-pound crostic, she wearing no rings except the wedding band and, in her otherwise straight brown hair, touching the single deep wave which she had saved from childhood.

Now and again from out the window would come the sound of lorries, the beat of the solitary policeman’s step, the cry of a child. Later, after he had pulled the light string, she would dream of the crostics and, in the dark, men with numbers wrapped round their fingers would feel her legs, or she would lie with an obscure member of the government on a leather couch, trying to remember and all the while begging for his name. Later still the cat would come licking about for its old woman’s milk.

The asparagus was boiling finally when the telephone rang. She groped, found the instrument in the hallway, did not let the receiver touch her ear. “Yes?” And even after the first words were spoken the bell continued to ring, a mad thing ringing and ringing, trying to rouse the darkened flat.

“… the telephone’s broken,” she whispered into the cup, and her hand was shaking. Then it went out of her head suddenly, and there was only the dark terrible dustiness in the hall.

“Margaret?”

“Michael, is it you?”

“It is. Have you turned down the stove?”

“I think so, Michael.”

“And the water off?”

“I think so.”

“Good.”

“Are you all right, Michael?”

“We’re going up,” and the voice was fainter now. “We’re going up for the Aldington. There’s a hundred thousand in it. …”

“I want to come,” she said.

There was a pause. And then: “I’ve thought of that. There’s always the train. You come by train. Tonight.”

“Annie might join me if I asked her.”

“Come alone. Just come alone.”

“Yes, Michael.”

After another pause: “You’re the dear,” he said softly in the dark with traces of tenderness, and she heard the click and a child wailing somewhere down the row.

“You’re the dear,” she repeated to herself in the kitchen. But she had not turned off the stove and the asparagus was burned. She put a little water in the pot and left it. An hour later she locked the flat, went down the stoop, signaled a high-topped taxicab to carry her to the train at Dreary Station. Hurrying she gave no thought to people on the streets. She was a girl with a band on her finger and poor handwriting, and there was no other world for her. No bitters in a bar, slick hair, smokes, no checkered vests. She was Banks’ wife by the law, she was Margaret, and if the men ever did get hold of her and go at her with their truncheons or knives or knuckles, she would still be merely Margaret with a dress and a brown shoe, still be only a girl of twenty-five with a deep wave in her hair.

A wife would always ride through the night if she were bidden. Would ride through rainstorm, villages like Wimble, through woodland all night long. All of it for Michael’s sake: the station, the sign at the end of the village, the cart with the single suitcase on it, the lantern swinging beyond the unfamiliar spout, the great shadows of this countryside. It was a lonely transport, there was a loose pin under her clothes. And in this world of carriage seats, vibrations, windows rattling, she stared at the other passenger, at the woman who had called something out to her in Dreary Station and followed her aboard the train.

A sudden roll of smoke passed the windows and she saw herself, and her eyes ached and already she had been in her clothes too long. But the crostics would be waiting when she returned. “What have you done with the kiddies, Mrs. Banks?” asked the woman again.

Beyond the lights of crossings it was dark, the trees bent away from the train, and Margaret felt the wobbling tracks running over the ties, and each tie crushed under the wheels became a child. Children were tied down the length of track: she saw the toads hopping off their bodies at the first whisper of wheels, the faint rattling of oncoming rods and chains, and she saw the sparks hitting the pale heads and feet. Then the steam lay behind on the tracks and the toads returned.

“Done with them?” Margaret said. “I’ve done nothing with them. There aren’t any children.”

The handle was rattling on her valise — she had not put it in the rack — and her toes pressed against a sooty pipe. Her brown skirt was drawn down completely, cloth over anonymous knees and heavy calves. In her hand was the pink ticket. She sat backward with her shoulder blades to the whistle engine, and looking out the window, she feared this reversed and disappearing countryside.

“Oh,” said the woman and flattened her paper, “I thought you’d probably parked them with your mother.”

“No. I didn’t do anything like that.”

“Weren’t you ever parked when you were a child?”

“I don’t remember. …”

“I was. I remember it,” said the woman. “I was parked out more than I was home. For me there was nothing at the window, I used to eat my hands in the corner.”

“I don’t remember much of when I was a child,” said Margaret. She noticed then a dead wasp suspended between the window’s double sheets of glass. The train turned sharply and the overnight bag fell against her leg.

“Well,” the woman spoke up above the noise. “Well,” and coldly she reached a hand toward Margaret, “it used to be parking out for me.” The woman paused, steadied herself, the train hissed round the turn. “But that’s past. Now it’s my sister leaves her kids with me of a weekend or summer. And I’m at the good end, now.”

“All summer long?” asked Margaret.

“Some years, she does. I encourage it.” And Margaret saw the wheels flattening the heads and feet.

A signal flashed. A yellow light then red, and levers, long prongs, pig-iron fingers worked in rust out there. The train swayed and stale water splashed in the decanters. The train smelled like the inside of an old man’s hat — smelled of darkness, hair, tobacco — and the steam was up and she saw a car with its tiny lamps like match heads off in the blackness at a crossing. Were they merely waiting in the car? Or had the hand brake been set and were they kissing? Margaret felt the soot sifting into her bosom, she was breathing it down her nostrils. She wanted a wash.

“How old are they? Your sister’s, I mean … her little children.”

“Oh, young,” said the woman, and Margaret looked at her. “But not so young they won’t remember when they’ve grown. …” There were smells coming off the woman too, smells that lived on her despite the odor of coke and burning rails. Smells of shoe black and rotting lace, smells that were never killed by cleaning nor destroyed by the rain. The woman’s strong body, her clothing, her hatpins and hair — all were greased with the smells of age.

“Monica’s in the middle. Seven. She paints her nails.”

“It’s a nice name,” said Margaret, and looking up, saw the woman’s eyes like a female warden’s eyes, black, almost beside each other, set into tiny spectacles with tweezers.

There were coffins in the baggage car and all through the night she smelled the cushions with their faint odor of skin tonic and old people’s basketry and felt the woman watching her — wide-awake — and it was dark and stifling, a journey that made her muscles sore. The light began to swing on its cord.

The train had stopped. The door handle went down suddenly — after how long, she thought. Then the door opened and she saw the figure of a man who was standing on some country station ramp with the steam round his legs and a wet face. Margaret saw the night behind the man, heard the far-off ring of spanners or hammer heads against the locomotive’s high black dripping wheels at the front of the train. The man was big, heavy as a horse cart of stone; there was not a wrinkle in his trenchcoat over the shoulders, his chest was that of a boxer. He blocked the door, held it, and his head came through. Hatless, dark hair, large straight nose. In one hand was a cigarette and he flicked the ash quickly into the skirts of his coat, as if he had no business smoking on the job. He swayed, leaned, his neck was red. He looked at the woman, and then at her; there was a movement in the dark eyes.

“All right now, Little Dora?” Nerve ends crossed in his gray cheek, it was a low conservative voice for kindness or bad weather.

“Right enough,” said the woman without moving her hands. Her chin was squared. Then: “But I could do with a smoke,” she added, and turned her spectacles toward Margaret.

“You don’t mind if Little Dora takes one, do you, Miss?” He looked at Margaret, spoke to her from the empty ramp. His tie was loose and he was an impassive escort who, by chance, could touch a woman’s breast in public easily, with propriety, offending no one. “You don’t mind, Miss?” And there was nothing hushed in the voice, no laughter in the eyes, only the man’s voice itself and his rainswept cheek and the cliff of his head with the old razor nicks, to startle her.

“It’s all right, Larry, don’t push it. I can wait,” said the woman. “Seen this item, have you?” She tapped her newspaper, watched him. A short cough of the whistle swept back over them like smoke.

He leaned forward, holding the door, gripping the jamb, and the shoes were blackened, everything neat about the socks, the gray gloves were softly buttoned about the wrists and the hair was smooth. Only the hint of the tie was disreputable; it was red silk and loosened round the neck.

“I don’t mind smoking,” said Margaret quietly.

She followed them, and the man put up his collar against the wind and coldness of the night’s storm. Down the wet planking, down the train’s whole length of iron, walking and through her tears now looking at the heads asleep behind the train’s dim and dripping windows. The rain had stopped, but there was a good wind. Despite it she thought she heard laughter and, farther on, the sounds of an infant crying and sucking too. In a brace on the wall of the station master’s hut was a rusty ax; directly over the top of the engine she saw a few stars. But she was cold, so dreadfully cold.

“Bloody wild,” the man said softly into her ear.

He was on one side of her, the woman on the other. The man took hold of her arm as if to escort her firmly, safely, through a crowd of men; the woman caught her by the hand. She breathed, was filled with the smell of the fog, saw the woman dart her cigarette into the night. At the platform’s sudden edge, she saw a field sunk like iron under the stone fences, a shape that might have been a murdered horse or sheep, a brook run cold. The soot was acrid, it drove against her cheeks; the smell of oil was heavy in its packing and under it lay the faint odor of manure and wet hay and gorse.

“Feeling better?”

But she could not answer him. The wind had not disturbed his collar, he never blinked, eyelids insensitive to the rush of air.

“Larry,” the woman plucked at his sleeve, shouted, “What have you on for tomorrow?” She clutched her spectacles, the lace was torn at her throat.

“Not much,” putting his arm down upon her, round her, “sleep late … get Sparrow to do my boots … drive out to the Damps, perhaps. …”

“And come by the Roost?” she shouted.

“I’ll look in on you, Dora. …”

Then his loose red tie was caught by the wind. It came out of the coat suddenly, and the red tip beat over the mist and thistles and wind off the end of the ramp. He waited a moment and carefully shut it away again.

“Had enough?” he asked.

They took her back down to the glass-and-iron door left open in the night, and she saw that it was the correct number on the door. With his hand still on her arm, and looking in as he had at first: “I expect you’ll be wanting to see Mr. Banks tomorrow, Miss? Look sharp for him, Miss. That’s my advice,” and the woman laughed. When he stepped away, cupped his cigarette from view, once more the train began to move and the man stood waiting for his own door to be pulled abreast of him.

It was a good crowd. Margaret and the woman climbed down together. Men pushed close to the standing train and reached up, while steam boiled round their trouser legs, to tap the windows with their canes. The coffins went by on their separate trucks. Women with their stockings crooked, men with their coats wrinkled— sounds of leather, wood, laughter, and a bell still tolling. There were beef posters, hack drivers displaying their licenses, a fellow drinking from a brown pint bottle. Suddenly she felt the woman taking hold of her hand.

“Where will Michael be?” asked Margaret then, surrounded by the searching crowd. A stray dog passed after the coffins. For a moment she saw the man in the trenchcoat and his broad belt. He made a sign to the woman and, with three others dressed like himself, went under an arch to hire a car. On a wall was pasted an unillustrated poster: You Can Win If You Want To.

“Little Dora,” a young woman was calling to them, “Dora!” She had red hair, dark near the crown. Her restless fingers touched the shoulder of a child whose hair was fastened with an elastic.

“You here too?”

“For the weekend only,” the little girl’s mother said, and fluffed her hair up on one side, kissed the woman’s cheek. “But fancy you … such luck!”

“What’s footing it, Sybilline?”

“It’s the sunshine I want only,” she said, holding the small girl’s collar, “a rum, a toss, a look through a fellow’s binoculars. … Will you take her, Dora?”

And after the child had changed hands: “This is Monica,” she said to Margaret.

Margaret lost the far-off smell of grass when they went up the stairs. She had smelled it, wondered about it, sniffed it, the fresh clipped odor, the living exhalation of earth green and vast, a springtime of wet and color beyond the town’s steam baths and shops and gaming rooms and the petrol pumps wedged between shuttered houses and hotels. Out there, over the steeple, over the wires, the wash, was the great green of the racecourse: the Damps. The grass itself; several ponds; the enormous stands with flags; the oval of roses in which men were murdered and where there fluttered torn-up stubs and a handkerchief — Margaret had tasted the green and then it was gone. Now the door closed and she smelled cheap marmalade and the rubber of pharmaceutical apparatus for home use. A small trunk stood by the door to the room. The woman, Dora, had a key in her hand.

“You seem to know the place, Little Dora.”

“It’s the first time for me.”

“How then …”

“It’s like all the rest.”

The room was on the second floor. White, large, it had a closet with a sink in it. There were two brass beds covered with sheets, a picture of a girl in a lake. It was clean, but a pair of braces had been forgotten near the window.