The Night Following

Chapter 12: Grace Tries to Take a Stand

It was Grace’s eighteenth birthday, and a Saturday in July. Summer lay like a warm haze over the sleepy little corner shop. The blinds had been drawn half down over the windows to protect the contents from the sun, but still the heat burned through, sending the warm sickly smells of powdered sugar and tobacco mixed with dust into the dark stuffy air. Grace had slipped into a doze in her chair behind the counter. There had been few customers all day, perhaps because the shop did not sell ices. There was an ice-cream kiosk a few yards up past the station and Uncle Les said they couldn’t compete on price. They moved quite a few bottles of pop in this kind of weather, but in general business was slack. Nobody wanted melting chocolate, bags of sweating barley sugar, or warm, prickly twists of sherbet.

Grace didn’t care. She despised the shop and that extended to its customers, too. Three years ago she had left school and come to work in the shop full-time. Her mother very seldom served behind the counter anymore, and many of the regular customers had dropped away. Only a handful of the old gents came in for their pipe tobacco anymore and Grace was none too pleased to see even them. To her they were a bunch of stinky old men and she couldn’t be bothered making herself pleasant. She hated their wavery voices and their coughing and their shuffling feet. She hated their lips clamped over their rotten pipes, and most of all she was repelled by their hands. She couldn’t bear to take money from them in case there was an accidental brushing of their skin against hers. She placed a plate on the counter for them to drop their money into, and she paid out their change in the same way.

The women and children who came in for sweets were scarcely less offensive. Grace had strict rules about finger marks and shopping baskets on the counter, and about children taking gobstoppers out of their mouths on the premises. She put up a sign threatening the direst consequences if bicycles were left against the window or if chewing gum was dropped on the pavement.

The ringing of the shop bell woke Grace up. Uncle Les strode in, rubbing his hands.“What, not cashed up yet, young lady? Resting on our laurels, are we, and on our birthday?”

Grace glared at him, made her way over to the till, and stabbed down hard on the keys to make it open.“Won’t take long, there’s little enough to count,” she said with bitter satisfaction.

Uncle Les leaned across the counter and seized her by the wrist. “Giving me cheek, are you?” he said in a rough whisper. “Eh, but you’ve ruined me. You’re a minx and a madam,” he said through clenched teeth. “Always were.”

“You ruined me. I hate you. You’re a pig.”

“Keep your voice down, your Mam’ll hear. Is that what you want? You want me to tell her her daughter was born bad and she’s been a dirty little minx since she was eight years old? I could put the pair of you out on the street, and don’t you forget it.”

“I hate you. Anyway, Mam’s round the baker’s getting me a birthday cake,” she said. With a wail of despair in her voice, she added,“A birthday cake! Oh, happy birthday, Grace!”

Uncle Les let go of her wrist and slapped her across the face. “Your Mam doesn’t know what you are, thanks to me. It’s a mercy she can’t see you, it’s a mercy your father never had to lay eyes on you. There’s bad blood in you. So get yourself round here where I can get at you.”

“Why should I? I won’t.”

“Oh, but you will.” Uncle Les’s voice was quiet and slow. “You will, miss. Birthday or no birthday, because I say so. And don’t forget I’m doing you a favour. You’re getting past it. You’re getting too old for my tastes. Now do as you’re told.”

Grace stared at him, biting her lip, but obeyed. Uncle Les pulled down the shop blinds and locked the door. He turned back, unbuttoning his trousers, and moved towards Grace, who had seated herself up on the edge of the counter.

“Aye, you know what you are. You know what I want. And I get what I want. So let’s be having you, you hussy,” he said.

Grace parted her legs and looked away as Uncle Les pushed a hand roughly up between them.

“I’m late,” she said. Then she slapped his face, hard.

“What?” Uncle Les drew his hand away and fisted it, ready to strike her. “You bitch!”

Grace flinched for a split second and then squared up to him.“You heard. And don’t you dare lift another finger to me or I won’t care who knows. I’ll tell the whole world what you done to me.”

Uncle Les buttoned himself up, staring at her. “But I’m careful. I’ve been careful since that last time, three years ago that were. Who else have you gone with, you bitch?”

Grace smoothed down her dress and slipped off the counter with a sideways look. “I’m late. Do you want to tell my Mam I’m in the family way,” she said,“and not for the first time, neither? Or are you going to help me out?”

Uncle Les pulled her round to face him.“Are you trying to get money out of me?”

Grace gave a sour laugh. “Money? I wouldn’t touch your rotten money. No, you just have to cough up for another week outside Blackpool, that’ll do it. Call it a birthday present. Still there, is it, your nice quiet place, family run? I’m sure if it isn’t you’ll find another. Somewhere discreet. Only be quick about it.”

She twisted her arm away and picked up her bag from the corner of the counter. Quickly she pulled out a compact and dabbed her face with powder. She slung the bag over her arm, marched to the door, and unlocked it.

“Oy, where do you think you’re going? Your mother’ll be back any minute.”

“Say ta-ta for me, then,” Grace said, opening the door. “Tell her I’m not staying for tea. I’m going to the Red Lion. I’ve got friends that want to buy me a drink and wish me happy birthday. Enjoy the cake,won’t you?”

Soon after my grandmother died, my mother closed the shop and sold it to a firm of bookmakers. They bought only the ground floor and we kept the rooms above. First of all they demolished the shop front and replaced it with mysterious, opaque glass, and a flat illuminated sign. There were laws against children setting foot on premises licensed for gaming, so the bookies made us a separate door from the street, opening onto a passageway newly partitioned from the rest of the ground floor, that led to our stairs at the back. In the space of two or three days the old shop ceased to exist and the new betting shop became, to me, forbidden ground.

My mother liked it, though. When I got back from school that’s where she would usually be. I asked her once if she won money every day and she told me scathingly she didn’t go there to gamble. That would be common. She only went for a bit of company, which was the least anyone was entitled to. I found out later that in fact from time to time and for a few discreet shillings she kept the floor swept clean of discarded betting slips. She also became adept at attaching herself to the day’s winners; if she could persuade them she’d brought them their luck, as often as not she could also persuade them to take her to celebrate at the Calypso Lounge of the Commercial Hotel up the street.

The betting shop and the Calypso Lounge were within a few hundred yards of each other and I walked past them nearly every day, but I could never picture my mother actually in them. I didn’t know if that was because I never saw inside them for myself, or if I had some notion of keeping alive my grandmother’s disdain for drinking and gambling. Whatever the reason, my mother grew ever more insubstantial and puzzling. She seldom went more than half a mile beyond the radius of home, but still her life seemed conducted at too vast a distance for me to make it out clearly, like something mimed on a rickety stage very far away, tawdry and mercifully unclear.

I left school when I was fifteen and got a job in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I went to night classes in painting and drawing, starting with still lifes of fruit and the more picturesque vegetables. All my attempts were misbegotten, deformed; not once did I not regret my despoliation of the white paper, not once did I prefer what I had done to its insensate purity before a mark had been laid upon it. Yet even as my efforts failed, images poured into my mind’s eye and I tried to catch them and set them down with watery brushstrokes or with wiry, silvered turns of my pencil. I filled sheets and sheets with seashells, feathers, bark, clouds, grasses. Some were painted from life, and others were either remembered or dreamed, I do not know; all were phantoms, lit by the gleam of white paper beneath. One tutor described my work as uncommitted and dismissive of basic tonal values, but I didn’t see those as faults. Another graded me poorly for putting both the observed and the imagined together in the same pictures, but I couldn’t see that there was a difference. Even if there was, was one more real than the other? Nor could I be persuaded to paint anything alive or moving.

So my mother and I continued for a time, living not together but side by side, doing all that we could, through some sort of kindness, to erase each other. By the time I was nineteen she was often drunk for days at a time, venturing no further than across the rolling seas of her own floors and negotiating her way with arms outstretched for the next anchor post of furniture. One day she fell against a small table, hit her head on the edge of the fireplace, and gashed her leg on a metal ashtray that was knocked off in the crash. I came back from the art shop to find her lying in her dressing gown on the yellow linoleum in the passageway. A ragged red trail of smears and drips reached behind her all the way back up the stairs. She had tried to drag herself as far as the street and given up, and when she’d thumped on the partition wall nobody in the betting shop had heard her above the television’s live relay of the afternoon’s racing from Sandown.

The ambulance took a long time. While we waited I cradled her in my lap and pressed my scarf, the only thing to hand, against the wound on her head. I wasn’t alarmed when she lost consciousness. I was too alert, all my attention taken by the sound of the racing commentary that floated on through the wall in an absurd, unvarying cycle, dignity ending in indignity, the man’s voice starting so measured, and then losing control and rising finally to that nervy, screaming finish. Was he not ashamed of his hysteria, did he not know that there was something ridiculous in such public, repetitive, and climactic excesses?

My mother’s hip and a number of ribs were broken and her bones were slow to heal. In the hospital her feet and hands turned blue and she stopped speaking. Bruises burst out in purple plumes all over her. She got a lung infection and then she died. Her absence joined my grandmother’s as a kind of added weight inside me that I was afraid I would carry for the rest of my life. My pictures grew paler and more ghostly still, and I got married.

Dear Ruth

I’m rather disturbed by the last bit of your story, I must say. How could you think up that kind of thing? I had no idea your mind worked that way. It’s not going to get any closer to the bone, is it? You weren’t going to publish it under your own name, were you?

There must have been many times before now, times in the old way I mean, when I heard you about the place, downstairs or in the next room, but it was different then. I could hear where you were, and usually I could tell what you were doing, but it meant nothing. Not then. Why is it so different now?

And there’s another thing about this new way of ours. In the old way I actually saw you, every day I actually saw you for real. Now in the new way I don’t, not actually-yet you are clearer and more real to me than ever you were.

Now I see you, Ruth. I do see you. In my way.

Fondly

Arthur

PS Ruth I remember you at Overdale Lodge, the first time, the first evening, the first year. How you looked then is how I see you now.

Did it really happen as neatly as that, my mother died and I got married? Of course not. Her dying was lurid and protracted. For those weeks in the hospital I was her only visitor, after the manager and a couple of the punters from the betting shop had dropped in, and day by day I sat studying her decline and hoping to get from her-exactly how I did not know, since she had given up on speech-some admission that it was unreasonable to expect me to bear so great a strain alone. I brought fruit she would not eat. I brought magazines to read aloud to her in which she took not the slightest interest. Soon, rather than just sit staring at her, I ate the grapes and read the magazines myself at the bedside while she lay with her eyes either blank and open, or closed, probably more to escape me than to invite sleep. After a few weeks of this my vigil began to feel like an effort that should be rewarded by her consenting to be dead by the next time I looked up. It wasn’t absolutely that I wanted her to die, I just felt that for both our sakes she ought to, before I could be found even more wanting.

It went on. Every day I agreed with the nurses that she was turning out to be “quite a fighter,” while privately I thought her remaining alive had nothing to do with tenacity or strength but was more a failure of skill and application. She hated life, so surely it was obtuse of her to be quite so lacking in ambition to get it over with? She deteriorated, but lingered. For another month, death loomed just beyond her reach like an accomplishment she had yet to acquire.

It was after she finally died that I met Jeremy-or, to be more accurate, that he noticed me. He was a houseman then. While she was alive he hadn’t taken any particular interest in either of us. We had met once over a brief assessment of her condition, conducted at the end of her bed, during which his eyes had been fixed either on her feet or on his notes. He spoke in my hearing, not to me, with no apparent concern about whether or not I was listening. I only came to his attention afterwards, when I was having trouble leaving the hospital.

On the day after my mother’s funeral I went back to the ward to give the nurses some of the flowers. The moment I walked back into its high white space and pungent smell, I realized how much I missed the routine of my daily visits: greeting the nurses, reporting to my mother on the weather, removing fruit too far gone, tidying her hair. I missed the sense of purpose I’d felt witnessing her descent, however starkly it had revealed my own shortcomings; what was I supposed to do now? I missed not so much my mother as the care that had been taken of her: the nurses’ firmly timetabled administrations of drugs and fluids, and towards the end, their optimistic, hour-by-hour regime for her comfort in the absence of any hope of her recovery. The ward was the only place I knew where kindness had not failed, and I did not belong there anymore.

Everyone said it was good of me to drop in with the flowers, everyone said they were lovely but they were a bit too busy to see to them straightaway. I volunteered to put them in water myself-goodness, didn’t I know where the vases were kept by this time!-and when I had done that I saw two or three patients without visitors whose flowers also needed freshening up. I stayed two hours. I had noticed how short of vases the ward was so the next day I took some in, along with a bottle of hand lotion that one of the patients had mentioned her sister had forgotten to get for her. I popped out on an errand for another, to buy a hair net, and then stayed to chat for a while. Over the next two or three weeks I found the nurses too busy to take much notice of me, but the patients seemed glad to see me. I listened to medical sagas of endurance and suffering, I listened to complaints about their visitors and those who failed to visit. I changed library books, peeled apples, wrote in crossword clues, posted letters; nothing was too much trouble. Next to the patients I appeared perfectly cheerful and somehow whole, and they didn’t seem to realize that I wasn’t really a kind person at all.

One day as I was leaving, Jeremy was also waiting for the lift. I was pleased he was there because its sequence of hums and clicks and whines, the little mechanical fanfare announcing my ejection from the ward for the night, sounded less lonely with someone beside me. Already I was missing the lulling hospital sounds: trolleys, soft treading feet, the swish of curtains drawn around beds. He stared at the lift doors, I studied him. His shoulders, but also something in his face, gave him a burdened air.

“Hi. Just off?” he said.

I nodded. He nodded back. “People often do find it difficult,” he said rather nicely. “I mean after.”

“After what?” I said, and he blushed.

The lift arrived and we travelled down. At the bottom he asked for my telephone number. Three days later he took me out for a drink and talked about himself. As I listened, I was thinking that even if burdened he looked, in the way doctors can, becalmed by responsibility. Despite the junior doctor pallor and slumped shoulders, he exuded enough certainty about life to deal with whatever might be waiting for me “after,” beyond the ward; he had a forward-going force that I knew I lacked. And he seemed an intrepid person-indeed the very practice of medicine was to me intrepid in itself: all those intimate, dreadful incursions into other people’s bodies, how did he ever dare? When he said that he intended to specialize in anaesthesia, I knew he wouldn’t let me feel a thing. It was the most seductive promise he could have made, to keep me benumbed.

What did I offer in return? Nothing really, of any visible value, perhaps nothing at all beyond my self as a prepared and willing surface for the marital textures of stasis and familiarity, an implicit pledge that I would spring no surprises. Two years later I entered marriage gratefully. It was like stepping into a clean white room whose door Jeremy held open and then closed quietly behind us.

For most of the rest of that night I drifted through Arthur’s house. Eventually I lay down on the sofa and drew in a long, stifling breath that made me wonder if I was taking in water rather than air, and indeed if I should not prefer to be drowning rather than falling asleep. It seemed that I was staring into dark water from a raft, alive but not quite rescued, and afloat slightly reluctantly. My eyes began to sting. I wanted Arthur with me.