Monday Lunch in Fairyland and Other Stories Page 10

  ‘Nothing, nothing thank you,’ said Tom, alarmed. It worried him that he should look ill: everything worried him.

  The next morning, an unusual event took place. Mr Lewis, whom normally he only saw about once a month, entered the room without knocking. Tom’s hand jolted, spilling gold paint on to his trousers. Quickly, he stood.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Tom.’ Mr Lewis patted a book under his arm. Tom, seeing its title, was incredulous. It was the new volume of colour plates he had received yesterday morning – £10 it had cost him. He had imprudently brought it to work to look at in his lunch hour so that he could report on it to Jack that night. But a few pages had depressed him, brought on his asthma. He had hidden it behind some frames, meaning to take it home, and had returned to work on a particularly valuable frame. Mr Lewis tapped the book again.

  ‘Sir,’ said Tom. Fire burned under the flesh of his face and his eyeballs scorched. Mr Lewis looked very sad.

  ‘Not here, Tom,’ he said. ‘Please, not here.’

  He put the book on the table and was gone.

  Tom stood quite still for a few moments, not knowing what to do. Seared with shame he had never experienced or imagined before, a trembling that began in his knees spread over the rest of his body. Blindly, he reached for a scrap of paper, scribbled an almost illegible note of resignation, put on his coat and slipped out of the shop the back way. He left all his tools, paints and brushes behind. The Lewises, whom he had respected for many years, would never see him again and, at his age, there would be no other jobs.

  At home, stupefied, he lit the kitchen fire and proceeded to burn every one of the loathesome books and pictures that he had collected. By evening they were all ashes. He hurried to the Cock to meet Jack.

  ‘What’s up, mate?’ asked Jack, seeing his friend unusually bright of eye, and with two red spots on his cheeks. ‘Hit you at last, has it?’

  ‘Jack,’ cried Tom. ‘Jack, what have you done to me?’ He fell against the bar. Jack supported his arm, saying there, there, everything’s all right, mate.

  But Tom pulled himself away from Jack, turned, and shouted: ‘No, it’s not all right, Jack Grass. It’s not. I never imagined, in all my days, I’d sink to this . . .’

  He heard his own voice, distant and hollow. He ran to the door, stumbling against people, aware that he was causing a scene, that people turned their heads and stared. He ran most of the way home, realising that would be the last he would see of Jack, as well as the Lewises. Coughing from the exertion of it all, he struggled for breath and felt a cold, clammy sweat coursing down his limbs.

  Tom went to bed late that night. He was much weakened by the attack of asthma: weakened and appalled. He let his eyes wander round the cracked old room, stripped of Lily’s things now, murky by the light of the dim lamp on the bedside table. Then he took the photograph of Lily from under his mattress, where he had hidden it the night she died. There she was, smiling still, hair blowing in the wind by the front gate, hands screwed up in her apron pocket. He touched her face with his finger and put out the light.

  In the dark the image of her continued to shine, a tangible thing. He lay the photograph under the jacket of his pyjamas, its cool glass on his heart, and pulled the hard sheets up round his chin.

  Quite suddenly, he heard himself cry out loud for Lily’s forgiveness. At once a warmth flowed back into his body. Then he smiled to himself, as he used to last thing at night when Lily was alive, knowing he would sleep.

  Maternity

  He’d brought no present, nothing. The prefabricated stall outside the hospital reminded Romilly of his forgetfulness. He chose a small bunch of expensive freesias. She would know, of course. She would know by the scrap of brown paper they were wrapped in they had come from the hospital steps. She would remember he was like that.

  On the long journey to her room the muted smells of disinfectant, ether and polished linoleum gathered in squalls about him and made him feel sick. He wondered if he should look for a lavatory. But there was nobody about to ask. Dizzily, he spun a complete circle on his heels, a trick he had learnt as a child, a trick that had driven his mother to high-pitched screams of annoyance. The floor of the corridor felt mushy. He knew his heels must have made dents. Luckily, nobody had seen. He pressed the button of the lift, dreading its arrival. He might well have chosen the wrong lift, the one that took trolleys of corpses down to the mortuary.

  It was empty of corpses, just the slightest smell of death, and took him to her floor. Private, of course. Plenty of nurses starching about in their small black shoes, there, thermometers like wicked fingers sticking out of their breast pockets. One of them stopped and asked Romilly if she could help. Her white hand fluttered round her cap. He wondered how many purple bloody heads she had pulled from how many gaping wombs with those hands. She asked him again. He gave the name. Ah, she said, you must be the lucky father. He followed her, silently, to the room.

  Jane sat in the high bed propped up by a mound of white pillows. Staring, blaring white they were. The whitest pillows he had ever seen. A bed in a greenhouse. For all around her were flowers, a hundred pounds’ worth of flowers, bright expensive colours, their heads bowed down by their own heavy scents. Pot plants whose earth had been disguised by moss: miniature rock gardens with dwarf trees. Bows round vases. Messages tied to bows. Bows tied to messages trailing from veinous leaves. Romilly’s feeling of nausea returned – the travel-sickness of one whose eyes lurch through a jungle.

  ‘Hello, Romilly,’ Jane said, and her eyes fell to the brown paper bunch in his hand.

  He heard the door close behind him. He sniffed the tide of terrible flowers. He took two paces to the end of her bed, and held on to the white iron rail.

  She was unnaturally propped up. Perhaps she needed to be. Perhaps having children – or at any rate your first child – did something to your back. Made it weak. Made it so that you needed pillows to keep you upright. Yes, she must be very weak. Etiolated face, white as the pillows, ashy under the eyes. Something had happened to her breasts. They seemed to have been propped up, too. Bolstered, padded, or something. Their upper curves were also tinged with the prevailing whiteness. Blueveined. Vast blue veins, an aerial map of trunk roads. She never used to have blue veins or this white skin. He often told her she was the colour of a free-range egg. Speckled. Lovely speckled breasts that weren’t caught up in slings like this. And brown arms, all year round, and capable hands. Even they were pale now, lying on the sheet stiff and helpless. She had scraped her hair back, a thing she had never done even in the rain. It was tied with red ribbon. The ends of the ribbon lay against the pillow, streaks of blood.

  ‘Well, do I look so terrible?’

  “Course not.’

  ‘I’d like a kiss, then.’ She patted the sheet with her useless hand. Romilly went to her, bent over, kissed her on the temple. He could smell warm milk. She used to smell of salt winds and grass after rain.

  ‘Sit down, go on. Don’t look so awkward.’ He sat on the upright chair beside her bed. Put the flowers on the floor. ‘It’s lovely, your coming,’ she said, ‘but you’ve been a long time.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You were the second person I rang.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He smiled a little, listened to the silence between them. ‘I can’t remember . . . what you said it was.’

  ‘Romilly! Really. You are a dopey old thing. I told you quite clearly. A boy. Orlando.’

  ‘Oh yes. I knew it was some funny name. Is he all right?’

  ‘Of course he’s all right. He’s absolutely marvellous. Beautiful, in fact. No, really. Everybody says he looks exactly like . . . Sorry, Rom,’ she added.

  Romilly looked through the density of flowers to the grey sticks of high-rise flats beyond the window.

  ‘Was it quite easy? Not too agonising?’ Once, he’d imagined she’d give birth to his child under a haystack. Lying on tarpaulin. A warm day, the smell of h
arvest, no pain, very easy. He would have been calm and helpful.

  “Course it was easy, a cinch. What do you think I am? He started in the middle of the night. Quite bearable pains, so we waited till after breakfast till coming in here.’

  Romilly listened to her voice as she told of the birth. (Geoffrey, as he might have guessed, hadn’t been there.) Her voice was the same. Maybe that was one thing birth didn’t change, voices. It chopped up and down, changing pace in its funny way, just as it used to on the boat, a small murmur against the waves so he would have to ask her to shout. She was quite capable of shouting. Braced squarely against the wind, brown hand resting on the boom, she could shout against the waves all right.

  ‘And you – what have you been doing?’ As usual, when she’d exhausted stories about herself, she remembered to ask about him.

  ‘Nothing’s changed. Quite a heavy lambing season.’

  ‘Still got the boat?’

  ‘Still got the boat.’

  ‘I miss the boat. We don’t sail.’

  ‘No.’ He paused, thinking of things to tell her that would please. ‘Oh yes. One bit of news, I suppose you could call it. I’m putting in an Aga.’

  ‘Taking my advice at last,’ she laughed.

  She had said so many times they should have an Aga. It was the only thing she had asked for in three years. It would make all the difference to the stone kitchen, she had pointed out. Take the slate-chill off the shelves and floor. She had been right, of course, but Romilly had always been reluctant to make swift changes. He liked their evenings poking at the surly fire, encouraging the logs to flare through the smoke. He liked the long ceremony of the lighting, the eggs and bacon fried in the iron pan over the eventual flames. It occurred to him, too late, he should have made his decision sooner.

  ‘I suppose you have all mod cons, now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. We do rather have that sort of house.’ She was honest, as always, but apologetic. ‘Did you come up from Cardiff by train?’ Romilly nodded. ‘That was awfully extravagant of you, Rom, coming all that way just to –’

  ‘What’s happened to your breasts?’ he asked.

  Jane looked down at the swelling lace frills beneath her chin. Slight colour came to her cheeks.

  ‘They get like that when you have a baby.’

  ‘They didn’t used to be like that, I remember.’

  He remembered her moon flesh under night skies, cold on the mountains. They never slept in the tent. No – he would open her to the cold, clamp his mouth over each part of her. Slow, nudging movements of his tongue that made her writhe, and made the earth beneath her move like the sea. Now that she’d had a child . . . would she want all that? He remembered the dew, mornings, on her sleeping face and hair; the promises they’d made each other in midday bracken, that this simple life would never change. Neither had wanted change, then. They had no need of other things.

  Her hand hovered above a bell.

  ‘Would you like to see him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Orlando.’ She said the name as if already she was used to it.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Perhaps I won’t show him to you. You’d just say he was like all babies, which he isn’t.’

  ‘All right.’ He had intended for her sake to say yes, he would like to see it. Instead he touched her hand and asked the question he had been determined not to ask.

  ‘If I’d given up the life we had, and offered you all this, would you have said yes?’

  ‘Oh, Rom.’ She laughed lightly, protected as she was from him by her new state of motherhood. ‘You were the most lovable adventure I’ve ever had. Ever, ever. Honestly. But you never made any suggestions about permanency. That was part of the adventure. Permanency might have spoiled it.’

  Romilly nodded, reflecting upon himself as an adventure. To him, it had been ordinary, perfect life.

  ‘Nor I did. It might have, yes. You’re right. Is marriage to Geoffrey a good adventure?’ He managed to keep his voice quite flat.

  Jane smiled, pausing while she thought up a comparison he would understand.

  ‘A life-long cruise on an ocean liner,’ she said, ‘rather than one of our jaunts in a precarious little sailing boat.’

  Romilly appreciated her care.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no one else. So far.’

  ‘But there will be. A beautiful Welsh wife who will sing over the new Aga.’ The gaiety of her voice hurled him away from her. She should give up trying to make it easy. ‘Next time you come up, won’t you come and see us? Could you bear to? I mean, I don’t think you’d hate Geoffrey, exactly.’

  ‘I don’t come up very often.’

  ‘No. I suppose you’re too busy. The farm and everything.’ Her voice faltered. Romilly scraped his chair back from the bed, sensing danger. He watched as she untied her hair for him. It fell darkly about her shoulders. It made her face so familiar that a physical pain burnt through him.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  She shrugged. He smiled – weak, desirous. ‘Can I see your breasts, too?’

  She paused.

  ‘No. I’d like you to remember them as they were. Besides someone might come in.’

  Romilly took his hand from hers.

  ‘Do you ever think of those days in the mountains? At sea? I can never remember our being in rooms, except the kitchen when it snowed. Some people might say you were a bloody fool, leaving.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Rom. You promised you wouldn’t mention any of that.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Jane glanced at the clock at her bedside, a battered brass thing with bells each side of its face like earphones. The only present he had ever given her, bought in the local market. It had never failed to wake them. They would wake just long enough to register the pleasure of returning to sleep in a new, entwined position.

  ‘Time for me to go?’ he asked.

  She smiled uneasily.

  ‘Visiting hours are any time in this sort of place,’ she said, apologetic again. ‘Geoffrey comes in every evening on his way back from the office.’

  ‘I’d better go, then.’

  ‘They’ll be bringing Orlando in for his evening feed any minute.’

  ‘I’ve got to catch the seven-ten, anyway.’

  ‘That means you’ll be back dreadfully late.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you in a lot of well-ordered rooms,’ Romilly said, standing. ‘In a real house with carpets.’

  ‘I like it. We all change. We grow up.’

  ‘We don’t all change. And we can’t all give up things to fit in with other people’s growing up, however much we may love them.’

  Jane frowned, careless.

  ‘Don’t let’s get into one of those conversations, please don’t let’s.’

  ‘No.’ Those sort of reflections, now, were unnecessary to her. He could understand. He bent down, kissed her on the temple again. She shifted, a sudden movement she would make when some new idea sprung her with enthusiasm.

  ‘Listen, would you like to be a godfather? I’m sure Geoffrey –’

  ‘No – for Christ’s sake.’ He went to the door.

  ‘I only meant to show you that I . . . Oh, don’t go away looking so furious, Rom. You didn’t used to take things the wrong way, did you?’

  ‘Be a good mother,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you will.’

  ‘Romilly!’

  He left quickly.

  On the train back to Wales he leaned against the black window. He remembered he had left the bunch of flowers on the floor, but didn’t care. It had been a bad idea, the visit. Hadn’t worked out as he had planned. Things rarely did. In future, he wouldn’t make plans. He sniffed at the rough sleeve of his jersey. It smelt of warm milk, the milk with which she was to feed someone else’s child. Suddenly, he could not remember why it was not his. Nor, in the following weeks, as spring came to the Welsh hills, could he precisely re-envisage Jane’s present whiteness, the bulging softness t
hat had come to her with maternity. He recalled only that she had changed, and was glad that his child – their child – had not been the cause of that change. Against all facts she remained in his mind the girl he had loved, the girl he had lost through his inability to see what she required beyond the life she had seen as adventure. He didn’t blame her: his own way of seeing the enemy within was not much understood. He tried to convince himself that she was happy with her kind of permanency. For his part, farming his land, sailing their boat for the first time without her, he occasionally allowed himself to think of the years they had had, and found himself reasonably content with his.

  Mind of her Own

  ‘Think the big one’ll win, Jack?’

  ‘Chancey.’

  ‘Small one looks as if he could do with a square meal.’

  ‘Wiry, though. Muscle through and through.’ Jack Lee tapped his thigh through his office trousers. ‘Here, budge up, will you? You’re cramping my style.’

  Alice had slumped a little towards her husband’s end of the sofa. She remembered the old days. ‘Here, snuggle up a bit, Al. Keeps the chill out,’ he used to say then. But that was twenty-eight years ago. Then, she would give him her hand. He would squeeze it, a passionless pressure that would cause no look of alarm in the eyes of his parents, who chaperoned Jack and Alice for five years while they waited, in their uncertainty, to marry. Now, she shifted her position obediently so that there should be a few more inches between them.

  Co-operation was pale yellow in Alice Lee’s mind. A primrose yellow, to be precise, sometimes almost metallic: a colour that started in her head, flowed down through her body filling it with warmth and making her limbs waxy, deliquescent, so that her movements, to onlookers, would sometimes appear clumsy. Most days Alice experienced these yellow sensations in some measure. The fact that she was used to them in no way diminished their rewards. They represented an inexplicable happiness that was her only secret, her only area of absolute privacy.

  Alice Lee was born a good woman. As her friends said, there was no trace of malice in her. When all around her bitched and snarled, she remained full of charity. As far as she could tell – as she often laughingly said – the Lord had forgotten to plant in her any form of neurosis. In appreciation of this blessing she was a willing listener and adviser to many friends and neighbours. And as a wife and mother, Alice was conscientious and sympathetic. She put her family’s interests always before her own, and thus never had the time to doubt that this was the best thing for herself. But for all her virtues, Alice ran no risk of being saintly. Sometimes, evenings like this, when Jack sat in front of the television thinking out loud about his day in the insurance office (he didn’t require any response), Alice would find her concentration wandering far away from her husband’s problems. Staring at the wrestling match before her eyes, she would see instead the woods of her childhood where she and her brother Sam would gather birds’ nests and blow the pale eggs. Next best, she would let herself become enveloped in what she called her Brontë cloud: magically, she would turn into Jane Eyre at that climactic moment when Mr Rochester sees her through his veils of blindness. Not that she ever wanted Jack to be blind, of course. Alice would rouse herself guiltily, glancing at her muttering husband, important things on his mind. He was a fine, healthy man, for all his years of desk work. But in some strange way he’d never given her the thrill – not even in their earliest days, picnicking Sundays on Box Hill – that in her view Mr Rochester had given Jane Eyre.