Nowhere Girl Page 9

  His film was ready for distribution and he was out of work. It didn’t suit him. He hated the forced idleness of the days, the fact that there was nowhere he had to be by ten o’clock. A company was negotiating tentatively about a documentary in Mexico, but the negotiations required no more than a couple of telephone calls a week. So Joshua fretted, chain-smoked, read quantities of magazines but never a book. The only time he was at peace was when he carved. In the last week he had made a set of wooden chessmen.

  The number he dialled didn’t answer. He banged back the receiver, exasperated.

  ‘It’s a loathsome day,’ he said. Last night, only slightly drunk, we had danced together after dinner, and had fallen back on to the sofa where he sat now, laughing at nothing in particular.

  ‘Why?’ He didn’t answer. I sat beside him and put my hand on his thigh.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he said. I didn’t move my hand so he picked it up, like an impatient housewife who has found some object in the wrong place, and thrust it back at me ‘I said leave me alone.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I felt myself irritating him.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. I must go.’ He got up. I stood too.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To see people. I must hurry things.’ He looked at me distractedly, and rubbed his fist down my nose. ‘Sorry. I’m hopeless when I’m not working.’ He left quickly, banging the front door behind him. After he’d gone I remembered that to-day was the day of Mrs Fox’s party for him. But as I didn’t know where he would be, there was no way of reminding him.

  *

  I was last to arrive at Mrs Fox’s party. She met me eagerly at the door, expecting Joshua to be with me.

  ‘I was just telling the others,’ she said, when she saw that he wasn’t, ‘that I couldn’t for the life of me remember how old he was.’

  The others sat in a semi-circle of peculiarly assorted chairs. They looked as if they’d been sitting for some time, waiting for something to happen.

  I was introduced. First, Cedric Plummer. Huge, kind face, and R.S.P.C.A. badge pinned to his plum satin-type tie. His wife, Nancy, had obviously had her hair in rollers all the morning. It rippled all over her head in curls still dented by kirby-grips.

  ‘We’ve come up from Epsom,’ she said. Beside her sat an enormous old woman, Mrs Plummer senior, who was vigorously enjoying the awesome introductions. She stood up, shook my hand with amazing ferocity, said: ‘Don’t mind me, dear,’ and sat down again with the supreme confidence of an experienced party-goer. In contrast, Mrs Bell, from Highgate, cowered at the introduction, sniffling well back into the arms of her chair.

  ‘Handkerchief,’ Mrs Fox whispered to me, smiling. I remembered her story about her sister’s friend whose flat smelt. Mrs Bell it was, I suppose.

  The mixing of the generations at the party was provided by Philip Cox and his girl-friend Liz. Philip was the talented young baker who had made and elaborately iced the pink and white birthday cake that stood among crêpe paper flowers on the centre table. Mrs Fox was proud of Philip. He, like Mrs Plummer senior, seemed to be at ease with party situations.

  ‘Seeing as I’ve rustled up that little cake for your old man,’ he said, ‘I think the least you should do is come and tell me whether I was right to take a risk on marzipan.’ He had beautifully greased hair whipped into waves neat and matching as the iced scallops on the cake. His girlfriend, Liz, watched him continually with harshly made-up eyes, her mouth smiling at everything he said.

  The room itself was transformed into a premature Christmas room. Scarlet balloons hung from the empty canary cage, paper chains looped round the brass bedhead, and countless well preserved Alexandra Rose Day roses and Poppy Day poppies were Sellotaped to the walls, the curtains, and the table cloth. There were plates of fatly stuffed bridge-rolls, and intricate things that smacked of Philip’s art: pastry tarts spiralling with cream, chocolate eclairs studded with silver balls and a wild choice of brightly iced buns. Two rows of neat cups painted with dragons stood waiting for tea. Orange paper napkins matched the orange of the dragons’ tongues. It was ten to five by the clock on the mantelpiece.

  I joined the semi-circle, sitting between Mrs Plummer senior and Mrs Bell.

  It’s a pity more people don’t do birthdays so well any more these days,’ said Mrs Plummer, looking hungrily at the cakes. ‘When I was young, birthdays were real birthdays.’ Opposite us, Philip and Liz twirled little fingers. She nodded towards them. ‘These days, birthdays don’t mean anything to people like those. There’s no respect left for sentiment in the world.’

  ‘But Philip made that magnificent cake,’ I said. He heard, and winked at me. Liz scowled.

  ‘Ah, yes, but that’s his profession,’ said Mrs Plummer. ‘Quite different.’ Her son leant forward and smiled peacefully.

  ‘Mother has her own views, don’t you, Mother?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Like there was the little matter of Mrs Fox’s canary, wasn’t there?’ went on Cedric.

  ‘Ced, don’t get on to that again,’ said Nancy.

  ‘There was,’ said Mrs Plummer senior, ‘indeed.’

  Cedric pulled himself up to his full sitting height, fingered his R.S.P.C.A. badge, and lowered his mouth.

  ‘I won’t go into all that again,’ he said. ‘Not here. It’s not the time or the place. But I would just like to say this. If a canary owner wants to let his, or for that matter her, canary go – then what I say is: he or she should do what he or she feels. Now in the case of our friend Mrs Fox, here, she felt that her particular canary wasn’t suited to cage life. She observed that it was pining. So what did she do? Quite simple. Let it out. Gave it its head. Gave it its chance for freedom.’

  ‘Wicked,’ snapped his mother. ‘Sheer murder, letting it out to be pecked to death by the wild birds of London.’

  ‘Wicked,’ agreed Mrs Bell, suddenly lively.

  ‘Mother? snapped Nancy, ‘what did you promise us about keeping your views to yourself at a party?’

  Mrs Plummer slumped at her daughter-in-law’s tone, suddenly deflated.

  ‘And my son an inspector of a wonderful society,’ she sighed, almost to herself. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ She nudged me to come closer to her. ‘The thing is,’ she whispered, stretching her hand across her huge stomach, ‘once you’ve had your operation, there’s nothing to fall back on.’

  Liz, bored, somehow managed to hear the confidence and laughed nastily. She glanced at the clock. Ten past five.

  ‘Your old man’s certainly waiting to make his entrance,’ she said.

  Mrs Fox came in from the kitchen, her hands clenched at her sides as they had been the day Edith died. She caused silence. Everybody looked at her, waiting for some decision.

  ‘I’ve just put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘I expect Joshua will be here by the time it’s ready. He’s probably been held up at work.’ She looked to me for confirmation.

  ‘I expect so.’ I sounded unconvincing.

  ‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ said Liz. ‘I’m parched.’ She managed to make everything she said sound accusing.

  ‘Yes, that would be very nice,’ agreed Mrs Plummer senior, trying again.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Mrs Bell.

  ‘Just what we all wanted you to say, Mrs Fox.’ Cedric rubbed his hands together, natural master of ceremonies.

  Mrs Fox went away. I went with her. In the tiny kitchen her hands trembled on the dragon teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl.

  ‘I expect he’s been held up,’ she said again.

  ‘I’m very sorry. He’s always vague about time.’

  ‘Never mind, we’ll start without him and just leave cutting the cake till he comes.’

  We went back to the room with the tea. The silence of the waiting people oppressed Mrs Fox immediately. She suggested music, and put on the gramophone. A Strauss waltz blared through the room. Philip and Liz made faces. But protected by the music, there was
no need for Mrs Fox to make any announcement. She gestured to everyone to come and help themselves. With the exception of Cedric, who was determined to show his enjoyment in spite of the music, they lumbered to the table unco operatively. They stacked their small dragon plates high with food and returned to the chairs they had come from. Mrs Fox and I poured the tea.

  ‘Lazy lot,’ she whispered. ‘You can never rely on people to have a sense of occasion.’

  Mrs Fox, eating and drinking nothing herself, looked after her guests with great thought. She stirred Mrs Bell’s tea because her hand shook too much to do it herself. She saved the last pink iced bun for Nancy because Nancy was fond of pink. She found a packet of cigarettes for Liz, a chain-smoker, who had none. The music gave them the excuse for no conversation and they ate very quickly. Soon all the food was finished and a second pot of tea made. Then the record came to an end.

  ‘Well,’ said Cedric, in charge again now that he could be heard, ‘that only leaves the cake.’

  Twenty to six on the clock. Still no Joshua. No sound of steps on the stairs.

  ‘So it does.’ Mrs Fox feigned some sort of amazement and gave a small laugh. She looked at her audience while they waited for her again to make a decision. ‘Perhaps we should have just one more record …’ Mrs Plummer senior put her huge hands on her huge parted knees.

  ‘Mrs Fox, I don’t want to speak out of turn, but speaking for myself I should say that our guest of honour isn’t going to honour us after all and we should cut the cake.’

  Liz applauded ostentatiously and laughed her nasty laugh. The others joined in the laughter without much reluctance, even Cedric.

  ‘A splendid idea,’ he said. ‘How about me doing the cutting? Seeing as I’m the man nearest to the age of the absent guest of honour.’

  But Mrs Fox was terse with indignation.

  ‘Certainly not,’ she snapped. ‘If Joshua’s not here, the poor man, because of hard work, then Clare shall cut the cake.’

  She thrust a long knife at me. The handle was ivory, carved with a lion’s head.

  ‘The sort of thing Henry’s patients left him in their wills,’ she whispered.

  I tapped at the icing with the long pointed blade. Suddenly, it was a familiar sensation. With a long pointed blade I had tapped at rock-hard white icing on a cake high with monstrous tiers. Richard Storm’s hand, cold and bony, had been on top of mine, guiding. As the knife weighed down, splitting first the icing then slicing faster down through the marzipan and cheap, eggless substance packed with currants, tidy velvet people with feather hats cheered and murmured, and naval men grunted. A new batch of tears slid down my mother’s mauve cheeks. I felt my nose prick with sweat, and I felt the burn of indigestion from two glasses of cut-price champagne – my father had always believed in the economics of bulk buying, even for his daughter’s wedding

  ‘Ah!’ Richard was saying over and over again, through my veil. ‘Ah! What now? What now?’ I suggested that we should get away quickly. But he said no, he was enjoying the party: it wasn’t every day a man got married.

  Hours later, we left, through squawking crowds who threw paper petals in our faces. In the taxi that drove us to the station Richard’s hand crept over the seat towards my red tweed thigh.

  ‘We’re married now, you know,’ I said, trying to smile, ‘there’s no need to be so cautious.’ My voice was high and thin and far away. I covered my hand with his and immediately his fingers wriggled free and scrabbled for protection somewhere up my cuff.

  ‘Slowly does it, my love,’ he said, and coughed.

  I looked at his translucent face, a map of blue broken veins on the high cheeks, the eyes dim and weak, the handsome pointed nose, the pale lips always lined with an inner rim of saliva – the face of a complete stranger. I heard myself give a great sob. His fingers climbed down my cuff again and clutched my wristwatch instead.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. I expect I’m tired. It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?’ He frowned and I sobbed again. ‘And you’ve only kissed me twice since we’ve been engaged.’ That was nothing to do with the matter, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

  ‘Is that what’s worrying you, little one? But we’ve all the time in the world. We’ll make up for it, now. All you have to do is love, honour and obey me in bed, and it’ll be quite easy, you’ll see.’ He laughed at his own joke and gave me a stiff white handkerchief for my eyes.

  In the two raining weeks in a Dorset cottage that was our honeymoon, we did make up for my nineteen years of virginity. Every night, among sheets that remained damp even when they were warm, in the dark. Crudely, inadequately. There was no pleasure. It hurt. His wet mouth kissed my temples, never my mouth. He rubbed his long cold feet up and down my legs to warm them. He rocked with horrible noises, holding my ears as if they were handles. Sometimes, I sang to myself till he had finished. Sometimes I tried to remember all the people who had been at the wedding, or all the books I had read that year. When it was over, he snapped the light on again, sat up, and took a thin piece of string from the bedside table. Then he would tie knots until he felt sleepy – minute reef knots, Granny knots, sheetbend knots. He could tie smaller, neater knots faster than anyone he knew, he said. He had learnt the art as a boy, and never tired of it.

  *

  I cut easily through the pink and white icing and Mrs Fox took over, chopping the cake into hunks that would keep even her guests going for some time. She put on another record. The eaters couldn’t complain because their mouths were so stuffed with cake, which they scooped up with spoons.

  *

  My second wedding cake was eaten with spoons, too. At one hack with the knife the fragile chocolate icing parted and the innards gushed out.

  ‘It’s practically neat rum,’ Jonathan had roared. He was rather drunk and pink. He had been drinking since before lunch and now it was six o’clock. Everybody laughed at everything he said. Everybody was very happy. He held my hand all the time, kneading the flesh over my knuckles with hot fingers, and led me round the room introducing me to all his neat friends, most of whom I didn’t know. They all said how happy they knew we’d be. It always worked better the second time round, they said. When we got to the door I wrenched myself free of Jonathan and ran to the hotel lavatory. I shut myself in and leant up against the cool pink tiles. A marvellous smell of disinfectant. Then I was very sick – more of my father’s even further-cut champagne.

  Cold and dizzy, I walked back to the lobby. I looked about, unable to remember the way to the private room of the wedding reception. So I went to the Cocktail Bar and sat on the only free stool at the bar. I asked the barman for a peppermint. My mouth tasted sour.

  ‘Peppermint what, madam?’ He was quite friendly.

  ‘Something strong to suck.’

  ‘You’re joking, madam. There aren’t any slot machines in a place like this. What about a creme de menthe frappé?’ I agreed. ‘Not feeling well? You look a bit shaken.’ I agreed again. He pressed crushed ice down into the glass with a spoon. ‘There’s a hell of a wedding party going on down the corridor,’ he chatted on. ‘They’re drinking dreadful stuff, I hear. Poison anyone.’ He looked at me carefully. ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’

  ‘I’m the bride,’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You’re joking again, of course. You wouldn’t look like that if you were the bride.’

  When I got back to the reception, half an hour later, Jonathan was in a state of great agitation. He thought I’d gone already. He thought I’d left him. More jokes were made, and he recovered. That night we ate sole bonne femme at a severely white tableclothed table and tried to think of things to say about the Thames looking so glamorous with all the lights. Then with the coffee Jonathan appealed to me never to leave his side again.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, digging a hole in a cigar I had hoped he wouldn’t smoke, ‘I’ll see to it you never leave me again. Not so long as we’re married.’


  And so the claustrophobia set in.

  *

  Joshua’s birthday cake was finished except for the slice that Mrs Fox had wrapped in greaseproof paper, with the one fat candle, for me to take home. Mrs Plummer senior was pulling on her angora beret, and Cedric was beginning to pace about. He was the first one to say good-bye, and thank you, Mrs Fox. It had been a lovely party, he said. The others were swift to copy him, and they all left in a rush.

  ‘They’re pleased to be gone, if you ask me,’ said Mrs Fox, when she shut the door. ‘You can never trust people to make a go of things, can you?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘about Joshua. Dreadfully sorry. I can’t imagine what happened. The trouble was, I didn’t know where he was going, so I couldn’t contact him.’

  ‘Now don’t think about it, or let him think about it either. People forget to go to parties. What does that matter? What’s a party?’ She began to clear the things away. I helped her wash up, then we unstuck all the roses and poppies from their places of decoration.

  ‘Shall we listen to a little music? You never did hear my favourite brass band.’ ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ by mass brass bands filled the room. We sat each side of the fireplace. ‘What’s a party?’ she asked, during a quiet phase. ‘I ask myself, what’s a party?’

  When the record came to an end, I left her. At the door she stretched her arms up as if to hug me, then decided against the gesture and let them fall to her side again. I tried to apologise further, but she interrupted quite crossly.

  ‘Off you go, he’ll need you to do his supper,’ she said. ‘And don’t get at him. It’s of no importance. I mean that.’

  Halfway down the stairs I heard the brass bands start up again. Phrases of intense anger filled my mind – anger against Joshua.

  It was after eight when I arrived back at the flat, which was empty and dark. As soon as I opened the front door I could smell strange cigarette smoke. I switched on the light in the sitting-room. It was more than usually untidy. Three ashtrays were filled with the white tips of French cigarettes. All printed with pale brown lipstick marks.