Wish Her Safe At Home Read online

  Oh, it’s only a paper moon,

  Floating over a paper sea,

  But it wouldn’t be make-believe,

  If you believed in me...

  and I was very much moved once more by her pathetically brave declaration: “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” Many years ago I had been told I looked like Vivien Leigh. This was the only meaningful compliment anyone had ever paid me and I had tried to savour it sparingly. Over the years, though, it had gradually turned sour. But that night in Bristol I again derived from it a gentle satisfaction.

  The following morning I went and bought the dress.

  It fitted perfectly. A further confirmation.

  “I saw this frock last night. Half of me was petrified it wouldn’t be here this morning. The other half knew perfectly well it would—that it would wait for me, if necessary, for ever.”

  The assistant was fortyish and svelte. “Yes, madam, it’s very lovely, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t imagine anyone could call it dull?” I turned admiringly before the mirror.

  “Good gracious, no!”

  I told her I couldn’t bear to change back into my skirt and jumper, happy though I’d always been with them, and she very sweetly stowed these into one of her smart carrier bags and added my receipt and the card of the establishment—“What,” I said, “no tissue?”—we had quite a little laugh. Fortunately my elegant black shoes were exactly right for the dress. As were my hat and coat and handbag. I felt like a model.

  It was another mild morning and even with my coat buttons undone I didn’t feel at all cold. I went back to the chemist’s to buy a bar of soap but my friend of the previous evening wasn’t there: merely a podgy adolescent who had mild acne and a shiny nose and wore a too-tight overall.

  A slightly jarring note. But there was bound to be a reason for it. I didn’t let it throw me.

  7

  In the train I sat opposite a man who had a biography of William Wallace lying unopened on the table. I felt so sorry for poor William Wallace; but for some while I attempted not to think of him, tried solely to think about my own book. I couldn’t. At last (though not wanting to reveal either my straining curiosity—the title had been upside-down and difficult—or to give away a possibly surprise ending) I said to the gentleman—who was old enough to make me feel I wasn’t being in the least bit forward—“Do you mind if I talk to you for a moment? I’ve just read the most frightful description of a hanging, drawing and quartering and I’m afraid I can’t stop reliving it.”

  I had to repeat my request but he didn’t appear at all put out. He’d only been looking through the window.

  “Really,” I said, “we have no right—ever—any of us—to complain or get depressed, do we? Not about a thing.”

  “What’s that? I’m sorry. I didn’t quite catch the last part?” He had leant forward.

  I again repeated what I’d said. “Not about bills or the things that people say to us or even illness. Not even cancer when you come to think of it.”

  “That’s probably true, my dear, but—”

  “Just imagine : waking up in the morning, possibly from some rather pleasant dream, and suddenly remembering... ”

  “I’m sorry?” He had now cupped his hand to his ear and I raised my voice yet further.

  “Not that I honestly suppose you’d have managed to get much sleep.”

  “I wasn’t dozing,” he said gently. “At least, I don’t believe I was.”

  Poor man. It happened to the majority of us; might even happen one day to myself. All the more reason then to be patient and not yield to any base temptation to exclude. I raised my voice still more.

  “I mean, imagine. Having your... thing cut off! Stuffed inside your mouth! And then they start the disembowelling... ”

  He stared at me, wordlessly, and I knew that I’d made contact: his eyes were showing something of the horror.

  “Your stomach cut open, your entrails pulled out... ”

  I suddenly realized just how loudly I was speaking and registered the relative, indeed unnatural, quietness of the whole carriage. I glanced about me. Along the full length of the compartment, heads were craning round, people were looking over the tops of their seats. I heard giggles.

  I coloured and smiled apologetically at the old man. I picked up Pride and Prejudice again. I felt such an idiot.

  8

  “Sunday, bloody Sunday!” declared Sylvia. “Bloody awful fucking Sunday!”

  I hated it when she talked like that.

  “But why? Why are you taking it this way? You’ll very easily find someone else to share the flat with.”

  “I must say it’s so lovely to be missed!”

  “Naturally I’ll miss you.”

  “Oh, pull the other one! I don’t suppose you’ve ever missed anybody in your entire life—not if you want to hear the truth!”

  We were meant to be digesting our lunch. I had thought that while we were sitting over coffee and struggling with the crossword it might be a relaxed and opportune moment in which to reveal my intentions.

  But my Sunday lunch—as I found so often happened with any meal eaten at home—was turning to a lump.

  “That isn’t true,” I said, both angry and ashamed. I tried to think of all the people I had ever missed but unsurprisingly the atmosphere wasn’t conducive to compiling lists. For the time being I could think of only three people: my father and Tony Simpson and Paul (whose second name I’d never known), the young picture framer with the rabbit. “And of course I’ll miss you, Sylvia. But you speak as though—oh, how can I put it?—as though we were married,” I said.

  And for the first time I suddenly wondered whether just possibly... But, no, the thought was too incredible; too remote from anything in my own experience. Lots of women had slightly mannish ways, didn’t they? Even the fact of my having formulated the question was startling and ridiculous. I rapidly dismissed it.

  “And if it were a goddamned marriage,” she was saying, “I know just what kind of marriage it would be! The kind that breaks down the moment the bloody man becomes successful. Which is precisely, if you want to know, what happened to my own mother.”

  And then—most awfully—she began to cry.

  I was amazed. I was the one who cried, did so quite often, cried with the quiet grey desperation of it all. Not Sylvia. Sylvia didn’t cry. I felt not merely amazed, I felt inadequate. Here she sat and blubbered unrestrainedly and all for what? Surely it had to be about more than just our current situation? I had so very little idea; and that seemed terrible.

  During those ten or fifteen minutes I came my closest to giving in. Yet she wasn’t my responsibility—no one was—and I found an inner core of strength, of self-preservation. This both surprised and saved me.

  Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me.

  Later that afternoon we had some further conversation. “You know you’ll never get another job?”

  “Well, there’s always the dole,” I answered brightly. “And I have got a bit of money set aside. For ages now I’ve been quite careful.”

  “Not to mention mean.”

  There was a silence. I thought of how just the previous morning I’d overtipped the chambermaid and of how, on the evening before that, I’d even more absurdly overtipped the waiter. He had actually been rather cute.

  Cute. A new word to enter my vocabulary. A Bristol word. Even in these present circumstances I could feel strangely pleased with it.

  “Do you really think I’m mean?”

  “No. You can’t be. That house will cost a fortune.”

  It wasn’t quite an answer. I now remembered the leather writing-case I had given her at Christmas, the cardigan on her last birthday. But I didn’t want to risk more tears. I only said—perhaps a shade coolly—“Well, anyway, whatever I do spend on it will doubtless be an investment.”

  “Something to bequeath to your children?”

  I didn’t answer. There really see
med no point.

  “Do you truly intend, then, to start sponging off the state?”

  Again I wouldn’t let myself be drawn.

  “Oh, bloody hell!” she exclaimed, after a pause. “I always said that you were feeble.”

  “Yes, you did,” I agreed, more equably.

  “Without your job what have you left? What shred of dignity?”

  Without Mr. Danby, you mean, and the clocking-in each morning and the clocking-out each evening (they sort of almost trusted you at lunchtime) and the boring day-to-day routine and the banal repetitive conversations and the yawns and the silly jokes and the waiting about in wet weather for a bus that, even supposing it stopped, you knew you’d have to fight to get on? Not to speak of that Monday-morning feeling which inevitably marred much of Sunday afternoon? (With the exception—fairly unsurprisingly—of this one; it was hardly the shadow of tomorrow that was beclouding things at present.) And the alarm clock set for 6:30 on five days out of seven? Yes, indeed. Without all that, what had you left?

  “I’ve got a house that maybe God always meant me to have.”

  Sylvia stood up, heavily. “Well, if you’re going to get all pompous about it I think it must be time I went to make the supper.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound pompous.”

  “You know, I can just see you one of these days turning into a religious maniac,” she told me at the door.

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Oh, a lot of old maids get taken that way. Nothing better to do with all that time on their hands.” Her cigarette momentarily got the better of her. “Or perhaps you’ll go in for looking after cats.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t especially like cats—or what I mean is, I don’t get soppy over them. And must you smoke if you’re about to go and do the food?” I had been fully intending to see to it myself; I had forgotten it was her turn.

  “The house will stink of pee,” she said. “You’ll become an old eccentric like your aunt.” She chortled, then spluttered. “You too can have your own private scrap heap. Something to sit on at the close of day.”

  Poor pitiful Sylvia. She was simply trying to wound. Bizarrely I again found it rather moving, this late realization of her sad unspoken dependence upon me; even if I most definitely didn’t want it.

  And yet there was one way in which she had managed to hurt me. I knew I wasn’t mean—at least I hoped I wasn’t—but I did have to admit that in the whole of my adult life there was only one person whom I’d ever truly missed. And even that had been over twenty-five years earlier.

  That Sunday night I lay awake for ages. It seemed an unfair truth to have to confront during those bleak and exaggerative small hours: that when it really came down to it there was no one I honestly cared about. That nothing which happened to others could genuinely affect me.

  In real life I had never seen an instance of unspeakable agony. Newspapers, even the news on TV, created simply a transient impression. Apart from the times when I cried for myself it was only novels and films that could actually move me to tears. I was a freak, without compassion.

  So I said a prayer: a prayer for someone whom I could care about, care about abidingly; someone for whom I would give up anything—life, looks, liberty, possessions—and on whose account, if necessary, I would wage war just as passionately as I would ever wage it on my own. More passionately. It was a prayer which harried me all night.

  But towards the morning I regained some sort of peace. Some sort of dull perspective. I could even laugh.

  “I’m afraid, God, I was probably a bit demanding! Oh dear! Perhaps you’re going to see me now as something of a handful?”

  Or wasn’t that respectful? I was glad at any rate to have kept my sense of humour—glad at any rate that even in London, and after the kind of night which I had just experienced, I could retain a vestige of my gaiety.

  9

  “And,” i had said, “I have got a bit of money set aside.” In fact it was just over £20,000: mainly what my mother had left me.

  I hadn’t liked my mother—as the woman from the café could doubtlessly have told you. On one occasion I’d dreamt vividly that my father had returned in the dead of night, shiningly resurrected, no scars or stitches from the mine. He’d left a kiss on my forehead, an apple and a book beside my pillow and when I’d stirred and sleepily opened my eyes had winked at me outrageously, jerked his head and drawn a hand across his throat... after which he’d slowly disappeared into the wall, still blowing me kisses. I had at once pushed back the bedclothes and tiptoed into my mother’s room—and there sure enough had found her staring at the ceiling all glassy-eyed and with her throat cut. It wasn’t a nightmare. I went back to my own room and gave my hair a hundred brush strokes then got back into bed and ate the apple. “Thank you, Daddy. I do love you.” Whereupon I picked up the book he’d left me—I was always an avid reader—and started on another dream.

  But that was the one I remembered in the morning: patchily at first but coming back to me with ever-greater clarity as I lay quietly endeavouring to recall it. And before I got dressed I wrote it down in my notebook, feeling pleasantly like Coleridge Taylor, a sly Coleridge Taylor, because of always referring to my father as Lancelot and to my mother as Morgan le Fay—in case the latter should again take it into her head to go prying through my things. And I even thought about turning it all into a poem. But that isn’t to say I didn’t feel a bit shifty when first confronting my mother over her breakfast tray. More than a bit. After all, she again lay in the very bed from which—blank-eyed and slit from ear to ear—she had so recently been called to meet her Maker. And that morning I seem to recollect I was extra attentive to her; although by evening if not indeed midday my usual mixture of impatience and resentment had probably returned.

  Yet the money when it came did partially make up. It couldn’t wholly make up because—I don’t apologize for this—there are things that money can’t buy, things like fresh youth to replace the one you’ve hardly been aware of, things like lost opportunities which might conceivably have led to nothing, but which on the other hand might have led to fulfilment and serenity and new lives and passionate involvement. (Along, of course, with disinheritance!) And human nature being what it is this is the version you’ll unquestionably believe.

  But all the same it was nice to watch the money grow. There was a definite satisfaction in that, an excitement possibly comparable to hearing the first word or to seeing the first step.

  It had been a little under £14,000 when it came to me, a sum I’d invested nervously but with some audacity (the lady takes a gamble; the lady indeed takes quite a few!)—at bottom trusting no one, not even my stockbroker. And Sylvia, it hardly needs to be said, had never received the slightest hint.

  I wasn’t just a miser, though, as was now fully proven—at least to my own satisfaction—for otherwise how could I have been so ready after all these years to raid that cache beneath the floorboards? It was perfectly true, of course, that bricks and mortar make a sound investment; but there was more to it than that. I actually revelled in the submitting of my notice. I revelled in the looks of dazed astonishment, the disbelief, the hurt, the rocking of foundations. I revelled in the fact that while others clearly thought I should have been at my most uncertain, my most worried, most conservative, I was cheerfully looking at heavy curtaining and carpet swatches and books of wallpaper. I worked out my month’s notice in a state of well-being and dissociation, floating through my days, feeling very slightly contemptuous of my workmates and letting those feelings, very slightly, show. At least half a dozen of my colleagues mentioned how they envied me. One was a pretty little blonde thing of only nineteen. Another was the office boy.

  On my leaving I received a book token for eight pounds fifty and a card that everyone had signed. Though I grew moist-eyed when they presented these two envelopes and felt almost sorry to be going—actually nostalgic already for my long time spent with them, for the little
things, the little laughs, the silly accidents and birthday cakes—on the bus home I made the mistake, or took the eminently sensible step, of working out how much on average each had given. It came to thirty-five pence per person, with ten pence added on. As I myself in recent years had seldom contributed less than a pound to such collections—had usually provided twice that sum—I felt for a moment the tears return to my eyes and had to gaze mistily out of the window whilst blinking rapidly and rummaging blindly. But then I shrugged and thought oh what the heck; I didn’t need their liking or appreciation, I knew there were parts of me which meant others well, I knew that I had tried to lead a decent life and that I had a value somewhere, in some great scheme of things, whether people were aware of it or not.

  But after eleven years in the same department surely I was worth more than 35p a head, with an extra 10p to top it up.

  I thought at first I wouldn’t spend their book token. At home I took it from my handbag and twice—impetuosity flooding up warmly—wanted to tear it through. But my fingers wouldn’t let me.

  And I saved the card too... yet purely for the sake of the office boy. If he had donated thirty-five pence it might have been the most he could afford. I kept it, hopefully, for the sake of that one name.

  10

  All the same I worried lest I might have given too much of myself away—behaved foolishly. I’d felt a little overcome. After the tea-lady had been up and somebody had handed round the cakes and Mr. Danby had presented me with the card and the book token, it was expected I should make a speech.

  “I’m not sure what to say.”

  Cheers. A suggestion of “Please trot this over to Accounts!” More cheers. I hadn’t realized that I had a catchphrase.

  “But I’m so glad you all decided on a token. I already know what book I’m going to buy.”

  “The Kamasutra?”