Time and tide, p.5
Time and Tide, page 5
* * *
She wrote to her mother, wrote with all the urgency and muddle of a child, knowing that it would be welcome news, in spite of the shock. Each day she awaited the reply.
Holding her mother’s envelope, which was thick and sturdy, she felt a moment of strength, of forgiveness, and of a burgeoning hope that life was going to be all right, that the worst had been. Out on the street, she halted by a lamppost to read it leisurely, and also because there were tremors in her heart. That was natural. A fat letter, a wad of words. Warm, comforting words. Instead, a diatribe. Her mother said that it was no surprise, that it had been crystal-clear for all to see, that even the most casual caller could tell how bitter and loveless the marriage was; then she dilated on each and every failing of his, reminding Nell of the trouble she had taken with meals for him, because of his faddiness, only to be put in the halfpenny places, to be treated like a skivvy. Next came the forbearance of her father, who had taken scarcely veiled insults from a man who was not fit to clean his boots. But that was the past and what mattered now was the future. Her mother was asking her to make some vows concerning that future. She was to kneel down as she read the words, kneel wherever she happened to be, and swear on her oath that she would never touch an alcoholic drink as long as she lived and, more importantly, that she would never have to do with any man in body or soul. She stood there in the street and thought, I’m going to do something terrible; I’m going to disgrace myself right here. It was a fairly smart street, with antique shops—a tiny oak staircase, replica of a larger one, the single item in one window, and in another a beautiful china cabinet with carved rosettes and, above, the lamppost with its hanging basket of fresh, leaking flowers, so gay and jaunty, and she thinking, This woman, my mother, is not my mother, because she has no pity; this is a mother who is made of stone.
* * *
On compassionate grounds, as he said, he decided to let her have the children a couple of evenings a week. The evenings were never certain, it depended on him, on Rita, and on whether the children had behaved themselves well enough to be allowed out, so that it was always a question of waiting for their phone call and of going to the station to wait. Often she waited for an hour or more. She began to know the station better than her own room. She knew the tracks and the clumps of cinders between the tracks and the gloriously inappropriate advertisements for holidays and suntan. Grass banks sloped steeply down from the little back gardens where clothes were hanging. Many, like herself, looked bedraggled, but some were full of vitality: young girls going on a date, dressed to the nines. The children always came running to her, as if they feared that somehow she might not be there. Sometimes they grumbled—their father had made them do this or do that, he had made them hoover their own room, and there on the platform, with a great flourish, they reenacted working this laborious machine and having to stop to pick up bits of fluff and Rita’s used matches. Another time it was milk bottles; Tristan had picked up the milk and suddenly felt the load was too much and said, “They’re slipping, they’re slipping!” but his father took no notice of the warning, until “Crash! Crash!” they slipped, and he said feebly, “They’ve slipped.” Paddy tried to help him sweep up the broken glass, but he was not permitted to.
“Let him do it, he dropped them,” their father said.
“It will all soon be resolved,” she said, not knowing if indeed it ever would. She had after all deserted them, and she felt too frightened to go to a lawyer, frightened about this crime of hers, and then of course there was money. Money was her second biggest bogey; she had gone to a bank manager recommended by a friend, and he took pity on her, agreed to let her have an overdraft. He was a fatherly man, said he knew what it was like, he had lost a son; he didn’t say how.
She got a job as an editor with a publisher, part-time, and then to supplement her income she read manuscripts at home; many stories not too different from her own, except the women in them had a little more pluck.
“Why don’t I do something?” she would say when alone in her little flat or when waiting in the station, but fear had paralysed her. Fear that she had done some great and incalculable wrong.
The flat that she got was small, but she loved it—a studio with a skylight, where she could see endless roofs and television aerials, nearby a steeple, its pale verdigrised dome like a gigantic fireman’s hat. The city seemed unfamiliar; it was as if she were in a strange place and not in London at all; Paris, she thought, although she did not know Paris. The children loved it, too; they pranced about marking their territory, and each time left some of their possessions. She had bought a huge bed and they slept in it with her, their feet and arms in the night lolloping over her. Love affairs were out. Now and then she went to the odd party, and once she met a singer she liked; he was very smooth, had a kind of bandleader quality, with his suede shoes and his very soft leather jacket and black polo-neck sweater, and yes, she did imagine being in his arms, and for some reason she wanted to be wearing black velvet to match his outfit, as if the two outfits rather than the two bodies would merge and ravish one another. In truth, she was afraid of being with anyone, afraid of being caught and therefore losing her children, but even more than that, afraid of being inadequate to the situation, the room somehow too shabby and she herself too emotional. He seemed interested enough in her, passed her some compliment about her ivory skin, her crop of hair, but was appalled to find that she didn’t have a telephone in her own flat, that it was a landing telephone which sometimes other people answered.
“I’ve applied for one,” she said.
“Good for you,” he said, and winked and trotted over to the table where there was a buffet—lasagna swamped in an overwhite sauce, bowls of lettuce, and French bread that was not cut but broken into clumps. She assumed that was probably the sophisticated thing to do.
Sometimes she told herself that it was all bearable. She saw the children, they loved her, she spoilt them with comics and sweets, and in ten years they would be grown up enough to make their own decisions. Ten years! she thought. Then again, as she waited at the station and they did not come, she fumed and made fantastic threats. He used to keep her waiting and say to them blithely, “Let’s see how flapped she gets.” He never got out of the car, just opened the door and let them out, like puppies coming through the hatch. The car was grey; he had bought it after she left, possibly to lift his spirits. It was a vintage car and very recognisable from a distance. So imagine her surprise when one day, going on the bus to fetch them, she saw it going in the opposite direction, the hood down, a young girl next to him in the passenger seat. At first she thought it was Rita, but no, it was another girl, long hair adrift in the wind in come-hitherish spill. She couldn’t believe it. She jumped from her seat, which was near the door, and mindless of the consequences, she leapt from the moving bus and soon was running down the road after the grey car, which was already out of sight. Her rage was matched only by her disbelief. Who was this girl? Where were they going? Had the children met her?
At the school gate the children were grumpy from having been kept waiting. One said that his shoelace was undone, and as she bent down to tie it, he said, “I thought you’d gone, disappeared.” To make amends, she bought them chocolate ices, and soon they were sallying along, surprised to learn that they were going to their dad’s house first to pick up some belongings of hers. She still had the latchkey. She had of course taken her clothes, but her excuse now was that she would take a few jugs, things that had belonged to her mother, and a paperweight that someone had given her, a paperweight with a dandelion seed inside it. Going up the street towards the house, she made them walk near the wall and the gateways, believing that they were less likely to be spotted that way—she had a story prepared in case he had returned. She would say that one of the children had left a textbook that he needed for his homework, a book on sea urchins.
“Fibber!” Paddy said, glad that she was now in some sort of confraternity with him, because he had told it at school that his mother had tuberculosis and had gone to a sanatorium and would be away indefinitely. The headmaster had not communicated this to her but to Walter, who wrote her a note and said that it would be estimable if from now on she would try to put an end to fantasising, as she was polluting her children’s minds with her lies.
She let herself into the house very quietly, and was quick to notice a couple of changes that had been made since she left. There was a new, coarse rush mat to wipe one’s feet on and he had put varnish on the hall cupboard. Rita seemed to be out. It was, in fact, her half-day, which was why Nell had collected them directly from the school instead of meeting them at the station. Nevertheless, she let out a little holler and the meekness and the ineffectuality of it annoyed her. She sent them into the kitchen, saying that she wanted to go into their father’s study to be alone.
“To look in his locked box?” Paddy asked.
“Nosy,” she said, and gave him a little biff.
The study was full of clutter, but on his desk was the incriminating material that she had come in search of. She read an advertisement from a woman who was looking for accommodation in London, a woman with a child. She was certain that the woman in the car was this same woman; quickly she copied out the box number and determined that she would answer the advertisement under an assumed name and find this woman’s name and address. She believed, momentarily, that her struggle was over; the existence of this woman would be grounds for adultery, and hence, she would be able to get her children. She was almost triumphant, when Rita burst into the room, curlers in her hair and an eggshell mask on her face making her look like a ghoul; she was obviously preparing for a date.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“What are you doing here!” Nell said in reply. She thanked her stars that Rita had not seen her rummaging at the desk.
“This is my house still,” she said as she went to the bookcase and took out three books, all of which had his name printed on them.
“Their father will be very cross about this,” Rita said.
“Fancy that,” she said, and made a big show of calling the children in from the kitchen and saying that they would have to hurry as they had an appointment at a hotel for tea. Even as she said it, she thought that she was going a little mad. Rita kissed them as they went out of the house and said to Tristan: “Who do you love most?” forcing him of course to say that he loved her.
Going down the street, she was still terrified of being seen by any of the neighbours, or worse, by her husband on his way back with the girl. Paddy complained that Rita didn’t love him but made a favourite of his brother and often he was sent out of the room while she told his brother secrets and once he was made to scrub the bath with a pumice stone.
“She’ll have to go,” Nell said, and that night she wrote a letter to Walter to say that she found Rita unsuitable for the children, but as she had no sensible grounds for this, she decided that posting the letter would only lead to more trouble, and instead she put it in a jug, one of the jugs she had taken from the house.
* * *
He began to let her see the children far oftener, so much so that she bought bunk beds and put them in the sitting room. He was hardly ever home. Nell believed he was with the girl, who lived in the country, and one day it came to her that for two months now she had had the solution to her plight. All she had to do was to find the young girl and himself together and she would have her evidence. The woman who had once lent her her flat suggested that they drive to this hamlet in the country where the girl lived and catch him there. She had got the address from the advertisement, which she answered under the assumed name. They set out after the children’s tea, and Nell was so possessed of victory that she told the children that very soon they would be with her all the time.
“Goody, goody,” they said to her and the babysitter. He was an old man with war wounds whom she had met in a playground and who had professed to love children. Little did she know that he wanted to interfere with them; he often asked them if he could unknot their pyjamas. Being a pair, they defied him, but they were a little wary of him all the same. They never told her, of course; instead, they told Rita.
The drive was far longer than she had anticipated. They drove first along the motorway, passing those neon-lit garages with metal signs that flapped because of the wind, overtaking a lorry or two, being overtaken; the woman telling her about her own life: her husband, their two best friends with whom they did everything, went on holiday, played bridge, and so forth, and one day coming home unexpectedly to find her husband and the woman in bed, her bed. They stopped to get coffee, and sitting in the cold car drinking it, Nell asked herself, “What is the logic of this escapade?” Two lorry drivers stood by their lorries, eating sausages and drinking tea, and one of them tapped on their window to see if they wanted to be chatted up.
“I’ll have the darkie,” the woman said, but when the men refused to go away, she put her finger up in a gesture of “piss off.”
Nell could hardly believe it when they entered the sleepy little town by the sea. It was very late by now, and almost all the lights in the houses were quenched. The sea lay at the end of the street like a gigantic grey mat; the wind had died down and everything was deathly still. There it was, parked at the end house, the stately grey motorcar—the evidence. She let out a shout of joy and grasped her friend’s arm and said, “That’s it! That’s it!”
They stopped and pulled into the driveway of a house that was undergoing renovation. She did not know what to do. They debated whether they should go and knock on the door and assume that either the girl would come down or he would come down. “Then … then what?” she asked aloud. She decided that it was best not to, she would hire a detective and have him do it; after all, it needed an outsider, someone impartial, to give evidence in the court, because go to court she now would. To satisfy herself, or to give vent to some streak of spite, she decided that she would ring the telephone number—she had it from the advertisement. The girl had answered her letter on letterhead paper and said that, yes, she did need accommodation, but she was very particular about the accommodation she would get, that she had a small boy.
Her friend waited, holding the door of the telephone kiosk open, and as Nell put the money in, she regretted doing it, found her heart leaping, even though she knew very well that she had no intention of speaking.
A sleepy voice, the girl’s, said “Hello” once, then twice, waited, and then said, “Why don’t you fuck off, whoever you are.” This was a very matter-of-fact girl, not like her.
She imagined them close together, with a window that looked out onto the sea, and for some reason she imagined a big jug of country flowers in an ewer and the furniture being all pine.
8
The next day, though quite unslept, she went to a lawyer, told her story, which, as she said, was a bit of a rigmarole, and sought his advice. He was a very busy man and, from what she could see, very influential. While she was there, he took three telephone calls; two of them entailed what to do with the effects of a famous pop singer who had committed suicide—she had read about this suicide in the paper. The lawyer was quite crisp as he discussed gold watch, gold cuff links, and various other personal effects. When she rose to leave he made a little flirtatious remark about taking her for supper, à deux, once they had her mess sorted out. He knew a very good detective, he said, just the man, had caught an earl with his trousers down. It all seemed so unreal, so hard, that to keep a grip on herself she thought of her children, their eager faces, the smell of their bodies in the evening after their bath, the way they gobbled sweets, and she wondered for the first time in her whole life if when they were grown up they would accuse her of all this—“this mess,” as the lawyer called it. His office was full of tasteless furniture, onyx boxes, clumpy ashtrays, gaudy prints such as one might see in any department store.
The detective that the lawyer chose was so busy himself that he sent a junior, thought for some reason that it was a walkover. The junior got to the hamlet in the middle of the night, just as she had done and just as had been planned, rang the doorbell, and, when the woman came down, asked her if she was having a relationship with Mr. So-and-so. The girl asked him who he was and he was fool enough to tell her that he was an enquiry agent from a detective agency. She asked him if he thought she was a “Doris,” daft enough to tell him anything, and said that as a mere addendum she kept lodgers, since she had an extra bedroom. She did not allow him in.
The upshot of all this was that Nell’s chances, which up to now had been slender, petered away. Her husband realised what she was up to and wrote a letter to say that he could not be responsible for his actions, and that if she was to take the children by some foul means, he would be working night and day to get them back, no sleeping or waking moment of her life would be secure, he would see to it that her life was hell.
It was a question now of not cracking, of somehow holding the sediment of her thoughts together until she gathered the ammunition to start again. Her sons had taken up hobbies; for one it was trains and for the other it was stamps. Tristan made a small profit one day simply by buying a stamp in a shop on the Strand and selling it in another shop a few doors away. This created discord. In a mad moment of appeasement she took them to the Savoy for lunch. Once inside the glittering lobby, their delight was so great that they ran around, thumped sofas, then snatched stationery from a little occasional desk and wondered aloud whom they should write to.
“Sorry, madam … but the young gentlemen must have ties,” the headwaiter said as they stood on the threshold of the Grill Room.
“Mr. Meanie…” she said, realising that it was an absurd thing to say to an agitated headwaiter, who was already perspiring, even though the clientele had not foregathered. He prevaricated, disappeared, and returned with two very garish ties, which, when donned, made them look like children impersonating clowns. They ate like wolves. They ate steak and kidney pie preceded by a cold soup, which they returned on the grounds of it being cold. Afterwards they had steamed pudding. The red jam threaded into the very yellow cake mix made them enquire saucily if she could spare the time to make one at home. They always referred to her house as home. The waiter, who by now had befriended them, whispered the secret recipe of the steamed pudding in a conspiratorial voice, then launched into a scenario of when they would be young men, coming to his restaurant after the theatre, with ladies on their arms. They giggled over this, and she saw as through a peephole into a future when she would not be essential to them.
