Shadow Play Page 7

  His mind changed smoothly with the gears. The man beside him sat silent and defeated, waiting for the radio to give them work and dispel the gloom of jealousy.

  Rose sat in the window of the second-floor flat she occupied with two other girls. She had been waiting all evening to watch the car go by. Not any car, but this particular car, with the white paint and the crowded wall of bodies on the inside. Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen ride by. She’d learned that poem in school, taught by some silly old fart who was trying to get across to them that all speech had its own rhythm, but no-one she knew talked like that. She was idle in her badly lit bedroom, watching her face in the mirror, over which there was the only light she was willing to use. Even a presence behind half-closed curtains was not something she wished to advertise. The street outside was peculiarly silent: the cold had driven all revellers and would-be visitors indoors. From the window opposite came the eerie neon light of a television.

  Rose moved across the room whenever she heard the sound of an engine, then she moved back to her mirror, where she watched her own face, without vanity, and let her thoughts meander. At times, she made play with shadows, using her fingers, creating on the opposite wall through the unattractive spotlight, the shape of a rabbit waving huge ears with an obscenely large tail, the edges furred, the thing making gestures all by itself. It was almost compulsive, this nervous habit she had, creating, when the light was right, these not unfriendly little images. But all of a sudden she was irritated by the twitching of the clownish shadows, frightened by the life they assumed for her own distraction. Slowly she uncurled her hand and used it, coupled with the other in a voluntary handcuff, to wave itself goodbye on the opposite wall. Her spread fingers now resembled the wing of a huge bird flying away across the sun: she made the wings move until the thing, half sinister and half exotic, blocked the light completely and made her afraid.

  Then she heard the sound of another engine, familiar without being tantalising. The shadow play had calmed her: she moved to the window without haste, knelt and put her chin on the window sill with the thin curtain behind her head. She was rewarded by the sight of a panda car, not speeding but cruising, a face on the passenger side looking out and looking up at the windows like some mother looking for a lost child in a department store. Dimly she recognised the face, withdrew her chin until her nose was level with the window, and giggled a little. Then she raised her whole head and turned it obliquely as the car stopped two doors down, the opposite door opened and he got out. She stole one lingering glance at his size, standing in the street with his breath on the air like mist, looking back towards his car door before looking up to her. She watched, with palpable pleasure, the straightening of his clean, pressed uniform, and then she was gone, scrambling across the floor with the curtains concealing her, towards the light-switch.

  There was silence for a minute, then the doorbell sounded into the vacuum of the empty first floor, without response from the second. The two girls with whom Rose shared the upper storey were out: otherwise, they would have asked anyone in, especially uniformed men. Rose waited until the buzzer echoed away, then heard the sound of footsteps crunching on frost, a large body colliding with the dustbin and the general shuffle which heralded departure.

  Back at the window with the light out now, she saw him adjust his jacket again before he climbed into the driver’s seat. She tried to make herself laugh. Bet you always do that, you silly big twit, she said to make her lips move, but when the car edged away, she could only feel the pain of grief, so sharp she was tempted to bust the window with her fist and yell, Here I am! But the impulse passed without the grief passing too. She had come home from the office in a taxi and made up her face in case he found her: weeping would disturb her looks, so instead she turned on the light, and, crouching in the corner, began the shadow play again. ‘Does he love me?’ she asked the rabbit. ‘Could he ever possibly love me? Can it happen so quick, just like that? Oh, please …’

  Her bedroom was festooned with soft toys; they sat in vigilant rows along the wall-side of her single bed, allowing little space for herself. She had a frilled pillowcase, frilled bedspread and a clutter of other possessions. The whole effect was somewhere between a boudoir and a toy shop.

  There was a crash from downstairs, a clattering of steps and voices which led to their cramped quarters. Cheryl had the largest room since she had found the place first and, with great self-importance, furnished a deposit through the bank where she worked. The others had smaller rooms, all off a tiny lobby which led to a smaller kitchen. They had chosen to relinquish communal living space and not double up on bedrooms for reasons which were obvious but understated. In case they got lucky, as Cheryl put it; with a man, she meant, but in fact the other two had never got lucky on the premises or anywhere else yet: they were hard working, young, full of ambitions and romantic dreams, and not inclined to promiscuity. As flatmates, they had embraced one another through mutual need and the columns of the Evening Standard, but this was not the same as friendship although it passed for that between Mary and Cheryl. They went out together in the general direction of pubs and discos and presented a politely united front against Rose, because Rose was odd, secretive, not quite like themselves, and although she cleaned up the mess they made in the kitchen without complaint, the habit was not exactly endearing. There was nothing as keen as dislike. The regime worked, after its fashion, better than most.

  Rose heard them lumber into the kitchen, then one to the bathroom on the landing, where they always locked the door quite unnecessarily since none would have invaded the naked privacy of the others, unless desperate. In which case, Cheryl kicked the door, Mary knocked and whined, and Rose simply waited. She liked this aspect of their forced intimacy least of all, and kept her cosmetics, her washbag and her towel along with her life in her own room, but now she remembered she had not quite honoured that self-imposed rule this evening in their absence, and she groaned. She should have done that test in the morning, like it said on the packet. The groan and the realization coincided with a kick on her door. Cheryl, friendly, concerned and voraciously curious.

  ‘We’re phoning out for a pizza. Do you want some? And what’s this doing here by the lav, then?’ She was holding aloft the self-testing pregnancy kit, clearly labelled on the cardboard frame which enclosed a small tube.

  ‘You got something to tell us?’

  Rose shrugged. It was too late now.

  ‘I dunno. There’s three versions. One says I am, another says I’m not and the third says it isn’t sure to make you buy another test. This one isn’t sure, but I think I am anyway. Yeah, I’d love some pizza. Tuna.’

  They sat in the kitchen which could scarcely hold the three of them and a telephone at a small table. Mary phoned for pizza, looking at Rose out of the corner of her eye with the same expression as Cheryl. The discovery of the pregnancy kit precluded any talk about work or the weather; they were looking at her as if examining a strange animal in the zoo, with a mixture of reverence, curiosity and only slight distaste. As near-miss virgins, they’d sort of assumed she was too, and they wanted to know what actually happened to get you otherwise, blow by blow, thrust by thrust, what it felt like. They wanted to ask all that before the pizza arrived and made everything all right again, but Mary and Cheryl were beginning to understand it was not quite possible. Cheryl, more streetwise, opted for making light of it. She hauled a can of beer from the fridge and offered it round. Rose shook her head.

  ‘Trouble is with sex,’ said Cheryl, mournfully, ‘nobody will ever actually tell you. What to do.’ They both looked at Rose, half challenging, half beseeching. She grinned.

  ‘You just don’t do what I did,’ she answered, making it sound rueful, as if the act in question was entirely isolated. All right, so she would tell them, make them laugh by lying all the way, anything to harness enough tolerance to help her deal with the molten anxiety which seemed to have taken the place of her blood. Anything to postpone th
e evil hour of wondering what to do.

  ‘Are you in love, then?’ said Mary, with her staggering naïvety.

  Rose sniggered uneasily. Going downstairs for the pizza, she wiped her eyes and her nose on her sweater sleeve and hoped they would think she was only laughing herself to death.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re in love, then.’

  The younger constable was recovered enough in the canteen after midnight to inject into his own voice an element of jeering. He winced as the scalding tea hit the tender spot inside his mouth and he thought briefly of an impending visit to the dentist. PC Michael was making notes with assiduous attention to detail on the subject of the juvenile they had just arrested at the back of an off-licence, more hopeful than wicked, he thought, a very quiet night.

  ‘With her. That Rose, I mean,’ the young one persisted, gratified to see the beginnings of a dull red blush colouring the skin of Michael’s placid forehead as the other bent back to his writing. The same blush might have been present, but unnoticed, in the car. It gave Williams the upper hand.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ Michael said. ‘I don’t know about love, do I? But after you lot were kicked into touch last week, I thought about how nobody was looking out for what happened to her, she was just chucked out. So I kept an eye open and then I saw her, a bit later, running down a road she was, I mean really running as if she was in dead trouble. She saw the car and she hid, in a garden. So I fished her out, and took her to where I showed you I dropped her, got her number at work. I was just sorry for her that’s all. She might be a scrubber, but she’s only a scrap.’

  The young one sniggered again and straightened his face. The tea was more comfortable and the cold outside was uninviting. He wanted to prolong the story and his own advantage. Michael’s qualities often had the effect of making other men feel mean.

  ‘Sorry enough to see her every night last week?’ Jeering again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I reckon that’s love then. You must be mad. You’ve broken all the records.’

  It was here somewhere, among all the other records of her life and that was why it was so hard to find. By foraging among old chocolate boxes kept in the big dresser in her living room, Mrs Mellors gave herself ample opportunity for distraction, since each box out of the five was like Aladdin’s cave. There were her wedding photos, dashing wartime economy, a borrowed hat she recalled as if it were yesterday and a corsage the size of a bush. Penny-pinching then, pound-pinching now, nothing altering. No photographs of children followed: they wouldn’t have bought a camera for years after and there was little enough to record. Mr Mellors being Mr Mellors, herself working in a school as a dinner-lady, moving into this house and him getting another job with the council, a foreman dustbin man in the days when a foreman was something powerful, and yes, yes she had been proud of him, but not of the constant struggle against dirt and smell and men who cared about neither, and about him sometimes reproving her for her inability to have babies though he tried every night, and about her never knowing until much later, when they were past it, that the failure was not hers but his, and never saying anything.

  All that took more than an hour, the second box, almost as long, the third, longer.

  In here were letters, not just invitation cards, birthday cards, Christmas cards, old keys (she could never throw away a key, you never knew with keys), photos, bills, pieces of ribbon, brooches from Woolworth’s, pieces of lace, hatpins (ouch, her finger caught a point, but the wound was bloodless, memoryless), ornate buttons waiting for a rainy day, but only letters. There were postcards, from the children she had looked after, and a bound volume, of messages, cards, childish and adult scrawls from the Logos. Because life had begun afresh with the Logos next door, a whole new, fifteen-year chapter which covered the last years of Mrs Mellors’ working life, the illness of her spouse, his death and the decline of the family next door into this one weird little eccentric. The Logos had marked the most productive era of all, when, in her fifties, she had felt, at last, as if she had acquired some family who would honour her, and did, oh they did. Logo the road sweeper (Mr Mellors had got him that job when the office cleaning failed), then his wife, then the child, all babes, all incompetent, waiting for a granny like her. But you never quite knew your neighbour, even when you thought you did, even when it sat in your kitchen eating your grub and weeping its heart out over some tale you knew even then was half truth and it wasn’t your business to question. There are no truer contacts than blood, thought Mrs Mellors, putting on the kettle to unseal the envelope which years had resealed. Blood’s thicker than water, thicker than glue, but between husband and wife, what is there? Some sort of flour-paste only made permanent by kids. So, among all the postcards, there it was, amongst all those childish letters from that little girl whom she and she alone had taught to write and read like a true grandmother because no-one else was going to do it, there was the final missive from next door’s wife, that hapless, silly woman with the sweet smile who could not cook or clean and had let her daughter become Margaret’s own. Mrs Logo wrote a lot of notes, always asking for favours; wrote this one as if it was not a sin to break a person’s heart.

  Dear Mags,

  I’m ever so sorry, but I’m going now. I know I said to you things weren’t right, but I didn’t know how wrong.

  The writing was bad, even though Margaret had read this script a thousand times, in scrappier missives which asked, Will you do this? Will you do that? Always in a feather-brained rush.

  I’m leaving him, I’ve got to, I can’t say why.

  Why not? Margaret had howled at the time and was still howling now.

  I’m taking Enid with me, we’re going to my cousin in Scotland where I can get a job and everything.

  A job? Feather-brain could no more earn a living for herself and a dependent daughter than fly over the moon.

  I’ll write when we get where we’re going. Please don’t tell Logo when he gets back, he’ll go mad. Or should I say madder. And don’t ask and don’t interfere, I do know what I’m doing, honest. Will write, promise, so will Eenie.

  Margaret had abided by her instructions not to interfere and not to speak, as discussed with her invalid husband, both sticking to the habits of a lifetime, he the one-time soldier, herself the soldier’s missus, non-complainers both. She obeyed and watched as shortly after the delivery of the note, she saw Mrs Logo exit the house carrying a fibre suitcase and pulling the door closed behind her. There had been something jaunty in the carriage of the little woman on her escape, so that Mrs Mellors had assumed not ill-treatment, but the existence of another man, and she had never doubted that assumption. The daughter was behind her, carrying a school-bag, and it was only she, whom they called Eenie, who looked back, waved to nothing but waved in a sad desperation and hesitation which had made Margaret want to run after her and shout from where she stood. The fibre suitcase carried by the mother was old; it expanded on one side but failed to expand on the other: the weight of it was less cumbersome than the bulk. And so they had gone, the two of them.

  More weeping in the kitchen, and the yelling of, Why, why, why? from Logo over weeks, while Margaret had listened, not said much while she kept looking at her own stairs and wondering if this were the night her husband might die. After some days, Logo reported his wife and child missing. The police came and searched their house; enquiries were instituted, but she never wrote, that silly bitch of a wife, and Margaret never said how she had seen them going down the back alley in the middle of the afternoon with the fibre suitcase which did not expand properly, because it was so etched in her memory she could not have given it words, and because she had been trusted and that meant she was bound by a promise.

  ‘Why?’ she muttered to herself. ‘Why? How could they just go?’

  You never know your neighbour. So her man had died, she had lost her substitute child and grandchild, and Logo had gone about howling, searching the hills and dales of North London, convinced he woul
d find, if not the wife, the darling daughter. Poor, poor soul, with the police picking on him ever since. Her heart had gone out to him, she respected his privacy, believed and pitied him, never intruded, same as always. If it hadn’t been for Sylvie, she might never have gone upstairs in his house, not unless he had fallen ill and he never did that.

  But this evening, following Blondie, tut-tutting and still playing games up Logo’s stairs, feeling cross with the naughty child, she had stopped in her tracks on the top landing. Facing her from the corner of his bedroom, spartan, bare of the superfluous, not a frill or a flounce like the rest of this house, was that fibre suitcase. As it had been, still crooked. The suitcase of a wife who had left with it and who, according to him and everyone else, had never come back.

  Margaret separated Mrs Logo’s letter from the rest and put it in the drawer where she kept knives.

  Helen West was rummaging in the kitchen. From time to time she eyed the telephone, not quite wishing it to ring, but somehow resenting its silence. She had willed the fridge to yield exciting secrets but after her own time-honoured fashion there was nothing inside but a jar of pickle, one of dead mayonnaise, butter, rock solid, a lettuce which was brown to the point of liquefaction and six suspect eggs. I have no rules, she said to herself, no rules at all. I feed like a soldier on the retreat in some frozen waste and I have grown as thin. I like being a renegade: I forage in shops rather than buy. Is this the life for me? It took ten days without Geoffrey (two phone calls, one too many), for all the old regimes to be reestablished. Through the very thin veneer of her domestication, acquired only through contact with men, the way they were supposed to acquire similar habits from women, she was emerging as an alley cat.