MRS DUNDRIDGE

Mrs Dundridge was extravagant with boiling water. She bathed every day.

Her neighbours often commented on it. They saw her from their windows lugging the heavy tin bath up the steps to her back garden and tipping the milky water onto the lawn. The water from their own tin baths was grey, almost black sometimes.

And the things she hung on her washing line? Scraps of flesh-coloured satin, pale blue chemises, white leg-shaped stockings kicking about like girls in a burlesque show. She’d catch her death dressing like that. Where were the sensible white lisle vests, the fleecy liberty bodices, the voluminous bloomers, the knitted wool stockings?

She’d not got an ounce of spare flesh on her either, and that couldn’t be good.

The neighbours all knew her story, how her young husband, a miner, had joined the Royal Engineers at the first call. He was one of those who marched away cheerfully while the brass band played.

Mind you, he’d been at that pit that had a fall in 1920, so chances were he’d be done for either way. Though if he’d stayed perhaps he’d have given her some babies, then she wouldn’t be so alone, would she?

Ah, poor thing.

She was universally pitied for the tragedy of her life, as much as she was scorned. She lacked good sense.

You’d think she’d go back to her people. Someone said she had a sister in England. Bristol wasn’t it? A place called Coalpit Heath. Must have been mines there too. But not such a limitless coal stream as the one hidden under the hills and valleys of South Wales. Black gold.

Poor dab. Some people say she’s waiting for him to come back, that’s why she won’t leave.

Mr Clements paid her court. Think of that. With all his money and that nice house on the hill. Everyone knows Mr Clements as he does his rounds once a week collecting money for the funeral plan. In the window of his shop he’s got a clock and a little sign that says ‘It’s never too soon’. The clock keeps good time though, but you can barely look at it without remembering that death is waiting for each of us. Well, not everyone would want to marry an undertaker. Not her, anyway, not for all the tea in China.

Hardly anyone’s been in that house of hers. She keeps you on the doorstep. Locks her doors, back and front, even when she’s at home.

Oh, she must get lonely, though.

Mrs Davies the dressmaker knew her best. But Mrs Dundridge always went to her, not the other way round. Always paid up front. Never a quibble about the price. Took Mrs Davies pictures torn from fancy magazines, said, ‘I’d like this one made up in violet crepe, but with three-quarter sleeves and no bow at the front.’

But Mrs Dundridge was good to her. Mrs Davies’ husband was gone too. Lost at sea with the merchant navy. And her with six boys and no war pension. As soon as the eldest, Gerald, could, Mrs Dundridge had given him little jobs around the house; you’d see him carrying sacks of spuds, or up a ladder fishing leaves out of the guttering. Good as gold that boy was. And handsome!

Oh you’d think he was Valentino. And clever too, went to the Grammar School. Could have gone to University, but wouldn’t leave his mother. Works in the bank now. Oh you should see his hands, lovely they are, clean nails and everything.

If it hadn’t been for Mrs Dundridge and her fancy Paris fashions that boy would’ve gone down the pit. Or off to sea like his father.

But there was something odd about her though. Something not right.

Poor dab.

Mrs Dundridge put the big pan of water on the copper and while she waited for it to boil, she turned the pages of her Ladies Home Journal. There was an article about the joys of modern indoor plumbing, accompanied by photos of a gleaming white bath with hot and cold taps, and crisp black and white checkerboard tiles on the walls, and marble-effect lino on the floor. The height of luxury. But the article, when it got down to the nitty gritty, was full of assumptions about the reader; namely that the lady of the house lived in London – or its sprawling suburbs at the very least. At the end of the article the lady was furnished with details of recommended suppliers; Harrods was listed first, then others in Fulham, Ealing, Hampstead, Windsor, Hove, Reading, Guildford, Chelsea and so on. The only one mentioned outside the closed circle of the Home Counties was in Edinburgh.

A proper indoor bathroom would be nice. There’s no harm in dreaming. But it was warm by the fire in the back parlour, and she’s careful about splashes, and put the oilskin cloth under the bath before she filled it. Why, she even had music to listen to while she soaked, timing her baths to coincide with the broadcast from the Wigmore Hall on the BBC. Three drops of lavender oil to soften and scent the water, a towel warming on the fireguard. She luxuriated. It couldn’t be such a sin, could it? Cleanliness was next to Godliness after all. Mrs Dundridge had her own ideas about God, too.

She believed in God, but not a vengeful god. Her God, were He to look inside her heart, would see that there was not a shred of anything bad within. Nothing evil anyway. But other people would see her differently. Especially if they knew about Gerald Davies.

The pan was boiling, so she extinguished the flame under the copper, and using a cloth to grip the hot handle and another to heft and steady the base of the pot, she carefully poured the water into the tin bath and added the lavender oil. Moist scented air filled the room pleasantly. She had already pulled the curtains shut. They only looked out onto a path by the side of the house and the neighbour’s high brick wall, but one had to be careful.

Leaving the water to cool, and taking the back door key with her, she went out to the privy, which was thankfully only six steps away from the kitchen. Some people had them at the bottom of the garden and you’d see people hurrying down their garden paths in their nightclothes with old newspaper in one hand and perhaps a full chamber pot in the other.

She locked her back door from the outside, even though where she was going was only a few feet away, and it was a peaceful Sunday evening and at seven-thirty, still light.

Her imagination, the same imagination that shaped God to her own design, was relentless; it sent swarthy feet tiptoeing past the wooden door of the privy, it made heavy hands with dirty fingers stealthily open her back door, it put shadowy men behind the couch in the best room, in the cupboard under the stairs, in the wardrobe.

So she locked the back door, locked herself in the privy, sat there gripping the key in her hand, alert to any sound or movement in the small yard beyond.

Gerald had promised to come to see her that night. Her feelings towards him were curiously mixed; lately he had grown so tall and manly that she often thought of him as a sort of father figure, but there again she vividly remembered him as a young boy of fifteen with only a slight dark fuzz on his upper lip and a wiry long body that had yet to develop the muscles and chest hair and broad shoulders of the man he would become. Back then she had felt worldly and maternal, like a teacher who would guide him towards the exquisite experience of love between a man and a woman. He had been dutiful in his lessons, had practised his techniques on her body like a virtuoso musician doing scales on a grand piano. But now she sensed that she was losing him.

Oh, and she had always known that one day she would. That he would go off into the world and find some pretty young virgin to love and marry. What she hadn’t anticipated was the sense of loss she felt, the anger and resentment at the insult to her.

And when he was sixteen he had (silly boy) told her he loved her, swore he would always love her and asked her to marry him. He’d even bought a ring from Woolworth’s; she’d worn it on the third finger of her right hand, until it turned her skin green and the claws that held the glass diamond bent and broke, disgorging the fake gemstone and rendering the ring an ugly spiteful weapon that snagged stockings, satin and skin.

He’d been spending a lot of his time with the ironmonger’s daughter. What was her name? It was hard to distinguish these young women; they all seemed to dress the same, to tie their hair in girlish braids or ponytails, and to hare around in packs giggling wildly. Edna. That was it. Edna Thomas.

There was a rumour that Gerald and Edna were courting, but until she heard it from his own lips she wouldn’t believe it.

Naked, she eased herself into the tub. She washed hurriedly, soaping under her arms, between her toes and behind her ears, before using a flannel to wash between her legs. She was careful to rinse all the soap from the soft black hair that grew there in such remarkable abundance.

After her bath Mrs Dundridge dressed in a new frock, it was made from a glazed cotton fabric with white flowers on a dark blue ground. It suited her figure, emphasized her small waist and slim legs.

Gerald arrived before she had a chance to put on her shoes or stockings. His knock at the door; two sharp taps, then three longer ones, sent a quiver of butterflies through her stomach where they trembled and thrilled in a delicious ripple of anticipation.

She hurried to unlock the door, and then airily, coldly – like the mistress of the house instructing a servant of the lowest order – she waved him in.

He shut the door and had only stepped forward two paces when she threw her arms around his neck and showered him with hot lavender-scented kisses.

It had not always been like this; she used to be shy and reluctant, would move around him or sit close to him, accidentally grazing her body against his. The moth and the candle; his young heat, her willful proximity. He had been young and naive at the beginning, and she had been subtle. She had not seemed to notice how he watched her, nor that she’d accidentally left two buttons on a blouse undone. She seemed oblivious when she leaned across the table to pour his tea and he could see the inviting valley between her swelling breasts.

His mother had taught him to feel both pity and gratitude for this childless widow. Mrs Dundridge had helped their family by giving Mrs Davies well-paid work, and she had extended her generosity by employing the eldest son too.

‘She might take a shine to you,’ Gerald’s mother had said, ‘and remember she has no children of her own.’

Mrs Davies had an idea that the widow would become so fond of Gerald that she might name him in her will. She pictured Gerald inheriting Mrs Dundridge’s house. She pictured Mrs Dundridge in an oak casket dead of consumption at a tragically young age. Mrs Davies would of course make her the most beautiful shroud. She imagined an open casket, a white satin dress, delicately hand-stitched and embroidered with seed pearls.

Gerald stood awkwardly by the coat stand in the hall, Mrs Dundridge had caught him off balance and he rested one hand on the wall to steady himself as she ran her tongue over his neck and hissed in his ear, ‘Oh Gerald, my god, Gerald.’

She tugged at his shirttails, pulling them and his vest out of his trousers so that she could run her hands over the bare skin of his back.

‘Darling,’ he said, meaning to arrest this intense assault, but she found his mouth and pushed her tongue into it. Thus silenced he found his body responding even as his mind resisted.

Mrs Dundridge felt dizzy and, as sometimes happened lately, she could sense an odd squeaky pulse as blood pumped through a vein at the base of her skull. She wanted Gerald to lift her in his arms and carry her upstairs and force her onto the bed. She would have liked to say, ‘No, no, please. Don’t, it’s wrong,’ but the one time she had said that he had actually stopped what he was doing and apologised. She wanted him to want her with all the swirling energy with which she wanted him.

As it had been at the beginning.

Suddenly, in the middle of that achingly beautiful kiss, he turned his head and moved his body up and away like a diver exploding out of the water and into the air. ‘Listen,’ he said. His mouth was cloying and tacky, ‘Could I have a glass of water?’

‘Oh, are you alright?’ Mrs Dundridge asked. The skin around her mouth was pink and raw-looking he noticed. His doing as he hadn’t shaved since the morning before.

Together they went through the house to the back parlour, where he dispensed with the civilities of the proffered glass, and bent his head under the tap to drink noisily from the cold torrent.

He sat at the table and asked if there was anything to eat. She offered to fry him some bacon and eggs, or to open a tin of salmon, but he said that bread was all he wanted.

She stood by the table a few feet away from him, her body set squarely towards him and with the bread loaf under one arm she sawed away with the serrated knife to produce a thin slither of bread. This was typical of her refinement; the daintiness of everything – there would be no doorstops of bread and dripping under her roof.

He wanted to snatch the bread and the knife from her and stuff his whole hand into the loaf, pull out the soft centre just as if he was cleaning the entrails from a rabbit, to jam it into his mouth and eat without any concession to good manners.

But he didn’t, he just watched as she first buttered, then sawed off each slice. Sometimes they were so wafer thin that it seemed it was only the salty, bright yellow butter that held each slice together.

The redness had faded from around her mouth, but now her cheeks wore high spots of colour. He still resented the way she had rejected his wedding proposal when he was sixteen. Resented it, even as he had grown to realise how preposterous it was, how much of an escape he had had. He’d noticed lately how her hair had developed strands of silvery white, how her cheeks often seemed sunken and drawn, how her eyelids were weighted and creased and the eyes themselves did not shine with the same clarity as before.

‘I’m going away tomorrow,’ he said at last.

She had laid each buttered slice of bread on a white dinner plate, stacking them up edge to edge.

‘I’ve got some cheese on the cold shelf. Or ham?’

‘I’ll be gone for a few days.’

She continued to slice the bread, sawing it inwards towards her pale chest and the softly swelling breasts, and the heart that lay hidden beneath.

He found himself picturing her heart, big as an ox’s and liver-coloured, throbbing with the same rhythm as a vein in his temple.

‘I don’t want anymore,’ he said, meaning the bread and butter.

She understood. There was no difficulty whatsoever. She put the kitchen knife down on the table and stood the flat heel of the loaf beside it. On the white plate the stack of sliced bread lay untouched.

He noticed how the bread in its neat stack on the plate mimicked the uncut half loaf; they were the same shape and approximately the same height. It reminded him of a trick he knew; you took an unpeeled banana, and with a needle and thread it was possible to slice the soft fruit inside, so that when you gave the banana to an unwitting person they would be amazed to see it fall apart in neat pieces.

Mrs Dundridge felt broken inside. She saw that she had been foolish; being older, wiser she should have known better. She had not known that love would slowly ambush her.

But there was no difficulty whatsoever. She showed no outward sign of anger or pain, but busied herself around the room.

This is why women have kitchens, they can mortify their hands with scalding water and carbolic soap, cut themselves with sharp knives, sweat themselves in the sauna of a summer Sunday dinner, make thunderous music with their pots and pans.

Saying nothing, Mrs Dundridge got a sheet of greaseproof paper from the drawer, laid the stack of bread and butter on top, then folded it into a neat package. Gerald watched her hands, but avoided her eyes. She pushed the wrapped bread towards him; he might have been her husband then, taking sandwiches to eat down the mine, or her child going off to school.

‘Go,’ she said.

And willingly he did as he was ordered.