I
Myra had had her hair cut. The soft, loose curls which had trailed around her face in a style first adopted when she was twenty had gone; the hair was swept up and back revealing the high forehead; brisk waves flicked forward at the tips of the ears emphasizing the lines of the cheekbones. One noticed the shapeliness of the head, the sharp outline of the jaw. She looked alert, not a little challenging.
‘Well?’ she greeted Ralph. ‘Does it meet with your approval?’
‘You seem so different,’ he answered uneasily.
Myra was uneasy herself. She could no longer feel the weight of her hair and this affected her profoundly. It seemed that along with her hair she had shed the youthful Myra; a corner had been turned in life’s journey and a new person awaited her. On her return from the hairdresser’s she had sat for a long time studying this new person in the mirror. The eyes were bright, but their laughter was not kind and the twist of the mouth was not without cruelty. There was, too, in the tilt of the shapely head a hint of the predatory, a suggestion of piracy in the unmasked boldness of the eyes, a cheap, but not uncourageous, daring betrayed itself in the lift of the jaw.
‘I am different,’ she said defensively. ‘We all change as we grow older.’
Ralph was too disturbed to answer. He seemed to see her more clearly, as though she had stepped out of the shadows on to a brightly lit stage. It occurred to him that a new relationship might have to be devised to go with the new hair style.
‘Can’t you put it back the old way?’ he asked persuasively.
‘It’s shaped this way now.’
She was a little frightened, too. But what could she do about it? The new person had, after all, been in embryo for a long time; it was rather late, now that she had emerged triumphantly complete, to disown her. Even now she was taking charge of the situation, testing her power to disturb.
‘You weren’t arrested?’
‘No.’
It was obvious that something had happened which had distressed him. Once, she would have said, ‘Tell me about it, Ralph,’ and he would have gone past her as though she were not really there, seeking some solace that lay beyond her. Now, she did not offer comfort. Instead, she said:
‘Perhaps you’ll be arrested next time, dear.’
He went up to his study and slammed the door. It was the most definite reaction she had had from her husband for a very long time.
After that he began to work with great energy on plans for the next demonstration, shutting himself away in his study for hours on end, Myra tried to occupy herself usefully. During the next few days she devoted an unusual amount of her time to good works, visiting at the hospital, calling on the old and lonely in the parish, even helping Mrs. Thomas with the teas for the young wives’ meeting. But while she did these things a part of herself stood to one side making caustic comments. As she walked through the windy streets on her way to and from her charitable ventures the dead leaves scurried across the pavement and a dry voice whispered, ‘You don’t belong among the angels; not you, dear, not you’. She started to make a costume for Sarah to wear in the Easter pageant: her feeling for Sarah, at least, was genuine. But even this task eventually led to trouble.
One evening she made her way to the church hall, meaning to search through some old boxes of theatrical costumes which were stored under the stage. As she went up the path, her breath coming quickly in the frosty air, she heard the melancholy pulsing of a slow fox-trot. It was not one of the evenings on which the youth Sclub met. On an impulse, she crossed the grass and looked in at one of the windows.
The music had stopped. Wilson and Jill were standing by a table going through a pile of records. Myra recalled that he had said that he wanted to weed out the ones that were no longer ‘with it’. She watched him put on a record and then stand to one side, his weight resting on the balls of his feet, his body ready for the music, still but not static. Jill, firmly anchored to the earth, continued to sort through the pile on the table. Myra took out herhandkerchief and rubbed at the pane of glass which had misted over. When she could see clearly again, he had swivelled on his heel to face Jill, his hands outstretched. The girl accepted his invitation awkwardly, standing away from him, looking down. He laughed. Myra could almost hear him telling her not to fuss about her feet. She could hear the music, too; soft, mournful, a slow fox-trot again, exacting in its demands on balance and timing. They might as well have danced in separate rooms for all the unity they achieved, Jill bobbing up and down like a cork in a rough sea while he rose and fell smoothly, obedient to the swell of the music. But he was a good teacher. Myra, shivering in the cold, the tip of her pointed nose reddening, marvelled at his patience. He did not mock at Jill’s clumsiness and in time she was persuaded to abandon her nervous giggling. Once, when they were passing the window, the girl’s face loomed very near; as Myra looked at the flushed cheeks, the half¬closed eyes, the slightly parted lips, she was reminded of herself at that age, waiting, wondering and excited, for the curtain to go up on life. The couple spun round. Now it was Wilson that Myra could see, pale and solemn as ever as he steered Jill with tender concern as though the room were full of snags and pitfalls which only he could see; the strained stiffness had gone and Myra realized that, despite the solemnity, he was happy. Gradually, as she watched, her eyes smarting with the cold, the two figures fused together as Jill relaxed, allowing her body to respond to the pressure of his. Myra turned away, but stopped at another window to catch a last glimpse of them; frost had starred the pane of glass and she saw them through a tinsel haze, like creatures in a fairy story. And she herself was momentarily transported into that fantastic world; only she was the darker spirit, angry at being left outside in the night.
She hurried back to the vicarage. Ralph, meeting her in the hall, said with concern:
‘Why, what is it, darling? You’re crying.’
‘It’s the cold.’ And this time it was she who hurried past to seek solace alone.
‘What a little fool Jill is!’ she said to herself as she walked up and down the bedroom, fighting back the tears. ‘A fine Prince Charming he’ll make!’ She crouched in front of the electric fire, pushing her fists against her sharp cheekbones. Dear Jill! Dear gawky Jill! It would be most unfortunate if . . . And yet, it was not really of Jill that she was thinking.
She began to pay more attention to Wilson. He was not always as happy as he had been in that moment with Jill. The week following the sit-down in Trafalgar Square he had managed to get himself a job on the Shepherd’s Bush Tribune, a paper which was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and was not, therefore, in a position to pick and choose its reporters. For a time he seemed to be enjoying himself, and then he suddenly became very reticent, avoiding any discussion of his work and becoming irritable if questioned. Myra remembered how he had behaved when she took him out for coffee after his interview at the Labour Exchange. She had thought then, ‘. . . if I press him, he might break down’. She had been ashamed then.
After several days of particularly morose behaviour, she tackled him on the subject. He had time off that morning and he was working with her in the kitchen, helping to wash down the paintwork. He looked very unapproachable, rubbing away at the larder door. She felt angry with him, as though his misery were a personal reflection on her; she cast around in her mind for something to say that would attract his attention.
‘You’re not getting into trouble in your job, are you?’
He swung round, as startled as though she had spoken his thoughts out loud. She was not really interested in his job; but apparently he wanted to unburden himself and after a few moments’ silence, during which he punished the larder door rather severely, he said:
‘I think I’m being watched.’
‘Who finds you so interesting?’ she teased.
He said that he had gone into the office one morning recently to find the editor talking to a police sergeant who had come in with an item for insertion in the paper warning people about the activities of pickpockets in the market. The sergeant had glanced at him sharply and Wilson was sure that the man knew something about him. Since then he had become convinced that there had been a change in the attitude of the office staff.
‘Yes?’
It was a dull tale; she was bored by it.
All this had worried him, he said. But it was plain from his manner that, having talked about it, he was now less troubled; he was prepared to dismiss the subject, and she would, be dismissed with it. Already he was turning back to that damned larder door. She threw her cloth down on the window sill and said sharply:
‘You know what that police sergeant was probably thinking?’
His head jerked round; like a puppet, she thought exultantly, just like a puppet when the right string is pulled. She had scarcely any idea of what she was going to say, but the words came without her giving much heed to them.
‘He was saying to himself, “Here’s a difficult young man; sullen, wrapped up in himself, chip on his shoulder . . . the lot, in fact”.’ He stared at her in surprise: but she wanted more than surprise from him.
‘And that’s how you’ve been for the last few days. No wonder you imagine people are shunning you! They’re not going to offer you friendship if they get nothing but scowls in return. You mustn’t expect to be treated as a privileged person for the rest of your life.’
‘Privileged person! Don’t be absurd.’
She liked the flash of spirit; it acted as a spur to her.
‘Yes, privileged person! Ex-con. Lack of manners, no consideration for others, inability to give—all to be excused because he’s the undermost of underdogs.’
He was dismayed now; but his eyes told her that he was dismayed not so much by her words as by something she had revealed in herself. He had the look of a person who knows he has seen too much: in future, he would not be indifferent to her. He turned away and began to punish the larder door again.
He kept out of her way for a little while after that; so she amused herself by studying the odd item by him which appeared in the paper. He wrote with an angry vehemence which would probably tone down in time; he would be more impressive when his work was less raw. Nevertheless, his observations were acute and he had the gift of making the drab routine of life seem interesting. But it was not his potential as a journalist with which she was concerned. The thing which intrigued her was the way in which personal weakness betrayed itself in his writing. In spite of the spurts of anger, he tended to pull his punches; his criticisms sometimes lost their bite because he qualified too much. While this might be due to a wholly admirable desire to avoid destructiveness, she suspected that a deep inner uncertainty was the more likely explanation.
She found, as the days passed, that she was gradually discovering the things about which he was particularly sensitive and every now and again she took the opportunity to probe these weaknesses. The youth club was an example of this.
‘You seem to be doing most of the painting of that hall,’ she said. ‘I thought the idea was that the youth club kids were doing it for the good of their souls.’
‘It gets a bit out of hand when there’s a crowd,’ he answered brusquely.
‘Would you like me to tell Ralph that the youth club is too much for you?’
‘Of course not.’
But she knew that he would have liked it. Yet she would not do it for him because that would mean relinquishing a part of her power to torment him. And so it went on.
One evening when she went up to his room on a trivial errand, she found that his door was open. She watched him from the stairs. He was standing in front of the mirror buttoning up his shirt. The shirt, a present from Ralph, was the first new one he had had since he came out of prison; as he stood, his dark head lowered, slightly adjusting the cuff, he looked handsome in his rather nerve-racked way. She could tell that he was pleased with himself and she found that she was searching in her mind for something to say that would deflate him. The senseless brutality of the impulse shocked her. She turned and ran quietly down the stairs to her bedroom where she flung herself on the bed, too shaken for tears.
What evil had taken hold of her? It was such an innocent thing, this small pleasure in a new shirt; yet she had wanted to destroy even this for him. Had love turned sour within her? She tried to pray for strength to turn back before irreparable harm was done. But prayer had never come to her easily because she felt self¬conscious when addressing herself to God.
After a time, she got up and went down to her husband’s study. She searched among his books, hoping that she might find something which would help her to fight the beastliness within herself. She flicked through the pages of Le Milieu Divin, remembering the resentment she had felt when Ralph presented it to her; she still found it largely incomprehensible, although she liked the wise face in the picture in the front of the book and felt that it might have been a help to talk to him. She picked up Four Quartets. It fell open, as it always did, at the middle with the description of the world as a gigantic hospital which Ralph always found so dreary. According to Ralph, Eliot’s God was very drab; a small, contracted, withered God. So there would be no help there. She put the book down and was fingering through the Confessions of Saint Augustine when Ralph came in.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ he enquired politely.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘God.’
‘Have you lost Him?’
The answer, she felt, came a little too pat; he might have been humouring a petulant child. She put the Confessions down on the edge of his desk and turned to face him. After all, he was God’s priest: who better to receive her confession?
‘I believe,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t make any impact on my life any more. It doesn’t help me to be good, or give me a glow of inner satisfaction or any of the other comforting things which should go with belief. So perhaps mine is a rather dead belief, do you think? Something lodged too deep in me to be completely eradicated, but no longer serving any very useful purpose.’
He hadn’t expected this. He said, ‘Why do you believe?’ more to give himself time, she suspected, than because he wanted to know. Nevertheless, she thought carefully before she answered.
‘It makes sense of personal experience. All the slow maturing over the years, the private decisions taken, the lessons learnt—or mostly unlearnt—which affect me and no one else. This inner personal experience seems wasteful, pointless, unless I am myself of some experimental importance. And as I don’t believe in this particular kind of waste, I believe there must be some point in the experiment and that behind it all there is God.’
He was on surer ground here.
‘And yet you say you have lost Him?’
‘I have lost my God—the one that I was brought up to believe in, gentle and loving, up above the clear blue sky. And interested in each one of us. The God who sees the sparrow fall.’
Ralph, who was himself more concerned with the universe than with sparrows, interrupted eagerly:
‘But surely, as we grow older, so our idea of God expands. You believe that there is a meaning and a purpose which directs the universe. Doesn’t this belief comfort you?’
‘Comfort?’
She smiled suddenly, surprised by an unexpected feeling of tenderness towards him because at this moment he had betrayed his weakness: he was an indifferent personal priest, lacking the surgeon’s probing, intuitive curiosity. As he sat there looking up at her, anxious, inadequate, she knew that he could not help her and for some strange reason she felt more sorry for him than for herself.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said gently.
‘But it does matter!’ he expostulated.
‘Well then, let me try to explain.’ She was still speaking gently, while he had become defensive. ‘Our knowledge expands; but the vaster the scale, the more remote God becomes until in the end it doesn’t seem to matter much to me, as an individual, whether He is or is not. I feel lost; caught up in something that overwhelms me, as though the design envisaged were beyond me. Only occasionally, the little individual pains remind me that I must somehow matter.’
He said, ‘Of course you matter,’ but his lips moved stiffly.
‘To whom do I matter, though? To God? That isn’t enough. If I am ever to be convinced that I matter to Him, I must matter to someone here on earth. That is the only way I can learn.’
He said, ‘You matter to me’, but he was looking at her in hurt astonishment, as though she had set a trap for him.
‘But how much. Ralph, how much?’
He must have expected that, but even so he gritted his teeth and tight lines appeared at the sides of his mouth. She had never noticed those lines before; it was as though she herself had etched them there at that moment.
Down in the hall, the telephone began to ring. He made no movement; courage—or pride—prevented him from running away. The insistent ringing jangled on her nerves. She said, ‘Answer it, Ralph.’ And then, as he went out of the door, she could no longer control her bitterness, and she added: ‘It might be something important.’
II
‘That was Jill on the telephone,’ Ralph said to Wilson. ‘She rang to say that she would be coming to the youth club tonight.’
Wilson was not pleased.
‘I shan’t be coming,’ Ralph went on. ‘I have to attend a meeting at Frank Godfrey’s.’
‘Who’s going to be there, then?’
‘It will be just you, I’m afraid. Harris is down with ’flu.’
The vicar looked sick enough to be going down with ’flu himself, Wilson thought. He stifled his annoyance and said:
‘I expect I shall manage.’
The assertion lacked confidence; but the vicar did not notice, he merely said:
‘And you will have Jill to help you.’
Wilson thought about Jill as he walked down the drive. He had not seen her for over a week and she had not visited the house recently. He had begun to wonder whether she was avoiding him. But why come to the youth club if she wanted to avoid him? Was this a follow-up, a final check before the case of Keith Wilson was closed? Was she just satisfying herself that he was making profitable use of those dangerous leisure hours? He kicked a stone into the long grass of the graveyard as he walked slowly up the church path. To the far side of the church he could see a few bicycle lamps bobbing about outside the hall. A voice called:
‘We’re locked out.’
He turned back and went across the road to Spencer’s cottage. Spencer peered out from a haze of fried onion and did not ask him in. It was not often that these two met and Wilson took the opportunity to mention the heating of the hall.
‘It’s been rather cold down there these last few weeks,’ he said as Spencer handed him the keys.
‘Cold?’
The old man’s eyes narrowed as though something particularly subtle had been said and he was not committing himself until the meaning was clear. He put his head on one side and said:
‘What do you mean—cold?’
‘I mean it hasn’t been warm enough in the hall during the youth club meetings.’
‘Warm enough?’ Spencer was tremendously surprised. ‘They’re warm enough! Jazzing around like that all the time.’
‘They aren’t all jazzing around at the same time.’ Wilson curbed an impulse to set the old man smartly about his business and explained: ‘They have to wait their turn to play table tennis and one or two of them are learning chess.’
‘Chess! They haven’t the brains for tiddly-winks.’
‘Are you damping down the boiler too early, do you think?’
There was, in spite of himself, a faint echo of the potential commission candidate in Wilson’s tone. Spencer quivered and his voice blared out stridently:
‘I’m not opening up that boiler every time the youth club meets. It’s all I can do to get the thing to heat the church on a Sunday; when the new one comes, if it comes . . .’
‘I don’t want to put you to a lot of extra trouble.’
‘And what with Mr. Rutledge counting every penny . . .’
There were distant shrieks and a bicycle lamp bobbed up and down between the gravestones. Wilson dismissed Spencer summarily: ‘I’ll attend to the boiler myself next time.’
Spencer stared after his hurrying form. First the painting of the hall, now a threat to take over the stoking of the boiler. He went back to the kitchen and brooded over possible lines of defensive action. After a while, he settled down in the sitting-room with a pencil and a piece of paper.
Wilson, in the meantime, had opened up the church hall to find, as he had anticipated, that it was cold and damp. The hall had been hired for a winter flower display the night before and although the stalls had been cleared. Spencer had not prepared the hall for the youth club. The youngsters huddled in groups complaining about the cold but showing no desire to improve their circulation by furniture shifting. They were an impoverished crowd, the vicar having skimmed the cream for the nuclear disarmament campaign. These were the aimless drifters, skittering before every breath of trouble, sent along each week by parents who wanted to watch television in peace and hoped that they would be out of mischief at the church youth club. In the navy, backed by a strong tradition of discipline, Wilson might have made something of them, but here he had to establish his own code of discipline and this he was not prepared to do. It had become his habit to let them get on with it and hope that nothing very bad would happen. Usually the vicar or one of the wardens came along and their presence ensured order of a kind. But tonight there would only be Mr. Slieman who taught chess and who hardly counted as a presence because he seemed quite unaware of what was happening around him. Mr. Slieman and, of course, Jill. Jill had not yet arrived. As he put out the table tennis tables with the help of one or two of the more amenable members of the group, Wilson was miserably aware that she would not think much of the set-up.
Mr. Slieman had come in and was making for the corner where the chess players awaited him. Why they wanted to learn chess, Wilson had no idea. They were the slower-witted and more pleasant- natured of the youngsters; perhaps they just enjoyed the long silences during which they could ruminate undisturbed.
Someone had turned the record player on very loud. The tone was bad and the music screeched and vibrated as though a handful of pins had been thrown into the sound-box. Wilson went over to the record player and turned the volume down; they flicked it up again as soon as his back was turned The table tennis players were arguing as to who should play first. He went across to sort them out. While he was arguing with them, a girl who wanted to produce a play came and stood by his side with a pile of books borrowed from French’s clutched at her breast. ‘Where can we go?’ she was screeching. ‘We can’t read with all this going on.’
‘They were playing the last half-hour last week,’ Sid Price, one of the table tennis players, said, stabbing his finger towards two giggling girls. Over the boy’s shoulder, Wilson saw the door open. Jill came in. He told the boys that they could play first because he thought it would cause less trouble.
‘Let’s have a look at these plays.’
He took the books from the girl and nodded briefly to Jill. Behind him he heard a strident clamour which indicated that he had probably made a mistake about the table tennis order of play.
‘You’ll need to do a bit of sorting out in the first place,’ he said to the girl. ‘Why don’t you get the others who are interested together and start going through these? When you’ve got one or two to choose from, perhaps we can get the use of the hall on another evening for a reading.’
Jill had wandered across to the chess corner.
‘You get quite good numbers, don’t you?’ she said as he joined her.
He glanced round unhappily; viewed from the one quiet corner it was like a picture without a focal point, a splintered confusion of scenes stridently vying for attention. There was a row developing because the girls were getting in the way of the table tennis players; Sid Price had flushed an angry salmon colour. Near by, a girl who had been jiving had joined the play-reading group and several of the jivers were trying to drag her away.
‘They come here to let off steam,’ he said to Jill.
‘I can see that.’
He glanced at the clock. A quarter past eight. He hoped that the next hour and three-quarters would pass without a major crisis.
‘I might as well work now that I’m here,’ she said.
He searched round for an area of comparative calm.
‘The play-reading people could do with a bit of guidance. Otherwise they’ll decide on something that it will be impossible to produce.’
The girl who had been jiving was still with the play-reading group, but she kept glancing back at the dancers and twisting her body provocatively to the music. Wilson supposed that she was at least five years younger than Jill; her hair, dyed the colour of a dark-red carnation, was piled high on her head like a disintegrating bird’s nest, her eyelashes were ludicrous; but the jerky movements of her puny little body showed an art well-mastered. Beside her, Jill seemed gauche and inexperienced and awkwardly aware of it. She sat down and took one or two plays to study, but every so often her eyes strayed to the gyrating carnation girl.
Wilson stood uncertainly in the middle of the room. It had suddenly become very hot. The noise and the whirling figures confused him, he seemed to be caught up in a crescendo of aimless violence, but whether the violence emanated from without or from within his own being he was not sure. The girl who was organizing the play-reading group went across to the record player and turned the volume down, one of the boys turned it up again immediately. She looked across at Wilson, but he pretended not to notice. He could tell by the throbbing of his pulse that if he went anywhere near the thing he would smash it. He decided to join the chess players, crouched at the far end of the room, contemplating their pawns with bovine detachment.
He was half-way across the room when the girl screamed; the sound shrilled on his nerves with all the urgency of a warning bell announcing an emergency long expected. He swung round. In the table-tennis area there was a huddle of figures, pushing, swaying, clawing. He could see one of the girls pounding with her fist at a boy’s shoulder, her face white and grotesquely twisted. He could not see the other girl. The jivers had stopped; they were poised like figures in a statue dance, wavering on the brink of movement. He elbowed his way between them before they could decide to participate; they fell back, watching him uncertainly. At the moment, the initiative was with him. He reached the bunched group and cleft through to the centre. Automatically, his hands reached out, caught the front of a jersey, a knot of hair. He parted them in a second with an ease which shook them and shook himself even more. Sid Price had cracked back against the wall and was slithering dazed to the ground; the girl was sprawling across the table, her head pillowed in her arms, sobbing gustily. Those who had been on the fringe of the action now backed away. They stood in a ragged half-circle, regarding Wilson warily.
Now he had them where he wanted them: Price, in particular. But he had had this moment before. At the recollection, the hot assurance began to evaporate, leaving his body chill and limp. If he threw Price out, the others would give him what little respect they had to give. But if Price turned nasty? He looked at Price: the boy had lost much of his swagger already, if it came to a tussle he would not be difficult to handle. A little tremor passed through his body at the thought of handling Price.
Price watched. He was frightened. Wilson was drawing things out, but Price understood the purpose of that; when you have someone at your mercy it is a good idea to let him sweat a little, particularly if his pals are watching. But as the seconds passed and his pulse began to quieten, a faint, incredulous hope flickered in Price’s eyes. He lowered the lids to conceal his relief; a little smile, no more at first than a nervous reaction, twitched his shaking lips.
Behind Wilson, the threads of control were snapping; feet scraped on the floor, someone moved an arm jerkily and a bracelet jangled. Wilson’s throat ached and his mouth was dry; he ran his tongue over his lips.
‘What was that all about?’
If he had gone crawling to them on his knees he could not have despised himself more than he did at that moment, hearing the weak jauntiness of his voice. Price was easing himself up against the wall, dusting down his sweater, already beginning to preen himself.
‘She kept getting in our way,’ he answered, summoning a shaky arrogance. ‘I warned her.’
‘It must have been annoying, but there are other ways of settling these things.’
Just like a scout master jollying up the cubs! Behind him Wilson heard someone titter. The injured girl, still sprawled across the table, rolled her head to one side and peered up at him resentfully through strands of damp hair.
‘He hit me,’ she whined. ‘He hit me and he twisted my arm and . . .’
‘And I’ll do it again in a minute.’
Price pulled his jersey down across his slim hips and glanced at Wilson. The smile was not nervous now: he was cock of the walk again.
Wilson said: ‘Don’t let’s have any more of this,’ and turned away. He knew, as he walked across to the chess group, that life would never again be tolerable for him with these youngsters. One of the girls piped in exaggerated mimicry: ‘Oh, I say, old fellow! Don’t let’s have any more of this.’ The injured girl and Price were laughing together; he looked across at Wilson and pretended to twist her arm and she gave a shrill, delighted scream. The laughter fanned out round the room. The joke carried them through the rest of the evening; soon they began to indulge in horseplay that grew more and more outrageous.
Jill sat quietly with the more sober members of the play-reading group, her head well down over a copy of one of the plays. When at last the ordeal was over, she stayed behind to help Wilson clear up. She began to sort through the plays while he put away the table tennis gear. She watched him from where she was sitting on a pile of drapes which had been produced for the coming Easter pageant. When the table legs collapsed, released too soon by his fumbling fingers, she said:
‘Why did you let him get away with it?’
He kicked at the table.
‘The last time I didn’t let someone get away with it, he ended up in hospital.’
‘You mustn’t let things get out of proportion,’ she said in a rather lecturing tone. ‘If you had called Sid Price’s bluff he would have folded up completely.’
He sat down beside her. Glancing at him sideways she saw that his hair was beaded with sweat. He was hunched forward and the damp shirt was stretched tight across his arched back. She could sense the strain of the whole of his body from the sight of the taut muscles at the back of his neck. She put her hand on his arm and he shivered.
‘What is it?’ she whispered, feeling suddenly inadequate, all her comfortable formulae deserting her. ‘You mustn’t worry about that other lad. It wasn’t your fault.’ She was running her hand back and forward across his shoulders, trying to soothe him. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You were trying to defend something that mattered to you and you went about it the wrong way; but . . .’
‘No!’ He turned on her. She felt the weight of his body against hers, pushing her back to the wall. ‘No! I don’t want you to believe that.’
Her arm was round his shoulders still. He was very close to her. She was beginning to be afraid, yet she continued to hold him as though something terrible might happen if she let go. She put up her free hand to his face and pushed the damp hair back from his forehead. She did not know why she was behaving like this, except that there seemed to be no alternative.
‘You mustn’t upset yourself like this,’ she whispered. ‘You’re not bad.’
Her tenderness made him despairingly brutal.
‘I enjoyed it. Once I started hitting him it was as though something was released in me. I knew just how he felt when he broke up that café. Only I was breaking up a human being, which is much more exciting because you get a response, and you need to feel something twist and turn beneath your hands; and the more you feel it the more it exhilarates you and the more you want to . . .’
There was a lot more, but she was not thinking of the frantic words, only of the agony that wrenched them from him. At first, she hardly realized that she had brought his head down against her shoulder, that his hands were touching her and that they were not gentle. She accepted, quite calmly, that his pent-up misery must find release; she had no thought of denying him his need, whatever it might be. Even when the tumult of words had ceased, she remained still while his hands explored parts of her body which had always been very private to her before. How far she would have let him go, she had no idea afterwards. She felt remote, as though this were happening to someone else; she stroked his head once or twice, when he hurt her she did not cry out, but sometimes she whispered soothing, stupid things as though he were a child. It was he who suddenly stopped, lying quite still against her for a moment and then rolling away to lie face down on the floor. After a while, she leant across and laid her hand gently on his shoulder. She said, ‘You’re all right, then?’ or some such meaningless phrase. He jerked away from her. She got up and tidied her clothes; then she went to the washing-up sink and bathed her face.
She was quite calm when she walked past Sid Price, crouched against the side wall of the hall. He heard her footsteps, slow but regular, on the gravel path and then, still unhurried, fading away along Sloe Lane. Somewhere between Shepherd’s Bush and Chelsea the calm evaporated. She just managed to get the door of her flat open before she broke down. Her friend came out of the sitting- room and found her in the hall, weeping bitter, silent tears. When at last Jill was in bed, the friend enquired:
‘Do I have to ring the police, get a doctor, or just offer sympathy?’
She listened for a while and then said impatiently:
‘Really, Jill! You’re not safe to be let out on your own with a full-grown male.’
Jill turned her face to the wall. The friend, who thought this was a rather tedious exhibition, went out after a few minutes. Jill lay still, feeling his hands move on her breasts, across her thighs. She was conscious, as she had not been at the time, that he had handled her roughly and it suddenly seemed to her that this was an indication of gross disrespect. And she had offered no resistance! She had even caressed him while he invaded the privacy of her body. She felt deeply ashamed. What had prompted her to abandon herself to him? Why had it seemed at the time that to refuse him what comfort he needed would be unthinkable? Her face burnt at the memory. In future he would think of her as he must think of that girl with the flame-coloured hair; only she would have managed things better, she would have resisted a little to start with to make it more interesting for him. Had he, in fact, lost interest? Was that why he had turned from her without demanding final satisfaction? The pain at the thought that his desire had failed cut sharper than ever shame had done. And then, as she lay there remembering his embraces, she felt the throb of something that was neither pain nor shame, a signal from the unknown darkness of her body where some sleeping creature stirred at last.