11

Mrs Ford gave the impression of being extremely materialistic. She was about fifty. She was slim and her hair was dyed black and lacquered so that it looked rather Japanese. She wore spectacles with heavy black frames and smoked one cigarette after another with her painted lips. Her femininity depended on making money from her lodgers. She needed money to buy smart clothes. Her clothes had to be more expensive than those that would suit a girl. I thought that I would like to be something like Mrs Ford when I was fifty. She seemed com­pact and unsentimental—though when I arrived a dog barked hysterically. It was an old terrier on stiff legs.

The boarding house was on Beverley Road, a main road that ran to the centre of the city. Sections of it looked prosperous and other sections were dilapidated. There were chapels, dance halls, hostels, shops, cafés, boarding houses, bowling alleys, fish-and-chip shops, churches, cinemas, laundrettes, pubs, trade union offices, coffee bars, second-hand motor dealers, men carrying ladders, women pushing prams, un­employed men walking purposefully, heavy lorries shaking the ground, cars, buses, trolley buses, girls on scooters, leather-bound youths on motor-cycles.

It was an old house, a unit in a block of tall, well-built properties. There had been gardens at the front but they had been concreted over and cars were standing where once there had been respectable flower beds. It seemed to be a place where people would be too busy to take any notice of me. Once the house might have been ruled by a sound father, patriotic but liberal, provident but generous. Now it was amoral—or seemed so. The walls in the hallway and up the stairs were painted grey. When I saw them I was reassured. It seemed a house for strangers to live in. Parcels could arrive and nobody would ask what they contained. Strangers allowed freedom. When Mrs Wilson had brought the birthday cake the feeling that I would be helped to pretend that I was a likeable person had been almost unbearable. The kindness made me feel too ashamed.

Mrs Ford told me that dinner was at six o’clock. I had come to a place where dinner was not the main meal in the middle of the day. Surely, I thought, in this place people would not expect to know all about each other.

She showed me a room at the front of the house on the second floor. It was simple and clean. The single bed had been made up geometrically and firmly so that it looked as though it had never been slept in. By the bed was a small table with a bedside lamp on it. The lampshade was of an oatmeal colour decorated with large interlocking circles of red and black. There was a plain oak wardrobe and a plain oak chest of drawers and a modern easy chair with wooden arms. It was an easy chair to sit in but not to go to sleep in.

The room would do until I was ready to leave the house.

As soon as Mrs Ford left me alone I went to the wardrobe to find out whether there was a mirror on the inside of the door.

It was a long mirror. I could manage to see myself full-length in it.

A small picture hung on the wall. I examined it. It was a reproduction of a painting of a waterfront. There were no figures, just ornate white buildings and a promenade and the blue sea. The scene appeared to be under oppressive heat. I decided that it must be siesta time and everybody was indoors. Inside, the men were sitting about in white suits, drinking whiskey and arguing about politics. They were sweating and working up nasty tempers. Upstairs, in a cool bedroom, a girl, tall and dark with dark eyes, cool in a midnight blue negligée, was lying on a couch upholstered with dove grey silk, thinking dreamily about clothes and sipping a cool green drink from a tall glass. In the afternoon the promenade would be thronged with people. The girl would put on a red bikini and swim in the sea with other rich and beautiful girls. The men in the white suits would watch slyly from the sea wall and use carnal words to one another to pretend that they liked being ugly. But the girls would be swimming superbly in the sea, happy and pretending to be unconscious of being seen. The men could do nothing but think, trousered and congested with viciousness.

I had a plan.

I was going towards the morning when I would walk on the pavements in high-heels. Then I would have broken through and escaped. It was impossible to know how long I would be able to go on living as a woman. In the end I might be caught and punished. But for a time I would have a holiday. I had not enough money to have treatment so that I could escape forever, but I had enough money for an outing that I would be able to remember whatever was done to me or however old I might become. After I had done what I wanted to do no punishment could change it. Not all the policemen in the country could break into the past. No magistrate, however pompously indignant, could make a court order to stop what had already happened. No stupidity or dishonesty would be able to touch what I remembered. Sabina had been Empress of Rome, and the miserable Christians who came after could not alter that with all their lies.

I hoped that I would not be caught on the day that I set out.