Natalie came to live with me. Not before she had moved into the council hostel, of course. She collected the children from the playing fields and with a suitcase in either hand walked on into the Emergency Hostel in Eddon Gurney.
‘Why didn’t you come straight to me?’ I asked her later.
‘I didn’t like to,’ she said. ‘Anyway, they were expecting me.’ A feeble answer, but then she was tired. She’d been allocated a room in Redfield House, once a convent, now roughly converted to multiple use; one family to a room, and communal cookers in the corridors, out by 9.00 in the morning and not in before 7 in the summer, 6.30 in the winter.
‘The worst thing about the hostel,’ Natalie said, ‘was that they’d painted bright colours over dirty walls: yellows and pinks and greens, in the hope of cheering the place up. But it was beyond cheering, and so were we.’
Well, that was her point, wasn’t it? She wanted to be really worthless, really degraded, really at the bottom of the pile, our proud Natalie. Really finished. That’s how the end of a marriage takes some people. They find themselves cleaning other women’s houses, or with some horrible skin disease, or whoring to make ends meet – anything to punish themselves for their failure. Failure? Well, of course. Their failure to be loved, every woman’s task, duty, to find someone to love them. Dragging the kids along as often as not, to witness the punishment.
Natalie had just stood there, since Harry left, and let herself be cheated, robbed, insulted and misled by Arthur, Angus, Alec, the bank manager, the police, the school, the DHSS – everyone. You could hardly blame them for doing it. She was like one of those little dolls weighted at the bottom, the only point to whose existence is that you try to knock them over. The dolls come on up again, swaying and smiling – they’re vaguely female – but Natalie was doing her damnedest to stay down.
It was Ben and Alice who shocked her back to her senses: so she shot suddenly upright and this time stayed there. Their poor white traumatized faces stared at her from the bunk beds – inmates had to provide their own sheets and she’d brought these in the suitcases. The hostel kindly provided charity blankets. (Now everyone with any sense uses duvets there’s a glut of discarded blankets all over the country and they’re freely available.) Natalie was just sitting, too tired even to unfold the rather stained sofa bed and get onto it and go to sleep. She couldn’t turn the overhead light off: a greenish ten watt bulb glimmered permanently overhead. The light stays on in case the children wake in a strange place and are frightened, or that’s what they say, but they don’t mean to make these places too comfortable, do they, or who’d make the effort to get out of them? ‘Their faces were so greeny-white and ghostly, and they were so quiet, I realized what I’d done,’ Natalie said. ‘I realized they only had me. Harry wasn’t coming back to rescue us. I clapped my hands and said very loudly, ‘All right! Up! We’re getting out of here,’ and they both sat up at once.
‘Natalie,’ Ben said, ‘I think we’d better stay just for the night. Get some sleep. We’ll think in the morning.’ (it was the first and only time he ever called her Natalie. Usually it was Mum, or Ma, or You. (The softer form, Mummy, was left for Alice.) But now he spoke to his mother as if she were an equal. This shocked her, too. Between them, Harry and she had deprived their son of his childhood – not that he’d been making too good a job of that, either, to date. Privilege and self-doubt mixed makes some people obnoxious, and Ben was one of them. In the short time he was with us up at the estate, he improved enormously: privilege had been snatched away, and his sense of being the one male amongst so many helpless, hopeless females did wonders for his self-esteem. He was okay, was Ben, in the end.
‘No,’ said Natalie, ‘we’re going right now! We are simply not going to spend the night in a place like this.’
And the children dressed and Natalie packed, and they tiptoed down the yellow and pink stairs (no carpet) in the greeny light from the horrible unquenchable bulbs. The warden – I shall call her Ms Frostbite because I never did get to hear her name – popped out of the ground floor front room where she was watching the late-night horror (no doubt) and said:
‘Where are you going? What irresponsibility is this? How dare you take those children out after bedtime! Don’t you know that room was booked for you? Don’t you know by accepting it you were keeping others out?’ and so forth, but Natalie took no notice and kept on walking, and so did the children, and the door closed behind them and no one followed them, and they were free. In the dark, in the cold, penniless, hungry, and alone, but free.
It took them forty-five minutes to walk to the Boxover Estate. Once they heard a police car, and hid behind a hedge until it passed. Perhaps it was looking for them, perhaps it wasn’t. Were there laws concerning vagrancy? Natalie didn’t know. There was a full moon. There was almost no traffic. The countryside seemed to hover – as if the fields lay quivering an inch or so above the brown earth – patterned with strange silvery shadows. Natalie had never seen it like this before. Even the children were impressed. ‘It’s like fairyland,’ said Alice.
‘You’re such a baby,’ said Ben, but he said it kindly. He carried one of the suitcases. Alice helped Natalie with the other, and though this was more trouble than it was worth, as the corner of the case kept banging into her ankles, Natalie did not try to stop her. Neither child complained about tiredness, hunger or thirst, and now they were out of the hostel and their mother was in charge of them and herself again, the colour had come back to their cheeks, albeit a strange translucent moonlit pink, the like of which Natalie doubted she’d ever see again. Crunch, crunch, crunch went their footsteps, echoing. An owl hooted, a fox barked.
‘I like this walk,’ said Alice. It was their moment out of time.
Her knock got me out of bed. Knocks after midnight usually mean trouble. I opened the door and there Natalie stood in the moonlight with her children, half apologetic, half stubborn. She didn’t say anything. Her presence explained itself.
‘Oh well,’ I said. I was wrapped in my blue silk kimono, circa 1930, 80p from Oxfam. ‘End of a quiet life. Come in. You can have the sofa, the kids will have to make do with the floor.’
You’ve got to stick together, down here at the bottom of the world. As I say, all you have in the end are your friends.