Natalie had finished work for the day. Her second week’s pay packet was in her pocket. The total was twenty-three pounds fifty-six pence, after National Insurance money and tax at the emergency rate had been deducted. She was walking home, since the one bus which passed the quarry gate came at eight minutes before the 6 o’clock siren went, and it was Natalie who was expected to push the button for the siren. It was raining. Natalie wore an old raincoat (two pounds seventy-five pence) and rain hat (seventy-five pence) and a pair of walking boots (one pound twenty-five pence) bought from Oxfam with Sonia’s help. The hat was inadequate and the rain made pasty runnels down her face, where quarry dust still lingered. There was no shower on site, and if there had been it would not have been available to females, in the interests of common decency. The job was terrible. Natalie’s task was to run here and there in the rain with cups of tea and messages, diving for shelter when the dynamite sirens went. Someone else was always there to push those – that was fun. When the sun came out others did the messenging and Natalie was put in the sweltering Portakabin to work the switchboard. Gnarled men clumped about disliking her, and younger, redder ones muttered about women taking the bread out of the mouths of family men. Nobody even whistled at her.
Angus’ Quattro drew up beside her. She consented, once again, to get in. She had a blister on her left heel from the boots and from the feel of it the plaster had slipped. Otherwise she would just have shaken her head and walked on. But if she kept walking now she would be in worse pain tomorrow, and if she did not work, she was not paid. On such small choices are our futures determined, and not just ours, other people’s.
‘You can’t go on like this,’ said Angus. ‘Your face is thinner. You’ll get old before your time.’
‘I don’t have much choice,’ said Natalie, but no one likes to hear that time is overtaking them. If you drudge for a living you end up like a drudge. She remembered her mother telling her this, and for the first time for years, years, missed her mother. Tears of frank self-pity came into her eyes.
Angus – he drove casually, one-handed, and at unnerving speed – put his spare hand on her knee.
‘There, there!’ he said, and Natalie felt a rush of not quite affection or dependency, but a kind of sensuous, erotic helplessness.
‘What you need is a man to look after you,’ he said. ‘Heard from Harry?’
‘Of course I haven’t heard from Harry. Have you?’
‘Why should I hear from Harry?’ He sounded surprised.
‘Because I reckon you and Harry made a deal. Harry disappears. Tax man claims: knock the house out to Arthur. Re-sell: split the difference three ways. Reappearance of Harry, tax paid and twenty thousand to the good. And he does you a good turn next time.’
‘There’s a flaw in that somewhere,’ said Angus, laughing. ‘But you’re learning.’
‘What’s the flaw?’
‘We wouldn’t go to all that trouble for so small a sum.’
She didn’t appear convinced.
‘I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t insure my life and then murder me. Just drop me at the gate, Angus. I’m not asking you in.’
‘I don’t want to come in.’ He took two twenty pound notes from his wallet. ‘These are for the kids.’
She stared at the notes and then put them in her pocket.
‘How’s your wife?’ she asked.
‘Much as usual,’ he said. ‘Shall I take you out to dinner tonight?’
‘All right,’ she said, giving in. I think it was the sight of the notes that did it. Up at the quarry she got paid in fivers and pound coins. The sight of large denominations can act as an aphrodisiac. ‘Pick me up at eight.’
She came into my house with the light of treachery, that is to say heterosexuality, in her eyes.
Normally she came in exhausted, white and depleted, and would sit down in a chair, arms and legs dangling like one of Bess’ rag dolls, and let me make her a cup of tea, which she’d drink while the children stared. But on this particular evening she came in quite cheerful and animated, and when she bent her head over the sink to shake the quarry dust out of her hair, it was as if she shook off depression, need, the past, everything. Perhaps it was just having forty unexpected extra pounds in her pocket, but I think it was more the reviving effect that the prospect of an erotic adventure has on women. I should have noticed and known.
Jealous and resentful? Of course I was. Who ever wanted to pounce on me in the hour of my greatest need and offer me a way out? Who ever followed me down country lanes in an Audi Quattro, or lay in wait in the alley behind the International Stores? I deserved good fortune, and got none. Natalie, who turned out to be nothing much better than a whore, deserved nothing and got everything. She left her children for me to look after, while she worked (of course I looked after them: what else could I do!). She had no community spirit: she took a job which fellow feeling with the hard-done-by should have prevented her from taking. She used my house as if it was her own. She used my heart as if it were hers to use and abuse as she felt fit. When it came to it, I just didn’t count. If a man turned up, any obligation to a female friend simply fell by the way. It was inexcusable.
I told her so that evening. She went into the bathroom looking like a Moscow street cleaner and came out dolled up, in a tight black skirt (hers, from the Harrix days) and a frilly white blouse (mine, Oxfam, one pound eighty), and make-up (Marks & Spencer, bought at the school fair for four pence – the blue eyeshadow all gone but everything else okay). She’d washed her hair and towelled it dry so it was curling wildly. She looked terrific. We were meant to be having split peas and sausage for supper. I’d planned it. I’d been soaking the peas all day.
So when she came out of the bathroom I was startled and asked where she was going.
‘Out to dinner,’ she said, without so much as a by-your-leave.
‘You didn’t ask me if I’d babysit,’ I pointed out.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘I didn’t think. My two are old enough to leave anyway.’
‘That’s hardly the point,’ I said. ‘I’ve made a special meal for us and now you’re letting me down.’
I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have been so neurotic. I should just have let her go, happily. I couldn’t.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She wasn’t sorry at all. She was embarrassed.
‘I don’t want you to be sorry for me,’ I said. ‘I just want you to have a scrap of feeling for me. But you don’t. You use me, you make use of me, you’ll go out to dinner but you won’t think of taking me. I’m not good enough for you!’
And so on and so on, weeping and wailing. Absurd. The kind of thing wives shriek at husbands, or, I suppose, any spouse or partner of any sex who’s on the losing side. It’s a kind of madness. Every word you utter, claiming love, makes you the more unloveable. The children looked on, trying to puzzle it out. They hadn’t seen me like this, weeping and hysterical, ravenous for love and reassurance, since their father left. They’d almost forgotten. ‘Don’t leave me, how can you, you don’t love me, my life is wasted –’ Did I drive Natalie further into Angus’ arms? Probably.
When she was gone Ben said, ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’
During his stay with me he had become a much nicer child.