The rain was no longer black and silent as it had been the night before. It scratched and pattered against the window panes and a diffused grey light pressed through the unlined curtains. Joshua was still asleep, his back to me. On the table his side of the bed a metal, schoolboy alarm clock and a thin gold watch both said ten to eight. Leaning over to see them I woke him.
‘What’s the matter? It’s too early.’ He turned to me and ran an unsleepy hand through my hair and down over my body. I curved towards him. The telephone rang. Joshua swore and flung his other arm out of bed to answer it. I could just hear a high, fast voice on the line.
‘Oh Christ,’ he said, when the voice at last stopped. ‘Well, as a matter of fact she’s here. Yes, it does make it easier.… I tell you what,’ – he was pinching my thigh – ‘I have to be on location to-day, but Clare could have my car and take you down there. No, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. Well, if you’re up and dressed already, why not come round here and she will meet you downstairs in twenty minutes’ time?’ He put down the receiver. ‘Fuck Mrs Fox.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Her sister’s had a heart attack and she wants to go down there straight away.’
‘Why couldn’t she go by train?’
‘She thought it would be quicker by car.’
‘So I’ve got to take her? In twenty minutes?’
‘I’m afraid so, you poor love.’ He kissed me. ‘I may go back to sleep.’ He turned over and immediately slept.
I got up and dresssed, tense with the alert, empty feeling that comes after a sleepless night. The toothpaste flowers in the basin were hard and cracked. I washed them away. Through the kitchen window the sky was a hood of unbroken grey. Rain fell regularly down. The buildings far below were hardly visible. I drank black coffee.
Downstairs Mrs Fox was standing outside the glass doors under her umbrella. The rain dripped and spiralled round her. She wore the same coat and hat as usual, but two goose feathers replaced the poppies and flags. When she saw me she ran down the steps to the car, which was parked some way down the road. I hurried after her and unlocked the door. Inside, I turned on the wipers and pulled out the choke. The car smelt of dank, airless leather, and the rain beat noisily against the windscreen and the soft roof.
‘I got this telegram very early this morning,’ said Mrs Fox, as we pulled out into the street. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind taking me in an emergency.’
‘Did they say how she was?’
‘No. You know how cruel telegrams are. I think she’s bad.’
We sloshed and skidded down the early London streets, through the persistent greyness and the warm rain. The windows of the car steamed up and the de-mister didn’t work, so our progress was slow.
‘Please hurry,’ said Mrs Fox, at a red traffic light. A little later her hand reached for the knobs of the radio. I turned it on for her, loud, and a moment or so later the skin of her face unclasped its tight hold over her bones.
I concentrated on driving. The faulty exhaust, the engine, and the thumping music on the wireless made too much noise for us to speak. We arrived at Herne Bay sometime mid-morning. Reluctantly, Mrs Fox turned down the wireless a little to direct me.
It still rained hard. In the wet, the buildings of the town were the ugly red of sodden chickens. Despondent black streets ran through rows of cheerless stucco houses. Their owners seemed to have given up the battle against ugliness, and painted the window frames and doors in compromising shades of gloomy greys, browns and greens.
‘It’s nice here earlier in the summer,’ Mrs. Fox said. ‘Sometimes they used to wheel Edith down to the front. She liked that.’
The Gulliver was a grey-black house of hideous proportions standing in a row of others identical to it in all but the merest detail. It was approached by a red tile path cut between two patches of scurvy lawn. On one was a large wooden notice which announced in elaborate lettering: The Gulliver Home for the Aged. All Comforts. For terms please apply to the Matron. Round the word Comforts the sign painter had put four primitive daisies, and their gold paint had run down to Matron.
Mrs Fox pranced up the wet path, tapping it distastefully with her umbrella, and rang a rusty handbell. It was answered by a small dark-haired maid with unshaven legs.
‘I’m Mrs Fox. My sister, Edith Smith…’
‘Oh yes, one moment.’ The girl hurried away and left us standing in the porch. In front of us was a hall papered with a dim, nubbly paper reminiscent of cheap brocade. The only furniture was a large polished hat-stand and a gilt-framed message that said Love Your Neighbour in a whirl of maroon peonies.
‘Judging by this hall you might think the place was clean,’ said Mrs Fox, prodding the multicoloured tile floor with her umbrella, and spattering it with drops of rain. ‘That’s why they receive visitors here and don’t like them to go any farther.’
A door off the hall opened and a thin, hunch-shouldered woman came towards us. She had rimless glasses and a hairy face. She wore a dress of mauve crotcheted wool, and under this small lumps of breasts, knotted straps and suspenders stood out obscenely.
‘Miss Fox,’ she said, ‘good of you to come. It wasn’t worth getting her to hospital, she won’t live the day.’
‘I’m Mrs Fox. – This is Matron.’
‘A relation?’ The Matron smiled up at me, stretching her thin bloodless lips over a crowd of ill-formed teeth. ‘Would you like to come and see Miss Smith too?’ I said no, I was not a relation and I would wait in the hall. But Mrs Fox plucked quickly at my arm.
‘Do come,’ she whispered. ‘Edith would like to see you again.’
The Matron led us down a brown linoleum-covered passage which bulged out at the end into a shapeless inner hall or room.
‘The lounge,’ she said brightly. With a little clipped movement of her skinny hand she gestured towards a huddle of old people in arm-chairs round a gas fire. Seven pairs of faded eyes moved listlessly towards us. ‘They’re waiting for their dinner. I always say they’re just like farm animals, you know. Up at the gate before the farmer gets there with his basket.’ She laughed at her joke and clattered up a flight of narrow wooden stairs. On the landing at the top stood a pile of slop pails, wet rags and chipped enamel bowls. There was a smell of disinfectant.
‘Didn’t you move her room?’ asked Mrs Fox, nodding towards a white door. ‘You said you would, last time I was here. You knew she never liked the one she’s in.’
‘My dear Miss Fox,’ the Matron replied, ‘if I succumbed to even a fraction of the whims of the people in this place I’d be running round on my hands and knees twenty-four hours a day. You ought to be grateful we didn’t send her to hospital.’
‘My name is Mrs Fox.’
The Matron scratched at the white door and opened it curtly. She beckoned us to follow her in.
The blinds of the narrow room were drawn, so that when we first left the beige light of the corridor it was difficult to distinguish anything more than a few weak shapes.
‘Hello, Miss Smith. Feeling better?’ The Matron’s voice vibrated through the semi-darkness. ‘How is she, Lillian?’ A young girl in nurse’s uniform came into focus by the low, narrow bed.
‘Not so bad.’
‘We might as well let the light in, in spite of the rain, yes?’ With the stealthy speed of a cat who knows its way in the dark the Matron moved to the window and snapped up the blind. The square of wet grey light rang through the room with a suddenness that almost shocked. The nurse looked up at us, as we stood cautiously by the bed, and smiled. She had large teeth that squatted on a plump vermilion lower lip. In the dim room the redness of her mouth was dazzling.
‘Edith …’ Mrs Fox put out a gloved hand and poked at the wan lumps under the blanket. Her fingers trailed up the sharp ridge of a leg, stopped at a peak of knee bone. Then, slowly, she made her eyes climb up over the undulations of the shrunken body till they reached the head, propped up on pillows.
‘Edith, I’m here.’ Edith gave no flicker of recognition. Her milky eyes hovered and trembled under the half-shut lids. The skin of her burned-out face raged under a mauve flush.
‘Perhaps we had better leave them together,’ suggested the Matron, cheerfully. She clacked her fingernails against the clutter of gauze-covered enamel bowls on the bedside table.
‘Yes, you go,’ said Mrs Fox to me. With an effort, she moved nearer to her sister. Edith’s hand was lying on the blanket, a small bundle of bones tied up in a rag of spotted skin. Mrs Fox picked up this hand and shook it at me.
‘Malnutrition,’ she said, and let it fall back on to the blanket. Edith blinked very slowly.
The Matron tugged at my sleeve and we left the room.
‘They get such funny ideas,’ she whispered, spitting, as we went downstairs. ‘Sometimes, the relations turn out to be as daft as the inmates.’
In the lounge, the seven old people were seated at a table now, eating some kind of stew out of soup plates. The table was covered with a squashy checked oil cloth, made soft by a blanket beneath. There was a napkin ring in front of each plate; seven plastic glasses, and plastic salt and pepper pots shaped like mushrooms. The room was very quiet, except for the hiss of the gas fire and the slopping noise of gravy being sucked out of spoons.
‘Perhaps you would like to wait here for a while,’ said the Matron, ‘while Mrs Fox makes up her mind what she’s going to do.’ She indicated a flowered arm-chair. I thanked her, sat down, and picked up a copy of the Radio Times from the floor. She went away.
As soon as she had left, with one accord the old people edged round in their chairs to look at me.
‘Is Edith gone?’ asked one old woman, finally. She wore an apple green cardigan worn smooth as felt from washing. Her chin rested on her bowl of soup.
‘No, her sister is with her.’
‘If you ask me, she’ll hang on for weeks,’ said an old man. ‘You might think you’ve come down here for the day, but you might have to stay weeks, or months.’ He chuckled to himself. A streak of brown gravy ran down his pitted chin.
‘Did she speak to you?’ asked the first old woman.
‘No, she didn’t say a word.’
‘She hasn’t addressed anyone with a word, let alone a civil one, ever since she’s been here. I would have liked to have met someone who had heard her utter.’ The old man clawed at the elbow of the green cardigan, shaking with laughter.
‘Don’t carry on like that, George. Edith was very fond of her sister.’
‘I never said she wasn’t,’ replied George, crumbling into another laugh. ‘Anyhow, how could you tell who she was fond of, if she didn’t speak?’
‘You just could,’ said the old woman, dabbing at her eye with her napkin.
The maid came in with a Pyrex dish of prunes and a sauceboat of custard. An old woman nearest to me looked up sharply. She had a pointed head, like a turnip, and a thin clump of white hair crowned the point – the kind of hair that can be snapped off a vegetable with one small gesture before boiling. She wore mittens on her hands. All the time the maid changed the plates and doled out helpings of prunes and custard this old woman followed her with hatred in her spiky eyes. When at last the maid left the room, she banged on the oil cloth with a clenched fist. The noise was no more than a muffled thud.
‘In my day,’ she said, ‘we would rather have gone out to the kitchens and helped ourselves than be waited upon by foreigners.’
‘Shut up, Avis,’ said George, at once. Avis crooked her finger and picked up her spoon. Opposite her, another white-haired old woman whose skinny neck was pricked by a hundred ropes of sharp black beads, and who looked permanently indignant, chipped into the fight.
‘You with your folly de grander,’ she said, shaking a custardy spoon towards Avis. Then she gave Avis a huge, toothless grin. She had long gums the whitish colour of condensation in a polythene bag.
‘How can I expect you to understand?’ asked Avis benignly. ‘To begin with, you’ve never had any education. You’ve never been waited upon in the style my husband and I were accustomed to. Why, we had the finest china and silver and glass in all of Hastings. And Firebird, the butler, used to clean the silver with his thumb, you know….’
‘I said lay off, Avis,’ snapped George. ‘If your china and that had been that bloody marvellous, why didn’t you sell it? Then you could have retired to a Majestic Hotel somewhere, instead of here, and surrounded yourself with other fine-china ladies who would have appreciated you.’ He chuckled again and several of the others joined in.
‘You’re always sniping,’ replied Avis, with a little shudder, as if she was cold.
They left the table and moved slowly back to the faded chairs. The three old men pulled tins of tobacco from the sagging pockets of their cardigans, and lit pipes. Three of the women picked up sewing or knitting. Avis pulled a small plastic sponge bag from down the side of her chair, took from it a silver-backed looking-glass, and dabbed at her white clump of hair. I read the Radio Times.
Some time later Mrs Fox reappeared, stiffly upright and walking with a conscious quiet. She ignored the curious glances she attracted and came straight over to my chair.
‘I wouldn’t want you to wait for me here any longer,’ she said, in a voice not too low for all the listeners to hear, ‘I’ll direct you to the Golden Sands. You can make arrangements from there, and have tea. They have the television on nearly all the time,’ she added.
She came with me to the front door and I promised to wait for her at the hotel. ‘It will only be a few hours,’ she said.
The Golden Sands was clumsily built of black and greasy stone. It overlooked a long sweep of grey beach and a lustreless sea. Inside, the walls were the colour of old teeth and a sports programme on the television blared through the soggy atmosphere.
I went to the reception desk and asked to use the telephone. The receptionist, dressed like a stage parlourmaid, directed me to behind a Japanese screen in the hall. When I explained I wanted to get through to London, she did not hold much promise for my call. She was right. The line wheezed and spluttered, and the girl on the exchange could barely hear me. Finally Joshua’s number rang, distantly, fifteen times. No reply.
I went to the lounge. As there was no one else there, I turned off the television. I sat in a brown damask chair and lit a cigarette. The receptionist brought me a tray with a plate of rock cakes and a china teapot painted to look like miniature bricks.
‘I’m everything here,’ she said, banging the tray on to the table. It was ten to four.
Several years ago Richard Storm and I had stayed in a hotel similar to the Golden Sands in Portsmouth. The smell of old furnishings was familiar. We moved there after a bleak, cold honeymoon in a Dorset cottage.
‘It will be more convenient,’ Richard had said, ‘than a flat. The flats aren’t very nice in Portsmouth, and you won’t have to cook.’
He had taken the best suite, a faded blue room with narrow twin beds and a noisy cupboard, and a pink bathroom where long brown stains ate into the deep bath.
‘A lovely view of the harbour,’ Richard had said.
Every morning his alarm woke us at seven thirty and he sprang out of bed with a guilty fright that never decreased as the mornings continued. He had a bath, and dressed, as far as his shirt, in the bathroom. Then he returned to put on his naval uniform in front of me. He would ruffle my hair and say he was just off for a bite of breakfast, and take great strides towards the door that made the floor creak. Later he would return, smelling of egg or sausages on alternate days, kiss me on the forehead and wish me a good day. He left The Guardian on the bed.
Nine o’clock until ten went by easily enough. I would read the paper and have a long bath; dress slowly and look at the harbour. Then I would go for a walk and buy a paperback, and not let myself look at a clock until I imagined that an hour or so had passed. Sometimes Richard would surprise me by coming back for lunch. He would jaunt into the lounge, where I was waiting-for the dining-room to open at twelve thirty, and kiss me on the forehead again. He would take my arm and guide me to the bar. People would look up at us from their drinks and I would feel rather proud. We sat on tall stools and drank a glass of medium dry sherry, and ate a plate of crisps, and the bar took on a small air of excitement which I never could recapture when he wasn’t there. He and the barman talked about the sea and winds and knots, and I gazed at Richard’s profile through the reflections of bottles and glasses in the mirror behind the bar. Then we would lunch in the stiff, white dining-room – Spaghetti Bolognese served on toast, with sprouts, – and I would listen to a story about a night he spent in a Tahitian brothel. At the end of those sort of stories Richard always laughed guiltily, and said he shouldn’t be telling his child wife such things.
In the afternoons I would go to a cinema, or feed the seagulls or have my hair done. Three evenings a week we would drive the yellow Ford Anglia to some local country pub for dinner. Sometimes, I would find a cottage near Portsmouth for Richard to contemplate. The hotel would make us up a box of fishpaste sandwiches and Penguin biscuits, and we would take a picnic to see it on a Sunday. But Richard was never tempted. The isolation or the unruly garden or the lack of heating depressed him. He preferred our hotel life.
When we came back to the hotel in the evenings, never later than ten thirty, it was always asleep. We would talk softly along the passages, and keep our voices low in our room. One night, after Richard had climbed back into his own bed again, he turned on the bedside light. The clock said midnight.
‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.
‘What about?’ I was sleepy, and unused to our routine being disturbed.
He leant on his elbow and did his pyjama jacket up to the neck. His ruffled hair stood straight up on his head, grey and stiff.
‘I can never forget you’re twenty years younger than me, little one, and there’s a whole – gap of experience between us.’ I thought of myself as a small rowing boat and him as an ocean liner. The rowing boat bounced hopelessly behind the liner, divided from it by a mile of churning sea. I giggled.
‘No, seriously,’ he said. ‘That’s what I think. And the thing is,’ he paused, ‘the thing is, an old sea dog like me isn’t likely to change his ways. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you ever since we were married. – I’m very ashamed of myself, but I must get it off my chest for once and for all.’ He undid his top pyjama button and did it up again. ‘Just before I came back from Barcelona to marry you, I was unfaithful to you. I had promised myself never to see Matilda again – but I did.’
I lay back on my pillow and he craned higher up on his elbow to see my face.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you mean the girl whose photograph is in your wallet?’
‘Now, don’t cry and get upset, darling,’ he said, extending a huge hand, with fingers outspread, towards me. ‘You must understand. I had to tell you.’
I asked about Matilda, and with relief he turned out the light.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked, and told me about her. She was thirty and divorced. Her skin was permanently suntanned and she smelt of tubor roses. She had black hair and kind eyes and three tom cats, and they had met in a night-club. She had a head like a rock, she cooked like a dream, and she wore tight silk trousers. We talked about her most of the night.
Every day for a week, after that night, Richard returned to lunch with me. We never mentioned Matilda. Instead, we made plans for some future day when we would have a house on the Solent, and three or four children. On the Sunday, Richard complained to the head waiter about the overcooked roast beef. He was not naturally a complainer, and seemed nervous.
On the eighth day he bought me twelve red roses wrapped in cellophane paper, and a box of liqueur chocolates. That evening I drove him down to the ship and waved good-bye. Duty forced him to return to Barcelona.
*
At five to eight Mrs Fox walked quietly into the room. In the subdued light, the dust of rain on her black coat made it glow like moleskin. Her hands were clenched at her side, gloveless.
‘Edith is dead,’ she said. ‘She died fourteen minutes ago.’
I stood up and she sat down.
‘Shall I get you some – tea, or brandy or anything?’
‘No, no. I’ll think about that later.’ She stared at the blank television set. I asked if I could help in any way.
‘No. You must go back to London. Joshua will be waiting for you. You have already done enough. I must stay here for a few days and arrange things.’ She spoke very quietly, with pauses in between each sentence. At a sign from her I turned on the television and we watched a commercial for Quick Brew tea. ‘I was thinking,’ she went on, ‘there might be a band down here, somewhere, who would care to play.… What do you think?’
‘There might be,’ I said, and she smiled. She stood up, came across to me and offered a clenched hand.
‘Now please go,’ she said, ‘and no arguing. I will be all right.’ She led me to the door, her hand taut but unquivering. As I left I heard her asking the receptionist for a room from which she could hear the sea.
*
Through the dark the lights crash on to the windscreen. Rosettes of blinding lights that split, multiply, divide and bloom again. The rain splinters the lights into a million petals that stay whole for a moment, then join into mean little channels and sneak down the glass. On another night like this Jonathan, driving in his fur-lined gloves, once said:
‘Darling, I must get one of those cloth covers for the steering wheel….’ Why should I remember that?
The noise of the engine, the wet black margin of night round the brilliant windscreen. Among the fractured headlights swim the dying Edith’s eyes, not quite burnt out. Was she frightened, or was she too tired to be frightened? Did the girl with the vermilion lips close the lids over her eyes when she died? Or was that the Matron’s prerogative?
I turn on the wireless. Bud Flanagan is crooning ‘Underneath the Arches’, and I smile to myself because if I did not smile I would almost cry. But at the end of this journey Joshua would be there with aspirin for the pain in my head, and a drink with ice in it which he would get quickly with no fuss, like a good actor does on the stage. I could have a bath and talk to him about his day, while he sat on the edge. Then he could take over the driving of the noisy car and we would go to a warm dark restaurant where candles and steaks and wine would crowd out Heme Bay and the ultra-black night. I accelerate. Doubly fast the lights crash on to the windscreen.
*
But Joshua was not in the flat. It was dark. The curtains were undrawn and the bed unmade. I threw myself on to the cold, rumpled bedclothes and shut my eyes. I had no energy to get up again.
It can only have been a few moments later, but it felt like several hours, that he came back. I could hear him in the next room, snapping on lights and flicking shut curtains. I didn’t call and he came in.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’ I sat up. He put on the light.
‘You look exhausted. Was it awful?’
‘It was long.’
‘I’ve had a terrible day, too.’ He sat beside me on the bed and took off his glasses. ‘In the cutting-room. Most of the good bits are on the floor.’
‘I’m very hungry,’ I said. ‘Is there any food?’
‘Not a thing. There’s a coffee bar place where we could get an omelette downstairs. We’d better hurry, before it shuts.’
We drank neat vodka. Warmth began to ease out the empty tiredness and the room became as fluid as an underwater scene. In the lift Joshua held my hand. In return I leant against him, half for support.
The coffee bar was almost empty. We sat in a corner by the window at a Formica-topped table and I focused on the island of salt, pepper and tomato sauce in its middle. A waitress with a squint approached us.
‘There’s only omelettes left, you can have,’ she said, with some triumph.
‘We only want omelettes – they are the only thing in the world we want,’ said Joshua, ‘if you could give us the choice of everything, if you could set a banquet before us, all us would ask for is an omelette. Think of what you could tempt us with: whole sucking pigs turning on a spit –’
‘Sucking what?’ said the waitress, making a note on her pad.
‘Sucking pigs. And wild boar and linnets’ tongues, gulls’ eggs and boeuf en croute and caviar; fraises de bois soaked in champagne and tagliatelle verde; and crumpets and waffles with maple syrup and steak tartare and marrons glacés…’
‘That’ll be omelettes for two, then,’ said the waitress, and almost ran away. We laughed weakly and pushed the salt and pepper and tomato sauce away to hold hands again, and the grainy pattern of the Formica blurred like rain.
‘Do you invite lots of girls back to your flat – to stay?’ I asked.
‘Hundreds of thousands,’ said Joshua. ‘Why have you asked me to stay? How long can I stay for?’
‘I don’t know. The thing about you –’ He shrugged. ‘The thing with you, when you’re not there I don’t have to think about you very much. When you’re there, it’s so strong. I mean to-day, working, I didn’t think about you at all. Not till I was coming home. Then I remembered, and it was something nice to look forward to.’
‘Well, I thought about you,’ I said.
‘What did you think?’
‘It was while I was waiting in the hotel Mrs Fox sent me to while she waited for her sister to die. I just wanted you to be there very much. I tried to telephone you, but you weren’t there. It was a very dingy hotel with flowered calendars on the wall –’
‘It’s absolutely no use telling me,’ he said, ‘there’s never any use in telling someone how you felt about them when they weren’t there. Reported feelings don’t carry. They become embarrassing when you try to recount them. The emphasis gets all wrong. Maybe I’m just biased –’ he smiled, ‘but once I left someone at a station. – Stations are awful for making one feel: I must remember to tell her how I felt when she left. Anyhow, once the train was on its way I wrote her a long letter describing the gloom that came over me as she disappeared out of sight. I was only twenty and I posted it, I remember, at the first stop-Didcot. Of course, this girl completely misunderstood me. She wrote back and said she hadn’t realised the extent of my feelings, and she presumed that if I felt like that about her, I wanted to marry her. Silly idiot. I didn’t feel like that about her in general. I just felt like that about her when the train left. – That’s what I mean.’
‘There are whole areas about people you should never get to know about,’ I said, ‘however involved you are with them. Once I went out with a very sophisticated sort of man, something to do with films, who took me to the Caprice all the time and ordered Lobster Newburg for me without asking if I wanted it. He was very steely and rather frightening, and I would have done anything for him. Then one day he asked me, at the Caprice, if I knew of any good launderettes in the Cromwell Road. I said why, and he said because since he’d lost his housekeeper his dirty linen had been piling up and he didn’t know what to do about it. The thought of this glossy, important man wandering about the Cromwell Road with his bag of dirty socks, hopelessly looking for a launderette, was completely disillusioning. So disappointing that I never went out with him again. He shouldn’t have told me.’
‘It’s all the same sort of thing,’ said Joshua. The waitress brought our omelettes. She put two white, frothy coffees down on the table as well.
‘You didn’t mention them in the banquet,’ she said, her humour recovered, ‘but I thought I’d better get them before the machine man goes home.’ We laughed with her and ate hurriedly.
It was very late when we got back. We made the bed.
‘It seems as if I’ve been here ten years, not twenty-four hours,’ I said.
‘You must forget to-day quickly. It can’t have been much fun for you.’
‘In a way, it’s made it much better, getting back.’
When we went to bed, we curved into each other and slept at once.