Angela Lowood stood at the bus stop and watched in impotent fury as her husband drove by without seeing her. The handles of the two plastic carrier bags she was holding cut into the palms of her hands. She turned to watch the car progress down the High Street. It was the evening rush hour but he would still be home within fifteen minutes. She almost moaned aloud with impatience, anticipating the long bus journey that lay ahead of her. But it was her own fault, she thought. She had urged him to borrow her car today, while his own was in the garage having the computer display on the dashboard looked at: it kept insisting that the driver’s door was open when, to his rage, it obviously was not. It was her own fault that she had no gloves with her; her own fault that she had bought five pounds of Marks and Spencer’s potatoes and two bottles of Chardonnay, the combined weight of which was threatening to snap the straining plastic handles.
She had watched the weather girl forecast snow on breakfast television, but had still left the house in the high-heeled bootees and Burberry raincoat she always wore to work in winter. “Why didn’t I put the quilted lining inside the raincoat? I’m inadequate and incompetent,” she said to herself; and warm tears of self-pity filled her eyes so that the bus appeared to her like a shimmering red mirage when it finally approached. When it was her turn to pay she couldn’t find her purse. The driver stared straight ahead, blanking out her apologies. Women and their purses, it was an occupational hazard. The posh ones were the worst, he thought.
The other passengers queuing in the snow behind her shuffled impatiently. Angela moved aside to let them pass while she fumbled for her purse. Sweat drenched her hair and she felt a wave of heat suffuse her face. She searched frantically through her large black crocodile-skin handbag. It had to be there. She lowered the carrier bags on to the floor of the bus and tried to jam them securely between her feet, still searching. But when the bus started up, the contents fell out and slid along the floor. Angela gave a cry of distress. She looked into the faces of the other passengers and imagined what they saw: a clumsy, fat, menopausal woman with a red face.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, as she bent to pick up the potatoes and the bottles of wine from between their snow-wet shoes and boots. An old woman picked up a packet of Marks and Spencer’s frozen Yorkshire puddings. Angela saw her glancing disapprovingly at the price on the box before she handed it over.
When at last she had found her purse, paid the driver and struggled to a seat, she turned her head fixedly towards the window. Her blurred reflection stared back at her. A woman with a discontented mouth, tired eyes and long dark hair that she couldn’t bring herself to have cut, although for many years there had been nobody to stroke it and tell her it was lovely.
Her husband had warned her before they married that he was an undemonstrative man. He had not allowed himself to smile for their wedding photographs, despite the entreaties of the hired photographer and the instructions of Angela’s mother. His name was Gregory. He was seven years younger than her and one inch shorter and she had never called him ‘Greg’.
When she got home he was in the hall, frowning at the thermostat. She dumped the bags on to the kitchen floor and kicked her bootees off. She didn’t tell him that he’d passed her at the bus stop, or that as the bus had approached the top of their road she had finally admitted to herself that she no longer loved him. She put the groceries away and began to cook dinner. He went into the sitting room with the evening paper. As she put four lamb chops under the grill, she wondered how she would be able to live with him for the rest of her life.
When she went to tell him that dinner was on the table in the dining area, Gregory was sitting in his customary armchair, beneath the standard lamp under the yellow pool of light. He had removed one of the nest of spindle-legged tables and on it rested the local paper, turned to the obituary column. He pushed himself to his feet with a sigh and followed her into the kitchen. When she asked him why he was sighing, he said he didn’t know. At five past seven he switched on ‘The Archers’. There was drama in Ambridge when a pan of milk boiled over on the Aga. Angela looked at the place under the chimney where their own Aga used to be before Gregory took against its lumbering inefficiency. He had known somebody who was moving into a country cottage and had sold him the Aga and replaced it with a French cooker which had a deep-fat frier and rotisserie. He had bought the French cooker from somebody else he knew. His relationships with other people always seemed to consist of buying things from them, and selling things to them. He had once offered to buy Tampax, ‘from a bloke in the trade’, at a massive discount, but Angela had put her foot down and continued to buy her own from Boots. She was glad when her periods stopped, and she no longer had to endure his exaggerated intake of breath whenever he looked at the price sticker on the packet.
Another of Gregory’s contacts had designed and built their new kitchen. The chairs and the oak table that he had done his homework on as a boy had been the only survivors. These were now incongruously surrounded by white and chrome surfaces. It’s more like an operating theatre than a kitchen, thought Angela, looking around. They had been forced to knock a wall down to make space for the towering American refrigerator which dispensed ice and chilled water from a recess at the front.
She found that she couldn’t look at Gregory’s face: his moustache seemed ludicrous to her now, like a foreign object stuck on to his top lip. They had been married for seventeen years and there was no question of leaving him. She hadn’t the energy to start a new life.
They were stacking the dishwasher together when the telephone rang. Gregory answered.
“Yes? Yes, she does. Who’s speaking?” After a pause he put the phone down.
“Who was it?” she said.
“A bloke. Wanted to know if Angela Lowood, nee Carr, lived here. I said, ‘Yes, she does’.”
“Yes, I heard what you said.”
Now that she realised she didn’t love him, she found his pedantry hard to bear. She dreaded the night ahead when she would have to lie in bed and watch and listen as he went through his bedtime routines: counting the change in his pocket, before placing it on the dressing table. Checking the alarm clock against the time pips on the bedroom radio, touching the radiator with the back of his hand, taking the bookmark out of his Ken Follett paperback.
“Who was it?” she repeated.
“I don’t know, he put the phone down didn’t he?” His tone was irritable, as hers had been.
They hardly every quarrelled, but the threat that they might hung over them for the rest of the evening. At twenty-five minutes to eleven, when Angela went out to put the milk bottles in the little crate on the doorstep, she saw a tall man in a long overcoat on the opposite side of the road. A barrel-chested dog stood in the snow next to him. The man and the dog were standing perfectly still in the shadow of a tree, looking at Angela’s house. Angela instantly thought, ‘Christopher’. But it couldn’t be Christopher Moore, she decided: she hadn’t seen him for seventeen years now.
As she moved from room to room turning off lamps, she could hear the shower going and smell the grooming products that Gregory had taken to using lately. His name was on file at the Clinique counter in Debenham’s. He had recently started to send away for things like nostril-hair clippers and moustache trimmers from a catalogue called Innovations. He now went to a hairdresser called Henry’s, for his monthly trim, instead of to Ron the barber’s. He had even talked about having a light perm. Angela had been thinking for some time that Gregory’s preoccupation with his appearance meant that he was planning to leave her for a woman of normal size. When she’d left Christopher Moore she’d weighed ten and a half stone. She was now nineteen stone and Gregory was half her size. They looked ludicrous together. It was for that reason that she wouldn’t go to English seaside resorts, with their revolving racks of comic postcards. She preferred to holiday in America, where car seats, restaurant meals and Bermuda shorts were of more generous proportions.
♦
It had been easy for Christopher to find her: one telephone call had given him her married name, and a second her present address and place of work. He was pleased to find that she had realised her ambition to live in a large detached house in a respectable area to the south of the city. She had put on weight, almost doubled in size, but when she had bent down to place the milk bottles in the crate and he had seen that black curtain of hair fall across her face, he had known for certain it was her. He had wanted to cross the road and speak to her, but he had not yet planned what he was going to say, so he stayed where he was. It was enough to be near her now.
He saw a light go on in an upstairs bedroom, then a small man with a large moustache approached the window and pulled the curtains together. Christopher experienced a moment of jealous rage. His fists clenched inside his overcoat pocket. He stood in the road, watching the window, until the dog pulled him away. The snow creaked beneath their feet as they embarked on the five-mile walk home together. The loveliness of the snow light affected Christopher. Joy overwhelmed him as he gazed up at the night sky and its brittle stars. He felt as though he could float up and touch them.
♦
Angela delayed going to bed for as long as possible. She stayed downstairs, plumping cushions, wiping surfaces, folding tea-towels, and finally going into the conservatory and breaking the brown stalks and leaves from the overwintering geraniums. Gregory called from the top of the stairs.
“Are you coming to bed or what?”
She went into the hallway reluctantly and looked up at him.
“What are you doing down there?” he said irritably.
“I’m not tired,” she said. “I’ll be up in a bit.”
“You know I can’t sleep if you’re not in bed,” he said. He turned away from her with slumped shoulders and went into the bedroom. She set the burglar alarm by the front door and went upstairs.
The coins lay on the dressing table in small towers. The bookmark had been placed on his bedside table. He looked up from his book, Airship, and said, “About time.” She held her hair back and bent down by the bed and kissed him lightly on the forehead. She saw by the way his body relaxed that he was comforted by this ritual. He switched off his bedside lamp and arranged himself on the pillow with a series of little grunts. She wanted to weep in pity for him. As far as she knew, nobody loved him now.
She kept her back turned to him as she undressed, removing the voluminous clothes she had chosen from a catalogue endorsed by Dawn French, the fat comedienne. She kept her face turned away from the mirrored wardrobe doors. She had learnt to censor the reality of her naked appearance. She felt that she was hardly recognisable as a female human being any more.
They had been turned down by an adoption agency ten years before because she was too fat. Now she was three stones heavier and also too old. She struggled into her nightgown and went to the window and looked out. The man who looked like Christopher had gone, leaving only his footprints in the snow.
♦
“Not far now.” The dog looked up at him as though pleased to hear this information. They were opposite the University, on the main road that led eventually to Curlew Close. A collection of teenagers burst out of the side door of a pub called the Swot and Firkin. Christopher remembered that the pub had once been called The King’s Head. He pushed the door open and went inside; the loudness of the music overwhelmed him for a moment, but the young people inside seemed to be talking to each other without discernible strain. There was a young woman behind the bar wearing a t-shirt. When she turned her back to find the bottle of Guinness that he had requested, he saw that her back was emblazoned with the words, I’m Firkin tonight—Are you Firkin with me?
He bought a packet of crisps, ripped them open and tipped them on to the bare floorboards for the dog. The dog ate anything. Christopher stood at the bar and drank in silent celebration: he had found Angela. He could still see the slim girl he’d loved inside the fat woman on the doorstep. When her hair had fallen across her face he had suddenly wanted her again in spite of everything. Scraps of student conversations lapped around him. He looked at the back of the t-shirt worn by a thin blonde girl who was collecting a tower of glasses. Get your lips round my Firkin Ass he read. It wasn’t right to make these girls wear these insulting words, he thought. He wouldn’t have let his daughter be humiliated in such a way. A wave of misery enveloped Christopher. He pulled the dog to its feet and went out into the cold night.
♦
Christopher woke early the next morning. He looked at the empty space where his clock radio used to be, then got out of bed and opened the thin blue curtains. The little light there was came from the snow. The sky was still dark. If he started to walk now he would be there, waiting for her when she arrived at Heavenly Travel—the agency where she worked. He dressed quickly, putting on the first things that came to hand in the wardrobe, unmindful of the weather conditions. A plaid shirt, a pair of thin corduroys, a short anorak, his old Adidas training shoes. He was too impatient to wash, or shave, or comb his hair. He threw some dog biscuits into the dog’s bowl on the kitchen floor and muttered, “Come on, come on,” as it crunched them between its powerful jaws. He ate nothing himself. As soon as the dog had swallowed the last biscuit, he attached its lead and pulled it towards the front door. His socks and shoes and the bottoms of his trousers were wet before he reached the dual carriageway. He was oblivious to any discomfort. A gritting lorry passed him and the driver raised a hand from the steering wheel in salute. You and me against the snow, it said. Christopher nodded in acknowledgment and turned on to the road that led towards the city centre. The occasional bus passed him, carrying a few early morning workers. But he wanted to walk, to make a proper journey of it, and anyway, he wasn’t ready to rejoin the everyday world, not yet.
When he was two miles from the city the snow began to fall more heavily in large flakes that seemed to float rather than fall to the ground. The dog’s back was coated in luminous white. There were occasional drifts where the snow came up to Christopher’s knees, and the dog needed encouragement before it would plunge into the blinding whiteness. He passed people on the pavement who were warmly wrapped, and they glanced at him curiously. This odd man with his jacket open, no gloves, no scarf, nothing on his head, wearing training shoes and dragging a frozen-looking dog behind him.
When he got to Heavenly Travel it was half-past eight by the town hall clock. A sign on the door showed that the shop opened at nine AM He looked in the windows where the Winter Sun holidays were advertised. There was a poster showing happy, tanned holiday-makers on a beach in Barbados, the sand appeared to be white and the sea to be turquoise. He pulled the dog away and they went to stand in the doorway of a jeweller’s opposite. To kill time he pretended to choose a ring for Angela from the wedding rings on display. He wondered why she had refused to marry him yet had married Lowood, the man with the moustache.
At ten minutes to nine he turned around to see that Angela was unlocking the front door of Heavenly Travel. He watched as she went inside and passed into a back room. The lights of the shop came on, but she didn’t reappear. He would wait for another fifteen minutes he thought, to give her time to settle in before he went inside the shop. Then he would ask her to tell him about the day she had their baby killed.