The Other Side of a Frontier, page 6
My arm ached with the cramp and I had a crick in my back, sitting in the awkward way I was on the bed. It was late. There was nothing to do but to ache and sit watching her and thinking. It is funny the way your mind drifts. When I was kissing her and watching her I was thinking out who I’d show our new Autumn range to first. Her hand held my wrist tight, and when I kissed her I got her tears on my lips. They burned and stung. Her neck and shoulders were soft and I could feel her breath hot out of her nostrils on the back of my hand. Ever noticed how hot a woman’s breath gets when she’s crying? I drew out my hand and lay down beside her and ‘Oh, Colin, Colin,’ she sobbed, turning over and clinging to me. And so I lay there, listening to the traffic, staring at the ceiling, and shivering whenever the picture of Colin shooting right off that damned red thing into the bus came into my mind – until I did not hear the traffic any more, or see the ceiling any more, or think any more, but a change happened – I don’t know when. This Colin thing seemed to have knocked the bottom out of everything and I had a funny feeling we were going down and down and down in a lift. And the further we went, the hotter and softer she got. Perhaps it was when I found with my hands that she had very big breasts. But it was like being on the mail steamer and feeling engines start under your feet, thumping louder and louder. You can feel it in every vein of your body. Her mouth opened and her voice was blind and husky. Colin, Colin, Colin, she said, and her fingers were hooked into me. I got out and turned the key in the door.
In the morning I left her sleeping. It did not matter to me what my father might have heard in the night, but still I wondered. She would hardly let me touch her before that. I told her I was sorry, but she shut me up. I was afraid of her. I was afraid of mentioning Colin. I wanted to go out of the house there and then and tell someone everything. Did she love Colin all the time? Did she think I was Colin? And every time I thought of that poor devil covered over with a white sheet in the hospital mortuary, a kind of picture of her and me under the sheets with love came into my mind. I couldn’t separate the two things. Just as though it had all come from Colin.
I’d rather not talk any more about that. I never talked to Muriel about it. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. She didn’t say a word.
The next day was a bad day. It was grey and hot and the air smelt of oil fumes from the road. There’s always a mess to clear up when things like this happen. I had to see to it. I had the job of ringing up the boy’s mother. But I got round that, thank God, by ringing up the garage and getting them to go round and see the old lady. My father is useless when things are like this. I was the whole morning on the phone: to the hospital, the police, the coroner – and he stood fussing beside me, jerking up and down like a fat indiarubber ball.
I found my mother washing up at the sink and she said: ‘That poor boy’s mother! I can’t stop thinking of her.’
Then my father comes in and says – just as though I was a customer: ‘Of course if Mrs Mitchell desires it we can have the remains of the deceased conveyed to his house by one of the new specially sprung motor hearses and can, if necessary, make all the funeral arrangements.’
I could have hit him because Muriel came into the room when he was saying this. But she stood there as if nothing had happened.
‘It’s the least we can do for poor Mrs Mitchell,’ she said. There were small creases of shadow under her eyes, which shone with a strong light I had never seen before. She walked as if she were really still in that room with me, asleep. God, I loved that girl! God, I wanted to get all this over, this damned Colin business that had come right into the middle of everything like this, and I wanted to get married right away. I wanted to be alone with her. That’s what Colin did for me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We must do the right thing by Colin.’
‘We are sometimes asked for long-distance estimates,’ my father said.
‘It will be a little something,’ my mother said.
‘Dad and I will talk it over,’ I said.
‘Come into the office,’ my father said. ‘It occurred to me that it would be nice to do the right thing by this friend of yours.’
We talked it over. We went into the cost of it. There was the return journey to reckon. We worked it out that it would come no dearer to old Mrs Mitchell than if she took the train and buried the boy here. That is to say, my father said, if I drove it.
‘It would look nice,’ my father said. ‘Saves money and it would look a bit friendly,’ my father said. ‘You’ve done it before.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose I can get a refund on my return ticket from the railway.’
But it was not as simple as it looked, because Muriel wanted to come. She wanted to drive back with me and the hearse. My mother was very worried about this. It might upset Muriel, she thought. Father thought it might not look nice to see a young girl sitting by the coffin of a grown man.
‘It must be dignified,’ my father said. ‘You see, if she was there, it might look as though she were just doing it for the ride – like these young women on bakers’ vans.’
My father took me out into the hall to tell me this because he did not want her to hear. But she would not have it. She wanted to come back with Colin.
‘Colin loved me. It is my duty to him,’ she said. ‘Besides,’ she said suddenly, in her full open voice – it had seemed to be closed and carved and broken and small – ‘I’ve never been in a hearse before.’
‘And it will save her fare too,’ I said to my father.
That night I went again to her room. She was awake. I said I was sorry to disturb her, but I would go at once only I wanted to see if she was all right. She said, in the closed voice again, that she was all right.
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
She did not answer. I was worried. I went over to the bed.
‘What is the matter? Tell me what is the matter,’ I said.
For a long time she was silent. I held her hand, I stroked her head. She was lying stiff in the bed. She would not answer. I dropped my hand to her small white shoulder. She stirred and drew up her legs and half turned and said, ‘I was thinking of Colin. Where is he?’ she asked.
‘They’ve brought him round. He’s lying downstairs.’
‘In the front room?’
‘Yes, ready for the morning. Now be a sensible girl and go back by train.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I want to go with Colin. Poor Colin. He loved me and I didn’t love him.’ And she drew my hands down to her breasts.
‘Colin loved me,’ she whispered.
‘Not like this,’ I whispered.
It was a warm grey morning like all the others when we took Colin back. They had fixed the coffin in before Muriel came out. She came down wearing the bright-blue hat she had got off Dormer’s millinery man and she kissed my mother and father goodbye. They were very sorry for her. ‘Look after her, Arthur,’ my mother said. Muriel got in beside me without a glance behind her at the coffin. I started the engine. They smiled at us. My father raised his hat, but whether it was to Muriel and me or to Colin, or to the three of us, I do not know. He was not, you see, wearing his top hat. I’ll say this for the old boy, thirty years in the trade have taught him tact.
After leaving my father’s house you have to go down to the tram terminus before you get on the bypass. There was always one or two drivers, conductors, or inspectors there, doing up their tickets, or changing over the trolley arms. When we passed I saw two of them drop their jaw, stick their pencils in their ears, and raise their hats. I was so surprised by this that I nearly raised mine in acknowledgement, forgetting that we had the coffin behind. I had not driven one of my father’s hearses for years.
Hearses are funny things to drive. They are well-sprung, smooth-running cars, with quiet engines, and if you are used to driving a smaller car, before you know where you are, you are speeding. You know you ought to go slow, say twenty-five to thirty maximum, and it’s hard to keep it down. You can return empty at seventy if you like. It’s like driving a fire engine. Go fast out and come back slow – only the other way round. Open out in the country, but slow down past houses. That’s what it means. My father was very particular about this.
Muriel and I didn’t speak very much at first. We sat listening to the engine and the occasional jerk of the coffin behind when we went over a pothole. We passed the place where poor Colin – but I didn’t say anything to Muriel, and she, if she noticed – which I doubt – did not say anything to me. We went through Cox Hill, Wammering, and Yodley Mount, flat country, don’t care for it myself. ‘There’s a wonderful lot of building going on,’ Muriel said at last.
‘You won’t know these places in five years,’ I said.
But my mind kept drifting away from the road and the green fields and the dullness, and back to Colin – five days before, he had come down this way. I expected to see that Indian coming flying straight out of every corner. But it was all bent and bust up properly now. I saw the damned thing.
He had been up to his old game, following us, and that had put the end to following. But not quite; he was following us now, behind us in the coffin. Then my mind drifted off that and I thought of those nights at my parents’ house, and Muriel. You never know what a woman is going to be like. I thought, too, that it had put my calculations out. I mean, supposing she had a baby. You see I had reckoned on waiting eighteen months or so. I would have eight hundred then. But if we had to get married at once, we should have to cut right down. Then I kept thinking it was funny her saying ‘Colin!’ like that in the night; it was funny it made her feel that way about me, and how it made me feel when she called me Colin. I’d never thought of her in that way, in what you might call the ‘Colin’ way.
I looked at her and she looked at me and she smiled but still we did not say very much, but the smiles kept coming to both of us. The light-railway bridge at Dootheby took me by surprise and I thought the coffin gave a jump as we took it.
‘Colin’s still watching us,’ I nearly said.
There were tears in her eyes.
‘What was the matter with Colin?’ I said. ‘Nice chap, I thought. Why didn’t you marry him?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was a nice boy. But he’d no sense of humour.
‘And I wanted to get out of that town,’ she said.
‘I’m not going to stay there, at that hotel,’ she said.
‘I want to get away,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough.’
She had a way of getting angry with the air, like that. ‘You’ve got to take me away,’ she said. We were passing slowly into Muster, there was a tram ahead and people thick on the narrow pavements, dodging out into the road. But when we got into the Market Square, where they were standing round, they saw the coffin. They began to raise their hats. Suddenly she laughed. ‘It’s like being the King and Queen,’ she said.
‘They’re raising their hats,’ she said.
‘Not all of them,’ I said.
She squeezed my hand and I had to keep her from jumping about like a child on the seat as we went through.
‘There they go.’
‘Boys always do,’ I said.
‘And another.
‘Let’s see what the policeman does.’
She started to laugh, but I shut her up. ‘Keep your sense of humour to yourself,’ I said.
Through all those towns that run into one another as you might say, we caught it. We went through, as she said, like royalty. So many years since I drove a hearse, I’d forgotten what it was like.
I was proud of her, I was proud of Colin, and I was proud of myself. And after what had happened, I mean on the last two nights, it was like a wedding. And although we knew it was for Colin, it was for us too, because Colin was with both of us. It was like this all the way.
‘Look at that man there. Why doesn’t he raise his hat? People ought to show respect for the dead,’ she said.
The Wheelbarrow
‘Robert,’ Miss Freshwater’s niece called down from the window of the dismantled bedroom, ‘when you have finished that, would you mind coming upstairs a minute? I want you to move a trunk.’
And when Evans waved back from the far side of the rumpled lawn where he was standing by the bonfire, she closed the window to keep out the smoke of slow-burning rubbish – old carpeting, clothes, magazines, papers, boxes – which hung about the waists of the fir trees and blew towards the house. For three days the fire had been burning, and Evans, red-armed in his shirt-sleeves and sweating along the seams of his brow, was prodding it with a garden fork. A sudden silly tongue of yellow flame wagged out: some inflammable piece of family history – who knew what? Perhaps one of her aunt’s absurd summer hats or a shocking year of her father’s daydream accountancy was having its last fling. She saw Evans pick up a bit of paper from the outskirts of the fire and read it. What was it? Miss Freshwater’s niece drew back her lips and opened her mouth expectantly. At this stage all family privacy had gone. Thirty, forty, fifty years of life were going up in smoke.
Evans took up the wheelbarrow and swaggered back with it across the lawn towards the house, sometimes tipping it a little to one side to see how the rubber-tyred wheel was running and to admire it. Miss Freshwater’s niece smiled. With his curly black hair, his sun-reddened face, and his vacant blue eyes, and the faint white scar or chip on the side of his nose, he looked like some hard-living, hard-bitten doll. ‘Burn this? This lot to go?’ was his cry. He was an impassioned and natural destroyer. She could not have found a better man. ‘Without you, Robert,’ she said on the first day and with real feeling, ‘I could never have faced it.’
It was pure luck getting him, but, lazy, smiling and drifting, she always fell on her feet. She had stepped off the morning train from London at the beginning of the week and had stood on the kerb in the station yard, waiting for one of the two or three taxi drivers who were talking there to take notice of her. Suddenly Evans drove in fast from the street outside, pulled up beside her, pushed her in, and drove off. It was like an abduction. The other taxi drivers shouted at him in the bad language of law-abiding men, but Evans slowly moved his hand up and down, palm downwards, silently and insultingly telling them to shut up and keep their hair on. He looked very pious as he did this. It made her laugh out loud.
‘They are manner-less,’ he said in a low, rebuking voice, giving each syllable its clear value as if he were speaking the phrase of a poem. ‘I am sorry I did not ask you where you want me to take you.’
They were going in the wrong direction, and he had to swing round the street. She now saw him glance at her in the mirror and his doll’s eyes quickly changed from shrewd pleasure to vacancy: she was a capture.
‘This is not the first time you are here, I suppose?’ he said.
‘I was born here,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been here for twenty-five years – well, perhaps just for a day a few years ago. It has changed. All this building!’
She liked friendly conversations.
They were driving up the long hill out of the town towards her aunt’s house. Once there had been woodland here, but now, like a red hard sea flowing in to obliterate her memory, thousands of sharp villas replaced the trees in angular waves.
‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘There is money everywhere.’
The car hummed up the long, concrete hill. The villas gave way to ribbons of shacks and bungalows. The gardens were buzzing with June flowers. He pointed out a bungalow that had a small grocery shop in the lean-to at the side, a yard where a couple of old cars stood, and a petrol pump. That was his place, he said. And then, beyond that, were the latest municipal housing estates built close to the Green, which was only half a mile from her aunt’s house. As they passed, she saw a white marquee on the Green and a big sagging white banner with the words ‘Gospel Mission’ daubed on it.
‘I see the Gospellers still keep it up,’ she said. For it was all bad land outside the town, a place for squatters, poor craftsmen, smallholders, little men with little sheds, who in their flinty way had had for generations the habit of breaking out into little religious sects.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Evans in a soft voice, shocked that she could doubt it. ‘There are great openings. There is a mighty coming to the Lord. I toil in the vineyard myself. You are Miss Freshwater’s niece?’ he said. ‘She was a toiler too. She was a giantess for the Lord.’
She saw she had been reckless in laughing. She saw she was known. It was as if he had knowingly captured her.
‘You don’t come from these parts, do you?’ she said.
‘I am from Wales,’ he said. ‘I came here from the mines. I ob-jected to the starvation.’
They arrived at the ugly yellow house. It could hardly be seen through the overgrown laurels and fir trees which in some places fingered the dirty windows. He steadied her as she got out, for she had put on weight in the last year or so, and while she opened her bag to find some money, he walked to the gate and looked in.
‘It was left to you in the will, I suppose?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. She was a woman always glad to confide. ‘I’ve come down to clear up the rubbish before the sale. Do you know anyone here who would give me a hand?’
‘There are many,’ he pronounced. ‘They are too handy.’ It was like a line from an anthem. He went ahead, opened the gate, and led the way in, and when she opened the front door, splitting it away from the cobwebs, he went in with her, walking into the stale, sun-yellowed rooms. He looked up the worn carpet of the stairs. He looked at the ceilings, measuring the size of everything.
‘It will fetch a high price,’ he said in a sorrowful voice and then, looking over her figure like a farmer at the market, in case she might go with the property, he added enthusiasm to his sorrow.
‘The highest!’ he said. ‘Does this door go to the back?’ She lost him for a while. When she found him he was outside, at the back of the house, looking into sheds. He had opened the door of one that contained gardening tools and there he was, gazing. He was looking at a new green metal wheelbarrow with a red wheel and a rubber tyre and he had even pulled it out. He pushed it back, and when he saw her he said accusingly:
