In order to prevent him behaving in the way his brothers were seen to treat their own wives, and becoming more like one of them than was absolutely necessary, considering that he was from the same mother at least, she helped him through the complications of starting his business. There was no guarantee that he would resemble his brothers, of course, because some could be very different, but he provided an answer to that one morning when she was halfway through her term with Edward.
After breakfast and before setting out for work he went, as was his habit, to the lavatory. Having finished, he couldn’t find any paper, and bellowed for some as if he had woken from a nightmare that had terrified him beyond endurance. She was unable to act for a few moments, his noise frightening her in quite a different way to the fear that had for some reason stricken him.
With a shout he opened the door a few inches so that she could pass a roll of paper. When he came out, the corners of his mouth were flecked with spit, and he was as pale as if he had been blind drunk and then vomited. He tried to say something, his mouth fighting a stone pressed on his vocal chords. His vacuous hazel eyes demanded to know why she had deliberately humiliated him, as if she would now go and tell his brothers about it so that they could all have a good laugh-up together. She sensed no other explanation for his distress.
‘You didn’t need to shout like that,’ she told him. ‘I forgot to put some in last night.’
He stared, but did not see her. She turned to walk away because there seemed nothing more to say about such a small matter, though she realized afterwards that it would have been safer to have screamed at him with fists and fingernails flying.
After a year of marriage she thought she knew him well, but now saw – and felt, when he struck her twice across the head – that he was a stranger impacted with unexplained emotions that no life would be of sufficient length to unravel. In any case, she had enough tremors of her own to take care of, whenever it might be possible to consider them.
Knowing his value, he was often unpleasantly vain, lacking the charm even his brothers might occasionally put on. Some time after the wedding Alf apologized for causing her to throw the glass at him, in such a way that she had to be forgiving. He talked sensibly, and was contrite, and not so light-hearted that he didn’t mean what he said. His features, better-looking than when he tried to be humorous, had the usual vulnerability that pleaded with her not to treat him harshly.
She fell against the wall as if the roof had pushed her there, but picked up a heavy wedding-present ashtray as she turned to face him. There was no question of throwing. Her intention was to strike at his head. His eyes came to life, their glitter fixed on the glass object in her hand. Like a cat in his dumb suffering he longed for the blow because he would then have paid for whatever he was supposed to have done. She would have nothing left to forgive him for.
That sort of brawling had gone on all the time in his family, physical argument that left its bruises but cleared the air quicker than otherwise. They were used to it, and thrived on it, but she refused to join in and periodically act out the domestic massacre as a way of maintaining unity.
He stepped away quickly when she lowered her arm, surprised not to be crouching by the stairs and staunching blood. Either that, or he was disappointed that she wasn’t on her way down town already, to sit in a café with a fag and a cup of tea till the storm had blown by, in which time he would have searched her out and agreed to forgive her.
‘Don’t ever hit me again,’ she cried. ‘Do you hear?’
He didn’t speak, looked anywhere but at her.
‘Never. If there’s any more of this, I’m off.’
She dropped the ashtray into a bowl of water to wash away any trace of what she had almost done. When he went to work she wept, unable to understand why he had hit her for something so ridiculous. She once visited her father, and got back too late to set a meal out, but he only joked about that, when he might have been angry after working hard the whole day.
She tried to detach him from his family on the assumption that such a course would separate him from his worst traits. They should see as little of his brothers as possible. He agreed, knowing that she was right.
But to cut him off on all except the superficial level of physical prosperity was impossible, she soon realized. The traits he got from them were, albeit camouflaged, unassailable. He suffered for this as much as she did, at times to an even greater degree, so that she was more sorry for him, at the possibility he had to endure, than she was for herself at being on the end of the powerline. He was like a person plugged into an electrified circuit who doesn’t suffer a shock as long as he holds on to someone else.
Yet he felt the current passing through, and wanted to let go – to have as little as possible to do with his family because they had, he once said to her, always regarded him as their chosen victim. He went one day to a travel agent’s in town to collect a passport for their first overseas holiday, and on coming out was hailed from the cab of a builder’s lorry by his brother Bert. Trying to remember in what half-demolished street he had parked his car, George was swamped by the various worries of his business, till the imperative tug of his brother’s greeting cleared them from his mind.
‘I ain’t seen yer for three weeks.’ Bert indicated that he had suffered as if it had been three years. On checking backwards, George found that he was exactly right, and felt unable to refuse the offer of a quick pint in the Peach Tree.
Bert parked on a double yellow line: ‘The firm will pay if I get fined,’ though to give his employers a sporting chance he stuck a card in his cab window saying BUILDING IN PROGRESS, then followed George inside as cold rain swept along the road. ‘That’s the trouble with the building trade: when the sky pisses down you’ve got no wok. Not like you, getting set up as your own boss with a cushy inside job.’
George bought the drinks. ‘It’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m at it sixteen hours a day, and often don’t get a minute to myself. Seven days a week, as well, which is why I ain’t seen you or any of the others lately.’
Bert put his cap on the bar. There was a line along his brow, and beads of sweat above, his thinning grey hair dampened by it. Tall and thin, he spoke mournfully. ‘I thought Pam had been putting in a bad word about us.’
‘She’s as busy as I am, bless her. But she needs a rest. I’m taking her to Majorca for a fortnight.’ He held up the new and shining book: ‘I’ve just been to get our passport.’ For himself, he wouldn’t have bothered with a holiday for another few years but: ‘She talked to a woman at the supermarket who went to Majorca last July, and said it didn’t cost all that much.’
Bert wanted to have another drink.
‘Can’t.’
He laughed. ‘I’ll pay.’
‘Must be going.’ He put the passport in his pocket, another symbol of the difference between them. ‘I’ve got to see an estate agent this afternoon, and there’s a few things to do before then.’
‘You’ll work yourself to death.’ Bert bumped against him as they stood. ‘You only live once, you know.’ He was the easygoing sort who would never do anything interesting. George thought it wasn’t only due to his wife, either, who was as slack and idle as he was. Though ten years younger, George was a much smarter man of the local world, and felt older, even protective to his feckless brothers as long as it didn’t cost time or money.
His car was only two hundred yards away, but Bert drove him there. ‘Save you getting wet through. I expect you’ll be warm and dry in Majorca. I wish I could get clear o’ this effing place for a couple of weeks.’
If he stopped drinking for six months and banked the money he would be able to go to the Bahamas. ‘You want to try it sometime.’