‘Depends on how much you’re offering,’ Bert said.
She felt her stomach turning solid. She was sorry for George, but there was nothing to do except bring in a packet of chocolate biscuits and make the biggest pot of tea they’d ever seen. The situation was not sinister, but simply the way such families worked out their problems.
‘We mentioned three hundred pounds.’ George had come back to life by surrendering to them, but he was also talking business, so didn’t need her pity. None of them did. She was a foreign body that could only jeopardize their decision-making machinery. Blood might be thicker than water, but its jewelled movement ran on the oil of centuries, and she was only a bit of grit temporarily involved. If one of them blew his nose she’d fly out of the window.
‘I wouldn’t call three hundred a fair price,’ Alf said.
‘You wouldn’t?’ George didn’t seem upset that they began arguing about an amount that anyone else might have considered settled.
‘Would you?’ Bert said. They were like an orchestra, she thought, and had to be admired for their perfect harmony and timing, inspired as they seemed to be by a conductor invisible to her.
George grinned more openly than at any time that evening. ‘Happen I wouldn’t. But it’s all you’re going to get.’
They accepted, as if in their rehearsals they had decided that at this point they must. Pam knew they were laughing. So did George, and the three of them knew that he and Pam were well aware of what they were thinking. Yet everyone was happy, especially George, who put a good measure of whisky into each cup. ‘When can you start?’
‘Start? Start what?’ Bert whacked him on the shoulder, and they guffawed until tea splashed into every saucer.
‘I’ll have to tell the lads when to let you in,’ George explained.
‘We’ve got a couple of jobs to finish first,’ Alf told him.
‘Make it as soon as you can, then,’ said George. ‘I just want to know the date, more or less.’
‘And we want the three hundred now,’ Bert said, ‘in cash, so’s we can get the paint. I’ll come up tomorrow to estimate how much it’ll take.’
George looked at her. ‘Get my cheque book. It’s half now, and the rest when the work’s done.’
‘I suppose it’ll have to do,’ they grumbled.
‘And I want you to do a good job. I mean that. No bloody messing on my premises.’
She thought Alf would weep. ‘We can bring you forty references from satisfied customers. When we get stuck in, we’re thorough. Thorough and careful, George. Nobody can beat us at our trade.’
He asked them to sign the receipt that Pam brought with the cheque. ‘You’d think he didn’t trust us,’ Harry winked. ‘Our own rotten brother!’
Their world was run on brotherhood, not fatherhood or motherhood or sisterhood. Everyone was their brother, to work with, to deceive, to bully or to drink with in the pub. Their God must be the biggest brother of all who knew their wiles and weaknesses, and whom they acknowledged as king only because they would never get the better of him. If anybody ever says anything to me about the Brotherhood of Man, Pam thought, I’ll run as far away as I can get.
They signed the receipt, and went far happier than when they arrived. George acted as if he’d brought off one of his best business deals, and Pam didn’t give an opinion. Having always believed that charity began at home, she was unable to dispute it now that she had seen it in operation.
14
She put more coins in the gas meter. Don’t like it here. She hadn’t liked it there, either, and at the moment she didn’t know where she disliked it most, except that she was here, and not there, and that her body had after all decided where it most wanted to be. Having made the second biggest jump of her life there was nothing to do except sit still in the knowledge that nowhere was perfect.
Being in a place which often struck her as worse than what she had left – clamped into a freezing bug-hole of a London bed-sitter and not knowing what she would do when her money had gone – she thought how Bert, Alf and Harry would roll on the pub floor with laughter if they could see her. The intensity of her complaints during twenty years of marriage had been known only to herself, but she had been a complainer nevertheless, and though they had turned in on herself, she was not morally superior to those who made them out loud. She had no doubt been tainted by contact with such a family, and years would need to elapse before its spirit was washed out of her, but at the same time she felt that allowances ought to be made for them, especially now that it seemed she would have to make so many for herself.
Frost enfolded the room, and in spite of a turned-up gas fire she couldn’t get used to the cold. Her bladder ached, but the only decent toilet was at the tube station, which was too far away, and in any case closed. The one downstairs was broken and filthy, and there was no telling who she might meet in the dark.
The enamelled sink in her room was fitted to the wall and stained like a map of places she hoped never to go to, a whitish bowl with a cold tap that brought forth water as if from the Rock itself. Vibrations shook the wall till it was turned off again.
She talked to herself, and to the pipe that shuddered as if about to burst and drown her. She would talk it into silence. There was often nothing to do but talk. At home with no one in the house she had talked to the knives and forks as she polished them in case they became savage and cut her throat, hacked off her limbs and hid her in such secret places that no one would find her, not even herself. So she talked. Her thoughts came out loud, so she imagined she was going mad. Because her arms might become dreadful and violent, she spoke to them as well. On her own, in her own room, it went on hour after hour, and she knew she wasn’t insane otherwise she would stop. She would strike herself dumb. Perhaps she was able to go on talking because she was so happy.
She pushed a rickety chair to the sink and stood on it, turned slowly so as not to overtopple, then crouched and at the same time pulled down her slacks and pants, freeing her bladder of all pressure. Loud-mouthed Jane White who had lived next door told her how, on last year’s motor trip to remote towns of Spain with her husband, she had broken at least half a dozen sinks staying at places that hadn’t got the facilities. She didn’t fancy going along corridors in the dark and looking for the proper place in case she never found her way back, and what would her Ted say then?
Pam hoped the present stance wouldn’t bring the sink down while her behind was on it and she was laughing at Jane White’s tales, causing those ominously sounding pipes behind the wall to flood her into the street. The guffaws of George’s family should they witness her on such a perch would last for the rest of their lives, so thank God they couldn’t see her.
Privacy was a luxury she’d never possessed, a wonderful word that could be said to herself over and over, marvelling that such a simple condition could feel so precious. You didn’t need more than a normal amount of money for the basis of a good life: food, clothes, shelter, and solitude. When you were on your own no one saw you. They didn’t even hear you, unless you talked too loud, and she needn’t bother whether anyone heard or saw her, because it didn’t matter what she said or did.
Being alone, she was out of the land of secrets for ever. You only feared secrets when you lived among people who took either a generous or vicious interest in you. On your own you could make them but didn’t need them. Until now her only secret had been the ever-burning desire that led her to this room, indicating as surely as nothing else what an innocent existence she had led.