‘It might.’ She glanced at the clouds. More reason to hurry for the bus.
‘I’m just off to the “Salutation” for a couple o’ jars o’ Shippoes. Do you want to come? I’ll buy you a short.’
‘I have to get home. Thank you, though.’
He nudged her. ‘Lots of ’em do, after coming out of chapel. Meks ’em thirsty! It would me, I know that much. I en’t bin in a place like that since I got married, and then it wor a forceput!’
The lie to George had been wasted. She had become a ‘religious maniac’. They had seen it happening years ago. Her sort probably gives pots of money to the chapel. Alf phoned George and asked to borrow ten quid, and laughed out the information on hearing him refuse.
She didn’t go any more, but it wasn’t important, since the only thing she thought was that she would walk out on George, even if it meant leaving Edward as well. It was certainly true that she couldn’t take either of them with her.
16
A woman by the outside steps of the house, wielding a sweeping-brush to clear leaves from a flooded grating, scooped several clutches of mould from the end of the drainpipe and flopped them towards the pavement. ‘That should fix it for a while.’
‘Should,’ Pam said.
She looked up. ‘Are you the person from the top floor?’
Pam stepped aside to see water rushing into the grille. Even her plastic hood and galoshes hadn’t stopped her getting soaked.
‘Yes.’
They walked up the steps, and the woman opened the door for her. ‘You look drowned.’ She hung the brush on a hook by the outside door. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea.’
She was tall and dark, and Pam was going to add ‘handsome’, but wasn’t sure it was the right word. A tail of hair swung down her back, and she wore a woolly black sweater, and rather baggy purple slacks so that you couldn’t tell whether she was broad behind or not. Her heels clattered on worn lino. The large ground-floor room had two single beds along one wall and a wide divan against the other. Pam thought the place must have been furnished off the junk-end of the Portobello Road, or from a War on Want depot. A series of orange-boxes in a recess made a book case of well-kept hardbacks. One or two lamps were fashioned from bottles and weighed down at the base with coloured marbles. The heavy square table was surrounded by odd chairs and a couple of boxes.
She looked at Pam’s face. ‘It may not be up to much as a London residence, but it’s home to me.’
‘It’s fine.’ She didn’t want to become too matey, but on the other hand would not like to seem either stuck-up or daft. She wondered which of the cups she would have to drink from. An electric fire glared reddish-pink from the wall, and a paraffin heater made the room damp rather than warm, producing a steamy atmosphere of uncertain temperature. She opened her coat. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘Six years. I’m Judy Ellerker.’ She poured tea in a cup sufficiently ornate to have come out of Buckingham Palace. Pam had seen her name on the outside door.
‘My name’s Pam – Hargreaves.’
‘Left your husband, then?’ Judy laughed. ‘Sugar?’
None of her business. ‘Please.’
‘I can tell a mile off. You look shell-shocked. Happens to us all. It’s the only hope for the future.’
‘I’m fine,’ she felt bound to say.
‘Why don’t you sit down, then?’ Judy faced her across the table on which was a newspaper, a doll with no head, and a machine-gun. She pushed them aside to make room for cups and elbows. ‘You will feel better, but it’s like when somebody dies: it needs a year to recover. Took me longer, if I remember. You’re lost. Nothing means anything. No references bouncing back at you from somebody you hate more than you love them. Oh, I remember it very well.’
There was less bitterness in her voice than the words suggested, though one or two lines around her mouth showed where plenty had been. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Pam said.
‘I am for myself, and that’s for sure. Fag?’
‘Not just now, thanks.’
‘You got kids?’
She felt too weary to resent being questioned. ‘I’ve left a son of eighteen behind.’
Her neatly trimmed eyebrows lifted. ‘He’s off your hands, then. You’re lucky.’
‘Yes.’
‘Wish mine were. Don’t let your tea get cold.’
She drank.
‘Are you looking after yourself?’
‘Oh yes, very well.’
‘I have no option, with two young kids. That’s what a man would like when you leave him though, that you would just fold up and die. That’d make him feel really good, the bastard.’
‘I shan’t do that.’
‘But they’d like you to. Anyway, men are the most boring objects in the world as far as I’m concerned, so I’m glad I hit the lid when I did. What did the man in your life do?’
Don’t hold back, she told herself. There’s no point any more.
‘Ran a small factory.’
‘Mine was political – very. Active, as they say. Radioactive was more like it. He was in one of those extreme leftwing parties. He was always jabbering on about workers’ rights and the rights of the underprivileged, but when he brought his mates home I was the tea-maker and envelope-licker and general tweeny. I once asked why his party was so small, and he said it was because it was only a splinter group, so I said well you had better get the idle lot from under my fingernails because the next time you bring them here they can make their own tea and sandwiches. He said I was a stupid reactionary woman who lacked political sense, because they first had to free the workers, and then it would be the women’s turn. So I said how about letting it be women first for a change? He said we had to work today so as to build the world of tomorrow, so I said I’d be dead by tomorrow, and that if he wanted a little slavey-helpmate he’d better shove off and get one from the Third World with a veil around her face, because I’d had enough. Then he lectured me in the usual baby-language on the realities of the class struggle, and when I thought he would go on for ever I dashed him away with the smoothing-iron and threw his pink shirts out of the window. No more jig-jig, and sleeping with the wet around your arse all night. I didn’t know I was born.’
Pam laughed, and listened. Oh lucky woman, who knew her own mind.
‘But let’s talk about you,’ Judy said. ‘I’ve seen you coming in now and again, and wondered who you were.’
The front door slamming sent a tremor under the floorboards and an eleven-year-old boy ran into the room and threw his schoolbag on a heap of old clothes. He went to the stove and poured a mug of tea, then came to the table. ‘Mum?’
Judy leaned across and lay a hand on Pam’s shoulder. ‘Women often don’t know how hard it was till they’ve been free for a while. How long were you in the M.G.?’
‘M.G.?’
‘Matrimonial Gulag.’
‘Oh, twenty years.’ Pam saw that her face was lined, and yet she was undeniably handsome, with her fine bones, lustrous eyes, and a well-shaped mouth marred only by the sight of two bad teeth when she spoke.
‘Mum?’ the boy demanded.
‘Shut up,’ Judy turned to him, ‘or I’ll cut it off!’
Pam thought it unsociable not to give some confidences in return. ‘I suppose I left because I thought I’d go mad if I didn’t.’
‘There’s nothing else to do when it gets to that stage.’
Then she didn’t want to talk, thinking the subject best left alone when she was with other people. Judy guessed, and decided not to ask, but fetched a loaf from the bread tin and cut two thick slices. ‘Sam, spread this for your tea.’