The window was the most important wall because it gave her the power to see other people without having to look into her mirror. She drew the dusty curtains, and threw her brassiere on the bed. The colours of the fireplace wall were locked inside her with the moon. The room was a home where she could be herself and think what she liked. She could buy tins of paint and decorate the walls with zigzags and circles, stars and ampersands. She could lock herself in whenever she cared to, or abandon the den at an hour’s notice and look for another if she felt the refuge growing so familiar that it turned into a prison.
The rectangular block of orange gas-fire warmed the whole room. There were no set meal times, so she had put on weight, and it wasn’t easy to undo the catch on her slacks. She folded them, and hooked the hanger on the back of the door. The heat rushed to her legs and thighs. She was tired, and ready to sleep, but relished her detachment in the surrounding space. ‘I went into marriage myself, and came out by myself,’ she said to the tall mirror carried home from the ruins. ‘It is only possible to do things for yourself.’
She took off her woollen drawers but kept her dressing-gown open. It was pleasant to stroke her skin. Her figure was firm, but there was no tension left. Nothing could go on for ever, and the break had been made. She felt her arms, and pressed the flesh, thinking of how she had never been idle in George’s house, though he had once said how lucky she was being a woman because she didn’t have to go to work, as if domestic service on tap twenty-four hours a day came about by the press of a button. In any spare time there’d been the exercise of cycling to the shops, or going for a walk, or pulling up weeds from the patch of garden. The rule of life was never to be idle, though in the last weeks she had done nothing more than work at her room till it became a home. Now it was perfect, and the time had come to leave, one way or another.
She sat with legs outstretched at the fire, smoothing the life-giving heat along her firm thighs as if the half-seen woman on the Tube train were now observing her. But, belonging to herself alone, she let that image drift away, and tried to stay fond of herself in spite of the woman’s absence.
Her breasts responded when she placed her palms over them. They had never been big, though she loved them because stroking the warm circle of corrugated flesh around the nipples calmed her. During a bath she could lift and soothe each in turn, and love the body that belonged to her alone. No longer sleeping with someone she didn’t love, she felt herself more attractive in the sight of other people when walking the streets. Going to the shops, a grey-haired elderly gas-fitter with a well-lined face whistled softly from a tent erected over a hole in the pavement. He was being ironic, aiming his call at her, even cruel, for a man of his age would wolf-signal anyone, though on the way back he was standing on the pavement, and had looked with more serious interest as she had passed.
Imagining things! But who would want her? It didn’t even matter. When she put on the table-lamp her body that she had never much considered lengthened in shadow. The body had cared for her, and rarely made her ill. Aches didn’t matter. Pains would go away before a day was out, and if they didn’t, and you fainted or screamed, then something was wrong, though it might only be ‘a bit of a turn’. She had ignored her body because it hadn’t belonged entirely to her, so perhaps she was still lucky to be alive on suddenly acknowledging that at long last it did.
Her white stomach had softened. She crossed arms and caressed each shoulder, she and her body in the same world at last. She would walk more, and decide what work to get. You couldn’t live for ever in London, so there must be something for her to do, and if not, there was a bigger world beyond, providing she mustered the energy to push into it.
Such speculations were not material to go to bed on. Her fingers parted the inner lips, and smoothed in a rhythm till an indescribable feeling convulsed her. But she resisted the impulse to rub until the end, suspending her fingers till normal breathing came back, when she drew both legs into the chair before closing her eyes.
The only wall beyond the shape of her own body was the enclosing border of her mind, within which she was beginning to perceive secrets till now concealed, yet still not to be clearly divined in case they sowed chaos and nothing else. Frightened, she would be satisfied with no more than a glimpse of those secrets, hoping that by the time full clarity came she would be willing and strong enough to accept them. From dying alone at the brick-end of a tunnel, like a coward evading all problems, she was recovering within her own warm tent of self-love. The final act was, for better or worse, impossible to resist. Intense and prolonged pleasure drove out shame, and was overwhelming.
Startled by someone treading up the stairs, she quickly put on her dressing-gown. Whoever it was was either vast in weight or carried heavy luggage – and must therefore be a man. The landing floor creaked. Suitcases thudded on to the boards, and keys jingled. He muttered in anger while sorting out the one that mattered. She put a hand over her breasts, as if to stop her heart bursting. He was a few feet away, and she couldn’t be sure that the key wouldn’t be pushed into her lock, and the door swing open. She stepped across and put on the latch, though any firm tap would smash the lot. What would she do if he did? Fight, scream, cry for George, and raise the street with sounds of murder and mayhem? She felt apprehensive, inexplicably guilty, but no real fear.
He cursed at so many keys packed into one bunch, and perhaps, she thought, at not having used the vital one for so long. In the darkness he couldn’t sort them out. She heard a match strike, and hadn’t known that such prolonged swearing was possible. He had burned his hand.
The key went into the lock. His door hit the wall, and he dragged the suitcases in. The almost biblical rhythm to his cursing both fascinated and appalled, yet made her less fearful, since the tone of his voice held no threat. The slamming of his door vibrated the house.
She was afraid to get into bed. He was moving about. She felt as if he had no right to do so, wanted to knock on the wall and tell him to turn his radio down but, as if he had picked up her thoughts, the noise decreased to become hardly audible. Unlike other nights, sleep seemed neither important nor necessary, even though it was past midnight and she had to be out early in the morning. The day had been good, and she didn’t want it to finish. But she got into bed and, on waking up, couldn’t remember a time when she had gone so quickly into oblivion.
22
She put a spoonful of coffee and two of sugar in the dry mug, and boiling water sent a tideline to the top, and was too hot for her lips. She took orange juice from the cupboard, some bread, a pot of jam and a saucer of butter. She went downstairs to the toilet in her dressing-gown, leaving her door open. If anyone was so poor as to want whatever was inside they were welcome. The radio was still on in the next room, but only at the same low pitch as last night. He had either gone to sleep and forgotten it, or he liked such moaning through his dreams.
The orange juice was sour, and went down the sink. She threw the crushed carton into the cardboard wastepaper box. Her small wireless sent out the five-minute news in a Donald Duck squawk: industrial stoppages, terrorist assassins killing innocent people, an air disaster, a financial scandal, a by-election with the Tories back, and a pub-yard slanging match between Russia and China, loud-mouthed notifications that had no reality, unless it was you being bombed, shot, kidnapped or burnt to death. If it happened to you it would only be news to other people, and therefore the sort of story you could well do without.