He put his key in the door. ‘Shurrup, though, like I towd yer, or there’ll be trouble.’
‘You’re frightened o’ waking yer mam, is that it?’
Rage blasted his nerve-ends into darkness. He wanted to get his hands at her throat because she wasn’t Cecilia. The doghead of himself had got rid of her, for nothing, for no reason, to destroy himself, to drop himself into the mire, then out of it and beyond into something he must have wanted but was too scared to think about. What an idiot he’d been.
‘Oh, don’t you have a nice little room?’ she said, when he pushed her inside.
Nice? He wondered what sort of squalid den she lived in, what rat-hole space she shared with a score of others. Maybe she shared a house with her ageing mother, as decent as they came except for an occasional night out like this. He could ask, but it didn’t matter. She stripped in practised fashion, skirt down, suspenders undone, stockings off, roll-on unpeeled, blouse and bra on the floor — good clean underwear she’d spent money on.
She spread her white and robust figure on the bed, pubic hair sprouting as if to wave him in. Glad the light wasn’t too bright, she was half gone anyway, make-up smeared from kissing on the stairs. Smile at north and south, she beckoned him to get a move on, telling him not to spill his cocoa. He was too drunk to do much, barely able to get hard enough. In a sober corner of his mind, a recurring and suicidal fantasy, he wondered what it would be like to stay with her for the rest of his life. By laughing it away he was able to use her. Even so, he was too quick, and had to play her by hand.
They were soon asleep, and in a dream he was standing by a large tropical bird of red and yellow and royal blue. He was affectionately stroking its warm vibrating plumage, when the Bird of Paradise lost its friendliness and, mindlessly, viciously, pressed its razor-sharp beak deep into his hand and wouldn’t let go. Blood spurted out, so to save his limb and possibly his life he squeezed its neck with the other hand, using all his strength until the feathers were bloody and ligaments began to separate till the bird was dead.
Tall thin Frank bent over the stove to fry their breakfast. Traffic noises beyond the windows were muted by rain. ‘It ain’t right,’ he murmured. ‘It ain’t bleddy right.’
‘What ain’t?’ There was no sign of Mrs Denman, and no place set for him, so he took plates and cutlery from the cupboard.
‘She’s having a lie-in this morning. But you know she’s not well, don’t you?’
He didn’t, but thanked the Lord he had got Denise out into the street with no noise. She’d been too sleepy to care, because it was only half past seven. ‘I at least expected to stay a bit longer,’ she whispered at the door. He pushed a pound note into her hand. ‘Your taxi fare.’ ‘Oh, ta!’ she said, happily enough.
‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’
‘She keeps complaining about her stomach, and won’t let me get her to the doctor. She gets these terrible pains. I phoned Ralph last night and told him about it, but the bogger don’t seem interested. He said she’ll see a doctor when she’s good and ready. I tell yer! His own mother!’ He put tomatoes and bacon on the table. ‘But will she see a doctor? Not her. She’s as stubborn as the bleddy Hemlock Stone.’
Herbert had thought she had looked all right to him. ‘Maybe she’s overworked.’
‘You think so?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me. She needs a week at the seaside, just sitting around all day or strolling along the front. She’d feel better then, I’m sure.’
Frank ate bread and butter with a shaking hand. ‘I’ll try her. You could be right. It’s the pain, though. She gets pole-axed, and it breaks my heart.’ He began to cry, and Herbert couldn’t wait to get out of the room.
The drill snapped, and a piece gashed his right arm. A short cut through carelessness. There was no such thing. He had done it himself, because the chuck hadn’t been tight enough. Blood marbled into the vat of milky suds, filtered away between coils of shining swarf. Toolsetter Paul, who knew Bert wouldn’t slacken without good reason, came to look. ‘That’s nasty. You’d better go to the first aid and ’ave it seen to.’
He felt close to sleep. The wound began to burn. ‘What did you say?’
‘Your arm. Looks like an ’ospital job. Are you all right?’
The ragged pomegranate split would need stitches — another scar to show. ‘It’s hard to say, at the moment. I have to be off now.’ The accent made Paul think he must be far from his old self, imitating the bloody BBC. He ought to be in the concert party.
Walking through the open gate of the hospital with his arm in a sling, he went at an unaccustomed slow pace down the street towards Slab Square and the bus stop. Cecilia was walking on the other side, by the eighteenth-century houses, in one of which Byron had lived, though she wasn’t talking about that, but saying something to a tall smartish man — good-looking in his clerkly provincial mode — who rounded his shoulders to hear her words. Bert assumed he could pass unnoticed wearing cap and overalls and clomping along in swarf-dull boots, but she saw, and expected him to give no sign. The shape of her lips would take a decade to analyse, but the impression he got was of regret, panic, damaged feelings and, finally, unmistakably, relief that he had caught her signal, and would pass as if they had never been acquainted.
He owed her that much, though the thought of assailing her as Bert, crowing: ‘Don’t yer know me, don’t yer know me, don’t yer know me, then, — duck?’ caused no inner laugh or gloating. Turning her prospects, even happy ones, into entrails of misery, was no part of him.
Putting out his left arm for the bus, he spewed contempt at the idea that his heart was wounded but knew it was true enough. He hadn’t been sufficiently adult or loving to hold her, or sufficiently mature to want to, though it was good that he hadn’t, since if they had married the inevitable parting would have been more destructive. The sense of loss reminded him of childhood, though he no longer blamed anyone for what he might have suffered then.
The bus on Wheeler Gate was slowed by the crowds and traffic at dusk. He scorned the bite of regret over Cecilia, though wondered whether it wasn’t time to flit from this town of romantic agony.
Mrs Denman and Frank were sitting by the range reading the advertisements in the evening paper for boarding houses at Skegness. She got up to ask Herbert what had gone wrong with his arm. It was plain she’d been ill for weeks, to go by the deep blue moons under her eyes. He hadn’t noticed, and now that he knew he must act as if she wasn’t. ‘Just a scratch. Industrial accident, it’s called.’
‘It’s only an excuse to stay off work,’ Frank said.
She reached for a letter from behind the walnut wood clock. ‘This came for you.’
Frank sat in the rocking chair to sip his tea. ‘We’re going to Skegness for a fortnight. And after we come back I’m going to make an honest woman of her.’
‘I should think it’s the other way round.’ Herbert, half fainting in the haze, put the white envelope into his pocket, and took Mrs Denman’s hands, drew her close for a kiss, noticing her carmined face above the pastiness of illness. ‘Congratulations, Ma. I’m glad.’
‘Me and Frank have known each other so long I think we can stand living together.’ She sat in her usual armchair by the fire. ‘I’ll still be here to look after you, Bert.’
‘That’s all right, then.’ He went slowly upstairs, as if the ache of gash and stitches ascended from each foot and ended as needles stabbing at the brain. Such a small room, no more than a cell it seemed, had been a life-long comfort, but he felt intolerably boxed in and wanted to put his coat back on and run as far as he could get into the countryside. Coming to a dense wood he would find the middle, fall asleep in the undergrowth, and hope never to wake up again.