She’d waited until there were no customers, and to her relief the woman wasn’t there. The woman’s old mother, very fat and dressed all in brown, was resting in an armchair in a little room behind the shop itself, a kind of store-room it seemed to be, with stacks of magazines tied with string, just as they’d come off the van.
‘Heavens above!’ Liam said.
‘Liam, could I have a word?’
The old woman appeared to be asleep. She hadn’t moved when Bridget had spoken. She was wearing a hat, and seemed a bit eccentric, sleeping there among the bundles of magazines.
‘Of course you could, dear. How are you, Bridget?’
‘I’m fine, Liam. And yourself?’
‘I’m fine too, dear.’
She told him quickly. Customers hurried in for the Evening Standard or Dalton’s Weekly, children paused on their way home from school. Liam looked for rubbers and ink cartridges, Yorkie bars and tubes of fruit pastilles. Twice he said that the New Musical Express didn’t come out till Thursday. ‘Extraordinary, how some of them forget that,’ he said.
He listened to her carefully, picking up the thread of what she told him after each interruption. Because once they’d known one another so well, she mentioned the intuition she felt where Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle were concerned. She watched the expressions changing on his face, and she could feel him nodding inwardly: she felt him thinking that she was the same as she’d always been, nervous where other people were concerned, too modest and unsure of herself.
‘I’ll never forget how pretty you looked,’ he said suddenly, and for no reason that Bridget could see. ‘Wasn’t everything great long ago, Bridie?’
‘It’s Betty we have to think of, Liam. The old days are over and done with.’
‘I often go back to them. I’ll never forget them, dear.’
He was trying to be nice, but it seemed to Bridget that he was saying she still belonged to the time he spoke of, that she had not managed to come to terms with life as it had been since. You had to be tougher to come to terms with a world that was tough itself, you had to get over being embarrassed when you were pulled out of the background. All that hadn’t mattered long ago; when Emir Ryall had stolen her atlas she hadn’t even complained. Being stolen from, she suddenly thought.
‘I don’t know what to say to them,’ she said. ‘The man keeps telephoning me.’
‘Tell him to leave you alone, Bridget. Tell him he has no business bothering you.’
‘I’ve tried saying that.’
‘Tell him the thing was legally done and he hasn’t a foot to stand on. Tell him he can be up for harassment.’
A child came into the shop and Liam had to look for drawing-pins. ‘I’m afraid I have to shut up now,’ he said when the child had gone, and as he spoke the old woman in the armchair stirred. She spoke his name. She said she’d fancy peaches for tea. ‘There’s a tin set aside for you, dear,’ Liam said, winking at Bridget. He had raised his voice to address the old woman. He lowered it again to say goodbye. ‘The best of luck with it,’ he said, and Bridget knew he meant it.
‘Thanks, Liam.’ She tried to smile, and realized that she hadn’t repeated the young man’s remarks about Betty being brought up in a hostile atmosphere. She almost did so, standing at the door of the shop, imagining Liam angrily saying that the man needed putting in his place and offering to meet him. But as she walked away she knew all that was make-believe. Liam had his own life to live, peaches and a sort of mother-in-law. He couldn’t be blamed for only wishing her luck.
She collected Betty from Mrs Haste and later in the evening, when she was watching television, the telephone rang. The young man said:
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lacy, I didn’t mean to bring up that thing about your nationality. It’s not your fault, Mrs Lacy, and please forget I mentioned it. I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t telephone me again. That’s all I ask. I’ve given you the only answer I can.’
‘I know you have, Mrs Lacy. You’ve been kind to listen to me, and I know you’re concerned for Norma, don’t think I’m not aware of that. I love Norma, Mrs Lacy, which has made me a little unprofessional in my conversations with you, but I promise we’ll neither of us bother you again. It was just that she felt she’d made a terrible mistake and all the poor thing wanted was to rectify it. But as my work so often shows me, Mrs Lacy, that is hardly ever possible. Are you there, Mrs Lacy?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘I’ll never stop loving Norma, Mrs Lacy. I promise you that also. No matter what happens to her now.’
She sat alone in her living-room watching the ten o’clock news, and when she heard Miss Custle in the hall she didn’t offer her a cup of tea. Instead of Betty’s rattling feet on the stairs there would be Miss Custle’s aged panting as she propelled her bulk to her upstairs room. Instead of Betty’s wondering questions there would be Miss Custle’s gloom as still she mourned her long departed lover.
The television news came to an end, an advertisement for Australian margarine began. Soon after that the programmes ceased altogether, but Bridget continued to sit in her living-room, weeping without making a noise. Several times she went upstairs and stood with the light on by Betty’s bed, gazing at the child, not wiping away her tears. For Betty’s well-being, and for Norma’s too, in all humanity the law would be reversed. No longer would she search the faces of Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle for the signs of what they really believed. They would put that into words by saying she was good and had courage.
In the countryside of long ago her failure in marriage and motherhood might be easier to bear, but she would be a stranger there now. She belonged among her accumulated odds and ends, as Betty belonged with her mother, and Liam with the woman he loved. She would look after Miss Custle when Miss Custle retired from the Underground, as fate dictated.
Mr Tennyson
He had, romantically, a bad reputation. He had a wife and several children. His carry-on with Sarah Spence was a legend among a generation of girls, and the story was that none of it had stopped with Sarah Spence. His old red Ford Escort had been reported drawn up in quiet lay-bys; often he spent weekends away from home; Annie Green had come across him going somewhere on a train once, alone and morose in the buffet car. Nobody’s parents were aware of the facts about him, nor were the other staff, nor even the boys at the school. His carry-on with Sarah Spence, and coming across him or his car, made a little tapestry of secrets that suddenly was yours when you became fifteen and a senior, a member of 2A. For the rest of your time at Foxton Comprehensive – for the rest of your life, preferably – you didn’t breathe a word to people whose business it wasn’t.
It was understandable when you looked at him that parents and staff didn’t guess. It was also understandable that his activities were protected by the senior girls. He was forty years old. He had dark hair with a little grey in it, and a face that was boyish – like a French boy’s, someone had once said, and the description had stuck, often to be repeated. There was a kind of ragamuffin innocence about his eyes. The cast of his lips suggested a melancholy nature and his smile, when it came, had sadness in it too. His name was Mr Tennyson. His subject was English.
Jenny, arriving one September in 2A, learnt all about him. She remembered Sarah Spence, a girl at the top of the school when she had been at the bottom, tall and beautiful. He carried on because he was unhappily married, she was informed. Consider where he lived even: trapped in a tiny gate-lodge on the Ilminster road because he couldn’t afford anything better, trapped with a wife and children when he deserved freedom. Would he one day publish poetry as profound as his famous namesake’s, though of course more up-to-date? Or was his talent lost for ever? One way or the other he was made for love.