The noise in the room, a distant fuzziness, was her voice. It spoke of what her mind was full of: Mrs Belhatchet and her son in the garden he had described. Servants collected glasses that were broken and jagged; their hands had blood on them. Couples were found dead beneath trees. The garden was all as ugly as the room she was in now, as dirty and as unpleasant.
And then it was different. In the garden they came at her, Mr Logan of the night-school, Robert in his yellow sportscar, and all the others. The touch of their hands was hard, like metal; she moaned in distress at their nakedness. They laughed because of that, pressing her apart, grunting with the passion of beasts. Through blood she screamed, and the voices of the men said that her tortured face was ecstasy to them. They longed for her cries of pain. They longed to wrap her in the filth of their sweat.
Their voices ceased and she heard the fuzziness again, and then it ceased also.
‘Eh now,’ murmured the desk sergeant soothingly.
‘I can’t help it,’ she said, weeping. ‘I’m frightened of it, and disgusted. I can’t help it; I don’t know why I’m like this.’
‘Just drink your tea and stop quiet, dear,’ the policewoman suggested. ‘Best to stop quiet, dear.’
Eleanor shook her head and for a moment her vision was blurred. She closed her eyes and forgot where she was. She opened them and found that her vision had cleared: she saw that she was in a grimy police station with two ugly people. Tea was spilt over her suit and there were drops of tea on her shoes. Her office boss had given her a drug in orange juice: she had experienced certain dreams and fantasies and had conducted with him a formless conversation. She’d never be able to return to the offices of Sweetawear.
‘He floats away,’ she heard a voice crying out and realized that it was her own. ‘He lies there entranced, floating away from his fear and his disgust. “The truth’s in this room,” he says – when what he means is the opposite. Poor wretched thing!’
She wept and the policewoman went to her and tried to help her, but Eleanor struck at her, shrieking obscenities. ‘Everywhere there’s ugliness,’ she cried. ‘His mother loved him with a perverted passion. He floats away from that.’
Tears fell from her eyes, dripping on to her clothes and on to the floor by her feet. She wanted to be dead, she whispered, to float away for ever from the groping hands. She wanted to be dead, she said again.
They took her to a cell; she went with them quietly. She lay down and slept immediately, and the desk sergeant and the policewoman returned to their duties. ‘Worse than drink,’ the woman said. ‘The filth that comes out of them; worse than a navvy.’
‘She’s hooked, you know,’ the desk sergeant remarked. ‘She’s hooked on that floating business. That floating away.’
The policewoman sighed and nodded. They sounded like two of a kind, she commented: the girl and the chap she’d been with.
‘Kinkies,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘Extraordinary, people getting like that.’
‘Bloody disgraceful,’ said the policewoman.
Going Home
‘Mulligatawny soup,’ Carruthers said in the dining-car. ‘Roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, mixed vegetables.’
‘And madam?’ murmured the waiter.
Miss Fanshawe said she’d have the same. The waiter thanked her. Carruthers said:
‘Miss Fanshawe’ll take a medium dry sherry. Pale ale for me, please.’
The waiter paused. He glanced at Miss Fanshawe, shaping his lips.
‘I’m sixteen and a half,’ Carruthers said. ‘Oh, and a bottle of Beaune. 1962.’
It was the highlight of every term and every holiday for Carruthers, coming like a no man’s land between the two: the journey with Miss Fanshawe to their different homes. Not once had she officially complained, either to his mother or to the school. She wouldn’t do that; it wasn’t in Miss Fanshawe to complain officially. And as for him, he couldn’t help himself.
‘Always Beaune on a train,’ he said now, ‘because of all the burgundies it travels happiest.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the waiter said.
‘Thank you, old chap.’
The waiter went, moving swiftly in the empty dining-car. The train slowed and then gathered speed again. The fields it passed through were bright with sunshine; the water of a stream glittered in the distance.
‘You shouldn’t lie about your age,’ Miss Fanshawe reproved, smiling to show she hadn’t been upset by the lie. But lies like that, she explained, could get a waiter into trouble.
Carruthers, a sharp-faced boy of thirteen, laughed a familiar harsh laugh. He said he didn’t like the waiter, a remark that Miss Fanshawe ignored.
‘What weather!’ she remarked instead. ‘Just look at those weeping willows!’ She hadn’t ever noticed them before, she added, but Carruthers contradicted that, reminding her that she had often before remarked on those weeping willows. She smiled, with false vagueness in her face, slightly shaking her head. ‘Perhaps it’s just that everything looks so different this lovely summer. What will you do, Carruthers? Your mother took you to Greece last year, didn’t she? It’s almost a shame to leave England, I always think, when the weather’s like this. So green in the long warm days –’
‘Miss Fanshawe, why are you pretending nothing has happened?’
‘Happened? My dear, what has happened?’
Carruthers laughed again, and looked through the window at cows resting in the shade of an oak tree. He said, still watching the cows, craning his neck to keep them in view:
‘Your mind is thinking about what has happened and all the time you’re attempting to make ridiculous conversation about the long warm days. Your heart is beating fast, Miss Fanshawe; your hands are trembling. There are two little dabs of red high up on your cheeks, just beneath your spectacles. There’s a pink flush all over your neck. If you were alone, Miss Fanshawe, you’d be crying your heart out.’
Miss Fanshawe, who was thirty-eight, fair-haired and untouched by beauty, said that she hadn’t the foggiest idea what Carruthers was talking about. He shook his head, implying that she lied. He said:
‘Why are we being served by a man whom neither of us likes when we should be served by someone else? Just look at those weeping willows, you say.’
‘Don’t be silly, Carruthers.’
‘What has become, Miss Fanshawe, of the other waiter?’
‘Now please don’t start any nonsense. I’m tired and –’
‘It was he who gave me a taste for pale ale, d’you remember that? In your company, Miss Fanshawe, on this train. It was he who told us that Beaune travels best. Have a cig, Miss Fanshawe?’
‘No, and I wish you wouldn’t either.’
‘Actually Mrs Carruthers allows me the odd smoke these days. Ever since my thirteenth birthday, May the 26th. How can she stop me, she says, when day and night she’s at it like a factory chimney herself?’
‘Your birthday’s May the 26th? I never knew. Mine’s two days later.’ She spoke hastily, and with an eagerness that was as false as the vague expression her face had borne a moment ago.
‘Gemini, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘Yes: Gemini. Queen Victoria –’
‘The sign of passion. Here comes the interloper.’
The waiter placed sherry before Miss Fanshawe and beer in front of Carruthers. He murmured deferentially, inclining his head.
‘We’ve just been saying,’ Carruthers remarked, ‘that you’re a new one on this line.’
‘Newish, sir. A month – no, tell a lie, three weeks yesterday.’
‘We knew your predecessor.’
‘Oh yes, sir.?’
‘He used to say this line was as dead as a doornail. Actually, he enjoyed not having anything to do. Remember, Miss Fanshawe?’
Miss Fanshawe shook her head. She sipped her sherry, hoping the waiter would have the sense to go away. Carruthers said: