‘Only a cup of coffee, Vera.’
That morning Sidney woke when it was half past six, the light just beginning. He thought at once about Vera, although it had been a particularly rough night in the club and usually that comes into his mind first thing. Harry and Alfie had had to separate youths who began to fight, one of them with a knife. Later, after two, a girl who was a stranger in the club collapsed. But in spite of the intervention of that excitement, this morning it was Vera he woke up to, her face as it was when her hair was blonde. Fleshy you’d have called her face then, soft was what he’d thought when he first saw the photograph, in the Evening Standard someone had left behind in the club. It doesn’t matter that Vera is leaner now, it doesn’t matter that her hair is different. Vera’s the same, no way she isn’t.
‘Dried out a lovely shade,’ Mr Schele says. ‘The bathroom.’
‘There’s half that tin left for touching up.’ The coffee cup is warm in Sidney’s cold hands. He likes that skirt. He’d like to see it folded on a chair and Vera standing in her slip, her jersey still on. The jersey’s buttons are at the top, along one shoulder, four red buttons to match the wool. In the photograph it was a jacket, and white dots on her shirt. A loving sister, the paper said.
‘Anything on the News, Sidney?’
He shakes his head, unable to answer the question because this morning he didn’t turn the radio on. Some expedition reached a mountain top, Vera says.
‘Bad night in the club,’ Sidney says, and tells them. He’d had to fish light bulbs and tins out of the toilet when he was closing up, but he doesn’t mention that. The girl who’d collapsed was on Ecstasy, the ambulance men said. There is some way they can tell an Ecstasy collapse, now that they’ve got used to them. Sidney doesn’t know what it is.
‘Out of control,’ Mr Schele comments, hearing that. ‘The whole globe out of control.’
‘Maybe how they sweat. There’s different ways a person sweats, an ambulance man told me. According to what’s taken.’
The blow left scarcely a contusion. It was to the neck, the paper said, the side of the neck, no more than a smack. The intruder had lost his head; he’d walked into a room where he wasn’t expecting anyone to be, and there was a figure in a wheelchair. He’d have been seen at once, but what he didn’t know was that he couldn’t ever have been described. Probably he struck the blow to frighten; probably he said if a description was given he’d be back. The room is empty now, even the bed taken away; two years ago Sidney painted out the flowery wallpaper with satin emulsion — Pale Sherbet — the woodwork to match in gloss.
‘One thing I hate,’ he says, ‘is when an ambulance has to come.’
God did not make another man in all His world as gentle: often Vera thinks that, and she thinks it now. His voice was gentle when he said about an ambulance coming to take away the Ecstasy girl, the hands that grasp the coffee cup are gentle. ‘Short of a slate or two,’ they said when they told her a man had come forward. ‘But crystal clear in his statements.’
The first time she saw him in court his shabby jacket needed a stitch. Yes, what he said was true, she agreed when it was put to her, and was told to speak up.
‘You see the world at that club, Sidney,’ her father says.
When she walked free, when she came back to the house, her father didn’t look at her at first. And when he did she could see him thinking that a man who was a stranger to her, whose face she had not even noticed, had reached out to her in the darkness of a cinema, and that she had acquiesced. With her looks, she could have had anyone: that, too, her father didn’t say.
‘Yeah, a lot come into the club. Though Monday’s always light. Not much doing on a Monday.’
She knew he’d visit. She knew in court, something about him, something about the pity that was in his eyes. Nearly a year went by but still she guessed she’d open the porch door and there he’d be, and then he was. He came when he knew her father would be out at work. He stood there tongue-tied and she said come in. ‘I couldn’t face him,’ her father said when she told him, but in the end he did, so much was owing; and now he waits for a proposal. Step by step, time wore away the prejudice any father would have.
‘You try that new biscuit, Sidney.’ She pushes the plate towards him and then fills up his coffee cup. Nicer than the ones with the peel in them, she says.
‘I met that woman with the dog again. Last night.’
They don’t know who the woman is. Must be she lives the other side of the green, her father has said when she was mentioned before. On his own walks he has never run into her, preferring to go the other way.
‘You think we put in another rose, Sidney?’ her father asks.
‘It’s empty, the way it is. You’d notice that.’
‘I thought it maybe would be.’
Mr Schele goes to see for himself, changing his shoes in the shed by the back door. The first time he faced Sidney he kept looking at his hands, unable to keep his eyes off them. He kept thinking of Vera when she was little, when her mother was alive, Mona already confined. Vera always looked out for him, and ran down the garden path to meet him when he came home, and he lifted her up high, making her laugh, the way poor Mona never could, not all her life. The first time he faced Sidney he had to go out and get some air, had stood where he is standing now, near to where the rosebush was. It wasn’t wrong that Vera had left Mona on her own that afternoon. Ever since their mother died he’d kept saying to Vera that she couldn’t be a prisoner in the house. One sister should not imprison another, no matter what the circumstances were; that was not ever meant. The shopping had to be done; and no one could begrudge an hour or so in a cinema. And yet, he thought the first day he faced Sidney, why did it have to be the way it was, poor Mona’s head fallen sideways as though her neck’d been cracked, while that was happening in the cinema’s dark?
‘I’m sorry there was that trouble,’ Vera says in the kitchen, referring to the fight in the club, and the girl for whom an ambulance had come.
‘On a Saturday you expect it.’ And Sidney says he doesn’t know why that is. Often on a Thursday or a Friday the club’s as full. ‘I like a Sunday,’ he says, quite suddenly, as if he has for the first time realized that. ‘There’s church bells somewhere near the club. Well, anyway they carry. Gould be a mile off.’
On Sunday evenings Vera goes to church, a Baptist place, but anywhere would do. She says she’s sorry when she kneels, and feels the better for saying it in a church, with other people there. And afterwards she wonders what they’d think if they knew, their faces still credulous following their hour of comfort. She makes herself go through it when she’s on her knees, not permitting the excuses. She wants to draw attention to how awful it was for so long, ever since their mother died, how awful it would always be, the two of them left together, the washing, the dressing, the lifting from the wheelchair, the feeding, the silent gaze. All that, when praying, Vera resists in her thoughts. ‘You want to get turned off?’ a boy said once, she heard him in the play yard when she was fourteen. ‘You take a look at the sister.’ And later, when the wheelchair was still pushed out and about, proposals didn’t come. Later still, when there were tears and protestations on the street, the wheelchair was abandoned, not even pushed into the garden, since that caused distress also: Mona was put upstairs. ‘Vera, take your friend up,’ her father, not realizing, suggested once: an afflicted sister’s due to stare at visitors to the house. On her knees — kneeling properly, not just bent forward — Vera makes herself watch the shadow that is herself, the sideways motion of her flattened hand, some kind of snap she felt, the head gone sideways too.
‘The wind’s dropped down. You stay to lunch, Sidney? You could have your fire, eh?’