Sweet William Read online

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  LOVE TO READ?

  LOVE GREAT SALES?

  GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

  Sweet William

  A Novel

  Beryl Bainbridge

  For Jimmy Boots

  1

  In the main entrance of the air terminal a young man stood beside a cigarette machine, searching in the breast pocket of his blue suit for his passport. A girl, slouching in a grey coat, as if she thought she was too tall, passively watched him.

  ‘It’s safe,’ he said, patting his jacket with relief.

  Suddenly the girl’s face, reflected in the chrome surface of the tobacco machine, changed expression. Clownishly her mouth turned down at the corners.

  ‘You should have taken me with you,’ she said. ‘You should have done.’

  He knew she was right, and yet how could he arrive in the States with someone who was not his wife? It wasn’t like London. The University would never stand for him living with a woman, not in quarters provided and paid for by the faculty.

  ‘I’ll send for you,’ he told her. ‘I’ll send for you very soon.’

  She thought how handsome he was, with his dark hair cut short to impress his transatlantic colleagues, his chelsea boots. There hadn’t been time for him to put on a tie, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. It occurred to her how masculine he was and how unfair that she should realise it only when saying goodbye.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Look at the clock. I’ll have to move, Ann.’

  ‘Wait,’ she pleaded. And he looked desperately at the queue forming outside the door leading to the coach park. ‘All right,’ she said bitterly. ‘Go.’

  He bent to pick up his suitcase and his white raincoat. She stood turned away from him with a bright deliberate smile on her face. He put down his case and touched her arm.

  He said uneasily, ‘I’ll miss the plane.’

  She relented and allowed him to embrace her. When they kissed, she felt her stomach turn over, it was probably the excitement of losing him. When they had been together she always stood outside, observing them both.

  He didn’t turn round to wave as he went through the departure door, nor did she follow to watch him boarding the coach. Acting out the fantasy that she had been betrayed, she stumbled with bowed head towards the exit. She was already feeling a little frightened at the thought of facing her mother. Maybe if she bought some fresh rolls on the Finchley Road and a bunch of flowers for her breakfast tray, Mrs Walton would be less condemning. She might even be sympathetic; after all, it had been her idea that Ann get engaged. Ann hadn’t thought she knew Gerald well enough – they had only known each other for a few weeks when he was offered the University post – but Mrs Walton said she would be a fool to think it over, particularly as Gerald was flying off to America and with such splendid prospects. She hadn’t met Gerald then, but her friend Mrs Munro, with whom she played bridge, had a daughter married to an American, and Mrs Munro had made three trips to the States in four years.

  When the No. 13 bus came, Ann sat on the top deck at the front holding tightly to the chrome rail as the vehicle tore between the parked cars and the tattered trees. She closed her eyes and re-lived Gerald kissing her goodbye. The excitement was still there – the sensation in the pit of her stomach – though she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t panic at the thought of the scene to come. Mrs Walton had insisted on travelling up from Brighton to be introduced to Gerald before he departed. It was natural enough that she should want to meet him, though she could have chosen a more convenient time. She’d brought a large suitcase too, as if it was going to be a lengthy visit, although she knew Pamela was arriving the day after tomorrow and there wasn’t room for them all; there weren’t enough sheets or blankets. Ann had asked her mother to come ten days ago but Mrs Walton said she hadn’t a spare moment. She had a busy agenda; there was a bridge evening arranged. The night before, Gerald’s friends had given him a farewell party to which Mrs Walton wasn’t invited. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Gerald when Ann hinted that perhaps they should take Mrs Walton. ‘You can’t take your mother with you.’ Mrs Walton’s mouth trembled the way it always did when she was put out about something. ‘I had thought,’ she said, ‘that we’d stay in and perhaps have a nice round of cards.’ And Gerald said ‘Tough’ under his breath. But she heard. Ann worried all evening about her mother being upset, and Gerald drank too much. When he brought her home he pushed his way into the flat and tried to make her take her clothes off. She wouldn’t remove all of them, in case her mother came out of the bedroom. He bent her over the sofa and made love to her standing up. It didn’t work very well because he was too drunk; every time he lunged forward she was pressed against the upholstered arm, and dust filled her nose. They couldn’t lie down because the floor creaked. Gerald became terribly irritated by her lack of co-operation, but there was nothing she could do. Mrs Walton started moving about in the other room and coughing and calling out for cups of water. In the end Gerald swore and made a dreadful noise going downstairs – a sort of howl like a dog on the end of a chain. It was astonishing Mrs Walton didn’t come out in her white nylon nightgown and confront them both. She wasn’t a coward.

  The bus circled the roundabout and Ann looked down on Lords Cricket Ground. There was a man in a boy’s cap running towards the fence. He flung his arm high into the air as if he was going to do a hand stand on the green grass. A van with a sprinkler advanced along the perimeter of the field, and the bowler plodded, bandy-legged and perspiring, back to his starting point. Ann couldn’t think what to say to her mother. She’d have to play it by ear – keep a straight bat and hope she wasn’t caught leg before wicket. Silly mid-off, she thought, and tore her bus ticket into little pieces.

  She bought the rolls and six carnations, and some fresh eggs from the health food shop. There probably wasn’t any difference between those and the ones in the supermarket, but she felt she was being nice to her mother – filling her up with goodness, nothing but the best. She made a lot of noise going up the stairs, thumping her feet at every step to give Mrs Walton time to put back any correspondence she might have found in the flat. She didn’t mind the way her mother spied on her, the detective work she felt compelled to do; there wasn’t anything sensational to find, and her father was such a private man her mother had a need to discover secrets.

  However, her mother was packing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Ann, though it was obvious.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ said Mrs Walton. She had been crying, and she wore her bedjacket, the one with the blue ribbons. She looked like an over-fed baby with her flushed cheeks, her diminutive mouth, and the little plump arms appearing from the beribboned sleeves of the fluffy bedjacket.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ann. ‘I thought you might stay to see Pamela.’

  ‘I know when I’m not wanted,’ said Mrs Walton, though she had never known.

  Ann realised it was too late to pretend innocence; she had to attack. ‘I can’t understand you,’ she cried fiercely. ‘You said you wanted to meet Gerald and yet you hardly spoke to him. He thought it was odd.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me,’ said Mrs Walton, pushing a blue taffeta dress into the suitcase.

  Ann watched her in silence for a moment. ‘I bought you some flowers.’ She laid the carnations on the coverlet.

  ‘I did not come here,’ her mother explained, ‘to put up with you running all over London with that person, and carrying on half the night.’

  ‘That person,’ said Ann, feeling on safer ground, ‘is the one you told me to get engaged to. He’s going to be your son-in-law.’

  Mrs Walton made a c
ontemptuous sound. Her eyes registered disbelief.

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not after last night. You and him … the noises … the grunting.’

  It did seem disgusting the way she described it. Ann remembered a holiday she had spent as a child on a farm in Wiltshire. Four days, bed and breakfast, and the rain sloping down across the fields. Her mother, in gum boots and headscarf, took her to see the cows in their shed. The animals coughed in the dark stalls and rattled their chains. ‘Look darling,’ cried Mrs Walton, wrinkling her sensitive nose at the smell of the dung, ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ At the end of the cobbled yard was a sty. They could hear the sounds of slaughter as they came out of the cow shed. ‘Wait,’ called Mrs Walton as Ann ran to look. There was a pink pig straddling another. She thought they were fighting. The rain dripped from the brim of her velour hat. ‘Come away,’ shouted Mrs Walton, face white with excitement. The larger pig scrabbled on hind legs, its trotters, like high-heeled shoes, jigging up and down among the potato peelings and the mud. Mrs Walton caught Ann by the belt of her mackintosh and tugged her back from the wall. She said pigs were absolutely animal in their behaviour. She said they were disgusting.

  ‘You didn’t even attempt to disguise what you were up to with Gerald,’ Mrs Walton said.

  ‘It’s not unusual,’ Ann retorted, ‘to enjoy making love to one’s fiancé. We’re not living in the middle ages. Everyone does it now.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ cried Mrs Walton. ‘Not everyone. There’s such a thing as self-control.’

  At the thought of the self-control she had been forced to exercise the night before, Ann was filled with rage. ‘I do have self-control,’ she shouted. ‘I do. What do you think it was like for us with you calling out all the time?’

  ‘You’re nothing but a prostitute,’ said Mrs Walton.

  The fight went out of Ann. She was gazing at her mother’s head bent over the suitcase, at the clean grey hairs beginning to show at the roots, at the dyed red curls quivering about her cheeks.

  ‘I don’t take money for it,’ she said forlornly, and she tried to touch her mother’s arm to reassure her that she was loved, but Mrs Walton sprang away from her with dilated eyes.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she cried out, running into the sitting room and snatching up her stockings, her handbag and the packet of humbugs she had bought for the train.

  O Hell, thought Ann, I’ll have to beg now, and she looked at her mother standing there in the centre of the room, her bare feet planted on the carpet, her toe-nails painted raspberry red.

  ‘Don’t go Mummy, please don’t go.’ She couldn’t bear the guilt that would follow if Mrs Walton left abruptly: the sniffing in the bedroom as she snapped the catches on the suitcase, the pathetic sighings as she dressed for the journey, the disgruntled face in the doorway as she departed for Brighton and the clean sea-air. Ann felt very sad and tired suddenly. She sank to her knees on the floor and tears spilled from her eyes.

  Neither of them heard Mrs Kershaw come into the flat. She wore sandals summer and winter and she padded about the house like a cat. With her gypsy earrings and her peasant blouse, she bounced into the room. She stopped, appalled.

  ‘The door was open,’ she began. ‘Do excuse me.’

  She fled out on to the landing at once, leaving Ann still on her knees and her mother clutching her bedjacket to her breast.

  ‘You foolish girl,’ said Mrs Walton, recovering. ‘Whatever will Mrs Kershaw think. Get up and behave yourself. I’m sick to death of your dramatics.’ And she went angrily into the bedroom.

  ‘Mrs Kershaw won’t mind,’ said Ann, following her. She stood there dejectedly, her face sullen.

  In the end Mrs Walton said she must go back to Brighton. She couldn’t possibly stay as there was a dance at the Wine Society and she needed to go to the hairdresser’s. She touched the pale roots of her hair and struggled into her girdle. The carnations fell to the floor. Ann thought she was probably telling the truth. Her mother had never intended to stay; she was just getting her own back for not being taken to the party.

  Ann made breakfast and they talked about Gerald’s job in the States and about Mrs Munro’s daughter. Throughout, Mrs Walton shifted on her chair as though aching from fatigue. ‘I’m so tired,’ she complained, and they both knew why but refrained from mentioning the farmyard noises that had kept her awake.

  Ann took her in a taxi to the station and Mrs Walton allowed herself to be kissed on the cheek.

  ‘Give my love to Father,’ said Ann.

  There was the expected moment on the platform as the train began to crawl away with the little displeased face, lonely at the carriage window.

  When she returned home Ann knocked at Mrs Kershaw’s door. Mrs Kershaw was preparing food in the kitchen. Though she was a vegetarian, she wore a butcher’s apron over her black skirt.

  ‘Ah, Ann,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. I’ve a favour to ask.’ She wanted Ann to go up to the school tomorrow for a religious service. She herself worked irregular hours for a newspaper and wouldn’t be able to go. ‘You have got two weeks’ holiday,’ she observed, ‘and the children are terribly fond of you.’

  Ann couldn’t refuse her. Mrs Kershaw never said a word about people coming to stay – not like some landladies – and she must have known that sometimes Gerald had stayed all night. It was a nuisance though, having to put off all the jobs she’d intended doing: there were the sheets to collect from the laundry, the smears of soap and dried-up toothpaste to be removed from the glass shelf in the bathroom, the cooker to clean – Ann had meant to take the whole thing apart and scrub round the gas jets. Not that Pamela was all that fussy – she spent most of her time away in Clapham – but she might mention at home that the flat looked untidy, and that was bound to get back to Mrs Walton, who would then ring up and say Ann had made her feel ashamed. Mrs Walton herself was short-sighted; she’d boiled coffee the night before and the milk had spilled over.

  ‘It’s a Harvest Festival Service,’ said Mrs Kershaw. ‘You’ll enjoy the singing.’

  It amazed Ann that Mrs Kershaw, who held such strong views, should send her children to a Parochial school with a vicar coming in twice a week to take morning prayers. You’d have thought she might have preferred one of those progressive places where the teachers were called by their Christian names and told to shut up. Perhaps it was a question of money. Ann didn’t think Mrs Kershaw was right in saying that the children liked her. ‘Tolerated’ would have been a better word. Ann didn’t care much for them either; she thought them tiresome and opinionated. Mrs Walton said she could never understand how a well-spoken woman like Mrs Kershaw had produced such dreadful offspring. ‘Their language,’ she said. ‘You’d think they were in the Merchant Navy.’

  Not to mention the second-hand clothing they wore.

  ‘Do make certain,’ said Mrs Kershaw, ‘that my jar of chutney is on display.’ She had made 14 lbs of chutney several months before, but neither Roddy nor the children would touch it. ‘If it isn’t, go and see if Jasper has left the bloody thing in the cloakroom.’

  Ann said she would. She hovered at the table and wondered whether to mention the scene with her mother. She stared at a small painting on the wall, in an elaborate frame, depicting a man and woman making love on a railway line. There was no sign of a train.

  ‘My mother’s gone,’ she said. ‘To Brighton. We had a row … about Gerald.’

  Mrs Kershaw listened attentively; beneath the embroidered roses her heart beat with sympathy. She chopped some French beans and sprinkled them with salt. She said, ‘You mustn’t be too hard on her, Ann dear. She’s a very ordinary woman. How can she understand the way we all live? We inhabit a different world.’ And she gave a small satisfied smile.

  Ann felt it was funny that anyone should call Mrs Walton ordinary. It wasn’t an adequate word. She thought of her mother’s piano playing, her scheming, her ability to read French, the strength of her convictions, the inflexibility of her dreadful wil
l. The way she advised Ann to wear makeup – ‘Exploit yourself more,’ she was given to saying; ‘paint your face.’ As if Ann were a Red Indian. The way she referred to men as ‘persons’. Her use of the possessive pronoun. The subjectivity of her every thought. However, she said, ‘You’re right, Mrs Kershaw’. She went upstairs yawning and found the carnations lying under the bed. Perhaps she had been a little hard on her mother. She could have just apologised for keeping her awake and denied that Gerald had been in the flat. She could have said a stray dog had got into the house and run up and down the stairs barking. Her mother wouldn’t have believed it, but the lie would have been appreciated.

  Her first impression was that she had been mistaken for someone else. She looked behind her but there was no one in the open doorway. The stranger was beckoning and indicating the empty chair beside his own. His eyes held such an expression of certainty and recognition that she began to smile apologetically. It was as if he had been watching the door for a long time and Ann had kept him waiting. She did notice, as she excused herself along the row of seated mothers, that he had yellow curls and a flattish nose like a prize fighter. He was dressed appallingly in some sort of sweater with writing on the chest. On his feet he wore very soiled tennis pumps without laces.

  He spoke when she sat down, though she couldn’t catch what he said. Ann remembered seeing him before, one day last summer when she had fetched the children. She had noticed him at the time because she thought how foolish he looked – a large overgrown boy with rounded buttocks kicking a ball about the playground.

  She could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks; everyone was watching them, thinking she was a Mummy come straight from the office and he a Daddy devotedly snatching a moment away from the building site. Mrs Kershaw’s Jasper was grinning at her; he had an army cap pulled down over his eyes and he was unravelling the braid from a crumpled school blazer. All through the singing of ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ the stranger was fingering the material of her green suit jacket: the shoulder, the pocket flap, the edge of the lapel.