Sweet William Read online

  ‘That’s a lovely bit of cloth,’ he hissed. And then a question – ‘Is it Donegal tweed?’

  She didn’t know; but it seemed hardly possible, looking the way he did, that he was an expert from the clothing industry, so she nodded and fixed her eyes on the row of children sitting cross-legged on the stage.

  Though it was October, the sun shone through the high windows of the hall; the children tilted their heads to avoid the glare. Blurred and golden, they played idly with glittering strands of hair, located their parents, nudged each other and giggled silently. After the second verse the smaller children gave up singing altogether and watched the dust spiralling to the roof. They gazed dreamily upward, sucking their thumbs.

  ‘That’s flesh of my flesh,’ said the stranger, tugging at her elbow.

  Try as she might she could not see which infant resembled him. Or rather, which did not. They were all beginning to look the same, flaxen-haired and snub-nosed, rocking now from side to side, eyes turned up to heaven. She felt slightly unwell. How else to explain the particular degree of agitation and palpitation that she was experiencing? Perhaps she had the beginnings of a temperature. Even when they hunched over their knees for the prayers, he still plucked little pieces of fluff from her sleeve.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I’m praying.’

  ‘I’m all in favour of that,’ he said, sliding from the metal chair on to his knees. The yellow ringlets bounced, exposing a white neck and a small brown mole just visible above the ragged curve of his jumper.

  One of those dramatic-looking Hampstead parents, enveloped in a black coat, was staring at Ann. She was winding a lock of hair round and round her finger. Ann didn’t know whether to smile or not. It could have been somebody she’d met at Mrs Kershaw’s – all her friends looked very intelligent and did things in the theatre or made pottery – but she couldn’t be sure. She started to tremble. There on the stage squatted the identical rows of children, flesh of his flesh, caught in a sunbeam. She had felt rather like this five years ago after an inoculation for polio before going to Spain with a girl from the office. At the time she’d expected to die. In the end she didn’t go away because Mrs Walton took her to Hastings, but she’d had splitting headaches and a temperature of 104, so it was probably a good thing she’d stayed in England.

  The vicar was saying how nice it had been that they’d come along. His face was out of focus. She had to clench her hands in her lap to stop her fingers fluttering up and down. He thanked them for their offerings; he pointed proudly at the trestle table, the pyramid of tinned soup, the home-made cake, the polythene bag dewy with condensation, containing potatoes. A father, dressed as a life-boatman in a P.V.C. jacket, stamped his waders on the wooden floor and shouted ‘Bravo’. Ann couldn’t identify Mrs Kershaw’s offering of chutney amongst so many others.

  They had to stay exactly where they were until the children had filed back to their classrooms. Emily wouldn’t look at her, but Jasper punched her on the shoulder as he passed. When they rose from their seats the stranger was close behind. She felt his hand on her shoulder, then her waist. She half turned her head, and his mouth brushed her hair. There was cinnamon on his breath.

  Outside in the playground, he ran ahead. Hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched about his ears, he stood at the gate and barred the way.

  ‘We’ll have a cup of coffee,’ he said. ‘Down the road.’

  He wouldn’t let her through. There was a confusion of women pushing prams, and a dog that ran in and out trailing a lead.

  ‘There’s things I have to do,’ she told him.

  He was jogging up and down now on the tips of his toes – people were forced to squeeze past them. He had rosy cheeks and pale blue eyes that watched her face.

  ‘Never,’ he said, and he took her arm and walked her away.

  She couldn’t eat the chocolate éclair he ordered. She was wondering how she could possibly be ill with Pamela corning to stay.

  ‘I don’t feel awfully well,’ she said. ‘It feels like the flu.’

  ‘Forget it,’ he advised. He was cramming cake between his slightly swollen lips, bending his head low over the plate. Even so there were crumbs all over the cloth.

  ‘My fiancé,’ she told him, ‘is a great believer in honey and lemon.’

  It wasn’t true – she had never known Gerald when ill – but she wanted him to know that she was engaged and wasn’t the sort of girl who allowed herself to be picked up by strange men. He didn’t seem to have heard; he was looking down at his plate thoughtfully. He wasn’t handsome like Gerald; he was soft and rounded, and he irritated her because she wanted to go home and clean the cooker. She knew she was watching him in a calculating way; she could feel how hard her face had become. Her knees had stiffened. She was staring at him quite rudely, one eyebrow raised in the manner of Mrs Walton when expressing contempt. She put her hand to her brow in case he glanced upwards. But he didn’t. After a moment he said, ‘Do you remember the vegetables?’

  ‘Vegetables?’

  ‘The cauliflowers on the altar steps … those purple cabbages.’

  ‘Purple?’

  ‘Do you not remember the loaves plaited to look like sheaves of corn?’

  ‘Bread’s not a vegetable,’ she said, though she had begun to remember the Harvest Festivals of her childhood – the choir in cassocks frilled at the neck, the lighted candles, D-Day dahlias in the pulpit, the smell of earth and wax, the whole church garlanded with fruit and flowers.

  ‘Swedes,’ he said. ‘Parsnips, onions, marrow—’

  ‘Carrots—’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Those tender carrots with the leaves like young ferns.’

  Once she’d been to a Wordsworth evening at work, organised by the Poetry Society. Her friend Olive said she would enjoy it. When they wandered lonely as a cloud she wanted to scream with embarrassment. But he said things properly.

  ‘Chrysanthemums,’ she told him. ‘Michaelmas daisies.’

  ‘Michaelmas daisies?’ he repeated wonderingly.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Michaelmas daisies,’ he said again. ‘You’ve got a lovely turn of phrase.’

  She’d stopped trembling. It wasn’t like talking to somebody at work or to Mrs Kershaw; she didn’t have to keep nodding and watching mouths to know when it was her turn. She told him she’d been living in London for two years, that she worked for the BBC. She was slightly breathless and spoke as if she were running at the same time. People came in and out, chairs were moved, dishes gathered up on trays, but it was happening at a great distance; she concentrated entirely on his pink face crowned with foppish curls. It wasn’t that he asked her questions – he hardly said a word for several minutes – rather that she felt compelled to talk. She didn’t say anything particularly memorable, that was the funny part of it. Nothing to compare with the Michaelmas daisies. She said she didn’t really know she was living in London, it could have been anywhere – she moved around on public transport to places that were names on maps, she travelled the underground system, she went up lifts at Bush House, she ate in sandwich bars; at the weekend she sometimes walked on the Heath with Olive.

  He might have been a doctor listening to the symptoms of some obvious disease, sitting there with eyes half-closed, nodding, murmuring an assent, rubbing the side of his snub nose with the edge of his finger. She told him Mrs Kershaw went out to work; she implied that she herself would never neglect her children for the sake of a career. She was going to take Jasper and Emily to the swimming baths at Swiss Cottage after school tomorrow. She didn’t swim herself because she grew hysterical every time the water drew level with her heart. Wasn’t that odd, considering she had been brought up beside the sea?

  He ate her éclair, ordered more coffee. Now and then he wiped his lips on his torn sleeve. Once he repeated her name – ‘Ann’ – as if he was biting on something, and when his mouth widened there were spaces between his teeth. She told him about her cousin c
oming to stay, how she had to fetch the clean sheets from the laundry. She started to describe Pamela’s character, certain mannerisms that were irritating. ‘When she eats something … like a piece of cheese … that sort of thing … she holds it in both hands and nibbles on it. Of course, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t … we’re all different … but all the same …’

  He looked up then, unsmiling, and she saw reflected in his eye the microscopic image of the tea-urn on the counter. In the middle of a sentence she detected the note of malice in her voice. She actually began to stutter; she couldn’t continue. She had never before experienced such a feeling of unworthiness. All the things she had told him, the boring trivia that had bubbled up from her mind, the stupid assertion that there was a right and a wrong way to eat a piece of cheese. Whatever was the matter with her? He wasn’t watching her critically; he was looking down at the table again, sweeping his fingers back and forth across the cloth, pushing a small wall of crumbs. She had to put her hand over her mouth to stop the other words coming out, the vulgar resentments – Gerald leaving her, the flowers her mother hadn’t wanted, Pamela and her visits to Clapham – all the confidential details of her life that suddenly sickened her. She wanted to be good.

  They sat for a moment in silence. Then he told her his name – William McClusky. He was a playwright. Both statements for some reason caused her distress. His voice was light in pitch, thin and brutal-sounding on occasions, but she hadn’t realised he was Scottish. He said he was ‘West Coast’, whatever that might mean. Eventually, she supposed, with that accent it would mean her mother and father would find him common. Not officer class. She was puzzled that she should think her parents might meet him; she couldn’t understand why she was upset at the idea of his being a writer of plays. What did it matter what he did? It was none of her business. And yet she was suffering. She stared at him in bewilderment.

  ‘Are you?’ she said.

  Maybe he was lying to her. He didn’t seem educated enough to be a writer. The few people she had met in the canteen of Bush House, who worked for Talks Programmes, had all come down from Oxford with degrees in Economics.

  ‘I’ve a play in rehearsal at the moment. If it goes well when we take it to the provinces, there’ll be a space at the Haymarket.’

  ‘How lovely.’

  She spoke flatly to disguise what she was feeling. She had only just met him and yet she didn’t want him to go away into the provinces, away on trains, away from her. She was becoming confused. It must have something to do with Gerald leaving for America and her mother going back to Brighton – everyone going on journeys. Or she was ill.

  ‘I’m on television tonight. Sort of an interview. Asking what it means to be a writer.’

  ‘My fiancé,’ she began, ‘is a lecturer in—’

  ‘Will you watch me, then?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t got a television set.’

  ‘I’ll get you one. Tell me where you live and I’ll have a friend of mine bring one round.’

  He wrote her address on the back of his hand. She was appalled that she had given it to him. She didn’t want anyone bringing her a television, not with Pamela arriving and all the things she had to do before tomorrow. Not that she imagined he meant it.

  He walked with her to the corner of the road. She was shaking so much she kept knocking her ankles together and stumbling. He didn’t seem to notice. He walked at the edge of the pavement, scuffing at the leaves with his tennis pumps.

  ‘I’m away to the churchyard,’ he said. ‘To look at the graves.’

  She wondered if someone close to him had died recently. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘That man of yours,’ he suddenly asked. ‘Is he out of work?’

  ‘Out of work?’

  ‘Could he not afford to buy a ring for your finger?’

  They had come to the top of the hill and he began to dart round her in a circle, dribbling an imaginary ball.

  ‘He had to go away to America,’ she protested. ‘There wasn’t time.’ It hurt that it wasn’t only her mother who thought Gerald hadn’t come up to scratch.

  ‘If you were my woman,’ he said. ‘You’d have a ring for your finger.’ And in broad daylight he took her left hand in both of his – her address tattooed in ink on his wrist – and kissed her at the edge of her mouth.

  He did send a television set. Two young men carried it up the stairs and put it on the window ledge. They didn’t pass on a message or anything, which meant she spent all evening trying to find the right programme, and she hardly had a moment to tidy the flat for Pamela. The picture kept sliding out of view and coming up at the bottom again, and she saw so many bits out of so many films that she was exhausted and her eyes ached. Just when she feared she had missed him altogether and she’d switched from some cowboys shooting each other to death, there was quite a clear image of two men seated at a table. One of them was William. He wore a collar and tie and his hair was brushed back from his forehead. The other man was asking a question about contemporary British drama and William said, ‘Are you referring to that Look Back in Anger stuff?’ At least, Ann thought those were his words, and she was in a position to understand him more than most, because she could still hear his voice in her head from earlier that day. She couldn’t think anyone else understood; his accent had broadened incredibly. At any rate, the interviewer never answered; he leant forward in his chair, and there was a pause, and then he thanked William for coming along. William gave an abrupt little nod, and there was a close-up of him sitting there with his lower lip thrust out aggressively, more like a boxer than a writer. Then he faded out to loud background music.

  She switched off the set and the picture folded inward; for a second there was a little white hole in the centre and then there was nothing but greyness and the outline of the kitchen door reflected in the screen. She knelt on the carpet and rocked backwards and forwards. Now that he had gone she couldn’t remember what he looked like. She could see Gerald in her mind: the way he screwed up one eye when he blew out smoke, the slightly hooked nose, the two fingers he placed flat against his puckered mouth when he was thinking about something. She could see her mother, all of her, at one of her bridge evenings, holding the cards to her breast like a fan, and the watch-strap too tight on her plump arm. She even remembered the crumpled face of the woman at the laundry when she collected the sheets. But she couldn’t see William at all.

  She must have knelt in front of the television for ages, because when she heard Mrs Kershaw calling, her knees hurt as she got up from the floor. She was so stiff she nearly fell over.

  Mrs Kershaw was standing halfway up the stairs, wearing a flowered dressing-gown tied round the waist with string.

  ‘Telephone,’ she said.

  Ann dreaded lest it was her mother; she was not in the mood to be reproached. Her mother would say ‘Hello stranger’, regardless of the fact that Ann had seen her two days previously. ‘Daddy thought I looked very peaky when I came home from you.’ And Ann would say ‘Hello Mummy’. Then Mrs Walton would ask with dreadful perception, ‘What’s wrong with you? What’s going on?’

  She picked up the phone and said carefully, ‘Hello’.

  ‘Did you watch, then?’

  ‘Oh I did … I did.’

  ‘I’m glad. I wanted you to.’

  ‘Oh I did … I did.’

  The wall was painted dark green like a public convenience. There was a card with the number of a taxi service and a typed notice saying that foreign coins should not be used. She could hear her breath echoing round and round the mouthpiece of the telephone.

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘That’s all right.’ And he rang off.

  Her cousin Pamela arrived the next day in time for lunch. She stood inside the porch with her lips slightly parted, as if she was bothered about something and was thinking of the right question. She had thin, perfectly straight eyebrows that almost met in the middle, and delicately tinted cheeks. Ann never thought of her
as being pretty until she saw her, and always it took her by surprise.

  ‘My God,’ said Pamela as soon as Ann opened the door. ‘You look worn out. Whatever have you been up to?’

  She carried a suitcase and two carrier bags and she said the stairs would kill her. She made an awful racket in the hall and Ann was worried about Mrs Kershaw’s friend, Roddy, coming out and complaining. He had once, a year ago, when Olive tripped over the mat, and he’d appeared, practically naked, waving his arms about. Olive had nearly died laughing. When Ann apologised later to Mrs Kershaw, she said Roddy had a damn nerve and not to take any notice. Still, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, or to Pamela for that matter.

  Pamela only came to visit when she wanted somewhere cheap to stay. Usually she went out every night and on occasions hadn’t returned till the afternoon. She told the most hair-raising stories about the friends she had in Clapham. Ann never understood why she couldn’t stay with them, seeing they were so friendly. They had a living room painted completely black, and they slept on cushions on the floor, so it wasn’t a question of there not being enough beds. Ann had never really liked her, which was strange as she was rather like Mrs Walton in a way – vivacious and full of fun when she was in a good mood. She made Ann feel clumsy. All the photographs in the family album showed them together at the seaside with bucket and spade – Pamela, small and dark, smiling into the camera, and Ann, tall and fair, staring down at the sand with her bony toes curled inwards. Pamela was always hinting that things were not as they seemed. When she was fifteen she had said that Ann’s father had put his arm round her in the greenhouse. Ann thought she was disgusting and told her so. Pamela had laughed and said, ‘What’s disgusting about it? It’s normal.’ If she hadn’t meant there was something odd about Captain Walton’s gesture of affection among the geraniums, why bother to mention it at all? Ann wasn’t close to her father. He had been in the regular army – her mother had married him on the rebound from an airman she met on the Isle of Wight – and he was twenty years older than she. He’d enjoyed the war and Mrs Walton said he wasn’t the same man once it was won. They’d lived in married quarters up and down the country – a succession of brick bungalows with concrete garages stained by the rain, and newly planted bushes withering beside concrete paths. They sent Ann away to school; and when that was over and Captain Walton had retired, Ann scarcely knew him. He was now erect and frail. He often didn’t answer when spoken to. Mrs Walton was fond of saying his mind had gone on manoeuvres. Ann wondered what she might have been like had her father been that rear-gunner – reckless, in her mother’s memory – and not the elderly man walking the pier at Brighton. Old soldiers, she knew, never died; in her father’s case she felt it was not so much that he was fading away, as that he had never been there in the first place. She did watch him at Christmas, after being told of the incident in the greenhouse, but he didn’t seem to notice Pamela. He sat straight-backed in his armchair by the electric fire and read his book on Rommel.