well.’ He replaced the receiver without another word. At his sides his hands clenched and unclenched themselves. There was the laughing, dazzlingly pretty Zena of his youth, and there was this sour, dangerous woman with touched-up hair and a puffy face. At what point of time had one image overlaid the other? Even now they seemed to him totally distinct, as if she had been two separate women, the one who had gone away and the one who had bafflingly taken her place.
‘I’m going out,’ he called up the stairs. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very long.’ He snatched his coat from the stand and shrugged it on, flung open the door and let himself out into the misty lamplight of the empty street.
A surge of melancholy rose inside him. He was forty-seven years old, no wife, no child, no house of his own, not even a spectacular success at his job. His mediocre qualifications had been laboriously acquired by sweating his way through an accountancy course at evening classes; it was highly unlikely that he could ever hope for a really good post.
He pondered again the possibility of clearing out, making a fresh start in some other town. It seemed for a hopeful moment that it might be the answer. At one stroke he could turn his back on the past, stepping down from the train in that far-off place a completely different man. Outgoing, at ease, in command of his life.
But there was never really a fresh start. Among the inescapable luggage one carried the burden of personality. And in that other town he would start without any kind of contact, he would be even more alone. He saw the bleak lodgings, himself confined every evening to a single room or wandering about streets that didn’t even call up, as the streets of Milbourne sometimes did, memories of a cherished childhood.
He shook his head, relinquishing the notion of escape. As he turned into the narrow road leading to The Sycamores he fell back into an old habit of mind he employed whenever depression threatened to overwhelm him. It was a trick he had begun to practise in the prison camp; it had kept him sane then and it had served him during all the years that followed. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but even when it failed, the effort involved at least took his attention for a brief spell from his blackest imaginings.
What he did was to switch his brain into another gear, trying to alter the whole climate of his mind, looking back into his boyhood, attempting to think himself into the same attitude of carefree gaiety to life.
He would look at the sky, the trees, the buildings, striving to see them as they had appeared to him then; he would watch a child skipping by and grasp at the notion that the time and place and weather that seemed so carelessly joyful to the child existed also at that very moment for himself.
And click! sometimes the brief miracle happened and he could glance about him with hope and pleasure, feeling the bright air as inviting, the roads as beckoning, as forty years ago. As if he were constantly practising the memory of happiness so that if he were ever fortunate enough to encounter it again in reality he would remember and recognize it, clutch it to him before it slipped away for ever.
By the time he turned the knob on the front door of The Sycamores he felt composed, almost cheerful.
‘Hello there!’ He sent an enquiring call soaring from the hallway. A moment later he heard Zena’s answering voice, and he went briskly, confidently up the stairs.
In the comfortable sitting room of his small detached house in a quiet area of Milbourne, Neil Underwood sat at his bureau, shuffling a little pile of bills into a tidy square. He sighed; his face wore a baffled look. The exuberance of Christmas had faded now, leaving behind a wash of regret for the rash generosity that had sent him out so blithely to the silver-glittered shops.
Rates, electricity, gas, coal; the record-player for his daughter. Once again he flicked through the accounts as if they might magically have diminished in the last three minutes. His glance came inescapably to rest on the biggest body-blow of the lot, the one he had so far managed to thrust into some merciful recess in his mind–the appalling, horrifying bill for Ruth’s fur coat.
Four hundred and fifty pounds! For an instant he felt almost proud of the figures, magnificent, princely. A noble gesture of a man towards his new wife on her first Christmas in the bosom of his family.
A week ago, with pine needles scattering the carpet and sprigs of holly peering out from the tops of pictures and mirrors, it had seemed worth every penny. Ruth had slipped the coat on with delight, sinking her fingers into the silky pelt. He had felt himself a maharajah, an emperor. And there had been the lunatic notion that Santa Claus might suddenly remember his duties, there might be a windfall, a legacy–a gold necklace from the Iron Age might spring up in his back garden.
He jabbed a pen down on the papers, considering the possibility of an overdraft, shaking his head even as he pondered the word. Some little time now since his bank manager had smiled at him; his eyes these days took on a wary, calculating look as soon as he saw Neil. Bank managers weren’t notoriously helpful to men who ran through their patrimony, actually spending capital instead of doing what every natural law commanded, sending it out to increase and multiply.
And not only to live up to the hilt of his less than princely salary from the local council but to take a new wife in addition! None of your homely stew-and-semolina-pudding wives either but an elegant, sophisticated young woman whom any bank manager would at once associate with a regrettable taste for fillet steaks and smoked salmon.
Ah well! Jabbing at the bills didn’t seem to have helped much, so he swept them all away into a pigeon-hole, slammed the desk shut and stood up. He’d done his bit for the time being; he’d taken the damned things out and looked at them, about all any civilized creature could be expected to do on New Year’s Day. It would be a few weeks yet before the final notices shrieked out their red-ink warnings. All kinds of things might happen in that time. He crossed over to the television set and switched it on.
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