How much would you charge them? And what happened when you grew old and they stopped wanting you?
To escape the questions I couldn’t answer, I had another drink, and then another. In the end I lost count. I knew I was drinking tomorrow’s lunch and tomorrow’s supper, and then the day after’s meals as well, and in a way that added to the despairing pleasure the process gave me. The barmaid and her mother persuaded me to leave when I ran out of money and started crying.
I dragged myself back to the bed and breakfast. On my way in I met Mrs Hyson. She knew what I’d been doing, I could see it in her face. She could hardly have avoided knowing. I must have smelt like a distillery and it was a miracle I got up those stairs without falling over. It was too much trouble to take off my clothes. The room was swaying so I lay down on top of the eiderdown. Slowly the walls began to revolve round the bed. The whole world had tugged itself free from its moorings. The last thing I remember thinking was that Mrs Hyson would probably want me out of her house by tomorrow.
I began the slow hard climb towards consciousness around dawn. For hours I lay there and tried to cling to sleep. My mouth was dry and my head felt as though there were a couple of skewers running through it. I was aware of movement in the house around me. The doorbell rang and the skewers twisted inside my skull. A few moments later there was a knock on the door.
Trying not to groan, I stood up slowly and padded across the floor in my stockinged feet. I opened the door a crack. Her nose wrinkling, Mrs Hyson stared up at me. I had slept in my clothes. I hadn’t removed my make-up either.
‘There’s a gentleman to see you, Mrs Appleyard.’
‘A gentleman?’
Mrs Hyson frowned and walked away. My stomach lurched at the thought it might be Henry. But I had nothing left for him to take. Maybe it was that solicitor, anxious about his cheque.
A few minutes later I went downstairs as if down to my execution and into Mrs Hyson’s front room. I found David Byfield examining a menacing photograph of the dear departed Mr Hyson. He turned towards me, holding out his hand and offering me a small, cool smile. He didn’t seem to have changed since his wedding day. Unlike me.
‘I hope you don’t mind my calling. I was up in town anyway, and Janet phoned me this morning with the news.’
‘She’s had my letter, then?’
He nodded. ‘We’re so sorry.’
How I hated that we. ‘No need. It had been coming to an end for a long time.’ I glared at him and winced at the stabs of pain behind my eyes. ‘You should be glad, not sad.’
‘It’s always sad when a marriage breaks down.’
‘Yes, well.’ I realized I must sound ungracious, and added brightly, ‘And how are you? How are Janet and Rosie?’
‘Very well, thank you. Janet’s hoping-we’re hoping that you’ll come and stay with us.’
‘I can manage quite well by myself, thank you.’
‘I’m sure you can.’
The Olivier nostrils flared a little further than usual. ‘It would give us all a great deal of pleasure.’
‘All right.’
‘Good.’
He smiled at me now, showing me his approval. That’s what really irritated me, the way I felt myself warming in the glow of his attention. Sex appeal can be such a depressingly impersonal thing.
David swiftly arranged the next stage of my life, barely bothering to consult me. His charity was as impersonal as his sex appeal. He was helping me because he felt he ought to or because Janet had asked him to. He was earning good marks in heaven or with Janet, possibly both.
A few hours later I was in a second-class smoking compartment and the train was pulling out of the echoing cavern of Liverpool Street Station. I still had the hangover but time, tea and aspirins had dulled the skewers of pain and made them irritating but bearable, like a certain sort of old friend. My suitcase was above my head and the two trunks would be following by road. I had bathed and changed. I’d even managed to eat and keep down a meal that wasn’t quite breakfast and wasn’t quite lunch. David wasn’t with me – his conference ended at lunchtime tomorrow.
The train lumbered north between soot-streaked houses beneath a smoky sky.
‘Let’s face it,’ I told myself as the train began to gather speed and I fumbled for my cigarettes, ‘he doesn’t give a damn about me. And why the hell should he?’
It occurred to me that I wasn’t quite sure which he I meant.
After Cambridge the countryside became flat. The train puffed on a straight line with black fields on either side. It was already getting dark. The horizon was a border zone, neither earth nor sky. I was alone in my compartment. I felt safe and warm and a little sleepy. If the journey went on for ever, that would have been quite all right by me.
The train began to slow. I looked out of the window and saw in the distance the spire of Rosington Cathedral. The closer we got to it, the more it looked like a stone animal preparing to spring. I went to the lavatory, washed a smut off my cheek and powdered my nose. David had telephoned Janet and asked her to meet me.
By the time I got back to the compartment, the platform was sliding along the window. I pulled down my suitcase and left the train. The first thing I noticed was the wind that cut at my throat like a razor blade. The wind in Rosington isn’t like other winds, Janet had written in one of her letters, it comes all the way from Siberia and over the North Sea, it’s not like an English wind at all.
Janet wasn’t on the platform. She wasn’t at the barrier. She wasn’t outside, either.
I dragged my suitcase through the ticket hall and into the forecourt beyond. The station was at the bottom of the hill. At the top was the stone mountain. The wind brought tears to my eyes. A tall clergyman was climbing into a tall, old-fashioned car. He glanced at me with flat, incurious eyes.
Before I went to Rosington I didn’t know any priests. They were there to be laughed at on stage and screen, avoided like the plague at parties, and endured at weddings and funerals of the more traditional sort. After Rosington, all that changed. Priests became people. I could believe in them.
I wasn’t any nearer believing in God, mind you. A girl has her pride. Sometimes, though, I wish I could think that it was all for the best in the long run. That God had a plan we could follow or not follow, as we chose. That when bad things happened they were due to evil, and that even evil had a place in God’s inscrutable but essentially benevolent plan.
It’s nonsense. Why should we matter to anyone, least of all to an omnipotent god whose existence is entirely hypothetical? I still think that Henry got it right. It was one evening in Durban, and we were having a philosophical discussion over our second or third nightcaps.
‘Let’s face it, old girl,’ he said, ‘it’s as if we’re adrift on the ocean in a boat without oars. Not much we can do except drink the rum ration.’
At Rosington station, I watched
