She usually took something special, when she went back north; she’d fall in with her old tennis-club set, and they’d go dancing, drive out to Cheshire restaurants with log fires and prawn cocktails. I thought, is she sick of them, the tennis-club set, is she moving on, or is the devious bitch not going home at all, has she got some secret new man that she’s not telling me about? I could hardly ask to see her train ticket. Jule snapped shut the clasp of her white vanity-case, fastened the strap. Her expression was joyless, remote. ‘Here I go then,’ she said, picking up her handbag. ‘Have a lovely fuck.’ Then at the door – it was quite unlike her – she hesitated: she swung back towards me and kissed my cheek. ‘Take care, Carmel,’ she said. ‘Of course, you always do.’
Niall brought a weekend bag, a solid leather and canvas bag that belonged to his father, with his father’s initials on it; he gripped it in his square cold hand. When I saw him walk in at the door of C3 I felt I would faint with joy; and the room did swim for a moment, the textbooks and files, the grey striped bedspreads, Mrs Webster grinning on her shelf.
I should have warned him to bring a sports bag, a plastic carrier, something that would not indicate so clearly that he was moving in for two nights. Jacqueline would have marked him with her gimlet eye, I felt sure. But then, there was no provisional, makeshift quality about Niall; his natural age was forty, jangling the keys of a Rover, pulling up before a good hotel which he had heard recommended by friends. The deceit would not suit him, the signing-out, the skulking in the corridors. But how else could we be together?
We kissed. It was a black-out kiss, where eyes close and thoughts no longer flow; his hands swam over me. We came up for air. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said. He was not displeased; it was the fashion for women to be as thin as they could manage. ‘Your hair . . .’ He appraised it. ‘It was an accident?’
‘It was an accident.’
Niall went to the wash-basin and ran the taps. He bent over it and splashed water on to his face, reached for the soap and scrubbed and scrubbed. ‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘That this town was so filthy.’
I had ceased to notice, I suppose: the grime that ran out of my hair when I washed it, the grime that edged white underwear with grey. I handed him a towel. ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘London has changed you. I knew it would.’
On Friday night we stayed in my room, in bed. It wasn’t easy, a big man and a small girl in a single bed; you had to turn together, you had to fit each other, thigh moving with thigh, arm with arm, foot sliding between feet as tongue slid between teeth. Saturday dawn, Niall complained of backache, and I gave him two soluble aspirin in a mug, melted in hot water from the tap. I joined him, though I would have died rather than complain; our hips jostled as we tried to sit up to an angle proper for medicine. Niall handed me his mug, I put it under the bed; we fell across each other, into an aching sleep.
At nine that morning I tripped lightly to the warden’s office, leaving Niall naked and locked in C3. I’d been in too much of a hurry to pull on tights – they’d only have to come off again – but I had jumped into an almost ankle- length skirt I’d borrowed from Lynette, and I thought that nobody would notice I was bare-legged. I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the great shadowy mirrors that peopled the ground floor. My lips flared scarlet, my cheeks blazed and my throat was mottled with an orgasmic flush.
‘A late key, Miss McBain?’ the warden inquired. ‘Another of your political meetings?’
‘No.’ I expect a stupid smile grew on my face. ‘I’m going to a film.’
‘Oh, my dear, I’m so pleased,’ the warden said. ‘There is such a thing, you know, as being too serious.’
‘Is there?’ I said. ‘Too serious for what?’
I was interested; the warden saw I was not being pert.
‘For the taste of the opposite sex, I suppose.’ She gave a brusque little laugh.
‘Yes, but after all,’ I said, ‘it’s not the Dark Ages, I don’t see that they have any right to say how serious you should be.’
‘I agree . . . oh, I do so agree. But – I’ve seen it again and again – they do have a way of making things difficult. Especially for clever girls. Your . . . your young man, are you very fond of him?’
Besotted, I wanted to say. We’ll be together for ever and ever. But then she might run upstairs and search my room. I was aware that a teardrop of semen was creeping down the inside of my left thigh. ‘Well, it’s early days,’ I said.
‘Yes. That’s the attitude,’ the warden said. ‘I like you, Carmel, you’re a very promising gel. You must put yourself first, establish yourself in life before you think of a husband and family. Why, we may see you in parliament one of these days! You’ll be interested to meet our guest next month, our guest at High Table. Have a word with me nearer the time and remind me to seat you near her. Now, there’s a determined lady who knows what she wants!’
I nodded. Smiled. The taste of the opposite sex was on my tongue; salt-jelly, heat and flesh. The last thing I wanted was a party political scrap with the warden; I wanted to run back upstairs, pull off my clothes and climb back into bed with Niall, who would by now be quite ready for me again. But the image came at once to my mind of the Labour Club concubines, trailing after the comrades; at each midnight meeting almost dropping from their seats with boredom, jerking back to wakefulness to fix soft eyes on the face of Dave or Mike or Phil. It wasn’t as if they thought they were Rosa Luxemburg; their role was to fetch packets of cigarettes, to cook stews on one ring in bedsits. Sometimes they were allowed to duplicate an agenda on an inky machine, or crayon a poster to advertise a meeting. They were allowed to stand on street corners, trying to sell Tribune, or rattling a collecting box for whatever worthy body of strikers needed students’ coins at the time.
The drop of semen inched downwards and slunk into my shoe. There’s a few thousand babies that won’t be born, I thought; I wonder if there are any little Beethovens run under my foot, any Tolstoys, any promising England fast bowlers? The warden handed over the key and I signed for it. When I passed the mirror again, my face looked quite pale and severe.
On Saturday evening I put on the fox fur and we went out to eat steak. Niall watched me thoughtfully as I dressed. ‘It’s a nice coat, isn’t it?’ I said, when he did not speak.
‘I’m not sure it’s really you, though.’ His tone was matter of fact. ‘It’s more for somebody glamorous.’
So, if you know anybody glamorous, go out with her, I thought. I was too meek to say it. ‘It’s because I’ve borrowed it,’ I said. ‘That’s what you don’t like.’
‘Yes, that’s it. I prefer you in your own clothes. And really, to be honest, I don’t think you need so much make- up.’
I paused, my lipstick in my hand, and gazed at him through the mirror. What did he prefer then, the stringy- haired girl in the grey velour hat?
