Sunday: Sylvia cooked roast beef (she does it brown, a full twenty-five minutes per pound plus twenty minutes), roast potatoes, carrots, frozen peas: rhubarb crumble, at which she is a dab hand, and custard.
CHAPTER 3
“Look,” Colin said, his hand half over the mouthpiece. “I can’t talk now. But why not Thursday?”
“Because Thursday is the writing class.”
“But you don’t really want to go there.”
“How do you know that I don’t?”
“You said you didn’t find any profit in it.”
“No, but much pleasure.”
“Isabel, please—look, I’m in the staffroom, I can’t talk.”
“Then what was the use of telephoning?”
“I wanted to fix something?”
“Well, then. But not Thursday.”
“It’s just that it’s such a good chance. Sylvia knows that I go out on Thursday.”
“Tell her you’re going out another night.”
He was awed by the simple terms in which she saw his predicament. “I—well, she might not just accept that.”
“That’s your problem.”
“Well—which night then?”
“Monday.”
“People don’t go out on a Monday. At the end of the week, that’s when they go out.”
“For pleasure, but not for business. You wouldn’t be going out for pleasure, would you, Colin?”
“No, that’s true. All right, I’ll think of something to tell her. Can we go to a film, would you like that?”
“Yes.”
“All right then, I’ll pick you up at half-past seven Monday, and we can have a drink first.”
“Fine,” she said. “Goodbye.”
“Isabel—”
But he had heard the click. He knew she had gone, and still went on calling her name. He stood still. He realised that her plan was better. He could see her on Monday, and on Thursday too. After the class they could go to the Duke of Norfolk. He would see her two evenings instead of one, and it was Friday already.
Where had she been last night? He hadn’t asked her. He could have raised the point, he could have said, ah, then why did you miss the class last night? But he hadn’t questioned her on that one. He’d been too relieved to hear her voice. She always seemed to be out, or engaged with a client. He rushed to the phone between lessons, piles of exercise books slipping about under his arm, wedging the receiver under his chin, trying to juggle his cigarettes and his lighter for a quick drag before the next forty-minute period. Sometimes Luther King House was engaged, solid, for hours. All the weary morning he rang her, through to spam fritters and steamed fruit pudding, and into the afternoon. Once he dropped a whole pile of books, and his colleagues looked up from their marking and card games, and he felt they had noticed he was agitated and red in the face. When he heard her voice at last he could hardly believe his luck was in; it seemed to him a miracle that she walked on the same pavements in the same town, that the line distorted her voice, like anyone else’s.
The tall and shady trees, the disconsolate sparrows huddling in the trees: these protected Evelyn and Muriel from observation. The oncoming winter stripped them of their shade, but because it was winter there was no need for Muriel to walk in the garden. By the end of October the plots were fenced by black arms held aloft, mourners from some more fervent culture; Brewer, Petty & Co. nailed up their signboard on 3 Buckingham Avenue, and Evelyn’s closest neighbours moved away. Sylvia remarked, when they next visited Florence, that the house would remain unsold until after Christmas; no one wants removals, she said, with Christmas upon us.
Evelyn gave Muriel some of her own old dresses. At five months, even six, Muriel didn’t show too much. She was tall, and ungainly at the best of times; her clothes had never been in the height of fashion. When in the end the dresses began to strain and pull in the middle, Evelyn went into the conservatory, and delved about among the boxes. She came out grey to the elbows with dust, lengths of fabric laid across her forearms.
She had found a pair of old blue curtains, very large. She hung them out on the line to get rid of the smell of must. When she brought them in they smelled of soil. Saxe-blue, she said, very nice. She took out a treadle sewing-machine and ran up a couple of garments for Muriel, two identical. She didn’t need a pattern. She could wear them turn and turn about. She wanted for nothing, Evelyn said.
Cards from the Welfare dropped through the letterbox; apart from the household bills, there was no other post. Muriel collected a stack of the cards. She held them in her hands and shuffled them until they were greasy and turned up at the corners. Evelyn took them from her in the end and burned them.
“Do you want to go to the doctor?” Evelyn asked. “Because if you do they’ll take it away when it’s born, and you’ll have nothing to show for it.”
Muriel seemed to have lost interest in life. She sat a good deal of the time with her eyes closed, her fingers in her ears. Then her fingers would pinch her nostrils closed; when Evelyn had first seen this trick she had been distraught. “What is the smell?” she had demanded, trying to drag Muriel’s hand away from her face. “What is the smell?”
