“Oh, really,” Evelyn said, “don’t be so foolish.”
The girl picked the tickets up and held them by one corner, as if they were contaminated. “These expired thirty years ago,” she said. She looked at Evelyn, a strange sideways look, as if she were considering calling for help. “You’d better fill in a form,” she said at last. “Are you a ratepayer?”
“Where did you get that cardigan?” Evelyn demanded.
“What?” The girl’s head jerked back, her eyebrows raised, her leaky ballpoint pen poised in the air. Evelyn turned her back and made for the door.
“Just a minute—” the girl said, but she didn’t come after her. Somebody laughed. Evelyn found herself back on the street.
She walked down to the town centre, to the Central Library. They had the same books, the ones she wanted. She just put them under her arm and walked out, past the desk, nodding to herself. Nobody saw her go, nobody tried to stop her. It was easier that way.
It was a cold, misty day. The town was full of people tramping to the January sales. The buildings seemed distant and insubstantial, walls of air and smoke. Nobody looked at her, stumping along in her old grey coat. Nobody looks at an old woman to see if her clothes are fashionable; old women have a set of fashions all their own. The crowds clutched their parcels and their slippery plastic bags, heading for home, weary and overheated from the department stores. Evelyn stopped on a street corner, by the entrance to a great cavern brilliantly stacked with scented soap and woollen hats. She felt a kind of safety and peace that she had not known in years, or that perhaps she had never known; but it touched her with a warm finger of nostalgia. Treading in the footsteps of the crowd, no demon would know her. She would get herself a parcel, jostle in a bus-queue, she would never, never go home. Impulsively, she turned to go into the store, and a young woman collided with her, a pale woman with dark almond eyes that seemed familiar from somewhere.
“I beg your pardon,” Evelyn said; but the girl did not look at her, simply closed her arms about her burdens, gathered them to her chest with an irritated twitch of her lips, and hurried on, her eyes downcast. City manners, Evelyn thought, the vast indifference of the heated crowds. She shrugged inwardly. Courtesy had gone, gone with Miss Williams, no one remembered that it had ever existed. But then another thought struck her. Had the girl seen her at all? Was there anything to be seen? In sudden panic, she started to walk, seeking her reflection in the plate glass windows. She saw other women goosestepping with their stout legs, the glow of their faces almost warming the glass, their big check coats and their big boots; and then, faint and flickering, a wraith of herself, her melting face with its hollow eyes, her hatchet nose like the nose of a corpse. She began to hurry, faster and faster, trundling up the hill to Lauderdale Road, panting, trying to outpace the fate she had seen for herself.
CHAPTER 6
The week before half-term, Frank O’Dwyer made good his long-standing promise, and invited Colin and Sylvia to a dinner party. Sylvia would normally have worried about what to wear, but in the circumstances had no choice but one of the all-purpose floral smocks she had kept from one pregnancy to the next. Colin thought, I should have noticed that she had not got rid of them, after Karen. If he looked in Sylvia’s wardrobe more often, he might be able to divine her intentions.
Sylvia had been to the hairdressers. Her pale hair, heavily lacquered, was fluffed up like a ball of cotton wool. With her pink face, and her cheerful frock of red and green leaves and sprigs, she looked like a badly constructed Christmas decoration that someone had forgotten to put away. It occurred to Colin now that he had never told anyone his wife was expecting. Would they congratulate him, and then mock him behind his back, or would they pretend not to notice?
Since September he had rehearsed imaginary conversations in which he told his colleagues about the break-up of his marriage and about his new relationship with a young professional woman with no ties. This way and that he put it to them, in his head. These monologues had become a habit, and a ghostly parallel to his real speech. Sometimes he interjected his listeners’ exclamations of amazement, incredulity, and envy; sometimes he elaborately countered difficulties they raised. Now these conversations would never be held, but they were hard to give up all the same. He let them run, little hallucinations to accompany his pain.
He woke up in the mornings, and Isabel was his first thought. For this reason, he tried to delay the moment of waking. “You’re ever so dozy these days, Colin,” his wife said. “We’ll have to make an effort to get to bed earlier.” The sick pain of loss jolted through him before he had opened his eyes. He saw images of himself staggering through the days, grey-faced, with fatuities on his lips. Daily he took the matter in hand, promised self-discipline, tried to shut her out of his mind. His thoughts fled back to her as the dieting obese think of food, an abstract orgy of longing and inner greed, one thought for the pain and one for the world, systole for living and diastole for Isabel.
The telephone was ringing. It was the night of the dinner party, wet and black. Seven P.M.
“59428.”
“Mrs. Sidney?”
“This is Mr. Sidney.”
“It’s Tracey here.”
“Sorry?”
“I said it’s Tracey. I’m supposed to be babysitting for you.”
“Oh yes, hello Tracey,” Colin said with an excess of bonhomie. “When are you coming along then?”
“I’m not coming, that’s what I’m phoning for, sorry.”
“Oh but Tracey, now—”
“Me mam says I’ve got to stop in because me Grandad’s coming.”
“But surely, Tracey—look, would you have a word with Mrs. Sidney?”
“No point, is there?”
“Could I have a word with your mother, do you think?”
