The Collected Stories

hot as a fire.

‘Unfortunately there’s a war on,’ he said. ‘Hard times, Matilda.’

I considered that rude. It was rude the way he’d asked where the fish had come from. He was stupid, as well. Who wanted to hear that he liked fish? He was a fool, like Stupid Miller, who’d been at Miss Pritchard’s school. He was ridiculous-looking and ugly, with his pointed face and crushed-together teeth. He’d no right to say there was a war on since he wasn’t fighting in it.

They listened to the news on the wireless and afterwards they listened to the national anthems of the countries which were fighting against Germany. He offered my mother and Betty cigarettes and they both took one. I’d never seen Betty smoking a cigarette before. He’d brought a bottle of some kind of drink with him. They drank it sitting by the range, still listening to the national anthems.

‘Good-night, Matilda,’ he said, standing up when my mother told me it was time to go to bed. He kissed me on the cheek and I could feel his damp teeth. I didn’t move for a moment after he’d done that, standing quite close to him. I thought I was going to bring up the fish pie and if I did I wanted to cover his clothes with it. I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have been embarrassed.

I heard Betty coming to bed and then I lay for hours, waiting for the sound of his bicycle going away. I couldn’t hear their voices downstairs, the way I’d been able to hear voices when Betty had been there. Betty’s had become quite loud and she’d laugh repeatedly. I guessed they’d been playing cards, finishing off the bottle of drink he’d brought. When I’d been there Betty had suggested rummy and he’d said that not a drop of the drink must be left. He’d kept filling up Betty’s and my mother’s glasses, saying the stuff was good for you.

I crossed the landing to the top of the stairs that led straight down into the kitchen. I thought they must have fallen asleep by the range because when a board creaked beneath my feet no one called out. I stood at the turn of the narrow staircase, peering through the shadows at them.

Betty had taken one of the two lamps with her as she always did. The kitchen was dim, with only the glow from the other. On the table, close to the lamp, was the bottle and one of the glasses they’d drunk from. The two dogs were stretched in front of the range. My mother was huddled on the man’s knee. I could see his tapering fingers, one hand on the black material of her dress, the other stroking her hair. While I watched he kissed her, bending his damp mouth down to her lips and keeping it there. Her eyes were closed but his were open, and when he finished kissing her he stared at her face.

I went on down the stairs, shuffling my bare feet to make a noise. The dogs growled, pricking up their ears. My mother was half-way across the kitchen, tidying her hair with both hands, murmuring at me.

‘Can’t you sleep, love?’ she said. ‘Have you had a dream?’

I shook my head. I wanted to walk forward, past her to the table. I wanted to pick up the bottle he’d brought and throw it on to the flags of the floor. I wanted to shout at him that he was ugly, no more than a halfwit, no better than Stupid Miller, who hadn’t been allowed in the Grammar School. I wanted to say no one was interested in his preference for fish.

My mother put her arms around me. She felt warm from sitting by the range, but I hated the warmth because it had to do with him. I pushed by her and went to the sink. I drank some water even though I wasn’t thirsty. Then I turned and went upstairs again.

‘She’s sleepy,’ I heard my mother say. ‘She often gets up for a drink when she’s sleepy. You’d better go, dear.’

He muttered something else and my mother said that they must have patience.

‘One day,’ she said. ‘After it’s all over.’

‘It’ll never end.’ He spoke loudly, not muttering any more. ‘This bloody thing could last for ever.’

‘No, no, my dear.’

‘It’s all I want, to be here with you.’

‘It’s what I want too. But there’s a lot in the way.’

‘I don’t care what’s in the way.’

‘We have to care, dear.’

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘My own darling,’ my mother said.

*

She was the same as usual the next day, presumably imagining that being half- asleep I hadn’t noticed her sitting on the man’s knees and being kissed by his mouth. In the afternoon I went into the summer-house. I looked at the two plush-seated chairs, imagining the figures of my mother and the man on them. I carried the chairs, one by one, to an outhouse and up a ladder to a loft. I put the tennis net underneath some seed-boxes. I carried the two rugs to the well in the cobbled yard and dropped them down it. I returned to the summer-house, thinking of doing something else, I wasn’t sure what. There was a smell of stale tobacco, coming from butts in the ashtray. On the floor I found a tie-pin with a greyhound’s head on it and I thought the treacherous, ugly-looking dog suited him. I threw it into the rhododendron shrubbery.

‘Poor chap,’ I heard Betty saying that evening. ‘It’s a horrid thing to have.’ She’d always noticed that he looked delicate, she added.

‘He doesn’t get enough to eat,’ my mother said.

In spite of her sympathy, you could see that Betty wasn’t much interested in the man: she was knitting and trying to listen to Bandwagon. As far as Betty was concerned he was just some half-sick man whom my mother felt sorry for, the way she was supposed to feel sorry for Mrs Latham of Burrow Farm. But my mother wanted to go on talking about him, with a pretended casualness. It wasn’t the right work for a person who was tubercular, she said, serving in a shop.

I imagined him in Blow’s, selling pins and knitting-needles and satin by the yard. I thought the work suited him in the same way as the greyhound’s-head tie-pin did.

‘What’s it mean, tubercular?’ I asked Belle Frye, and she said it meant you suffered from a disease in your lungs.