‘We’ll take a bus to the bridge,’ he said. ‘A thirty-seven.’
He sat close to her, paying her fare, pressing a cigarette on her. She took it and he lit it for her. His eyes were foxy, she noticed; she could see the desire in them.
‘I saw you a week back,’ he said.
They walked by the river, away from the bridge, along the tow-path. He put his arm around her, squeezing a handful of underclothes and flesh. ‘Let’s sit down here,’ he said.
They sat on the grass, watching barges going by and schoolboys rowing. In the distance traffic moved, gleaming, on the bridge they’d walked from. ‘God,’ he said, ‘you have fantastic breasts.’
His hands were on them and he was pushing her back on to the grass. She felt his lips on her face, and his teeth and his tongue, and saliva. One hand moved down her body. She felt it under her skirt, on the bare flesh of her thigh, and then on her stomach. It was like an animal, a rat gnawing at her, prodding her and poking. There was no one about; he was muttering, his voice thickly slurred. ‘Take down your knickers,’ he said.
She pushed at him and for a moment he released his hold, imagining she was about to undo some of her clothing. Instead she ran away, tearing along the tow-path, saying to herself that if he caught up with her she’d hit him with the briefcase that contained her school books.
But he didn’t follow her and when she looked back he was lying where she had left him, stretched out as though wounded on the grass.
Her father talked of who might come that night to Daisy’s. He mentioned Princess Margaret. Princess Margaret had seen him wrestling, or if it hadn’t been Princess Margaret it had been a face almost identical to hers. The Burtons might come tonight; you never knew when the Burtons were going to pop in.
Her mother placed the fried fish, with chips and peas, in front of him. She never really listened to him when he went on about the night-club because her mind was full of what had happened on
Tomorrow would be worse, Eleanor thought. Even at this very moment Denny Price’s blubber lips might be relating the incident to Liz Jones, how Eleanor had almost let him and then had drawn back. ‘I went down by the river with a boy,’ she wanted to say. ‘I wanted to get done because it’s the Class 2 fashion. I’m tired of being mocked by Liz Jones.’ She could say it with her eyes cast down, her fork fiddling with a piece of cod on her plate. She wouldn’t have to see the embarrassment in her father’s face, like she’d seen it when she’d asked for money for sanitary towels. Her mother wouldn’t hear at first, but she’d go on saying it, repeating herself until her mother did hear. She longed for the facts to be there in the room, how it disgusted her to imagine her father taking off his uniform in the mornings, and Rogo Pollini doing Dolly Rourke. She wanted to say she’d been disgusted when Denny Price had told her to take down her knickers.
‘Extraordinary, that woman,’ her mother said. ‘Fancy two days stuck in a bath.’
Her father laughed. It could be exaggerated, he said: you couldn’t believe everything you read, not even in the newspapers.
‘Extraordinary,’ her mother murmured.
Her mother was trapped, married to him, obliging him so that she’d receive housekeeping money out of which she could save for her morning glass of gin. He was trapped himself, going out every night in a doorman’s uniform, the Prince of Hackney with a bad back. He crushed her mother because he’d been crushed himself. How could either of them be expected to bother if she spoke of being mocked, and then asked them questions, seeking reassurance?
They wouldn’t know what to say – even if she helped them by explaining that she knew there was no man with delicate hands who’d take her away when the leaves in London were yellow-brown, that there were only the blubber lips of Denny Price and the smell of meat that came off him, and Susie Crumm’s father doing Mrs Rourke, and Liz Jones’s father doing her also, and the West Indian railway porter, and Mr Rourke not aware of a thing. They wouldn’t know what she was talking about if she said that Miss Whitehead had divorced herself from all of it by lying solitary at night in a room in Esher where everything was clean and neat. It was better to be Miss Whitehead than a woman who was a victim of a man’s bad back. In her gleaming room Miss Whitehead was more successful in her pretence than they were in theirs. Miss Whitehead was complete and alone, having discarded what she wished to discard, accepting now that there was no Mr Right.
‘Nice day at school?’ her mother inquired suddenly in her vague manner, as though mistily aware of a duty.
Eleanor looked up from her fish and regarded both of them at once. She smiled, forcing herself to, feeling sorry for them because they were trapped by each other; because for them it was too late to escape to a room in which everything was clean.
Edward Tripp had often noticed Mrs Mayben at her sitting-room window, putting bread on the window-sills for the birds. Her hair was white and she was dressed always in the same way, in several shades of grey. She had, he considered, the kindest face in all Dunfarnham Avenue, and when she saw him she would nod at him in a dignified manner, befitting a woman of her years. He had never rung the bell of Mrs Mayben’s house as he had rung the bells of the other houses; he had never held her in conversation on her doorstep, but he knew that the day would come when his sister would ask him to cross the road and speak to the old woman. Edward was notorious in Dunfarnham Avenue, yet he felt whenever he considered the fact that Mrs Mayben, who kept herself to herself and did not gossip with the other people, was perhaps – just possibly – unaware of his notoriety. He thought, too, that when the time came, when eventually he found himself face to face with Mrs Mayben, he would tell her the truth: he would speak to her bluntly, and Edward guessed that an old woman with Mrs Mayben’s dignity, who was a Christian and who never forgot the birds, would listen to him and would say a word or two of comfort. He imagined how things would be after that visit, he himself passing by Mrs Mayben’s house and the truth hanging between them, she nodding with a smile from her window and he giving thanks to God for her understanding heart.
On Sunday August 26th Edward Tripp’s sister, Emily, spoke of Mrs Mayben and Edward knew that on this morning he would hear himself protesting in a familiar way and that in the end he would cross the road to Mrs Mayben’s house.
‘We have watched the neighbourhood go down,’ said Emily. ‘Mrs Mayben was the last who was a decent sort of person. And now she’s gone too. In cold blood.’
Edward, slicing some ham that he had purchased the day before in Lipton’s, had been thinking to himself that the piece of gammon was not as satisfactory as usual: there was, for instance, a certain stringiness and a
