Other People's Worlds Page 4

  The last bus had already left when it was time for him to return to Cheltenham, and the women laughed when he suggested he should walk the ten miles. They insisted that he should be driven, but when Julia Ferndale’s Vauxhall passed over the cobbles in front of the house Francis said he could feel something wrong with one of the front wheels. He got out as soon as Julia brought the car to a halt, and then reported that one of the tyres appeared to have a puncture. A torch was necessary, he said, and by the time Julia had fetched one from the house he had unscrewed the valve and released a quantity of air. ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of trouble here,’ he said, offering to change the wheel. But in the darkness and the bitter cold the task was not one which the women wished to impose on their guest, so Francis brushed away their apologies and spent the night. Months later all three of them laughed about it, for if the misfortune hadn’t occurred he and Julia might never have become friends.

  Before finally departing on that occasion Francis had promised to telephone when further filming brought him to Cheltenham in three weeks’ time. Although no filming was scheduled and none took place he returned to the city and this time, when the bus dropped him in Stone St Martin, he asked the way to the Catholic church. Already he’d spent a long time reading through the order of Catholic services, and in the church itself he noticed tablets to the memory of several long-dead Ansteys. After that he noticed all sorts of things. Stone St Martin suited the two women as perfectly as their house did, nicely reflecting the lace-work quality of their life. Near-by Cheltenham reflected it too, so architecturally proper, so gracious unless you happened to be in a hurry or a car. He noticed Julia Ferndale’s dragon brooch and her seed pearls, and a quickening in her blue-green eyes when he held them with his own.

  In the Massmith sisters’ bungalow he had noticed details also: the jealousy that had developed because of his presence, the tearstains on their cheeks after a quarrel. They’d vied in fussiness, like two nice little hens petting and patting at him, insisting on Horlicks last thing at night and both of them hurrying away to make it. He could have stayed in the bungalow for ever if only he could have borne the indifferent food, and if they hadn’t turned difficult he would certainly have been happy to go on cheering them up for quite a while longer. Unfortunately that was nearly always the trouble, people turning difficult about little things. The sums of money the Massmith sisters had missed could easily have been taken by the TV repair man on both occasions. Francis had explained all that to them, but of course they hadn’t wanted to listen, just as the Kilvert-Dunnes hadn’t listened about the travelling clock. Nor had it been his fault when the doctor’s wife wrote him notes with kisses on them. He hadn’t invited the woman’s advancing hands; he hadn’t relished being asked to perform unpleasant little tasks in the Kilvert-Dunnes’ glasshouses; but in both cases he had done his best and hadn’t complained. He had tried to explain to the doctor’s wife that it went against the grain having to ask her for money because of the notes, that he never would have if he hadn’t been so wretchedly short just then. He had tried to explain to Kilvert-Dunne that he’d had every intention of paying back his loans.

  Waking in Swan House on the morning after the cocktail party, Francis rose and crossed his bedroom to the window. It was not yet six o’clock. Beyond the garden the river flowed peacefully; cows rested in distant meadows. The garden itself looked cool, its colours softer in the early light than they would later become. On the grass a lone rabbit crouched like a concrete replica of itself, before abruptly darting beneath a pink shrub. What damage the engaging little creature would do! Francis thought, no wonder he’d once suggested there should be a dog about the place. Was the pink shrub deutzia? Or weigela? He’d been told, but couldn’t quite remember.

  He turned away and again lay down on his bed, allowing his mind to wander. Since childhood he’d conversed with himself, playing different parts, using different voices. ‘Oh yes, they’re dead all right,’ a Northern accent had been saying for more than twenty years, referring to the railway accident that had not taken place. A guard on the train, Francis imagined, bluff and pink-faced, horrified by all that had happened. ‘Poor child,’ a lady in furs said.

  Real people had rarely matched the shadows of this make-belief. As a schoolboy, Francis’s greatest pleasure had been to sit alone through an afternoon in a cinema, watching the stories of other people who did not exist: Bad Day at Black Rock, Twelve Angry Men, From Here to Eternity. There was an out-of-the-way Odeon he had favoured, to which entrance might be made through a broken window of the Ladies’. Avoiding long hours of chemistry or mathematics, Francis had slipped into his illicit wonderland, careless of the consequences.

  It was a debt-collector, a lodger in his parents’ house, who had suggested that he should act himself, in end-of-term entertainments. Francis had done so with some embarrassment at first, taking a part in Outward Bound, in sketches and in playlets, as Butters in Thread o’Scarlet. ‘Good heavens!’ his father protested in a startled way. ‘An actor, Francis?’ His mother didn’t know what to say. It was the debt-collector who talked them round.

  Nowadays it all seemed an age ago. The span of Francis’s theatrical life looked like a journey to him, with milestones irregularly placed, indicating moments of achievement or disappointment. There had been the news that a travelling company in Liverpool needed another pair of hands to get it on to the road. There’d been the delivery of the first lines he’d ever been paid for, and the financial problems of the travelling company, and a year spent almost wholly on the dole. There’d been his struggling on, managing as best he could for year after year, and then the tobacco advertisements.

  The role of an under-gardener in the story of Constance Kent could hardly be regarded as a milestone, but in the usual way there would be the excitement of performing, and when the rehearsals were over there would be the beginning of a whole new existence. He had said to the two women that he’d like to invite thirty or so guests to the wedding, later explaining that jealousies were so rampant in his profession that it would be difficult to pick out thirty friends without offending three or four times as many-and so in the end had decided to limit himself to his best man. He had already mentioned a boy he’d been at school with, someone called Brian Donsworth who had since made his way in the textile industry. But like the aunt in Suffolk and the guard on the train and the lady in furs, this figure did not exist and at the very last moment Francis intended to bring him low with glandular fever. In real life he had always had trouble cultivating relationships that lasted.

  One, though, had: when in London for rehearsals Francis invariably stayed with the woman who had borne his child, a woman who was under the impression that in Folkestone he and the dressmaker still lived together as man and wife. It was convenient that she should imagine so, just as her rather grubby and uncomfortable flat in Fulham was a convenient place to lodge. Occasionally she was a nuisance, so one factor had to be balanced against another, and on this particular visit to London Francis intended to avoid any association with her, and hoped indeed that all association was at an end. He couldn’t see himself ever having to make use of the Fulham flat in the future, a fact he’d anticipated by treating himself for the next three weeks to a luxury that seemed in keeping with his change in fortune. He had booked a room with a bath in the Rembrandt Hotel, from which eventually he planned to slip quietly away without attending to his account.

  This arrangement pleasurably occupied Francis’s mind as he continued to lie awake in the early morning. Such small details in his life were always a source of interest, for above all else his own life was a fascination for him. How he appeared to other people when he entered their different worlds was a constant concern; his destiny was constantly surveyed. He smiled, thinking of the debt-collector who had lodged in his parents’ house and of the dressmaker he had married, and of the mother of his child. He found it hard to understand why he had wished, so many years ago, to watch this shop girl becoming pregnant. All he
certainly knew was that when the experience of fathering a child had come about it had been only another disappointment. Not that it mattered now: people helped him or harmed him, yet he had always tried to be nice and not a nuisance, fitting in and forgiving. He hadn’t changed his name for the Massmith sisters or for the doctor and his wife, but for the Kilvert-Dunnes it had seemed more suitable to be Adrian Staye, and for other couples to be Edward Osborne. He didn’t know why he enjoyed having a different name for a while, any more than he knew why he again began to wonder about Constance Kent, of whom he had never even heard until the television script arrived. Poor violent creature, not to be allowed to remain in the twilight of her death but to end up so trivially on the television screen, neither real nor unreal. In a limbo somewhere she was no doubt a weeping ghost, and out of sympathy, or just for fun, Francis decorated her adolescent nakedness with Julia Ferndale’s jewellery. The little sapphires gleamed on her pale white skin, the dragon brooch was miraculously suspended, the seed-pearl necklace fell coolly from her neck. He smiled as he lay there, considering the image extraordinary.

  An hour or so later and more than a hundred miles away, in the flat in Fulham which Francis did not again intend to make use of, the mother of his child placed a plate of sausages in front of this child, now aged twelve. Joy, in a green and yellow school uniform, had fluffy fair hair and plastic-rimmed spectacles. She also had a chapped look, as if she’d been left standing in a wind. Her mother, called Doris Smith, was a gaunt woman of forty with an excessively pale and bony face. She was attired in a pink nightdress and was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Hurry,’ she urged. ‘Hurry, dear.’

  Joy poked at her sausages with a fork. She burst the skin of one and drew her head sharply back. Observing this drama, Doris ignored it.

  ‘I think these sausages is off.’

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with the sausages.’

  ‘Smells like vomit, ’smatter of fact. Like someone in the factory –’

  ‘Now, dear, try not to be silly.’ Doris spoke sharply. She seized the plate of sausages and applied her thin nose to it. The smell was a perfectly normal one, she declared, and pointed out that sausages were sixty-five a pound and must on no account be wasted.

  ‘I’ll be throwing up myself after them. Like Tuesday and that postman-God, I nearly died.’

  ‘That had nothing whatever to do with sausages.’

  ‘Peas and chips all over his letters, and then the curry we had.’ ‘We’re eating a meal, Joy.’

  ‘Poor black bugger didn’t know what’d hit him.’

  ‘Joy, will you please stop using that language? And for heaven’s sake tell me another time before I’ve fried your sausages. You’ve always eaten the things before.’

  ‘I’ve eaten them evenings. There’s a difference between a person’s digestion morning and evening.’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk nonsense, Joy.’

  ‘Miss Upuku says that. She can’t take grease herself first thing.’

  ‘I wish to God Miss Upuku would teach you something, never mind her blooming digestion.’

  Joy ate a slice of bread, leaving the sausages on her plate. Having made a fuss, her mother had now gone dreamy and wouldn’t notice that they had not been eaten. It was always like that.

  Doris smoked and thought about Joy’s father, which she did very often. Almost everything in her existence could be traced back to her thirteen-year-old passion for Francis Tyte and to her bearing of his child. That one day they would all three be together was something Frankie was reassuring about every time he came to the flat. Ever since she’d known him Doris had quite accepted the fact that he was married to a dressmaker he couldn’t leave because her heart condition mightn’t survive the shock. From the word go, fairly and squarely he’d explained all that, but when Doris had gone to a fortune-teller a year ago she had received the news that a future awaited her in which she’d be happy. Without even having to think, she knew what that implied because she could never be happy without Frankie. She knew as well as she knew anything that one red-letter day he’d walk into the flat and quietly say that the dressmaker he’d married in error had passed away in her sleep. Together then they’d watch Joy growing up. There’d be grandchildren to enjoy, and in the end he’d be famous, as he deserved to be. She’d told him about the fortune-teller and he’d said if only it could be. He’d held her hand, the way she loved; no more than a boy he still seemed sometimes.

  ‘Cheers,’ Joy said, pushing books and a pencil-case into her briefcase. ‘See you.’

  Mechanically Doris nodded, wrenching her mind away from her consideration of the future. Mechanically she said, as she did every day:

  ‘You eat your dinner, mind.’

  ‘God, the dinner on a Thursday! Like some dog came into the kitchen –’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Joy. And don’t go getting into trouble.’

  ‘Which trouble’s that?’

  ‘You know as well as I do, Joy.’

  ‘Dump like that, what better’s there to do?’

  She was gone before her mother could formulate a reply, banging the door of the kitchen and then the door of the flat. Doris lit another cigarette. Just occasionally nowadays it was hard to think of Joy as a child of love, with everything the expression romantically implied. A month ago there’d been a letter from the headmaster of Tite Street Comprehensive which stated that Joy was neither making progress nor choosing her companions wisely. Vandalism, obscenity and thieving were mentioned. The caretaker’s car had twice been turned on its side, a student teacher had been gagged and left in a cupboard. When taxed by Doris, Joy spoke of sexual practices in the school’s lavatories and Doris had to tell her to be quiet.

  All of it was a worry, one which was aggravated by the fact that Joy could apparently not yet read or write. Every day Doris sighed over that in the shoe department of the store where she worked, and often said she didn’t know what to do. The girls on the floor were sympathetic, and so was the floor supervisor, a kindly Indian. Irene in Handbags kept urging Doris to complain to Tite Street Comprehensive and not let the school always get its moaning in first, but Doris felt she couldn’t. Sharon, in House Beautiful, was of the opinion that nothing could be done with schools the way they were these days: her sister’s kiddy, out Perivale way, couldn’t multiply by two even though he’d just turned fourteen. But the Indian floor supervisor refused to permit gloom among his girls on this subject or on any other, and wagged a dark finger at any of them whom he caught promoting it. ‘Doris,’ he reminded her, ‘there are silver linings in that cloudy sky.’ Doris was a ready recipient for his cheerfulness, believing enthusiastically in the future he implied. Her faith in this direction was boundless, its vigour alone capable of dissipating her worry about Joy. Nothing mattered when she thought about the future, and with it in mind she had hung the flat with colourful pictures she’d bought in Boots, two of them depicting Negro girls, another of fishing-boats on a sun-gilded sea, others of various jungle animals. The furniture, acquired over the years on hire purchase, was what she could afford. Rugs and carpets reflected that consideration also, but when eventually the future became the present, when at last they were a family, she had plans to make a few replacements with the extra money Frankie would bring with him.

  Behind the bread-bin in one of the kitchen cupboards she felt for the half bottle of vodka in which she’d left an inch or two the night before. She raised the bottle to her lips since that was quicker than bothering with a glass. It was ages since he’d been to the flat, ages since all three of them had gone down to Pizzaland for an evening meal, just like a family would. When the bottle was empty she placed it in her handbag, for disposal on her way to work.

  Francis’s parents, believed by quite a large number of people to have perished on a railway track in the 1950s, lived in the Sundown Home for the elderly in Hampton Wick, and on this particular morning-as on all fine mornings in summer-they made their way after breakfast to the ga
rden. They passed from the dining-room through a hall which had stained-glass panels on either side of the door. This darkened glass, depicting events in the Garden of Eden, reduced the light considerably and at certain times of day cast faintly coloured shadows on the coats and hats that hung in two long rows on either side of a hallstand with a bevelled mirror. At the bottom of a lugubrious chocolate-brown staircase stood an elephant’s foot from which the Tytes now lifted their walking-sticks. The rule in the Sundown Home was that the hazards of the garden should never be faced without the assistance of a stick.

  ‘There’s no one on the cedar seat,’ Mrs Tyte remarked, surveying the suburban garden from the crazy paving outside the hall’s side door.

  Her husband did not reply. He eyed the sparrows which were busy on the five different bird-tables, pecking at pieces of bacon and toast. Beneath his jacket, folded twice, was the Daily Telegraph. He’d taken it from the sun lounge, which was against the rules.

  ‘The chairs by the shed,’ he said at length, already moving in the direction of a wooden toolshed. Beyond it, hidden from the windows of the house, was a cinder square with two deck-chairs on it. It was forbidden to move them elsewhere, or to erect them if they had been folded up and placed in the shed.

  ‘It’s difficult for me,’ she murmured, following him, knowing he would not listen or want to understand. It wasn’t easy for her to recline in a deck-chair and the struggle to get up again was sometimes painful. The cedar seat beside the goldfish pond was where she was happiest, looking at the little pots of geraniums and listening to the aeroplanes.