Other People's Worlds Read online

  ‘Child of a girl on the streets of Nottingham. Born and not aborted because of the mother’s love for a useless man. And then there was the orphanage.’

  Susanna laughed and shook her head, but her companion spoke of a Nottingham orphanage as though it had really existed. He described paint-chipped corridors, and wash-rooms which were dank, and the institution’s rusty cutlery. Stage-struck, he said, she had run away from it, hitch-hiking to London in a lorry loaded with drain-pipes, an event which would one day become a landmark in a famous theatrical saga, like Marilyn Monroe working in a paint shop. In London an aged lecher called Vassbacher, a dilettante of the theatre who’d helped girls in the past, helped her also. He it was who had changed her name to Susanna Music.

  Drawn into the surprising fantasy, Susanna could not help seeing this figure as he was described: wizened and small, repeatedly lifting a handkerchief that smelt of peppermint to his lips, eyes running in the cold. ‘Star quality is what you have,’ he grunted at her as he used her body. That was, in fact, what Susanna believed she did possess: a kind of magic that crept out of hiding when she acted, something you could never mention to other people.

  ‘Oh, yes indeed,’ Francis said. ‘That orphanage girl became outrageously famous.’

  Susanna laughed again, but couldn’t help feeling that there was a bizarreness about the speed with which an ersatz existence had been so skilfully created for her. Without any hesitation for thought the old dilettante called Vassbacher had been given life, as had the housekeeper of the orphanage in Nottingham, and the odd-job man there, a cantankerous person with a humped back. The housekeeper was a woman who’d been a missionary, whose skin had a leathery quality because of its exposure to years of African sun. Retired now, the odd-job man still came to see her, bringing vegetables from his garden. A week ago Vassbacher had been cremated – quite an occasion – in Putney Vale.

  It seemed to Susanna that the talk could continue for hours, effortlessly inventing people and situations, changing her identity for her because she’d said she thought she’d had an easy time of it. ‘I felt I could be Constance Kent before today,’ she said, and glanced at Francis’s face beside hers. She hoped he would talk about the drill-hall and Constance Kent, but he only nodded.

  She’d lain awake in the early morning, she continued, and had felt herself invaded by the other girl’s life: the whine of a milk trolley had not been real, nor the agile voice of the newsreader on her mother’s transistor in the room beneath. ‘My father’s a gynaecologist,’ she said, and described how it had been his rattling of tea things on the stairs that had jolted her back to the reality of her lilac bedroom.

  ‘Make-belief is all we have,’ Francis said, smiling and picking up their glasses again.

  The bar had quite suddenly become lively. Girls swung their handbags as they swayed about on built-up shoes, demanding Bloody Marys or Martinis. Men in shirtsleeves or business suits crowded behind Francis at the bar, moving aside when he turned to carry through them the drinks he’d bought. As he passed the wide open doors he noticed that the sky was reddening as the sun began to set. A fiery glow softened the concrete of office buildings across the street, and lit the features of passers-by. It lit as well the features of Francis’s child, the fluffy fair hair above the chapped skin of her face, her green and yellow uniform and plastic-rimmed spectacles. ‘Hi,’ she cried delightedly, waving a hand at him. ‘Hi, Dad.’

  Doris could hardly believe it. He always telephoned her at the shoe department, giving her notice, always saying how long he’d probably be in London for. Never in all the years of their love had he sprung a surprise like this.

  In the bedroom she shared with Joy she lit a cigarette and then hunted for clean underclothes and an ironed blouse, for she liked to be fresh when he was in London, he being fastidious by nature. With a loping stride, she hurried between the wardrobe and the dressing-table, her thin body bent in a semi-circle. Unable to find what she sought, she rooted among the bedclothes but found nothing there either.

  That it was a long time since Francis might have noted the state of her underclothing was something Doris ignored. Yet the fact was, being fastidious he was also particular: there was Joy’s approaching adolescence to consider, for as he had so often quietly pointed out, you had to be careful with a growing child. The flat had only a single bedroom and when he stayed he spent the night on the sofa in the sitting-room. Even after Joy had gone to bed he was reluctant to engage in any kind of love-making, pointing out that the walls in the flat were thin. Yet on each occasion when he came to London Doris believed that this rule he’d made would somehow be broken, that in the sitting-room he would stand in front of her and slowly take off her cardigan as once upon a time he used to, that he would kiss her eyes and then her ears, that his fingers would unzip her skirt and run about over her naked back. For all that she wished to be fresh for him.

  She tidied the bedroom, having changed into clothes she’d put aside a week ago but had not yet washed. Lying idle like that often added a bit of life to clothes, making them seem fresher than those worn all day. She put away more than she normally did, making the two beds for the first time for some weeks. She collected all the used tissues she could see and rolled tights into balls. She pushed the dirty garments into drawers.

  In the kitchen she washed up the dishes she and Joy had eaten their breakfast from, putting Joy’s uneaten sausages in the fridge. When they’d had their meal in the Pizzaland he would come back and they’d sit together, having a drink in the kitchen while Joy watched the television in the sitting-room. She’d probably show him the last batch of the table-mats she’d made for At-Home Industries in Hammersmith, the scenes of old London. They’d sit quite close to one another at the table.

  Still smoking her cigarette, Doris hurried from the kitchen to the sitting-room to gather up the exercise-books and pencils Joy should have taken to school with her but which had been lying there all day. She bundled together the materials she used to make the table-mats: cardboard she had to cut and trim, green baize, scenes of coaches travelling through the snow, Anne Hathaway’s cottage. She pulled at the sofa and the armchairs, trying to tighten the creases out of the covers, deploring the stains that seemed to be everywhere, and the charred chair-leg where it had been pulled too close to the gas fire. She scraped at pieces of chewing-gum with her fingernails and drew the curtains over a bit, to keep the daylight from showing up the dust too much. When she’d finished she lit another cigarette, absent-mindedly throwing the match on to the floor and crossly picking it up again.

  ‘He said a surprise, did he?’ she inquired of Joy, who was standing impatiently by the door, watching her. ‘He definitely said a surprise, dear?’

  Making a great deal of noise, Joy sighed. She repeated what she’d said already: that her father had wished to give them a surprise, that he’d intended to ring the doorbell of the flat at half past six.

  ‘He definitely said that, Joy?’

  ‘I told you. After I called out to him he said to keep it a surprise for you. He said to get you to come down to the Pizzaland and there he’d be. But I said you’d know immediately I mentioned the Pizzaland.’

  ‘Like I did, dear. Of course I did.’

  Doris smeared her mouth with lipstick and told Joy to go to the lavatory. She felt behind the bread-bin in the cupboard by the sink for the half bottle of vodka she’d bought at lunchtime in Value Wines. She saw no harm in giving herself a little lift, especially with the walk to the Pizzaland in front of them. She’d given herself a couple of little lifts in the Ladies’ during the course of the afternoon and she felt all the better for them. ‘Ciggies,’ she said when Joy reappeared. ‘I’ll need to call in at the Bricklayer’s for ciggies on the way.’

  She drew on a maroon mackintosh. It made her feel excited just to think of him waiting for them in the Pizzaland. It made her even feel she had a plain golden ring on her finger because the Pizzaland was always lovely, with snow-capped mountains on the
walls and the light gleaming on the carafes of red wine. Even in the old days when she hadn’t had pennies to spare, any more than he had, they’d occasionally managed to eat in a restaurant because you could always find somewhere cheap. She hadn’t made table-mats in the old days, but then she hadn’t needed little lifts now and again, so in a way it evened out. The only trouble was the mats were getting more difficult. Recently in the evenings she hadn’t felt at all like sticking down pictures of old London or cutting the corners off rectangles of cardboard. She’d had to look round for an alternative source of income, and something Frankie had said ages ago had given her the idea of going to see the dealer in Crawford Street. But none of that, of course, would she mention tonight.

  They left the flat and on the way down the concrete stairs she repeated that she mustn’t forget to call in at the Bricklayer’s Arms for cigarettes. Joy reminded her that there was a cigarette machine outside the public house, but she explained that she didn’t possess the right change. When she emerged a quarter of an hour later Joy said:

  ‘I wonder who the bird was.’

  ‘Bird, dear?’

  ‘There was a bird with him on the street, and then they went into the pub. Long black hair and a blue dress on.’

  ‘A girl you mean? With Dad?’

  ‘Constance Kent he said her name was, something like that.’

  4

  Francis’s

  ‘Oh, dearie, lovely,’ Doris cried in the Pizzaland, her lips reaching out for him. The snowy mountains were there as usual, enlivening the walls and making Doris think of ski resorts. There was music, and the carafes on the wooden tables, and the waitresses as smart as ever in their green and black get-up with their little red aprons.

  He’d said at once that just for a change he’d wanted his presence in London to be a surprise, exactly as Joy had been on about. He’d stood up when they arrived. He’d said she was looking well.

  ‘Oh, you are nice!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Frankie!’ Whatever you do, she said to herself, don’t refer to the girl. A man could be on a street with a girl, a man could be buying a drink for some girl he was maybe in an ad with. No harm done, for God’s sake, no need to make a fuss.

  ‘Lovely,’ she said again. ‘Lovely surprise, Frankie.’ She helped herself to wine because it was there on the table in front of her, ordered by him already. Joy had picked up the menu, and Frankie was remarking that it wasn’t an ad he was working in but some kind of telly thriller. It was hard to hear exactly what he was saying because there were other people talking at the next table and his voice was always low. It sounded gory, a body down a toilet.

  Joy said she wanted a Pizzaland Special and then made a remark concerning the toilets at the Comprehensive, about what had happened to some girl there with a geography master. ‘Nutty little stud he is,’ Joy said, going into details and causing Doris to pretend not to hear because not hearing was always best when Joy got dirty like that. Without meaning to, she drifted into a reverie, gazing at her daughter as if seeking some clue to the complications of her personality, but the only thought that occurred to her was that Joy’s hair was definitely on the skimpy side. You could see it quite clearly because of the way she was sitting; a tragedy it would be if poor Joy began to go bald.

  ‘One Pizzaland Special,’ he was saying to the waitress. ‘I’ll just have coffee, thanks. What about you, Dorrie?’

  She reached across the table and touched his hand. She smiled at him and he smiled back. He’d got even thinner, his face especially, not that it didn’t suit him. Lean bacon’s best, as Irene in Handbags always said. All the girls on the floor knew what he looked like of course because of being on the television, especially since he’d become the Man with the Pipe and there were more close-ups of his features. ‘Dishy,’ young Maeve who brought the tea to the floor supervisor’s office had said only three weeks ago. But some of the other girls, aware of how long Doris had been waiting for him, sometimes pursed their lips.

  ‘I’ll have the one with the prawns,’ she said.

  ‘And a baked potato with mine, Dad. And a Tizer?’ Joy hopefully inquired of the waitress, but the waitress said there was only Coca-Cola.

  Doris poured herself more wine from the carafe while Joy continued to tell him about various doings at Tite Street Comprehensive. She didn’t listen herself, preferring to think about July 2nd 1966, her favourite day. A few months previously her father had remarried and as a result of that Doris had moved out of the house she’d lived in all her life, not being able to stand the woman. She’d been feeling miserable about all that on a bus while the bus was caught in a traffic jam in Oxford Street, in the dumps because she’d taken it for granted when her mother had died that she and her father would become chummier than ever. ‘Quicker to walk,’ the chap beside her had said, and five minutes later they were sitting in a saloon bar in Woodstock Street. The Spread Eagle it was called, the chap was Frankie.

  Joy was talking about vomiting again, going through the business of being sick over the postman’s letters. She was peering at Frankie through her spectacles, waving a fork about.

  ‘July the second,’ Doris said, hoping he’d forgive the coarseness about vomit. She tried to frown at Joy, but found it difficult. ‘I was a mile down Memory Lane, Frankie.’

  The flash of his teeth appeared, responding as he always did.

  ‘That day on the bus,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget it, Frankie. When Dad and me met,’ she reminded Joy. ‘A 73 it was.’

  ‘I know,’ Joy said.

  ‘A red-letter day I call it.’

  Lager and lime she used to drink then. ‘Carlsberg, if they have it,’ she’d said in the Spread Eagle. She’d held back a bit, not wishing to seem easy or a pick-up because when it came to the point she wasn’t. She’d always rather avoided men, being so chummy with her dad, not needing them really, not interested.

  ‘I went into the Spread Eagle the other day,’ she said, ‘just to see.’

  He nodded agreeably, and she nodded back. She often went into the Spread Eagle as a matter of fact, since Woodstock Street was only just across Oxford Street from the store where she worked. She climbed the stairs to the upstairs bar, just as they’d done on that first Saturday afternoon, except that everything was a bit different now. There were pictures of birds on the stairs, which there hadn’t been in the old days, and the upstairs bar was called the Inn People’s Place. But the buttoned brown velvet was just as it had been, with the red shades on the wall-lights and the eagle over the bar, and the big fan in the centre of the ceiling, like a propeller. When she sat alone there her eye was always caught by the movement of the fan and she was reminded of an aeroplane, which made her think of faraway places, of the holidays together she knew there would one day be. ‘Join you?’ a man might boldly inquire, plonking a glass down beside hers, but she always looked away.

  ‘‘Course nowhere’s the same,’ she said. ‘There’s this jukebox now.’

  Again he nodded. The last time he’d come up from Folkestone he had definitely said the dressmaker’s heart condition was worse. Doris had imagined him carrying meals on trays, pouring out medicine. Recently she’d begun to feel it in her bones that the release would be any day now.

  A prawn pizza was placed in front of her, and again she reached across the table and touched one of his hands. In the Spread Eagle that day he’d made up for everything. He’d listened when she’d told him about the chumminess there’d been between her and her dad, he’d held her hand and said he understood. A few weeks later he’d brought her to a hotel near King’s Cross and she’d been unable to believe she was enjoying it so much, realizing she’d never been in love before.

  ‘All righty?’ she said. ‘All righty, love?’

  Beneath the table she tried to find his knee with hers. She wasn’t able to, but he seemed to understand her intention. A tiny smile cut into the delicacy of his face.

  ‘Run to another carafe, shall we, Frankie?’

  He raised a han
d and the waitress came. He ordered the wine and more Coca-Cola for Joy, and another potato because Joy had asked for it as well.

  ‘Lovely, the wine they have here,’ Doris said. She lowered her voice. ‘How’s her shaking, Frankie?’

  ‘How’s what?’

  ‘Her shaking. You were saying last time about her shaking.’

  ‘She’s taking something for the shaking.’

  ‘But she’s worse is she, Frankie?’

  ‘They have pills for everything these days.’

  He felt sorry for his wife, he’d said so that first day in the Spread Eagle. She was the cross he bore; no one could love an invalid. Consoling herself with that, Doris put her head on one side, the way he liked. She wanted to ask him about the girl, to come straight out with it, but she didn’t. ‘Great, it sounds,’ she said instead. ‘Your telly thriller.’

  His entire stay in London had been ruined just because the child had noticed him on the street. He’d felt shaky, almost unwell, when he’d seen her in the doorway of the bar, peering at him through her unattractive glasses. He’d been obliged to listen to a long rigmarole about how she’d been in a café eating chips, which she’d had to finish before running after him. He should have known that bad luck was going to strike again. He should have guessed that he couldn’t simply walk about the crowded streets of London without being bothered by a child. Anger crept through him in a familiar way, and he struggled to control it. While the voices of Doris and the child continued, he tried to convince himself that none of it would matter in the end. Fate had turned round: Julia Ferndale’s love for him made up for everything.

  But the anger wouldn’t quite go away. As vividly as Doris remembered July 2nd 1966, he remembered it also: it was on the morning of that day that the dressmaker had finally told him to go. He’d gone into her workroom after breakfast, watching for a moment while she cut out a dress, waiting to ask her about the shopping. She’d been cross the evening before, and he’d been hoping the crossness would have passed. Her bouts of bad temper had become more frequent recently, and it was during one of the worst of them that she’d thrown the sewing-machine cover at him, severely damaging a wall of the workroom with it. ‘Fish fingers, shall I get, dear?’ he’d said on the morning of July 2nd, and in reply she had requested him to leave her house, claiming she’d repeatedly asked him to do so before. When he’d opened his mouth to speak she’d threatened him with the police.