After a few minutes we looked at each other, me with what I hoped to be a gaze of honesty, and adoration, she with what seemed to be puzzled embarrassment and an excitement of wanting it that changed the curves of her face so that she hardly seemed the same person I’d known at the office. ‘I love you,’ I said, ‘more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I’d like to marry you.’
She pressed me into her wonderful breasts. ‘Oh Michael, don’t say it. Please don’t.’ I decided not to, in case she started to cry, though that would be no bad match for the passion I felt in her. Nevertheless I said it again, and held her so tight that she couldn’t respond to it. ‘It would be marvellous,’ I murmured into her shoulder. ‘Marvellous.’
She shuddered at the touch of my fingers, then broke away: ‘We really ought not to spoil it.’
‘I love you,’ I said, ‘so it’s the last thing I want to do’ — which set off another round. This time she forgot to tell me not to spoil it, or perhaps she couldn’t say anything at all, as my hand had found the warmest part of her.
We went into her bedroom at six o’clock, and didn’t come out till eight the next morning, when she had to get ready for work. The whole night seemed no longer than five minutes, though I don’t know how many times we worked up to the apple-and-pivot and cried out in the moonlit darkness. I shook like a jelly-baby while driving her to work, afraid of every vehicle that came close: ‘I’ll come and see you tonight,’ I said.
‘Please. I’ll wait for you.’
‘And I’ll ask you to marry me again.’
‘Oh, Michael, I don’t know what to say.’
‘Just say yes,’ I said.
‘You’re wonderful.’
I set her down a hundred yards from the office, then drove home. The house was empty, and I undressed to get into bed. Unable to sleep, because I ached in every last limb, I wondered what I had done in tacking on to Miss Bolsover. Naturally, I wanted it to go on and on, never having tasted such loving before. Perhaps the fact that I had actually stayed all night in bed with her had something to do with it, though not entirely. There was really nothing to think about, but simply to lie there and regret that she wasn’t still with me, only to hope that time would speed along before tonight, and that I would be able to get some rest before setting out again. I drifted into half-sleep, wonderful as only sleep can be when you know that daylight is pushing behind drawn curtains, and that the whole town is going full tilt at hard and boring work.
I don’t know how long I’d been in bed, but I became aware of a battering-ram breaking through to my sweetest dreams. There was no rest for the Devil in heaven, so I put on some trousers and stomped downstairs with half-closed eyes, wondering who the hell it could be at this time of the day. At the back door, which we usually used, no one was there, and just as I was thankfully up on my way to bed the knocking came this time from the front. Any such sound at the door always pushed my heart off course, jacked-up its noise in the veins of my ears. We weren’t used to people rapping at our doors. If a neighbour came to see us she usually called out my mother’s name and walked straight in. A knock meant either a tally man, the police, or a telegram, and since my mother had never bought anything on credit, and neither of us had been in trouble with the police, and no one we knew ever felt in such an urgent frame of mind as to send a telegram, you can imagine that such formal visitations at the door were few and far between. When one did come, and I happened to be in on my own, the effect was of such intensity that it almost had me scared.
Claudine tried to smile, but ended up with a distressful saccharine expression that fixed me in speech and movement to the spot. ‘Come in,’ I said, after a while, and at my brisk tone she gave a normal worried look and followed me through to the kitchen. ‘It’s good to see you.’
She came back sharply: ‘Is it?’
‘Course it is, love. Take your coat off and sit down. I’ll make you a cup of tea. I could do with breakfast, myself.’
‘Breakfast? Do you know what time it is? It’s just gone twelve o’clock.’
‘We’ll call it brunch, then,’ I said from the kitchen stove. I cracked eggs into the pan, and layed enough bacon on the grill for two of us.
‘You must be going to pieces,’ she said, ‘staying in bed so late. It’s terrible. I always knew there was something funny about you.’
‘The sun will never rise on me, and that’s a fact.’
I spread a cloth and put out knives and forks, turned on the radio, gave her a fag, and pushed another lump of coal into the fire, not even wondering why she had come to see me, keeping so busy that I wouldn’t be able to, while she went on and on about how useless I was. ‘Still,’ she said, watching me closely, ‘you are a bit more domesticated than I ever thought.’
‘I’ve often had to look after myself when Mam’s been away, that’s why.’
We pulled up our seats, but she didn’t tuck in as heartily as I’d hoped. ‘It’s good to see you,’ I said, ‘but what’s on your mind?’
‘A lot that you ought to know,’ she answered.
I thought I’d be funny: ‘You’re pregnant?’ I said brightly.
‘You bastard,’ she cried, standing up. ‘How did you know?’
I choked on a piece of bacon rind, ran over to the mirror and yanked it out like a tapeworm. ‘I didn’t. It was a joke.’
‘It’s no joke to me,’ she said, eating a bit faster, now that she’d told me in this back-handed fashion.
‘How’s Alfie Bottesford?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean? What are you getting at?’
I stood by the mantelshelf, riled that she could go on eating at a time like this, till I remembered that she had two mouths to feed. ‘I’m getting at nothing. But you and Alfie are back together, aren’t you?’
‘I won’t talk about it,’ she wept, eating her egg.
‘Suit yourself. You walked out on me.’
She stood up and faced me: ‘And can you wonder at it, Michael-rotten-Cullen? Look at the way you’re living. Lounging in bed all day stinking with sleep. No job. No prospects even. What a deadbeat tramp you are. I can see there’s no hope for me with you, even though I am having your baby. Oh, it’s terrible. I feel awful. I’ll do myself in. I shall. That’s the only thing to do.’
‘If you’re serious about it,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you a couple of bob for the gas, and a cushion to put your head on.’
‘I really beliève you would,’ she said quietly, stunned at my response to her unnatural threat.
‘You bet I would, if that’s the way you feel. I love you so much I’d do anything for you.’
‘You don’t imagine I can feel very good, do you?’
‘No, but don’t come here palming a baby off on me when you’ve been going with Alfie Bottesford for the last month. I don’t know what your game is, but I’m not falling for that one.’
‘I thought you loved me,’ she said, ‘but all that went on between us meant nothing to you. As long as you got what you wanted. Alfie Bottesford’s never in all his life done anything to me. He hasn’t laid a finger on me, ever. And that’s the stone truth, I’m telling you.’