Betty took his arm, and the pliant warmth of her breast came through his sleeve. “I’ll show you the room, love. It’s at the back—where you get most of the sun.”
Redpath allowed himself to be led forward like a child being coaxed into school on the first day. Betty opened the inner door for him and he went through into the hallway. The staircase on his right terminated in a long landing, and at the far end of the landing was a window featuring a stained glass fleur-de-lis. Rays of sunlight streaming through the window emphasised the darkness of the rest of the house. Redpath jerked his head back in alarm as his nostrils filled with an overpowering smell of cloves. The cloying aroma was gone in a second and he understood at once that it had been synaesthetic, a false sensation triggered by his seeing the house’s rear window exactly as he had anticipated. He shivered, suddenly feeling that he had been given a warning.
“This way, love.” Betty went up the stairs ahead of him, each step causing diagonal ripple patterns to appear in the taut denim of haunch and thigh. As he followed her to the landing he kept looking around for Albert, half-expecting to see him grinning from a doorway, but the house seemed to have absorbed the strange individual into itself. The only sound was that of their footsteps on the thinly carpeted treads as they made their way up a second flight of stairs. There were two doors on the top landing, both painted an incongruous nursery pink.
Children grow up in places like this, too. God help them.
Betty opened the door which was nearer the back of the house and went ahead of Redpath into a largish square bedroom. The floorcovering was pink oilcloth heavily disfigured with parallel brown lines marking the edges of the underlying boards. Redpath advanced into the room and saw that it contained a double bed, a wardrobe, two tallboys and a dresser—all culled from old suites of differing design and employing different woods. In the middle of the ceiling was a pendant light fitting which was dragged out of plumb by the flex connecting it to a second light stapled to the wall above the bed.
“It isn’t Buck House,” Betty commented, “but you’ll be very comfortable here, John. Bathroom’s just at the foot of the stairs.”
She’s serious about the room, Redpath thought, walking to the window. How am I going to get out of this?
Below the window was the grey slate roof of the lower rear section of the house, and further down he could see an enclosed yard with brick outhouses and an old-style clothes wringer standing beside two dustbins. Beyond the yard wall was another row of three-storey houses which would have limited his field of view but for the fact that, slightly to his left, two houses had been chopped cleanly out of the terrace, possibly by a wartime bomb. Through the gap Redpath could see, as though artfully crowded into a frame, the smokestacks, gantries, spires and trees of Cal-bridge, all glowing with the clean light of normality, and he was seized by a yearning to be out there doing ordinary things like sitting in a coffee bar or getting his hair trimmed or taking a book back to the library. There was a creaking sound behind him and he turned to see that Betty had sat on the edge of the bed.
“Soft mattress,” she said, her eyes fixed solemnly on his. “I like a nice soft mattress.”
Redpath crossed the room, stood in front of her and placed his hands on her shoulders. He felt cold and ill. She tried to fall back on to the bed and draw him down on top of her, but he tightened his grip on her shoulders and stiffened his body, keeping her sitting upright.
“It’s like that, is it?” she said, lowering her gaze to his belt buckle which was on a level with her face. She put her hands on the buckle and began sliding the belt’s leather tongue through the clasp.
Redpath stood motionless for a moment, his body a pounding column of blood, then he broke free and ran from the room, plunging down through the brown dimness of the house on nerveless legs, fleeing like a man in a nightmare and not slowing down until he was outside in the lemon-coloured sunlight of the street. He strode to the nearest corner and rounded it into the cross-street without looking back, anxious to break the visual connections with the house which he could feel clinging to him like skeins of gossamer.
CHAPTER TWO
Let that be a lesson to you. Redpath walked for more than a mile intoning the same sentence over and over again, making it a kind of silent chant, his pace gradually slowing as he got further from the house in Raby Street. Let that be a lesson to you. Almost trembling with relief, he began loitering at shop windows and taking an interest in things which had not interested him before—the range of styles in transistor radios, the price of wallpaper, the cubic capacities of refrigerators. Let that be a lesson to you.
Some thirty minutes had gone by before he got the moral of the morning’s escapade into sharp focus in his mind, and it concerned Leila. He could see very clearly now that he loved, admired and needed her; that picking a quarrel with her had been an act of monumental stupidity; that top priority had to be given to finding a way of patching up the relationship. Gazing intently into the window of a home bakery as though seeking significance in the arrangement of cakes and scones, he decided that getting Leila completely on her own was a tactical necessity. He had already proved the futility of trying to speak to her in the office.
It was wrong of her to laugh at me like that. Very wrong. Perhaps she needs to be taught a lesson as well. I mean, there’s no bigger champion of women’s lib than I am—but lib is an old word for geld. It bears thinking about…
Redpath looked at his watch, frowning, and calculated that if he went straight to the park and got his bicycle he could reach Leila’s flat on the Leicester Road before she did. She had said she was going home only to pick up some papers, but he ought to be able to talk her into making coffee and with a little time in hand, in the undisturbed quietness of her flat, he should also be able to straighten things out. He would do everything in his power to convince her that he would be happy to get back on the old footing, that he would never be jealous or possessive again.
But is that true, John? Is it really true? If you can refuse other women, why can’t she refuse other men? Why can’t she learn her lesson the way you learned yours?
The sparse population of Churchill Gardens had changed when Redpath returned for his bicycle, the young matrons with their baby carriages and toddlers having been replaced by workers from the nearby steelworks and factories. There was a smell of hot food and vinegar in the air, reminding Redpath that he was hungry. He went to his bicycle, stooped to unchain it and halted in that position, staring at the torpedo-shaped combination lock. The four-digit number he had used practically every day for years was gone from his memory.
“This is stupid,” he said aloud. “I know this number.” He narrowed his eyes at the lock, making a painful effort to remember, then his fingers moved almost of their own accord and set up the combination 1-2-1-6. Without any certainty that the correct digits had been selected, he tugged on the lock and it slid apart. He got on to the bicycle and, feeling strangely chastened, rode off in the direction of Leicester Road.
Leila Mostyn’s flat was on the second floor of a large detached house set back a discreet distance from the main road. Its pleasant architecture had been marred by the tacking on of a narrow brick structure containing new concrete stairs, and most of the front garden was given over to the parking of cars, but the building still retained an air of genteel exclusiveness. The first time Redpath had seen it he had been struck by how closely it matched his preconceptions of the sort of place in which Leila would choose to live.