‘Yes, who’s here, please?’ This came from the now open front door, at which a small red-haired, red-faced man was standing.
‘My name’s Lewis.’
‘I don’t know you. What you want here?’
I looked along the pavement to where Mair, nodding faster, was standing with her back to me. It must have had all the appearance of a furtive, sidelong, up-to-no-good look. Like a fool, I said: ‘I’m a friend of your wife’s.’ As I said this, I smiled.
‘Get out of here,’ the red-haired man bawled. He wore a red shirt. ‘Get out, you bastard.’
‘Look, it’s all right, there’s no need to—’
‘Get out quick, you bastard.’ For the first time he saw Mair and the policeman, who were now approaching. ‘Mrs Webster, hallo. And you, Officer. Take away this bastard.’
‘Now calm down, Bent, nothing to get excited about. Mr Lewis is with me. He and his wife have been very kind to Betty. He’s come along with me to see how you all are. He’s a friend of mine.’
‘Sorry, Mrs Webster. Sorry, sir, very sorry.’
‘That’s all right, Bent, Mr Lewis doesn’t mind. He knows you didn’t mean anything. You just forget it. Now, can we come in?’
‘Please, yes, come in.’
‘Bye-bye, Emrys, give Maureen my love. Tell her I’ll pop in to see her in a day or two. And don’t you worry. She’s a good strong girl and with the better weather coming she’ll soon pull round, I guarantee.’
‘Thank you very much, Mrs Webster. Goodbye now.’
Before he turned away I caught a glimpse of Emrys’s face and was startled to see on it an expression of relief and gratitude, quite as if he’d just received an important reassurance of some kind. I followed Mair across the threshold, frowning and shaking my head at life’s endless enigma.
Bugs or no bugs, the house revealed itself to me as not too bad. There were loose and cracked floorboards, but none missing, and no damp; the kitchen we penetrated to was dark all right, but it smelt no worse than stale; through its open door I could see a scullery with a row of clean cups hanging above the sink and a dishcloth spread over the taps to dry. One of the twins came into view in that quarter, took in the sight of visitors and doubled away again.
‘Good afternoon, Betty,’ Mair was saying in her hospital-rounds manner. ‘My goodness, you have done well, haven’t you? You really ought to be congratulated. You have made the place look nice.’
She went on like that while I glanced round the place. It did look nice enough as far as it went, but that wasn’t at all far. Most noticeably, there was an absence of the unnecessary things, the ornaments, the photographs and pictures, the postcards on the mantelpiece that every home accumulates. It was as if the moving men had just dumped the furniture down, leaving the small stuff to be unpacked later, only in this case there was nothing to unpack. Curtains perhaps fell into the category of the unnecessary, even, with a small single window like this one, of the excessive. They were of Betty’s favourite lilac shade, and ranks of mauve personages, with sword and fan, periwig and towering hair-do, were doing a minuet on them. At this sight I felt pity stirring. Get back, you brute, I said internally, giving it a mental kick on the snout. Then I felt angry with a whole lot of people, but without much prospect of working out just who.
Mair was nearing her peroration. I looked covertly at Betty. Although no longer tarted up, she hadn’t recovered the quiet, youthful air she’d had when I first saw her. She wore a grey cardigan which seemed designed to accentuate the roundness of her shoulders. The circles under her eyes weren’t the temporary kind. She was staring up at Mair with the sarcastic patience of someone listening to a shaky alibi. Bent Arnulfsen, after standing about uneasily for a time, went out into the scullery and I heard water plunging into a kettle. Still talking, the old moral commando moved to follow him. ‘I just want to have a word with Bent a minute,’ she said, and shut the door behind her.
‘Well, how are things?’ I asked.
Betty glanced at me without friendliness, then away. ‘Okay,’ she muttered, picking at a hole in the cover of her chair.
‘Your husband seems a nice chap.’
‘What you know about it, eh?’
‘I’m only going on how he struck me.’
‘Aw, he’s okay, I suppose. He’s a good boy.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for good boys.’
‘Suppose so.’
‘You seem to have settled down here nicely.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Jean and the children asked to be remembered to you, by the way.’
To shrug both her shoulders would have meant heaving herself up from the chair back, so she made do with just shrugging the uppermost one. It was clear to me that there was nothing left of the cordiality of our last meeting, and no wonder. A man who had seen her when she was free was the last kind of person on earth who should have been allowed to see her now she was tamed. And in any contact not made on terms of equality the speech of one party or the other will fall almost inevitably into the accents and idioms of patronage, as I’d just heard my own speech doing. Severity is actually more respectful. But that wouldn’t do here. Would anything? I said: ‘Do you ever miss the old life?’
‘What you want to know for? What’s it got to do with you?’
‘Nothing. I was only asking.’
‘Well, don’t ask, see? Mind your own bloody business, see? What you want to come here for anyway?’
‘I’m sorry, Betty. I just came to see how you were getting on.’
‘Like old Webster, eh? Well I don’t like people coming along to see how I’m getting on, see? I gets brassed off with it, see?’
As she got up from her chair to make her point more forcibly, the scullery door opened and Mair came back into the room. My sense of relief filled me with shame. Triumph swept over Betty’s face at being about to do what she must have wanted to do for quite a time.
‘Your husband certainly thinks the world of you, Betty,’ Mair led off. ‘He’s been telling me—’
‘Get out, you old cow,’ Betty shouted, blinking fast. ‘I doesn’t want you here, see? I got enough to put up with with the bloody neighbours hanging over the fence and staring in the bloody windows and them buggers upstairs complaining. I got enough without you poking your bloody nose in, see? Just you piss off quick and leave me alone.’
‘Please, my dear, be quiet.’ Bent Arnulfsen had reappeared in the scullery doorway. In one hand he held a brown enamel teapot, in the other the hand of one of the twins. ‘Mrs Webster is kind. And this gentleman.’
‘You keep out of this, man. Go on, Webster, what you waiting for? I said get out, didn’t I? Who do you think you are, that’s what I’d like to know — poking your bloody nose in everywhere and telling every bugger what to do. You’re beyond, you are, Webster. Bloody beyond. And as for you—’ At the moment when Betty, who was now crying, turned to me, Mair looked at her wristwatch with a quick movement. ‘Who asked you to come snooping in, that’s what I’d like to know,’ Betty started to say to me, but Mair cut in.
‘I’m afraid we shan’t be able to manage that cup of tea, Bent,’ she said interestedly; ‘I’d no idea the time was getting along like this. I must take Mr Lewis off to his place of work or I shall get into trouble. I’ll be in next week as usual and I’m sure things will have settled down by then. Goodbye, Betty; don’t upset yourself, there’s a good girl. Goodbye, Bent.’