While she worked she didn’t think. The vacuum cleaner from the cupboard on the stairs wouldn’t suck the grit easily. What was left clinging to the floor had to be lifted with fingers and fed to the nozzle as if the zoo had boarded one of its tamer and more delicately nurtured animals on her for a month while the keeper went on holiday. George had shown her how to unblock a vacuum cleaner by reversing the hose and blowing out the obstructions after switching on the power. She tried. A cloud of rainbow-coloured fluff shot over the carpet, but it took only a few minutes for the nozzle to suck it clean again.
She peeled a potato, an onion and a carrot, and dropped them to boil in the same water. She put a mutton chop under the grill, then set a slice of bread and an apple on the table. Being hungry, she was not unhappy. When the onion brought water to her eyes she no longer felt like weeping. At forty years old, and alone for the first time, she smiled because such misery as she felt made her happy in her own way and nobody else’s.
She sat in front of the fire, a woollen hat pulled over her ears, and a hand in her pocket squeezing the tenpence coins because they would keep her warm till morning. She kept her coat and gloves on. In the spring she would get a train to the nearest countryside and smell clean air, even if she had to walk through muddy fields to reach it.
When from her previous warm home she had tried to imagine being so beleaguered, she had seen herself as a cypher without purpose. The spice and anodyne of reality had been missing, and she was sufficiently herself not to feel in any way a cypher, because the process of surviving provided enough reality to be going on with. An advantage she had not foreseen was that you could talk to yourself, and that when you spoke your thoughts aloud they became more coherent than when they stayed locked in. On first hearing her voice she made up her mind that it had got to stop: ‘If anyone hears you they’ll think you’ve gone off your head.’
But she had no control over the need to hear herself, and thought that if she didn’t control it she really would go mad. Her voice filled the room and proved she was sane. When she spoke, her body was warmer. The noise told her she was alive. She felt more herself when she could listen to her voice, and decide whether or not it was talking sense, than when the same useless phrases spun in silence. She had never heard her voice before. It was worth arguing with. She hadn’t been able to listen and know how it sounded when in conversation with George. Her words had been distorted, and emotional confrontation had made them more his than hers, which would not be the case anymore.
Occasionally forgetting to say that she did not like it here, she was most tempted to when on the street, and when she knew that she must under no circumstances talk aloud. The urge had been hard to resist, except for saying the odd word in a supermarket, or while waiting at a traffic light. So she allowed herself to talk all she liked in her room, hoping there would be less impulse to let anything out on the street where others might hear.
Happy enough in her freedom, she couldn’t believe George was much bothered by her departure. He wasn’t to blame that she had gone, and nor was she. It had taken them a long time to realize they weren’t made for each other, though she was sure George didn’t yet know, and was mystified at what she had done. He had grown fat through never knowing where his next meal was coming from, having been brought up in a family where everything in sight was eaten in case they never got fed again, a scramble for existence which left him with dulled perceptions where other people’s feelings were concerned.
Putting on weight was part of George’s getting-on in life. Having more energy than a thin man, he wanted feeding. He made good money, drove himself at his work, and needed to eat, and became stout in his self-assurance. Nobody could blame him for that – but don’t expect him to care what you were thinking.
He had become his own boss, which in his family was everyone’s dream if not their ambition, though only he had the force and intelligence to show the way. His three brothers hoped it would come by winning the pools, or by pulling off the Great Train Robbery one rainy night when nobody was looking. They never thought of giving themselves a start by working hard, so that the acquiring of money bred an interest and momentum all its own. George had a passion for it, but first he had an obsession for making objects that were useful to others. He’d had little time for her, in that every hour cost money, and she wondered if any man would have, since she did not seem to possess whatever it was that any man needed from her.
She had lived without thought on the matter, though at the time it hadn’t seemed so. But too late was too late, and she couldn’t go back. She burned the telegraph forms one by one in the hearth before the gas fire.
The steam smelled good. She prodded the vegetables, and drained them into the sink. The meat spluttered in its fat. She was more famished than hungry, but took the heated plate to the table as if to serve someone else. It was for her alone. She stood back for a moment to look, then sat down to eat.
6
The estate agent had been unsure about letting the room in case, being on her own, she might use it for a particular purpose. She’d read the evening paper, telephoned from a box outside her bed-and-breakfast near St Pancras, gone by tube to Holland Park, and located herself on a London Transport map and by asking the way. The agent was waiting between the crumbling pillars of the gate. He said it was on the top floor, which became obvious, unless they were going to a hencoop on the roof.
‘The only other person up here,’ he said, pointing to a brown-painted door, as distinct from hers which seemed to be a kind of tawny orange, ‘is a merchant navy chap who goes away for weeks at a time. It’ll be very quiet. If that’s what you want.’
‘I do,’ she said.
His hair was cut short and combed into a parting. Most men had it dangling over their shoulders as if they were teachers or beatniks, but she supposed that the older they got the shorter it would go again, till at sixty it would be as clipped as their grandfathers’. He had trouble with the lock: ‘Are you from the north?’
Did he think she was an Eskimo? ‘I’m from the Midlands.’
He opened the door. ‘Permanently?’
It was rancid and cold. She hoped he had seen from her face, and judged by her talk, that she hadn’t come to London just to have a good time. Hard to remember when she had last told a lie: ‘I start a new job next week, in a bank.’
He looked at her, and she expected him to ask for references. Maybe he won’t, for such a pig-hole as this. ‘A student had it till last week. We haven’t had time to clean it yet. When do you want to move in?’
He didn’t ask what bank she would work at. Obviously didn’t believe her. None of his business. He must be used to people like me. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘I’ll get the woman on the ground floor to tidy it up.’
‘Don’t bother. I’ll have a go myself.’ Perhaps her accent hid the irony. Was it possible to clean such a place? She paid a month’s rent in cash. Maybe he wasn’t as surprised as he looked.
‘If you leave me, how will you keep yourself?’ George wrapped a serviette around his cut finger. ‘Beg on the street? Get national assistance?’ He leered: ‘Go on the batter and pick up a man now and again? That’s all you’ll be able to do.’ Rather than mince words, he threw them at her like stones. She stayed rigid till his Ford Granada crunched over the gravel and turned on to the avenue. His wounded hand lifted in case she waved goodbye. I was only joking, he would have said, if she had welcomed him home that night. You know me! Bark worse than bite. Don’t mean it.