Let him scoff. Didn’t like it here, but she would never go back, wanted to be as far from any man as it was possible to get. Shows how little he had learned if he thought she wanted to pick up men. She lacked energy to do anything except clean the room. Someone had run a sweeping brush over the floor, but if a man had been moving in it would probably have been dusted as well.
After the initial swill-down and polish she bought a square of coloured cloth from an Indian shop and tacked it on the wall. She cleaned the window inside, and as far as she dared lean outside, with newspaper and plain water till it was impossible to tell there was glass in the frames. Light shone in, even the sun now and again.
At the risk of breaking a leg she stood a chair on the table and found that with a wet rag she could wipe the ceiling white. Such hard labour took a whole day, for each square-foot needed rubbing several times before cleanliness showed through. Where plaster had crumbled on the walls she pinned a couple of old scarves, and a flower poster from the Royal Academy.
Let George see her now. She didn’t like it here, which wasn’t strange, all things considered, but at least she could live with no future. The idea of getting a job before her money ran out frightened her, and she refused to think about it. Having finished making the place habitable, she lived in fear. She hadn’t worked at anything for years, because George had thought that if she went out to find a job people would say he was going bankrupt and needed his wife to get money for him.
‘We’ve all the spot-cash we need,’ he said when she mentioned doing more with her life than staying at home. He liked to keep her out of harm’s way, and busy whenever he was in the house. She thought he spoke from his need to prove he could care for her, but she should have known better. Men were either too fat to be affectionate, or too lean to be lovable, she told herself when the unreality of life worried her into visions and grudges.
She couldn’t do much except office work and housekeeping, though when the time came she would find something and be glad of it. Because she’d had no diverting occupation it had been easier for her to walk out on him. She had saved her energy to make the only move that had any meaning since the one that got her married at nineteen, and to view that event as the most important in her life proved how empty her existence had been. Never again. Hadn’t liked it there, either. They had no doubt said they loved each other at the beginning, but she had no memory of it. To get married for life was too long a period. The vows were weighted too much against a woman. If you could only get married on a seven-year licence she wondered how many would apply for a second term.
She pulled the mattress off the bed, dipped rag in a tin of paraffin to wipe the springs and headboard. Bugs could be everywhere. The smell was horrible, but necessary. When she went out she would leave the window open.
They had called it love, which was always something other than what it was said to be, but it could only have been the usual mix up of two young kids. She had wanted to change her life by getting into the adventure of controlling a house as she had previously arranged the furniture and kitchen utensils of her doll’s cottage.
Marriage was a way out of the overheated office she worked in. With twenty other girls of the City Transport Company she checked receipt rolls of money collected on the buses, and entered the amounts in ledgers before reckoning the totals. They were busy from half-past eight in the morning till half-past four in the afternoon. It was familiar, and she liked it, but after four years she wanted to get away yet not take another job.
Best not to examine the mattress too closely as she pulled it back on to the bed. Looking in a shop window, events on the television screens moved in silence on their different channels. A few children from school sucked lemonade tins, while a chick was shown struggling out of an egg on a bed of straw. The first hairline cracks appeared, then a split, and a gap before she knew what was happening. After a pause came a webbed foot, and more collapse of the shell, followed by a hole, till a side of the shell fell in, and another panel was pushed out, and the damp feathers of a small moving body became obvious. The rest of the shell dropped around, and the silence and distance created by the glass, and the further remoteness of the event within the television screen, and the continuous rush of traffic and movement of people behind, gave a feeling of having watched a birth that had nothing to do with life at all.
A stack of cardboard boxes by the door were waiting to be carted away. Rummaging, she found thin sheets of plastic, which she folded under her arm, and now used to wrap the mattress top and bottom into an envelope so as not to be touched by the stains from whoever had slept there before.
Marrying George in order to go to bed with him was a part of the uprooting that she had hardly thought about. She had set off for Wollaton one Sunday morning on an old sit-up-and-beg machine with a case around the chain that had once been her mother’s. Telling the story as if someone was in the room to listen made her feel as young as when it had taken place.
The long brick walls of Wollaton Park stood clean and distinct after a night of rain. Clouds were high and woolly, and a west wind cooled her face as she pedalled. The main road forked near the turn-off for Martins Pond, and she kept to the quieter way curving between high banks towards the village.
The monotony lulled her, and it was marvellous to be in fresh air after the night in her stuffy home, and five days in an overwarm office. Out of breath going up the slope, she pulled the three-speed backward so as not to get off before reaching the church, which meant half-standing from the saddle and pressing hard. The top of the incline was close, but as she drew near, the chain slipped from the ratchet inside its crankcase.
She leaned the bicycle against a wall in the middle of the village, but did not have the knack or strength to lift the machine and press the pedal with one foot so as to snap the chain back into place. Hands black with grease, she already felt the effort of pushing the whole way home. Trying again, the bike capsized.
His face was almost touching. ‘You’ll never do it like that, duck.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’ll show you.’ Leaning his own slim racer by the wall, he pressed the chain on in a few seconds. ‘It’s the knack as yer want!’
‘I suppose it is.’ She didn’t care to encourage his vulgarity, though he seemed nice enough. ‘Thanks, anyway.’
‘Trust a proper cyclist to rescue a lady in distress! I’ve been to Heanor already this morning.’ He stood upright by his bicycle, head bent back as he tapped a map poking from his pocket. ‘To see a pal at work. He broke his arm. Where did you get that old dragon-bike?’
‘Oh, it belonged to my mother before she died.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about that.’
She was amused at his sympathy. ‘That was years ago.’
His foot was on the pedal, as if ready for a race. ‘I’ll ride back to Nottingham with you in case the chain comes off again. It is a bit loose.’
She would leave the office and get a bus for Old Lenton to meet him walking out of the factory at five. He had only to look at a broken contraption to know what to do. He tinkered with his fingers, prodded a screwdriver here and there, and applied a spanner till whatever it was slotted back into place and shifted in tune when the motor was switched on and electricity flowed through. The women pampered him, and he took their praise as gospel truth, whereas they were on piece rates and only wanted him to mend their machines straightaway.