But there was nothing sweet for her. She had dropped crumbs for the birds, she had leaned from the window, she had given the cat its dish. In the window — it looked out on the laundry court, was hard to raise — she had smelled the cool drifting air of spring and glanced at wireless antennas pulled taut across the sky. Annie must have heard the frame crash up, or must have caught the sound of her humming. Because Annie had come to the adjoining window, thrust out her blonde head, at twenty past two had jammed her sharp red elbows on the sill and talked for a while.
“Rotten day,” Annie had said to her.
“Michael mentioned it would be clear.”
“It’s a rotten day. How’s his horse?”
“Oh, he’s a fine horse. A lovely horse. …”
“I don’t know who Mike thinks he is, to go off and get himself a horse. But I’ve always wanted to kiss a jockey.”
And Annie had taken up a little purse and counted her change in the window. Together they had heard a tram eating away its tracks, heard the hammer and hawking of the world on the other side of the building. It was spring in the sunlight and they leaned toward each other, and the smell of cooking mutton had come into the courtyard.
Now, between three and six, there was nothing sweet for her. Even her friend Annie had left the flat next door, and Michael was gone.
“I’m dead to the world,” she said aloud.
Behind cataracts of pale eyes the cat looked across at her, cat with a black and yellow head which a good milliner, in years past, might have sewn to the front of a woman’s high-crowned feathered hat. Margaret scratched on the floor, for a moment smiled. Her cat circled round the dish. It was so dark now that she could not see into the kitchen. From somewhere a draft began blowing the bottom of her skirt and she wondered what a fortuneteller — one of those old ladies with red hair and a birthmark — would make of her at this moment. There was the beef broth, water to be drawn and boiled, the sinister lamp to light, a tom photograph of children by the sea. Cold laurels in this empty room.
“He has only gone to look at the horse in Highland Green,” she said. “It isn’t far.”
Once the madame of a frock shop had tried to dress her in pink. And even she, Margaret, had at the last minute before the gown was packed, denied the outrageous combination of herself and the color. Once an Italian barber had tried to kiss her and she had escaped the kiss. Once Michael had given her an orchid preserved in a glass ball, and now she could not find it. How horrible she felt in pink; how horrible the touch of the barber’s lips; how heavy was the glassed orchid on her breast.
Feeling lucky? Soon Michael would ask her that, after the sink was empty and her apron off. It was never luck she felt but she would smile.
In the darkness the cat swallowed the last flake of herring — Michael usually fed it, Michael understood how it wanted an old woman’s milk to drink — then disappeared. It was gone and she thought it had left her in search of the whispering tongue of some old woman in a country cottage. So she stood, picked up the dish, made her way toward the smells of yellow soap and blackened stove. There was a bulb in the kitchen. But the bulb was bleak, it spoiled the brown wood, the sink, the cupboard doors which she had covered with blue curtains. She washed the cat’s dish in the dark, lit the stove in the dark. For a moment, before the match flame caught at the sooted jets, she smelled the cold endless odor of greasy gas and her heart commenced suddenly to beat.
“Michael. Michael, is it you?”
But she turned, struck a second match, and the gas flames puffed up from the pipe in a circle like tiny blue teeth round the rim of a coronet and she herself was plain, only a girl who could cook, clean, sing a little. And then, in the light of the gas, she saw a stableboy’s thin face and, outside, the mortuary bells were ringing.
… The thin face of a pike and dirty hands — not black by earth, soot, or grease, but the soiled tan color of hands perpetually rubbing down a horse’s skin — and wearing riding trousers of twill but no socks, and from the belt up, naked.
“Now then, Mr. Hencher’s with the horse, is that it?”
Together they walk in the direction of the stalls, passing a shovel in an iron wheelbarrow, a saddle pad covered with black flies, a whip leaning against a whited post. Over one stall, on a rusty nail, hangs a jockey’s faded green-and-yellow cap.
They continue and from the rotted wood in the eaves overhead comes the sound, compact, malcontent, of a hive of bees stinging to death a sparrow. And the stable-boy, treading hay wisps and manure between his shoes and the stones, points to the closed stalls and tells him of Princess Pat, Islam, Dead-at-Night, the few mares and stallions within. And he hears them paw the dark, hears the slow scraping of four pointed hoofs.
“Smoke, Mr. Banks? I’ll just have a drag or two before I go back in with him.”
A growth of wild prickly briar climbs one side of the stall. There are no sounds within. Michael steps away, draws in his cuff, stares at the double doors — while the stableboy shoots back the bolt, slips inside. The horse stands head to the rear wall, and first he sees the streaks of the animal’s buttocks, the high point that descends to the back. Then he sees the polished outline of the legs. Then the tail.
And at the same moment, under the tail’s heavy and graying gall, and between the hind legs, he sees Hencher’s outstretched body and, nearest himself, the inert shoes, toes down.
“How do you like him, Mr. Banks? Fine horse, eh?”
“Hencher,” he whispers, “here’s Hencher!”
Together they will bury Hencher with handfuls of straw, bolt the doors, wipe their hands, and for himself there will be no cod or beef at six, no kissing her at six, no going home — not with Hencher kicked to death by the horse. And forward in the dark the neck is lowered and he sees the head briefly as it swings sideways at the level of the front hoofs with ears drawn back and great honey-colored eyes floating out to him.
She heard the distant mortuary bells. Outside, over all this part of the city, returning fathers were using their weary keys. It was time to feed the cats, the dogs, the little broken dolls. It was never luck she felt, but Margaret waited, standing beside the coal grate in which they built no fire, waited for him to hang up his hat, untie her apron strings. When Banks had first kissed her, touching the arm that was only an arm, the cheek that was only a cheek, he had turned away to find a hair in his mouth.
Feeling lucky?
In how many minutes now she would nod, smile again, sit across from him and hold her pencil and the evening five-pound crostic, she wearing no rings except the wedding band and, in her otherwise straight brown hair, touching the single deep wave which she had saved from childhood.
Now and again from out the window would come the sound of lorries, the beat of the solitary policeman’s step, the cry of a child. Later, after he had pulled the light string, she would dream of the crostics and, in the dark, men with numbers wrapped round their fingers would feel her legs, or she would lie with an obscure member of the government on a leather couch, trying to remember and all the while begging for his name. Later still the cat would come licking about for its old woman’s milk.