‘Baby,’ crooned Binny, going upstairs with outstretched arms. Alison was on all fours, crouched against the wall. Binny often told friends it was nothing to worry about. Until two years ago Alison had insisted on baring her tummy button in the street and rubbing it against lamp posts. She had grown out of that, as doubtless she would soon grow tired of pretending she was a dog.
‘Come along, darling,’ said Binny brightly. She bent down and patted her daughter’s head.
Alison growled and seized Binny’s ankle in her teeth.
Putting both hands behind her to resist hitting the child, Binny descended the stairs.
Lucy was at the sink pouring cooking sherry into a milk bottle.
‘Out, out, out,’ cried Binny. ‘I am not here to provide booze for your layabout friends. This is not an off-licence.’
She frogmarched Lucy to the door and pushed her down the steps. Alison began to cry. Running down the path, Binny caught up with Lucy at the hedge and put desperate arms about her. She said urgently, ‘Now please, pull yourself together. Get your things, take your coat, and I’ll give you a pound note to spend.’
Smirking, Lucy re-entered the house and began to put on her flying jacket. Smothering her youngest daughter in kisses, Binny took her to the door. She nodded blindly as Alison climbed the fence.
‘You’re crying, Mummy,’ called Alison. Her mouth quivered.
‘I’m very happy, darling,’ said Binny. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’ She wiped her cheeks with her hand. ‘I’m going to have a lovely party.’ She stood there waving until Alison was let into the Evans’s.
Lucy had locked herself in the bathroom. Binny blew crumbs off the tablecloth and attended to the cushions on the sofa. She cut the end off the mutilated loaf and straightened the reproduction of The Last Supper that hung askew on the wall. Then she called gently down the hall that she would like to use the lavatory.
‘Go away,’ snarled Lucy. ‘I’m trying to have a crap.’
Binny left a pound note on the table and climbed the stairs. She walked round and round her bedroom humming fiercely. At that moment she fully understood Mrs Papastavrou, fluttering in the wind and protesting for all the world to hear.
After a time Lucy shouted that she was off now. Binny kept silent:
‘Well, come on. Give us a kiss.’
‘I certainly won’t,’ called Binny. ‘You’re far too rude.’
The door slammed violently. Instantly remorseful, Binny ran to the window and watched her daughter walk sullenly along the gutter. She looked such a little girl, aggressively scuffing the ground with the studs of her massive boots. At the same age Binny had been married and looking after a house. She rapped frantically on the pane of glass; she blew kisses. Lucy disappeared round the corner.
Binny turned and banged her hip painfully against the edge of the ping-pong table. Every week she meant to advertise it for sale in the local newspaper. It had been bought three years ago for the children; she had hoped it might keep them off the streets. Selflessly she had moved her bed and her wardrobe into the back half of the room so that there would be somewhere to put it. After six weeks of their constant bickering, turfing her personal belongings ruthlessly on to the landing to make additional space, and bringing their friends in at all hours of the day and night, sometimes even when Binny was asleep, she had forbidden them the use of the room. They didn’t seem to grasp how irritating it was for her to lie there with her face-cream on and be subjected to large unknown youths clambering under and over her bed in the pursuit of ping-pong balls. She couldn’t think where they learned such behaviour, though she suspected it was being taught in the schools. They couldn’t spell and they didn’t read and they had little respect for property. Like a vast army on the move they swarmed across the city playing gramophone records and frequenting public houses. It wasn’t that they disliked adults – they simply didn’t notice them. Devoted to their homes, it was obvious that they would never leave. The only edge they had on an earlier generation was their casual regard for animals; they didn’t pull wings off flies or throw stones at cats.
Rubbing her side, Binny was about to take off her coat when she heard a knock at the front door. Alarmed, she crept on to the landing. It could be any one of a number of people, none of them welcome – Alison deceived over the ice cream and returning in tears, the woman from No. 52 looking for her cat, the arrears collector from the television rental service? It was too early surely for the Simpsons to have arrived.
Thinking it might be Lucy come back for a cuddle, she went hopefully downstairs and opened the door.
‘Are you the cleaning woman?’ A stout black man advanced into the hall. His neck was encased in plaster of Paris.
‘No,’ said Binny.
‘I am bringing a message for you and all believing strangers, so that you may have a chance of redemption.’
‘I don’t really think I’m a believer,’ Binny said.
‘The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous,’ claimed the man, taking no notice. His own eyes were fixed on a point directly above Binny’s left shoulder. ‘His ears are open to their prayers, but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil. And who is he that will harm you if you be followers of that which is good?’
‘I’m rather busy at the moment,’ said Binny.
‘All that He asks is that you should follow Him.’
‘Still,’ protested Binny, ‘I haven’t much time.’
She was relieved to see Edward stepping out of a taxi at the kerb, holding several bottles in his arms.
‘Luke xv:7,’ preached the black man relentlessly. ‘Who are the just persons who need no repentance?’ He was watching the stairs, as if waiting for somebody to appear.
Edward came up the path. Binny thought he looked terribly attractive. She usually thought that when he came towards her unexpectedly; later it wore off. Lucy addressed him as ‘Fatso’ whenever she saw him; but really, in his dark City suit and his shirt with the pale stripe, he seemed very trim and dapper. He reminded Binny of a pre-war father come home ready for his Ovaltine – pipe in mouth, the evening newspaper under his arm. She did find him attractive, but when he went on about his roses or blew his nose like a trumpet or fell over when he stood on one trembling leg to remove his sock, she was at a loss to understand why.
‘Are you going somewhere?’ he demanded. ‘It’s gone seven, you know.’
‘This gentleman’s from the Bible,’ said Binny. ‘We were just having a little chat.’
‘Well, I should hurry it up if I were you.’ Edward pushed past them and went into the kitchen.
‘Now that your man’s home,’ the black man decided, ‘I’d best be going. He’ll want his tea.’ He told her he’d leave a copy of his magazine and she ought to look at the questions at the back. Possibly when he called next week she’d have answered a few of them.
‘I shouldn’t count on it,’ said Binny, stung at the speed with which he was prepared to be on his way now that ‘her’ man had returned. He hadn’t minded wasting her time; it hadn’t occurred to him that she too might have been wanting her tea.
Edward poured her out a drink before she went upstairs to do her face. He congratulated her on the table – he admired the flowers in the centre. He forbore to mention that the vase could do with a wash.
‘Food smells good,’ he said, anxious to be appreciative.
‘There’s nothing cooking yet,’ she said. ‘It isn’t time.’
He sat her on his lap and, relinquishing his pipe, kissed her. She couldn’t respond wholeheartedly because of her headscarf. She felt faded and work-worn.
He said huskily, ‘Are the children gone?’
She nodded.
‘Can’t we go upstairs?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not in the mood. Lucy was awful.’
‘I’ve had the devil of a day,’ said Edward. ‘One thing after another.’
‘She made Alison cry.’
‘The telephone never stopped ringing.’
‘I feel odd,’ she confided. ‘That man telling me there was nothing to fear – and earlier on when I was out shopping people kept waving.’
Edward attempted to push his hand inside the front of her coat but it was tightly buttoned.
‘Why
my
door?’ she asked.
‘I’d
knock on your door,’ Edward said urgently. ‘Any time.’
‘You’ve been drinking,’ said Binny. She suddenly remembered the taxi drawing into the kerb and felt resentful. He never came in his car in case somebody recognised the number plate and told his wife. ‘I can’t imagine why you think you’ve had the devil of a day. What with your eight-course lunches and visits to the pub—’
‘Three,’ he corrected.
‘Nobody cooked
my
lunch. And look at the way that man ran off because he thought it was time for your tea. Talk about the chosen people of this world—’
‘He didn’t look chosen to me,’ said Edward. ‘Somebody obviously tried to break his neck.’
He wanted Binny to get into the bath so that he could scrub her back. She said she’d already bathed, and he said why didn’t he get in the bath then and she could wash his back.
‘I’m not having you wallowing and snorting in my clean bath,’ she told him, and went upstairs to take off her coat and scarf.
She stood in the cramped bedroom and combed her hair. She felt crushed, flattened in some way. It was Edward’s fault, coming in a taxi like that and not wanting to know about Lucy being rude. He always slid away when she mentioned the children. Of course his own son was too busy learning Latin and Greek and generally behaving like Little Lord Fauntleroy to cause him a moment’s trouble. Why, she wondered, was Edward always trying to get her into soapy water? It must have some connection with his days at boarding school; he probably thought it more hygienic to do it in the bath.
She didn’t know why she felt so despairing inside. All the big issues were over and done with – it wasn’t likely now that she’d get pregnant and even if she did, nobody, not even her mother, was going to tell her off. She didn’t have any financial problems, she didn’t hanker after new carpets. She didn’t hanker after anything – certainly not Edward with a block of soap in one hand and that pipe spilling ash down her spine.
She was compelled suddenly to stand very still. She felt like an animal in long grass scenting smoke on the wind. She saw her reflection in the dressing-table mirror; she was holding a green comb to her head and staring fixedly at the glass. It had been the same this morning when she was out with Alma; only then there had been so much noise, so many faces with insinuating smiles – voices calling her name. Was it because she’d sent Lucy away without kissing her? Was Gregory lying battered by football hooligans on the floor of a tube train to Clapham? With the children gone, the whole house was heavy with silence.
It was Edward, she decided, who was upsetting her. He lived too much in the past; all that rubbish about his dormitory and the shadows on the playing fields. He evaded her completely. He should be dragged, by that schoolboy lock of hair falling over one nostalgic eye, into the present. She was fed up with his fumblings on the sofa, as if it was still those days before the war when mothers kept coming in and out with trays of tea and courting was a furtive thing. Why couldn’t he pretend that he longed to leave his wife, so that she in return could pretend she wished he would? He ought to forget the ins and outs of capital transfer tax, and the particular type of pest that plagued his fruit bushes, and discuss what he did with Helen at night when she’d come back from all those meetings. They could have a row over it and be moved to tears, and then they both might feel something, some emotion that would nudge them closer to one another. Obviously he did do something with Helen. He was far too uncomplicated a man to abstain when there was a body lying next to him in bed, and apart from his roses it wasn’t as if he had any hobbies to take his mind off sex. Old Simpson was quite right to disapprove of his carryings on. What Edward should do, she told herself, as though discussing somebody she had never met, was to park his car actually outside the house. In full view. After he made love he should lie there dozing and not trot into the darkness desperate for a taxi. Though he removed his socks and even put down his pipe during the act, he could not bring himself to unbuckle the watch from his wrist. Sometimes, when he lay exhausted on top of Binny, a little to one side with his cheek resting on his arm, she knew he was looking squint-eyed at the time.
She put away her comb and brushed the shoulders of her dress. That was the worst of black, it showed the slightest speck of dust; by the time she’d cooked the dinner she’d be spotted with grease. Except for the end of that french loaf, Lucy probably wouldn’t have a bite of food until tomorrow morning. It was madness putting complete strangers before one’s own flesh and blood. She had enough to do fighting hormone losses and hot flushes and depressions that dropped out of nowhere, without being tormented by guilt.
Belligerently she flung down the clothes-brush and returned to Edward, who was seated at the table with the evening newspaper spread before him.
‘I think I should start cooking,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. It was, he realised, ten minutes to eight. ‘Can I help?’
But he didn’t move. He and Binny had another glass of wine.
She was sure the Simpsons were late. She kept asking the time, but Edward answered casually, saying, ‘What? Oh, the time . . . Jolly early if you ask me.’ It wouldn’t do to get her into a state.
After half an hour Binny said the chops were ruined. Greatly alarmed, he rose to his feet.
‘Well, almost,’ she amended. ‘What shall I do with them?’
He didn’t know what to advise. Helen produced perfectly edible meals in an effortless way, and he was a bit thrown by the atmosphere of panic generated by Binny at the stove.
‘Well, look at them,’ Binny shouted, bringing the grilling tray to the table and thrusting the chops under his nose.