The Likes of Us (46 page)

‘I don't know. But I've got nothing to lose now, so I thought I'd chance it.'

She shook her head as he offered cigarettes.

‘What was she like?'

He shrugged. ‘She was nobody.'

‘Was she a whore?'

‘Hell fire, no! She was a divorced woman. She was a bit lonely and willing and, well, I was tempted.'

‘What was so special about it?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Have I ever refused you?'

‘No.'

‘So what did you want from her that you weren't getting at home?'

‘I don't know. Ask other fellers; they might explain better than me.'

‘I'm not interested in other fellers. I'm asking you.'

‘Doreen, love, look, listen.'

‘I'm doing both.'

‘Look, if a marriage is going to break down as easy as that, it's about time people stopped getting married.'

‘A lot of people are. I only wish I'd been one of 'em.'

‘I know I can't expect you to take me back straight away...'

‘If at all.'

‘...but I have said I'm sorry. I've come here tonight, cap in hand, to try to save our marriage.'

‘You'd better tell me how you intend to do it.'

‘Well, like I say, I can't expect us to pick up now as if nothing'd happened, so what I thought was if we took a bit of time over it and saw each other for a while without living together, we might get things sorted out.' She reached for the glass in front of her, lifted it, then put it down again without drinking. ‘I mean, we could find out how we felt about it after two or three months, or maybe six. P'raps it'd take a year. I don't know, but I'm willing to wait.'

‘What do you mean, see each other?'

‘I mean we'd be separated, but I'd come and take you out.' He got up and crossed to sit beside her. She moved along the sofa to leave space between them. ‘I don't like to think of not seeing you at all, but I do see 'at you'll need time to get over it and make your mind up whether you want me to come back for good.'

‘Where are you living now?' she asked after a moment.

‘I'm using Mick Hollins's spare bedroom. His wife's a nice woman. I'm comfortable enough for the time being. I mean, I'm hoping it won't be forever.'

‘I thought you might have moved in with her.'

‘Hell, no!'

‘I wish it had never happened.'

‘So do I, love. But one mistake. We can't let it spoil everything.' He took her hand and slid his fingers between hers as she instinctively made to pull away. ‘What do you say? Where's the harm in giving it a try?' He chuckled and squeezed. ‘We can reckon I'm on probation.'

‘You can talk,' she said. ‘I'll give you that.'

‘Somebody's got to talk for both of us,' he said, ‘or else that pride of yours'll finish us for good.'

‘I call it self-respect.'

‘Whatever you call it, you can carry it too far.' He looked at his watch and went to fetch his glass. ‘What time are you going out?' he asked when he was beside her again.

‘Soon.'

‘Is it something important?'

‘Why?'

‘Chuck it and come out with me. I've missed you.'

‘You should have thought of that before.'

‘I'm thinking about it now.' He pulled her gently back till their heads were resting a foot apart. ‘What do you say?'

‘I suppose I can be late.'

‘Is nobody calling for you?'

‘No. It's some women I meet round at the pub, after bingo.'

‘You've never taken up bingo,' he said. ‘Not you?'

‘No, I meet them after they've been.'

‘Well, we could go to another pub and then I could drop you off there for the last half-hour.'

‘I don't want them seeing us together, thinking I've turned soft.'

‘All right. I can understand that. Till you know your own mind. So let's just stop here and talk a bit more.' He moved his face towards hers. ‘Can you manage a kiss on it?'

‘You didn't say that was part of the bargain.'

‘I didn't think it was till I got you near me. But, you see, I've missed you and there's no reason why we...'

He sat up, twisting in his seat. He took a drink, put down his glass, then hunched forward, his arms on his knees. She waited without moving from where he had left her.

‘Well, I don't know whether it'll work or not, but we are married, even if we shan't be living together, and all I know is I don't want to be tempted to go drinking and birding with the lads at the weekend. And I don't think you... well...'

‘What?' she said.

‘I don't think you want to live like a widder-woman either.' He shifted on the sofa and looked at her, taking her hand again, this time holding it between both of his. ‘You don't, do you? I mean, let's face it – seeing you, knowing you like I do, it's more than flesh and blood can bear.'

They went, later that evening, to two pubs, neither of them where she was due to meet her friends. Des chose carefully, knowing the kind of place she liked – or tolerated – and the kind she liked to say she wouldn't be found dead in. He made her laugh a couple of times and for a moment then she could almost forget how he had let her down. For a moment, until her face clouded again and she toyed pensively with her glass while he sustained the conversation single-handed and kept a careful watch on every shift of her mood from the corner of his eye.

He left her a little after one. She awoke from a doze to find him dressing by the bedside. He leaned over to kiss her as he heard her move.

‘I'd like to stop till morning,' he said. ‘But a bargain's a bargain. Thanks for everything, and I'll be seeing you.'

She had been cold in bed ever since he had left. Now, as she heard the house door shut quietly behind him, she stretched her slack limbs into each warmed corner then, spreadeagled, fell into a deep sleep.

The clack of the letterbox woke her again. She had not slept so soundly for some while. Her body felt drugged with satisfaction. She was surprised that he had gone without argument and thought that she would not, as she'd felt then, have had the will to deny him had he insisted on staying. But this was how it should be. She would call the tune now, until she was sure he was sufficiently contrite and she could take him back. There was, as he had said, plenty of time to consider that. In the meantime, she wished there were someone to bring her a cup of tea.

Des had the Hollinses' youngest on his knee and was helping her with her reading. Bess Hollins, cooking and laying the table for the evening meal, watched them with that slow smile which lingered perpetually, deep in the jet-like lustre of her eyes. It was of a piece with her unhurried movements and her soft Devon voice. She was just beginning to show with her third child.

‘I'm sure Uncle Des has had enough of that for now, Claire.'

‘Nay, she's right where she is for a minute or two.'

‘You're good with them. You should have a family of your own.'

‘Not much chance of that, is there, with me placed as I am just now? Anyway, I've got a ready-made family here. What more could a chap want?'

‘You're comfortable, are you?'

‘As snug as a bug in a rug,' Des said. He squeezed the child. ‘I bet you've never heard that one afore, young Claire – “as snug as a bug in a rug”. Eh?'

‘He is an' all,' Hollins said. He was kneeling on the floor near the sink, with parts of the vacuum cleaner laid out on a sheet of newspaper.

‘But look,' Des said, ‘I've been meaning to say. I'm taking a lot for granted. I don't want to get under anybody's feet. The minute you feel I'm a bother you've only to say the word.'

‘Oh, no,' Bess said. ‘Mick and I had a talk about that. You're no trouble to us. You pay your way and the children like you. You can stay as long as you like.'

‘But when number three arrives you'll mebbe be needing the room.'

‘Oh, it'll be a while before that one needs separate accommodation. And perhaps by then you'll have got your own affairs straightened out.'

‘Aye, well. As long as we know where we stand.'

‘Might you be going to see your wife tonight?'

‘I thought I might pop over later on.'

‘He's not saying which one,' Hollins said.

Bess had not heard. She wasn't meant to. It was between men. In the knowing grin that Hollins threw at him over his shoulder there was, with its
just discernible glimmer of envy, an invitation to Des to share for a moment his surely understandable glee in the situation he was so cheekily and adroitly manipulating. But Hollins could never remember that cheek was a quality Des only ever recognised in others. For all he gave his friend was that characteristic little frown which Hollins finally understood as the look of one whose cross in life is to be perpetually misjudged.

And Hollins, turning back to his repairs, thought, ‘Well, that must be it, then. That must be how it's done.'

Foreign Parts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He's doing it again. Those two girls passing the pavement table. ‘I wonder where they disappear to when they get older...' I thought nothing of it when he first brought it up, but now that he's mentioned it again and he's watching them right into the crowd, I'm bound to own to a twinge of irritation. No, it's not jealousy: just that after I've agreed to come here and we're together so far from home I don't think he should be looking at other women. Not women yet, either, which is hardly designed to let me forget my own age and the flaws I see in the mirror every day or when I catch a glimpse of myself at that certain angle in a shop window. For I only have eyes for you, dear... Was that how I imagined it, wanted it? No, come on, Cheryl; we're mature people, worldly enough to plan and take this holiday together simply for the pleasure of it. But still...

‘There seems to be a particular type of young girl here,' was what he said before. ‘They have long legs, narrow hips and full high breasts.' But then, he said, all the grown women you see gossiping in doorways and carrying shopping-bags in every town and village on the island are short-legged, stocky, wide-hipped. So where do all the young girls go? That's like another song...

‘Do you find them attractive?' I'm asking him now, careful to keep it light and neutral.

‘Oh, I'm not really drawn to dark-skinned women. Especially women who don't mature well.' That grin he's giving me before he drinks. He's got the
nicest, wickedest grin I've ever seen in a man. What drew my eye the first time I noticed him; and the way it drives out the sadness that sometimes lurks at the back of his eyes when his face is still.

I don't know what that wife he's separated from looks like, but I can make two compliments out of what he's said: me – the wrong side (if only just) of thirty – with my nearly white hair and my transparent white skin. I can't complain that I don't turn him on. ‘You almost glow in the dark,' he said when he saw me on the bed in the heat that first night. Then he was all over me while I lay there, not stopping him but not giving yet, wondering if this was what I'd foreseen at the end of all the white lies and secret planning. But we were both fagged-out from the lateness and the journey and George was over-excited, he said, at that first-ever full sight of me and too quick at the end, for which he apologised. ‘It'll be better for you next time,' though it wasn't much, though nice enough and I could see he enjoyed it so I pretended so he wouldn't feel let down.

‘It doesn't matter unless you're thinking of something permanent, does it?' Then I chide myself because he could think I'm hinting at him and me.

‘I don't follow.'

‘Whether they mature well or not.'

‘You mean chasing women at their best age? Not really my style.'

‘No.' But I don't really know. I don't really know him, come to that. He could still be living with his wife, for all I know; him on one side of London and me on the other and only ever meeting somewhere in the middle. I'm perhaps only one of a string of women he makes up to on his rounds. Except he can hardly go abroad on holiday with all of them. Perhaps I'm just his choice for this year.

The pleasure boats are filling up for trips round Grand Harbour. We've talked about going later. That sea so blue it's almost fierce and the white light that sometimes turns to pink at sunset on the stone fortresses standing on this side of the point and right round the other side. I wondered, I must confess, what kind of place we'd come to that first night, driving from the airport through the dark and nothing to see but piles of white stone all round and the pot-holed roads and the bouncing, swaying minibus that quite turned my stomach over, and me congratulating myself that I hadn't felt a tremor on the plane. But then we woke to the sun...

I love the sun: day after day of settled heat without a sign of a thunderstorm or the clouding-over you get at home. But we should be somewhere else, away from this crowded corner of the island, where the streets are narrow and stifling and here on the promenade there's exhaust fumes from the endless traffic churning by. The buses, single-deckers, such as you've not seen in England for a lot of years; George says we send old buses here to die – like elephants all go to that secret graveyard – but the Maltese do them up, painting them in that pale green livery and putting them back into service. Scores of them, you can see, outside the main gate at Valletta. Adaptable, the Maltese, George says. They've learned to be. If everybody at home worked as hard, the country wouldn't be in the mess it is in. Cheap and frequent, too, the buses. Perhaps we should have gone by bus and not bothered hiring the car. As it is, the island being so small, we've seen it all in the first few days, and now... No, we're not bored and you do want to relax on a holiday and not spend all your time dashing from place to place; but it does mean we're thrown more on each other.

Head back, the sun on my face, as George goes inside the bar for more drinks. I must be careful.

It's fiercer than I'm used to and I go lobster-pink before I brown. What was George saying about nude pin-ups of girls who've been sunbathing in bikinis? They're brown everywhere except the intimate parts and they look as if they've got leprosy in their breasts. Well, he'll have to put up with that, since there's nowhere on this island where you can take all your clothes off. They're devout Catholics here and the women keep covered, which was why when men first looked at me, like those two locals are doing from the table along the pavement, I thought I was perhaps showing a hint of nipple or a too natural bustline without my bra. Until I realised it's my colouring that's the chief novelty. They think I can't see them stripping me where I sit. But I can, and I don't mind as long as I've got my sunglasses to protect me. Maltese men are not as brazen as I've heard some Spaniards and Italians can be, so there's no feeling of danger in it. In times gone by, I suppose, I could have been some rich man's favourite and lived in one of those big secret houses in Valletta or Mdina, brought out occasionally to be shown off to his friends, and nothing to do but pamper my body, keep my skin white and not get fat. At home, men hardly look at me twice. I'm just another face in the crowd.

Would I have taken to that kind of life, I wonder? Being kept as a favourite, I mean. I do like men. I like having them around to look after things, make arrangements, take me places. Funny to think I'd have been married to Ronnie now, and perhaps two or three kiddies growing up, if he hadn't got that rare disease they said rats carry. Swimming in that flooded quarry – he loved his swimming, Ronnie did; how he'd have loved all this clean blue water here – when he cuts his foot on a rock and in only a few days he's dead. Of course, I was shocked and I cried and everybody felt sorry for me as well as him, with the date already fixed and the bridesmaids' dresses made. I couldn't tell them – I never told anybody – when I realised a few months later I'd never really loved him, not as I always think people who marry ought to love each other, and I felt relieved that I'd not gone through with it and found out too late. Though perhaps I wouldn't have found out. Perhaps I should have grown to love him, settled into married life like all the rest, made the best of it. That's living for most people, after all, isn't it?

And as there's been nobody special since, people who remember think I've never got over him, that I must be comparing every eligible man with him and finding them lacking. Well, they are, or else it must be me, because it's never got as far as that since then. Oh, there have been men, and one or two adventures. That time with Mark, when he took me up to Leeds with him because he needed secretarial help, and after dinner and a nightcap he came to my room in his dressing-gown and pyjamas. I'm not on the pill, I told him, and it's the wrong time in the month and I wouldn't risk it like that anyway. And if he didn't have contraceptives in his pocket, ready. I asked him, because I was put out, what had made him think I was such a sure thing, and he said he hadn't been sure at all but it would have been stupid to find I was willing and lose the chance because he hadn't taken precautions in advance. When he smiled, he made me laugh with his little-boy-caught-in-the-jam expression, and I had to admit the sense in what he said. It was nice, too. He was slow and gentle. Though it did cross my mind to wonder afterwards, when there wasn't another time, whether it wasn't consideration that had held him back, but rather when it came to it I wasn't all he'd hoped. But I'm liable to do myself down like that and he was awfully busy, always dashing here and there, and it wasn't long before I left for this other job.

George brought his precautions with him, this being a Catholic country and him not wanting the embarrassment of going into a shop and asking, let alone running the risk of being refused. Imagine finding ourselves here, on our own, with a room and a bed for the first time and not being able to do what we came for. Well, partly what we came for. I caught sight of the box when his case was open. Good lord, I thought, taking in the size of it, he can't be expecting it twice every day. But no, he was a bit eager the first couple of nights, then last night he just tucked his arm round me and went to sleep after a kiss. Trust me to lie there then, wanting him to wake up and take me. I nearly got hold of him in the night to bring him on, but I thought better not. If it happens that he can't till he's rested a day or two, it'll really embarrass him. After all, he's not a young man any more. Not an old man, by any means, but over forty. And men have their pride in these matters.

He's a long time coming with those drinks. He'll have got chatting to the barman. Likes to get to know the natives, he always says. I hope those two men don't start thinking I'm on my own and waiting to be picked up. No, I'm obviously on holiday and waiting for someone. They're perhaps hoping it's another woman. I wonder what kind of time two women could have here, if they were that way inclined. Now, I didn't like that. Not the way that one looked then spoke to his friend and they both laughed. I'm not showing anything, am I? So what's the joke?

The joke is, it isn't me they're looking at now, it's this tall girl coming towards us. Blonde. Swedish or German, I'd guess. Nearly six foot, golden brown everywhere you can see. Straight, as though she's carrying a basket on her head, shoulders back, bosom out, free but firm inside her white blouse, and sauntering, sauntering for all the world as if she's on a beach, alone and miles from anywhere. Style. Oh, God, they don't half make you feel small and timid and provincial.

Come on, George, you're missing this one. She's not dark-skinned and she won't disappear as she grows older. She'll still have most of it when she's fifty. No, don't come out till she's gone, even though I want to spend a penny now and I daren't leave the table empty because there isn't another one free.

I'll write that card to my mother. She'll expect more than just the one to say I arrived safely. We arrived. Maureen and I. ‘I've never heard you talk about Maureen, have I?' she said, because even though the office is miles away and she's never likely to meet any of them I somehow couldn't use any of their names. ‘What's the matter with Mavis this year?' ‘Oh, she's got a feller.' Which she hasn't. She wanted us to go away together this year like last. ‘A friend who lives nearby,' I told Mavis. ‘Maureen.' My mother doesn't know that George exists, though Mavis does of course, because him coming into the office every three or four weeks is how I met him. And then when he first asked me out it was when we were alone, naturally, and since he has no reason to tell the others his business, it was more or less left to me to tell them or say nothing. It was because I didn't know his domestic circumstances that I kept quiet. Then I went on like that. Maybe I've got a naturally secretive nature. Or I just believe in personal privacy. Anyway, I didn't feel in need of their advice about the wisdom of going out with a married man, even if he is separated. They'd naturally have thought we were having it off straight away, the minds they've got, and we weren't. We just went out for a meal every two or three weeks and, apart from a kiss or two and some touches a bit more intimate, that was it. No doubt things would have gone further faster if we'd had somewhere private to go, but we hadn't. It was hard enough finding places to park the car so that we could go as far as we did. Which was no doubt frustrating for him, though I liked him for his patience and the way he wasn't desperate to get there at all cost. Or didn't show it.

Then: ‘I'm going on holiday, Cher. Like to come with me? To Malta?' And, to make sure I didn't misunderstand: ‘We could go as a couple. The only place we'd have to show separate passports would be the airport.'

So he fixed it all. Simply booked a double room through a travel agency. We could have got a flat, which would have meant no fellow guests to size us up, but George didn't want the bother of self-catering and neither did I. Whose business is it besides ours, anyway? People do it all the time nowadays. I brought the cheap ring with me, though. George smiled but didn't rib me about it. ‘If it makes you feel easier,' he said. And I have to admit it has. It's a modern world. You don't have to live like an old maid because you're not married. All the same, you don't have to shout it from the rooftops either.

‘Here we are.'

‘You've been a long time.'

‘Did you miss me?' His grin, turning it into a compliment.

Don't nag him, Cheryl. You didn't mean to use that tone of voice. Or did you?

‘I was just wondering why it was taking so long.'