A Day Off Page 2

  In the street the air was dry and hot and the fumes of oil, petrol and gaspers were almost visible. As she crossed Leicester Square Garden a child ran sharply against her knees and fell over. She picked it up, dusted it, and was trying to find a cachou in her bag when the mother snatched it up. “Oh, keep your brat,” she muttered, but she felt mildly sorry that the child had missed its treat. She popped the cachou in her mouth.

  The train was nearly empty. Leaning back in one of the cross-seats she pretended that she was going down to Richmond on the invitation of a friend. What friend? Well, it could be a man of about forty, like the man in that book, she couldn’t recall the name, whose wife never understood him, though he was well-off and had married her when he was too young to know his own mind. She half closed her eyes against the sun (they were in the open now) and to imagine it better. At first he was reserved, pleased to be with her but not yielding himself to the strong fascination. Then one day she called at his city office to ask his advice about her investments (naturally he had told her how to make money by buying something that was going up and selling it again in the nick of time), and when she had thanked him he looked at her with a strange smile and said quietly, You know I love you of course. And she said, Yes, just as quietly, because she would never make the mistake of raising her voice at a man with his disposition and refinement, Yes I know. He closed his eyes. I suppose you don’t feel anything for me. She was tense and composed. I made excuses to come and see you because I—love you. He came round his desk to her and took her in his arms. When he kissed her it was like the first time, only better, because she knew what to do. He let her go quickly and stepped back. His face was very stern and what was it, distorted. (She distorted her own, acting the word.) He looked at her and folded his arms. What is going to become of us, he sighed. That was a thing to ask her. I don’t know, she said, I’ll go. Quickly, before he could speak, she had gone. Well, she was travelling down now to his house, because of course she knew his wife, who was civil to her though of course not liking her, afraid of her looks and her strange power over men. After dinner another guest in the house would suggest a moonlight drive. Off they go, he, she, and the other (featureless) woman. The hedges flow past like pale water. They have driven a long way when the car breaks down and leaving it they walk through the forest to a small inn. She saw it with great clearness : it was The Three Pigeons from past Staveley. Their rooms were small and bare. She noticed at once that the wash-stand in her room only half concealed the door leading to his. He saw it too. We didn’t plan this—it happened. Very well. When she left the stuffy parlour to go up to her room his hand brushed the side of hers.

  Here a woman stumbled in and sat down facing her in the narrow place formed by their two seats. She carried a bag bursting with packages. A strong smell of onions came from the bag and flowed through the carriage.

  Where was I? She closed her eyes and settled back easily into the familiar excitement. She was waiting all ready for him when he came (having nipped out to the village general store and post-office and bought a jar of cold cream and the only bottle of Quelques Fleurs they had) and they were together all that night. The train lurched, the train stopped, and went on again with a cripple who got in at Baron’s Court and three unemployed men who had heard that there were jobs to be had in the motor works at Gunnersbury. The oniony woman got out but the smell of onions stayed.

  None of these events were as real to the woman as her thoughts. An imbecile smile crossed her face. She knew nothing about it, given up to the sensual pleasure she was enacting. When it was over, when her mind, limp and spent like an animal after a hard chase, turned to stare at the other people in the carriage, she did not know which station they were approaching. It might be Richmond. Smoothing back her hair and giving a set to the front of her jacket she looked nervously through the window. A middle-aged gentleman had moved into the seat left empty by the onion woman. She spoke to him, and such is the idiot simplicity of our bodies, she could not help giving her words the form of a smiling invitation, though all she said was: “Where are we?”

  “Kew,” he replied.

  She leaned back again, relieved, and then thought that a woman at the other side of the carriage was looking at her disdainfully. She sat up, adjusted her belt, pointed her right shoe (the left had a dark stain across the top), and assumed the glassy stare proper to an attractive woman whose butler held the door open for her to step out into Portland Place, leaving behind her the black and white paved hall, the plants, the stags’ heads—she had seen it all, that day trudging past in the cold, in the bitter rain, when the door opened and she saw. Through the warmth in the carriage she felt that cold, that rain. It was as if she carried about with her everywhere the horror of some winter when, for all anybody cared, for all the women who lived warm and snug in houses in Portland Place cared, she might perish of cold in her lonely room. But she must not think such things. She tilted her hat back cleverly and smiled in an amused absent way, looking directly at the woman opposite, but as though she were, as a woman, scarcely worth the trouble of noticing.

  The middle-aged gentleman had glanced at her when she smiled. She now began to watch him from the corner of her eye and to play carelessly with her beads. The tips of her gloves were all screwed and wrinkled. Still, he’s not looking at them, she thought. He’s looking at me, wondering which part of Richmond I live in and whether we shall ever meet. There’s no doubt he’s keen. I can always tell. Something in the eyes. The train slowed into Richmond, stopped, and she got out, followed by the middle-aged gentleman. She was aware of him walking a few yards behind her in the sunny street. She hesitated, half turned as if meaning to cross the road, walked on, with a smile and a swift glance behind her, the ends of her scarf blowing out as she walked, like an invitation, like beckoning arms. She felt young and gay. ‘The handsome reckless young woman drew all eyes.’ All at once, as she was passing the shop where they sell the maids of honour, she felt certain that he had gone; and she swung completely round to look. He was nowhere in sight. Some side street had swallowed him and he had gone without a word or a sign. Her eyelids sank slowly once. She turned; thinking, Oh well. Her foot dragged a little scraping the pavement as she turned. There’s as good fish in the sea, isn’t there? This sort of thing had happened to her before. She went on, slowly, a little confused now by the heat and the morning brightness. Still, it was really very nice, and reminded her of some seaside town—Ramsgate?—the tea-shops, and the young rosy women in thin dresses, and then the air, too, filled, wherever she looked, with points of light that might have been flung off, flung high in the air, by the many-waved sea.

  Farther up the hill the street was less crowded and the pavement narrower. Two women, walking together, came towards her. They filled the breadth of the pavement. At once she was on the defensive, thinking that they would expect her to give way to them—and I won’t, she said, I won’t step off the flags into the gutter for anyone, man or woman, I’m as good as anyone. She adopted a harsh expression, prepared to return rudeness by rudeness, and when she came close to the women she looked them full in the face with an insolent smile. The one walking on the outside fell back, to make room. She stood plump in the path of the other, who was compelled to walk round her. This little triumph put her in a good humour with herself and when she reached the top of the hill and could sink, thankfully, on a wooden bench, she felt that she had adjusted the score against her by at least one heavy stroke on the right side.

  It was a picture up here, really—but she had made out to see the Park that morning, and see it she would, so in a few minutes she started up : and stepped through the wide gates and onto the turf feeling that she could do almost anything since she had, without encouragement, without even a friend to walk with her and sustain her, reached Richmond Park from a bed-sitting-room off the Tottenham Court Road, on the warmest day of the year, and with less than ten shillings between her and—nothing.

  At first, when she had found a good pla
ce—she could see the road and the cars gliding along, and lean back against the roots of the tree—she felt a vague discomfort. As if it were somehow quite wrong that she should be sitting here, her legs stretched out wide apart, for the sake of coolness, her suede bag with the initial lying between them where she could keep her hand on it supposing she dropped off for a minute—the wild idea crossed her mind that she ought to undress and hide her clothes, gloves, bag, high-heeled shoes and all, in the bracken and let the sun do its worst. A sight I should look sitting up here in my skin, she thought, abashed. I’m too fleshy —and gone—here and here—and my feet swelled the way they are, I suppose with the heat and this walking, and of course I’m not a child, not a girl. I was thin enough once but you can’t stay looking like that all your life, can you? Regret moved in her, gentle, inescapable, but for what she scarcely now knew.

  The sun fell through the leaves in heavy yellow drops, splashing the mould, the grey roots of the trees, her legs and arms. Everything was quiet, not even a car hummed along the road far below her. In this stillness she could hear after a time the creaking of stems when an insect scuttled through them, and the cries, thin and far-off, of children on the farther edge of the trees. She dozed a little and woke in a few minutes with a heavy start, saying to herself: “I can’t think.”

  For a moment she stared vacantly, trying to remember what it was she could not think. But at once she knew. She made an effort to thrust it from her but it came on, hovering between her and the bright scene like a cloud, like the shadow of a cloud moving swiftly, inexorably, across the side of a hill. Warmth and the light were both diminished by it.

  If George—she picked up her gloves and began to smooth the fingers—if George did not come on Saturday, or write, sending money; she was done for. Nothing for it then but to try for a job, and that failing her—not acknowledged by her yet, the notion of failure had grown into a conviction, which was only waiting its moment to pounce on her from some dark alley of her mind. She was forty-six and getting stout.

  A squirrel leaping up the tree behind her made her jump. She pressed her hand to her heart.

  “Well! What next, I wonder?”

  She did not know that she had said anything. She went on thinking, her poor head, never to be relied on since the days when she could not remember the capitals of Northern Europe (as if their names were going to make any difference or be of the least use to her then or ever) as helpless and baffled as a calf at a gate. In some place older, bleaker than the known places of her mind, dark, and washed by a dark tide, she knew more than she said. Knew indeed everything that could happen to women, in this world—and it was not much help to think about the next, not now. It’s a fact I’m getting too old, she cried in the darkness. And as if the tide moving sluggishly about her had flung them up she saw clearly a coat trimmed with fur, and a child’s shoe. But she had never had a child. I’ve always been respectable, she thought angrily. Not one man here and another there, like a common woman : I’ve kept myself to myself. Many an evening when she was alone, no chance of him coming, she could have had company and men had spoken to her in the streets, one man in particular she remembered, four years ago in the empty street at the back of Regent Street, because he had seemed a well-spoken merry fellow, and she had been feeling low that evening, too—but no, she had walked on, disregarding him and his quiet friendly voice and gone home and cried, and thought of telling George and then not told him. You never know with men.

  Her anger against George increased. Five years it was he had come regularly, once a week, usually on Saturday, except during the time when he was working in Manchester and even from there he had never forgotten to post on her weekly money, though for all he knew she might have been having men on all that time. But he did know. He knows he can trust me, she thought bitterly; he knows I won’t go back on a friend. I’ll stick to one man just as long as he sticks to me and give others the go-by, now and forever amen.

  (The lean stooping figure of George’s predecessor darkened her mind, as a man walking past a window darkens with his shadow the unentered room.)

  Her fingers pressed on the dry earth, reckoning the time since he had written. Three, no. Four weeks. He had come, earlier than usual, and seated himself on the bed while she dressed, elbow on his knee, a familiar gesture. She felt his glance on her as she moved between glass and cupboard, doing up her hair, her shoes, whatever it was. When she asked him to hook her skirt over he did it silently, bending under her lifted arm, afterwards without the friendly smack she expected, and then when she was ready and took his arm, he stood stock still in the door, looking at the room as if he had forgotten something. She asked him, What’s the matter with you? and Nothing, he said, nothing, I was just thinking. He walked in front of her down the unlighted stairs, so familiar to her that they were only an extension of her room. As she pulled the hall door to after her he said that the whole house smelled of dust and females. But it was not what he said, it was his face. She felt anger squeezing her across her throat.

  But she had nothing to reproach herself with. Provoked as she was she had kept her temper and taken his arm again, and coaxed him. And before long he was joking and pinching her thigh as if nothing had happened. But something had happened that evening—though for the life of her she couldn’t tell what it was. But instead of coming back with her as usual, he made an excuse, something she didn’t catch, and left her gaping after him in Tottenham Court Road long after he’d ducked like that into the Underground. She couldn’t take it in.

  Since then, nothing. Not a sign.

  Her hand moved blindly, feeling for something, some support. There was nothing. But a door flew open in her mind, letting through the rough noise of a gramophone. He left her behind before. She stared at the road, at the lightly waving trees, at her hand clasping the suede bag, and said angrily, Nothing’s going to happen, not to you, not this time, dearie. Fear moved horribly in her, fold gliding over dry cold fold. But for what had happened, and might happen to her, she had no more tragic expression than the idiot stuttering of the gramophone.

  E-e-e ee-yi eeyor

  It seemed to her that she had never been left by herself like this in her life. Even when she was alone in it she did not feel that her room was empty. Perpetually there were sounds in the street, children, dogs quarrelling, a sudden taxi, people shouting to each other outside The Swan after closing time—their loud friendly voices died away with the shuffle of their feet on the flags. See you Monday. He didn’t ‘alf cut up rough he didn’t. Well goonight. Goonight ol’ girl. Goonight. In the mornings she padded about the room in a kimono that it was all right to wear when she was alone, and did odd jobs or cooked herself something over the gas ring with the fullness of her nightgown tucked safely between her legs. It was a chance, too, to let that cream soak into her face. There were a dozen things that needed doing, if she had the time and the patience to do them. Last Friday she had emptied out the contents of a drawer onto the bed, looking for the little bottle of brown cascara tablets, and she was folding the things back into it when she saw the time and it was just time to tear her clothes on and round to May’s, not to be late for the funeral—she’d given to the wreath when she was asked, a waste—so everything had to be jumbled back anyhow. The bottle was there all right.

  Suddenly the surface of her life split across and its days poured out in an untidy crumpled heap, like clothes emptied from a drawer. She could not tell one from the other. All she knew was that something terrible had happened, something she couldn’t have prevented—(she thought confusedly, I might of done something, kept the room cleaner and tidier, I could of taken a course in book-keeping at that college, they say they guarantee a good post, nothing grand I daresay but better than nothing)—and now the walls of her room were giving way, dissolving, before her eyes. She pulled at her skirt. It was like an earthquake, like the scene at the cinema, with the woman’s arm sticking from a pile of bricks. They saw a man run up and tug at the fingers. “He’s
pulling her wedding-ring off,” her friend said. That was awful, awful. If the rings were tight and stuck, they sliced them, sliced the fingers off, he meant.

  Panic swept through her, one wave meeting the next in a fume of spray, of fear, but without forcing her to cry out. She sat still clasping both hands over her bag, dumb, as though she had grown to the earth. But all the time she felt herself falling, falling, and the other things fell cruelly on top of her, the trees, the walls of houses, people, the manager of The Swan, waiters, broken plates. She was caught, squeezed—but she could not die. She would live a long time, because she was strong and had never been ill. And then she was afraid of dying. So that unless she could be instantly painlessly done away with she was bound to go on trying to live.

  She saw the street differently. To step out into it from her over-habited room had been an adventure, a release (she could not explain it) of all her senses. The room now was her refuge. It was to it she belonged; to the faded wallpaper; the cupboard; the cracks in the ceiling; the smells, of old rotten wood, clothes, the worn mats. In silence she rocked and quivered, mad with terror at the thought of leaving it. And to go where?

  “But it’s all his fault,” she cried.

  Still, she was alive. She was sitting, warmed and comfortable (but for the hardness of the ground), in Richmond Park. The awful fear drew back, slowly, leaving behind it small pools over which she could skip. She was like that, hated to think of disagreeable things, to be upset and moody. So little contented her. I’ve been a fool really, she thought. Resentment flowed smoothly over her mind, hardening into a crust on which she could move in safety.

  I’ve been too soft, she repeated, surprised, now that her eyes were opened, by her forbearing conduct for so many years, too many, her whole life. Mending over old petticoats to save their money, she cried—even if they were grateful for it which they never will be as like as not they only spend it on some other woman not you—and then begging him to get cheap seats at the cinema always, and that day when he wanted me to answer should he get me a dress at Marshall’s and I said No, I said no they’ll shake your waistcoat to find your last shilling, I know two of that I laughed, I’ll go to a woman I know in one room (you can call it a room) in Herbrand Street and she’ll run me up one for a quarter their figure. Of course I ought to have stung him for the money for the other place and put the half of it by. I’m too honourable.