What Was Rescued Page 9

  15

  ARTHUR

  Before the completion date on my house I invited Dora up to London to meet my parents. I was embarrassed by their enthusiasm. Ever since Philip died, I had become the focus of all their aspirations, and my mum made it very plain to me on numerous occasions that I was her only hope of grandchildren. If I’m honest, though, I could not have been more pleased with the fuss they made over Dora. She was everything they could have wished for in a daughter-in-law: polite, pretty, kind and anxious to please. Before I left, my mum cornered me in the kitchen and whispered, ‘She’s the one! Don’t waste any time, now, or someone else will snatch her up!’ and she slipped her dress ring into my pocket. ‘Let her choose a new one this weekend!’

  This had been my ulterior motive in going to see them, but I realized I should have brought her sooner. I was so proud of Dora. I felt mighty and kinglike with her on my arm. My dad was clearly taken with her too, and when we left, Mum clung on to Dora’s hand with tears in her eyes. ‘It was lovely to meet you, my dear. We’ll be seeing much more of you, though, I’m sure.’

  I often remember that look my mother gave me, her eyes glistening with excitement, and I want to put my arms around her and say ‘I’m sorry’.

  I picked up the keys to my new home on the 5th of March and moved in on the 6th. It was pouring with rain, and the boxes I took out of the boot of the taxi were soggy by the time they reached the hallway. In one box I had a lamp, a few old knives and forks from Mrs Peet, my landlady, and a kettle I had bought, along with one saucepan, a frying pan and some tea. In another box were some bed linen, a blanket and a pillow, and in the third box were my books.

  After a cup of tea, I emptied the boxes, made a makeshift bed and sat down to write a list of the things that Dora and I could buy together. I still felt huge and mighty. Walking through my own house for the first time, waiting on the arrival of my own woman, a woman whose love filled me with confidence and longing and made me swell up with emotion. The certainty of Dora’s love for me was like a drug. That she could love me as she did authenticated me in some way and added to the fieriness of my love for her. All my self-doubt had ebbed away since I’d known her, and I couldn’t wait for her knock on the door and for all our tomorrows to be spent together.

  I made two trips to the shops. I returned with tins of food, milk, cereal, fruit, bread and a new pillowcase, a sponge, some cleaning products, toilet roll and a dishcloth. I paced around the house making notes on where we should start first. The priority was a bed and some chairs – and a table, of course. The curtains were a good quality and wouldn’t need replacing, but the floors were bare and in a sorry state. We would have to buy some rugs. At around midday I allowed myself a can of corned beef and sat on the floor of my dining room eating it. I could have sat there cross-legged all day making plans, but the sound of my own front doorbell interrupted me.

  Through the misted glass I could see the figure of a woman. I opened the door, elated. I hadn’t expected her until seven o’clock.

  ‘Hello, Arthur!’

  ‘Pippa?’

  ‘Just passing. Didn’t really expect to find you here, if I’m honest.’

  ‘How did you—’

  ‘Your landlady gave me your address. Hope I’m not disturbing anything.’ She raised her eyebrows mischievously. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  She glided past me and started to look around, commenting on the curtains that had been left by the previous owners. ‘Did they leave that ship in a bottle too? Lord, isn’t it ghastly?’

  ‘It’s mine, actually.’

  ‘Oh, well. I’m sure Dora will like it. She’ll probably make you some new curtains as well. Isn’t she here yet?’

  ‘It’s Friday. She has college. She’ll be along later. Where are you “passing” to?’

  She inspected my face as if she were a teacher looking for traces of insolence. ‘I’m on my way to Devon, if you must know. A house party.’

  ‘Well, since you’re here,’ I said, ‘let me show you round properly.’

  I showed her the kitchen, the narrow garden, shaking off the drab winter with a few daffodils and some yellow kerria; I showed her the bathroom with its white tiles and brand-new white towel, and I showed her the three bedrooms.

  ‘Well, the third bedroom is rather petite, but this one is fit for a king.’ She smiled her winning smile. ‘And you are something of a king, these days, aren’t you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Arthur, that you are a salaried man with your own home. It’s impressive at your age.’

  ‘You mean for a man from my class.’

  ‘I mean for a man of any class. You’ve done well.’ Then she looked me in the eyes with what seemed like tenderness. ‘I admire you.’

  ‘Would you like a quick cup of tea?’

  We sat on the dining-room floor and had tea and biscuits. Afterwards, she produced from her bag a bottle of champagne and insisted we toast the new house. We talked about this and that, and before I knew it, my watch said three o’clock.

  ‘You’d better be off or your friends will be wondering where you are. I’ll see you to the station if you like.’

  I went to use the bathroom, but when I came downstairs she had gone. All that was left was the empty champagne bottle and the teacups. Then I noticed her coat still slung over the bannister in the hallway. I found her in the bedroom, looking out of the window at the splashes of yellow flowers.

  ‘Pippa?’ She didn’t answer, and when I reached her I saw that her face was covered in tears. I said, ‘What is it?’

  She sobbed. ‘I’m so envious of Dora. She’s so lucky . . . having . . . you.’ Her voice broke up and she fell on my shoulder. I didn’t want to console her too much, for fear of how it could be construed, but she wept so copiously it was hard not to put a hand on her hair.

  ‘Please don’t cry. You must have lots of admirers.’

  ‘That’s just it. I was engaged again and once again it’s all fallen apart.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Usual thing. I found out he only wanted me for my money.’

  I held her away from me by the shoulders. ‘Listen to me, Pippa. Whatever else a man may want you for, it will never be just for your money.’

  She attempted a smile. ‘You’re so good to me!’ She hugged me very hard. I should have extricated myself, but I felt it right to console her for a few moments. She really was in a terrible state. She began weeping again. ‘Do you really think that?’ she sniffed.

  ‘Yes, I do. You’re a beautiful woman, Pippa.’

  And her lips were on mine.

  I know how it sounds, but really, she kissed me. I know that’s absolutely no excuse for what happened next, but you need to know what she was like. Her hands, they were everywhere. I was a virgin; I wasn’t prepared for that sort of thing. I mean, well, she took me by surprise. She took me by storm. That woman knew exactly what she was doing.

  The thing is, my coals had been stoked for Dora, so to speak. I was already on fire waiting for her all day. But even so . . . It was my fault. I should have found a way to stop her – and to stop myself. At the time it felt as though a ‘no’ from me would have seemed like a further rejection, like the last straw for a woman who was already down and distraught. Oh God, even as I say it, it sounds so pathetic.

  I was woken by a bell. It took me a while to find my bearings. The ceiling was alien. I was in my new house, of course. I could hear bare feet on the carpetless stairs. I pulled on my trousers and rushed out of the bedroom, only to see Pippa at the bottom of the stairs. Pippa, face flushed and sleepy, wearing a new white towel, opening the front door.

  As long as I live I shall be haunted by that look on Dora’s face. She was so bewildered and hurt. Pippa might as well have slapped a child for no reason, the incomprehension was as painful to witness. Those eyes, they took in Pippa, the towel and then me. I had always thought them pretty eyes, but I had never noticed how beautif
ully limpid they were. If Pippa’s dazzled, Dora’s at that moment could have nailed me to the wall.

  I stood there speechless on the stairs, still giddy with what I had just done with Pippa, woolly-headed with the doze that must have followed. Fleetingly, it seemed possible that this moment could be easily explained. For a split second, it was no more than Pippa turning up unheralded again, and I would tell Dora and roll my eyes and she would tell me not to trust her in future. But the thought scuttled away, chased by the devastation on Dora’s face, visible over Pippa’s naked shoulder, and by the brisk movement she made to pick up the little brown suitcase that she had set down on the front step. She turned swiftly and fled.

  I would have done the same.

  Pippa had said something overzealous like, ‘Oh, Dora! It’s you! Come on in!’ I just stood on those stairs, hating myself, hating Pippa, hating her smugness, but then, as soon as she turned around, aching to take the towel off her and hating myself for wanting her again.

  ‘You knew she was coming,’ I said, incredulous. ‘You planned it!’

  She came right up to me where I had slumped down on the stairs. She inserted a leg between my knees and dropped the towel. ‘And you loved it.’

  16

  DORA

  Over the weeks that followed, all this lovely cherry blossom puffed out over the sun-warmed pavements of Cheltenham, daffodils trumpeted along every grass verge, and the whole world seemed to be having a heartless celebration of my crushed spirit.

  He wrote me a postcard, begging to see me and explain. He said that what he had to say couldn’t be explained in a letter. No, it certainly couldn’t. He wrote me another postcard, imploring me to please give him a chance. I couldn’t think what explanation could possibly make it all right. He had known I was coming. He knew I was arriving at seven o’clock, and I was on time. I wasn’t even early. I was on time! He knew I didn’t want him to see Pippa again. He had promised that he wouldn’t. And yet there she was, all pink and tousled. And naked. And then there he was, coming down the stairs in nothing but his trousers, his pale chest covered in dark hair, and all I could think was that I had never seen him like that before. I had been seeing him for months and he had told me I was his girl and I had never seen him how she had seen him. I felt a pang of lust and grief come crashing together. I had touched his chest and put my cheek against it when we had kissed. I had felt his skin under his shirt when we petted in the sunshine. But I had never seen him naked to the waist, his braces dangling down, coming down the stairs of the house I thought we were to share together, coming up behind a woman who smiled sheepishly and whose attempt at surprise was as obnoxious as the perfume she wafted too close to me. I would have known her with my eyes closed. Since that time in the cloakroom at the Wayfarer’s Inn, I knew the smell of her.

  I couldn’t cry. I stood on the station that evening looking for trains to Newport, but I couldn’t cry. I knew he would follow me, so I hid in the ladies’ cloakroom until the train arrived, then scuttled on at the First Class end, where I knew he wouldn’t be looking. I didn’t look out to see if he was standing there on the platform. I couldn’t bear to see him. Perhaps he didn’t come after all.

  On the train I started to shake, just a little at first, and then so violently that I had to sit on my hands. It was terror that I felt then, not grief. Not yet. It began to sink in that I had lost everything, that this terrible wound could not be mended. My whole future would be different now, and I would have to rethink it. There would be no life with Arthur, no shared house, no waking up together or shopping together or children together. All that was gone. He had vanished into thin air and taken my future with him. But the woman he had betrayed me for was the worst part of it. If he had known the truth about her it would never have happened, and I was the one person who could have told him.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ A woman sitting in the opposite corner of the train compartment was studying me anxiously.

  ‘Just a bit cold. I’ll be fine, thank you.’ I realized my teeth were chattering, and she encouraged me to put on my coat.

  My parents’ house was like a warm blanket. Outside the newborn lambs were crying to their fat mothers, who replied with deep, curdled bellows. The house smelt of home: coal dust and gas and onions and carbolic soap. Our Mam wasn’t expecting me that weekend. She made a fuss of me and fetched me bread and dripping. Then I cried.

  What sort of fool was I to imagine he would want to marry a girl like me? It wasn’t as if he’d asked me or anything. But why had he hinted so strongly? I remembered us touching each other once so ravenously that it had been hard to hold back. He had made me moan with the pain of it all, but I had said that I was saving myself for the man I married, and he had whispered very slowly and deeply in my ear, ‘Well, let’s hope he bears an uncanny resemblance to me.’ It seemed cruel, and the more I thought about it, the crueller it became. There could be no explanation that would do. Supposing Pippa had just turned up. Supposing she had just turned up and asked to have a bath . . . and he had just chosen that moment to change his clothes . . . What was I thinking? She opened the door. She opened the door to our house. She had scent-marked the place. It was hers now, and she was welcome to it.

  Then I remembered what Ralph had said about her. I didn’t think she would set her sights so low – in monetary terms, at least – but if she had been desperate enough once to steal what she thought were diamonds, she might certainly feel inclined to settle for a steady, good-looking man who was doing all right for himself. A pity she hadn’t thought of someone else to steal off this time. But I knew, even then, that there’s no such thing as theft in love. No one can be taken if they don’t want to go, and Arthur had gone.

  A rumour swiftly spread around the college that I must have ‘fallen out’ with my boyfriend. I did nothing to dispel it, and nothing to enlighten anybody either. When Jenny asked me why I was so shaken, I told her a version of events that left an open door for things to work out. I didn’t mention Pippa. I said I wasn’t sure about Arthur any more and needed some time to reflect. She said she understood and would keep it under her hat.

  It’s interesting, looking back, that I didn’t tell Our Mam either. I must have thought that, against all the odds, there was some sort of hope. She cottoned on straight away, of course, as mothers do. There was only one reason for that level of grief beyond someone dying, and that was betrayal. She knew there was something going on and guessed straight away it was another girl. But even though I acknowledged it – because I needed to tell someone, and because I knew I could trust Our Mam if no one else – I gave her a safer version of it, one where another woman merely answered the door. There was no nakedness, no hint of sexual betrayal. There could have been a hundred reasons for her being there, and Our Mam must’ve tried out dozens of them on me for consolation, but I omitted the one detail that would have damned him forever in her eyes. And I knew that in so doing I was throwing a lifebuoy to hope. One day, just possibly, she might still need to approve of him.

  It must have been a couple of weeks later – maybe less – when Jenny asked me round one Friday for a musical evening at her flat. I guessed Ralph would be there, and he was.

  An exciting array of bohemian types turned up: bearded men, women with berets at a carefully jaunty angle, men and women with duffle coats and battered instrument cases. The red-headed guitar player was there again, and it was a relief to sing along to familiar happy songs, although the lump in my throat at some of the love songs took some concealing. I would need some practice, I knew, before I was back on my feet.

  Ralph did a careful job of ignoring me, after the initial ‘hello’, that is. He busied himself chatting to everyone else, and I sat in a corner on a cushion, studying the ceiling rose or the chords of the guitarist with ridiculous interest. It was a huge relief when Jenny came over to chat.

  ‘Don’t you just wish you could play something? Or perhaps you do?’

  ‘No. I gave up piano after “Three B
lind Mice”. I did have a little go on a concertina once, but that was ages ago.’

  ‘A concertina? How exotic! We’ll have to find you one.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I only knew one tune on that as well.’ We laughed at our hopelessness. ‘Thank you for inviting me.’

  ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

  I nodded. The tightness around my chest was beginning to fade, and my hands were shaking less. People talk about a broken heart, and that is where it hurts. I felt someone was squeezing my chest so hard it had been difficult to breathe freely for weeks. I thought I might explode with pain. There was nowhere to go with it. And now the music made me tap my feet, and the slow numbers gave my aching heart some curious form of balm, giving me permission to feel moved. Most of all I felt alive. I felt the fast numbers in my bones and in my blood. Smiling and laughing with Jenny, however forced, was the release my face had longed for. So I sat and smiled and tapped my feet and let myself be lulled by the music and the wine into a state so like happiness that I could nearly believe it was.

  Perhaps because I was speaking mostly to Jenny, who lived there, I didn’t really notice when people started to leave. I became slowly aware that it was later than I’d thought and that only a handful of friends and cohabitants remained. I still felt invigorated and a little disappointed that the evening was drawing to a close. The red-haired musician, whose name I learnt was Tighe, filled my glass up with wine.

  ‘If you look behind that pile of papers in the corner, you’ll find a box,’ he told me with a wink. I was fascinated and went to investigate.

  The box was instantly recognizable. That is, it was clear from its shape what it contained. Gently I slid open the fastener and lifted out a well-worn concertina. Tighe had put down his instrument and was talking to Ralph and some people who were leaving. Tentatively, I tried a note or two. No one was listening, so a tried a few more, seeing if I could capture something I thought I had forgotten. Through trial and error, I got the first few bars. Very softly I played them again. Tighe turned and looked at me. He walked over and picked up his guitar and went straight into ‘The Galway Shawl’ for me. Then he smiled. It was such a simple tune, but it made me shiver. We played it together, painfully slowly at first, then slowly with feeling.