Friday Night/Saturday Morning — Nick
‘Bloody marmalade!’ Marion said, lighting another cigarette, dropping the lighted match on the carpet.
She looked down at it in dismay. Her feet were bare. She was wearing only a dressing gown.
‘You asked me what I had been doing,’ I said, stamping out the match, leaning down to pick it up. Marion rarely smoked but the ashtray was full. Had she smoked the cigarettes because she needed them or to make a point and why did I always have to see these indirect little signals and despise her for them?
She had been downstairs when I came in. It was nearly midnight and I wanted to go to bed. There had been little sleep with Charlotte. I was tired.
‘All we ever talk about these days is Morgan-Mackie’s filthy marmalade,’ she said accusingly.
‘Well what else do you want to talk about?’ I retorted, throwing the burnt-out match to the wastebasket and missing. I got up and picked it off the carpet again, turning my back to her.
‘Oh, I don’t know, anything. Not marmalade,’ she was backing off, as usual.
‘We don’t actually talk about marmalade, anyway,’ I said, falling into the sterile pattern of our rows. ‘Never the stuff itself, you may recall but how to sell more of it.’
‘That’s just as bad,’ she said, lamely.
I turned round and looked at her, sitting on the edge of the settee, her knees tight together, her shoulders miserably hunched into her neck, the cigarette quivery between her fingers. My gaze went beyond her. A crack had appeared in the wall. The builder would have to come back. That was in the contract, filling in the cracks.
‘I don’t know why you bothered to wait up if everything I say is so boring,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry, Nick. Really,’ she said in her pleading tone. ‘We’d better go to bed. It’s late.’
‘Why do you apologize? Why do you always apologize?’ I heard myself rounding on her.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.’
‘There you go again. Can’t you let me do the sorry bit just once in a while?’
‘I’m sor …’ she stopped herself.
I was bullying her. It had to stop. Pointless. The whole thing was crazy.
I crouched down in front of her. ‘Marion.’
She lifted her head a little and blinked at me. Her eyes were red and puffy, but I had to go on. There was never going to be a good time to tell her.
‘There’s someone else. I spent last night with someone else, I’m sorry.’
At first she was calm. There was a pause, she took another puff from her cigarette.
‘Is it serious? I mean, are you saying that you want a divorce?’ Her voice was unnaturally even, almost a monotone.
‘I suppose so,’ I said, getting up and turning away from her again. ‘Do you?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve been expecting something like this but …’ She trailed off and then said: ‘I always thought that you’d want to leave me one day.’
‘Don’t you want to know who it is?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I know. I’ve seen her. She doesn’t look your type. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry.’
Intuitive. Marion was uncannily so. It was one of her greatest assets and weapons.
‘How did you know? Who told you?’ I demanded.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes, I think it does. Who was it?’
‘I’d rather not say. I’m sorry.’
‘For Christ’s sake!’
She started to cry.
‘Please. You’re right, it doesn’t really make any difference who it was. Don’t get upset.’
‘Don’t get upset!’ she yelled, through sobbing and nose-blowing. ‘Don’t get upset! You bastard!’
She leapt up and threw herself at me, punching her fist hard into my arm.
‘Stop it. Don’t be silly,’ I said, trying to push her away.
‘I hate you,’ she yelled. ‘You’ve ruined my life. You’ve ruined everything.’ She seemed on the verge of hysteria. I had never seen her show such emotion before; it was raw and hideous and I felt ashamed for having caused it.
She hit out at me again but this time when I pushed her away she fell back on the settee, sniffing hard and gasping for breath.
‘Can’t you wait a bit?’ she asked, the outburst seemingly over. ‘Wait and see whether this is what you really want.’
‘That doesn’t sound very fair to you,’ I said.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind,’ she pleaded.
‘It’s no good,’ I said, going to her, crouching down in front of her again. ‘It’s too late. What’s the point of pretending otherwise.’
‘Fifteen years! Fifteen years just thrown away like that,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t think I can stand it.’
I did not know whether it would make it easier or harder for her if I said then that Charlotte had not been the first. I wanted Marion to hate me, but I did not want her to think this time was like the others.
‘I think I’d rather you had been killed in a car crash than lose you like this,’ she said. ‘Did you ever love me?’
‘Of course.’
‘You might again then.’
I did not reply but got up and went over to the fireplace and began running my hand over the slabs of York stone, rough and hard, I pressed my palm into them and tried to feel.
‘I saw Phyllis Roberts today,’ Marion was saying. ‘Her husband has had a stroke. He’s paralysed down one side. He can’t talk. She’s worried out of her mind. Do you know what she said to me though, she said: “He can’t speak but we’ve never been so close. We’ve never really ‘talked’ the way we do now!” And do you know, I pitied her, I felt sorry for her.’
‘Is he going to recover?’ I asked.
‘I doubt it, but I envy her now. I actually envy her.’
We were silent for a while. It crossed my mind that if the same fate came to me Marion would nurse and cosset and keep faith whereas with Charlotte I could not be sure. Worthy Marion. Elusive Charlotte; with the objectivity of hypothesis I felt it would be easier to accept the latter.
‘Nick, we’ve been through so much together. I know I’m not very exciting, but all the times we’ve shared — a lot of them have been good, haven’t they?’ Marion ventured tentatively.
‘Yes, I never said that they hadn’t, but things change, we’ve both changed.’ It was easier when she was being unreasonable. She was completely calm now, almost unnaturally so. Her words were measured and distinct.
‘I love you so much,’ she said, ‘more now than in the beginning. I’m sorry if that makes things more difficult for you but I can’t help that.’
My back was turned to her but her words hung round me like a cage. Perhaps if she had carried on yelling and punching and venomously throwing hate I would not have felt so desperate to get out.
‘What are you going to say to Paul?’ she said next.
‘Tell him the truth,’ I said, snatching my hand away from the stones. I looked at the palm and saw that I had grazed it. A trickle of blood had come and I stood watching as it ran down to my wrist and soaked into the white edge of my shirt cuff.
‘It would be Vicky too,’ Charlotte had said. ‘I couldn’t leave without Vicky. She’d have to come too. It would be a package deal.’
‘Of course. I never expected otherwise,’ I had lied.
‘I’m afraid there’s a donkey as well.’
I had acquiesced. I did not feel in a bargaining position. Didn’t even want to be in one. The donkey could be sorted out afterwards, but how endearingly bizarre of Charlotte to include a donkey. Paul liked animals. He had always wanted a dog but I had not let him have one. Animals were a nuisance and a tie. But how would Paul feel when he found out that I had left him and his mother for a woman with a donkey? My chest ached. My hand began to sting and I took out a handkerchief to press into the blood. Paul was the really hard part.
*
Marion had wanted a child straight away, fifteen years ago when we were first married and I was earning next to nothing as a journalist in the provinces.
‘We’ll manage. Other people do,’ she said, but it seemed to me that other people did not manage. I saw the evidence of this in the stories I wrote and besides, I did not want children, only a regular sex life and freedom to achieve something in life which, at that time, meant getting to Fleet Street.
Marion, I thought, had understood. She had never mentioned children before we were married, but then we had not talked much, there was never time.
I met her on a story, a strike at a vacuum cleaner factory. ‘Sits Vac’ the headline — a memorable one — had read, splashed across the front page over a large picture of a group of workers sitting down in front of the factory gates. Marion had been one of them, blonde then and petite, a banner in her hands, her face, like all the others, set in a contrived expression of belligerence.
‘Get down there and bring back a story about the little blonde piece,’ the news editor had said, studying the row of faces. ‘We’ll feature her in the late editions, and I want a picture of her on her own with the banner.’
By then the only stories that interested me were those acceptable in Fleet Street. I was jaded with provincial news and spent most of my time on the lookout for Daily Mirror-type material. I spent hours in telephone boxes sending copy down to London, twisting stories round and round, bending the truth to get a good angle.
Outside the factory gates Marion, wearing a white mini skirt and pink T-shirt, had abandoned her banner for an enamel mug cupped between her hands. It had started to rain and she was shivering over the steaming tea, her blonde hair wet and lank round her face. She looked very young and had an urchin quality about her accentuated by the tall iron gates she stood against and the rain which seemed to have soaked her scant clothing as well as her hair.
Her banner, which rested against the gates, had slipped down at an angle. ‘We need our tea break,’ it read. I grabbed the photographer who had come with me and the picture was taken.
I asked her her name and how old she was.
‘Nineteen,’ she said. ‘Nineteen today. It’s my birthday,’ she added miserably. ‘What a way to spend a birthday.’
‘Never mind, love, at least you won’t forget this one,’ a tall woman, a notice demanding equal pay strapped across her chest, remarked.
‘Come on, let me buy you a drink to celebrate,’ I said, feeling pleased with the picture and the story I would write.
She hesitated.
‘Go on, love,’ the tall woman said, ‘and have one for me,’ she added, casting a knowing look in my direction.
Marion saw it and looked embarrassed, but put down her mug and we hurried away.
‘I hate it there,’ she said. ‘They’re all like that.’ She was still shivering and unexpectedly put her arm through mine and huddled against my sleeve as we walked down the street.
The pubs had just opened and I took her to a dingy little place which was the nearest to the factory. The photographer had gone off to process the film.
I bought her a drink, an orange juice was all she would have, and asked her a few questions to pad out the story. It turned out she was leaving the vacuum cleaner factory in a fortnight and had been inveigled into taking part in the strike as it would not matter if she lost her job.
‘There are too many tea breaks already,’ she said, ‘but it’s so boring working there I don’t blame them for wanting more. My dad drives one of the lorries but it’s not so bad for him being as he’s out and about most of the time.’ She spoke earnestly, her small round face damp and serious.
‘What are you going to do in a fortnight?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got a job with your newspaper,’ she said. ‘I’m going to sell advertisements over the telephone. The factory job was just a fill-in.’
She frowned. ‘You won’t tell them about me striking, will you? It might not sound very good.’
I smiled at her. She was sweet, pretty and naive and her picture would probably appear in most of the popular tabloids the next day.
*
She started her new job and without much thought I began taking her out, at first with other people from the office when we went to the pub after work. Everybody liked her. She was bright but seemed to have a curiously innocent view of the world which was quite natural and rather endearing. She never knew anything about news stories in our paper or the nationals but listened to our interminable shoptalk and added her own uncomplicated opinions, often more to the point than the rambling complexities the rest of us indulged in to prolong the drinking sessions.
I was living in a bed-sit, a single room with a gas ring, shared bathroom and pedantic landlady. I spent as little time as possible there but could not afford to eat out if it meant buying for two. Marion, instinctively aware of my predicament, persuaded her mother to invite me to share their evening meal two nights a week and I gratefully fell prey to the allure of home cooking. These evenings never varied much, we ate round a high table in a sort of general living room with the television loud and prominent although nobody listened or watched. Marion’s father talked at great length about road hogs and vacuum cleaners but nobody listened to him either. There were two sisters, both younger than Marion, and an elder brother. The elder of the two girls never ate a thing while I was there and looked about two stone under weight for her sixteen years. The younger, who was fourteen, ate and did her homework at the same time, books spread out round her plate and splodged with drips of tomato ketchup. The brother, who was slightly simple, read comics and laughed, a low, rumbling sound interspersed with an occasional belch.
It was Marion’s mother who dominated the supper table and the family. She was and still is amazingly large to be Marion’s mother. But the largeness was not just in appearance, she has a huge personality which can switch like lightning from overbearing affection to manic bad temper and yet people are drawn to her. There have been times when I have loathed her and then despised myself for falling under her spell again. Marion hates her but for different reasons, hers is an abiding hatred probably born out of the sort of thing that happened soon after I got to know the family from those two nights a week against a background of Coronation Street and a strong smell of stale frying fat and Player’s Number 6.
One evening Marion said she had to go out for a short while after tea but that I could wait at the house if I liked until she got back. When the meal was over and she had left, her mother accepted my offer of help with the washing up and between us we cleared the table and took the debris through to the kitchen. The house was old and large. It belonged to Marion’s grandmother who lived in a geriatric hospital in Birmingham, and little had been done to modernize or improve it. The kitchen was some way from the general living room, down a long narrow passageway, dark and dingy, cracked brown linoleum on the floor. The kitchen itself was a high-ceilinged room with dull red quarry tiles on the floor and a general air of chill.
‘Wash or dry, Nick?’ Marion’s mother, who had insisted I call her Ruby, asked. She smiled at me. It was a sort of leer which at first I failed to recognize for what it really was.
‘I don’t suppose a good-looking boy like you was ever asked to do any washing up at home,’ she said next. ‘I’d better wash. If you could just tie my apron …’ she added, turning her back to me and holding out the two ties for me to take.
‘There, dear, that’s right,’ she said, wriggling a little as I made the knot. Her hair, a faded orangey colour, but thick and wavy, hung down her back. She had been a good-looking woman and was still quite presentable. She took trouble with her appearance, her nails were always painted red and I rarely saw her without make-up. Her biggest mistake was the skirts she wore, too short for a woman her age, but on this occasion she had on a pair of black slacks.
‘Marion’s a treasure, you know,’ she went on, pulling a pair of pink rubber gloves on to her hands. ‘She usually does all the washing up. She’s a homely little body, but none the worse for that. We can’t all be clever, can we, that wouldn’t do at all, although I sometimes wonder where I went wrong with my children. Their father maybe!’ she added and gave a little laugh which sounded both bitter and collusive.
She plunged her gloved hands into the bowl of steaming water and began passing me the dripping plates.
‘Sometimes I feel that I’ve just wasted my life but if I say that to Frank he just looks at me as if he hasn’t heard and goes on talking about his wretched vacuum cleaners. Anybody’d think he’d invented them the way he carries on, when all he does is drive round the country with a silly smile on his face, convinced that he’s keeping the nation’s carpets clean. He is a fool. We haven’t even got one of his cleaners in our own home. Do you know, Nick, he even talks about them in bed. Don’t you think that’s kinky, because I do?’
I did not know quite how to answer although the question seemed rhetorical. I also had an uneasy feeling that Ruby had only said all she had in order to mention bed.
‘You wouldn’t talk about your work in bed, would you, Nick,’ she continued, on cue. ‘Not if you did Frank’s kind of job, although I should think your sort of work is a lot more interesting. I’ve always thought that I could write, you know. I’ve just never had the opportunity, although I did once have a poem published. I love poetry, Wordsworth, Keats. They’re a sort of refuge from all this. I’m sure you understand.’
She was full of surprises. I had no interest in poetry but found it incredible that Ruby had. She gave a little cry and stepped back from the sink, her hands in the pink gloves held out wide in sudden alarm.
‘Oh, quickly, Nick. I’ve just drenched myself. Get a towel, will you, over there. Please!’
I fetched the towel and took it to her.
‘Can you?’ she pleaded. ‘My hands!’ She looked at them in dismay. I hesitated a moment and then began tentatively to dab the towel at her blouse.
‘You are a dear,’ she murmured, ‘and so good-looking,’ she added wistfully, and leaning forward brushed her cheek against mine.
The gesture was unmistakably sexual and I felt a grotesque sort of excitement. She moved her head back a little and I saw a distinct look of satisfaction in her eyes.
‘Careful, dear,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to get wet.’ My hand was still holding the towel against her breast as I looked beyond her and saw Marion standing in the doorway to the passage, her thin legs rooted to the spot, her face horribly sad and knowing.
‘There you are, darling!’ Ruby said, turning her head as she followed my gaze. ‘Did you get it all right? Nick’s just been helping me with the washing up and like the silly thing I am, I drenched myself. I told him that you usually do all the washing up. Such a treasure.’
She stepped forward to the sink again and continued with the dirty dishes as if nothing had happened although there was a cunning awareness about her. Marion turned and retreated along the passage without a word.
‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ she said later when I made a clumsy attempt at explaining what she had witnessed in the kitchen. ‘You’re not the first one,’ she added miserably, but with a stoical attempt at dignity that I rather admired. Suddenly it seemed quite insufferable that a girl like Marion should have to put up with a mother like Ruby.
‘Where did you go, anyway?’ I asked.
‘To collect a prescription for her. She asked me if I would.’
What a devious old bag Ruby was, and jealous of her own daughter.
‘Why do you stay at home, I mean, why not get your own place?’ I taxed her.
‘I have thought about it, but it’s difficult. Mum would make a fuss.’
‘You’re bound to leave home one day. She’ll just have to accept it,’ I said.
‘Yes, but my sisters are still at school. It would be different if they were earning. It’s the money, you see. I have to give her all my money.’
The injustice of this incensed me. We were sitting in a Wimpy Bar, drinking Expresso coffee, Marion sitting opposite me looking exceptionally vulnerable as she gazed into her cup.
‘Why don’t you move in with me?’ I said on impulse.
She glanced up at me in surprise.
‘Do you mean that?’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t,’ I answered, although I realized that I had perhaps been precipitate, but quickly pushed the thought to the back of my mind.
*
Marion moved into my bed-sit the following day. She brought with her two suitcases of clothing, a hair dryer and a teddy bear. The sight of the bear, bald and battered and with one eye missing, triggered the same misgivings I had felt the previous night, but again I ignored them and took her out to an Italian restaurant to celebrate our new arrangement.
Weeks went by and it seemed that things were looking up all round. The news editor had a row with the editor and I was offered the newsdesk job. It meant more money and Marion and I were able to move out of the bed-sit into a self-contained flat. I was working longer and longer hours which meant we saw little of one another but when we were together the relationship was easy and undemanding. We had the money to eat out more often but invariably Marion would have cooked a meal for us when I got home. She seemed to enjoy cooking and washing and looking after the flat. She redecorated it and bought net curtains for all the windows. I did not particularly like this idea but saw no point in protesting. Besides, I could not really explain, even to myself, why I found net curtains irritating.
Christmas came and we were invited to spend it with her family. I had not seen my own parents for nearly two years but was grateful for an excuse not to have to take Marion to meet them. The reason did not do me credit but the loss of affinity, if there had ever been any, troubled me little. Marion, I knew, looked up to me, and this was partly due to a certain degree of mystery I had allowed over my background. It suited me to remain somewhat ‘unexplained’. I wanted to be seen as I was myself and not against a categorizing family background, although the image was probably more for my own satisfaction than any deliberate scheme to present a contrived persona to Marion.
Her family, whom we had not visited since Marion’s removal, welcomed us back with their usual indifference as if there had been no break in the pattern of our relationship. The television remained on throughout Christmas day and evening. Frank exerted himself to pour me a brown ale when we arrived and then happily subsided back into his chair and with a look of deep satisfaction announced that he had given Ruby a vacuum cleaner. The elder of Marion’s two younger sisters had finally been taken to the doctor who had diagnosed her condition as anorexia, although her parents, who had never heard of the illness, still appeared not to appreciate the seriousness of it and didn’t seem to notice her eating a cooking apple while the rest of us had turkey. The other sister and the brother ate enormous quantities and intermittently watched bits of Billy Smart’s Circus.
Ruby, who kissed me when we arrived and then pointed coquettishly to a twig of dead mistletoe hanging over the front door, seemed the most pleased to see us. She hugged Marion to her bosom and murmured ‘my child’, just loud enough for me to hear and with an unmistakable edge of tragedy as if Marion were the prodigal daughter. Ruby was the sort to feast upon and magnify emotion. I watched Marion dutifully kiss her mother’s cheek but avoid actually looking at her.
‘When’s it going to be wedding bells for you two?’ Ruby asked when we were sitting at the big table feeling gluttonous and bloated after the meal.
She cracked a walnut and looked at Marion and then me. I had not even considered marriage up until that point but now I saw that Marion and her mother had been talking about it, probably in the kitchen when Marion had been helping Ruby with the turkey.
Marion looked embarrassed and helped herself to a Chinese fig. The question was for me but I did not know what to say.
‘You’re doing quite well now, aren’t you, Nick?’ Ruby persisted. ‘Time you settled down and made me a grandmother,’ she added, giving me a decidedly ungrand-motherly look over Marion’s bent head.
‘Oh, Mum!’ Marion murmured incoherently and began collecting up the dishes.
*
The second week in January the National Union of Journalists called a strike over pay rates for trainees. I resented having to take part in it but the union was getting stronger and I felt I had no choice as I still had hopes of reaching Fleet Street where a reputation for ‘black-legging’ might be a barrier.
We were out for seven weeks and as the dispute was widespread the union could not afford strike pay. One thin edition of the paper was produced each day by the editor and his deputy and a fair amount of help from the advertising department, which included Marion.
During those seven weeks we had to rely on her money and the day before the dispute was settled, I suggested we might get married. The wedding took place a month later at a registry office. I sent a telegram to my parents but did not hear anything back. We talked about not telling anybody until afterwards and just asking two strangers to act as witnesses. The idea seemed to appeal to Marion at first but in the end her family came, Ruby wearing pillarbox red and a huge white hat and, as might have been expected, quite overshadowing her daughter.
After the ceremony we all went to a hotel. Ruby had too much to drink and becoming maudlin decided to recite one of her poems. Marion was acutely embarrassed, although there was only a waiter and one other couple in the dining room apart from her family. I felt oddly detached from the whole proceedings as if the events of the day were just that and of no permanent duration.
We stayed at the hotel through the afternoon and Ruby insisted on dancing with me to the mournful rhythm of the background muzak in the restaurant. Frank had fallen asleep, untroubled and content. He and Ruby had given us a vacuum cleaner. The sisters and the brother had wandered off to the television room.
At half past five we had to leave as the restaurant needed to be prepared for the evening session. Frank woke up and shook my hand but forgot to say goodbye to Marion. Ruby kissed us both and went home in tears. Marion and I went back to the flat and had our first row.
‘For Christ’s sake, she’s your mother and old enough to be mine too,’ I bellowed at her.
‘She ruins everything, she always has, and you just let her get away with it. She deliberately monopolized you today — our wedding day. She did it on purpose. She hates me, but not as much as I hate her.’ Marion, tears streaming down her face, managed to get out all the pent-up vitriol through the sobs and gasps as she stood by the bed in her tights and slip, attempting to rip up the pale pink dress she had been wearing.
‘She was pissed,’ I said. ‘She didn’t mean any harm. And stop doing that. It’s stupid. In fact you’re being completely stupid about the whole thing.’ I was beginning to lose patience with her. I had never seen this side of her before and found it ugly and contemptible. It seemed to me that she had deliberately lost control of herself. Her face had gone red and blotchy and she was actually stamping her feet in temper as she continued to pull at the dress.
‘I said stop it,’ I repeated, going over to where she was standing to take the dress away.
I took hold of it and she spun round, fetching a stinging slap across my cheek. Automatically I raised my other hand and hit her back.
Her eyes widened in horror. She let go of the dress and fled to the bathroom.
For the next hour I stood by the locked door and tried to cajole her into coming out. I apologized. I pleaded. I felt wretched and guilt-ridden but ultimately exasperated. I left the flat and went to the office.
The newsroom was empty, rows of desks with typewriters and telephones, silent and inert, waiting for news. Clatter and urgency seemed to belong to another world. I slumped down at my desk and pulled open the day’s edition I had missed by getting married. The main story was about the Profumo affair and there were pictures of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. They did not really look what they were, at least the girl, Keeler, did not. Her face had an almost vacant look about it, naive. She reminded me a little of Marion, as she had been until tonight. I tried to close my mind to the awful mistake I had made. Marion had provoked me and all I felt was disgust with both myself and her, when the contrived little scene might have roused some sort of passion between us that could have been played out and resolved in bed. But I felt no passion for her in that direction. I think I never had and that was the trouble, I had never really thought about it and any qualms over the past few months had been shoved aside for the sake of convenience. What a dreadful admission to have to make to yourself on your wedding night. A lonely and miserable realization. There was not even sufficient passion to go back and tell her of the mistake and say that we should part, just an awful creeping lethargy which would probably bind me to her for years and years.
I got up and went over to the sub-editors’ table where I knew there would be a bottle of scotch in one of the drawers. I found it and took a swig. I put the bottle down and a voice behind me said:
‘Is this what they call married bliss?’
I turned and saw one of the subs, Jane Hillier, standing a few feet away, watching me, an expression of mock reproach on her sallow-skinned face. I had never liked Jane. She was an ardent feminist and generally assumed by the rest of the staff to be a lesbian. She was tall and thin and always wore trousers. Her hair was short and straight and her face colourless, although her eyes had an oddly disquieting quality. They seemed to miss nothing, even the goings-on within one’s soul.
‘Are you planning on keeping it all to yourself or can anyone join in?’ she said, glancing at the whisky bottle.
I picked it up and handed it to her as she came forward and perched herself on the edge of the table.
‘How did it go today, or is that a rhetorical question?’ she asked, her eyes still penetrating my befuzzled brain. I must have drunk a lot during the day and it was beginning to register. Heedless, I took another gulp of the whisky and between us Jane and I finished it off over the next hour as I told her about Marion’s mother and Marion and more about Ruby and about Frank and his vacuum cleaners, and the anorexic sister and the idiot brother, the whole lot, poured out in a spate of drunken weakness, and all of it a mournful indirect tirade against poor Marion, locked away in our bathroom, smarting at the unfairness and injustice of it all just as I was with the all-perceiving Jane.
She listened and watched and I didn’t care what she heard or saw, only that she stayed to hear me out even though I would probably regret it in the morning.
When all the scotch had gone she got up and told me she was going to take me to her flat and make black coffee. I followed her out of the building and got into her car. My mind and will had gone into a sort of neutral suspended in an alcoholic haze. I think I fell asleep on her sofa while she went to make the coffee and woke up some hours later to find I was lying in a bed with Jane beside me. I sat up and tried to remember how I had got there. I was naked and yet could not recall undressing. I felt Jane’s body stir.
‘You’re not going to be sick, are you?’ I heard her murmur drowsily as she switched on the bedside lamp. She eased herself up on her pillow, the sheet slipping down over one breast.
‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I was staring at her, confused, my mind trying to fill in the gap in my recollection. ‘Did I … I mean, did we …?’ I asked.
‘Yes, we did,’ she said, her eyes on mine. ‘There seemed no point in trying to get you home in the state you were in although you managed a reasonable performance.’
I felt vaguely alarmed to be told that I had managed anything at all in view of the fact I could not remember a thing.
‘But I thought you were …’ I began, only half aware of what I was saying.
‘That I prefer women?’ Jane said, moving back down the bed and switching out the light. ‘Let’s just say that I’m ambidextrous. Good night, Nick, sleep well and don’t confess to your wife.’