Her Victory (7 page)

At the first session she didn't see anyone resembling a workman. They were the same kind as herself, except for one or two she thought might look down upon her as she had thought to look down on others who in fact were not there at all. During the discussion on E. M. Forster one of the women was staring at her, and under the thin face and grey hair she recognized Eunice Dobson who had once worked at the corporation ticket office.

Pam sat at the large table, conspicuous by her inability to say anything. She had read the books, and shaped whole sentences from her ideas, but couldn't speak. She did not feel stupid, having something to say if only she could get it out. George would have laughed if he had known that she couldn't talk.

She was content to listen to the lecturer, and those who, during the round-table talk, which he cleverly encouraged, were not afraid to state their views, even though they might be shown as mistaken or irrelevant in the summing up. But the discussion was easy and even humorous, and though unable to add anything, she felt happy to be in a different world to the one at home.

When D. H. Lawrence's attitudes to the working class were under discussion, after a reading of
Sons and Lovers
, a young ginger-bearded man commented that in his opinion Lawrence was an Edwardian snob who in fact hated the workers, was a writer whose views were not to be trusted because he made the working people out to be far worse than they were, and totally ignored their proletarian virtues, not to mention their revolutionary potential.

She was compelled to speak at last, her face red from embarrassment, her eyes staring with such conviction that she did not see anyone. Her words were distorted by unnecessary hurry, but the class gave absolute attention to what she was saying: ‘You can't talk like that about “the workers”. They all behave differently. Some are good and work hard, others are skivers and don't. Lawrence's opinion is as good as anybody else's. So is mine, I suppose, and yours as well. I only know my own family, and my husband's, and I never saw any revolutionary potential in them.'

She sat down. It was politically criminal to look on the workers in the way she did, the man retorted. But she had broken her quietude and didn't care what he said, even if she had sounded a fool. Even if, she thought, I am a fool. Her heart banged against her blouse. She seemed bloodless, and wished the words unsaid. Yet she had done it, and would speak again whenever she felt like it.

As soon as she found something to do which excluded him, George realized that she had done so because there was no part of his life he would let her share. As a way of getting back at her he decided there would be even less in the future.

9

The two workmen from the first floor were talking to the police. She expected argument, vociferation, perhaps pushing around, but they only mentioned what had happened. The younger man tapped at a brick with his foot. The other laughed because one of the policemen made a joke. It hadn't been their fault. The old woman had run across the house-wreckage after her bit of treasure and been struck down. Another onlooker told them how. There were neither shouts nor moans of sorrow, and no one was taken struggling away. The demolishers had not thrown the wardrobe on her, but neither had they looked properly beforehand. It was an accident, like all unstoppable occurrences. But some were lawful and others were not. The men in the house had their bit of fun by chucking objects out of the window and laughing at the smash, but this time they had broken the ribs of a person who, a few seconds before, had thought nothing of grabbing at every little thing to earn a shilling or two.

She felt close to her whom the ambulance had taken. The woman would be looked after. For a few seconds Pam didn't know where she was, and envied the injured woman's fate because day and night had been separated from her senses. Icy rain chilled, and she turned, intending to go to her proper home, as if she had been lost for an hour while walking the streets, and had daydreamed of a woman being struck down. She would make coffee and wait for George to come from work and tell what she had seen. She went as close as possible to the fire, pressing fingers against her eyelids till they hurt, then looked to see in what part of the world she now belonged.

George soon thought better of her evening classes, because they made her less liable to snap and grumble when, about once a week, he wanted to make love. His ramming habit, as she thought of it, maligned her body and left her in despair. Her mind veered off it like a finger from an open wound. The emptiness of space was paradise compared to such memories. In her rented room she could moan like a mutilated animal which had nevertheless got out of the trap. Solitude was preferable to a feeling of annihilation with George, when her spirit had been a particle of light getting further and further away, bruised and disregarded because no other human being thought it of any value.

The hold he kept on her was harder to break the tighter it became. The more he oppressed, the more she was his prisoner, till she felt that even to raise a finger would be as impossible as getting under the world and attempting to walk with it on her back.

Sufficient anger came to indicate what she wanted, but finally it wasn't what she wanted that mattered. Desires and necessities, once she knew what they were, were seen to be of no importance, except that they too helped to keep her a prisoner which, reducing her to impotence, thereby made her feel like a victim. But life went on as if nothing were the matter. Action was denied to someone who could endure for so long. The force that eventually moved her to act existed far below the level of intention. Everything she did was under her control. The insupportable life she led seemed as if it would go on forever, but it felt like something had fallen from the sky and crushed her.

She was finally taken by the scruff of the neck, and what she had wanted to do for so long was accomplished by a part of her that she didn't know existed. Whatever it was had more strength – though still part of her – than she had ever been aware of before. She had sensed it, yet for a long time held back in case it betrayed her by not being strong enough when the time came, but its power at last erupted so positively that she had been taken by sufficient force to get to the railway station. From the beginning she had wanted to be dominated by this act, since it was, after all, her own well-concealed self emerging from its hiding place to prove that it was her victory and nobody else's.

Smoke from the fire turned in her direction, so she stepped aside. The wardrobe lay across splintered laths and a mouldy chair, one of its doors detached. Her reflection was distorted by rain spots hitting the full-length mirror, and she knelt to slide a finger from right to left over the glass. Lakes and rivers formed. She rubbed a place dry with her handkerchief, and saw her face in the few seconds before colourless globs of water disguised it again.

The mirror was heavy in its wooden framework, and she was several streets from home. The fire was a hump of smouldering rubbish, and no one else was on the site. She had never taken something from a wasteground before, but felt no sense of stealing when she lifted the mirror-door to the pavement.

The back was covered with black dust, and dirtied her coat. Hinges torn from the main supports had left splinters, but she gripped above and below, and hoped people would move as she walked down the road, for it was impossible to see unless she swung the mirror aside like a windmill sail.

The man in the telephone box seemed to be looking over her shoulder, his face almost as clear as her own. She had seen him in the corridor of the train that was leaving Nottingham when he spat out of the window to say goodbye. There was no doubt. She hoped he was more satisfied with London which, being a bigger place to spit on, might feel the sting less.

She leaned the mirror against a wall, but disliked stopping, even though it was vital, because of picking it up again. The intervals were made fewer by counting an extra dozen steps when at the end of her endurance. She had never carried such weight for any distance. It was painful against her breasts, and pulled her arms till the muscles deadened. At a corner the wind pressed hard as if to prevent her getting the plunder home.

Wall and pavement-edge were visible, and anything in front seemed unimportant. The mirror faced outwards, and people coming towards her, seeing their reflection, stepped aside to let her by. The screen baffled their remarks. The mirror was a memento, and set against a wall of her room would hide a blemish, and fill emptiness. When polished it would reflect both herself and the room within, and create space to look into when the illusion of being a prisoner wore her down. It would reflect light for someone who had come out of the dark. Should it crack, seven years' bad luck would be in store, so she would have to be careful.

Crossing Ladbroke Grove, she stepped up the opposite pavement. Acquiring the burden might make a different person out of her, for she felt wedded to the weight, an experienced carrier not to be waylaid by the last obstacle of the kerb on the final few hundred yards.

Her toast-and-tea breakfast of four hours ago left her famished. In her exertions she was all awkwardness, and rested before reaching the gate. The rain drove, but the mirror protected her. Water streamed off her knuckles. She spun when a corner of her load struck a lamp post. She scraped a low wall, and the mirror fell.

An elbow-pain tightened her grip, and took the weight of the board which banged into her face. Someone had pushed viciously from the front. George had caught her, and was ready to gloat or kick. She heard herself shouting.

Her burden was indestructible, but she felt the biting ache of her grazed hand. No one was nearby. At whatever cost, every limb had played its part in guarding the mirror. An attempt to break it had failed at the expense of a fingernail, proving that the speed of disaster wasn't always too quick to handle.

She opened the front door, thankful to be out of the rain, and knew that even if she took all day to get her prize up the stairs no one would notice how happy she felt about the bit of old trash she had saved.

10

She had never known what she appeared like till now, because those mirrors previously looked into had been surrounded by things which weren't entirely hers. The histories of such objects had intimidated her to the extent that her features seemed either false or indistinct when she stared back at herself from the mirror. She could never look for long because George was always moving in another part of the house, and could come in any second to distort her image.

A proper upstanding full-length mirror would not only allow her to talk to herself, but to see the motions of her lips as well. If she cared to she could speak without noise, like a dumb person. It seemed less insane to have her features clearly in view. When she spoke she would see that she resembled only herself. The inside of the mouth was as important as the tip of her nose or the colour of her eyes.

The clarity of her reflected features would have been seen only as a flat picture when sitting by her dressing-table in what used to be her home, an image pained and drab which she couldn't bear to look at for long, so that she rarely had to worry about being caught examining herself. A mirror showed what was in your spirit, and there had been nothing more than a mask of indecision hiding what one day, after self-murder or emotional earthquake, might be revealed.

The woodwork around the mirror had been eaten with worm, so she bought a chisel and a screwdriver and, careful not to send any cracks through the silvering behind, eased each piece away. Tall and narrow, it leaned without borders against the wall so that when she stood back her whole form could be seen, enabling her to talk from a distance if anything special came into her mind.

She sometimes saw her son Edward as if he were behind her, sent by George as an emissary to bring her home. Walking through Bayswater he had been coming towards her, or standing on the platform of a bus that turned a corner. He was eighteen, and at college, but in her dreams Edward was eight years old, and talked as if he were herself, and also looked as if he were George, so that she woke with tears on remembering that part of her life. What she had lived could not be taken away, but anguish did not diminish on seeing the first light of another day straining at the window, which could only be pushed back by switching on the light and glancing in the mirror as she passed to brush her teeth at the sink. Change was a poison that had to run its course before healing could begin. But knowing such a thing did not make life easier to bear. Her inability to profit from self-knowledge created a further layer of torment.

She could reflect any person in her mirror, but it was another matter when it came to who was allowed into her dreams. The walls of rooms and corridors glowed with pale intimidating light. Such dreams caused her mind to labour all night long among frightening combinations of people she had known, permutations lacking any logic or reason. The underworld dogs of the past were set on her by George and his family now that they were no longer able to get at her above ground. They came through doorways, or sprang in mayhem from the waves of the sea or the muddy banks of rivers. With changing faces they pursued her towards disaster, so that she woke having bitten hard enough on her finger for blood to show. At breakfast it was impossible to reorganize every move of her night's dreams.

If George had been unfortunate in meeting her, he had been even more unlucky with the family he had been born into. Perhaps such was the common burden of the self-made man, because having something to fight against gave inordinate resource and strength. It was impossible to get away from his family, but he never ceased trying, while making it obvious that his effort was as much for Pam's sake as for his own, though she guessed that the process must have started long before meeting her.

They had broken with his brothers on many occasions, and though George felt safer and more at peace she knew that he also regretted the poorer spiritual surroundings in which he found himself. He had sharpened his ambition, and learned that the value of what you strove for was only equalled by the payment you made. Having taught him, she now had to learn the same hard lessons for herself.