Crossings (30 page)

‘Am I? Almost beautiful?' I would have believed anything she said at that moment.

‘Almost. Like your stories. Not great, but very good.'

I laughed. ‘I like you very much, Iris.'

‘Yes, I grow on one, like artichokes.'

We were inching slowly ahead now, car by car, but at the barrier, the guard stopped us. ‘No more cars,' he said.

‘Oh shit,' she said.

They hoisted up the ramp. I half-opened the car door and called, ‘Can I come on anyway?'

The guard grinned at me. I could see now he was really a sailor. ‘If you can shimmy up a ladder!'

‘Iris? Thanks.' I got out and slammed the door. ‘Listen, do you mind?'

‘No. I think I'll go back to the cabin for the night.'

‘Don't tell him. Let me.'

‘I'd like to tell him,' she said.

‘I know. But, don't, eh? I will.'

‘Okay.' And I ran. The sailor waved to the captain up in his little house at the top of the ferry, and everyone waited until I clambered up the ladder and over the rail and jumped down to the deck. Then a cheer went up, and the captain blew the great horn, and everyone laughed and waved. It was like walking onto a great empty patch of floorboards and finding you're standing on the stage of the Old Vic with a full audience out front. But I laughed and waved back.

I'm probably a fool, but I believe she never told the professor. Not that night.

I was very happy. I went up to the café and had a mug of coffee and looked at people. And they spoke to me. They said, ‘Hey, that was something!' And, ‘You're quite a girl.' Men. Yes, it was men who said this. I was bubbling inside. I couldn't remember anything like this ever happening before. No. It had never happened before. I'd grown up ugly and I'd married ugly and I'd spent a lot of years being too disgusting to touch. And now men were looking at me with grins and a kind of love, because I was almost beautiful.

I know this sounds all out of kilter. I know I bought the suit and the dress that day with Edna. I know how I've described it … looking at the girl in the mirror.

But I had never
felt
beautiful, or almost beautiful. Not in my whole life. Till that evening, sailing back across the strait, with the gulls circling and weaving overhead and people, men, grinning at me and laughing. Iris was right. It was only youth and I knew it, but youth is never ‘only.' It was nothing I could take credit for, nothing I had accomplished or won. But I loved Iris for telling me before I was too old. How awful if
now,
for instance, she were to say, ‘That summer you were twenty-seven, you were almost beautiful.' And I sat there with my coffee, thinking. But I must have been at least
pretty
then, when I was eighteen. I must have been, and all the years since, even when I was fat, if I'm almost beautiful now.

And then I thought, Oh to hell with it. I've found out before it's too late. I can be almost-beautiful for three more years, and then, when I'm old, at least I'll have known what it was like. For at thirty, of course, one's womb fell out, dropped with a great clank, like a rusty old carburetor, and everything was over. No one could possibly look at a woman of thirty.

I sat there and I thought, I'll love Iris till the day I die, and I might make it yet.

 

WHEN I GOT home (a lot of people offered me rides, but I took one with a nice married couple), Mik wouldn't speak to me. ‘What have I done?' I kept saying, though I knew very well. And in bed, he punished me.

He sent me to Coventry. He turned his back to me and it was worse than anything.

‘What is it? What's the matter?'

‘You know damned well.'

I did. I knew. I had denied him.

‘But you don't understand.'

‘I understand.'

It occurs to me now that Mik might have been hurt about the phone call to the island. It stops me. Even writing the line stops me. I stare at it a few seconds. Well, what had I thought until now? I had thought it was a matter of principle—I had denied him, which is not done amongst friends or lovers. Mik was disgusted with me. Properly so. But hurt? Yes, he was angry, because I was such a chicken-shit, but hurt? Mik?

‘You see, it was, well, it was a peculiar situation, just when you phoned. He had … well, he'd just that minute asked me to marry him and I …'

‘You accept?'

‘What?'

‘You accept his proposal?'

‘Oh for god's sake, Mik!'

‘Yeah, well, tell me about it in the morning.'

‘No. I want to have this out.'

‘Look. I got to get my rest. I got to hustle a job tomorrow.'

‘No, you're refusing to discuss this logically …'

‘I'm tired.'

‘I'm going to tell him.'

But Mik was breathing heavily, rhythmically.

Jocelyn was getting ready to go, all her stuff piled into boxes for the Salvation Army. The grey blouse she'd worn for four years, a hand-me-down when it started; the black skirt I'd given her at Christmas. That was a pang. I stood there, pawing through the things and, in the end, salvaged the skirt.

Sala was being crated down at the freight office, and of the two kittens I'd given Jocelyn, only Lolly remained. Humbert had gone one night, telling me goodbye from the garden. ‘What's the matter, you idiot?' I yelled out Mik's window. Humbert was standing right below the cat door; he could get in if he wanted. But he stood down there, yowling up at me in the moonlight. I knew it wasn't an ordinary cry. There are all kinds of cries, and this was different. But I just said, ‘Oh, come on in,' and went back to bed. And he went away. That day, in the afternoon, Jocelyn had picked Humbert up by the tail and swung him around, for the hell of it. Jocelyn never does things like that. It was so terrible, I hate to write it even now. And Humbert flicked his back paws fastidiously and went off to lick himself under the radiator. Thinking it over. We advertised in the papers, and offered rewards, but we never got him back. So now there was only Lolly. When she left, Sally and Peter would be alone.

The professor took me to lunch in the faculty club. I dressed carefully, trying to look sedate and mature with my hair done up. He came to the house and I introduced him to Mik. I told him just before we started lunch, after the martinis. I thought, Oh god! I would have to spoil his appetite, too! What a thing, just before he eats! But I wanted it over and done with.

At first, he was good about it. But then he said, ‘I know these types. Basically, they despise women. Their true loyalties are always given to men friends. I saw this sort in the war. It's a form of homosexuality. And if they don't outgrow it then, in the war, it just carries on. I would bet you Mik has tremendous ties with old friends … isn't it true?'

‘Yes. From Ortona. They hang around beer parlours and remember the good old days.'

‘You see? I could tell, the moment I saw him. He's what they call “A man's man,” which means he can never really relate to a woman. You're a symbol to him, something to show his friends. And, basically, now that you've slept with him, he'll come to despise you for it. That sort of man is terribly romantic. There are two sorts of women for him: the kind who do and the kind who don't. And now that you have, he'll despise you, Vicky. He will. He'll knock you up and he'll probably beat you and then he'll walk out, because you're a slut anyway.'

‘I sort of have trouble in that area myself.'

‘What?'

‘Oh, the slut-lady distinction.' I laughed. ‘We're a lot alike, Mik and me.'

He drove me home, being terribly calm and wise. But at five o'clock he phoned from the island: ‘You used me. You used me, you got me to introduce you to important people. You just used me. You used me all through university, to get the scholarship too. I got you that scholarship and I got you the teaching assistantship, and all along you've just been using me.'

It was terrible, to hear him humiliate himself like that. I kept saying I was sorry, over and over.

Jocelyn called a taxi and we stood together like strangers in the dining room. Everything looked dusty. ‘I've done all I can,' she said, almost crying, ‘but I've decided. I'm through with you, Vicky. I really am. You deserve everything you get!'

And she went out to the kitchen and emptied the tin bread box and started punching holes in it with a chisel and hammer.

‘What's that for?'

‘Lolly,' she said.

I let her do it too. I even helped. Punching holes.

And we put Lolly in, and shut the lid. I even let them get out to the taxi. I even let Jocelyn put the bread tin on the back seat. And then I couldn't help it, I rushed down the walk and grabbed the bread tin and opened it.

Lolly was already hot and dry and half asleep with terror.

‘I'll send her,' I said. ‘I promise. I'll send her. You can't, Joss. Look at her. She'd be dead before you got to Mission.'

And she could see it was true, and I could see she would never forgive me, and that was how she left, all the violence still between us.

 

THERE IS something I've got to put in. I can't place it. It was when my mother was there. The three of us, Jocelyn, my mother and I, are in the dining room. There is music playing. A record on the hi fi. It is about seven o'clock at night, and suddenly my mother starts to dance. And Jocelyn is dancing too. And I am dancing. The three of us, like fools, dancing in a circle in the dining room, laughing, a little embarrassed, but dancing, going around and around, dancing, not alone but together, the four of us, Jocelyn, my mother, Francie, and me. It must have been after one of those awful strained truth sessions. I saw it happen in Greece once. A girl, Georgia, jumped up and began to dance and I jumped up too, not able to stop. In a tavern. And after, Maria, Georgia's friend, said, ‘You see. Her brother. He was burnt to death by fire. Last week.'

And that was how we danced, Jocelyn, Francie, my mother, and me.

Francie? But Francie wasn't there that summer. Francie was somewhere else. Where was she then? That summer? If Mom was at my place, where was Francie?

It used to happen often, in the days after my father died. My mother would suddenly leap up, music on the radio, and begin to dance, and we children would dance too, all four of us, and would laugh at ourselves because of course it wasn't done, women dancing together.

And when it was over, Francie said, ‘You're still the best, Mom,' and Mom laughed and said, ‘At least I gave you all straight legs.' She is still the best, our mother. She outdances all of us. And she married a man whose religion forbids dancing.

Why did I have to put that in?

 

AFTER JOCELYN left in the taxi, I took Lolly back into the house. It was so empty. The windows were filthy. The garden drooped. Dishes in the sink. Salvation Army boxes everywhere. Scum and crud and confusion. The end of the summer.

I don't remember. What happened then?