Flying Under Bridges (28 page)

‘I don’t
think that women should be frightened into buying something. You shouldn’t keep
telling women that they can’t go out, that it isn’t safe.’

Adam
didn’t understand and I didn’t know how to explain. Things were starting to
change. There seemed to be a male thing happening and a female thing happening
and somehow I was caught in the middle of it. I was and so was John.

Subterfuge

And when they rose early
in the morning, and the sun shone upon the water, the Moabites saw the water
opposite them as red as blood…

(2 KINGS
3.22)

After many sessions, my
psychiatrist has finally voiced something close to an opinion. ‘I presume the
deceased, John.

Antrobus,
opposed your plans for the refugees.’

‘Why do
you?’

‘It was
important to you. Did he object? Was he unpleasant?’

‘I wish
he had been. No, it was John being so damned nice that put a spanner in the
whole thing. At least everyone else thought he was being nice. I don’t now.’

We had
been collecting for about three weeks. Everyone in Edenford had been helping
and Adam, even though he’s not mad about people from abroad, had promised the
full support of the council. Then things started to go a bit wrong.

First,
I lost the WI Flower Arranging/Candlestick Competition. No surprise there.
Doris won with an extraordinary display of daisies, sprayed green and wrapped
around a white candle. She called it Flame of Liberty. There was some talk that
she’d cheated and used hairspray to hold the arrangement together. I felt this
was rather confirmed when her granddaughter, Tasha, set fire to the wick and
the entire creation went up, but everyone decided it was a freak gust from that
loose window pane above the piano. Doris got her award and Tasha got rather
singed eyebrows. Doris thought I had bad-mouthed her about the whole thing so
she was a little tense with me in the shop each day. I think it turned her
against me in the end.

Then
John turned up one afternoon with a huge bag of second-hand clothes. I think he
expected all the old biddies in the shop to swoon and, of course, most of them
did. He was very good-looking and he charmed everyone. It wasn’t difficult.
These were women whose idea of an intimate encounter was a hair wash at Pat’s
Beauty Spot.

‘Just a
few bits and pieces,’ he chuckled, as we pulled stunning designer shirts out of
his bin liners.

‘We can
really sell these. Oh, John, you are kind,’ dribbled Doris.

Everyone
was smiling and dribbling when suddenly he reached out to steady himself
against the counter.

‘Sorry,
sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I think I’m a little faint.’

‘Get
him a chair! A chair!’ barked Mrs Hoddle, who had done years of service with
Meals on Wheels and knew infirmity when she saw it. ‘Doris, open the door, get
air, we need fresh air!’ she commanded to the very winds of the town.

Everyone
ran in all directions. Tea was made, hankies were pressed with lavender water,
Helen Richler tried rescue remedy but John declined.

‘No
stimulants, thank you.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Sorry, I’m being pathetic. I always
am when I give blood.’

‘You
gave blood!’ Emma Milton squealed. ‘That’s so wonderful.’

John
managed to speak, but quietly so that we all had to gather round.

‘It was
just an idea I had for all the men. You know we have these little meetings.’
The women all nodded. The Centurion Club now boasted nearly every prominent man
in town. ‘I thought we should all give blood. It’s the least we can do what
with you ladies doing such wonderful work for the refugees. Everyone must do
their bit. After all we have no idea how much will be needed.’

There was
much clucking and approving of this idea.

‘The
man is a saint,’ was the general refrain until Helen said, ‘Blood? Sorry, why
will we need blood?’

John
patted her hand. ‘Oh, I don’t know that we will need it, it’s just a
precaution.’

‘Sorry?’
Mrs Hoddle was confused and stopped fanning him with a copy of
The Lady
magazine.
‘I don’t follow.’

‘Well,
it’s just that these poor, misfit people, who you quite rightly are helping,
have been through a lot. They have had very little food, terrible
accommodation… Who knows what infectious diseases they may have picked up.
We need to be ready to help. No one would want Edenford General to be
unprepared in the event of some epidemic or other…’

‘No.’

‘Not
that it will happen,’ he managed weakly. John recovered shortly after that and
left. There was a silence in the shop that lasted some time after he had gone.

‘I
think I’ll be off home now,’ announced Mrs Hoddle.

‘Yes.
It is late, isn’t it?’ said Doris, looking at her wrist even though she didn’t
wear a watch. It was the beginning of the end.

I’m
tired. Tell Shirley that I love her.

Love,
Eve

Chapter
Seventeen

Eve had woken up feeling
fat. She seemed to be lying on one side of the bed and her stomach on the
other. When she looked in the mirror she saw that she was fat.

The
journalist from the
Mail
was trying to get Inge to look at herself. The
feature, Why I Never Married, was to be a big spread and the writer was unhappy
about doing the interview on the phone. She wanted to meet Inge.

‘Body
language is so important,’ she kept saying, but Inge insisted. The conversation
did not go well. No, Inge hadn’t had a disastrous affair from which she had
never recovered. No, she did not dislike men. The interviewer was relentless in
pursuit of Inge’s inner life. She belonged to the nation, they owned her, they
had a right to know. It was ironic that Inge was made to be so defensive about
liking men. She did like them. A lot. In fact, it was because she tried to save
Lawrence’s boy, Patrick, that she got into such trouble.

After
John’s appearance a few women had stopped coming to the charity shop. The
appeal was still going great guns but there had been talk about disease and the
‘risk to the town’, and the
Eden ford Gazette
had carried an article
about TB amongst refugees. Then the Centurion Club passed a motion requesting
that Edenford General prioritise blood supplies for residents of no less than
five years. They also petitioned for each member’s wife to be given first
access to any donated blood. The request concluded, ‘We will protect our women.’
And was then signed by them all.

‘What
diseases are we worrying about?’ Eve asked Adam.

‘Tuberculosis,’
he said darkly.

‘Yes,
but you don’t need blood for that. You need… well, not blood anyway. I don’t
see what all the blood is for.’

They
were both on shaky medical ground so Adam lost his temper.

‘Eve,
it is my job to protect you and I would appreciate it if you would just let me
get on with it.’

‘Adam,
darling, of course, but we can’t possibly need buckets of blood unless the
incomers arrive determined to hack us all down with some foreign machete or
something.’

Adam
looked at his wife and frowned. ‘You’re right. They could be violent. We don’t
know why they had to leave their country in the first place.

‘I didn’t
mean…’

Naturally
the hospital refused the request, but then the whole thing became another steel
leg in Adam’s election platform. The
Gazette
was behind him all the way.
Councillor Marshall says
—
stand up for your town. Don’t let others
suck your blood.

Eve was
furious. ‘I thought you were on my side, Adam.’

‘I am.
I’m not saying those people can’t come here, you know, if that’s what you
really want, but I do have a civic duty to make sure Edenford is safe first.’

‘It is
safe. It’s so bloody safe that it’s boring the arse off me. I can’t think of
anything I would like better than an intruder in the middle of the night or a
quick how’s-your-father with some mugger down the bus station. There is no
danger here, Adam. There never has been and there never will be. There was no
mugging. Nothing happened. No one could be bothered. No one in Edenford needs
blood because they are already half dead!’

They
were both rather shocked by this. Adam sat down at the kitchen table and Eve
made tea as if it had never happened. Then he went to fix a new light sensor on
the garage door and Eve went to see if Inge was in.

It was
raining when Eve went outside. Horrible grey, English rain. She was soaked in
an instant. Wet through to the marrow. Kate answered the door. She looked thin
and wore no make-up. Eve’s mother would have said she hadn’t made the most of
herself, but she smiled so warmly that Eve didn’t care about that.

‘Eve!
You’re soaked! Come on in. Inge is battling with mirrors.’

In the
sitting room, Inge was unscrewing a large mirror from above the fireplace.

‘Camie!’
she shouted. ‘Just in time for a coffee, or shall we have gin?’

Eve
stood dripping on the carpet. ‘I’m sorry, I must look a fright.’

Kate
laughed. ‘You’ll never know in this house. Inge has taken down every mirror in
the place.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’
said Inge, heaving the mirror off the wall, ‘I am sure that part of every day
is ruined by people wondering about what they look like. I am sure that a
preoccupation about her appearance goes some way towards ruining some part of
every woman’s day. It’s all part of the oppression that is cultivated by the
media to make women feel disgusted by their own bodies, and I’m not having it.’

Kate
sat down on the sofa and looked up at Inge. ‘I don’t think there’s any
oppression in having a straight parting,’ she said gently.

Inge
shook her head. She was adamant. ‘The fact is that every woman is told from the
day she is born that no matter what she does with her life, if she is not
beautiful then she didn’t make it. Life becomes a daily struggle against hair
unwanted on major parts of our bodies and remembering what colour the stuff we
do want used to be. Camie, give us a hand.’

Eve
grabbed one end of the mirror and together they lowered it to the floor.

‘There.’
Inge dusted her hands and began to put away the ladder. ‘Gin and tonic, I
think.’

‘Just
tonic, thanks,’ called Kate, as Inge headed for the kitchen. Kate settled back
on the sofa. She was thin, very thin and pale. It was sort of frightening and
for a minute Eve couldn’t think of anything to say. Kate beckoned her to come
closer and then whispered, ‘She’s lying to you.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Inge…
about the mirrors. She doesn’t give a damn what she looks like. She just doesn’t
want me to see myself wasting away. Do you want to sit down?’

Eve
didn’t know if she did or not. She wasn’t sure what was happening. She felt
uncomfortable and didn’t know why. ‘I’m very wet,’ she managed. Eve looked
around for something else to talk about. She had been to Inge’s house before,
of course, but they had always sat in the kitchen. The sitting room was nice.
Sort of terracotta colours with one whole wall covered in photographs of
deserts. Acres and acres of sand and dunes and windswept horizons.

‘Did
Inge take these?’ she asked.

‘No, I
did. It’s what I do… did. I’m a photographer. Travel pictures mainly.’

Things
started to click with Eve. ‘With Inge’s writing. She writes articles sometimes.
I’ve seen them.’

‘Yes.’

How
wonderful to travel to the desert together and bring it back for people who
couldn’t go. ‘I’d love to go the desert. I hate the rain. I hate being wet. I’d
love to travel.’ Eve ran her hand over a photograph of rich, golden sand.

‘I once
knew a young man who hated the rain. He hated it with such a passion that he
began to be afraid of it, afraid of getting wet.’ Kate began a story, and like
a child Eve found herself sitting down and listening. ‘He ran away to the
desert and tried to live like a nomad. He wandered the sands and learnt about
the birds and the plants. Then one night when he was sleeping, with no warning
a flash flood came. It poured through the desert valley in the blink of an eye.’

‘He
drowned,’ Eve gasped.

Kate
nodded. ‘I know, strange, isn’t it?’

‘Is
that true?’

Kate
shrugged and they sat silent, looking at the photographs. A small carriage
clock on the mantel ticked quietly. Inge came in with the drinks. She had no
tray but carried them any old how under her arm and in her hands.

‘Hello,
who set the room temperature to gloomy in here?’ she enquired.