It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (22 page)

“So no more nonsense. All right?”

A crestfallen look appeared on his face, but he seemed to accept the rebuff, bunching his lips as he turned from her.

Back in the house she looked at the flowers. She’d had flowers sent to her enough times in her adult life for them to stop meaning very much to her. They were just things that had to be unwrapped and cooed over and arranged in a vase and then thrown out before they started smelling bad. But these seemed to take her back to an earlier time, when such offerings still had a power to move her.

She had done the right thing in sending the boy home, she sup posed. And yet an unexpectedly strong emotion had come into her: an unnerving delight. Looking at these chalky blue flowers lolling on their stems over the glass bowl, she had a feeling of having just sacrificed the chance of some rare, harmless intimacy for the sake of an idea of propriety that meant absolutely nothing to her.

At once, as if that thought paradoxically freed her from a lingering resistance, she went over to the piano and began trying in earnest to learn the Bruckner piece, the “Reminiscence.”

For the next three days she did little else. As she had thought, it was well within the range of what she had once been able to play, and the challenge of learning it seemed to her just what was needed to help her get back the old discipline and agility she’d had as a girl. Her concentration, grown weak in recent years, was remarkably focused once she started. It was no effort to sit at the piano for two or three hours at a time. Her hands ached, but she could feel them growing supple, her fingers recovering their memory of intervals and progressions. The music itself, even in the more complex passages, was a little bland, she thought, and she wondered whether the composer had really had anything much to “reminisce” about when he wrote it. But it had its effect on her nevertheless, filling her with a cleansing, clarifying sensation, and the more she played it, the more she liked being in its atmosphere.

Once, as she was playing, she saw Martin walking the dogs across the common. The family must have stayed down for the Easter holidays. He glanced several times at the house as he passed, and a feeling of gladness came into her: the looks seemed to confirm that she hadn’t put him off entirely. It would have been easy enough to go out and say hello, but she stayed where she was, afraid of finding herself once again compelled to say something “responsible.” She watched him instead, and it was almost as satisfying as talking to him, his loose jeans and untucked cotton shirt billowing down the length of his bony frame in the April breeze as he strode forward in his dreamy, gliding way along the path.

Thursday was her Meals on Wheels day. She picked up the meals in their heatproof cases at the Apetito center in the industrial park outside Mayborough, a few miles beyond Three Bells Green, and dropped them off with the clients on the estates nearby. She liked being with these elderly men and women, enjoyed s'eeing her own brightening effect on them as she set them up with the meals, often doing a bit of tidying for them while she was there. Some of the homes were squalid in the extreme, forgotten food rotting in odd places, overpowering smells of incontinence. But to her own surprise she had discovered that this made her want to stay around and help, rather than get out as quickly as she could. It occurred to her that she would have made a good district nurse, if such an office still existed, and at the back of her mind was a vague thought of training for that or some other sort of social work when the time came to get a job.

After she’d finished, she went to the town center to do some errands. She was coming out of the greengrocer’s on High Street when she saw Hazel Crawford walking toward her with the dogs. She smiled, bracing herself for the encounter. But on seeing her the woman looked abruptly away and crossed to the other side of the street.

The snub, if that was what it was, didn’t touch June in a personal way—Hazel Crawford was not someone whose good opinion mattered to her one way or another. But it was certainly peculiar, and its disquieting mystery fell over the cheerful mood she had been in for the past few days, not altogether dispelling it, but blurring it, like a half-opaque scrim.

The next day was Mrs. Dolfuss’s day. She was an odd character, this Mrs. Dolfuss; honest to a fault (any loose change she found she would lay out conspicuously on the mantelpiece), but taciturn and singularly humorless, and she had always intimidated June. She spoke with the light burr and idiosyncratic grammar of the older locals, mixed strangely with a foreign accent, and June had a dim memory of having been told that she was a refugee, or had been brought over by refugees, though she had no idea from where, or how she had ended up in this rural corner. All June knew of her personal life was that it centered around a church somewhere in Mayborough, one where, judging from the pamphlets she left behind, a peculiarly bleak brand of Christianity was practiced. When June had informed her about her divorce, the woman had looked almost physically uncomfortable, as if the news placed her in a suddenly stressful relation to the house. Since then she had given an impression of being there on sufferance, coming strictly in observance of some regrettably binding agreement.

At the appointed hour that Friday she arrived on her bicycle, wearing a brown raincoat and a black plastic fisherman’s hat. It was drizzling, but even allowing for that it seemed to June that there was something more concertedly forbidding than usual about the woman’s appearance. Instead of letting herself in as she usually did, she knocked, remaining outside the door when June opened it.

“I’ve come to give my notice, Mrs. Houghton,” she said, looking fiercely at her employer. “I did consider phoning but I come up meself in the end because I’m not ashamed to speak my mind. The fact of it is I can’t be in conscience working here no more so if you’ll kindly pay me to when I last come, I’ll be on my way.”

“What are you talking about?” June asked in a daze. “What are you saying?”

The woman’s round, haggard face seemed to dilate in the gray air as though swelling on her own obscurely affronted rectitude. She shifted her weight on her feet: “What I’m saying, Mrs. Houghton, is I don’t judge others because it’s their business how they carry on, but where 1 work and who I work for is my business.” “What are you
saying
?”

“I’m saying there’s some kinds of carryings-on I’ll not be party to. So if you’ll pay me what I’m owed in my wages I shan’t be troubling you no more.”

Abruptly June seemed to grasp what had happened.

“All right, I’ll get your money,” she said. She went inside for her purse, and thrust the money into Mrs. Dolfuss’s hands. For a moment the woman looked nonplussed, hanging dripping in the doorway as though she expected June to defend herself, perhaps even beg her to reconsider, and it was a gratifying minor victory to be able to thwart her in that.

“What are you waiting for?” June asked.

Later, she regretted being quite so high-handed. It was obvious the woman had been manipulated, and equally obvious by whom. Vindictiveness was rare in June’s experience, but she wasn’t, after all, a complete stranger to it. She knew well the feeling of luxuri ant, almost voluptuous destructiveness it released, over and above any justified punitive function it might serve. It seemed clear to her that something similar—some pure malicious pleasure—was discernible in Paul Crawford’s behavior. No doubt there was a practical element too, at least from his point of view: preempt any attack she might launch on his standing as a family man, respected member of his profession, et cetera, by undermining her credibility among those who might matter. But she could feel something else too: some chill, gloating delight in the discovery of this power to harm her. Even when he had come to her door that night she’d sensed something much icier than simple lust going on. Certainly nothing as frolicsome as the word “totty” had seemed to be on his mind.

It rained all weekend and on into the next week. She stayed inside, brooding on what had happened. Who besides Mrs. Dolfuss had he maligned her to? What exactly had he said? It struck her that there was no reason for him to have restricted himself to the story about her and Alan’s brother. He could be inventing all kinds of unpleasant rumors about her. It came to her suddenly that he had told his wife she’d made a pass at him as he was seeing her off from their house after that dinner. Yes: she could imagine it as clearly as if he were right there, speaking in that affected way of his:
Quite the little Miss Bedroom Eyes, that woman. She was all for dragging me home across the common with her on some pretext about the dark. I had to send Martin out with her just to keep her claws off me . .
. Was that why his wife had crossed the street? Meanwhile, what other things might he have spread about her? Nothing specific came to mind, but the sense of being spoken about, of remarks being made in the village shop, loaded questions asked in the bar of the White Hart, innuendos dropped into the conversation at the post office, was vivid and disturbing. The clear, invigorating air of her new life here in the country had been polluted, it seemed to her, a foulness spread into it.

What strange vacillations of feeling were being forced on her by her new neighbors! The boy’s bluebells, the mother’s snub, the piano piece, and now this. She spent the week shifting between these two moods. It was as though two mutually exclusive realities were being laid before her. One moment she would be playing the Bruckner, calm and alert, with a sense of being close to the source of some mysterious strength. And then a moment later she would find herself in the caustic atmosphere of the boy’s father—hurt, enraged, and filled with her own, increasingly vivid, thoughts of revenge.

That Saturday afternoon, as she was about to leave the Sains-bury’s car park in Mayborough, she saw a Bange Bover with a familiar face at the wheel pull into a parking space. Keeping herself out of view, she watched Paul Crawford climb out and walk toward the Sainsbury’s entrance. An idea came to her, a sudden image blooming in her mind, irresistible in its stark, obliterating splendor . . . She stood a moment, stunned at this resurgence of her old audacity, then smiled to herself, and took a pen and paper from her bag. She was about to start writing when she had a better thought, and went on into the supermarket instead.

It was crowded, but the man’s tall figure in its tweed country coat was easy to spot: he was at the poultry section, appraising the respective merits of some pink young ducklings. He was handsome, there was no denying that. His cropped, silvering hair had a bristling look as if it might make the nerves in your flesh tingle. The line of his clean-shaven chin jutted forward.

You could say anything to people, she’d discovered in London, if you thought of yourself as an actor in a play, preferably some sparkling comedy. Impudence, malice, tenderness, brazen flirtation—anything was possible if you could summon that particular heightened, theatrical poise. Pausing a moment to armor herself, mentally, with spotlights and an audience, she moved in softly beside her neighbor.

“I was just going to put a note on your car,” she said, not looking at him.

He took his time responding.

“Were you indeed.”

“Yes. Shall I tell you what I was going to write?”

“I don’t see that I can prevent it.”

“Oh, I think you’ll be pleased. I’ll give you the exact words.” She cleared her throat: “ ‘I find I am unable to stop thinking about you after all. Let yourself in at midnight tonight. I’ll be waiting for you upstairs.’ There.” She turned to face him. “No need to RSVP. Goodbye.”

With a brief, candid glance into his eyes, which appeared once again to be appraising her with that air of detached, amused con-noisseurship, she turned and walked unhurriedly out of the shop. On her way home she stopped off at the ironmonger’s to pick up a small can of red paint.

It was late afternoon. By the time she got to the common the sun was melting orange through the treetops. Inside the house she poured herself a glass of wine. There were several hours to kill. She was aware of something volatile inside her: a strong, surging excitement, edged with faint dread. An uneasy urge to go over her plan repeatedly in her mind, assure herself of its invincible brilliance and logic, was making her restless. Small doubts began to assail her. Perhaps he wouldn’t come. Well, that didn’t matter. Perhaps, if he did come, he wouldn’t leave, even after she’d thrown the paint at him. Not possible: he wasn’t the type to risk getting into serious trouble. Well, then, the paint—wasn’t that going to make a horrible mess of her cottage? Worth it, she assured herself. She looked out across the common. Occasionally at this hour you’d see a fox creeping under the tall tendrils of rosebay willow herb. Sometimes a barn owl glided by, heavy-bodied like a cargo plane.

Movement caught her eye—a figure deep in the woods, hidden and then unhidden by trees. No detail was discernible, not even enough to show whether it was a man or a woman, and yet she recognized immediately who it was. At once she found herself in a state of bright astonishment, in which several things appeared to be happening at once. Her “plan,” in all its frail brilliance, seemed to collapse abruptly and evaporate like some flimsy illusion. But meanwhile another, still more incandescent invention rose up in its place. As it disclosed itself, she could feel the encroaching doubts vanishing abruptly from her mind.
This
was what was called for, she realized: an act of vengeance that would also be one of sweetly fantastical magnanimity . . . She wouldn’t even have to spatter her walls with paint, she realized: the sight awaiting her antagonist as he opened her door was going to be all the red paint she could possibly need.

Opening wide the w indows, she sat at the piano and began playing the “Reminiscence” piece.

It seemed easier than it ever had before. Passages that only a few days earlier had continued to elude her, unfolded with a fluency that made them sound, for the first time, purposeful. It was as if some final obstruction had been lifted, restoring abilities she hadn’t felt since she’d moved from her parents’ home, leaving her piano lessons and all other such childish things behind her. As her hands traveled over the keys, her mind raced forward, not so much planning events as foreseeing them, as if what awaited her was as clearly and unequivocally written as the notes on the staves before her, and would itself, in due time, become the indelible material of reminiscence.