Spare Brides (28 page)

‘I met a number of brave and impressive aristocratic men in battle. They weren’t all lofty or indolent.’

‘Well then.’

‘And I met a fair few nasty bastards too. They weren’t all heroes.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you? I wonder.’ Edgar looked exasperated. She didn’t know what she’d done wrong, but she felt she had made a gaffe. The whole afternoon had had that air to it. They were missing one another or knocking up against one another; they weren’t merging into one as they had before. ‘I know that you see that wood must be chopped and carried, along with coal scuttles, breakfast trays and hot-water bottles, but do you see the people who actually do these things? Or is it lost in the code that life must simply be made as pleasant as possible for the wealthy, irrespective of the cost.’

‘You sound like a Bolshevik.’

‘That’s nonsense. I am no such thing. I’m an Englishman and I’m proud to be such. But we could do better.’

So he was angry with her. Why? Because she was rich? Because she was other? Lydia saw a glimmer of hope. He was not done with her. Anger showed that he was, at least, still involved. He thought that she had views and hopes and beliefs; he wanted to hear them. He wanted to tell her his. Lawrence simply thought she was beautiful although rather useless, like an elaborate, expensive ornament.

‘Why are you so angry with me? What have I done wrong?’ She wanted to reach across and lace her fingers through his. She couldn’t stretch across the no-man’s-land of the wobbly café table.

Instead of answering her question he asked one of his own.

‘Why are you here?’

‘You invited me.’

‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’ Edgar pushed his hair out of his eyes. It was a straightforward gesture; Lydia shivered as though he’d just trailed his fingers up her thigh. He sighed, heavily. ‘That Oaksley fellow, I hardly spoke to him.’

‘The party was huge; it’s impossible to chat with everyone at that type of gathering.’

‘I ignored him, or as good as. Everyone did, except for your friend.’ He took another drag on his cigarette, his hand quivering slightly. ‘After the war, your sort wanted everything to return to exactly as it had been. That’s what those weekends are about: you think if you party hard enough, you’ll turn back time. But my type – the working man, and woman – we saw that could never be the case. We wanted change. We still do.’ Lydia realised he wasn’t angry with her; he was furious and unforgiving of himself. ‘I forgot as much that weekend. I shouldn’t have ignored him.’

‘You can’t save everyone,’ she said carefully.

‘I’m well aware of that,’ he sneered. ‘Do you know something, Lid? Holding on to my anger is the best thing I can do. If I suppress it, it might dissipate into despair. I might just admit to how bloody futile it all was. How bloody useless it all is now.’

Suddenly he flopped, as though his skeleton had been sucked out of his body. He looked weary, lost. Lydia reached out and touched him lightly with her neatly manicured finger.

‘I do understand. You think I don’t, but I do.’

‘How?’

‘After you. After us. I felt the same. I wanted change. I want change, now.’

E
DGAR’S ANGER ENGULFED
the room, the street, the world, and then it became so enormous that it collapsed in on itself. He felt foolish for not being able to forget and move on. After all, he was one of the lucky ones. He’d got through. He didn’t have any life-ruining injuries. He should just get on with things. Others did, didn’t they? He wasn’t sure. Other people’s lives always looked rosy from the outside, but if you got close – and he had no wish to do so – the lives of strangers were just as likely to be blighted with cankerous doubt. Generally Edgar tried very hard to disguise his anger. He had some tricks. He held his cigarette with considered nonchalance, or linked his hands behind his head, making a pillow, slouching in a parody of relaxation. He laughed loudly, he drank quickly, he ate heartily and fucked greedily. He was covetous, avaricious. He ached with hunger. A hunger for lost time, but he knew he couldn’t ever satiate that particular craving. He wanted to make up for lost time. They all did.

It wasn’t possible.

He cloaked his anger but for some reason he couldn’t hide the truth of his self from her.

He wondered why.

She was very attractive, but there were always lots of attractive women lined up around the walls of dance floors, serving at tables or in shops, waiting to be noticed. She was wealthier than most of the women he’d had, but then every woman at the Pondson-Callows’ had been wearing jewels that held a value equivalent to many months, possibly years, of his pay; he could have had any one of them. Lady Anna Renwick had sent him seven invitations in the past six weeks, and she was single. Lady Lydia Chatfield should have been easier to forget. Yet when she smiled, one side of her lips turning up before the other, he found she was harder to fool. Harder to forget. It was dangerous. Potentially messy. He ought to cut it here. But hadn’t he tried? He hadn’t contacted her for six weeks; he’d fully expected to forget all about her in that time. He had not. He had thought of her thin fingers – her red nails and loose rings – grabbing on to the edge of the desk, on to his shirt. He had failed to forget the exact shade of the oyster silk suspender belt against her pale thighs or the dark triangle of hair between her legs. And every time he had thought of her, the muscles in his stomach flexed instinctively. It wasn’t just the sex he remembered and craved. He thought of her running through the snow, inappropriately and hurriedly dressed. Keen, then awkward with sincerity, despite her habitual good manners and well-practised sophistication. She was not easy to forget.

They drained their teacups. He glanced at his timepiece, which was strapped to his wrist. Such a thing had been worn by those engaged in aerial combat; now everyone loved the idea. It was just after five. They could go home now.

Or not.

‘What shall we do?’ he asked. She shrugged. Her skinny shoulders rose up high, like a puppet’s, and met the ends of her glossy blunt-cut hair. Her eyes were clear and desperate. Women often looked at him in that way. He knew he could propose anything and she’d agree. As other women had. Women he’d taken in dark alleyways or cheap guest houses that cost just shillings and their reputations. He’d had them in the back of borrowed cars or in their lodgings while their roommates feigned sleep. He’d fucked hard, hoping with each thrust to shove away the dead bodies, the twisted limbs and the black staring eyes that could no longer see. He put his fingers up women and attempted not to think of the three occasions when he’d tried, and failed, to shove the spilt bellies and innards back inside a dying man. He told himself that death and sex were separate. But they weren’t. He’d been used. Tricked. The bastards had used sex to get them all to go and kill.

He shut his eyes and clenched his fists, but the images stayed tattooed on to the insides of his eyelids; the violence clung to his fingertips. He was so often alone and angry. More alone and more angry when he fucked. There was brutality in his thrusts, even though he tried to control it. The women saw it, if they looked for it. He didn’t want it to be that way. Not with her.

‘Let’s walk.’ He flung down enough coins on the table to pay for the tea and generously tip the waitress, then they stood up and left.

Outside, she shivered and pulled her coat tightly around her; the weak spring sunshine was no match for the long shadows thrown by the imposing multiple-storeyed buildings. They found their way back to the Cromwell Road and walked until it dissolved into Brompton Road. They kept going past Harrods, where no doubt she spent too much time and too much money. They pushed on past Knightsbridge tube station and Hyde Park Corner. He had a vague idea that they were heading to Green Park; they could walk along the Mall to St James’s Park. He had no idea where they would go after that.

As they put one foot in front of the other, they both thought of their previous trudge together, through the luscious, pure surface of fresh snow. Away from other people they became freer. Free from the inequalities that wealth, and lack of it, laid down; free from the constraints of being someone else’s wife; free from the guilt and grief of war. They were simply a couple, walking. They slowly shook off the awkward unfamiliarity and were doused in genial relief as they rediscovered their connection. At one point he put his hand on the small of her back as he guided her across a road; she then linked her arm through his. Their steps fell together; he thought it was as though they had been drilled, she thought it was as though they had been together for ever. They both liked it.

As they walked, he told her about himself. He was the eldest of four. His parents owned a corner shop in Middlesbrough, a town in the north of England that she had never heard of. He found it was possible, essential, to painstakingly tell her some flimsy, long-forgotten details from his boyhood. He wanted her to know him. To see him stripped of his recent acquisitions – medals, uniform, a disarming ability to say just the right thing in an aristocratic lady’s parlour. She listened with assiduous attention. He liked it. He felt fascinating.

‘Didn’t you ever consider going back there after the war?’

‘The north makes me too pensive. After I got back to England, I knew it would be impossible to live in a place where everyone was the same as my mam and dad – everyone that is except perhaps for me. I feel less dislocated in London, where hardly anyone is the same as anyone, and everyone is lonely. This is where I belong, with the other lonely people. For now.’

‘For now?’

He told her about his dreams of travelling; he’d like to see Africa, America, even Australia. She gasped, looked panicked, and he joked, ‘Wouldn’t you like me to live a long way away? I’m nothing but a nuisance.’

‘No,’ she replied simply. ‘Stay close.’ She looked afraid, anxious. She wanted him, badly. She was too willing to please him. But then he wanted to please her too. Or at least impress her. Something. It was hard to name exactly what it was he wanted in relation to her. Something different. He was mesmerised by her red rosebud lips, glistening and apart. He watched them when she talked and when she listened. Everything around her seemed less distinct. The crowds and the streets blurred to one homogenous mess. She alone stood out, gleaming.

He told her about how it was for him before the fighting. He’d been so young then. Not just seven years younger; aeons younger. He’d often been carefree and careless, but not with any hint of anarchy; back then his freedom came from a lack of knowledge. He had not known what mankind was. What it could be. Could do. He’d served behind the counter in his father’s shop. ‘A comfortable living. Pleasant.’ His father was popular, because he was generous with his tick and he gave the skinny, poverty-stricken, lice-ridden kids free sweets if they stayed out of trouble, out of the way. But Edgar had grown too large for the space behind the counter, squeezed between his parents, with his younger siblings elbowing in too. He’d yearned for something bigger and more physical, so when he turned fourteen, he’d got a job in the shipyard.

‘Hard work,’ his mother had warned. Worried, she’d folded her arms under her big bosoms. He’d got his physical size from her side of the family. She saw the shipyard as a step down. She’d scrambled to reach her lower-middle-class position and she didn’t like the idea of her son flinging himself back down the greasy pole into a working-class job.

‘Man’s work.’ His father, a neat and honest man, who had always envied the bulk, if not the poverty, of the shipbuilders who visited his shop, had seemed proud.

Edgar had felt ropes roughen his palms and heavy loads broaden his shoulders. He’d tasted the salt in the air, and after some months, he’d begun to smell of it himself. The North Sea air, air that had travelled a long way to arrive up the River Tees, sat in his hair and skin. ‘I used to wonder how far that air had come. At least from France, maybe further, from the Baltic. I was breathing air that Scandinavians or even Russians might have breathed. It seemed a marvellous thing.’ He beamed at her and she smiled back, dazzled. What a world it had been then. Before. When the world was connected by sea breezes, not grief.

It was a time of simple pleasures. Easy laughter with the men he worked and drank with. Cold beer. Hot girls. A regular although decidedly modest salary, to put into his mother’s hand at the end of the week. At the weekends a gang of them sometimes got on their bikes and pedalled over to one of the villages, Guisborough or Great Ayton, eating apples and cheese from brown paper bags on the North York Moors. It was a time when he still thought of the soil as a good thing: fertile and giving. He barely remembered that lad now. The smell of the sea made him think of the crossing to France. Soil was intrinsically linked with death, rotting corpses, blood, rats and shit. Except when he was with her. Then breezes smelt good again.

‘You’ve been a soldier for seven years?’

‘Yes. I’m not sure how to stop being one. I went early. There were Hun raids on Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby as early as December nineteen fourteen. The war came to us quite quickly.’

‘You volunteered?’

‘There and then. For God’s sake, Lid, please don’t be impressed.’

Edgar realised that he couldn’t banish the bounce in his step as he walked by her side. Something that he usually reserved just for the few short hours of elation following a sexual conquest. He hadn’t touched her that way for weeks, and yet he still bounced.

He found it astoundingly easy to tell her the most extraordinary and macabre things about himself. He was amazed that she was equally seduced by both. She accepted his breathtaking successes as a foregone conclusion; did not blanch at his compromises or his ambition. He told her more about his family. One of his sisters had just married, at Christmas time. ‘She’s picked a lazy oaf but she seems happy enough, at least for now. There’s no accounting for taste.’ He wondered if she could understand his world full of necessary economies, self-motivation, self-improvement. She seemed to. But how could she? Really? Had she ever spent an afternoon watching flies die a slow death on the sticky ribbon of paper that hung from the ceiling? Had she ridden a bike? She had never earned a penny in her life. Yet did it have a bearing?