The Backward Shadow (8 page)

‘You call that making love?' I said. ‘You poor ignorant bastard. Go home.' I always was inclined to stoop to abusive language when upset, as I was now, exceedingly. I always regret it later and wish I had been dignified and ladylike, but by then it's too late.

Unfortunately, he had this in common with me, and there followed a perfectly unprintable string of filth from which I inferred that he thought a woman in my position (only he put it more graphically) who invites men into her house and fills them with whisky is asking for anything she gets, and should be grateful to get it from somebody like him and not from some passing yokel who'd probably murder her afterwards. From his description of the poor mythical yokel's crime, I came to the firm conclusion that Mr. Alan Innes was a none-too-well-sublimated sadist.

I sat on the John with my plastic tooth-mug of water, feeling more and more ill and appalled as I listened helplessly, wondering how long it would go on and whether I'd really brought it on myself. I suspected I might have done. It was easy to see now what had set Dottie off on the downward path to disillusion and cynicism. Strange she hadn't mentioned any of this. Perhaps as she was not ‘a woman in my position' he had treated her with more restraint. I sincerely hoped so.

At last he withdrew, snarlingly. I heard the front door slam, but I wasn't falling for that. About ten minutes later I heard it close again, more convincingly this time, and shortly afterwards came the angry roaring of a car engine being revved up with merciless violence. It drove away, and a beautiful silence fell, broken only by the patter of rain on the roof and my own somewhat unsteady breathing.

I emerged from my haven, and stood in the hall, fighting the desire to bolt and bar every entrance to the cottage. Never had the spectre of the demented chalk-pit worker loomed larger. Eventually I settled for the chain. Then I went to see David. On the threshold of his room a sudden most ghastly fear came over me—what if Alan should have …? But of course he hadn't. David was peacefully asleep. I woke him up, quite needlessly, and fed him, quite selfishly. I remember holding him tightly and rocking him with tears of wretchedness and reaction running down my face and saying Toby's name over and over again, like an incantation to hold off the fear.

THE
next morning I telephoned Dottie long distance from the village call-box and said I'd been thinking about her shop idea and was prepared to think about it some more if she had been serious.

‘What changed your mind?' she asked at once.

‘I've decided living alone isn't such a good idea.'

‘Why?'

‘I had a visitor last night—your charming friend Mr. Innes.'

There was a pause, and then she said, ‘Oh. Did he behave himself?'

‘No,' I said.

After another pause, she said, ‘Did you by any chance let him have anything to drink?'

‘Yes. Your blasted whisky.'

‘Oh, God! I'd have warned you, if I'd thought for a moment you'd ever meet. He's practically a schizo. Did you manage all right?'

‘I lost the first battle but I won the war.'

‘
God
, I'm sorry you had that through me! Do you want me to come down?'

‘Yes, but not just to give me moral support. I think you're right. I think we ought to try and do something together, down here. I don't know about your shop idea, but something.'

She thought for a moment, and then said: ‘Are you all right by yourself for another night or so?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘Then give me a few days to make some enquiries and do some thinking. Meanwhile, you find out a few more details about that place, what's the lowest we could rent it for. By the way, if I haven't enough in the bank, what about your aunt's
£
400? Couldn't we use that?'

‘No,' I said. ‘That's for New York.'

‘Are you still set on this New York business?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're crazy. All right. I'll see you on Friday or Saturday.'

Actually it hadn't only been loneliness that had prompted my change of mind. It had also been a letter from the bank that morning, to say I was overdrawn, but much worse than I had thought. Of course I knew I should put the
£
400 in to get myself out of the red, but if I did that it would be gone in no time. I was deeply determined not to spend it on day-to-day living.

So now I had an insane long term plan (New York), a dubious middle-term plan (Dottie) but no recourse at all for the immediate present. How, for example, could I go to Acres' General Grocery today to get my week's supplies, to be paid for as usual by cheque, when I knew there was more than an even chance the cheque would bounce? The bank's letter, couched though it was in the usual refined verbiage, had indicated as much. Mr. Acre had always been kind enough to cash a weekly cheque somewhat larger than my bill, to allow me some spending money. I really couldn't risk abusing his touching faith in me. On the other hand, I had to cat. If I didn't, David wouldn't, and from the cries which were even now resounding from his carry-cot in the back of the car, he wouldn't take kindly to any drop in milk-production.

The situation called for drastic action. After sitting in the car for ten minutes in futile thought, I went into the post-office and asked Mrs. Stephens, who kept it, if she knew of any job-vacancies.

She knew of several. A button-factory in a town twenty miles away had a sign up—she'd seen it last time she passed. Or one of the wealthier local farmers' wives was looking for help in the house. No? Well, several of the probationers from the local cottage hospital were down with 'flu, she knew … not a very
nice
job, of course, the probationers only did the floors and the bedpans and were shouted at by everybody, but …? No? Well, what did I have in mind?

I asked if she, herself, needed an assistant.

She stared at me with her voluble mouth a little open.
Clearly, such an idea had never come to her. She said she had always run the place alone, post-office, sweets, papers, greetings-cards, tobacco and all. There was hardly room for two behind the all-purpose counter. But, I said, I'd seen her run off her feet at certain times, with a queue protruding from the door. What if I were to come in, not all day, but just at those busy hours, to lend her a hand, for, say, 10/- an hour? She could then concentrate on the post-office part, and leave all the sundries to me.

She argued that it wouldn't be worth it, since there would be no increase in business to cover the cost of employing me. I said, wouldn't it be worth it in terms of better service and efficiency—and less work for her? She shook her head very doubtfully and said she would have to speak to Mr. Stephens.

Mr. Stephens, I knew, was usually kept out of sight in the musty little flat behind the shop. He was considerably older than his wife, old to a point where, frankly, his advice on any matter more taxing than whether he felt hungry or cold was scarcely worth asking. But Mrs. Stephens, who tended him devotedly, frequently scurrying through the dividing door to guide him away from his favourite pastime of turning on the gas-taps, maintained the saving fiction that he was her
eminence gris
, controlling her and the business from backstage, so to speak. The village maintained it with her, and the neighbours stood by to call the fire-brigade or turn off water at the main should Mrs. Stephens' sixth sense of her husband's ‘little mischiefs' fail to warn her in time.

So when she spoke of consulting him, I knew that what she really wanted was time to think it over herself, and that the answer would probably be no. Nevertheless, I said I'd call back again in the afternoon to see if she'd arrived at any decision. Meantime, I went into the Swan, next door, and asked its burly proprietor, whom I knew only as A. Davies from the name on his framed licence in the saloon bar, if he needed a part-time bar-maid.

His astonishment was quite comic. He actually reared back his head and made his eyes pop. Then he began to laugh.

‘What do you know about drawing pints, my love?' he asked. ‘It ain't s'easy as it looks, y'know!'

I told him it didn't even look easy, but that I thought I could learn. The idea evidently tickled him even pinker than his normal shade, and before I knew it he'd lifted the hinged partition and urged me in behind the bar.

‘Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly! Now then, have a try, go on, just you have a try!' He gave me a pint-pot and positioned me opposite a three-handled pump. ‘Draw that gentleman a pint of mild and bitter. That's the mild—that's the bitter—don't you worry, Ben, you won't have to drink it, we'll make her drink it, eh, love? You'll pull all the better with a pint inside you.'

At my first attempt I spilled just enough to satisfy him that the whole business was just as highly skilled as he said it was, and pleased him further by drinking half the overflowing pot down in one go, though it nearly killed me as beer is not my drink. However, my effort drew cries of ‘She's a good 'un—open your throat, love, tip it down—you see, Alf, you don't have to drive her to it, she's willin'!' and a scattered round of applause. When I raised my face from the mug, and had received the laugh due to me for my foam moustache, Alf was looking at me with a gleam of speculation in his small eyes.

‘Have another go, my dear,' he said in a quite different tone.

This time I drew a perfect pint, basing my timing on what I remembered from a vast tea-urn I once presided over during my waitress days in Yorkshire. Alf watched me narrowly. ‘A shade too much bitter,' he commented.

‘Never mind that,' said Ben, a rotund farmer with a whiskery jowl. ‘I'll settle for that one. Never seen one prettier pulled'n that, neither. Give 'er the job, I would.'

‘Come through into the private,' said Alf.

I finished the day with two jobs under my belt, ‘Mr. Stephens' having decided his dear wife needed a helper after all. The hours were as complex as a jig-saw puzzle—10 a.m. till opening time in the post office. The Swan till 2.30, lunch
to be eaten on the hop, then a break until 3.30 when I returned to the post office until it closed at 5. I was also to do special duty in the evenings at The Swan on Saturdays and other occasions, as and when Alf needed me and I could manage.

Fitting David's schedule in with this was going to be none too easy. I sat at home in the evening and worked it out at Addy's desk. What it amounted to was that I was going to have to start weaning him—well, at 6½ months that was no tragedy, but the truth was I adored feeding him myself and rather envied those primitive women who go on suckling their children till they're walking. Of course I realised there was something a bit Freudian and perilous in this. I had been unable to help noticing the distinctly erotic element in the delight engendered by that eager, nuzzling mouth. Sometimes, in the sleepy hours of the night when I had taken David into by bed and, propped up with pillows, had found myself drifting off to sleep in the middle of a feed, I had been guiltily aware of the intrusion of some highly unmaternal images. My memories of Toby's caresses were still concrete enough to need very little stimulation to revive disturbingly.

All in all, the necessity of abandoning the two middle feeds of the day and combining them, with luck, into one milk-plus-solids meal which could be given to him by kind Mrs. Alf, or me if not too busy, seemed an excellent plan. I only hoped it would seem so to David.

The first day worked out splendidly. I fed him an hour early, an arrangement which surprised but did not seem to dismay him, and took him, sleeping peacefully, in his carry-cot to Mrs. Stephens' where I found a corner for him behind the counter—raised from the floor on four pillars of glass containing Sunny Sparklers, Treacle Bon-Bons, Lemon Sherbets and Dolly-Mixture respectively. There wasn't a peep out of him all the while I was learning the secrets of weighing sweets, taking newspaper orders, pricing cigarettes and locating stationery, a minor line relegated to some dusty boxes on a top shelf. The only bad moment was when I saw Mrs. Stephens' grey Persian cat stealing towards the cot, its eyes narrowed with fell intent.
I let out a roar which caused Mrs. Stephens, two steps down in the post-office section, to drop one of the parcel weights on her foot, and the cat to leap afrightedly into a box of jelly babies which fell all over the floor.

‘What is it, what is it?' I heard the wheezing voice of poor senile Mr. Stephens pettishly inquiring. ‘What have I done now?'

‘Nothing, dearie, it's nothing, just the pussy!' Mrs. Stephens called gaily, whispering to me, ‘Don't cry out like that, dear, it does startle him.'

‘But the cat was going to jump in the cot!'

‘No, no, I'm sure Muffy would never do such a thing!' she cried, much shocked. She scooped the cat, whose name was Mufferpaws, up in her arms and put her face into its long, suffocating fur.

‘Isn't there somewhere else we could put the baby?' I asked.

‘Well … there's the bedroom. Even with the door closed, we could easily hear him if he cried.'

We carried him through between us, and I saw Mr. Stephens for the first time. He was sitting in a cretonne-covered wing chair before a tiny black range which included a minute fire of glowing coke. He was covered from bedroom-slippers to shoulders with an ancient rug, and his white head lolled against one of the wings, though his eyes opened as we passed through and observed us blearily.

‘It wa'n't me this time,' he muttered rather smugly as we passed.

‘Of course it wasn't, lovie,' said Mrs. Stephens briskly. ‘You sleep a bit more, it'll soon be time for your dinner.'

We put the cot in the middle of the pink satin bedspread on some newspapers. There was a stifling odour of old flesh and old clothes and chamber-pots in the room and I sidled over to the window to open it. Thick lace curtains, brown with age, obscured the light, and the window stuck after being opened the first inch or two. Also I was none too happy about the proximity of the room to the wandering old man.