The Ghost Road (8 page)

But on Sundays she locked up the shop and entertained
the Vicar, the Rev. Arthur Lindsey, in a room which might have been designed as
a stage set for the purpose. Dark oak furniture, plants with thick, durable,
rubbery leaves—Ada had no patience with flowers, always drooping and dying—and,
prominently displayed on a side table, the family Bible, open at a particularly
fortifying text. In this setting Ada poured tea into china cups, dabbed her rat
trap of a mouth with a starched napkin and engaged in light, or, in deference
to the Sabbath, improving conversation on the topics of the day.

Billy Prior sat at the other end of the table, a concession
to his new status as future son-in-law. No more material concessions had been
forthcoming: he and Sarah had not been left alone together for a second.
Though Ada was gratified by the engagement.
She believed in
marriage, the more strongly,
Prior
suspected, for
never having sampled it herself.
You don't know that
, he
reminded himself. But then he looked round the room and thought,
Yes, I do.
Photographs of Sarah and Cynthia stood on the sideboard, but none of the
grandparents, none of their father. No portrait of Ada-the-blushing-bride. And
the fortifying text she'd selected for display was the chapter of the Book of
Job in which Eliphaz the Temanite visits his friend and seeks to console him
for the plague of boils which covers his skin from crown to sole by pointing
out that he had it coming. One thing Ada
did
have was a sense of
humour. Oh, and an eye for male flesh. Yesterday he'd helped her hang curtains,
and her gaze on his groin as she handed the curtains up had been so frankly
appraising he'd almost blushed.
You might fool Lindsey,
he thought,
but you don't fool me.

He made an effort to attend to the conversation. They
were talking about the granting of the vote to women of thirty and over, an act
of which Ada strongly disapproved. It had pleased Almighty God, she said, to
create the one sex visibly and
unmistakably
superior to the other, and that was all there was to be said in the matter.
From the way Lindsey simpered and giggled, one could only assume he thought he
knew which sex was meant. He was one of those Anglo-Catholic young men who waft
about in a positive miasma of stale incense and seminal fluid. Prior knew the
type—biblically as well.

Sarah touched
the teapot, and stood up. 'I think this could do with freshening. Billy?'

'Does it take
two of you, Sarah?'

'I need Billy to
open the door, Mother.'

In the kitchen
she burst out, 'Honestly, what century does she think she's living in?'

Prior shrugged.
From the kitchen window Melbourne Terrace sloped steeply down, a shoal of
red-grey roofs half hidden in swathes of mist and rain. He wondered whether Ada
had taken this house for the view, for the sweep of cobbled road, the rows and
rows of smoking chimney-stacks, was as dramatic in its way as a mountain range,
and, for Ada, rather more significant. For there, below her, was the life she'd
saved her daughters from: scabby-mouthed children, women with black eyes,
bedbugs, street fights,
marriage
lines pasted to the
inside of the front window to humiliate neighbours who had none of their own to
display. He could quite see how the vote might seem irrelevant to a woman
engaged in such a battle.

Sarah came
across and joined him by the window, putting her arms round his chest from
behind and resting her face against his shoulder. 'I hope
it's
nicer tomorrow. You haven't had much luck with the weather, have you?'

Wasn't all he
hadn't
had.
He turned to face her. 'When are we going
to get some time alone?'

'I don't know.'
She shook her head. 'I'll work something out.'

'Look, you could
pretend to go to work, and—'

'I can't
pretend
to go to work,
Billy. We need the money. Come on, she'll be wondering where we are.'

Prior found a
plate of lardy cake thrust into his hand, and followed her back into the front
room.

They found
Lindsey confiding his ideas for next week's sermon—he was attracted to the idea
of sacrifice, he said. Are you indeed?
thought
Prior,
plonking the plate down. Cynthia, not long widowed, was hanging on every word,
probably on her mother's instructions: she was by far the more biddable of the
two girls. Sitting down,
Prior
nudged Lindsey's foot
under the table and was delighted to see a faint blush begin around the dog
collar and work its way upwards. A sidelong, flickering glance, a brushing and
shying away of eyes, and...
You're wasting your lardy cake on that one, Ma,
Prior told his future
mother-in-law silently, folding his arms.

* * *

After Lindsey
had gone, Ada changed into her weekday dress and settled down with a bag of
humbugs and a novel. She sat close to the fire, raising her skirt high enough
to reveal elastic garters and an expanse of white thigh. As her skirt warmed
through, a faint scent of urine rose from it, for Ada, as he knew from Sarah,
followed the old custom and when taken short in the street straddled her legs
like a mare and pissed in the gutter. His being allowed to witness these
intimacies was another concession to the ring on Sarah's finger.

The young people
gathered round the piano, and, after the requisite number of hymns had been
thumped and bellowed through, passed on to sentimental favourites from before
the war.

'You'll know
this one, Ma,' Prior said, drawing out the vowel sounds, ogling her over his
shoulder. Rather to his surprise, she sang with him.

For her beauty was sold,

For an old man's gold,

She's just a bird in a gilded cage!

'By heck, it was
never my luck,' Ada said, going back to her book.

Prior glanced at
his watch. 'Do you fancy a turn round the block?' he asked Sarah, closing the
piano lid.

'Yes,'
A
quick glance at Cynthia.

'I'm too tired,'
said Cynthia.

'You're never
thinking of walking in this?' Ada said. 'Listen at it. It's blowing a gale.'

It was too.

'Anyway it's
work tomorrow, our Sarah,' Ada said, closing her book. 'I think we'd all be
better for an early night. Are you comfortable on that sofa, Billy?'

'Fine, thank
you.' Except them's this ruddy great pole sticking into the cushions.

'You might try lying
on your back.'

They'd have
burnt her in the
Middle
Ages. Sarah brought down
blankets and pillows from her bedroom, and, watched by Ada from the foot of the
stairs, kissed him chastely goodnight.

It's my
embarkation leave, he wanted to howl. We're engaged.

The door closed
behind her. He wasn't ready for
bed—or rather he wasn't
ready for bed
alone.
He took off his tunic and boots, wandered round the
room, looked at photographs, finally threw himself on to the sofa and picked up
Ada's discarded novel.

Ada had a great
stock of books. A few romances, which she read with every appearance of
enjoyment, gurgles of laughter erupting from the black bombazine like a hot
spring from volcanic earth. But she preferred penny dreadfuls, which she read
propped up against the milk bottle as she prepared the evening meal.
Fingerprints, translucent with butter, encrusted with batter, sticky with jam,
edged every page. Bloody thumbprints led up to one particularly gory murder.
All the books had murders in them, all carried out by women. Aristocratic
ladies ranged abroad, pushing their husbands into rivers, off balconies, over
cliffs, under trains or, in the case of the more domestically inclined,
feminine type of woman, remained at home and jalloped them to death. Only the final
pages were free of cooking stains, and for a long time this puzzled him, until
he realized that, in the final chapter, the adulterous murderesses were caught
and punished. Ada had no truck with that.
Her
heroines got
away with it.

The clock ticked
loudly, as it had done all last night, a malevolent tick that kept him awake.
He picked it up, intending to put it in the kitchen, but it stopped at once and
only resumed its ticking when he replaced it on the mantel shelf. For Christ's
sake, he thought, even the bloody
clock's
trained to
keep its knees together.

He could hear
the girls getting undressed in the room overhead: the thump of shoes being
kicked off, snatches of conversation, giggles, almost—he convinced himself—the
sigh of petticoats dropping to the floor. Sarah's momentary nakedness, before
the white shroud of night-dress came down. He got up and went to the piano,
stroking the keys, singing under his breath.

Far, far from Wipers

I long to be,

Where German snipers

Can't get at me.

Damp is my dug-out,

Cold are my feet

Waiting for Whizzbangs

To put me to sleep.

The door opened.
He turned and saw Sarah, a white column of night-gown, a thick plait hanging
down over her left shoulder.

‘I'm sorry,' he
said, closing the piano. 'Have I been making too much noise?'

'No. I just
wanted to see you.'

Incredibly,
impossibly, the sound of girlish whispering and giggling continued overhead.

'Cynthia,' Sarah
said, closing the door. 'She's pretending I'm still there.'

She knelt on the
hearthrug, and began feeding the few remaining sticks of wood into the fire.
Then, carefully, so as not to douse the flames, she dropped shiny nuggets of
coal into the fiery caverns the dying fire had made. A hiss, for the coal was
damp after recent rain, and, for a moment, the glow on her face and hair
darkened,
then
blazed up again.

'We seem to keep
missing each other,' she said.

'You mean we're
kept apart.'

That amazing
hair, he thought. Even now, when it
was all brushed and
tamed for bed, he could see five or six different shades of copper, auburn,
bronze, even a strand of pure gold that looked as if it must belong to somebody
else.

She turned to
look at him. 'It's her house, Billy.'

'Have I said
anything?'

The firelight,
gilding her face, disguised the munitions-factory yellow of her skin.

'We could get
married by special licence,' he said. 'At least I suppose we could, I don't
know how long it takes.'

'No, we
couldn't.'

No, he thought,
because after the war things'll be different, I could be getting on in the
world, I might not want to be saddled with a wife from Beale Street. I have to
be protected from myself. Sarah had a great sense of honour. About as much use
to a woman as a jock-strap, he'd have thought, but there it was, Sarah was
saddled with it. 'I love you, Sarah Lumb.'

'I love you,
Billy Prior.'

She leant back,
and he unbuttoned her night-dress, pushing it off her shoulders so that the
side of one heavy breast was etched in trembling gold. He slid to the floor
beside her and took her in his arms, feeling her tense against him. 'It's all
right, it's all right.'

And all he
wanted, at that moment, was to hide his face between her breasts and shut out
the relentless ticking of the clock. But a voice above shouted, 'Sarah?
Cynthia? Time you were asleep.'

'I'll have to
go.'

'All right.'

But his hands
refused to loosen their grip, and she had to pull herself away.

'Look, tomorrow
night she goes to the spuggies. I'll tell her I've got a headache, and see if I
can stay here.'

* * *